THE GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS
The Victorian novel was a thing entirely Victorian; quite unique and
suited to a sort of cosiness in that country and that age. But the novel
itself, though not merely Victorian, is mainly modern. No clear-headed
person wastes his time over definitions, except where he thinks his own
definition would probably be in dispute. I merely say, therefore, that
when I say "novel," I mean a fictitious narrative (almost invariably,
but not necessarily, in prose) of which the essential is that the story
is not told for the sake of its naked pointedness as an anecdote, or for
the sake of the irrelevant landscapes and visions that can be caught up
in it, but for the sake of some study of the difference between human
beings. There are several things that make this mode of art unique. One
of the most conspicuous is that it is the art in which the conquests of
woman are quite beyond controversy. The proposition that Victorian women
have done well in politics and philosophy is not necessarily an untrue
proposition; but it is a partisan proposition. I never heard that many
women, let alone men, shared the views of Mary Wollstonecraft; I never
heard that millions of believers flocked to the religion tentatively
founded by Miss Frances Power Cobbe. They did, undoubtedly, flock to
Mrs. Eddy; but it will not be unfair to that lady to call her following
a sect, and not altogether unreasonable to say that such insane
exceptions prove the rule. Nor can I at this moment think of a single
modern woman writing on politics or abstract things, whose work is of
undisputed importance; except perhaps Mrs. Sidney Webb, who settles
things by the simple process of ordering about the citizens of a state,
as she might the servants in a kitchen. There has been, at any rate, no
writer on moral or political theory that can be mentioned, without
seeming comic, in the same breath with the great female novelists. But
when we come to the novelists, the women have, on the whole, equality;
and certainly, in some points, superiority. Jane Austen is as strong in
her own way as Scott is in his. But she is, for all practical purposes,
never weak in her own way--and Scott very often is. Charlotte Bronte
dedicated _Jane Eyre_ to the author of _Vanity Fair_. I should hesitate
to say that Charlotte Bronte's is a better book than Thackeray's, but I
think it might well be maintained that it is a better story. All sorts
of inquiring asses (equally ignorant of the old nature of woman and the
new nature of the novel) whispered wisely that George Eliot's novels
were really written by George Lewes. I will cheerfully answer for the
fact that, if they had been written by George Lewes, no one would ever
have read them. Those who have read his book on Robespierre will have
no doubt about my meaning. I am no idolater of George Eliot; but a man
who could concoct such a crushing opiate about the most exciting
occasion in history certainly did not write _The Mill on the Floss_.
This is the first fact about the novel, that it is the introduction of a
new and rather curious kind of art; and it has been found to be
peculiarly feminine, from the first good novel by Fanny Burney to the
last good novel by Miss May Sinclair. The truth is, I think, that the
modern novel is a new thing; not new in its essence (for that is a
philosophy for fools), but new in the sense that it lets loose many of
the things that are old. It is a hearty and exhaustive overhauling of
that part of human existence which has always been the woman's province,
or rather kingdom; the play of personalities in private, the real
difference between Tommy and Joe. It is right that womanhood should
specialise in individuals, and be praised for doing so; just as in the
Middle Ages she specialised in dignity and was praised for doing so.
People put the matter wrong when they say that the novel is a study of
human nature. Human nature is a thing that even men can understand.
Human nature is born of the pain of a woman; human nature plays at
peep-bo when it is two and at cricket when it is twelve; human nature
earns its living and desires the other sex and dies. What the novel
deals with is what women have to deal with; the differentiations, the
twists and turns of this eternal river. The key of this new form of art,
which we call fiction, is sympathy. And sympathy does not mean so much
feeling with all who feel, but rather suffering with all who suffer. And
it was inevitable, under such an inspiration, that more attention should
be given to the awkward corners of life than to its even flow. The very
promising domestic channel dug by the Victorian women, in books like
_Cranford_, by Mrs. Gaskell, would have got to the sea, if they had been
left alone to dig it. They might have made domesticity a fairyland.
Unfortunately another idea, the idea of imitating men's cuffs and
collars and documents, cut across this purely female discovery and
destroyed it.
It may seem mere praise of the novel to say it is the art of sympathy
and the study of human variations. But indeed, though this is a good
thing, it is not universally good. We have gained in sympathy; but we
have lost in brotherhood. Old quarrels had more equality than modern
exonerations. Two peasants in the Middle Ages quarrelled about their two
fields. But they went to the same church, served in the same semi-feudal
militia, and had the same morality, which ever might happen to be
breaking it at the moment. The very cause of their quarrel was the cause
of their fraternity; they both liked land. But suppose one of them a
teetotaler who desired the abolition of hops on both farms; suppose the
other a vegetarian who desired the abolition of chickens on both farms:
and it is at once apparent that a quarrel of quite a different kind
would begin; and that in that quarrel it would not be a question of
farmer against farmer, but of individual against individual. This
fundamental sense of human fraternity can only exist in the presence of
positive religion. Man is merely man only when he is seen against the
sky. If he is seen against any landscape, he is only a man of that land.
If he is seen against any house, he is only a householder. Only where
death and eternity are intensely present can human beings fully feel
their fellowship. Once the divine darkness against which we stand is
really dismissed from the mind (as it was very nearly dismissed in the
Victorian time) the differences between human beings become
overpoweringly plain; whether they are expressed in the high caricatures
of Dickens or the low lunacies of Zola.
This can be seen in a sort of picture in the Prologue of the _Canterbury
Tales_; which is already pregnant with the promise of the English novel.
The characters there are at once graphically and delicately
differentiated; the Doctor with his rich cloak, his careful meals, his
coldness to religion; the Franklin, whose white beard was so fresh that
it recalled the daisies, and in whose house it snowed meat and drink;
the Summoner, from whose fearful face, like a red cherub's, the children
fled, and who wore a garland like a hoop; the Miller with his short red
hair and bagpipes and brutal head, with which he could break down a
door; the Lover who was as sleepless as a nightingale; the Knight, the
Cook, the Clerk of Oxford. Pendennis or the Cook, M. Mirabolant, is
nowhere so vividly varied by a few merely verbal strokes. But the great
difference is deeper and more striking. It is simply that Pendennis
would never have gone riding with a cook at all. Chaucer's knight rode
with a cook quite naturally; because the thing they were all seeking
together was as much above knighthood as it was above cookery. Soldiers
and swindlers and bullies and outcasts, they were all going to the
shrine of a distant saint. To what sort of distant saint would Pendennis
and Colonel Newcome and Mr. Moss and Captain Costigan and Ridley the
butler and Bayham and Sir Barnes Newcome and Laura and the Duchess
d'Ivry and Warrington and Captain Blackball and Lady Kew travel,
laughing and telling tales together?
The growth of the novel, therefore, must not be too easily called an
increase in the interest in humanity. It is an increase in the interest
in the things in which men differ; much fuller and finer work had been
done before about the things in which they agree. And this intense
interest in variety had its bad side as well as its good; it has rather
increased social distinctions in a serious and spiritual sense. Most of
the oblivion of democracy is due to the oblivion of death. But in its
own manner and measure, it was a real advance and experiment of the
European mind, like the public art of the Renaissance or the fairyland
of physical science explored in the nineteenth century. It was a more
unquestionable benefit than these: and in that development women played
a peculiar part, English women especially, and Victorian women most of
all.
It is perhaps partly, though certainly not entirely, this influence of
the great women writers that explains another very arresting and
important fact about the emergence of genuinely Victorian fiction. It
had been by this time decided, by the powers that had influence (and by
public opinion also, at least in the middle-class sense), that certain
verbal limits must be set to such literature. The novel must be what
some would call pure and others would call prudish; but what is not,
properly considered, either one or the other: it is rather a more or
less business proposal (right or wrong) that every writer shall draw the
line at literal physical description of things socially concealed. It
was originally merely verbal; it had not, primarily, any dream of
purifying the topic or the moral tone. Dickens and Thackeray claimed
very properly the right to deal with shameful passions and suggest their
shameful culminations; Scott sometimes dealt with ideas positively
horrible--as in that grand Glenallan tragedy which is as appalling as
the _OEdipus_ or _The Cenci_. None of these great men would have
tolerated for a moment being talked to (as the muddle-headed amateur
censors talk to artists to-day) about "wholesome" topics and suggestions
"that cannot elevate." They had to describe the great battle of good and
evil and they described both; but they accepted a working Victorian
compromise about what should happen behind the scenes and what on the
stage. Dickens did not claim the license of diction Fielding might have
claimed in repeating the senile ecstasies of Gride (let us say) over his
purchased bride: but Dickens does not leave the reader in the faintest
doubt about what sort of feelings they were; nor is there any reason why
he should. Thackeray would not have described the toilet details of the
secret balls of Lord Steyne: he left that to Lady Cardigan. But no one
who had read Thackeray's version would be surprised at Lady Cardigan's.
But though the great Victorian novelists would not have permitted the
impudence of the suggestion that every part of their problem must be
wholesome and innocent in itself, it is still tenable (I do not say it
is certain) that by yielding to the Philistines on this verbal
compromise, they have in the long run worked for impurity rather than
purity. In one point I do certainly think that Victorian Bowdlerism did
pure harm. This is the simple point that, nine times out of ten, the
coarse word is the word that condemns an evil and the refined word the
word that excuses it. A common evasion, for instance, substitutes for
the word that brands self-sale as the essential sin, a word which weakly
suggests that it is no more wicked than walking down the street. The
great peril of such soft mystifications is that extreme evils (they
that are abnormal even by the standard of evil) have a very long start.
Where ordinary wrong is made unintelligible, extraordinary wrong can
count on remaining more unintelligible still; especially among those who
live in such an atmosphere of long words. It is a cruel comment on the
purity of the Victorian Age, that the age ended (save for the bursting
of a single scandal) in a thing being everywhere called "Art," "The
Greek Spirit," "The Platonic Ideal" and so on--which any navvy mending
the road outside would have stamped with a word as vile and as vulgar as
it deserved.
This reticence, right or wrong, may have been connected with the
participation of women with men in the matter of fiction. It is an
important point: the sexes can only be coarse separately. It was
certainly also due, as I have already suggested, to the treaty between
the rich _bourgeoisie_ and the old aristocracy, which both had to make,
for the common and congenial purpose of keeping the English people
down. But it was due much more than this to a general moral atmosphere
in the Victorian Age. It is impossible to express that spirit except by
the electric bell of a name. It was latitudinarian, and yet it was
limited. It could be content with nothing less than the whole cosmos:
yet the cosmos with which it was content was small. It is false to say
it was without humour: yet there was something by instinct unsmiling in
it. It was always saying solidly that things were "enough"; and proving
by that sharpness (as of the shutting of a door) that they were not
enough. It took, I will not say its pleasures, but even its
emancipations, sadly. Definitions seem to escape this way and that in
the attempt to locate it as an idea. But every one will understand me if
I call it George Eliot.
I begin with this great woman of letters for both the two reasons
already mentioned. She represents the rationalism of the old Victorian
Age at its highest. She and Mill are like two great mountains at the end
of that long, hard chain which is the watershed of the Early Victorian
time. They alone rise high enough to be confused among the clouds--or
perhaps confused among the stars. They certainly were seeking truth, as
Newman and Carlyle were; the slow slope of the later Victorian vulgarity
does not lower their precipice and pinnacle. But I begin with this name
also because it emphasises the idea of modern fiction as a fresh and
largely a female thing. The novel of the nineteenth century was female;
as fully as the novel of the eighteenth century was male. It is quite
certain that no woman could have written _Roderick Random_. It is not
quite so certain that no woman could have written _Esmond_. The strength
and subtlety of woman had certainly sunk deep into English letters when
George Eliot began to write.
Her originals and even her contemporaries had shown the feminine power
in fiction as well or better than she. Charlotte Bronte, understood
along her own instincts, was as great; Jane Austen was greater. The
latter comes into our present consideration only as that most
exasperating thing, an ideal unachieved. It is like leaving an
unconquered fortress in the rear. No woman later has captured the
complete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while all
the after women went about looking for their brains. She could describe
a man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Bronte could do.
She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what
she did not know--like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanished
world before the great progressive age of which I write.
One of the characteristics of the central Victorian spirit was a
tendency to substitute a certain more or less satisfied seriousness for
the extremes of tragedy and comedy. This is marked by a certain change
in George Eliot; as it is marked by a certain limitation or moderation
in Dickens. Dickens was the People, as it was in the eighteenth century
and still largely is, in spite of all the talk for and against Board
School Education: comic, tragic, realistic, free-spoken, far looser in
words than in deeds. It marks the silent strength and pressure of the
spirit of the Victorian middle class that even to Dickens it never
occurred to revive the verbal coarseness of Smollett or Swift. The other
proof of the same pressure is the change in George Eliot. She was not a
genius in the elemental sense of Dickens; she could never have been
either so strong or so soft. But she did originally represent some of
the same popular realities: and her first books (at least as compared
with her latest) were full of sound fun and bitter pathos. Mr. Max
Beerbohm has remarked (in his glorious essay called _Ichabod_, I think),
that Silas Marner would not have forgotten his miserliness if George
Eliot had written of him in her maturity. I have a great regard for Mr.
Beerbohm's literary judgments; and it may be so. But if literature
means anything more than a cold calculation of the chances, if there is
in it, as I believe, any deeper idea of detaching the spirit of life
from the dull obstacles of life, of permitting human nature really to
reveal itself as human, if (to put it shortly) literature has anything
on earth to do with being _interesting_--then I think we would rather
have a few more Marners than that rich maturity that gave us the
analysed dust-heaps of _Daniel Deronda_.
In her best novels there is real humour, of a cool sparkling sort; there
is a strong sense of substantial character that has not yet degenerated
into psychology; there is a great deal of wisdom, chiefly about women;
indeed there is almost every element of literature except a certain
indescribable thing called _glamour_; which was the whole stock-in-trade
of the Brontes, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp clambers amid rotten
wood by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray when Esmond with his
melancholy eyes wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues
of Castlewood. Of this quality (which some have called, but hastily, the
essential of literature) George Eliot had not little but nothing. Her
air is bright and intellectually even exciting; but it is like the air
of a cloudless day on the parade at Brighton. She sees people clearly,
but not through an atmosphere. And she can conjure up storms in the
conscious, but not in the subconscious mind.
It is true (though the idea should not be exaggerated) that this
deficiency was largely due to her being cut off from all those
conceptions that had made the fiction of a Muse; the deep idea that
there are really demons and angels behind men. Certainly the increasing
atheism of her school spoilt her own particular imaginative talent: she
was far less free when she thought like Ladislaw than when she thought
like Casaubon. It also betrayed her on a matter specially requiring
common sense; I mean sex. There is nothing that is so profoundly false
as rationalist flirtation. Each sex is trying to be both sexes at once;
and the result is a confusion more untruthful than any conventions. This
can easily be seen by comparing her with a greater woman who died before
the beginning of our present problem. Jane Austen was born before those
bonds which (we are told) protected woman from truth, were burst by the
Brontes or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that
Jane Austen knew much more about men than either of them. Jane Austen
may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth
that was protected from her. When Darcy, in finally confessing his
faults, says, "I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice
_though not in theory_," he gets nearer to a complete confession of the
intelligent male than ever was even hinted by the Byronic lapses of the
Brontes' heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot's. Jane
Austen, of course, covered an infinitely smaller field than any of her
later rivals; but I have always believed in the victory of small
nationalities.
The Brontes suggest themselves here; because their superficial
qualities, the qualities that can be seized upon in satire, were in this
an exaggeration of what was, in George Eliot, hardly more than an
omission. There was perhaps a time when Mr. Rawjester was more widely
known than Mr. Rochester. And certainly Mr. Rochester (to adopt the
diction of that other eminent country gentleman, Mr. Darcy) was simply
individualistic not only in practice, but in theory. Now any one may be
so in practice: but a man who is simply individualistic in theory must
merely be an ass. Undoubtedly the Brontes exposed themselves to some
misunderstanding by thus perpetually making the masculine creature much
more masculine than he wants to be. Thackeray (a man of strong though
sleepy virility) asked in his exquisite plaintive way: "Why do our lady
novelists make the men bully the women?" It is, I think, unquestionably
true that the Brontes treated the male as an almost anarchic thing
coming in from outside nature; much as people on this planet regard a
comet. Even the really delicate and sustained comedy of Paul Emanuel is
not quite free from this air of studying something alien. The reply may
be made that the women in men's novels are equally fallacious. The reply
is probably just.
What the Brontes really brought into fiction was exactly what Carlyle
brought into history; the blast of the mysticism of the North. They were
of Irish blood settled on the windy heights of Yorkshire; in that
country where Catholicism lingered latest, but in a superstitious form;
where modern industrialism came earliest and was more superstitious
still. The strong winds and sterile places, the old tyranny of barons
and the new and blacker tyranny of manufacturers, has made and left that
country a land of barbarians. All Charlotte Bronte's earlier work is
full of that sullen and unmanageable world; moss-troopers turned
hurriedly into miners; the last of the old world forced into supporting
the very first crudities of the new. In this way Charlotte Bronte
represents the Victorian settlement in a special way. The Early
Victorian Industrialism is to George Eliot and to Charlotte Bronte,
rather as the Late Victorian Imperialism would have been to Mrs. Humphry
Ward in the centre of the empire and to Miss Olive Schreiner at the edge
of it. The real strength there is in characters like Robert Moore, when
he is dealing with anything except women, is the romance of industry in
its first advance: a romance that has not remained. On such fighting
frontiers people always exaggerate the strong qualities the masculine
sex does possess, and always add a great many strong qualities that it
does not possess. That is, briefly, all the reason in the Brontes on
this special subject: the rest is stark unreason. It can be most clearly
seen in that sister of Charlotte Bronte's who has achieved the real
feat of remaining as a great woman rather than a great writer. There is
really, in a narrow but intense way, a tradition of Emily Bronte: as
there is a tradition of St. Peter or Dr. Johnson. People talk as if they
had known her, apart from her works. She must have been something more
than an original person; perhaps an origin. But so far as her written
works go she enters English letters only as an original person--and
rather a narrow one. Her imagination was sometimes superhuman--always
inhuman. _Wuthering Heights_ might have been written by an eagle. She is
the strongest instance of these strong imaginations that made the other
sex a monster: for Heathcliffe fails as a man as catastrophically as he
succeeds as a demon. I think Emily Bronte was further narrowed by the
broadness of her religious views; but never, of course, so much as
George Eliot.
In any case, it is Charlotte Bronte who enters Victorian literature. The
shortest way of stating her strong contribution is, I think, this: that
she reached the highest romance through the lowest realism. She did not
set out with Amadis of Gaul in a forest or with Mr. Pickwick in a comic
club. She set out with herself, with her own dingy clothes, and
accidental ugliness, and flat, coarse, provincial household; and
forcibly fused all such muddy materials into a spirited fairy-tale. If
the first chapters on the home and school had not proved how heavy and
hateful _sanity_ can be, there would really be less point in the
insanity of Mr. Rochester's wife--or the not much milder insanity of
Mrs. Rochester's husband. She discovered the secret of hiding the
sensational in the commonplace: and _Jane Eyre_ remains the best of her
books (better even than _Villette_) because while it is a human document
written in blood, it is also one of the best blood-and-thunder detective
stories in the world.
But while Emily Bronte was as unsociable as a storm at midnight, and
while Charlotte Bronte was at best like that warmer and more domestic
thing, a house on fire--they do connect themselves with the calm of
George Eliot, as the forerunners of many later developments of the
feminine advance. Many forerunners (if it comes to that) would have felt
rather ill if they had seen the things they foreran. This notion of a
hazy anticipation of after history has been absurdly overdone: as when
men connect Chaucer with the Reformation; which is like connecting Homer
with the Syracusan Expedition. But it is to some extent true that all
these great Victorian women had a sort of unrest in their souls. And the
proof of it is that (after what I will claim to call the healthier time
of Dickens and Thackeray) it began to be admitted by the great Victorian
men. If there had not been something in that irritation, we should
hardly have had to speak in these pages of _Diana of the Crossways_ or
of _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_. To what this strange and very local sex
war has been due I shall not ask, because I have no answer. That it was
due to votes or even little legal inequalities about marriage, I feel
myself here too close to realities even to discuss. My own guess is that
it has been due to the great neglect of the military spirit by the male
Victorians. The woman felt obscurely that she was still running her
mortal risk, while the man was not still running his. But I know nothing
about it; nor does anybody else.
In so short a book on so vast, complex and living a subject, it is
impossible to drop even into the second rank of good authors, whose name
is legion; but it is impossible to leave that considerable female force
in fiction which has so largely made the very nature of the modern
novel, without mentioning two names which almost brought that second
rank up to the first rank. They were at utterly opposite poles. The one
succeeded by being a much mellower and more Christian George Eliot; the
other succeeded by being a much more mad and unchristian Emily Bronte.
But Mrs. Oliphant and the author calling herself "Ouida" both forced
themselves well within the frontier of fine literature. _The Beleaguered
City_ is literature in its highest sense; the other works of its author
tend to fall into fiction in its best working sense. Mrs. Oliphant was
infinitely saner in that city of ghosts than the cosmopolitan Ouida ever
was in any of the cities of men. Mrs. Oliphant would never have dared to
discover, either in heaven or hell, such a thing as a hairbrush with its
back encrusted with diamonds. But though Ouida was violent and weak
where Mrs. Oliphant might have been mild and strong, her own triumphs
were her own. She had a real power of expressing the senses through her
style; of conveying the very heat of blue skies or the bursting of
palpable pomegranates. And just as Mrs. Oliphant transfused her more
timid Victorian tales with a true and intense faith in the Christian
mystery--so Ouida, with infinite fury and infinite confusion of
thought, did fill her books with Byron and the remains of the French
Revolution. In the track of such genius there has been quite an
accumulation of true talent as in the children's tales of Mrs. Ewing,
the historical tales of Miss Yonge, the tales of Mrs. Molesworth, and so
on. On a general review I do not think I have been wrong in taking the
female novelists first. I think they gave its special shape, its
temporary twist, to the Victorian novel.
Nevertheless it is a shock (I almost dare to call it a relief) to come
back to the males. It is the more abrupt because the first name that
must be mentioned derives directly from the mere maleness of the Sterne
and Smollett novel. I have already spoken of Dickens as the most homely
and instinctive, and therefore probably the heaviest, of all the
onslaughts made on the central Victorian satisfaction. There is
therefore the less to say of him here, where we consider him only as a
novelist; but there is still much more to say than can even conceivably
be said. Dickens, as we have stated, inherited the old comic, rambling
novel from Smollett and the rest. Dickens, as we have also stated,
consented to expurgate that novel. But when all origins and all
restraints have been defined and allowed for, the creature that came out
was such as we shall not see again. Smollett was coarse; but Smollett
was also cruel. Dickens was frequently horrible; he was never cruel. The
art of Dickens was the most exquisite of arts: it was the art of
enjoying everybody. Dickens, being a very human writer, had to be a very
human being; he had his faults and sensibilities in a strong degree; and
I do not for a moment maintain that he enjoyed everybody in his daily
life. But he enjoyed everybody in his books: and everybody has enjoyed
everybody in those books even till to-day. His books are full of baffled
villains stalking out or cowardly bullies kicked downstairs. But the
villains and the cowards are such delightful people that the reader
always hopes the villain will put his head through a side window and
make a last remark; or that the bully will say one thing more, even from
the bottom of the stairs. The reader really hopes this; and he cannot
get rid of the fancy that the author hopes so too. I cannot at the
moment recall that Dickens ever killed a comic villain, except Quilp,
who was deliberately made even more villainous than comic. There can be
no serious fears for the life of Mr. Wegg in the muckcart; though Mr.
Pecksniff fell to be a borrower of money, and Mr. Mantalini to turning a
mangle, the human race has the comfort of thinking they are still alive:
and one might have the rapture of receiving a begging letter from Mr.
Pecksniff, or even of catching Mr. Mantalini collecting the washing, if
one always lurked about on Monday mornings. This sentiment (the true
artist will be relieved to hear) is entirely unmoral. Mrs. Wilfer
deserved death much more than Mr. Quilp, for she had succeeded in
poisoning family life persistently, while he was (to say the least of
it) intermittent in his domesticity. But who can honestly say he does
not hope Mrs. Wilfer is still talking like Mrs. Wilfer--especially if it
is only in a book? This is the artistic greatness of Dickens, before and
after which there is really nothing to be said. He had the power of
creating people, both possible and impossible, who were simply precious
and priceless people; and anything subtler added to that truth really
only weakens it.
The mention of Mrs. Wilfer (whom the heart is loth to leave) reminds one
of the only elementary ethical truth that is essential in the study of
Dickens. That is that he had broad or universal sympathies in a sense
totally unknown to the social reformers who wallow in such phrases.
Dickens (unlike the social reformers) really did sympathise with every
sort of victim of every sort of tyrant. He did truly pray for _all_ who
are desolate and oppressed. If you try to tie him to any cause narrower
than that Prayer Book definition, you will find you have shut out half
his best work. If, in your sympathy for Mrs. Quilp, you call Dickens the
champion of downtrodden woman, you will suddenly remember Mr. Wilfer,
and find yourself unable to deny the existence of downtrodden man. If in
your sympathy for Mr. Rouncewell you call Dickens the champion of a
manly middle-class Liberalism against Chesney Wold, you will suddenly
remember Stephen Blackpool--and find yourself unable to deny that Mr.
Rouncewell might be a pretty insupportable cock on his own dung-hill. If
in your sympathy for Stephen Blackpool you call Dickens a Socialist (as
does Mr. Pugh), and think of him as merely heralding the great
Collectivist revolt against Victorian Individualism and Capitalism,
which seemed so clearly to be the crisis at the end of this epoch--you
will suddenly remember the agreeable young Barnacle at the
Circumlocution Office: and you will be unable, for very shame, to
assert that Dickens would have trusted the poor to a State Department.
Dickens did not merely believe in the brotherhood of men in the weak
modern way; he was the brotherhood of men, and knew it was a brotherhood
in sin as well as in aspiration. And he was not only larger than the old
factions he satirised; he was larger than any of our great social
schools that have gone forward since he died.
The seemingly quaint custom of comparing Dickens and Thackeray existed
in their own time, and no one will dismiss it with entire disdain who
remembers that the Victorian tradition was domestic and genuine, even
when it was hoodwinked and unworldly. There must have been some reason
for making this imaginary duel between two quite separate and quite
amiable acquaintances. And there is, after all, some reason for it. It
is not, as was once cheaply said, that Thackeray went in for truth, and
Dickens for mere caricature. There is a huge accumulation of truth,
down to the smallest detail, in Dickens: he seems sometimes a mere
mountain of facts. Thackeray, in comparison, often seems quite careless
and elusive; almost as if he did not quite know where all his characters
were. There is a truth behind the popular distinction; but it lies much
deeper. Perhaps the best way of stating it is this: that Dickens used
reality, while aiming at an effect of romance; while Thackeray used the
loose language and ordinary approaches of romance, while aiming at an
effect of reality. It was the special and splendid business of Dickens
to introduce us to people who would have been quite incredible if he had
not told us so much truth about them. It was the special and not less
splendid task of Thackeray to introduce us to people whom we knew
already. Paradoxically, but very practically, it followed that his
introductions were the longer of the two. When we hear of Aunt Betsy
Trotwood, we vividly envisage everything about her, from her gardening
gloves to her seaside residence, from her hard, handsome face to her
tame lunatic laughing at the bedroom window. It is all so minutely true
that she must be true also. We only feel inclined to walk round the
English coast until we find that particular garden and that particular
aunt. But when we turn from the aunt of Copperfield to the uncle of
Pendennis, we are more likely to run round the coast trying to find a
watering-place where he isn't than one where he is. The moment one sees
Major Pendennis, one sees a hundred Major Pendennises. It is not a
matter of mere realism. Miss Trotwood's bonnet and gardening tools and
cupboard full of old-fashioned bottles are quite as true in the
materialistic way as the Major's cuffs and corner table and toast and
newspaper. Both writers are realistic: but Dickens writes realism in
order to make the incredible credible. Thackeray writes it in order to
make us recognise an old friend. Whether we shall be pleased to meet the
old friend is quite another matter: I think we should be better pleased
to meet Miss Trotwood, and find, as David Copperfield did, a new friend,
a new world. But we recognise Major Pendennis even when we avoid him.
Henceforth Thackeray can count on our seeing him from his wig to his
well-blacked boots whenever he chooses to say "Major Pendennis paid a
call." Dickens, on the other hand, had to keep up an incessant
excitement about his characters; and no man on earth but he could have
kept it up.
It may be said, in approximate summary, that Thackeray is the novelist
of memory--of our memories as well as his own. Dickens seems to expect
all his characters, like amusing strangers arriving at lunch: as if they
gave him not only pleasure, but surprise. But Thackeray is everybody's
past--is everybody's youth. Forgotten friends flit about the passages of
dreamy colleges and unremembered clubs; we hear fragments of unfinished
conversations, we see faces without names for an instant, fixed for ever
in some trivial grimace: we smell the strong smell of social cliques
now quite incongruous to us; and there stir in all the little rooms at
once the hundred ghosts of oneself.
For this purpose Thackeray was equipped with a singularly easy and
sympathetic style, carved in slow soft curves where Dickens hacked out
his images with a hatchet. There was a sort of avuncular indulgence
about his attitude; what he called his "preaching" was at worst a sort
of grumbling, ending with the sentiment that boys will be boys and that
there's nothing new under the sun. He was not really either a cynic or a
_censor morum_; but (in another sense than Chaucer's) a gentle pardoner:
having seen the weaknesses he is sometimes almost weak about them. He
really comes nearer to exculpating Pendennis or Ethel Newcome than any
other author, who saw what he saw, would have been. The rare wrath of
such men is all the more effective; and there are passages in _Vanity
Fair_ and still more in _The Book of Snobs_, where he does make the
dance of wealth and fashion look stiff and monstrous, like a Babylonian
masquerade. But he never quite did it in such a way as to turn the
course of the Victorian Age.
It may seem strange to say that Thackeray did not know enough of the
world; yet this was the truth about him in large matters of the
philosophy of life, and especially of his own time. He did not know the
way things were going: he was too Victorian to understand the Victorian
epoch. He did not know enough ignorant people to have heard the news. In
one of his delightful asides he imagines two little clerks commenting
erroneously on the appearance of Lady Kew or Sir Brian Newcome in the
Park, and says: "How should Jones and Brown, who are not, _vous
comprenez, du monde_, understand these mysteries?" But I think Thackeray
knew quite as little about Jones and Brown as they knew about Newcome
and Kew; his world was _le monde_. Hence he seemed to take it for
granted that the Victorian compromise would last; while Dickens (who
knew his Jones and Brown) had already guessed that it would not.
Thackeray did not realise that the Victorian platform was a moving
platform. To take but one instance, he was a Radical like Dickens; all
really representative Victorians, except perhaps Tennyson, were
Radicals. But he seems to have thought of all reform as simple and
straightforward and all of a piece; as if Catholic Emancipation, the New
Poor Law, Free Trade and the Factory Acts and Popular Education were all
parts of one almost self-evident evolution of enlightenment. Dickens,
being in touch with the democracy, had already discovered that the
country had come to a dark place of divided ways and divided counsels.
In _Hard Times_ he realised Democracy at war with Radicalism; and
became, with so incompatible an ally as Ruskin, not indeed a Socialist,
but certainly an anti-Individualist. In _Our Mutual Friend_ he felt the
strength of the new rich, and knew they had begun to transform the
aristocracy, instead of the aristocracy transforming them. He knew that
Veneering had carried off Twemlow in triumph. He very nearly knew what
we all know to-day: that, so far from it being possible to plod along
the progressive road with more votes and more Free Trade, England must
either sharply become very much more democratic or as rapidly become
very much less so.
There gathers round these two great novelists a considerable group of
good novelists, who more or less mirror their mid-Victorian mood. Wilkie
Collins may be said to be in this way a lesser Dickens and Anthony
Trollope a lesser Thackeray. Wilkie Collins is chiefly typical of his
time in this respect: that while his moral and religious conceptions
were as mechanical as his carefully constructed fictitious conspiracies,
he nevertheless informed the latter with a sort of involuntary mysticism
which dealt wholly with the darker side of the soul. For this was one
of the most peculiar of the problems of the Victorian mind. The idea of
the supernatural was perhaps at as low an ebb as it had ever
been--certainly much lower than it is now. But in spite of this, and in
spite of a certain ethical cheeriness that was almost _de rigueur_--the
strange fact remains that the only sort of supernaturalism the
Victorians allowed to their imaginations was a sad supernaturalism. They
might have ghost stories, but not saints' stories. They could trifle
with the curse or unpardoning prophecy of a witch, but not with the
pardon of a priest. They seem to have held (I believe erroneously) that
the supernatural was safest when it came from below. When we think (for
example) of the uncountable riches of religious art, imagery, ritual and
popular legend that has clustered round Christmas through all the
Christian ages, it is a truly extraordinary thing to reflect that
Dickens (wishing to have in _The Christmas Carol_ a little happy
supernaturalism by way of a change) actually had to make up a mythology
for himself. Here was one of the rare cases where Dickens, in a real and
human sense, did suffer from the lack of culture. For the rest, Wilkie
Collins is these two elements: the mechanical and the mystical; both
very good of their kind. He is one of the few novelists in whose case it
is proper and literal to speak of his "plots." He was a plotter; he went
about to slay Godfrey Ablewhite as coldly and craftily as the Indians
did. But he also had a sound though sinister note of true magic; as in
the repetition of the two white dresses in _The Woman in White_; or of
the dreams with their double explanations in _Armadale_. His ghosts do
walk. They are alive; and walk as softly as Count Fosco, but as solidly.
Finally, _The Moonstone_ is probably the best detective tale in the
world.
Anthony Trollope, a clear and very capable realist, represents rather
another side of the Victorian spirit of comfort; its leisureliness, its
love of detail, especially of domestic detail; its love of following
characters and kindred from book to book and from generation to
generation. Dickens very seldom tried this latter experiment, and then
(as in _Master Humphrey's Clock_) unsuccessfully; those magnesium blazes
of his were too brilliant and glaring to be indefinitely prolonged. But
Thackeray was full of it; and we often feel that the characters in _The
Newcomes_ or _Philip_ might legitimately complain that their talk and
tale are being perpetually interrupted and pestered by people out of
other books. Within his narrower limits, Trollope was a more strict and
masterly realist than Thackeray, and even those who would call his
personages "types" would admit that they are as vivid as characters. It
was a bustling but a quiet world that he described: politics before the
coming of the Irish and the Socialists; the Church in the lull between
the Oxford Movement and the modern High Anglican energy. And it is
notable in the Victorian spirit once more that though his clergymen are
all of them real men and many of them good men, it never really occurs
to us to think of them as the priests of a religion.
Charles Reade may be said to go along with these; and Disraeli and even
Kingsley; not because these three very different persons had anything
particular in common, but because they all fell short of the first rank
in about the same degree. Charles Reade had a kind of cold coarseness
about him, not morally but artistically, which keeps him out of the best
literature as such: but he is of importance to the Victorian development
in another way; because he has the harsher and more tragic note that has
come later in the study of our social problems. He is the first of the
angry realists. Kingsley's best books may be called boys' books. There
is a real though a juvenile poetry in _Westward Ho!_ and though that
narrative, historically considered, is very much of a lie, it is a good,
thundering honest lie. There are also genuinely eloquent things in
_Hypatia_, and a certain electric atmosphere of sectarian excitement
that Kingsley kept himself in, and did know how to convey. He said he
wrote the book in his heart's blood. This is an exaggeration, but there
is a truth in it; and one does feel that he may have relieved his
feelings by writing it in red ink. As for Disraeli, his novels are able
and interesting considered as everything except novels, and are an
important contribution precisely because they are written by an alien
who did not take our politics so seriously as Trollope did. They are
important again as showing those later Victorian changes which men like
Thackeray missed. Disraeli did do something towards revealing the
dishonesty of our politics--even if he had done a good deal towards
bringing it about.
Between this group and the next there hovers a figure very hard to
place; not higher in letters than these, yet not easy to class with
them; I mean Bulwer Lytton. He was no greater than they were; yet
somehow he seems to take up more space. He did not, in the ultimate
reckoning, do anything in particular: but he was a figure; rather as
Oscar Wilde was later a figure. You could not have the Victorian Age
without him. And this was not due to wholly superficial things like his
dandyism, his dark, sinister good looks and a great deal of the mere
polished melodrama that he wrote. There was something in his all-round
interests; in the variety of things he tried; in his half-aristocratic
swagger as poet and politician, that made him in some ways a real
touchstone of the time. It is noticeable about him that he is always
turning up everywhere and that he brings other people out, generally in
a hostile spirit. His Byronic and almost Oriental ostentation was used
by the young Thackeray as something on which to sharpen his new razor of
Victorian common sense. His pose as a dilettante satirist inflamed the
execrable temper of Tennyson, and led to those lively comparisons to a
bandbox and a lion in curlpapers. He interposed the glove of warning and
the tear of sensibility between us and the proper ending of _Great
Expectations_. Of his own books, by far the best are the really charming
comedies about _The Caxtons_ and _Kenelm Chillingly_; none of his other
works have a high literary importance now, with the possible exception
of _A Strange Story_; but his _Coming Race_ is historically interesting
as foreshadowing those novels of the future which were afterwards such a
weapon of the Socialists. Lastly, there was an element indefinable about
Lytton, which often is in adventurers; which amounts to a suspicion that
there was something in him after all. It rang out of him when he said to
the hesitating Crimean Parliament: "Destroy your Government and save
your army."
With the next phase of Victorian fiction we enter a new world; the
later, more revolutionary, more continental, freer but in some ways
weaker world in which we live to-day. The subtle and sad change that
was passing like twilight across the English brain at this time is very
well expressed in the fact that men have come to mention the great name
of Meredith in the same breath as Mr. Thomas Hardy. Both writers,
doubtless, disagreed with the orthodox religion of the ordinary English
village. Most of us have disagreed with that religion until we made the
simple discovery that it does not exist. But in any age where ideas
could be even feebly disentangled from each other, it would have been
evident at once that Meredith and Hardy were, intellectually speaking,
mortal enemies. They were much more opposed to each other than Newman
was to Kingsley; or than Abelard was to St. Bernard. But then they
collided in a sceptical age, which is like colliding in a London fog.
There can never be any clear controversy in a sceptical age.
Nevertheless both Hardy and Meredith did mean something; and they did
mean diametrically opposite things. Meredith was perhaps the only man
in the modern world who has almost had the high honour of rising out of
the low estate of a Pantheist into the high estate of a Pagan. A Pagan
is a person who can do what hardly any person for the last two thousand
years could do: a person who can take Nature naturally. It is due to
Meredith to say that no one outside a few of the great Greeks has ever
taken Nature so naturally as he did. And it is also due to him to say
that no one outside Colney Hatch ever took Nature so unnaturally as it
was taken in what Mr. Hardy has had the blasphemy to call Wessex Tales.
This division between the two points of view is vital; because the turn
of the nineteenth century was a very sharp one; by it we have reached
the rapids in which we find ourselves to-day.
Meredith really is a Pantheist. You can express it by saying that God is
the great All: you can express it much more intelligently by saying that
Pan is the great god. But there is some sense in it, and the sense is
this: that some people believe that this world is sufficiently good at
bottom for us to trust ourselves to it without very much knowing why. It
is the whole point in most of Meredith's tales that there is something
behind us that often saves us when we understand neither it nor
ourselves. He sometimes talked mere intellectualism about women: but
that is because the most brilliant brains can get tired. Meredith's
brain was quite tired when it wrote some of its most quoted and least
interesting epigrams: like that about passing Seraglio Point, but not
doubling Cape Turk. Those who can see Meredith's mind in that are with
those who can see Dickens' mind in Little Nell. Both were chivalrous
pronouncements on behalf of oppressed females: neither has any earthly
meaning as ideas.
But what Meredith did do for women was not to emancipate them (which
means nothing) but to express them, which means a great deal. And he
often expressed them right, even when he expressed himself wrong. Take,
for instance, that phrase so often quoted: "Woman will be the last thing
civilised by man." Intellectually it is something worse than false; it
is the opposite of what he was always attempting to say. So far from
admitting any equality in the sexes, it logically admits that a man may
use against a woman any chains or whips he has been in the habit of
using against a tiger or a bear. He stood as the special champion of
female dignity: but I cannot remember any author, Eastern or Western,
who has so calmly assumed that man is the master and woman merely the
material, as Meredith really does in this phrase. Any one who knows a
free woman (she is generally a married woman) will immediately be
inclined to ask two simple and catastrophic questions, first: "Why
should woman be civilised?" and, second: "Why, if she is to be
civilised, should she be civilised by man?" In the mere intellectualism
of the matter, Meredith seems to be talking the most brutal sex
mastery: he, at any rate, has not doubled Cape Turk, nor even passed
Seraglio Point. Now why is it that we all really feel that this
Meredithian passage is not so insolently masculine as in mere logic it
would seem? I think it is for this simple reason: that there is
something about Meredith making us feel that it is not woman he
disbelieves in, but civilisation. It is a dark undemonstrated feeling
that Meredith would really be rather sorry if woman were civilised by
man--or by anything else. When we have got that, we have got the real
Pagan--the man that does believe in Pan.
It is proper to put this philosophic matter first, before the aesthetic
appreciation of Meredith, because with Meredith a sort of passing bell
has rung and the Victorian orthodoxy is certainly no longer safe.
Dickens and Carlyle, as we have said, rebelled against the orthodox
compromise: but Meredith has escaped from it. Cosmopolitanism,
Socialism, Feminism are already in the air; and Queen Victoria has
begun to look like Mrs. Grundy. But to escape from a city is one thing:
to choose a road is another. The free-thinker who found himself outside
the Victorian city, found himself also in the fork of two very different
naturalistic paths. One of them went upwards through a tangled but
living forest to lonely but healthy hills: the other went down to a
swamp. Hardy went down to botanise in the swamp, while Meredith climbed
towards the sun. Meredith became, at his best, a sort of daintily
dressed Walt Whitman: Hardy became a sort of village atheist brooding
and blaspheming over the village idiot. It is largely because the
free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they
want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their
small but sincere movement has failed.
For the duel is deadly; and any agnostic who wishes to be anything more
than a Nihilist must sympathise with one version of nature or the
other. The God of Meredith is impersonal; but he is often more healthy
and kindly than any of the persons. That of Thomas Hardy is almost made
personal by the intense feeling that he is poisonous. Nature is always
coming in to save Meredith's women; Nature is always coming in to betray
and ruin Hardy's. It has been said that if God had not existed it would
have been necessary to invent Him. But it is not often, as in Mr.
Hardy's case, that it is necessary to invent Him in order to prove how
unnecessary (and undesirable) He is. But Mr. Hardy is anthropomorphic
out of sheer atheism. He personifies the universe in order to give it a
piece of his mind. But the fight is unequal for the old philosophical
reason: that the universe had already given Mr. Hardy a piece of _its_
mind to fight with. One curious result of this divergence in the two
types of sceptic is this: that when these two brilliant novelists break
down or blow up or otherwise lose for a moment their artistic
self-command, they are both equally wild, but wild in opposite
directions. Meredith shows an extravagance in comedy which, if it were
not so complicated, every one would call broad farce. But Mr. Hardy has
the honour of inventing a new sort of game, which may be called the
extravagance of depression. The placing of the weak lover and his new
love in such a place that they actually see the black flag announcing
that Tess has been hanged is utterly inexcusable in art and probability;
it is a cruel practical joke. But it is a practical joke at which even
its author cannot brighten up enough to laugh.
But it is when we consider the great artistic power of these two
writers, with all their eccentricities, that we see even more clearly
that free-thought was, as it were, a fight between finger-posts. For it
is the remarkable fact that it was the man who had the healthy and manly
outlook who had the crabbed and perverse style; it was the man who had
the crabbed and perverse outlook who had the healthy and manly style.
The reader may well have complained of paradox when I observed above
that Meredith, unlike most neo-Pagans, did in his way take Nature
naturally. It may be suggested, in tones of some remonstrance, that
things like "though pierced by the cruel acerb," or "thy fleetingness is
bigger in the ghost," or "her gabbling grey she eyes askant," or "sheer
film of the surface awag" are not taking Nature naturally. And this is
true of Meredith's style, but it is not true of his spirit; nor even,
apparently, of his serious opinions. In one of the poems I have quoted
he actually says of those who live nearest to that Nature he was always
praising--
"Have they but held her laws and nature dear,
They mouth no sentence of inverted wit";
which certainly was what Meredith himself was doing most of the time.
But a similar paradox of the combination of plain tastes with twisted
phrases can also be seen in Browning. Something of the same can be seen
in many of the cavalier poets. I do not understand it: it may be that
the fertility of a cheerful mind crowds everything, so that the tree is
entangled in its own branches; or it may be that the cheerful mind cares
less whether it is understood or not; as a man is less articulate when
he is humming than when he is calling for help.
Certainly Meredith suffers from applying a complex method to men and
things he does not mean to be complex; nay, honestly admires for being
simple. The conversations between Diana and Redworth fail of their full
contrast because Meredith can afford the twopence for Diana coloured,
but cannot afford the penny for Redworth plain. Meredith's ideals were
neither sceptical nor finicky: but they can be called insufficient. He
had, perhaps, over and above his honest Pantheism two convictions
profound enough to be called prejudices. He was probably of Welsh
blood, certainly of Celtic sympathies, and he set himself more swiftly
though more subtly than Ruskin or Swinburne to undermining the enormous
complacency of John Bull. He also had a sincere hope in the strength of
womanhood, and may be said, almost without hyperbole, to have begotten
gigantic daughters. He may yet suffer for his chivalric interference as
many champions do. I have little doubt that when St. George had killed
the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess. But certainly neither
of these two vital enthusiasms touched the Victorian trouble. The
disaster of the modern English is not that they are not Celtic, but that
they are not English. The tragedy of the modern woman is not that she is
not allowed to follow man, but that she follows him far too slavishly.
This conscious and theorising Meredith did not get very near his problem
and is certainly miles away from ours. But the other Meredith was a
creator; which means a god. That is true of him which is true of so
different a man as Dickens, that all one can say of him is that he is
full of good things. A reader opening one of his books feels like a
schoolboy opening a hamper which he knows to have somehow cost a hundred
pounds. He may be more bewildered by it than by an ordinary hamper; but
he gets the impression of a real richness of thought; and that is what
one really gets from such riots of felicity as _Evan Harrington_ or
_Harry Richmond_. His philosophy may be barren, but he was not. And the
chief feeling among those that enjoy him is a mere wish that more people
could enjoy him too.
I end here upon Hardy and Meredith; because this parting of the ways to
open optimism and open pessimism really was the end of the Victorian
peace. There are many other men, very nearly as great, on whom I might
delight to linger: on Shorthouse, for instance, who in one way goes with
Mrs. Browning or Coventry Patmore. I mean that he has a wide culture,
which is called by some a narrow religion. When we think what even the
best novels about cavaliers have been (written by men like Scott or
Stevenson) it is a wonderful thing that the author of _John Inglesant_
could write a cavalier romance in which he forgot Cromwell but
remembered Hobbes. But Shorthouse is outside the period in fiction in
the same sort of way in which Francis Thompson is outside it in poetry.
He did not accept the Victorian basis. He knew too much.
There is one more matter that may best be considered here, though
briefly: it illustrates the extreme difficulty of dealing with the
Victorian English in a book like this, because of their eccentricity;
not of opinions, but of character and artistic form. There are several
great Victorians who will not fit into any of the obvious categories I
employ; because they will not fit into anything, hardly into the world
itself. Where Germany or Italy would relieve the monotony of mankind by
paying serious respect to an artist, or a scholar, or a patriotic
warrior, or a priest--it was always the instinct of the English to do it
by pointing out a Character. Dr. Johnson has faded as a poet or a
critic, but he survives as a Character. Cobbett is neglected
(unfortunately) as a publicist and pamphleteer, but he is remembered as
a Character. Now these people continued to crop up through the Victorian
time; and each stands so much by himself that I shall end these pages
with a profound suspicion that I have forgotten to mention a Character
of gigantic dimensions. Perhaps the best example of such eccentrics is
George Borrow; who sympathised with unsuccessful nomads like the gipsies
while every one else sympathised with successful nomads like the Jews;
who had a genius like the west wind for the awakening of wild and casual
friendships and the drag and attraction of the roads. But whether George
Borrow ought to go into the section devoted to philosophers, or the
section devoted to novelists, or the section devoted to liars, nobody
else has ever known, even if he did.
But the strongest case of this Victorian power of being abruptly
original in a corner can be found in two things: the literature meant
merely for children and the literature meant merely for fun. It is true
that these two very Victorian things often melted into each other (as
was the way of Victorian things), but not sufficiently to make it safe
to mass them together without distinction. Thus there was George
Macdonald, a Scot of genius as genuine as Carlyle's; he could write
fairy-tales that made all experience a fairy-tale. He could give the
real sense that every one had the end of an elfin thread that must at
last lead them into Paradise. It was a sort of optimist Calvinism. But
such really significant fairy-tales were accidents of genius. Of the
Victorian Age as a whole it is true to say that it did discover a new
thing; a thing called Nonsense. It may be doubted whether this thing was
really invented to please children. Rather it was invented by old
people trying to prove their first childhood, and sometimes succeeding
only in proving their second. But whatever else the thing was, it was
English and it was individual. Lewis Carroll gave mathematics a holiday:
he carried logic into the wild lands of illogicality. Edward Lear, a
richer, more romantic and therefore more truly Victorian buffoon,
improved the experiment. But the more we study it, the more we shall, I
think, conclude that it reposed on something more real and profound in
the Victorians than even their just and exquisite appreciation of
children. It came from the deep Victorian sense of humour.
It may appear, because I have used from time to time the only possible
phrases for the case, that I mean the Victorian Englishman to appear as
a blockhead, which means an unconscious buffoon. To all this there is a
final answer: that he was also a conscious buffoon--and a successful
one. He was a humorist; and one of the best humorists in Europe. That
which Goethe had never taught the Germans, Byron did manage to teach the
English--the duty of not taking him seriously. The strong and shrewd
Victorian humour appears in every slash of the pencil of Charles Keene;
in every undergraduate inspiration of Calverley or "Q." or J. K. S. They
had largely forgotten both art and arms: but the gods had left them
laughter.
But the final proof that the Victorians were alive by this laughter, can
be found in the fact they could manage and master for a moment even the
cosmopolitan modern theatre. They could contrive to put "The Bab
Ballads" on the stage. To turn a private name into a public epithet is a
thing given to few: but the word "Gilbertian" will probably last longer
than the name Gilbert.
It meant a real Victorian talent; that of exploding unexpectedly and
almost, as it seemed, unintentionally. Gilbert made good jokes by the
thousand; but he never (in his best days) made the joke that could
possibly have been expected of him. This is the last essential of the
Victorian. Laugh at him as a limited man, a moralist, conventionalist,
an opportunist, a formalist. But remember also that he was really a
humorist; and may still be laughing at you.