We have seen how great was the reverence which the 18th century paid to
poetry, and how many different kinds of poetic experiment were going on,
mostly by the imitative efforts of revivalists (Spenserians, Miltonians,
Shakespeareans, Ballad-mongers, Scandinavian, Celtic, Gothic scholars
and the like), but also in the direction of nature study and landscape
description, while the more formal type of Augustan poetry, satire and
description, in the direct succession of Pope, was by no means
neglected.
Wordsworth.
The most original vein in the 19th century was supplied by the
Wordsworth group, the first manifesto of which appeared in the _Lyrical
Ballads_ of 1798. William Wordsworth himself represents, in the first
place, a revolutionary movement against the poetic diction of
study-poets since the first acceptance of the Miltonic model by Addison.
His ideal, imperfectly carried out, was a reversion to popular language
of the utmost simplicity and directness. He added to this the idea of
the enlargement of man by Nature, after Rousseau, and went further than
this in the utterance of an essentially pantheistic desire to become
part of its loveliness, to partake in a mystical sense of the loneliness
of the mountain, the sound of falling water, the upper horizon of the
clouds and the wind. To the growing multitude of educated people who
were being pent in huge cities these ideas were far sweeter than the
formalities of the old pastoral. Wordsworth's great discovery, perhaps,
was that popular poetry need not be imitative, artificial or
condescending, but that a simple story truthfully told of the passion,
affliction or devotion of simple folk, and appealing to the primal
emotion, is worthy of the highest effort of the poetic artist, and may
achieve a poetic value far in advance of conventional descriptions of
strikingly grouped incidents picturesquely magnified or rhetorically
exaggerated. But Wordsworth's theories might have ended very much where
they began, had it not been for their impregnation by the complementary
genius of Coleridge.
Coleridge.
Coleridge at his best was inspired by the supreme poetic gifts of
passion, imagination, simplicity and mystery, combining form and colour,
sound and sense, novelty and antiquity, realism and romanticism,
scholarly ode and popular ballad. His three fragmentary poems _The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner_, _Christabel_ and _Kubla Khan_ are the three
spells and touchstones, constituting what is often regarded by the best
judges as the high-standard of modern English poetry. Their subtleties
and beauties irradiated the homelier artistic conceptions of Wordsworth,
and the effect on him was permanent. Coleridge's inspiration, on the
other hand, was irrecoverable; a physical element was due, no doubt, to
the first exaltation indirectly due to the opium habit, but the moral
influence was contributed by the Wordsworths. The steady will of the
Dalesman seems to have constrained Coleridge's imagination from aimless
wandering; his lofty and unwavering self-confidence inspired his friend
with a similar energy. Away from Wordsworth after 1798, Coleridge lost
himself in visions of work that always remained to be "transcribed," by
one who had every poetic gift--save the rudimentary will for sustained
and concentrated effort.
Lamb.
Hazlitt.
Leigh Hunt. De Quincey.
Coleridge's more delicate sensibility to the older notes of that more
musical era in English poetry which preceded the age of Dryden and Pope
was due in no small measure to the luminous yet subtle intuitions of his
friend Charles Lamb. Lamb's appreciation of the imaginative beauty
inhumed in old English literature amounted to positive genius, and the
persistence with which he brought his perception of the supreme
importance of imagination and music in poetry to bear upon some of the
finest creative minds of 1800, in talk, letters, selections and essays,
brought about a gradual revolution in the aesthetic morality of the day.
He paid little heed to the old rhetoric and the _ars poetica_ of
classical comparison. His aim was rather to discover the mystery, the
folk-seed and the old-world element, latent in so much of the finer
ancient poetry and implicit in so much of the new. The _Essays of Elia_
(1820-1825) are the binnacle of Lamb's vessel of exploration. Lamb and
his great rival, William Hazlitt, both maintained that criticism was not
so much an affair of learning, or an exercise of comparative and
expository judgment, as an act of imagination in itself. Hazlitt became
one of the master essayists, a fine critical analyst and declaimer,
denouncing all insipidity and affectation, stirring the soul with
metaphor, soaring easily and acquiring a momentum in his prose which
often approximates to the impassioned utterance of Burke. Like Lamb, he
wanted to measure his contemporaries by the Elizabethans, or still older
masters, and he was deeply impressed by _Lyrical Ballads_. The new
critics gradually found responsible auxiliaries, notably Leigh Hunt, De
Quincey and Wilson of _Blackwood's_. Leigh Hunt, not very important in
himself, was a cause of great authorship in others. He increased both
the depth and area of modern literary sensibility. The world of books
was to him an enchanted forest, in which every leaf had its own secret.
He was the most catholic of critics, but he knew what was poor--at least
in other people. As an essayist he is a feminine diminutive of Lamb,
excellent in fancy and literary illustration, but far inferior in
decisive insight or penetrative masculine wit. The Miltonic quality of
impassioned pyramidal prose is best seen in Thomas De Quincey, of all
the essayists of this age, or any age, the most diffuse, unequal and
irreducible to rule, and which yet at times trembles upon the brink of a
rhythmical sonority which seems almost to rival that of the greatest
poetry. Leigh Hunt supplies a valuable link between Lamb, the sole
external moderator of the Lake school, Byron, Shelley, and the junior
branch of imaginative Aesthetic, represented by Keats.
Keats.
John Keats (1795-1821), three years younger than Shelley, was the
greatest poetic artist of his time, and would probably have surpassed
all, but for his collapse of health at twenty-five. His vocation was as
unmistakable as that of Chatterton, with whose youthful ardour his own
had points of likeness. The two contemporary conceptions of him as a
fatuous Cockney Bunthorne or as "a tadpole of the lakes" were equally
erroneous. But Keats was in a sense the first of the virtuoso or
aesthetic school (caricatured later by the formula of "Art for Art's
sake"); artistic beauty was to him a kind of religion, his expression
was more technical, less personal than that of his contemporaries, he
was a conscious "romantic," and he travelled in the realms of gold with
less impedimenta than any of his fellows. Byron had always himself to
talk about, Wordsworth saw the universe too much through the medium of
his own self-importance, Coleridge was a metaphysician, Shelley hymned
Intellectual Beauty; Keats treats of his subject, "A Greek Urn," "A
Nightingale," the season of "Autumn," in such a way that our thought
centres not upon the poet but upon the enchantment of that which he
sings. In his three great medievalising poems, "The Pot of Basil," "The
Eve of St Agnes" and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," even more than in his
Odes, Keats is the forerunner of Tennyson, the greatest of the
word-painters. But apart from his perfection of loveliness, he has a
natural magic and a glow of humanity surpassing that of any other known
poet. His poetry, immature as it was, gave a new beauty to the language.
His loss was the greatest English Literature has sustained.
Landor.
Before Tennyson, Rossetti and Morris, Keats's best disciples in the
aesthetic school were Thomas Lovell Beddoes, George Dailey and Thomas
Hood, the failure of whose "Midsummer Fairies" and "Fair Inez" drove him
into that almost mortific vein of verbal humour which threw up here and
there a masterpiece such as "The Song of a Shirt." The master virtuoso
of English poetry in another department (the classical) during this and
the following age was Walter Savage Landor, who threw off a few
fragments of verse worthy of the Greek Anthology, but in his Dialogues
or "Imaginary Conversations" evolved a kind of violent monologizing upon
the commonplace which descends into the most dismal caverns of egotism.
Carlyle furiously questioned his competence. Mr Shaw allows his
classical amateurship and respectable strenuosity of character, but
denounces his work, with a substratum of truth, as that of a
"blathering, unreadable pedant."
Shelley.
Among those, however, who found early nutriment in Landor's Miltonic
_Gebir_ (1798) must be reckoned the most poetical of our poets. P.B.
Shelley was a spirit apart, who fits into no group, the associate of
Byron, but spiritually as remote from him as possible, hated by the
rationalists of his age, and regarded by the poets with more pity than
jealousy. He wrote only for poets, and had no public during his lifetime
among general readers, by whom, however, he is now regarded as _the
poet_ par excellence. In his conduct it must be admitted that he was in
a sense, like Coleridge, irresponsible, but on the other hand his poetic
energy was irresistible and all his work is technically of the highest
order of excellence. In ideal beauties it is supreme; its great lack is
its want of humanity; in this he is the opposite of Wordsworth who reads
human nature into everything. Shelley, on the other hand, dehumanises
things and makes them unearthly. He hangs a poem, like a cobweb or a
silver cloud, on a horn of the crescent moon, and leaves it to dangle
there in a current of ether. His quest was continuous for figures of
beauty, figures, however, more ethereal and less sensuous than those in
Keats; having obtained such an idea he passed it again and again through
the prism of his mind, in talk, letters, prefaces, poems. The deep sense
of the mystery of words and their lightest variations in the skein of
poetry, half forgotten since Milton's time, had been recovered in a
great measure by Coleridge and Wordsworth since 1798; Lamb, too, and
Hazlitt, and, perhaps, Hogg were in the secret, while Keats had its
open sesame on his lips ere he died. The union of poetic emotion with
verbal music of the greatest perfection was the aim of all, but none of
these masters made words breathe and sing with quite the same
spontaneous ease and fervour that Shelley attained in some of the lyrics
written between twenty-four and thirty, such as "The Cloud," "The
Skylark," the "Ode of the West Wind," "The Sensitive Plant," the "Indian
Serenade."
The path of the new romantic school had been thoroughly prepared during
the age of Gray, Cowper and Burns, and it won its triumphs with little
resistance and no serious convulsions. The opposition was noisy, but its
representative character has been exaggerated. In the meantime, however,
the old-fashioned school and the Popean couplet, the Johnsonian dignity
of reflection and the Goldsmithian ideal of generalized description,
were well maintained by George Crabbe (1754-1832), "though Nature's
sternest painter yet the best," a worsted-stockinged Pope and austere
delineator of village misdoing and penurious age, and Samuel Rogers
(1763-1855), the banker poet, liberal in sentiment, extreme Tory in
form, and dilettante delineator of Italy to the music of the heroic
couplet. Robert Southey, Thomas Campbell and Thomas Moore were a dozen
years younger and divided their allegiance between two schools. In the
main, however, they were still poeticisers of the orthodox old pattern,
though all wrote a few songs of exceptional merit, and Campbell
especially by defying the old anathemas.
Byron.
The great champion of the Augustan masters was himself the architect of
revolution. First the idol and then the outcast of respectable society,
Lord Byron sought relief in new cadences and new themes for his poetic
talent. He was, however, essentially a history painter or a satirist in
verse. He had none of the sensitive aesthetic taste of a Keats, none of
the spiritual ardour of a Shelley, or of the elemental beauty or
artistry of Wordsworth or Coleridge. He manages the pen (said Scott)
with the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality. The "Lake
Poets" sought to create an impression deep, calm and profound, Byron to
start a theme which should enable him to pose, travel, astonish,
bewilder and confound as lover of daring, freedom, passion and revolt.
For the subtler symphonic music--that music of the spheres to which the
ears of poets alone are attuned--Byron had an imperfect sympathy. The
delicate ear is often revolted in his poetry by the vices of impromptu
work. He steadily refused to polish, to file or to furbish--the damning,
inevitable sign of a man born to wear a golden tassel. "I am like the
tiger. If I miss the first spring I go growling back to the jungle."
Subtlety is sacrificed to freshness and vigour. The exultation, the
breadth, the sweeping magnificence of his effects are consequently most
appreciated abroad, where the ineradicable flaws of his style have no
power to annoy.
The European fame of Byron was from the first something quite unique. At
Missolonghi people ran through the streets crying "The great man is
dead--he is gone." His corpse was refused entrance at Westminster; but
the poet was taken to the inmost heart of Russia, Poland, Spain, Italy,
France, Germany, Scandinavia, and among the Slavonic nations generally.
In Italy his influence is plainly seen in Berchet, Leopardi, Giusti, and
even Carducci. In Spain the Myrtle Society was founded in Byron's
honour. Hugo in his _Orientales_ traversed Greece. Chateaubriand joined
the Greek Committee. Delavigne dedicated his verse to Byron; Lamartine
wrote another canto to _Childe Harold_; Merimee is interpenetrated by
Byronesque feeling which also animates the best work of Heine, Pushkin,
Lermontov, and Mickievicz, and even De Musset.
Criticism.
Like Scott, Byron was a man of two eras, and not too much ahead of his
time to hold the Press-Dragon in fee. His supremacy and that of his
satellites Moore and Campbell were championed by the old papers and by
the two new blatant Quarterlies, whose sails were filled not with the
light airs of the future but by the Augustan "gales" of the classical
past. The distinction of this new phalanx of old-fashioned critics who
wanted to confer literature by university degree was that they wrote as
gentlemen for gentlemen: they first gave criticism in England a
respectable shakedown. Francis Jeffrey, a man of extraordinary ability
and editor of _The Edinburgh Review_ from 1803 to 1829 (with the
mercurial Sydney Smith, the first of English conversationists, as his
aide-de-camp), exercised a powerful influence as a standardizer of the
second rate. He was one of the first of the critics to grasp firmly the
main idea of literary evolution--the importance of time, environment,
race and historical development upon the literary landscape; but he was
vigorously aristocratic in his preferences, a hater of mystery,
symbolism or allegory, an instinctive individualist of intolerant
pattern. His chief weapons against the new ideas were social superiority
and omniscience, and he used both unsparingly. The strident political
partisanship of the _Edinburgh_ raised up within six years a serious
rival in the _Quarterly_, which was edited in turn by the good-natured
pedagogue William Gifford and by Scott's extremely able son-in-law John
Gibson Lockhart, the "scorpion" of the infant _Blackwood_. With the aid
of the remnant of the old anti-Jacobins, Canning, Ellis, Barrow,
Southey, Croker, Hayward, Apperley and others, the theory of _Quarterly_
infallibility was carried to its highest point of development about
1845.
The historical and critical work of the _Quarterly_ era, as might be
expected, was appropriate to this gentlemanly censorship. The thinkers
of the day were economic or juristic--Bentham, the great codifier;
Malthus, whose theory of population gave Darwin his main impulse to
theorise; and Mackintosh, whose liberal opposition to Burke deserved a
better fate than it has ever perhaps received. The historians were
mainly of the second class--the judicial Hallam, the ornate Roscoe, the
plodding Lingard, the accomplished Milman, the curious Isaac D'Israeli,
the academic Bishop Thirlwall. Mitford and Grote may be considered in
the light of Tory and Radical historical pamphleteers, but Grote's work
has the much larger measure of permanent value. As the historian of
British India, James Mill's industry led him beyond his thesis of
Benthamism in practice. Sir William Napier's heroic picture of the
Peninsular War is strongly tinged by bias against the Tory
administration of 1808-1813; but it conserves some imperishable scenes
of war. Some of the most magnetic prose of the Regency Period was
contained in the copious and insincere but profoundly emotionalising
pamphlets of the self-taught Surrey labourer William Cobbett, in whom
Diderot's paradox of a comedian is astonishingly illustrated. Lockhart's
Lives of Burns and of Sir Walter Scott--the last perhaps the most
memorable prose monument of its epoch--appeared in 1828 and 1838, and
both formed the subjects of Thomas Carlyle in the _Edinburgh Review_,
where, under the unwelcome discipline of Jeffrey, the new prophet worked
nobly though in harness.
Scott.
Great as the triumph of the Romantic masters and the new ideas was, it
is in the ranks of the Old School after all that we have to look for the
greatest single figure in the literature of this age. Except in the
imitative vein of ballad or folk-song, the poetry of Sir Walter Scott is
never quite first-rate. It is poetry for repetition rather than for
close meditation or contemplation, and resembles a military band more
than a full orchestra. Nor will his prose bear careful analysis. It is a
good servant, no more. When we consider, however, not the intensity but
the vast extent, range and versatility of Scott's powers, we are
constrained to assign him the first place in his own age, if not that in
the next seat to Shakespeare in the whole of the English literary
Pantheon. Like Shakespeare, he made humour and a knowledge of human
nature his first instruments in depicting the past. Unlike Shakespeare,
he was a born antiquary, and he had a great (perhaps excessive) belief
in _mise en scene_, costume, patois and scenic properties generally. His
portraiture, however, is Shakespearean in its wisdom and maturity, and,
although he wrote very rapidly, it must be remembered that his mind had
been prepared by strenuous work for twenty years as a storehouse of
material in which nothing was handled until it had been carefully
mounted by the imagination, classified in the memory, and tested by
experimental use. Once he has got the imagination of the reader well
grounded to earth, there is nothing he loves better than telling a good
story. Of detail he is often careless. But he trusted to a full wallet,
and rightly, for mainly by his abundance he raised the literature of the
novel to its highest point of influence, breathing into it a new spirit,
giving it a fulness and universality of life, a romantic charm, a
dignity and elevation, and thereby a coherence, a power and predominance
which it never had before.
In Scott the various lines of 18th-century conservatism and 19th-century
romantic revival most wonderfully converge. His intense feeling for Long
Ago made him a romantic almost from his cradle. The master faculties of
history and humour made a strong conservative of him; but his Toryism
was of a very different spring from that of Coleridge or Wordsworth. It
was not a reaction from disappointment in the sequel of 1789, nor was it
the result of reasoned conviction. It was indwelling, rooted deeply in
the fibres of the soil, to which Scott's attachment was passionate, and
nourished as from a source by ancestral sentiment and "heather"
tradition. This sentiment made Scott a victorious pioneer of the
Romantic movement all over Europe. At the same time we must remember
that, with all his fondness for medievalism, he was fundamentally a
thorough 18th-century Scotsman and successor of Bailie Nicol Jarvie: a
worshipper of good sense, toleration, modern and expert governmental
ideas, who valued the past chiefly by way of picturesque relief, and was
thoroughly alive to the benefit of peaceful and orderly rule, and deeply
convinced that we are much better off as we are than we could have been
in the days of King Richard or good Queen Bess. Scott had the mind of an
enlightened 18th-century administrator and statesmen who had made a
fierce hobby of armour and old ballads. To expect him to treat of
intense passion or romantic medievalism as Charlotte Bronte or Dante
Gabriel Rossetti would have treated them is as absurd as to expect to
find the sentiments of a Mrs Browning blossoming amidst the horse-play
of _Tom Jones_ or _Harry Lorrequer_. Scott has few niceties or secrets:
he was never subtle, morbid or fantastic. His handling is ever broad,
vigorous, easy, careless, healthy and free. Yet nobly simple and
straightforward as man and writer were, there is something very complex
about his literary legacy, which has gone into all lands and created
bigoted enemies (Carlyle, Borrow) as well as unexpected friends
(Hazlitt, Newman, Jowett); and we can seldom be sure whether his
influence is reactionary or the reverse. There has always been something
semi-feudal about it. The "shirra" has a demesne in letters as broad as
a countryside, a band of mesne vassals and a host of Eildon hillsmen,
Tweedside cottiers, minor feudatories and forest retainers attached to
the "Abbotsford Hunt." Scott's humour, humanity and insistence upon the
continuity of history transformed English literature profoundly.
Transition fiction.
Scott set himself to coin a quarter of a million sterling out of the new
continent of which he felt himself the Columbus. He failed (quite
narrowly), but he made the Novel the paymaster of literature for at
least a hundred years. His immediate contemporaries and successors were
not particularly great. John Galt (1779-1839), Susan Ferrier (1782-1854)
and D.M. Moir (1798-1851) all attempted the delineation of Scottish
scenes with a good deal of shrewdness of insight and humour. The main
bridge from Scott to the great novelists of the 'forties and 'fifties
was supplied by sporting, military, naval and political novels,
represented in turn by Surtees, Smith, Hook, Maxwell, Lever, Marryat,
Cooper, Morier, Ainsworth, Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli. Surtees gave
all-important hints to _Pickwick_, Marryat developed grotesque
character-drawing, Ainsworth and Bulwer attempted new effects in
criminology and contemporary glitter. Disraeli in the 'thirties was one
of the foremost romantic wits who had yet attempted the novel. Early in
the 'forties he received the laying-on of hands from the Young England
party, and attempted to propagandize the good tidings of his mission in
_Coningsby_ and _Sybil_, novels full of _entrainement_ and promise, if
not of actual genius. Unhappily the author was enmeshed in the fatal
drolleries of the English party system, and _Lothair_ is virtually a
confession of abandoned ideals. He completes the forward party in
fiction; Jane Austen (1775-1815) stands to this as Crabbe and Rogers to
Coleridge and Shelley. She represents the fine flower of the expiring
18th century. Scott could do the trumpet notes on the organ. She fingers
the fine ivory flutes. She combines self-knowledge and artistic
reticence with a complete tact and an absolute lucidity of vision within
the area prescribed. Within the limits of a park wall in a country
parish, absolutely oblivious of Europe and the universe, her art is
among the finest and most finished that our literature has to offer. In
irony she had no rival at that period. But the trimness of her plots and
the delicacy of her miniature work have affinities in Maria Edgeworth,
Harriet Martineau and Mary Russell Mitford, three excellent writers of
pure English prose. There is a finer aroma of style in the contemporary
"novels" of Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866). These, however, are rather
tournaments of talk than novels proper, releasing a flood of satiric
portraiture upon the idealism of the day--difficult to be apprehended in
perfection save by professed students. Peacock's style had an
appreciable influence upon his son-in-law George Meredith (1828-1909).
His philosophy is for the most part Tory irritability exploding in
ridicule; but Peacock was one of the most lettered men of his age, and
his flouts and jeers smack of good reading, old wine and respectable
prejudices. In these his greatest successor was George Borrow
(1803-1881), who used three volumes of half-imaginary autobiography and
road-faring in strange lands as a sounding-board for a kind of romantic
revolt against the century of comfort, toleration, manufactures,
mechanical inventions, cheap travel and commercial expansion,
unaccompanied (as he maintains) by any commensurate growth of human
wisdom, happiness, security or dignity.
The Victorian era.
In the year of Queen Victoria's accession most of the great writers of
the early part of the century, whom we may denominate as "late
Georgian," were silent. Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb,
Sheridan, Hazlitt, Mackintosh, Crabbe and Cobbett were gone. Wordsworth,
Southey, Campbell, Moore, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, De Quincey, Miss
Edgeworth, Miss Mitford, Leigh Hunt, Brougham, Samuel Rogers were still
living, but the vital portion of their work was already done. The
principal authors who belong equally to the Georgian and Victorian eras
are Landor, Bulwer, Marryat, Hallam, Milman and Disraeli; none of whom,
with the exception of the last, approaches the first rank in either. The
significant work of Tennyson, the Brownings, Carlyle, Dickens,
Thackeray, the Brontes, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, Trollope, the
Kingsleys, Spencer, Mill, Darwin, Ruskin, Grote, Macaulay, Freeman,
Froude, Lecky, Buckle, Green, Maine, Borrow, FitzGerald, Arnold,
Rossetti, Swinburne, Meredith, Hardy, Stevenson, Morris, Newman, Pater,
Jefferies--the work of these writers may be termed conclusively
Victorian; it gives the era a stamp of its own and distinguishes it as
the most varied in intellectual riches in the whole course of our
literature. Circumstances have seldom in the world been more favourable
to a great outburst of literary energy. The nation was secure and
prosperous to an unexampled degree, conscious of the will and the power
to expand still further. The canons of taste were still aristocratic.
Books were made and unmade according to a regular standard. Literature
was the one form of art which the English understood, in which they had
always excelled since 1579, and in which their originality was supreme.
To the native genius for poetry was now added the advantage of materials
for a prose which in lucidity and versatility should surpass even that
of Goldsmith and Hazlitt. The diversity of form and content of this
great literature was commensurate with the development of human
knowledge and power which marked its age. In this and some other
respects it resembles the extraordinary contemporary development in
French literature which began under the reign of Louis Philippe. The one
signally disconcerting thing about the great Victorian writers is their
amazing prolixity. Not content with two or three long books, they write
whole literatures. A score of volumes, each as long as the Bible or
Shakespeare, barely represents the output of such authors as Carlyle,
Ruskin, Froude, Dickens, Thackeray, Newman, Spencer or Trollope. They
obtained vast quantities of new readers, for the middle class was
beginning to read with avidity; but the quality of brevity, the
knowledge when to stop, and with it the older classic conciseness and
the nobler Hellenic idea of a perfect measure--these things were as
though they had not been. Meanwhile, the old schools were broken up and
the foolscap addressed to the old masters. Singers, entertainers,
critics and historians abound. Every man may say what is in him in the
phrases that he likes best, and the sole motto that compels is "every
style is permissible except the style that is tiresome." The old models
are strangely discredited, and the only conventions which hold are those
concerning the subjects which English delicacy held to be tabooed. These
conventions were inordinately strict, and were held to include all the
unrestrained, illicit impulses of love and all the more violent
aberrations from the Christian code of faith and ethics. Infidel
speculation and the liaisons of lawless love (which had begun to form
the staple of the new French fiction--hence regarded by respectable
English critics of the time as profoundly vitiated and scandalous) had
no recognized existence and were totally ignored in literature designed
for general reading. The second or Goody-two-Shoes convention remained
strictly in force until the penultimate decade of the 19th century, and
was acquiesced in or at least submitted to by practically all the
greatest writers of the Victorian age. The great poets and novelists of
that day easily out-topped their fellows. Society had no difficulty in
responding to the summons of its literary leaders. Nor was their fame
partial, social or sectional. The great novelists of early Victorian
days were aristocratic and democratic at once. Their popularity was
universal within the limits of the language and beyond it. The greatest
of men were men of imagination rather than men of ideas, but such
sociological and moral ideas as they derived from their environment were
poured helter-skelter into their novels, which took the form of huge
pantechnicon magazines. Another distinctive feature of the Victorian
novel is the position it enabled women to attain in literature, a
position attained by them in creative work neither before nor since.
Dickens.
The novelists to a certain extent created their own method like the
great dramatists, but such rigid prejudices or conventions as they found
already in possession they respected without demur. Both Dickens and
Thackeray write as if they were almost entirely innocent of the
existence of sexual vice. As artists and thinkers they were both
formless. But the enormous self-complacency of the England of their
time, assisted alike by the part played by the nation from 1793 to 1815,
evangelicalism, free trade (which was originally a system of
super-nationalism) and later, evolution, generated in them a great
benignity and a strong determination towards a liberal and humanitarian
philosophy. Despite, however, the diffuseness of the envelope and the
limitations of horizon referred to, the unbookish and almost unlettered
genius of Charles Dickens (1812-1870), the son of a poor lower
middle-class clerk, almost entirely self-educated, has asserted for
itself the foremost place in the literary history of the period. Dickens
broke every rule, rioted in absurdity and bathed in extravagance. But
everything he wrote was received with an almost frantic joy by those who
recognized his creations as deifications of themselves, his scenery as
drawn by one of the quickest and intensest observers that ever lived,
and his drollery as an accumulated dividend from the treasury of human
laughter. Dickens's mannerisms were severe, but his geniality as a
writer broke down every obstruction, reduced Jeffrey to tears and Sydney
Smith to helpless laughter.
Thackeray.
The novel in France was soon to diverge and adopt the form of an
anecdote illustrating the traits of a very small group of persons, but
the English novel, owing mainly to the predilection of Dickens for those
Gargantuan entertainers of his youth, Fielding and Smollett, was to
remain anchored to the history. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)
was even more historical than Dickens, and most of his leading
characters are provided with a detailed genealogy. Dickens's great
works, excepting _David Copperfield_ and _Great Expectations_, had all
appeared when Thackeray made his mark in 1848 with _Vanity Fair_, and
Thackeray follows most of his predecessor's conventions, including his
conventional religion, ethics and politics, but he avoids his worse
faults of theatricality. He never forces the note or lashes himself into
fury or sentimentality; he limits himself in satire to the polite sphere
which he understands, he is a great master of style and possesses every
one of its fairy gifts except brevity. He creates characters and scenes
worthy of Dickens, but within a smaller range and without the same
abundance. He is a traveller and a cosmopolitan, while Dickens is
irredeemably Cockney. He is often content to criticize or annotate or to
preach upon some congenial theme, while Dickens would be in the flush of
humorous creation. His range, it must be remembered, is wide, in most
respects a good deal wider than his great contemporary's, for he is at
once novelist, pamphleteer, essayist, historian, critic, and the writer
of some of the most delicate and sentimental _vers d'occasion_ in the
language.
Charlotte Bronte.
George Eliot.
Kingsley. Trollope. Reade. Meredith. Hardy.
The absorption of England in itself is shown with exceptional force in
the case of Thackeray, who was by nature a cosmopolitan, yet whose work
is so absorbed with the structure of English society as to be almost
unintelligible to foreigners. The exploration of the human heart and
conscience in relation to the new problems of the time had been almost
abandoned by the novel since Richardson's time. It was for woman to
attempt to resolve these questions, and with the aid of powerful
imagination to propound very different conclusions. The conviction of
Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) was that the mutual passionate love of one
man and one woman is sacred and creates a centre of highest life, energy
and joy in the world. George Eliot (1819-1880), on the other hand,
detected a blind and cruel egoism in all such ecstasy of individual
passion. It was in the autumn of 1847 that _Jane Eyre_ shocked the
primness of the coteries by the unconcealed ardour of its love passages.
Twelve years later _Adam Bede_ astonished the world by the intensity of
its ethical light and shade. The introspective novel was now very
gradually to establish a supremacy over the historical. The romance of
the Brontes' forlorn life colours _Jane Eyre_, colours _Wuthering
Heights_ and colours _Villette_; their work is inseparable from their
story to an extent that we perhaps hardly realize. George Eliot did not
receive this adventitious aid from romance, and her work was, perhaps,
unduly burdened by ethical diatribe, scientific disquisition and moral
and philosophical asides. It is more than redeemed, however, by her
sovereign humour, by the actual truth in the portrayal of that
absolutely self-centred Midland society of the 'thirties and 'forties,
and by the moral significance which she extracts from the smaller
actions and more ordinary characters of life by means of sympathy,
imagination and a deep human compassion. Her novels are generally
admitted to have obtained twin summits in _Adam Bede_ (1859) and
_Middlemarch_ (1872). An even nicer delineator of the most delicate
shades of the curiously remote provincial society of that day was Mrs
Gaskell (1810-1865), whose _Cranford_ and _Wives and Daughters_ attain
to the perfection of easy, natural and unaffected English narrative.
Enthusiasm and a picturesque boyish ardour and partisanship are the
chief features of _Westward Ho!_ and the other vivid and stirring novels
of Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), to which a subtler gift in the
discrimination of character must be added in the case of his brother
Henry Kingsley (1830-1876). Charles, however, was probably more
accomplished as a poet than in the to him too exciting operation of
taking sides in a romance. The novels of Trollope, Reade and Wilkie
Collins are, generally speaking, a secondary product of the literary
forces which produced the great fiction of the 'fifties. The two last
were great at structure and sensation: Trollope dogs the prose of
every-day life with a certainty and a clearness that border upon
inspiration. The great novels of George Meredith range between 1859 and
1880, stories of characters deeply interesting who reveal themselves to
us by flashes and trust to our inspiration to do the rest. The wit, the
sparkle, the entrain and the horizon of these books, from _Richard
Feverel_ to the master analysis of _The Egoist_, have converted the
study of Meredith into an exact science. Thomas Hardy occupies a place
scarcely inferior to Meredith's as a stylist, a discoverer of new
elements of the plaintive and the wistful in the vanishing of past
ideals, as a depicter of the old southern rustic life of England and its
tragi-comedy, in a series of novels which take rank with the greatest.
Tennyson.
If Victorian literature had something more than a paragon in Dickens, it
had its paragon too in the poet Tennyson. The son of a Lincolnshire
parson of squirearchal descent, Alfred Tennyson consecrated himself to
the vocation of poesy with the same unalterable conviction that had
characterized Milton, Pope, Thomson, Wordsworth and Keats, and that was
yet to signalize Rossetti and Swinburne, and he became easily the
greatest virtuoso of his time in his art. To lyrics and idylls of a
luxurious and exotic picturesqueness he gave a perfection of technique
which criticism has chastened only to perfect in such miracles of
description as "The Lotus Eaters," "The Dream of Fair Women," and "Morte
d'Arthur." He received as vapour the sense of uneasiness as to the
problems of the future which pervaded his generation, and in the elegies
and lyrics of _In Memoriam_, in _The Princess_ and in _Maud_ he gave
them back to his contemporaries in a running stream, which still
sparkles and radiates amid the gloom. After the lyrical monodrama of
_Maud_ in 1855 he devoted his flawless technique of design, harmony and
rhythm to works primarily of decoration and design (_The Idylls of the
King_), and to experiments in metrical drama for which the time was not
ripe; but his main occupation was varied almost to the last by lyrical
blossoms such as "Frater Ave," "Roman Virgil," or "Crossing the Bar,"
which, like "Tears, Idle Tears" and "O that 'twere possible," embody the
aspirations of Flaubert towards a perfected art of language shaping as
no other verse probably can.
Browning.
Few, perhaps, would go now to _In Memoriam_ as to an oracle for
illumination and guidance as many of Queen Victoria's contemporaries
did, from the Queen herself downwards. And yet it will take very long
ere its fascination fades. In language most musical it rearticulates the
gospel of Sorrow and Love, and it remains still a pathetic expression of
emotions, sentiments and truths which, as long as human nature remains
the same, and as long as calamity, sorrow and death are busy in the
world, must be always repeating themselves. Its power, perhaps, we may
feel of this poem and indeed of most of Tennyson's poetry, is not quite
equal to its charm. And if we feel this strongly, we shall regard Robert
Browning as the typical poet of the Victorian era. His thought has been
compared to a galvanic battery for the use of spiritual paralytics. The
grave defect of Browning is that his ideas, however excellent, are so
seldom completely won; they are left in a twilight, or even a darkness
more Cimmerian than that to which the worst of the virtuosi dedicate
their ideas. Similarly, even in his "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics"
(1845) or his "Men and Women" (1855) he rarely depicts action, seldom
goes further than interpreting the mind of man as he approaches action.
If Dickens may be described as the eye of Victorian literature, Tennyson
the ear attuned to the subtlest melodies, Swinburne the reed to which
everything blew to music, Thackeray the velvet pulpit-cushion, Eliot the
impending brow, and Meredith the cerebral dome, then Browning might well
be described as the active brain itself eternally expounding some point
of view remote in time and place from its own. Tennyson was ostensibly
and always a poet in his life and his art, in his blue cloak and
sombrero, his mind and study alike stored with intaglios of the thought
of all ages, always sounding and remodelling his verses so that they
shall attain the maximum of sweetness and symmetry. He was a recluse.
Browning on the other hand dissembled his poethood, successfully
disguised his muse under the semblance of a stock merchant, was civil to
his fellowmen, and though nervous with bores, encountered every one he
met as if he were going to receive more than he could impart. In
Tennyson's poetry we are always discovering new beauties. In Browning's
we are finding new blemishes. Why he chose rhythm and metre for
seven-eighths of his purpose is somewhat of a mystery. His protest
against the materialistic view of life is, perhaps, a more valid one
than Tennyson's; he is at pains to show us the noble elements valuable
in spite of failure to achieve tangible success. He realizes that the
greater the man, the greater is the failure, yet protests unfailingly
against the despondent or materialist view of life. His nimble
appreciation of character and motive attracts the attentive curiosity of
highly intellectual people; but the question recurs with some
persistence as to whether poetry, after all, was the right medium for
the expression of these views.
Ruskin. Morris. Symonds. Pater.
Many of Browning's ideas and fertilizations will, perhaps, owing to the
difficulty and uncertainty which attaches to their form, penetrate the
future indirectly as the stimulant of other men's work. This is
especially the case with those remarkable writers who have for the first
time given the fine arts a considerable place in English literature,
notably John Ruskin (_Modern Painters_, 1842, _Seven Lamps_, 1849,
_Stones of Venice_, 1853), William Morris, John Addington Symonds and
Walter Pater. Browning, it is true, shared the discipleship of the first
two with Kingsley and Carlyle. But Ruskin outlived all discipleships and
transcended almost all the prose writers of his period in a style the
elements of emotional power in which still preserve their secret.
Arnold.
More a poet of doubt than either Tennyson or the college friend, A.H.
Clough, whose loss he lamented in one of the finest pastoral elegies of
all ages, Matthew Arnold takes rank with Tennyson, Browning and
Swinburne alone among the Dii Majores of Victorian poetry. He is perhaps
a disciple of Wordsworth even more than of Goethe, and he finds in
Nature, described in rarefied though at times intensely beautiful
phrase, the balm for the unrest of man's unsatisfied yearnings, the
divorce between soul and intellect, and the sense of contrast between
the barren toil of man and the magic operancy of nature. His most
delicate and intimate strains are tinged with melancholy. The infinite
desire of what might have been, the _lacrimae rerum_, inspires
"Resignation," one of the finest pieces in his volume of 1849 (_The
Strayed Reveller_). In the deeply-sighed lines of "Dover Beach" in 1867
it is associated with his sense of the decay of faith. The dreaming
garden trees, the full moon and the white evening star of the beautiful
English-coloured _Thyrsis_ evoke the same mood, and render Arnold one of
the supreme among elegiac poets. But his poetry is the most individual
in the circle and admits the popular heart never for an instant. As a
popularizer of Renan and of the view of the Bible, not as a talisman but
as a literature, and, again, as a chastener of his contemporaries by
means of the iteration of a few telling phrases about philistines,
barbarians, sweetness and light, sweet reasonableness, high seriousness,
Hebraism and Hellenism, "young lions of the _Daily Telegraph_," and "the
note of provinciality," Arnold far eclipsed his fame as a poet during
his lifetime. His crusade of banter against the bad civilization of his
own class was one of the most audaciously successful things of the kind
ever accomplished. But all his prose theorizing was excessively
superficial. In poetry he sounded a note which the prose Arnold seemed
hopelessly unable ever to fathom.
Rossetti.
It is easier to speak of the virtuoso group who derived their first
incitement to poetry from Chatterton, Keats and the early exotic ballads
of Tennyson, far though these yet were from attaining the perfection in
which they now appear after half a century of assiduous correction. The
chief of them were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his sister Christina, William
Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne. The founders of this school,
which took and acquired the name Pre-Raphaelite, were profoundly
impressed by the Dante revival and by the study of the early Florentine
masters. Rossetti himself was an accomplished translator from Dante and
from Villon. He preferred Keats to Shelley because (like himself) he had
no philosophy. The 18th century was to him as if it had never been, he
dislikes Greek lucidity and the open air, and prefers lean medieval
saints, spectral images and mystic loves. The passion of these students
was retrospective; they wanted to revive the literature of a forgotten
past, Italian, Scandinavian, French, above all, medieval. To do this is
a question of enthusiastic experiment and adventure. Rossetti leads the
way with his sonnets and ballads. Christina follows with _Goblin
Market_, though she subsequently, with a perfected technique, writes
poetry more and more confined to the religious emotions. William Morris
publishes in 1858 his _Defence of Guenevere_, followed in ten years by
_The Earthly Paradise_, a collection of metrical tales, which hang in
the sunshine like tapestries woven of golden thread, where we should
naturally expect the ordinary paperhanging of prose romance.
Swinburne.
From the verdurous gloom of the studio with its mysterious and occult
properties in which Rossetti compounded his colours, Morris went forth
shortly to chant and then to narrate Socialist songs and parables.
Algernon Charles Swinburne set forth to scandalize the critics of 1866
with the roses and lilies of vice and white death in _Poems and
Ballads_, which was greeted with howls and hisses, and reproach against
a "fleshly school of modern poetry." Scandalous verses these were,
rioting on the crests of some of these billows of song. More discerning
persons perceived the harmless impersonal unreality and mischievous
youthful extravagance of all these Cyprian outbursts, that the poems
were the outpourings of a young singer up to the chin in the Pierian
flood, and possessed by a poetic energy so urgent that it could not wait
to apply the touchstones of reality or the chastening planes of
experience. Swinburne far surpassed the promoters of this exotic school
in technical excellence, and in _Atalanta in Calydon_ and its successors
may be said to have widened the bounds of English song, to have created
a new music and liberated a new harmonic scale in his verse. Of the two
elements which, superadded to a consummate technique, compose the great
poet, intensity of imagination and intensity of passion, the latter in
Swinburne much predominated. The result was a great abundance of heat
and glow and not perhaps quite enough defining light. Hence the tendency
to be incomprehensible, so fatal in its fascination for the poets of the
last century, which would almost justify the title of the triumvirs of
twilight to three of the greatest. It is this incomprehensibility which
alienates the poet from the popular understanding and confines his
audience to poets, students and scholars. Poetry is often comparable to
a mountain range with its points and aiguilles, its peaks and crags, its
domes and its summits. But Swinburne's poetry, filled with the sound and
movement of great waters, is as incommunicable as the sea. Trackless and
almost boundless, it has no points, no definite summits. The poet never
seems to know precisely when he is going to stop. His metrical flow is
wave-like, beautiful and rather monotonous, inseparable from the general
effect. His endings seem due to an exhaustion of rhythm rather than to
an exhaustion of sense. A cessation of meaning is less perceptible than
a cessation of magnificent sound.
Newman and the Church.
Akin in some sense to the attempt made to get behind the veil and to
recapture the old charms and spells of the middle ages, to discover the
open sesame of the _Morte D'Arthur_ and the _Mabinogion_ and to reveal
the old Celtic and monastic life which once filled and dominated our
islands, was the attempt to overthrow the twin gods of the 'forties and
'fifties, state-Protestantism and the sanctity of trade. The curiously
assorted Saint Georges who fought these monsters were John Henry Newman
and Thomas Carlyle. The first cause of the movement was, of course, the
anomalous position of the Anglican Church, which had become a province
of the oligarchy officered by younger sons. It stood apart from foreign
Protestantism; its ignorance of Rome, and consequently of what it
protested against, was colossal; it was conscious of itself only as an
establishment--it had produced some very great men since the days of the
non-jurors, when it had mislaid its historical conscience, but these had
either been great scholars in their studies, such as Berkeley, Butler,
Warburton, Thomas Scott, or revivalists, evangelicals and missionaries,
such as Wilson, Wesley, Newton, Romaine, Cecil, Venn, Martyn, who were
essentially Congregationalists rather than historical Churchmen. A new
spiritual beacon was to be raised; an attempt was to be made to realize
the historical and cosmic aspects of the English Church, to examine its
connexions, its descent and its title-deeds. In this attempt Newman was
to spend the best years of his life.
The growth of liberal opinions and the denudation of the English Church
of spiritual and historical ideas, leaving "only pulpit orators at
Clapham and Islington and two-bottle orthodox" to defend it, seemed to
involve the continued existence of Anglicanism in any form in
considerable doubt. Swift had said at the commencement of the 18th
century that if an act was passed for the extirpation of the gospel,
bank stock might decline 1%; but a century later it is doubtful whether
the passing of such a bill would have left any trace, however
evanescent, upon the stability of the money market. The Anglican _via
media_ had enemies not only in the philosophical radicals, but also in
the new caste of men of science. Perhaps, as J.A. Froude suggests, these
combined enemies, _The Edinburgh Review_, Brougham, Mackintosh, the
Reform Ministry, Low Church philosophy and the London University were
not so very terrible after all. The Church was a vested interest which
had a greater stake in the country and was harder to eradicate than they
imagined. But it had nothing to give to the historian and the idealist.
They were right to fight for what their souls craved after and found in
the Church of Andrewes, Herbert, Ken and Waterland. Belief in the divine
mission of the Church lingered on in the minds of such men as Alexander
Knox or his disciple Bishop Jebb; but few were prepared to answer the
question--"What is the Church as spoken of in England? Is it the Church
of Christ?"--and the answers were various. Hooker had said it was "the
nation"; and in entirely altered circumstances, with some
qualifications, Dr Arnold said the same. It was "the Establishment"
according to the lawyers and politicians, both Whig and Tory. It was an
invisible and mystical body, said the Evangelicals. It was the aggregate
of separate congregations, said the Nonconformists. It was the
parliamentary creation of the Reformation, said the Erastians. The true
Church was the communion of the Pope; the pretended Church was a
legalized schism, said the Roman Catholics. All these ideas were
floating about, loose and vague, among people who talked much about the
Church.
One thing was persistently obvious, namely, that the nationalist church
had become opportunist in every fibre, and that it had thrown off almost
every semblance of ecclesiastical discipline. The view was circulated
that the Church owed its continued existence to the good sense of the
individuals who officered it, and to the esteem which possession and
good sense combined invariably engendered in the reigning oligarchy. But
since Christianity was true--and Newman was the one man of modern times
who seems never to have doubted this, never to have overlooked the
unmistakable threat of eternal punishment to the wicked and
unbelieving--modern England, with its march of intellect and its chatter
about progress, was advancing with a light heart to the verge of a
bottomless abyss. By a diametrically opposite chain of reasoning Newman
reached much the same conclusion as Carlyle. Newman sought a haven of
security in a rapprochement with the Catholic Church. The medieval
influences already at work in Oxford began to fan the flame which
kindled to a blaze in the ninetieth of the celebrated _Tracts for the
Times_. It proved the turning of the ways leading Keble and Pusey to
Anglican ritual and Newman to Rome. This anti-liberal campaign was
poison to the state-churchmen and Protestants, and became perhaps the
chief intellectual storm centre of the century. Charles Kingsley in 1864
sought to illustrate by recent events that veracity could not be
considered a Roman virtue.
Scientific cross-currents.
Macaulay.
After some preliminary ironic sparring Newman was stung into writing
what he deliberately called _Apologia pro vita sua_. In this, apart from
the masterly dialectic and exposition in which he had already shown
himself an adept, a volume of autobiography is made a chapter of general
history, unsurpassed in its kind since the _Confessions_ of St
Augustine, combined with a perfection of form, a precision of phrasing
and a charm of style peculiar to the genius of the author, rendering it
one of the masterpieces of English prose. But while Newman was thus
sounding a retreat, louder and more urgent voices were signalling the
advance in a totally opposite direction. The _Apologia_ fell in point of
time between _The Origin of Species_ and _Descent of Man_, in which
Charles Darwin was laying the corner stones of the new science of which
Thomas Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace were to be among the first
apostles, and almost coincided with the _First Principles_ of a
synthetic philosophy, in which Herbert Spencer was formulating a set of
probabilities wholly destructive to the acceptance of positive truth in
any one religion. The typical historian of the 'fifties, Thomas
Babington Macaulay, and the seminal thinker of the 'sixties, John Stuart
Mill, had as determinedly averted their faces from the old conception of
revealed religion. Nourished in the school of the great Whig pamphleteer
historians, George Grote and Henry Hallam, Macaulay combined gifts of
memory, enthusiastic conviction, portraiture and literary expression,
which gave to his historical writing a resonance unequalled (even by
Michelet) in modern literature. In spite of faults of taste and
fairness, Macaulay's resplendent gifts enabled him to achieve for the
period from Charles II. to the peace of Ryswick what Thucydides had done
for the Peloponnesian War. The pictures that he drew with such exultant
force are stamped ineffaceably upon the popular mind. His chief faults
are not of detail, but rather a lack of subtlety as regards
characterization and motive, a disposition to envisage history too
exclusively as a politician, and the sequence of historical events as a
kind of ordered progress towards the material ideals of universal trade
and Whig optimism as revealed in the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Carlyle.
Macaulay's tendency to disparage the past brought his whole vision of
the Cosmos into sharp collision with that of his rival appellant to the
historical conscience, Thomas Carlyle, a man whose despair of the
present easily exceeded Newman's. But Carlyle's despondency was totally
irrespective of the attitude preserved by England towards the Holy
Father, whom he seldom referred to save as "the three-hatted Papa" and
"servant of the devil." It may be in fact almost regarded as the reverse
or complement to the excess of self-complacency in Macaulay. We may
correct the excess of one by the opposite excess of the other. Macaulay
was an optimist in ecstasy with the material advance of his time in
knowledge and power; the growth of national wealth, machinery and means
of lighting and locomotion caused him to glow with satisfaction.
Carlyle, the pessimist, regards all such symptoms of mechanical
development as contemptible. Far from panegyrizing his own time, he
criticizes it without mercy. Macaulay had great faith in rules and
regulations, reform bills and parliamentary machinery. Carlyle regards
them as wiles of the devil. Frederick William of Prussia, according to
Macaulay, was the most execrable of fiends, a cross between Moloch and
Puck, his palace was hell, and Oliver Twist and Smike were petted
children compared with his son the crown prince. In the same bluff and
honest father Carlyle recognized the realized ideal of his fancy and
hugged the just man made perfect to his heart of hearts. Such men as
Bentham and Cobden, Mill and Macaulay, had in Carlyle's opinion spared
themselves no mistaken exertion to exalt the prosperity and happiness of
their own day. The time had come to react at all hazards against the
prevalent surfeit of civilization. Henceforth his literary activity was
to take two main directions. First, tracts for the times against modern
tendencies, especially against the demoralizing modern talk about
progress by means of money and machinery which emanated like a miasma
from the writings of such men as Mill, Macaulay, Brougham, Buckle and
from the Quarterlies. Secondly, a cyclopean exhibition of Caesarism,
discipline, the regimentation of workers, and the convertibility of the
Big Stick and the Bible, with a preference to the Big Stick as a
panacea. The snowball was to grow rapidly among such writers as
Kingsley, Ruskin, George Borrow, unencumbered by reasoning or deductive
processes which they despised. Carlyle himself felt that the condition
of England was one for anger rather than discussion. He detested the
rationalism and symmetry of such methodists of thought as Mill, Buckle,
Darwin, Spencer, Lecky, Ricardo and other demonstrations of the dismal
science--mere chatter he called it. The palliative philanthropy of the
day had become his aversion even more than the inroads of Rome under
cover of the Oxford movement which Froude, Borrow and Kingsley set
themselves to correct. As an historian of a formal order Carlyle's
historical portraits cannot bear a strict comparison with the published
work of Gibbon and Macaulay, or even of Maine and Froude in this period,
but as a biographer and autobiographer Carlyle's caustic insight has
enabled him to produce much which is of the very stuff of human nature.
Surrounded by philomaths and savants who wrote smoothly about the
perfectibility of man and his institutions, Carlyle almost alone refused
to distil his angry eloquence and went on railing against the passive
growth of civilization at the heart of which he declared that he had
discovered a cancer. This uncouth Titan worship and prostration before
brute force, this constant ranting about jarls and vikings trembles
often on the verge of cant and comedy, and his fiddling on the one
string of human pretension and bankruptcy became discordant almost to
the point of chaos. Instinctively destructive, he resents the
apostleship of teachers like Mill, or the pioneer discoveries of men
like Herbert Spencer and Darwin. He remains, nevertheless, a great
incalculable figure, the cross grandfather of a school of thought which
is largely unconscious of its debt and which so far as it recognizes it
takes Carlyle in a manner wholly different from that of his
contemporaries.
New schools.
History.
The deaths of Carlyle and George Eliot (and also of George Borrow) in
1881 make a starting-point for the new schools of historians, novelists,
critics and biographers, and those new nature students who claim to cure
those evil effects of civilization which Carlyle and his disciples had
discovered. History in the hands of Macaulay, Buckle and Carlyle had
been occupied mainly with the bias and tendency of change, the results
obtained by those who consulted the oracle being more often than not
diametrically opposite. With Froude still on the one hand as the
champion of Protestantism, and with E.A. Freeman and J.R. Green on the
other as nationalist historians, the school of applied history was fully
represented in the next generation, but as the records grew and
multiplied in print in accordance with the wise provisions made in 1857
by the commencement of the Rolls Series of medieval historians, and the
Calendars of State Papers, to be followed shortly by the rapidly growing
volumes of Calendars of Historical Manuscripts, historians began to
concentrate their attention more upon the process of change as their
right subject matter and to rely more and more upon documents,
statistics and other impersonal and disinterested forms of material.
Such historical writers as Lecky, Lord Acton, Creighton, Morley and
Bryce contributed to the process of transition mainly as essayists, but
the new doctrines were tested and to a certain extent put into action by
such writers as Thorold Rogers, Stubbs, Gardiner and Maitland. The
theory that History is a science, no less and no more, was propounded in
so many words by Professor Bury in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge in
1903, and this view and the corresponding divergence of history from the
traditional pathway of Belles Lettres has become steadily more dominant
in the world of historical research and historical writing since 1881.
The bulk of quite modern historical writing can certainly be justified
from no other point of view.
The novel.
The novel since 1881 has pursued a course curiously analogous to that of
historical writing. Supported as it was by masters of the old regime
such as Meredith and Hardy, and by those who then ranked even higher in
popular esteem such as Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Besant and
Rice, Blackmore, William Black and a monstrous rising regiment of lady
novelists--Mrs Lynn Linton, Rhoda Broughton, Mrs Henry Wood, Miss
Braddon, Mrs Humphry Ward, the type seemed securely anchored to the old
formulas and the old ways. In reality, however, many of these popular
workers were already moribund and the novel was being honeycombed by
French influence.
This is perceptible in Hardy, but may be traced with greater
distinctness in the best work of George Gissing, George Moore, Mark
Rutherford, and later on of H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John
Galsworthy. The old novelists had left behind them a giant's robe.
Intellectually giants, Dickens and Thackeray were equally gigantic
spendthrifts. They worked in a state of fervent heat above a glowing
furnace, into which they flung lavish masses of unshaped metal, caring
little for immediate effect or minute dexterity of stroke, but knowing
full well that the emotional energy of their temperaments was capable of
fusing the most intractable material, and that in the end they would
produce their great downright effect. Their spirits rose and fell, but
the case was desperate; copy had to be despatched at once or the current
serial would collapse. Good and bad had to make up the tale against
time, and revelling in the very exuberance and excess of their humour,
the novelists invariably triumphed. It was incumbent on the new school
of novelists to economize their work with more skill, to relieve their
composition of irrelevancies, to keep the writing in one key, and to
direct it consistently to one end--in brief, to unify the novel as a
work of art and to simplify its ordonnance.
The novel, thus lightened and sharpened, was conquering new fields. The
novel of the 'sixties remained not, perhaps, to win many new triumphs,
but a very popular instrument in the hands of those who performed
variations on the old masters, and much later in the hands of Mr William
de Morgan, showing a new force and quiet power of its own. The novel,
however, was ramifying in other directions in a way full of promise for
the future. A young Edinburgh student, Robert Louis Stevenson, had
inherited much of the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelitic virtuosos, and
combined with their passion for the romance of the historic past a
curiosity fully as strong about the secrets of romantic technique. A
coterie which he formed with W.E. Henley and his cousin R.A.M. Stevenson
studied words as a young art student studies paints, and made studies
for portraits of buccaneers with the same minute drudgery that Rossetti
had studied a wall or Morris a piece of figured tapestry. While thus
forming a new romantic school whose work when wrought by his methods
should be fit to be grafted upon the picturesque historic fiction of
Scott and Dumas, Stevenson was also naturalizing the short story of the
modern French type upon English ground. In this particular field he was
eclipsed by Rudyard Kipling, who, though less original as a man of
letters, had a technical vocabulary and descriptive power far in advance
of Stevenson's, and was able in addition to give his writing an exotic
quality derived from Oriental colouring. This regional type of writing
has since been widely imitated, and the novel has simultaneously
developed in many other ways, of which perhaps the most significant is
the psychological study as manipulated severally by Shorthouse, Mallock
and Henry James.
Criticism.
The expansion of criticism in the same thirty years was not a whit less
marked than the vast divagation of the novel. In the early 'eighties it
was still tongue-bound by the hypnotic influence of one or two copy-book
formulae--Arnold's "criticism of life" as a definition of poetry, and
Walter Pater's implied doctrine of art for art's sake. That two dicta so
manifestly absurd should have cast such an augur-like spell upon the
free expression of opinion, though it may of course, like all such
instances, be easily exaggerated, is nevertheless a curious example of
the enslavement of ideas by a confident claptrap. A few representatives
of the old schools of motived or scientific criticism, deduced from the
literatures of past time, survived the new century in Leslie Stephen,
Saintsbury, Stopford Brooke, Austin Dobson, Courthope, Sidney Colvin,
Watts-Dunton; but their agreement is certainly not greater than among
the large class of emancipated who endeavour to concentrate the
attention of others without further ado upon those branches of
literature which they find most nutritive. Among the finest appreciators
of this period have been Pattison and Jebb, Myers, Hutton, Dowden, A.C.
Bradley, William Archer, Richard Garnett, E. Gosse and Andrew Lang.
Birrell, Walkley and Max Beerbohm have followed rather in the wake of
the Stephens and Bagehot, who have criticized the sufficiency of the
titles made out by the more enthusiastic and lyrical eulogists. In
Arthur Symons, Walter Raleigh and G.K. Chesterton the new age possessed
critics of great originality and power, the work of the last two of whom
is concentrated upon the application of ideas about life at large to the
conceptions of literature. In exposing palpable nonsense as such, no one
perhaps did better service in criticism than the veteran Frederic
Harrison.
In the cognate work of memoir and essay, the way for which has been
greatly smoothed by co-operative lexicographical efforts such as the
_Dictionary of National Biography_, the _New English Dictionary_, the
_Victoria County History_ and the like, some of the most dexterous and
permeating work of the transition from the old century to the new was
done by H.D. Traill, Gosse, Lang, Mackail, E.V. Lucas, Lowes Dickinson,
Richard le Gallienne, A.C. Benson, Hilaire Belloc, while the open-air
relief work for dwellers pent in great cities, pioneered by Gilbert
White, has been expanded with all the zest and charm that a novel
pursuit can endow by such writers as Richard Jefferies, an open-air and
nature mystic of extraordinary power at his best, Selous, Seton
Thompson, W.H. Hudson.
Poetry.
The age has not been particularly well attuned to the efforts of the
newer poets since Coventry Patmore in the _Angel in the House_ achieved
embroidery, often extremely beautiful, upon the Tennysonian pattern, and
since Edward FitzGerald, the first of all letter-writing commentators on
life and letters since Lamb, gave a new cult to the decadent century in
his version of the Persian centoist Omar Khayyam. The prizes which in
Moore's day were all for verse have now been transferred to the prose
novel and the play, and the poets themselves have played into the hands
of the Philistines by disdaining popularity in a fond preference for
virtuosity and obscurity. Most kinds of the older verse, however, have
been well represented, descriptive and elegiac poetry in particular by
Robert Bridges and William Watson; the music of the waters of the
western sea and its isles by W.B. Yeats, Synge, Moira O'Neill, "Fiona
Macleod" and an increasing group of Celtic bards; the highly wrought
verse of the 17th-century lyrists by Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson,
Ernest Dowson; the simplicity of a more popular strain by W.H. Davies,
of a brilliant rhetoric by John Davidson, and of a more intimate romance
by Sturge Moore and Walter de la Mare. Light verse has never, perhaps,
been represented more effectively since Praed and Calverley and Lewis
Carroll than by Austin Dobson, Locker Lampson, W.S. Gilbert and Owen
Seaman. The names of C.M. Doughty, Alfred Noyes, Herbert Trench and
Laurence Binyon were also becoming prominent at the opening of the 20th
century. For originality in form and substance the palm rests in all
probability with A.E. Housman, whose _Shropshire Lad_ opens new avenues
and issues, and with W.E. Henley, whose town and hospital poems had a
poignant as well as an ennobling strain. The work of Henry Newbolt, Mrs.
Meynell and Stephen Phillips showed a real poetic gift. Above all these,
however, in the esteem of many reign the verses of George Meredith and
of Thomas Hardy, whose _Dynasts_ was widely regarded by the best judges
as the most remarkable literary production of the new century.
Drama.
The new printed and acted drama dates almost entirely from the late
'eighties. Tom Robertson in the 'seventies printed nothing, and his
plays were at most a timid recognition of the claims of the drama to
represent reality and truth. The enormous superiority of the French
drama as represented by Augier, Dumas _fils_ and Sardou began to dawn
slowly upon the English consciousness. Then in the 'eighties came Ibsen,
whose daring in handling actuality was only equalled by his intrepid
stage-craft. Oscar Wilde and A.W. Pinero were the first to discover how
the spirit of these new discoveries might be adapted to the English
stage. Gilbert Murray, with his fascinating and tantalizing versions
from Euripides, gave a new flexibility to the expansion that was going
on in English dramatic ideas. Bernard Shaw and his disciples,
conspicuous among them Granville Barker, gave a new seasoning of wit to
the absolute novelties of subject, treatment and application with which
they transfixed the public which had so long abandoned thought upon
entering the theatre. This new adventure enjoyed a _succes de stupeur_,
the precise range of which can hardly be estimated, and the force of
which is clearly by no means spent.
20th-century changes.
English literature in the 20th century still preserves some of the old
arrangements and some of the consecrated phrases of patronage and
aristocracy; but the circumstances of its production were profoundly
changed during the 19th century. By 1895 English literature had become a
subject of regular instruction for a special degree at most of the
universities, both in England and America. This has begun to lead to
research embodied in investigations which show that what were regarded
as facts in connexion with the earlier literature can be regarded so no
longer. It has also brought comparative and historical treatment of a
closer kind and on a larger scale to bear upon the evolution of literary
types. On the other hand it has concentrated an excessive attention
perhaps upon the grammar and prosody and etymology of literature, it has
stereotyped the admiration of lifeless and obsolete forms, and has
substituted antiquarian notes and ready-made commentary for that live
enjoyment, which is essentially individual and which tends insensibly to
evaporate from all literature as soon as the circumstance of it changes.
It is prone, moreover, to force upon the immature mind a rapt admiration
for the mirror before ever it has scanned the face of the original. A
result due rather to the general educational agencies of the time is
that, while in the middle of the 19th century one man could be found to
write competently on a given subject, in 1910 there were fifty. Books
and apparatus for reading have multiplied in proportion. The fact of a
book having been done quite well in a certain way is no longer any bar
whatever to its being done again without hesitation in the same way.
This continual pouring of ink from one bottle into another is calculated
gradually to raise the standard of all subaltern writing and compiling,
and to leave fewer and fewer books securely rooted in a universal
recognition of their intrinsic excellence, power and idiosyncrasy or
personal charm. Even then, of what we consider first-rate in the 19th
century, for instance, but a very small residuum can possibly survive.
The one characteristic that seems likely to cling and to differentiate
this voluble century is its curious reticence, of which the 20th century
has already made uncommonly short work. The new playwrights have
untaught England a shyness which came in about the time of Southey,
Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott. That the best literature has survived
hitherto is at best a pious opinion. As the area of experience grows it
is more and more difficult to circumscribe or even to describe the
supreme best, and such attempts have always been responsible for base
superstition. It is clear that some limitation of the literary
stock-in-trade will become increasingly urgent as time goes on, and the
question may well occur as to whether we are insuring the right baggage.
The enormous apparatus of literature at the present time is suitable
only to a peculiar phasis and manner of existence. Some hold to the
innate and essential aristocracy of literature; others that it is bound
to develop on the popular and communistic side, for that at present,
like machinery and other deceptive benefits, it is a luxury almost
exclusively advantageous to the rich. But to predict the direction of
change in literature is even more futile than to predict the direction
of change in human history, for of all factors of history, literature,
if one of the most permanent, is also one of the least calculable.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--_The Age of Wordsworth_ and _The Age of
Tennyson_ in Bell's "Handbooks of English Literature" are of special
value for this period. Prof. Dowden's and Prof. Saintsbury's
19th-century studies fill in interstices; and of the "Periods of
European Literature," the _Romantic Revolt_ and _Romantic Triumph_ are
pertinent, as are the literary chapters in vols. x. and xi. of the
_Cambridge Modern History_. Of more specific books George Brandes's
_Literary Currents of the Nineteenth Century_, Stedman's _Victorian
Poets_, Holman Hunt's _Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood_, R.H. Hutton's
_Contemporary Thought_ (and companion volumes), Sir Leslie Stephen's
_The Utilitarians_, Buxton Forman's _Our Living Poets_, Dawson's
_Victorian Novelists_, Thureau-Dangin's _Renaissance des idees
catholiques en Angleterre_, A. Chevrillon's _Sydney Smith et la
renaissance des idees liberales en Angleterre_, A.W. Benn's _History
of English Thought in the Nineteenth Century_, the publishing
histories of Murray, Blackwood, Macvey Napier, Lockhart, &c., J.M.
Robertson's _Modern Humanists_, and the critical miscellanies of Lord
Morley, Frederic Harrison, W. Bagehot, A. Birrell, Andrew Lang and E.
Gosse, will be found, in their several degrees, illuminating. The
chief literary lives are those of Scott by Lockhart, Carlyle by
Froude, Macaulay by Trevelyan, Dickens by Forster and Charlotte Bronte
by Mrs Gaskell. (T. Se.)