FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT TIME.
1832-1886.
The literature of the past fifty years is too close to our eyes to
enable the critic to pronounce a final judgment, or the literary
historian to get a true perspective. Many of the principal writers of
the time are still living, and many others have been dead but a few
years. This concluding chapter, therefore, will be devoted to the
consideration of the few who stand forth, incontestably, as the leaders
of literary thought, and who seem likely, under all future changes of
fashion and taste, to remain representative of their generation. As
regards _form_, the most striking fact in the history of the period
under review is the immense preponderance in its imaginative literature
of prose fiction, of the novel of real life. The novel has become to
the solitary reader of to-day what the stage play was to the audiences
of Elisabeth's reign, or the periodical essay, like the _Tatlers_ and
_Spectators_, to the clubs and breakfast-tables of Queen Anne's. And,
if its criticism of life is less concentrated and brilliant than the
drama gives, it is far {267} more searching and minute. No period has
ever left in its literary records so complete a picture of its whole
society as the period which is just closing. At any other time than
the present, the names of authors like Charlotte Bronte, Charles
Kingsley, and Charles Reade--names which are here merely mentioned in
passing--besides many others which want of space forbids us even to
mention--would be of capital importance. As it is, we must limit our
review to the three acknowledged masters of modern English fiction,
Charles Dickens (1812-1870), William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863),
and "George Eliot" (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880).
It is sometimes helpful to reduce a great writer to his lowest term, in
order to see what the prevailing bent of his genius is. This lowest
term may often be found in his early work, before experience of the
world has overlaid his original impulse with foreign accretions.
Dickens was much more than a humorist, Thackeray than a satirist, and
George Eliot than a moralist; but they had their starting-points
respectively in humor, in burlesque, and in strong ethical and
religious feeling. Dickens began with a broadly comic series of
papers, contributed to the _Old Magazine_ and the _Evening Chronicle_,
and reprinted in book form, in 1836, as _Sketches by Boz_. The success
of these suggested to a firm of publishers the preparation of a number
of similar sketches of the misadventures of cockney sportsmen, to
accompany plates by the {268} comic draughtsman, Mr. R. Seymour. This
suggestion resulted in the _Pickwick Papers_, published in monthly
installments, in 1836-1837. The series grew, under Dickens's hand,
into a continuous, though rather loosely strung narrative of the doings
of a set of characters, conceived with such exuberant and novel humor
that it took the public by storm, and raised its author at once to
fame. _Pickwick_ is by no means Dickens's best, but it is his most
characteristic, and most popular, book. At the time that he wrote
these early sketches he was a reporter for the _Morning Chronicle_.
His naturally acute powers of observation had been trained in this
pursuit to the utmost efficiency, and there always continued to be
about his descriptive writing a reportorial and newspaper air. He had
the eye for effect, the sharp fidelity to detail, the instinct for
rapidly seizing upon and exaggerating the salient point, which are
developed by the requirements of modern journalism. Dickens knew
London as no one else has ever known it, and, in particular, he knew
its hideous and grotesque recesses, with the strange developments of
human nature that abide there; slums like Tom-all-Alone's, in _Bleak
House_; the river-side haunts of Rogue Riderhood, in _Our Mutual
Friend_; as well as the old inns, like the "White Hart," and the "dusky
purlieus of the law." As a man, his favorite occupation was walking
the streets, where, as a child, he had picked up the most valuable part
of his education. His tramps about London--often after {269}
nightfall--sometimes extended to fifteen miles in a day. He knew, too,
the shifts of poverty. His father--some traits of whom are preserved
in Mr. Micawber--was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea prison,
where his wife took lodging with him, while Charles, then a boy of ten,
was employed at six shillings a week to cover blacking-pots in Warner's
blacking warehouse. The hardships and loneliness of this part of his
life are told under a thin disguise in Dickens's masterpiece, _David
Copperfield_, the most autobiographical of his novels. From these
young experiences he gained that insight into the lives of the lower
classes, and that sympathy with children and with the poor which shine
out in his pathetic sketches of Little Nell, in _The Old Curiosity
Shop_, of Paul Dombey, of Poor Jo, in _Bleak House_, of "the
Marchioness," and a hundred other figures.
In _Oliver Twist_, contributed, during 1837-1838, to _Bentley's
Miscellany_, a monthly magazine of which Dickens was editor, he
produced his first regular novel. In this story of the criminal
classes the author showed a tragic power which he had not hitherto
exhibited. Thenceforward his career was a series of dazzling
successes. It is impossible here to particularize his numerous novels,
sketches, short tales, and "Christmas Stories"--the latter a fashion
which he inaugurated, and which has produced a whole literature in
itself. In _Nicholas Nickleby_, 1839; _Master Humphrey's Clock_, 1840;
_Martin Chuzzlewit_, 1844; _Dombey and Son_, 1848; {270} _David
Copperfield_, 1850; and _Bleak House_, 1853, there is no falling off in
strength. The last named was, in some respects, and especially in the
skillful construction of the plot, his best novel. In some of his
latest books, as _Great Expectations_, 1861, and _Our Mutual Friend_,
1865, there are signs of a decline. This showed itself in an unnatural
exaggeration of characters and motives, and a painful straining after
humorous effects; faults, indeed, from which Dickens was never wholly
free. There was a histrionic side to him, which came out in his
fondness for private theatricals, in which he exhibited remarkable
talent, and in the dramatic action which he introduced into the
delightful public readings from his works that he gave before vast
audiences all over the United Kingdom, and in his two visits to
America. It is not surprising, either, to learn that upon the stage
his preference was for melodrama and farce. His own serious writing
was always dangerously close to the melodramatic, and his humor to the
farcical. There is much false art, bad taste, and even vulgarity in
Dickens. He was never quite a gentleman, and never succeeded well in
drawing gentlemen or ladies. In the region of low comedy he is easily
the most original, the most inexhaustible, the most wonderful of modern
humorists. Creations such as Mrs. Nickleby, Mr. Micawber, Sam Weller,
Sairy Gamp, take rank with Falstaff and Dogberry; while many others,
like Dick Swiveller, Stiggins, Chadband, Mrs. Jellyby, and Julia Mills
are almost {271} equally good. In the innumerable swarm of minor
characters with which he has enriched our comic literature, there is no
indistinctness. Indeed, the objection that has been made to him is
that his characters are too distinct--that he puts labels on them; that
they are often mere personifications of a single trick of speech or
manner, which becomes tedious and unnatural by repetition; thus,
Grandfather Smallweed is always settling down into his cushion, and
having to be shaken up; Mr. Jellyby is always sitting with his head
against the wall; Peggotty is always bursting her buttons off, etc.,
etc. As Dickens's humorous characters tend perpetually to run into
caricatures and grotesques, so his sentiment, from the same excess,
slops over too frequently into "gush," and into a too deliberate and
protracted attack upon the pity. A favorite humorous device in his
style is a stately and roundabout way of telling a trivial incident as
where, for example, Mr. Roker "muttered certain unpleasant invocations
concerning his own eyes, limbs, and circulating fluids;" or where the
drunken man who is singing comic songs in the Fleet received from Mr.
Smangle "a gentle intimation, through the medium of the water-jug, that
his audience were not musically disposed." This manner was original
with Dickens, though he may have taken a hint of it from the mock
heroic language of _Jonathan Wild_; but as practiced by a thousand
imitators, ever since, it has gradually become a burden.
It would not be the whole truth to say that the {272} difference
between the humor of Thackeray and Dickens is the same as between that
of Shakspere and Ben Jonson. Yet it is true that the "humors" of Ben
Jonson have an analogy with the extremer instances of Dickens's
character sketches in this respect, namely: that they are both studies
of the eccentric, the abnormal, the whimsical, rather than of the
typical and universal--studies of manners, rather than of whole
characters. And it is easily conceivable that, at no distant day, the
oddities of Captain Cuttle, Deportment Turveydrop, Mark Tapley, and
Newman Noggs will seem as far-fetched and impossible as those of
Captain Otter, Fastidious Brisk, and Sir Amorous La-Foole.
When Dickens was looking about for some one to take Seymour's place as
illustrator of Pickwick, Thackeray applied for the job, but without
success. He was then a young man of twenty-five, and still hesitating
between art and literature. He had begun to draw caricatures with his
pencil when a schoolboy at the Charter House, and to scribble them with
his pen when a student at Cambridge, editing _The Snob_, a weekly
under-graduate paper, and parodying the prize poem _Timbuctoo_ of his
contemporary at the university, Alfred Tennyson. Then he went abroad
to study art, passing a season at Weimar, where he met Goethe and
filled the albums of the young Saxon ladies with caricatures; afterward
living, in the Latin Quarter at Paris, a Bohemian existence, studying
art in a desultory way, and seeing men and cities; {273} accumulating
portfolios full of sketches, but laying up stores of material to be
used afterward to greater advantage when he should settle upon his true
medium of expression. By 1837, having lost his fortune of 500 pounds a
year in speculation and gambling, he began to contribute to _Fraser's_,
and thereafter to the _New Monthly_, _Cruikshank's Comic Almanac_,
_Punch_, and other periodicals, clever burlesques, art criticisms by
"Michael Angelo Titmarsh," _Yellow Plush Papers_, and all manner of
skits, satirical character sketches, and humorous tales, like the
_Great Hoggarty Diamond_ and the _Luck of Barry Lyndon_. Some of these
were collected in the _Paris Sketch-Book_, 1840, and the _Irish
Sketch-Book_, 1843; but Thackeray was slow in winning recognition, and
it was not until the publication of his first great novel, _Vanity
Fair_, in monthly parts, during 1846-1848, that he achieved any thing
like the general reputation which Dickens had reached at a bound.
_Vanity Fair_ described itself, on its title-page, as "a novel without
a hero." It was also a novel without a plot--in the sense in which
_Bleak House_ or _Nicholas Nickleby_ had a plot--and in that respect it
set the fashion for the latest school of realistic fiction, being a
transcript of life, without necessary beginning or end. Indeed, one of
the pleasantest things to a reader of Thackeray is the way which his
characters have of re-appearing, as old acquaintances, in his different
books; just as, in real life, people drop out of mind and then turn
{274} up again in other years and places. _Vanity Fair_ is Thackeray's
masterpiece, but it is not the best introduction to his writings.
There are no illusions in it, and, to a young reader fresh from Scott's
romances or Dickens's sympathetic extravagances, it will seem hard and
repellant. But men who, like Thackeray, have seen life and tasted its
bitterness and felt its hollowness, know how to prize it. Thackeray
does not merely expose the cant, the emptiness, the self-seeking, the
false pretenses, flunkeyism, and snobbery--the "mean admiration of mean
things"--in the great world of London society: his keen, unsparing
vision detects the base alloy in the purest natures. There are no
"heroes" in his books, no perfect characters. Even his good women,
such as Helen and Laura Pendennis, are capable of cruel injustice
toward less fortunate sisters, like little Fanny; and Amelia Sedley is
led, by blind feminine instinct, to snub and tyrannize over poor
Dobbin. The shabby miseries of life, the numbing and belittling
influences of failure and poverty upon the most generous natures, are
the tragic themes which Thackeray handles by preference. He has been
called a cynic, but the boyish playfulness of his humor and his kindly
spirit are incompatible with cynicism. Charlotte Bronte said that
Fielding was the vulture and Thackeray the eagle. The comparison would
have been truer if made between Swift and Thackeray. Swift was a
cynic; his pen was driven by hate, but Thackeray's by love, and it was
not {275} in bitterness but in sadness that the latter laid bare the
wickedness of the world. He was himself a thorough man of the world,
and he had that dislike for a display of feeling which characterizes
the modern Englishman. But behind his satiric mask he concealed the
manliest tenderness, and a reverence for every thing in human nature
that is good and true. Thackeray's other great novels are _Pendennis_,
1849; _Henry Esmond_, 1852; and _The Newcomes_, 1855--the last of which
contains his most lovable character, the pathetic and immortal figure
of Colonel Newcome, a creation worthy to stand, in its dignity and its
sublime weakness, by the side of Don Quixote. It was alleged against
Thackeray that he made all his good characters, like Major Dobbin and
Amelia Sedley and Colonel Newcome, intellectually feeble, and his
brilliant characters, like Becky Sharp and Lord Steyne and Blanche
Amory, morally bad. This is not entirely true, but the other
complaint--that his women are inferior to his men--is true in a general
way. Somewhat inferior to his other novels were _The Virginians_,
1858, and _The Adventures of Philip_, 1862. All of these were stories
of contemporary life, except _Henry Esmond_ and its sequel, _The
Virginians_, which, though not precisely historical fictions,
introduced historical figures, such as Washington and the Earl of
Peterborough. Their period of action was the 18th century, and the
dialogue was a cunning imitation of the language of that time.
Thackeray was strongly {276} attracted by the 18th century. His
literary teachers were Addison, Swift, Steele, Gay, Johnson,
Richardson, Goldsmith, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, and his special
master and model was Fielding. He projected a history of the century,
and his studies in this kind took shape in his two charming series of
lectures on _The English Humorists_ and _The Four Georges_. These he
delivered in England and in America, to which country he, like Dickens,
made two several visits.
Thackeray's genius was, perhaps, less astonishing than Dickens's, less
fertile, spontaneous, and inventive; but his art is sounder, and his
delineation of character more truthful. After one has formed a taste
for his books, Dickens's sentiment will seem overdone, and much of his
humor will have the air of buffoonery. Thackeray had the advantage in
another particular: he described the life of the upper classes, and
Dickens of the lower. It may be true that the latter offers richer
material to the novelist, in the play of elementary passions and in
strong, native developments of character. It is true, also, that
Thackeray approached "society" rather to satirize it than to set forth
its agreeableness. Yet, after all, it is "the great world" which he
describes, that world upon which the broadening and refining processes
of a high civilization have done their utmost, and which, consequently,
must possess an intellectual interest superior to any thing in the life
of London thieves, traveling showmen, and coachees. Thackeray is {277}
the equal of Swift as a satirist, of Dickens as a humorist, and of
Scott as a novelist. The one element lacking in him--and which Scott
had in a high degree---is the poetic imagination. "I have no brains
above my eyes," he said; "I describe what I see." Hence there is
wanting in his creations that final charm which Shakspere's have. For
what the eyes see is not all.
The great woman who wrote under the pen-name of George Eliot was a
humorist, too. She had a rich, deep humor of her own, and a wit that
crystallized into sayings which are not epigrams, only because their
wisdom strikes more than their smartness. But humor was not, as with
Thackeray and Dickens, her point of view. A country girl, the daughter
of a land agent and surveyor at Nuneaton, in Warwickshire, her early
letters and journals exhibit a Calvinistic gravity and moral severity.
Later, when her truth to her convictions led her to renounce the
Christian belief, she carried into Positivism the same religious
earnestness, and wrote the one English hymn of the religion of humanity:
"O, let me join the choir invisible," etc.
Her first published work was a translation of Strauss's _Leben Jesu_,
1846. In 1851 she went to London and became one of the editors of the
Radical organ, the _Westminster Review_. Here she formed a
connection--a marriage in all but the name--with George Henry Lewes,
who was, like {278} herself, a freethinker, and who published, among
other things, a _Biographical History of Philosophy_. Lewes had also
written fiction, and it was at his suggestion that his wife undertook
story writing. Her _Scenes of Clerical Life_ were contributed to
_Blackwood's Magazine_ for 1857, and published in book form in the
following year. _Adam Bede_ followed in 1859, the _Mill on the Floss_
in 1860, _Silas Marner_ in 1861, _Romola_ in 1863, _Felix Holt_ in
1866, and _Middlemarch_ in 1872. All of these, except _Romola_, are
tales of provincial, and largely of domestic, life in the midland
counties. _Romola_ is a historical novel, the scene of which is
Florence, in the 15th century, the Florence of Macchiavelli and of
Savonarola. George Eliot's method was very different from that of
Thackeray or Dickens. She did not crowd her canvas with the swarming
life of cities. Her figures are comparatively few, and they are
selected from the middle-class families of rural parishes or small
towns, amid that atmosphere of "fine old leisure," whose disappearance
she lamented. Her drama is a still life drama, intensely and
profoundly inward. Character is the stuff that she works in, and she
deals with it more subtly than Thackeray. With him the tragedy is
produced by the pressure of society and its false standards upon the
individual; with her, by the malign influence of individuals upon one
another. She watches "the stealthy convergence of human fates," the
intersection at various angles of the planes of character, the power
{279} that the lower nature has to thwart, stupefy, or corrupt the
higher, which has become entangled with it in the mesh of destiny. At
the bottom of every one of her stories, there is a problem of the
conscience or the intellect. In this respect she resembles Hawthorne,
though she is not, like him, a romancer, but a realist.
There is a melancholy philosophy in her books, most of which are tales
of failure or frustration. The _Mill on the Floss_ contains a large
element of autobiography, and its heroine, Maggie Tulliver, is,
perhaps, her idealized self. Her aspirations after a fuller and nobler
existence are condemned to struggle against the resistance of a narrow,
provincial environment, and the pressure of untoward fates. She is
tempted to seek an escape even through a desperate throwing off of
moral obligations, and is driven back to her duty only to die by a
sudden stroke of destiny. "Life is a bad business," wrote George
Eliot, in a letter to a friend, "and we must make the most of it."
_Adam Bede_ is, in construction, the most perfect of her novels, and
Silas Marner of her shorter stories. Her analytic habit gained more
and more upon her as she wrote. _Middlemarch_, in some respects her
greatest book, lacks the unity of her earlier novels, and the story
tends to become subordinate to the working out of character stories and
social problems. The philosophic speculations, which she shared with
her husband, were seemingly unfavorable to her artistic growth, a
circumstance which {280} comes apparent in her last novel, _Daniel
Deronda_, 1877. Finally in the _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_,
1879, she abandoned narrative altogether, and recurred to that type of
"character" books which we have met, as a flourishing department of
literature in the 17th century, represented by such works as Earle's
_Microcosmographie_ and Fuller's _Holy and Profane State_. The moral
of George Eliot's writings is not obtruded. She never made the
artistic mistake of writing a novel of purpose, or what the Germans
call a _tendenz-roman_; as Dickens did, for example, when he attacked
imprisonment for debt, in _Pickwick_; the poor laws, in _Oliver Twist_;
the Court of Chancery, in _Bleak House_; and the Circumlocution office,
in _Little Dorrit_.
Next to the novel, the essay has been the most overflowing literary
form used by the writers of this generation--a form, characteristic, it
may be, of an age which "lectures, not creates." It is not the essay
of Bacon, nor yet of Addison, nor of Lamb, but attempts a complete
treatment. Indeed, many longish books, like Carlyle's _Heroes and Hero
Worship_ and Ruskin's _Modern Painters_, are, in spirit, rather
literary essays than formal treatises. The most popular essayist and
historian of his time was Thomas Babington Macaulay, (1800-1859), an
active and versatile man, who won splendid success in many fields of
labor. He was prominent in public life as one of the leading orators
and writers of the Whig party. He sat many times in the House of
Commons, as member for Calne, for Leeds, and {281} for Edinburgh, and
took a distinguished part in the debates on the Reform bill of 1832.
He held office in several Whig governments, and during his four years'
service in British India, as member of the Supreme Council of Calcutta,
he did valuable work in promoting education in that province, and in
codifying the Indian penal law. After his return to England, and
especially after the publication of his _History of England from The
Accession of James II._, honors and appointments of all kinds were
showered upon him. In 1857 he was raised to the peerage as Baron
Macaulay of Rothley.
Macaulay's equipment, as a writer on historical and biographical
subjects, was, in some points, unique. His reading was prodigious, and
his memory so tenacious, that it was said, with but little
exaggeration, that he never forgot any thing that he had read. He
could repeat the whole of _Paradise Lost_ by heart, and thought it
probable that he could rewrite _Sir Charles Grandison_ from memory. In
his books, in his speeches in the House of Commons, and in private
conversation--for he was an eager and fluent talker, running on often
for hours at a stretch--he was never at a loss to fortify and
illustrate his positions by citation after citation of dates, names,
facts of all kinds, and passages quoted _verbatim_ from his
multifarious reading. The first of Macaulay's writings to attract
general notice was his article on _Milton_, printed in the August
number of the _Edinburgh Review_, for 1825. The editor, Lord Jeffrey,
in {282} acknowledging the receipt of the MS., wrote to his new
contributor, "The more I think, the less I can conceive where you
picked up that style." That celebrated style--about which so much has
since been written--was an index to the mental character of its owner.
Macaulay was of a confident, sanguine, impetuous nature. He had great
common sense, and he saw what he saw quickly and clearly, but he did
not see very far below the surface. He wrote with the conviction of an
advocate, and the easy omniscience of a man whose learning is really
nothing more than "general information," raised to a very high power,
rather than with the subtle penetration of an original or truly
philosophic intellect, like Coleridge's or De Quincey's. He always had
at hand explanations of events or of characters, which were admirably
easy and simple--too simple, indeed, for the complicated phenomena
which they professed to explain. His style was clear, animated, showy,
and even its faults were of an exciting kind. It was his habit to give
piquancy to his writing by putting things concretely. Thus, instead of
saying, in general terms--as Hume or Gibbon might have done--that the
Normans and Saxons began to mingle about 1200, he says: "The great
grandsons of those who had fought under William and the great grandsons
of those who had fought under Harold began to draw near to each other."
Macaulay was a great scene painter, who neglected delicate truths of
detail for exaggerated distemper effects. He used the {283} rhetorical
machinery of climax and hyperbole for all that it was worth, and he
"made points"--as in his essay on _Bacon_--by creating antithesis. In
his _History of England_, he inaugurated the picturesque method of
historical writing. The book was as fascinating as any novel.
Macaulay, like Scott, had the historic imagination, though his method
of turning history into romance was very different from Scott's. Among
his essays, the best are those which, like the ones on _Lord Clive_,
_Warren Hastings_, and _Frederick the Great_, deal with historical
subjects; or those which deal with literary subjects under their public
historic relations, such as the essays on _Addison_, _Bunyan_, and _The
Comic Dramatists of the Restoration_. "I have never written a page of
criticism on poetry, or the fine arts," wrote Macaulay, "which I would
not burn if I had the power." Nevertheless his own _Lays of Ancient
Rome_, 1842, are good, stirring verse of the emphatic and declamatory
kind, though their quality may be rather rhetorical than poetic.
Our critical time has not forborne to criticize itself, and perhaps the
writer who impressed himself most strongly upon his generation was the
one who railed most desperately against the "spirit of the age."
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was occupied between 1822 and 1830 chiefly
in imparting to the British public a knowledge of German literature.
He published, among other things, a _Life of Schiller_, a translation
of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, and two volumes of translations from the
German {284} romancers--Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Fouque, and
contributed to the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign Review_, articles on
Goethe, Werner, Novalis, Richter, German playwrights, the _Nibelungen
Lied_, etc. His own diction became more and more tinctured with
Germanisms. There was something Gothic in his taste, which was
attracted by the lawless, the grotesque, and the whimsical in the
writings of Jean Paul Richter. His favorite among English humorists
was Sterne, who has a share of these same qualities. He spoke
disparagingly of "the sensuous literature of the Greeks," and preferred
the Norse to the Hellenic mythology. Even in his admirable critical
essays on Burns, on Richter, on Scott, Diderot, and Voltaire,
which are free from his later mannerism--written in English, and
not in Carlylese--his sense of spirit is always more lively than
his sense of form. He finally became so impatient of art as to
maintain--half-seriously--the paradox that Shakspere would have
done better to write in prose. In three of these early essays--on
the _Signs of the Times_, 1829; on _History_, 1830; and on
_Characteristics_, 1831--are to be found the germs of all his later
writings. The first of these was an arraignment of the mechanical
spirit of the age. In every province of thought he discovered too
great a reliance upon systems, institutions, machinery, instead of upon
men. Thus, in religion, we have Bible Societies, "machines for
converting the heathen." "In defect of Raphaels and Angelos and
Mozarts, we have royal {285} academies of painting, sculpture, music."
In like manner, he complains, government is a machine. "Its duties and
faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable."
Against the "police theory," as distinguished from the "paternal"
theory of government, Carlyle protested with ever-shriller iteration.
In _Chartism_, 1839; _Past and Present_, 1843; and _Latter-day
Pamphlets_, 1850, he denounced this _laissez faire_ idea. The business
of government, he repeated, is to govern; but this view makes it its
business to refrain from governing. He fought most fiercely against
the conclusions of political economy, "the dismal science," which, he
said, affirmed that men were guided exclusively by their stomachs. He
protested, too, against the Utilitarians, followers of Bentham and
Mill, with their "greatest happiness principle," which reduced virtue
to a profit-and-loss account. Carlyle took issue with modern
liberalism; he ridiculed the self-gratulation of the time, all the talk
about progress of the species, unexampled prosperity, etc. But he was
reactionary without being conservative. He had studied the French
Revolution, and he saw the fateful, irresistible approach of democracy.
He had no faith in government "by counting noses," and he hated talking
parliaments; but neither did he put trust in an aristocracy that spent
its time in "preserving the game." What he wanted was a great
individual ruler, a real king or hero; and this doctrine he set forth
afterward most fully in _Hero Worship_, 1841, and {286} illustrated in
his lives of representative heroes, such as his _Cromwell's Letters and
Speeches_, 1845, and his great _History of Frederick the Great_,
1858-1865. Cromwell and Frederick were well enough; but as Carlyle
grew older, his admiration for mere force grew, and his latest hero was
none other than that infamous Dr. Francia, the South American dictator,
whose career of bloody and crafty crime horrified the civilized world.
The essay on _History_ was a protest against the scientific view of
history which attempts to explain away and account for the wonderful.
"Wonder," he wrote in _Sartor Resartus_, "is the basis of all worship."
He defined history as "the essence of innumerable biographies." "Mr.
Carlyle," said the Italian patriot, Mazzini, "comprehends only the
individual. The nationality of Italy is, in his eyes, the glory of
having produced Dante and Christopher Columbus." This trait comes out
in his greatest book, _The French Revolution_, 1837, which is a mighty
tragedy, enacted by a few leading characters, Mirabeau, Danton,
Napoleon. He loved to emphasize the superiority of history over
fiction as dramatic material. The third of the three essays mentioned
was a Jeremiad on the morbid self-consciousness of the age, which shows
itself in religion and philosophy, as skepticism and introspective
metaphysics; and in literature, as sentimentalism, and "view-hunting."
But Carlyle's epoch-making book was _Sartor Resartus_ (The Tailor
Retailored), published in _Fraser's {287} Magazine_ for 1833-1834, and
first reprinted in book form in America. This was a satire upon shams,
conventions, the disguises which overlie the most spiritual realities
of the soul. It purported to be the life and "clothes-philosophy" of a
certain Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, Professor der Allerlei Wissenschaft--of
things in general--in the University of Weissnichtwo. "Society," said
Carlyle, "is founded upon cloth," following the suggestions of Lear's
speech to the naked bedlam beggar: "Thou art the thing itself:
unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as
thou art;" and borrowing also, perhaps, an ironical hint from a
paragraph in Swift's _Tale of a Tub_: "A sect was established who held
the universe to be a large suit of clothes. . . . If certain ermines
or furs be placed in a certain position, we style them a judge; and so
an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a bishop." In
_Sartor Resartus_ Carlyle let himself go. It was willful, uncouth,
amorphous, titanic. There was something monstrous in the combination,
the hot heart of the Scot married to the transcendental dream of
Germany. It was not English, said the reviewers; it was not sense; it
was disfigured by obscurity and "mysticism." Nevertheless even the
thin-witted and the dry-witted had to acknowledge the powerful beauty
of many chapters and passages, rich with humor, eloquence, poetry,
deep-hearted tenderness, or passionate scorn.
Carlyle was a voracious reader, and the plunder {288} of whole
literatures is strewn over his pages. He flung about the resources of
the language with a giant's strength, and made new words at every turn.
The concreteness and the swarming fertility of his mind are evidenced
by his enormous vocabulary, computed greatly to exceed Shakspere's, or
any other single writer's in the English tongue. His style lacks the
crowning grace of simplicity and repose. It astonishes, but it also
fatigues.
Carlyle's influence has consisted more in his attitude than in any
special truth which he has preached. It has been the influence of a
moralist, of a practical, rather than a speculative, philosopher. "The
end of man," he wrote, "is an action, not a thought." He has not been
able to persuade the time that it is going wrong, but his criticisms
have been wholesomely corrective of its self-conceit. In a democratic
age he has insisted upon the undemocratic virtues of obedience,
silence, and reverence. _Ehrfurcht_--reverence--the text of his
address to the students of Edinburgh University, in 1866, is the last
word of his philosophy.
In 1830 Alfred Tennyson (1809- ----), a young graduate of Cambridge,
published a thin duodecimo of 154 pages, entitled _Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical_. The pieces in this little volume, like the _Sleeping
Beauty_, _Ode to Memory_, and _Recollections of the Arabian Nights_,
were full of color, fragrance, melody; but they had a dream-like
character, and were without definite theme, resembling an artist's
studies, or {289} exercises in music--a few touches of the brush, a few
sweet chords, but no aria. A number of them--_Claribel_, _Lilian_,
_Adeline_, _Isabel_, _Mariana_, _Madeline_--were sketches of women; not
character portraits, like Browning's _Men and Women_, but impressions
of temperament, of delicately, differentiated types of feminine beauty.
In _Mariana_, expanded from a hint of the forsaken maid, in Shakspere's
_Measure for Measure_, "Mariana at the moated grange," the poet showed
an art then peculiar, but since grown familiar, of heightening the
central feeling by landscape accessories. The level waste, the
stagnant sluices, the neglected garden, the wind in the single poplar,
re-enforce, by their monotonous sympathy, the loneliness, the hopeless
waiting and weariness of life in the one human figure of the poem. In
_Mariana_, the _Ode to Memory_, and the _Dying Swan_, it was the fens
of Cambridge and of his native Lincolnshire that furnished Tennyson's
scenery.
"Stretched wide and wild, the waste enormous marsh,
Where from the frequent bridge,
Like emblems of infinity,
The trenched waters run from sky to sky."
A second collection, published in 1833, exhibited a greater scope and
variety, but was still in his earlier manner. The studies of feminine
types were continued in _Margaret_, _Fatima_, _Eleanore_, _Mariana in
the South_, and _A Dream of Fair Women_, suggested by Chaucer's _Legend
of Good {290} Women_. In the _Lady of Shalott_, the poet first touched
the Arthurian legends. The subject is the same as that of _Elaine_, in
the _Idylls of the King_, but the treatment is shadowy, and even
allegorical. In _Oenone_ and the _Lotus Eaters_, he handled Homeric
subjects, but in a romantic fashion, which contrasts markedly with the
style of his later pieces, _Ulysses_ and _Tithonus_. These last have
the true classic severity, and are among the noblest specimens of
weighty and sonorous blank verse in modern poetry. In general,
Tennyson's art is unclassical. It is rich, ornate, composite, not
statuesque, so much as picturesque. He is a great painter, and the
critics complain that in passages calling for movement and action--a
battle, a tournament, or the like--his figures stand still as in a
tableau; and they contrast such passages unfavorably with scenes of the
same kind in Scott, and with Browning's spirited ballad, _How we
brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix_. In the _Palace of Art_,
these elaborate pictorial effects were combined with allegory; in the
_Lotus Eaters_, with that expressive treatment of landscape, noted in
_Mariana_; the lotus land, "in which it seemed always afternoon,"
reflecting and promoting the enchanted indolence of the heroes. Two of
the pieces in this 1833 volume, the _May Queen_ and the _Miller's
Daughter_, were Tennyson's first poems of the affections, and as
ballads of simple, rustic life, they anticipated his more perfect idyls
in blank verse, such as _Dora_, the _Brook_, _Edwin Morris_, and {291}
the _Gardener's Daughter_. The songs in the _Miller's Daughter_ had a
more spontaneous, lyrical movement than any thing that he had yet
published, and foretokened the lovely songs which interlude the
divisions of the _Princess_, the famous _Bugle Song_, the no-less
famous _Cradle Song_, and the rest. In 1833 Tennyson's friend, Arthur
Hallam, died, and the effect of this great sorrow upon the poet was to
deepen and strengthen the character of his genius. It turned his mind
in upon itself, and set it brooding over questions which his poetry had
so far left untouched; the meaning of life and death, the uses of
adversity, the future of the race, the immortality of the soul, and the
dealings of God with mankind.
"Thou madest Death; and, lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made."
His elegy on Hallam, _In Memoriam_, was not published till 1850. He
kept it by him all those years, adding section after section, gathering
up into it whatever reflections crystallized about its central theme.
It is his most intellectual and most individual work, a great song of
sorrow and consolation. In 1842 he published a third collection of
poems, among which were _Locksley Hall_, displaying a new strength of
passion; _Ulysses_, suggested by a passage in Dante: pieces of a
speculative cast, like the _Two Voices_ and the _Vision of Sin_; the
song _Break, Break, Break_, which preluded _In Memoriam_; and, lastly,
some additional {292} gropings toward the subject of the Arthurian
romance, such as _Sir Galahad_, _Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere_ and
_Morte d' Arthur_. The last was in blank verse, and, as afterward
incorporated in the _Passing of Arthur_, forms one of the best passages
in the _Idylls of the King_. The _Princess, a Medley_, published in
1849, represents the eclectic character of Tennyson's art; a medieval
tale with an admixture of modern sentiment, and with the very modern
problem of woman's sphere for its theme. The first four _Idylls of the
King_, 1859, with those since added, constitute, when taken together,
an epic poem on the old story of King Arthur. Tennyson went to
Malory's _Morte d' Arthur_ for his material, but the outline of the
first idyl, _Enid_, was taken from Lady Charlotte Guest's translation
of the Welsh _Mabinogion_. In the idyl of _Guinevere_ Tennyson's
genius reached its high-water mark. The interview between Arthur and
his fallen queen is marked by a moral sublimity and a tragic intensity
which move the soul as nobly as any scene in modern literature. Here,
at least, the art is pure and not "decorated;" the effect is produced
by the simplest means, and all is just, natural, and grand. _Maud_--a
love novel in verse--published in 1855, and considerably enlarged in
1856, had great sweetness and beauty, particularly in its lyrical
portions, but it was uneven in execution, imperfect in design, and
marred by lapses into mawkishness and excesses in language. Since 1860
Tennyson has added little of permanent {293} value to his work. His
dramatic experiments, like _Queen Mary_, are not, on the whole,
successful, though it would be unjust to deny dramatic power to the
poet who has written, upon one hand, _Guinevere_ and the _Passing of
Arthur_, and upon the other the homely, dialectic monologue of the
_Northern Farmer_.
When we tire of Tennyson's smooth perfection, of an art that is over
exquisite, and a beauty that is well-nigh too beautiful, and crave a
rougher touch, and a meaning that will not yield itself too readily, we
turn to the thorny pages of his great contemporary, Robert Browning
(1812- ----). Dr. Holmes says that Tennyson is white meat and Browning
is dark meat. A masculine taste, it is inferred, is shown in a
preference for the gamier flavor. Browning makes us think; his poems
are puzzles, and furnish business for "Browning Societies." There are
no Tennyson societies, because Tennyson is his own interpreter.
Intellect in a poet may display itself quite as properly in the
construction of his poem as in its content; we value a building for its
architecture, and not entirely for the amount of timber in it.
Browning's thought never wears so thin as Tennyson's sometimes does in
his latest verse, where the trick of his style goes on of itself with
nothing behind it. Tennyson, at his worst, is weak. Browning, when
not at his best, is hoarse. Hoarseness, in itself, is no sign of
strength. In Browning, however, the failure is in art, not in thought.
{294}
He chooses his subjects from abnormal character types, such as are
presented, for example, in _Caliban upon Setebos_, the _Grammarian's
Funeral_, _My Last Duchess_, and _Mr. Sludge, the Medium_. These are
all psychological studies, in which the poet gets into the inner
consciousness of a monster, a pedant, a criminal, and a quack, and
gives their point of view. They are dramatic soliloquies; but the
poet's self-identification with each of his creations, in turn, remains
incomplete. His curious, analytic observation, his way of looking at
the soul from outside, gives a doubleness to the monologues in his
_Dramatic Lyrics_, 1845, _Men and Women_, 1855, _Dramatis Personae_,
1864, and other collections of the kind. The words are the words of
Caliban or Mr. Sludge; but the voice is the voice of Robert Browning.
His first complete poem, _Paracelsus_, 1835, aimed to give the true
inwardness of the career of the famous 16th century doctor, whose name
became a synonym with charlatan. His second, _Sordello_, 1840, traced
the struggles of an Italian poet who lived before Dante, and could not
reconcile his life with his art. _Paracelsus_ was hard, but _Sordello_
was incomprehensible. Mr. Browning has denied that he is ever
perversely crabbed or obscure. Every great artist must be allowed to
say things in his own way, and obscurity has its artistic uses, as the
Gothic builders knew. But there are two kinds of obscurity in
literature. One is inseparable from the subtlety and difficulty of the
thought or the compression {295} and pregnant indirectness of the
phrase. Instances of this occur in the clear deeps of Dante,
Shakspere, and Goethe. The other comes from a vice of style, a
willfully enigmatic and unnatural way of expressing thought. Both
kinds of obscurity exist in Browning. He is a deep and subtle thinker;
but he is also a very eccentric writer, abrupt, harsh, disjointed. It
has been well said that the reader of Browning learns a new dialect.
But one need not grudge the labor that is rewarded with an intellectual
pleasure so peculiar and so stimulating. The odd, grotesque impression
made by his poetry arises, in part, from his desire to use the artistic
values of ugliness, as well as of obscurity; to avoid the shallow
prettiness that comes from blinking the disagreeable truth: not to
leave the saltness out of the sea. Whenever he emerges into clearness,
as he does in hundreds of places, he is a poet of great qualities.
There are a fire and a swing in his _Cavalier Tunes_, and in pieces
like the _Glove and the Lost Leader_; and humor in such ballads as the
_Pied Piper of Hamelin_ and the _Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister_,
which appeal to the most conservative reader. He seldom deals directly
in the pathetic, but now and then, as in _Evelyn Hope_, the _Last Ride
Together_, or the _Incident of the French Camp_, a tenderness comes
over the strong verse
"as sheathes
A film the mother eagle's eye,
When her bruised eaglet breathes."
{296} Perhaps the most astonishing example of Browning's mental vigor
is the huge composition, entitled _The Ring and the Book_, 1868, a
narrative poem in twenty-one thousand lines, in which the same story is
repeated eleven times in eleven different ways. It is the story of a
criminal trial which occurred at Rome about 1700, the trial of one
Count Guido for the murder of his young wife. First the poet tells the
tale himself; then he tells what one-half of the world says and what
the other; then he gives the deposition of the dying girl, the
testimony of witnesses, the speech made by the count in his own
defense, the arguments of counsel, etc., and, finally, the judgment of
the pope. So wonderful are Browning's resources in casuistry, and so
cunningly does he ravel the intricate motives at play in this tragedy
and lay bare the secrets of the heart, that the interest increases at
each repetition of the tale. He studied the Middle Age carefully, not
for its picturesque externals, its feudalisms, chivalries, and the
like; but because he found it a rich quarry of spiritual monstrosities,
strange outcroppings of fanaticism, superstition, and moral and mental
distortion of all shapes. It furnished him especially with a great
variety of ecclesiastical types, such as are painted in _Fra Lippo
Lippi_, _Bishop Blougram's Apology_, and _The Bishop Orders his Tomb in
St. Praxed's Church_.
Browning's dramatic instinct has always attracted him to the stage.
His tragedy, _Stratford_ (1837), {297} was written for Macready, and
put on at Covent Garden Theater, but without pronounced success. He
has written many fine dramatic poems, like _Pippa Passes_, _Colombo's
Birthday_, and _In a Balcony_; and at least two good acting plays,
_Luria_ and _A Blot in the Scutcheon_. The last named has recently
been given to the American public, with Lawrence Barrett's careful and
intelligent presentation of the leading role. The motive of the
tragedy is somewhat strained and fantastic, but it is, notwithstanding,
very effective on the stage. It gives one an unwonted thrill to listen
to a play, by a living English writer, which is really literature. One
gets a faint idea of what it must have been to assist at the first
night of _Hamlet_.
1. Dickens. Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield,
Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities.
2. Thackeray. Vanity Fair, Pendennis, Henry Esmond, The Newcomes, The
Four Georges.
3. George Eliot. Scenes of Clerical Life, Mill on the Floss, Silas
Marner, Romola, Adam Bede, Middlemarch.
4. Macaulay. Essays, Lays of Ancient Rome.
5. Carlyle. Sartor Resartus, French Revolution, Essays on History,
Signs of the Times, Characteristics, Burns, Scott, Voltaire, and Goethe.
6. The Works of Alfred Tennyson (6 vols.). London: Strahan & Co., 1872.
{298}
7. Selections from the Poetical Works of Robert Browning. (2 vols.)
London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1880.
8. E. C. Stedman's Victorian Poets.
9. Henry Morley's English Literature in the Reign of Victoria.
(Tauchnitz Series.)
{299}