CHAPTER I

Produced by Karina Aleksandrova, Juliet Sutherland and the

Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

No. 61

_Editors:_

THE RT. HON. H. A. L. FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.

PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, LITT.D., LL.D., F.B.A.

PROF. SIR J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.

PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.

_A complete classified list of the volumes of The Home University

Library already published to be found at the back of this book._

THE VICTORIAN AGE

IN LITERATURE

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

LONDON

THORNTON BUTTERWORTH LTD.

COPYRIGHT, 1913,

BY

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

INTRODUCTION 7

I THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE AND ITS ENEMIES 12

II THE GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 90

III THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 156

IV THE BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 204

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 253

INDEX 255

The Editors wish to explain that this book is not put forward as an

authoritative history of Victorian literature. It is a free and personal

statement of views and impressions about the significance of Victorian

literature made by Mr. Chesterton at the Editors' express invitation.

THE VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE

INTRODUCTION

A section of a long and splendid literature can be most conveniently

treated in one of two ways. It can be divided as one cuts a currant cake

or a Gruyere cheese, taking the currants (or the holes) as they come. Or

it can be divided as one cuts wood--along the grain: if one thinks that

there is a grain. But the two are never the same: the names never come

in the same order in actual time as they come in any serious study of a

spirit or a tendency. The critic who wishes to move onward with the life

of an epoch, must be always running backwards and forwards among its

mere dates; just as a branch bends back and forth continually; yet the

grain in the branch runs true like an unbroken river.

Mere chronological order, indeed, is almost as arbitrary as alphabetical

order. To deal with Darwin, Dickens, Browning, in the sequence of the

birthday book would be to forge about as real a chain as the "Tacitus,

Tolstoy, Tupper" of a biographical dictionary. It might lend itself

more, perhaps, to accuracy: and it might satisfy that school of critics

who hold that every artist should be treated as a solitary craftsman,

indifferent to the commonwealth and unconcerned about moral things. To

write on that principle in the present case, however, would involve all

those delicate difficulties, known to politicians, which beset the

public defence of a doctrine which one heartily disbelieves. It is quite

needless here to go into the old "art for art's sake"--business, or

explain at length why individual artists cannot be reviewed without

reference to their traditions and creeds. It is enough to say that with

other creeds they would have been, for literary purposes, other

individuals. Their views do not, of course, make the brains in their

heads any more than the ink in their pens. But it is equally evident

that mere brain-power, without attributes or aims, a wheel revolving in

the void, would be a subject about as entertaining as ink. The moment we

differentiate the minds, we must differentiate by doctrines and moral

sentiments. A mere sympathy for democratic merry-making and mourning

will not make a man a writer like Dickens. But without that sympathy

Dickens would not be a writer like Dickens; and probably not a writer at

all. A mere conviction that Catholic thought is the clearest as well as

the best disciplined, will not make a man a writer like Newman. But

without that conviction Newman would not be a writer like Newman; and

probably not a writer at all. It is useless for the aesthete (or any

other anarchist) to urge the isolated individuality of the artist, apart

from his attitude to his age. His attitude to his age is his

individuality: men are never individual when alone.

It only remains for me, therefore, to take the more delicate and

entangled task; and deal with the great Victorians, not only by dates

and names, but rather by schools and streams of thought. It is a task

for which I feel myself wholly incompetent; but as that applies to every

other literary enterprise I ever went in for, the sensation is not

wholly novel: indeed, it is rather reassuring than otherwise to realise

that I am now doing something that nobody could do properly. The chief

peril of the process, however, will be an inevitable tendency to make

the spiritual landscape too large for the figures. I must ask for

indulgence if such criticism traces too far back into politics or ethics

the roots of which great books were the blossoms; makes Utilitarianism

more important than _Liberty_ or talks more of the Oxford Movement than

of _The Christian Year_. I can only answer in the very temper of the

age of which I write: for I also was born a Victorian; and sympathise

not a little with the serious Victorian spirit. I can only answer, I

shall not make religion more important than it was to Keble, or politics

more sacred than they were to Mill.

CHAPTER I

THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE AND ITS ENEMIES

The previous literary life of this country had left vigorous many old

forces in the Victorian time, as in our time. Roman Britain and Mediaeval

England are still not only alive but lively; for real development is not

leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from

a root. Even when we improve we never progress. For progress, the

metaphor from the road, implies a man leaving his home behind him: but

improvement means a man exalting the towers or extending the gardens of

his home. The ancient English literature was like all the several

literatures of Christendom, alike in its likeness, alike in its very

unlikeness. Like all European cultures, it was European; like all

European cultures, it was something more than European. A most marked

and unmanageable national temperament is plain in Chaucer and the

ballads of Robin Hood; in spite of deep and sometimes disastrous changes

of national policy, that note is still unmistakable in Shakespeare, in

Johnson and his friends, in Cobbett, in Dickens. It is vain to dream of

defining such vivid things; a national soul is as indefinable as a

smell, and as unmistakable. I remember a friend who tried impatiently to

explain the word "mistletoe" to a German, and cried at last, despairing,

"Well, you know holly--mistletoe's the opposite!" I do not commend this

logical method in the comparison of plants or nations. But if he had

said to the Teuton, "Well, you know Germany--England's the

opposite"--the definition, though fallacious, would not have been wholly

false. England, like all Christian countries, absorbed valuable elements

from the forests and the rude romanticism of the North; but, like all

Christian countries, it drank its longest literary draughts from the

classic fountains of the ancients: nor was this (as is so often loosely

thought) a matter of the mere "Renaissance." The English tongue and

talent of speech did not merely flower suddenly into the gargantuan

polysyllables of the great Elizabethans; it had always been full of the

popular Latin of the Middle Ages. But whatever balance of blood and

racial idiom one allows, it is really true that the only suggestion that

gets near the Englishman is to hint how far he is from the German. The

Germans, like the Welsh, can sing perfectly serious songs perfectly

seriously in chorus: can with clear eyes and clear voices join together

in words of innocent and beautiful personal passion, for a false maiden

or a dead child. The nearest one can get to defining the poetic temper

of Englishmen is to say that they couldn't do this even for beer. They

can sing in chorus, and louder than other Christians: but they must have

in their songs something, I know not what, that is at once shamefaced

and rowdy. If the matter be emotional, it must somehow be also broad,

common and comic, as "Wapping Old Stairs" and "Sally in Our Alley." If

it be patriotic, it must somehow be openly bombastic and, as it were,

indefensible, like "Rule Britannia" or like that superb song (I never

knew its name, if it has one) that records the number of leagues from

Ushant to the Scilly Isles. Also there is a tender love-lyric called "O

Tarry Trousers" which is even more English than the heart of _The

Midsummer Night's Dream_. But our greatest bards and sages have often

shown a tendency to rant it and roar it like true British sailors; to

employ an extravagance that is half conscious and therefore half

humorous. Compare, for example, the rants of Shakespeare with the rants

of Victor Hugo. A piece of Hugo's eloquence is either a serious triumph

or a serious collapse: one feels the poet is offended at a smile. But

Shakespeare seems rather proud of talking nonsense: I never can read

that rousing and mounting description of the storm, where it comes to--

"Who take the ruffian billows by the top,

Curling their monstrous heads, and _hanging_ them

With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds."

without seeing an immense balloon rising from the ground, with

Shakespeare grinning over the edge of the car, and saying, "You can't

stop me: I am above reason now." That is the nearest we can get to the

general national spirit, which we have now to follow through one brief

and curious but very national episode.

Three years before the young queen was crowned, William Cobbett was

buried at Farnham. It may seem strange to begin with this great

neglected name, rather than the old age of Wordsworth or the young death

of Shelley. But to any one who feels literature as human, the empty

chair of Cobbett is more solemn and significant than the throne. With

him died the sort of democracy that was a return to Nature, and which

only poets and mobs can understand. After him Radicalism is urban--and

Toryism suburban. Going through green Warwickshire, Cobbett might have

thought of the crops and Shelley of the clouds. But Shelley would have

called Birmingham what Cobbett called it--a hell-hole. Cobbett was one

with after Liberals in the ideal of Man under an equal law, a citizen of

no mean city. He differed from after Liberals in strongly affirming that

Liverpool and Leeds are mean cities.

It is no idle Hibernianism to say that towards the end of the eighteenth

century the most important event in English history happened in France.

It would seem still more perverse, yet it would be still more precise,

to say that the most important event in English history was the event

that never happened at all--the English Revolution on the lines of the

French Revolution. Its failure was not due to any lack of fervour or

even ferocity in those who would have brought it about: from the time

when the first shout went up for Wilkes to the time when the last

Luddite fires were quenched in a cold rain of rationalism, the spirit of

Cobbett, of rural republicanism, of English and patriotic democracy,

burned like a beacon. The revolution failed because it was foiled by

another revolution; an aristocratic revolution, a victory of the rich

over the poor. It was about this time that the common lands were finally

enclosed; that the more cruel game laws were first established; that

England became finally a land of landlords instead of common

land-owners. I will not call it a Tory reaction; for much of the worst

of it (especially of the land-grabbing) was done by Whigs; but we may

certainly call it Anti-Jacobin. Now this fact, though political, is not

only relevant but essential to everything that concerned literature. The

upshot was that though England was full of the revolutionary ideas,

nevertheless there was no revolution. And the effect of this in turn was

that from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the

nineteenth the spirit of revolt in England took a wholly literary form.

In France it was what people did that was wild and elemental; in England

it was what people wrote. It is a quaint comment on the notion that the

English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were

rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

It has been well and wittily said (as illustrating the mildness of

English and the violence of French developments) that the same Gospel of

Rousseau which in France produced the Terror, in England produced

_Sandford and Merton_. But people forget that in literature the English

were by no means restrained by Mr. Barlow; and that if we turn from

politics to art, we shall find the two parts peculiarly reversed. It

would be equally true to say that the same eighteenth-century

emancipation which in France produced the pictures of David, in England

produced the pictures of Blake. There never were, I think, men who gave

to the imagination so much of the sense of having broken out into the

very borderlands of being, as did the great English poets of the

romantic or revolutionary period; than Coleridge in the secret sunlight

of the Antarctic, where the waters were like witches' oils; than Keats

looking out of those extreme mysterious casements upon that ultimate

sea. The heroes and criminals of the great French crisis would have been

quite as incapable of such imaginative independence as Keats and

Coleridge would have been incapable of winning the battle of Wattignies.

In Paris the tree of liberty was a garden tree, clipped very correctly;

and Robespierre used the razor more regularly than the guillotine.

Danton, who knew and admired English literature, would have cursed

freely over _Kubla Khan_; and if the Committee of Public Safety had not

already executed Shelley as an aristocrat, they would certainly have

locked him up for a madman. Even Hebert (the one really vile

Revolutionist), had he been reproached by English poets with worshipping

the Goddess of Reason, might legitimately have retorted that it was

rather the Goddess of Unreason that they set up to be worshipped.

Verbally considered, Carlyle's _French Revolution_ was more

revolutionary than the real French Revolution: and if Carrier, in an

exaggerative phrase, empurpled the Loire with carnage, Turner almost

literally set the Thames on fire.

This trend of the English Romantics to carry out the revolutionary idea

not savagely in works, but very wildly indeed in words, had several

results; the most important of which was this. It started English

literature after the Revolution with a sort of bent towards independence

and eccentricity, which in the brighter wits became individuality, and

in the duller ones, Individualism. English Romantics, English Liberals,

were not public men making a republic, but poets, each seeing a vision.

The lonelier version of liberty was a sort of aristocratic anarchism in

Byron and Shelley; but though in Victorian times it faded into much

milder prejudices and much more _bourgeois_ crotchets, England retained

from that twist a certain odd separation and privacy. England became

much more of an island than she had ever been before. There fell from

her about this time, not only the understanding of France or Germany,

but to her own long and yet lingering disaster, the understanding of

Ireland. She had not joined in the attempt to create European democracy;

nor did she, save in the first glow of Waterloo, join in the

counter-attempt to destroy it. The life in her literature was still, to

a large extent, the romantic liberalism of Rousseau, the free and humane

truisms that had refreshed the other nations, the return to Nature and

to natural rights. But that which in Rousseau was a creed, became in

Hazlitt a taste and in Lamb little more than a whim. These latter and

their like form a group at the beginning of the nineteenth century of

those we may call the Eccentrics: they gather round Coleridge and his

decaying dreams or linger in the tracks of Keats and Shelley and Godwin;

Lamb with his bibliomania and creed of pure caprice, the most unique of

all geniuses; Leigh Hunt with his Bohemian impecuniosity; Landor with

his tempestuous temper, throwing plates on the floor; Hazlitt with his

bitterness and his low love affair; even that healthier and happier

Bohemian, Peacock. With these, in one sense at least, goes De Quincey.

He was, unlike most of these embers of the revolutionary age in letters,

a Tory; and was attached to the political army which is best represented

in letters by the virile laughter and leisure of Wilson's _Noctes

Ambrosianae_. But he had nothing in common with that environment. It

remained for some time as a Tory tradition, which balanced the cold and

brilliant aristocracy of the Whigs. It lived on the legend of Trafalgar;

the sense that insularity was independence; the sense that anomalies are

as jolly as family jokes; the general sense that old salts are the salt

of the earth. It still lives in some old songs about Nelson or Waterloo,

which are vastly more pompous and vastly more sincere than the cockney

cocksureness of later Jingo lyrics. But it is hard to connect De Quincey

with it; or, indeed, with anything else. De Quincey would certainly have

been a happier man, and almost certainly a better man, if he had got

drunk on toddy with Wilson, instead of getting calm and clear (as he

himself describes) on opium, and with no company but a book of German

metaphysics. But he would hardly have revealed those wonderful vistas

and perspectives of prose, which permit one to call him the first and

most powerful of the decadents: those sentences that lengthen out like

nightmare corridors, or rise higher and higher like impossible eastern

pagodas. He was a morbid fellow, and far less moral than Burns; for when

Burns confessed excess he did not defend it. But he has cast a gigantic

shadow on our literature, and was as certainly a genius as Poe. Also he

had humour, which Poe had not. And if any one still smarting from the

pinpricks of Wilde or Whistler, wants to convict them of plagiarism in

their "art for art" epigrams--he will find most of what they said said

better in _Murder as One of the Fine Arts_.

One great man remains of this elder group, who did their last work only

under Victoria; he knew most of the members of it, yet he did not belong

to it in any corporate sense. He was a poor man and an invalid, with

Scotch blood and a strong, though perhaps only inherited, quarrel with

the old Calvinism; by name Thomas Hood. Poverty and illness forced him

to the toils of an incessant jester; and the revolt against gloomy

religion made him turn his wit, whenever he could, in the direction of

a defence of happier and humaner views. In the long great roll that

includes Homer and Shakespeare, he was the last great man who really

employed the pun. His puns were not all good (nor were Shakespeare's),

but the best of them were a strong and fresh form of art. The pun is

said to be a thing of two meanings; but with Hood there were three

meanings, for there was also the abstract truth that would have been

there with no pun at all. The pun of Hood is underrated, like the "wit"

of Voltaire, by those who forget that the words of Voltaire were not

pins, but swords. In Hood at his best the verbal neatness only gives to

the satire or the scorn a ring of finality such as is given by rhyme.

For rhyme does go with reason, since the aim of both is to bring things

to an end. The tragic necessity of puns tautened and hardened Hood's

genius; so that there is always a sort of shadow of that sharpness

across all his serious poems, falling like the shadow of a sword.

"Sewing at once with a double thread a shroud as well as a shirt"--"We

thought her dying when she slept, and sleeping when she died"--"Oh God,

that bread should be so dear and flesh and blood so cheap"--none can

fail to note in these a certain fighting discipline of phrase, a

compactness and point which was well trained in lines like "A

cannon-ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms." In France he

would have been a great epigrammatist, like Hugo. In England he is a

punster.

There was nothing at least in this group I have loosely called the

Eccentrics that disturbs the general sense that all their generation was

part of the sunset of the great revolutionary poets. This fading glamour

affected England in a sentimental and, to some extent, a snobbish

direction; making men feel that great lords with long curls and whiskers

were naturally the wits that led the world. But it affected England also

negatively and by reaction; for it associated such men as Byron with

superiority, but not with success. The English middle classes were led

to distrust poetry almost as much as they admired it. They could not

believe that either vision at the one end or violence at the other could

ever be practical. They were deaf to that great warning of Hugo: "You

say the poet is in the clouds; but so is the thunderbolt." Ideals

exhausted themselves in the void; Victorian England, very unwisely,

would have no more to do with idealists in politics. And this, chiefly,

because there had been about these great poets a young and splendid

sterility; since the pantheist Shelley was in fact washed under by the

wave of the world, or Byron sank in death as he drew the sword for

Hellas.

The chief turn of nineteenth-century England was taken about the time

when a footman at Holland House opened a door and announced "Mr.

Macaulay." Macaulay's literary popularity was representative and it was

deserved; but his presence among the great Whig families marks an

epoch. He was the son of one of the first "friends of the negro," whose

honest industry and philanthropy were darkened by a religion of sombre

smugness, which almost makes one fancy they loved the negro for his

colour, and would have turned away from red or yellow men as needlessly

gaudy. But his wit and his politics (combined with that dropping of the

Puritan tenets but retention of the Puritan tone which marked his class

and generation), lifted him into a sphere which was utterly opposite to

that from which he came. This Whig world was exclusive; but it was not

narrow. It was very difficult for an outsider to get into it; but if he

did get into it he was in a much freer atmosphere than any other in

England. Of those aristocrats, the Old Guard of the eighteenth century,

many denied God, many defended Bonaparte, and nearly all sneered at the

Royal Family. Nor did wealth or birth make any barriers for those once

within this singular Whig world. The platform was high, but it was

level. Moreover the upstart nowadays pushes himself by wealth: but the

Whigs could choose their upstarts. In that world Macaulay found Rogers,

with his phosphorescent and corpse-like brilliancy; there he found

Sydney Smith, bursting with crackers of common sense, an admirable old

heathen; there he found Tom Moore, the romantic of the Regency, a

shortened shadow of Lord Byron. That he reached this platform and

remained on it is, I say, typical of a turning-point in the century. For

the fundamental fact of early Victorian history was this: the decision

of the middle classes to employ their new wealth in backing up a sort of

aristocratical compromise, and not (like the middle class in the French

Revolution) insisting on a clean sweep and a clear democratic programme.

It went along with the decision of the aristocracy to recruit itself

more freely from the middle class. It was then also that Victorian

"prudery" began: the great lords yielded on this as on Free Trade.

These two decisions have made the doubtful England of to-day; and

Macaulay is typical of them; he is the _bourgeois_ in Belgravia. The

alliance is marked by his great speeches for Lord Grey's Reform Bill: it

is marked even more significantly in his speech against the Chartists.

Cobbett was dead.

Macaulay makes the foundation of the Victorian age in all its very

English and unique elements: its praise of Puritan politics and

abandonment of Puritan theology; its belief in a cautious but perpetual

patching up of the Constitution; its admiration for industrial wealth.

But above all he typifies the two things that really make the Victorian

Age itself, the cheapness and narrowness of its conscious formulae; the

richness and humanity of its unconscious tradition. There were two

Macaulays, a rational Macaulay who was generally wrong, and a romantic

Macaulay who was almost invariably right. All that was small in him

derives from the dull parliamentarism of men like Sir James Mackintosh;

but all that was great in him has much more kinship with the festive

antiquarianism of Sir Walter Scott.

As a philosopher he had only two thoughts; and neither of them is true.

The first was that politics, as an experimental science, must go on

improving, along with clocks, pistols or penknives, by the mere

accumulation of experiment and variety. He was, indeed, far too

strong-minded a man to accept the hazy modern notion that the soul in

its highest sense can change: he seems to have held that religion can

never get any better and that poetry rather tends to get worse. But he

did not see the flaw in his political theory; which is that unless the

soul improves with time there is no guarantee that the accumulations of

experience will be adequately used. Figures do not add themselves up;

birds do not label or stuff themselves; comets do not calculate their

own courses; these things are done by the soul of man. And if the soul

of man is subject to other laws, is liable to sin, to sleep, to

anarchism or to suicide, then all sciences including politics may fall

as sterile and lie as fallow as before man's reason was made. Macaulay

seemed sometimes to talk as if clocks produced clocks, or guns had

families of little pistols, or a penknife littered like a pig. The other

view he held was the more or less utilitarian theory of toleration; that

we should get the best butcher whether he was a Baptist or a

Muggletonian, and the best soldier whether he was a Wesleyan or an

Irvingite. The compromise worked well enough in an England Protestant in

bulk; but Macaulay ought to have seen that it has its limitations. A

good butcher might be a Baptist; he is not very likely to be a Buddhist.

A good soldier might be a Wesleyan; he would hardly be a Quaker. For the

rest, Macaulay was concerned to interpret the seventeenth century in

terms of the triumph of the Whigs as champions of public rights; and he

upheld this one-sidedly but not malignantly in a style of rounded and

ringing sentences, which at its best is like steel and at its worst like

tin.

This was the small conscious Macaulay; the great unconscious Macaulay

was very different. His noble enduring quality in our literature is

this: that he truly had an abstract passion for history; a warm, poetic

and sincere enthusiasm for great things as such; an ardour and appetite

for great books, great battles, great cities, great men. He felt and

used names like trumpets. The reader's greatest joy is in the writer's

own joy, when he can let his last phrase fall like a hammer on some

resounding name like Hildebrand or Charlemagne, on the eagles of Rome or

the pillars of Hercules. As with Walter Scott, some of the best things

in his prose and poetry are the surnames that he did not make. And it is

remarkable to notice that this romance of history, so far from making

him more partial or untrustworthy, was the only thing that made him

moderately just. His reason was entirely one-sided and fanatical. It

was his imagination that was well-balanced and broad. He was

monotonously certain that only Whigs were right; but it was necessary

that Tories should at least be great, that his heroes might have foemen

worthy of their steel. If there was one thing in the world he hated it

was a High Church Royalist parson; yet when Jeremy Collier the Jacobite

priest raises a real banner, all Macaulay's blood warms with the mere

prospect of a fight. "It is inspiriting to see how gallantly the

solitary outlaw advances to attack enemies formidable separately, and,

it might have been thought, irresistible when combined; distributes his

swashing blows right and left among Wycherley, Congreve and Vanbrugh,

treads the wretched D'Urfey down in the dirt beneath his feet; and

strikes with all his strength full at the towering crest of Dryden."

That is exactly where Macaulay is great; because he is almost Homeric.

The whole triumph turns upon mere names; but men are commanded by

names. So his poem on the Armada is really a good geography book gone

mad; one sees the map of England come alive and march and mix under the

eye.

The chief tragedy in the trend of later literature may be expressed by

saying that the smaller Macaulay conquered the larger. Later men had

less and less of that hot love of history he had inherited from Scott.

They had more and more of that cold science of self-interests which he

had learnt from Bentham.

The name of this great man, though it belongs to a period before the

Victorian, is, like the name of Cobbett, very important to it. In

substance Macaulay accepted the conclusions of Bentham; though he

offered brilliant objections to all his arguments. In any case the soul

of Bentham (if he had one) went marching on, like John Brown; and in the

central Victorian movement it was certainly he who won. John Stuart Mill

was the final flower of that growth. He was himself fresh and delicate

and pure; but that is the business of a flower. Though he had to preach

a hard rationalism in religion, a hard competition in economics, a hard

egoism in ethics, his own soul had all that silvery sensitiveness that

can be seen in his fine portrait by Watts. He boasted none of that

brutal optimism with which his friends and followers of the Manchester

School expounded their cheery negations. There was about Mill even a

sort of embarrassment; he exhibited all the wheels of his iron universe

rather reluctantly, like a gentleman in trade showing ladies over his

factory. There shone in him a beautiful reverence for women, which is

all the more touching because, in his department, as it were, he could

only offer them so dry a gift as the Victorian Parliamentary Franchise.

Now in trying to describe how the Victorian writers stood to each other,

we must recur to the very real difficulty noted at the beginning: the

difficulty of keeping the moral order parallel with the chronological

order. For the mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions and

not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will

occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect.

Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated:

notions will be first defined long after they are dead. It is no good

getting the almanac to look up moonshine; and most literature in this

sense is moonshine. Thus Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as it

were, from a Shelleyan extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus

Newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet

delivered, that was coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason no

one can understand tradition, or even history, who has not some

tenderness for anachronism.

Now for the great part of the Victorian era the utilitarian tradition

which reached its highest in Mill held the centre of the field; it was

the philosophy in office, so to speak. It sustained its march of

codification and inquiry until it had made possible the great victories

of Darwin and Huxley and Wallace. If we take Macaulay at the beginning

of the epoch and Huxley at the end of it, we shall find that they had

much in common. They were both square-jawed, simple men, greedy of

controversy but scornful of sophistry, dead to mysticism but very much

alive to morality; and they were both very much more under the influence

of their own admirable rhetoric than they knew. Huxley, especially, was

much more a literary than a scientific man. It is amusing to note that

when Huxley was charged with being rhetorical, he expressed his horror

of "plastering the fair face of truth with that pestilent cosmetic,

rhetoric," which is itself about as well-plastered a piece of rhetoric

as Ruskin himself could have managed. The difference that the period had

developed can best be seen if we consider this: that while neither was

of a spiritual sort, Macaulay took it for granted that common sense

required some kind of theology, while Huxley took it for granted that

common sense meant having none. Macaulay, it is said, never talked about

his religion: but Huxley was always talking about the religion he hadn't

got.

But though this simple Victorian rationalism held the centre, and in a

certain sense _was_ the Victorian era, it was assailed on many sides,

and had been assailed even before the beginning of that era. The rest of

the intellectual history of the time is a series of reactions against

it, which come wave after wave. They have succeeded in shaking it, but

not in dislodging it from the modern mind. The first of these was the

Oxford Movement; a bow that broke when it had let loose the flashing

arrow that was Newman. The second reaction was one man; without teachers

or pupils--Dickens. The third reaction was a group that tried to create

a sort of new romantic Protestantism, to pit against both Reason and

Rome--Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, Maurice--perhaps Tennyson. Browning

also was at once romantic and Puritan; but he belonged to no group, and

worked against materialism in a manner entirely his own. Though as a boy

he bought eagerly Shelley's revolutionary poems, he did not think of

becoming a revolutionary poet. He concentrated on the special souls of

men; seeking God in a series of private interviews. Hence Browning,

great as he is, is rather one of the Victorian novelists than wholly of

the Victorian poets. From Ruskin, again, descend those who may be called

the Pre-Raphaelites of prose and poetry.

It is really with this rationalism triumphant, and with the romance of

these various attacks on it, that the study of Victorian literature

begins and proceeds. Bentham was already the prophet of a powerful sect;

Macaulay was already the historian of an historic party, before the true

Victorian epoch began. The middle classes were emerging in a state of

damaged Puritanism. The upper classes were utterly pagan. Their clear

and courageous testimony remains in those immortal words of Lord

Melbourne, who had led the young queen to the throne and long stood

there as her protector. "No one has more respect for the Christian

religion than I have; but really, when it comes to intruding it into

private life----" What was pure paganism in the politics of Melbourne

became a sort of mystical cynicism in the politics of Disraeli; and is

well mirrored in his novels--for he was a man who felt at home in

mirrors. With every allowance for aliens and eccentrics and all the

accidents that must always eat the edges of any systematic

circumference, it may still be said that the Utilitarians held the fort.

Of the Oxford Movement what remains most strongly in the Victorian Epoch

centres round the challenge of Newman, its one great literary man. But

the movement as a whole had been of great significance in the very

genesis and make up of the society: yet that significance is not quite

easy immediately to define. It was certainly not aesthetic ritualism;

scarcely one of the Oxford High Churchmen was what we should call a

Ritualist. It was certainly not a conscious reaching out towards Rome:

except on a Roman Catholic theory which might explain all our unrests by

that dim desire. It knew little of Europe, it knew nothing of Ireland,

to which any merely Roman Catholic revulsion would obviously have

turned. In the first instance, I think, the more it is studied, the more

it would appear that it was a movement of mere religion as such. It was

not so much a taste for Catholic dogma, but simply a hunger for dogma.

For dogma means the serious satisfaction of the mind. Dogma does not

mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought. It was a revolt

against the Victorian spirit in one particular aspect of it; which may

roughly be called (in a cosy and domestic Victorian metaphor) having

your cake and eating it too. It saw that the solid and serious

Victorians were fundamentally frivolous--because they were

fundamentally inconsistent.

A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent

talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So

long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a

shape. Mahomet created, when he forbade wine but allowed five wives: he

created a very big thing, which we have still to deal with. The first

French Republic created, when it affirmed property and abolished

peerages; France still stands like a square, four-sided building which

Europe has besieged in vain. The men of the Oxford Movement would have

been horrified at being compared either with Moslems or Jacobins. But

their sub-conscious thirst was for something that Moslems and Jacobins

had and ordinary Anglicans had not: the exalted excitement of

consistency. If you were a Moslem you were not a Bacchanal. If you were

a Republican you were not a peer. And so the Oxford men, even in their

first and dimmest stages, felt that if you were a Churchman you were not

a Dissenter. The Oxford Movement was, out of the very roots of its

being, a rational movement; almost a rationalist movement. In that it

differed sharply from the other reactions that shook the Utilitarian

compromise; the blinding mysticism of Carlyle, the mere manly

emotionalism of Dickens. It was an appeal to reason: reason said that if

a Christian had a feast day he must have a fast day too. Otherwise, all

days ought to be alike; and this was that very Utilitarianism against

which their Oxford Movement was the first and most rational assault.

This idea, even by reason of its reason, narrowed into a sort of sharp

spear, of which the spear blade was Newman. It did forget many of the

other forces that were fighting on its side. But the movement could

boast, first and last, many men who had this eager dogmatic quality:

Keble, who spoilt a poem in order to recognise a doctrine; Faber, who

told the rich, almost with taunts, that God sent the poor as eagles to

strip them; Froude, who with Newman announced his return in the arrogant

motto of Achilles. But the greater part of all this happened before what

is properly our period; and in that period Newman, and perhaps Newman

alone, is the expression and summary of the whole school. It was

certainly in the Victorian Age, and after his passage to Rome, that

Newman claimed his complete right to be in any book on modern English

literature. This is no place for estimating his theology: but one point

about it does clearly emerge. Whatever else is right, the theory that

Newman went over to Rome to find peace and an end of argument, is quite

unquestionably wrong. He had far more quarrels after he had gone over to

Rome. But, though he had far more quarrels, he had far fewer

compromises: and he was of that temper which is tortured more by

compromise than by quarrel. He was a man at once of abnormal energy and

abnormal sensibility: nobody without that combination could have written

the _Apologia_. If he sometimes seemed to skin his enemies alive, it was

because he himself lacked a skin. In this sense his _Apologia_ is a

triumph far beyond the ephemeral charge on which it was founded; in this

sense he does indeed (to use his own expression) vanquish not his

accuser but his judges. Many men would shrink from recording all their

cold fits and hesitations and prolonged inconsistencies: I am sure it

was the breath of life to Newman to confess them, now that he had done

with them for ever. His _Lectures on the Present Position of English

Catholics_, practically preached against a raging mob, rise not only

higher but happier, as his instant unpopularity increases. There is

something grander than humour, there is fun, in the very first lecture

about the British Constitution as explained to a meeting of Russians.

But always his triumphs are the triumphs of a highly sensitive man: a

man must feel insults before he can so insultingly and splendidly

avenge them. He is a naked man, who carries a naked sword. The quality

of his literary style is so successful that it succeeds in escaping

definition. The quality of his logic is that of a long but passionate

patience, which waits until he has fixed all corners of an iron trap.

But the quality of his moral comment on the age remains what I have

said: a protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasing

irrationality of mere Victorian comfort and compromise. So far as the

present purpose is concerned, his protest died with him: he left few

imitators and (it may easily be conceived) no successful imitators. The

suggestion of him lingers on in the exquisite Elizabethan perversity of

Coventry Patmore; and has later flamed out from the shy volcano of

Francis Thompson. Otherwise (as we shall see in the parallel case of

Ruskin's Socialism) he has no followers in his own age: but very many in

ours.

The next group of reactionaries or romantics or whatever we elect to

call them, gathers roughly around one great name. Scotland, from which

had come so many of those harsh economists who made the first Radical

philosophies of the Victorian Age, was destined also to fling forth (I

had almost said to spit forth) their fiercest and most extraordinary

enemy. The two primary things in Thomas Carlyle were his early Scotch

education and his later German culture. The first was in almost all

respects his strength; the latter in some respects his weakness. As an

ordinary lowland peasant, he inherited the really valuable historic

property of the Scots, their independence, their fighting spirit, and

their instinctive philosophic consideration of men merely as men. But he

was not an ordinary peasant. If he had laboured obscurely in his village

till death, he would have been yet locally a marked man; a man with a

wild eye, a man with an air of silent anger; perhaps a man at whom

stones were sometimes thrown. A strain of disease and suffering ran

athwart both his body and his soul. In spite of his praise of silence,

it was only through his gift of utterance that he escaped madness. But

while his fellow-peasants would have seen this in him and perhaps mocked

it, they would also have seen something which they always expect in such

men, and they would have got it: vision, a power in the mind akin to

second sight. Like many ungainly or otherwise unattractive Scotchmen, he

was a seer. By which I do not mean to refer so much to his

transcendental rhapsodies about the World-soul or the Nature-garment or

the Mysteries and Eternities generally, these seem to me to belong more

to his German side and to be less sincere and vital. I mean a real power

of seeing things suddenly, not apparently reached by any process; a

grand power of guessing. He _saw_ the crowd of the new States General,

Danton with his "rude flattened face," Robespierre peering mistily

through his spectacles. He _saw_ the English charge at Dunbar. He

_guessed_ that Mirabeau, however dissipated and diseased, had something

sturdy inside him. He _guessed_ that Lafayette, however brave and

victorious, had nothing inside him. He supported the lawlessness of

Cromwell, because across two centuries he almost physically _felt_ the

feebleness and hopelessness of the moderate Parliamentarians. He said a

word of sympathy for the universally vituperated Jacobins of the

Mountain, because through thick veils of national prejudice and

misrepresentation, he felt the impossibility of the Gironde. He was

wrong in denying to Scott the power of being inside his characters: but

he really had a good deal of that power himself. It was one of his

innumerable and rather provincial crotchets to encourage prose as

against poetry. But, as a matter of fact, he himself was much greater

considered as a kind of poet than considered as anything else; and the

central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

He first emerged, as it were, as a student and disciple of Goethe. The

connection was not wholly fortunate. With much of what Goethe really

stood for he was not really in sympathy; but in his own obstinate way,

he tried to knock his idol into shape instead of choosing another. He

pushed further and further the extravagances of a vivid but very

unbalanced and barbaric style, in the praise of a poet who really

represented the calmest classicism and the attempt to restore a Hellenic

equilibrium in the mind. It is like watching a shaggy Scandinavian

decorating a Greek statue washed up by chance on his shores. And while

the strength of Goethe was a strength of completion and serenity, which

Carlyle not only never found but never even sought, the weaknesses of

Goethe were of a sort that did not draw the best out of Carlyle. The one

civilised element that the German classicists forgot to put into their

beautiful balance was a sense of humour. And great poet as Goethe was,

there is to the last something faintly fatuous about his half

sceptical, half sentimental self-importance; a Lord Chamberlain of

teacup politics; an earnest and elderly flirt; a German of the Germans.

Now Carlyle had humour; he had it in his very style, but it never got

into his philosophy. His philosophy largely remained a heavy Teutonic

idealism, absurdly unaware of the complexity of things; as when he

perpetually repeated (as with a kind of flat-footed stamping) that

people ought to tell the truth; apparently supposing, to quote

Stevenson's phrase, that telling the truth is as easy as blind hookey.

Yet, though his general honesty is unquestionable, he was by no means

one of those who will give up a fancy under the shock of a fact. If by

sheer genius he frequently guessed right, he was not the kind of man to

admit easily that he had guessed wrong. His version of Cromwell's filthy

cruelties in Ireland, or his impatient slurring over of the most

sinister riddle in the morality of Frederick the Great--these passages

are, one must frankly say, disingenuous. But it is, so to speak, a

generous disingenuousness; the heat and momentum of sincere admirations,

not the shuffling fear and flattery of the constitutional or patriotic

historian. It bears most resemblance to the incurable prejudices of a

woman.

For the rest there hovered behind all this transcendental haze a certain

presence of old northern paganism; he really had some sympathy with the

vast vague gods of that moody but not unmanly Nature-worship which seems

to have filled the darkness of the North before the coming of the Roman

Eagle or the Christian Cross. This he combined, allowing for certain

sceptical omissions, with the grisly Old Testament God he had heard

about in the black Sabbaths of his childhood; and so promulgated

(against both Rationalists and Catholics) a sort of heathen Puritanism:

Protestantism purged of its evidences of Christianity.

His great and real work was the attack on Utilitarianism: which did real

good, though there was much that was muddled and dangerous in the

historical philosophy which he preached as an alternative. It is his

real glory that he was the first to see clearly and say plainly the

great truth of our time; that the wealth of the state is not the

prosperity of the people. Macaulay and the Mills and all the regular run

of the Early Victorians, took it for granted that if Manchester was

getting richer, we had got hold of the key to comfort and progress.

Carlyle pointed out (with stronger sagacity and humour than he showed on

any other question) that it was just as true to say that Manchester was

getting poorer as that it was getting richer: or, in other words, that

Manchester was not getting richer at all, but only some of the less

pleasing people in Manchester. In this matter he is to be noted in

connection with national developments much later; for he thus became the

first prophet of the Socialists. _Sartor Resartus_ is an admirable

fantasia; _The French Revolution_ is, with all its faults, a really

fine piece of history; the lectures on Heroes contain some masterly

sketches of personalities. But I think it is in _Past and Present_, and

the essay on _Chartism_, that Carlyle achieves the work he was chosen by

gods and men to achieve; which possibly might not have been achieved by

a happier or more healthy-minded man. He never rose to more deadly irony

than in such _macabre_ descriptions as that of the poor woman proving

her sisterhood with the rich by giving them all typhoid fever; or that

perfect piece of _badinage_ about "Overproduction of Shirts"; in which

he imagines the aristocrats claiming to be quite clear of this offence.

"Will you bandy accusations, will you accuse _us_ of overproduction? We

take the Heavens and the Earth to witness that we have produced nothing

at all.... He that accuses us of producing, let him show himself. Let

him say what and when." And he never wrote so sternly and justly as when

he compared the "divine sorrow" of Dante with the "undivine sorrow" of

Utilitarianism, which had already come down to talking about the

breeding of the poor and to hinting at infanticide. This is a

representative quarrel; for if the Utilitarian spirit reached its

highest point in Mill, it certainly reached its lowest point in Malthus.

One last element in the influence of Carlyle ought to be mentioned;

because it very strongly dominated his disciples--especially Kingsley,

and to some extent Tennyson and Ruskin. Because he frowned at the

cockney cheerfulness of the cheaper economists, they and others

represented him as a pessimist, and reduced all his azure infinities to

a fit of the blues. But Carlyle's philosophy, more carefully considered,

will be found to be dangerously optimist rather than pessimist. As a

thinker Carlyle is not sad, but recklessly and rather unscrupulously

satisfied. For he seems to have held the theory that good could not be

definitely defeated in this world; and that everything in the long run

finds its right level. It began with what we may call the "Bible of

History" idea: that all affairs and politics were a clouded but unbroken

revelation of the divine. Thus any enormous and unaltered human

settlement--as the Norman Conquest or the secession of America--we must

suppose to be the will of God. It lent itself to picturesque treatment;

and Carlyle and the Carlyleans were above all things picturesque. It

gave them at first a rhetorical advantage over the Catholic and other

older schools. They could boast that their Creator was still creating;

that he was in Man and Nature, and was not hedged round in a Paradise or

imprisoned in a pyx. They could say their God had not grown too old for

war: that He was present at Gettysburg and Gravelotte as much as at

Gibeon and Gilboa. I do not mean that they literally said these

particular things: they are what I should have said had I been bribed to

defend their position. But they said things to the same effect: that

what manages finally to happen, happens for a higher purpose. Carlyle

said the French Revolution was a thing settled in the eternal councils

to be; and therefore (and not because it was right) attacking it was

"fighting against God." And Kingsley even carried the principle so far

as to tell a lady she should remain in the Church of England mainly

because God had put her there. But in spite of its superficial

spirituality and encouragement, it is not hard to see how such a

doctrine could be abused. It practically comes to saying that God is on

the side of the big battalions--or at least, of the victorious ones.

Thus a creed which set out to create conquerors would only corrupt

soldiers; corrupt them with a craven and unsoldierly worship of success:

and that which began as the philosophy of courage ends as the philosophy

of cowardice. If, indeed, Carlyle were right in saying that right is

only "rightly articulated" might, men would never articulate or move in

any way. For no act can have might before it is done: if there is no

right, it cannot rationally be done at all. This element, like the

Anti-Utilitarian element, is to be kept in mind in connection with after

developments: for in this Carlyle is the first cry of Imperialism, as

(in the other case) of Socialism: and the two babes unborn who stir at

the trumpet are Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Kipling also

carries on from Carlyle the concentration on the purely Hebraic parts of

the Bible. The fallacy of this whole philosophy is that if God is indeed

present at a modern battle, He may be present not as on Gilboa but

Golgotha.

Carlyle's direct historical worship of strength and the rest of it was

fortunately not very fruitful; and perhaps lingered only in Froude the

historian. Even he is more an interruption than a continuity. Froude

develops rather the harsher and more impatient moral counsels of his

master than like Ruskin the more romantic and sympathetic. He carries on

the tradition of Hero Worship: but carries far beyond Carlyle the

practice of worshipping people who cannot rationally be called heroes.

In this matter that eccentric eye of the seer certainly helped Carlyle:

in Cromwell and Frederick the Great there was at least something

self-begotten, original or mystical; if they were not heroes they were

at least demigods or perhaps demons. But Froude set himself to the

praise of the Tudors, a much lower class of people; ill-conditioned

prosperous people who merely waxed fat and kicked. Such strength as

Henry VIII had was the strength of a badly trained horse that bolts, not

of any clear or courageous rider who controls him. There is a sort of

strong man mentioned in Scripture who, because he masters himself, is

more than he that takes a city. There is another kind of strong man

(known to the medical profession) who cannot master himself; and whom it

may take half a city to take alive. But for all that he is a low

lunatic, and not a hero; and of that sort were too many of the heroes

whom Froude attempted to praise. A kind of instinct kept Carlyle from

over-praising Henry VIII; or that highly cultivated and complicated

liar, Queen Elizabeth. Here, the only importance of this is that one of

Carlyle's followers carried further that "strength" which was the real

weakness of Carlyle. I have heard that Froude's life of Carlyle was

unsympathetic; but if it was so it was a sort of parricide. For the

rest, like Macaulay, he was a picturesque and partisan historian: but,

like Macaulay (and unlike the craven scientific historians of to-day) he

was not ashamed of being partisan or of being picturesque. Such studies

as he wrote on the Elizabethan seamen and adventurers, represent very

triumphantly the sort of romance of England that all this school was

attempting to establish; and link him up with Kingsley and the rest.

Ruskin may be very roughly regarded as the young lieutenant of Carlyle

in his war on Utilitarian Radicalism: but as an individual he presents

many and curious divergences. In the matter of style, he enriched

English without disordering it. And in the matter of religion (which

was the key of this age as of every other) he did not, like Carlyle, set

up the romance of the great Puritans as a rival to the romance of the

Catholic Church. Rather he set up and worshipped all the arts and

trophies of the Catholic Church as a rival to the Church itself. None

need dispute that he held a perfectly tenable position if he chose to

associate early Florentine art with a Christianity still comparatively

pure, and such sensualities as the Renaissance bred with the corruption

of a Papacy. But this does not alter, as a merely artistic fact, the

strange air of ill-ease and irritation with which Ruskin seems to tear

down the gargoyles of Amiens or the marbles of Venice, as things of

which Europe is not worthy; and take them away with him to a really

careful museum, situated dangerously near Clapham. Many of the great men

of that generation, indeed, had a sort of divided mind; an ethical

headache which was literally a "splitting headache"; for there was a

schism in the sympathies. When these men looked at some historic

object, like the Catholic Church or the French Revolution, they did not

know whether they loved or hated it most. Carlyle's two eyes were out of

focus, as one may say, when he looked at democracy: he had one eye on

Valmy and the other on Sedan. In the same way, Ruskin had a strong right

hand that wrote of the great mediaeval minsters in tall harmonies and

traceries as splendid as their own; and also, so to speak, a weak and

feverish left hand that was always fidgeting and trying to take the pen

away--and write an evangelical tract about the immorality of foreigners.

Many of their contemporaries were the same. The sea of Tennyson's mind

was troubled under its serene surface. The incessant excitement of

Kingsley, though romantic and attractive in many ways, was a great deal

more like Nervous Christianity than Muscular Christianity. It would be

quite unfair to say of Ruskin that there was any major inconsistency

between his mediaeval tastes and his very unmediaeval temper: and minor

inconsistencies do not matter in anybody. But it is not quite unfair to

say of him that he seemed to want all parts of the Cathedral except the

altar.

As an artist in prose he is one of the most miraculous products of the

extremely poetical genius of England. The length of a Ruskin sentence is

like that length in the long arrow that was boasted of by the drawers of

the long bow. He draws, not a cloth-yard shaft but a long lance to his

ear: he shoots a spear. But the whole goes light as a bird and straight

as a bullet. There is no Victorian writer before him to whom he even

suggests a comparison, technically considered, except perhaps De

Quincey; who also employed the long rich rolling sentence that, like a

rocket, bursts into stars at the end. But De Quincey's sentences, as I

have said, have always a dreamy and insecure sense about them, like the

turret on toppling turret of some mad sultan's pagoda. Ruskin's sentence

branches into brackets and relative clauses as a straight strong tree

branches into boughs and bifurcations, rather shaking off its burden

than merely adding to it. It is interesting to remember that Ruskin

wrote some of the best of these sentences in the attempt to show that he

did understand the growth of trees, and that nobody else did--except

Turner, of course. It is also (to those acquainted with his perverse and

wild rhetorical prejudices) even more amusing to remember that if a

Ruskin sentence (occupying one or two pages of small print) does not

remind us of the growth of a tree, the only other thing it does remind

of is the triumphant passage of a railway train.

Ruskin left behind him in his turn two quite separate streams of

inspiration. The first and more practical was concerned, like Carlyle's

_Chartism_, with a challenge to the social conclusions of the orthodox

economists. He was not so great a man as Carlyle, but he was a much more

clear-headed man; and the point and stab of his challenge still really

stands and sticks, like a dagger in a dead man. He answered the theory

that we must always get the cheapest labour we can, by pointing out that

we never do get the cheapest labour we can, in any matter about which we

really care twopence. We do not get the cheapest doctor. We either get a

doctor who charges nothing or a doctor who charges a recognised and

respectable fee. We do not trust the cheapest bishop. We do not allow

admirals to compete. We do not tell generals to undercut each other on

the eve of a war. We either employ none of them or we employ all of them

at an official rate of pay. All this was set out in the strongest and

least sentimental of his books, _Unto this Last_; but many suggestions

of it are scattered through _Sesame and Lilies_, _The Political Economy

of Art_, and even _Modern Painters_. On this side of his soul Ruskin

became the second founder of Socialism. The argument was not by any

means a complete or unconquerable weapon, but I think it knocked out

what little remained of the brains of the early Victorian rationalists.

It is entirely nonsensical to speak of Ruskin as a lounging aesthete, who

strolled into economics, and talked sentimentalism. In plain fact,

Ruskin was seldom so sensible and logical (right or wrong) as when he

was talking about economics. He constantly talked the most glorious

nonsense about landscape and natural history, which it was his business

to understand. Within his own limits, he talked the most cold common

sense about political economy, which was no business of his at all.

On the other side of his literary soul, his mere unwrapping of the

wealth and wonder of European art, he set going another influence,

earlier and vaguer than his influence on Socialism. He represented what

was at first the Pre-Raphaelite School in painting, but afterwards a

much larger and looser Pre-Raphaelite School in poetry and prose. The

word "looser" will not be found unfair if we remember how Swinburne and

all the wildest friends of the Rossettis carried this movement forward.

They used the mediaeval imagery to blaspheme the mediaeval religion.

Ruskin's dark and doubtful decision to accept Catholic art but not

Catholic ethics had borne rapid or even flagrant fruit by the time that

Swinburne, writing about a harlot, composed a learned and sympathetic

and indecent parody on the Litany of the Blessed Virgin.

With the poets I deal in another part of this book; but the influence of

Ruskin's great prose touching art criticism can best be expressed in the

name of the next great prose writer on such subjects. That name is

Walter Pater: and the name is the full measure of the extent to which

Ruskin's vague but vast influence had escaped from his hands. Pater

eventually joined the Church of Rome (which would not have pleased

Ruskin at all), but it is surely fair to say of the mass of his work

that its moral tone is neither Puritan nor Catholic, but strictly and

splendidly Pagan. In Pater we have Ruskin without the prejudices, that

is, without the funny parts. I may be wrong, but I cannot recall at this

moment a single passage in which Pater's style takes a holiday or in

which his wisdom plays the fool. Newman and Ruskin were as careful and

graceful stylists as he. Newman and Ruskin were as serious, elaborate,

and even academic thinkers as he. But Ruskin let himself go about

railways. Newman let himself go about Kingsley. Pater cannot let himself

go for the excellent reason that he wants to stay: to stay at the point

where all the keenest emotions meet, as he explains in the splendid

peroration of _The Renaissance_. The only objection to being where all

the keenest emotions meet is that you feel none of them.

In this sense Pater may well stand for a substantial summary of the

aesthetes, apart from the purely poetical merits of men like Rossetti and

Swinburne. Like Swinburne and others he first attempted to use mediaeval

tradition without trusting it. These people wanted to see Paganism

_through_ Christianity: because it involved the incidental amusement of

seeing through Christianity itself. They not only tried to be in all

ages at once (which is a very reasonable ambition, though not often

realised), but they wanted to be on all sides at once: which is

nonsense. Swinburne tries to question the philosophy of Christianity in

the metres of a Christmas carol: and Dante Rossetti tries to write as if

he were Christina Rossetti. Certainly the almost successful summit of

all this attempt is Pater's superb passage on the Mona Lisa; in which he

seeks to make her at once a mystery of good and a mystery of evil. The

philosophy is false; even evidently false, for it bears no fruit to-day.

There never was a woman, not Eve herself in the instant of temptation,

who could smile the same smile as the mother of Helen and the mother of

Mary. But it is the high-water mark of that vast attempt at an

impartiality reached through art: and no other mere artist ever rose so

high again.

Apart from this Ruskinian offshoot through Pre-Raphaelitism into what

was called AEstheticism, the remains of the inspiration of Carlyle fill a

very large part in the Victorian life, but not strictly so large a part

in the Victorian literature. Charles Kingsley was a great publicist; a

popular preacher; a popular novelist; and (in two cases at least) a very

good novelist. His _Water Babies_ is really a breezy and roaring freak;

like a holiday at the seaside--a holiday where one talks natural history

without taking it seriously. Some of the songs in this and other of his

works are very real songs: notably, "When all the World is Young, Lad,"

which comes very near to being the only true defence of marriage in the

controversies of the nineteenth century. But when all this is allowed,

no one will seriously rank Kingsley, in the really literary sense, on

the level of Carlyle or Ruskin, Tennyson or Browning, Dickens or

Thackeray: and if such a place cannot be given to him, it can be given

even less to his lusty and pleasant friend, Tom Hughes, whose

personality floats towards the frankness of the _Boy's Own Paper_; or to

his deep, suggestive metaphysical friend Maurice, who floats rather

towards _The Hibbert Journal_. The moral and social influence of these

things is not to be forgotten: but they leave the domain of letters. The

voice of Carlyle is not heard again in letters till the coming of

Kipling and Henley.

One other name of great importance should appear here, because it cannot

appear very appropriately anywhere else: the man hardly belonged to the

same school as Ruskin and Carlyle, but fought many of their battles, and

was even more concentrated on their main task--the task of convicting

liberal _bourgeois_ England of priggishness and provinciality. I mean,

of course, Matthew Arnold. Against Mill's "liberty" and Carlyle's

"strength" and Ruskin's "nature," he set up a new presence and entity

which he called "culture," the disinterested play of the mind through

the sifting of the best books and authorities. Though a little dandified

in phrase, he was undoubtedly serious and public-spirited in intention.

He sometimes talked of culture almost as if it were a man, or at least a

church (for a church has a sort of personality): some may suspect that

culture was a man, whose name was Matthew Arnold. But Arnold was not

only right but highly valuable. If we have said that Carlyle was a man

that saw things, we may add that Arnold was chiefly valuable as a man

who knew things. Well as he was endowed intellectually, his power came

more from information than intellect. He simply happened to know certain

things, that Carlyle didn't know, that Kingsley didn't know, that Huxley

and Herbert Spencer didn't know: that England didn't know. He knew that

England was a part of Europe: and not so important a part as it had been

the morning after Waterloo. He knew that England was then (as it is now)

an oligarchical State, and that many great nations are not. He knew

that a real democracy need not live and does not live in that perpetual

panic about using the powers of the State, which possessed men like

Spencer and Cobden. He knew a rational minimum of culture and common

courtesy could exist and did exist throughout large democracies. He knew

the Catholic Church had been in history "the Church of the multitude":

he knew it was not a sect. He knew that great landlords are no more a

part of the economic law than nigger-drivers: he knew that small owners

could and did prosper. He was not so much the philosopher as the man of

the world: he reminded us that Europe was a society while Ruskin was

treating it as a picture gallery. He was a sort of Heaven-sent courier.

His frontal attack on the vulgar and sullen optimism of Victorian

utility may be summoned up in the admirable sentence, in which he asked

the English what was the use of a train taking them quickly from

Islington to Camberwell, if it only took them "from a dismal and

illiberal life in Islington to a dismal and illiberal life in

Camberwell?"

His attitude to that great religious enigma round which all these great

men were grouped as in a ring, was individual and decidedly curious. He

seems to have believed that a "Historic Church," that is, some

established organisation with ceremonies and sacred books, etc., could

be perpetually preserved as a sort of vessel to contain the spiritual

ideas of the age, whatever those ideas might happen to be. He clearly

seems to have contemplated a melting away of the doctrines of the Church

and even of the meaning of the words: but he thought a certain need in

man would always be best satisfied by public worship and especially by

the great religious literatures of the past. He would embalm the body

that it might often be revisited by the soul--or souls. Something of the

sort has been suggested by Dr. Coit and others of the ethical societies

in our own time. But while Arnold would loosen the theological bonds of

the Church, he would not loosen the official bonds of the State. You

must not disestablish the Church: you must not even leave the Church:

you must stop inside it and think what you choose. Enemies might say

that he was simply trying to establish and endow Agnosticism. It is

fairer and truer to say that unconsciously he was trying to restore

Paganism: for this State Ritualism without theology, and without much

belief, actually was the practice of the ancient world. Arnold may have

thought that he was building an altar to the Unknown God; but he was

really building it to Divus Caesar.

As a critic he was chiefly concerned to preserve criticism itself; to

set a measure to praise and blame and support the classics against the

fashions. It is here that it is specially true of him, if of no writer

else, that the style was the man. The most vital thing he invented was a

new style: founded on the patient unravelling of the tangled Victorian

ideas, as if they were matted hair under a comb. He did not mind how

elaborately long he made a sentence, so long as he made it clear. He

would constantly repeat whole phrases word for word in the same

sentence, rather than risk ambiguity by abbreviation. His genius showed

itself in turning this method of a laborious lucidity into a peculiarly

exasperating form of satire and controversy. Newman's strength was in a

sort of stifled passion, a dangerous patience of polite logic and then:

"Cowards! if I advanced a step you would run away: it is not you I fear.

_Di me terrent, et Jupiter hostis._" If Newman seemed suddenly to fly

into a temper, Carlyle seemed never to fly out of one. But Arnold kept a

smile of heart-broken forbearance, as of the teacher in an idiot school,

that was enormously insulting. One trick he often tried with success. If

his opponent had said something foolish, like "the destiny of England is

in the great heart of England," Arnold would repeat the phrase again and

again until it looked more foolish than it really was. Thus he recurs

again and again to "the British College of Health in the New Road" till

the reader wants to rush out and burn the place down. Arnold's great

error was that he sometimes thus wearied us of his own phrases, as well

as of his enemies'.

These names are roughly representative of the long series of protests

against the cold commercial rationalism which held Parliament and the

schools through the earlier Victorian time, in so far as those protests

were made in the name of neglected intellect, insulted art, forgotten

heroism and desecrated religion. But already the Utilitarian citadel had

been more heavily bombarded on the other side by one lonely and

unlettered man of genius.

The rise of Dickens is like the rising of a vast mob. This is not only

because his tales are indeed as crowded and populous as towns: for truly

it was not so much that Dickens appeared as that a hundred Dickens

characters appeared. It is also because he was the sort of man who has

the impersonal impetus of a mob: what Poe meant when he truly said that

popular rumour, if really spontaneous, was like the intuition of the

individual man of genius. Those who speak scornfully of the ignorance of

the mob do not err as to the fact itself; their error is in not seeing

that just as a crowd is comparatively ignorant, so a crowd is

comparatively innocent. It will have the old and human faults; but it is

not likely to specialise in the special faults of that particular

society: because the effort of the strong and successful in all ages is

to keep the poor out of society. If the higher castes have developed

some special moral beauty or grace, as they occasionally do (for

instance, mediaeval chivalry), it is likely enough, of course, that the

mass of men will miss it. But if they have developed some perversion or

over-emphasis, as they much more often do (for instance, the Renaissance

poisoning), then it will be the tendency of the mass of men to miss that

too. The point might be put in many ways; you may say if you will that

the poor are always at the tail of the procession, and that whether they

are morally worse or better depends on whether humanity as a whole is

proceeding towards heaven or hell. When humanity is going to hell, the

poor are always nearest to heaven.

Dickens was a mob--and a mob in revolt; he fought by the light of

nature; he had not a theory, but a thirst. If any one chooses to offer

the cheap sarcasm that his thirst was largely a thirst for milk-punch, I

am content to reply with complete gravity and entire contempt that in a

sense this is perfectly true. His thirst was for things as humble, as

human, as laughable as that daily bread for which we cry to God. He had

no particular plan of reform; or, when he had, it was startlingly petty

and parochial compared with the deep, confused clamour of comradeship

and insurrection that fills all his narrative. It would not be gravely

unjust to him to compare him to his own heroine, Arabella Allen, who

"didn't know what she did like," but who (when confronted with Mr. Bob

Sawyer) "did know what she didn't like." Dickens did know what he didn't

like. He didn't like the Unrivalled Happiness which Mr. Roebuck praised;

the economic laws that were working so faultlessly in Fever Alley; the

wealth that was accumulating so rapidly in Bleeding Heart Yard. But,

above all, he didn't like the _mean_ side of the Manchester philosophy:

the preaching of an impossible thrift and an intolerable temperance. He

hated the implication that because a man was a miser in Latin he must

also be a miser in English. And this meanness of the Utilitarians had

gone very far--infecting many finer minds who had fought the

Utilitarians. In the _Edinburgh Review_, a thing like Malthus could be

championed by a man like Macaulay.

The twin root facts of the revolution called Dickens are these: first,

that he attacked the cold Victorian compromise; second, that he

attacked it without knowing he was doing it--certainly without knowing

that other people were doing it. He was attacking something which we

will call Mr. Gradgrind. He was utterly unaware (in any essential sense)

that any one else had attacked Mr. Gradgrind. All the other attacks had

come from positions of learning or cultured eccentricity of which he was

entirely ignorant, and to which, therefore (like a spirited fellow), he

felt a furious hostility. Thus, for instance, he hated that Little

Bethel to which Kit's mother went: he hated it simply as Kit hated it.

Newman could have told him it was hateful, because it had no root in

religious history; it was not even a sapling sprung of the seed of some

great human and heathen tree: it was a monstrous mushroom that grows in

the moonshine and dies in the dawn. Dickens knew no more of religious

history than Kit; he simply smelt the fungus, and it stank. Thus, again,

he hated that insolent luxury of a class counting itself a comfortable

exception to all mankind; he hated it as Kate Nickleby hated Sir

Mulberry Hawke--by instinct. Carlyle could have told him that all the

world was full of that anger against the impudent fatness of the few.

But when Dickens wrote about Kate Nickleby, he knew about as much of the

world--as Kate Nickleby. He did write _The Tale of Two Cities_ long

afterwards; but that was when he _had_ been instructed by Carlyle. His

first revolutionism was as private and internal as feeling sea-sick.

Thus, once more, he wrote against Mr. Gradgrind long before he created

him. In _The Chimes_, conceived in quite his casual and charitable

season, with the _Christmas Carol_ and the _Cricket on the Hearth_, he

hit hard at the economists. Ruskin, in the same fashion, would have told

him that the worst thing about the economists was that they were not

economists: that they missed many essential things even in economics.

But Dickens did not know whether they were economists or not: he only

knew that they wanted hitting. Thus, to take a last case out of many,

Dickens travelled in a French railway train, and noticed that this

eccentric nation provided him with wine that he could drink and

sandwiches he could eat, and manners he could tolerate. And remembering

the ghastly sawdust-eating waiting-rooms of the North English railways,

he wrote that rich chapter in _Mugby Junction_. Matthew Arnold could

have told him that this was but a part of the general thinning down of

European civilisation in these islands at the edge of it; that for two

or three thousand years the Latin society has learnt how to drink wine,

and how not to drink too much of it. Dickens did not in the least

understand the Latin society: but he did understand the wine. If (to

prolong an idle but not entirely false metaphor) we have called Carlyle

a man who saw and Arnold a man who knew, we might truly call Dickens a

man who tasted, that is, a man who really felt. In spite of all the

silly talk about his vulgarity, he really had, in the strict and

serious sense, good taste. All real good taste is gusto--the power of

appreciating the presence--or the absence--of a particular and positive

pleasure. He had no learning; he was not misled by the label on the

bottle--for that is what learning largely meant in his time. He opened

his mouth and shut his eyes and saw what the Age of Reason would give

him. And, having tasted it, he spat it out.

I am constrained to consider Dickens here among the fighters; though I

ought (on the pure principles of Art) to be considering him in the

chapter which I have allotted to the story-tellers. But we should get

the whole Victorian perspective wrong, in my opinion at least, if we did

not see that Dickens was primarily the most successful of all the

onslaughts on the solid scientific school; because he did not attack

from the standpoint of extraordinary faith, like Newman; or the

standpoint of extraordinary inspiration, like Carlyle; or the standpoint

of extraordinary detachment or serenity, like Arnold; but from the

standpoint of quite ordinary and quite hearty dislike. To give but one

instance more, Matthew Arnold, trying to carry into England constructive

educational schemes which he could see spread like a clear railway map

all over the Continent, was much badgered about what he really thought

was _wrong_ with English middle-class education. Despairing of

explaining to the English middle class the idea of high and central

public instruction, as distinct from coarse and hole-and-corner private

instruction, he invoked the aid of Dickens. He said the English

middle-class school was the sort of school where Mr. Creakle sat, with

his buttered toast and his cane. Now Dickens had probably never seen any

other kind of school--certainly he had never understood the systematic

State Schools in which Arnold had learnt his lesson. But he saw the cane

and the buttered toast, and he _knew_ that it was all wrong. In this

sense, Dickens, the great romanticist, is truly the great realist also.

For he had no abstractions: he had nothing except realities out of which

to make a romance.

With Dickens, then, re-arises that reality with which I began and which

(curtly, but I think not falsely) I have called Cobbett. In dealing with

fiction as such, I shall have occasion to say wherein Dickens is weaker

and stronger than that England of the eighteenth century: here it is

sufficient to say that he represents the return of Cobbett in this vital

sense; that he is proud of being the ordinary man. No one can understand

the thousand caricatures by Dickens who does not understand that he is

comparing them all with his own common sense. Dickens, in the bulk,

liked the things that Cobbett had liked; what is perhaps more to the

point, he hated the things that Cobbett had hated; the Tudors, the

lawyers, the leisurely oppression of the poor. Cobbett's fine fighting

journalism had been what is nowadays called "personal," that is, it

supposed human beings to be human. But Cobbett was also personal in the

less satisfactory sense; he could only multiply monsters who were

exaggerations of his enemies or exaggerations of himself. Dickens was

personal in a more godlike sense; he could multiply persons. He could

create all the farce and tragedy of his age over again, with creatures

unborn to sin and creatures unborn to suffer. That which had not been

achieved by the fierce facts of Cobbett, the burning dreams of Carlyle,

the white-hot proofs of Newman, was really or very nearly achieved by a

crowd of impossible people. In the centre stood that citadel of atheist

industrialism: and if indeed it has ever been taken, it was taken by the

rush of that unreal army.