THE VICTORIAN AGE
(1)
Had it not been that with two exceptions all the poets of the Romantic
Revival died early, it might be more difficult to draw a line between
their school and that of their successors than it is. As it happened,
the only poet who survived and wrote was Wordsworth, the oldest of them
all. For long before his death he did nothing that had one touch of the
fire and beauty of his earlier work. The respect he began, after a
lifetime of neglect, to receive in the years immediately before his
death, was paid not to the conservative laureate of 1848, but to the
revolutionary in art and politics of fifty years before. He had lived on
long after his work was done
"To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
That blamed the living man."
All the others, Keats, Shelley, Byron were dead before 1830, and the
problem which might have confronted us had they lived, of adult work
running counter to the tendencies and ideals of youth, does not exist
for us. Keats or Shelley might have lived as long as Carlyle, with whom
they were almost exactly contemporary; had they done so, the age of the
Romantic Revival and the Victorian age would have been united in the
lives of authors who were working in both. We should conceive that is,
the whole period as one, just as we conceive of the Renaissance in
England, from Surrey to Shirley, as one. As it is, we have accustomed
ourselves to a strongly marked line of division. A man must be on either
one side or the other; Wordsworth, though he wrote on till 1850, is on
the further side, Carlyle, though he was born in the same year as Keats,
on the hither side. Still the accident of length of days must not blind
us to the fact that the Victorian period, though in many respects its
ideals and modes of thinking differed from those of the period which
preceded it, is essentially an extension of the Romantic Revival and not
a fresh start. The coherent inspiration of romanticism disintegrated
into separate lines of development, just as in the seventeenth century
the single inspiration of the Renaissance broke into different schools.
Along these separate lines represented by such men as Browning, the
Pre-Raphaelites, Arnold, and Meredith, literature enriched and
elaborated itself into fresh forms. None the less, every author in each
of these lines of literary activity invites his readers to understand
his direct relations to the romantic movement. Rossetti touches it
through his original, Keats; Arnold through Goethe and Byron; Browning
first through Shelley and then in item after item of his varied
subject-matter.
In one direction the Victorian age achieved a salient and momentous
advance. The Romantic Revival had been interested in nature, in the
past, and in a lesser degree in art, but it had not been interested in
men and women. To Wordsworth the dalesmen of the lakes were part of the
scenery they moved in; he saw men as trees walking, and when he writes
about them as in such great poems as _Resolution and Independence_, the
_Brothers_, or _Michael_, it is as natural objects he treats them,
invested with the lonely remoteness that separates them from the
complexities and passions of life as it is lived. They are there, you
feel, to teach the same lesson as the landscape teaches in which they
are set. The passing of the old Cumberland beggar through villages and
past farmsteads, brings to those who see him the same kind of
consolation as the impulses from a vernal wood that Wordsworth
celebrated in his purely nature poetry. Compare with Wordsworth,
Browning, and note the fundamental change in the attitude of the poet
that his work reveals. _Pippa Passes_ is a poem on exactly the same
scheme as the _Old Cumberland Beggar_, but in treatment no two things
could be further apart. The intervention of Pippa is dramatic, and
though her song is in the same key as the wordless message of
Wordsworth's beggar she is a world apart from him, because she is
something not out of natural history, but out of life. The Victorian age
extended the imaginative sensibility which its predecessor had brought
to bear on nature and history, to the complexities of human life. It
searched for individuality in character, studied it with a loving
minuteness, and built up out of its discoveries amongst men and women a
body of literature which in its very mode of conception was more closely
related to life, and thus the object of greater interest and excitement
to its readers, than anything which had been written in the previous
ages. It is the direct result of this extension of romanticism that the
novel became the characteristic means of literary expression of the
time, and that Browning, the poet who more than all others represents
the essential spirit of his age, should have been as it were, a novelist
in verse. Only one other literary form, indeed, could have ministered
adequately to this awakened interest, but by some luck not easy to
understand, the drama, which might have done with greater economy and
directness the work the novel had to do, remained outside the main
stream of literary activity. To the drama at last it would seem that we
are returning, and it may be that in the future the direct
representation of the clash of human life which is still mainly in the
hands of our novelists, may come back to its own domain.
The Victorian age then added humanity to nature and art as the
subject-matter of literature. But it went further than that. For the
first time since the Renaissance, came an era which was conscious of
itself as an epoch in the history of mankind, and confident of its
mission. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries revolutionized
cosmography, and altered the face of the physical world. The nineteenth
century, by the discoveries of its men of science, and by the remarkable
and rapid succession of inventions which revolutionized the outward face
of life, made hardly less alteration in accepted ways of thinking. The
evolutionary theory, which had been in the air since Goethe, and to
which Darwin was able to give an incontrovertible basis of scientific
fact, profoundly influenced man's attitude to nature and to religion.
Physical as apart from natural science made scarcely less advance, and
instead of a world created in some fixed moment of time, on which had
been placed by some outward agency all the forms and shapes of nature
that we know, came the conception of a planet congealing out of a
nebula, and of some lower, simpler and primeval form of life multiplying
and diversifying itself through succeeding stages of development to form
both the animal and the vegetable world. This conception not only
enormously excited and stimulated thought, but it gave thinkers a
strange sense of confidence and certainty not possessed by the age
before. Everything seemed plain to them; they were heirs of all the
ages. Their doubts were as certain as their faith.
"There lives more faith in honest doubt
Believe me than in half the creeds."
said Tennyson; "honest doubt," hugged with all the certainty of a
revelation, is the creed of most of his philosophical poetry, and what
is more to the point was the creed of the masses that were beginning to
think for themselves, to whose awakening interest his work so strongly
appealed. There were no doubt, literary side-currents. Disraeli survived
to show that there were still young men who thought Byronically.
Rossetti and his school held themselves proudly aloof from the
rationalistic and scientific tendencies of the time, and found in the
Middle ages, better understood than they had been either by Coleridge or
Scott, a refuge from a time of factories and fact. The Oxford movement
ministered to the same tendencies in religion and philosophy; but it is
the scientific spirit, and all that the scientific spirit implied, its
certain doubt, its care for minuteness, and truth of observation, its
growing interest in social processes, and the conditions under which
life is lived, that is the central fact in Victorian literature.
Tennyson represents more fully than any other poet this essential spirit
of the age. If it be true, as has been often asserted, that the spirit
of an age is to be found best in the work of lesser men, his complete
identity with the thought of his time is in itself evidence of his
inferiority to his contemporary, Browning. Comparison between the two
men seem inevitable; they were made by readers when _In Memoriam_ and
_Men and Women_ came hot from the press, and they have been made ever
since. There could, of course, scarcely be two men more dissimilar,
Tennyson elaborating and decorating the obvious; Browning delving into
the esoteric and the obscure, and bringing up strange and unfamiliar
finds; Tennyson in faultless verse registering current newly accepted
ways of thought; Browning in advance thinking afresh for himself,
occupied ceaselessly in the arduous labour of creating an audience fit
to judge him. The age justified the accuracy with which Tennyson
mirrored it, by accepting him and rejecting Browning. It is this very
accuracy that almost forces us at this time to minimise and dispraise
Tennyson's work. We have passed from Victorian certainties, and so he is
apt when he writes in the mood of _Locksley Hall_ and the rest, to
appear to us a little shallow, a little empty, and a little pretentious.
His earlier poetry, before he took upon himself the burden of the age,
is his best work, and it bears strongly marked upon it the influence of
Keats. Such a poem for instance as _Oenone_ shows an extraordinarily
fine sense of language and melody, and the capacity caught from Keats of
conveying a rich and highly coloured pictorial effect. No other poet,
save Keats, has had a sense of colour so highly developed as Tennyson's.
From his boyhood he was an exceedingly close and sympathetic observer of
the outward forms of nature, and he makes a splendid use of what his
eyes had taught him in these earlier poems. Later his interest in
insects and birds and flowers outran the legitimate opportunity he
possessed of using it in poetry. It was his habit, his son tells us, to
keep notebooks of things he had observed in his garden or in his walks,
and to work them up afterwards into similes for the _Princess_ and the
_Idylls of the King_. Read in the books written by admirers, in which
they have been studied and collected (there are several of them) these
similes are pleasing enough; in the text where they stand they are apt
to have the air of impertinences, beautiful and extravagant
impertinences no doubt, but alien to their setting. In one of the
_Idylls of the King_ the fall of a drunken knight from his horse is
compared to the fall of a jutting edge of cliff and with it a lance-like
fir-tree, which Tennyson had observed near his home, and one cannot
resist the feeling that the comparison is a thought too great for the
thing it was meant to illustrate. So, too, in the _Princess_ when he
describes a handwriting,
"In such a hand as when a field of corn
Bows all its ears before the roaring East."
he is using up a sight noted in his walks and transmuted into poetry on
a trivial and frivolous occasion. You do not feel, in fact, that the
handwriting visualized spontaneously called up the comparison; you are
as good as certain that the simile existed waiting for use before the
handwriting was thought of.
The accuracy of his observation of nature, his love of birds and larvae
is matched by the carefulness with which he embodies, as soon as ever
they were made, the discoveries of natural and physical science.
Nowadays, possibly because these things have become commonplace to us,
we may find him a little school-boy-like in his pride of knowledge. He
knows that
"This world was once a fluid haze of light,
Till toward the centre set the starry tides
And eddied wild suns that wheeling cast
The planets."
just as he knows what the catkins on the willows are like, or the names
of the butterflies: but he is capable, on occasion of "dragging it in,"
as in
"The nebulous star we call the sun,
If that hypothesis of theirs be sound."
from the mere pride in his familiarity with the last new thing. His
dealings with science, that is, no more than his dealings with nature,
have that inevitableness, that spontaneous appropriateness that we feel
we have a right to ask from great poetry.
Had Edgar Allan Poe wanted an example for his theory of the
impossibility of writing, in modern times, a long poem, he might have
found it in Tennyson. His strength is in his shorter pieces; even where
as in _In Memoriam_ he has conceived and written something at once
extended and beautiful, the beauty lies rather in the separate parts;
the thing is more in the nature of a sonnet sequence than a continuous
poem. Of his other larger works, the _Princess_, a scarcely happy blend
between burlesque in the manner of the _Rape of the Lock_, and a serious
apostleship of the liberation of women, is solely redeemed by these
lyrics. Tennyson's innate conservatism hardly squared with the
liberalising tendencies he caught from the more advanced thought of his
age, in writing it. Something of the same kind is true of _Maud_, which
is a novel told in dramatically varied verse. The hero is morbid, his
social satire peevish, and a story which could have been completely
redeemed by the ending (the death of the hero), which artistic fitness
demands, is of value for us now through its three amazing songs, in
which the lyric genius of Tennyson reached its finest flower. It cannot
be denied, either, that he failed--though magnificently--in the _Idylls
of the King_. The odds were heavily against him in the choice of a
subject. Arthur is at once too legendary and too shadowy for an epic
hero, and nothing but the treatment that Milton gave to Satan (i.e. flat
substitution of the legendary person by a newly created character) could
fit him for the place. Even if Arthur had been more promising than he
is, Tennyson's sympathies were fundamentally alien from the moral and
religious atmosphere of Arthurian romance. His robust Protestantism left
no room for mysticism; he could neither appreciate nor render the
mystical fervour and exultation which is in the old history of the Holy
Grail. Nor could he comprehend the morality of a society where courage,
sympathy for the oppressed, loyalty and courtesy were the only essential
virtues, and love took the way of freedom and the heart rather than the
way of law. In his heart Tennyson's attitude to the ideals of chivalry
and the old stories in which they are embodied differed probably very
little from that of Roger Ascham, or of any other Protestant Englishman;
when he endeavoured to make an epic of them and to fasten to it an
allegory in which Arthur should typify the war of soul against sense,
what happened was only what might have been expected. The heroic
enterprise failed, and left us with a series of mid-Victorian novels in
verse in which the knights figure as heroes of the generic mid-Victorian
type.
But if he failed in his larger poems, he had a genius little short of
perfect in his handling of shorter forms. The Arthurian story which
produced only middling moralizing in the _Idylls_, gave us as well the
supremely written Homeric episode of the _Morte d'Arthur_, and the sharp
and defined beauty of _Sir Galahad_ and the _Lady of Shallott_. Tennyson
had a touch of the pre-Raphaelite faculty of minute painting in words,
and the writing of these poems is as clear and naïve as in the best
things of Rossetti. He had also what neither Rossetti nor any of his
contemporaries in verse, except Browning, had, a fine gift of
understanding humanity. The peasants of his English idylls are conceived
with as much breadth of sympathy and richness of humour, as purely and
as surely, as the peasants of Chaucer or Burns. A note of passionate
humanity is indeed in all his work. It makes vivid and intense his
scholarly handling of Greek myth; always the unchanging human aspect of
it attracts him most, in Oenone's grief, in the indomitableness of
Ulysses, the weariness and disillusionment in Tithonus. It has been the
cause of the comfort he has brought to sorrow; none of his generation
takes such a human attitude to death. Shelley could yearn for the
infinite, Browning treat it as the last and greatest adventure, Arnold
meet it clear eyed and resigned. To Wordsworth it is the mere return of
man the transient to Nature the eternal.
"No motion has she now; no force,
She neither hears nor sees,
Roiled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees."
To Tennyson it brings the fundamental human home-sickness for familiar
things.
"Ah, sad and strange as on dark summer dawns,
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square."
It is an accent which wakes an echo in a thousand hearts.
(2)
While Tennyson, in his own special way and, so to speak, in
collaboration with the spirit of the age, was carrying on the work of
Romanticism on its normal lines, Browning was finding a new style and a
new subject matter. In his youth he had begun as an imitator of Shelley,
and _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_ remain to show what the influence of the
"sun-treader" was on his poetry. But as early as his second publication,
_Bells and Pomegranates_, he had begun to speak for himself, and with
_Men and Women_, a series of poems of amazing variety and brilliance, he
placed himself unassailably in the first rank. Like Tennyson's, his
genius continued high and undimmed while life was left him. _Men and
Women_ was followed by an extraordinary narrative poem, _The Ring and
the Book_, and it by several volumes of scarcely less brilliance, the
last of which appeared on the very day of his death.
Of the two classes into which, as we saw when we were studying Burns,
creative artists can be divided, Browning belongs to that one which
makes everything new for itself, and has in consequence to educate the
readers by whom its work can alone be judged. He was an innovator in
nearly everything he did; he thought for himself; he wrote for himself,
and in his own way. And because he refused to follow ordinary modes of
writing, he was and is still widely credited with being tortured and
obscure.[7] The charge of obscurity is unfortunate because it tends to
shut off from him a large class of readers for whom he has a sane and
special and splendid message.
[Footnote 7: The deeper causes of Browning's obscurity have been
detailed in Chapter iv. of this book. It may be added for the benefit of
the reader who fights shy on the report of it, that in nine cases out of
ten, it arises simply from his colloquial method; we go to him expecting
the smoothness and completeness of Tennyson; we find in him the
irregularities, the suppressions, the quick changes of talk--the
clipped, clever talk of much idea'd people who hurry breathlessly from
one aspect to another of a subject.]
His most important innovation in form was his device of the dramatic
lyric. What interested him in life was men and women, and in them, not
their actions, but the motives which governed their actions. To lay bare
fully the working of motive in a narrative form with himself as narrator
was obviously impossible; the strict dramatic form, though he attained
some success in it, does not seem to have attracted him, probably
because in it the ultimate stress must be on the thing done rather than
the thing thought; there remained, therefore, of the ancient forms of
poetry, the lyric. The lyric had of course been used before to express
emotions imagined and not real to the poet himself; Browning was the
first to project it to express imagined emotions of men and women,
whether typical or individual, whom he himself had created. Alongside
this perversion of the lyric, he created a looser and freer form, the
dramatic monologue, in which most of his most famous poems, _Cleon,
Sludge the Medium, Bishop Blougram's Apology_, etc., are cast. In the
convention which Browning established in it, all kinds of people are
endowed with a miraculous articulation, a new gift of tongues; they
explain themselves, their motives, the springs of those motives (for in
Browning's view every thought and act of a man's life is part of an
interdependent whole), and their author's peculiar and robust philosophy
of life. Out of the dramatic monologues he devised the scheme of _The
Ring and the Book_, a narrative poem in which the episodes, and not the
plot, are the basis of the structure, and the story of a trifling and
sordid crime is set forth as it appeared to the minds of the chief
actors in succession. To these new forms he added the originality of an
extraordinary realism in style. Few poets have the power by a word, a
phrase, a flash of observation in detail to make you see the event as
Browning makes you see it.
Many books have been written on the philosophy of Browning's poetry.
Stated briefly its message is that of an optimism which depends on a
recognition of the strenuousness of life. The base of his creed, as of
Carlyle's, is the gospel of labour; he believes in the supreme moral
worth of effort. Life is a "training school" for a future existence,
and our place in it depends on the courage and strenuousness with which
we have laboured here. Evil is in the world only as an instrument in the
process of development; by conquering it we exercise our spiritual
faculties the more. Only torpor is the supreme sin, even as in _The
Statue and the Bust_ where effort would have been to a criminal end.
"The counter our lovers staked was lost
As surely as if it were lawful coin:
And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Was, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a crime, I say."
All the other main ideas of his poetry fit with perfect consistency on
to his scheme. Love, the manifestation of a man's or a woman's nature,
is the highest and most intimate relationship possible, for it is an
opportunity--the highest opportunity--for spiritual growth. It can reach
this end though an actual and earthly union is impossible.
"She has lost me, I have gained her;
Her soul's mine and thus grown perfect,
I shall pass my life's remainder.
Life will just hold out the proving
Both our powers, alone and blended:
And then come the next life quickly!
This world's use will have been ended."
It follows that the reward of effort is the promise of immortality, and
that for each man, just because his thoughts and motives taken together
count, and not one alone, there is infinite hope.
The contemporaries of Tennyson and Browning in poetry divide themselves
into three separate schools. Nearest to them in temper is the school of
Matthew Arnold and Clough; they have the same quick sensitiveness to the
intellectual tendencies of the age, but their foothold in a time of
shifting and dissolving creeds is a stoical resignation very different
from the buoyant optimism of Browning, or Tennyson's mixture of science
and doubt and faith. Very remote from them on the other hand is the
backward-gazing mediaevalism of Rossetti and his circle, who revived
(Rossetti from Italian sources, Morris from Norman) a Middle age which
neither Scott nor Coleridge had more than partially and brokenly
understood. The last school, that to which Swinburne and Meredith with
all their differences unite in belonging, gave up Christianity with
scarcely so much as a regret,
"We have said to the dream that caress'd and the dread that smote us,
Good-night and good-bye."
and turned with a new hope and exultation to the worship of our
immemorial mother the earth. In both of them, the note of enthusiasm for
political liberty which had been lost in Wordsworth after 1815, and was
too early extinguished with Shelley, was revived by the Italian
Revolution in splendour and fire.
(3)
As one gets nearer one's own time, a certain change comes insensibly
over one's literary studies. Literature comes more and more to mean
imaginative literature or writing about imaginative literature. The mass
of writing comes to be taken not as literature, but as argument or
information; we consider it purely from the point of view of its subject
matter. A comparison will make this at once clear. When a man reads
Bacon, he commonly regards himself as engaged in the study of English
literature; when he reads Darwin he is occupied in the study of natural
science. A reader of Bacon's time would have looked on him as we look on
Darwin now.
The distinction is obviously illogical, but a writer on English
literature within brief limits is forced to bow to it if he wishes his
book to avoid the dreariness of a summary, and he can plead in
extenuation the increased literary output of the later age, and the
incompleteness with which time so far has done its work in sifting the
memorable from the forgettable, the ephemeral from what is going to
last. The main body of imaginative prose literature--the novel--is
treated of in the next chapter and here no attempt will be made to deal
with any but the admittedly greatest names. Nothing can be said, for
instance, of that fluent journalist and biased historian Macaulay, nor
of the mellifluousness of Newman, nor of the vigour of Kingsley or
Maurice; nor of the writings, admirable in their literary qualities of
purity and terseness, of Darwin or Huxley; nor of the culture and
apostleship of Matthew Arnold. These authors, one and all, interpose no
barrier, so to speak, between their subject-matter and their readers;
you are not when you read them conscious of a literary intention, but of
some utilitarian one, and as an essay on English literature is by no
means a handbook to serious reading they will be no more mentioned here.
In the case of one nineteenth century writer in prose, this method of
exclusion cannot apply. Both Carlyle and Ruskin were professional men of
letters; both in the voluminous compass of their works touched on a
large variety of subjects; both wrote highly individual and peculiar
styles; and both without being either professional philosophers or
professional preachers, were as every good man of letters, whether he
denies it or not, is and must be, lay moralists and prophets. Of the two
Ruskin is plain and easily read, and he derives his message; Carlyle,
his original, is apt to be tortured and obscure. Inside the body of his
work the student of nineteenth century literature is probably in need of
some guidance; outside so far as prose is concerned he can fend for
himself.
As we saw, Carlyle was the oldest of the Victorians; he was over forty
when the Queen came to the throne. Already his years of preparation in
Scotland, town and country, were over, and he had settled in that famous
little house in Chelsea which for nearly half a century to come was to
be one of the central hearths of literary London. More than that, he had
already fully formed his mode of thought and his peculiar style. _Sartor
Resartus_ was written and published serially before the Queen came to
the throne; the _French Revolution_ came in the year of her accession at
the very time that Carlyle's lectures were making him a fashionable
sensation; most of his miscellaneous essays had already appeared in the
reviews. But with the strict Victorian era, as if to justify the usually
arbitrary division of literary history by dynastic periods, there came a
new spirit into his work. For the first time he applied his peculiar
system of ideas to contemporary politics. _Chartism_ appeared in 1839;
_Past and Present_, which does the same thing as _Chartism_ in an
artistic form, three years later. They were followed by one other
book--_Latter Day Pamphlets_--addressed particularly to contemporary
conditions, and by two remarkable and voluminous historical works. Then
came the death of his wife, and for the last fifteen years of his life
silence, broken only briefly and at rare intervals.
The reader who comes to Carlyle with preconceived notions based on what
he has heard of the subject-matter of his books is certain to be
surprised by what he finds. There are histories in the canon of his
works and pamphlets on contemporary problems, but they are composed on a
plan that no other historian and no other social reformer would own. A
reader will find in them no argument, next to no reasoning, and little
practical judgment. Carlyle was not a great "thinker" in the strictest
sense of that term. He was under the control, not of his reason, but of
his emotions; deep feeling, a volcanic intensity of temperament flaming
into the light and heat of prophecy, invective, derision, or a simple
splendour of eloquence, is the characteristic of his work. Against
cold-blooded argument his passionate nature rose in fierce rebellion;
he had no patience with the formalist or the doctrinaire. Nor had he the
faculty of analysis; his historical works are a series of pictures or
tableaux, splendidly and vividly conceived, and with enormous colour and
a fine illusion of reality, but one-sided as regards the truth. In his
essays on hero-worship he contents himself with a noisy reiteration of
the general predicate of heroism; there is very little except their
names and the titles to differentiate one sort of hero from another. His
picture of contemporary conditions is not so much a reasoned indictment
as a wild and fantastic orgy of epithets: "dark simmering pit of
Tophet," "bottomless universal hypocrisies," and all the rest. In it all
he left no practical scheme. His works are fundamentally not about
politics or history or literature, but about himself. They are the
exposition of a splendid egotism, fiercely enthusiastic about one or two
deeply held convictions; their strength does not lie in their matter of
fact.
This is, perhaps, a condemnation of him in the minds of those people who
ask of a social reformer an actuarially accurate scheme for the
abolition of poverty, or from a prophet a correct forecast of the result
of the next general election. Carlyle has little help for these and no
message save the disconcerting one of their own futility. His message is
at once larger and simpler, for though his form was prose, his soul was
a poet's soul, and what he has to say is a poet's word. In a way, it is
partly Wordsworth's own. The chief end of life, his message is, is the
performance of duty, chiefly the duty of work. "Do thy little stroke of
work; this is Nature's voice, and the sum of all the commandments, to
each man." All true work is religion, all true work is worship; to
labour is to pray. And after work, obedience the best discipline, so he
says in _Past and Present_, for governing, and "our universal duty and
destiny; wherein whoso will not bend must break." Carlyle asked of every
man, action and obedience and to bow to duty; he also required of him
sincerity and veracity, the duty of being a real and not a sham, a
strenuous warfare against cant. The historical facts with which he had
to deal he grouped under these embracing categories, and in the _French
Revolution_, which is as much a treasure-house of his philosophy as a
history, there is hardly a page on which they do not appear.
"Quack-ridden," he says, "in that one word lies all misery whatsoever."
These bare elemental precepts he clothes in a garment of amazing and
bizarre richness. There is nothing else in English faintly resembling
the astonishing eccentricity and individuality of his style. Gifted with
an extraordinarily excitable and vivid imagination; seeing things with
sudden and tremendous vividness, as in a searchlight or a lightning
flash, he contrived to convey to his readers his impressions full
charged with the original emotion that produced them, and thus with the
highest poetic effect. There is nothing in all descriptive writing to
match the vividness of some of the scenes in the _French Revolution_ or
in the narrative part of _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_, or more
than perhaps in any of his books, because in it he was setting down
deep-seated impressions of his boyhood rather than those got from
brooding over documents, in _Sartor Resartus_. Alongside this unmatched
pictorial vividness and a quite amazing richness and rhythm of language,
more surprising and original than anything out of Shakespeare, there are
of course, striking defects--a wearisome reiteration of emphasis, a
clumsiness of construction, a saddening fondness for solecisms and
hybrid inventions of his own. The reader who is interested in these (and
every one who reads him is forced to become so) will find them
faithfully dealt with in John Sterling's remarkable letter (quoted in
Carlyle's _Life of Sterling_) on _Sartor Resartus_. But gross as they
are, and frequently as they provide matter for serious offence, these
eccentricities of language link themselves up in a strange indissoluble
way with Carlyle's individuality and his power as an artist. They are
not to be imitated, but he would be much less than he is without them,
and they act by their very strength and pungency as a preservative of
his work. That of all the political pamphlets which the new era of
reform occasioned, his, which were the least in sympathy with it and are
the furthest off the main stream of our political thinking now, alone
continue to be read, must be laid down not only to the prophetic fervour
and fire of their inspiration but to the dark and violent magic of their
style.