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ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 IN THE 
 
 NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 IN THE 
 
 NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 AN ESSAY IN CRITICISM 
 
 BY 
 
 LAURIE MAGNUS, M.A. 
 
 author of 
 'introduction to poetry' etc. 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 New York : G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 London : ANDREW MELROSE 
 
 1909 
 
- /yvv' 
 
 f/ 
 
DEDICATED 
 
 BY PERMISSION 
 
 TO 
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 193681 
 
PREFACE 
 
 SO much has been written about the literature of 
 the nineteenth century since that literature was 
 written that a few words of apology may seem due for 
 a fresh book on the same theme. I have attempted 
 in this volume not so much a history of English 
 literature between 1784 and the present day as a 
 survey of that literature as a whole, and an essay in 
 its criticism. Where such ample help is provided in 
 the shape of handbooks and epitomes, I may be per- 
 mitted to add that I have neither consciously adopted 
 any opinion at second-hand nor criticized any book 
 which I have not read. At the same time, I am much 
 indebted to some of the volumes in the * English Men 
 of Letters ' series, most, if not all, of which have the 
 advantage of being written by (as well as about) 
 English men of letters ; and, among other authorities, 
 I think that no student of English literature can 
 fail to realize his obligation to the works of scholar- 
 ship by Professor George Saintsbury. His histories of 
 criticism and prosody, his (edited) Periods of European 
 Literature and some of his other works are not merely 
 mines of learning; they are valuable, too, for their 
 commonsense, and for the corrective they supply to 
 aerial experiments in poetics. 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 In discussing living writers I have drawn an im- 
 aginary, but fairly obvious, line between the nineteenth 
 and the twentieth centuries. Writers belonging to 
 the twentieth century I have not discussed in their 
 persons, but rather, as far as requisite, according to 
 the tendencies they represent, and otherwise hardly 
 at all. Writers belonging to the last century I have 
 tried to consider impartially, whether living or dead. 
 So many died prematurely that the survivors can- 
 not logically be omitted. The passages referring to 
 Swinburne were in type before his sudden illness and 
 death this month, and only a few words have been 
 altered while the book was in the press. 
 
 The proof-sheets have been read by my friend, 
 Miss Elizabeth Lee, whom I am glad to thank for her 
 care and trouble. A debt of encouragement, indirect 
 and direct, I am permitted to acknowledge in the 
 dedication. 
 
 L. M. 
 
 ' London, April 1909. 
 
 / 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Preface .... 
 Proem .... 
 
 Book I. 1784-1832— 
 
 § 1. Heirs and Assigns 
 
 § 2. George Crabbe . 
 
 § 3. "With Many Voices 
 
 § 4. Prose Fiction 
 
 § 5. Imaginative Poetry, I. . 
 
 § 6. Essayists and Critics . 
 
 § 7. Sir Walter Scott 
 
 § 8. Imaginative Poetry, II. 
 Book II. The Transit through 1832 
 Book III. The Victorian Age— 
 
 § 1. Knowledge and Belief 
 
 § 2. Tennyson . 
 
 § 3. The Novel . - 
 
 § 4. Imaginative Eeason 
 
 § 5. Pre-Kaphaelitism-. 
 
 § 6. The Sanction of Beauty 
 
 § 7. The Sanction of Morality 
 
 § 8, Symbols of Beauty 
 
 § 9, The Higher Journalism 
 Index . . . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 vii 
 
 13 
 
 20 
 
 28 
 
 44 
 
 66 
 
 83 
 
 103 
 
 117 
 
 151 
 
 198 
 224 
 243 
 280 
 301 
 315 
 338 
 367 
 391 
 411 
 
► 
 
 f 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 ^ OF THE 
 
 
 NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 LITERATURE 
 
 PROEM 
 
 LOOKING back in this centenary year of Tennyson, 
 Darwin, Gladstone, Fitzgerald, at tlie monuments 
 of progress which they raised, it is just and timely to 
 ask, not merely for facts, but for conclusions. A new 
 formula is wanted by which to connote the hterature 
 of the nineteenth century in England. Is it an * age ' 
 or a nonage in the jealous records of art ? Can a name 
 and a symbol be attached to it, by which to distinguish 
 it for ever, and wherever literature is held dear ? 
 
 Broadly stated, and assuming a background to set 
 ofi the properties of criticism, a sensitive consciousness 
 responds to a touch upon certain keys. We have 
 learned to recognize the notes of the Renaissance, the 
 Age of Discovery, Puritanism, the Age of Reason, and 
 the Romantic Revolt. These names pierce to willing 
 
2 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 minds. Each means something beyond the name. 
 Each suggests an atmosphere and a point of view, 
 and a canon by which to pronounce judgment. From 
 the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, our mood 
 changes with the scene. We fare with the company 
 of pilgrims on the April morning which was Chaucer. 
 We thread with Sidney and Spenser the last enchant- 
 ments of the Middle Ages. We thrill with Shakespeare 
 and Bacon to the glory of a receding horizon, and of 
 virgin territories unexplored. We stiffen our conscience 
 with Milton, and stifle our consciousness with Pope, 
 who found, successively, in the Puritan and in the 
 Neo-Augustan ideals, compensation for the lost gardens 
 in which so much had run to seed ; and, finally, we 
 acclaim, as a ' romantic revival * or a ' renascence of 
 wonder ', the reaction towards the end of the eighteenth 
 century from the exclusive standards of that epoch. 
 There, commonly, pliability stops. The swift shifting 
 of the moods, responsive through five hundred years of 
 history to the impressions which that history conveys, 
 begins to slacken at the last. The record, as Sir John 
 Seeley said of English history as a whole, ' leaves off 
 in such a gradual manner, growing feebler and feebler, 
 duller and duller towards the close, that one might 
 suppose that England, instead of steadily gaining in 
 strength, had been for a century or two dying of mere 
 old age '. 
 
 The injustice is greatest to literature, where most 
 progress has been made ; and it is to correct the con- 
 clusion from this feebleness and dulness, and to measure 
 
PROEM 3 
 
 the steady gain in strength, that the following chapters 
 are composed. It is not merely as a revival or revolt 
 in the direction of romance, it is not even as a ' re- 
 nascence of wonder ', in Mr. Watts-Dunton's phrase, 
 that a complete formula is found for the literature of 
 the nineteenth century in England. The ' Romantic 
 Revival ' proper was a clear and a well-defined means, 
 deliberately adopted by some writers, towards a more 
 remote goal. It was chiefly the Scottish contribution 
 to the main movement of the times, and was due to the 
 native wealth of romantic material in the North. To 
 this we shall come in its own place. But if the descrip- 
 tion was not wholly adequate even to the pioneers 
 of revolt, it falls ludicrously short of comprehending, 
 say, Wordsworth or Shelley. Moreover, while the 
 term invalidates much of the most sincere work of the 
 writers included in the formula, its novelty is obviously 
 exhausted before the nineteenth century is well begun. 
 To force Carlyle, Ruskin and Charles Dickens, Tennyson, 
 Darwin and Matthew Arnold into the Procrustes-bed 
 of a * renascence of wonder ' is to weaken their force, 
 and to postpone indefinitely the recognition of their 
 meaning. Part of the contempt for literature as an 
 unpractical study, and part of the present reluctance 
 to regard it, equally with religion and philosophy, as 
 a medium of truth, are to be traced to this ineffective 
 statement of its contribution to modern thought. 
 
 The issue might be evaded by selecting arbitrary 
 dates between which to place the contents of the litera- 
 ture of the nineteenth century. Thus, it would be 
 
4 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 comparatively simple, by taking 1801 as the starting- 
 point and 1900 as the close, to sort into congruous 
 groups aU books published within that period. Again, 
 a less crude device would be to select two dates of 
 obvious public importance at a distance of about a 
 hundred years. The French Revolution and the death 
 of Queen Victoria would serve. Or, thirdly, and more 
 subtly still, the century of literature might be defined 
 in literary terms, with Wordsworth's birth as the 
 terminus a quo and Tennyson's death as the terminus 
 ad quem. This view, plausible in itself, ranges senti- 
 ment on its side. It is pleasant and graceful to write 
 of the dawn of a Hterary cycle in the Cumberland hills 
 and of its fading on the moonlight at Haslemere. But 
 none of these methods is historical, the last, perhaps, 
 least of all. Sentiment prepares fresh effects, and 
 February 12th, 1908, with its sunshine on eighty winters 
 at Boxhill, is as notable a date in nineteenth- century 
 literature as October 5th, 1892. 
 
 It is not for the sake of fixing dates, but in order to 
 focus observation, that a survey in advance is required. 
 We are seeking a common formula, a distinct and 
 recognizable mark, to which the literary products of 
 the nineteenth century may be referred. For this 
 purpose the period corresponds to no definite tale of 
 years, whether in the Gregorian calendar or in the 
 calendar of great men. The art of an age begins in a 
 tentative way, with little tributary runlets, springing 
 in all kinds of places and percolating all kinds of soil. 
 Presently, these gather strength ; they break down the 
 
PROEM 5 
 
 intervening barriers, and unite in a common stream. 
 A single tendency is observed. Works conforming to 
 that tendency belong to the main current of thought ; 
 works failing to conform to it are related thereto in 
 various degrees of reaction, modification, and excess. 
 There is individual variation, and there is a process 
 of growth. A nation's literature is an organism, 
 subject, like all the rest, to laws of heredity and evolu- 
 tion. Each age is a phase of development. Natural 
 instincts compel it to throw off as violently as it can 
 the slough of the preceding age. The youthful revolt 
 of Keats against ' the name of one Boileau ', to which 
 we shall recur later on, is a manifestation of this instinct ; 
 it is a birth-mark which disappears. The progress of 
 literature is not measured by weighing this name against 
 that, by opposing the standard of Milton to the standard 
 of Pope, and pronouncing definitely for either. By 
 this method criticism is degraded to ' I like, thou 
 likest, he likes '. The true measure of value for the 
 literature of the eighteenth century is not the revolt of 
 Keats, but the degeneracy of Donne. Out of the 
 ' fantastic ' decline the Augustan proprieties were 
 constructed, in obedience to obscure laws of growth, 
 adding purpose and order to the material and power 
 which were to pass to the nineteenth century. But 
 the heirs by natural selection are not mere rebels 
 against their fathers. The butterfly frees itself from 
 the chrysalis ; it does not spend its short career in the 
 throes of that antagonism. Agony succeeds antagony, 
 as the noonday the twilight. 
 
6 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 When we pass from the birth of a new age to con- 
 sider its maturity, its agonia, — what it did, and how it 
 did it, the sum of its desire, its achievement, and its 
 bequest — , we see more clearly the operation of these 
 obscure laws of growth. Summit by summit, the 
 peaks of literature emerge, each with distinctive 
 features and a character of its own. The cloud-capped 
 peak of the Renaissance, the purple Puritan height, the 
 glittering summit of Augustanism, are revealed in the 
 splendid symmetry of their increasing strength, till 
 the expectant spectator turns to the historian of the 
 new age and demands the record of its trust, the revela- 
 tion of its accumulated power. It is not enough to 
 drag our footsteps through the flat lands between 
 steep and steep, to observe Keats impatient at Boileau, 
 and De Quincey railing at Pope ; a positive formula 
 is wanted, and a definite conclusion from experience : 
 in the process of the ages, fresh light has collided with 
 the darkness — what new colour is revealed ? 
 
 Reviewed under this aspect not of time but of eternity, 
 a nation's literature is seen to be a part of the coherent 
 movement of mankind towards self-realization and 
 self-expression. The permanence of the arts — as modes 
 independent of their own forms — is a strong argument 
 for optimism, and goes far towards proving man's 
 intuitive belief in ultimate design. The most readily 
 conceivable idea of Good is a state of complete and 
 harmonious satisfaction of every need of expression, 
 and the efforts of mankind tend steadily in that direction . 
 The hand and the eye find their aim before the search- 
 
PROEM 7 
 
 ings of the heart. The wings of the spirit beat in vain, 
 though our air-ships grapple in the void. But as the 
 secrets of matter are revealed, and material darkness 
 rolls away before the increasing sun of knowledge, 
 some glimpses are revealed. Spiritual wisdom, we 
 hope — and Hope survives her broken strings — , is 
 served by the increment to knowledge. Meanwhile, 
 the most readily conceivable idea of Evil is a state of 
 opposition to that tendency, and the value of the oppo- 
 sition lies in the friction between the two, stimulating 
 the tendency to Good. These ideas of finite intelli- 
 gence are, doubtless, not absolutely right. They are 
 of use as a working hypothesis, however, to explain 
 what were otherwise obscure, — the relation of the spirit 
 to the flesh, and the place of religion and the arts in a 
 material universe. As a child expresses his needs at 
 first in sounds of broken speech, and, later, through a 
 medium of interpretation common to a certain district 
 — the English language throughout the British Empire, 
 the Italian in Italy, and so forth — , thus employing the 
 best available means, halting and imperfect though it 
 be, of self-expression and communication, so mankind, 
 communing with nature and with whatsoever Power 
 ordained nature's design, devises modes of interpreta- 
 tion, still halting and imperfect, but common to a wider 
 area than a single country or empire. Under each 
 system of religion its adherents are united by a bond 
 of expression, not of ordinary needs which everyday 
 language satisfies, but of spiritual cravings satisfied 
 by a higher revelation. And the religious idea, tran- 
 
8 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 scending systems of religion, unites mankind by a bond 
 the strength of which is disguised by differences of 
 fashion in the wearing of it. Art, again, is a language 
 interpreting nature to man, and the differences of cult 
 count for less than the imperious need to which the 
 perpetuation of the mode bears witness. As a child 
 laughs or cries when he is pleased or hurt, so man 
 expresses in art-forms his sense of wonder and of beauty 
 which ordinary speech is inadequate to convey. 
 
 One further reflection may be suggested. The 
 service of art to man is in the most practical kind. 
 There are those who ignore this fact of supreme import- 
 ance to appreciation, and, misled by their steep im- 
 mersion in merely material pursuits, deem religion a 
 pastime for women, and literature, like Latin verse, 
 a kind of ' extra ' for schools — a ' frill ' of education, 
 in the expressive American phrase. The two things 
 commonly go together, for the so-called emotional 
 appeal of the religious and imaginative moods dis- 
 guises, and even destroys, their severely practical 
 purpose. This ' man of the world ' type of opinion 
 is a man's of a very little world, and his argument 
 deserves to be exposed in all its hideous small-minded- 
 ness. Women, because of their part in the little world 
 of these worldlings, are degraded forthwith to a lower 
 intellectual plane, and then religion, almost the sole 
 mystery which still defies knowledge, is committed 
 to their charge. Ignorance has rarely been betrayed 
 by so complete a double fallacy. And hardly, if at all, 
 less servile is the attitude of those who affect to despise 
 
PROEM 9 
 
 literature and the arts. The poet — 'Troirjrrjg, the 
 maker, — confers an incalculable boon on the rest of 
 mankind precisely by his abstraction from ordinary 
 pursuits. His ardent, invincible resolve to thrust 
 back the substance-seeming shadows, and to clutch at 
 the realities beyond, his so-called ' unpractical ' search 
 for a language adequate to thought and for a method 
 suited to his aim, his re-interpretation of the universe 
 in terms of a quickened understanding, are faculties 
 more and more precious as the weight of custom grows 
 heavier, and as civilized life is crushed by the resources 
 of its own invention. A misprisal of the gifts of art, 
 and a postponement of the claims of the imagination 
 to the satisfaction of material desires, are signs of an 
 ignorance of values urgently crying for correction. 
 For such work is immediately directed to the practical 
 benefit of mankind. 
 
 The same tendency towards Good which edifies our 
 conduct and purifies our laws refines at the same time 
 our art. All progress is a single process ; no part of 
 it comes undivided, and no part of it comes in full 
 measure. But the cultivation of art is, of all other 
 modes, the least subject to abuse and mischance, and 
 the most tenacious of the ideal. Fewer obstacles oppose 
 its fulfilment, for it belongs more securely to the sphere 
 where hunger, and pain, and greed, and a thousand 
 temporal distractions do not tempt its votaries to 
 compromise. Accordingly, the artistic revelation of 
 design draws nearer to the goal than the revelation by 
 government or conduct. Our art is purer than our 
 
10 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 laws, our laws are purer than our action. The farther 
 the milieu of circumstance in which our principles are 
 displayed is removed from actuality, the clearer and 
 more enduring is the vision. Our laws would not fall 
 short of just government, nor our acts of right conduct, 
 if the vehicles of artistic truth were as familiar as our 
 daily speech. Herein is the reward of art-study. It 
 raises enjoyment to a higher power. It bestows on 
 men the new faculty of communion beyond the region 
 of facts. 
 
 Pure literature is one of the art-forms, and it is 
 under this aspect that the contribution of English 
 letters in the nineteenth century may most fitly be con- 
 sidered. No lower standard will satisfy the demands 
 its practitioners make. And when we have taken this 
 resolve to discuss literature as a mode of truth, the 
 problem of a formula is simplified. Whatever addi- 
 tion the nineteenth century has made to the growing 
 evidence of God to man, whatever advance has been 
 recorded along the permanent way of human progress — 
 physical science and its application — , we shall find its 
 spiritual value, its increment to truth, weighed in the 
 crucible of such art-forms as the age shall deem most 
 appropriate. The literary form has proved best suited 
 to English inspiration^, and to the literature of the 
 nineteenth century, accordingly, we look for the 
 
 * Two predisposing conditions may be mentioned, (i) the Anglican 
 Church does not encourage the art of painting, which was almost 
 wholly ecclesiastical in media?val Italy, and (ii) the climate deters 
 us from studying nature in the open. How large a part is played 
 in English life by the Church and the weather is obvious. 
 
PROEM II 
 
 spiritual evaluation of the works and business of 
 that age. 
 
 Thus, the formula of literature is identical with the 
 tendency of the age, and the soul of the nineteenth 
 century is revealed through the vision of its writers. 
 Two moments especially stand out pre-eminently in 
 retrospect. The first is the French Kevolution, and 
 the second is the Darwinian hypothesis. They are 
 connected by threads so fine as almost to escape detec- 
 tion save when sublimated by art. The seers and 
 interpreters render them in their unity, not in their 
 differences, and, reviewed in that light, they are parts 
 of a single whole, which, in default of a better name, 
 may be called, in one word, emancipation. * This 
 wonderful century', exclaimed one of its great men, 
 William Ewart Gladstone, whose life (1809-98) ex- 
 tended nearly through its course, ' its motto is. 
 Unhand me ! ', and it is as the Age of Emancipation 
 that it takes its place in the series of which the Age 
 of Reason was the last. The doctrine of political 
 equality acted on the social system by a revolution 
 in France, and by a chain of enactments less violent 
 in their happening, but not less subversive in their 
 results, during the Victorian era and the years immedi- 
 ately preceding it. The doctrine of biological evolu- 
 tion, as applied directly to the conclusions of human 
 knowledge, and acting indirectly on pre-established 
 systems of religious and moral prohibitions, was yet 
 more revolutionary in its effect, inasmuch as no Parlia- 
 ments or Kings were interposed between the force 
 
12 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 and its object. It drove straight at its goal, opposing 
 the light of its truth to the clinging and reluctant 
 shadows of authority, sentiment, and tradition ; and 
 it is not too much to say that the combined action of 
 both forces has changed the foundations of EngUsh 
 life, and leaves us, at the dawn of the twentieth century, 
 grasping at new clues to truth, at new dogmas of belief, 
 in conduct and in politics. It is in the reconstruction 
 of the foundations of reason, and faith, and hope, 
 without which no philosophy has equipoise, and no life 
 is worth living, shattered as they were by the impact 
 of emancipation in its various shapes, that we find 
 the function of art in the history of the literature of 
 the nineteenth century. Art, whether literary or 
 other, selects its material from experience, and re- 
 combines it for eternity. If experiment aim sincerely 
 at emancipation, literature, mirroring the aim, will 
 vindicate true liberty. 
 
BOOK I 
 
 FKOM THE DEATH OF JOHNSON TO THE 
 DEATH OF SCOTT, 1784-1832 
 
 § 1. HEIRS AND ASSIGNS. 
 
 WE may start with the disapproved metliod of a 
 catalogue of names, for out of its compilation 
 may arise a feeling for differences and departures. Dr. 
 Johnson died in 1784, at the age of seventy-five. He Some 
 was the last of the triumvirate — Dry den. Pope, an?dates, 
 Johnson — who, through three generations, covering 
 the eighteenth century, had set the standard of taste. 
 Dryden died in 1700, on the frontier of the age ; Pope 
 in 1744; and Dr. Johnson, surviving him forty years, 
 lived tiU within five years of the storming of the 
 Bastille by the insurgent mob in Paris. With this 
 insurrection of the mob, and with all that was implied 
 in society and poHtics by the industrial unrest 
 throughout Europe, the standard set by the trium- 
 virate — its precise and formal urbanity — was to prove 
 no longer acceptable. With Dr. Johnson there seemed 
 to pass away the reasonable spirit of the English 
 
 13 
 
14 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 eighteenth century. His contemporaries had mostly 
 predeceased him ; there were alive in the year of his 
 death — 
 
 Name. 
 
 Born. 
 
 Flourished. 
 
 Died. 
 
 Horace Walpole . 
 
 1717 
 
 1765 
 
 1797 
 
 Edmund Bmrke . 
 
 1729 
 
 1775 
 
 1797 
 
 Adam Smith 
 
 1723 
 
 1775 
 
 1790 
 
 Thomas Warton . 
 
 1728 
 
 1775 
 
 1790 
 
 Jeremy Bentham . 
 
 1748 
 
 1780 
 
 1832 
 
 William Cowper . 
 
 1731 
 
 1780 
 
 1800 
 
 Edward Gibbon . 
 
 1737 
 
 1780 
 
 1794 
 
 R. B. Sheridan . 
 
 1751 
 
 1780 
 
 1816 
 
 Wilham Blake 
 
 1757 
 
 1790 
 
 1827 
 
 Robert Bums 
 
 1759 
 
 1790 
 
 1796 
 
 WiUiam Paley 
 
 1743 
 
 1790 
 
 1805 
 
 WiUiam Godwin . 
 
 1756 
 
 1795 
 
 1836 
 
 WiUiam Wordsworth . 
 
 1770 
 
 1805 
 
 1850 
 
 Jane Austen . 
 
 1775 
 
 1810 
 
 1817 
 
 Thomas Campbell . 
 
 1777 
 
 1810 
 
 1844 
 
 George Crabbe 
 
 1754 
 
 1810 
 
 1832 
 
 S. T. Coleridge 
 
 1772 
 
 1815 
 
 1834 
 
 Maria Edgoworth . 
 
 1767 
 
 1815 
 
 1849 
 
 Sir Walter Scott . 
 
 1771 
 
 1815 
 
 1832 
 
 Robert Southey . 
 
 1774 
 
 1815 
 
 1843 
 
 WiUiam Cobbett . 
 
 1762 
 
 1820 
 
 1835 
 
 Henry HaUam 
 
 1777 
 
 1820 
 
 1859 
 
 WiUiam HazUtt . . 
 
 1778 
 
 1820 
 
 1830 
 
 Leigh Hunt . 
 
 1784 
 
 1820 
 
 1859 
 
 Charles Lamb 
 
 1775 
 
 1820 
 
 1834 
 
 Walter Savage Landor . 
 
 1775 
 
 1820 
 
 . 1864 
 
 Thomas Moore 
 
 1779 
 
 1820 
 
 1852 
 
 Thomas de Quincey 
 
 1785 
 
 1820 
 
 1859 
 
 Samuel Rogers 
 
 1763 
 
 1820 
 
 1856 
 
 Ebenezer Elliott . 
 
 1781 
 
 1825 
 
 1849 
 
 Francis Jeffrey 
 
 1773 
 
 1830 
 
 1860 
 
 Thus, rearranging these names with a view to dis- 
 covering some guidance : when Johnson, ' the last of 
 the Tories ', bluff, burly, and domineering, was removed 
 
HEIRS AND ASSIGNS 15 
 
 from the scene which he adorned, he was survived by 
 Boswell, his biographer (d. 1795), and by Reynolds, 
 his painter {d. 1792), and of the rest chiefly by Walpole, 
 man of letters and of leisure, by Cowper, the stricken 
 poet, by Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, 
 by Burke, Crabbe, Warton, and Gibbon. Of the men 
 and women whom he had known, and some of whom 
 he had fascinated by his conversation. Lady Mary 
 Wortley Montagu had died in 1762, Thomas Gray in 
 1771, Goldsmith in 1774, David Hume in 1776, David 
 Garrick in 1779, Smollett, Richardson, and Fielding in 
 1771, 1761, and 1754 respectively, thus taking us back 
 to the older generation of Pope, which belonged to 
 Johnson's childhood and early manhood. Blake and 
 Burns, whose active years fell shortly after 1784, 
 blaze in the forehead of the new age, and many of its 
 major prophets were born between 1770 and 1780, 
 and were therefore in the schoolroom when Johnson 
 died. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Campbell, 
 Southey, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Moore, Jane Austen, the 
 novelist, Jeffrey, the critic, Hallam, the historian, are 
 among the offspring of that decade. The trinity of 
 marvellous youth, Keats (1795-1821), Shelley (1792- 
 1822), and Byron (1788-1824), which burned itself 
 out so quickly, was still to be born when Johnson died, 
 though it left an undying inheritance to the solid 
 phalanx of great writers, whose lives extend to our 
 own day, and a few of whose names may briefly be 
 set down to complete the forecast of the century. 
 
 The following list is not complete, but it suJSices to 
 
i6 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 show the continuity of English literature since Johnson 
 died in 1784, and to indicate the change in its spirit 
 since that great dictator of taste pronounced judgment 
 on Gray, the author of the Elegy in a Country Church- 
 yard : ' He was dull in a new way, and that made 
 people think him great '. 
 
 Name. 
 
 Bom. 
 
 Died. 
 
 Thomas Carlyle 
 
 1795 
 
 1881 
 
 Thomas Hood . 
 
 
 
 
 1799 
 
 1845 
 
 Lord Macaulay. 
 
 
 
 ; i 1800 
 
 1859 
 
 John Henry Newma 
 
 n 
 
 
 . i 1801 
 
 1890 
 
 T. L.Beddoes . 
 
 
 
 . j 1803 
 
 1849 
 
 George Borrow . 
 
 
 
 . j 1803 
 
 1881 
 
 Lord Lytton . 
 
 
 
 . I 1803 
 
 1873 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 
 
 
 
 . 1 1804 
 
 1881 
 
 Harrison Ainsworth 
 
 
 
 
 1 1805 
 
 1882 
 
 John Stuart Mill 
 
 
 
 
 1806 
 
 1873 
 
 Charles Darwin 
 
 
 
 
 1809 
 
 1882 
 
 Alfred Tennyson 
 
 
 
 
 1809 
 
 1892 
 
 Edward Fitzgerald 
 
 
 
 
 1809 
 
 1883 
 
 Mrs. GaskeU . 
 
 
 
 
 1810 
 
 1865 
 
 W. M. Thackeray 
 
 
 
 
 1811 
 
 1863 
 
 Robert Browning 
 
 
 
 
 1812 
 
 1889 
 
 Charles Dickens 
 
 
 
 
 1812 
 
 1870 
 
 Charles Reade . 
 
 
 
 
 1814 
 
 1884 
 
 Charlotte Bronte 
 
 
 
 
 1816 
 
 1855 
 
 A. H.aough . 
 
 
 
 
 1819 
 
 1861 
 
 * George Ehot ' . 
 
 
 
 
 1819 
 
 1880 
 
 Charles Kingsley 
 
 
 
 
 1819 
 
 1875 
 
 John Ruskin . 
 
 
 
 
 1819 
 
 1900 
 
 Herbert Spencer 
 
 
 
 
 1820 
 
 1903 
 
 Matthew Arnold 
 
 
 
 
 1822 
 
 1888 
 
 T.H.Huxley . 
 
 
 
 
 1826 
 
 1895 
 
 George Meredith 
 
 
 
 
 1828 
 
 — 
 
 D. G. Rossetti . 
 
 
 
 
 1828 
 
 1882 
 
 Leslie Stephen . 
 
 
 
 
 1832 
 
 1904 
 
 William Morris 
 
 
 
 
 1834 ! 
 
 1896 
 
 Sir W. Besant . 
 
 
 
 
 1836 
 
 1901 
 
 A. C. Swinburne 
 
 
 
 
 1837 
 
 1909 
 
>-' OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 HEiSS AND ASSIGNS 17 
 
 Time has mollified this judgment. The new way of The «dul 
 dulness was to prove a new way to greatness in the Gray, 
 end; and here, at the beginning of a new time, it is 
 interesting and instructive to consider in what sort the 
 novelty was to which Johnson objected. The con- 
 sideration will probably be helpful beyond the bounds 
 of the country churchyard. It is true that, in Johnson's 
 life of Gray, the Elegy was honourably excepted from 
 the critic's depreciation of the poet : * Had Gray 
 written often thus, it had been vain to blame, and 
 useless to praise him '. It was against the Odes more 
 particularly and their innovating metrical experiments 
 — the so-called ' Pindaric ' structure in place of the 
 * heroic couplet ' — that Johnson's shaft was directed. 
 These Odes were alleged by Bishop Warburton {d. 1779), 
 Pope's literary executor, and a partisan ex officio of 
 Pope's verse, to be ' understood as well as the works of 
 Milton and Shakespeare, which it is the fashion to 
 admire ' ; and the faint praise and quaint imputation 
 may be accepted as a type of Gray's estimation in 
 his own age. Thus, it is no betrayal of Dr. Johnson's 
 case against Gray to examine this charge of a new 
 dulness in connection with the better-known poem. 
 
 At first sight, the ' new ' features are not marked. 
 Certainly, we are taken into the country ; the town and 
 its wits are left behind, and there is an effort at last, 
 as sincere, approximately, as Watteau's, to break 
 down the Fleet Street convention, and to shift — not 
 Dr. Johnson himself — but the Hterature of which he 
 was the centre to new and less familiar surroundings. 
 
i8 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Still, the townsman's prejudices are consulted. The 
 dead leaves and the mud are swept away. It is essenti- 
 ally a townsman's countryside to which Gray ventures 
 to invite us, with conventional images and properties, 
 idealized out of all possibility of shocking his trained 
 susceptibilities. The tolling curfew, the lowing herd, 
 the droning beetle, and the moping owl are just what he 
 would expect to see and hear, just the correct selection 
 to create a rural illusion in the eighteenth- century 
 mind. An equal avoidance of surprises characterizes 
 the human note. The cottage interior is modelled 
 after the best pattern of pastoral sentiment ; the 
 housewife is busy and clean, the children await their 
 ' sire ', and a fire, whether of wood or coal, is ' blazing ' 
 on the hearth. Further, the diction is congruous 
 with the propriety of the picture as a whole. A 
 scholarly, almost pompous, Latinity defers to the 
 reader's taste, and if the epitaph at the close is a trifle 
 too decorous and frigid, at least it does not offend by 
 reeking of the common soil. 
 
 Yet there is this novelty to set off against the classical 
 tradition : the poor and the meek are exalted, if not in 
 their stations in life, at any rate in their homely graves. 
 Wit and fashion are reminded, through the medium of 
 their own classic speech, of the common fate of vulgar 
 death. The perception is not in modern sort. We 
 whose feelings have been lacerated by slum-novels and 
 * realistic ' poems, till a kind of self-defensive callousness 
 is engendered to protect us at last, turn back to the 
 Elegy with delight. Its theme of the universal vanity 
 
HEIRS AND ASSIGNS 19 
 
 soothes without irritation ; it is not exacting in its 
 demands ; it does not require us to reform our poor law, 
 or our pensions, or our drainage ; at the most it 
 * implores the passing tribute of a sigh ', and then 
 its earliest readers were dismissed, as after a sermon, 
 with a pleasing sense of an obligation discharged in a 
 thoroughly well-bred fashion. If we recall how, less 
 than twenty years after the publication of the Elegy, 
 James Hargreaves' house and machinery were de- 
 stroyed by the mob, this little sidelight let in from 
 England's industrial condition will show how remote 
 from actuality was Gray's acquaintance with the lot of 
 the poor. The new order tugged in one direction, but 
 by taste, affinity, and tradition he retired to his scholar's 
 seclusion. 
 
§ 2. GEORGE CRABBE. 
 
 A re- "YTERY different in this respect was the daring 
 ^ZT^l ^ indignation of George Crabbe (1754-1832)1. 
 *^*- Collins died when he was five years old, and Gray when 
 he was seventeen, and the temptations and hesitancies 
 to which the elder poets had listened and deferred, the 
 half-timid, half-venturesome intelligence with which 
 they had looked out from their cloisters on a new 
 world blushing to a new spring, their coy yet artful 
 resolves to break away from the Pope conventions, — 
 the papal infallibility of Reason, — their fresh, shy 
 observation conveyed in such serious wise, the kind of 
 virginity which restrained even their boldest advances 
 in matter or form, were all overborne and swept away 
 on the copious streams of verse which the younger 
 poet poured out through his long and active career. 
 In respect to metrical devices, he was an innovator 
 without experimentation. He found the heroic couplet 
 at hand, as a serviceable and familiar poetic weapon, 
 
 * Oeorge Crabbe : Poems. Edited by Adolphus William Ward, 
 Litt.D., Hon. LL.D., F.B.A., Master of Peterhouse. 3 vols. Cam- 
 bridge University Press, 1905. 
 
 Oeorge Crabbe and his Times, 1754-1832 : a Critical and BiO' 
 graphical Study. By Ren6 Huchon. Translated from the French 
 by Frederick Clarke, M.A. John Murray, 1907. 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 21 
 
 and he manipulated it to his own purpose. When it 
 emerged from his use, it was a new form of verse. In ' ' 
 respect to style, he may be called a realist without 
 theories. In the works of Wordsworth and Coleridge, 
 his greater contemporaries, we shall be sated with 
 theorizing about poetics. Crabbe was naively content 
 to practise what others preached. 
 
 It is difficult to draw a line in time between the new The 
 age and the old ; the dates and the facts do not always muse, 
 correspond. The true distinction resides in states of 
 feeling and of temperament, and a key to this difference 
 is found in the contrast between Gray's Elegy (1750) or 
 Goldsmith's Deserted Village (1769) and Crabbe's The 
 Village, in two books, of 1783. The separation in time 
 is negligible ; little more than twelve years divided the 
 two last, and the more remarkable, accordingly, is 
 the opposition in their points of view. Gray's pastoral 
 we have briefly examined ; turning to Goldsmith's, we 
 note that it was inscribed to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 
 and that Dr. Johnson wrote the last four verses, thus 
 ranging it definitely on the side of the classical tradition. 
 It is more important to note that the poet's purpose 
 was political. For four or five years he had observed, 
 in his * country excursions ', a depopulation of the 
 country, or, as we call it now, the signs of a rural exodus. 
 Goldsmith, let us say at once, was an Irishman resident 
 in London, and a member of Johnson's club. He had 
 written The Traveller, The Citizen of the World, and 
 The Vicar of Wakefield, and, his financial troubles tem- 
 porarily over, he had settled in the Temple to write 
 
22 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 biographies and histories, and gay comedies for Co vent 
 Garden. In this busy literary life, with its urban 
 friendships and distractions, it is likely that ' country 
 excursions ' would be partly reminiscent and partly 
 superficial. There was nothing in his preparation for 
 The Deserted Village which resembled the training and 
 experience of Crabbe, the Suffolkshire poet. It is one 
 thing to write, like Goldsmith, of the idyllic village 
 preacher who was ' passing rich with forty pounds a 
 year ' ; it is another thing to grow up like Crabbe, as 
 one of many children born to an obscure customs- 
 ofl&cer whose yearly salary was one-fourth of that sum. 
 The one may, perhaps, be said to appeal to the literary 
 sense, and the other to the literal ; and the contrast 
 between the two will be found in the poems we are 
 considering. 
 
 Despite the political theme which lent direction to 
 his musings. Goldsmith does not get away from the 
 pastoral view of the country. The stock epithets and 
 diction are utilized in full. The ' labouring swain ' is 
 cheered by plenty and health, precisely as Gray's 
 ' forefathers ' had driven their team in * jocund ' mood. 
 The same ' sober ' herd went ' lowing o'er the lea ' ; 
 ' village statesmen ', own brothers to the ' village- 
 Hampden ' of Gray, ' talked with looks profound ', and 
 ' the breezy covert of the warbling grove ' was com- 
 posed in the echo of ' the breezy call of incense-breathing 
 morn '. The lament at the depopulation, ascribed, 
 in the dedicatory epistle, to ' the increase of our 
 luxuries', is heightened, of course, by lingering reflections 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 23 
 
 on the decline from a golden age, but how savage in 
 effect is the satire with which Crabbe crushed the 
 whole illusion a brief dozen years after — 
 
 On Mincio's banks, in Caesar's bounteous reign. 
 If Tityrus found the Golden Age again, 
 ,. Must sleepy bards the flattering dream prolong, 
 Mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song ? ^ . . . 
 From this chief cause these idle praises spring. 
 That themes so easy few forbear to sing ; 
 For no deep thought the trifling subjects ask : 
 To sing of shepherds is an easy task. 
 The happy youth assumes the common strain, 
 A nymph his mistress, and himself a swain; . . . 
 I grant indeed that fields and flocks have charms 
 For him that gazes or for him that farms ; 
 But, when amid such pleasing scenes I trace 
 The poor laborious natives to the place. 
 And see the midday sun, with fervid ray. 
 On their bare heads and dewy temples play ; 
 While some, with feebler heads and fainter hearts, 
 Deplore their fortune, yet sustain their parts : 
 Then shall I dare these real ills to hide 
 In tinsel trappings of poetic pride ? 
 
 Tht Village, i. 15-48. 
 
 From this challenge there was no appeal ; for this A troop 
 courage there was no surrender. These peasants, nesses. 
 sweating in public beneath the glare of the noonday 
 sun, were the first of a long train of witnesses, sum- 
 moned by Crabbe from the fields, to rebuke the mere- 
 tricious images of rural plenty and rustic innocence 
 which the idea of the country had been employed to 
 
 ^ So Cowper wrote of Pope in Table Talk that he — 
 
 Made poetry a mere mechanic art. 
 
 And every warbler has the tune by heart. ^ 
 
24 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 evoke. They came in their squalor and their rags, 
 hardly even pathetic in their viciousness, for pathos 
 itself deludes, from The Parish Register, and The 
 Borough, from Tales in Verse and the Tales of the Hall, 
 insisting, as their poet's power matured, as he relaxed 
 more and more the hampering bonds of the heroic 
 couplet, and even developed at last a sense of drama 
 as well as of description, of composition as well as 
 of detail, upon the self-helplessness of their condition 
 and the duty incumbent on authority to ameliorate 
 their lot. 
 
 And they came with steel beneath their rags. Not 
 the alms of the charitable would appease them, but 
 Factory Acts to fix their hours of work. Reform Acts 
 to help them to self-government. Education Acts to 
 teach their children, a Poor Law to constrain the rich, 
 and, later, a Pension Act, and free meals, and even 
 protection against foreign skill. All this was implicitly 
 contained in Crabbe's rejection of the * tinsel trap- 
 pings ', and in his awakening from the long dream of 
 a countryside garnished for town tastes. Crabbe 
 stands between the old and the new in an almost grim 
 isolation. He was a man of science who expressed 
 himself in poetry, and a satirist who became a clergy- 
 man, and the paradox of his career, no less than the 
 hardship of his experience, is reflected in his verse. It 
 is awkward, uneven, and uninspired. Its best admirers 
 do not claim for it any imaginative power, or any 
 transforming genius. What he saw he wrote ; and 
 his vision was a botanist's, fixed chiefly on the ground. 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 25 
 
 He missed, in the older generation, the comfortable 
 compromise with reason, the belief, as Edward Young 
 said, satirizing the philosophy of his age, in * a Deity 
 that's perfectly well-bred ', and the conformity with 
 Pope's rational standard, * true wit is Nature to advan- 
 tage dress'd '. And he missed, in the younger genera- 
 tion, the reconcilement to be sought from a wider 
 range of observation and a deeper dip of interpretation. 
 His method was cumulative, not selective. He added 
 detail to detail, till the very weight of his evidence 
 carried the confirmation of its truth. But it brought 
 weariness too ; so much effort was spent in demon- 
 stration that the springs of reflection were exhausted. 
 The reader abandoned the struggle against the pessim- 
 ism and the gloom ; his constructive and recuperative 
 powers proved unequal to the strain, and Crabbe was 
 neglected and laid aside. 
 
 This is hardly a matter for surprise. His Village 
 was published in 1783, and the Tales of the Hall in 1819, 
 and any progress that may be marked in Crabbe's 
 talents and capacities, as displayed at these two dates, 
 is very far from commensurate — is incommensurate 
 in kind and in degree — with the development of litera- 
 ture during the same period. The French Revolution 
 had intervened, and the battles of Trafalgar and 
 Waterloo, and changes no less far-reaching had occurred 
 in the intellectual plane. To all these Crabbe showed 
 a stubborn front, and his tenacious and inelastic 
 realism repelled the sympathies of the new age. In 
 recent years, his admirers have revived. The similar 
 
Crabbe. 
 
 26 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 method of Thomas Hardy, in analysing the psychology 
 of Wessex, though relieved by a finer humour and 
 a truer art-instinct, may have helped to repair ap- 
 preciation. In permanent value, however, Crabbe 
 must always be important on account of the sincerity 
 and daring with which he depicted rural life, and 
 exposed incidentally the pastoral fallacy in English 
 poetry. 
 After Crabbe, standing apart from the finer sensibilities 
 of his age, found no disciples or successors. But 
 Robert Bloomfield (1766-1823) and John Clare (1793- 
 1864), though not approaching him in force, were like 
 him in, the fate of their humble and obscure origin in 
 rural districts of East AngHa. A third poet of the 
 people rose to more enduring fame at the end of the 
 first quarter of the nineteenth century in the person 
 of Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849), whose Corn Law 
 Rhymes of 1828 were the intense expression of the 
 experience of his own long manhood in the workshops 
 of the Black Country before the passing of the Factory 
 Acts. He was the poet of wrongs and sufferings which 
 issued in social reform, and the self-taught labouring- 
 man is honourably distinguished in his verse by a 
 sympathy with his own kind, by a perception of the 
 sudden contrasts between the country as man made it 
 in industrial England and the natural setting of those 
 scenes, by his observation and rendering of the beauties 
 of nature, by his vigour and his music, and, above all, 
 perhaps, by his extension — however shrilly in places, 
 and with whatever want of mental balance — to crowded 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 27 
 
 cities and to the busiest haunts of men of the 
 rights and opportunities claimed by the 'romantic' 
 poets for the ' statesmen ' of the Cumbrian dales, 
 and for the flowers which blossomed in their hedge- 
 rows. 
 
§ 3. WITH MANY VOICES. 
 
 EBENEZER ELLIOTT'S muse has taken us some- 
 wliat far along the lines of social discontent 
 The new which issued in the Reform Acts. In spite of Crabbe 
 ^ and his witnesses, there was still merriment in England. 
 There were still love-songs and wassailings, and ballads 
 of adventurous deeds, and sighs of the wind and sea, 
 and opening buds in May, and tales of old-time heroism, 
 and wonders of the East and the South, and human 
 character itself, and the tragi-comedy of life ; and, 
 when once taste had broken down the barriers of Pope 
 and Dr. Johnson, and Goldsmith's ' country excur- 
 sions ', and Gray's * country churchyard ' were admitted 
 to the franchise of art, poets and novelists enough 
 were found to work the new field. They wore their 
 rue with a difference. Something, whatever it was — 
 Rousseau's influence across the Channel, or, more pro- 
 bably, as it seems, a quickening sense of self-respect 
 among ' hands ' conscious of their own strength, not 
 merely to set fire to their masters' dwellings, but also 
 to kindle imagination, the fruitful mother of reform — 
 some pervading spirit of the times touched the novelists 
 and poets to sympathies unperceived before. Litera- 
 ture, subtly moved by perceptions turned long since 
 
 28 
 
WITH MANY VOICES 
 
 29 
 
 to the uses of biology and psychology, took a deeper 
 and more tender note, and discovered a remoter signi- 
 ficance in the common things that lay around it. Not 
 Crabbe's witnesses alone, but a chorus of sweeter 
 voices rose in music to the skies. The shorn daisy, 
 and the friendly hare, the wee mouse, and the meanest 
 flower — no evidence was so light as to be disregarded, 
 no link so weak as to imperil the golden chain of design. 
 The seed sprang in many places ; and, returning at 
 this point to the ' new ' note detected by Johnson in the 
 world which he loved so well, and which he saw crumbling 
 about him, we may carry our researches a little farther. 
 If we revert to our first list of names, and keep mainly 
 to the great decade, 1770-80, a part of its information 
 may be rearranged in a slightly different form — 
 
 Name. 
 
 Born. 
 
 Birthplace. 
 
 Lived Jn 
 
 Maria Edgeworth 
 
 1767 
 
 Ireland 
 
 Ireland. 
 
 WiUiam Wordsworth 
 
 1770 
 
 Cockermouth 
 
 Lake District. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott 
 
 1771 
 
 Edinburgh 
 
 Scotland. 
 
 S. T. Coleridge . 
 
 1772 
 
 (Devon) 
 
 Lake District. 
 
 Francis Jeffrey . 
 
 1773 
 
 Scotland 
 
 Scotland. 
 
 Robert Southey 
 
 1774 
 
 London 
 
 Keswick. 
 
 Jane Austen 
 
 1775 
 
 Basingstoke 
 
 Hants and 
 Wilts. 
 
 W. S. Landor . 
 
 1775 
 
 Warwickshire 
 
 Bath; Italy. 
 
 Thomas Campbell 
 
 1777 
 
 Glasgow 
 
 In or near 
 London. 
 
 William Hazlitt 
 
 1778 
 
 Maidstone 
 
 Winterslow. 
 
 Thomas Moore . 
 
 1779 
 
 Ireland 
 
 Much abroad. 
 
 The evidence is fairly conclusive that the centre of 
 literary life is no longer fixed in London. It is no 
 
30 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 longer essential to frequent coffee-houses and clubs, to 
 follow the leader of a clique, or sedulously to cultivate 
 a fashion. The flight to London is arrested. Richard- 
 son, Fielding, Johnson, Garrick, Goldsmith, Reynolds, 
 and the rest, though born in various parts of England, 
 had spent their busy years in London. The metro- 
 politan flavour was absorbed as an ingredient of their 
 wit, and hfe in the provinces was ' provincial ' in a 
 sense which exactly recalls the Augustan tradition of 
 ancient Rome. This had not always been the case. 
 Elizabethan and Caroline writers were not necessarily 
 beyond the pale if they wrote at a distance from the 
 capital ; but, during the eighteenth century, literary 
 production had become so special and professional a 
 pursuit that London's hospitality was sought as a first 
 condition of being heard. This taste was fostered by 
 outside causes. In the early days of reviews and 
 newspapers, distribution was difficult, and their in- 
 fluence at the same time was far more considerable 
 than it is now. The wits, the critics, and the divines 
 were compelled to be ' on the spot ' ; rustic comment, 
 however shrewd, was bound to be behind the times. 
 Moreover, the growing conveniences of travel were 
 likely to operate, at first, adversely to social equality. 
 The man who cannot afford to keep a motor-car to-day 
 is far more effectively cut off from intercourse with his 
 fellows than in the days when horse traffic set the 
 pace ; and, similarly, a hundred and fifty years ago, 
 when the squire began to avail himself of the better 
 means of reaching London, stay-at-homes would fall 
 
WITH MANY VOICES 31 
 
 behind in the competition of fashion and culture. A 
 temporary or permanent residence in London, with all 
 that it implied in better sources of information, and a 
 finer wit in dealing with it, became a necessity rather 
 than a luxury, and these social tendencies encouraged 
 the concentration of Johnson and his circle on the little 
 world about Fleet Street and Covent Garden. 
 
 It is therefore not without significance that some of The 
 the writers who were children when Johnson died were pation 
 content, as they grew up, to forgo the set habits and °o^ntry- 
 the sophisticated opinions of the town, and to live out side, 
 their simpler lives in rural districts of England, or in 
 the North, or even abroad. They found their material 
 at hand. They no longer felt the impulsion which, in 
 the older generation, had driven Johnson, Garrick, and 
 Crabbe to seek clubs and patrons in the capital. The 
 change is quick with the promise of new skies and a 
 wider horizon ; and, true to expectation, a little group 
 of early poets — harbingers of an ample spring — begin 
 to pipe an unaccustomed note in English coppices and 
 hedgerows. More pertinently still, far away in Allo- 
 way, in Ayrshire, the strong, sweet voice of Robert 
 Burns (1759-96), who flooded Scotland with melody 
 in the last years of the eighteenth century, is raised in 
 lyric exaltation of the poor, the lowly, and the meek. 
 We cannot pause at this period, full of interest though 
 it be, save briefly to characterize its note fin-de-sidcle. 
 It was a note of a keener sympathy with wider classes 
 of society. The sympathetic faculty was extended 
 from the lower orders of mankind to animate and even 
 
32 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 to sentient creation^. When once the principle was 
 admitted — and the breakdown of the urban convention 
 contributed to its admission — that all conscious or 
 seeming- conscious life is worthy of a place in the sun ; 
 that the hodman at his plough, the daisy in the field, 
 and the lover with his lass, are alike a part of Nature's 
 pageant, sharing passively, even if not actively, in her 
 beneficent and universal scheme, then the bounds of 
 literature were enlarged to include these also in its 
 survey. Thus, the figures symbolizing the transition 
 from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century are 
 Cowper, fondling his hare, and Burns, confiding in a 
 mouse. 
 Independ- How far this enlargement was due to the influence 
 French ^^ Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), whose philo- 
 example. sophy, frankly naturalistic, represents the speculative 
 side of the revolutionary movement in France, is a 
 question, already referred to, which it is difficult to 
 answer. What is meant by influence, in the first place ? 
 Rousseau directly inspired, through J^mile, his educa- 
 tional treatise, the once famous Sandford and Merton 
 (1783-89), the author of which, Thomas Day, an 
 eccentric social reformer, sought to turn Rousseau's 
 doctrine to a more moral end. The Man of Feeling, 
 again, the chief work of Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831), 
 was composed in the vein of Rousseau's sentimental 
 
 * Dr. Darwin, in his Presidential Address at the British AsBOcia- 
 tion in 1908, lent support to the view of the sentiency of plants, 
 anticipated, for instance, by Wordsworth in 1798. The whole of this 
 field of speculation has been mapped out by members of his family, 
 from Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) downwards. 
 
WITH MANY VOICES 33 
 
 heroes, and most of tlie floods of tears which were 
 poured through English fiction at this time may be 
 traced to the same well-head. More gratefully, too, 
 English Kterature refers to Rousseau for the enjoyment 
 of the Alps, and of scenic Nature generally, in her 
 wilder and more sombre shapes. The * discovery ' in 
 this sense of Geneva in Rousseau's Nouvelle Heldise 
 marks the beginning of Alpine worship and of the 
 sense of mountainous beauty. The perception might 
 be vulgarized and overdone, and marred by a hundred 
 affectations, the most obvious of which, perhaps, in 
 the years immediately succeeding, was its cultivation 
 for its own sake irrespective of circumstance and char- 
 acter. Lovesick maidens turned to hills and deserts 
 as to a kind of universal comfort, with a sublime 
 indifference to geological or psychological conditions. 
 So far, French example was contagious, but at the 
 same time, though the sympathetic sentiment was 
 reinforced by Rousseau's naturalism, and, later, by 
 the ' sansculottism ' of the revolutionaries, its rise in 
 England was spontaneous and independent. England's 
 own industrial conditions and social development, and 
 a certain impatience of authority in the literary sphere 
 engendered by a too long devotion to the rules and 
 artifices of a school, encouraged the expression of the 
 same ideas, and stimulated at many points at once 
 the minds of writers and thinkers towards 'liberty, 
 fraternity, equality '. England's ' return to nature ', 
 — to employ a well-worn phrase which means dif- 
 ferent things at different times, — her return to a 
 3 
 
34 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 simpler standard of nature-study at first hand, was 
 a movement springing on her own soil, issuing in 
 several directions, industrial, social, and artistic, 
 and chiefly traceable, perhaps, in the lyrical songs of 
 Burns, 
 
 Literature was no longer set to the standard of town 
 taste. Forms and cliques were losing their authority, 
 and writers, accordingly, were set free to reflect what 
 they saw, as they saw it. Birth, death, old age, the 
 swelling of the sap in spring, the innocent gambolling 
 of lambs, the flute of the nightingale in the thicket, 
 autumn's fall of leaves, the life quickening under snow, 
 love transforming experience, duty inspiriting love — 
 these themes were presented to the men of letters of 
 the day in a fresh and an unobstructed guise. No 
 obstacles of convention were interposed between the 
 writer and his material. London and a Londoner's 
 life were intellectually remote from the hills, the lakes, 
 and the dales whence inspiration was gathered. Even 
 the rumours of Paris arrived in a softened guise, in a 
 kind of beatific transfiguration of the actual horror of 
 its doings. Burns was a democrat to the core, and 
 spoke out boldly what he felt ; but the bloodshed 
 and carnage of the Revolution have plainly been purged 
 with hyssop before they are idealized in his poems to 
 such an issue as the following : — 
 
 A king can mak' a belted knight, 
 
 A marquis, duke, and a' that ; 
 But an honest man's aboon his might ; 
 
 Quid faith, he mauna fa' that ! 
 
WITH MANY VOICES 35 
 
 For a' that, and a' that, 
 
 Their dignities, and a' that. 
 The pith o' sense, and pride o' worth, 
 
 Are higher ranks than a' that. 
 
 Then let us pray that come it may — 
 
 As come it will for a' that — 
 That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth, 
 May bear the gree, and a' that ; 
 For a' that, and a' that, 
 
 It's coming yet for a' that. 
 That man to man, the warld o'er. 
 Shall brothers be for a' that ! 
 
 The seers and interpreters in the new world now Objective 
 opened to observation followed mainly two lines. ^^^ ^^^' 
 Remember for a moment what was happening, not only 
 in France, but in England. The impetus was all to 
 get away from the cramped and narrowing restrictions 
 of subject and style. Human passion was no longer 
 to be regulated by the decorum of good breeding ; 
 human action no longer to be confined within the four 
 walls of a lady's salon ; human speech no longer to 
 be guarded by the mechanism of urbane diction, and 
 human sympathy no longer to be measured by the 
 familiarity of its object. Ways of escape were sought 
 — ways of enlargement and refreshment. On the one 
 hand the method was objective : the appropriate 
 means were found in far-off and unfamihar places, 
 amid novel persons and surroundings. Themes and 
 thoughts too wild for English habits were introduced 
 in an antique guise, or in Southern or Eastern dress. 
 A new convention was established, and imposed for a 
 time on the unread and the incurious public, that the 
 
36 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 manners of former days or of present-day nations in 
 the South and the East were subject to a kind of 
 authors' licence, justifying every imputation of autre 
 temps (or, autre lieu), autres moeurs. A past and a 
 distant were constructed, for the invasion of letters 
 corresponding, as was presently realized, with no 
 actual conditions of history or society, and a new 
 literature arose, peopled with mysterious heroes and 
 exalting mysterious heroisms, which succeeded in its 
 primary aim of taking people out of themselves. 
 Subjective The second method was subjective. Instead of 
 T^m! flying to untravelled lands or to glamorous periods of 
 time for the mise-en-sc^ne of the novel emotions, writers 
 began to resort to the metaphysical region beyond 
 the substantial world. They explored the back of 
 experience. They endeavoured to abstract from 
 common things all the properties conveyed by sense- 
 perception. When visibility, audibleness, tangibility 
 and the rest had been removed, there remained an im- 
 palpable abstraction, an essential spirituality, imper- 
 ceptible to the senses, which delude, but imaginable 
 by faculties of the emotions. This spiritual recognition 
 represented phenomena in new aspects. The dividing 
 differences disappeared. Forms cognizable by the eye 
 and sounds by the ear were assimilated to a truer, 
 because a deeper and a more abiding, significance. 
 A bird's song was absorbed in its evidence to elemental 
 joy ; a flower's scent and form were resumed in ele- 
 mental beauty. The incarnate universe, confused by 
 tens of thousands of shapes which opportunity and 
 
WITH MANY VOICES 37 
 
 circumstance had fashioned, was simplified to the 
 arch-patterns of informing design. Take a few ex- 
 amples, selected almost at random from the poetic 
 writers of this time, and the working of the method 
 will be clearer. There is the rapture of Wordsworth's 
 vision (Excursion, i. 201-13) — 
 
 Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth 
 And ocean's hquid mass, in gladness lay- 
 Beneath him : — Far and wide the clouds were touched. 
 And in their silent faces could he read 
 Unutterable love. Sound needed none. 
 Nor any voice of joy ; his spirit drank 
 The spectacle : sensation, soul, and form. 
 All melted into him ; they swallowed up 
 His animal being ; in them did he hve. 
 And by them did he live ; they were his life. 
 In such access of mind, in such high hour 
 Of visitation from the living God, 
 Thought was not ; in enjoyment it expired. 
 
 There is Shelley's incorporeal skylark-essence — 
 
 The pale purple even 
 
 Melts around thy flight ; 
 Like a star of heaven 
 In the broad daylight 
 Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight. 
 
 There is Blake's quintessential babyhood — 
 
 Sweet joy, but two days old; 
 Sweet joy I call thee ; 
 
 Thou dost smile : 
 
 I sing the while. 
 Sweet joy befall thee ! 
 
 Again and again it recurs, — in the pages of the literature 
 of this age, and especially in its poetry, — that supreme 
 
38 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 transcendental note, in whicli an attempt is made to 
 remove from objects of sense-perception every attri- 
 bute apparent to sight, bearing, or toucb, and to render 
 the imaginable qualities, the truly qualifying pro- 
 perties, which create the true image of the object, in 
 language expressing nothing else, nothing accidental to 
 those abstractions ; or, as Blake wrote in his Auguries 
 of Innocence — 
 
 To see the world in a grain of sand 
 And a heaven in a wild flower ; 
 
 Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, 
 And eternity in an hour. 
 
 Here was new matter enough for the poets of the 
 period to explore ; and, if the first method fed curiosity 
 with the literature of mystery, the second fed it with the 
 literature of mysticism. To these twin movements 
 from one impulse, attention is now to be directed. 
 Blake and Meanwhile, it is instructive to note that the founda- 
 owper. ij^Qj^g wQTQ laid before the eighteenth century's close. 
 There is a kind of critics' competition for the place of 
 first favourite in this respect. Thus, Mr. W. B. Yeats, 
 in introducing Blake to modern readers, writes that 
 his ' poems mark an epoch in English literature, for 
 they were the first opening of the long-sealed well of 
 romantic poetry ; they, and not the works of Cowper 
 and Thomson and Chatterton, being the true heralds 
 of our modern poetry of nature and enthusiasm ' ^.z 
 Perhaps ; though it matters very little in comparison 
 
 1 Poems of William Blake. Edited by W. B. Yeats. Muses* 
 Library. P. xxiii. 
 
WITH MANY VOICES 39 
 
 with the fact that the long- sealed well was opened 
 and the magic casements were at last unbarred. We 
 remember single lines from Cowper — ■ 
 
 He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, "^ 
 or — 
 
 God made the country, and man made the town, 
 
 or, most characteristically of all — 
 
 I know at least one hare that had a friend, 
 
 which show that, in his solitary experience, he had 
 lived through a moral revolution, and had sought to 
 rebuild society on a simpler and a humbler basis. 
 * Alas ! what can I do with my wit ? ' he sighed. ' I 
 have not enough to do great things with, and these 
 little things are so fugitive that, while a man catches 
 at a subject, he is only filling his hand with smoke '. 
 And, again, in his verses to The Castaway — 
 
 We perish'd, each alone ; 
 But I beneath a rougher sea 
 And whelm'd in deeper gulfs than he. 
 
 These hints are sufficient for sympathy to construct 
 the sad and lonely lot, the life on a broken wing, which 
 befel this elder poet ; and, sympathizing thus, we can 
 but wonder at the sense of equal design which he 
 worked out in his broken musings. The note which 
 was to reverberate, with stronger and clearer sound, 
 through Burns, Blake, and their successors, however 
 ' fugitive ' and though to no ' great things ', is caught 
 by Cowper before them. It is borne on the same 
 evening wind, sprung up in the twilight of the eighteenth 
 
40 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 century, of which Mr. William Watson tells us in an 
 exquisite elegiac stanza — 
 
 Prom dewy pastures, uplands sweet with thyme. 
 
 V 
 
 A virgin breeze freshened the jaded day. 
 It wafted Collins' lonely vesper-chime, 
 
 It breathed abroad the frugal note of Gray. 
 
 Our appreciation of the literature of the nineteenth 
 century is heightened and quickened by listening to 
 these frugal herald-voices, by tracing backwards to 
 Gray, or Collins, or Cowper, or Thomson, the earliest 
 premonition of the thought, elaborated in later writers, 
 which has changed the very texture of our minds, and, 
 intellectually at least, has created a new heaven and a 
 new earth. 
 The tend- Lastly, the first exponents of these methods were 
 diSse- liable to extreme diffuseness. The country was so 
 novel and unfamiliar that the pioneers took their 
 work too seriously. There was a lack of order and 
 ol' proportion, shown even to worse advantage by its 
 contrast with the standards of the eighteenth century, 
 which deliberately aimed at order in every region it 
 explored, from Pope's garden-plot at Twickenham to 
 the Garden of Eden itself. There were no ragged edges 
 in that scheme, no distances or dimness ; and the 
 strength derived from such limitations was transferred 
 to the diction of literature and to the metres of poetry. 
 Into these limits, which belonged to the former age, 
 we need inquire no farther than to note, when the new 
 territories were opened out, how the restricting dams 
 were overrun. The limits of the heroic couplet were 
 
WITH MANY VOICES 41 
 
 completely broken down. Crabbe, who took it over from 
 his contemporaries, handed it on to his successors in a 
 far more malleable form ; and poets more skilled than 
 Crabbe, who frequently used no better device for 
 prolonging the argument beyond the rhyme than a 
 succession of relative pronouns or other obvious terms 
 of conjunction, manipulated the metre so well that its 
 distich-character disappeared in a swelling organ-roll 
 of melody which assisted the transition to the richer 
 prosodies of blank verse. Language, too, was subject 
 to a like change. The diction of the eighteenth century i- 
 was distinguished by clearness, non-complexity, and 
 completeness. Its words were truly and squarely set ; 
 each had its own place and full use. There is a brief 
 passage in Coleridge (1772-1834) whicfi, treatmg of 
 this very theme, exemplifies the point which it dis- 
 cusses. In his Lectures on Shakespeare he writes : — >- 
 
 Dr. Johnson used to say that in the most unre- 
 strained discourse he always sought for the properest 
 word — that which best and most exactly conveyed 
 his meaning ; to a certain point he was right, but, 
 because he carried it too far, he was often laborious 
 where he ought to have been light, and formal where 
 he ought to have been familiar. Men ought to en- 
 deavour to distinguish subtly, that they may be able 
 afterwards to assimilate truly. 
 
 Subtle distinctions in language, requiring words with 
 a margin of meaning, corresponded to the new perception 
 of emotions unplumbed by experience, of wonder in 
 common things, and of tears at the back of thought. 
 
42 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 There was no space for such vagaries in the clear-cut 
 prose of Dr. Johnson : — 
 
 If the opportunities of beneficence be denied by 
 fortune, innocence should at least be vigilantly pre- 
 served. It is well known that time once past never 
 returns ; and that the moment which is lost is lost for 
 ever. Time therefore ought, above all kinds of pro- 
 perty, to be free from invasion. 
 
 Analyse this extract from The Idler, and we see that, 
 in the Latin and the Saxon words alike, their connota- 
 tion is exact and self-contained. There are no am- 
 biguities, no vagueness ; even the metaphor in ' pro- 
 perty ' and ' invasion ' does not relax the bounds, or 
 leave anything to the imagination. 
 
 These illustrations may carry us too far, but they 
 help to explain the relief, frequently manifest to 
 immoderateness, with which the frontiers were over- 
 stepped. Men expatiated freely in a new air, and if 
 they happened to see marvels in a spectacle which 
 common folk find commonplace, if they cried, like 
 Jacob in the wilderness, ' Surely God is in this place, 
 and I knew it not ', where we, repairing their vision, 
 see, not Bethel, but Luz, understanding will bring con- 
 donation, and, with the clue to their method in our 
 hands, we shall travel with securer sympathy through 
 the occasional aridities of their style. The masters of 
 the nineteenth century conquered in a very few years 
 the difficulties which its material presented to them. 
 The elements of composition were soon acquired — 
 
WITH MANY VOICES 43 
 
 order, arrangement, selection, the relation of ornament 
 to design, and the elimination of the inappropriate 
 and the grotesque. Strength was added to purpose, 
 and beauty increased with use, and, with this certainty 
 before us, we may enter without misgiving the paradise 
 of regained romance. 
 
§ 4. PKOSE FICTION. 
 
 R°H Iff X^ needs the promise of the paradise to resist the 
 (1764- -L languor and ineptitude of the kind of literature 
 
 1823) 
 
 '' which is typified by Mrs. KadclifEe's The Mysteries of 
 Udolpho. It is not merely the burden of its three 
 hundred thousand words ; other novels, earlier and 
 later, are of equal or even greater length. But in 
 Udolpho we plunge at once into the limbo of unbaptized 
 romance. It is all there except the soul to spiritualize 
 the separate parts ; and the stage properties creak 
 against a background of uninspired talent. 
 Gothic' But, all deductions notwithstanding, Mrs. Radcliffe's 
 The Mysteries of Udolpho and her three other romances 
 — A Sicilian Romance, The Romance of the Forest, and 
 The Italian — have no slight importance in the history 
 of English fiction. They mark the rise of the sensa- 
 tional school, which, after correcting the abuses of its 
 earliest practitioners, was destined, through greater 
 writers, to acquire qualities of strength and order, and, 
 allying itself with the school of character-study, in the 
 Bronte sisters, for example, was to make the English 
 novel a chief medium of national expression, and a 
 chief engine of moral teaching and of social reform. 
 
 44 
 
 romance. 
 
PROSE FICTION 45 
 
 We are concerned here with the beginnings, and should 
 note that the mystery-mongers belonged to the school 
 of so-called ' Gothic ' romance, an epithet derived from 
 the period of its antiquarian properties, and applied 
 by extension to its character and style. Of this type 
 The Castle of Otranto (1764), by Horace Walpole, Lord 
 Orford, was the most conspicuous example. That 
 once famous book is of the eighteenth century through- 
 out, and a higher level was reached in Vathek (1784), 
 by William Beckford, traveller and connoisseur. His 
 romance of the East was written originally in French, 
 and was translated without permission, and it shows 
 a really ingenious use of supernatural machinery 
 employed to stimulate and ,-,jencourage the romantic 
 curiosity of the age. M. G. Lewis, known as ' Monk ' 
 Lewis, from the title of his principal work, Ambrosio, 
 or The Monk, published in 1795, took a more lurid view, 
 and appealed to lower passions. 
 
 It is worth while to inquire more closely into the 
 making of this kind of book, and the mood which it was 
 intended to satisfy, in order more clearly to apprehend 
 the ' romantic ' outlook on life. An interesting clue 
 is afforded by Mrs. RadclifTe's frequent quotations 
 from Thomson, Collins, and Gray. These writers, who 
 had died respectively in 1748, 1759, and 1771, were 
 at the height of their fame very near the years of 
 Mrs. Radclifie's activity (1790-97) — too near, perhaps, 
 to permit her to judge with true discrimination the 
 value of their contribution to thought. It is plainly 
 their sentiment which seizes her, the attractive melan- 
 
46 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 choly mood in which they sought to subdue themselves 
 to nature in her changing aspects. The external 
 features of scenery are painted again and again, and 
 lead to enthusiasm and verse. No particular ap- 
 propriateness is sought in the circumstances of time 
 or place. There is just a gush of feeling issuing in a 
 rush of words : — 
 
 ' The evening gloom of woods was always delightful 
 to me ', said St. Aubert : ' I remember that in my 
 youth this gloom used to call forth to my fancy a 
 thousand fairy visions and romantic images ; and I 
 own I am not yet wholly insensible of that high en- 
 thusiasm which wakes the poet's dream : I can linger 
 with solemn steps under the deep shades, send forward 
 a transforming eye into the distant obscurity, and 
 listen with thrilling delight to the mystic murmuring 
 of the woods '. 
 
 ' my dear father ', said Emily, while a sudden 
 tear started to her eye, ' how exactly you describe what 
 I have felt so often, and which I thought nobody had 
 ever felt but myself ! But, hark ! here comes the 
 sweeping sound over the wood-tops — Now it dies away. 
 How solemn the stillness that succeeds ! Now the 
 breeze swells again ! It is like the voice of some super- 
 natural being — the voice of the spirit of the woods, 
 that watches over them by night '. 
 
 Defective The want of depth to this sentiment, the easy tears 
 ization. it calls forth, and the loose associative language of 
 which it avails itself so freely, all point to a false con- 
 vention, or, rather, to a convention misapplied, or 
 never properly understood. To dethrone the ' reason ' 
 
PROSE FICTION 47 
 
 of the eighteenth century, and to crown ' feeling ' in 
 its stead, was a simple and plausible programme in an 
 age curious about itself ; but the un-moral aim of Mrs. 
 Radcliffe — her delight in harrowing for the mere 
 horror's sake — left no permanent impression when the 
 thrill or the shudder was spent. ' Emotion remembered 
 in tranquilHty ', was Wordsworth's account of his art ; 
 emotion manufactured for the occasion, was the height 
 of Ann Radcliffe's aim. This distinction is important, 
 and essential to a correct judgment of the literature of 
 mystery. Character and incident are kept apart, and, 
 when the cultivated sentiment is employed to justify 
 action, criticism rebels at the conclusion, and Mrs. 
 Radcliffe fails in the first instance of the novelist's 
 craft : she does not convince the intelligence of her 
 readers. Take the following example. St. Aubert 
 is breaking to his daughter the news of a reduction of 
 his income. Emily smiles at him through her tears, 
 and St. Aubert conceals his face with his handkerchief : 
 
 * Besides, my dear sir ', she urges, * poverty cannot 
 deprive us of intellectual delights. It cannot deprive 
 you of the comfort of affording me examples of fortitude 
 and benevolence, nor me of the delight of consoling a 
 beloved parent. It cannot deaden our taste for the 
 grand and the beautiful, nor deny us the means of 
 indulging it ; for the scenes of nature — those sublime 
 spectacles, so infinitely superior to all artificial luxuries ! 
 are open for the enjoyment of the poor as well as of the 
 rich. Of what, then, have we to complain, so long as 
 we are not in want of necessaries ? Pleasures, such as 
 
48 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 wealth cannot buy, will still be ours. We retain, then, 
 the sublime luxuries of nature, and lose only the 
 frivolous ones of art '. 
 
 Then, * he caught Emily to his bosom, their tears 
 flowed together . . . After this language of the heart, 
 all other would have been feeble, and they remained 
 silent for some time '. But we have an uneasy sense 
 that neither the ' language of the heart ' nor the silence 
 of the tongue is a true expression of character. The 
 constructive principle is not developed. 
 
 When we pass from the earlier portion of the book, 
 in nineteen desultory chapters, to the mysteries of 
 Udolpho itself — ' the Gothic magnificence of Udolpho, 
 its proud irregularity, its lofty towers and battlements, 
 its high-arched casements, and its slender watch-tower, 
 perched upon the corners of turrets ' — a like dissatis- 
 faction supervenes. Partly, this sense arises from the 
 theory of the mystery-novel, which postpones the ex- 
 planation to the event and demands a credulous reader. 
 The action of Udolpho is placed in 1584, and, though 
 Mrs. Radcliffe took no pains to observe the probabili- 
 ties of history, the distant date was employed as a 
 sufficient pretext for wild improbabilities of manners. 
 Doubtless, at the date of its appearance, this type of 
 fiction had its uses. It took readers out of themselves, 
 and out of the formal way of their own lives, to shriek 
 at ghosts and apparitions, at horrid noises in the night, 
 and to quake with innocent heroines at ingeniously 
 grim tormentors. Better, in the last resort, too much 
 
PROSE FICTION 49 
 
 sensibility than none, and to this extent, at any rate, 
 Mrs. Radcliffe did the right thing at the right time. If 
 certain classes had to be shaken out of a smug self- 
 complacency, Mrs. Radcliffe's method was well suited 
 to disturb their content. On the other hand, she 
 lulled emotion almost as soon as she aroused it, or, 
 rather, by trusting exclusively to an emotional appeal, 
 and by opposing the fiat of Gothic castledom to the 
 protests of the intellect, she produced a mental inertia 
 which each of her books prolonged indefinitely. 
 
 u. 
 
 Her much greater contemporary, Jane Austen Jane 
 (1775-1817), achieved more by trying less. She seized ^'''*^''' 
 the spirit of the movement, of which Ann Radcliffe 
 only saw the furniture. Her novels are hard to classify, 
 though easy to enjoy, and we may take the facts, which 
 are brief, before trying the conclusions, which are 
 hazardous. Her father was a clergyman at Steventon, 
 in Hampshire, and her life was spent in that county, 
 with intervals at Bath. She died at Winchester in 
 her forty-second year, but her genius ripened early, 
 and, though none of her novels was published before 
 1821, three at least, and one of these the best, were more 
 or less complete in manuscript in 1798. Thus, the 
 author of Pride and Prejudice was little more than a 
 girl, and the more remarkable, accordingly, was her 
 quiet contentment with the limitations of experience 
 4 
 
50 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 and surroundings. That it was a quiet, an acquiescent, 
 contentment, not a mere passive receptivity, is im- 
 portant to the understanding of her art. The rural 
 parsonage and the narrow life might not have been her 
 choice, had the power of choosing been offered to her ; 
 but she was too wise to fret at restrictions which she 
 was too observant to ignore. She employed her 
 faculties upon them. There were men and women, after 
 all, within her sphere of observation, and many shapes 
 of love and death, and pity, and hope, and fear. If 
 Gray had enlarged the bounds of a country churchyard, 
 and had shown a forgetful generation that virtue and 
 vice, and the infinite interplay of conduct, may be 
 great even in little men, so this daughter of a country 
 parsonage, reading more truly than Mrs. Radcliffe the 
 hints of the new-time poets, sat down quietly to the 
 task of rendering in this sense the features of the life 
 around her. She possessed the cosmic touch, which 
 is nothing but order, or proportion, applied to the 
 comedy of life. So, out of the drawing-rooms, and 
 parlours, and the corners of the hunting-field which 
 she knew, she drew the threads together in a clear and 
 composite pattern. If folly or prudence had suffered 
 the extreme punishment or reward, she re -arranged the 
 scene and grouped the figures afresh, so as to exhibit on 
 her own small stage the ideal and universal process 
 which nature works out at large, and, most often, 
 beyond human view. Thus, a wholesome leaven of 
 common sense and a rare faculty of imagination helped 
 her, despite tradition, and despite the reaction from 
 
PROSE FICTION 51 
 
 tradition, to join in a perfect synthesis the irre- 
 concilables of a former generation — romance and a 
 country life. 
 
 At the same time, there was no glamour in her 
 scheme ; it was excluded by the limits which she 
 accepted, and its absence creates an impression of 
 eighteenth-century tradition which is more illusory than 
 just. Miss Austen belongs to the new age, and is a 
 foremost exponent of its principles, by the indefeasible 
 right of her conquest of new territories for art. She 
 enfranchised the parsonage and the villa, as they 
 existed a hundred years ago. \ Rejecting instinctively 
 the machinery of the romantic novelist as beyond the 
 scope of her characters, ridiculing, though without 
 harshness, the methods and admirers of Mrs. Radcliffe, 
 and the sentimental female of her school, Jane Austen 
 held up the mirror to human nature as she knew it. 
 Her tea-parties lacked the wit of Dr. Johnson and 
 Mrs. Thrale ; her love-scenes were not expanded 
 beyond the capacity of her lovers ; even their rare 
 elopements received no meretricious decoration ; her 
 rustics were as indifferent to rusticity as rustics genuinely 
 are ; and fate depended on character with a sureness 
 which left no room for sentimental vapourings or 
 repining. The style of the eighteenth century is 
 touched to a simpler mode by the finer perception 
 of nineteenth century sympathy. It is not an ad- 
 venturous world, not even a world of rapid movement, 
 to which Jane Austen invites us. A social introduction 
 is formidable, a visit is a serious undertaking, the 
 
52 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 writing of a letter is momentous. ' We have dined 
 nine times at Rosings, besides drinking tea there twice ! 
 How much I shall have to tell ! ' is the typical reflec- 
 tion of a typical Austenian young lady. 
 
 But the writer conceals her art, for she is fully con- 
 scious all the while of the littleness of her little people's 
 <2^ bignesses, and in this sense Miss Austen is a satirist. 
 There are those who find in her work nothing but 
 primness and insipidity, and who miss in her narrow 
 sky the light of her delicate humour and minute ob- 
 servation. To these, her series of novels. Pride and 
 Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Northanger 
 Abbey, Mansfield Park and Persuasion — if an order of 
 merit may be suggested — will fail to appeal through 
 their gallery of characters : Elizabeth Bennet, sensible 
 and lovable, who taught Mr. Darcy how to propose, 
 and stripped the schoolgirl's ideal lover of his cloak of 
 elegance and affectation ; the inimitable Mr. Collins, 
 revealing all his mean nature in situations etched with 
 the delicacy of vignettes ; the Bennets, the Bertrams, 
 the Woodhouses, and the Dashwoods, Lady Catherine 
 de Bourgh, and Mr. Norris — , the palate cloyed with 
 sentiment and the appetite sated with horrors repair 
 to Miss Austen for refreshment, and find in the humours 
 I and foibles of her faithfully portrayed countryfolk a 
 wisdom perfectly proportioned and a wit admirably 
 adjusted to the skill of the writer and the demands of 
 her material. 
 
PROSE FICTION 53 
 
 m. 
 
 Somewhat similar in kind, thougli with more of a Maria 
 masculine vigour, were the Irish romances of Maria worth. 
 Edgeworth (1767-1849). She evinced in her earlier 
 books a very filial deference to that eccentric Irish 
 squire, her father, who was addicted to educational 
 theorizing and to the study of French philosophy. 
 Though she lived to be eighty-two, and was writing 
 through most of her life, she never quite lost the fear of 
 her father's pen in revision, and her Parents' Assistant 
 (1796) and Early Lessons (1801) — the latter incorpo- 
 rating Frank and Harry and Lucy and similar tales — 
 were distinguished by a moral purpose and by a certain 
 primness of treatment, which, though, perhaps, more 
 obtrusive than the present generation approves, yet 
 displayed a freshness and a naturalness and a deft 
 originality of touch still attractive to-day. Miss Edge- 
 worth worked her way to a higher type of moral tales, 
 addressed to an older audience of young people, and 
 intended to arm them against the dangers and tempta- 
 tions of the fashionable life which she portrayed. Of 
 these the most notable is Belinda (1801). In the first 
 twenty years of the nineteenth century, Maria Edge- 
 worth's hand grew firmer, and she gave her talents a 
 looser rein. She produced in The Absentee (1812) and 
 Ormond (1817) really enduring novels of Irish life and 
 character racy of the soil, picturesque, human, and 
 romantic, and comparable, by the generosity of the 
 
54 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 greater artist, with the Scottish novels of Sir Walter 
 Scott. 
 William Another novelist of this time was William Godwin 
 noveTsr'' (1756-1836). He is chiefly famous to-day as the 
 father-in-law of Shelley, and as the author, in 1793, of 
 an Enquiry concerning Political Justice. That treatise 
 was passionately admired by the young bloods of 
 revolution, and the lofty principles it professed cloaked 
 the meannesses of Godwin's character, and built a 
 serviceable bridge between the anarchy he sought and 
 the freedom which he preached. His novels were a 
 kind of by-work, and the first and best of them, Caleb 
 Williams (1794), was likewise political in scope, and 
 attempted, somewhat incoherently, to point the way 
 to social reform. With St. Leon (1799), Godwin 
 entered the lists of romance, and paid an exhausting 
 tribute to the claims of sentiment in fiction. Its plot 
 of the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life ranges 
 it in the same class of supernatural romance, in which 
 his daughter, Mary WoUstonecraft Shelley, was to win 
 far higher renown. Her Frankenstein, a tale of terror, 
 published in 1818, remains the best example of the 
 Radcliffian school, for it combines probability of 
 character with improbability of incident, and, by a 
 rigid elimination of the inessential, it seizes and retains 
 a hold on the reader's imagination. 
 Minor It would be possible to pursue romance through its 
 
 less enduring manifestations in the didactic work of 
 Mrs. Inchbald and Hannah More, and in the more 
 sentimental novels of the Scottish writer, Susan 
 
PROSE FICTION 55 
 
 Ferrier (1782-1854), to whom Scott, in his large gene- 
 rosity, paid yet another tribute of admiration. There 
 were Robert Bage (1728-1801), a Godwinian disciple 
 in the generation before his master, and Thomas Hol- 
 croft (1745-1809), a similar firebrand, who was tried 
 for high treason in 1794. No particular interest 
 attaches to their novels to-day, and a like oblivion is 
 threatening the later work of William Carleton and 
 Thomas Croker, two students of Irish life and character ; 
 of Samuel Lover (1797-1868), a more distinguished 
 Irish writer, whose Handy Andy (1842) is still familiar 
 to boys ; of Lady Blessington, of The Keepsake, and > 
 Mrs. Opie, of Godwin's school, author of Father and 
 Daughter (1801), but more memorable for her works of 
 piety under the influence of the Quakers. A more 
 considerable name, before we part with the forerunners 
 of the Victorian novelists, is that of Thomas Love 
 Peacock (1785-1866), who was poet as well as novel- 
 writer, and whose talents were employed in the gradual 
 perfection of a scholarly, almost an exotic, style, full 
 of whims and quiddities as risible and quaint as Sir 
 Thomas Browne's, and brilliant with the fanciful 
 humour of a keen and fearless social observer. His 
 residence in Wales supplied the colour for his first 
 novel, Headlong Hall, which appeared in 1816, and from 
 that date to 1861 Peacock wrote a succession ■ of 
 poems and tales — his gifts and style are displayed 
 most characteristically in Crotchet Castle (1831) — which 
 give him an unique and a firm hold on the affections of 
 the cultivated readers for whom he deliberately wrote, 
 
§ 5. IMAGINATIVE POETRY, I. 
 
 Lyrtcal TJUT it IS m the poetry of the age, and not m the 
 Ballads. r\ t n - -, 
 
 -■— ^ development of prose fiction, that we trace the 
 
 true course of this movement. The mysteries of 
 Udolpho led nowhere : this is the important point. 
 Its spells were woven, its incantations sung, the tears 
 of ajBlicted damsels fell, hissing, into the seething 
 cauldron ; and nothing came of it all. The stirred 
 feelings were recomposed ; readers, gradually inured 
 to the so-called ' Gothic ' convention, grew more and 
 more difficult to rouse, till the baser motives of 
 ' Monk ' Lewis reinforced the sensational appeal. The 
 degradation of the type was inevitable, for it struck 
 ^ no permanent note. 
 
 A more definite claim, or challenge, was made, in 
 1798, in Lyrical Ballads, by S. T. Coleridge and William 
 Wordsworth. These authors affected no disguise of 
 their ulterior purpose. They used the sensational 
 method as a means to an end and no longer as an end 
 in itself. They aimed at society through conduct ; 
 the new high-road to social reform was along the strait 
 way of character. With due seriousness, they pre- 
 faced their book by what French critics call a pi^ce 
 
 56 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 57 
 
 justificative, or a special plea to justify its appearance. 
 Several lines of departure are to be dated from this 
 book, whicb sought to create a taste, and to found 
 precedents for poetry ; but, in respect to the literature 
 of mystery, with which we are immediately concerned, 
 attention is chiefly to be directed to Coleridge's famous 
 ballad, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In this poem, 
 the supernatural machinery, which Mrs. RadclifEe had 
 introduced for the sake of shocking the senses, as a 
 child might be shocked by thunder before he had ascer- 
 tained its cause, is employed with better constructive 
 skill — more artistically, that is to say — in order to 
 emphasize the efiects of causes latent in character. 
 The method of mystery is allied with the method of 
 mysticism. They pass and repass imperceptibly. 
 To the poets, building their arguments on the basic 
 truths of conduct, nature manifest was wonderful ; 
 the rest was ornament and heightening. The super- 
 natural in Coleridge is less supernatural than super- 
 sensible. It is extra-ordinary chiefly, — beyond the 
 experience of common life. Nature might conceivably 
 include it ; it might be true in an unexplored world ; 
 but experience must enlarge its bounds in order to 
 admit the concepts. 
 
 And here, with no closer acquaintance with the 
 contents of Lyrical Ballads, we may test the bond of 
 alUance between Coleridge and Wordsworth. Each 
 sought to emancipate art, as the nature-interpreting 
 medium, to release it from shibboleths and formulae, 
 and to find a language to express what is, as it is, for 
 
58 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 ever. Definite certainties had been affirmed in every 
 department of knowledge, — set out in trim parterres, 
 watered, and watched, and weeded. The unknown 
 waited to be explored, over the hedges, far away, 
 remote in the fastnesses of nature, near, as Jane Austen 
 saw, in the hearts and homes of common men, half- 
 hidden in self-revelation, silent in the music of the 
 spheres, and viewless in the radiance of the universe, 
 till the magic of poesy unstopped the ears and eyes of 
 human kind. Minor differences matter less to-day. 
 If Wordsworth left the imaginable to the imagination, 
 and impressed by mere description and narration the 
 effects which Coleridge sought by concrete images of 
 terror, his treatment cannot be said to have been less 
 imaginative for this restraint. The value of Lyrical 
 Ballads, of the challenge of 1798, is above rather than 
 below the pretensions of its authors. It swept away 
 all the cobwebs which the eighteenth century had 
 spun. Wordsworth himself had spun them in some 
 of his earliest poems, composed in the metre and 
 the spirit of eighteenth- century writers. But to the 
 chapter in English literature which opened with 
 Lyrical Ballads we come with a reasoned faith, with 
 no barred windows of the soul, confident that a voice 
 will be found for each starved or craving emotion 
 ennobling the judgment of man. 
 Words- A few lines of biography are required before ex- 
 
 Coleridge^ amining these poems and their preface. Wordsworth 
 and Coleridge alike, especially in early manhood, 
 were particularly sensitive to the impressions of their 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 59 
 
 times. They lived in an age of great events, and 
 they possessed, too, the rare faculty of historical in- 
 sight, which weighs the trivial and the profound with 
 accurate discernment. 
 
 William Wordsworth, born in 1770, was the senior 
 by two years, and, in a further sense, he remained the 
 elder till the end. His temper was naturally less pliant ; 
 he asked more than he gave, as husband, brother, and 
 friend ; and if, in every union of true minds, there is 
 always Vun qui aime, et Vautre qui se laisse aimer, it 
 was Coleridge who played the active part. He left his 
 family home in Devonshire to settle with the Words- 
 worths in the Lake District ; he took the second place 
 in the poetic partnership, and employed his critical 
 faculty in the service of his fellow-poet. In brief, 
 throughout the fellowship Coleridge gave more than 
 he received. At bottom, it was a difference of tempera- 
 ments. Coleridge was unhappy in his own nature, 
 while Wordsworth seemed to live aloof from the 
 accidents of fortune, secure in the constant love of 
 Dorothy, his sister, and Mary, his wife, and, in later 
 years, of the second Dora, his daughter. With Cole- 
 ridge's separation from his wife and his fatal habit of 
 opium-eating we need have no further concern, save 
 to trace his misfortunes to constitutional ill-health. 
 This led him to desultory ways, and to loose and casual 
 living, till his habits embarrassed, more or less, the 
 goodwill even of his best friends. 
 
 We return with increasing relief to the records of 
 early life. There was the brave, impossible plan of 
 
6o NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 a State of All the Liberties on the Susquehanna, the 
 ' pantisocracy ' of a young man's dream, which hurried 
 the three young dreamers — Coleridge, Southey and 
 Lovell — into an early marriage with the three sisters 
 Fricker. The scheme hardly survived the wedding- 
 bells, and Lovell, the latest of the brothers-in-law, 
 died as early as 1796. There was Joseph Cottle, the 
 bookseller-publisher, always looking out for talent, 
 whose timely advances right and left were so welcome 
 to the refractory team which he tried to turn into 
 the way of steady, respectable royalties. There was 
 Wordsworth's sojourn in Paris, when the revolutionary 
 turmoil was at its height, and his meeting with Michel 
 Beaupuy, the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche : 
 the memory of the republican general, mingled with 
 that of the poet's sailor-brother, John, inspired many 
 fine passages on the virtues of captains of men. There 
 was Raisley Calvert and his legacy — the name has no 
 other connotation — , which, in 1795, set Wordsworth 
 free from unsympathizing guardians to settle down 
 with Dorothy, his sister, in a very modest minage d> 
 deux. There was the later home in the Quantocks, 
 amid a circle of friends, and the ardent, enheartening 
 talk, and the unconventional ways, which aroused the 
 suspicion of neighbours and the attention of a Govern- 
 ment spy. There was the poets' visit to Germany in 
 1798-99, when Wordsworth met the great Klopstock, 
 and Coleridge was studying Kant : 
 
 Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. 
 And to be young was very Heaven, — 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 6i 
 
 is Wordworth's tribute in The Prelude to the illumina- ' 
 tion of those years ; and Coleridge, writing to Godwin, 
 in March 1801, declared ' If I die, and the booksellers 
 will give you anything for my life, be sure to say 
 " Wordsworth descended on him like the yvajh azavTov 
 from heaven ; by showing him what true poetry was, 
 he made him know that he himself was no poet " '. 
 With the poets' own sentiments to guide us, it is no 
 surprise that the critic, William Hazlitt, their junior 
 by a few years, should write, after a visit to the Quan- 
 tocks, that the poems of the friends conveyed ' some- 
 thing of the effect that arises from the turning up of 
 fresh soil, or the first welcome breath of spring '. 
 
 We come back to 1798, and to the two young poets Ballads 
 among the hills. Miracles were happening at that purpose, 
 time ; Dorothy's journal is full of them, and William and 
 his friend wrote them down. The procession of nature 
 was miraculous. Pearls dropped from peasants' tongues. 
 Distance forgot its limits, and near things remembered 
 their kind. The friends wrote them down, and talked 
 them over. They staked out the ground between 
 them, and allotted a plot to each. Coleridge, according 
 to his powers, was to give ' a human interest and a 
 semblance of truth ' to ' persons and characters super- 
 natural, or at least romantic '. Wordsworth, perhaps 
 more greatly daring, was to reverse this process. His 
 task it was ' to excite a feeling analogous to the super- 
 natural ' by rousing men's minds from * the lethargy 
 of custom ', and directing their attention to ' the love- 
 liness and wonders of the world before us '. Thus, 
 
62 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 he was to impart the ' charm of novelty to things of 
 every day '. The one, therefore, was to humanize 
 Ann Radcliffe, and the other to ethereaHze Jane Austen. 
 Lyrical Ballads ^ was the result. 
 
 The foregoing extracts are taken from Coleridge's 
 own account of its inception in his Biographia Literaria. 
 ^The (1) Preface to Lyrical Ballads was revised in 1800, 
 when Wordsworth treated it for the first time as a 
 separate essay. He added (2) an Appendix, in the form 
 of a note to the Preface, upon ' Poetic Diction '. In 
 1814, he wrote (3) a Preface to The Excursion ; and, in 
 the following year, in a two-volumes edition of his 
 poems, he included a paper, since entitled by Dr. Grosart, 
 the editor of Wordsworth's prose works, (4) * Of Poetry 
 as Observation and Description ', to which he appended 
 an essay, supplementary to the Preface, called by 
 Grosart (5) ' Poetry as a Study '. These are the five 
 sources of Wordsworth's much-discussed literary criti- 
 cism — his ordnance-survey of Parnassus — , and they 
 are reinforced by Coleridge's works in prose, and 
 particularly by the latter part of his literary auto- 
 biography ; and here, though the ordnance-survey is less 
 important than the flowers, a reference is due to the 
 theory before we approach the practice — to the poetics 
 before the poetry. 
 
 The new Knowing as much as we do of the claims of mystery 
 and mysticism to replace and, at the same time, to 
 
 * An exact reprint is issued, ' with certain poems of 1798, and 
 an Introduction and Notes?/- by Thomas Hutchinson {optime de 
 Wordsworthianis meritue). Duckworth, 2nd ed., 1907. 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 63 
 
 enlarge the vision and the diction of the eighteenth 
 century, and recognizing the change in the ideal reflected 
 by literature from society since Pope declared in his 
 Essay on Man, 
 
 The bhss of Man (could pride that blessing find) 
 Is not to act or think beyond mankind 
 
 — the essence of the new faith being, in the fine phrase 
 of Robert Browning (1812-89), to ' write a book shall 
 mean beyond the facts ' — , we are less liable to mistake 
 the tendency of Wordsworth's revolt, or to insist too 
 literally on the professions of the young reformers of 
 1798. Works illustrating their teaching had still to 
 be composed. To-day, that teaching is adorned by 
 poetry and prose which have passed into the heritage 
 of western civilization. Time, inimitably just, has 
 raised the fruit from the seed, and we mark the applica- 
 tion of the principles revealed to Coleridge and Words- 
 worth through a century of English literature. Thus, 
 this anonymous book, originally issued as an ' experi- 
 ment ', remains an experiment to-day. Wordsworth' 
 and Coleridge sought, without even the recommendation 
 of such worth as the publication of their names would 
 have conveyed, 'to ascertain', as they said, 'how far 
 the language of conversation in the middle and lower 
 classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic 
 pleasure '. It was an extension of the literary franchise 
 thirty-four years before the Reform Act, for the ' rotten 
 boroughs ' and monopolies of literature were even more 
 noisome than in politics. ' Gaudiness and inane phrase- 
 ology ', according to these reformers, were the mark 
 
 ^ 
 
64 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 of many modern writers. Readers accustomed to 
 such style would, doubtless, they said, ' enquire by 
 what species of courtesy these attempts can be per- 
 mitted to assume ' the name of poetry. The answer 
 was : do they contain ' a natural delineation of human 
 passion, human characters, and human incidents ' ? 
 If so, it is the readers who are at fault ; ' they should 
 consent to be pleased in spite of that most dreadful 
 enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes 
 of decision '. 
 
 »- ^ In this Preface is the pith of the whole argument. 
 The rest of Wordsworth's critical essays is little more, 
 in effect, than an expansion of these remarks from the 
 
 / Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads. The ' language of 
 conversation in the middle and lower classes of society ', 
 in its relation to poetic pleasure, became the excursus 
 on poetic diction. The ' natural delineation of human 
 passions ', etc., became the essay on poetry as observa- 
 tion and description ; and ' our pre-established codes 
 of decision ' were attacked, at considerable length, 
 and with a high degree of skill, in these and the re- 
 maining papers. It sounds more serious than it is, 
 for its main interest to-day is not literary, but personal. 
 English literature would probably have sown the barren 
 fields of eighteenth-century thought, even if Words- 
 worth had left these elaborate essays unwritten. They 
 were required for his personal satisfaction, for the 
 tranquillization and reconcilement of his own psycho- 
 logical being. He, too, had sinned with the Pharisees, 
 and he repented in sackcloth and ashes, seeking those 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 65 
 
 symbols of atonement from the homes of the ' middle 
 and lower classes '. Confession is good for the soul, 
 even artistic confession for the erring psychologist, 
 and Wordsworth sought, by open recantation, to 
 restore to an exhausted world the depredations of 
 William Godwin and his votaries. 
 
 For the author of Political Justice would have stripped 
 human life bare of all its amenities and variety. ' His 
 system ', as Mr. Hutchinson writes, * represented 
 the eighteenth-century cult of reason carried to the 
 pitch of fetish- worship. The mind must be scoured 
 and smooth - rubbed and stripped of all habitudes 
 whatsoever, — be they instincts, natural affections, 
 sentiments, prejudices, or principles. There must have 
 taken place, in the man, a complete dissolution of all 
 that we understand by the words moral character^ 
 before Godwin will allow him to be reckoned one of 
 the emancipated ' ; and from this * servitude to free- 
 dom's name' Wordsworth, painfully reconstructing 
 his faith shattered in France, sang men free. In the 
 mood of Godwinian reason he had written his tragedy 
 The Borderers (1795-96), and his revulsion from those 
 standards to the wider democratic ideal of The Excur- 
 sion, 1814, is traced in considerable detail by Professor 
 fimile Legouis in his wholly admirable study. La Jeun- 
 esse de Wordsworth : ' il serait aise ', he declares, * de 
 poursuivre cette etude, et de montrer Wordsworth 
 reconstruisant un a un, par I'observation des humbles, 
 les sentiments dont Godwin avait depouille I'homme 
 ideal ' (p. 316). 
 5 
 
66 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 The Reviewed in this liglit, accordingly, Wordsworth's 
 
 and The literary criticism, as such, apart from the occasional 
 Prefaces, interest of his judgments and opinions, is the prose 
 version of the poem, in which, in thirteen books, under 
 the title of The Prelude, he traced ' the growth of a 
 poet's mind '. This work, written at different times 
 between 1799 and 1805, was not published till 1850, 
 the year of the poet's death. His revision of the 
 manuscript was continued till at least as late as 1832. 
 It was intended to form an introduction to The Recluse 
 in three Parts, of which only The Excursion, designed 
 as Part II, is complete, and thus to become, as Words- 
 worth called it, the ' ante -chapel ' to his * Gothic 
 Church '. In a sense, it was a kind of invocation — pro- 
 longed and peculiarly conscientious — not of visionary 
 muses, but of the powers and faculties of the poet who 
 desired to employ them to great ends. Meanwhile, 
 his examination of those faculties involved a theory of 
 poetics. The poet who was to dare to sing 
 
 Of Truth, and Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope, 
 
 And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith ; 
 
 Of blessed consolations in distress ; 
 
 Of moral strength and intellectual power; 
 
 Of joy in widest commonalty spread ; 
 
 who was to recover for an age self -blinded by its own 
 knowledge, the fabled happiness of Elysian fields — 
 
 For the discerning intellect of Man, 
 When wedded to this goodly universe — 
 
who, 
 
 IMAGINATIVE POETRY 67 
 
 In love and holy passion, shall find these 
 A simple ijroduce of the common day ; — 
 
 long before the bhssful hour arrives. 
 Would chaunt, in lonely place, the spousal verse 
 Of this great consummation, — 
 
 such a poet, such an interpreter, must plainly test 
 to the utmost, not merely the faculties of his mind, 
 but the mechanical implements which he employed. 
 Hence The Prelude, in its thirteen books, of the growth 
 of a poet's mind ; and hence, equally, the prefaces from 
 1798 to 1815, with their plethoric defence of the ' choice 
 of incidents from common life ' and the ' selection of 
 language really used by men '. ^. 
 
 It is all written in the poems, for those who have the Poetic 
 wit to read. Take this reprint of the volume of 1798, aw'°°" 
 designed expressly as an experiment, and consider in 
 the light of these conclusions some passages from 
 Wordsworth's contributions. There is, first, the right 
 use of landscape, and the moral power of beauty : 
 
 These forms of beauty have not been to me. 
 As is a landscape to a blind man's eye : 
 But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din 
 Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, 
 In hours of weariness, sensations sweet. 
 Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart. 
 And passing even into my purer mind 
 With tranquil restoration : — feelings too 
 Of unremembered pleasure ; such, perhaps. 
 As may have had no trivial influence 
 On that best portion of a good man's life; 
 His little, nameless, unremembered acts 
 Of kindness and of love. 
 
68 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 The so-called sensational school of fiction — Mrs. Rad- 
 cliffe and her friends — had followed the wrong road. 
 These resolute disciples of Rousseau had affected to 
 treat the sublime as a kind of patent medicine, — so 
 many mountains to heal the wounds of so much 
 misfortune. Wordsworth tested the theory of the 
 principle. The forms of beauty were to pass into the 
 mind, and to issue by chemical changes in acts of 
 good conduct. They were to be felt ' in the blood ' 
 and * along the heart ', availing, in changed sur- 
 roundings, and when their actual features were 
 forgotten, to purify the springs of action. The 
 efificacy of scenery was not its forms, as the efficacy 
 of education is not its facts. The value of each 
 resides in its power to mould character. If the 
 senses are exercised on right objects, then ' emotion 
 remembered in tranquillity ' will make every man a 
 poet in soul. These sensational stimuli are all around 
 us, if we have but the seeing eye ; Otranto and 
 Udolpho are no wiser than the hills and dales of our 
 own land. Nor is it only our imperception which is at 
 fault ; our doctrine of values is even more to blame. 
 We have been taught and wrought upon to despise what 
 is honourable, and to neglect what is noteworthy. So, 
 the slighted is to be restored to greatness, and the un- 
 remembered to memory ; the victims of the vast 
 proscription are to be summoned from their nameless 
 graves. And the repaired operation of the senses 
 will lead to deeper delights, disused by the smooth- 
 rubbed soul : 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 69 
 
 Nor less, I trust. 
 To them I may have owed another gift, 
 Of aspect more sublime ; that blessed mood, 
 In which the burthen of the mystery, 
 In which the heavy and the weary weight 
 Of all this unintelligible world 
 Is lighten'd. 
 
 The false light of reason had misled the conscience of the 
 eighteenth century into an unverified acceptance of an 
 ideal order of things. ' Get order ' was the text of 
 Pope's gospel ; for ' whatever is, is right ' ; and to the 
 decorous passion for order he offered a willing sacrifice 
 of the allurements of the unknown. Words lost their 
 edging of mystery, and thought its province of the 
 imagination. But in the new age, the senses rebelled. 
 Crabbe's witnesses proffered their evidence ; Burns' s 
 daisy sighed to God ; the white radiance of Blake 
 melted our substances to shadows. The stoical sur- 
 render broke down ; no true man could shut his eyes 
 and live. The French ' sensational ' Revolution inter- 
 vened in the social sphere ; and, already, French and 
 English writers — Henry Mackenzie, for example — were 
 permitting their characters a free exhibition of emotion, 
 chiefly, it must be added, by way of weeping. The 
 restored evidence of the senses, so long languishing in 
 disrepute, revealed, through the poet's insight, a 
 burden of a mystery, where reason had imposed its 
 terms of finite peace and comprehension. The design 
 and pattern of the universe were not so simple, after 
 all. Repose and complacency were disturbed. The 
 complexities of poverty and ignorance, and, above all, 
 
70 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 of opportunities withheld, could no longer be neglected 
 by a generation faced by the mob — the mobile, that 
 terrible type of unrest — which, when it speaks, speaks 
 in blows. 
 
 ^ So, the world was * unintelhgible ' once more. To 
 one, its unintelligible aspects took appropriate shapes 
 of mystery. This, in the last resort, is the method of 
 The Ancient Mariner, the pangs of whose conscience 
 were materialized in visible shapes of terror : 
 
 All stood together on the deck 
 
 For a chamel-dungeon fitter : 
 All fixed on me their stony eyes 
 
 That in the moon did glitter. 
 
 ^ To another, the unintelligible aspects are explored by 
 the lonely soul, divested more and more completely 
 of the conditions of time and place. 
 
 Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, 
 And even the motion of our human blood 
 Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
 In body, and become a living soul : 
 While, with an eye made quiet by the power 
 Of harmony, and the deep power of joy. 
 We see into the life of things. 
 
 Thus Coleridge, thus Wordsworth, in this volume ; 
 and we, conceding its premisses, can better appreciate 
 now the moral conclusion to many of the ballads which 
 it contained : 
 
 O reader ! had you in your mind 
 Such stores as silent thought can bring, 
 
 O gentle reader! you would find 
 A tale in everything. 
 
 Simon Lee. 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 71 
 
 dearest, dearest boy ! my heart 
 For better lore would seldom yearn, 
 Could I but teach the hundredth part 
 Of what from thee I learn. 
 
 Anecdote for Fathers. 
 
 If I these thoughts may not prevent. 
 If such be of my creed the plan, 
 Have I not reason to lament 
 What man has made of man ? 
 
 Lines in Early Spring. 
 
 Enough of science and of art ; 
 
 Close up these barren leaves ; 
 
 Come forth, and bring with you a heart 
 
 That watches and receives. 
 
 The Tables Turned. 
 
 For the supernatural effects which. Coleridge invoked The 
 so skilfully to heighten the Ancient Mariner's remorse Mariner, 
 are satisfied in Wordsworth by plain statements of 1"?, ^^*^^ 
 his creed. To find a tale in everything, to learn a 
 hundredfold of what one teaches in the relation of father 
 and child, to perceive how the man-made universe 
 counteracts the beneficent design, to watch and receive 
 impressions without the sophistication of science, — 
 these are the finger-posts directing us to the states 
 of being and of feeling of which the Ancient Mariner's 
 experience was a single eloquent example. Resolve the 
 complexities of social life by considering natural design 
 was, briefly, the rescript of both reformers. Wordsworth 
 boldly proclaimed it, as a first principle of conduct, 
 
 One impulse from a vernal wood 
 May teach you more of man; 
 Of moral evil and of good 
 Than all the sages can ; 
 
72 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 and Coleridge exemplified the ' teaching ' by depicting 
 
 nature's revenge on a man who had offended against 
 
 the ' good '. 
 
 But it is in Wordsworth's Peter Bell, which, though 
 
 first published in 1819, was written as early as 1798, 
 
 and not in any of his poems included in Lyrical Ballads, 
 
 that we discover the true pendent to The Ancient 
 
 Mariner of Coleridge. Peter is an itinerant potter, 
 
 whose hardware is carried by asses from one village 
 
 to another. His vocation might have subdued him 
 
 to the influences of nature in her changing scenes 
 
 and seasons, but, though he dwelt in her presence night 
 
 and day. 
 
 Nature ne'er could find the way 
 Into the heart of Peter Bell . . . 
 A primrose by a river's brim 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothing more. 
 
 In brief, he was as insensible to nature's clamorous 
 and multiple appeal as the Ancient Mariner had proved 
 himself when he slew the auspicious bird which typified 
 nature's hospitality. 
 
 The soft blue sky did never melt 
 Into his heart, — he never felt 
 The witchery of the soft blue sky. 
 
 So nature, seeming supernatural, wrought a miracle 
 by the exercise of her powers. She used the simplest 
 means, not requiring the elaborate machinery of the 
 phantom-ship and the risen dead. Peter was be- 
 labouring an ass to death, and his cruel mood rejoiced 
 to hear it cry : 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 73 
 
 But in the echo of the rocks 
 
 Was something Peter did not like . . . 
 
 What is there now in Peter's heart ? 
 
 Or whence the might of this strange sound ? 
 
 The moon uneasy look'd and dimmer, 
 
 The broad blue heavens appeared to glimmer 
 
 And the rocks stagger'd all around. 
 
 Here, then, is nature intervening, and we need not 
 follow the exhibition of her agency of conversion, 
 save to note that between Peter's fear of ' ugly witch- 
 craft,' in the scene which his own crime had made 
 mysterious, and the Mariner's similar sensitiveness 
 to the images of conscious guilt, the difference was in 
 degree, not in kind. Coleridge was perhaps better 
 advised in seeking a mise-en-sc^ne more remote from 
 common humanity, but Wordsworth's potter and 
 his ass, drawn from the world that lay about him to 
 exemplify ' nature's plan ' working universally through 
 her domain, and marred by ' what man makes of man ', 
 are essential to the statement of his faith, and are 
 equally characteristic of the intention of both poets 
 as displayed in their critical writings. 
 
 m. 
 
 To the later Coleridge we shall return in the section other 
 dealing with prose criticism. Here, in connection ^ol^fd°. 
 with his poetry, we may briefly refer to the mystic €^^* 
 loveliness of his best verse — there is not much of it — , 
 which strikes through the clinging integuments of 
 
74 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 circumstance and matter to the hearts and passions of 
 men. Sometimes he shows his method in the making : 
 a ruined tower, and an evening twihght, a statue of a 
 knight in armour, and * an old rude song, that suited 
 well that ruin wild and hoary ', are the sought-out 
 ingredients of a ballad which opens, as it were, on the 
 top note of poetic adoration : 
 
 All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 
 Whatever stirs this mortal frame. 
 All are but ministers of love. 
 And feed his sacred flame, 
 
 and which closes, when the song has been sung, and 
 
 the moving narrative related, on the note of a 
 
 lover's triumph : 
 
 I calmed her fears, and she was calm. 
 And told her love wdth virgin pride ; 
 And so I won my Genevieve, 
 My bright and beauteous Bride. 
 
 At other times, as in the ode to Dejection^ in Chris- 
 tahel, and pre-eminently in Kuhla Khan, we are 
 initiated directly into the effect which the cultivation 
 of the means produces. What can be more intangible 
 or indefinable than the feelings of which Kuhla Khan 
 is the grand and the perfect expression ? The function 
 of genius is creative, and here is created for men a new 
 mode of interpretation. Language, the most plastic 
 of all modes, had not availed hitherto to express the 
 remoter sense of beaut jr, the haunting under-note of 
 music, which is revealed, not at first, nor directly, to 
 the sensitive listener or seer. To him, the upper mean- 
 ing of phenomena, so far from exhausting their content, 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 75 
 
 is merely delusive and retarding. He might imitate 
 what he saw, and seek its meaning in its features. 
 He might select his material, rejecting what seemed to 
 him accidental, and retaining what seemed to him 
 essential, among the images presented to his conscious- 
 ness ; re-combining them, accordingly, to an artistic 
 design. But these poets of a passionate insight sought 
 a truth even more remote than the truths of sense - 
 perception and of art-perception. They drew — or 
 tried to draw — from the spectacle its purest flame of 
 vital being ; the last, unconquerable essence which 
 the senses cannot perceive and the artist cannot repre- 
 sent. Imagination could essay no higher flight, and, 
 though it used language as its medium — no other 
 medium was available — , the language was so liquid 
 and wordless as almost to rank as vocal thought. 
 William Blake, as we saw, had this power of closing 
 his ears and his eyes, and of evoking from his conscious- 
 ness of true being single images of reality, such as the 
 type of ' infant joy '. The effect of Coleridge in a few 
 poems was even better sustained, and in Kuhla Khan, 
 if we yield, first, our senses, then our mind, to its agency, 
 we become conscious of the poet's interpretation of 
 feelings so deep and so remote, though latent in phe- 
 nomena, that we hardly suspected their presence, and 
 hardly acknowledge them when represented. Yet the 
 more we train ourselves in this perception, the more 
 joyful and wonderful life becomes, and the better we 
 are able to appreciate the revelation of the poets of 
 the nineteenth century. 
 
76 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Words- This faculty of appreciation cannot be taught, 
 
 method of Either we share, or we miss, the meaning beyond the 
 mterpre- ^Qj-^g which resides in such hints at expression as the 
 
 tation. ^ 
 
 following phrase conveys : 
 
 And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far 
 Ancestral voices prophesying war. 
 
 If we seize it, we are freemen of poetry, privy to truths 
 unexpressed, and inexpressible in any other mode. 
 But its enjoyment is really an initiation, and it rests, in 
 the last resort, with the reader himself to submit to 
 this force of creative genius. Missing it, he misses the 
 chief part of the literature of the nineteenth century, 
 of which the supreme merit resides in its growing 
 ability to render the evidence of the unseen to the 
 seen, not along the old lines of the theological 
 sanction but along the new path of psychological 
 inquiry. 
 
 Conviction gathers with the perfecting of the method. 
 From its early vagueness and conjecture it increases 
 in definiteness and substance, till it suggests to the 
 reason of man, enlarged to the capacity of his imagina- 
 tion, a new sanction of conduct, more comprehensive 
 in its sympathy and more binding in its obligation, 
 inasmuch as its justice and its beauty are founded 
 impregnably on truth. Here, in 1798, let us seize the 
 magic of that phrase in Kuhla Khan, which, though 
 made out of words, transcends them, as a cathedral 
 transcends its stones, and we shall be on the road to 
 acquiring the poet's faculty of supersensible expression. 
 It is comparable, in its own period, with certain 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 77 
 
 passages from Wordsworth's shorter poems — with the 
 vanishing greeting in Stepping Westward, 
 
 'Twas a sound 
 Of something without place or bound ; 
 And seemed to give me spiritual right 
 To travel through that region bright ; 
 
 with * Lucy ', leaning her ear 
 
 In many a secret place 
 ^ Where rivulets dance their wayward round. 
 
 And beauty born of murmuring sound 
 Shall pass into her face, 
 
 (where nature's agency in Peter Bell and The Ancient 
 
 Mariner is transfused by the lyrical perception of 
 
 identity in diversity) ; with the song of The Solitary 
 
 Reaper, 
 
 Will no one tell me what she sings — 
 Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow 
 From old, unhappy, far-off things, 
 And battles long ago, 
 
 a type of expression fashioned by the same cunning of 
 interpretative art as the ' ancestral voices prophesying ^^ 
 war ', and drawing out of the significance of words an 
 equally distant meaning ; with the compensation — 
 transfiguring human judgment — of A PoeCs Epitaph, 
 
 The outward shows of sky, and earth, 
 
 Of hill and valley he has viewed ; 
 And impulses of deeper birth 
 
 Have come to him in solitude. 
 
 In common things which round us lie 
 Some random truths he can impart, — 
 
 The harvest of a quiet eye 
 
 That broods and sleeps on its own heart 
 
7^ NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 — an apology, or, rather, a vindication, whicli recalls 
 a hundred passages in Wordsworth, whether from 
 Expostulation and Reply ^ contained in Lyrical Ballads : 
 
 Nor less I deem that there are Powers 
 Which of themselves our minds impress ; 
 
 That we can feed this mind of ours 
 In a wise passiveness ; 
 
 or from The Prelude, book xiii : 
 
 The promise of the present time retired 
 Into its true proportion ; sanguine schemes, 
 Ambitious projects, pleased me less ; I sought 
 For present good in life's familiar face. 
 And built thereon my hopes of good to come ; 
 
 or from the great Ode : Intimations of Immortality from 
 Recollections of Early Childhood, the corner-stone of the 
 Wordsworthian * Gothic Church ' : 
 
 Thanks to the human heart by which we live, 
 Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears. 
 To me the meanest flower which blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. — 
 
 The mystical method of poetry, employing the force 
 of natural magic, could go no further in this age ; and if 
 criticism object that such ' random truths ' require a 
 synthesis, before faith can apply them to experience, 
 we may reply with the late Professor Masson, who, 
 writing in 1860 on Recent British Philosophy, deplored 
 the ' loss and imbecihty ' of excluding Wordsworth 
 from that survey. 
 
 iv. 
 
 His later There is little to be added to this record. Quotation 
 '^^ i°gs. j^jg]^^ Qj^iy gjj^ T^j|.]j Wordsworth's works, and these, 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 79 
 
 in the long life vouchsafed to him (1770-1850), extended 
 to about eighty thousand lines. His finest poems were 
 written in his second period, from Lyrical Ballads 
 to The Excursion, 1798-1814. His genius seemed to 
 harden as he grew older, and his gaze to fix itself more 
 firmly on the concrete symbols of the realities which 
 he had sought in his more impassioned years. His 
 faculty was not less spiritual, but he relaxed to some 
 extent his hold on the spirit-essence immanent in 
 material forms. Thus, sonnet-sequences on the River 
 Duddon and on ecclesiastical history occupied him in 
 1820 and 1822 ; memorials of tours began to multiply, 
 and, in 1835, he finally completed, with additions, 
 his prose Guide to the Lake District. In 1847 he wrote 
 the ' Ode ' on the installation of the Prince Consort as 
 Chancellor of Cambridge University — his only public 
 performance in virtue of his office as Poet-Laureate, 
 which he accepted on Southey's death in 1843 and 
 bequeathed to Alfred Tennyson in 1850. 
 
 The true, the excellent Wordsworth was the poet of the 
 earlier years and of the ' indirect language ', as it is called. 
 He owed something to the work of his predecessors, 
 Collins and Gray ; but the fitful glimpses of blue, re- 
 vealed up and down their poems, broaden and deepen at 
 last to the greater poet's enthusiastic vision, till the 
 whole heaven is opened to his faithful and patient 
 gaze, and earth is brighter in its light. He created a 
 new mode of interpretation, applying the transcendental 
 method to the commonplaces of life and experience. 
 He brought a larger tract of the unknown within 
 
8o NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 the compass of human understanding. The fringe of 
 darkness receded. Thoughts and feelings, neglected or 
 ignored, were irradiated and liberated. Joy, like the 
 light of Genesis, was spread upon the face of the deep, — 
 joy, reasoned and functional, justifjdng God to man : 
 
 I have felt 
 A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean, and the living air. 
 And the blue sky, and in the Mind of Man, 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things. 
 
 "^ Moreover, he found and perfected what he terms 
 * the language of the sense ', the expression which reaches 
 out beyond the meaning of its words into the region 
 of suggestion and association and surprises us by its 
 familiar strangeness. A French writer of this age, 
 Joseph Joubert (1754-1824), has left on record his 
 difficulty in enduing ethereal ideas with corporeal 
 language. * I cannot build a house for my ideas ', 
 he says. ' The true science of metaphysics consists 
 not in rendering abstract that which is sensible, but in 
 rendering sensible that which is abstract ; apparent, 
 that which is hidden ; imaginable, if so may be, that 
 which is only intelligible ; and intelligible, finally, 
 that which an ordinary attention fails to seize '. It is 
 for the sake of this supreme appeal from darkness to 
 light, from appearance to reality, from the inductive 
 to the imaginative reason, that men go back to Words- 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 8i 
 
 worth ; for none save him, or, rather, none before him, 
 had solved this diJB&culty of language, and reached, in 
 literature, the goal of metaphysics. 
 
 One word must be added in conclusion. There were Other 
 
 Poets 
 
 problems which Wordsworth left untouched, problems 
 of religion, of industry, socialism, democracy, and so 
 forth. To these, and to those who dealt with them, 
 other chapters will refer. But this section will not have 
 been too long if it succeed in initiating readers — no 
 lower aim is adequate — into the poetic method of 
 Wordsworth. His resources were increased during the 
 century by conclusions from other spheres of knowledge, 
 but already in 1798 he had unlocked secrets of nature 
 hardly guessed - at hitherto. He surpassed all his 
 contemporaries in what, for want of a better term, 
 may clumsily be called intuitional constructiveness. 
 His greatness needs no foil, but it is interesting to com- 
 pare his work with that of Samuel Rogers, or Robert 
 Southey, or Thomas Campbell, or Thomas Moore, all 
 of whom likewise lived through the French Revolution 
 into the reign of Queen Victoria. 
 
 Southey (1774-1843), who was Coleridge's brother- 
 in-law, formed a third with Coleridge and Wordsworth 
 in many of their conclaves, especially in the earlier 
 period, and settled with them in the Lake District. 
 Surviving the ideahsm of his youth, he accepted a 
 pension from the Crown, and declined the honour of 
 a baronetcy. His chief poems were romantic and 
 adventurous, in the more obvious sense, and later in 
 6 
 
82 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 life he became a frequent contributor to The Quarterly 
 and an industrious compiler of biographies and his- 
 tories. Rogers (1763-1855) belonged by taste to an 
 earlier generation, and his Pleasures of Memory (1792) 
 need not detain us here. He was a banker by trade, 
 and a kindly host in middle life to younger men. The 
 Pleasures of Hope by Campbell (1777-1844) was composed 
 in a similar vein, though Campbell, who is buried 
 in Westminster Abbey, has other titles to esteem, 
 both as a literary man by his Specimens of the British 
 Poets (1819) and in public life as an advocate for the 
 establishment of the University of London. Moore 
 (1779-1852), the youngest of the group, was a kind 
 of satellite to Byron's sun, and may more fitly be 
 considered in connection with the trio, Byron, Shelley, 
 and Keats, who, unlike the poets of the first period, 
 were joined by the common fate of a short life. Not 
 one of the elder four had the strength of purpose, the 
 tenacious idealism, of Wordsworth, who rose from the 
 slough of despond and the disillusion of the hopes of 
 the revolutionaries to the faith of a higher revelation, 
 founded on nature, not on man. To him alone in his 
 age, and only to one other after him, may his own words 
 be applied (from the Fourth Book of The Excursion) : 
 
 he was one, 
 
 In whom persuasion and belief 
 Had ripened into faith, and faith become 
 A passionate intuition ; whence the soul. 
 Though bound to earth by ties of pity and love. 
 From all injurious servitude was free. 
 
§6. ESSAYISTS AND CRITICS. 
 
 IN passing from the poets to the critics, the passage 
 is assisted by two facts, first, that several writers 
 filled both parts, and, secondly, that, without set 
 purpose, they worked towards common ends. 
 ^ ,Thus Coleridge, as we saw, wrote his own literary Criticism 
 biography as well as The Ancient Mariner, Christahel creation, 
 and Kuhla Khan, Wordsworth defended in his prefaces 
 the principles which he displayed in his poems. 
 Sou they, Campbell and others wrote in prose as well ^ 
 as verse ; and, generally, we may say that criticism 
 and creation went together in this age. Indeed, looking 
 a little deeper, we may say that no strict boundary- 
 line was drawn between the critics and the poets. 
 They glided into one another. Shelley wrote a Defence 
 of Poesy as well as immortal poems. Landor and 
 Lamb, the critics, were poets at the same time. Matthew 
 Arnold's definition helps us : if poetry is, in a sense, 
 ' a criticism of life ', it is only the conditions which are 
 varied to make a critic or a poet. This conclusion, if 
 tenable, is important, for, though the art of criticism 
 at that time was neither systematic nor methodical, 
 
 it should exhibit, if our proposition is correct, a creative 
 
 83 
 
84 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 force of its own, in the sense of a kind of reinforcement 
 of the purely literary products. Criticism of this kind, 
 which is to be distinguished as sharply as possible 
 from the so-called critical writing which passes current 
 to-day, is itself pure literature of a high order. By 
 applying first principles to appreciation, it increases 
 truth as effectively as direct nature-interpretation. 
 The German example may be quoted in this context, and 
 
 of^Faust. it touched English practice towards the beginning of 
 the nineteenth century at more than one point. Goethe 
 (1749-1832), for instance, who was poet, critic and 
 philosopher, illustrated throughout his useful and 
 beautiful career the fusion of philosophy in poetry, and 
 of criticism in creation, which marked, in a less degree, 
 ' ' the work of some English writers ; and the names of 
 Lessing (1729-1781), Schlegel (1767-1845), Tieck (1773- 
 1853) and Schelling (1775-1854) occur in the same con- 
 nection. Goethe's Faust, perhaps the most remarkable 
 of all the writings of the age, may be described as a 
 world-poem. Faust, tempted of the devil, yearned 
 to take upon his shoulders the weal and woe of all 
 mankind, ' and so to enlarge his own capacity to the 
 capacity of all conscious being '. The scheme of the 
 poem, or drama, involves a criticism of life, in a sense 
 even more complete than the Wordsworthian criticism 
 of the life which he surveyed. Wordsworth shrank, 
 after one brief experience in revolutionary France, from 
 contact with life in its fullest aspects. His theme, 
 ' but little heard of among men ', was to be, as he 
 stated in a famous passage, ' how exquisitely the 
 
ESSAYISTS AND CRITICS 85 
 
 external World is fitted to the Mind ' ; and, in order 
 to display this reconcilement, he was aware that he 
 would have to linger, as in France, among ' ill sights of 
 madding passion mutually inflamed ', that he would 
 hear ' humanity in fields and groves pipe solitary 
 anguish ', and that he would hang 
 
 Brooding above the fierce confederate storm 
 Of sorrow, barricadoed evermore 
 Within the walls of cities. 
 
 Unfortunately, of this portion of his theme the magni- 
 ficent phrase just cited is all that he achieved. The 
 Recluse, as we saw, was never finished. One part only, 
 The Excursion, is complete, and it rarely quits the 
 countryside. How the same reconcilement between 
 experience and design would have been sought * within 
 the walls of cities ', how the World and the Mind would 
 have been shown cooperating in exquisite fitness 
 under the conditions of ' confederate storm ' is, to-day, 
 conjectural only. English literature is the poorer in con- 
 sequence, and it refers us forward to Browning, Tenny- 
 son, and George Meredith, in their several capacities, 
 for the signs of the further harmony. But Goethe did 
 not shrink from this trial of faith. The ' external 
 world ' of Faust's experience was fitted to the ' in- 
 dividual mind ', and the sorrows which he would have 
 taken to his bosom included those of humanity in 
 towns. There was a fusion of the individual and the 
 universal in Goethe's sane and leisurely outlook, which 
 enlarged his criticism of life beyond the bounds of 
 English writers of the same period. 
 
86 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Charles But if the compass of the English survey was not 
 as immense as that of Goethe, his example helps 
 us to understand how the contribution of literature 
 to thought — thought opening territories and pushing 
 back the frontiers of the unknown — was marked by a 
 singleness of aim beneath its diversities of style ; how, 
 if Faust is drama to the actors, and opera to the 
 musicians, and experience to the critics, so Lamb, 
 De Quincey and Landor, Coleridge, Wordsworth and 
 Scott, and, according to their vision, Southey, Hazlitt 
 and Leigh Hunt are all tributary to one stream, and 
 that their work, whether as poetry or criticism, is re- 
 sumed in the larger term of philosophy — the quest of 
 truth. Thus Charles Lamb (1775-1834), in his valour 
 and his tenderness the bravest and the brightest of 
 the men of genius who adorned the early years of the 
 nineteenth century, was as truly a creative force in his 
 essays, his selections, and his notes, as Wordsworth 
 in his poems or prefaces. The reviewers and critics 
 of to-day who form so numerous a tribe cannot claim 
 this distinction. They are commentators, not creators, 
 and it is only occasionally that a Swinburne will de- 
 scend from the mountain to the plain, and, winging 
 his way back, will raise criticism again to the level of 
 pure literature. But such a book, for instance, as, 
 '^Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Writers who 
 lived about the Time of Shakespeare (1808), though it 
 consist merely of extracts with a few footnotes, and his 
 Tales from Shakespeare, written in conjxmction with 
 his sister, mark an epoch in constructive criticism. 
 
ESSAYISTS AND CRITICS ^y 
 
 Not merely did they recall a forgetful generation to tlie 
 beauty of older letters — most elegant extracts may do 
 that — : but they revealed this beauty in new aspects, 
 thus effecting for art what art itself effects for nature, 
 a new medium of interpretation. The criticism itself 
 becomes an art, without which the material on which 
 it works would fall short of the fulness of its powers. 
 Lamb's notes to the Specimens are restrained by a rare 
 parcimony ; he was content that his sympathy with 
 the Elizabethans should communicate itself through 
 their own works. But take, for example, such a foot- 
 note as the following, and we see how fresh was the 
 point of view, and how inspiring was the refreshment 
 which it offered : 
 
 It requires a study equivalent to the learning of a 
 new language to understand their meaning, when they 
 speak. ... It is as if a being of pure intellect should 
 take upon himself to express the emotions of our 
 sensitive nature. There would be all knowledge, but 
 sympathetic expression would be wanting. 
 
 This is a poet's commentary on poetry, and a 
 similarly penetrating note — one of many among the 
 few — is this upon William Rowley : 
 
 The old play-writers are distinguished by an honest 
 boldness of exhibition ; they show everything without 
 being ashamed. If a reverse in fortune be the thing 
 to be personified, they fairly bring us to the prison-grate 
 and the alms-basket. A poor man on our stage is always 
 a gentleman ; he may be known by a peculiar neatness 
 
88 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 of apparel, and by wearing black. Our delicacy, 
 in fact, forbids the dramatizing of distress at all. It 
 is never sbown in its essential properties ; it appears 
 but as the adjunct to some virtue, as some tiling which, 
 is to be relieved, from the approbation of which relief 
 the spectators are to derive a certain soothing of self- 
 referred satisfaction. We turn away from the real 
 essences of things to hunt after their relative shadows, 
 moral duties ; whereas, if the truth of things were 
 fairly represented, the relative duties might be safely 
 trusted to themselves, and moral philosophy lose the 
 name of a science. 
 
 x^ We have here a hint of the contention which Lamb 
 elaborated elsewhere that many of the best effects of 
 Shakespeare are lost on the stage. Paradoxically put, 
 this was equivalent to saying that Shakespeare is not 
 a good acting playwright, — a paradox which no one 
 would support. But the paradoxes of a critic as great 
 as Lamb are aflame with the insight of genius, and he 
 brought readers to see that conventional judgments 
 may prove even wilder and more fallacious than the 
 new and surprising point of view. He dared to be 
 original in criticism, and to be a poet with his poets ; 
 in the result, he added considerably to the expressive- 
 ness of poetry. One of the finest of his essays is that 
 which appeared in The New Monthly Magazine (1826), 
 as one of a series of papers refuting popular fallacies, 
 under the heading ' That Great Wit is allied to Madness ', 
 now included in the Last Essays of Elia as ' The Sanity 
 of True Genius '. He urges — and the argument has 
 never been more timely since that date than to-day — 
 
i UNIVERSITY 
 
 \ CF y 
 
 ESSAYISTS AND CRITICS 89 
 
 that the cause for the disrepute of poetry as ' a state 
 of dreaminess and fever ' is to be found in the false 
 analogy between that common experience of men and 
 the ' condition of exaltation, to which they have no 
 parallel in their own experience '. Caliban and the 
 witches, he tells us, drawing, as so often, his illustra- 
 tion from Shakespeare, ' are as true to the laws of 
 their own nature as Othello, Hamlet and Macbeth '. ^ 
 And here is the difference between the great and 
 the little wits : ' If the latter wander ever so little 
 from nature or actual existence, they lose them- 
 selves and their readers. Their phantoms are lawless ; 
 their visions nightmares. . . . For the supernatural, 
 or something super-added to what we know of nature, 
 they give you the plainly non-natural', and Lamb 
 appeals to the reader of ' Lane's novels ' of that day — 
 the Family Herald, supplements of our own — ' whether 
 he has not found his brain more " betossed ", his memory 
 more puzzled, his sense of when and where more con- 
 founded, among the improbable events, the incoherent 
 incidents, the inconsistent characters, or no characters, 
 of some third-rate love intrigue, a more bewildering 
 dreaminess induced upon him, than he has felt wander- 
 ing over all the fairy grounds of Spenser '. This is 
 creative criticism at its highest, the criticism by 
 which all creators would wish to have their work 
 judged. 
 
 Lamb's writings were by no means confined to books . 
 and the makers of books. The Essays of Elia discuss U- 
 ' Roast Pig' and 'Poor Relations', 'Old China' 
 
90 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 and ' The Old Margate Hoy ' ; and for their complete 
 understanding some acquaintance is required with 
 the facts of his hfe. It is a story of strength in weak- 
 ness, that tiny menage h deux of Charles and Mary 
 Lamb, and all the tragedy that was hidden, and all 
 the comedy that was revealed. How often they 
 changed their lodging, and how often Charles was 
 alone, and how sad, and with what deepening sadness, 
 the cause of this and of the rest ; and the brother's 
 devotion to the sister, and her sustaining love for 
 him, piercing even the shadows of the calamity 
 which wrecked her life ; and the love-episode, so 
 like Lamb in its confidences and reticences ; and 
 the poverty, consecrated by cheerfulness, and the 
 drollery, the wit, and the tears — London, which he 
 found so companionable, has never nurtured a son 
 who moves us more wholly to admiration and to 
 pity. 
 
 It is the human touch which irradiates much of the 
 self-revealing style of Elia in his Essays, expanding 
 the personal note to sentiments of universal import ; 
 and, taking all into account, it is hard to disagree 
 with those who place such a paper as ' Dream Children ' 
 at the height of imaginative writing : ' I became in 
 doubt which of them stood there before me, or whose 
 that bright hair was ' ; and ' nothing at last but two 
 mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, 
 which, without speech, impressed upon me the effects 
 of speech : " We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are 
 we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartram 
 
ESSAYISTS AND CRITICS 91 
 
 father " ; and immediately awaking I found myself 
 quietly seated in my bachelor armchair, with the 
 faithful Bridget unchanged by my side '. There is 
 nothing like this in English literature, nothing so 
 unstudied in its exquisite perfection, so moving in its 
 grace and tenderness. Lamb possessed the rare gift 
 of preserving his own personality under many varia- 
 tions ; if he dealt with an Addisonian topic, he acquired 
 the Addisonian tricks of language. He evinced a genius 
 for apt quotation which every intending essayist should 
 very carefully analyse and study. But, above all, 
 he was true to Charles Lamb, to the shy, sensitive, 
 stuttering, brave, stricken, poor, gay, true-hearted 
 gentleman whom everybody loved, and who, seeking 
 the best in everything, adorned, in a famous phrase, 
 everything which he touched. 
 
 11. 
 
 Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), a friend of Lamb Thomas 
 and of the Coleridge group, cherished a conscious aim in Quincey. 
 literature more ambitious than Lamb's, but achieved, 
 in the judgment of posterity, less tangible and definite 
 results. He desired — by instinct and intention — to 
 become the Wordsworth of prose-reform, or the Words- 
 worth and Coleridge combined, adding to Lyrical 
 Ballads a restoration in prose of the traditions of passion 
 and ornateness of seventeenth- century writers. But 
 though we can point to the passages, neither infrequent 
 
92 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 nor uninspired, in whicli De Quincey realized his aim, 
 on the whole he compels us to the conclusion that his 
 style was too good for his material. The root of the 
 fault lay in character. Against his jealousy of 
 Coleridge in later life, and his pitiful balancing of their 
 drugs, we may set of!, in honourable quittance, his 
 offer, through Cottle, the pubHsher, of a sum of £500 to 
 help the struggling poet in his most necessitous days. 
 A part of the gift — £300 — was accepted on Coleridge's 
 behalf, and literary history contains hardly a more 
 striking example of an act of unacknowledged gene- 
 rosity performed by a junior towards a senior, to whom 
 he was joined by a similar experience of adversity. 
 
 The generous impulse was not unique — De Quincey 
 was a man of impulses — , but it does not redeem his 
 life, and, consequently, his writings, from the charge 
 of narcotic influence. Opium-eating is a vice which 
 men of letters, as such, have disused ; and, in De 
 Quincey's case, at any rate, its adoption, and gradual 
 domination, may be traced, in the first instance, to 
 imperfect supervision at school and to the stupidity of 
 a local doctor. Still, neither Coleridge nor De Quincey 
 was able wholly to withstand the moral deterioration 
 which the use of the drug produces. De Quincey's 
 prose often rises to truly impassioned eloquence. Far 
 more deliberately than Lamb, he opposed, not merely 
 his fine scholarship, but his artistic principles and 
 practice, to the formal modes of the past age. With a 
 better concentration of purpose he might have effected 
 in prose, not the means of reform, but the results, and 
 
ESSAYISTS AND CRITICS 93 
 
 in economics at least might have made a permanent 
 mark. Actually, he fails in conviction. His Con- 
 fessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822, revised 1856), 
 which is the medley of autobiography, criticism and" 
 talk by which he is best known, is extremely interesting 
 in parts, and its value in the development of EngHsh 
 prose — since all development in literature is a return to 
 and an improvement upon former models : in this 
 instance, as De Quincey himself tells us, ' Donne, 
 ChilHngworth, Sir Thomas Browne, Milton, South, 
 Barrow, a constellation of seven golden stars ' — is never 
 to be neglected. But page after page occurs of forced 
 and inefiective trifling — stuffed Lamb, so to speak — 
 while the edge of much of the wit is feminine and 
 spiteful. De Quincey could write of London, * sole, 
 dark, infinite, brooding over the whole capacities of 
 my heart ' ; he could transform metaphysics to litera- 
 ture : ' if in this world there is one misery having no 
 relief, it is the pressure on the heart from the Incom- 
 municable. And, if another Sphinx should arise to 
 propose another enigma to man, saying, " What burden 
 is that which only is insupportable by human forti- 
 tude ? ", I should answer at once, "It is the burden 
 of the Incommunicable " ' — a passage which explains 
 elsewhere ' the deep deep magnet of William Words- 
 worth ' — ; but he could publish without discrimination 
 pages of trivial verboseness about the ' tintinnabulous 
 propensities ' of a college porter, which relax the con- 
 ventions of Gibbon and Dr. Johnson, but do not add 
 to art. 
 
94 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 in. 
 
 John De Quincey properly belongs to the new era of 
 
 journalism, or of the periodical press, which was to 
 play so large a part in the history of the next hundred 
 --years. Like John Wilson (1785-1852) in the North— 
 they were born in the same year — he was, above all, a 
 feuilletonist, forerunners both of a line which, closing 
 for our purposes with W. E. Henley (1849-1903), forms, 
 with the poets and the novelists, who availed them- 
 selves of the same means, a triple chain of strength in 
 nineteenth-century literature. Wilson was the chief 
 contributor, under the pen-name of ' Christopher North,' 
 to Blackwood'' s Magazine, from 1817 till his death, and 
 his association with ' Maga ' (as ' Ebony's ' magazine is 
 still called) was as close as that of De Quincey with 
 The London Magazine, in which his Confessions first 
 appeared. If the Confessions are tinged with opium, 
 Wilson's Nodes Ambrosiance are drenched with strong 
 ' ine. De Quincey himself has a role — a very small one 
 though it be — in the revels of this Round Table of the 
 Nor h, at which the chief place was reserved for Wilson's 
 idealization of James Hogg (1770-1836), a Scottish 
 vernacular poet, known as ' the Ettrick Shepherd '. 
 The eating and drinking bouts of the company whom 
 * Christopher North ' assembled at Blackwood's have 
 been made famous by his book, and the atmosphere is 
 certainly more refreshing, if in places very much more 
 primitive, than that of De Quincey's confessional. 
 
ESSAYISTS AND CRITICS 95 
 
 But, as literature, their merit is equivalent. The 
 Nodes and the Confessions alike expand the powers 
 of English prose. Heroes in corduroy and fustian, 
 heroines in deshabille and rags — De Quincey's Ann, 
 for example, that sad-eyed daughter of the streets, who, 
 failing to keep an assignation, won a place in national 
 biography — are admitted freely to their pages. The 
 limits of decorum and convention — of decorum con- 
 ventionally defined — are for ever overrun. A new 
 convention is established, as old as the comedy of 
 human life, that quidquid agunt homines may be matter 
 for men's contemplation. 
 
 The Shakespearean spectacle is resumed, and some- 
 thing of Shakespeare's style — of the man whom the 
 style revealed — is recalled from the overlying dust. 
 Scott, for instance, had a stage as crowded as Shake- 
 speare's and a sympathy almost as catholic ; and 
 Wilson, De Quincey and Lamb, according to their 
 tastes and capacities, brought back to a younger genera- 
 tion the bolder and the broader points of view. They 
 were thoroughly conscious Elizabethans. Lamb re- 
 told the tales of Shakespeare, and revived the dramas 
 of his age. Coleridge lectured on Shakespeare ; and 
 De Quincey, constantly admiring him, cultivated a 
 seventeenth-century style. It was part of the faith 
 of the times that salvation lay in that revival ; that the 
 great and spacious days of Drake and Ralegh and 
 Bacon — all adventurers and explorers in territories 
 of action and thought — would foster the romantic 
 temperament which was so urgently desired. This 
 
96 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 faith still lives in A. C. Swinburne, whose Age of Shake- 
 speare (1908) is inscribed to the memory of Lamb. 
 These early pioneers were scholars in no pedantic 
 sense. They were Greeks rather than Grecians, if 
 a difference may be subsumed in the distinction ; the 
 very idea of a magazine or miscellany implies that 
 barriers are broken down ; and they left to the in- 
 heritors of English prose a more malleable and pliant 
 weapon than Dr. Johnson had conceived. 
 The^ It is to these writers and their like — to J. E. Lockhart 
 
 era. ' (1794-1854), Scott's biographer, and a Blackwood and 
 a Quarterly man ; to Leigh Hunt (1784-1851), the friend 
 of Keats, and the ' belles -lettrist ', pre-eminently, of his 
 times — that we trace the elasticity of modern prose 
 and the rise of modern reviews, rather than to the 
 slightly older men, older in tradition, if not in years, 
 "^ such as William Gifford (1756-1826), Francis Jeffrey 
 (1773-1850), Lord Brougham (1778-1868), and Sydney 
 Smith (1771-1845) — Southey's name might be added — 
 who are associated with the beginnings of the Quarterly 
 and the Edinburgh Reviews. The reputation of these 
 four founders, though their secrets of authorship were 
 well preserved, stood very high in their own day, far 
 higher then than now, when the true light of their 
 criticism has been somewhat obscured by the heavy 
 "^ clouds of their mistakes. Their judgment was not free 
 from prejudice. They seldom fully shook off the false 
 analogy of the law-courts, that a judge tries malefactors. 
 Literary criticism to-day is perverted by such contrary 
 canons that justice, weary of advertisement, might sigh 
 
 N 
 
ESSAYISTS AND CRITICS 97 
 
 for an hour of Jeffrey ; still, it is obvious enough that 
 their mental attitude was ' set ', and the tendency of 
 their opinions too rigid to affect the main current of 
 literature. They wore their learning too closely ; 
 and, as the poets whom they put right have sur- 
 vived even the memory of their blame, so the fame 
 of the editors is surpassed by that of some of their 
 contributors. 
 
 The growing tolerance of the age, its broader and more Coleridge 
 catholic spirit, are manifest in the prose works of Cole- Hazlitt. 
 ridge, and in the critical writings of Walter Savage 
 Landor (1775-1864) and of William Hazlitt (1778-1830). 
 Like Lamb, Wilson and De Quincey, and many of the 
 writers of these times, Coleridge practised with success 
 the lost art of conversation, for which, as for the 
 newspapers and reviews, favourable opportunity was 
 afforded by better means of communication. As a 
 leading Unitarian preacher, he took a considerable 
 pai*t in the liberal movement of the Church, and his 
 influence in this direction was as consistent and strong 
 as his desultory habits permitted. He assimilated 
 German metaphysics, which he introduced to English 
 thought through his Aids to Reflection and other channels. 
 He attracted munificent patrons — Thomas Wedgwood, 
 for example — , and, where patrons failed, he would 
 quarter himself upon his friends. Wordsworth at 
 least he repaid in overflowing measure by the pene- 
 trating praise of his poetry in Biographia Literaria, 
 which likewise contains some of his valuable criticism 
 of Shakespeare. 
 7 
 
98 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 To Shakespeare, again, William Hazlitt, like Lamb, 
 Coleridge and others, devoted his keen and clear talents 
 of exposition and interpretation. Hazlitt was an 
 Edinburgh reviewer, a contributor to Leigh Hunt's 
 Examiner — for which he wrote The Round Table, so 
 characteristic even in its title of the tastes of the age — , 
 and to other periodicals, and he is prominently 
 associated with the repaired allegiance to Elizabethan 
 standards and models. It was their own fresh out- 
 look on life — the effect, in part, of social changes summed 
 up in the French Revolution — which drove critics in 
 this age back to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, 
 and, through them, back to the Greeks. Enthusiasm 
 and common sense — the last including all human sensi- 
 bilities — returned like the sun at noonday ; a purer 
 and more wholesome atmosphere restored the sanity 
 of humankind. And hence criticism in this age takes 
 on the unforgetable note of Lamb and Hazlitt and 
 Coleridge, from whom one example may be selected : 
 
 Keeping at all times in the high road of life, Shake- 
 speare has no innocent adulteries, no interesting incests, 
 no virtuous vice : — he never renders that amiable 
 which religion and reason alike teach us to detest. . . . 
 Shakespeare's fathers are roused by ingratitude, his 
 husbands stung by unfaithfulness ; in him, in short, 
 the affections are wounded in those points in which all 
 may, nay, must, feel. In Shakespeare vice never 
 walks as in twilight : nothing is purposely out of its 
 place ; — he inverts not the order of nature and pro- 
 priety, ... he has no benevolent butchers, nor any 
 sentimental rat-catchers. 
 
ESSAYISTS AND CRITICS 99 
 
 This is constructive criticism of the highest creative^ 
 kind, and it blows — like a wind from the sea — through 
 the clustering perversities of men too civil to be true. 
 
 IV. 
 
 More fortunate in his circumstances than some of Landor. 
 the writers already discussed, though not uniformly- 
 fortunate in moulding them, and — partly by the grace 
 of his eighty-nine years — more deliberate in his literary 
 methods, Walter Savage Landor succeeded in associ-^^ 
 ating the reform of English prose with writings more 
 composite than De Quincey's and more co-ordinate 
 than Lamb's. The charm of Lamb resides in the 
 occasional character of his essays, and in the skiU with 
 which he imparts an efEect of improvization to the most 
 delicate works of art. De Quincey and, to a large 
 extent, Coleridge, as a critic and prose-writer, permitted 
 themselves a wide expatiation. De Quincey especially, 
 in the Confessions, helped to establish in England a form 
 of egoistic literature, more recently differentiated as 
 introspective, of which the Apologia pro vita Sua 
 (1864) of John Henry Newman, cardinal, is the most 
 eminent Victorian example, though closer analogues 
 are found in Richard JefEeries's Story of my Heart 
 (1883) and in some of the essays of Robert Louis 
 Stevenson. Hazlitt's Table-talk and Wilson's Noctes 
 are to be classed in the same kind, at the period of 
 its loosest manipulation, and it is a striking tendency 
 
100 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 to Lander's finer sense of form that he poured the 
 resources of his scholarship into vessels of fixed 
 capacity. With no less eloquence than his contem- 
 poraries, he resisted their tendency to overflow by 
 composing his material to the conditions of his style. 
 If Elia is identified with the release of English prose 
 from the pomp and ritual of the Latinizers, and if the 
 Opium-Eater decorated prose with Gothic ornaments 
 and imagery, Landor's Imaginary Conversations add 
 weight, order, and authority to the new liberties to be 
 enjoyed. 
 
 Landor's biography is full of tales of his ungovernable 
 temper and obstinate errors of judgment. Trinity, 
 Oxford, sent him down in 1794, as University College 
 sent down Shelley in 1811. He bought an estate in 
 Wales, and left it under a cloud of public odium. He 
 settled at Como for three years, and lampooned its 
 dignitaries so rudely that he had to migrate in 1818. 
 He wandered from Pisa to Florence, and bought a 
 villa at Fiesole. Later, having quarrelled with his 
 wife, he settled again in England, and lived at Bath for 
 twenty years. In 1858 he returned to Italy, the magnet 
 of many English poets, from Keats and Shelley in 
 Landor's youth to Robert Browning in his old age. 
 Browning's care was extended to him in that period, 
 and he died at Florence in 1864. Something of the 
 defects of his private character, which are otherwise 
 irrelevant to his writing, may be discerned in his style. 
 He is impatient, opinionated, and entete in much that 
 he says, while the very severity of his taste^repels 
 
ESSAYISTS AND CRITICS loi 
 
 many of his readers. Thus, at the present day, it 
 is, perhaps, rather for his example as a master of 
 English prose than for the intrinsic interest of his work 
 that Landor is chiefly to be remembered. But these 
 Conversations, at the same time, with the immense field 
 of topics which they cover — poHtical, artistic, literary, 
 historical — , display a wealth of knowledge, sometimes 
 misapplied, but never misprized, and preserve, through- 
 out their dramatic variety, the best classical traditions 
 of diction, rhythm and arrangement. They may be 
 left unread in an age of less robust scholarship, but the 
 formal beauty of their writing adds honour to Enghsh 
 prose. And a brief reference is due to Lander's verses. 
 He had not the self-abandonment of a great poet, but 
 his sense of order and design assisted him to achieve a 
 few masterpieces of poetic style ; among these — and 
 with feeling superadded — ' Rose Aylmer ', a lyric in 
 eight lines, remains as an abiding possession. 
 
 There were minor writers in this class : the Radical Other 
 journalist, William Cobbett (1762-1835), who started ^"*^'*^- 
 The Weekly Register ; John Wilson Croker (1780-1857), 
 of The Quarterly Review, politician and essayist, and 
 editor of Boswell's Johnson; Isaac DTsraeli (1766- 
 1848), another Quarterly reviewer, and a diligent 
 scholar in trifles, best known by his Curiosities of 
 Literature, and as the father of Lord Beaconsfield, 
 and others enough to supply in abundance the needs 
 of the growing number of newspapers and reviews. 
 It is less unjust to pass these over in favour of their 
 greater contemporaries than to omit to mention Henry 
 
102 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 \ Hallam (1777-1859), whose Constitutional History of 
 England lias only recently been superseded, and whose 
 Introduction to the Literature of Europe still has weight 
 as an authority. In the same class of talent without 
 genius — unlit talent, as it were — are to be counted 
 William Mitford (1744-1827), historian of Greece, 
 Thomas Arnold (1795-1842), historian of Rome, and 
 George Finlay (1799-1875), the historian of Greece in 
 her decadence. Contemporary with these was George 
 Grote (1794-1871), a banker by trade and a radical in 
 politics, who represented for a time the City of London 
 in Parliament. His History of Greece, despite its many 
 shortcomings in the light of recent research, is still a 
 most valuable study, from the democratic point of view, 
 of the rule of the Athenian Empire. Moreover, it is a 
 popular history, and to this quality, perhaps, it owes its 
 continuing renown. 
 
 Meanwhile, the historians proper were passed by 
 another kind of writers, who, alike in poetry and prose, 
 sought to revive the past, not in its actual happenings, 
 but in its human possibilities. History itself, in its 
 order as it happened, was not vivid enough for the 
 ardent curiosity of the age ; and, against the back- 
 grounds emerging by the patient labour of historians, 
 historical novelists and romanticists began to arrange 
 their crowded scenes. 
 
§ 7. SIR WALTER SCOTT. 
 
 TO study original authorities, to weigli evidence, to The 
 reject improbabilities, and to present the con- ^°°^^^^°' 
 elusions in a sober and painstaking narrative, did not lustory. 
 comprise, accordingly, the whole duty of the historian. 
 A condition precedent of his craft was the large view and 
 the wide interest in human affairs as a whole. The 
 historical sense was to be aroused from its long sleep 
 in the eighteenth century, which Gibbon alone had 
 interrupted, towards the close of the period, in his 
 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), and 
 which Edmund Burke, statesman and pamphleteer, 
 had rebelled against in his published thoughts and re- 
 flections. The problem was not so much how history 
 should be written — the conflict of schools came later, 
 when the historians were at work — ; the prehminary 
 problem was to render the past attractive, to turn 
 contemplation backwards, and to extend to the hap- 
 penings of former times the sympathy and the active 
 curiosity which were the mark of contemporary thought. 
 The impulse to escape from fixed conditions of a 
 known and a limited horizon, which had driven Mrs. 
 Radchfle to old castles, Cowper and Wordsworth to the 
 countryside, Wordsworth and Coleridge to the mysteries 
 
104 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 — the familiar strangenesses — of the hearts of men, 
 which drove revolutionaries like Godwin to imaginary 
 states of perfection released from the conventions of 
 his own day, was the same impulse, differently directed, 
 which revived the historical sense, and induced men 
 of imagination to explore not merely the facts, but the 
 feehngs which inspired the facts, of past ages and 
 achievements. It is the humanizing of time past which 
 arrests us in the work of the writers to be discussed, their 
 sudden, deep realization of it as a world of psychological 
 processes, of life and movement and temperament, of 
 tears and laughter, of women, children, and armed 
 men. The day would come — it has come long since — 
 when vivid writing would be discredited, when the 
 personal bias would be distrusted as disguising 
 the impartiality of truth, and when the status of 
 history would pass from an art to an exact science — 
 from the treatment by interpretation to the treatment 
 by demonstration. Meanwhile, it was to enjoy the 
 genius of Carlyle, Macaulay and Froude ; and, even 
 before their sympathies helped to illuminate the past, 
 its romantic aspect had appealed with penetrating 
 force to a writer whose constructive talents, seeking 
 malleable material, seized on the folklore and legends 
 and heroic annals of the North, his own Scotland 
 which he loved. He taught his countrymen to associate 
 them with the natural features of the land — its heather, 
 as a covert for the foeman, its mountains, its secluded 
 lochs, its wild, uncultivated stretches, its hardy and 
 independent sons — ; and, fashioning this rich material 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 105 
 
 to the literary temper of his times, he produced in 
 succession historical ballads and romances of literally 
 radiant power. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) satisfied at once the 
 ardent passion for adventure, the increased emotional 
 sensibilities, and the exploring curiosity of his age. 
 He summed up in his one person the various tendencies 
 which we have traced in contemporary literature ; and 
 if research shows that he owed the direction of his 
 genius to Germany — the debt is partly acknowledged 
 by his translation of Biirger's Lenore — , or if the present 
 generation, fed full with fiction, and jealous of the 
 accuracy of historians, find Scott tedious or ' untrue ' — 
 by the standards of demonstrable, not imaginative 
 truth — , yet no deductions can detract from the victory 
 won by Scott in the first quarter of the nineteenth 
 century over readers and writers alike. He was the 
 master of them all, the unapproached king of letters, 
 reigning royally in the North, and interpreting to his 
 subjects the feelings and aims of their own hearts. 
 
 It was Thomas Percy (1729-1811), a grocer's son. Bishop 
 who became Dean of Carlisle and Bishop of Dromore, ijeiigwL 
 who gave the lead in this direction. He had been the 
 first to tap the wealth of mediaeval ballad-literature, and 
 thus to point the way to that revolution of taste which 
 was to establish Scott in the North as literary dictator 
 in the place of Dr. Johnson in the South. Percy's 
 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry were first issued in 
 1765, and were available, accordingly, when Scott was 
 a boy. He seized iipon them with avidity, especially 
 
io6 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 on the Border ballads which included the famous 
 * Chevy Chase ' ; and he supplemented his familiarity 
 with this book by intercourse with Scottish country 
 folk, from whose homely and illiterate lore he learned, 
 and committed to memory, many tales and sayings 
 and phrases which were afterwards embodied in his 
 works. 
 
 With all his immense range of reading, it was always 
 the external features of what he read that attracted him. 
 In a sense, Scott never had a style : he absorbed a 
 national spirit, and returned, as it were, great pieces 
 of national literature without particular attention to 
 details of form. He wrote with extraordinary rapidity, 
 chiefly, as it seems to-day, because his main labour in 
 writing was to deposit rather than to compose ; one 
 after another he laid down the huge fragments of his 
 work, manipulating them as he unburdened himself, 
 and turning swiftly to the next. Thus, he tells us that 
 Coleridge's Christahel inspired his own Lay of the Last 
 Minstrel (1805), and we see at once that he refers to 
 an influence on the ear, not the mind. There is a 
 formal likeness between the two — a likeness in the 
 accidents of metre, which both owe in the last resort 
 to the self-taught skill of old minstrelsy ; but Scott, 
 seizing the most obvious characteristic which memory 
 most readily retained, speaks of Coleridge as his master 
 and of himself as the pupil in this instance. For com- 
 plete understanding, however, it is more relevant to 
 note that Scott, in 1802, supplemented Bishop Percy's 
 work by a collection in two volumes of The Minstrelsy 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 107 
 
 of the Scottish Border, compiled, unlike the ' fakes ' 
 of Chatterton and Macpherson towards the close of 
 the eighteenth- century, by careful study at first-hand 
 among the peasantry of the Lowlands. 
 
 In these years just subsequent to his marriage (1797) Scott's 
 he was still playing at the law, obediently to the wishes ity. , 
 of his father, who was a Writer to the Signet, and of 
 whom, in the paternal relationship, a sketch is given 
 in Redgauntlet. Shortly afterwards, the Sheriffship of 
 Selkirkshire gave Scott a regular income, which was 
 supplemented by his appointment to a Clerkship of 
 Session ; and in 1804 he felt justified, to employ his 
 own famous phrase, in making literature ' a staff, not 
 a crutch '. For twenty years he leaned upon the stafE 
 with complete confidence and security. From 1805, 
 the year of The Lay, through Marmion (1808), The Lady 
 of the Lake (1810), Eokeby (1812) and The Lord of the 
 Isles (1815), these poems of the romantic revival flowed 
 delightfully from his pen, and when, in 1814, the stream 
 was deflected to prose, there was no slackening of 
 strength. Waverley (1814) was the first of a series of 
 novels which continued triumphantly through Guy 
 Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816), Old Mortality 
 (1816), Roh Roy (1818), The Heart of Midlothian, The 
 Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose (1818- 
 19), Ivanhoe (1820), The Monastery and The Abbot 
 (1820), Kenilworth (1821), The Pirate (1822), The 
 Fortunes of Nigel (1822), Peveril of the Peak (1823), 
 Quentin Durward (1823), St. Ronan's Well (1824), 
 Redgauntlet (1824), to The Betrothed and The Talisman 
 
io8 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 of 1825 — the year of crisis in Scott's affairs. It is a 
 y wonderful list, Homeric in its range and power, and 
 with this difference from Homer, that there is no 
 doubt as to the singleness of authorship. It is hardly 
 conceivable to-day that a score of novels of this 
 quality — all the masterpieces are in the list — should 
 have been written by one man, not driven by stress of 
 poverty but purely by the delight of invention, within 
 barely a dozen years. The mere bulk of the achieve- 
 ment is astounding ; and, measured by quality, not by 
 bulk, the record is more astounding still. 
 His life A brief tract of biography must be interposed be- 
 
 aoter. tween the catalogue and the criticism. Shortly after 
 the * staff and crutch ' epigram had marked Scott's 
 abandonment of the law, he removed to an estate 
 on the Tweed, to which he gave the name of Abbots - 
 ford. There he brought up his children and cultivated 
 a country gentleman's life. He took these duties, or 
 privileges, more seriously than he need, aiming in his 
 indefatigable labours at the honourable ambition of 
 founding a family in the more conventional use of the 
 term. The desire was typical of the man, who was an 
 idealist in his egoism. His whole being was romantic. 
 He could do nothing in a small way. The singer of his 
 nation's songs, the narrator of his country's legends, 
 Scott of Abbotsford was to become a name and a fame 
 in his own day, a representative in his own person, 
 not of the writer's craft — ' the author of Waverley ' 
 was his pen-name — , but of Scottish custom and tradi- 
 tion manifest in the hospitable grandeur, the homely 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 109 
 
 state, of a Scottish laird. His anonymity, or the 
 shadow of it, was preserved till 1820, when his reputa- 
 tion was recognized by a baronetcy, and it was a part 
 of the mystery which surrounded him — no petty 
 secrecy of a small mind, but the distance-keeping awe 
 of genius — that, as his house became more and more 
 the centre of culture in the North, his friends and 
 visitors should forget that the host who entertained them 
 so genially had been working since daybreak among 
 his books. He kept the instruments of his toil out of 
 sight, deliberately isolating his finished work from the 
 details of production, which are so much vulgarized 
 to-day by the curiosity of newspapers, and which 
 even then might have detracted from the dignity of 
 authorship. 
 
 The Waverley Novels became an institution, and 
 their author aimed at this end. Its pursuit brought 
 dangers in its train. Scott's character was affected 
 by his ambition. His large views became enlarged 
 beyond the control of his own action, for his hands 
 were already too full of work and multifarious em- 
 ployment. He relaxed his hold on affairs, till his 
 relations with Constable and Ballantyne, when the 
 crash came in 1825, involved him, through his own 
 negligence, in large liabilities which he refused to evade 
 by bankruptcy. There is no blame to be allotted ; 
 it is swallowed up in reverent admiration of the 
 splendid strength of Scott's character. The ambition 
 which had founded Abbotsford, and all that the name 
 implied, which had won honours and a title, and had 
 
no NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 brought the Scottish genius to self-expression, availed 
 to sustain Sir Walter Scott in the task of paying his 
 creditors, to whom, at the age of fifty-four, with twenty 
 years of hard work behind him, he owed over £100,000. 
 The debt was discharged in full, and with it, we may 
 fairly say, Scott in his own person discharged an 
 obligation of noblesse. 
 
 It was inevitable that some compensation should be 
 exacted for this toil, and literature suffered in Scott's 
 hands. Woodstock (1826) and The Fair Maid of Perth 
 (1828) show signs of a lower spirit, if not of a slower 
 imagination, while the loss of gaiety, of nimbus, is 
 even more obvious in the Chronicles of the Canongate 
 (1827-28). In Anne of Geierstein (1829) there is a 
 flicker of the old power, but Count Robert of Paris and 
 Castle Dangerous, which belong to the last year of 
 Scott's life, bear clear signs of a sinking flame. In 
 these years, too, he produced his contributions to 
 Scottish history in The Tales of a Grandfather, and 
 his Life of Napoleon, and other works — altogether a 
 magnificent response from a man broken in fortune to 
 the call of honour and reparation. He died in 1832, 
 at Abbotsford restored, his work twice done, and the 
 guerdon twice won. 
 The What is the result of his life's work from the point of 
 
 ©rscott? ^^^^ of ^^® historian of British Hterature ? To him 
 it matters not at all that Waverley gratified an ambition, 
 and Anne of Geierstein satisfied a debt. Our business, 
 throughout this history, is the increment to truth by 
 the vision of British men of letters, and, judged by 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT tii 
 
 this canon, Scott's title is supreme. He is among the^ 
 fathers of literature, a pious founder of a dynasty, or 
 kind, which was not destined to decay. Like Cromwell 
 and Napoleon in affairs, like Shakespeare, Wordsworth 
 and Goethe in his own department of letters, Scott 
 stands above criticism in the sense that, whatever his 
 mistakes, no later comer has improved upon him. We 
 may say. Here he failed ; we cannot say. Here so-and-so 
 did better ; and, without such a standard of judgment, 
 the most hostile critic is disarmed. Scott fathered the 
 historical romance. He re-peopled the silent spaces of 
 bygone days. By the magic of his pen he restored 
 Scotland to her past, and re-invented from snatches of 
 old songs and broken records of past fabulists connected 
 harmonies of arms and men. To this Orpheus of a 
 Northern sky the land yielded up its dead ; the Border 
 territories of romance were bold and adventurous 
 again ; Robin Hood returned at that call to his merry 
 men in Sherwood Forest ; Rebecca, the Jewess, won 
 hearts which her sister, Jessica, had left cold ; Mary 
 Stuart and Amy Robsart revived the wonder and 
 the thrill of Elizabethan England ; Jeanie Deans, 
 adventuring to London, Lucy, Meg Merrilies, Diana 
 Vernon — Scott's stage is as full of women characters 
 as of all sorts and degrees of men ; and if he lacked 
 the subtler knowledge — the cosmic comedy — of George 
 Meredith in delineating female types, yet in range of 
 interest and in truth of outline he is comparable only 
 with Shakespeare. He has not all Shakespeare's gifts ; 
 none, save the master, commands all the keys of human 
 
112 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 experience, and of character moulded by action. But 
 the comparison is admissible, and it is noteworthy, at 
 least, that Shakespeare, like Scott, made his art sub- 
 servient to ambition. And, apart altogether from 
 Scott's skill in clothing the dry bones of history, and 
 the yet drier bones of legend, with life and verisimilitude, 
 apart from his unfailing truth to the light and reason of 
 imagination, and apart even from his interest as a 
 mere teller of moving tales — apart, in three words, 
 - from his work as historian, poet and novelist — , Scotland 
 owes a debt to Scott which is still renewed every year, 
 when visitors to the Trossachs and Loch Katrine love 
 the land the better for his praises. As R. D. Black- 
 more, by Lorna Doone (1869) surpassed the eloquence 
 of nature in a Somersetshire valley, as Thomas Hardy 
 (h. 1840), by his novels and his poems, has made 
 'Wessex' his own, so Scott, honouring Scotland, has 
 added to her renown, and has brought to light beauties 
 of landscape and capacities of character which had 
 otherwise passed unseen. 
 Criticism It should be repeated that Scott had no style, at 
 style. least in the esoteric sense in which style is valued to-day. 
 And, even without such diminishment of the lack that 
 is confessed, it is clear that, alike in the ballad narratives 
 of the first period of Scott's work and in the historical 
 romances of the second, he wrote straight out of a full 
 memory. But at the same time, and still not for the 
 esoterics, Scott had a style in the sense that he seldom, 
 if ever, mistook the relations between matter and form. 
 As he abandoned verse for prose, when Bjron passed 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 113 
 
 him in his own vein, so, with equal bonhomie, and — in 
 his age, at least — a rare avoidance of theorizing, he 
 displayed a sound comprehension, not only of the 
 practice of fiction, but also of its principles. He had 
 an instinct for differences of material, and for the 
 consequent variations of manner. Take, for instance, 
 the author's Introduction, dated February, 1832, to St. 
 RonarCs Well (1824), and these virtues will be manifest. 
 The novel is intended, he says, ' celebrare domestica 
 facta — to give an imitation of the shifting manners of 
 our own time, and paint scenes the original of which 
 are daily passing round us'. He adopted this kind, he 
 continues, with the same genial obviousness concealing 
 its force as criticism, ' rather from the tempting circum- 
 stance of its ofiering some novelty in his compositions, 
 and avoiding worn-out characters and positions ', than 
 from the hope of rivalling such ladies as Miss Burney, 
 Miss Austen and Miss Edgeworth, whose success, Scott 
 generously alleges, ' seems to have appropriated this 
 province of the novel as exclusively their own '. The 
 entire preface should be read — it is brief, and modest, 
 and instructive — in order to do full justice to Scott's 
 critical powers. There are mind and heart in his 
 writings, knowledge and feeling combined, and these 
 lent the swing and movement, the Homeric quality, to 
 his work. 
 
 There is nearly always, too, let us add for the un- 
 doing of purer stylists of meaner force, a reserve 
 of strength on which to draw. Partly because Scott 
 was too wise to exceed the limits of his powers, his 
 8 
 
114 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 reader's taste never grates on tlie narrow edge of 
 capacity. Most writers sufEer their readers at one or 
 another point to feel a sense of strain, as if the border 
 had been reached — the shelving fringe of shingle dragged 
 down by the disappointed tide. There is nearly always 
 fulness in Scott ; his writing, in technical phrase, is 
 seldom or never ' thin '. And these qualities of swing 
 and fulness carry him triumphantly through places 
 where greater writers, from the point of view of style, 
 fall short of the standard which they have set. Scott's 
 confidence does not betray him, whether in tragic or 
 humorous situations. One does not say of him, as of 
 other masters. This is less or more Scott-like than 
 that ; the Wordsworthian note may elude Wordsworth, 
 but Scott, except when health failed, never missed his 
 aim in writing. Health is, perhaps, the just word. 
 There is a gay and a radiant wholesomeness in the 
 poems and novels alike which merges the errors of 
 the craftsman in the joy of the inventor. Reading 
 Scott, we return to a world in which sickUness is yet 
 unborn ; and, if some of the qualities are wanting 
 with their defects, if love is less than fully impassioned, 
 and contemplation not unfathomably deep, Scott's 
 world is bright and true, and the hearts of living men 
 and women beat beneath the properties of the novelist. 
 
 The decay Instead of following the decline of historical romance 
 
 historical through William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-82) and 
 
 novel. Gr, p. R. James (1799-1860), it would not be illogical 
 
 in this context to pursue the growth of history through 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 115 
 
 Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and Thomas Babington 
 Macaulay (1800-59). Each was actively engaged in 
 literature during the lifetime of Sir Walter Scott. 
 Carlyle had been at work for ten years, seeking channels 
 of self-expression, and Macaulay, whose essay on Milton 
 appeared in 1825, was attached to The Edinburgh 
 Review. But their influence belongs to a later period, 
 and one observation only is due here to the greatness 
 of Scott in connection with these two pairs of writers, 
 that, while his method in history proved inimitable, 
 his theory of history found historians to develop it. 
 Of the imitators of his method it is to be said that 
 Scott wrote for grown men, Ainsworth and James for 
 schoolboys. This, at least, is the verdict of posterity, 
 now that the early glamour has passed away, and the 
 difference helps us to realize that what is vital and 
 permanent in Scott is not the form which he chose, but 
 the idea that underlay it. To visualize history and to 
 apply to time past common canons of humanity were 
 parts of the liberal aim which informed the method of 
 Scott, but which Ainsworth and James subordinated 
 to the meretricious claims of story and adventure. 
 Rookwood, Jack Sheppard, The Tower of London, 
 Windsor Castle, and Old St. PauVs, and the rest of the 
 nine-and-thirty novels which Ainsworth produced in the 
 intervals of editing Bentley^s Miscellany and The New 
 Monthly Magazine, stand high in their own class, but 
 they are novels with a historical background, not history 
 re-incarnated in romance. The same criticism applies 
 with even stronger force to the works in this kind of 
 
ii6 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 James, whose stereotyped opening with ' a solitary 
 horseman ' emerging across a plain hastened the decline 
 of the genus ; as Historiographer Royal to William iv, 
 he wrote some creditable memoirs and biographies. 
 But it is on other lines than theirs that Scott's lifework 
 was continued by the prose-writers of the second 
 quarter of the nineteenth century. 
 
 Before pursuing this theme, we have to take up the 
 thread of poetry which Scott deliberately broke in 
 1814, when he laid aside verse for prose. What was 
 it that caused this change, in the popular author of 
 Marmion, and of what sort were the writers into whose 
 keeping poetry was transferred ? 
 
§ 8. IMAGINATIVE POETRY, II. 
 
 THREE poets pre-eminently respond to the question 
 at the end of the last section : Byron, Shelley 
 and Keats. The poets of the earlier period, born chiefly 
 in the seventies of the eighteenth century, had been 
 alike in the fortune of long life. Scott died in 1832 ; 
 Lamb and Coleridge survived him till 1834, Southey 
 till 1843, and Campbell till 1844. Wordsworth died 
 at eighty in 1850, in the same year as Jeffrey, his re- 
 viewer ; Thomas Moore in 1852 ; Samuel Rogers at 
 ninety-two in 1855, and Landor at eighty-nine in 1864. 
 They were all men of ripe years. Fate did not grudge 
 them time to fulfil the tasks they undertook. 
 
 They all saw the birth and death of Byron, Shelley Two 
 and Keats. Rogers's ninety-two years were longer than ^^°"P** 
 the sum of the lives of these three combined. He was 
 twenty-five when Byron was born, and outlived him 
 thirty-one years. Keats died at twenty-five, and 
 Shelley at just under thirty. All the lifetime of the 
 three fell between 1788 and 1824. 
 
 These facts and figures are not cited for the mere 
 interest of the dates. They are important to criticism, 
 
 1X7 
 
ii8 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 too. Sorting the names into two groups, as of the 
 elder men who died late and of the younger men who 
 died early, it is to be noted at once that Scott, when 
 he resigned poetry, resigned it into the younger men's 
 keeping. In 1812 there were two poets who ' counted ', 
 the author of Marmion in Edinburgh, and the author 
 of Childe Harold in London. In 1814 there was only 
 one : Scott had started the ' Waver ley ' novels. 
 
 Meanwhile, what had become of the older group, 
 and of Wordsworth especially, with his Excursion in 
 1814 ? Judged by the test of popularity, his brilliant 
 junior had passed him. It pleased Byron to pour 
 scorn on the older and more placid writers, and, in 
 competition with Byron's wild tales, these were left 
 hopelessly behind. In a sense, they did not bid for 
 the popularity of a season ; it was not to no purpose 
 that they had time on their side. Scott himself took 
 the longer road, in preference to disputing with Byron 
 for the first place in the field in which he had been first 
 in time. Another question suggests itself, to which no 
 clear reply can be given. This group of three young 
 poets, who wrote and ceased within the lifetime of 
 the youngest of the older group, — how far is a critic 
 competent to pass judgment on their work ? It 
 was obviously unfinished. They are, in Shelley's 
 own phrase, heirs of unfulfilled renown. The broken 
 columns appeal to time to reserve judgment for eternity. 
 Yet, plainly, something must be said. What we 
 miss is not so much the poems which they did not 
 write (it has been said that literature could spare all 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 119 
 
 that Wordsworth wrote after forty) ; what is wanting 
 is, rather, the standard which every man sets for his 
 own appraisement, if he live out the psalmist's span. 
 The value of Wordsworth's golden decade — 1798 to 
 1808 (the reckoning is Matthew Arnold's)— is en- 
 hanced, if not by the merit, at least by the virtues of 
 his after-work. It added constancy of purpose, faith, 
 loyalty, conscientiousness, all the qualities that make 
 for confidence. We know these elder writers through 
 and through, in their old age as in their youth. Are 
 we equally confident about the young ? Would 
 Byron have ceased to be Byronic ? Would Shelley 
 have found out his father-in-law ? Would Keats 
 always have cared for beauty first ? Time should have 
 answered all such questions. ' By our own spirits 
 are we deified ', and judgment, without this evidence, 
 is a halting and lame affair, unverified, uncorrected, 
 unconfirmed. 
 
 Lastly, of these two groups, the one of ripened men, 
 the other of precocious boys, can we argue from the 
 known to the unknown ? Are we to say of Keats : 
 he wrote so many poems in ten years ; fifty more years 
 were his due ; five times as much poetry was to come ? 
 Again, if five times as much, then how good ? Less 
 good, or better ? A reply by analogy may be sought, 
 but it is necessarily very imperfect. Most of the 
 elder line fell away from their great beginnings. The 
 age itself fell away from the high hopes of revolution. 
 The tract of social reform was dreary and flat to tra- 
 verse. In the late Georgian days, the units of society 
 
120 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 sparkled. Holland House and other centres were full 
 of brilliant men and women, and the art of conversation 
 flourished. But the general effect was dull. The units 
 did not coalesce, and art and letters languished in the 
 shallows. Later on, the contrary is true. There was 
 less glitter and more light. The fresh start of 1832 
 proved an enduring inspiration, and the glowing interest 
 was reflected in the powers of the writers who accom- 
 panied it. To these writers it seems very likely that 
 Keats at any rate would have belonged. He was the 
 youngest of the three, and the nearest in age to the 
 new era. 
 Scott The actual historical happenings do not exactly 
 ByroDi correspond with their appearance in restropect. There 
 was no collision of great wits. A pleasant record of 
 amenities lends a touch of human feeling to the planetary 
 splendour of the writers, who, the one with tranquil 
 illumination, and the other with intermittent lightning, 
 ruled the literary horizon in the first quarter of the 
 nineteenth century. It was not long after Byron, in 
 his own words, awoke one morning and found himself 
 famous, that Scott, a visitor to London, met him at 
 John Murray's, in Albemarle Street. They found, 
 according to Scott's letters, ' a great deal to say to 
 each other '. Their host was Byron's publisher, and 
 the annals of his craft contain no record more attractive 
 than that of the relations between these two. Brilliant, 
 wayward, unstable, affectionate. Lord Byron found in 
 Murray the countervailing, complementary qualities, 
 and a sympathy upon which he could always depend. 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 121 
 
 It was tested, finally, ten years afterwards, when, in 
 1824, the dead poet's memoir of his life was burned 
 by his publisher in Albemarle Street, with the consent 
 of his family and in the presence of Thomas Moore, to 
 whose loving and faithful pen the biographer's task 
 was entrusted. But of this, and of Scott's embarrass- 
 ment by the houses of Constable and Ballantyne, 
 there was no thought in these days, when romantic 
 taste was veering from the North and the West to 
 the South and the East, from the simple vigour of 
 Scott's tales of old chivalry and feudalism to Byron's 
 bolder tales of rich colour and warm blood. Grace 
 marked the transition. In 1816, Scott reviewed the Third 
 Canto of Childe Harold in Murray's Quarterly Review, 
 and recognized that Byron ' was placed pre-eminent 
 among the literary men of his country by general 
 acclamation'. At the next available opportunity, in 
 the Fourth Canto of the same poem, BjTon celebrated 
 
 The southern Scott, the minstrel who called forth 
 
 A new creation with his magic line. 
 
 And, Uke the Ariosto of the North, 
 
 Sang Ladye-love and War, Romance and Knightly worth. 
 
 Finally, in December, 1821, in a letter from Edinburgh 
 to John Murray, Scott accepted, ' with feelings of great 
 obligation, the flattering proposal of Lord Byron ' to 
 prefix his name to ' the very grand and tremendous 
 drama of Cain. You have much occasion', he added, 
 ' for some mighty spirit, like Lord Byron, to come 
 down and trouble the waters '. There was courtesy 
 on Parnassus. 
 
122 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 BoWness Wherein, precisely, did it lie, this fascination of 
 Byron ? There was, first, the self-confidence of his 
 poetry, even on the merely technical side. No one 
 could withstand a poet — especially a hundred years 
 ago, when versification was still hampered by the 
 traditions of the eighteenth century — who was to essay 
 such tours de force as a rhyme to ' intellectual ' ^, or 
 who, in the First Canto of Childe Harold — the first 
 ' fytte ', as Byron called it, — contrasted a bull-fight at 
 Cadiz with a typical Sunday in London, and invented 
 such amorous invocations as the following stanza 
 conveyed : 
 
 The seal Love's dimpling finger hath impressed 
 
 Denotes how soft the chin which bears his touch : 
 
 Her lips, whose kisses pout to leave their nest. 
 
 Bid man be valiant ere he merit such : 
 
 Her glance how wildly beautiful ! how much 
 
 Hath Phoebus wooed in vain to spoil her cheek, 
 
 Which glows yet smoother from his amorous clutch ! 
 
 Who round the North for paler dames would seek ? 
 
 How poor their forms appear 1 how languid, wan, and weak ! 
 
 Society quivered, and gave way. The appeal of Byron 
 was irresistible. The ' spruce citizen ', untravelled, and 
 unqualified to test these praises, swallowed the illusion 
 whole. He yielded, if not his mind, at least his emotions 
 to the spell. The Giaour ^ mysteriously termed ' a 
 fragment of a Turkish tale ', and composed straightway 
 in the metre which Scott had adopted for his ballad- 
 
 * But — Oh ! ye lords of ladies intellectual, 
 Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all ? 
 
 Don Juan, i. xxii. 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 123 
 
 poems, followed Childe Harold in 1813, and ran through 
 edition after edition. A voluptuous beauty was spread 
 over it ; names, unfamiliar and alluring, conspired 
 with the local machinery of camels, turbans and the 
 rest, to work, like opium, on men's wits : 
 
 To-night set Rhamazani's sun ; 
 To-night, the Bairam feast's begun ; 
 To-night — but who and what art thou, 
 Of foreign garb and fearful brow ? 
 And what are these to thine and thee. 
 That thou shouldst either pause or flee ? 
 
 ' What's Hecuba to him ', we echo, with the thrill in 
 our blood benumbed. But, though these lines (Giaour, 
 228-33) carry now, in the scrutiny of a sophisticated 
 age, the mere face-value of their diction, on Byron's 
 own generation, eager for novelty and mystery, for 
 adventure without peril, and for the gratification of 
 new-awakened senses, they struck with extraordinary 
 delight ; and, when the replies to the rhetorical questions 
 — the who^s and the whales of his treasure-house — 
 led into paths of romance, rich with exotic blossoms 
 and odorous with perfume, unknown to the stay-at- 
 home world ; when the narrative took such forms of 
 passion as 
 
 But thou, false Infidel ! shall writhe 
 Beneath avenging Monkir's scythe. 
 
 or 
 or 
 
 The cold in chme are cold in blood. 
 
 Go, when the hunter's hand hath wnmg 
 From forest-cave her shrieking young. 
 And calm the lonely lioness : 
 But soothe not, mock not my distress ! 
 
work. 
 
 124 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 or 
 
 Yet still 'tis there ! In silence stands. 
 And beckons with beseeching hands ! 
 With braided hair, and bright black eye — 
 I knew 'twas false — she could not die ! 
 
 then poetry unlocked emotions unsuspected hitherto ; 
 the poets of a colder cHme were left behind, and the 
 * Byronic ' note — meretriciously exalted, and indebted 
 to strange gods — stimulated a kind of extra sense which 
 is even yet not always satisfied by the response along 
 pure channels of expression. 
 Life and Byron added to the strength of the note. He learned 
 to purify it in part from the clinging disguises of youth. 
 Life led him through devious ways before the three 
 weeks' general mourning and the thirty-seven minute 
 guns of the Provisional Government of Greece pro- 
 claimed the death of a Greek hero who was also an 
 English poet. Born in 1788, and inheriting his grand- 
 uncle's title when he was ten years old, George Gordon, 
 Lord Byron, took with him to Harrow and Cambridge 
 a natural ambition to excel, a fiery temper for the 
 right, a wild reputation from his father, brilliant talents 
 on the showy side, and a capacity for hard reading. 
 When manhood brought its new appetites, and oppor- 
 tunity, waiting on desire, raised fancy to passion, 
 Byron's social position and literary gifts made his 
 excesses notorious, and gradually wove about his 
 acts a curious mesh of confusion with those of the 
 heroes of his poems. There is no doubt he encouraged 
 the confusion, and wore his reputation like a cloak. 
 His principles, his indiscretions, his melancholy and his 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 125 
 
 poetry became a kind of fever or possession, from which 
 certain advantages — even a certain immunity — were 
 derived, but from the evil of which he was never 
 wholly free. 
 
 It is not necessary here to rehearse the details of 
 Byron's marriage, in January, 1815, with Sir Ralph 
 Milbanke's only daughter — he consented to a separation 
 in the following year — ; nor need we discuss the associa- 
 tion of the names of Lady CaroHne Lamb, Clara Clair- 
 mont — a relative of the Godwins, and mother of Byron's 
 daughter, Allegra, to whom he was deeply attached, 
 and who died at the age of five years — , of the Comtesse 
 Guiccioli, and others. Merciful time explicates what 
 the sermons of the charitable confound. Here, it is 
 enough to note how, though Byron died in 1824, he had 
 — partly by weariness of himself, partly by the alienation 
 of others, but mainly, no doubt, by the power of the 
 genius that was in him — achieved, through strange ex- 
 periences, the goal of poetic expression. He met Shelley 
 in 1816 — (he assisted, in 1822, at the deeply melancholy 
 ceremony of Shelley's pyre on the seashore at Viareggio) 
 — and the intimate talks that ensued led Byron, if not 
 to appreciate, at least to realize the attitude towards 
 the function of poetry of Wordsworth and his kind. 
 There could be no sympathy, no true community of 
 aim, between Byron, the apostle of revolt, satirist, 
 scoffer, and voluptuary, and Wordsworth, the patient 
 builder of waste places, who wove his fabric out of 
 behefs. Don Juan and other of Bjrron's pieces are 
 full of bitter gibes at Wordsworth as the prototype 
 
126 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 of the ' Lake ' school, though Byron's rejection of its 
 principles, so far as they are capable of formulation, 
 was confined to its external marks. For Shelley saw, 
 and could force the insight upon Byron's quickening 
 understanding, that truth finds many voices, and that 
 freedom, seeking an entrance, beats at many doors at 
 once. Wordsworth's poems of imagination unsealed 
 spiritual bars ; Byron struck at the bars of the flesh. 
 The sins of Don Juan, Sardanapalus, Manfred, Cain, 
 and the rest, interest us less to-day, and shock us 
 hardly at all. We take the poet's precepts less seriously, 
 now that his practice is forgotten. There are certain 
 threads in Byron's verse, woven of pure gold without 
 alloy, which shine more frequently as his powers matured, 
 and which, it is fair to conjecture, would have formed, 
 had his life been prolonged, the main element in his 
 poetry. Greece, idealized in contemplation to a glory 
 even greater than she won, appealed to him from the 
 disillusions of later history and from the disappointments 
 of his own career. Salamis, Marathon, Thermopylae 
 — her names were music in his ears ; and second only 
 to Athens, Venice, another bride of the sea, moved 
 this great sea-poet to ecstasy. He aimed at visible 
 signs. Nature spoke to him chiefly through men. 
 Out of the dust of empires and the ashes of heroes 
 he fashioned his most stirring verse. To hurl down 
 oppression in high places, to denounce hypocrisy and 
 shams, and evil masquerading as expediency, and 
 avarice, and cowardice, and sloth, and to strike a blow 
 for freedom ere he died — this was the spirit which moved 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 127 
 
 Byron, which inspired le Byronisme and der Byronismus 
 of a century of Continental adoration, and the flame 
 whereof immortalized his poetry when its temporary 
 vogue was spent. 
 
 Byron died in 1824. At the early age of thirty -six, he The 
 had outlived Shelley and Keats, both of whom were sheUey. 
 his juniors by birth. The writings of all three poets 
 fell between 1814 and 1824, in this respect the most 
 wonderful decade which poetic England has enjoyed. 
 Her enjoyment is more tranquil in retrospect. Percy 
 Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), like Byron, offended the 
 conventions of his caste. His father was a country 
 gentleman, of all men the most unlikely at that time 
 to deal wisely and gently with an exceptional son. In 
 the class of society to which Byron and Shelley be- 
 longed, the youth of a hundred years ago were held 
 more responsible for their opinions, and were less care- 
 fully guarded from the consequences of their acts, than 
 in these days of long schooling and late marriage. 
 To-day, if a clever boy of twenty, the son of a county 
 landowner, held the unorthodox view that ' a husband 
 and wife ought to continue so long united as they 
 love each other ; any law which should bind them to 
 combination for one moment after the decay of their 
 affection would be a most intolerable tjrranny ', or 
 that ' the state of society in which we exist is a mixture 
 of feudal savageness and imperfect civilization ; the 
 
128 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 narrow and unenliglitened morality of the Cliristian 
 religion is an aggravation of these evils ', his father 
 and friends would not be very much alarmed. Even 
 if he went to the expense of privately printing his 
 views, and of circulating seventy-five copies, the re- 
 cipients, in all probability, would wait and hope for 
 better things. Unfortunately, Shelley was taken 
 seriously. The authorities at Oxford sent him down 
 for a pamphlet on The Necessity of Atheism, and in the 
 same year — 1811 — he was married to Harriet West- 
 brook, and began a correspondence with William 
 Godwin, the social reformer, a dangerous friend of 
 youth. 
 
 The flames and fire of nineteen are fanned more 
 readily than they are subdued. Shelley's next few 
 months were employed in putting Godwin's precepts into 
 practice by an agitation in Ireland. In 1813 he had 
 the rare felicity of being the victim of an attempted 
 assassination, and, meanwhile, he had written his 
 philosophical poem. Queen Mob, from the footnotes to 
 which the foregoing citations were taken. Marriage, 
 philosophy, ' assassination ', sedition, free love and 
 atheism are a complex record at one-and-twenty, and, 
 in Shelley's station and generation, it would have 
 required the experience of many years to undo the 
 errors of youth. The many years were denied him. 
 In 1822 he was drowned off Spezzia, in Italy, having 
 added to his record in the meantime an elopement 
 with Godwin's daughte?') Mary, whom he married 
 in 1816, after his deserted wife had committed suicide. 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 129 
 
 This brief and stormy career, which sounds so sordid 
 in its details, and so avoidable as to many of its mis- 
 takes, is saved from criticism — and, therefore, from 
 blame — by the mature sincerity of its hero. The 
 standards by which he did evil are not the standards 
 by which he is to be judged. A doctrine of immunity 
 by genius is dangerous and misleading, but the fiercest 
 examination of Shelley's character fails to reveal aught 
 but good. His opinions and his acts were the con- 
 sequence, not of selfish or vain desires, but of social 
 and moral motives founded on reason and cherished 
 with passion. Had these led him to penury and a 
 monastery instead of to Mary Godwin and literature, 
 he would have followed them with equal loyalty ; 
 and, apart from the justification by character — 
 and Shelley's purity and lovableness are affirmed by 
 portraiture, both lineal and literary — , excuse and ex- 
 oneration disappear in the contemplation of his poetry. 
 The poet and the man are one, and these poems 
 of a youth of nine-and-twenty are the true Shelley of 
 our day — not Harriet's, or Mary's, or another's. Let 
 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the clever author of 
 Frankenstein, speak finally for her husband : ' To 
 defecate life of its misery and its evil ', she wrote, in 
 1839, in a preface to the first collected edition of his 
 poems, ' was the ruling passion of his soul ; he dedi- 
 cated to it every power of his mind, every pulsation of 
 his heart. He looked on political freedom as the 
 direct agent to effect the happiness of mankind ; and 
 thus any new-sprung hope of liberty inspired a jojr an(i 
 9 
 
130 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 an exultation more intense and wild than lie could 
 liave felt for any personal advantage'. Conversely, 
 a distrust of this hope was interpreted by him as 
 treachery to human weal. Thus, in 1816, after Words- 
 worth had built up in The Excursion his ideal of social 
 reform by changes within, not without — ' my heart 
 was all given to the People, and my love was theirs ' — , 
 and had turned away from the ruined hopes of more 
 violent methods of liberation, Shelley's disappointment 
 was expressed in a sonnet thoughtfully beautiful, 
 which he would doubtless have lived to regret. ' Shel- 
 ley ', wrote his wife, ' resembled Plato ', in the sense 
 that both took ' more delight in the abstract and ideal 
 than in the special and tangible '. But he differed 
 from Plato in a sense in which Wordsworth was a 
 truer Platonist, in his consent, that is to say, to take 
 the fjbocpcporipotv ohov, or the longer road to truth. It 
 might almost seem that Wordsworth foresaw his tranquil 
 enjoyment of many years in which to apply for man's 
 benefit nature's equal design, and that Shelley, doomed 
 to die young, sought to justify artificial means. 
 Shelley The quotations from Mary Shelley's preface suggest 
 Byron. 7^^ another distinction. Byron aimed at * the special 
 and tangible ', attaching his love of liberty to concrete 
 images of freedom, and to Athens and Venice above 
 all. Shelley approached it from the intellectual side. 
 * Come thou ', he apostrophized Liberty (Ode, 1820), 
 but lead out of the inmost cave 
 Of man's deep spirit, as the moming-star 
 Beckons the sun from the Eoan Wave, 
 Wisdom, 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 131 
 
 thus seeking to base the reality on a metaphysical 
 foundation ; and, in a note to his lyrical drama Hellas 
 (1821), he wrote, ' The final chorus is indistinct and 
 obscure, as the event of the living drama whose arrival 
 it foretells. Prophecies of wars, and rumours of wars, 
 may safely be made by poet or prophet in any age, 
 but to anticipate however darkly a period of regenera- 
 tion and happiness is a more hazardous exercise of the 
 faculty which bards possess or feign '. Shelley's poetry 
 is true to this principle. In a note to Queen Mah he 
 declares that his negation of a God ' must be under- 
 stood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis 
 of a pervading spirit coeternal with the universe remains 
 unshaken ', and to the elaboration (or representation) 
 of this hypothesis the bulk of his poetry is devoted : 
 
 The awful shadow of some unseen Power 
 Floats though unseen among us 
 
 are the opening words of his Hymn to Intellectual 
 Beauty, and the same passionate belief is breathed from 
 the stanzas of Adonais, in which, in 1821, Shelley mourned 
 the death of Keats, whom he was so soon to follow to 
 the grave : 
 
 The One remains, the many change and pass; 
 Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; 
 Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass. 
 Stains the white radiance of Eternity, 
 Until Death tramples it to fragments . . . 
 That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, 
 That Beauty in which all things work and move. 
 That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse 
 Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love 
 now beams on me. 
 
132 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Other poets in later times have proclaimed their faith 
 in Unity under diversity, in the immortality of beauty 
 and love transcending the phantasmagoria of experi- 
 ence ; but none, like Shelley, has proclaimed it, not 
 merely in his poetry, but in his life, or has interpreted 
 it in matchless language while the first down was still 
 on his cheek. 
 Diction It is to the language that we recur in our appreciation 
 rhythm, of Shelley as a poet. He was more analytical than 
 Byron, whose ardent and lucent wit aimed at the 
 direct expression of the hopes that he conceived, and 
 subordinated imagery to presentation. Again and 
 again, throughout his writings, Shelley, who thought in 
 images, adopted the tangential method, sliding away 
 from the hard, clear light to follow the soft allurements 
 — the shifting illumination — of simile and metaphor. 
 Read in this spirit The Sensitive Plant, perhaps the 
 most typical of his genius of all Shelley's poems, and 
 his marvellous faculty of imagination will become 
 more apparent. The ' young ' winds ' feed ' the plant, 
 which closes beneath the ' kisses of Night '. Spring 
 arose on the garden ' like the Spirit of Love felt every- 
 where '. The ' companionless ' plant ' trembled and 
 panted ' ' like a doe in the noontide with love's sweet 
 want ' — an example of image within image. The breath 
 and scent of the flowers are ' like the voice and the 
 instrument '. The music of the bells of the hyacinth 
 is * felt like an odour within the sense '. The rose, 
 ' like a nymph to the bath addressed ', lays bare, fold 
 after fold, ' the soul of her beauty and love '. We 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 133 
 
 recall from the ode To a Skylark, the wonderful series 
 of likenesses by which the poet expresses, one by one, 
 the feelings, or suggestions of feelings, stirred by that 
 music in the sky : ' Hke a Poet hidden in the light of 
 thought ', ' like a high-born maiden in a palace tower ', 
 ' like a glow-worm golden in a dell of dew ', ' like a rose 
 embowered in its own green leaves ', and each of the 
 images is invoked to point a special analogy, so that 
 the head of the similitudes, the blythe skylark itself, 
 is endowed with a sum of attributes which are yet 
 inadequate to its complete being. Take, in the same 
 connection, Shelley's Ode to the West Wind and The 
 Cloud, both of which were published in 1820 with his 
 Prometheus Unbound, and consider the wealth of their 
 imagery and the masterful brilliancy of their personifica- 
 tions. The silent powers and processes of nature are 
 re-created by the insight of this poet, and impress their 
 action on our senses. The dead leaves driven like 
 ghosts ; the sweet buds pasturing in air ; the Medi- 
 terranean roused from his dreams ; the locks of the 
 approaching storm ; the vaulted dome of congregated 
 vapours ; the sapless foliage of ocean, — Shelley's art 
 makes nature expressive by the magic of his words. 
 Critics have found in him, and in Keats, a lack of 
 solidity, of body; his ethereal qualities want poise, 
 and a safe habitation in thought. Unlike the skylark 
 of Wordsworth, which, through all its wanderings, was 
 ' true to the kindred points of heaven and home ', 
 Shelley's skylark was mere spirit, * an unbodied joy ', 
 resumed eternally in the empyrean ; and the point 
 
134 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 of the contrast is directed to the method of the poets 
 as a whole. 
 
 The charge may freely be admitted, for Shelley's 
 poetry was necessary to his times. An abandonment 
 to nature's impressions, such an abandonment as 
 Shelley's own Alastor, in one of the earliest of his poems, 
 was designed to portray, — 
 
 Every sight 
 And sound from the vast earth and ambient air 
 Sent to his heart its choicest impulses, — 
 
 was the preparation for the message of the nineteenth 
 century in literature. The letters had to be spelt 
 over again, and the old, false records to be obliterated, 
 in order that poetry should interpret the meaning of 
 life to man, and should justify, from the reading of 
 earth, the high hopes of liberty and joy towards which, 
 imperfectly, and by violence, and with many repulses 
 and misgivings, the civilized peoples were advancing. 
 Shelley deliberately sought Alastor's identity with 
 Nature : ' Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is ', 
 he besought the spirit of the wind ; ' I could lie down 
 like a tired child, . . . Till death, like sleep, might 
 steal on me ', he wrote In Dejection, near Naples ; 
 ' Many a green isle needs must be In the deep wide sea 
 of Misery ', he sang Among the Euganean Hills, and, 
 haply, when the deep sea engulfed him, he found the 
 green isle which he sought. Finally, Shelley was a 
 'musician. He combined his images of nature in such 
 exquisite forms that the beauty of the whole tran- 
 scended the beauty of the parts. His longer poems — 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 135 
 
 the dramas of Prometheus Unbound^ Hellas and The 
 Cenciy tlie narratives of The Revolt of Islam, The Witch 
 of Atlas, and the rest — are full of passion and imagina- 
 tion ; his songs and lyrics are pure music, a perfect 
 fusion of sense and sound. Quotation is really un- 
 necessary : 
 
 The fountains mingle with the river 
 And the rivers with the ocean. 
 
 Rarely, rarely, comest thou. 
 Spirit of Delight ! 
 
 Music, when sweet voices die. 
 Vibrates in the memory, 
 
 O World ! life ! O Time ! 
 On whose last steps I climb. 
 
 One word is too often profaned 
 
 For me to profane it, \ 
 
 On a poet's lips I slept, 
 Dreaming like a love-adept, 
 
 — these poems, and others as familiar, have sung them- 
 selves into the consciousness of all who care for litera- 
 ture. And, perhaps, a last word of praise may be 
 given to the less well-known sonnet, Ozymandias, in 
 which Shelley captured the very spirit of the desert 
 
 which he never saw : 
 
 Round the decay 
 Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare 
 The lone and level sands stretch far away. 
 
 111. 
 
 John Keats (1795-1821), the third of the group, held, Keats, 
 as far as can be judged, the most promise of all three. 
 
136 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 It is partly because lie was the youngest, and partly 
 on account of his obscure birth — he was a livery- 
 stableman's son who was apprenticed to a surgeon- 
 apothecary — , and partly, again, because of his ceaseless 
 struggle with iU-health, that we are constantly reminded 
 of the greater things he might have done. There is 
 less maturity in his work than in that of the other two. 
 Except for a few odes and sonnets — ^immortal, however 
 few — , there is always a sense of beginning, or, at 
 least, of adolescence. The summer summons us from 
 the spring, but, like the call of the cuckoo, ' still longed 
 for, never seen ', it mocks us from the further hill. 
 The biographers of Keats, who are as many, almost, 
 as his years, preserve one anecdote at least which it is 
 pleasant to recall. He had gone to school at Enfield, 
 and Charles Cowden-Clarke (1787-1877), the poet's 
 senior by eight years and his survivor by more than 
 half a century, was his schoolmaster's son. Clarke, 
 who became well known as a Shakespearean scholar, 
 was the first to introduce Keats to the two worlds — the 
 Elizabethan and the Greek — in which, through the rest 
 of his life, he found himself most at home. In 1811, or 
 thereabouts, he lent him a volume of The Faerie Queen, 
 and Spenser, ' the poet's poet ', as Charles Lamb aptly 
 called him, never had a more poetic reader, in the sense 
 of Carlyle's epigram, ' we are all poets when we read a 
 poem well'. Keats went through the volume, says 
 Clarke, ' as a young horse through a spring meadow, 
 ramping '. He picked out the happiest epithets, the 
 deftest Spenserian touches, and learnt them, literally. 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 137 
 
 by heart. ' What an image that is ', he exclaimed, 
 looking burly and dominant, ' sea-shouldering whales ' ! 
 A year or two afterwards, Clarke lent him a copy of 
 Chapman's Homer, and Keats himself has left on record 
 his first impressions of that book. The sonnet, his 
 mentor tells us, was laid on the breakfast-table on the 
 morrow of the introduction : 
 
 Then felt I Hke some watcher of the skies 
 
 When a new planet swims into his ken ; 
 Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 
 
 He stared at the Pacific — and all his men 
 Looked at each other with a wild surmise. 
 
 Silent, upon a peak in Darien. 
 
 Many books are a great boon, and much verse has 
 flowed from their plenty ; but literature counts no 
 purer triumph than the inspiration of Keats by these 
 stray copies of Chapman and of Spenser. 
 
 His recourse to poetry was inevitable. Elizabethan 
 and Greek were in his blood, and his invocation of the 
 muse was published in 1817. Leigh Hunt, ruralizing 
 at Hampstead, was his host and hero at that time, and 
 Hunt's cheerful and easy sciolism encouraged the eager 
 young poet. For sometimes an angel rushes in where 
 wise men fear to tread. Sleef and Poetry was written Sleep and 
 in heroic couplets, with all the aids of paragraphs ^^^^' 
 and pauses by which Pope's detractors were relaxing 
 the metre which they hesitated to abandon, and it ran 
 to four hundred and four lines. Remembering Words- 
 worth's Prelude — his invocation to poetry in thirteen 
 books, begun in 1805, finished in 1832, and not published 
 
138 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 till 1850 — , it is difficult not to wonder how Keats would 
 
 have regarded Sleep and Poetry from the standard, say, 
 
 of middle life. His ' young spirit ' was to ' follow The 
 
 morning sun-beams to the great Apollo ', with all The 
 
 luxury of the weak termination. In the * eiysium * 
 
 of ' a bowery nook ' he was to copy from * an eternal 
 
 book' 
 
 Many a lovely saying 
 About the leaves and flowers — about the playing 
 Of nymphs in woods, and fountains ; and the shade 
 Keeping a silence round a sleeping maid. 
 
 In that * happy silence ' he was to ' wander . . . like 
 the clear Meander ', and, ' like a strong giant ', he 
 was to seize ' the events of this wide world '. * for 
 ten years ', he prayed, ' that I may overwhelm Myself 
 in poetry ', but foreshortening fate hardly rendered him 
 the half. We remember this as we note how this en- 
 thusiasm for the seventeenth- century recoiled suddenly 
 from its successor, or, more exactly, how his love of 
 Spenser brought a hate of Pope. Lyrical Ballads had 
 mastered him, and Wordsworth's poems of 1807. The 
 formal influence of Wordsworth is strong in the middle 
 of this poem, where Keats jeered at the ' dismal-soul'd 
 bards ', for whom ' the winds of heaven blew, the 
 ocean roll'd Its gathering waves ', and * the blue Bared 
 its eternal bosom ' in vain. ' Beauty was awake ', he 
 declaimed, but ' ye were dead to things ye knew not of ' : 
 
 Easy was the task ; 
 A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask 
 Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race ! 
 That blasphemed the bright Ljrrist to his face, 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 139 
 
 And did not know it, — no, they went abont. 
 Holding a poor, decrepid standard out 
 Mark'd with most flimsy mottos, and in large 
 The name of one Boileau ! 
 
 Boileau (1636-1711), the French inventor of classical 
 counsels for poets, though Professor Saintsbury {History 
 of Criticism, ii. 289) finds the counsels ' simply nega- 
 tive ', the doctrine ' usually wrong ', and the sum of 
 help ' meagre and disappointing ' — thereby justifying 
 * Keats, and the men of 1830 ' whom he anticipated — , 
 was the idol of Pope in poetics ; and thus Keats in 
 these verses threw down a gage of defiance : 
 
 And they shall be accounted poet-Kings 
 Who simply tell the most heart-easing things. 
 
 Therefore should I 
 Be but the essence of deformity, 
 A coward, did my very eye-lids wink 
 At speaking out what I have dared to think. 
 
 The gage was quickly taken up. Byron, who admired 
 Pope, and who therefore somewhat perversely ranged 
 himself on the side of the eighteenth- century, and shut 
 his eyes to the new era inaugurated by Lyrical Ballads, 
 attacked this poem in Blackwood^s Magazine as * the 
 work of a young person learning to write poetry, and 
 beginning by teaching the art ' — which, on the whole, 
 was not unfair. He went on to designate Keats * a 
 tadpole of the Lakes ', but admitted, in 1821, when the 
 younger poet was dead, that his indignation for Pope's 
 sake had rendered him less than just to Keats's own 
 ' genius. . . . His Fragment of Hyperion is as sublime 
 as iEschylus '. There were others who hailed the new 
 
140 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 poet in terms of extravagant praise. Hunt, trans- 
 ferring to The Examiner his hospitality at Hampstead, 
 naturally justified his disciple, and Benjamin Haydon, 
 the painter, to whom Keats had inscribed two sonnets, 
 compared Sleep and Poetry to a flash of lightning 
 heralding the thunder's crash. Here, then, we may 
 leave the matter. The disputes of critics and reviewers 
 of a hundred years ago are an endless and unfruitful 
 topic, the interest of which has been much exaggerated. 
 It is enough in this place to note, first, that the weightier 
 reviews were adverse, on the whole, to the reactionary 
 (or romantic) poets, and, secondly, that it is untrue 
 that Keats was killed by his critics, in the sense that 
 their unkindness hastened or caused his decline. Keats 
 died of consumption, and, probably, of want of proper 
 nourishment, and his disease followed a normal course, 
 as its treatment was understood in those days, through 
 periods of high and low spirits. From his published 
 letters it would seem that, when health permitted, he 
 accepted criticism in good part. Thus he wrote in 
 1818, ' Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on 
 a man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him 
 a severe critic on his own works. ... I was never 
 afraid of failure ; for I would rather fail than not be 
 among the greatest '. 
 Aim3 and This was a more stable aim, a more modest ambition of 
 
 achieve- 
 ments, genius, than to * follow Apollo ' and to ' wander like 
 
 Meander ' ; and we turn to his latest work, by which 
 
 he would wish to be judged, for the signs of fulfilment. 
 
 The Fall of Hyperion, a Vision, was not published till 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 141 
 
 after his death. He had worked at it during his last 
 months, intending it to replace the broken fragment 
 of Hyperion which he had ' given up ' two years before. 
 Precisely why he gave it up is a little uncertain, nor is 
 it altogether to be determined out of the unfinished 
 re-cast version. For death had laid its hand upon him ; 
 the ' warm love ' was slipping away for which he set 
 his 'casement ope at night'. Hyperion had been 
 written under Milton's influence — Keats was always 
 young enough to be rapt — ; and he seems to have 
 become dissatisfied with the restraints which the Milton- 
 ism imposed. It would appear, then, that he was 
 feeling his way towards a freer self-expression when 
 he turned the narrative into a vision. However this 
 may be, Keats dwelt, alike in Hyperion and in The Fall, 
 on the excellence of poetry and the high mission of a 
 poet. Every man has the vision within him : 
 
 Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave 
 A paradise for a sect ; the savage, too. 
 From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep 
 Guesses at heaven. The Fall of HyperioUy [i.] 14. 
 
 At one level or another, the fanatic's, the savage's, or 
 the poet's, heaven is in each man's ken. But * Poesy 
 alone can tell her dreams ', and it is the poet's privilege 
 to employ imagination upon experience. The mere 
 dreamer, wandering in the gardens of enchantment, 
 * among the leaves and flowers ' of Keats's poem of 1817, 
 fell short of the powers of his kind. For ' the Poet and 
 the dreamer are distinct, diverse, sheer opposite '. 
 The dreamer abides in his fancies — in his ' elysium ', 
 
142 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 we may add, of the earlier poem — and ' vexes ' the world 
 
 by ineffective and will-o'-the-wisp reports. The Poet 
 
 ' pours out a balm upon the World ', returning to it, like 
 
 a seer inspired, to reconstruct its phenomena by the 
 
 pattern of the permanent design. The argument is 
 
 somewhat obscure, and it has to be built up out of 
 
 manuscript fragments of the incomplete poem ^ ; but, 
 
 plainly, it reveals the dying poet's deeper insight into 
 
 his vision of five years before. 
 
 Then the events of this wide world I'd seize, 
 Like a strong giant, and my spirit tease 
 Till at its shoulders it should proudly see 
 Wings to find out an immortality. 
 
 Sleep and Poetry, 81-84. 
 
 The ' ten years ' he had asked for were refused. Already 
 in the fifth he was aware that ' the car is fled Into the 
 light of heaven '. Faithfully to his promise, he had 
 striven to ' keep alive The thought of that same chariot, 
 and the strange Journey it went ' ; and now, though the 
 strength of the ' giant ' was brought low by bodily 
 suffering and mental anguish, 
 
 There grew 
 A power within me of enormous ken ^ 
 
 To see as a god sees, and take the depth •■ 
 
 Of things as nimbly as the outward eye 
 Can size and shape pervade. 
 
 The Fall of Hyperion, [i.j 279-82. 
 
 This, too, was Hyperion's ambition in the relinquished 
 poem : 
 
 * The material is supplied in Mr. E. de S^lincourt's valuable 
 annotation to The Fall of Hyperion, in his The Poems of John Keats, 
 Methuen,U905 (pp. 515-19). 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 143 
 
 For to bear all naked truths, 
 And to envisage circumstance, all calm. 
 That is the top of sovereignty. 
 
 Hyperiouy ii. 202-5. 
 
 It is from this passion of faith that Keats's mortal fate 
 appeals. 
 
 Far more consciously than Shelley, though with less 
 help from his training and associates, Keats aimed, if 
 words so harsh may be applied to thought so melodious, 
 at a transcendental synthesis of experience. He sought 
 always, untaught as he was, without sympathy, and 
 weak with pain, the reality behind the seeming. Men 
 looked out on life, he would have said, at the worst, 
 through veils of convention, at the best, through windows 
 limiting the view. For him, the beauty of the universe 
 lay behind the window and the veil, and his poems are 
 interpenetrated with the gleams of it, revealed. His 
 song, like that of his own nightingale, was to charm 
 
 Magic casements, opening on the foam, 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn, 
 
 and to regain the lost paradise of true being. He 
 sought expression where he found it. From Greece, 
 from the Middle Ages, from the seventeenth-century, 
 he drew the power of self-expression, the right of a free 
 man to be free, and, through enjoyment of the beauties 
 of creation, to pierce to the Creator's design. He did 
 not live long enough — despite all the wonder that he 
 wrought — to strike his own note thoroughly, and to 
 throw ofE his allegiance to the Greeks, to Spenser, 
 Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Milton. His soul was so 
 
144 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 much attuned to beauty that works of beauty over- 
 whelmed him. But more completely than Shelley, and 
 far more completely than Byron, he was detached from 
 party and from polemics. If these cared for truth and 
 beauty first, Keats cared for them absolutely, and, 
 caring so much, he achieved, in some of his shorter 
 poems, a mature and an original note. His odes On a 
 Grecian Urn, To a Nightingale and To Autumn, among 
 others, and several of his sonnets, are great without 
 deduction or detraction. In his poems on medieval 
 themes, such as Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, 
 and, most notably, La Belle Dame sans Merci, he 
 captured the very spirit of romance, and surpassed 
 Coleridge in his own line. The longer poems, 
 Endymion, Lamia, Hyperion, have more elusive 
 qualities of beauty. They are filled with poetic imagina- 
 tion, overflowing in places and uncontrolled, and, alike 
 in metre and in language, they poured their influence 
 on later poets, and on Tennyson above all. In this 
 sense, Keats, hke his loved Spenser, may be entitled 
 a poets' poet. But he became the people's poet, 
 too, by virtue of his shorter poems and of their many 
 deathless phrases. To Keats, finally, we may apply 
 the conclusion of a sonnet of his own — 
 
 And calmest thoughts come round us — as of leaves 
 Budding — fruit ripening in stillness — autunm suns 
 
 Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves — 
 
 Sweet Sappho's cheek — a sleeping infant's breath — 
 The gradual sand that through an hourglass runs — 
 
 A woodland rivulet — a Poet's death. 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 145 
 
 IV. 
 
 Of (James Henry) Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), Bryan other 
 Procter (1787-1874), who wrote under the name of 
 'Barry Cornwall', Sir Aubrey de Vere (1788-1846), 
 Henry Kirke White (1785-1806), James Montgomery 
 (1771-1854), William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), Joanna 
 BailHe (1762-1851), Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849), 
 Felicia Hemans (1793-1835), and other stars, great and 
 small, which shone in the firmament of letters between, 
 say, Wordsworth and Tennyson, it is not necessary to 
 say much. They filled their parts and had their day, 
 and criticism is not unfriendly if it recall some of these 
 names in another connection than of poetry. Hunt, 
 for example, is remembered as the chief of the ' Cockney 
 School ' — the cock of the Cockneys, so to speak — , the 
 name given by Lockhart, in Blackwood's Magazine, to 
 the London supporters of the ' Lakists ', on account of 
 their town tastes and alleged vulgarity. It is all very 
 dead to-day, though Hunt, it must be acknowledged, 
 had frequent lapses from good form. At the same time, 
 it was in even worse form to build criticism on an 
 imputation of low birth, and Haydon, ' the Cockney 
 Raphael ', Hazlitt, ' the Cockney Aristotle ', Keats, 
 Lamb, Barry Cornwall, and the rest, have long since 
 forgotten this dispraise. Bowles, a writer of ' sonnets 
 on picturesque spots ', a year or two before Lyrical 
 Ballads, may now forgive the debt which Coleridge is 
 stated to have owed him ; his more memorable claim 
 10 
 
146 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 is an edition of Pope, whence arose, about 1807, the 
 dispute as to Pope as a poet. The reaction was favour- 
 able to a controversy, the embers of which are still 
 aglow. Hartley Coleridge was the son of a poet, and 
 de Vere became a poet's father. Felicia Hemans 
 (1793-1835), with whom, perhaps, we may join Reginald 
 Heber (1783-1826), the hymn- writer, and Letitia Landon, 
 represent what the Germans call an ' iiberwundener 
 Standpunkt ', or a somewhat antiquated point of view — 
 the point of view of sublimated tenderness. Joanna 
 Baillie, who wrote plays, and Henry Gary, the trans- 
 lator, must not be permitted to detain us. To George 
 Darley (1795-1846) and Thomas Lovell Beddoes 
 (1803-49) reference will be made later on, for they seem 
 to belong more definitely to the next poetic cycle. 
 Thomas The last word here is due to Thomas Moore (1779- 
 oore. 2352)^ friend and biographer of Byron, and an excellent 
 writer in the second class. He was an Irishman by 
 birth, and the author of Irish Melodies which are, if 
 anything, too melodious — too mellifluous, or sweet- 
 flowing, that is to say, for the taste of a country and of 
 a generation which is, perhaps, more thoughtful than 
 musical. By his long poem Lalla Rookh, published in 
 1817, he rose to considerable popularity on the crest of 
 Byron's wave, and he was brilUant, too, in political 
 satire — the least enduring form of verse. The Twopenny 
 Post Bag and The Fudge Family are his best-known 
 pieces in this kind. But his poetry, though lower than 
 the highest, has fine qualities of its own. Many of his 
 songs are as touching — as permanently touching — as 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 147 
 
 they are familiar. ' 0, breathe not his name ; let it 
 sleep in the shade ' — ' The harp that once through 
 Tara's halls ' — ' She is far from the land where her 
 young hero sleeps ' — ' 'Tis the last rose of summer 
 left blooming alone ' — ' I saw from the beach, when 
 the morning was shining ' — ' Dear Harp of my Country ! 
 in darkness I found thee ' — these and others our grand- 
 fathers sang, and our grandchildren are likely to sing 
 them. 
 
 V. 
 
 This long section must come to a close, and with it, Conclu- 
 perhaps, a partial conclusion of the present book may ^^°^* 
 be essayed. It can, at the best, be only partial, since 
 but a part of the century has been completed. 
 
 It is the first part in time and in importance. An 
 immense force had been at work in social dynamics. 
 The power of the French Revolution extended in several 
 directions beyond its poHtical scope. It was at once 
 the cause and the effect — or, rather, the accompanying 
 sign — of deep and far-reaching changes in many depart- 
 ments of life. It would take us too far from our special 
 department of English letters to pursue these in detail. 
 The foregoing sections have referred to them, as 
 they seemed chiefly to occur. There was a general 
 opening-out and breaking-down — in certain instances, a 
 ' breaking-out ' as well. The neglected countryside was 
 revisited. The timid notes of Collins and Gray, the 
 tender diffidence of Cowper, and Goldsmith's * country 
 
148 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 excursions ' were for ever swept away on the almost 
 interminable stream of Wordsworth's musings in his 
 Excursion. Burns's songs of the soil, Scott's ballads 
 and romances, John Wilson and ' the Ettrick Shepherd ', 
 and the rest of the company of ' Maga ', destroyed the 
 illusion of the North fostered in the dictatorship of Dr. 
 Johnson. Actually, they did more than this. They 
 proved a positive, as well as negatives. They estab- 
 lished principles in poetry and precedents in fiction 
 which succeeding periods were to apply. Scott, Jane 
 Austen, and Maria Edgeworth founded the use of the 
 novel ; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats laid down the lines 
 for future poets. 
 
 A third great invention of the era was the periodical 
 press. The Times, The Morning Post, and other news- 
 papers ; The Edinburgh, The Quarterly, and other 
 reviews, all had their beginning at this time. Writers 
 like Lamb, Hunt and De Quincey were attached to 
 special papers, and were associated with special schools 
 of taste. Drama languished in obscurity ; James 
 Sheridan Knowles (1784-1862) was the only playwright 
 of any note, and his work is mainly subsequent to the 
 date which we have taken as closing the first period. 
 But with this sole exception, men of letters were more 
 active and literature reached a higher level than at 
 any time since the Elizabethan. And on every side 
 it aimed at liberation. The metres of poets were 
 emancipated by Byron's daring experiments, by 
 Shelley's musical numbers, and by the liquid prosody 
 of Keats, to name but three writers out of many. The 
 
IMAGINATIVE POETRY 149 
 
 matter of poetry and prose was enlarged to include all 
 subjects and all kinds and conditions of men. 
 
 A reference to older standards is helpful at this point. 
 George Puttenham, author of an Art of Poetry published 
 in 1589, set on record the notable judgments that 
 ' the actions of mean and base personages tend in very- 
 few cases to any great good example ' ; that ' there- 
 fore was nothing committed to history but matters 
 of great and excellent persons and things ', and that 
 the geographical area of literary England was bounded 
 by ' London and the shires lying about London, within 
 sixty miles, and not much above '. The Revolution 
 of 1789 — exactly two hundred years later — and the 
 natural development of social and moral ideals, brought 
 about a revision of these statements. The sixty-mile 
 radius was extended beyond the power of computation. 
 ' Great and excellent persons ' were giving way to 
 the * mean and base ', in whose lives romance and 
 imagination discovered ' good example ' enough. This, 
 generally, is the effect which a review of the period 
 impresses. 
 
 The work of the pioneers of the nineteenth century 
 was complete before 1832. Lamb, Coleridge, Words- 
 worth, De Quincey, Landor, Moore, Southey, Campbell, 
 Rogers, and many others survived Scott's death, but 
 literature counts little wanting to the splendid heritage 
 at that date save the mature gifts of Byron, Shelley 
 and Keats. A kind of pause now ensued, a less 
 ardent and eager phase, in which the writers of the 
 transition were more ready to enjoy than to invent. 
 
150 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 The bulk of their possessions was overwhelming, and, 
 with certain exceptions and harkings-back, and under 
 a duller sky of politics, men of letters seemed to wait 
 awhile in order to test and prove their new resources. 
 Conclusions were examined and applied ; forms were 
 moulded more closely to material ; narrower paths of 
 adventure were followed up beneath the light of single 
 stars ; and a second harvest was growing ripe mean- 
 time. So our summary leads to a fresh beginning. 
 
BOOK II 
 
 THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 
 
 W 
 
 reach a time of great difficulty, though of even Some 
 greater interest. The clues are confusing and threads. 
 the threads hard to unravel. It is a time of young 
 men's opportunities, tempered by indecisive fears, 
 and of old men's surrender of a stage where the scene 
 has been changed. It is a time when dead men are 
 missed for the great things they might have done, and 
 when men in the prime of hfe are cut off before their 
 fulfilment. Above all, it is a time of shifting standards. 
 Rousseau's aim at moral simpUfication had ruled, by 
 interaction and analogy,, the literature of the last 
 generation. It had appealed to conduct through 
 sentiment. The spiritual universe had been enlarged ; 
 nature, idealized by imagination, had been explored 
 for the consolation of mankind. Poets, noveUsts, 
 historians, and philosophers in motley had trooped 
 through the ivory gate. Passion apphed to contem- 
 plation had raised consciousness to insight. 
 The desire to 6e, led to a knowledge of being. This 
 
 »5i 
 
 FCR^i^■^r> 
 
152 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 is the important point. There was a kind of irony 
 in the manner in which the courage of the age was 
 turned against itself. The fearless attack on traditions, 
 on principles which had ranked as sacred and on con- 
 ventions which it had been folly to oppose — the invasion 
 of reason by emotion — let loose larger forces than 
 it could control. The spirit of investigation was 
 released ; the positive spirit and the scientific method. 
 If the ideal was to be grasped for use, it must be founded 
 on a basis of the real. The poets, as creators, must 
 defer to the craftsmen of applied arts. The centre 
 of activity was moved from the trustees of pure litera- 
 ture to politicians, legislators, and men of science. 
 Knowledge became the main quest of a time intent on 
 social reform. Knowledge, with whatever reservations 
 on the part of the heirs of Keats, was for the next few 
 years the predominant concern of all classes, and writers 
 otherwise as diverse as Tennyson (in his first period), 
 Carlyle, Macaulay, Sir Charles Lyell, Beddoes, Edward 
 Bulwer (Lord Lytton), and a host of lesser men, became 
 disciples of the new creed. 
 
 We shall come to the evidence later on. Here, 
 assuming confirmation, a few conclusions may be 
 essayed. In such a period as we are describing there 
 will be both reaction and advance. Reaction, lacking 
 the stimulus of contact with life, will be marked, in 
 the literary sphere, by an exaggeration of formal 
 features. Literature, thrown back on its own re- 
 sources, will appeal, less to the sympathy between a 
 writer and his readers, than to powers of emphasis 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 153 
 
 and insistence, to a bizarreness of manner, or a volup- 
 tuousness of beauty, or a strangeness of material. It 
 will be driven to arrest attention, since it ceases to 
 command it. On tbe other hand, advance will be 
 marked by a certain hardening of the intellect, a metallic 
 quality of the mind. The pioneers of knowledge, 
 like the bridegroom, will go forth rejoicing in their 
 might. They will be less disposed than at a time 
 when imagination is held in honour to make allowance 
 for the fallibility of dogma. And, between the two, 
 there will be found at least two classes of neutral 
 writers. There will be those who strive at a compro- 
 mise, and those who reject both courses. The one class 
 will be known by its inconclusiveness, and the other by 
 its seclusion ; and these, too, are represented in this age. 
 
 It is essential to the understanding, not merely of the 
 present period but of the next, to seize the value of 
 these distinctions. They explain the decay of poetry 
 in the years after Byron's death ; the rapid rise of the 
 novel as the vessel through which the positive vision 
 of the new thinkers was poured ; the theological unrest 
 which produced the High Church and the Broad Church 
 movements ; the corresponding movements in literature, 
 typified, at their extremes by, say, Rossetti and Charles 
 Kingsley ; and the varying willingness and reluctance 
 among writers of the next sixty years to include in 
 their survey the results of scientific observation. 
 
 There was one man, and one man only, who, while 
 the age was yet young, rose to the height of its inspira- 
 tion. Others, had they lived, might have scaled it. 
 
154 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Bjrron, especially, occurs to the memory. But, dealing 
 with things as they are, and reserving this sole ex- 
 ception — the Scotsman, Thomas Carlyle — for separate 
 treatment later on, an attempt may now be made 
 to arrange the contents of the present section in some 
 kind of tabulated order (see p. 155). It is well to see 
 names and facts in close juxtaposition before trying 
 to distinguish the strands. They may be grouped 
 as symbols of progress and decay (or suspense). The 
 progress in literature is single, and corresponds to a 
 definite progress in social life and other arts. The sus- 
 pense, to be accurate, is in three sorts : (i) the decadence 
 of writers who veered between reaction and advance — 
 twilight writers, so to say ; (ii) the suspense of writers 
 who retired to undisturbed pastures, and (iii) the decay 
 of the dead — the more deeply deplored, as criticism 
 grows more familiar with the writers who filled their 
 places. 
 
 u. 
 
 Omitting for the present Carlyle, and noting the 
 signs of the times in Ly ell's Elements of Geology, which 
 broke down the tradition of Genesis^ in Turner's release 
 of nature from the conventions of art-schools, and in 
 such obvious instances as the Reform Act of 1832, which 
 enlarged the power of the middle-classes, and in the 
 industry of pubHshers catering for popular taste — 
 Charles Knight (1791-1873) and William (1800-1883) 
 and Robert (1802-1871) Chambers — , we may seek 
 
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156 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Macaulay, in the early writings of Thomas Babington Macaulay 
 and Lays, for a picture of the age. Macaulay, son of an abolitionist 
 when the British slave-trade was flourishing, was at 
 this time a barrister at Gray's Inn, and eked out his 
 income from the law by contributions to the Edinburgh 
 Review. He entered the House of Commons in 1830, 
 and quickly made his mark on the Liberal side, especially 
 in connection with Indian politics. He was the author 
 of the existing Copyright Act, and served the Govern- 
 ment as Secretary of War. In 1857 he was raised 
 tq the peerage, and two years later, when he died, 
 he was buried in the Abbey. It was a consistent and 
 brilliant career, and, turning to the first of his essays 
 in the Edinburgh Review — the John Milton of 1825 — we 
 are at once aware of the practical positive spirit which 
 was to be the rule for twenty years : 
 
 We think that, as civilization advances, poetry 
 almost necessarily declines. 
 
 Here was an unequivocal challenge to an age of 
 poetical decline. The experimental sciences were being 
 investigated, and Macaulay, speaking for his time, ofiered 
 no kind of encouragement to those who resisted the 
 stream. 
 
 The vocabulary of an enlightened society is philo- 
 sophical, that of a half -civilized people is poetical. . . . 
 In proportion as men know more and think more, 
 they look less at individuals and more at classes. They 
 therefore make better theories and worse poems. . . . 
 Analysis is not the business of the poet. His office is 
 to pourtray, not to dissect. 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 157 
 
 One great poet had registered this observation 1, 
 and another was shortly to repeat it 2, but — face 
 Macaulay — they did not reach the same conclusion as 
 to the illusory character of the imagination : 
 
 His creed on such subjects will no more influence 
 his poetry, properly so called, than the notions which a 
 painter may have conceived respecting the lachrymal 
 glands, or the circulation of the blood, will afEect the 
 tears of his Niobe, or the blushes of his Aurora. 
 
 But, allowing for the lawyer in Macaulay — his 
 dialectic skill in stating a case — and his natural gift 
 of epigram, we remember that scientific accuracy was 
 to enhance the value of Tennyson's poetry, as it was 
 already enhancing the value of Turner's painting. 
 
 In an enhghtened age there will be much intelligence, 
 much science, much philosophy, abimdance of just 
 classification and subtle analysis, abundance of wit 
 and eloquence, abundance of verses, and even of good 
 ones — but little poetry. Men will judge and compare, 
 but they will not create. 
 
 The proposition is couched in general terms, but we 
 recognize it at once as an ideal picture of 1825. 
 
 Let us turn to another of these pictures, in the Robert 
 Souihey of 1830 : 
 
 If we were to prophesy that in the year 1930 a popula- 
 tion of fifty millions, better fed, clad, and lodged than 
 the English of our time, will cover these islands, that 
 
 * Wordsworth : ' The world is too much with us ' {Sonnet), and 
 A Poet's Epitaph, and elsewhere. 
 
 * Tennyson : ' The individual withers, and the world is more 
 and more ' {Locksley Hall), and In Memoriam. 
 
158 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Sussex and Huntingdonshire will be wealthier than 
 the wealthiest parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire 
 are now, that cultivation, rich as that of a flower- 
 garden, will be carried to the very tops of Ben Nevis 
 and Helvellyn, that machines, constructed on principles 
 yet undiscovered, will be in every house, that there 
 will be no highways but railroads, no travelling but by 
 steam, that our debt, vast as it seems to us, will appear 
 to our great-grandchildren a trifling encumbrance, 
 which might easily be paid off in a year or two, many 
 people would think us insane. 
 
 The insanity was rather of understatement. We 
 are near enough to 1930 to know that Macaulay was 
 well within the mark in his prophetical hypothesis. 
 But note the materialism of the objects on which his 
 mind is set. Steam-power and wealth, population 
 and finance. There is no place for the imagination in 
 his millennium. Moreover, his main argument was 
 wrong. He derided ' Mr. Southey's idol, the omniscient 
 and omnipotent State ', and held that ' our rulers 
 will best promote the improvement of the people by 
 strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate 
 duties '. The ageing poet was a truer prophet than 
 the brilliant young advocate. For individualism was 
 to 37ield to collectivism. 
 
 To Macaulay as an historian we shall come in a later 
 section ; his History of England belongs to 1848-55. 
 Here we are concerned with his ' mentality ' — to use 
 an ugly but convenient term — with his ' criticism of 
 life ' in the age in which he lived ; and we see clearly 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 159 
 
 how he rendered it under the aspect of practical use. 
 The appeal to nature, he seemed to say, was all very 
 well in its time. Romance and imagination availed 
 to restore the neglected to honour, and the forgotten 
 to memory. We honour the poor and oppressed ; we 
 remember our kinship with the dust. Now we turn 
 from principles to measures, from speculation to 
 analysis and comparison. His father's example was 
 before him — Zachary Macaulay, the champion of 
 slaves — , and he, too, became a champion of liberties, 
 as distinct from the poets' Liberty. He supported 
 the disabilities of the Jews. He advocated reasonable 
 concessions to the incoming demos : 
 
 Time is bringing round another crisis analogous to 
 that which occurred in the seventeenth century. We 
 stand in a situation to that in which our ancestors 
 stood under the reign of James i. It will soon again 
 be necessary to reform that we may preserve, to save 
 the fundamental principles of the Constitution by 
 alterations in the subordinate parts. 
 
 This extract from his essay (1828) on Hallam's Con- 
 stitutional History is interesting in two respects. It 
 suggests the cause of his starting his own history of 
 England at the reign of James 11, and it illustrates 
 well the safe, moderate, unimaginative. Whig-bred 
 sensibiUties of the writer, who found in the bastard 
 ballads entitled Lays of Ancient Rome fitting occupation 
 for a practical man's leisure. An age too enhghtened 
 to create poetry might be amused, and even instructed, 
 by ingenious mnemonic exercises. 
 
i6o NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 iii. 
 
 Lord A similar view of the function to which literature 
 
 ^ °°* was called, and a not dissimilar career, are the marks 
 of Edward Bulwer. He started to write about the 
 same time as Macaulay, but chose the Quarterly tradi- 
 tion instead of the Edinburgh. His gifts were more 
 multifarious, and, making literature his staff, he wrote 
 for all kinds of periodicals. He entered Parliament 
 in 1831, and, like Macaulay, advocated authors' copy- 
 right. He became Colonial Secretary on the Con- 
 servative side, and was created a peer in 1866, as Lord 
 Lytton of Kneb worth. His son, who was Viceroy of 
 India and British Ambassador in Paris, was raised 
 from a baron to an earl. Incidentally, too, under his 
 pen-name of ' Owen Meredith ', the second Lord Lytton 
 ran counter to the literary opinions of the first. Owen 
 Meredith, in the intervals of diplomacy, published 
 several volumes of poems. The Wanderer (1857), Lucile 
 (1860), Orval (1869), and King Poppy (1892). To these 
 meritorious recreations of a brilliant and strenuous 
 public life reference is due later on. Here it is in- 
 teresting to note that Edward Bulwer, in Paul Clifford, 
 the fourth of a series of social novels, proclaimed 
 the death of poetry (and, by imphcation, its intestacy) 
 as a remunerative branch of literature. In a later 
 preface (1848) to the same book, he referred this decease 
 to causes inherent in the age : 
 
 The novel is a loud cry to society. ... It is an 
 appeal from Humanity to Law. And, thus, if it could 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 161 
 
 not pretend to influence or guide the temper of the 
 times, it was at least a foresign of the coming change. . . . 
 The true movement of the last fifteen years has been 
 the progress of one idea — Social Reform. . . . With the 
 completion of this work closed an era in the writer's 
 self -education. From Pelham to Paul Cliff ordy the 
 Author rather observes than imagines ; rather deals 
 with the ordinary surface of human life than attempts, 
 however humbly, to soar above it, or to dive beneath. 
 
 But out of an age which * rather observes than 
 imagines ', and which appeals * from Humanity to 
 Law ' — from humane studies to the legislature — , 
 great literature is not made. 
 
 The same point of view was expressed in the prefaces 
 to other of Lytton's novels. Thus, in A Strange Story 
 (1861), in which, with sensational success, Bulwer 
 returned in part to the older convention of terror, he 
 remarked that, ' in the brains of our time, the faculty 
 of Causation is very markedly developed ' — it was so 
 new that he underHned it — , and he * presumed to 
 borrow from Science some elements of interest for 
 Romance '. The borrowing has been considerable 
 since, and no apology is made. It has gone far to 
 leaven the mass, and the positive method that rules 
 it has produced, in unskilful hands, the ugliness of 
 dissection and analysis, unrelieved by imagination, 
 and ignorant of the canons of beauty, which so many 
 modern novels display. To this, too, we shall come 
 back later on. Lytton's dues of leadership require 
 that his early perception of the tendency, and his 
 II 
 
i62 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 frequent right use of it — observing its proper limit- 
 ations, and checking its abuse by art — should be recorded 
 in this place. 
 
 Another quotation may be given from the preface 
 (1845) to a new edition of Night and Morning. At 
 that date Dickens was in the field, and Lytton, intro- 
 ducing his Robert Beaufort, ' the systematic self-server ', 
 pays an appropriate compliment to the ideal prototype 
 of such characters, the Pecksniff of Dickens, ' the 
 popular and pre-eminent Observer of the age in which 
 we live '. But the eclipse of Lytton by Dickens as 
 an observer of his times is not immediately in question. 
 All the literature of this period reaches out to the 
 period to come. The point is that Lytton, in this 
 novel, sought to advance his art another step. He 
 always took it very seriously, and here he traces its 
 growth : 
 
 I impress not here, as in Paul Clifford, a material 
 moral to work its effect on the Journals, at the Hustings, 
 through Constituents, and on Legislation. I direct 
 myself to a channel less active, more tardy, but as 
 sure — to the Conscience that reigns, closer and superior 
 to all Law, in men's hearts and souls. 
 
 And again, 
 
 I am, not vainly, conscious that I have had my 
 influence on my time — that I have contributed, though 
 humbly and indirectly, to the benefits which Public 
 Opinion has extorted from Governments and Laws. 
 
 Lastly, from the preface to Eugene Aram, the 
 criminal (1704-59) whose tragic life-history had been 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 163 
 
 considered already by William Godwin as a subject 
 for a novel, Lytton, defending his choice, declares 
 that 
 
 The moral consisted in showing more than the mere 
 legal punishment at the close. It was to show how 
 the consciousness of the deed was to exclude whatever 
 humanity of character preceded and belied it from 
 all active exercise — all social confidence. 
 
 The last two words are all-important. This new 
 class of fiction with a purpose, new then, but very 
 old to-day, aimed directly at reflecting, through a 
 popular medium, the social aspirations of the age. 
 ' Aspirations ' is, perhaps, too exalted a term for the 
 severely practical forms in which the age clothed its 
 desires. Macaulay, as a statesman, did not aspire ; 
 there was nothing visionary in his judgment. But 
 as far as the policy of the times was directed to well- 
 defined ends for social benefit and welfare, Lytton, 
 in certain of his novels, pursued and displayed the 
 like purpose. His splendid versatility turned from 
 one method to another, according to the shifting direc- 
 tion of the breeze of public taste. Novels of social 
 reform, novels of criminal warning, novels of historical 
 example, and novels of domestic manners — Pelham, 
 Eugene Aram, The Last Days of Pompeii, and The 
 Caxtons — flowed in full measure from his pen. He 
 may have proved too versatile, too easily successful, 
 to win the high place which he sought. Such rapid 
 minting of characters is apt to produce faint im- 
 pressions ; and the man who combined the parts of 
 
i64 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 politician, statesman, novelist, playwright, miscellanist, 
 and, in private life, of defendant against lawsuits 
 and attacks unremittingly urged by his wife, may be 
 forgiven if his depth is fathomable. His style, too, is 
 somewhat otiose for the taste of the present generation, 
 and Thackeray's parody, George de Barnwell, though 
 unkind, was not too severe. But, all deduction not- 
 withstanding, Edward Bulwer, more than any other, 
 filled the place left vacant by Byron as the critic of 
 the life of his times. 
 
 Finally, there was Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81), 
 afterwards Prime Minister and Earl of Beaconsfield, 
 a far greater statesman than either Lytton or Macaulay, 
 but inferior to both in authorship. His chief novels — 
 Vivian Grey, The Young Duke, Alroy, Venetia, Henrietta 
 Temple — were published within these fifteen years, 
 1825-40. Others, more political in subject, followed 
 during the next decade, the well-known Coning shy 
 among them ; Lothair appeared in 1870, and Endymion 
 as late as 1881, in the year of Beaconsfield's death. 
 They are not in any sense great literature ; but, even 
 without allowing for the interest they bear on account 
 of Disraeli's place in politics — an adventitious, though 
 not unjust, advantage — they command considerably 
 more than mere attention and respect. Disraeli's 
 characters have a nimbus, which, if it is not natural 
 air, is often a far better substitute, and creates a more 
 likely illusion, than Lytton could devise. They move 
 with too heavy a panoply, but they move of their 
 own accord, and their cleverness is beyond dispute. 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 183^ 165 
 
 IV. 
 
 A philosophy of the new life, a one man's view of 
 its many aspects, was the motive of Sartor Resartus, 
 written about 1830, and issued through Fraser's 
 Magazine in 1833, the first considerable work of 
 Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). 
 
 Like several of the giants of these times — Words- Carlyle' 
 worth and Landor among the elders — , Carlyle 
 lived to a great age. He spent his boyhood in the 
 shadow of the French Revolution, a history of which 
 was his masterpiece, and he survived the death of 
 the third Napoleon and of the Prince Imperial of 
 France. Born at Ecclefechan, in Dumfriesshire, the 
 son of a North country stonemason, he was intended 
 for the national Church, which satisfies the intel- 
 lectual ambition of so many humble Scottish youth. 
 His parents' thrift secured his education, and his 
 abilities rewarded their self-denial. At the grammar- 
 school at Annan, and afterwards at Edinburgh Uni- 
 versity, he laid the foundation of the hard reading 
 which he practised till the last. Possibly, the scholar's 
 temperament soared too high from the cottar's soil; 
 possibly, the hardships of upbringing, ' safe and quiet ' 
 though it was, fell too severely on a studious lad ; but 
 certainly, before he was twenty-five, he was already a 
 victim to dyspepsia, from which he suffered all his life. - 
 A moral, or spiritual, dyspepsia seized upon him at the 
 same time, and the one may have aggravated the other. 
 
i66 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURlS 
 
 Abandoning the plan of the ministry, he settled in 
 Edinburgh (1818), after an interval of schoolmaster- 
 ing. There he read law and learnt German — the more 
 important study of the two. Directly, he wrote a 
 paper on Faust for the New Edinburgh Review (1822), 
 translated Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1824), and con- 
 tributed a Life of Schiller (1825) to the London Magazine ; 
 indirectly, he absorbed the Teuton spirit as conveyed 
 by the idealism of Fichte, the forerunner of recent 
 German Socialism, by the problem of Faust itself, 
 and, above all, by the medley of enchantment — the 
 riotous and romantic individualism — of Jean Paul 
 Friedrich Richter (1763-1825), commonly known as 
 Jean Paul. To Richter he owed very much of his early 
 over-mannered style, as well as of his powers of expres- 
 sion, with its extraordinary range through the humorous, 
 the magical-tender, and the grotesque. These studies 
 fell on good soil, for Coleridge, De Quincey, and others 
 had fostered a taste for German letters ; and Carlyle's 
 literary career was, accordingly, well begun. In 
 1826 he married Jane Baillie Welsh (1801-66), and 
 settled, in 1828, with his wife at her farmhouse at 
 Craigenputtock. He became an Edinburgh reviewer, 
 and the second great lowly Scottish writer contri- 
 buted to that Review an illuminating paper on Burns, 
 the great Scottish peasant-poet, who had died in the 
 year after Carlyle's birth. Then came Sartor Resartus^ 
 and the removal of the Carlyles to Cheyne Row, Chelsea ; 
 the French Revolution (1837) ; Heroes and Hero- Worship 
 (1841) ; Past and Present (1843) ; the Life of Sterling 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 167 
 
 and Frederick the Great — and the death of Mrs. Carlyle. 
 Into the loss and gain of that marriage we do not 
 propose to enter ; its sudden termination was an 
 abiding grief, in which a Lord Rectorship and other 
 honours, in the grey, great prophet's old age, were too 
 late to reward his early struggles. 
 
 A part of the younger story, not only of Carlyle, but Sartor 
 of his generation, is enshrined in Sartor Resartus. 
 This wonderful book, implicated fold by fold in 
 the maze of its pretended German authorship, and 
 revealing the heart of Carlyle through the mock sur- 
 roundings and literary remains — properly, ' the life 
 and opinions ' — of Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, Professor 
 of Things in General (AUerlei-Wissenschaft) in the 
 University of Utopia (Weissnichtwo), purports to be a 
 philosophy of clothes, in the sense, mainly, of Goethe's 
 aphorism that ' Nature is the living, visible Garment 
 of God '. The basis is broad enough to bear the weight 
 of many arguments, from the simple clothes-satire 
 of the early chapters — for instance. Book I, chapter ix, 
 * Often in my atrabiliar moods . . .' and ' lives the 
 man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw 
 addressed a naked House of Lords ? ' — through the 
 biography (part fiction, part truth) and ethics of 
 Book II, to the political and metaphysical specula- 
 tions out of which the Third Book is composed. 
 We are told, not unkindly, of his early Hfe, and 
 are admitted to glimpses of the struggle between 
 Carlyle's soul, capacious of religion, and his mind 
 rejecting its formulas : 
 
i68 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 The hungry young looked up to their spiritual 
 nurses; and, for food, were bidden eat the east-wind. . . . 
 In the silent night-watches, still darker in his heart 
 than over sky and earth, he (Teufelsdrockh) has cast 
 himself before the All-seeing, and, with audible 
 prayers, cried vehemently for Light, for dehverance 
 from Death and the Grave. Not till after long years, 
 and unspeakable agonies, did the believing heart 
 surrender ; sink into spell-bound sleep, under the 
 nightmare. Unbelief; and, in this hag-ridden dream, 
 mistake God's fair, living world for a pallid, vacant 
 Hades and extinct Pandemonium. But through such 
 Purgatory pain it is appointed us to pass ; first must 
 the dead Letter of Religion own itself dead, and drop 
 piecemeal into dust, if the living spirit of Religion, 
 freed from this its charnel-house, is to arise on us, 
 newborn of Heaven, and with new healing under its : 
 wings. 
 
 And then Carlyle himself resumes the commentator's 
 role, and tells of the ' earthly distresses ' added to 
 these * Purgatory pains ' — of the ' want of practical 
 guidance, want of sympathy, want of money, want of 
 hope ; and all this in the fervid season of youth, so 
 exaggerated in imagining, so boundless in desires '. 
 Something, Carlyle tells us, had been accomplished 
 when he left the University, for ' truly a Thinking Man 
 is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have ', 
 and the * thaumaturgy ' of thought is a part of 
 Carlyle's gospel. The wonder of Romance was added, 
 and the miracle of Sorrow. So we come to Carlyle's 
 central doctrine, and to his gospel of work : 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 169 
 
 Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first 
 sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly 
 of that impossible precept, Know thyself ; till it be 
 translated into this partially possible one, Know what 
 thou canst work at. 
 
 This perception leads to reconstruction : 
 
 The poor Earth, with her poor joys, was now my 
 needy Mother, not my cruel Stepdame ; Man, with his 
 so mad wants and his so mean endeavours, had become 
 the dearer to me. 
 
 Teufelsdrockh, says Carlyle, ' here first got his eye 
 on the knot that had been strangling him '. The 
 'authentic Church - Catechism ' of the nineteenth 
 century was still to be compiled, but, meanwhile, 
 Teufelsdrockh says : 
 
 For my own private behoof, I attempt to elucidate 
 the matter so. Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, 
 comes of his Greatness ; it is because there is an 
 Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot 
 quite bury under the Finite. Will the whole Finance 
 Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of 
 modem Europe undertake, in joint-stock company, 
 to make one shoeblack happy ? They cannot accom- 
 plish it, above an hour or two ; for the shoeblack 
 also has a soul quite other than his stomach. . . . 
 Always there is a black spot in our sunshine : it is 
 even, as I said, the shadow of Ourselves. 
 
 And the conclusion of the whole matter, — a Carlylean 
 epigram in black and white : * Close thy Byron ; open 
 thy Goethe ' ; equivalent, in the next paragraph, to 
 
170 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 the summary rescript : ' Love not Pleasure ; love God. 
 This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction 
 is solved ; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well 
 with him '. 
 
 It is not possible to pinch the philosophy of Sartor 
 Resartus into the pillule of a resume. Still to-day, 
 nearly eighty years after, Carlyle may enter his plea 
 for his fictitious, self-pourtraying hero : ' His ideas 
 may by and by prove significant. ... To look through 
 the Shows of things into Things themselves he is led and 
 compelled '. This account, abbreviated almost un- 
 recognizably, has omitted the whole of Book III, 
 with its wonderful chapters on ' Symbols ', ' Organic 
 Filaments ', ' Natural Supernaturalism ', and others. 
 Here we find the distrust of the ballot-box, the nucleus 
 of the lectures on hero-worship, the new religion of 
 literature, the littleness of human science, the ob- 
 struction of custom and names, the wonder of daily 
 life and common things, the ' dandiacal sect ' and 
 the ' poor-slaves ' — a scathing satire on fashionable 
 society — , the illusions of space and time, and the last 
 word of all : ' Well at ease are the Sleepers for whom 
 Existence is a Shallow Dream '. 
 
 Carlyle's Sartor Resartus set the lines which Carlyle followed 
 
 ^thi s t^liroughout the rest of his life-work. His Lectures 
 
 on Heroes y Hero-Worship^ and the Heroic in History 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 171 
 
 took certain phases of human action, and discussed 
 the philosophy of the kind in connection with definite 
 types: Odin and the myths of Scandinavia (a new 
 field for literature at that time) for ' the hero as 
 divinity ' ; Mahomet for ' the hero as prophet ' ; Dante 
 and Shakespeare for ' the hero as poet ' ; Luther and 
 Knox for ' the hero as priest '. The closing sentences 
 of this essay illustrate the Carlylean point of view : 
 
 All true Reformers are by the nature of them Priests, 
 and strive for a Theocracy. . . . Hildebrand wished 
 for a Theocracy ; Cromwell wished for it, fought for 
 it ; Mahomet attained it. . . . How far such Ideals 
 can ever be introduced into Practice, and at what 
 point our impatience with their non-introduction 
 ought to begin, is always a question. . . . There will 
 never be wanting Regent-Murrays enough to shrug 
 their shoulders, and say, A devout imagination. . . . 
 The Earth will not become too godlike ! 
 
 Johnson, Rousseau, and Burns were selected for 
 ' the hero as man of letters ', and the essay pelds 
 rich spoils of familiar quotations. Three of these 
 may be set down, since they contain what practically 
 amounts to a criticism of life within the period we 
 are discussing. The first is the sanction of education : 
 The true University of these days is a Collection of 
 Books '. The second is the christening of the Press : 
 ' Burke said there were three Estates in Parliament ; 
 but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a 
 Fourth Estate more important far than they all '. 
 The third is the people's charter: 'Invent Writing, 
 
172 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Democracy is inevitable '. Finally, Cromwell and 
 Napoleon were his types of 'the hero as king'. 
 
 The reader of these six lectures, rich with what 
 Carlyle here again calls the ' thaumaturgic virtue ' 
 of thought, and full of the spirit of noble conduct 
 measuring the acts of men, will well-nigh share the 
 impulsion which presently drove Carlyle to more 
 extensive studies of two moments. In the last of the 
 six essays he had written : 
 
 We are all born enemies of Disorder ; it is tragical 
 for us all to be concerned in image-breaking and down- 
 puUing ; for the Great Man, more a man than we, 
 it is doubly tragical. Thus too all human things, 
 maddest French Sansculottism, do and must work 
 towards Order. . . . While man is man, some Cromwell 
 or Napoleon is the necessary finish of a Sansculottism. 
 . . . The old ages are brought back to us ; the manner 
 in which Kings were made, and Kingship itself first 
 took rise, is again exhibited in the history of these 
 Two. 
 
 To the drama of the first of these moments Carlyle 
 devoted his next few years — literally, devoted, in one 
 sense, for a part of the manuscript was burnt and had 
 to be rewritten — , and produced (1837) his History of 
 the French Revolution. Of the second, in 1845, there is 
 his monument in the Letters and Speeches of Oliver 
 Cromwell. He went down a third time into Valhalla, 
 spending fourteen years, as Mrs. Carlyle said, * in the 
 valley of the shadow of Frederick ', and wrote his 
 History of Frederick the Great — it may be noted that 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 173 
 
 Teufelsdrockh's father, in Sartor Resartus, 'had been 
 grenadier Sergeant, and even regimental Schoolmaster ' 
 under that same ' Fritz the Only ' (Bk. II, ch. i, init.) — ; 
 and round these great historical pieces there are grouped 
 his minor writings, part moral, part historical, part 
 political, Chartism, Past and Present, Latter - Day 
 Pamphlets, Life of John Sterling (1806-44), and various 
 miscellanies, as well as his Reminiscences, published in 
 1881. His life was written by J. A. Froude (1818-94), 
 himself a notable historian, to whom we shall recur in a 
 later section ; and the frankness which marked Froude's 
 treatment of the material confided to him was, perhaps, 
 in advance of the rights of posterity, and deflected 
 men's interest for many years from Carlyle, the sage, 
 to Carlyle, the husband. He remains, indisputably, 
 the sage, great in his strength and its limitations, 
 rugged, true, and deeply tender, scornful of indolence 
 and cant, an historian as painstaking as he is brilliant, 
 and a pure fountain of moral refreshment. 
 
 VI. 
 
 It is common to speak of Carlyle's style as something Carlyle's 
 fantastic and apart, and what is called unintelligible. ^ ^ ^* 
 * Over-mannered ' it may fairly be termed ; we em- 
 ployed this epithet above, in referring the quality 
 to Teutonic influence or example. But, even so, 
 deductions must be made, for no small share of the 
 mannerism is contributed by printers' devices. The 
 
174 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 capital letters account for something, and the italic 
 types for something more, and much of the rest is made 
 up out of rhetorical figures, which, when we meet 
 them in Greek poets, we greet as ornaments of style : 
 aposiopesis, for example, or the abrupt succession of 
 one thought on the heels of another ; apostrophe, 
 and its marks of interjection, so frequent in Carlyle's 
 pages ; epanalepsis, or the author's repair to a word 
 or sentence dropt above ; soraismus, a hospitable 
 device, which covers Carlyle's German terms and 
 Germanizings, — and others enough. The presence of 
 these figures is unfamiliar, or, at least, disguised, in 
 the prose of most English writers. Carlyle, obscure 
 by birth, studious by temperament, and a recluse by 
 habit, gave them a ready welcome, and tended, doubt- 
 less, in course of years, to cultivate them for their 
 own sake. But they do not make him ' unintelligible ', 
 save only to the unintelligent. He ' wants ' reading, 
 in the current phrase ; he wrote for the mind rather 
 than for the eye ; but once the surprise is overcome 
 of finding in English prose a poet-theologian of un- 
 compromising honesty, grand simplicity, and unaffected 
 tenderness, to whom truth and its anomalies presented 
 themselves dramatically, who, like the prophets of 
 old, sought strange images to expel his readers' torpor, 
 and who laboured in a ' pregnant obscurity ' i, such 
 as lay upon the universe before the light, we shall 
 find Carlyle sweet and pure enough, and shall say of 
 him as Robert Browning said of ^Eschylus, of whom 
 
 * J. P. Mahafify, History of Greek Literature, ch. xv. 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 175 
 
 Carlyle puts us in mind, that his ' eagle-bark ' has 
 somehow spoilt our * taste for twitterings '. 
 
 vu. 
 
 We go back a moment to Byron. The peer and the Carlyle 
 peasant at first sight have very little in common ; Byron, 
 in all the accidents of fate and fortune they differed 
 thoroughly and obviously. But variations of soil 
 and sun raise different blossoms from like roots, and, 
 at bottom, Byron and Carlyle were joined by an ethical 
 purpose which their contrasting temperaments disguised. 
 Carlyle was a Byron moralized, and not bred to the 
 flesh-pots of Egypt ; or Bjrron was a sensuous Carlyle. 
 Sartor Resartus and the Heroes were Carlyle's Childe 
 Harold ; his dramas were the French Revolution. 
 Mutatis mutandis — and there are many — these two 
 contemporary writers, of unequal birth and fate, 
 and unequal length of years, display a true likeness 
 beneath their differences. They both hated shams 
 and pretence ; they both believed in the strong man, 
 and in the sovereignty of thought ; they both read 
 history in biography ; both inveighed against custom 
 and opinion ; they were both unconventional moralists, 
 and masters of the arts of rhetoric. 
 
 The class distinction which divided them was itself 
 a source of equal strength. Byron was so much above, 
 and Carlyle was so much below the comfortable plane 
 of compromise that each could afiord to neglect the 
 conventions of ' respectable ' thought. The moral and 
 
176 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 intellectual gain in both instances was immense, and 
 it is not wholly to be measured by the freshness 
 and the fearlessness which are obvious. Carlyle, the 
 stonemason's son, like Burns, his fellow-countryman, 
 pierced the hypocrisies and follies of politics and society 
 with native and shrewd independence. Byron, by 
 virtue of his rank and his fiery pride in it, indulged a 
 contempt for the shibboleths to which he would not 
 subscribe. The point of view was ultimately identical, 
 as was the object of their search. Compare the opening 
 of Lectures on Heroes (' The Hero as Divinity ') with 
 the close of Childe HarolcTs Pilgrimage (Canto iv, xciii 
 and onwards), and this essential Hkeness emerges 
 through all superficial difierences. The likeness is 
 deeper than the difierences, and, if due allowance 
 be made for the unequal fate of these contemporaries — 
 Bjnpon died in the reign of George iv ; Carlyle lived till 
 within six years of Queen Victoria's first jubilee — , it 
 will be seen to absorb the differences in the c^ear light 
 of a common purpose. For Byron, too, in a sense — 
 a very charitable sense, it may be, and haply to the 
 detriment of right action — was likewise preoccupied 
 with righteousness. Lord Morley, writing in 1870, 
 when Carlyle was still living, declared that Carlyle's 
 doctrine had effectually ' routed B3nronism '. But 
 the fact is, B3rronism was routed, not by Carlyle, or 
 another, but by the death of Lord Bjn-on himself. 
 Add to Byronism the fulfilled renown which Carlyle 
 lived to inherit, and Lord Morley's notes of contrast 
 are touched to a deeper sympathy. *Carlylism', he 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 177 
 
 writes, 'is the male of Byronism. It is Byronism 
 with thew and sinew, bass pipe and shaggy bosom. 
 There is the same grievous complaint against the time 
 and its men and its spirit, something even of the same 
 contemptuous despair, the same sense of the puniness 
 of man in the centre of a cruel and frowning universe ; 
 but there is in Carlylism a deliverance from it all, 
 indeed the only deliverance possible. Its despair is a 
 despair without misery. Labour in a high spirit, duty 
 done, and right service performed in fortitudinous 
 temper — here was, not indeed a way out, but a way of 
 erect living within '. 
 
 vin. 
 
 Meanwhile, what are we to say of the writers, less 
 sure than Lytton and Macaulay, and far more timid 
 than Carlyle, whose work we have classed as the litera- 
 ture of suspense ? 
 
 Theirs was not a conscious timidity. They did not Contem- 
 deliberately turn aside from greater opportunities Cadvir 
 proposed to them. ' Well at ease are the sleepers 
 for whom existence is a shallow dream ', and, perhaps, 
 the worst that can be said of them is that they slept 
 at the edge of the dawn. They missed, in Carlyle's 
 generation, the particular combination of chances 
 which composed his strenuous fate ; and, missing it, 
 they fell short of his achievement. 
 
 A partial parallel may be sought from the evidence of 
 history. For these writers, in their relation to Carlyle, 
 
178 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 may be said to have repeated the role of the Cavalier 
 poets, almost exactly two hundred years before, towards 
 the eagle -flight of Milton. They, too, when the 
 challenge to duty came, and the engine stood ready 
 at the door, were discovered in a * shallow dream ', 
 at ease in the Zion which they loved. Milton had been 
 summoned, in Lycidas (1637), to a purgation of the 
 Church, as Carlyle was summoned, in Sartor (1833), to 
 the cause of social reform. But the choir of irrespons- 
 ible divines, with Robert Herrick at their head, did not 
 listen to the trumpet. The noise of battle went by 
 them. They were sporting with Amaryllis in the shade. 
 A like egotism and self-indulgence mark the work 
 of Carlyle's contemporaries. They possessed rare 
 faculties and gifts — Herrick, too, had the charm of 
 his kind — , but their direction was remote from the 
 highway. They strayed into bypaths and blind alleys. 
 They made shift with a semblance of the might, of 
 which Carlyle — and the Byron who would have been — 
 clutched at the substance. They took shelter in 
 corners of the field. They tended their delicate plants, 
 and the great winds of power passed over them. Their 
 * Neaera ' wore difierent shapes. For one, the tangles 
 of her hair were the threads of a superfine style with 
 which he played till they broke. For another, her 
 murky shade was a lure for fanciful ghosts which drove 
 the light from his mind. For a third, the echo of her 
 laughter was louder than the music which it mocked. 
 The radiance of Shelley and Keats was refracted in 
 prismatic hues, the ' hues of flourished steel ' of a 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 179 
 
 later poet. The streaming confidence of Wordsworth ''' 
 was turned back to the emotions from which it sprang. 
 Day was breaking unacclaimed, save by the prophecies ' 
 of Carlyle. None other waited for the morning, to 
 bring glad tidings from the East. The poets who 
 should have gone to meet it lay dead in Italy and Greece, 
 and the lesser voices of the twilight proved unequal 
 to the call. The sessions of thought were invaded by 
 the trivial, the vernacular, and the bizarre. Weeping 
 was better than sorrow, laughter better than joy ; it 
 was better to die than to live. 
 
 IX. 
 
 Alfred Tennyson (1809-92), afterwards poet-laureate Tennyson: 
 (1850) and a peer (1884), was among these writers period 
 of the twilight, though he lived to emerge from 
 its shadow. His note was never very sure, yet his 
 finer instincts overcame the surrender which his cir- 
 cumstances encouraged. So strongly, through all his 
 limitations, did he aspire towards the light, and so 
 strong a voice he Uved to raise above other makers of 
 our songs, that he would seem almost in his own despite 
 to have followed in his earliest poems the line of least 
 resistance. Even there, in Poems, chiefly Lyrical 
 (1830) 1, and, certainly, in his second volume — Poems 
 
 ^ Lord Tennyson had collaborated with his elder brothers, 
 Frederick (1807-98) and Charles (afterwards Tennyson-Turner, 
 1808-79), in the so-called Poems by Two Brothers (182[6]7), but 
 Hcec no8 novimue ease nihil was its not inappropriate motto. 
 
i8o NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 (183[2]3) — he displayed clear signs of the influence 
 which he was later to wield. Still, the faults of the 
 times lay upon him. He compares unfavourably in 
 this respect with Carlyle and his summons to his age. 
 Tennyson's boyhood in the rectory at Somersby and 
 his pleasant undergraduate career (In Memoriam, Ixxxv) 
 formed a wholly different training from that at ' Entep- 
 fuhl ' and ' Weissnichtwo ', where Carlyle placed the 
 ; drama of his experience. Or, contrast these Poems, 
 V chiefly Lyrical with the Lyrical Ballads (1798) of just a 
 generation before. We recall from the preface to that 
 work that the poems were ' to be considered as experi- 
 ments ', and that readers would ' frequently have 
 to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkward- 
 ness '. Tennyson owed his readers no such apology. 
 He bowed to the gods of his own day. Adeline, 
 "" Madeline, Lilian, and the rest of the maids — and their 
 ' moods — , who open the life-work of poetry which closed 
 ^ with Crossing the Bar, are types of the decay of romance. 
 They are loose, and riotous, and detached, damsels- 
 errant between earth and heaven, not touched by 
 informing genius or the vital Pygmalion-spark. And 
 the like beauty of decay marks his iterated, hyphenated 
 language. 
 
 Looking back on Tennyson's first period, ex post 
 facto critics discern the greater poet who was to be : 
 
 It is man's privilege to doubt, 
 
 Tf so be that from doubt at length 
 
 Truth may stand forth unmoved of change, 
 
 An image with profulgent brows, 
 
 And perfect limbs, as from the storm 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 i8x 
 
 Of running fires and fluid range 
 
 Of lawless airs, at last stood out 
 
 This excellence and solid form 
 
 Of constant beauty. . . 
 
 Shall we not look into the laws 
 
 Of life and death, and things that seem, 
 
 And things that be, and analyse 
 
 Our double nature, and compare 
 
 All creeds, till we have found the one. 
 
 If one there be ? Ay me ! I fear 
 
 All may not doubt, but everywhere 
 
 Some must clasp Idols. Yet, my God, 
 
 Whom caU I Idol ? Let Thy dove 
 
 Shadow me over, and my sins 
 
 Be unremembered, and Thy Love 
 
 EnUghten. Oh, teach me yet 
 
 Somewhat, before the heavy clod 
 
 Weighs on me, and the busy fret 
 
 Of that sharp-headed worm begins 
 
 In the gross blackness underneath. 
 
 O weary hfe ! weary death ! 
 
 O spirit and heart made desolate ! 
 
 O damned vacillating state ! 
 
 This extract — from tlie Confessions of a Sensitive Mind 
 (1830) — is long, but it is not too long for the occasion. 
 Devout Tennysonians regard it as sacred. They 
 repair to it as to a Pisgah, commanding the promised 
 land of In Memoriam, xcvi, cxviii, and other passages. 
 But at the time in which it appeared, it was neither 
 better nor worse — it was, certainly, not more uplifting — 
 than much contemporary verse. It displayed qualities 
 which persisted through all Tennyson's poetry, though 
 they were afterwards merged and farther to seek, — 
 qualities of inconsequence and banality, or, by harsher 
 judgment, of vulgarity. 
 
i82 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 The anticipations of science are there, reached by 
 insight and conjecture — the sensitiveness to current 
 or to imminent speculation — , in the ' fluid range ' 
 and the reign of law, which evolutionists presently 
 codified. The religious speculation was there, too, 
 the defence of philosophic doubt, and the popular, 
 plausible compromise. Decadent diction was obvious, 
 in * profulgent ' and ' fret ', and similar verbal conceits, 
 more common in the lyrical poems, and gradually 
 disused. But chiefly typical of Tennyson is the note 
 of inconsequence, which was struck in the querulous 
 Hamlet - like conclusion. Even when his powers 
 matured, and distress had humanized his soul, Tennyson 
 found it hard to sustain an argument. In a later 
 section we shall see how he avoided forms which re- 
 quired a consistent and exacting material. He broke 
 up In Memoriam into short poems, and his epic into 
 idyls. He did not hew marbles from the rock. We 
 are dealing here with the beginning, but the evil of 
 the transition years — their twilight timidity, as we 
 have called it — overshadowed his genius till the 
 end. 
 
 Not less remarkably typical is the banal, or vulgar, 
 note ; the curious undertone betraying, by an un- 
 conscious test, the imperfect rapture of art. Unlike 
 Wordsworth, who distrusted formal beauty, and who 
 lived to unwrite in cold blood his best verses forged 
 at white heat, in obedience to what he deemed a canon 
 of poetic composition, Tennyson cared for form most. 
 He never published rough copies of his verse^. More- 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 183 
 
 over, the fault we are discussing is not one of form in 
 the first instance. It is revealed in jarring notes, but 
 it is due to a vice of temperament. ' That good man, 
 the clergyman, has told me words of peace ' is an instance 
 from The May Queen ; ' the little town Had seldom 
 seen a costlier funeral ' is another from Enoch Arden. 
 Both of these were among his early poems, and the 
 quality is more subtly concealed in the point of view 
 of this Sensitive Mind, with its easy and shallow 
 sensibilities. 
 
 Other writers seemed to show equal promise, though George 
 they did not Hve to justify it. George Darley (1798- ^^ ^^' 
 1846), an Irishman, a mathematician, and a friend 
 of Charles Lamb — and a worse stammerer than he — 
 was joined with Tennyson by Carlyle ; and Thomas 
 Lovell Beddoes (1803-49), a physiologist, for many 
 years a wanderer on the Continent, and a nephew of 
 Maria Edgeworth, was at one time deemed his superior. 
 The fact is, this note of detachment was not very hard 
 to acquire. The loose and unrelated forms of the 
 romantic convention, cultivated mainly for its own 
 sake, and remote from active life, lay ready to hand, 
 in closet-studies of Elizabethan dramatists, and of 
 Keats's manner without Keats's aim. We need not 
 pause at obvious echoes, such as, for instance, the 
 reminiscence of Shakespeare, Henry viii, iii, 2, 371, 
 in Barley's Thomas d-Becket, 
 
i84 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Through them he 
 Burst soon, as I shall ! If at last he falls. 
 He falls in splendour, — and all men must die ! 
 
 The poet was too skilful to do this often. His skill was 
 the greater part of his art. Rather, we refer to the 
 songs in his Sylvia, or The May -Queen — 
 
 and 
 
 Here be pansies just a-blowing ; 
 Here be lords-and-ladies glowing; 
 
 Pearly brow and golden hair. 
 Lips that seem to scent the air. 
 Eyes as bright, and sweet, and blue, 
 As violets fill'd with orbs of dew. 
 O fairest ! 
 O rarest ! 
 Creature of no mortal birth ! 
 
 If thou'rt woman. 
 
 If thou'rt human. 
 Heaven is sure outdone on earth. 
 
 These are nearer to the Elizabethan convention — 
 every inspiration decays to a convention when its 
 time-spirit has departed — than simple verbal imitations. 
 They are nearer, too, to Tennyson's first period, to his 
 ' airy, fairy ' * rare, pale ' creatures, feeding, not on 
 Paradisal dew, but on the distilled fragrance of that 
 essence. The new-old mysticism abounded in this 
 self-involved Irishman's brain, and absorbed in the 
 end his powers of independent observation. In his 
 earliest poem he had declared : 
 
 I'm framed, the fool of sensibility ! 
 I cannot see a young flow'r i' the grass 
 Smile at my foot which kills it in its prime, 
 And yet not think of undeserved death. ^ 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 185 
 
 This was a product, less of pure emotion, than of emotion 
 derived through Burns and Wordsworth from records 
 of feeling stored in books : 
 
 I cannot look ascaunt the mighty deep, 
 Shaking the firm strand with its plangent waves. 
 And cry * 't is good in faith *, or * sooth 't is fair *, 
 But my whole spirit rushes through my eyes, 
 And mingles with the motion of the flood, 
 And blind tumultuations of the main. 
 
 Here the falseness and artificiality are betrayed as much 
 in the language as in the thought. ' Ascaunt ', ' plan- 
 gent ', ' sooth ', and the heavy ' tumultuations ' are 
 furniture, not language. And, plainly, it is not Barley's 
 spirit which rushed through Barley's eyes, but the ghost 
 of Shelley's insight, (from Stanzas, written in Dejection 
 near Naples) which stared from Barley's vacant orbits : 
 
 Nor yet subsides, with the subsiding sea, 
 But tasks invention to out-measure nature. 
 And puts imagination to the. stretch 
 In framing vast ideas of the Deluge. 
 
 But when invention had achieved this pseudo-Eliza- 
 bethan labour, the issue would still have been nil. It 
 was not for the sake of ' vast ideas of the Beluge ' 
 that the sea-captains of Elizabeth fared boldly across 
 the deep, and inspired her poets at home. Their letter, 
 not their spirit, was revived by these poets of hectic 
 romance ; and The Quarterly reviewer who pointed 
 out the insincerity of Tennyson's testament (in one of 
 these poems of 1830), 
 
 Come only, when the days are still. 
 And at my headstone whisper low. 
 And tell me if the woodbines hlow^ 
 
i86 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 was not wholly unjust in his attempt to cover the 
 plaintive prettiness with ridicule. The juvenilia of 
 Tennyson are redeemed by fifty years of greater poetry 
 (1842-92). Darley died in 1846, leaving but a few 
 fine songs to be dug out from his closet-dramas, and 
 recent pious endeavours to place him in the succession 
 of British poets are likely to prove unavailing. 
 
 XI. 
 
 Lovell In Beddoes — it may have been heredity, but it was 
 
 more probably environment, and his intrusions into 
 liberal politics in England, Switzerland and Germany — 
 we come to a stronger writer, though, perhaps, not to a 
 more consistent poet. At least one of his lyrics is </' 
 great poetry, without deduction or apology i. It is 
 not * sicklied o'er ' with the pale cast of any other age 
 of thought, or of any single thinker ; and the like 
 criticism applies — though its objects are not as supreme 
 — to one or two more of Beddoes's fragments. He 
 
 * Dream-Pedlary : 
 
 If there were dreams to sell. 
 
 What would you buy ? 
 Some cost a passing bell, 
 Some a light sigh. . . . 
 
 Prof. Saintsbury {A History of Nineteenth Century Lit&^ature, 2nd 
 edition, Macmillan, 1901, p. 115) writes in the same sense : 
 
 ' The author of such things . . . attains to that small and disputed 
 . . . class of poets who, including Sappho, Catullus, some medieval 
 hymn- writers, and a few moderns, especially Coleridge, have, by \ yi' 
 virtue of fragments only, attained a higher position than many \ 
 authors of large, substantive, and important poems '. In expressing 
 ^ similar opinion, I am glad to ^uote this authority. 
 
 0^ 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 187 
 
 possessed imgaination, too ; a little derivative, perhaps, 
 and a little self-conscious, but bold and direct enough 
 to strike an original note at its impact on experience. 
 It would be pedantic to try to trace to purer sources 
 such a passage as this from Death's Jest-Booh (first 
 completed in 1826, and constantly revised ; published 
 posthumously in 1850) : 
 
 How strange it is that I can live today; 
 
 Nay, look like other men who have been sleeping 
 
 On quiet pillows and not dreamt ! Methinks, 
 
 The look of the world's a lie, a face made up 
 
 O'er graves and fiery depths ; and nothing's true 
 
 But what is horrible. If man could see 
 
 The perils and diseases that he elbows. 
 
 Each day he walks a mile ; which catch at him, 
 
 Which fall behind and graze him as he passes ; 
 
 Then would he know that Life's a single pilgrim. 
 
 Fighting unarmed among a thousand soldiers. 
 
 It is this infinite invisible 
 
 Which we must learn to know, and yet to scorn. 
 
 And, from the scorn of that, regard the world 
 
 As from the edge of a far star. 
 
 It is not quite lucid or exact, but the new perception is 
 there which the literature rising to maturity was to 
 learn to express. Beddoes's latest editor, Mr. Kamsay 
 Golles, is eager to discover the ' germ-theory ' in the 
 central lines of this passage, as he discovers, probably 
 enough, Herbert Spencer's Principles of Biology and 
 Haeckel's Evolution of Man in other passages in this 
 drama : 
 
 Had I been bom a four-legged child, methinks, ■ 
 I might have found the steps from dog to man, 
 And crept into his nature, 
 
i88 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 There's lifeless matter ; add the power of shaping, 
 And you've the crystal : add again the organs, 
 Wherewith to subdue the sustenance to the form 
 And manner of one's self, and you've the plant : 
 Add power of motion, senses, and so forth, 
 And you've all kinds of beasts ; suppose a pig : 
 To pig add reason, foresight, and such stuff, 
 Then you have man. . . . 
 
 And so forth. The wonder of this kind of writing has 
 been over-praised in Tennyson, who certainly poured 
 the material into more shapely vessels. Beddoes, a 
 physician by training, reminds us of Erasmus Darwin 
 in a later age. Literature has more concern with the 
 philosophy of life than with the history of physiology. 
 It notes a hint of Robert Browning in the poetic form, 
 and it notes, more significantly, Beddoes's prophecy 
 of a further exploration of the unknown as a condition 
 precedent of faith, and his yet more acute prescience 
 of the inadequacy of such knowledge to displace or 
 replace faith. This is new, and true, in English litera- 
 ture, and it pointed, however remotely, to a firm foothold 
 for belief amid the shifting experiments of current 
 politics and thought. If dogmatism was to leap into 
 the maelstrom, this counsel of hope was on its lips. 
 
 The credit of Beddoes's insight is shared with Tenny- 
 son, who, in another early poem, remodelled, as a part- 
 answer to the searchings of his own heart — and, by 
 extension, of the heart of his age — the Greek myth 
 of Paris and (Enone. The plea of Pallas (Knowledge) 
 in (Enone (1832), with which the reader should compare 
 In Memoriam cxiv, is touched by the same perception 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 189 
 
 that illuminates our first extract from Death's Jest- 
 
 Book : 
 
 Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, 
 These three alone lead life to sovereign power. 
 
 To live by law. 
 Acting the law we live by without fear ; . . . 
 Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence. 
 
 Oh ! rest thee sure. 
 That I shall love thee well and cleave to thee. 
 So that my vigour, wedded to thy blood, 
 Shall strike within thy pulses, like a God's, 
 To push thee forward thro' a life of shocks. 
 Dangers and deeds, until endurance grow 
 Sinew'd with action, and the full-grown will. 
 Circled through all experiences, pure law, 
 Commeasure perfect freedom. 
 
 So Beddoes once more : 
 
 I have a bit of Fiai in my soul. 
 And can myself create my little world. 
 
 It is not a fully assured message. It lingers obscurely 
 in the neutral region between science and art. But 
 this, at least, we may say : if Beddoes had published 
 the Jest-Book at the time that he wrote it, contemporary 
 criticism would have found it hard to foretell whether 
 he or Tennyson was to utter the soul of the nineteenth 
 century. But ' nothing's true but what is horrible ', 
 and Beddoes died, a suicide, at forty-six. At that 
 date, in that dim suspense, a new ' criticism of life ' 
 for men's guidance, enlightenment, and inspiration, 
 was not attempted by the poets. Carlyle, as we saw, 
 did attempt it, as Wordsworth and the elder poets 
 had applied ideas to their own day. The Recluse (The 
 Excursion) was to have been a new Pope's Essay on 
 
190 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Man, taking to tlie credit of man's account Lis further 
 increase of knowledge with its deeper obligation on 
 conduct. Keats, if he had lived, might have applied it, 
 or Byron, restored by Greece. But Tennyson, who 
 took their place, distrusted Keats's ' Beauty ' and 
 Byron's ' Humanity ' alike. His poem. The Palace 
 of Art, is instructive at this point. He was vaguely- 
 sensitive to the call. He wrote CEnone and The Two 
 Voices, as Beddoes, too, in certain passages, struggled 
 upwards to the light. But Beddoes perished apraktos, 
 and Tennyson— till 1840, at any rate, which sets the 
 present limit to our inquiry — shrank from, or felt 
 unequal to, the whole issue. 
 
 Read The Two Voices carefully (and finally, in this 
 context), and his unconscious evasion will be clear. It 
 was the choice of the times, not the man. The man's 
 contribution was contained, the individual note supplied, 
 in Tennyson's personal conservatism and the instinctive 
 conformity of his class. It was possible, but only 
 barely possible, to enter the gates of the East. The 
 safe alternative was to dwell in the light of the setting 
 sun. The heat had departed from its beams ; the 
 energy, and the stimulus to energy. But the colours 
 were deepening in the firmament. Hence the rich 
 lights and tones of Tennyson's Poems, chiefly Lyrical. 
 Hence Barley's hollow emotion, and the fiery vacancy 
 of Beddoes, and hence the language of poetry, em- 
 broidered like the tapestry of the sky. 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 191 
 
 ^- ... 
 
 xii. 
 
 Other writers in this age, who similarly missed the 
 big note, may be passed more rapidly in review. 
 
 Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-39) was a w. M. 
 graceful trifler in Trash (1833), as he called one volume 
 of his verses. Eton and Trinity, Cambridge, had 
 trained him, and his light and elegant scholarship 
 flowed easily from a pen which was never blunt or 
 dipped in gall. His vers de societe are perfect in their 
 kind. They need not otherwise detain us. 
 
 Thomas Hood (1799-1845), a humourist by need Thomas 
 rather than by choice — ' a lively Hood for a livelihood ', 
 as he jested it — , had more in common with his age, 
 and has nearer claims on posterity. His fame as a 
 punster is well merited. He raised punning to a fine 
 art, and, if he had not the deftness of Praed — the ex- 
 quisite tact of social knowledge — he possessed, in a 
 higher degree, the deeper tact of common sympathy. 
 Even his fun struck chords to which men's heart- 
 strings reverberate. His own ill-health and ill-fortune 
 seemed to mellow his nature, and to touch his drollest 
 fancy with stray notes from the music of humanity. 
 The * livelihood ' pressed him very closely. His sense 
 of what the public wanted compelled him, in his 
 magazines and annuals, to separate the strands of his 
 talent into pure humour or pure pathos. The Parental 
 Ode to his son is a kind of mosaic of the two, fashioned 
 in alternate lines. The familiar Song of the Shirty a 
 
192 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 genuine song of the times, is simply pathetic. The 
 Lament for the Decline of Chivalry is. a type of simple 
 burlesque. In A Retrospective Review we see the 
 union of both strands, and not their mere juxtaposition. 
 There are puns to tickle the ear — 'some sugar in the 
 cane', 'no satis to the jams' — , but the theme of the 
 passage of boyhood mingles light with shade, and 
 awakens comedy's ' thoughtful laughter '. Above all, 
 perhaps, Thomas Hood was a master of wistful emotion : 
 
 I remember, I remember. 
 The house where I was bom. 
 The Uttle window where the sun 
 Came peeping in at mom. 
 
 It is of songs like this that George Herbert, the seven- 
 teenth-century divine, must, we feel, have been thinking 
 when he wrote ' A verse may find him who a sermon 
 flies '. It does not need the moral ending to Hood's 
 
 stanzas 
 
 — But now 't is little joy 
 
 To know I'm farther oflF from heav'n 
 
 Than when I was a boy — 
 
 to attune his readers to his sentiment. The moral 
 was already in the mood, pathetic rather than passionate, 
 fanciful rather than imaginative, which gives suitable 
 expression to an unaspiring age. 
 
 xiu. 
 
 Other Robert Browning, despite the date (1833) of 
 Wnters. p^^i^^^^ belongs to the Victorian age. Here, omitting 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 193 
 
 Richard Henry (Hengist) Home (1803-44), who 
 published an ' epic ' poem, Orion, at the price of a 
 farthing, and omitting, too, Richard Harris Barham i 
 (1788-1845), whose Ingoldshy Legends are hardly as 
 funny as they were — perhaps because the fun was so 
 positive — , we come to a httle group of writers character- 
 istic of a period of transition. The dull time overtaking 
 pure literature, the discouragement of imaginative 
 methods at the centre of afiairs, the need of an effort 
 to enforce them, and the comparative futility of making 
 it, shunted a certain class of writers on to branch- 
 or loop- lines. The driving-power was there, and the 
 movement, and the scenery at the wayside, but the 
 sense of a goal was wanting. There was no remoter 
 object or destination, no ' universal ' setting for the 
 * particular ' route. An attractive author in this 
 class was George Borrow (1803-81) whose travels ^ 
 on the Continent and study of Continental tongues 
 were turned to good account in a series of works which 
 started the literature of vagabondage. His literary 
 interests were as promiscuous as the hospitality which 
 he practised when he settled down at home, and his 
 Bible in Spain and other books are delightful examples 
 of their kind. Miss Mitford (1786-1855), a writer of 
 forgotten poems and plays, is remembered for her 
 sketches of Our Village, a kind of travel-book round 
 her own home, full of whim, and fancy, and brightness. 
 William Barnes (1800-86), the Dorsetshire poet, ^ 
 cultivated his native dialect ; and Robert Stephen ^ 
 Hawker (1803-75), farther West, likewise confined 
 13 
 
194 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 to a locality his celebration of ' domestica facta ' in 
 Cornish Ballads and Other Poems. W. E. Aytoun 
 (1813-65), joint-author with Sir Theodore Martin 
 of the clever Bon Gaultier Ballads, Douglas Jerrold 
 (1803-57), playwright and wit, and Thomas Gordon 
 Hake (1809-95), a serious poet, would have to be 
 added to this record, which might be indefinitely 
 extended, if mere talent increased the growth of art. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 Summary. So we come, through assurance and suspense, to 
 the end of this difficult period. A path, faltering, 
 perhaps, but as clear as the clues allow, has been found 
 through the maze of writing produced in the fifteen 
 years of which 1832 is the centre. Dates are reconciled 
 with facts by historians rather than by history. But 
 the choice of 1832 as the centre of a literary cycle 
 may claim a twofold significance. As the death-year 
 of Scott, it looks back on the great period of Romance. 
 As the birth-year of Reform, it looks forward to the 
 great period of Democracy. The problem of the next 
 half century is how to reconcile the two ; how to give 
 soul to the positive and brain to the imagination ; 
 how to make the real spiritual, and the spiritual real, 
 and so to complete the work of intellectual liberty. 
 
 Before examining this work, we, too, concluding 
 this book, may look backwards for a moment from 
 the year of transit, 1832. The results of the Reform 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 195 
 
 Act were irrevocable ; its social and moral gains. 
 A force was added to social life ; tlie moral horizon 
 was widened. The older writers had done their parts — 
 Crabbe, Burns and Wordsworth in their several 
 degrees. Jane Austen had etched her pictures of 
 middle-class society. Scott had founded his sanctions 
 in history. But henceforward — here was the difference 
 — the inclusion of the fresh material became a common- 
 place of letters. Philosophy, poetry and fiction had to 
 reckon with the new order from the start. The mere 
 technical revolt from the literary standards of the 
 eighteenth century was merged in a genuine rejection 
 of the principles from which they sprang. 
 
 Consider, for instance, in the light of the Reform 1733 ; 
 
 1832 
 
 Act of 1832, the inner meaning, and not only the 
 outward form, of Pope's Essay on Man, which was 
 pubHshed in 1733. Measure the force of the famous 
 line, more often quoted than understood, ' The proper 
 study of mankind is Man '. Did it raise or degrade 
 men's power of moral and social improvement ? If 
 mankind had properly studied man, in the sense in- 
 tended by Pope, would any reform have been enacted 
 during the next hundred years ? What is the relation 
 of Pope's formula to the * high argument ' of Words- 
 worth in The Recluse, 
 
 How exquisitely the individual Mind 
 (And the progressive powers perhaps no less 
 Of the whole species) to the external World 
 Is fitted ; and how exquisitely too — 
 Theme this but Uttle heard of among men — 
 The external World is fitted to the Mind, 
 
196 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 or of Carlyle in Sartor Resartus, or of Tennyson in 
 (Enoney or of others to whom we shall come — of George 
 Meredith, for example, in Outer and Inner — , and of 
 most of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century ? 
 These are the questions, or some of them, suggested 
 by the literary contrast between 1733 and 1832. For 
 Pope meant something like this : Divine order must 
 be accepted as a whole ; no sane purpose is served 
 by opposing, or seeking to overthrow, the estabhshed 
 order of things in any department of nature. The 
 way of salvation lies, not in adapting ' order ' to cir- 
 cumstances, but in justifying circumstances by referring 
 them to ' order ' : 
 
 All nature is but art, unknown to thee 
 (that is, nature's seeming inequalities are parts of the 
 constructive Artist's design) ; 
 
 All chance, direction, which thou canst not see ; 
 All discord, harmony not understood ; 
 A partial evil, universal good 
 
 (that is, nature is always right ; pain, suffering, ' in- 
 justice ', and all other so-called ills are only the illusion 
 of half-knowledge) : 
 
 And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, 
 One truth is clear, whatever is, is right. 
 
 Keats railed at the form of these verses — from the 
 Essay on Man — , but the Revolution in Paris and the 
 Reform Act in England are signal instances of rebellion 
 against its spirit. In the eyes of the revolutionaries 
 and reformers, it was no longer impious or fooHsh 
 to refuse to subscribe to Pope's dogma. His Universal 
 
THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1832 197 
 
 Prayer found no echo in an age when the conceptions 
 of piety and wisdom had been enlarged beyond the 
 compass of his survey. Religion and philosophy, it 
 was obvious, would have to test the new conceptions, 
 and literature and art to interpret them through 
 mediums remote from vulgar error. The new time 
 was to hold the higher faith, or, at any rate, the braver 
 faith, that the proper study of mankind is God, — in 
 religion, the sanction of theology, with a liberal move- 
 ment in the Church ; in politics, the sanction of power, 
 with democracy's advance ; in art, the sanction of 
 beauty ; in philosophy, the sanction of truth ; ^nd, 
 in all, by fearless inquiry. 
 
 Literature is preoccupied for awhile with this re- 
 construction of faith ^. How far the builders were 
 well-inspired, whether every stone was truly laid, 
 what corner-stone, if any, was rejected, and how much 
 remains undone ere the new temple is complete, are 
 questions still awaiting solution, which the following 
 book may elucidate. The present instalment is com- 
 pleted. England has passed through 1832. 
 
 * It may be on account of such preoccupation thai* drama 
 practically ceased. The dramatic form (in all theatres since the 
 Attic, and with the possible exception of Faust, which is really 
 epic in character) has never been suitable for the presentation 
 of * divine ' and human relations. 
 
BOOK III 
 
 THE VICTOKIAN AGE, 1837-1900 
 
 § 1. KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF. 
 
 i. 
 
 A con- /^N *^® opposite page^we attempt to exhibit by 
 ^^^"° V-/ concentric tables the names and dates of the 
 chief writers who rendered the Victorian age so extra- 
 ordinary a flowering-time in English literature. They 
 found the material ample, and endued it with every 
 kind of shape. In fiction, theology, philosophy, poetry 
 and criticism occur some of the greatest names which 
 adorn any age in any country, and there is this mark to 
 distinguish them from similar groups in other countries, 
 that their rise is not to be associated with a definite 
 authority — such as the Universities constitute in Ger- 
 many, or the Academy in France — , but was spontaneous, 
 local, and occasional in its area of distribution, and 
 displayed the common feature of national inspiration. 
 
 The whole people was moving to self-expression. 
 Literature was only one aspect of the general stirring 
 
 and awakening. A new stream of thought was being 
 
 198 
 
CONCENTRIC TABLES OF V 
 
 FICTION. 
 
 THEOLOGY. 
 
 PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 HISTORY. 
 
 B. Disraeli, 
 
 E. B. Pusey, 
 
 1 
 Thomas Carlyle, 
 
 1804-1881. 
 
 1800-1882. 
 
 1795-1881. 
 
 Eliz. Gaskell, 
 
 J. H. Newman, 
 
 J. S. Mill, 
 
 Lord Macaulay, 
 
 1810-1865. 
 
 1801-1890. 
 
 1806-1873. 
 
 1800-1859. 
 
 W. M. Thackeray, 
 
 R. H. Froude, 
 
 Charles Darwin, 
 
 A. Kinglake, 
 
 1811-1863. 
 
 1803-1836. 
 
 1809-1882. 
 
 1809-1891. 
 
 Charles Dickens, 
 
 F. D. Maurice, 
 
 
 
 1812-1870. 
 
 1805-1872. 
 
 
 
 Charles Reade, 
 
 S. Wilberforce, 
 
 
 
 1814-1884. 
 
 1805-1873. 
 
 
 
 A. Trollope, 
 
 R. C. Trench, 
 
 
 
 1815-1882. 
 
 1807-1886. 
 
 
 
 Charlotte Bronte, 
 
 H. E. Manning, 
 
 
 
 1816-1855. 
 
 1808-1892. 
 
 
 
 Emily Bronte, 
 
 MarkP 
 
 attison. 
 
 
 1818-1848. 
 
 1813- 
 
 1884. 
 
 
 Frank Smedley, 
 1818-1864. 
 
 J. W. Colenso, 
 
 
 
 1814-1883. 
 
 
 
 
 H. P. Stanley, 
 
 
 
 
 1815-1881. 
 
 
 
 
 B. Jowett, 
 
 
 
 1817- 
 
 1893. 
 
 
 Charles ] 
 
 lingsley, 
 
 
 J. A. Froude, 
 
 1819- 
 
 1875. 
 
 
 1818-1894. 
 
 * George Eliot,' 
 
 H. C. ] 
 
 Mansel, 
 
 
 1819-1880. 
 
 1820- 
 
 1871. 
 
 
 G. J. Whyte-Melville, 
 
 
 Herbert Spencer, 
 
 
 1821-1878. 
 
 
 1820-1903. 
 
 
 Thomas 
 
 fs?!!'^^' 
 
 John Tyndall, 
 
 
 1822- 
 
 1820-1893. 
 
 
 Charlotte Yonge, 
 1823-1901. 
 
 
 Sir Henry Maine, 
 
 
 1822-1888. 
 
 Wilkie Collins, 
 
 
 H. T. Buckle, 
 
 1824-1889. 
 
 
 1822-1862. 
 
 Richard Blackmore, 
 
 H. P. Liddon, 
 
 
 E. A. Freeman, 
 
 1825-1900. 
 
 1829-1890. 
 
 
 1823-1892. 
 
 Dinah Craik, 
 
 
 T. H. Huxley, 
 
 WUliam Stubbs, 
 
 1826-1887. 
 
 
 1825-1895. 
 
 1825-1901. 
 
 Margaret Oliphant, 
 
 
 Walter Bagehot, 
 
 1828-1897. 
 
 
 1826-1877. 
 
 George Meredith, 
 
 
 Sir Leslie Stephen, 
 
 1828. 
 
 
 1832-1904. 
 
 Sir W. Besant, 
 
 
 
 Sir J. R. Seeley, 
 
 1836-1901. 
 
 
 
 1834-1895. 
 
 Thomas Hardy, 
 
 
 T. H. Green, 
 
 Lord Acton, 
 
 1840. 
 
 
 1836-1882. 
 
 1834-1902. 
 
 William Black, 
 
 
 Henry Sidgwick, 
 
 J. R. Green, 
 
 1841-1898. 
 
 
 1838-1900. 
 
 1837-1883. 
 
 R. L. Stevenson, 
 
 
 John Morley, 
 
 1850-1894. 
 
 
 1838. 
 
 
 
 F. H. Bradley, 
 
 W. E. H. Lecky, 
 
 
 
 1846. 
 
 1838-1903. 
 
TORIAN MEN OF LETTERS 
 
 CRITICISM (Litera- 
 ture, Art, Nature). 
 
 POETRY. 
 
 HUMOUR. 
 
 DATES AND FACTS. 
 
 
 C. J. Wells, 
 
 W. M. Praed, 
 
 1847. Thackeray's 
 
 
 1800-1879. 
 
 1802-1839. 
 
 Vanity Fair. 
 
 
 Eliz. Browning, 
 1806-1861. 
 
 Douglas Jerrold, 
 
 Bronte's Jane 
 
 
 1803-1857. 
 
 Eyre. 
 
 
 Lord Tennyson, 
 
 Mark Lemon, 
 
 1848. Pre-Raphaelite 
 
 
 1809-1892. 
 
 1809-1870. 
 
 Brotherhood. 
 
 
 Lord Houghton, 
 1809-1885. 
 
 Edward Lear, 
 
 1849. Dickens's 
 
 
 1812-1888. 
 
 David Copper- 
 
 Ed. Fitzgerald, 
 
 
 field. 
 
 1809-1883. 
 
 
 1850. Tennyson's /w 
 
 George Brimley, 
 
 R. Browning, 
 
 
 Memoriam. 
 
 1819-1857. 
 
 1812-1889. 
 
 
 1851. The Great 
 
 John Ruskin, 
 
 A. H. Clough, 
 
 Frederick Locker, 
 
 Exhibition. 
 
 1819-1900. 
 
 1819-1861. 
 
 1821-1895. 
 
 1854. Patmore's 
 
 Matthew Arnold, 
 
 
 Angel in the 
 
 1822-1888. 
 
 
 House. 
 
 
 Coventry Patmore, 
 
 
 1858. Tennyson's 
 
 
 1823-1896. 
 
 
 IdylU of the 
 
 
 Sydney Dobell, 
 
 
 King. 
 
 
 1824-1874. 
 
 
 1859. Darwin's 
 
 
 Adelaide Procter, 
 
 
 Origin of 
 
 
 1825-1864. 
 
 
 Species. 
 
 
 D. G. Rossetti, 
 
 
 Meredith's Rich- 
 
 
 1828-1882. 
 
 
 ard Feverel. 
 
 
 George Meredith, 
 
 
 George Eliot's 
 
 
 1828. 
 
 
 Adam Bede. 
 
 
 Christina Rossetti, 
 
 C. S. Calverley, 
 1831-1884. 
 
 1860. Ruskin'silfocf- 
 
 
 1830-1894. 
 
 ern Painters 
 
 Alex. 
 
 Smith, 
 
 'Lewis Carroll,' 
 
 (last vol.). 
 
 1830-1867. 
 
 1833-1898. 
 
 1864. Newman's 
 
 
 Earl of Lytton, 
 
 Sir W. S. GUbert, 
 
 Apologia. 
 
 
 1831-1891. 
 
 1836. 
 
 1865. Swinburne's 
 
 
 Hon. Roden Noel, 
 
 
 Atalanta in 
 
 
 1834-1894. 
 
 
 Calydon. 
 
 
 James Thomson, 
 
 
 'Lewis Carroll's' 
 
 
 1834-1882. 
 
 
 Alice in Won- 
 
 Wm. ] 
 
 tforris, 
 
 
 derland. 
 
 1834-1896. 
 
 
 Arnold's Essays 
 
 Walter Pater, 
 
 Lord de Tabley, 
 
 
 in Criticism. 
 
 1839-1894. 
 
 1835-1895. 
 
 
 1868. Browning's 
 
 J. A. Symonds, 
 
 A. C. Swinburne, 
 
 
 Ring and the 
 
 18'10-1893. 
 
 1837-1909. 
 
 
 Book. 
 
 Richard JeflFeries, 
 
 A. O'Shaughnessy, 
 
 ^ 
 
 1870. Rossetti's 
 
 1848-1887. 
 
 1844-1881. 
 
 
 Poems. 
 
 R. L. Stevenson, 
 
 
 
 1873. Pater's Re- 
 
 1850-1894. 
 
 
 
 naissance. 
 
 W. E. 
 
 aenley, 
 
 
 
 1849-1903. 
 
 
 1887. Queen Vic- 
 
 
 Oscar Wilde, 
 
 
 toria's Jubilee. 
 
 
 1856-1900. 
 
 
 
 
 Francis Thompson, 
 
 J. K. Stephen, 
 
 
 
 1859-1907. 
 
 1859-1892. 
 
 
 [To face p. 198. 
 
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 199 
 
 poured through the land, to which all channels of in- 
 tellect became tributary. Ideas, fertilizing faculties, 
 were blown on the wind. They passed and re-passed 
 imperceptibly. Theologians wrote novels. Historians 
 wrote books on theology. Poets and critics exchanged 
 parts. Charles Kingsley, rector of Eversley, was the 
 author of Westward Ho ! The author of The Expansion -^ 
 of England — Seeley's most suggestive lectures — ^wrote, 
 anonymously, Ecce Homo. Froude wrote The Nemesis 
 of Faith. Matthew Arnold, poet and critic, wrote 
 essays on God and the Bible. Huxley descended from 
 science, and Gladstone from statecraft, into the theo- 
 logical arena. Charles Dodgson, the mathematician, 
 was ' Lewis Carroll ' of the Alice books. Ideas, fer- 
 tilizing faculties, sprang to expression in all quarters. 
 They compelled the variety of expression which is so 
 remarkable a feature of the age. 
 
 Yet this diversity can be viewed under a single The 
 common aspect. We have said that the literature of Move- 
 this age was distinguished from that of other countries °^®^*' 
 by its spontaneity of origin. The wind blew where it 
 listed, and the seeds of literature were sown. But 
 there is one exception to this statement. A definite 
 stream of thought proceeded from Oxford University, 
 and especially from Oriel College, the last of whose 
 greater sons, the late Mr. Cecil Rhodes, has recently 
 brought so many changes into the hfe of the University 
 by the effect given to the terms of his will. With this 
 we are not concerned, but rather with the older Oriel, 
 of which Keble and Newman, Pusey and Matthew ^ 
 
conflict. 
 
 200 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Arnold were fellows, with Manning at Merton, Wilber- 
 force at AU Souls, and Jowett at Balliol, or even 
 with an older Oriel still, that of Copies ton and Whateley \ 
 whence came the Oxford Movement and the ' ruinous 
 wrath ' which divided knowledge and belief. 
 The Mtjviv asihy 6k(x. — it would need the canvas of Homer 
 
 and the sweep and range of epic verse appropriately 
 to depict this conflict, in which, as of old, gods took 
 part, or were claimed by votaries as partizans, and in 
 which the picturesqueness of the fighting, and the hard 
 blows given and returned, tended partly to disguise 
 the actual purpose of the fray. There was Disraeli's 
 brilHant choice of the side of the angels, not the apes. 
 There was Huxley's famous retort to Bishop Wilberforce 
 at Oxford 2. There are a hundred episodes of con- 
 troversy to be disinterred from the burnt-out embers 
 in the Quarterly and other reviews. But we are writing 
 an essay in criticism, not a history of polemics as such, 
 
 * An attractive account of these earlier fellows of Oriel (the 
 * Noetics ', as they called themselves) has recently been issued 
 under the title of Pre-Tractarian Oxford^ by Rev. W. Tuckwell 
 (Smith, Elder & Co., 1909). 
 
 * At the British Association Meeting, 1860. The Bishop had 
 asked if it was ' through his grandfather, or his grandmother that 
 he claimed his descent from a monkey'. Huxley, exclaiming to 
 the man next him. Sir B. Brodie, the physician, ' the Lord hath 
 delivered him into mine hands ', replied to the scientific argument 
 with eloquence and force, and then retorted to the effect that he 
 would feel less shame in recalling his descent from an ape than from 
 ' a man — a man of restless and versatile intellect — who, not content 
 with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific 
 questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure 
 them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers 
 from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled 
 appeals to religious prejudice.' 
 
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 201 
 
 and, accordingly, we are more concerned with tendencies 
 than with details. 
 
 What was the meaning of it all, the actual purpose 
 of the fray ? A glance back may help us at this point. 
 The new schoolmaster was abroad. There were forces 
 at work in human thought which could not be exhibited 
 on a screen, to which no names could be attached, and 
 of which the living types of fiction were, as yet, an 
 inadequate expression. The positive sympathies which 
 resulted in Acts of Education and Reform, in improved 
 conditions of labour and the better housing of the 
 poor, corresponded to an intellectual awakening, which 
 found its reflection in literature, dimly at first, through 
 clouded glass, in novelists and poets to whose writings 
 we shall come. It is the function of literature to 
 interpret an age to itself, to apply imagination to ex- 
 perience, to discover the unifying purpose which con- 
 secrates the diverse means, and to render sub specie 
 CBternitatis the new temporal possessions of men. How 
 far Victorian literature has succeeded in discharging 
 its function will be apparent later on. Judged by 
 this supreme test, its work is not yet complete. All 
 the resources of the age have not yet been interpreted 
 by art. This legacy is bequeathed to the new century. 
 Moreover, arrested movements — movements of reaction, 
 not reform — were Hkewise rendered in art-forms by 
 painters and poets, and the beauty of these seK-con- 
 tained art-products (which were more easily produced 
 in proportion to their distance from the centre of ad- 
 vance) interrupted, and partially confused, the direct 
 
202 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 inspiration of art and letters. These schools of indirect 
 taste achieved a more exquisite perfection inasmuch 
 as they consciously retired from the central struggle 
 of their times. But in certain novehsts and poets, in 
 certain painters and critics, we shall reach the more 
 impassioned seers and the more ambitious interpreters. 
 They are not always lucid. They do not always prophesy 
 smooth things. Their expression — ^whatever medium 
 they employ — is not always adequate to their insight. 
 But, according to the vision within them, and to the 
 Hght in which they walked, they drew out the truth 
 underlying — they displayed in their service, or relation, 
 to that truth — the manifold endeavours and experi- 
 ments of an innovating age. 
 The new Meanwhile, in what sort were these experiments, 
 a mng. ^^^ these new possessions mentioned above ? Sir 
 Charles Lyell, as we saw, had completed in 1833 his 
 new Principles of Geology. Thomas Robert Malthus 
 (1766-1834), in an earlier generation, had issued in 
 1798 his famous Essay on Population, and, though the 
 influence of his economics is inconsiderable to-day, 
 his biological researches were of prime importance to 
 the new learning. Robert Chambers, the Edinburgh 
 publisher, issued in 1844 his (anonymous) Vestiges / 
 of Creation, Charles Darwin (1809-82) ^ was ready 
 in the same year with a sketch of his theory of evo- 
 
 ^ Grandson of Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), physician and 
 evolutionist (old style), author of Loves of the Plants ; and son of 
 Dr. Darwin, F.R.S. The Fellowship of the Royal Society has also 
 been conferred on three of Darwin's sons, including his biographer, 
 Dr. Francis Darwin, and Sii- George Darwin, K.C.B. 
 
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 203 
 
 lution by natural selection, and published in 1859 the 
 first edition of the Origin of SpecieSy based on his 
 own experiments, and on those of Dr. Alfred Russel 
 Wallace (6. 1823), after correspondence with Lyell and 
 others. John Tyndall (1820-93) and Thomas Henry 
 Huxley (1825-95), who became fellows of the Royal 
 Society in 1852 and 1850 respectively, were associated 
 in 1860 in a volume on The Glaciers of the Alps. Hux- 
 ley's Zoological Evidences as to Man^s Place in Nature 
 followed in 1863, and was succeeded by special studies 
 in comparative anatomy and physiology ; Tyndall in- 
 vestigated the properties of light, sound and heat, and 
 his Contributions to Molecular Physics were collected 
 in 1872. 
 
 These men — and Darwin and Huxley especially — 
 did more than continue the tradition of natural philo- 
 sophy set by Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) and 
 Michael Faraday (1791-1867), for example. Davy 
 invented the safety -lamp (1815) and Faraday dis- 
 covered the principle of magneto-electricity (1831). Like 
 Hargreaves, Arkwright and George Stephenson, in an 
 older generation, their researches led them to inven- 
 tions, beneficial, mechanically, to society, the utmost 
 opposition to which would be industrial in kind. The 
 full force of that opposition was felt in 1768, when, as 
 we saw in another context 1, Hargreaves' s house and 
 machinery were wrecked by dispossessed hand-labourers, 
 and it was killed by Stephenson's ridicule of the problem 
 of the steam-engine and the cow. The new investi- 
 
 1 Page 19. 
 
204 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 gation of nature, directed to knowledge, not to its appli- 
 cation, came home to ' men's business and bosoms ' 
 with, far deeper force. No wrecked and reparable 
 machinery would wipe out the dispossession of beliefs 
 established immemorially in the heart. Nature's 
 facts, observed and tabulated, and summarized, where 
 legitimate, to conclusions — ' I only give facts, and such 
 conclusions from them as seem to me fair ' (Darwin, in 
 a letter to Lyell) — , had to meet, not the angry fears of 
 a superseded regiment of industry, but the bitter 
 hostility of disbanded soldiers of faith. Theology 
 armed against geology, the augurs of heaven against 
 the searchers of earth. 
 
 The old 'Science does not know its debt to imagination'. 
 
 ^'^^' This saying of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), 
 the American philosopher, may fitly stand at the 
 front of the present section of our inquiry. For, if 
 science had known its debt, how much bitterness would 
 have been avoided, how much good time would have 
 been saved, and how much pure literature might have 
 replaced the cross-breed literature of controversy. And, 
 conversely, if poets and theologians — the trustees of the 
 imaginative method — had recognized their debt to 
 science, how much more quickly, and with how much less 
 suffering, would reaction and obscuration have retreated 
 to the fastnesses where superstition masquerades in the 
 robe and with the sceptre of imagination. 
 
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 205 
 
 In retrospect, the evil side is uppermost. The 
 ignored debt must be paid. The longer the day of 
 reckoning is put off, the more difficult becomes recon- 
 cilement. History marches from symbolism to symbol- 
 ism, and the successive optimism of the symbolists is 
 the sole evidence we possess of the reluctant but in- 
 destructible reality which eludes the imitative types. 
 The Sphinx, gazing across the desert in the light of the 
 setting sun, across mounds which were once living 
 cities and ruins which once resounded with the love and 
 worship of mankind, expresses, not the triumph of 
 human skill and engineering, still less the triumph of 
 stone : it expresses the infinite yearning of an im- 
 prisoned idea, an imponderable spirit uncrushed be- 
 neath tons of vainglorious masonry, an elusive reality 
 mocking the ultimately inevitable dissolution of its 
 most powerful material rival. It derides the trophies 
 of dead kings laid at the feet of dead gods ; it re- 
 bukes human petrifaction defying nature's putrefaction. 
 The husk has survived the flame. To us, reviewing 
 the nineteenth century under the aspect of this struggle 
 between knowledge and beUef, the riddle of the Sphinx 
 recurs with insistent and urgent meaning. Did they, 
 too, our high priests of religion, viewed as formula 
 rather than as function, build their temple too solidly, 
 in the hope of imprisoning faith ? Did they, too, dis- 
 credit imagination by raising a monument in her name ? 
 Did they, too, seek to capture the untameable, and to 
 arrest the process of time ? 
 
 Each will answer these questions for himself, accord- 
 
2o6 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 ing to the significance which he attaches to the High 
 Church and the Broad Church movements, to the 
 defections to Rome, and to the increasing strength of 
 reason. To some perhaps it may seem that certain 
 aspects of life to-day — the prominence of ' positivist ' 
 aims among the leaders of the working classes, the lapse 
 of strenuous ideals, the abandoned safeguards and 
 shibboleths, and the vague material aspirations clouded 
 by socialist talk which confuse pohtics and society — 
 are not indirectly to be traced to the delusion fostered 
 by theologians as to the identity of dogma and rehgion. 
 They insisted that truth, observed, must be clipped to 
 tradition, revealed. Divine genesis, eternal damnation, 
 rewards and punishments, the immaculate conception, 
 and salvation by faith were to stand unmoved and un- 
 moveable in the age of advancing knowledge. The 
 pity was that, when these dogmas tottered, they shook 
 the foundations of better things. ' The vulgar only 
 'scaped, who stood without ', and even these might not 
 whoUy escape the noise and rubble of the ruin of the 
 noblest ideal ever offered to the contemplation of man- 
 kind. Take the evidence of contemporary writers — 
 Mr. Gosse's mid- Victorian memories, when his father, 
 Philip Henry Gosse (1810-88), genuinely thought 
 that he had reconciled geology with Genesis : ' In 
 my heart the artificial edifice of extravagant faith 
 began to totter and crumble ' ^ ; take Tess's meeting 
 with the glory-monger who painted the countryside red 
 with texts of damnation and burning : ' The last 
 
 ^ Father and Son, a Stvdy of Two Temperaments. Heinemann, 1 907. 
 
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 207 
 
 grotesque phase of a creed which, had served mankind 
 well in its time ' ^ — , and a portion of the evidence is at 
 hand. 
 
 m. 
 
 As Davy and Faraday preceded the era of Darwin Phases 
 and Huxley, so John Keble (1792-1866) and E. B. Pusey f^^lt. 
 (1800-82) proved, after the ' Noetics ', the authors, or 
 forerunners, of the Tractarian or High Church move- 
 ment, which included John Henry Newman (1801-90), 
 Richard Hurrell Froude (1803-36), Henry Edward 
 Manning (1808-92), William George Ward (1812-82) 
 and Henry Parry Liddon (1829-90), in their various 
 degrees of nearness and distance. 
 
 These form the Extreme Lefts of the two parties to 
 the fray in the camps of science and faith. The 
 Scientific Right is composed of such leaders of rational 
 philosophy as John Stuart Mill (1806-73), George 
 Henry Lewes (1817-78) and Herbert Spencer (1820- 
 1903), with a strong line of extension in the domain 
 of the philosophy of science, including Henry Longue- 
 ville Mansel (1820-71) in metaphysics. Sir Henry 
 Maine (1822-88) in jurisprudence, Henry Sidgwick 
 (1838-1900) in ethics, and others of recent date. 
 
 On the Religious Right may be placed the champions of 
 Broad Church Christian Socialism, Frederick Denison 
 Maurice (1805-72), Charles Kingsley (1819-75) and 
 
 ^ Tess of the D'Urbervilles, a Pure Woman. By Thomas Hardy. 
 11. 12. 
 
2o8 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Thomas Hughes (1823-96). Among those who ex- 
 tended their thought in the domain of the philosophy 
 of religion were Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of West- 
 minster, and Richard Chenevix Trench, Archbishop of 
 Dublin, Benjamin Jowett, Master of BalHol, and Mark 
 Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford ; Matthew 
 Arnold, Seeley and Froude in their theological excur- 
 sions from the realms of criticism and history ; and, it 
 might almost be said, every prominent churchman and 
 every eminent man of letters of the middle-Victorian era. 
 So infectious was the air of the Oxford Movement. 
 
 With these names to guide us, and keeping broadly in 
 view these clues to their strategical positions, we may 
 examine, perhaps, certain phases of the conflict. Take, 
 as a single instance from the most moderate camp, the 
 notice in July, 1871, of Darwin's Descent of Man in 
 The Quarterly Review. The writer affected to rise from 
 it ' with mingled feelings of admiration and disap- 
 pointment '. He sought for ' some consolation for the 
 injurious effects which this work is likely to produce on 
 many of our half -educated classes ', and he hoped that 
 ' Mr. Darwin may yet live to furnish us with another 
 work, which, while enriching physical science, shall not, 
 with needless opposition, set at nought the first principles 
 of both philosophy and religion '. Reading this review 
 as it was written, and taking Darwin as a type, and 
 Darwinism as a science, rather than a contribution to 
 it, the whole moral obliquity of nineteenth-century 
 thought is contained in these characteristic utterances. 
 It invented the ' opposition ' which it deplored. Let 
 
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 209 
 
 knowledge increase, tlie reviewer said in efiect ; let 
 it ' enrich ' — the word had a tang — the particular 
 fields which it cultivates ; but it must trail across the 
 sky of its bold and free observation a few of the illu- 
 minated texts which weaker brethren interpose between 
 the vision and the seer. Its May-Queens must die to 
 slow music. 
 
 And note that it was not the theologians who urged 
 the obvious plea, ' Complete the half-education as a 
 first condition of knowledge '. Newman wrote the 
 Idea of a University — an eloquent and a generous appeal 
 from the Roman Catholic university in DubHn — , but 
 it was Huxley, the coiner of ' agnosticism ', and the 
 protagonist of scientific method, who spared time 
 from his morphological researches to sit on the original 
 committee of the School Board for London (1870), and 
 who lent his valuable aid to its early deUberations. In 
 his zeal to increase knowledge, the man of science was 
 too wise to divorce philosophy from practice. Huxley 
 voted for the resolution in favour of religious teaching, 
 proposed by the late W. H. Smith, afterwards leader 
 of the House of Commons, which is still (1909) the 
 actual basis of religious instruction in the majority 
 of State-aided primary schools. He supported, accord- 
 ing to his son's memoir, ' what appeared to be the 
 only workable plan under the circumstances, though 
 it was not his ideal ', and it is precisely this power of 
 adaptation to environment which was lacking in the 
 theologians' camp. The hungry sheep looked up, and 
 were not fed. They were still asked to acquiesce in 
 14 
 
210 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 the medieval consolation of philosophy for aspirations, 
 sorrows, and a joy-hunger of a new era of reform. 
 The Tractarian movement was inadequate, like its 
 Pre-Raphaelite analogue in art, and Rome formed the 
 retreat of Newman, Manning and Patmore. The 
 Broad Church movement was inadequate, despite its 
 eloquence and courage ; not the least good it achieved 
 was Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua in reply to 
 Kingsley's attack. Meanwhile, if faith failed in its 
 synthesis, science never made the attempt. Science, 
 so called, or so miscalled, in opposition to faith, did not 
 aim at a moral sanction. Darwin consciously resigned 
 it to his imperious appetite for facts. ' My mind ', he 
 said in his Recollections (1876), ' seems to have become 
 a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large 
 collections of facts, but why this should have caused the 
 atrophy of that part of the brain alone on which the 
 higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. The loss of 
 these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly 
 be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the 
 moral character, by enfeebhng the emotional part of 
 our nature '. This double spiritual failure is deeply 
 to be deplored. Neither ' science ' nor ' imagination ' 
 alone — each ignoring its debt to the other — availed to 
 effect the reconciliation which complete enUghtenment 
 demands. The mind of the nineteenth century has 
 been enlarged by the conclusions of science, and has 
 efiected, partially, its enfranchisement from the bondage 
 of ecclesiastical authority. But true intellectual 
 freedom awaits its rebirth from the marriage of reason 
 
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 211 
 
 with faith. Till these two shall be united and identified, 
 the soul of man is still enslaved. There are still more 
 gardens to be won, till ' our half -educated classes ' 
 complete their education at last. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Before passing to this literature of reconcilement, 
 with its meed of harmony and form, a brief survey must 
 be made of the actual literature of conflict. 
 
 It is not all pure literature. This test, strictly appHed, The 
 would rule out the scientific monographs, much of the heriuJe 
 literature of the faith-and-reason controversy, and no 
 few, indeed, of the Oxford Movement books and 
 pamphlets. Tlie Origin of Species, for example, and 
 The Descent of Man, though they belong to literature 
 in the sense that the French Revolution belongs to it — 
 in a motive sense, that is to say, affecting literary in- 
 spiration, and estabhshing precedents (or positions) 
 from which human thought cannot go back — , were not 
 in themselves works of art of a literary kind. But 
 artem acquirunt eundo. Sincerity lent them form, and 
 enthusiasm imparted its glow, and, in respect to the 
 religious writings especially, the material was plastic 
 from the start. 
 
 John Keble, who was born in Shelley's year, was one Keble. 
 of Matthew Arnold's most distinguished predecessors 
 in the chair of poetry at Oxford, and published the 
 lectures of his professorate — De Poeticce Vi Medica — 
 
212 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 in 1841. For the last thirty years of his life (1836 to 
 1866) he administered a Hampshire vicarage, from 
 which he occasionally sent forth a volume of sermons 
 or addresses afire with the simple righteousness which 
 was the keynote of his aims. An assize sermon on 
 national apostacy which he preached in 1833 is commonly 
 regarded as the starting-point of the Oxford Movement 
 towards a refined ecclesiastical authority, and his seven 
 Tracts for the Times were among the earhest of the series. 
 But it is for his applied theology, rather, perhaps, than 
 for his theories, that Keble claims affection to-day. 
 His Christian Year, of 1827, and his Lyra Innocentium 
 of twenty years after, contain the pure essence of the 
 faith recommended by a Kempis and the saints, and 
 uphold an ideal of conduct, too monastic, it may be, 
 to convince, the appeal of which is well-nigh irresistible. 
 R. H. Hurrell Froude, the historian's elder brother, was a 
 Froude. p^pj^ ^f Keble at Oxford, and lived long enough, though 
 he died at thirty-four, to write three of the Tracts for 
 the Times, and to collaborate with Newman in the 
 ' Lyra Apostolica. His brother, James Anthony Froude 
 (1818-94), to whom we shall recur in a later section, 
 wrote, in 1844, a life of Neot, the saint, for a series 
 edited by Newman, and published, in 1849, The Nemesis 
 of Faith, a copy of which had the honour of being 
 pubHcly burned by William Sewell (1804-74), who 
 had renounced the Tractarian doxies. 
 Pusey* In Edward Bouverie Pusey, who was elected to an 
 Oriel fellowship in 1822, we reach a leader of the Oxford 
 Movement, who never swerved for sixty years — ^he 
 
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 213 
 
 died in 1882 — from his endeavour to found the doctrines 
 of the Church of England on the writings of the Anghcan 
 fathers. He contributed doctrinal treatises to the 
 Tracts for the Times, and was among the most active 
 of the controversialists. He was charged with heresy 
 in 1843, he took part in ecclesiastical trials for heresy, 
 and in 1862 he arraigned Jowett for heretical teaching. 
 His monument exists in Pusey House, and his work 
 and influence are abiding. 
 
 Newman became a fellow of Oriel in the same year Newman. 
 as Pusey, but resigned in 1832, in order to visit Italy. 
 His Lyra ApostoUca was written in Rome, and his fine 
 hynm, ' Lead, kindly Light ', was a part of the argosy of 
 his travels. On his return in 1833, he commenced 
 his Tracts for the Times, of which Tract XC (1841) con- 
 firmed the unorthodoxy of the Tractarians in the eyes 
 of Anglican defenders. He was already the author 
 of several Anglo-CathoHc monographs, and he spent 
 three years of his life (1842-45) in a monastic retreat, 
 at the close of which he was received into the Church 
 of Rome. He established an oratory at Birmingham, 
 became rector of the Cathohc University at Dublin, and 
 was created a cardinal in 1879. To Kingsley's attack 
 on Newman's veracity brief reference has been made, 
 and the Apologia pro Vita Sua was very much more 
 than a reply. With Loss and Gain : the Story of a 
 Convert, told in the guise of fiction, it remains the 
 clearest and most sincere of religious biographies in the 
 EngHsh language. Newman's style had an imaginative 
 power, which added considerably to his influence. It 
 
214 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 glows with the ardour of his mind. It is persuasive 
 where suasion is required, rapierlike where thrusts are 
 necessary, and, above all, deeply -laid in a spiritual 
 soil. Its flowers are redolent of heaven ; they open, 
 not to our sun, but to the light of another world. He 
 added to the resources of English prose the strength 
 of distance and of mystery employed on appropriate 
 material, thus completing De Quincey's aim with far 
 more than De Quincey's inspiration. There are prayer 
 and fasting in his style, as well as in his life. It has 
 a virtue, at its best, which can only be described as at 
 once virile and virginal. Its force was never used for 
 demagogy, its virginity was rarely claustral. Yet 
 these two qualities of this pious man of eloquence 
 transfused nearly everything which he wrote. 
 Oxford Cardinal Manning, whose conversion occurred in 
 Group, jggj. j)j. Ward— 'Ideal Ward', as he was called— 
 whose Ideal of a Christian Church appeared in 1844, 
 and who edited The Dublin Review from 1863 to 1878 ; 
 Canon Liddon, who wrote a Life of Pusey, and whose 
 sermons at St. Paul's Cathedral were an attraction of 
 mid- Victorian Sundays ; Bishop Wilberforce, of Oxford 
 and Winchester, who presided over the revision of the 
 New Testament ; these, and others, must not detain us 
 in a criticism of literature. Nor can we pause very 
 long at the names of the more popular writers — Jowett 
 (1817-93), whose paper on 'The Interpretation of 
 Scripture ' in the famous Broad Church manifesto, 
 the Essays and Reviews of 1860, is less important to-day 
 than his translations of Plato and Thucydides, and his 
 
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 215 
 
 work and influence at Balliol from 1870 till his death ; 
 Pattison (1813-84), in early life a Puseyite and 
 Newmanizer, Rector of Lincoln from 1861, and the 
 writer of his own Memoirs (up to the date of that 
 appointment), which have the curious value, more 
 difficult to define than to appreciate, attaching to the 
 literature of introspection. A little more remote from 
 Oxford was Dean Stanley (1815-81), biographer of 
 Thomas Arnold (Rugby's famous headmaster, 1795- 
 1842), and author of several series of lectures on ecclesi- 
 astical history, of which he held the Oxford chair. As 
 Dean of Westminster (1864-81), his work at the 
 Abbey was the counterpart of Liddon's at St. Paul's, 
 and his support of Ward and Jowett and his defence 
 of Essays and Reviews, as these episodes of controversy 
 arose, display the trend of his opinions. John William 
 Colenso (1814-83), writer of mathematical text-books, 
 and afterwards Bishop of Natal (1853), belongs to the 
 same busy age, and combined the criticism of Scripture 
 with missionary and educational work among the Zulus. 
 Colenso combined them so effectively, and with so 
 liberal a conception of criticism, that he was excom- 
 municated by the Bishop of Natal, though the courts 
 re-instated him in the see. He was one of the foremost 
 thinkers among the theologians of his time. 
 
 Educational activity, it should be added, was a pre- 
 occupation of this epoch. Jowett and Pattison took 
 part in it, on University Commissions and otherwise, 
 and it attracted as large a share of public interest and 
 time as the religious controversy itself. Thus Trench 
 
2i6 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 (1807-86) suggested the Oxford English. Dictionary 
 and was virtually the originator in this country of a 
 special class of literature, possessing considerable charm 
 — the folklore of words. He treated words as living 
 entities, under the aspects of morality and beauty, and 
 so raised philology from a science to an art. His 
 Notes on the Miracles and Parables and a moderate 
 number of good sonnets are also to be written to his 
 credit. Thus, too, Richard WilHam Church (1815-90), 
 afterwards Dean of St. Paul's — to be distinguished 
 from the Rev. A. J. Church (6. 1829), author of 
 many tales from many histories — , was one of Newman's 
 constant friends, a consistent member of the High 
 Church party, and a writer on literature and religion. 
 Thus, too, F.W. Farrar (1831-1903), Dean of Canterbury, 
 scholar, philologian, and author of school-stories, among 
 which Eric, or Little hyLittlewsiS once held in high esteem; 
 thus Canon Ainger (1837-1904), lover of Charles Lamb, 
 and other eminent divines. 
 -p J) From this list, which becomes a mere catalogue, as 
 
 we approach the present date, we go back to the writers 
 whom we placed on the right of the phalanx of religion. 
 The first of these is F. D. Maurice, who edited an 
 ^ Education Magazine, held the chair of English literature 
 at King's College, London, and was associated with 
 the foundation of Queen's College (1848). He was 
 accused of heterodoxy by The Quarterly Review (1851), 
 and confirmed the charge in the opinion of the authorities 
 • at King's by his Theological Essays (1853). He founded 
 the Working Men's College, and became its first head, 
 
 Maurice. 
 
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 217 
 
 and, late in life, lie returned to Cambridge as professor 
 of moral philosophy. In these happier days, when 
 the echoes of controversy are dead, Maurice is gratefully 
 remembered for his social and educational work, as a 
 true Christian democrat — or Christian Socialist, to use 
 the accepted term — , and, through his writings on 
 philosophy and sacred subjects, for his powers of 
 abstract argument. He is hardly yet adequately 
 honoured as a kind of Plato of Christianity. If Socrates 
 had been raised to divine rank in a religion of Socrati- 
 anity — ^and it became ' the religion, not of the masses 
 in general, but of the masses of the educated ' 1, — 
 Plato's writings would have taken their place by the 
 side of the Pauline Gospel. Maurice, in certain respects 
 of style, is hardly inferior. His works distil the wisdom 
 of the West, and their heterodoxy of fifty years ago is 
 to-day a conservative spirit which is as valuable as it 
 is deeply-reasoned. It is almost impossible to illustrate 
 by quotation these men of letters who were ' religionists ' 
 first, and whose literary merit is sometimes an accident 
 of temperament. But Maurice, Hke Newman among 
 the Tractarians, is one of the masters of Enghsh prose, 
 and the following passage may be taken as typical of 
 his style : 
 
 My desire is to ground all human morahty upon the 
 relation in which man stands to God, to exhibit what- 
 ever is right and true in man as only the image and 
 reflex of the original Righteousness and Truth. I can- 
 not base this morahty upon the dread of some future 
 ^ T. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers^ Murray, ii. 244. 
 
2i8 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 punishments, upon the expectation of some future 
 rewards. I believe the attempts to make men 
 moral by such means have failed always ; are never 
 more egregiously and monstrously failing than now. 
 . . . Morality consists, as I believe, in the giving up 
 of ourselves. All immorality consists in self-seeking, 
 self-pleasing, self-glorifying. Instead of giving himself 
 up to God, man seeks to make his God, or his gods, 
 give up to him ; he offers sacrifices, that he may per- 
 suade the power which he thinks he has wronged to 
 exempt him from the punishment of his wrong. This 
 is man's theology ; this is what has produced all the 
 hateful superstition under which the world groans. 
 
 Dedicatory Letter to The Doctrine of Sacrifice. 
 
 Kingsley. Charles Kingsley, two of whose brothers (George, 
 1827-92, and Henry, 1830-76) and whose niece, 
 Mary (1862-1900), George Kingsley's daughter, were 
 likewise writers and travellers, became rector of Eversley 
 in 1844, and a canon of Westminster in 1873. He was 
 the first lecturer in EngUsh at Maurice's foundation. 
 Queen's College, London, and, in 1860, took the chair 
 of modern history at Cambridge. As ' Parson Lot ' 
 he wrote Politics for the People, and his type of Christian 
 Socialism was distinctly more militant than Maurice's. 
 The * muscular Christian ' idea is associated with his 
 teaching. Mainly, it was expressed in romances, 
 thus bringing us back — for the first time since faith 
 took the field against knowledge — to the domain of 
 pure literature. The finest of his romances is the 
 Elizabethan Westward Ho/, but Yeast, Hypatia and 
 AUon Locke — the last a genuine labour-novel — though 
 
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 219 
 
 a little too vehement, or ' muscular ', are very worthy 
 of the cause for which he stood, and Two Years Ago, ^ 
 published two years after the Crimea, is not much 
 inferior in power. The roving instinct in the Kingsley 
 blood, which Mary Kingsley was most fully to express, 
 found its vent in her uncle's papers on sport and the 
 open air, and in a certain vigorous abandon to the call 
 of the winds and sea which is of the essence of his style. 
 The Water Babies (1863) and Glaucus, studies of the 
 seashore, were wholly successful experiments in child- 
 and nature- lore respectively. 
 
 Lastly, Thomas Hughes (1822-96), a County Court Hughes, 
 judge, who succeeded Maurice as head of the Working 
 Men's College, was the author of Tom Brovm's School- 
 days (1857), a vivid study of Rugby under Arnold, 
 .which no later story of school-life has dethroned from 
 its supreme place. The Oxford sequel (1861) was by 
 no means as happy, and Hughes is emphatically among 
 the writers who live by the merit of one book. 
 
 Finally, in the realm of pure knowledge, as distinct Science 
 from that of faith, the works of Darwin and T5nidall sophy. 
 cannot detain us as Uterature, and Huxley, despite a 
 trenchant style, was a man of science first and a man 
 of letters afterwards. His educational papers possess per- 
 manent value ; his monograph on Hume is a masterpiece ; 
 and he was impelled — or attracted — ^to take a some- 
 
220 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 what copious share in the controversial literature of his 
 day, the bulk of which is historical material. His part in 
 controversy has been defined, and his labours in the cause 
 of elementary education have been mentioned, nor can 
 they be overpraised. Pure learning claims the rest. 
 Herbert The extension of reason to rationalism, and the 
 (1820^^ application of the rational sanction to ethics, politics \/ 
 1903). a^jj(j economics, by the philosophers of this age, are 
 likewise beyond the survey of the critic of pure letters. 
 Theirs is more neutral territory, lying between literature 
 and learning. Philosophic writers, if distinguishable 
 from philosophers — ^Plato, as against Aristotle — , have 
 also been great men of letters ; but the school-men, 
 from Aristotle downwards, belong to the history of 
 thought, and are, at most, but foster-sons of literature. 
 So Herbert Spencer's ' magna instauratio ', Baconian 
 in its height and breadth, but missing Bacon's depth 
 of wisdom, and inamenable to literary judgment — the 
 man was a mass of inamenities, as his chapters of auto- 
 biography 1 reveal — , must be left to the province which 
 he occupied, and in which he was dictator rather than ^ 
 prince. The comer-stones of his vast scheme were 
 J First Principles (1861), the Classification of the Sciences 
 (1864) and Data of Ethics (1879). Round his stupendous 
 ^ scheme of a synthetic philosophy, which aimed at uni- 
 fying knowledge, and at explaining humanity in the 
 terms of evolution, Spencer built a series of monuments, 
 founded on the principle of individualism, the total im- *^ 
 
 * An Autobiography. By Herbert Spencer. 2 vols. Williams &. 
 Norgate, 1904.] 
 
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 221 
 
 pression of which is somewhat disappointing. Spencer's 
 ' absolute ethics ' were based on a moral criterion 
 drawn up in a perfect society. The egoism and al- 
 truism were to coalesce in conduct yielding complete 
 pleasure ; and, whatever the verdict of knowledge, 
 literature will agree with the leaders of the ideaUstic 
 revolt in modifying, by metaphysical criticism, and 
 under psychological analysis, Spencer's evolutional 
 conclusions from the purely logical point of view. 
 
 Mill, who was Spencer's senior, and whom Spencer John 
 survived by thirty years, was a far more humane ^^i 
 thinker. He devoted his best work and talents to the ^}q^^ 
 
 lo7o). 
 
 construction of a system of utihtarian ethics, thus 
 following Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), a founder of 
 The Westminster Review, to which Mill was a constant 
 contributor. Mill's System of Logic (1843) was faithful 
 to the inductive method of contemporary science, with 
 its patient investigation of phenomena. His studies 
 of Political Economy appeared in the following year, 
 and led to a more extensive treatise on the Principles 
 of Political Economy in 1848. These works, which rank 
 as English classics, suffer from the same defect of under- 
 rating the influence of human nature. The individual- 
 ists reckoned without socialism, and British moral 
 philosophy in the first half of the nineteenth century was 
 slow in learning its lesson from Continental and Trans- 
 atlantic writers. The influence on MiU of Auguste Comte, 
 the French Positivist philosopher 1, and the inventor 
 
 ^ Positivism may briefly, and unscientifically, be defined as 
 Huxley's agnosticism, or phenomenalism (knowability limited by 
 
222 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 of the term, if not of the science, of sociology, proved 
 considerable in later life, when Mill added On Liberty, 
 Representative Government and Utilitarianism to the 
 longer treatises of twenty years before. Later still, 
 he collected from reviews a number of Dissertations 
 and Discussions, which afiord very interesting reading. 
 They include a paper on ' Poetry and its Varieties ', 
 which Herbert Spencer, for all his learning, could never 
 have composed. 
 
 Summary. It is not practicable to pursue these notes through 
 all the philosophic writers who belong to, or are 
 variants of, this school. There was Sir William 
 Hamilton (1788-1856), the metaphysician, some years 
 senior to Mill, whose philosophy Mill criticized, 
 and whose logical bent he appreciated. There 
 were Alexander Bain, T. H. Green, Henry Sidgwick, 
 Stanley Jevons, W. K. Clifford, and the Uving 
 writers, Professors F. H. Bradley, William James (of 
 New York), F. C. S. Schiller, J. A. Stewart, Mr. Ben- 
 jamin Kidd, and others. But rich as the age has been 
 in philosophers and writers on philosophy, the true 
 direction of English genius has taken other channels. 
 Darwin stands alone as the author of categories of 
 thought, which determine the very processes of our 
 minds. Apart altogether from the value of his incre- 
 ment to knowledge, we think in Darwinian terms. We 
 are all intellectual Darwinians, whether consciously 
 
 sense- perception) plus ' the religion of humanity ', which has found 
 eminent disciples in Mr. Frederic Harrison (6. 1831) and others. 
 
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 223 
 
 or unconsciously. But, Darwin excepted, the Victorian 
 philosophers hardly rank as members of a school. The 
 Oxford Movement, which came forth from Oriel, bore 
 witness to the preoccupation of the university with 
 religious speculation. Few facilities were offered to 
 philosophers, and, though certain types of thinkers 
 were encouraged to reside at such centres, the direct 
 association of schools of thought with British homes 
 of learning has not been a characteristic of the age. 
 
 Our philosophers have been novelists and poets. The 
 age, at the point which we have reached, is urgently in 
 need of refreshment. It needs writers, more universal 
 than the synthetists, who will gather to an harmonious 
 whole the mingled voices of their times. Reason is to 
 be a function of faith, and faith an attribute of 
 reason. A spirit must be breathed into intellect, and 
 wisdom added to learning. Literature, we feel, must 
 transcend the bounds of logical inquiry, and shed upon 
 a dry land the healing dews of imagination. Science 
 has liberated the mind. It is for literature to make 
 valid the new resources. 
 
T 
 
 § 2. TENNYSON. 
 
 I HOSE who look, as contemporaries looked, for a 
 complete answer in Tennyson are likely to be 
 disappointed. More tlian any writer in this age, he 
 devoted his genius to the conflict between knowledge 
 and behef. He had himself a scientific mind, to the 
 extent of — if not beyond — a talent for patient observa- 
 tion, and he was always sensitive to currents of opinion 
 and thought. These faculties were combined with a 
 constant conservative purpose, rooted in the associations 
 of his childhood, and confirmed by his experience 
 throughout life. The stable order of things haunted 
 him well-nigh ' like a passion ' ; and hence came his 
 curious reluctance to face the logic of facts. 
 
 His poetic powers developed slowly, but, having once 
 reached their height, they were maintained evenly 
 Poems of at one level. He accompanied, as we have seen, the 
 transit through 1832 with a volume of poetry more 
 melodious than thoughtful. In the following year 
 occurred the death of his close college -friend and in- 
 tended brother-in-law, Arthur Henry Hallam (1811-33). 
 This bereavement, his son reminds us, ' blotted out 
 all joy from his hfe, and made him long for death ' ; 
 the slow process of recovery from ' such a first friend- 
 
 334 
 
 1842. 
 
TENNYSON 225 
 
 ship and such a loss helped to reveal himself to himself, 
 while he enshrined his sorrow in his song ' ^. For ten 
 years thereafter he was silent, brooding over his grief, 
 and fitting its moods to the hints and echoes of the 
 times. Then, 1842, he issued Poems, in two volumes. 
 The first volume contained, mainly, reimpressa — revised 
 versions of earlier poems — , and the second, mainly, 
 new pieces. Among these, Ulysses, Tithonus and 
 Locksley Hall were, perhaps, the most characteristic of 
 two aspects of his genius. 
 
 The idylls of Ulysses and Tithonus aimed at rendering 
 Greek themes in the terms of modern understanding, 
 and were, so far, Keats-Hke by design, with an added 
 sensationalism in the point of view. Their extra- 
 ordinarily careful workmanship displayed Tennyson's 
 cultivated power of steeping the senses in music, half 
 Miltonic and half Virgilian. He employed the metre of 
 blank verse to induce emotional effects of a partly lan- 
 guid, partly august beauty, the secret of which, if it can be 
 analysed at all, is chiefly to be traced to his disposition of 
 consonants and vowels — ^his exquisite tact for sound — , 
 to his variation in pauses, and to his choice of simple 
 epithets. We can give but the barest instances, and these 
 are necessarily inadequate to effects which grow clearer 
 at each re-reading. Note, among sound-arrangements, 
 
 (1) There gloom the dark broad seas 
 
 (2) The long day wanfes ; the slow moon climbs ; the deep 
 Moans round with many voices 
 
 1 Alfred, Lord Tennyson : a Memoir. By his son. Macmillan, 
 1897, i. 109. 
 
 15 
 
226 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 in both of which an effect is produced by sounds falling 
 like heavy sighs. ' The lights begin to twinkle from the 
 rocks ', with its obvious succession of sounds vanishing 
 suddenly on the ear, is a contrary instance of UghreU 
 likewise taken from Ulysses. Note, too, the predomi- 
 nant monosyllables in which these vowel-sounds occur 
 — a very Tennysonian practice. Skill in the arrange- 
 ment of consonants is a more common gift, but Tenny- 
 son's alliteration is not common. ' There lies the 
 port : the vessel pufEs her sail ' is notable for the ' p ' 
 in ' puffs ' picking up the ' p ' in ' port ', as well as, 
 more subtly, for the ' s . . 1 ' sound repeated from 
 ' vessel ' in ' sail '. The ' m ' and ' n ' sounds in the 
 couplet just above (* wanes ', * moon ', ' climbs ', 
 ' moans ', ' round ', ' many ') are combined with the 
 vowel-variations. As an instance of the use of pauses 
 we may take four consecutive lines of this poem : 
 
 Push off, I and sitting well in order smite 
 The sounding furrows ; I for my purpose holds 
 To sail beyond the sunset, | and the bars 
 Of all the western stars until I die. | 
 
 In the first line the pause occurs at the end of 
 the first of the five beats; in the second, between 
 the second and the third ; in the third, between the 
 third and the fourth ; in the fourth, at the end of 
 the fifth. 
 
 Tennyson is full of these subtleties, of these technical 
 feats of word- and sound- craft, affording delight to 
 the ear, and the foregoing indications will be multipUed 
 by any of his readers. 
 
TENNYSON 227 
 
 Locksley Hall, the third poem referred to, is charac- 
 teristic in another wise. It displays the popular 
 presentment of current tendencies of thought which 
 made the poet for more than fifty years the most readily 
 quoted of English writers. The verses beginning ' In 
 the spring ', 'As the husband is, the wife is ', 
 ' Baby lips will laugh me down ', ' Men, my brothers, 
 men the workers ', ' Knowledge comes, but wisdom 
 lingers ', ' Woman is the lesser man ', ' Better 
 fifty years of Europe ', and others, typify Tennyson's 
 genius in summing up philosophies in phrases. 
 
 In the same volume (ii. 1842) was included Love 
 and Duty, a brief poem in blank verse, containing the 
 well-known lines — from ' Of Love that never found his 
 earthly close ' to ' Wait : my faith is large in time, 
 And that which shapes it to some perfect end ' — , 
 which unhappy lovers have always recited with a con- 
 scious glow of moral rectitude. This suspicion of 
 strvt in conduct, this slightest touch of veneer overlying 
 the admirable sentiment — a sublime primness, so to 
 speak — , is not an unusual mark of Tennyson's virtuous 
 man, from Enoch Arden to Arthur himself. Here, too, 
 we meet the distinction between ' knowledge ' and 
 ' wisdom ' — ^it is found at the same time in Locksley 
 Hall — , which was used to more passionate purpose 
 in In Memoriam, cxii, and by which Tennyson sought 
 to express the need of his age for a higher power of 
 knowledge than mere knowing. But the power of 
 faith, to which he raised it, and by virtue of which he 
 discerned the * perfect end ' shaped by Time, proved 
 
228 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 less efficacious at closer quarters. To this shrinking 
 we shall return. 
 The The Princess, a Medley, appeared in 1847, and was 
 
 rtncesa. af^^j^^j^g extensively revised. Its chief charm is in 
 its songs : ' Come down, maid, from yonder mountain 
 height ' is mentioned in another context (p. 246, 
 infra) ; ' Tears, idle tears ' is quoted in full below. 
 The argument of the whole poem, amplified, perhaps, 
 from the couplet in LocJcsley Hall, beginning ' Woman 
 is the lesser man', is not very enlightening to-day. 
 Little is added to social ideals, and nothing to social 
 practice, by the melodious musing of this serio-comic 
 medley. 
 Tenny- With the publication of The Princess, Tennyson's 
 
 maturity : apprenticeship was ended. His name was already on 
 the Civil List, and, when Wordsworth died in 1850, he 
 was appointed with general approval to the vacant 
 poet-laureateship. His marriage with Miss Emily 
 Sellwood had taken place in the same year. He retained 
 the laurel till his death, and wore it more sedulously 
 than Southey and Wordsworth, his predecessors in the 
 nineteenth century. Precisely to trace its influence on 
 his material and style would carry us too far along the 
 line of speculation, but it is not fanciful to say that 
 Tennyson's friendship with Queen Victoria — the Queen 
 herself honoured it with that name — , though he pre- 
 served throughout the privilege an independent, almost 
 unconventional bearing, reinforced his native instinct 
 towards tame and safe conclusions. His patriotism 
 was always of this kind. It had nothing venturesome 
 
TENNYSON 229 
 
 or confident in its haughty, almost regal, reverence of 
 place, and ceremony, and order. In the lines of 1832, 
 composed in the metre of In Memoriam, Tennyson 
 defended his love of England as ' a land of settled 
 government . . . Where freedom slowly broadens down 
 From precedent to precedent ', a description hardly to 
 have been expected from a yomig poet of the England 
 of the Reform Act. He admitted the efficacy of change, 
 but bespoke for its complement so much patience that 
 fruition might be indefinitely postponed. In The 
 Palace of Art he drew that moving picture of an EngHsh 
 home, ' gray twilight pour'd On dewy pastures, dewy 
 trees, Softer than sleep — all things in order stored, A 
 haunt of ancient Peace ', which symbolizes his love of 
 tradition. It is to be compared with many aspirations 
 in In Memoriam of which the following is a type ; 
 
 A love of freedom greatly felt. 
 Of freedom in her regal seat 
 Of England, not the schoolboy heat. 
 
 The blind hysterics of the Celt. 
 
 The same note is heard again in the Ode on the Death of 
 the Duke of Wellington, and it characterized and limited 
 the poet's sympathies throughout. 
 
 There is a courtliness — a courtier liness — in his Idylls of 
 poetry which is not altogether to the good. It in- ^^' ^*''^* 
 fected the Idylls of the King with a sentimental humour 
 — Q, kind of moral mock - responsibility — ^which made 
 even noble deeds too flowery : 
 
 And noble deeds, the flower of all the world, 
 And each invited each to noble deeds. 
 
230 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 The ideal was pitched impossibly high. Hardly Shelley's 
 love-sick ' maiden in a palace tower ' could have asked 
 for floods of sweeter music than Tennyson poured out in 
 these pictures, based upon Malory's stirring narrative. 
 Five well-known calls to conduct may be quoted out of 
 many famihar examples : 
 
 (1) Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all 
 
 (2) To lead sweet lives in purest chastity. 
 To love one maiden only, cleave to her, 
 And worship her by years of noble deeds 
 
 (3) Let no man dream but that I love thee still 
 
 (4) We needs must love the highest when we see it 
 
 (5) Ideal manhood closed in real man 
 
 These passages, and passages like these, which abound 
 in the Idylls, were written, it may fairly be suggested, 
 with a consciousness of the laureate's robe. They are 
 ornate, stately, statuesque, of Leighton rather than of 
 Watts, a trifle under-impassioned, and a little too polite 
 to be true, except in the charmed circle of a court. 
 In Me- At the date of his marriage and appointment, in the 
 middle of the century, 1850, Tennyson issued, anony- 
 mously at first, his most ambitious poem. In Memoriam. 
 It was inscribed to the memory of Arthur Hallam, 
 who had died seventeen years before, and its parts had 
 been gradually put together — no other description is 
 so suitable — during the interval of mourning. The 
 actual expressions of bereavement : 
 
 (1) 'Tis better to have loved and lost 
 ThaQ never to have loved at all . . . 
 
 mortam. 
 
TENNYSON 231 
 
 (2) My guardian angel will speak out 
 
 In that high place, and tell thee all . . . 
 
 and other phrases more appropriate to a stricken bride- 
 groom than to a man of forty commemorating an early 
 friend, need not be taken too literally, and, even literally, 
 should not repel sympathy. It was an age which 
 exaggerated signs of grief — Queen Victoria's letters are 
 full of them — ^without affecting, in the least, men's 
 powers of intellect and character. Moreover, the sorrow 
 of In Memoriam is general rather than personal. It 
 typifies human bereavement, and is subsidiary, accord- 
 ingly, to the main purpose of the poem — the triumph 
 of faith over death. 
 
 A second point is the form which the poem assumed. 
 Tennyson himself, a little consciously, describes its 
 parts (In Memoriam, xlviii) as * brief lays of sorrow 
 bom ', and as ' short swallow-flights of song, that dip 
 Their wings in tears, and skim away '. It was the 
 poet's thought perhaps, rather than his sorrow, as he 
 himself avows, which dared not ' trust a higher lay ', 
 but Tennyson was wisely inspired in avoiding the 
 mistake of Philip James Bailey, for example, who 
 essayed the eagle-flight of Goethe on very insecure 
 pinions. There is a Trinity monument in Vienna which 
 represents clouds in marble. The material contradicts 
 the form, and the effect is top-heavy. Tennyson, the 
 half-way thinker, was almost always too perfect an 
 artist to commit this mistake. Occasionally, he gilds 
 the edges which Wordsworth, for instance, would have 
 left plain, as in Enoch Arden contrasted with Michael ; 
 
232 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 but his art-instinct seldom betrays him, and, certainly, 
 in In Memoriam, the broken poems correctly represent 
 the imperfect and personal design. 
 
 The poem belongs to its age, and, in less skilful 
 hands, it might, conceivably, have perished with the 
 circumstances that produced it. Its beauty saves it 
 from this fate, the elaborate charm — ^with the labour 
 concealed — ^which the greatest word-artificer in English 
 poetry introduced into every verse and every phrase. 
 In no instance was Tennyson content with less than 
 complete expression, whether in nature-observation, 
 especially of birds and flowers, or in popular renderings 
 of the abstract arguments of his day. So simple and 
 lucid is his language that the pains which went to 
 fashion it are overlooked, at least till we study the 
 comparative history of his text, with his patient labour 
 in revision. In the end, his challenge to thought 
 was rewarded with the gift of expression. The new 
 methods of science were endued with the forms of art. 
 A philosophy hardly articulate was made not merely 
 vocal but artistic. Arguments of exceptional difficulty 
 were sustained at the height of poetic style. Pope 
 himself, in his poUshed couplets, never surpassed these 
 feats of linguistic exposition, and Pope did not seek to 
 add to them Tennyson's emotional appeal. Take, for 
 instance, the following few lines from Pope's Essay on 
 Maw, and measure Tennyson's achievement by comparing 
 them with a poem from In Memoriam. Pope writes : 
 
 Self-love thus pushed to social, to divine, 
 
 Gives thee to make thy neighbour's blessing thine. 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 Of 
 
 TENNYSON"-'^""^^^"^-'^ 233 
 
 Is this too little for the boundless heart ? 
 
 Extend it, let thy enemies have part ; 
 
 Grasp the whole worlds of reason, life, and sense, 
 
 In one close system of benevolence : 
 
 Happier as kinder, in whate'er degree, 
 
 And height of bliss but height of charity. 
 
 God loves from whole to parts : but human soul 
 
 Must rise from individual to the whole. 
 
 Gnomic verse, as it is called — the poetry most alien 
 to lyric, and most impersonal in inspiration — , could not 
 go further than in this passage. Volumes of ethical 
 theory and of social philosophy are contained in it. It 
 is delivered with no bias save of intellect, thus irre- 
 sistibly commanding intellectual admiration. ' Happier 
 as kinder ', for instance, is a phrase minted by the 
 mind, conveying, in form and diction (' kind ' sum- 
 marizing ' kin '), all the resources available to 
 the poetic art of the eighteenth century. Now, 
 read these lines again, and turn from them to In 
 Memoriam, Iv : 
 
 The wish, that of the living whole 
 
 No life may fail beyond the grave, 
 Derives it not from what we have 
 
 The likest God within the soul ? 
 
 Are God and Nature then at strife, 
 
 That Nature lends such evil dreams ? 
 So careful of the type she seems, 
 
 So careless of the single life ; 
 
 That I, considering everywhere 
 
 Her secret meaning in her deeds. 
 And finding that of fifty seeds 
 
 She often brings but one to bear, . . . 
 
234 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope. 
 And gather dust and chaff, and call 
 To what I feel is Lord of all. 
 
 And faintly trust the larger hope. 
 
 Allowing for the difference between the stanza and the 
 couplet — four lines with two rhymes against two with 
 one — ^is there not the same felicity of phrase-making in 
 Tennyson as in Pope ? the same ability to complete an 
 argument in a phrase, and the same gnomic power : 
 * So careful of the type she seems ', ' God loves from 
 whole to parts ', and so forth ? 
 
 What Tennyson added to Pope was the drenching 
 personal emotion. * /, considering everywhere ', ' / 
 stretch lame hands of faith ', ' / feel is Lord of all ', 
 etc., replacing the * boundless heart ' and the ' human 
 soul ', and the generic ' thou ' of the Essay. The ' I ', 
 Tennyson might say, ' is not always the author speaking 
 of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking 
 through him ' {Memoir, i. 305) ; but it is always 
 personal, always emotional. It kindles a lyrical in- 
 tensity on the chill altar of the intellect, and the essence 
 of Ijrricism is contained at the close of the preceding 
 stanza : 
 
 But what am I ? 
 An infant crying in the night : 
 An infant crying for the light : 
 And with no language but a cry. 
 
 It is the language of feehng which is invoked, and 
 through which the poet sought to transcend the revela- 
 tion of knowledge : 
 
TENNYSON 235 
 
 A warmth within the breast would melt 
 The freezing reason's colder part. 
 And like a man in wrath the heart 
 
 Stood up and answer'd ' I have felt '. 
 
 No, like a child in doubt and fear : 
 
 And that blind clamour made me wise ; 
 Then was I as a child that cries, 
 
 But, crying, knows his father near. 
 
 76., cxxiv. 
 
 A new language should deliver a new message. How 
 far did this child of feeling — ^the critic of In Memoriam 
 must ask — succeed in delivering such a message ? How 
 far do these associative phrases, softening the harshness 
 of the intellect, truly and finally correspond to the 
 questions raised in the poem ? Do the pacified feelings 
 extend the canopy of their peace to reason ? Does 
 the tranquiUized ' I ' speak finally for ' the human 
 race ' ? For the questions raised by Tennyson are 
 serious to thought. * Are God and Nature then at 
 strife ? ' was one. * What fame is left for human 
 deeds in endless age ? ' was another. To ' contemplate 
 all this work of Time ' was his attitude towards geo- 
 logical speculation. * I think we are not wholly brain, 
 . . . Let science prove we are, and then What matters 
 science unto men ? ' was the gage which he threw down 
 in the morphological arena. It is not unreasonable 
 to expect a reply as bold as the challenge. But Tenny- 
 son shrank from this issue, both here and in his later 
 poems. He calls man ' the herald of a higher race ', but 
 the heraldic emblem which he worships is the ' grand 
 old name of gentleman '. He bids man ' move up- 
 
236 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 ward, working out the beast ', and ' let the ape and 
 tiger die '. He repudiates the scientific monster who 
 would ' shape his action like the greater ape '. He 
 declares that he is ' born to better things '. He 
 guesses at a ' power in darkness ' transcending the god 
 of evolution, and he trusts, or believes, that ' all is well ' . 
 But, withal, men's efforts towards good are * red 
 fool-fury ' thrice repeated. Do nothing, dare nothing, 
 assert nothing — tradition, custom, doubt — are at the 
 root of his practical counsel, and ' the larger hope ' and 
 the ' divine event ' are subordinated to these negations. 
 The ' higher man ' and the ' better things ' are post- 
 poned by Tennyson to a dateless consummation : 
 
 Where is one that, bom of woman, altogether can escape 
 From the lower world within him, moods of tiger or of ape ? 
 Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning age of ages 
 Shall not aeon after aeon pass, and touch him into shape ? 
 
 This was his commentary in later life upon his creed 
 in 1850. The killing of the tiger and the ape was ad- 
 journed sine die, and, meanwhile, the progress of 
 freedom, moral and political alike, was to observe the 
 conventions of decorum. 
 Tenny- We return from Tennyson, the interpreter, to 
 style. Tennyson, the craftsman, with his unfailing sources 
 of dehght. One or two elements in this dehght have 
 already been analysed, and it may, summarily, be 
 said that a mastery of words and sounds almost in- 
 finitely subtle is the secret of the whole. Even when 
 this is said, however, the wonder of the secret remains. 
 The utmost that criticism can do is to indicate — 
 
TENNYSON 237 
 
 somewhat conjecturally — some keys to the poetic 
 method : the genius manipulating the keys lies beyond 
 the crucible of the critic. 
 
 In the bazaars of the East there may be seen, sitting 
 cross-legged on his bench, the goldsmith with his 
 trays of precious stones. Darting a tiny pair of pincers 
 here and there among the jewels, he picks out now one 
 and now another, and examines it in the sun and the 
 shade. If the slightest flaw be detected, the stone is 
 put back into the tray : the chosen gems are laid 
 aside, and are disposed in artistic patterns, according 
 to colour and size. Tennyson's method with words 
 and sounds was not unlike the goldsmith's, and tiaras 
 and rivieres of design rewarded his patient craftsman- 
 ship. The total gain to the^ technique of literature is 
 far more than a matter of vowel-sounds, but a single 
 instance makes it clear how important is this factor of 
 word-music. Nothing else would have made the poet 
 alter the opening line of Tithonus from ' Ay me, ay me ! 
 the woods decay and fall ' to ' The woods decay, the 
 woods decay and fall'. 
 
 From this elementary example it is mainly a task of 
 observation to track the art of the poet through its 
 more remote and complicated windings. Take the 
 following stanza from one of the songs in Maud : 
 
 Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls, 
 
 Come hither, the dances are done, 
 In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls, 
 
 Queen lily and rose in one ; 
 Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls, 
 
 To the flowers, and be their sun. 
 
238| NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 The mere rhymes, though in triplicate, are the least 
 part of the charm of these verses. ' Queen rose . . . 
 rosebud . . . Queen lily and rose ' ; ' g^arden . . . 
 girls ', ' (^awces . . . dom ', ' grZoss . . . grZimmer ', 
 ' lily . . . little ', ' sunning . . . sun ', are a few of the 
 alliterative and repetitive effects. The vowel-effects 
 are similarly skilful. ' Hither ', ' satin ', ' glimmer ', 
 * lily ', * little ', ' sunning ', all contain the short ' i ' 
 sound which adds to the tripping measure of the dance, 
 and the sound of ' out ' is caught up in ' over ', as 
 the ' s . . n ' of ' shine ' in the ' s . . n ' of ' sun '. 
 
 All this, in analysis, is meticulous, and seems very 
 distant from the impression actually produced by the 
 poem. But turn from it to the song in The Princess, 
 already mentioned above, and note how completely 
 this depends on similar triumphs of skill. The whole 
 song must be quoted ; there are only twenty lines : 
 
 Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, 
 Tears from the depth of some divine despair 
 Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes. 
 In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, 
 And thinking of the days that are no more. 
 
 Fresh as the first beam gUttering on a sail. 
 That brings our friends up from the underworld. 
 Sad as the last which reddens over one 
 That sinks with all we love below the verge ; 
 So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more. 
 
 Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns 
 The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds 
 To djdng ears, when unto dying eyes 
 The casement slowly grows a glimmering square ; 
 So sad, so strange, the days that are no more. 
 
TENNYSON 239 
 
 Dear as remember'd kisses after death. 
 And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign' d 
 On lips that are for others ; deep as love, 
 Deep as first love, and wild with all regret ; 
 Death in Life, the days that are no more. 
 
 Here we notice, or, rather, we hardly notice, tliat 
 there are actually no rhymes. Tennyson straightly 
 renounces this first aid to poetry, and relies solely upon 
 the resources of interior decoration. The close of each 
 stanza with the words ' the days that are no more ' is 
 the first and most obvious 'pro-ihyme. ' Tears . . . 
 tears . . . tears ', in lines 1 and 2, is likewise fairly 
 obvious, as are ' fresh ' (6 and 10), ' sad ' (8, 10, 11 and 
 15), ' strange ', ' deep ' and ' love '. Another sig- 
 nificant point is the predominance of monosyllables. 
 Thirty-four words out of forty-two in the first stanza 
 are one-syllabled, thirty-five out of forty-two in the 
 last, and thirty-nine out of forty-four in the second 
 The value of this feature is twofold, or, rather, it pre 
 sents two aspects of simplicity. The meaning is pellu 
 cidly clear ; the notes strike directly on the emotions 
 like pure music untranslated through language ; and 
 secondly, the mind is soothed by famihar and homely 
 words. Next, there are the subtler assonances 
 running through the whole poem. Take the ' d ' and 
 ' t ' sounds, for example, in ' tears ', ' idle ', ' depth ', 
 ' divine ', ' despair ' (two of these repeat ' p ' as well) ; 
 take the short vowel sound in ' fresh ', * first ', ' glitter- 
 ing ', ' brings ', ' friends ', ' and ', ' sad ', * red ' (noting 
 the quadrupled ' d ' ending), ' sinks ', * love ', and so 
 
240 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 back, through ' sad ', to ' fresh '. Take the long 
 vowel sound in the third stanza : ' strange ', ' dark ', 
 
 * dawn ', ' earl ', ' pipe ', ' wake ', ' dy ', ' ears ', ' eyes ', 
 
 * case ', ' slow ', ' grow ', ' square ' ; and, again and less 
 variously in the fourth : ' dear ', ' death ', ' sweet ', 
 
 * hope ', ' feign ', ' deep ', ' wild ', ' Life ', chiefly long 
 ' e ' and long ' i '. Take ' rise . . . eyes ', ' love below 
 the verge ' (' 1 ' and ' v ') ; take ' casement . . . 
 square ' (the ' ka ' and ' s ' sounds in both), and the 
 repeated ' o ' and ' g ' in the same line ; take ' lips . . . 
 love ', and many others, and even a first reading of this 
 poem will reveal its marvellous sound-magic. Break, 
 break, break. Crossing the Bar, and other poems will 
 repay a similar scrutiny, and thereafter we shall wonder 
 less at the feats of mere onomatopoeia, such as the 
 famous passage in the Morte d^ Arthur commencing 
 
 * Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves '. 
 
 Conclu- It would be too sweeping to say that these few songs 
 are the only poems on which Tennyson's renown will 
 stand. In the course of his long life he wrote 
 a large volume of poetry, and it is not possible 
 to point to any definite falling-off from the first to the 
 last. Recollections of the Arabian NigJits, for example, 
 which appeared in the first volume of his poems, is not 
 more exquisite in its kind than Crossing the Bar, which, 
 like death, ' closes all '. To these, then, and to Mariana 
 in the South, to Break, break, break, to a few of the 
 Greek and Enghsh idylls, to Virgil, to Frater Ave atque 
 Vale, and to Merlin and the Gleam, the reader, Hke the 
 traveller to the south, returns with renewed admiration. 
 
 Bion. 
 
TENNYSON 241 
 
 There is a certain invariability in Tennyson, which may, 
 perhaps, be compared, in respect to his readers' de- 
 pendence upon it, to the consciousness of Riviera sun- 
 shine prevailing through the fogs of a London winter. 
 We know that we can transplant ourselves, by no 
 difficult incantations, and with no transcendental 
 effort, to the pure cleanness of his diction and the lucid 
 beauty of his style. Nothing wild, nothing strange, 
 will accost us ; we shall change our sky, not our mind ; 
 such mental refreshment as we receive will be due to 
 external influences. 
 
 And Tennyson, as he never fell below, so he never 
 rose above himself. It was owing to his serene self- 
 measurement that he used his material so correctly, 
 breaking it up to the scale of the talent to be employed 
 upon it. Herein may lie the non-contagion, the less 
 than fully possessive power, of the dramas, the Idylls 
 of the King, and even of In Memoriam. His inspiration 
 was hardly strong enough for these efforts. He be- 
 longed so completely to his own times, or, rather, he 
 was so obsequious, in the best sense, to the shifting 
 opinions of his age, that he missed the permanent 
 aspect and the reconciling power of vision. It would 
 seem, too, that the very perfection which he aimed at — 
 and reached— in expression was only to be acquired on 
 the lower levels of thought. He was so properly 
 jealous of the exact word and the exact sound that, 
 as he said himself, many fine verses escaped up the 
 chimney. He was never content to be only imper- 
 fectly understood, as was the fate, occasionally, of 
 16 
 
242 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 other poets in his generation ; and it may be that some 
 of those escaped verses bore the impress of more 
 diflS.cult arguments than Tennyson succeeded in sustain- 
 ing. Moreover, his eyes were closed to much that was 
 urgent in life. The shows of things appealed to him 
 more strongly than the rude and the nude beneath. 
 He did not subscribe to the philosophy of Carlyle's 
 Diogenes Teufelsdrockh. The ' crowning common- 
 sense ' of his own ideal was, perhaps, his mark as a 
 thinker, recommended always by the charm of his 
 perfect craftsmanship in execution. 
 
§ 3. THE NOVEL. 
 
 LYTTON'S prefaces and example have prepared us for 
 the discovery, that what the drama was to the age 
 of Elizabeth, the poem in heroic couplets to the age of * 
 Anne, and lyric verse to the age of Revolution, such 
 was the novel to prove itself in the age of Queen 
 Victoria. 
 
 It was adapted from the older models of Richardson, Domin- 
 SmoUett and Fielding to almost every kind of use. fictbn. 
 From the beginning of the era to this day there is 
 hardly a tendency of thought or an aspect of action 
 which has not been reflected in its mirror. There are 
 novels of art, science, labour and religion. Probably, 
 if search be made, there will be discovered anti- vivi- 
 section novels, as there are certainly novels advocating 
 the extension of the suffrage to women. The com- 
 parative history of certain social developments can be 
 traced by a careful student in selected works of fiction. 
 Thus, Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown and Archdeacon 
 Farrar's Eric must be supplemented by Mr. Rudyard 
 Kipling's Stalky and Co., in order to obtain a full view 
 
 of boys' school-life in the nineteenth century. The 
 
 243 
 
244 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 rise of the modern millionaire and the increased cost of 
 living might be illustrated from a hundred novels, from 
 Becky Sharp's modest ambition to be virtuous on 
 £5000 a year to the plutocrats of Mr. Percy White and 
 other writers. And, apart altogether from definite 
 types of fiction — the historical novel, such as Thackeray's 
 Esmond ; the novel of adventure, such as Stevenson's 
 Treasure Island ; the character-study, such as Mere- 
 dith's Egoist — ^there are various novels associated with 
 fixed periods and ideas. Dickens's Oliver Twist gave 
 the name of Bumbledom to the tyrannous epoch of the 
 parish beadle. Sir Walter Besant's All Sorts atid 
 Conditions of Men was the origin of the People's Palace 
 in Mile End. Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere 
 expressed a phase of the conflict between tradition 
 and modernity. Further, the form of fiction has 
 been used to cover tractates and treatises which are 
 hardly novels at all, such as Cardinal Newman's Loss 
 and Gain, and Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean 
 and Gaston de Latour, ranking as" romances somewhat 
 in the same sense as Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Con- 
 versely, the spirit of fiction has invaded other than 
 novel-forms : Tennyson's English idyls were love- 
 stories versified ; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 
 Aurora Leigh was a novel in verse. Again, there is 
 a type of fiction which transcends the common limits 
 of humanity. Stevenson's Dr. JeJcyll and Mr. Hyde, 
 The Jungle-hooks of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, and 
 F. Anstey's Vice-Versa teach truths of conduct by 
 means of fables. 
 
THE NOVEL 245 
 
 The normal development has been most rapid in recent 
 years. Writers like Mr. Wells, Mr. Arnold Bennett and 
 Mr. Galsworthy, though they do not fall within the period 
 we are considering, will afford evidence to future genera- 
 tions as to the social conditions of to-day far more 
 direct and apodeictic, if a logical term may be employed, 
 than that which is to be gathered from the writings of 
 earlier novelists. The whole class of ' slum '-novels, 
 for example, which flourished a year or two ago, as a 
 kind of offshoot of Besant, was little more than Blue- 
 books made sensational ; and, more recently, it is 
 middle-class society on which the limelight has been 
 turned. 
 
 Plainly, no attempt can be made to examine in 
 detail the writings of all the novelists who adorn 
 the Victorian age. The utmost that can be done 
 is to enumerate the chief writers, and to discuss, 
 by groups rather than by individuals, the main 
 tendencies which affected them. The prevailing 
 motive of thought was set towards the positive, 
 towards an acceptance and perusal of the resources ' 
 of science on the one part, and, on the other, to- 
 wards a furtherance of the ends of social reform. 
 The audience itself was changing. It could not 
 be reached by the theatre, and it was for the . 
 moment less sensitive to the emotions through which 
 poetry appeals. As the shepherd cried to his maid, 
 in the idyl introduced by Tennyson into The 
 Princess, so the novelists implored their muse to 
 come down from the mountain height, where the 
 
246 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 broken purposes waste in air, and to find love in 
 the valley — 
 
 So waste not thou ; but come ; for all the vales 
 Await thee ; azure pillars of the hearth 
 Arise to thee ; thy children call, and I 
 ; Thy shepherd pipe. 
 
 The azure pillars were multiplied. It was precisely 
 this domestic cry which Charles Dickens (1812-70), 
 the first Victorian novelist and in some respects the 
 greatest, deliberately set himself to make heard. 
 Charles As the son of a Government clerk, he belonged 
 ' to that grade of society which he most skilfully 
 pourtrayed ; the grade which struggles to make ends 
 meet, which is always trying to make little seem much, 
 which is genteel abroad and dishevelled — or even 
 brutal — at home. It is not a pleasant picture which 
 he drew. Education, open air and self-respect have 
 since altered many of its features. But at the time 
 when Dickens wrote the picture was true enough. 
 This class had not been exploited. They had stood 
 outside literature till then ; practically, they had 
 stood outside life. They were discovered by re" 
 formers and legislators, who sought to improve their 
 condition and to secure their vote. So they became 
 important at this date, and Dickens displayed them 
 as they were. Secondly, Dickens continued Lytton's 
 ' novels with a purpose ', directing the chief force of his 
 
THE NOVEL 247 
 
 crusade against the oppression of children, against the 
 workhouse system in Oliver Twist (the first of his 
 Sketches by Boz — 1834 — had been a sketch of the 
 parish beadle) and against the notorious Yorkshire 
 schools in Nicholas Nicklehy. Thirdly, Dickens was 
 moved by a genuine love of London. London, un- 
 seizable as a whole, has been interpreted in some of 
 her aspects by certain writers and painters. Whistler 
 rendered her strangeness — the romance of street-lamps 
 in the twilight of evening — ; Dickens rendered her 
 familiarity. There is no other word so appropriate 
 to his studies of her folk and folk-lore : her grime 
 and shabbiness, her horse-play and pastimes, her 
 homeliness and ugliness were made familiar by him. 
 They led him to the wharves of the Thames, and to 
 thieves' kitchens in Seven Dials. Much of his London 
 has disappeared, but certain districts about Snow Hill, 
 and further eastward through the City, are still alive 
 with the people of his fancy. 
 
 These, then, first, in an appreciation of the writer, 
 who, from 1840 to 1870, and especially in the first 
 twenty years, took the hearts of his readers by storm * : 
 
 ^ The old stories are well known of the publication by monthly 
 parts, of the eager waiting for the numbers, and of the compart- 
 mental style of composition to which this practice seemed to lead, 
 accounting to some extent for the frequent incoherency of Dickens's 
 plots. But it is not generally remembered at how early a date 
 — nearly twenty years before his death — Dickens ranked as an 
 English classic. Mrs. Gaskell, in Cranford (1853), makes the death 
 of one of her characters turn on his absorption in the new number 
 of Pickwick. It is seldom that a contemporary writer is thus 
 treated as a classic. 
 
248 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 his criticism of life in the grade in which he was born ; 
 his zeal for social welfare, and his familiar London. 
 An unflinching realism of temperament and an ideal 
 method of treatment combined to produce the effects 
 of which Dickens is a master. His character-studies 
 stand out, ideally typifying real action, and hence 
 the extraordinary prominence of his people above 
 their surroundings. His was a purely formal idealism, 
 not the moral idealism of temperament. He turned 
 his realities to caricatures by exhibiting them with- 
 out their setting. The realistic observer lifted the 
 spectacle out of its natural scene and circumstances, 
 and displayed it, as it were, on a screen. A bad man 
 became a monster of iniquity. A good man became 
 impossibly beneficent, a funny man incessantly 
 ridiculous. George Crabbe in the previous generation 
 and Thomas Hardy in the next would have brought 
 the facts visibly before us. Dickens pruned them, 
 and pared them, leaving for representation a bare 
 hulk of what he saw, correct and true in each detail, 
 but stripped by the writer's idealism of its likeness to 
 the whole truth. 
 
 Another point, less personal to Dickens, belonged to 
 the age in which he wrote. Reason was perverted by 
 sentiment. It pursued the positive point of view till 
 just within sight of the goal, and then suddenly clutched 
 at the vanishing symbols of feeling. The logic of facts 
 was grasped in those days of scientific method, but its 
 remorseless conclusions were evaded, as Mr. Joseph 
 Conrad, for example, and other writers do not evade 
 
THE NOVEL 249 
 
 them to-day. A dying May-Queen, bereft of her 
 triumph, torn away from her family and friends, and 
 cut off in the prime of youth, repaired that sequel of 
 disaster by a solace obviously conventional, in the 
 eyes of the poet of evolution, and false to the principles 
 of his art. An Enoch Arden, restored from exile, 
 and from a loneliness magnificently painted, to find 
 his wife and his friend living as husband and wife, and 
 his children calling the other father, crept away to die 
 unrevealed, and closed this series of misfortune by a 
 transposition of the key. Faith and its symbols were 
 invoked to staunch the bleeding wounds of reason. 
 Art was true to its canons till the breaking-point, or 
 till the point at which consistency broke down. Then 
 it sought to reconcile the reader by employing a 
 different set of terms. In effect, the reader rebels 
 according to the degree of his reasonableness. The 
 introduction of a sentimental sanction to justify 
 a rational argument is, artistically, false, and, morally, 
 unsound. But the convem'ent delusion was fostered 
 by the intellectual temper of the times, arming for the 
 long fight between knowledge and belief. It was the 
 sophism of the spirit, compromising truth, and putting 
 shackles on freedom. Certain scenes in Domhey and 
 Sony in David Copperfield, and other novels, are resented 
 at once as inconsequent in inspiration. The true and 
 the false notes are struck with an irritating indifference 
 to the universal element in art. Dora is sometimes true 
 and pure woman, the eternal feminine of a craftsman's 
 genius ; sometimes she is the idiotic doll — strictly. 
 
250 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 idiosyncratic — of a peculiar temperament fashioned by 
 a particular combination in circumstance and time. The 
 elemental virtue departs from her, and she is adapted in 
 her own despite to the cringing half-truths of her age. 
 
 It is easier to enjoy Dickens than to criticize him, yet 
 he challenges criticism in the sense that he appealed 
 consciously to posterity : 
 
 As the stern and plain truth was a part of the purpose 
 of this book, I will not, for these readers, abate one hole 
 in the Dodger's coat, or one scrap of curl-paper in the 
 girl's dishevelled hair. I have no faith in the delicacy 
 which cannot bear to look upon them. ... It is useless 
 to discuss whether the conduct and character of the girl 
 seems natural or unnatural, probable or improbable, 
 right or wrong. IT IS TRUE. . . . From the first 
 introduction of that poor wretch to her laying her bloody 
 head upon the robber's breast, ... it is emphatically 
 God's truth. 
 
 So far from the preface to Oliver Twist. In his 
 preface to Martin Chuzzlewit Dickens wrote : 
 
 Nothing is more common in real life than a want of 
 profitable reflection on the causes of many vices and crimes 
 that awaken the general horror. What is substantially 
 true of families in this respect, is true of a whole common- 
 wealth. ... In all my writings, I hope I have taken 
 every possible opportunity of showing the want of 
 sanitary improvements in the neglected dwellings of the 
 poor. Mrs. Sarah Gamp is a representation of the hired 
 attendant on the poor in sickness. . . . Mrs. Betsy 
 Prig is a fair specimen of a Hospital Nurse. 
 
THE NOVEL 251 
 
 And in his preface to Bhah House he declared : 
 
 I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of 
 familiar things. 
 
 A writer's purpose is not always his readers' law. The 
 emphatic and substantial truths which Dickens laboured 
 to expound escape the sense of an audience which 
 delights in the humour of Jack Dawkins and Mr. Bumble, 
 Sairey Gamp and Mrs. Podgers. The ingenious humbug, 
 Mr. Pecksniff, is more diverting than the Chuzzlewit 
 tragedy is impressive. ' The romantic side of familiar 
 things ' in Bleak House is a less abiding memory than 
 Mrs. Jelly by. Partly, this difference is explained by 
 what was said above as to the idealism of treatment 
 correcting the realism of temperament. What * is true ' 
 may still * seem improbable ', for between the observa- 
 tion and its presentment the mind of the writer is 
 interposed. The ' fair specimen of a hospital nurse ' 
 may have been the Betsy Prig whom Dickens saw ; it 
 is not the Betsy whom he shows us. He selects her 
 qualities so rigorously and guards them so jealously that 
 they become grotesque under his manipulation. So far, 
 the work of Dickens is a failure. His skill fell short 
 of his design. 
 
 All this matters very little, in the face of what he 
 actually achieved. Dickens falls an easy prey to 
 paradox in judgment. He was a humourist working 
 in tragedy, a caricaturist attacking social wrongs. 
 He is remembered best for what he valued least. His 
 intentions were belied by his practice. But a man 
 
252 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 may plead guilty to these counts, and yet smile at 
 his critics from Elysium. There are certain invaluable 
 assets by which English literature would be poorer 
 save for the genius of Charles Dickens. There were 
 certain great things he did well, which no one since has 
 done better. There is, above all things, his exuber- 
 
 ' ance, recalUng the manner of the Elizabethans, and 
 abundantly refreshing to an exhausted age. He was 
 thorough in aU that he wrote, whether his mood was 
 grave or gay. Heartiness has fallen out of fashion in 
 these days, when good form is identified with a culti- 
 vated uniformity of inarticulateness. A robuster 
 courage may be restored, and the thin, tepid, vacuous, 
 
 v^nexpressive, undemonstrative demeanour which is 
 now considered correct may disappear with the irre- 
 solute canons of taste and breeding whence it sprang. 
 Then Shakespeare, Fielding, Dickens, and other great 
 realists in letters will again inherit the earth. We 
 shall not be too lily-fingered to handle ' the Dodger's 
 coat *, nor too careful of our knees to * thank heaven, 
 fasting, for a good man's love ' (As You Like It, iv. v.). 
 Read the description of Marseilles at the opening of 
 Little Dorrit, or read the account of Carker's journey 
 in chapter xxv of Dombey and Son, vol. ii., or read 
 chapter xlv of The Old Curiosity Shop, or read a score of 
 other passages in the novels of Charles Dickens, or 
 his Tale of Two Cities right through, and a sense of his 
 strength, and power, and of his deeply human sym- 
 pathy, cannot fail to impress itself. Mawkish in 
 places he was, and in places melodramatic, and often 
 
THE NOVEL 253 
 
 he blundered helplessly among wooden figures of his 
 own manufacture, as when he tried to satirize ' high 
 life ' ; but he has left us a gallery of portraits — Mr. 
 Micawber, the Cheeryble Brothers, Wackford Squeers, 
 Pickwick, Pecksniff, Sam Weller, Silas Wegg, Rogue 
 Riderhood, Jingle, Uriah Heep, Mrs. Gamp, Peggotty, 
 Sally Brass, Mrs. Wilfer, Betsy Trotwood, and others 
 too many to enumerate — whom no one knowing them 
 can forget. These are his title to immortality, the 
 splendid bead-roll of his praise. To them the sore 
 or jaded spirit, smitten with the disease of world- 
 weariness, repairs without fear of disappointment. 
 They set free the springs of tonic laughter. Their 
 creator is the physician of the mind. 
 
 Though Dickens founded no school, and on his Novels of 
 humorous side is inimitable ^, yet the homes of the ^ ^^°^' 
 poor were invaded in these and later years by novelists 
 moved by like sympathy. Thus, Elizabeth Gaskell 
 (1810-65) issued her Mary Barton in 1848. As a 
 pathetic picture of working-class life in Manchester, 
 this novel takes high rank, and won praise from Carlyle 
 and others. Later, in Sylvia's Lovers (1863), she returned 
 to the same social grade, and provided a moving tale 
 of urban and rural characters. These novels, signifi- 
 cant at their time, are held in less account to-day, 
 
 * Perhaps the stories of Mr. W. W. Jacobs are most akin to Dickens 
 from the point of view of humour. Two main differences are, 
 first, the limited range of Mr. Jacobs's observation, and, secondly, 
 that the farce resides in the situations as much as in the characters. 
 There is more farce than human comedy. But our laughter at 
 any rate is involuntary. 
 
254 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 when Mrs. GaskeU is chiefly remembered as the author 
 of Cranford, a simple, humorous study of feminine 
 gentility, drawn from observation at Knutsford, and 
 of perennial charm, and, further, as the author of a 
 Life of Charlotte Bronte, to whose works we shall come. 
 Again, in 1849, Charles Kingsley published Alton 
 Locke, a kind of Chartist novel, eloquent of the people's 
 wrongs. George EUot's Felix Holt, the Radical, did 
 not appear till 1866, though its scene opens in 1832 ; 
 and this brings us to the more recent work of Sir Walter 
 Besant (1836-1901), whose best books were written 
 with James Rice, but whose All Sorts and Conditions 
 of Men appeared in 1882, at about the same time when 
 George Gissing (1857-1903) was beginning his some- 
 what gloomy series of novels — The Unclassed, Demos, 
 New Grub Street, The Town Traveller, etc. A descend- 
 ant in this line is Mr. Pett Ridge. 
 
 m. 
 
 Charlotte Another group in fiction is suggested by the mention 
 Bronte, ^f Charlotte Bronte (1816-55). Jane Eyre (1847), her 
 best known and most memorable novel, is the story of a 
 woman's man and of a woman's wants. The slightly 
 caustic note and the obvious chafing at restrictions 
 reflected from the writer's own experience are personal 
 to Charlotte Bronte, whose biography has been so much 
 expanded since Mrs. GaskeU' s wholly admirable Life 
 that it need not detain us here. We shall but refer 
 
THE NOVEL 255 
 
 very briefly to the pathetic and quite unique picture 
 of starved and eloquent genius which the household 
 at Haworth provides. The three sisters, Charlotte, 
 Emily and Anne — ' Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell ', as 
 they disguised their sex and their identity — ,with the 
 silent, difficult, old father, and the dreary tragedy of 
 the brother's life, are types of passionate woman- 
 hood, deprived by inscrutable fate of appropriate 
 channels of expression. So much that they wanted was 
 denied them : love, company, fame, and the more 
 material luxuries of books, travel and dress which 
 money would have bought. Yet through all, and 
 despite all, something noble each achieved before 
 death overtook them. It is doubtful which is 
 more pathetic — the shy visits to London, with their 
 shadowy instalments of due fame, which Charlotte, 
 the eldest sister, lived long enough to enjoy, though 
 the enjoyment was always half anguish, or Emily's 
 terrible silence, unbroken by the incident of death, or 
 the slower decline of Anne. Charlotte Bronte survived 
 both her sisters, and there remain Emily Bronte's 
 few poems and her forceful romance Wuthering Heights, 
 and Anne Bronte's two novels, Agnes Grey and The 
 Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Shirley, Villette, and The 
 Professor were added by Charlotte Bronte to Jane 
 Eyre. Villette was, perhaps, her most finished piece of 
 work, but Jane Eyre remains the most notable book 
 written by any of the three sisters. The more general 
 interest of the work, at the date and in the place of its 
 appearance, lies in its middle-class mise-en-sc^ne. Jane 
 
256 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Eyre is among the first of many governesses who have 
 won or failed to win their employers' hearts in the well- 
 appointed households of widowers or seeming widowers. 
 The mystery-novel of the old sensational romance passed 
 in Charlotte Bronte's skilful hands into the novel of the 
 domestic type, of which some Victorian novehsts became 
 such voluminous exponents. The type degenerated in 
 their hands, though the succession may be traced. East 
 Lynne (1861), for instance, by Mrs. Henry Wood 
 (1814-87), owes as much to Jane Eyre as the perform- 
 ance of a provincial actor can owe to the example of a 
 genuine artist. 
 
 IV. 
 
 It is obvious that the novel of ordinary life, dealing 
 with the fate and conduct of everyday men and women, 
 can concentrate on one of two things, on character, or on 
 jncident. The greater novelists oi the age were devoted, 
 with more or less philosophy, to the study of character, 
 in its infinite interplay. Four of these may detain us : 
 WilHam Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63), George Eliot 
 (Mary Ann (Evans) Cross, 1819-80), George Meredith 
 (6. 1837), and Thomas Hardy (b. 1840). 
 Trollope. In the same class was Anthony TroUope (1815-82), a 
 member of a literary family, whose interest in character 
 was mainly confined to the ecclesiastical society of a 
 cathedral town and diocese. His series of Barchester 
 novels — ' Barchester ' was more or less Winchester ; and 
 ' Barsetshire ' more or less Hampshire — , which include 
 
THE NOVEL 257 
 
 The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thome, Framleij 
 Parsonage, The Small House at Allington and The Last 
 Chronicle of Barset, ranging from 1855 to 1867, are quite 
 excellent in their kind, which may, perhaps, be described 
 aS the best kind of an unambitious type. The interest in 
 who would be bishop, who would take charge of Hiram's 
 Hospital, what would the archdeacon say, what would 
 the bishop's chaplain do next, and other questions of this 
 sort, is found to be less apt to wane under Trollope's 
 confident guidance than seems intrinsically probable. 
 The same people recur throughout the series in various 
 degrees of prominence, and one or two of them — Mrs. 
 Proudie especially — belong to the republic of comedy. 
 
 Undeniably citizens of that republic are the character- 
 types of Thackeray, George Eliot, Meredith and Hardy. 
 Thackeray, unlike Dickens, with whom he is often com- Thack- 
 pared, though they had little in common save the age ^^^^* 
 in which they wrote, belonged to a good family and was 
 educated at Charterhouse — long before its migration to 
 Godalming — and Trinity, Cambridge. An early loss of 
 fortune threw him on his own resources. These were, 
 fortunately, multifarious and distinguished. He was at 
 once a draughtsman and a writer, a caricaturist in both 
 arts, a humourist, a romanticist, and a student of history, 
 especially of the eighteenth century. Two of these 
 tastes were combined in an admirable volume of lectures, 
 English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century. There 
 were two or three Sketch-books, the Paris volume of 1840, 
 the Irish volume of 1843, and From Cornhill to Cairo 
 (l846), which afforded scope to his versatility. He was 
 17 
 
258 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 an early contributor to Fraser*s Magazine, tlie wisely 
 enterprising monthly wliicli encouraged Carlyle and 
 Ruskin, and likewise to Punch, which published The 
 Booh of Snobs, the laughable Yellowplush memoirs of life 
 below stairs, and much of Thackeray's good verse. Legi- 
 timate laughter is also provided by his burlesques and 
 parodies of novelists' mannerisms in Novels by Eminent 
 Hands — G. P. R. James, Bulwer Lytton, and others — , 
 and there is a large amount of miscellaneous writings. 
 
 But Thackeray's reputation rests on the few finely- 
 imagined novels which he wrote in the fifteen years before 
 his sudden and early death. These are Vanity Fair {1S4:S), 
 Pendennis (1850), Esmond (1852), The Newcomes (1855), 
 and The Virginians (1859). Then came a visit to 
 America, where he lectured on The Four Georges. On 
 his return he took up the editorship of The Cornhill 
 Magazine, for which he wrote Lovel the Widower and The 
 Adventures of Philip, and started a characteristic series 
 of Roundabout Papers. He was writing Denis Duval, 
 his last novel, when he died. 
 
 His books fall easily into two groups, with one pre- 
 dominant in each. Esmond is supreme in the class of 
 eighteenth-century romances, to which The Virginians, 
 its sequel, belonged, and Denis Duval was to belong ; and 
 Vanity Fair is supreme in the class of novels of contem- 
 porary manners, which include the rest of his fiction. 
 The predominance of Esmond is undisputed. It is the 
 finest picture we possess of social life in the age of Queen 
 Anne. Beatrix, its heroine, is pourtrayed, or is suffered 
 to pourtray herself, in all her woman's variability ; and 
 
THE NOVEL 259 
 
 the plot was contrived to arouse genuine passion and 
 emotion. Further, the writing afforded the fullest oppor- 
 tunities for Thackeray's mingled grace and humour, for 
 the reflective, infinitely kindly, clear-sighted, sometimes 
 stern, never cynical, and always warm and human 
 moralizing which marked his leisurely style. The 
 History of Henry Esmond^ Esquire, Colonel in the Service 
 of Her Majesty Qit^n Anne — to give this great romance 
 its full title — is the finest historical novel which English 
 literature possesses. 
 
 At the same time, the vein which he worked in Vanity 
 Fair and other novels is capable of more valuable spoils. 
 It is indisputably a great feat to revive the life of the 
 past. To keep the present alive is as indisputably 
 greater. To apply imagination to the actual, and to 
 depict the romance in reality, is the highest task offered 
 to a novelist. Poor novels are far too many, and far too 
 easy to produce. The rubble lies on the surface, and 
 may be sifted by any comer. But those who are patient 
 to go down into the deeps of the mine return with hands- 
 ful of shining ore, as precious as poetry itself. Good 
 novels are few and far between. They add not only to 
 enjoyment, but also to knowledge and wisdom. The 
 final test of a good novel is its power affecting conduct. 
 It is not enough that it should take the reader, as the 
 phrase goes, out of himself. It must teach him truths 
 of human conduct. It must interpret his experience to 
 his understanding. It must provide him with a standard 
 and criterion, by which to raise his own action. It must 
 summon him from what he sees to the moral aspect in 
 
26o NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 which he should see it. The different types of selfishness 
 of George Osborne, senior and junior, appeal powerfully 
 from their acts to the imagination which represents them : 
 ' 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 '. The terse reticence of 
 the statement emphasizes the moral of the tragedy. 
 Note, too, the study of Becky Sharp, the most sympathetic 
 adventuress who ever lived in an English novel. Her 
 whole career is a failure. Amelia, for all her tears, is 
 not worsted at the end : George's compromising letter 
 is the hilht doux of his widow's second marriage ; Sir 
 Pitt goes back to his good Jane ; Rawdon Crawley, the 
 too fond husband, rises to manhood at the crisis, and is 
 redeemed by his love of his son. Nothing ignoble comes to 
 greatness, nothing good suffers enduring hurt, nothing 
 remediable but has its opportunity. The point is, to see 
 things in the right light, to measure facts in their due 
 proportion, and to be certain of the values attaching to 
 them. Conduct- values are a novelist's sphere of interest ; 
 their delineation, typically, is his function. 
 
 Test Thackeray by this, and his supremacy is clear. 
 Apart from the purple passages which everybody knows 
 — Rawdon Crawley's meeting with Lord Steyne, the 
 first love-episode of Pendennis, Colonel Newcome's last 
 Adsum — , we recall type after type stamped with the 
 impress of truth. A great novelist works like a Royal 
 Commission, whose reference is life itself. He hears 
 evidence and records it ; he lets his witnesses talk ; 
 and his ' findings ', or conclusions, serve as points 
 
THE NOVEL 261 
 
 of departure in the region of conduct. ' This was 
 decided by Becky Sharp ' ; ' that is the Jos Sedley 
 fallacy ' ; 'by this road Dobbin was undone ' ; ' that 
 is an entry from Blanche Amory's diary ' : almost 
 unconsciously we store these gathered experiences 
 in our minds, and start our judgment of action with 
 the gain of a fresh set of precedents. Further, it 
 was Thackeray's talent, and the good fortune of his 
 readers, to adorn his narrative with little essays — 
 little sermons, in the Horatian sense — , which are 
 pleasant in themselves, and which help us across the 
 bridges of the long periods covered by his tales. For 
 Thackeray is among the masters — ^Mr. William De 
 Morgan, a recent example, belongs to a not much later 
 generation — who deal not with episodes but with careers. 
 In this section, necessarily cramped, little space can 
 be spared for illustration, but one extract may be 
 given to show the leisured ease of Thackeray. The 
 broad canvas on which he worked admitted a feeling 
 for perspective. Thus, d^th^ when it occurred, was 
 respected, even in the person of a subordinate char- 
 acter. For the ' star ' system of modern novels, 
 reducing every one to insignificance save a central lime- 
 lit figure, and stupefying judgment by an accumula- 
 tion of ' atmospheric ' effects, was not the method of 
 these masters. Our example is the death of Mr. Sedley 
 from Vanity Fair, chapter Ixi : 
 
 Which of the dead are most tenderly and passionately 
 deplored ? Those who love the survivors the least, 
 
262 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 I believe. . . . Perhaps as he was lying awake there, 
 his life may have passed before him — ^his early hopeful 
 struggles, his manly successes and prosperity, his 
 downfall in his declining years, and his present helpless 
 condition — ^no chance of revenge against Fortune, 
 which had had the better of him — neither name nor 
 money to bequeath — ^a spent-out bootless life of defeat 
 and disappointment, and the end here ! Which, I 
 wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die pros- 
 perous and famous, or poor and disappointed ? To 
 have, and to be forced to yield ; or to sink out of life, 
 having played and lost the game ? ... So there came 
 one morning and sunrise, when all the world got up 
 and set about its various works and pleasures, with the 
 exception of old John Sedley, who was not to fight 
 with fortune, or to hope or scheme any more. 
 
 It should be remembered that this mood of reflection 
 is evoked by the death of an old man, who is only the 
 father of the second heroine, and who is at least sixty 
 when we meet him first. 
 
 andman^ In passing from Dickens and Thackeray to George 
 Eliot, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy, we are 
 at once conscious of a change. Its precise character 
 is elusive. It is easy to say that the personages of 
 Dickens tend to stand out from their surroundings, and 
 those of Meredith to sink into them. It is easy, too, 
 to say that Thackeray is better humoured than Thomas 
 
THE NOVEL 263 
 
 Hardy, and George Eliot more learned than Thackeray. 
 But the true difference is not external. It will be 
 found mainly to depend on the younger writers' atti- 
 tude towards nature. Half-unconsciously, they tended 
 to refer phenomena to design, and to adopt the Words- 
 worthian standard, measuring man by nature : ' If 
 this be nature's holy plan, Have I not reason to lament 
 What man has made of man ? ' According to the 
 manner of their temperament, they wrote as reasoners 
 on this theme. They argued by types about ideas. 
 They found their chief inspiration in the conflict 
 between nature and man. Nature's stillness invaded 
 by men's voices, nature's purposes opposed by men's 
 conventions, nature's resources misapplied by men's 
 greed, provided matter enough for lament and irony 
 in representation. 
 
 Thus, these writers introduced a new mark in English 
 fiction. Theirs is not the old ' return to nature ', 
 traced plausibly to Rousseau, and leading to the extra- 
 vagance of sentiment in which Mrs. Radcliffe indulged ^. 
 It is not the pure descriptive writing, in which Sir 
 Walter Scott excelled, and which Dickens, Thackeray, 
 Kingsley, Charles Reade and others could command, 
 when the adventures of their heroes required it. It is 
 not detached from human fortune, like a line which 
 never meets its parallel. It is not illustrative, decora- 
 tive, or incidental, but it is essential to the human 
 factors in the piece. These writers, and others who 
 succeeded them — Richard Blackmore, Eden Phillpotts, 
 * See p. 45, aupra. 
 
264 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 in our day — , sought nature as the universal mother ; 
 they did not separate her from her works. As Walter 
 Pater acutely said of Wordsworth : by subduing 
 man to the level of nature, they raised nature to the 
 level of human thought. 
 
 It is well to seize this at the outset, and three simple 
 examples may be submitted : 
 
 (1) It was a still afternoon — the golden light was 
 lingering languidly among the upper boughs, only 
 glancing down here and there on the purple pathway 
 and its edge of faintly-sprinkled moss : an afternoon 
 in which destiny disguises her cold awful face behind a 
 hazy radiant veil, encloses us with warm downy wings, 
 and poisons us with violet-scented breath. 
 
 George Eliot, Adam Bede, ch. xii. 
 
 (2) The little skylark went up above her, all song, 
 to the smooth southern cloud lying along the blue : 
 from a dewy copse dark over her nodding hat the 
 blackbird fluted, calling to her with thrice mellow note : 
 the kingfisher flashed emerald out of green osiers : 
 a bow- winged heron travelled aloft, seeking solitude. 
 . . . Surrounded by the green shaven meadows, the 
 pastoral summer buzz, the weir-fall's thundering white, 
 amid the breath and beauty of wild flowers, she was 
 a bit of lovely human life in a fair setting ; a terrible 
 attraction. . . . Stiller and stiller grew nature, as at 
 the meeting of two electric clouds. 
 
 George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, 
 
 ch. xiv. 
 
 (3) On the lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide 
 was of a piece with the element she moved in. Her 
 
THE NOVEL 265 
 
 flexuous and stealthy figure became an integral part 
 of the scene. At times her whimsical fancy would 
 intensify natural processes around her till they seemed 
 a part of her own story. Rather they became a part of 
 it ; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, 
 and what they seemed they were. The midnight 
 airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped 
 buds and bark of the winter twigs, were formulae 
 of bitter reproach. A wet day was the expression of 
 irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of 
 some vague ethical being whom she could not class 
 definitely as the God of her childhood, and could not 
 comprehend as any other. 
 
 Thomas Hkkdy, Tess of the jyUrhervilles, xiii. 
 
 The motive in all three is fairly clear. In (1) George A new 
 Eliot associates nature's illusory calm with the dis- 
 guised awfulness of destiny. Man is poisoned with 
 violet-scented breath ; and, in the sequel of the scene, 
 when Hetty (in chapter xv) is prodigal of her beauty 
 to the moon, we are vividly reminded of this sensation : 
 ' There was an invisible spectator whose eye rested 
 on her like morning on the flowers. His soft voice 
 was saying over and over again the pretty things she 
 had heard in the wood ; his arm was round her, and the 
 dehcate rose-scent of his hair was with her still'. 
 The poison which nature had conspired with man 
 to distil — the poison of a mood simply natural, and 
 forbidden by social forms — had entered into Hetty's 
 blood. In (2) the meeting of Richard and Lucy is 
 subdued to the level of design. Meredith removes 
 all meretriciousness. The lovers float on the stream of 
 
266 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 natural processes, the mere drift of inevitable laws. 
 Their union is accomplished without collision. It had 
 to be, and therefore it is, while the skylark goes up, 
 all song, and the blackbird flutes his mellow note, 
 and the kingfisher flashes out of the osiers, and the 
 wild flowers breathe their beauty. Nothing in nature 
 is disturbed, and this abstract idealization of the 
 idyl intensifies the tragedy which ensues, when 
 humanity, reduced to nature, is delivered back to the 
 judgment of man, or even to the serio-comic judgment 
 of Mrs. Berry in Richard Feverel : ' Kissing don't last ; 
 cookery do '. In (3) the identity is yet completer, 
 ' for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, 
 and what they seemed they were '. Tess emerges 
 from the scenery of Wessex, like Aphrodite from the 
 waves, a very product of its soil. As it made her, so 
 she became. No God interfered with the waste or 
 use of nature's material. Day by day the cows 
 were milked amid the sweets of the upland farm, 
 and if nature exacted other toll from the sweets of 
 her daily making, her ' vulpine slyness ', as Hardy 
 calls it, was greater than the resistance of men's 
 God. 
 
 The moral is that man must be his own God, if he 
 will find strength in the God of man, thus reversing 
 full-circle the delusive philosophy of Pope as to the 
 proper study of mankind being man. For the novel 
 of the nineteenth century in the hands of these three 
 masters takes on an austerer note, when it applies to 
 man and nature * that fatal knife, deep questioning. 
 
THE NOVEL 267 
 
 which probes to endless dole '. Deeper and deeper it 
 probed to the very pith and marrow of the problem, 
 till we cry, first, Who is to blame ? and, at last, What 
 is the remedy ? 
 
 But, might some say, where was Tess's guardian 
 angel ? Where was the providence of her simple faith ? 
 Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical 
 Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, 
 or he was on a journey, or perad venture he was sleeping 
 and not to be awaked. Why it was that upon this 
 beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and 
 practically blank as snow as yet, there should have 
 been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed 
 to receive ; why so often the coarse appropriates the 
 finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong 
 woman the man, many thousand years of analytical 
 philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of 
 order. . . . Though to visit the sins of the fathers 
 upon the children may be a morality good enough for 
 divinities, it is scorned by average human nature. 
 
 Tess of the U XJrbervilles, xi. 
 
 The earlier novelists, such as Lytton and Dickens, 
 in their fine zeal for undoing social wrong and for spread- 
 ing the canopy of freedom, had attacked certain definite 
 evils which laws or kings could cause or cure. Meredith 
 and Hardy particularly have sought to found human 
 liberties on a deeper sanction still, and to undo, not 
 social anomalies, but the failures that offend ' our 
 sense of order '. They have availed themselves of 
 every means of increasing knowledge ; they have 
 
268 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 pressed into their service the new (or the remodelled) 
 sciences of physiology, morphology and psychology, 
 and from these they have appealed to God in heaven, 
 as revealed — or, rather, as depicted by the interpreters 
 of revelation — in pre-scientific times. In other words, 
 these novelists, turned seers, have attempted, together 
 with the greatest poets, to reconcile those old opponents 
 in the grievously mistaken conflict between science 
 and faith, knowledge and belief, seen and unseen, sense 
 and soul. They have been as fearless in liberating 
 the soul as the men of science in liberating the senses. 
 They have struck through the disguises of half-truths, 
 imperfect knowledge, accepted formulae, tradition, 
 and sentiment, to the evidence of reality itself, the one 
 sound basis of the ideal. It would be too much to say 
 that they have succeeded in aU that they undertook. 
 George Eliot is sometimes pedantic, George Meredith 
 is sometimes obscure from very excess of light, and 
 Thomas Hardy's fulness of vision is sometimes ob- 
 structed by gloom. But this, at least, may be said : 
 they are the friends of the bridegroom, if not the very 
 he that cometh. ' Ring out, and ring in ', cried 
 Tennyson, in In Memoriam, cvi, though he created no 
 types of the new evangel : 
 
 Ring out the feud of rich and poor. 
 Ring in redress to all mankind. . . . 
 
 Ring out old shapes of foul disease; 
 
 Ring out the narrowing lust of gold ; 
 
 Ring out the thousand wars of old. 
 Ring in the thousand years of peace. 
 
THE NOVEL 269 
 
 Ring in the valiant man and free. 
 
 The larger heart, the kindlier hand ; 
 
 Ring out the darkness of the land. 
 Ring in the Christ that is to be. 
 
 And these writers, on the meridian of the century of 
 emancipation, sought, by their deep exposure of phases 
 of moral disorder, to ring in the Christ who was to be, 
 and who should give laws to the social conscience of 
 the future. 
 
 It is not possible to discuss their many novels sever- Some 
 ally, but one or two points may be selected as guides Si^e^ 
 to such a study. There is, first, recalling Wordsworth, 
 the greatest pure force in English letters since the 
 industrial revolution, their common recourse to the soil. 
 Peasants, journeymen and humble people walk securely 
 through their pages. Tragedy is not less tragic because 
 royal and great personages are not affected. It is 
 precisely because the sphere of fate is outside of the 
 sphere of parliament that the decrees of fate become so 
 intensely real, and so wholly independent of shib- 
 boleths. All nature is animate and vocal, and has 
 equivalence of worth. Hetty, Lucy and Tess are 
 queens by divine right, not by man's. Another point 
 is the attraction to these novelists of periods of liberty. 
 George Eliot's Romola and Felix Holt, Meredith's 
 Vittoria and The Tragic Comedians are instances of 
 this gravitation. Large ideas require spacious air. 
 A third point is the dominance of woman. Roughly 
 reckoned, half the mistakes which modern society has 
 made in formulating its ideals of civilization can be 
 
270 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 traced to its conception of the woman's part. The 
 educated woman of the eighteenth century shook off 
 the veil of the Middle Ages only to represent the role 
 of a ' blue-stocking ' or a ' rake ' (Pope, Moral Essays, 
 ii. 215, and passim). The woman- type delineated by 
 Tennyson as a kind of compromise between the 
 Middle Ages and the Middle-Victorian age has been 
 sufficiently displayed in our quotations in the last 
 section from The Princess and the Idylls of the 
 King. These summaries are, of course, very general, 
 and suffer in exactness accordingly ; but the re- 
 construction of women's part in life, attempted so 
 brilliantly on the stages of George Eliot, Thomas 
 ; Hardy, and, above all, of George Meredith, is the 
 j more remakable by contrast. Emilia, Renee, 
 ! Clotilde, Clara Middleton, Diana and the rest are 
 j new women in the best sense : their appeal is to 
 i men regenerate, and to a revised social system. 
 \ Character, Meredith seems to say, has been main- 
 \tained at its highest in woman's soul, undistracted 
 by the shifts and compromises which experience has 
 exacted from human nature. It is for men to repair 
 ^ ^0 that limpid stream of moral and intellectual refresh- 
 ment. Finally — in a hasty survey — the chorus is 
 important in these writers. The return of fiction to 
 philosophy is marked by a deep reflectiveness on the 
 part of its practitioners. Meredith went so far as to 
 personify gossip, and to introduce characters whose 
 sole metier is to be sententious ; and George Eliot 
 and Thomas Hardy — the one sometimes rather ponder- 
 
THE NOVEL 271 
 
 ously, and the other rather pessimistically — were 
 addicted to the same good habit. 
 
 The foregoing paragraphs should help us to read 
 these novelists with advantage, and no epitome of their 
 books can succeed in doing more. They represent 
 together a new force in the honourable history of 
 English fiction, and a brief word is now due to the 
 distinctions that divide them. George Eliot was, George 
 as is well known, the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans ° * 
 (1819-80) . Her early bent was towards philosophy. 
 She translated two German treatises on the philosophy 
 of religion, as diploma-pieces, as it were, of her Uni- 
 tarianism. Later, she became a contributor to The 
 Westminster Review, and a friend of Mill and his circle. 
 In that circle was George Henry Lewes (1817-78), a 
 philosopher and historian of philosophy, who belonged 
 by profession to the highest rank of journalists. Miss 
 Evans formed a union with Lewes which lasted till his 
 death, and the irregular nature of which typified the 
 courage and sincerity with which she held her opinions. 
 Two years after his death, and a few months before her 
 own, she was married to John Cross, who published 
 her Life and Letters. The liberal bias of her mind, the 
 frank acceptance of truths which had convinced her 
 reason, and the pursuit of advanced lines of thought 
 which constantly engaged her intellectual energy, are 
 all to be traced in the novels, to which, with curiously 
 feminine ductility, she turned at Lewes's instance 
 from her more directly philosophic work. Daniel 
 Deronda, for example, to take her latest novel first, is 
 
Meredith. 
 
 272 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 a remarkable account of modern Jewish idealism, and 
 even more exacting in its claims on George Eliot's 
 conscientious methods was her Romola — a novel of the 
 Renaissance. The Mill on the Floss is a brilliant 
 (though a somewhat darkly brilliant) study of a brother 
 and a sister, and the subsidiary characters of aunts, 
 uncles, and others are etched with mordant force. 
 Middlemarch, Felix HoU, Silas Marner, and the master- 
 piece, Adam Bede, are the remaining chief novels 
 between the Scenes of Clerical Life and the Opinions of 
 Theophrastus Such at the beginning and at the end of 
 her career. 
 George What George EUot gave to learning George Meredith 
 
 gave to humour ; and it is, perhaps, due to our climate 
 as much as to anything else that the philosophy of 
 George Eliot appealed to the taste of the reading public 
 many years before the humour of George Meredith. 
 His intense love of the open air, his almost Greek sense 
 of the influence of the body on the mind, and a certain 
 instinctive naturalism, which did not so much oppose 
 conventionalism as leave conventions aside, were 
 combined with a difficult style of writing and a keener 
 insight than is common into motives of action to repel 
 the novel-reading public ; and it is only at a com- 
 paratively recent date that Meredith has inherited his 
 fame as a paramount master of fiction. The dis- 
 covery is still gaining ground, and even yet it is not 
 fuUy realized how much of the difficulty is due to his 
 search for expression corresponding to thought in 
 advance of the resources of language in his day. In 
 
THE NOVEL 273 
 
 order to convey ideas, he put all nature under levy, 
 exacting approximate representations of what he 
 sought to express in pictures sometimes contiguous, 
 sometimes actually superimposed. There are sentences 
 in Meredith which are as confusing as a palimpsest 
 with the first impression partly legible : the first and 
 second impressions (in his instance) being not of writing 
 but of thought. A metaphor is suggested by a 
 metaphor, and replaces it before it is complete. This 
 sounds more serious than it is, and, in practice, the 
 brilliance of Meredith finds a lucid way to the imagina- 
 tion without fatiguing the intellect overmuch. His 
 series of romantic novels, and particularly, perhaps, 
 Richard Feverel, The Egoist, Harry Richmond, Beau- 
 champ^s Career, Diana of the Crossways, and that 
 extraordinarily successful study of the tailor-gentle- 
 man, Evan Harrington, with their subtle characteriza- 
 tion, their exalted yet reasonable idealism, and their 
 interpenetration with natural lore, raised the power 
 and function of the novel to a height which it had not 
 attained before. 
 
 This level was maintained by Thomas Hardy, who, Thomas 
 like Meredith, is poet as well as novelist, and who in ^^ ^* 
 recent years has published a Napoleonic epic-drama 
 in three parts entitled The Dynasts. Among his novels, 
 Under the Greenwood Tree, A Pair of Blue Eyes, and 
 Far from the Madding Crowd — possibly the best one of all 
 — belong most obviously to his first period, The Mayor of 
 Casterhridge and The Woodlanders to his second period, 
 and Tess of the D^Urhervilles and Jude the Obscure to 
 18 
 
274 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 his third, the difference being marked by a deepening 
 of the romantic interpretation of reality. Especially 
 valuable in Hardy's novels are his arrest of decaying 
 rural pastimes and the salt of his rustic wit. 
 
 VI. 
 
 There are still a few categories to be considered. 
 
 Charles Among past masters who must not be omitted is 
 ^* ^' Charles Reade (1814-84), who wrote plays alone and 
 with Tom Taylor (1817-80), a journalist and an editor 
 of Punch, and whose best novel is historical (fifteenth 
 century), The Cloister and the Hearth. Peg Wofflngton 
 (1852) was novelized from a drama, reversing the 
 common procedure, and It is Never Too Late to Mend 
 (1856) was remarkable at a date just before Dickens 
 for its sociological motive in exposing the evils of 
 prison-discipline. 
 
 Wilkie Wilkie ColHns (1824-89) was more intimately con- 
 ° ^^^' nected with Dickens as a collaborator in one or two 
 minor works and in No Thoroughfare (1867). His most 
 famous independent novels are The Woman in White 
 and The Moonstone, and his skill in weaving detective - 
 mysteries has been repeated with variations (based 
 mainly on French models) in the ' Sherlock Holmes ' 
 series of Sir A. Conan Doyle. 
 
 Sport Still avoiding the mere catalogue, reference is due to 
 
 venture. ^^® group of Victorian novelists who dealt with ad- 
 venture and sport. Between the two is F. E. Smedley 
 
THE NOVEL 275 
 
 (1818-64), author of Frank Fairleigh and Lewis Arundel 
 and one or two similar books written in the brightest 
 spirits out of a background of acute suffering. Pure 
 sport attracted Kobert Surtees (1803-64), of Jorrocks^s 
 Jaunts, Handley Cross and Ask Mamma. These 
 writers had the advantage of the aid of the well-known 
 draughtsmen of the time, John Leech and Hablot K. 
 Browne (' Phiz '). Their succession through G. J. 
 Whjrte-Melville (1821-78) to the sporting-noveHsts of 
 our own day need not detain us here. Adventure is 
 represented by William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-82), 
 and the Irish writers, Samuel Lover (1797-1868) and 
 Charles James Lever (1806-72), who all belonged to a 
 slightly older generation ; and adventure, dominantly 
 naval, and mainly intended for boys, is the distinguishing 
 mark of the works of Frederic Marryatt (1792-1848), 
 W. H. G. Kingston (1814-80), Mayne Reid (1818-83), 
 R. M. Ballantyne (1825-94), and G. A. Henty, recently 
 dead. Robert Louis Stevenson, a more formal artist 
 of this craft, and a great writer in other departments, 
 is commemorated in a later section. 
 
 vu. 
 
 Of living writers less distant from their prime than 
 George Meredith and Thomas Hardy we do not propose 
 to speak. Many — the majority, perhaps — belong to the 
 twentieth century, and two only of those whose repu- 
 tation was established in the nineteenth may detain 
 
 V- 
 
276 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 us for a moment. One is Mrs. Humpliry Ward, and the 
 other is Mr. Rudyard Kipling. 
 Mrs. Mrs. Ward belongs by birth to the Arnold family, 
 
 Ward. which has contributed so notably to the serious thought 
 of our times. Her Robert Elsmere (1888) was the first 
 of a series of romances, dealing mainly with religion. 
 It attained, and maintains, a considerable vogue, 
 independently of its appearance in a period of religious 
 doubt, and of the approval which it won from Mr. 
 Gladstone for its theological interest. It was followed 
 in the same line by David Grieve and Helheck of Bannis- 
 dale. Mrs. Ward then- turned her attention to politics 
 and sociology, and produced in Marcella and its sequel 
 Sir George Tressady two novels which are, artistically, 
 perhaps her most finished studies of strenuous life in 
 the higher grades of society. Her later books have 
 abandoned to some extent the insistent sense of purpose, 
 and, though they have gained not a little in spontaneity 
 and freshness, they have missed (in the opinion of some 
 admirers) the force and vigour of her earlier works i. 
 
 1 Women-novelists, it should be noted, have played a remarkable 
 part in nineteenth-century literature. Jane Austen, Charlotte 
 Bronte and Mrs. Gaskell open a list of names which includes George 
 Eliot, among the dead, IVIrs. Craik, Charlotte Yonge and Mrs. Oliphant. 
 Among the living, Rhoda Broughton and M. E. Braddon (Mrs. 
 Maxwell) may be singled out as veteran favourites ; and, if Mary 
 Johnston and Gertrude Athe'rton may not be claimed as English- 
 women, we have had Mrs. Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes), Olive 
 Schreiner, Amy Levy, and we have, among many others. Miss 
 Cholmondeley, Mrs. Clifford, Mrs. de la Pasture, George Egerton, 
 George Fleming, Mrs. Blundell (M. E. Francis), Maxwell Gray, Miss 
 Harraden, Annie Holdsworth, Miss Hunt, Lucas Malet, Helen 
 Mathers,||Jean Middlemass, Rita, Mrs. F. A. Steel, and Mrs. Woods. 
 
THE NOVEL 277 
 
 Mr. Rudyard Kipling's star is likewise too near its 
 rising for a detailed criticism to be seemly. He repre- 
 sents a phase of thought which, so far, seems to be on 
 the wane, and which is especially associated with the 
 Imperial sentiment aroused in 1897, at the diamond 
 jubilee of Queen Victoria. The movement was neither 
 as strong nor, apparently, as enduring as the Free 
 Trade, shop-window ardour which found its tangible 
 expression in the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 
 the early years of the Queen's reign. Still, it had its 
 vogue and its voice in the history of the nation and its 
 literature ; and, if Ruskin in a sense was the opponent 
 in Hterature of the moral and economic point of view 
 represented by the Crystal Palace, Mr. William Watson 
 may perhaps be taken as the poetic antitype of Mr. 
 Kipling. 'The Things which are more Excellent', 
 for example, which is the title of one of Mr. Watson's 
 poems, may fairly be contrasted with some of the 
 militant ditties of Mr. Kipling's patriotric muse. But 
 with this movement and counter-movement, the critic 
 of literature, as such, cannot yet be concerned, save 
 only to note that Mr. Kipling's vigorous writing and 
 his genius for visualization have already enriched 
 English literature with certain zrrjfjijara, Ig cat. ' The 
 Finest Story in the World ', reviving the experience 
 of a Greek galley-slave ; ' The Ship that found her- 
 self ', making a living whole of the separate parts of a 
 modern ship ; Captains Courageous, The Jungle-boohs, 
 and parts of Puck of PooFs Hill, together with the 
 Indian Kim and some of the Plain Tales from the Hills, 
 
sion 
 
 278 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 belong to no phase of opinion but to national literature 
 itself. 
 Conclu- It would be pleasant to confess to a few personal 
 predilections among tbe novelists, outside the greatest 
 masters, who have contributed to the entertainment 
 of this age. There was James Payn (1830-98), for 
 example, whose long series of novels, never great 
 but seldom less than good, seem in retrospect par- 
 ticularly typical of the times in which he wrote. There 
 was Mr. F. Marion Crawford (1854-1909)1, with his 
 Cigarette-Maker^ s Romance and his excellent Italian 
 stories, and there is Mr. Guthrie (F. Anstey) who, apart 
 from his works of pure humour, has given us, in The 
 Gianfs Robe and a little less certainly in The Pariah^ 
 two novels of permanent merit. But an expression of 
 such tastes would carry us too far, and would inevitably 
 bring us to the border-line — obvious, if not tangible — 
 which divides the nineteenth century from its successor. 
 There is a line of demarcation between the two, though 
 it would be difficult to define it. Perhaps the difference 
 lies in the more responsive consciousness of the present 
 age. More delicate feelings are tracked to more subtle 
 currents of physiology. The writing is cleverer than 
 it was, more deliberately clever, that is to say, and its 
 robuster qualities are disappearing. But, whatever 
 direction may be given to the fiction of the future by 
 writers of such diverse gifts as Mr. le Gallienne, Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Mr. Wells, and 
 other modem craftsmen, this, at least, is clear : The 
 
 ^ Mr. Crawford died while this volume was in the press, April 9, 1909. 
 
THEpOVEL 279 
 
 masters of the novel in the nineteenth century have 
 illuminated an important tract of time more thought- 
 fully than the press, more thoroughly than the historians, 
 and more graphically than the poets. Their work, 
 in the mass, is to be regarded as an enlightened com- 
 mentary on the times, and, in detail, it is to be enjoyed 
 for its humour, its pathos, its tenderness, its noble 
 standard and its high style. 
 
§ 4. IMAGINATIVE REASON. 
 
 WE return to the poetry of the nineteentli century, 
 and especially to that kind which, like the 
 pictures of Watts, appeals to * the imaginative reason ' ^. 
 Browning Robert Browning (1812-89), the son of a clerk in the 
 
 find 
 
 Tennyson. Bank of England, differed in every respect from Tenny- 
 son, except only in the dates of biography. Pauline, 
 his first volume, appeared only three years later than 
 '^ Tennyson's Poems, chiefly Lyrical. Each writer con- 
 tinued to publish at fairly frequent intervals there- 
 after, and poetic society tended to divide itself into 
 Browningites and Tennysonians, to the not incon- 
 siderable loss of the true appreciation of both poets. 
 
 They were alike, too, in their leave-taking of the 
 world which they had benefited so much. Browning's 
 
 1 ' The main element of the modern spirit's life is neither the 
 senses and understanding, nor the heart and imagination ; it is 
 the imaginative reason '. 
 
 Matthew Abnold, Essays in Criticism : ' Pagan and Medieval 
 Religious Sentiment '. 
 
 * Whereas the Semitic genius placed its highest spiritual life in 
 the religious sentiment, and made that the basis of its poetry, the 
 Indo-European genius places its highest spiritual life in the imagina- 
 tive reason, and makes that the basis of its poetry '. 
 
 Id., Celtic Literature, vi. 
 280 
 
IMAGINATIVE REASON 281 
 
 * Epilogue ' in Asolando (published on the day of his 
 death) appeared almost simultaneously with Tenny- 
 son's ' Crossing the Bar ' in his Demeter and other 
 Poems (December, 1889). These two brave poems of 
 passing struck on the consciousness of their generation 
 with a readily measurable force. Each poet had 
 accompanied the nineteenth century from the Reform 
 Act and the accession of Queen Victoria to her Majesty's 
 jubilee in 1887. The celebrations of that year had 
 appealed powerfully to the popular imagination. The 
 ageing queen, the grown ideals, the mature hopes, 
 energies, and thoughts, were all present in men's 
 minds, suffused with a glow of jubilation, half pensive, 
 half congratulatory ; and the outward rejoicings 
 were scarcely done with, the beacon fires hardly 
 extinct, when the twin poets who, with all their 
 differences, were alike in fame and age, bade fare- 
 well to poetry and life, and declared their last oracles 
 to the people whose progress they had followed for 
 fifty years. With an interval of less than three years, 
 each was buried in Westminster Abbey, leaving their 
 final utterances for the consolation of their mourners. 
 
 Here, however, all likeness ceases, and even these 
 are characteristically distinct. Tennyson's rhythm in 
 ' Crossing the Bar ' reproduces wonderfully the move- * Crossing 
 ment of the full, slow tide of which it speaks, g^r.' 
 Without ' foam ' and almost without * sound ', it 
 rises in one swelHng verse and falls stilly in the 
 next; and, rising and falling with the rhythm, borne 
 tranquilly, gravely, almost passively, seawards, the 
 
282 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 thought, or soul, of the poet moves on the bosom 
 of the deep : 
 
 For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place 
 
 The flood may bear me far, 
 I hope to see my Pilot face to face 
 
 When I have crost the bar. 
 
 Upwards in five beats, downwards in three, with 
 Tennyson's well-known music of monosyllables, the 
 stately surrender of activity and its resumption in 
 eternity are accomplished. There was a speck in the 
 darkness. The darkness gradually overwhelms it. 
 The awful tide rolls on. 
 'Epilogue' Browning dispels the awe. He asserts his individu- 
 lando. ^ ality till the last. Not for him is the passive surrender 
 to a force greater than himself. Not for him the aids 
 to consolation derived from harmonies of sentiment 
 and harmonizing metaphors of language. The twilight 
 of day and the twilight of life ; the call of death and the 
 evening bell ; the open sea and time without end ; 
 this subtle play upon emotions — these associative 
 ideas and transferences of thought — were foreign to 
 Browning's art : 
 
 So, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time, 
 
 Greet the unseen with a cheer ! 
 Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 
 ' Strive and thrive ! ' cry * Speed, — fight on, fare ever 
 There as here ! ' 
 
 The difference is obvious and essential. The robust 
 
 activities of man — his bustle, his cheering, his braced 
 
 ^' courage — are to break, unaffrighted, the silence to 
 
IMAGINATIVE REASON 283 
 
 which Tennyson attuned his mood. The ' unseen ' is 
 not to be explained away by fallacies from limited 
 horizons. Force, however puny and inadequate, is to 
 be opposed to greater force, in the confidence derived 
 from the experience of him who 
 
 never doubted clouds would break. 
 Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would 
 
 triumph, 
 Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
 Sleep to wake. 
 
 Push this faith to the uttermost, cried Browning. 
 Reject despair, whatever its disguise : every form of 
 relaxed energy is unfaith : 
 
 What had I on earth to do 
 With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly ? 
 Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel — 
 Being — who ? 
 
 How splendid a message of conscious being to resound, 
 as actually occurred, on the very day of the poet's 
 death ! 
 
 Nor was his message confined to his last day or last Brown- 
 poem. It is the secret of Browning's optimism, and ^^ 
 the clue to his life and writings throughout. There 
 were two things eminent in Robert Browning : first, 
 his faith in a reconciling purpose, in a soul of good 
 beneath the evil, however much the evil overlay it, 
 bearing witness to the origin of evil as a test and as a 
 condition of the good ; and, secondly, and depending 
 on the first, his belief in energy and effort. True life — ^ 
 not its failure or its misses — is a struggle towards good. 
 
V 
 
 284 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 ^ The survival of the fittest is the survival of the best. 
 Evil is good's opportunity. Sin is the milieu of resist- 
 ance. The law of nature is the moral law as well, since 
 both spring from one source. 
 
 As resistance is the beginning of good, so effort is 
 the means to perfection through all the stages of life. 
 Even sin, in this creed, is more sinful if it be the sin of 
 surrender and not that of purposeful action. Merely 
 not-sinning may sometimes be farther from good 
 than sinful action itself. To * depart from evil and do 
 good ' was Browning's rescript, as it was the psalmist's ; 
 but to avoid evil and do nothing might be a worse sin 
 against manhood. Read, for instance, in Dramatic 
 Romances, Browning's rendering of the Florentine fable 
 of The Statue and the Bust. Two lovers, whose love 
 was a crime, postponed and dallied with their desires 
 till time crept on them unawares. Youth and the 
 dream escaped. The faculties of feeling were dried 
 up, and, reversing the Pygmalion myth, cold stone 
 took the place of warm humanity. What judgment 
 does the poet pronounce ? They abstained from sin, 
 says the world ; abstention was sin, declares the poet : 
 'a crime will do As well, I reply, to serve for a test 
 As a virtue golden through and through '. It is the '^ 
 action that matters ; the colour of the act is not 
 important : 
 
 Let a man contend to the uttermost 
 For his life's set prize, be it what it will I 
 The counter our lovers staked was lost 
 As surely as if it were lawful coin, 
 
IMAGINATIVE REASON 285 
 
 (they failed by the supreme test of action, without 
 reference to the stamp of the act) : 
 
 And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 
 Is the unUt lamp and the ungirt loin, 
 Though the end in sight was a vice, I say. 
 
 And then Browning challenges every one of us to reply 
 
 by the test of contention : 
 
 You of the virtue (we issue join) 
 How strive you ? De te fabvla ! 
 
 Right or wrong, this was Browning's creed, his 
 message to a self-conscious generation. To keep 
 the loins girded and the lamp alight was at once his 
 precept and his practice. He upheld it faithfully for 
 fifty years. He never pretended that life was easy. 
 Alike in his poetry and in his acts he never shirked 
 its utmost responsibilities. And herein lies the futility 
 of comparing Browning with Tennyson. They are 
 essentially incomparable. There is no common 
 standard of measure. The pale Arthur of the Idylls, 
 the dim Avilion of his peace, are as remote from 
 Browning's dramatic genius as the finish of Tennyson's 
 workmanship was remote from Browning's uncouth 
 style. Browning seized a mass of material, and, 
 hacking oil fragments as he could, roughly shaped them 
 to his fancy. The material is nearly always flawless 
 marble ; the art is very often crude and sometimes 
 even grotesque. Only here and there — rarely, but 
 how gratefully — the style is worthy of the subject. 
 
 What was it, we may ask at this point, which, in 
 Browning's opinion, made effort worth while in a world 
 
286 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 The beleaguered by sin and bounded by the unseen ? Why 
 of love, strive, or struggle, or contend ? Why do God's work 
 with Pippa's heart : ' God's in His heaven — All's 
 right with the world ' ? Browning's answer is the 
 one word, love. The Maker, he says in effect, who has 
 decreed this test of character, does not leave us to 
 strive in vain. He gives us love in life, and, through 
 love, justifies all. As early as 1835, in his noble poem, 
 Paracelsus^ Browning upheld this belief. Men, he 
 
 grow too great 
 For narrow creeds of right and wrong, which fade 
 Before the unmeasured thirst for good. . . . 
 I learned my own deep error, love's undoing 
 Taught me the worth of love in man's estate. 
 And what proportion love should hold with power 
 In his right constitution ; love preceding 
 Power, and with much power, always much more love. 
 
 ^ It is love which binds man to woman ; love, which 
 
 binds man to his fellow-men ; love, which binds man 
 
 to his Maker, even the vilest of creatures to the Creator 
 
 of evil and of good ; it is love — constitutional love — 
 
 which knits the universe together, binding the Maker 
 
 to man. 
 
 To the strength and majesty of this force Browning 
 
 testified in his life, as well as in his writings. His 
 
 love was true poetry, as his poetry was true love. 
 
 E. B. Robert Browning's marriage (1846) with Elizabeth 
 
 ^*^°^" Barrett (1806-61) — poet with poet and lover with 
 
 lover — is one of the very few romances which ' romantic ' 
 
 writers lived instead of telling. To the pure flame of 
 
 this passion the garish flambeaux of Byron's amours 
 
IMAGINATIVE REASON 287 
 
 are as gaslight unto sunlight. Elizabeth Barrett 
 Browning was not a great poet, but she was the ideal 
 counterpart of a great lover. We talk in these days of 
 the relations of women to men, the equality of the 
 sexes, and so forth, as if the great women of the nine- 
 teenth century had failed to vindicate their rights. 
 If complete self-expression be the final definition of 
 true liberty, then Queen Victoria on the throne, and 
 Florence Nightingale in the camp, and Elizabeth 
 Barrett Browning in love, are surely types of English- 
 women who found liberty attainable through, not 
 despite of, their sex. And of these three, the woman of 
 forty who left her invalid's couch and her masterful 
 father's home to foUow her ardent lover — her junior 
 by several years — , who wrote poetry by his side, and 
 lived romantic days as his wife for fifteen years, and 
 bare him a son of their love, was, perhaps, the most 
 womanly of all, alike in her submission and in her 
 revolt. 
 
 Literature owes her a direct debt for Aurora Leigh 
 and Sonnets from the Portuguese, but the indirect debt 
 is larger for her influence on Robert Browning's life 
 and work, and for such a poem as One Word More, in 
 which he acknowledges what he owed : 
 
 God be thanked, the meanest of His creatures 
 Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with. 
 One to show a woman when he loves her. 
 
 And this love, which Browning celebrated in a 
 hundred different poems, from the tremendous thanks- 
 giving to his wife to so slight a lyric as A Woman's 
 
288 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Last Word, led to a further constructive principle. 
 When Pippa passes through Asolo, singing her brave 
 refrain, which we quoted just above ; when Cleon 
 avers, in the poem of that name, 
 
 Life's inadequate to joy, 
 As the soul sees joy, tempting life to take ; 
 
 when Bishop Blougram, in his Apology, repels the 
 scofEer's attack : 
 
 No, when the fight begins within himself, 
 
 A man's worth something. God stoops over his head, 
 
 Satan looks up beneath his feet — both tug — 
 
 He's left, himself, in the middle : the soul wakes 
 
 And grows, 
 
 the reader is conscious of an appeal — of an implied 
 assumption appealing — to a consciousness beyond 
 experience, which is new in poetry, new in art, newly 
 inwrought by contemplation of the new experience 
 of the age. There is a conclusion to this hypothesis, 
 which Tennyson, with all his artistry, never succeeded 
 in revealing. Love, which makes life worth while, 
 reveals the value of effort, and evaluates life afresh. 
 The poet is the interpreter of these new values. There 
 were philosophers enough at that time — they are not 
 less many to-day — to render the material view ; and 
 the more the conditions of existence thrust material 
 interests to the front, the more urgent it becomes that 
 the great thinkers of the age, its Wordsworth, its 
 Browning, its George Meredith, should be consulted 
 at all points, in order to insure a due performance 
 
IMAGINATIVE REASON 289 
 
 of man's spiritual functions in a world which is increasing 
 
 its demands on his merely physical activities. 
 
 Read in this light the conclusion to the twenty- The. Ring 
 
 three thousand lines of Browning's masterpiece, The^^^j^^ 
 
 Ring and the Book : 
 
 So, British Public, who may like me yet, 
 
 (Marry and amen !) learn one lesson hence 
 
 Of many which whatever lives should teach : 
 
 This lesson, that our human speech is naught, 
 
 Our human testimony false, our fame 
 
 And human estimation words and wind. 
 
 Why take the artistic way to prove so much ? 
 
 Because it is the glory and good of Art, 
 
 That Art remains the one way possible 
 
 Of speaking truth. . . . 
 
 . . . Art — wherein man nowise speaks to men. 
 
 Only to mankind — Art may tell a truth 
 
 Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought, 
 
 Not wrong the thought, missing the mediate word. 
 
 So may you paint your picture, twice show truth, 
 
 So, note by note, bring music from your mind, 
 
 So write a book shall mean beyond the facts, 
 
 Suffice the eye and save the soul beside. 
 
 Read this and ponder its significance. Remember 
 that it is imaginatively conceived and literally meant. 
 Remember the man who wrote it, his fifty years' 
 witness to its truth, his love casting out fear, his courage 
 stronger than death. ' Our human speech ', faltering, 
 imperfect, and most imperfect, perhaps, when its 
 forms are most delusively attractive, ' is naught '. 
 ' Our human testimony ', the guesswork of induction 
 from phenomena seen in time and space, is * false ', 
 and most false, perhaps, when most dogmatic. * Our 
 human estimation ' of base and noble, great and small, 
 19 
 
290 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 ^is 'words and wind', and most fleeting, perhaps, in 
 the near perspective of contemporaries. Art is the 
 one way possible of speaking truth. The poet or 
 painter, searching beyond experience, aiming through 
 the illusion of the senses at the transcendental point 
 of view, appealing from effects to causes, from experi- 
 ence to God, is alone competent to speak truth, though 
 he come down from the mountain with but broken 
 fragments of stone, their inscription hard to decipher, 
 and though the shining of his face quickly fade. 'So 
 write a book shall mean beyond the facts ' — thus 
 reversing the bliss of man, according to Pope ^ — , 
 this transcendental aim, however inadequately realized, 
 of the poets of the nineteenth century is, in the last 
 resort, their knowledge-value. To correct the con- 
 ventions of human judgment by a higher and a wiser 
 standard is the message of the poets in the forward 
 line. 
 
 u. 
 
 The There was one writer- in these years who was seized 
 
 o^GSrge ^^ fu.lly by this rapture that the inscription on his 
 
 Meredith, tablets became in places almost undecipherable. We 
 
 rehearse every pretext of imperfection — derived from 
 
 the task of reducing a hardly malleable material to 
 
 familiar forms of beauty — in order to diminish, or, 
 
 at least, to extenuate the formal difficulties which 
 
 confront us in his works. An aphorism of the late 
 
 ^ ' Not to act or think beyond mankind ', see p. 03, supra. 
 
IMAGINATIVE REASON 291 
 
 Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), rational philosopher, 
 and critic of the eighteenth century, is serviceable at 
 this point : ' The deepest thinker ', he says, ' is not 
 really — though we often use the phrase — in advance 
 of his day so much as in the line along which advance 
 takes place ' (English Literature and Society in the 
 Eighteenth Century, p. 17). This is true and important 
 to criticism, for it helps to explain the formal obscurity 
 of writers — and, incidentally, their neglect in their own 
 day — who notch out the rugged path ahead, where 
 the flowers of the new age will blossom. They are 
 expressing the thoughts of to-morrow in the language 
 — and to the ears — of to-day. Consequently, they 
 speak hard sayings to a heedless generation. 
 
 George Meredith as poet, even more than as novelist, 
 belongs to this class of pioneers, to the men in the 
 line of advance, whose full greatness awaits recognition 
 till the advance is completed and the novelty has become 
 commonplace by repetition. The identity of Faith 
 with Reason, the Real as the basis of the Ideal, society 
 reanimated by love of Earth, and not shivering with 
 dread of the things that are — not clinging to the 
 customary and the sentimental — , for these ideas 
 Meredith strove in the worst years of the divorce 
 between knowledge and belief, fulfilling the vision of 
 Wordsworth in the new era of democracy, raising to 
 impassioned contemplation the milder curiosity of 
 Tennyson, and surpassing by a deeper transcenden- 
 talism the human harmonies of Robert Browning. 
 
 A poet's instrument — a feeble one — ^is language, 
 
292 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 and, as the experience is more novel., and the evidence 
 more unexpected, so his instrument must prove less 
 adequate and manageable. There are even occasions 
 when the commonest words have to be called in and 
 re-coined, in order to remove their trite appearance, 
 and to repair their expressiveness. The imperfection of 
 language as a medium of truth is remedied in course 
 of time. It repeats, in similar circumstances, differing 
 only in degree, the history of its original development. 
 All this is familiar enough, but, till recently, it has not 
 been applied to the criticism of Meredith's poetry i. 
 Thus applied, it explains, for example, his makeshift 
 with an adjective where no substantive exists ; it 
 explains his use of ' Earth ', and, partially, his disuse 
 of ' God ' ; and it explains the cause, if not altogether 
 Hymn io the result, of the obscurity of such poems as his Hymn 
 to Colour. There he is adapting an old language to 
 the requirements of a new philosophy : 
 
 With Life and Death I walked when Love appeared, 
 And made them on each side a shadow seem. . . . 
 Around, save for those shapes, with him who led 
 And linked them, desert varied by no sign 
 Of other Ufe than mine. 
 
 Love takes the poet's hand, and Life and Death 
 sink away. ' Whichever is, the other is ', says Love ; 
 Life and Death are twin aspects of one whole, ' but 
 
 1 Several books have appeared in the last year or two. Especial 
 interest attaches to The Poetry and Philosophy of Qeorge Meredith, 
 by George Macaulay Trevelyan (Constable, 1906), and to Aspects 
 of Qeorge Meredith, by Richard H. P.' Curie (Routledge, 1908), 
 which will be found to supplement each other. 
 
IMAGINATIVE REASON 293 
 
 know, It is thy craving self that thou dost see, Not in 
 
 them seeing me ', not recognizing Love as stronger 
 
 than Death and Life. This thought of the ' craving 
 
 self ' obstructing the activity of the spirit, and, 
 
 therefore, the perception of truth, is essential to 
 
 Meredith's message. We find it everywhere in his 
 
 poems : ' It is our ravenous that quails ' (the adjective 
 
 for the substantive, as above), ' Flesh by its craven 
 
 thirsts and fears distraught ', is an example from 
 
 Meditation under Stars. ' Love meet they who do not 
 
 shove Cravings in the van of Love ' is another, from 
 
 The Woods of Westermain. 
 
 Then Love, in this hymn, introduces the difficult 
 
 analogy between Colour, as the mediator between 
 
 Light and Dark, and Love, as the mediator between 
 
 Life and Death. Recollect that the whole argument 
 
 is new ; the whole field of speculation is unexplored. 
 
 Poetry has never yet attempted, at any rate in the 
 
 same degree, to ' see, hear, feel, outside the senses ', 
 
 as Meredith writes elsewhere, and to penetrate Earth's 
 
 appearances, beyond even the links of her phenomena, 
 
 to Earth's ultimate, secret relationships, and to the 
 
 very psychology of her physics. 
 
 Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes 
 The house of heaven splendid for the bride. 
 
 The physical process of dawn — colour irradiating the 
 firmament — is extended, allegorically, or by analogy, 
 to the psychical process of truth — love irradiating the 
 
 He gives her homeliness in desert air, 
 And sovereignty in spaciousness; he leads 
 
294 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Through widening chambers of surprise to where 
 Throbs rapture near an end that aye recedes, 
 Because his touch is infinite and lends 
 A yonder to all ends . . . 
 
 He is the heart of light, the wing of shades. 
 The noon of beauty : never soul embraced 
 Of him can harbour unfaith ; soul of him 
 Possessed walks never dim. 
 
 And as Colour brings beauty out of darkness, and 
 quickens death into life, so by Love 
 
 . . . have men come out of brutishness. 
 To spell the letters of the sky, and read 
 A reflex upon Earth else meaningless. 
 
 Then the song ceases, and the shadows reappear, but 
 the poet sees them with different eyes : 
 
 Life ere long 
 Came on me in the public ways and bent 
 Eyes deeper than of old : Death met I too, 
 And saw the dawn glow through. 
 
 This is a genuine re-interpretation of experience, and 
 it matters not at all if the subject prove at times too 
 hard for the manipulation of language. Meredith sins 
 by excess, not defect. Unlike Tennyson's child, who 
 had ' no language but a cry ', the imperious need of 
 his imagination creates the utterance of the lips. 
 Meredith breaks through the thicket of words, using 
 images as lanterns and shaping swords to pruning- 
 hooks, till those that win with him to the other side, 
 panting and a little breathless, forget which was 
 lantern or sword, which was image or metaphor, and 
 
IMAGINATIVE REASON 295 
 
 even what use either served, in the glad greeting of a 
 
 goal to which none other could have led them. 
 
 Above all, do not drift on sensation, is the key to Meredith's 
 
 message. 
 
 Meredith's creed. ' Look with spirit past the sense, 
 Spirit shines in permanence ', he warns us in The Woods 
 of Westermain. ' Behold the life at ease ; it drifts. 
 The sharpened life commands its course ', we are re- 
 minded in Hard Weather. Again and again it occurs, 
 up and down the pages of his poems, and especially 
 in * A Reading of Earth ' — this sweet, stern call to 
 mere, dear duty. There is no mysticism in the message, 
 though there is still a mystery ; but it brings to fuller 
 completeness — it advances another step, historically — 
 the psychological structure of Wordsworth's emotional 
 faith in the common direction of all nature, conscious, 
 sentient, and inanimate alike. It expresses, in however 
 hard verse, the rational sanction of faith, the psycho- 
 logical basis of moral action. The appeal to theological 
 sentiment, which Tennyson affected from his earliest 
 to his latest verse, is not in Meredith's range. Like 
 Wordsworth before him, in the fine phrase of the late 
 F. W. H. Myers, Meredith turns a theology back into 
 religion. His May-Queen, we feel (for she might surely 
 have qualified), would have died less theologically, 
 though not, therefore, less religiously, than Tennyson's. 
 Her portrait is drawn in the most musical, as it was 
 also the earliest, of Meredith's poems, the Love in the 
 Valley of 1850 K 
 
 1 The metre of Love in the Valley is the same as that of George 
 Barley's Serenade of a Royal Martyr. It has also been remarked 
 
296 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Reconcile- It is for his supreme reconcilement of ' the external 
 world ' with ' the individual mind ' in Wordsworth's 
 programme, of the ' outer ' with the ' inner ' in his own, 
 that George Meredith is accounted among the greatest 
 English poets. He offers the revelation sought in the 
 morning of the century, and he rests it on no divorce 
 between human knowledge and heavenly wisdom, on 
 no antagonism of reason and faith, no compromise 
 disguised by association, but on a real union of the two. 
 Imagination coalesces with reason. It is the poet's 
 pathway to reality. Its truths are as vital and as valid 
 as those of science itself. Living thought will not 
 acquiesce for more than a period of transition in any 
 more diffident conclusion. A permanent reconciliation 
 is required, an enduring and a transcending identification. 
 These we find, obscurely though it be, in Meredith's 
 A Thrush in February, in The Woods of Westermain, 
 in Woodland Peace, in A Faith on Trial, in The Lark 
 Ascending, and in twenty other poems, from which we 
 may cite the conclusion to Meditation under Stars, ^ 
 where Earth is transformed in the eyes of her 
 lover : 
 
 Then at new flood of customary mom, 
 
 Look at her through her showers, 
 
 Her mists, her streaming gold: 
 A wonder edges the familiar face ; 
 She wears no more that robe of printed hours; 
 Half strange seems Earth, and sweeter than her flowers. 
 
 that, in Parley's Becket, the phrase ' such a leg ! * occurs in a dis- 
 cussion of the Chancellor by the ladies of the Court. If Meredith / 
 owed this to Darley, he turned it to excellent account in The Egoist. I 
 
IMAGINATIVE REASON 297 
 
 Finally, in Meredith, the poet, there is an impassioned 
 tenderness that attracts us. It is never wistful, never 
 morbid, never indulgent. The poet's attitude is that 
 of faith, infinitely charitable to ignorance. Meredith 
 says in effect : The power of happiness is within you ; 
 this earth, which seems so cruel, which takes such 
 delight in slaughter, is the earth which speeds the race, 
 which brings man from dust to flame, and which love 
 illuminates with colour. Love Earth, and her secret 
 is ours. ' Earth loves her young ' ; 'in her charge 
 is our fate ' ; ' the road to her soul is the Real '. ' Once 
 beheld, she gives the key airing every doorway '. There 
 is spirit in her clods, ' footway to the God of Gods '. 
 But have care, adds the poet, pitying even as he warns, 
 and yearning to help us ; 'in yourself may lurk the 
 trap '. For to Meredith, as to Wordsworth in A Poet's 
 Epitaph — but more conspicuously because with more 
 knowledge — , fear, and selfishness, and greed, and 
 knowledge as an end in itself, and hollow professions 
 of piety, and hate, and all the fry of darkness, are the 
 obstacles which we raise against happiness. It is so 
 simple, he says, and yet so difficult ; we cling to custom, 
 as to the old coat in Carlyle's philosophy of clothes. 
 But ' Enter these enchanted woods, you who dare '. 
 Nay, you who care, even more than you who dare, for 
 it is our blindness, our folly, and our pretence against 
 which Meredith prays. All his poetry is a prayer of 
 thanksgiving for light manifest and truth full-grown. 
 
 There are those who prefer the novelist to the poet. 
 There are those who, choosing among his poems, prefer 
 
298 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Love in the Valley, with its music of youth, and Modern 
 Love, with its tragedy of wedlock, to the impersonal 
 and philosophic Earth-poetry. The choice is there, and 
 the preference is immaterial. But to some, the poetry 
 of the romantic movement seems to have felt its way 
 through all the magic of Meredith's predecessors to 
 that final utterance of romance realized, in the wonder 
 edging the familiar. For, after all, true poetry, at 
 bottom, is a consecration of the commonplace : 
 
 Mine are these new fruitings rich 
 The simple to the common brings. 
 
 m. 
 
 Summary. Since the first notes of Thomson and Gray, in the 
 dawn of the new romance, we have marked the gradual 
 opening of sealed fountains and barred windows. The 
 sober proprieties are overrun. The region of pure 
 imagination is desolate and comfortless no more. The 
 forest of Arden is re-tenanted. Ships sail across the 
 sea of fancy to people the deserts of Bohemia. The 
 unfinished work of Wordsworth finds its complement 
 and continuation. The ' walls of cities ' which Words- 
 worth left standing with all their sorrow ' evermore 
 within ' are levelled at a more powerful trumpet-call. 
 Less and less is excluded from the poet's survey, and 
 this summons to the acceptance of a common fate, seen 
 steadily and whole, is a sign of the poet's growing power 
 to interpret and to reconcile appearances. 
 
IMAGINATIVE REASON 299 
 
 Those who tried, in accents however faltering, to 
 recover the whole truth of life from the hands of the 
 commissioners who were parcelling it out into religious 
 and scientific partial truths ; those who, within the 
 limits of their powers, but not below the dignity of 
 their resolve, sought the evidence of reality as the sole 
 basis of an inference to the ideal ; who, not content 
 with ad interim conclusions, attempted, in the fine 
 phrase of Keats, to ' pour out a balm upon the world ' ; 
 who fused the particular in the universal, and rendered 
 the spectacle, transformed, in the eternal terms of 
 art ; who aimed at the transcendental Synthesis, 
 despite all allurements by the way — allurements of 
 subject and style in byways of speculation or decora- 
 tion — ; these are they who revolved concentrically 
 with the revolution of their times, and made the needs 
 of their times the centre of their strivings and their 
 aims. Tennyson tried it ; Browning tried it ; Mere- 
 dith tried it ; none completely, for the solution is not 
 yet ; Tennyson, with many barkings back, with much 
 timidity and dependence on transition, skilfully dis- 
 guised as ' honest doubt ' , with much tugging from 
 the realm of pure beauty to which Keats had first 
 repaired, and with much conscientious endeavour to 
 beautify the forms of thought ; Browning, with un- 
 conquered hope — not yet, and, haply, never, to be 
 disproved — that the soul of man, dissected, contains 
 the principle of good ; Meredith, with intense con- 
 viction that * blood and brain and spirit ' are the 
 triune parts of Earth, in the harmonious working of 
 
300 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 which is the key to unlock all mysteries — , and all 
 three poets with absolute sincerity. 
 
 They achieved, through this, more than this. Lyrical 
 poetry attained in their hands a power and a range of 
 expression which it had never reached before. In our 
 desire to display their concentric purpose, their response 
 to the questioning of their age — a response truer than 
 the philosophers' and deeper than the novelists' — , 
 it may well be that we have failed to praise their beauties 
 enough ; that ' the chirp of Ariel ' has escaped between 
 the lines of ' the reading of Earth '. If so, the remedy 
 is at hand : there are the open pages of their poems ; 
 and, perhaps, appreciation will be quickened through 
 insight into the historical view. Poetry, like heaven, 
 has many mansions, and a comparison by degrees 
 of greatness would be invidious, nor, indeed, could it 
 be sustained. 
 
§ 5. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 
 
 THE world beautiful was to be less remotely wooed. 
 A group of young writers and painters recall at 
 the noon of the nineteenth century the pleasant 
 Bohemian tradition set in an earlier generation by\ 
 the Wordsworths, the Coleridges and the Lambs, and 
 renewed about 1875 by the Barbizon group which 
 included R. A. M. Stevenson, the art-critic and painter, j 
 and his cousin, Robert Louis Stevenson. 
 
 They were all about the same age : D. G. Rossetti ; a group 
 his (surviving) brother, William Michael, and their ^emians 
 sister Christina ; John Everett Millais, Thomas 
 Woolner, Holman Hunt, James CoUinson and George^ 
 Meredith. With sundry comings and goings, which 
 it would be tiresome to follow in detail, now in Blooms- 
 bury and now in Chelsea, this eager band of youth 
 kept house and counsel together, reading, writing, 
 drawing, and inspiring one another. Ford Madox 
 Brown (1821-93) was one of the cdterie^ though not in 
 it ; John Ruskin (1819-1900), Rossetti's senior by 
 nine years, stooped at intervals from Olympus to offer ^ 
 help and advice, with a certain kindly condescension ; 
 William Morris (1834-96) was a junior recruit, who "^ 
 brought funds as well as talents to the fellowship ; 
 
302 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne and Theodore Watts 
 (-Dunton), both a little younger yet, preserved till 
 the last at Putney the practice of a house in common ; 
 and to this list, incomplete as it is, should be added 
 the name of Mr. Hall Caine, who, in Rossetti's decline, 
 proved a valuable friend. 
 
 We are only incidentally concerned with the work of 
 the painters in this group. Millais lived to be a baronet 
 and president of the Royal Academy ; Mr. Holman 
 Hunt, O.M., is still alive, and shares with Mr. W. M. 
 Rossetti the role of historiographer of the Pre- 
 Raphaelites. Many of the best pictures of the artists 
 are now hung in the Tate Gallery, and not a few possess 
 a literary interest, independently of the principles 
 then common to literature and art. Thus, Millais's 
 ' Ophelia ' (1852) preserves the lineaments of Elizabeth 
 Siddal, afterwards Rossetti's wife ; his ' North-West 
 Passage ' (1874) had as model for its sea-captain 
 Trelawny, Byron's friend. There, too, are Rossetti's 
 portrait of Mrs. William Morris, his ' Beata Beatrix ' 
 (1863), painted in memory of his wife, and his ' Ecce 
 Ancilla Domini ' (1850), with the heads of Christina 
 Rossetti and of Woolner, the sculptor. There, too, 
 is a canvas by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, who was 
 associated with Rossetti and Morris in a scheme for 
 decorating the walls of the Union Society at Oxford, — 
 one example among several (though its remains have 
 perished) of the communion between the painters and 
 the poets. 
 
 From this ardent group of younger men Alfred 
 
PRE-RAPHAELITISM 303 
 
 Tennyson and the Brownings were necessarily aloof. 
 These were senior by, roughly, twenty years. But 
 Robert Browning's influence on the forms of Rossetti's 
 poems can be traced in several places, and when 
 Tennyson, in 1832, issued The Lady of Shalott (among 
 his Poems, chiefly Lyrical), he became, unwittingly, a 
 leader of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which was Pre 
 formally constituted from this circle. For that poem, it^m.*^ ' 
 above all others in the volume, except, perhaps, 
 Mariana in the South, displayed the gifts of colour and 
 of draughtsmanship which marked the writings of 
 the school. Moreover, it anticipated other qualities : 
 It was founded on an Italian story. It repaired to 
 Astolat and Camelot, and the wonderland of the 
 Arthur-legend. It revived the device of a refrain. It 
 was direct and detailed in its particularization. It had 
 recourse to a certain preciosity of archaic convention, 
 and it admitted the full effect, at once voluptu- 
 ous and simple, of a soft and liquid vocabulary 
 (' lilies ', ' willows ', ' carols ', ' shallops ', and so 
 forth). 
 
 The idea governing this poem was, so to speak, 
 atavistic. It derived, through Keats, from Spenser, 
 and, through Spenser, from Dante and his circle, 
 whence came Rossetti's fore-name, the subjects of 
 several of his pictures, and his edition of the early 
 Italian poets. Keats himself had abandoned this 
 motive when the spirit of Milton swept the strings 
 which he tuned to the vision of Hyperion, and Tennyson 
 was likewise to abandon it for Miltonic cadences of 
 
304 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 blank verse, and for the problems of post-medigeval 
 philosophy to which the death of Hallam turned his 
 mind. But there, in The Lady of Shalott, is the true 
 Pre-Raphaelite idea, embroidered with complete success 
 through the winding beauty of its stanzas. There is 
 the verse which is pictorial, and there are the pictures 
 made poetic, with that special fusion of the arts peculiar 
 to the genius of men, who, like Ruskin, Rossetti and 
 William Morris (and Millais, who wrote poetry for 
 The Germ), were painters and designers as well as 
 critics and poets. There, too, ideally, as formally, is 
 the retirement from action to sensation, and from the 
 contemplative to the sensuous state of being ; above 
 all, from to-day to yesterday. Tennyson, as we have 
 seen, lived to modernize Malory and to try to spiritualize 
 evolutionist science. Millais, too, had a second period. 
 Meredith, like Madox Brown, had no liking for cdterieSy 
 though there are traces of the Pre-Raphaelite motive in 
 one or two of his poems, especially in the sonnet- 
 sequence Modern Love, the affinities of which with 
 Rossetti's House of Life it would be an interesting 
 special study to follow out. Ruskin and Morris, as 
 we shall see, became chiefly concerned with the world 
 of to-morrow, and Rossetti, alone in poetry, preserved 
 the Pre-Raphaelite idea throughout his life. 
 
 The origin of the brotherhood has been fixed with 
 comparative certainty. In a letter written by Keats to 
 his brother and sister, and included in the Life by Lord 
 Houghton, which Rossetti was reading in 1848, the 
 following remark occurs : ' When I was last at Haydon's 
 
PRE-RAPHAELITISM 305 
 
 I looked over a book of prints, taken from the fresco of 
 the church at Milan, the name of which I forget. In 
 it were comprised specimens of the first and second age 
 of Art in Italy. I do not think I ever had a greater treat 
 out of Shakespeare ; full of romance and of the most 
 tender feeling ; magnificence of drapery beyond every- 
 thing I ever saw, not excepting RaphaeVs^ — but grotesque 
 to a curious pitch '. In this enthusiasm for the work 
 of Italian painters before Raphael — Rossetti refers to the 
 passage in a letter to his brother — doubtless we have the 
 source of the name and notions of the ' P.R.B.', as the 
 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood came to be known to the 
 esoterics. There are those who will point to the same 
 extract for the source of its decline ; who will trace it to 
 an excess of ' tender feeling ' and to a too * curious pitch ' 
 of grotesqueness. And the criticism would be justified 
 from its records. But the high enthusiasm at the begin- 
 ning is at once more inspiring and more important than 
 the causes of decKne. Like Tennyson's Knights of the ^ 
 Round Table, the Pre-Raphaeliteswere banded to oppose 
 unworthy standards of taste in art, letters and conduct. 
 They aimed at a revival of chivalry, as rendered by Scott, 
 and of its symbols, as rendered by the painters. They 
 believed in purity sans phrases, in a non-periphrastic 
 ingenuousness, up to the level of which they wrote, and 
 painted, and Hved. And if their ideal bred its own con- 
 ventions — as Rossetti' s natural taste for old china fostered 
 in lesser men an acquisitiveness for bric-a-brac — ; if some 
 of the knights proved false and others fickle to their 
 
 Y0V7a]; if some turned away to other gods, ' lest one good 
 20 
 
3o6 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 custom should corrupt the world ', the point is to define 
 the custom at the height of its good intent. 
 Dante This was reached in 1848, when Mr. W. M. Rossetti 
 Rossetti became literary secretary of the Brotherhood, and when 
 1882). *^^ significant letters, ' P.R.B.', were first affixed to its 
 members' pictures in the Royal Academy. It had an 
 y organ of its own, not very happily called The Germ, as 
 brilliant (and now as precious) as it was short-lived, and 
 its members — especially the artists — were severely dealt 
 with by the critics as soon as their audacity was recog- 
 nized. But the leading spirit in the movement — and 
 the literature written around it is vaster than the litera- 
 ture which represents it — was D. G. Rossetti himself. 
 He was at this time twenty years of age in a group of 
 talent in its twenties, and fate could hardly have selected 
 a more appropriate character for a more enviable part. 
 He was already the author of The Blessed Damozel, and 
 had drafted first versions of other poems, including that 
 marvellous piece of angels' wings bedraggled — soiled 
 etherealism — Jenny. He was handsome, happy and 
 careless — secure, in its proper connotation — ; a man, 
 as all accounts agree, of exceptional charm and 
 vigour ; the kind of man — rare, but irresistible — who 
 communicates an enthusiasm for high objects. His 
 influence on the companionship was remarkable, and 
 it is only to be explained by the candour of his motives 
 and the strength of his resolves. Men talked of it as of 
 a spell, and, one after another, they succumbed to it, 
 listening to Rossetti's conversation, painting pictures 
 or writing poems under his guidance, slaying the dragons 
 
PRE-RAPHAELITISM 307 
 
 of indifEerence and compromise, and learning that the 
 will to do is the deed. The dark days came with heavy- 
 wings, and Rossetti was wrapped in the shadows ; but 
 the radiance of the early years remains — the radiant 
 memory of genius sunning itself without jealousy in the 
 applause and emulation of its disciples. 
 
 In however brief a record of Rossetti, there are always 
 three factors to remember : the un-English strain in 
 his blood, his pure and shining youth, and the shipwreck 
 of his love-marriage. We may take them in the inverse 
 order. Rossetti became engaged in 1851 to a girl of 
 seventeen years of age, named Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal. 
 Her fortune was her eyes and hair ; her father had been 
 a tradesman in Sheffield, and she was a sempstress in 
 London. She sat as an artists' model, and Rossetti 
 first met her in a studio. She was painted byMillais 
 and Holman Hunt, and times without number by her 
 lover. She possessed artistic skill, and a truly artistic 
 temperament upon which her physical weakness was 
 allowed, unfortunately, to react. Consumption began 
 to display itself, and the restraints of her dragging 
 engagement — Rossetti could not afford to marry — and 
 of her unexpressed talents told, inevitably, on her 
 health. The marriage took place in 1860, and was 
 ended in 1862 by Mrs. Rossetti's accidental death from 
 an overdose of laudanum. 
 
 The fact itself was sad enough ; its circumstances 
 made Rossetti sadder. There had always been financial 
 stress, and the young wife's illness to increase it. 
 A still-born baby had come and gone, leaving JMrs. 
 
3o8 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Rossetti weaker and more depressed. And, as the wife 
 relaxed her hold on life, the husband grasped it more 
 firmly. This is the physical fact, with its helpless 
 psychological consequences. Rossetti grew stronger 
 in art, more impatient of lets and hindrances, more 
 virile, more expressive, more sensuous, as the pale flower 
 which he had plucked from a hardly compatible soil 
 was turning, slowly but surely, away from the sun- 
 shine to the shadows. What followed is a matter of 
 history. Rossetti, sensitive and passionate, was over- 
 come with remorse, and he indulged it with characteristic 
 thoroughness. In the coffin of his wife he laid the 
 manuscript of poems which he had written, as he 
 felt, when he might have been lightening her burden. 
 It was an act so splendidly useless as almost to fail 
 in human beauty, and the failure was completed by 
 the sequel, when, in 1869, Rossetti slew his own idea 
 and claimed back his dead from the grave. The sacri- 
 ficial poems were recovered and published, and Rossetti's 
 fame as a poet was increased. But henceforward 
 the poet and the man became as different beings. 
 He was subject to a painful insomnia, which only 
 chloral could relieve. The relief was paid for by 
 other ailments, which attacked him in his working 
 hours. He was haunted by morbid delusions, and, 
 in varying degrees, by all the horrors known as hallu- 
 cination. His friends did all that was possible to help 
 him, but his disease was at times so severe that he 
 suspected the birds in the garden of complicity in a 
 plot to insult him and to drive him out of society. 
 
PRE-RAPHAELITISM 309 
 
 Rossetti's illness l^ardly impaired his work, though 
 the contrast between his bright and ardent youth in 
 the ten years after the ' P.R.B.', and his sick and 
 fanciful middle age till he died, an old man, at fifty- 
 three, is tragic enough, and has kept us too long from 
 his poems. But one more incident in his biography 
 is essential. The publication in 1871 of a paper, 
 expanded to a pamphlet, on The Fleshly School of 
 Poetry, which took Rossetti as its type, is admitted 
 to have hastened his decline. The writer was Robert 
 Buchanan (1841-1901), a Scottish novelist and poet, 
 though he wrote it under the pen-name of Thomas 
 Maitland. He professed, with a certain plausibility, 
 to represent the interests of public morals, but the 
 bitterness, the partiality, and the venom of the 
 pamphlet deprived it of real critical value, and fostered 
 Rossetti's delusion as to a conspiracy against him. 
 The so-called ' fleshly ' element in Rossetti's poems — 
 the decadent note in Pre-Raphaelitism — is untenable 
 as a personal proposition (in which sense Buchanan 
 advanced it), though it has some critical foundation, 
 if ' sensuous ' be read for ' fleshly.' The British 
 ' Philistine ' standard, on which Matthew Arnold 
 poured scorn — the ' Wragg is in custody ' point of 
 view — , was of all attitudes most foreign to Rossetti's 
 foreign blood. His Jenny is ' Wragg ' de -Philistinized, 
 — Wragg hellenized, to keep to Arnold's language, 
 which, by constant iteration, he made sufficiently 
 intelligible ; and the Southern strain in Rossetti's 
 blood was, doubtless, a determining cause in his rejection 
 
310 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 of the conventions of Britisli thought. It is unnecessary 
 to saymore on this topic, which has little actuality to-day. 
 Imagina- The merits of the poems themselves will, perhaps, 
 realism, ^^^e been gathered from these indications of design. 
 Beauty, obviously, they will possess, a beauty, at first, 
 of perception, and, secondly, of recollection. As the 
 glow of enthusiasm faded, imperceptibly but surely, 
 under trouble, grief and disease, so the poet's early 
 delight in beautiful things for the sake of handling 
 and ^escribing them gave place to his so-called second 
 manner (not always or everywhere distinguishable) of 
 the connoisseur, or collector, rather than of the lover. 
 The difference brought with it, in style, a more gorgeous 
 and ornate vocabulary, and more deliberate effects 
 of art ; and the corresponding loss of simplicity was 
 redeemed by a gain in technique. Handling, as suggested 
 just now, was essential to Rossetti's manner. Symbols 
 of resistance and touch became concrete in his hands. 
 Wings, and aureoles, and chalices, and other inventions 
 of poets' imagination, to convey the impressions of a 
 sense beyond the ordinary senses, were indued with 
 tangible forms by Rossetti's brush or pen. His vivid 
 decorative instinct required the visible shapes of 
 imagined emblems of beauty, and his poems, early 
 and late, are full of such substantiated images, trans- 
 ferred sometimes from the canvases of the Italian 
 masters whom he loved. * She had three lilies in her 
 < hand, And the stars in her hair were seven ' ; 'As 
 N low as where this earth Spins like a fretful midge ' ; 
 . ' And the souls mounting up to God Went by her like 
 
PRE-RAPHAELITISM 311 
 
 thin flames ' ; ' The curled moon Was like a little 
 feather Fluttering far down the gulf ', are clear instances 
 of this imaginative realism selected from The Blessed 
 Damozel, in the last stanza of which the two sentences 
 in brackets — ' (I saw her smile) ' and ' (I heard her 
 tears) ' — likewise point to the same vivid symbolism. 
 
 Take, as a further instance, the characteristic song 
 * Love -Lily ' from The House of Life. The title itself 
 is a" picture -symbol — the spirit of abstract love half- 
 imagined in lily-like humanity. (To this Southern 
 passion for form should, doubtless, be referred the 
 Northerner's coarse charge of fleshliness.) Love-Lily 
 has hands, brows and lips. Between them the ' spirit 
 is born ' whose birth fires the poet's blood, and unlocks 
 his physical senses : 
 
 Who on my mouth his finger lays, 
 
 And shows, while listening lutes confer, 
 
 That Eden of Love's watered ways 
 Whose winds and spirits worship her. 
 
 The symbolism is still as innocent as that of the 
 writer in the Old Testament who conceived the grandly 
 simple image about the face and hinder-parts of the 
 Deity, and the tangible appeal is assisted by the lutes 
 visualized from the unseen. Then in the last stanza 
 of the song, the man, who is body and soul combined 
 to pure harmony of function, is permitted access to 
 this abstract-concrete, this tangible-symbolic Love- 
 Lily. Flesh has qualified for this happiness by its 
 power to perceive spirit : 
 
 Brows, hands, and lips, heart, mind, and voice, 
 Kisses and words of Love-Lily, — 
 
312 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 (all the parts imagined from abstract being) — 
 
 Oh ! bid me with your joy rejoice 
 
 Till riotous longing rest in me ! 
 Ah ! let not hope be still distraught, 
 
 But find in her its gracious goal, 
 Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought, 
 
 Nor Love her body from her soul. 
 
 Speech and thought, in the ideal realized, are to be 
 indistinguishably true, and body and soul united in 
 love. 
 
 The later Rossetti, as we have seen, moved gradually 
 away from the direct beauty-worship of his youth. 
 But it is a mistake to think — a mistake fostered by 
 Buchanan — that his gradual cultivation of a more 
 exotic style sapped the foundation of his loyalty to a 
 high ideal of conduct. Not Browning himself was 
 more strenuous in his devotion to right action, though 
 the lessons which Browning drew from dramatic 
 conflicts in the soul Rossetti preferred to exhibit by 
 external symbols. A single comparison will make 
 this clear. There is a sonnet entitled ' Vain Virtues ' 
 in Rossetti's House of Life which conveys precisely 
 the same teaching as Browning's The Statue and 
 the Bust, examined on p. 284 above. Browning 
 dramatized the lesson, applying it through the persons 
 of two lovers in a Florentine fable. Rossetti rendered 
 its abstract meaning by the symbols of religious art. 
 * What is the sorriest thing that enters Hell ? ' he begins 
 by asking, thus reviving at once the atmosphere of 
 mediaeval painters. ' None of the sins ', he declares, 
 (and we recall their horrible shapes), ' but this and that 
 
PRE-RAPHAELITISM 313 
 
 fair deed which a soul's sin at length could supersede *. 
 Browning's fable shows forth the same truth, that 
 a nominal sin may be better than the most closely- 
 cherished virtue, but, while Browning sought persons 
 and a plot, Rossetti personified the ideas. These 
 vain virtues — remember Browning's ' frustrate ghosts ' 
 — are ' virgins, whom death's timely knell might once 
 have sainted ', and, even in Hell, ' the scorching bride- 
 groom leaves their refuse maidenhood abominable ' : 
 
 Night sucks them down, the garbage of the pit, 
 \Vliose names, half-entered in the book of Life, 
 Were God's desire at noon. And as their hair 
 
 And eyes sink last, the Torturer deigns no whit 
 To gaze, but, yearning, waits his worthier wife, — 
 The Sin still blithe on earth that sent them there. 
 
 These images, ' Pre-Raphaelite ' though they are, and An 
 belonging to a tradition older than modern sanctions mode. 
 — to theology rather than to psychology — ^hurt us 
 and haunt us by their realism. A time may come 
 when the symbols will be worn out, when ' hell ' and 
 the ' devil ' of the Middle Ages will as thoroughly have 
 forfeited their appeal as have the gods of Greek 
 mythology. Then these lines will possess what is 
 called a merely literary interest. Their emotional 
 power, derived from the impact of a poet's images on 
 a sympathetic imagination, will have ceased by detri- 
 tion ; while Browning's dramatic method, appealing 
 to the eternal man in men, will still continue efficacious. 
 This hypothetical obsolescence (or, superannuation) of 
 a medium of artistic expression is no part of our present 
 inquiry, save only to hazard one conclusion : The 
 
314 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 artist (or poet, in this instance) who deliberately 
 chooses a single definite medium, with clearly marked 
 characteristics recommending it to a special mood, is 
 more likely to have a temporary vogue, or intermittent 
 temporary vogues, according to the extent of the 
 distribution of the mood at its first period or at its 
 revivals, than an artist, • or poet, whose appeal rests 
 on a permanent basis. Rossetti, in other words, though 
 to-day, and, it may be, for generations to come, we are 
 deeply sensitive to the emotions which he deemed 
 consecrated to art, runs the risk of missing men's 
 response, not to the beauties of his style, but to the 
 images of his thought. In his return to what he held 
 a purer medium than artists were employing in his 
 day, in his conscious rejection of the aids to expression 
 formulated in reply to the demands of art-material 
 itself, and in his creation by his own enthusiasm of 
 a circle of contemporary sympathy, he sacrificed 
 universalism to particularism, and concentric to 
 esoteric art. 
 
§ 6. THE SANCTION OF BEAUTY. 
 
 THE Pre-Raphaelite example drove several writers 
 in this age to pursue the search for the life beautiful. 
 This is the simplest statement of a somewhat complex 
 fact, and it may stand at the head of a list of names 
 in which the first to arrest us is that of Christina Rossetti, 
 the youngest of the four children of Gabriele and Frances 
 (Polidori) Rossetti. Hers was the beauty of asceticism, 
 when the virtue of renouncement in literature had not 
 yet become suspect of pose ; and, before passing to her 
 poetry, a preliminary question arises as to the nature 
 of the influence we are discussing. 
 
 Pre-Raphaelitism was idea and style. As idea, it Rossettrs 
 attracted, or affected, John Ruskin, among Rossetti's 
 seniors, and, among his younger admirers, notably 
 William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne. 
 As style it affected these directly, and, coming into 
 association with Tennyson's elaborate word-music, 
 it revived the attention to formal excellence which 
 Wordsworth, for instance, had postponed to the claims 
 of the moral imagination. In this aspect, its influence 
 is to be traced in Christina Rossetti herself, in Coventry 
 Patmore, Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds 
 
3i6 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 and Robert Louis Stevenson, and, among living writers, 
 in Mrs. Meynell and others. 
 
 So far, the statement is simple, but considerable 
 reservations must be made. Influence in literature 
 is always a confusing and difficult quest, liable to the 
 shattering danger of being misread as a charge of imita- 
 tion. It works by subtlety and finesse, by remin- 
 iscences of diction and rhythm, and by an adherence, 
 mainly unconscious, to a strong and masterful tradition. 
 The tradition of Tennyson and Rossetti was undoubtedly 
 of this kind. On some writers Tennyson's was stronger, 
 and on others Rossetti's : it would be an endless labour, 
 and, finally, unprofitable, to parcel out the field between 
 them. The point is that, without their example, these 
 particular aims in style might never have been culti- 
 vated. 
 
 At the same time, an equally important point is that 
 such cultivators of style were, in the main, and indi- 
 vidually, original thinkers and independent craftsmen. 
 Certain mannerisms in common were inherited, or 
 acquired, by some of their descendants. There have 
 been so-called aesthetic writers, with too much of the 
 egotist about them, who engendered the faults of a 
 clique and nursed a literary mysticism. They petted 
 their nebular transbodiments and fondled their pro- 
 leptic ghosts. This danger is inherent in style, regarded 
 as an end, not a means, and employed without inspira- 
 tion upon spent materials of composition. But, on 
 the whole, English literature of the last century is 
 singularly and honourably free from genius manifest 
 
THE SANCTION OF BEAUTY 317 
 
 in its eccentricities. On the whole, it may fairly be 
 said to contain but few hothouse specimens, and to 
 display, throughout its course, from William Cowper 
 to George Meredith, a sane and constant sensibility 
 to the influences of wind and sun, and a certain moral 
 preoccupation — which shone equally on Chaucer's 
 pilgrims' way, in the fairyland of Spenser, and the para- 
 dise of Milton — , never wholly disused. 
 
 So we greet the schoolmen of beauty as a vital force 
 in English letters. The Pre-Raphaelite movement, 
 when it came, came wholesomely and desirably. It 
 created — partly by the circumstance of its rise in a 
 material age, more, perhaps, by the temperament 
 of its prime mover, with Southern warmnesses in his 
 blood — a respect for beautiful writing, re-animate from 
 Keats and Spenser. And it came at a favourable time. 
 It arrived, or served, as a protest against the plate- 
 glass window point of view staring out of the walls of 
 the Crystal Palace (1851), and against the half-smug, 
 half-mock respectability of prosperous cotton-spinners' 
 ideals, of which the Great Exhibition was so successful 
 an expression. Moreover, encountering the contro- 
 versy between knowledge and belief, the pursuit of 
 beauty in art and life (in art as life, according to some 
 prophets) was reinforced by the demand for beauty 
 in thought, for the re -establishment of the faculty of 
 imagination in the judgment of affairs. Thus, beauty 
 became strengthened by utility. Morris translated 
 its principles into practical wall-papers and furniture. 
 Ruskin extended its canons from art to economics. 
 
3i8 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 The novelists applied its promise to the fortunes of the 
 poor. And, finally, Sir W. S. Gilbert and the late Sir 
 •Arthur Sullivan were in waiting to ridicule in opera 
 the excesses of a cult. These developments, as far 
 as they are separable from the social history of the times 
 — from the history of socialism in its early phases — 
 will be considered in their due place. Here it is enough 
 to have recognized how the good inherent in Pre- 
 Raphaelitism enriched the resources of English literature 
 both as style and as idea, and how its potential evil was 
 corrected by contact with reality, through extension, 
 through reaction, and through satire. Rossetti's genius 
 was unique. His temperament lent him the courage, 
 and ensured the artistic consistency, which an English- 
 man fur sang would have missed. He was not only 
 fearless of ridicule in the direct communication of his 
 ideas, according to the vision that was in him, but, 
 further, he possessed a sense of beauty in a degree not 
 native to English soil — a British Romeo is inconceiv- 
 able — ; and with this he succeeded in infecting a band 
 of disciples and friends. In the beginning, the sanction 
 of beauty was binding on the man as well as on his 
 work, and, while the glow lasted and the brotherhood 
 held togfther, a rare standard of perfection was attained. 
 It failed, as such ideals must fail when the bond is 
 dissolved. The Englishmen fur sang took it over, 
 and applied it to utilitarian ends or combined it with 
 moral aims. 
 
 We come back to Christina Rossetti, who never 
 relaxed the obligation. Physical suffering, the burden 
 
THE SANCTION OF BEAUTY 319 
 
 of which increased with increasing years, must be held to Christina 
 account in part for the rigorous spiritual discipHne to (1830- 
 which she constantly submitted herself, and which she 
 bore with that cheerful conscientiousness which so often 
 surprises us in women. She is said (by her surviving 
 brother) to have sacrificed two suitors, with one of > 
 whom — Cayley, the translator of Dante, — she was 
 herself in love, to religious scrupulosity, and her poems, 
 largely devotional, bear eloquent witness to her search 
 for inward peace. As an artist, she was thoroughly 
 seized with the more obvious appeal — the more external 
 aspects — of Pre-Kaphaelitism. The magnificence noted) ^^ 
 by Keats overwhelmed her with its spiritual emblems.' 
 Trollope says of one of his characters that, ' in religion, t- 
 she was a pure Druidess ' ; of Christina Rossetti we 
 may say that, in religion, she was a pure Pre-Raphaelite. ^ 
 Her poetry breathes adoration. It is drenched with 
 the visible signs of an active and an observant faith. 
 The poet, as pains and sorrows multiplied, became 
 more and more of a recluse, and her work, always 
 cloistral, deepened gradually in intensity. 
 
 Her style was exquisite throughout. She displayed \ \y 
 in a rare degree that feeling for words — the tact in their 
 choice and disposition — which is, from first to last, a 
 characteristic of Victorian literature. In another 
 quality of the age she was more successful even than 
 her brother : it is in what, for want of a better term, 
 may be called eeriness, or intimate grotesqueness^ ^ n 
 Goblin Market ranks in this respect with Robert \ 
 Browning's Pied Piper of Hamelin and Meredith's 
 
 \l^ 
 
320 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Woods of Westermain, as a supreme example of the 
 faculty. No one who reads it can forget it. The 
 rush and pattering of eliin feet, intent on their mis- 
 chievous machinations, the chattering of elfin tongues, 
 the deliciousness of the fare they offer, the invasion 
 of the sisters' white purity, the horror of the imminent 
 corruption, the sacrifice, the brave renunciation — the 
 realism and imagination of it all combine to make up 
 a poem of a kind of which we wish that Miss Rossetti 
 had left more. It is dated 1859 — the year of The 
 L Origin of Species, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and 
 Adam Bede : one of many great years in this epoch — , 
 and the fifty years that have elapsed increase its pure 
 poetic value. It must have been on this side of the 
 author's genius, we late Victorians are fain to think — 
 reconstructing the times of which our fathers have told 
 us — , that ' Lewis Carroll ', her friend in later life, 
 found sympathetic affinity. 
 
 The same delicate fancy which peopled the * brook- 
 side rushes ' with a rout of elfin merchantmen revealed 
 the beauties of heaven to the poet's sore and yearning 
 eyes. Her imaginings of the beatific life are marked 
 by a daring devoutness of an unusual kind. Her fine 
 lyrical gift was joined to an ecstatic perception, not so 
 much of personal emotion, as of sorrow and vanity as 
 ideas. She seemed to walk securely among sublimities, 
 and to accept as first principles of cosmic harmony 
 conclusions which weaker men hardly reach through 
 years of travail. Thus, her devotional poems may be 
 said to begin where that class of verse commonly leaves 
 
THE SANCTION OF BEAUTY 321 
 
 ofi. The impression produced upon the reader is of a 
 kind of rarefied atmosphere of singular truth and purity. 
 It is not quite sacred, at least in the conventional 
 sense, and it is certainly not profane. It is virtually 
 non-moral in its attitude towards the religious mood. 
 
 In passing from Christina Rossetti to William Morris William 
 (1834-1896), we pass chiefly from a woman to a man. (1334! 
 Rossetti' s sister and his friend both fell under his i^^^)- 
 influence. Morris, his junior by six years, was an early 
 adherent to the brotherhood. ' Rossetti says I ought to 
 paint, he says I shall be able ' ; 'I want to imitate 
 Gabriel as much as I can ' — these are typical utterances 
 in or about 1858, of the man who was later to lead a 
 socialist secession from the Democratic Federation, 
 and who was to manifest, throughout his career, 
 a sturdy and unconventional self-dependence. This 
 early influence of Rossetti is a factor of importance in 
 Morris's life. Their years of joint residence at Kelms- "^ 
 cott, and Rossetti's partnership in the decorating- 
 firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company (1861 ; 
 afterwards Morris and Company), left permanent im- 
 pressions on the younger man's character and writings. 
 His first book. The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems ^ 
 (1858), was inscribed ' to my friend, Dante Gabriel 
 Rossetti, painter ', and it displays the characteristics 
 of the school, in masculine hands, as clearly as they 
 
 21 
 
 OF THE \ 
 
 UMfVERSITY j 
 
] 
 
 322 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 are displayed, in feminine hands, by Rossetti's in- 
 spired sister. The difference is of sex and race. 
 Morris's manhood predominated. There was more 
 than a touch of Dr. Johnson in his composition. He 
 was big, and bluff, and burly. He was apt to smash 
 what he despised. He had the tenderness of a big man 
 towards little people — the little people of life and of 
 fancy — , and the contempt of a great mind for mean- 
 nesses. The faith which glorified renouncement in 
 Christina Rossetti, in William Morris glorified accept- 
 ance. Secondly, he was free from the Latin strain, 
 which — as in Flaubert, for instance, — can detach 
 the artist from his emotions, and the lover from the 
 object of his love. The beauty for beauty's sake of 
 Rossetti became, with Morris, beauty for the sake of 
 life. He, too, held beauty most desirable, and sought 
 her where she is to be found, following Rossetti in 
 his quest to idealized tracts of the Middle Ages. But, 
 finding her, he turned her to high uses. The virtues 
 of chivalry, revisited, were virtues of man for men. 
 It was true, as Pre-Raphaelitism implied, that the 
 application of science to industry and of knowledge 
 to belief had obliterated the ancient landmarks of 
 magnanimity, generosity, pride of labour, devotion, 
 purpose, faith, awe, reverence, humility. But to 
 restore these, in art, by a reversion to the old tradition, 
 to collect them, to arrange them, and to adore them, 
 without reference to conduct, was too indefinite a 
 scheme of idealism for Morris's practical temper. He 
 exalted them in his poetry, he imitated them in his 
 
THE SANCTION OF BEAUTY 323 
 
 crafts, but, above all, he interpreted them for practice. 
 Act the life beautiful, as well as behold it, was his im- 
 passioned appeal from the contemplation of beauty 
 to the life beautiful revealed. He wrote fairy-tales 
 for the children of light, and tried to verify them for 
 the children of this world. 
 
 Morris was a man of action first, and those who read 
 the story of his life, as told by Mr. Mackail ^ , will realize 
 the significance of his change ' from the romantic to 
 the epic manner ', from Guenevere and The Earthly 
 Paradise to The Story of Sigurd the Volsung. In his 
 Northern tales of the Niblungs and the Wolfings he found 
 material more apt to his hand than in the epyllia of 
 Greece which he adorned. The tapestry appropriate 
 to romance was laid aside for narration and exhortation, 
 and these were combined in a note intimate with a keen 
 sensibility to the needs of his day and his own ability 
 to supply them. The lessons of the muse of the North 
 were ' no bad thing ', we are reminded, ' to infiltrate 
 into the weakened blood of England. I think that 
 living in these stories nursed the modern revolutionist 
 in Morris, and added imagination to the energy with 
 which he took up in his socialism the cause of the enslaved 
 in England. . . . Like Sigurd, he fought with the 
 dragon of Capitalism . . . ; like Sigurd, time and fate 
 were against him ', and so forth {Four Poets. By 
 Stopford A. Brooke. Pitman, p. 245). This parallelism 
 is, perhaps, a little fanciful, and it may be more correct 
 
 1 The Life of William Morris. By J. W. Mackail. 2 vols. 
 Longmans. 
 
324 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 to say that Morris's ardent quest of beauty, as the 
 man was developed from the youth, was turned from 
 dreaming to acting. ' The idle singer of an empty 
 day ', as he described himself in the refrain of the Apology 
 and Envoy to The Earthly Paradise, became — as man- 
 kind itself became — the busy builder of monuments 
 to progress ; and the artist in Morris turned with him 
 to tales of a more enduring heroism, out of which to 
 justify and defend his belief in the destiny of man. 
 But, whichever way we use the analogy, whether we 
 account for the propaganda by the poetry or for the 
 poetry by the propaganda, the propagandist of social 
 welfare and the poet of heroic blood were united in 
 William Morris for noble and useful ends. His poetry 
 is easier to enjoy than that of some of the Victorians. 
 He deliberately limited its range. He clipped the 
 wings of style, and was content to produce his effects 
 within a definite circle of diction and fancy. He 
 employed * stock ' epithets and figures. He created a 
 literary atmosphere, within which he moved securely, 
 and outside which he rarely tried experiments. These 
 limits lent him the powers of fluency and ease in com- 
 position which his readers appreciate so well. 
 
 He wrote prose as well as poetry : economic-political 
 prose — of the kind which Carlyle and Ruskin had 
 raised, or were raising, above its class — , in addresses 
 on art and industry, in News from Nowhere and A 
 Dream of John Ball ; romantic-imaginative prose, of a 
 kind new in English literature since Mandeville and 
 Malory, in The Story of the Glittering Plain, The Wood 
 
THE SANCTION OF BEAUTY 325 
 
 beyond the World, and others. But, above all, this 
 lover of old times for the sake of the new time to be 
 was filled with an overmastering desire to light on the 
 cold altars of to-day the fires of ancient sacrifice, to 
 kindle in the chill hearts of his fellow-men a passion 
 intolerant of wrong, and to sow our leaden skies with 
 the colour and the pattern of romance : 
 
 Ever was the heart within him hot 
 To gain the Land of Matters Unforgot. 
 
 The ' magic casements ' flung aside by Keats revealed 
 a fairyland of beauty ; William Morris cherished the 
 ambition to people it with living men and women. 
 
 ui. 
 
 A moment of retrospection is required. It must Recapitu- 
 be clear to every one who has followed the course of 
 poetry to this point that the direct line of succession 
 is divided, or disputed, between two schools. This 
 divergence dates right back to the Lyrical Ballads of 
 1798. The inventive mysticism of Coleridge followed a 
 different road from the natural mysticism of Wordsworth, 
 though they proceeded from the same source and 
 aimed at the same goal. One sought to make symbols 
 interpretative, the other to desymbolize experience. 
 One based the Real on the Ideal, the other the Ideal 
 on the Real. These are rough and general distinctions, 
 modifiable at almost every step, and the details must 
 
326 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 be gathered from preceding sections. But they serve 
 to mark the succession, in the poetic line, of Words- 
 worth and Meredith, as poets of transcendental being 
 treated in philosophic language, with Robert Browning 
 illustrating by examples the truth which these taught 
 directly. The mysticism of Coleridge was reinforced 
 by the medievalism of Keats. Together they passed 
 through the twilight of poets like Beddoes and Darley, 
 and acquired certain formal characteristics of consider- 
 able value to their art. Shelley, the angel of revolt, 
 and Byron, the unfulfilled seeker, belong to both lines 
 and to neither. When the Coleridge-Keats tradition 
 emerged from the miniature Middle Ages of 1825 to 1840, 
 it brought with it, among others, Alfred Tennyson, 
 who, in his philosophic and patriotic poems (In 
 Memoriam and the Ode on the Duke of Wellington, for 
 example), reverted to Wordsworth's themes ' of blessed 
 consolation in distress ' and * of joy in widest common- 
 alty spread ', though he comprehended them less than 
 quite adequately under modern aspects of evolutionary 
 science ; and who, in his Idylls and in other poems, 
 continued the medieval symbolizing, with a less than 
 complete absorption in the beauties of the past. Be- 
 tween them, he achieved a few poems [The Lady of 
 Shalott has been instanced) which belong exclusively 
 and fully to the second line of succession. In this 
 line Rossetti, introducing an analytic — or detached — 
 point of view into the emotions of creative art, dis- 
 covered what was amiss with English poetry. Its 
 wisdom was becoming sophistication ; its principles 
 
THE SANCTION OF BEAUTY 327 
 
 were degenerating into conventions ; and its cue was 
 to go straight back to medieval gardens of enchant- 
 ment. A profusion of beautiful images decorating 
 the simplest ideas was, in esssence, the method of the 
 Pre-Raphaelites. It brought the magic of the word, 
 and the music of the stanza, and the deliberate, elaborate 
 devices of metre, and rhyme, and rhythm to a pitch 
 which had never hitherto been reached, and can verily 
 never be surpassed, at the present stage in the develop- 
 ment of the English language. When Browning's 
 feelings become expressible melodiously, and Meredith's 
 intuitions intelligibly — when social psychology is an 
 exact science — , then poetry will find a new language 
 upon which to exercise its powers. Meanwhile, in this 
 temple of poesy, Rossetti became high priest, his 
 sister tended the vestal flame, and Morris, clothed in 
 rent raiment of stories often sung, went out to do battle 
 in crusades. 
 
 IV. 
 
 We come to the youngest, the most certain, and, i^lgernon 
 poetically, the strongest of this school. Swinburne Swin- 
 was born in 1837, and was thus nine years junior to ^^^^' 
 Rossetti and three to William Morris. He paid them an 
 eloquent tribute, as also Edward Burne-Jones, in the 
 dedication to Poems and Ballads, the first series of 
 which (1866) was the fourth book which Swinburne 
 published. The other three were The Queen-Mother 
 and Rosamond, Atalanta in Calydon and Chastelard, all ,\ 
 
328 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 of them dramas, though the middle one, Atalanta, was 
 rich with the lyrical beauties more fully displayed in 
 the next volume. That volume, Poems and Ballads, 
 revealed to the modest gaze of middle-Victorian 
 matrons — in the most bourgeois years of May Queen 
 sentiment and of a widowed Court — other aspects 
 which seemed less desirable. If we search this volume 
 to-day (especially if we take as a standard the average 
 novel of the hour) for the improprieties which shocked 
 our grandmothers, we shall find a certain excess of 
 voluptuous or sensuous imagery, but, while we shall 
 be cheated of the shudders which shook society, we 
 shaU be rewarded by an outburst of music, breaking 
 insistently on our ears, and drowning the thinner 
 voices in its finer and its fuller strains. The chased 
 designs and decorous experiments of the new school of 
 poets were swept away on the torrent of Swinburne's 
 verse. He triumphantly gathered it all up — the 
 metres, the vocabularies, the word-lore — , and stormed 
 the citadel of taste with forces in various array. Some 
 advanced with stately measure, some rushed in a kind 
 of cascade, some threatened and retired under elaborate 
 regulation. All alike were marshalled by genius ; the 
 sunshine poured on them all, and gave these wonderful 
 poems colour and light and vibrancy. 
 
 The martial metaphor is appropriate because Swin- 
 burne's poetry has the effect of a great military review. 
 Those who have watched this effect on the Tempelhof 
 Plain near Berlin, for example, will doubtless concede 
 the likeness. The poet himself concedes it in the 
 
THE SANCTION OF BEAUTY 329 
 
 * Dedication to Joseph Mazzini ' of Songs before Sun- y 
 rise (1871) : 
 
 I bring you the sword of a song, 
 The sword of my spirit's desire. 
 Feeble ; but laid at your feet ; 
 That which was weak shall be strong, 
 That which was cold shall take fire, 
 That which was bitter be sweet. 
 
 It was wrought not with hands to smite. 
 Nor hewn after swordsmiths' fashion. 
 Nor tempered on anvil of steel ; 
 But with visions and dreams of the night. 
 But with hope, and the patience of passion. 
 And the signet of love for a seal. 
 
 Be it witness, till one more strong. 
 Till a loftier lyre, till a rarer 
 Lute praise her better than I, 
 Be it witness before you, my song. 
 That I knew her, the world's banner-bearer, 
 Who shall cry the republican cry. 
 
 His gift is ' the sword of a song '. Homer's^ similes of \, 
 panoply in the second book of the Iliad may be trans- 
 ferred, mialtered, to Swinburne's poetry. It marches 
 ' like ravaging fire in a forest on a mountain's height ', 
 with ' dazzling gleam from innumerable bronze '. 
 ' Even as the goatherds easily divide the ranging flocks 
 of goats when they mingle in the pasture ', so does 
 the poet mete his forces on this side and on that, ' his 
 head and eyes Hke unto Zeus, whose joy is in the 
 thunder '. It is all there except the casus belli, and 
 to the absence thereof may, perhaps, be ascribed an 
 occasional emptiness, or hoUowness, or even aimless- 
 
330 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 ness in the display. We feel that it is too beautiful 
 to be quite real. The ebullient lines crash and break ; 
 the tremulous ripple is accomplished ; but not even 
 the vision of revolution, which dominates many of the 
 poems, succeeds wholly in vivifying — in actualizing — 
 the poetry in every instance. 
 
 Certain factors are obvious in Swinburne. His range 
 of metres is incomparable, from his first volume to 
 his last. By refinements of equivalence in prosody, by 
 sense-concomitant variations of rhythm, and by a power 
 of verbal music evoking melodies of phrase and sound, 
 Swinburne's fearless vigour of language has been 
 enabled to surpass the harmonies even of Tennyson. 
 Overflow, again, is a word which applies forcibly to 
 Swinburne. Dreams, thriUs, lures, pallor, sweetness, 
 mooniness, light, lustre and delight, all these are 
 clearly in plenty — to some, clearly in excess. The 
 time is not yet, however, for a correct judgment of 
 this poet. There have been three series of Poems and 
 Ballads (1866, 1878 and 1889) ; there have been several 
 series of Songs {of Italy y 1867 ; before Sunrise, 1871 ; 
 of Two Nations, 1876 ; of the Spring-tides, 1880), as 
 well as A Century of Roundels (1883), Astrophel and 
 Other Poems (1894), etc. ; there have been the plays 
 — Chastelard, Bothwell, and Mary Stuart among the 
 English ; Atalanta and Erectheus among the Greek — ; 
 there have been Arthurian tales in verse — Tristram of 
 Lyonesse and Balen — , and there have been prose 
 works of masterly criticism on William Blake, Charlotte 
 Bronte, Victor Hugo — the French note in Swinburne 
 
THE SANCTION OF BEAUTY 331 
 
 is emphatic — , and the contemporaries of Shake- 
 speare. It is a long but now a finished list, 
 for Swinburne died at his house in Putney- 
 while these pages were passing through the press 
 (April 10th, 1909). In the very shadow of his 
 death praise is more seemly than criticism. 
 Posterity will, perhaps, credit him with an achieve- 
 ment unmatched — and necessarily unique — in the 
 splendid story of English poetry. Unmatched, because 
 no other poet has so fully availed himself of such 
 ample opportunities. Formal beauty was immediately 
 perfectible, and Swinburne perfected its resources. 
 National freedom was immediately seizable, and 
 Swinburne seized its ideas. The Arthurian legends 
 were in every poet's wallet — except Browning's and 
 Meredith's, the transcendentalists — and Swinburne was 
 the youngest of the ' romantics '. The Elizabethan 
 tradition, explored in the twilight, was waiting for 
 illumination at noon. But unique, because, conceiv- 
 ably, his achievement can never be repeated. The 
 same combination of the same chances is never likely 
 to recur. Other chances may be similarly combined, 
 and may find an equally brilliant exponent, but the 
 powers of this particular combination must be taken 
 as exhausted. The thought of their fresh employment 
 is too fatiguing. Even in Swinburne the fervour of 
 the phrase is not invariably a fervour of the blood, 
 and later poets let loose on the same material would 
 increase the distance between the two. It is as the 
 voice of the eleventh hour of a great cycle that we, 
 
332 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 groping for light in the perplexed dawn of a new age, 
 venture finally to commemorate Swinburne. 
 
 V. 
 
 Beauty, struck sharp on sorrow, makes dreadful 
 music. There were three poets in this age who were 
 urged in various degrees by the quest of a sanction, 
 and who were joined in missing its reconciliation with 
 experience. The comparative shortness of their lives 
 should not be left out of account. Arthur Hugh Clough 
 (1819-61) died at the age of forty- two ; James Thomson 
 (1834-82) died at the age of forty-eight ; Arthur 
 O'Shaughnessy (1844-81) died at the age of thirty- 
 sevcii ; and Thomson, the longest-lived, was the 
 unhappiest in temperament and in fortune. Unresting 
 sons of the muse, who find earth a harsh stepmother, 
 and who die on the threshold of middle age, feeling 
 the chill of its advance but falling short of its ultimate 
 tranquillity, will not write happy poetry out of the 
 full fate of a Morris or a Swinburne. 
 Arthur Clough, the eldest of the three, sailed into tranquil 
 Qough. harbourage but a few short years before his death. 
 The Board of Education brought him employment, 
 and his wife brought him content. Till then he had 
 been a fellow of Oriel, a freethinker — the two were 
 incompatible — , a wanderer in America, a tutor at 
 Cambridge, and, by disposition at least, a man of 
 unsettled habits and indecisive opinions. The times 
 
THE SANCTION OF BEAUTY 333 
 
 were too exacting for his talents. His gentle and 
 earnest spirit was borne down by the battle of the 
 creeds, like a leaf on a stream. He was always asking 
 whither ? and whence ? ' Where lies the land to which 
 the ship would go ? ' ; 'Is this the object, end, and 
 law, And purpose of our being here ? '. This note of 
 seeking, of questioning, most often with the metaphor 
 from the sea, recurs in Clough's few poems with insistent 
 iteration. Sometimes it rises to a prayer, a sceptic's 
 prayer though it be, as in the well-known Qua Cursum :-" 
 Ventus — ' bounding breeze, rushing seas ! At last, 
 at last, unite them there ' ; but commonly it subsides 
 in doubt, and even subsists on doubt, and not even 
 fate's apology for his incomplete career can make a 
 great poet out of this attractive thinker on great 
 issues. 
 
 Thomson, whom his biographers assess as a ' recal- James 
 citrant ' by nature, wrote poems which Mr. Bertram °°^^^* 
 DobeU has recently collected in two volumes, and of 
 which the best known by name is The City of Dreadful \^ 
 Night. There are certain influences which criticism 
 must reckon with in dealing with this writer. Many 
 of his poems were published over the initials ' B. V.', 
 which stood for Bysshe Vanolis, recalling Percy Bysshe 
 Shelley and Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg). 
 Another influence was the late Mr. Bradlaugh. Another 
 was the idealization of a very early love-affair. Another, 
 unfortunately, was drink. From this amalgam was 
 made a poet whose work undoubtedly belongs to the 
 particular class we are discussing. He saw horror and 
 
334 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 he felt despair ; but the horror of the spectacle and 
 the desperate emotion are the revelation and the 
 expression of the same search and desire as opened 
 heaven to happier men's eyes. Thomson's poetry can 
 never be popular, and much of it may be passed by ; 
 but, historically, it is necessary to a complete picture 
 of this period, and, from the personal point of view, 
 it has the fascination of abysmal gloom. 
 O'Shaugh- O'Shaughnessy likewise belongs to this outgrowth 
 of Pre-Raphaelitism. Music and Moonlight is the 
 title of one of his volumes, and it may serve to sum- 
 marize his poems. He mooned and mused through 
 life in no derogatory sense, or, at least, in no sense 
 more derogatory than these terms of ineffectiveness 
 convey. His technical skill in music enabled him to 
 combine vocal sounds in melodies which poetic language 
 had rarely, if ever, attained, though he, too, a seeker 
 for beauty, lacked the strength which conquers in the 
 search. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Other Here, too, other writers must be mentioned in a 
 * kind of catalogue of honour. To examine all would 
 be tedious. Each has an excellence of his own. 
 Together they constitute a force of which English 
 literature is proud, but separately none was so great 
 as to pass that undefined line which divides for all 
 lovers of poetry the minor from the major poets. 
 
 At the head of this list — as is due to the association 
 
THE SANCTION OF BEAUTY 335 
 
 of the year of his birth — stands Edward Fitzgerald 
 (1809-83), intimate friend of Tennyson and others of 
 his great contemporaries, and author of a poem of rare 
 beauty and exceptional influence, The Ruhaiyat 
 of Omar Khayyam. The Eastern philosopher thus 
 rendered into sensuous quatrains would, doubtless, 
 not recognize his thoughts in their modern English dress. 
 The fiction of translation availed as a pretext for the 
 metaphors from the nightingale and rose and other 
 images of an Oriental garden, but the value of the 
 poem consists in its frank material hedonism, combined 
 with a fearless death-mysticism, and expressed in 
 stanzas of haunting charm. Posterity will probably 
 judge that the merits of the Ruhaiyat have been over- 
 estimated during the last twenty years, as it has judged 
 already the rest of Fitzgerald's scanty writings. His 
 truer fame rests in his letters, which conserve the 
 characteristics of a personality well-beloved by selected 
 friends. 
 
 Lord Houghton (Richard Monckton-Milnes) is 
 another of the 1809 men, and he lived till 1885. He, 
 too, was a kind of social force, a focus of letters rather 
 than a man of letters, though he wrote some admirable 
 verse, and not a little good criticism. Thomas Gordon 
 Hake and John Stuart Blackie were likewise born in 
 the same year ; the one wrote poetry in parables, and 
 the other — a teacher and a philosopher — wrote some 
 stirring songs. 
 
 Nearly all the theologians were poets. They opposed 
 the arms of imagination to the advancing regiment of 
 
v/ 
 
 336 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 science. Keble wrote The Christian Year, Newman 
 The Dream of Gerontius, Kingsley ' Be good, sweet 
 maid ', and a score of charming lyrics in hexameters 
 and other metres. Among writers moved by a like 
 impulse, or, at least, ranged on the same side, may be 
 placed Philip James Bailey (1806-92), whose Festus 
 (a variant of Faust) was a long poem — elongated at 
 intervals — in the epic of paradise style. Martin Tupper, 
 too (1810-99) — if twice-dead fame is ever to be sum- 
 moned from oblivion — , deserves mention in this 
 place for the sake of his Proverbial Philosophy (1838), 
 since turned by philosophy to a proverb. Besides 
 these, there are the echo -voices, among whom may be 
 named Sir Lewis Morris (1833-1907), the poetic shadow 
 of Lord Tennyson. Charles Jeremiah Wells (1798- 
 1879) was the friend and contemporary of Keats, and 
 wrote poetry which has recently withstood the perils 
 of enthusiastic revival. Another name which emerges 
 from the shadows is that of Adelaide Anne Procter 
 (1825-64), Bryan Procter's daughter, a pleasant writer 
 of ' souvenir ' poems, sometimes rising above their 
 class ; and Lord de Tabley (Leicester Warren, 1835-95), 
 Lord Lytton (* Owen Meredith', 1831-92), whose 
 name has been mentioned before, Gerald Massey, 
 Philip Bourke Marston, Roden Noel, Francis Turner 
 Palgrave, anthologist, and others enough, would claim 
 longer notice among the poets, if this were a history 
 of literature instead of an essay in criticism. But the 
 bare enumeration of names will not add to appreciation 
 otherwise than by helping us to recognize the exceptional 
 
THE SANCTION OF BEAUTY 337 
 
 fecundity of this epoch, still expressing itself in poetry 
 through such artists as Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. Stephen 
 Phillips, Mr. Binyon, Mr. Trench, Mr. Yeats, Mr. 
 Watson, and others. 
 
 The last word in the present section belongs to the Edward 
 humouiists. Edward Lear (1812-88), 'Lewis Carroll' 'Lewis 
 (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1833-98), Frederic Locker ^^-^^^^ '• 
 (1821-95), Charles Stuart Calverley (1831-1884), and, 
 more remotely, Henry Duff Traill (1842-1900) and 
 James Kenneth Stephen (1859-92), relieved the rigours 
 of the highway by excursions in a lighter vein. Lear's ,_ 
 nonsense verse, especially, and Carroll's adventures 
 of Alice present with curious distinctness the humour 
 of the transcendental point of view. They seemed to 
 say, ' Come and live in this world, where matter is a 
 dissolving dream and reality is behind the veil '. Alice 
 gets behind the looking-glass, and finds her way into 
 the wonderland. The serious is eliminated from their 
 scheme, and the inconsequence delights the child ; but 
 higher than the child's delight is that of the eternal 
 child in man conscious of his limitations. The impro- 
 babilities of the senses are still possibilities of reason, 
 enlarged to the capacity of the imagination. Even 
 serious writers were grotesque, when their fancy played 
 among abstractions. Edward Lear — and Lewis Carroll 
 even more — made the playthings of imagination human, 
 and thus completed the circle of Pre-Raphaelitism. 
 
 22 
 
§ 7. THE SANCTION OF MORALITY. 
 
 Beauty T'^ ^^ characteristic of the Northern temper never to 
 ^^^ . Jl rest wholly satisfied with the contemplation of 
 beauty, xul ovrog f/jh &iuv (^log — ' This is the life of the 
 Gods ', declares Plato in the Phcedrus myth, but the 
 attribute dips deeper into Dante than into Shakespeare. 
 The genius of Enghsh art, with rare exceptions, has been 
 practical, in the sense of aiming at transferring the 
 ideas of beauty to experience. Its practitioners go 
 up into the mountain and come down with the light 
 on their face, but they bring in their hands the two 
 tables of stone, inscribed with commandments for 
 observance, or, at least, with the fragments of such 
 inscription. Thus Edmund Spenser, the Rubens of 
 English poetry, aimed, through the harmonies of his 
 style and the craft of its elaborate mechanism, at the 
 same truths of conduct which Shakespeare vitalized in his 
 plays, and Hooker codified in his treatise. His mood 
 of spiritual uplifting elevated the old moralizings about 
 personified virtues and the seven deadly sins. His 
 strenuous hate of evil ennobled, while it emboldened, 
 the passages delineating vice ; and his practical aim 
 was defined in the Preface to The Faerie Queene — 
 
 added at Ralegh's instance — : * The general end of 
 
 338 
 
 r 
 
THE SANCTION OF MORALITY 339 
 
 all the book is to fashion a gentleman or noble person 
 
 in virtuous and gentle discipline.' 
 
 If this aim be insinuated through the windings of 
 
 Spenser's melodious stanzas, it would be superfluous 
 
 to dwell on the disciplinary intention of Milton, or 
 
 Wordsworth, or Carlyle, or of B5n:on — a Carlyle in 
 
 petto. Shelley's soul, too, though it wore wings, and 
 
 soared to ' the Plain of Truth ' was ardent for practice ; 
 
 and in fiction, the second great stream which has 
 
 flowed into English literature, there is hardly a novel 
 
 in the language which was not written with a purpose. 
 
 The eighteenth century emphasized this tendency. 
 
 Pope disclaimed the ' microscopic eye, ' and forwent the 
 
 ' winged mind ' of the philosopher. It was John Keats J 
 
 ' ramping ' through fairyland, without regard to the ■ 
 
 morals of the fairies, who led the great reaction to 
 
 beauty for beauty's sake. His Ode on a Grecian Urn, 
 
 ' all breathing human passion far above ', with its 
 
 magnificent conclusion, 
 
 * Beauty is truth, truth beauty' — that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know, 
 
 is the purest English statement of this creed. Keats, 
 as we saw, began to compromise it — in his re-cast of 
 Hyperion — before death completed his vision ; but 
 Rossetti (and Tennyson of Shalott) founded the Pre- 
 Raphaelite Brotherhood on the essential basis of that 
 creed. Rossetti maintained its principles with an 
 artistic consistency less than fully English in one 
 aspect, more than merely English in another. His 
 couplet, which we have followed Mr. A. C. Benson 
 
340 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 {Rossetti, ' English Men of Letters ', p. 129) in selecting 
 
 as typical of his philosophy, 
 
 Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought. 
 Nor Love her body from her soul, 
 
 is composed in the spirit of Plato's ' lover ', descended 
 through Italy and Keats. The rest of the brethren 
 kept faith in various degrees. Happily, the invidious 
 distribution belongs to art rather than to literature. 
 In literature, as we have seen, the line of descent, say, 
 from Milton, is through Wordsworth to Robert Browning 
 and George Meredith, and, less resolutely, to Tennyson. 
 Among Rossetti's more intimate friends, William 
 Morris sought to beautify objects, and Swinburne to 
 objectify beauty. In other hands, as we shall see in 
 the next section, beauty became a symbol, not a trust, 
 and was sought not so much for its gifts as for the 
 sake of the travail of seeking it. Hence, as a technical 
 point, the ode of aspiring enthusiasm replaced — or 
 tended to replace — , in the poems of these writers, 
 the simpler forms of lyrical outpouring. 
 John Meanwhile, of beauty turned to use, a more conscious 
 "* ^^ moralist than Morris was John Ruskin (1819-1900), 
 his senior by about fifteen years. The seniority is 
 important, for when, after 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite 
 Brotherhood had been constituted, Ruskin descended 
 on the young men in the self-chosen guise of an elder 
 brother. His close acquaintance with Rossetti began 
 about 1854, and it bore — typically enough — a white 
 flower of humanitarianism, when Rossetti undertook 
 to teach art in the famous Working Men's College, of 
 
THE SANCTION OF MORALITY 341 
 
 which F. D. Maurice was then principal. Moreover, 
 Ruskin subsidized Rossetti, and, though he proved a 
 difficult Maecenas — ' You are a conceited monkey ', 
 ' You are a very odd creature ', are among the phrases 
 in his letters — , the relationship, while it lasted, was as 
 useful to Rossetti as it was creditable to Ruskin. 
 Their friendship drooped after 1868. William Morris 
 was also attracted by the noble pioneers of the College 
 who gathered round Frederick Maurice in the days of 
 revolution on the Continent, and who tried not in vain 
 to extract from that seething anarchical idealism ripe 
 counsels of practice to prevent the evils which others 
 sought to cure. In this movement, responsible and 
 serious, and allied, as we have seen, with Pre- 
 Raphaelite art on the one part and with the religious 
 ferment on the other — a movement subsequently 
 associated with the excellent names of Arnold Toynbee, 
 Walter Besant, Quintin Hogg, Passmore Edwardes, 
 and others ; with University Extension societies, 
 girls' high schools, and similar organizations for under- 
 mining artificial barriers of culture and education ; a 
 movement more truly socialistic than much which is 
 misnamed socialism ; a movement, finally, in this 
 context, which enters literature again in Mr. H. G. 
 Wells's studies of Mr. Lewisham and Kipps — John 
 Ruskin, throughout his active life, bore a noble and a 
 useful part. George Allen, afterwards his publisher 
 and, incidentally, his business-manager, was among 
 the engravers and draughtsmen whom Ruskin taught 
 and trained ; and the principles which he preached 
 
342 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 may still be read in liis little Elements of Drawing^ 
 Elements of Perspective, etc. 
 The Later on, when the College had lost the bond of its 
 period, original idea, Ruskin's social idealism was devoted 
 to his Company or Guild of St. George, first mooted in 
 a letter (Fors Clavigera, v) of May, 1871. Neither 
 morally, industrially, nor financially — though the 
 heir to about £200,000 dispersed his substance in good 
 works — , did the success of the Guild reward the faith 
 and genius of ' the Master '. His apologists compare 
 it with the success of the teachings of the Sermon on 
 the Mount — a comparison which, if admitted, obviously 
 stops discussion. On the whole, the comparison is not 
 admissible. Faith and genius Ruskin possessed, but 
 the faith was marred by egomania and the genius was 
 crossed with quixotism. He was rarely spectator ah 
 extra. Most commonly, he viewed mankind and its 
 multifarious institutions as a circle with John Ruskin 
 at the centre. The encyclopaedic character of his 
 schemes was too ambitious for effectiveness. It has 
 beeii said that * Fors was Ruskin's Hamlet ' (Frederic 
 Harrison's John RusJcin, ' English Men of Letters ', 
 p. 182), in the sense — presumably, and more accur- 
 ately — , not that Ruskin was the Shakespeare of Fors, 
 but that he was the Hamlet of his own drama, enacted 
 in ninety-six letters between 1871 and 1884, and revised, 
 with * cuts ', in 1896. Even this comparison is too 
 favourable ; for, whether or not Hamlet was mad, 
 there is, unfortunately, no doubt, not that Ruskin 
 was mad, though his mind was at times (not necessarily 
 
THE SANCTION OF MORALITY 343 
 
 at productive times) diseased, but that he exceeded in 
 lors Clavigeraj which, dealt with matters of real moment 
 to the audience he addressed, the legitimate bounds 
 of irony, obliquity, inconsequence, quiddity, wayward- 
 ness, self-licence, allusiveness, Puck-likeness and in- 
 souciance ; and that his indulgence in these humours, 
 so wholly delightful in his familiar correspondence, 
 bewrayed the cause he had at heart. 
 
 His sincerity — the sincerity of his zeal — , like that The 
 of most prophets and martyrs, is not to be measured ^riod. 
 by his success. His sacrifice of fortune on dependants, 
 almoners, pensioners, and, above all, on ideas — 
 an angel with a revenue would, perhaps, not ineptly 
 describe him in some of his social activities — , seemed 
 to Ruskin the least notable and most obvious ex- 
 pression of his creed. As is inevitable when such 
 spending is undertaken personally, and not confided 
 to trustees, an individual element entered into it. A 
 business-man spies imperfections in these day-dreams 
 floated with gold. Romance flies out at the window 
 when money comes in at the door. This.. may be a 
 fault of humanity, a flaw in the composition of our 
 nature, but there is an inherent dislike to see expensive 
 experiments fail at the initiative of one man, even 
 though he bear the expense. Moreover, the cumber- 
 some method by which Ruskin came to his own rescue, 
 and supplied by the income from his books the loss of 
 income from investments, though a certain quasi-royal .— 
 prestige attached to the printing-press at Orpington, 
 is not as impressive as it should be. But these matters 
 
344 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 hardly concern criticism, save as they illustrate his 
 writings. Ruskin's style would plainly be affected 
 by these generous and grandiose views, as was the 
 style of Sir Walter Scott, whom Ruskin fervently 
 admired. There is a like largeness in both writers, a 
 like sense of breadth and space, of the latis otia fundis, 
 though Ruskin's scholarship and taste enabled him 
 to build on these foundations more coherently ornate 
 designs. Sometimes, his scholarship misled him. He 
 was liable to be the slave of words, or, more strictly, 
 of philology. Such terms as ' value ', ' wealth ', ' rent ', 
 ' interest ', and so forth, he was fond of driving into 
 philological comers and belabouring with petulant 
 pedantry. The schoolmaster sought to be the governor 
 in the new Ruskinian republic. But these lapses from 
 the perfect marriage of the idealist with the writer 
 detract hardly at all from the splendour of his style, 
 especially in his earlier books. Before examining these, 
 however, a few words are due to the ideas underlying 
 Unto this Last (1860 [1862]), which, with Munera 
 Pulveris (1862 [1872]) i, stands, as it were, midway 
 
 1 The dates in square brackets refer to the volume-publication 
 in each instance. Unto this Last appeared originally in The Cornhill 
 Magazine, then edited by Thackeray, and Munera Pulveris (as 
 Political Economy) in Fraser's, then edited by J. A. Froude. Both 
 Thackeray and Froude suspended the serial publication, owing 
 to their readers' opposition. Munera Pulveris in book-form was 
 appropriately dedicated to Carlyle, whose Sartor Eesartus had 
 similarly appeared in Fraser's, to the great credit of its editor and 
 the no less great bewilderment of its readers. Here, perhaps, 
 it may be added that the definitive edition of Ruskin is that 
 edited by Messrs. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, and published in 
 luxurious volumes by the firm of George Allen and Sons, who 
 
THE SANCTION OF MORALITY 345 
 
 between Ruskin, the art-critic of Modern Painters^ 
 and Ruskin, the social prophet of Fors Clavigera. 
 
 As is so often the case with nineteenth-century Capital 
 thought, its obscurer issues are illumined by their Labour 
 reflection in fiction ; and we may seek the aid of a 
 novelist to illumine what seemed so obscure to Ruskin's 
 audience in 1860. What was the secret of the 
 popularity, now plainly on the wane, of John Halifax, 
 Gentleman (1857), by Mrs. Craik (1826-87)? John 
 was a ragged lad, who was taken into a manufacturer's 
 employment, and who worked his way up through 
 various stages of promotion to the headship of the 
 business, which he conscientiously administered on the 
 highest principles of a master towards his men. He 
 married, socially, above his class, and won his wife's 
 equal love. He brought up his family with due respect 
 to his own origin and to their prospects ; neither honey- 
 ing at the whisper of a lord, nor condescending too 
 willingly to a governess. A glow of sentiment was 
 difEused from a blind daughter, obviously born to die 
 young ; and the narrator, a hero -worshipper, the lame 
 son of the old master, always leaned on John's strength. 
 Such, in bare outline, is the story, which, though well- 
 written and consistently worked-out, would never have 
 taken its place as an English classic if its hero had not 
 been a type. John Halifax is, preeminently the type 
 
 continue the tradition of its founder, the late Mr. Allen, Ruskin's 
 original publisher. The bibliography of Ruskin is interesting, for 
 he altered much that he had written, not always for the better. 
 A complete account has been compiled by ]\Ir. T. J. Wise and Mr. 
 J. P. Smart. 
 
346 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 of the industrious apprentice. He personified the 
 virtues of Capital. He was the breath in the nostrils 
 of Individualism. He illustrated by example the 
 philosophy of John Stuart Mill. He might have been 
 shown behind plate-glass as the good boy of the Exhibi- 
 tion of 1851. He might have stepped in his artisan's 
 clothes straight out of a text by Dr. Samuel Smiles. 
 
 Now, it was precisely to the destruction of this type, 
 to its utter rending and confusion, and to the desecra- 
 tion of the religion thus devoted to its worship, that 
 Ruskin consciously directed his new political economy. 
 We know to-day that he was right. How right, we 
 still do not know ^. But ' the modern soi-disant science 
 of political economy, based on the idea that an ad- 
 vantageous code of social action may be determined 
 irrespectively of the influence of social affection ' ( Unto 
 this Last, i.), is no longer to be reckoned among the 
 'most curious and least creditable delusions of large 
 masses of the human race '. With the historical 
 overthrow of this creed we are not here concerned. 
 The reconstruction of society on a surer basis is 
 the problem of the twentieth century, to be solved 
 now or hereafter. Ruskin fulminated, divagated, 
 exaggerated. He was in places too simple and 
 unworldly, and in places too prone to sophistication. 
 
 ^ Mr. John Galsworthy's inconclusive drama, Strife, produced in 
 1909, emphasizes this remark. An instructive comparison might 
 be instituted, in connection with the mirror of fiction held up to 
 Capital and Labour, between the literal idealism of John Halifax, 
 Gentleman, and the romantic realism of such a study of mid-Victorian 
 commerce as the first part of The Old Wives' Tales by Mr. Arnold 
 Bennett (Chapman & Hall, 1909), or, indeed, of Mr. Wells's Kiffs. 
 
THE SANCTION OF MORALITY 347 
 
 But, whenever the port is reached, and liberty enlarges 
 her tent — her holding, as Ruskin would remind us — , 
 and it is recognized, at least as clearly as more closely 
 perfected conditions allow, that ' There is no Wealth but 
 Life — Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and 
 of admiration' {Unto this Last, fin.), then the Ruskin 
 of 1860 to 1870 will be counted as a vates sacer, an in- 
 spired father of lawgivers to be. 
 
 Here, then, the critic of literature must leave Ruskin's The 
 social ethics. We mount yet another step in this period, 
 busy writer's career, and come at last to our more 
 proper province : Modern Painters (five volumes, 1843, 
 1846, 1856 — two — , 1860), Seven Lamps of Archi- 
 tecture (1849), and Stones of Venice (three volumes, 
 1851-53). Ruskin returned to art-studies in various 
 series of lectures delivered in later hfe as Slade Professor 
 at Oxford. In two years — 1865 and 1866 — he pub- 
 lished three little books, Sesame and Lilies, The Crown 
 of Wild Olive, and The Ethics of the Dust ^, all of which 
 lie in the region between ethics and art, and the first 
 of which is particularly noble-mannered. His Prceterita, 
 or reminiscences — unfinished — concluded his long list 
 of writings. But the art-studies of his first period 
 display his literary gifts at their strongest and their 
 best. It is from these that he derives his fame as a 
 master of English prose, the successor, in thought 
 through Carlyle and in style through De Quincey, to the 
 
 1 This title — the book dealt partly with crystals — has no relation 
 to the more far-fetched title of Munera Pvlveris (Horace, Odes, 
 L 28). Ruskin's titles are characteristically fanciful, like that of 
 Carlyle's Sartor Besartus. 
 
348 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 writers of the seventeenth century. It was the paintings 
 of J. M. W. Turner (see p. 154, sujyra), and the loyalty 
 of a fellow-artist in the face of a neglectful generation, 
 which inspired the five volumes of Modern Painters, 
 written, as Ruskin says, neither for fame, nor for 
 money, nor for conscience' sake, ' but of necessity. . . . 
 I saw an injustice done, and tried to remedy it. I 
 heard falsehood taught, and was compelled to deny 
 it '. So Modern Painters takes its place as one of the 
 monuments to justice and truth raised by Englishmen 
 ^ in the nineteenth century. It is a charter of liberty, 
 a State-paper, among the archives, of the liberation of 
 beauty from the conventions of mistaken schools. 
 Ruskin, Hke a new Perseus, rescued art from its 
 oppressors. 
 Buskin's And now take an example of his style. Read — ^it 
 is too long for quotation — §§35 to 38 (the last) of 
 Part II. section iii. chapter iv. of the first volume 
 of Modern Painters. The general subject is the ' Truth 
 of Skies ' ; chapter i. is ' of the open sky ', chapter ii. is 
 * of the region of the cirrus ', chapter iii., 'of the 
 central cloud region ', and chapter iv. (the present), 
 ' of the region of the rain-cloud '. The conclusion is 
 ' that the old masters attempted the representation of 
 only one among the thousands of their systems of 
 scenery, and were altogether false in the little they 
 attempted '. Then Ruskin lifts up his voice like a 
 prophet of old, fusing traditional Hebraism with 
 traditional Hellenism, as Milton had fused them before 
 him, as Carlyle was fusing them in his day, and as 
 
THE SANCTION OF MORALITY 349 
 
 they must ever be fused for complete revelation. 
 The ancient harmonies are revived, and the diction of 
 the translators of the Bible. The sacred fountains 
 of emotion are sought in their unchanging wellsprings : 
 
 Stand upon the peak of some isolated mountain 
 at daybreak, when the night mists first rise from off 
 the plains . . . 
 
 — the quiet opening to splendour recalls the simple 
 nature-observation where Homer and the Psalmist 
 meet. Ruskin's burden, ' Has Claude given this ? ', 
 interposed between the strophic clauses of this ode in 
 prose, assists, rhetorically, the argument to rise from 
 height to height, like the cumulative stanzas of the 
 Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni by Coleridge. So it 
 climbs from strength to strength to ' the sudden rush 
 of the awakened wind ', and falls with the sinking sun 
 ' till the large white circle of the slow moon is lifted 
 up among the barred clouds, step by step, line by 
 line ; star after star she quenches with her kindling 
 light, setting in their stead one army of pale, pene- 
 trable, fleecy wreaths in the heaven, to give light upon 
 the earth, which move together, hand in hand, company 
 by company, troop by troop, so measured in their 
 unity of motion, that the whole heaven seems to roll 
 with them, and the earth to reel under them. Ask 
 Claude, or his brethren, for that '. And, last, the 
 obhligato thanksgiving to ' the Maker and Doer of 
 this ' — (' Earth, with her thousand voices, praises 
 God ') : — once more, we have Meredith's message of 
 
350 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 the ' half -strangeness ' of Earth, edged with the wonder 
 of the vision of design. 
 
 Another passage, more obviously Carlylean, may 
 be quoted in extenso. It is from § 23 of Part IX. 
 chapter ix. of the fifth volume : 
 
 Look on the map of Europe, and count the blood- 
 stains upon it, between Areola and Waterloo. Not 
 alone those blood-stains on the Alpine snow, and the 
 blue of the Lombard plain. The English death was 
 before his eyes also. No decent, calculable, consoled 
 dying ; no passing to rest like that of the aged burghers 
 of Nuremburg town. No gentle processions to church- 
 yards among the fields, the bronze crests bossed deep 
 on the memorial tablets, and the skylark singing above 
 them from among the corn. But the life trampled 
 out in the sHme of the street, crushed to dust amidst 
 the roaring of the wheel, tossed countlessly away into 
 howling winter wind along five hundred leagues of 
 rock-fanged shore. Or, worst of all, rotted down to 
 forgotten graves through years of ignorant patience, 
 and vain seeking for help from man, for hope in God — 
 infirm, imperfect yearning, as of motherless infants 
 starving at the dawn ; oppressed royalties of captive 
 thought, vague ague-fits of bleak, amazed despair. 
 
 This is the summit of suggestive narration. The 
 descriptive faculty employed in the cloud-pictures 
 above — and too rarely attempted in English prose — 
 is combined with an eclectic method to a kind of 
 literary impressionism, capable of abysmal degradation, 
 when proportion and dignity are sacrificed to effects 
 of shock and surprise, but maintained here on the 
 
THE SANCTION OF MORALITY 351 
 
 Attic plane between over-empliasis and under-state - 
 ment. The significant words are ' blood-stains ', graphi- 
 cally depicted on the map, and imaginatively sum- 
 marizing particular records of places and times ; ' the 
 English death ', as a noun of number, more impressive 
 than the details it interns ; the sudden homeliness of 
 the skylark ; the ' life . . . tossed countlessly away ', 
 and * rotted down to forgotten graves ', with that 
 iterated, terrible neuter plural ; the naked imagery 
 of ' motherless infants starving at the dawn" ' — each 
 word a negation of rights, except the last, which denotes 
 a common right ; and the adult horror of full-grown 
 sentiency, expressible, therefore, ore rotundo, in the 
 richly-dight phrase, ' oppressed royalties of captive 
 thought '. The epithets, too, are to be noted, for 
 Ruskin, like Patmore and Pater, to whom we shall 
 come in the next section, sought his adjectives with 
 delicate perception, and chose those with a nimbus 
 beyond their edges. ' Decent, calculable, consoled ' 
 is more than a description in three words ; it opens 
 out into an endless picture of cottage interiors on the 
 countryside, with the whole experience of their inhabit- 
 ants, and the peaceful close of not unworthy lives. 
 Such magic in language is to become a familiar feature 
 of English prose, and is connected with the de- 
 velopment of psychology as a special department of 
 knowledge. 
 
352 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Ruskin's criticism of life was deduced from the art 
 of painting, Matthew Arnold's from the art of poetry. 
 We might even go further, and say that Wordsworth, 
 particularly, was Matthew Arnold's Turner. And as, 
 from first to last, the poets are nearer than the painters 
 to the expression of the English soul, so Arnold's 
 criticism of life came nearer to English consciousness 
 than Ruskin's. 
 Matthew Born in 1822, the son of Thomas Arnold, of Rugby, 
 (1S2- Matthew Arnold lived till 1888, thus belonging by 
 J1888). birth and time to the group of strenuous workers who 
 contributed to the liberalizing tendency in English 
 life and thought. He became a Fellow of Oriel in 
 1845, and an Inspector of Schools in 1851. In 1857 
 he was appointed to the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, 
 and delivered courses of lectures on Celtic Literature 
 and On Translating Homer, His work for the Board 
 of Education (then a department of the Privy Council) 
 led to one or two books, A French Eton among them, 
 which are like oases in a wilderness of blue-books, and 
 for the last twenty years of his life he engaged in a 
 crusade for * sweetness and light ' — Swift's phrase, 
 which he made his own — ^in social relations and in 
 intellectual habit. He conducted this crusade through 
 written essays in the criticism of literature and life. 
 The Essays in Criticism proper were collected in two 
 series (1865 and 1888). Culture and Anarchy (1869) 
 had as sub-title * an Essay in Political and Social 
 
THE SANCTION OF MORALITY 353 
 
 Criticism ', and Literature and Dogma (1873), with its 
 sequel God and the Bibhy was ' an Essay towards 
 a better Apprehension of the Bible '. Besides 
 these, there were one or two volumes of more mis- 
 cellaneous papers, and his Letters, posthumously 
 published ^. 
 
 This account of Arnold's life and writings has omitted 
 the part of his work which the late Dr. Richard Garnett 
 {Dictionary of National Biography) considered to be 
 the most abiding. In 1849 and, again, in 1852, a 
 certain ' A.' — otherwise anonymous — issued* volumes 
 of poetry, the bulk of the contents of which were 
 included in Poems (1853), by Matthew Arnold. The two 
 earlier volumes were withdrawn by the author before 
 many copies had been sold. The Poems (1853) were 
 reprinted, with omissions and additions, in 1854 and, 
 again, in 1857, when they appeared as Poems, First 
 Series, a volume of Poems, Second Series, having appeared 
 in 1855. By that year, when Arnold was thirty- 
 three, the whole thing was practically over. There 
 was Merope (1858), which languished in obscurity till 
 1885 ; there were New Poems (1867), which included 
 Empedocles on Etna, revived from 1852 at the instance 
 of Robert Browning, and in 1869 and subsequent years 
 there were collected editions of the poems, with in- 
 significant differences in their contents. But for aU 
 
 1 There is an edition de luxe of Matthew Arnold's works in fifteen 
 volumes by Macmillan (1903), who publish cheaper editions of his 
 poems, his letters, and his Essays in Criticism. Messrs. Smith, 
 Elder & Co. have popular editions of his other writings. 
 23 
 
354 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 purposes except the bibliographer's, Matthew Arnold's 
 career as a poet lasted about half a dozen years. He 
 began by practising the art which he went on to criticize 
 (as professor of poetry at Oxford) ; and his criticism 
 widened its channel to take in religious and social 
 problems. 
 His It follows — indeed, it is fundamental — that his 
 
 P etary. p^^^j.^. ^^ ^^^ satisfy himself. He was seeking some- 
 thing which he did not find, and, faithfully to expecta- 
 tion, the sum-total, intensively, of Arnold's poetry — 
 its extent, considering how occasional was the manner 
 of its production, is apt to come as a surprise — is a 
 note of complaint with life. The essential Arnold 
 in this capacity is a half-indignant, half-querulous 
 poet, never wholly perfect in counsel, who cannot see 
 his way to self-expression. We have no * shelter to 
 grow ripe ', no ' leisure to grow wise '. We live too 
 fast, and are harassed too much. Our age is a ' hopeless 
 tangle '. We can neither enjoy, when we will, ' nor, 
 when we will, resign ' {Stanzas in Memory of the Author 
 of Ohermann). We ' pursue our business with un- 
 slackening stride ', and ' glance, and nod, and bustle 
 by, And never once possess our soul Before we die ' 
 {A Southern Night). This is his plea against fate. 
 It recurs with variations throughout his poems, and, 
 by poetry at any rate, he failed to find a way out. 
 The height of his aspiration was reached in such poems 
 as A Summer Night and Kensington Gardens^ where 
 he invokes the spirit of contrast between reality and 
 seeming to supply what is missing to satisfaction : 
 
THE SANCTION OF MORALITY 355 
 
 Plainness and clearness without shadow or stain I 
 
 Clearness divine ! 
 
 Ye heavens, whose pure dark regions have no sign 
 
 Of languor, though so calm, and, though so great, 
 
 Are yet untroubled and unpassionate ; . . . 
 
 I will not say that your mild deeps retain 
 
 A tinge, it may be, of their silent pain 
 
 Who have long'd deeply once, and long'd in vain. 
 
 — Note the association between men's restless moods 
 and the divine clearness which resumes them, trans- 
 ferred from a verbal likeness between men's dee'p 
 longing and natmre's mild deejps. — 
 
 But I will rather say that you remain 
 A world above man's head, to let him see 
 How boundless might his soul's horizon be, 
 How vast, yet of what clear transparency. 
 
 A Summer Night, 
 
 And again, 
 
 Calm soul of all things ! make it mine 
 To feel, amid the city's jar, 
 That there abides a peace of thine, 
 Man did not make, and cannot mar. 
 
 The will to neither strive nor cry. 
 The power to feel with others give ! 
 Calm, calm me more ! nor let me die 
 Before I have begun to Hve. 
 
 Kensington Gardens. 
 
 And again, from the prayer to the stars in Self- 
 Dependence : 
 
 Ye who from my childhood up have calm'd me. 
 Calm me, ah, compose me to the end ! . . . 
 From the intense, clear, star- sown vault of heaven, 
 Over the Ut sea's unquiet way, 
 
356 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 In the rustling night-air came the answer: 
 
 * Wouldst thou be as these are ? Live as they '. 
 
 But the stars and the sea, thus immediately apostro- 
 phized, do not readily transform experience. No 
 ' wonder edges the familiar face ', when we descend 
 with the poet to the plain. The charm of the poetry 
 is obvious, and one or two of its elements may be 
 analysed. There is, first, the scholarship of epithets : 
 ' intense, clear, star-sown vault of heaven ' is one 
 instance ; ' the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea ' is 
 another ; ' that wild, unquench'd, deep-sunken, old- 
 world pain ' is a third. They beat like hammer- 
 strokes upon the literary sense. Akin to this is the 
 felicity of phrase-making : ' who saw life steadily, 
 and saw it whole ', is the earliest and most famous 
 example. Others are more frankly derivative, and 
 less universal in their origin : the ' physician of the 
 iron age ', ' Wordsworth's healing power ', and so 
 forth, indicate the direction of Arnold's genius towards 
 brilliant generalizations in criticism. Again, there are 
 traceable certain influences in Arnold's poetry. Words- 
 worth's simplicity of faith (and, incidentally, of ex- 
 pression) appealed to him most strongly, though it 
 proved, in places, incompatible with the sensibility 
 to Attic forms by which Matthew Arnold was always 
 attracted. In Sohrah and Rustum he attempted the 
 Homeric style of simile and metaphor ; Merope and 
 Empedocles are Sophoclean in intention ; Tristram and 
 Iseulty Balder Dead, and the Merman pieces owe some- 
 thing to Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites. 
 
THE SANCTION OF MORALITY 357 
 
 The clearest note struck by this poet is gentle, ' un- 
 
 passionate ', and elegiac. The Arthur Clough poems — 
 
 The Scholar-Gipsy and Thyrsis—, which mingle the 
 
 magic of Oxford with the memories of two poets ; 
 
 Rugby Chapel, sacred to his father ; the Ohermann 
 
 stanzas ; A Southern Night ; Memorial Verses ; Heine's 
 
 Grave, and others are marked by literary grace of an 
 
 exceptional degree of refinement, and by elegances — 
 
 the old word is the best — of metre and diction, rising 
 
 at times to spontaneous rapture. Spontaneity and 
 
 genuine sentiment, true harmonies of thought and 
 
 expression, satisfying and complementary to each 
 
 other, mark, first, the sonnet on Shakespeare, and, 
 
 secondly, two series of Arnold's lyrics, Switzerland 
 
 and Faded Leaves. These include about a dozen 
 
 poems, celebrating an unknown ' Marguerite ', and in 
 
 them the poetry of Matthew Arnold reaches its highest 
 
 point. He was often in love with love ; here at least 
 
 he became a lover. There is a certain note of moral 
 
 ecstasy, not very easy to define, but fairly obvious to 
 
 detect, which places the writer of these poems in one 
 
 line of succession to Wordsworth — ^in the same line as, 
 
 in a later day, has been followed by Mr. William Watson. 
 
 It is not the transcendental Wordsworth, opening heaven 
 
 on earth ; it is the poet of elegy and reflection of whom 
 
 we are instantly put in mind by such stanzas as the 
 
 following : 
 
 How sweet, unreach'd by earthly jars. 
 My sister ! to maintain with thee 
 The hush among the shining stars, 
 The calm upon the moonlit sea ! 
 
358 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 — Note, again, the uncompleted transference of the 
 
 idea of nature to the needs of men — 
 
 How sweet to feel, on the boon air. 
 All our unquiet pulses cease ! 
 
 — There are Keats and Shelley in this couplet ; see 
 Stanza 6 of the Ode to a Nightingale and Stanza 4, 
 Written in Dejection near Naples. — 
 
 To feel that nothing can impair 
 
 The gentleness, the thirst for peace — 
 
 The gentleness too rudely hurl'd 
 
 On this wild earth of hate and fear. . . . 
 
 And, among these Switzerland lyrics, those beginning 
 ' Yes, in the sea of Hfe enisled ', and ' In this fair 
 stranger's eyes of grey', and 'Vain is the effort to 
 forget ', display in a rare degree the marriage of deep 
 feeling with perfect speech. 
 
 We venture to hold the belief that, if Matthew 
 Arnold had obtained from the muse what he was 
 always asking — the ' clear prospect o'er our being's 
 whole ', the ' will like a dividing spear ', the ' calm ', 
 the ' restoration ', and the ' durability ' — , he would 
 have continued to exercise the art in which his skill 
 was so sure. His abandonment of poetry is, to this 
 belief, a sign of his casting about for a means of ex- 
 pression better suited to his gifts ; and, though it may 
 be urged that he was mistaken, it is, perhaps, juster 
 to assume that his thirty years' life with Leah represent 
 his genius more truly than his seven years' service to 
 Rachel. But, before passing from the poet to the 
 critic, one detail of style should be noted, not merely 
 
THE SANCTION OF MORALITY 359 
 
 for its teclinical success, but because it is so character- 
 istic of the writer. Again and again he affects such 
 forms of expression as the following : 
 
 Distracted as a homeless wind, 
 
 In beating what we must not pass, 
 
 In seeking what we shall not find. 
 
 A Farewell. 
 
 The type touches its ideal in the twin lines from The 
 
 Scholar-Gipsy y 
 
 Still nursing the unconquerable hope, 
 Still clutching the inviolable shade, 
 
 and, whatever name grammarians give the figure, 
 Matthew Arnold's readers recognize it as a sign of the 
 iterative mannerism which became so common in his 
 prose. 
 
 The ' strange disease of modern life, with its sick Hia 
 hurry, its divided aims ', was, as we have noted, a ww^ks. 
 common complaint in the poems. The poet, qua poet, 
 failed to cure it, and he sought a remedy in prose. 
 Matthew Arnold is conspicuous in English literature 
 for his belief in the efficacy of the preface. He wrote 
 prefaces to his own books, and prefaces to volumes of 
 selections from Wordsworth and other writers. The 
 practice has since been killed by kindness, and readers 
 (or publishers) are reverting to the texts of their authors 
 unadorned. But Arnold — like Lamb before him — was 
 undoubtedly right in supporting the etiquette of 
 introduction. ' The remedy is at hand ', he seemed 
 to say, * but you are not competent to use it. Let 
 me dispose you correctly to receive the benefit of the 
 
36o NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 cure '. Carlyle's dictum, ' we are all poets when we 
 read a poem well ', and Ruskin's similar warning (in 
 Sesame and Lilies), that a reader must rise to his author, 
 the author will not stoop to him, remind us that good 
 reading is in the nature of an apprenticeship, and is not 
 a self -developed art. Thus, the ' essays in criticism ', 
 introductory to enjoyment, which Matthew Arnold 
 interposed between Milton, Gray, Keats, Shelley, 
 Byron, and their readers — the ' Gray ' and * Words- 
 worth ' are the best, as they were most akin to Arnold's 
 sympathies — , are extraordinarily helpful to apprecia- 
 tion ; and the more general papers on ' The Study of 
 Poetry ', ' The Function of Criticism at the Present 
 Time ', ' The Literary Influence of Academies ', and so 
 forth, are full of acute perception, very admirably 
 expressed, of the difference between reading and reading 
 welly in the sense of Carlyle's aphorism. They were 
 inquisitive, exegetical and didactic, differing toto ccbIo 
 from the personal method of criticism which leaves an 
 author to reveal himself ; and thus, as special studies, 
 they were most successful when they dealt with a mis- 
 sionary writer, such as Wordsworth. They aimed at 
 fashioning an intelligent disposition, at creating re- 
 ceptivity and pliability of mind ; and they insisted — 
 with the mannered iterativeness — on certain definite 
 principles of taste. Almost without deliberation, they 
 were extended from reading well to living well. There 
 were flaws and vices in the age, according to Arnold's 
 diagnosis, which prevented the desirable attitude in 
 the patient's disposition. These vices were most 
 
THE SANCTION OF MORALITY 361 
 
 readily to be corrected by doses of Greek and French 
 culture ; and the literary critic gave way in turn to 
 the rationalist (or simplifier) in popular philosophy. 
 
 This phase, founded on a sound distinction, pre- 
 current in the essays, between truths of science and of 
 religion, is to-day the least interesting in Matthew 
 Arnold. But in his own day of controversial theology, 
 he imported into the discussion a refreshing indignation 
 which bore him triumphantly through. He hated 
 the type of mind which he called ' Philistine ' or 
 * common ', and, in seeking to awaken imagination — a 
 sense of proportion in things, and a sense of the other 
 point of view — , Matthew Arnold rendered a real 
 service to the cause of mundane morality. He taught 
 criticism, or definiteness of view ; he taught culture, 
 or revolt against bad taste ; and he taught imagination, 
 or rebellion against the tyranny of facts. These 
 three ideas he deemed requisite for salvation, social and 
 political alike. To these three he dedicated his talents, 
 relinquishing for their sake the attractive allurements 
 of the muse, and consenting to jostle in the throng 
 with ' Mr. Murphy ', the * young lions ', and other 
 offences to fastidiousness. 
 
 Fastidious, trivial, dogmatic, too harsh and too 
 precise he may have been in his attacks, concerted or 
 occasional, upon Philistia in England. But he wrote 
 some passages of prose, and invented some definitions 
 of first principles, which have won him the undivided 
 title of the leading English critic of the nineteenth 
 century. Though but three years younger than John 
 
362 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Ruskin, lie seems much more modern than that master. 
 He was certainly much more free from obvious sins 
 of individualism. He came as near to a system of 
 criticism — to a science of the art — as any English 
 writer has ever come. He was urgent, hopefully 
 urgent, about the comparative method. His dictum, 
 
 * The criticism which alone can much help us for the 
 future is a criticism which regards Europe as being, 
 for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great con- 
 federation, bound to a joint action, and working to a 
 common result ', has been selected by Professor Saints- 
 bury as the motto for his Periods of European Literature 
 (12 vols., by various writers, Blackwood), and in his 
 own History of Criticism (3 vols., Blackwood) he writes 
 of Arnold in the following terms : ' He had an exacter 
 knowledge than Dryden's ; the fineness of his judg- 
 ment shows finer beside Johnson's bluntness ; he could 
 not woolgather like Coleridge ; his range was far wider 
 than Lamb's ; his scholarship and his delicacy alike 
 give him an advantage over Hazlitt. Systematic 
 without being hidebound ; well-read (if not exactly 
 learned) without pedantry ; delicate and subtle, 
 without weakness or dilettanteism ; catholic without 
 eclecticism ; enthusiastic without indiscriminateness, — 
 Mr. Arnold is one of the best and most precious teachers 
 on his own side '. There is nothing to add to this 
 eulogy, except to remind the reader, first, of Arnold's 
 vivaciousness, and, secondly, of his skill in devising 
 catchwords. The ' grand style ', ' provinciality ', 
 
 * sweetness and light ', belong, together with many 
 
THE SANCTION OF MORALITY 363 
 
 others, to the vocabulary of criticism, enriched im- 
 measurably by Matthew Arnold. 
 
 m. 
 
 Once more, and always more clearly as the conclusion other 
 of this book draws nearer, we must be content to ^"*®^^- 
 indicate the scope, without pursuing the representatives, 
 of each department of letters. Among those who 
 properly claim mention in a study of this kind are 
 Walter Bagehot (1826-77), critic and economist. Dr. 
 John Brown (1810-82), of Horce SuhsecivcB, Sir Arthur 
 Helps (1813-75), of Friends in Council, William Minto 
 (1845-93), George Brimley( 1819-57), JohnForster(1812- 
 76), and Sir George Cornewall Lewis (1806-63). Each 
 of these, to whom might be added Canon Ainger, among 
 the recent dead. Dr. Gosse and Professor Saintsbury 
 among the living, has added to the structure of 
 English criticism in the application of principles to taste. 
 
 Here, however, in concluding the present section, it Cliarlotte 
 seems more appropriate to note the work of a novelist °^^^* 
 than of a critic. For among the formative influences 
 which affected national character at this time, 
 Charlotte Yonge (1823-1901) certainly estabhshed a 
 definite place and name. It was precisely in this 
 deliberate didacticism that she differed from the 
 greater novelists — ^that her difierence and her inferiority 
 both lay. And it was, again, precisely through this 
 quality that her work joins on to the writings of Ruskin 
 and Matthew Arnold, as one of the steadying forces — 
 
364 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 the moral standards — of the age. The Heir of Redcliffe, 
 
 The Daisy Chain and Heartsease^ to name three out of a 
 
 long list of novels, were in operation (the term is quite 
 
 suitable) at about the same time — say, roughly, about 
 
 1860 — at which Ruskin was teaching domestic art 
 
 and Matthew Arnold was tilting at the Philistines. 
 
 They belong to the same cycle of thought which 
 
 Charles Kingsley expressed in his well-known lines, 
 
 Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever, 
 Do noble things, not dream them, all day long ; 
 
 the same, again, which Tennyson had exalted to an 
 untenable height in The Princess of 1847 ; the same, 
 again, if another witness, a nominis umbra, may be 
 summoned without calling his evidence, which is 
 typified by the title of a book on The Gentle Life by 
 James Hain Friswell (1825-78). 
 
 Charlotte Yonge illustrates well the weaker and less 
 permanent aspects of this middle-Victorian ideal. 
 Its goodness tended towards goodiness ; and, though 
 there is very much less of the ' namby-pamby ' (or 
 mawkish) in her books than their present neglect 
 suggests, these novels certainly point to the speedy 
 degeneration of the type. Ruskin and Arnold read — 
 or tended to read — too much didactic morality into 
 literature and art. They were too anxious to translate 
 their beauties into practical counsels of conduct for 
 vernacular use. Emerson, writing on Manners, says 
 that ' lovers should guard their strangeness '. The 
 same warning appUes to subUmated lovers of the arts. 
 Intimacy, not founded on deep truth, leads impercep- 
 
THE SANCTION OF MORALITY 365 
 
 tibly to familiarity ; and herein we see the degrada- 
 tion of the Ruskinian to the Charlotte Yonge type. 
 Noble conduct, gentle goodness, became too easy a 
 quest, and the artistic-moral life tended to tameness 
 and domesticity. Curiously enough, the most purely 
 domestic poem of this epoch, Coventry Patmore's 
 Angel in the House, to which we shall come in the next 
 section, smouldered with subdued fires, and effectively 
 * guarded the strangeness ' of the hearths which it 
 sang. But the moral version of the search for beauty 
 did not permanently attain the Greek ideal of philosophy 
 without softness. 
 
 Arnold's purpose was the more masculine of the 
 two : ' I too have long'd for trenchant force, And 
 will like a dividing spear ', but he, too, as we have 
 seen, was disposed to lament 
 
 The gentleness too rudely hurl'd 
 On this wild earth of hate and fear, 
 
 and to complain of 
 
 The thirst for peace a raving world 
 Would never let us satiate here. 
 
 For, turn back for a moment to p. 85. Did this 
 ' peace ' and ' gentleness ' of Matthew Arnold, or their 
 more effeminate counterparts in John Ruskin and 
 Charlotte Yonge, satisfy the desire for reconciliation 
 between the ' external world ' and the ' individual 
 mind ' of Wordsworth ? Consider the continuation of 
 this message in George Meredith's most Wordsworthian 
 poem. Earth is speaking (in Outer and Inner) to the 
 perception of the same discord : 
 
366 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Accept, she says; it is not hard 
 
 In woods; but she in towns 
 Repeats, accept ; and have we wept, 
 
 And have we quailed with fears. 
 Or shrunk with horrors, 
 
 — * the thirst for peace a raving world would never 
 let us satiate ' — 
 
 sure reward 
 We have whom knowledge crowns ; 
 Who see in mould the rose unfold. 
 The soul through blood and tears. 
 
 Experience transcendent consoles experience com- 
 plainant. The outer peace and the inner fear are at 
 one. The world is composed to the mind. Not Arthur's 
 shattered peace in Tennyson's Passing of Arthur, 
 
 And all whereon I lean'd in wife and friend 
 Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm 
 Reels back into the beast, and is no more; 
 
 not the patched-up truce of 1850, so melodiously 
 celebrated in In Memoriam ; not the peace of wall- 
 papers and furniture, and the decorative gentlenesses 
 of moral art : not these, but a deeper reconcilement, 
 founded more firmly on what is real, and resting on 
 no divorce between human knowledge and heavenly 
 wisdom, on no antagonism of reason and belief, but 
 on the union of the two in love. An express and 
 invincible faith in the truth of this ultimate harmony 
 between experience and design — the seeming ' hate ' 
 and the seeming * gentleness ' — ^is alone competent to 
 still the querulous cries of men. Not Ruskin, not 
 Matthew Arnold, for all their energies. 
 
A 
 
 § 8. SYMBOLS OF BEAUTY. 
 
 FIERCER appetite for beauty — for its symbols The point 
 
 of view, 
 rather than its obligation — marks the writers 
 
 of the last phase of the aesthetic movement. To them 
 it mattered not at all (or hardly at all) that the times 
 were out of joint. They were conscious of no fate 
 urging them to set things right. They had affinities 
 with all the rest : with the letter-perfectness of 
 Tennyson, the domestic idealism of Ruskin, the chaste 
 socialism of Morris, the force and fire of Swinburne, 
 the psychological mysticism of Meredith, the profane 
 godhness of Rossetti, the holy godliness of his sister, 
 the moral unrest of Matthew Arnold ; even with the 
 disappointed glooms of Arthur Clough and James 
 Thomson. But they differed from all in a certain 
 remoteness from the centre towards which those writers 
 were striving. 
 
 This difference, negative in origin, is difficult to 
 seize. It depends on various conditions of biography, 
 temperament and circumstances which it would take 
 too long to substantiate, and which are, after all, less 
 important than their obvious results in the writings 
 
 bequeathed to us. Their common object was enjoy- 
 
 367 
 
368 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 ment, in the sense of a complete self-expression, based 
 partly, if not wholly, upon physical faculties, though 
 extended thence to metaphysics. An accurate rendering 
 of these records was a sacred canon of their art. If 
 the revelation proved incommunicable, they preferred 
 to destroy the records rather than to leave them 
 imperfect. Style, which seems their preoccupation, 
 was far more a secondary matter than it was with 
 some less rapt inquirers. It was evolved in the course 
 of their endeavour to satisfy the appetite for joy. 
 They were self-engrossed in contemplation. They 
 listened intently for the unheard, and gazed intensely 
 at the unseen. The exact word was indispensable 
 to such a purpose, and the exact word was more often 
 than not a term of indefiniteness and vagueness. This 
 gives the loftiness to their style, and leads to its 
 occasional languor. Further, the mood perplexes 
 criticism. The conclusions of these writers appeal to a 
 partly undeveloped consciousness, and are to be tested 
 by future consent. In hands less clean than theirs, 
 in hearts less passionate, and with motives less sincere, 
 lay the danger of imperfect rapture, and of symbolizing 
 for impure (because insincere) ends. 
 
 Five major names occur in this context — Coventry 
 Patmore, Walter Pater, Francis Thompson, Robert 
 Louis Stevenson, Richard Jefferies. With these 
 are joined the names of John Addington Symonds, 
 Oscar Wilde, William Ernest Henley, as well as of 
 others still at work. 
 
 Pater and Symonds alike made special studies of 
 
SYMBOLS OF BEAUTY 369 
 
 the Renaissance. Pater's Studies of its history was Walter 
 
 Pater 
 
 published in 1873, and Symonds's history, expanded (i839- 
 from a prize-essay at Oxford, between 1875 and 1886. ^^^^)- 
 The mere attraction of the subject is significant, in 
 connection with the Pre-RaphaeUte creed, to which 
 Pater gravitated in early life ; but more significant 
 is the point of view from which Pater deliberately set 
 out. Take, for instance, the following aphorisms from 
 his Renaissance volume : 
 
 The service of philosophy towards the human spirit 
 is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager 
 observation. ... To burn always with this hard, 
 gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in 
 life. 
 
 Again : 
 
 We are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says : we 
 are all under sentence of death but with a sort of 
 indefinite reprieve : we have an interval, and then 
 our place knows us no more. . . . Our one chance lies 
 in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsa- 
 tions as possible into the given time. ... Of such 
 wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire for beauty, the 
 love of art for its own sake, has most. 
 
 Again : 
 
 Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, 
 is the end. 
 
 And, again (from the Preface) : 
 
 The function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, 
 to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue 
 24 
 
370 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 by whicli a picture, a fair personality in life or in a book, 
 produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, 
 to indicate what the source of that impression is, and 
 under what conditions it is experienced. 
 
 There is, as Pater himself says, ' a kind of passionate 
 coldness ' in this attitude, which is at the opposite 
 extreme to, say, Kingsley's heats of idealism or Arnold's 
 moralization of experience. It is the joy-search 
 raised to an exact science, and insulated from all 
 distracting influences, which is recommended as 
 * our one chance ', as the ultimate object of all criticism 
 and as the secret of ' success in life '. ' John Halifax ', 
 amassing capital, and ameliorating the conditions of 
 labour ; John Ruskin, ennobling labour, and modify- 
 ing the tyranny of capital ; altruism itself, and 
 human relations, and all the compromises on which 
 social life is founded — starting with the great com- 
 promise of sex — are shrivelled up before this ' gem-like 
 flame '. 
 
 Let us turn to these exclusions for a moment, and 
 particularly to the exclusion of woman from the paradise 
 of aesthetic impressionism. We are far too close to the 
 shadow of the actual figures of these men to discuss 
 this question biographically. Pater's donnish celibacy 
 and Wilde's shipwreck of his life have no direct interest 
 for literature. But this at least may be said by the 
 literary critic, that in the works of no one of these 
 writers, neither in Patmore, nor Pater, nor Thompson, 
 nor Stevenson, nor Jefleries, nor Symonds, nor Wilde, 
 nor Henley, nor another, does the splendid selfishness 
 
SYMBOLS OF BEAUTY 371 
 
 compensate for the problems which they left untouched, 
 and to the solution of which the novelists had been 
 devoting their highest talent. It is the reaction, 
 perhaps, which has added weight to the impetus with 
 which writers as different as Mr. Kipling, Mr. Wells, 
 and Mr. Shaw, have returned to these aspects. And 
 this is said irrespectively of the fact that the key to 
 all Patmore's poetry is the relation of husband to 
 wife, and, more mystically, of lover to lover. His 
 idealization is so complete as to set it above the 
 human plane. Contrast Meredith's Modern Love 
 with Patmore's Angel in the House^-oi, rather, with 
 the Preludes of that poem — , and our statement will 
 be justified. 
 We must look at this Patmore note more closely. Coventry 
 
 -Tk , Tx r Patmore 
 
 In one aspect it approximates to Paters. Here, for (1823- 
 
 instance, is an expansion of the ' interval ', a conscious 
 
 recount of the ' pulsations ' : 
 
 Not in the crises of events, 
 
 Of compass'd hopes, or fears fulfill'd, 
 Of acts of gravest consequence, 
 
 Are Ufe's delight and depth reveal'd. 
 The day of days was not the day ; 
 
 That went before, or was postponed ; 
 The night Death took our lamp away 
 
 Was not the night on which we groan'd. 
 I drew my bride, beneath the moon. 
 
 Across my threshold ; happy hour ! 
 But, ah, the walk that afternoon 
 
 We saw the water-flags in flower ! 
 
 And here, in the following stanza (The Angel in the 
 House, canto viii), is the investiture of the thought — 
 
372 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 already purified from clinging grossnesses of earth — with 
 ethereal raiment : 
 
 Lo, there, whence love, life, light are pour*d 
 
 Veil'd with impenetrable rays. 
 Amidst the presence of the Lord 
 
 Co-equal Wisdom laughs and plays. 
 Female and male God made the man ; 
 
 His image is the whole, not half; 
 And in our love we dimly scan 
 
 The love which is between Himself. 
 
 Add to this the symbolism of the later Patmore — the 
 Patmore of the odes which are pure fire — , and the 
 growth of this poet in ' a kind of passionate coldness ', 
 an austerity transfiguring desire, will partly be trace- 
 able. Read in this sense ' A Child's Purchase ', or 
 ' Delicise Sapientiae de Amore ', or ' Sponsa Dei ' 
 (afterwards the title of a prose-work which he destroyed), 
 in the volume called The Unknown Eros, 
 
 Who is this Maiden fair, 
 
 The laughing of whose eye 
 
 Is in man's heart renew'd virginity ? 
 
 he asks, in one of these three odes ; ' who is this only 
 happy She, whom, by a frantic flight of courtesy ', 
 he adores, under the name of a living woman, 'as 
 Margaret, Maude, or Cecily ' ? 
 
 What if this Lady be thy Soul, and He 
 Who claims to enjoy her sacred beauty be. 
 Not thou, but God ! 
 
 This tremendous symbolism, the more tremendous for 
 its simplicity of statement at a white heat of sincerity, 
 underlies the music of the odes, and is latent, though not 
 
SYMBOLS OF BEAUTY 373 
 
 explicit, in the seeming mildness — external only — of 
 
 The Angel in the House. We may quote from another 
 
 of these three odes : 
 
 Love makes the life to be 
 
 A fount perpetual of virginity; 
 
 For, lo, the Elect 
 
 Of generous Love, how named soe'er, affect 
 
 Nothing but God, 
 
 Or mediate or direct. 
 
 Nothing but God, 
 
 The Husband of the Heavens: 
 
 And who Him love, in potence great or small. 
 
 Are, one and all. 
 
 Heirs of the Palace glad, 
 
 And inly clad 
 
 With the bridal robes of ardour virginal. 
 
 If we turn back to Meredith's Hymn to Colour (p. 292, 
 above) we find a trace of the same thought, though 
 without Patmore's religious imagery — ^he became a 
 convert to the Roman Catholic Church — , and with less 
 voluptuousness than his : 
 
 Cleave thou thy way with fathering desire 
 
 Of fire to reach to fire. 
 Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes 
 The house of heaven splendid for the bride. 
 To him as leaps a fountain she awakes, 
 In knotting arms, yet boundless : him beside, 
 She holds the flower to heaven, and by his power 
 
 Brings heaven to the flower. 
 
 It is found again, and with the same differences, in the 
 same poet's Meditation under Stars : 
 
 Bethink you : were it Earth alone 
 Breeds love, would not her region be 
 
 The sole delight and throne 
 
 Of generous Deity ? 
 
374 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Transcendental language of this sort — ' dead 
 language ', as Patmore calls it ; unborn language, as 
 we should prefer to call it — should be ' decently 
 cloaked', Patmore says, 'in the Imperial tongue of 
 Rome ', and it is, indeed, sometimes, not less obscure. 
 It is language which is either understood or not. It is 
 not easily to be taught. Its effect does not reside in 
 combinations of consonants and vowels, nor in con- 
 ventions, nor in Crashaw-like figures. The recurring 
 reference to Richard Crashaw, and the example of 
 seventeenth-century mysticism, is, in fact, a little 
 misleading. There was more white passion in Patmore, 
 especially in the fifteen years of silence between The 
 Victories of Love (in the vein of The Angel in the House) 
 and The Unknown Eros of 1877. This language, so 
 curiously unlike all associated Victorian conceptions, is 
 the language of male angels discoursing love, ' tender- 
 soft as seem The embraces of a dead love in a dream ', 
 and yet burning with an unquenchable flame. It is 
 the last great effort of the spirit, emancipate in the 
 nineteenth century, to overleap the bounds of space 
 and time, and to exist as a naked soul, released from 
 the thraldom of the senses, yet winning its release 
 through pure sense, and speaking the old poetic tongue. 
 It may be missed, as we have said, or understood ; 
 there is no middle way of hearing it ; but we dwell on 
 its magical qualities, its remote and jewelled perfection, 
 because, from first to last, it is the voice of free cog- 
 nition. 
 
 It evoked strains of prose style wholly different from 
 
SYMBOLS OF BEAUTY 375 
 
 the rhetoric of which Macaulay was a master, and Charac- 
 different in kind and in degree from the bulk of Arnold of style. 
 and of Ruskin. There are sifted passages in Ruskin 
 which have affinities with Pater, especially in Ruskin's 
 chastened moods ; but the moral purpose of these 
 critics tempered with warmer lights the marmoreal 
 dignity of Pater. Pater commanded an eloquence of 
 prose which, when a poet is inspired by it, moves him 
 to use the form of ode, the most exalted of the lyrical 
 measures. Take, for instance, the following passage 
 from the Renaissance volume, as a touchstone of 
 Pateresqueness. He is describing Leonardo Da Vinci's 
 ' Gioconda ' : 
 
 She is older than the rocks among which she sits ; 
 like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and • 
 learned the secrets of the grave ; and has been a diver 
 in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about 
 her ; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern 
 merchants ; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen 
 of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary ; 
 and all this has been to her but as the sound of Ijrres 
 and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which 
 it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged 
 the eyelids and the hands. 
 
 It is written of art of this kind, ars est celare artem. 
 These unseizable, yet denominated, apparencies, as 
 evanescent ' as the sound of lyres and flutes ', and to 
 be inferred only from changes of the features, and 
 expressions of ' the eyelids and the hands ', are endued 
 with origin and presence by the power of imaginative 
 
376 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 language. The ' fallen day ' of tlie deep seas, and the 
 ' strange webs ' of Eastern traffickers, and the mother- 
 hood of Helen and of Mary, are suggestions thrown 
 out at ideas — spars of language to support them ere 
 they sink — like thoughts that have broken their 
 vessels — , comparable, if to anything in English 
 literature, then to rare flashes in Coleridge (see p. 76, 
 above) who ' on honey-dew hath fed. And drunk the 
 milk of Paradise '. 
 
 One high power of style supervenes, replacing much 
 that is excluded from the survey of these apostles of 
 sensation, and this is, in one word, discrimination, or, 
 more precisely, essentiality. The mere fact became 
 a symbol of true being, and the symbolized fact opened 
 out into a revelation of essential truth, uplifting the 
 fact to spiritual communion. Again and again it 
 occurs, in the writings of Pater and Patmore, and 
 likewise of Richard Jefferies, — this faculty of selecting 
 the essential detail, and of merging it, by a master's 
 choice of words, in the complexus of relationships to 
 which it ultimately belongs. 
 
 A few examples will help to make this clearer : 
 
 His mother became to him the very type of maternity 
 in things, its unfailing pity and protectiveness. 
 
 Pater, Marius the Epicurean. 
 
 Here is manifest the same faculty as in Blake's 
 * Sweet joy I call thee '. The mother is resumed in 
 pity, as the infant in joy. Again, 
 
 Surely, the aim of a true philosophy must lie, not 
 in futile efforts towards the complete accommodation 
 
SYMBOLS OF BEAUTY 377 
 
 of man to the circumstances in which he chances to 
 find himself, but in the maintenance of a kind of candid 
 discontent, in the face of the very highest achievement ; 
 the unclouded and receptive soul quitting the world 
 finally, with the same fresh wonder with which it had 
 entered the world still unimpaired, and going on its 
 blind way at last with the consciousness of some 
 profound enigma in things, as but the pledge of some- 
 thing further to come. ibid. 
 
 This passage is very characteristic. Note, first, the 
 clarity of the statement of that very difi&cult quest, 
 ' the aim of a true philosophy '. The parsimony of 
 words is extraordinary, considering the luminousness 
 of the expression. We may compare it with the 
 extract of essences in other parts of Pater's writings, 
 such as his description of Wordsworth's poetry : ' The 
 sudden passage from lowly thoughts and places to the 
 majestic forms of philosophical imagination, the play 
 of these forms over a world so different, enlarging so 
 strangely the bounds of its humble churchyards, and 
 breaking such a wild light on the graves of christened 
 children ' — ^where the difficult idea of transcendentalism 
 is unsurpassably expressed. 
 
 Secondly, note in the Marius sentences, the rare 
 appearance in EngKsh prose of particles as supple as 
 in Attic ; especially the use of * a kind of ', ' some ', 
 ' a certain ' — , the enclitic rtg of the Greeks, which 
 Pater made his own : 
 
 As if by way of a due recognition of some immeasurable 
 divine condescension manifest in a certain historic fact, 
 
378 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 its influence was felt more especially at those points 
 which demanded some sacrifice of one's self, for the 
 weak, for the aged, for little children, and even for 
 the dead. And then, for its constant outward token, 
 its significant manner or index, it issued in a certain 
 debonair grace, and a certain mystic attractiveness, 
 a courtesy, which made Marius doubt whether that 
 famed Greek ' blitheness ', or gaiety, or grace, in the 
 handling of Hfe, had been, after all, an unrivalled 
 success. ibid. 
 
 The words we have here underlined point to language 
 employed in new uses, to expression sought for ideas 
 which have no exact correspondence in words, and the 
 recurring confession of inadequacy (seen again in the 
 variants of ' blitheness ') is itself a token of the precision 
 with which these empiricists of style exhausted the 
 resources at their disposal. 
 
 Take, for instance, The Toys of Patmore, with its 
 deeply pathetic enumeration of the objects which the 
 little boy had put within his reach, ' to comfort his 
 sad heart ' : 
 
 A box of counters and a red-vein'd stone, 
 
 A piece of glass abraded by the beach 
 
 And six or seven shells, 
 
 A bottle with bluebells 
 
 And two French copper coins. . . , 
 
 How exact and punctilious is the art thus dealing 
 with tangible things, and yet neither more exact 
 nor more punctiHous than the art of the same master 
 applied to impalpable essences : 
 
SYMBOLS OF BEAUTY 379 
 
 So when that night I pray'd 
 
 To God, I wept, and said — 
 
 Ah, when at last we he with trancM breath. 
 
 Not vexing Thee in death. 
 
 And Thou rememberest of what toys 
 
 We made our joys. 
 
 How weakly understood 
 
 Thy great commanded good. 
 
 Then, fatherly not less 
 
 Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay, 
 
 Thou' It leave Thy wrath, and say, 
 
 *I wiU be sorry for their childishness'. 
 
 These writers — Patmore and Pater — must, of all 
 others, be studied solely through the medium of their 
 works, or of such extensive quotation from them as the 
 limits of this volume forbid. They aimed, if the paradox 
 be permitted, at a metaphysic of sensation, at realizing 
 sensation so vividly as to make it the key to unlock 
 the deepest delights of which the soul is capable. 
 Pater's Marius the Epicurean is a study of ' his sensa- 
 tions and ideas ', and the period of the death of 
 Antoninus was chosen for its special appropriateness 
 as a time of transitional thought. His unfinished 
 Gaston de Latour was again a study of solution, afford- 
 ing scope for the powers of balance, suspense and 
 equilibrium, in which Pater excelled. Besides these 
 narrative romances, there are his Renaissance studies, 
 his Imaginary Portraits, his Appreciations, his lectures 
 on Plato and Platonism, his Greek Studies, and Essays 
 from the Guardian. Patmore's works have been specified. 
 The poems of earlier life, The Angel in the House and 
 The Victories of Love, prepared the way for the deeper 
 
38o NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 mysticism and the purer flame of abstraction in the odes 
 which compose The Unknown Eros of his maturity. 
 
 John Addington Symonds (1840-93) must here be 
 passed over as an essayist in Pater's vein ; a poet, a 
 scholar, and a critic, of the sesthetic and sensuous school. 
 And several causes compel us to almost as bare a 
 Francis statement of the name and fame of Francis Thompson, 
 (185?- °° Patmore's successor in his own kind. It is not that his 
 1907). death is so recent, for our survey has included living 
 writers ; it is rather that his writings are of small 
 bulk, and are not yet sufficiently familiar to have 
 passed the test of time. He owes much to a few 
 faithful friends, Mr. Wilfrid Meynell in especial, whose 
 wife, as Alice Thompson and Alice Meynell, is the 
 author of a few poems of rare and exquisite delicacy, 
 likewise of the Patmore type. But Francis Thompson, 
 though little known, is growing in the appreciation of 
 readers. His finest poem, The Hound of Heaven, is 
 rapidly and rightly becoming recognized as an ode of 
 exceptional poignancy and almost incredible loveliness. 
 It possesses the universal note, transcending, while it 
 interprets, the poet's personal experience ; and its 
 height, gorgeousness, and subtlety, and a certain 
 intimate mystical appeal are characteristic of the 
 kind we are considering. The human soul (and its 
 science, psychology) are still in the dawn of exploration : 
 spiritual man is not yet weary of conventions and of 
 illusions disguising his own needs. He still declines 
 the majesty of his strength, and deprecates the sanction 
 of his weakness. He still clings to earthly integuments, 
 
SYMBOLS OF BEAUTY 381 
 
 and weaves his aspirations of mixed fabrics. Thus, 
 he misses the splendid appeal, the uncompromised, 
 esoteric truth, of this ode, ever growing on his con- 
 viction : 
 
 I fled Him, down the nights and down the days ; 
 I fled Him, down the arches of the years ; 
 I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways 
 Of my own mind ; and in the mist of tears 
 I hid from Him, and under running laughter. 
 
 The imagery is as lofty as the thought is passionate 
 and austere. 
 
 In the ' Preface, by way of Criticism ', to Familiar R. L. 
 Studies of Men and Books — chiefly reprints of articles (i850-^°° 
 in The Cornhill — , Stevenson admits us to glimpses of ^^^'^)' 
 his principles and tastes. 
 
 A writer of short studies, he avers, is bound to a 
 definite 'point of view'. 'What he cannot vivify he 
 should omit '. There may be perversion and even 
 caricature. ' The lights are heightened, the shadows 
 overcharged ', and in this preface Stevenson explains 
 the point of view governing each of the studies. The 
 whole volume, from title-page to finish, is full of interest 
 to Stevensonians. The epithet ' familiar ' is illu- 
 minating. We are plainly not to expect detached and 
 documentary evidence, but an intimate and a personal 
 note. The dedication to his father, Thomas Stevenson, 
 ' by whose devices the great sea lights in every quarter 
 of the world now shine more brightly ', is not only an 
 
382 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 ofl&ce of natural piety. It illustrates Stevenson's 
 attraction to the romance of lonely seas, and to the 
 lives of those who go down to them in ships. Then 
 there are the subjects of the studies. Victor Hugo, 
 Robert Burns, Walt Whitman (in the early days of 
 his English appreciation), Thoreau, Yoshida, Villon, 
 Charles of Orleans, Pepys, and John Knox ; three 
 Frenchmen, two democrats of America, the Scottish 
 poet, the Scottish theologian, a Japanese reformer, 
 and the prince of diarists. Surely, an amalgam of 
 their quaUties — Scottish grit, humour and truth ; GaUic 
 romance and grace ; a love of freedom and adventure, 
 and *an insatiable curiosity in all the shows of the 
 world ' — does not imperfectly represent the man, 
 Robert Louis Stevenson. 
 
 The style, too, is characteristic. ' I ought to have 
 stated this more noisily ', and ' conceived in the 
 noisiest extreme of youthful eloquence ', which occur 
 on successive pages, show Stevenson pleased with a 
 new word, or, rather, with an old word freshly applied. 
 ' [Carlyle], like his favourite Ram Dass, had a fire 
 in his belly much more hotly burning than the patent 
 reading lamp by which Macaulay studied ', is an 
 obviously clever piece of style. ' I have only added 
 two more flagstones, ponderous like their predecessors, 
 to the mass of obstruction that buries the reformer 
 from the world ', is, perhaps, more obvious and 
 less clever. ' One after another the lights of his 
 life went out, and he fell from circle to circle to 
 the dishonoured sickbed of the end ' gives the purer 
 
SYMBOLS OF BEAUTY 383 
 
 Stevenson touch ; and all these are taken from this 
 Preface. 
 
 We see it more clearly in other essays. Virginihus 
 Puerisque (inscribed to W. E. Henley), Memories and 
 Portraits and Across the Plains are filled with examples 
 of this stoical -plaintive humour in which Stevenson 
 excelled. Take, for instance, the following passage 
 from ' Pulvis et Umbra ', in the last of those volumes : 
 
 Meanwhile, our rotatory island loaded with pre- 
 datory life, and more drenched with blood, both animal 
 and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship, scuds through 
 space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate 
 cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety 
 million miles away. ... Of all earth's meteors, here 
 at least is the most strange and consoling : that this 
 ennobled lemur, this hair-crowned bubble of the dust, 
 this inheritor of a few years and sorrows, should yet 
 deny himself his rare delights, and add to his frequent 
 pains, and live for an ideal, however misconceived. 
 Nor can we stop with man. . . . Kather this desire 
 of well-being and this doom of frailty run through all 
 the grades of life. . . . The whole creation groaneth 
 and travaileth together. It is the common and godlike 
 law of life ^. 
 
 ^ A similar passage occurs in Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson's Justice 
 and Liberty (Dent, 1909), beginning : ' This animal Man, this poor 
 thin wisp of sodden straw, buffeted on the great ocean of fate, 
 this ignorant, feeble, quarrelsome, greedy, cowardly victim and 
 spawn of the unnatural parent we call Nature, this abortion, this 
 clod, this indecent, unnamable thing, is also as certainly the child 
 of a celestial father '. The whole extract is too long for quotation, 
 but, like much modern prose, it displays the influence of Stevenson 
 In its exaltation of ' the Reality of Realities ', the Ideal. 
 
384 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 It is not particularly deep thought, and it is not 
 exceptionally good writing ; but the thing was worth 
 saying in that way — with ' rotatory ', ' predatory ', 
 
 * reverberation ', ' lemur ', and the rest — , especially 
 in Stevenson's time, not very long since, of a decaying 
 theological sanction. 
 
 Or take a few of his aphoristic sentences : ' The 
 vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb '. 'If your 
 morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are 
 wrong '. ' One person I have to make good : myself '. 
 
 * One is almost tempted to hint that it does not much 
 matter whom you marry '. * The woman must be 
 talented as a woman, and it will not much matter 
 although she is talented in nothing else '. 'To marry 
 is to domesticate the Recording Angel '. ' It is surely 
 beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle 
 in youth '. ' Atlas was just a gentleman with a pro- 
 tracted nightmare '. ' It is better to lose health like a 
 spendthrift than to waste it like a miser '. 'To distrust 
 one's impulses is to be recreant to Pan '. There is a 
 talent in this philosophizing — as of Charles Lamb 
 with a tang — , which Stevenson's constant care for 
 the right word raised to the level of genius, and 
 made charming in the ears of his contemporaries. 
 Perhaps the most admirable papers in this class are 
 ' Ordered South ', ' The Lantern Bearers ', and ' Thomas 
 Stevenson '. 
 
 With rare literary grace Stevenson appealed to the 
 memory of ' Kingston and Ballantyne the brave ' in 
 issuing Treasure Island (1883), the first of his romances 
 
SYMBOLS OF BEAUTY 385 
 
 of adventure. He might rather have appealed to 
 Dumas, Balzac and Sir Walter Scott than to the pure 
 writers for boys, Ballantyne, Marry at and Kingston. 
 For this story, and Kidnapped (1886), and The Black 
 Arrow (1888), and The Master of Ballantrae (1889) and 
 Catriona (1893), belong, prescriptively, to the class of 
 books which are at once exciting for boys and fasci- 
 nating for adults. Stevenson's canvas was never as 
 broad as Scott's. Except in Catriona, he omitted 
 the feminine note, and he was inclined to be negligent 
 about tying his knots. But there was ample compen- 
 sation for these faults in his more decorative style, and 
 the keener immediateness of his narration. * And I was 
 going to sea myself ; to sea in a schooner, with a 
 piping boatswain, and pig-tailed singing seamen ; to 
 sea, bound for an unknown island, and to seek for 
 buried treasures ! ' Jim Hawkins's cry of glee in 
 Treasure Island gives the very flavour of romance ; 
 and the stream flowed with stronger current through 
 the succeeding books. 
 
 Stevenson's death from lung disease in Samoa at 
 the early age of forty-four was a genuine loss to letters. 
 The Strange Case of Br. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which he 
 published in 1886, is still unique in its kind. It is a 
 study of dual personality, with each element individual- 
 ized, ' new-old, and shadowing sense at war with soul ', 
 as Tennyson described his Idylls, and an allegory 
 in prose of the same conflict. It is mordant to 
 the point of unpleasantness, and as brilHant as 
 it is relentless in its psychological guesswork. In 
 25 
 
386 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 the stories composing Prince Otto (1885) Stevenson 
 had already displayed his powers of concen- 
 trated character-study. Stevenson, the poet, need 
 not detain us. Underwoods and A Child's Garden of 
 Verse owe more to their admirers than to their 
 merits. 
 Richard Richard Jefferies, like Stevenson, died young, but 
 (1849- i^ot too young to have bequeathed a few imperishable 
 1886). ^v^itings. Among these. The Story of my Heart (1883) 
 is an intimate autobiography of sensations and aspira- 
 tions, delicate, faithful, and carefully observed, and 
 appealing in an extraordinary degree to the hearts 
 of less articulate truth-seekers. The whole book is a 
 psalm of Hfe, of man's physical and spiritual emancipa- 
 tion. ' I bum life like a torch ', he declared. ' No 
 thought which I have ever had has satisfied my soul '. 
 Again : ' Fulness of physical life ever brings to me a 
 more eager desire of soul-life '. Hence the statement 
 of his creed : ' I believe all manner of asceticism to be 
 the vilest blasphemy. . . . The ascetics are the only 
 persons who are impure. Increase of physical beauty 
 is attended by increase of soul beauty ' — a creed 
 obviously true, and yet so plainly premature as to 
 be daily falsified by experience. For experience was 
 greedily swallowing the ideal of material success, 
 against which *Jefieries protests : ' The pageantry of 
 power, the still more foolish pageantry of wealth, the 
 senseless precedence of place ; words fail me to express 
 my utter contempt for such pleasures or such am- 
 bitions '. Words failed this transcendentalist in other 
 
SYMBOLS OF BEAUTY 387 
 
 places. Like Joubert before him (see p. 80, supra), 
 Jefieries felt the difficulty of language, the same difficulty, 
 we may add, which Meredith, in his poems, solves 
 sometimes amhulando : ' One of the greatest difficulties 
 I have encountered is the lack of words to express 
 ideas. ... I must leave my book as a whole to give its 
 own meaning to its words '. And, as a type of his 
 * book as a whole ', the following extract may be sub- 
 mitted : 
 
 Give me life strong and full as the brimming ocean ; 
 give me thoughts wide as its plain; give me a soul 
 beyond these. Sweet is the bitter sea by the shore 
 where the faint blue pebbles are lapped by the green- 
 grey wave, where the wind-quivering foam is loth to 
 leave the lashed stone. Sweet is the bitter sea, and the 
 clear green in which the gaze seeks the sail, looking 
 through the glass into itself. The sea thinks for me, 
 as I listen and ponder ; the sea thinks, and every boom 
 of the wave repeats my prayer. . . . The sense of 
 soul-life burns in me like a torch. 
 
 De Quincey related the visions of ' an English opium- 
 eater ' ; Newman laid bare the processes of intellectual 
 and spiritual beUef ; but no one has quite effected the 
 particular task of Jefferies, who suffered nature herself 
 to work her wonders upon him, not opposing her will, 
 nor overmuch aiding the ministration, but setting 
 forth as simply as he could the true experience of her 
 working. He was the son of a farmer, and his native 
 country was the Wiltshire downland, which Thomas 
 Hughes has celebrated in Tom BroiorCs Schooldays, 
 
388 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 The wide peace of these surroundings was a permanent 
 influence for good ; and his papers on country life have 
 the merit of accurate knowledge as well as of poetic 
 imagination. There are several volumes of this kind, 
 the most delightful, perhaps, being that called Field 
 and Hedgerow. It is the child of Gilbert White's 
 Selhorne, and the father of many books of the same 
 class, among which may justly be mentioned Idle- 
 hurst (1898)^by 'John Halsham ' (Mr. G. Forrester 
 Scott). But the master surpasses his disciples in a 
 certain passionate intuition into the hidden qualities 
 of the ' medical herb '. 
 W. E. The dedication to William Ernest Henley of Steven- 
 OM'd^ son's Virginibus Puerisque is a sign of the affinity 
 1903). between these two contemporary writers. They wrote 
 some plays together, which were performed at London 
 theatres, but which have no permanent value, and 
 they were joined by common sentiments on art, 
 literature and life. Henley's contemporary fame was 
 mainly as a journalist, in connection with The Scots 
 Observer, afterwards The National Observer, and its 
 particular type of contributions, in a spirit of romantic 
 idealism. His influence on journalism was remarkable, 
 and he collected on his stafl a number of young men, 
 some of whom, though middle-aged to-day, still feel 
 the spirit of his teaching. Others have abandoned 
 its tradition in response to the more urgent call of 
 romance in the realities of to-day. His posthumous 
 fame is as a poet, and several volumes of brave and 
 ardent verse, together with two series of prose Views 
 
SYMBOLS OF BEAUTY 389 
 
 and Reviews, and an anthology, Lyra Heroica, are his 
 chief literary remains. 
 
 Wilde's fame was won as a dramatist {Lady Winder- Oscar 
 mere^s Fan and others), and will probably live as a (ig56^_ 
 poet. An edition de luxe of his works has recently 1900). 
 been published, and reminds us of the exceptional 
 sense of beauty — raised deliberately to a cult, and 
 obviously associated with the tendencies discussed 
 in the present section — which this gifted Irishman 
 possessed. He did not always apply it to the highest 
 uses. He was too often tempted to pose as the 
 sensitive-clever young man, and the atmosphere of 
 some of his works is as dreary in its kind as that 
 of *Ouida' (Louise de la Ramee, 1840-1908). But 
 his Poems (1881) are the pledge, if not, in places, 
 the fulfilment, of a true poetic inspiration, and there 
 are many who find its confirmation in the Ballad of 
 Reading Gaol, issued anonymously in 1898. His last 
 prose-work, De Profundis, is still too near to us for 
 criticism. Exquisite writing has its privileges, and 
 time only can decide if this book is a genuine cri du 
 coeur — a ' human document ', in literary slang — of a 
 rare and valuable type, or merely a clever affectation 
 of the thing which is not. 
 
 The connection of literature with the stage, which 
 Wilde consummated in comedy, and which Tennyson, 
 aided by Sir Henry Irving, had effected tentatively 
 in poetic drama, has since been continued in that kind 
 by Mr. Stephen Phillips, and, more notably, in Ireland, 
 by Mr. W. B. Yeats. Mr. Yeats, and the 'Celtic 
 
390 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Renaissance ', of wliich he is the father and type, are 
 properly to be accounted the last phase of the passion 
 for beauty and its symbols which we have tried to 
 trace through Keats and Rossetti to our own day. 
 Its increment to loveliness is immense, and if the bulk 
 of its achievement stands a little outside of the line 
 of national literature, reviewed, historically, as one 
 piece — if it represents, in other words, a kind of litera- 
 ture more narrowly professionalized, and demanding 
 more esoteric apprehension, than is wholly comfortable 
 to the consciousness of Chaucer's and Shakespeare's 
 heirs — , we, whose enjoyment it serves, may be the 
 more lavish of gratitude, inasmuch as the writers who 
 have produced it have been content to make their 
 labour its own reward, and to treat the art which they 
 have cultivated as the jealous mistress of aU their 
 being. Moreover, their exploitation of the art to the 
 uttermost limit of its capacities must in the end advance 
 its interpretation to a wider audience. Mr. Hardy, 
 in The Dynasts^ has attempted a new poetic form ; 
 and Mr. Wells, in Tono-Bungay, a variant in fiction. 
 These experiments are significant, perhaps, of a further 
 development of literature, including, not defiant of, 
 ' science '. Then the beauty so jealously sought will 
 be available for the new forms, and the truths of 
 ' literature ' and ' science,' too long specialized in 
 their departments, will be combined in a higher 
 synthesis than those older ones of Lucretius or of 
 Dante, and will be justified of the sacrifices they have 
 exacted. 
 
§ 9. THE HIGHER JOURNALISM. 
 
 THOUGH little has been added to literature from the 
 rostrum or the stage since the speeches of Edmund 
 Burke (1729^97) and the plays of Richard Brinsley 
 Sheridan (1751-1816), a considerable debt has been in- 
 curred in other directions. Valuable contributions have 
 been made by the pulpit and the classroom, despite the 
 partial usurpation of their rights by the ubiquitous 
 and all-absorbing novel. Few would choose to-day a 
 theologian's sermons in preference to Mrs. Ward's 
 Robert Elsmere, or a history of the Civil War in England 
 in preference to Shorthouse's John Inglesant (1881), 
 or would study a Blue-book on the Poor Law in pre- 
 ference to reading Besant's All Sorts and Conditions 
 of Men. But the general reader has been served by 
 another class of writers in the nineteenth century in 
 a manner and to a degree quite unparalleled before. 
 There is nothing in the history of British Hterature as 
 sudden, as brilliant and as clearly marked as the flourish- 
 ing of journalists in the noon of the Victorian era. 
 Journalism, as the term was understood by its practi- 
 tioners forty or fifty years ago, was recruited from the 
 
 391 
 
392 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 foremost writers, and included — ^in tlie sense of contri- 
 butors to the periodical press — men of letters as eminent 
 as Ruskin and statesmen as distinguished as Gladstone. 
 The greater novelists, Thackeray, Trollope, George 
 Meredith, and the rest, regularly published by instal- 
 ments in the monthly reviews, and the titles of many 
 collected works, such as Froude's Short Studies on Great 
 Subjects and Stephen's Hours in a Library, bear witness 
 to their resuscitation from the magazines. 
 
 Journals It was essentially an epoch of great editors. John 
 
 and their ™, , , ^ jt o 
 
 editors. Thaddeus Delane (1817-79) was editor of The Times 
 
 from 1841 till 1877, and raised it to the height of its 
 power and influence as 'The Thunderer'. His Life 
 and Letters have recently been issued by his nephew, 
 Mr. Dasent, a son of Sir George Webbe Dasent (1817- 
 96), Delane's brother-in-law and contemporary, who 
 was assistant-editor of The Times during the greater 
 part of the same period, and who is known in literature 
 as the author of tales and translations from the Norse. 
 The Daily News was founded in 1846, with Charles 
 Dickens as its first editor, and The Daily Telegraph in 
 1855. The Pall Mall Gazette evening newspaper was 
 the creation of George Smith (1824-91), the head 
 of the publishing-house of Smith, Elder & Co., who 
 founded in 1859 the Cornhill Magazine, first edited by 
 Thackeray, and afterwards by his son-in-law. Sir Leslie 
 Stephen. Stephen was likewise the first editor — after- 
 wards associated with and succeeded by Dr. Sidney 
 Lee — of a later enterprise (1882) of George Smith, The 
 Dictionary of National Biography. Frederic Chapman 
 
THE HIGHER JOURNALISM 393 
 
 (1823-95), another London publisher, the head 
 of Chapman and Hall, started the Fortnightly Review 
 in 1865, and John Morley (now Viscount Morley) and 
 George Meredith have been among its editors. James 
 Anthony Froude (1818-94) edited Fraser^s Magazine 
 from 1860 till 1874. Walter Bagehot (1826^77) was 
 editor at various times of The Inquirer, The Economist 
 and the National Review. The London Review (to be 
 distinguished from The London Magazine of De Quincey's 
 generation) was founded in 1835 by John Stuart Mill, 
 as an organ of philosophic radicalism, not very distant 
 in its views from Jeremy Bentham's Westminster 
 Review, established in 1824. Punch was founded in 
 1841, and attracted from the start the services of the 
 most distinguished humourists . Mark Lemon ( 1 809 -70 ) 
 was its first editor, and among past Knights of its 
 Round Table have been Douglas Jerrold (1803-57), 
 Richard Doyle (1824-83), who designed the cover, 
 Thackeray, John Leech (1817-64), George du Maurier 
 (1834-96), who, late in life, added fiction to draughts- 
 manship, and wrote at least one successful novel, 
 subsequently dramatized, Trilby, and, among others, 
 the veteran Sir John Tenniel, who enters literature 
 chiefly as the illustrator of Lewis Carroll's immortal 
 Alice books. The Spectator, revived from the eighteenth 
 century, was founded in 1828, and its chief Victorian 
 editor (1861-97) was Richard Holt Hutton (1826-97). 
 The Athenceum was established in the same year, The 
 Guardian in 1846, and The Saturday Review in 1855. 
 Sir James Knowles (1831-1908) founded The Nineteenth 
 
394 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Century in 1877, with a sonnet by Tennyson^to^ send 
 it off. 
 Pub- This list is long, but not exhaustive. The relations 
 ' between authors and pubHshers were more intimate 
 then than now. John Murray's friendship with Byron 
 has been commemorated above (p. 120). George 
 EUot belonged to the Blackwoods, Charlotte Bronte 
 and the Brownings to George Smith, and literary 
 biography is full of pleasant tales of these relationships. 
 Such intimacy, since relaxed, in part at the instance 
 of Sir Walter Besant, who founded the Authors' Society 
 (1883), and in part by the multiplication of writers and 
 the inevitable development of commerce in books, was 
 important in the sense that it encouraged enterprise. 
 Leading publishers could rely on the help and goodwill 
 of authors more or less closely connected with them, 
 and to the names of those already mentioned — Murray, 
 Blackwood, Chapman, Smith — there should be added 
 Richard Bentley (1794-1871), who made Dickens 
 editor of his Miscellany (1837) ; George Bentley (1828^ 
 95), his son, first editor of the defunct Ternple Bar; 
 Daniel Macmillan (1813-51) and his successors, who 
 have since absorbed the Bentleys' business ; Thomas 
 Norton Longman (1771-1842)— the third Thomas 
 Longman — and his sons, Thomas (iv, 1804-79) and 
 William (1813-77) ; Adam Black (1784-1874), of the 
 Encyclopcedia Britannica ; Richard Benton Seeley 
 (1798-1886), George Routledge (1812-88) and John 
 Gassell (1817-65). 
 Round these men, and round [the newspaper- 
 
THE HIGHER JOURNALISM 395 
 
 proprietors — the Walters of The Times ; the Borthwicks 
 (Peter, 1804-52, and his son, afterwards Lord Glenesk, 
 1830-1908) of The Morning Post ; the Levys (Joseph 
 Moses, 1812-88, and his son, now Lord Burnham) of 
 The Daily Telegraph, and others — there were gathered 
 the editors and contributors in whose co-operation 
 confidence could be placed. Dickens was an editor by- 
 instinct. Though he held the helm of The Daily News 
 only for about six months, there are many stories of his 
 kindness as well as records of his success in connection 
 with various miscellanies and especially with his House- 
 hold Words. Thackeray, too, was a born journalist, 
 and the annals of the Cornhill in the successive charge 
 of Thackeray, Stephen and James Payn (1830-98), 
 testify freely to the same qualities. Fraser^s hospitality 
 to Carlyle and Ruskin, in the days when they were 
 heterodox and obscure, has been mentioned in its 
 due places ; and, while many of the reviews, with The 
 Qiiarterly and The Edinburgh at their head, still maintain 
 their prestige, there are some of us old enough to regret 
 the decease of Fraser^s, Temple Bar, Longman's and 
 Macmillan's magazines, and even of Charlotte Yonge's 
 Monthly Packet and Mrs. Henry Wood's Argosy ; and, 
 haply, old-fashioned enough to wonder if Tit-Bits (1881) 
 and The Strand Magazine (1891) are fuUy adequate in 
 compensation, despite cheaper processes of illustration 
 and increased facilities of distribution devised for a 
 literate proletariat. 
 
30 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 ii. 
 
 These questions belong to social history rather than 
 to literary criticism. Here, in the golden age of journal- 
 ism, a more detailed account is due of some of the leading 
 journalists who were likewise leading men of letters. 
 Macaulay. The first group in this class is that of the historians, 
 and the first name in that group is Lord Macaulay's. 
 He collected his Edinburgh essays in 1843, and definitely 
 broke with journalism a year or two before that date. 
 His History of England (since the accession of James ii) 
 was begun in 1839, when Macaulay was Secretary of 
 State for War ; the first two volumes appeared in 1848, 
 and the last two in 1855, two years before his peerage 
 and four years before his death. Macaulay's historical 
 method was, like Carlyle's, scientific. It was based, 
 that is to say, upon the study and collation of con- 
 temporary, unedited documents, as far as they were 
 available. In his task, which covered, comparatively, 
 a brief period of time, Macaulay was aided by his 
 memory, which he trained to remarkable feats. This 
 gift occasionally betrayed him into inaccuracies of fact, 
 and a further vice (which he encouraged) was likewise 
 due to an excess of talent. He had a genius for general- 
 ization, for bird's-eye views of tracts of territory, and 
 sometimes employed this faculty to prove conclusions 
 not supported by ordnance-survey. At the same time, 
 allowing for his bias towards safe and moderate 
 standards, and admitting also his tendency to a hard, 
 antithetical prose-style, this gift illumined his narrative 
 
THE HIGHER JOURNALISM 397 
 
 with passages of extraordinary vividness, especially 
 in his accounts of stages of social conditions. Thus, 
 the third chapter of his History, ' The State of England 
 in 1685 ', though, as he says, ' composed from scanty 
 and dispersed materials ' (to which but few references 
 are given), contains, in its fifty thousand words, the 
 most brilliant composite conspectus of the various 
 phases of national life which it is possible to conceive. 
 The whole chapter is as interesting as a novel, and it 
 is difficult to realize the immense erudition and the 
 technical power of arrangement which the even flow of 
 the bright narrative submerged. The glitter of style 
 might mislead him. It was not correct to represent 
 the petticoated peasant women of the Tyne as ' half- 
 naked women chaunting a wild measure ' ; he sometimes 
 misquoted Pepys, or drew false inferences from such 
 quotations, and his love of epigram and antithesis led 
 to much exaggeration. But no one save Macaulay 
 could summarize volumes of documents and masses of 
 authority — or, in places, again, mere feathers of tradition 
 — in such a form as is presented by this chapter, among 
 the twenty-five great chapters of his history. ' The 
 servile Judges and Sheriffs of those evil days could not 
 shed blood so fast as the poets cried out for it '. Such 
 a sentence peals at the intellect. It is not possible to 
 evade its tremendous compendious statement of the 
 corruption of justice and the intemperance of wit ; 
 and Macaulay constantly commanded this lightning 
 brevity and force. 
 J. A. Froude, whose Nemesis of Faith (1849) was 
 
398 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Froude. mentioned on page 212, and who resigned his Oriel 
 fellowship in consequence of the controversy it aroused, 
 became the friend, and the disciple, and, eventually, 
 the literary executor of Carlyle. In that capacity he 
 published several books of biography, letters and 
 reminiscences, which fiUed the 'eighties of the century 
 with a heated discussion as to the relations between 
 Carlyle and his wife. Probably, Froude was indiscreet 
 and inclined to a^sensational view, but this question of 
 biography is really not important to the life-work of 
 either writer. Fronde's work as an historian comprised 
 a History of England, in twelve volumes, dealing with 
 the few years from the fall of Wolsey to the defeat of 
 the Armada ; . The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth 
 Century ; and various volumes arising out of his visits 
 to the Colonies, (after he had given up the editorship 
 of Eraser'' s), of which the best known is Oceana (1886). 
 He held the chair of history at Oxford in the last years 
 of his life, and his professorial lectures on Erasmus, 
 The Council of Trent, and English Seamen in the Six- 
 teenth Century rank with his Short Studies among the 
 most finished examples of narrative English prose. 
 Into the value and demerits of his scholarship this is not 
 the place to enter. 
 
 Freeman. Froude's predecessor in the Oxford chair was his 
 constant controversialist, Edward Augustus Freeman 
 (1823-92). Freeman, like Froude, was a journalist, 
 in the sense employed in this section, and he became 
 a regular contributor to The Saturday Review from its 
 start (1855). His great work is the History of the Norman 
 
THE HIGHER JOURNALISM 399 
 
 Conquest, which occupied him for more than twelve 
 years. He wrote histories of the Saracens and of 
 Sicily, and his collected essays fill several readable 
 volumes. 
 
 The Cambridge colleagues of these professors were Sir Sedey, 
 John Robert Seeley (1834-1895), the pubHsher's son, ^''^'^' 
 who held the chair of modern history at Cambridge from 
 1869 till his death, and the first Lord Acton (1834-1902), 
 who succeeded him. Seeley's anonymous Ecce Homo 
 (1865), which, like The Nemesis of Faith, belonged to 
 the controversy between knowledge and belief, has been 
 mentioned in the section on that subject. Here we 
 need only refer to his lectures on The Expansion of 
 England, which form in many respects the most in- 
 spiring and suggestive account ever placed before 
 students of England's foreign wars in the eighteenth 
 century. Lord Acton's contributions to history were 
 as much to method as to results. He represented, 
 preeminently, the scientific point of view and the study 
 of the document ; and he cultivated a severer style than 
 Froude, Freeman and Seeley. He planned the Cam- 
 bridge Modern History, which Dr. Prothero and others 
 have carried out. 
 
 fi|Bishop (Wilham) Stubbs (1825-1901), the consti- stubbs, 
 tutionalist, and Sir Henry Sumner Maine (1822-88), ^^^^^' 
 the jurist, who, like Freeman, was a Saturday reviewer 
 from the start, and whose monograph on Ancient Law 
 is particularly valuable, need not detain us further. 
 A last word in this connection is due to the memory of 
 John Richard Green (1837-83), whose Short History of 
 
400 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 the English People, alike in its original shape and in 
 later illustrated or abbreviated editions, has deservedly 
 won a higb degree of popularity for its lucidity, its 
 completeness, and its moral force. 
 ^8«>iip jj^ ^i^g ^j^g neutral territories between history and 
 
 of philo- '' 
 
 sophers. philosophy occur the names of Henry Thomas Buckle 
 (1821-62), author of the History of Civilization in 
 England ; of William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838- 
 1903), an Irishman, author of The History of European 
 Morals, of England in the Eighteenth Century, of an 
 essay (in two volumes) on Democracy and Liberty, and, 
 among other books, of one called A Map of Life, written 
 in a pleasant vein of didactic reflectiveness ; further, 
 of Walter Bagehot (1826-77), the economist, whose 
 Physics and Politics (and, less directly, his Lombard 
 Street) threw a novel light upon the relations of those 
 branches of learning, and of others enough. 
 
 An interest in the eighteenth century and a clear 
 tendency to practical standards distinguished two 
 thinkers in this age, one of whom is still with us. Sir 
 Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) and John Morley, now 
 Viscount Morley, who was born in 1838. Stephen's 
 English Thought in the Eighteenth Century first appeared 
 in 1876, and he returned to the same theme in his 
 posthumous volume of lectures on English Literature 
 and Society in the Eighteenth Century. Between the two 
 he published, in addition to the essays contained in 
 his Hours in a Library, and apart from his editorial 
 work, a valuable treatise on The Science of Ethics, 
 and studies of The English Utilitarians and An Agnostic^ s 
 
THE HIGHER JOURNALISM 401 
 
 Apology. Lord Morley's works include the great 
 biography of Gladstone, lives of Cromwell and of 
 Cobden, several volumes of Miscellanies, a brilliant 
 monograph On Compromise, and studies of Diderot and 
 the EncyclopcBdists, of Rousseau, Voltaire, and others. 
 Like Stephen, he has always been a busy editor, and 
 his rank as a writer of English prose is certainly not 
 less high than his distinguished record as a statesman. 
 Here we meet again^ the name — his fame is outside 
 of our limits — of Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), author 
 of Methods of Ethics, Elements of Politics, and other 
 works, whose life-long connection with Cambridge was 
 continued by Mrs. Sidgwick, as principal of Newnham. 
 Pure philosophy claims Thomas Hill Green (1836-82), 
 the Oxford idealist, whose Prolegomena to Ethics appeared 
 in 1883, and who has his shrine in fiction as the ' Mr. 
 Gray ' of Robert Elsmere ; and final reference may be 
 made, among Oxford teachers of recent date, to Green's 
 disciple, Richard Lewis Nettleship (1846-92). 
 
 111. 
 
 It would be pleasant to fill out this sketch, now so Conclu- 
 shadowy and imperfect, with a more ample account of the ^^°°' 
 lives and writings of the men and women who made the 
 middle years of Queen Victoria so great a flowering-time 
 of letters. When Thackeray, Froude, Stephen, Morley, 
 Bagehot and their like were among the editors of reviews, 
 
 1 See p. 222, supra. 
 26 
 
402 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 and when the contributors on whom they drew included 
 Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Symonds, T. H. Green 
 and Sir Henry Maine, to name five only among the dead, 
 as typical of the rest, it is obvious that journalism 
 enjoyed a brilliant spell of active talent. Space forbids 
 a closer examination of the actual files of the reviews, 
 or a more detailed account of such writers as do not 
 belong to the single category of pure literature. Litera- 
 ture applied to other ends than pure literature itself, 
 whether to historical research or to philosophical 
 speculation, must be excluded from our purview. 
 
 It is time to try a few conclusions, however faltering 
 and tentative, from the long survey we have made. 
 
 Taking poetry first, it is clear that, at the close of the 
 nineteenth century, good writing has become more 
 common. Whatever lack there may be, whether of brain 
 or blood, whether of marrow or sap, form, at least, will 
 be available. This has been Tennyson's gift, and the 
 legacy of the Pre-Raphaelites to their successors. A 
 young poet, pursuing the beaten track, finds his experi- 
 ments in writing already made. For him, there are no 
 more jejunities, such as Wordsworth committed ; no 
 more stumbling measures, such as tripped up Crabbe. 
 Mr. Alfred Noyes, Mr. Herbert Trench, and the rest of 
 the tuneful choir who sang the cradle-songs of the 
 new century inherit the forms of verse and the re- 
 sources of diction which were perfected in the previous 
 generation. 
 
 One illustration will make this plain. Such a singer 
 
CONCLUSION 403 
 
 as Mr. Stephen Phillips, whose first garland was woven 
 in 1890 or thereabouts, and who has since compromised 
 his aims by constructing decorative plays, typifies in 
 his Poems (1897) and in his New Poems (1908) this new 
 faciUty of form. Consider the following passages : 
 
 Thou shalt persuade the harvest and bring on 
 
 The deeper green ; or silently attend 
 
 The fiery funeral of foliage old. 
 
 Connive with Time serene and the good hours. . . . 
 5 Thou meanest what the sea has striven to say 
 
 So long, and yeamed^up the cliffs to tell ; 
 
 Thou art what all the winds have uttered not, 
 
 What the still night suggesteth to the heart. 
 
 Thy voice is like to music heard ere birth, 
 10 Some spirit lute touched on a spirit sea; 
 
 Thy face remembered is from other worlds, 
 
 It has been died for, though I know not when. 
 
 It has been sung of, though I know not where. 
 
 It has the strangeness of the luring West, 
 16 And of sad sea-horizons ; beside thee 
 
 I am aware of other times and lands. 
 
 Of birth far back, of lives in many stars. . . . 
 
 So far, Apollo to Marpessa ; and, now, from Mar- 
 pessa's reply, in the poem called by her name : 
 
 Then the delight of flinging the sunbeams. 
 Diffusing silent bliss ; and yet more sweet, — 
 
 20 To cherish fruit on the warm wall ; to raise 
 Out of the tomb to glory the pale wheat. 
 Serene ascension by the rain prepared; 
 To work with the benignly falling hours. 
 And beautiful slow Time, . . . 
 
 25 To shine on the rejected, and arrive 
 
 To women that remember in the night ; . . . 
 Out of our sadness have we made this world 
 So beautiful ; the sea sighs in our brain. 
 And in our heart the yearning of the moon. 
 
404 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 Again, from Beautiful Death : — 
 
 30 Blind shall I be and good, dumb and serene : 
 I shall not blame, nor question ; I shall shine 
 Diffused and tolerant, luminous and large. 
 No longer shall I vex, but live my life 
 In solaces, caresses, and in balms, 
 
 35 Nocturnal soothings and nutritious sighs. 
 
 The unhappy mind an odour shall be breathed ; 
 I shall be sagely blown, flung with design, 
 Assist this bland and universal scheme. 
 Industrious, happy, sweet, delicious, dead ! 
 
 Last, from Endymion : 
 
 40 And I begin to sorrow for strange things 
 And to be sad with men long-dead ; now 
 I suffer with old legends, and I pine 
 At long sea-glances for a single sail. . . . 
 Listen ! the sea is on the verge of speech, 
 
 45 The breeze has something private for me : Night 
 Would lead me, like a creature dumb, with signs. 
 
 With wliicli compare, from Paolo and Francesca : 
 
 It is such souls as mine that go to swell 
 The childless cavern cry of the barren sea, 
 Or make that human ending to night-wind. 
 
 And from Herod : 
 
 60 And he shall still that old sob of the sea, 
 And heal the unhappy fancies of the wind. 
 And turn the moon from all that hopeless quest. 
 
 The writing is unquestionably beautiful, but those 
 who have followed the progress of poetry in these 
 pages will applaud such triumphs with discretion. 
 Ever indissolubly involved in them, and implicated 
 in every fold of all their texture, are the magic of Cole- 
 ridge and Walter Pater, as makers of English style. 
 
CONCLUSION 405 
 
 ' She is older than the rocks among which she sits ; 
 like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and 
 learned the secrets of the grave ; and has been a diver 
 in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her ' 
 (see p. 375, supra) might have been written of Mr. 
 Phillips's muse in such contexts as lines 5-10, 15-17, 
 28-29, 40-46, and 47-51 of the quotations from different 
 poems, which, for convenience' sake, we have ventured 
 to number consecutively. His iterated, recurring note 
 about the wind and the sea is descended straight from 
 the romantic movement which dawned a hundred years 
 before. Nay, lines 33 to 36 are in the very language 
 of Wordsworth : 
 
 Hers shall be the breathing balm, 
 And hers the silence and the calm 
 Of mute insensate things. 
 
 What is added is Patmore's Latinity, solemnizing 
 every theme. ' Persuade ', * connive ', ' serene ', ' dif- 
 fusing', 'benign', 'luminous', 'tolerant', 'bland', 'in- 
 dustrious', and so forth, recall the language of The 
 Unknown Eros and its author's contention (see p. 374, 
 supra) that 
 
 These thoughts which you have sung 
 In the vernacular. 
 
 Should be, as others of the Church's are. 
 Decently cloak'd in the Imperial Tongue. 
 
 Mr, Stephen Phillips has succeeded in marrying the 
 manner of Patmore and Pater to the matter of Coleridge 
 and Keats, on the side of their mystical appeal, and we 
 have dwelt at this length upon his striking and attractive 
 
4o6 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 achievement because it illustrates so well the temptations 
 to which poetry is prone in a time following great 
 writers. Variations, however ingenious, on models set 
 in the past, are a sign of technical skill, of literary 
 mastery, of tact, and faith, and power, but not of 
 plenary inspiration. The like criticism applies, with 
 Wordsworth and Arnold as exemplars, to the elegiac 
 muse of Mr. William Watson. 
 
 It is rash to dogmatize about poetry ; it is yet more 
 rash to prophesy. Those who hold what Dr. A. C. 
 Bradley calls ' the formalist heresy ' will be most of 
 all difficult to convince that the true problem of the 
 poetry of the twentieth century is that of the adequacy 
 of the poetic vehicle to thoughts maturing for expression. 
 Beautiful writing is a cultivable art, but its powers have 
 still to be extended to include, without forfeiture of 
 beauty, all the material waiting to be clothed. The 
 Lyrical Ballads of the twentieth century may be pre- 
 paring out of sight ; it may even be that its George 
 Crabbe, forerunning it, is still to be apprenticed, and 
 that form is once more to be passed through the 
 dissolving crucible of thought. To those who believe 
 in this re-birth, through all disappointment and false 
 hopes (among which we count the poems of the late 
 Mr. John Davidson), the conclusion may be stated in 
 the shape of George Meredith's note of interrogation : 
 
 Wai there be rise of fountains long repressed, 
 To swell with affluents the forward stream ? 
 
 Will men perceive the virtues in unrest. 
 Till life stands prouder near the poets' dream 7 
 
CONCLUSION 407 
 
 Our hopes, in battling acts embodied, dare 
 Proclaim that we have paved a way for feet 
 
 Now stumbling ; air less cavernous, and air 
 That feeds the soul, we breathe; for more entreat. 
 
 What figures will be shown the century hence ? 
 
 What lands intact ? We do but know that Power 
 From Piety divorced, though seen immense, 
 
 Shall sink on envy of a wayside flower \ 
 
 Tantum ferro quantum pietate potentes stamus, sang the 
 poet of Imperial Rome ; and to us, entering on our 
 inheritance of the new liberties of the soul, the same 
 warning is addressed, lest we drag old liberties in 
 chains. 
 
 Fiction, the second great vehicle of artistic expression, 
 is less perilous to the prophet. Le roi s^amuse, and, 
 though Mr. Bernard Shaw always laughs at our amuse- 
 ment, filling admirably the privileged part of King's 
 Jester to King Demos, and though Mr. Gilbert Chesterton 
 tries to make us break into philosophy 2, in the spirit 
 of Moliere's satire on Monsieur Jourdain's prose, we 
 persist in demanding entertainment of the immemorial 
 kind in which children most delight. We must have 
 stories about ourselves, just a little idealized and 
 heightened, so that the moral is not too plain, and at 
 times just a little above our heads. ' Air that feeds 
 the soul we breathe ', and, in these days of the science 
 
 ^ II y a Cent Ana : from The Flag, published by The Daily Mail, 
 May, 1908. 
 
 ^ He culls blossoms of philosophy from common things. The same 
 fanciful inversiveness and a like whimsicality of wit and plausi- 
 bility of observation distinguish the Breakfast-table books of Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes, especially, perhaps, the Professor volume. 
 
4o8 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 of psychology and of emancipated emotions, we continue 
 to explore the real with the aim of attaining the ideal. 
 The heirs of Robert Louis Stevenson, using their 
 inheritance in different ways, are employed in manipu- 
 lating the material. At the bottom are the mere sensa- 
 tionalists, of whom no more need be said. At the top 
 are writers like Mr. Joseph Conrad, a Slav by descent, 
 who, like Rossetti, owes much to the un-English strain 
 in his blood. Further and further he adventures on 
 the infinite ocean of feeling from the secure moorings 
 of proven fact, yet returns to them again with the 
 spoils of the sea made probable. This pursuit of fancy, 
 though it resemble at times a mere will o' the wisp chase, 
 and though it lead literature on strange odysseys, 
 among which we may mention the writings of Lafcadio 
 Hearn, is yet a source of strength and opens the door 
 to higher knowledge ; and a growing taste for such 
 adventures marks a line of literature's advance. 
 
 To dip deeper into the present would be too hazardous 
 a quest, and it is more appropriate to look back. The 
 century of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of Keats and 
 Shelley, of Byron and Carlyle, of Browning and George 
 Meredith, of Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, of Rossetti 
 and Swinburne, of Ruskin and Wilham Morris, of 
 Dickens and Thackeray, of George Eliot and Thomas 
 Hardy, of Patmore and Pater, is the forest of enchant- 
 ment which we have traversed. Of all its beauty we 
 are not yet sensible, of all its truth we are not yet 
 conscious, of all its wisdom we are not yet freemen. 
 
CONCLUSION 409 
 
 And thus, uninformed still with the whole of its spiritual 
 power, we may seek our conclusion from the Conclusion 
 to the poem which was an invocation to the age : 
 
 This spiritual Love acts not nor can exist 
 Without Imagination, which, in truth. 
 Is but another name for absolute power 
 And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, 
 And Reason in her most exalted mood. 
 This faculty hath been the feeding source 
 Of our long labour : we have traced the stream 
 From the blind cavern whence is faintly heard 
 Its natal murmur ; followed it to light 
 And open day ; accompanied its course 
 Along the ways of Nature, for a time 
 Lost sight of it bewildered and engulphed ; 
 Then given it greeting as it rose once more 
 In strength, reflecting from its placid breast 
 The works of man and face of human life; 
 And lastly, from its progress have we drawn 
 Faith in life endless, the sustaining thought 
 Of human Being, Eternity, and God. 
 
 Wordsworth, The Prelude, xiv. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abbotsford, 109. 
 Acton, Lord, 399. 
 Adam Bede, quoted, 264. 
 Adonais, 131. 
 i^dventure, novels of, 275. 
 Ages in literary history, 2, 6. 
 Aids to Reflection, 97. 
 Ainger, Canon, 363. 
 Ainsworth, William Harrison, 
 
 114, 275. 
 All Sorts and Conditions of Men, 
 
 244, 254, 391. 
 Allen, George, 341. 
 Alpine worship, 33. 
 Angd in the House, The, 371. 
 Anstey, F., 244, 278. 
 Aphorisms, of R. L. Stevenson, 
 
 384. 
 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 210, 212. 
 Argosy, 395. 
 i<Amold, Matthew, 352 ; his 
 ^ poetry, 353 ff. ; 'his| prose 
 r works, 359 ff. 
 Arnold, Thomas, 102. 
 Atheism, 131. 
 Athenaeum, 393. ' 
 Auguries of Innocence, quoted, 
 
 38. 
 v/ Austen, Jane, 49 £f. 
 Aytoun, W. E., 194. 
 
 Bage, Robert, 55. 
 Bagehot, Walter, 363, 393, 400. 
 Bailey, P. J., 336. 
 • BaOUe, Joanna, 146. 
 Ballantyne, R. M., 275. 
 Banality, 181. 
 
 Barchester Novels, 256. 
 Barham, R. H., 193. 
 Barnes, William, 193. 
 Beaupuy, Michel, 60. 
 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 186 ff. 
 Bennett, Mr. Arnold, 245, UQ\ 
 Benson, Mr. A. C, 339. 
 Bentham, Jeremy, 221, 393. 
 Bentley, Richard, 394 ; George, 
 
 394. 
 Besant, Sir Walter, 244, 254, 
 
 394. 
 Biographia Literaria, 97. 
 Black, Adam, 394. 
 Blackie, John Stuart, 335. 
 Blackmore, Richard, 263. 
 Blackwood, William, 394. 
 Blackwood's Magazine, 94. 
 Bleak House, quoted, 251. 
 Blessington, Lady, 55. 
 Bloomfield, Robert, 26. 
 Bohemians in London, 301. 
 Boileau, 139. 
 Books and poetry, 137. 
 Borrow, George, 193. 
 Borthwick, Peter, 395. 
 Bowles, William Lisle, 145. 
 Brimley, George, 363. 
 British Association, 200^. 
 Bronte, Anne, 255. 
 Bronte, Charlotte, 254 ff. 
 Bronte, Emily, 255. 
 Brooke, Stopford A., quoted, 323. *^ 
 
 Jrougham, Lord, 96. 
 rown. Dr. John, 363. 
 Browning, E. B., 286 f. 
 Browning, Robert, 63, 280 ; his 
 
412 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Epilogue to Asolando, 282 ; his 
 message, 283 ; his views of 
 sin and virtue, 284 f . ; of love, 
 286 ; his interpretation of 
 experience, 288 ; his revalua- 
 tion, 289 f. 
 
 Buchanan, Robert, 309. 
 
 Buckle, H. T., 400. 
 
 Bumbledom, 244. 
 
 Burns, Robert, 31 ; symbolizes 
 transition, 32. 
 
 Byron, Lord, meets Scott, 120 ; 
 his fascination, 122 ; his 
 exoticism, 123 ; biography, 
 124; meets Shelley, 125; 
 love of the sea, 126 ; of liberty, 
 130 ; criticizes Keats, 139 ; 
 compared with Carlyle, 175. 
 
 Calverley, C. S., 337. 
 
 Calvert, Raisley, 60. 
 
 Campbell, Thomas, 82. 
 
 Capitalistic ideal, 345. 
 
 Carleton, William, 55. 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 154 ; bio- 
 graphy, 165 ; autobiography, 
 168 ; his writings, 169 ff. ; his 
 style, 173 ; and Byron, 175 ; 
 in relation to his contem- 
 poraries, 177. 
 
 Carroll, Lewis, 337. 
 
 Cary, Henry, 146. 
 
 Cassell, John, 394. 
 
 Cavalier poets, 178. 
 
 Celtic Renaissance, 389. 
 
 Chambers, Robert, 154, 202; 
 William, 154. 
 
 Chapman, Frederic, 392. 
 
 Chesterton, Mr. G. K., 278, 407. 
 
 Childe Harold, 121 f. 
 
 Church, R. W., 216. 
 
 City of Dreadful Night, The, 333. 
 
 Clare, John, 26. 
 
 Clough, A. H., 332. 
 
 Cobbett, William, 101. 
 
 Cockney School, 145. 
 
 Colenso, Bishop, 215. 
 
 Coleridge, Hartley, 145. 
 
 Coleridge, S. T., quoted, 41 ; 
 his poetical aim, 57 ; bio- 
 graphy, 59 ; gratitude to 
 
 Wordsworth, 61 ; his language, 
 76 ; prose works, 97. 
 
 Collectivism, 158. 
 
 Collins, Wilkie, 274. 
 
 Comto, Auguste, 221. 
 
 Conduct- values, 260. 
 
 Confessions of a Sensitive Mind, 
 181. 
 
 Confessions of an English 
 Opium- Eater, 93. 
 
 Conrad, Mr. Joseph, 248, 408. 
 
 Cornhill Magazine, 392. 
 
 Cosmic comedy. 111. 
 
 Cottle, Joseph, 60. 
 i/Country, as rendered by Gray, 
 18 ; by Goldsmith, 21 ; by 
 Crabbe, 23 ; by Burns, 34. 
 
 Cowden-Clarke, Charles, 136. 
 
 Cowper, William, symbolizes 
 transition, 32 ; anticipates 
 revolutionary note, 39. 
 
 Crabbe, George, 20 ; his country 
 musings compared with Gold- 
 smith's, 22; The Village, 
 quoted, 23 ; his troop of 
 witnesses, 24 ; his inelasticity, 
 25 ; his followers, 26. 
 
 Cranford, 247^, 254. 
 
 Crashaw, Richard, 374. 
 
 Crawford, F. Marion, 278. 
 
 ' Criticism of life ', 83. 
 
 Croker, John William, 101. 
 
 Croker, Thomas, 55. 
 
 Cross, John, 271. 
 
 Crystal Palace, 277, 317, 346. 
 
 Curie, Mr. R. H. P., 292i. 
 
 Daily News, 392. 
 
 Daily Telegraph, 392. 
 
 Darley, George, 183 ff. 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 202 ; as typical 
 
 philosopher, 208 ; seeks facta 
 
 first and foremost, 210 ; his 
 
 influence, 222. 
 Darwinian hypothesis, influence 
 
 of, 11, 211. 
 Dasent, Sir George, 392. 
 Davidson, John, 406. 
 Davy, Sir H., 203. 
 Day, Thomas, 32. 
 ' Dead language ', 374. 
 
INDEX 
 
 413 
 
 Death's Jest-Book, 187. 
 
 Deaths of poets, 117 flf. 
 
 Decentralization of literature, 
 30. 
 
 Defence of Ouenevere, The, 221. 
 
 Defence of Poetry, 83. 
 
 Delane, J. T., 392. 
 
 Democratic idealism in Words- 
 worth, 65. 
 
 Democratic verse, 24. 
 
 De Morgan, Mr. William, 261. 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas, 91 ff. 
 
 de Tabley, Lord, 336. 
 
 de Vere, Sir Aubrey, 145. 
 
 Dickens, Charles, 246 £f. ; his 
 appeal to posterity, 250 ; his ex- 
 uberance, 252 ; his characters, 
 253. 
 
 Dickinson, G. Lowes, 383^ 
 
 Dictionary of National Biography, 
 392. 
 
 Diffuseness of early nineteenth- 
 century poets, 40. 
 
 Disraeli, Benjamin, 164. 
 
 D'Israeli, Isaac, 101. 
 
 Doctrine of Sacrifice, The, 218. 
 
 Dogmatic theology, 206. 
 
 Domestic fiction, 256. 
 "^Don Juan, 125. 
 
 Doyle, Sir A. C, 274. 
 
 Doyle, Richard, 393. 
 V-Dr. Jehjll and Mr. Hyde, 244, 
 385. 
 
 Dream-children, 90. 
 
 Dream-Pedlary, 186^. 
 
 du Maurier, George, 393. 
 
 Earth-poetry, 298. 
 Earthly Paradise, The, 324. 
 East Lynne, 256. 
 Edgeworth, Maria, 53 fE. 
 Edinburgh Review, The, 96. 
 Educational pioneers, 209. 
 Egoistic literature, 99. 
 Eighteenth century, revolt from, 
 
 138. 
 Elegy in a Country Churchyard, 
 
 17. 
 Elia, Essays of, 89. 
 Eliot, George, see Evans. 
 Elizabethanism, 95. 
 
 Elliott, Ebenezer, 26. 
 Emancipation, the age of, 11. 
 Emerson, R. W., quoted, 204, 
 
 364. 
 English Humourists of the 
 
 Eighteenth Century, 257. 
 Esmond, 258. 
 Essays and Reviews, 214. 
 Essays in Criticism, 360. 
 Essay on Man, The ( 1733 : 1832), 
 
 195 ; and In Memoriam, 232 f . 
 Eugene Aram, 162. 
 Evans, Mary Ann ('George 
 
 Eliot '), 262 ; biography, 271 ; 
 
 works, 272. 
 Excursion, The, quoted, 37, 82. 
 Expansion of England, The, 399. 
 
 Fall of Hyperion, The, 141. 
 Faraday, Michael, 203. 
 Farrar, F. W., 216, 243. 
 Faust, 84. 
 Ferrier, Susan, 65. 
 Feuilletonists, 94. 
 Fichte, 166. 
 HFiction, future, 407; Victorian, 
 
 234 £f. 
 Finlay, George, 102. 
 Fitzgerald, Edward, 335. 
 Fleshly School of Poetry, The, 309. 
 Fors Clavigera, 342. 
 Forster, John, 363. 
 Fortnightly Review, 393. 
 Frankenstein, 49. 
 Freeman, E. A., 398. 
 French Revolution, influence 
 
 of, 11, 211. 
 Friswell, J. H., 364. 
 Froude, J. A., 393 ; as historian, 
 
 398 
 Froude, R. H., 212. 
 Function of literature, 5, 201. 
 
 Gallienne, Mr. le, 278. 
 Galsworthy, Mr. John, 245. 
 Gamett, Dr. Richard, 353. 
 kX5askell, Elizabeth, 253. 
 Georgian society, 120. 
 Giaour, The, 122. 
 Gifford, William, 96. 
 Gilbert, Sir W. S., 318. 
 
414 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Gissing, George, 254. 
 
 QoUin Market, 320. 
 
 God or man, proper study of 
 mankind, 197, 266. 
 i^odwin, William, 49. 
 »/Goethe, 84. 
 
 Goodiness, 364. 
 
 Gosse, Philip Henry, 206. 
 
 Gray, Thomas, 17. 
 ■ Great Exhibition, 277, 317. 
 
 Green, J. K, 399. 
 
 Green, T. H., 401. 
 
 Grote, George, 102. 
 
 Ottardian, 393. 
 
 Hake, T. G., 194, 335. 
 Hallam, Henry, 101. 
 Halsham, John, 388. 
 Hamilton, Sir William, 222. 
 Hardy, Thomas, 262, 273 f. 
 Hargreaves, James, significance 
 
 of, 19, 203. 
 Harrison, Frederic, 222^ ; on 
 
 Ruskin, quoted, 342. 
 Hawker, R. S., 193. 
 Hazlitt, William, 98. 
 Heartiness, 252. 
 Heber, Reginald, 146. 
 Hellas, 131. 
 Helps, Sir Arthur, 363. 
 Hemans, Felicia, 145. 
 Henley, W. E., 388. 
 Henty, G. A., 275. 
 Herrick, Robert, 178. 
 ^Historians, 397 S. 
 Historical romance, decline of, 
 
 114. 
 Historical writing, 103 f . 
 
 Jacobs, Mr. W. W. 
 vkjames, G. P. R 
 
 Hogg, James, 94. 
 Holcroft, Thomas, 55. 
 Holmes, O. W., 407^ 
 Hood, Thomas, 191. 
 Home, R. H., 193. 
 Houghton, Lord, 335. 
 Hound of Heaven, The, 380. 
 Hughes, Thomas, 219. 
 Hunt, Leigh, 96, 145. 
 Hutchinson, Mr. Thomas,quoted, 
 
 65. 
 Hutton, R. H., 393. 
 Huxley, T. H., 203; joins 
 
 School Board for London, 
 
 209 ; his work, 219. 
 Hymn to Colour, 292, 373. 
 Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, 131. 
 Hyperion, 141. 
 
 Idea of a University, The, 209. 
 Idler, The, quoted, 42. 
 Idylls of the King, 229. 
 Imaginary Conversations, 100. 
 Imaginative realism, 310. 
 Imaginative reason, 280^. 
 Immortality, Ode, quoted, 78. 
 In Memoriam, 230 ff., 268. 
 Indirect language, 79. 
 Infant Joy, quoted, 37. 
 Interpretation, need of, 7. 
 Intuitional constructiveness, 81. 
 Irish Melodies, 146. 
 
 2531. 
 ,114. 
 
 Jane Eyre, 254. 
 
 Jefferies, Richard, 386 ff. 
 
 Jeffrey, Francis, 96. 
 
 Jenny, 306, 309. 
 
 Jerrold, Douglas, 194, 393. 
 
 John Halifax, Gentleman, 345. 
 
 John Inglesant, 391. 
 
 John Milton, Essay on, quoted, 
 156. 
 
 Johnson, Dr., death of, 13 ; his 
 survivors, 14 ; their relation- 
 ship, 15 ; their successors, 16. 
 
 Joubert, Joseph, quoted, 80. 
 
 Journalism, 392. 
 
 Jowett, Benjamin, 214. 
 
 Keats, John, 135 ; biography, 
 
 136; rebels at Pope, 138; 
 
 his critics, 140; his aim, 143; 
 
 and Pre-Raphaelitism, 305. 
 Keble, John, 211 f. 
 »|^Kingsley, Charles, 210, 218, 254. 
 Kingsley, Mary, 218. 
 Kingston, W. H. G., 275. 
 /Kipling, Mr. Rudyard, 243, 277. 
 Knight, Charles, 154. 
 Knowledge and belief, 205 ; 
 
 parties to the conflict, 207 f. ; 
 
 false basis of opposition, 209. 
 
INDEX 
 
 415 
 
 Knowles, James Sheridan, 148. 
 Knowles, Sir James, 393. 
 Kubla Khan, 74. 
 
 Lady of Shalolt, The, 303. 
 
 Lalla Rookh, 146. 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 86 fif. 
 
 Lamb, Mary, 90. 
 
 Landon, Letitia, 146. 
 - Landor, Walter Savage, 99 flf. 
 
 Landscape, right use of, 67. 
 
 Language of the sense, the, 80. 
 
 Lays of Ancient Rome, 159. 
 
 Lear, Edward, 337. 
 
 Lecky, W. E. H., 400. 
 
 Lectures on Heroes, 170. 
 
 Lee, Dr. Sidney, 392. 
 
 Leech, John, 393. 
 
 Legouis, Prof. E., quoted, 65. 
 
 Lemon, Mark, 393. 
 
 Lever, C. J., 275. 
 
 Levy, J. M., 395. 
 
 Lewes, George Henry, 271. 
 
 Lewis, Sir G. C., 363. 
 •^ Lewis, M. G., 48. 
 
 Liberty, periods of, 269. 
 
 Literature an organism, 5. 
 
 Locker, Frederic, 337. 
 
 Lockhart, J. E., 96. 
 
 Locksley Hall, 227. 
 
 London, aspects of, 247. 
 
 Longman, JThomas, 394. 
 
 Lorna Doone, 112. 
 
 Loss and Gain, 213, 244. 
 
 Love and Duty, 227. 
 
 Love in the Valley, 295. 
 
 Love- Lily, 311. 
 
 Lover, Samuel, 65, 275. 
 
 Lyell, Sir Charles, 152, 202. 
 
 Lyrical Ballads, 56 ; its im- 
 portance, 61. 
 •^ Lytton, Earl of (' Owen Mere- 
 dith '), 160. 
 
 Lytton, Lord, 160 £f. 
 
 Macaulay, Lord, 156 ff., 396 f. 
 Macaulay, Zachary, 159. 
 Mackenzie, Henry, 32. 
 Macmillan, Daniel, 394. 
 Magazines, old and new, 394 f . 
 Maine, Sir H. S., 399. 
 
 Malthus, T. R., 202. 
 
 Manning, Cardinal, 214. 
 
 Marius the Epicurean, 376 ff. 
 
 Marryatt, Frederic, 275. 
 
 Marston, P. B., 336. 
 
 Martin Chuzzlewit, quoted, 250. 
 
 Martin, Sir Theodore, 194. 
 
 Massey, Gerald, 336. 
 
 Masson, Prof., quoted, 78. 
 
 Maurice, F. D., 216 ff. 
 
 Meditation under Stars, 296, 373. 
 -Meredith, George, 262 ; treat- 
 ment of women, 270 ; char- 
 acteristics of his novels, 272 ; 
 prose style, 273 ; as poet, 291 ; 
 his allegory of Colour and 
 Love, 292 f . ; his message, 
 295 ; his tenderness, 297 ; 
 as novelist and poet, 298 ; 
 quoted, 406. 
 
 Meynell, Alice, 380. 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, 221. 
 
 Minto, William, 363. 
 
 Mitford, Miss, 193. 
 
 Mitford, William, 102. 
 
 Modern Painters, 348. 
 
 Montgomery, James, 145. 
 
 Monthly Packet, 395. 
 
 Moore, "Thomas, 82, 146. 
 
 Moral preoccupation of English 
 poets, 317. 
 
 Moral simplification, 151. 
 
 Morley, John (Viscount), quoted, 
 176 ; his work, 393, 401. 
 
 Morris, Sir Lewis, 336. 
 
 Morris, William, 321 ff. 
 
 Murray, John, 120, 394. 
 
 Myers, F. W. H., 295. 
 
 Mysteries of Udolpho, The, 44. 
 
 Natural philosophy, tradition 
 
 of, 203. 
 Natural worth, 269. 
 Nature and Man, 262 ff. 
 Necessity of Atheism, The, 128. 
 Nettleship,' R. L., 401. 
 Newman, John Henry, 213 f. 
 Ninht and Morning, 162. 
 Nineteenth Century Review, 393. 
 Nodes Ambrosiance, 94. 
 Noel, Roden, 336. 
 
4i6 
 
 INDEX 
 
 ' Noetics ', 200. 
 y Novel, function of, 259 f. 
 Noyes, Mr. Alfred, 402. 
 
 Objective mystery, 35. 
 
 Ode on a Qrecian Urn, 339. 
 
 Oliver Twist, quoted, 250. 
 
 One Word More, 287. 
 
 Opie, Mrs., 55. 
 
 Optimism and art, 6. 
 
 Ordeal of Richard Feverel, quoted, 
 
 264. 
 Oriel College, 199. 
 O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 334. 
 ' Ouida ', 389. 
 
 Outer and Inner, quoted, 366. 
 Oxford movement, 199. 
 OzymandiaSf 136. 
 
 Palgrave, F. T., 336. 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette, 392. 
 
 Paracelsus, 286. 
 
 Pater, Walter, 369 ff. 
 
 Patmore, Coventry, 371 ff. 
 
 Pattison, Mark, 2i5. 
 
 Paul Clifford, 160. 
 
 Payn, James, 278. 
 
 Peacock, Thomas Love, 55. 
 
 Percy, Thomas, 105. 
 
 Peter Bell, 72. 
 
 Philistia, 361. 
 
 Phillips, Mr. Stephen, 389 ; his 
 poetry examined, 403 ff. 
 
 Phillpotts, Mr. Eden, 263. 
 
 Philosophers, short list of Vic- 
 torian, 222. 
 
 Poems by Two Brothers, 11 9\ 
 
 Poems, chiefly Lyrical, 179 ff. 
 
 Poetic language, imperfection 
 of, 292. 
 
 Poetry, future, 406. 
 
 PoeCs Epitaph, A, quoted, 77. 
 
 Political Justice, 65. 
 
 Politics for the People, 218. 
 
 Pope, Alexander, quoted, 63 ; 
 and Keats, 138 ; his Essay 
 on Man reconsidered a 
 hundred years afterwards, 
 195 ; and Tennyson, 234. 
 
 Positivism, 22P. 
 
 Practical value of art, 8. 
 
 Praed, W. M., 191. 
 
 Prefaces, 359. 
 
 Prelude, The, examined, 66 ; 
 quoted, 78, 409. 
 
 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 
 303 ; origin, 305. 
 
 Pre-Raphaelitism, effect of, 318. 
 
 Princess, The, 228, 238. 
 
 Procter, Adelaide Anne, 336. 
 
 Procter, Bryan (' Barry Corn- 
 wall '), 145. 
 
 Prose, development of, 93, 224, 
 348, 375. 
 
 Prothero, Dr. George, 399. 
 
 ' Pulvis et Umbra ', 383. 
 
 Punch, 393. 
 
 Pusey, Edward Bouverie, 212 f. 
 
 Puttenham, George, quoted, 149. 
 
 Quarterly Review, The, 96 ; on 
 The Descent of Man, quoted, 
 208. 
 
 Queen Mob, 128. 
 
 Radcliffe, Mrs., 44 ff. 
 ^eade, Charles, 274. 
 
 ' Reading of Earth, A ', 295. 
 
 Recapitulation, first period, 148 ; 
 
 ^second period, 194 ; poetic 
 
 ^renaissance, 298 ; from Cole- 
 k^^ridge to Morris, 325 ; Pre- 
 Raphaelite movement, 339, 
 365. 
 
 Recluse, The, quoted, 195. 
 
 Reform Act, 195. 
 
 ' Renascence of Wonder ', 3. 
 
 ' Return to Nature ', 33. 
 
 Rhodes, Cecil, 199. 
 
 Richter, J. P. F., 166. 
 
 Ridge, Mr. Pett, 254. 
 
 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 
 The, 57, 71. 
 
 Ring and the BooTc, The, 289. 
 
 Robert Elsmere, 244, 276. 
 
 Rogers, Samuel, 82. 
 •f Romance and science, 161. 
 
 Romantic Revival, inadequacy 
 of the term, 3. 
 
 Rose Aylmer, 101. 
 
 Rossetti, Christina, 318 ff. 
 
 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 306 ff. 
 
INDEX 
 
 417 
 
 Rossetti, W. M., 302. f^ 
 Rousseau, his influence examined, 
 
 32. 
 Routledge, George, 394. 
 Ruhaiyat, 335. 
 Ruskin, John, 340 ; last period, 
 
 342 ; middle period, 343 ; 
 
 first period, 347 ; his style, 
 
 348 ff. 
 
 Saintsbury, Prof., quoted, 139, 
 
 186^ 362 ; his work, 363. 
 Sandford and Merton, 32. 
 Sartor Besartus, 167 ff., 344i. 
 Saturday Review, 393. 
 Scenery and sentiment, 46. 
 Science, and romance, 161 ; and 
 
 imagination, 204, 210 ; and 
 
 beauty, 390. 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 105 ; literary 
 
 training, 106 ; fecundity, 107 ; 
 
 biography, 108 ; character, 
 
 109 ; greatness. 111; criticism 
 
 of style, 112 ; his supersession 
 
 as a poet, 118 ; meets Byron, 
 
 120. 
 Seeley, Sir J. R., quoted, 2 ; 
 
 as historian, 399. 
 Seeley, Richard Benton, 394. 
 S61incourt, Mr. E. de, 142^. 
 Sensationalism, 68. 
 Sense and soul, conflict between, 
 
 268, 385. 
 Sensitive Plant, The, 132. 
 Sentiency of plants, 32^ 
 Shakespeare, Lamb's views on, 
 
 88. 
 Shaw, Mr. Bernard, 278, 407. 
 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 
 
 quoted, 129. 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, meets 
 
 Byron, 125 ; biography, 127 ; 
 
 love of liberty, 130 ; his 
 
 diction and rhythm, 132 ; 
 
 nature-maeric, 134 ; music, 
 
 135 ; and Darley, 185. 
 Siddal, Elizabeth, 307. 
 Sidgwick, Henry, 401 ; Mrs. 
 
 Henry, 401. 
 Skylark, The, quoted, 37. 
 Sleep and Poetry, 137. 
 27 
 
 Smedley, F. E., 275. 
 
 Smiles, Samuel, 346. 
 
 Smith, George, 392. 
 
 Smith, Sydney, 96. 
 
 Smith, W. H., 209. 
 
 Social idealism, 342. 
 
 Social welfare, 163. 
 
 Solitary Reaper, The, quoted, 77. 
 
 Sophism of the spirit, 249. 
 
 Southey, Robert, 81. 
 
 Specimens of English Dramatic 
 
 Writers, 87. 
 Spectator, 393. 
 Spencer, Herbert, 220. 
 Spenser, Edmund, 338. 
 Sporting fiction, 274. 
 Stalky and Co., 243. 
 Stanley, A. P., 215. 
 Statue and the Bust, The, 284, 
 
 312. 
 Stephen, J. K., 337. 
 Stephen, Sir Leslie, quoted, 291 ; 
 
 as editor, 392 ; his works, 400. 
 Stepping Westward, quoted, 77. 
 Stevenson, R. A. M., 301. 
 g^evenson, Robert Louis, 275, 
 
 381 ff. 
 Story of my Heart, The, 386 f. 
 Strand Magazine, 395. 
 Stubbs, Bishop, 399. 
 Subjective mysticism, 36. 
 Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 318. 
 Supematuralism, 71. 
 Surtees, Robert, 275. 
 Swinburne, A. C, 96, 327 ff. 
 Sylvia, 184. 
 Symonds, J. A., 380. 
 Sympathy with the poor, 253. 
 
 Taylor, Tom, 274. 
 
 Temple Bar, 394. 
 
 Tenniel, Sir John, 393. 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred (Lord), first 
 period, 179 ff. ; and Beddoes, 
 189 ; silence in bereavement, 
 224; Poems of 1842, 225; 
 moral rectitude, 227 ; his 
 maturity, 228 ; conservatism, 
 229 ; his philosophy, 232 ; com- 
 pared with Pope, 234 ; his 
 creed, 235 ; his style, 236 ff. ; 
 
4i8 
 
 INDEX 
 
 common sense, 242 ; his fare- 
 well poem, 281 ; and Meredith, 
 294; and the Pre-Raphaelites, 
 303, 366. 
 
 Tess of the Z)' Urbervilles, quoted, 
 207, 264, 267. 
 / Thackeray, W. M., 257 tf. 
 
 Theologians as poets, 335. 
 
 Theology v. geology, 204. 
 
 Thompson, Francis, 380. 
 
 Thomson, James, 333. 
 
 Timidity, 182. 
 
 Tit- Bits, 395. 
 
 Tithonus, 225. 
 
 Toys, The, 378. 
 
 Tracts for the Times, 212 f. 
 
 Traill, H. D., 337. 
 
 Transcendental language, 76, 374. 
 
 Transcendental synthesis, 143. 
 
 Transition (1825-1840), tabu- 
 lated, 155. 
 
 Treasure Island, 384. 
 
 Trench, Mr. Herbert, 402. 
 
 Trench, R. C, 216. 
 
 Trevelyan, Mr. G. M., 292i. 
 v/Trollope, Anthony, 256 f. 
 
 Tupper, Martin, 336. 
 
 Turner, J. M. W., 154, 348. 
 
 Tvx) Voices, The, 190. 
 
 Tyndall, John, 203. 
 
 Ulysses, 225. 
 Unknown Eros, The, 372. 
 Unto this Last, 346. 
 trtility and beauty, 317. 
 
 ' Vain Virtues', 312. 
 Vanity Fair, 259. 
 Vestiges of Creation, 202. 
 Victoria, Queen, and Tennyson, 
 
 228 ; diamond jubilee, 277 ; 
 
 golden jubilee, 281. 
 
 Victorian literature, 201. 
 Village, The, 23. 
 
 Wallace, Dr. A. R., 203. 
 
 Walter family, 395. 
 
 Ward, Dr., 214. 
 
 Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 244, 
 
 276. 
 Watson, Mr. William, quoted, 
 
 40, 277. 
 Waverley Novels, 107 ff. 
 Wedgwood, Thomas, 97. 
 Wells, C. J., 336. 
 Wells, Mr. H. G., 245, 278, 341, 
 
 390. 
 ' Wessex', 112. 
 Westward Ho !, 218. 
 Whiggism, 159. 
 White, Henry Kirke, 145. 
 White, Mr. Percy, 244. 
 Whyte-Melville, G. J., 275. 
 Wilberforce, Bishop, 200. 
 Wilde, Oscar, 389. 
 Wilson, John (' Christopher 
 
 North '), 94. 
 *-Women in fiction, 270. 
 ' Women-novelists, short list of, 
 
 2761. 
 Wood, Mrs. Henry, 256. 
 Wordsworth, William, and 
 
 Coleridge, 57 ; biography, 59 ; 
 
 his literary criticism, 62 ; his 
 
 interpretative method, 77 ; 
 
 and Pope, 195 ; and Meredith, 
 
 297. 
 Working Men's College, 216, 
 
 340. 
 World and mind, 85, 296, 365. 
 
 Yeats, W. B., on Blake, 38; 
 
 his work, 389. 
 Yonge, Charlotte, 363 f. 
 
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