“Time and space,” a noble philosopher has observed, “are but
hallucinations.” It may be so, and from the point of view of the
metaphysician ours may have been merely a “so-called nineteenth
century.” Certain it is that to judge literature in blocks of centuries
is to make a convenient but illogical cross-division. The early, and
perhaps the most important, literary influences of the century were in
existence long before 1801. Thus, if we look at whatever is now called
_fin de siècle_, at violent antagonism to tradition and convention, at
discontent of every sort with everything—with rank, wealth, morality,
law, marriage, the family—we find that this passion was as noisy
and self-complacent a hundred years ago as it is to-day. The French
Revolution was the lurid playground of “New Women,” full of what they
supposed to be new ideas. The German drama of 1780–1800, now best
remembered by the parody called “The Rovers,” in the _Anti-Jacobin_,
was replete with the humorless paradoxes and strained situations of
Ibsen. The shortest way to an understanding of the antiquity of our
“new ideas” is, in fact, a study of the Poetry of the _Anti-Jacobin_.
Romance, again, as far as romance depends for her effects on desperate
deeds, on the rhetoric of noble brigands, on the phantasms of the
sheeted dead shivering down dark passages among skeletons, on clanking
chains, and on distressed damsels, was as much alive in the end of
the eighteenth century as at any age of literary history. Goethe,
Schiller, Bürger, Mrs. Radcliffe, all following in the Gothic wake of
honest Horace Walpole and his _Castle of Otranto_, were preparing the
ground for Scott and Dumas. Once more the old “popular” elements so
necessary to literature (which, like Antæus, regains vigor on touching
mother-earth) had been wholly absent from the poetry and prose of
the last reigning Stuart and of the first two Hanoverian kings of
England. But, about 1770–1780, literature had returned to its archaic
popular sources. Percy had made _volks-lieder_ fashionable, Fergusson
and Burns had revived the rustic muse of Scotland, and Macpherson
had given mankind a draught, though an adulterated draught, from the
cup of the sorceries of the Celtic enchantress. In opposition to the
urban self-restraint and contented complacency of the Augustan age,
Rousseau had preached the pleasures of virtue, sentiment, and of a
“blessed state of Nature”; young Werther had gotten him a stool to be
sad upon, like Master Stephen: weeping was the mode. Rousseau, as Mr.
Pater once observed in conversation, was “the grandmother of us all,”
and as tearful as Mrs. Gummidge in _David Copperfield_. Meanwhile the
“emancipation” born of science had set in; people thought they knew
all about everything; the elder Darwin could explain the universe
without a God, quite as easily as any modern Darwinian, if not so
elaborately. He may not have been always correct in his theories and
facts, still, there they were, and they were “emancipating.” Yet,
far from being laughed out of court by the gratifying progress of
science, a more mystical religion and a life more austere had come in
from the preaching of Wesley, who was practically the parent of our
neo-Catholicism in its varying forms. The “Oxford Movement,” with all
the strange after-symptoms which it has left behind it, is directly
descended from Wesley. Thus romance, sentiment, freedom and variety
in poetic form, philanthropy, revolt against the past, return to and
reverence for the past, scientific doubt, weariness of life, love
of nature, wistful belief, relapse on the forms of the Church, and
everything else which stamps the literature of the nineteenth century
were alive and active in the last half of the eighteenth century. The
year 1801 made no sudden break. The nineteenth century merely went on
evolving the principles, revolutionary or reactionary, of the last half
of the eighteenth century.
Thus Crabbe, the precursor of whoever, Englishman, American, Frenchman,
or Slav, has written of the sombre tragedies of the poor, was born in
1754. Blake, whose perfectly un-Augustan rhapsodies and mystic lyrics
were made fashionable about 1870, was born in 1757, out of due time,
for his best side is Elizabethan in quality. Burns, born in 1759, is
as much at home in the nineteenth century as Tolstoï, while Godwin
could not be more “advanced,” or Mary Wollstonecraft more of “a New
Woman,” if the former belonged to our “Forward Liberals” and the latter
perorated at congresses of her sex. The first twenty-five years of Miss
Austen belong to the eighteenth century; yet, except for a certain
“old-fashioned” primness of style, she is the first, and, beyond all
doubt, the greatest of all nineteenth-century “realistic” novelists
of domestic life. For, though a “realist,” she is a humorist, and the
combination is almost unexampled. Your common realist is a gloomy
thing, with no more sense of the comic than M. Zola.
Of the new poets, revolutionary in metre and matter, Wordsworth,
Scott, Coleridge, and Southey were born in 1770–1774; they were mature
before the nineteenth century dawned. His northern home, among the
hills and lakes, fitted Wordsworth to be the austere and mystical poet
of nature and of man in relation to nature. Born a poet, his genius
was determined by his environment, while his ardent sympathy with the
Revolution at once turned his attention to the unregarded poor, and
inspired his not wholly successful attempt to shake off the trammels
of Augustan “poetic diction,” the survival of the Latinism of Boileau
and Pope. Later, of course, Wordsworth became the Tory, the patriot,
the Churchman, and the Stamp Collector. But his poetical creed he never
consciously changed, though he often lapsed from it unconsciously. If
Scott was to be a poet at all he was fated to be influenced by the New
World, not in its emancipated ideas, but in its wistful return to the
Old World of reivers, spearmen, claymores, goblin, ghost, and fairy.
The Border ballads lulled his cradle and were the joy of his childhood
and manhood. All tradition murmured to him her charms of Border and
Highland legend; every ruined abbey and castle had its tale for him; to
Ettrick and Yarrow he needed not to say, like Lady John Scott, “Have
you no message for me?” He never had a touch of the Augustan horror
of mountain and torrent, never a touch of the Augustan contempt of
“Barbarism.” Walpole’s _Castle of Otranto_ and Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels
of terror went to the molding of his genius, as the novels of Miss
Edgeworth (born 1767) suggested fiction about the lives and manners of
his own people. In his return to the past he came, like Lamb, on the
Elizabethan drama, and, unlike Lamb, on the unpublished documents of
the Tudor age, the age of desperate resistance to England. But Scott
would never have been exactly the poet that he was if he had not heard
“Christabel” recited. “Christabel,” the entirely original utterance
of a genius which, at first, was a child of the enlightenment of the
eighteenth century. The early ideas of Coleridge were the ideas of
Rousseau and of Bernardin de Saint Pierre, who was, like Coleridge,
but more energetically, a seeker for an ideal land where pantisocracy
might flourish and a clown might be the poet’s “brother.”
In poetry, in poetic form, Coleridge was the real and daring innovator,
inspired by the eighteenth century reaction against convention, and
played on like an æolian harp by every wind of his mystic spirit. His
reaction was too violent even for Lamb; his originality too extreme
even for Wordsworth. In him, of all our later poets, the “unconscious
self” was the strongest and the most free, and of all our poets he had
the hardest battle with the dull Augustan survival in such critics as
Jeffrey. To them all the ripened fruit of the blossoming time of the
late eighteenth century, the poetry of Scott and of Wordsworth, was but
dimly intelligible, but Coleridge was the most unintelligible of all.
From the Germany of the late eighteenth century came one of Scott’s
springs of poetic action; from the _Lenore_ of Bürger (a popular ballad
rewritten) and from the _Götz von Berlichingen_ of Goethe. These were
the days when Scott longed to possess a skull and cross-bones, and
in a love-letter dilated on his choice of a sepulchre. But what came
to Coleridge from Germany was the late eighteenth century’s reaction
against the truly “common-sense” ideas of Hume, the philosophy of Kant,
Schelling, and Fichte. In this field, too, he was unintelligible (and
no wonder), but he was but adapting the ideas of 1770–1800, and the
neo-Hegelians of Oxford are doing the same thing. A reaction against
the materialism of common-sense was inevitable; Mesmer, Swedenborg, and
Kant began what survives in the hands of the Master of Balliol and of
Professor William James.
In a more recent generation Byron prolonged the Wertherism of Werther,
Byron being thus a grandson of Rousseau, while he borrowed his form,
and borrowed it very ill, from what Scott borrowed of Coleridge. The
genius of Byron is not contested by the sane, but except in satire it
seldom found clear and adequate, because it sought hurried, heedless,
and tumultuous, expression. Scott had a better ear and was not so
reckless an _improvisatore_. Poems that can endure are not written
like Byron’s, in the brief leisure of fashionable industry. We admire
the native impetus of Byron, his gift of satire, his sensitiveness
to elemental force in nature and in man, but we cannot understand
the furore which was so much the child of his title, his beauty,
his recklessness, and his studiously cultivated air of mystery. Mr.
Lenville, as reported by Mr. Folair, said that Nicholas Nickleby was
“a regular stick of an actor, and it’s only the mystery about him that
has caused him to go down with the people here, though Lenville says
he don’t believe there’s anything at all in it.” A later age must
partly adopt the same theory of Byron’s original and unparalleled
success in Europe as well as in England. He was mysterious Manfred,
he was Childe Harold, he was the Corsair; a hero of Mrs. Radcliffe’s,
with an Oriental air and a gloomy secret and a heart burning with
indignation against the unworthy species of men. What had Byron done?
Even Goethe was curious, believing wild anecdotes; now we really do not
care what Byron did, recognizing in him, his genius, and his pose, not
so much the “Satanic,” as the result of hysteria and madness in his
race. Satanism, from of old, has been mainly hysteria. The element of
personal _reclame_ in Byron has faded, and with it fades his reputation
as an earth-shaking poet. Attempts to revive that fame in our day,
attempts to bring us back to “the noble poet,” are respectable,
being based on loyalty to the taste of our great-grandfathers and
grandmothers in all civilized countries. But the efforts are futile.
“Byron,” says Mr. Saintsbury, “seems to me a poet distinctly of the
second class, and not even of the best kind of second, inasmuch as
his greatness is chiefly derived from a sort of parody, a sort of
imitation of the qualities of the first. His verse is to the greatest
poetry what melodrama is to tragedy, what plaster is to marble, what
pinchbeck is to gold.” Such, however unpopular they may be, are my own
candid sentiments, for though from childhood I could and did read all
our great poets with pleasure, it was not with the kind of pleasure
which Byron in his satire and his declamation could occasionally give
me. He is monotonous, he is rhetorical, his versification is often
incredibly bad, and he is more obscure, mainly by dint of hurry, bad
printing, and bad grammar, than Mr. Browning. Thus Byron leaves us
impressed as with a vast, even volcanic, yet dandified force, untrained
and often misdirected. Either by nature, or in reaction, he professed
sympathy with the Augustan school of Queen Anne’s reign, and sided with
Pope in the long quarrel as to whether Pope is a poet.
Even the modern opponents of Byron must recognize in him qualities
which won the admiration and affection of Scott and Shelley. In Shelley
we had a true child of the revolution, the _Aufklarung_, and the later
eighteenth century. His boyhood trifled with chemical science (probably
not then popular with the human boy); his adolescence was given to
converting school-girls into “dear little atheists.” His social ideas,
like those of some advanced moderns, aimed at the absolute destruction
of the family; and the moral of _Laon and Cythna_ went far behind the
morals of the most backward savages, who make incest a capital offence.
Shelley, a boy all his life, was more boyishly devoted to destruction
than even the newest writers on the relations of the sexes. In “making
all things new” both he and they are, in fact, relapsing on a condition
of society which, if it ever existed, is so old that it may be called
“pre-human,” and is contrary to nature, as far as we can study human
nature in the least developed of tribes. His ideas conducted Shelley
to the tragedy and farce of his career: his desertion of one young
wife, followed by her suicide, and his marriage with another, in entire
opposition to his own opinions. In literature he began at school
with a devout following of Mrs. Radcliffe; while, in _Queen Mab_ and
_Alastor_, vigorous but vague and misty _Childe Harold_, wandering in
No Man’s Land, he first displayed his originality in poetical form.
His personal character being noble and generous in the highest degree,
his sympathy with the poor and the oppressed being a true passion,
Shelley’s errors arose from the fixed idea that almost every human
ordinance must, being old, be necessarily bad. He would recognize that
there is, after all, something right in the sixth commandment, but
did not draw the inference that a gleam of reason might also be found
in most of the rest of the Decalogue. The state of society then, as
always, provoked revolt, but the state of society was grievous, not
because its moral laws were bad, but because its laws were not obeyed.
Shelley had no turn for narrative, and, in such poems as _The Revolt
of Islam_, it is the splendid meteoric genius, the unexcelled music
that captivate. In lyrics he was probably the most original force since
the Elizabethan age: his verse is a singing and soaring flame. In
_Adonis_ his righteous indignation carries him forward like an angel
with a sword of fire; and _The Witch of Atlas_ is a triumph in a new
“fairy way of writing.” His is the Muse of clouds and stars, of sea and
tempest, of all the aspects, and, in appearance, most capricious forces
of the world, yet his is also the Muse of flowers and peaceful woods,
of dejection and of delight. What the born rebel, Milton, might have
been without the foundation and trammels of Puritanism, that Shelley
was, though his wild and tender lyric note was even more exquisite than
Milton’s. Neither was, in the full sense, human, for both were without
humor, as may be seen in their humorous pieces.
Keats, but three years younger than Shelley (1795), was more a true
child of the nineteenth century. His social ideas, though of course
liberal, were more in abeyance; he was more exclusively an artist; and
his art was more controlled by the revived Elizabethanism of Leigh Hunt
(1784). That singular man, who had so much taste, and so much of it
bad; so intense a theory of social benevolence, and so keen a belief
that it was more blessed to receive than to give, “owed little” (in the
way of literature) “to any but the old masters, and many contemporaries
owed not a little to him.” Few owed more, for good and bad, than
Keats. Virgil he had found out for himself, and had translated when a
schoolboy. Spenser, too, he found for himself, and Greece he discovered
afresh in Lemprière’s _Dictionary_ and in Chapman’s _Homer_. But this
superficial euphuism and elaborate verbal quaintness he partly derived
at second hand from Leigh Hunt.
That something in Leigh Hunt which suggested Harold Skimpole to
Dickens, and his violent conception of _The Cockney School_ to
Lockhart, was not hidden from Keats, and inspired him with some bitter
words. It was what he derived from Hunt that gave occasion to Keats’s
assailants, who were more of political than of literary partisans.
Lockhart, or Wilson, or both, with the _Quarterly_ reviewer, in
attacking _Endymion_ were attacking, they thought, a member of an
affected, effeminate, and radical coterie. Keats himself, maturing
with the suddenness of genius, looked on _Endymion_ as thoroughly
immature. But killed, or even discouraged, by his critics he was
not, and on a page of a copy of _Lamia_ where his publishers spoke
of his discouragment he wrote “This is a lie.” (The copy is in the
possession of Canon Ainger.) Keats, like Burns, whom he so intensely
admired and so unerringly judged as a man and a poet, was his own
best critic. Despite his boyish lusciousness of taste, and the
fever of letters written when dying, there was no manlier or more
chivalrous soul in England than that of the poet of the odes to the
nightingale and to autumn. Keats at his best attained sheer perfection
of language, of emotion, and of thought. As he advised Shelley to be,
he was not content with less than filling all the rifts with pure
gold. “Untaught,” like the minstrel of Odysseus, he combined a Greek
clarity and largeness of manner with that romance which Greece does not
lack, but which he possessed in a degree more conspicuous, at least
to readers who are not Greeks. Though he has not been and cannot be
imitated, he has supplied to Tennyson and the best moderns a standard
and an ideal. That the Shakespearian copiousness of humanity and humor
and dramatic genius would ever have been his nothing indicates, but
what writer of the nineteenth century, except Scott, has possessed
a large share of these qualities? In poetry, not one, and it was in
prose that Scott wore his fragment of the cloak of Shakespeare. For the
century has not produced, in England or America, a great dramatic poet.
It is to fiction, to Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Stevenson, Meredith,
Hawthorne, George Eliot, that we must look for the humor and humanity
and passion which, earlier, found their vehicle in the drama.
Ours is a reading rather than a seeing century, though this does not
explain the reason which made the great novelists incapable of writing
for the stage. Of the other poets of the early century, Campbell,
Rogers, Moore, Landor, Hogg, and the ladies, Mrs. Hemans, and L. E. L.,
and Beddoes, space does not permit us to treat. Landor’s audience
has not increased; Rogers has none; Campbell is best remembered for
war songs which I fear are overrated; Hogg, despite some exquisite
passages in _Kilmeny_, and some admirable songs, suffers from his
countrymen’s exclusive devotion to Robbie Burns. When Scott turned to
fiction (1814) the current of popular taste at once changed into that
channel. Byron had still his vogue; Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge then
sang only to the few initiated; Wordsworth was past his prime; and
with the general public nothing was really popular but fiction, and
that fiction was Scott’s. Miss Austen is probably much more widely
appreciated to-day than when she died, little noted by the world, in
1817. A criticism of Scott’s novels, which first made fiction supreme
and far above poetry in the estimation of “the reading public,” cannot
be attempted in this place. The best estimate of Scott, if far from
most favorable, is his own, in the introduction to _The Fortunes of
Nigel_. His faults of prolixity, haste, indifference to delicacy of
style, and even to grammar; his “big bow-wow” vein (as he calls it);
the stilted theatrical language of his Catherine Glovers and Helen
Macgregors—all these defects, with his hasty denouéments (as of
Shakespeare and Molière), are patent, are confessed, and probably deter
many readers from making profit of his humor, his rich knowledge of and
sympathy with all human nature, his infrequent but exquisite touches of
passion, his tragedy and comedy. None the less, Scott is the main stock
of the fiction of the century. Men may now have more minute knowledge,
though so wide a knowledge has none; may have more wit, if less humor;
may eagerly hunt for all that Scott loathed and avoided in our animal
nature; may, indeed must, practise a more careful style, but all the
novelists are, willy-nilly, children of Scott and Miss Austen. Dickens,
indeed, owed more to Smollett (one of Scott’s chief favorites),
Thackeray owed more to Fielding, the “Kailyard School” owed more to
Galt (1779—1839). But Scott is “the father of the rest,” above all,
of Dumas; and Miss Austen is the mother. Lord Lytton and Mr. Disraeli
had, especially at first, a tinge of Byronism, later developing on
their own lines: Mr. Disraeli’s political; Lord Lytton’s multifarious,
including the line of modern mysticism, now often worked. Scott lived
to be interested in Lytton, and might have seen (though probably he did
not see them) the little-noted beginnings of Browning and Tennyson,
about 1830.
What he did see, and admire, was the performance of Cooper, with whom
actual and living American fiction may perhaps be said to take its
rise. In England, Cooper was regarded as the Scott of America; and it
is to be regretted that Lockhart did not excise a splenetic personal
reference to Cooper in Sir Walter’s _Journal_. He was old, tired, and
fatigued with the pressure of society in Paris when he wrote. Cooper
had the genius to appropriate the unworked fields of American patriotic
seafaring life, and of the manners of the Red Man; he is “Cooper of the
wood and wave.” Eagerly were his works read by boys, when Thackeray was
a boy, and when I was a boy. Never shall his readers forget the “Long
Carabine,” to whom Thackeray was devoted, and Uncas, and Chingachgook.
“Still we love the Delaware,
And still we hate the Mingos.”
Doubtless Cooper’s Indians are not “realistically” treated, though
there is infinitely more of truth in his dignified hunters and warriors
than people conversant only with the Red Man of to-day are ready to
believe. But Cooper, probably, does not live with the immortality of
his first renowned successor, Hawthorne, who, for secure perfection of
form, is to modern fiction what Keats is to modern poetry. Like Scott,
Hawthorne is the unforced fruit of his ancestry and the society into
which he was born—a Puritan, not a Cavalier artist, with a background
of austere faith and of old superstition, differentiated from that of
the Covenanters by the shadow of deep forests and of struggles with
the Indians and the wild things of the woods. These had passed into
mellow memories, as, for Scott, had passed the age of witches, fairies,
reivers, and claymores. Entirely, in the _Scarlet Letter_, as by way
of hereditary influence in the _House of Seven Gables_, Hawthorne
reproduced what was old, making it poetically enduring. _His Mosses
from an Old Manse_, and other brief tales set the fashion, except by
Poe, long unfollowed, of the _conte_. Neither author has been excelled
in his own portion of this field. Hawthorne’s haunted consciences,
Poe’s treasure tale, his detective stories, and his tales of terror
remain unequalled, though so profusely imitated. This epoch, say from
1830 to 1855, was a kind of classical interspace in the literature of
the century. France, preoccupied by war in the first thirty years of
the age, now awoke to her own famous romantic era, with Hugo, Dumas,
Musset, Gautier, George Sand, Sainte-Beuve, Mérimée—names of the
highest. Germany, to the non-Teutonic world, is, in poetry, represented
by Heine, and, in science, philosophy, philology, and history by a
galaxy of innovators ingenious and industrious. America saw Hawthorne,
Poe, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Ticknor, Prescott, Motley, Longfellow,
Bryant, Emerson, in their prime; while England had Carlyle, Tennyson,
Newman, Browning, the Brontës, Kingsley, Thackeray, Dickens, and
Ruskin, all recognized and flourishing.
We look around and see, as Mr. Stevenson says in a letter, that “the
suns have set,” while we are scarcely conscious of new dawns. Who can
explain, by circumstances of social evolution and historical event,
the rising and the setting of such constellations of genius? It is
not enough to speak of the democratic demand, naturally indifferent
to style, for never was style the object of such anxious research,
except in other ages of euphuism. Encouragement is even overabundant;
“masterpieces” are announced every week, and forgotten every year. It
may be the prejudice of hoary eld, but I must confess that our new
literature does not seem to me to show such promise of permanence as
the literature of 1830–1860 gave, and, so far, has fulfilled. Has
fulfilled in spite of our sneers at the “early Victorian,” which
was not socialistic, or evolutionist and Darwin-ridden, and was
“respectable,” and did avert its eyes from all that most people in
real life don’t care to stare at. This “prudery” was no new thing. The
Greeks, in except some late decadents and in the old comedy, have a
“prudish” literature. The Latin classics are not in the taste of M.
Zola. The age of Chaucer, the age of Elizabeth, were grossly frank,
that of the Restoration was frankly lewd, but we have sought out
many inventions over which Sedley and Rochester would not have cared
to linger. Their grossness was gay; ours is morbidly squalid. Such
things are absent from the work of Hawthorne and Holmes, Longfellow,
Dickens, Thackeray, and the rest. Such things we now treat of, greatly
daring, and somehow our elders appear apt to outlaugh and outlive us as
humorists, novelists, and poets. It is strange.
Into the merits of that remarkable middle age of the century we cannot
enter in much detail. Tennyson holds unimperilled the throne of the
poet of the time. That his thought is not especially penetrating,
whether he deals with the intricacies of human character, or with the
problems of the universe, may be readily admitted. But I am unaware
that any poet has yet “got the absolute into a corner,” or solved
the problems of the universe. Tennyson, more than people suppose,
was, personally, a mystic, with his own mystic experiences; and his
philosophy was influenced by them. He “followed the Gleam.” Neither
in the _Idylls of the King_ nor in plays, was dramatic rendering
of character his forte. His forte was charm, and music, and the
interpretation of nature. In these he is the equal of the Mantuan, is
the Virgil of the modern world, “golden branch among the shadows.”
Moreover, he has infinite variety: from _Mariana_ to _Fatima_ and
_Rizpah_; from the _Lotos-Eaters_, which “adds a new charm” after the
_Faërie Queene_, to the _Northern Farmer_, from _Ulysses_ to _Crossing
the Bar_. The early _Morte d’Arthur_ is of unsurpassed nobility and
magic; the last poem, _Crossing the Bar_, is no less pre-eminent in
these qualities. Tennyson, in short, had genius; new, as all genius
is new, and no occasional defects of taste or temper can impair the
splendor and richness of his gift to the world, nor the immortality of
his fame.
His contemporary, Browning, had the misfortune to attract, by his
faults, the people who wish to believe themselves clever, because
they labor at appreciating passages which the poet had made obscure.
Darkness is not depth, nor is obscurity a merit. From his letters it
is plain that Mr. Browning had not the gift of lucid expression; from
his poems it is manifest that he had not, in a high degree, the gift of
verbal music and of charms. His gift of the grotesque, very real and
original, was also his snare. In _Christmas Eve_ and _Easter Day_, with
_Men and Women_, we have the true essence of Browning at his best; we
have his dramatic lyrics, with their amazing abundance of character and
variety of measure. After the first fascinating volume _The Ring and
the Book_ became monotonous. One song in _Paracelsus_, to myself, seems
worth all the dissection of character in the blank verse. There are
many who find a kind of spiritual help in such pieces as _Prospice_.
There are thousands who find in _Men and Women_ a sort of intellectual
enjoyment (or entertainment) which they can derive from no other poet
who ever lived. An energy, life, and sympathy, breaking forth in
fresh, unheard-of ways; vocal in strange, piercing, untried measures:
these are the imperishable qualities of Browning. Look at his rendering
of the Agamemnon: such is his version of life. The poetry of Æschylus
is not there: “_carmina desunt_”; but there is a new, odd, unexpected
rendering of the tragedy. So poignant and broken, sad, glad, grotesque,
and pitiful, was Browning’s rendering of life. He was “ever a fighter”:
no poet is more exempt from whining and despair. Destiny linked him
with Mrs. Browning, whose genius, sincere and original, is apt to be
obscured by palpable faults of manner, emotion, and even rhyme, on
which it is superfluous to dwell. Her merits, and some of her defects,
made Mrs. Browning the most popular of women poets in England, except,
perhaps, Miss Ingelow. Both, in the crowd of accomplished versifiers,
appear as true poets, though both, no doubt, fail to reach the place of
Miss Christina Rossetti, who never can be popular.
The matter of popularity is full of puzzles and paradoxes. Tennyson
was popular, yet great because he is popular. There was a moment when
popularity without permanence might have been expected for Longfellow.
The excellence of his moral intentions was then more obvious than the
poetry. Such early pieces as _Excelsior_ and _The Psalm of Life_ yield
odd results on analysis. But not much better can be said for the _Queen
of the May_, and for parts of _The Miller’s Daughter_. In these is a
marvellous dexterity in sinking. But sink, and remain sunk, was as
little characteristic of Longfellow as of Tennyson. He was a true poet,
in his lyrics, even in his translations, as well as in _Evangeline_,
and that excellent experiment _Hiawatha_, where the measure of the
Finnish popular poems is applied to the not dissimilar legends of
another woodland race. But Longfellow lacked that undefinable quality
of the rare, the strange, the hitherto unheard yet delightful note
which now and again is heard in the verse of Edgar Poe. He was an
Ishmaelite in literature, his hand against every man’s hand, and
hence seems to be less admired where he was personally known than in
France and England. It is not the famous _Raven_, but such pieces
as _To Helen_, _the Sleeper_, and at most a dozen others which give
Poe his high place in the judgment of his admirers. Not his ideas,
but the beauty of his haunting lines, confers on him the laurel. Of
Bryant, as a rule, and of Whittier almost always, the reverse is the
truth. The acceptability of their ideas, the refined simplicity, not
the natural magic, of their form, are their claims to renown. Except
in a few places, as in such as his _Commemoration Ode_, Mr. Lowell
is better remembered for the wit and vigor of his Biglow poems than
for his serious verse, at least in England; while Emerson’s prose has
precedence here over his poetry. The wisdom of the East and West,
blended with his happy, courageous temper, made Emerson a corrective
Carlyle, while Thoreau is the complement of Emerson.
Concerning the great Victorian novelists, Thackeray and Dickens,
so much is daily written that remark is superfluous. A master of
observation of all that had rarely been observed, a generous heart,
an original and abundant humorist, the greatest source of mirth
in our century, Dickens appears to wear less well than his rival.
The unapproached merits of Thackeray’s style must preserve him in
literature; his pathos is rare and unforced; his form of humor is as
permanent as that of Fielding, and as successfully matched by his
phrasing. Even his verse, mirthful or melancholy, does not fade, and
has its own place on the borderland of poetry. George Eliot’s fame,
too, must revive the success of her earlier and more humorous novels,
before she became too fond of the Spencerian philosophy, and took
herself too seriously, a natural result of adulation. Charlotte
Brontë, in the same way, has been, as it were, rediscovered amid
a chorus of fresh applauses, and with perhaps rather too curious
investigations. In America, after Hawthorne, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
and Mrs. Beecher Stowe were the novelists most generally admired in
England, when Thackeray and Dickens were verging to their decline. It
is, indeed, to be regretted that Dr. Holmes did not write more fiction
when in his prime. His excellent and original _Elsie Venner_, and
_Guardian Angel_, with their humorous pictures of real life and their
thread of phantasy, half mystical, half scientific, border (as often
in the _Poet_ and _Professor at the Breakfast Table_) on the ground of
“psychical research.” Dr. Holmes was not merely, in verse and prose,
an exquisite wit, but a man of rare knowledge, a man of science, and a
sturdy defender of the purity of the language. Mrs. Beecher Stowe, on
the other hand, took the world by storm with a vivid tract in the form
of fiction; a book now not easy to criticise, but which can still move
to laughter and tears. It is my “insular ignorance” which prevents me
from appreciating other American fictions of that age, before the days
of writers still happily living and working: Mark Twain, Bret Harte,
W. D. Howells, Henry James, and scores of others, who, being here
to speak for themselves, shall not be commented upon in this place.
With Mr. Howells, as a critic, I have tried to break lances, while
ready to admit one of his main contentions, that the art of Scott,
Thackeray, Dickens, and others of our fathers would have profited much
by being a finer art, by condensation, by omission, by avoidance of the
superfluous. But that our modern fiction is a greater art, that romance
and story-telling and adventure are obsolete, or ought to be obsolete,
that I can never admit while human nature is human nature. Mankind
will never be content, in fiction, with tales of the psychology of
the ordinary person; ordinary as we are, we desire to be, like Homer’s
Heracles, conversant with great adventures. Mr. Howells perhaps may
think Aristotle a Greek snob when he maintains that tragedy must find
its theme in the sorrows of the god-descended kings. Are not the griefs
of the poor or of the middle classes as poignant? They are; but they
do not involve such heights and depths of fortune, raising or wrecking
whole states, as do the woes “of Thebes, or Atreus’s line.” The fall
of Prince Charles from an hour even of shadowy royalty, from the
leadership of an army, from the wondering admiration of Europe and the
applause of Voltaire into the subject and dependent sot is an example
of modern historical tragedy; in its elevation and its decline more apt
to move “pity and terror” than the circumstance that a journalist has
taken to drink.
As in the case of America, so in that of England, I cannot enter into
the merits of living novelists in so wide a task as the brief review of
a century. Mr. Meredith, as a veteran of the 60’s, has shown, perhaps,
fully what is the nature of his achievement; he shines as a creator
of character (the highest praise) and as a writer with a thoroughly
original view of the world, as a poet and as a wit. That his manner is
entirely fortunate, and not rather tinged with wilful eccentricities
like those of Browning and Carlyle, can scarcely be disputed. An
accomplished young novelist has admitted to me that his manner is
“catching,” and that he has to struggle against half-conscious efforts
at imitation. Others do not struggle; and most grow older before they
are able to write like themselves, with their own voices. Even Mr.
Stevenson was caught now and then, his own voice being original indeed,
but yet full of memories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
and even of the Cameronian writers. To my mind Mr. Stevenson was the
greatest, or, at least, the most enjoyable, of our novelists since
George Eliot, excelling in matter and form, though probably always
prevented by thwarting circumstances from doing himself complete
justice. He practically revived in England the novel historical, now so
abundantly practised, and practised with spirit, by Mr. Stanley Weyman,
Mr. Anthony Hope, Dr. Conan Doyle, Mr. A. E. W. Mason, and a regiment
of followers. The novel scientific, as in the hands of Mr. Wells, and
the novel of adventure, “beyond the bounds of known romanticism,” as in
Mr. Rider Haggard’s works, with the detective novel and the Oriental
and imperialistic romances of Mr. Kipling, prove that man will not be
satisfied with domestic realism alone. I never thought he would! Mr.
Kipling’s astonishing powers of vision, his habit of ruthlessly cutting
the superfluous, and his amazing command of technicalities, help to
account for his world-wide fame. But the greatest of these is vision,
not an acquired result of thought, but a gift of Heaven. The age has
also produced a wealth of novels with a purpose. Would that the authors
could be induced to state their purposes squarely, in undecorative
treatises! But I confess that the treatises would not be read. The
specialism of modern science has also invaded fiction, and some authors
find a county or a parish wide enough for the work of a lifetime. The
district has its dialect, and who can reprove it when spoken by the
creatures of Mr. Barrie and Mr. Crockett? This kind of fiction is the
result of our desire to learn (through novels) about the lives of
all sorts and conditions of men. _Enfin_, the whole scope of mortal
existence is now the _farrage libelli_ of the novelists who range from
prehistoric man to Bethnal Green; from Thrums to Central Africa. There
is not the same eagerness to read history, which James II. regarded as
“more instructive, and quite as amusing.” My heart is here with King
James, and I confess to gaining more entertainment from Carlyle’s
_Frederick the Great_ than from most novels.
The earlier historians, from Scott to Carlyle, Macaulay and Froude,
placed the human interest in the front rank. They conceived that
history had to do with human beings of passions, caprices, moods,
loves, and hates, dwelling in a world of interesting costumes, arms,
architecture, ideas, and beliefs. Thus Carlyle, with much research,
created his Cromwell or his Frederick, as Scott created his Queen
Mary, his Louis XI., his James VI., or his Cromwell in _Woodstock_,
who is not too remote from Carlyle’s. For these reasons Scott, Froude,
Carlyle, and Macaulay really are “amusing” as well as instructive
historians. When institutions and constitutions had to be described
they were placed in separate compartments, as in the works of Hallam
and Bishop Stubbs. Historians studied manuscripts, of course, but it
was not held that only the unprinted was the valuable, that a new
survey of known matter was absolutely valueless.
In the end of the century we have history which is not “as interesting
as a novel” (like that of Prescott, Motley, Froude, and Macaulay), but
very far from gay. Novelty of research is, quite justly, insisted upon
(though research is as old as Hemingburgh, and was much advanced by
Gibbon, Carter, Rymer, Walpole, Tytler, and so on) till, by a natural
error, every scrap won from a wilderness of charters is valued beyond
its deserts. The human interest is frowned upon; movements of forces,
political and social, are treated in preference to personal character
and adventure. Meticulous accuracy is insisted upon, till nervous
students are actually afraid to publish. Even Mommsen, greatest of
original students, is regarded as frivolous, even Curtius as “popular”
by the modern school. It is natural to man to run into these excesses
of reaction. Froude is not often accurate, Macaulay has prejudices,
even Mr. Freeman was not sound about Knights’ Fees and about a certain
palisade. Now the public does not care about Knights’ Fees or about
the Manor, much; nor even about the obscure early history of civic
institutions. In fact, even references to authorities frighten away
part of the public, whose timidity I do not applaud. The results of our
frivolity and of the portentous gravity of some modern historians is
that, since Mr. Green, scarcely any writer of history is read except
for examinations. As long as historians declare (often with perfect
truth) that their own works are not literature, but something far more
awful and solemn, namely science, history must be unpopular. But we are
only waiting for a man of genius as accurate as the most meticulous,
and as interesting as the agreeably irresponsible Froude. Of science
I am not to treat, so I am dispensed from remarks on our scientific
modern historians. It is certain that in collecting and printing and
calendaring documents the age in all countries has shown praiseworthy
industry, while Mr. Parkman in America, like our mid-century
historians, was not too scientific to be readable.
Of theology, except when recommended by the art of a Newman or
a Jowett, nothing is here to be said; though I could cheerfully
say a good deal, especially about Biblical criticism. But that is
science, though scarcely the sort of science which has been defined
as “organized common-sense.” The poetry of the late century in
England boasts the names of Rossetti, William Morris, Matthew Arnold,
and Mr. Swinburne. It is tinged, in the former with mediævalism
derived from the Italians and Chaucer; while in Mr. Swinburne every
conceivable literary influence, from the Greeks to Baudelaire, from
the Elizabethans to Victor Hugo, makes itself abundantly conspicuous.
These poets, younger than Matthew Arnold, are not much influenced by
Wordsworth, though by Shelley Mr. Swinburne was influenced. On the
other hand, Mr. Arnold was a modern, academic, heterodox Wordsworth,
and often a truly delightful poet.
He stood much aloof from the contemporary literature of his day, and
his letters prove that he was no fervent admirer even of Tennyson
or Browning. His own poetry has been to many, as to myself, full of
delightful passages, whether he wrote of the Oxford country-side, or
of Wordsworth’s hills, of “the shorn and parcelled Oxus,” or of the
moaning sea that Sophocles long ago heard as he heard it on Dover
beach. He was our greatest modern elegiac poet; a master of the Dirge.
Of the living, again, no criticism can be offered; we only note the
names, and real if very various merits, of Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr.
Watson, Mr. Davidson, Mr. Dobson, Mr. Benson, Mr. Thompson, Mr. Henley,
Mr. Gosse, Mr. Stephen Philips, Mrs. Marriott Watson, Mrs. Maynell,
Mr. Kipling, “a nest of singing birds.” It would be impertinent, and
indeed perilous, to “draw invidious distinctions,” as the undergraduate
said about the major and minor prophets: nor is it for this century to
sift the poetic sheep from the goats, who, in an age that reads little
poetry, are greatly guilty of much verse.
The unassuming and decried art of criticism remains. Essays are of no
one age; there are similar excellences in every good essayist since
Montaigne. We have no Hazlitt, Lamb, or Leigh Hunt, but we had Mr.
Stephenson and Mr. Pater, so unlike in all but conscious interest in
style, and reminiscence of the best models. Indeed, essay writing is
almost an unpractised art, as the public “has no use for it,” any more
than for the letter H on the Sandwich boards. A fairly bad novelist
can live; to an appallingly bad novelist the workhouse unfolds its
awful valves. In literary criticism Mr. Arnold stood alone in his
age, and Mr. Arnold’s literary income, it is known, surprised, when
stated, the Commissioners of Income Tax: not by its affluence. Of
living critics it would be in the highest degree dangerous to say a
word, though many words, both of praise and dispraise, might be said
of a person of reckless character. That (with obvious exceptions) most
critics are men intimately familiar with what is best, from Homer
to Mr. Stephen Philips, few students would venture to aver. That we
(for am I not the least of all critics, and not worthy to be called
a critic?) are entirely devoid of ignorance, personal bias, likes,
dislikes, prejudices, pet aversions, indolence, we are not so blindly
conceited as to maintain. We have been taught by many centuries of
creative geniuses, from Theocritus to the latest protesting popular
novelists, to know our proper place, and we take refuge in “confession
and avoidance.” The new century will not know our names when we pass
where Dennis and where Cibber are, unless Mr. Robert Buchanan writes a
new _Dunciad_.
The century, even if we are in full decadence (of which we are not
the best judges), has been glorious in literature, and holds its own
well with any in modern history. English itself has passed from the
occasionally stilted Augustan survival, through the novelties of
Macaulay, De Quincey, and Carlyle, and the early decorated of Mr.
Ruskin, into slipshod slang in one extreme, and euphuism in the other.
But the main stream keeps its course, and English may be written with
perfect purity, and with new fluency and variety, by the men for whom
the task is reserved by fate. But what does the century bequeath by way
of intellectual motive? Little but the more or less transformed forces
of the eighteenth century. There is science, but science, happily, is
beginning to be aware that she is not really omniscient. Conceivably
her foot is on the border of a new region, often surmised, never
explored, full of light on the problems of spirit and matter. Hence,
indeed, might come a new force in letters. Again, the social ideas of
1750–1800 may take practical shapes of incalculable momentousness, but
these would not for long be favorable to literature. Or, less probably,
the return on the past may assume practical shape, though this element
of the later eighteenth century may seem, as far as letters go, to be
exhausted. In brief, as I began by saying, the division of literary
periods by measures of time is a cross-division. This peculiarity the
last hundred years possess: that literature now blossoms on a far
wider field. English-speaking America had, indeed, a literature long
before the War of Independence; but it was not a literature for every
reader of to-day. Now, and for long, the States have taken their own
part in history, fiction, poetry, and all other branches of letters.
Germany came back into world literature again just at the ending of the
eighteenth century, after unregarded ages of neglect. Russia and the
Scandinavian North awoke about the same time, and daily widen their
influence, as does Belgium in the sunshine of Maeterlinck. France, of
course, has in all time been in the foremost rank; while to balance
America, Russia, and the North, Italy and Spain have scarcely held
the place which through so many centuries was their own. Such changes
in national literatures resemble the political waxings and wanings
of national fortunes. The English-speaking peoples may have their
eclipse; perhaps it is heralded by a modern comparative deficiency in
humor which, if England and America cease to laugh, will die out of a
profoundly solemn world.
In the foregoing remarks little has been said about the literature
of the century except among English-speaking peoples. Not being a
Mezzofanti, I am not personally acquainted with the literature of all
languages, and it is a vain thing to speak of books at second hand.
It was not the nineteenth but the eighteenth century that saw Germany
re-enter the field of pure literature, as distinguished from that of
scholarship and science. Since the end of the Middle Ages, with their
poets, German writers had mainly been devoted to theology and classical
criticism. Latin was the language of the learned. Many ascertainable
causes, in the middle and end of the eighteenth century, and doubtless
many causes which cannot be ascertained, awoke again the Teutonic
genius. The victories of Frederick the Great gave Germans patriotism
and confidence in their own tongue.
The philosophic and social works which preluded to the French
Revolution stirred the German mind and required popular expression.
Thus Kant wrote in his own native speech in reaction against the
sceptical philosophy of David Hume, and Kant became the father of
the long array of German metaphysicians from Hegel and Fichte to
Schopenhauer and Hartmann. Their philosophy “cannot be briefly stated,
especially in French,” as one of them said, but its general effect
has been rather to counteract materialism by making it pretty plain
that human nature is not so simple and easily to be explained as the
Scottish philosophers were apt to suppose. In England, Coleridge gave
an Anglican heart to the new German philosophy, which also influenced
Hamilton, and still affects the philosophical teaching of Oxford.
“It is nonsense, but is it _the right sort_ of nonsense?” asked the
late Professor Sidgwick (a Cambridge man) when struggling with the
examination papers of a Hegelian undergraduate.
More important as literature were the double influences of return on
the mediæval past and of inspiration by the new political and social
ideas which gave the impulse to the genius of Goethe, Schiller,
Bürger, and others. Goethe began as the child of Rousseau, but as a
child who had read Kant, and drunk deep of the romance of the Middle
Ages. Doubtless his is the greatest name of modern Germany, both as
a student of life, of nature, of history, and of thought. He was the
spiritual parent of Scott, with his _Götz von Berlichingen_, and,
with Richter, of Carlyle. Through himself and his English or Scottish
disciples, Goethe has been the most fertile source of change in the
literature of the nineteenth century. In extreme old age, curious
to say, he gave the first impulse to the study of early religion as
displayed in the obscure rites and beliefs of the Australian natives:
a theme remote enough from his effect on the poetry of Matthew Arnold.
Probably the two parts of his _Faust_ and his _Roman Lyrics_ are the
most popular, and, as literature, the most permanent parts of his work,
with _Werther_, _Wilhelm Meister_, and _Elective Affinities_, in prose.
Schiller, beginning with the boyish romanticism of _The Robbers_,
became a kind of classic in his later dramas. Lessing and Winckelmann
were the most sound and fertile influences in criticism. _The Laocoon_
remains indispensable. The patriotic lyrists resurrected the national
spirit of the Teutonic race, and Heine, Hebrew by race and half French
in character, combined the characteristics of Lucian, Burns, and
Voltaire.
Wolf, writing in Latin (and I believe that his work on Homer has never
attained a third edition, and has never been translated into English),
became the parent, for good or evil, of what is called the Higher
Criticism, Lachmann introducing the painfully conjectural tendencies
of that intellectual exercise. Its application to scriptural texts is
notorious, but not precisely as part of literature. Like other European
countries, the Germany of the close of the century is not remarkable
for resplendent genius in poetry or fiction, though novels abound. The
scientific, historical, and scholarly literature is of vast profusion.
In thoroughness and tireless patience, Germany is the teacher of the
world, while in curious contrast to her practical genius is the love
of some of her scholars for baseless conjecture. The “insularity”
with which the English are charged is a matter of reproach by French
scholars against Germany. Some sets of ideas, long familiar in America,
England, and the Latin nations, are only now beginning to reach German
classical scholars.
To write an account of the changes in French literature during the
century is impossible within moderate space. The revolutionary and
Napoleonic wars were unfavorable to the literary art, and the head
of so great a poet as André Chénier fell under the guillotine. Till
about 1825–1830 the Restoration was accompanied by literature in the
old classic style of Boileau and of the Augustan age, only enlivened
by the romantic if somewhat affected style of that great rhetorician,
Châteaubriand. The year 1830 is the sacred year of French romanticism,
drawing its ideals partly from the German romantic movement, partly
from Scott and Shakespeare, read, of course, only in translations.
Everything was now to be mediæval, Spanish, and passionate: the drama
was to be emancipated from Aristotle, also read in translations. As
far as classicism went the young adventurers had no more Greek than
Shakespeare or Scott. But they had the colossal and Titanic genius
of Hugo, exquisitely sweet, rapid, strange, and versatile in lyric:
potent, if inflated, in the drama and the novel. They had the charming
humor and exquisite taste of Théophile Gautier; the feverish passion
and mastery in verse of Alfred de Musset; the delicate, dreamy, and
wandering spirit of Gérard de Nerval; and the manly, courageous,
humorous, and unwearied vigor, in drama and in fiction, of Alexandre
Dumas.
This was, indeed, an extraordinary generation, by far the greatest
since that of Corneille, Racine, and Molière. Many others might be
named: the reserved force and incisive irony of Mérimée; the learned
and genial criticism of Sainte-Beuve; the inexhaustible talent of
George Sand, and the mighty Balzac, the maker and founder of the modern
work of introspection. Probably, of all these writers, Dumas and Balzac
have exercised most influence on later fiction in England and America.
Flaubert continued, with painful elaboration, the traditions of Balzac;
from Flaubert, and round him, grew up Daudet and M. Zola, and the
Goncourts. Poetry, after Lamartine, dwindled into the prettinesses of
the Parnasse and the eccentricities, too obviously intentional, of
Baudelaire, Verlaine, and the Symbolistes. Literary art, at the end
of the century, became too self-conscious, too fond of argument about
ideals and methods, the tattle of the studio. Great men have not thus
dissipated their energy; they have done what they could do; they have
not talked about how they did it. What English literature was borrowed
from France, at this time, is more in the nature of words than work.
Criticism has been a _chimaera bombinans in vacuo_, chattering about
realism, naturalism, symbolism, the use of documents, and so forth.
The defects, rather than the merits, of France have been imitated; a
squalid pessimism is easily affected.
The closing century has seen Russia awake, as the close of the
eighteenth century beheld the literary revival of Germany. Russian
poetry has only reached the learned among us: the novels of
Turguenieff, Dustoiefsky, and Tolstoï are read in translation, with
curiosity, antipathy, enthusiasm, and an absence of that emotion. It
is very long since Terentianus Maurus remarked that the fortunes of
a book depended on the taste of the reader. Often he is favorably
impressed, not by the actual merit of the story as a story or as a work
of literary art, but by its appeal to his private sentiments, as of
socialism, pessimism, toryism, or whatever they may be. Possibly the
vehement admirers of some Russian writers have been thus misguided.
In any case, no qualified critic thinks that his opinion of works
which he cannot read in the original language is of any value. For
this reason I need not offend or please the reader by offering any
uninstructed sentiments about the great Scandinavian dramatist, Dr.
Ibsen; or concerning the work of Signor d’Annunzio, or the plays of
M. Maeterlinck. To pronounce each of these gentlemen a Shakespeare
or Æschylus is not unusual in cultivated circles; it remains for the
new century to ratify or quash the verdict. In the mean time, have
the approving critics taken the precaution of reading Æschylus and
Shakespeare?