CHAPTER XI

PERIOD IX. THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, ABOUT 1830 TO 1901

GENERAL CONDITIONS. The last completed period of English literature, almost

coincident in extent with the reign of the queen whose name it bears

(Victoria, queen 1837-1901), stands nearly beside The Elizabethan period in

the significance and interest of its work. The Elizabethan literature to be

sure, in its imaginative and spiritual enthusiasm, is the expression of a

period more profoundly great than the Victorian; but the Victorian

literature speaks for an age which witnessed incomparably greater changes

than any that had gone before in all the conditions of life--material

comforts, scientific knowledge, and, absolutely speaking, in intellectual

and spiritual enlightenment. Moreover, to twentieth century students the

Victorian literature makes a specially strong appeal because it is in part

the literature of our own time and its ideas and point of view are in large

measure ours. We must begin by glancing briefly at some of the general

determining changes and conditions to which reference has just been made,

and we may naturally begin with the merely material ones.

Before the accession of Queen Victoria the 'industrial revolution,' the

vast development of manufacturing made possible in the latter part of the

eighteenth century by the introduction of coal and the steam engine, had

rendered England the richest nation in the world, and the movement

continued with steadily accelerating momentum throughout the period. Hand

in hand with it went the increase of population from less than thirteen

millions in England in 1825 to nearly three times as many at the end of the

period. The introduction of the steam railway and the steamship, at the

beginning of the period, in place of the lumbering stagecoach and the

sailing vessel, broke up the old stagnant and stationary habits of life and

increased the amount of travel at least a thousand times. The discovery of

the electric telegraph in 1844 brought almost every important part of

Europe, and eventually of the world, nearer to every town dweller than the

nearest county had been in the eighteenth century; and the development of

the modern newspaper out of the few feeble sheets of 1825 (dailies and

weeklies in London, only weeklies elsewhere), carried full accounts of the

doings of the whole world, in place of long-delayed fragmentary rumors, to

every door within a few hours. No less striking was the progress in public

health and the increase in human happiness due to the enormous advance in

the sciences of medicine, surgery, and hygiene. Indeed these sciences in

their modern form virtually began with the discovery of the facts of

bacteriology about 1860, and the use of antiseptics fifteen years later,

and not much earlier began the effective opposition to the frightful

epidemics which had formerly been supposed to be dependent only on the will

of Providence.

Political and social progress, though less astonishing, was substantial. In

1830 England, nominally a monarchy, was in reality a plutocracy of about a

hundred thousand men--landed nobles, gentry, and wealthy merchants--whose

privileges dated back to fifteenth century conditions. The first Reform

Bill, of 1832, forced on Parliament by popular pressure, extended the right

of voting to men of the 'middle class,' and the subsequent bills of 1867

and 1885 made it universal for men. Meanwhile the House of Commons slowly

asserted itself against the hereditary House of Lords, and thus England

became perhaps the most truly democratic of the great nations of the world.

At the beginning of the period the social condition of the great body of

the population was extremely bad. Laborers in factories and mines and on

farms were largely in a state of virtual though not nominal slavery,

living, many of them, in unspeakable moral and physical conditions. Little

by little improvement came, partly by the passage of laws, partly by the

growth of trades-unions. The substitution in the middle of the century of

free-trade for protection through the passage of the 'Corn-Laws' afforded

much relief by lowering the price of food. Socialism, taking shape as a

definite movement in the middle of the century, became one to be reckoned

with before its close, though the majority of the more well-to-do classes

failed to understand even then the growing necessity for far-reaching

economic and social changes. Humanitarian consciousness, however, gained

greatly during the period. The middle and upper classes awoke to some

extent to their duty to the poor, and sympathetic benevolent effort, both

organized and informal, increased very largely in amount and intelligence.

Popular education, too, which in 1830 had no connection with the State and

was in every respect very incomplete, was developed and finally made

compulsory as regards the rudiments.

Still more permanently significant, perhaps, was the transformation of the

former conceptions of the nature and meaning of the world and life, through

the discoveries of science. Geology and astronomy now gradually compelled

all thinking people to realize the unthinkable duration of the cosmic

processes and the comparative littleness of our earth in the vast extent of

the universe. Absolutely revolutionary for almost all lines if thought was

the gradual adoption by almost all thinkers of the theory of Evolution,

which, partly formulated by Lamarck early in the century, received definite

statement in 1859 in Charles Darwin's 'Origin of Species.' The great

modification in the externals of religious belief thus brought about was

confirmed also by the growth of the science of historical criticism.

This movement of religious change was met in its early stages by the very

interesting reactionary 'Oxford' or 'Tractarian' Movement, which asserted

the supreme authority of the Church and its traditional doctrines. The most

important figure in this movement, who connects it definitely with

literature, was John Henry Newman (1801-90), author of the hymn 'Lead,

Kindly Light,' a man of winning personality and great literary skill. For

fifteen years, as vicar of the Oxford University Church, Newman was a great

spiritual force in the English communion, but the series of 'Tracts for the

Times' to which he largely contributed, ending in 1841 in the famous Tract

90, tell the story of his gradual progress toward Rome. Thereafter as an

avowed Roman Catholic and head of a monastic establishment Newman showed

himself a formidable controversialist, especially in a literary encounter

with the clergyman-novelist Charles Kingsley which led to Newman's famous

'Apologia pro Vita Sua' (Apology for My Life), one of the secondary

literary masterpieces of the century. His services to the Catholic Church

were recognized in 1879 by his appointment as a Cardinal. More than one of

the influences thus hastily surveyed combine in creating the moral, social,

and intellectual strenuousness which is one of the main marks of the

literature of the period. More conspicuously than ever before the majority

of the great writers, not least the poets and novelists, were impelled not

merely by the emotional or dramatic creative impulse but by the sense of a

message for their age which should broaden the vision and elevate the

ideals of the masses of their fellows. The literature of the period,

therefore, lacks the disinterested and joyous spontaneity of, for example,

the Elizabethan period, and its mood is far more complex than that of the

partly socially-minded pseudo-classicists.

While all the new influences were manifesting themselves in Victorian

literature they did not, of course, supersede the great general inherited

tendencies. This literature is in the main romantic. On the social side

this should be evident; the Victorian social humanitarianism is merely the

developed form of the eighteenth century romantic democratic impulse. On

the esthetic side the romantic traits are also present, though not so

aggressively as in the previous period; with romantic vigor the Victorian

literature often combines exquisite classical finish; indeed, it is so

eclectic and composite that all the definite older terms take on new and

less sharply contrasting meanings when applied to it.

So long a period naturally falls into sub-divisions; during its middle part

in particular, progress and triumphant romanticism, not yet largely

attacked by scientific scepticism, had created a prevailing atmosphere of

somewhat passive sentiment and optimism both in society and in literature

which has given to the adjective 'mid-Victorian' a very definite

denotation. The adjective and its period are commonly spoken of with

contempt in our own day by those persons who pride themselves on their

complete sophistication and superiority to all intellectual and emotional

weakness. But during the 'mid-Victorian' years, there was also a

comparative healthiness in the lives of the well-to-do classes and in

literature which had never before been equalled and which may finally prove

no less praiseworthy than the rather self-conscious freedom and unrestraint

of the early twentieth century.

The most important literature of the whole period falls under the three

heads of essays, poetry, and prose fiction, which we may best consider in

that order.

LORD MACAULAY. The first great figure, chronologically, in the period, and

one of the most clearly-defined and striking personalities in English

literature, is Thomas Babington Macaulay, [Footnote: The details of

Macaulay's life are known from the; famous biography of him by his nephew,

Sir George Trevelyan.] who represents in the fullest degree the Victorian

vigor and delight in material progress, but is quite untouched by the

Victorian spiritual striving. The descendant of Scottish ministers and

English Quakers, Macaulay was born in 1800. His father was a tireless and

devoted member of the group of London anti-slavery workers (Claphamites),

and was Secretary of the company which conducted Sierra Leone (the African

state for enfranchised negroes); he had also made a private fortune in

African trade. From his very babyhood the son displayed almost incredible

intellectual precocity and power of memory. His voracious reading began at

the age of three, when he 'for the most part lay on the rug before the

fire, with his book on the floor, and a piece of bread-and-butter in his

hand.' Once, in his fifth year, when a servant had spilled an urn of hot

coffee over his legs, he replied to the distressed inquiries of the lady of

the house, 'Thank you, madam, the agony is abated.' From the first it seems

to have been almost impossible for him to forget anything which had ever

found lodgment in, or even passed through, his mind. His childish

production of both verse and prose was immense. These qualities and

accomplishments, however, did not make him a prig. Both as child and as

man, though he was aggressive and showed the prejudices of his class, he

was essentially natural and unaffected; and as man he was one of the most

cordial and affectionate of companions, lavish of his time with his

friends, and one of the most interesting of conversationalists. As he grew

toward maturity he proved unique in his manner, as well as in his power, of

reading. It is said that he read books faster than other people skimmed

them, and skimmed them as fast as any one else could turn the leaves, this,

however, without superficiality. One of the habits of his middle life was

to walk through London, even the most crowded parts, 'as fast as other

people walked, and reading a book a great deal faster than anybody else

could read.' His remarkable endowments, however, were largely

counterbalanced by his deficiency in the spiritual sense. This appears most

seriously in his writings, but it shows itself also in his personal tastes.

For Nature he cared little; like Dr. Johnson he 'found London the place for

him.' One occasion when he remarked on the playing of 'God save the Queen'

is said to have been the only one when he ever appeared to distinguish one

tune from another. Even on the material side of life he had limitations

very unusual in an English gentleman. Except for walking, which might

almost be called a main occupation with him, he neither practised nor cared

for any form of athletic exercise, 'could neither swim nor row nor drive

nor skate nor shoot,' nor scarcely ride.

From private schools Macaulay proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge,

where he remained through the seven years required for the Master's degree.

In spite of his aversion for mathematics, he finally won a 'lay'

fellowship, which did not involve residence at the University nor any other

obligation, but which almost sufficed for his support during the seven

years of its duration. At this time his father failed in his business, and

during several years Macaulay was largely occupied with the heavy task of

reestablishing it and paying the creditors. In college he had begun to

write in prose and verse for the public literary magazines, and in 1825

appeared his essay on Milton, the first of the nearly forty literary,

historical, and biographical essays which during the next thirty years or

more he contributed to 'The Edinburgh Review.' He also nominally studied

law, and was admitted to the bar in 1826, but he took no interest in the

profession. In 1828 he was made a Commissioner of Bankruptcy and in 1830 he

attained the immediate object of his ambition by receiving from a nobleman

who controlled it a seat in Parliament. Here he at once distinguished

himself as orator and worker. Heart and soul a Liberal, he took a prominent

part in the passage of the first Reform Bill, of 1832, living at the same

time a busy social life in titled society. The Ministry rewarded his

services with a position on the Board of Control, which represented the

government in its relations with the East India Company, and in 1834, in

order to earn the fortune which seemed to him essential to his continuance

in the unremunerative career of public life, he accepted the position of

legal adviser to the Supreme Council of India, which carried with it a seat

in that Council and a salary of £10,000 a year. During the three months

voyage to India he 'devoured' and in many cases copiously annotated a vast

number of books in 'Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, and English;

folios, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos.' Under the pressure of actual

necessity he now mastered the law, and the most important parts of the

astonishing mass of work that he performed during his three and a half

years in India consisted in redrafting the penal code and in helping to

organize education.

Soon after his return to England he was elected to Parliament as member for

Edinburgh, and for two years he was in the Cabinet. Somewhat later the

publication of his 'Lays of Ancient Rome' and of his collected essays

brought him immense fame as a writer, and in 1847 his defeat at Edinburgh

for reelection to Parliament gave him time for concentrated labor on the

'History of England' which he had already begun as his crowning work. To it

he thenceforth devoted most of his energies, reading and sifting the whole

mass of available source-material and visiting the scenes of the chief

historical events. The popular success of the five volumes which he

succeeded in preparing and published at intervals was enormous. In 1852 he

was reelected to Parliament at Edinburgh, but ill-health resulting from his

long-continued excessive expenditure of energy warned him that he had not

long to live. He was made a baron in 1857 and died in 1859, deeply mourned

both because of his manly character and because with him perished mostly

unrecorded a knowledge of the facts of English history more minute,

probably, than that of any one else who has ever lived.

Macaulay never married, but, warm-hearted as he was, always lived largely

in his affection for his sisters and for the children of one of them, Lady

Trevelyan. In his public life he displayed as an individual a fearless and

admirable devotion to principle, modified somewhat by the practical

politician's devotion to party. From every point of view, his character was

remarkable, though bounded by his very definite limitations.

Least noteworthy among Macaulay's works are his poems, of which the 'Lays

of Ancient Rome' are chief. Here his purpose is to embody his conception of

the heroic historical ballads which must have been current among the early

Romans as among the medieval English--to recreate these ballads for modern

readers. For this sort of verse Macaulay's temperament was precisely

adapted, and the 'Lays' present the simple characters, scenes, and ideals

of the early Roman republican period with a sympathetic vividness and in

stirring rhythms which give them an unlimited appeal to boys. None the less

the 'Lays' really make nothing else so clear as that in the true sense of

the word Macaulay was not at all a poet. They show absolutely nothing of

the finer feeling which adds so much, for example, to the descriptions in

Scott's somewhat similar romances, and they are separated by all the

breadth of the world from the realm of delicate sensation and imagination

to which Spenser and Keats and all the genuine poets are native-born.

The power of Macaulay's prose works, as no critic has failed to note, rests

on his genius as an orator. For oratory he was rarely endowed. The

composition of a speech was for him a matter of a few hours; with almost

preternatural mental activity he organized and sifted the material,

commonly as he paced up and down his garden or his room; then, the whole

ready, nearly verbatim, in his mind, he would pass to the House of Commons

to hold his colleagues spell-bound during several hours of fervid

eloquence. Gladstone testified that the announcement of Macaulay's

intention to speak was 'like a trumpet call to fill the benches.' The great

qualities, then, of his essays and his 'History' are those which give

success to the best sort of popular oratory--dramatic vividness and

clearness, positiveness, and vigorous, movement and interest. He realizes

characters and situations, on the external side, completely, and conveys

his impression to his readers with scarcely any diminution of force. Of

expository structure he is almost as great a master as Burke, though in his

essays and 'History' the more concrete nature of his material makes him

prevailingly a narrator. He sees and presents his subjects as wholes,

enlivening them with realistic details and pictures, but keeping the

subordinate parts subordinate and disposing of the less important events in

rapid summaries. Of clear and trenchant, though metallic, narrative and

expository style he is a master. His sentences, whether long or short, are

always lucid; he knows the full value of a short sentence suddenly snapped

out after a prolonged period; and no other writer has ever made such'

frequent and striking (though somewhat monotonous) use of deliberate

oratorical balance of clauses and strong antithesis, or more illuminating

use of vivid resumes. The best of his essays, like those on the Earl of

Chatham and on the two men who won India for England, Clive and Warren

Hastings, are models of the comparatively brief comprehensive dissertation

of the form employed by Johnson in his 'Lives of the Poets.'

Macaulay, however, manifests the, defects even of his virtues. His

positiveness, fascinating and effective as it is for an uncritical reader,

carries with it extreme self-confidence and dogmatism, which render him

violently intolerant of any interpretations of characters and events except

those that he has formed, and formed sometimes hastily and with prejudice.

The very clearness and brilliancy of his style are often obtained at the

expense of real truth; for the force of his sweeping statements and his

balanced antitheses often requires much heightening or even distortion of

the facts; in making each event and each character stand out in the

plainest outline he has often stripped it of its background of qualifying

circumstances. These specific limitations, it will be evident, are

outgrowths of his great underlying deficiency--the deficiency in spiritual

feeling and insight. Macaulay is a masterly limner of the external side of

life, but he is scarcely conscious of the interior world in which the finer

spirits live and work out their destinies. Carlyle's description of his

appearance is significant: 'I noticed the homely Norse features that you

find everywhere in the Western Isles, and I thought to myself, "Well, any

one can see that you are an honest, good sort of fellow, made out of

oatmeal." Macaulay's eminently clear, rapid, and practical mind

comprehended fully and respected whatever could be seen and understood by

the intellect; things of more subtle nature he generally disbelieved in or

dismissed with contempt. In dealing with complex or subtle characters he

cannot reveal the deeper spiritual motives from which their action sprang;

and in his view of history he does not include the underlying and

controlling spiritual forces. Macaulay was the most brilliant of those whom

the Germans have named Philistines, the people for whom life consists of

material things; specifically he was the representative of the great body

of middle-class early-Victorian liberals, enthusiastically convinced that

in the triumphs of the Liberal party, of democracy, and of mechanical

invention, the millennium was being rapidly realized. Macaulay wrote a

fatal indictment of himself when in praising Bacon as the father of modern

science he depreciated Plato, the idealist. Plato's philosophy, said

Macaulay, 'began in words and ended in words,' and he added that 'an acre

in Middlesex is better than a peerage in Utopia.' In his literary and

personal essays, therefore, such as the famous ones on Milton and Bacon,

which belong early in his career, all his immense reading did not suffice

to produce sympathetic and sensitive judgments; there is often more

pretentiousness of style than significance of interpretation. In later life

he himself frankly expressed regret that he had ever written these essays.

Macaulay's 'History of England' shows to some degree the same faults as the

essays, but here they are largely corrected by the enormous labor which he

devoted to the work. His avowed purpose was to combine with scientific

accuracy the vivid picturesqueness of fiction, and to 'supersede the last

fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.' His method was that of an

unprecedented fulness of details which produces a crowded pageant of events

and characters extremely minute but marvelously lifelike. After three

introductory chapters which sketch the history of England down to the death

of Charles II, more than four large volumes are occupied with the following

seventeen years; and yet Macaulay had intended to continue to the death of

George IV, nearly a hundred and thirty years later. For absolute

truthfulness of detail the 'History' cannot always be depended on, but to

the general reader its great literary merits are likely to seem full

compensation for its inaccuracies.

THOMAS CARLYLE. The intense spiritual striving which was so foreign to

Macaulay's practical nature first appears among the Victorians in the

Scotsman Thomas Carlyle, a social and religious prophet, lay-preacher, and

prose-poet, one of the most eccentric but one of the most stimulating of

all English writers. The descendant of a warlike Scottish Border clan and

the son of a stone-mason who is described as 'an awful fighter,' Carlyle

was born in 1795 in the village of Ecclefechan, just across the line from

England, and not far from Burns' county of Ayr. His fierce, intolerant,

melancholy, and inwardly sensitive spirit, together with his poverty,

rendered him miserable throughout his school days, though he secured,

through his father's sympathy, a sound elementary education. He tramped on

foot the ninety miles from Ecclefechan to Edinburgh University, and

remained there for four years; but among the subjects of study he cared

only for mathematics, and he left at the age of seventeen without receiving

a degree. From this time for many years his life was a painful struggle, a

struggle to earn his living, to make a place in the world, and to find

himself in the midst of his spiritual doubts and the physical distress

caused by lifelong dyspepsia and insomnia. For some years and in various

places he taught school and received private pupils, for very meager wages,

latterly in Edinburgh, where he also did literary hack-work. He had planned

at first to be a minister, but the unorthodoxy of his opinions rendered

this impossible; and he also studied law only to abandon it. One of the

most important forces in this period of his slow preparation was his study

of German and his absorption of the idealistic philosophy of Kant,

Schelling, and Fichte, of the broad philosophic influence of Goethe, and

the subtile influence of Richter. A direct result was his later very

fruitful continuation of Coleridge's work in turning the attention of

Englishmen to German thought and literature. In 1821 he passed through a

sudden spiritual crisis, when as he was traversing Leith Walk in Edinburgh

his then despairing view of the Universe as a soulless but hostile

mechanism all at once gave way to a mood of courageous self-assertion. He

afterward looked on this experience as a spiritual new birth, and describes

it under assumed names at the end of the great chapter in 'Sartor Resartus'

on 'The Everlasting No.'

In 1825 his first important work, a 'Life of Schiller,' was published, and

in 1826 he was married to Miss Jane Welsh. She was a brilliant but quiet

woman, of social station higher than his; for some years he had been acting

as counselor in her reading and intellectual development. No marriage in

English Literature has been more discussed, a result, primarily, of the

publication by Carlyle's friend and literary executor, the historian J. A.

Froude, of Carlyle's autobiographical Reminiscences and Letters. After Mrs.

Carlyle's death Carlyle blamed himself bitterly for inconsiderateness

toward her, and it is certain that his erratic and irritable temper, partly

exasperated by long disappointment and by constant physical misery, that

his peasant-bred lack of delicacy, and his absorption in his work, made a

perpetual and vexatious strain on Mrs. Carlyle's forbearance throughout the

forty years of their life together. The evidence, however, does not show

that the marriage was on the whole really unfortunate or indeed that it was

not mainly a happy one.

For six years beginning in 1828 the Carlyles lived on (though they did not

themselves carry on) the lonely farm of Craigenputtock, the property of

Mrs. Carlyle. This was for both of them a period of external hardship, and

they were chiefly dependent on the scanty income from Carlyle's laborious

work on periodical essays (among which was the fine-spirited one on Burns).

Here Carlyle also wrote the first of his chief works, 'Sartor Resartus,'

for which, in 1833-4, he finally secured publication, in 'Fraser's

Magazine,' to the astonishment and indignation of most of the readers. The

title means 'The Tailor Retailored,' and the book purports to be an account

of the life of a certain mysterious German, Professor Teufelsdröckh

(pronounced Toyfelsdreck) and of a book of his on The Philosophy of

Clothes. Of course this is allegorical, and Teufelsdröckh is really

Carlyle, who, sheltering himself under the disguise, and accepting only

editorial responsibility, is enabled to narrate his own spiritual struggles

and to enunciate his deepest convictions, sometimes, when they are likely

to offend his readers, with a pretense of disapproval. The Clothes metaphor

(borrowed from Swift) sets forth the central mystical or spiritual

principle toward which German philosophy had helped Carlyle, the idea,

namely, that all material things, including all the customs and forms of

society, such as government and formalized religion, are merely the

comparatively insignificant garments of the spiritual reality and the

spiritual life on which men should center their attention. Even Time and

Space and the whole material world are only the shadows of the true

Reality, the spiritual Being that cannot perish. Carlyle has learned to

repudiate, and he would have others repudiate, 'The Everlasting No,' the

materialistic attitude of unfaith in God and the spiritual world, and he

proclaims 'The Everlasting Yea,' wherein are affirmed, the significance of

life as a means of developing character and the necessity of accepting life

and its requirements with manly self-reliance and moral energy. 'Seek not

Happiness,' Carlyle cries, 'but Blessedness. Love not pleasure; love God.'

This is the central purport of the book. In the second place and as a

natural corollary Carlyle vigorously denounces, throughout, all shams and

hypocrisies, the results of inert or dishonest adherence to outgrown ideas

or customs. He attacks, for instance, all empty ostentation; war, as both

foolish and wicked; and the existing condition of society with its terrible

contrast between the rich and the poor.

Again, he urges still a third of the doctrines which were to prove most

characteristic of him, that Gospel of Work which had been proclaimed so

forcibly, from different premises, five hundred years before by those other

uncompromising Puritans, the authors of 'Piers Plowman.' In courageous

work, Carlyle declares, work whether physical or mental, lies the way of

salvation not only for pampered idlers but for sincere souls who are

perplexed and wearied with over-much meditation on the mysteries of the

universe, 'Be no, longer a Chaos,' he urges, 'but a World, or even

Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal,

fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast

in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do

it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the Night

cometh, wherein no man can work.'

It will probably now be evident that the mainspring of the undeniable and

volcanic power of 'Sartor Resartus' (and the same is true of Carlyle's

other chief works) is a tremendous moral conviction and fervor. Carlyle is

eccentric and perverse--more so in 'Sartor Resartus' than elsewhere--but he

is on fire with his message and he is as confident as any Hebrew prophet

that it is the message most necessary for his generation. One may like him

or be repelled by him, but a careful reader cannot remain unmoved by his

personality and his ideas.

One of his most striking eccentricities is the remarkable style which he

deliberately invented for 'Sartor Resartus' and used thenceforth in all his

writings (though not always in so extreme a form). Some of the specific

peculiarities of this style are taken over, with exaggeration, from German

usage; some are Biblical or other archaisms; others spring mainly from

Carlyle's own amazing mind. His purpose in employing, in the denunciation

of shams and insincerities, a form itself so far removed from directness

and simplicity was in part, evidently, to shock people into attention; but

after all, the style expresses appropriately his genuine sense of the

incoherence and irony of life, his belief that truth can be attained only

by agonizing effort, and his contempt for intellectual and spiritual

commonplaceness.

In 1834 Carlyle moved to London, to a house in Cheyne (pronounced Cheeny)

Row, Chelsea, where he lived for his remaining nearly fifty years. Though

he continued henceforth in large part to reiterate the ideas of 'Sartor

Resartus,' he now turned from biography, essays, and literary criticism to

history, and first published 'The French Revolution.' He had almost decided

in despair to abandon literature, and had staked his fortune on this work;

but when the first volume was accidentally destroyed in manuscript he

proceeded with fine courage to rewrite it, and he published the whole book

in 1837. It brought him the recognition which he sought. Like 'Sartor

Resartus' it has much subjective coloring, which here results in

exaggeration of characters and situations, and much fantasy and

grotesqueness of expression; but as a dramatic and pictorial vilification

of a great historic movement it was and remains unique, and on the whole no

history is more brilliantly enlightening and profoundly instructive. Here,

as in most of his later works, Carlyle throws the emphasis on the power of

great personalities. During the next years he took advantage of his success

by giving courses of lectures on literature and history, though he disliked

the task and felt himself unqualified as a speaker. Of these courses the

most important was that on 'Heroes and Hero-Worship,' in which he clearly

stated the doctrine on which thereafter he laid increasing stress, that the

strength of humanity is in its strong men, the natural leaders, equipped to

rule by power of intellect, of spirit, and of executive force. Control by

them is government by the fit, whereas modern democracy is government by

the unfit. Carlyle called democracy 'mobocracy' and considered it a mere

bad piece of social and political machinery, or, in his own phrase, a mere

'Morrison's pill,' foolishly expected to cure all evils at one gulp. Later

on Carlyle came to express this view, like all his others, with much

violence, but it is worthy of serious consideration, not least in twentieth

century America.

Of Carlyle's numerous later works the most important are 'Past and

Present,' in which he contrasts the efficiency of certain strong men of

medieval Europe with the restlessness and uncertainty of contemporary

democracy and humanitarianism and attacks modern political economy; 'Oliver

Cromwell's Letters and Speeches,' which revolutionized the general opinion

of Cromwell, revealing him as a true hero or strong man instead of a

hypocritical fanatic; and 'The History of Frederick the Great,' an enormous

work which occupied Carlyle for fourteen years and involved thorough

personal examination of the scenes of Frederick's life and battles. During

his last fifteen years Carlyle wrote little of importance, and the violence

of his denunciation of modern life grew shrill and hysterical. That society

was sadly wrong he was convinced, but he propounded no definite plan for

its regeneration. He had become, however, a much venerated as well as a

picturesque figure; and he exerted a powerful and constructive influence,

not only directly, but indirectly through the preaching of his doctrines,

in the main or in part, by the younger essayists and the chief Victorian

poets and novelists, and in America by Emerson, with whom he maintained an

almost lifelong friendship and correspondence. Carlyle died in 1881.

Carlyle was a strange combination of greatness and narrowness. Like

Macaulay, he was exasperatingly blind and bigoted in regard to the things

in which he had no personal interest, though the spheres of their

respective enthusiasms and antipathies were altogether different. Carlyle

viewed pleasure and merely esthetic art with the contempt of the Scottish

Covenanting fanatics, refusing even to read poetry like that of Keats; and

his insistence on moral meanings led him to equal intolerance of such

story-tellers as Scott. In his hostility to the materialistic tendencies so

often deduced from modern science he dismissed Darwin's 'Origin of Species'

with the exclamation that it showed up the capricious stupidity of mankind

and that he never could read a page of it or would waste the least thought

upon it. He mocked at the anti-slavery movement in both America and the

English possessions, holding that the negroes were an inferior race

probably better off while producing something under white masters than if

left free in their own ignorance and sloth. Though his obstinacy was a part

of his national temperament, and his physical and mental irritability in

part a result of his ill-health, any candid estimate of his life cannot

altogether overlook them. On the whole, however, there is no greater

ethical, moral, and spiritual force in English Literature than Carlyle, and

so much of his thought has passed into the common possession of all

thinking persons to-day that we are all often his debtors when we are least

conscious of it.

JOHN RUSKIN. Among the other great Victorian writers the most obvious

disciple of Carlyle in his opposition to the materialism of modern life is

John Ruskin. But Ruskin is much more than any man's disciple; and he also

contrasts strongly with Carlyle, first because a large part of his life was

devoted to the study of Art--he is the single great art-critic in English

Literature--and also because he is one of the great preachers of that

nineteenth century humanitarianism at which Carlyle was wont to sneer.

Ruskin's parents were Scotch, but his father, a man of artistic tastes, was

established as a wine-merchant in London and had amassed a fortune before

the boy's birth in 1819. The atmosphere of the household was sternly

Puritan, and Ruskin was brought up under rigid discipline, especially by

his mother, who gave him most of his early education. He read, wrote, and

drew precociously; his knowledge of the Bible, in which his mother's

training was relentlessly thorough, of Scott, Pope, and Homer, dates from

his fifth or sixth year. For many years during his boyhood he accompanied

his parents on long annual driving trips through Great Britain and parts of

Europe, especially the Alps. By these experiences his inborn passion for

the beautiful and the grand in Nature and Art was early developed. During

seven years he was at Oxford, where his mother lived with him and watched

over him; until her death in his fifty-second year she always continued to

treat him like a child, an attitude to which, habit and affection led him

to submit with a matter-of-course docility that his usual wilfulness and

his later fame render at first sight astonishing. At Oxford, as throughout

his life, he showed himself brilliant but not a close or careful student,

and he was at that time theologically too rigid a Puritan to be interested

in the Oxford Movement, then in its most intense stage.

His career as a writer began immediately after he left the University. It

falls naturally into two parts, the first of about twenty years, when he

was concerned almost altogether with Art, chiefly Painting and

Architecture; and the second somewhat longer, when he was intensely

absorbed in the problems of society and strenuously working as a social

reformer. From the outset, however, he was actuated by an ardent didactic

purpose; he wrote of Art in order to awake men's spiritual natures to a

joyful delight in the Beautiful and thus to lead, them to God, its Author.

The particular external direction of Ruskin's work in Art was given, as

usual, more or less by accident. His own practice in water-color drawing

led him as a mere youth to a devoted admiration for the landscape paintings

of the contemporary artist J.M.W. Turner. Turner, a romantic revolutionist

against the eighteenth century theory of the grand style, was then little

appreciated; and when Ruskin left the University he began, with

characteristic enthusiasm, an article on 'Modern Painters,' designed to

demonstrate Turner's superiority to all possible rivals. Even the first

part of this work expanded itself into a volume, published in 1843, when

Ruskin was only twenty-four; and at intervals during the next seventeen

years he issued four additional volumes, the result of prolonged study both

of Nature and of almost all the great paintings in Europe. The completed

book is a discursive treatise, the various volumes necessarily written from

more or less different view-points, on many of the main aspects, general

and technical, of all art, literary as well as pictorial. For Ruskin held,

and brilliantly demonstrated, that the underlying principles of all the

Fine Arts are identical, and 'Modern Painters' contains some of the most

famous and suggestive passages of general literary criticism ever written,

for example those on The Pathetic Fallacy and The Grand Style. Still

further, to Ruskin morality and religion are inseparable from Art, so that

he deals searchingly, if incidentally, with those subjects as well. Among

his fundamental principles are the ideas that a beneficent God has created

the world and its beauty directly for man's use and pleasure; that all true

art and all true life are service of God and should be filled with a spirit

of reverence; that art should reveal truth; and that really great and good

art can spring only from noble natures and a sound national life. The style

of the book is as notable as the substance. It is eloquent with Ruskin's

enthusiastic admiration for Beauty and with his magnificent romantic

rhetoric (largely the result, according to his own testimony, of his

mother's exacting drill in the Bible), which here and elsewhere make him

one of the greatest of all masters of gorgeous description and of fervid

exhortation. The book displays fully, too, another of his chief traits, an

intolerant dogmatism, violently contemptuous of any judgments but his own.

On the religious side, especially, Ruskin's Protestantism is narrow, and

even bigoted, but it softens as the book proceeds (and decidedly more in

his later years). With all its faults, 'Modern Painters' is probably the

greatest book ever written on Art and is an immense storehouse, of noble

material, and suggestion.

In the intervals of this work Ruskin published others less comprehensive,

two of which are of the first importance. 'The Seven Lamps of Architecture'

argues that great art, as the supreme expression of life, is the result of

seven moral and religious principles, Sacrifice, Truth, Power, and the

like. 'The Stones of Venice' is an, impassioned exposition of the beauty of

Venetian Gothic architecture, and here as always Ruskin expresses his

vehement preference for the Gothic art of the Middle Ages as contrasted

with the less original and as it seems to him less sincere style of the

Renaissance.

The publication of the last volume of 'Modern Painters' in 1860 roughly

marks the end of Ruskin's first period. Several influences had by this time

begun to sadden him. More than ten years before, with his usual filial

meekness, he had obeyed his parents in marrying a lady who proved

uncongenial and who after a few years was divorced from him. Meanwhile

acquaintance with Carlyle had combined with experience to convince him of

the comparative ineffectualness of mere art-criticism as a social and

religious force. He had come to feel with increasing indignation that the

modern industrial system, the materialistic political economy founded on

it, and the whole modern organization of society reduce the mass of men to

a state of intellectual, social, and religious squalor and blindness, and

that while they continue in this condition it is of little use to talk to

them about Beauty. He believed that some of the first steps in the

necessary redemptive process must be the education of the poor and a return

to what he conceived (certainly with much exaggeration) to have been the

conditions of medieval labor, when each craftsman was not a mere machine

but an intelligent and original artistic creator; but the underlying

essential was to free industry from the spirit of selfish money-getting and

permeate it with Christian sympathy and respect for man as man. The

ugliness of modern life in its wretched city tenements and its hideous

factories Ruskin would have utterly destroyed, substituting such a

beautiful background (attractive homes and surroundings) as would help to

develop spiritual beauty. With his customary vigor Ruskin proceeded

henceforth to devote himself to the enunciation, and so far as possible the

realization of these beliefs, first by delivering lectures and writing

books. He was met, like all reformers, with a storm of protest, but most of

his ideas gradually became the accepted principles of social theory. Among

his works dealing with these subjects may be named 'Unto This Last,'

'Munera Pulveris' (The Rewards of the Dust--an attack on materialistic

political economy), and 'Fors Clavigera' (Fortune the Key-Bearer), the

latter a series of letters to workingmen extending over many years. To 1865

belongs his most widely-read book, 'Sesame and Lilies,' three lectures on

the spiritual meaning of great literature in contrast to materialism, the

glory of womanhood, and the mysterious significance of life.

From the death of his mother in 1871 Ruskin began to devote his large

inherited fortune to 'St. George's Guild,' a series of industrial and

social experiments in which with lavish generosity he attempted to put his

theories into practical operation. All these experiments, as regards direct

results, ended in failure, though their general influence was great. Among

other movements now everywhere taken for granted 'social settlements' are a

result of his efforts.

All this activity had not caused Ruskin altogether to abandon the teaching

of art to the members of the more well-to-do classes, and beginning in 1870

he held for three or four triennial terms the newly-established

professorship of Art at Oxford and gave to it much hard labor. But this

interest was now clearly secondary in his mind.

Ruskin's temper was always romantically high-strung, excitable, and

irritable. His intense moral fervor, his multifarious activities, and his

disappointments were also constant strains on his nervous force. In 1872,

further, he was rejected in marriage by a young girl for whom he had formed

a deep attachment and who on her death-bed, three years later, refused,

with strange cruelty, to see him. In 1878 his health temporarily failed,

and a few years later he retired to the home, 'Brantwood,' at Coniston in

the Lake Region, which he had bought on the death of his mother. Here his

mind gradually gave way, but intermittently, so that he was still able to

compose 'Præterita' (The Past), a delightful autobiography. He died in

1900.

Ruskin, like Carlyle, was a strange compound of genius, nobility, and

unreasonableness, but as time goes on his dogmatism and violence may well

be more and more forgotten, while his idealism, his penetrating

interpretation of art and life, his fruitful work for a more tolerable

social order, and his magnificent mastery of style and description assure

him a permanent place in the history of English literature and of

civilization.

MATTHEW ARNOLD. Contemporary with Carlyle and Ruskin and fully worthy to

rank with them stands still a third great preacher of social and spiritual

regeneration, Matthew Arnold, whose personality and message, however, were

very different from theirs and who was also one of the chief Victorian

poets. Arnold was born in 1822, the son--and this is decidedly

significant--of the Dr. Thomas Arnold who later became the famous

headmaster of Rugby School and did more than any other man of the century

to elevate the tone of English school life. Matthew Arnold proceeded from

Rugby to Oxford (Balliol College), where he took the prize for original

poetry and distinguished himself as a student. This was the period of the

Oxford Movement, and Arnold was much impressed by Newman's fervor and

charm, but was already too rationalistic in thought to sympathize with his

views. After graduation Arnold taught Greek for a short time at Rugby and

then became private secretary to Lord Lansdoune, who was minister of public

instruction. Four years later, in 1851, Arnold was appointed an inspector

of schools, a position which he held almost to the end of his life and in

which he labored very hard and faithfully, partly at the expense of his

creative work. His life was marked by few striking outward events. His

marriage and home were happy. Up to 1867 his literary production consisted

chiefly of poetry, very carefully composed and very limited in amount, and

for two five-year terms, from 1857 to 1867, he held the Professorship of

Poetry at Oxford. At the expiration of his second term he did not seek for

reappointment, because he did not care to arouse the opposition of

Gladstone--then a power in public affairs--and stir up religious

controversy. His retirement from this position virtually marks the very

distinct change from the first to the second main period of his career. For

with deliberate self-sacrifice he now turned from poetry to prose essays,

because he felt that through the latter medium he could render what seemed

to him a more necessary public service. With characteristic

self-confidence, and obeying his inherited tendency to didacticism, he

appointed himself, in effect, a critic of English national life, beliefs,

and taste, and set out to instruct the public in matters of literature,

social relations, politics and religion. In many essays, published

separately or in periodicals, he persevered in this task until his death in

1888.

As a poet Arnold is generally admitted to rank among the Victorians next

after Tennyson and Browning. The criticism, partly true, that he was not

designed by Nature to be a poet but made himself one by hard work rests on

his intensely, and at the outset coldly, intellectual and moral

temperament. He himself, in modified Puritan spirit, defined poetry as a

criticism of life; his mind was philosophic; and in his own verse, inspired

by Greek poetry, by Goethe and Wordsworth, he realized his definition. In

his work, therefore, delicate melody and sensuous beauty were at first much

less conspicuous than a high moral sense, though after the first the

elements of external beauty greatly developed, often to the finest effect.

In form and spirit his poetry is one of the very best later reflections of

that of Greece, dominated by thought, dignified, and polished with the

utmost care. 'Sohrab and Rustum,' his most ambitious and greatest single

poem, is a very close and admirable imitation of 'The Iliad.' Yet, as the

almost intolerable pathos of 'Sohrab and Rustum' witnesses, Arnold is not

by any means deficient, any more than the Greek poets were, in emotion. He

affords, in fact, a striking example of classical form and spirit united

with the deep, self-conscious, meditative feeling of modern Romanticism.

In substance Arnold's poetry is the expression of his long and tragic

spiritual struggle. To him religion, understood as a reverent devotion to

Divine things, was the most important element in life, and his love of pure

truth was absolute; but he held that modern knowledge had entirely

disproved the whole dogmatic and doctrinal scheme of historic Christianity

and that a new spiritual revelation was necessary. To his Romantic nature,

however, mere knowledge and mere modern science, which their followers were

so confidently exalting, appeared by no means adequate to the purpose;

rather they seemed to him largely futile, because they did not stimulate

the emotions and so minister to the spiritual life. Further, the restless

stirrings of his age, beginning to arouse itself from the social lethargy

of centuries, appeared to him pitifully unintelligent and devoid of

results. He found all modern life, as he says in 'The Scholar-Gypsy,' a

'strange disease,' in which men hurry wildly about in a mad activity which

they mistake for achievement. In Romantic melancholy he looked wistfully

back by contrast to periods when 'life was fresh and young' and could

express itself vigorously and with no torturing introspection. The

exaggerated pessimism in this part of his outcry is explained by his own

statement, that he lived in a transition time, when the old faith was (as

he held) dead, and the new one (partly realized in our own generation) as

yet 'powerless to be born.' Arnold's poetry, therefore, is to be viewed as

largely the expression, monotonous but often poignantly beautiful, of a

temporary mood of questioning protest. But if his conclusion is not

positive, it is at least not weakly despairing. Each man, he insists,

should diligently preserve and guard in intellectual and moral integrity

the fortress of his own soul, into which, when necessary, he can retire in

serene and stoical resignation, determined to endure and to 'see life

steadily and see it whole.' Unless the man himself proves traitor, the

littlenesses of life are powerless to conquer him. In fact, the invincible

courage of the thoroughly disciplined spirit in the midst of doubt and

external discouragement has never been, more nobly expressed than by Arnold

in such poems as 'Palladium' and (from a different point of view) 'The Last

Word.'

There is a striking contrast (largely expressing an actual change of spirit

and point of view) between the manner of Arnold's poetry and that of his

prose. In the latter he entirely abandons the querulous note and assumes

instead a tone of easy assurance, jaunty and delightfully satirical.

Increasing maturity had taught him that merely to sit regarding the past

was useless and that he himself had a definite doctrine, worthy of being

preached with all aggressiveness. We have already said that his essays fall

into four classes, literary, social, religious, and political, though they

cannot always be sharply distinguished. As a literary critic he is uneven,

and, as elsewhere, sometimes superficial, but his fine appreciation and

generally clear vision make him refreshingly stimulating. His point of view

is unusually broad, his chief general purpose being to free English taste

from its insularity, to give it sympathetic acquaintance with the peculiar

excellences of other literatures. Some of his essays, like those on 'The

Function of Criticism at the Present Time,' 'Wordsworth,' and 'Byron,' are

among the best in English, while his 'Essays on Translating Homer' present

the most famous existing interpretation of the spirit and style of the

great Greek epics.

In his social essays, of which the most important form the volume entitled

'Culture and Anarchy,' he continues in his own way the attacks of Carlyle

and Ruskin. Contemporary English life seems to him a moral chaos of

physical misery and of the selfish, unenlightened, violent expression of

untrained wills. He too looks with pitying contempt on the material

achievements of science and the Liberal party as being mere 'machinery,'

means to an end, which men mistakenly worship as though it possessed a real

value in itself. He divides English society into three classes: 1. The

Aristocracy, whom he nick-names 'The Barbarians,' because, like the

Germanic tribes who overthrew the Roman Empire, they vigorously assert

their own privileges and live in the external life rather than in the life

of the spirit. 2. The Middle Class, which includes the bulk of the nation.

For them he borrows from German criticism the name 'Philistines,' enemies

of the chosen people, and he finds their prevailing traits to be

intellectual and spiritual narrowness and a fatal and superficial

satisfaction with mere activity and material prosperity. 3. 'The Populace,'

the 'vast raw and half-developed residuum.' For them Arnold had sincere

theoretical sympathy (though his temperament made it impossible for him to

enter into the same sort of personal sympathy with them as did Ruskin); but

their whole environment and conception of life seemed to him hideous. With

his usual uncomplimentary frankness Arnold summarily described the three

groups as 'a materialized upper class, a vulgarized middle class, and a

brutalized lower class.'

For the cure of these evils Arnold's proposed remedy was Culture, which he

defined as a knowledge of the best that has been thought and done in the

world and a desire to make the best ideas prevail. Evidently this Culture

is not a mere knowledge of books, unrelated to the rest of life. It has

indeed for its basis a very wide range of knowledge, acquired by

intellectual processes, but this knowledge alone Arnold readily admitted to

be 'machinery.' The real purpose and main part of Culture is the training,

broadening, and refining of the whole spirit, including the emotions as

well as the intellect, into sympathy with all the highest ideals, and

therefore into inward peace and satisfaction. Thus Culture is not

indolently selfish, but is forever exerting itself to 'make the best

ideas'--which Arnold also defined as 'reason and the will, of

God'--'prevail.'

Arnold felt strongly that a main obstacle to Culture was religious

narrowness. He held that the English people had been too much occupied with

the 'Hebraic' ideal of the Old Testament, the interest in morality or right

conduct, and though he agreed that this properly makes three quarters of

life, he insisted that it should be joined with the Hellenic (Greek) ideal

of a perfectly rounded nature. He found the essence of Hellenism expressed

in a phrase which he took from Swift, 'Sweetness and Light,' interpreting

Sweetness to mean the love of Beauty, material and spiritual, and Light,

unbiased intelligence; and he urged that these forces be allowed to have

the freest play. He vigorously attacked the Dissenting denominations,

because he believed them to be a conspicuous embodiment of Philistine lack

of Sweetness and Light, with an unlovely insistence on unimportant external

details and a fatal blindness to the meaning of real beauty and real

spirituality. Though he himself was without a theological creed, he was,

and held that every Englishman should be, a devoted adherent of the English

Church, as a beautiful, dignified, and national expression of essential

religion, and therefore a very important influence for Culture.

Toward democracy Arnold took, not Carlyle's attitude of definite

opposition, but one of questioning scrutiny. He found that one actual

tendency of modern democracy was to 'let people do as they liked,' which,

given the crude violence of the Populace, naturally resulted in lawlessness

and therefore threatened anarchy. Culture, on the other hand, includes the

strict discipline of the will and the sacrifice of one's own impulses for

the good of all, which means respect for Law and devotion to the State.

Existing democracy, therefore, he attacked with unsparing irony, but he did

not condemn its principle. One critic has said that 'his ideal of a State

can best be described as an Educated Democracy, working by Collectivism in

Government, Religion and Social Order.' But in his own writings he scarcely

gives expression to so definite a conception.

Arnold's doctrine, of course, was not perfectly comprehensive nor free from

prejudices; but none could be essentially more useful for his generation or

ours. We may readily grant that it is, in one sense or another, a doctrine

for chosen spirits, but if history makes anything clear it is that chosen

spirits are the necessary instruments of all progress and therefore the

chief hope of society.

The differences between Arnold's teaching and that of his two great

contemporaries are probably now clear. All three are occupied with the

pressing necessity of regenerating society. Carlyle would accomplish this

end by means of great individual characters inspired by confidence in the

spiritual life and dominating their times by moral strength; Ruskin would

accomplish it by humanizing social conditions and spiritualizing and

refining all men's natures through devotion to the principles of moral

Right and esthetic Beauty; Arnold would leaven the crude mass of society,

so far as possible, by permeating it with all the myriad influences of

spiritual, moral, and esthetic culture. All three, of course, like every

enlightened reformer, are aiming at ideal conditions which can be actually

realized only in the distant future.

Arnold's style is one of the most charming features of his work. Clear,

direct, and elegant, it reflects most attractively his own high breeding;

but it is also eminently forceful, and marked by very skilful emphasis and

reiteration. One of his favorite devices is a pretense of great humility,

which is only a shelter from which he shoots forth incessant and pitiless

volleys of ironical raillery, light and innocent in appearance, but

irresistible in aim and penetrating power. He has none of the gorgeousness

of Ruskin or the titanic strength of Carlyle, but he can be finely

eloquent, and he is certainly one of the masters of polished effectiveness.

ALFRED TENNYSON. In poetry, apart from the drama, the Victorian period is

the greatest in English literature. Its most representative, though not its

greatest, poet is Alfred Tennyson. Tennyson, the fourth of a large family

of children, was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, in 1809. That year, as it

happened, is distinguished by the birth of a large number of eminent men,

among them Gladstone, Darwin, and Lincoln. Tennyson's father was a

clergyman, holding his appointments from a member of the landed gentry; his

mother was peculiarly gentle and benevolent. From childhood the poet,

though physically strong, was moody and given to solitary dreaming; from

early childhood also he composed poetry, and when he was seventeen he and

one of his elder brothers brought out a volume of verse, immature, but of

distinct poetic feeling and promise. The next year they entered Trinity

College, Cambridge, where Tennyson, too reserved for public prominence,

nevertheless developed greatly through association with a gifted group of

students. Called home by the fatal illness of his father shortly before his

four year's were completed, he decided, as Milton had done, and as Browning

was even then doing, to devote himself to his art; but, like Milton, he

equipped himself, now and throughout his life, by hard and systematic study

of many of the chief branches of knowledge, including the sciences. His

next twenty years were filled with difficulty and sorrow. Two volumes of

poems which he published in 1830 and 1832 were greeted by the critics with

their usual harshness, which deeply wounded his sensitive spirit and

checked his further publication for ten years; though the second of these

volumes contains some pieces which, in their later, revised, form, are

among his chief lyric triumphs. In 1833 his warm friend Arthur Hallam, a

young man of extraordinary promise, who was engaged, moreover, to one of

Tennyson's sisters, died suddenly without warning. Tennyson's grief, at

first overwhelming, was long a main factor in his life and during many

years found slow artistic expression in 'In Memoriam' and other poems. A

few years later came another deep sorrow. Tennyson formed an engagement of

marriage with Miss Emily Sellwood, but his lack of worldly prospects led

her relatives to cancel it.

Tennyson now spent much of his time in London, on terms of friendship with

many literary men, including Carlyle, who almost made an exception in his

favor from his general fanatical contempt for poetry. In 1842 Tennyson

published two volumes of poems, including the earlier ones revised; he here

won an undoubted popular success and was accepted by the best judges as the

chief living productive English poet. Disaster followed in the shape of an

unfortunate financial venture which for a time reduced his family to

serious straits and drove him with shattered nerves to a sanitarium. Soon,

however, he received from the government as a recognition of his poetic

achievement a permanent annual pension of two hundred pounds, and in 1847

he published the strange but delightful 'Princess.' The year 1850 marked

the decisive turning point of his career. He was enabled to renew his

engagement and be married; the publication of 'In Memoriam' established him

permanently in a position of such popularity as few living poets have ever

enjoyed; and on the death of Wordsworth he was appointed Poet Laureate.

The prosperity of the remaining half of his life was a full recompense for

his earlier struggles, though it is marked by few notable external events.

Always a lover of the sea, he soon took up his residence in the Isle of

Wight. His production of poetry was steady, and its variety great. The

largest of all his single achievements was the famous series of 'Idylls of

the King,' which formed a part of his occupation for many years. In much of

his later work there is a marked change from his earlier elaborate

decorativeness to a style of vigorous strength. At the age of sixty-five,

fearful that he had not yet done enough to insure his fame, he gave a

remarkable demonstration of poetic vitality by striking out into the to him

new field of poetic drama. His important works here are the three tragedies

in which he aimed to complete the series of Shakspere's chronicle-history

plays; but he lacked the power of dramatic action, and the result is rather

three fine poems than successful plays. In 1883, after having twice refused

a baronetcy, he, to the regret of his more democratic friends, accepted a

peerage (barony). Tennyson disliked external show, but he was always

intensely loyal to the institutions of England, he felt that literature was

being honored in his person, and he was willing to secure a position of

honor for his son, who had long rendered him devoted service. He died

quietly in 1892, at the age of eighty-three, and was buried in Westminster

Abbey beside Browning, who had found a resting-place there three years

earlier. His personal character, despite some youthful morbidness, was

unusually delightful, marked by courage, honesty, sympathy, and

straightforward manliness. He had a fine voice and took undisguised

pleasure in reading his poems aloud. The chief traits of his poetry in form

and substance may be suggested in a brief summary.

1. Most characteristic, perhaps, is his exquisite artistry (in which he

learned much from Keats). His appreciation for sensuous beauty, especially

color, is acute; his command of poetic phraseology is unsurpassed; he

suggests shades of, feeling and elusive aspiration with, marvelously

subtile power; his descriptions are magnificently beautiful, often with

much detail; and his melody is often the perfection of sweetness. Add the

truth and tenderness of his emotion, and it results that he is one of the

finest and most moving of lyric poets. Nor is all this beauty vague and

unsubstantial. Not only was he the most careful of English poets, revising

his works with almost unprecedented pains, but his scientific habit of mind

insists on the greatest accuracy; in his allusions to Nature he often

introduces scientific facts in a way thitherto unparalleled, and sometimes

even only doubtfully poetic. The influence of the classic literatures on

his style and expression was great; no poet combines more harmoniously

classic perfection and romantic feeling.

2. The variety of his poetic forms is probably greater than that of any

other English poet. In summary catalogue may be named: lyrics, both

delicate and stirring; ballads; romantic dreams and fancies; descriptive

poems; sentimental reveries, and idyls; long narratives, in which he

displays perfect narrative skill; delightfully realistic

character-sketches, some of them in dialect; dramas; and meditative poems,

long and short, on religious, ethical, and social questions. In almost all

these forms he has produced numerous masterpieces.

3. His chief deficiency is in the dramatic quality. No one can present more

finely than he moods (often carefully set in a harmoniously appropriate

background of external nature) or characters in stationary position; and

there is splendid spirit in his narrative passages of vigorous action.

Nevertheless his genius and the atmosphere of his poems are generally

dreamy, romantic, and aloof from actual life. A brilliant critic [Footnote:

Professor Lewis E. Gates in a notable essay, 'Studies and Appreciations,'

p. 71.] has caustically observed that he 'withdraws from the turmoil of the

real universe into the fortress of his own mind, and beats the enemy in toy

battles with toy soldiers.' He never succeeded in presenting to the

satisfaction of most good critics a vigorous man in vigorous action.

4. The ideas of his poetry are noble and on the whole clear. He was an

independent thinker, though not an innovator, a conservative liberal, and

was so widely popular because he expressed in frank but reverent fashion

the moderately advanced convictions of his time. His social ideals, in

which he is intensely interested, are those of Victorian humanitarianism.

He hopes ardently for a steady amelioration of the condition of the masses,

proceeding toward a time when all men shall have real opportunity for full

development; and freedom is one of his chief watchwords. But with typical

English conservatism he believes that progress must be gradual, and that it

should be controlled by order, loyalty, and reverence. Like a true

Englishman, also, he is sure that the institutions of England are the best

in the world, so that he is a strong supporter of the monarchy and the

hereditary aristocracy. In religion, his inherited belief, rooted in his

deepest fibers, early found itself confronted by the discoveries of modern

science, which at first seemed to him to proclaim that the universe is much

what it seemed to the young Carlyle, a remorseless monster, 'red in tooth

and claw,' scarcely thinkable as the work of a Christian God who cares for

man. Tennyson was too sincere to evade the issue, and after years of inner

struggle he arrived at a positive faith in the central principles of

Christianity, broadly interpreted, though it was avowedly a faith based on

instinct and emotional need rather than on unassailable reasoning. His

somewhat timid disposition, moreover, never allowed him to enunciate his

conclusions with anything like the buoyant aggressiveness of his

contemporary, Robert Browning. How greatly science had influenced his point

of view appears in the conception which is central in his later poetry,

namely that the forces of the universe are governed by unchanging Law,

through which God works. The best final expression of his spirit is the

lyric 'Crossing the Bar,' which every one knows and which at his own

request is printed last in all editions of his works.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AND ROBERT BROWNING. Robert Browning, Tennyson's

chief poetic contemporary, stands in striking artistic contrast to

Tennyson--a contrast which perhaps serves to enhance the reputation of

both. Browning's life, if not his poetry, must naturally be considered in

connection with that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with whom he was united

in what appears the most ideal marriage of two important writers in the

history of literature.

Elizabeth Barrett, the daughter of a country gentleman of Herefordshire

(the region of the Malvern Hills and of 'Piers Plowman'), was born in 1806.

She was naturally both healthy and intellectually precocious; the writing

of verse and outdoor life divided all her early life, and at seventeen she

published, a volume of immature poems. At fifteen, however, her health was

impaired by an accident which happened as she was saddling her pony, and at

thirty, after a removal of the family to London, it completely failed. From

that time on for ten years she was an invalid, confined often to her bed

and generally to her chamber, sometimes apparently at the point of death.

Nevertheless she kept on with persistent courage and energy at her study

and writing. The appearance of her poems in two volumes in 1844 gave her a

place among the chief living poets and led to her acquaintance with

Browning.

Browning was born in a London suburb in 1812 (the same year with Dickens),

of very mixed ancestry, which may partly explain the very diverse traits in

his nature and poetry. His father, a man of artistic and cultured tastes,

held a subordinate though honorable position in the Bank of England. The

son inherited a strong instinct for all the fine arts, and though he

composed verses before he could write, seemed for years more likely to

become a musician than a poet. His formal schooling was irregular, but he

early began to acquire from his father's large and strangely-assorted

library the vast fund of information which astonishes the reader of his

poetry, and he too lived a healthy out-of-door life. His parents being

Dissenters, the universities were not open to him, and when he was

seventeen his father somewhat reluctantly consented to his own unhesitating

choice of poetry as a profession. For seventeen years more he continued in

his father's home, living a normal life among his friends, writing

continuously, and gradually acquiring a reputation among some good critics,

but making very little impression on the public. Some of his best short

poems date from these years, such as 'My Last Duchess' and 'The Bishop

Orders His Tomb'; but his chief effort went into a series of seven or eight

poetic dramas, of which 'Pippa Passes' is best known and least dramatic.

They are noble poetry, but display in marked degree the psychological

subtilety which in part of his poetry demands unusually close attention

from the reader.

In one of the pieces in her volumes of 1844 Elizabeth Barrett mentioned

Browning, among other poets, with generous praise. This led to a

correspondence between the two, and soon to a courtship, in which

Browning's earnestness finally overcame Miss Barrett's scrupulous

hesitation to lay upon him (as she felt) the burden of her invalidism.

Indeed her invalidism at last helped to turn the scales in Browning's

favor, for the physicians had declared that Miss Barrett's life depended on

removal to a warmer climate, but to this her father, a well-intentioned but

strangely selfish man, absolutely refused to consent. The record of the

courtship is given in Mrs. Browning's 'Sonnets from the Portuguese' (a

whimsical title, suggested by Mrs. Browning's childhood nickname, 'The

Little Portuguese'), which is one of the finest of English

sonnet-sequences. The marriage, necessarily clandestine, took place in

1846; Mrs. Browning's father thenceforth treated her as one dead, but the

removal from her morbid surroundings largely restored her health for the

remaining fifteen years of her life. During these fifteen years the two

poets resided chiefly in various cities of Italy, with a nominal home in

Florence, and Mrs. Browning had an inherited income which sufficed for

their support until their poetry became profitable. Their chief works

during this period were Mrs. Browning's 'Aurora Leigh' (1856), a long

'poetic novel' in blank verse dealing with the relative claims of Art and

Social Service and with woman's place in the world; and Browning's most

important single publication, his two volumes of 'Men and Women' (1855),

containing fifty poems, many of them among his very best.

Mrs. Browning was passionately interested in the Italian struggle for

independence against Austrian tyranny, and her sudden death in 1861 seems

to have been hastened by that of the Italian statesman Cavour. Browning, at

first inconsolable, soon returned with his son to London, where he again

made his home, for the rest of his life. Henceforth he published much

poetry, for the most part long pieces of subtile psychological and

spiritual analysis. In 1868-9 he brought out his characteristic

masterpiece, 'The Ring and the Book,' a huge psychological epic, which

proved the tardy turning point in his reputation. People might not

understand the poem, but they could not disregard it, the author became

famous, almost popular, and a Browning cult arose, marked by the spread of

Browning societies in both England and America. Browning enjoyed his

success for twenty years and died quietly in 1889 at the home of his son in

Venice.

Browning earnestly reciprocated his wife's loyal devotion and seemed really

to believe, as he often insisted, that her poetry was of a higher order

than his own. Her achievement, indeed, was generally overestimated, in her

own day and later, but it is now recognized that she is scarcely a really

great artist. Her intense emotion, her fine Christian idealism, and her

very wide reading give her real power; her womanly tenderness is admirable;

and the breadth of her interests and sometimes the clearness of her

judgment are notable; but her secluded life of ill-health rendered her

often sentimental, high-strung, and even hysterical. She has in her the

impulses and material of great poetry, but circumstances and her

temperament combined to deny her the patient self-discipline necessary for

the best results. She writes vehemently to assert the often-neglected

rights of women and children or to denounce negro slavery and all

oppression; and sometimes, as when in 'The Cry of the Children' she

revealed the hideousness of child-labor in the factories, she is genuine

and irresistible; but more frequently she produces highly romantic or

mystical imaginary narrations (often in medieval settings). She not seldom

mistakes enthusiasm or indignation for artistic inspiration, and she is

repeatedly and inexcusably careless in meter and rime. Perhaps her most

satisfactory poems, aside from those above mentioned, are 'The Vision of

Poets' and 'The Rime of the Duchess May.'

In considering the poetry of Robert Browning the inevitable first general

point is the nearly complete contrast with Tennyson. For the melody and

exquisite beauty of phrase and description which make so large a part of

Tennyson's charm, Browning cares very little; his chief merits as an artist

lie mostly where Tennyson is least strong; and he is a much more

independent and original thinker than Tennyson. This will become more

evident in a survey of his main characteristics.

1. Browning is the most thoroughly vigorous and dramatic of all great poets

who employ other forms than the actual drama. Of his hundreds of poems the

great majority set before the reader a glimpse of actual life and human

personalities--an action, a situation, characters, or a character--in the

clearest and most vivid possible way. Sometimes the poem is a ringing

narration of a fine exploit, like 'How They Brought the Good News';

sometimes it is quieter and more reflective. Whatever the style, however,

in the great majority of cases Browning employs the form which without

having actually invented it he developed into an instrument of thitherto

unsuspected power, namely the dramatic monolog in which a character

discusses his situation or life or some central part or incident, of it,

under circumstances which reveal with wonderful completeness its

significance and his own essential character. To portray and interpret life

in this way, to give his readers a sudden vivid understanding of its main

forces and conditions in representative moments, may be called the first

obvious purpose, or perhaps rather instinct, of Browning and his poetry.

The dramatic economy of space which he generally attains in his monologs is

marvelous. In 'My Last Duchess' sixty lines suffice to etch into our

memories with incredible completeness and clearness two striking

characters, an interesting situation, and the whole of a life's tragedy.

2. Despite his power over external details it is in the human characters,

as the really significant and permanent elements of life, that Browning is

chiefly interested; indeed he once declared directly that the only thing

that seemed to him worth while was the study of souls. The number and range

of characters that he has portrayed are unprecedented, and so are the

keenness, intenseness, and subtilety of the analysis. Andrea del Sarto, Fra

Lippo Lippi, Cleon, Karshish, Balaustion, and many scores of others, make

of his poems a great gallery of portraits unsurpassed in interest by those

of any author whatever except Shakspere. It is little qualification of his

achievement to add that all his persons are somewhat colored by his own

personality and point of view, or that in his later poetry he often splits

hairs very ingeniously in his effort to understand and present

sympathetically the motives of all characters, even the worst. These are

merely some of the secondary aspects of his peculiar genius. Browning's

favorite heroes and heroines, it should be added, are men and women much

like himself, of strong will and decisive power of action, able to take the

lead vigorously and unconventionally and to play controlling parts in the

drama of life.

3. The frequent comparative difficulty of Browning's poetry arises in large

part first from the subtilety of his thought and second from the obscurity

of his subject-matter and his fondness for out-of-the-way characters. It is

increased by his disregard of the difference between his own extraordinary

mental power and agility on the one hand and on the other the capacity of

the average person, a disregard which leads him to take much for granted

that most readers are obliged to study out with no small amount of labor.

Moreover Browning was hasty in composition, corrected his work little, if

at all, and was downright careless in such details as sentence structure.

But the difficulty arising from these various eccentricities occurs chiefly

in his longer poems, and often serves mainly as a mental stimulus. Equally

striking, perhaps, is his frequent grotesqueness in choice of subject and

in treatment, which seems to result chiefly from his wish to portray the

world as it actually is, keeping in close touch with genuine everyday

reality; partly also from his instinct to break away from placid and

fiberless conventionality.

4. Browning is decidedly one of those who hold the poet to be a teacher,

and much, indeed most, of his poetry is occupied rather directly with the

questions of religion and the deeper meanings of life. Taken all together,

that is, his poetry constitutes a very extended statement of his philosophy

of life. The foundation of his whole theory is a confident and aggressive

optimism. He believes, partly on the basis of intellectual reasoning, but

mainly on what seems to him the convincing testimony of instinct, that the

universe is controlled by a loving God, who has made life primarily a thing

of happiness for man. Man should accept life with gratitude and enjoy to

the full all its possibilities. Evil exists only to demonstrate the value

of Good and to develop character, which can be produced only by hard and

sincere struggle. Unlike Tennyson, therefore, Browning has full confidence

in present reality--he believes that life on earth is predominantly good.

Nevertheless earthly life is evidently incomplete in itself, and the

central law of existence is Progress, which gives assurance of a future

life where man may develop the spiritual nature which on earth seems to

have its beginning and distinguishes man from the brutes. This future life,

however, is probably not one but many, a long succession of lives, the

earlier ones not so very different, perhaps, from the present one on earth;

and even the worst souls, commencing the next life, perhaps, as a result of

their failure here, at a spiritual stage lower than the present one, must

ultimately pass through all stages of the spiritual process, and come to

stand with all the others near the perfection of God himself. This whole

theory, which, because later thought has largely adopted it from Browning,

seems much less original to-day than when he first propounded it, is stated

and reiterated in his poems with a dynamic idealizing power which, whether

or not one assents to it in details, renders it magnificently stimulating.

It is rather fully expressed as a whole, in two of Browning's best known

and finest poems, 'Rabbi ben Ezra,' and 'Abt Vogler.' Some critics, it

should be added, however, feel that Browning is too often and too

insistently a teacher in his poetry and that his art would have gained if

he had introduced his philosophy much more incidentally.

5. In his social theory Browning differs not only from Tennyson but from

the prevailing thought of his age, differs in that his emphasis is

individualistic. Like all the other Victorians he dwells on the importance

of individual devotion to the service of others, but he believes that the

chief results of such effort must be in the development of the individual's

character, not greatly in the actual betterment of the world. The world,

indeed, as it appears to him, is a place of probation and we cannot expect

ever to make it over very radically; the important thing is that the

individual soul shall use it to help him on his 'lone way' to heaven.

Browning, accordingly, takes almost no interest in the specific social and

political questions of his day, a fact which certainly will not operate

against the permanence of his fame. More detrimental, no doubt, aside from

the actual faults which we have mentioned, will be his rather extravagant

Romanticism--the vehemence of his passion and his insistence on the supreme

value of emotion. With these characteristics classically minded critics

have always been highly impatient, and they will no doubt prevent him from

ultimately taking a place beside Shakspere and the serene Milton; but they

will not seriously interfere, we may be certain, with his recognition as

one of the very great English poets.

ROSSETTI AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITE MOVEMENT. Many of the secondary Victorian

poets must here be passed by, but several of them are too important to be

dismissed without at least brief notice. The middle of the century is

marked by a new Romantic impulse, the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, which begins

with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti was born in London in 1828. His father

was an Italian, a liberal refugee from the outrageous government of Naples,

and his mother was also half Italian. The household, though poor, was a

center for other Italian exiles, but this early and tempestuous political

atmosphere created in the poet, by reaction, a lifelong aversion for

politics. His desultory education was mostly in the lines of painting and

the Italian and English poets. His own practice in poetry began as early as

is usual with poets, and before he was nineteen, by a special inspiration,

he wrote his best and most famous poem, 'The Blessed Damosel.' In the

school of the Royal Academy of Painting, in 1848, he met William Holman

Hunt and John E. Millais, and the three formed the Pre-Raphaelite

Brotherhood, in which Rossetti, whose disposition throughout his life was

extremely self-assertive, or even domineering, took the lead. The purpose

of the Brotherhood was to restore to painting and literature the qualities

which the three enthusiasts found in the fifteenth century Italian

painters, those who just preceded Raphael. Rossetti and his friends did not

decry the noble idealism of Raphael himself, but they felt that in trying

to follow his grand style the art of their own time had become too abstract

and conventional. They wished to renew emphasis on serious emotion,

imagination, individuality, and fidelity to truth; and in doing so they

gave special attention to elaboration of details in a fashion distinctly

reminiscent of medievalism. Their work had much, also, of medieval

mysticism and symbolism. Besides painting pictures they published a very

short-lived periodical, 'The Germ,' containing both literary material and

drawings. Ruskin, now arriving at fame and influence, wrote vigorously in

their favor, and though the Brotherhood did not last long as an

organization, it has exerted a great influence on subsequent painting.

Rossetti's impulses were generous, but his habits were eccentric and

selfish, and his life unfortunate. His engagement with Miss Eleanor Siddal,

a milliner's apprentice (whose face appears in many of his pictures), was

prolonged by his lack of means for nine years; further, he was an agnostic,

while she held a simple religious faith, and she was carrying on a losing

struggle with tuberculosis. Sixteen months after their marriage she died,

and on a morbid impulse of remorse for inconsiderateness in his treatment

of her Rossetti buried his poems, still unpublished, in her coffin. After

some years, however, he was persuaded to disinter and publish them.

Meanwhile he had formed friendships with the slightly younger artists

William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, and they established a company for

the manufacture of furniture and other articles, to be made beautiful as

well as useful, and thus to aid in spreading the esthetic sense among the

English people. After some years Rossetti and Burne-Jones withdrew from the

enterprise, leaving it to Morris. Rossetti continued all his life to

produce both poetry and paintings. His pictures are among the best and most

gorgeous products of recent romantic art--'Dante's Dream,' 'Beata Beatrix,'

'The Blessed Damosel,' and many others. During his later years he earned a

large income, and he lived in a large house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea (near

Carlyle), where for a while, as long as his irregular habits permitted, the

novelist George Meredith and the poet Swinburne were also inmates. He

gradually grew more morbid, and became a rather pitiful victim of insomnia,

the drug chloral, and spiritualistic delusions about his wife. He died in

1882.

Rossetti's poetry is absolutely unlike that of any other English poet, and

the difference is clearly due in large part to his Italian race and his

painter's instinct. He has, in the didactic sense, absolutely no religious,

moral, or social interests; he is an artist almost purely for art's sake,

writing to give beautiful embodiment to moods, experiences, and striking

moments. If it is true of Tennyson, however, that he stands aloof from

actual life, this is far truer of Rossetti. His world is a vague and

languid region of enchantment, full of whispering winds, indistinct forms

of personified abstractions, and the murmur of hidden streams; its

landscape sometimes bright, sometimes shadowy, but always delicate,

exquisitely arranged for luxurious decorative effect. In his

ballad-romances, to be sure, such as, 'The King's Tragedy,' there is much

dramatic vigor; yet there is still more of medieval weirdness. Rossetti,

like Dante, has much of spiritual mysticism, and his interest centers in

the inner rather than the outer life; but his method, that of a painter and

a southern Italian, is always highly sensuous. His melody is superb and

depends partly on a highly Latinized vocabulary, archaic pronunciations,

and a delicate genius in sound-modulation, the effect being heightened also

by frequent alliteration and masterly use of refrains. 'Sister Helen,'

obviously influenced by the popular ballad 'Edward, Edward,' derives much

of its tremendous tragic power from the refrain, and in the use of this

device is perhaps the most effective poem in the world. Rossetti is

especially facile also with the sonnet. His sonnet sequence, 'The House of

Life,' one of the most notable in English, exalts earthly Love as the

central force in the world and in rather fragmentary fashion traces the

tragic influence of Change in both life and love.

WILLIAM MORRIS. William Morris, a man of remarkable versatility and

tremendous energy, which expressed themselves in poetry and many other

ways, was the son of a prosperous banker, and was born in London in 1834.

At Oxford in 1853-55 he became interested in medieval life and art, was

stimulated by the poetry of Mrs. Browning and Tennyson, became a friend of

Burne-Jones, wrote verse and prose, and was a member of a group called 'The

Brotherhood,' while a little later published for a year a monthly magazine

not unlike 'The Germ.' He apprenticed himself to an architect, but at the

same time also practised several decorative arts, such as woodcarving,

illuminating manuscripts, and designing furniture, stained glass and

embroidery. Together with Burne-Jones, moreover, he became an enthusiastic

pupil of Rossetti in painting. His first volume of verse, 'The Defence of

Guinevere and Other Poems,' put forth in 1858, shows the influence of

Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelitism, but it mainly gives vivid presentation to

the spirit of fourteenth-century French chivalry. In 1861 came the

foundation of the decorative-art firm of Morris and Co. (above, p. 337),

which after some years grew into a large business, continued to be Morris'

main occupation to the end of his life, and has exercised a great

influence, both in England and elsewhere, on the beautifying of the

surroundings of domestic life.

Meanwhile Morris had turned to the writing of long narrative poems, which

he composed with remarkable fluency. The most important is the series of

versions of Greek and Norse myths and legends which appeared in 1868-70 as

'The Earthly Paradise.' Shortly after this he became especially interested

in Icelandic literature and published versions of some of its stories;

notably one of the Siegfried tale, 'Sigurd the Volsung.' In the decade from

1880 to 1890 he devoted most of his energy to work for the Socialist party,

of which he became a leader. His ideals were largely identical with those

of Ruskin; in particular he wished to restore (or create) in the lives of

workingmen conditions which should make of each of them an independent

artist. The practical result of his experience was bitter disappointment,

he was deposed from his leadership, finally abandoned the party, and

returned to art and literature. He now published a succession of prose

romances largely inspired by the Icelandic sagas and composed in a strange

half-archaic style. He also established the 'Kelmscott Press,' which he

made famous for its production of elaborate artistic editions of great

books. He died in 1896.

Morris' shorter poems are strikingly dramatic and picturesque, and his

longer narrations are remarkably facile and often highly pleasing. His

facility, however, is his undoing. He sometimes wrote as much as eight

hundred lines in a day, and he once declared: 'If a chap can't compose an

epic poem while he's weaving tapestry, he had better shut up; he'll never

do any good at all.' In reading his work one always feels that there is the

material of greatness, but perhaps nothing that he wrote is strictly great.

His prose will certainly prove less permanent than his verse.

SWINBURNE. A younger disciple of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement but also a

strongly original artist was Algernon Charles Swinburne. Born in 1837 into

a wealthy family, the son of an admiral, he devoted himself throughout his

life wholly to poetry, and his career was almost altogether devoid of

external incident. After passing through Eton and Oxford he began as author

at twenty-three by publishing two plays imitative of Shakspere. Five years

later he put forth 'Atalanta in Calydon,' a tragedy not only drawn from

Greek heroic legend, but composed in the ancient Greek manner, with long

dialogs and choruses. These two volumes express the two intensely vigorous

forces which were strangely combined in his nature; for while no man has

ever been a more violent romanticist than Swinburne, yet, as one critic has

said, 'All the romantic riot in his blood clamored for Greek severity and

Greek restraint.' During the next fifteen years he was partly occupied with

a huge poetic trilogy in blank verse on Mary Queen of Scots, and from time

to time he wrote other dramas and much prose criticism, the latter largely

in praise of the Elizabethan dramatists and always wildly extravagant in

tone. He produced also some long narrative poems, of which the chief is

'Tristram of Lyonesse.' His chief importance, however, is as a lyric poet,

and his lyric production was large. His earlier poems in this category are

for the most part highly objectionable in substance or sentiment, but he

gradually worked into a better vein. He was a friend of George Meredith,

Burne-Jones, Morris, Rossetti (to whom he loyally devoted himself for

years), and the painter Whistler. He died in 1909.

Swinburne carried his radicalism into all lines. Though an ardently

patriotic Englishman, he was an extreme republican; and many of his poems

are dedicated to the cause of Italian independence or to liberty in

general. The significance of his thought, however, is less than that of any

other English poet who can in any sense be called great; his poetry is

notable chiefly for its artistry, especially for its magnificent melody.

Indeed, it has been cleverly said that he offers us an elaborate service of

gold and silver, but with little on it except salt and pepper. In his case,

however, the mere external beauty and power often seem their own complete

and satisfying justification. His command of different meters is marvelous;

he uses twice as many as Browning, who is perhaps second to him in this

respect, and his most characteristic ones are those of gloriously rapid

anapestic lines with complicated rime-schemes. Others of his distinctive

traits are lavish alliteration, rich sensuousness, grandiose vagueness of

thought and expression, a great sweep of imagination, and a corresponding

love of vastness and desolation. He makes much decorative use of Biblical

imagery and of vague abstract personifications--in general creates an

atmosphere similar to that of Rossetti. Somewhat as in the case of Morris,

his fluency is almost fatal--he sometimes pours out his melodious but vague

emotion in forgetfulness of all proportion and restraint. From the

intellectual and spiritual point of view he is nearly negligible, but as a

musician in words he has no superior, not even Shelley.

OTHER VICTORIA POETS. Among the other Victorian poets, three, at least,

must be mentioned. Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), tutor at Oxford and

later examiner in the government education office, expresses the spiritual

doubt and struggle of the period in noble poems similar to those of Matthew

Arnold, whose fine elegy 'Thyrsis' commemorates him. Edward Fitzgerald

(1809-1883), Irish by birth, an eccentric though kind-hearted recluse, and

a friend of Tennyson, is known solely for his masterly paraphrase (1859) of

some of the Quatrains of the skeptical eleventh-century Persian

astronomer-poet Omar Khayyám. The similarity of temper between the medieval

oriental scholar and the questioning phase of the Victorian period is

striking (though the spirit of Fitzgerald's verse is no doubt as much his

own as Omar's), and no poetry is more poignantly beautiful than the best of

this. Christina Rossetti (1830-94), the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,

lived in London with her mother in the greatest seclusion, occupied with an

ascetic devotion to the English Church, with her poetry, and with the

composition, secondarily, of prose articles and short stories. Her poetry

is limited almost entirely to the lyrical expression of her spiritual

experiences, much of it is explicitly religious, and all of it is religious

in feeling. It is tinged with the Pre-Raphaelite mystic medievalism; and a

quiet and most affecting sadness is its dominant trait; but the power and

beauty of a certain small part of it perhaps entitle her to be called the

chief of English poetesses.

THE NOVEL. THE EARLIER SECONDARY NOVELISTS. To Scott's position of

unquestioned supremacy among romancers and novelists Charles Dickens

succeeded almost immediately on Scott's death, but certain secondary early

Victorian novelists may be considered before him. In the lives of two of

these, Bulwer-Lytton and Benjamin Disraeli, there are interesting

parallels. Both were prominent in politics, both began writing as young men

before the commencement of the Victorian period, and both ended their

literary work only fifty years later. Edward Bulwer, later created Sir

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and finally raised to the peerage as Lord Lytton

(1803-1873), was almost incredibly fluent and versatile. Much of his life a

member of Parliament and for a while of the government, he was a vigorous

pamphleteer. His sixty or more really literary works are of great variety;

perhaps the best known of them are his second novel, the trifling 'Pelham'

(1828), which inaugurated a class of so-called 'dandy' novels, giving

sympathetic presentation to the more frivolous social life of the 'upper'

class, and the historical romances 'The Last Days of Pompeii' (1834) and

'Harold' (1843). In spite of his real ability, Bulwer was a poser and

sentimentalist, characteristics for which he was vigorously ridiculed by

Thackeray. Benjamin Disraeli, [Footnote: The second syllable is pronounced

like the word 'rail' and has the accent, so that the whole name is

Disraíly.] later Earl of Beaconsfield (1804-1881), a much less prolific

writer, was by birth a Jew. His immature earliest novel, 'Vivian Grey'

(1826), deals, somewhat more sensibly, with the same social class as

Bulwer's 'Pelham.' In his novels of this period, as in his dress and

manner, he deliberately attitudinized, a fact which in part reflected a

certain shallowness of character, in part was a device to attract attention

for the sake of his political ambition. After winning his way into

Parliament he wrote in 1844-7 three political novels,' Coningsby,' 'Sybil,'

and 'Tancred,' which set forth his Tory creed of opposition to the

dominance of middle-class Liberalism. For twenty-five years after this he

was absorbed in the leadership of his party, and he at last became Prime

Minister. In later life he so far returned to literature as to write two

additional novels.

Vastly different was the life and work of Charlotte Bronté (1816-1855).

Miss Bronté, a product and embodiment of the strictest religious sense of

duty, somewhat tempered by the liberalizing tendency of the time, was the

daughter of the rector of a small and bleak Yorkshire village, Haworth,

where she was brought up in poverty. The two of her sisters who reached

maturity, Emily and Anne, both still more short-lived than she, also wrote

novels, and Emily produced some lyrics which strikingly express the stern,

defiant will that characterized all the children of the family. Their lives

were pitifully bare, hard, and morbid, scarcely varied or enlivened except

by a year which Charlotte and Emily spent when Charlotte was twenty-six in

a private school in Brussels, followed on Charlotte's part by a return to

the same school for a year as teacher. In 1847 Charlotte's novel 'Jane

Eyre' (pronounced like the word 'air') won a great success. Her three later

novels are less significant. In 1854 she was married to one of her father's

curates, a Mr. Nicholls, a sincere but narrow-minded man. She was happy in

the marriage, but died within a few months, worn out by the unremitting

physical and moral strain of forty years.

The significance of 'Jane Eyre' can be suggested by calling it the last

striking expression of extravagant Romanticism, partly Byronic, but grafted

on the stern Bronté moral sense. One of its two main theses is the

assertion of the supreme authority of religious duty, but it vehemently

insists also on the right of the individual conscience to judge of duty for

itself, in spite of conventional opinion, and, difficult as this may be to

understand to-day, it was denounced at the time as irreligious. The

Romanticism appears further in the volcanic but sometimes melodramatic

power of the love story, where the heroine is a somewhat idealized double

of the authoress and where the imperfect portrayal of the hero reflects the

limitations of Miss Bronté's own experience.

Miss Bronté is the subject of one of the most delightfully sympathetic of

all biographies, written by Mrs. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell. Mrs. Gaskell

was authoress also of many stories, long and short, of which the best known

is 'Cranford' (1853), a charming portrayal of the quaint life of a secluded

village.

CHARLES DICKENS. [Footnote: The life of Dickens by his friend John Forster

is another of the most famous English biographies.] The most popular of all

English novelists, Charles Dickens, was born in 1812, the son of an

unpractical and improvident government navy clerk whom, with questionable

taste, he later caricatured in 'David Copperfield' as Mr. Micawber. The

future novelist's schooling was slight and irregular, but as a boy he read

much fiction, especially seventeenth and eighteenth century authors, whose

influence is apparent in the picaresque lack of structure of his own works.

From childhood also he showed the passion for the drama and the theater

which resulted from the excitably dramatic quality of his own temperament

and which always continued to be the second moving force of his life. When

he was ten years old his father was imprisoned for debt (like Micawber, in

the Marshalsea prison), and he was put to work in the cellar of a London

shoe-blacking factory. On his proud and sensitive disposition this

humiliation, though it lasted only a few months, inflicted a wound which

never thoroughly healed; years after he was famous he would cross the

street to avoid the smell from an altogether different blacking factory,

with its reminder 'of what he once was.' To this experience, also, may

evidently be traced no small part of the intense sympathy with the

oppressed poor, especially with helpless children, which is so prominent in

his novels. Obliged from the age of fifteen to earn his own living, for the

most part, he was for a while a clerk in a London lawyer's office, where he

observed all sorts and conditions of people with characteristic keenness.

Still more valuable was his five or six years' experience in the very

congenial and very active work of a newspaper reporter, where his special

department was political affairs. This led up naturally to his permanent

work. The successful series of lively 'Sketches by Boz' dealing with people

and scenes about London was preliminary to 'The Pickwick Papers,' which

made the author famous at the age of twenty-four.

During the remaining thirty-three years of his life Dickens produced novels

at the rate of rather more than one in two years. He composed slowly and

carefully but did not revise greatly, and generally published by monthly

installments in periodicals which, latterly, he himself established and

edited. Next after 'The Pickwick Papers' came 'Oliver Twist,' and 'David

Copperfield' ten years later. Of the others, 'Martin Chuzzlewit,' 'Dombey

and Son,' 'Bleak House,' and 'A Tale of Two Cities,' are among the best.

For some years Dickens also published an annual Christmas story, of which

the first two, 'A Christmas Carol' and 'The Chimes,' rank highest.

His exuberant physical energy gave to his life more external variety than

is common with authors. At the age of thirty he made a visit to the United

States and travelled as far as to the then extreme western town of St.

Louis, everywhere received and entertained with the most extravagant

enthusiasm. Even before his return to England, however, he excited a

reaction, by his abundantly justified but untactful condemnation of

American piracy of English books; and this reaction was confirmed by his

subsequent caricature of American life in 'American Notes' and 'Martin

Chuzzlewit.' For a number of years during the middle part of his career

Dickens devoted a vast amount of energy to managing and taking the chief

part in a company of amateur actors, who performed at times in various

cities. Later on he substituted for this several prolonged series of

semi-dramatic public readings from his works, an effort which drew heavily

on his vitality and shortened his life, but which intoxicated him with its

enormous success. One of these series was delivered in America, where, of

course, the former ill-feeling had long before worn away.