f I / 4.' ' EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE. STUDIES IN EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE. BY FREDERIC HARRISON. EDWARD ARNOLD. LONDON: NEW YORK: 37, Bedford Street. 70, Fifth Avenue. Copyright, 1S95, By Edward Arnold. SInibcrsitg Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. NOTE. The following essays appeared in the "Forum" of New York, and simultaneously in London, during the years 1894-95. They have been carefully revised and partly re-written, after due consideration of various suggestions and criticisms both in England and in America. The aim of the writer was to attempt a mature estimate of the permanent influ- ence and artistic achievement of some of the prin- cipal prose writers in the earlier half of the reign of our Queen. The work of living authors has not been touched upon, nor any book of poetry, phi- losophy, or science. CONTENTS. Page I. Characteristics of Victorian Liteiuture . 9 — II. Thomas Carlyle 43 III. Lord Macaulay 64 IV. Benjamin Disraeli 88 V. William Makepeace Thackeray . . . . 107 VI. Charles Dickens 128 VII. Charlotte Bronte 145 VIII. Charles Kingsley 163 IX. Anthony Trollope 183 — X. George Eliot 205 •--S^f---^ I CHARACTERISTICS OF VICTORIAN LITERATURE That which in England is conveniently described as the Victorian Age of literature has a character of its own, at once brilliant, diverse, and complex. It is an age peculiarly difficult to label in a phrase ; but its copious and versatile gifts will make it memorable in the history of modern civilisation. The Victorian Age, it is true, has no Shakespeare or Milton, no Bacon or Hume, no Fielding or Scott, — no supreme master in poetry, philosophy, or romance, whose work is incorporated with the thought of the world, who is destined to form epochs and to endure for centuries. Its genius is more scientific than literary, more historical than dramatic, greater in discovery than in abstract thought. In lyric poetry and in romance our age has names second only to the greatest ; its researches into nature and history are at least equal to those of any previous epoch ; and if it has not many great phi- losophers, it has developed the latest, most arduous, most important of all the sciences. This is the age of Sociology ; its central achievement has been the revelation of social laws. This social aspect of lO EARLY VICTORIAl\r LITERATURE i lluniq;lit colours the poetry, the romance, the litera- ture, the art, and the philosophy of the Victorian A<;e. Literature has been the trainer thereby in originality and in force. It has been the loser in symmetry, in dignity, in grace. The Victorian Age is a convenient term in English literature to describe the period from 1837 to 1895: not that we assign any sacramental efficacy to a reign, or assume that the Queen has given any spe- cial impulse to the writers of her time. Neither reigns, nor years, nor centuries, nor any arbitrary measure of time in the gradual evolution of thought can be exactly applied, or have any formative in- fluence. A period of so many years, having some well-known name by which it can be labelled, is a mere artifice of classification. And of course an Englishman will not venture to include in his survey the American writers, or to bring them within his national era. The date, 1837, '^ an arbitrary point, and a purely English point. Yet it is curious how different a colour may be seen in the main current of the English literature produced before and after that year. In the year of the Queen's accession to the throne, the great writers of the early part of this century were either dead or silent. Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb, Sheridan, Hazlitt, Mackintosh, Crabbe, and Cobbett, were gone. There was still living in 1837, Wordsworth, Southey, Camp- bell, Moore, Jeft"rey, Sydney Smith, De Quincey, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Mitford, Leigh Hunt, Brougham, Samuel Rogers : — living, it is true, but they had all produced their important work at some earlier date. Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Macaulay, Tennyson, I VICTORIAN I ITER A TURE 1 1 Browning, had begun to write, but were not generally- known. The principal English authors who belong equally to the Georgian and to the Victorian Age are Landor, Bulwer, Disraeli, Hallam, and Milman, and they are not quite in the very first rank in either age. It is a significant fact that the reign of the Queen has produced, with trifling exceptions, the whole work of Tennyson, the Brownings, Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontes, George Eliot, Kingsley, Trol- lope, Spencer, Mill, Darwin, Ruskin, Grote, Macaulay, Freeman, Froude, Lecky, Milman, Green, Maine, Matthew Arnold, Symonds, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, John Morley, to say nothing of younger men who are still in their prime and promise. Widely as these differ among themselves, they have characters which diff"erentiate them from all men of the eighteenth century, and also from the men of the era of Goethe and Scott. Can we im- agine Sartor Resai'ties being published in the age of Johnson, or In Mcnioriain in that of Byron? How different a land is the Italy which Ruskin sees from the Italy that Rogers knew ! What a new world is that of the Brontes and George Eliot beside that which was painted by Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen ! In what things would Southey and John Morley agree, except about books and pure English? Place Burke On tJie Sublime and Beautiful beside Ruskin's Modern Painters; compare the Stones of Venice with Eustace's Classical Tonr ; compare Car- lyle's French Revolution with Gibbon's Decline and Fall ; compare the Book of Snobs with Addison's Spectator ; contrast the Ring and the Book with Gray's Elegy or Cowper's Task. What wholly dif- 12 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE i fcrcnt types, ideas, aims ! Tlie age of Pope and Addison, of Johnson and Gibbon, clung to symmetry, " the grand air," the " best models ; " it cared much more for books than for social reforms, and in the world of letters a classical manner was valued far more than originality of ideas. And when we come to a later age, what an irrepressible and stormy imagination do we find ! Byron, Shelley, Scott, Coleridge, Campbell, Southey, Landor, revelled in romance and colour, in battle and phantasmagoria, in tragedy, mystery, and legend. They boiled over with excitement, and their visions were full of fight. The roar and fire of the great revolutionary struggle filled men's brains with fierce and strange dreams. Our Victorian Age is as different from the Virgilian and Ciceronian style of the age of Gray and Johnson, as it is from the resounding torrent which was poured forth by Byron and Scott. The social earnestness of our time colours our literature, and almost distorts our literature ; while, on the other hand, our prac- tical and scientific genius scorns the melodramatic imagery with which our grandfathers were delighted. Gibbon would have smiled a cruel epigram, if he had been expected to thrust a Latter-Day Pamphlet on the social question into one of his chapters on the Fall of Rome. But Carlyle's French Revolution is as much political rhapsody and invective as it is history. Dickens made a series of novels serve as onslaughts on various social abuses; and George Eliot's heart is ever with Darwin, Spencer, and Comte, as much as it with Miss Austen. Ruskin would sacrifice all the pictures in the world, if society would transform itself into a Brotherhood I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 13 of St. George. Tennyson has tried to put the dilemmas of theological controversy into lyric poe- try, and Psychology is now to be studied, not in metaphysical ethics, but in popular novels. The aim of the modern historian is to compile a Times newspaper of events which happened three or four, eight or ten centuries ago. The aim of the modern philosopher is to tabulate mountains of research, and to prune away with agnostic no7t possumus the ancient oracles of hypothesis and imagination. Our literature to-day has many characteristics : but its central note is the dominant influence of Sociology, — enthusiasm for social truths as an inst ru-^ ment of social reform. It is scientific, subjective, introspective, historical, archaeological : — full of vital- ity, versatility, and diligence : — intensely personal, defiant of all law, of standards, of convention : — laborious, exact, but often indifferent to grace, sym- metry, or colour: — it is learned, critical, cultured: — with all its ambition and its fine feeling, it is un- sympathetic to the highest forms of the imagination, and quite alien to the drama of action. It would be a difficult problem in social dynamics to fix anything like a true date for this change in the tone of literature, and to trace it back to its real social causes. The historian of English literature will perhaps take the death of Walter Scott, in 1832, as a typical date. By a curious coincidence, Goethe died in the same year. Two years later Coleridge and Lamb died. Within a few years more most of those who belonged to the era of Byron, Shelley, Scott, and Sheridan were departed or had sung their last effective note. The excep- 14 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE I tions were Wordsworth and his immediate Lakist fol- lowers, Landor and Buhver, of whom the latter two continued to produce. The death of Scott happened in the year of the JR.eform Act of 1832 ; and here we reach a political and social cause of the great change. The reformed democratic Parliament of 1832 was itself the reaction after the furious upheaval caused by the Revolution of 1789, and it heralded the social and legislative revolution of the last sixty years. It was the era when the steam-power and railway system was founded, and the vast industrial development which went with it. The last sixty years have witnessed a profound material revolution in English life ; and the reaction on our literature has been deep and wide. The most obvious and superficial change in lit- erature is the extreme diversity of its form. There is no standard now, no conventional type, no good "model." It is an age of "Go-as-you-please," and of tons Ics genres sont bons, snrtoiit le genre cnnuyenx. In almost any age of English literature, or indeed of any other literature, an experienced critic can detect the tone of the epoch at once in prose or verse. There is in them an unmistakeable Zeit-Geist in phraseology and .form. The Elizabethan drama, essay, or philosophy could not be mistaken for the drama, essay, or philosophy of the Restoration ; the heroic couplet reigned from Dryden to Byron ; Ciceronian diction reigned from Addison to Burke ; and then the Quarterlies, with Southey, Lamb, Scott, De Quincey, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, and Leigh Hunt, introduced a simpler, easier tone of the well- bred causeur, as free from classical mannerism as it I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 1 5 was free from subtle mechanism or epigrammatic brilliance. Down to about the death of Scott and Coleridge, almost any page of English prose or verse could be certainly attributed to its proper generation by the mark of its style alone. The Victorian literature presents a dozen styles, every man speaking out what is in him, in the phrases he likes best. Our Zeit-Geist flashes all across the heavens at once. Let us place a page from Sartor Resartus beside a page from Macaulay's History of England, or either beside a page from Arnold's Literature and Dogma or one from the Stones of Venice. Here are four typical styles in prose, each of which has been much admired and imitated ; yet they differ as widely as Shelley frorri Ovid, or Tennyson from Pope. .• Again, for verse, contrtrrt Paracelsns with The Princess, — poems writ- ten about the same time by friends and colleagues. Compare a poem of William Morris with one by Lewis Morris. Compare Swinburne's Sojigs and Sonnets with Matthew Arnold's Obermami ; Rudyard Kipling's Ballads with The Light of Asia. Have they any common standard of form, any type of metre? The purists doubt as to the style of Carlyle as a " model," but no one denies that the French _^ Revolution and Hero- Worship, at least in certain passages, display a mastery over language as splen- did as anything in our prose literature. Exactly the same might be said also of Esmond, and again of Silas Marner, and again of the Seven Lamps of ArcJiitecture. Yet all of these differ as widely as one style can differ from another. Fifine at the Fair, and The Angel in the House, have each fervent 1 6 EARLY VTCTORTAN LITERATURE i admirers. No! there is no recognised "model" cither in verse or in prose. In truth, wc have now both in prose and in verse strongly contrasted types, each of which commands admiration and following. Both in prose and verse we have one type which has carried subtle finish and a purism studied almost to the point of " precious- ness," alongside of another type which crowds its efifects without regard to tone and harmony, and by its side a third type which trots along breathless in its shirt-sleeves. Tennyson's In Memoriam has that exquisite polish of workmanship which we find in such poets as Virgil, Racine, and Milton, — that per- fection of phrase which we cannot conceive the poet capable of improving by any labour. Put aside for the moment any question about the ideas, inspira- tion, or power of the poem as a whole, and consider that, in all those hundreds of stanzas, there is hardly one line that is either careless, prosaic, or harsh, not a single false note, nothing commonplace, nothing over-coloured, but uniform harmony of phrase. This perfection of phrasing is not always to be found even in the greatest poets, for ^schylus and Dante at times strike a fierce discord, and Shakespeare, Cal- deron, and Goethe sometimes pass into rank extrava- ganza. But this scholarly and measured speech has impressed itself on the poetry of our time, inso- much, that the Tennysonian cycle of minor poets has a higher standard of grace, precision, and subtlety of phrase than the second rank of any modern litera- ture: — a standard which puts to shame the rugosi- ties of strong men like Dryden, Burns, and Byron. There is plenty of mannerism in this school of our I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 1/ minor poetry, but no one can call it either slovenly or harsh. The friend, contemporary, almost the rival of Tennyson, one whom some think endowed by na- ture with even stronger genius, on the other hand, struck notes of discord harsher, louder, and more frequent than any poet since Elizabethan times. Whatever we hold about the insight and imagination of Browning, no one can doubt that he often chose to be uncouth, crabbed, grotesque, and even clown- ish, when the humour was on him. There are high precedents for genius choosing its own instrument and making its own music. But, whatever were Browning's latent powers of melody, his method when he chose to play upon the gong, or the ancient instrument of marrow-bone and cleavers, was the exact antithesis of Tennyson's ; and he set on edge the teeth of those who love the exquisite cadences of lit Memoriam and Maud. Browning has left deep influence, if not a school. The younger Lytton, George Meredith, Buchanan, here and there Swin- burne and William Morris, seem to break loose from the graceful harmony which the Tennysonians afifect, and to plunge headlong into the obscure, the un- couth, the ghastly, and the lurid. No one denies originality and power in many of these pieces: but they are flat blasphemy against the pellucid melody of the Tennysonian idyll. Our poetry seems to be under two contrary spells : it is enthralled at one time by the ravishing symmetry of Mozart; at an- other time it yearns for the crashing discords that thunder along the march of the Valkyrie through the air. iS EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE i As in poetry, so in prose. We find in our best prose of to-day an extraordinary mastery over pure, nervous, imaginative language; and all this, along- side here of a riotous extravagance, and there, of a crude and garrulous commonplace. Thackeray's best chapters, say in Vanity Fair, Esmond, the Hninor- ists, contain an almost perfect prose style, — a style as nervous as that of Swift, as easy as that of Gold- smith, as graceful as that of Addison, as rich as that of Gibbon or Burke. No English romances have been clothed in a language so chaste and scholarly, — not even Fielding's. Certainly not the Waverley series ; for Scott, as we know, rehearsed his glowing chronicles of the past with the somewhat conven- tional verbosity of the iinprovisatore who recites but will not pause to write. George Eliot relates her story with an art even more cultivated than that of Thackeray, — though, doubtless, with an over-elab- orated self-consciousness, and perceptible suggestions of the laboratory of the student. Trollope tells his artless tales in perfectly pure, natural, and most articulate prose, the language of a man of the world telling a good story well. And a dozen living novel- ists are masters of a style of extreme ease and grace. Side by side with this chastened English prose, we have men of genius who have fallen into evil habits. Bulwer, who knew better, would quite revel in a stagey bombast; Dickens, with his pathos and his humour, was capable of sinking into a theatrical mannerism and cockney vulgarities of wretched taste ; Disraeli, with all his wit and savoir faire, has printed some rank fustian, and much slip-slop gossip ; and 1 VICTORIAN LITERATURE 1 9 George Meredith at times can be as jerky and mys- terious as a prose Browning. Charlotte Bronte and Kingsley could both descend to bhie fire and demo- niac incoherences. Macaulay is brilHant and em- phatic, but we weary at last of his everlasting staccato on the trumpet; and even the magnificent sym- phonies of Ruskin at his best will end sometimes in a sort of coda of fantasias which suggest lime-lights and coloured lenses. Carlyle, if not the greatest prose master of our age, must be held to be, by virtue of his original genius and mass of stroke, the literary dictator of Victorian prose. And, though we all know how wantonly he often misused his mighty gift, though no one now would venture to imitate him even at a distance, and though Matthew Arnold was ever taking up his parable — "Flee Carlylese as the very Devil!" — we are sliding into Carlylese unconsciously from time to time, and even CiiltJtre itself fell into the trap in the very act of warning others. Side by side with such chastened literary art as that of Thackeray and George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and John Morley, Lecky and Froude, Maine and Symonds, side by side with a Carlylese tendency to extravagance, slang, and caricature, we find another vein in English prose, — the flat, ungainly, nerveless style of mere scientific research. What lumps of raw fact are flung at our heads ! What interminable gritty collops of learning have we to munch ! Through what tangles of uninteresting phenomena are we not dragged in the name of Research, Truth, and the higher Philosophy ! Mr. Mill and Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bain and Mr. Sidgwick, have taught our age very 20 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE i much; but no one of them was ever seen to smile; and it is not easy to recall in their voluminous works a single irradiating image or one monumental phrase. There are eminent historians to-day who disdain the luminous style of Hume and Robertson, and yet deride the colour and fire of Gibbon. Grote poured forth the precious contents of his portentous note- books with as little care for rhythm and as little sense of proportion as a German professor. Free- man and Gardiner have evidently trained themselves in the same school of elaborate learning, till they would appear to count the graceful English of Froude, Lecky, and Green as hardly becoming the dignity of history. It would seem as if the charge which some of our historians are most anxious to avoid is the charge of being " readable," and of keeping to them- selves any fact that they know. The men who are rather pleased than pained to hear themselves called by the barbarous term of " scientists " seem to think that it matters nothing how ill-digested be their book, or how commonplace be their language. They are accustomed to lecture to students in the laboratory in their shirt-sleeves with their hands in their pockets ; and they believe that immortality may be achieved if they can pile up enough facts and manufacture an adequate number of monographs. And they do this, in the teeth of excellent examples to the contrary. Huxley and Tyndall have given their brethren in science fine examples of a pure, vigorous, and well-knit style. Yet, how many of them are still quite content to go rumbling along with an interminable rigmarole of dry " memoirs." Our ponderous biographies of third- VICTORIAN LITERATURE 21 rate people tend to become mere bags of letters and waste-paper baskets. And all this with such con- summate models before us, and so very high a standard of general cultivation. We have had in this age men who write an English as pure and powerful as any in the whole range of our literature ; we have tens of thousands of men and women who write a per- fectly correct and intelligent prose. And yet out of a million books, we find so very few which even aim at being works of art in the sense that Tom Jones is a work of art, and the Decline and Fall is a work of art. It is, no doubt, this preponderance of the practical, scientific, and social energies which has checked in our Victorian Age the highest imaginative and dra- matic genius. With all its achievements in lyric and psychologic poetry, it has hardly attempted to scale the empyrean of song. In the seventy-six years that have passed since Shelley conceived his Prometheus, as he sat gazing over the sombre ruins of the Cam- pagna, no one has ever ventured into that seventh heaven of invention. Since the School for Scandal (1777) no English drama has been produced which has anything like the same hold on the stage. For more than sixty years the English stage has not known one consummate actor. Though men of real genius have in these sixty years laboured at the higher drama, they have hardly achieved even such measures of success as fell to Byron and Shelley with Manfred and the Cenci. With all its lyric and psychologic power, with all its energy and its learn- ing, the Victorian Age has not quite equalled the age of Goethe. It is as if its scientific spirit checked the 22 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE supreme imagination : as if its social earnestness produced a distaste for merely dramatic passion. One of the most striking facts about our modern literature is the preponderance of the "subjective" over the " objective." The interest in external events, as the subject of imaginative work, quite pales before the interest in analysis of mental and moral impulse. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Jane Austen, have com- pletely dominated our age, and have displaced the epic and legendary themes of Scott, Byron, Campbell, and Southey. The Two Voices, hi Mcmoriam, The Ring and the Book^ Silas Marner, Vanity Fair, Bleak House, dissect brain and heart, but do not make their prime motive in any thrilling history. The crisis of modern romance goes on in the conscience, not in the outside world. Hence the enormous multiplica- tion of the psychologic novel, a form of art which the eighteenth century would have viewed with wonder and perplexity. The curious part of this is the strik- ing abatement of taste for the historical romance, in spite of the immense extension of historical study and archaeological revival. We know far more about the past, both within and without, than did our fathers ; and we are always seeking to realise to our- selves the habits, ideas, aspect, the very clothes and furniture of ages of old, which we study with sympa- thetic zeal and in the minutest detail. Yet the his- torical romance appears only at intervals. Harold and Esmo>id are both more than forty years old, Romola more than thirty years old. They are none of them quite unqualified successes ; and no later his- torical romance has approached these three in power and interest. Why is it, that, in an age pre-eminently I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 23 historical, in an age so redundant of novels, the his- torical novel is out of fashion? Partly, no doubt, our romancers shun comparison with the mighty Wizard of the North ; partly, the analytic genius of our time so greatly exceeds its synthetic genius ; and mainly, the range of our historical learning inclines us to restore the past by exact scholarship and not by fiction without authority. George Eliot was so anx- ious to have her local colour accurate that she ended by becoming somewhat fatiguing. Some day, no doubt, the genius of romance will return to this inexhaustible field with enthusiasm equal to Scott's, with a knowledge far more accurate than his, and a spirit quite purged from political and social bias. From the death of Scott in 1832 until 1894 are sixty-two years ; and if we divide this period into equal parts at the year 1863 (it was the year of Thackeray's death), we shall be struck with the fact that the purely literary product of the first period of thirty-one years (i 832-1 863) is superior to the purely literary product of the second period of thirty- one years (1863-1894). The former period gives us all that was best of Tennyson, the Brownings, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, the Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope, George Eliot, Kingsley, Dis- raeli, Dr. Arnold, Thirlwall, Grote, Hallam, Milman, Macaulay, Mill, Froude, Layard, Kinglake, Ruskin. The second period gave us in the main, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, G. H. Lewes, Maine, Leslie Stephen, John Morley, Matthew Arnold, Lecky, Freeman, Stubbs, Bryce, Green, Gardiner, Symonds, Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne. Poetry, romance, the critical, imaginative, and pictorial power dominate the former 24 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE i period : pliilosoph)', science, politics, history arc the \ real inspiration of the latter period. ^The era since the death of Scott is essentially a scientific age, a sociologic age ; and this is peculiarly visible in the second half of this era of sixty-two years. About the middle of the period we see how the scientific and sociologic interest begins to over- shadow, if not to oust, the literary, poetic, and romantic interest. Darwin's Oj'igin of Species was published in 1859; and its effect on thought became marked within the next few years. In 1862, Herbert Spencer commenced to issue his great encyclopaedic work, Synthetic Philosophy, still, we trust, to be com- pleted after more than thirty years of devoted toil. Darwin's later books appeared about the same period, as did a large body of scientific works in popular form by Huxley, Tyndall, Wallace, Lewes, Lubbock, Tylor, and Clifford. It is only needful here to refer to such scientific works as directly reacted on general literature. About the same time the later specula- tions of Comte began to attract public attention in England, and the Positive Polity was translated in 1875. Between the years 1 860-1875, there grew up in England an absorbing interest in Social Philo- sophy, and a conviction that the idea of invariable law offered a solution of the progress of society. Evolution as an idea was in the air, and it was applied to Man as much as to Nature. It is no part of our present purpose to trace its growth from the scientific aspect. It is enough to note how it acted and reacted on general literature. Poetry began to hover round the problem of Evo- lution. It wrapped it in mystery, denounced it with I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 25 fine indignation, and took it for the text of some rather prosaic homihes. Criticism fell into the pre- vailing theory: so did history, and even romance. Philosophy and Science are not the best foster- mothers of Poetry and Romance. Philosophy and Science grew more solemn than ever; and Poetry and Romance lost something of their wilder fancy and their light heart. Literature grew less spontaneous, more correct, more learned, and, it may be, more absorbed in its practical purpose of modifying social life. -^ The old notion of literature being a business apart from affairs, of men of letters being an order, of an absorption in books being ample work for a life, — all this is far from the rule. At least twenty members of the present and late Governments have been copious writers ; Mr. Gladstone and at least three or four of his late colleagues are quite in the front rank of living authors, — nay, several of them began their career as literary men. It would be difficult to name an important writer of the Victorian Age who has not at times flung himself with ardour into the great social, political, or religious battles of his time. Thackeray, Trollope, Green, Symonds, are possible exceptions, — examples of bookmen who passed their lives with books, and who never wrote to promote " a cause." But all the rest have entered on the " burning questions " of their age, and most of them with the main part of their force. As a consequence " learning," as it was understood by Casaubon, Scali- ger, Bentley, Johnson, and Gibbon, as it was under- stood by Littre, Dollingcr, and Mommsen, may be said to have disappeared in England. Cardinal New- 26 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE i man, Mark Pattison, Dr. Pusey, were said to be very learned, but it was a kind of learning which kept very much to itself. P^or good or for evil, our liter- ature is now absorbed in the urgent social problem, and is become but an instrument in the vast field of Sociology, — the science of Society. This predominance of Sociology, the restless rapidity of modern life, the omnipresence of material activity, fully account for the special character of modern literature. Literature is no longer " bookish," — but practical, social, propagandist. It is full of life, — but it is a dispersive, analytic, erratic form of . vitality. It has a most fastidious taste in form, — but -y(^ it often flings the critical spirit aside in its passion for doing, in its ardour to convince and to inspire. It is industrious, full of learning and research, — but it / regards its learning as an instrument of influence, not 1 as an end of thought. It can work up a poem or an essay, as carefully as Mieris or Breughel polished a \cabinet picture, — and it can " tear a passion to mtters," or tumble its note-books into a volume all in a heap. It has no " standard," no " model," no " best writer," — and yet it has a curious faculty for reviving every known form and imitating any style. It is intensely historical, but so accurately historical that it is afraid to throw the least colour of imagination around its history. It has consummate poetic feeling, and copious poetic gifts, — but it has now no single poet of the first rank. It has infinite romantic resources, and an army of skilful novelists, — and yet it has no single living writer worthy to be named beside the great romancers of the nineteenth century. I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 2/ This rich, many-sided, strenuous literature, which will place the name of Victoria higher than that of Elizabeth in the history of our language, would form a splendid subject hereafter for some one of our descendants who was equal to the task of treating our Victorian literature as a whole. In the mean time, it may be worth while for the men and women of to- day, who are full of all the excellent work around us, to be reminded of the good things produced now nearly sixty years ago. As one who can remember much that was given to the world in a former genera- tion, I shall endeavour in these little sketches to mark some of the characteristics of the best writers in the early Victorian Age, confining myself for the present to prose literature of the imaginative kind. It is now some time since the country of Shake- speare and of Milton has been without its poet lau- reate, and to the non-poetical world the absence of that court functionary is hardly perceptible. Nay, the question has begun to arise, If there is to be a laureate in poetry, why not a laureate also in prose romance? And if there were a laureate in prose romance whom should we choose? The same phenomenon meets us in the realm of prose fiction as in poetry : that we have vast quanti- ties of thoughtful work produced, an army of cultivated workers, a great demand, an equally great supply, a very high average of merit, — and yet so little of the very first rank. For the first time in the pres- ent century, English literature is without a single living novelist of world-wide reputation. The nine- teenth century opened with Castle Rackrcnt and the admirably original tales of Maria Edgeworth, Jane 28 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE i Austen followed in the same field. And since Wav- erley appeared, in 1814, we have had a succession of fine romances in unbroken line. Fenimore Cooper's work is nearly contemporary with the best of Scott's. At Sir Walter's death Bulwer-Lytton was in full career. And Lytton, Disraeli, Hawthorne, the Brontes, Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope were all at their best nearly together. During the last twenty }-ears or so of this splendid period they had been joined by George Eliot; and of the whole band Anthony Trollope was the survivor. With him our language lost the last of those companions of the fire- side in mansion and cottage whose names are house- hold words, whose books are in every hand, where the English tongue is heard. We need not engage in any critical estimate of these writers : we are but too well aware of their fail- ures and defects. Lytton indited not a little bombast, Dickens had his incurable mannerisms, and Thack- eray his conventional cynicisms. There are passages in George Eliot's romances which read like sticky bits from a lecture on comparative palaeontology; and Disraeli, who for fifty years threw off" most read- able tales in the intervals of politics, seems always to be laughing at the public behind his mask. Yet the good sense of mankind remembers the best and for- gets the worst, even if the worst be four-fifths of the whole. The place of genius is decided by its inimitable hits, and its misses evermore drop out of memory as time goes on. The world loves its bright spirits for what they give it, and it does not score their blots like an examiner marking a student's paper. Thus I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 29 the men and women of the first rank still hold the field in the million homes where English tales are a source of happiness ; and it would be perverse to maintain that any living men have reached that level. We can see no trace that Pickwick or Emma, Natty Bumppo or Uncas, are losing their hold on the imagination of men and women, any more than Jeanie Deans and the Antiquary, Oliver Twist, the Last Days of Pompeii, Vanity Fair, yaiie Eyre, have more readers than ever. And I find the Last Chronicle of Barset, Lothair, and Silas Marner as fresh as they were a quarter of a century ago. We all admit that there are delightful writers still. I am not about to decry our living romancers, and certainly not to criticise them. If any man choose to maintain that there is more poetry in Tess than in the entire Barsetshire series, that Dickens could not have bettered the Two Drummer Boys of Rudyard Kipling, that Treasure Lsland has a realism as vivid as Robinson Crusoe, that Mrs. Wood's Village Tragedy may rank with Silas Marner, that Howells and Besant, Ouida and Rhoda Broughton, Henry James and Mrs. Burnett, are as good reading as we need, that Bret Harte has struck a line as original as that of Dickens, and that George Meredith has an eye for character which reminds us not seldom of Thackeray and Fielding, — I do not dispute it. I am no one-book man or one-style man, but enjoy what is good in all. But I am thinking of the settled judg- ment and the visible practice of the vast English- speaking and English-reading world. And judging by that test, we cannot shut our eyes to this, that we have no living romancer who has yet achieved that 30 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE i world-wide place of being read and welcomed in every home where the lans^uage is heard or known. George Meredith has been a prolific writer for thirty years and Stevenson for twenty years ; but their most ardent admirers, among whom I would be counted, can hardly claim for them a triumph so great. We come, then, to this, that for the first time during this whole century now ending, English litera- ture can count no living novelist whom the world, and not merely the esoteric circle of cultured Englishmen, consents to stamp with the mark of accepted fame. One is too eccentric, obscure, and subtle, another too local and equal, a third too sketchy, this one too unreal, that one far too real, too obvious, too prosaic, to win and to hold the great public by their spell. Critics praise them, friends utter rhapsodies, good judges enjoy them, — but their fame is partial, local, sectional, compared to the fame of Scott, Dickens, or Thackeray. What is the cause? I do not hesitate to say it is that we have over-trained our taste, we are overdone with criticism, we are too systematically drilled, there is far too much moderate literature and far too fasti- dious a standard in literature. Every one is afraid to let himself go, to offend the conventions, or to raise a sneer. It is the inevitable result of uniform- ity in education and discipline in mental training. Millions can write good grammar, easy and accurate sentences, and imitate the best examples of the age. Education has been driven at high pressure into literary lines, and a monotonous correctness in lit- erary taste has been erected into a moral code. Tens I VICTORIAN LITER A TURE 3 I of thousands of us can put the finger on a bit of exaggeration, or a false Hght in the local colour, or a slip in perfect realism. The result is a photo- graphic accuracy of detail, a barren monotony of commonplace, and the cramping of real inventive genius. It is the penalty of giving ourselves up to mechanical culture. If another Dickens were to break out to-morrow with the riotous tomfoolery of Pickwick at the trial, or of Weller and Stiggins, a thousand lucid criticisms would denounce it as vulgar balderdash. Glaucus and Nydia at Pompeii would be called melodramatic rant. The House of tlie Seven Gables would be re- jected by a sixpenny magazine, and yane Eyre would not rise above a common " shocker." Hence, the enormous growth of the Kodak school of romance, — the snap-shots at every-day realism with a hand camera. We know how it is done. A woman of forty, stout, plain, and dull, sits in an ordinary par- lour at a tea-table, near an angular girl with a bad squint. "Some tea?" said Mary, touching the pot. " I don't mind," replied Jane, in a careless tone; " I am rather tired and it is a dull day." " It is," said Mary, as her lack-lustre eyes glanced at the murky sky without. " Another cup? " And so the modern romance dribbles on hour by hour, chapter by chap- ter, volume by volume, recording, as in a phono- graph, the minute commonplace of the average man and woman in perfectly real but entirely common situations. To this dead level of correctness literary purism has brought romance. The reaction against the photographic style, on the other hand, leads to spasmodic efforts to arouse the jaded interest by 32 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE i forced sensationalism, physiological bestialities, and a crude form of the hobgoblin and bogey business. In all the ages of great productive work there were intense individuality, great freedom, and plent}'' of failures. Tom Jones delighted the town which was satiated with gross absurdities, some of them, alas! from the pen of Fielding himself Shake- speare wrote happily before criticism had invented the canons of the drama, and Sir Walter's stories had no reviews to expose his historical blunders. In the great romance age which began to decline some forty years ago, there was not a tithe of such good average work as we get now ; criticism had not be- come a fine art; every one was free to like what he pleased, and preposterous stuff was written and en- joyed. Of course it cannot be good to like prepos- terous stuff, and an educated taste ought to improve literature. But it is almost a worse thing when general culture produces an artificial monotony, when people are taught what they ought to like, w'hen to violate the canons of taste is far worse than to laugh at the Ten Commandments. With a very high average of fairly good work, an immense mass of such work, and an elaborate code of criticism, the production of brilliant and inimitable successes is usually arrested in every field. Having thousands of graceful verse-writers, we have no great poet; in a torrent of skilful fiction, we have no great novelist; with many charming painters, who hardly seem to have a fault, we have no great artist; with inises-en-schie, make-up costumes, and accessories for our plays such as the world never saw before, we have no great actor ; and with ten thousand thought- I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 33 ful writers, we have not a single genius of the first rank. Elaborate culture casts chill looks on original ideas. Genius itself is made to feel the crudeness and extravagance of its first efforts and retires with shame to take a lower place. We are all so fastidious about form, and have got such fixed regulation views about form, we are so correct, so much like one another, such good boys and girls, that the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies of the inventive spirit are taught from childhood to control themselves and to conform to the decorum of good society. A highly organised code of culture may give us good manners, but it is the death of genius. There are other things which check the flow of a really original literature, though perhaps a high average culture and a mechanical system of educa- tion may be the most potent. Violent political struggles check it: an absorption in material in- terests checks it: uniformity of habits, a general love of comfort, conscious self-criticism make it dull and turbid. Now our age is marked by all of these. From the age of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, the French genius produced almost no imaginative work of really European importance until it some- what revived again with Chateaubriand in the present century. Nor in England can we count anything of a like kind from the death of Goldsmith until we reach Scott, Byron, and Wordsworth after an interval of forty years. In the United States the great eras of imaginative production have been those which were free from political and military struggles. The case of France is indeed conclusive proof 3 34 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE i how suddenly political turmoil kills imaginative work. French literature, which during the greater part of the eighteenth century had shown amazing activit\', suddenly seems arrested with Rousseau ; and in the latter years of the eighteenth 'century there is abso- lutely nothing of even moderate quality in the field of art. The same is true of England for the last thirty years of the same century. Shakespeare's dramas were not produced till his country had victoriously passed through the death-struggle of the religious wars in the sixteenth century. The civil war of the Puritans arrested poetry, so that for nearly thirty years the muse of Milton himself withdrew into her solitary cell. Dryden carried on the torch for a time. But prose literature did not revive in England until the Hanoverian settlement. Political ferment kills literature: prolonged war kills it: social agitation unnerves it; and still more the uneasy sense of being on the verge of great and unknown change. Take our Queen's reign of now some fifty-eight years (i 837-1 895) and divide it in half at the year 1866. It is plain that by far the greater part of the "Victorian" literature was produced in the former half and quite the inferior part of it was produced in the latter half By the year 1866 we had already got all, or all that was best, of Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin, Lytton, Thackeray, Dickens, Trol- lope, George Eliot, Disraeli, Kingsley, and others who lived after that date. In 1865 Lord Palmerston died, and with him died the old Parliamentary era. In the same year died Abraham Lincoln in the great crisis of the reconstruction of the American Constitu- tion. We attach no peculiar importance to that date. I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 35 But it is certain that both English and American people have been in this last twenty-nine years absorbed in constitutional agitations which go deep down into our social system. We in England have passed from one constitutional struggle to another, and we are now in the most acute stage of all this period. Parliamentary reform, continental changes, colonial wars, military preparations. Home Rule, have absorbed the public mind and stunned it with cataracts of stormy debate. We are all politicians, all party-men now. There is upon us also, both in England and in America, a social ferment that goes deeper than any mere constitutional struggle. It is the vague, pro- found, multiform, and mysterious upheaval that is loosely called Socialism, — not Socialism in any definite formula, but the universal yearning of the millions for power, consideration, material improve- ment, and social equality. The very vagueness, uni- versality, and unbounded scope of the claim they make constitute its power. All orders and classes are concerned in it: all minds of whatever type are affected by it: every political, social, or industrial axiom has to be reconsidered in the light of it: it appeals to all men and it enters into life at every corner and pore. We are like men under the glamour of some great change impending. The spell of a new order holds us undecided and expect- ant. There is something in the air, and that some- thing is a vague and indescribable sense that a new time is coming. Men felt it in France, and indeed all over Europe, from 1780 till 1790. It was an un- certain and rather pleasing state of expectancy. It 36 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE i did not check activity, nor enjoyment, nor science. But it diverted the profounder minds from the higher forms of imaginative work. There is no reason to assume that Socialism or the ideals of Socialism are at all hostile to literature or even imaginative poetry, provided they are not too close, not actually causing direct agitation. But when men are debating bills in heated meetings, they do not often see these questions in the halo of romance. Rousseau's Heloise and Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield were quite a generation before the Revo- lution, at a time when franchise and agrarian politics had hardly begun. The poetry and the romance of a great social reformation are never visible to men in the midst of it, who are ready to tear each others eyes out in the name of Eight-Hours Bills and Land Nationalisation. When men have got to this stage they want lighter matter to amuse them at home ; but they can hardly appreciate, even if they could find, the loftier flights of social romance. Sam VVeller to-day has joined a union, and reads his Henry George. Rawdon Crawley of our own genera- tion is a mere drunken ruffian, only fit to point the moral in a lecture on the drink traffic. And Becky Sharp is voted to be a stupid libel on the social destiny of the modern school " marm." The great advance in the material comfort and uniformity of life and manners dries up the very sources of prose romance, even more than it ruins poetry. The poet is by nature an isolated spirit dwelling in an ideal world of his own. But the prose novelist draws life as he sees it in the concrete from intimate knowledge of real men and women. I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 37 How intensely did Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Thack- eray, Miss Austen, Miss Edgeworth, know by expe- rience the characters they drew ! A romance cannot be constructed out of the novelist's inner conscious- ness as Paradise Lost, Shelley's Prometheus, and Wordsworth's Excursion were constructed. Even Scott becomes grave and melodramatic when he peoples his stage with those whose like he never saw. But how vastly more romantic was the Scot- land of Scott than is the Scotland of Stevenson ! The Vicar of Wakefield and Squire Western are not to be found in an age that is busy with railways and telegraphs and the Reviezv of Reviews. Pickwick and Oliver Twist have been improved off the face of the earth by cheap newspapers and sanitary reform. The fun has gone out of Vanity Fair, and the House of the Seven Gables is an hotel with seven hundred beds. Comfort, electric light, railway sleeping-cars, and equality are excellent things, but they are the death of romance. The essence of romance is variety, contrast, individuality, the eccentric, the unconven- tional. Level up society, put nineteen out of every twenty on fairly equal terms, popularise literature, and turn the Ten Commandments into a code of decorum, and you cut up by the roots all romantic types of life. The England of Fielding and the Scotland of Scott were breezy, boisterous, dis- orderly, picturesque, and jolly worlds, where gay and hot spirits got into mischief and played mad pranks as, in the words of the old song, " They powlered up and down a bit and had a rattling day." Laws, police, total abstinence, general education, and 38 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE i weak digestions have put an end to pranks, as we are all proud to say. The result is that Romance, finding little of romance in the real world, has taken two different lines in the desperate effort to amuse us somehow. The virtuous line is the phonographic reproduction of evcry-day life in ordinary situations. The disreputable line is Zolaesque bestiality, and forced, unreal, unlovely, and h}-sterical sensation- alism. It cannot be more than a paradox to pretend that fin de siecle has anything to do with it. But it is a curious coincidence how the last decade of modern centuries seems to die down in creative fertility. The hundred millions who speak our English tongue have now no accepted living master of the first rank, either in verse or in prose. In 1793 there v.'as not one in all Europe. In 1693, though Dryden lingered in his decline, it was one of the most barren moments in English literature. And so in 1593, though \\\q. Faery Queen was just printed, and Shakespeare had begun to write, there were nothing but the first streaks which herald the dawn. But this is obviously a mere coincidence; nor can an artificial division of time affect the rise or fall of genius. It may be that in these latter days, when our age is the victim of self- conscious introspection, the close of a century which has shown such energy may affect us in some uncon- scious way. Perhaps there is a vague impression that the world is about to turn over a new page in the mighty ledger of mankind, that it is now too late to do much with the nineteenth century, and that we will make a new start with the twentieth. The world is growing less interesting, less mysteri- I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 39 ous, less manifold, at any rate to the outer eye. The misc-cn-schtc of external life is less rich in colour and in contrast. Magnificence, squalor, oddity, historic survivals, and picturesque personalities grow rarer year by year. Everybody writes a grammatical letter in conventional style, wears the clothes in fashion, and conforms to the courtesies of life. It is right, good, and wise : but a little dull. It is the lady-like age, the epoch of the dress-coat, of the prize lad and the girl of the period. Mr. Charles Pearson, in his remarkable forecast of National Life and Chaj'aclcr, warned us how the universal levelling of modern democracy must end in a certain monot- ony and a lowered vitality. We live longer, but in quiet, comfortable, orderly ways. This is not at all injurious to morality, politics, industry, science, phi- losophy, or religion. It is not necessarily injurious to poetry, at least of the lower flight. But it is ad- verse to high art. And it is asphyxiating to romance. The novelist must draw from the living model and he must address the people of his own age. He can- not write for posterity, nor can he live in a day-dream world of his own. The poet is often lost to his own contemporaries. It may need two or three, five or six, generations to reveal him, as Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, and Wordsworth may remind us. But the novelist must live in his generation, be of it most intensely, and if he is to delight at all, like the actor, he must delight his own age. What sons of their own time were Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope: how intensely did they drink with both hands from the cup of life. George Eliot, George Meredith, Louis Stevenson, Howells, James, look on 40 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE i life from a private box. We sec their kid gloves and their opera-glass, and we know that nothing could ever take them on to the stage and ruffle it with the world of the day, like men of the world who rhean to taste life. There is no known instance of a great novelist who lived obscure in a solitary retreat or who became famous only after the lapse of many generations. It is the lady-like age: and so it is the age of ladies' novels. Women have it all their own way now in romance. They carry oft" all the prizes, just as girl students do in the studios of Paris. Up to a certain point, within their own limits, they are supreme. Half the modern romance, and many people think the better half, is written by women. That is perfectly natural, an obvious result of modern society. The romance to which our age best lends itself is the romance of ordinary society, with delicate shades of character and feeling in place of furious passion or picturesque incident. Women are by nature and training more subtle observers of these social nuances and refined waverings of the heart than any others but men of rare genius. The field is a small and home-like area, the requirements are mainly those of graceful intuition, the tone must be pure, lady-like, subdued. In this sphere it is plain that women have a marked superiority; it is the sphere in which Jane Austen is the yet unapproached queen. But we may look for more Jane Austens, and on wider fields with a yet deeper insight into far grander characters. The social romance of the future is the true poetic function of women. It is their own realm, in which they will doubtless achieve I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 4I yet unimagined triumphs. Men, revolting from this polite and monotonous world, are trying desperate expedients. But they are all wrong; the age is against it. Try to get out of modern democratic uniformity and decorum and you may as well try to get out of your skin. Mr. Stevenson was driven to playing at Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling once seemed bent on dying in a tussle with Fuzzy- Wuzzy in the Soudan. But it is no good. A dirty savage is no longer a romantic being. And as to the romance of the wigwam, it reminds me of the Jews who keep the Feast of Tabernacles by putting up some boughs in a back yard. Let us have no nonsense, no topsy-turvy straining after new effects, which is so wearisome to those who love the racy naturalisn of Parson Adams and Edie Ochiltree. But let us have no pessimism also. The age is against the romance of colour, movement, pas- sion, and jollity. But it is full of the romance of subtle and decorous psychology. It is not the highest art: it is indeed a very limited art. But it is true art: wholesome, sound, and cheerful. Ihe 1 world does not exist in order to supply brilliant liter- ature ; and the march of democratic equality and of decorous social uniformity is too certain a thing, in one sense too blessed a thing, to be denied or to be denounced. An age of colour, movement, variety, and romantic beauty will come again one day, we know not how. There will be then a romance of passion and incident, of strenuous ambition and mad merriment. But not to-day nor to-morrow. Let us accept what the dregs of the nineteenth century can EAKLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE give US, without murmuring and repining for what it \ cannot give and should not seek to give. I In this little series of studies, I shall make no attempt to estimate the later literature of the Victo- rian Age, nor will I at all refer to any living writer. Nor shall I deal with social and moral philosophy, poetry, art, or religion. I propose to look back, from our present point of view, on the literature, in the narrower sense of the term, produced in the earher part of the Queen's reign. II THOMAS CARLYLE It is now for about half a century that the world has had all that is most masterly in the work of Thomas Carlyle. And a time has arrived when we may very fairly seek to weigh the sum total of influ- ence which he left on his own and on subsequent generations. We are now far enough off, neither to be dazzled by his eloquence nor irritated by his eccentricities. The men whom he derided and who shook their heads at him are gone : fresh problems, new hopes, other heroes and prophets whom he knew not, have arisen. Our world is in no sense his world. And it has become a very fair question to ask — What is the residuum of permanent effect from these great books of his, which have been permeating English thought for half a century and more? It is a rare honour for any writer — at least for one who is neither poet nor novelist — to have his pro- ductions live beyond two generations, and to continue to be a great literary force, when fifty years have altered all the conditions in which he wrote and the purposes and ideas which he treated. It cannot be said that Carlyle's effective influence is less now than it was a generation ago. It has lived through the 44 EARLY VICTORIAN LITER ATTTRE ii Utilitarian and Evolution movements and has not been extinguished by them. And Thomas Carlyle bids fair to enter into that sacred band whose names outlive their own century and give some special tone to their national literature. The survival of certain books and names from generation to generation does not depend on merit alone. Boswell's Life of Johnson is immortal: though we do not rank " Bozzy " as a hero or a genius. Hume's History of England is a classic: though it can hardly be said to be an adequate account of our country. Few books have ever exercised so amazing an influence as Rousseau's Social Contract ; yet the loosest mind of to-day can perceive its sophis- try. Burke's diatribes on the French Revolution affected the history of Europe ; though no one denies that they were inspired by passion and deformed by panic. Hobbes has very few readers to-day; but the LeviatJian may last as long as More's Utopia, which has hardly more readers in our age. Books which exert a paramount influence over their con- temporaries may die down and be known only in the history of literature. And books, again, of very moderate value, written by men of one-sided intellect or founded on somewhat shallow theories, may, by virtue of some special quality, or as embodying some potent idea, attain to a permanent place in the world of letters. Many a great book ceases very early to command readers : and many books continue to be read although they are far from great. The first question that arises is this : Do the chief works of Carlyle belong to that class of books which attain an enduring and increasing power, or to 11 THOMAS CARLYLE 45 that class which effect great things for one or two generations and then become practically obsolete? It would not be safe to put his masterpieces in any exclusive sense into either of these categories; but we may infer that they will ultimately tend to the second class rather than the first. Books which attain to an enduring and increasing power are such books as the Ethics^ the Politics, and the Republic, the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius and of Vauvenar- gues, the Essays of Bacon and of Hume, Plutarch's Lives and Gibbon's Rome. In these we have a mass of pregnant and ever-fertile thought in a form that is perennially luminous and inspiring. It can hardly be said that even the masterpieces of Carlyle — no! not the Revolution, Cromwell, or the Heroes — reach this point of immortal wisdom clothed with consum- mate art. The "personal equation " of Teufelsdrock- hian hum.our, its whimsies and conundrums, its wild outbursts of hate and scorn, not a few false judg- ments, and perverse likes and dislikes, — all this is too common and too glaring in the Carlylean cycle, to permit its master to pass into the portals where dwell the wise, serene, just, and immortal spirits. Not of such is the Kingdom of the literary Immortals. On the other hand, if these masterpieces of sixty years ago are not quite amongst the great books of the world, it would be preposterous to regard them as obsolete, or such as now interest only the his- torian of literature. They are read to-day practically as much as ever, and are certain to be read for a generation or two to come. But they are not read to-day with the passionate delight in the wonderful originality, nor have they the commanding authority 46 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ii they seemed to possess for the faithful disciples of the 'forties and the 'fifties. Nor can any one suppose that the next century will continue to read them, except with an open and unbiassed mind, and a willingness to admit that even here there is much dead wood, gross error, and pitiable exaggeration. When we begin to read in that spirit, however splendid be the imagination, and however keen the logic, we are no longer under the spell of a master: we are reading a memorable book, with a primary desire to learn how former generations looked upon things. Thomas Carlyle, like all other voluminous writers, wrote very much that cannot be called equal to his best; and it cannot be denied that the inferior pieces hold a rather large proportion of the whole. Nothing is less fatal to true criticism than the popular habit of blindly overvaluing the inferior work of men of genius, unless it be the habit of undervaluing them by looking at their worst instead of at their best. Great men are to be judged by their highest; and it is not of very great consequence if this highest forms a moderate part of the total product. Now, what are the masterpieces of Thomas Carlyle? In the order of their production they are Sartor Resar- tus, 1 831; French Revolution, 1837; Hero- Worship, 1840; Past and Present, 1843; Cromwell, 1845. We need not be alarmed if this list forms but a third of the thirty volumes (not including translations) ; and if it omits such potent outbursts as Chartism, 1839; and Latter-Day Pamphlets, 1850; or such a wonder- ful piece of history as FriedricJi the Second, 185 8- 1865. Chartism and the Latter-Day Pamphlets are full of ir THOMAS CARLYLE 47 eloquence, insight, indignation, and pity, and they exerted a great and wholesome effect on the genera- tion whom they smote as with the rebuke and warn- ing of a prophet. But, as we look back on them after forty or fifty years of experience, we find in them too much of passionate exaggeration, at times a ferocious wrong-headedness, and everywhere so little practical guidance or fruitful suggestion, that we cannot reckon these magnificent Jeremiads as permanent masterpieces. As to Friedrich, it is not a book at all, but an encyclopaedia of German biographies in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Who reads every word of these ten volumes? Who cares to know how big was the belly of some court chamberlain, or who were the lovers of some unendurable Frau? What a welter of dull garbage ! In whait dustheaps dost thou not smother us, Teufelsdrockh ! Oh, Thomas, Thomas, what Titania has bewitched thee with the head of Dryasdust on thy noble shoulders? Compare Friedrich with Cromwell. In the Life of the Puritan hero we have a great purpose, a pro- longed homily, a magnificent appeal against an un- just sentence passed two hundred years before by ignorance, bigotry, and passion. The literary in- terest never overpowers the social and political, the moral and the religious purpose. Twenty years later, when he takes up the German Friedrich, the literary interest overpowers the historical. Half of the ten volumes of Friedrich are taken up with tire- some anecdotes about the ordinary appendages of a German court. Even the true greatness of Fred- erick — his organisation of a model civil administra- 48 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ii tion — is completely obscured in the deluge of court gossip and Potsdamiana. Fricdrich is a wonderful work, highly valuable to the student, a memorable result of Teufelsdrockhian industry, and humour, — but it is not a masterpiece: judged by the standard of Carl}'le's own masterpieces, it is really a failure. Cromwell is the life of a hero and a statesman; FriedricJi consists of miscellaneous memoirs of the court and camp of the greatest of modern rulers. On the whole, we may count the Cromwell as the greatest of Carlyle's effective products. With his own right hand, alone and by a single stroke, he completely reversed the judgment of the English nation about their greatest man. The whole weight of Church, monarchy, aristocracy, fashion, literature, and wit, had for two centuries combined to falsify history and distort the character of the noblest of English statesmen. And a simple man of letters, by one book, at once and for ever reversed this sentence, silenced the allied forces of calumny and rancour, and placed Oliver for all future time as the greatest hero of the Protestant movement. There are few examples in the history of literature of so great and so sudden a triumph of truth and justice. At the same time, it is well to remember that the Cromwell is not a literary masterpiece, in the sense of being an organic work of high art. It is not the " Life " of Cromw^ell : it was not so designed, and was never so worked out. It is his " Letters and Speeches," illustrated by notes. A work so planned cannot possibly be a work of art, or a perfect piece of biograph}^ The constant passage from text to commentary, from small print to large, from Oliver's II THOMAS CARLYLE 49 Puritan sermonising to Carlyle's Sartorian eccen- tricities, destroys the artistic harmony of the book as an organic work of art. The " Life " of Cromwell was in fact never written by Carlyle ; and has yet to be written. Never yet was such splendid material for a " Life" prepared by a great historian. Sartor Re sarins (183 i), the earliest of his greater works, is unquestionably the most original, the most characteristic, the deepest and most lyrical of his pro- ductions.'*^ Here is the Sage of Craigenputtock at his best, at his grimmest, and, we must add, in his most incoherent mood. To make men think, to rouse men out of the slough of the conventional, the sensual, the mechanical, to make men feel, by sheer force of poetry, pathos, and humour, the religious mystery of life and the " wretchlessness of unclean living " — (as our Church article hath it) — nothing could be more trumpet-tongued than Sartor. The Gospel according to Teufelsdrockh is, however, a somewhat Apocalyptic dispensation, and few there be who can "rehearse the articles of his belief" with anything like precision. Another and a more serious diffi- culty is this. How many a " general reader" steadily reads through Sartor from cover to cover? And of such, how many entirely understand the inner Philo- sophy of Clothes, and follow all the allusions, quips, and nicknames of Sartorian subjectivity. It would be a fine subject for some Self-Improvement Circle of readers to write examination papers upon ques- tions as to the exact meaning of all the inward mus- ings of Teufelsdrockh. The first class of successful candidates, one fears, would be small. A book, — not of science or of pure philosophy, or any tech- 4 50 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ii nical art whatever, — but a book addressed to the general reader, and designed for the education of the pubHc, and which can be intelHgently digested and assimilated by so very few of the public, can hardly be counted as an unqualified success. And the adepts who have mastered the inwardness of Sartor are rare and few. The French Revolution, however, is far more dis- tinctly a work of art than Cromwell, and far more accessible to the great public than Sartor. Indeed the French Revolution is usually, and very properly, spoken of and thought of, as a prose poem, if prose poem there can be. It has the essential character of an epic, short of rhythm and versification. Its "argument" and its "books"; its contrasts and " episodes " ; its grouping of characters and denoil- utent, — are as carefully elaborated as the Gerusa- lenime of Tasso, or the ALncid of Virgil. And it produces on the mind the effect of a poem with an epic or dramatic plot. It is only a reader thoroughly at home in the history of the time, who can resist the poet's spell when, at the end of Part III., Book VII., he is told that the Revolution is " ended," and the curtain falls. As a matter of real history, this is an arbitrary invention. For the street fight on the day named in the Revolutionary Calendar — 13 Vendc- ntiaij'e, An 4 (5th October, 1795), is merely a casual point in a long movement, at which the poet finds it artistic to stop. But the French Revolution does not stop there, nor did the "Whiff of Grapeshot" end it in any but an arbitrary sense. When the poet tells us that, upon Napoleon's defeating the sections around the Convention, " the hour had come and the n THOMAS CARLYLE 5 1 Man," and that the thing called the French Revolu- tion was thereby " blown into space," nothing more silly, mendacious, and '* phantasmic " was ever stated by sober historian. The Convention was itself the living embodiment and product of the Revolution, and Bonaparte's smart feat in protecting it, increased its authority and confidence. If Carlyle's FrciicJi Revohition be trusted as real history, it lands us in as futile a noii scquitiir as ever historian committed. Viewed as an historical poem, the French Revolu- tion is a splendid creation. Its passion, energy, colour, and vast prodigality of ineffaceable pictures, place it undoubtedly at the head of all the pictorial his- tories of modern times. And the dramatic rapidity of its action, and the inexhaustible contrasts of its scenes and tableaux — things which so fatally per- vert its truthfulness as authentic history — immensely heighten the effect of the poem on the reader's mind. Not that Carlyle was capable of deliberately manu- facturing an historical romance in the mendacious way of Thiers and Lamartine. But, having resolved to cast the cataclysm of 1789 and the few years before and after it into a dramatic poem, he inevitably, and no doubt unconsciously, treated certain incidents and certain men with a poet's license or with a distorted vision. This too is more apparent toward the close of his work, when he begins to show signs of fatigue and exhaustion. Nay, it is to be feared that we are still suffering from the outrage committed on Victo- rian literature by Mr. Mill's incendiary housemaid. We may yet note marks of arson in the restored volume. At the same time, there are large parts of his work which are as true historically as they are poetically 52 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ii brilliant. Part. I. — " The Bastille " — is almost per- fect. The whole description of Versailles, its court, and government, of the efiferv^escence of Paris, — from the death of Louis XV. to the capture of Versailles, — is both powerful and true. Part II. — "The Con- stitution " — is the weakest part of the whole from the point of view of accurate history. And Part III. — " The Terror " — is only trustworthy in separate pictures and episodes, however splendid its dramatic power. It would need an essay, or rather a volume, on the French Revolution to enumerate all the wrong judg- ments and fallacies of Carlyle's book, if we bring it to tlie bar of sober and authentic history. First and foremost comes his fundamental misconception that the Revolution was an anarchical outburst against corruption and oppression, instead of being, as it was, the systematic foundation of a new order of society. Again, he takes it to be a purely French, local, and political movement, instead of seeing that it was an European, social, spiritual movement toward a more humane civilisation. And next, he regards the Revolution as taking place in the six years be- tween the taking of the Bastille and the defeat of the Sections by Bonaparte ; whereas the Revolution was preparing from the time of Louis XIV., and is not yet ended in the time of President Faure. Next to the capital mistake of misconceiving the entire character and result of the Revolution, comes the insolence which treats the public men of France dur- ing a whole generation as mere subjects for ribaldry and caricature. From this uniform mockery, Mira- beau and Bonaparte, two of the least worthy of them. II THOMAS CARLYLE 53 are almost alone exempted. This is a blunder in art, as well as a moral and historical offence. Men like Condorcet, Danton, Hoche, Carnot, not to name a score of other old Conventionels, soldiers, and leaders, were pure, enlightened, and valorous patriots, — with a breadth of soul and social sympathies and hopes that tower far above the insular prejudices and Hebrew traditions of a Scotch Cameronian littera- teur, — poet, genius, and moralist though he also was himself But though the French Revolution is not to be accepted as historical authority, it is profoundly stimulating and instructive, when we look on it as a lyrical apologue. It is an historical phantasmagoria — which, though hardly more literally true than Aristophanes' Knights or Clouds, may almost be placed beside these immortal satires for its imagina- tion, wisdom, and insight. The personages and the events of the French Revolution in fact succeeded each other with such startling rapidity and such bewildering variety, that it is difficult for any but the most patient student to keep the men and the phases steadily before the eye without confusion and in distinct form. This Carlyle has done far better than any other historian of the period, perhaps even better than any historian whatever. That so many Englishmen are more familiar with the scenes and the men and women of the French Revolution than they are with the scenes and the men and women of their own history, is very largely the work of Carlyle- And as to the vices and weakness of the Old Regime, the electric contagion of the people of Paris, the in- domitable elasticity of the French spirit, the magnetic 54 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ii power of the French genius, the id^vaous ftiria franccse, and the terrible rage into which it can be lashed, — all this Carlyle has told with a truth and insight that has not been surpassed by any modern historian. It being then clearly understood that Carlyle did not leave us the trustworthy history of the French Revolution, in the way in which Thucydides gave us the authentic annals of the Peloponnesian war, or Csesar the official dispatches of the Conquest of Gaul, we must willingly admit that Carlyle's history is one of the most fruitful products of the nineteenth century. No one else certainly has written the authentic story of the French Revolution at large, or of more than certain aspects and incidents of it. In spite of misconceptions, and such mistaken estimates as those of Mirabeau and Bonaparte, such insolent mockery of good and able men, such ridiculous caricatures as that of the " Feast of Pikes" and the trial of the King, such ribald horse-play as " Grilled Herrings " and " Lion Sprawling," in spite of blots and blunders in every chapter, — the FrencJi Revolution is destined to live long and to stand forth to posterity as the typical work of the master. It cannot be said to have done such work as the Cromwell ; for it is far less true and sound as history, and it is only one out of scores of interpreters of the Revolution, whereas in the Cromzvell Carlyle worked single-handed. But being far more organic, far more imaginative, indeed more powerful than the Cromwell in literary art, the French Revolution — produced, we may remember, exactly in the middle of the author's life — will remain the enduring monument of Carlyle's great spirit and splendid brain. II THOMAS CARL VLB 55 L^ ^ The book entitled Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840), to give it its full and original title, comes next in order of time, and per- haps of abiding value. It is a book rather difficult for us now to estimate after more than half a century, for so very much has been done in the interval to build upon these foundations, to enlarge our knowl- edge of these very heroes, and the estimates of Carlyle in the first half of this century are for the most part so completely the commonplaces of the English-speaking world at the close of the century, that when we open the Heroes again it is apt to seem obvious, connji, the emphatic assertion of a truism that no one disputes. How infinitely better do we now, in 1895, know Dante and Shakespeare, Crom- well and Napoleon, than did our grandfathers in 1840! Who, nowadays, imagines Mahomet to have been an impostor, or Burns to have been a mere tipsy song-writer? What a copious literature has the last half-century given us on Dante, on Islam and its spirit, on Rousseau, on Burns, on the English and the French revolutions! But in 1840 the true nature of these men was very faintly understood. Few people but soldiers had the least chance of being called " heroes," and the " heroic in history " was certainly not thought to include either poets, preach- ers, or men of letters. Heroes and Hero- Worship, like the Cromwell, has, in fact, done its work so com- pletely that we find it a little too familiar to need any constant reading or careful study. To judge fairly all that Carlyle effected by his book on Heroes we must put ourselves at the point of view of the time when it was written, the da)s of 56 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE il Wellington and Melbourne, Brougham and Macaulay, Southey and Coleridge. None of these men under- stood the heroic in Norse mythology, or the grandeur of Oliver Cromwell, or the supreme importance of the Divina Coinmcdia as the embodiment of Catholic Feudalism. All this Carlyle felt as no Englishman before him had felt, and told us in a voice which has since been accepted as conclusive. How far deeper is the view of Carlyle about some familiar personal- ity like Johnson than is that of Macaulay, hov/ much farther does Carlyle see into the Shakesperean firma- ment than even Coleridge ! How far better does he understand Rousseau and Burns than did Southey, laureate and critic as he was hailed in his time. The book is a collection of Lectures, and we now know how entirely Carlyle loathed that kind of utterance, how much he felt the restraints and limits it involved. And for that reason, the book is the simplest and most easily legible of his works, with the least of his mannerism and the largest concessions to the written language of sublunary mortals. Nearly all the judg- ments he passes are not only sound, but now almost universally accepted. To deal with the heroic in history, he needed, as he said, six months rather than six days. It was intended, he told his hearers, "to break ground," to clear up misunderstandings. It has done this: and a rich crop has resulted from his ploughshare. Nothing but a few sketches could be compressed into six hours. But it is curious how many things seem omitted in this survey of the heroic. At the age of forty-five Carlyle had not recognised Friedrich at all, for he does not figure in the " Hero as King." ir THOMAS CARLYLE 57 Napoleon takes his place, though Bonaparte was a " hero" only in the bad sense of hero which Carlyle was seeking to explode. It is well that, since he finished the Frcncli Revolution, Carlyle seems to have found out that Bonaparte " parted with Reality," and had become a charlatan, a sham. Still for all that, he remains " our last great man." Mazzini was pres- ent at the delivery of these lectures ; and when he had listened to this last, he went up to Carlyle and told him that he had undone his Hero-Worship and had fallen from the truth ; and from that hour Mazzini would hold no terms with the gospel of One-Man. To make Hero-Worship close with the installation of Napoleon as " our last great man," was to expose the inherent weakness of the Sartorian creed, — that humanity exists for the sake of its great men. The other strange delusion is the entire omission from the " Hero as Priest " of any Catholic hero. Not only are St. Bernard and St. Francis, Becket and Lanfranc — all the martyrs and missionaries of Catholicism — con- signed to oblivion; but not a word is said of Alfred, Godfrey, St. Louis, St. Ferdinand, and St. Stephen. In a single volume there must be selection of types. But the whole idea of Hero-Worship was perverted in a plan which had no room for a single Catholic chief or priest. This perverse exaggeration of Puritan religion, and the still more unjust hatred of Catholic religion, unfortunately runs through all Carlyle's work, and perhaps nowhere breaks out in so repulsive a form as in the piece called "Jesuitism" (1850), in the Latter-Day Pamphlets (No. VIII.). Discarding the creed, the practice, and the language of Puritanism, 58 EARLY VICTORIAX LITERATURE ii Carlyle still retained its narrowness, its self-righteous- ness, its intolerance, and its savagery. Tiie moralist, to whom John Knox was a hero, but St. Bernard was not, but only a follower of the " three-hatted Papa," and an apostle of " Pig's-wash," was hardl}' the man to exhaust the heroic in history. In the " Hero as Man-of-Letters," Carlyle was at home. If ever pure letters produced a hero, the sage of Chelsea was one. With Johnson, with Rousseau, he is per- fectly rational, and the mass of literature which has accumulated round the names of these two, only tends to confirm the essential justice of Carl}'le's estimate. Nor need we dispute his estimate of the vigour and manliness of Ikirns. It is only when Carlyle describes him as " the most gifted British soul" in the eighteenth century- — the century of Hume, Adam Smith, Fielding, and Burke — that we begin to smile. . Burns was a noble-hearted fellow, as well as a born poet. But perhaps the whole cycle of Sartorian extravaganza contains no saying so futile as the complaint, that the British nation in the great war with France entrusted their destinies to a phantasmic Pitt, instead of to " the Thunder-god, Robert Burns." Napoleon would no doubt have welcomed such a change of ministry. It is incoher- ences of this sort which undo so much of the splendid service that Carlyle gave to his age. But we are not willing to let the defects of Carlyle's philosophy drive out of mind the permanent and beautiful things in his literary work. Past and Present{\%^l) is certainly a success, — a happy and true thought, full of originality, worked out with art and power. The idea of embedding a living and II THOMAS CAKLYLE 59 pathetic picture of monastic life in the twelfth cen- tury, and a minute study of the labours of enlightened churchmen in the early struggles of civilisation, — the idea of embedding this tale, as if it were the remains of some disinterred saint, in the midst of a series of essays on the vices and weaknesses of modern society, — was a highly original and instructive device, only to be worked to success by a master. And the master brought it to a delightful success. In all his writings of thirty volumes there are few pages more attractive than the story of Jocelin of Brakelond, Abbot Hugo, Abbot Samson, and the festival of St. Edmund, which all pass away as in a vision leaving " a mutilated black ruin amidst green expanses," — as we so often see in our England to- day after the trampling of seven centuries over the graves of the early monks. And then, when the preacher passes suddenly from the twelfth century to the nineteenth, from toiling and ascetic monks to cotton spinners and platform orators, the effect is electric, — as though some old Benedictine rose from the dead and began to preach in the crowded streets of a city of factories. Have we yet, after fifty years of this time of tepid hanker- ing after Socialism and Theophilanthropic experi- ments, got much farther than Thomas Carlyle in his preaching in Book IV. on " Aristocracies," " Captains of IndustrjV "The Landed," "The Gifted"? What truth, what force in the aphorism : — " To predict the Future, to manage the Present, would not be so impossible, had not the Past been so sacrilegiously mishandled ; effaced, and what is worse, defaced ! " — " Of all Bibles, the frightfulest to disbelieve in is 60 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ii this ' Bible of Universal History.'" — " The Leaders of Industry, if Industry is ever to be led, are virtually the Captains of the World." What new meaning that phrase has acquired in these fifty years! " Men of letters may become a ' chivalry,' an actual instead of a virtual Priesthood." Well ! not men of letters exactly: but perhaps philosophers, with an adequate moral, and scientific training. Here, as so often, Carlyle just missed a grand truth to which his insight and nobility of soul had led him, through his perverse inability to accept any systematic philosophy, and through his habit to listen to the whispering of his own heart as if it were equivalent to scientific cer- tainty. But the whole book, Past and Present, is a splendid piece and has done much to mould the thought of our time. It would impress us much more than it does, were it not already become the very basis of all sincere thought about social prob- lems and the future conditions of industry. Of the Cronnveir s Letters and Speeches (1845) ^^'^ have already spoken, as the greatest of our authors effective products, inasmuch as it produced the most definite practical result in moulding opinion, and a result of the highest importance. But it is not, as w^e have seen, a work of art, or even an organic work at all, and it cannot compare in literary charm with some other of the author's works. We do not turn to the Cromwell again and again, as we do to the French Revohition, or to Sartor, which we can take up from time to time as we do a poem or a romance. Many of the great books of the world are not read and re-read by the public, just as none but special students continually resort to the Novum Organum, THOMAS CARLYLE 6 1 or the Wealth of Nations. For similar reasons, the Cromwell will never be a favourite book with the next century, as it cannot be said to have been with ours. It has done its work with masterly power; and its work will endure. And some day perhaps, from out these materials, and those collected by Mr. Gardiner, and by ol irepl Gardiner, a L(f. of Crom- well may be finally composed. It is true that Carlyle's determination to force Oliver upon us as perfect saint and infallible hero is irritating and sometimes laughable; it is true that his zeal to be-dwarf every one but Cromwell himself is unjust and untrue; and the depreciation of every man who declines to play into Oliver's hands is too often manifest. But, on the whole, the judgments are so sound, the supporting authorities are so over- whelming, the work of verification is so thorough, so scrupulous, so perfectly borne out by all subsequent research, — that the future will no doubt look on the Cromwell, not only as the most extraordinary, but the most satisfactory and effective of all Carlyle's work; although, for the reasons stated, it can never have the largest measure of his literary charm or possess the full afflatus of his poetic and mystical genius. By the time that Cromwell was published, Thomas Carlyle was turned of fifty, and had produced nearly two-thirds of his total work. It may be doubted if any later book will be permanently counted amongst his masterpieces. Friedrich, for reasons set forth, was an attempt in late life to repeat the feat of the Cromwell: it was a much less urgent task: and it was not so well performed. The Latter-Day Pam- 62 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE \\ pli!its (1850) do not add much that is new to Past and P ITS c fit (1843) or to Sartor (183 1) ; and little of what they add is either needful or true. The world had been fully enlightened about Wind-bags, Shams, the approach to Tophet, Stump-orators, Palaver- Parliaments, Phantasm-Captains, and the rest of the Sartorian puppet-pantomime. There was a profound truth in all of these invectives, warnings, and prophe- cies. But the prophet's voice at last got so shrieky and monotonous, that instead of warning and inspir- ing a second generation, these terrific maledictions began to pall upon a practical world. An ardent admirer of the prophet has said that, when he first heard Carlyle speak face to face, he could hardly resist the impression that he was listening to an actor personating the Sage of Chelsea, and mimick- ing the stock phrases of the Lattcr-Day PampJdcts. Certainly no man of sense can find any serious guid- ance on any definite social problem from these " Pamphlets " of his morbid decline. Carlyle at last sat eating his heart out, like Napoleon on St. Helena. His true friends will hasten to throw such a decent covering as Japhet and Shem threw around Noah, over the latest melancholy outbursts about Negroes, Reformers, Jamaica massacres, and the anticipated conflagration of Paris by the Germans. It is pitiful indeed to find in " the collected and revised works," thirty-six volumes, the drivel of his Pro-Slavery advocacy, and of ill-conditioned snarling at honest men labouring to reform ancient abuses. It is perilous for any man, however consummate be his genius, to place himself on a solitary rock apart from all living men and defiant of all before him, as THOMAS CARLYLE 63 the sole source of truth out of his own inner con- sciousness. It is fatal to any man, however noble his own spirit, to look upon this earth as " one fuliginous dust-heap," and the whole human race as a mere herd of swine rushing violently down a steep place into the sea. Nor can the guidance of mankind be with safety entrusted to one who for eighty-six years insisted on remaining by his own hearth-stone a mere omnivorous reader and omnige- nous writer of books. Carlyle was a true and pure " man of letters," looking at things and speaking to men, alone in his study, through the medium of printed paper. All that a " man of letters," of great genius and lofty spirit, could do by consuming and producing mere printed paper, he did. And as the " supreme man of letters " of his time he will ever be honoured and long continue to be read. He deliber- ately cultivated a form of speech which made him unreadable to all except English-speaking readers, and intelligible only to a select and cultivated body even amongst them. He wrote in what, for practical purposes, is a local, or rather personal, dialect. And thus he deprived himself of that world-wide and European influence which belongs to such men as Hume, Gibbon, Scott, Byron, — even to Macaulay, Tennyson, Dickens, Ruskin, and Spencer. But his name will stand beside theirs in the history of British thought in the nineteenth century; and a devoted band of chosen readers, wherever the Anglo-Saxon tongue is heard, will for generations to come continue to drink inspiration from the two or three master- pieces of the Annandale peasant-poet. Ill LORD MACAULAY Macaulay, who counted his years of hfe by those of this century, may fairly claim to have had the greatest body of readers, and to be the most admired prose-writer of the Victorian Age. It is now some seventy years since his first brilliant essay on " Mil- ton " took the world by storm. It is half a century since that fascinating series of Essays was closed, and little short of that time since his famous History appeared. The editions of it in England and in America are counted by thousands; it has six trans- lations into German, and translations into ten other European languages. It made him rich, famous, and a peer. Has it given him a foremost place in Eng- lish literature? Here is a case where the judgment of the public and the judgment of experts is in striking contrast. The readers both of the Old and of the New World continue to give the most practical evidence that they love his books. Macaulay is a rare example of a writer all of whose works are almost equally popular, and believed by many to be equally good. Essays, Lays, History, Lives, — all are read by mil- lions; as critic, poet, historian, biographer, Macaulay Ill LORD MAC AULA Y 65 has achieved world-wide renown. And yet some of our best critics deny him either fine taste, or subtlety, or delicate discrimination, catholic sympathies, or serene judgment. They say he is always more de- claimer than thinker, — more advocate than judge. The poets deny that the Lays are poetry at all. The modern school of scientific historians declare that the History is a splendid failure, and it proves how rotten was the theory on which it is constructed. The pur- ists in style shake their heads over his everlasting antitheses, the mannerism of violent phrases and the perpetual abuse of paradox. His most indulgent friends admit the force of these defects, which they usually speak of as his "limitations" or his "methods." Here, indeed, is an opportunity for one of those long- drawn antitheses of which Macaulay was so great a master. How he would himself have revelled in the paradox, — " that books which were household words with every cowboy in Nevada, and every Baboo in Bengal, were condemned by men of culture as the work of a Philistine and a mannerist; " " how ballads which were the delight of every child were ridiculed by critics as rhetorical jingles that would hardly win a prize in a public school; " " how the most famous of all modern reviewers scarcely gave us one ex- ample of delicate appreciation or subtle analysis ; " how it comes about " that the most elaborate of modern histories does not contain an idea above the commonplaces of a crammer's text-book," — and so forth, in the true Black-and-White style which is so clear and so familiar. But let us beware of applying to Macaulay himself that tone of exaggeration and laborious antithesis which he so often applied to 5 66 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE iii Others. Boswcll, he says, was immortal, " becarise he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb." It would be a feeble parody to retort that Macaulay became a great literary power *'^r^^7^5^ he had no philosophy, little subtlety, and a heavy hand." For my part, I am slow to believe that the judgment of the whole English-speaking race, a judgment maintained over more than half a century, can be altogether wrong; and the writer who has given such delight, has influenced so many writers, and has taught so much to so many persons, can hardly have been a shallow mannerist, or an ungovernable partisan. No one denies that Macaulay had a prodigious know- ledge of books; that in literary fecundity and in varied improvisation he has rarely been surpassed ; that his good sense is unfailing, his spirit manly, just, and generous ; and lastly, that his command over language had unequalled qualities of precision, energy, and brilliance. These are all very great and sterling qualities. And it is right to acknowledge them with no unstinted honour, — even whilst we are fully con- scious of the profound shortcomings and limitations that accompanied but did not destroy them. In a previous paper we discussed the permanent contribution to English literature of Thomas Carlyle ; and it is curious to note how complete a contrast these two famous writers present. Carlyle was a simple, self-taught, recluse man of letters : Macaulay was legislator, cabinet minuter, orator, politician, peer, — a pet of society, a famous talker, and member of numerous academies. Carlyle was poor, despond- ent, morbid, and cynical: Macaulay was rich, opti- mist, overflowing with health, high spirits, and good Ill LORD MA CAUL AY 6/ nature. The one hardly ever knew what the world called success: the other hardly ever knew failure. Carlyle had in him the elements that make the poet, the prophet, the apostle, the social philosopher. In Macaulay these were singularly wanting; he was the man of affairs, the busy politician, the rhetorician, the eulogist of society as it is, the believer in material progress, in the ultimate triumph of all that is prac- tical and commonplace, and in the final discomfiture of all that is visionary and Utopian. The Teufels- drockhian dialect is obscure even to its select students : the Macaulay sentence is plain as that of Swift him- self. Carlyle's gospel is full of passion, novelty, suggestion, theory, and social problems. Macaulay turned his back on social problems and disdained any kind of gospel. He had no mission to tell the world how bad it is ; on the contrary, he was never wearied with his proofs that it ought to be well satisfied with its lot and its vast superiority in all things to its ancestors. The great public, wherever English books pene- trate, from the White Sea to Australia, from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, loves the brilliant, manly, downright optimist; the critics and the philosophers care more for the moody and prophetic pessimist. But this does not decide the matter; and it does not follow that either public or critic has the whole truth. If books were written only in the dialect and with the apocalyptic spirit of Sartor, it is certain that mil- lions would cease to read books, and could gain little from books if they did. And if the only books were such " purple patches " of history as Macaulay left us, with their hard and fast divisions of men into 68 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE iii sheep and goats, and minute biographies of fops, pedants, and grandees, narrated in the same resonant, rhetorical, unsympathetic, and falsely emphatic style, — this generation would have a very patchwork idea of past ages and a narrow sense of the resources of our English language. There is room, for both liter- ary schools, and we need teachers of many kinds. We must not ask of any kind more than they can give. Macaulay has led millions who read no one else, or who never read before, to know something of the past, and to enjoy reading. He will have done them serious harm if he has persuaded them that this is the best that can be done in historical literature, or that this is the way in which the English language can be most fitly used. Let us be thankful for his energy, learning, brilliance. He is no priest, philoso- pher, or miaster. Let us delight in him as a fireside companion. In one thing all agree, — critics, public, friends, and opponents. Macaulay's was a life of purity, honour, courage, generosity, affection, and manly persever- ance, almost without a stain or a defect. His life, it was true, was singularly fortunate, and he had but few trials, and no formidable obstacles. He was bred up in the comfortable egoism of the opulent middle classes ; the religion of comfort, laisser-fatre, and social order was infused into his bones. But, so far as his traditions and temper would permit, his life was as honourable, as unsullied, and as generous, as ever was that of any man who lived in the fierce light that beats upon the famous. We know his nature and his career as well as we know any man's ; and we find it on every side wholesome, just, and right. in LORD MAC AULA Y 69 He has been fortunate in his biographers, and amply- criticised by the best judges. His nephew, Sir George Trevelyan, has written his life at length in a fine book. Dean Milman and Mark Pattison have given us vignettes ; Cotter Morison has adorned the Men of Letters series with a delightful and sympa- thetic sketch ; and John Morley and Leslie Stephen have weighed his work in the balance with judicial acumen and temperate firmness. There is but one voice in all this company. It was a fine, generous, honourable, and sterling nature. His books deserve their vast popularity and may long continue to main- tain it. But Macaulay must not be judged amongst philosophers, — nor even amongst the real masters of the English language. And, unless duly corrected, he may lead historical students astray and his imi- tators into an obtrusive mannerism. I>et us take a famous passage from one of his most famous essays, written in the zenith of his powers after his return from India, at the age of forty, — ^an essay on a grand subject which never ceased to fas- cinate his imagination, composed with all his amazing resources of memory and his dazzling mastery of colour. It is the third paragraph of his well-known review of Von Ranke's History of the Popes. The passage is familiar to all readers, and some of its phrases are household words. It is rather long as well as trite; but it contains in a single page such a profusion of historical suggestion ; it is so vigorous, so characteristic of Macaulay in all his undoubted resources as in all his mannerism and limitations ; it is so essentially true, and yet so thoroughly obvious ; it is so grand in form, and yet so meagre in philoso- 70 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE m phic logic, that it may be worth while to analyse it in detail; and for that purpose it must be set forth, even though it conve\- to most readers little more than a sonorous truism. There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deser\-ing of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilization. No other institu- tion is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphi- theatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth ; and far beyond Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy ; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth, to the farthest ends of the world, missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated her for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascen- dancy extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which, a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and Ill LORD MA CAUL AY 7 1 fifty millions ; and it will be difficult to show that all the other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the eccle- siastical establishments that now exist in the world ; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had crossed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast soli- tude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's. Here we have Macaulay in all his strength and all his Hmitations. The passage contains in the main a solid truth — a truth which was very little accepted in England in the year 1840 — a truth of vast import and very needful to assert. And this truth is clothed in such pomp of illustration, and is hammered into the mind with such accumulated blows; it is so clear, so hard, so coruscating with images, that it is im- possible to escape its effect. The paragraph is one never to be forgotten, and not easy to be refuted or qualified. No intelligent tiro in history can read that page without being set a-thinking, without feeling that he has a formidable problem to solve. Tens of thousands of young minds must have had that deeply-coloured picture of Rome visibly before them in many a Protestant home in England and in Amer- ica. Now, all this is a very great merit. To have posed a great historical problem, at a time when it /- F.A RL ] ' / 'IC TOR I A N LITER A TURK was very faintly grasped, and to have sent it ringing across the EngHsh-spcaking world in such a form that he who runs may read, — nay, he who rides, he who sails, he who watches sheep or stock must read, — this is a real and signal service conferred on literature and on thought. Compare this solid sense with Carlyle's ribaldry about " the three-hatted Papa," " pig's-wash," "servants of the Devil," " this accursed nightmare," and the rest of his execrations, — and we see the difference between the sane judgment of the man of the world and the prejudices of intolerant fanaticism. But, unfortunately, Macaulay, having stated in majestic antitheses his problem of " the unchangeable Church," makes no attempt to provide us with a solu- tion. This splendid eulogium is not meant to con- vert us to Catholicism, — very far from it. Macaulay was no Catholic, and had only a sort of literary admiration for the Papacy. As Mr. Cotter Morison has shown, he leaves the problem just where he found it, and such theories as he offers are not quite trust- worthy. He does not suggest that the Catholic Church is permanent because it possesses truth: but, rather, because men's ideas of truth are a matter of idiosyncrasy or digestion. The whole essay is not a very safe guide to the history of Protestantism or of Catholicism, though it is full of brilliant points and sensible assertions. And in the end our essayist, the rebel from his Puritan traditions, and the close ally of sceptical Gallios, after forty pages of learned pros and cons, declares that he will not say more for fear of " exciting angry feelings." He rather sneers at Protestant fervour; he declaims grand sentences LORD MAC AULA Y 73 about Catholic fervour. He will not declare for either of them; and it does not seem to matter much in the long run for which men declare, provided they can be kept well in hand by saving common-sense. In the mean time the topic is a mine of paradox to the picturesque historian. This is not philosophy, it is not history, but it is full of a certain rich literary seed. The passage, though a truism to all thoughtful men, was a striking novelty to English Protestants fifty years ago. But it will hardly bear a close scru- tiny of these sweeping, sharp-edged, " cock-sure " dogmas of which it is composed. The exact propo- sitions it contains may be singly accurate; but as to the most enduring " work of human policy," it is fair to remember that the Civil Law of Rome has a con- tinuous history of at least twenty-four centuries ; that the Roman Empire from Augustus to the last Con- stantine in New Rome endured for fifteen centuries; and from Augustus to the last Hapsburg it endured for eighteen centuries. There is a certain ambiguity between the way in which Macaulay alternates be- tween the Papacy and the Christian Church, which are not at all the same thing. The Papacy, as a European or cosmical institution, can hardly be said to have more than twelve centuries of continuous history on the stage of the world. The religion and institutions of Confucius and of Buddha have twice that epoch ; and the religion and institutions of Moses have thirty centuries ; and the Califate in some form or other is nearly coeval with the Papacy. The judicious eulogist has guarded himself against denying in words any of these facts; but a cool sur- 74 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE in vey of universal history will somewhat blunt the edge of Macaulay's trenchant phrases. After all, we must admit that the passage as a whole, apart from the superlatives, is substantially true, and contains a most valuable and very striking thought. Passing from the thought to the form of this famous passage, with what a wealth of illustration is it en- forced, with what telling contrasts, with what gor- geous associations ! Plow vivid the images, how stately the personages, who are called up to heighten the lights of the tableau of the Vatican ! Ancient and modern civilisation are joined by it; it recalls the Pantheon and the Colosseum; it gave sanction to the Empire of Charlemagne and to that of Napoleon, it inspired Augustin, and confronted Attila ; Venice is a mere modern foundation; the Church is older than Hengist and Horsa, Clovis, or Mahomet; yet it stretches over the Atlantic continent from Missouri to Cape Horn, and still goes on conquering and to conquer. And the climax of this kaleidoscopic " symphony in purple and gold " — theNewZealander sketching the ruins of St. Paul's from a broken arch of London Bridge — has become a proverb, and is repeated daily by men v/ho never heard of Macaulay, much less of Von Ranke, and is an inimitable bit of picturesque colouring. It is very telling, nobly hyperbolic, no man can misunderstand it, or forget it. The most practised hand will not find it easy to " go one better than" Macaulay in a swingeing trope. It is a fascinating literary artifice, and it has fascinated many to their ruin. In feebler hands, it degenerates into what in London journalistic slang is known as " telegraphese." A pocket encyclopaedia and a co- Ill LORD MACAULAY 'JC^ pious store of adjectives have enabled many a youth to roar out brilHant articles " as gently as a sucking dove." But all men of power have their imitators, and are open to parody and spurious coining. Now, Macaulay, however brilliant and kaleidoscopic, is always using his own vast reading, his own warm imagination, his unfailing fecundity, and his sterling good sense. Turn to the style of the passage, — it is perfectly pellucid in meaning, rings on the ear like the crack of a rifle, is sonorous, rich, and swift. One can fancy the whole passage spoken by an orator; indeed it is difficult to resist the illusion that it was " declaimed " before it was written. We catch the oratorial tags and devices, the repeated phrase, the incessant anti- thesis, the alternate rise and fall of eloquent speech. It is declamation — fine declamation — but we miss the musical undertones, the subtle involutions, the unexpected bursts, and mysterious cadences of really great written prose. The term " the Republic of Venice " is repeated three times in three lines : the term " the Papacy " is repeated three times in two lines. Any other writer would substitute a simple " it " for most of these ; and it is difificult to see how the paragraph would lose. The orator aids his hearers by constant repetition of the same term ; the writer avoids this lest he prove monotonous. The short sentences of four or five words interposed to break the torrent — the repetition of the same words — the sea-saw of black and white, old and young, base and pure — all these are the stock-in-trade of the rhetorician, not of the master of written prose. Now, Macaulay was a rhetorician, a consummate '](S EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE in rhetorician, who wrote powerful invectives or pane- gyrics in massive rhetoric which differed from speeches mainly in their very close fibre, in their chiselled phrasing, and above all in their dazzling profusion of literary illustration. If it was oratory, it was the oratory of a speaker of enormous reading, inexhaus- tible memory, and consummate skill with words. There is nothing at all exceptional about this pas- sage which has been chosen for analysis. It is a fair and typical piece of Macaulay's best style. Indeed his method is so uniform and so mechanical that any page of his writing exhibits the same force and the same defects as any other. Take one of the most famous of his scenes, the trial of Warren Hastings, toward the end of that elaborate essay, written in 1 841. Every one knows the gorgeous and sonorous description of Westminster Hall, beginning — "The place was worthy of such a trial." In the next sen- tence the word " hall " recurs five times, and the rela- tive " which " occurs three times, and is not related to the same noun. Ten sentences in succession open with the pronoun "there." It is a perfect galaxy of varied colour, pomp, and illustration ; but the effect is somewhat artificial, and the whole scene smells of the court upholsterer. The "just sentence of Bacon " pairs off with "the just absolution of Somers ; " the " greatest painter " sits beside the " greatest scholar of the age ; " ladies have " lips more persuasive than those of Fox ; " there, too, is " the beautiful mother of a beautiful race." And in the midst of these long- drawn superlatives and glittering contrasts come in short martial phrases, as brief and sharp as a drill- sergeant's word of command. " Neither military nor Ill LORD MACAULAY -JJ civil pomp was wanting." — " The avenues were lined with grenadiers." — "The streets were kept clear by- cavalry." No man can forget these short, hard decisive sentences. The artificial structure of his paragraphs grew upon Macaulay with age. His History of England opens with a paragraph of four sentences. Each of these begins with " I purpose," " I shall ; " and the last sentence of the four has ten clauses each beginning with " how." The next paragraph has four succes- sive sentences beginning " It will be seen," — and the last sentence has again three clauses each beginning with " how." The fourth paragraph contains the word " I," four times in as many lines. This method of composition has its own merits. The repetition of words and phrases helps the perception and pre- vents the possibility of misunderstanding. Where effects are simply enumerated, the monotony of form is logically correct. Every successive sen- tence heralded by a repeated " how," or " there," or *' I," adjusts itself into its proper line without an effort of thought on the reader's part. It is not graceful ; it is pompous, and distinctly rhetorical. But it is eminently clear, emphatic, orderly, and easy to follow or to remember. Hence it is unpleasing to the finely attuned ear, and is counted somewhat vulgar by the trained lover of style, whilst it is immensely popular with those who read but little, and is able to give them as much pleasure as it gives instruction. The famous passage about Westminster Hall, written in 1841, may be compared with the equally known passage on the Chapel in the Tower which occurs in the fifth chapter of the Historyy written in 78 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE in 1848. It begins as all lovers of English remember, — " In truth there is no sadder spot on the eartli than this little cemetery." The passage continues with "there" and " thither" repeated eight times; it bristles with contrasts, graces and horrors, antithesis, climax, and sonorous heraldries. " Such was the dust with which the dust of Monmouth mingled." It is a fine paragraph, which has impressed and de- lighted millions. But it is, after all, rather facile mor- alising; its rhetorical artifice has been imitated with success in many a prize essay and not a few tall-talk- ing journals. How much more pathos is there in a stanza from Gray's Elegy, or a sentence from Car- lyle's Bastille, or Burke's French Reiwlution ! The habit of false emphasis and the love of super- latives is a far worse defect, and no one has attempted to clear Macaulay of the charge. It runs through every page he wrote, from his essay on Milton, with which he astonished the town at the age of twenty- five, down to the close of his History wherein we read that James II. valued Lord Perth as "author of the last improvements on the thumb-screw." Indeed no more glaring example of Macaulay's megalomania or taste for exaggeration can be found than the famous piece in the Milton on the Restoration of Charles II. Then came those days, never to be recalled without a blush, the days of servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love, of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the par- adise of cold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. The king cringed to his rival that he might trample on his people, sank into a viceroy of France, and pocketed, with complacent infamy, her de- Ill LORD MACAULAY 79 grading insults, and her more degrading gold. The caresses of harlots and the jests of buffoons regulated the policy of the State. The government had just ability enough to deceive and just religion enough to persecute. The prin- ciples of liberty were the scoff of every grinning courtier, and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean. In every high place, worship was paid to Charles and James, Belial and Moloch ; and England propitiated these obscene and cruel idols with the blood of her best and bravest chil- dren. Crime succeeded to crime, and disgrace to disgrace, till the race, accursed of God and man, was a second time driven forth, to wander on the face of the earth, and to be a by-word and a shaking of the head to the nations. This is vigorous invective, in the style of Cicero against Catiline, or Junius attacking a duke; it is brilliant rhetoric and scathing satire. At bottom it has substantial truth, if the attention is fixed on Whitehall and the scandalous chronicle of its fre- quenters. It differs also from much in Macaulay's invectives in being the genuine hot-headed passion of an ardent reformer only twenty-five years old. It is substantially true as a picture of the Court at the Restoration : but in form how extravagant, even of that! Charles II. is Belial; James is Moloch; and Charles \?> propitiated by the blood of English- men ! — Charles, easy, courteous, good-natured, profli- gate Charles. And all this of the age of the Paradise Lost and the Morning Hymn, of Jeremy Taylor, Izaak Walton, Locke, Newton, and Wren ! Watch Macaulay banging on his antithetic drum, — "ser- vitude without loyalty and sensuality without love." — "dwarfish talents and gigantic vices," — "ability enough to deceive," — "religion enough to per- 8o EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE in secute." Every phrase is a superlative ; every word has its contrast; every sentence has its cHmax. And withal let us admit that it is tremendously powerful, that no one who ever read it can forget it, and few even who have read it fail to be tinged with its fury and contempt. And, though a tissue of superlatives, it bears a solid truth, and has turned to just thoughts many a young spirit prone to be fascinated by Charles's good-nature, and impressed with the halo of the divine consecration of kings. But the savage sarcasms which are tolerable in a passionate young reformer smarting under the follies of George IV., are a serious defect in a grave histo- rian, when used indiscriminately of men and women in every age and under every condition. In his Machiavelli, Macaulay hints that the best histories are perhaps "those in which a little of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed." " Much," he says, " is gained in effect." It is to be feared that this youthful indiscretion was never wholly purged out of him. Boswell, we know, was " a dunce, a par- asite, and a coxcomb," — a7id therefore immortal. He was one of " the smallest men that ever lived," of " the meanest and feeblest intellect," " servile," " shallow," " a bigot and a sot," and so forth, — and yet " a great writer, because he was a great fool." We all know what is meant ; and there is a substra- tum of truth in this; but it is tearing a paradox to tatters. How differently has Carlyle dealt with poor dear Bozzy ! Croker's Boswell' s JoJuison " is as bad as bad can be," full of " monstrous blunders," (he had put 1761 for 1766), "gross mistakes," "for which a schoolboy would be flogged." Southey is in LORD M AC AULA Y 8 1 " utterly destitute of the power of discerning truth from falshood." He prints a joke which " is enough to make us ashamed of our species." Robert Mont- gomery pours out *' a roaring cataract of nonsense." One of his tropes is "the worst simihtude in the world." And yet Macaulay can rebuke Johnson for " big words wasted on Httle things " ! Neither Cicero, Milton, Swift, nor Junius ever dealt in more furious words than Macaulay, who had not the excuse of controversy or passion. Frederick William of Prussia was "the most execrable of fiends, a cross between Moloch and Puck ; " " his palace was hell ; " compared with the Prince, afterwards Frederick the Great, " Oliver Twist in the workhouse, and Smike at Dotheboys Hall were petted children." It would be difficult for Mark Twain to beat that. "The follies and vices of King John were the salvation of England." Cranmer was peculiarly fitted to or- ganise the Church of England by being " unscrupu- lous, indifferent, a coward, and a time-server." James I. was given to " stammering, slobbering, shedding unmanly tears," alternating between the bufifoon and the pedagogue. James H. " amused himself with hearing Covenanters shriek; " he was "a libertine, singularly slow and narrow in understanding, obstinate, harsh, and unforgiving." The country gentleman of that age talked like " the most ignorant clown ; " his wife and daughter were in taste " below a stillroom maid of the present day." The chaplain was a mere servant, and was expected to marry a servant girl whose character had been blown upon. But it ought to be remembered that all of these descriptions are substantially true. Macaulay's pic- 6 EARLY ]'JC'1VRIAN LITERATURE tures of the Stuarts, of Cromwell, of the Restoration and its courtiers, of Milton, of William III., arc all faithful and just; Boswell was often absurd; Southcy was shallow; Montgomery 7tv?j" an impostor; Fred- erick William c//V/ treat his son brutally; the country squire and the parson two centuries ago were much rougher people than they are to-day. And if Ma- caulay had simply told us this in measured language of this kind, he would have failed in beating his lesson into the mind. Not only was " a little of fictitious narrative judiciously employed," but not a little of picturesque exaggeration and redundant superlatives. Carlyle is an even worse offender in this line. Did he not call Macaulay himself " squat, low-browed, commonplace," — "a poor creature, with his diction- ary literature and his saloon arrogance," — "no vision in him," — " will neither see nor do any great thing " ? ^ Ruskin, Freeman, Froude, and others have been tempted to deal in gross superlatives. But with all these it has been under the stimulus of violent indig- nation. With Macaulay the superlatives pour out as his native vernacular without heat or wrath, as a mere rhetorician's trick, as the favourite tones of a great colourist. And though the trick, like all literary tricks, grows upon the artist, and becomes singularly offensive to the man of taste, it must always be re- membered that, with Macaulay, the praise or blame is usually just and true; he is very rarely grossly unfair and wrong, as Carlyle so often is; and if Macaulay resorts too often to the superlative degree, he is usually entitled to use the comparative degree of the same adjective. 1 Froude's Carlyle, i. 192. Ill LORD I\IACAULAY 83 The style, with all its defects, has had a solid suc- cess and has done great things. By clothing his historical judgments and his critical reflections in these cutting and sonorous periods, he has forced them on the attention of a vast body of readers wherever English is read at all, and on millions who have neither time nor attainments for any regular studies of their own. How many men has Macaulay succeeded in reaching, to whom all other history and criticism is a closed book, or a book in an unknown tongue ! If he were a sciolist or a wrong-headed fanatic, this would be a serious evil. But, as he is substantially right in his judgments, brimful of saving common-sense and generous feeling, and profoundly well read in his own periods and his favourite litera- ture, Macaulay has conferred most memorable ser- vices on the readers of English throughout the world. He stands between philosophic historians and the public very much as journals and periodicals stand between the masses and great libraries. Macaulay is a glorified journalist and reviewer, who brings the matured results of scholars to the man in the street in a form that he can remember and enjoy, when he could not make use of a merely learned book. He performs the office of the ballad-maker or story- teller in an age before books were known or were common. And it is largely due to his influence that the best journals and periodicals of our day are writ- ten in a style so clear, so direct, so resonant. We need not imitate his mannerism ; we may all learn to be outspoken, lucid, and brisk. It is the very perfection of his qualities in rousing the interest of the great public which has drawn 84 EARLY r/CTOK/AX LITER ATURE iii down on Macatilay the grave rebukes of so many fine judges of the higher historical literature. Cotter Morison, Mark Pattison, Leslie Stephen, and John Morley all agree that his style has none of the subtler charms of the noblest prose, that his conception of history is radically unsound, that, in fact, it broke down by its own unwieldy proportions. Mr. Mori- son has very justly remarked that if the History of England had ever been completed on the same scale for the whole of the period as originally designed, it would have run to fifty volumes, and would have occupied in composition one hundred and fifty years. As it is, the eight duodecimo volumes give us the events of sixteen years, from 1685 to 1701 ; so that the history of England from Alfred would require five hundred similar volumes. Now, Gibbon's eight octavo volumes give us the history of the world for thirteen centuries; that is to say. Gibbon has re- counted the history of a century in nearly the same space that Macaulay records the history of a year. There cannot be a doubt that Gibbon's Decline and Fall is immeasurably superior to Macaulay's frag- ment, in thought, in imagination, in form, in all the qualities of permanent history; it stands on a far higher plane ; it will long outlast and overshadow it. Compared with this, Macaulay's delightful and brilliant pictures are mere glorified journalism. Macaulay, who was no braggart, has put it on record that his conception of history was more just than that of Hume, Robertson, Voltaire, and Gibbon. It is perfectly true that his conception was different from theirs, his execution was different, and he does not address the same class of readers. But his con- Ill LORD MAC AULA Y 85 ception of history was not just; it was a mistake. His leading idea was to make history a true romance. He has accompHshed this ; and he has given us a historical novel drawn from aiitJientic documents. This is, no doubt, a very useful thing to do, a most interesting book to read ; it is very pleasant liter- ature, and has a certain teaching of its own to a certain order of readers. But it is not history. It sacrifices the breadth of view, the organic life, the philosophy, the grand continuity of human society. It must be a sectional picture of a very limited period in a selected area ; it can give us only the external ; it inevitably tends to trivial detail and to amusing personalities ; it necessarily blinds us to the slow sequence of the ages. Besides this, it explains none of the deeper causes of movement ; for, to make a picture, the artist must give us the visible and the obvious. History, in its highest sense, is the record of the evolution of humanity, in whole or in part. To compose an historical novel from documents is to put this object aside. History, said Macaulay in his Hal/am, " is a compound of poetry and philoso- phy." But in practice, he substituted word-painting for poetry, and anecdote for philosophy. His own delightful and popular History of England is a compound of historical romance and biographical memoir. Macaulay's strong point was in narrative, and in narrative he has been surpassed by hardly any historian and even by few novelists. Scott and Victor Hugo have hardly a scene more stirring than Macaulay's death of Charles II., Monmouth's rebel- lion, the flight of James II., the trial of Titus Oates, 86 EARLY VICTORIAX LITEKATURE in the inner life of William III. This is a very great quahty which has deservedly made him popular. And if Macaulay had less philosophy than almost any historian of the smallest pretension, he has a skill in narration which places him in a fair line with the greatest. Unfortunately, this superb genius for narration has rarely been devoted to the grander events and the noblest chiefs in history. Even his hero William III, hardly lives in his canvas with such a glowing light as Charles II., Monmouth, and Jeffreys. The expulsion of James II. was a very poor affair if compared with the story of Charles I. and the Parliament. If Macaulay had painted for us the Council Chamber of Cromwell as he has painted the Whitehall of Charles II.; if he had described the battle of Naseby as well as he has pictured the fight of Sedgemoor; if he had narrated the campaigns of Marlborough as brilliantly as he has told that which ended at the Boyne, — how much should we have had! But it could not be. His own conception of his- tory made this impossible. It is well said that he planned his history " on the scale of an ordnance map." He did what a German professor does when he tries to fathom English society by studying the Times newspaper day by day. The enormous mass of detail, the infinitesimal minuteness of view, beat him. As he complained about Samuel Johnson, he runs into " big words about little things." Charles's mistress, her pug-dog, the page-boy who tended the dog, nay, the boy's putative father, occupy the fore- ground : and the poet, the statesman, and the hero retire into the middle distance or the background. LORD MA CAUL AY 8/ What would we not have given to have had Macau- lay's History of England continued down to his own time, the wars of Marlborough, the reign of Anne, the poets, wits, romancers, inventors, reformers, and heroes of the eighteenth century, the careers of Walpole, Chatham, Pitt, Burke, Fox, Nelson, Wel- lington, Brougham, Bentham, and Canning, — the formation of the British Empire, — the great revolu- tionary struggle in Europe ! The one thought which dims our enjoyment of this fascinating collection of memoirs, and these veracious historical romances, is the sense of what we might have had, if their author had been a great historian as well as a magnificent literary artist. IV BENJAMIN DISRAELI Ix the blaze of the pohtical reputation of the Earl of Beaconsfield we are too apt to overlook the liter- ary claims of Benjamin Disraeli. But many of those who have small sympathy with his career as a states- man find a keen relish in certain of his writings ; and it is hardly a paradox to augur that in a few genera- tions more the former chief of the new Tory Democ- racy may have become a tradition, whilst certain of his social satires may continue to be widely read. Bolingbroke, Swift, Sheridan, and Macaulay live in English literature, but are little remembered as poli- ticians; and Burke, the philosopher, grows larger in power over our thoughts, as Burke, the party orator, becomes less and less by time. We do not talk of Viscount St. Albans, the learned Chancellor: we speak only of Bacon, the brilliant writer, the potent thinker. And so perhaps in the next century, we shall hear less of Lord Beaconsfield, the Imperial Prime Minister: but Benjamin Disraeli's pictures of English society and the British Parliament may still amuse and instruct our descendants. It is true that the permanent parts of his twenty works may prove to be small. Pictures, vignettes, IV BENJAMIN DISRAELI 89 sketches, epigrams will survive rather than elaborate works of art ; these gems of wit and fancy will have to be picked out of a mass of rubbish ; and they will be enjoyed for their vivacious originality and Vol- tairean pungency, not as masterpieces or complete creations. That Disraeli wrote much stuff is true enough, but so did Fielding, so did Swift, and Defoe, and Goldsmith. Writers are to be judged by their best ; and it does not matter so very much if that best is little in bulk. Disraeli's social and political satires have a peculiar and rare flavour of their own, charged with an insight and a vein of wit such as no other man perhaps in this century has touched, — so that, even though they be thrown off in sketches and sometimes in mere jcux d' esprit, they bring him into the company of Swift, Voltaire, and Montesquieu. He is certainly inferior to all these mighty satirists both in wit and passion, and also in definite purpose. But he has touches of their lightning-flash irradiating contemporary society. And it seems a pity that the famous Men of Letters series which admits (and rightly admits) Hawthorne and De Quincey, could find no room for the author o{ Ix'wn in Heaven^ The Infernal Marriage, Coningsby, and Lothair. Disraeli's literary reputation has suffered much in England by the unfortunate circumstance of his hav- ing been the leader of a political party. As the chief of a powerful party which he transformed with amazing audacity, as the victorious destroyer of the old Whig oligarchy and the founder of the new Tory democracy, as a man of Jewish birth and alien race, as a man to whom satire was the normal weapon and bombastic affectation a deliberate expedient for daz- 90 EARL V VICTORIAN' LITERA TURE iv zling the weak, — Disraeli, even in his writings, has been exposed in England to a bitter system of dis- paragement which blinds partisans to their real liter- ary merit. His political opponents, and they are many and savage, can see little to admire in his strange romances ; his political worshippers and fol- lowers, who took him seriously as a great statesman, are not fond of imagining their hero as an airy satirist. His romances as well as his satires are wholly unlike anything English; and though he had brilliant liter- ary powers, he never acquired any serious literary education. Much as he had read, he had no learning, and no systematic knowledge of any kind. He was never, strictly speaking, even an accurate master of literary English. He would slip, as it were, uncon- sciously, into foreign idioms and obsolete words. In America, where his name arouses no political preju- dice, he is better judged. To the Englishman, at least to the pedant, he is still a somewhat elaborate jest. Let us put aside every bias of political sympathy and anything that we know or suspect of the nature of the man, and we may find in the writer, Benjamin Disraeli, certain very rare qualities which justify his immense popularity in America, and which ought to maintain it in England. In his preface to LotJiair (October 1870), he proudly said that it had been " more extensively read both by the people of the United Kingdom and the United States than any work that has appeared for the last half century." This singular popularity must have a ground. Dis- raeli, in truth, belongs to that very small group of real political satirists of whom Swift is the type. He IV BENJAAIIN DISRAELI 9 1 is not the equal of the terrible Dean ; but it may be doubted if any Englishman since Swift has had the same power of presenting vivid pictures and decisive criticisms of the political and social organism of his times. It is this Aristophanic gift which Swift had. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rabelais, Diderot, Heine, Beaumarchais had it. Carlyle had it for other ages, and in a historic spirit. There have been far greater satirists, men like Fielding and Thackeray, who have drawn far more powerful pictures of particular char- acters, foibles, or social maladies. But since Swift we have had no Englishman who could give us a vivid and amusing picture of our political life, as laid bare to the eye of a consummate political genius. It must be admitted that, with all the rare qualities of Disraeli's literary work, he hardly ever took it quite seriously, or except as an interlude and with some ulterior aim. In his early pieces he simply sought to startle the town and to show what a wonderfully clever young fellow had descended upon it. In his later books, such as Coniitgsby, Sybil, and Tancrcd, he wished to propound a new party programme. Lothair was a picture of British society, partly indul- gent and sympathetic, partly caustic or contemptuous, but presented all through with a vein of persiflage, mockery, and extravaganza. All this was amusing and original; but every one of these things is fatal to sustained and serious art. If an active politician seeks to galvanise a new party by a series of novels, the romances cannot be works of literary art. If a young man wants only to advertise his own smart- ness, he will not produce a beautiful thing. And if a statesman out of office wishes to amuse himself by 92 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE iv alternate banter and laudation of the very society which he has led and which looks to him as its inspi- ration, the result will be infinitely entertaining, but not a great work of art. Disraeli therefore with literary gifts of a very high order never used them in the way in which a true artist works, and only resorted to them as a means of gaining some practi- cal and even material end. But, if Disraeli's ambition led him to political and social triumphs, for which he sacrificed artistic suc- cess and literary honours, we ought not to be blind to the rare qualities which are squandered in his books. He did not produce immortal romances, — he knew nothing of an ingenious plot, or a striking situation, or a creative character, — but he did give us inimitable political satires and some delicious social pantomimes ; and he presented these with an orginal wit in which the French excel, which is very rare indeed in England. Ask not of Disraeli more than he professes to give you, judge him by his own standard, and he will still furnish you with delightful reading, with suggestive and original thoughts. He is usually inclined to make game of his reader, his subject, and even of himself; but he lets you see that he never forgets this, and never attempts to conceal it. He is seldom dull, never sardonic or cruel, and always clean, healthy, and decent. His heroines are ideal fairy queens, his heroes are all visionary and chivalrous nincompoops; and even, though we know that much of it is whimsical banter and nonsensical fancy, there is an air of refined extravaganza in these books which may continue to give them a lasting charm. IV BENJAMIN DISRAELI 93 The short juvenile drolleries of his restless youth are the least defective as works of art; and, being brief and sinipley^v/A' d' esprit o{ 3. rare order, they are entirely successful and infinitely amusing. Ixiou in Heaven, The Infernal Marriage, and Popanilla., are astonishing products of a lad of twenty-three, who knew nothing of English society, and who had had neither regular education nor social opportunities. They have been compared with the social satirettes of Lucian, Swift, and Voltaire, It is true they have not the fine touch and exquisite polish of the witty Greek of Samosata, nor the subtle irony of Voltaire and Montesquieu, nor the profound grasp of the Dean. But they are full of wit, observation, sparkle, and fun. The style is careless and even incorrect, but it is full of point and life. The effects are rather stagey, and the smartness somewhat strained, — that is, if these boyish trifles are compared with Candide and the Lettres Persanes. As pictures of English society, court, and manners in 1827 painted in fantastic apo- logues, they are most ingenious, and may be read again and again. The Infernal Marriage, in the vein of the Dialogues of the Dead, is the most successful. Ixion is rather broader, simpler, and much more slight, but is full of boisterous fun. Popanilla, a more elaborate satire in direct imitation of Gulliver s Travels, is neither so vivacious nor so easy as the smaller pieces, but it is full of wit and insight. Nothing could give a raw Hebrew lad the sustained imagination and passion of Jonathan Swift; but there are few other masters of social satire with whom the young genius of twenty-three can be compared. These three satires, which together do not fill 200 94 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE iv pages, are read and re-read by busy and learned men after nearly seventy years have passed. And that is in itself a striking proof of their originality and force. It is not fair to one who wrote under the condi- tions of Benjamin Disraeli to take any account of his inferior work : we must judge him at his best. He avowedly wrote many pot-boilers merely for money ; he began to write simply to make the world talk about him, and he hardly cared what the world might say ; and he not seldom wrote rank bombast in open contempt for his reader, apparently as if he had made a bet to ascertain how much stuff the British public would swallow. Vivian Grey is a lump of impudence ; TJie Young Duke is a lump of affectation; Alroy is ambitious balderdash. They all have passages and epigrams of curious brilliancy and trenchant observa- tion ; they have wit, fancy, and life scattered up and down their pages. But they are no longer read, nor do they deserve to be read. Contarini Fleming, Henrietta Temple, Venetia, are full of sentiment, and occasionally touch a poetic vein. They had ardent admirers once, even amongst competent judges. They may still be read, and they have scenes, de- scriptions, and detached thoughts of real charm, and almost of true beauty. They are not, in any sense, works of art; they are ill-constructed, full of the mawkish gush of the Byronic fever, and never were really sincere and genuine products of heart and brain. They were show exercises in the Byronic mode. And, though we may still take them up for an hour for the occasional flashes of genius and wit they retain, no one believes that they can add much permanent glory to the name of Benjamin Disraeli. IV BENJAMIN DISRAELI 95 Apart from the three early burlesques of which we have spoken — -trifles indeed and crude enough, but trifles that sparkle with penetration and wit — the books on which Disraeli's reputation alone can be founded are Coningsby^ Sybil, and Loihair. These all contain many striking epigrams, ingenious theories, original suggestions, vivacious caricatures, and even creative reflections, mixed, it must be admitted, with not a little transparent nonsense. But they are all so charged with bright invention, keen criticism, quaint paradox, they are so entirely unlike anything else in our recent literature, and they pierce, in a Voltairean way, so deeply to the roots of our social and political fabric, that they may long continue to be read. In the various prefaces, and especially in the general preface to LotJiair (of October 1870), Disraeli has fully explained the origin and aim of these and his other works. It is written, as usual, with his tongue in his cheek, in that vein of semi-bombastic paradox which was designed to mystify the simple and to amuse the acuter reader. But there is an inner seriousness in it all; and, as it has a certain correspondence with his public career and achievements, it must be taken as substan- tially true. Coningsby (1844) and 5//;// (1845) were written in the vigour of manhood and the early days of his political ambition, with an avowed pur- pose of founding a new party in Parliament. It must be admitted that they did to some extent effect their purpose, — not immediately or directly, and only as part of their author's schemes. But the Primrose League and the New Tory Democracy of our day bear witness to the vitality of the movement 96 EARL Y VICTORIAN LITER A TURE iv which, fifty )-cnrs acjo, Disraeli propounded to a puzzled world. Lothair (1S70) came twenty-five years later, — when he had outlived his illusions; and in more artistic and more mellow tones he painted the weaknesses of a society that he had failed to inspire, but which it gratified his pride to command. " Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancrcd^' says he, in his grandiose way, "form a real Trilogy." "The deriva- tion and character of political parties" — he goes on to explain — " was the subject of Coiiingsby." " The condition of the people which had been the conse- quence of them " — was the subject of Sybil. " The duties of the Church as a main remedial agency," and " the race who had been the founders of Christi- anity " [although, surely, friend Benjamin, if we are to believe the Gospels, the murderers and persecutors of Christ and His Apostles] — were the subjects of Tancred (1847). Taucred,'Ct\ov\^\ it has some highly amusing scenes, may be dismissed at once. Disraeli fought for the Chosen Race, their endowments and achievements, with wonderful courage and ingenuity. It was perhaps the cause which he had most deeply at heart, from its intimate relation to his own superb ambition and pride. But it has made no real way, nor has it made any converts, unless we count Daniel Dcronda as amongst them. Thackeray's " Codlingsby " has almost extinguished " Sidonia." And the strange phantasmagoria of the Anglican Church, revivified by the traditions of Judaism, and ascending to the throne of St. Peter, is perhaps the most stupendous joke which even Disraeli had ever dared to perpe- trate. In the preface to Lothair we read: — IV BENJAMIN DISRAELI 9/ The tradition of the Anglican Church was powerful. Rest- ing on the Church of Jerusalem, modified by the divine school of Galilee, it would have found that rock of truth which Providence, by the instrumentality of the Semitic race, had promised to St. Peter. Whatever this jargon may mean, the public has allowed it to fall flat. It seems to suggest that the Archbishop of Canterbury, by resuming the tradition of Caiaphas, as " modified " by the Sermon on the Mount, might oust the Pope of Rome as was foretold by the Divine young Jevi'ish reformer when he called the fisherman of Galilee. It is difficult to believe that Disraeli himself was serious in all this. In the last scene, as Tancred is proposing to the lovely Jewess, their privacy is disturbed by a crowd of retainers around the papa and mamma of the young heir. The last lines of Tancred are these : " The Duke and Duchess of Bellamont had arrived at Jerusalem." This is hardly the way in which to preach a New Gospel to a sceptical and pampered generation. But, if the regeneration of the Church of England by a re-Judaising process and by return to the Targum of the Pharisees has proved abortive, it must be admitted that, from the political point of view, the conception announced in the " trilogy," and rhapsodically illustrated in Tancred — the conception of the Anglican Church reviving its political ascend- ancy and developing " the most efficient means of the renovation of the national spirit " — has not proved quite abortive. It shows astonishing prescience to have seen fifty years ago that the Church of England might yet become a considerable political power, and 7 98 EARLY VICTOR I AxV LITERATURE in could be converted, by a revival of Mediaeval tradi- tions, into a potent instrument of the New Tory Democracy. Whatever we may think about the strengthening of the Established Church from the point of view of intellectual solidity or influence with the nation, it can hardly be doubted that in the fifty years that have passed since the date of the " trilogy," the Church as a body has rallied to one party in the State, and has proved a potent ally of militant Imperialism and Tory Democracy. Lord Beacons- field lived to witness that great transformation in the Church of the High and Dry Pluralists and the Simeonite parsons, which he had himself so power- fully organised in Parliament, in society, and on the platform. His successor to-day can count on no ally so sure and loyal as the Church. But it was a wonderful inspiration for a young man fifty years ago to perceive that this could be done, — and to see the way in which it might be done. Coningsby and Sybil at any rate were active forces in the formation of a definite political programme. And this was a programme which in Parliament and in the country their author himself had created, organised, and led to victory. It cannot be denied that they largely contributed to this result. And thus these books have this very remarkable and almost unique character. It would be very difficult to mention anything like a romance in any age or country which had ever effected a direct political result or created a new party. Don Quixote is said to have annihilated chivalry; Tartiijfe dealt a blow at the pretensions of the Church ; and the Marriage of Figaro at those of the old noblesse. It is possible IV BENJAMIN DISRAELI 99 that Bleak House gave some impulse to law reform, and Vanity Fair has relieved us of a good deal of snobbery. But no novel before or since ever created a political party and provided them with a new programme. Cotiingsby and Sybil really did this; and it may be doubted if it could have been done in any other way. " Imagination, in the government of nations " (we are told in the preface to Lothair) " is a quality not less important than reason." Its author trusts much " to a popular sentiment which rested on a heroic tradition and which was sustained by the high spirit of a free aristocracy." Now this is a kind of party programme which it was almost impossible to propound on the platform or in Parliament. These imaginative and somewhat Utopian schemes of " changing back the oligarchy into a generous aristocracy round a real throne," of " infusing life and vigour into the Church as the trainer of the nation," of recalling the popular sym- pathies " to the principles of loyalty and religious reverence," — these were exactly the kind of new ideas which it would be difficult to expound in the House of Commons or in a towns-meeting. In the preface to Coningsby the author tells us that, after reflection, the form of fiction seemed to be the best method of influencing opinion. These books then present us with the unique example of an ambitious statesman resorting to romance as his means of reorganising a political party. There is another side to this feature which is also unique and curiously full of interest. These romances are the only instances in which any statesman of the first rank, who for years was the ruling spirit of a lOO EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE iv great empire, has thrown his political conceptions and schemes into an imaginative form. And these books, from Vivian Grey (1825) to Endyniion (1880), extend over fifty-five years ; some being published before his political career seemed able to begin, some in the midst of it, and the later books after it was ended. In the grandiloquent style of the autobiogra- phical prefaces, we may say that they recall to us the Meditatio7is of Marcus Aurelius, the Political Testa- ment of Richelieu, and the Conversations oi^di'^oX^on at St. Helena. In judging these remarkable works, we ought to remember that they are not primarily romances at all, that they do not compete with genuine romances, and they ought to be read for the qualities they have, not for those in which they fail. They are in part autobiographical sketches, meditations on society, historical disquisitions, and political manifestoes. They are the productions of a statesman aiming at a practical effect, not of a man of letters creating a work of imaginative art. The creative form is quite subsidiary and subordinate. It would be unreason- able to expect in them elaborate drawing of character, complex plot, or subtle types of contemporary life. Their aim is to paint the actual political world, to trace its origin, and to idealise its possible develop- ment. And this is done, not by an outside man of letters, but by the very man who had conquered a front place in this political world, and who had more or less realised his ideal development. They are almost the only pictures of the inner parliamentary life we have ; and they are painted by an artist who was first and foremost a great parliamentary power, IV BENJAMIN DISRAELI lOI of consummate experience and insight. If the artistic skill were altogether absent, we should not read them at all, as nobody reads Lord Russell's dramas or the poems of Frederick the Great. But the art, though unequal and faulty, is full of vigour, original- ity, and suggestion. Taken as a whole, they are quite unique. Coningsby ; or, the Nczv Generation, was the earliest and in some ways the best of the trilogy. It is still highly diverting as a novel, and, as we see to-day, was charged with potent ideas and searching criticism. It was far more real and effective as a romance than anything Disraeli had previously written. There are scenes and characters in the story which will live in English literature. Thackeray could hardly have created more living portraits than *' Rigby," " Tad- pole," and "Taper," or "Lord Monmouth." These are characters which are household words with us like " Lord Steyne " and " Rawdon Crawley." The social pictures are as realistic as those of Trollope, and now and then as bright as those of Thackeray. The love- making is tender, pretty, and not nearly so mawkish as that of " Henrietta Temple " and " Venetia." There is plenty of wit, epigram, squib, and bon mot. There is also none of that rhodomontade which per- vades the other romances, except as to " Sidonia " and the supremacy of the Hebrew race, — a topic on which Benjamin himself was hardly sane. Coningsby, as a novel, is sacrificed to its being a party manifesto and a political programme first and foremost. But as a novel it is good. It is the only book of Disraeli's in which we hardly ever suspect that he is merely trying to fool us. It is not so gay and fantastic as Lothair. LI •TATS -' • •A NT A '. li:= I02 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE But, being far more real and serious, it is perhaps the best of DisracH's novels. As a political manifesto, Coningsby has been an astonishing success. The grand idea of Disraeli's life was to struggle against what he called the " Venetian Constitution," imposed and maintained by the " Whig Oligarchy." As Radical, as Tory, as novelist, as statesman, his ruling idea was " to dish the Whigs," in Lord Derby's historic phrase. And he did " dish the Whigs." The old Whigs have disappeared from English politics. They have either amalgamated with the Tories, become Unionist Con- servatives, henchmen of Lord Salisbury, or else have become Gladstonians and Radicals. The so-called Whigs of 1895, if any politicians so call themselves, are far more Tory than the Whigs of 1844, and the Tories of 1895 are far more democratic than the Whigs of 1844. This complete transformation is very largely due to Disraeli himself Strictly speaking, Disraeli has eliminated from our political arena both " Whig" and " Tory," as under- stood in the old language of our party history. And the first sketch of the new policy was flung upon an astonished public in Coningsby, just fifty years ago. No doubt, the arduous task of educating the Con- servative Party into the new faith of Tory Democracy was not eff'ected by Coningsby alone. But it may be doubted if Mr. Disraeli would have accomplished it by his speeches without his writings. As a sketch of the inner life of the parliamentary system of fifty years ago, Coningsby is perfect and has never been approached. Both Thackeray and Trollope have painted Parliament and public life so far as it could IV BENJAMIN DISRAELI IO3 be seen from a London club. But Disraeli has painted it as it was known to a man who threw his whole life into it, and who was himself a consummate parliamentary leader. Sybil ; or, the Two Nations, the second of the trilogy (1845), was devoted, he tells us, "to the con- ditions of the people," that dismal result of the " Venetian Constitution " and of the " Whig Oli- garchy" which he had denounced in Coningsby. Sybil was perhaps the most genuinely serious of all Disraeli's romances ; and in many ways it was the most powerful. Disraeli himself was a man of sym- pathetic and imaginative nature who really felt for the suffering and oppressed. He was tender-hearted as a man, however sardonic as a politician. He had seen and felt the condition of the people in 1844. It was a time of cruel suffering which also stirred the spirits of Carlyle, Mill, Cobden, and Bright. It led to the new Radicalism of which Mr. Gladstone and Mr. John Morley are eminent types. But the genius of Disraeli saw that it might also become the founda- tion of a new Toryism ; and Sybil was the first public manifesto of the new departure. The political his- tory of the last fifty years is evidence of his insight that, to recover their political ascendancy, a Conser- vative Party must take in hand " the condition of the people," under the leadership of " a generous aris- tocracy," and in alliance with a renovated Church. These are the ideas of Sybil, though in the novel they are adumbrated in a dim and fantastic way. As a romance, Sybil is certainly inferior to Coningsby. As a political manifesto, it has had an almost greater success, and the movement that it launched is far 104 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE iv from exhausted even yet. One of Disraeli's com- rades in tlic new pro,2^ramme of 1844-5 ^^'^s a member of the last Conservative cabinet. And when we con- sider all the phases of Tory Democracy, Socialistic Toryism, and the current type of Christian Socialism, we may come to regard the ideas propounded in Sybil as not quite so visionary as they appeared to the Whigs, Radicals, Free Traders, and Benthamites of fifty years ago. In Lothair, which did not appear until twenty-five years after Sybil, we find an altered and more mellow tone, as of a man who was playing with his own pup- pets, and had no longer any startling theories to pro- pound or political objects to win. For this reason it is in some ways the most complete and artistic of Disraeli's romances. The plot is not suspended by historical disquisitions on the origin of the Whig oligarchy, by pictures of the House of Commons that must weary those who know nothing about it, and by enthusiastic appeals to the younger aristoc- racy to rouse itself and take in hand the condition of the people. In 1870, Mr. Disraeli had little hope of realising his earlier visions, and he did not write Lothair to preach a political creed. The tale is that he avowed three motives, the first to occupy his mind on his fall from power, the second to make a large sum which he much needed, and the third to paint the manners of the highest order of rank and wealth, of which he alone amongst novelists had intimate knowledge. That is exactly what we see in Lothair. It is airy, fantastic, pure, graceful, and extravagant. The whole thing goes to bright music, like a comic opera of Gilbert and Sullivan. There is life and IV BENJAMIN DISRAELI IO5 movement; but it is a scenic and burlesque life. There is wit, criticism, and caricature; but it does not cut deep, and it is neither hot nor fierce. There is some pleasant tom-foolery; but at a comic opera we enjoy this graceful nonsense. We see in every page the trace of a powerful mind ; but it is a mind laufjhing at its own creatures, at itself, at us. Lothair would be a work of art, if it were explicitly presented as a burlesque, such as was The Infernal Marriage, or if we did not know that it was written to pass the time by one who had ruled this great empire for years, and who within a few years more was destined to rule it again. It was a fanciful and almost sympa- thetic satire on the selfish fatuity of the noble, wealthy, and governing orders of British society. But then the author of this burlesque was himself about to ask these orders to admit him to their select ranks, and to enthrone him as their acknowledged chief. As the rancour of party feeling that has gathered round the personality of Beaconsfield subsides, and as time brings new proofs of the sagacity of the judgments with which Benjamin Disraeli analysed the political traditions of British society, we may look for a fresh growth of the popularity of the trilogy and Lotliair. England will one day be as just, as America has always been, to one of our wittiest writers. He will one day be formally admitted into the ranks of the Men of Letters. He has hitherto been kept outside, in a sense, partly by his being a prominent statesman and party chief, partly by his incurable tone of mind with its Semitic and non- English ways, partly by his strange incapacity to acquire the nuances of pure literary English. No I06 EARLY VICTOKIAiY LITERATURE iv English writer of such htcrary genius sh'ps so often into vulgarisms, solecisms, archaisms, and mere slip- shod gossip. But these are after all quite minor defects. His books, even his worst books, abound in epigrams, pictures, characters, and scenes of rare wit. His painting of parliamentary life in England has neither equal nor rival. And his reflections on English society and politics reveal the insight of vast experience and profound genius. V W. M. THACKERAY The literary career of William Makepeace Thackeray- has not a few special features of its own that it is interesting to note at once. Of all the more eminent writers of the Victorian Age, his life was the shortest: he died in 1863 at the age of fifty-two, the age of Shakespeare. His literary career of twenty-six years was shorter than that of Carlyle, of Macaulay, Disraeli, Dickens, Trollope, George Elliot, Froude, or Ruskin. It opened with the reign of the Queen, almost in the very year of Pickwick^ whose author stood beside his grave and lived and wrote for some years more. But these twenty-six years of Thackeray's era of production were full of wonderful activity, and have left us as many volumes of rich and varied genius. And the most striking feature of all is this, — that in these twenty-six full volumes in so many modes, prose, verse, romance, parody, burlesque, essay, biography, criticism, there are hardly more than one or two which can be put aside as worthless and as utter failures ; very few fail in his consummate mastery of style; few can be said to be irksome to read, to re-read, and to linger over in the reading. I08 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATVRE v This mastery over style — a style at once simple, pure, nervous, flexible, pathetic, and graceful — places Thackeray amongst the very greatest masters of English prose, and undoubtedly as the most certain and faultless of all the prose writers of the Victorian Age. Without saying that he has ever reached quite to the level of some lyrical and apocalyptic descants that we may find in Carlyle and in Ruskin, Thackeray has never fallen into the faults of violence and turgidity which their warmest admirers are bound to confess in many a passage from these our two prose-poets. Carlyle is often grotesque ; Macaulay can be pompous; Disraeli, Bulwer, Dickens, are often slovenly and sometimes bombastic; George Eliot is sometimes pedantic, and Ruskin has been stirred into hysterics. But Thackeray's English, from the first page of his first volume to the last page of his twenty-sixth volume, is natural, scholarly, pure, incisive, and yet gracefully and easily modulated, — the language of an English gentleman of culture, wit, knowledge of the world, and consummate ease and self-possession. It is the direct and trenchant language of Swift: but more graceful, more flexible, more courteous. And what is a truly striking fact about Thackeray's mastery of style is this, — that it was perfectly formed from the beginning; that it hardly ever varied, or developed, or waned in the whole course of his literary career; that his first venture as a very young man is as finished and as ripe as his very latest piece, when he died almost in the act of writing the words — " and his heart throbbed with an exquisite bliss'' This prodigious precocity in style, such uniform V IV. M. THACKERAY IO9 perfection of exact composition, are perhaps without parallel in English literature. At the age of twenty- six Thackeray wrote The History of Samuel Tituiarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond. It was produced under very melancholy conditions, in the most un- favourable form of publication, and it was mangled by editorial necessities. And yet it can still be read and re-read as one of Thackeray's masterpieces, trifling and curtailed as it is (for it may be printed in one hundred pages) ; it is as full of wit, humour, scathing insight, and fine pathos in the midst of burlesque, as is Vanity Fair itself. It is already Thackeray in all his strength, with his " Snobs," his " Nobs," his fierce satire, and his exquisite style. Modern romance has no purer, more pathetic, or simpler page than the tale of the death of poor Samuel Titmarsh's first child. Though it is, as it deserves to be, a household word, the passage must be quoted here as a specimen of faultless and beau- tiful style. It was not, however, destined that she and her child should inhabit that little garret. We were to leave our lodgings on Monday morning ; but on Saturday evening the child was seized with convulsions, and all Sunday the mother watched and prayed for it : but it pleased God to take the innocent infant from us, and on Sunday, at midnight, it lay a corpse in its mother's bosom. Amen. We have other children, happy and well, now round about us, and from the father's heart the memory of this little thing has almost faded ; but I do believe that every day of her life the mother thinks of her first-born that was with her for so short a while : many and many a time she has taken her daughters to the grave, in Saint Bride's, where he lies buried ; and she wears still at her neck no EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE v a little, little lock of gold hair, which she took from the head of the infant as he lay smiling in his coffin. It has happened to me to forget the child's birthday, but to her never ; and often in the midst of common talk, comes something that shows she is thinking of the child still, — some simple allu- sion that is to me inexpressibly affecting. Could words simpler, purer, more touching be found to paint a terrible, albeit very common sorrow ! Not a needless epithet, not a false note, not a touch over-wrought ! And this is the writing of an un- known, untried youth ! This exquisitely simple, easy, idiomatic, and ner- vous style marks all Thackeray's work for his twenty-six years of activity, and is equally perfect for whatever purpose it is used, and in whatever key he may choose to compose. It naturally culminates in Vanity Fair, written just in the middle of his literary career. Here not a word is wasted : the profoundest impressions are made by a quiet sentence or a dozen plain words that neither Swift nor Defoe could have surpassed. I know nothing in English literature more powerful than those last lines of the thirty-second chapter of Vanity Fair. For thirty- two chapters we have been following the loves, sor- rows, and anxieties of Amelia Sedley and George Osborne. For four chapters the story has pictured the scene in Brussels on the eve of Waterloo. The women and non-combatants are trembling with ex- citement, anxiety, fear; the men are in the field, whilst the cannon roar all day in the distance, — Amelia half distracted with love, jealousy, and fore- boding. And the wild alternations of hope, terror, V W. M. THACKERAY III grief, and agony are suddenly closed in the last paragraph of Chapter XXXII. No more firing was heard at Brussels, — the pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city : and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart. Take all the great critical scenes in the book, and note how simple, and yet how full of pathos and of power, is the language in which they are described. There is the last parting of George and Amelia as the bugle rings to arms. George came in and looked at her again, entering still more softly. By the pale night-lamp he could see her sweet, pale face, — the purple eyelids were fringed and closed, and one round arm, smooth and white, lay outside of the cover- let. Good God ! how pure she was ; how gentle, how ten- der, and how friendless ! and he, how selfish, brutal, and black with crime ! Heart-stained and shame-stricken, he stood at the bed's foot, and looked at the sleeping girl. How dared he — who was he, to pray for one so spotless ! God bless her ! God bless her ! He came to the bed-side, and looked at the hand, the little soft hand, lying asleep ; and he bent over the pillow noiselessly towards the gentle pale face. The whole tragedy of their lives is given in minia- ture in this touching scene; and yet how natural and commonplace are all the effects of which it is com- posed, how few and simple the words which describe such love and such remorse. It is hard to judge in Vanity Fair which are the more perfect in style, the pathetic and tragic scenes or those which arc charged with humour and epigram. 112 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE v And the scene after George's marriage, when old Osborne burns his will and erases his son's name from the family Bible, — and the scene when Osborne receives his son's last letter — " Osborne trembled long before the letter from his dead son " — " His father could not see the kiss George had placed on the superscription of his letter. Mr. Osborne dropped it with the bitterest, deadliest pang of balked affec- tion and revenge. His son was still beloved and unforgiven." And the scene of " the widow and mother," when young Georgy is born, and the won- derful scene when Sir Pitt proposes marriage to the little green-eyed governess and she is scared into confessing her great secret, and the most famous scene of all, when Rawdon Crawley is released from the sponging-house and finds Lord Steyne with Rebecca alone. It is but a single page. The words spoken are short, brief, plain, — not five sentences pass — "I am innocent," said she — "Make way, let me pass," cried My Lord — " You lie, you coward and villain ! " said Rawdon. There is in all fiction no single scene more vivid, more true, more burnt into the memory, more tragic. And with what noble simplicity, with what incisive reticence, with what subtle anatomy of the human heart, is it recorded. Vanity Fair was written, it is true, under the strain of serial publication, haste, and anxiety, but it is perhaps, even in style, the most truly complete. The wonderful variety, elasticity, and freshness of the dialogue, the wit of the common scenes, the terrible power of the tragic scenes, the perfection of the mise-en-scaic, — the rattle, the fun, the glitter of the Fair are sustained from end to end, from the V IF. M. THACKERAY II3 first words of the ineffable Miss Pinkerton to the Vanitas Vanitatum when the showman shuts up his puppets in their box. There is not in all Vanity Fair a single dull page that we skip, not a bit of padding, no rigmarole of explanation whilst the action stands still. Of what other fiction can this be said? Richardson and even Fielding have their longueurs. Miss Austen is too prone to linger over the tea-table beyond all human patience. And even Scott's de- scriptions of his loved hills grow sometimes unread- able, especially when they are told in a flaccid and slovenly style. But Vajiity Fair is kept up with inexhaustible life and invention, with a style which, for purity and polish, was beyond the reach of Field- ing, Richardson, or Scott. Esmond was composed with even greater care than Vanity Fairy and in the matter of style is usually taken to be Thackeray's greatest master- piece. Its language is a miracle of art. But it is avowedly a tonr de force, — an effort to reproduce an entire book in the form and speech of a century and a half preceding. As a tonr de force it is wonderful ; but in so long a book the effort becomes at last too visible, and undoubtedly it somewhat cramps the freedom of the author's genius. Thackeray was not a born historical romancist, as were Scott and Dumas; nor was he a born historian at all. And when he undertook to produce an elaborate romance in the form and with the colouring of a past age, like George Eliot, he becomes rather too learned, too conscientious, too rigidly full of his authorities; and if as an historian he enters into rivalry with Macaulay, he somewhat loses his cunning as a novelist. Thack- 114 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE v eray's force lay in the comedy of manners. In the comedy of manners we have nothing but Tom Jojics to compare with Vanity Fair. And thougli Thackeray is not equal to the " prose Homer of human nature," he wrote an English even finer and more racy. In Esmond we are constantly pausing to admire the wonderful ingenuity and exquisite grace of the style, studying the language quite apart from the story; and we feel, as we do when we read Milton's Latin poems or Swinburne's French sonnets, that it is a surprising imitation of the original. But at the same time Esmond contains some of the noblest passages that Thackeray ever wrote, scenes and chapters which in form have no superior in English literature. That sixth chapter of the second book, in the cathedral, when Henry Esmond returns to his mistress on the 29th of December, on his birthday. " Here she was weeping and happy. She took his hand in both hers ; he felt her tears. It was a rapture of reconciliation, " — " so for a few moments Esmond's beloved mistress came to him and blessed him." To my mind, there is nothing in English fiction which has been set forth in language of such exquisite purity and pathos. Esmond, too, which may be said to be one pro- longed parody of the great Queen-Anne essayists, contains that most perfect of all parodies in the Eng- lish language, — "The paper out of the Spectator" — in chapter third of the third book. It is of course not a " parody " in the proper sense, for it has no element of satire or burlesque, and imitates not the foibles but the merits of the original, with an absolute illusion. The 341st number of the Spectator, dated V IV. M. THACKERAY II5 Tuesday, April i, 1712, is so absolutely like Dick Steele at his best, that Addison himself would have been deceived by it. Steele hardly ever wrote any- thing so bright and amusing. It is not a " parody " : it is a forgery; but a forgery which required for its execution the most consummate mastery over all the subtleties and mysteries of style. In parody of every kind, from the most admiring imitation down to the most boisterous burlesque, Thackeray stands at the head of all other imitators. The Rejected Addresses of James and Horace Smith (18 1 2) is usually regarded as the masterpiece in this art; and Scott good-humouredly said that he could have mistaken the death of Higginbottom for his own verses. But Thackeray's Novels by Eminent Hands are superior even to the Rejected Addresses. Codlingsby, the parody of Disraeli's Conhigsby, may be taken as the most effective parody in our lan- guage : intensely droll in itself, it reproduces the absurdities, the affectations, the oriental imagination of Disraeli with inimitable wit. Those ten pages of irrepressible fooling are enough to destroy Disraeli's reputation as a serious romancer. No doubt they have unfairly reacted so as to dim our sense of Disraeli's real genius as a writer. When we know Codlingsby by heart, as every one with a sense of humour must do, it is impossible for us to keep our countenance when we take up the palaver about Sidonia and the Chosen Race. The Novels by Em- inent Hands are all good : they are much more than parodies; they are real criticism, sound, wise, genial, and instructive. Nor are they in the least unfair. If the balderdash and cheap erudition of Bulwer and Il6 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE v Disraeli are covered with inextinguishable mirth, no one is offended by the pleasant imitations of Lever, James, and Fenimore Cooper. All the burlesques are good, and will bear con- tinual re-reading; but the masterpiece of all is Rebecca and Rowcna, the continuation in burlesque of Ivanlioc. It is one of the mysteries of literature that we can enjoy both, that the warmest admirers of Scott's glorious genius, and even those who delight in Ivanlioc, can find the keenest relish in Rebecca and Rowena, which is simply the great romance of chivalry turned inside out. But Thackeray's im- mortal burlesque has something of the quality of Cervantes' Do?i Quixote, — that we love the knight whilst we laugh, and feel the deep pathos of human nature and the beauty of goodness and love even in the midst of the wildest fun. And this fine quality runs through all the comic pieces, ballads, burlesques, pantomimes, and sketches. What genial fun in the Rose and the Ring, in Little Billee, in Mrs. Perkins Ball, in the Sketch Book, in Yellowplush. It is only the very greatest masters who can produce extrava- ganzas, puerile tomfooleries, drolleries to delight children, and catchpenny songs, of such a kind that mature and cultivated students can laugh over them for the fiftieth time and read them till they are house- hold words. This is the supreme merit of Don Quix- ote, of Scapin, of Gulliver, oi Robinson Crusoe. And this quality of immortal truth and wit we find in Rebecca and Rowena, in the Rose and the Ring, in Little Billee, in Codlingsby, and YellowplusJi. The bur- lesques have that Aristophanic touch of beauty, pathos, and wisdom mingled with the wildest pantomime. V W. M. THACKERAY WJ A striking example of Thackeray's unrivalled powers of imitation may be seen in the letters which are freely scattered about his works. No one before or since ever wrote such wonderfully happy illustra- tions of the epistolary style of boy or girl, old maid or illiterate man. There never were such letters as those of George Osborne in Vanity Fair, — that letter from school describing the fight between Cufif and Figs is a masterpiece, — the letters of Becky, of Rawdon, of Amelia, — all are perfect reproductions of the writer, as are scores of letters scattered up and down the twenty-six volumes. Nor must we omit, as part of the style, the author's own illustrations. They are really part of the book ; they assist us to understand the characters; they are a very impor- tant portion of the writer's method. None of our great writers ever had this double instrument: and Thackeray has used it with consummate effect. The sketches in Vanity Fair, and in Punch, especially the minor thumb-nail drolleries, are delightful, — true caricatures, — real portraits of character. It is true they are ill-drawn, often impossible, crude, and almost childish in their incorrectness and artlessness. But they have in them the soul of a great caricaturist. They have the Hogarthian touch of a great comic artist. One is tempted to enlarge at length on the merits of Thackeray's style, because it is in his mastery over all the resources of the English language that he surpasses contemporary prose writers. And it is a mastery which is equally shown in every form of composition. There is a famous bit of Byron's about Sheridan to the effect that he had written the best Il8 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE v comedy, made the finest speech, and invented the drcTllest farce in the Enghsh language. And it is hardly extravagant to say of Thackeray that, of all the Englishmen of this century, he has written the best comedy of manners, the best extravaganza, the best burlesque, the best parody, and the best comic song. And to this some of his admirers would add, — the best lectures, and the best critical essays. It is of course true that he has never reached or at- tempted to reach the gorgeous rhapsodies of De Ouincey or the dithyrambic melodies of Ruskin. But these heaven-born Pegasi cannot be harnessed to the working vehicles of our streets. The marvel of Thackeray's command over language is this, — that it is unfailing in prose or in verse, in pathos or in terror, in tragedy or in burlesque, in narrative, in repartee, or in drollery: and that it never waxes or flags in force and precision throughout twenty-six full volumes. Of Thackeray's style, — a style that has every quality in perfection : simplicity, clearness, ease, force, elasticity, and grace, — it is difficult to speak but in terms of unstinted admiration. When we deal with the substance and effective value of his great books we see that, although Thackeray holds his own with the best writers of this century, he cannot be said to hold the same manifest crown of supremacy. One of his strongest claims is the vast quantity and variety of his best work, and the singularly small proportion of inferior work. Fielding himself wrote pitiful trash when he became, as he said, a mere " hackney writer ; " Richardson's Grandison over- comes most readers; Scott at last broke down; W. M. THACKERAY 119 Carlyle, Disraeli, Dickens, and Ruskin have written many things which " we do not turn over by day and turn over by night," to put it as gently as one can. But Thackeray is hardly ever below himself in form, and rarely is he below himself in substance. Pcndemiis is certainly much inferior to Vanity Fair, and Philip is much inferior to Pendennis. The Virginians is far behind EsnioJid. But of the more important books not one can be called in any sense a failure unless it be Lovel the Widower, and The Adventures of Philip. Thackeray's masterpiece beyond question is Vanity Fair, — which as a comedy of the manners of con- temporary life is quite the greatest achievement in English literature since Tom yoncs. It has not the consummate plot of Tom yones ; it has not the breadth, the Shakespearean jollity, the genial humanity of the great " prose Homer; " it has no such beautiful character as Sophia Western. It is not the over- flowing of a warm, genial, sociable soul, such as that of Henry Fielding. But Vanity Fair may be put beside Tom Jones for variety of character, in- tense reality, ingenuity of incident, and profusion of wit, humour, and invention. It is even better written than Tom yoncs ; has more pathos and more tragedy; and is happily free from the nauseous blots into which Harry Fielding was betrayed by the taste of his age. It is hard to say what scene in Vanity Fair, what part, what character, rests longest in the memory. Is it the home of the Sedleys and the Osbornes, is it Queen's Crawley, or the incidents at Brussels, or at Gaunt House; is it George Osborne, or Jos, or Miss Crawley, the Major or the Colonel, I JO EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE v — is it Lord Stej^ne or Rebecca? All are excellent, all seem perfect in truth, in consistency, in contrast. The great triumph of Vanity Fair — the great triumph of modern fiction — is Becky Sharp: a character which will ever stand in the very foremost rank of English literature, if not with Falstaff and Shylock, then with Squire Western, Uncle Toby, Mr. Primrose, Jonathan Oldbuck, and Sam Weller. There is no character in the whole range of literature which has been worked out with more elaborate completeness. She is drawn from girlhood to old age, under every conceivable condition, and is brought face to face with all kinds of persons and trials. In all circumstances Becky is true to herself; her in- genuity, her wit, her selfishness, her audacity, her cunning, her clear, cool, alert brain, even her common- sense, her spirit of justice, when she herself is not concerned, and her good-nature, when it could cost her nothing, — all this is unfailing, inimitable, never to be forgotten. Some good people cry out that she is so wicked. Of course she is wicked : so were lago and Blifil. The only question is, if she be real? Most certainly she is, as real as anything in the whole range of fiction, as real as Tartuff'e, or Gil Bias, Wilhelm Meister, or Rob Roy. No one doubts that Becky Sharps exist : unhappily they are not even very uncommon. And Thackeray has drawn one typical example of such bad women with an anatom- ical precision that makes us shudder. And if Becky Sharp be the masterpiece of Thack- eray's art amongst the characters, the scene of her husband's encounter with her paramour is the master- piece of all the scenes in Vanity Fair, and has no su- V W. M. THACKERAY 121 perior, hardly any equal in modern fiction. Becky, Rawdon Crawley, and Lord Steyne, — all are inimi- tably true, all are powerful, all are fearful in their agony and rage. The uprising of the poor rake almost into dignity and heroism, and his wife's out- burst of admiration at his vengeance, are strokes of really Shakespearean insight. It was with justice that Thackeray himself felt pride in that touch. ''She stood there trembling before him. She admired her hiLsband, strong, brave, victorious ^ It is these touches of clear sight in Becky, her respect for Dobbin, her kindliness to Amelia apart from her own schemes, which make us feel an interest in Becky, loathsome as she is. She is always a woman, and not an inhuman monster, however bad a woman, cruel, heartless, and false. There remains always the perpetual problem if Vanity Fair be a cynic's view of life, the sardonic grin of a misanthrope gloating over the trickery and meanness of mankind. It is well to remember how many are the scenes of tenderness and pathos in Vanity Fair, how powerfully told, how deeply they haunt the memory and sink into the heart. The school life of Dobbin, the ruin of old Sedley and the despair of Amelia, the last parting of Amelia and George, Osborne revoking his will, Sedley broken down, Rawdon in the sponging-house, the birth and boyhood of Georgy Osborne, the end of old Sedley, the end of old Osborne, are as pathetic and humane as anything in our literature. Mature men, who study fiction with a critical spirit and a cool head, admit that the only passages in English romance that they can never read again without faltering, without a 122 EARLY VIC TORI AN LITERATURE v dim eye and a quavering voice, arc these scenes of pain and sorrow in Vanity Fair. The death of old Sedley, nursed by his daughter, is a typical piece, — perfect in simplicity, in truth, in pathos. One night when she stole into his room, she found him awake, when the broken old man made his confession. " Oh, Emmy, I 've been thinking we were very unkind and unjust to you," he said, and put out his cold and feeble hand to her. She knelt down and prayed by his bedside, as he did too, having still hold of her hand. When our turn comes, friend, may we have such company in our prayers. And this is the arch-cynic and misanthrope, grinning at all that is loveable and tender ! It is too often forgotten that Vanity Fai}^ is not intended to be simply the world : it is society, it is fashion, the market where mammon-worship, folly, and dissipation display and barter their wares. Thackeray wrote many other books, and has given us many worthy characters. Dobbin, Warrington, Colonel Newcome, Ethel Newcome, Henry Esmond are generous, brave, just, and true. Neither Esmond, nor The Nczvcomes, nor TJie Virginians are in any sense the work of a misanthrope. And where Thack- eray speaks in his own person, in the lectures on the English Humourists, he is brimful of all that is genial, frank, lenient, and good-hearted. What we know of the man, who loved his friends and was loved by them, and who in all his critical and personal sketches showed himself a kindly, courteous, and considerate gentleman, inclines us to repel this charge of cyni- cism. We will not brand him as a mere satirist, and a cruel mocker at human virtue and goodness. V IV. M. THACKERAY 1 23 This is, however, not the whole of the truth. The consent of mankind, and especially the consent of women, is too manifest. There is something ungenial, there is a bitter taste left when we have enjoyed these books, especially as we lay down Vanity Fair. It is a long comedy of roguery, meanness, selfishness, intrigue, and affectation. Rakes, ruffians, bullies, parasites, fortune-hunters, adventurers, women who sell themselves, and men who cheat and cringe, pass before us in one incessant procession, crushing the weak, and making fools of the good. Such, says our author, is the way of Vanity Fair, — which we are warned to loathe and to shun. Be it so : — but it cannot be denied that the rakes, ruffians, and adventurers fill too large a canvas, are too conspic- uous, too triumphant, too interesting. They are more interesting than the weak and the good whom they crush under foot: they are drawn with a more glowing brush, they are far more splendidly endowed. They have better heads, stronger wills, richer natures than the good and kind ones who are their butts. Dobbin, as the author himself tells us, " is a spooney." Amelia, as he says also, " is a little fool." Peggy O'Dowd, dear old goody, is the laughing-stock of the regiment, though she is also its grandmother. Vanity Fair has here and there some virtuous and generous characters. But we are made to laugh at every one of them to their very faces. And the evil and the selfish characters bully them, mock them, thrust them aside at every page, — and they do so because they are more the stuff of which men and women of any mark are made. There are evil characters in Shakespeare, in Field- 124 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE v inc^, in Goldsmith, in Scott: wc find ruffians, rakes, traitors, and parasites. But they are not paramount, not universal, not unqualified. lago is utterly over- shadowed by Othello, BHfil by Alworthy, Tom Jones by Sophia Western, Squire Thornhill by Dr. Primrose, the reprobate Staunton by the good angel Jeanie Deans. Shakespeare, Fielding, Goethe, Scott draw noble and generous natures quite as well as they paint the evil natures : indeed they paint them better; they enjoy the painting of them more ; they make us enjoy them more. Take this test: if we run over the characters of Shakespeare or of Scott we have to reflect before we find the villains. If we run over the characters in Thackeray, it is an effort of memory to recall the generous and the fine natures. Thackeray has given us some loveable and affectionate men and women ; but they all have qualities w hich lower them and tend to make them either tiresome or ridiculous. Henry Esmond is a high-minded and almost heroic gentleman, but he is glum, a regular kill -joy, and, as his author admitted, something of a prig. Colonel Newcome is a noble true-hearted soldier; but he is made too good for this world and somewhat too innocent, too transparently a child of nature. Warrington, with all his sense and honesty, is rough ; Pendennis is a bit of a puppy ; Clive New- come is not much of a hero ; and as for Dobbin he is almost intended to be a butt. A more serious defect is a dearth in Thackeray of women to love and to honour. Shakespeare has given us a gallery of noble women ; Fielding has drawn the adorable Sophia Western ; Scott has his Jeanie Deans. But though Thackeray has given us V IV. M. THACKERAY 1 25 over and over again living pictures of women of power, intellect, wit, charm, they are all marred by atrocious selfishness, cruelty, ambition, like Becky Sharp, Beatrix Esmond, and Lady Kew; or else they have some weakness, silliness, or narrowness which prevents us from at once loving and respecting them. Amelia is rather a poor thing and decidedly silly; we do not really admire Laura Pendennis; the Little Sister is somewhat colourless; Ethel New- come runs great risk of being a spoilt beauty; and about Lady Castlewood, with all her love and devo- tion, there hangs a certain sinister and unnatural taint, which the world cannot forgive, and perhaps ought not to forgive. The sum of all this is, that in all these twenty-six volumes and hundreds of men and women portrayed, there is not one man or one woman having at once a noble character, perfect generosity, powerful mind, and loveable nature ; not one man or one woman of tender heart and perfect honour, but has some trait that tends to make him or her either laughable or tedious. It is not so with the supreme masters of the human heart. And the world does not condone this, and it is right in not condoning it. But to say this, is not to condemn Thackeray as a cynic. With these many scenes of exquisite tender- ness and pathos, with men and women of such loving hearts and devoted spirits, with the profusion of gay, kindly, childlike love of innocent fun, that we find all through Thackeray's work, he does not belong to the order of the Jonathan Swifts, the Balzacs, the Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice and mean- ness. On the other hand he does not belong to the 126 EARLY VICTOKIAN LITERATURE v order of the Shakespeares, Goethes, and Scotts, to whom human virtue and dignity ahvays remain in the end the supreme forces of human h'fe. Thackeray, with a fine and sympathetic soul, had a creative imagina- tion that was far stronger on the darker and fouler sides of hfe than it was on the brighter and pure side of hfe. He saw the bright and pure side: he loved it, he felt with it, he made us love it. But his artistic genius worked with more free and consum- mate zest when he painted the dark and the foul. His creative imagination fell short of the true equi- poise, of that just vision of c]iiaroscnro, which we find in the greatest masters of the human heart. This limitation of his genius has been visited upon Thackeray with a heavy hand. And such as it is, he must bear it. The place of Thackera}' in English literature will always be determined by his Vanity Fair: which will be read, we may confidently predict, as long as Tom Jones, Clarissa, Tristram SJiandy, The Anti- qtiary, and Pickwick. But all the best of his pieces, even the smaller jeux d' esprit, may be read with delight again and again by young and old. And of the best are — Esmond, The Newconies, Barry Lyn- don, the Book of Snobs, the Hoggarty Diamond, some of the Burlesques and Christinas Books, and the English Humourists. Of these, Esmond has every quality of a great book, except its artificial form, its excessive elaboration of historical colouring, and its unsavoury plot. Beatrix Esmond is almost as won- derful a creation as Becky Sharp ; though, if formed on a grander mould, she has less fascination than that incorrigible minx. The Newcomcs, if in some V IV. M. THACKERAY 12/ ways the most genial of the longer pieces, is plainly without the power of Vanity Fair. And if Barry Lyndon has this power, it is an awful picture of cruelty and meanness. The Book of Snobs and the Hoggarty Diamond were each a kind of prelude to Vanity Fair, and both contain some of its essential marks of pathos and of power. It is indeed strange to us now to remember that both of these books, written with such finished mastery of hand and full of such passages of wit and insight, could have been published for years before the world had recognised that it had a new and consummate writer before it. The Book of Snobs indeed may truly be said to have seriously improved the public opinion of the age, and to have given a death-blow to many odious forms of sycophancy and affectation which passed unrebuked in England fifty years ago. And the Burlesque Romances and the English Hiinionrists have certainly assisted in forming the public taste and in promoting a sound criticism of our standard fiction. Charlotte Bronte dedicated her Jane Eyre, in 1847, to William Makepeace Thackeray, as "the first social regenerator of the day." Such language, though interesting as coming from a girl of singular genius and sincerity, however ignorant of real life, was excessive. But we may truly assert that he has enriched our literature with some classical master- pieces in the comedy of contemporary manners. VI CHARLES DICKENS It is a fearsome thing to venture to say anything now about Charles Dickens, whom we have all loved, enjoyed, and laughed over: whose tales are house- hold words in every home where the English tongue is heard, whose characters are our own school-friends, the sentiment of our youthful memories, our boon- companions and our early attachments. To view him in any critical light is a task as risky as it would be to discuss the permanent value of some fashionable amusement, a favourite actor, a popular beverage, or a famous horse. Millions and millions of old and young love Charles Dickens, know his personages by heart, play at games with his incidents and names, and from the bottom of their souls believe that there never was such fun, and that there never will be con- ceived again such inimitable beings, as they find in his" ever-fresh and ever-varied pages. This is by itself a very high title to honour: perhaps it is the chief jewel in the crown that rests on the head of Charles Dickens. I am myself one of these devotees, of these lovers, of these slaves of his : or at least I can remember that I have been. To have stirred this pure and natural humanity, this force of sympa- VI CHARLES DICKENS 1 29 thy, in such countless millions is a great triumph. Men and women to-day do not want any criticism of Charles Dickens, any talk about him at all. They enjoy him as he is : they examine one another in his books : they gossip on by the hour about his innu- merable characters, his never-to-be-forgotten wag- geries and fancies. No account of early Victorian literature can omit the name of Charles Dickens from the famous writers of the time. How could we avoid notice of one whose first immortal tale coincides with the accession of our Queen, and who for thirty-three successive years continued to pour out a long stream of books that still delight the English-speaking world? When we begin to talk about the permanent place in Eng- lish literature of eminent writers, one of the first definite problems is presented by Charles Dickens. And it is one of the most obscure of such problems ; because, more than almost any writer of our age, Charles Dickens has his own accustomed nook at every fireside: he is a familiar friend, a welcome guest ; we remember the glance of his eye ; we have held his hand, as it were, in our own. The children brighten up as his step is heard ; the chairs are drawn round the hearth, and a fresh glow is given to the room. We do not criticise one whom we love, nor do we suffer others to do so. And there is per- haps a wider sympathy with Charles Dickens as a person than with any other writer of our time. For this reason there has been hardly any serious criti- cism or estimate of Dickens as a great artist, apart from some peevish and sectional disparagement of his genius, which has been too much tinged with 9 I30 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vi academic pedantry and the bias of aristocratic temper or political antagonism. I am free to confess that I am in no mood to pre- tend making up my mind for any impartial estimate of Charles Dickens as an abiding power in English literature. The " personal equation " is in my own case somewhat too strong to leave me with a per- fectly " dry light " in the matter. I will make a clean breast of it at once by saying, that I can remember reading some of the most famous of these books in their green covers, month by month, as they came out in parts, when I was myself a child or " in my "teens." That period included the first ten of the main works from Pickwick down to David Coppcrficld. With Bleak House, which I read as a student of philo- sophy at Oxford beginning to be familiar with Aris- totelian canons, I felt my enjoyment mellowed by a somewhat more measured judgment. From that time onward Charles Dickens threw himself into a great variety of undertakings and many diverse kinds of publication. His Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities, were never to me anything like the wonder and delight that I found in Oliver Twist, Nicklehy, and Copperfield. And as to the short tales and the later pieces down to Edwin Drood, I never find my- self turning back to them ; the v^ery memory of the story is fading away; and I fail to recall the charac- ters and names. A mature judgment will decide that the series after David Copperfield, written when the author was thirty-eight, was not equal to the series of the thirteen }'ears preceding. Charles Dickens will always be remembered by Pickivick, Oliver Twist, VI CHARLES DICKENS 131 NicJdcby, and Coppcrficld. And though these tales will long continue to delight both old and young, learned and unlearned alike, they are most to be envied who read him when young, and they are most to be pitied who read him with a critical spirit. May that be far from us, as we take up our Pickwick and talk over the autobiographic pathos of David Coppcrficld. This vivid sympathy with the man is made stronger in my own case in that, from my own boyhood till his death, I was continually seeing him, was frequently his neighbour both in London and the seaside, knew some of his friends, and heard much about him and about his work. Though I never spoke to him, there were times when I saw him almost daily; I heard him speak and read in public ; and his favourite haunts in London and the country have been familiar to me from my boyhood. And thus, as I read again my Pickiuick, and Nickleby, and Coppcrficld, there come back to me many personal and local memories of my own. The personality of Charles Dickens was, even to his distant readers, vivid and intense ; and hence it is much more so to those who have known his person. I am thus an ardent Pickwickian myself; and anything I say about our immortal Founder must be understood in a Pickwickian sense. Charles Dickens was before all things a great humourist, — doubtless the greatest of this century; for, though we may find in Scott a more truly Shakespearean humour of the highest order, the humour of Dickens is so varied, so paramount, so inexhaustible, that he stands forth in our mem- ory as the humourist of the age. Swift, Fielding, 132 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vi Hogarth, Sterne, and Goldsmith, in the last century, reached at times a more enduring level of humour without caricature ; but the gift has been more rarely- imparted to their successors in the age of steam. Now, we shall never get an adequate definition ot that imponderable term, — humour, — a term which, perhaps, was invented to be the eternal theme ot budding essayists. We need not be quite as liberal in our interpretation of humour as was Thackeray in opening his English Humourists ; for he declared that its business was to awaken and direct our love, our pity, our kindness, our scorn for imposture, our tenderness for the weak, to comment on the actions and passions of life, to be the week-day preacher, — and much more to that effect. But it may serve our immediate purpose to say with Samuel Johnson that humour is "grotesque imagery;" and "grotesque" is " distorted of figure ; unnatural." That is to say, humour is an effort of the imagination presenting human nature with some element of distortion or disproportion which instantly kindles mirth. It must be imaginative; it must touch the bed-rock of human nature; it must arouse merriment and not anger or scorn. In this fine and most rare gift Charles Dickens abounded to overflowing; and this humour poured in perfect cataracts of "grotesque imagery" over every phase of life of the poor and the lower middle classes of his time, in London and a few of its suburbs and neighbouring parts. This in itself is a great title to honour; it is his main work, his noblest title. His sphere was wide, but not at all general; it was strictly limited to the range of his own indefatigable observations. He VI CHARLES DICKENS 1 33 hardly ever drew a character or painted a scene, even of the most subordinate kind, which he had not studied from the hfe with minute care, and whenever he did for a moment wander out of his hmits, he made an egregious failure. But this task of his, to cast the sunshine of pathos and of genial mirth over the humblest, dullest, and most uninvit- ing of our fellow-creatures, was a great social mission to which his whole genius was devoted. No waif and stray was so repulsive, no drudge was so mean, no criminal was so atrocious, but what Charles Dickens could feel for him some ray of sympathy, or extract some pathetic mirth out of his abject state. And Dickens does not look on the mean and the vile as do Balzac and Zola, that is, from without, like the detective or the surgeon. He sees things more or less from their point of view : he feels with the Marchioness: he himself as a child was once a Smike: he cannot help liking the fun of the Art- ful Dodger : he has been a good friend to Barkis : he likes Traddles: he loves Joe: poor Nancy ends her vile life in heroism : and even his brute of a dog worships Bill Sikes. Here lies the secret of his power over such count- less millions of readers. He not only paints a vast range of ordinary humanity and suffering or wearied humanity, but he speaks for it and lives in it himself, and throws a halo of imagination over it, and brings home to the great mass of average readers a new sense of sympathy and gaiety. This humane kinship with the vulgar and the common, this magic which strikes poetry out of the dust of the streets, and dis- covers traces of beauty and joy in the most monoto- 134 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vi nous of lives, is, in the true and best sense of the term, Christ-like, with a message and gospel of hope. Thackeray must have had Charles Dickens in his mind when he wrote : "The humourous writer pro- fesses to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness, — your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture, — your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy." Charles Dickens, of all writers of our age, assuredly did this in every work of his pen, for thirty-three years of incessant production. It is his great title to honour; and a novelist can desire no higher title than this. There is another quality in which Charles Dickens is supreme, — in purity. Here is a writer who is realistic, if ever any writer was, in the sense of having closely observed the lowest strata of city life, who has drawn the most miserable outcasts, the most aban- doned men and women in the dregs of society, who has invented many dreadful scenes of passion, lust, seduction, and debauchery; and yet in forty works and more you will not find a page which a mother need withhold from her grown daughter. As Thack- eray wrote of his friend: "I am grateful for the innocent laughter and the sweet and unsullied page which the author of David Coppcrjicld gives to my children." We need not formulate any dogma or rule on such a topic, nor is it essential that all books should be written virginibus pncrisquc ; but it is cer- tain that every word of Charles Dickens was so written, even when he set himself (as he sometimes did) to describe animal natures and the vilest of their sex. Dickens is a realist in that he probes the gloomiest recesses and faces the most disheartening vr CHARLES DICKENS I35 problems of life: he is an idealist in that he never presents us the common or the vile with mere com- monplace or repulsiveness, and without some ray of humane and genial charm to which ordinary eyes are blind. Dickens, then, was above all things a humourist, an inexhaustible humourist, to whom the humblest forms of daily life wore a certain sunny air of genial mirth; but the question remains if he was a humourist of the highest order: was he a poet, a creator of abiding imaginative types? Old John- son's definition of humour as " grotesque imagery," and " grotesque " as meaning some distortion in figure, may not be adequate as a description of humour, but it well describes the essential feature of Charles Dickens. His infallible instrument is caricature, — which strictly means an "overload," as Johnson says, " an exaggerated resemblance." Cari- cature is a likeness having some comical exaggeration or distortion. Now, caricature is a legitimate and potent instrument of humour, which great masters have used with consummate effect. Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Rembrandt, Hogarth, use it; but only at times, and in a subsidiary way. Rabelais, Swift, Fielding, use this weapon not unfrequently ; Shakespeare very sparingly; Goldsmith and Scott, I think, almost never. Caricature, the essence of which is exaggeration of some selected feature, dis- tortion of figure, disproportion of some part, is a potent resource, but one to which the greater masters resort rarely and with much moderation. Now, with Charles Dickens caricature — that comi- cal exaggeration of a particular feature, distortion of some part beyond nature — is not only the 136 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vi essence of his humour, but it is the universal and ever-present source of bis mirth. It would not be true to say that exaggeration is the sole form of humour that he uses, but there is hardly a character of his to which it is not applied, nor a scene of which it is not the pervading " motive." Some feature, some oddity, some temperament is seized, dwelt upon, played with, and turned inside out, with in- cessant repetition and unwearied energy. Every char- acter, except the walking gentleman and the walking lady, the insipid lover, or the colourless friend, have some feature thrust out of proportion, magnified be- yond nature. Sam Weller never speaks without his anecdote, Uriah is always " 'umble," Barkis is always " willin'," Mark Tapley is always "jolly," Dombey is always solemn, and Toots is invariably idiotic. It is no doubt natural that Barnaby's Raven should always want tea, whatever happens, for the poor bird has but a limited vocabulary. But one does not see why articulate and sane persons like Captain Cuttle, Pecksniff, and Micawber should repeat the same phrases under every condition and to all persons. This, no doubt, is the essence of farce : it may be irresistibly droll as farce, but it does not rise beyond farce. And at last even the most enthusiastic Pick- wickian wearies of such monotony of iteration. Now, the keynote of caricature being the distor- tion of nature, it inevitably follows that humourous exaggeration is unnatural, however droll ; and, where it is the main source of the drollery, the picture as a whole ceases to be within the bounds of nature. But the great masters of the human heart invariably remain true to nature; not merely true to a selected CHARLES DICKENS 137 feature, but to the natural form as a whole. Falstaff, in his wildest humour, speaks and acts as such a man really might speak and act. He has no catch- phrase on which he harps, as if he were a talking- machine wound up to emit a dozen sounds. Parson Adams speaks and acts as such a being might do in nature. The comic characters of Goldsmith, Scott, or Thackeray do not outrun and defy nature, nor does their drollery depend on any special and ab- normal feature, much less on any stock phrase which they use as a label. The illustrations of Cruikshank and Phiz are delightfully droll, and often caricatures of a high order. But being caricatures they over- load and exaggerate nature, and indeed are always, in one sense, impossible in nature. The grins, the grimaces, the contortions, the dwarfs, the idiots, the monstrosities of these wonderful sketches could not be found in human beings constructed on any known anatomy. And Dickens's own characters have the same element of unnatural distortion. It is possible that these familiar caricatures have even done harm to his reputation. His creations are of a higher order of art and are more distinctly spontaneous and original. But the grotesque sketches with which he almost uniformly presented his books accentuate the element of caricature on which he relied ; and often add an unnatural extravagance beyond that extravagance which was the essence of his own method. The consequence is that everything in Dickens is " in the excess," as Aristotle would say, and not " in the mean." Whether it is Tony Weller, or " the Shepherd," or the Fat Boy, Hugh or the Raven, 138 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vi Toots or Traddles, Micawber or Skimpole, Gamp or Mantalini, — all arc overloaded in the sense that they exceed nature, and are more or less extravagant. They are wonderful and delightful caricatures, but they are impossible in fact. The similes are hyper- bolic ; the names are grotesque ; the incidents par- take of harlequinade, and the speeches of roaring farce. It is often wildly droll, but it is rather the drollery of the stage than of the book. The char- acters are never possible in fact ; they are not, and are not meant to be, nature; they are always and everywhere comic distortions of nature. Gold- smith's Dr. Primrose tells us that he chose his wife for the same qualities for which she chose her wedding gown. That is humour, but it is also pure, h'teral, exact truth to nature. David Copperfield's little wife is called a lap-dog, acts like a lap-dog, and dies like a lap-dog; the lap-dog simile is so much overdone that we are glad to get rid of her, and instead of weeping with Copperfield, we feel disposed to call him a ninny. Nothing is more wonderful in Dickens than his exuberance of animal spirits, that inexhaustible fountain of life and gaiety, in which he equals Scott and far surpasses any other modern. The intensity of the man, his electric activity, his spasmodic nervous power, quite dazzle and stun us. But this restless gaiety too often grows fatiguing, as the rol- licking fun begins to pall upon us, as the jokes ring hollow, and the wit gets stale by incessant reiteration. We know how much in real life we get to hate the joker who does not know when to stop, who repeats his jests, and forces the laugh when it vi CHARLES DICKENS 139 does not flow freely. Something of the kind the most devoted of Dickens's readers feel when they take in too much at one time. None but the very greatest can maintain for long one incessant outpour of drollery, much less of extravagance. Aristophanes could do it; Shakespeare could do it; so could Cervantes ; and so, too, Rabelais. But then, the wildest extravagance of these men is so rich, so varied, so charged with insight and thought, and, in the case of Rabelais, so resplendent with learning and suggestion, that we never feel satiety and the cruel sense that the painted mask on the stage is grinning at us, whilst the actor behind it is weary and sad. When one who is not amongst the very greatest pours forth the same inextinguishable laughter in the same key, repeating the same tricks, and multiplying kindred oddities, people of cultiva- tion enjoy it heartily once, twice, it may be a dozen times, but at last they make way for the young bloods who can go thirty-seven times to see " Charley's Aunt." A good deal has been said about Dickens's want of reading; and his enthusiastic biographer very fairly answers that Charles Dickens's book was the great book of life, of which he was an indefatigable student. When other men were at school and at college, he was gathering up a vast experience of the hard world, and when his brother writers were poring over big volumes in their libraries, he was pacing up and down London and its suburbs with inexhaustible energy, drinking in oddities, idio- syncrasies, and wayside incidents at every pore. It is quite true : London is a microcosm, an endless I40 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vi and bottomless Babylon; which, perhaps, no man has ever known so well as did Charles Dickens. This was his library: here he gathered that vast encyclopaedia of human nature, which some are inclined to call " cockney," but if it be, " Cockayne " must be a very large country indeed. Still, the fact remains, that of book-learning of any kind Dickens remained, to the end of his days, perhaps more utterly innocent than any other famous English writer since Shakespeare. His biographer labours to prove that he had read Fielding and Smollett, Don Quixote and Gil Bias, The Spectator, and Robin- son Crusoe. Perhaps he had, like most men who have learned to read. But, no doubt, this utter severance from books, which we feel in his tales, will ultimately tell against their immortality. This rigid abstinence from books, which Dickens practised on system, had another reaction that we notice in his style. Not only do we feel in reading his novels that we have no reason to assume that he had ever read anything except a few popular romances, but we note that he can hardly be said to have a formed literary style of his own. Dickens had mannerisms, but hardly a style. In some ways, this is a good thing: much less can he be said to have a bad style. It is simply no style. He knows nothing of the crisp, modulated, balanced, and re- served mastery of phrase and sentence which marks Thackeray. Nor is it the easy simplicity of Robin- son Crusoe and the Vicar of Wakefield. The tale spins along, and the incidents rattle on with the volubility of a good story-teller who warms up as he goes, but who never stops to think of his sentences vr CHARLES DICKENS 141 and phrases. He often gets verbose, rings the changes on a point which he sees to have caught his liearers; he plays with a fancy out of measure, and turns his jest inside out and over and over, Hke a fine comic actor when the house is in a roar. His language is free, perfectly clear, often redundant, sometimes grandiloquent, and usually addressed more to the pit than to the boxes. And he is a little prone to slide, even in his own proper person, into those formal courtesies and obsolete compliments which forty years ago survived amongst the superior orders of bagmen and managing clerks. There is an old topic of discussion whether Dickens could invent an organic and powerful plot, and carry out an elaborate scheme with perfect skill. It is certain that he has never done so, and it can hardly be said that he has ever essayed it. The serial form in parts, wherein almost all his stories were cast, requiring each number of three chapters to be " assorted," like sugar-plums, with grave and gay, so as to tell just enough but not too much, made a highly wrought scheme almost impossible. It is plain that Charles Dickens had nothing of that epical gift which gave us Tom Jones and IvaiiJioe. Perhaps the persistent use of the serial form shows that he felt no interest in that supreme art of an immense drama duly unfolded to a prepared end. In Pickwick there neither was, nor could there be, any organic plot. In Oliver Twist, in Barn a by Riidge, in Donibcy, in Bleak House, in the Talc of Two Cities, there are indications of his possessing this power, and in certains parts of these tales we seem to be in the presence of a great master of 142 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE wr epical narration. But the power is not sustained; and it must be confessed that in none of these tales is there a complete and equal scheme. In most of the other books, especially in those after Bleak House, the plot is so artless, so deconsn, so confused, that even practised readers of Dickens fail to keep it clear in their mind. The serial form, where a leading character wanders about to various places, and meets a succession of quaint parties, seems to be that which suited his genius and which he himself most entirely enjoyed. In contrast with the Pickwickian method of comic rambles in search of human " curios," Dickens in- troduced some darker effects and persons of a more or less sensational kind. Some of these are as power- ful as anything in modern fiction ; and Fagin and Bill Sikes, Smike and poor Jo, the Gordon riots and the storms at sea, may stand beside some tableaux of Victor Hugo for lurid power and intense realism. But it was only at times and during the first half of his career that Dickens could keep clear of melo- drama and somewhat stagey blue fire. And at times his blue fire was of a very cheap kind. Rosa Dartle and Carker, Steerforth and Blandois, Quilp and Uriah Heep, have a melancholy glitter of the footlights over them. We cannot see what the villains want, except to look villainous, and we fail to make out where is the danger to the innocent victims. We find the villain of the piece frantically struggling to get some paper, or to get hold of some boy or girl. But as the scene is in London in the nineteenth century, and not in Naples in the fifteenth century, we cannot see who is in real danger, or why, or of VI CHARLES DICKENS 1 43 what. And with all this, Dickens was not incapable of bathos, or tragedy suddenly exploding in farce. The end of Krook by spontaneous combustion is such a case : but a worse case is the death of Dora, Copperfield's baby wife, along with that of the lap-