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 t'i f t i
 
 THE LITERATURE 
 OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 6 7 3
 
 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 C. F. CLAY, Manager 
 
 LONDON : FETTER LANE, E.G. 4 
 
 NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN CO. 
 
 BOMBAY \ 
 
 CALCUTTA I MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. 
 
 MADRAS ) 
 
 TORONTO : THE MACMILLAN CO. OF 
 
 CANADA, Ltd. 
 TOKYO: MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
 
 THE LITERATURE 
 OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 BY 
 
 HUGH WALKER, LL.D., D.Litt. 
 
 Cambridge : 
 at the University Press 
 
 I92I 
 
 14H4H2
 
 First Edition igio 
 Reprinted igto, 1913, 1921 
 
   MUM
 
 r'   
 
 "" PREFACE 
 
 'T^HE purpose and scope of this book will be rendered 
 ^ -*• plainer by a glance at the table of contents than I 
 ^ could hope to make it here, except by anticipating what 
 v^^will be found in the following chapters. And as nobody 
 is likely to be interested in the reasons which led me 
 to undertake the task which is now, at last, ended, if 
 not accomplished, I should be disposed to write no 
 preface at all. But it is my pleasant duty to thank those 
 who have been good enough to help me in my work. I 
 am greatly indebted to Professor Henry Jones, of Glasgow, 
 I and to Professor T. Stanley Roberts, of Aberystwyth, who 
 j each read part of the manuscript, and made valuable 
 *^ suggestions. Mr A. R. Waller, of Peterhouse, read the 
 ' whole of the proofs with a patience and care for which, 
 as I can make no adequate acknowledgment, I must 
 thankfully rest his debtor. For the errors and short- 
 comings of the book as it now stands I, of course, am 
 alone responsible. That the errors are not more numerous 
 and the shortcomings greater is due to the generous help 
 of the three men whom I have named.
 
 Vi PREFACE 
 
 I have dealt only with writers who have passed away. 
 The task of selection from among the living is peculiarly 
 invidious ; and the death of Swinburne and of Meredith 
 has greatly reduced the temptation to cross the line which 
 divides the two worlds. 
 
 HUGH WALKER. 
 
 Lampeter, 
 
 December^ 1909.
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 CHAPS. PAGE 
 
 I. The New Age i 
 
 II. The German Influence : Thomas Cailyle ... 23 
 
 PART I 
 
 SPECULATIVE THOUGHT 
 
 I. Theology 80 
 
 II. Philosophy 141 
 
 III. Science 211 
 
 PART II 
 
 CREATIVE ART. A. POETRY 
 
 I. The Interregnum in Poetry 240 
 
 II. The New Kings: Tennyson and Browning . . 287 
 
 III. The Minor Poets: Earlier Period .... 327 
 
 IV. Tennyson 374 
 
 V. Browning 411 
 
 VI. The Turn 01 the Century : New Influences . . 444 
 
 Vil. Later Developments 527
 
 viii TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 CREATIVE ART. B PROSE FICTION 
 
 CHAPS. PAGE 
 
 I. After Scott 612 
 
 II. Dickens and Thackeray 660 
 
 III. The Women Novelists 707 
 
 IV. The Later Fiction 753 
 
 PART III 
 ET CETERA 
 
 I. History and Biography 818 
 
 II. Literary and Aesthetic Criticism .... 932 
 III. Miscellaneous Prose 1024 
 
 Index io55
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY. 
 
 This summary is intended to be used closely with the text of the book : 
 without reference to the text the classification would in many cases be mis- 
 leading. The order is the order of treatment in the book. Where for any 
 reason a writer has been dealt with along with a group to which he does not 
 naturally belong, the fact is indicated by the use of square brackets. If however 
 the connexion be close, though the writer may not be strictly within the group, 
 brackets are not used. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 CHAPTER II. THE GERMAN INFLUENCE. 
 
 Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881. 
 
 Life of Schiller, 1823-1824. 
 
 Wilhebn Meister's Apprenticeship {Translation), 1824. 
 T^artor Resarltis, 1833-1834. 
 •/The Frejtch Revohition, 1837. 
 
 Chartism, 1839. 
 
 Heroes and Hero- Worship, 1 840. 
 
 Past and Present, 1843. 
 
 Oliver CromweWs Letters and Speeches, 1845. 
 
 Latter-Day Pamphlets, 1850. 
 
 Life of Sterling, 1851. 
 
 Frederick the Great, 1 858-1865. 
 
 PART I. 
 
 CHAPTER I. THEOLOGY. 
 
 The Evangelicals. 
 
 Robert Hall, 1764-1831. 
 Thomas Scott, 1 747-1821. 
 Charles Simeon, 1759-1836. 
 Thomas Chalmers, 1780- 1847. 
 
 Discourses on the Christian Revelation, 1817. 
 
 Thomas Guthrie, 1803-1S73. 
 
 Robert Smith Candlish, 1806-1873?^ 
 
 Edward Irving, 1792- 1834. ' 
 
 John M'=Leod Campbell, 1 800-1 8j2r 
 
 The Nature of the Atonement,, .I,85i5i_ 
 
 Thoughts on Revelation^ 1862. 
 Thomas Erskine, 1788-1870.' 
 
 W.
 
 X CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY 
 
 The Noetics. 
 
 Edward Copleston, 1776-1849. 
 Rent! Dickson Hampden, 1797,-1868. 
 
 The Scholastic Philosophy in lis relation to Christian 77ieolooy, 1832. 
 Thomas Arnold. 1 795-1842. 
 
 The Principles of Church Reform, 1833. 
 See also Part III, Chapter I. 
 Richard Whately, 1787-1363. 
 Logic, 1826. 
 Rhetoric , 1828. 
 
 Essays on some Difficulties in Paul, 1828. 
 Essays on the Errors of Romanism, 1830. 
 The Kingdom of Christ Delineated, 184 1. 
 The Coleridgeans. 
 
 Julius Hare. 1799-1855. 
 
 See also Part III, Chapter III. 
 Charles Kingsley, 1819-1S75. 
 
 See also Part II B, Chapter IV. 
 Frederick Denison Maurice, 1S05-1S72. 
 The Kingdom of Christ, 1838. 
 Prophets and Kings, 1853. 
 The Doctrine of Saci-ifue, 1854. 
 F. W, Robertson, 1816-1S53. 
 The Broad Churchmen. ^, — , _^ 
 Connop Thirl wall, 1797-1 875. j 
 
 See also Part III, .Clmpter I. 
 Benjamin Jowett, 181 7-1893. 
 
 Epistles to the Thessaloniar,s, Galatians, and Romans, 1855. 
 See also Part I, Chapter II. 
 Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, 1S15-1881. 
 Epistles to ike Coritithiaiis,,^\^ll. 
 Sinai and Palestine, 1856. % 
 
 Lertnres mi the TTfstory of the Eastern Church, 1861. 
 Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church, 1863-1S65. 
 See also Part III, Chapter I. 
 Mark Pattison, 1813-1884. 
 
 Tendencies of Religious Thought in England (in Essays and Reviews, 
 
 i860). 
 L^aac Casaubon, 1875. 
 Milton, 1879. 
 
 John William Colenso, 1814-1883. ^— 
 
 The Pentateuch and Joshua critically Examined, .i862-iS-jg. 
 Scottish Theologians. 
 John Caird, 1820-1898. 
 
 Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 1880. 
 Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1900. 
 The Theologians of the Oxford Movement. 
 John Keble, 1 792-1866. 
 
 Life of Bishop Wilson, 1863. 
 ._^^ See also Part II A, Chapter I. 
 
 ^^^ichard Hurrell Froude, 1 803-1 836. 
 Hugh James Rose. 1 795-1 838. 
 
 Discourses on the State of the Protestant Religion in Germany, 1825. 
 John Henry Newman, 1801-1890. 
 
 The Aridfis of the Fourth Century, 1833
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL SUMxMARY Xi 
 
 John Henry Newman {contintced). 
 
 Tracts for the Times (with others), 1833-1841. 
 
 An Essay on the Miracles recorded in the Ecclesiastical History of 
 
 the Early Ages, 1843. 
 The Developtnent of Christian Doctrine, 1845. 
 
 Loss and Gain, 1848. 
 -•w^allista, 1856. 
 
 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 1864. 
 
 A Granitnar of AssentTi^^ , 
 
 See also Part II A.'^ffapter III. 
 Frederick Oakeley, 1802- 1880. 
 
 Historical Notes on the Tractarian Movetnent, 1865. 
 William George Ward, 181 2-1 882. 
 
 Ideal of a Christian Church, 1844. 
 Henry Edward Manning, 180S-1892. 
 Nicholas Patrick Wiseman, 1802-1865. 
 
 77^1? Cojinexion between Science and Revealed Religion, 1836. 
 
 Fabiola, 1854. 
 Walter Farquhar Hook, 1798-1875. 
 
 Lives of the Archbishops of Catiterbury, i860- 18 76. 
 Samuel Wilberforce, 1 805-1 873. 
 
 Life of William Wilberforce (with his brother), 1838. 
 
 Agatha, 1839. 
 Edward Bouverie Pusey, 1800-1SS2. 
 
 Historical Enquiry into the Causes of the Rationalist Character of 
 German Theology, 1828-1830. 
 Thomas Mozley, 1806-1893. 
 
 Reminiscences of Oriel, 18S2. 
 James Bowling Mozley, 1813-1878. 
 
 The Augustiriian Doctrine of Predestination, 1855. . . 
 
 ^ThePHmitwe^ Doctrine p^^ 
 
 Lectures on Aliraclcs, 1865. 
 Richard William Church, 1815-1889. 
 
 St Anselm, {iBjd^Ji 
 
 Dante, 1879. 
 
 Spejiser, 1879. 
 
 Bacon, 1884. 
 
 The Oxford Movement, 1891. 
 Henry Parry Liddon, 1829-1890. 
 
 The Divinity of Jesus s 1867. 
 
 Life of Pusey, 1S93-1894. 
 The Cambridge Theologians. 
 
 Brooke FjOSS Westcott, 1825-1901. 
 Joseph Barber Lightfoot, 1828-1SS9. 
 Fenton J. A. Hort, 1S28-1892. 
 
 CHAPTER n. PHILOSOPHY. 
 The Scottish School. 
 
 Dugald Stewart, 1 753-1828. 
 Thomas Brown, 177S-1820. 
 
 Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect, 18 18. 
 James Mackintosh, 1765-1832. 
 William Hamilton, 1 788-1856. 
 
 Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, 1852. 
 Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, 1 859-1 861. 
 
 b2
 
 xii CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY 
 
 Henry Lonj^eville Mansel, iS^o-iS;!. 
 Frolfgomena Logica, 1S51. 
 The Limits of Religious Thought, 1859. 
 The Philosophy of the Conditioned, 1 866. 
 
 The Utilitarians. 
 
 Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1S32. 
 James Mill, 1773-187,6. 
 John Austin, 1790- 1859. 
 
 The Province of Jtirisprudence Determined, 1832. 
 
 Lectures on Jurisprudence, i S63. 
 John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873. 
 
 A System of Logic, 1843. 
 
 The Principles of Political Economy, 184S. 
 
 On Liberty, 1S59. 
 
 Representative Government, iS6r. 
 
 Utilitarianism, 1S63. 
 
 Comte and Positivism, 1865. 
 
 An Examina(io7i of Sir W. Ham ilton' s Philosophy, 1865 
 
 The Subjection of Women, (l869j^ 
 
 Aiitomos;raphy, 1S73. 
 [W'illiam Whewell, 1794-1866. 
 
 History of the Inductive Sciences, 1837. 
 
 Philosophy of the Ittd active Sciences, 1840.] 
 Alexander Bain, 18 18-1903. 
 
 The Senses and the Intellect, 1855. 
 
 The Emotions and the Will, 1859. 
 Henry Sidgwick, 183S-1900. 
 
 The Methods of Ethics, 1874. 
 
 The PHnciples of Political Eco7iomy, 1883. 
 
 The Elements of Politics, 1891. 
 
 The PosiTivisTs. 
 
 Richard Congreve, 1818-1899. 
 George Henry Lewes, 181 7-1 878. 
 
 A Biographical History of Philosophy, 1845-1846. 
 Contte's Philosophy of the Sciences,. 1853. 
 Problems of Life and Mind, slS;[^4-i87^>» 
 See also Part III, Chapter I. 
 George Eliot, 18 19- 1880. 
 
 See also Part II A, Chapter VII, and Part II B, Chapter III. 
 Harriet Martineau, 1 802-1876. 
 
 Illustrations of Political Economy, 1832-1834. 
 Deerbrook, 1839. 
 
 The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte freely Translated and 
 Condensed, 1853. 
 
 See also Part III, Chapter I. 
 
 The English Hegelians. 
 
 James Frederick Feirier, 1808-1864. 
 
 Institutes of Metaphysic, 1S54. 
 Benjamin Jowett, 1817-1893. ^ " " 
 The Dialogues of Plato, 1871/ 
 See also Part I, Chapter I. 
 Thomas Hill Green, 1S36-1882. 
 
 The Works of Hume (edited), 1874-1 87 5. 
 Prolegomena to Ethics, 1SS3.
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY XUi 
 
 Edward Caird, 1835-1908. j 
 A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant, iSjj. 
 The Evolution of Religion, 1893. 
 
 The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, 1904.   
 
 * 
 
 James Martineau, 1805-1900. 
 
 Rationale of Religious Inquiry, 1836. | 
 
 Studies of Christianity, 1858. ] 
 
 Types of Ethical Theory, 1S85. j 
 
 The Seat of Authority z>z Religion, 1890. ! 
 
 Francis William Newman, 1805-1897. I 
 
 Phases of Faith, 1850. ' 
 
 Writers on the Philosophy of History. j 
 
 Henry Thomas Buckle, 1821-1862. \ 
 
 History of Civilisation, 1857-1866. ' 
 
 Henry Sumner Maine, 1822-1S88. ! 
 
 Ancient Law, 1861. ' 1 
 
 Village Cormnunities, 1871.),/ I 
 
 The Early History of Itistitutions, 1875. 
 
 Popular Government, 1885. , 
 
 Walter Bagehot, 1826-1877. I 
 
 The English Constitution, 1865-1867. I 
 
 Physics and Politics, 1872. j 
 
 Lotnbard Street, 1873. ' 
 
 The Economists. \ 
 
 Joim Elliott Cairnes, 1824-1875- ' 
 
 The Slave Power, 1862. ; 
 Richard Jones, i 790-1855. 
 
 J. E. Thorold Rogers, 1823-1890. ; 
 
 History of Agriculture and Prices in England, 1S66-1887. 
 
 T. E. Cliffe Leslie, 1827 ?-i882. i 
 
 CHAPTER in. SCIENCE. 
 
 Charles Lyell, 1797-1875. 1 
 
 Principles of Geology, 1830-1833. 
 
 Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, 1863. 
 Hugh Miller, 1802-1856. 
 
 The Old Red Satidstone, 1840. 
 
 Footprints of the Creator, 1849. I 
 
 Aiy Schools and Schoolmasters, 1854. 1 
 
 The Testimony of the Rocksr i?>^T- j 
 
 Robert Chambers, 1S02-1871. 1 
 
 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 1844. > 
 
 Herbert Spencer, 1 820-1 903. ' j 
 
 Principles of Psychology, 1855 (revised, 1870-1872). \ 
 
 First Principles, 1S62. ' ; 
 
 Principles of Biology, 1864-1867. ^ 
 
 Principles of Sociology, 1876-1896. 
 
 Principles of Ethics, 1 892-1893. , 
 
 Charles Darwin, 1809-1882. ] 
 
 Journal of Researches during the Voyage of the Beagle, 1839. ! 
 
 ..The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, 1842. ] 
 ^^^^ Origin of Species, rSspr • 
 
 The Descent of Man, i^'i. 1 
 
 The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of IVorms, i88i, j
 
 XIV CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY 
 
 Thomas Henry Huxley, 1 825-1 895. 
 Alan's Place in Nature, 1863. 
 Lay Sermons, (^^]o^ 
 Hume, 1879. 
 
 PART II A. 
 
 CHAPTER L THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY. 
 
 Allan Cunningham, 17S4-1842. 
 Bernard Barton, 1 784-1 849. 
 John Clare, 1 793-1864. 
 
 Poems, descriptive of Rural Life, 1820. 
 William Thorn, i798?-i848. 
 
 Rhymes and Recollections of a Handlooni Weaver, 1 844. 
 Ebenezer Elliott, 1781-1849. 
 Corn- Law Rhymes, 1828. 
 Thomas Hood, 1 799-1845. 
 Lyciis the Centaur, 1822. 
 The Plea of the Midsti>ntner Fairies, 1827. 
 Hartley Colerids;e, 1796-1849. 
 
 Poems, 1833. 
 Religious Poetry. 
 
 John Bowring, 1 792-1872. 
 James Montgomery, I77r-i854. 
 Reginald Heber, 1 783-1 826. ^ 
 Robert Pollok, 1 798-1827. 
 John Keble, 1 792-1866. 
 
 The Christian Year, 1827. 
 Lyra Jnnocentium, 1846. 
 
 See also Part I, Chapter I. 
 The Dramatic Poets. 
 
 James Sheridan Knovvles, 1 784-1862. 
 Virginius, 1820. 
 
 The Beggar's Daughter of Bethnal Green, 1828. 
 The LIunchback, 1832. 
 James Robinson Planche, 1 796-1 8S0. 
 Henry Hart Milman, 1791-186S. 
 The A folio Bclvidere, 18 12. 
 Fazio, 1 81 5. 
 
 The Fall of Jerusalem, 1820. 
 The Martyr of Antioch, 1821. 
 Belshazzar, 1822. 
 Anne Boleyn, 1826. 
 
 See also Part III, Chapter I. 
 Aubrey de Vere the Elder, 1788-1846. 
 Julian the Apostate, 1822. 
 The Duke of Mercia, 1823. 
 Mary Tudor, 1847. 
 Mary Russell Mitford, 1 786-1855. 
 Julian, 1823. 
 The Foscari, 1826. 
 Rieuzi, 1828. 
 
 See also Part III, Chapter III-
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY XV ' 
 
 Bryan Waller Procter, 1 787-1874. ] 
 
 Mirandola, 1821. ; 
 
 English Songs, 1832. ,1 
 Henry Taylor, 1 800-1 886. 
 
 Isaac Comnemis, 1827. 
 
 Philip van A7-tevelde, 1834. 
 
 Edwin the Fair, 1842. . 
 
 The Virgin Widow, 1849. 1 
 
 .S"^ Clement's Eve, 1862. , \ 
 
 Thomas Noon Talfourd, 1 795-1854. ; 
 
 Ion, 1836. 
 
 The Athenian Captive, 1838. i 
 
 Glencoe, 1840. ; 
 Bulwer Lytton (Lord Lytton), 1803- 1873. 
 
 The Duchesse de la Valliere, 1836. 
 
 The Lady of Lyons, 1838. ' 
 
 Richelieu, 1838. i 
 
 See also Part II B, Chapter I. , 
 
 Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 1803-1849. '- 
 
 The Bride's Tragedy, 1822. 1 
 
 Death's Jest Book, 1 850. j 
 
 George Darley, 1 795-1 846. I 
 
 Sylvia, 1827. '■ 
 
 Nepenthe, 1835. ! 
 
 Charles Jeremiah Wills, 1800-1879. \ 
 
 Joseph and his Brethren, 1823. j 
 Thomas Wade, 1805-1875. 
 
 Mundi et Cordis Carrnina, 1835. j 
 
 I 
 I 
 
 CHAPTER II. THE NEW KINGS. | 
 
 Alfred Tennyson, 1809- 189 2. \ 
 
 Poems by Two Brothers (with Frederick and Charles Tennyson), 1827. 1 
 
 Poems, chiefly Lyrical, 1830. | 
 
 Poems, 1832. I 
 
 Poems, 1842. ! 
 
 The Princess, 1847. ] 
 In Memoriam, 1850. 
 ^Maud,_ 185.=^- 
 
 IdyUs'^of the King, 1857-1885:^/'^ ', 
 
 Enoch Arden, 1864. i 
 
 Queen Mary, 1875. ,: 
 
 Harold, 1876. 1 
 
 Becket, 1884. i 
 
 Tiresias, 1885. i 
 
 Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, 1886. ' 
 
 Demeter, 1889. /* j 
 
 The Death of CEnone, 1892. ^ ,i 
 
 Charles Tennyson (afterwards Turner), 1808-1S79. \ 
 
 Frederick Tennyson, i8o7-i898j^.»=' \ 
 
 Days and Hours, 1854. I 
 
 The Isles of Greece, 1890. \ 
 
 Robert Browning, 1812-1889. j 
 Pauline, 1833. 
 
 Paracelsus, 1835. ;
 
 XVi CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY 
 
 I 
 
 Robert Browning {continued). j 
 Strafford, 1837. 
 
 Sordello, 1840. I 
 
 Pippa Passes, 1841. j 
 
 Dramatic Lyrics, iSi2. , 
 
 A Blot in the ^Scutcheon, 1S43. 1 
 
 Colombes Birthday, 1844. i 
 
 Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1845. j 
 
 Luria, 1846. | 
 ^ SottPs Tragedy, 1S46. 
 
 Christmas Eve and Easter Day, 1850. ! 
 
 il/ijw a«a? Women, 1855. | 
 
 Dramatis Pcrsontte; 'XS64.. v, I 
 
 T:^^ j?V«^ «;2(j' the Book, iS68-i86^<X ! 
 
 Balattstion's Adventure, 1871. ] 
 Fifine at the Fair, 1872. 
 
 7'/^if /«« Album, 1875. ; 
 
 Za Saisiaz, 18 78. j 
 
 Dramatic Idyls, 1879- 1880. ' 
 
 Ferishtah's Fancies, 1884. I 
 
 Parleyings with certain People of Importance, 1887. j 
 Asolando, 1889. 
 
 Alfred Domett, 1811-1887. j 
 
 CHAPTER in. THE MINOR POETS. ! 
 
 The Bali-adists. 
 
 Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1800-1859. ' 
 
 Lays of Ancient Rome, 1842. , 
 
 See also Part III, Chapter I. j 
 
 William Edmondstoune Aytoun, 1813-1865. 1 
 
 Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, 1848. I 
 
 Firmilian, 1854. 
 
 Bon Gaultier Ballads (with Sir Theodore Martin), 1855. | 
 
 Francis Hastings Doyle, i8io-i888.^-' 
 
 William Motherwell, 1797-1835.   
 
 Robert Stephen Hawker, 1803-1875. \ 
 
 The Quest of the Sangraal, 1803. > 
 
 Richard Harris Barham, 1788-1845. ] 
 
 The Ingoldsby Legends, 183 7- 1847. \ 
 
 Writers of Vers de SociiiTE. \ 
 
 Thomas Haynes Bayly, 1 797-1 S39. , 
 
 Laman Blanchard, 1804-1845. ' 
 
 Winlhrop Mack worth Praed, 1802- 1839. j 
 
 Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), 1 805-1 8S5. \ 
 
 Memorials of a Tour in Greece, 1834- \ 
 
 Poems, Legendary and Historical, 1S44. \ 
 
 Palm Leaves, 1844. \ 
 
 The Catholic Poets. 
 
 John Henry Newman, 1801-1890. 
 
 Lyra Apostolica (with others), 1836. j 
 
 The Dream of Gerontius, 1865. 1 
 
 Verses on various Occasions, 1868. 
 Frederick William Faber, 1814-1863. 
 Isaac Williams, 1803-1865. 
 John Mason Neale, 18 18-1866.
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY XVll 
 
 The Philosophic Poets. 
 
 Richard Henry Home, 1803-1884. 
 Cosmo de Medici, 1837. 
 The Death of Marlowe, 1837. 
 Gregory VIl, 1840. 
 Orion, 1843. 
 
 A New Spirit of the Age (with others), 1844. 
 Philip James Bailey, 1 816-1902. 
 Festtis, 1 839. 
 The Political Poets. 
 
 Thomas Cooper, 1 805-1892. 
 
 The Purgatory of Suicides, 1845. 
 Capel Lofft, 1806-1873. 
 Self Formation, 1837. 
 Ernest, or Political Regeneration, 1839. 
 Ebenezer Jones, 18-20-1860. 
 
 Studies of Sensation and Event, 1843. 
 Poets of the Celtic Revival. 
 
 Richard Chenevix Trench, 1 807-1 886. 
 
 See also Part III, Chapter I. 
 James Clarence Mangan, 1803-1849. 
 The Poetesses. 
 
 Sarah Flower Adams, 1805- 1848. 
 Isabella Harwood, 1840-1888. 
 Fanny Kemble, 1 809-1893. 
 Francis the First, 1832. 
 Poems, 1844, 1866, 1883. 
 An English Tragedy, 1863. 
 Felicia Dorothea Hemans, 1 793-1 835. 
 Letitia Elizabeth Landon, 1802-1838. 
 Sara Coleridge, 1802-1852, 
 
 Phantasmion, 1837. 
 Lady Dufferin, 1807-1867. /< 
 Caroline Norton, 1808-1877.V 
 Caroline Clive, 1801-1873. 
 IX Poems by V, 1840. 
 Paul Ferroll, 1855. 
 Elizabeth Barrett Bro\vning, 1 806-1 861. 
 An Essay on Mind, 1826. 
 The Seraphim, 1838. 
 Poems, 1844. 
 
 Sonnets from the Portuguese, 1850. 
 Casa Guidi Windows, 185 1. 
 Aurora Leigh, 1857. 
 Poenis before Congress, i860. 
 Last Poems, 1862. 
 The Brontes. 
 
 Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, 1846. 
 See also Part II B, Chapter III. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. TENNYSON. 
 For the works of Tennyson see Summary of Part II A, Chapter II. 
 William Barnes, 1 801- 1886. 
 
 Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect, 1844, 1858, 1863. 
 Edwin Waugh, 181 7-1890.
 
 xviii CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY 
 
 CHAPTER V. BROWNING. 
 For the works of Browning see Summary of Part II A, Chapter II. 
 
 1 
 
 CHAPTER VI. THE TURN OF THE CENTURY. 
 
 Patriotic Verse. 
 
 Gerald Massey, 1828-1907. 
 
 The Ballad of Babe Christabel, 1854. 
 
 War Waits, 1855. 
 Henry Lushington, 1812-1855. 
 
 La Nation Bontiqidere, 1855. 
 Franklin Lushington, 1823-1901. 
 
 Points of War, 1855. 
 The Poets of the Sceptical Reaction. 
 Arthur Hugh Clough, 18x9-1861. 
 
 The Bothic of Tober-na- Vuolich, 1848. 
 
 Ambai-valia (with T. Burbidge), 1849. 
 
 Dipsychus, 1862. 
 Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888. 
 i The Strayed Reveller, 1849. 
 / Empedocles on Etna, 1852. 
 \ Poems, 1853. 
 ' Merope, 1858. 
 
 Thyrsis, 1866. 
 
 Nezv Poems, 1867. 
 
 See also Part III, Chapter II. 
 
 Edward FitzGerald, 1809- 1883. 
 Ettphranor, 185 1. 
 C alder 071, 1853. 
 
 Ritbdiydt of Omar Khayy&m, 1859. 
 The Pre-Raphaelites. 
 
 Dante Gabriel Ross^tti^ 1828-1882. 
 Poems, 1870. V* 
 
 The Early Italian Poets, i86x. 
 
 Ballads and Somiets, 18S1. 
 
 See also Part III, Chapter IT: 
 Thomas Gordon Hake, 1809-1895. 
 
 Vates, or the Philosophy of Madness, 184c. 
 
 Nenv Symbols, 1876. 
 Christina Rossetti, 1830-1894. 
 
 Gobliti Market, 1862. 
 
 The Prince's Progress, 1866. 
 
 Time Flies, 1S85. 
 
 A Pa.^eant, 1887. 
 Thomas Woolner, 1825-1892. 
 
 My Beautiful Lady, 1866. 
 William Bell Scott, 1812-1890. 
 
 The Year of the World, 1846. 
 
 Poems by a Painter, 185a. • 
 
 Poems: Ballads, Studies from Nature, Sonnets, 1S75. 
 
 A Poet's Harvest Home, "1882.
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY xix 
 
 J. Noel Paton, 1821-1901. \ 
 
 Poems by a Painter, i86i. | 
 
 Spindrift, 1867. ' 
 
 Coventry Patmore, 1823-1896. : 
 
 Tamerton CJutrch Tower, 1853. ' 
 
 The Angel in the House, i854-i856.o«C:. '' 
 
 Odes, 1868. ^ . I 
 
 The Unknown Eros, 1877. ' 
 
 Amelia, 1878. ■' 
 
 The Spasmodic Poets. i 
 
 John Stanyan Bigg, 1828-1865. ^ 
 
 The Sea-King, 1848. i 
 Night and the Soul, 1854. 
 
 Sydney Dobell, 1824-1874. 
 The Roman, 1850. 
 Balder, 1854. 
 
 Sonnets on the War (with Alexander Smith), 1855. ' 
 
 England in Time of War, 1856. i 
 
 The Magyar's New- Year- Eve, "^ \%t^%. - ' 
 
 The Youth of England to Garibaldi's Legion, i860. | 
 
 Alexander Smith, 1 829-1 867. ; 
 
 Poems, 1853. I 
 
 City Poems, 1857. • j 
 
 Edwin of Deira, 1861. i 
 
 Dreamthorp, 1863. | 
 
 A Sumtner in Skye, 1865. I 
 
 Alfred Hagart's Household, 1866. \ 
 
 CHAPTER VII. LATER DEVELOPMENTS. 1 
 
 The Later Pre-Raphaelites. I 
 
 y William Morris, 1834-1896. j 
 
 / The Defence of Guenevere, 1858. i 
 
 The Life and Death of Jason, 1%6-j.y^ ; 
 
 The Earthly Paradise, 1 868- 18 70 V''^ 
 
 Sigurd the Volsimg, 1876. 
 
 The House of the Wolfings, 1888. ' 
 
 News from Nowhere, 1 89 1 . 
 
 The Well at the World's End, 1896. 
 
 The Water of the Wofidrous Lsles, 1897 i 
 
 The Sundering Flood, 1898. * [ 
 
 [Ernest Charles Jones, 18 19- 1868. j 
 
 Songs of Democracy, j 856-1 857. ' i 
 
 Robert Barnabas Brough, 1828-1870. I 
 
 Songs of the Governing Classes, 1855.] j 
 
 Richard Watson Dixon, 1833-1900. ! 
 
 Christ's Company, 1861. '; 
 
 Odes and Eclogues, 1884. ' 
 
 History of the Church of England, 1 878-1902. 
 -'I Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1 837-1 909. 
 
 The Queen Mother, Rosamond, i860. 
 
 Atalanta in Calydon, 1865. j 
 
 Chastelard, 1865. 
 
 Poetns and Ballads, 1866, 1878, 1889. ;
 
 XX CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY 
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne (continued). i 
 
 Songs before Sunrise, 187 1. 1 
 
 Both-well, 1874. I 
 
 Erechtheus, 1876. i 
 
 Songs of the Springtides, 18S0. i 
 Sttidies in Song, 1880. 
 Mary Stuart, 1881. 
 
 Tristram of Lyonesse, 1882. ! 
 
 A Century of Roundels, 1883. j 
 
 Marino Faliero, 1885. i 
 
 Loa-ine, 1887. I 
 
 The Tale of BaUfi, i8q6. j 
 
 Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards, 1 899. ; 
 
 J. B. Leicester Warren (Lord de Tabley), 1835-1895. , 
 
 Philoctetes, 1866. I 
 
 Orestes, i867._ .. ^   ! 
 
 Rehearsals, (8j}>\ | 
 
 Searching the Net, 1873. i 
 
 Orpheus in Thrace, 1901. ' 1 
 
 Arthur O'Shaughnessy, iSj^cjSSi. 
 ^« -£//f on IVomenii-^lo^ 
 Lays of France, 1872.' ' ' 
 Music atid Moonlight, 1874. 
 6'i?«.?-^ (?/ a Worker, 1881. 
 
 Philip Bourke Marston, 1S50-1S87. j 
 
 Song- Tide, 1S71. 
 
 Roden Noel, 1 834-1 S94. : 
 
 Beatrice, 1868. I 
 
 ^ Modern Faust, 18S8. ] 
 
 Frederick Myers, 1 843-1 901. j 
 
 The Celtic Poets. 
 
 Aubrey de Vere the Younger, 1814-1902. 
 
 The Sisters, Inisfail, a7ul other Poems, 1861. j 
 
 The Legends of St Patrick, 1872. 1 
 
 Alexander the Great, 1S74. j 
 
 St Thomas of Canterbury, 1876. \ 
 
 The Foray of Queen Meavc, 1SS2. ' 
 
 Samuel Ferguson, 1810-1886. | 
 
 Lays of the Western Gael, 1865. ! 
 Congal, 1872. 
 Poems, 1880. 
 
 William AUingham, 182 4- 1889. | 
 
 Poems, 1850. ' 
 
 Day and Night Songs, 1854. \ 
 
 Lewis Morris, 1S33-1907. ' 
 Songs of Two Worlds, 1871-1875. 
 
 The Epic of ILades, \^1^-\^11. I 
 
 Songs Unstmg, 1883. , 
 
 Gycia, 1886. I 
 
 Songs of Britain, 18S7. ! 
 
 Thomas Edward Brown, 1S30-1S97. ( 
 
 Fdcs'ie Yarns, 1881. | 
 
 Charles Mackay, 1S14-1889. 
 
 John Stuart Blackie, 1809-1895.
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY xxi \ 
 
 George MacDonald, 1824-1895. l 
 
 Within and Without, 1855. 
 
 Poems, 1857. i 
 
 See also Part II B, Chapter IV. \ 
 
 David Gray, 7838-1861. I 
 
 Robert Buchanan, 1841-1901. 
 
 Idyls and Legends of Inverburn, 1865. ; 
 
 London Poems, 1866. 
 
 No7-th Coast and Qi^isr^^^ems, 1868. ' 
 
 The Book of Ornif-iBj^o'. ' 
 
 Saint Abe and his Seven Wives, 1872.   
 
 Wliite Rose and Red, 1873. ' 
 
 Balder the Beautiful, 1877. 1 
 
 The City of Dream, 1888. 
 
 The Wandering Jew, 1S93. ' 
 
 The Poetry of Pessimism. 
 
 James Thomson, 1834-1882. j 
 
 A Lady of Sorrow, 1 862-1 864. | 
 
 Vafte's Story, 1864. i 
 
 Wcddah and Om-el-Bonain, 1866-1S67. j 
 
 The City of Dreadjul Night, 1874. 
 The Later Poetesses. ,| 
 
 Dinah Maria Craik, 1826- 1887. i 
 
 Eliza Cook, 1818-1S89. j 
 
 Menella Bute Smedley, 1820-1877. j 
 
 Dora Greenwell, 1821-1882.' ] 
 
 Emily Pfeiffer, 1827-1890. ' 
 
 Sarah Williams, 1841-1868. i 
 
 Isabella Harwood, 1840?- 1888- ': 
 
 George Eliot, 18 19-1880. ' 
 
 The Spanish Gypsy, 1868. 
 
 The Legend of Jubal, 1869. 
 
 See also Part I, Chapter II, and Part II B, Chapter III. 
 Adelaide Anne Procter, 1825-1864. 
 
 Legends and Lyrics, 1858. 
 
 A Chaplet of Verses, 1862. 
 Jean Ingelow, 1820-1S97. 
 
 Poems, 1863, 1876, 1885. 
 
 A Story of Doom, 1867. 
 Augusta Webster, 1837-1894. 
 
 Dramatic Studies, 1866. 
 
 A WomoM^-Sold^ 1867. 
 
 Portrait s)^^l6f 
 
 The Auspicious Day, 1872. 
 
 /« a Day, 1882. 
 
 The Sentence, 1887. 
 Constance Naden, 1858-1889. 
 Miscellaneous Poets. ' 
 William Cory, 1823- 1892. 
 
 lonica, 1858. 
 Francis Turner Palgrave, 1 824-1897. 
 William Ernest Henley, 1 849-1905. 
 
 A Book of Verses, 1888. 
 
 The Song of the Sword, 1892. 
 
 For England's Sake, 1900.
 
 XXll CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY 
 
 William Ernest Henley {continued). 
 
 Hawthorn and Lavender, 1801. 
 
 See also Part HI, Chapter IL 
 Robert, Earl of Lytton (Owen Meredith), 1831-1891. 
 
 Clytemnestra, 1853. 
 
 Lucile, i860. 
 
 Fables in Sons;, 1874. 
 
 Glenaveril, 1885. 
 
 After Paradise, or Legends of Exile, 1SS7. 
 Edwin Arnold, 1832-1904. 
 
 The Light of Asia, 1879. 
 
 Pearls of the Faith, 1883? 
 
 The Light of the World, 1891. 
 Frederick Locker- Lampson, 1821-1895. 
 
 London Lyrics, 1857. 
 Mortimer Collins, i8'27-i876. 
 Charles Stuart Calverley, 183 1- 1884. 
 
 Fly Leaves, 1872. 
 James Kenneth Stephen, 1859-1893. 
 
 Lapsus Calami, 1891. 
 R. F. Murray, 1863- 1894. 
 Henry Sambrooke Leigh, 1837-18S3. 
 
 Carols of Cockayne, 1869. 
 Ernest Dawson, r867-it|00. 
 Francis Thompson, 1859-1907. 
 
 Poems, 1893. 
 
 Sister Songs, 1895. 
 
 Neiv Poems, 1897. 
 John Davidson, 1S57-1909. 
 
 Fleet Street Eclogues, 1S93-1896. 
 
 Ballads and Songs, 1894. 
 
 PART II B. 
 
 CHAPTER L AFTER SCOTT. 
 
 Henry Fothergill Chorley, 1808-1872. 
 Thomas Love Peacock, 1 785-1 866. 
 Headlong Hall, 18 16. 
 Melincourt, 1817. 
 Nightmare Abbey, 18 18. 
 Maid Marian, 1822. 
 The Misfortunes of Elfin, 1829. 
 Crotchet Castle, 1831. 
 Gryll Grange, 1861. 
 Imitators of Scott. 
 
 William Harrison Ainsworth, 1805- 1882. 
 Rookivood, 1834. 
 Jack Sheppard, 1839. 
 The Tower of London, 1840. 
 Old St Pants, 1841. 
 Windsor Castle, 1843.
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY xxiii 
 
 Horace Smith, 17 79- 1849. 
 
 Rejected Addresses (with James Smith), 1812. 
 
 Brambletye House, 1826. 
 G. P. R. James, 1801-1860. 
 Novelists of Scottish Life. 
 
 John Gibson Lockhart, 1 794-1854. 
 
 Valerius, 18-21. ^ 
 
 Adam Blair, 1822. 
 
 See also Part HI, Chapters I and IL 
 John Wilson, 1 785-1854. 
 
 Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life, 1822. 
 
 The Trials of Margaret Lindsay, 1823. 
 See also Part III, Chapter II. 
 Susan Ferrier, 1782-1854. 
 David Macbeth Moir, 1798-1851. 
 
 Mansie IVauch, 1828. 
 John Gait, 1779-1839. 
 
 Annals of the Parish, 1821. 
 
 The Ayrshire Legatees, 1821. 
 
 The Entail, 1823. 
 Irish Writers. 
 
 William Carleton, 1 794-1 869. 
 
 The Pilgrimage to Lough Derg, 1828. 
 
 Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, 1830-1833. 
 
 Fardarougha the Miser, 1837-1838. 
 
 Vale7itine M'^Clntchy, 1845. 
 
 Parra Sastha, 1845. 
 
 The Emigrants of Ahadarra, 1847. 
 
 The Tithe Proctor, 1849. 
 
 Willy Reilly, 1855. 
 
 Autobiography (in Life by D. J. O'Donoghue), 1896. 
 John Banim, 1798-1842. 
 
 Tales by the O'Hara Family (with Michael Banim, 1796-1874), 
 1825-1827. 
 Gerald Griffin, 1803-1840. 
 
 The Collegians, 1829. 
 William Maginn, 1793-1842. 
 [Theodore Plook, 1798-1S41. 
 
 Sayings and Doings, 1824-1831. 
 
 Maxwell, 1830. 
 
 Gilbert Gtcrney, 1836. 
 Jack Bray, 1837.] 
 Francis Mahony, 1804-1866. 
 
 The Reliqnes of Father Prout, 1836. 
 T. Crofton Croker, 1798-1854. 
 
 Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, 1825. 
 
 Legends of the Lakes, 1829. 
 Samuel Lover, 1797-1868. 
 
 Rory O'More, 1837. 
 
 Handy Andy, 1842. 
 Charles Lever, 1806-1872. 
 
 Harry Lorreqtier, 1839. 
 
 Charles CMalley, 1841. 
 Jack Hinton, 1843. 
 
 Tom Burke of Ours. 1844..
 
 XXIV CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY 
 
 Charles Lever {continued). 
 
 Cornelius O'Dowdupon Men, Women, and other Things^ 1864-1865. 
 
 Tony Butler, 1865. 
 
 Sir Brook Fossbrooke, 1866. 
 Joseph Sheridan le Fanu, 1814-1873. I 
 
 Novelists of War. 
 
 William Hamilton Maxwell, 1792-1850. 
 
 Stories of Waterloo, 1834. 
 
 The Bivouac, 1837. 
 George Robert Gleig, 1796-1888. | 
 
 7he Stibaltern, 1826. 
 
 Life of Wellington, 1862. 
 Thomas Hamilton, 1 789-1842. 
 
 Cyril Thornton, 1827. 
 James Grant, 1822-1887. 
 
 The Romance of War, 1845. 
 Novelists of Sea Life. 
 
 Frederick Marryat, 1 792-1 848. 
 
 Newton Foster, 1832. 
 
 Peter Simple, 1834. 
 
 facob Faithful, 1834. 
 
 Japhet in Search of a Father, 1836. i 
 
 Midshiptnan Easy, 1836. i 
 
 Masterman Ready, 1841. •, 
 
 W. N. Glascock, 1787- 1847. 
 Frederick Chamier, 1796-1870. 
 
 Ben Brace, 1836. 
 
 The Arethusa, 1837. 
 
 Tom Bowling, 1841. ' 
 
 Michael Scott, 1789-1835. 
 
 Tom Cringles Log, 18 29- 1830. \ 
 
 The Cruise of the Midge, 1836. ] 
 
 James Hannay, 1827-1873. 1 
 
 Singleton Fontettoy, 1850. j 
 
 See also Part IH, Chapter II. ! 
 
 Thomas Hope, 1 770-1831. j 
 
 Anastasius, 1819. ' 
 
 James Morier, 1780?-! 849. 
 
 Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, 1824. I 
 
 Ayesha, the Maid of Kars, 1834. 
 
 Samuel Warren, 1 807-1 870. 1 
 
 Passages from the Diary of a late Physician, 183 2- 1838. I 
 
 Ten Thousand a Year, 1839-1841. 1 
 
 Bulwer Lytton (Lord Lytton), 1 803-1 873. \ 
 
 Falkland, 1827. 
 
 Pel ham, 1828. ; 
 
 Paul Clifford, 1830. . ; 
 
 Eugene Aram, 18^2. 
 
 The Last Days of Pompeii, 1834. ; 
 
 Rienzi, 1835. . 
 
 Zanoni, 1842. < 
 
 The Last of the Barons, 1 843. ' 
 
 Harold, 1848. : 
 
 The Caxtons, 1849. (
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY XXV 
 
 Bulwer Lytton (Lord Lytton) (continued). ; 
 
 My Novel, 1853. __. - 
 
 What will He do with It? 1859. '• 
 
 The Coming Race, 1871. 
 
 Kenelm Chillingly, 1S73. 
 
 See also Part II A, Chapter I. 
 Benjamin Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield), 1804-1S81. 
 
 Vivian Grey, 1826-1827. 
 
 The Young Duke, 1S31. 
 
 Conta7-ini Fleming, 1832. 
 
 The JVondj-ous Tale of Ahoy, 1833. 
 
 Venetia, 1837. 
 
 Henrietta Temple, 1837. 
 
 Cotiingsby, 1844. 
 
 Sybil, 1845. 
 
 Tancred, 18^. 
 
 Lothair, t_^'joi,^ 
 
 £nitymion^'TS§o. 
 
 CHAPTER II. DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 
 
 ^Charles Dickens, 1812-1870. 
 
 Sketches by Boz, 1836. 
 
 The Pickwick Papers, 1 836-1 837. 
 
 Oliver Twist, 1837-1838. 
 
 Nicholas Nickleby, 1 838-1839. 
 
 The Old Curiosity Shop, 1 840-1 841. 
 
 Barnaby Rudge, 1841. 
 
 Martin Chuzzlewit, 1843-1844. 
 
 Dombey and Son, 1846-1848. 
 
 David Copperfield, 1849- 1850. 
 
 Bleak House, 1852-1853. 
 
 Hard Times, 1854. 
 
 Little Dorrit, 1855-1857. 
 
 A Tale of Two Cities, 1859. 
 
 Our Mutual Friend, rRfi,|-r86 ^ 
 
 The Mystery of Edwin Droodf'iS'joi^ . 
 
 Robert Smith Surtees, 1 803-1 864. V._-*i«' ' j 
 
 Jorrocks^s Jaunts, 1838. 
 
 Hundley Cross, 1843. 
 Charles Whitehead, 1804-1862. 
 
 The Solitary, 1831. ! 
 
 Lives and Exploits of English Highwaymen, Pirates and Robbers, 1834. 
 
 The Autobiography of Jack Ketch, 1834. ' 
 
 Richard Savage, 1842. \ 
 
 The Earl of Essex, 1843. ^ 
 
 William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811-1863. I 
 
 The Great Hoggarty Diamond, 1841. 
 
 Barjy Lyndon, 1844. i 
 
 Vanity Fair, 1847- 1848. 1 
 
 The Book of Snobs, 1848 (in Punch, 1846-1847). 
 
 Pendennis, 1849-1850. 
 
 The Efiglish Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, 185 1. 
 
 Esmond, 1852. I 
 
 The Nezvcomes, 1853-1855. j 
 
 W. C 1
 
 XX vi CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY 
 
 William Makepeace Thackeray [contiiiMed). 
 
 The Four Georges, 1 85 5-1 856. -^'^ — -^'^ 
 
 The Virginians, 185 7-1 859. 
 
 The Adventures nf Philip, 1861-1862. 
 
 Denis Duval, 1867. 
 George du Maurier, 1834-1896. 
 
 Peter Ibbetson, 1891. 
 
 Trilby, 1894. 
 
 CHAPTER in. THE WOMEN NOVELISTS. 
 
 Anna Elizabeth Bray, 1 789-1883. 
 
 77^-? Protestant, 1838. 
 Lady Georgina Fullerton, iSii-iSSs. 
 
 Ellen Middleton, 1844. 
 Elizabeth Sewell, 1815-1906. 
 
 Amy Herbert, 1844. 
 Catherine Gore, 1799-1861. 
 Anne Marsh, 1791-1874. 
 
 T-dio Old Men's Tales, 18)4. 
 Frances TroUope, 1 780-1863. 
 
 The Domestic Manners oj the Americans, 1832. 
 Charlotte Bronte, 1816-1855. 
 Jane Eyre, 1847. 
 Shirley, 1849. 
 
 Villette, 1853. 
 
 The Professor, 1857. 
 Emily Bronte, 1818-1848. 
 
 IVutherin^ Heights, 1847. 
 
 See also Part II A, Chapter III. 
 Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, 1810-1S65. 
 
 Mary Barton, 1848. 
 
 Ruth, 1853. 
 
 Cranford, 1853. 
 
 North and South, 1855. 
 
 Sylvia's Lovers, 1863. 
 
 Cousin Phillis, 1 863-1 864. 
 
 \\'ives and Daughters, 1866, 
 George Eliot, 1819-1880. 
 
 Scenes of Clerical Life, 1857. 
 
 Adam Bede, 1859. i 
 
 The Mill on the Floss, i860. 
 
 Silas Marncr, 1861. 
 
 Romola, 1863. 
 
 Felix Holt, 1866. 
 
 Middlemarch, 1871-1872. 
 
 Daniel Deronda, 1876. tt » r-u . it-tt 
 
 See also Part I, Chapter II, and Part II A, Chapter VII. 
 
 Mrs Henry Wood, 1814-1887. 
 East Lynne, 1861. 
 Mrs Halliburton's Troubles, 1862. 
 The Chaftnings, 1S62. 
 Johnny Ludlow, 1874-1885. 
 ^^Dinah Maria Craik, 1826-1887- 
 
 John Halifax, Gentleman, 1856. .
 
 ^ 
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY xxvii \ 
 
 Charlotte Mary Yonge, iS^s-igoi. 
 
 Tk£ Heir of Reddyffe, tS^^. \ \ -^^~~ 
 Margaret Oliphant, 1828-1897. ' ' I 
 
 Margaret Maitland, 1849. 
 
 The Chronicles of Carlingford , 1863- 1876. ' 
 
 See also Part III, Chapter I. i 
 
 CHAPTER IV. THE LATER FICTION. | 
 
 Charles Reade, 1814-18S4. 
 
 Peg Woffington, 1853. ; 
 
 Christie Johnstone, 1853. i 
 
 It is Never too Late to Memi, 1856. -'.^_—~- 
 
 The Cloister and the Hearth, 1861. 
 
 Hard Cash, 1863. 
 
 Griffith Gaunt, 1866. 
 
 Put Yourself in his PlaceC^Sj^ 
 
 A Terrible Temptation, 1871F: 
 Charles Kingsley, 1819-1875. I 
 
 Yeast, 1848. 1 
 
 The Sainfs Tragedy, 1848. I 
 
 Alton Locke, 1850. i 
 
 Hypatia, 1853. I 
 
 Westward ZT*? / 1855. 
 
 The Water Babies, 1863. 
 
 Hereward the Wake, 1866. 
 Henry Kingsley, 1 830-1876. 
 
 The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn, 1859. 
 
 Ravefishoe, 1862. 
 Francis Smedley, 1818-1864. 
 
 Frank Fairleigh, 1850. 
 
 Harry Coverdale's Courtship, 1854. 
 Albert Smith, 1816-1860. j 
 
 The Adventures of Mr Ledbury, 1844. \ 
 
 The Scattergood Family, 1845. ' 
 
 The Marchioness of Brinvilliers, 1 846. i 
 
 Christopher Tadpole, 1848; | 
 
 George Alfred Lawrence, 1827-1876. > 
 
 Guy Livingstone, 1857. j 
 
 Thomas Hughes, 1823-1896. - 
 
 Tom Bro%vn's School Days, 1857. ' 
 
 -G. J. Whyte-Melville, 1821-1878. j 
 
 Digby Grand, 1853.- : 
 
 Kate Coventry, 1855. \ 
 
 Holmby House, i860. ' j 
 
 The Gladiators, 1863. ] 
 
 Wilkie Collins, 1 824-1889. 1 
 
 Antotiina, 1850. ,' 
 
 The Woman in White, i860. j 
 
 Armadale, 1866. ; 
 
 The Moonstone, 1868. \ 
 
 Anthony Trollope, 181 5- 1882. j 
 
 The Macdermots of Ballycloran, 1847. j 
 
 The Warden, 1855. 
 
 Barcjiester Towers, 1857.
 
 XXVlU CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY 
 
 Anthony Trollope (continued). ! 
 
 Doctor Thorne, 1858. 1 
 
 The Three Clerks, 1858. 1 
 
 Framley Parsonage, 1861. j 
 
 The Small House at Allin^ton, 1864. j 
 
 Can You forgive Her? 1864. | 
 
 The Last Chronicle of Barset, 1867. i 
 
 Pkineas Finn, 1869., I 
 
 Phineas Redux, 1874. 
 
 The Prime Minister, 1876. ; 
 
 Autobiography, 18S3. I 
 
 George Meredith, 1828-1909. j 
 
 Poems, 1851. 
 
   I 'The Shaving of Shagpat, 1 856. 
 
 The Ordeal of Richard Feveril, 1859. • i 
 
 Evan Harriftgton, i86i. 
 
 Modern Love, 1862. 
 
 Emilia in England [Sandra Belloni], 1864. . 1 
 
 Rhoda Fleming, 1865. 
 
 Vittoria, 1867. I 
 
 The Adventures of Harry Richmond, 1871. j 
 
 Beauchamfs Career, 1876. ' 
 
 The Egoist, 1879. ' 
 
 The Tragic Comedians, 1880. 
 
 Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, 1883. 
 
 Diana of the Crossways, 1885. I 
 
 Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life, 1887. 
 
 A Reading of Earth, 1 888. 
 
 One of our Conqtterors, 1 89 1 . j 
 
 The Amazing Marriage, 1895. | 
 
 Odes in contribution to the Song of French History, 1898. i 
 
 A Reading of Life, 1901. | 
 
 James Payn, 1830-1898. j 
 
 Lj)st Sir Massingbred, 1864. , 
 
 By Proxy, 1878'. 
 
 George Macdonald, 1 824-1 905. 
 David Elginbrod, 1863. 
 Alec Forbes, 1865. 
 
 Robert Falconer, 1868. 1 
 
 Malcolm, 1875. j 
 
 The Marquis of Lassie, 1877. 
 
 Sir Gibbie, 1879. 4 
 
 Donal Grant, 18S3. i 
 
 William Alexander. 
 
 Johnnie Gibb of Gushetneuk, 187 1. 
 
 William Sharp, 1S56-1905. 
 
 The Dominion of Dreams, 1895. 
 The Sin-Eater, 1899. 
 
 The New Romantic Novel. 
 
 Richard Blackmore, 1825-1900. 
 Lorna Doone, 1869. 
 The Maid of Sker, 1872. 
 Oliver Madox Brown, 185.5-1874. 
 Gabriel Denver, 1873. 
 The Dwale Bluth, 1876.
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY xxix ', 
 
 j 
 
 William Black, i84T-t898. j 
 
 A Daughter of Heth, 1871. j 
 
 A Princess of Thule, 1S73. k 
 
 Walter Besant, 1836-1901. j 
 Ready-Money Mortiboy (with James Rice, 1843-1882), 1872. 4 
 
 The Golden Butterfly (with Rice), 1876. j 
 
 All Sorts and Conditions of Men, 1882. ] 
 
 Dorothy Forster, 1884. ' 
 The Children of Gibeon, 1886. ^ 
 Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850-1894. ^ 
 
 An Inland Voyage, 1878. 1 
 
 Virginibus Puerisque, 1881. ' 
 
 Fa?niliar Studies of Men and Books, 1883. » 1 
 
 New Arabian Nights, 1882. ' ^ 
 
 Jreasure Island, 1883. \ 
 
 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr^yde, 1886. ,; 
 
 Kidnapped, 1886. -f j 
 
 The Master of Ballantrae, 1889. '^ ' 
 
 The Wrecker (with Mr Lloyd Osbourne), 1892. ! 
 
 Catriona, 1893. \ 
 
 Island Nights Entertainments, 1893. i 
 
 The Ebb Tide (with Mr Lloyd Osbourne), 1894. j 
 
 Weir of Hermiston, 1896. i 
 St Ives, 1899. 
 In the South Seas, 1900. 
 
 i 
 John Watson, 1850-1907. 
 
 Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, 1894. 
 
 The Days of Atild Lang Syne, 1895. I 
 
 George Douglas Brown, 1869- 1902. i 
 
 The House with the Green Shutters, 1901. ; 
 
 Joseph Henry Shorthouse, 1834- 1903. '. 
 
 fohn Inglesani, 1881. : 
 
 Sir Percival, 1886. 1 
 
 Samuel Butler, 1835-1902. ' 
 
 Erewhon, 1872. ; 
 
 Ereivhon Revisited, 1901. ; 
 
 The Way of all Flesh, 1903. i 
 
 George Gissing, 1857-1903. \ 
 
 The Unclassed, 1884. i 
 
 Demos, 1 886. ' 
 
 New Grub Street, 1891. f 
 
 The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, 1903. 
 
 Writers for Children. j 
 
 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), 1 832-1898. j 
 
 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865. 
 
 Through the Looking- Glass, 1871. 
 
 Margaret Gatty, 1809-1873. \ 
 
 Fairy Godmothers and other Tales, 185 1. | 
 
 Aunt Judy's Tales, 1859. j 
 
 Juliana Horatia Ewing, 1841-1885. 
 
 The Land of Lost Toys, 1869. \ 
 
 Madam Liberality, 1873. ; 
 
 Jan of the Windmill, 1876. ' 
 
 We and the World, 1877-1879. \ 
 Jackanapes , 1879.
 
 XXX CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY 
 
 PART III. 
 
 CHAPTER L HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. 
 
 § I. The Historians. 
 
 Sharon Turner, 1 768-1847. 
 
 History of the Anglo-Saxons, 1799-1805. 
 J. M. Kemble, 1807-1857. 
 
 The Saxons in England, 1849. 
 Francis Palgrave, 1788-1861. 
 
 History of iVor/nandy and of England, 1851-1864. 
 [The Philologists. 
 
 Joseph Bosworth, 1789-1876. 
 Benjamin Thorpe, 1782-1870. 
 Richard Chenevix Trench, 1807-1886. 
 On the Study of Words, 1851. 
 English Past and Present, 1855. 
 
 See also Part II A, Chapter III. 
 Friedrich Max Miiller, 1 823-1 900.] 
 
 Henry Hallam, 1777-1859. 
 
 The State of Europe during the Aliddle Ages, 1S18. 
 The Constitutional Histo7y of England, 1827. 
 An Introduction to the Literature of Europe, 1837-1839. 
 John Lingard, 1771-1851. 
 
 History of England, 18 19-1830. 
 Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1800-1859. 
 Critical and Historical Essays, 1843. 
 History of England, 1 848-1 860. 
 
 See also Part II A, Chapter III. 
 Writers on Ancient History. 
 Thomas Arnold, 1 795-1 842. 
 
 History of Rome, 1 838-1843. 
 See also Part I, Chapter I. 
 Connop Thirhvall, 1797- 1875. 
 
 History of Greece, 1835-1847. 
 See also Part I, Chapter I. 
 George Grote, 1 794-1871. 
 
 History of Greece, 1846-1856. 
 George Comewall Lewis, 1806- 1863. 
 
 On the Government of Dependeticies, 184T. 
 On the Infltience of Authority in Matters of Opinion, 1844. 
 Inquiry oti the Credibility of Early Roman History, 1855. 
 Charles Merivale, 1 808-1 893. 
 
 History of the Romans under the Empire, 1850-1862. 
 George Finlay, 1 799-1875. 
 
 History of Greece from its Conquest by the Romans, 1844-1861. 
 Henry Hart Milman, 1791-1868. 
 History of the Jrujs, 1829. 
 History of Christianity, 184O. 
 History of Latin Christianity, 1850-1855. 
 See also Part II A, Chapter I.
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY XXXI 
 
 James Anthony Froude, 1818-1894. 
 
 The Nemesis of Faith, 1849. 
 
 History of Ens;land, 1856-1870. 
 
 Short Studies in Great Subjects, 1S67-1883. 
 
 The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, 1872-1874. 
 
 Thomas"' Carlyle, 1882- 1884. 
 
 Oceania, 1886. 
 
 The Two Chiefs of Dtmboy, 1889. 
 The Oxford Historians. 
 
 Edward Augustus Freeman, iS'ZS-iSg'z. 
 
 History of the Norman Conquest, 1S67-1879. 
 
 The Reign of William Rufus, 1883. 
 
 The History of Sicily, 1891-1894. 
 William Stubbs, 1825-1901. 
 
 The Constitutiotial History of England, 1874-1878. 
 
 The Early Plantagenets, 1876. 
 John Richard Green, 1837-1883. 
 
 A Short History of the English People, 1874. 
 
 A History of the English People, 1877-1880. 
 
 The Making of England, 1881. 
 [Charles Henry Pearson, 1830-1894. 
 
 The Early and Middle Ages of England, 1861. 
 
 Natio7ial Life and Character, 1893.] 
 Mandell Creighton, 1843-1 901. 
 
 Simon de Montfort, 1876. 
 
 History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation, 1882- 
 1897. 
 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, 1829-1902. 
 
 Hist07'y of England from the Accession of James I... to the Year 
 1656, 1863-1901. 
 
 John Robert Seeley, 1834-1895. 
 
 Ecce Hotno, 1866. 
 
 The Life and Times of Stein, 1878. 
 
 Natural Religion, 1882. 
 
 The Expansion of England, 1883. 
 
 The Growth of British Policy, 1895. 
 W. E. H. Lecky, 1838-1903. 
 
 The Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, 1865. 
 
 History of European Morals, 1869. 
 
 History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 1878-1890. 
 
 Democracy and Liberty, 1896. 
 John Hill Burton, 1809-1881. 
 
 History of Scotland, 1867-1870. 
 John Dalberg Acton (Lord Acton), 1834-1902. 
 Frederick William Maitland, 1 850-1 906. 
 
 The History of English Law before Edward I (with Sir F . Pollock) .1895. 
 
 Domesday Book and Beyond, 1897. 
 
 Township and Borotigh, 1898. 
 
 Roman Canon Law in England, 1898. 
 Archibald Alison, 1 792-1867. 
 
 History of Europe during the French Revolution, 1S33-1842. 
 Harriet Martineau, 1802-1876. 
 
 History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace, 1849-1850. 
 See also Part I, Chapter IL
 
 ■! 
 
 XXXll CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY 
 
 Military Historians. 
 
 W. F. P. Napier, 1785-1860. 
 
 History of the War in the Peninsula, 1828-1840. 
 Alexander William Kinglake, 1 809-1891. 
 
 Edihen, 1844. 
 
 The Invasion of the Crimea, 1 863-1 887. 
 Edward Bruce Hamley, 1824-1893. 
 John William Kaye, 1814-1876. 
 
 History of the Sepoy War in India, 1 864-1 876. 
 G. F. R. Henderson. 
 
 Stofuwall Jackson and the Civil War, 1898. 
 
 § 2. The Biographers. i 
 
 John Gibson Lockhart, 1794-1854. j 
 
 Life of Burns, 1828. ' 
 
 Life of Scott, 1S36-1838. \ 
 
 See also Part H B, Chapter I, and Part HI, Chapter II. ( 
 
 Thomas Moore, 1 779-1852. \ 
 
 Life of Byron, 1830. I 
 
 Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, 1815-1881. , 
 
 Life of Thomas Arnold, 1844. ] 
 
 See also Part I, Chapter I. ' 
 
 George Henry Lewes, 181 7-1878. j 
 
 Life of Goethe, 1855. 1 
 See also Part I, Chapter II. 
 
 John Forster, 1812-1876. j 
 
 Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith, 1S48. ' 
 Sir John Eliot, 1S64. 
 Life of Landor, 1869. 
 Life oj Dickens, 1 872-1874. 
 Life of Swift, 1875. 
 
 David Masson, 1822-1907. 
 
 Life of Milton, 1859-1880. 
 
 Margaret Oliphant, 1828-1S97. I 
 
 Life of Edward Irving, 1862. ' 
 
 Memoirs of Laurence Oliphant, 1891. 1 
 
 William Blackwood and his Sons, 1S97. , 
 
 See also Part II B, Chapter III. j 
 
 Samuel Smiles, 1812-1904. | 
 
 Life of George Stephensoti, 1857. | 
 
 Life of a Scotch Naturalist, 1876. | 
 
 Lives of the Engineers, 1877. ' 
 
 Robert Dick, Baker, of Thurso, 1878. j 
 
 Memoir of John Murray, 1891. , 
 
 CHAPTER n. LITERARY AND AESTHETIC . 
 
 CRITICISM. ' 
 
 § I. Literary Criticism. j 
 
 John Wilson, 1785-1854. j 
 The Isle of Palms, 1812. 
 
 The City of the Plague, 18 16. I 
 
 Noctes Ambrosianae, 1822-1833. ,
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY xxxiil 
 
 John Wilson {contifiued). 
 
 The Recreations of Christopher North, 1S43. 
 See also Part II B, Chapter I. 
 John Gibson Lockhart, 1 794-1 854. 
 
 See also Part II B, Chapter I, and Part III, Chapter I. 
 Leigh Hunt, 1 784-1 S59. 
 
 Imagination and Fancy, 1844. 
 Wit and Humour, 1846. 
 Men, Women, and Books, 1847. 
 A utobiography, 1850. 
 Thomas de Quincey, 1 785-1859. 
 
 Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1822. 
 Autobiographic Sketches, 1853.. 
 William Johnson Fox, 1786- 1864, 
 Abraham Hayward, 1801-1884. 
 The Art of Dining, 1852. 
 Biographical and Critical Essays, 1858, 
 James Hannay, 1827-1873. 
 Satire and Satirists, 1854. 
 
 See also Part II B, Chapter I. 
 George Brimley, 1819-1857. 
 Eneas Sweetland Dallas, 1828-1879. 
 
 The Gay Science, 1866. 
 Shakespearean Critics. 
 
 John Payne Collier, 1789-1883. 
 
 History of English Dramatic Poetry, 183 1. 
 Notes and Emendations to the Plays of Shakespeare, 18:5?. 
 J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, 1820-1889. 
 Samuel Weller Singer, 1783-1858. 
 
 The Text of Shakespeare Vindicated, 1853. 
 Howard Staunton, 1810-1874. 
 Alexander Dyce, 1798-1S69. 
 Charles Cowden-Clarke, 1 787-1877. 
 Mary Cowden-Clarke, 1 809-1898. 
 
 The Girlhood of Shakespeare s Heroines, 185 1. 
 Anna BrowTiell Jameson, 1 794-1860. 
 
 Characteristics of Shakespeare's Women, 1832. 
 Sacred and Legendary Art, 1848. 
 Helena Savile Faucit (Lady Martin), 1817-1898. 
 
 On some of Shakespeare's Female Characters, 1885. 
 
 James Spedding, 1 808-1 881. 
 
 Evenings with a Revieiver, 1848. 
 
 Letters and Life of Bacon, 1861-1874. 
 John Brown, 1810-1882. 
 
 Horae Subsecivae, 1858-1882. 
 Matthew Arnold, iS22-i'888. 
 
 On Translating Homer, 1861. 
 
 Essays in Criticism, 1865, 1888. 
 
 The Sttidy of Celtic Literature, 1S67. 
 
 Culture and Anarchy, 1869,^ -.. 
 
 St Paul and Protestantisin, 1870?' 
 
 Friendship's Garlattd, \%fr>-.^ 
 
 Literature and Dogma, 1873. 
 
 God and the Bible, 1875.
 
 XXXIV CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY I 
 
 i 
 Matthew Arnold (contimied). 
 
 Mixed Essays, 1879. 
 
 Irish Essays, 1882. \ 
 
 Discourses in America, 1885. I 
 
 See also Part II A, Chapter VL \ 
 Francis Turner Palgrave, 1824- 1897. 
 John Skelton, 183 1-1897. 
 
 Nugae Criticae, 1862. '< 
 
 A Campaigner at Home, 1865. ; 
 
 Maitland of Lethington, 1887-1888. ! 
 
 Mary Stuart, 1893. 1 
 
 The Table Talk of Shirley, 1895. ' 
 
 A. K. H. Boyd, 1 825-1 S99. 1 
 
 Recreations of a Country Parson, 1859. ' 
 
 Graver Thoitghts of a Country Parson, 1862. i 
 
 Critical Essays by a Country Parson, 1865. I 
 
 John Addington Symonds, 1849-1893.   
 
 The Renaissance in Italy, 1875- 1886. ! 
 
 Essays Specidative and Suggestive, 1890. ' i 
 William Ernest Henley, 1849-1903. 
 
 Views and Reviews, 1S90. i 
 
 See also Part II A, Chapter VII. I 
 
 Richard Holt Hutton, 1826-1897. j 
 
 Essays, Theological and Literary, 187 1. ] 
 
 Criticisms on Contemporary Thought and Thinkers, 1894. i 
 
 Leslie Stephen, 1832-1904. ! 
 
 Hours in a Library, 1874-1879. 
 
 English Thou:^ht in the Eighteenth Century, 1S76. \ 
 
 Studies of a Biographer, 1S98. ' 
 
 The English Utilitarians, 1900. 
 
 Richard Garnett, 1835-1906. ' 
 
 Primula and other Lyrics, 1858. 1 
 
 lo in Egypt, 1859. 
 
 CarlyU, 1887. 
 
 § 2. Aesthetic Criticism. 
 Benjamin Haydon, 1786-1846. 
 
 Autobiography, 1853. 
 John Ruskin, 1819-1900. 
 
 Modern Painters, 1 843-1 860. 
 
 The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849. 
 
 The Stones of Venice, 1851-1853. 
 
 Pre-Raphaelitism, 1851. 
 
 Lectures on Architecture and Painting, 1854. I 
 
 The Political Economy of Art, 1857. I 
 
 Unto this Last [i860], 1862. ' 
 
 Muncra Pulvefts^^d'i-x'&f)-^, 1872. i 
 
 Sesame and Lilies, 1865. 
 
 The Crown oj Wild Olive, 1866. 
 
 Time and Tide bv Wear and Tyne, 1867. j 
 
 Lectures on ArtL^iSjajt, \ 
 
 Fors Clavigera, V8ff-^r<S84. 1 
 
 Praeterita, 1 885- 1 889. 
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828-1883.   
 
 Hind and Soul, 1S50. 
 
 See also Part II A, Chapter VI. ^
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY XXXV 
 
 Walter Pater, 1839-1894. 
 
 Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 1873. 
 
 Marius the Epicurean, 1885. 
 
 Imaginary Portraits, 1887. 
 
 Appreciations, 1889. 
 
 Plato and Platonism, 1893. 
 
 Gaston de Latour, 1896. 
 
 CHAPTER III. MISCELLANEOUS PROSE. 
 
 Walter Savage Landor, 1775-1864. 
 Gebir, 1798. 
 Count Julian, 1 8 1 2 . 
 Imaginary Conversations, 1824-1853. 
 Pericles and Aspasia, 1836. 
 The Pentameron, 1837. 
 Andrea of Hungary, Giovanna of Naples, and Fra Rupert : a Trilogy, 
 
 1839-1841. 
 The Siege of Ancona, 1846. 
 Hellenics, 1847. 
 
 The last Fruit off an Old Tree, 1853. 
 Heroic Idyls, 1863. 
 Mary Russell Mitford, 1 786-1855. 
 Our Village, 1 824-1832. 
 Recollections of a Literary Life, 1852. 
 See also Part II A, Chapter I. 
 Julius Hare, 1795-1855- 
 
 Guesses at Truth (with Augustus Hare, 1792-1834), 1827. 
 See also Part I, Chapter I. 
 Arthur Helps, 1813-1875. 
 
 Friends in Council, 1847-1859. 
 Companions of my Solitude, 1851. 
 William Rathbone Greg, 1809-1881. 
 The Creed of Christendom, 185 1. 
 Enigmas of Life, 1872. 
 William Brlghty Rands, 1823-1882. 
 Lilliput Levee, 1864. 
 
 Henry Holbeach, Student in Life and Philosophy, 1865. 
 Views and Opinions, 1866. 
 Chaucer's England, 1869. 
 Travellers and Explorers. 
 
 Amelia Blandford Edwards, 1831-1892. 
 
 A Thousand Miles up the Nile, i%1'j. 
 F. L. M^Clintock, 1819-1907. 
 
 The Voyage of the Fox, 1859. 
 Robert Curzon (Baron Zouche), 1810-1873. 
 
 Visits to Monasteries in the Levant, 1849. 
 David Livingstone, 18 13-1873. 
 
 Missionary Travels m South Africa, 1857. 
 Henry Morton Stanley, 1841-1904. 
 How ] fotind Livingstone, 1^7^. 
 Through the Dark Continent^ 1878. 
 In Darkest Africa, 1890.
 
 xxxvi CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY I 
 
 John Hanning Speke, 1827-1864. : 
 
 Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, 1863. j 
 
 Samuel Baker, 1 821-1893. ! 
 
 The Albert N'yanza, 1S66. i 
 
 The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, 1867. i 
 Is7nailia, 1874. 
 
 Richard Burton, 1 821-1890. 
 
 A Pilgrimage to El-Medinah afid Meccah, 1855-1856. j 
 
 The Arabian Nights, 1885-1888. \ 
 
 Edward William Lane, 1 801- 18 76. i 
 
 Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 1836. j 
 
 George Borrow, 1 803-1 881. | 
 
 The Zincali, 1841. ] 
 
 The Bible in Spain, 1843. ' 
 
 Lavengro, 1851. ' 
 The Romany Rye. iS^J. 
 Wild Wales, 1862. 
 
 Laurence OliphapJ^,^ 1829- 1888. \ 
 
 Piccadilly, 'xZ-iO* I 
 
 Altiora Petb, 1883. j 
 
 Episodes in a Life of Adventure, 1887. ! 
 
 Lafcadio Hearn, 1 850-1904. | 
 
 Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 1894. \ 
 
 Kokoro, 1896. ] 
 
 Gleanings in Buddha- Fields, 1897. j 
 
 Japan : an Attempt at Interpretation, 1904. ; 
 
 The Literature of Sport. 
 
 William Scrope, 1 772-1852. | 
 
 The Art of Deer-Stalking, 1838. j 
 
 John Colquhoun, 1 805-1 885. ' 
 
 The Moor and the Loch, 1840. ; 
 
 Charles St John, 1809-1856. 
 
 Wild Sports atid Natural History of the Highlands, 1846. ' 
 
 A Tour in Sutherlandshire, 1849. ] 
 Natural History and Sport in Moray, 1863. 
 
 William Bromley-Davenport. 
 
 Sport, 1 885. \ 
 
 Richard JefFeries, 1848-1887. 
 
 The Gamekeeper at Home, 1878. 
 
 The Amateur Poacher, 1879. | 
 
 Wood Magic, 1881. j 
 
 Bevis, 1882. I 
 
 The Story of my Heart, 1883. 
 
 The Life of the Fields, 1884. ^ 
 
 Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900. ! 
 
 Poems, 1 88 1. i 
 
 Intentions, 1891. ] 
 
 Lady Windermere' s Fan, 1893. | 
 
 A Woman of no Importance, 1894. 1 
 
 The Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1898. , j 
 
 The Importance of being Earnest, 1899. I 
 
 De Pnfuiidis, 1905. I
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE NEW AGE 
 
 At the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria the English nation 
 grew " drunk with sight of power." There were miles of war- 
 ships gathered at Spithead; feudatory princes from India and 
 representatives of free peoples ruling over territories such as had 
 never before owned allegiance to a single flag were assembled 
 to do homage to the aged sovereign. The newspapers whose 
 "frantic boast and foolish word " gave utterance to the feeling of 
 the nation, and the nation from which those newspapers took 
 their spirit, were not without excuse. But suddenly, upon ears 
 still ringing with the blare of trumpets and hearts still elate with the 
 proofs of material power, there fell the arresting voice which pro- 
 claimed the insufficiency and the evanescence of all such power : 
 
 "Far called, our navies melt away; 
 
 On dune and headland sinks the fire : 
 Lo, all our pomp of yesterday 
 
 Is one with Nineveh and Tyre ! " 
 
 No more masterly expression was ever given to that sense of 
 reaction which follows upon feverish activity and exalted hope. 
 That such reaction must come is a law of life, and it is also 
 a law that its depth must be proportional to the exaltation which 
 has gone before. The mightier the wave, the greater and the 
 more desolate is the stretch of naked shingle its reflux leaves 
 exposed. All history shows that just as a physical stimulant 
 exacts payment in the shape of a subsequent depression, so the 
 w. I
 
 2 THE LITERATURE Of THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 moral or intellectual stimulant must be followed sooner or later 
 by a temporary lowering of spiritual vitality. The example of a 
 St. Francis of Assisi for a time lifts his followers to a height 
 altogether beyond the reach of the ordinary world ; but literary 
 satire and the sober documents of history are at one in their 
 testimony that in the sixteenth century their successors had sunk 
 below that world's level. 
 
 We see the same law at work in political history. The 
 magnificent panegyric which Thucydides puts into the mouth of 
 Pericles stands in sharp contrast with the laments of Demos- 
 thenes a century later for the want of those very qualities which 
 the great historian represents as the special endowment of his 
 countrymen. Both conceptions of the Athenian character are 
 probably just : they are certainly the conceptions of the men best 
 qualified to discover the truth and to express it accurately. But 
 if so, is it not probable that the depression was largely due to 
 reaction from the abnormal energy of the earlier Athenians ? A 
 still more familiar instance is to be found in the history of 
 England. We know how deep and sincere were the moral 
 earnestness and the religious feeling of the Puritans ; and we 
 know likewise the price which was paid when the Restoration 
 relaxed the strain. 
 
 The same principle unquestionably holds in literature ; and, 
 as the artistic is the most sensitive of all types of human character, 
 it would not be surprising to find the principle exemplified 
 there more strikingly than anywhere else. We cannot ascribe to 
 accident the fact that in the literatures of Greece, of Spain, of 
 France, of England, the dominant forms have varied from age 
 to age. Now the drama prevails, now the lyric, now the novel; 
 in this generation poetry, in that prose; one century addresses 
 itself mainly to the understanding, another to the imagination. 
 It is no mere coincidence that chivalric romance has so prevailed 
 in Spain, the land of the romantic conflict of Moor and Christian. 
 There is more than bare chance in the fact that the golden age 
 of the drama, par excellence the literature of action, was con- 
 temporaneous, alike in Athens and in England, with the period 
 of highest political and individual energy; or again in the fact 
 

 
 THE NEW AGE 3 
 
 that when England was arrayed in hostile camps we have on the 
 one hand the cavalier literature of persiflage and on the other the 
 lofty strain of Milton. 
 
 After each of these times of activity there has followed, in 
 literature as in national life, a period of depression, sometimes, 
 but not always, succeeded by a fresh revival. For Athens, after 
 the glory of the drama and of history had passed, there still 
 remained the glory of philosophy and of oratory. In Spain, the 
 eclipse of romance was permanent. In France, the great age 
 of Louis XIV passes into the lower phase of the Encyclopaedia, 
 only to revive again in the marvellous burst of political life in 
 which she led, and of literature in which she shared with, the 
 rest of Europe. In England, the many-sided activity of the 
 Elizabethans changes into the factional spirit of Cavalier and 
 Roundhead, and that again sinks with the debasement of the 
 court and of society into the ribaldry and license of the Restora- 
 tion drama. 
 
 The same spectacle of rise and fall meets the eye when we 
 turn to the great age of the French Revolution and compare it 
 with the period immediately after its force was spent. No one 
 can doubt that the Revolution was for Europe in general, both 
 in national life and in literature, a time of heightened energy 
 and productiveness. For more than twenty years the sword was 
 hardly ever sheathed, and the whole Continent shook with the 
 tramp of armies. It is true, war in itself is not productive; 
 but De Tocqueville's L'Ancien Regime shows that the political 
 ideas which set the armies in motion were eminently fertile. And 
 who can doubt that in literature the thirty years or so during 
 which " the gospel of Jean Jacques " swayed the thought of 
 Europe were among the most productive in the history of the 
 world ? But when we look a generation forward, we see once 
 more innumerable evidences of decline. War is exhausting ; and 
 in 1815 the nations found themselves the richer by a prisoner 
 whom they feared even in captivity, and the poorer by hundreds 
 of thousands of lives, by countless millions of money, and by 
 multitudes of shattered hopes. For however clear it might be 
 to De Tocqueville that the ideas of the Revolution were still 
 
 I 3
 
 4 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 alive, for the moment its failure seemed to be complete, and the 
 fascinating vision of liberty, fraternity and equality faded into 
 the light of common da)'. 
 
 England had suffered from the great struggle far less than the 
 continent of Europe. She had never felt the pressure of hostile 
 armies on her soil, and for her the measureless waste of war had 
 been in great part made good by the extraordinary development 
 of her commerce. Yet even in England the reaction after the 
 war was severe. Prices were high ; the artificial stimulus to trade 
 was gone ; the evils inherent in that industrial revolution which 
 had been in progress for half a century were becoming more 
 conspicuous ; and there was as yet little or no factory legislation 
 to check them. Moreover, the poor law has never, either before 
 or since, been so unwisely administered : it was sapping the 
 manhood of the nation, pauperising the poor, demoralising the 
 well-to-do. There were bread-riots. Necessary and inevitable 
 political reforms were delayed till, as the Duke of Wellington 
 warned the nation, the choice lay between concession and civil 
 war. In truth, the state of things was not far removed from a 
 state of civil war. The windows of Apsley House were broken 
 by an infuriated mob; there was a crisis when troops and artillery 
 were held in readiness to sweep the streets of London; the Chartist 
 movement grew; that warlike spirit in the civilian, which in the 
 opening years of the century had been directed against a foreign 
 foe, was now absorbed in contemplated civil strife. " You should 
 have the like of this," said a young lawyer equipped as a volunteer 
 to Thomas Carlyle. " Hm, yes," was the reply ; " but I haven't 
 yet quite settled on which side." The continuance of such a 
 social state meant the death of hope, which is as indispensable 
 in Hterature and art as Bacon knew it to be in politics. 
 
 A time of stress and strain, far from being inimical to literature 
 and art, is in the highest degree stimulating, provided the ferment 
 is due to the leaven of great ideas and of ennobling conflicts. 
 The greatest periods of the world's literature have followed upon 
 such times. The effect is due, not to the turmoil, but to the 
 operation of the ideas which occasion the turmoil, or which are 
 evoked by it. But there is nothing dignified, nothing vivifying,
 
 THE NEW AGE 5 
 
 in the social struggles of England during the third and fourth 
 decades of the nineteenth century. So far, then, as the outward 
 and visible circumstances of national life are concerned, we should 
 not be surprised to find those decades to be a period of com- 
 parative sterility. And such is in fact their character. But this 
 phenomenon of rise and fall in literature is so universal, and is 
 in itself so interesting, that it may be not amiss to examine it 
 more carefully and to attempt, in some measure at least, to 
 account for it. 
 
 In the first place, it is to be observed that the phenomenon is 
 by no means confined to literature. At one time the whole stream 
 of Hfe seems to flow on in a single triumphant and irresistible 
 current ; at another the movement is slow, uncertain, purposeless, 
 as if in some "backwater of the soul." The facts of history, and 
 especially of literature, often suggest the analogy of the life of the 
 individual. We seem to see years of growth, years of highest 
 energy, years of decline, just as we see the individual man wax 
 and flourish and wane. The explanation is doubtless to be sought 
 in the rise and decay of ideas. Though the stream of human life 
 flows on, unlike the life of the individual, in a steady and equable 
 volume, those ideas which, like the winds, agitate its surface or 
 stir it to its depths, are variable. To their appearance and dis- 
 appearance is due the semblance of the kind of change which 
 marks the individual life. When a dominant idea or group of 
 ideas is in full vigour, we seem to be as it were on the crest of a 
 wave of life. But the interest sinks, the power lessens, the fervour 
 is lost, the whole tone of life becomes lower. The race, we 
 imagine, has aged, though the men are as young as they ever were. 
 
 We imagine so, and it may be the case. A nation which has 
 marched in the van may fall permanently behind ; it may pass into 
 the winter of its days ; and, with nations as with men, there is no 
 following spring to renew the vigour of life. Rome went down 
 before the onslaught of the barbarians because Roman life was 
 already debased. It was not the ridicule of Don Quixote that 
 killed Spanish romance, it was the disease already inherent in it. 
 But in the case of a nation in normal social health and enjoying 
 a vigorous spiritual life, it will be found that the times of apparent
 
 6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 decline in literature are really what we may call periods of germina- 
 tion. When the great French writers of the age of Louis XIV 
 gradually passed away, they seemed to leave a vacancy; and no 
 doubt for a time they did so. It was a vacancy never to be filled 
 again by men of their stamp, men pursuing their aims or dominated 
 by their ambitions. Moliere, Corneille and Racine, the men 
 who made the French drama, and who gave France her Hterary 
 pre-eminence in Europe, died, the first in 1673, the last in 1699; 
 but in no long time Voltaire and Rousseau, who did so much to 
 determine the course of French history during the eighteenth 
 century, were ripe to take their place; and already before the 
 death of Racine, Bayle's Dictionary, that curious armoury from 
 which so many of their weapons were drawn, was collected and 
 arranged. The old descend to the grave with the laurels on their 
 brow, and the world laments the loss; the young, with their 
 laurels still to win, are already preparing to take their place ; but 
 the world will not and cannot take the laurels upon trust. It is a 
 law of life that we know the greatest only when it is passing or has 
 already passed away. 
 
 " The gates of fame and of the grave 
 Stand under the same architrave." 
 
 If we turn to England, we are confronted more than once in 
 the not distant past by the same spectacle of rise and decline. 
 Within a period of twenty-one years are recorded the deaths of 
 Hume, Johnson, Adam Smith, Gibbon and Burke ; and with them 
 the eighteenth century in its literary aspect passes away. But 
 again we see how the losses are made good. Wordsworth, 
 Scott and Coleridge were all born before the death of the first of 
 the men named; Byron, Shelley and Keats, before the death of 
 the last. The work of these men may be said, with sufficient 
 accuracy for the present purpose, to form the English contribution 
 to the great romantic revival, or the Literature of the Revolution. 
 They are separated from one another by very wide differences, 
 yet the world is not mistaken in believing that they were stirred 
 to work by common impulses, and that there are points ol con- 
 nexion between them which do not and cannot exist between
 
 THE NEW AGE 7 
 
 men of different generations. They were, sometimes in spite of 
 themselves, children of the Revolution, and the ideas of the 
 Revolution were fermenting in their minds. 
 
 When we look onwards once more some fifty years we see 
 the old order changing ; it is only faith, or else a glance at the 
 productions of still more recent days, that assures us it is "giving 
 place to new." It is plain that in the third decade of the nine- 
 teenth century the impulse given by, or at least associated with, 
 the French Revolution rapidly failed. Whether it would have 
 done so with such speed had the younger men survived, cannot 
 be determined. But Keats died in 1821, Shelley in the following 
 year, and Byron in 1824. The elder men had for the most part 
 already done their work, and, except Wordsworth and Landor, 
 they did not very long survive their younger contemporaries. So 
 far as it is possible to fix a date, we may say that the period ends 
 with the year 1832, the year of the death of Scott at Abbotsford, 
 of Goethe in Germany and of Cuvier in France, the year after 
 the death of Hegel, whose thought so profoundly influenced the 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 The years 1825 to 1840 show a comparatively meagre list of 
 memorable works. In the writings of the younger generation we 
 have only a partial counterpoise to the loss caused by failing 
 powers and thinning ranks among their elders. We can see in 
 it numerous beginnings and rich promise, but the actual per- 
 formance is poor beside that of the preceding fifteen years, which 
 includes all that matters of Byron, the best of Scott's prose, and 
 Miss Austen's, and all of Shelley and Keats, together with much 
 of Coleridge and Wordsworth. But the true significance of the 
 years after 1825 will be missed unless we bear in mind that they 
 were the seed-time of all the rich literature of the early and 
 intermediate Victorian era. By the greatness of that literature 
 we must estimate the importance of the years in which it was 
 germinating. 
 
 It is interesting to notice that the men who in England 
 governed thought during the second quarter of the nineteenth 
 century, conceived of their social and political relations with the 
 immediate past as largely negative. The French Revolution
 
 8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 seemed to them to have failed. Some of them, like Carlyle, 
 would have refused to characterise it as a failure absolute; but 
 to others, like Tennyson, there appeared to have flowed little or 
 nothing but evil from "the red fool-fury of the Seine," — a phrase 
 evoked, it is true, by a later revolutionary movement, but still 
 descriptive, to its author's mind, of the earlier and greater one. 
 In this respect England stood in contrast to the country of the 
 Revolution itself, where faith in it and in its principles had been 
 transmitted, almost as a religious cult, through all political changes. 
 "He must take care not to touch my Revolution," is the phrase 
 attributed to Thiers when he heard that Taine was engaged on 
 the Origines de la France contemporaine; and the historian who 
 quotes it adds: "By the expression 'my Revolution' the aged 
 statesman did not refer to his own history of the change of things 
 with which, as a youth, he won a front place in the brilliant 
 literary group of the Restoration. He was giving expression to 
 the sentiment cherished to the period of his death by most 
 Frenchmen excepting the fanatics of Legitimism, that the Revo- 
 lution was a sacred manifestation which might be diversely 
 interpreted, but never profoundly assailed'." 
 
 There was a time when in England too the Revolution ap- 
 peared to some a "sacred manifestation"; and their feeling can 
 be traced momentarily in the verse of Coleridge and Wordsworth, 
 permanently in that of Shelley, and in the political philosophy of 
 his father-in-law Godwin. To others it seemed much more like 
 a manifestation of diabolic power; and this view found unre- 
 strained expression in the later writings of Burke, while it gave a 
 tone to the work of Scott, and imparted a deeper meaning to that 
 revived interest in mediaeval history which he did so much to 
 excite. But on all, on its opponents as well as on its advocates, 
 the Revolution acted as a tremendous impulsive force. The 
 intense political and military activity of the time seems to find an 
 echo in the swing and the rush and the vigour which characterise 
 the literature produced during those years. But before the close 
 of the first quarter of the century all this was changed. There 
 were not many who would have taken, with Burke, the diabolic 
 
 ^ Bodky's J'taiiu, i. 63.
 
 THE NEW AGE 9 
 
 view of the Revolution ; there were still fewer who would have 
 accepted it as a " sacred manifestation." It had become a subject 
 for study and criticism. The great victory which freed England 
 from danger made it easier for the conservative side to take a 
 moderate and dispassionate view, while reflection on the "fatal 
 Saturnalia" of France chastened and sobered those who had at 
 one time maintained that even a French invasion was a thing to 
 be hoped for rather than to be dreaded. The fierce energy of 
 opposition on the one side and the fervour of hope on the other 
 were alike gone. If the Revolution had produced fruit, it was 
 certainly not the fruit which enthusiasts had expected. What was 
 immediately visible was the wreck of the ancien regime ; and the 
 task before men was to construct a new world out of the ruins of 
 the old, not, as they had hoped, by the wave of an enchanter's 
 wand, but by slow and painful toil. Hence, as has been said, 
 the mental attitude of men towards the past was negative. The 
 events of the preceding generation showed what was no longer 
 possible in politics and society ; it remained to discover what was 
 possible. 
 
 But after two generations more we can see that while the 
 outward failure of the Revolution was complete, its real failure 
 was only partial. Modern democracy, a political development of 
 absorbing interest because it is unexampled in history, had already 
 taken its rise in America ; but in Europe the movement towards 
 it has been profoundly influenced by the French Revolution. 
 What has been, and what is likely to be, the effect of this 
 democratic movement upon literature? Few questions can be 
 propounded that are better worth investigating. The supreme 
 political interest of the nineteenth century is the picture it pre- 
 sents of an ever-widening harmony between order and freedom. 
 The chief steps in this progress are clearly marked — in England, 
 in the successive reform bills, in Catholic Emancipation, in the 
 abolition of the Corn Laws, and in the various constructive 
 measures which in later days have helped to humanise the lives 
 of the industrial multitudes. Of special importance from the 
 literary point of view was the enfranchisement of the press; for 
 the abolition of the paper tax and of the stamp duty upon
 
 10 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 newspapers was in effect an enfranchisement. Moreover, we too 
 readily forget the numerous causes, trivial as they seem to us 
 now, which less than a century ago exposed newspapers and 
 authors and publishers to the risk of prosecution, and which, 
 down to a far later date, brought less definite but no less real 
 penalties on all who dared to think unpopular thoughts. Leigh 
 \ Hunt was imprisoned from 1813 to 1815 for criticisms of the 
 ^ ( Prince Regent, whose chief fault was that they were scandalously 
 true; and if these criticisms were injudicious, it might be pleaded 
 in excuse that they were provoked by panegyrics which were 
 scandalously false. The trial of Richard Carlile for " blasphemous 
 libel" in publishing the works of Thomas Paine took place in 
 18 19; and the sentence against Thomas Pooley, which roused the 
 indignation of Mill and of Buckle, was pronounced in 1857. 
 Later still, Huxley found it necessary to devote a considerable 
 portion of his life to an effort to secure for himself and others 
 unfettered liberty of thought. In the part of the field where he 
 fought the battle has been won ; but it would be rash to conclude 
 that the evil has ceased to exist. Intolerance can be practised in 
 the name of science as well as in that of religion, and recent trials 
 have come perilously near to disputing the mature and sane man's 
 right even to die except secundum artem. It is, however, certain 
 that in this direction progress has been great and rapid. 
 
 What have been and what will be the effects upon literature 
 of a political, social and intellectual development and enfranchise- 
 ment such as this, are questions which have never been fully 
 investigated. That these effects must be profound and far- 
 reaching is obvious. The mere multiplication of the number of 
 readers is a fact of great significance. More important still is the 
 change in their social position, their ambitions, their training, 
 their character. In the middle of the eighteenth century Johnson 
 fought his desperate way — reduced at one time to living upon 
 \\d. a day — from the system of patronage to that of direct 
 dependence upon a reading public. Carlyle, in the middle of the 
 nineteenth century, saw in this fact the birth of the Hero as Man 
 of Letters : " Much had been sold and bought, and left to make 
 its own bargain in the market-place ; but the inspired wisdom of
 
 THE NEW AGE 1 1 
 
 I a Heroic Soul never till then, in that naked manner." And he 
 proclaimed, as the greatest task before mankind, the problem of 
 organising the chaotic profession of letters. The problem is still 
 unsolved, the profession is still chaotic ; and while the public has 
 grown far wider and the dependence of the men of letters upon it 
 has become more and more direct, the price of the Heroic Soul 
 is as uncertain as ever. The problem which was too great and 
 too complicated for the intellect of Carlyle remains too great and 
 too complicated for his successors. 
 
 Can this state of things fail to exercise the profoundest 
 influence? Even in literature the souls are few which serenely 
 dwell apart, and it may be questioned whether we should desire 
 them to be many. Shakespeare himself was not of the number. 
 The majority of writers must always be influenced by a conscious 
 or an unconscious consideration of the character of their audience; 
 and though there is danger in the influence, there can be no 
 danger comparable to that which attaches to the cutting of 
 literature adrift from life and from reality. It is such freaks as 
 
 1 the "metaphysical" element in poetry, or the fantastic romance 
 satirised by Cervantes, which stand permanently condemned in 
 critical judgment. Their practitioners suppose that they are 
 addressing a band of the elect, and are apt to value themselves in 
 proportion as they leave the common earth behind ; but what has 
 saved them, in so far as they have found salvation, has been their 
 failure to attain their end. 
 
 But if there is good there is unquestionably evil as well in the 
 present state of matters. Johnson thought that even in his time 
 there lurked a risk to literature in the multiplicity of books. If 
 so, the danger has vastly grown. In the introduction of slang, in 
 roughness of style, in crudity of thought, sometimes in a certain 
 vulgarity of tone, we seem to see the influence of modern 
 conditions. Walt Whitman would have been impossible in an 
 ! aristocracy, and Mr Rudyard Kipling must have undergone many 
 changes. We are by no means destitute of examples of repose 
 and dignity ; but no one would single these out as characteristic 
 qualities of recent literature. The great predominance of the 
 novel, which is certainly connected with the character and
 
 12 IHE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 circumstances of the mass of readers, is not a matter for un- 
 mingled satisfaction. 
 
 Probably, however, the most serious danger arises from the 
 absurd disproportion which may frequently be noticed between 
 the quality of the work done and the magnitude of the reward 
 reaped. Carlyle, the foremost man of letters of his time, was fain 
 at forty-five to earn by lecturing, a task he loathed, the money 
 necessary to make ends meet and to save himself from exile. 
 Had he not possessed a private fortune Darwin could never have 
 devoted himself to science. Browning for many years made no- 
 thing by his writings, and Matthew Arnold throughout his life made 
 very little. Although Tennyson became the most popular poet of 
 his day, he was compelled for ten years to suspend relations with 
 /Emily Sellwood, because he could not afford to marry. So low 
 at the beginning of the period was the repute of poetry, the finest 
 flower of literature, that Murray, the most liberal and the most 
 enterprising of publishers, made it his rule " to refuse all original 
 works of this kind'." Chateaubriand, a few years later, declared 
 the only popular English poet to be " a political verse-writer, who 
 was a working blacksmith"; and in 1S41 John Sterling wrote to 
 Emerson that there was not one man then living whose verse 
 would pay the expense of publication. Sterling was wrong : then, 
 or soon afterwards, Martin Tupper was drawing from ;^5oo to 
 ;^8oo a year for Proverbial Philosophy, and the price which the 
 English public ultimately paid to the author of this "inspired 
 wisdom" was something Uke ;^io,ooo. Unfortunately there is 
 no sign of improvement. The author of a new Proverbial Philo- 
 sophy is as likely now as he was sixty years ago to receive 
 _;^io,ooo, and the author of a new Paracelsus to receive nothing 
 whatsoever. It is just as likely now as it was then that a new 
 Richard Feverel will be neglected, and a new Ifeir o f Redely ffe 
 hailed as one of the greatest books ever written. 
 
 All the revolution in thought which we associate with the 
 
 name of Darwin hangs upon the chance that the man who wrought 
 
 it possessed a private fortune ! Nothing else is required to prove 
 
 how clamant is the need to reduce the present chaos to order. 
 
 ^ Siniles's Memoir of John AJurray, ii. 374.
 
 THE NEW AGE I 
 
 O 
 
 And yet, as Carlyle again insists (and he spoke from experience), 
 there might be far worse evils than poverty in the lot of the man 
 of letters. Worse infinitely was the sceptical and negative spirit 
 of the eighteenth century ; for literature in all ages must live by 
 its ideas, or die from the want of them. And for the evils which 
 democracy brings in its train will not compensation be found in 
 the volume of life ? If the results are not yet fully satisfactory, 
 the reason may be that we have not yet learnt how to manage the 
 
 ^forces which produce them. The poetry of Walt Whitman in 
 America, the novels of Zola in France, and in England the sordid 
 stories of the London streets, seem to be the work of men 
 intellectually and artistically overburdened with their subject. 
 But Dickens is a hopeful example of what may be done, and in 
 the future men greater than he may make a yet greater use of 
 
 ^their inexhaustible material. It is no light thing that the millions 
 have now a place and an influence in literature, where a century 
 ago only the thousands, and earlier still hardly more than hundreds 
 had it. Here, no doubt, lies the task of the present and of the 
 immediate future for literature as well as for pohtics. Goethe, 
 with his usual insight, saw that only half the man could be 
 developed unless he threw himself into the stream of life: 
 
 " Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, 
 I Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt." 
 
 I Character is necessary no less than talent for the highest litera- 
 ture ; and the stream of that life in which it must be fashioned 
 flows now in the democratic channel. 
 
 In all this democratic movement we have entered upon the 
 inheritance of the Revolution ; but we have done so in an altered 
 spirit. It is no longer the Revolution regarded as a "sacred 
 manifestation," but the Revolution seen under the critical micro- 
 scope. Principles which enthusiasts a hundred years ago regarded 
 as self-evident, and their opponents as maniiestly false, have 
 proved to be eminently in need of interpretation. We have to 
 ask how liberty can be reconciled with order, how far fraternity 
 is consistent with the stern law of universal competition, what 
 remains of equality when we have allowed for the infinite diversity
 
 14 THE LITERATU^^ijpF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 of faculties and of needs. Questions such as these form the 
 substance not mer(^y of systematic poUtical philosophy, but of 
 the work of "seers" like Carlyle and of poets like Tennyson. 
 
 But if literature has relations with politics, it has relations still 
 more intimate and vital with the conceptions which underlie 
 religion and philosophy. In order to understand the Victorian 
 age we must ask here again what are the points of resemblance 
 and of difference between it and the preceding generation ; which 
 of the fundamental ideas of religion and philosophy lived on into 
 it ; which of them \w^fj^-x^e(/t^d, reversed, changed or developed. 
 
 In respect of^religi^pf the relation of the Victorian age 
 to the era of the ReVSTution is extremely interesting and curious. 
 On a superficial view, it presents an aspect wholly different from 
 that presented by politics; more closely considered, it is seen 
 to be explainable by the same principles. The science of 
 politics lends itself to compromise. Hence the extreme views 
 inherited from the previous age blend and run together in a 
 kind of amalgam which partakes of the character of both. But 
 compromise is far less easy in ideas than it is in practical Hfe; 
 experience teaches rather that the tendency of a purely logical 
 development is always towards extremes. On this principle we 
 can explain what at first sight is so puzzling — the co-existerree 
 throughout the Victorian era of a powerful school c^' rationaUsrn) 
 the inheri-tOr 'oT'the^eistic spirit of the eighteenth century^-^^mi 
 that >€ratholic reactiojj which manifested itself eaxly in the nine- 
 teenth-eefttarypand whose influence is not yet dx; hausted . 
 
 The opposition of these two schools givesitrsupreme interest 
 ^. to the English literature of the nineteenth century; all else will 
 be found in the long run to be subordinate. It is not the only 
 case in history in which such an opposition has existed, nor is it 
 the only case in which momentous questions have depended upon 
 the result of the conflict. The most profoundly thoughtful of 
 the recent historians of Greece has been struck with just such 
 a contrast and conflict in the latter part of the sixth century 
 B.C., and has depicted it in a few masterly paragraphs. Having 
 told the story of the great struggle against the Persian monarchy, 
 he proceeds : " We have now to see how another danger was
 
 THE NEW AGE I 5 
 
 averted, a danger which, though it is not like the Persian invasjon 
 written large on the face of history, threatened Greece with a no 
 less terrible disaster. This danger lay in the dissemination of a 
 new religion, which, if it had gained the upper hand, as at one 
 time it seemed likely to do, would have pressed with as dead 
 and stifling a weight upon Greece as any oriental superstition. 
 Spiritually the Greeks might have been annexed to the peoples of 
 the orient ^" He goes on to narrate how the age of Solon 
 witnessed the beginning of a rationalistic movement due to 
 "intellectual dissatisfaction with the theogony of Hcsiod as an 
 explanation of the origin of the world^"; the result being the 
 birth of the Ionian philosophy. On the other hand, " men began 
 to feel a craving for an existence after death, and intense curiosity w 
 about the world of shades, and a desire for personal contact with 
 the supernatural"; and this craving "led to the propagation of a 
 new religion, which began to spread about the middle of the sixth 
 century^" This was the Orphic rel igion ; and the antidote to it 
 " was the philosophy of Ionia. In Asiatic Greece, that religion 
 never took root; and most fortunately the philosophical move- 
 ment — the separation of science from theology, of ' cosmogony ' 
 from 'theogony' — had begun before the Orphic movement was 
 disseminated. Europe is deeply indebted to Ionia for having 
 founded philosophy ; but that debt is enhanced by the fact that 
 she thereby rescued Greece from the tyranny of a religion inter- 
 preted by priests. Pythagoras, although he and his followers ^' 
 made important advances in science, threw his weight into the 
 scale of mysticism ; affected by both the religious and the philo- 
 sophical movements, he sought to combine them ; and in such 
 unions the mystic element always wins the preponderance. But 
 there were others who pursued, undistracted, the paths of reason, 
 and among these the most eminent and influential were Xenophanes 
 and Heraclitus^" To the men who "pursued, undistracted, the 
 paths of reason," Greece owed her salvation. "It is not without 
 significance," says the historian in summing up, " that, when the 
 Orphic agitation had abated, Greece should have enshrined the 
 
 / ' Bury's Histoty 0/ Greece, ch. vii. § 12 
 
 * ibid. 2 ibid. * ibid. % 14.
 
 l6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 worldly wisdom of men who stood wholly aloof from mystic 
 excitements and sought for no revelation, in the fiction of the 
 Seven Sages ^" 
 
 There is not in all history a more exact parallel than that 
 which exists between Greece in the sixth century B.C., when thus 
 interpreted, and Western Europe in the nineteenth century a.d. 
 The saying that "history repeats itself" is stupid, if we take it au 
 pied de la IcUre ; but, read with intelligent freedom, it conveys a 
 profound truth. Substitute for the Ionian philosophy the deistic 
 philosophy of the eighteenth century, for the Orphic religion the 
 Catholic Reaction, and the words written by the historian of the 
 one may be applied with little change to the other. The springs 
 of the opposing movements were in both cases precisely the same. 
 The principal difference is that the danger in the modern case 
 was far less, because philosophy was no longer staggering on 
 infant limbs; but the danger did, and to some extent does still, 
 exist. 
 
 There are few things more interesting in literature than the 
 contrasts it so frequently presents ; and there is nothing in recent 
 literature v/hich more demands or which will more richly repay 
 investigation than the extraordinary contrast now in question. 
 It goes deep down towards the roots of human nature, which 
 demands satisfaction for the emotions as well as for the intellect. 
 The investigation is necessary, if it were only because we are here 
 in contact with one of the " idols " of the human mind, which, as 
 Bacon long ago pointed out, tends to grasp prematurely at unity. 
 We are prone to forget the wide diversity of human thought. We 
 call certain ages, ages of faith, and others again, ages of reason. 
 When they are employed with due care, the phrases are useful, 
 and have their own important element of truth ; but the danger is 
 that they may be supposed to represent the whole truth and the 
 exact truth. This is by no means the case. Patient investigation 
 shows that in the very midst of the ages of faith there was plenty 
 of the rationalising spirit, though from motives of prudence it 
 might refrain from obtruding itself. We have only to look round 
 and observe in order to become convinced that in what is usually 
 ^ Buiy's History oj Greece, ch. vii. § 14.
 
 THE NEW AGE 17 
 
 described as an age of reason there is abundance of the spirit 
 which leads to behef in things beyond and above reason, or even 
 in things contrary to it. It has always been thus, and thus, until 
 human nature is radically changed, it always will be. We have 
 laboriously constructed our system of the universe, we are con- 
 vinced that we have solved its secrets, there is no mystery beyond 
 which brings us to a pause. But 
 
 "Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, 
 A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, 
 A chorus-ending from Euripides, — 
 ^ / Ai.d that's enough for fifty hopes and fears 
 ^ ' \ As old and new at once as nature's self, 
 / To rap and knock and enter in our soul, 
 Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, 
 Round the ancient idol on his base again, — 
 \ The grand Perhaps." 
 
 So it proved conspicuously at the opening of the nineteenth 
 century. All the omens seemed to point to the early and complete 
 victory of rationalism. It was in the very air. Not long ago the 
 Goddess of Reason had been throned in France. She was the 
 creature of a whole century of work by the ablest minds, — work 
 attended, as it seemed, by the most triumphant results. Hume, 
 with his calm, cold, clear logic, — Gibbon, "the lord of irony," 
 "sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer V — Voltaire with his 
 piercing wit, his dangerous and deadly power of ridicule, — these 
 were the typical spirits of the eighteenth century. The French 
 Revolution was the tremendous birth which marked their triumph 
 at its close. All forces seemedjto be working in harmony towards 
 one end. Science had begun her conquering march, and every 
 fresh discovery with regard to the, true nature and constitution of_.. 
 tHe^universe appeared to make the old conception of man's place 
 Tn it less and less credible. There was scarcely a human being 
 but felt the influence of the forces at work. The ministers of 
 religion themselves betrayed it in their conduct. The Church, it 
 
 ^ This passage was written before I had read Mr II. A. Beers's extremely 
 able and interesting History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth 
 Century. I have let it stand, although I have since found that he has used 
 precisely the same quotations in a very similar context. 
 
 W. 2
 
 *' 
 
 1 8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 has often been said, was asleep ; and loud are the denunciations 
 against the officials who permitted and shared the slumber. 
 Certain it is that if the sheep looked up hungry they were not 
 fed. But the denunciations are perhaps a little unjust. The 
 clergy were, after all, only yielding to forces which hardly any 
 were powerful enough to resist. Even when the tide was already 
 on the turn, we find a poet so intensely spiritual as Shelley was, 
 imagining himself to be, and loudly proclaiming himself, an 
 atheist. Robert Owen the socialist, like Lucretius of old, held 
 religion to be the great obstacle to human progress. And yet 
 Robert Owen was a man filled with that enthusiasm of humanity 
 which under other influences would have made him zealous, 
 perhaps a fanatic, in religion. 
 
 No wonder that in such an atmosphere the vision of the 
 clearest eyes was blurred and dimmed, ff^r''-^ was the wisest 
 man then living in Europe, the one mo^ \ }\^ h to see the truth 
 through the mists of futurity ; and Goethe "" thought that the 
 Catholic Church was doomed and could hardly survive long. 
 Yet even as Goethe spoke, the Counter-Revolution was in progress ; 
 and towards the close of the century which was then beginning 
 the greatest statesman of the mighty empire of united Germany 
 received at the hands of the Catholic party the most damaging 
 defeat of his life; while in France Thiers prophesied that the 
 Republic would fall if ever it quarrelled completely with the 
 Catholic Church. The quarrel has taken place, and one of the 
 most interesting questions of the future is, what will be the issue ? 
 / The causes of such reversions are obscure. The arguments 
 of the Encyclopaedists had not been answered. It is true, Kant 
 had put philosophy on a new foundation; but it is a far cry 
 from the Kantian philosophy to the dogma of the Catholic 
 Church. Probably the explanation lies partly in the fact that 
 the success of the rationaUstic school had never been as complete 
 as it appeared to the superficial observer. Even in France itself, 
 men no longer believe that the Catholic Church had lost its hold 
 Von the people as completely as was once supposed. Though 
 the Encyclopc-edists had carried with them the thinkers and the 
 multitudes of the cities, it is by no means so clear that they had
 
 THE NEW AGE 19 
 
 i 
 
 [ won the rural population. But in the main we must be content ; 
 
 to attribute the change to one of those silent and mysterious , 
 
 movements of thought of which we only feel the effects without j 
 
 being able to trace them to a cause. Both Lecky in his History   
 
 of nationalism and Leslie Stephen in his English Thought iti the '■ 
 
 Eighteenth Century remark how modes of thought pass away — 
 and the latter adds, how superstitions revive — without direct I 
 
 proof or disproof. Beliefs draw their nourishment from the at- ^ 
 
 mosphere of thought, just as truly as plants draw theirs from the ) 
 
 air around them. And this doubtless is the element of truth in   
 
 the common saying that certain ideas are " in the air." The 
 mental conditions are favourable, and the ideas spring up and 
 seed and multiply, like plants in a suitable soil and climate. j 
 
 Not only did this movement give birth to a literature, not I 
 
 only did it influence far more than it produced ; it is interesting 
 also as an illustration of the close connexion between the most ' 
 
 various manifestations of intellect. It is the most striking 
 aspect of an all-pervading contrast. A multitude of other things, ^y^ 
 
 outwardly unconnected, are really in close affinity with this Catholic ^^1 " j 
 moveTiient. All romanticism is, often uniBonsciously, cognati' to 
 it. ^-^e revival of Gothic architectureTme change in the spirit j 
 
 of poetry — the consciousness of the supernatural in Coleridge, the 
 sensuousness of Keats, the feeling in Shelley of a spiritual element 
 in all things, in the west wind, in the cloud, in mountains, seas 
 and streams, — these were kindred manifestations. Above all, this 
 Catholic revival was stimulated by, as it in turn stimulated, that I 
 
 imaginative sympathy with the Middle Ages, of which the most \ 
 
 curious and in some respects the profoundest products are Kenelm 
 Digby's (1800-1880) Broad Stone of Honour (1826-1827) and 
 Mores Catholici (1831-1840). The former in its four books, 
 Godefridus, Tancredus, Morus and Orlandus, as it were incarnates ; 
 
 the cardinal virtues of the Middle Ages as they appear to the eye ' 
 
 of a believer, and suggests, as efi^ectively in its way as Q arlyle's * ; 
 
 Past and Present, that the changes of modern times are by no^^ \ 
 
 rrrearrs'ainmpFovemehts. .^ I 
 
 — tt-^wftsplibwever, Scott who gave the most powerful and the \ 
 
 most vivid expression to this iniaginative sympathy with the I 
 
 2—2 i
 
 20 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Middle Ages. He was himself innocent enough of Popery, and 
 would have been more astonished at the charge of Romanising 
 than he probably was when Thomas McCrie denounced him for 
 his picture of the Scottish Covenanters in Old Mortality. And 
 yet we have testimony to his Romanising influence on the one 
 side from Cardinal Newman, and on the other from that champion 
 f'^^0^ Protestantism, George Borrow. The former in the Apologia 
 ty notes the effect Scott's novels had in promoting in him a Catholic 
 frame of mind; and the latter in the appendix to The Komafiy 
 Rye denounces Scott as the man who had brought back to life 
 again Jacobitism and Laudism and Popery. All were dead 
 and buried, in the " home of lost causes " as elsewhere through 
 England, till he called them from their graves. The so-called 
 Oxford Movement, therefore, according to Borrow, was really a 
 
 V Imovement originating in the Waverley Novels. Carlyle, for his 
 'i.^^ part, traces "spectral Puseyisms" to Coleridge; while others have 
 ^ ^^suspected that Carlyle himself was not wholly unconnected with 
 such phenomena. If he wished to keep his hands perfectly 
 clean, he ought to have had no dealings with Novalis. Scornful 
 as he was of Puseyism, when he insists that we go from mystery 
 
 * J to mystery, that the age of miracle is not past, but that on the 
 contrary there is miracle all around us, he is just giving expression, 
 in his own language, to that which Puseyites were trying to express 
 in theirs. There may be the widest possible difference in the 
 degree of intellectual truth contained in the two forms of ex- 
 pression, but the kinship is none the less real. Both Carhj^le 
 and the P^gpyitp^ wp'"^ ^n revolt against _Jbp i: £igii or~the logical 
 understa riding . 
 
 1 these genealogies are instructive so long as they are taken 
 only to indicate an afifinity, but if they are pressed too far they 
 become misleading. Notwithstanding Borrow, it is desirable still 
 to treat the English phase of the reaction as the Oxford Move- 
 ment, and to regard it, not as the effect of any single cause, but 
 as one manifestation of a change in the human spirit so wide in 
 its range that we might well ask where its influence is not to 
 be found. We call it romance, and for the last hundred years 
 romance has been everywhere. For example, the Manxman,
 
 THE NEW AGE 21 
 
 T. E. Brown, ascribes to it the rise of the spirit of nationality, 
 and speaks of a suspicion, which is gradually becoming a belief 
 on his part, that the intense national feeling of the Welsh and 
 their determination to keep their own language are matters of the 
 nineteenth century romance movement. In the eighteenth century, 
 he believes, the Welsh desired nothing more than to be thoroughly 
 English \ 
 
 The Catholic Reaction, then, is an integral part, or an aspect, 
 
 ' of the great Romantic Revival. Both rest in the last resort 
 
 on the sense of mystery surrounding human life; both are irrj^-V ^ ~ 
 
 concilably opposed to the spirit which regards the universe a^ ^ • *^ 
 
 ) explainable, or which would dismiss as outside our sphere that 
 
 I in it which cannot be explained. On the contrary, it is just the 
 
 inexplicable^ which is important: nothing^j ^rth proving can be 
 
 proved. ^ b.^=J^ ' 
 
 ^ut philosophy also has to be listened to; for philosophy is not 
 only itself a part of literature, but, like religion, it wields power 
 far beyond the limits of its own domain. Besides, philosophy 
 deals, more directly than anything else, with ideas ; and in it the 
 thought which in poetry or painting may only be seen as through 
 a glass darkly, frequently comes into full view. Now, philosophy 
 bears the same witness as religious thought to the two-fold 
 current running through the whole intellectual and moral life 
 of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, we find in it the 
 
 ' various forms of rationalism, carrying on the characteristic and 
 dominant thought of the eighteenth century. We find in par- 
 ticular the powerful school of the Utilitarians, disciples of 
 Jeremy /SenthiH? but all owning the paternity of Hume, and 
 essentially English in spirit as in origin. With them must be 
 classed many of the physicis ts, especially those of the earlier 
 part of the century. Cognate to them in some respects, though 
 deeply coloured by the mind of France, are the( Positivist£ ) whose 
 singular religion is, not perhaps a very profound, but certainly a 
 
 5 very interesting manifestation of the human spirit. Kinship may 
 be claimed for them also with the scientific evolutionists, Herbert 
 Spencer, Darwin, and their followers; for the theory of Darwin 
 
 ^ Letters, Aug. x8, 1886.
 
 f 
 
 / V 
 
 22 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 took its rise from the speculations of Malthus, and the classical 
 jcconomists were all in more or less intimate relation with the 
 ' Utilitarians. Further, the agnostic tendencies of the biological 
 evolutionists are in harmony with the scepticism of the school of 
 Mill. On the other hand, however, the fundamental conception 
 of evolution has no place at all in the earlier phases of the utili- 
 tarian system, while it is the master-thought of the other great 
 school which struggled with the Utilitarians and their allies for 
 the allegiance of thinking men; and so supremely important is 
 this conception in the thought of the century that disagreement 
 with regard to it is of more moment than agreement in all 
 other respects. 
 
 The greatest of the opponents of Utilitarianism went back for 
 their inspiration to Germany. Not Hume but Immanuel Kant, 
 the great thinker who was roused by Hume from his "dogmatic 
 slumber," was their spiritual father. To describe them we must 
 discard the adjective "utilitarian" and substitute for it "tran- 
 scendental." The word is probably most familiarly known from 
 the works of Emerson, but the thing it signifies inspires also the 
 prose of Coleridge and of Carlyle. This too lets in once more 
 that sense of mystery which is scarcely consistent with a concep- 
 tion of life as made up of pleasures and pains capable of being 
 weighed and numbered, added, multiplied and divided. Through 
 their transcendentalism the philosophers share, with the poets, the 
 architects, the painters and the Catholic party, that very complex 
 thing which we call the spirit of romance. So powerful, indeed, 
 is the romantic strain that Hoffding in his History of Modern 
 Philosophy calls Hegel and the Hegelians "the romantic school." 
 They, however, make a momentous addition to transcendentalism, 
 the addition of the conception of development, which, more than 
 anything else, has made modern thought what it is. Like all 
 great conceptions it has a long history and springs from many 
 roots; but, except Darwin, no single man has done so much as 
 Hegel to establish its authority over the human mind. Hence 
 in part the immense significance of that intellectual affiliation to 
 Germany which must be discussed in the next ciiapter.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 Every literature, says De Quincey, unless it be crossed by 
 some other of different breed, tends to superannuation; and he 
 points to the French as an example of one which has suffered so 
 as to be, in his opinion, on the point of extinction, because it has 
 "rejected all alliance with exotic literature^" Writing in 182 1 
 he asks what, with this example before their eyes, the English 
 should do ; and he answers : " Evidently we should cultivate an 
 intercourse with that literature of Europe which has most of a 
 juvenile constitution." That, he adds, is the German literature. 
 
 The leaders of English literature have at all times acted in the 
 spirit of De Quincey's advice ; and, frequently as she is charged 
 with insularity, England has been, in literature at least, far more 
 willing than France to learn from foreign nations. While no 
 modern literature is more richly original than English, it is also 
 true that none is more deeply indebted to foreign influences. 
 The great classical literatures of Greece and Rome have exercised 
 a constant power which has been in the aggregate greater than 
 that of all other external influences whatsoever. But besides, 
 there has always been in concurrent operation some dominant 
 force of modern Europe. In the period of Chaucer it was at one 
 time French and at another Italian; in the Elizabethan period 
 it was again Italian ; in the eighteenth century, French. The 
 almost fanatical dislike of Coleridge for all things French, and the 
 
 A John Paul Frederick Richier.
 
 24 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 j depreciations of De Quincey himself, are merely the reaction from 
 
 an opposite excess. So strong had been the French influence 
 
 that it almost made the greatest of English historians a writer in 
 
 the French language; while Hume, another typical man of the 
 
 eighteenth century, was so steeped in French opinions as to be 
 
 deaf and blind to whatever was not in accordance with French 
 
 u canons of taste. Coleridge declared of him that he " compre- 
 
 U bended as much of Shakespeare as an apothecary's phial would, 
 
 "placed under the falls of Niagara." 
 
 The advice De Quincey gave was only a way of stating and 
 stamping with his approval what had already been done. More 
 than twenty years before he wrote Wordsworth and Coleridge had 
 made that journey .to Germany the influence of which on the 
 latter at least, and through him on England, was momentous. 
 Circumstances had been weakening the hold of France upon the 
 English mind. The events of 1789 and the years which followed 
 shocked and alienated nearly all. Those who, like Wordsworth, 
 faced the first excesses undismayed, were gradually estranged as 
 one act of outrage followed another, and even if they were not 
 horrified by bloodshed they were dismayed by the violence done 
 to liberty in the name of liberty. The following of Burke therefore 
 increased while that of Mackintosh diminished, and the long years 
 of war between the two countries steadily widened the spiritual 
 gulf between them. 
 
 The causes of estrangement, however, were by no means 
 exclusively political : we have to take account also of the fact that 
 the rising taste of England itself was of a kind which could not 
 find its appropriate nutriment in France. The French genius 
 had had its great period of romance in the past, and was destined 
 to have another in the future ; but it was through classicism, not 
 through romance, that France in the eighteenth century had held 
 sway over the English mind. The Gothic revival, which had 
 been for some time in progress, was a thing alien from the French 
 genius, while it found sympathy and encouragement in the rising 
 literature of Germany. Not that it was due to Germany ; rather 
 Germany first borrowed from England, and afterwards repaid the 
 debt. Macpherson's Ossiaii, Percy's Reliques and Walpole's
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 2$ 
 
 Castle of Otrmito were all antecedent to the period of German 
 influence upon England. 
 
 /' There are two periods of borrowing from the Germans, sepa- 
 rated from one another by only a short interval. Before the middle 
 of the eighteenth century it would be difficult to demonstrate any 
 interest whatever on the part of England in the literature of 
 Germany ; in truth, for many years after that date such literature 
 was commonly supposed not to exist. Carlyle quotes Pere 
 Bouhours' pregnant question : si tin AUemand pent avoir de 
 r esprit 1 and records his negative answer. Our own Hume was 
 no better. To the end of his life he coupled " the barbarians, 
 
 1 Goths and Vandals of Germany" with those of Russia, and 
 lamented that these two states should be rising in power, while 
 the two most civilised nations, the English and French, were, as 
 he believed, on the declined The Frenchman and the Scot had 
 whatever excuse the Germans themselves could give. The great 
 Frederick's ignorance of his native language is notorious. The 
 works of Leibnitz were written in Latin or in French. In the 
 vernacular there was, this side the Middle Ages, little literature 
 except of the popular sort, and this is not likely of itself to attract 
 a foreigner's attention. But a vernacular literature was quickly 
 growing up, and in the latter part of the century England began 
 to show interest in it by translations from Gessner, from Klopstock 
 and from Lessing. The culminating point in this period came in 
 the closing decade of the century ; and among the names we 
 encounter in connexion with it are those of "Monk" Lewis, 
 Walter Scott and William Taylor of Norwich. The last named 
 constituted himself especially the interpreter of Germany to 
 England, and a German scholar of the present day has deemed 
 it worth while to devote a special work to him and to associate 
 his name with the " Einfluss der neueren deutschen Litteratur in 
 England." Taylor translated indefatigably, from Burger, from 
 Lessing, from Goethe, and wrote a large number of reviews of 
 German works which were ultimately strung together, chiefly, as 
 Carlyle says, by the bookbinder's packthread, in that "jail- 
 delivery," the Historic Survey of German Poetry (1830). 
 
 ^ Burton's Hume, ii. 497.
 
 26 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 So far as this group of writers was concerned, the centre of 
 j interest in German literature lay in its most pronounced roman- 
 ticism. Goetz voft Berlichingen, The Robbers, and Burger's Lenore, 
 were among the works which most profoundly moved them. But 
 had this been all the vogue would soon have passed. It was 
 already on the wane when Scott's translation of Goetz appeared, 
 its decline having been hastened by the pungent satire of The 
 Robbers which appeared in The Anti-Jacobin two years before 
 Scott's translation. " To have given Goethe anything like a fair 
 chance with the English public," says Lockhart, " his first drama 
 ought to have been translated at least ten years before. The 
 imitators had been more fortunate than the master, and this work 
 ...had not come even into Scott's hands, until he had familiarised 
 himself with the ideas which it first opened, in the feeble and 
 puny mimicries of writers already forgotten \" 
 
 Ghosts, and diablerie, and dramas like The Robbers were, 
 however, only a part of the German influence in the earlier period. 
 Just as Goethe, through Goetz, gave an impulse to Scott in the 
 direction of the romances in verse and prose which filled his busy 
 literary life, so by another stream of influence — what Carlyle calls 
 Wertherism — he gave an impulse no less powerful to the Byronic 
 school. Byron did not know German, but he knew something of 
 Goethe's work and regarded him with profound admiration. In 
 1820 he speaks of him as " //z^ greatest man of Germany — perhaps 
 of Europe^"; and in 182 1 he dedicates to him Sardanapalus 2JS, 
 an offering from "a literary vassal to his liege lord." 
 
 Both these streams were merged and lost in the copious and 
 [ powerful flood of the English literature of the first quarter of the 
 nineteenth century. This earHer German influence is interesting 
 and noteworthy, but scarcely for a moment did it threaten to 
 / become dominant. It could not do so. There was an English 
 romanticism older than the romanticism of Germany; and the 
 Germans themselves had borrowed from Percy and from Ossian, 
 and above all from Shakespeare, before they began to give back 
 by the hands of Goethe and Schiller. While we admit the truth 
 
 ^ Life of Scott, vol. i. chap. ix. 
 ^ Moore's Life of Byron, v. ^20.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 2/ 
 
 of Carlyle's assertion that Werther stands " prominent among the 
 causes, or, at the very least, among the signals, of a great change 
 (in modern Literature^" it is well to remember that Werther itself 
 ^ was inspired by Ossiati, and that Werther's dirge is borrowed from 
 Macpherson. When De Quincey wrote the essay above quoted 
 he felt, and rightly felt, that the borrowed element was of secondary 
 importance; but he felt also that behind the "Goetzism" and 
 " Wertherism " lay the solid substance of German thought, and 
 that it was of first-rate importance. He wrote on the verge of the 
 second period of German influence, which differed in certain very 
 important respects from the first, and which, though less striking 
 
 '. to the superficial view, in reality produced a far greater effect. 
 
 The connecting link between the two periods, both chrono- 
 
 / logically and by reason of the nature of his interests, was C oleridg e. 
 He was as decidedly romantic as the most romantic of the Germans, 
 and he could handle the supernatural more exquisitely than any 
 of them. But what he imported into England was not the spirit 
 of The Robbers, or of Goetz, or of the balladists — that had been 
 
 V done- before him : it was the spirit of German philosophy. In 
 this field he was a pioneer. The poet-philosopher was led to the 
 German philosophers by his perception of the fundamental identity 
 between the spirit of the poetry and that of the philosophy of the 
 eighteenth century, and his conviction that the Romantic Revival 
 in poetry must come to naught unless it could justify itself to 
 thought. Coleridge would hardly allow the typical verse of the 
 eighteenth century to be poetry at all. He was fully conscious of 
 its brilliancy : he called Pope's Iliad an " astonishing product of 
 matchless talent and ingenuity^"; but he would by no means 
 allow that even this made Pope a poet. And with regard to 
 eighteenth century philosophy, in that History of Metaphysics 
 which is one of the numerous books Coleridge did not write, 
 Hume is " besprinkled copiously from the fountains of Bitterness 
 and Contempt^" 
 
 We have learnt once more to respect "our indispensable 
 
 ^ Goethe {Miscellanies , vol. i.). 
 
 ^ Biographia Literaria, chap. i. 
 
 3 Dykes Campbell, Life of Coleridge, 137.
 
 28 THK LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 eighteenth century" without ceasing to respect the Romantic 
 Revival. That has amply justified itself; but in many of its 
 earlier phases it was open to attack and stood in need of ex- 
 planation. The frequently tumid rhetoric, the enchanted castles, 
 spectres, blood and thunder of the early romanticists were things 
 not in themselves admirable. The greater men speedily became 
 ashamed of all that this machinery represented and of all that was 
 associated with it. Goethe, once the leader of the Sturm und 
 Drang movement, returned from Italy separated from it by a 
 whole hemisphere of thought and feeling. Schiller in later years 
 loathed the popularity of The Jobbers. Coleridge himself shows 
 everywhere by his infinitely more subtle handling of the super- 
 natural his aversion from the crudeness and barbarism of the 
 work of this period. His artistic instinct was always right ; but it 
 was not until he passed under the influence of Kant that he could 
 explain the principle upon which he worked. 
 
 For a time Coleridge was completely dominated by Kant. 
 He tells us that the Critique of Pure Reason took possession of 
 him with a giant's hand^; and the marks of Kant's influence are 
 j stamped deep upon all Coleridge's prose works. The Friend, the 
 j various series of lectures, the Biographia Literaria and the Aids 
 to Reflection initiated into the mysteries of the transcendental 
 philosophy those who read or heard them. But it was the tran- 
 scendental philosophy filtered through the intellect of Coleridge 
 and enveloped in a Coleridgean mist as hard to penetrate as that 
 which wraps the original, " It is," says De Quincey with truth, 
 "characteristic of Mr Coleridge's mind that it never gives back 
 anything as it receives it*." De Quincey accordingly undertook 
 to play the part of mirror, and to clear away the mists which had 
 hitherto dimmed the reflection. Unfortunately, if in Coleridge 
 we suffer from obscurity, in De Quincey we suff"er from a worse 
 evil, tenuity of thought. Kant, passing through the mind of 
 Coleridge, is transmuted "into something rich and strange": the 
 mind of De Quincey reduces him to insignificance. 
 
 The importance of the Coleridgean influence is amply attested. 
 Transcendentalism, as interpreted by Coleridge, at once justified 
 
 ^ Bio^raJ^hia LiUraiiu, ciiap. ix. ^ Works, xiii. 90-91. 
 
 {■
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 29 
 
 1 romantic poetry, and furnished the groundwork for a philosophy 
 ) widely different from that of the eighteenth century, or from 
 I Utilitarianism. It appealed alike to the imagination and to the 
 reason ; and through different channels it reached poetry and art, 
 philosophy and religion. The Aids to Reflection was read by few ; 
 yet it stirred some who afterwards stirred the nation. "To 
 Julius Hare it appeared to crown its author as ' the true sovereign 
 of modern English thought'; while some younger men, as yet 
 unknown to the author — Maurice and Sterhng among others — 
 felt that to this book they 'owed even their own selves^'" 
 Before Coleridge's Highgate throne passed nearly all the promis- 
 ing youth of England. He moulded modern English criticism, 
 he coloured poetry through the next generation, and his impress 
 is evident in the Oxford Movement. 
 
 That transcendentalism through which mainly Coleridge 
 wrought these effects was a specially German birth. Though 
 Goethe was the greatest man of letters in Europe, France, Italy 
 and England had names which might reasonably be put beside 
 those of Schiller and Richter. But all Europe had none to match 
 with Kant, Fichte and Hegel. Their thought, filtered through the 
 minds of poets (for Carlyle's mode of conception is essentially 
 poetical), is the thing which most of all has given its special 
 significance to the second period of German influence, and more 
 than all else, except only the tremendous fact of the French 
 Revolution, has given to the EngHsh literature of the last two 
 generations its special tone. This thought has become so in- 
 grained with our own that an effort is needed to realise the time 
 when for England it did not exist. But in the early years of the 
 nineteenth century even professional philosophers knew little or 
 nothing about it. Edinburgh was in those days the chief focus 
 of philosophic thought, and when in 1803 Thomas Brown under- 
 took there to expound Kant's Kritik, he /rew his information not 
 from the original German, but from a French translation. Dugald 
 Stewart's chapter on Kant proves that he, as late as 1821, was 
 little better equipped. Their countryman, James Mackintosh, 
 took Kant and Fichte with him on his voyage to India in iSo'i, 
 ^ Dykes Campbell, op. cit. 356.
 
 30 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 but his writings show that his knowledge too remained superficial. 
 Even Sir William Hamilton, wide as was his reading, did not go 
 deep into German thought. The other great school, that of 
 Bentham, practically ignored it. Bentham himself had reached 
 maturity before the German influence began to tell. John Stuart 
 Mill learnt German, but he admits that the reading of German 
 logic went much against the grain with him, and he bases his 
 theory of induction upon Hume, practically ignoring Kant. 
 
 The important fact, however, was that an intellectual inter- 
 course had been established between England and Germany, and 
 for his share in that work William Taylor deserves to be gratefully 
 remembered. Eager young men made pilgrimages to Weimar. 
 One, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, too much neglected in this as in 
 other respects, made Germany his home for more than twenty 
 years. He went, it is true, primarily to study medicine, but he 
 carried with him a poet's heart, and his judgments, though 
 whimsical and inconsistent, are worthy of attention. He advises 
 his friend Kelsall by all means to learn German ; " its literature," 
 he says, "touches the heaven of Greek in many places \" He 
 puts Goethe above Schiller as superior in originality. He calls 
 Iphigenie auf Tauris "a poem faultlessly delightfuP," but adds 
 with regard to the author, " I never felt so much disgust or much 
 more admiration for any poet than for this Goethe^"; which 
 recalls Carlyle's impatient exclamation in the throes of the transla- 
 tion of Wilhelm Meister: "Goethe is the greatest genius that has 
 lived for a century, and the greatest ass that has lived for three'*." 
 
 Beddoes, however, lived and died unknown. The really 
 
 efficient intermediary between the mind of Germany and that of 
 
 England was Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), and it is not less for 
 
 this fact than because of his own intrinsic greatness that Carlyle 
 
 is the best introduction to the literature of the Victorian era. 
 
 No one else touches it at so many points ; no one else combines 
 
 in the same degree the vital principles of poetry and of prose; 
 
 no one else did so much to make it what it was. And not the 
 
 least important aspect of the German influence is the fact that, if 
 
 ^ Letters, 57. "^ ibid. 60. 
 
 * ibid. 01. * Early Letters, \\. m,.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 3 1 
 
 Carlyle revealed Germany to England, Germany revealed Carlyle 
 to himself. 
 
 What, then, we must ask, was the source and nature of the 
 new power which Carlyle imparted to literature ? So intimately 
 are all his works and his whole spiritual nature bound up with 
 his early surroundings that for answer some reference to them is 
 essential. Born on the edge of the wild moorlands of southern 
 Scotland, brought up in the stern Calvinism which was still 
 dominant there, the rugged son of a rugged sire, Carlyle bears 
 upon him to the end the deeply graven marks of his early life. 
 One might imagine that as his father's chisel shaped the stones 
 for the bridges and the houses of his native district, so by those 
 very strokes, strong, true, decisive, he shaped course by course 
 the years of his son's life. And the son's aspiration that he 
 might build as well as his father built has been gratified ; for his 
 books are as it were piled from blocks hewn from the granite. 
 He wandered far enough away from the conceptions and beliefs 
 of his simple kindred ; but the essence of all that made Thomas 
 Carlyle may be traced back to that little village of Ecclefechan. 
 ,^'People ask whence came Carlyle's strange style. Notwithstanding 
 its German colour there is evidence for the belief that it is just 
 the nervous speech of his father lighted by the rays ot genius; 
 and it has an unmistakable kinship with the vigorous, racy, native 
 eloquence of many a Scottish peasant of the olden days, before 
 his vernacular began to decay, and with it his power of dry 
 humour and biting satire and thunderous denunciation. Whence, 
 it is asked, came Carlyle's humour ? Whence came the humour 
 which serves as the salt of all Scottish literature from Dunbar and 
 Lyndsay and Knox himself down to Burns and Scott ? Whence 
 came his moral earnestness and his religious belief ? It is, as has 
 been well said, just Calvinism without the Christianity ; and no 
 one familiar with the character of the two men will doubt that 
 John Knox had much to do with the shaping of Carlyle. 
 
 Carlyle went out into the world. He went to the "worst of 
 all hitherto discovered Universities," locally situated at Edinburgh. 
 There, but especially in that Collection of Books which he declared 
 in Hero- Worship, and repeated long afterwards in the Inaugural
 
 32 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Address in Edinburgh itself, to be "the true University of these 
 days," — there he accumulated the knowledge indispensable to his 
 subsequent career. There in particular he made acquaintance 
 with that German literature which, next to his family and his 
 native country, did most to form his mind. With this mental 
 freight, as all the world knows, he retired after a troubled interval 
 to Craigenputtock, the German leaven working wildly in his 
 Scottish soul. At Craigenputtock he remained for six years, there 
 he wrote Sartor Resartus, there he brooded over the French 
 Revolution, there in a word his genius grew to maturity. It 
 was the complete and perfect Carlyle who migrated to London 
 in 1834; and the broad Scotch accent was but the outward 
 symbol of the fact that this stormful personality, who came to 
 combat, and then to astonish, and ultimately to dominate the 
 Metropolis, had been begotten in far different surroundings and 
 nourished under far different influences. 
 
 Carlyle's was a life of the spirit, not a life of events. From 
 his migration to London until his body was borne away for 
 burial among his kindred in the kirkyard of Ecclefechan, his one 
 home was No. 5, now No. 24, Cheyne Row. But a perverse 
 fate has attended Carlyle beyond the grave, and it is impossible 
 wholly to ignore the controversy which, for twenty years, has 
 raged around his character more fiercely than it has ever raged 
 round any one else in the annals of EngHsh literature. 
 
 Himself one of the most skilful of biographers, a historian 
 who viewed history as in principle biographical, a philosopher 
 who sought the key to the great problems of human society in 
 the lives and actions of heroes, Carlyle inconsistently enough 
 condemned biography as applied to himself, and many times 
 expressed the wish that no life of himself should be written. It 
 became obvious, however, to himself, as it always was to others, 
 that this wish could not be gratified; and when his sister, 
 Mrs Aitken, told him that many would write biographies of him, 
 "there was," says one who was there, "a 'far-away' look on his 
 face, and he said softly, as if half in soUloquy, 'Yes, there will be 
 many biographies^'" There have been many biographies. No 
 
 ^ Wilson's Froude and Carlyle.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 33 
 
 poor rag of reticence has been left to him who of all English 
 writers most fiercely denounced the morbid curiosity and pru- 
 riency of those who sought to penetrate the privacy of others' 
 lives. And by a curious irony the chief sinner, he to whom 
 the whole commotion is due, was Carlyle's own chosen literary 
 executor, Frpude. 
 
 So far as Froude fell into error in his handling of Carlyle, his 
 mistakes seem to have sprung mainly from three sources. He 
 had to delineate a man with an extraordinary gift of humour, 
 and he was himself destitute of that quality. Carlyle, though he 
 could not write verse, was a poet, and, superb artist as Froude v 
 was in prose, he had little or no poetic gift. In the third place, . 
 Carlyle had a command of vivid words and telling phrases un- 
 equalled in his own generation and unsurpassed by any one who 
 has ever written in EngHsh; and Froude never learnt to make \ 
 adequate allowance for the exaggerations into which this gift ) 
 constantly betrayed its possessor. For Carlyle was fully conscious 
 of the power which his humour and his command of language 
 gave him, and he enjoyed their effects. He was the most brilliant 
 conversationalist of his time. Occasionally his tongue, as the 
 phrase goes, ran away with him; and Darwin records how, after 
 every one at a dinner party had been made dumb by a harangue 
 on the advantage of silence, "Babbage, in his grimmest manner, 
 thanked Carlyle for his interesting lecture on silence." But few 
 wished Carlyle to stop. The most distinguished of his con- 
 temporaries listened enthralled by his eloquence and by his 
 originality. *'The waiters and ostlers at inns," he says of Burns, 
 "would get out of bed, and come crowding to hear this man 
 speak! Waiters and ostlers: — they too were men, and here was 
 a manM" Such scenes could be paralleled from Carlyle's own 
 life. The servants who waited at tables where he dined ran from 
 the room choking down their laughter at his bursts of humour. 
 His phrases could sear like hot iron, or illuminate like a sudden 
 burst of sunshine. This power of phrase-making is among the 
 greatest of literary gifts. Many of Carlyle's epigrams are inimitably 
 racy; sometimes they are pregnant with a wisdom shared by many, 
 
 ^ Heroes and Hero- Worship, 
 
 W. 3
 
 34 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 but consummately expressed only by him. Jewels of description, 
 especially descriptions of persons, are lavished on his letters and 
 journals: Mazzini is "a small, square-headed, bright-eyed, swift, 
 yet still, Ligurian figure; beautiful, and merciful, and fierce^"; 
 Tennyson is "a fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-coloured, 
 shaggy-headed man;... dusty, smoky, free and easy*." 
 
 The dangers of this gift of language are sufficiently obvious. 
 Carlyle repeatedly succumbs to temptation, studying effect more 
 than truth, and sometimes ruining eftect through exaggeration. 
 Mill is a man of aridities and negations; Newman has not the 
 intellect of a moderate-sized rabbit. As a rule, such exaggera- 
 tions may be passed over as of trivial consequence, but sometimes 
 they are serious. The tremendous civil war in America was to 
 Carlyle merely "a smoky chimney which had taken fire," and his 
 view of it was unfortunately published in the Ilias Americana in 
 Nuce. 
 
 Perhaps the instance just adduced is the least pardonable of 
 all Carlyle's aberrations of this kind. Usually his phrases are 
 either harmless in themselves, or else the offence is palliated by 
 some quality of the expression. Sir Henry Taylor tells how 
 Carlyle received the doctor sent to him by Lady Ashburton with 
 a volley of invectives against his profession, declaring that "of all 
 the sons of Adam they were the most eminently unprofitable, and 
 that a man might as well pour his sorrows into the long hairy ear 
 of a jackass." Taylor acutely remarks that "the extravagance and 
 the grotesqueness of the attack sheathed the sharpness of it, and 
 the little touch of the picturesque, — the 'long hairy ear,' — seemed 
 to give it the character of a vision rather than a vituperation ^" 
 But the best of all illustrations of this point is to be found in 
 the story which Mr David Wilson quotes from Madame Venturi. 
 The quotation is rather long, but it does so much to set right 
 what Froude has put elaborately wrong, that it is worth making : 
 
 "I was sitting," says Madame Venturi, "with Mrs Carlyle in 
 the drawing-room one day, when — owing, I think, to the error of 
 
 ^ Froude's Life of Carlyle, iii. 454. 
 
 ^ ibid. iii. 190. 
 
 * Autobiography, i. 333.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 35 
 
 a new servant insufficiently impressed with the inviolability of the 
 'silent apartment,' — an unfortunate German gentleman was shown 
 up into that sanctuary, at a moment, as it afterwards appeared, 
 when the Worker therein was even especially unable to endure 
 interruption. Mrs Carlyle, hearing the step of an intruder pass 
 the drawing-room door and ascend the stairs beyond, gazed at me 
 with a face expressive of horror, and, running to the door, inquired 
 anxiously of the servant whom she had shewn into the presence. 
 
 " ' Oh, it is all right,' said the unconscious sinner, ' for the 
 gentleman had a letter of introduction'; a reply which increased 
 her mistress' dismay. After a very few moments we heard the 
 precipitate steps of the unfortunate German stumbling down the 
 stairs in full retreat ; we heard the house door closed with a loud 
 bang, and we saw from the window the ill-starred intruder rushing 
 down Cheyne Row as if desirous of vanishing as rapidly as possible 
 from a scene of disaster and defeat. 
 
 "Before we had time to compose ourselves, Mr Carlyle entered 
 the room like a living thunder-clap : he in no way acknowledged 
 my humble presence; I do not think he looked at me; he certainly 
 addressed himself neither to me nor to his wife, but apparently 
 to the adverse Fates as, raising his eyes and his clenched hands 
 to the ceiling, he passionately asked — what had he done that God 
 Almighty should send a d — d German all the way from Weimar 
 for no earthly or human purpose but to wrench off the handles of 
 his cupboard doors? The tragedy of manner, voice, and gesture, 
 was worthy of Qidipus, and the unconscious comedy of the words, 
 so ludicrously out of all proportion to the subject-matter, and to 
 the fierce glare of his magnificent eyes, that I burst into a fit of 
 the most irreverent laughter, which I found it impossible to 
 restrain even when he turned upon me with the look of a lion 
 about to spring upon and rend his prey. 
 
 "A moment's pause followed, during which I continued to 
 laugh, while Mrs Carlyle looked ready to cry; he then inquired 
 with much scorn, 'And pray, what does this little lady find to 
 laugh at?' Making a desperate effort to control myself, I gasped 
 out that it really did appear to me to be an exceedingly un- 
 dignified interference with human affairs on the part of God 
 
 3—2
 
 36 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Almighty, to despatch even the most insignificant citizen of 
 Weimar all the way to London on so very paltry a mission as 
 that of wrenching off the handles of anybody's cupboard door. 
 The extreme absurdity of the incident itself then seemed to strike 
 him as forcibly as it had struck me, and he laughed at his own 
 share in it as cordially and heartily as I had done ; and to our 
 earnest inquiry whether the unfortunate German was a lunatic, 
 answered that he 'believed the poor soul was at least as sane 
 as himself.' 
 
 "It appeared that the luckless visitor had arrived at a moment 
 when Mr Carlyle was undergoing much mental Sturm und Drang 
 over the intricacies of his subject, and it was clear to us, after 
 listening to his calmer account of the matter, that he had received 
 the poor man with icy coldness; had taken from him the intro- 
 ductory letter in silence, and, after reading it, had uttered no word 
 of welcome or even of comment; had, in fact, simply looked at 
 him and said, 'Well, sir, proceed!' The unfortunate wfJ^^w/ar)' 
 from Weimar rose in great embarrassment, saying that he feared 
 he had called at an unfortunate moment, and offering to retire. 
 Mr Carlyle, who seemed, in relating the scene, to be perfectly 
 unconscious of the cruelty of his own part in it, had shewn his 
 approval of the proposal by rising from his seat. The 'silent 
 apartment' was octagon in form\ the doors of the cupboards were 
 similar in size and shape to the entrance door, and when that 
 door was shut, indistinguishable from it. The German, eager to 
 escape, attempted to turn the handle of one of the cupboard 
 doors. It was locked, and in his confusion he had, in very truth, 
 wrenched the handle off. The same thing happened on his next 
 attempt, and then Mr Carlyle pointed out his only exit, saying 
 severely, 'That, sir, is the door.'" 
 
 " He laughed at his own share in it as cordially and heartily 
 as I had done." The words ought to be borne constantly in 
 mind as the corrective to Froude's solemn treatment of Carlyle's 
 grotesquely exaggerated complaints, objurgations and denuncia- 
 tions. The artist in words is carried away by his own power, just 
 as an athlete will perform feats of strength for the mere pleasure 
 ^ A mistake on Madame Venturi's part.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 37 
 
 of doing them, or a spirited horse will gallop round a field from 
 sheer delight in his own speed. We may be sure too that 
 Mrs Carlyle understood perfectly how to reduce the words to 
 the ordinary power of human speech. Not only was she an 
 extraordinarily clever woman, but she was a coiner of phrases 
 almost as vivid as her husband's, and characterised by a similar 
 exaggeration, sometimes at his expense. Caroline Fox quotes 
 her as saying that "Carlyle has to take a journey always after 
 writing a book, and then gets so weary with knocking about that 
 he has to write another book to recover from it'"; and the same 
 journalist quotes Sterling as her authority for the statement that 
 Mrs Carlyle played all manner of tricks on her husband, and told 
 wonderful stories about him in his presence, he vainly trying to 
 interrupt, until he was forced to join in the laugh against himself. 
 Carlyle's deep and ready sympathy must also be remembered 
 as a corrective to Froude. "No doubt he is a son of Gehenna," 
 Froude himself tells us he would say, when remonstrated with for 
 charity to some scoundrel, "but you can see it is very low water 
 with him." If he heard a tale of sorrow he could not rest till 
 he knew all about it and saw whether it was or was not within 
 his power to cure or to mitigate it ; and sometimes, with that 
 end in view, he showed a simple-minded impulsiveness which 
 was at once comical and touching. Tennyson^ tells how, "hav- 
 ing heard that Henry Taylor was ill, Carlyle rushed off from 
 London to Sheen with a bottle of medicine, which had done 
 Mrs Carlyle good, without in the least knowing what was ailing 
 Henry Taylor, or for what the medicine was useful." And a 
 whole life of kindhness to humble neighbours lay behind the 
 admiration of the omnibus conductor who said to Froude, "We 
 thinks a deal on him down in Chelsea, we does"; and when he 
 was told that the Queen had just offered the "fine old gentleman" 
 the Grand Cross of the Bath, added, "Very proper of she to think 
 of it, and more proper of he to have nothing to do with it. 'Tisnt 
 that as can do honour to the likes of he*." There is something 2.«<< 
 
 Ih'l. 
 
 ^ Jotirnals, ii. 21. 50 
 
 ^ Life of Tennyson, i. 334, n. 
 * Froude's Carlyle, iv. 434. 
 
 143432
 
 38 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 to be set against even the charges of impatience and irritability, 
 though there is better foundation for these than for most of the 
 others. In 1849 Carlyle travelled in Ireland with Charles Gavan 
 Duffy, and the testimony of his companion is that during a tour 
 of six weeks there was "of arrogance or impatience not a shade" 
 on Carlyle's part. 
 
 No man of letters has ever been subjected to a more unsparing 
 and uncharitable scrutiny than that which has been turned upon 
 Carlyle; and yet as the smoke of battle rolls away and the dust 
 settles, it becomes more and more clear that he was not only in 
 essentials noble, like his books, but good and kindly and lovable 
 in the little things of daily life as well. His faults have been 
 viewed under a magnifying-glass, and he has borne the blame of 
 many which were not his. His life was not happy: there needs 
 no Froude to tell us that: the portraits by Watts and Millais and 
 Whistler tell it far more convincingly. The cause of the sorrow 
 written on that most pathetic face was partly the almost life-long 
 indigestion which wrung from him the exclamation that he could 
 wish Satan nothing worse than "to try to digest for all eternity 
 with my stomach \" A deeper cause was those domestic troubles 
 which Froude does not invent, though he exaggerates and com- 
 pletely misinterprets them. The Ashburton unhappiness was a 
 reality, but neither Carlyle nor Lady Ashburton was responsible 
 for it. The cause lay in Mrs Carlyle's mind; and she in turn was 
 only responsible in the sense in which Carlyle was responsible for 
 the condition of his stomach. But the deepest cause of all was 
 his genius. Carlyle would never have agreed with Dryden that 
 great wits are near allied to madness: on the contrary, he nobly 
 defines genius as "the clearer presence of God Most High in a 
 man*." But as the divine has appeared most manifest on earth 
 in the person of the Man of Sorrows, it need occasion no surprise 
 that this "clearer presence" proved, in Carlyle's case, incompatible 
 
 * C. Yoyi'sJ'ouriials, i. 220. 
 
 ^ Past and Present. Carlyle is credited also with the stupid definition 
 of genius as "an infinite capacity for taking pains." What he really said was 
 that genius "means transcendent capacity of taking trouble _/frj/ of all." 
 (Frederick, Bk. iv. ch. iii.)
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 39 
 
 with happiness. He himself warns men that what they ought to / 
 seek is not happiness, but blessedness. Every page of his writings ' 
 bears witness that he was not one who was born to be at ease 
 in Zion. Each of his books was the fruit of birth-pangs which 
 seemed almost to threaten life itself; to each in succession he 
 travelled through an ever-lengthening "valley of the Shadow of 
 Death." Surely not the least of the legacies he has left to 
 posterity is the lesson afforded by the stubborn courage with 
 which he faced the rugged road he had to traverse. 
 
 Turned from divinity by " his grave prohibitive doubts," and 
 barred from the law because he became convinced that it and— j 
 all connected with it were "mere denizens of the kingdom of / 
 dulness," Carlyle was by a sort of compulsion driven towards 
 literature. That alone promised what was indispensable to him, — 
 freedom and an opening to the ideal. But the literature which 
 would serve Thomas Carlyle must be a literature of thought and] 
 I of spiritual truth, not of mere form. He had already absorbed, 
 jwhat the literature of England in the eighteenth century could' 
 j give him. He had found it to be essentially destructive, and the 
 influence of Gibbon had merely deepened the doubts which beset 
 him. Neither could he find help from France. Her negative 
 attitude of mind, the scepticism of the Encyclopaedists, the 
 persiflage of Voltaire, were objects of life-long disUke to him. 
 There was much in the recent literature of England which might 
 have served him better; but while, as the essays on Voltaire and 
 on Diderot prove, Carlyle could be wonderfully just to characters 
 most diverse from his own, a necessary condition was that they 
 must be sufficiently removed from him in time or space or both. 
 The calm wisdom of Wordsworth and the manly sense of Scott 
 were to him of no avail, because these men stood too near him. 
 
 Carlyle was adrift. Some one told him that German literature 
 would give him what he wanted, and he turned to it. This 
 was in 18 19, a time of deep despondency, two years before that 
 "Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism," which took 
 place in the Rue Saint-Thomas de PEnfer, known on earth as 
 Leith Walk. In spite of what had been already done, those who 
 knew German were still few, and German books were still scarce.
 
 40 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 It was through the kindness of a Kirkcaldy friend that Carlyle 
 procured his from Hamburg. Here at last he found what he had 
 been seeking. 
 
 When Carlyle began his literary career Coleridge was in un- 
 disputed possession of the German field; and when the former 
 moved to London, with Sartor Resartus in his pocket, the latter 
 /was still living and still uttering his famous monologues. The 
 pungent criticism of Coleridge in the Life of Sterling shows how 
 English transcendentalism, as it was embodied in the person of 
 its greatest prophet of the passing generation, appeared to the 
 keenest eyes of that which was just rising. Severe as it is, the 
 criticism is essentially true, and it is especially important as 
 coming from the pen of him who was to be — and who was 
 Iwhen the passage was written — the successor to Coleridge in the 
 leadership of the German party. Carlyle in England and Emerson 
 in America were destined to infuse into English literature in the 
 generation following the death of Coleridge the spirit of tran- 
 scendentalism. They differed widely from one another, but they 
 differed still more widely from the father of English transcenden- 
 talism: and in the difference lies one of the chief points of 
 contrast between the early and the intermediate periods of the 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 It is easy to discover what Carlyle considered to be the 
 weakness of Coleridge's transcendentalism. "He [Coleridge] says 
 once, he 'had skirted the howling deserts of Infidelity'; this was 
 evident enough: but he had not had the courage, in defiance of 
 pain and terror, to press resolutely across said deserts to the 
 /new firm lands of Faith beyond; he preferred to create logical 
 f fatamorganas for himself on this hither side, and laboriously 
 solace himself with these."..." What the light of your mind, 
 which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces in- 
 credible, — that, in God's name, leave uncredited; at your peril 
 do not try believing that. No subtlest hocus-pocus of 'reason' 
 versus 'understanding' will avail for that feat;— and it is terribly 
 perilous to try it in these provinces^ 
 
 ,1 » 
 
 ^ Life of Sterling, viii.
 
 % 
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 41 
 
 Nearly always there is in Carlyle an opposition, either covert 
 or explicit, to the philosophy of the eighteenth century — what 
 he calls scornfully the cause-and-effect philosophy, — and it is in -''^ i 
 terms of opposition to that, not to Coleridge, that he indicates ! 
 
 what in his opinion is important in German philosophy. English 
 philosophy, if there was such a thing — for Carlyle in his essay on j 
 
 the Sta/e 0/ German Literature (1827) denied its existence — was 
 still dominated by the principles of the eighteenth century; and 
 Carlyle in that essay explains with singular lucidity wherein pre- 
 cisely the philosophy of Germany was different: — "The Kantist, in 
 direct contradiction to Locke and all his followers, both of the (/^^/ 
 French and English or Scotch school, commences from within, fyu^'stU^. 
 and proceeds outwards; instead of commencing from without r t^^ 
 and, with various precautions and hesitations, endeavouring to '^f^'^^^'^ 
 proceed inwards. The ultimate aim of all Philosophy must be oi^^^s^- 
 to interpret appearances, from the given symbol to ascertain the 
 thing. Now the first step towards this, the aim of what may be 
 called Primary or Critical Philosophy, must be to find some 
 indubitable principle; to fix ourselves on some unchangeable 
 basis; to discover what the Germans call the Urwahr, the 
 Primitive Truth, the necessarily, absolutely and eternally True. 
 This necessarily True, this absolute basis of Truth, Locke silently, 
 and Reid and his followers with more tumult, find in a certain 
 modified Experience, and evidence of Sense, in the universal and 
 natural persuasion of all men. Not so the Germans : they deny 
 that there is here any absolute Truth, or that any philosophy I 
 
 whatever can be built on such a basis; nay they go to the length 
 of asserting, that such an appeal even to the universal persuasions 
 of mankind, gather them with what precautions you may, amounts 
 to a total abdication of Philosophy, strictly so called, and renders 
 not only its farther progress, but its very existence, impossible. 
 What, they would say, have the persuasions, or instinctive beliefs, 
 or whatever they are called, of men, to do v*ith the matter? Is 1 
 
 it not the object of Philosophy to enlighten, and rectify, and , 
 
 many times directly contradict these very beliefs? Take, for - 
 
 instance, the voice of all generations of men on the subject 
 of Astronomy, Will there, out of any age or climate, be one
 
 42 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 dissentient against the fad of the Sun's going round the Earth ? 
 Can any evidence be clearer; is there any persuasion more 
 universal, any belief more instinctive? And yet the Sun moves 
 no hair's-breadth; but stands in the centre of his Planets, let us 
 vote as we please. So is it likewise with our evidence for an 
 external independent existence of Matter, and, in general, with 
 our whole argument against Hume; whose reasonings, from the 
 premises admitted both by him and us, the Germans affirm to 
 be rigorously consistent and legitimate; and, on these premises, 
 altogether uncontroverted and incontrovertible. British philosophy 
 since the time of Hume, appears to them nothing more than a 
 'laborious and unsuccessful striving to build dike after dike in front 
 of our Churches and Judgment-halls, and so turn back from them 
 the deluge of Scepticism, with which that extraordinary writer over- 
 flowed us, and still threatens to destroy whatever we value most.'" 
 There was never penned a more admirable popular exposition 
 of the difference between the two systems; and the difference is 
 of vital importance in practice; for the old philosophy gives us 
 the French Revolution: — "French Philosophism has arisen; in 
 which little word how much do we include ! Here, indeed, lies 
 properly the cardinal symptom of the whole widespread malady. 
 Faith is gone out; Scepticism is come in. Evil abounds and 
 accumulates; no man has Faith to withstand it, to amend it, 
 to begin by amending himself; it must go on ever accumulating. 
 While hollow languor and vacuity is the lot of the Upper, and 
 want and stagnation of the Lower, and universal misery is very 
 certain, what other thing is certain? That a Lie cannot be 
 believed ! Philosophism knows only this : her other belief is 
 mainly, that in spiritual supersensual matters no Belief is possible. 
 Unhappy ! Nay, as yet the Contradiction of a Lie is some kind of 
 Belief; but the Lie with its Contradiction once swept away, what 
 will remain? The five unsatiated Senses will remain, the sixth 
 insatiable Sense (of vanity); the whole dcemonic nature of man 
 will remain, — hurled forth to rage blindly without rule or rein; 
 savage itself, yet with all the tools and weapons of civilisation; 
 a spectacle new in History ^" 
 
 ^ French Revolution, i. i. 2. 13.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 43 
 
 The children have asked for bread and received a stone. The 
 function of idealism is to replace the doubt that kills by the faith 1 
 
 which makes alive. All this, Carlyle held, could be done by 
 religion, and by that alone; and he valued German idealism 
 because he found in it the basis of a religion still possible to men 
 of the nineteenth century. He disdained the shallow view that 
 history repeats itself. Faith must return — but not the old faith. 
 /Reason must dominate understanding — but not to bring back ; 
 
 what understanding had conclusively disproved. Just here lay ^ 
 the difference between his transcendentalism and the tran- \&*^'f^'jr' 
 scendentalism of Coleridge. In spite of Carlyle's sarcasm, the '/^'f^'<*c'? 
 distinction between Verstand and Vertiunft is as vital to him as it 
 is to Coleridge : Carlyle's denunciations of the eighteenth century 
 philosophy rest upon the ground that it is a philosophy of the 
 understanding only. But while Coleridge uses the distinction to 
 bring back by an intellectual jugglery an impossible past, Carlyle 
 uses it to build up a new world out of the ruins of the old. 
 
 But though the substance of Carlyle's thought is always philo- 
 sophical, he seldom chooses to express himself in the technical 
 language of philosophy. On the contrary, he frequently reveals 
 his distrust of it. " In the perfect state, all Thought were but the 
 picture and inspiring symbol of Action; Philosophy, except as 
 Poetry and Religion, would have no being."..." It is a chronic I 
 
 malady that of Metaphysics. "..."A region of Doubt hovers for ever 
 in the background ; in Action alone can we have certainty. Nay 
 properly Doubt is the indispensable inexhaustible Material where- 
 on Action works, which Action has to fashion into Certainty and 
 ReaUty; only on a canvas of Darkness, such is man's way of 
 being, could the many-coloured picture of our Life paint itselt 
 and shine^" 
 
 No wonder that the man who thought and felt thus should 
 have found his inspiration rather in a thoughtful poet than in a 
 professional philosopher. Not only is the English conception ot ' 
 
 German transcendentalism transformed as we pass from the first 
 to the second period of German influence, but a highly significant 1 
 
 change occurs at the same time in the character of the influence 
 
 ^ Characteristics.
 
 44 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 ! exercised by German poetry, Coleridge's Walletistein was a fine 
 \ tribute to Schiller, but in the earlier period it stood alone. Both 
 , Schiller and Goethe were, for the most part, known by cruder 
 : productions of their youth. Lockhart believed that Scott himself 
 did not know Faust in a complete form till the year 1818. 
 Further, notwithstanding "Goetzism" and " Wertherism," nothing 
 in the earlier period is more noteworthy than the secondary posi- 
 tion taken by Goethe ; in the later period, nothing is more note- 
 worthy than his predominance. This change likewise was largely 
 due to Carlyle. Scott and Byron had, it is true, proclaimed their 
 allegiance to Goethe; but Crabb Robinson found himself a prophet 
 crying in the wilderness when he proclaimed his admiration of the 
 author of Faust. John Stuart Mill retained till his death that 
 preference for Schiller which he had found common in his youth. 
 William Taylor preferred Wieland to Goethe. From the vantage- 
 ground of a comprehensive ignorance Jeffrey, impartially disparag- 
 ing all Germans, but with more particular reference to Goethe, 
 told Carlyle that there were nobler tasks for a man like him " than 
 to vamp up the vulgar dreams of these Dousterswivels you are so 
 anxious to cram down our throats," and predicts that " England 
 never will admire, nor indeed endure," his German divinities^ 
 Above all, Coleridge was a Schillerite. He condemned some scenes 
 ^ J of Faust as "mere magic-lantern pictures," and pronounced the 
 whole play a canting story of seduction. It is Schiller, not Goethe, 
 whom he couples with Shakespeare — and Wordsworth — as reveal- 
 ing the profoundest secrets of the human heart. De Quincey, 
 speaking of Schiller, remarks that "in the land of his birth, by 
 those who undervalue him most, he is ranked as the second name 
 in German literature ; everywhere else, he is ranked as the first." 
 " For us," he adds, " who are aliens to Germany, Schiller is the 
 representative of the German intellect in its highest form ; and to 
 him, at all events, whether first or second, it is certainly due, that 
 German intellect has become a known power, and a power of 
 growing magnitude, for the great commonwealth of Christendom ^" 
 On the other hand, he asks us to believe that Goethe's strongest 
 
 1 Froude's Carlyle, ii. 39. 
 " Essay on Schiller.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 45 
 
 claim to our notice is "extravagant partisanship put forward on 
 his behalf for the last forty years " ; and that one of the causes 
 which explain the disproportionate interest attaching to him is 
 " the quantity of enigmatical and unintelligible writing which he 
 has designedly thrown into his later works, by way of keeping up 
 a system of discussion and strife upon his own meaning amongst 
 the critics of his country^" 
 
 Carlyle himself, in the preface to his translation of Wilhelm 
 Meister, declares that to the English Goethe's name "is sound 
 and nothing more: it excites no definite idea in almost any mind"; 
 and lecturing on the Hero as Alan of Letters he said that he would 
 have chosen Goethe as his hero had he not been hopeless of giving 
 any impression but a false one about him. So late as 1840, then, 
 notwithstanding all he and others had done, Carlyle considered 
 the work to be still very incomplete and the gulf between England 
 and Germany very imperfectly bridged. No wonder that twenty 
 years earlier he himself, then starting his study of German, was 
 content to follow the received opinion and make Schiller the first 
 object of his attention. His offer to translate the whole of Schiller's 
 works was declined by the booksellers, but he wrote that charming 
 Life of Schiller (182 3- 182 4) which Goethe procured to be trans- 
 lated into German and pronounced to show an insight surprising 
 in a native of another country. But Schiller was not great enough 
 to hold Carlyle long. He could not be "physician of the iron 
 age" of Europe. He was neither in sufficiently close contact 
 with the real nor sufficiently daring in handling the ideal. What 
 did permanently hold Carlyle was the shadowy mysticism of 
 Novalis, the round and perfect naturalness of Goethe, and the 
 bold humour of Richter, his "intellect vehement, rugged, 
 irresistible," his "imagination vague, sombre, splendid, or appal- 
 ling-." His later works are besprinkled with quotations from, 
 references to, reminiscences of these men, not of Schiller. But 
 the greatest of these is Goethe, and it was to him more than to 
 any one else that Carlyle owed his intellectual salvation. Already 
 in 1823 Goethe is to him "the only living model of a great 
 
 ^ Essay on Goethe. 
 
 » Essay on Richter. /^cJ^MIa 'O^JJJU~i^'(cf''f'^'^)'
 
 46 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 writer ^" Goethe, he wrote to his brother in 1832, "was my 
 evangelist. His works, if you study them with due earnestness, 
 are the day-spring visiting us in the dark night^." 
 
 Goethe was more profoundly natural than Schiller', and this 
 was one reason why Carlyle continued to dig from the mines of 
 the former long after he had exhausted all that was valuable to 
 him in the latter. But the reason above all others was that he 
 found Goethe profoundly philosophical, while Schiller was essenti- 
 / ally an artist, — and even as artist was second to Goethe. Now 
 Y what Carlyle above all things sought for was something to believe 
 about the universe, some ground of truth to rest upon. " In my 
 1 heterodox heart," he writes in 1833, "there is yearly growing up 
 ' the strangest, crabbed, one-sided persuasion, that art is but a 
 \ reminiscence now: that for us in these days prophecy (well under- 
 stood), not poetry, is the thing wanted. How can we sing and 
 paint when we cannot yet believe and see " ? Not to learn how to 
 sing and paint, but to learn how to believe and see, Carlyle had 
 studied German. That was the "what you want" which his 
 friend had told him he would find there. He found it amply 
 in Goethe, but only in a minor degree in Schiller ; and his 
 countrymen under his guidance transferred their allegiance from 
 the smaller to the greater man, with consequences not unim- 
 portant. 
 
 Carlyle's work on Goethe followed with scarcely any interval 
 upon that which he devoted to Schiller. He translated Wilhelm 
 Meister's Appre7iticeship (1824). The book took a deeper hold of 
 him as he worked at it ; and when, three years later, the transla- 
 tions entitled German Romance appeared, there was included 
 among them the less interesting second part, Wilhelm Meister's 
 Travels. Besides these translations, a number of articles on 
 Goethe in various magazines, ranging in date from 1828 to 1832, 
 helped to fix attention upon the great German. 
 
 It would be difficult to conceive two men outwardly more 
 unhke than the master and the disciple : the son of the Scottish 
 
 ' Early Letters, ii. 191, ^ Fronde's Carlyle, ii. 260. 
 
 * Readers of Eckermann's Conversations^ or of Lewes's Lije of Goethe, will 
 call to mind the story of the rotten apples.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE : THOMAS CARLYLE 47 
 
 peasant in contrast with the brilliant ornament of the court of 
 Weimar; the seamed and haggard sage of Chelsea on the one 
 hand, on the other a pattern of manly grace, in youth a radiant 
 Apollo. And in many respects the difference was spiritual also. 
 Carlyle cared comparatively little for the artist in Goethe. What 
 interested him supremely, what he valued as a gospel, was 
 Goethe's answer to the "obstinate questionings" which neces- 
 sarily arise in the thoughtful mind. Behind Carlyle lay the 
 negations of the eighteenth century, so hateful to him. He 
 could neither rest in them, nor go on, like most of his contem- 
 poraries, passively accepting beliefs which the "understanding" 
 had rejected as incredible. In Goethe he found an escape from 
 the negations. Goethe had no prejudices, held nothing sacred 
 from investigation, wore no " Hebrew old-clothes." Yet he stood 
 
 1 as far as possible from the materialism of the eighteenth century 
 and from the machine theory of the universe which Carlyle saw 
 in possession in the nineteenth. 
 
 To Carlyle, the supreme interest of Goethe lay in his religion. 
 The "Calvinist without the Christianity" held that "a man's 
 religion is the chief fact with regard to him." Religion is " the 
 thing a man does practically believe;... the thing a man does 
 practically lay to heart and know for certain, concerning his vital 
 relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duties and destiny 
 
 Vthere^" It "consists not in the many things he is in doubt of 
 and tries to believe, but in the few he is assured of, and has no 
 need of effort for believing ^" It is something which lies over the 
 religious man " like an all-embracing heavenly canopy, like an 
 atmosphere and life-element, which is not spoken of, which in all 
 things is presupposed without speech^" Of it he asks, "Is not 
 serene and complete Religion the highest aspect of human nature ; 
 as serene Cant, or complete No-religion, is the lowest and miser- 
 ablest? Between which two all manner of earnest Methodisms, 
 introspections, agonising inquiries, never so morbid, shall play 
 their part, not without approbation*." 
 
 ^ Heroes and Hero- Worship. 
 
 ^ Latter-Day Pamphlets, 
 
 * Past and Present, * ibid>
 
 48 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Carlyle saw around him, and he had himself gone through, 
 the earnest Methodisms, introspections, agonising inquiries. When 
 he first turned to Germany and found his gospel in Goethe he 
 had not yet seen the "spectral Puseyisms" which roused his 
 scorn in later days. But the antidote to both, and to the deifica- 
 tion of machinery, lay in Goethe. It lay in Goethe, because he 
 alone among the moderns had resolutely faced the problems of 
 the universe, and solved them. A man of the eighteenth century, 
 he was never under the dominion of its negations and unbeliefs. 
 The three typical heroic men of letters of that century, Johnson, 
 Rousseau and Burns, were men who " fought bravely, and fell." 
 Goethe fought and conquered. He had sounded all the depths 
 of human experience. The Confessions of a Beautiful Soul are 
 felt by the pietist to be a perfect picture, because Goethe had 
 experienced those feelings himself. And yet the most thorough- 
 going rationalist could not be more unsparing than he in criticism 
 of worn-out dogmas. The issue of all was a religion profound 
 and true, a religion of things " known for certain," yet absolutely 
 divorced from all creeds, independent of all churches ; certain just 
 because it was personal. " God," said Goethe in the last year of 
 his hfe, "did not retire to rest after the well-known six days of 
 creation, but, on the contrary, is constantly active as on the first. 
 It would have been for Him a poor occupation to compose this 
 heavy world out of simple elements, and to keep it rolling in the 
 sunbeams from year to year, if He had not had the plan of 
 founding a nursery for a world of spirits upon this material basis. 
 So He is now constantly active in higher natures to attract the 
 lower ones'." 
 
 This was the religion essential to Carlyle, here lay the secret 
 ' of his spiritual salvation, this was the Germanism he introduced 
 into English literature. How different from the Germanism of 
 \ the previous generation, with its spectres and goblins, its enchant- 
 j ments and diablerie\ It will be found that all that Carlyle 
 1 borrowed from other Germans, from Richter and from Novalis 
 and from Kant and from Fichte, is in substance the same as Uiis. 
 
 * Eckermann, translated by Oxenford.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 49 
 
 It finds the best expression in his favourite quotation, the song of 
 the Earth Spirit in Faust, 
 
 " 'Tis thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply, 
 And weave for God the garment thou see'st him by." 
 
 Far from bottling-up the Creator in a Leyden jar, we find that He 
 can no longer be confined within the covers of a book or the 
 communion of a Church. There is a promise that reUgion may 
 prove to be no longer a thing which has seen its best days, a thing 
 whose function is to give respectability to the decorous idleness 
 of Sunday, but the vital part of the business of life, a real atmo- 
 sphere, a heavenly canopy. It was this enlarged idea of religion, 
 a religion~nor^r"tHeTirst century, or of the sixteenth, but of the 
 nineteenth, that Carlyle absorbed into himself. To transmit this 
 from Germany to England, to convince the English mind that 
 there is an alternative to the garb of Hebrew old-clothes on the 
 one hand, and the nakedness of atheism on the other, was the 
 main part of his function in literature. It was thus that he 
 interpreted the mind of Germany. This is the thing which makes 
 the dominance of Germany so significant in the Victorian period. 
 
 The ten or twelve years after 1820 were Carlyle's formative 
 period, and the change brought about, in thought and still more 
 in style, is extraordinary. Sartor Resartus was finished in 1831; 
 in the same year Characteristics appeared in the Edinburgh 
 Review; and in these we have the mature Carlyle, the most 
 potent personality in English literature for the next half-century. 
 It is an unconventional personality. To an unsympathetic French- 
 man, Taine, Carlyle is " a strange animal, a relic of a lost family, 
 a sort of mastodon, who has strayed in a world not made for him." 
 Even to a countryman, James Smetham, he is a "great Gothic 
 whale lumbering and floundering in the Northern Seas, and 
 spouting his ' foam fountains ' under the crackling Aurora and , 
 the piercing Hyperborean stars^" And yet in the early part of n 
 this formative period we find the Life of Schiller a very model of \ \ 
 simple, limpid English. * 
 
 It would be a profound mistake to refer that style, which has 
 
 * Smetham s Letters^ 213. 
 W. 4
 
 50 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 been such a cause of offence to numberless readers, exclusively or 
 
 even principally, to Carlyle's Germanism. Assuredly he did not 
 
 learn it from Goethe; probably he took something of it from 
 
 ' Richter; more still perhaps from Reinecke Fuchs. He declared 
 
 that hardly any book in the world had sunk so deep into him as 
 
 that; and he added that perhaps his whole speculations about 
 
 [clothes arose out of it^ But in its essence Carlyle's style is the 
 
 outcome of his own wrestlings with life and its mystery. Para- 
 
 / doxical as it seems to say so, no English style is more natural. 
 
 Addisonian English could never have expressed Carlyle's meaning; 
 
 however excellent it may have been for Addison, to Carlyle it 
 
 / would always have remained a false style. Carlyle conquered his 
 
 I spiritual kingdom with difficulty, and his words bear the marks 
 
 of his strivings, as his face through life, in its seams and wrinkles, 
 
 \bore them too. 
 
 The truth is, the style of the Life of Schiller is an imitated 
 style, that of Sartor Resartus is natural, and has its roots in a 
 more distant but a more intimate past. Carlyle told Froude that 
 it originated in the old farmhouse in Annandale. " The humour 
 of it came from his mother. The form was his father's common 
 mode of speech, and had been adopted by himself for its brevity 
 and emphasis'." How true this is we shall better understand if we 
 turn to Carlyle's own description of his father's style, in that 
 beautiful section of the Reminiscences which is devoted to 
 James Carlyle : — " None of us will ever forget that bold glowing 
 style of his, flowing free from his untutored soul, full of metaphors 
 (though he knew not what a metaphor was), with all manner of 
 potent words which he appropriated and applied with a surprising 
 accuracy you often would not guess whence — brief, energetic, and 
 which I should say conveyed the most definite picture, definite, 
 clear, not in ambitious colours but in full white sunlight, of all 
 the dialects I have ever listened to. Nothing did I ever hear him 
 undertake to render visible which did not become almost ocularly 
 so.... Emphatic I have heard him beyond all men. In anger he 
 had no need of oaths, his words were like sharp arrows that smote 
 * Journal, quoted by Froude, ii. 372. 
 ' f roudes Catljile, iii. 40.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 5 1 
 
 into the very heart. The fault was that he exaggerated (which 
 fault I also inherit), yet only in description and for the sake chiefly 
 of humorous effect \" Except for one point, nearly every word 
 of this might have been written about James Carlyle's great son. 
 The style of Thomas Carlyle cannot be compared to '* pure bright 
 sunshine " : the colour with which it is full charged is fre- 
 quently lurid. He accurately indicated its character in declaring 
 his intention, with respect to the French Revolution, to splash 
 down what he knew "in large masses of colour, that it may look 
 like a smoke-and-flame conflagration in the distanced" But all 
 the other points — the boldness and glow, the metaphors, the 
 potency and piercing sharpness of the words, the emphasis, the 
 marvellous pictorial power, the exaggeration — are features of the 
 style of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 I This consideration, that the style in which Carlyle wrote was 
 I really the vesture in which, to him, thought naturally clothed 
 
 I 
 
 itself, ought to be decisive of the frequently but fruitlessly debated 
 question whether Carlyle ought to have written in such a style or not. 
 Most of his contemporaries, and many in later days, have arraigned 
 him at the bar of criticism on the score of this style; and the 
 gravamen of the charge, implicit if not explicit, usually is that the 
 style is unnatural, contorted, fantastic. Jeffrey remonstrated with 
 him, evidently under the belief that the thought expressed and the 
 manner of expression were alike the outcome of perversity and 
 wrong-headedness. Edmond Scherer, under the same impression, 
 spoke of Carlyle as " demeaning himself like a mystagogue." 
 Taine called his style " demoniacal." 
 
 After his marriage in 1826 Carlyle Hved for a short time at 
 Comely Bank, near Edinburgh; but in 1828 he removed to the 
 now famous moorland farmhouse of Craigenputtock, where he 
 remained until the removal in 1834 to Cheyne Row. There is 
 no period in all his life more important or more really fruitful 
 than the six years spent at Craigenputtock. It would be tiresome 
 to enter again into the controversy as to whether he was or was 
 not unkind to his wife in taking her there; but it may be safely 
 
 ^ Reminiscences, i. 8. * Quoted in Nichol's Caiiyle, 'ji. 
 
 4—2
 
 52 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 said that whatever justification can come from doing what was 
 best for his own genius, was his. The actual literary output of 
 the period is considerable ; its influence on Carlyle's subsequent 
 career was incalculable. The best of the essays were written 
 there. Besides the Characteristics^ already mentioned, there were 
 written at Craigenputtock, among others, Burns, Voltaire, Diderot, 
 Johnson, Novalis, the second essay on Richter, The Diamond 
 Necklace and Signs of the Time. 
 
 To the Craigenputtock period and the years immediately pre- 
 ceding it belongs, then, much the greater part of Carlyle's work 
 in criticism, and it will be well to pause and consider its signifi- 
 cance. This has been occasionally exaggerated, but far more 
 frequently underrated. There is some exaggeration when we are 
 told that Carlyle marks "the beginning of a new era in the history 
 of British criticism'." Undoubtedly he does, as contrasted with 
 Jeffrey and Gifford and the Blackwood group. The professional 
 reviewing of the day was done in a style altogether foreign to 
 Carlyle, a style which he did more, perhaps, than anyone else to 
 render impossible. But Lamb and Coleridge and Shelley and 
 Landor had written before Carlyle, or were writing contem- 
 Iporaneously with him; and though they are all unlike him, still 
 the germs of the revolution in criticism lay in them. The essence 
 of the new criticism is sympathy, that of the old is rule. The 
 eighteenth century critics, and those of the early nineteenth 
 century who followed in their steps, wrote under the conviction 
 that there were certain canons in literature, valid at all times and 
 under all circumstances, by which the writer could be tried, and 
 under which he ought to be condemned if he were found guilty 
 of infringement. Hence criticism was apt to consist either of 
 mere laudation or of mere censure ; or if the two were mingled 
 they were equally dogmatic. Wordsworth was simply condemned; 
 Shakespeare, having passed through the fires of censure, was 
 merely lauded. " Nine-tenths of our critics," says Carlyle, " have 
 told us Uttle more of Shakspeare than what honest Franz Horn 
 says our neighbours used to tell of him, 'that he was a great 
 spirit, and stept majestically along".'" 
 
 ^ Nichol's Carlyle, i68. * Aliscellanies, i. an. 
 
 I
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 53 
 
 To Carlyle, criticism must be neither pure panegyric nor bare 
 censure. Goethe must do something more than "step majestically 
 along"; Voltaire must at least be understood. The first and chief f ,^ ^^^ 
 thing needful is comprehension, sympathy ; only on that basis is I ^'^'''fli 
 wise praise or wise censure possible. " No man can pronounce ' 
 dogmatically, with even a chance of being right, on the faults of a 
 poem, till he has seen its very best and highest beauty;... the 
 beauty of the poem as a whole in the strict sense ; the clear view 
 of it as an indivisible Unity ^" And this could only be done by 
 vievy'ing it from the author's own standpoint. 
 
 In all the works of Carlyle there is no idea so deep-rooted or 
 so multifariously expressed as that of the supreme importance of 
 biography. This is the essence of his Hero- Worship. It is 
 reaffirmed with hardly less emphasis in Past and Present and in 
 Latter-Day Pamphlets. "There is no Biography of a man," he 
 says, "much less any History, or Biography of a Nation, but \ 
 
 wraps in it a message out of Heaven ^" It is the core of his ' i 
 
 conception of history. "History," he quotes, "is the essence of 
 innumerable biographies ^" In Heroes and Hero- Worship he 
 declares that the history of the world is the biography of great 
 men. In Sartor Resartiis we are told that "Biography is by 
 nature the most universally profitable, universally pleasant of all 
 things: especially Biography of distinguished individuals*"; and 
 again, " Great Men are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts 
 of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is com- 
 pleted from epoch to epoch, and by some named History^" And 
 he not only preached this doctrine, but he practised it as well. 
 His Cromwell and his Frederick are both practical illustrations of 
 the doctrine of hero-worship. The French Revolution itself is 
 made, not always without some suspicion of violence, to revolve i 
 
 round persons, above all the person of Mirabeau. 
 
 Carlyle's literary criticism comes under the same all-embracing 
 conception : it too is essentially biographic. " There is no heroic 
 poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a 
 
 ^ Miscellanies, i. 219-220. ^ Latter-Day Pamphlets, 277. 
 
 3 Miscellanies, iv. 53. * Sartor Re^artus, 51. I 
 
 ^ ibid. 122.
 
 54 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 man'"; and conversely, "there is no life of a man, faithfully 
 recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed^." 
 '^The biographic element may be purely spiritual, as in Carlyle's 
 own "spiritual autobiography," Sartor Resartus^ but in all cases 
 we shall find that it is not only present but is essential. He 
 conceives himself to be successful when he has got to the man's 
 own inner meaning, as it appeared to himself. Till that is done 
 nothing is accomplished ; and that can only be done through the 
 power of sympathy. "No character, we may affirm, was ever 
 rightly understood till it had first been regarded with a certain 
 feeling, not of tolerance only, but of sympathy. For here, more 
 than in any other case, it is verified that the heart sees farther 
 than the head. Let us be sure, our enemy is not that hateful 
 being we are too apt to paint him. His vices and basenesses lie 
 combined in far other order before his mind than before ours ; 
 and under colours which palliate them, nay perhaps exhibit them 
 as virtues. Were he the wretch of our imagining, his Hfe would 
 be a burden to himself; for it is not by bread alone that the 
 basest mortal lives; a certain approval of conscience is equally 
 essential even to physical existence ; is the fine all-pervading 
 cement by which that wondrous union, a Self, is held together ^" 
 
 The first qualification of the critic, then, must be sympathy, 
 the determination and the capacity to understand the thing 
 criticised, in the light of its creator's purpose. Carlyle was warned 
 of the importance of this because he saw so much of what he 
 himself admired, of what had nourished his own spirit, condemned 
 from sheer lack of comprehension. The favourite adjective de- 
 preciatory of German literature, was the adjective mystical ; and 
 I" mystical," writes Carlyle in the essay on the State of German 
 Literature, " in most cases, will turn out to be merely synonymous 
 with not uJiderstood." 
 
 A second qualification, equally necessary, is reverence; and 
 
 that implies a radical change in, almost a reversal of, the attitude 
 
 habitually assumed by the critic towards the thing criticised. The 
 
 reviewer was in the habit of pronouncing his judgments ex 
 
 ^ Essay on Scott. ^ tdid. 
 
 ' Essay on Voltaire.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 5$ 
 
 cathedra : he was the judge, and the author came before him for 
 sentence. In Carlyle's view, the critic, ^tm critic at least, is the 
 inferior. His function is only to understand, that of the author 
 is to create. "Criticism stands like an interpreter between the 
 inspired and the uninspired ; between the prophet and those who 
 hear the melody of his words, and catch some glimpse of their 
 material meaning, but understand not their deep import'." 
 
 Sympathy is good, reverence is good ; but neither one nor the 
 other, nor even both together, are sufficient. The fact remains 
 that the critic /las the function of judge. Sympathy is good in so 
 far as it leads to comprehension, not if it produces confusion 
 between right and wrong, wise and foolish. Reverence must be 
 directed to that which is worthy of respect. The greatest of men 
 are faulty and their works imperfect, and it is part, though a 
 subordinate part, of the critic's duty to point out the imperfections. 
 In order to do so correctly he must act on some principle. " To 
 determine with any infallibility whether what we call a fault is in 
 very deed a fault, we must previously have settled two points, 
 neither of which may be so readily settled. First, we must have 
 made plain to ourselves what the poet's aim really and truly was, 
 how the task he had to do stood before his own eye, and how far, 
 with such means as it afforded him, he has fulfilled it. Secondly, 
 we must have decided whether and how far this aim, this task of 
 his, accorded, — not with us, and our individual crotchets, and the 
 crotchets of our little senate where we give or take the law, — but 
 with human nature, and the nature of things at large; with the 
 universal principles of poetic beauty, not as they stand written in 
 our text-books, but in the hearts and imaginations of all men^" 
 
 It was in this spirit and under the guidance of this principle, 
 that Carlyle approached the task of criticism. He was successful 
 in it exactly in proportion to his fidelity in following the laws he 
 had himself laid down. On the whole he showed himself surpris- 
 ingly catholic. His principal limitation was with reference to his 
 own countrymen and contemporaries, whom he rarely judged 
 generously or even justly. What he has said or written in letters 
 or reminiscences about Lamb and Coleridge is well known. Of 
 ^ Staie oj German Literature. ^ Goethe, Miscellanies, i. 219.
 
 56 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the formal essays published in his lifetime the least satisfactory is 
 that on Scott, whose success he seemed to find it hard to pardon. 
 He could not indeed blind himself to Scott's deep manliness, but he 
 almost completely ignored his genius. A few cheap sneers at the 
 restaurateur of Europe are a poor acknowledgment for a gallery 
 of portraits unmatched for fulness and variety, and on the whole 
 for quality, since Shakespeare. 
 
 Scott's great fault, in Carlyle's view, was the want of sufficient 
 seriousness. It is the lack of sympathy resulting from this idea 
 which makes Carlyle's criticism of his great countrymen so in- 
 adequate : Carlyle for once has been false to his own principle, 
 and the result is to demonstrate the truth and the importance of 
 the principle. Had he been always as easily repelled, Carlyle 
 would assuredly not have deserved the praise of catholicity ; but 
 if his subject were only removed sufficiently from himself, he 
 could treat not only tolerantly but with generosity talents and 
 aims the most widely opposed to his own. None of his essays 
 is more creditable to him, though some are profounder, than 
 those on the Frenchmen, Voltaire and Diderot. Voltaire was 
 nearly everything that Carlyle most detested ; he had hardly any 
 of the gifts which won his critic's spontaneous admiration. He 
 speaks with truth of Voltaire's " inborn levity of nature, his entire 
 want of Earnestness." He "was by birth a mocker, and light 
 Fococurante\" " He is no great man, but only a great Persifleur; 
 a man for whom life, and all that pertains to it, has, at best, but 
 a despicable meaning ; who meets its difficulties not with earnest 
 force, but with gay agility ; and is found always at the top, less 
 by power in swimming, than by lightness in floating'." Voltaire's 
 results are mainly negative ; and Carlyle loathed mere negation. 
 In all points this man is as wide as the poles removed from 
 Carlyle and from all that Carlyle instinctively admires. But he 
 is French, and he belongs to a slightly earlier time ; and instead 
 of railing, Carlyle resolutely sets himself to understand him. 
 He finds that great part of what he dislikes in Voltaire is not 
 really the fault of Voltaire, but is the outcome of his surround- 
 ings. He cannot place Voltaire on such a pedestal as that on 
 » Voltaire. * ibid.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 57 
 
 which he elevates Goethe; but he can and he does do justice 
 to the much that is admirable in Voltaire's intellect, and gives 
 generous recognition to his lucidity, his method and the wide 
 sweep of his knowledge. " From Newton's Principia to the 
 Shaster and Vedam, nothing has escaped him : he has glanced 
 into all literatures and all sciences ; nay studied in them, for he 
 can speak a rational word on all. It is known, for instance, that 
 he understood Newton when no other man in France understood 
 him : indeed his countrymen may call Voltaire the discoverer of 
 intellectual England ; — a discovery, it is true, rather of the Curtis 
 than of the Columbus sort, yet one which in his day still remained 
 to be made. Nay, from all sides he brings new light into his 
 country : now, for the first time, to the upturned wondering eyes 
 of Frenchmen in general, does it become clear that Thought has 
 actually a kind of existence in other kingdoms ; that some 
 glimmerings of civilisation had dawned here and there on the 
 human species, prior to the Siecle de Louis Quatorze^." 
 
 Three conspicuous features mark the criticism of Carlyle : its j 
 profound humanity, its penetration, and its reach. ' 
 
 Its humanity springs from his conviction of the essentially 
 biographic character of all books worth calling books. To him, 
 as to Hegel, " ideas are living things, and have hands and feet." 
 Everything in existence is the embodiment of thought ; and " of 
 all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the 
 most momentous, wonderful and worthy are the things we call 
 Books," because a book " is the purest embodiment the thought of 
 man can have^" One of the numerous points of contact between 
 Carlyle and Browning is the conviction, held by both, that nothing 
 is much worth study but the development of soul. This conviction 
 deeply influences Carlyle' s criticism. The man and his work are 
 always viewed in relation ; the one throws a light on the other ; 
 and hence the book is no less vital than the writer. It is by this 
 method that Carlyle is enabled to bridge the gulf between himself 
 and writers like Voltaire and Diderot. It is thus that he fathoms 
 the meaning of Goethe. It is in this spirit that he achieves such 
 
 ^ Voltaire, " Hero as Man of Letters. 
 
 I v* 
 
 c 
 
 ■o^
 
 58 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 a triumph of criticism as the essay on Burns. Carlyle had drunk 
 in with his mother's milk the knowledge necessary for the triumph 
 in the last case. Scotch himself, and sprung from the class to 
 which Burns belonged, he knew the poet's meaning by instinct, 
 without needing to reason it out Every word that Burns wrote 
 was to him a revelation of the spirit of the man. His essay has 
 rather the value of a piece of creative literature than of a mere 
 criticism. 
 
 f The second point, the penetrative character of Carlyle's criti- 
 
 I cism, is closely connected with the first. He is absolutely 
 
 i indifferent to superficial and subordinate matters. Until he has 
 
 reached the heart, he conceives himself to have achieved nothing; 
 
 and usually he gains his end through groanings and travail. 
 
 Dr Garnett has admirably pointed out how, "another Jacob, he 
 
 wrestled with Goethe, and would not let him go till he had won 
 
 his blessing " ; and how in the translation of Wilhelm Meister he 
 
 gradually advanced from the view that " Goethe is the greatest 
 
 genius that has lived for a century, and the greatest ass that has 
 
 lived for three," to the avowal that the principal demerit of his 
 
 Wilhelm Meister is " the disfigurement of a translation." It is by 
 
 a similar process that all Carlyle's successes are won. Occasionally, 
 
 as in the case of Burns and partly of Richter and Johnson, by 
 
 natural sympathy; sometimes, as in the case of the French 
 
 writers, by a violent intellectual effort ; sometimes again, as with 
 
 I Goethe, by a mixed process, Carlyle wins the actual standpoint of 
 
 his author, or what he believes to be such, and interprets his works 
 
 from thence. 
 
 The last point in connexion with Carlyle's criticism is its 
 reach. He is scarcely ever purely critical ; there is almost always 
 something creative in his essays. The writers he values are those 
 who give him an outlook over history and an insight into 
 human nature ; and he values them in proportion as they do 
 that. Mere elegance of form and phrase he cares little for ; rather, 
 he has no patience with it; but genuineness, whether in a Corn- 
 Law Rhymer or in a Goethe, he deems of incalculable worth. 
 Both are emphatically men. " Here is an earnest truth-speaking 
 man; no theoriser, sentimentaliser, but a practical man of work
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 59 
 
 and endeavour, man of sufferance and endurance^." Goethe is 
 "the Strong One of his time." And both, with the many inter- 
 imediate between them in gifts and importance, are valued for the 
 ^insight they give into their own country or the world. The history 
 of Goethe's mind "is, in fact, at the same time, the history of 
 German culture in his day^"; and the Corn-Law Rhymes are rich 
 in suggestions for the author of Latter-Day Pamphlets, Behind 
 literature there always lies to Carlyle something greater than 
 literature. He cites the correspondence between Frederick and 
 Voltaire, and then adds his comment: — "We can perceive what 
 kind of Voltaire it was to whom the Crown-Prince now addressed 
 himself; and how luminous an object, shining afar out of the 
 solitudes of Champagne upon the ardent young man, still so 
 capable of admiration. Model Epic, Henriade; model history, 
 Charles Douze; sublime tragedies, Cesar, Alzire and others, which 
 readers still know though with less enthusiasm, are blooming forth 
 in Friedrich's memory and heart : such Literature as man never 
 saw before ; and in the background Friedrich has inarticulately a 
 feeling as if, in this man, there were something grander than all 
 Literatures: a Reform of human Thought itself; a new 'Gospel,' 
 good-tidings or God's Message, by this man; — which Friedrich 
 does not suspect, as the world with horror does, to be a Ba'spel^ 
 or Devil's-Message of bad-tidings^ !" 
 
 j This feeling, inarticulate in Frederick, is articulate in Carlyle. 
 He quotes with approval the saying of Novalis that "the highest 
 problem of literature is the Writing of a Bible*"; and that of 
 Fichte, that the "Literary Man" is the "Priest" of these Modern 
 Epochs ^ To Carlyle therefore there is nothing of dilettantism in 
 literature that is worthy of the name. Its function is to reveal the 
 Divine Idea of the World ; and it is valuable just in proportion 
 as it performs that function. A typical example of Carlyle's mode 
 of criticism is the contrast he draws between Johnson and Hume. 
 Brushing aside all subordinate matters he goes straight to the 
 heart of each ; and he views both in relation to the life of Europe 
 in their time : — 
 
 ^ Corn-Law Rhymes. ^ Miscellanies, i. 1 76. 
 
 ^ Friedrich, iii. 225. * Latter-Day Pamphlets, 240. * ibid. 270.
 
 60 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA j 
 
 ^ "It is worthy of note that, in our little British Isle, the two , 
 grand Antagonisms of Europe should have stood embodied, ; 
 under their very highest concentration, in two men produced 
 simultaneously among ourselves. Samuel Johnson and David 
 Hume were children nearly of the same year; through life they '< 
 were spectators of the same Life-movement; often inhabitants of 
 the same city. Greater contrast, in all things, between two great 
 men, could not be. Hume, well-born, competently provided for, 
 whole in body and mind, of his own determination forces a way 
 into Literature: Johnson, poor, moonstruck, diseased, forlorn, is 
 forced into it 'with the bayonet of necessity at his back.' And 
 what a part did they severally play there! As Johnson became 
 the father of all succeeding Tories; so was Hume the father of all 
 succeeding Whigs, for his own Jacobitism was but an accident, as 
 worthy to be named Prejudice as any of Johnson's. Again, if 
 Johnson's culture was exclusively English; Hume's, in Scotland, 
 became European ; — for which reason too we find his influence 
 spread deeply over all quarters of Europe, traceable deeply in all 
 speculation, French, German, as well as domestic; while Johnson's 
 name, out of England, is hardly anywhere to be met with. In 
 spiritual stature they are almost equal; both great, among the 
 greatest ; yet how unlike in likeness ! Hume has the widest, 
 methodising, comprehensive eye; Johnson the keenest for per- 
 spicacity and minute detail: so had, perhaps chiefly, their education 
 ordered it. Neither of the two rose into poetry; yet both to some 
 approximation thereof: Hume to something of an Epic clearness 
 and method; as in his delineation of the Commonwealth Wars; 
 Johnson to many a deep Lyric tone of plaintiveness and impetuous 
 graceful power, scattered over his fugitive compositions. Both, 
 rather to the general surprise, had a certain rugged humour shining 
 through their earnestness: the indication, indeed, that they were 
 earnest men, and had subdued their wild world into a kind of 
 temporary home and safe dwelling. Both were, by principle and 
 habit, Stoics: yet Johnson with the greater merit, for he alone 
 had very much to triumph over; farther, he alone ennobled his 
 
 ^ Stoicism into Devotion. To Johnson Life was as a Prison, to 
 be endured with heroic faith: to Hume it was little more than a
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 6l 
 
 foolish Bartholomew-Fair Show-booth, with the foolish crowdings 
 and elbowings of which it was not worth while to quarrel; the 
 whole would break up, and be at liberty, so soon. Both realised 
 the highest task of Manhood, that of living like men; each did 
 not unfitly, in his way: Hume as one, with factitious, half-false 
 gaiety, taking leave of what was itself wholly but a Lie: Johnson 
 as one, with awe-struck, yet resolute and piously expectant heart, 
 taking leave of a Reality, to enter a Reality still higher. Johnson 
 had the harder problem of it, from first to last: whether, with 
 some hesitation, we can admit that he was intrinsically the better 
 gifted, may remain undecided^" 
 
 The removal to Cheyne Row in the summer of 1834 was the 
 last great change in Carlyle's life. Henceforth, in locality, as well 
 as in profession, his destiny was fixed; but trials and struggles 
 stern enough were still to be endured. The available capital with 
 which he and his wife faced the change to London amounted 
 only to about ;^2oo; and in February, 1835, he records "as a 
 fact and document for the Hterary history of this time," that "it 
 is now some three-and-twenty months since I have earned one 
 penny by the craft of literature ^" But writing to his brother 
 John in January, 1834, Carlyle mentions receipt of money from 
 Fraser for Sartor. The statement quoted therefore must apparently 
 mean that he had not been paid for anything written within 
 twenty-three months. Such, at the age of thirty-nine, was the 
 financial condition of the greatest literary genius of his time. 
 
 Twice before Carlyle had paid visits of considerable duration 
 to London; the first in 1824-1825; the second in 1831-1832. 
 On the latter occasion his object had been to arrange for the 
 publication of Sartor Resartus. It proved no easy task. Sartor 
 was offered to John Murray, among others, and actually accepted 
 by him. But Byron's ava| of publishers had lost some of his 
 youthful daring, and drew back. All the world knows how it 
 ultimately appeared in Fraser's Magazine in 1833-1834, and 
 justified, from their own point of view, the publishers who re- 
 jected it, by proving to be "beyond measure unpopular." Cash 
 scanty — no prospect of more except through literature — and his -~v 
 ^ Miscellanies, iv. 129-130. ^ Froude's Carlyle, ili. 19.
 
 62 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 principal work threatening to bring disaster on its publisher — 
 the prospect was gloomy enough. But Carlyle held doggedly on, 
 and had the courage to decline an offer of employment on the 
 Times, procured for him by his friend John Sterling. 
 
 Before Carlyle moved to London he had determined upon 
 his next subject. He had spent the early months of 1833 in 
 Edinburgh S "reading violently" in the Advocates' Library, on 
 John Knox as well as on the French Revolution, until he finally 
 settled down to the latter subject. The possibility of settling in 
 Edinburgh had been in his mind, but when he revisited them he 
 found himself not sufficiently attracted by those with whom it 
 would have been necessary to associate. "As to the men here, 
 they are beautiful to look upon after mere black-faced sheep; yet 
 not persons of whom instruction or special edification in any way 
 is to be expected. From a Highlander you once for all cannot 
 get breeches ^" 
 
 It was therefore with a mind full of the Revolution that 
 Carlyle made his migration. A few months later he began writing 
 his history, not without the usual stress. On September 21, 1834, 
 he records that "after two weeks of blotching and bloring" 
 he has produced — "two clean pages*!" He had to struggle, not 
 only with the natural difficulties of his subject, but with officialdom 
 and red-tape as well. The British Museum contained the finest 
 collection in the world of pamphlets on the Revolution; but 
 Carlyle failed to get access to it. Nevertheless, early in 1835 
 the first volume was finished. It was the MS. of this volume 
 which, lent to Mill, who had been generously helpful in finding 
 and lending books, was accidentally destroyed. Carlyle bore the 
 loss nobly — he never failed to meet the great troubles of life 
 with dignity. Setting himself resolutely to re-wiite it, he finished 
 it just a year after he began the composition of the first version. 
 The last sentence of the third volume was written on January 12, 
 ''1837, and Carlyle went out for a walk, saying to his wife, "I 
 ' know not whether this book is worth anything, nor what the 
 world will do with it, or misdo, or entirely forbear to do, as is 
 
 ^ Froude's Carlyle, ii- 333. * ibid. 
 
 ' ibid. ii. 4j6.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 63 
 
 likeliest; but this I could tell the world: You have not had for a 
 hundred years any book that comes more direct and flamingly from 
 
 the heart of a living man. Do what you like with it, you \" 
 
 Almost exactly half a century earUer, Edward Gibbon had written 
 the last sentences of the greatest history in the English language; 
 and the record of his emotions forms an instructive contrast: "It 
 was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787, between 
 the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the 
 last page, in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down 
 my pen, 1 took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of 
 acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and 
 the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the 
 silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all 
 nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy 
 on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment 
 of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober 
 melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had 
 taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, 
 and that whatsoever might be the future date of my History, the 
 Hfe of the historian must be short and precarious." The core of 
 the differences between The French Revolution and The Decline 
 and Fall of the Roman Empire is contained in these two passages. 
 There could be no more convincing proof of the truth of Carlyle's 
 doctrine that what a man writes in his books is himself. 
 
 The reception of The French Revolution was very different 
 from that which had been accorded to Sartor. The most pro- 
 minent men of the time, even those who least agreed with Carlyle, 
 recognised its author as now one of the first of English men of 
 letters. But meanwhile finances were running low; and though 
 the essays on Mirabeau and on The Diamond Necklace brought in 
 something, it was difficult to bridge the time till the history could 
 be printed and become remunerative ; and Carlyle turned his 
 eyes towards America, as his countryman Burns, in distress for 
 widely different reasons, had formerly turned his. Emerson had 
 visited him at Craigenputtock in 1833, and afterwards more than 
 once urged him to migrate across the Atlantic, where, he was 
 
 ^ Froude's Carlyle, iii. 84.
 
 64 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 assured, he could make income sufficient for his needs by lecturing. 
 Sartor Resartus had been published there in book form (1836) 
 before England was ready to receive it in that shape. Carlyle 
 would probably have gone; but Harriet Martineau and several 
 others determined to make an effort to keep him in England ; 
 and the outcome was a series of six lectures on German literature 
 delivered in 1837. The experiment was completely successful, 
 and the ;^i35 it brought in solved for the Carlyles the problem 
 of the material means of life. A second set followed in 1838, a 
 third in 1839, and the fourth and last in 1840. The subject of 
 ^ the last course was Heroes and Hero- Worship. They were the 
 only lectures which were published in full and during Carlyle's 
 life ; but the second course, on the History of European Literature, 
 was printed from notes after his death. 
 
 Before this last course of lectures was delivered, Chartism 
 (1839) had been written and published. It was offered first to the 
 Quarterly Review, because the author's notions differed intensely 
 both from those of the speculating Radicals and from those of 
 the Whigs, and he thought he might most hopefully address 
 himself to the better class of Conservatives'. Lockhart felt 
 obliged to decline it ; but he did so in such a way that the two 
 men, who were very slightly known to one another previously, 
 remained friends ever after. When Mrs Welsh died, Carlyle 
 turned to Lockhart for comfort, and the latter in response sent 
 him his own beautiful lines, which Carlyle frequently repeated in 
 his declining years : — 
 
 " It is an old belief 
 That on some solemn shore 
 Beyond the sphere of grief 
 Dear friends shall meet once more —   
 
 Beyond the sphere of Time 
 And Sin and Fate's control, 
 Serene in changeless prime 
 Of Body and of Soul. 
 
 That creed I fain would keep, 
 This hope I'll not lorego ; 
 Eternal be the Sleep 
 Unless to waken so." 
 
 * Lang's Lockhart^ ii. 437.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 65 
 
 Before he wrote Chartism Carlyle had already fixed in his 
 ntiind that his next subject should be Oliver Cromwell ; but no 
 book he ever undertook longer refused to be written. The 
 subject was suggested to him by Mill, who asked him to write an 
 article on the great Protector for the London and West?ninster 
 Review. Carlyle consented ; but Mill went abroad, and in his 
 absence his sub-editor, an Aberdonian named Robertson, imperti- 
 nently wrote to Carlyle that he " meant to do Cromwell himself^" 
 Carlyle in anger determined to expand the article into a book. 
 Early in 1839 he was busy gathering authorities; and in the 
 course of his quest he set on foot the movement which resulted 
 in the establishment of the London Library. But as late as 
 October, 1843, '^ot a word had been written. It was not until Carlyle 
 had completely changed his plan that he made any progress. 
 He had designed a life of Cromwell and, practically, a history of 
 the Commonwealth; what he ultimately produced was a sort of 
 glorified and inspired piece of editorial work, Oliver Cromiveirs 
 Letters and Speeches: with Elucidations (1845). From the plan, 
 there is necessarily less of Carlyle than in any other of his great 
 works. There is therefore some loss of vividness ; for the Lord- 
 General was not such an artist in words as his editor. But it is a 
 wonderful piece of portraiture ; and here and there we come upon 
 passages, like the Battle of Dunbar, as vivid and picturesque as 
 any Carlyle ever wrote. 
 
 Two years before the appearance of Cromwell, Carlyle pub- 
 lished that remarkable irdpe.pyov, Fast and Present, — remarkable 
 not only for its intrinsic merits but as one of the only two books 
 Carlyle ever wrote which he found easy of composition. It was 
 the fruit of seven weeks' work, and it has left, says Froude, not a 
 single cry of complaint in his correspondence. This book, its pre- 
 decessor. Chartism, and its successor, the Latter-Day Pamphlets, 
 form a trio of works inspired by the social condition of England 
 in Carlyle's own day, and full of that peculiar Radicalism which 
 cut Carlyle off from the party to which the English aristocracy 
 belonged, and yet left him not only the most vigorous advocate 
 of aristocratic or rather autocratic government, but a believer in 
 
 * f roude's Carlyle, iii. 149. 
 
 w. 5
 
 66 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the English aristocracy itself, as at any rate the most capable and 
 the most conscientious class the country possessed. 
 
 The year 1851 was marked by the Lt/e of Sterling, the purest 
 work of art Carlyle ever produced, and one of the most beautiful 
 biographies in English, — probably the one which best of all 
 satisfies Carlyle's own conception of what a biography ought to 
 be. Like Fast and Present it was written swiftly and with ease ; 
 standing thus in strong contrast to its successor, the last important 
 work of Carlyle, the History of Friedrich II of Prussia, called 
 Frederick the Great (1858-1865). Frederick had been in Carlyle's 
 mind as a possible subject soon after the completion of his 
 Cromwell; and when/<?>^« Sterling was out of his hands he began 
 reading. It was by far the largest subject Carlyle had ever 
 attempted, and the difficulties were proportionate. " If they were 
 to offer me all Prussia, all the solar system," he said, " I would 
 not write Frederick again." About the end of 185 1 Carlyle was 
 deep in study. In September, 1852, he was in Germany for the 
 purpose of gathering materials. For five years more he was 
 completely immersed in the subject; and it was not until 1858 
 that the world saw the fruit of this labour in the first two volumes 
 of Friedrich. In the same year he took his second journey to 
 Germany, his principal object being to visit the battle-fields of 
 Frederick. Carlyle was always scrupulously careful in studying 
 topography, and he had an eye for country almost as penetrating 
 as his eye for human physiognomy. No journey of his failed to 
 leave its mark on his books. A visit to Paris in 1825 contributed 
 to the vividness of the French Revolution; and without this 
 second visit to Germany the magnificent battle-pieces which enrich 
 Friedrich must have missed great part of their effect. He landed 
 at Hamburg on August 24, and he was back again at Chelsea 
 on September 22. The work accomplished in the time was 
 marvellous ; and surely no higher compliment was ever paid to a 
 historian than that which is implied in the German belief that, 
 down to the opening of the German archives, and the publication 
 of the correspondence of Frederick in the eighties, Carlyle's work 
 was the best, not only as a general history of Frederick, but as a 
 study of his campaigns.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 6/ 
 
 The remaining years of Carlyle's life crept through gloom 
 towards the grave. The triumph of the rectorship of Edinburgh 
 University was clouded immediately by the tragedy of his wife's 
 death. He was condemned to idleness, for his hand trembled so 
 that he could not write. He tried dictation, but no one who in 
 the least degree understands Carlyle will be surprised that the 
 experiment failed: for him it was impossible. He occasionally 
 showed an interest in public affairs, such as the agitation over 
 General Eyre ; and he wrote a few slight things, — the Early Kings 
 of Norway and the essay on the portraits of Knox, — but sub- 
 stantially his work was done when he finished Frederick; and 
 when he died in 1881 he had already for fifteen years belonged 
 to the past of English literature. 
 
 The effective literary life of Carlyle is comprised, then, within 
 the forty-two years between 1823, the date of the series of articles 
 on Schiller's Life and Works in the London Magazine, and 1865, 
 when Frederick the Great was completed. Throughout, under 
 superficial differences, it was singularly of a piece : gradual develop- 
 ments can be traced, but no fundamental change of principle. 
 Carlyle "made himself" at Craigenputtock, and what he became 
 there he remained till the end. As an apostle of Germanism and 
 as a critic he has been already considered : it remains to notice 
 the longer works, and those in which he speaks more directly in 
 his own name. It will be possible to dismiss them with com- 
 parative brevity ; for, as has just been indicated, under all forms 
 and guises we find the same Carlyle. 
 
 ~ The works now in question may be divided into two principal 
 groups, — the histories, and that group of writings in which Carlyle 
 either openly or under the veil of myth spoke to and advised his 
 own generation. The division however does not go as deep as it 
 may seem to go. Carlyle's histories are, like his other works, 
 intensely personal, — and also intensely practical. What he said 
 of his French Revolution was true : it came direct and flaming 
 from his heart. And it did so because to him the facts were not 
 'dead, but alive for lesson and for warning. He was a John the 
 Baptist, faring hard, girt with rough skins, and from his desert 
 retreat calling upon the world to repent. His whole works are 
 
 5-2
 
 68 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 , a sermon on the text that what men sow that shall they reap, 
 / whether as individuals or as nations. The French Revolution 
 was to him simply the most impressive illustration of that truth 
 afforded by modern Europe : — 
 
 " So many centuries, say only from Hugh Capet downwards, 
 had been adding together, century transmitting it with increase to 
 century, the sum of Wickedness, of Falsehood, Oppression of 
 man by man. Kings were sinners, and Priests were, and People. 
 Open Scoundrels rode triumphant, bediademed, becoronetted, 
 bemitred; or the still fataler species of Secret-Scoundrels, in 
 their fair-sounding formulas, speciosities, respectabilities, hollow 
 within : the race of Quacks was grown many as the sands of the 
 sea. Till at length such a sum of Quackery had accumulated 
 itself as, in brief, the Earth and the Heavens were weary of. Slow 
 seemed the Day of Settlement; coming on, all imperceptible, 
 across the bluster and fanfaronade of Courtierisms, Conquering- 
 Heroisms, Most Christian Grand- Mo }iargue-\sm?,, Well-beloved 
 Pompadourisms : yet behold it was always coming; behold it 
 has come, suddenly, unlooked for by any man ! The harvest of 
 long centuries was ripening and whitening so rapidly of late ; and 
 now it is grown white, and is reaped rapidly, as it were, in one 
 day. Reaped, in this Reign of Terror; and carried home, to 
 Hades and the Pit ! — Unhappy sons of Adam : it is ever so ; and 
 
 j never do they know it, nor will they know it. With cheerfully 
 smoothed countenances, day after day, and generation after 
 generation, they, calling cheerfully to one another, Well-speed-ye, 
 are at work, sowing the wind. And yet, as God lives, they shall 
 reap the whirlwind: no other thing, we say, is possible, — since 
 God is a Truth, and His World is a Truth'." 
 
 This is no mere rhapsody; it was a belief firmly held by 
 
 Carlyle; it was the beUef which made all history so intensely 
 
 I alive to him. He is profoundly impressed by the scientific fact 
 
 'that no slightest action fails of its effect; that the casting of a 
 
 I pebble alters the centre of gravity of the world; and that the effect 
 ' goes on producing other effects for ever. And what was true in 
 the physical was equally, or if possible was more deeply true in 
 ^ French Revolution, in. v. i. 172-173.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 6g 
 
 the moral sphere; for the spiritual is the real, and the so-called 
 real is only appearance, the vesture of the spiritual. It was 
 largely, if not principally, to preach this doctrine that Carlyle 
 wrote his French Revolution ; and this purpose goes far to explain 
 the plan of that book, which is rather, as it has been variously 
 called, the "epic" or the "drama" than the "history" of the 
 Revolution. Carlyle's is, historically viewed, an extremely solid 
 piece of work. Much has been discovered since which he did not 
 know ; many mistakes into which he fell have been revealed ; yet 
 having regard to what was known and what was possible to be 
 known seventy years ago, the book fully deserves the praise of 
 accuracy. It has other and deeper merits ; no new discoveries of 
 fact can ever make antiquated the pictures drawn by Carlyle ; no 
 future historian can afford to ignore his delineations of the men 
 of the Revolution. But even when it was new, Carlyle's history 
 was not and did not pretend to be a record of the facts. The 
 method is rather that of an apocalypse than that of a narrative. 
 It assumes much knowledge in the reader; if he possesses that 
 knowledge, the book throws a flood of light upon the subject ; if 
 he does not, it remains itself in some respects a mystery. For the 
 soul of it, however, the only knowledge which is indispensable is a 
 knowledge of human nature, the only indispensable power is the 
 power to appreciate thought. Nothing but the heart to feel and 
 the mind to think are needed for the appreciation of Mirabeau 
 and Danton and Robespierre, of the taking of the Bastille, the 
 flight to Varennes, the death of Louis XV, the carnage of the 
 Swiss. All those wonderful pictures are so poetical that we can 
 only marvel why the man who painted them could not express 
 himself through the usual vehicle of poetry. But he tried and 
 failed. 
 
 If there were no specific declaration of Carlyle's belief in the 
 importance of biography to be found, it would be amply attested 
 by the character of his histories. They are emphatically histories 
 of men, living, acting, failing, triumphing. No "machine theory" 
 of the universe will do for him ; on nothing are the phials of his 
 wrath emptied more copiously than on that. In the Hero as 
 Divinity he pictures beautifully Igdrasil, the Ash-tree of Existence,
 
 70 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 and, with a sigh, contrasts with it "the Machine theory of the 
 Universe." He has no beUef in the doctrine that the time calls 
 forth the great man. "The Time call forth? Alas, we have 
 known Times call loudly enough for their great man ; but not find 
 \ him when they called ! He was not there ; Providence had not 
 sent him ; the Time, calling its loudest, had to go down to con- 
 fusion and wreck because he would not come when called^" 
 Hence history is nothing to Carlyle until he has found his great 
 man ; and when he has found him he has to realise him as a man, 
 clothed in flesh and blood. His outward appearance even was 
 important as an index of inward character. Carlyle was skilled 
 in physiognomy, and reUed much upon it. "Aut Knox aut 
 Diabolus," he said of what he believed to be the genuine portrait 
 of the Reformer ; " if not Knox who can it be ? A man with that 
 face left his mark behind him'^." And in 1854 he wrote with 
 reference to a project of a National Exhibition of Scottish Portraits: 
 " In all my poor Historical investigations it has been, and always is, 
 one of the most primary wants to procure a bodily likeness of the 
 personage inquired after ; a good Portrait if such exists ; failing 
 that, even an indifferent if sincere one. In short, any representa- 
 tion, made by a faithful human creature, of that Face and Figure, 
 which he saw with his eyes, and which I can never see with mine, 
 is now valuable to me, and much better than none at alP." 
 
 The moving force in history, then, is the Great Man. Carlyle 
 would have scoffed at the idea of a " science " of history ; for as 
 yet, at least, there is no science of human character. For parlia- 
 ments, assemblies and the machinery of government Carlyle had 
 little respect — too little. To him, the struggle between King and 
 Parliament in England summed itself up in the character of 
 Cromwell. He could interest himself in nothing else; and the 
 history of the Commonwealth refused to be written by him. He 
 could not interest himself even in the other human actors, much 
 less in the " machinery " : it was more tolerable to him to rescue 
 the speeches of Cromwell from their "agglomerate of opaque 
 
 ^ Hero as Divinity. ^ Froude's Carlyle, iv. 417. 
 
 '* Miscellanies, vii. 129.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 7 1 
 
 confusions, printed and reprinted; of darkness on the back of 
 darkness, thick and threefold ^" 
 
 The method of hero-worship has its dangers, as all methods 
 have. Carlyle has not escaped the tendency to idealise the hero. 
 It is probable that Cromwell, in the latter part of his career, is 
 less defensible against the charge of "vaulting ambition" than 
 Carlyle would make him. But it was with reference to Frederick 
 that he had to do most violence to himself. Here too he felt the 
 need of the hero ; but neither in respect of the man nor in respect 
 of the period was his choice altogether happy. Few periods of 
 the world's history could be found with which Carlyle was less in 
 sympathy than he was with the eighteenth century ; and Frederick 
 was in many ways the incarnation of the eighteenth century. But 
 in two points Frederick satisfied Carlyle's needs; and in other 
 respects the historian squared him as best he could with those 
 requirements. The first and chief point was that Frederick was 
 the man who placed the Prussian monarchy on a firm footing and 
 raised it to the rank of a great Power. Carlyle already foresaw 
 how much that would mean to Europe ; and his history was hardly 
 complete when the practical proof of his prescience came. Thus, 
 in writing the history of Frederick he was dealing with no dead 
 past, but with matters of vital moment to the Europe of his own 
 day. 
 
 The second point was the strength of Frederick. No man 
 ever attracted Carlyle unless he was strong ; and for the sake of 
 strength he was prepared to pardon many things. Sir Henry Taylor 
 in his Autobiography remarks on the strangeness of what he believes 
 to be the fact that such a man as Carlyle should have chosen as 
 the object of his idolatry "'iste stultorum. magister' — Success," 
 and tells an amusing story in illustration. " Long before his life 
 of Cromwell came out, I heard him insisting in conversation on 
 the fact that Cromwell had been invariably successful ; and having 
 with much satisfaction traced the long line of his successes to the 
 end, he added, 'it is true they got him out of his grave at the 
 Restoration and they stuck his head up over the gate at Tyburn, 
 but not till he had quite done with it^'" This conversation 
 ^ Cromwell, i. ^4. '^ Taylor's Aulobiography, i. 329.
 
 72 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 evidently remained in Carlyle's memory, for the concluding phrase 
 appears in his Cromwell. 
 
 The story is thoroughly characteristic, but Taylor has mis- 
 interpreted it. Success was never a god of Carlyle's idolatry : 
 such idolatry on his part would be more than strange ; it would 
 be inconceivable, because contradictory of his whole nature. 
 Mere success, measured by any ordinary standard, he regarded 
 with contempt. Sauerteig finds the word Hell in frequent use 
 among the English people and investigates its meaning; for "the 
 Hells of men and Peoples differ notably. With Christians it is 
 the infinite terror of being found guilty before the Just Judge. 
 With old Romans, I conjecture, it was the terror not of Pluto, for 
 whom probably they cared little, but of doing unworthily, doing 
 unvirtuously, which was their word for unwa^fully. And now 
 what is it, if you pierce through his Cants, his oft-repeated Hear- 
 says, what he calls his Worships and so forth, — what is it that 
 the modern English soul does, in very truth, dread infinitely, and 
 contemplate with entire despair? Whatw his Hell, after all these 
 reputable, oft-repeated Hearsays, what is it? With hesitation, 
 with astonishment, I pronounce it to be : The terror of ' Not 
 succeeding ' ; of not making money, fame, or some other figure in 
 the world, — chiefly of not making money ! Is not this a some- 
 what singular HelP?" Notice again that the two heroes whom he 
 chooses as representatives of the class of men of letters are men 
 whom he declares to have fought bravely and fallen. Goethe 
 fought and won, and would therefore, but for other considerations, 
 have been the better hero; but failure does not annul the heroism. 
 One of the many thoughts of Browning which might have been 
 thoughts of Carlyle — which were thoughts of Carlyle — is that which 
 finds such noble expression in Rabbi Ben Ezra. It is not on the 
 vulgar mass called " work " that sentence must be pronounced : 
 
 "All I could never be, 
 All, men ignored in me 
 This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped." 
 
 Except by an accident of expression, it was not " success " that 
 Carlyle valued in Cromwell ; but he saw that success won through 
 
 ^ Pose and Present, 125.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 73 
 
 such strife as Cromwell passed through was the voucher for the 
 power behind by which it was won. It was the fruit by which the 
 tree might be known. 
 
 Carlyle valued Might, but not Success. The close relation 
 which he asserted to exist between Might and Right was a 
 difficulty to many of his disciples and an offence to multitudes 
 who were not disciples. " Might and Right do differ frightfully 
 from hour to hour ; but give them centuries to try it in, they are 
 found to be identical^." "All fighting... is the dusty conflict of 
 strengths, each thinking itself the strongest, or in other words, the 
 justest; — of Mights which do in the long-run, and forever will in 
 this just Universe in the long-run, mean Rights^" The repulsion 
 with which many have regarded this doctrine, which they look 
 upon as a mere deification of bare force, has arisen from their 
 failure to see that the order of the words may be reversed, and 
 that with quite as much truth it may be said that Right is Might. 
 In a passage immediately following the one last quoted, Carlyle 
 himself points this out : — " Howel Davies dyes the West-Indian 
 Seas with blood, piles his decks with plunder; approves himself 
 the expertest Seaman, the daringest Seafighter : but he gains no 
 lasting victory, lasting victory is not possible for him. Not, had 
 he fleets larger than the combined British Navy all united with 
 him in bucaniering. He, once for all, cannot prosper in his duel. 
 He strikes down his man : yes ; but his man, or his man's 
 representative, has no notion to lie struck down ; neither, though 
 slain ten times, will he keep so lying ; — nor has the Universe any 
 notion to keep him so lying ! On the contrary, the Universe and 
 he have, at all moments, all manner of motives to start up again, 
 and desperately fight again. Your Napoleon is flung out, at last, 
 to St Helena; the latter end of him sternly compensating the 
 beginning. The Bucanier strikes down a man, a hundred or a 
 million men : but what profits it ? He has one enemy never to 
 be struck down ; nay two enemies : Mankind and the Maker of 
 Men^" Surely there was never a more robust faith in the justice 
 of the Universe. Might is Right only in the sense in which the 
 
 ^ Chartism, 158, ^ Past and Present^ 164. " ibid. i^^-iCi^).
 
 74 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 two terms are convertible. So interpreted, the phrase may seem 
 to be an identical proposition ; but it is not so. 
 
 Froude states that Carlyle had never read Aristotle's Politics. 
 If he had read it, he would have found there several of his own 
 theories. Aristotle said that "the conqueror is always superior in 
 respect of some good or other." Carlyle's idea of the relation 
 between power and right is similar in meaning to Aristotle's, 
 though it is differently expressed. The condition — "give them 
 centuries to try it in " — is Carlyle's way of ensuring that the force 
 shall really be that most powerful kind which is based upon virtue. 
 Some of his applications of the doctrine were, it must be admitted, 
 terribly dangerous. But he could have found in Aristotle too an 
 analogue to the fundamental principle on which he defended 
 ^ negro slavery and insisted on the privilege of the weak to be 
 governed by the strong, the foolish by the wise. " It is the 
 
 ^ everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise; 
 to be guided on the right path by those who know it better than 
 they. This is the first ' right of man ' ; compared with which all 
 other rights are as nothing." 
 
 Admiring this strength, which, by the solidity and permanence 
 of its results, he conceived to have proved its kinship if not its 
 identity with virtue, Carlyle seized upon Frederick, and in that 
 spirit treated his history. There is again something of the 
 exaggeration of the worshipper. Sometimes Carlyle was tempted 
 to make the worse appear the better reason, and to gloss over 
 /his hero's questionable actions. But when all deductions on this 
 / (account are made, Carlyle's Frederick the Great remains probably 
 
 ^ 'on the whole the greatest of all his works. It is certainly the most 
 massive. Nowhere else has he achieved such triumphs in the 
 handling of materials ; for nowhere else has he attempted such a 
 task. It is the most extensive of all his galleries of portraits ; and 
 they are no less vivid than those contained in the earlier works. 
 Frederick himself and his father, his generals and his opponents, 
 the ambassadors at his court, Voltaire, Belleisle, Pitt, George II, 
 Maria Theresa, Catherine II, Wilhelmina, high and low, men and 
 women, are depicted, sometimes at length, sometimes in a sentence 
 or two, but always admirably. There are fewer brilliant passages
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 75 
 
 than the French Revolution presents ; but on the other hand there 
 is nothing in the latter book quite as great as the treatment of 
 Frederick's campaigns. 
 
 Chartism, Fast a?id Fresent and the Latter-Day Famphlets 
 obviously belong to the group of works which deal with Carlyle's 
 own generation. So does Sartor Fesartus, of all his books the 
 most original, and in some ways the greatest. In Heroes and 
 Hero- Worship he goes back in history as far as Odin ; but his own 
 time is never absent from his mind. And the Life of Sterling, at 
 once so charged with religion and so repugnant to orthodoxy, is 
 as characteristic of Carlyle himself and as full of lessons to his 
 own generation as anything he ever wrote. Among these books 
 are included both the most popular, and, in their day, the most 
 bitterly resented of all Carlyle's works. 
 
 In Heroes and Hero- Worship Carlyle quotes with approval the 
 declaration of Fichte: "That all things which we see and work 
 with on this Earth, especially we ourselves and all persons, are as 
 a kind of vesture or sensuous appearance : that under all there 
 lies, as the essence of them, what he calls the ' Divine Idea of the 
 World.'" His favourite lines of verse were those spoken by the 
 Earth Spirit in Faust, and already quoted, and Shakespeare's : — 
 
 " We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made on; and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep." 
 
 'idealistic conceptions envelope all his thought, and make him 
 loathe the "dismal sciences" and " cause-and-effect philoso- 
 phies" of his time. These, he was convinced, dealt only with 
 appearance, with the mere mechanism of the world, while the) C^ i^ 
 moving principle lay altogether deeper ; and the whole treatment , 
 was made false by the failure to recognise its character, or even T 
 its existence. The whole clothes-philosophy is a humorous and ' 
 fantastic application of this principle./ It was this which put 
 Carlyle in such pronounced opposition to the popular opinion of 
 his time. He had to create the mind to understand and the taste 
 
 Ito enjoy himself. Jeffrey, a survival of the eighteenth century 
 school of criticism, told him at an early stage of his career that he
 
 76 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 was "a sectary in taste and literature." Napier of the Edinburgh 
 Review, in accepting the great essay entitled Characteristics, 
 confessed that he did not understand it, though he saw in it 
 the stamp of genius ^ 
 
 In every respect Carlyle was to his contemporaries an enigma. 
 He was an enigma in his politics. He believed himself to be, and 
 in truth he was, one of the most thoroughgoing of Radicals; and 
 yet he poured contempt on those who called themselves by that 
 name, and on all their nostrums. For "Ballot-boxes, Reform 
 Bills, winnowing machines'*" he has little respect. He declares 
 democracy to be inevitable, to be indeed here; and he adds that 
 it is not a form of government at all. No ballot-boxes will guide 
 the state aright, any more than unanimity of voting will navigate a 
 ship round Cape Horn. "On this side of the Atlantic and on 
 that. Democracy, we apprehend, is for ever impossible!... The 
 Universe itself is a Monarchy and Hierarchy.... The Noble in the 
 high place, the Ignoble in the low, that is, in all times and in all 
 countries, the Almighty Maker's Law^" For Conservatives, on 
 the other hand, he had the warning that "Truth and Justice alone 
 are capable of being 'conserved' and preserved*." 
 
 In religion likewise all parties in turn found Carlyle im- 
 practicable. He had no belief whatever in the dogmatic part of 
 Christianity. While he regarded the whole universe as miraculous, 
 he was utterly incredulous of the specific miracle which consisted 
 in a violation or suspension of the law of that universe. The 
 Life of Sterling was a revelation to many, especially to men of the 
 Coleridgean school, of the negative character of Carlyle's views on 
 this question ; but the fact that a revelation was needed is a proof 
 how ill they had comprehended his earlier works. And yet, on 
 the other hand, it was plain on almost every page that Carlyle was 
 one of the most religious of men. To him, religion was the chief 
 fact about a man ; and his quarrel with the eighteenth century had 
 its root in the irreligion of that time. 
 
 Carlyle then was to all sects and parties a speaker of things 
 
 ' unwelcome. It is no matter for surprise that he was long un- 
 
 1 Froude's Carlyle, ii. 245. - Past and Present, 72. 
 
 * Latter- Day Pamphlets, 19. * Past and Present, 142.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 77 
 
 popular; it is rather the most eloquent tribute to his vast 
 power and to the fundamental Tightness and goodness and truth 
 of his doctrine that at length he won recognition and conquered 
 popularity. His services have been great, greater than they have 
 ever yet been acknowledged to be. Two charges have been often 
 brought against him which demand a brief investigation. The 
 first is the charge of self-contradiction. It is easily enough 
 established by following the plan of taking this passage and 
 that from different parts of his writings and setting them against 
 one another. In this way, for example, he might be made to 
 appear a pronounced individualist or a rampant socialist. To 
 the orthodox, as we have just seen, he is irreligious; to the 
 materialist, he might seem superstitious. He denounced laissez 
 /aire, "Competition and Devil take the hindmost," and, in a 
 word, poured anathemas on all political economy. Yet he admitted 
 that the regulation of life by the wisest of mediaeval religious 
 minds would have made modern Europe a Thibet. In his own 
 day he saw men under a system of laissez /aire distributing them- 
 selves over a new continent; and he declared that it was done on 
 the whole with wonderful success. 
 
 To some extent the contradiction is real and is a flaw in 
 jCarlyle. In his emphatic way he exaggerated that which threatened 
 ■(to be neglected, and depreciated or ignored what he conceived to 
 ' figure too prominently. In a democratic society he thought the 
 lesson of order more important than that of freedom; and hence 
 he sometimes wrote as if the latter need not be considered at all. 
 The defect of Past and Present is that the past is idealised, and 
 the present painted in hues of unnatural blackness. In Latter- 
 Day PamJ)hlets the denunciations are shrill and unmeasured. 
 But to a larger extent Carlyle can be defended on the ground 
 that the seeming contradictions are both true. He had not 
 studied Kant's antinomies in vain. T..us, there is no real con- 
 tradiction between the individualistic and the socialistic elements 
 in his political philosophy; pure individualism and pure socialism 
 being alike impossible extremes, and wise statesmanship consisting 
 in discovering the just mean between them. 
 
 The second and, if it were true, by far the more serious
 
 78 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 objection to Carlyle is that his work has borne no fruit in practice, 
 that he denounced modern society and yet failed to show how it 
 was to be improved. The answer of more sympathetic critics is 
 the true one. It seems to us as if this were the case because 
 in so many instances what Carlyle denounced has been reformed, 
 and what he recommended has been done or is in process of 
 being done. /No one any longer defends laissez faire as alone 
 a sufficient principle of government; and no one did so much as 
 Carlyle to turn the mind of the country against it. He insisted 
 upon the organisation of labour as "the universal vital Problem of 
 the World ^'z'' When he wrote, labour was regarded as a thing 
 which would organise itself and must be left to do so. Now, it 
 is recognised by all that, however difficult it may be of solution, 
 this problem does exist and must be faced. The difference between 
 the political economy of the present day and that which he de- 
 nounced is a tribute to the wisdom of Carlyle : in no small degree 
 it is due to his influence. The science of abstract laws has 
 disappeared; a science based on concrete facts is taking its place. 
 With Carlyle's aid we see as it was never seen before how much is 
 assumed in the phrase ^'■free competition"; but if the freedom 
 be real, the law of competition is perhaps the safest of all laws. 
 There may be a doubt whether Carlyle would have admitted this; 
 and yet he has stated the principle clearly enough in pointing out 
 the possible effects of "benevolence." "Incompetent Duncan 
 M'Pastehorn, the hapless incompetent mortal to whom I give 
 the cobblmg of my boots, — and cannot find in my heart to refuse 
 it, the poor drunken wretch having a wife and ten children; he 
 withdraws the job from sober, plainly competent, and meri- 
 torious Mr Sparrowbill, generally short of work too; discourages 
 Sparrowbill; teaches him that he too may as well drink and 
 loiter and bungle; that this is not a scene for merit and demerit 
 at all, but for dupery, and whining flattery, and incompetent 
 cobbling of every description; — clearly tending to the ruin of 
 poor Sparrowbill! What harm had Sparrowbill done me that I 
 should so help to ruin him? And I couldn't save the insalvable 
 M'Pastehorn; I merely yielded him, for insufficient work, here and 
 
 ^ Latter- Day Pamphhis, 31.
 
 THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 79 
 
 there a half-crown, — which he oftenest drank. And now Sparrowbill 
 also is drinkingM" Bastiat's " What we see" and "What we do not 
 see," is not more vivid. There is nowhere a better argument for 
 really //■>?(? competition. 
 
 / Elsewhere, in Past and Present^ he points out with faultless 
 accuracy the real aim to be kept in view, and defines the true 
 work of this vast "organisation of labour." "Day's work for day's 
 wages?... The Progress of Human Society consists even in this 
 same, The better and better apportioning of wages to work. Give 
 me this, you have given me all. Pay every man accurately what 
 he has worked for, what he has earned and deserved, — to this 
 man broad lands and honours, to that man high gibbets and 
 tread-mills; what more have I to ask? Heaven's Kingdom, which 
 we daily pray for, has come; God's will is done on Earth even as 
 it is in Heaven! This is the radiance of Celestial Justice; in the 
 light or in the fire of which all impediments, vested interests, 
 iron cannon, are more and more melting like wax, and dis- 
 appearing from the pathways of men^'/ 
 
 / Behind everything in Carlyle lay an unalterable beUef in the 
 Law of the Universe, which was his Religion, and a conviction 
 that this law was identical with Truth and Justice — the only 
 things capable of being conserved./ No one ever preached this 
 doctrine more consistently; and, what is more difficult, no one 
 ever lived more consistently in accordance with it. No higher 
 standard of truth than Carlyle's has ever been held before the 
 world. Neither by word, nor by action, nor by refraining from 
 action, would he palter with the truth. For this lesson alone, if 
 it owed him nothing else, the world would have cause to rank him 
 among its great men. 
 
 1 LatUr-Day Pamphlets, 57-58. * Past and Present, 17.
 
 PART I 
 
 SPECULATIVE THOUGH! 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THEOLOGY 
 
 U The surest and easiest way to penetrate the thought ot any 
 
 * age is to study it in the systematic thinkers. The same ideas 
 may possibly be more profoundly expressed in poetry; but they 
 will certainly be more elusive; for, while it is the philosopher's 
 business to express definite opinions, no one reproaches the poet 
 if he only sees visions and dreams dreams. 
 
 Speculative thought falls into three great divisions, closely 
 
 related in theory, but in practice often widely divergent. Science 
 
 in most of its branches stands apart, and as a rule scarcely 
 
 infringes upon literature at all; but in the nineteenth century it 
 
 cannot be ignored. Theology ought to be the complement of 
 
 philosophy, holding towards the latter the place of high-minded- 
 
 ness in the Aristotelian scheme of the virtues, and in fact Aristotle 
 
 uses the word ^coXoyiKij as equivalent to ontology. But we must 
 
 set it down as one of the results of creeds that the true relation 
 
 is always obscured and sometimes completely lost. In England 
 
 especially, the connexion of theology with philosophy is often very 
 
 slight. 
 
 It will be most convenient to take the theologians first. In 
 earlier times they themselves might have claimed priority on the
 
 THEOLOGY 8 1 
 
 score of the dignity of "the queen of the sciences"; but such 
 assertions of superiority are a little discredited, and of late "the 
 queen of the sciences" has fallen on evil days. A better reason 
 for priority can, however, be assigned ; for, whatever may be 
 thought of the comparative endowments of the philosophers and 
 the theologians, the latter have in the Victorian period exercised 
 the more potent influence upon literature. 
 
 The theologians of this period are divisible into four groups, — ' 
 the Evangelicals , who at the start were by far the most powerful; \ 
 the Noetics, and theiri successors of the Brojid^ Church; the •• 
 
 foUojwers of Coleridge; and, by far the most interesting of all, 
 the exponents of the Catholic Reaction, which is known in 
 England as the Oxford Movement. 
 
 The feet of men have travelled far from the ground on which 
 they stood at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It would 
 be fruitless to compare the opinions of men who simply rejected 
 supernatural religion. There were multitudes who did so then, 
 as there are multitudes still. But ex nihilo nihil fit : we learn 
 nothing from a mere negation : we may learn much from the 
 differences between those who are in partial agreement. In a 
 passage published in 1893, Charles Pearson gave some data from 
 which may be measured the distance that separates the thought of 
 the present day from thought just a little less modern: — "Professor 
 Agassiz, whom many still living can remember with affection and 
 reverence, was brought up under teachers who held that God 
 had scattered fossils about the world as a test of faith ^; and an 
 Oxford teacher of the highest local repute at least thirty years 
 later published his belief that the typical vertebra — a column with 
 lateral processes — was multiplied all over the world as a proof of 
 the Crucifixion ^ A little later an Oxford divine, the accredited 
 head of a great party in the Church, was consulting with an 
 Oxford anatomist to know if it was not possible to point to a 
 whale that might have swallowed Jonah ^." Illustrations might 
 
 ^ Professor Agassiz told me this himself. (The notes are Pearson's.) 
 "^ Christian Ethics, by the Rev. W. Sewell. 
 * National Life and Character, 305. 
 
 W. 6
 
 82 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 easily be multiplied. In 1859, the year of Darwin's great book, 
 the Bampton lecturer, Rawlinson, gravely assumed the accuracy 
 of the biblical chronology from Adam. In 1864, eleven thousand 
 clergy signed a declaration on inspiration and eternal punishment, 
 the effect of which, according to Archibald Campbell Tait, then 
 Bishop of London, and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 was that "all questions of physical science should be referred 
 to the written words of Holy Scripture." Still later, in 1890, 
 no less a person than William Ewart Gladstone wrote The Im- 
 pregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, whose purpose was, not indeed 
 to test physical science by Scripture, but to show that, after all 
 the assaults of astronomy, geology and biology, the early chapters 
 of Genesis stood undamaged. 
 
 Gladstone, however, was contemporary with Agassiz, and had 
 been educated in an age when it was not impossible for intelligent 
 men to believe that fossils were meant to be a test of faith. There 
 are numerous evidences of change within the Churches themselves. 
 In 1843, Chalmers, Guthrie and the other leaders of the Scottish 
 Disruption, went out into the wilderness, a Bible in one hand 
 and the Westminster Confession of Faith in the other. The 
 doctrine of predestination had no terrors to them. Holy Williis 
 I'rayer hsid been written; but the "New Licht" succumbed to 
 the "Auld Licht"; and it is certain that men who put everything 
 to the touch, as they did, believed in all sincerity of mind the 
 creed they professed. And in those days the interpretation of the 
 creed in question was that which Burns so vigorously expresses. 
 Fifty years later their successors have become uneasy, and a 
 Declaratory Act is needed to disburden troubled consciences. 
 Now, the doctrine of 1843 seems to find its only safe home 
 among some score of Highland congregations. In England, 
 evidences of similar change may be seen on every side. It is 
 unnecessary to go to the heterodox or to the doubtfully orthodox. 
 The biblical chronology is abandoned; the word "inspiration" 
 has wholly changed its meaning; a profound silence is observed 
 with regard to the doctrine of eternal punishment. Bishops and 
 dignitaries of the Church pick and choose among the miracles,
 
 THEOLOGY 83 
 
 and invent marvellous hypotheses to reconcile the doctrine of the 
 fall with the theory of evolution'. 
 
 If this great change — almost a revolution — be not borne in 
 mind, it will be difficult to understand the position at the be- 
 ginning of the nineteenth century. Then, the idea of an infallible 
 Book was easy and simple : it was readily accepted with little or 
 no qualification. On the other hand, the conception of an infallible 
 Church had scarcely any hold in England; and no one yet dreamed 
 of attempting to reduce the Reformation, so far as the Anglican 
 Communion is concerned, to the dimensions of a storm in a tea- 
 cup. Circumstances therefore were favourable for the Evangelicals; 
 and accordingly we find them throned in high places. It is true, 
 their power had passed its zenith, and their fervour was already de- 
 clining. The disintegrating forces of eighteenth century philosophy 
 told upon the theologians; and even Christian apologists, like 
 Butler, were profoundly influenced by them. Nevertheless, they 
 were in the main stream of ecclesiastical life. In the Baptist 
 Robert Hall (1764- 1831) they possessed the most powerful preacher 
 of the time, and, in the opinion of Coleridge, the master of the 
 best style in English. It was they who made converts. When 
 Thomas Scott (i 747-1821) became convinced of the error of 
 Unitarianism, it was to the Calvinistic Evangelicals that he attached 
 himself; and his commentary on the Bible is written on strictly 
 evangelical principles. Scripture is the sole test of Scripture: there 
 is no appeal against the infallible Book; and the only criticism 
 permissible is that which throws light upon one part by showing 
 how it is explained by another. Newman speaks of Scott as 
 the man "to whom (humanly speaking) I almost owe my soull" 
 Charles Simeon (1759-1836) of Cambridge, who is commemo- 
 rated in Shorthouse's Sir Percival, is said to have had a following 
 of young men larger even than that of Newman. It was the 
 Evangelicals also who produced the most scholarly work of the 
 time. No contemporary divines did work as solid as Scott's 
 Commentary^ already mentioned, or Simeon's Horae Homileticae. 
 
 ^ See articles by Mr W. H. Mallock in XIX Century for September, 
 November and December, 1904, and replies by the Rev. Prebendaiy 
 Whitworth and the Rev. H. Maynard Smith. * Apologia, 5. 
 
 6—2
 
 84 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 The foundation is unsatisfactory, the method unphilosophical, 
 and the conclusions often quaint; but, granted their presuppo- 
 sitions, these men were thorough. 
 
 An interesting feature of the EvangeHcals is the ease with 
 which the Church and the Dissenting sections of the party 
 fraternise'. Thackeray in the Newcomes has drawn a picture of 
 Clapham which gives the impression that the "sect" which had 
 its centre there was a sect of Dissenters. Macaulay, who knew the 
 place and the sect thoroughly, declared that this was a mistake. 
 "The leading people of the place," says his biographer, "with 
 the exception of Mr William Smith, the Unitarian member of 
 Parliament, were one and all staunch Churchmen; though they 
 readily worked in concert with those religious communities which 
 held in the main the same views and pursued the same objects 
 as themselves*." But in truth, among the evangelical party the 
 question of Church or Dissent was a small matter in comparison 
 with that of unity or difference of aim. Their theory of the 
 Church emphasised its Protestant character and minimised the 
 points of resemblance between it and the Church of Rome. The 
 more earnest among them devoted themselves to efforts for moral 
 and social reform, and above all to the great struggle for the 
 emancipation of slaves. In this they got little help from the 
 bench of bishops or from the aristocracy, while they got much 
 from nonconformist ministers and from the wealthy laymen who 
 were influenced by these. It is the lasting glory of the evangelical 
 party that this great reform was mainly their work. Whatever 
 may be the merits or the faults of their theology, or of their views 
 about the Church, they gave to the Christian doctrine of the 
 brotherhood of man one of the greatest practical applications it 
 has ever received. 
 
 The Evangelicals are also by far the richest of all the divisions of 
 theologians in literary connexions. Carlyle, Macaulay, Browning, 
 Ruskin and George Eliot all came under Calvinistic and evan- 
 
 1 It must be observed that this is true only of the Evangelicals. Gladstone 
 always believed that at Oxford he had run risk of rustication for the offence of 
 attending Dissenting chapels. (Doyle's Remimscences, loi.) 
 
 " Life of Macaulay, i. 6i.
 
 THEOLOGY 85 
 
 gelical influences; and though some of them wandered very far 
 from the fold, they all bore to the end the marks of their early 
 training and associations. Even Macaulay, the least speculative 
 of them, spoke in later days of "the bray of Exeter Hall"; but it 
 was Macaulay also who drew the pointed contrast between the 
 condition of Protestant Europe and that of Catholic Europe, 
 which has been to many the most convincing of all arguments 
 against Popery. 
 
 Yet, though the Evangelicals were the heirs of the past and 
 the possessors of the present, they had not the power to transmit 
 their inheritance to the coming generation in their own line. 
 The English Simeons and Scotts and Halls begat no sons. For 
 representatives of their school of a later day we must look north- 
 ward, to Scotland, where^ since the days of Knox, their modes of 
 thought had been far more firmly rooted than they ever were in 
 England. 
 
 No one can fail to be impressed by the striking similarity, and 
 the difference no less striking, between the ecclesiastical position 
 in Scotland and that in England during the fourth and fifth 
 decades of the nineteenth century. In the latter country, the 
 Oxford Movement began in 1833 ; ^^^ ^^ ^^V ^^^^e its culmi- 
 nation either in 1843, when Newman resigned his charge of 
 St Mary's, Oxford, and retracted the strictures which he had 
 formerly passed on the Church of Rome; or in 1845, when he 
 was formally received into the Roman Communion. In Scotland, 
 the Ten Years' Conflict issued in 1843 in the great Disruption 
 which drove 453 out of 1000 or iioo ministers from the Estab- 
 lished Church^. In England, Newman towers head and shoulders 
 above all rivals on either side ; in Scotland, Thomas Chalmers is 
 as indisputably pre-eminent. In both countries, one effect was to 
 stimulate the zeal and energy of all sections. But there the 
 resemblance ends. In Scotland, the dispute was merely about the 
 relation between Church and State, the ministers and congregations 
 of the Disruption holding that the existing law of patronage com- 
 promised their spiritual freedom. They introduced no new type 
 of Presbyterianism, and denied no dogma which had previously 
 ^ Cockburn's numbers {Li/e of Jeffrey, 380).
 
 86 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 been accepted. On the contrary, their influence tended rather to 
 ( retard than to accelerate change. In England, on the other hand, I 
 I the whole principle of the Reformation was at stake. To Newman ' 
 I and his followers the right of private judgment was ariathema. 
 \ They wished to emphasise authority : quod semper^ quod ubique, \ 
 \ quod ab omnibus. They have attempted to re-write ecclesiastical | 
 / history, maintaining that before the Reformation the English : 
 I Church was a National Church, with a law of its own, and that , 
 though the canon law of Rome was " always regarded as of great 
 authority in England," it "was not held to be binding on the   
 Courts." And they seemed to have succeeded, — at any rate, the | 
 pronouncement of what were regarded as the highest authorities 
 was to that effect, — until Maitland's Roman Canon Law in the , 
 Church of England shivered the theory into fragments. ; 
 
 V Thomas Chalmers (i 780-1847) was the most massive figure   
 
 in ecclesiastical history during the nineteenth century. In mere ' 
 learning many surpassed him. The flippant of his own day hinted | 
 that he was one of those who confounded Augustine of Hippo j 
 with Augustine of Canterbury^; and though this was doubtless a : 
 calumny, Carlyle was right in his stricture upon him as " a man : 
 essentially of little culture, of narrow sphere, all his life"." He   
 was great in another and a larger sphere, — " a native ava| av8pc3v," •. 
 as the author of Horae Subsecivae well calls him. Like his ' 
 countryman and contemporary, Scott, Chalmers would always \ 
 have preferred the fame of the doer of great deeds to that of the ; 
 writer of great books. And such was the fame that he won. If ' 
 he were judged merely as a writer of books, he would hold but a 
 secondary place. Neither in philosophy nor in theology did he 
 originate anything. His Moral and Mental Philosophy leaves the 
 science of ethics where he found it ; his Institutes of Theology 
 expounds the Calvinistic doctrine of his country with a docility 
 remarkable in a man who had won his way to Calvinism through 
 doubts that at one time verged upon atheism. Even the style 
 does not support the author's contemporary reputation. It is 
 rhetorical, often inflated, sometimes clumsy. He wrote in haste, 
 
 ^ Doyle's Reminiscences, 10?. 
 
 * Kemittiscences: Edward Irving.
 
 THEOLOGY 87 
 
 and wrote far too copiously : it would have been well for his 
 permanent fame if he had blotted three paragraphs out of every 
 four which bear his name. 
 
 Yet Chalmers had unquestionably a gift for words as well as 
 for action, and his best passages deserve a place in any anthology 
 of prose. But his was the gift of the orator, rather than that of 
 the writer. The touch of personal contact and sympathy was 
 needed to kindle his imagination. Like sunlight on a landscape, 
 it brightens what is already beautiful and irradiates with colour 
 what is misty and obscure. The judgment of contemporaries 
 proves Chalmers to have been one of the greatest orators who 
 ever used the English language ; and though a speech which is 
 read never produces the effect of the same speech when spoken, 
 there is ample evidence in his printed works that the judgment of 
 contemporaries was sound. 
 
 Chalmers won this great reputation in spite of grave physical 
 disadvantages. He was rugged, almost coarse, both in face and 
 person, his movements were ungraceful, his accent strong and, to 
 an English ear, extremely unpleasant. In his method of oratory 
 he resembled those who take the kingdom of heaven by storm. 
 Hazlitt compares him to Balfour of Burley in his cave, " with his 
 Bible in one hand and his sword drawn in the other, contending 
 with the imaginary enemy of mankind, gasping for breath, and 
 with the cold moisture running down his face'." Yet audiences 
 aristocratic and polished to the last degree, audiences who had 
 no sympathy with the orator's theology, and to whom his accent 
 was at first a pain, forgot all in the fervour and earnestness and 
 sincerity of his eloquence, and saw in the uncouth figure in the 
 pulpit not a mere man but an inspired prophet. "Fervit im- 
 mensusque ruit," Dr John Brown quotes as illustrative of the 
 compelling force of his eloquence. His London lectures (1838) 
 were as strikingly successful as his Discourses on the Christian 
 Revelation (181 7), and these when they were published ran a 
 neck-and-neck race for the prize of popularity with Scott's Old 
 Mortality^ which was published almost simultaneously ^ 
 
 ^ The Spirit 0/ the Age, ' Rev. Mr Irving.' 
 ' Hanna's Memoirs of Dr Chalmers, ii. 89.
 
 88 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 There was one gift greater still which Chalmers possessed, the 
 gift of ecclesiastical statesmanship. It is this which best ensures 
 the permanency of his fame. Had he been an English pohtician, 
 he might have left one of the greatest names in history ; on the 
 narrower stage of Scottish Churchmanship, he is the biggest figure 
 since Knox. In his first parish of Kilmany he had little oppor- 
 tunity for the exercise of talents of this sort ; but the bent of his 
 mind revealed itself in the subject of an early work, the Inquiry 
 into the Extent and Stability of the National Resources (1808), the 
 purpose of which was to estimate the staying-power of England in 
 the great struggle against Napoleon. With what a zest would the 
 author have taken up the work of Pitt, if fortune had opened 
 such a career to him! In 1815 Chalmers left Kilmany for the 
 Tron parish, Glasgow, whence he migrated in 1820 to St John's, 
 the most populous of the Glasgow parishes. There he first had 
 the opportunity of showing his statesmanlike qualities; and the 
 three or four years he spent in Glasgow are memorable not 
 only in the history of Chalmers but in the social history of 
 Scotland. 
 
 In the time of Chalmers Glasgow was a comparatively small 
 place, its population in 182 1 being only 147,000. But though 
 the total population was not very great, the Industrial Revo- 
 lution had already come; and no one as yet knew, few had 
 seriously thought, how to deal with it. High prices, and the 
 reaction after the great war, intensified the sufferings of the 
 poor. Chalmers' parish included a larger percentage of the 
 destitute than was to be found in any other quarter of the city. 
 At the beginning of his administration the annual expenditure for 
 the relief of the poor of St John's parish amounted to ;^i4oo. 
 Chalmers asked and obtained from the Town Council a free hand 
 to deal with the problem in his own way. In three years he had 
 reduced the expenditure to ;;^28o ; and he had at the same time 
 greatly raised the standard of comfort among the poor. His 
 principle was simple. Never a voluntary in matters of religion, 
 Chalmers was always a voluntary in respect of poor-relief. He 
 strongly opposed the levying of a poor-rate. He held that the 
 rate not only lowered the character of the recipients, but dried up
 
 THEOLOGY 89 
 
 the fountain of natural charity. Uphold the character of the poor 
 at all costs, he urged; and bring home to the well-to-do their 
 obligations towards their poorer neighbours, and above all towards 
 their relatives. No one gave more striking evidence than he 
 before the Commission appointed in 1832 to inquire into the 
 administration of the poor-law ; and, though the Commission did 
 not go as far as Chalmers would have gone, the changes recom- 
 mended and afterwards carried into effect went in the direction 
 to which he pointed. It may be that such success as his could 
 only have been achieved by a genius for administration like his 
 own ; but at least he proved that, in the right hands, his system 
 was the right system. 
 
 While he was still at Glasgow, Chalmers conceived another 
 scheme for improving the administration of the Church. He was 
 a warm admirer of the parochial system : his whole scheme for 
 the relief of the poor was based upon it; but he saw that the 
 parochial system had come to need revision. His own parish 
 was much too populous to be successfully administered by one 
 man; and there were other parishes of Glasgow in almost 
 as bad case. Chalmers came forward with a bold proposal to 
 add twenty parishes to Glasgow alone, — or rather, by dividing 
 the existing parishes to increase the total number by twenty. 
 The scheme was rejected at the time; but afterwards it was 
 taken up again and extended to the whole of Scotland, with 
 the result that some 200 parishes quoad sacra were constituted. 
 
 In 1823 Chalmers left Glasgow for the chair of moral philo- 
 sophy in St Andrews; and in 1828 he became professor of theo- 
 logy in the University of Edinburgh. His powerful personality, 
 his eloquence and his transparent sincerity, gave him immense 
 influence over his pupils ; but it seemed improbable that he would 
 ever again have the opportunity of bringing into play his greatest 
 talent. The Disruption however gave him one more chance; 
 and again he showed himself equal to the occasion. The task of 
 organising 453 congregations and of making adequate provision 
 for their ministers was a gigantic one. No single man, however 
 great, could have accomplished it; only the united labours, the
 
 90 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 liberality and the self-denial of thousands, could have made the 
 Free Kirk of Scotland what she is — or was. But while this is 
 true, Chalmers was the organising brain behind all. He invented 
 the Sustentation Fund. His plan was the very genius of simplicity. 
 By a simple arithmetical calculation he showed that a contribution 
 of a penny a week from each member of the Kirk would provide 
 a stipend of ;£iS° ^ V^^^ ^^^ every minister. The iron was hot, 
 and he struck. From the first the people recognised that if they 
 would have spiritual independence they must pay for it. And 
 they paid. At the date of the union of the Free and the United 
 Presbyterian Kirks of Scotland, the minimum fixed by Chalmers 
 was considerably exceeded. 
 
 It has seemed worth while to give this brief account of the 
 work of Chalmers, because this is the essence both of his life and 
 of his voluminous writings. Sustentation funds and schemes for 
 the relief of the poor are not literature ; neither are they theology ; 
 but they are highly practical Christianity, and they give the best 
 insight into the spirit of the evangelical party — or rather of the 
 evangelical great man; for to judge any party by its great man 
 is to flatter that party. Moreover, they explain the narrowness, 
 surprising in such a man, which Chalmers shows in speculation. 
 It is impossible to read without a smile his quaint conception of 
 the duty of the State to choose out one from among the rival sects, 
 and to make that the organ of the national religion. The summary 
 rejection of the Church of Rome, as obviously outside the sphere 
 of choice, presents no difficulty to his mind ; and the statesman, 
 rather than the theologian, is apparent in the tolerance which 
 would accept Episcopacy as the national form of religion in 
 England ; though of course Chalmers maintains the national form 
 in Scotland to be Presbyterianism. In the earnestness of his 
 desire for the moral and social good of the nation, Chalmers 
 threw off all the rancour of the sectarian, and forgot all the logic 
 of schemes of salvation rigidly limited to orthodox believers. 
 Such latitudinarianism would have shocked alike his own pre- 
 decessors, whose hatred of " black prelacy " found expression in 
 many a fiery discourse, and his English Tractarian contemporaries,
 
 THEOLOGY 9I 
 
 who would have found few indeed of the " notes " of a Church in 
 the State establishments contemplated by Chalmers. 
 
 The same speculative narrowness is manifested in the relation 
 of Chalmers to German thought. He had long dreaded it, 
 without knowing what it meant. At the very close of his life he 
 believed himself to have discovered that it was all verbiage, and 
 the last of his writings was an article in the North British Revieiv 
 explaining the vanity of the German philosophy. " It was," says 
 Professor A. Campbell Fraser, "the first half of the nineteenth 
 century in Scotland in a preparatory encounter with the second \" 
 
 Great as Chalmers was, some of those who supported him in 
 the crisis of the Disruption were not unworthy of him. Probably 
 the layman, Hugh Miller, deserves the second place. He claims 
 notice elsewhere; but from 1840 till his death in 1856 he edited 
 a bi-weekly paper, The Witness, which became the organ of the 
 Free Kirk party, and which did excellent service to that party. 
 Among the ministers, Chalmers' most powerful supporter was 
 Thomas Guthrie (1803-1873), who on the death of the great 
 leader became by repute the most eloquent of Scottish preachers. 
 A reader of the sermons may detect a certain thinness of texture ; 
 but it is certain that they produced a great effect upon those who 
 heard them. Guthrie's theological works are strictly popular in 
 their character. It was, however, not Guthrie but Robert Smith 
 Candlish (1806-1873) who inherited the mantle of statesmanship, 
 and who was from the death of Chalmers to his own death the 
 most influential man of the Free Kirk. Though less prominent 
 as a theologian than as an ecclesiastical leader, he crossed swords 
 with Maurice, not without credit, in an examination of the latter's 
 Theological Essays. 
 
 For two or three years Edward Irving (i 792-1834) was assis- 
 tant to Chalmers in Glasgow; and for that reason his singular 
 career may be briefly discussed here. His natural gifts were 
 great. Carlyle, Chalmers and Connop Thirlwall were all judges 
 of unquestionable competence, and two of them at least were 
 inclined to severity ; yet they have all borne witness to Irving's 
 
 ^ Biograpkia PhUosophica, 132.
 
 92 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 powers. But there was probably from the first a want of balance 
 in his mind ; and he was swept away by his own success as a 
 preacher. Shortly after his removal to London in 1822, he 
 became a disciple of Coleridge, whose mysticism fostered the latent 
 mysticism in Irving's own mind. The latter soon announced his 
 belief that the second advent of Christ was imminent. His 
 followers prepared ascension robes, and made sparing provision 
 for the needs of a world which was soon to pass away\ Delusion 
 drew delusion in its train. The faithful spoke with tongues, which 
 to the profane ear of Carlyle sounded Hke " a shrieky hysterical 
 'lall-lall-lall.'" There was little or nothing left of the sober Scottish 
 Presbyterianism ; and Irving's expulsion from his London. church 
 and from the presbytery of Annan was the natural consequence 
 of his own excesses. A sadder result was the ruin of his brain. 
 His works are little better than empty rhapsodies, and the 
 founder of the Catholic Apostolic Church is merely magni 
 nominis umbra. 
 
 Among the friends of Irving was one, John McLeod Campbell 
 (1800— 1872), who did far more for the liberalising of theological 
 thought than has ever been adequately recognised. He was 
 among the first to recoil from the generally accepted doctrine 
 of the atonement, and he met the fate which so often befalls men 
 who are in advance of their time, being in 1831 deprived of his 
 ministerial charge. In this crisis he was warmly supported by 
 Thomas Erskine (i 788-1 870) of Linlathen, one of those men 
 who by their lives and by what they are rather than by what they 
 write mould the thoughts of others. Erskine's views were perhaps 
 most akin to those of Maurice, and the two were friends from 
 their first meeting in 1838 till the death of the former. But while 
 in Maurice there was something which repelled the intellect even 
 though it won the heart, Erskine maintained his hold upon men 
 of the most diverse opinions. He was, to begin with, among the 
 most liberal of men, the friend not only of Irving and of Campbell 
 and Maurice, but of Carlyle, who in turn loved and admired him 
 
 ^ Persons still living in Irving's native town remember believers who 
 bought coal by the hundredweight, thinking it waste to buy tons when the 
 end of the world was so near.
 
 THEOLOGY 93 
 
 to the end. He speaks of Erskine as "one of the gentlest, 
 kindliest, best bred of men," and compares him to "a draught 
 of sweet rustic mead, served in cut glasses and a silver tray^" 
 
 Campbell's views were first expressed in Sermons and Lectures 
 (1832), and afterwards more fully in The Nature of the Atonemeiit 
 (1856) and in Thoughts on Revelation (1862). The chief point in 
 his speculation was the universality of the atonement. It was a 
 conception which cut across too many prejudices to be generally 
 accepted either in Scotland or in England ; but yet Campbell did 
 not work in vain. Even those who would reject his doctrine do 
 not think as they would have thought had he never lived and 
 written. 
 
 Men like these transgress the bounds of evangelicalism in one 
 way; the Noetics did so in another. Though between the greatest 
 of the Evangelicals and the Noetics there is a manifest kinship, 
 yet the latter breathed a different atmosphere. They were the 
 "intelligent" of the Church, the men who laid emphasis on the 
 "intelligible," the men to whom credo quia impossibile would itself 
 have been impossible. In short, "Noetic" is "rationalistic" 
 softened through the mist of the Greek language, so that to 
 clerical ears it did not suggest all the dire associations of the 
 latter word. It is difficult to read without a smile the explanations 
 of friends of the Noetics that their rationalism is not the bad sort 
 of rationalism ^ They seem to find the same sort of comfort in 
 this that the child, fascinated and yet terrified by the story of 
 a bear, finds in the assurance that this particular animal is a good 
 bear. 
 
 At first the Noetics belonged to no single section of the 
 Church ; still less were they a section by themselves. Copleston, 
 opposed as he was to Tractarianism, is best described as a High 
 Churchman of the old school; and Hampden's affinities were with 
 the Evangelicals. But as the sense came home to men that 
 voijTtKos, in some of its developments, seemed twin brother to 
 " rationalistic," both the orthodox High and the orthodox Evan- 
 gelical were alike eager to repudiate those who, shortly after the 
 
 ^ Froude's Carlyle, iii. 127. 
 
 ' Cf. J. T. Coleridge, in Stanley's Li^e 0/ Arnold, i. 20.
 
 94 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 middle of the century, came to be known as the Broad Church- 
 men. If Noetic was a translation of Rationalist into Greek, it is 
 significant to notice that Broad Churchman^ is a translation of 
 Latin into Saxon; for as the years rolled on, there was less 
 disposition to be diffident or apologetic in the application of that 
 dreaded instrument, reason, to matters of religion ; perhaps there 
 was a more generous confidence that what was essential in religion 
 had nothing to fear from the application. 
 
 The Noetics made no original contributions to thought, but 
 they are interesting for their very deficiencies, no less than for 
 their merits. They were excessively insular. They knew nothing 
 about Kant; nor was this ignorance of German philosophy, which 
 they shared with the majority of their English contemporaries, 
 redeemed by any profound acquaintance with the thought of 
 France. They knew very little about the theories which had 
 given birth to the French Revolution; but they had unconsciously 
 adopted their central principle. They are interesting because 
 they are among the earliest and among the most uncompromising 
 advocates at Oxford of reason as against authority. They were 
 the " liberals " who at a later date were the objects of the dislike 
 and dread of Newman and the Tractarians ; and fear of the results 
 of their teaching had no small influence in causing, or at any rate 
 in precipitating, the Tractarian reaction. The Noetics themselves 
 did not foresee all the consequences of their own teaching, nor 
 was its full effect manifest for many years after. Jowett as an 
 undergraduate saw but the rudiments of the changes initiated by 
 them. In a letter written in 1865, he comments upon the signifi- 
 cance of the development which had subsequently taken place. 
 "When I was an undergraduate," he says, "we were fed upon 
 Bishop Butler and Aristotle's Ethics, and almost all teaching 
 leaned to the support of doctrines of authority. Now there are 
 new subjects. Modern History and Physical Science, and more 
 important than these, perhaps, is the real study of metaphysics in 
 the Literae Hurnainores school — every man in the last ten years 
 who goes in for honours has read Bacon, and probably Locke, 
 
 1 "Church," of course, is ultimately Greek; but the distinguishing word 
 here is "broad."
 
 THEOLOGY 
 
 95 
 
 Mill's Logic, Plato, Aristotle, and the history of ancient philosophy. 
 See how impossible this makes a return to the old doctrines of 
 authority^" 
 
 In the ecclesiastical battle the victory lay with the reactionaries, 
 and Jowett well knew it. Five years after the date of the letter 
 just quoted we find him prophesying that " in another ten years 
 half the English clergy will be given up to a fetish-worship of 
 the Sacrament"; and time has proved the substantial truth of 
 his words. The Broad Churchmen have founded no school; 
 there are no crowds following in the steps of Copleston and 
 Arnold, of Jowett and Stanley ; but the name of those who follow 
 and who strive to outdo Keble and Pusey, is legion. The fact is 
 not surprising. It is far easier to think the thoughts (or at any 
 rate to repeat the formulae) of ten centuries ago, than to think 
 the thoughts of ten years in advance. The victors in the ecclesi- 
 astical strife have been conquered in the field of thought; and 
 the battle for influence over the minds of the young has gone 
 irretrievably against the principle of authority. The change to 
 which Jowett calls attention is of incalculable importance. It is 
 a change of spirit, not of subjects. There are no better subjects 
 than Aristotle and Butler. But Aristotle and Butler, treated as 
 semi-inspired "authorities," are very different from the same 
 philosophers treated as factors in a " real study of metaphysics." 
 Now, so far as Oxford was concerned, the initiators of this change 
 were the Noetics ; and therefore, though we can trace to them no 
 original contribution to thought, though they are very evidently 
 hampered, and though their usefulness is lessened, by their 
 ignorance of the development of European philosophy, they 
 deserve an honourable place in the history of English thought 
 in the nineteenth century. 
 
 Oriel College, Oxford, was the centre of the Noetics, as it was 
 afterwards of Tractarianism. Copleston was its Provost from 
 1814 to 1828; and Whately, Hampden and Thomas Arnold were 
 among the fellows. Copleston was a man of powerful intellect, of 
 profound scholarship and of varied interests ; but he left his mark 
 
 * Life and LeUcrs^ i. .^12.
 
 g6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 less on literature than on the College which he ruled and on the 
 diocese — Llandaff — which he administered in his later years. 
 Hampden is recollected mainly because of the envenomed con- 
 troversy of which he, an amiable and mild man, became the 
 subject when, in 1836, he was made by Lord Melbourne Regius 
 Professor of Divinity at Oxford. It was a controversy in which 
 Hampden suffered in feeling, and in which some of his opponents 
 — among them Newman — suffered in reputation; for they were 
 unscrupulous in their choice of weapons. Arnold is remembered 
 as a great schoolmaster and a historian, rather than as a theologian. 
 But he was intensely interested in religion, watched the Tractarian 
 movement closely, and was far too vehement to keep clear of the 
 controversies it occasioned. He objected strongly to the doctrine 
 of apostolical succession, and thought the argument from primitive 
 episcopacy to episcopacy as it existed in the nineteenth century 
 absurd. In more ways than one, Arnold stood between two 
 extremes. On the one hand, he was a liberal (in the ecclesiastical 
 as well as in the political sense of the word), and on the other he 
 was profoundly religious. He was a convinced Churchman ; and 
 yet he looked with favour on the idea of a comprehension of 
 Dissenters, provided it were "comprehension without compromise." 
 His views were expressed in a pamphlet on T/ie Principles of 
 Church Reform (1833), which was condemned alike by Church 
 and by Dissent. Whether Arnold's position was ultimately tenable 
 or not may be questioned. Carlyle thought it was not ; and there 
 is a passage in the letters of Matthew Arnold which suggests that 
 he shared Carlyle's doubt. But there can be no question about 
 Thomas Arnold's perfect sincerity. He was fully convinced of 
 the essential rightness of the Church of England, and he never 
 doubted that there was a place within its fold for people who, like 
 himself, reasoned upon its dogmas boldly, and, as he believed, 
 without such bias as to warp the judgment. 
 
 The Noetic spirit was incarnate in Richard Whately (1787- 
 1863), who is better known as a philosopher than as a theo- 
 logian. But he contributed no new principle to philosophy, 
 and his influence was chiefly the influence of a teacher. His 
 Logic (1826) and his Rhetoric (1828) are both excellent little text-
 
 THEOLOGY 97 
 
 books; and the former is especially noteworthy for its effect in 
 reviving a study which had fallen into neglect. The best part of 
 it is the treatment of fallacies, where Whately shows qualities of 
 mind of which he had given a foretaste in his Historic Doubts 
 relative to Napoleon Buonaparte (18 19). Though the Rhetoric 
 and the Logic are not permanent possessions of philosophy, yet 
 their author left a lasting mark, and a deeper one than any 
 other of the Noetics except Arnold. His powerful intellect and 
 his masterful personality, which became despotic after he had risen 
 to be Archbishop, attracted some and repelled others, but left 
 none indifferent. His wit, generally pungent and sometimes 
 corrosive, branded his sayings on the memory. His extraordinary 
 manners, or want of manners, deepened the effect. " He ate and 
 drank and joked," says Blanco White in a letter to Newman, 
 "like Hercules in the Alcestis\" Sir Henry Taylor ascribes his 
 eccentricities to " a strange unconsciousness of the body " ; and it 
 is not easy to account otherwise for the things he did. Taylor 
 was assured by the wife of one of the Lord-Lieutenants of 
 Ireland, next to whom Whately's rank placed him when he 
 dined at the Castle, that "she had occasionally to remove the 
 Archbishop's foot from her lap^." Such doings would have 
 blasted the career of an ordinary man ; but Whately rose in spite 
 of them, and as it was impossible to ignore him or to dismiss him 
 as a lunatic, they fixed interest and attention upon him all the 
 more. The growing imperiousness of his character did however 
 in later years limit his circle chiefly to weaklings and sycophants. 
 But though the tendency was always there, those whom he in- 
 fluenced in his Oxford days were neither weaklings nor sycophants. 
 Newman, his Vice-Principal at Alban Hall, was one; and 
 though they were too diverse in disposition to remain friends 
 permanently, Newman continued to be Whately's disciple long 
 enough to draw weapons from the armoury of the latter which 
 he afterwards used for ends by no means congenial to Whately. 
 
 In theology, Whately's principal work was the Kingdo7n of 
 Christ Delineated (1841). Among his formal works may be 
 mentioned Essays on the Errors of Romanism (1830) and Essays 
 1 Newman's Letters, i. 187. * Autobiography, i. 322. 
 
 w. 7
 
 98 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 on some Difficulties in Paul (1828). These and his other theo- 
 logical writings are exceedingly acute ; but they do not, any more 
 than his philosophical works, embody any great original thought. 
 Like most of the productions of the Noetic school, they are too 
 negative. Powerful for destruction when turned against either 
 Low Church or High Church, Whately's arguments substitute 
 nothing for the systems which he shows to be untenable. The 
 truth seems to be that Whately, though sincere in his religion, 
 was deficient in fervour. He believed with the head : it would be 
 unfair and untrue to say that he did not feel with the heart ; but 
 at least the emotional was less than the intellectual part. The 
 defect was fatal. Whately's influence was great; but it showed 
 itself more, perhaps, in the reaction which he helped to provoke, 
 than in the winning of converts and followers. He was destitute 
 of that personal attractiveness which drew boys to the side of 
 Arnold, and kept them there after they had grown to be men. 
 
 Something was needed to supplement and to enrich the 
 positive teaching of the Noetics; and it was supplied by the 
 importation of the ideas of German philosophy. Henceforth, the 
 most vital distinction in English theology is that between those 
 who know and who accept the principles of Kant and Hegel and 
 Fichte and Schleiermacher, and those who either do not know 
 or do not understand them, or who are afraid to apply them. 
 " Germanism " was dreaded in the circles of the orthodox at least 
 as much as rationalism : " omne ignotum pro — horribili." As 
 seen, however, through the cloudy magnificence of the prose 
 monologues of Coleridge, "Germanism" took the shape of a 
 friend to faith, rather than an enemy\ The principal disciples 
 were Julius Hare, Maurice and Kingsley ; but many who were not 
 disciples felt the influence of Coleridge, and some became imbued 
 with "Germanism " who did not understand the German language. 
 Even a man so widely different as John Stuart Mill was influenced. 
 
 " Germanism " in theology reached out one hand towards the 
 Tractarians, and the other towards the Broad Churchmen. The 
 
 1 I refer to the impression left by Coleridge upon contemporaries. 
 Mr Benn's History of English Rationalism in the XIX Century shows clearly 
 enough that Coleridge was a dantjeious all> to the Church paity.
 
 THEOLOGY 
 
 99 
 
 Tractarians were usually innocent of all knowledge of the meaning 
 of "Germanism"; but the mystic element, that in it which appealed 
 to feeling rather than understanding, that which might be called 
 the romanticism of philosophy, was akin to their spirit. Hence 
 the baseless supposition that Coleridge or that Carlyle was re- 
 sponsible for the Oxford Movement At a later date too German 
 idealism has become acquainted with strange bedfellows, and has 
 been used as an instrument by the modern High Church party. 
 Nevertheless, its true relations are with the other side; its true 
 function has been to mediate the transition from the older Noetics 
 to the more recent Broad Churchmen. 
 
 A certain ineffectiveness characterises the Coleridgeans, just as 
 it characterised Coleridge himself Even Kingsley, it has been 
 said with truth, remained a boy, though a glorious boy, all his Ufe. 
 Sterling's failure may be set down to ill-health and to his early 
 death; but the remains he has left certainly fall short of greatness; 
 and Carlyle, the affectionate friend of the man, was disappointed 
 in the author. Sterling's first biographer and quondam rector, 
 Julius Hare, joint author with his brother Augustus of Guesses at 
 Truth, has lost that power over the mind which the testimony of 
 contemporaries assures us that he once possessed. But the most 
 typical Coleridgean was Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-187 2), 
 who himself passed through some of the spiritual experiences of 
 his master. He came of a Unitarian family, left Cambridge with- 
 out a degree, then, after an interval, went to Oxford, graduated, 
 and took holy orders. His theological opinions were too liberal 
 for the time; and in 1853 ^^ was dismissed from his professorship 
 of theology in King's College, London. He was unsound on the 
 question of eternal punishment; and to save a doctrine so precious 
 his services were dispensed with. But though he was judged 
 unfit in 1853 to teach theology in London, the University of 
 Cambridge thirteen years later was proud to receive him as a 
 teacher of morals. 
 
 Maurice best illustrates the ineffectiveness of the Coleridgeans. 
 Those who knew the man testify convincingly to the greatness of 
 his powers; but the consensus as to the unsatisfactory character 
 of the result is still more remarkable. On the one hand, Tennyson
 
 lOO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 thought him the greatest mind of all the Metaphysical Society^ 
 "For merely intellectual power, apart from poetical genius," Mill 
 considered Maurice to be decidedly superior even to his master, 
 Coleridge; and Kingsley pronounced him "a great and rare 
 thinker." On the other hand, Mill thought his power was wasted; 
 Carlyle found him "one of the most entirely uninteresting men 
 of genius"; and Mrs Carlyle was "never in his company without 
 being attacked with a sort of paroxysm of mental cramp." Ruskin, 
 again, pronounces Maurice "puzzle-headed, and, though in a 
 beautiful manner, wrong-headed." The Carlyles had a pungent 
 style, and in their judgments of contemporaries they seldom 
 erred on the side of leniency; while Ruskin might possibly be 
 prejudiced by the correspondence on the Notes on the Con- 
 struction of Sheep/olds, wherein Maurice certainly held his own. 
 But their judgment is borne out by multitudes of others. Sir 
 Mountstuart Grant Duff "never carried away one clear idea, or 
 even the impression that he [Maurice] had more than the faintest 
 conception of what he himself meant." Aubrey de Vere compared 
 listening to him to eating pea-soup with a fork. Matthew Arnold 
 speaks of him as "always beating the bush with profound emotion, 
 but never starting the hare"; and Huxley writes in 1863, probably 
 with reference to The Claims of the Bible and of Science: "Maurice 
 has sent me his book. I have read it, but I find myself utterly 
 at a loss to comprehend his point of viewl" 
 
 A perusal of Maurice's works confirms these unfavourable 
 opinions. The mistiness, as well as the mysticism, of Coleridge 
 hangs about them; and it is not so evident that they have the per- 
 manent suggestiveness of the great poet's prose. Since Maurice's 
 death, the circle— never very wide— of those who are directly 
 influenced by him has greatly narrowed. He was greater as a 
 man than as a writer; it was mainly those who felt the magnetism 
 of his pure, unselfish character who read his works; and that 
 generation has almost passed away. His Kingdojn of Christ 
 (1838), his presentation to a Quaker of his own views regarding 
 
 * LifeofTevnysoii,\\. iiiS. 
 
 2 Most of these quotations will be found in the Lib:a>y of Literary 
 
 Criticism.
 
 THEOLOGY lOI 
 
 the Catholic Church; his Doctrine of Sacrifice (1854), wherein 
 with questionable success he attempted to buttress the doctrine 
 of the atonement by showing how often one being suffers for the 
 act of another; his Theological Essays (1853), which occasioned 
 his ejection from King's College; and his Prophets and Kifigs 
 (1853), though it is less chargeable than the others with the 
 author's usual fault, are likely to be more and more left at peace 
 upon their shelves. Still less will the Moral and Metaphysical 
 Philosophy (1871— 1872) stand the test of time. 
 
 In view of the testimony to Maurice's extraordinary powers, 
 the disappointing nature of the product requires explanation. 
 The wisest words ever written about him are those of Mill; and 
 they are all the more remarkable because of the evident un- 
 willingness with which Mill expresses an opinion in any way 
 unfavourable to one whose character and intellect he admired 
 so greatly. " Great powers of generalization, rare ingenuity and 
 subtlety, and a wide perception of important and unobvious 
 truths, served him not for putting something better into the 
 place of the worthless heap of received opinions on the great 
 subjects of thought, but for proving to his own mind that the 
 Church of England had known everything from the first, and 
 that all the truths on the ground of which the Church and 
 orthodoxy have been attacked (many of which he saw as clearly 
 as any one) are not only consistent with the Thirty-nine Articles, 
 but are better understood and expressed in those Articles than 
 by any one who rejects them. I have never been able to find 
 any other explanation of this, than by attributing it to that 
 timidity of conscience, combined with original sensitiveness of 
 temperament, which has so often driven highly gifted men into 
 Romanism from the need of a firmer support than they can find 
 in the independent conclusions of their own judgment^" 
 
 Maurice, like many another, having put his hand to the 
 plough, looked back. He built upon reason, but he feared to 
 trust his foundation to the full. He thought he had learned from 
 Coleridge what Carlyle contemptuously calls "the sublime secret 
 of believing by 'the reason' what 'the understanding' had been 
 ^ Mill's Autobiography, 155-104-
 
 102 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 obliged to fling out as incredible'." Hence that amazing torturing 
 of the Thirty-nine Articles; hence that reconciHation of the Bible 
 with science which Huxley failed to understand. Maurice was 
 "German" enough to see that eighteenth century orthodoxy and 
 eighteenth century scepticism were alike incomplete; but he was 
 not "German" enough boldly to cut his cable and sail into any 
 sea of thought whither his logic would carry him. He was still 
 fast anchored to the Thirty-nine Articles; and his task was, not 
 to discover truth, but to show that the truth had been already 
 proclaimed. The well-meaning and in many ways admirable 
 scheme known as Christian Socialism shows again how, in regard 
 to fundamental principles, Maurice's mind was wrapped in fog. 
 It was inspired by the heart-felt desire to help the poor, and it 
 was productive of not a little good; but it was in no intelligible 
 sense Socialism at all. It recognised the right of private 
 property; it depreciated rather than exaggerated the power of 
 the state to effect reform; it insisted upon the profoundly in- 
 dividualistic principle that the whole world could not do so much 
 for the reformation of any man as the man himself Confusion 
 was common then, as it is now, with regard to Socialism; but 
 for a leader there cannot be pleaded that excuse for confusion 
 which may be urged in defence of his followers. Robert Owen 
 and Pierre Leroux had already lived and taught; and to call 
 by the name appropriated to their systems, principles so widely 
 different as those of Maurice and Kingsley, was to court mis- 
 understanding. 
 
 In some ways Frederick William Robertson (1816— 1853) 
 resembles Maurice. In literary form., and in the glow of his 
 eloquence, he is superior; but, dying as he did at thirty-seven, 
 the work he actually accomplished was necessarily much less 
 considerable. The celebrated Brighton sermons, though not his 
 only productions, are those by which he stands the best chance 
 of being remembered. He resembles Maurice in the compre- 
 hensiveness of his Churchmanship; and in consequence of it, he, 
 like Maurice, was regarded with distrust both by the Evangelicals 
 and by the High Churchmen. He has also Maurice's tendency 
 
 ^ Lije of SUriing, chap. viii.
 
 THEOLOGY IO3 
 
 to find new and strange meanings in old formulae; and there is 
 an element of truth in the complaint brought against him by 
 less original theologians, that he sometimes blurs the division 
 between truth and error. Robertson did a service to thought in 
 pointing out how impossible it is to maintain the hard alterna- 
 tives in which the commonplace thinker delights, and in insisting 
 that forms of expression, seemingly inconsistent, are often merely 
 different ways of expressing the same truth. But perhaps he 
 carried the process too far; on many minds, at least, his form 
 of faith after a time produces an effect akin to that produced by 
 scepticism. Men long for firm earth under their feet, for the 
 certain knowledge that this is right and that wrong, this correct 
 and that mistaken ; and they distrust a system of reconciliations 
 carried so far that it seems to leave nothing unreconciled. 
 
 From the point of view of philosophy, there is a distinct 
 advance from Maurice to the younger group of Broad Church- 
 men who were so influential at Oxford about the middle of the 
 nineteenth century. They too were influenced by "Germanism," 
 but it filtered to them from different fountains. The bolder 
 thought of Carlyle had by this time made men less timorous in 
 touching the accursed thing; and Connop Thirlwall (1797-1875), 
 one of the widest and profoundest scholars of the century, had 
 done much to open the flood-gates. The greatness of Thirlwall's 
 intellect and the extent of his influence are hardly yet recognised. 
 In precocity he rivalled Mill himself, reading Latin at three and 
 Greek at four; and, far from withering as precocious intellect 
 often does, Thirlwall's grew with his growth. In his maturity, 
 he far surpassed Mill in the extent of his knowledge. There 
 were few languages of any importance which he had not studied. 
 He was one of the Englishmen least removed from Carlyle in 
 knowledge of German thought and literature. At a time when 
 Arnold was learning German in order to read Niebuhr, Thirlwall 
 was already profoundly versed in German theology, was making 
 translations from the German, and then or very soon afterwards 
 was preparing to translate Niebuhr himself. The translation of 
 Schleiermacher's Critical Essay on Luke (1825), with his own 
 introduction, was the first thing which marked his power. The
 
 I04 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 doubts as to Thirlwall's orthodoxy raised by this introduction 
 were, according to the standard of orthodoxy of that day, not 
 surprising; for it abandons the then accepted theory of verbal 
 inspiration. But it interested Lord Melbourne, and induced him, 
 after he had satisfied himself of the essential orthodoxy of the 
 author, to recommend Thirlwall in 1840 for the bishopric of 
 St David's. More than once Thirlwall as bishop showed the 
 old spirit. He was the solitary occupant of the bench who 
 refused to sign the address calling upon Colenso to resign, and 
 he alone voted for the disestablishment of the Irish Church. On 
 the other hand, it is somewhat surprising to recall that he was 
 among those who took proceedings against Essays and Reviews. 
 
 To his acceptance of the bishopric must be ascribed Thirlwall's 
 failure to redeem the promise of the introduction to Schleiermacher. 
 He was hampered in two ways. His time was much taken up with 
 official duties (he preached, for example, in the Welsh language, 
 though it was whispered that the Welsh people hardly understood 
 the sermons) ; and his position necessarily fettered his freedom of 
 thought. Able as the episcopal charges are, they hardly show 
 that daring which might have been expected of the man who in 
 1834 wrote in favour of the admission of Dissenters to degrees, 
 and who resigned his office in Trinity College rather than com- 
 promise his independence. Perhaps the most interesting memorial 
 of his later days is the collection of Letters to a Young Friend. 
 They show that Thirlwall always retained the tastes of the scholar 
 and the remarkable capacity for omnivorous reading which dis- 
 tinguished him at Cambridge; they are easy, frank and genial; 
 and they reveal a most attractive side of a character outwardly 
 somewhat hard and stern. 
 
 Kant distilled through the mind of Coleridge, Nicbuhr and 
 Schleiermacher rendered accessible by Thirlwall, Goethe and 
 Schiller and Richter made familiar names by Carlyle, — these 
 were sufficient to wield a mighty influence upon thought. The 
 best men were not content to take them at second hand. From 
 the middle of the century onwards, the line between the progressive 
 and the unprogressive may almost be drawn where the knowledge 
 of German ceases. There were exceptions. While Newman was
 
 THEOLOGY 
 
 105 
 
 ignorant of German, Pusey knew it, and was at one time deeply 
 interested in German theology. To his honour be it said, Pusey 
 had a wide knowledge of the theology, and a considerable know- 
 ledge of the philosophy, at a date when very few in England knew 
 anything about either. In later years, however, he looked with 
 suspicion on all who had drunk of the polluted stream, and never 
 referred to his own volumes on the causes of the rationalistic 
 character of German theology. The leaders of the liberal party 
 were undeterred by such suspicions, and unhesitatingly imperilled 
 their worldly prospects by incurring them. In 1844 Arthur Penrhyn 
 Stanley (1815-1881) and Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893) made a 
 tour in Germany. They studied Kant and Hegel, and they met 
 some of the most distinguished German scholars and philosophers 
 then living. 
 
 In their knowledge of Hegel the two friends brought back to 
 England the most powerful of all solvents of theological dogma. 
 It was so just because it permitted, and indeed encouraged, the 
 recognition of the truth which usually underlies even a false way 
 of expressing human thought. It led the leaders themselves in- 
 sensibly on to a goal the prospect of which would have frightened 
 them at the start. Jowett at the close of his life rejected nearly 
 all supernatural religion, at least in the forms in which it is 
 commonly taught. We shall never return, he says, writing in 
 1886, "to the belief in facts which are disproved, e.g. miracles, 
 the narratives of creation, of Mount Sinai'." And again, "We 
 believe in a risen Christ, not risen, however, in the sense in 
 which a drowning man is restored to life, nor even in the sense 
 in which a ghost is supposed to walk the earth, nor in any sense 
 which we can define or explain. We pray to God as a Person, a 
 larger self; but there must always be a sub-intelligitur that He is 
 not a Person. Our forms of worship, public and private, imply 
 some interference with the course of nature. We know that the 
 empire of law permeates all things'^." Whether a man holding 
 such views ought to have remained a clergyman of the Church 
 of England is a question that may fairly be asked: it may be 
 taken for certain that Jowett never would have been a clergyman 
 * Life, ii. 310. ^ tbid. 313.
 
 I06 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 if he had held such views at the beginning. But in his youth he 
 was far less heterodox. Writing to Stanley in 1845, the year 
 in which he took priests' orders, he says that he has "not any 
 tendency to doubt about the miracles of the New Testament." 
 Not only does he not disbelieve them; he has no tendency to 
 doubt them. From this point he was insensibly led on to the 
 disbelief in nearly everything that, to the majority, constitutes 
 Christianity. To Jowett, however, the word Christianity still 
 had a vital meaning, and in his own sense he was most sincerely 
 Christian. 
 
 Ten years after the date of the letter to Stanley quoted above, 
 Jowett published his first work, an edition of the epistles to the 
 Thessalonians, Galatians and Romans, with notes and disserta- 
 tions ; which appeared on the same day with his friend's edition of 
 the epistles to the Corinthians. In these ten years Jowett had 
 doubtless advanced considerably beyond the position in which he 
 stood in 1845 '} but he was still far from that to which he finally 
 came. He "disbelieved in the story of Jonah and the whale"; 
 but "he kept his judgment in suspense as to whether the Law 
 had or had not been given from Sinai"; and "even when he felt 
 most sceptical, his belief in immortality had never wavered \" His 
 heresies therefore were likely to be mild in comparison with those 
 to which he could have given utterance in later days. But yet it 
 was no food for babes that his edition provided. The principles 
 suggested in the essay On the Imputation of the Sin of Adam 
 would consign to the rubbish-heap whole libraries of theology. 
 But above all the essay on the atonement, wherein he powerfully 
 denounced the absolute immorality of the doctrine as commonly 
 received, roused a storm of vituperation, and sowed the seeds of 
 difficulties which sprang up to beset for years the path of the 
 author. On the other hand, the transparent honesty of the man, 
 the literary finish of his work and the weight of his thought, won 
 him a reputation which was not confined to England. His book 
 was deemed important enough to require an answer, and a volume 
 of sermons on Christian Faith and the Atonement was published, 
 
 1 Tolleinache's_/pwtf/^, 7.
 
 THEOLOGY lO/ 
 
 among the contributors to which were the Bishop of Oxford 
 (Wilberforce) and Pusey. One essay which had been partly 
 prepared for Jowett's work had to be kept back because the 
 author's health did not permit him to finish it. This circum- 
 stance gave rise to further trouble, for the paper in question was 
 the Essay on Interpretation which was published in i860 in the 
 celebrated volume entitled Essays and Reviews. It is probable 
 enough that had Jowett not had the paper already by him, he 
 would have declined to contribute. 
 
 The stir caused by Essays and Reviews is still well remembered. 
 Of the seven contributors only two, Rowland Williams and H. B. 
 Wilson, were prosecuted. One of the charges against Wilson was 
 that he denied the doctrine of eternal punishment. The Privy 
 Council found that he had only expressed a "hope" that "a 
 judgment of eternal misery may not be the purpose of God," and 
 declined to visit with penal consequences the holding of such a 
 hope. Pusey was alarmed. " In regard to that awful doctrine of 
 the Eternity of Punishment," he wrote to Keble, "their Judgment 
 is most demoralising in itself and in its grounds^." Evidently the 
 scathing denunciation of the doctrine which Browning wrote a few 
 years later in The Inn Album was not as needless as some critics 
 have supposed. The defendants won their case, but all who were 
 concerned suffered in public opinion. The essays, read at the 
 present day, seem to many who are not anti-ecclesiastical mild and 
 innocent ; but while on that account they are unexciting, they are 
 all the more valuable as a measure of progress. The mops to stay 
 the tide are now wielded much farther up the shore. But in one 
 respect at least the uproar produced the effects its authors in- 
 tended. Jowett was turned aside from theology, which was his 
 primary intellectual interest ; the great translation of Plato became 
 the work of his life; and, except within his College, he was for 
 many years almost completely excluded from the pulpit. 
 
 Jowett's fellow-traveller, Stanley, though a far more voluminous 
 author, had much less influence upon the development of thought. 
 The two friends gave one another the warmest support; but, if 
 we except their common liberalism, the differences between them 
 
 ^ Life of Pusey, iv. 48.
 
 /;^^ 
 
 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 were more apparent than the resemblances. While Jowett was a 
 philosopher, Stanley had an essentially historical mind. Lightfoot's 
 criticisms of both were directed chiefly against the inaccuracies of 
 Stanley ; and when the latter brought the criticisms to the notice 
 of Conington, his friend's advice was "to surrender at discretion." 
 Stanley did so with perfect grace, and gave up the scheme which 
 had been in his mind for further critical editions of the epistles, 
 devoting himself rather to the writing of picturesque books of 
 travel, combined with research, like his Sinai afid Palestine (1856), 
 and historical works, like his Lectures on the History of the Eastern 
 Church (1861) and his Lectures on the IJistory of the Jewish Church 
 (1863- 1 865). These works won and deserved a wide popularity. 
 They have the great merit of being emphatically readable; the 
 English is always pleasant, and in the finest passages really 
 eloquent. They have charm ; but, brought to the test by com- 
 parison with histories truly great, they appear only second-rate. 
 Stanley's picturesqueness is occasionally excessive, he plays too 
 much on the surface of things, too seldom seeks to penetrate the 
 depths. 
 
 With the two celebrated Oxonians there is usually joined a 
 third, very different from either of them, — Mark Pattison (18 13- 
 1884), who was Rector of Lincoln College from 186 1 till his 
 death, — a man who, like Jowett, was at one point in his career 
 disappointed of his legitimate ambition, but who, unlike Jowett, 
 suffered himself to be embittered and partly spoilt by the dis- 
 appointment. Pattison is rather a scholar and a critic than a 
 theologian. His greatest work is his Isaac Casaiihon (1875), a 
 biography which exhibits a depth of learning in humanism such 
 as no contemporary could equal. His monograph on Alilton 
 (1879) 's perhaps the best of all the numberless books of the 
 kind which have been produced during the last thirty years. His 
 single considerable contribution to theology (or rather philosophy) 
 was the paper in Essays and Reviews entitled Tetidencies of Re- 
 ligious Thought in England, 1688-1750, of which it is too little 
 to say that it is the most memorable of all the papers contained 
 in that volume. Like Pattison's other productions, it was quite 
 the best thing on its subject in English. It was a dispassionate
 
 THEOLOGY 
 
 109 
 
 inquiry into the subject of deism, — the causes which led to its 
 rise, and afterwards to its decay; it made no pronouncement 
 whatever upon dogma. There was in it, therefore, no real ground 
 for offence ; the clergy ought to have accepted it gratefully as a 
 contribution to knowledge. They were left quite at liberty, if 
 they only had the capacity, to use the material for the support of 
 the Catholic faith. Partly, however, because the paper was found 
 in bad company, partly, it may be suspected, because many of the 
 readers had not intelligence enough to comprehend the writer's 
 purpose, Pattison was involved in the suspicion which attached 
 to the whole band. Doubtless this tended to silence him, and 
 may be the cause of the deplorable fact that a man who did so 
 superlatively well all that he attempted should, in a life of over 
 seventy years, have accomplished so little. 
 
 North of the Tweed a similar work to that of Jowett was done, 
 and from the philosophic side done more thoroughly, by John 
 Caird (1820-1898). Caird, however, though only three years 
 younger than Jowett, was much later before he wrote anything 
 that appreciably influenced thought, and he has not that special 
 importance which belongs to a pioneer. He first won fame as a 
 preacher, and it may be doubted whether in his best days he had, 
 as a pulpit orator, any equal in Great Britain. Stanley pronounced 
 his Religion in Common Life, preached before the Queen and 
 published by her command, to be " the greatest single sermon of 
 the century." Caird won his reputation as a preacher at once, 
 and to a man less strong and less imbued with the spirit of 
 thoroughness it might easily have proved fatal. But he recognised 
 the danger, and after ministering for two years to an Edinburgh 
 congregation, he retired to the country parish of Errol in Perth- 
 shire. The eight years (1849-185 7) which he spent there were 
 his seed-time. Perceiving the importance of the German philo- 
 sophy, he learnt the language in order to make acquaintance at 
 first hand with the great thinkers. When, therefore, he emerged 
 trom his retirement, he had a knowledge of modern thought such 
 as was by no means common either in Scotland or in England ; 
 and when in 1862 he became professor of divinity in Glasgow 
 University, the doctrine which he taught was as alarming to the
 
 no THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 more old-fashioned of his countrymen as it was inspiring to the 
 younger generation. Apart from sermons, his publications all 
 belong to the close of his life. The Croall lectures, which he 
 delivered in 1 878-1 879, were the basis of his Introduction to the 
 Philosophy of Religion (1880), and his Futidame7ital Ideas of 
 Christianity (1900) was the product of his tenure of the Gifford 
 lectureship. He was the author also of a monograph on Spinoza 
 (1888). Caird's teaching is mainly based on Hegel. It is inspired 
 by the conviction that the old formulae are wholly inadequate 
 — indeed it may be roundly said, untrue — to modern thought. 
 The alternative is, therefore, either to find new principles, or to 
 surrender to the materialists. Caird believed that Hegelianism 
 supplied the new principles, and that the doctrine of development 
 might be applied in such a way as to rejuvenate Christianity. 
 His purpose was, of course, widely different from that of Newman 
 in his Development of Christian Doctri?ie, and also from that of 
 the recent Anglican school which has sought to buttress sacer- 
 dotalism by the aid of the great German. Caird gave no such 
 twist to the philosopher's meaning ; but whether he succeeded in 
 bringing it into harmony with any interpretation of Christianity as 
 a supernatural religion, is perhaps open to question. 
 
 The time of Essays and Reviews was one of unrest for theo- 
 logians. That volume made its appearance when the excitement 
 about the Origin of Species was at its height ; and the second 
 turmoil had not had time to settle when J. W. Colenso (1814- 
 1883), Bishop of Natal, set a new stone of stumbling in the path. 
 From the simplicity and definiteness of the arithmetical tests 
 applied by Colenso, the effect of his critical examination of the 
 Hexateuch (186 2-1 8 7 9) was at the time extraordinary. Kuenen 
 pronounced it to be "simply annihilating^" The subsequent 
 advance of knowledge and opinion has tended to obscure the 
 merit of Colenso and to make many of his criticisms seem obvious. 
 If his writings are no longer read, it is because they have reached 
 what Huxley called the euthanasia of scientific work, and are 
 built into the temple of thought. The judgment of Kuenen is 
 sufficient proof that Colenso's examination was not idle, even to 
 1 Quoted in Benn's History of English nationalism, ii. 143.
 
 THEOLOGY 1 1 1 
 
 the greatest scholars of the time ; while the treatment meted out 
 to him shows that it had stirred many who stood somewhat below 
 Kuenen. Colenso was deposed from his see by the Bishop of 
 Capetown ; the Privy Council declared the deposition to be null 
 and void ; and the Bishop then excommunicated Colenso. His 
 inhibition by the Bishop of Oxford (Wilberforce) from preaching 
 at Carfax drew from Ruskin the question, "Is there a single 
 statement of the Bishop of Natal's, respecting the Bible text, 
 which the Bishop of Oxford dares to contradict before Professor 
 Max Miiller, or any other leading scholar of Europe*?" It ill 
 becomes those who have entered upon the inheritance of freedom 
 to depreciate the men who bore the burden and heat of the day, 
 though their bodies may lie by the walls of forts long since carried 
 and far in the rear. 
 
 "Thoughts that great hearts once broke for, we 
 Breathe cheaply in the common air." 
 
 The subject of the Broad Churchmen has led us far on 
 towards the close of the period with which we have to deal. It is 
 necessary to return to the beginning, and to trace another thread 
 of causation. For while in a sense the Broad Churchmen were 
 the heirs of the Noetics, they were related in a negative way to 
 the Tractarians, reacting against the latter, just as the Tractarians 
 reacted against the Noetics. 
 
 That great Catholic Reaction of which in Germany the con- 
 version of Frederick Schlegel and in France the movements of 
 Lamennais and Lacordaire were symptoms, took in England the 
 characteristic form of an attempted compromise, to which we owe 
 the theological road-making of Newman's via viedia. It is one of 
 the many attempts to bring back that faith which the eighteenth 
 century had disowned, and the absence of which Ruskin declared 
 to be the great defect of the early nineteenth century. 
 
 Whether this particular attempt was wisely made or not remains 
 to be seen. Having regard to the time and the circumstances, it 
 is one of the strangest, and therefore one of the most interesting, 
 of all the manifestations of the human mind. To the great mass 
 
 ^ Fors Clavigera, Letter xlix. 
 
 P
 
 ' 1 
 \ i 
 
 112 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 of the rationalising thought of the time, it seemed no better than 
 a conspiracy to put back the clock of thought by some centuries — 
 a diligent search inspired by the extraordinary hope of discovering 
 in the ages which the world has agreed to call dark, the light of 
 heaven — the astonishing belief that in respect of the highest of all 
 subjects it was the duty of modern man to sit humbly at the feet 
 of those who, in nearly all other matters, were demonstrably 
 inferior to the great intellects of Greece and Rome. Such was 
 the aspect which the Oxford Movement wore to poets like 
 Browning and Arnold, to theologians like Jowett, to philosophers 
 like Spencer and Mill. Such, it seemed to them, was the extrava- 
 gant demand made upon the heirs of Shakespeare and Bacon 
 and Newton, of Kant and Hegel and Goethe. 
 
 There are two points of view from which the Oxford Move- 
 ment may be regarded, and from which it may present, to the 
 same mind, very different aspects. These are respectively the 
 i ptellp.r.f na] pf^inWvryiaa;^ and the aesthe tic. Many who are wholly 
 destitute of sympathy with the movement on its intellectual side — 
 who would perhaps roundly declare its whole aim and method to 
 be radically and irredeemably false — are by no means deficient in 
 sympathy with it on the aesthetic side. As regards the intel- 
 lectual foundation, they would argue that, supposing the purpose 
 of the Tracts for the Times accomplished, supposing the language 
 of the XXXIX Articles to be reconciled with Catholic truth as 
 conceived by Newman, — still, the only effect would be to excite 
 wonder at the eccentricity of the men who framed those articles 
 and who used such language for such a purpose. At this point 
 the task would only be beginning. They would proceed to ask 
 how Catholic truth in this Newmanite sense was to be reconciled 
 with truth Ko-ff oAou in its secular sense ; and it is safe to say that 
 they would receive no answer which would satisfy them. In 
 Germany, Strauss's Leben Jesu was published; in France, Comte's 
 Cours de Philospphie positive was issued, contemporaneously with 
 the Tracts for the Times. The former subjects the life of Jesus 
 to a thoroughly rationalistic examination \ the latter calls the 
 dogma of exclusive salvation a "fatal declaration," pronounces 
 the dogma of the condemnation of mankind through Adam to be
 
 THEOLOGY II3 
 
 "morally more revolting than the other," and traces to political 
 necessity the dogma of the divinity of Christ. Even in the British 
 Isles, and within the circle of believers, Thomas Chalmers, the 
 only theologian who rivalled and in some ways surpassed Newman 
 in greatness, was, as we have seen, in those very years conducting 
 a religious movement on radically different principles from those 
 of Tractarianism. How could the leaders of the Catholic Reaction 
 appeal to such men ? To their reason they could not appeal at 
 all : possibly they might captivate their emotions. 
 
 Many who were only aHenated intellectually by the Catholic 
 Reaction have shown considerable sympathy with its aesthetic 
 phase. Some of its manifestations appear to them paltry enough. 
 With an amused glance Browning passes by the figure of the 
 ritualist, 
 
 "All Peter's chains about his waist, his back 
 Brave with the needlework of Noodledom^"; 
 
 and he leaves "thrilling views of the surplice question" to those 
 who care to deal with them. But there are more important 
 aspects. Nothing is plainer than that the Catholic Reaction 
 was to a great extent an aesthetic movement. It is one form of 
 the manifold protest against the hardness and bareness of the 
 eighteenth century. The intellect had been fed, but not the 
 emotions ; the understanding, but not the imagination ; the head 
 was full, but the heart was empty. The dearth of lyrical poetry 
 is significant, the character of that which was written is more 
 significant still. Contrast the metallic brilliancy of Dryden's 
 Alexander's Feast or of Pope's Ode on St Cecilia's Day with the 
 cloudy wizardry of the Ancient Mariner, the enchanting move- 
 ment of Kubla Khan, or the languorous beauty of the Ode to a 
 Nightingale-, and put alongside of this the contrast between the 
 bare sternness of Puritanism, or the cold decorum which often 
 passed for religion after Puritanism had decayed, and the sensuous 
 beauty of the Catholic worship. The highest beauty is spiritual, 
 and the bare walls of a hideous chapel, or the desolate, mist-clad 
 hill-side where the persecuted found their retuge, might be made 
 
 ^ Bishoji Biougram. 
 
 w. 8
 
 114 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 grander than the interior of St Peter's. But lofty cathedrals 
 aglow with the colours of painting, "storied windows," stately 
 processions in gorgeous vestments and with swinging censers, and 
 all the pomp and circumstance of a ceremonial religion, attract 
 even such Puritanic minds as Milton's, and are almost the only 
 attraction to the multitudes whose God must take a visible shape 
 and be not too far removed above humanity. With this aspect of 
 the Reaction, with the bringing back of colour and beauty into 
 religious life, with the appeal to the imagination and the feelings, 
 many who are only alienated by the arguments for it may well be 
 in sympathy. No one who understands it can fail to be inter- 
 ested; for it is one of the best examples in history of the imperious 
 demand of human nature that it shall be satisfied as a whole. 
 They who reject the demand do so at their peril. The eighteenth 
 century offered the feelings not bread, but a stone. One section 
 of the nineteenth retaliates with the attempt to monopolise all the 
 bread for feeling, and to put off intellect in its turn with mock 
 nutriment. How will the reaction here again show itself? The 
 answer has been partly given already, in tracing the Broad Church 
 movement : it will be given more fully when we come to deal 
 with the Oxford poets of doubt, Clough and Arnold. 
 
 The Oxford Movement was initiated in 1833, at least that is 
 the date which Newman adopts as its starting-point. There had, 
 however, been silent and to a great extent unconscious preparation 
 for it ever since Newman, sixteen years before, had entered Oxford 
 as an undergraduate. It reached a crisis in 1845, when Newman 
 was received into the Romish communion; but it was not at 
 an end, nor is it at an end now. The literary product of the 
 movement is not great, except that which comes from the pen of 
 John Henry Newman (1801— 1890). We owe to it a little poetry, 
 which will be noticed in its place. Its great prose document is 
 Newman's fascinating Apologia (1864). There has grown up 
 about the movement a whole prose literature ; but most of the 
 contents of this literature are, except as historical documents, 
 what Charles Lamb calls biblia-a-biblia^ books which are no 
 books. They do not even rise to the level of " Hume, Gibbon, 
 Robertson, Beattie, Soanie Jenyns, and, generally, all those
 
 THEOLOGY 
 
 115 
 
 volumes which *no gentleman's library should be without.'" 
 Unless he specially wishes to investigate the Oxford Movement, 
 any gentleman's library may quite well be without the great 
 majority of the books which have been written about it. But it 
 may not be without the Apologia : that is eminently and emphati- 
 cally literature. Every reader must be grateful to Newman for 
 the palpitating humanity which vivifies every line. It is the 
 revelation of a great and a fiery soul, its fires covered and banked, 
 it is true, by the sense of priestly duty, but breaking out now and 
 then with scorching heat and blazing coruscations all the more 
 effective for the previous suppression. Newman has often been 
 described as saintly, but he is of the type of the older and greater 
 saints, rather than of the later, as they are discriminated in 
 J. R. Green's letters : " The devotees of the later hagiology could 
 fast and weep and whimper, but they could not get into one of 
 St Columba's grand wrath-explosions ^" Newman could, and it 
 is this fact which keeps him so human under all the weight of 
 ecclesiasticism. Many years after he left Oxford he wrote to 
 Isaac Williams that of all human things Oxford was perhaps 
 nearest his heart; yet in his room at the Oratory there hung a 
 view of Oxford, and over that dream of Church spire and College 
 pinnacle he had inscribed from the vision of Ezekiel the words, 
 "Son of Man, can these dry bones live?" Beneath was the 
 answer, " O Lord God, thou knowest^" Intense passion vibrates 
 in the words. The iron must have entered deep indeed before 
 the man whose spirit has perhaps, of all during the last century, 
 been most deeply penetrated, whose genius has been most 
 irradiated by the influence of Oxford, could write thus. 
 
 Newman was the one great man, the one genius, of the Oxford 
 Movement. Froude calls him the " indicating number," all the 
 rest being but as ciphers ; and the judgment is sound. Newman 
 himself with characteristic modesty ascribes to Keble the initiation 
 of the movement, and he " ever considered and kept the day " of 
 Keble's assize sermon on National Apostasy as the start of what 
 came to be known as Tractarianism. But the preparations for the 
 movement had gone a long way before the sermon was preached. 
 *■ p. 7g. ' Protheio's Lije oj Sianley^ ii. 340. 
 
 8—2
 
 Il6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Hurrell Froude, who accompanied Newman on the famous journey 
 in 1 83 2-1 833, writes with regard to their visit to Rome that they 
 had got an introduction to Wiseman " to find out whether they 
 [the Romish Church] could take us in on any terms to which we 
 could twist our consciences'." The words are the words of 
 Froude ; but unless he has used the plural number unwarrantably 
 they throw an unpleasant light on an early use of " economy " by 
 Newman too ; for the date is prior to the sermon on National 
 Apostasy, prior to the Tracts^ prior by years to any outward 
 indication of a tendency on the part of Newman to secede to the 
 Romish communion. 
 
 The exaggerated respect in which John Keble (i 792-1 866) 
 was held was characteristic of the party, though some of it was 
 doubtless due simply to the precocious learning of "the boy 
 bachelor." When Newman went to Oxford there was already a 
 kind of halo of sainthood about Keble's head, and it was the type 
 of sainthood which is measured rather by the inches of aberration 
 than by the diameter of the orbit. When Keble walked the 
 streets it was with " eagerness " that the youth who knew him by 
 sight pronounced his name, and with " awe " that he who was 
 not so privileged — Newman himself — heard it. Even a Master 
 of Arts — sublime being though he be — is " almost put out of 
 countenance" by the gentleness, courtesy and unaffectedness of 
 Keble. Alas ! the trebly hundred triumphs. The conquests, 
 glories, triumphs, spoils of Keble are indeed shrunk to little 
 measure ; and we can now pronounce his name without the least 
 eagerness, and hear it without a particle of awe. He was a man 
 of many attractive qualities, simple, kind, unassuming, almost the 
 embodiment of that negative conception of goodness which lays 
 greater stress upon sins avoided than upon great deeds done. It 
 is true, Keble in his own parish did much good both by precept 
 and by example ; but there is nothing great either in his life or in 
 his works. In prose, he is the author of a finely sympathetic 
 Life of Bishop Wilson (1863) and of divers volumes of sermons 
 which give expression, often beautifully, to the thoughts of a 
 good, true and pious man. But there is nothing in them to rouse 
 * Ward's Life of Wiseman, i. 117.
 
 THEOLOGY II7 
 
 or startle, little reach of thought, no evidence of originality. Keble 
 was not the man to head a great movement, and if there had not 
 been more virile spirits behind, the sermon on National Apostasy 
 would soon have been forgotten. But there is a profound truth, 
 noted by both Aristotle and Bacon in political affairs, which holds 
 equally in the movements of religion. Fiyi/ovTai fikv ovv al o-rao-eis 
 ov TTcpi ixiKfxav aAA. e/c [xiKpwv, (TTaarid^ovcrL Se irepl /JL^ydXwv^, says 
 Aristotle. "If there be fuel prepared," says Bacon, "it is hard 
 to tell whence the spark shall come that shall set it on fire^" 
 The spark is a trivial thing in itself; but the conflagration may 
 be great. So it was in the case of the Oxford Movement : fuel 
 had been gathering for years, and Keble chanced to light it. 
 
 The case of the two brothers Newman is interesting. From 
 their common starting-point they diverged as wide as the poles ; 
 so that, while the elder brother surrendered his judgment to an 
 infallible Church and then to an infallible Pope, we find the 
 younger discussing the defective morality of the New Testament, 
 and giving reasons why he cannot call himself a Christian. This 
 wide divergence had its source in an innate difference of character. 
 "I am more thankful on your account than on his," writes the 
 mother to J. H. Newman on the younger brother winning a 
 fellowship at Balliol. " He is a piece of adamant. You are such 
 a sensitive being ^." But the difference is also illustrative of the 
 two great currents of thought of the century ; the one brother 
 hears and obeys the call of reason, the other takes shelter under 
 authority. 
 
 It was in 1826 that the memorable friendship between Newman 
 and Hurrell Froude began. Froude has left no writing worthy of 
 his high reputation. He was the author of only two of the Tracts 
 for the Times; the Remains (1838— 1839), published after his 
 death, are disappointing; and the few pieces from his pen in 
 Lyra Apostolica do not suffice to lift him to the rank of the poets. 
 Froude had bad health, and his mind seems to have been critical 
 rather than creative. Though these two causes sufficed to check 
 his productiveness, contemporaries bear emphatic testimony to 
 
 1 Politics, viii. 4. i. " Essay Of Seditions and Troubles. 
 
 ' Newman's Letters, i. 134.
 
 Il8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the greatness of his powers. Much as Newman admired Keble, 
 he writes that in variety and perfection of gifts, he thinks Froude 
 far exceeds even him^ Neither can the greatness of Froude's 
 influence on the movement be doubted. It was a personal and 
 impelling influence : he caused others to do what he himself could 
 not, or at least did not do. Moreover, he was bold to the verge 
 of rashness, and boldness was needed if the friends were to succeed. 
 "If the times are troublous, Oxford will want hot-headed men, 
 and such I mean to be, and I am in my placed" wrote Newman. 
 Froude would have concurred. 
 
 The mainspring of the Oxford Movement was the dread of 
 rationalism. The majority knew it only as it was exemplified in 
 the Noetics ; but they saw, some dimly, others with greater clear- 
 ness, that the principles of the Noetics, logically carried out, led a 
 long way. The history of the French Revolution showed how 
 much authority had to fear from the application of such principles. 
 A few, with wider knowledge, perceived that Germany was the 
 home of a school of theology working upon those principles^ a 
 school of wider learning and of more boldly speculative spirit than 
 that which was springing up in England. It was to counteract 
 this German school and to warn religious minds against it that 
 Hugh James Rose delivered and published his Discourses on the 
 State of the P7-otesta7it Religion in Germany (1825), to which 
 Pusey replied in a work already alluded to^ Pusey was as hostile 
 as Rose to rationalism, and his quarrel with the latter was only on 
 certain errors into which Rose had fallen, and certain misrepresenta- 
 tions of individual German theologians into which he had been led 
 by imperfect knowledge of the subject. 
 
 It was not, however, along this line that the Oxford Movement 
 was destined to advance; for Newman himself was ignorant of 
 German. The problem for him was how to check the growth of 
 rationalism as he saw it in England. He set to work as soon as 
 he returned from his sojourn on the Continent ; the Arians of the 
 Fourth Century, at which he had been labouring before he left, 
 was published within a few months of his return ; and before the 
 close of the year 1833 the first of the celebrated Tracts for the 
 ^ Letters, ii. 174. ^ ibid, i. 250. * ante, p. 105.
 
 THEOLOGY II9 
 
 Times (1833-1841) appeared. Newman was, as is well known, 
 the soul of the Tracts, writing twenty-nine of them, and more or 
 less inspiring many of the rest. The notorious Tract XC was 
 from his pen. The tone of the Tracts had been steadily becoming 
 more and more Romish; not without reason, the suspicions of 
 Protestants had been growing deeper and deeper ; and Tract XC 
 was a little more than they could bear. The story of the commo- 
 tion it excited is so well known that it need not be retold. It 
 drove Newman to Littlemore ; the surprising thing is that it did 
 not drive him farther ; and we can only accept with astonishment, 
 as another illustration of the mysterious working of the human 
 mind, the statement that he regarded Littlemore as his Torres 
 Vedras, whence, like Wellington, he was to advance once more 
 and conquer. The younger Newman expresses a very natural 
 surprise that it took his brother ten years to discover to what goal 
 he was going. After the last of the Tracts, four years had still to 
 elapse before he was received within the fold of the R.omish Church. 
 
 Before the close of the Anglican period Newman had written, 
 besides the works mentioned. Lectures on Justification (1838) and 
 an Essay on the Miracles recorded in the Ecclesiastical History of 
 the Early Ages (1843), as well as a large number of sermons. 
 The Essay on Miracles drew from Macaulay the remark that " the 
 times require a Middleton'." It is an attempt to secure for the 
 miracles of the early Church the same credence which, until lately. 
 Protestantism readily gave to those of the Scriptures. Just as the 
 latter were becoming incredible the former were to be added, — 
 not a mere straw, but a huge bundle, to an overburdened back. 
 Nothing can more strikingly illustrate the hopelessness of the task 
 in which Newman was engaged. " Our popular religion," writes 
 Matthew Arnold, "at present conceives the birth, ministry and 
 death of Christ, as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracle; 
 — and miracles do not happen^." 
 
 The works of Newman after his secession are very numerous. 
 His delightful purity of style is the charm of them all. But no 
 man can surrender his freedom without danger to the intellect; 
 
 ^ Macvey Napier's Correspondence, 427. 
 ^ The italics are Arnold's.
 
 120 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 and it may be doubted whether Newman ever produced anything 
 quite worthy of the powers with which he was endowed, — except 
 the Apologia, which illustrates how indignation bursts all bonds 
 and makes eloquence as well as verse. The process of deteriora- 
 tion had begun long before the close of the Anglican period. 
 Few great men have left letters more disappointing and barren 
 than those of Newman during that period. They give the impres- 
 sion, not of a man, but of an ecclesiastical machine. There is no 
 humour, little satire, hardly anything to recommend them except 
 limpid English. The same impression is left by Newman's two 
 disappointing tales, Loss arid Gain (1848) and Callista (1856), 
 both of which were intended to further the cause of Catholicism, 
 and neither of which has any other value. 
 
 Next to the Apologia, the most remarkable of Newman's works 
 is the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). It well illustrates 
 Newman's quickness in apprehending an advantage. Mr Benn^ 
 ascribes to the French Catholic reactionary Bonald the credit of 
 introducing the idea of development into theology. Newman felt 
 at once what an advantage it gave a Catholic in attacking the 
 Protestant position. The Protestant — and the Tractarian — argu- 
 ment was that Rome had introduced innovations on primitive 
 practice. Newman replies that in every living institution, as in 
 every living being, there is a natural principle of growth, and that 
 the changes which this growth brings are not to be regarded as 
 corruptions or perversions ; the final state is as natural as the 
 primitive state ; it is indeed that for which the primitive state 
 existed. And this law of development supplied, to Newman's 
 mind, a remarkable proof of the truth of Roman Catholicism. 
 Properly understood, it showed that Rome was in the direct line 
 of succession from primitive Christianity; not the same as that, 
 but an outgrowth from it as natural and necessary as branch and 
 twig and leaf are from the trunk. All Protestantism, on the 
 contrary, including Anglicanism, was an aberration, a thing off 
 the true line of development. Possibly Newman might have 
 needed all his ingenuity to stop the argument just at the point 
 when it would have become dangerous to his own position ; but 
 1 English Rationalism in the XIX Century, ii. 7.
 
 THEOLOGY 121 
 
 at least it was not easy to meet him on the lines of orthodox 
 Protestantism. The great idea for which he contended was the 
 master-thought of the century ; and the principle of Protestantism 
 was that, in respect of religious truth, there was a point far in the 
 past where development had ceased ^ 
 
 This was Newman's one great principle for the future. There 
 is no further growth. The step which he took in 1 845 sacrificed 
 his freedom and could not but tend to belittle his mind. Stanley 
 felt this. His interview with Newman in 1864 "left the impres- 
 sion, not of unhappiness or dissatisfaction, but of a totally wasted 
 life, unable to read, glancing at questions which he could not 
 handle, rejoicing in the caution of the Court of Rome, which had 
 (like the Privy Council) kept open question after question that he 
 enumerated as having been brought before it'*." On such crumbs 
 from the rich table of truth had that great intellect to feed, — always 
 with a glance to this side and that lest he might find the crumb 
 claimed by a mightier power, never certain when the open question 
 might be pronounced to be open no longer. He was forced to 
 bow his head in 1870 to the dogma of papal infallibility. Such is 
 the price paid for the abnegation of intellectual duty. Newman 
 says that his entry into the Romish Church was "like coming into 
 port after a stormy sea." Doubtless it was. The sea was the sea 
 of Truth, and the storms were the storms of doubt which inevitably 
 sweep it for those who boldly spread their sails and steer towards 
 the sunrise. Those storms could blow no longer in the still haven 
 sheltered all round by the breakwaters of authority. But what a 
 false idea of life, — what a pitiable conception of duty, as contrasted 
 with the conceptions of the other great intellects of the time ! 
 " Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well," writes Arnold ; 
 and Emerson declares that every man has some time or other to 
 choose between rest and truth. Newman chose the ignoble 
 alternative. He seems never to have suspected — or, if he did, 
 
 ^ Huxley, who approached the doctrine of development without theological 
 prepossessions, in the article on Agnosticism and Christianity, uses Newman's 
 work to enforce his argument against both Newman himself and Newman's 
 Protestant opponents. 
 
 * Life of Stanley, ii. 34a.
 
 122 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 he never dared to face the suspicion — that his own law of de- 
 velopment, more widely and fearlessly applied, would have shown 
 that the doubt he discarded was an evidence of progress, not of 
 decay. He never felt the confidence expressed in Tennyson's 
 well-known lines, and in Browning's noble Rabbi Ben Ezra, that 
 it is the " finished and finite clod " which is " untroubled with a 
 spark." Still less could he rise to the conception, embodied in 
 one of the latter poet's latest pieces, Rephan, that evil itself, 
 because of the struggle it evokes, is to be welcomed in preference 
 to a "neutral best." Carlyle tells us that "Man's Unhappiness... 
 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." 
 Mill, in a passage eloquent with passion, declares that he will brave 
 hell itself rather than be false to what is highest within himself, or 
 assert to be true what that highest pronounces false. It was with 
 such intellects that Newman was meant to stand ; but he has 
 pronounced his own doom, and, beautiful as is his English, he 
 has left no legacy worthy to be treasured along with theirs. If 
 ever there was a "lost leader," it was Newman. His place by 
 right of intellect was with " the van and the freemen " ; his choice 
 of ^'rest" instead of "truth" condemned him to "sink to the 
 rear and the slaves ^" 
 
 The central principle of Newmanism is expressed in a sentence 
 in the Apologia, which declares that there is " no medium, in true 
 philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicity''." The Grammar 
 of Assent {\Zio), a subtle and interesting but essentially sophistical 
 book, was written principally to enforce this proposition. It was 
 this belief, growing more and more fixed in his mind, which led 
 Newman from Calvinism along the via media to Rome. Step 
 after step, the ground sank beneath him, until at last he saw no 
 refuge but the complete abandonment of himself to authority. If 
 he ever thought of a reversal of the process, like Carlyle's bold 
 defiance to the Everlasting No, he did not venture upon it. 
 Strange if it never occurred to him that his pyramid was resting 
 
 ^ I do not mean to suggest that Newman was personally untruthtiil: I use 
 the word "truth"' in the sense in which Emerson, in the passage referred to 
 above, contrasted it with "rcbt." * Apologia, 198.
 
 THEOLOGY 1 23 
 
 on its apex ; for however safe a man may feel under the shelter of 
 authority, he is logically bound to ask himself on what principle 
 he selects the authority. There are many claimants for his 
 allegiance. "There is but one God, and Mahomet is his pro- 
 phet." Why not this refuge rather than the Catholic Church? 
 Why not Buddhism, which presents so many analogies to the 
 theology of Europe that the early Romish missionaries were driven 
 to conjecture an intervention of the devil for the confusion of the 
 faithful? Why not any other refuge? In spite of Newman's 
 belittling of reason and repudiation of the right of private judg- 
 ment, there must be an act of reason and an implicit assertion of 
 that right in the first and most momentous step of all, the deter- 
 mination of the question, which of the claimants is the Infallible 
 Authority ? If so, why does the right cease at that point ? The 
 hardness of the alternative therefore vanishes ; and authority itself 
 is completely undermined if the person subject to it is to choose 
 the sovereign. 
 
 Newman has been praised for the subtlety of his logic; and 
 within certain limits he did possess a most subtle gift of reasoning. 
 But before we praise it unreservedly, we should do well to note 
 what are the limits within which this logical power is confined. 
 It speedily appears that the use of it is, not so much to discover 
 truth, as to support and buttress a foregone conclusion. Hence 
 Kingsley's charge of dishonesty ; hence the effect Newman pro- 
 duced upon the mind of Huxley, who writes: "After an hour or 
 two of him I began to lose sight of the distinction between truth 
 and falsehood^" Newman was not consciously or intentionally 
 dishonest ; but he used reason to maintain beliefs which had been 
 reached without its aid. This is the secret of his constant use 
 of arguments which must be described by the phrase "special 
 pleading." The vital thing has taken place before; the arguments 
 are altogether subordinate. Science has "little of a religious 
 tendency; deductions have no power of persuasion. The heart 
 is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the 
 imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of 
 facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, 
 
 ^ Life 0/ Huxley, ii. 225.
 
 124 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man 
 will live and die upon a dogma : no man will be a martyr for a 
 conclusion. A conclusion is but an opinion ; it is not a thing 
 which is, but which we are ^ quite sure about' ; and it has often 
 been observed, that we never say we are sure and certain without 
 implying that we doubt. To say that a thing must be, is to admit 
 that it may not be. No one, I say, will die for his own calculations : 
 he dies for realities. This is why a literary religion is so little to 
 be depended upon ; it looks well in fair weather ; but its doctrines 
 are opinions, and, when called to suffer for them, it slips them 
 between its foHos, or burns them at its hearth^" 
 
 This passage, written in 1841, and emphasised by the author's 
 quoting it from himself in 1870, is very significant. Few would 
 deny that much of it is true, and the truth is admirably expressed. 
 *' Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds 
 inflame us." Such things are not susceptible of demonstration, 
 yet we feel their profound reality. It would be absurd to apply 
 logical formulae to voices and looks, and often even to persons 
 and deeds ; yet these are the sort of realities for which men die. 
 ^ Everything, however, depends upon the application. What are 
 the " dogmas " and the " mysteries " for which it is worth living 
 and dying, the " realities " which are so far superior to the things 
 we are ^^ quite sure about'' as to need no proof? Many have felt 
 a shock on discovering that central among them is the Athanasian 
 Creed. This " is not a mere collection of notions, however mo- 
 mentous. It is a psalm or hymn of praise, of confession, and 
 of profound, self-prostrating homage, parallel to the canticles of 
 the elect in the Apocalypse. It appeals to the imagination quite 
 as much as to the intellect. It is the war-song of faith, with which 
 we warn first ourselves, then each other, and then all those who 
 are within its hearing, and the hearing of the Truth, who our God 
 is, and how we must worship Him, and how vast our responsibility 
 will be, if we know what to believe, and yet believe it not — For 
 myself, I have ever felt it as the most simple and sublime, the 
 most devotional formulary to which Christianity has given birth, 
 more so even than the Vefii Creator and the Te Deum'^." 
 * Grammar of Assent f 93-93. ^ ibid. 133.
 
 THEOLOGY 1 25 
 
 After this amazing declaration it is difficult to proceed. Surely 
 the force of self-persuasion can go no farther ; surely he who could 
 speak thus had gone into a region of thought or feeling where 
 words had lost their common meaning. It might reasonably be 
 pleaded that to measure the Te Deum with logical compass and 
 square would be as misleading as would be the same process if it 
 were applied to Shakespeare's " We are such stuff as dreams are 
 made on." But the Athanasian Creed is cast in as hard, precise, 
 logical terms, as are the propositions of EucUd. It purposely 
 seeks to constrain the reason; and Newman has given no good 
 ground for refraining to test it by the reason. 
 
 This is, unfortunately, typical. First an illustration which 
 commands assent — then a dexterous twist in the process of 
 thought — then under shelter of the illustration something is 
 brought in which is wholly aHen from it. This is why so many 
 have felt that Newman is not so much a logician as a sophist. 
 His mind is made up from the start, and his logic is not that 
 of a seeker for truth. Hence, he is sometimes contented with 
 reasoning which, to such an intellect as his, ought to have been 
 contemptible. Occasionally, those who had been fascinated into 
 discipleship by the attractiveness of his personality, the plausi- 
 bility of his argument and the charm of his style, won their 
 deliverance so. J. A. Froude owed his to a sophism of Newman's 
 about the word motion. "Scripture," said Newman, in a sermon, 
 "says the earth is stationary and the sun moves; science, that the 
 sun is stationary and the earth moves, and we shall never know 
 which is true until we know what motion is." Froude argued 
 that if Scripture did not mean by "motion" what all men intend 
 to convey by the word, he could never be sure what it did mean ; 
 and he turned his back upon Newmanism\ 
 
 Sophistry of this kind, however, is by no means confined to 
 Newman, or to Newman's party. When Mansel roused the in- 
 dignation of Mill by arguing that the "justice" of God may be 
 something different — not higher or purer, but wholly different in 
 quality — from the "justice" of man, he was using exactly the 
 same sophism; and all the numerous tribe of the reconcilers of 
 
 '^ Nemesis of Faith.
 
 126 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Genesis with science use it too when they put upon the words of 
 Genesis a non-natural meaning. It is seldom just to accuse them 
 of dishonesty or conscious disingenuousness; they feel that they 
 must defend what has been imparted to them as vital truth, and 
 they do it with the best weapons they can find. 
 
 In Newman's case the sophistry is the more frequent, because 
 it was by imagination, not by reason, that he reached what he 
 believed to be the truth. In him, the use of reason is always 
 subordinate. He long concealed the fact from his readers and 
 hearers, and partly from himself; because he must always clothe 
 his imaginings in the garb of reason. In more ways than this he 
 had great powers of self-deception. He was impulsive, and yet 
 he made himself believe that he was cautious and deliberate. 
 The long delay before he joined the Romish communion was 
 really a sort of veil hung before his own eyes. Any dispassionate 
 observer could see from a very early date what the result must 
 inevitably be. 
 
 While in other respects Newman must be sorrowfully pro- 
 nounced a doubtful steward of the great talents committed to 
 him, in one point he deserves unqualified praise. No English 
 of the nineteenth century surpasses Newman's exquisite prose. 
 Some other writers may have equalled (though very rarely) his 
 highest flights; but probably no other has continuously, from first 
 to last, written prose so pure, so flawless. Among contemporaries, 
 he who comes nearest to him is Froude; among writers of the 
 eighteenth century, Goldsmith. There is all the scholar's severity 
 in his choice of words and in the concision of his sentences; 
 nothing loud, nothing exaggerated, nothing importunate. Those 
 who listened to his conversation were impressed with the sense of a 
 force kept under severe restraint; and this impression is conveyed 
 also by his writings. One observer's description of the man might 
 stand almost equally well for a description of the style: "Nothing 
 more characterised Newman than his unconscious refinement. 
 It would have been impossible for him to tolerate coarse society, 
 or coarse books, or manners seriously deficient in self-respect and 
 respect for others. There was also in him a tenderness marked 
 by a smile of magical sweetness, but a sweetness that had in it
 
 THEOLOGY I 27 
 
 nothing of softness. On the contrary, there was a decided severity 
 in his face, that severity which enables a man alike to exact from 
 others, and himself to render, whatever painful service or sacrifice 
 justice may claim.... The saying, 'Out of the strong came forth 
 sweetness,' was realised in Newman more than in anyone else 
 whom I have known ^" Refinement — severity — strength — sweet- 
 ness, — all of these words are truly descriptive of the style as well 
 as of the character of Newman. One more characteristic deserves 
 specially emphatic notice, — its extraordinary range. In this respect 
 Newman surpasses both Goldsmith and Froude. In general, his 
 English flows on with such limpid simplicity that its excellence 
 escapes attention; but the finest distinction, the most elusive 
 subtlety, easily finds expression. Cold sarcasm, biting irony and 
 glowing passion are also within its scope. The note sinks and 
 rises apparently without effort; for Newman's art is perfectly con- 
 cealed. 
 
 An obvious distinction among the minor Tractarians (and, 
 compared with Newman, all the rest are minor) is that which 
 separates those who, like Newman, went over to the Romish 
 Church, from those who remained in the Anglican communion. 
 Among the former were F. W. Faber (1814-1863), best known as 
 a writer of religious verse, which is meritorious but by no means 
 great, and Frederick Oakeley, one of the historians of Trac- 
 tarianism, who tells us that, whatever the Tractarians might be 
 on the English side of the Channel, "there could be no doubt of 
 their perfect Catholicity on the other," and that they "used to 
 distinguish themselves by making extraordinarily low bows to 
 priests, and genuflecting, even in public places, to every one who 
 looked in the least like a Bishop^" To the same class belong 
 W. G. Ward (1812-1882), and H. E. Manning (1808-1892). 
 Perhaps before any of these notice ought to be taken of 
 Nicholas Patrick Wiseman (1802-1 S65), who, though not a Trac- 
 tarian, was, as the most distinguished English-speaking Roman 
 Catholic, the natural centre towards which the more advanced 
 Tractarians gravitated. Wiseman will always retain a place in 
 
 ^ Aubrey de Vere's Recollections, 278-279. 
 
 '^ Historical Notes on the Tractarian Movement, 73.
 
 128 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA \ 
 
 I 
 
 literature, if it were only for the fact that he was the original from ! 
 
 which Browning drew Bishop Blougram; and, according to Father j 
 Prout, Wiseman himself reviewed the volume in the Romanist 
 journal. The Rambler. He did it in the most good-natured fashion, 
 
 praising the "fertility of illustration and felicity of argument" of ; 
 
 Blougram. Though much of the matter of the poems, says I 
 
 the reviewer, "is extremely offensive to Catholics, yet beneath j 
 the surface there is an under-current of thought that is by no 
 
 means inconsistent with our religion ; and if Mr Browning is a I 
 
 man of will and action, and not a mere dreamer and talker, we \ 
 
 should never feel surprise at his conversion \" Wiseman was ' 
 
 wrong, but the thought was suggested by the perception of a tone : 
 
 of feeling which is really present in Browning. ' 
 
 Wiseman perhaps took from Newman's Loss and Gain the j 
 
 idea that the novel might be used as a vehicle for disseminating | 
 
 Catholic truth; and with this purpose in view he wrote Fabiola \ 
 
 (1854), a tale of the Church of the Catacombs. It won immense j 
 success, and was soon translated into all the principal and not 
 
 a few of the less important European languages. By this book ^ 
 
 Wiseman is far more widely known than by his Connection between ; 
 
 Science and Revealed Religion (1836), or by any of his theological 1 
 
 or controversial writings. But he was not a great writer. His > 
 
 style was impure and verbose; for he had spent so much of his ' 
 
 time abroad that he had got out of touch with the English j 
 
 language as well as with English life. According to Monckton \ 
 
 Milnes^ he was described by a German translator of his Hora. \ 
 
 Syriacce as a "from-an-Irish-family-descended-in-Spain-born-in- , 
 
 England-educated-in-Italy-consecrated-Syrian-Scholar"; and that ; 
 
 remarkable polysyllabic creation not inaptly indicates the pro- ; 
 
 portion of England in him. j 
 
 Wiseman is credited by Newman with a perception of what j 
 
 was coming when, in 1835, he lectured in London on The i 
 
 Principal Doctrines and Practices of tlie Catholic Church ; and | 
 
 Newman adds that he "created an impression through the , 
 
 country, shared in by ourselves, that we had for our opponents 1 
 
 1 Quoted in Fumivall's Bibliography of Browning, 54. 
 
 * Monographs, quoted in the Library of Literary Criticism. j
 
 THEOLOGY 1 29 
 
 in controversy, not only our brethren, but our hereditary foes\" 
 Wiseman's was at this time a name known throughout the Catholic 
 world ; the names of the Oxford band were only beginning to be 
 known outside Oxford itself. In the University, the reputation 
 of W. G. Ward was second only to Newman's. A brilliant 
 talker, a daring controversialist, scornful of compromise, he fixed 
 attention upon himself; and he held it by his intellect. In 
 after years he was one of the most extreme advocates of the 
 ultramontane doctrine of infallibility. Anti-rationalist as he was, 
 he might almost from one point of view be regarded as the 
 "reasoning machine" which the Utilitarians were said to be. 
 "He used," says Church, "to divide his friends, and thinking 
 people in general, into those who had facts and did not know 
 what to do with them, and those who had in perfection the 
 logical faculties, but wanted the facts to reason upon^" Church 
 adds that Ward belonged to the latter class. He afterwards used 
 these faculties to good purpose in the Essays on the Philosophy 
 of Theism (collected in 1884), in which he crossed swords with 
 Mill. But the book by which he is best known is his Ideal of 
 a Christian Church (1844), which led to his degradation from 
 the degrees of B.A. and M.A. The book is a sort of gospel 
 of Tractarianism in its utmost development; but though it had 
 great influence at the time, as a piece of literature it is poor. 
 If Ward's friend Newman was almost the best of English stylists. 
 Ward himself was not very far removed from the worst. The 
 words of Jenkyns, the Mastef of Balliol, were critically accurate: 
 "Well, Ward, your book is like yourself, fat, awkward, and un- 
 gainly ^" 
 
 Though Manning has been named as one of those Tractarians 
 who passed over to Rome, it is not strictly correct to call him a 
 Tractarian; not correct, at least, if we mean by that either a 
 contributor to Tracts for the Times, or a man closely associated 
 with the contributors. Manning did not know Ward till after the 
 latter's degradation in 1845; ^^ condemned Tract XC as being 
 casuistical ; and it was not till he had travelled on the Continent 
 
 ^ Apologia, 64. ^ Church's Oxford Movement, 207, 
 
 ^ W. G. Ward and the Oxford Movement. 
 
 w. 9
 
 130 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 in 1847-1848 that he began to doubt whether the position of the 
 High Church Anglicans could be maintained He was troubled, 
 because he found it always difficult and sometimes impossible to 
 make foreigners understand why men holding such views should 
 not be Roman Catholics. The Gorham controversy, turning as 
 it did upon the question of baptismal regeneration, in which 
 Manning had always shown a special interest, further weakened 
 his shaken faith; and in 185 1 he followed Newman into the 
 Romish Church. 
 
 Manning, who was, after Newman, the greatest of those who 
 went over to Rome, presents a strong contrast to the latter ; and 
 it is notorious that there was little love lost between the two 
 Cardinals. Newman was the typical student and scholar, almost 
 the recluse, — "nunquam minus solus quam cum solus," as 
 Copleston finely said of him. Manning was essentially the man 
 of affairs. His delight was in practical and administrative work. 
 He played an important part in the CEcumenical Council of 1870, 
 the history of which he has told in the True Story of the Vatican 
 Council (1877); and he threw himself zealously into such social 
 questions as the great London dock strike of 18S9. He had 
 not the ambition, and probably he had not the power, to excel in 
 literature. 
 
 Along with the other class — the class of those who remained 
 content with the via media although its great engineer himself 
 deserted it — may, for the sake of convenience, be included one 
 or two who, though more or less in sympathy with the fundamental 
 ideas, could not be described as members of the Tractarian party. 
 One of these was Walter Farquhar Hook (1798-187 5), who became 
 Dean of Chichester. Hook was one of the pioneers of " High " 
 views ; but he shrank from extremes, and though from his vicarage 
 of Leeds he looked upon the Tracts with sympathetic interest, 
 their later developments thoroughly frightened him. There is a 
 comic element in a correspondence between him and Pusey, — 
 Hook, on the eve of Newman's secession, suggesting to Pusey 
 that " We ought to put forward the Protestant view ot our Church 
 in the strongest way'." It was a time of rapid movement, and 
 
 1 Life 0/ Pusey, ii. +88.
 
 THEOLOGY 
 
 131 
 
 he who had been yesterday in the van was in danger of finding 
 himself to-morrow a mere unnoticed fragment of the main body. 
 
 Hook's only book of note is the bulky Lives of the Archbishops 
 of Canterbury (1860-1876), which carries the narrative down to 
 Archbishop Juxon. It is not a great work. The plan promised 
 neither the advantages of great history nor of good biography. 
 For the highest kind of biography, personal acquaintance with 
 the subject of the biography is indispensable ; and great history 
 demands a kind of unity. On one condition only could the Lives 
 of the Archbishops have been raised into a great history of the 
 Church in England. That condition was that all the Archbishops 
 must have been really as well as officially the heads and centres 
 of Church life in their time. In point of fact, they were not. 
 Some of the Archbishops of Canterbury were great men ; others 
 were mediocrities. The interest, therefore, of Hook's work is inter- 
 mittent ; it is a collection of fragments. The same inherent vice 
 of plan mars Lord Campbell's Lives of the Lord Chancellors 
 (1845-1869), which afforded a precedent to Hook. 
 
 Samuel Wilberforce (1805- 1873), the celebrated Bishop of 
 Oxford, stood at a greater distance from the movement than 
 Hook, and, though sympathetic, was from the first cautious and 
 reserved in his attitude towards it. His High Churchmanship 
 was derived, not from the Tractarians, but rather from the older 
 Anglican tradition. The Clapham associations of his birth and 
 early life tended to moderation; and the strongly practical and 
 statesmanlike cast of his mind made him suspicious of speculative 
 conclusions when they threatened to create practical difficulties. 
 Long before Tract XC, therefore, he began to show his dis- 
 approbation of much of the work that the Tractarians were doing. 
 Tract LXVLL'm particular, dealing with sin after baptism, incurred 
 his disapproval. Half of his University Sermons (1839) ^^^^^ ^^ 
 effect an examination of its doctrine ; and he wrote to his brother 
 Robert in strong terms about the defence afterwards issued by 
 Pusey, the author of the tract, denouncing part of the argument 
 as "special pleading and quibbling, of which I could not have 
 believed Pusey capable^" 
 
 '^ Ashwell's Life of Wilberforce, i. 155. 
 
 9-2
 
 132 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 It was as an administrator, as a preacher and orator, and as 
 a brilliant conversationist, that Wilberforce most impressed men. 
 In the unanimous opinion of his contemporaries, very few equalled 
 and scarcely any surpassed him in these respects. So deep is the 
 mark he has left by his practical work that he has been called 
 "the remodeller of the episcopate"; and there remain sufficient 
 relics of his ready and witty conversation to prove that he only 
 needed a Boswell to be assured of a rank among talkers second 
 only, in his generation, to that of Carlyle. His published sermons 
 scarcely sustain his reputation. They, and especially those preached 
 after he became bishop, were the productions of an extremely busy 
 man who was often forced to rely upon his readiness to supply the 
 lack of preparation. Nevertheless, his position even in literature 
 is a respectable one. The Life of William Wilberforce (1838), 
 which he wrote in conjunction with his brother, is a bright and 
 readable biography. He was one of the most successful of the 
 ecclesiastical story-writers, and his allegorical tale, Agathos (1839), 
 as well as its successor. Rocky Island (1840), won a very wide 
 popularity. He was, however, most conspicuous as a writer of 
 articles in the Quarterly Review on topics of controversy. These 
 were collected and republished in 1874; but they are not among 
 the small number of such collections which have become a 
 permanent possession of literature. Wilberforce was too often 
 on the side which was popular in clerical circles at the time, and 
 which has not won the suffrage of later years. He was the author 
 of a celebrated review of Darwin's Origin of Species, to which 
 reference is made elsewhere; and in an article on Essays and 
 Reviews he championed another " lost cause." 
 
 Of the actual contributors to Tracts for the Times, the only 
 ones calling for notice, besides Newman and Keble and Hurrell 
 Froude, were Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-18S2) and Isaac 
 Williams^ of whom the last has won a reputation, such as it is, 
 chiefly in poetry. Pusey was the chief man of the section of 
 the Tractarians who remained in the English, as decidedly as 
 Newman was the chief of those who seceded to the Romish 
 Church. He was a man of profound learning, which was by no 
 means confined, as the learning of theologians in that age too fre-
 
 THEOLOGY 1 33 
 
 quently was, to professional and quasi-professional subjects. His 
 familiarity with the German language and with German philosophy 
 has been already mentioned. In his hands was the key which to 
 so many others of that time opened the door of intellectual 
 salvation, and showed a way as remote from the bare negation 
 of the spiritual, on the one hand, as it was from Catholicism 
 on the other. The reason why the result in Pusey's case was 
 so different is probably to be found in a certain confusion of 
 mind lying behind all his learning, certainly unremoved by it, 
 possibly increased by its very greatness. George Eliot's caustic 
 description of Casaubon contains a truth which may be generalised, 
 — a truth vigorously expressed in the great Duke of Wellington's 
 regret that a certain peer's education had been " so far too much 
 for his abilities." Casaubon was too highly educated for his in- 
 tellect; he had accumulated knowledge until he had lost the 
 power to use it, or even to understand it He could not see the 
 wood for the trees. Even so it was with Pusey, to whom above 
 all men of the nineteenth century the moral of Casaubon is appli- 
 cable. His books are, in a literary sense, contemptible, the style 
 crude, ungainly and confused. His judgment was far inferior to 
 his knowledge. He had no penetration ; he seemed to be on the 
 verge of the discovery of great truths ; he might even be said 
 to have them in his hand; and he never suspected the fact. 
 "He never knew when he burned V said Newman of him, 
 alluding to the children's game in which the blindfolded searcher 
 is guided by the words, "warm," "hot," "you burn." To this 
 obtuseness, if it may be called so without offence, was added 
 another cause, an obstinate prepossession in favour of authority. 
 He objected to the German theologians that their theories "pull 
 to pieces what has been received for thousands of years," as if 
 the antiquity of a belief were a sufficient ground for accepting it. 
 Under the influence of this obstinate prepossession, the mind of 
 Pusey was hermetically sealed against German philosophy. He 
 knew it, and yet he knew it not. Where it began to diverge 
 from the things which had been received for thousands of years, 
 there he ceased to regard it as possibly true. Hence it came that, 
 ^ A. de Vere's Recollections, ill.
 
 134 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 notTvathstanding all his learning, Pusey was all his life a drag upon 
 the wheel of progress. He was always to be found among the 
 reactionaries, his language was often violent, and sometimes he 
 stooped to actions which many of his friends would wish to be 
 forgotten. He was one of those who opposed the proper endow- 
 ment of the chair of Greek at Oxford, because the holder of the 
 chair was Jowett, with whose opinions Pusey was, of course, in 
 bitter antagonism ; and he denounced in no measured terms the 
 appointment of Temple to the bishopric of Exeter, declaring it to 
 be "the most frightful enormity that has ever been perpetrated 
 by a Prime Minister^," and severing himself from Gladstone, who 
 was the minister responsible for this " enormity." 
 
 There is distinctly traceable in Pusey's work a gradual deteriora- 
 tion. His Historical Enquiry into the Causes of the Rationalist 
 Character of Gertnan Theology (1828-1830) is fair-minded as well 
 as learned ; and it brought upon Pusey an amount of abuse for 
 heterodoxy which ought to have taught him sympathy with others. 
 Ten years later, as we have seen, a man so well disposed to High 
 Church principles as Wilberforce denounces his "special pleading 
 and quibbling"; and six years later still, while he believes Pusey 
 to be "a very holy man," he thinks "his last letter about Newman 
 ...deeply painful, utterly sophistical and false '^." The later rela- 
 tions between Wilberforce and Pusey were not always very friendly, 
 and there may be some exaggeration in this language; but the 
 impartial critic will discern a diminution of candour in the progress 
 from the work on German rationalism to the tract on Sin after 
 Baptism, the teaching on the Eucharist and on Penitence, and 
 the critical principles (or the absence of them) in such writings 
 as the Commentary on Daniel. The Nemesis of an essentially 
 sophistical position overtook Pusey, as it overtook Newman. It 
 is not easy to reconcile the refusal "to renounce any doctrine 
 formally decreed by the Roman Church*," with the candid 
 acceptance of Articles which declare a certain Romish doctrine 
 to be " a fond thing vainly invented," and which further, without 
 any hint of a distinction between theory and practice, declare 
 
 * Life of Stanley, ii. 371. * Life of Wilberforce, i. 311. 
 
 * Life of Pusey, iii. 43.
 
 THEOLOGY 1 35 
 
 certain other parts of the system to be " blasphemous fables and 
 dangerous deceits." No mind can go on arguing that " Black's 
 not so black, — nor white so very white," without suffering for it. 
 The boundary-line between truth and falsehood becomes blurred : 
 Pusey was personally quite honest in intention ; but long habit 
 of making the worse appear the better reason, acting upon an 
 intellect inherently disinclined to probe questions to the bottom, 
 rendered him a most unsafe guide. 
 
 Among lesser figures, the two brothers Mozley deserve notice. 
 The elder, Thomas (1S06-1893), is most likely to be remembered 
 as the author of one of the most spirited and readable accounts 
 of the Oxford Movement, the Reminiscences of Oriel (1882). 
 Bright and pleasantly written as is Mozley's book, valuable as it 
 is in substance, because it gives an account of the movement from 
 the inside, and yet from another standpoint than Newman's, it has 
 not the perennial charm of that great spiritual autobiography, the 
 Apologia ; and nothing else left by its author rivals it in interest. 
 The younger brother, James Bowling Mozley^ (1813-1878), less 
 brilliant, but more profound, did work more solid, though less 
 likely to be remembered. He was among those who as time went 
 on became alienated from the extreme doctrines of the Tractarians. 
 He accepted the Gorham judgment with satisfaction, and traversed 
 the position of the Ritualists as to baptism in three publications. 
 The Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination (1855), The Primitive 
 Doctrine of Baptismal Regeneratim (1856), and A Review of the 
 Baptismal Controversy (1862). His best-known work, however, 
 is the volume of the Eampton Lectures On Miracles (1865), in 
 which he sets himself to prove the credibility of miracles, but 
 unfortunately leaves almost untouched that which was more and 
 more becoming the question of the men of science when they 
 thought of the theme at all, — viz.. Are they proved? He thus 
 leaves unimpugned the criticisms of such a man as Huxley, who 
 abandons altogether the a priori argument against miracles, and 
 proceeds to examine the evidence for and against any alleged 
 miracle. 
 
 Last among the personal disciples of Newman may be 
 mentioned Richard William Church (1815-1889); and he, the
 
 136 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 youngest of the band, is also the one least distant from Newman 
 in excellence as a writer, and in charm as a man. His volume, 
 The Oxford Movejucnt, published posthumously in 1891, is the 
 best succinct account which we possess, — better as a history than 
 even the Apologia; for while the latter simply professes to trace the 
 development of Newman's own mind, Church's book is singularly 
 impersonal. It has been remarked that he is perhaps the only 
 writer who has ever written a history of events in which he played 
 a prominent part, and yet never mentioned his own name. Cer- 
 tainly Church showed modesty, and he had in a high degree the 
 power of self-effacement. But perhaps this, which was said in his 
 praise, was really his chief defect. After all, the business of a 
 historian is to tell the truth ; and it is hard to see how that 
 can be satisfactorily done without giving to every actor his due 
 prominence. Probably we should do well to go back sometimes 
 from the Christian, or at least the popular, conception of humility, 
 to the Aristotelian conception of highmindedness. There could 
 be no greater contrast than that which exists, on this point, between 
 Church's book and an incomparably greater book, Knox's History 
 of the Refort7iation. And yet the egotism of the latter is one of its 
 greatest charms, and perhaps not the least element in its value. 
 
 Of all the men of the Tractarian party. Church was the most 
 Catholic, in a sense which they rarely gave to the word. He is 
 remarkably comprehensive, large and generous in his judgment of 
 men and things outside the range of his special sympathies. This 
 characteristic is seen in his references to contemporaries, where it is 
 most difficult to show such a virtue. An opponent is sure to have 
 fair treatment at the hands of Church ; there is no shibboleth to 
 be pronounced in order to win his sympathy. In this respect he 
 differs from the majority even of the best men on both sides 
 of the heated controversy in which he took part, and his only 
 rival in generosity of judgment is Stanley. This is the secret 
 of the excellence of his literary monographs. Whoever may be 
 his subject — St Anselm (1870), Dante (1879), Spenser (1879) ^r 
 Bacon (1884), — what Church has to say is worthy of the most 
 careful attention. The very choice of these men indicates 
 catholicity of taste; the sympathetic treatment of them all demon-
 
 THEOLOGY 1 37 
 
 strates it. The severe Dante, the rich and sensuous Spenscfj the 
 saintly Anselm, the not too saintly Bacon, all receive equal justice 
 at his hands. Yet he is not guilty of indiscriminate laudation. 
 In his judgment of Bacon, for example, he is as far removed from 
 the hero-worship of Spedding as he is from the excessive severity 
 of Macaulay. 
 
 It has sometimes been said that the secession of Newman 
 stopped the Oxford Movement; but the statement requires ex- 
 planation and limitation. The secession was a blow to the 
 movement in Oxford itself, but its progress in the country at 
 large was not stopped. On the contrary, the progress was prob- 
 ably greater and more rapid after, than before 1845. Doctrines 
 of confession and absolution, of the " sacrifice " of the Eucharist, 
 and all the rest of the sacerdotal system, have gone on propagating 
 themselves rapidly, and they are far more widespread now than 
 they were sixty years ago. But it is true that in Oxford itself the 
 effect of the secession was like that of an earthquake : men were 
 stunned; they hardly knew whether they were injured or un- 
 injured, alive or dead. As they recovered their senses, each had 
 to bethink himself of the ground on which he stood. A few 
 followed Newman; more were driven backwards to the position 
 of the moderate High Church; yet others became bolder in 
 rationalism than their predecessors had ventured to be. Only a 
 very few, like Pusey, were hardly influenced in their opinions at 
 all. But the seed which had been sown, whether for good or for 
 evil, was still in the ground; and in due season it bore fruit 
 again, — a fruit of somewhat different flavour from that of the 
 Newmanite school. It must suffice to take one example, that of 
 Henry Parry Liddon (1829-1890). 
 
 Mark Pattison, in his Memoirs, remarks on the decline in the 
 interest in knowledge in Oxford after the rise of Tractarianism. 
 This remark seems, at first sight, to be contradicted by the facts. 
 Tractarianism led to a great outburst of speculation, to a ransacking 
 of the Fathers, to an investigation of the early history of the 
 Church, such as had been undreamed of by the old school of 
 contented orthodoxy. It was primarily a critical movement. But, 
 in the first place, the criticism was like a boxing-match with gloves
 
 138 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 on. It was never pushed home. So long as its results tended 
 to support "catholic" doctrine, they were accepted; when they 
 threatened it, the criticism was stopped. Pusey did not answer 
 German rationalism : he simply pointed out that the ground was 
 forbidden ground, that the business of criticism was to agree with, 
 and by no means to dissent from, "what has been received for 
 thousands of years." Any real pursuit of knowledge under such 
 conditions is impossible. Science is a jealous mistress ; she will 
 admit no rival ; her votary must swear 
 
 "To follow knowledge like a sinking star, 
 Beyond the utmost bound of human thought." 
 
 No such vow was possible to the Tractarians ; and therefore, 
 though the seed sown was Knowledge, the crop reaped was 
 Ignorance. 
 
 It may seem shocking to name, as an illustration of this war- 
 fare against knowledge, a man of such attractive personality, of so 
 great gifts and so great attainments, as Liddon ; and yet that 
 is just the lesson of his life and work. He was the most eloquent 
 English preacher of his day, and for twenty years he made the 
 pulpit of St Paul's a force to be reckoned with. '\^%enever there 
 was need, his powerful voice was raised for justice and for mercy. 
 His mind was highly cultivated ; his knowledge, in his own field, 
 was extensive. But it is just because he was the consummate 
 flower of his party, that he best illustrates the inherent antipathy 
 between Tractarianism and science, in the widest sense of the 
 word. Liddon seems to have had no searchings of heart, no 
 hesitation as to what he should believe or not believe. He at 
 once became a follower of Pusey, and he remained a follower 
 all his life. The point of interest about him is that his mind 
 seems, properly, to have no history at all. Pusey, as we have 
 seen, shrinks back from the comparative liberalism of his youth ; 
 Newman finds that there is no room for him within the bounds of 
 Anglicanism ; Mark Pattison recoils from the verge of the gulf 
 which swallowed Newman, and becomes a thoroughgoing liberal. 
 Liddon passes through no such process. A development of thought 
 which is almost unparalleled takes place in his day ; but it moves 
 him not at all. The whole criticism of the Bible, from the points
 
 THEOLOGY 1 39 
 
 of view of geology, of astronomy and of biology, leaves him un- 
 affected. He is indifferent to what is called the "higher criticism," 
 German idealism rises and flourishes in Oxford; and his only 
 feeling for it is a feeling of dislike. He does not take the trouble 
 to understand it. 
 
 This singular passivity is all the more remarkable because it is 
 not at all characteristic of the men of the High Church party still 
 younger than Liddon. In the career of the great preacher there 
 is nothing more instructive than his attitude to Lux Mundi. He 
 loathed the doctrine of inspiration there taught, because he felt it 
 to be a manifestation of a new critical movement. In it, the 
 German philosophy, which Liddon had learned from Pusey to 
 dread and to hate, is translated into terms of theology, — much as 
 Bottom was " translated " ; it is reconciled with High Churchism 
 as successfully as Genesis has been reconciled with science. 
 Liddon's instinct was to leave things alone. Many labour to 
 introduce new ideas; he rather strove to avoid them. He was 
 from first to last opposed to putting the new wine of modern 
 thought into the old bottles of the creeds and formuL-e of the 
 Church. And from his own point of view, as an Anglo-Catholic, 
 who shall say that he was wrong ? Perhaps the process which he 
 set his face against may lead to strange results. 
 
 This feature of Liddon's work renders his writings disap- 
 pointing. In them, there is no thought in the making. The 
 popularity of the Bampton Lectures on the Divinity of Jesus (1867) 
 was due, in the first place to their eloquence, and in the second 
 place to the very fact that they were destitute of originality. His 
 inordinately long Life of Pusey (1893-1894) shows that he could 
 not condense ; and this fault is not redeemed in the book, as it 
 was in the author's sermons, by charm of voice and manner. 
 
 No other recent theologians have produced anything like as 
 great an effect upon general life, and consequently upon literature, 
 as the men of the Oxford Movement; but, though their work 
 merely touches the skirts of literature, the great Cambridge trio, 
 Westcott, Lightfoot and Hort^, cannot be passed over in silence. 
 
 ^ Brooke Foss Westcott (iS^s-ipoi); Joseph Barber Lightfoot (1828-1889); 
 Fenton John Anthony ilort (1628-1892).
 
 140 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 In scholarship they were the profoundest of their time in England, 
 and they almost alone were fit to measure swords with the critics 
 of Germany, the greatest of whom spoke of them with respect. 
 They were remarkable not only in themselves, but in their alliance. 
 Two of them, Westcott and Lightfoot, were pupils of the same 
 school,— King Edward's, Birmingham, — all three were members 
 and became Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; from 1872 
 to 1879 they were all teaching together at Cambridge; and for 
 the last year of that period they were all professors of divinity 
 there. The intimacy of the alliance was lessened, though the 
 friendship was in no way impaired, when Lightfoot in 1889 
 accepted the bishopric of Durham. This close intercourse of 
 minds essentially in harmony was beneficial to all ; and especially 
 to Westcott and Hort, whose joint work in the critical revision 
 of the text of the New Testament, originally undertaken when 
 they were resident apart, was much promoted by the intimacy 
 of their intercourse at Cambridge. It was in this department 
 probably that the work of the three friends was most valuable. 
 They were not highly gifted for philosophical speculation, nor 
 were they great on the literary side. Westcott at least had 
 singular difficulty in expressing himself clearly; and the value 
 of his judgment in things literary may be gauged by his extra- 
 ordinary pronouncement that " a verse of Keble is worth volumes 
 of Tennyson." But all had in a remarkable degree the tempera- 
 ment of the scholar. The work which they did was perhaps that 
 which most demanded to be done. Both on the side of orthodoxy 
 and on that of scepticism, there had been abundance of specula- 
 tion : it was time to take account of what was accurately known, 
 or could be discovered, with regard to the subjects in dispute. 
 For this end, no one did more than the three Cambridge men; 
 but for that very reason their work is in the main highly technical 
 and hardly belongs to literature.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Under the conditions which prevail in England, philosophy 
 is less subject to preconceptions than theology. Whatever may 
 be the value, or even the imperative necessity of creeds, their very 
 existence must to some extent hamper freedom of thought : where, 
 as in England, the accredited teachers of the subject in the great 
 Universities were until quite recently invariably men who had 
 accepted a whole system, their fettering power cannot fail to be 
 exceedingly great, — the simple fact that " free thought " is a term 
 of reproach, and a "free thinker" a person much more to be 
 avoided than a mere drunkard or liar, sufficiently indicates how 
 great. There are, fortunately, no "articles" of philosophy; but 
 of course philosophy, like all forms of thought, is modified by its 
 historical setting; and it is no less necessary in the case of philo- 
 sophy than in the case of poetry, to get a clear conception of 
 the state of things about the close of the first quarter of the 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 Ever since the publication of Hume's Treatise of Human 
 Nature, the contribution of Scotland to philosophic thought has 
 been far greater than her population or her general culture would 
 justify anyone in expecting. At times it has rivalled, and perhaps 
 even surpassed, that of England. For some generations before 
 the opening of the nineteenth century, the study of philosophy 
 had been a tradition in the Scottish Universities ; indeed, it had 
 been so from their very foundation ; but in earlier days philosophy
 
 142 THE LiTiiRATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 was rather the handmaid of theolog)' than a spirit of free and un- 
 trammelled investigation of the fundamental laws of the universe. 
 It is, therefore, necessary to ask what was the condition of philo- 
 sophic thought in Scotland in the early part of the nineteenth 
 century. 
 
 With the exception of Kant, the two most original thinkers of 
 the latter half of the eighteenth century were the Scotsmen, 
 David Hume and Adam Smith. Their death left a blank which 
 was never filled; and the development of what is called the Scottish 
 philosophy was on the line of opposition to Hume, not of agree- 
 ment with him or development from him. James Beattie and 
 Thomas Reid, both professors of the University of Aberdeen \ 
 undertook the defence of orthodoxy against the assaults of the 
 sceptic. Beattie's book was just good enough to win the praise 
 of that sturdy bundle of prejudices, Samuel Johnson ; but it was 
 not good enough to be remembered. Reid, on the other hand, 
 founded a school, and is still well known as the father of the 
 Scottish philosophy. His disciple, Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), 
 was the chief of this school in the first quarter of the nineteenth 
 century. He had small power of original speculation, and added 
 little or nothing to the principles of Reid ; but his eloquence and 
 the moral elevation of his character made him a force not in 
 Scotland only, but throughout the English-speaking world. He 
 would have a claim to remembrance if it were only for the sake 
 of the great men whom he influenced. Among his pupils who 
 afterwards won distinction in philosophy were Thomas Brown, 
 Sir James Mackintosh and James Mill. The founders of the 
 Edinburgh Review, Sydney Smith, Jeffrey, Brougham and Horner, 
 also owed much to his teaching; and the greatest of all his 
 pupils was Walter Scott. Most of the Senators of the College of 
 Justice for a generation also passed through his hands. It is a 
 convincing testimony to the charm of Stewart that with scarcely 
 an exception they speak in the warmest terms of his teaching 
 and influence. Scott writes that the "striking and impressive 
 eloquence " of Stewart " riveted the attention even of the most 
 
 ^ Reid migrated in 1764 to Glasgow, where he succeeded Adam Smith in 
 the chair of moral philosophy.
 
 PHILOSOPHY 143 
 
 volatile student'." Lord Cockburn declares that his excellence as 
 a lecturer was "so great that it is a luxury to recall it'"; and he 
 quotes with approval the saying of Mackintosh that " the peculiar 
 glory of Stewart's eloquence consisted in its having ' breathed the 
 love of virtue into whole generations of pupils*.' " Cockburn went 
 so far as to say that there was eloquence in Stewart's very spitting 
 (he was asthmatic). "Then," said the philosopher, to whom the 
 saying was repeated, " I am glad there was at least one thing in 
 which I had no competitor^" 
 
 Notwithstanding the charm of style and the personal attractive- 
 ness of Stewart, Scottish philosophy in his day was in its decline. 
 As has been already said, he added nothing to the substance 
 of Reid; and death rapidly swept away those who might have 
 supplied his deficiencies. Thomas Brown (1778-1820), who was 
 a poet as well as a philosopher, died before his teacher, to whom 
 he had acted as colleague from 1810 to 1820, when Stewart 
 resigned. His speculative gifts were superior to those of Stewart, 
 and his system, a kind of amalgam of Hume with Reid, is more 
 original; but the great fame and the wide popularity of his 
 Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect (1818) have long 
 been forgotten. Sir James Mackintosh (1765- 183 2) was a man 
 of whom, if he had died young, it would have been said with 
 confidence that he had the capacity to do great work either in 
 philosophy or in history. He attained the age of sixty-seven, and 
 the work he actually accomplished must be admitted to be a little 
 disappointing. No fresh philosophical conception is due to him ; 
 though he had a great reputation fbr learning, his knowledge both 
 of Greek and of German philosophy was superficial ; and his work 
 fares ill under the scrutiny of James Mill. The critic survived the 
 subject of his criticism only four years; and with his death the 
 last great Scot of philosophic temperament seemed to have gone. 
 The clearance was as complete as that of the poets in the third 
 and fourth decades of the century. 
 
 The academical status of philosophy had fallen deplorably. 
 
 ^ Lockbart's Life of Scott , I. chap. i. ^ Memorials of his Time, 19. 
 
 "* Life of Jeffrey, 49. * Memorials of his Time, 21.
 
 144 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Professor Alexander Campbell Fraser declares that "in 1836 
 philosophy was at a lower ebb in Scotland than at any time since 
 the advent of Francis Hutcheson from Ireland to Glasgow, rather 
 more than a century before^"; and Professor Fraser speaks from 
 personal experience of two of the Scottish Universities. At 
 Glasgow indeed there was Mylne, whom he regards as " probably 
 the most independent thinker in the Scottish philosophical pro- 
 fessoriate of that time^" — a man who wrote no books but who 
 could evidently form the minds of his pupils. But in Edinburgh, 
 he found in the chair of logic David Ritchie, who treated the 
 subject "more as an appendage to his ministerial charge than as 
 the professor's supreme interest^" It is true that contempo- 
 raneously with Ritchie's tenure of the chair of logic, the brilliant 
 John Wilson held that of moral philosophy ; but, poet and man 
 of genius though Wilson was, he was not a philosopher. Indeed, 
 the fact that on the death of Brown he was elected to the chair 
 of moral philosophy in preference to Hamilton, is itself a proof 
 that the serious study of philosophy had ceased. 
 
 If Professor Fraser is right in fixing upon 1836 as the year in 
 which philosophy in Scotland had sunk lowest, this is a case in 
 which the darkest hour was just before the dawn ; for in 1836 
 Sir William Hamilton (i 788-1856) was appointed professor of 
 logic and metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh, and for 
 the remaining twenty years of his life he was generally regarded 
 as the foremost man in British philosophy. Hamilton had the 
 advantage of the double training of a Scottish University and of 
 an English one. Upon the m'etaphysical stock of the former he 
 grafted the scholarly culture of Oxford, but not perhaps her 
 scholarly grace ; for his learning sat somewhat heavily upon him. 
 Trained for the bar, he acquired sufficient legal skill to establish 
 his own title to a baronetcy ; but his true interest was always in 
 philosophy. He was an associate of that group of young men of 
 literary tastes who then abounded in Edinburgh. He shared 
 their full-blooded vitahty, took part in the wild fun of the Chaldee 
 MS.y is credited with the composition of one verse of it, and is 
 
 ^ Biographia Philosophica, 46. 
 2 ibid. 42. " ibid. 46.
 
 PHILOSOPHY 145 
 
 said to have fallen off his chair with laughter at his own jest. A 
 mysterious estrangement between him and Lockhart was the cause 
 of Hfe-long pain to both. 
 
 Hamilton had already reached middle age when he was 
 appointed professor of logic and metaphysics. For years he 
 had enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most learned 
 men in Britain, — perhaps the most learned of all. He had 
 written little, but he had read enormously. Scarcely any subject 
 came amiss to him; no "authority" was too mean to be consulted. 
 At Oxford he studied witchcraft: " He seriously considers it as worth 
 his while," says Lockhart, "to pore over Wierus and Bodinus, and 
 all the believers in witchcraft from St Augustine downwards \" 
 He was familiar with the German revival of animal magnetism 
 when Carlyle knew him in 1824 or 1825, long before the know- 
 ledge of it had spread to England^. Notwithstanding all this mass 
 of learning, at forty-eight Hamilton was still reading with the 
 voracious appetite of a man who is mastered by the instinct for 
 accumulating knowledge. In the interval between his appoint- 
 ment and the beginning of his duties, the reading went on at an 
 accelerated pace. The opening of the session found him with 
 little or nothing written, and the lectures afterwards so celebrated 
 were, his biographer says, the product of the night's toil before the 
 morning on which each was delivered. Their history explains 
 some of the characteristics which strike the reader, but it hardly 
 excuses Hamilton's failure to remedy their defects in subsequent 
 years. The substance of thought is beaten out very thin, and the 
 excessive use of quotation seriously tells against Hamilton's claim 
 to originality. 
 
 During the twenty years of his professoriate Hamilton added 
 little to the substance of his lectures as they were originally 
 delivered. Neither did he write very much. An elaborate edi- 
 tion, with notes, of the works of Thomas Reid; an edition, less 
 important, of the works of Dugald Stewart; and a volume of 
 Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, reprinted (1852) from 
 periodicals, were the sole important publications of Hamilton's 
 life. His influence was mainly based upon the lecture room, and 
 
 ^ Lang's Lockhart y i. 57. =* Veitch's Life of Hamilton. 
 
 W, 10
 
 146 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 it is by the Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, published after his 
 death (185 9-1 861), that he is still best known. 
 
 The immense influence which, for about a generation, Hamilton 
 exercised over philosophic thought, was mainly due to two causes. 
 First and greatest was the personal magnetism of the man, which 
 was greatly increased by his position in the chair of metaphysics 
 in the metropolitan University of Scotland. Nearly all the ablest 
 men who passed through that University during Hamilton's tenure 
 of office bore his stamp through life. Pupils of speculative pro- 
 clivities, like Mansel and Veitch, the editors of the Lectures, were 
 often moulded in Hamilton's own image, and followed him with a 
 fidelity only too unquestioning. But they who largely disagree 
 with Hamilton bear testimony no less emphatic to his personal 
 attractiveness and his mental power. " I owe more to Hamilton," 
 says the Berkeleian Professor Fraser, "than to any other intel- 
 lectual influenced" "Morally and intellectually," says J. F. Ferrier, 
 "Sir William Hamilton was among the greatest of the great. A 
 simpler and a grander nature never arose out of darkness into 
 human life; a truer and a manlier character God never made*." 
 And he who is thus warm in his praise adds that he knew Hamilton 
 "better than any other man ever did." The sway of Hamilton 
 was not, however, confined to men of philosophic tastes. A 
 Scottish professor of philosophy holds a position of almost match- 
 less power, if he only knows how to use it. Year after year scores 
 of young men, on the whole the elite of the country, pass under 
 his influence, — nearly all more or less imbued with the national 
 taste for speculation, nearly all disposed to regard the professor as 
 an oracle. They become in after life, each in his own little sphere, 
 the leaders of the nation. The advocate at the bar, the village 
 minister, doctor, lawyer, schoolmaster, thus receive their education; 
 and through them the influence of one powerful mind may filter 
 down to hundreds and thousands who never heard so much as 
 the name of the teacher. Ever since the revival of the Scottish 
 Universities in the eighteenth century, there have been a few such 
 men; and Hamilton was one of the greatest of them. He has left 
 
 * Biographia Philosophica, 58. 
 
 « Fenier's Fhilosojihical IVork:, i. 555.
 
 PHILOSOPHY 147 
 
 no written work half as valuable as that which was inscribed on 
 the lives and characters of his pupils, and through them on the 
 nation. 
 
 The second source of Hamilton's influence (second in im- 
 portance, though first in time) was his learning. Years before he 
 had written anything of note, his name was known not in Britain 
 only, but in Germany as well, as that of one of the most learned 
 of living men in classics and philosophy. Since Flamilton's death, 
 doubts have been raised about the depth and accuracy of his 
 learning. But the question is not important ; for it is plain that, 
 though he had read enormously, he had not always read wisely ; 
 and his permanent fame is more likely to be damaged than 
 increased by his learning. Probably no Englishman at that time 
 had made so wide a study of German philosophy; but unfortunately 
 it was not a fruitful study. For comprehension of the mind of 
 Germany, Hamilton is not to be compared either with Coleridge 
 or with Carlyle. It is strange that, though Hamilton was an 
 admirable German scholar, he seems to have been content to 
 take his knowledge of Kant largely at second-hand ; but the fact 
 goes far to explain his blindness to the real significance of the 
 critical philosophy. He saw that it was important, and he turned 
 the attention of others to it ; but the man who wrote as he did 
 about the distinction between Reason and Understanding had not 
 penetrated deeply into it. "Why distinguish Reason {Vernun/t)" 
 he asks, " from Understanding ( Verstajid), simply on the ground 
 that the former is conversant about, or rather tends towards, the 
 Unconditioned; when it is sufficiently apparent, that the Uncon- 
 ditioned is conceived only as the negation of the Conditioned, 
 and also that the conception of contradictories is one? In the 
 Kantian philosophy both faculties perform the same function, 
 both seek the one in the many; the Idea {Idee) is only the 
 Concept {Begriff) sublimated into the inconceivable ; Reason 
 only the Understanding which has 'overleaped itself ^"' All 
 his reading of the Germans never revealed to Hamilton that the 
 significance of Kant lay in his going back to principles prior to 
 Reid, prior to Hume, prior to Locke. His attempt to weld the 
 * Discussions on Philosophy y 16-17, 
 
 10—2
 
 148 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 incompatibles, Scottish and German philosophy, entangled him in 
 a hopeless maze. 
 
 " For thirty years past, I have been of opinion that the dedica- 
 tion of his powers to the service of Dr Reid was a perversion of 
 his genius, that this was the one mistake of his career, and that 
 he would have done far better if he had built entirely on his own 
 foundation^" So wrote Ferrier shortly after Hamilton's death, 
 and we can only repeat his words now. Led astray, perhaps, by 
 a mistaken patriotism, and an equally mistaken conception of 
 orthodoxy, Hamilton spent his life in a vain attempt to establish 
 the principles of the philosophy of common sense. That philo- 
 sophy was in its inception an attempt to buttress faith against the 
 sceptic battery of Hume, and that motive influenced nearly every 
 member of the school from Reid himself down to Mansel. Un- 
 fortunately, the essence of the attempt lay, not in an answer to 
 Hume, but in the assertion that no answer was needed. To 
 Hume's argument that we have no guarantee of any real nexus 
 between cause and effect, but only an experience of invariable 
 sequence, Reid in effect replies that the nexus is real, because he 
 and all plain men feel it to be so. No amount of rarefying of 
 common sense changes the essence of the argument, or meets the 
 objection that the same argument supports the belief that the sun 
 goes round the earth. Unquestionably our senses tell us so, and 
 no unsophisticated man ever thought otherwise. 
 
 This fundamental mistake vitiates all Hamilton's philosophy, 
 and makes his influence, both in logic and in metaphysics, some- 
 what unwholesome. His only important contribution to logical 
 doctrine (supposing the question of priority to be settled in his 
 favour) was the theory of the quantified predicate ; and its eftect 
 was to force logic still farther along the barren path of formalism, 
 and to widen the breach between logical theory and the facts of 
 human thought. The full advantages (such as they were) which 
 Hamilton claimed for quantification could be secured only at the 
 price of setting up propositional forms which no human being 
 ever used in practice ; and quantification further strengthened the 
 tendency among logicians, already far too strong, to regard the 
 1 Ferrier's Fhilosophical Works, i. 555.
 
 PHILOSOPPIY 149 
 
 predicate equally with the subject as a class notion, ignoring the 
 fact that in the immense majority of significant judgments it is an 
 attribute. Even the person who uses the familiar example, Man 
 is mortal, seldom concerns himself with the question whether man 
 is all mortal or only some mortal ; and it is safe to assume that 
 Adam did not ask it when the death of Abel brought the fact of 
 human mortality home to him. Neither did the discoverer of the 
 X-rays, or of argon, or of radium, pause before announcing his 
 discovery, to ask whether his proposition was simply convertible, 
 or convertible only by limitation. The presence in the subject of 
 the attribute indicated by the predicate is sufficient: qua attribute, 
 it is all there, if it is there at all. The question whether it may 
 or may not be in something else is a later and a minor one. 
 
 In Hamilton's theory of perception we see the result of an 
 attempt to harmonise irreconcilables. While admitting that know- 
 ledge is subjective and relative, he tries to maintain the position 
 of "natural realism"; in other words, our minds make the 
 knowledge which we possess, and at the same time we know 
 an external world independent of our minds. A similar desire 
 to " run with the hare and hunt with the hounds " may be 
 detected in his theory of the conditioned. According to this, 
 human thought in the last resort is always driven to choose 
 between two contradictory alternatives, neither of which is con- 
 ceivable, and yet one of which must be true. For example, 
 space must either be limited or unlimited, and we can conceive 
 neither the one alternative nor the other. If we attempt to 
 imagine a limited space, we are driven immediately to ask, what 
 is the nature of the boundary, and what is outside of it ? If there 
 is something outside, what contains that something? if there is 
 nothing, how can nothing abut upon the boundary of space? 
 On the other alternative of an unlimited space, the difficulty is 
 equally insuperable. We can conceive a space stretching on and 
 on indefinitely, but when we have widened our imagination to 
 the utmost, and conceived the distance between earth and the 
 remotest star multiplied by millions, we are still only at the 
 beginning oi infinity. In the same way, moral freedom and 
 necessity are alike unthinkable ; '' but practically, our conscious-
 
 I50 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 ness of the moral law, which, without a moral liberty in man, 
 would be a mendacious imperative, gives a decisive preponderance 
 to the doctrine of freedom over the doctrine of fate. We are free 
 to act, if we are responsible for our actions^" 
 
 No doctrine more profoundly sceptical than this was ever 
 promulgated. The intellect is brought helplessly to a pause 
 before the two contradictory and inconceivable alternatives. And 
 yet one of them must be true. Hamilton's system supplies no 
 answer to the natural question, which? So far as intellect is 
 concerned, it might be determined by tossing a penny. In the 
 case of freedom vers^is necessity, indeed, an apparent success is 
 gained by the appeal to the moral imperative; but there is no 
 imperative to appeal to in the case of the inconceivables, bounded 
 or unbounded space, infinite or finite time. Neither is it clear 
 that such an appeal is possible as between the conception of a 
 world God-created or a world self-begotten or unbeginning. The 
 choice seems to be arbitrary. It would appear that there may 
 be two systems of philosophy, absolutely contradictory, and yet 
 standing on precisely the same plane, as regards the evidence of 
 their truth. But if the foundation is thus uncertain, what are 
 we to think of the superstructure ? Should we have chosen the 
 wrong alternative, surely no castle in the air could be more unreal 
 than the system built upon it. Hume himself was less destructive, 
 for he left undisputed the fact of invariable sequence. Yet there 
 can be no doubt that Hamilton's doctrine was advanced with the 
 desire to aid faith against unbeHef, and under the honest con- 
 viction that it would do so. Here, at the foundation of our 
 intellectual hfe, was mystery; and the addition of a few other 
 mysteries in its progress would matter little. If reason is so 
 impotent, what temptation is there to rebel against authority ? 
 Hamilton accordingly expressed the conviction that the philosophy 
 of the conditioned would be found to be "the most useful auxiHary 
 of theology*." "A world of false, and pestilent, and presumptuous 
 reasoning, by which philosophy and theology are now equally dis- 
 credited, would be at once abolished, in tiie recognition of this 
 rule of prudent nescience^" Unfortunately, the author of the 
 * Discussions, 620. * ibid. 621. * ibid.
 
 PHILOSOPHY 151 
 
 rule forgot that in retaining the positive teaching of theology 
 he was himself transgressing the rule. Others, less swayed by 
 prepossessions, were more logical ; and the philosophy of the 
 conditioned became the foundation of the agnosticism of Herbert 
 Spencer and of Huxley. 
 
 Hamilton did not himself apply the philosophy of the con- 
 ditioned to the fundamental conceptions of theology; but he 
 distinctly suggested its application ; and he quoted with approval 
 "the declarations of a pious philosophy: — 'A God understood 
 would be no God at all'; — 'To think that God is, as we can 
 think him to be, is blasphemy \"' The actual adaptation of 
 the Hamiltonian philosophy to theology was the work of Henry 
 Longueville Mansel (1820-187 1), the ablest of all Hamilton's 
 pupils. Mansel's great power and acuteness of mind soon raised 
 him to prominence in the Church of England. At Oxford he 
 was successively reader in philosophy, Waynflete professor, and 
 professor of ecclesiastical history; and shortly before his death 
 he was appointed Dean of St Paul's. His chief works were the 
 Prolegomena Logica (1851), The Limits of Religious Thought {i^S9)^ 
 which had been delivered in the year preceding their publication 
 as lectures under the Bampton foundation, and the Fhilosophy 
 of the Conditioned (1866). In all of them, Mansel shows himself 
 the pupil of Hamilton ; in the first-named, he expounds again with 
 great acuteness the principles of the Hamiltonian logic; in the 
 last, he defends both his mentor and himself from the strictures 
 of Mill, whose Examination of Hamilton had appeared shortly 
 before. But the work in which Mansel showed most originality, 
 and that by which he is best known, is his Limits of Religious 
 Thought. The popular favour which this book won was balanced 
 by the powerful dislike it excited in the minds of men of the 
 most diverse views who saw the unsoundness of the foundation. 
 It was attacked by Maurice, who considered his controversy with 
 Mansel the most important work of his life. Mill called it a 
 "loathsome" book, and indignantly disowned all allegiance to 
 the God of Mansel. And Huxley compared Mansel to the 
 drunken fellow in Hogarth's Contested Election, who is sawing 
 
 ^ Discussions t i5» n.
 
 r 
 
 152 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 through the sign-post on the outer end of which he is himself 
 sitting ^ 
 
 What roused Mill's loathing was Mansel's distinction between 
 the relative morality of man and the absolute morality of God ; 
 which in its application seems to introduce the possibility that 
 absolute or divine morality may bear a strange resemblance to 
 relative or human immorality. What stirred Maurice, as well as 
 many simple-minded pious people, was the perception that the 
 application of the Hamiltonian principle of the conditioned to 
 the conception of Deity, really makes it illogical to assert the 
 existence of a God at all. Numbers who had not the wit to 
 think of Hogarth's drunkard and his sign-post, felt dimly what 
 Huxley saw clearly, and were uneasily conscious that the foot- 
 hold of faith was giving way. The wheel was come full circle : 
 Hamilton had dug a pit for Reason, and Faith was in danger 
 of falling in. It would not be easy to find a more striking 
 example of an intellectual Nemesis. 
 
 The first half of the nineteenth century was the period of the 
 sway of the Scottish school, but in the third quarter of the century 
 it was ousted from the pride of place by the Utilitarians, whose 
 tenets were for a time received as something like a philosophic 
 revelation. These Utilitarians form one of the most clearly- 
 marked groups in early Victorian literature. They grew up 
 under the personal influence of Jeremy Bentham (i 748-1832), 
 the founder of the school, and for many years they grouped 
 themselves round his devoted disciple James Mill (1773-1836). 
 The dates of Bentham are noteworthy. Though he lived for 
 nearly a generation into the nineteenth century he was in all 
 essentials a man of the eighteenth. His Fragtnent on Govern- 
 ment appeared in 1776, the year of the death of Hume, and his 
 . J^rinciples of Morals and Legislation was privately printed in 1780, 
 the year when the Encyclopedie was completed. The substance 
 of his thought is in harmony with the dates of these works. It 
 is essentially the thought of the eighteenth century; and thus 
 Bentham makes his disciples, radical as they were, in some 
 respects the most old-fashioned among the thinkers of the time. 
 
 * Life of Huxley, i. 202.
 
 PHILOSOPHY 153 
 
 More than anywhere else in the nineteenth century we find in 
 / them the intellectual atmosphere of the_ eighteenth. They are 
 inheritors of the Revolution with none of that glow from romance 
 which brightened others who were inspired by it. Theirs is still 
 the sphere of rheunderstanding, to the almost total exclusion of 
 Limagination andTof "reason" in the sense which it bears in 
 German philosophy?" :A cold, hard, clear and somewhat narrow 
 logic is the instrument of their thought. . Suffrages, majorities, 
 ballot-boxes, the "machinery" upon which Carlyle poured his 
 ridicule, form their panacea for all social and political evils. / 
 For metaphysical groundwork they go back to Hume and found 
 upon him in almost complete oblivion that the criticism of Kant 
 had intervened, j 
 
 The founder of the Utilitarian school was a man who, more 
 perhaps than any other of equal distinction who ever lived, 
 needed an interpreter; and an interpreter he found in James 
 Mill, one of the earliest and assuredly one of the most efficient 
 of his disciples. Mill did not a little to import into English 
 thought a quality of his countrymen commonly believed to be more 
 characteristic of them than the mysticism of Carlyle. The phrase 
 "hard-headed Scot" is never better used than when it is applied 
 to the historiaii of British India. It indicates both his merits 
 and his defects ; and both alike attracted him to Bentham. Soon 
 after the beginning of the personal acquaintance between the two 
 men in 1808, Mill came to be recognised as the mouthpiece of 
 Bentham; and as his powerful intellect attracted men with tastes 
 and tendencies similar to his own, while certain features of his 
 character, which show conspicuously in the autobiography of his 
 son, rather repelled an opposite type, his house became the chief 
 centre in London of the Benthamite thinkers. They derived all 
 the benefits which arise from intercourse with sympathetic minds; 
 but perhaps at the same time they suffered some of the evils from 
 which the association of a coterie is rarely free. 
 
 Among the men who frequented the house of James Mill were 
 John Austin (1790- 1859), the philosophical jurist, and George 
 Grote, the historian of Greece ; and the influence of the former 
 introduced, a little later, his brilliant brother Charles, who gave
 
 154 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the Utilitarians a connexion with a remarkable set of Cambridge 
 men. More important than any of these was Mill's own son, 
 John Stuart Mill. 
 
 The bond which united these men was the bond of common 
 opinions. They all held the philosophical creed of Utilitarianism, 
 though they had come to it in different ways, — John Mill by in- 
 heritance, Grote as a pupil of the elder Mill, Austin, as John 
 Mill tells us, by independent thought and investigation. Like 
 the founder of the philosophy himself, Hke English thinkers in 
 .^general, they were not content with speculation as an end in 
 / itself. They philosophised that they might the better know how 
 to legislate and to govern ; and so they were united al§o as a 
 political party, "the philosophical radicals." Though their doctrines 
 j were at the time thought to be extreme, most of them would 
 //appear moderate now. They were too deeply imbued with the 
 principles of economics to lose hold of practical considerations, 
 and readers of Mill's Liberty need not be told that they were far 
 from desiring the subversion of order. ' 
 
 They were also united in what they rejected and in what they 
 lacked, as well as in the qualities they possessed and the opinions 
 they held in common. In religion, they were all sceptics more 
 or less complete. In respect of education, Grote, John Austin 
 and John Stuart Mill were all alike destitute of those University 
 associations and free from the influence of those University 
 traditions which as a rule do so much to mould the thought of 
 intellectual men. The fact that they had no share in those 
 associations and traditions made it easier for them to adopt 
 radical opinions, and perhaps made them more original. Possibly 
 the same fact may help to account for the tendency which they 
 show in their schemes and theories to forget or to underrate the 
 human element. The mingling in youth with equals of different 
 types and of contrary opinions would have helped to correct 
 this error. Though not solitary thinkers, they were essentially a 
 coterie, in spite of what John Mill did in the Utilitarian Society 
 to introduce other elements. No doubt the absence of University 
 training influenced their conceptions of what such training ought 
 to be. Their educational ideals were German rather than English. 
 
 L!'
 
 PHILOSOPHY 155 
 
 Further, all the Utilitarians (with the exception of John Stuart 
 Mill) showed the same striking deficiency on the imaginative and 
 emotional sides. They were too exclusively "reasoning machines"; 
 and the defect is seriously felt in their works. It is this defect 
 which condemns Austin to creep along the ground, and, while 
 doing valuable work in reducing jurisprudence to a science, to 
 enunciate new principles so that they seem commonplaces. 
 Perhaps Grote suffered most of all. A little imagination would 
 have lighted up his drab and dreary style, and might have saved 
 him from the fundamental error of his history, the naive belief 
 that it is possible to draw lessons direct from the Athenian 
 democracy of the fifth century b.c. to the English democracy 
 of the nineteenth century a.d.   ^_ 
 
 The Utilitarians, then, inherit a philosophy for whose'"sourc? 
 we must seek in the eighteenth century. On its basis they) 
 establish a political tradition, and work zealously for the develop- 
 ment of that democracy whose advent to. power is the great 
 political feature of the nineteenth century. ''They are pioneers 
 in the movement for popular education. They are champions 
 of free thought; and for this r,eason they are regarded by the 
 majority of their contemporaries with deep distrust. They are 
 not by predilection literary at all, and they write books only: 
 because they have to use language in order to communicate their 
 thoughts. Their literary sympathies are consequently limited, 
 and, except in the case of John Stuart Mill, their literary gift is 
 not great. The name Utilitarian is admirably descriptive of the 
 aim and spirit of the school; and whether their fundamental 
 principle be philosophically sound or not, at any rate the steady 
 pursuit of the end indicated by that name saved them from mere 
 logomachies and gave substance and body to their work. The 
 primary interest of Bentham himself lay, as is well known, in 
 legislation ; and in respect of the theory of legislation his work 
 was carried on by John Austin, the most celebrated of English 
 writers on jurisprudence until, in Leslie Stephen's phrase, his star 
 set as the star of Maine rose. 
 
 Austin belonged to the class of men who enjoy among con- 
 temporaries a great reputation which can hardly be justified to
 
 156 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 after ages. The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832) and 
 the Lectures on Jurisprudence, posthumously published in 1863, 
 do not bear out the opinion his friends held of him. They are 
 arid and verbose. Mill ascribes Austin's comparative failure to 
 over-elaboration: "When his task ought to have been completed, 
 he had generally worked himself into an illness, without having 
 half finished what he undertook." There must, however, have 
 been a deeper reason in mental deficiencies not suspected by 
 Austin's friends; for, in their literary aspect at least, his works 
 could well have borne more elaboration than they received, and 
 they are by no means conspicuous for that vigour and richness 
 of expression which, we are told, distinguished their author's 
 conversation. It cannot be pleaded that his subject did not 
 admit of attractive treatment ; for the example of Maine proves 
 the contrary. But comparison with Maine suggests that the 
 impression of aridity which Austin conveys to the modern mind 
 is due partly, not to his fault, but to a change in taste. He lived 
 before the rise of the historical school. He is highly abstract in 
 his method: his definitions of "sovereignty" and "law" are given 
 as things absolute, without, apparently, a suspicion that definitions 
 sound in a certain historical setting might elsewhere and under 
 other circumstances be quite misleading. Bagehot has aptly com- 
 pared jurisprudence so conceived with the economics of Ricardo. 
 Distrust of the method has led to doubt about the conclusion 
 in both cases. Granted the conditions presupposed, and the 
 reasoning is sound enough. But do the facts square with the 
 presuppositions ? 
 Y" It was, however, to John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) that there 
 fell the task of carrying on the work of Bentham through the 
 period with which we have to deal, and to his influence must be 
 ascribed the temporary supremacy of Utilitarianism. 
 
 John Stuart Mill was a Benthamite from the cradle. For his 
 benefit his father devised, wholly under Benthamite ideas, the 
 extraordinary system of education described in the Autobiography. 
 Never was system more successful from the point of view of the 
 man who devised it, seldom have the eftects of an experiment 
 upon the subject of it been more debatable. In after years
 
 / 
 
 PHILOSOPHY 157 
 
 we seem to see the soul of Mill, like Milton's lion at creation, 
 struggling to get free. Whether he ever succeeded, as the lion 
 did, is doubtful. "It may be questioned," writes a thoughtful 
 essayist, " whether the real John Stuart Mill ever did exist ; such 
 had been the effect of the force employed to impress the mould 
 of other minds on his\" 
 
 Mill himself estimated very highly the benefit he derived from 
 his father's system. Taught Greek at three, he grew up a prodigy 
 of precocious learning. " I started," he says, " I may fairly 
 say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my con- 
 temporaries"; and when we find men of talent and even genius, 
 who were twelve or fifteen years his seniors, treating him even in 
 boyhood as an equal, we see that there must have been good 
 ground for the assertion. Yet there were drawbacks whose im- 
 portance Mill may not have fully realised. " I am thus," he says 
 again, " one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who 
 has not thrown off religious belief, but never had it." This he 
 never regretted. But there was another omission which he did 
 live to lament. He confesses that his father's training led to "an 
 undervaluing of poetry, and of Imagination generally, as an element 
 of human nature," and that the common notion of a Benthamite 
 as " a mere reasoning machine " was, during two or three years, 
 not altogether untrue of him. He who bends nature too far 
 must beware of the rebound. The violent repression, for such 
 it really was, of one side of Mill's nature led, in 1826 and 1827, 
 to a spiritual crisis^ and it is interesting to learn that in this crisis 
 Mill found comfort in the "healing influence" of that poetry which 
 his father and Bentham had depreciated, and especially in the 
 poetry of one so far removed from his teachers as Wordsworth. 
 
 Mill affords one of the best examples of the value of the study 
 of character as furnishing a key to the interpretation of writings, 
 
 * Wilson Stuart's English Philosophical Styles. 
 
 2 Bain and, following him, Leslie Stephen, ascribe this crisis to over-work; 
 but though over-work may have been the occasion, Mill's own account 
 {Autobiography, 132 sqq.) suggests that there was a deeper cause behind, 
 namely, dissatisfaction with what had hitherto been his ideal of life, as a thing 
 too limited to yield satisfaction.
 
 158 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 even when they are of an abstract, philosophic kind. Critics of 
 his philosophy have observed in how great a degree it is a con- 
 glomerate of materials derived from all sources, and sometimes 
 imperfectly fused with its Benthamite basis. Critics of his style 
 have noticed how he frequently passes from an exact but ponderous 
 technical phraseology to an infinitely more telling but not always 
 exact form of popular statement These would be strange charac- 
 teristics if they belonged to a mere " reasoning machine " ; but 
 they are explainable when we observe that the reasoning machine 
 was of James Mill's manufacture, and that the real John Stuart 
 Mill was a being highly emotional, sensitive to many influences, 
 not a mystic, as Carlyle at first took him to be, but with elements 
 in him which under other training might have developed into 
 mysticism. The man who found the balm for his spiritual trouble 
 in Wordsworth, the hero-worshipper who sat at the feet succes- 
 sively of Bentham, Carlyle, Comte, Mrs Taylor and her daughter, 
 could be no mere machine for the manufacture of syllogisms. He 
 might be acute in handling them ; but he would never be either 
 wholly destitute of that inspiration which apprehends truths that 
 cannot be proved, or wholly free from the danger of sudden lapses 
 and inconsistencies. And it is just such inconsistencies which 
 form a trap for the unwary in Mill's writings. 
 
 Mill's engaging docility, the humility of mind which left him 
 open to the most diverse impressions, is well illustrated by the 
 story of his relations with Carlyle. He found Carlyle hard to 
 understand. On reading Sartor Resartus he "made little of it"; 
 but afterwards, when it was published, he "read it with enthusiastic 
 admiration and the keenest delight." He never did understand 
 Carlyle completely, and he never made any close approach to 
 Carlyle's opinions. " I did not, however," he says, "deem myself 
 a competent judge of Carlyle. I felt that he was a poet, and that 
 I was not ; that he was a man of intuition, which I was not ; and 
 that, as such, he not only saw many things long before me, which 
 I could only, when they were pointed out to me, hobble after and 
 prove, but that it was highly probable he could see many things 
 which were not visible to me even after they were pointed out. 
 I knew that I could not see round him, and could never be certain
 
 PHILOSOPHY 159 
 
 that I saw over him\" The transparent candour of these sentences, 
 the unruffled evenness of judgment with which Mill compares 
 himself with his great contemporary, and the ready frankness with 
 which he admits the certainty of Carlyle's superiority in some 
 respects and the possibility of his superiority in others, are 
 admirable. 
 
 This passage illustrates well the possibilities for good inherent 
 in Mill's receptivity, and in his freedom from any overweening 
 egotism. The possibilities for evil also inherent in these qualities 
 are equally well illustrated by the continuation of the passage : — 
 "I never presumed to judge him with any definiteness, until he was 
 interpreted to me by one greatly the superior of us both — who 
 was more a poet than he, and more a thinker than I — whose own 
 mind and nature included his, and infinitely more^" Needless to 
 say, this phoenix, who was more a poet than the writer of the 
 storming of the Bastille, and more a thinker than the author of the 
 Logic, was Mrs Taylor. In his references to her. Mill loses all 
 sense of measure and proportion, and it is difficult to keep due 
 patience, even with the help of the reflection that the words are 
 the words of a doting husband about his dead wife. They are 
 also the words of a man who was Hable to lose his judgment. 
 
 The book in which this interesting and attractive character 
 may best be studied is the invaluable Autobiography (1873); which 
 is not only, in the purely literary sense, one of the best of Mill's 
 works, but one of the most interesting revelations of a great 
 mind ever given to the world. All the influences which went to 
 form Mill's intellect and character, all that he thought, all that he 
 was and aspired to be, are here explained with uncompromising 
 frankness. No form of literature is more attractive than auto- 
 biography when it is thoroughly sincere, as Mill's is. Whether 
 he always understood others, or even himself, may be doubted ; 
 but in the Autobiography he always sets down what he really 
 believes. It is this, combined with the fact that the style is 
 throughout Mill's simpler, more homely style, that gives the book 
 its literary charm. Without eftort, without inflation or pretence, 
 but never meanly, he tells his story; and lew things in recent 
 ^ Autobiography, 176. ^ Olid,
 
 l60 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 literature are more worthy of attention than the narrative of the 
 way in which the powerful young mind grew under his father's 
 influence; how Dumont's Trait'e de Legislation came upon him 
 almost as a revelation ; how " Philip Beauchamp's " Analysis of 
 the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of 
 Mankind had power upon him only inferior to that; how he 
 struggled to burst his bonds ; and how forces the most diverse, 
 some of them poles asunder from Benthamism, VVordsworthian, 
 Coleridgean and Comtist forces, produced their effect upon him ; 
 and how finally a nature inherently emotional passed under the 
 sway of two women, Mrs Taylor and her daughter. 
 
 It is evident that from the first there were germs in Mill of 
 something richer than the hard and dry, though powerful, intellect 
 of his father could comprehend. His face, as it may be seen 
 depicted by Watts on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery, 
 might pass for that of a mediaeval saint; and Gladstone, who 
 called him " the saint of rationalism," must have been impressed 
 by him in the same way as the painter was. In youth. Sir Henry 
 Taylor declared. Mill seemed so naturally and necessarily good 
 that men hardly thought of him as having occasion for a con- 
 science. Caroline Fox more than once remarks on the extreme 
 refinement of his expression; and in a letter to her Mill probably 
 betrays the secret of that refinement, in laying down the "one 
 plain ruleof Ufe eternally binding, and independent of all variation 
 in creeds," which is this: "Try thyself unweariedly till thou findest 
 the highest thing thou art capable of doing, faculties and outward 
 circumstances being both duly considered, and then do it." 
 
 A man so constituted could not be bound within the limits 
 of any single formula or system. He had found in Dumont "a 
 creed, a doctrine, a philosophy ; in one of the best senses of the 
 word, a religion'"; but to the Gospel according to Bentham and 
 Dumont he soon added the Gospel according to Malthus, declaring 
 the population principle to be "quite as much a banner" as any 
 Benthamite principle. He added also many things much more 
 widely divergent from Benthamism. He took every opportunity 
 of cultivating the friendship of men of ability and character, 
 
 ^ Autobiography, 6y.
 
 PHILOSOPHY l6l 
 
 however diverse their opinions. He dates from meetings and 
 discussions in Grote's room his "real inauguration as an original and 
 independent thinker^" He met and debated with the Owenites, 
 differing widely from them, but respecting their zeal for the social 
 improvement of the working classes. He made the acquaintance 
 also of the Coleridgeans, Maurice and Sterling, breathing in their 
 society an intellectual atmosphere wholly different from that to 
 which he had been accustomed; and we have already seen how 
 he wrestled with Carlyle, and, like Jacob of old, would not let 
 him go without a blessing. Mill judged correctly when he pro- 
 nounced himself much superior to most of his contemporaries "in 
 willingness and ability to learn from everybody ^" 
 
 For thirty-four years of his life Mill was a busy official in the 
 India Office ; and, like many other men of letters, he valued highly 
 the practical experience so acquired. His labours in literature 
 and philosophy were carried on concurrently with this official 
 work. They began early. From the foundation of the West- 
 minster J^eview in 1824 the younger Mill was an active contributor. 
 The Review was established by Bentham as the organ of his 
 opinions ; but it was from the first as disappointing to the Utilit- 
 arians as it was disquieting to many of their opponents. In 1828 
 Mill ceased to write for it. He afterwards contributed to the 
 Examiner, and in 1834 became editor of the newly-established 
 London Review (known in later days as the London and West- 
 mi?ister) ; an office which absorbed nearly all his spare time and 
 energy till 1840. 
 
 The character of Mill was now fully formed, and his ap- 
 prenticeship in literature and philosophy served. He had written 
 much, but he had hitherto published no independent book. In 
 the comparative leisure following his resignation of the editorship 
 of the Review, he was about to enter upon a new phase of his 
 career; and henceforth the landmarks of his life are, with two 
 exceptions, the dates of the publication of his books. 
 1 The two exceptions are his marriage, and his election to 
 Parliament as member for Westminster. It was in 1830 that 
 
 ^ Autobiography, laj. * ibid. 242. 
 
 W. H
 
 l62 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Mill first met Mrs Taylor. Her first husband was then alive ; 
 but within a few years a very unusual and scarcely defensible — 
 though, Mill assures us, a morally pure — relation sprang up between 
 her and Mill. It was the cause of endless difficulties and of several 
 estrangements between Mill and his friends. At last, in 1849, 
 Mr Taylor died, and two years later his widow married Mill. One 
 of Mill's encomiums on his wife has already been quoted. He 
 was never weary of sounding her praises in the most extravagant 
 fashion. The dedication of the treatise on Liberty, the inscription 
 upon her grave at Avignon and numerous passages in the Auto- 
 biography, bear witness to his complete infatuation. If we could 
 trust his judgment, we must ascribe some of the most important 
 of his works at least as much to her as to himself. But there is 
 no evidence of a revolution in Mill's thought after he came under 
 Mrs Taylor's influence. Some years passed before the acquaintance 
 became intimate; and though Mill was still young and had written 
 little, his mind was mature far beyond his years. All the elements 
 which afterwards showed themselves were already present in it. 
 The probability is that Mrs Taylor rather adopted her opinions 
 from Mill, and that the latter was led to overrate her by hearing 
 his own views echoed back by a beloved voice. It may well be 
 that on some points, especially in The Subjection of Women, her 
 influence was important; but she was neither the author of Mill's 
 philosophy, nor did she greatly modify its substance. 
 
 The history of Mill's election as member of Parliament for 
 Westminster is alike honourable to the body of Liberals who 
 invited him to stand, and to him who accepted their invitation. 
 He stipulated that he should not be expected to canvass, and he 
 was returned simply on the ground of his eminence in philosophy 
 and his life long interest in good government. At the election of 
 1868, however, he was defeated; and unfortunately the men of 
 Westminster had not the opportunity to repair their error, as the 
 electors of Edinburgh had done in the case of Macaulay. Mill's 
 life was drawing to a close. He retired to Avignon, where he 
 died in 1873. 
 
 The remarkable unity of aim pervading Mill's writings makes 
 the simplest classification of them also the best ; while all divisions
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 163 
 
 must be recognised as of only partial validity. Like all the 
 Utilitarians, in everything that he wrote Mill had in view a 
 practical end ; but sometimes the end was nearer, and sometimes 
 more remote. He was conscious that no great and far-reaching 
 purpose could be achieved except upon a basis of principle. 
 Some of his works, therefore, are primarily concerned with theory; 
 that is, they are philosophical, and map out the field of thought. 
 In other works Mill applies the principles he has laid down in his 
 philosophy, and is directly practical. And the sphere of his 
 practice is social life, the science of government. The second 
 class of his works, therefore, is political, and deals with the 
 machinery of government. It must be added that the philo- 
 sophical writings exist for the sake of the political ones, and the 
 author is never happier than when he can mingle a practical 
 element with theory. Mill shows little interest in philosophic 
 speculation in and for itself. In his Political Economy he is 
 more concerned with the light thrown by the science upon 
 society, than with the science itself. It was Benthamism in its 
 bearing upon legislation which furnished him with "a creed, 
 a doctrine, a philosophy, a religion " ; it was the very practical 
 aspect of Malthusianism which made that too "a banner." 
 
 For a statement of Mill's philosophical principles we naturally 
 turn to the System of Logic {xZ/i^T^), the Principles of Political Economy 
 (i848)and Utilitarianism {\'&^t^^ where they are directly expounded. 
 In Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865) and in the Examination of 
 Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865) they have partly to 
 be inferred from the criticisms passed upon other thinkers. 
 
 The System of Logic remains the most original as it was the 
 first important work of Mill. In itself a remarkable book, it is 
 still more remarkable when viewed in relation to the state of 
 philosophic thought in England. When Mill began the study of 
 logic, the antiquated Aldrich, Whately's little text-book and 
 Hobbes's Coniputatio sive Logica were the only authorities he 
 could find to work upon. Hamilton's lectures were then acces- 
 sible only to his own pupils. On the Continent things were 
 different. Hegel had lived and written his logic and died. Mill, 
 who knew German, was induced by Sterling to study the German 
 
 11--2
 
 164 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 philosophers ; but, like many Englishmen of that time, he failed 
 to enter into the spirit of their thought. To this failure we may 
 trace his worst mistakes. 
 
 The wish to supply the deficiency which had been forced upon 
 his notice by his own early studies was one of the motives which 
 induced Mill to write his Logic. Apart from its intrinsic merits, 
 the extraordinary influence it exercised would of itself suffice to 
 make it one of the most noteworthy books of the nineteenth 
 century. Bagehot did not exaggerate when, on the death of Mill, 
 he wrote that half the minds of the younger generation of 
 Englishmen had been greatly coloured by it, and would have 
 been sensibly different if they had not received its influence. 
 The secret of this influence is doubtless to be found in the 
 breadth of Mill's view, in the decision with which he cuts himself 
 loose from mere formalism, and in the close connexion between 
 his logical principles and the intellectual work of his own 
 generation. While Hamilton's teaching was tending to more 
 and more rigid formalism, Mill shook off the fetters of the 
 scholastic logicians. He maintained that the syllogism involved 
 a petitio principii; and in the emphasis which he laid upon 
 " things " and " real kinds," he showed his conviction that reasoning 
 in vacuo was likely to prove misleading. 
 
 It was, however, in the books devoted to induction that Mill 
 was most original. Little had been done since the time of Bacon 
 towards a theory of scientific method ; but the rapid accumulation 
 of the material of science rendered some effort to this end 
 necessary. The attempt was made several times within a few 
 years. Scattered through Sir John Herschel's writings are many 
 reflections on method ; and in his treatise On the Study of Natural 
 Philosophy {\Zio) he discusses the question systematically. A little 
 later William Whewell (1794-1866) did so again on a far more 
 ambitious scale. Whewell was specially well informed about the 
 history of science. He embodied his knowledge in his History of 
 the Inductive Sciences (1837), which was followed by the Philosophy 
 of the Inductive Sciences (1840). Perhaps he is most widely known 
 by his Novum Organum Renovatum, which was the second part of 
 the Philosophy of the Inducuve Sciences.
 
 PHILOSOPHY l6S 
 
 Mill's theory of induction therefore was not without rivals; 
 and though on the whole it deserved the success it has won over 
 them, in two important respects the work of Whewell is superior. 
 In the first place, Whewell's richer knowledge of the history of 
 science enabled him to illustrate more copiously and more 
 suggestively. Secondly, in respect of the fundamental principle 
 of his philosophy, Whewell appears to be nearer the truth than 
 Mill. The philosophy of the latter was wholly empirical : in 
 the second book of the Logic he even maintains that the axioms 
 of geometry are generalisations from observation. And to Mill 
 experience meant something which came to the mind from without, 
 something in the reception of which the mind was passive. His 
 was, in short, the empiricism of Hume. Whewell maintained, on 
 the other hand, that besides empirical truth we must recognise 
 necessary truth. The distinction, as he drew it, was crude, and 
 his doctrine far too much resembled the untenable theory of 
 innate ideas, or the " common sense " of the Scottish philosophy ; 
 but nevertheless he was right in the conviction, which pervades 
 all his philosophical treatises and runs through his controversy 
 with Mill, that pure empiricism is impotent. Kant's redudio ad 
 absurdum of the principles adopted by Hume from Locke remains 
 unanswered. 
 
 On the other hand, in the details of his inductive theory 
 Whewell is deplorably vague. Induction as conceived by him is 
 nothing more than hypothesis subjected to certain tests. This 
 might be satisfactory enough, provided the tests were at once 
 sufificient and generally applicable. Unfortunately for Whewell 
 they are not. The test of prediction is certainly insufficient ; and 
 the test of consilience is as certainly inapplicable in the great 
 majority of cases. Mill's theory has the advantage of being more 
 definite and more adequate. But it is only a relative superiority 
 that can be granted to him. Few of the men of science acknow- 
 ledge any debt to the canons ; they have been severely damaged 
 by the critical examination of logicians like Mr Bradley; and 
 even the most cursory reader must be struck by the immense gulf 
 between the canons and some of the instances— especially under 
 the method of agreement — which are supposed to exemplify them.
 
 l66 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 It is impossible to acquit Mill of a slovenly and dangerous looseness 
 of reasoning in this section of his work. 
 
 In view of the strongly practical bent of Mill's mind it would 
 hardly be surprising to discover that his talent for abstract specu- 
 lation fell short of the standard of greatness ; and there are several 
 indications in the System of Logic that this was the case. A 
 comparatively small but nevertheless significant indication in the 
 chapter " Of Names " is the doctrine of non-connotative terms. It 
 is scarcely credible that a man with the metaphysical instinct 
 would have confused thus between the etymological meaning and 
 the actual significance of proper names, or have failed to discover 
 that it is just because they are more deeply connotative than class 
 names, that proper names can subserve their purpose. A far 
 more important point is Mill's absolute severance of " things" from 
 "thought." German idealism long ago demonstrated the im- 
 possibility of maintaining such complete separation ; and the 
 latest scientific theories about the nature of matter powerfully 
 support the idealistic criticism. 
 
 Mill's conception of the two laws of uniformity of nature and 
 universal causation betrays the same deficiency. On the one 
 hand, we are asked to regard them as the foundation of all 
 scientific induction ; on the other hand, we are told that they are 
 themselves the outcome of induction, — necessarily of unscientific, 
 and presumably therefore of insecure, induction. Mill never 
 penetrates down to the question, what would human experience 
 be if these laws and all principles of relation were eliminated? 
 In point of fact, there would be no experience at all ; the isolated, 
 independent, self-existent "idea" or "impression" is a mere figment. 
 But probably the most convincing proof of Mill's weakness on the 
 metaphysical side may be found in his treatment of the law of 
 causation. He sees the inadequacy of Hume's definition of cause. 
 A mere invariable antecedent does not answer to our conception 
 of cause ; for night is the invariable antecedent, but it is assuredly 
 not the cause, of day. Instead, however, of abandoning Hume's 
 definition. Mill proceeds to tinker it, and re-defines cause as the 
 invariable and unconditmial antecedent. Thus, day toUows upon 
 night only on condition that the sun rises, and not night but the
 
 PHILOSOPHY 167 
 
 rise of the sun is the condition invariably and unconditionally 
 antecedent to the effect, day. Good and well ; but Mill does not 
 comprehend the full effect of his own alteration ; which is no less 
 than the substitution for the sensationalism of Hume of some kind 
 of intellectual conception of an ordered universe. There is no 
 room for an " unconditional " in pure empiricism. In improving 
 Hume Mill has unconsciously but completely shifted his ground. 
 This is one of a number of cases, and perhaps the most important, 
 in which we find side by side in Mill's system, unexplained and 
 unharmonised, elements of the diverse influences through which 
 his mind passed. 
 
 At the time when the Logic was nearing completion. Mill was 
 under the sway of Comte, and it became his ambition to formulate 
 a science of sociology. To this, however, he conceived a necessary 
 preliminary to be a science of ethology, or the formation of 
 character ; a subject to which he devotes a chapter in the sixth 
 book of the Logic. Baffled in the attempt to formulate such a 
 science, he fell back upon political economy as a pis aller. He 
 had already paid a good deal of attention to the subject. As 
 early as 1830-31 the five Essays on some Unsettled Quest ions in 
 Political Economy were written, though it was not till 1844, after 
 the success of the Logic was assured, that they were published. 
 Once free from the toil of the Logic^ and convinced that, for him at 
 least, the science of ethology was unattainable, Mill turned all his 
 powers to economics; and the fruit of his labour was the Principles 
 of Political Economy. Here again, more obviously though not 
 more really than in the Logic, Mill was obeying his instinct for 
 practice. The development of commerce was no less characteristic 
 of the age than the advance of science; and a theory of commerce 
 was as much a need of the time as an organon of science. Mill 
 accordingly set himself to fill the gaps in the theories of Adam 
 Smith and Ricardo, to supply what time had shown to be lacking, 
 and above all to enquire how the principles he had reached might 
 be brought to bear on society with practical effect. Essentially, 
 Mill is a disciple of Ricardo ; but he is more human than Ricardo, 
 and the Ricardian laws frequently gain in truth while they lose in 
 rigidity under Mill's handling. He himself was most interested
 
 l68 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 in those parts of his work which were in a strictly scientific sense 
 extra-economical ; and in none more than in the chapter on the 
 probable future of the labouring classes'. Here he applied that 
 Malthusian doctrine which had so profoundly interested him, in a 
 way directly opposite to that in which the author of the doctrine 
 had used it. For while Malthus originally advanced it to prove 
 the unsoundness of ideas such as Godwin's concerning the bound- 
 less possibilities of human improvement, Mill sought to show that 
 the understanding of the law, the acceptance of it, and a voluntary 
 restriction of numbers, gave to the working classes the one chance 
 of a general and permanent elevation of their position. 
 
 The Principles of Political Economy is a far less original book 
 than the Logic. The leading ideas are accepted by Mill from his 
 predecessors, and scarcely anything is wholly his own. Within 
 the stricter limits of the science, probably his most original con- 
 tribution was the theory of foreign exchanges ; and even that is 
 the development of ideas to be found in Ricardo. Mill's great 
 merits as an economist are, not originality, but lucidity of expression 
 and copiousness of illustration. He explains with a fulness which 
 occasionally borders upon verbosity ; but the impatience which he 
 now and then excites is checked by the reflection that at any rate 
 he has made it almost impossible to misapprehend the meaning. 
 He is less abstract than his master Ricardo, and sometimes — 
 particularly in his theory of rent — while accepting the Ricardian 
 doctrine in substance, introduces modifications or qualifications 
 suggested by actual experience. But in this department too there 
 is occasionally a certain incongruity between the abstract theory 
 which Mill advocates and the concrete experience with which he 
 illustrates it. 
 
 The period of Mill's predominance in philosophy is also the 
 golden age of the classical school of political economy : soon after 
 his death the credit of the science began to decay. The high 
 position which it then held was due in part to Mill's own influence; 
 but in far larger measure it was the result of the circumstances 
 of the time. The great development of commerce was in mid 
 
 ' This chapter was an addition suggested. Mill tells us, by his guide and 
 counsellor, Mrs Taylor.
 
 PHILOSOPHY 169 
 
 career; machinery was transforming the conditions of industry; 
 railways and steamships were working a revolution in the conditions 
 of transport; the capitalist class ruled; the great political question 
 of the time was an economic one. And after the triumph of free 
 trade, men were for many years content to utter jubilations and 
 to refer the whole growth of wealth to it, oblivious of the fact that 
 those engines and railways and steamships might have something 
 to do with it too. Mill himself seems to stand, half consciously, 
 at the parting of the ways. With one hand he is linked to Ricardo 
 and that political economy which dictated "laws of nature" with 
 the confidence of a Newton. But Mill was never quite contented 
 with the "economic man," never satisfied to regard the getting of 
 wealth as in itself a sufficient end of human life; and so with the 
 other hand he seems to reach out towards the historical and 
 a posteriori school of economics. He never follows its methods, 
 but its rise might almost be prophesied from his writings. 
 
 After the publication of the Political Economy, there is a long 
 blank in Mill's literary history. For eleven years he published no 
 independent work; and even his contributions to periodicals were 
 far less frequent than of old. The cause was partly a loss of 
 health, which may be attributed to over-strain ; while in the latter 
 part of the period a contributory cause was the worry of his official 
 work at the India Office, increased as it was by the Mutiny and 
 preparations for the transference of the administration from the 
 Company to the Crown. Upon that event Mill retired ; and from 
 1858 onwards, except for the three years of his parliamentary life, 
 he was free to devote himself to literature and philosophy. 
 
 The result of Mill's freedom is seen immediately in the record 
 of his literary work. Liberty and Thoughts on Parliamentary 
 Reform both appeared in 1859, Representative Government two 
 years later, and Utilitarianism after another interval of two years. 
 Then, after the books on Comte and Hamilton, came The Sub- 
 jection of Women (1869), the last work published during Mill's 
 life. After his death, besides the Autobiography, there appeared 
 three Essays on Religion and Chapters on Socialism, all that he 
 had been able to do of a projected book on socialism. 
 
 Of these works the most important as a contribution to
 
 I/O THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 philosophy is UHliiarianism, the only one of Mill's works which 
 is devoted to ethics. It is one of the best books in which to 
 study the history of Mill's mind. The core of it is Benthamism; 
 but round that core cluster the accretions Mill had gathered in his 
 course through the world. The consequence is that Mill's theory 
 is ethically far richer than Bentham's ; but on the other hand it 
 is far less simple and far less consistent. The greatest point of 
 difference between him and his master lies in Mill's contention 
 that pleasures differ from one another in quality as well as in 
 quantity. Bentham denied any difference but a quantitative one, 
 and thus greatly simpHfied the "calculus of pleasures." "The 
 greatest happiness of the greatest number" was a thing which 
 (apparently at least) could be estimated without undue difficulty. 
 But in Mill the idea of " happiness " is sublimated. It becomes 
 doubtful whether it can be identified with pleasurable sensation 
 at all ; and at any rate Mill cannot bring himself to maintain that 
 the highest intellectual pleasure, or the pleasure of the philan- 
 thropist in an act of benevolence, is the same in kind with that 
 derived from the grossest indulgence of sensual appetite. But if 
 there are differences in kind among pleasures, how are they to be 
 reduced to a common measure ? 
 
 Though Mill's mental receptiveness led to the introduction 
 into his system of elements of thought whose right to stand there 
 may well be disputed, it was nevertheless to this receptiveness, 
 and perhaps even to the presence of these incongruities, that he 
 owed great part of his influence. This aspect of his intellectual 
 character is well illustrated by his relations with Comte. Mill 
 had been largely instrumental in making the French philosopher 
 known in England. Already in 1830 he had been attracted by 
 the early writings of Comte, and when the Positive Philosophy 
 came into being he was powerfully influenced by the social system 
 there expounded, and made generous acknowledgment of his obli- 
 gations. For some years before and after the publication of the 
 Logic Mill was in close correspondence with Comte; but he found 
 the connexion as troublesome as Hume had found the friendship 
 of Rousseau, and the two philosophers became estranged. Long 
 before he wrote the book on Comte Mill's view of the philosophy
 
 PHILOSOPHY 171 
 
 as well as of the philosopher had changed. He was no longer 
 moved by the chivalrous desire, which at first he felt, to say all 
 that could be said in favour of a neglected thinker. The English 
 Positivists were now a body, not indeed large in numbers, but 
 wielding a considerable influence. Further, Mill had grown in- 
 creasingly conscious of certain differences between Comtism and 
 the system which underlay all his own thought. Lord Morley 
 has called Comtism simply " Utilitarianism crowned by a fantastic 
 decoration," and Edmond Scherer remarks that in passing from 
 Bentham to Comte Mill was "merely following the course of 
 utilitarian ideas to the point where they debouch and lose them- 
 selves in a vaster system." But notwithstanding this affinity, the 
 author of Liberty could hardly be at ease within the limits of the 
 system which Huxley, condensing Comte's own words, described 
 as "Catholicism minus Christianity," — i.e. a system destitute of 
 Catholic dogma, but based upon an ultra-Catholic organisation. 
 Mill, in fact, was gradually driven to recognise the existence of 
 incongruous elements in his own scheme. He was hopeful of the 
 results of social organisation, and he was attracted by economic 
 socialism. Yet on the other hand he was an economist of the 
 school of Adam Smith and Ricardo, and he set an almost im- 
 measurable value upon the freedom of the individual. Naturally, 
 therefore, as he became conscious of the degree in which Comtism 
 threatened what he valued so highly, Mill was impelled to point 
 out what he considered the defects, as well as the merits, of the 
 system, and its insufficiency for that regeneration of society which 
 he valued above all things. 
 
 The examination of Hamilton, which is much more elaborate 
 than that of Comte ^ and a more profound piece of philosophy, 
 was also in a manner forced upon Mill. Hamilton's philosophy 
 ranked in England as the great rival system to Utilitarianism, 
 and, for reasons noted in connexion with Mansel, Mill thought 
 its influence highly prejudicial. Therefore, unwilling though he 
 was to give himself the appearance of disparaging a man no longer 
 living. Mill, in obedience to his practical instinct, put all his 
 force into the examination of the rival school, and especially of 
 ^ It preceded the articles on Comte.
 
 172 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Hamilton's cardinal doctrine, the philosophy of the conditioned. 
 What chiefly roused Mill's dislike was the essentially negative and 
 destructive character of this philosophy, and it is interesting to 
 find the " atheist " and disciple of the sceptic Hume here taking 
 up arms in defence of faith against its own defenders. But it 
 would be a mistake to regard the Examination of Hamilton as 
 purely critical. It contains not only Mill's refutation of Hamil- 
 tonianism, but also a great deal of positive doctrine not to be 
 found elsewhere. Indeed, after the System of Logic, the Exami- 
 nation of Hamilton is the book by which Mill can be most 
 adequately judged, and the fact that it is not usually so regarded 
 is to be explained by its critical character. Its very success tended 
 to its own eclipse: people are slow to interest themselves in 
 criticisms of philosophy, and above all of philosophies which have 
 no longer any vitality. 
 
 All Mill's works which have not hitherto been noticed are, in 
 different ways and degrees, political. Those which deal with the 
 machinery of government — even the important volume on Repre- 
 sentative Government — have in great measure lost their interest 
 But the value of Liberty is permanent, and The Subjection of 
 Women, though much inferior, is inspired with the same spirit. 
 The theme of the latter book is just a special case of that dealt 
 with in the earlier. Oti Liberty discusses the rights of the in- 
 dividual generally ; The Subjection of Women is an impassioned 
 plea for the enfranchisement of one sex from the domination of 
 the other ; and if the passion at times exceeds measure, the fault 
 is more than redeemed by the generous spirit of the book. 
 
 In the volume On Liberty too Mill is profoundly in earnest. 
 Nothing roused him to fiercer wrath than an infringement of 
 liberty, whether it was in the name of the sovereign or of the 
 mob, of religion or of law. His readiness to champion the cause 
 of a negro, or to denounce an act of judicial oppression, was in 
 keeping with his whole history; but his anxious care for the 
 rights of minorities shows that he was equally alive to the 
 dangers which might threaten individual liberty in a democracy. 
 Mill's Liberty is in more respects than one a landmark. It is 
 among the last and the best statements of the principles of
 
 PHILOSOPHY 173 
 
 ^individualism', and a comparison between it and political writings 
 of the present day, even by those who do not profess socialism, 
 affords a measure of the distance traversed by thought within the 
 last half century. Mill himself had taken tints, it is true, from 
 socialism; but Benthamism is fundamentally individualistic, and 
 Liberty proves that the later influences upon Mill were superficial 
 compared with those which governed his youth. He insists strongly 
 upon the great importance of allowing the free development of 
 the greatest possible variety of characters; and though he would 
 have given more scope to government than the Manchester school 
 was disposed to concede, he held that the burden of proof always 
 lay upon those who advocated interference with the individual. 
 
 In another respect too this book marks the end of an epoch. 
 Published in the same year with the Origin of Species, it is con- 
 spicuous, as are all Mill's works, for the total absence of the sense 
 of heredity. The individual stands in a certain environment, 
 but we are not taught to regard him as having been made what 
 he is by the generations which have gone before. Had he taken 
 this view Mill must of necessity have modified his individualism. 
 Not only so, but he must have revised the fundamental principles 
 of his philosophy. Perhaps the gravest defect which in the present 
 day strikes the student of the Utilitarian philosophy from Bentham 
 to Mill is the complete failure of its adherents to assimilate the 
 greatest constructive idea of the nineteenth century, that of 
 evolution. Bentham himself was too early for it; but his disciples 
 lived within its influence. Hegel, Comte and Herbert Spencer in 
 philosophy, Lamarck, Lyell and Darwin in science, all live and 
 breathe in this atmosphere. The idea had been applied to the 
 physical structure of the earth, to animal life, to human society; 
 but notwithstanding all this, the Utilitarians remain unconscious 
 and unmoved. Their work has in consequence suffered in other 
 fields as well as in philosophy. If Grote had been able to apply 
 the idea of evolution to history, he would never have fallen into 
 the blunder of treating ancient democracy as a thing on the same 
 plane with modern democracy. There is no other line of cleavage 
 
 ^ Herbert Spencer's The Man versus the Ulate (1884) is however far 
 more individualistic. 
 
 aa?i^o/a
 
 \- 
 
 174 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 in modern thought so deep as this. Philosophies in which the 
 idea of evolution reigns have still some message to the present ; 
 those which have it not belong to the past. 
 
 In the future Mill will probably rank as a thinker somewhat 
 lower than he stood in the estimation of his contemporaries ; but 
 after all deductions have been made he remains upon the whole 
 the greatest English publicist since Burke. He has neither the 
 weight of thought, nor the sweep of imagination, nor the fervour 
 of eloquence of the great Irishman ; but through his whole life he 
 devoted himself with unwearied earnestness to public questions; 
 and he treated them with a largeness of spirit which no con- 
 temporary and no successor has equalled. 
 
 Notable among the younger contemporaries of Mill who 
 worked upon the theory of Utilitarianism was Alexander Bain 
 (1818-1903), perhaps the best of all illustrations of the "reasoning 
 machine," at once in its power and in its weakness. Strength of 
 spirit and of intellect he undoubtedly possessed; otherwise, he 
 could never have made his way against the difficulties which beset 
 his youth ; nor could he have been, as he was for many years, 
 the weightiest man in the University of Aberdeen. Neither is it 
 possible to read his works without perceiving that he was gifted 
 with a singular clearness of mind. T/ie Seiises and the Intellect 
 (1855) and The Emotions arid the Will (1859) are lucid as well as 
 solid contributions to Utilitarian psychology. There was no mist 
 about the things Bain saw. On the other hand, there were 
 many things which he did not see at all. Few books are more 
 arid than Bain's Autobiography; the reader travels through a dry 
 parched land. Yet it is valuable, because it gives the key to 
 Bain's philosophy. We discover that it is highly personal, that the 
 system in its hardness and dryness exactly reflects the hardness 
 and dryness of the philosopher's mind. There were, however, 
 other qualities as well in Bain's mind. The Autobiography bears 
 witness to an inflexible integrity, which also inspires the philosophy. 
 No man of the time sought truth with more perfect singleness of 
 mind, no one was more courageously ready to suffer for it if need 
 were. It cannot be said that Bain made any great original con- 
 tribution to Utilitarianism; but he did sound work in detail. His
 
 PHILOSOPHY 175 
 
 knowledge of science especially was valuable, because it enabled 
 him to fill gaps left by Mill. 
 
 Among the names of those who in later days have, with more 
 or less divergence and originality followed Mill, there is none 
 more honoured or more honourable than that of Henry Sidgwick 
 (1838- 1 900), a disciple who in the three great works of his life 
 showed the same mixture of speculative with practical interests, 
 and the same devotion to the former for the sake of the latter, as 
 Mill himself Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics (1874) is an attempt 
 to restate the philosophic principles of Utilitarianism in the light 
 of criticism and reflection. So too the Principles of Political 
 Economy (1883) starts from the work which Mill had published 
 just a generation before, but at the same time shows very clearly 
 the influence of that spirit of scepticism which declined any longer 
 to accept the "laws" of political economy as conceptions in the 
 same category with the law of gravitation. And, finally, the 
 Elements of Politics (1891) indicates the persistence in the disciple 
 of that practical interest in government which had been charac- 
 teristic of the whole Utilitarian school. 
 
 While, however. Mill was deliberately trained in abstract 
 thought, Sidgwick rather drifted into philosophy. His first studies 
 were classical, and his earliest academical employment was a 
 classical lectureship. It was his membership of the Society of 
 the Apostles which revealed Sidgwick to himself, convinced him 
 that the true bent of his mind was towards the investigation of 
 the ultimate problems of life, and made him one of the earliest 
 workers in the newly created tripos of moral science at Cam- 
 bridge. His classical lectureship was exchanged for a lectureship 
 in moral philosophy in 1869, and ultimately, in 1883, he became 
 professor of that subject in his own university. And Sidgwick 
 did not reach this position without passing through that period 
 of stress and doubt which few of his contemporaries escaped. He 
 was a man of strong religious instincts, reared in the atmosphere 
 of orthodoxy, but in days when orthodoxy was becoming less and 
 less credible to the thoughtful. The reading of Kenan's Atudes 
 d'Histoire Religieuse in 1862 powerfully influenced Sidgwick's mind. 
 He turned to the study of Arabic and Hebrew for a solution
 
 176 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 of the questions which had been thus suggested to him, and 
 persevered in it for more than two years. Ultimately, however, 
 he abandoned this line of enquiry, mainly because he became 
 convinced that the most complete mastery of these languages 
 would qualify him only for the investigation of secondary problems. 
 The key to the problem lay, he believed, in philosophy, not in 
 linguistic science. The trend of his thought was clearly shown 
 by his resignation of his Trinity fellowship in 1869, a step which 
 he felt called upon to take because of the change which had 
 passed over his opinions since he had made the declaration which 
 was the condition of his admission to the fellowship. The re- 
 signation was characteristic in two ways, characteristic in the 
 steadiness and caution with which he paused to see whether 
 there might possibly be any swing backwards towards his former 
 position, and characteristic too in the scrupulous honour with 
 which, having convinced himself that there could be none, he 
 faced all the consequences of his own views. 
 
 This beautiful sincerity is the most striking feature in the 
 character of Sidgwick, and it is the root-principle of his whole 
 method of philosophising. No one gave himself more whole- 
 heartedly to the pursuit of truth, no one more courageously 
 accepted unwelcome conclusions. He was repelled by the negative 
 aspect of the philosophy of Mill, and so far as he accepted Mill 
 as a guide, it was because he believed himself to find in him a 
 larger portion of the truth than in any other. But he always 
 estimated highly the value of positive beliefs for practical life. 
 His conviction of the importance of the belief in immortality 
 induced him to become one of the founders of the society lor 
 psychical research ; his rigorous conception of the character of the 
 evidence required made him dubious about most of the results ; 
 and, eager as he was for a positive answer, he describes himself in 
 1887 as drifting steadily to the conclusion that we have not and 
 are never likely to have empirical evidence of the existence oi the 
 individual after deaths 
 
 This same characteristic is at once the strength of Sidgwick's 
 philosopiiy and, in a sense, its weakness, it is a source of 
 
 ^ Life, 460.
 
 PHILOSOPHY 177 
 
 weakness in so far as he is never likely to be as popular or as 
 widely influential as a man more dogmatic would be. He 
 habitually pauses and balances, sometimes even when he is hardly 
 in doubt, just from a caution almost in excess. And this native 
 tendency was strengthened by the sense that the philosophy at 
 which he had arrived was not that which he would have chosen 
 to teach had the choice been his. But it was not his choice, it 
 was intellectual constraint. The truth as he saw it was not the 
 truth as he wished it to be. In a remarkable passage in his 
 journal at the close of 1884 he contrasts himself with T. H. Green, 
 the meagre numbers whom he influenced with the many who bore 
 the stamp of Green ; and he adds what we may be sure is at least 
 part of the explanation. " P'eeling," he says, " that the deepest 
 truth I have to tell is by no means 'good tidings,' I naturally 
 shrink from exercising on others the personal influence which 
 would make men [resemble] me, as much as men more opti- 
 mistic and prophetic naturally aim at exercising such influence'." 
 Cautious, then, by nature and from a sense of duty, and rendered 
 still more cautious by the doubt whether what he had to teach 
 would be practically inspiring and elevating, Sidgwick habitually 
 expresses himself in such a way as to blur the outhnes of his 
 thought, to give a sense of inconclusiveness, and to alienate 
 the reader who longs for decision and definiteness. But the 
 conclusions he does reach are all the more impressive on this 
 account, and the fact that his allegiance was given on the whole 
 to the Utilitarian school (modified though it is in his case by 
 elements of intuitionalism) is an indication of the continued 
 vitality of that philosophy ; and it may well be that if Sidgwick 
 had not felt himself hampered as he did, in the days after the 
 death of Mill, the battle might not have gone as decidedly as it 
 seemed to go in favour of the idealists. 
 
 The thinkers who were most powerfully influenced by the idea 
 of evolution may be most conveniently classified by the countries 
 from which they drew their inspiration. Both the Utilitarians 
 and the Scottish philosophers worked upon native materials, but 
 
 ^Life, 395. 
 W. 12
 
 178 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 some of the evolutionists were inspired by France, others by 
 Germany, while yet a third group were essentially English. 
 
 It will be most convenient to discuss first the Anglo-French 
 school, for it reached maturity earlier than the others, it was 
 most closely akin to the school last reviewed, and it made the 
 smallest breach with the older systems of thought. There is, 
 indeed, truth in the criticisms already quoted from Scherer and 
 Lord Morley; but the evolutionary conception must not be 
 ignored. The law of the three stages is evidently evolutionary, 
 and if this aspect of it had been made prominent it would have 
 been of vast importance. Urvfortunately, the significance of the 
 law as an evolutionary doctrine did not come home to the English 
 Positivists, nor even fully to Comte himself; and though it was 
 this vivifying conception of history which attracted the disciples, 
 both they and their master went astray after that very strange god, 
 the "fantastic decoration." Comte himself was to blame, partly 
 because of the decoration, and partly for a deficiency in expression 
 almost unparalleled among Frenchmen. The fact that Harriet 
 Martineau's paraphrase of the thought — for it is not a translation 
 of the words — of Comte has been rendered into French, and has 
 become one of the principal means by which Comte's own country- 
 men acquire a knowledge of his system, is at once one of the most 
 emphatic compliments ever paid to such a performance, and one 
 of the most trenchant criticisms ever passed upon the writings of 
 a great man. 
 
 Mill's partial discipleship to Comte has been already spoken 
 of; but Mill could not at any time be reckoned as an unqualified 
 Comtist. Among those who may be fairly described as Posi- 
 tivists, not more than four require notice here. They are George 
 Henry Lewes, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau and Richard 
 Congreve. 
 
 Richard Congreve (1818-1899) claims the first place, not as 
 the earliest English Comtist, but as the founder of the Positivist 
 community in London. Comte's works are said to have been 
 first introduced into England in 1837, and Mill certainly read 
 them shortly after that date. A visit to Paris in 1848, during 
 which he met the great philosopher himself, converted Congreve,
 
 PHILOSOPHY 179 
 
 and convinced him so thoroughly that in 1855 ^^ resigned the 
 fellowship he held at Wadham College, Oxford, in order to 
 devote himself to the Positivist religion. Congreve, as his edition 
 of Aristotle's Politics shows, was an excellent scholar, as well as 
 a man of great gifts, and the group which gathered round him 
 included a considerable number of the most talented men then 
 living in England. Soon, however, the cult of Humanity, instead 
 of spreading, began to lose ground, for the sober English mind 
 was alienated by its artificiality. 
 
 None of the other three was absorbed in Positivism as Congreve 
 was. George Eliot had her own creative work to do, and Lewes 
 and Harriet Martineau were both persons of singularly varied 
 activity. George Henry Lewes (181 7-1878) was, indeed, one of 
 the most versatile men of his time. He did so many things that 
 nothing he attempted could astonish those who knew him; and^ 
 Thackeray expressed a general feeling when he declared that he 
 would not be surprised to see Lewes riding down Piccadilly on 
 a white elephant. But the suggestion of mere meaningless eccen- 
 tricity has to be corrected. The versatility of Lewes was the out- 
 come of an exceedingly active intellect, continually on the watch 
 for new ideas and seeking new openings for its energy. Thus he 
 was at once novelist, dramatist, critic, biographer, philosopher 
 and man of science. If he did not attain a high position in 
 all, he reached at least a respectable one, and in biography some- 
 thing a good deal beyond that. The biographical part is the best 
 element in the Biographical History of Philosophy (1845-1846); 
 and the Life of Goethe is an extraordinarily able delineation oi 
 one of the most complex of literary figures. 
 
 A man so alert as Lewes was naturally one of the first in 
 England to master the ideas of Comte; and, with the exception 
 of Mill, he was the first who made any serious attempt to in- 
 troduce those ideas to his countrymen. The Cours de Philosophte 
 Positive was completed in 1842 ; and already in the Biographical 
 History of Philosophy Lewes is a convinced disciple, and a warm 
 advocate of the system of Comte. The book is a stimulating 
 and interesting one, bright and lucid, rather than weighty and 
 profound. The standpoint of the Positivist was not the best for 
 
 12—2
 
 l8o THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 a historian of philosophy. It is notorious that Comte regarded 
 the metaphysical stage as merely a time of transition between the 
 effete theological period and that positive stage towards which 
 humanity was moving. Fully accepting this view, and the de- 
 finition of metaphysics as merely "the art of amusing oneself 
 with method," Lewes was obviously not particulariy well qualified 
 to appreciate the metaphysicians, and it is not surprising that his 
 treatment of them is superficial. 
 
 Lewes remained faithful all his life to the Positivist principles. 
 In Coffite's Philosophy of the Sciences (1853) he devoted himself 
 exclusively to the explication of the system ; and in the last 
 philosophical work published during his life, Problems of Life and 
 Mind (1874-187 9), he shows himself still an ardent Positivist. 
 In his capacity of advocate his gifts told and his defects were 
 unnoticed; so that though he was rather a clever popular expositor 
 than a profound original thinker, no one did more to establish 
 Comtism in England. 
 
 Notwithstanding the fantastic character of the "decoration," 
 the fact that Comte's system is at once a philosophy and a religion 
 made it attractive to a certain class of minds which would have 
 been comparatively indifferent to a mere philosophy. For it is 
 an attempt to satisfy the two-fold need of human nature, and to 
 shun at once the pitfall whereinto the Catholic Church had fallen, 
 and the opposite error of the pure rationalists. The balance 
 between intellect and feeling is redressed in the Religion of 
 Humanity, wherein each finds a place,— Feeling as the superior, 
 Intellect as the subordinate, but a subordinate with rights and a 
 fixed position in the scheme of things. 
 
 Obviously such a system must have been attractive to souls 
 torn asunder in the conflict between the head and the heart. The 
 fact is significant that two of the most conspicuous among the early 
 English Positivists were women; and though Harriet Martineau 
 was of a somewhat masculine type of mind, George Eliot was 
 feminine to the core. They, like many others, wished at once 
 to be true to their reason and to find an object of worship. 
 Perhaps they were not inclmed to enquire very closely how far 
 Humanity, with a big H, was such an object. The disintegrating
 
 PHILOSOPHY l8l 
 
 forces of modem thought were at work on the old beliefs, and 
 some substitute was imperiously demanded. 
 
 It was not Lewes alone, it was also the force of a kind of 
 natural selection which impelled George Eliot towards Positivism. 
 She stands on a wholly different plane from the other two. We 
 may quite justly and fairly label and ticket them " Positivists " ; 
 but we cannot do so in her case. They were primarily philo- 
 sophical, she was artistic. They were people of talent; she, a 
 woman of genius. Positivism was the air they breathed ; it was 
 but an odour in her ampler atmosphere. On that very account 
 its presence there is peculiarly interesting. The history of 
 the spiritual struggles of Mary Ann Evans must be traced 
 elsewhere — the orthodoxy of her early years — the Unitarian in- 
 fluence — the sway of German biblical criticism — the connexion 
 with Lewes, and the importation into her mind of the element of 
 Positivism. We see throughout the working of two contrasted sides 
 of her character. On the one hand is an intellect of the most 
 masculine strength, on the other, a sensibility even tremulously 
 feminine ; on the one hand, a resolute will to probe life and the 
 universe to their depths, on the other, a yearning wish to discover 
 after all that the old faith was true. The translator of the Leben 
 Jesu found comfort at her work in looking at a crucifix which she 
 had fixed over her desk. To such a soul. Positivism was, not 
 perhaps absolutely satisfying, but at any rate more comforting 
 than any other system of philosophy. Philosophical she was 
 bound to be, her intellect demanded it: her emotions imperiously 
 called for a religion. The double demand was more nearly 
 satisfied by the system of Comte than by any other. 
 
 Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), whose useful and able para- 
 phrase and condensation of the Comtist philosophy gives her an 
 important place in the history of Positivism in England, came of 
 a Unitarian family ; and her younger brother, James Martineau, 
 was, throughout his long life, the just pride and the ornament of 
 the sect to which he belonged. Norwich, their place of abode, 
 was, in the end of the eighteenth and the early part of the nine- 
 teenth centuries, the seat of one of those local literary coteries 
 which had not yet been completely swallowed up in London.
 
 1 82 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 It was also the seat of a better known and a far greater school 
 of art. Of the literary coterie the principal figure was William 
 Taylor; and Mrs Barbauld and her niece Lucy Aikin, persons 
 who were then considered by no means insignificant, were drawn 
 thither as occasional visitors. Thus Miss Martineau grew up in 
 an atmosphere wherein literature disputed the pre-eminence with 
 commerce, and under influences which set her in opposition to 
 the prevailing creed of the country. Such influences generally, 
 to the credit of human nature, produce an intense loyalty to the 
 small, and frequently the despised and contemned sect. In the 
 case of Harriet Martineau (for reasons not at all to her discredit) 
 they had the opposite effect. The fact that she was in opposition 
 to the majority of her contemporaries led her to examine the 
 ground upon which she stood. In consequence, doubt succeeded 
 doubt; but the spiritual effect was not that which the process 
 would have had on many masculine and on nearly all feminine 
 minds. There is a ring of jubilation in her record of the final 
 issue. "At length," she says, "I recognised the monstrous super- 
 stition [she means Christianity] in its true character of a great fact 
 in the history of the race, and found myself, with the last link 
 of my chain snapped, — a free rover on the broad, bright, breezy 
 common of the universe \" 
 
 But even for a Harriet Martineau the "breezy common of the 
 universe " proved a little cold and comfortless. There is ample 
 evidence that, in spite of the masculine strain in her intellect, 
 she had the clinging feminine nature too. If she could not find 
 much of a God in heaven, she was skilful in fashioning gods on 
 earth, — and also demons, for she had many pet aversions. Now 
 mesmerism, which had cured her physical ailments, was the 
 object of worship ; now it was the wonderful Mr Atkinson, whose 
 somewhat ordinary intellect, seen through the vapours of her 
 imagination (not the brightest of her faculties), was magnified to 
 gigantic proportions and clothed in the splendours of the rainbow. 
 What could be more natural than for a person like Miss Martmeau 
 to turn for comfort to a philosophy which was also a religion? 
 
 * Autobiography t i. 1 16.
 
 PHILOSOPHY 183 
 
 Miss Martineau did so with a zeal sufificient to carry her through 
 her toilsome task of translation and condensation, which was 
 completed in 1853. The place given to emotion, the idea of 
 service to humanity as a duty, the insistence upon unity in the 
 world and in human nature, — in a word the religious spirit of the 
 Comtian philosophy, was the thing which made the "breezy 
 common of the universe " more home-like and habitable. 
 
 An interesting but not an attractive personality is that of 
 Harriet Martineau. "Dogmatic," "hasty," "imperious," W. R. 
 Greg has called her; and the adjectives are well chosen. The 
 judgments upon contemporaries recorded in the Autobiography 
 bear that stamp; and they are moreover as a rule uninstructive 
 and shallow. Nevertheless, Miss Martineau compels respect by 
 reason of her force, her earnestness, her indomitable activity and 
 her dauntless courage. Further, she could at times turn a very 
 different face to the world. A lady so tender and pious as 
 Caroline Fox praises Deerbrook (the best of Miss Martineau's 
 stories — so admirably constructed out of commonplace materials) 
 as "a brave book," and one which "inspires trust and love, 
 faith in its fulness, resignation in its meekness." Surprising as 
 these words are with reference to a book by Harriet Martineau, 
 they are aptly applied to Deerbrook. On a first impression it is 
 not less surprising to learn that she was a sufferer for a book 
 which was judged to be too favourable to the Catholics. Dickens 
 declined her story. The Missionary, for Household Words, because 
 he objected to publishing anything in their favour. 
 
 Miss Martineau's literary career was an active and prolific 
 one. Besides the books already mentioned, she wrote several 
 works of fiction, numerous tales illustrative of political economy, 
 several books and pamphlets on questions of government and 
 economics, two works on the history of England during the 
 period of her own life, a number of volumes on miscellaneous 
 subjects, and an ambitious but not profound work on Eastern Life, 
 Present and Past (1848), the purpose of which was to illustrate the 
 origin and rise of the Egyptian, Hebrew, Christian and Moham- 
 medan faiths. Perhaps the most interesting of all these works 
 are the Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-1834). They are
 
 l84 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 a collection of tales illustrating the principal doctrines of political 
 economy as they were then understood. Miss Martineau was led 
 to form the plan of this work by the discovery that in certain 
 earlier tales which she had written she had been unconsciously 
 teaching political economy. She claims that in the Illustrations 
 she has sacrificed no principle of economics to the exigencies of 
 the story. The claim appears to be well founded ; and the method 
 has the advantage of vividness. The tales were an effective 
 means of popularising the outlines of political economy, and they 
 might still be read with advantage. At the same time, there are 
 inevitable disadvantages in this way of illustrating a science by 
 means of fiction. The systematic development suffers; and in 
 spite of the summary of principles illustrated, some of these are 
 necessarily in danger of being lost in the story. 
 
 Highly gifted as she was, Harriet Martineau lacked the 
 crowning gift of genius, and had she not linked her own with a 
 greater name she might be in danger of oblivion. But her 
 Positive Philosophy of Angus te Comte is a great work, and, for the 
 reason already indicated, it has no small share of originality. 
 She is no mere translator, but an interpreter at the same time. 
 
 The other evolutionary school of foreign parentage has exer- 
 cised a far profounder influence than the Comtists upon English 
 thought, principally because it has been in touch with a far more 
 vitalising form of the doctrine. Tracing descent from Hegel, and 
 in the farther past from Kant, it has been borne along by the 
 most powerful current of modern thought and it has done a great 
 work in familiarising England with that thought. 
 
 Attention has already been called to the extraordinary way in 
 which Mill, Hamilton and their contemporaries missed the real 
 significance of German speculation. In spite of the work of 
 Coleridge and Carlyle, and of the ardent discipleship of Maurice 
 and Sterling, there was still little systematic knowledge of German 
 philosophy and scanty infiltration of its principles into English 
 speculation. It was the English Hegelians who completed the 
 work which Coleridge and Carlyle had begun, and by means of 
 German thought potently swayed the minds of a generation of 
 Englishmen; for even those who have not been disciples have
 
 PHILOSOPHY 185 
 
 been to some degree moulded by their influence. Probably never 
 before has a foreign philosophy (Greek philosophy excepted) been 
 so powerful over England. English Hegelianism was later in 
 developing than the other schools, and the works in which it is 
 embodied are of comparatively recent date. In earlier days it 
 gave a point of view and supplied principles for teaching, but it 
 was rarely reduced to writing. The importance of that point of 
 view and of those principles can be correctly estimated only by 
 those who have been trained first under a system which had them 
 not, and then under that which gave them. Many still alive have 
 had that experience, and they can testify that the result has been 
 nothing less than an intellectual new birth. 
 
 On the threshold it may be well to notice briefly a philosopher 
 who can be identified with no school and who left no followers, 
 but whom it would be unjust to ignore. The literary connexions 
 of James Frederick Ferrier (1808— 1864) are interesting. A 
 nephew of Miss Ferrier the novelist and of Christopher North, 
 he had by birth the right of entry into the literary society of 
 Edinburgh. He was too late, however, to see much of its brightest 
 ornament, Scott. From the first, Ferrier's interest centred in 
 philosophy; and, though it was not till 1854 that he published 
 his Institutes of Metaphysic^ he had long before drawn the atten- 
 tion of the thoughtful by his philosophical essays. One of the 
 things which Emerson in 1844 enjoins Carlyle "not to forget," is 
 to send information about the author of the essay on conscious- 
 ness in Blackwood's Magazine. 
 
 Ferrier, with a touch of patriotic prejudice, described his 
 philosophy as "Scottish to the core"; but, happily for his fame, 
 the accuracy of the description must be challenged, if it means 
 that he is in the direct line of descent from Reid and Stewart, 
 and is an exponent of the philosophy of common sense. That 
 he certainly is not. Among British thinkers, Ferrier has most in 
 common with Berkeley ; for his theory is a form of subjective 
 idealism. But it is Berkeley read in the light of a later day, 
 crossed with German thought and remoulded in Ferrier's own mind; 
 so that if by the phrase "Scottish to the core," Ferrier meant 
 to claim that his philosophy was essentially original, the claim is
 
 1 86 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 well founded. There are elements in him not only of Berkeley, 
 but of Spinoza, of Kant and of Hegel. But Ferrier was far too 
 powerful merely to reproduce the thought of another man. 
 Nothing passes unchanged through the alembic of his mind. 
 Further, there was an originality even in his borrowings from the 
 Germans. He was perhaps the first of the professional philo- 
 sophers to enter into the spirit of German thought; and the 
 Institutes of Metaphysic is the earliest systematic work into which 
 that spirit largely enters. The difference between Ferrier's manner 
 of dealing with it and that of Brown or of Hamilton, is a striking 
 indication of the way in which thought was moving. 
 
 Ferrier had perhaps a finer gift for metaphysical speculation 
 than any man of his time. This was his distinctive sphere ; and 
 it is largely for this reason that he is so much less known and has 
 been so much less influential than other men who were certainly 
 not his superiors in genius for speculation. No British thinker 
 has had less than Ferrier of that practical instinct which has been 
 noticed in Mill, Pure Being was a conception not too abstract 
 for him, and he was content to breathe that rarefied air not merely 
 for a moment but always^ Such a devotion to unpractical con- 
 ceptions is a thing which England does not readily forgive ; and 
 for that reason this bold, subtle and original thinker, in spite of 
 the brilliancy of his style, has been recognised by and has been 
 influential over only a handful of specialists. 
 
 The English Hegelians had their home originally at Oxford, 
 where the most influential of them was Jowett, some aspects of 
 whose work have been noticed already in the chapter on the 
 theologians. In thought, Jowett was an eclectic. At no period 
 of his life was he disposed to bind himself to any party, creed 
 or faction in philosophy, and least of all in the later stages, 
 when his aversion from dogmatic systems became exaggerated to 
 a fault. But though he would have objected to being called a 
 Hegelian, it was the background of Hegelian and Kantian thought 
 which gave life to his teaching, which made his commentaries 
 on Thessalonians, Galatians and Romans stimulating when they 
 first appeared, and which gave pregnancy to his introductions to 
 Plato. And for a long time Hegelianism had a most powerful
 
 PHILOSOPHY 187 
 
 hold upon Jowett In 1845 he writes to a friend with reference 
 to his study of Hegel : " One must go on or perish in the attempt, 
 that is to say, give up Metaphysics altogether. It is impossible 
 to be satisfied with any other system after you have begun with 
 this'." 
 
 Jowett's most important work, the translation of the Dialogues 
 of Plato (187 1 ), has been subjected to a good deal of rather 
 carping criticism, the main outcome of which is that it is not 
 ideally well-adapted for the purposes of a " crib." The sufficient 
 answer is that Jowett never meant it for that purpose, and that it 
 is something far greater, a noble rendering for the English reader 
 of one of the greatest writers of antiquity. There have been 
 many men superior to Jowett in minute accuracy of scholarship ; 
 but if there have been any superior to him in the power to 
 reproduce the meaning of a great author, they have unfortunately 
 hidden their light. We could spare many discussions on points of 
 grammar and verbal criticism for a few more renderings such as 
 that of the Dialogues of Plato. Thanks to Jowett, Plato is a 
 classic of the English language as well as of the Greek; and 
 whatever may happen to the study of Greek, his tame and in- 
 fluence are secure as long as the English language lives. Taking 
 the translation and the introductions together, with their charm 
 of style and their mass of suggestive thought, this work may 
 fairly be ranked as one of the greatest contributions to English 
 speculation. 
 
 The translation was not Jowett's only service to the memory 
 of Plato. Perhaps his greatest achievement as a teacher was the 
 introduction of the Republic into the schools of Oxford, where 
 previously the only Greek philosophy studied had been the Ethics 
 and Rhetoric of Aristotle. Jowett was evidently drawn to Plato 
 by a kind of natural attraction ; and this affinity partly explains 
 the wonderful success of the translation. That success led him 
 on to the translation of others with whom he was less in sympathy, 
 and whom he failed to handle with equal skill. Neither his 
 Thucydides (1881) nor his Politics of Aristotle (1885) will bear 
 
 ^ Life, i. 92, n.
 
 1 88 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 comparison with the translation of Plato. The latter was both 
 a strange and an unfortunate choice of subject. Apparently 
 he who is born a Platonist cannot be an Aristotelian. Jowett 
 was unsympathetic towards the thought of Aristotle; and he 
 found in Aristotle none of those fine turns of phrase which 
 gave scope in Plato to the translator's skill in the manipulation 
 of language. 
 
 Many, like Leslie Stephen, have been puzzled to explain the 
 admittedly great influence exercised by Jowett over English 
 thought in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is objected 
 that his original writings are comparatively scanty, and that it is 
 impossible to point to any great thought which was emphatically 
 his own. He had a great reputation in philosophy ; yet, it is said, 
 the answer to the question, "Is any phase of speculation 
 marked by Jowett's personal stamp?" must be in the negative. 
 Three suggestions may be made towards the solution of this 
 difficulty. The first is that it is a mistake to judge Jowett in his 
 character of author wholly or even chiefly by his original writings. 
 He is emphatically a translator, the greatest of his time and one 
 of the greatest of all time ; and he who successfully naturalises in 
 another language such a classic as Plato, performs a service 
 greater than the production of original work of the second class. 
 Secondly, although Jowett has not left his own stamp on any 
 phase of speculation, although he has not even affiliated himself 
 to any school, he has here also performed a service analogous to 
 that of translation. Almost in spite of himself the atmosphere of 
 Hegelianism clung to him. It was under his shadow that the 
 English Hegelian school grew, and among his pupils were its 
 leaders' found. Herein Jowett served his generation better than 
 he knew. German thought, in contrast with the hardness of 
 Benthamism, and the aridity of Hamiltonianism, was like romance 
 in the sphere of metaphysics. There it subserved the same 
 function as that mysticism which had overspread religion and 
 poetry, painting and architecture. It was the proper antidote 
 to the merely reactionary mediaevalism of the Oxford Movement. 
 
 ' With the exception of Dr Hutchison Stirling, the author of the Secret of 
 Hegel.
 
 PHILOSOPHY 189 
 
 This fitness of his teaching to time, place and circumstance goes 
 far to explain the influence of Jowett. 
 
 The third suggestion is that Jowett's influence was primarily a 
 personal influence exercised over young men ; and it was strongest 
 in the days when he was simply tutor and not yet Master of 
 Balliol. His conception of education had some of the character- 
 istics of his translation of Plato. He was not indifferent to 
 scholarship, but he did not put it in the first rank. He conceived 
 a college to be a place for the training of men for life and for the 
 service of their fellow-men. So far as the proper basing of ovv 
 and the true doctrine of the enclitic Sc helped to that end, he was 
 interested ; beyond that point, he cared little. The realisation of 
 this conception was the great purpose of his life ; and his success 
 is enough in itself to explain a high reputation. The men who 
 knew him and who felt themselves indebted to him were men whose 
 task it was to mould the thought and the history of the nation. 
 
 Jowett's pupil, Thomas Hill Green (1836-1882), was superior 
 to his master in speculative capacity, and ranks as one of 
 the most powerful English thinkers of the nineteenth century. 
 Unfortunately, a deficiency in the power of expression greatly 
 curtailed the influence of his teaching ; and the shortness of his 
 life prevented him from doing the great work which, given longer 
 time, he could have done. Green's first important production 
 was the edition of Hume's works which he issued (1874-1875) in 
 conjunction with T. H. Grose. The elaborate introduction to the 
 Treatise on Human Nature makes this not merely a fine edition 
 of a classic^ but the most important application which had up 
 to that date been made in English of Kantian and Hegelian 
 principles. Though the uncouthness of the style throws irritating 
 difficulties in the way of the reader, those who have the patience 
 to overcome them reap their reward. Most of Green's other 
 works were published posthumously, the greatest of them all being 
 the profound Prolegomena to Ethics (1883). 
 
 Mill's philosophy was dominant in England when the Oxford 
 philosopher began his work; and though Green consistently 
 avoided polemics, an undercurrent of opposition to Mill runs 
 through his writings. He respected and admired the man; but
 
 I90 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 in the Introduction to Hume and in the Prolegomcfta to Ethics, as 
 well as in the lectures on Mill's logic, his dissent from the 
 philosophy is made manifest. He points out the inadequacy of 
 Mill's conception of cause; in the introduction to Hume he makes 
 a somewhat contemptuous reference to the "juggle which the 
 modern popular logic performs with the word 'phenomenon^'"; 
 and from the ethical theory of Utilitarianism his dissent is 
 absolute and unqualified. It is true, he generously recognises 
 the practical value of Utilitarianism. This is the theory, he 
 says, which has given the conscientious citizen in modern Europe 
 "a vantage-ground for judging of the competing claims on his 
 obedience, and enabled him to substitute a critical and intelligent 
 for a blind and unquestioning conformity*"; and he pronounces 
 that "there is no doubt that the theory of an ideal good, con- 
 sisting in the greatest happiness of the greatest number, as the 
 end by reference to which the claim of all laws and powers and 
 rules of action on our obedience is to be tested, has tended to 
 improve human conduct and character'." But nevertheless he 
 utterly rejects the idea of pleasure being the one true end of 
 moral action, and instead places the sumviuin bonum for man 
 in "some perfection of human life, some realisation of human 
 capacities*." The improvement in conduct and character is 
 sufficient in itself, whether it be accompanied with pleasure or 
 not. Both in his metaphysics and in his ethics Green was irre- 
 concilably at variance with the Utilitarians. His function was to 
 substitute for their empiricism an idealistic interpretation both of 
 the universe and of human life. 
 
 Green's philosophy lent itself to purposes which were not his, 
 all the more readily because of his dislike of polemics and his 
 studied avoidance of unnecessary controversy with his contem- 
 poraries. In particular, he carefully abstained from attacking 
 religious dogma, and was remarkably conservative in his attitude 
 towards the Christian faith. The spirit was excellent, but the 
 result has not been altogether happy. There are few symptoms 
 of the state of contemporary English thought more melancholy 
 
 ^ Hutne's Works, i. § 202. * FroUgoiiuiia, }fii . 
 
 ' ibid. 363. * ibid. 390,
 
 PHILOSOPHY 191 
 
 than that afforded by the popiilarit}' which is enjoyed by the 
 very peculiar "Germanism" of the modern High Church school. 
 For much of this Green is indirectly responsible. It grew up 
 under the shadow of his authority ; its essence is a perversion of 
 his ideas ; and the natural conclusion is that plainer speech on 
 his part would have gone far to prevent it. 
 
 Green's contemporary and friend, Edward Caird (1835-1908), 
 was unquestionably superior to the great Oxford professor as a 
 teacher and writer, though not in originality and power. It was 
 somewhat later in his case than in Green's before the impact of 
 his work began to be felt outside the college class-room. His 
 first independent publication was A Critical Accoutit of the Philo- 
 sophy of Kant (1877), a work afterwards revised, expanded and 
 completed in The Critical Philosophy of Kant (1889). Among his 
 later works The Evolution of Religion (1893) and The Evolution 
 of Theology in the Greek Philosophers (1904) are specially worthy 
 of note. The former in particular is among the profoundest as 
 well as the most readable works dealing with the philosophy of 
 religion in the English language. 
 
 Caird had a marvellous gift of exposition. He was perhaps 
 the greatest teacher of his generation ; at least it is safe to say 
 that he had no superior. And greater than any of his printed 
 works is the personal influence which he wielded, first at Glasgow 
 as professor of moral philosophy from 1866 to 1893, and after- 
 wards at Oxford as Master of Balliol College from 1893 to 1907. 
 In the former place especially his influence over the successive 
 generations of students was extraordinary. The situation was 
 striking. The Scottish philosophy, though discredited, was not 
 yet dead ; and local prejudice told, of course, against the repre- 
 sentative of the foreign system. Notwithstanding this, Caird won 
 to himself year after year the allegiance of all who were capable 
 of forming a judgment on the points at issue. He seldom or 
 never attacked the dying school. He was content calmly and 
 temperately to express his own views, leaving his teaching to 
 germinate in the minds of his students as surely as the seed 
 germinates in the earth. A similar reserve and temperance 
 marked his attitude towards popular religious doctrines. The
 
 192 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 philosophy he taught was profoundly religious, but yet it was a 
 most powerful solvent of the dogmas which were still taught from 
 the Scottish pulpit. This was dimly felt with respect to the 
 teaching of both the brothers Caird. They went calmly on their 
 way, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left, uttering 
 hardly a word of direct criticism, and yet surely and not slowly 
 making the retention of the old beliefs in the old form impossible. 
 The change in the religious beliefs of Scotland within the last 
 generation has probably been due to Edward Caird in a greater 
 degree than to any other single cause; for the men whom he 
 taught became themselves, in one way or another, teachers. If 
 this had been all, Caird himself would have deplored the result of 
 his own teaching. Fundamentally, his mind was anything but 
 sceptical. A purely negative result he considered always incom- 
 plete, and sometimes possibly worse than useless. But he knew 
 that in this case the negative result was inevitable : if not 
 philosophy, then science would surely bring it about. Quietly, 
 therefore, but with unhesitating firmness, he brushed aside the 
 familiar plea on behalf of the simple faith of the simple soul, and 
 went on labouring, not to achieve a negative, but for the sake of 
 the positive beyond. Idealism, he believed, was the antidote to 
 the materialistic poison of the age ; and for twenty-seven years he 
 persevered in inviting his countrymen to abandon a "common 
 sense " which could give no account of itself, to strike out boldly — 
 if we may borrow Carlyle's metaphor — for the distant shore of 
 truth, and to show their faith, not by a parrot repetition of belief 
 in the incredible, but by staking all on the existence of that shore, 
 even though they could not see it. 
 
 Caird's mind was essentially historical. Unlike Ferrier, he 
 never dwelt long in the regions of Pure Being. He loved best to 
 instil his own teaching through the medium of an examination of 
 the thinkers of the past. Hence, for example, his examination 
 of Comtism, his enquiry into the theology of the Greek thinkers, 
 his critical examination of Kant himself In all cases he was 
 admirably fair-minded. He was more prone to discover agreement 
 than difference — sometimes, it may be, by giving unconsciously 
 some twist to the philosophy he was examining. In this respect
 
 PHILOSOPHY 193 
 
 the difference between him and Green is wide. Green brings 
 out his own thought by setting it in opposition to that of the 
 thinker he is criticising ; so much so that, in the case of Hume, 
 the hasty reader may occasionally be tempted to ask whether it 
 was worth while elaborately to examine a philosopher with 
 whom the critic had little in common. Not so in the case of 
 Caird : the surprise is rather to discover how much there is in 
 common between the most diverse systems. 
 
 Few philosophers have written so well as Caird. His style 
 often gives an appearance of simplicity to ideas which are really 
 difficult. The work on Kant is, it is true, rather heavily loaded 
 with technicalities ; but this charm of style is certainly a feature 
 of Caird's later writings. For he had the literary instinct as well 
 as the philosophical ; and he had the wisdom to diversify his 
 studies in abstract thought with studies in the poets. He seems 
 to have felt it necessary to justify to himself his literary studies 
 by some association with philosophy ; but for all that, the literary 
 interest is unmistakable in the essays on Dante and Goethe, 
 Wordsworth and Carlyle. 
 
 The distinguished Unitarian, James Martineau (i 805-1 900), 
 cannot be classed among the EngHsh Hegelians, but nevertheless 
 he may conveniently be noticed in company with them. While 
 he differed from them in philosophic principle and method, he 
 agreed with them in opposing the agnosticism of the time, and 
 like them too he may be said to owe himself to Germany. In 
 common with many other thinkers of the nineteenth century, 
 Martineau dates "a new intellectual birth" from a visit to the 
 country of Kant and Hegel. Martineau began his career as a 
 Unitarian minister. In 1841 he became professor of mental and 
 moral philosophy at Manchester New College, in which office he 
 found himself a colleague of Francis William Newman (i 805-1 897), 
 a man who, from a widely different starting-point, moved to a 
 position not dissimilar to that of Martineau. Newman, however, 
 though a person of remarkable gifts, will be remembered chiefly 
 for the contrasts he affords to his greater brother. His Phases of 
 Faith (1850), indeed, retains the interest which must always belong 
 to a sincere account of spiritual experiences ; but its predecessor, 
 
 w. 13
 
 194 'fHE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 The Soul (1849), which was enthusiastically welcomed by 
 Martineau among others, is hardly remembered. On the other 
 hand, unfortunately for Newman, the ill-advised translation of 
 Homer cannot be forgotten as long as Arnold's On Translating 
 Homer is read. 
 
 Though he remained to the end a member of the Unitarian 
 body into which he was born, Martineau traversed a long range 
 of thought in the course of his career. The scientific bias 
 which was originally given to his education — he was to be a civil 
 engineer — clung to him for some time and made him attach him- 
 self to the Utilitarians. Nevertheless, in his first book, the 
 Ratio7iale of Religious Inquiry (1836), which was spoken of, with 
 some extravagance of praise, as one of the most wonderful works 
 of the time, he expressed the view that those who did not believe 
 in the miracles recorded in the Gospels ought not to be called 
 Christians. If in later years he became more religious he also 
 became more liberal, for the passage in which this opinion was 
 expressed was ultimately struck out. It was a sense of the ethical 
 inadequacy of the empirical school which led him to abandon 
 determinism and to revise his conception of causation'; and a 
 furlough of fifteen months, in 1848- 1849, spent largely under Tren- 
 delenburg in Berlin, completed the process which was already 
 begun. He studied chiefly Plato and Aristode, but they had the 
 effect of lifting " the darkness from the pages of Kant and even 
 Heger." " The metaphysic of the world had come home to me," 
 says Martineau, ** and never again could I say that phenomena, in 
 their clusters and chains, were all, or find myself in a universe 
 with no categories but the like and unlike, the synchronous and 
 successive '." 
 
 This is the vital change which links Martineau with the 
 Hegelians and which colours all his later work. The principal 
 fruits of his thought were Studies of Christianity (1858), A Study 
 of Spinoza (1882), Types of Ethical Theory (1885) and The Seat 
 of Authority in Religion (1890). By these works, with others in 
 the same vein, and by numerous essays, sermons and addresses, 
 
 1 Preface to Types 0/ Ethical Theory, xii. 
 « ihld. xiii. ' i>>^'i'
 
 PHILOSOPHY 195 
 
 Martineau rose to one of the highest positions in the philosophy 
 of the time. He was essentially a moralist. Too broad-minded 
 not to perceive the interdependence of all forms of speculation, too 
 penetrating to misapprehend the importance of the final questions 
 of ontology, his own interests were nevertheless almost wholly 
 ethical and religious, and his investigations into the background 
 of being were somewhat perfunctory. To such investigations he 
 contributed little or nothing of his own; neither was he the disciple 
 of any one school. He was eclectic in his tendency, culling from 
 all sources what suited his own intellect and his emotional nature; 
 and laying for his ethical and religious system a somewhat 
 miscellaneous foundation. But whatever doubt may be felt 
 about the groundwork, the main lines of the superstructure are 
 perfectly distinct. The great conceptions which Martineau up- 
 holds are those of God, freedom and immortality. He strenuously 
 fought against the sensationalism and materialism which the 
 influence of physical science made prevalent in the middle 
 period of the nineteenth century. He contended that without the 
 conception of God there could be no unity in the intellectual 
 nature of man, no moral imperative, no sure foundation for social 
 order. And he maintained his position in English which, though 
 sometimes less terse than it might have been, was always attractive 
 and occasionally poetical. In method perhaps his greatest vice 
 was discursiveness. His mind was remarkably open to suggestions, 
 and he was seldom able to resist the temptation of following 
 out a thought although it only bore indirectly on the main 
 theme. 
 
 Martineau's high reputation was due partly to his great 
 intellectual force, and partly to his lofty character and noble 
 life — " a life," said the remarkable birthday address presented to 
 him in 1888, "which has never been distracted by controversy, 
 and in which personal interests and ambitions have never been 
 allowed to have a place." But partly also it was due to his central 
 position. At an earUer time Martineau the Unitarian would have 
 been anathema to the orthodox ; but while the rank and file were 
 still absorbed in Gorham controversies and Jerusalem bishoprics, 
 the more intelligent saw that the main battle was raging round 
 
 13—2
 
 196 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the central positions, and were glad to welcome an ally who would 
 help to hold these. Martineau's unhappy difference with his 
 sister Harriet showed how far he was from the extreme. No one 
 probably did more effective work than he in opposition to 
 materialism, altruism, positivism, and all the schemes of thought 
 which seemed to threaten the very existence of Christianity ; and 
 therefore many, even of those who found all the truth within the 
 limits of the Thirty-nine Articles or the Westminster Confession, 
 learnt to look upon him as the champion of a cause which was 
 theirs as well as his. 
 
 Of even wider and deeper significance than either the French 
 or the German was the native English school of evolution ; but 
 this will be best treated in the chapter on science, because by far 
 the greatest man of the school, Charles Darwin, was a man of 
 science; and the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, who is second 
 only to him in importance, is closely linked to science. 
 
 After the evolutionists, no recent philosophic writers are 
 
 more interesting than those who treat of the philosophy of history. 
 
 They belong to a class sparsely represented in the literature of the 
 
 past Vico has been called the father of the philosophy of 
 
 history ; Montesquieu's great work, D Esprit des Lois, is one of 
 
 the classics of the subject ; more recently, Hegel had thrown the 
 
 light of his genius upon it in a series of lectures which have 
 
 profoundly influenced subsequent thought. But there was as yet 
 
 no beaten path; only a few choice spirits had perceived the 
 
 possibility of a philosophy of history. Gradually, however, the 
 
 imperative need for it was forced upon men by the enormous 
 
 and unmanageable accumulation of materials, under the load of 
 
 which intelligible and intelligent history was in danger of being 
 
 smothered. The need was felt first in the sphere of law, and 
 
 Austin's work was an attempt to satisfy it. The whole school of 
 
 the Benthamites felt the need, and especially John Mill, the great 
 
 aim of whose philosophy was to formulate a science of man in 
 
 society. The Comtists were influenced by the same desire. But 
 
 the desire could not be gratified unless some principles could be 
 
 enunciated that would reduce the chaos to order; and accordingly 
 
 the attempt is made to discover such principles. In England the
 
 PHILOSOPHY 197 
 
 principal names associated with this attempt are those of Buckle, 
 Maine, and Bagehot. 
 
 Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862) was one of that small band 
 of men who have devoted themselves through Hfe to the unswerving 
 pursuit of a great ideal. A delicate child, he received but little 
 regular education, leaving school at the early age of fourteen ; and 
 though afterwards he passed a short time under a private tutor, by 
 far the greater part of his vast store of knowledge was accumulated 
 by himself without guidance from anyone. Some have sought to 
 account thus for the deficiencies of Buckle's great work; but there 
 is a good deal of pedantry in this. It is probable that the 
 History of Civilisation gained as much as it lost from the absence, 
 in Buckle's case, of a regular University training. It has an in- 
 describable freshness which is rarely found except in the works of 
 self-taught genius ; recalling, in this respect, Lecky's Rationalism, 
 which, though the writer was regularly trained, was largely the 
 product of self-directed browsings in the libraries of Italy. The 
 death of his father in 1842 left Buckle his own master and, 
 happily, the possessor of a small fortune, which enabled him to 
 follow the bent of his own mind. He read everything he could 
 lay his hands upon, devouring books with a rapidity, and retaining 
 their contents with a tenacity of memory, like that of Macaulay. 
 His capacity for acquisition was enormous : though the irregularity 
 of his education made him rather backward than otherwise in 
 boyhood, by the year 1850 he knew no fewer than nineteen 
 languages, seven of them so that he could either converse in 
 them or write them, and the rest well enough to read them 
 without troubled 
 
 A plan of his great work seems to have been formed in some 
 dim way soon after his father's death; and to the realisation of 
 this scheme the whole of his manhood was given up. He would 
 rarely suffer himself to be diverted even for a moment ; but his 
 admiration for Mill, whom he considered the greatest of living 
 men, led to an exception. On the publication of Mill's Liberty, 
 Buckle reviewed the book in Fraser's Magazine. Mill mentions 
 one of the most outrageous cases of judicial oppression in recent 
 ^ Huth's Life of Biickle, i. 38.
 
 198 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 history, the sentence of twenty-one months* imprisonment pro- 
 nounced by Sir John Coleridge upon a half-witted man named 
 Pooley for writing upon a gate offensive words about Christianity. 
 Buckle, roused to indignation, enquired into the matter, satisfied 
 himself of Mill's accuracy, and attacked Coleridge with a 
 vehemence all the greater because of the prominence of the 
 latter's position. Many of Buckle's own friends doubted the 
 wisdom of his attack; but he held his ground. 
 
 Like many another explorer in an untravelled world, Buckle 
 found the margin fade before him. In 1852 he thought himself 
 on the verge of publication ; and in 1853, in a letter to Lord 
 Kintore', he explains with admirable clearness the plan of the 
 book as it actually appeared. Already the scope of the work has 
 been greatly curtailed, the idea of a history of civilisation in 
 general giving place to that of a history of English civilisation. 
 It is to be an " attempt to rescue history from the hands of 
 annalists, chroniclers, and antiquaries " ; and the root idea of 
 it is the detection of the laws that govern progress. " I have been 
 long convinced," says Buckle, " that the progress of every people 
 is regulated by principles — or, as they are called, laws — as regular 
 and as certain as those which govern the physical world. To 
 discover those laws is the object of my work." 
 
 The publication in 1857 of the first volume of the History of 
 Civilisation in England raised Buckle at once to a high rank 
 among men of letters. The second volume in 1861 was equally 
 well received. The edition in three volumes, which bears the 
 title. History of Civilisation in France and England^ Spain and 
 Scotland (1866), was posthumous. 
 
 Buckle's work has already passed through two phases in public 
 opinion, and it seems to be entering upon a third. They are phases 
 through which many another great man's reputation has passed. 
 At first, the boldness and originality of the design and the 
 brilliancy of the execution swept readers away ; they thought that 
 the riddle was already read, and that the laws enunciated by 
 Buckle were the veritable laws under which human progress had 
 
 ^ Life of Buckle, i. 63.
 
 PHILOSOPHY 199 
 
 been made. There were hostile criticisms in plenty; but, as 
 Buckle says, " if men are not struck down ' by hostility, they 
 always thrive by it'." The critics were brushed aside, and for a 
 time Buckle passed as a sort of prophet, and the History of 
 Civilisation as an inspired utterance. Then came the reaction 
 which inevitably follows upon excess. Calmer consideration 
 awakened the suspicion that all the incalculable complexity of 
 human history could not be brought under the comparatively 
 simple laws laid down in the History of Civilisation. It was 
 perceived moreover that Buckle was a man of prejudices ; and 
 that, in particular, his account of civilisation in Scotland was 
 vitiated by the anti-ecclesiastical bias of his mind. Hence came 
 an opposite excess; and twenty or thirty years after his death 
 Buckle was as much underrated as he had been at first over- 
 estimated. Of late years there have been signs of a tendency for 
 opinion to settle down in a position intermediate between the 
 two extremes. Mr J. M. Robertson's Buckle and his Critics is a 
 powerful and in many points a successful vindication of the great 
 historian; and it is seen that, after full allowance is made for 
 errors and exaggerations, enough remains to establish a very 
 solid reputation. Buckle was a man of real genius ; and if he has 
 not founded a science of history, he has at any rate formulated a 
 number of very fruitful generalisations. 
 
 As is not infrequently the case, some of the best of these 
 generalisations were among those most fiercely attacked when 
 they were first promulgated. In particular, no doctrine of the 
 History of Civilisation was so vehemently impugned as Buckle's 
 assertion of the superior efficacy of the intellectual to the moral 
 element as a cause of progress. The former, he taught, is dynamic, 
 the latter, static. Buckle was by no means disposed to underrate 
 morality : he held that, for the individual, it was far more im- 
 portant to be moral than to be clever; and he thought that 
 education ought to aim more at the development of character 
 than of intellect ; but when he looked abroad upon history and 
 considered men in the mass, he saw that the great discoveries 
 
 * Life^ ii. 86.
 
 200 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 which had raised the condition of mankind had been the work of 
 intellect. Buckle had the grim satisfaction of being told by a 
 later critic, that this conception, which was vehemently denounced 
 when he first promulgated it, was "a truism." 
 
 Probably nothing has done so much to foster doubt about the 
 soundness of the History of Civilisation as the treatment of the 
 individual; and this is no mere subordinate matter, but a thing 
 absolutely fundamental. If Carlyle's view, that history is essentially 
 biographic, be correct, there can be no " science of history " in the 
 sense in which Buckle used the phrase. These two stand in the 
 most pronounced opposition \ and the fact that Frederick the 
 Great and the History of Civilisation were published contempo- 
 raneously vividly illustrates the danger of laying down general 
 rules as to the thought of any age. In the former, it is hardly too 
 much to say that the history of the whole continent of Europe is 
 centred in Frederick; in the latter we are taught the insignificance 
 of the individual. " In the great march of human affairs," says 
 Buckle, " individual peculiarities count for nothing " ; and he 
 means not only ordinary individuals but the greatest men as well. 
 If this proposition be not true, then it is impossible to reduce 
 history under law; for the individual is incalculable as well as 
 indefinable. If it be possible to merge the individual in the mass 
 and to reason by averages, then the conception of law prevails ; in 
 so far as it is not possible to do so, its scope is limited. 
 
 Buckle had great faith in the statistical method. If we take 
 men one by one, each seems to act in accordance with his own 
 good pleasure. He adopts this profession or that, marries or re- 
 mains celibate, emigrates or stays at home, as seems good to himself. 
 If we widen the view, the soundness of this conclusion seems 
 to become doubtful. It appears that the number of emigrants 
 varies through causes beyond the control of the individual, and 
 that marriages are few or many according as food is dear or cheap. 
 For such reasons as these Buckle argued that the individual could 
 be eliminated. Take a wide enough view, he urges, and it is 
 possible to detect the laws that govern human action, irrespective 
 of the supposed freedom of the individual. Even as regards the 
 average man, it may be doubted whether the argument is valid ;
 
 PHILOSOPHY 20I 
 
 though for many purposes averages yield results sufficiently 
 accurate, and often they are the only means by which results can 
 be attained at all. But with regard to exceptional men the fallacy 
 is obvious. It may be possible to determine the average brain- 
 power of a million men ; but if each man possessed exactly the 
 average, the result would be widely different from that which 
 would follow if one man possessed a thousand times as much as 
 any of his fellows. It is just the exceptional man who makes 
 those intellectual discoveries to which, as Buckle insists, all pro- 
 gress is due. Suppose the French Revolution without Napoleon. 
 And what law of averages shall guarantee a Napoleon ? We take 
 him after he has appeared, and he becomes part of that material 
 from which the average is struck. Perhaps even his brain-power 
 does not appreciably alter the world's average ; but its concentra- 
 tion in one head changes the world's history. There is exaggeration 
 in both extremes, but Carlyle's hero-worship is sounder after all 
 than Buckle's science of history. It is not true that Julius Caesar 
 and Napoleon and Luther and Shakespeare and Newton count for 
 nothing in the great march of human affairs ; and no law has ever 
 been formulated which entitles us to count upon such men 
 appearing when they are needed. No calipers yet devised can 
 take the diameter of a spirit. Averages are often delusive. It 
 would be easy to tabulate the heights of the peaks of the Alps and 
 to strike an average ; but the summit of Mont Blanc would not 
 be a foot the lower, and it would still be the only spot from which it 
 would be possible to overlook all the others. Within a few years 
 of Buckle, Huxley, approaching the problem from a sounder basis 
 of science, writes: "The advance of mankind has everywhere 
 depended on the production of men of genius ; and that produc- 
 tion is a case of ' spontaneous variation ' becoming hereditary, not 
 by physical propagation, but by the help of language, letters and 
 the printing press '." History can never become purely scientific, 
 and the individual can never be eliminated; but on the other 
 hand his presence does not mean the reign of lawlessness and 
 caprice. 
 
 What Leslie Stephen said about Austin and Sir Henry Maine 
 * Life of Huxley y i. 240.
 
 202 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 (1822-1888) might be repeated with regard to the relation between 
 Maine and Buckle; for Buckle's star too shone dimmer after the 
 appearance of the new light. The publication of Maine's Ancient 
 Law (1861) at once established his reputation. It was followed 
 by a series of works bearing upon cognate problems, — Village 
 Communities (187 1), The Early History of Institutions (1875) ^^id 
 Dissertations on Early Law and Custom (1883). The only im- 
 portant work of Maine which stands somewhat apart is his 
 Popular Government {1885). In his other works he deals with 
 the distant past and treats his material in a purely scientific spirit. 
 In Popular Government he turns the mind stored with the 
 thoughts thus accumulated upon the present, and even seeks to 
 forecast the future. It is not surprising that many of those who 
 disliked his unfavourable conclusions as to modern democracy 
 regarded the Popular Government as little better than a political 
 pamphlet. 
 
 Maine's plan is much less ambitious than was Buckle's, and 
 partly for that very reason he has been more successful. He takes 
 for his subject not the whole of civilisation, even in any one 
 country, but only laws and political institutions. These he 
 regards in the spirit of a philosopher : he is not content merely to 
 ask what they are, but he seeks to show their place in life and 
 thought, and to penetrate their meaning by tracing them back to 
 their primitive forms. It is not too much to say that Maine 
 revolutionised jurisprudence by bringing it into organic connexion 
 with history. One of the great merits of his mode of treatment is 
 that it is thoroughly evolutionary. Whether he was consciously 
 influenced by The Origin of Species or not, it is certain that the 
 spirit of that book informs all Maine's works. The reader of 
 Ancient Law is made to feel that, however distant in time the 
 subject under discussion may be, it has a vital bearing upon the 
 present. To this is due much of the interest which Maine never 
 fails to inspire. He has in him nothing of the mere antiquary. 
 The progress from status to contract is just a step in a great 
 process which is still going on ; the study of the village com- 
 munity throws a flood of light on laws actually in force and 
 customs actually followed at the present day. This practical
 
 PHILOSOPHY 203 
 
 aspect of his speculations was characteristic of Maine. He never 
 philosophised purely for the sake of philosophising ; but no one 
 was more vividly conscious that a mere fact was nothing until it 
 was interpreted. One of his highest gifts was his remarkable 
 power of reasoning back from scanty remnants of the past to the 
 system in which they had a place. 
 
 Another of Maine's great merits is the charm of his style, 
 which is even better than Buckle's — as clear^ and more uniformly 
 bright. Scarcely any other writer on juridical subjects is com- 
 parable with him. Macaulay made Indian codification fascinating; 
 but probably only he and Maine have ever performed such a feat. 
 Conceptions which, in writers like Austin, are of the hardest and 
 most arid kind, are in Maine full of interest. The reason is that 
 he always looks at them in relation to the life of the community 
 in which they prevail. It is this which makes Maine's books 
 so eminently readable ; it is the underlying evolutionary con- 
 ception which makes him always sparkling and vivacious. 
 There is strictly no past to him, for the past lives on in the 
 present. 
 
 The youngest of the three, Walter Bagehot (182 6- 1877), is a 
 man whose works do not suggest, to outward view, that unity of 
 aim which characterises Buckle and Maine. He was a journalist, 
 and his writings have something of the multifarious character 
 which is fostered by journalism. But he is too great a man to be 
 treated as a writer of miscellaneous prose ; and when the attempt 
 is made to weigh and measure the importance of the various items 
 of his work, it becomes manifest that his fame must rest on what 
 he accomplished as a publicist. 
 
 Bagehot received his education at University College, London, 
 and afterwards read law with a view to the bar ; but, though he 
 was called, he soon abandoned the intention of making the law 
 his profession, and joined his father, who was a partner in Stuckey's 
 bank. He entered upon this career with zest : " Business," said 
 he, " is much more amusing than pleasure " ; and he is probably 
 the only writer who has ever succeeded in making business 
 amusing even to the reader who is not a business man. It seems 
 clear that his education was for him a fortunate one. If he had
 
 204 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 gone to Oxford or Cambridge, whatever he had gained, he would 
 certainly have been in less familiar touch with commerce and 
 with statesmanship than he was in London. And what specially 
 distinguishes Bagehot is just the breath of real life which he 
 communicates to his treatment of these subjects. On the literary 
 side of his education too he was by no means unfortunate ; for in 
 those days Clough was the head of University Hall, and Bagehot 
 was strongly drawn to him. 
 
 Nearly all Bagehot's work is critical in spirit, but the essays 
 devoted to literary criticism, though they are among the best of 
 the time, rich, suggestive, pointed, and enlivened here and there 
 by a pungent humour, are nevertheless little more than a by-play 
 of his mind. Like all he did, they are philosophical in essence, 
 and rest upon a wholly different foundation from that which 
 underlies the criticisms of Jeffrey and his school. Bagehot always 
 seeks to penetrate to the principle on which a writer's art is based, 
 in the conviction that by it he will be able to explain all special 
 characteristics. This, for example, is the manner of procedure in 
 tHe essay on Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning, or Pure, 
 Ornate and Grotesque Art. Here and elsewhere there is a feeling 
 of abundance about the criticism ; the words seem to flow out of 
 the fulness of the critic's mind ; and wealth makes him careless. 
 His good things are often dropped casually, as the ostrich drops 
 its eggs. It would not be easy to find a more illuminative 
 criticism than his remark that sacred poets thrive by translating 
 the weaker portions of Wordsworth and Coleridge into the speech 
 of women. He is notable too for wise, pregnant maxims: 
 "Though it is false and mischievous to speak of hereditary 
 vice, it is most true and wise to observe the mysterious fact of 
 hereditary temptation." And he is rich in incidental humour, e.g. : 
 "A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk 
 wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself"; or the 
 grotesque description of H. Crabb Robinson: "The nose was 
 one of the most slovenly which nature had ever turned out, and 
 the chin of excessive length, v/ith portentous power of extension." 
 
 The Biographical Studies are even more happy than the 
 literary criticisms. Dealing by preference with statesmen and
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 205 
 
 publicists, Bagehot is here upon the ground which he had studied 
 most minutely. In the subjects he selects, in the praise he 
 bestows or in the censure he passes, the reader may frequently 
 find hints of Bagehot's own likes and dislikes. He admired 
 learning; but he admired still more capacity for affairs and the 
 power to apply knowledge to the practical needs of life. The 
 combination of the two is the secret of his strong admiration of 
 Sir G. Cornewall Lewis. "No German professor," Bagehot de- 
 clares, " from the smoke and study of many silent years, has ever 
 put forth books more bristling with recondite references, more 
 exact in every technicality of scholarship, more rich in natural 
 reflection, than Sir George Cornewall Lewis found time, mind, and 
 scholar-like curiosity, to write in the very thick of eager English 
 life. And yet he was never busy, or never seemed so." But 
 perhaps Bagehot is seen at his best in the essay on Sir Robert 
 Peel, the whole of which is an admirable specimen of shrewd 
 wisdom, while scattered through it are many happy touches of 
 humour. Not the least of his merits is his capacity of expressing 
 in a memorable way truths which are or ought to be familiar. 
 "A constitutional statesman," he tells us, "is in general a man of 
 common opinions and uncommon abilities." We feel that this 
 not only is but must be true. If he were not a man of common 
 opinions, how could he ever gain his position ? if he were not a 
 man of uncommon abilities, how could he escape disaster? Many 
 had blundered round the meaning before Bagehot : it is the 
 essence of the criticism made against not a few constitutional 
 statesmen, that they follow rather than lead, adopt the opinions 
 of the multitude rather than show them something better. But 
 though many had dimly felt the truth, no one had ever expressed 
 it so tersely and so well. 
 
 These essays, however, whether the date of the individual 
 papers be early or late, are of the nature of preparatory 
 studies to the main work of Bagehot's life. He was a publicist, 
 and his most valuable work was economic and political in 
 character. His two greatest books are his English Constitution 
 and his Lombard Street. A third, Physics and Politics (1872), ij 
 sometimes preferred to these; but it is more interesting as a
 
 206 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 symptom than for its intrinsic merits. It is an attempt, not 
 completely successful, to apply the idea of development to 
 politics. Though the scheme is promising the book as a whole 
 is less suggestive than most of Bagehot's writings. 
 
 The English Constitution was published as a series of essays in 
 the Fortnightly Review between May, 1865, and June, 1867; and 
 the essays were collected into a volume in the latter year. Lombard 
 Street : a description of the Motiey Market, first appeared in 1873. 
 These were the subjects upon which Bagehot had been training 
 himself all his life to write, and on them all the wealth of his 
 thought is lavished. He shows in the highest degree the power 
 of writing on great and serious subjects weightily, but not in the 
 least heavily. No writer has ever made the money-market half as 
 attractive as he; there is no book on the English Constitution 
 comparable to his in interest for the general reader. And yet 
 this is not due to superficiality ; rather the opposite. The living 
 interest which Bagehot infuses into economics and constitutional 
 problems alike is due to the fact that he begins by treating his 
 subject as a living thing. He brushes aside the cobwebs of old 
 theory, and asks himself what is the genuine fact beneath. He had 
 himself much of that vivid power of realisation which he justly 
 ascribed to Scott : " If he [Scott] had given the English side of 
 the race to Derby, he would have described the Bank of England 
 paying in sixpences, and also the loves of the cashier." Though 
 the loves of the cashier did not come in Bagehot's way, he wrote 
 in the spirit of this quotation. 
 
 In Bagehot's Lombard Street there is very little about the 
 Bank Charter Act ; but there is a great deal about the operation 
 of financial facts in times of crisis on the minds of merchants and 
 bankers. The human element, not the mechanical one, is the 
 vital thing ; and no system, however plausible, can possibly work, 
 if it fails to take account of that vital thing. Lombard Street owes 
 its impressiveness to the constancy with which the human element 
 is kept in view. It is written in the clearest and simplest style, 
 almost wholly free from technicalities. The concentration of 
 money in banks acts as a bounty on trading with borrowed money, 
 and so produces a " democratic structure of commerce," which
 
 PHILOSOPHY 207 
 
 renders men prompt to seize advantages. Hence, "all sudden 
 trades come to England," because money is readily lent. Hence 
 too comes the extraordinary centralisation of the commercial 
 system of the country, which turns on the reserve of the Bank of 
 England as on a pivot ; so that, in Bagehot's own words, " on the 
 wisdom of the directors of that one Joint Stock Company, it 
 depends whether England shall be solvent or insolvent-" Bagehot's 
 book had an influence such as few economic works have ever 
 produced. It ranks with Cairnes's Slave Power as a demonstra- 
 tion of a particular economic theme ; and the work it did was 
 done once for all. Circumstances have changed, partly through 
 lapse of time, but not a little through the influence of Bagehot. 
 He educated not merely public opinion, but Government and 
 the Bank itself, as to the true position of the Bank of England 
 and its functions and duties. The facts were open to everybody, 
 yet no one understood their true significance till Bagehot explained 
 it. Probably Lombard Street has either averted or mitigated more 
 than one commercial crisis during the generation which has passed 
 since it was written. 
 
 Much the same holds true of Bagehot's discussion of the 
 English constitution. No one has done more than he to get rid 
 of the theory of checks and balances ; and he did so once more 
 because he insisted upon digging down to the fact beneath the 
 show; for he shares the interest he ascribes to science in "stupid" 
 facts. But on the other hand no one knew better than he that 
 sentiment also is a fact. The sound system of finance and the 
 sound constitution must alike act on the imagination. This is 
 necessary in finance, because if all were to insist upon the hard 
 fact — i.e. the solid money — there does not exist enough to satisfy 
 one-tenth part of the claims. It is necessary in politics, because 
 the average man, or the man ignorant and stupid beyond the 
 average, can understand the " august " part of a constitution, for 
 he can see it ; but he cannot understand its operative part, for to 
 do so he must assimilate an abstract idea. The conception of 
 government by a monarch is simple, ior the monarch may be seen 
 in the streets of the capital, and the sceptre and crown are on 
 
 * The italics are Bagehot's.
 
 208 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 show in the Tower of London, to prove that he is not as other 
 men are. But the cabinet is a mere board of gentlemen, without 
 insignia, clothed with no legal powers, theoretically, it may almost 
 be said, non-existent. 
 
 Great originality and independence of mind, imagination, 
 clearness of conception, a vivid style and a power of lucid 
 exposition were Bagehot's special gifts. What he accomplished 
 was due, above all, to his determination to see the truth for him- 
 self, to probe things to the bottom. He took no theory upon 
 trust. Theory told him that the Bank of England was a joint 
 stock bank, like any other : fact convinced him that the Bank of 
 England was indeed a joint stock bank, — but not like any other. 
 The bank which kept the only reserve in the country must 
 necessarily be diflferent from all others. Theory again told him 
 that the constitution of England was a system of balances in which 
 King, Lords and Commons were played off against one another: 
 fact showed him that a body of gentlemen called a Cabinet, 
 unrecognised in the constitution, exercised more power than any 
 one of them. In both cases, so much the worse for the theory. 
 Bagehot follows the guidance of fact, and his readers follow 
 him. 
 
 In Mill, in Harriet Martineau, and in Bagehot notice has 
 already been taken of certain phases of economic theory. No 
 other economist of the period rises to their level in literature, nor 
 does any one rival Mill in eminence in the science of economics; 
 but this form of thought was too characteristic of the time to 
 be passed over without further notice. One economist, Malthus, 
 moved the mind which moved the world; another, Ricardo, 
 though himself a thinker only of the third rank, for half a century 
 wielded an influence which has rarely been exercised even by the 
 greatest. The change in the conditions of industry produced by 
 the introduction of machinery and the improvement of the means 
 of locomotion, rendered inevitable the investigation of economic 
 problems. The development of democracy exercised a remarkable 
 influence upon the character of the theories which resulted from 
 this investigation. For the most striking fact in the history of 
 economics is the change which gradually comes about between
 
 PHILOSOPHY 209 
 
 the beginning of the period and the end. In the beginning, the 
 theorists represent, in the main, the views of triumphant and 
 prosperous capitalism ; in the end, those of the labouring popula- 
 tion have become prominent. In the beginning, the sway of Ricardo 
 is nearly absolute; in the middle, it still prevails, though not with- 
 out challenge ; in the end, his authority is all but absolutely 
 superseded. Mill may be described as a Ricardian in spite of 
 himself. His sympathy with the working classes made him shrink 
 from some of the results of abstract economic theory, and Comte 
 suggested thoughts alien from the Ricardian system. But Mill 
 was essentially an "orthodox," or "classical," or "deductive" econo- 
 mist; he added little to the theory and omitted little from it; 
 if he had even assimilated Adam Smith as completely as he had 
 assimilated Ricardo, he might have found within the bounds of 
 orthodox economics the germs of a more liberal theory. But 
 Mill was among the last of the economists who were in the fullest 
 sense "orthodox." His disciple, John EUiott Cairnes (1824-1875), 
 remained, indeed, firm in the faith, and expounded it with great 
 ability in Sofue Leading Principles of Political Economy newly 
 Expounded (1874); while The Slave Power (1862) is a singularly 
 brilliant monograph and a remarkably successful application of 
 the principles of science to a great practical question. 
 
 Long before Cairnes, however, and before even Mill, there can 
 be detected the beginnings of a revolt against the Ricardian 
 doctrines. Richard Jones (i 790-1855), the successor of Malthus 
 at Haileybury, showed that the celebrated theory of rent held 
 good only under certain conditions, and that what he called 
 "peasant rents" were fixed not by competition but by custom. 
 He may be regarded as a precursor of the historical school, 
 which for thirty years has been steadily gaining ground at the 
 expense of the abstract economists. To this result forces out- 
 side England — the theories of Marx and Lassalle for example 
 — and forces extra-economic contributed. Carlyle poured his 
 contempt upon what he called a philosophy of dirt, and Ruskin 
 followed him with no less vehemence and with greater persis- 
 tency. Under such influences the popular faith in "laws" was 
 shaken, and the historical method began to prevail over the 
 
 w. 14
 
 2IO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 deductive. Vast compilations of facts, like Thorold Rogers' 
 History of Agriculture and Prices in England (1866-1887) and 
 Six Centuries of Work and Wages (1884) are symptomatic; and 
 T. E. Cliffe Leslie (1827?- 188 2) in Essays Moral and Political 
 (1879) expounds the theory upon which men had already begun 
 to act. The general result is the substitution for the old "laws" 
 of a body of teaching far less dogmatic, — teaching imbued with 
 the conviction that, for the most part, economic truth is a thing 
 which varies with degrees of latitude and longitude and is not 
 necessarily the same yesterday, to-day and for ever ; and cautious 
 of asserting anything until abstract reasoning has been confirmed 
 by the appeal to experience. 
 
 Note : — This chapter was in print before the death of the veteran 
 Hegelian, J. Hutchison Stirhng.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 SCIENCE 
 
 If every book were 'literature/ it would be necessary to 
 discuss Bradshaw. Fortunately, there are multitudes of volumes 
 which can be at once and without hesitation dismissed as not 
 coming within the denotation of the word. In many cases, how- 
 ever, there is some difificulty in determining what ought to be 
 included, and what may be safely dismissed as outside the pale. 
 It will probably be agreed that the great majority of scientific 
 works belong to the latter category, and that science in general 
 impinges upon literature only in the same way that every other 
 force which moves humanity does so. But last century was 
 pre-eminently the century of science. Never before was its 
 influence so potent, and never before were so many books 
 written which were literary as well as scientific. Since the 
 beginning of the Victorian era the spirit of science has permeated 
 literature in every department. Its mark is to be seen in poetry. 
 It is seen too in imaginative prose : Ruskin, who declares that 
 he himself might have been the first geologist of his time, reproaches 
 Wordsworth because "he could not understand that to break a 
 rock with a hammer in search of crystal may sometimes be an act 
 not disgraceful to human nature, and that to dissect a flower 
 may sometimes be as proper as to dream over it' "; and, unlike 
 the poet, he bases his own conception of beauty upon scientific 
 study. 
 
 * Modern Painters^ iii., xvii. § 7. 
 
 14—2
 
 212 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 But it is only in men's attitude towards truth and in their 
 conception of the universe that the influence of science can be 
 truly seen. The idea of the reign of law is the work of science. 
 Quite recently, "chance" was not a mere name for our ignorance, 
 but a positive conception. Dimly and confusedly it was felt that 
 there was in real existence a "reign of Chaos and old Night." 
 The winds blew where they listed ; and few conceived that they 
 were as strictly links in the great chain of causation as were the 
 fall of the apple and the rise of water in the Torricellian tube. 
 On reflection, doubtless, all educated men, then as now, would 
 have admitted that every event had a cause ; but they would have 
 been much less sure than we are that the cause must be natural, 
 and they would have had no adequate conception of the "orderli- 
 ness" of nature, of the true "reign of law." They regarded violent 
 breaches of continuity as things of relatively frequent occurrence. 
 It requires an effort to remember that before the publication of 
 Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-1833), the science of geology 
 was taught as essentially "catastrophic." 
 
 The change has been fruitful of results far beyond the bounds 
 of the theses propounded and the propositions established. It 
 has created a tone of mind, a habit of thought, whose influence is 
 by no means limited to science. Science, strictly interpreted, has 
 little to say about the problems of profoundest interest to humanity ; 
 but the spirit and the method of science have influenced the 
 treatment of those problems. Multitudes of things have silently 
 but surely become impossible of belief, not because they have 
 been disproved by science, but because the scientific habit of 
 mind has been fatal to them as sunlight is fatal to the bacillus 
 which loves the dark. In the nineteenth century the battle for 
 freedom of thought was won ; and the very opprobrium formerly 
 attaching to the phrase " free thought," proves how necessary it 
 was to fight it. 
 
 Under such circumstances it is not only relevant and legiti- 
 mate, but essential, to pay some attention to the development of 
 science, particularly in those branches which have been most 
 directly influential in producing this revolution in thought. These 
 are geology und biology, with the kindred science of anthropology.
 
 SCIENCE 213 
 
 It was the change in the former which paved the way for the great 
 development of the latter; and it has been the new ideas originated 
 in the latter which, more than any other single cause, have 
 revolutionised modern thought. 
 
 In the early part of the nineteenth century the science of 
 geology was still in its infancy. Important discoveries had been 
 made and solid work had been done. Werner had done much 
 for mineralogy; Hutton had attempted to explain the earth by 
 the operation of causes still at work ; and William Smith had 
 proved that certain strata were characterised by the presence in 
 them of fossil species not to be found at all in other strata. But 
 the full consequences of this last discovery were not perceived : it 
 remained a fact waiting for its interpretation. Even the founda- 
 tion of the science was hardly yet secure. Though there were 
 uniformitarians before Lyell, the accepted basis of geology was 
 still catastrophic ; that is, in cases of difficulty there was constantly 
 resort to causes, natural indeed but not orderly. Earthquakes 
 and volcanic eruptions and floods (partial ones) are phenomena 
 which actually occur ; but a world shaped by such forces must be 
 regarded as the product of a series of spasms rather than of a 
 process of growth. Substitute for these glacial action, the slow 
 denudation by rivers, subsidence and elevation, and the like, and 
 we have all the difference between order and chaos, between law 
 and caprice. This great change was brought about by Lyell's'l 
 Principles of Geology, which made manifest the immense superiority 
 of the uniformitarian doctrine. The older men were naturally 
 slow to accept the new views ; and Darwin's teacher, the botanist 
 Henslow, while advising him to take Lyell's book with him on the 
 Beagle, warned him against accepting its teaching. The warning 
 was vain ; for at the very first place where he had the opportunity 
 to geologise, Darwin became convinced of the " immense superi- 
 ority " of Lyell's views \ 
 
 Lyell therefore, though he was not the founder of geology 
 even in the modified sense in which Adam Smith is spoken of as 
 the founder of political economy, may be compared to some 
 reformer of a state, some great legislator, a Lycurgus or a Solon, 
 
 * Lije of Darwin, i. 73.
 
 214 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 who has set it on a new path of honour and of progress. To him 
 more than to any other man is due the present state of the science; 
 and to his agency is due the fact that a great domain of nature 
 has been effectually brought under the conception of law. Except 
 Darwin, no one else has contributed so greatly to the revolution 
 of thought which we have ascribed to science. It is not necessary 
 to pronounce him a greater man of science than Faraday, oi 
 Joule, or Kelvin ; but the principles he enunciated did result in 
 a revolution ; theirs were just the orderly development out of the 
 laws of Newton. 
 
 Biological evolution is only the extension to the organic world 
 of the principles which Lyell maintained to be dominant in the 
 inorganic. Lyell had to face the question in his examination of 
 Lamarck, whose speculations at once fascinated and repelled him; 
 for he viewed with great repugnance the theory of the descent of 
 man from the lower forms of life. It was largely this feeling 
 which led to his negative judgment on Lamarck ; and it was this 
 which for nearly a generation kept him in the position he had 
 taken up in the Principles of Geology. Before the appearance of 
 his second great work, the Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of 
 Man (1863), Darwin's book had been published. Lyell, who, 
 with Huxley and Hooker, had been mentally fixed upon by 
 Darwin as one of the judges by whose verdict he would consider 
 his own theory to stand or fall, was a convert ; and the new book 
 necessarily showed the influence of the Darwinian theory. But it 
 also showed the influence of the old feeling of repugnance, and 
 Darwin was disappointed. Lyell could not bring himself to adopt 
 the theory of the descent of man from the brutes, which he saw 
 clearly to follow from the admission of the modification of species. 
 
 Purely as a man of science Hugh Miller (1802-1856) would 
 certainly not deserve mention along with Lyell. He inculcated no 
 new principle; and he was far too impertectly educated to be capable 
 of forming valuable opinions on the great questions opened up by 
 geology ; but on the other hand the rugged stone-mason was not 
 only a writer of vigorous and beautiful English, but was himself a 
 very striking and interesting figure. The materials for his first 
 noteworthy book, the Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland
 
 SCIENCE 215 
 
 (1835), were drawn from his native Cromarty. So in great part 
 were those from which the Old Red Sandstone (1840) was con- 
 structed. Miller's great merit in science was that he gave with 
 entire candour the results of his own observation. He might 
 misinterpret \ his ignorance of anatomy might make some of his 
 conclusions worthless; but he had looked with his own eyes, and 
 he faithfully described what he saw. "I have been," he said 
 towards the close of his life, "an honest journalist. I have never 
 once given expression to an opinion which I did not conscientiously 
 regard as sound, nor stated a fact which, at the time at least, I 
 did not believe to be true." 
 
 Miller had migrated from Cromarty to Edinburgh in 1839 ; 
 and he found himself plunged there into the midst of a theological 
 turmoil. He became pars magna of the Scottish Disruption : 
 Guthrie calls him "the greatest of all the men of the Ten Years' 
 Conflict" except Chalmers. For sixteen years, from 1840 till his 
 death, he edited The Witness^ a paper issued twice a week to 
 advocate the principles of the anti-patronage party, while it 
 incidentally did a service to literature by encouraging such talent 
 as the editor could discover. His next independent book, Foot- 
 prints of the Creator (1849), also bore evidence of theological 
 interests. It was a reply to the Vestiges of Creation^ and an 
 attempt, in opposition to it, to maintain the accepted and orthodox 
 doctrine of special creation as against the form of evolution 
 advocated in the Vestiges. 
 
 The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) remained 
 for a long time anonymous, and it was not till 1884 that the veil 
 was completely withdrawn and the authorship of Robert Chambers 
 (1802-187 1) avowed. Chambers was one of those Scots of active 
 intellect and indomitable industry who have come to be regarded 
 as typical of their country. A thirst for knowledge and an interest 
 in books and in education characterised his brother William as 
 well as himself and determined the direction of their activity. 
 They founded the publishing house of W. and R. Chambers, 
 devoted themselves especially to the diffusion of useful knowledge, 
 and were both active with their own pens. Robert, however, was 
 much the more copious and the more distinguished as a writer.
 
 2l6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 As early as 1823 he published his Traditions of Edinburgh, which 
 made Scott ask with wonder where the boy had got all his 
 information. From that date to the end of his life Chambers 
 produced a prolific crop of histories, biographies, and antiquarian 
 compilations. He is seen at his best in books of the last class 
 such as the Traditions of Edinburgh and the Book of Days. But 
 of all his writings the anonymous Vestiges is the most remarkable. 
 Even if it be not a great book it is a memorable one. Chambers 
 had scarcely the bare elements of the knowledge necessary to deal 
 with the subject. Huxley was irritated by "the prodigious ignor- 
 ance and thoroughly unscientific habit of mind manifested by the 
 writer'." Hooker was amused. Darwin thought the writing and 
 arrangement admirable, but the geology bad and the zoology far 
 worse*. Sedgwick, who wrote a crushing criticism of the book in 
 the Edinburgh Rroiew, ungallantly argued that the author was 
 probably a woman, "partly from the fair dress and agreeable 
 exterior of the Vestiges ; and partly from the utter ignorance the 
 book displays of all sound physical logic ^" On the other hand, 
 Richard Owen refused to write a hostile review, and declared 
 the zoology and anatomy of the book to be on the whole 
 correct*. 
 
 But in spite of all the weight of authority the book was exceed- 
 ingly popular, and by the year 1853 it had passed through ten 
 editions. Nor were the reasons solely those suggested by Sedgwick, 
 — the shallowness of the fashionable reading world and the dogmatic 
 form of the work. Darwin, with his customary justice, points out 
 merits as well as defects. The Vestiges is well written and admir- 
 ably arranged; no reader could fail to understand the central idea; 
 and this is a most striking one. It was not new: Erasmus Darwin 
 and Lamarck had both given expression to the hypothesis of a 
 gradual modification of species by natural causes ; but, for what- 
 ever reason, the ground was now more ready lor the seed than it 
 had been in those earlier days. Chambers deserves for the 
 Vestiges the kind and degree of credit which belongs to one who 
 
 ' Life of Darwin, ii. 188. ^ idid. i. 33. 
 
 * Correspondence of Jilacvey Napier, 49 r . 
 
 * Life of Owen, quoted in Bonn's Enj*llish Rationalism, ii. 12.
 
 SCIENCE 217 
 
 has been among the first to grasp a great conception, and who 
 has had the skill to make it interesting. He could not buttress it 
 with anything like the immense mass of evidence accumulated by 
 Darwin. 
 
 It was not owing to Chambers that the idea of evolution 
 ultimately prevailed, but nevertheless he had very effectually 
 fluttered the dovecots both of science and of orthodoxy. The 
 Vestiges was just the sort of work to rouse a "theologian studying 
 geology " like Miller. The latter, always distinguished for a full 
 share of the perfervidum ingenium of his countrymen, seldom 
 wrote with more force and warmth of conviction than in the Foot- 
 prifiis. His case was strong, his feelings were excited, and he 
 poured out the stores of his observation with energy and effect. 
 It was the last book of geology published during his life. The 
 Testimony of the Rocks (1857) maintained the same thesis j but in 
 the year before it appeared Miller, his mind upset by overwork 
 and by physical suffering due to the hardships of his youth, had 
 died by his own hand. 
 
 Miller's best book is the admirable autobiography. My Schools 
 and Schoolmasters (1854), with its picture of himself, strong-willed, 
 self-reliant, high-minded, indomitable. His is not the least noble 
 figure in that band of leaders of the Disruption, every man of 
 whom commands respect; and though he was not, like the 
 ministers, called upon to surrender home and income, it is safe to 
 say that he had the high sense of duty and the courage which 
 would have nerved him to sacrifice everything for conscience' 
 sake. The picture of such a man drawn by his own hand was 
 bound to be among the treasures of literature. 
 
 Chambers in the Vestiges had broached an idea which in the 
 hands of an incomparably greater man was destined to prove the 
 most influential among all the ideas originated or maintained in 
 the nineteenth century. Few periods in the history of the world 
 have been intellectually more active, none has ever been more 
 copious in literary production, and none has more numerous 
 names of high, if not of the highest, rank. At the close of this 
 century a London daily paper asked its readers to send lists of 
 the ten books, English or foreign, produced during the century,
 
 21 8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 which had been in their judgment most influential. The lists 
 varied greatly, but in one respect they all agreed. In every list 
 returned stood the name of The Origin of Species. No great 
 importance need be attached to plebiscites of this sort; but 
 such remarkable unanimity of judgment as this, after an interval 
 of forty years, comes as near, in weight and authority, to the 
 judgment of remote posterity, as anything we can conceive. And 
 yet the idea of evolution was not new. It had been more than 
 once mooted by men of science ; it can be traced far back in 
 philosophy; and through two distinct sources, Herbert Spencer 
 and the English Hegelians, it was penetrating English thought in 
 philosophic form. 
 
 Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) ought strictly to be classed 
 with the philosophers rather than with the men of science, but 
 his is so peculiarly the philosophy of science and his connexion 
 with the theory of evolution is so intimate, that there is an 
 obvious convenience in discussing him here. It is to him we 
 must go if we wish to see the theory of evolution stretched to 
 the utmost reach, and perhaps beyond it ; and however various 
 may be the views as to the intrinsic worth of his system, all 
 must acknowledge that there is something singularly impressive in 
 the vast scope of his design and in the dauntless persistence with 
 which, thrusting aside all secondary ends and resolutely struggling 
 against feeble health, he devoted his life to its execution. 
 
 The speculative bent of Spencer's mind was for a time 
 obscured by the circumstances of his life. For nearly ten years 
 he acted as a railway engineer ; and as they were the years from 
 1837 to 1846, he saw great part of the process which revolu- 
 tionised the internal means of communication in England. More 
 than almost anything else, such an experience was calculated to 
 make a man contented with what in the common English and 
 not in the Aristotelian sense is called the practical ; but Spencer 
 turned from it at the earliest opportunity. From 1848 to 1853 
 he was sub-editor of the Economist, and for some years after he 
 was an active contributor to the Westminster Review. More and 
 more he devoted himseli to the exclusive study of philosophy, 
 and by the year i860 he had planned the Synthetic Philosophy,
 
 SCIENCE 219 
 
 to the accomplishment of which the rest of his life was devoted. 
 His earlier works, Social Statics (1851), Over-Legislation (1854) 
 &c., may be regarded as preliminary studies for this system, and 
 his Principles of Psychology (1855), in an enlarged and developed 
 form, actually became part of it. As a complete system the 
 Synthetic Philosophy is composed of five parts : First Principles 
 (1862), Principles of Biology (1864-1867), the revised Principles 
 of Psychology (1870-1872), Principles of Sociology (1876-1896) 
 and Principles of Ethics (1892— 1893). 
 
 Most important and also most questionable of all are the 
 First Principles, with their fundamental division into the Un- 
 knowable and the Knowable. Spencer, as is well known, derived 
 this distinction directly from Mansel's Bampton Lectures, and 
 so mediately from Hamilton's philosophy of the conditioned, 
 and it has been already touched upon in the last chapter. The 
 criticisms are obvious and have been frequently repeated. If a 
 thing is unknown what is there to say about it ? If we can even 
 afifirm that a thing exists, surely it is not completely unknown ; 
 and if it were, surely it would be a most unsatisfactory foundation 
 on which to base all knowledge, a flimsy material on which to 
 rest the imposing structure of the Synthetic Philosophy. In- 
 tellectually, the Unknowable = nothing, and Spencer is therefore 
 placed in the absurd position of devoting half of the first and 
 most vital part of his philosophy to sheer vacuity. But of course 
 the Unknowable purely as such would not have furnished material 
 even for a sentence, and Spencer is in reality, though unconsciously, 
 engaged in showing that the Unknowable is not only in some 
 sense knowable but known. It is really a kind of deus ex machina, 
 a new Ding an sich, a substratum for the dance of phenomena, 
 whose dim tenuity is an advantage to the philosopher; for from 
 such very raw material anything whatever may be fashioned. 
 
 The whole philosophy of Spencer is really contained in the 
 First Principles, but it is obvious that these principles are im- 
 portant to him only for the sake of the subsequent parts. His 
 real design is to trace the operation of the single principle of 
 evolution from the simplest to the most complex forms; and hence 
 obviously the progress from biology to psychology, sociology and
 
 220 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 ethics. Darwin's design was larpje, but he confined himself to 
 the origin of species ; he had nothing to say about the origin of 
 life, he never professed to be master of any principle which would 
 show how inorganic matter became organic. But Spencer believed 
 that he could account for everything by means of the single law 
 of the persistence of force. He regarded evolution as " the law 
 of the continuous re-distribution of matter and motion " ; a law 
 which governs the inorganic equally with the organic, and which, 
 we are to understand, continues unchanged in essence from the 
 beginning of the universe to the end, if the universe can be said 
 to have either beginning or end. If this could be shown, it would 
 be a triumph which would dwarf the achievements even of Darwin 
 and Newton. But in point of fact, though the scheme of the 
 Synthetic Philosophy is nominally complete and the ten volumes 
 originally promised are all in existence, there is really a gigantic 
 gap in the system : there is no attempt to trace the evolution of 
 the inorganic into the organic. Spencer excused this omission 
 on the plea that the matter was less pressing than that of the 
 higher grades of evolution; but the plea will not bear examination. 
 For a philosophy \vhich explains all things as the outcome of one 
 continuous process, it is just this which is the most pressing of 
 all. Others as well as Spencer could show good grounds for 
 believing that the more complex forms of life had been evolved 
 from simpler forms, and some have done it more convincingly 
 than he. But there was and is no plausible theory to account 
 for the transition from that which has not life to that which has. 
 Huxley towards the close of his life declared his belief that the 
 gap would ultimately be bridged ; but this was an act of faith, and 
 he confessed that the feat had not yet been done. Biologists, 
 then, were groping in the dark in vain ; and the only rational 
 explanation of Spencer's omission to throw light upon the problem 
 is that he had none to throw. Here, therefore, at the very founda- 
 tion of his philosophy, lies an immense assumption. The living 
 and the lifeless are still two severed worlds, and the attempt to 
 explain the universe on mechanical principles is so far foiled. 
 
 Behind evolution itself there lies, for Spencer, the Persistence 
 of Force, from which he says the phenomena of evolution have
 
 SCIENCE 221 
 
 to be deduced. On this point Professor Ward's criticism seems 
 to be unanswerable : "So far from accounting for all the phenomena 
 of evolution, the doctrine of the persistence of energy alone will 
 not account for a single one. The celestial, organic, social, and 
 other phenomena which make up what Mr Spencer calls cosmic 
 evolution are so many series of qualitative changes. But the 
 conservation of energy is not a law of change, still less a law of 
 qualities. It does not initiate events, and furnishes absolutely 
 no clue to qualitative diversity. It is entirely a quantitative law. 
 When energy is transformed, there is precise equivalence between 
 the new form and the old; but of the circumstances determining 
 transformation and of the possible kinds of transformation the 
 principle tells us nothing. If energy is transferred, then the 
 system during work loses precisely what some other part of the 
 universe gains; but again the principle tells us nothing of the 
 conditions of such transferences'." 
 
 It is singular that the century which, of all in human history, 
 has witnessed the greatest development of specialised knowledge, 
 should also have produced two of the boldest of encyclopaedic 
 thinkers. Comte in France and Spencer in England without 
 hesitation took all knowledge for their province, and the very 
 audacity of their attempt awed contemporaries and helped to 
 win for them a position which can never be wholly lost. For 
 there is an element of greatness in the very magnitude of their 
 schemes, and even if their doctrines were completely rejected 
 the mere fact that they were able to conceive them is a proof 
 of rare endowment. But time has certainly obscured the fame 
 of Comte, and it seems to be in process of obscuring that of 
 Spencer too. Men begin to suspect that the strain put upon 
 persistency of force is greater than it will bear, and that the word 
 evolution is pronounced like a sort of magic incantation. The 
 whole process is suspiciously simple ; and when we ask what has 
 really been explained by this deduction of the universe from the 
 law of the persistence of force, we find that the true answer is, 
 Nothing whatever. Life is as much a mystery as ever; we do 
 not know how it originates or what it is. The process is not only 
 * Naiuraliiin and Agnosticism, i. 21^-214.
 
 222 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 not explained, it is not even described: there is only the assertion, 
 wrapped in a haze of vague technical or fuasi-technical words, 
 that the process has taken place. How, why, under what impulse, 
 these are questions to which there is really no answer. 
 
 Spencer, it may be suspected, falls between two stools. Living 
 in an age of men of science, he is not sufficiently scientific ; the 
 author of a new theory of the universe, he is not sufficiently 
 metaphysical. It is remarkable that he does not satisfy the 
 specialists either on the one side or on the other. Literary men 
 like R. L. Stevenson and Lafcadio Hearn are impressed by him : 
 the latter has no doubt that Spencer is the wisest man in all the 
 world : his whole intellectual life moves round the Synthetic 
 Philosophy like a satellite round its sun. So too he commends 
 himself to a people like the Japanese, who are just beginning to 
 familiarise themselves with the conceptions in which the western 
 world has been steeped for generations. When they turn to the 
 West for advice, it is of Spencer that they ask it, — and they get 
 much that is extremely sagacious and far-sighted. But with the 
 specialists the case is different. Men like Professors Ritchie and 
 Ward show the unsoundness of Spencer's metaphysic; physicists 
 and biologists lament that he is not more accomplished in science. 
 " If," says Darwin, " he had trained himself to observe more, 
 even if at the expense, by the law of balancement, of some loss 
 of thinking power, he would have been a wonderful man\" With 
 all his defects he was a wonderful man, and if he has left the 
 riddle of the universe unread, he has but failed in common with 
 all who have attempted the task. 
 
 The proverb, the half is greater than the whole, could hardly 
 be better illustrated than by a comparison of Spencer with Darwin. 
 Partly because he attempted less the latter accomplished much 
 more. The two great evolutionists were not much indebted to 
 one another. Already, before the publication of T^e Origin of 
 Species, Spencer was an evolutionist, and in the early fifties, 
 when Darwin was absorbed in the work, Spencer was one of the 
 very few whom he found already convinced of the truth of the 
 principle. In consequence Spencer's evolutionism retains to the 
 
 * Life of Darwin, iii. 56.
 
 SCIENCE 223 
 
 end traces of its Lamarckian parentage. On the other hand, 
 Darwin of course was in no sense indebted to Spencer for the 
 idea. It had dawned upon him before he ever knew Spencer 
 and before Spencer had published anything upon the subject. 
 But apart from the question of originality, what distinguished 
 Darwin from all others who had handled or who were handling 
 the idea, was his explicit theory of the manner in which evolution 
 had operated, and the masterly marshalling of evidence in support 
 of it. 
 
 Charles Darwin (1809-1882) had through his grandfather, 
 Erasmus Darwin, a kind of hereditary right to the theory of 
 evolution. His love of science was early developed. The seven 
 years which he spent at Shrewsbury Grammar School, where the 
 boys nicknamed him "Gas" on account of his chemical ex- 
 periments, were almost wasted, because the school was classical 
 and set no value on gas. His loathing of the sight of blood 
 turned him from his father's profession. Two operations which 
 he witnessed (before the days of chloroform) " fairly haunted him 
 for many a long year." He afterwards lamented as an " irreme- 
 diable evil " that he had never learnt to dissect. 
 
 After two years at Edinburgh, therefore, he was sent in 1828 
 to Cambridge, with the object of preparing to be a clergyman. 
 If there be truth in phrenology he would have been a good one, 
 for he was pronounced in after years to possess *' the bump of 
 reverence developed enough for ten priests." The results he had 
 carried up from Edinburgh were chiefly negative. Of the lectures 
 there, he says some were "fearful to remember," others "in- 
 credibly dull"; and he shunned lectures as much as possible at 
 Cambridge, though he liked those of Henslow on botany. At 
 the end of three years he took a humble pass degree; and he 
 declares the time at Cambridge to have been wasted, academically, 
 as much as that at Edinburgh. He had, however, been training 
 himself all the time. It is clear that the man of science is some- 
 times born, as well as the poet. At this period of his life Darwin 
 had other tastes besides the love of science. Though he was 
 utterly destitute of ear, his "backbone would sometimes shiver" 
 listening to the anthem in King's College Chapel ; and he read
 
 224 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the poets, and especially Shakespeare, with appreciation. He 
 deeply regretted the complete loss of these tastes in later years. 
 But his master-passion was science. The books by which he was 
 most profoundly influenced were scientific, — Humboldt's Personal 
 Narrative and Herschel's Introduction to the Study of Natural 
 Philosophy. At Edinburgh he had gone trawling with the New- 
 haven fishermen, and by the law which draws like to like he 
 had become the friend of Macgillivray the ornithologist. At 
 Cambridge he was a collector of beetles, and even then showed 
 a certain originality in devising new methods of capture. 
 
 The turning-point in Darwin's career was his selection as 
 naturalist on the Beagle. He owed the post to the friendship of 
 Henslow; and he almost lost it owing to the shape of his nose. 
 Fitz-Roy, he says, " doubted whether any one with my nose could 
 possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyaged" 
 Fitz-Roy, however, resolved to risk taking the owner of the nose, 
 and in December, 1831, Darwin embarked on the memorable 
 voyage from which he returned five years later with an immense 
 mass of fresh information, and with the germs of the theory of 
 evolution seething in his brain. He had laboured and thought 
 so intensely that on his return his father, whom he describes 
 as the most acute observer he ever saw, remarked that the very 
 shape of his head was altered^. 
 
 Darwin's own development was now nearly complete, and, 
 for the future, the landmarks of his life are the dates of the 
 publication of his books. For five or six years after his return 
 he lived principally in London. In 1839 he married; and in 
 1842 he removed to Down, in Kent, his home for the rest of his 
 Ufe. Unfortunately, the voyage which had done so much for him 
 intellectually had seriously impaired his constitution. For the 
 rest of his life he was more or less an invalid, and all his work 
 was accomplished under that disadvantage. 
 
 1 Perhaps Darwin had this incident in his mind when, years afterwards, he 
 asked Lyell, in answer to an objection against his theory, whether he supposed 
 that the shape of his (Darwin's) nose was designed. 
 
 "^ It is interesting to notice that Buckle called attention to the way in which 
 thought had developed his own forehead, originally rather low, ultimately very 
 high and broad.
 
 SCIENCE 225 
 
 Darwin's first task after his return to England was the pre- 
 paration of his Jourtial of Researches, which, originally published 
 in 1839 as part of Fitz-Roy's narrative, was, six years later, 
 issued independently in a second edition. Its immediate success 
 "tickled" the author's "vanity," and its long-continued popularity 
 surprised him; but they can be explained without difficulty. 
 Simple, direct, suggestive, full of matter, it is a book which 
 cannot be read without interest. It is a storehouse of facts, but 
 it is also something more. Darwin had passed the stage of the 
 mere collector, and had learnt that " science consists in grouping 
 facts so that general laws or conclusions can be drawn from 
 them\" The Journal was rather the place for facts than for 
 the enunciation of great principles; but the charm of it lies in 
 the feeling that the writer regards every fact as something having 
 a meaning which it is his business to discover. It is a glimpse into 
 a great man's mind in process of formation. The self-revelation 
 on Darwin's part is unconscious, or at least is unintentional; many 
 readers are probably but dimly aware of it; yet the fact that the 
 revelation takes place gives the Journal a peculiar fascination. 
 In style, the book is just Darwin himself, — the simple, modest, 
 courteous gentleman, wholly free from self-consciousness, con- 
 cerned only to say what he has to say clearly and briefly, neither 
 desirous nor, in his own opinion, capable of fine writing. 
 
 Few men of science have written so well as Darwin. With no 
 pretence to the brilliancy of Huxley, he had an extraordinary power 
 of making plain even to the uninstructed the meaning of techni- 
 calities. Doubtless his utter fidelity to truth helped towards this 
 result. His earnest wish to say exactly what he saw and knew 
 necessitated care in the choice of language. Probably his diffi- 
 dence helped also : he had no confident belief in his own power 
 to convince, he felt that he could only hope to do so by the 
 exercise of the utmost care. And part of this care must go to the 
 formation of style. "No nigger with lash over him," he says, 
 "could have worked harder at clearness than I have done I" He 
 had his reward. It seems to be true that Darwin had not by 
 nature the gift of style. His is formed by sheer hard work ; and 
 1 Life of Darwin, \. 57, a ibid. ii. 156. 
 
 W. 15
 
 226 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 it becomes better with practice. Though xho. Journal of Researches 
 is a charming book, the English of it is decidedly inferior to that 
 of the book on earthworms ; and though the difficulties of The 
 Origiji of Species are mainly due to the extreme condensation of 
 thought, it too is not free from occasional obscurity and clumsiness 
 of expression. 
 
 From Darwin's marriage till the removal to Down, the greater 
 part of the time during which he was well enough to do anything 
 was devoted to the Structure atid Distribution of Coral Reefs (1842), 
 "•No other work of mine," he says, "was begun in so deductive a 
 spirit as this, for the whole theory was thought out on the west 
 coast of South America, before I had seen a true coral reef ^" ; but 
 he adds that for two years previously he had been incessantly 
 observing and reflecting upon the effects of elevation, denudation 
 and the deposition of sediment. Subsidence is necessarily 
 suggested by elevation, and the growth of coral comes in to play 
 the part of the deposition of sediment. In truth, the Coral Reefs 
 is no exception to Darwin's ordinary method. It differs from the 
 others, not in the use of deduction, nor in any special prominence 
 given to it, but only in the fact that deduction was so prominent 
 at the beginning. All the greater works of Darwin illustrate what 
 Mill calls the deductive method. They are based upon an immense 
 accumulation of facts, the inductive foundation ; these are grouped 
 together and explained by some great speculative principle, like 
 the theory of the coral reefs, or of natural selection, or of the 
 action of earthworms in the formation of vegetable mould ; and 
 finally, the theory is tested by its agreement with phenomena. It 
 is the largeness and the luminousness of the deductive principles 
 that give the speculations of Darwin their fascination ; it is the 
 width of the induction that gives them their solidity. This 
 speculation as to coral reefs, if it be not an accepted dogma of 
 science, is at any rate, sixty years after its promulgation, still a 
 subject of enquiry, and is still helpful to thought. 
 
 Darwin had already begun the great work of his life. His first 
 note-book for facts bearing upon the origin of species was opened 
 in July, 1837, immediately after he had finished the writing of his
 
 SCIENCE 227 
 
 Journal. But already he had " long reflected " on the subject ; 
 and although in the Journal he. occasionally uses language implying 
 special creation, it is clear that before the end of the voyage of the 
 Beagle, his belief in the traditional view was shaken. He had at 
 this date no theory as to the manner in which the mutation of 
 species had taken place ; he only guided his observations by the 
 general hypothesis that species might not be permanent and 
 unalterable entities. In October, 1838, he read Malthus on the 
 Principle of Population, and the idea dawned upon him that here 
 lay the solution. Given a state of matters in which population 
 increases faster than food, there necessarily follows a struggle for 
 existence. Variations, however caused, do occur; and in this 
 struggle favourable variations will tend to be preserved and 
 unfavourable ones to be eliminated. That is Natural Selection, 
 or the Survival of the Fittest. 
 
 No scientific thinker was ever more bold than Darwin ; few if 
 any have known better how to combine caution with boldness. 
 Though the theory was now clear in his mind, in order to avoid 
 prejudice, he refrained for nearly four years from writing it. His 
 first abstract was written in June, 1842. Two years later it was 
 much enlarged. In 1856 he began writing on a scale three or 
 four times as large as that adopted in The Origin of Species; 
 and yet even this was only an abstract of the materials which he 
 had collected. He had got about half way through this task when 
 in 1858 he received from Mr A. R. Wallace an essay On the 
 Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type^. 
 The sequel is well known. An abstract from Darwin's MS. was 
 published at the same time with Mr Wallace's essay ; and the 
 former set himself at once to re-write his book on a smaller scale. 
 The Origin of Species was published in November, 1859. 
 
 " So thought on thought is piled till some great truth 
 Is loosened, and the nations echo round." 
 
 In the whole history of science there is no better example than 
 that afforded by The Origin of Species of the patient piling up of 
 facts, observations and thoughts. The author was fifty, and he 
 
 ^ It is remarkable that Mr Wallace, like Darwin himself, had found the 
 key to the problem of evolution in Malthus. 
 
 15-2
 
 228 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 had devoted twenty years of his life consciously, and the rest of it 
 unconsciously, to this great end. Neither have the nations ever 
 echoed more loudly with the result. The theory of the evolution 
 of species was a great constructive idea ; but it was also destructive, 
 and it came close home to all sorts of men. In the first place, it 
 ran directly counter to all the orthodox views of religion, as they 
 then were. Genesis distinctly states that the world was created in 
 six days, and that the various kinds of living things, plants and 
 beasts and birds and fishes, were created during those days. 
 There are probably few men over fifty who cannot remember the 
 denunciations of the book for impiety and absurdity, which rang 
 from the pulpits of England and Scotland ; and the views expressed 
 in print may still be read by those who care to examine the files of 
 old journals. It had not then been discovered that the whole 
 theory is contained in the Old Testament ; and we may imagine 
 that Darwin smiled, as grimly as it was in his nature to smile, when 
 he wrote in his Autobiography that there had even appeared an 
 essay in Hebrew to demonstrate this. 
 
 Hardly anything, as Galileo found to his cost, is apt to stir up 
 so great excitement as the publication of a theory in real or apparent 
 conflict with the accepted dogmas of religion. But in Darwin's 
 case there was a prejudice still wider than this to struggle against. 
 His view involves the doctrine of the pithecoid origin of mankind; 
 and even among men of science there were many who loathed 
 this. It is evident that some of Sedgwick's virulence against the 
 Vestiges was due to this loathing. Lyell felt the prejudice 
 powerfully, and it was probably the cause why in his Antiquity 
 of Man he disappointed Darwin by the caution of his utterances. 
 Mr Wallace's contention for a special treatment of humanity rests 
 on a different ground ; yet it is possible that that too has been 
 influenced by the same feeling. 
 
 But the very strength of the opposition it excited was among 
 the causes of the immediate success of The Origin of Species. 
 Its friends were warm, its foes bitter, few were indifferent; and 
 though the active friends were not at first numerous, there were 
 among them some whose names commanded respect. All the 
 three men whom Darwin had fixed upon beforehand as the judges
 
 SCIENCE 229 
 
 whose decision he would accept as the test of success or failure, 
 were convinced by his arguments. Huxley's adhesion was especi- 
 ally important. " Poor dear Darwin," he says, " neither would nor 
 could defend himself." Huxley therefore becomes, as he himself 
 phrases it, " Darwin's bulldog," or, as he elsewhere says, " maid- 
 of-all-work and gladiator-general of science." In the troubles 
 which were to come he proved himself a very present help. 
 
 The story of the meeting of the British Association at Oxford 
 in i860 has been told by several eye-witnesses; and while there 
 are numerous small discrepancies in their accounts, the main facts 
 are beyond dispute. Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, as the 
 champion of orthodoxy, made an attack upon the Darwinian 
 theory, in the course of which he referred insolently to Huxley's 
 descent from an ape, and apparently asked him whether it was on 
 the grandfather's side or the grandmother's that he claimed that 
 descent. "The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands," 
 whispered Huxley to his neighbour, and he justified the quotation 
 by his stinging retort. " I asserted," he said, — " and I repeat — that 
 a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for a grand- 
 father. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in 
 recalling it would rather be a man — a man of restless and versatile 
 intellect — who, not content with an equivocal 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 prejudiced" This reply produced an immense sensation 
 in the arena in which the battle was fought; nor did the effect 
 stop there. Darwinism, which was to have been pulverised, was 
 proved to be more than able to hold its own ; and Huxley was 
 drawn from relative obscurity into the fore-front of the struggle. 
 
 After fifty years of effort, immensely stimulated by Darwin's 
 own speculation, there is a disposition in many quarters to modify 
 
 ^ Life of Hi4xley, i. 185. No perfectly accurate version of Huxley's retort 
 exists ; but that quoted in the text, which is J. R. Green's, is probably the best. 
 Huxley, however, disowned the word "equivocal,"
 
 230 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the view of evolution expressed in The Origin of Species. There 
 are Mendelists and Mutationists as well as Darwinians. But even 
 if the particular theory of evolution embodied in The Origin of 
 Species were disproved or shown to be highly improbable, the 
 name of Darwin would still remain among the most memorable 
 in the annals of science. The idea of evolution is far greater 
 than any theory of the manner in which evolution has operated ; 
 and Darwin has practically made this idea his own. Others, as 
 we have seen, had enunciated it before. But they left it bare; 
 he alone has supported it with evidence which, after half a century, 
 men are still examining, sifting and adding to. The consequence is 
 that he has worked a complete revolution in thought. Before the 
 publication of The Origin of Species Darwin himself could find no 
 naturalist who doubted the permanence of species : now, all are 
 evolutionists, though not all are Darwinians. No such change 
 has taken place since the days of Newton; and even Newton's 
 great law did not touch mankind as closely as Darwin's. 
 
 All Darwin's subsequent books take their place in relation to 
 this great central work. The Descent of Man (187 1) may be 
 regarded as its completion, and the others as buttresses or out- 
 works. Darwin had seen from the first that the law of descent 
 which governed other animals must hold with respect to man as 
 well, and he had all along been collecting facts in illustration of 
 his view. But in The Origin of Species his object was, not to 
 trace the evolution of either man or any other animal, but to 
 explain and illustrate the laws under which, as he believed, 
 evolution had taken place. In The Descetit of Man he applies 
 those laws specifically to the human race ; and it is here that 
 he parts company with his great co-discoverer, Mr A. R. Wallace. 
 Mr Wallace believes indeed that man is descended from the 
 lower forms of life, but he holds that "natural selection could 
 only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to 
 that of an ape " ; and he argues that some other principle must 
 be supposed in order to account for the higher moral and intel- 
 lectual powers of humanity. Darwin thought, and the great 
 majority of naturalists agree with him, that the difficulty of 
 accounting for the higher faculties of man was far less than the
 
 SCIENCE 231 
 
 difficulty involved in the conception that while all nature had 
 developed under the action of one law, just at the end that law 
 was superseded by a wholly different one. It seems reasonable 
 to doubt whether, if the supernatural does not govern the whole 
 of life, its introduction to explain the last stage is necessary. It 
 is however worth remembering that Darwinism is silent as to the 
 origm of life and as to the cause of variation. 
 
 The respectful reception of The Descent of Man was one of the 
 evidences of the progress of the theory of evolution. The day 
 for mere abuse was gone by; and though the theory expounded 
 was even more distasteful to average opinion than that expressed 
 in the earlier book, in nearly every quarter worthy of attention it 
 was treated as a thing to be temperately discussed. Although 
 Huxley was called into the field once more against the old 
 adversary, the Quarterly Review, he remarks upon the general 
 absence of " the mixture of ignorance and insolence which at first 
 characterised a large proportion of the attacks with which he 
 [Darwin] was assailed^" 
 
 None of Darwin's other books is comparable in importance to 
 these ; and though they all have an interest, and nearly all illustrate 
 some engaging characteristic of the man, they may be left aside as 
 things belonging to the domain of science rather than to literature. 
 That which is perhaps in scientific importance almost the least of 
 them is, however, an exception. Whatever possesses the power of 
 fascination is literature, and The Formation of Vegetable Mould 
 through the Action of Worms (188 1) is fascinating. Darwin 
 thought the enthusiasm with which it was received "almost laugh- 
 able"; but in truth it was only reasonable and right. The book is 
 admirably written, and it is perhaps the most striking illustration 
 in English of the importance of the unimportant. It is " Httle 
 drops of water, little grains of sand," illuminated and glorified by 
 the light of genius; a creature so low in the scale as the earth- 
 worm becomes one of the great agents in moulding the world. 
 
 This was Darwin's last work. He had lived to see his theory 
 accepted by a large proportion of naturalists and respectfully 
 considered by all; and he was known as the greatest force in 
 
 ^ Life of Huxley, i. 364.
 
 O '> 
 
 32 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 modern thought. He owed this great position to a rare com- 
 bination of qualities, — the capacity for patient and accurate 
 observation, united with a powerful and daring imagination capable 
 of conceiving the largest generalisations, and both with a complete 
 sanity of mind which perceives how unsatisfying are mere facts so 
 long as they are isolated, and how misleading may be imagination 
 if it is not brought to the test of facts. Many have had as great 
 powers of observation as Darwin, a few have been as largely 
 gifted with imagination; but not more than a mere handful of 
 the greatest have possessed the two gifts in such harmonious 
 combination. 
 
 It is an easy transition from Darwin to the great disciple who, 
 next to him, did most for the diffusion of evolutionary ideas. 
 Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) has not Darwin's claim to 
 recognition in a history of literature on the score of the supreme 
 greatness of his contribution to thought ; but he has the claim 
 that he was himself a man of letters almost as much as a man 
 of science. Everything he wrote has the literary flavour to such 
 a degree that he has successfully undergone one of the severest 
 of tests, the collection of his lectures, addresses and miscellaneous 
 articles into volumes. In the best and most honourable sense he 
 was a populariser of science. Himself among the profoundest in 
 scientific knowledge, he had in an unsurpassed degree the power 
 of making what he said or wrote intelligible and perspicuous. In 
 this respect he contrasts pleasantly with many writers on science, 
 because these have seldom studied the art of expression. His 
 style is the antithesis of that which, in one of his bright and 
 sparkling letters, he ascribes to a fellow-worker in science. "From 
 a literary point of view, my dear friend, you remind me of nothing 
 so much as a dog going home. He has a goal before him which 
 he will certainly reach sooner or later, but first he is on this side 
 of the road, and now on that; anon, he stops to scratch at an 
 ancient rat-hole, or maybe he catches sight of another dog, a 
 quarter of a mile behind, and bolts off to have a friendly, or 
 inimical sniff. In fact, his course is... (here a tangled maze is 
 
 drawn) not ^." Huxley himself never forgot that a straight 
 
 1 Li/e, i. 415.
 
 SCIENCE 
 
 233 
 
 line is the shortest distance between any two points; and to 
 reach his point he took the straight line. He had early con- 
 vinced himself of the importance of expression, and he studied 
 it. According to his own account, he was deficient in facility^ ; 
 but we may assume that his standard was a lofty one, for his 
 published writings give the impression of a perfectly easy flow. 
 His high success was probably due to his concentration on a 
 single point, lucidity. Valuing the manner for the sake of the 
 matter, he doubtless believed that if he could be clear all the 
 other graces would be added unto him ; and he was right. 
 Never aiming at fine writing, or attempting eloquence such as 
 Ruskin's, Huxley in his writings impresses us as a building does 
 which is destitute of ornament, but beautiful by reason of its 
 outline and proportions. The perfect fitness of his words and 
 phrases for their purpose is their beauty. But though there is 
 no ornament for its own sake, the style is illuminated by the 
 brilliance of the writer's wit. He knew well the value of a 
 telling phrase, and the gift of coining phrases was his by nature. 
 It is this which makes his letters, as well as his writings intended 
 for publication, among the most racy of the last half century. 
 The wit is invariably illuminative : take for example his admirable 
 simile written to Darwin, when roused by the criticisms directed 
 against the discourse On the Physical Basis of Life : " A good 
 book is comparable to a piece of meat, and fools are as flies who 
 swarm to it, each for the purpose of depositing and hatching his 
 own particular maggot of an idea^" He is felicitous in metaphor 
 and phrase : "There is always a Cape Horn in one's life that one 
 either weathers or wrecks one's self on^" 
 
 On this basis of natural gifts and with this deliberate training 
 in the art of luminous expression Huxley worked. He added to 
 it, of course, unsparing devotion to his scientific studies. This 
 would have been necessary on his theory of style alone, for the 
 indispensable condition precedent to saying a thing clearly is to 
 have something to say. It was indispensable also from Huxley's 
 moral theory. The virtue he loved above all others was truth. 
 
 ^ Life, i. 118. ^ ibid. 300. 
 
 ** ibid. 11 J.
 
 234 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Carlyle taught him to hate humbug, and his own nature chimed 
 in with the teaching of Carlyle. In a letter written on the death 
 of his eldest child to Kingsley — one of the noblest that ever 
 passed between man and man — he bids men welcome to call him 
 "atheist, infidel and all the other usual hard names." But, he 
 adds, " one thing people shall not call me with justice and that 
 is — a liar'." And in the solitude of his own study, on the last 
 night of the year, while waiting for the birth of this very child, 
 we find him writing : " To smite all humbugs, however big ; to 
 give a nobler tone to science; to set an example of abstinence 
 from petty personal controversies, and of toleration for everything 
 but lying ; to be indifferent as to whether the work is recognised 
 as mine or not, so long as it is done: — are these my aims^?" 
 Huxley's life shows that they were his aims. His many con- 
 troversies were never on petty personal points, and though he had 
 a healthy enough personal ambition, he always subordinated it 
 to that love of truth which was the keystone of his character. 
 
 The resolution "to smite all humbugs, however big," promised 
 a life of combat; and the promise was redeemed. Though he was 
 accustomed to say that he never but twice began a controversy, it 
 is evident that Huxley loved fighting. And in controversy he was 
 unmatched. It was this, and his ability to interest and to win 
 large audiences, which made him an ideal complement to Darwin, 
 who was both by disposition and by reason of his ill health un- 
 fitted for such work. From the time of the Oxford meeting of 
 the British Association onwards, Huxley constituted himself the 
 protagonist of evolution. For this, the chief work of his life, 
 he had been preparing himself for nearly twenty years. During 
 the voyage of the Rattlesnake and in the years afterwards he 
 had gradually piled up a great mass of scientific knowledge; 
 and the circumstances of his life had diversified the knowledge 
 beyond his own wish or purpose. To win his own bread he found 
 it necessary to make a profound study of palaeontology, although 
 originally he "did not care for fossils'." Without this study of the 
 fossils his work for evolution could never have been done. 
 
 1 Life, i. aji. ' ibid. 151. 
 
 » ibid. 132.
 
 SCIENCE 235 
 
 That work again was its own reward. Darwin's debt to 
 Huxley was great, but Huxley's to Darwin was greater still. 
 Huxley was a man of essentially philosophical intellect. He 
 early studied Hamilton's philosophy of the conditioned ; he 
 mastered the positive philosophy, and "put it away into one of 
 the pigeon-holes of his brain " till it was wanted ; his book on 
 Hume was written con amore; and he plunged with avidity into 
 the Jesuit Suarez in order to answer Mivart. He looked upon 
 facts as the raw material of philosophy, things indispensable 
 indeed, but valuable only for the conclusions that could be 
 drawn from them. Consequently the great central idea of The 
 Origin of Species was to him priceless. It unified the various 
 fragments of his knowledge, and gave a new meaning to the fossils 
 which made them once for all objects of intense interest. 
 
 In other ways as well as in disposition Huxley was the com- 
 plement of Darwin. He was strong in knowledge where Darwin 
 was comparatively weak. The latter laments his own ignorance 
 of anatomy: Huxley was a trained and accomplished anatomist, 
 whose knowledge enabled him to make important additions to 
 the evidence for Darwinism, and to combat criticisms with success. 
 For example, it enabled him both to give and to justify a direct 
 contradiction of the assertion of Richard Owen at the famous 
 Oxford meeting of the British Association in i860, that the 
 difference between the brain of man and that of the highest ape 
 was greater than the difference between the brains of the highest 
 and the lowest of the quadrumana. 
 
 Huxley's earliest writings were of purely technical interest, 
 and were chiefly the fruit of that voyage in the Rattlesnake, which 
 holds to his life the same relation as the voyage of the Beagle 
 holds to Darwin's. On the scientific value of such writings only 
 men of science are entitled to an opinion. Some of them have 
 shown a tendency to depreciate Huxley; but Haeckel in 1874 
 emphatically declared his work on the comparative anatomy of 
 vertebrates to be the only thing which could "be compared with 
 the otherwise incomparable investigations of Carl Gegenbaur^"; 
 and the editors of The Scientific Memoirs of T. H. Huxley^ Sir 
 ^ Quoted in the Library of Literary Criticism, viii. 324.
 
 236 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Michael Foster and Professor E. Ray Lankester, pronounce him 
 to be "in some respects the most original and most fertile in 
 discovery of all his fellow-workers in the same branch of science ^" 
 
 In Man's Place in Nature (1863), Huxley with characteristic 
 boldness devoted himself to the most unpopular aspect of an 
 unpopular theory; for he was the first frankly and undisguisedly 
 to apply the Darwinian doctrine to man. The application had 
 been plainly suggested in The Origin of Species ; but it was not 
 within the scope of that book to carry out the suggestion. Matins 
 Place in Nature was, of course, abused, — but was unharmed by 
 the abuse. Writing a preface to the reprint, thirty years later, the 
 author could note with pardonable satisfaction that it had "achieved 
 the fate, which is the euthanasia of a scientific work, of being 
 inclosed among the rubble of the foundations of later knowledge, 
 and forgotten." 
 
 The years immediately following are filled with active scientific 
 work and with an active polemic. Some of the fruits of this 
 polemic, along with other things, were included in the volume 
 of Lay Sermons (1870), which won an audience wider, probably, 
 than any other of Huxley's writings, — an audience, however, at- 
 tracted in no small measure by opposition rather than by agreement. 
 The keenest interest was concentrated on the paper on the Physical 
 Basis of Life, the substance of which had shortly before been 
 delivered as an address in Edinburgh. Having, as he humorously 
 explains in the prefatory letter to Tyndall, intended the paper for 
 a plain statement of a great tendency of modern biology, with 
 a protest against what is commonly called materialism, he found 
 himself "generally credited with having invented 'protoplasm' in 
 the interests of 'materialism.'" Huxley's pugnacity — a trait about 
 which Darwin gently warned him, while Huxley humorously dis- 
 claimed it — had caused him to be regarded as more Darwinian 
 than Darwin. His caution was forgotten, his boldness was 
 remembered to his prejudice. His contention that until varieties 
 unfertile when crossed could be produced by selection, the proof 
 of Darwinism was incomplete, scarcely counted for righteousness; 
 while the fact that he brushed aside and rejected all arguments 
 ^ Quoted in the Library of Literary Criticism, viii. 327,
 
 SCIENCE 237 
 
 tending to set man in a place apart from the rest of the animal 
 kingdom, made a profound impression. When Darwin, moving, 
 like the stars, ohne hast, ohne rast, produced The Descent of Man, 
 he found that a great part of the odium had already been ex- 
 pended on his "bull-dog"; and Huxley was chivalrous enough to 
 rejoice that it was so. 
 
 The strong firm thread of scientific work in laboratories and 
 lecture-rooms which ran through all the life of Huxley was little 
 known to the public except when it furnished matter for some 
 essay or address, usually controversial. Occasionally he made 
 mistakes; and when he did the consequence of his pugnacity 
 became evident. His error about " Bathybius " was in itself 
 trifling ; but it was seized upon with avidity, and small allowance 
 was made for the author's manly recantation. But besides being 
 a man of science, Huxley was a public character, serving on many 
 commissions, and doing excellent work for science, for education 
 and for society. His place in literature however depends upon 
 those essays and lectures in which science is brought to bear upon 
 the interpretation of life, or in which the critical intellect, trained 
 through long years of labour, is turned to the examination of old 
 beliefs. Such is the general character of those Collected Essays 
 gathered from the papers of many years and reissued near the 
 close of Huxley's Ufe. The titles are a fair index to the contents 
 of the volumes, — Science and Education, Science and Hebrew 
 Tradition, Science and Christian Tradition, &c. The volume on 
 Hume (1879), which Huxley undertook and wrote with zest for 
 the English Men of Letters series, is of the same class ; for Hume 
 supplied a foundation to the empiricists of the nineteenth century. 
 
 Many of the papers contained in these volumes have been 
 criticised as somewhat wantonly polemical ; and Huxley certainly 
 felt the joy of battle. "I really can't give up tormenting ces droles'^," 
 he says of one group of his controversial enemies. But through 
 all the controversies he was steadily doing his real life-work. His 
 function was, not merely to be the man of science, but to vindicate 
 for scientific thought, and for all thought, complete and unfettered 
 freedom. If the kind of criticism which Darwin originally met 
 
 ^ Li/e^ ii. 269.
 
 238 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 would be almost impossible now, the change is largely to be 
 ascribed to Huxley. No one ever battled more valiantly for 
 freedom of thought, or rather (since that could never be denied) 
 for freedom to express thought ; and under his controversies there 
 always lay this or some other serious justification. On this plea 
 he successfully defended his share in the later phase of the cele- 
 brated controversy with Gladstone, against a critic who objected 
 that both he and Gladstone might employ their time better than 
 in quarrelling about the Gadarene swine. If the swine, said 
 Huxley, " were the only parties to the suit, I for my part should 
 fully admit the justice of the rebuke. But the real issue is whether 
 the men of the nineteenth century are to adopt the demonology 
 of the men of the first century, as divinely revealed truth, or to 
 reject it as degrading falsity \" Huxley might also have pleaded 
 fairly that a man is justified in doing that which he can do 
 supremely well. His gift for controversy has probably never been 
 surpassed, and it has very rarely been equalled. During the 
 thirty-five years from the encounter with Wilberforce to his death, 
 Huxley was engaged in numberless literary and scientific battles, 
 and in not one did he fail. Wherever he crossed swords with an 
 antagonist — Wilberforce, or Owen, or Gladstone, — Huxley re- 
 mained master of the field ; and his manner of fighting the duel 
 is a model which may be commended to the careful study of all 
 who are minded to go and do likewise. 
 
 All the wonderful development of science along other lines 
 must be left with the briefest notice. It does not belong to 
 literature as the works of Darwin and of Huxley do. Great 
 in his own sphere, a mathematician like Sir William Rowan 
 Hamilton or a physicist like Lord Kelvin counts for little in the 
 domain of letters. John Tyndall (i 820-1 893), indefinitely smaller 
 than the latter as a man of science, had a far superior gift of 
 expression. Michael Faraday (1791-1867) had that gift too, and 
 did much to popularise chemistry ; but neither he nor any of the 
 others had that influence upon the substance of Hterature which 
 the evolutionists and the geologists exercised. Still, their work 
 lies behind literature, as it were, giving a tone of mind, holding 
 ^ Collected Essays, v. 414 — quoted in the Life of Huxley, ii. 271.
 
 SCIENCE 239 
 
 up a standard of truth, helping to render much impossible which 
 in earlier days seemed not only possible but necessary. One 
 remarkable fact may be noted. As early as 1834 two of the men 
 named, Hamilton and Faraday, seem to have had already some 
 prevision of the most modern scientific conception of the nature 
 of the external world. In a remarkable letter to his sister 
 Hamilton expresses his pleasure in finding that Faraday from 
 the side of induction and experiment had reached the same 
 anti-material view that he himself had arrived at by deduction. 
 Both apparently were disposed to reject the conception of atoms, 
 and to regard matter rather as a centre of forces than as some- 
 thing fundamentally inert
 
 PART II 
 
 CREATIVE ART. A. POETRY 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 
 
 In the temporary absence of any fresh " Kings of Song " about 
 the close of the first and the beginning of the second quarters of 
 the nineteenth century, a special interest attaches to the minor 
 writers who in those discouraging years had the courage to 
 meditate what usually proved a very thankless muse. The 
 shadows of many coming events may be seen in the work of 
 those poets of the interregnum. The Christian Year is so mani- 
 festly imbued with the spirit of the Tractarians that an effort of 
 memory is needed to realise the fact that it was published six 
 years before the birth of the Oxford Movement. Henry Taylor's 
 Isaac Comfienus heralds a classical reaction from Byron ; and it 
 is curious that the reaction should be specially directed against 
 him who had championed the classical school of the eighteenth 
 century at a time when few had a word to say in its favour. Even 
 before the Reform Bill, democracy begins to find voice in the 
 Corn Law Rhy?nes. But above all, the revival of the Elizabethan 
 spirit is manifest in Beddoes and Wells and Wade, who may 
 be regarded as the product of the critical teaching of Coleridge, 
 Lamb and Hazlitt It is melancholy to reflect that while these men 
 were silenced by neglect and indifference, "Satan" Montgomery 
 was flourishing and spreading his branches until they were 
 effectually pruned by the critical knife of Macaulay. 
 
 The "large-hearted Scot," Allan Cunningham (i 784-1842), 
 belongs essentially to the Revolutionary period ; and so does 
 the Quaker poet, Bernard Barton (i 784-1849), who is more 
 memorable for his friendship with Lamb and his connexion with
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 24I 
 
 Edward FitzGerald than for his own pleasant but hardly inspired 
 verse. Cunningham is in the line from Burns, Barton sometimes 
 brings Cowper to mind. But there is one poet of those years, 
 John Clare (1793-1864), who stands absolutely alone, a figure of 
 singular interest, at once like and strangely unlike what a man of 
 poetic gifts, in circumstances such as his, might be expected to 
 be. He deserves careful consideration, not only for his pathetic 
 story, but for the high poetic merit of his writings. Clare has 
 found generous panegyrists, but their encomiums have failed to 
 hft him to the position in the history of literature which he well 
 deserves. Men are ready enough to praise and to wonder at 
 humble aspirants for literary honours ; but their praise is apt to 
 have a touch of condescension, and Clare had not the force to 
 show, like Burns in Edinburgh, that the condescension was un- 
 called for^. 
 
 No other English poet has had quite so sad a life as Clare, 
 though there is gloom enough in many, and that of a much 
 smaller versifier, his contemporary William Thom (i 798 ?-i848) of 
 Inverury presents some points of resemblance. Thom tells his own 
 pathetic story in Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom Weaver 
 (1844). Though the author of The Blind Boy's Pranks was 
 clearly not a great poet, he was no ordinary man who, born and 
 bred as Thom had been, could win from the well-known critic 
 W. J. Fox the emphatic declaration that he had the richest vein 
 of humour Fox had ever known. Thom, however, had some 
 support from the tradition of his country, where verse-writing 
 ploughmen and weavers have been numerous ; Clare had none. 
 The son of a day-labourer who, from failure of health, was forced 
 to seek relief from his parish, Clare from the age of seven had to 
 do such rural tasks as his years and strength permitted. He had 
 had almost no education, but his zeal for knowledge led him, 
 even in childhood, to undertake extra work in order that he might 
 earn enough to pay the fee for an evening school. But his true 
 education was drawn from nature, the love of which was inborn 
 
 ^ Since the paragraphs following were written Mr A. Symons has done 
 a fresh service to English literature by re-editing the poems of Clare, with a 
 sympathetic introduction. I have corrected the quotations by his text. 
 
 \v. 16
 
 242 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 in him. Clare was fortunate in having this taste strengthened by 
 the influence of an old woman of a type almost unknown in rural 
 England, though it is occasionally to be met in Wales and in 
 Scotland. She had a taste for verse, and a memory full of it ; and 
 from her the boy got his first ideas of what poetry is. At the 
 age of thirteen he bought a copy of Thomson's Seasons ; and it is 
 Thomson's influence, more than that of any other poet, which 
 is felt in his early pieces. But essentially they are original and 
 independent; Clare's authorities were his ears and eyes. He 
 wrote "with his eye on the object," as we should expect a man 
 with so few books and so little training to do — if he wrote at all. 
 
 By the ignorant boors among whom he lived Clare's passion 
 for scribbling was despised. His mother, who thought he was 
 wasting his time, used the scraps of paper on which he had written 
 his verses to light her fire ; and he was dismissed from a lime-kiln 
 on which he was employed, because he was suspected, rightly or 
 wrongly, of neglecting his work in order to write. But the verses 
 which his fellows held so cheap at last drew the attention of 
 some men who were better instructed ; and through them Clare's 
 first volume. Poems, descriptive of Rural Life, was published in 
 1820. Southey criticised it generously in the Quarterly Review. 
 Interest in the poet was roused, he was taken to London, and on 
 the whole treated with wisdom as well as with kindness. A sum 
 was raised, the interest of which— ^^45 a year — ought to have 
 sufficed, with the supplement of his own labour, to keep a man in 
 his position above want; and he returned to that rural life in 
 which his whole soul was centred, and to the wife, *' Patty of the 
 Vale," whom he had married. But a shrewd observer, S. C Hall, 
 notes that "his huge, overburdening head might have dreamed 
 dreams and seen visions, but obviously was not the throne of 
 productive thought." He had neither much strength, nor much 
 competence for the labour which was his destiny; and he fell 
 under the influence of the prevailing vice of his country and class, 
 drink. His mind gave way : probably the "huge, overburdening 
 head" indicated a tendency to brain disease, as well as exceptional 
 endowment. He was placed, first in a private asvlum, and then 
 in the County Lunatic Asylum of Northamptonshire, where he
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 243 
 
 spent the last twenty-two years of his life. In intervals of sanity 
 he had expressed the wish to be Buried in his native village of 
 Helpstone, near Peterborough ; and on his death a subscription 
 was raised by the aid of which his wish was gratified. 
 
 Had Clare's first book of verse been also his last, that achieve- 
 ment of a man starved alike in body and in soul would have been 
 sufficiently remarkable to win him a place far above Bloomfield. 
 But it was followed by The Village Minstrel (1823) and the 
 Shepherd's Calendar (1827). Even after his burial in the living 
 tomb of the asylum, he continued to write, and, inexplicable as 
 the fact is, his finest pieces date from that place. Christopher 
 Smart and William Blake are the closest parallels. Not the least 
 remarkable point about Clare is that he bears triumphantly a test 
 under which even Burns breaks down. In his early verse Clare 
 used dialect with some freedom ; in his later writings he confined 
 himself almost wholly to the diction of classical English ; yet his 
 poems lost nothing in ease and naturalness. He even ventured 
 on imitations of some of the older English poets ; and, strange to 
 say, he succeeded. The success proves that his poetic gift was 
 something more and greater than a narrow compass of "native 
 wood-notes wild"; and the proof is clinched by the dignity, almost 
 unsurpassed, of at least one of his pieces. Surely, if the over- 
 burdening head portended disease, that head was also the home of 
 a genius which needs no excuse from circumstance, but demands 
 homage simply on the ground of its own greatness. There are 
 no better tests of a poet than the power to write a lyric, and the 
 power to impress the reader with the sense of the dignity and 
 greatness of the verse, — to write, in short, in "the grand style." 
 The first of the two following quotations is a lyric of wonderful 
 sweetness and charm ; the second, for grandeur, would do honour 
 to any poet of the nineteenth century. Clare's biographer, Martin, 
 is not using words amiss when he calls it "a sublime burst of 
 poetry." It is almost uncanny to find, in the poor poet of the 
 asylum, a reminder of that most dauntless of souls, Emily Bronte. 
 
 •' O the evening's for the fair, bonnie lassie O ! 
 To meet the cooler air and join an angel there, 
 With the dark dishevelled hair, 
 Bonnie lassie O ! 
 
 16 — 2
 
 244 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 The bloom's on the brere, bonnie lassie O ! 
 Oak apples on the tree ; and wilt thou gang to see 
 The shed I've made for thee, 
 Bonnie lassie O I 
 
 'Tis agen the running brook, bonnie lassie O ! 
 In a grassy nook hard by, with a little patch of sky, 
 And a bush to keep us dry, 
 Bonnie lassie O 1 
 
 There's the daisy all the year, bonnie lassie O ! 
 There's the king-cup bright as gold, and the speedwell never cold, 
 And the arum leaves unrolled, 
 Bonnie lassie O 1 
 
 meet me at the shed, bonnie lassie O ! 
 
 With the woodbine peeping in, and the roses like thy skin 
 Blushing, thy praise to win, 
 Bonnie lassie O \ 
 
 1 will meet thee there at e'en, bonnie lassie O ! 
 
 When the bee sips in the bean, and grey willow branches lean. 
 And the moonbeam looks between, 
 Bonnie lassie O ! " 
 
 "I am ! yet what I am who cares or knows ? 
 My friends forsake me like a memory lost; 
 I am the self-consumer of my woes, 
 They rise and vanish, an oblivious host. 
 Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost; 
 And yet I am ! and live with shadows tost 
 
 Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, 
 Into the living sea of waking dreams. 
 Where there is neither sense of life nor joys, 
 But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems; 
 And e'en the dearest — that I loved the best — 
 Are strange — nay, rather stranger than the rest. 
 
 I long for scenes where man has never trod; 
 For scenes where woman never smil'd or wept; 
 There to abide with my creator, GOD, 
 And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept : 
 Untroubling and untroubled where I lie ; 
 The grass below — above the vaulted sky." 
 
 There was one other poet, Ebenezer Elliott (i 781-1849), who 
 during the greater part of his life stood almost as much alone
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 245 
 
 as Clare, but who, unlike Clare, left heirs to carry on his work. 
 Like Clare too, Elliott belongs to the class of unlettered poets, and 
 in youth he was only a little less straitened in circumstances than 
 the poor labourer's son. Like Clare again, he found in Thomson 
 his earliest poetical model. But here almost all resemblance 
 between the two ceases. Elliott was strong where Clare was 
 weak, and what in the latter bred a gentle melancholy, roused the 
 former to a saeva indigtiatio almost as intense as Swift's. 
 
 In all Elliott's verse there are just two notes, — a keen sense 
 of natural beauty and a profound feeling for man. Elliott was 
 first stirred to interest in the beauty of nature by the picture of 
 a primrose in Sowerby's English Botany. This sent him from 
 the ironworks among which his life was passed to wander along 
 the streams and over the moors of Yorkshire ; and the inspiration 
 of Thomson's Seasons, acting upon what he saw there, made him 
 a poet. His earliest piece, the Vernal Walk, was written at the 
 age of seventeen, contemporaneously with the Lyrical Ballads. 
 Elliott hardly knew what "the return to nature" was, but he felt 
 the impulse no less than Wordsworth and Coleridge. As a nature 
 poet he is true but not great, and though he does not deserve 
 complete oblivion, he would hardly be remembered for that alone. 
 His verse, if less faulty than Clare's, is also less spontaneous, 
 and his touch is not so sure ; for Clare's whole life was a com- 
 munion with nature, while Elliott knew it only by glimpses. 
 
 This youthful outburst was followed by twenty years of silence. 
 In his early manhood Elliott was too fully occupied in the struggle 
 for life to indulge his taste for verse. Long years of frustrated 
 effort were at last crowned with success; for Elliott had, as he 
 claims in A Poefs Epitaph, "a hand to do, a head to plan." 
 When hope grew brighter, he began once more to write. The 
 Vernal Walk itself was not published till 1821. Two years later 
 came Love : a Poem ; and then, in rapid succession, The Ranter 
 (1827), Corn-Law Rhymes (1828) and The Village Patriarch 
 (1829). 
 
 Elliott's daily contact with the life of the poor, his intimate 
 acquaintance with their sufferings, and his own long struggle from 
 poverty to affluence, had left deep marks on a nature originally
 
 246 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 sensitive and sympathetic, but imperfectly controlled. Without 
 losing his love of nature, he became far more emphatically the 
 poet of man. He is above all the Corn-Law Rhymer; and it 
 was as such that Carlyle hailed him in an essay of considerable 
 length, printed in the Edinburgh Review, in which he Hkens the 
 poet's work to "hues of joy and harmony, painted out of troublous 
 tears." Elliott knew " the tragic heart of towns " ; and his name 
 will live in literature as that of one of the first poets of modern 
 democracy. His nervous organisation made him keenly sensitive 
 to the evils and the suffering which he saw around him, and in 
 fierce wrath he thundered for a remedy. He has glaring faults : 
 he often mistakes mere abuse for vigour and ill-temper for strength; 
 but the very intensity which leads him wrong raises him on 
 occasion to lofty heights: the light which leads astray is^ after 
 all, " light from heaven." 
 
 There is in Elliott a remarkable combination of keen vision 
 with complete blindness. He sees with crystal clearness one 
 aspect of the eternal antithesis between wealth and poverty, 
 another he does not see at all. The view which he takes is 
 different from that which has been most commonly taken in 
 recent years. We are familiar enough with the conflict between 
 employer and workman ; but to Elliott the two are fellow-sufferers, 
 and the indignation which fires his verse is directed against the 
 landowner, not against the master. " Let us contrast," he says 
 in a note to The Ranter, " the fortunes of the owner [of the land] 
 with those of his neighbour, the patient, long-eared iron master. 
 The capital of the latter is reduced from ^100,000 to ^i^io.ooo, 
 and he would be glad to receive 2\ "j^ on the reduced sum. Yet he 
 maintains scores of families, while the unproductive, complaining 
 landowner, without risk, and wthout exertion, is obtaining about 
 forty times his profits." The struggles against the introduction of 
 machinery had shown, before Elliott's day, how real, under the 
 wages system, is the conflict between capital and labour, and how 
 bitter it may easily become; but there is no hint of this in 
 Elliott's verse. To him, as A Poet's Epitaph shows, there are 
 two classes of the rich : " the rich who make the poor man's 
 little more"; and, in contrast with these, "the rich who take
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 247 
 
 from plunder'd labour's store." The former are the employers, 
 the latter the landowners. In the deeply pathetic " Child, is thy 
 father dead?" master and man are represented as partners in 
 misfortune. The father "clams" thrice a week; and then the 
 significant question is asked, " Why did his master break ? " 
 
 There is a great deal of unconscious prejudice in this anti- 
 thesis between the classes of the rich. Himself an ironmaster 
 moved by the best motives towards his workmen, Elliott sees the 
 master in a rosy light, and ignores the possible conflict between 
 his interest and the interest of his employee. He is also greatly 
 influenced by the circumstances of the time. The long wars had 
 left England strained and exhausted ; and the system of protection 
 helped to make bread excessively dear at a time when the poor 
 had little with which to pay for it. Matters were made worse by 
 an administration of the poor-laws which had raised the rates 
 for relief inordinately. It is impossible to determine how far, 
 under the conditions of production and of transport then pre- 
 vailing, even free trade in corn would have proved effectual as 
 a remedy. But when many of the people were starving, and still 
 more were undergoing the moral degradation of poor relief, a 
 system which laid a crushing tax upon the most necessary article 
 of food was indefensible. Elliott was one of the first who not 
 only saw this, but devoted himself heart and soul to the task 
 of reform. The " bread-tax " became to him an obsession. He 
 traced to it all the sufferings of the time, he became blind to 
 every other source of evil ; and his profound pity and fierce anger 
 made him the lyrist of the cause. This obsession made him 
 narrow — but also intense and vivid. It inspired his masterpiece, 
 the grand Battle Song of modern democracy : — 
 
 *' Day, like our souls, is fiercely dark ; 
 What then? 'Tis day! 
 We sleep no more; the cock crows — hark! 
 To arms ! away ! 
 
 They come ! they come ! the knell is rung 
 
 Of us or them ; 
 Wide o'er their march the pomp is flung 
 
 Of gold and gem.
 
 248 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 What coUar'd hound of lawless sway, 
 
 To famine dear — 
 What pension'd slave of Attila 
 
 Leads in tlie rear? 
 
 Come they from Scythian wilds afar. 
 
 Our blood to spill ? 
 Wear they the livery of the Czar? 
 
 They do his will. 
 
 Nor tassell'd silk, nor epaulet, 
 
 Nor plume, nor torse — 
 No splendour gilds, all sternly met, 
 
 Our foot and horse. 
 
 But, dark and still, we inly glow, 
 
 Condens'd in ire ! 
 Strike, tawdry slaves, and ye shall know 
 
 Our gloom is fire. 
 
 In vain your pomp, ye evil powers, 
 
 Insults the land; 
 Wrongs, vengeance, and the cause are ours, 
 
 And God's right hand ! 
 
 Madmen ! they trample into snakes 
 
 The wormy clod ! 
 Like fire, beneath their feet awakes 
 
 The sword of God ! 
 
 Behind, before, above, below. 
 
 They rouse the brave ; 
 Where'er they go, they make a foe. 
 
 Or find a grave." 
 
 This spirit was the legacy of the French Revolution, and 
 Elliott's battle-song might have been the Marseillaise of an 
 English version of it. The history of Chartism proves that 
 there wanted only the spark to set the fuel aflame. The passing 
 of the danger was due to the united wisdom of all classes, in 
 which the visions and warnings of seers and prophets, the songs 
 of the poets, the novels of the novelists, the moderation of the 
 multitude, as well as the laws passed in the legislature, all played 
 their part. If the result falls pitiably short of what could be 
 desired, there has been at any rate an advance. The horrors 
 of the earlier period of the industrial revolution are no longer
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 249 
 
 possible; yet it is melancholy to reflect that Elliott's full pro- 
 gramme has been carried out, and there still remains so much of 
 the evil he denounced. The Corn Laws were repealed ; England 
 passed under the sway of capital, which ought, according to Elliott, 
 to rule the world; all the blessings oilaissez faire were experienced. 
 And Marx and Lassalle arise to denounce capital as bitterly as 
 ever Elliott denounced landlordism. 
 
 In his discipleship to Thomson Elliott belonged to the past ; 
 in respect of his social interests he was a pioneer, for these 
 interests are a special feature of literature in the years after the 
 close of Elliott's life. On this point there is just a slight contact 
 between him and a widely different writer, Thomas Hood (1799- 
 1845), the most richly endowed of all the poets intermediate 
 between Shelley and Keats on the one hand, and Tennyson and 
 Browning on the other. 
 
 As a youth Hood was apprenticed to an engraver; but the 
 confinement necessitated by the occupation told on a delicate 
 constitution, and, as change was necessary, his taste led him to 
 become at twenty-one sub-editor of the London Magazine. His 
 Lycus the Centaur v^zs published in 1822, and, working in con- 
 junction with John Hamilton Reynolds, he issued Odes and 
 Addresses to Great People in 1825. This was followed by Whims 
 and Oddities (182 6- 1827). In 1827 there appeared also the Flea 
 of the Midsutnmer Fairies, a piece regarded by the author himself 
 with special affection. A year afterwards The Dream of Eugene 
 Aram was printed in an annual. The Gem, of which Hood himself 
 was then editor. To 1830 belongs the first of Hood's Comic 
 Annuals. In 1834 he published his only novel, Tylney Hall. 
 Soon afterwards one of his greatest misfortunes befell him, — a 
 heavy pecuniary loss through the failure of a firm in which he 
 was interested. He went abroad, hoping to live economically 
 and to work off the debt; but the passage across to Holland, 
 though short, was extremely trying, and Hood's health was per- 
 manently injured. The rest of his life was a struggle against 
 poverty and disease. On the death of Theodore Hook in 1841 
 he became editor of the New Monthly Magazine. In 1843 The 
 Song of i/ie Shirt was published in the Christmas number of
 
 250 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Punch. Hood''s Magazine was started in 1844, and his own poem, 
 The Haunted House, came out in the first number. In the same 
 year a pension of ^^^loo, offered by Sir Robert Peel in a manner 
 which made it alike honourable to the giver and to the receiver, 
 relieved him ; but he only lived to enjoy it for a year. " The 
 Bridge of Sighs was his Corunna," says Thackeray, " his heights 
 of Abraham — sick, weak, wounded, he fell in the full blaze of 
 that great victory ^" 
 
 Much of Hood's verse is of the humorous sort. The comic 
 vein was native in him: he was perpetually playing practical jokes 
 in his own home, — persuading his wife, for example, that the red 
 or orange spots on the plaice were the signs of advanced decom- 
 position, and that fish so marked were dangerous for food. But 
 he was no mere jester, and when he seemed to become so he 
 was acting not from choice but of necessity. He found that puns 
 paid better than poetry, and in order to win bread for his wife 
 and children, in a manly spirit, without complaint, he provided 
 the public that for which it was willing to pay. We may regret 
 that so much of Hood's genius was devoted to such work, but we 
 cannot blame him. 
 
 The longest of Hood's poems, Miss Kilmansegg, one of his 
 contributions to the New Monthly Magazine, stands quite alone. 
 For originality of conception and execution it is unsurpassed in 
 English. Though it belongs to the humorous class of poems, it 
 was written in no mere jesting spirit. A profound sense of the 
 besetting evils of Hood's age and country inspires it throughout. 
 Under the grotesqueness of the conception there shine satire and 
 criticism of life, the satire mingled with pity of a man not bitter 
 but sad, of one whose sweetness of temper had been in no 
 way spoilt by the struggle through which he had passed and 
 was passing. The fertility and resource with which Hood keeps 
 up the play upon gold are marvellous : the metal glitters in 
 every Une of the poem ; but the satirist has read St Paul more 
 accurately than many preachers : it is not money, but the love of 
 money, that is the root of all evil. Money itself, Hood teaches, 
 
 ^ Roundabout Papers.
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 25 1 
 
 like the man of sense he was, may be as potent for good as for 
 
 evil : — 
 
 "Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! 
 
 Good or bad a thousand fold ! 
 
 How widely its agencies vary — 
 To save — to ruin — to curse — to bless — 
 As even its minted coins express, 
 Now stamped with the image of Good Queen Bess, 
 
 And now of a Bloody Mary." 
 
 Miss Kilmansegg clearly belongs in spirit rather to Hood's later 
 than to his earlier period, more to the serious than to the purely 
 comic poems. The comic element runs all through ; it was as we 
 have seen natural to Hood and came out in his private Ufe. But 
 still we must distinguish. In his earlier years, before he was quite 
 so hard pressed for the means of living as he afterwards came to 
 be, Hood showed a disposition to take himself seriously. Then 
 came an intermediate period, during which necessity drove him to 
 play the jester almost exclusively. Finally, in the last four or five 
 years of his life he emerged from this state, and to these years 
 belongs a great proportion of his most memorable pieces. 
 
 The serious poems of Hood's earlier years are far less earnest 
 and less original than those of the closing period. Lycus the 
 Centaur^ a poem founded on the myth of Circe, is the work of a 
 young man of poetic sensibility, responsive to the influences 
 around him. Perhaps the traces of Keats which it shows are 
 due to the influence of Hood's friend and future brother-in-law 
 Reynolds, himself a poet. The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, a 
 gracefully fanciful poem, is in its way admirable. It is more 
 original than Lycus, and far more masterly in metre. But it is not 
 yet representative of the true Hood, whom the Ode to Rae Wilson 
 discloses as neither a jester nor a denizen of fairyland, but a man 
 deeply impressed with the realities of life. He was gradually dis- 
 covering himself; and in the weird Eugene Aram's Dream, a poem 
 ineffaceable from the memory, one phase of his genius found its 
 perfect expression. Ruth likewise, one of his most beautiful 
 poems, belongs to this earlier period. But with these exceptions, 
 the pieces by which Hood is likely to be remembered as a serious 
 poet are the work of his closing years. Passing over two or three
 
 252 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 exquisite lyrics, there are, besides Miss KilmaMsegg, three to be 
 specially noted, — The Bridge of Sighs, The Song of the Shirt, 
 and The Haunted House. These are the voice of the Hood we 
 love to remember. He was well aware that the two pieces first 
 named were of all his writings most likely to keep his memory 
 green ; and he directed that the words, " He sang the Song of 
 the Shirt," should be engraved on his tombstone. 
 
 In industry there is a terrible gamut or scale of comparison, 
 which allots always the greater misery to the more helpless. We 
 have had the positive already in Ebenezer Elliott. Hood's 
 championship of the suffering seamstress gives the comparative. 
 The superlative finds utterance in Mrs Browning's exceeding bitter 
 Cry of the Children. Never was there despair more poignantly 
 expressed than in the lines : — 
 
 "They know the grief of man, without its wisdom; 
 They sink in man's despair without its calm." 
 
 These poems are among the signs of advancing democracy ; and 
 there are many others. This inspires the prose of Carlyle and 
 of Frederick Maurice. The novels of Dickens and of Charles 
 Kingsley are full of it. The New Lanark of Robert Owen was its 
 practical outcome in industry. In politics it was the motive of the 
 work of Lord Shaftesbury. It started the memorable commission 
 on the working of the poor law; it initiated our factory legislation; 
 it swept away horrors so great that we have already almost forgotten 
 that they could ever be. 
 
 It was a manly instinct which guided Hood in his choice of 
 theme, and the fact that his social poems were practically useful is 
 one more point to his honour. But we have to consider them 
 here chiefly from the point of view of art. In metre and rhythm 
 they are masterly; for in technique Hood went on improving to the 
 end of his life. In tone too they are exactly right. Full of 
 sentiment, as the subject demands that they should be, they are 
 yet never sentimental. 7 he Bridge of Sighs, with its charitable 
 and pitiful humanity, is perhaps rather the finer of the two ; but 
 The Song of the Shirt is also one of the best poems that have ever 
 been devoted to the alleviation of the lot of the weak, and it
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 253 
 
 remains one of the greenest leaves in the honourable chaplet of 
 Mr Punch, whose voice on great national occasions and for great 
 national causes has more than once or twice rung the truest of all. 
 The Haunted House is a poem of a widely different class, yet it 
 too is among the very best of Hood's productions, and if it stood 
 alone would be sufficient evidence of a highly poetical mind. It is 
 poetry of the sort which only masters can create. In some 
 respects it is suggestive of Eugene Aram's Dream : both manifest 
 the same sway over the feelings of awe and terror. But the 
 Dream narrates facts, while the Haunted House merely produces 
 impressions ; and if he who produces impressions be an im- 
 pressionist, then in this piece Hood is among the greatest of the 
 class. But he does his work by strokes perfectly definite and 
 precise. The object is to create a sense of the supernatural : — 
 
 •' O'er all there hung a shadow and a fear ; 
 A sense of mystery the spirit daunted, 
 And said, as plain as whisper in the ear, 
 The place is Haunted I" 
 
 It is done by a careful selection of the objects the explorer — or 
 the dreamer — sees, and of those he would expect to see in a 
 human home, but does not see in the Haunted House, — "a 
 dwelling-place, — and yet no habitation " : — 
 
 " Unhinged the iron gates half open hung, 
 Jarr'd by the gusty gales of many winters, 
 That from its crumbled pedestal had flung 
 One marble globe in splinters. 
 
 No dog was at the threshold, great or small ; 
 No pigeon on the roof — no household creature — 
 No cat demurely dozing on the wall — 
 Not one domestic feature. 
 
 No human figure stirred, to go or come, 
 No face looked forth from shut or open casement ; 
 No chimney smoked — there was no sign of Home 
 From parapet to basement. 
 
 With shatter'd panes the grassy court was starr'd ; 
 The time-worn coping-stone had tumbled after ! 
 And through the ragged roof the sky shone, barr'd 
 With naked beam and rafter."
 
 254 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 This fine piece makes no such appeal to popular feeling as the 
 other two, or as Eugene Aram with its intelligible story. But it 
 may be doubted whether Hood has ever written better poetry. It 
 invites comparison with Browning's baffling, yet pictorially definite, 
 Childe Roland to the Dark Totver Came, or with Lord de Tabley's 
 weird Knight in the Wood. Compare this stanza from the former 
 poem ; — 
 
 •' As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair 
 
 In leprosy ; thin dry blades pricked the mud 
 Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood 
 
 One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare, 
 
 Stood stupeSed, however he came there : 
 
 Thrust out past service from the devil's stud ! " 
 
 Hood is a poet who just falls short of greatness. With better 
 fortune, better health and longer life, one is tempted to say, he 
 would have achieved it. And yet it is possible that the " veined 
 humanity " of his later pieces is in some degree due to the battles 
 he fought and the sufferings he endured. We have seen that he 
 worked his way from the older style to the newer, from the fading 
 influence of the classical school to the glow of the most burning 
 and the most modern of questions. He is therefore a natural 
 medium of transition from the school of the past to that of the 
 present ; from those who sought their models among the Eliza- 
 bethans or in the eighteenth century, to those whose first care was 
 to express, whether in the tones of Keats or of Shelley or of 
 Wordsworth, the poets then most influential, some need or 
 aspiration, thought or longing, of their own life and time. 
 
 In substance Hood's work belonged rather to the age which 
 was to come than to that which had just ended ; and in this 
 respect he contrasts with a notable contemporary, Hartley Coleridge 
 (i 796-1849), whose very name is a link with earlier days, although 
 the dates of his publications associate him with the years under 
 review. Working under the shadow of the genius of his father 
 and of Wordsworth, Hartley Coleridge seemed to rest satisfied 
 with the ideals of the recent past, the chief differences between 
 his work and that of his models being apparently due to tempera- 
 ment. Though he admired the Elizabethans, he was scarcely
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 255 
 
 touched by the Elizabethan revival. He had a strange mixture of 
 good and bad fortune in his birth and early surroundings. The 
 son of one of the most highly gifted of English poets, he inherited 
 both his father's genius and his father's fatal defect of character. 
 He breathed an atmosphere of poetry from his infancy. While he 
 was still a child Wordsworth's beautiful lines inscribed to him, and 
 the lines of his father, scarcely less beautiful, in Frost at Midnight, 
 had ensured him a place in literature. Unfortunately, his father's 
 lines are not merely a lovely fancy, they are also a theory of 
 education for the boy, and whether from belief in it or from 
 remissness the theory was actually carried into practice. After 
 reference to his own early life, spent in the great city, Coleridge 
 goes on, 
 
 " But thou, my babe ! shalt wander like a breeze 
 By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags 
 Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, 
 Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores 
 And mountain crags : so shalt thou see and hear 
 The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible 
 Of that eternal language, which thy God 
 Utters, who from eternity doth teach 
 Himself in all, and all things in himself." 
 
 Such a system, if system it can be called, was probably the worst 
 that could be conceived for a creature like Hartley Coleridge. 
 From his earliest infancy he was imaginative to excess. At the 
 age of five he had already the metaphysician's doubt as to the 
 reality of matter. Asked a question about his being called 
 Hartley, '"Which Hartley?' asked the boy. 'Why, is there more 
 than one Hartley?' 'Yes,' he replied, 'there's a deal of Hartleys.' 
 ' How so ? ' ' There's Picture-Hartley (Hazlitt had painted a 
 portrait of him) and Shadow-Hartley, and there's Echo-Hartley, 
 and there's Catch-me-fast Hartley,' at the same time seizing his own 
 arm very eagerly." 
 
 The desultory education of Hartley Coleridge left his will 
 undisciplined and his fancy unrestrained; and the sad story of his 
 later years is but the natural sequel to a childhood and youth 
 unwisely guided. He won a fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford, 
 but at the end of his year of probation forfeited it for intemperance.
 
 256 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 His after-life was principally spent wandering irresponsibly in the 
 Lake district There his name is associated with the cottage 
 called the Nab, in which he died in 1849. ^^ had previously been 
 inhabited by Thomas De Quincey, and it was within easy reach 
 of Wordsworth's home at Rydal ]\Iount. 
 
 Hartley Coleridge, "a sun-faced little man," as Tennyson 
 called him', won the hearts of the country people by his genial 
 friendliness. They thought him a greater poet than Wordsworth, 
 and with a fine indifference to dates they ascribed to the help of 
 " lir Hartley o' the Nab " the best work of the latter. In reality 
 his besetting weaknesses prevented him from producing anything, 
 except sonnets, worthy of his real powers. About 1820 he wrote 
 a dramatic fragment, Prometheus, of high promise. He con- 
 tributed in prose and in verse to the Lotidon Magazine and to 
 Blackwood, showing among other qualities a power of delicate 
 criticism. His Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire appeared 
 under its first title of Biographia Borealis in 1832 ; and in 1833 
 came a volume of Poe^ns. The rest of Hartley Coleridge's 
 poetry was published posthumously in 1851, with an interesting 
 biographical sketch by his brother Derwent. 
 
 Hartley Coleridge is at his best in the sonnets. A few of his 
 lyrics are very good, but his touch is unsure. In longer composi- 
 tions, like Leonard and Susan, he fails; and his "playful and 
 humorous " pieces are contemptible. But the best of his sonnets 
 will bear comparison with almost any in the English language. 
 They are exquisitely musical, they show a keen sense of natural 
 beauty, a fine human sympathy, and they are touching from the 
 pathetic sense of failure they often suggest. Wordsworth proved 
 that he fathomed Hartley Coleridge's character and foresaw his 
 destiny ; but no one knew him better than he knew himself, and 
 no one has more wisely depicted his character. His own beautiiul 
 sonnet is as full of insight as of poetry : — 
 
 " Long time a child, and still a child, when years 
 Had painted manhood on my cheek, was I, — 
 For yet I lived like one not born to die; 
 A thiiftless prodigal of smiles and tears, 
 
 ^ Life 0/ Tenuyson, i. 154.
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 257 
 
 No hope I needed, and I knew no fears. 
 
 But sleep, though sweet, is only sleep, and waking, 
 
 I waked to sleep no more, at once o'ertaking 
 
 The vanguard of my age, with all arrears 
 
 Of duty on my back. Nor child, nor man, 
 
 Nor youth, nor sage, I find my hair is grey, 
 
 For I have lost the race I never ran ; 
 
 A rathe December blights my lagging May; 
 
 And still I am a child, though I be old. 
 
 Time is my debtor for my years untold." 
 
 An irresponsible being like Hartley Coleridge carries the 
 reader far away from those political and social interests which may 
 sometimes be associated with work poetically inferior. In The 
 Christian Year the historical interest is felt once more, though in 
 this case the sphere of interest is not politics, as it was in the 
 Corn-Law Rhymes, but religious thought, and still more religious 
 emotion. 
 
 Critics have sometimes remarked how strange it is that so 
 little poetry of the first class, at least among Europeans either of 
 ancient or of modern times, can be classified as "religious." 
 Poetry seems, nay is, closely cognate to religion; yet The Treasury 
 of Sacred Sofig is weak and poor and pale beside The Golden 
 Treasury of Songs and Lyrics. The ancient Hebrews possessed 
 the secret of making their religion poetry and their poetry religion; 
 but we have lost it, or rather we never had it. There is a religious 
 element in Paradise Lost; but though the great epic attempts — 
 perhaps partly because it attempts — to "justify the ways of God to 
 man," it is not what we mean when we speak of a religious poem. 
 As regards this general inferiority of purely religious verse, the 
 nineteenth century was no exception to the rule. The volume of 
 Sacred, Moral and Religious Verse is the most bulky in Mr Miles's 
 valuable collection. The Poets and the Poetry of the Century ; and 
 it is also, not the dreariest, but the only dreary volume of the ten. 
 How few are the grains of wheat and how plentiful the chaff in 
 such collections as Hymns Ancient and Modern, which are 
 supposed to be receptacles of the precious grain after the rubbish 
 has been carefully eliminated ! Probably the boards of selection 
 have not been ideally qualified for their task ; but they have 
 
 w. 17
 
 25S THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 certainly had "glimmerings of sense," like Scott's " Dougal cratur." 
 It may be granted that they might have done better; but the 
 broad fact remains that the material does not exist which alone 
 would have enabled them to do well. 
 
 In this depressing department of verse, where hardly anything 
 is of first-rate quality and the great bulk is intolerably flat and 
 tedious, there is in the present instance the exceptional interest of 
 a great change, which was itself a reaction against an opposite 
 change in the preceding century. In the seventeenth century 
 there is the name of Milton on the Puritan side; but there is 
 no compartment of English religious verse large enough to hold 
 Milton ; while all the group of three, Crashaw, Herbert and 
 Vaughan, usually classified as religious poets, are catholic and 
 mystical. Crashaw became by creed a Roman Catholic, and the 
 other two unmistakably share the cathoUc spirit. In the 
 eighteenth century, on the other hand, the great writers of devo- 
 tional and religious verse were either dissenters by birth, like 
 Isaac Watts, or were driven into dissent, like the Wesleys, or, like 
 Cowper, were attached to that Calvinistic section of the Church 
 which is regarded with a sorrowful and not always a very willing 
 tolerance by the more catholic section. This strain of dissenting 
 or Protestant-Anglican religious verse was carried on into the early 
 part of the nineteenth century ; for the season of "catholic" poetry 
 was not yet. It was carried on feebly enough by Henry Kirke 
 White ; by the excellent but not very poetical Bishop Mant, who 
 versified the miracles of the Gospels as well as the Psalms, and of 
 whose hymns a few are still in use; and by James Grahame, author 
 of The Sabbath. Another who deserves mention if it were only 
 for the surprise of finding him in such company is John Bowring 
 (1792-1872), who in 1854 was knighted for his diplomatic services. 
 As poetry, Bowring's hymns are of little value ; but the fact that 
 the friend of Bentham's old age, and the first editor of the 
 Westminster Review, wrote hymns is curious enough to be worth 
 recording. It is true that his editorship gave little satisfaction to 
 the more stalwart utilitarians, and that he felt impelled by religious 
 scruples to exclude certain of Bentham's works from the collected 
 edition. But though Bowring was no poet, and a puzzling and
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 259 
 
 possibly puzzled Benthamite, he was a great linguist and intro- 
 duced to English readers specimens of Russian, Spanish, Polish, 
 Servian, Magyar and Cheskian poetry. 
 
 The great representative, however, of Protestant religious 
 poetry in the early part of the nineteenth century was James 
 Montgomery (1771-1854), the Moravian, whose Hnes on home 
 (from The West Indies) formerly were, and perhaps still are, a 
 favourite selection for recitation among the middle classes — of 
 society and of education. From the close of the eighteenth 
 century to the eve of his own death Montgomery was an active 
 and diligent writer. His volumes of verse and prose are numerous, 
 and all tend to edification, — morally, but not so certainly in the 
 literary sense. In his own day he was much overrated, and his 
 great popularity was due less to merit than to the fact that he so 
 exactly and accurately expressed in verse the spirit of English 
 dissent; but it would be unjust to deny him a share, though a 
 small one, of the poetic spirit. The best of his hymns, such as 
 " Hail to the Lord's Anointed," and " For ever with the Lord," 
 are good, and there are grains of gold, though rarely without 
 alloy, among his miscellaneous pieces. 
 
 The year 1827 was a kind of annus mirabilis of religious verse. 
 The fact that one of Montgomery's volumes. The Christian Poet, 
 appeared then, is of little moment; for most years witnessed a 
 volume by him. But in that year the hymns of Reginald Heber 
 (i 783-1826) were published posthumously, The Course of Time by 
 Robert Pollok (i 798-1827) appeared just a few months before the 
 young author was laid in the grave, and The Christian Year by 
 John Keble (1792-1866) started the Anglo-Catholic school of the 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 Pollok is sometimes bracketed with Kirke White, chiefly because 
 both died young, and both were of a religious turn of mind. But 
 there seems to have been more true poetic stuff in Pollok than in 
 his English predecessor. The plan of his poem— a review of 
 human history from Adam downwards — is absurd, and much of 
 the verse is fustian ; but there are passages which show genuine, 
 though immature and undisciplined, power. Had he lived he 
 would have run risk of being ruined by the extraordinary popu- 
 
 17 — 2
 
 26o THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 larity of his first achievement, a popularity which made The Course 
 of Time for many years one of the most saleable of books ; but 
 there are evidences of strength in PoUok which render it at least 
 as probable that he would have " deposited his mud," and flowed 
 on in a strong and clear stream of verse. It is to be feared, how- 
 ever, that the success of his only poem was due almost as much to 
 defects as to merits. He did not soar too high above his audience; 
 like Montgomery, he versified the religious sentiment of Presby- 
 terian Scotland and Nonconformist England. 
 
 Of the three volumes of 1827, the Hymns of Heber may be 
 regarded as a connecting link between the volume of the 
 Presbyterian PoUok and that of the High Church Keble ; for the 
 great missionary bishop was almost as far removed from the one 
 as from the other. Scott met him at Oxford in 1803 ; and, reading 
 Heher's Journal in the sad evening of his life, was reminded of the 
 time when his own laurels were beginning to bloom, and both 
 were " madcaps," and Heber was "a gay young fellow, a wit and a 
 satirist, and burning for literary fame." Heber's poetical career 
 was just beginning. He read to Scott the MS. of his prize poem, 
 Palesiine; and it was on Scott's suggestion that the lines describing 
 the silent rise of Solomon's Temple were added, — " No hammer 
 fell, no ponderous axes rung," &c. The circumstances of Heber's 
 life gave little scope for the " madcap " quality, the gaiety, wit and 
 satire of his youth ; but an occasional effusion shows the presence 
 of the qualities detected by Scott. Though the literary promise 
 he gave in those early years was never fully redeemed, Heber is 
 one of the best of modern hymnologists, and in his happier efforts 
 he contrives to put into his lines a rare majesty of sound. 
 
 So far, however, as religious verse is concerned, the future 
 belonged neither to Montgomery, nor to Heber, nor to any of 
 their kin, but to the school founded by Keble, who, whether he 
 was or was not the real originator of the Oxford Movement, was 
 certainly its corypheus in verse. We see his spirit rather than 
 theirs in the verse of Newman, Isaac Williams, Neale, Faber, 
 R. S. Hawker, Christina Rossetti and the younger Aubrey de 
 Vera. To a certain extent they were all anticipated by Wordsworth, 
 who, as inspiration waned, became more and more didactic, and
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 261 
 
 who in his Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1821) versified many phases of 
 religious life and history, doctrine and custom. This collection is, 
 to the superficial, the chief of Wordsworth's contributions to 
 religious verse ; but in reality there is far less religion in it than 
 in those earlier poems where he allows nature to speak through a 
 reverent heart. Wordsworth himself felt his kinship with the 
 Catholic party and was interested in their poetical work. Of Tlie 
 Christian Year he said, characteristically, *' It is very good ; so 
 good, that, if it were mine, I would write it all over again." 
 
 The Christian Year still remains the most satisfactory expres- 
 sion in poetry of the spirit which inspired the Oxford Movement, 
 and is the work by which Keble is most likely to be remembered, 
 though there is higher poetry in the Lyra Innocentium (1846), 
 and though the Miscellaneous Poems, posthumously published in 
 1869, give refreshing glimpses of the poet stripped of his eccle- 
 siastical robes. It would be a critical extravagance to call Keble 
 a great poet; but he is a true and a good one. He would have 
 been better if he could have made hi mself, n ot less religious, but, 
 in his poetry, ^i^ss \:onsct r ni5 oFHisreligiop ) The plan of The 
 Christian Year clogs and hampers the freedom of the poetic 
 movement ; yet, beyond doubt, it has given the poet a popularity 
 he would not otherwise have enjoyed. A volume which carries 
 the devout reader round and through all the Ch urch fas ts and 
 festivals must, if it be competently done at all, be in request ; and 
 there is far more than competence in Keble's execution. Never- 
 theless, even to a devout mind, to follow such a plan must be at 
 times something of a task. It has not the sustaining power of a 
 great subject which has an inherent unity, and which by the 
 force of that unity lifts the poet to the " highth " of his "great 
 argument." As a laureate manufacturing odes on public occasions 
 is prone to sink beneath himself; as a preacher preaching that 
 which is appropriate to the season, rather than that which comes 
 home to his own bosom, is apt to seem vapid to his hearers ; so 
 the poet of The Christian Year sinks not infrequently to the 
 commonplace. Homer may nod; but the more frequently he 
 nods — "the less Homer he." All are familiar with the Morning 
 and Evening hymns ; and such pieces are sufficient guarantee
 
 262 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 that Keble's poetry at its best is worthy of high praise. Yet even 
 at its best it often suffers from the religious purpose. Take, for 
 example, the beautiful lines, "Red o'er the forest peers the setting 
 sun." The first stanza is a perfect picture of a beautiful natural 
 scene : — 
 
 " Red o'er the forest peers the setting sun, 
 The line of yellow light dies fast away 
 That crowned the eastern copse : and chill and dun 
 Falls on the moor the brief November day." 
 
 But the next stanza betrays the fact that the picture has not been 
 painted from disinterested love of its beauty. We are called 
 upon to 
 
 " See the calm leaves float 
 Each to his rest beneath their parent shade." 
 
 This naturally suggests the likeness to decaying life; and then the 
 difference between the life of man and the life of plants is pointed 
 out; they have in store "no second spring"; but "man's portion 
 is to die and rise again." After this come the reflections which 
 naturally occur to the pious mind. All this is unobjectionable. 
 It is within any poet's right, and it may be one of his highest merits, 
 to " moralise his song." But in order to be perfectly successful it 
 must be done naturally, spontaneously, inevitably. Shakespeare's 
 nature-pictures grow out of the situation. The flowers which add 
 so much to the pathos of the mad Ophelia come there of them- 
 selves; the references of Duncan and Banquo to the site of 
 Macbeth's castle, effective as they are from the contrast between 
 the peace suggested by the "loved mansionry" of "the temple- 
 haunting martlet," and the deed of blood which is to follow, are 
 just the natural, unforced utterances of travellers ; the scene 
 between Florizel and Perdita is almost as beautiful in its absolute 
 fitness and its perfect ease as in the imaginative treatment of the 
 daffodils and the violets. When Burns disturbs the nest of the 
 poor mouse, there is nothing forced in the transition of his 
 thoughts from mice to men ; once started upon such a train of 
 reflection, it is to the imaginative mind inevitable. So too in the 
 best of Wordsworth the fervour of imagination holds in perfect 
 fusion the two elements of natural beauty and of human feeling.
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 263 
 
 So it is always with the greatest masters; but so it is not with 
 Keble. After the making of the ring of virgin gold there remains 
 necessary, Browning tells us, "just a spirt o' the proper fiery 
 acid " to unfasten the alloy indispensable to the craftsman in the 
 process of manufacture. It is this which Keble seems unable to 
 supply. The elements of his verse lie side by side, mingled, but 
 not fused. We see the nature-poet in one stanza, the religious 
 poet in the next. He lacks the art to conceal art, or, better, the 
 glow of feeling which effects the concealment unconsciously. A 
 little coldness is the defect of his verse, just as it is the defect of 
 a most amiable and virtuous life. We are tempted to speculate 
 whether he might not, like the monster of fable, have gained 
 strength by touching earth. But he belongs to that class of 
 saintly characters who are innocent, rather than greatly virtuous 
 by conquest over evil; he is of Rephan rather than of earth. 
 
 The progress in poetry of the movement of which Keble's 
 work was an anticipation must be traced later. That move- 
 ment has been referred to in the introduction as a reaction ; and 
 in matters intellectual it is correctly so called. Essentially an 
 attempt to substitute authority for reason, it could not but be 
 reactionary in the sphere of intellect, where no divided empire 
 is possible. But it was far from being wholly reactionary in the 
 domain of poetry and art; on the contrary, it did much to breathe 
 new life into them. It was, as we shall find, closely related to 
 the great pre-Raphaelite movement alike in art and in literature ; 
 it just touched Browning and Tennyson; and it furnishes the key 
 to much of the work of Clough and Arnold, as well as to some of 
 that of Ruskin. 
 
 The remaining poets of the interregnum, though they show 
 the widest differences, are all bound together by a common 
 interest in the drama. Some, like Milman, carried on the Byronic 
 tradition. A little later the new Elizabethan school rose into 
 prominence; and to it belong Beddoes, Wells, Wade and Darley, — 
 some of whom, in their work for the drama, seem to have done 
 almost as much violence to their genius as did Lord Brooke in 
 the Elizabethan age itself. Taylor, and after him Talfourd, may 
 be called dramatists ox the study ; while Sheridan Knowles and
 
 264 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Planch^ owe their position in the history of the drama not to 
 poetic gift but to stagecraft. 
 
 The misfortune of the time, in regard to the drama, is that 
 the qualities requisite for success in dramatic art are not found 
 united in any single individual. One has plenty of poetry, another, 
 abundance of technical skill, a third, a gift of very serviceable 
 rhetoric ; but no one has all that is required. And so, there is 
 no drama of the time, which, as at once a poetic work and a 
 piece to be presented on the stage, is fit to compare, not with the 
 masterpieces of Shakespeare, but with the best of Byron or of 
 Shelley. Beddoes rivalled them on the poetic side, and Sheridan 
 Knowles surpassed them in technique; but it would have required 
 a union of the two to produce a great dramatist. 
 
 James Sheridan Knowles (i 784-1862) had the will and 
 purpose to revive the poetical drama, and he lacked only one 
 thing needful to carry out the design. He had stagecraft ; for, 
 deserting the medical profession for which he was trained, he 
 appeared in 1809 as an actor. He was an adept at the con- 
 struction of plots, and few have been better able to sustain the 
 interest and to conceal the issue until it is ripe for disclosure. 
 The one thing needful which he did not possess was, unfortunately, 
 just a flash of the divine fire. His other gifts are rendered 
 nugatory by the mediocrity of his imagination. His poverty may 
 be detected, not exclusively but most easily, in the stiff metre 
 and ordinary conceptions of the lyrics scattered through the 
 dramas. Knowles is a bondman of the commonplace, content 
 to trudge along the earth when he ought to be soaring into the 
 empyrean. The mirror which the dramatist holds up to nature 
 is of the magic sort, which either, as in the case of Shakespeare, 
 reflects an infinity more than is visible to ordinary humanity, or 
 just so much as the average man realises ; and that is incompar- 
 ably less than the whole of nature. Moreover, in order to make 
 the poetical drama, to the naturalism which Hamlet enjoins upon 
 the players there must be added the supernaturalism hinted at in 
 Wordsworth's "light that never was on sea or land." And of this 
 Knowles has no conception. 
 
 The career of Knowles as a dramatist began in 1810, his
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 265 
 
 Caius Gracchus was acted in 1815, and his Vtrginius, which won 
 him fame, in 1820. From that time onwards until 1843 he 
 produced a large number of plays of the most varied kinds, — 
 historical and domestic, tragic and comic. In the latter part of 
 his life an exaggerated evangelicalism turned him from the drama. 
 Knowles was a man of little scholarship and of narrow reading. 
 He was almost entirely uninfluenced by the Elizabethan revival, 
 in the midst of which he lived ; and though superficial resem- 
 blances to Shakespeare may be detected in his works, he is not 
 in any real sense Shakespearean. We are told that from the time 
 when he started authorship he purposely refrained from reading 
 in order that he might not be led into plagiarism. But ignorance 
 never was the parent of originality ; and the result of this singular 
 precaution was, not so much to eliminate reminiscences of his 
 predecessors, as to impoverish his ideas. In no case could he 
 have risen to high literary rank; but if he had read more he would 
 probably have attained a somewhat wider reach of mind. 
 
 The high reputation of Knowles as a writer of tragedy has 
 long passed away; and whoever reads his works at the present 
 day will marvel how it was ever won. There is doubtless vigour 
 and power in Virginius ; but Caius Gracchus is poor, and the 
 other historical dramas, William Tell (1825) and Alfred the Great 
 (1831) are not much better. The lack of the poetic element is a 
 fatal defect in tragedy ; and it was a happy change when, in the 
 middle of his career, Knowles turned to comedy. His first 
 attempt in that line was The Beggar's Daughter of Bethnal 
 Green (1828), his most successful. The Hunchback (1832). The 
 Love Chase (1837) and Old Maids (1841) are also favourable 
 examples of the comedy of Knowles. He was a follower of the 
 eighteenth century school, and in comedy his practical knowledge 
 was of great value. 
 
 The amiable and good James Robinson Planche (i 796-1880) 
 scarcely deserves more than a passing notice, for his pleasant 
 extravaganzas and burlesques have not the "body" necessary to 
 secure permanence in literature; and his more ambitious design 
 to naturalise on the English stage a comedy of the type of 
 Aristophanes was wholly unsuccessful. His archaeological studies
 
 266 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 led, however, to one reform on the stage. On the revival of ICmg 
 John in 1823, Planche designed the costumes in accordance with 
 the fashion of the age in which the scene of the play was laid; 
 and it was largely due to him that the gross anachronisms which 
 had hitherto prevailed were gradually swept away. 
 
 Among the more literary writers of drama, the first place 
 chronologicall}', and for a time in reputation, belongs to Henry 
 Hart Milman (i 791-1868) who, though far greater as a historian, 
 first made his name as a writer of verse. Milman possessed more 
 of the poetic spirit than he is now credited with. He is among 
 the best of our hymn-writers ; and his prize poem, the Apollo 
 Belvidere (181 2) is the very best prize poem ever wi-itten. If the 
 style is rhetorical, the rhetoric is of the best sort. The secret 
 of Milman's loss of popularity is not want of poetry, but rathei 
 deficiency of dramatic power. There are splendid passages in 
 most of his plays ; yet the plays cannot be described as splendid 
 wholes, for the author fails to impart action. Milman's dramatic 
 career began with Fazio (18 15), which was brilliantly successful, 
 and culminated with The Fall of Jerusalem (1820), a "Sacred 
 Tragedy," which the author described to the publisher as neither 
 intended for nor capable of being adapted to public representation '. 
 Milman gradually lost reputation in his later dramas, The Martyr 
 of Antioch (182 1), Belshazzar (1822) and Aiine Boleyn (1826). 
 At the zenith of his success he seems to have over-estimated his 
 own work, and narrowly escaped being the first author who ever 
 left John Murray on account of money ^ 
 
 Sir Aubrey de Vere (i 788-1846) was slightly senior to Milman, 
 but he was considerably less precocious. A contemporary of 
 Byron at Harrow, it is remarkable that he completely escaped 
 the dominant influence of his early manhood. He was rather a 
 follower of Wordsworth, who held a very high opinion of De Vere's 
 sonnets. His first drama vidLS Julian the Apostate (1822). The 
 Duke of Mercia (1823) followed; and then De Vere almost 
 ceased to write till near the close of his life. Though by reason 
 of the works already named he is a poet of the interregnum, his 
 
 ^ Memoirs of fohi Murrciy, ii. 102. 
 * ibid. 106.
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 267 
 
 place in literature depends mainly upon Ma7'y Tudor, which was 
 written in the last year of his hfe and published posthumously. 
 This powerful and moving tragedy (which was meant to be 
 part of a trilogy, to be entitled The Daughters of Tudor) is not 
 altogether unworthy of the emphatic praise of Gladstone, who 
 ranked Mary Tudor next to Shakespeare^ The conception of 
 the Queen's character is admirable. De Vere delineates Mary 
 as a character by nature at once strong and good, but gradually 
 warped by the influence of the deepest and in themselves the 
 finest feelings of humanity, — love for her husband, combined with 
 the womanly yearning to win the love which he did not give her 
 in return; and reverence for religion, degenerating in her case 
 under evil guidance to superstition and cruelty. Nor is Mary's 
 the only well-drawn character of the play. Pole stands out clear 
 and strong; and so does Gardiner, a churchman of a very different 
 type. This distinct and sometimes subtle characterisation, along 
 with the excellence of the plot, gives De Vere's work a high place 
 among the few poetical dramas of the period ; and the vividness 
 of the metaphors and similes renders its place the more sure. A 
 curious circumstance in literary history is that Tennyson entered 
 into a sort of competition, doubtless unintentional, with the 
 dramatic work of the De Veres, father and son. His Queen 
 Mary treats again, less successfully, the subject which Sir Aubrey 
 may fairly be said to have made his own in Mary Tudor; and 
 his Becket traverses once more the ground of the younger De Vere's 
 Saint Thomas of Canterbury, which had only been published a 
 few years before. 
 
 Mary Russell Mitford would deserve a word in this connexion 
 were it only for the excellence of her descriptive prose. She took 
 herself very seriously as a dramatist, and, perversely enough, 
 valued herself in that capacity more highly than as the writer of 
 the exquisite sketches in Our Village. From Julian (1823) on 
 through the Foscari (1826) to the culminating point in Rienzi 
 (1828), she was conceived to rank among the first of English 
 tragedians. The flavour is however evaporated from her dramas. 
 
 ^ A. de Vere's Recollections, 2 r,<;.
 
 268 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 The gentle, shrewd, humorous power of observation, which Our 
 Village shows to be her true gift, was not that which could supply 
 the materials for tragedy ; and, beautiful as is her prose style, she 
 had not the gift of verse. 
 
 So too Bryan Waller Procter (1787-1874), better known by 
 his nom de plume of Barry Cornwall, in his earlier days aspired to 
 fame in the drama, and, though he is now remembered solely as 
 the writer o{ English Songs (1832), his tragedy of Mirandola was 
 in 182 1 performed with great success at Covent Garden. Procter, 
 however, is already no more than a name in literature. Nothing 
 he has done is really noteworthy, and his name survives rather for 
 its associations with greater names than for his own sake. The 
 author of " The Sea, the Sea, the open Sea ! " might be forgotten, 
 for it is only spirited verse; but the schoolfellow of Byron, the 
 steady friend of the hapless Beddoes and the early admirer of 
 Browning will be remembered for their sake. 
 
 But by far the most interesting figure among the group of 
 dramatists of the closet was Henry (afterwards Sir Henry) Taylor 
 (1800— 1886), who by reason of his Isaac Covinenus (1827) belongs 
 to the interregnum, though his greatest and most memorable pro- 
 duction was published after the appearance of Tennyson and 
 Browning. Taylor is interesting not only, perhaps not even chiefly, 
 for the value of his writings, but also because he is the representa- 
 tive of a tendency, and because he made a deliberate and conscious 
 effort to do what many were vaguely striving to do without being 
 aware of their own purpose. The age was gradually emancipating 
 itself from Byron. One way of emancipation lay along the path 
 traversed by Shelley and Keats ; and this was taken by Beddoes 
 and those akin to him. The other was by the cultivation of a 
 spirit of thoughtfulness, restraint and lucidity; and this was chosen 
 by Taylor. The great leaders of the period afterwards steered an 
 intermediate course, with a leaning towards the romantic side 
 rather than the classical. 
 
 Taylor's theory and purpose were proclaimed in the introduc- 
 tion to Philip van Artevelde (1834). His theory was that the 
 poetry which was popular in his own day was a weakened 
 Byronism, sensational in its character rather than intellectual.
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 269 
 
 Further, with an interesting anticipation of the judgment of 
 Matthew Arnold, Taylor pronounced Shelley to be wanting in 
 reality, and declared that the mind was no more enriched by 
 reading his verse than by gazing on "gorgeously-coloured clouds in 
 an evening sky^" Current poetry, then, in Taylor's opinion, had 
 passion and fervour and colouring : what it lacked was the 
 intellectual and immortal part of poetry, its philosophy. 
 
 Taylor contrasts with his contemporaries in character and 
 circumstances, as well as in dramatic theory. He entered the 
 Colonial Office in 1824, lived an easy life of official routine, 
 gradually rose in the service, was knighted in 1869, and retired in 
 1872 on a comfortable pension, to die at last full of years and 
 honours. He began his literary career as a contributor to the 
 Quarterly Review^ then edited by Gifford, and adopted at first, 
 but afterwards regretted and abandoned, that tone of sarcastic 
 superiority which in those days was customary with anonymous 
 critics. His Isaac Comnenus won the praise of Southey, but 
 failed to achieve popularity ; and the loss involved in the publica- 
 tion of it led Murray to decline Philip van Artevelde when it was 
 offered to him a few years later. Though the latter is separated 
 from its predecessor by seven years in date of publication, it was 
 begun almost immediately after Isaac Comnenus appeared. It was 
 hammered out and laboured at and polished in the leisure hours 
 of six years. This deliberateness of composition was natural to 
 Taylor, and was enforced by his theory of the function of verse. 
 The Virgin Widow (1849), one of his latest compositions, was on 
 hand for four years. Philip van Artevelde won immediate success, 
 and made Taylor a lion of society. The triumph was all the 
 more surprising because it followed upon the conscious and 
 deliberate defiance of popular taste, which is proclaimed in the 
 preface. From the vantage-ground of seventy years we can see 
 clearly enough that success came because the time was ripe, and 
 because the popular taste was waiting for new men, new methods 
 
 1 Some nine years later we shall find Ruskin teaching in Modei-n Painters 
 that there are few things which will more enrich the mind than just this 
 cloud-gazing.
 
 270 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 and new ideals. For the moment, it seemed as if Taylor was to 
 be the man, and his the methods. 
 
 A prose volume, The Statesman {1836), helped to check 
 Taylor's popularity, and brought upon him, through the sarcasm 
 of certain passages, the hostility of those who felt the possible 
 application to themselves. Edwin the Fair followed in 1842, and 
 then, thirteen years after The Virgin Widow, came the last of his 
 dramatic compositions, St Clement's Eve (1862). 
 
 Taylor never equalled Philip van Artevelde. Isaac Comnenus 
 was immature. Edwin the Fair was similar to Philips but less 
 striking and less strong ; and both the romantic comedy of The 
 Virgin Widow and the much better as well as more popular 
 St Clemenfs Eve were of slighter materials. Taylor was a man 
 of great talent ; but his dramatic scheme demanded superlative 
 ability. His solitary success exhausted him, and there remained 
 no more for him to do but to repeat himself. By an intel- 
 lectual tour de force he built up an admirable play; but he had 
 not the material wherewith to construct a second. And it was a 
 case of conscious construction. The element which is underrated, 
 if not forgotten, in his theory of poetry, is that which, for want of 
 a better name, is called " inspiration." He left no room for " the 
 inevitable " in plot and characterisation. His men and women are 
 not like paintings, where the colours melt into one another ; they 
 are rather mosaics, laboriously pieced together; and though the 
 work is skilfully done, the seams are visible. Neither had Taylor 
 the instinct for action ; frequently the piece stands still while the 
 characters brood and moralise and reflect. 
 
 It may be well to do some little violence to chronology in 
 order to notice with Taylor two or three other dramatists who 
 belong more completely than he to the later period. One of 
 them, Thomas Noon Talfourd (i 795-1 854), has, on more than 
 one ground besides his own work, a claim upon the gratitude 
 of lovers of literature. He was among the early champions of 
 Wordsworth, and he was the friend and literary executor of 
 Charles Lamb, whose letters and memorials he edited with care 
 and taste. Talfourd's work at the bar left him only the odd 
 moments of a busy Ufe to devote to literature. Hence, although
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 2/1 
 
 the drama had been with him a passion from early years, it was 
 not till 1836 that his first tragedy, Ion, was performed. Its 
 success stimulated him so that The Athenian Captive followed 
 in 1838, and Glencoe in 1840. 
 
 The subject of Ion, Talfourd's best-known work, is classical ; 
 but in form the drama shows the influence of the classics as 
 filtered through France and modified also by the higher traditions 
 of the English stage. Macready detected in it the qualities 
 necessary for success, and the event proved him to be right. 
 Nevertheless, an ordinary reader would be tempted to say that 
 the play was one which would appeal to the student rather than 
 to a popular audience. Talfourd is a sort of Henry Taylor 
 considerably weakened. His work is essentially psychological. 
 The whole play is constructed for the sake of Ion, in whom we 
 see the representation of an innocent but noble-minded inex- 
 perience awakening to heroism through contact with the tragical 
 facts of life. The Athenia?i Captive is another classical theme 
 handled in much the same spirit and exhibiting similar merits ; 
 and the similarity is preserved still in Glencoe : or, The Fate of 
 the Macdonalds, in spite of the fact that it deals with the modern 
 world instead of the ancient, and with the north instead of the 
 south. In all these plays the scheme is ambitious. Talfourd's 
 purpose, avowed in the somewhat wordy and self-conscious prefaces, 
 was to re-create a poetical drama. But for this he was inadequately 
 endowed. He was a man of poetical mind rather than a poet. 
 His statuesque characters are almost invariably frigid in their 
 speech. Under the influence of Wordsworth descriptions of 
 nature are sometimes dragged in without much regard to poetic 
 fitness ; and there is in all the plays rather too little action, 
 combined with a superfluity of sentiment. The style is redundant 
 and overloaded with ornament. Nowhere is there the least touch 
 of comedy or of humour. 
 
 Between Talfourd and Bulwer Lytton there is a point of 
 connexion in the fact that the second and most successful play 
 of the latter. The Lady of Lyons, was dedicated to Talfourd. 
 Lytton fills a larger space in the department of fiction than in 
 that of verse, whether dramatic or other; but nevertheless the
 
 272 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 man who wrote two of the very few plays which have kept the 
 stage from their appearance till the present day, and which enjoy 
 a steady popularity that has not been equalled since the comedies 
 of Sheridan, is clearly a person deserving of some attention and 
 study. 
 
 In the beginning of his career Lytton was decidedly Byronic ; 
 and, though he repudiated the connexion, there is throughout 
 more of the Byronic spirit than of any other in his works. It is 
 certainly so in the case of the dramas. When Henry Taylor 
 was declaring, with much truth, that the day of Byron was past, 
 Lytton with his sure instinct was discovering just how far Byronism 
 was antiquated, and how far it could still be made popular. He 
 found the solution in the dramas. In the period of his early 
 novels Lytton was too close a follower of Byron for the taste of 
 the rising generation: he was speaking to the generation which 
 was passing away. The dramas are an intermediate stage, still 
 Byronic, but with a Byronism written up to the new taste. 
 
 Lytton's first play, The Duchess de la Vallilre (1836) was, 
 notwithstanding the help of Macready in the cast of actors, one 
 of his few failures. On the other hand, The Lady of Lyons (1838), 
 written in a fortnight for Macready, and represented on the stage 
 by him in the part of Claude Melnotte, won a dazzling success. 
 RicJielieu (1838) was almost equally popular; and both these 
 plays have ever since remained favourites on the stage. The 
 Sea Captain (1839) was not so well liked; but even that was 
 good enough in respect of stage effect to be revived thirty years 
 later at the Lyceum. Money (1840), a prose comedy, and Not 
 so Bad as we Seem {185 1), another, complete the tale of Lytton's 
 dramatic compositions. 
 
 Few lovers of poetry and of the poetical drama will rank any 
 of Lytton's plays very high. There is nothing in them that rivals 
 in poetic quality the best of Beddoes, nothing comparable in force 
 to the most powerful scenes of Wells, nothing equal to the best 
 character-studies of Henry Taylor, nothing so profound as A Blot 
 in the 'Scutclieofi, nothing even approaching the passion of Ottitna 
 and Sebald. All Lytton's plays are melodramatic. When he strives 
 /or stage effect he becomes theatrical, and there is tinsel in nearly
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 273 
 
 everything that he writes. The plot of The Lady of Lyons trembles 
 on the verge of absurdity, the hero is about the poorest creature 
 who was ever elevated to such a position. In Richelieu, the great 
 statesman is a shadow. And yet in spite of all this, there is in 
 these dramas the incommunicable something which makes them 
 act and go. Better poets compose far richer dramas, which fail ; 
 but Lytton somehow hits the nail at which he aims, and drives it 
 home. 
 
 It is strange that in the lyric the false taste and false sentiment 
 of Lytton are less felt than in the other forms of his work, although 
 the ear is more sensitive to such faults in lyrical poetry than in 
 anything else. Expecting glare in the theatre, men pardon some 
 measure of it in dramatic work ; and fiction is not usually judged 
 by very rigid canons of art. But the lyric is emotion seven times 
 refined, and unless all dross is burnt and purged away it stands 
 condemned. Lytton's lyrics do not always bear the test. They 
 are often hard and sometimes false ; but on the whole there is in 
 them far less of the meretricious than we should expect. There 
 are many echoes and imitations, conscious and unconscious, echoes 
 of most of the great contemporary and recent poets, of Byron, 
 Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, and many more. There is also a 
 good deal of rhetoric. But when all deductions have been made, 
 in such pieces as The First Violets, Ls it all Vanity ? The Love of 
 Afaturer Years and Absent yet Present there is sufficient evidence 
 that Lytton had in considerable measure the lyrical gift. 
 
 There is a great gulf between Taylor and the group of which 
 Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) was the brightest ornament. 
 The two contrast at every point. While Taylor was somewhat 
 deficient in imagination, Beddoes was "of imagination all compact." 
 Taylor constructed everything by line and rule : Beddoes took 
 a perverse pleasure in defying, not merely literary conventions, 
 but often the vital laws of art. Taylor was too conscious and 
 deliberate : of all writers of the nineteenth century, Beddoes is 
 the man whose best pieces most impress us as having "written 
 themselves." Taylor was classical, Beddoes ultra-romantic ; but 
 although Taylor was successful and honoured, while Beddoes 
 died by his own hand, and his extraordinary masterpiece was 
 
 W. i8
 
 274 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 not printed till he was in his grave, it was nevertheless Beddoes 
 who was in the main stream, while Taylor was in only a side 
 current. 
 
 Numerous attempts have been made, with very limited success, 
 to define that romanticism which so powerfully moved the mind 
 of Europe in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and which 
 has been the life and soul of the hterature of the nineteenth. 
 Heine described it as the re-awakening of the spirit of the Middle 
 Ages; and one of the latest writers on the subject finds nothing 
 better he can do than to adopt this as "a rough working definition." 
 But such a definition explains nothing. In truth, it is no definition 
 at all, being really equivalent to the assertion that romanticism 
 prevailed also in the Middle Ages, and so reducible to the 
 tautologous proposition, "romanticism is romanticism." A phrase 
 such as Heine's, however, though worthless as a definition, may be 
 useful enough when the purpose is, like that of Mr Beers in the 
 passage referred to, to enquire what works manifest the romantic 
 spirit. It fulfils the function of what is called the "characteristic" 
 in the classifications of botanists. But being purely artificial it 
 has also the limitations of the characteristic, and tells us nothing 
 of the spirit or inner meaning of romanticism, any more than 
 the symptomatic hectic cough tells the nature of phthisis. We 
 come nearer to the essence in Mr Theodore Watts-Dunton's 
 phrase, "the renascence of wonder " ; in fact we have here 
 probably as much of the essence as a single phrase will carry. 
 We can see the operation of wonder in all the manifestations 
 of the romantic spirit. It explains the spectres and goblins 
 and enchantments of poetry and fiction. It explains the rising 
 admiration of Gothic in opposition to classical architecture, — 
 the one with its vaguely grand vistas and its endless variety; 
 the other a harmony created from a few simple principles. 
 It explains the cloudy visions of Turner in contrast with the 
 realism of the Dutch school, and the tense emotion of the 
 figures drawn by the Pre-Raphaelites in contrast with the calm 
 of a Greek statue. It explains the reversion to the Catholic 
 mythology with its appeal to the feelings, in contrast with the 
 Protestant appeal to the judgment
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 2/5 
 
 The subtler manifestations of the romantic spirit might be 
 illustrated indefinitely by quotations from Coleridge and Shelley 
 and Keats side by side with quotations from Dryden and Pope. 
 In the former company we find ourselves in a world of faery 
 casements, of mysterious, untraversed, silent seas, of clouds 
 piloted over earth and ocean by the lightning. And when we 
 turn from the treatment of nature to the treatment of moral 
 problems, we find a similar spirit prevalent among the romantic 
 poets. Such problems are either wrapped in a haze of mystery, 
 or their proportions are so gigantic that the human mind can 
 hardly grapple with them. Prometheus on his crag, Hyperion 
 flaring on "from stately nave to nave, from vault to vault," are 
 figures not to be measured with a foot-rule. They carry the mind 
 back, not to the immediate predecessors of their creators, but to 
 Milton and to Michael Angelo. Christabel in the midnight wood — 
 the Ancient Mariner on the shrinking deck — the subtle suggestions 
 of sin, the incalculable consequences of a deed of cruelty or of 
 love — such are the problems which the poets of the Romantic 
 Revival love, not to treat, but to suggest, and then leave to bear 
 their fruit in the mind. Such work stands in the strongest possible 
 contrast to the philosophy of the Essay on Man or the hard 
 outlines of the character of Achitophel. The earlier poets present 
 us with a series of syllogisms, the later ones create an atmosphere. 
 
 Although they are in eternal warfare, the two schools are 
 the necessary complement one of the other. Eighteenth century 
 classicism had to give place to romanticism, because the former 
 had cut itself away from " the root of the matter." " Our in- 
 dispensable eighteenth century " had to be rediscovered, because 
 without it romanticism was in danger of wandering aimlessly in 
 a fog. The two spirits are never completely separated, because 
 they are not really two, but only different aspects of one spirit. 
 Perfection means perfect equipoise and due proportion between 
 them ; imperfection is the loss of balance and proportion. Taylor 
 inclined to the one side, and was barren; Beddoes inclined to the 
 other, and was ineffective. The latter, with far higher gifts, could 
 make nothing round and whole; the former has nothing com- 
 parable to the inspired snatches of Beddoes. 
 
 18-2
 
 276 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 The first to appreciate the greatness of Beddoes's gift for 
 poetry was George Darley (i 795-1846), himself a poet, who in 
 the London Magazine sang the praise of The Bride's Tragedy in 
 terms rendered all the more striking by the author's unsparing 
 censure of some men of much greater fame than Beddoes. Darley, 
 an Irishman, was one of the leaders of that Celtic revival to which we 
 owe a great body of recent verse; and though he early left his native 
 island, he never ceased to look back with fond affection to the 
 country of his birth. His life was unfortunate. A shy and sensitive 
 man afflicted with a distressing stammer, he cut himself off almost 
 completely from society. He had the ambition of a poet, but he 
 never could be sure of the adequacy of his own gift, and little 
 encouragement came to him from without. There is deep pathos 
 in his statement to Miss Mitford, who had written in " kindly 
 praise" of Nepenthe (1835), that for seven long years he had lived 
 "on a charitable saying of Coleridge's, that he sometimes liked 
 to take up Sylvia" (1827). The latter work, a fairy pastoral, part 
 prose, part lyrical verse, was aptly described by Miss Mitford as 
 " something between The Faithful Shepherdess and A Midsum,7ner 
 Nighfs Dream." But Darley's connexions are rather with the 
 Cavaliers than with the Elizabethans ; and his well-known piece, 
 " It is not beauty I demand," was the best of all imitations of the 
 Cavaher style until Miss K. Mann, in Old Songs of the Elizabethans 
 with new Songs in Reply, caught the tone again and again. 
 
 It is the lyrical snatches which give charm to Sylvia, a lyrical 
 drama which shows little power of construction, but by fits and in 
 fragments displays a rare grace of fancy, a keen eye for the beauty 
 of nature, and a delicate ear for rhythm. The description of the 
 army of the fairies is spirited, and the lines which usher it in are 
 nature-poetry of very high merit. The song, "O May, thou art a 
 pleasant time," and the dirge, "Wail! wail ye o'er the dead!" are 
 specimens of Darley's art scarcely, if at all, inferior. More than 
 twice or thrice Darley rose into the higher regions of lyrical verse, 
 and he never deserved the almost complete oblivion which till 
 lately had overtaken him. The unfinished Nepenthe, though less 
 charming and perhaps still more uneven than Sylvia, was stronger 
 and more daring. It showed no trace of exhaustion of the poetic
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 277 
 
 faculty ; yet, except a few lyrics, it was the last work of Darley that 
 is worth naming. It failed as Sylvia had failed. Jacob had at least 
 Leah when he served a second seven years for Rachel ; but Darley 
 could hardly live for another seven years on such unsubstantial 
 fare as a chance phrase of approval. His career was practically 
 at an end ; and eleven years after the publication of Nepe7ithe he 
 died a disappointed and broken man. Darley was partly to blame 
 for his own failure, for he showed something less than common 
 sense in the management of his works at their publication. But 
 his contemporaries can hardly be acquitted of an almost Boeotian 
 dulness in their failure to appreciate the exquisite grace of his 
 lyrics. 
 
 Beddoes was the only one of the writers of the interregnum 
 who may be fairly described as a "lost leader," an "inheritor of 
 unfulfilled renown"; and the reason was that he, like Taylor, 
 lacked unum necessarmm. A great statesman has said that " the 
 great statesman must have two qualities, — the first is prudence, 
 the second imprudence"; and the saying may be adapted to the 
 poets. The great poet likewise must have two qualities; and the 
 first is obedience to law, the second disobedience. Henry Taylor 
 had the first, Beddoes had the second ; and the union of the two 
 would have made a very great poet. But Beddoes's wonderful 
 imagination was always unrestrained, and the volumes of his 
 poetry are little more than the scraps and fragments of what he 
 might have produced. His career was strange and irregular, like 
 his verse. His first literary venture was The Impj-ovisatore (182 1), 
 a poem in three "fyttes," published when he was only eighteen; 
 and it was immediately followed by The Bride's Tragedy (1822), 
 a play written not for the stage, but for the study. Both of these 
 appeared while Beddoes was still an undergraduate of Oxford. 
 For some three years more he continued to write busily, intending 
 to make literature his profession. He executed many fragments. 
 In the spring of 1825 he writes to his friend Kelsall that he is 
 "thinking of a very Gothic-styled tragedy," DeaWs Jest-Book\ 
 and in October, 1826, he declares it to be finished. Yet after 
 The Bride's Tragedy nothing except one or two fugitive pieces 
 was published during the lifetime of Beddoes. He could hardly
 
 2/8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 have been seriously discouraged by the treatment of his two 
 volumes; for The Brides Tragedy was fairly well received. But 
 he was conscious that he could never win popularity: "Of course 
 no one will ever read it," he says of Deaths Jest-Book ; and he 
 suddenly determined to abandon literature and follow his father's 
 profession of medicine. This resolution led to that residence in 
 Germany to which reference has been made in an earlier chapter. 
 There or in Switzerland he spent nearly all the rest of his life. He 
 died by suicide in the hospital of Basel. Death's Jest-Book was 
 published in the year after the author's death by his friend and 
 literary executor, Kelsall ; and a volume of miscellaneous poems 
 followed in 185 1. 
 
 Beddoes is an extraordinary mixture of the highly artificial 
 and the absolutely inevitable in poetry. Of his Death'' s Jest-Book, 
 his editor, Mr Gosse, declares that " no play in literature was less 
 of a spontaneous creation, or was further from achieving the ideal 
 of growing like a tree^"; and this is undoubtedly true of it as a 
 whole. It is forced and tortured into the appearance of a tragedy. 
 There is only one "whole" among the works of Beddoes, The 
 Bride's Tragedy; and the abortive fragments of The Second Brother 
 and Torrisjfwnd and The Last Man, as well as the numerous 
 beginnings, endings and middles of Death's Jest-Book, show how 
 difficult the art of construction was to him. In the letter dedicatory 
 of The Bridis Tragedy he affirms "the flourishing condition of 
 dramatic literature" in his own day; and all his ambitious efforts 
 were of the dramatic sort. Yet all his genius failed to make 
 him a dramatist. He could write noble blank verse and glorious 
 lyrics, and could throw the most striking lights upon character; 
 but in the art of construction he was hopelessly inferior to men 
 who had scarcely a gleam of his poetic insight. 
 
 His works, then, including Death's Jest-Book, are really a 
 collection of fragments ; but the judgment pronounced upon the 
 fragments must be widely different from that passed upon the 
 whole. The best of them are singularly spontaneous in the true 
 sense; which does not at all imply that they were written "with 
 the graceful and negligent ease of a man of quality." Spontaneity 
 * Poetical Works of Beddoes, Introduction, xxxvii.
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 279 
 
 in literature is achieved when the author, having something to 
 say, says it in the manner most perfectly fitting its character, 
 whether that manner be reached with labour or mastered easily. 
 It is as much a property of the high-wrought lyrics of Shelley as 
 of the simple songs of Burns. The "conceits" of the seventeenth- 
 century poets are frequently wrong only because they are in the 
 wrong place ; the metaphors of Shakespeare in scenes of intense 
 passion are often of the same order. We call the former artificial 
 because they are arbitrary ; the latter are natural, though they 
 must have been won with sweat of soul. It is in this sense that 
 the fragments of Beddoes, both lyrical and dramatic, are among 
 the most spontaneous verse of recent times. Any of Beddoes's 
 better-known lyrics, such as Dream-Pedlary, or Wolfram's Dirge, 
 would illustrate what is meant. The following dirge, which is 
 inferior to none of them, is less known and is equally good for 
 illustration : — 
 
 "To-day is a thought, a fear is to-morrow. 
 And yesterday is our sin and our sorrow ; 
 And life is a death, 
 
 Where the body's the tomb, 
 And the pale sweet breath 
 
 Is buried alive in its hideous gloom. 
 Then waste no tear. 
 
 For we are the dead; the living are here, 
 In the stealing earth, and the heavy bier. 
 Death lives but an instant, and is but a sigh, 
 And his son is unnamed immortality, 
 Whose being is thine. Dear ghost, so to die 
 Is to live, — and life is a worthless lie. — 
 Then we weep for ourselves, and wish thee good-bye." 
 
 Death's Jest-Book is strange, wild and chaotic, yet wonderfully 
 interesting throughout. Beddoes, says Mr Gosse, even as a child 
 displayed a " precocious tendency to a species of mocking meta- 
 physics\" If so, the boy was in this case emphatically father of 
 the man; for both the mockery and the metaphysics are here. 
 Beddoes disguised his thought under the Gothic garb of the 
 grotesque, but the charm of his work is its rare power of sugges- 
 
 ■^ Inlroduction, xx.
 
 280 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 tion. Carried back in imagination to the date of its composition, 
 Death's Jest-Book becomes one of the earliest and most remark- 
 able manifestations of the spirit of the rising generation. The 
 German influence is already there. The preferences of Beddoes, 
 when he became thoroughly familiar with the Germans, are in- 
 structive. Goethe wrung admiration from him; but his heart 
 went out spontaneously to Tieck and the ultra-romantic writers. 
 The first was a genius too sane and round and orderly for him, 
 while the lawlessness and morbidness of the ultra-romantic writers 
 answered to something in his own nature. 
 
 But the most remarkable thing in Beddoes is the Elizabethan 
 note in his work ; which is also a note of the time. It is heard 
 alike in the lyrics, in the blank verse of all the dramatic pieces, 
 and in the prose passages of Death's Jest-Book. Especially in his 
 lyrics, Beddoes has the note of Elizabethan song in a degree 
 which is unequalled. He caught the tone, not once or twice, but 
 many times. He was probably induced to study the Elizabethans 
 by Coleridge and Lamb and Hazlitt; but it is not mere imitation: 
 it is rather the Elizabethan spirit re-incarnate in a man of the 
 nineteenth century. Beddoes was far too daring for imitation ; and 
 he had also too sound a conception of what was needed in order 
 to give life to the literature of his own age. Just about the time 
 when the idea of Death's Jest-Book was budding in his mind, 
 he writes to Kelsall about an Elizabethan revival : " These re- 
 animations are vampire-cold. Such ghosts as Marloe {sic), Webster, 
 etc., are better dramatists, better poets, I dare say, than any 
 contemporary of ours^ but they are ghosts — the worm is in their 
 pages, — and we want to see something that our great-grandsires 
 did not know. With the greatest reverence for all the antiquities 
 of the drama, I still think that we had better beget than revive, 
 attempt to give the literature of this age an idiosyncrasy and spirit 
 of its own, and only raise a ghost to gaze on, not to live with^" 
 The man who wrote thus was the last who would have set himself 
 the task of writing in a by-gone style ; and we must ascribe the 
 remarkable similarity of tone between his work and that of the 
 Elizabethans to a kinship of birth, not one of adoption. His 
 
 ^ Inirodticiion, xxiv.
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 28 1 
 
 mind was cast in their mould ; conceptions came to him in the 
 same fashion as they came to them. Take, for example, the 
 speech of Isbrand to Siegfried over the body of Wolfram : — 
 
 "Dead and gone! a scurvy burthen to this ballad of life. 
 There lies he, Siegfried ; my brother, mark you ; and I weep not, 
 nor gnash the teeth, nor curse ; and why not, Siegfried ? Do you 
 see this? So should every honest man be: cold, dead, and leaden- 
 coffined. This was one who would be constant in friendship, and 
 the pole wanders: one who would be immortal, and the light 
 that shines upon his pale forehead now, through yonder gewgaw 
 window, undulated from its star hundreds of years ago. That is 
 constancy, that is life. O moral nature^!" 
 
 Or, in verse, take Athulf s description of Amala : — 
 
 " So fair a creature ! of such charms compact 
 As nature stints elsewhere; which you may find 
 Under the tender eyelid of a serpent, 
 Or in the gurge of a kiss-coloured rose, 
 By drops and sparks : but when she moves, you see. 
 Like water from a crystal overfilled, 
 Fresh beauty tremble out of her and lave 
 Her fair sides to the ground. Of other women, 
 (And we have beauteous in this court of oxxrs,) 
 I can remember whether nature touched 
 Their eye with brown or azure, where a vein 
 Runs o'er a sleeping eyelid, like some streak 
 In a young blossom ; every grace count up, 
 Here the round turn and crevice of the arm, 
 There the tress-bunches, or the slender hand 
 Seen between harpstrings gathering music from them! 
 But where she is, I'm lost in her abundance. 
 And when she leaves me I know nothing more, 
 (Like one from whose awakening temples rolls 
 The cloudy vision of a god away,) 
 Than that she was divine''." 
 
 This almost Shakespearean opulence is unquestionably the 
 outflow of Beddoes's own mind; and as certainly it has the boldness 
 and the massiveness of "the spacious days." But besides the 
 Elizabethan strain we detect in Beddoes the note of Shelley and 
 
 1 Death's jfesi-Book, il. L ' ibid. ii. ii.
 
 282 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Keats; and herein again he was a pioneer, for the new age was 
 the age of their disciples. He has indeed been called "a Gothic 
 Keats"; and it is possible that he was fundamentally more akin 
 to Keats than to Shelley ; but on the other hand his resemblance 
 to the latter is more obvious. It would not be easy to find a 
 passage as redolent of Keats as the song from Torrismond, "How 
 many times do I love thee, dear?" is redolent of Shelley. But 
 . the traces of both are evident; and the very union is again 
 
 / characteristic of the time. Shelley and Keats are poets between 
 whom there are very wide differences. The one is intellectual, 
 the other sensuous; the one is abstract, the other concrete; the 
 one is in the clouds, the other, without being in the least earthy, 
 has a firm footing on earth. Shelley, like Byron, was a poet of 
 revolt, keen to solve the problem of the rights of man, and all on 
 fire to redress social wrongs; Keats, absorbed in the religion of 
 beauty, cared for none of these things. It was to him no mere 
 figure of speech, but a literal fact, that beauty was truth, and he 
 could hardly understand how truth could be reached by a process 
 of reasoning; but the son-in-law of Godwin, devotee as he was of 
 beauty, understood the mystery very well. He was a critic and 
 philosopher as well as a poet. Yet notwithstanding all this, those 
 who have been influenced by Shelley have almost without ex- 
 ception been influenced by Keats; and while Beddoes was drawn 
 towards the former by his intellect, he was drawn towards the 
 latter by his imagination. 
 
 The growth in popularity of Shelley and Keats is a subject 
 worthy of a moment's attention; and the group to which Beddoes 
 
 ' belonged were among the earliest and most devoted of their 
 followers. In the fourth decade of the century the growth was 
 considerable; but their popularity was then quite recent, and it 
 was not really wide. In his review of Tennyson's Poems in 1833, 
 Lockhart ironically retracted the censures which had been passed 
 by The Quarterly Review upon Keats, and spoke of "the un- 
 bounded popularity which has carried it [Evdymion] through we 
 know not how many editions; which has placed it on every table; 
 and, what is still more unequivocal, familiarized it in every mouth." 
 But there must have been great exaggeration in this; at least,
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 283 
 
 Blackwood's Magazine in 1844 misspelt the name of Keats; and 
 Rossetti, who began to study him about 1845 or 1846, imagined 
 himself to be "one of the earliest strenuous admirers of Keats \" 
 Rossetti was certainly wrong; but he never could have made such 
 a mistake if Keats had been well and widely known. About 
 Shelley, Tennyson knew nothing until he went to Cambridge. 
 Browning at the age of fourteen accidentally saw in a second-hand 
 book-shop a little volume described as " Mr Shelley's Atheistical 
 Poem, very scarce." He begged his mother to get him Shelley's 
 works; but no local bookseller had ever heard the name, and 
 they had to be procured from London. Along with them, 
 Mrs Browning "brought also three volumes of the still less known 
 John Keats, on being assured that one who liked Shelley's works 
 would like these also^" Thus early were the two names linked 
 together, and so deep was the ignorance about the two poets even 
 after they were both in the grave. The few who were better 
 instructed were without influence. Peacock, the satirist as well 
 as the friend of Shelley, knew ; so did John Hamilton Reynolds, 
 whose portrait hangs now in the National Portrait Gallery inscribed 
 with the words, "the friend of Keats"; so did Charles Jeremiah 
 Wells; so, of course, did Beddoes, the student of everything 
 romantic. But these men had no following and hardly any 
 audience : they had nothing but poetic taste. The fact that they 
 gave their suffrages to the neglected poets was an indication that 
 the day of those poets would come ; but it did little to bring that 
 day nearer. Their " discovery " by the Cambridge contemporaries 
 of Tennyson was more effectual. 
 
 The same union of the Elizabethan spirit with something 
 derived from Keats and Shelley is to be found in the work of 
 Charles Jeremiah Wells (1800-18 7 9) and in that of Thomas 
 Wade (1805-1875); and unfortunately there is to be found in 
 them also the same ostentatious defiance of or indifference to the 
 requirements of the stage. Herein, of course, the nineteenth 
 century writers were unfaithful to the Elizabethan tradition ; and 
 the difference is highly interesting. Shakespeare is almost as 
 
 ^ D. G. Rossetti : his Family Letters, i. 100. 
 ® Mrs Sutherland Orr's Life of Browning, 40.
 
 284 'i'HE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 remarkable for his practical sagacity as he is for his poetic gift; 
 but the men of the Elizabethan revival sometimes seem to value 
 themselves on the absence of that practical sagacity, as applied to 
 matters of the theatre. The fact is a sure proof that they lacked 
 the true dramatic instinct, the end of which is to find its expression 
 on the stage. All pleas for the closet drama are conclusively 
 answered by the appeal to experience, which shows that in all 
 ages and in all countries the really great dramatists have been 
 able to satisfy the requirements of representation, and have con- 
 trived to be poetical without ceasing to be practical. 
 
 In 1822 Wells published a volume in the vein of Boccaccio 
 entitled Stories after Nature; but the work on which his fame 
 must wholly rest is Joseph and his Brethren (1823), the history 
 of which is too curious to be omitted. On its publication, Joseph 
 and his Brethren passed unnoticed, except, as the event proved, 
 by a discerning few; and Wells seems to have calmly accepted 
 himself as a literary failure, and ceased to write. About twenty 
 or thirty years afterwards, however, he was induced by the urgency 
 of two or three admirers to revise the book ; but before it could 
 be published the copy was lost. Later still, the warm praise of 
 two great poets, Rossetti and Swinburne, induced Wells to under- 
 take a second revision, and in 1876 the poem was issued in the 
 form in which it is now known. 
 
 Joseph and his Brethren is not a true drama, and Wells can 
 hardly be said to have seriously attempted to make it one; but it 
 is a very fine dramatic poem. The action often pauses for 
 dialogue and soliloquy which are incredible under the given 
 circumstances ; and the scenes might be added to, or diminished, 
 or changed in their order, indefinitely. The poem therefore must 
 be judged rather by its parts than as a whole. The characterisa- 
 tion, in Joseph and Reuben, and above all in Phraxanor, 
 Potiphar's wife, is excellent. The last is a profound and subtle 
 study of a woman unprincipled and sensuous, but great in 
 intellect, in beauty, and in a certain evil charm which is not 
 wholly lost even in the scene where she woos Joseph. That 
 scene, the most difficult to manage, is likewise the triumph of the 
 book. The introductory dialogue between Phraxanor and her
 
 THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 285 
 
 attendant is wholly admirable, and Phraxanor's two speeches, on 
 the power of love and on the want of truth in women, are great. 
 Scarcely less excellent is the stormy outburst of Reuben, when he 
 turns upon his brethren after searching the pit and finding no 
 Joseph. The general mode of conception recalls Marlowe ; but 
 there are constant suggestions of Shakespeare throughout the 
 poem, — not imitations, but rather instances of community of 
 thought. There is often a Shakespearean breadth in single lines or 
 phrases; thus, 
 
 " A little secret is a tempting thing 
 Beyond wide truth's confession." 
 
 And there is a Shakespearean ring in this metaphor : — 
 
 " Great Conscience is task-master to the will, 
 And lets it forth as men hold bears in chains, 
 To have them back, and whip them at the fault." 
 
 Along with the name of Wells is commonly mentioned that of 
 one of his earliest panegyrists. Wade, who, in a note to The Con- 
 tention of Death and Love, speaks of the verse of Wells as in " the 
 same stream of sublime, subtle and unsurpassed poetry" as 
 Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes and Antony and Cleopatra. But 
 a better justification of the conjunction of the names is the 
 similarity between the two men, though it is a similarity which is 
 striking rather than close. Both illustrate the influence of the 
 Elizabethan revival; both follow Marlowe, — of whom and of 
 Webster there is more than of Shakespeare in the movement; 
 and both are influenced by Keats ; though Wells was affected by 
 him far less than Wade. Here the resemblance ends. Wells, 
 though not a dramatist, was essentially dramatic in the type of his 
 mind, while Wade was not. Wells was the more forcible. Wade 
 by far the more polished and regular in his work. In Wells there 
 is little of the influence of Shelley, in Wade there is a great deal. 
 
 Wade's career opened with a volume of Poems (1825), which 
 was followed by two dramas, Woman's Love (1828) and The Jew 
 of Arragon (1830). The latter is interesting both for its tnotif d>.nd 
 for the fate which that motif brought upon it. Dealing with the 
 persecution of the Jews by the Christians, the author clearly shows
 
 286 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 that his sympathies are on the side of the former. The result had 
 been predicted by Mrs Kemble. The play was damned by an 
 audience which could not tolerate the championship of the Jews, 
 and which had seen The Alerchant of Venice without a suspicion 
 that possibly Shakespeare might have thought there was something 
 to say on the side of Shylock. 
 
 Wade wrote at least one play afterwards, but it remains un- 
 published ; and the fact that he was by this failure diverted from 
 the stage is not to be regretted. Though there is poetry in his 
 dramas, Wade's true gift was rather of the lyrical order. He had 
 been for some years contributing to The Monthly Reposiiory; and 
 in 1835 he gathered his contributions together in a volume which 
 is usually known by its shortened title, Mundi et Cordis Carmiua. 
 The contents of this volume, certain miscellaneous sonnets, and 
 four poems which were published separately in pamphlet form in 
 1837 and 1839, are Wade's best contributions to literature. 
 
 The sonnets, which are somewhat free in construction, are 
 often good, and occasionally they reach excellence. Birth and 
 Death, for example, is fine alike in conception and in execution. 
 But on the whole. Wade is at his best in the lyrics and miscel- 
 laneous poems whose metre is somewhat simpler than that of the 
 sonnet. Probably he never wrote anything finer than Helena. 
 Modelled on Keats's Isabella, it bears the stamp of imitation on its 
 face ; but this fact detracts little from its value. When poetry is 
 genuine, and is the sincere expression of the poet's own spirit, 
 very little importance need be attached to similarities, or even to 
 conscious imitation. There are in Milton and Tennyson a 
 thousand resemblances to Virgil, but no one thinks the less of 
 those two poets on account of them.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 
 
 " The King is dead : long live the King," is the cry of the 
 citizen in times of political change; but the kings of thought 
 succeed each other with no such startling rapidity. " The king is 
 dead," was the cry of contemporaries when Byron died at 
 Missolonghi, but they could only gaze helplessly around and ask, 
 "Whom shall we crown?" Looking back with the wisdom born 
 of years we can see that the answer came in 1833, the date printed 
 on the title-page of Tennyson's second volume of verse, which 
 closes his apprentice period of authorship, the year of Browning's 
 Pauline, the year when Carlyle's Sartor Resartus began to run its 
 course in Fraser's Magazine. But the wisdom born of years is 
 not granted till the years have passed. There was a time of 
 struggle yet between Carlyle and any adequate recognition of his 
 power, it was not till 1842 that Tennyson achieved popularity, and 
 it was longer still before the world became conscious of the great- 
 ness of Browning. 
 
 In respect of poetry, the period between the close of the 
 interregnum and the end of the nineteenth century may be 
 roughly divided into three parts. The first, extending to about 
 1850, is marked by the rise of two great poets, Tennyson and 
 Browning. The second, from 1850 to 1875, is the period of their 
 greatest predominance, though even at the latter date Browning 
 had not yet reached his widest popularity. In 1875 Tennyson's 
 dramatic period began, and by that date all Browning's greatest 
 
 h
 
 288 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 work was done. The Spasmodic School had flourished and 
 faded, the Pre-Raphaelites had produced their best poems, 
 Clough was dead and Matthew Arnold had written nearly all his 
 verse. The third period is too close to our own time for detailed 
 examination. It will concern us chiefly for the sake of those who 
 had won fame before it began. Tennyson and Browning are 
 still the leading names ; but in a certain sense their day is past, 
 and in the younger poets we detect the struggle after ideals which 
 are not the ideals of the older men. 
 
 Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) deserves that close attention 
 which is due to one who was not merely a great man but, with 
 the exception of Carlyle, the most complete and comprehensive 
 representative of his age. He was born in the Lincolnshire 
 rectory of Somersby, in the midst of beautiful and character- 
 istically English scenery, which has left its mark on many a line 
 of his verse. The "English home" depicted on the arras in The 
 Palace of Art might have been drawn from the rectory: — 
 
 " Gray twilight pour'd 
 On dewy pastures, dewy trees, 
 Softer than sleep — all things in order stored, 
 A haunt of ancient Peace." 
 
 So profound was the "ancient peace" that even the thunder of 
 Waterloo failed to break it, and while England was jubilant with 
 victory, Somersby remained ignorant that the battle had been 
 fought ^ This seclusion doubtless helped to deepen the native 
 Teutonic reserve into that shyness which characterised Tennyson 
 through life. Little or no sympathy came to his boyhood or 
 youth from the outside world. The bucolic mind of Lincolnshire 
 neither knew nor cared about the literary tasks of the Tennyson 
 family. Notwithstanding the fact that Alfred Tennyson was 
 " Hercules as well as Apollo," and could beat the rustics in their 
 rustic feats of strength, such impression as the Tennysons made 
 was due more to the father than to the sons. And it was an 
 impression of wonder rather than of sympathy. An old parish 
 clerk described him as "a fine owd gentleman," but had nothing 
 definite to say except that he " remembered on 'im dying." An 
 
 ^ Life oj Tennyion, i. 5.
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 289 
 
 old housekeeper described him " ' glowering ' in his study, the 
 walls of which were covered ' wi' 'eathen gods and goddesses 
 wi'out cloas^'" 
 
 But if there was quiet without, there was bustle and life enough 
 within the home. Alfred Tennyson was the fourth of a family of 
 eight sons and four daughters, all of whom, with the exception of 
 the first-born, a boy, survived to maturity. Such a family made a 
 society in itself, which was the more satisfying to the young Alfred 
 because his two elder brothers showed strong literary tastes. The 
 overshadowing greatness of Alfred Tennyson paralysed his brothers. 
 Fastidious in their taste, they felt his superiority, and comparison 
 with his work convinced them that their own fell short of the 
 highest standard. This was partly the reason why, although both, 
 Frederick as well as Charles, joined with Alfred in the early 
 venture of the Poems by Two Brothers (1827), the eldest had 
 reached middle life before he published anything independently, 
 while the published work of Charles Tennyson Turner is limited 
 to a volume of sonnets and a handful of lyrics. 
 
 Charles Tennyson (1808-1879), ^^^ took the name of Turner 
 on his succession to his great-uncle Samuel Turner's estate, was 
 decidedly the more independent and original of the two minor 
 poets. He had true genius, but his qualities were fineness of 
 perception and of touch rather than largeness of view. Naturally 
 and rightly enough therefore he confined himself to the shorter 
 kinds of verse, and preferred before all others the sonnet form. 
 This was Charles Tennyson's choice from the first. He published 
 in 1830 a slender volume of fifty sonnets; and his literary history 
 is summed up in successive additions to these, until in the 
 Collected Sonnets^ Old and New (1880), the number has grown to 
 considerably more than three hundred. 
 
 The sonnet suited Charles Tennyson as it suited Wordsworth, 
 but for the opposite reason. It suited Wordsworth because he 
 was compelled to select only the best from among the suggestions 
 of a mind which tended to redundancy. It suited Charles 
 Tennyson because his thoughts, true and beautiful in themselves, 
 
 ^ Literary Anecdotes of the XIX Cent. ii. 423. 
 
 w. 19
 
 290 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 were of narrow range and limited in number. And the circum- 
 stances of his life tended not to change, but rather to confirm and 
 strengthen his innate disposition. He took orders, and passed the 
 greater part of his life as vicar of Grasby in Lincolnshire, another 
 "haunt of ancient peace," near to which lay the estate he had 
 inherited. In tone and substance the sonnets befit the pastor of 
 such a place. Some of them were suggested by the controversies 
 which rent the Church and the criticisms which assailed her, but 
 these are not the most happy. It is when he allows himself to be 
 inspired by rural sights and sounds, by the human incidents of 
 his professional experience, or by the charm of childhood, that 
 Charles Tennyson deserves the praise bestowed on his sonnets by 
 so competent a judge as Coleridge, and repeated by Alfred 
 Tennyson, who declared a few of them to be "among the noblest 
 in our language." "Noblest" is perhaps not a very happily 
 chosen word; for the quality which raises the best sonnets of 
 Charles Tennyson into high poetry is not that which thrills and 
 awes in Drummond of Hawthornden's sonnet on John the 
 Baptist, or in Milton's on the massacre in Piedmont, or in that of 
 Wordsworth written upon Westminster Bridge ; it is rather com- 
 parable to the charm of Wordsworth in a somewhat lowlier and 
 homelier strain, or to the gentle beauty of some of the best of 
 Hartley Coleridge's sonnets. Edward FitzGerald hit upon the 
 right image when he compared them to violets. 
 
 Frederick Tennyson (1807— 1898) published his first volume, 
 Days and Hours, in 1854. After a long interval The Isles of 
 Greece (1890) followed, then Daphne and other Poems (1891), and 
 finally Poems of the Day and Year (1895). As regards date of 
 publication, therefore, most of his work is the verse of an old 
 man ; but much of it is known to have been written, and some 
 of it was printed, many years before its publication. As Scott 
 declared that Campbell was " afraid of the shadow that his own 
 fame cast before him," so, it is probable, was Frederick Tennyson 
 afraid of the shadow of his brother's fame. And not without 
 reason; for there is sufficient similarity between the poetic note 
 of Frederick and that of Alfred Tennyson to make it probable 
 that the weaker poet would have been accused of imitation and
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 29I 
 
 condemned as an echo. At a later date, however, the fact that 
 Frederick Tennyson was brother of the laureate had quite the 
 opposite influence. Alfred Tennyson's fame was founded deep 
 and built high; and his brother's productions were certain to be 
 received sympathetically and to be studied with a natural curiosity, 
 not merely for their own sake, but to see whether any light was 
 thrown on the greater man's mind by the writings of one so near 
 akin to him. And so it is probable that at the present day 
 Frederick Tennyson's name is better known and his verse more 
 read than they would have been but for his connexion with the 
 most widely popular of recent English poets. For of the three 
 poet-brothers he is decidedly the least. He not only falls far 
 short of the greatness of Alfred, but he is destitute also of the 
 exquisite touch of Charles. His verse is the outflow of a mind 
 accomplished and sensitive, but hardly capacious enough to make 
 the product memorable for its substance, and hardly delicate 
 enough to give it the compensating grace of form. Its diff"useness 
 will probably doom it to an early oblivion. Frederick Tennyson 
 had more fluency than force. It was far easier for him to write 
 many lines than to concentrate their meaning in a phrase; and 
 when at last he was induced to publish, he did not eliminate 
 what was redundant. 
 
 We have already seen the nature of the early influences which 
 were brought to bear upon the three poet-brothers. Through 
 the next stage also the influences were common to them all ; for 
 they passed from their father's home to Cambridge, and became 
 members of the society of Trinity College in one of the most 
 flourishing periods of the University. It will be worth while to 
 pause a little over the Cambridge of that time, for English litera- 
 ture was in no small degree moulded by the young men who were 
 gathered there. 
 
 For the birth of great men 1809 is the annus mirabilis of 
 English history. Alfred Tennyson and William Ewart Gladstone 
 and Charles Darwin all first saw the light then. If we look across 
 the Atlantic we have to add Abraham Lincoln, the saviour of the 
 Union, and, among men of letters, O. W. Holmes and E. A. Poe. 
 In England, to the names of the giants we have to add those of 
 
 19—2
 
 292 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 A. W. Kinglake, R. Monckton Milnes and Edward FitzGerald. 
 Now it so happens that all the Englishmen except Gladstone went 
 to Cambridge. Even if they had stood alone they would have 
 sufficed to make an epoch in the intellectual history of the 
 University. And they did not stand alone. Taking Alfred 
 Tennyson, who matriculated at Trinity College in February, 1828, 
 as the centre of the group, we find among his University contem- 
 poraries his two brothers, Frederick and Charles, both, like 
 himself, poets. Three more members of the band, R. C Trench, 
 John Sterling and A. H. Hallam, were likewise endowed with 
 more or less of the poetic faculty. Thackeray too was there, 
 and, but for the overshadowing greatness of his gift for fiction and 
 satire, there can be little doubt that he had the capacity to 
 surpass them all in verse, Alfred Tennyson alone excepted. It 
 was veritably "a nest of singing-birds." Besides these, James 
 Spedding, Charles Merivale, J. M. Kemble, F. D. Maurice and 
 Julius Hare all subsequently won distinction, and all were con- 
 temporaries of Alfred Tennyson. So was the witty and brilliant 
 Charles BuUer, who died in 1848 on the threshold of a parlia- 
 mentary career which promised to raise him to the first rank of 
 statesmen. And yet, though these were men of the highest 
 talent, some for writing, some for speech, some for both, when in 
 1866 Lord Houghton, inaugurating the new club-house of the 
 Cambridge Union Society, referred to the greatest speaker he had 
 ever listened to, he meant none of them, but another contemporary 
 whose name few have heard except through their biographies- 
 Thomas Sunderland. Sunderland's brain gave way soon after 
 his University career was over, and all the hopes which had 
 clustered round him were blighted. Nearly all these men were 
 known to one another, and many of them were united in the 
 small club known from the number of its members as the 
 Apostles. 
 
 Readers of The Life of Macaulay must be struck with the fact 
 that the ruling passion in the Cambridge of his day was not 
 literature but politics. Between his time and the time of Tennyson 
 a great change had passed over the spirit of the University, and 
 for literature the omens, as we read them now, were of the
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 293 
 
 brightest kind. There was power in abundance, it was power of 
 the right sort, and it was stimulated by the right ambitions. 
 Further, we can see now that it was power not imitative but 
 essentially independent. This is manifest from the critical canons 
 which more or less consciously governed these young men. They 
 showed a marked originality in their taste. Cambridge was the 
 centre of the growing cult of Wordsworth ; and while Shelley 
 and Keats were still unknown to the British public, Cambridge 
 did much to draw them from their obscurity. It was through 
 the agency of A. H. Hallam that Adonais was first printed in 
 England. Young men as a rule are either iconoclasts or prose- 
 lytisers, and the Cambridge youths were of the latter class. 
 They began by spreading and confirming the faith within their 
 own circle. Poems by Two Brothers affords sufficient evidence 
 that down to the year before his entrance at Trinity the predomi- 
 nant influence over Tennyson was that of Byron. It soon ceased 
 to be so. If he had not already found critical salvation before he 
 went to the University he speedily found it there; for the cult of 
 Shelley and Keats was the cult of the elect of Cambridge, and 
 Alfred Tennyson was of the number. 
 
 The next step was to convert others. In their crusade they 
 were fired by the chivalrous zeal of youth in the cause of men 
 contemned and vilified, or at best neglected. They had to fight 
 against popular indifference and critical disparagement. They 
 had to fight against even the sister University. They proclaimed 
 their allegiance and proved their zeal in a celebrated debate 
 which took place at Oxford, whither delegates were sent by Cam- 
 bridge. The delegates were Hallam, Sunderland and Milnes; 
 and the last always suspected that he owed his exeat to a certain 
 mist which he had allowed to rest on the mind of the Master, 
 Dr Wordsworth, as to the particular poet who was to be defended 
 by the Cambridge men. At the Oxford Union Francis Hastings 
 Doyle had brought forward a motion, which he calls " an echo of 
 Cambridge thought and feeling," and which was quite contrary to 
 the almost universal opinion of Oxford, that Shelley was a greater 
 poet than Byron. The purpose of the Cambridge men was to 
 champion the poet whom Oxford had formerly expelled and
 
 294 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 whom she still neglected. Manning summed up for Oxford, and 
 according to Doyle the backbone of his speech was just this : 
 "Byron is a great poet, we have all of us read Byron; but... if 
 Shelley had been a great poet we should have read him also; but 
 we none of us have done so. Therefore Shelley is not a great 
 poet — a fortiori he is not so great a poet as Byron \" The argu- 
 ment from ignorance carried the day, as it has often done before 
 and since ; but nevertheless the seed dropped by the Cambridge 
 enthusiasts germinated and grew. 
 
 This story is worth dwelling upon, because it indicates a most 
 momentous change which was passing over English Kterary taste. 
 The sun of Byron was set, the day of Wordsworth and Shelley 
 and Keats was just about to dawn. The Oxford men were 
 clinging to the past, the future was for the undergraduates of 
 Cambridge. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that they were 
 the future. Such was the genius of this group of young men that 
 they could make the imaginative literature of England for the 
 next generation in no small measure what they chose. In this 
 contest they had indicated plainly enough the use to which they 
 were likely to put their power, enthusiasm and genius. 
 
 At Cambridge, then, Tennyson's poetical education really 
 began. The reading in English poetry of the authors of Poems 
 by Ttuo Brothers had certainly been narrow; but under the 
 stimulus of the Apostles, and especially of Arthur Hallam, it soon 
 widened. Tennyson grew surprisingly in intellectual stature. 
 Timbuctoo, the prize poem of 1829, was by admiring friends and 
 contemporaries judged to be "certainly equal to most parts of 
 Milton'"'; and though no one now would echo that opinion, the 
 piece shows a great advance upon the Poems by two Brothers, and 
 is perhaps almost as much above the average level of prize poems 
 as it is below the standard of Milton. In the following year ap- 
 peared Tennyson's first independent volume. Poems, chiefly Lyrical 
 (1830), containing a number of pieces which were afterwards 
 reprinted by Tennyson himself unchanged or with only minor 
 alterations. Towards the close of 1832 a second volume was 
 
 ^ Reminiscences, 113. 
 
 • Lije of Lord Houghton, '\. 72.
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 295 
 
 published, bearing on the title-page the date 1833. This also 
 was written under the influence of his early life and of Cambridge. 
 Then followed a long silence of nearly ten years, broken only by 
 The Lover's Tale, privately printed, and by the publication in 
 periodicals of two short but exquisite poems, St Agnes' Eve and 
 that lovely lyric which formed the germ of Maud, — "O that 
 'twere possible." Finally, in 1842, appeared the two volumes 
 which have been declared to mark Tennyson's "decisive" appear- 
 ance in poetry, and which close the first period of his poetic life. 
 
 No poet, not even Shakespeare, has a more consistent develop- 
 ment than Tennyson ; and the line of his development is from 
 the purely artistic to the blend of thought with art. Tennyson 
 agreed in substance with the criticism quoted in the preceding 
 chapter from Henry Taylor; and his agreement is important as 
 well as interesting, because he was great enough to supply what 
 both he and Taylor considered to be lacking in their immediate 
 predecessors. " I close with him," says Tennyson in a letter to 
 Spedding, " in most that he says of modern poetry, tho' it may be 
 that he does not take sufficiently into consideration the peculiar 
 strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley, who, 
 however mistaken they may be, did yet give the world another 
 heart and new pulses \" This acquiescence in Taylor's criticism 
 indicates the fact that Tennyson was never of the school of 
 Shelley; and though he did for a moment belong to that of Byron, 
 the Byronic influence soon vanished. His opinion about Shelley 
 was permanent : he repeated it long afterwards. Shelley, he said, 
 "is often too much in the clouds for me'^"; and there is very little 
 of his own work that has the ring of Shelley. The Lover's Tale 
 has been singled out as an instance ; and rightly enough, notwith- 
 standing the fact that it was written before Tennyson had ever 
 seen a copy of Shelley's works'; for the germs of other things as 
 well as disease may be carried in the air, and there are many 
 ways in which new pulses may be started to beat. 
 
 The Lover's Tale, however, is exceptional. The poet who, 
 among Tennyson's immediate predecessors, had by far the greatest 
 
 ^ Lift of Tetmyson, i. 141. * ibid. ii. 285. * ibid.
 
 296 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 influence over him, was Keats, and next to him perhaps Coleridge. 
 He put Keats, says his son, on a lofty pinnacle, declaring that 
 " there is something of the innermost soul of poetry in almost 
 everything he ever wrote ^" The secret of the attraction is easily 
 discovered; and the point of difference between the two poets 
 also is not far to seek. The sensuousness of Keats attracted 
 Tennyson, for no poet was more keenly alive than he to the 
 importance of the sensuous element in verse, and none was more 
 readily responsive to the suggestions of sense. His early poems 
 were criticised for the excessive minuteness of observation they 
 displayed. Lockhart ridiculed the " gummy " chestnut buds of 
 The Millet's Daughter in the original version, the water-rat that 
 plunged in the stream and the long green box of mignonette. 
 The long green box remains, but the water-rat is gone now, and 
 the literal fact of the gum is indicated by its effects, the glistening 
 of the buds to the breezy blue. This literalness is far enough 
 removed from the style of Keats, but it indicates that sensitiveness 
 to impression on which the style of Keats is based. This was the 
 quality which was earliest developed in Tennyson ; and it was 
 doubtless love of it which caused Edward FitzGerald to look back 
 upon the poems of 1842 and the earlier volumes as embodying 
 the true and the great Tennyson. FitzGerald never fully approved 
 of the later poems, partly because he thought that from The 
 Princess onwards Tennyson tried to put too much thought into 
 his verse and overloaded it with politics and social philosophy 
 and theology, things good in themselves, but in FitzGerald's 
 opinion detrimental to poetry. This other element too was in 
 Tennyson from the start, but it grew in importance. "One 
 must," he said, "distinguish Keats, Shelley and Byron from the 
 great sage poets of all, who are both great thinkers and great 
 artists, like ^schylus, Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe'." Here 
 is just Taylor's criticism in another form ; and it shows clearly 
 enough that Tennyson's ambition was to be, if not equal to, yet 
 like, " the great sage poets of all." 
 
 By analysing the work of the most influential of Victorian 
 poets and by observing the trend of change in him we may see, 
 ^ Life, ii. 286. * ibid. ii. 287.
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 297 
 
 with a vividness unrivalled elsewhere, both what poetry was at the 
 beginning of this period, and what it was tending to become \ In 
 the first two volumes the poet's art is, at its best, already exquisite; 
 but it is as yet uncertain and immature. Tennyson, always an 
 unsparing critic of himself — though he was impatient of other 
 criticism, — judged his work in those volumes with a severity he 
 never afterwards showed. Of the total number of eighty-six 
 pieces he permanently rejected thirty-two. Moreover, of those 
 which passed muster and were included among the poems of 
 1842, a considerable number underwent very extensive altera- 
 tions. In the cases of CEnone and Tlu Palace of Art the revision 
 was so free as to make them almost new poems. Several other 
 permanent favourites, — for example, A Dream of Fair Women, The 
 Lady of Shalott and The Miller's Daughter, — were likewise greatly 
 changed. No one who is familiar with these five poems only in 
 their final form can judge of them as they appeared in the text of 
 1832 ; for no small portion of the charm of all of them is due to 
 the poet's alterations, additions and excisions. Tennyson's amend- 
 ments well repay study. They are as a rule singularly judicious*. 
 In most cases they are suggested by his own maturing taste and 
 growing skill, but he does not disdain to learn from his critics. 
 The best thing that can be said for Lockhart's famous criticism 
 in The Quarterly Review is that Tennyson himself has in a 
 measure stamped it with approval by altering or omitting most of 
 the pieces and passages objected to. 
 
 Omission and revision on a scale so extensive as occurs with 
 the contents of the volumes of 1830 and 1832 seem to justify the 
 
 ^ Every one who takes up Tennyson with this object in view will find 
 himself deeply indebted to the scholarly edition of the early poems of 
 Tennyson, by J. Churton Collins. It contains all the poems up to 1842, with 
 complete materials for tracing all the changes of reading, omissions and 
 additions, to that date. 
 
 * BrowTiing, however, thought otherwise. Writing to Alfred Domett he 
 says of the Poe7ns of 1842 : "The alterations are insane. Whatever is touched 
 is spoiled. There is some woeful mental infirmity in the man — he was months 
 buried in correcting the press of the last volume, and in that time began 
 spoiling the new poems (in proof) as hard as he could." Kenyon's Robert 
 Browning and Alfred Domett, p. 40.
 
 298 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 inference that Tennyson felt himself to be still an apprentice in 
 the art of poetry. The fact that the process of re-writing never 
 afterwards took place in anything like an equal degree may be 
 taken to indicate that by 1842 he judged himself to have attained 
 maturity. It is also significant that of all the pieces in the 
 collection of 1842, only one was afterwards denied by the poet 
 a place in his collected works. But a closer examination of the 
 contents of the two early volumes, and a more minute comparison 
 of the text with that of the poems of 1842, suggests further 
 inferences. In the first place, it is remarkable that of the twenty- 
 four pieces adopted from the volume of 1830 into the Poems of 
 1842, not one was vitally or even considerably altered. Tennyson's 
 second volume contributed sixteen pieces to the collection of 
 1842, and of these seven had undergone important alterations. 
 At first sight the conclusion would seem to be that the poet felt 
 that in 1832 he had fallen back in his art. A sounder inference 
 would be that he had changed, and that he was less master of 
 that which he attempted to do in 1832 than of what he had 
 attempted two years earlier. The characteristic subjects of the 
 Poems, chiefly Lyrical are much lighter than those of the volume 
 which followed it. In the earlier volume an occasional grand note 
 is struck, as in The Poet, an occasional tone of passion is heard, as 
 in The Ballad of Oriana, or of deep human sorrow, as in Mariana. 
 But the more prevalent note is one of light, airy, playful grace. 
 Most of the "moonshine maidens," as The Quarterly Review a.'^iXy 
 called them, are there, — Claribel, Lilian, Madeline and Adeline. 
 So are The Merman and The Mermaid. Some of these pieces are 
 exquisite, but none of them is or attempts to be profound. None 
 of them was subsequently changed in any important way. 
 
 Very different is the table of contents in the later volume. 
 The portrait-gallery was indeed enlarged by the addition of 
 Elednore, of Margaret and of Rosalind. But the keynote of the 
 volume was struck rather in the five pieces which have already 
 been named as examples of Tennyson's careful revision. Along 
 with these may be mentioned, as among the most important of the 
 contents of the volume, The Lotos-Eaters and The May Queen. 
 To the last was added in 1S42 the third part; but it is the only
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 299 
 
 one of the seven which remains otherwise without change of 
 importance. The exquisitely musical Lotos-Eaters had its charac- 
 teristic charm in the first version; but the substitution in 1842 of 
 the present conclusion for the original one removed blemishes and 
 added beauties which raise it to the first rank among the poems of 
 Tennyson and of Tennyson's century. 
 
 The points which distinguish all these poems from the contents 
 of the earlier volume (except perhaps The Poet) are their more 
 ambitious design and their greater force. The difference is un- 
 mistakable in A Dreajn of Fair Women and The Palace of Art. 
 It is plain enough too in such idyllic pictures as we find in CEnone 
 and The Miller's Daughter; and, though less obvious, it is not less 
 real in those pieces of pure loveliness, The Lady of Shalott and 
 Th£ Lotos-Eaters. It might be unwise to insist much on the 
 allegorical interpretation of the former; but he who can read such 
 poems and feel his life and character unenriched has still to learn 
 how to use poetry. As truly as an "impulse from a vernal wood" 
 was a form of teaching to Wordsworth, so truly, to him who has 
 brain and heart to understand, is the beauty of such poems 
 instructive beyond all sermons on the deepest problems of life. 
 
 And this is the real significance of the change of which we see 
 the beginnings in Tennyson in the two years between the issue of 
 his first and the issue of his second volume of poems. In 1830 
 he is not indeed frivolous, but still less is he distinguished for 
 "high seriousness." A Keatsian worship of beauty, without as yet 
 Keats's full conviction of its identity with truth, is his characteristic. 
 The task which he set himself in 1832 was the exhibition of their 
 identity. Hence the larger scope of his subjects and the greater 
 weight of his style. Hence too the comparative failure, the 
 necessity of unsparing revision afterwards. The Tennyson of 
 1830 contented himself with a lower aim, and he hit his mark. 
 The Tennyson of 1832 aimed at the sun. The arrow fell short; 
 but the very effort taught him more than the earlier success, and 
 prepared the way for the triumph of 1842. 
 
 This attempt to supply the intellectual deficiency of contempo- 
 rar)' poetry gives interest to the comparison between the two early 
 volumes. Another interest emerges when we set these volumes
 
 300 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 beside the Poems of 1842. It is the interest of comparing promise 
 with performance, effort with achievement. In 1842 Tennyson 
 has attained the fulness of his stature as a poet. In the opinion 
 of some good judges he never afterwards did so good work. 
 Coventry Patmore seems to have agreed with Edward FitzGerald; 
 for he declared that the greatest part of all that was essential in 
 Tennyson's work was contained in the second of the two volumes 
 of 1842^ The intervening ten years had transformed the youth 
 of twenty-three into the mature man of thirty-three. But life is 
 better measured by experience than by time ; and during those 
 ten years Tennyson had come in contact with the great facts of 
 life. A brief biographical sketch will help towards an under- 
 standing of the new qualities displayed in 1842. 
 
 In 1 83 1 Tennyson left Cambridge, and soon afterwards his 
 father died. In 1833 an even heavier blow fell in the death of 
 Arthur Henry Hallam (1811-1833), his own chosen friend and 
 the betrothed of his sister Emily. Though Hallam was the 
 younger man of the two, his had been the leading mind in the 
 friendship. Under the guidance of his distinguished father, he 
 had enjoyed a culture wider than Tennyson's, and he was able to 
 open up to his friend new fields of thought and to suggest fresh 
 lines of study. It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence 
 exercised over Tennyson by the life, and still more by the death, 
 of this friend. Hallam's Remains in Verse and Prose (1834) 
 necessarily leaves undecided the question, what would have been 
 his place in English literature if he had lived ; but it indicates 
 that it would have been at least a considerable and might have 
 been a great one. The book contains nothing that is intrinsically 
 great, but some things which are highly promising ; and the 
 unanimous judgment of all, both seniors and coaevals, who knew 
 the author, is still more impressive than the Remains. His 
 father, judicial-minded as he was, might have been misled by the 
 partiality of a parent ; but Henry Hallam's opinion of his son's 
 talents was not a whit higher than that of the members of the 
 Apostles Club, all of whom were themselves men of rare ability, 
 
 * Memoirs of Patmore, i. 198,
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 3OI 
 
 and some of them men of genius ; and the fact that Hallam 
 dominated Tennyson is perhaps the most impressive of all. 
 
 But great as was the influence of the Hving Hallam, that of 
 Hallam dead was more potent still. The friendship between the 
 two young men was one of that kind, almost as rare as the highest 
 genius, of which the classical instance is the friendship of David 
 and Jonathan. It produces all the effects of the ideal friendship 
 of the Greek philosophers ; it spreads beyond and towers above 
 everything embraced under the same name in ordinary parlance ; 
 it surpasses the tie of blood, though that is much more powerful 
 than ordinary friendship, and even rivals the love of sex for sex. It 
 is not In Memoriafn alone which bears witness to the astonishing 
 depth and the all-potent influence of this friendship. After the 
 death of Hallam the whole tone of Tennyson's poetry changes. As 
 if an effacing sponge had been drawn across the past, the 
 dilettante disappears. The artist remains, but he is an artist 
 full of serious purpose : there are no more puerilities like the 
 " Darling room." The Two Voices, originally entitled Thoughts of 
 a Suicide, shows what a struggle it cost Tennyson to rise above the 
 depression caused by the death of his friend; but still more 
 significant is the seriousness and the lofty tone of such poems as 
 Ulysses and Lucretius and Morte d" Arthur, the passionate grief of 
 "O that 'twere possible," and the mournful wail of "Break, break, 
 break." 
 
 Other cares and sorrows followed the death of Hallam. The 
 parting from Somersby was painful ; but far deeper was the pain 
 of parting enforced by poverty between Tennyson and Emily 
 Sellwood. They had been lovers from the time of the marriage 
 of Charles Tennyson in 1836, but on account of the poor pros- 
 pects of the poet all correspondence between them ceased in 
 1840. They did not meet again till 1850, when the success oi In 
 Memoriayn had so improved Tennyson's position that he could 
 once more think of marriage. 
 
 During those ten years therefore the discipline of life had come 
 to Tennyson in ample measure. Much reading had also been 
 crowded into them. His scholarship, of which the foundation had 
 been laid at Cambridge, had been widened and deepened. Many
 
 302 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 a line of his verse bears witness to his careful reading both of the 
 classics and of the literature of modern languages, especially that 
 of his own country. /He read thoughtfully and with purpose. His 
 friends urged, and he believed, that it was his function to penetrate, 
 and as an artist to interpret, the inner meaning of the modern 
 spirit — to find a poetic expression alike for its religion and for its 
 science. That he won no small measure of success in what must 
 have been the more difficult part of his purpose is attested by the 
 fact that Norman Lockyer declared Tennyson's mind to be 
 "saturated with astronomy V' and that Huxley pronounced him to 
 be " the first poet since Lucretius who has understood the drift of 
 science*." As to the other side, Jn Memoriam has been as a 
 gospel to thousands of souls who have felt the movement of 
 modern thought and yet been conscious of the need of religion.) 
 
 Of the two volumes of 1842, the first consisted almost wholly 
 of pieces which had been published before, while the second 
 contained only two poems which were not new. It is, then, 
 mainly to the second that we must turn for evidence of Tennyson's 
 development. We find in it the continuation of many things the 
 beginnings of which are seen in the volume of 1832. The 
 English idyllic strain, first heard in The Miller's Daughter and 
 The May Queen, is sounded again in The Gardener's Daughter 
 and Dora and Audley Court. Arthurian legend had already won 
 the poet's attention in The Lady of Shalott: a serious study of it 
 is indicated by Sir Galahad, Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere, 
 and above all \y sMorte_dL dLthur. perhaps Tennyson's greatest 
 achievement in Jjaot-Jffijge. The same volume contains also 
 many things of which Tennyson had given no previous example. 
 "Break, break, break," the most perfect and thoughtful of his 
 songs hitherto published, is in this volume. There too is that 
 marvellous classical idyll, Ulysses, and there are Locksley Hall and 
 The Two Voices and The Vision of Sin. 
 
 It cannot be doubted that these poems embody a serious 
 philosophy of life, and that the author of them must be regarded 
 both as an artist and as an intellectual force. In Tennyson's own 
 
 ^ Quoted in The Quarterly Review, Jan. 1907. 
 ' Lift of Iluxlty, ii. 338.
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 303 
 
 judgment, the attempt made ten years previously to write verse in 
 the grand style had failed. From the fact that no changes of 
 importance were found necessary afterwards, we may conclude 
 that he considered the second attempt successful ; and the world 
 has ratified his judgment. We might naturally suppose that 
 this success was the slow result of ten years' labour; but the 
 known facts point rather to the conclusion that it came of a 
 sudden. Ulysses was written soon after the death of Hallam, 
 and so were some of the stanzas of In Memoriajn ; Spedding saw 
 The Two Voices and Sir Galahad in 1834 ; and the Morte 
 d'Arthir was read to Edward FitzGerald in 1835. Moreover, 
 the grand political poems, "You ask me why, tho' ill at ease," 
 " Of old sat Freedom on the heights " and " Love thou thy land 
 with love far brought," can all be traced back to the years 1833 
 and 1834. It is uncertain how far any or all of these poems may 
 have undergone revision between the date of their composition 
 and that of their publication ; but at least it seems clear that in 
 1833 and 1834 Tennyson made the greatest advance of his life, 
 and that this advance was connected with the death of Arthur 
 Hallam. We know that Ulysses and The Two Voices and "O that 
 'twere possible," as well as the early fragments of In Afemoriam, 
 were directly associated in Tennyson's mind with him. 
 
 A marked feature of the poems of 1842 is their unity and 
 completeness. In the earlier pieces, as Tennyson's own altera- 
 tions show, there are frequent irrelevances and redundancies. 
 The young poet seems to be unable to bear the pain of suppress- 
 ing any of his verses ; and this weakness was the occasion of one 
 of Lockhart's gibes, which went home. " Mr Tennyson," he 
 says, "manages this delicate business [the introduction of re- 
 dundant matter] in a new and better way; he says, with great 
 candour and simplicity, ' If this poem were not already too long, 
 / should have added the following stanzas,' and then he adds them 
 
 or, ' the following lines are manifestly superfluous, as a part of 
 
 the text, but they may be allowed to stand as a separate poem,' 
 which they do ; — or, ' I intended to have added something about 
 statuaryj but 1 found it very difficult ;... but I had finished the 
 statues of Elijah and C'/^'w/Za^ - judge whether I have succeeded'
 
 304 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 — and then we have these two statues." Tennyson's good sense 
 told him that Lockhart was right. Aubrey de Vere relates a story 
 which shows what importance he attached in later days to the 
 unity of his poems. " One night, after he had been reading 
 aloud several of his poems, all of them short, he passed one of 
 them to me and said, 'What is the matter with that poem?' I 
 read it and answered, ' I see nothing to complain of.' He laid 
 his finger on two stanzas of it, the third and fifth, and said, 'Read 
 it again.' After doing so I said, ' It has more completeness and 
 totality about it ; but the two stanzas you cover are among its 
 best' ' No matter,' he rejoined, ' they make the poem too long- 
 backed; and they must go, at any sacrifice.' 'Every short poem,' 
 he remarked, 'should have a definite shape, like the curve, 
 sometimes a single, sometimes a double one, assumed by a 
 severed tress or the rind of an apple when flung on the floor \"' 
 
 It may be questioned whether Tennyson ever well understood 
 the building up of long poems ; but he was extremely skilful in 
 the construction of short pieces, and after 1832 he studied the 
 art with the greatest care. The lighter pieces from the beginning, 
 and from 1832 onwards the weightier ones as well, owe a great 
 deal of their charm to the unity of impression which they convey. 
 Always a poet of the fitting word and the exquisite phrase, 
 Tennyson in his maturity never forgot the importance of the 
 setting. Thus, Ulysses is the round and flawless delineation of 
 the stoical mind, 
 
 "Strong in will \ 
 
 To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." ) 
 
 Few if any poems of equal length contain a greater number of 
 gems of expression. It is absolutely free from anything that could 
 be wished away, and to add anything to it would be " wasteful 
 and ridiculous excess." St Simeon Styliks is a poem of a lower 
 order ; yet it is almost equally perfect in its own way as a picture 
 of the diseased asceticism of the early saint. Again, The Two 
 Voices and The Vision of Sin have the unity which belongs to a 
 mental state vividly conceived. In llie Palace of Art there is 
 
 ^ Appendix to Life, i. 506-7.
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 305 
 
 greater complexity; but there is a unity no less real. Every 
 stanza is made to illustrate the soul centred in itself, proud of its 
 own strength, feeding upon and satisfied with beauty, looking not 
 beyond this world. A comparison between the text of 1832 and 
 that of 1842 shows how far this unity is due to transposition here, 
 and to excision or addition there. Whether Beckford was or was 
 not the prototype of him who built his soul a lordly pleasure- 
 house, at least it is clear that Tennyson had in his mind a con- 
 ception of character as distinct as if he drew from life. 
 
 Perhaps the only important poem of 1842 which has not this 
 convincing completeness is A Dream of Fair Women; and even 
 in that there is a notable advance as compared with the original 
 text. The " balloon stanzas " are cut out, of which Edward Fitz- 
 Gerald said that "they make a perfect poem by themselves without 
 affecting the ' dream.' " But the best proof of the great advance 
 which Tennyson had made in the art of construction is to be 
 found in The Lotos-Eaters, a piece which can hardly be paralleled 
 except in Spenser or in Thomson's Castle of Indolence. It was a 
 delicious poem even as it stood originally ; and few, if Tennyson 
 had not helped them, would have been conscious of any want. 
 It is the poem of sensuous indulgence and enjoyment. In the 
 land of the lotos-eaters it seems "always afternoon." Work is 
 hateful, "dreamful ease" is the only object of desire. Nay, so 
 deep a drowsiness broods over the land that desire itself is a 
 word too suggestive of action and effort to be appropriate. Now, 
 in 1832 The Lotos-Eaters was already nearly perfect within its 
 compass as a picture of this Hfe of "dreamful ease." But by 
 1842 Tennyson had convinced himself that it was incomplete. 
 To use his own figure, it ought to have been a double curve 
 rather than a single one. A moral being may resolve to lead 
 a life of voluptuous enjoyment ; but, if he does, such a life will 
 influence him morally as well as physically. The moral influence 
 had been omitted in 1832 : it is recognised in § 6 of the Choric 
 Song, beginning, " Dear is the memory of our wedded lives," 
 which was added in 1842. Partly for the same reason the 
 original conclusion was omitted and a new one was substituted. 
 The introduction of the epicurean gods suggests thoughts reach- 
 w. 20
 
 306 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 ing far beyond the lotos-land. But there were other grounds 
 as well for this change. By the substitution Tennyson not 
 only enriched The Lotos-Eaters in thought, but ennobled it in 
 style. The two versions are worthy of comparison as a specimen 
 of the numerous changes whereby from his youthful standard the 
 poet struggled upward towards perfection. The closing lines in 
 1832 ran as follows: — 
 
 '* We ^ave had enough of motion, 
 Weariness and wild alarm, 
 Tossing on th? tossing ocean, 
 Where the tuskid sea-horse wallowelh 
 In a stripe of grass-green calm, 
 At noontide beneath the lee ; 
 And the monstrous narwhale swalloweth 
 His foam-fountains in the sea. 
 
 Long enough the wine-dark wave our weary bark did carry. 
 This is lovelier and sweeter, 
 Men of Ithaca, this is meeter, 
 In the hollow rosy vale to tarry, 
 Like a dreamy Lotos-eater, a delirious Lotos-eater 1 
 We will eat the Lotos, sweet 
 As the yellow honeycomb, 
 In the valley some, and some 
 On the ancient heights divine ; 
 And no more roam. 
 On the loud hoar foam, 
 To the melancholy home 
 At the limit of the brine, 
 
 The little isle of Ithaca, beneath the day's decline. 
 We'll lift no more the shattered oar, 
 No more unfurl the straining sail ; 
 With the blissful Lotos-eaters pale 
 We will abide in the golden vale 
 Of the Lotos-land till the Lotos fail ; 
 We will not wander more. 
 Hark ! how sweet the horned ewes bleat 
 On the solitary steeps, 
 And the merry lizard leaps, 
 And the foam-white waters pour ; 
 And the dark pine weeps, 
 And the lithe vine creeps, 
 And the heavy melon sleeps
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 307 
 
 On the level of the shore : 
 
 Oh ! islanders of Ithaca, we will not wander more, 
 Surely, surely slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore 
 Than labour in the ocean, and rowing with the oar, 
 Oh! islanders of Ithaca, we wall return no more^." 
 
 It was a sound judgment which substituted for this passage the 
 following beautiful lines : — 
 
 " We have had enough of action, and of motion we, 
 RoU'd to starboard, roU'd to larboard, when the surge, was seething free, 
 Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea. 
 Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, 
 In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined 
 On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind. 
 For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd 
 Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl'd 
 Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world : 
 Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands, 
 Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, 
 Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships and praying hands. 
 But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song 
 Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, 
 Like a tale of little meaning the' the words are strong ; 
 Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil, 
 Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil, 
 Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil; 
 Till they perish and they suffer — some, 'tis whisper'd — down in hell 
 Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell. 
 Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel. 
 Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore 
 Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; 
 Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more." 
 
 It would be easy to multiply examples of similar improvement 
 in substance and style and rhythm. Thus, in the text of The 
 Palace of Art now received a well-known stanza runs, 
 
 *' One seem'd all dark and red — a tract of sand, 
 And some one pacing there alone, 
 Who paced for ever in a glimmering land, 
 Lit with a low large moon." 
 
 1 From J, Churton CoUins's edition. 
 
 20—3
 
 308 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 In 1832 it stood thus : — 
 
 " Some were all dark and red, a glimmering land 
 Lit with a low round moon, 
 Among brown rocks a man upon the sand 
 Went weeping all alone." 
 
 And the three stanzas, among the finest in the poem, which now 
 follow this, were an addition. 
 
 But in other respects still the later volumes contrast with the 
 earlier. They show a far wider range of interests, a more catholic 
 spirit, a deeper humanity. The young Tennyson betrays some- 
 thing of the temper of a dilettante; but in 1842, while he is more 
 than ever an exquisite artist, he is also a profoundly earnest man, 
 absorbed in his task of manufacturing, in Carlyle's phrase, some 
 fragment of chaos into cosmos. Nearly all that Tennyson subse- 
 quently cared for is represented in the volumes of 1842. Few 
 poets have been more patriotic; and we find there the three grand 
 political poems, with their pride in England, scarcely equalled 
 since Shakespeare glorified "this royal throne of kings, this 
 sceptred isle." Social as well as political questions always filled 
 Tennyson's mind; and here we have Locksley Hall. He was 
 interested in character ; and we have studies of moods of mind, 
 like Ulysses and St Simeon Stylites. He was a student of the 
 ultimate problems of religion and_i)f_ethics ; and we have The 
 Two Voices^ The Vision of Sin and The Palace of Art. We have 
 also, in a widely different strain, such gems as St Agne^ Eve and 
 Sir Galahad. Finally, he was always, as a poet ought to be, a 
 dreamer of dreams; and so we find in these volumes such a piece 
 of pure fancy as The Day-Dream. 
 
 Southey died in 1843, ^"^ the laureateship vacated by him 
 was very properly conferred upon Wordsworth. But the aged 
 poet's day was past; and though the formal coronation was 
 deferred for eight years longer, the majority of competent judges 
 held that the name of the new king of English verse was Alfred 
 Tennyson. He was worthy of the position not only as an artist, 
 but because, emphatically and in the best sense, he was the most 
 representative poet of his age. He was no less worthy in character. 
 In the authoritative biography it is to be regretted that a natural.
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 309 
 
 but none the less mistaken, piety has smoothed away the scars and 
 wrinkles, and with them not a little of the man. Tennyson could 
 perfectly well afford to have the moodiness and gruffness frankly 
 acknowledged ; and there is in some of the authentic stories of 
 such moods a raciness and humanity which give the poet a share 
 of the charm of those authors who are loved as men and not 
 merely as writers. The author of In Memoriam never comes so 
 close to us as he does in such a story as that which Spedding tells, 
 of how he dined with Tennyson at the Cock Tavern, on two 
 chops, one pickle, two cheeses, one pint of stout, one pint of port 
 and three cigars ; and when they had finished Spedding had to 
 take the poet's regrets to the Kembles ; he could not go because 
 he had the influenzal The rich humanity of this tale prepares 
 us, as nothing in Tennyson's earlier writings does, for the humorous 
 pictures of rural characters in his later volumes. 
 
 In the case of Robert Browning (181 2-1889) the intellectual 
 element was even from the first excessive, and the purely artistic 
 was always in danger of being crushed under it. There was there- 
 fore no room for the kind of development which we observe in 
 Tennyson. But Browning too had a period of apprenticeship to 
 serve, errors to commit and experiments to try, before he "found 
 himself"; and in his case the first period may be taken as 
 extending to 1846, the date of Luria and A Soul's Tragedy. After 
 that he seems to have convinced himself that the method of the 
 regular drama was not for him; for I?i a Balcony (iS^s) is his only 
 composition of later date which takes that form. The year 1846 
 was a turning-point also in Browning's private life, for it was the 
 date of his marriage with Elizabeth Barrett. 
 
 Browning came of a family of modest means and modest 
 position, and yet he owed not a little to his birth. The genius of 
 the boy showed itself early, and the father's pride in his son is 
 indicated by the fact that as early as 1824 he privately printed a 
 small collection of his son's verses under the title of Incondita. 
 The family were dissenters in religion^ and in those days this fact 
 cut a boy off from the public schools and the universities. Young 
 
 1 Letter of Spedding, 1837, quoted in Reid's Life of Houghton, i. 192. 
 
 1/
 
 3IO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Browning was educated under a private tutor from 1826 to 1829; 
 and in 1 829-1 830 he attended lectures at the University of 
 London, afterwards University College. But what ruled his 
 intellectual development was the fact that his father, a man of 
 taste and culture, had filled his house with the best of books, in 
 English and French, Latin and Greek. The poet's knowledge 
 of German was never very great, but the Scotch and German 
 blood in his veins was sufficient guarantee for the development of 
 the Teutonic element in him, and no reader of his poetry needs to 
 be assured of its presence. Growing up, then, in the language of 
 O. VV. Holmes, as familiar with books as a stable-boy is with 
 horses, Robert Browning carried about with him through life the 
 aroma of learning. Not only so, but his learning was something 
 individual, independent, unexpected. He knew the beaten paths 
 well, though not perhaps so well as some men more regularly 
 trained ; but he knew also many by-ways which few feet but his 
 own had trodden. It is characteristic and instructive that when 
 it was finally decided that he should adopt the profession of letters 
 " he qualified himself for it by reading and digesting the whole of 
 Johnson's dictionary \" Thus Browning gained the advantage of 
 wide knowledge without the drawback of having his mind cast in 
 any traditional mould. He would not have been a better poet, 
 and he might have been a more commonplace one, had he 
 graduated double first at Oxford or senior classic at Cambridge. 
 His independence of the associritions of the national Church and 
 the national universities tended to foster and preserve that striking 
 originality of mind for which he was always distinguished. 
 Possibly, at the same time, it tended to give to his originality its 
 almost aggressive character. 
 
 Browning's regular education closed with the single session of 
 the University of London mentioned above ; but though his 
 father, a clerk in the Bank of England, had little money to spare, 
 it was determined to make the promising son an author by pro- 
 
 ^ Mrs Sutherland Orr's Life of Brmvning, 53. The curious taste here 
 indicated survived to the close of his life. Just as in his youth he read and 
 digested Johnson, so in his old age he read and digested the portion of 
 Dr Murray's great dictionary which had appeared before his death.
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 3 II 
 
 fession. Browning, therefore, belongs, with Milton, to that very 
 small band of Englishmen who have been deUberately dedicated 
 to literature. It was wisely resolved to widen his mind by 
 travel, and in 1 833-1 834 he visited Russia and Italy. In later 
 days he became intimately acquainted with the latter country, and 
 after his marriage for long years made his home there. His 
 knowledge became extraordinary. Sordello, The Ring and the 
 Book and numbers of the shorter poems bear witness to his 
 familiarity with Italian history and literature. In preparation for 
 Sordello, to the sorrow of his readers, he read all the books 
 bearing upon the period in the British Museum. Rossetti com- 
 pares his scholarship with that even of Ruskin, much to the 
 disadvantage of the latter : " I found his [Browning's] knowledge 
 of early Italian art beyond that of anyone I ever met — encyclo- 
 pczdically beyond that of Ruskin himself \" Notwithstanding his 
 irregular education, therefore, Browning is to be ranked among 
 the most learned of English poets ; and his learning was woven 
 into the fabric of his work as closely as Milton's own. 
 
 Browning's first publication, Paulme^ appeared in 1833. The 
 young Tennysons had received :£xo from the Jacksons of Louth 
 for Poems by Two Brothers; but the fact that any printers had 
 been willing to pay any sum whatever for a volume of boyish 
 poems has been a puzzle to the biographers and critics of 
 Tennyson. Browning had no such good fortune: the expenses of 
 publication were defrayed by an aunt. In after years the poet 
 would fain have let Pauline sink into oblivion, and it was not until 
 1868 that, with the fear of piracy before his eyes, he suffered it to 
 be reprinted. Though the poem is immature we must rejoice that 
 the author's wish was balked ; for it is thoroughly characteristic of 
 him, and for that reason alone would be worthy of study. It is 
 described as " a fragment of a confession " ; and unquestionably 
 the confession is Browning's own. The youthful ideals and 
 ambitions of his mind are here disclosed, and the models 
 upon which he is forming himself are revealed. And in these we 
 find much more than the germs of the mature Browning. All the 
 
 ^ Letters to Allingham, i6o.
 
 312 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 essentials of his method are already present, — immense scope, 
 boldness, concentration upon character. As the poet's first 
 favourable reviewer noticed, it is "of the spirit, spirituaP"; and 
 /this befits the work of one who held, from first to last, that little 
 Velse besides the incidents in the development of a soul was worth 
 notice. Again, Pauline is a monologue, and so far is in the form 
 which Browning in his maturity found specially suitable to his 
 genius. But it is hardly a dramatic monologue ; and if we com- 
 pare it with many of the poems in Men and Women or in 
 Drafnaiic Rofnances, we see at a glance how much it loses in 
 vividness from the absence of the dramatic element. From the 
 beginning Browning's poetry is dramatic in principle, but it is 
 not yet dramatic in execution ; and hence mainly his deep dis- 
 satisfaction with his first poem. 
 
 Pauline throws a valuable light upon the author's literary 
 genealogy. It was remarked in the opening chapter on poetry 
 that nearly all the rising poets of that time were more or less 
 obviously and deliberately followers of Keats or of Shelley ; and 
 there are parts of Pauline redolent of the latter. The young 
 poet's enthusiasm for the " sun-treader," as he calls Shelley, is 
 explicitly declared. And it was lasting. Even in later days, 
 merely to have " seen Shelley plain " was to be marked out from 
 others and crowned. But though Browning continued to admire 
 him, all direct evidence of Shelley's influence soon disappears. 
 Even in Pauline it is hardly more than superficial. The two 
 poets were essentially unlike, and Browning followed his own 
 original and independent course. 
 
 Browning, then, was of the tribe of Shelley ; Tennyson, as we 
 have seen, belonged to that of Keats ; and this was only one of a 
 multitude of differences which separated the two poets. Never, 
 perhaps, have two great writers of the same age differed more 
 widely. They were as unlike in personal appearance as in their 
 work. Tennyson looked every inch a poet. One observer, 
 perhaps with a touch of maHce, likened his head to that of "a 
 dilapidated Jove'' " ; but probably the most vivid thing ever said 
 
 ' W. J. Fox, quoted in Fumivall's Bibliography of Browning, 41. 
 2 Bayard Taylor, quoted in The Library of Literary Criticism.
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 313 
 
 of him was the remark of Sydney Dobell: "If he were pointed out 
 to you as the man who had written the Iliad, you would answer, 
 'I can well believe it^'" But if Browning had been pointed 
 out as the author of the Iliad, the answer would have been an 
 ejaculation of surprise. He impressed the observer as a capable 
 and successful man of the world, a man distinguished for good 
 sense rather than for imagination. Until he met Browning, Jowett 
 "had no idea that there was a perfectly sensible poet in the world." 
 But the two poets were different in points far more important than 
 outward appearance. While Tennyson at the start sometimes 
 sank to triviality, Browning's designs were always ambitious and 
 daring, even to excess. Browning is uniformly "dramatic in 
 principle"; but there is not much in literature that is less dramatic 
 than Tennyson's early poetry. Browning chisels out his work 
 with the daring strokes of a Michael Angelo ; Tennyson cuts with 
 the fineness needed for a cameo. The one depends upon broad 
 effects, the other upon minute beauties. 
 
 Pauline passed not wholly without recognition ; for, on the 
 evidence of it. Fox in The Monthly Repository emphatically pro- 
 nounced the anonymous author to be a poet. But it was little 
 read and soon forgotten. Many years afterwards Dante Rossetti 
 found it in the British Museum, divined by the style that it was 
 Browning's, and was sufficiently interested to copy it; but only the 
 fame won by later works effectually revived this youthful essay. 
 The poem, however, opened to the author the pages of The 
 Monthly Repository, and he contributed a few pieces to that 
 periodical. His next work of importance was Paracelsus (1835), 
 in which the complete Browning at once leaps to light. He 
 ascribes his"^)wn"TaTrure'Tn /^"zT^Tz?^ to the extravagance of the 
 scheme and the impracticability of the scale. In Paracelsus the 
 scheme is not less ambitious, yet the poet comes as near complete 
 success as he ever' came in aifyofTiis larger works. A difference 
 even of two years counts for much between twenty-one and 
 twenty-three ; but far more is due to the fact that the method is 
 right. Paracelsus, though not a drama, is dramatic. Slender as 
 
 ' Quoted in Thu Life of Tmnyson, i. 355, n.
 
 314 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 is the skeleton of facts, it is sufficient for the purpose. The soul 
 
 whose development is traced in Faracelstis is in contact with the 
 
 . world ; while in Pauline it might as well be a disembodied spirit. 
 
 r'' {Paracelsus is one of the greatest poems of the nineteenth century. \ 
 
 In grandeur of design, in depth of thought and in intellectual ' 
 
 and ethical significance, it may bear comparison even with i 
 
 Goethe's Faust, with which indeed Home, in A Ne7v Spirit of j 
 
 the Age, actually did compare it. If contemporary poetry was^ ' 
 
 deficient in philosophy, the want is here magnificently supplied. 
 
 f Paracelsus embodies a coherent and profound theory of life, 
 
 ^ -powerfully and at the same time_artistically expressed. Beauty j 
 
 " — "TRid'power, love anH knowledge, these, we are taught, are the I 
 
 threads which i^ust be woven together to make the fabric of life ; 
 
 ^^eomplete.^ - t : 
 
 This pniTosophy of life is expressed in Paracelsus in a dramatic 1 
 
 form ; but notwithstanding the fact that there are four inter- | 
 
 locutorS;, the poem has more affinity with the dramatic monologue, j 
 
 which Browning gradually found to be the best form for him, than ' 
 
 it has with the regular drama. Two of Jhe interlocutors, Festus 
 
 and Michal, merely serve to throw into_reHef thF^^ilFactex^and ; 
 
 : purpose of Paracelsus himself; whil£_the_ third, Aprile, is his ] 
 
 conTp}'eTnEnl7^roiigh~\vEom is brought home_to,hiro his essential | 
 
 •efror, acknowledged in-the-exclamationj * 1 
 
 *' Are we not halves of one dissevered world, 
 Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part never! 
 Till thou, the lover, know ; and I, the knower, i 
 
 Love — until both are saved." 
 
 I 
 
 The character of Paracelsus, as depicted by Browning, is at once 
 thoroughly original, and extraordinarily great. The historical 
 Paracelsus was generally believed to be a- mere charlatan ; and 
 Browning himself thought, erroneously, that the ^orcL.. bombast 
 was simply the proper name of Paracelsus (Bombast von Hohen- 
 heim) adapted to a new use on account of the inflated style of his 
 lectures. Just as Carlyle refused to believe that a charlatan could 
 have done the work of Mahomet, so to Browning it seemed 
 incredible that a mere impostor could have filled so large a place 
 in the mediaeval mind, or could have given a start to so much
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 315 
 
 sound science. An examination of the original documents con- 
 vinced him that the commqn_a£.w of the man was mistaken, and 
 led to the creation of the character familiar to us from the poem. 
 Whether the tfue^P'aracelsus was the charlatan of common belief, 
 or the dauntless seeker after truth and the profound philosopher 
 of Browning's cbnceptiorvjila question historically important, but 
 unimportant for the appraisement of the poet's work. The 
 estimate of that must depend upon what he has made of his own 
 conception j and, tried by any test, the poem emerges triumphant. 
 It is rich in beauties of imagery and expression ; it contains a 
 glorious lyric in "Over the sea our galleys went." But all the 
 beauties of parts are subordinate to the beauty and the profound 
 meaning of the whole. Matthew Arnold complained that the 
 modern poet was apt to forget the whole and to content himself if 
 the parts were fine ; and he contrasted with this attitude of mind 
 that of the ancient poet who said that he had finished his poem 
 when he had only planned it. The criticism is Just; but in the 
 case of Paracelsus the central conception is as clear and as 
 coherent as that of any poem of antiquity. 
 
 Paracelsus, the seeker after truth, starts upon his quest with 
 full appreciation of all that he is sacrificing. His friend Festus, 
 who at first doubts this, is afterwards forced to acknowledge it : — 
 
 "The value of repose and love, 
 I meant should tempt you, better far than I 
 You seem to comprehend ; and yet desist 
 No whit from projects where repose nor love 
 Has part." 
 
 But, great as he knows the sacrifice to be, in his own view 
 Paracelsus has no choice. Like other men who have opened up 
 new realms of action, or burst into unknown seas of thought, he 
 believes himself to be but an instrument with no share in the 
 selection of his own lot beyond his " ready answer to the will of 
 God," whose organ he'is. There is nevertheless an element of 
 pride and self-will in him, and we are from the first prepared for 
 failure, or for a successHRardly Fess disastrous than failure. He 
 haughtily cuts himself off from his fellows, and sets put to accom-^ 
 plish single-Jaanded what ought to be the achievement, of united
 
 3l6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 humanity. "I never will be served by those I serve," he declares; 
 and Festus lays his finger on the flaw when he points out that the 
 better course would be for the seeker to make failure impossible 
 by raising a rampart of^his fellowsT" . 
 
 Paracelsus commits two fatal mistakes.— Vast as his purpose is, 
 
 it is in one sense not great enough, fek^sgeks an unbounded 
 
 satisfaction of the intellect ; but even that would be insufficient 
 
 unless it were accompanied with an equal satisfaction of the heart. 
 
 In another sense, his ambition is inordinate; for, as has been 
 
 hinted, the work he.seeks to do is ihe^workjioi-of an individual, 
 
 but of the humaa race. Bagehot somewhere._quotes a great 
 
 r statesman who said that there is someone " Who is greater than 
 
 \ Napoleon, wiser than Voltaire, — c'est tout le monde." This is a 
 
 I \ truth hid from Browning's Paracelsus, and his ignorance of it is 
 
 '-^eofthe great causes of his catastrophe^, / 
 
 The essential error of Paracelsus is revealed in Part ii., where 
 the man of science meets the poet, Aprile, and where the-one 
 declares that he aspires to know, and the other that he would love 
 infinitely, and be loved. Paracelsus awakens suddenly to the one- 
 sidedness of his own aim : he has sacrificed " love, hope, fear, 
 faith," and these " make humanity." Hence his impassioned 
 appeal to Aprile : — 
 
 " Love me henceforth, Aprile, while I learn 
 To love ; and, merciful God, forgive us both I 
 We wake at length from weary dreams ; but both 
 Have slept in fairy-land : though dark and drear 
 Appears the world before us, we no less 
 Wake with our wrists and ankles jewelled still. 
 I too have sought to KNOW as thou to love — 
 Excluding love as thou refusedst knowledge. 
 Still thou hast beauty and I power. We wake : 
 What penance canst devise for both of us?" 
 
 Probably no youth of twenty-three ever wrote a poem greater 
 than Paracelsus ; probably no other poet ever made so great an 
 advance in two years as Browning did between Pauline and 
 Paracelsus. Such a rate of progress could not be maintained; 
 and in fact, only once afterwards, in The Ring and the Book, did 
 Browning do work which is clearly greater than this youthful
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 317 
 
 production. At the publication of Paracelsus he stood, unknown 
 to himself, at the parting of the ways. He had found the form 
 which best of all suited his genius ; but he was hardly aware of the 
 fact himself. His friend and admirer Macready asked the poet 
 to write a play and keep him from going to America'; and the 
 request led to the production of Strafford (1837). Doubtless 
 Macready's suggestion was only the seed sown in prepared soil. 
 Browning was conscious of the possession of dramatic genius ; he 
 had cause to wish for the material rewards of literature ; and if he 
 could write a successful play he was likely to gain them in more 
 liberal measure than by any other sort of work. It was natural 
 that the experiment should be tried, and natural too that it should 
 be repeated several times ; but it was nevertheless unfortunate that 
 for eight years the bulk of Browning's work took the form of plays. 
 Of the eight numbers of Bells and Pomegranates six were plays. 
 Among these is included Pippa Passes (1841), which is rather a 
 series of dramatic scenes than a drama ; but all the others are in 
 regular form. They include King Victor and King Charles (1842), 
 The Return of the Druses (1843), A Blot in the ^Scutcheon (1843), 
 Colombo s Birthday (1844), and Luria and A SouVs Tragedy 
 (1846), 
 
 There can be no doubt that Browning possessed in the 
 highest degree some of the elements of dramatic genius, and that 
 in his dramas there is much admirable work. Nowhere out of 
 Shakespeare, and rarely even in Shakespeare, can there be found 
 a scene more intensely dramatic than the tremendous incident 
 of Ottima and Sebald in Pippa Passes. The murder of Duncan 
 is not more terrific or more vivid, Colombe's Birthday is a 
 thrilling dramatic romance of perennial charm, and it is almost 
 completely free, at least as regards its general meaning and 
 purpose, from the customary difficulty and obscurity of Browning. 
 A Soul's Tragedy is a thoroughly dramatic conception, and is 
 equally clear; and of A Blot in the 'Scutcheon Dickens emphatically 
 declared that no man living, and not many dead, could produce 
 such a work. And yet, notwithstanding all this, most critics are 
 
 * Literary Anecdotes of the XIX Century, i, 524.
 
 3l8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 agreed that Browning is not at his best in the dramas, and that the 
 energy he devoted, during those eight years, to the writing of 
 plays, would have produced better results if it had been otherwise 
 directed. There is at least no gainsaying the fact that Browning's 
 plays have failed to keep the stage. There have been occasional 
 revivals of A Blot in tJie 'Scutcheon and one or two others ; but 
 none of them has ever become a stage favourite. Attempts have 
 been made to account for the failure by the badness of the acting; 
 but Macready and Helen Faucit played in Strafford; the latter, 
 with Phelps and Mrs Stirling, was on the cast of A Blot in the 
 'Scutcheon ; and she and Barry Sullivan took the principal parts in 
 Colo?nbe's Birthday. Whatever may have been the deficiencies of 
 some of these actors, they were among the best of their day. It is 
 vain to plead that they missed the subtle meaning of Browning's 
 verses, and that if he had been less intellectual and less great they 
 would have succeeded better. No doubt in a sense that is true ; 
 but these very players managed to represent Shakespeare in a way 
 which, if not flawless, was at any rate adequate to the demands of 
 the audience. 
 
 It is probable that the true reasons for the very modified 
 success of Browning's dramas are to be found partly in the 
 character of his genius, and partly in the age in which he lived. 
 He undoubtedly "possessed in the highest degree sofne of the 
 elements of dramatic genius " ; but he did not possess them all. 
 No one since Shakespeare has surpassed him in the power to 
 illuminate some striking phase of character. Ottima and Sebald 
 in Pippa Passes, Colombe and Valence in Colombe's Birthday, the 
 Moor Luria in the play which bears his name, the surly patriot 
 Chiappino and the Papal legate Ogniben in A Soul's Tragedy, are 
 all masterly ; and yet not one of the plays has, in kind, not to 
 speak of degree, the sort of masterliness which we find in Macbeth, 
 or in As You Like It. Ottima and Sebald are, as has been said, 
 equal to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth themselves in the great 
 murder-scene ; and if Browning had any complete drama equal to 
 that single scene, he would rank, at least in respect of it, along 
 with the greatest playwright of all time. But, while it would be 
 difficult to overpraise the poetry of I'ippa Passes, it is not a drama,
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 319 
 
 but only a collection of dramatic scenes. The dramatic motive 
 comes from without. In each case it is the song of Pippa passing 
 outside, and wholly unconscious of the drama which is being 
 enacted within, that bring the crisis. In Macbeth everything — 
 the promptings of the witches, the conception and germination of 
 the guilty purpose in Macbeth's mind, his wife's whetting of it, the 
 tremendous revulsion after the crime and its different effects on 
 the two great characters — is within. 
 
 It may be urged that Pippa Passes is not a play, and that it 
 should be judged for what it is, not by reference to a standard to 
 which it does not profess to conform. This is true ; though on 
 the other hand it might be argued that there is an inherent 
 inferiority in an external device such as Browning employs in 
 Pippa Passes, as compared with the natural evolution which we 
 see in Shakespeare's dramas. But the case does not stand alone, 
 and we get a result not dissimilar if we compare Colombe's Birth- 
 day with As You Like It. Each is romantic in the highest degree, 
 and each is about the best of its kind among the authors' works. 
 The significant difference lies in the enormous amount of argu- 
 mentation in Browning's play, and the complete absence of it from 
 Shakespeare's. In As Vou Like It, the characters live and act, or 
 live and dream, as befits their "golden world," and the conclusion 
 flows with the ease of a placid stream from their actions and their 
 dreams. In Colombe's Birthday it is hammered out by reasoning 
 and discussion. A similar characteristic may be noticed in Luria. 
 The Moor is an unconscionable time dying, and there is inor- 
 dinate discussion during the process. In both plays the argument 
 is rhetoric, splendid rhetoric, indeed, but still something different 
 from the Shakespearean method of unfolding a character as a 
 flower unfolds its petals. Again it may be pleaded that Browning's 
 method suits Browning's theme, as Shakespeare's suits his. And 
 again it must be replied that even if it be so the choice of theme 
 is instructive. Shakespeare never selects themes which demand 
 such treatment. The nearest approach is probably in the great 
 speeches vo. Julius Caesar; and even they bear a far smaller pro- 
 portion to the whole play than that borne by Valence's arguments 
 to the play of Colombe's Birthday. The question is, of course, not
 
 320 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 merely, nor principally, a question of the number of lines, but far 
 more one of vital connexion. 
 
 (This method of evolving character and dramatic situations by 
 argument is not a device used once by Browning and abandoned ; 
 it is rather his habitual method, and that in which he best suc- 
 ceeds. It is in essence the method of his greatest works after he 
 has abandoned the drama. Pompilia, Caponsacchi, Guido, the 
 heroine of The Inn Album, all tell their own story and argue their 
 own cause. It is safe, then, to infer that the method had a close 
 affinity with the genius of Browning. For him it was the right 
 method, and his first and greatest task as an artist was to discover 
 under what conditions it could be best applied.| Just this discovery, 
 more than anything else except the fact that his fortune had been 
 so chequered, finally turned him from the drama. For while 
 argumentation is right and natural in the dramatic monologue, 
 there may easily be too much of it in a play. 
 
 A second cause which unfitted Browning for the regular drama 
 lay in his style. Many critics have pointed out that whoever the 
 speaker may be, he speaks in the voice of Browning ; and the fact 
 is too obvious to require much discussion. No dramatist ever 
 possessed a style less flexible. The simple mill-girl Pippa and the 
 magnificent Ottima use the English language in the same way. 
 Thorold, Luria, Djabal, Valence, all speak Browningese. The 
 defect is a grave one in the drama, and at once shuts out 
 from Browning's range all that variety of minor characters who 
 immensely enrich the plays of Shakespeare. A Browningesque 
 Touchstone, or Aguecheek, or Dogberry, is hardly conceivable. 
 And this perhaps is one reason for the fact that Browning's plays 
 tend so often to become one-character plays. In Strafford the 
 title-role, in Luria the Moorish general, and in A Soul's Iragedy 
 Chiappino, absorb all the interest. It is the proverbial pre- 
 dominance of Hamlet repeated in play after play ; and the 
 predominance is unmodified by any such masterly presentation of 
 the minor characters as we find in Hamlet. 
 
 Perhaps it is only another way of expressing the first cause, if 
 we point out, as another reason for Browning's limited success in 
 the drama, the fact that though he is profoundly interested in
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 32I 
 
 character, he cares h'ttle for action as such.) And yet the drama is 
 essentially the literature of action. In narrative we are told what 
 occurs, in the drama we see the actual occurrence. Shakespeare's 
 mastery of character is so great that he has almost fixed the belief 
 that the first business of the drama is the delineation of human 
 nature ; but his own example, carefully considered, shows that in 
 reality action is coordinate and of equal importance. It is in and 
 through action that character, in the Shakespearean drama, reveals 
 itself; for indispensable as are the soliloquies, they are still excep- 
 tional. The soliloquy and the "aside" are implied confessions 
 that not everything in character can express itself in action or in 
 dialogue. The Elizabethans refused to impoverish themselves by 
 the exclusion of that which is most inward; but they never 
 wavered in the conviction that the drama is essentially the 
 literature of action. ? Browning on the other hand prefers to take 
 the action as past. In his plays little happens, though much is 
 said, t 
 
 But, as has been already hinted, the personal qualities of 
 Browning are probably not the sole explanation of his failure. It 
 is at least remarkable how many highly gifted men of the nine- 
 teenth century attempted the drama without success. Coleridge, 
 Scott, Byron and Shelley all wrote plays. Shelley wrote one. The 
 Cenci, which, but for the nature of the subject, would have been 
 as successful on the stage as it is in the closet. Byron put some 
 admirable work into Cain and Manfred; but they are not acting 
 dramas. Few who have studied their writings would deny to 
 Beddoes and Wells genius, and dramatic genius too ; but, though 
 they both tried dramatic art, neither of them wrote what would be 
 tolerable on the stage. The explanation assuredly is not that they 
 thought it better not to write for the stage. Beddoes distinctly 
 expressed his conviction that a play was meant to be acted, and 
 ought to be fit for its end ; and generally, it may safely be said 
 that no dramatist who could write for the stage was ever content 
 to do less. Later on we have the same tale of failure, relieved by 
 only a few partial and chequered and never first-rate successes. 
 In the classical revivals of Matthew Arnold and Swinburne and 
 Lord de Tabley we have an almost explicit confession of the 
 w. 21
 
 322 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 writers' incapacity to be practical playwrights. In a word, the 
 poverty of the nineteenth century drama is a commonplace: in the 
 midst of abundant genius there is scarcely any to enrich the 
 stage. 
 
 The "blessed word" evolution has been so much misused 
 that it needs some courage to pronounce it once more ; and yet 
 probably the simple fact is that the literary evolution of England 
 had gone beyond the dramatic stage. There does seem to be a 
 succession of literary forms, corresponding broadly to the stages 
 of development in the mind. The famous Aristotelian classifica- 
 tion of poetry into epic, dramatic and lyric, corresponds to three 
 such stages. The first in its simplest elements demands no more 
 than mere observation and the record of events, whether imaginary 
 or real. The second implies the projection of the mind into 
 another personality ; it deals with action, but even in its simplest 
 form it must do so reflectively, i'ln the third the introspective 
 and reflective element is greatly increased, and action has become 
 subordinate. Now, in its highest manifestations, the English 
 poetry of the nineteenth century is lyrical : it is often so in 
 principle, even when it is not in form. Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
 Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Arnold, Rossetti,. Swinburne, — all these 
 are first and foremost lyrists. Even in the case of Browning, 
 (though his poetry is always "dramatic in principle," a very great 
 deal of it is also lyrical. But this predominance of the lyric 
 implies a development of feeling and reflection, which must have 
 taken place at the expense of something. In point of fact, it did 
 take place largely at the expense of action. The great mass of 
 nineteenth century poetry is brooding and slow in movement. 
 Scott and Morris are the only great masters of narrative verse; for 
 though Byron could tell a story with great vigour, the true Byron 
 is to be found not in the narrative poems, but in the introspective 
 and reflective Childe Harold and in the satirical Don Juan. 
 
 Thus, in shunning action in his dramas. Browning was not 
 merely revealing an individual trait, but illustrating a tendency of 
 the time. In a sophisticated age " the native hue of resolution " 
 becomes "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," and the 
 balance between the two which the drama demands is destroyed.
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 323 
 
 Though the dramas are the bulkiest portion of Browning's 
 work in the ten years after Paracelsus, they are by no means 
 the whole of it. After Strafford came the long, involved and 
 contorted narrative poem Sordello (1840), which was a bitter 
 disappointment to many of the poet's warmest admirers, has been 
 a stumblingblock to nearly all since, and remains a ready weapon 
 in the hand of the enemy. There is a well-known story to the 
 effect that Douglas Jerrold, reading it in illness and finding 
 himself utterly unable to understand it, was thrown into panic 
 with the belief that he had lost his reason ; and Harriet Mar- 
 tineau in her Autobiography relates that for the same cause she 
 thought she must be ill. Attempts have been made to defend 
 the poem, but it is really indefensible. Though many poetic 
 beauties of high quality may be found scattered through its 
 pages, they are scarcely worth the toil of the search, and even 
 students of Browning who have read it once will as a rule content 
 themselves with that experience. The poet at one time intended 
 to re-write it, and by nothing short of that process could he have 
 given it a chance of life. The intention was never carried out : 
 probably he found that to write a new poem would not be more 
 toilsome than to give form to the formless. 
 
 The two numbers of Bells and Pomegranates which were not 
 filled with dramas were Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatic 
 Romances and Lyrics (1845). These contained some of Brown- 
 ing's finest work. In a Gondola, Porphyria^s Lover, The Lost 
 Leader, Home Thoughts from Abroad a.nd from the Sea, The Flight 
 of the Duchess and Night and Morning form a group of dramatic 
 lyrics and dramatic romances which of themselves would secure 
 for their author an honourable place among poets. But perhaps 
 the gem of the two collections was the magnificent Saul; though 
 only the first half was given in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 
 the second part being added in Men and Women. Besides the 
 pieces just named, there appeared in these collections the two 
 spirited narrative poems. The Pied Piper of Hamelin and How 
 they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, and, most 
 characteristic of all, The Bishop orders his Tomb at St Praxed's 
 Church, of which Ruskin wrote: "I know no other piece of 
 
 21 — 2
 
 324 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 modern English prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, 
 as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit, — its worldliness, 
 inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of 
 luxury, and of good Latin ^" 
 
 One more of these lyrical pieces may be mentioned for the 
 sake of an interesting literary association. Waring, as is well 
 known, is Browning's expression of surprise and regret at the 
 sudden disappearance of a friend of whose gifts he held a high 
 opinion. Alfred Domett (1811-1887) had been a student of 
 Cambridge contemporaneously with Tennyson ; but, notwithstand- 
 ing his poetical tastes, he does not appear to have been known to 
 the literary group there. He published a volume of poems in 
 1833, followed this up with some pieces published in Blackwood^ s 
 Magazine in 1837, was called to the bar in 1841, and in the 
 following year suddenly left England for New Zealand, where he 
 rose to high office, being Prime Minister in 1862- 1863. His 
 political work put a stop for a generation to his poetry ; but in 
 1872 he published a long poem, Ranolf and Amohia, founded 
 upon Maori legends and descriptive of the scenery of New 
 Zealand. It was followed by Flotsam and Jetsam, Rhymes Old 
 and New (1877). Had Domett devoted his life to poetry he 
 might have made a great name. He had many of the qualities 
 of the poet, an observant eye, a light touch, the power to write 
 melodious verse. He had above all a strong intellect, and his 
 verse always proclaims itself the work of a thoughtful man. 
 Though Ranolf and Amohia is Antipodean in subject, it deals in 
 masterly fashion with some of the profoundest and most difficult 
 problems of the modern intellect. But Domett is not at his best 
 in a long piece. Ranolf and Amohia is rather a poem of striking 
 passages than a fine whole. And among the short pieces there 
 is not enough of the quality of A Christmas Hymn and The 
 Portrait and Hougotimont, to make his fame safe. True poet as 
 he was, he is most likely to be remembered through Browning. 
 The verses entitled Hougoumont may, however, be quoted as 
 evidence of his power : — 
 
 ^ Modern Fainter s, iv. xx. § 34.
 
 THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 325 
 
 "The air is sweet and bright and hot, 
 
 And loaded fruit-trees lean around ; 
 There black unmoving shadows spot 
 
 The twinkling grass, the sunny ground ; 
 No sound of mirth or toil to wrong 
 The orchard's hush at Hougoumont ! 
 
 And silver daisies simply deck 
 
 With meek bright eyes that orchard-plot; 
 And therein lurks, an azure speck, 
 
 The tiny starred Forget-me-not — 
 Fond type of hearts that love and long 
 In lonely faith, at Hougoumont. 
 
 At every step the beetles run, 
 
 Where none pursue, in vain concealed; 
 Each mailed coat glistens in the sun. 
 
 Where none attack, an idle shield 1 
 And ants unheeded scour and throng 
 The velvet sward at Hougoumont. 
 
 The headlong humble-bee alone 
 
 Assaults the old and crumbling wall; 
 His busy bugle faintly blown, 
 
 With many a silent interval ; 
 Unchecked he tries each nook along 
 The moss-grown walls at Hougoumont. 
 
 Aloft the moaning pigeons coo, 
 
 One gurgling note unvaried still ; 
 The faltering chimes of Braine-le-Heii 
 
 The meads with hollow murmurs fill; 
 And skylarks shower out all day long 
 Swift- hurrying bliss o'er Hougoumont. 
 
 With transport lulled in dreamy eyes, 
 
 June woos you to voluptuous ease ; 
 At every turn love smiling sighs; 
 
 Dear Nature does her best to please ! 
 How sweet some loved one's loving song, 
 Couched in green shade z.t...Hougou??iont\ 
 
 — Oh, God ! what are we ? Do we then 
 
 Form part of this material scene ? 
 Can thirty thousand thinking men 
 
 Fall — and but leave the fields more green? 
 'Tis strange — but Hope, be staunch and strong! 
 It seems so at S7veet Hougoumont."
 
 326 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 The world did not conceive Browning to have established 
 himself as "decisively" in 1845 as it judged Tennyson to have 
 done in 1842; and possibly there may for a long time be more 
 doubt about his position among poets than about Tennyson's. 
 But when we look back now it seems evident that the man who 
 had written Paracelsus and Pippa Passes and the Dramatic 
 Romances and Lyrics must prove a power of the first importance 
 in literature. Force, originality, philosophy even in superabund- 
 ance, all these he promised to add to the literature of the future; 
 and in large measure he had already added them. Besides all 
 this, his cosmopolitanism must not be forgotten. Here, as in 
 many other points, .he contrasts with Tennyson. While the latter 
 is intensely patriotic, the note of nationality is rare in Browning. 
 He is Nelson's to command at any time in prose or rhyme ; off 
 Cape Trafalgar he drinks the great Admiral's health deep in 
 British beer ; and, viewed in a loftier mood, the same scene gives 
 birth to the noble Home Thoughts, from the Sea. But as a rule 
 Browning is cosmopolitan in his championship of liberty as in 
 other things) His mixed blood seems to predestine him for this. 
 There is in fact more of Italy, at least in respect of subject- 
 matter, than of England in his verse. So he himself felt when he 
 adapted to himself the old story of Queen Mary, and said that 
 the word Italy would be found engraved on his heart. Yet 
 notwithstanding the immense part which Italy played in furnishing 
 Browning's mind, it would be a profound mistake to regard his 
 genius as Italian in type. In the substance of his mind he was 
 essentially Teutonic. 
 
 It was a good omen for English literature that the two leaders 
 in poetry differed from one another so widely : it could not be a 
 bad omen that while the one was fervidly patriotic, the other 
 was frankly cosmopolitan.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE MINOR POETS : EARLIER PERIOD 
 
 There is something unpleasant in the phrase, minor poets ; 
 and yet it is hardly possible to dispense with the use of it. In 
 the present chapter there will be found included names, such as 
 that of Mrs Browning, to which its application may seem almost 
 insulting; and it may be well therefore to explain at the start 
 that it is merely meant to convey the view that the poets so 
 designated are of lesser rank than Tennyson and Browning. It 
 has been said that English literature is not a republic but a 
 monarchy of letters, and that all its members are the subjects of 
 King Shakespeare. In comparison with him, all others might 
 fairly be described as " minor " writers. Adapting this saying, we 
 have taken Tennyson and Browning to be the joint monarchs of 
 early Victorian song. In the general opinion their reign lasted 
 through the whole length of the period ; and as they themselves 
 may be called minor in relation to Shakespeare, so all their 
 contemporaries in verse may be called minor in relation to them. 
 
 In spite of the fact that the vogue of poetry had passed, an 
 immense amount of poetical work was executed in the twenty j 
 
 years or so which preceded the turn of the century. Some of it i 
 
 was of kinds long rooted in our literature ; some may be said to j 
 
 illustrate the transition between the age which was passing away 
 and that which was coming into being. Other sections of it, 
 again, are marked by the special qualities which we have already
 
 328 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 found to be, in one way or another, distinctive of this period; 
 and yet others are prophetic of qualities not up to this point fully 
 revealed. 
 
 § I. The Balladists. 
 
 There can be no hesitation in ranking the writers of ballads 
 among those who look to the past rather than to the future ; and 
 this not merely, nor even chiefly, because the ballad form is one of 
 the oldest in our literature. A more cogent reason in the present 
 instance is that all the early Victorian writers of ballads are more 
 or less closely akin to Scott, and contentedly accept him as their 
 model. Neither Macaulay, nor Aytoun, nor Motherwell, nor 
 R. S. Hawker would have written such verse as they did if Scott 
 had not revived the Border Ballads, and written splendid speci- 
 mens of the modern ballad as well. 
 
 At the head of this group stands Macaulay by virtue of the 
 Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), in the preface to which the debt to 
 Scott and to the old ballads is explicitly acknowledged. The Lays 
 have, like the rest of Macaulay's works, passed through a period 
 of undue depreciation, and seem now to be read in a fair and 
 just spirit. They were criticised by Matthew Arnold, with a 
 harshness and injustice rare in him, as "pinchbeck." But pinch- 
 beck is something which, superficially, looks better than it is; 
 while the Lays pretend to be nothing but just exactly what they 
 are. They are not great poetry: no competent judge ever claimed 
 that they were. They are not even among the best of their kind; 
 for there are heights in such ballads as Scott's Cadyow Castle and 
 Harlaw and Rossetti's King's Tragedy, to which Macaulay could 
 never soar. But his Lays are nevertheless extremely spirited 
 verse, altogether admirable for the purpose he had in view, and 
 an excellent example of the historical spirit transfused into verse. 
 For here as ahvays Macaulay is essentially the historian. So he 
 is also in the English ballads, The Armada and The Battle of 
 Naseby ; so he is in the lay of Lvry; so in great measure he is in 
 the beautiful verses written after his defeat at Edinburgh ; and it 
 is evident that the historical spirit inspires even the finest of all 
 his poems, the Epitaph on a Jacobite. This is the true spirit of
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 329 
 
 the balladist; and Macaulay succeeds in his verse just because he 
 calls into play his own strongest faculties. The popular taste 
 which raised the Lays into favour was neither an ignoble nor a 
 mistaken one. They have a fine martial ring, such as is hardly 
 to be found except in Homer or in Scott or in William Morris, 
 they are altogether wholesome in tone, and they are exactly the 
 right thing for the purpose in view. 
 
 The influence of the striking success of the Lays of Ancient 
 Rome is seen, six years later, in the appearance of the Lays of 
 the Scottish Cavaliers (1848). This was the work of William 
 Edmondstoune Aytoun (18 13-1865), the brilliant professor of 
 English literature in the University of Edinburgh. Aytoun, though 
 not a great writer, did several things very well. He was a good 
 critic, an excellent story-teller, and one of the best of parodists. His 
 novel, Norman Sinclair, though ill-constructed, has much of the 
 interest of a ^z^a^Z-autobiography, and is enlivened with the 
 humour which seasons the best of his Blackwood tales, — for 
 example, the famous Glenmutchkin Railway. Contemporaneously 
 with the Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers Aytoun was writing, in 
 conjunction with Mr (now Sir) Theodore Martin, the Bon 
 Gaultier Ballads, a collection of humorous pieces, including, with 
 much besides that is good, the admirable Massacre of the Mac- 
 pherson. 
 
 In the Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers Aytoun is hardly so 
 successful. Though inspiriting, they are far inferior to the ballads 
 of Scott, on which they are modelled. The verse is highly rhe- 
 torical and sometimes inflated. The material is frequently beaten 
 out too thin, and the poetic feeling is less pure and true than it is 
 in the Lays of Ancient Rome. Nevertheless, The Burial March 
 of Dundee, Edinburgh after Flodden and The Island of the Scots 
 are all inspired by a fine feeling of chivalry which ought long to 
 preserve them. That beautiful poem Hermotimus shows powers 
 of a different and in some respects of a higher order. It is written 
 in the difficult measure of The Bride of Corinth by Goethe, of 
 whom Aytoun was one of the earliest admirers, and of whose 
 Faust he made a translation which was never published. 
 
 As in Aytoun so too in Sir Francis Hastings Doyle (1810-
 
 ^^O THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 1888) there is a nobly clear martial and heroic strain, which well 
 beseemed the descendant of a family of soldiers. Doyle's rare 
 gifts and high accomplishments are indicated by the fact that he 
 succeeded Matthew Arnold in the chair of poetry at Oxford, and 
 by the expectations formed of him by his friends, among whom 
 were the most distinguished men of his time, both of Oxford and 
 Cambridge. But Doyle never quite justified those expectations. 
 It is evident that more than most poets he depended upon 
 "inspiration," and while his best pieces are unsurpassed in their 
 kind, the whole bulk of his really good verse is very small. If 
 the subject stirred his blood as in T/ie Private of the Buffs and 
 The Red Thread of Honour he wrote splendidly. In the Don- 
 caster St Leger he is carried away by the rush and excitement of 
 the race, and he makes the reader feel his own enthusiasm. 
 These pieces were evidently written at a white heat, and Boyle 
 has a few others scarcely less admirable ; but no other strain of 
 his work is comparable to this. 
 
 Another balladist of somewhat earlier date, William Mother- 
 well (i 797-1835), may be named for the sake of a few spirited 
 pieces such as The Cavalier's Song and The Trooper's Ditty, and 
 for the fine Norse poems which helped to keep alive the interest 
 in Scandinavian literature which had been felt since Gray. It 
 would, however, be a mistake to regard Motherwell as in any 
 appreciable degree the means of importing a Scandinavian element 
 into our literature. That was the work of greater men. 
 
 Of the ballad sort is likewise much of the verse of Robert 
 Stephen Hawker (1803-18 75), a good poet and a very interesting 
 man. Hawker spent forty years of his life in the lonely Cornish 
 parish of Morwenstow, but, in spite of the loneliness, the story of 
 his work there is of thrilling interest. It deserves to be had in 
 remembrance at least as much as even his best verse. He prac- 
 tically Christianised a population previously little better than 
 savages ; and his poetry everywhere bears traces of the nature of 
 his work, of the scenery of Cornwall, and of the character of the 
 people among whom he lived, their habits, legends, superstitions, 
 virtues. Shipwrecks, and the giving up of the dead by the sea, 
 were frequent incidents in his experience, and both in prose and
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 33 1 
 
 in verse he has depicted them vividly. Many of his best pieces 
 are founded upon such incidents, or upon local legends, by which 
 his mind was deeply impressed. To the former class belong, 
 for instance, The Figure-head of the Caledonia^ the Death Song 
 and the Burial Hour; to the latter, The Death-Race, Annot of 
 Benallay and The Silent Tower of Bottreau. As a rule, Hawker's 
 pieces, though full of the ballad spirit, are undisguisedly modern ; 
 but he could imitate the tone of antiquity when he chose, and he 
 notes with pardonable pride that his best-known piece. The So?ig 
 of the Western Men, deceived three such good judges as Sir 
 Walter Scott, Macaulay and Dickens. 
 
 From the serious ballad to the ballad of humour is an easy 
 transition, and already passing mention has been made of it in 
 connexion with Aytoun. In this domain the most widely popular 
 work was that of Richard Harris Barham (1788- 1845). He was 
 by profession a clergyman, and he had been a man of letters as 
 well for many years before he struck the vein by which he won 
 renown. It was in 1837 that the celebrated Ingoldsby Legends 
 began to appear in Bentkfs Miscellany, then edited by Charles 
 Dickens. They had a wonderful vogue, and for more than a 
 generation after Barham's death they were regarded as models of 
 what such pieces ought to be. In some ways they well deserved 
 their reputation. They are exceedingly clever, especially in the 
 matter of rhymes ; the stories are skilfully told ; the ingenuity of 
 the author seems to be well-nigh inexhaustible ; and the best of 
 the legends, such as The Jackdaiv of Rheims and A Lay of St 
 Nicholas, are in their own way almost perfect. And yet we soon 
 come to an end of their merits. There is a hard clank in 
 Barham's verse, and his light is never softened with shade. His 
 humour grows monotonous ; only two or three subjects on which 
 to exercise it seem to occur to him, and they are subjects which, 
 when constantly reiterated, leave an unpleasant taste. Of poetry 
 the Legends are almost completely destitute, and but for the 
 beautiful "last lines," As / laye a-Thynkynge, it might be 
 suspected that Barham had none of the poetic faculty. 
 
 There are few things in the study of literature so saddening as 
 to turn over again the leaves of books of verse which have once
 
 332 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 enjoyed a reputation for fun and frolic. To borrow Thackeray's 
 simile, it is like the aspect of an expired feast after the heel-taps 
 have been exposed all night to the air. In the pure light of day 
 the relics of gaiety and festivity seem poor and tawdry and 
 nauseous. And so it is with the revelries of literature, especially 
 when they are versified. The best of the Rejected Addresses and 
 of the Bon Gaultier Ballads still retain their power to please, in 
 most cases because they have caught a gleam from the very 
 poems they mimic; but a considerable part even of these 
 volumes has lost the racy flavour which we must believe it once 
 possessed. Much of the wit of George Colman, of Theodore 
 Hook, of Francis Mahony, of William Maginn and of Douglas 
 Jerrold leaves us cold and indifferent; and some of it even 
 repels. Though they stand comparatively near our own time, 
 their day is irretrievably gone. It was not altogether their fault, 
 for they were masters of their craft; it is rather the almost 
 inevitable consequence of working in that particular genre. We 
 see this the more clearly the farther we go back in literature. No 
 race more quick-witted than the Greeks has ever existed ; and yet 
 nothing can be more vapid than some of those jests which have 
 been carried down the stream of time — as if Bacon had indeed 
 been right when he compared fame to a river which bears up 
 " things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid." 
 The truth seems to be that literature is like wine, it will not keep 
 unless it has a certain "body"; and wit alone, unstrengthened by 
 other qualities, seldom suffices to give it that body. 
 
 Nevertheless it is certain that fun in verse can be made to 
 keep sweet for centuries. Aristophanes is still delightful reading ; 
 and there is no lack of flavour in the humorous pieces among The 
 Canterbury Tales. But it is to be noticed that these works are 
 humorous even more than they are witty; and it is their rich 
 setting of human nature which makes them permanently valuable. 
 Humour wears well, wit in isolation, it would seem, does not. 
 The pieces which we still care to remember are not strings of 
 puns or sparkling sayings, but pieces richly freighted with associa- 
 tion, like the best of the parodies ; pieces resting upon some 
 human feeling, however ludicrously presented, as in George
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 333 
 
 Outram's Annuity ; or, best of all, pieces in which a touch of 
 pathos softens the humour and the wit, as in Thackeray's Ballad 
 of Bouillabaisse. Compare the mere play of wit in the famous 
 Ass-ass-ination, from John Bull, or in Hood's Faithless Nellie 
 Gray, with Bon Gaultier's delightful parody, redolent of the 
 old ballads, The Queen in France, or with the parodies on Scott 
 and Wordsworth in Rejected Addresses, or with Calverley's or 
 J. K. Stephen's parodies, or with that admirable travesty of the 
 Idylls of the King, Sir Tray; and the superiority of the latter class 
 is at once apparent. Nowhere is it more apparent than in 
 Shirley Brooks's " More luck to honest poverty," because that so 
 well illustrates how the parodist may make his verses the vehicle 
 of wisdom. Burns's song, "A man's a man for a' that," is the 
 very essence of manliness ; yet it can be made to do service to 
 mere cant, and Brooks's retort is sound and wise as well as 
 clever : — 
 
 "More luck to honest poverty, 
 It claims respect, and a' that ; 
 But honest wealth's a better thing, 
 We dare be rich for a' that. 
 
 For a' that, and a' that, 
 
 And spooney cant, and a' that, 
 A man may have a ten pun note, 
 
 And be a brick for a' that." 
 
 § 2. Vers de Societk. 
 
 The light and elegant verse of society is another of those 
 species which are characteristic of no particular age. It is the 
 symptom of a sophisticated civilisation, and is sure to appear 
 whenever the conditions favourable to it exist. In English litera- 
 ture, however, it has never held a place so prominent as in French ; 
 and previous to the nineteenth century Matthew Prior reigned 
 unchallenged, with no rival near the throne. During the nine- 
 teenth century several writers have won high distinction for this 
 form of verse. It was a factor in the reputation of Moore, and 
 Moore had influence over nearly all the lighter poets of the 
 earlier part of the century. This influence is conspicuous both in
 
 334 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the wit and in the sentimentality of Thomas Haynes Baj'ly 
 (1797-1839), whose gift of facile versification won for some of his 
 songs a popularity they have not yet wholly lost. So too the 
 gentle and amiable Laman Blanchard (1804-1845) impressed 
 upon verses of no great distinction his own kindly gaiety and 
 humour. But in the earlier half of the century the best writer of 
 light verse was Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-1839), to whose 
 primacy, in the latter part of it, Frederick Locker-Lampson and 
 Mr Austin Dobson have succeeded. 
 
 With Praed ought perhaps to be classed a younger man, 
 Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton (1805-1885). Milnes, 
 whose portrait has been etched skilfully, though not without 
 acid, in the Vavasour of Tancred, was one of the most interest- 
 ing figures of his generation. Prominent at once in society, 
 in politics and in literature, he was just a little injured in the 
 latter two by the inability to throw himself resolutely into one 
 kind of work. The "catholic sympathies and eclectic turn of 
 mind" noted by Disraeh in Mr Vavasour led Milnes astray; 
 because, as the same pungent satirist proceeds, the capacity to see 
 something good in everything and everybody "disqualifies a man 
 in some degree for the business of life, which requires for its con- 
 duct a certain degree of prejudice." It was this foible which led 
 Carlyle to say to him, "There is only one post fit for you, and 
 that is the oflSce of perpetual president of the Heaven and Hell 
 Amalgamation Society^" But the foible was no ignoble one ; or 
 rather, it was more the expression of a generous and widely 
 tolerant character than a foible. "I have many friends," said 
 W, E. Forster of Milnes, "who would be kind to me in distress, 
 but only one who would be equally kind to me in disgrace*." To 
 the memory of Milnes there clings the fragrance of a thousand 
 generous deeds. It was to him that everybody turned when in 
 
 * Life 0/ Lord Houghton, i. 187. 
 
 * ibid. 44. It was pure kindness of heart, not laxity of principle, that 
 made Milnes lenient to evil-doers, and he could be severe enough on occasion. 
 After the cotiji d'etat he broke off friendly relations with Napoleon III, and 
 did not resume them till the Emperor had been stripped of all the ill-gotten 
 gains of that crime.
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 335 
 
 need. To a rich man the giving of money was easy, but Milnes 
 also gave sympathy and took trouble. He was the untiring and 
 delicately generous benefactor of the hapless poet David Gray, 
 and so many others did he befriend that he was regarded as the 
 natural champion of the struggling man of letters. Carlyle had 
 asked him to get a pension for Tennyson, and when Milnes 
 pleaded that it was not easy to do so — his constituents knew nothing 
 about Tennyson and would believe the pension to be a job — 
 Carlyle burst out, "Richard Milnes, on the Day of Judgment, when 
 the Lord asks you why you did not get that pension for Alfred 
 Tennyson, it will not do to lay the blame on your constituents; it 
 is you that will be damned \" 
 
 When Milnes was still at Cambridge a College friend and 
 warm admirer, Stafford O'Brien, wrote to him words which show 
 an almost uncanny prescience: "I often wonder what will be your 
 future destiny, and I think you are near something very glorious, 
 but you will never reach it. I wish it were in my power to give 
 you all the good I possess, and which you want, for I would 
 willingly pull down my hut to build your palace*." These words 
 were fully justified in the sequel. Milnes had splendid gifts, and 
 he was always "near something very glorious," but he never 
 reached it The cause lay, no doubt, in that eclecticism which 
 was noted by Disraeli, — a fatal facility in the reception of impres- 
 sions and influences, which usually implies a want of depth in the 
 impressions received. Milnes was attracted by Newmanism, and 
 pleaded eloquently for it in One Tract More \ but when he went 
 to the East he was equally ready to be charmed by Mahom 
 medanism. In fact, he was so ready to see truth in anything that 
 he was rarely impressed by any one truth with the intensity of 
 conviction necessary to great work. He never put his fortune to 
 the touch, " to win or lose it all." He played upon the surface, 
 wrote gracefully, not powerfully, touched — and adorned — many 
 things, rather than made any one all his own. 
 
 Milnes began his poetical career early. One of his best-known 
 pieces, The Brook-side, was written in 1830, and the rhythm of it 
 was hammered out to the tramp of a horse's hoofs and the rattle 
 * Life of Houghton, i. 296. - ibid. 85.
 
 336 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 of an Irish jaunting-car. He versified his travels in Greece in the 
 Memorials (1834) of his tour, while his travels in Egypt and the 
 Levant were similarly commemorated in Palm Leaves (1844). In 
 Poems, Legendary and Historical (1844), he entered into competi- 
 tion, not very successfully, with Macaulay and Aytoun. There 
 is great similarity between Milnes's Death of Sarsfield and 
 Aytoun's Lsland of the Scots; but the former leaves the reader 
 perfectly cold, while the latter impresses him, if not as great poetry, 
 at any rate as stirring chivalrous verse. It would however be 
 unjust to judge Houghton by this. He is best in one of his later 
 poems, the beautiful and pathetic Strangers Yet. 
 
 "Strangers yet! 
 After years of life together, 
 After fair and stormy weather, 
 After travel in fair lands, 
 After touch of wedded hands, — 
 Why thus joined? why ever met. 
 If they must be strangers yet ? 
 
 Strangers yet! 
 After childhood's winning ways, 
 After care and blame and praise, 
 Counsel asked and wisdom g^ven, 
 After mutual prayers to Heaven, 
 Child and parent scarce regret 
 When they part — are strangers yet. 
 
 Strangers yet! 
 After strife for common ends. 
 After title of 'old friends,' ^ 
 
 After passions fierce and tender, 
 After cheerful self-surrender, 
 Hearts may beat and eyes be met. 
 And the souls be strangers yet." 
 
 Ivlilnes never elsewhere rose so high as this. But that which he 
 did with the most uniform success was the vers de societe. 
 
 Praed resembled Milnes in the fact that he united literature 
 with politics. In that respect he resembled also a greater writer 
 than either of them, Macdulay, between whom and Praed there
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 337 
 
 are other interesting associations : Praed, who was two years 
 Macaulay's junior at Cambridge, read classics with the elder man; 
 and in Parliament the Radical of the Cambridge Union was 
 looked upon as a bulwark of the constitution against the innova- 
 tions of his former coach, the Cambridge Tory. 
 
 Praed's literary faculty was very early developed, and it was 
 cultivated until it became the ready instrument of every thought 
 which he chose to put into verse. From his boyhood at Eton, till 
 he died, he was continually writing, — first for school magazines, 
 including the famous Etonian, of which he was the chief supporter, 
 and afterwards for Knight's Quarterly Magazine. But in spite of 
 his brilliancy and of his early success, he seems to have recognised 
 that there was a limit to his powers which he could not pass. He 
 never attained, and it does not appear that he earnestly aimed at, 
 greatness in any serious form of literature. Occasionally the 
 reader of Praed is tempted to regret this. There is austere force 
 in The Covenanter's Lament, and The Red Fisherman shows 
 imagination of a very rare sort. But probably Praed judged well. 
 Though he died young, his seven-and-thirty years were the years 
 also of Burns, and his circumstances were incomparably more 
 favourable for production than those of the ploughman-poet. 
 Many others have done great work in a space still more brief. 
 The fact therefore that Praed did not write great poems may be 
 taken as evidence that he did not possess the power, though 
 contemporaries like Miss Mitford believed that if he had lived 
 longer he would have won distinction in the higher kinds of 
 poetry. As it is, he is clearly first in his own line, and his niche 
 in the temple of fame is more secure than that of many prouder 
 figures. The author of Quince and The Vicar and A Letter of 
 Advice is safe from oblivion. In work of this kind Praed at his 
 best is nearly perfect ; and neither Prior, who reigned before him, 
 nor Locker-Lampson, who came after, can be ranked as his 
 equal. Native gifts and acquired skill unite to give him the 
 primacy. The atmosphere of scholarship and high culture 
 envelops all he wrote. A playtul and not too piercing wit, ready 
 but not mordant sarcasm, sympathy genuine but not painfuUy 
 acute, a mind by habit fanciful rather than imaginative, these are 
 w. 22
 
 33^ THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the qualities the combination of which makes Praed the most 
 perfect writer of society verse in English literature ; or perhaps it 
 would be more accurate to say that his only rival is Landor, a 
 man who has done things so much greater that we easily forget to 
 regard him in this light at all, but who on rare occasions showed 
 that he could write vers de societe to perfection. If we take 
 Praed's masterpiece, The Vicar, we see at once the secret of his 
 excellence. It is a character-sketch, touched with exquisite 
 lightness and delicacy. Few poems are so witty, but there is more 
 than wit in it. Compare it with anything by Theodore Hook or 
 Barham. Hook was one of the wittiest men who ever lived ; but 
 wit was the end as well as the beginning of his verse. Praed, 
 especially in The Vicar, has feeling as well as brightness, humour 
 as well as wit, he is a poet, not merely a jester. There is a 
 remarkable resemblance, and also a remarkable difference, between 
 him and Hood. He is a Hood at once weaker and stronger; 
 weaker far as a serious poet, yet more masterly as a writer of 
 light verse. But the point of difference is that in Hood we find 
 side by side, but seldom fused, a comic writer and a sombre, nay, 
 a tragic one ; in Praed, grave and gay are habitually combined. 
 Judged by Mary's Ghost and John Trot and Tim Turpin, it 
 would appear that Hood was never serious: The Song of the Shirt 
 and Eugene Aram and The Haunted House would be equally good 
 evidence that he never laughed. The truth is that, except in 
 Miss Kilmansegg, Hood is a poet witty rather than humorous; 
 and he is grave, even melancholy, far more than either. But 
 Praed mingled humour with his wit, and there are suggestions of 
 gravity in some of his lightest pieces. Sometimes, it is true, the 
 touch of the one poet is scarcely distinguishable from that of the 
 other. There is a Hood-like tone in Praed's Unes about the time 
 of King Richard, when 
 
 " Saracens and liquor ran 
 
 Where'er he set his foot"; 
 
 and we seem to be reading Hood at his happiest in the lines, 
 
 •' And he spurred Sir Guy o'er mount and moor, 
 With a long dull journey all before, 
 And a short gay squire behind him."
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 339 
 
 There is still mxich of Hood in 
 
 " Sound was his claret — and his head ; 
 
 Warm was his double-ale — and feelings: 
 His partners at the whist-club said 
 That he was faultless in his dealings." 
 
 But we notice even here that the puns are made to serve in the 
 delineation of character; and in some of the stanzas of Quince and 
 The Vicar the serious poet and the shrewd kindly observer of 
 human nature stand pretty clearly revealed : — 
 
 " While decay 
 Came, like a tranquil moonlight, o'er him, 
 And found him gouty still, and gay, 
 
 With no fair nurse to bless or bore him, 
 His rugged smile and easy chair, 
 
 His dread of matrimonial lectures, 
 His wig, his stick, his powdered hair, 
 
 Were themes for very strange conjectures." 
 • ••••• 
 
 "And he was kind, and loved to sit 
 
 In the low hut or garnished cottage, 
 And praise the farmer's homely wit. 
 
 And share the widow's homelier pottage: 
 At his approach complaint grew mild ; 
 
 And when his hand unbarred the stutter, 
 The clammy lips of fever smiled 
 
 The welcome which they could not utter." 
 
 § 3. The Catholic Poets. 
 
 While poets like Praed might belong to almost any age, the 
 group which has next to be considered could hardly have flourished 
 before the second quarter of the nineteenth century. By reason of 
 the date of his principal work, its leader, Keble, has been classed 
 with the poets of the interregnum; but he and a few others whose 
 interests were primarily religious and largely ecclesiastical form a 
 homogeneous class which may conveniently be denominated 
 Catholic. First and chief among the followers is Keble's great 
 companion of the early days of the Oxford Movement, John 
 Henry Newman. His poetry, though slight, indeed, almost insig- 
 
 22 — 2
 
 340 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 nificant in bulk, is of high imaginative quality. Unfortunately, 
 Newman never regarded himself as a poet, and almost the whole 
 of his verse is the work of his earlier years. Even The Dream of 
 Gerontius, though it was not published till 1865, had been written 
 many years before that date and thrown aside and forgotten, until 
 Newman, rummaging for something to gratify the editor of a 
 magazine, came upon it and sent it as his contribution : in so 
 little esteem was one of the subtlest of modern religious poems 
 held by its author. His own saying that " poetry is the refuge of 
 those who have not the Catholic Church to fiee to and repose 
 upon," probably indicates the reason for the scantiness of his pro- 
 duction as a poet. 
 
 Besides The Dream of Geronfius, Newman wrote a number of 
 poems which appeared, mingled with pieces from other pens, 
 in Lyra Apostolica (1834). A volume of Verses on Various 
 Occasions (1868) consists exclusively of his work, and there the 
 greater part of his poetry is to be found. His most prolific years 
 were the early thirties, before his mind was immersed in the 
 turmoil of the Tracts too completely for poetical composition. The 
 period of his voyage in the Mediterranean was especially fruitful ; 
 and to it belongs in particular the piece by which he is and will 
 remain best known, the beautiful hymn, " Lead, kindly Light," 
 The Dream of Gerontius is by far his longest poem, and, with the 
 possible exception of that most poetical of hymns, it is his best 
 title to the name of poet. It is the vision of a dying soul, 
 beautiful with that severe beauty which always characterised 
 Newman, and fascinating from its austere imagination. The 
 lyrical parts are not wholly satisfactory, but the blank verse is 
 grand in its restraint and strength. Newman had a reach of 
 thought and a boldness of imagination which none of the other 
 Catholic poets could rival. By reason of his greater devotion to 
 the art and the greater quantity of his work, Keble must take 
 rank as a poet above Newman ; but Newman had the higher 
 endowment, and if he had chosen, or had found time, he would 
 have left work superior to the best that The Christian Year 
 contains. 
 
 It is unnecessary to delay long over the other writers of this
 
 THE MINOR POETS : EARLIER PERIOD 34I 
 
 group. Without any exception but Newman they show mediocrity 
 of intellect ; and their emotional fervour could not alone produce 
 great poetry. One of them, Frederick William Faber (1814-1863) 
 found refuge, in the same year as Newman, in the bosom of the 
 Church of Rome. Both before and after his reception into the 
 Romish communion he was a diligent writer of verse ; but sub- 
 sequently to that event he devoted himself in his verse exclusively 
 to the service of his Church. Wordsworth lamented the change 
 and declared that in it England lost a poet. In spite of this judg- 
 ment, it is not easy to discover in Faber the qualities which under 
 any circumstances would have entitled him to the name of poet ; 
 and he is not likely to be remembered, except with that dubious 
 immortality which clings to the hymn-writer who has secured 
 entrance into popular collections. His verse is commonly weak, 
 and often exaggerated in tone and tainted with sentimentality. 
 
 As little or even less can Isaac Williams (i 802-1 865) claim a 
 place in the ranks of those "sacred bards" who are so far 
 removed from the writers of what passes for religious poetry. 
 While Faber went with Newman, Williams remained with Keble, 
 among those who did not feel the via media slipping from under 
 their feet ; and after Keble he is usually ranked as a minor poet 
 of the Oxford Movement. But Williams was a weak man, and 
 nothing he has written is likely to survive, or deserves to survive. 
 He was the author of the papers on Reserve in the Tracts for the 
 Times. His Autobiography is a feeble book, and not altogether a 
 pleasant one. More than any other of Newman's Anglican friends, 
 Williams kept up relations with him after the secession; and 
 the unamiable acerbity of some of the references to Newman 
 which are sprinkled through the Autobiography ill befits one who 
 continued to profess friendship. 
 
 John Mason Neale (1818-1866), though a Cambridge man, was 
 one of those who came under the influence of the Tractarians 
 while the tracts were still running their course. By virtue of his 
 History of the Eastern Church and of two or three other historical 
 works, he claims a minor place among historians ; but he is best 
 known as a writer, and especially as a translator, of hymns. A 
 number of his translations from the Greek have been incorporated
 
 342 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 from his Hymns of the Eastern Church into Hymns Ancient and 
 Modern and other widely-used collections. The best are very 
 good; but even here Neale's touch is uncertain, and his choice 
 from among the originals is not discriminating. The volume 
 contains, for example, the beautiful and popular *' Art thou weary, 
 art thou languid ? " and also the absurd, though likewise popular, 
 "Christian, dost thou see them?" 
 
 Of far higher quality was the poetry of R. S. Hawker, whose 
 ballads have been already noticed. The Quest of the Sangraal, by 
 virtue of which principally he claims notice here, was published 
 incomplete in 1863, and incomplete it still remained at his death 
 in 1875. But his poetical career had begun and his mind had 
 been formed far earlier. Such changes as occurred in him were 
 the result of lonely communings with his own soul ; and naturally 
 enough they came more slowly than they came to others who 
 lived more among their fellows. The nature of his broodings may 
 be conjectured from the fact that within a few hours of his death 
 he was received within the Romish communion. Such a change 
 under such circumstances is suggestive; but it would be unjust to 
 Hawker to lay stress on it. No one can tell how far a dying man 
 is really responsible for his actions. In his full health and vigour 
 this consummation might never have been reached : on the other 
 hand, had he lived in close contact with the world it might have 
 been reached years before. By the cast of his mind and his 
 imagination there was a pre-established harmony between Hawker 
 and the High Church revival, though he disliked those who 
 merely emphasised ritual. He had the Tractarians' ready 
 credulity, their mysticism, their appetite for legends, with more 
 than their power of turning legends into poetry. Such tendencies, 
 combined with his residence in Cornwall, naturally drew Hawker 
 towards the more mystical side of the Arthurian legends ; and the 
 result was the Quest.
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 343 
 
 § 4. The Philosophic Poets. 
 
 The Catholic poets are important chiefly as premonitory of 
 that which was to come under the reign of the Pre-Raphaelites, 
 and these belong to the later part of the period. With the 
 philosophic movement the case was different; for as soon as 
 Browning appears it has to be taken most seriously into account. 
 It claimed the allegiance of the greatest minds of the age, who 
 naturally drew to themselves followers as time went on. But even 
 from the first the intellectual element in verse fascinated some of 
 the minor writers. Of these we may take as representatives Philip 
 James Bailey (1816-1902) and Richard Henry (or Hengist) Home 
 (1803-1884). 
 
 After Beddoes and Wells there is no one so deeply imbued 
 with the Elizabethan spirit as Home, whose life as well as his 
 writings brings to mind the great Queen's time ; for he seems to 
 have been akin to the sea-dogs and adventurers as well as to the 
 dramatists. No literary man of the nineteenth century lived a 
 fuller life than he. Though of small stature, he was endowed 
 with immense strength, and was proud of the athletic feats which 
 he was still able to perform almost to the close of his life. He was 
 destined for the army, but riotous conduct cut short his career at 
 Sandhurst. He then joined the Mexican navy as a midshipman, 
 and saw service in the war with Spain. After numerous perils, 
 among which were a narrow escape from a shark and another 
 from a still more dangerous enemy, a mutinous ship's crew, 
 Home returned to England and began a career of letters; but 
 nearly ten years passed before he produced anything of permanent 
 importance. In 1837 appeared Cosfno de' Medici and The Death 
 of Marlowe, the latter of which has no small share of the fire and 
 strength of Marlowe himself. In 1840 they were followed by 
 another tragedy, Gregory VII, and that again three years later by 
 Home's best known work, Orion, an Epic Poem in three Books. 
 In scorn of the public, which had long ceased to buy poetry, but 
 which was buying Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy, the author 
 fixed the price at one farthing. Next came A New Spirit of 
 the Age (1844), an interesting collection of essays, in which
 
 344 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Home collaborated with Elizabeth Barrett and others. Ballad 
 Romances (1846) was the only other publication worthy of 
 note before the life of adventure began again. In 1852 the 
 gold fever drew Home to Australia, where he played many 
 parts and ran many risks. It was at this time that for some 
 obscure reason he dropped his baptismal name of Henry and 
 assumed that of Hengist. He returned to England in 1869; 
 and the rest of his life was filled with miscellaneous literary 
 work, all of it of less importance than that which he had 
 previously done, — unless indeed Home himself was right in the 
 opinion that the still unpublished poem entitled Ancient Idols ; or, 
 the Fall of the Gods was the greatest of his writings'. 
 
 Home was a man who gave the stamp of distinction to all he 
 wrote, and who scorned any aim below the highest. In the 
 drama, he held the highest aim to be representation on the stage, 
 and consequently his tragedies were written with that end in view. 
 At the same time, he was convinced that prostitution of poetry 
 and art was the price to be paid for admission to the English 
 stage ; and so he contemplated representation only as the possi- 
 bility of a distant future. The intensity of Home's dramas goes 
 far to justify his assertion, quoted from Goethe, that they "were 
 written with his blood." No man who values high thought and is 
 capable of sympathy with deep passion and suffering can read 
 them with indifference. And yet it was not wholly the fault of 
 the stage that Home's dramas were excluded from it. Their high 
 merit as tragic conceptions is marred by stiffness of movement; 
 along with their elevation of thought goes a certain monotony; 
 and the characters are somewhat crudely delineated. All this is 
 true not only of Cosmo de' Medici, but also, though in a less 
 degree, of The Death of Marlowe and of Gregory the Great. The 
 faults grow again in Laura Dibalzo (1880), where there is besides 
 a marked lowering of the dignity of the author's style. 
 
 Home's genius, however, was not essentially dramatic. Occa- 
 sionally he rose high in the lyric, as in Genius (Gulf of Florida) ; 
 and the Ballad of Delora is admirable. But by far the most 
 memorable of his works is the epic of Orion. Its history shows 
 
 ^ Literary Anecdotes of the XIX Century, i. 245.
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 345 
 
 that the readers of the time were not quite so contemptible as 
 Home thought them. They exhausted three editions at the 
 original price of a farthing, and three more at higher rates, within 
 the year of its publication \ 
 
 Orion is an allegorical epic. Its object, Home explains, is 
 " to present a type of the struggle of man with himself, i.e. the 
 contest between the intellect and the senses " ; and this is done 
 under the veil of classical myths. The scheme was well adapted 
 to Home's type of mind. He worked best on a broad canvas ; 
 and in the case of Orion he could make the canvas as broad as 
 he pleased. Notwithstanding his life of adventure, his literary 
 strength lay in thought, not in action ; and in Orion there was no 
 such necessity for movement as there was in the dramas. Though 
 never likely to be widely read, the poem will always command the 
 admiration of those who love great thoughts expressed in sonorous 
 verse ; and they will find in it many passages of remarkable power. 
 No one probably would echo the extravagant praise of Poe, who 
 ranked Home next to Tennyson, and pronounced his Orion 
 " superior even to Milton's Paradise Lost^ " ; but at least he is a 
 poet of no mean order. 
 
 Though Home was essentially original it is evident that he 
 was under the influence of Keats. No doubt the echo is conscious 
 and intentional in the lines : — 
 
 "Never renew thy vision, passionate lover — 
 Heart-rifled maiden — nor the hope pursue 
 If once it vanish from thee." 
 
 Probably it is so too in : —   
 
 "Oinopion strode about his pillared hall, 
 And the dim chequers of its marble floor 
 Counted perplexed." 
 
 Occasionally something overwrought in the style suggests the 
 kind of error into which a disciple is apt to fall : — 
 
 " Old memories 
 Slumbrously hung above the purple line 
 
 * Literary Anecdotts of the XIX Century, i. 240. 
 
 * The Poe-Chivers Papers, edited by G. E. Woodberry, in The Century 
 Magazine.
 
 346 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Of distance, to the east, while odorously 
 Glistened the tear-drops of a new-fallen shower; 
 And sunset forced its beams through strangling boughs, 
 Gilding green shadows, till it blazed athwart 
 The giant-caves, and touched with watery fires 
 The heavy foot-marks which had plashed the sward 
 On vacant paths, through foliaged vistas steep, 
 Where gloom was mellowing to a grand repose." 
 
 Bold and ambitious as was Home in his plans, still bolder 
 was Philip James Bailey, whose Festus startled the literary world 
 in 1839. No poet has forgotten more completely the injunction 
 to think about Noah and be brief. Already at twenty-three he 
 gave the world a poem of some nine or ten thousand lines, and 
 by additions gradually made through a long life it grew to about 
 forty thousand. Even The Ring and the Book is a pigmy by the 
 side of Festus. 
 
 In one respect Bailey resembles Milton ; for he deliberately 
 trained himself from boyhood for the function of a poet. But 
 there is also a striking difference. At thirty-four, when the Civil 
 War began, Milton was still meditating his great work ; while at 
 twenty-three Bailey was confident that he had adequately executed 
 one of the most ambitious poetical schemes ever conceived. It 
 is, the poet tells the reader in the preface to the fiftieth-anniversary 
 edition, "a summary of the world's combined moral and physical 
 conditions, estimated on a theory of spiritual things." Struc- 
 turally, he goes on to say, the poem resolves itself "not into 
 books, or acts, but into twelve or more groups, celestial, astral, 
 interstellar and terrestrial, solar, planetary and one other, the 
 sphere of the Infernals ; that is to say, into so many clusters of 
 sections subordinated into seven classes, finally reducible into 
 three, Heavenly, firmamental, earthly." This vast plan the author 
 carries out in fifty-two "scenes," the poem being a sort of drama 
 in which the principal actors — or interlocutors, for it is rather 
 speech than action — are Lucifer and Festus ; while a number of 
 supernatural beings, from the Deity downwards, take part. 
 
 Festus is not likely ever again to arouse the interest and to 
 win the praise it once gained. Men were awed by the daring of 
 the poet who could not only conceive and resolve to carry out
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 347 
 
 such a design, but who in the course of it shrank not from 
 challenging comparison with the greatest of modern poets. The 
 whole structure is suggestive of Goethe, and indeed Feshis owes 
 not a little to Faust. Again, the prominence given to the 
 supernatural turns the thoughts to Milton, though the differ- 
 ence between Festus and Paradise Lost is very wide. Neither 
 was it possible, within twenty years of the publication of Cain, to 
 handle such a subject without bringing Byron to mind. Far 
 from concealing all this, Bailey rather drags it to the front. 
 The very name of Festus recalls Faust; and as if to invite 
 comparison with one of the sublimest passages of Paradise 
 Lost, we have, parallel with Satan's address to the sun, an 
 address by Festus to the same luminary. Here is the opening 
 of it : — 
 
 "Parent of spheres, who filling once all space, 
 God bidding, threwest off all cloaking clouds, 
 To thee intolerable, of nebulous heat, 
 The planetary fires; which, gathered there 
 In narrowing circlets, imminent o'er the void, 
 Each in one common sky, thou centering all, 
 Reign 'st o'er, their lord and sire ; so hailed by earth 
 First of heaven's stars reflective of the light 
 And favourite of the sun sole source and end 
 All turn to ; I too like thyself, a liege 
 But spiritual, of God, who gave us both 
 To be ; but in free obedience me ; in law 
 Infrangible thee, the law of light ; through space 
 Darting thy quickening ray from orb to orb, 
 Leaping, like thought; behold, I seek thee, Sun!" 
 
 The thought in this passage (a favourable specimen of the style 
 and substance of Festus) is but a poor counterpoise to the grand 
 harmonies of the Miltonic address, even as the world-philosophy 
 of Bailey seems commonplace beside that of Goethe. 
 
 Perhaps about a tenth part of Festus is good, and a tenth of 
 that tenth part is really admirable ; but what is good is so lost 
 and buried in a superincumbent mass of the mediocre and the 
 worthless, that we are reminded of Gratiano's reasons, and doubt 
 whether the grains of wheat <re worth the search through all the
 
 348 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 chaff. Bailey is capable of wi-iting noble lines and fine passages. 
 There is grandeur in the opening : — 
 
 "Eternity hath snowed its years upon them; 
 And the white winter of their age is come, 
 The world and all its worlds, and all shall end." 
 
 He has gleams of splendid thought perfectly expressed, — e.g.^ 
 " I am," says Lucifer, " the shadow which creation casts From 
 God's own light." And again in the Proem we read, " Evil and 
 good are God's right hand and left." Occasionally there are 
 longer passages which are equally elevated in thought and right 
 in expression : — 
 
 "Life's more than breath and the quick round of blood, 
 It is a great spirit and a busy heart. 
 The coward and the small in soul scarce do live. 
 One generous feeling, one great thought, one deed 
 Of good, ere night would make life longer seem 
 Than if each year might number a thousand days*. 
 We live in deeds, not years, in thoughts, not breaths; 
 In feelings, not in figures on a dial. 
 We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives 
 Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best." 
 
 But Bailey was incapable of self-criticism, and the changes he 
 made were often lamentably for the worse. For example, the 
 lines after " Evil and good are God's right hand and left," 
 originally ran : — 
 
 "By ministry of evil good is clear, 
 And by temptation virtue" ; 
 
 and they served to make the thought clearer and to deepen the 
 effect In the final version, however, ten dreary and inharmonious 
 lines are interposed between the first of these lines and the 
 second, which again is ruined by expansion into four. It is this 
 unfortunate deficiency in the critical faculty which makes Fesius 
 so extraordinarily uneven and therefore on the whole so weari- 
 some. 
 
 ^ liut compare this with 
 
 " One crowded hour of glorious lite 
 Is worth an age without a name."
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 349 
 
 Bailey had a very faulty sense of style, and he cannot be said 
 to have possessed an ear at all. His metre is nearly always 
 rough, and not infrequently it is execrable. The style is often 
 vitiated by specimens of the worst sort of eighteenth-century 
 taste. Clumsy phrases, harsh inversions, pauses too numerous 
 and ill placed, wear out the patience of the reader who has any 
 ear for the melodies of Keats and Coleridge. James Smetham 
 in his delightful letters has recorded that Fesius was the only 
 book he ever flung to the other side of the room ; and there are 
 many passages irritating enough to provoke such an explosion 
 of wrath. The adjectives, " tremendous, absurd, raw, loud and 
 fuliginous," which Dr John Brown of the Horae Subsecivae hurls 
 at Festus are all justified. 
 
 Bailey is sometimes spoken of as the " father of the Spasmodic 
 School "; but the criticism which classifies him with Dobell and 
 Alexander Smith is superficial, and he was fully justified in repu- 
 diating it. We have seen that Bailey is excessively uneven ; and 
 so are the Spasmodic poets. But few poems were ever written 
 less " spasmodically " than Festus. It is an exhaustive philo- 
 sophical treatise in verse ; and whatever we may think of the 
 philosophy, we must grant that the work is far too laboriously 
 hammered out to be fairly described as "spasmodic." 
 
 § 5. The Political Poets. 
 
 In religion, the great movement of the early nineteenth 
 century was the Catholic Reaction ; and corresponding to it we 
 find in poetry Keble and Newman. In philosophy, the greatest 
 fact was the attraction to Germany ; and we find Bailey challeng- 
 ing comparison with Goethe. So too in politics, the movement 
 to democracy finds its poet in Ebenezer Elliott, and after him 
 several of the minor poets draw their inspiration from the political 
 questions of the time. Associated with the Chartist movement 
 there is a small literature, both in prose and in verse, which is by 
 no means destitute of merit. The best of the poetry is of rather 
 later date; for Robert Brough, E. C Jones and Gerald Massey 
 all belong to the period after the middle of the century; but
 
 350 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Chartism and the radicalism which led up to it have left their 
 memorial in the interesting autobiographies of Samuel Bamford, 
 William Lovett and Thomas Cooper. Of these the best is that 
 of Bamford, whose style is uncommonly good — simple, lively 
 and pointed. A few imperfections of grammar and the occasional 
 misuse of words betray the imperfect education of the man ; but 
 his gift of rapid and interesting narrative, his keen observation, 
 his frankness, and the dash of poetry evinced in such passages as 
 his vivid description of a storm at sea, would have redeemed far 
 worse faults. 
 
 Cooper in his Autobiography shoivs considerably less of the 
 literary faculty than Bamford, and he appears to have been a man 
 of altogether less sane and safe judgment than that very acute and 
 sensible radical. He supported the wild scheme for a total 
 cessation of work; but he had the penetration to see that, if 
 carried out, it meant civil war. Cooper, however, was a writer of 
 verse as well as of prose, and has left as a memorial of his literary 
 ambition a lengthy work entitled The Purgatory of Suicides. It 
 is a poem in the Spenserian stanza, divided into ten books, and 
 extending to about eight thousand lines. The ambition to write 
 it had been cherished for a considerable time by Cooper, and the 
 leisure to do so came during an imprisonment of two years, from 
 1843 to 1845, to which he was condemned because of his support 
 of the Chartist movement. The Purgatory of Suicides has many 
 faults. The Miltonic inversions and complexity of sentence, 
 imitated by an ill-educated man, produce a deplorable effect. 
 The style, in short, is inartistic and bad, and the tone generally 
 too shrill to be dignified. Cooper had a good deal of self-esteem, 
 which sometimes bears a close resemblance to self-conceit, and 
 sometimes vents itself in abuse of those of whom he disapproves. 
 
 Of somewhat greater note in literature is Capell Lofft (1806- 
 1873), a man once the object of extravagant praise and of equally 
 extravagant dread and horror. Part of this may have been 
 hereditary, for his father had been an author, a reformer, and a 
 friend of Godwin. Lofft was the author of a prose work, Self- 
 Formation (1837), and of an agrarian epic, Ernest (1839). Harriet 
 Martineau in her autobiography refers to the former as "a wonder-
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 35 1 
 
 ful book," and to the latter as " a poem of prodigious power, but 
 too seditious for publication." The adjectives "wonderful" and 
 "prodigious" seem considerably too strong for the occasion. 
 Though Self-Formatio}i shows in parts marked ability, on the 
 whole it is pretentious and wearisome. The author is always on 
 the strain, and the importance of his work is not at all propor- 
 tioned to his own and Miss Martineau's conception of it. 
 
 Ernest, or Political Regeneration, the Chartist epic in twelve 
 books, was reviewed by Milman in the Quarterly in a spirit of the 
 warmest admiration of the poetry and of the greatest horror of the 
 politics. The political opinions expressed in Ernest are violent 
 enough. There is to be nationalisation of the land without com- 
 pensation, except so much as will yield the landlords a bare 
 subsistence ; and the people are to rule directly, not through 
 representatives. But opinions as violent have often been expressed 
 with at least as great force as Lofft could command, and without 
 any terrific consequences. At the present time we should hardly 
 deem such a poem "too seditious for publication." But as the 
 Chartist principles have lost their terror, so, it is to be feared, has 
 the poem in which they are enshrined lost its savour. There are 
 beautiful passages and powerful passages in Ernest; but there are 
 also passages in which the verse is harsh and tuneless in the 
 extreme. There is, however, force and fervour in the lyrical out- 
 burst of Hermann, when by the treachery of his father he is driven 
 into the arms of the revolutionists ; and in the rush and energy of 
 this passage there is a resemblance to Ibsen's Brand, for the sake 
 of which part of the passage may be quoted : — 
 
 "No; I will redeem the shame 
 Of our vile, dishonoured name: 
 Now that name throughout the land 
 Is charactered in felon brand ; 
 Soon it shall be pure and bright, 
 Written in a sunbeam's light, 
 Uttered in the thunder's voice — 
 
 Hear it and quake, my foes, and ye, my friends, rejoice j 
 For there shall live a spirit in that name, 
 Who breathes it forth shall breathe a fiery flame ; 
 Evermore proclaim'd aloud 
 In the council and the crowd :
 
 352 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Strong to comfort and to save, 
 
 To cheer the faint, to steel the brave : 
 
 Soul of the battle shout, 
 
 Rallying here and scattering there in rout. 
 
 But what strange cloud o'erhung my brow, 
 
 That I was blind till even now? 
 
 I saw it not, yet was it there, 
 
 That precious truth so heavenly fair. 
 
 All in vain did Love and Hope 
 
 Point me to this glorious scope, 
 
 Till another counsel came, 
 
 Muttered in my ear by shame. 
 
 Yes, Honour, unto thee 
 
 I bow my knee, 
 
 To redeem the foul disgrace 
 
 Lowering o'er my name and race: 
 
 Thy bidding have I done. 
 
 So be the Sire forgotten in the Son ! " 
 
 Both Cooper and Lofft carried their Chartism into their h'terary 
 work. Ebenezer Jones (1820-1860) did so in a far less marked 
 degree ; and circumstances greatly curtailed his poetic work. So 
 cold was the reception of his Studies of Sensation and Event {i2,^2>) 
 that he burned the poems he had written and devoted himself to 
 articles in the newspapers on topics which interested the radicals 
 of the time. His volume is dedicated to the spirit of Shelley, not 
 to that of Keats ; but, though it is far too crude and immature to 
 resemble either poet closely, there is far more of Keats in it than 
 of Shelley. Jones's struggling painful life, his grinding toil, his 
 "lamentable" domestic relations, all plead for recognition as 
 generous as possible for the work he did in circumstances so 
 untoward. His youth when Studies of Sensation and Event 
 appeared is an excuse for many faults; and the manly strength 
 which he showed in other ways makes it probable that had he 
 lived longer, or rather, had he been in a position to use for 
 literature his forty years of life, he would have left a considerable 
 name. He who, toiling from the age of seventeen for twelve hours 
 daily for daily bread, nevertheless had the resolution to devote 
 part of the other twelve hours to the higher life of literature, 
 instead of contenting himself with sleeping through them, was
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 353 
 
 assuredly no weakling. Some of his pieces, such as the Song of the 
 Kings of Gold and the Song of the Gold Getters, show how his soul 
 was wrung by the ethics of trade. Some others, in particular The 
 Face, deserve high praise as poetry. Yet on the whole the book 
 needs all the excuses that charity can plead and all the praise that 
 indulgence can bestow. For a heavy indictment might be framed 
 against it. The phrase, " studies of sensation," is well chosen ; 
 and the sensations are often of a kind best passed over in silence. 
 Many of the pieces are morally unwholesome. The best that can 
 be said of them is that they are the voice of youthful defiance, and 
 that if Jones had been able to write in maturer years his native 
 strength and rectitude of purpose would have led him to a wiser 
 choice of theme. Certainly his Hfe was not that of a decadent ; 
 but it is no matter for regret that he was unable to write more 
 poems of this fleshly sort 
 
 § 6. The Celtic Revival. 
 
 But the nineteenth century witnessed a deeper sort of political 
 movement than that which manifested itself in Reform Bills and 
 People's Charters. It is emphatically the century of nationalism, 
 and the unification of Italy and the semi-disintegration of Austria- 
 Hungary are among the results; for obviously nationalism may, 
 according to circumstances, either be a force of union or a force 
 of disruption. In Britain this spirit has shown itself in a growing 
 consciousness of self on the part of the different races (partial 
 though the distinction is) of which the United Kingdom is com- 
 posed. In literature, we know it as the Teutonic theory among 
 historians, and as the Celtic Revival among imaginative writers. 
 
 A good deal, perhaps more than enough, has been heard of 
 late years about the Celtic Revival. It has been mainly Irish, 
 though Scottish, Welsh and Manx Celts also have played their 
 part. In its wide diffusion it is of recent date; but before as well 
 as during the period with which we have to deal there were poets 
 of Celtic blood who, by the subjects they chose, or the qualities of 
 imagination they displayed, or in both ways, showed the influence 
 of the race to which they belonged. The Scottish Celt had 
 w. 23
 
 354 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 through Macpherson's Ossian made his voice heard not in 
 England alone but through Europe ; and much of the work of 
 Sir Walter Scott tended to his glorification. Macaulay long ago 
 pointed out the extraordinary result of this romantic presentation 
 of the Celtic character and of Celtic history, in that Killiecrankie, a 
 victory of Highlands over Lowlands, has come to be regarded as 
 a national victory; and the poorer and more backward division of 
 the kingdom has been invested with such a glamour and charm of 
 romance that all the sympathies of the Lowland Scot are with 
 those against whom his fathers fought, and who, when they could, 
 drove his fathers' beeves to their mountain fastnesses. Lady 
 Charlotte Guest's translation of the Mabinogion (i 838-1 849) in 
 part did for the Welsh Celt what Ossian had done for the High- 
 lander. But Europe could not be captured a second time ; and 
 the very tenacity with which the Welshman has clung' to his 
 native language, and his success in cultivating it, have disguised 
 from the English reader the real vigour of the Celtic spirit in the 
 principality. Matthew Arnold was right in pointing to Wales as 
 the true home of the Celtic genius, and in fixing upon Welsh 
 institutions as its most perfect embodiment. 
 
 Arnold's essay On the Study of Celtic Literature has done more 
 than anything else to render familiar the idea that there is such a 
 thing as the Celtic spirit, that this spirit shows itself markedly in 
 literature, and that it is widely different from the Teutonic spirit. 
 " Certainly," says Arnold, " the Jew — the Jew of ancient times at 
 least, — seemed a thousand degrees nearer than the Celt to us. 
 Puritanism had so assimilated Bible ideas and phraseology ; 
 names like Ebenezer, and notions like that of hewing Agag in 
 pieces, came so natural to us, that the sense of affinity between 
 the Teutonic and the Hebrew nature was quite strong ; a steady, 
 middle-class Anglo-Saxon much more imagined himself Ehud's 
 cousin than Ossian's." Then the "steady, middle-class Anglo- 
 Saxon" was assured that there was something in his neighbourhood 
 which he did not comprehend and which it was important for him 
 to comprehend, something which in certain respects was of a finer 
 temper than himself. The middle-class Anglo-Saxon is obstinate 
 enough in his own \iew of things which he rightly or wrongly
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 355 
 
 believes himself to understand; but he is extremely docile in 
 respect of things which he knows that he does not understand, 
 and among these things is literature. The middle-class Anglo- 
 Saxon has his own tastes. When Arnold wrote he still read and 
 liked Martin Tupper, because the Philistine in Tupper spoke to 
 the Philistine in himself; but when he was assured that it was bad 
 taste to like Tupper, he believed, obeyed and ceased to read. 
 
 The Celt on his part was ready enough to take himself 
 seriously. We have had Celtic twilights since then ; we have had 
 more than hints that Shakespeare was a Celt — or at least was good 
 enough to be one ; we have had demonstrations that nearly every- 
 thing worthy of the name of poetry in English is due to the Celtic 
 strain. It is the extreme opposite of the Teutonism of the 
 historical school of Freeman ; and probably both extremes are 
 about equally exaggerated and misleading. The fundamental 
 fact is that except in a few remote and isolated Welsh or Highland 
 or Irish valleys, all blood in these islands is mixed blood; and the 
 qualities displayed by the race, in literature and in active life, are, 
 by all the laws of heredity, the result of the mixture. It is in the 
 highest degree probable that neither the native Britons nor the 
 Teutonic invaders, if they had remained pure, would have dis- 
 played the great qualities of the English race. But when we come 
 to disentangle the elements, and to label this Celtic and that 
 Teutonic, wc are on very doubtful ground. It is said that a high 
 idealising spirit and a rich imaginative glow are marks of the Celt. 
 But Turner was the son of a London barber (who however 
 came from Devon), and his mother was a native of Islington. Yet 
 in the whole range of art there are no paintings more distinguished 
 for these qualities than his. In the case of one individual mere 
 birth-place counts for little. But when we observe similar gifts 
 manifested by Spenser, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Shelley and 
 Keats, the theory which makes those gifts peculiarly Celtic is surely 
 strained to the breaking. The Celt, again, is said to be gifted 
 with the power of seeing apocalyptic visions which are hid from 
 the Saxon. Blake was a Londoner. Possibly his blood was 
 mixed; but it would be interesting to learn where, among pure 
 Celts, the power is more strikingly developed than it is in him, 
 
 23—2
 
 356 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 More generally, it is asserted that wherever there is mysticism we 
 may suspect the presence of the Celtic spirit Now, since the 
 revival of romance, mysticism has been extremely widespread, and 
 the claim is therefore a large one. Carljle, for example, shared 
 it ; and the Celtic school would ascribe it to the Celtic blood in 
 his veins. But Carlyle's mysticism was, if not derived from, at 
 least strongly influenced by, the Germans. Where, then, did the 
 Germans get theirs? Was Novalis a Celt? And if all the higher 
 and more ethereal qualities of English poetry are due to the Celtic 
 strain, whence come the more ethereal qualities in the poetry of 
 Goethe, who is surely not wholly mundane ? Above all, why is it 
 that German poetry, which is unquestionably Teutonic, is richer 
 in those ethereal qualities than French poetry, which has at least 
 more of the Celtic element than German ? 
 
 The more extravagant claims of the eulogists of the' Celtic 
 spirit are not borne out by the work of those who are specially 
 claimed as Celtic poets. Some of that work is highly poetical, 
 much of it is respectable, but none of it is absolutely first-rate. 
 None of it, for example, is equal to the best of Tennyson, who is 
 as markedly Teutonic as Mangan is Celtic. 
 
 Ireland had in the eighteenth century contributed a number 
 of great writers to the national literature, though some of them, 
 like Swift, were rather Irish by the accident of birth than in any 
 deeper sense. But the Irish writers, unlike their Scottish brethren, 
 had usually been absorbed in the greater mass of the English. It 
 was not merely that there was no distinctive language or cultivated 
 dialect to mark them off as Lowland Scotch did : but they seemed 
 also to drop many of their national qualities in writing for an 
 English public. We detect Irish characteristics in the ready and 
 brilliant wit of Sheridan, in the genial humour of Goldsmith and 
 in the fervour and passion of Burke; yet these writers are not 
 strongly national in the sense in which Burns and Scott are so. 
 Still, to a certain degree Ireland and Irish life already enjoyed that 
 citizenship of literature which Scott is said to have conferred on 
 Scotland. The tales of Miss Edgeworth are Irish in every sense 
 of the word. But the brilliant success of the Waverley Novels 
 brought home to men more fully the possibilities opened up by the
 
 THE MINOR POETS : EARLIER PERIOD 357 
 
 delineation of national character ; and Charles Lever in his lively 
 stories painted certain types of Irishmen, not indeed with the 
 insight of a Scott, but at least with a great deal of dash and verve. 
 He, together with Samuel Lever, William Maginn, Father Prout, 
 Crofton Croker, William Carleton and Gerald Griffin, gave a 
 noticeable Irish flavour to the fiction of the period ; and though 
 most of them wrote verse with some degree of success, it is mainly 
 as writers of prose fiction that they must be judged. 
 
 What we have to consider here, however, is the Irish element, 
 not in prose, but in verse. It has been the fashion of late to 
 insist much, and not without exaggeration, on this Irish element. 
 A dispassionate review seems to lead to the conclusion, first, that 
 none of the writers is of the highest power ; and secondly, that in 
 some cases, notwithstanding Irish birth, Irish characteristics are 
 not very conspicuous. In the early part of last century Thomas 
 Moore was considered a great poet, and probably the Irish 
 Melodies would have been named as the best gift of Ireland to 
 England. Now it would seem but a poor compliment to any 
 race to say that Moore's thin tinkle was its characteristic note in 
 poetry. A little later George Darley showed both a higher poetic 
 gift and more true Celtic fervour, though he never won a tithe of 
 Moore's fame. Richard Chenevix Trench (1807- 1886), well 
 known as Archbishop of Dublin and as the author of some very 
 bright and interesting books on the study of the English language, 
 was another writer of verse who was of Irish birth. But there is 
 nothing great in Trench's poetry, nor is there much that is speci- 
 fically Irish. It is the verse of an accomplished man, rather than 
 of one inspired, and the model on which it is framed is supplied 
 by Wordsworth. The most individual and characteristic thing in it 
 is that vein of pensive melancholy which fits the "large melancholy 
 face, full of earnestness and capacity for woe " that Caroline Fox 
 saw. But Tennyson and Arnold — to name only contemporaries — 
 show that this is not an exclusively Celtic gift. 
 
 What has been said of Trench may be repeated of Sir Aubrey 
 de Vere, elsewhere noticed as a dramatist. Though Irish by birth 
 he was of English ancestry, and while he always retained a faithful 
 love of his native country, his ideals were essentially English. He
 
 358 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 went to English history for the subject of his greatest drama, and 
 in the very un-Irish Wordsworth he found the model for his non- 
 dramatic verse. So too Aubrey de Vere the younger, in spite of 
 his Irish themes, is essentially a Wordsworthian. He belongs 
 moreover, as does also Sir Samuel Ferguson, mainly to the later 
 period. There remains in the early part of the Victorian era only 
 one figure rising above the mass of inferior versifiers, and at the 
 same time displaying in his verse genuinely Irish characteristics. 
 This is James Clarence Mangan (1803- 1849), whose harassed life 
 and pathetic death add to the interest of his intrinsically interesting 
 poetry. Mangan lived in poverty and toil : so much is certain, even 
 if we hesitate to accept his own statement that for seven years he 
 laboured as a copyist eighteen hours a day. A few years before the 
 close of his Hfe he found more congenial employment in the library 
 of Trinity College, Dublin. By that time, however, he was a victim 
 of the opium habit; and in spite of his struggles he remained in 
 bondage to it or to alcohol till his death. The circumstances of his 
 life are Mangan's best excuse. A highly-gifted and sensitive man, 
 with the artistic temperament abnormally developed, was under no 
 common temptation to seek such a refuge from his miseries. The 
 result was the usual one. "No purer and more benignant spirit," 
 says his friend, John Mitchel, " ever alighted upon earth ; no 
 more abandoned wretch ever found earth a purgatory and a hell. 
 There were... two Mangans : one well known to the Muses, the 
 other to the police; one soared through the empyrean and sought 
 the stars, the other lay too often in the gutters of Peter Street and 
 Bride Street^." Such a man was foredoomed to an early death. 
 Mangan died in 1849 in a hospital, whither he had been removed 
 suffering from cholera. 
 
 The nationality of the author is wtten large on the face of 
 Mangan's works. He attached himself to the Young Ireland 
 party and wrote patriotic songs for it. He translated, adapted or 
 imitated the relics of Erse poetry ; although till near the close of 
 his life his knowledge of the language appears to have been 
 superficial. His best-known piece, My Dark Rosaleen, a love-song 
 
 ^ Mr D. J. 0"Donoghue, however, remarks in a note that Mitchel here 
 exaggerates, and adds thai Mangan's weaknesses were not publicly known.
 
 THE MINOR POETS : EARLIER PERIOD 359 
 
 allegorising the poet's passion for his country, is one of those 
 translations from the Irish, and doubtless its excellence is the 
 greater because of the fervour with which Mangan realised the 
 feeling of the original. The fine Lament for the Princes of Tyrone 
 and Tyrconnel, also a translation, draws its inspiration from the 
 same source ; and so do some of the best of his original poems, 
 for example, the admirable Soul and Country, a piece which has a 
 fire, intensity and concentration not easily to be surpassed. And 
 yet one of Mangan's editors^ calls attention to the strange fact 
 that " his genius is happier on Saxon than on Celtic ground." 
 For Mangan was among those who felt the influence of German 
 literature; and he translated, or pretended to translate, not only 
 from Erse, but from the Oriental languages, German, Welsh, 
 Danish, Frisian, Swedish, Spanish and Bohemian ; and the 
 general level of his German translations is at least as high as that 
 of his versions from the Erse, though perhaps there are two or 
 three pieces in the latter class superior to anything in the former. 
 Nothing however among the Irish poems surpasses, if indeed any- 
 thing equals, the best of the Oriental section. The Karamanian 
 Exile with its daring imagination, its fine swinging rhythm, its 
 skilful use of the proper name and of Mangan's favourite device of 
 repetition. 
 
 " I see thee ever in my dreams, 
 Karaman ! 
 
 Thy hundred hills, thy thousand streams, 
 Karaman, O Karaman ! 
 As when thy gold-bright morning gleams, 
 As when the deepening sunset seams 
 With lines of light thy hills and streams, 
 Karaman ! 
 
 So thou loomest on my dreams, 
 Karaman ! 
 
 On all my dreams, my homesick dreams, 
 Karaman, O Karaman ! " 
 
 This beautiful poem, ringing in the ears of the American, 
 J. R. Randall, led, on the occasion of the occupation of Baltimore 
 by Northern troops, to his writing the stirring song, Maryland, 
 
 ^ Miss Guiney.
 
 3C0 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 my Maryland. The repetition of the refrain is a favourite device 
 of Mangan's. Whether it was consciously imitated by Poe from 
 Mangan or by Mangan from Poe, or whether its presence in 
 both is just a coincidence due to kinship of genius, cannot be 
 determined. 
 
 It was inevitable that a poet with such a history as Mangan's 
 should be unequal. Much that he has written is of little or no 
 value ; a considerable portion even of his Selected Poems might 
 well be spared. But at his best he rises high. Under favourable 
 circumstances he would have left a great name in literature; 
 as it is, he is likely to be remembered only by a few pieces which 
 well deserve, and which it may be hoped will receive more 
 frequently in the future than they have received in the past, a 
 place in the anthologies. 
 
 § 7. The Poetesses. 
 
 One of the features of the nineteenth century is a development 
 both in the quantity and in the quality of the verse written by 
 women which is sufficiently remarkable to call for special notice. 
 In earlier times the verse — and for that matter the prose too — written 
 by women was very scanty, and it was often published furtively. 
 The seventeenth centur}'', it is true, boasted its " matchless Orinda," 
 who made no secret of her productions ; but the tar more highly- 
 gifted group of Scottish songstresses. Lady Nairne and the 
 authoresses of the two versions of The Flowers of tJie Fo7'est, con- 
 cealed the fact of their authorship as if it had been a crime. They 
 listened demurely to the singing of their own songs, and to the 
 conjectures of the company as to the authorship of the beautiful 
 words. But sentiment changed with time ; and their successors, 
 Elizabeth Browning and Christina Rossetti, women no less sensitive 
 than they, took with just pride their share of literary fame. 
 Edward FitzGerald thought that women in literature were only 
 doing what men could do much better, while they were leaving 
 undone what men could only do worse than they, or else could not 
 do at all. He was certainly so far right that no woman hitherto has 
 written poetry of the highest kind, and that none except Sappho
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 361 
 
 (whose achievement is vouched for by the judgment of a critical 
 race) is entitled to a place among the giants, while even she can 
 hardly be classed among the gods of song. But nevertheless the 
 work of the Scottish poetesses alone goes far to answer FitzGerald. 
 Though there are grander instruments of poetry than Scottish 
 song, yet in that Burns breathed the music of his soul; and a 
 number of the songs written by women rival the best of his. 
 Auld Robin Gray, The Land 0' iJu Leal, The Auld House and 
 Caller Herri7i\ are songs which have gained and which will retain 
 as firm a hold on the affections of the Scottish people as Jolm 
 Anderson and Bonnie Doon. 
 
 It was a Scottish songstress too, Joanna Baillie, who, towards 
 the close of the eighteenth century, took the lead among what we 
 may call the professional poetesses. Her plays were extrava- 
 gantly praised by Scott and by John Wilson ; and they have been 
 described, in a phrase which may provoke a smile, as the best 
 ever written by a woman. In truth they are somewhat common- 
 place productions; but the success and fame won by Miss Baillie, 
 evanescent though they have proved, were among the influences 
 which encouraged women to make literature their profession. 
 She was a pioneer of the poetesses, just as Fanny Burney was a 
 pioneer of the novelists. 
 
 Few of Miss Baillie's successors were ambitious enough to 
 follow her footsteps in the attempt to revive the Shakespearean 
 drama, and none of those who did so attained her measure of 
 success. Miss Mitford is remembered as the writer of Our Village, 
 not as the authoress of The Foscari and oi Julian. Sarah Flower 
 Adams (1805- 1848) will more probably live as a writer of hymns, 
 and especially of the beautiful " Nearer, my God, to Thee," than 
 as the authoress of the drama, Vivia Ferpelua. Isabella Flarwood 
 (1840- 1 888), who wrote under the pseudonym of Rose Neil, is 
 not likely to be long remembered; but it was she who made 
 the most persistent effort to revive the poetical drama. More 
 noteworthy as a dramatist, and in many other ways, was Fanny 
 Kemble (1809-1893), who, as a grand-niece of the great Mrs 
 Siddons, had a kind of hereditary right to work for the theatre. 
 Herself a distinguished actress, Fanny Kemble is best remem-
 
 362 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN F:RA 
 
 bered for her appearances on the stage and her readings, and 
 above all for her chequered and interesting life, which yielded 
 those racy journals and volumes of reminiscences aptly charac- 
 terised by Sir F. B. Head as " full of cleverness, talent, simple- 
 heartedness, nature and nakedness^" Nevertheless, she deserves 
 a place in the history of dramatic literature and of poetry as well. 
 Her Francis the First, written when she was seventeen, is not 
 only a marvellous production for a girl of her years, but a good 
 one in itself Few plays of that period vie with it in sustained 
 interest; and not the least surprising fact about it is that it is 
 faulty rather from superabundance of energy than from poverty or 
 thinness. In her English Tragedy there is less advance than 
 might have been expected from her greater maturity when it 
 was written ; but it is a common enough experience that the 
 minds of those who show precocious power early lose the capacity 
 of growth. Yet An English Tragedy is a very creditable work. 
 The story, though an unpleasant one, is well told. The characters 
 have not perhaps those fine shades which indicate genius for 
 dramatic art, but they are happily conceived and consistently 
 drawn. 
 
 Fanny Kemble wrote poems as well as plays, and in successive 
 volumes dated 1844, 1866 and 1883, she poured out her soul in 
 verse. As a poetess she shows considerable accomplishment, and 
 a few of her sonnets in particular are of high quality and finish. 
 Yet the poetry as a whole is a little superficial, and its value 
 would be slight were it not that the vein of naturalness which 
 marks iho. Journals runs through the verse as well. 
 
 The marriages of literary women have frequently been unhappy. 
 The three greatest in English literature, Mrs Browning, Charlotte 
 Bronte and George Eliot, have indeed been otherwise. But Caroline 
 Sheridan had bitter cause to rue that she ever changed that name 
 for the name of Norton ; Fanny Kemble was driven to seek divorce 
 from her American husband. Pierce Butler; and the two poetesses 
 who in the middle period of the nineteenth century were the 
 poetic oracles of the middle class of culture were both unhappy 
 in their domestic lives. One of these, Felicia Dorothea Hemans 
 ^ Alemoirs of John Murray, ii. 404.
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 363 
 
 (i 793-1835), is best known by the name which became hers 
 by marriage; the other, Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-1838), 
 remains known by that which she surrendered on a union still 
 more unhappy than the marriage of Mrs Hemans. Her death 
 from poison at Cape Coast Castle, where her husband was 
 governor, remains to this day unexplained. Her poetry would be 
 hardly worth mentioning but for its former fame. She wrote 
 with something that seemed like energy and spirit, and she was 
 "romantic" as those are who neither share nor can comprehend 
 the spirit of Coleridge and of Keats ; but she has left nothing 
 that any human being can now be the richer for remembering. 
 
 Wordsworth wrote some well-known verses on the death of 
 Hogg, where, after naming the poet whose death was the occasion 
 of his writing, he calls upon the reader not to sigh for him, but to 
 
 "Mourn rather for that holy Spirit, 
 Sweet as the spring, as ocean deep ; 
 For Her who, ere her summer faded, 
 Has sunk into a breathless sleep." 
 
 No poet of Wordsworth's calibre would now refer to Mrs Hemans 
 in such terms ; no one with any critical faculty would compare 
 her to the ocean for depth. It is on the contrary a rather super- 
 ficial sentimentality which is the worst fault of her verse. But if 
 she was once extravagantly praised she is now unduly depreciated; 
 and for that reason it is necessa.ry to insist that the vein of her 
 poetry was genuine though somewhat thin. Weak in thought, 
 verbose in style, in her longer pieces deficient in constructive 
 power, she nevertheless had at her best the unmistakable lyrical 
 touch. The Graves of a Household is pathetic ; in Eftgland^s 
 Dead and The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers there mingles with 
 the sentiment a note of heroism. We may condemn the popular 
 taste which was insensible to the weakness and difi'useness of 
 Mrs Hemans's work ; but the popular instinct, in fastening upon 
 such pieces as these, was sound. 
 
 Among the minor songstresses of the time were three who had 
 a quasi-hereditary right to a place in literature, like that which Fanny 
 Kemble had to a place on the stage ; and, like her, they vindicated 
 their right by their performances. The eldest of the three, Sara
 
 364 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Coleridge (1S02-1852) shared with her brother Hartley the 
 inheritance of their father's wonderful intellectual and imaginative 
 gifts. Richard Garnett goes so far as to pronounce hers, " after 
 George Eliot's... the most powerful female mind which has as yet 
 addressed itself to English literature^" This is a judgment whose 
 soundness can neither be proved nor disproved ; but when we 
 remember the two Brontes, it is at least doubtful. There can 
 however be no doubt that Sara Coleridge was a highly gifted 
 woman. She proved that she possessed considerable learning by 
 translating, at the age of twenty, Dobrizhoffer's Account of the 
 Abipones ; and both learning and acuteness were required for the 
 work of editing her father's literary remains, a task to which she 
 succeeded on the death of her cousin and husband Henry Nelson 
 Coleridge in 1843. She had helped in the work during her 
 husband's lifetime too, and probably it was in part the reason for 
 the fact that her only original contribution to English literature is 
 Phatitasviion (1837), a fairy tale of mingled prose and verse, the 
 lyrical snatches of which awaken regret that their author wrote so 
 little. 
 
 The other two of the trio, Helen Sheridan, afterwards Lady 
 Dufferin (1807-1S67), and Caroline Sheridan, afterwards the Hon. 
 Mrs Norton (1808-1877), were grand-daughters of Richard 
 Brinsley Sheridan. These two sisters united in an extraordinary 
 degree the charms of person and of intellect. They and another 
 sister, who became Duchess of Somerset, were known for their 
 beauty as " the three Graces," and their writings sufficiently attest 
 their intellect. Lady Dufferin wrote little in comparison with her 
 younger sister, probably because she had never that need to write 
 which drove the other on. What she did write suggests also that 
 she may have been by nature less energetic than Mrs Norton. 
 Her poems were collected and published in 1894 by her son, the 
 late Marquis of Dufferin ; but two or three of them, in particular 
 the Lament of the Irish Emigrant, had before attained wide 
 popularity as songs. Her poetic style is purer and less rhetorical 
 than that of her sister ; but it has also less rush and energy. 
 
 Mrs Norton, who, only a few months before her death, became 
 * Poets and Poetry of the XIX Century.
 
 THE MINOR POETS : EARLIER PERIOD 365 
 
 the wife of the learned and accomplished Sir William Stirling- 
 Maxwell, was forced to write systematically and with serious 
 purpose ; for she won by her pen the means of life. Under this 
 stimulus she poured out a copious stream both of prose and of 
 verse; but it is possible that, in the long run, her name will be 
 remembered not so much for anything she wrote herself as for the 
 fact that part of her unhappy story forms the ground-work of 
 George Meredith's Diana of the Crosszvays. Her novels are of 
 little merit, and her verse is variable. Her longer works are all 
 beaten out rather thin, and the earlier ones especially are tainted 
 with the sentimentality which appealed to the taste of that time. 
 At a later date she turned to those social problems which were 
 then becoming popular. But she is at her best in ballads and 
 occasional poems, where her high spirit and chivalrous feeling 
 tell. Binge}i on the Rhine is not unworthy of its popularity. 
 
 In an article in The Quarterly Review for September, 1840, 
 there were grouped together a number of poetesses, including 
 among others Elizabeth Barrett, Mrs Norton and Sara Coleridge. 
 Along with their poems the writer noticed a slim anonymous 
 volume entitled IX Poems by F, which he greeted with the 
 emphatic compliment, jSaia /xiv, dXXa poSa. This praise was 
 echoed a few years afterwards by one of the finest and most 
 sensitive of critics, Dr John Brown. The writer of the poems 
 was Mrs Archer Clive (1801-1873). She gradually added to 
 her small handful of poems, but the whole volume of her verse 
 is very slender. Like so many other female writers, she also 
 essayed prose fiction ; and in Faui Ferroll (1855) did work which 
 is scarcely surpassed by more than three or four of them. In 
 poetry too she deserved the praises of the reviewers ; and, though 
 she has never become popular, she is much superior to not a few 
 of the poets and poetesses whose names are still familiar. There 
 is masculine force and a rare dignity of thought and expression 
 in The Grave and in Hearfs Ease and in The Queen's Ball. 
 Possibly there is also something morbid. Mrs Clive is at least 
 habitually gloomy; but then she is never commonplace, and 
 there is always meaning in her gloom. She is said to have been 
 personally the very reverse of her poems; ''There is no resistmg,"
 
 
 
 66 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 says Miss Mitford, "the contagious laughter of those dancing 
 eyes." It is the other side of the familiar story of the melancholy 
 clown. 
 
 These female writers have been grouped together partly by 
 reason of their sex. The emergence of woman into literature is 
 practically an occurrence of the nineteenth century, and it is 
 sufficiently important to demand special recognition. But besides, 
 it is a fact that all of them, with the possible exxeption of Mrs 
 Hemans and L. E. Landon, who died early in the period, illus- 
 trate the transition. On the one hand they point to the past : as 
 a rule they are more Byronic than the poets. On the other hand, 
 perhaps because of their sex, they show a remarkable sensitiveness 
 to new influences. The only male writer who does so in equal or 
 greater degree is Lytton. 
 
 Accomplished as these women were, pleasant as much of their 
 verse and thoughtful as some of it is, the view taken of the work 
 of women in poetry must depend mainly upon the opinion which 
 may be formed with respect to two poetesses of a larger growth, 
 namely, Mrs Browning and Christina Rossetti, the latter of whom 
 belongs to the later part of our period. 
 
 The life of EHzabeth Barrett (1806-1861) was uneventful, — 
 "a bird in a cage," she said, "would have as good a story." 
 After the injury to her spine which crippled her at fifteen, for 
 many years she never left her couch, and for the whole of her life 
 she was to the last degree fragile and delicate. Her marriage 
 with Robert Browning in 1846, their settlement at Florence for 
 the sake of Mrs Browning's health, the birth of a son, and her 
 death in 1861, are all there is to record. But the very absence of 
 incident is instructive here. The young poet of The Batik of 
 Marathon, which was printed for private circulation before she 
 had left the schoolroom, and of An Essay on Mind, which was 
 published in 1826, was precocious. She had read widely for her 
 years, and at the age of eight had acquired some knowledge of 
 Homer in the original. At a later time she read Plato in the original 
 and all the Greek poets, as well as the whole Bible in Hebrew. 
 Her translation of Prometheus Bound attests her scholarship. 
 But she was a recluse who saw nobody beyond the domestic
 
 THE MINOR POETS : EARLIER PERIOD 367 
 
 circle, except one or two very intimate friends; and the sole 
 influence in the formation of her mind, outside the family, was 
 that of the blind scholar to whom she owed her knowledge of 
 Greek. A person so situated — a girl too — was not likely to 
 initiate any new movement ; she was rather likely to look farther 
 back than most of her contemporaries. 
 
 And this is just what Ehzabeth Barrett did. One influence 
 upon her, as we should expect, is that of Byron. The volume 
 named from the Essay on Mind contained stanzas on his 
 death, and certain other stanzas "occasioned by a passage in 
 Mr Emerson's journal," which related to him. It also contained a 
 poem entitled The Dream, which was modelled with a child-like 
 naivety on a greater and more famous Dream. But notwithstanding 
 this, there is really nothing of the Byronic spirit here. Far more 
 significant is the title-poem. An Essay on Mind, the very name of 
 which is an imitation of Pope. So too, as far as the author's 
 power went, is the treatment; and she long retained Pope's 
 fondness for antitheses, though she had not his skill in framing 
 them. This discipleship serves to remind us of the fact that the 
 controversy as to the merits of Pope, in which Bowles was the 
 protagonist on one side and Byron on the other, was but newly 
 ended, and that there were still here and there a few, like Miss 
 Barrett, secluded by fortune or by inclination, who looked back 
 for their models to the eighteenth century. Another small group 
 of poems appeared in 1833, and then two more important publi- 
 cations. The Seraphim and other Poems (1838) and Poems (1844). 
 The last-named volume brings us to the point where the influence 
 of Robert Browning begins. 
 
 The Seraphim is correctly described by the author as "a 
 dramatic lyric rather than a lyrical drama." The subject, a 
 dialogue between two seraphs hovering over Calvary at the 
 crucifixion, is chosen with more daring than wisdom. The poem, 
 rather more than a thousand lines long, is in a variety of lyrical 
 metres, some of them of an exceedingly trying and difficult kind. 
 It was a sort of work for which Miss Barrett was ill suited, for she 
 was always prone to lapse into faults of rhyme and rhythm, and 
 always apt, even in simple poems, to be lengthy. Such faults are
 
 368 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Still present in the more ambitious and far more successful Drama 
 of Exile, the first and longest of the poems of 1844. Here there 
 are passages of powerful thought, intense feeling and vivid con- 
 ception, — and yet in the very opening song of Lucifer, where a 
 glaring fault is least pardonable, we meet with the intolerable 
 rhyme of " strangles " and " angels/' and a little further on with its 
 fellow in vileness, "raiment "and "lament." So it is always in 
 Mrs Browning. She is one of the most irregular of writers. 
 Side by side with beautiful poetry we find commonplace 
 thought, verbose diction, inharmonious verse. Such unhappy 
 conjunctions are illustrated even in the shorter poems of those 
 early volumes. In The Poefs Vow we have beautiful things 
 like 
 
 *'His changing love — with stars above, 
 His pride — with graves below," 
 
 and 
 
 "The old eyes searching, dim with life, 
 The young ones dim with death." 
 
 And along with these we have, again conspicuously placed at 
 the end, 
 
 "Hold it in thy constant ken 
 That God's own unity compresses 
 
 (One into one) the human many, 
 And that his everlastingness is 
 
 The bond which is not loosed by any." 
 
 Most of the characteristics of Mrs Browning are present in 
 those early volumes. Her religious feeling is manifest every- 
 where, and especially in the very subjects of the two most 
 ambitious poems. Some of the class who consider such a thing 
 as religion too good for use except on Sundays, even thought that 
 this feeling was made too prominent. The romantic spirit inspires 
 The Ro?naunt of Margret, The Romaujit of the Page, The Lay of the 
 Brown Rosary, Lady Geraldine^ s Courtship and Bertha iti the 
 Lane. Her deep social sympathies find voice in The Cry of the 
 Children and The Cry of the Himian ; and the special emotions of 
 her own art are in The Poefs Vow, A Vision of Poets and Lady 
 Geraldine's Courtship, — the last noteworthy as containing her 
 first published praise of Robert Browning. But perhaps ihe
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 369 
 
 most perfect piece those two volumes contained was Cowper's 
 Grave. 
 
 No student of Mrs Browning, remembering the Sonnets from the 
 Portuguese, can doubt that the influence which Browning brought 
 into her life was on the whole good ; but probably few who care- 
 fully compare her earlier with her later work will question that 
 along with the good there was an element of evil. Mrs Browning 
 never excelled in long compositions of complex structure; but her 
 ambition disposed her from the first to make the attempt, and 
 Browning strengthened the inclination. She was thoroughly 
 feminine ; but under the impulse from him she unconsciously 
 adopted a more masculine tone. She imagined herself a thinker; 
 in reality she felt, and in the attempt to translate her feeling into 
 thought she fell into numerous mistakes. She is at her best when 
 she gives free play to her emotions, and it is only then that she 
 attains felicity of style. She does so in the pathetic Cowper's 
 Grave; she does it sometimes in the uneven but still beautiful 
 Cry of the Children ; she does it again in Bertha in the Lane. 
 
 Mrs Browning's first publication after her marriage was the 
 wonderful Sotmets frotn the Portuguese (1850), her greatest work 
 and her best title to the rank of premier English poetess. They 
 are not only a great but a unique collection of poems. " Good as 
 they are, these sonnets have neither massiveness and subtlety of 
 thought on the one hand, nor melody and charm on the other, 
 sufficient to secure a place beside the greatest poetry. But they 
 are the genuine utterance of a woman's heart, at once humbled 
 and exalted by love ; and in this respect they are unique. The 
 woman's passion, from the woman's point of view, has seldom 
 found expression at all in Hterature, and this particular aspect of 
 it never. Hence, while it would be too much to say that these 
 sonnets are, as pieces of poetry, equal to the sonnets of Wordsworth 
 or of Milton, it is not so unreasonable to question whether their 
 removal would not leave a more irreparable gap in literature." 
 
 The sonnet suited Mrs Browning's genius well, for the same 
 
 reason that it suited Wordsworth's. Her besetting sin was diffuse- 
 
 ness, and the sonnet forced upon her concentration and selection. 
 
 Even her best pieces in freer forms are marred by excessive 
 
 w. 24
 
 370 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 length. The Cry of the Children, The Lay of the Broivn Rosary 
 and The Rhyme of the Duchess May would all be better if they 
 were shorter. Lady Geraldin^s Courtship — "a sort of Lord of 
 Burleigh from the other side " — cries aloud for condensation. In 
 the sonnet, with its rigid limit to fourteen lines, there was no 
 choice : concentration was imperative. And hence we have such 
 faultless pieces as A Soul's Expression, where there is not a word 
 too much nor a word wrong. As a rule in Mrs Browning's 
 works we have to pardon the faults in consideration of the 
 beauties. 
 
 Casa Guidi Windows (1851) followed the Sonnets from the 
 Fortugtiese, and this in turn was followed by Aurora Leigh (1857). 
 Poems before Congress (i860) was the last volume published during 
 Mrs Browning's Hfe; and the posthumous Last Poems (1862) 
 gathered up the remaining fragments of her verse. 
 
 Two of these volumes, Casa Guidi Windows and Poems 
 before Congress, are inspired by Italy. Her residence in that 
 country naturally gave her an interest in its condition and 
 prospects, which was deepened by the influence of her husband. 
 But the choice of subject was for Mrs Browning unfortunate. 
 Casa Guidi Windows is long and diffuse. The writer speaks 
 disparagingly of Byron as " not the best kind of second " in the 
 grades of poets; but the passages in his poems which were 
 inspired by Italy have a far clearer and more sonorous ring than 
 Mrs Browning's. 
 
 The ambitious metrical romance of Aurora Leigh suffers, like 
 much of Mrs Browning's poetry besides, from excessive length. 
 He who has read it once shrinks from travelling again through its 
 many flats of commonplace. As a poem which dealt with questions 
 of the day, as the work of one of the most prominent writers of the 
 time, it was read when it was new. But it is one of that class of 
 poems which after times are content to talk about and take as 
 read. Its length saves it from complete oblivion ; but that same 
 length hinders it from reaching the heart. And yet there are 
 beautiful oases of poetry in Aurora Leigh, lively descriptions, 
 wise maxims, clear-cut phrases, telling sarcasms. Few have dealt 
 more justly and appreciatively than Mrs Browning with English
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 37 1 
 
 landscape. Nowhere is its character more tersely expressed than 
 in the simple words, 
 
 "The ground's most gentle dimplement 
 (As if God's finger touched but did not press 
 In making England)." 
 
 She is sensible of what it lacks. 
 
 "All the fields 
 Are tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like ; 
 The hills are crumpled plains, the plains parterres, 
 The trees, round, woolly, ready to be clipped, 
 And if you seek for any wilderness 
 You find, at best, a park. A nature tamed 
 And grown domestic like a barn-door fowl." 
 
 But on the other hand the passage which immediately follows 
 corrects the injustice which this, if it stood alone, would do, and 
 proves the writer to have been equally sensible of the extreme 
 beauty of English scenery. 
 
 In spite of its frequent flatness probably none of Mrs Browning's 
 longer poems contains so great a proportion of memorable phrases 
 as Aurora Leigh. There are striking images and comparisons: — 
 
 "Those hot fire-seeds of creation held 
 In Jove's clenched palm before the worlds were sown " ; 
 
 " Life, struck sharp on death, 
 Makes awful lightning " ; 
 
 " Young 
 As Eve with nature's daybreak on her face." 
 
 There are paradoxes conveying truth : fathers love " not as wisely, 
 since less foolishly " than mothers. There are pungent and witty 
 sayings : 
 
 "We are of one flesh, after all, 
 
 And need one flannel (with a proper sense 
 
 Of difference in the quality)." 
 
 It is worth dwelling upon such lines and phrases in 
 Mrs Browning's case more than in the case of most poets, for 
 they represent that in which she is weakest. She has both fervid 
 emotion and intellectual abundance, but she is deficient in art 
 She is far too expansive. She will not restrain herself, select or 
 
 24 — 2
 
 372 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 condense. She Mas prone to this error from the first ; and 
 unfortunately the influence of Browning tended to foster rather 
 than to check it. He too suffers from the same mistake. Most 
 of his long poems are too long. But his intellectual vigour is 
 sufficient, not to make the fault a merit, but to make it com- 
 paratively unimportant. It is not so in Mrs Browning's case. 
 Though she is vigorous, she is far less vigorous than her husband; 
 though she is no mere imitator, she has not his unsurpassed 
 originality. Some of Browning's thoughts are to be found no- 
 where except in him ; many more are nowhere else so powerfully 
 expressed. Mrs Browning's were the thoughts of her own time, 
 and people will be increasingly prone to turn from her diffuse 
 expression of them to some more concentrated presentation. Her 
 memory is safe by reason of the Sonnets from the Portuguese, such 
 a beautiful piece of pathos as A Child^s Grave at Florence, and 
 such a spirited romance as The Rhyme of the Duchess May. But 
 her poems will be severely weeded, and her ultimate place will 
 probably be less lofty than that which her contemporaries were 
 disposed to claim for her. 
 
 There remains to notice one other female writer who, though 
 best known for her prose, had the capacity to win very high 
 distinction in poetry. Emily Bronte rarely misses the poetic note, 
 and her verse, if sometimes rough, is nearly always inspired. In 
 the little volume of Poems: by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell{i^^6), 
 only the pieces by Ellis were, as Charlotte Bronte frankly admitted, 
 worthy of that notice which neither they nor the others received. 
 But, neglected as they were, the poems of Emily Bronte bear the 
 stamp of genius even more unmistakably than Wuthering Heights, 
 and the best of them are far more satisfying than it. Emily Bronte 
 has a strength, a reach of thought and an austerity of imagination 
 which lift her very near the level of the greatest of her contem- 
 poraries. She has not volume and she sometimes — not always — 
 lacks polish ; but nothing else is wanting. Such pieces as " The 
 linnet in the rocky dells," Often Rebuked, Remembrarice and The 
 Old Stoic are great poetry. The noble Last Lines may be quoted; 
 for they are the best memorial we possess of the dauntless spirit 
 of their author:—
 
 THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 373 
 
 "No coward soul is mine, 
 
 No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere : 
 I see Heaven's glories shine, 
 
 And faith shines equal, arming me from fear. 
 
 O God within my breast, 
 
 Almighty, ever-present Deity ! 
 Life — that in me has rest, 
 
 As I — undying Life — have power in thee ! 
 
 Vain are the thousand creeds 
 
 That move men's hearts : unalterably vain ; 
 Worthless as gathered weeds 
 
 Or idlest froth amid the boundless main. 
 
 To waken doubt in one 
 
 Holding so fast by thine infinity ; 
 So surely anchored on 
 
 The steadfast rock of immortality. 
 
 With wide-embracing love 
 
 Thy spirit animates eternal years, 
 Pervades and broods above. 
 
 Charges, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears. 
 
 Though earth and man were gone, 
 
 And stars and universes cease to be, 
 And Thou wert left alone, 
 
 Every existence would exist in Thee. 
 
 There is not room for Death 
 
 Nor atom that his might could render void : 
 Thou — Thou art Being and Breath, 
 
 And what Thou art may never be dealroyed."
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 TENNYSON 
 
 The career of Tennyson has already been traced down to the 
 issue of the two volumes of poetry in 1843. His subsequent life 
 was altogether uneventful; for he devoted himself with unswerving 
 persistence and industry to the art of poetry, and he found no 
 disturbing circumstances to turn him from his task. He lived 
 retired and solitary ; but yet it would be a profound mistake to 
 regard him as a mere recluse, pursuing art for art's sake alone, and 
 indifferent to the life of the world around him, of his own nation, 
 or of those among whom his lot was cast. In respect of his own 
 immediate neighbours, he was in later Hfe something of a hermit. 
 He rarely sought their society, and his gruff manner did not 
 encourage familiarity. The very distinction of his air and appear- 
 ance kept men aloof even while it attracted them. The man who 
 might have written the Iliad was a person too awe-inspiring to be 
 approached without encouragement ; and from Tennyson the 
 encouragement did not come. Nevertheless, Tennyson's poems 
 are the work of a man keenly alive to every human interest. In 
 no other poet is the thought of the age more faithfully mirrored ; 
 and the poems in dialect are sufficient proof of interest in the 
 humbler aspects and phases of life. It is evident that in youth 
 Tennyson had listened with an acute ear to the speech of the 
 plain men around him, and had observed their manners and 
 character with a penetrating eye. If he did not add much in later 
 years to such stores of knowledge, he at least preserved with a 
 tenacious memory what he had before accumulated.
 
 TENNYSON 375 
 
 With respect to the wider concerns of human society, Tenny- 
 son's interest never declined, but rather grew almost to the end. 
 He was among the most patriotic of poets, and he lost no 
 opportunity of singing the glories of England, whether for her 
 political stability or for her renown in arms. Every political change, 
 every great national event, was noted by him, and often such events 
 became the theme of his verse. The revolutionary year 1848, 
 the coup d'eiat in France, the rumours of a French invasion, the 
 question of the sufficiency of the fleet, the death of Wellington, 
 the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, have all left their mark 
 on his poetry. But this by no means measures the full range of 
 his interests. Readers of In Memoriam know how earnestly the 
 attempt is made to reconcile the science which he had studied so 
 deeply with the religion which many believed to be undermined 
 by it. Readers of Locksley Hall: Sixty Years After know how 
 passionately he protested against the merely material interpretation 
 of the universe. 
 
 Tennyson ranks high among the learned poets; and one of the 
 most remarkable features of his verse is the union in it of two 
 sorts of learning. He is learned in his own art. Coleridge declared, 
 with respect to the early poems, that Tennyson had " begun to write 
 verse before he well knew what metre was^"; but he studied till 
 he became one of the subtlest metrists who have ever handled the 
 English language. He is less enchanting than Coleridge himself or 
 than Keats; but probably no one except Milton has surpassed 
 him in the conscious art of verse-construction. He is learned also 
 in the works of other poets. His verse is full of haunting sugges- 
 tions of his predecessors in Greek and Latin, Italian and English; 
 so full that if we dwell upon this aspect of his work exclusively we 
 are tempted to deny him the quality of originality. Ample justice 
 has been done to this side of Tennyson's learning ; indeed it has 
 been exaggerated, and echoes have been heard and reminiscences 
 suggested in many cases where there is probably no connexion 
 except that which must always bind the thought of one mind to 
 the thought of another. But justice has not been done to the 
 other side ; and the full truth is not told about him till it is said 
 
 1 Tabu 'lalk.
 
 3/6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 that he studied almost as deeply the thought, the aspirations and 
 the needs of his own day, and applied all the lore of his art to 
 these. It has been objected against the Idylls of the King that 
 they are the Arthurian legends expressed in the language and 
 adapted to the sentiment of the nineteenth century ; and whether 
 this be a fault or not, the statement is true. When Tennyson goes 
 back to the Middle Ages he usually does so in obedience to a 
 fashion of the time, rather than because his imagination naturally 
 leads him thither ; and so little is he at home in those ages that 
 even his imagination does not save him from occasional absurdity. 
 In short, he made it the great end of his art to express the modern 
 spirit, and the delineation of other times only a means to that end. 
 And this is one great reason for his popularity. Every age is 
 primarily interested in itself; and Tennyson had things to say 
 which went home alike to the statesman of his time, to the man 
 of science, to the man who doubted and to the man who believed. 
 In the traces of this learning we read the real history of 
 Tennyson's life. After he left Cambridge almost its only land- 
 marks are the dates of the publication of his books. Besides these 
 the sole points worth mentioning are his accession to the laureate- 
 ship in 1850, his marriage in the same year and his elevation to 
 the peerage in 1884. His acceptance of a title was the subject of 
 some criticism ; and it is true enough that no peerage could add 
 to the dignity of Alfred Tennyson. Yet public as well as private 
 reasons could be given in favour of the poet's decision. Public 
 honours do encourage service in art as well as in other things; and 
 England has been only too little prone to bestow them. Peerages 
 had been conferred plentifully for political reasons, or on success- 
 ful brewers for distinction in the art of accumulating money ; but 
 the countrymen of Shakespeare and of Milton had never yet 
 bestowed such an honour on any man merely because he 
 happened to be a great man of letters. Macaulay's case is no 
 exception ; for he was a politician as well as a historian, and it 
 may be doubted whether he would not have passed unnoticed, like 
 Gibbon, had his parliamentary career been as undistinguished as 
 that of the latter. Tennyson therefore might well have argued 
 that it was good for his countrymen to learn to think that the
 
 TENNYSON 377 
 
 highest honours ought to be bestowed on the highest talents and 
 services, in whatever field they might be displayed. Whether he 
 did argue so or not, his acceptance of the peerage was itself of the 
 nature of a public service. 
 
 The modern spirit grew stronger in Tennyson as the years 
 passed. Much of the early verse might belong to any age, and 
 some of it really breathes the spirit of the past : there is more of 
 mediaevalism in The Lady of Shalott than in all the Idylls of the 
 King. But after 1842 this is rare: Tennyson is the poet of his 
 own time. The change is manifest in The Princess (1847). This 
 is the first long poem its author had produced, and though it 
 ranks low among his works, in several respects it is worthy of 
 attention. It is in a tone between jest and earnest of which the 
 examples are rare ; it is an attempt to deal in verse with a great 
 modern problem ; and it affords the earliest evidence of that 
 deficiency in power of construction which mars all Tennyson's 
 more ambitious poems. 
 
 The questions of the proper position of women in society, the 
 functions they might legitimately and usefully endeavour to 
 discharge in addition to those of the family which obviously fall 
 to them, and the education which would fit them for those 
 functions, were just beginning to be agitated in England. They 
 are the offspring of that democratic development which had won 
 its earliest triumphs a few years before ; and they received point 
 from that utilitarian doctrine which taught that in striking the 
 balance between good and evil everybody was to count for one, no 
 more and no less. If this were the proper principle, it was pretty 
 obvious that hitherto half the human race had counted for con- 
 siderably less, and consequently that here there was crying need 
 of reform. Naturally therefore many of the earliest champions of 
 women were found among the Utilitarians; and though Mill's 
 Subjection of Women belongs to a later date, the principles it 
 embodies had been taught long before. Comte's exaltation of the 
 feminine element in the universe tended in the same direction. 
 So did that revived medisevalism to which Tennyson in this very 
 poem proved himself unfaithful. So did the religious movement 
 which was one of the forms of medievalism. The "saints"
 
 378 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 of Puritanism were of the masculine gender, and their hand was 
 often on the sword ; but many of the saints of Anglo-Catholicism 
 were feminine, and far more were effeminate. The position 
 assigned to the Virgin Mary necessarily reacted on her sex. 
 Burke's celebrated lament for the decay of chivalry came, oddly 
 enough, just at the time when that chivalry was starting into a 
 renewed, and, as it seemed, a vigorous life. If we look back at 
 either the poetry or the prose fiction of the eighteenth century, 
 before it was touched with romance, we see Httle or no chivalry in 
 the relations of the sexes. It does not exist in the verse of Dryden 
 or of Pope. The episode of Musidora in Thomson's Seasons, once 
 much admired, seems to the modern mind coarse and false in 
 taste. Still less do we find chivalry towards women in Fielding or 
 Smollett. But the moment romance revives it comes again. The 
 Celtic strain of Ossiafi did something to bring it back. We find 
 it in the love-songs of Burns. It would be superfluous to point to 
 the evidences of it in Shelley and Keats and Scott and their con- 
 temporaries in England and on the Continent. The lay of the 
 lady-love was evidently inseparable from lays of war and knightly 
 worth. 
 
 There had however always been an element of unreality in that 
 knightly worship of womanhood. Cervantes had ridiculed it in 
 his Dulcinea del Toboso ; and the most romantically incHned 
 could not wholly blind themselves to the sordid facts which 
 marred the picturesqueness of the Middle Ages. When, therefore, 
 it came to applying the lessons of the past to the present, and 
 translating these romantic imaginations into fact (for the most 
 ethereal imaginations do influence facts), men, and still more 
 women themselves, were struck with the glaring incongruity 
 between the dream and the reality. The woman of romance was 
 a queen of love and beauty, and the knight of romance was a 
 being whose principal business was to worship her and to right 
 her wrongs. The man of reality led a much more mundane and 
 prosaic existence. The woman of reality was a being of no 
 political power, and of very little real power of any sort. Her 
 education was narrow : it consisted chiefly of "accomplishments." 
 She could embroider, paint a little, and play commonplace music
 
 TENNYSON 379 
 
 in a manner worthy of the music. She was barred from the pro- 
 fessions; if she married, her own property passed out of her hands; 
 if she did anything outside her own home, she ran the risk of being 
 criticised as " unsexed " ; and hence, as we have seen, the earUest 
 female writers carefully concealed the sins of their pen. In short, 
 a woman had the high privilege to "suckle fools and chronicle 
 small beer." It was neither possible nor desirable that one half of 
 the human race should be queens of love and beauty and the 
 other half their servants; but it might be both possible and 
 desirable to attain to something less like the reverse of all this 
 than the actual condition of things. 
 
 Considerations of this sort were confusedly fermenting in the 
 minds of men about the middle of the nineteenth century, and 
 Tennyson in The Princess gives voice to some of them. For him it 
 was a great change. The delicately-fanciful portraits of maidens 
 in the early poems are all touched with romance of a somewhat 
 dilettante sort. The very names, Claribel, Mariana, Oriana, 
 Madeline, Rosalind, Fatima, are redolent of romance. But these 
 "airy fairy," "ever varying," "faintly smiling" or "rare pale" 
 damsels are all shadowy and unreal ; they are not " for human 
 nature's daily food"; they themselves have not been nourished on 
 such food, they have fed on honey-dew and drunk the milk of 
 Paradise. They would not stand the wear and tear of life. The 
 only thing possible is to set them apart, like china ornaments on a 
 bracket or in a cupboard. 
 
 The type of woman for and by whom " the woman question" 
 was raised was far different. In The Princess Tennyson partly sees 
 this. But the great defect of the poem is that it is in every respect 
 half-hearted. Banyan's Mr Facing-both-ways was not more divided 
 in mind as to his choice of the road to heaven or the road to hell 
 than is Tennyson in The Princess. This is the reason why it is "a 
 medley " : no close-knit plan was possible until the poet had 
 cleared his own mind, and when he wrote he had not done so. To 
 the same cause is due the hybrid mixture of the modern idea 
 and the mediaeval story. This too is the reason why the poem 
 hovers midway between jest and earnest. The author has not 
 quite made up his mind about anything. He never gets clear
 
 38o THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 away from the atmosphere of the picnic, he never knows how to 
 regard his own " sweet girl-graduates." The conventional ending 
 of love and marriage seems to hint that after all there is not much 
 in this "woman question," that the one great profession for women 
 is that which always has been and always must be open to them 
 — matrimony. This doubtless is true, but it is 'not very illumi- 
 native : it throws no light upon the path of that considerable 
 minority for whom the profession in question is fiot open. Still, the 
 doctrine of the close is good sense admirably versified. It is a 
 little difficult, perhaps, to do it full justice, for the thoughts are well 
 within the range of much smaller minds than Tennyson's. They 
 are so now; but they were so in a much less degree then. 
 '"Tis sixty years since"; and Tennyson's recognition of the 
 woman's sphere was then unusually liberal. It seems all the more 
 creditable to him when we bear in mind the predilections apparent 
 in the portraits of those fancy-maidens of the early poems. And 
 we become conscious of the distance traversed when we compare 
 the Tennysonian ideal with the Miltonic. 
 
 The Princess is an exception among the poems subsequent to 
 1842 in respect of the alterations it has undergone. These have 
 been great, and perhaps we may infer that Tennyson himself was 
 not quite satisfied with his production. The most noticeable 
 change was the insertion of the beautiful lyrics which stand now 
 between the parts. The highest grace of The Princess was absent 
 from the version of 1847 '■ the songs were added in 1850, and 
 some of them are worthy to rank among the best even Tennyson, 
 always a master of the lyric, ever wrote. Apart from the songs, 
 The Princess contained nothing calculated to add to the reputation 
 won by the volumes of 1842. The problems of construction 
 presented by a lengthy work had been rather shirked than 
 solved. 
 
 Three years later the disappointment faded from the minds of 
 nearly all admirers of Tennyson. Milton calls a good book " the 
 precious life-blood of a master spirit," and to few books is the 
 phrase more applicable than to In Memoriam (1850). It is the 
 result of the long brooding of seventeen years. The history of its 
 composition is known only in outline; but from that outline, from
 
 TENNYSON 381 
 
 what is known of Tennyson's method in general, and from the 
 internal evidence of style and substance, the gaps can be filled 
 with considerable confidence. Besides the sections oi In Memoriam 
 which are known to have been composed shortly after the death 
 of Arthur Hallam, many others, whether written or not, must 
 have been meditated and shaped in the poet's " study of imagina- 
 tion." At Christmas, 1841, Edmund Lushington (Dean of West- 
 minster) found that " the memorial poems had largely increased^" 
 since he had seen the poet. Even outside In Memoriam, some of 
 the profoundest of his work in those years is known to have been 
 the product of the feelings which inspired the great elegy Ulysses. 
 In short, the subject had full possession of him, and In Memoriam 
 may be taken to be the best that Tennyson's head and heart could 
 frame in the long labour of seventeen years, — years which found 
 him in the prime of youthful manhood and left him on the verge 
 of middle age. 
 
 Many readers approach /« Memoriam with a certain degree of 
 scepticism as to the reality of the feeling expressed by it. *' All 
 this about a friend dead seventeen years?" they ask. A little 
 examination shows that they are not required to understand it 
 thus. In Memoriam is a poetic philosophy of life and death, as 
 well as an elegy on Arthur Hallam. Only so can a poem of nearly 
 three thousand lines on such a subject be justified ; and even so 
 the faults of In Memoriam are first, the monotony due to long 
 dwelling upon thoughts, profound indeed and of universal and 
 vital importance, but still all in one key ; and secondly, the sense 
 of something not altogether wholesome in this long brooding over 
 the grave; for all the light which Tennyson imparts does not avail 
 to dispel the gloom. After all, and in spite of generations of 
 preachers, the business of life is living, not dying ; and there 
 is a fallacy in all attempts to convince men that eternity is 
 infinitely more important than tinae. At least time is the way to 
 eternity ; and it has never been shown that there can be any 
 preparation for it better than doing what our hand finds to do here 
 and now. Though Tennyson does not teach the preachers' doctrine, 
 he moves in this sphere of thought, and the long lingering in it tends 
 
 * Life of Tennysojtf i. 203.
 
 382 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 to sap the will and to weaken the springs of action. In one way 
 its length and its complexity lift In Me7noriam above all other 
 English elegies ; in another they place it at a disadvantage with 
 those of Milton and Shelley. Adonais is like a trumpet-call to 
 action ; and the reader of Lycidas rises from it ready to grasp the 
 "two-handed engine" and smite; though he may be doubtful 
 what the engine is, and what is to be smitten. It is not so with In 
 Memoriam. The difference may be partly explained by the 
 character of the personal relation between the authors and the 
 subjects of the three elegies ; for the connexion between Shelley 
 and Keats, or between Milton and Edward King, was slight in 
 comparison with the love of Tennyson for Hallam. Perhaps it is 
 partly due also to the influence of the time : at any rate Arnold's 
 Thyrsis tends to the same paralysis of action, though its shortness 
 makes the effect comparatively slight. 
 
 Less than half of In Memoriam bears direct reference to the 
 sorrow of Alfred Tennyson for his dead friend ; and the portion is 
 ample for every tone of grief, from the first crushed feeling when 
 the blow falls to the calm regret when years have passed and 
 reflection has done its work and the manifold interests and duties 
 of life have made their claim. The rest of the poem (with many 
 of the sections referring more directly to Hallam) contains that 
 poetic philosophy to which reference has been made. It is a 
 wide one ; for In Memoriam is Tennyson's best title to the rank 
 of a thinker in verse, — a lofty rank, when the thinker does not 
 lower the melody or the poetic charm of his verse, as Tennyson 
 has certainly not done in this poem. Science, religion, patriotism, 
 all find their place here. Most of all the poems of Tennyson, In 
 Memoriam is "saturated" with astronomy. The teaching of 
 geology has gone home to the writer, and the sound of streams 
 suggests to his mind how they 
 
 " Draw down Ionian hills, and sow 
 The dust of continents to be." 
 
 He has glimmerings of evolution before the birth of evolution : a 
 proof how well he "understood the drift of science"; for the 
 embryo is contained in LycU's Principles of Geology.
 
 TENNYSON 383 
 
 The religious element in In MemoHam is all-pervading. The 
 true theme of the poem is the group of problems which are the 
 soul of all religion. Any death inevitably suggests those problems : 
 the death of Hallam — the brilliant mind blighted before it was 
 fully opened, the promising career cut short ere it was well begun 
 — forced them upon Tennyson. All his study of nature is 
 ancillary to this. The sense of mystery awes him. Life seems to 
 him, as it did to Carlyle, a moment between two eternities : man 
 is "an infant crying in the night." Theje is no solution of the 
 problem, no creed that makes all things clear. We only trust 
 that '^somehow good willbe the final goal of ill." This attitude 
 of mind was one of the causes of the popularity of the poem. 
 In Mefnoriam contained something that appealed to all; to the 
 man of science, who was pleased to find himself understood ; to 
 the man oppressed with doubts, who found many of his own difiS- 
 culties powerfully and beautifully expressed by the poet ; and to 
 the orthodox believer, who was gratified by the final victory of faith. 
 It may be questioned whether the victory was quite legitimately 
 won. The heart standing up like a man in wrath suggests 
 Alexander's masterful way of dealing with the Gordian knot. 
 Some of the sceptical arguments are not pressed home, and the 
 reader is reminded of Don Quixote's treatment of his helmet. 
 With the first stroke by which he meant to test its strength he 
 damaged it sorely ; so after he had repaired it he refrained from 
 testing it again. It was doubt which made Don Quixote cautious, 
 and perhaps doubt made Tennyson cautious too. Hence the 
 suggestion, surprising enough to the superficial reader, that "■In 
 Memoriam may almost be said to be the poem of nineteenth 
 century scepticism \" 
 
 In his final standpoint Tennyson contrasts with Browning. 
 His is the attitude of faith, just because it is also that of doubt : 
 he does not see how good can be the goal of ill, but he trusts. 
 Even Browning is not always faithful to knowledge, but in essence 
 his is the attitude of philosophy: he faces the difficulty and 
 reasons it out. " Is evil a result less necessary than good ? " he 
 asks, and he brings both good and evil into reasoned connexion 
 1 Hiram Corson, quoted in The Library of LUerary Criticism.
 
 384 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 with the scheme of the universe. Much may be learnt as to the 
 difference between the two poets by comparing La Saisiaz with 
 In Memoriam. The former, inferior as a poem, is a far weightier 
 piece of reasoning. 
 
 On its artistic side, In Memoriam is full of interest. It is one 
 of the metrical triumphs of the language. The stanza is not 
 Tennyson's invention, for Ben Jonson had used it, and so had 
 Lord Herbert of Cherbury. But if Tennyson did not invent the 
 measure, he unquestionably made it his own. "Property to whom 
 proper," says Ruskin; and so masterly is the skill with which this 
 peculiar quatrain is used that we may consider the title established. 
 It is now one of the classical stanzas of the English language, and 
 till Tennyson showed what could be made of it, to all intents and 
 purposes it was unknown. Not a little of the effect is due to the 
 admirable adaptation of the metre to the subject. The slow 
 movement of the verse suits the brooding thought as perfectly as 
 even Spenser's stanza suited him. 
 
 In Memoriam is also one of the most learned of English 
 poems, not only in the sense already indicated, but by reason of 
 the wealth of literary allusion embodied in it. This does not 
 mean borrowing, still less stealing ; but during those seventeen 
 years Tennyson studied hard and read widely, and all this study 
 and reading blends in his verse. As the air of a garden full of 
 flowers is loaded with all their mingled scents, so is the verse of 
 In Memoriam fraught with reminiscences, indicated by a word, a 
 turn of phrase, a point of view, from numberless poets and from 
 not a few prose-writers whom the poet had studied. The rich and 
 high-wrought style, the extraordinary felicities of expression, are 
 among the results of this poetic learning. Few poems contain 
 more " jewels five words long " ; no other poem of recent times has 
 given so many familiar quotations to the language. And on the 
 whole the taste which selects and passes current these quotations 
 is remarkably sure : their number is no bad test of merit. On the 
 other hand, it must be confessed that Tennyson does not always 
 escape the faults which usually accompany such a style. It is 
 sometimes not merely high-wrought but over-wrought ; the ex- 
 pression is too weighty for the thought, or the words are tortured.
 
 TENNYSON 385 
 
 Thus, " eaves of wearied eyes " is an affected expression, and 
 " mother town " for metropolis is hardly English. 
 
 The great elegy is no less noticeable than The Princess in 
 respect of its construction ; for once more a long poem leaves 
 unsettled the question whether Tennyson had or had not the 
 power of creating a great artistic whole. Such a whole In 
 Memoriatn is not. It has a unity of its own, sufficient for the 
 purpose, and the poet is in no way to blame because it has no 
 more. Still, the fact remains that it has not a unity like that of a 
 great epic such as the Aeneid or Paradise Lost, or a great tragedy 
 such as Antigone or Othello. It has only the unity which belongs 
 to a series of moods of one person, and is therefore comparable 
 rather to that which binds together the sonnets of Shakespeare, or 
 better, those of Petrarch to Laura, from the scheme of which 
 Tennyson borrowed hints. The separate sections are, like the 
 sonnets, independent poems as well as parts of one great poem ; 
 and it would be affectation to pretend that none could be omitted 
 without leaving an appreciable gap. 
 
 The election of Tennyson to the throne left vacant by the 
 death of Wordsworth was natural after In Memoriam. As we 
 look back, he seems to tower, latis humeris et toto vertice, above all 
 his contemporaries except Browning; and although Browning 
 had been warmly praised by critics, one at least of whom in 1845 
 had claimed for him pre-eminence among the poets of the day, 
 he had never been popular. The laureateship was, in point of 
 fact, first gracefully offered to, and as gracefully declined by, the 
 aged Samuel Rogers ; but apart from the compliment tb such a 
 veteran of letters, there was a difference of opinion as to the 
 proper recipient of the honour which seems surprising now. The 
 appointment of Tennyson was, however, generally welcomed ; and 
 the choice proved to be a happy one, not only because of the 
 eminence of the poet, but because few if any have ever excelled 
 him in the art of turning those complimentary verses on ceremonial 
 occasions which it falls to the laureate officially or quasi-o^cidiWy 
 to celebrate. 
 
 The death of Wellington, occurring not long after Tennyson's 
 appointment to the laureateship, gave him a splendid opportunity 
 
 w. 25
 
 386 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 for the gimst'-official exercise of his function. The great Ode, 
 however, was received with a coldness at which we can only 
 wonder now. Three years later came Maud (1855). Of all 
 his longer works, except The Prificess, this lyrical monodrama 
 is the least satisfactory. Nowhere do we find more splendid 
 fragments of poetry; but Maud too is loosely compacted. 
 The thread of connexion is the character of the hero, whose 
 mind, in an unwholesome state from the start, is followed 
 through passion, exaltation and disaster to madness. In respect 
 of the general scheme, therefore, there is some resemblance to 
 In Memoriam. Both poems are studies of a soul. But in I/i 
 Memoriam the soul is the poet's own and the method is the 
 method of reflection, while in Maud the method is dramatic. 
 Tennyson had already made tentative advances towards the 
 dramatic method, for The May Queen and Locksley Hall are 
 dramatic lyrics. These poems had attained a popularity some- 
 what beyond their deserts ; they were perhaps the best known of 
 all their author's writings ; but they were by no means the finest 
 poetry he had produced. The May Queen borders upon the 
 namby-pamby, and the hero of Locksley Hall is unworthy of the 
 splendid verse. The same mistake is repeated in Maud. The 
 picture of reason overthrown may be made impressive, but there 
 ought to be a grandeur in the reason before its overthrow. There 
 is no grandeur in the peevish, querulous, scolding hero oi Maud; 
 and therefore, even if the scenes of madness had been skilfully 
 managed, they would have failed to produce their proper effect. 
 
 When we descend from the whole to the parts the verdict 
 must be very different ; for among those parts are some of the 
 loveliest lyrics, including the most splendid Tennyson ever wrote, 
 "Come into the garden, Maud," and another, "O that 'twere 
 possible," which for exquisite pathos is only rivalled by "Break, 
 break, break." It is in these lyric fragments that the merit of 
 Maud lies, and probably the work it embodies would have helped 
 his fame more if he had never attempted to bind the pieces 
 together. 
 
 Nevertheless the attempt to build up the fragments into a 
 whole is significant, and so are the contents of many of the parts.
 
 TENNYSON 387 
 
 The poet, though a lyrist, will not rest in the emotion of the 
 moment. The purpose, the didactic element, traceable, some- 
 times to its detriment, in nearly all his work after the death of 
 Hallam, is prominent here. Science has left its mark, and the 
 evolutionary tendencies of the poet are unmistakable : — 
 
 "A monstrous eft was of old the Lord and Master of Earth, 
 For him did the high sun flame, and the river billowing ran, 
 And he felt himself in his force to be Nature's crowning race. 
 As nine months go to the shaping an infant ripe for his birth, 
 So many a million of ages have gone to the making of man : 
 He now is first, but is he the last? is he not too base?" 
 
 The state of society has left its mark too, and the poet is awake 
 to the evils which stirred the spirits of Carlyle and Kingsley and 
 Mill. The " Mammonite mother " kiUing " her babe for a burial 
 fee," the poor "hovell'd and hustled together, each sex, like 
 swine," the society in which '* only the ledger lives, and only not 
 all men lie," — we hear of similar things to these long afterwards 
 in some of Tennyson's most powerful poems. He was still only 
 learning how to use such material. The poet's defence of war has 
 been loudly condemned ; but it is to be remembered that it is a 
 defence of war conceived as bringing to an end not the peace of 
 the golden age, but peace based on lies and fraud and oppression, 
 and substituting for the self-seeking of the trading trickster that 
 which at any rate unites the nation in a common pursuit of a 
 single end not meanly selfish. 
 
 Hitherto the great bulk of Tennyson's work had been lyrical. 
 The Princess is the only exception on a large scale. Maud is a 
 bundle of lyrics, and In Memoriani is lyrical throughout both in 
 structure and in principle. So are the majority of the poems in 
 the earlier volumes. The principal exceptions are the English 
 Idylls which form a group remarkable in themselves and influen- 
 tial upon subsequent poetry. 
 
 Poems dealing with rural subjects have held a place in literary 
 tradition from the time of Theocritus. Spenser made the fashion 
 English. But the pastoral of literature was a highly conventional 
 form of composition, and the shepherds and shepherdesses were 
 creatures of an Arcadia where their business was to " fleet the time 
 
 25 — 2
 
 388 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 carelessly, as they did in the golden world." Allan Ramsay 
 transferred them to Scotland, and, though he still retained many 
 conventions, he made the figures of his pastoral real Scottish 
 shepherd lads and lasses. Ramsay, however, presented them 
 dramatically; and it was not until the close of the eighteenth 
 and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries that the narrative 
 of rural life as it is in reality was rooted in English verse by 
 Southey and Wordsworth. It was in their footsteps that Tennyson 
 followed ; but he made a deviation too, and after his fashion 
 introduced a new convention, so that, of the group of poems 
 called English Idylls there is only one, the tale of Dora, which 
 can be considered simply a tale of rural life, and that closely 
 follows Miss Mitford's Talc of Dora CreswelP. The artists 
 of The Gardener's Daughter, and Edwin Morris, who knows 
 "long names of agaric, moss and fern," and who forges "a 
 thousand theories of the rocks," and Letty, who looks "like 
 Proserpine in Enna gathering flowers," are beings from another 
 world. 
 
 The truth is that Tennyson, especially in his earlier years, 
 was eminently a poet of the study. His habitual diction was 
 ornate, sometimes it was artificial, contorted, almost fantastic. 
 He could write with great simplicity when he chose, as the idyll 
 of Dora shows ; but even there the flavour of the verse is not 
 that of the upturned clod, but of the library. Burns holds the 
 plough himself, and with his own hand " turns the weeder-clips 
 aside " to spare the symbol of his country. He finds poetry in his 
 own life : he has his vision of the muse who wreathes his brow with 
 holly, — but it is in an "auld clay biggin" the smoke of which 
 irritates the reader's throat and nostrils. His jolly beggars sing 
 jolly songs ; but their rags are of the raggedest. We are a long 
 way from this sort of reality in Tennyson. We have escaped 
 from Arcadia only to get into the land of a new convention, 
 whose latitude and longitude have not yet been taken. But for 
 his Northern Farmer and Northern Cobbler and a few other pieces 
 of the same kind, all of them the product of later years, his ability 
 to get into closer contact with reality might have been questioned. 
 
 * J. Churton Collins pointed this out in his Illustrations of Tennyson.
 
 TENNYSON 389 
 
 The English Idylls were noteworthy experiments in blank 
 verse. In these, in Ulysses, and afterwards on a larger scale in 
 The Princess, Tennyson proved that he could handle the metre 
 not merely with skill, but with a mastery of varied effects probably 
 unequalled by any English poet except Shakespeare. Milton has 
 made the measure all his own for epic purposes, and he has no 
 rival in the stately music of his lines ; but in respect of variety of 
 types of blank verse Tennyson surpasses him. There is a vast 
 difference between the simple measure of Dora and that of the 
 rich and musical classical idyll of CEnone, or the subtle suggestive- 
 ness of Ulysses, or the force of Lucretius ; and there is an immense 
 variety within the limits of the Idylls of the King. 
 
 We have already seen that Tennyson had from an early date 
 shown a strong interest in those Arthurian romances which have 
 so powerfully attracted the imaginative minds of England, France 
 and Germany from the Middle Ages downwards. In England, 
 Spenser had made use of them ; and Milton at one time thought 
 of Arthur as a possible subject for the great poem which was to 
 be the magnum opus of his life and to justify the dedication of 
 his talents to what many Puritans regarded as the unprofitable 
 art of poetry. But Milton abandoned the design ; and none of 
 those who touched the Arthurian story afterwards had succeeded 
 in making a great poem from it. Just a few years previous to the 
 appearance of the first group of the Idylls, Lytton had written an 
 epic on King Arthur ; but Tennyson could safely ignore this and 
 treat the subject as still open. The poems he had previously 
 written upon episodes or characters of Arthurian romance, except 
 in one instance, were lyrics. The Lady of Shalott and Sir 
 Galahad are lyrical wholes which do not admit of expansion. 
 Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere is described as a fragment, 
 but it is evidently one which could never grow into a long poem. 
 These poems, therefore, delightful and beautiful as they are, for 
 the present purpose are no more than items of evidence bearing 
 witness to the attraction the Arthurian legends had for Tennyson. 
 
 It appears however, from the biography by his son, that from 
 an early date the poet had contemplated making Arthur the 
 subject ot a long work, and had written out prose sketches of the
 
 390 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 story. The first hint in verse of such a design is given in the 
 Morte d'' Arthur, which was originally published as one of the 
 English Idylls, where it is introduced as the only one of the 
 twelve books of the poet's epic, "his King Arthur," which has 
 escaped burning. This may be pure playfulness, but it is also 
 possible that there was some foundation for it, and that Tennyson 
 had failed to satisfy himself in an attempt to treat the subject. 
 At any rate, alone among the early Arthurian poems, this is in 
 blank verse, and proves to be capable of indefinite expansion ; for 
 as The Passing of Arthur it becomes the last book or idyll of the 
 Idylls of the King. FitzGerald heard Morte d^ Arthur read, 
 without the introduction and epilogue, in 1835'; and it is remark- 
 able that in this early experiment in a measure so difficult as 
 blank verse Tennyson showed a skill and mastery he never 
 afterwards surpassed. Probably In Memoriam thrust aside the 
 Arthurian epic ; but not long after the great elegy was finished the 
 mind of the poet was again busy with the subject. Excepting 
 Morte d' Arthur, no part of the Idylls was published till 1859, 
 when Enid, Vivien, Elaine and Guinevere z.'^'^&zxQd. ; but in 1857 
 two of them had been privately printed under the title of Enid 
 and Ni7nu'e. 
 
 So far as non-dramatic forms are concerned, the question 
 whether Tennyson possessed constructive power must be taken 
 to be finally settled in the negative by the Idylls. The most 
 ingenious attempts have been made to find a unity in them. 
 Sometimes the narrative is deemed sufficient, and we are asked to 
 regard the collection as constituting an epic, though, it is ad- 
 mitted, a somewhat episodic one. At other times the unifying 
 principle is found in allegory. All such theories, however, are 
 obviously forced. When they are re-read with an open mind, 
 the Idylls obstinately persist in keeping their character of twelve 
 short stories, all, it is true, united by the fact that they move 
 round King Arthur as a centre. But though this gives unity of a 
 sort, it is not the unity of a great work of art ; it is certainly not 
 such a unity as makes the books of the Iliad, the Aeneid and the 
 Paradise Lost obviously only parts of the poems to which they 
 
 ^ Life of Tennyson, i. 194.
 
 TENNYSON 39I 
 
 belong. The bare history of the publication of the Idylls ought 
 to suffice to establish their want of unity. After 1859 there was 
 a pause of ten years, until The Holy Grail, and other Poems was 
 published. The " other " idylls in the volume were The Coming 
 of Arthur, Pelleas and Ettarre and The Passing of Arthur, as 
 Morte d' Arthur was now called. In 187 1 The Last Tour7iament 
 and in 1872 Gareth and Lynette appeared; then, after a long 
 pause, the structure was completed by the addition of Balin and 
 Balan (1885). If anyone still imagines that there is true unity 
 in a poem which begins at the end, reaches the beginning in mid- 
 course, and the middle at the close, he should turn to the amusing 
 and instructive article on " the Building of the Idylls " in Literary 
 Anecdotes of the XLX Century. 
 
 There is certainly an element of truth in the allegoric theory. 
 No one who reads Gareth and Lynette and The Holy Grail can 
 doubt the presence of allegory there. Moreover, the theory has 
 the countenance of Tennyson himself, who speaks of the tales as 
 " new-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul " ; and this 
 might seem to be conclusive. But on the other hand, he also 
 protested against being tied down to any one meaning, saying, 
 very sensibly, that "poetry is like shot-silk with many glancing 
 colours. Every reader must find his own interpretation accord- 
 ing to his ability, and according to his sympathy with the poet\" 
 It is not clear, therefore, how far Tennyson meant to press 
 the allegorical interpretation. An examination of the dates of 
 publication deepens the doubts. It so happens that the earliest 
 idylls are those in which the allegorical element is least prominent. 
 Only towards the end do we see the unmistakable marks of 
 symbolism. The idea of allegorical treatment had certainly been 
 present in Tennyson's mind many years before he took the 
 Arthurian story seriously in hand, for one of the early prose 
 sketches is allegorical^. But he seems to have let it sink into the 
 background, and to have brought it into prominence again only 
 when the want of a more organic unity began to be seriously felt. 
 In any case, the allegory is vague, shadowy and of dubious inter- 
 
 ^ Life of Tennyson, ii. 117. 
 ° ibid, ii. 123.
 
 392 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 pretation. Where, except in Bunyan's great work, does allegory 
 not exhibit these defects ? 
 
 For the materials of his Idylls Tennyson drew principally 
 upon two sources, Malory's Morte d' Arthur and the Mabinogion, 
 supplementing them occasionally from Geoffrey of Monmouth 
 and other sources. He derived his knowledge of the Mabinogion 
 from Lady Charlotte Guest's translation. In most of the tales he 
 follows his original pretty closely, and the fact has been urged 
 against him as a reproach. But in truth he would have fallen 
 into a great error had he done otherwise. "Genuine poetic 
 material is handed down in the imagination of man from genera- 
 tion to generation, changing its spirit according to the spirit of 
 each age, and reaching its full development when in the course of 
 time the favourable conditions coincide'"; and the man who 
 prefers to invent rather than to use the material thus provided for 
 him dooms himself to oblivion. 
 
 Tennyson's course, therefore, was determined for him by his 
 choice of a subject. The great cycles of romance have become 
 part of the raw material of literature, just as the stories of Troy, 
 of Pelops and of Oedipus had for the Greeks. How large has 
 been the part played by the Arthurian legends in the literature 
 not only of England but of Europe is admirably shown in Pro- 
 fessor Maccallum's Tennyson^s Idylls and Arthurian Story. Such 
 being the subject-matter, any wide deviation from it would have 
 given a shock to the feelings. If the adoption of a story be 
 plagiarism, then Shakespeare is the most unblushing of plagiarists. 
 He hardly ever invents the framework of his dramas, and in the 
 case of the Roman plays he draws very freely indeed upon his 
 original. Neither do we impute it for blame to Milton that he 
 owes the framework of Paradise Lost to the Bible and the 
 Talmudic legends, or to Aeschylus and Sophocles that they are 
 similarly indebted to the legends of their own race. Such instances 
 (they might easily be multiplied) give strong support to Kuno 
 Fischer's theory of poetic material. The question of the value 
 and the true originality of a poem depends upon the way in 
 
 ^ Quoted from Kuno Fischer in Professor Richard Jones s scholarly mono- 
 graph, The Growth of tlu Idylls of the King.
 
 TENNYSON 393 
 
 which the poet handles his material. Just as the ruler who 
 finds a city brick and leaves it marble may be regarded as its 
 second founder, so the poet who by his touch transmutes his 
 baser materials into gold may justly claim property in what he has 
 so transmuted. And much depends upon the nature of the 
 material. Tennyson's relation to his authorities is like Shake- 
 speare's relation to Plutarch rather than his relation to Holinshed. 
 Both Malory's Morte d' Arthur and Lady Charlotte Guest's 
 Mabinogiofi are excellent ; and Tennyson, recognising their excel- 
 lence, has in many passages been content to versify them, as 
 Shakespeare has versified Plutarch. 
 
 At the same time, he introduced many changes, and in 
 particular he threw round the Idylls a wholly different atmosphere 
 from that either of the Welsh tales or of Malory. This has been 
 a ground of complaint against the poet. It has been urged with 
 truth that the Idylls are not really mediaeval, that King Arthur is 
 a modern English gentleman, and that the knights and ladies are 
 as indubitably Victorian as is the poem in which their valour and 
 their beauty are sung. They wear the armour and are dressed in 
 the garments of the Middle Ages, but they speak the speech and 
 think the thoughts of the nineteenth century; their sentiment, 
 their morality, all that belongs to them except the barest externals, 
 are modern. In truth Tennyson was never mediaeval. He 
 frequently went back to the Middle Ages for a theme ; but if he 
 entered into their spirit at all, he certainly never reproduced it in 
 his poems. It is doubtful whether he seriously tried or wished 
 to do so. He is an intensely modern poet; in spite of his 
 elaborate art, he often seems almost utilitarian in his spirit. He 
 has a " message," like his friend Carlyle ; and he can make it more 
 intelligible in the language of his own time than in that of centuries 
 ago. The point is not of much significance. The Idylls are 
 anachronistic, and there is an end. If Tennyson imagined they 
 were mediaeval, he was mistaken ; if a reader is unable to find 
 pleasure except in the mediaeval, the Idylls are not for him. 
 There remain the great majority who are content to take a thing 
 for what it is, and who are as little disturbed by Tennyson's 
 modernism as they are when Shakespeare makes Ulysses quote
 
 394 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Aristotle, or when Leonardo sets the table-appointments of his own 
 time upon the board on which is spread the Last Supper. 
 
 The question of the quality of the work is infinitely more 
 important than that of its fidelity to the time in which the scene is 
 laid. Granted that Arthur is but a modern gentleman, the larger 
 question remains whether he is a good type of modern gentleman. 
 The two questions have frequently been confused. We are told 
 in one breath that he is a piece of colourless perfection and that 
 he is no mediaeval knight as if the two statements were of the 
 same kind. They are not: the former is a criticism of the drawing 
 of a character; the latter only of its appropriateness to a particular 
 time. A figure, painted on canvas or delineated in words, may be 
 "no mediaeval knight" and yet a very excellent type of man; but 
 " colourless perfection " belongs to no age or race of humanity. 
 
 Now it is hardly possible to deny that this is a real flaw of the 
 Idylls. The " blameless king " is vapid ; a little blameworthiness 
 would do him a world of good ; we long for some of the " blessed 
 evil" of Browning. And something of unreality clings to all the 
 figures of the Idylls, male and female, without exception. The 
 stained and guilty but always knightly Lancelot is the most 
 interesting, because of his very sins ; and yet in spite of those sins 
 he too, in respect of his chivalry, is flawed as a character by the 
 very absence of flaw, — "faultily faultless." Tennyson had not yet 
 acquired the knack of delineating men and women ; indeed he 
 never succeeded in the idyllic form, though some of the Idylls 
 were written after he had won conspicuous success in other forms 
 of verse. In the Idylls he is as unsuccessful with the very bad as 
 with the very good. No one can say that Vivien lacks her due 
 share of human frailty, but she very poorly represents the witchery 
 of an unprincipled woman. We have only to compare her with 
 Shakespeare's Cleopatra to realise what consummate work is, and 
 how great is the gulf between it and anything less excellent. 
 
 In the whole of the Idylls there is nothing more remarkable, 
 nothing more distinctively Tennyson's own, than the treatment of 
 the Quest of the Grail. Originally no part of the Arthurian legend, 
 obscure in origin, it early passed into the cycle, and attained so 
 prominent a place that it threatened to subordinate all the rest to
 
 TENNYSON 395 
 
 itself. Nothing in the whole cycle is more characteristic of the 
 mediaeval spirit than this. It is profoundly mystical. It is the 
 element of the Church coming in to ennoble and purify and 
 sanctify the world. It makes the Arthurian legends, according to 
 mediseval ideas, a round and complete whole, a world in them- 
 selves. For the mediseval mind honoured just two forms of life; 
 the life of arms, idealised in the system of chivalry represented 
 here by the Round Table, as it is in the Charlemagne cycle by 
 "Roland brave and Oliver" and all the paladins and peers who fell 
 at Roncesvalles ; and secondly the life of the Church, here intro- 
 duced by the Quest of the Grail. And that the scripture might be 
 fulfilled the last was first. Wherever the Church entered she 
 claimed precedence : the call to seek the Grail overcame the 
 knightly sense of loyalty to Arthur. 
 
 The hero of this legend, Sir Galahad, is the subject of one 
 of Tennyson's early Arthurian poems. He is, as becomes his 
 character, an ascetic : 
 
 *' I never felt the kiss of love. 
 Nor maiden's hand in mine." 
 
 One half of the knightly life is closed to him by the Quest ; but 
 another vista opens which more than compensates him for it. He 
 is a visionary, a mystic, and in his visions he finds happiness as 
 perfect as is possible until the Grail, and heaven, are found : 
 
 " Sometimes on lonely mountain-meres 
 
 I find a magic bark ; 
 I leap on board : no hehaisman steers : 
 
 I float till all is dark. 
 A gentle sound, an awful light I 
 
 Three angels bear the holy Grail : 
 With folded feet, in stoles of white, 
 
 On sleeping wings they sail." 
 
 The incidents of this Quest are not original with Tennyson : 
 he is nowhere more indebted to his authorities on matters of 
 detail. And yet by a few skilful turns and adaptations, by the 
 setting he gives it in the cycle, he has made the whole spirit his 
 own. It was not possible for the mediseval mind to conceive of 
 evil in connexion with the Quest of the Grail; it was in itself
 
 39^ THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 good, pure, holy. Nearly all the knights failed, many of them met 
 disaster in the Quest ; but this was through their own unworthi- 
 ness. In the Quest itself there was nothing unreal; there could be 
 no abrogation of duty in the fact that a knight elected to follow it. 
 In the hands of Tennyson the Quest of the Grail becomes one 
 of the two causes which bring about the disruption of the Round 
 Table. The corruption of the court, the sin of Lancelot and 
 Guinevere, the vices of many of the knights, are of course one 
 cause. How deep the vice has eaten and how deplorable has 
 been the fall from the height of a great ideal we see when we 
 contrast the song of the knights in The Coming of Arthur with the 
 last sad tourney of the " dead innocence." Contrast 
 
 "The King will follow Christ, and we the King 
 In whom high God hath breathed a secret thing," 
 
 with the mournful question of Lancelot to Tristram, victor in this 
 " Tournament of the Dead Innocence " : — 
 
 "Hast thou won? 
 Art thou the purest, brother? See, the hand 
 Wherewith thou takest this is red 1 " 
 
 But corruption is not the only cause that breaks up Arthur's 
 chivalry: the Quest itself leads to the same result. The king 
 foresees the effect. It is "a sign to maim this Order which I 
 made " ; the knights are following " wandering fires." The Quest 
 is proper for men like Galahad or Percivale, for those in whom 
 saintliness is inborn. It is a mere misleading will-o'-the-wisp to 
 the ordinary stained and spotted man, sinful, yet capable of work 
 useful for the world, 
 
 ♦'Men 
 With strength and will to right the wrong'd, of power 
 To lay the sudden heads of violence flat." 
 
 The evil of the Quest is that it takes such men from the work they 
 can do and leads them to attempt needlessly and fruitlessly that 
 which they cannot do. 
 
 This treatment of the legend is extremely significant, especially 
 with reference to the time at which Tennyson wrote. It is the 
 best standard for measuring the distance which separated the
 
 TENNYSON 397 
 
 poet, intellectually, from the Middle Ages. He had no part or lot 
 in that movement which was drawing so many of his contem- 
 poraries to think the thoughts of those ages. We see the effect of 
 this attraction in Newman, in the extravagant importance he 
 attaches to the very conception of sin ; in the assertion that it 
 would be better the whole world should go to ruin than that the 
 most venial sin should be committed, or that anything should be 
 done which would lead to the commission of such sin. No doubt 
 theology has always been tempted to extravagance on this point ; 
 probably many excellent and sensible clergymen would still 
 hesitate to repudiate Newman's language. But if we are to refrain 
 not only from doing that which is sinful, but from that which will 
 produce sin, we must refrain from action altogether — and we shall 
 not succeed then. The greatest minds among Newman's con- 
 temporaries altogether reject such teaching. Carlyle taught that 
 a man was to be measured, not by the negative standard of absence 
 of fault, error, sin, but by a far nobler standard — the presence of 
 good. The proper question to ask is not, how few sins has the 
 man committed? but, how much good has he accompHshed? 
 Browning taught that evil was necessary for the evolution of good. 
 In a similar spirit Hawthorne, in his great romance, Transforma- 
 tion, makes sin the parent of the moral nature of Donatello. All 
 the Utilitarians too recognise the necessary mingling of evil with 
 good and call that action best which produces the greatest balance 
 of good. 
 
 Tennyson in the Idylls teaches this doctrine too. Arthur finds 
 himself in a world chequered and shadowed with evil as the hills 
 are shadowed with clouds. His task is to make bad better, not to 
 produce perfection ; and the tools with which he works are, like 
 the world in which he lives, faulty and of mixed material. The 
 head of gold or of iron may be joined to feet of miry clay; but the 
 king is content to make the best of his instruments, such as they 
 are, and in the process to make the instruments themselves better. 
 He is a statesman, not a visionary. It is to be borne in mind that 
 he, not Sir Galahad, is Tennyson's ideal; and though he is too 
 faultless, his perfection is not the pale perfection of Sir Galahad. 
 The mediaeval mind, whatever it might have felt in secret, must
 
 398 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 have made obeisance to the ideal of saintliness : Tennyson is 
 thoroughly modern in his refusal to do so. When at last 
 Guinevere recognises the highest, it is "not Lancelot, nor another, 
 but the King." Not Galahad any more than Lancelot, but the 
 man who lives in the world and best does the work of the world. 
 
 During the long period between the beginning and the comple- 
 tion of the Idylls Tennyson did not concentrate himself on this 
 one work as far as he did on In Memoriam in the seventeen years 
 from the death of Arthur Hallam to its publication ; for interspersed 
 between the successive parts of the Idylls were many important 
 publications which had no bearing upon them. Excluding the 
 Idylls, the productions of the last thirty years of Tennyson's life 
 are divisible into two classes — on the one hand dramas, and on the 
 other miscellaneous poems, all more or less short. After the four 
 Idylls the first volume of the latter class was that which took its 
 title from Efioch Arden (1864). Other poems were included with 
 The Holy Grail {iZ6<)). The Lover's Tale, an early piece which 
 had been printed and then suppressed, was published in 1879. 
 Ballads and other Poems (1880), Tiresias (1885), Locksley Hall: 
 Sixty Years After (1886), Demeter (i88g) and The Death of CEnone 
 (1892), are the other volumes which contain the later miscellaneous 
 poems. 
 
 Enoch Arden belongs to the idyllic class, not of the Arthurian 
 type, but rather like the English Idylls. The strain of sentimen- 
 tality which pervades it made it popular, just as the same fault had 
 increased the popularity of The May Queen ; but it is not among 
 the poems of Tennyson which will live. The volume however 
 contained also pieces of a very different stamp. It contained The 
 Grandmother (which had appeared some years earlier in Once a 
 Week) and The Northern Farmer, Old Style. These poems, and 
 especially the latter, indicate a change in Tennyson of the utmost 
 importance. 
 
 A comparison between the miscellaneous poems of these later 
 years and those published up to 1842 yields very interesting 
 results. Through the sixty years of Tennyson's literary life we can 
 trace a steady development ; in the opinion of many good judges, 
 not a steady improvement ; but certainly a series of changes pro-
 
 TENNYSON 399 
 
 ceeding upon a principle and tending towards a definite goal. 
 Among these changes there is none more certain to arrest the 
 attention than the gradual development of the dramatic element 
 even in poems which are not dramatic in form. In the early 
 poems, as we have seen, this element is rather conspicuously 
 absent, and even where we might expect some evidence of 
 dramatic power we fail to find it. None of the figures in The 
 Princess, for example, is in the least interesting as a character. 
 Tennyson first proved that he possessed the power of characterisa- 
 tion by the two fine studies of The Northerti Farmer; and as these 
 are poems in dialect we may conjecture that the freedom and 
 unconventionality of dialect helped to reveal the power to 
 Tennyson himself. If so, the dialect poems are important for 
 other reasons besides their own high merits. 
 
 Perhaps the use of dialect was suggested to Tennyson by the 
 Dorset Poe7ns {1844-1863) of William Barnes (1801-1886), a man 
 of note alike for the intrinsic value of his poetry and for the fact 
 that he is the first of English dialect poets. Scottish vernacular 
 poetry stands on a different footing. It is supported by a national 
 tradition, and through the existence of Scotland for centuries as an 
 independent political entity the northern dialect of English, there 
 established, never wholly lost the character of a language. Very 
 different was the fate of the dialects of the south. Occasional 
 poems of a popular sort might be written in the speech of the 
 people, but the dialects of the English counties have seldom been 
 cultivated in literature, and never on a considerable scale or with 
 marked success till Barnes showed the way. Thus, though Burns 
 was altogether a greater, more powerful and more varied poet, the 
 exploit of Barnes, simply on the linguistic side, was more remark- 
 able than his. It was the raising at once to literary rank of a 
 mode of speech which had hitherto been used only by peasants. 
 
 Barnes was descended from a family which for generations had 
 been rooted in the soil of Dorset, and he had a mother who was 
 gifted with tastes for poetry such as are rarely found among the 
 wives of farmers ; but unfortunately she died when the boy was 
 only five. He was, however, physically too feeble for the drudgery 
 of farm lifej and his active mind made such good use of his
 
 400 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 opportunities of education that he was soon marked out for a 
 career of letters in some shape or other. He became a school- 
 master in 1823, and in 1827 began contributing to periodicals. In 
 middle life he took orders, was presented to the rectory of Came 
 in 1862, and died there twenty-four years afterwards. 
 
 Barnes had a mania for linguistic studies, learning, besides the 
 more ordinary languages, Welsh, Russian, Hindustani and Persian. 
 These studies bore fruit in after years in various philological 
 publications, among them a Philological Gra?nmar, dealing mainly 
 with English, Latin and Greek, but based upon a comparison of no 
 fewer than sixty languages. But it is by his Poems in the Dorset 
 Dialect that Barnes will be remembered. He began writing them 
 in 1833, and the first of them were published in the Dorset County 
 Chy-onicle. Three separate collections were issued — in 1844, 1858 
 and 1863; and the poet was induced, two years after the first 
 issue, to try the experiment of a volume of poems on such subjects 
 in national English. It was unsuccessful, and is only interesting 
 as showing how completely poetry is a matter of expression. 
 
 No verses more sincere and natural than those of Barnes 
 were ever penned. The poet's intellectual endowments enabled 
 him to express admirably the feelings of the rustic population ; 
 and all his learning had raised no barrier between him and 
 them, as such gifts and accomplishments often do. When he 
 was induced to give readings, the effect upon local audiences is 
 said to have been extraordinary. They recognised the pictures of 
 scenes, people and occupations, as being true to the very life : the 
 poet had not ceased to be in heart and mind one of themselves. 
 Crabbe has greater strength; but even Crabbe has not profounder 
 knowledge of that about which he writes, and even Crabbe is not 
 more unfalteringly true. Burns has a force of passion to which 
 there is nothing comparable in Barnes; but even Burns is not 
 more genuinely than he the poet of rural life and feeling. 
 
 And here perhaps we may find a hint as to the secret of 
 popularity in poetry. It is hardly too much to say that since the 
 decline of Athens the only great poet who has been popular in the 
 widest sense of the word is Robert Burns. Other poets have had 
 audiences wider or narrower; but no one else, at least in our
 
 TENNYSON 4OI 
 
 country, has spoken to the heart of a whole nation ; no one else is 
 known by the people, as Burns is known by every class of the 
 inhabitants of Lowland Scotland. Barnes, it is pretty certain, has 
 already lost part of his hold on Dorset — the absence of the 
 literary tradition there tells against the permanence of his 
 influence. But the success of his readings showed that his 
 poetry did go home to the heart even of the most uncultivated 
 audience. Now the point in common between the two poets is that 
 they both deal with the life and the scenes which are most familiar 
 to their audience, and so deal with them that no barrier is raised 
 between poet and people. Many other poets have handled rural 
 subjects ; but usually their manner of doing so has practically had 
 the effect of translating them into another language. It would be 
 unfair to insist upon the thoroughly sophisticated pastorals of 
 writers such as Pope. But even Wordsworth, notwithstanding his 
 theory of poetic diction and his life among the Cumberland 
 "statesmen," and Tennyson, notwithstanding the simplicity of his 
 English idylls, speak in a tongue not understanded of the people. 
 The culture and the literary associations of three thousand years 
 are behind their simplest utterance; and hence the uneducated 
 feel the chill of unfamiliarity and turn aside. It is not that they 
 are unresponsive to poetry as such, for most human hearts feel 
 dumbly the poetry of life and of nature. This seems to be proved 
 by the fact that the sparse population of a Welsh valley will yield 
 its score of competitors in an eisteddfodic competition ; that three 
 generations after the death of Burns there is hardly a Scottish village 
 which cannot boast of several who know the poet's works really 
 well, and probably of one or two who write verse themselves ; that 
 the Dorset rural audiences listened to Barnes, perhaps with most 
 delight to the humorous pieces, but still with appreciation to those 
 of quieter beauty. Burns in Scotland and Barnes in Dorset have 
 the happy knack of weaving language into beautiful poetry with- 
 out making of their own intellectual superiority a wall between 
 themselves and the sympathies of the people. In Tennyson's 
 Dora the chisel of the artist has smoothed away all the rugged 
 homeliness of the rustic. It belongs to another world, it can 
 never stir the emotions which almost any of the eclogues of 
 w. 26
 
 402 THE LITERATURE OF THE 'VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Barnes will rouse. For an ordinary English rustic audience, it 
 might almost as well be written in Greek. 
 
 What Barnes did best was the eclogue ; but it would be a 
 complete mistake to compare him with the writers of conventional 
 pastoral verse. He depicts no Arcadia, with shepherds piping 
 upon oaten reed, and tending their sheep when they have leisure 
 from the serious business of poetry, but a very real work-a-day 
 Dorset. To this world he is confined, and the range afforded by 
 it is not wide ; but, such as it is, Barnes knew it in every part and 
 aspect. There is humour in A bit d sly Coortin\ there is good 
 sense mingled with satire in The Times, and there is pathos in 
 Woak Hill. The Dorset Poems moreover display a lyrical gift 
 which, if not very great, is nevertheless such that the greatest 
 would own kinship with its possessor. A Wold Friend may be 
 called a Dorset Auld Lang Syne, and The Slanten Light o' Fall 
 brings pleasantly to mind the Tennysonian idyllic poems. 
 
 Perhaps "the Lancashire Burns," Edwin Waugh (i8i 7-1890), 
 may also have helped to turn Tennyson's mind towards dialect. 
 Less gifted than Barnes, he had still a touch of the authentic fire; 
 and even if it were less than it is, his gallant struggle with adver- 
 sity, his success in educating himself and the sweetness of 
 nature which remained unimpaired when fame was won, would 
 of themselves entitle him to honourable remembrance. These 
 moral excellences call to mind the Scottish collier-poet, David 
 Wingate ; but Wingate's verse must be read with an indulgence 
 which Waugh's does not require. The latter first became known 
 through his Sketches of Lancashire LAfe and Localities (1855). 
 Soon after his charming "Come whoam to thi childer and 
 me" gained a success which encouraged him to issue Poems 
 and Songs (1859). Afterwards his publications were frequent, 
 and his collected works fill eleven volumes. Waugh would gain 
 greatly by selection. At his best, though not indeed excellent, he 
 is very good ; for he had sympathy and humour and an observant 
 eye, and also that understanding of others which is the natural 
 outcome of these qualities. But his real ability is apt to be 
 underrated because of the mass of commonplace work with which 
 he has loaded himself.
 
 TENNYSON 403 
 
 If it was the example of Barnes which suggested poetry in 
 
 dialect to the mind of Tennyson, our debt to the former is all the 
 
 greater; for there is an unfettered vigour and life about the 
 
 dialect poems to which there is no parallel in Tennyson's earlier 
 
 works. The success of The Northern Farmer was repeated in The 
 
 Northern Cobbler, The Spinster's Sweet- Arts, Owd Rod and the 
 
 delightful Church- Warden and the Curate, with its fine touches 
 
 of humour and its shrewd worldly wisdom : 
 
 " If ever tha means to git 'igher, 
 "Tha mun tackle the sins o' the Wo'ld, an' not the faults o' the Squire." 
 
 These poems are all intensely dramatic, and it is remarkable that 
 
 most of the characters seem to have been suggested by single 
 
 expressions carried in the poet's mind for many years. Thus, The 
 
 Northern Farmer, Old Style, is founded upon the dying words of 
 
 a farm-bailiff: "God A'mighty httle knows what He's about, a- 
 
 taking me. An' Squire will be so mad an' all." " I conjectured 
 
 the man from that one sentence," said Tennyson. So too the 
 
 farmer of the new style was founded on a sentence reported to 
 
 him, "When I canters my 'erse along the ramper (highway), I 
 
 'ears proputty, proputty, proputty '." Again, The Northern Cobbler 
 
 sprang from a story of a man who " set up a bottle of gin in his 
 
 window when he gave up drinking, in order to defy the drinks" 
 
 And the pathetic Grandmother, which is a kind of pioneer to 
 
 such pieces, is based upon the saying of an old lady, "The spirits 
 
 of my children always seem to hover about me^" 
 
 The art of delineating character once learnt, it proved possible 
 
 to apply it, not only in poems where the dialect makes something 
 
 like a new language, but where, as in the noble Rizpah, it is 
 
 unimportant, or even where there is no dialect at all. Examples 
 
 of the latter kind are the masterly sketch of Sir John Oldcastle, 
 
 Lord Cobham, and Romney's Remorse. Because of the language 
 
 these are more akin than the dialect poems to the classical 
 
 sketches of earlier days ; but they are far more dramatic than the 
 
 latter. Sir John Oldcastle is an individual man ; so is Romney. 
 
 Ulysses is a type : he is the stoical soul. Neither is it the 
 
 ^ Life of Tennyson, ii. o. * ibid, ii. 251. 
 
 * ibid. i. 432. 
 
 26—2
 
 404 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 individuality of the man that impresses us in Lucretius. Powerful 
 and exquisitely beautiful as these poems are, they do not read 
 like the work of a man of dramatic genius. 
 
 This movement towards the dramatic form of art is one of 
 several changes which during the last fifteen or twenty years of 
 his life gave Tennyson's work more of Browning's '* veined 
 humanity " ; and perhaps Browning's example helped to bring 
 about the change. The thought too continues to grow in weight. 
 While the greater number of the early poems have no theme 
 which could find expression in prose at all, a large proportion of 
 the later ones have subjects on which essays or dissertations 
 might be written. They are never prosaic : Tennyson was far 
 too good an artist to fall into that mistake. But he has passed 
 the boundary line which divides two great classes of the lovers of 
 verse. To some, Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner are the 
 very acme of poetry ; others would not give a single one of the 
 Canterbury Tales for whole volumes of such dreams. Those 
 who prefer poems which are poems and nothing else like best the 
 Tennyson of the earlier days ; those who prefer a theme, turn 
 rather to the later Tennyson. To some the shadowy, mystical, 
 elusive Lady of Shalott may seem more precious than all the 
 Idylls of the King. 
 
 Tennyson has himself supplied a measure of the change in 
 the two poems, Locksley Hall and Locksley Hall : Sixty Years 
 After \ and these two accordingly are found to divide readers 
 much in the way suggested. Another feeling, however, enters 
 here as well. An old favourite is not easily displaced, and a 
 second treatment of a subject once successfully dealt with by a 
 great writer is rarely received with thankfulness. Even change is 
 dangerous, as Addison pointed out to Pope sensibly enough, 
 though he proved to be mistaken in the particular instance. 
 Another instance of this unconscious partiality occurs in the 
 works of Tennyson himself. He wrote his well-known Charge of 
 the Light Brigade when the whole country was ringing with the 
 glory and throbbing with the grief of the charge. The verses are 
 not great poetry, but they are extremely spirited, and they echo 
 the tramp of charging horse. Therefore they won their place in
 
 TENNYSON 405 
 
 the heart of the nation when it was open to receive them. Some 
 thirty years later the poet celebrated in verses not quite so 
 impetuous and rushing, but far more skilful, far more subtly 
 adapted to the subject, the charge of the Heavy Brigade. But 
 the earlier poem still holds the field. Everyone knows it, while 
 only the lovers and readers of poetry know the later one. 
 
 The same prejudice tells powerfully in favour of the earlier 
 Locksley Hall. It too is far more widely known than the later 
 poem is ever likely to be ; and yet on its merits there is much to 
 be said for Locksley Hall : Sixty Years After. The question here, 
 however, is not the relative merits of the two poems, but the 
 measure they afford of the distance traversed by Tennyson, in art, 
 between 1842 and 1886. Both, of course, are dramatic utter- 
 ances, but they are none the less representative. Now the essen- 
 tial difference between the two poems is just that the earlier one 
 is of much slighter substance, more visionary, less realistic. The 
 young man is a dreamer, optimistic at heart in spite of the 
 bitterness due to thwarted passion. He is sanguine of the 
 progress of science, sanguine of the establishment of universal 
 peace, sanguine of a steady progress through the ages — " Let the 
 great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change'." 
 In the later poem the old man is far less optimistic, and for the 
 visions of heavens filled with commerce and of "airy navies 
 grappling in the central blue," he substitutes the sad comment of 
 his eighty years' experience : 
 
 "Half the marvels of my morning, triumphs over time and space, 
 Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage into commonest commonplace." 
 
 The hope of universal peace has faded away into a future too dim 
 and distant to influence action or to inspire hope. Science has 
 not cured the evils under which men groan. The slums of the 
 cities, their dirt and vice and disease, show to the old man that 
 the process the youth thought nearly ended is hardly even begun. 
 The picture is gloomy but it is powerful. If it is less attractive 
 
 ^ The phrase " grooves of change " was suggested to Tennyson by a ride in 
 the first train from Liverpool to Manchester, when he thought that the wheels 
 ran in a groove.
 
 406 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 than the one which is drawn in the earlier poem, it has that 
 strength which fidelity to the real always gives. 
 
 Along with these changes in substance there goes a change in 
 versification also. The two poems just spoken of are again 
 typical. The later is less smooth than the earlier ; and in many 
 other pieces as well Tennyson seems to have sought to produce 
 the impression of rugged strength either by his choice of metre or 
 by his method of handling it. The reason is not decline of skill, 
 for the metre is admirably adapted to the end in view ; and when 
 he has another purpose the poet can be as smooth as of old, — 
 witness the beautiful Crossing the Bar, or the exquisite lullaby in 
 The Foresters, which for delicacy of touch will bear comparison 
 with any of Tennyson's songs : — 
 
 "To sleep I to sleep! The long bright day is done, 
 And darkness rises from the fallen sun. 
 To sleep ! to sleep ! 
 
 Whate'er thy joys, they vanish with the day ; 
 Whate'er thy griefs, in sleep they fade away. 
 To sleep ! to sleep ! 
 
 Sleep, mournful heart, and let the past be past ! 
 Sleep, happy soul ! all life will sleep at last. 
 To sleep! to sleep!" 
 
 There remain to notice only the dramas, which are the most 
 remarkable, though also in the opinion of many the most unfortu- 
 nate, of the later developments of Tennyson's work. But whatever 
 we may think of the quality of Tennyson's dramas, a careful 
 examination of his work makes it evident that they were the 
 natural goal to which he was bound to come. Writing for the 
 stage is just the last step in the process which we see in the 
 dialect poems. The dramas open with Qiieen Mary (1875), 
 which was speedily followed by Harold (1876); then came 
 Becket^, The Cup aild The Falcon, all in 1884. The Foresters, 
 published in the year of the poet's death, bears marks of declining 
 powers. The other shorter plays are all more or less faulty also. 
 Neither The Falcon nor The Promise of May would vindicate 
 the poet's claim to the title of dramatist. Of the minor dramatic 
 
 ^ It had been primed in 1879.
 
 TENNYSON 407 
 
 pieces the best is Tfie Cup, which is powerfully written, and in 
 which the characters are well and clearly drawn. 
 
 But upon Tennyson as a dramatist judgment must pass in 
 respect of the three English historical plays. As a rule it has 
 been given decisively against him : Mr Stopford Brooke has even 
 written a large volume of criticism on Tennyson alone, without 
 deeming it necessary to criticise the dramas at all. Here again, 
 however, we may suspect the influence of unconscious prejudice. 
 Just as the popularity of The Charge of the Light Brigade operates 
 against the acceptance of The Charge of the Heavy Brigade, and 
 the earlier Locks ley Hall against the later, so the very greatness 
 and the deep-rooted fame of Tennyson as a lyrist, as author of 
 In Memoriam and of Idylls of the King, make it at first a little 
 difficult to think of him as also a dramatist. If Shakespeare had 
 spent a long life in writing exquisite songs and sonnets and narra- 
 tive poems, had been recognised for many years as facile princeps 
 in his art, and then had suddenly produced Hamlet, possibly his 
 contemporaries would have resented it. Probably too in 1875 no 
 critic opened Queen Mary without a more or less conscious 
 expectation that it would prove, if not a failure, at any rate some- 
 thing below its author's level. That certainly was the critical 
 verdict, and it cannot be denied that the verdict was sound. 
 Queen Mary showed that Tennyson had still a good deal to learn 
 about dramatic art. It contains matter enough for two plays. 
 The stage is overcrowded, and one character jostles out another, 
 so that all but a few of the chief ones remain undeveloped. 
 There is bustle without movement, and where there ought to be 
 excitement the reader is cold and listless. What is perhaps most 
 disappointing of all is the fact that Queen Mary is not a specially 
 poetical play. 
 
 Harold showed that, though he was nearer seventy than sixty 
 when he wrote Queen Mary, the poet was not yet too old to learn. 
 He reduced the figures of his drama to manageable numbers, he 
 made the action more rapid, he put life into the characters. The 
 figure of Harold himself is admirably drawn — bold, frank, truthful, 
 yet led by an inevitable destiny into lies and the breach of his oath. 
 He stands between two worlds, the last of the old race and its
 
 408 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 champion, yet with gleams in his thought from the new world 
 which is to rise from its ashes. Half-sceptic, he yet feels the 
 force of dreams and prophecies and portents which he less than 
 half believes. 
 
 "They seem to me too narrow, all the faiths 
 Of this grown world of ours, whose baby eye 
 Saw them sufficient." 
 
 He scoffs at the portent of the comet. Yet the knowledge that he 
 has sworn falsely on the bones of the saints almost palsies his 
 arm, and he is saddened by the bowing of the Holy Rood, even 
 while he remains uncertain whether it bowed at all or no, or what 
 was signified if it did bow. The other figures too are good. 
 William of Normandy, though much more lightly sketched than 
 Harold, forms an effective contrast. So does Edith to Aldwyth. 
 The former is perhaps the most charming of all Tennyson's 
 women. 
 
 Becket showed still further advance, both in dramatic manage- 
 ment and in respect of the delineation of character. It is indeed 
 the greatest literary drama of recent years. The prologue is 
 perhaps questionable in art; for it seems hardly proper for the 
 dramatist to reveal so much of his purpose ere the action begins. 
 But it is admirably written, and whether proper or not for the 
 spectator in the theatre, it is useful to the student in the closet 
 No commentary in the same space can reveal so much of the 
 mind and purpose of the writer. In Becket Tennyson is happy 
 in the first place in his choice of subject. The crisis of the 
 struggle between Church and State in the reign of Henry II 
 is not only one of the most important, but one of the most 
 strikingly dramatic, in English history, and it is surprising that 
 it had not been used up before. Moreover, the great question 
 is, for dramatic purposes, very happily embodied in the two 
 characters of Henry and Becket, whom Tennyson brings to- 
 gether with excellent effect. There are striking points both ot 
 resemblance and of difference between them, — of resemblance 
 principally by nature, and of difference arising from circumstance 
 and training. By nature, Becket is a stronger Henry ; and the 
 Churchman's superiority is further increased by better discipline
 
 TENNYSON 409 
 
 and by self-restraint. The female characters, Eleanor and 
 Rosamund, are on the other hand contrasted, the hard glitter 
 of the former showing up the gentleness of the latter. In this 
 play and in Harold lies the justification of Tennyson's experiments 
 in the drama. He had acquired the dramatic skill which he did not 
 possess when he wrote Queen Mary, and the poetry which seemed 
 to have deserted him in that play had returned. The best part of 
 ten years of his life had been devoted — or so it seemed — to these 
 experiments, and not unnaturally his admirers grudged the time. 
 But he judged better than they. He could hardly have surpassed 
 himself in other forms of verse, or added anything strikingly new ; 
 while the figures of Harold and Becket, of Edith and Eleanor, 
 are memorable additions to the dramatic gallery of England. 
 
 Of all the poetical writings of the Victorian era, those just 
 passed in review are the most broadly representative of the age to 
 which they belong. It was this fact, quite as much as the excellence 
 of his work, which made Tennyson the most popular poet of his 
 time : he gained the ear of the age, because, as we have seen, he 
 spoke with its voice. The excellences are obvious. With less 
 fervour and inspiration than Shelley, he has a more certain touch. 
 His best work is hardly equal to the best of Keats, but he has left 
 so much more that is good and even excellent as to fill a bigger 
 place in literature. But in some respects the causes which brought 
 about his popularity are likely to tell against his permanent fame. 
 He is too prone to echo back the thoughts of his own time and 
 country. Patriotism is good ; but it is not a pure good when 
 there goes along with it a hard, unsympathetic tone of mind 
 towards other races ; and in Tennyson we hear rather too much 
 of "the blind hysterics of the Celt," and " the red fool-fury of the 
 Seine." He lived under the sway of the Teutonic idea, and 
 already the Teutonic idea is discredited. Shakespeare is no less 
 patriotic, but in the universal range of his sympathies are em- 
 braced the Italian, the Jew and the Moor, as well as the English- 
 man. A similar impression is left when we examine Tennyson's 
 intellectual range. In Memoriam is in one aspect an essay in 
 apologetics. For this reason it appealed to his contemporaries, 
 but it will survive in spite of this, not because of it. While
 
 4IO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 beauty is independent of time, particular forms of doubt and 
 belief are not. Men may agree to use the same phrases, but 
 there can be no effectual agreement to mean the same thing 
 by them. 
 
 Such special causes of temporary popularity will tend not to 
 remembrance but to oblivion in ages to come. It is a great thing 
 to have expressed best of all the thought and feeling of one 
 century; but it is not so great as to have expressed the thoughts of 
 all centuries. When the time is gone the interest passes away. 
 There remains, however, to be set against this the pure and 
 exquisite beauty of much of Tennyson's work, the melody of his 
 verse, the perennial charm of the Hterary associations which he, 
 better than any contemporary, knew how to impart to his poetry. 
 There remains also the mass of thought which is not of one age 
 but of all. By virtue of these Tennyson's memory is safe.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 BROWNING 
 
 Browning's poems vary in quality at least as widely as 
 Tennyson's ; and there are differences in tone between the works 
 of one period as a whole and those of another. But there is no 
 such revolution as that which is implied in the development of the 
 dramatic element in Tennyson. On the contrary, the principle 
 upon which Browning's work is based remains singularly uniform 
 from beginning to end: he never swerved from the conviction 
 that his genius was fundamentally dramatic. He contrasts with 
 Tennyson also in his remarkable independence. Only a few great 
 poets owe so much to their predecessors as Tennyson, while hardly 
 any are so entirely self-sustained as Browning. Tennyson is full of 
 echoes from the classics; but though Browning knew all the 
 Greek and Latin poets, there are few lines or phrases in his works 
 which can be traced back to them. Browning could when he 
 pleased interweave among his lines literary reminiscences drawn 
 from his vast reading. But his method of conception was 
 essentially his own, and his work did not readily amalgamate with 
 the work of others. The echoes of Shelley in his early poetry 
 seem not quite in keeping with the context. He felt the incon- 
 gruity, and early learnt to rely upon himself alone. 
 
 Even his marriage with a poetess had little influence upon 
 Browning's work. Though there is a change after 1846, the 
 greater part of it seems to be due not to her but to himself: it 
 was something which would have come whether he had married 
 
 6
 
 412 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 or not. The scanty success achieved after many efforts made his 
 abandonment of the drama almost inevitable. No doubt the long 
 residence in Italy was a result of the marriage, and no doubt it 
 strengthened the Italian influence. But this was no new thing: 
 Browning had visited Italy before, and had already felt the charm 
 of the Italian Renascence. Further, although he knew and loved 
 Italian literature, his own work remains Teutonic in spirit. Per- 
 haps no English poet ever knew any foreign country as well as 
 Browning knew Italy ; certainly none has ever dedicated more of 
 his best work to a land which was not his own. Pippa Passes, 
 Luria, A Soul's Tragedy, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Lippo Lippi, The 
 Bishop at St Praxed's, with many more of the shorter poems, and 
 the great Ping and the Book itself, are all Italian in subject-matter; 
 they show an infinity of knowledge; and yet not one of them 
 could for a moment be conceived to be the work of an Italian. 
 Tennyson's knowledge of the country, the people and the literature 
 was far narrower, but there is a great deal more of the spirit of 
 Italian poetry embodied in his verse. Byron is far less alien. 
 The Elizabethan dramatists seem more in harmony with Venice 
 or Verona than Browning ever is. 
 
 If Keats was born a Greek, Browning was born a Goth — the 
 author of The City of Dreadful Night has said so in other words. 
 His case proves how much spiritual affinity has to do with literary 
 resemblances, and how dangerous is the argument that such 
 resemblances indicate direct influence. Anyone familiar with 
 German philosophy as well as with Browning would be tempted 
 to argue that the latter had been powerfully swayed by the 
 philosophers, and that some of his most characteristic and most 
 frequently reiterated ideas were borrowed from them. And yet 
 the poet " was emphatic in his assurance that he knew neither the 
 German philosophers nor their reflection in Coleridge^" Why, 
 then, is it that there is in his poetry far more of the spirit of that 
 Germany in which he never lived, and whose language and 
 literature he knew very imperfectly, than there is of Italy, though 
 he knew it thoroughly and lived in it for many of the best years of 
 his life ? No answer can be given more definite than that, some- 
 ^ Mrs Sutherland Orr's Lijc of J>rowni>i^; 108.
 
 BROWNING 413 
 
 how, the poet was born a Goth. But stress must not be laid on 
 blood; for English, Scotch, German and Creole meet in Robert 
 Browning ; and some believe that there was a Jewish element as 
 well. 
 
 The Brownings settled in Italy, partly for the sake of 
 Mrs Browning's health, and partly because the unhappy relations 
 between her and her father, on account of his violent and un- 
 reasonable opposition to the marriage, made it desirable that 
 father and daughter should Hve far apart. Their home, till 
 Mrs Browning's death, was at Florence, whence Browning sent 
 his two next works, Christmas Eve and Easter Day (1850) and 
 Men and Women (1855). 
 
 The former of these poems is the only work of Browning's in 
 which we may with probability trace the influence of Mrs Brown- 
 ing ; and even in this instance the influence is conjectural. The 
 manner is Browning's, and the subject is one which would 
 naturally attract him. It may, therefore, be no more than a 
 coincidence that the poet's first publication after his marriage 
 is that in which he most explicitly deals with questions of 
 religion, or rather of theology, for he is religious throughout. 
 But whatever may be the secret of its genesis, Christmas Eve and 
 Easter Day is a poem of peculiar interest as that in which the 
 poet's own views are most clearly revealed; for in spite of the 
 dramatic principle we may safely ascribe to himself a large part of 
 its substance. It is further interesting because of a connexion, 
 unusually close for Browning, with contemporary thought. In 
 this respect Browning is unlike all his chief contemporaries. 
 Tennyson, Arnold, Clough, Rossetti and Dobell, all betray them- 
 selves not only as poets of the nineteenth century, but of a 
 particular decade or, at widest, a particular quarter of it. The 
 themes which caught their imagination would not have caught it 
 a little earlier or a little later, or else they would have been treated 
 differently. But Browning did not much love to work on topics 
 connected with his own generation. To him, time was a matter 
 almost of indifference ; for the human soul, in which his interest 
 was centred, has remained much the same since the days of 
 Adam. If he had a preference, it was for the Italian Renascence
 
 414 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 rather than for any other age or country. Nevertheless, he kept 
 his eyes open to what was' taking place around him. Sludge the 
 Medium shows that he was awake to the rise of spiritualism ; 
 perhaps because Mrs Browning would not allow him to sleep. 
 He was also interested, in a scornful way, in the ecclesiastical 
 ferment caused by Newman. He was familiar with all the 
 "thrilling views of the surplice question," and he was con- 
 temptuously amused by the clerical figure with the chains of 
 Peter round his waist, and his back " brave with the needle- 
 work of noodledom." So too he noted the effect of Essays and 
 Reviews and of Colenso's work as well as the negative criticism 
 of the German school ; while he showed no more inclination to 
 accept this without reserve than to give over his intellect into the 
 keeping of the Catholic party. 
 
 It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that Browning should 
 have chosen in Christmas Eve to make his comments upon the 
 two extreme forms of faith which divide his countrymen, and upon 
 the form of scepticism which was threatening both. As the 
 representatives of faith he chooses, on the one hand, ultra-Protes- 
 tantism, "the dissidence of dissent," and, on the other, Roman 
 Catholicism. In both he finds much to question and to reject, 
 but in both he finds present the "one thing needful," love. This 
 is where churches and chapels have the decisive advantage over 
 the German professor's lecture-room. The last speaks only to the 
 intellect, they address the heart; and Browning is always disposed 
 to give the heart a higher place than the head. Stupid as is the 
 doctrine of the Nonconformist preacher, and gross as is the yoke 
 of Rome, either is preferable to the negations of the German 
 professor. The two former may "poison the air for healthy 
 breathing," 
 
 "But the Critic leaves no air to poison; 
 Pumps out with ruthless ingenuity 
 Atom by atom, and leaves you — vacuity." 
 
 It will be observed that, proceeding from a different starting-point, 
 Paracelsus reaches a similar conclusion. The difference between 
 the two poems is that the earlier is fundamentally philosophical.
 
 BROWNING 415 
 
 the later one, religious. In this case at least the change is not an 
 improvement. In the shadowy figure of Christ which guides the 
 speaker, warns him against contempt for faith, even stupid faith, 
 and deserts him when he goes where no faith is, there is no 
 adequate counterpoise to the loss of the free discussion and the 
 dramatic evolution of Paracelsus. 
 
 There are two artistically excellent pieces in Christmas Eve. 
 One is the admirably humorous description of the gathering of 
 the congregation in the little chapel. It is an imaginary scene, 
 but it is convincing. Browning's picture, taken from nowhere, has, 
 nevertheless, the fidelity of a photograph, and in scores and 
 hundreds of places in England it is reproduced, year in year out, 
 in all its details, except the presence of the poet. And the 
 triumph of the poet is that out of all this ugliness he has made 
 something which is, though faithful, yet artistically beautiful, and 
 through all the vulgarity of the doctrine he has retained sympathy. 
 The second passage, scarcely less admirable, is the picture of the 
 German professor himself. Little as Browning likes the teaching, 
 he cannot but admire the " martyr to mild enthusiasm," even 
 though it be enthusiasm for destruction. 
 
 Easter Day is less varied than the companion piece, and on 
 the whole it is less successful as a poem. Superficially viewed, it 
 seems to teach a doctrine of asceticism, for the soul in the vision 
 is condemned because it has refused to renounce the pleasures of 
 the world. But this is certainly not the meaning. Browning was 
 no ascetic. To him, the world "means intensely, and means 
 good"; and no one has sung more fervidly than he the delight of 
 life. "How good is man's life, the mere living," cries David in 
 Saul; and not only David, but Pippa, the gipsy Duchess, Fra 
 Lippo Lippi, and the Bishop of St Praxed's — characters morally 
 lofty and morally low — are all alike keenly alive to the pleasures 
 of sense. Neither does the poet impute it to them for blame ; on 
 the contrary, to the end of his life he teaches that it is a merit. 
 The pleasures the world yields, wisely used, are instruments to the 
 mind, as food is an instrument to the body : both are equally 
 legitimate and may be equally necessary. In Two Camels it is the 
 abstemious animal that breaks down, and he does so because of
 
 4l6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 foolish abstinence. Rabbi Ben Ezra condemns the opposition 
 between soul and flesh : — 
 
 "Let us not always say 
 
 ' Spite of this flesh to-day 
 I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!* 
 
 As the bird wings and sings, 
 
 Let us cry * All good things 
 Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!'" 
 
 The poet was capable of sympathy with asceticism when directed 
 to higher ends ; but for asceticism as an end in itself he had 
 nothing but dislike. So it is in Easter Day as well. A careful 
 reading shows that here too what the poet really teaches is not 
 asceticism. The condemnation of the erring soul is pronounced, 
 not because the world has been enjoyed, but because the enjoy- 
 ment of it has stood in the way of something higher. The soul in 
 its complete contentment with the beauty and delight of the world 
 has forgotten what is greater still, the love of the Maker of it ; and 
 sentence passes in vindication of this higher thing. The analogy 
 with Paracelsus is again manifest. Neither truth nor beauty, far 
 less pleasure, is the central point of Browning's system, but 
 love. 
 
 Five years after these two poems Browning published Me7i and 
 Women, the collection which gained, and on the whole has retained, 
 the widest popularity of all his works. Not that the poems so 
 named in the collected editions of his works are to be identified 
 with the volume so named in 1855. Then, the "men and women" 
 were fifty in number, and there was an additional poem, the 
 beautiful One Word More, addressed to his wife. Many of them 
 are now to be found among the Dramatic Lyrics and Dramatic 
 Romances; while the one-act drama. In a Balcony, stands by itself. 
 Various causes may be assigned for the popularity of Men and 
 Women. The poet was in the full maturity and vigour of his 
 powers, and the method he adopted was that which best suited 
 his genius. Moreover, he is here less difficult to understand, less 
 crabbed and eccentric than he too frequently is. The quality 
 therefore is very high, and the average level is perhaps more 
 uniformly sustained than it is anywhere else. Even those, there-
 
 BROWNING 417 
 
 fore, who think that Browning has done still greater things, will 
 admit that the admirers of Men and Women have much to say in 
 justification of their preference. 
 
 But Men and Women does not stand alone. In substance and 
 principle its contents are closely akin to the Dra?natic Lyrics 
 and Dramatic Romances of Bells and Pomegranates, and also to 
 Dramatis PersoJiae (1864). They are akin likewise to the 
 Pacchiarotto, the Dra?natic Idylls, the Parley ings, and other 
 volumes of later days. But the later groups are all marred by the 
 growing eccentricity and, as it would seem, the wilfulness, of 
 Browning, so that, except for a few pieces here and there, they are 
 hardly worthy to be put beside the earlier collections. These 
 collections form together one of the most precious and pro- 
 foundly original of all the contributions to the poetic literature 
 of the nineteenth century. Browning did not invent the dramatic 
 monologue, but he made it specially his own, and no one else has 
 ever put such rich and varied material into it. The defects which 
 prevented his complete success in the regular drama are not 
 apparent in this cognate form. He takes just what interests him, 
 and consequently he is nearly always inspired, nearly always at his 
 best. The style, indeed, is invariably his own and does not change 
 with the character as it should; but under such conditions the 
 fact matters little. Few of the poems are long enough to render 
 the fault conspicuous, and a monologue cannot present that 
 contrast of characters which would make it wholly unnatural. 
 
 All that is best and all that is most characteristic of Browning 
 is represented in these dramatic monologues. They include the 
 finest of his poems of love, and in nothing is Browning more 
 distinguished than in these. Evelyn Hope, The Last Ride Together, 
 One Way of Love, Any Wife to any Husband, A Woman's last 
 Word, By the Fireside, In a Gondola, The Worst of It, Porphyria' s 
 Lover, James Lee's Wife, One Word More and Lyric Love, are a 
 collection not to be paralleled in English poetry, nor, probably, in 
 the poetry of any language. The most remarkable thing about 
 them all is their complete independence of convention and 
 their elevation of tone. The ordinary love-song is inspired by 
 desire and has no small element of physical passion. This 
 
 w. 27
 
 41 8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 sensuousness characterised, in particular, the poetry of the Pre- 
 Raphaelites, a few years after the date we have reached. But in 
 Browning the intellectual element is too powerful to allow this 
 predominance of sense even when the poet is dealing with the 
 relations of the sexes. All these poems throb with emotion, yet 
 none of them, except In a Gondola, can be said to be absorbed in 
 it. Porphyrid!s Lover, though a study of madness, is, like all the 
 rest, inspired by intellect. 
 
 Coimected with this point is the fact that while Minnesinger 
 and Troubadour and Cavalier sing the song of desire not gratified, 
 many of Browning's are poems of fruition, the utterance of the 
 husband or the wife, of a love happy or unhappy, but, in either 
 case, of one which looks to the present and the past at least as 
 much as to the future. Connected with it too is the fact that 
 nearly all Browning's pieces are dramatic. One Word More is 
 the expression of the poet's love for his wife, and the beautiful 
 apostrophe, Lyric Love, is addressed to her disembodied spirit. 
 For this reason these two pieces have not only the charm of a rare 
 beauty, but that peculiar interest which belongs to the personal 
 utterance of a poet who is habitually dramatic. All the others are 
 dramatic. A poet like Burns is never dramatic ; and as a rule the 
 lyric utterance of love has not been genuinely dramatic even when 
 it has been so in form. But Browning's pieces are dramatic in 
 essence and not merely in show. He conceives some definite 
 situation, his poem gives the emotions of the persona dramatis 
 placed in that situation, and thus the individuality of the speaker 
 is brought out. Perhaps, because of its wider range, James Lee's 
 Wife is the best illustration It traces the woman's mind 
 dramatically through all the stages, from the first dawning of 
 suspicion that her husband's love is gone from her until the 
 separation. Its success depends wholly upon Browning's realisa- 
 tion of the character. The fundamentals of human nature are 
 merely the groundwork : the passion of love is individualised by 
 Browning as much as the passion of avarice is individualised by 
 Shakespeare in the person of Shylock. 
 
 One result of this dramatic conception is that Browning has 
 greatly the advantage in point of variety over all the other lyrists
 
 BROWNING 419 
 
 of love. The only limits are the possibilities of dramatic situation 
 and of variety of character within the poet's range of conception. 
 And in Browning's case the range is wide. James Lee's Wife giv«&^ 
 one phase of jealousy; but there is a widely different one in ' 
 Cristina and Moiialdeschi and again in The Worst of It. In Cristina "^^ 
 
 it leads to revenge, an end true to nature, but common enough. 
 In The Worst of It we have one of the most striking examples of 
 Browning's originality. It is the utterance of a man whose wife 
 has been unfaithful to him ; but instead of breaking out into wild 
 rage at the wrong done to him. Browning's speaker is agonised to 
 think of the degradation the guilty wife has brought upon herself 
 His love survives the wrong he has suffered : what he can hardly 
 realise is the wrong she has done against herself : — 
 
 "She ruined? How? No heaven for her? 
 Crowns to give, and none for the brow 
 That looked like marble and smelt like myrrh? 
 
 Shall the robe be worn, and the palm-bianch borne, 
 And she go graceless, she graced now 
 Beyond all saints, as themselves aver ? " 
 
 Equal self-command, exercised in a widely different spirit and with 
 another result, is shown in A Forgiveness. In Porphyria' s Lover, 
 In a Gofidola and Evelyn Hope there is scarcely less originality 
 and freshness. The first depicts the lover and murderer sitting 
 with the murdered girl's head on his shoulder; the second, the 
 death-scene of the lover stabbed by the side of her he loves ; and 
 the third, loveliest perhaps of all, is the old man's declaration of 
 his love for the dead girl, the emblem of their secret enclosed 
 within the " sweet cold hand," and his confidence that she will 
 " wake, and remember, and understand." 
 
 Scarcely second in importance even to the poems treating of 
 love are those which deal with religion, and in pieces of this class 
 the group of publications under consideration is remarkably rich. 
 The principal poems can be arranged in a sort of order, according 
 to the character or situation conceived; and when they are so 
 arranged we see that they cover nearly the whole range of religious 
 thought from the first dim gropings of the natural man for some- 
 thing above himself up to complete faith, and thence downwards 
 
 27—2
 
 420 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 again to scepticism. Thus that profoundly interesting poem, 
 Caliban upon Setebos, has its purpose revealed by its secondary 
 title, " Natural Theology in the Island." The hint is taken from 
 Shakespeare ; and the deity, Setebos, whom Caliban evolves from 
 his own mind, is such as might be conceived by a brutal savage, 
 not without intellect, but completely destitute of the moral virtues. 
 The poem might serve as a sermon on Goethe's text, "Man never 
 knows how anthropomorphic he is," and it goes to show that each 
 man has the god whom he deserves. As Caliban's deity is created 
 entirely out of his own nature, the motives attributed to him are 
 those upon which Caliban himself would act. He spares or 
 destroys his creatures, " loving not, hating not, just choosing so," 
 even as Caliban lets twenty crabs go and crushes the twenty-first. 
 The covert satire on theology is highly effective. The .satiric 
 vein is rare in Browning; but Caliban upon Setebos, Sludge the 
 Medium and Bishop Blougrams Apology, prove that he possessed 
 the gift and only lacked the will to use it. 
 
 Above Caliban stand poems such as Cleon and the Epistle of 
 
 Karshish, which express the mood of mind of a heathen brought 
 
 into contact, more or less intimate, with Christianity. In the 
 
 former the contact is of the slightest. Cleon, a Greek of the 
 
 highest gifts and accomplishments, has heard of Paulus, who, 
 
 however, proves to be " a mere barbarian Jew," possibly identical 
 
 with Christus; and Cleon has all a Greek's contempt for barbarians. 
 
 It is inconceivable that anything hid from him can be known to 
 
 such as they. Nevertheless, Cleon bears witness to the natural 
 
 craving for that which Christianity promises, namely immortality. 
 
 It seems so natural and so right that he could accept it all, 
 
 were not the circumstances incredible: were it true, Jove surely 
 
 must have revealed it to the Greeks. In the Epistle of Karshish, 
 
 a closer contact comes to a man by nature more prone to believe; 
 
 for Karshish is not a rationalising Greek, but an Arab physician 
 
 who has a touch of the mysticism of his race, which holds in 
 
 check the sceptical tendency of his scientific training. He has 
 
 seen and talked with Lazarus, the story of the raising from the 
 
 dead impresses him in spite of himself, and something not 
 
 altogether earthly in the bearing of Lazarus compels him to pay
 
 BROWNING 421 
 
 an attention to the story which a mere ordinary tale of miracle 
 would not deserve. The character of Karshish as a reasoner and 
 a man of science obliges him to thrust this story aside ; but it 
 recurs again and again in spite of him. What most deeply 
 impresses him is the conception of the love of God, and of the 
 union of human attributes with omnipotence. Granting the truth 
 of Lazarus' story, that Christ was very God, then " the All-Great 
 were the All- Loving too"; and the temptation to believe this is so 
 strong that Karshish is almost prepared to bear the scoffs and 
 jeers of his sceptical friends and accept the new faith. 
 
 Two other poems, Smd and Rabbi Ben Ezra, are the utter- 
 ances of Israelites ; but the latter is so highly idealised that it may 
 be regarded as almost independent of time, place and circumstance. 
 Saul, a poem unsurpassed for lyrical fervour and beauty, evidently 
 occupied Browning's thoughts for a long time. The first half of 
 it appeared among Bells and Pomegranates; but it had to wait ten 
 years for completion, and the whole was carefully revised. The 
 speaker is David, and the poem is a prophecy of the Messiah 
 who had been promised to the line of Jesse — not, however, the 
 Messiah of Jewish tradition, but the Christian Messiah. The two 
 great points of Karshish, the humanity in Godhead and the union 
 of infinite love with infinite power, are in Saul likewise. But 
 there is a difference. What in Karshish is no more than a hope 
 — is hardly even that — becomes in Saul a confident prophecy. 
 Though the time is pre-Christian, the fulness of conviction makes 
 it essentially a Christian poem. 
 
 We reach the culmination in Rabbi Ben Ezra, one of the 
 greatest poems Browning ever wrote. It is put into the mouth of 
 a Jew ; but for once Browning is not anxious to individualise, his 
 aim is rather to idealise. Rabbi Ben Ezra is an old man, the type 
 of all that is best and wisest in his race. There is no dogma in 
 his utterances, nothing distinctive of the Jewish or even of the 
 Christian faith. What he says might be appropriately put into the 
 mouth of a Socrates or of a St Francis of Assisi ; for the purest 
 religion is of any creed, or of none. The poem is the embodiment 
 of all that is deepest in Browning's philosophy of religion, and all 
 that is highest in his morality. Nowhere else, except in the Pope 
 of The Ring and the Book, can we be so sure that we have Brown-
 
 422 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 ing's own thought, just the best that he can conceive, unaltered 
 and unmodified by dramatic conditions. What induced Browning 
 to ascribe these thoughts to Rabbi Ben Ezra may have been the 
 fact that the Rabbi was one of those Jews who taught the doctrine 
 of immortality ; for this is the teaching of the poem too. No more 
 confident and triumphant poem was ever written ; it has the mag- 
 nificent faith of certain of the Psalms. The Rabbi welcomes age : 
 it is " the last of life, for which the first was made." He welcomes 
 pain and doubt : they indicate kinship to God, closer than that of 
 the brutes which are undisturbed by them. He refuses to accept 
 "apparent failure": better high aim than low achievement — "a 
 brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale." And 
 all is summed up in the doctrine of a universe divinely governed. 
 Carpe diem is folly : — 
 
 " Fool ! All that is, at all, 
 
 Lasts ever, past recall ; 
 Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure : 
 
 What entered into thee, 
 
 That was, is, and shall be: 
 Time's wheel runs back or stops : Potter and clay endure." 
 
 Browning afterwards expanded this teaching, and made it argu- 
 mentative in La Saisiaz ; but he never improved upon it, never, 
 perhaps, touched the subject so wisely again. 
 
 A Death in the Desert belongs, like Rabbi Ben Ezra, to the 
 volume of Dramatis Personae, and is also notable among the 
 religious poems. It is lower, as theology is lower than rehgion ; 
 but it adds one thing of importance which is absent from the 
 other poem, the element of definite Christian doctrine. As a rule, 
 Browning is disposed to shun this ; but in A Death in the Desert 
 St John, dying solitary in extreme old age, the last of all who have 
 personally known the Christ, argues out his faith on the ground of 
 what he has seen and known. In doing so he gives expression to 
 the thoughts rather of Browning's time than of the historical 
 St John. The poet's purpose was not so much to carry back the 
 mind to the first century of the Christian era, as to put in the 
 most impressive way the arguments which were likely to carry 
 conviction to his own generation. The poem, therefore, while it 
 is dramatic in its accessories — the cave in which the old man lies
 
 BROWNING 423 
 
 dying, his attendants and the Bactrian sentinel — is hardly more 
 dramatic in thought than Rabbi Ben Ezra ; but the scene and the 
 character add impressiveness to the statement of difficulties and 
 the emphatic assertion of knowledge on the part of the dying 
 man. 
 
 Lucretius thought that religion was the great bane of the 
 human race, and he could give striking support to his opinion. 
 Widely as Browning differed, he too was conscious of the element 
 of evil, and he shows part of it in Holy- Cross Day. Another 
 aspect, again, is shown in Bishop Blougram's Apology. The 
 apology is put into the mouth of a man who is not quite sure 
 whether to believe or not. Seventy years ago men were certain 
 on the subject, and Blougram would have been a sceptic; but 
 times have changed, and he is a man of the time. It is safer to 
 believe ; there can be no harm in it ; whereas there is disastrous 
 harm to the sceptic if the creeds happen to be right. Moreover, 
 it pays to believe — or to act belief By so acting Blougram has 
 got all the best the earth affords, and he points out to Gigadibs, 
 who values himself on his unbelief, how much more practically 
 wise his own course has been and how much more fruit it has 
 yielded. Hardly ever has Browning sustained dramatic propriety 
 better than in this piece : it rivals Sludge the Medium and The 
 Bishop at St Fraxed's, each a masterpiece in its way, and is 
 perhaps clearly surpassed only by Guido. Browning, of course, 
 knows that the argument is sophistical. A faith assumed not 
 because it is believed, but because it would be safe to believe it, 
 is, in the real sense of the word faith, absurd. But Blougram is 
 allowed to speak for himself without the least interference from 
 his creator; he scores a triumph over Gigadibs; and it is not even 
 clear that Browning does not sympathise with him rather than 
 with Gigadibs, though the latter is the honester man of the two. 
 Certainly Blougram has won worldly success, and within its limits 
 worldly success is a good thing. But the poet must have smiled 
 sardonically when Wiseman expressed the opinion that possibly 
 the author of the collection of poems among which his own 
 portrait appeared might be converted to the Catholic faith. 
 
 There is no other group of poems which holds so much of the 
 soul of the poet as these two; but the poems on art are inferior in
 
 424 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 importance only to them. Like the great leaders of the Italian 
 Renascence, Browning did not confine his interest within the 
 limits of one art. As Raphael wrote his solitary poem, and as 
 Dante prepared to paint his single angel, so Browning felt the 
 impulse to express himself through another medium than words. 
 He even studied the arts of painting and modelling, and though the 
 labour he spent probably yielded nothing worth preserving in the 
 shape of picture or bust, it gave him knowledge of which he has 
 made good use in his poetry. 
 
 In his own proper art too Browning was not content with 
 practice merely ; he was all through his life a profound student of 
 the theory as well. Evidences of this study are to be found as 
 early as Pauline, and in Paracelsus we have the figure of the poet 
 Aprile, who is far indeed from representing Browning's conception 
 of the perfect artist-character, but who certainly embodies his view 
 of some of its tendencies and dangers. Long afterwards, in Fifine 
 at the Fair and in Aristophanes' Apology, he gives an elaborate and 
 carefully reasoned theory of poetic art. And among the produc- 
 tions of this intermediate period are quite a large number which 
 deal, mostly in a dramatic way, with poetry or with painting or 
 with music. Thus Transcendentalism and How it Strikes a Con- 
 temporary relate to poetry, the latter showing that Browning's 
 conception of the dignity of the poet's function might have 
 satisfied Milton himself; for the threadbare poet is no less than 
 the "general-in-chief " for a whole life-campaign. 
 
 Subtlety is one of the most marked characteristics of Browning's 
 mind, and it is among the reasons for the obscurity often really 
 present but occasionally only imagined to exist in his works. 
 There are few better examples of this quality than the little poem, 
 Deaf and Dumb, that exquisite interpretation, through the force of 
 sympathy, of the meaning of a piece of sculpture : — 
 
 "Only the prism's obstruction shows aright 
 The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light 
 Into the jewelled bow from blankest white : 
 
 So may a glory from defect arise : 
 Only by Deafness may the vexed Love wreak 
 Its insuppressive sense on brow and cheek, 
 Only by Dumbness adequately speak 
 
 As favoured mouth could never, through the eyes."
 
 BROWNING 425 
 
 Youth and Art is interesting for a wholly different reason, 
 teaching that Hfe holds things of higher worth than any art. 
 The end of ambition is attained, and the life is empty : as in 
 Tennyson's Romnefs Remorse, substance has been sacrificed for 
 shadow. 
 
 As usual, however, Browning's favourite and most successful 
 mode of expression is dramatic, and the most remarkable poems 
 of this group are three in which he embodies his ideas of painting 
 and of music in the persons of individual painters and musicians. 
 They are Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea del Sarto and AM Vogler. 
 Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha might be added to make the 
 balance even between the two arts; but it is not worthy of a place 
 beside the other three. Neither is A Toccata of Galuppi's, which 
 is somewhat overloaded with technicalities — another cause of 
 obscurity. But the soul of music is in Al?t Vogler. The 
 musician's sense of the reality of his work is wonderfully rendered. 
 It is a palace of sound that he rears; and the reaction, the starting 
 of the tears as the palace vanishes away, is followed immediately by 
 the faith that " there shall never be one lost good " : what is lost 
 in time will be found again in eternity : — 
 
 " All we have willed or hoped or dreairted of good shall exist, 
 
 Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power 
 Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist 
 
 When eternity confirms the conception of an hour. 
 The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, 
 
 The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, 
 Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard ; 
 
 Enough that he heard it once : we shall hear it by-and-by." 
 
 F^-a Lippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto are not written in this 
 high-strung lyrical strain; but what they lose in one way they gain 
 in another. They are intensely dramatic, and the two painters 
 are among the most admirably portrayed of Browning's men. 
 f Filippo Lippi is a sensualist, in the main quite contented with his 
 sensualism, yet not without sympathy with things higher, which 
 sometimes get into his work in a way he himself does not under- 
 stand. Trained in a convent, he yet finds afterwards that all he
 
 426 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 knows which is worth the knowing has been drunk in uncon- 
 sciously during his Ufe in the gutter, before he saw the convent. 
 What he experienced in the street is real to him, and by virtue of 
 it he is enabled afterwards to give life to the lifeless figures of the 
 monkish pictures. Browning's dislike of the monastic abandon- 
 ment of the world is shown in this poem. Faulty and stained as 
 is the character of Filippo Lippi, he has much of the poet's 
 sympathy — far more than the respectable Bishop Blougram. He 
 has hold of reality and he is at heart sincere. The world which 
 he finds good, is a good thing. When he declares that 
 
 " This world's no blot for us, 
 Nor blank ; it means intensely, and means good," 
 
 he is speaking the opinion of Browning, as well as his own 
 experience. | 
 
 j^ Andrea del Sarto is a character of a higher order, and the 
 depth of his fall is proportioned to the height whence he came. 
 While Filippo Lippi has realised the best that was in him, 
 chequered as it is, Andrea has not. He has been unfaithful to 
 his art; he has bartered his gifts for gold and for the semblance of 
 love; and all his life is poisoned by the sense of the wrong he has 
 done his own higher nature. Technically perfect, he can correct 
 the faults even of Raphael, — "but all the play, the insight, and 
 the stretch — out of me, out of me!" He imagines 
 
 *' Four great walls in the New Jerusalem, 
 Meted on each side by the angel's reed, 
 For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo and me 
 To cover." 
 
 But even while he imagines it he knows it to be impossible. He 
 has chosen his reward on earth, and it is earthy. He whose 
 reach does not exceed his grasp has no use for a heaven. The 
 Grammarian is " for the morning " because there is something of 
 the infinite in his aspiration ; Andrea, who has not aspired, must 
 rest on the lower slopes. ] 
 
 These two poems deal with the Italian Renascence, and move 
 in it with an easy mastery which shows how far Browning had
 
 BROWNING 427 
 
 advanced since Sordello. There was no period of history he knew 
 so well, and somewhere or other in his verse every aspect of it is 
 represented — its art, its learning, its luxury and brilliance and its 
 heartlessness. Andrea and Filippo Lippi are men of their time, 
 and their ambitions and aspirations, their strength and their 
 weakness belong to Italy and to no other country, to the 
 Renascence and to no other period, — always, however, to these as 
 seen by the eyes of a Goth. ^Another aspect of it is seen in My 
 Last Duchess, a perfect picture of cold-blooded heartlessness, a 
 thing possible in any age, though fortunately rare in all ages. But 
 in its circumstances this is indubitably Italian, and unmistakably 
 tinged with the spirit of the Renascence.\ Again, the mixture of 
 paganism with Christianity in The Bishop at St Fraxed's, and the 
 Bishop's worldliness and luxuriousness, combined with his sense 
 of the beauty of form and colour and his fine taste in Latinity, 
 are characteristic of the same age. So too in The GrainmariarCs 
 Funeral, the old scholar's zeal in the pursuit of knowledge even in 
 its driest forms and the determination which spurs him on, in spite 
 of sinking frame and failing sense, to settle the " business " of the 
 Greek particles, bespeaks the day when Greek learning was new, 
 and when it seemed to hold out almost limitless promise to the 
 human race. 
 
 Mr Beers ^ quotes with obvious dissent the saying of Ruskin 
 that " Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of 
 the Middle Ages." He dissents, not on the ground that Browning 
 erred, but that he was indifferent and seldom touched upon the 
 Middle Ages at all. And indeed the dictum is surprising, unless 
 we suppose that Ruskin extends the term " Middle Ages " a little 
 beyond the ordinary bounds, so as to include at least the early 
 part of the Renascence. The Middle Ages proper make but 
 slight appeal to Browning. To him, chivalry counted for little, 
 and the faith of the Middle Ages perhaps for even less. He has 
 caught a few points. One is their grotesquerie, which is illustrated 
 in Holy-Cross Day and The Heretids Tragedy; and perhaps we 
 may reckon the vividness of their faith in a future world as 
 another. If time enters into Easter Day at all, it is a poem of the 
 ^ History of English Romaniicism in the XIX Century, 277.
 
 428 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 poet's own age; but the picture of the day of judgment might 
 have been painted by the brush of a mediaeval artist : — 
 
 "Sudden there went, 
 Like horror and astonishment, 
 A fierce vindictive scribble of red 
 Quick flame across, as if one said 
 (The angry scribe of Judgment) ' There- 
 Burn it ! ' and straight I was aware 
 That the whole ribwork round, minute 
 Cloud touching cloud beyond compute, 
 Was tinted, each v,'ith its own spot 
 Of burning at the core, till clot 
 Jammed against clot, and spilt its fire 
 Over all heaven, which 'gan suspire 
 As fanned to measure equable, — 
 Just so great conflagrations kill 
 Night overhead, and rise and sink 
 Reflected. Now the fire would shrink 
 And wither off the blasted face 
 Of heaven, and I distinct might trace 
 The sharp black ridgy outlines left 
 Unbumed like network — then, each cleft 
 The fire had been sucked back into 
 Regorged, and out it surging flew 
 Furiously, and night writhed inflamed, 
 Till, tolerating to be tamed 
 No longer, certain rays world-wide 
 Shot downwardly." 
 
 This is just the picture of the Judgment which the mediriDval mind 
 conceived, and here Browning might be said to enter into the 
 spirit of mediaevaHsm. But so much is common knowledge, and 
 if a source were needed he might have got all this through the 
 medium of the Renascence, when it was still the business of the 
 great artists to represent in stone or on canvas the ideas they no 
 longer shared. 
 
 Except for such superficial points, Browning has perhaps less 
 of the mediaeval spirit than any other poet of his time. He has 
 been called a mystic, but the word hardly fits ; and in any case 
 the mysticism with which he sympathises is not of the mediaeval 
 sort : it is transcendentalism rather than mysticism. He remains
 
 BROWNING 429 
 
 singularly unmoved by the religious revival, or reaction, which so 
 powerfully influenced the imagination of the Pre-Raphaelites; and 
 large as is the place filled by religion in his verse, there is hardly 
 a piece that is ' catholic ' in a sense which would have satisfied 
 Newman or Manning. To them, dogma and authority were 
 essential : to Browning they were an obstruction. Even his Pope 
 is almost as free from them as his Rabbi Ben Ezra: he is universal, 
 but not ' catholic.'j 
 
 Just as little is Browning attracted by the system of chivalry. 
 We hear little in his verse of tournaments and feats of arms. A 
 deed of heroism or devotion appeals to him no more in the 
 knightly Count Gismond vindicating a lady's honour than in the 
 simple Breton sailor, Herve Riel, steering the fleet of his country 
 into safety ; and if in the former he seems to stamp the chivalric 
 spirit with his approval, in T/ie Glove he reveals one of the 
 absurdities to which it was apt to lead. Mere daring had for him 
 only the attraction which he felt towards any form of intense life : 
 he preferred infinitely themes which opened out some problem 
 beyond, like that of Clive. And just as he cared little for the warlike 
 side of the spirit of chivalry, so he was indifferent to its amatory 
 aspect. There is nothing in common between the love-poems of 
 Browning and those of the troubadours, and the fantastic devotion 
 of the knights to their ladies v/as more likely to stir him to con- 
 tempt than to win his admiration. 
 
 Instead, then, of representing Browning as a master of the lore 
 of the Middle Ages, it seems more consistent with the facts to say 
 that no man of his time was more completely free from their 
 influence. This was not due to ignorance ; it was rather due to 
 alienation of mind. 
 
 Though the death of Mrs Browning led to the migration of 
 the poet back to England, he never ceased to love " the land of 
 lands " as he calls it. 
 
 "What I love best in all the v/orld 
 Is a castle, precipice-encurled, 
 In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine." 
 
 To Italy therefore he finally returned to die; and to Italy, also, 
 he went back for the subject of his next poem after Dramatis
 
 430 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Personae. It was The Ring and the Book (1868-1869), the 
 longest and the greatest of all, with which closes the second period 
 of his work. During these two decades, from 1850 to 1870, 
 Browning had moved beyond the experimental stage, had dis- 
 covered what he could best do, and was doing it with powers in 
 the fullest maturity and with experience steadily growing richer. 
 Afterwards, unfortunately, his work is injured, and much of it is 
 almost ruined, by a loss of balance between the artistic and the 
 philosophic elements ; and the poet sinks into the preacher of a 
 doctrine. 
 
 ^he plan of The Ritig and the Book is unique. Theoretically 
 indefensible, its sufficient justification is that practically it succeeds, 
 except in one respect which is in no way essential, and must be set 
 down as Browning's great error of judgment. Each of the ten 
 books regards the same story, from beginning to end, from a 
 different point of view. Superficially, then, the plan seems to 
 involve an intolerable amount of repetition ; but in point of fact 
 there is very little. The introductory book tells the story, a know- 
 ledge of which is afterwards assumed, so that what we get is not a 
 reiterated narrative of the facts, but the comments of the various 
 speakers upon them. Thus there is really very little action : the 
 whole object of the poem is the revelation of character, with the 
 advantage that it is character elicited in all the different cases by 
 the same set of circumstances. The five great books, Po7npilia, 
 Count Guido Franceschini^ Guido, Caponsacchi and The Pope are 
 never wearisome and never seem to repeat. The wearisomeness 
 of the other five (which few, having read them once, will ever read 
 again) is due to the quality of the matter Browning puts into them. 
 His mistake lay in writing them : they are no way essential to his 
 purpose ; and it is scarcely credible that they could have been 
 made good poetry ; Browning at least has not made them so. 
 
 The Ring and the Book, then, is a group of dramatic mono- 
 logues closely bound together. All the speakers have been con- 
 cerned in the same events, and they necessarily throw light upon 
 one another. Thus Caponsacchi owes to Pompilia what is vir- 
 tually a new birth, and in learning to understand her we are helped 
 to understand him. But in most respects the five books are
 
 BROWNING 431 
 
 practically five different poems ; and the merit of The Ring and 
 the Book lies mainly in the excellence of these five dramatic mono- 
 
 logues.) 
 
 [Pompilia is certainly the best of Browning's female characters : 
 her only rival is Pippa, who is altogether a lighter sketch. The 
 triumph is all the more remarkable, because this simple, uneducated 
 girl speaks in the language of Robert Browning. It would be vain to 
 deny that many of her utterances are dramatically out of character. 
 She is endowed with a range of thought and a power of expression 
 we can hardly conceive a girl so bred and trained to have pos- 
 sessed, and thus far Browning falls short of the highest dramatic 
 gift. But the fundamental conception of the character is faultless, 
 and in the beauty of it the reader willingly forgets the poet's failure 
 to adapt his style to her. The development in her nature, 
 brought about by the sense of coming motherhood, is infinitely 
 touching. Hitherto she has been first the simple, harmless, 
 colourless girl, and then the patient, down-trodden wife. Now 
 she suddenly reveals herself the heroine. The Patient Griselda is 
 not a type of character which wins the modern mind ; and Browning 
 was the last man to exalt patience without limit and without con- 
 dition. The moment Pompilia feels that she has another life 
 to protect, her obedience ends. She is defiant of convention, 
 fertile in resource, a possible tigress in defence of her trust. The 
 instinct which turns the tree " away from the north wind with what 
 nest it holds " turns her from all the courses her life has followed 
 hitherto. It is a transformation almost like the change from 
 chrysalis to butterfly ; and yet it is so managed that we feel there 
 is no break in the character. 
 
 The Pope is perhaps the greatest book of all. The figure of the 
 old Pope has less charm than the picture of the girl-wife, but it has 
 more grandeur. Called upon in extreme old age to pronounce the 
 doom of a fellow-creature, he never hesitates, though he recognises 
 the possibility that, black as the case against Guido looks, there 
 may yet be a mistake. He has done his best ; he believes Guido 
 to be guilty ; and he sends him to execution. But though in form 
 a dramatic monologue like the other books, and though dramatic 
 in conception too. The Pope is in substance the utterance of
 
 432 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Browning himself. It is his philosophy of life that is here em- 
 bodied ; it is his criticisms on the characters that are put into the 
 mouth of the Pope. It could not be otherwise. The Pope is not 
 so much a character as the embodiment of ideal wisdom and justice. 
 The book, therefore, is simply the best that Browning could con- 
 ceive about life. We have already found the same characteristic 
 in Rabbi Ben Ezra, and something of the same charm ; but, on the 
 whole, the palm of greatness belongs to The Fope. 
 
 Each of the other books has likewise a beauty and a greatness 
 of its own. The character of Caponsacchi is magnificently drawn. 
 It resembles Pompilia's in the fact that all the grander features are 
 evoked by one great crisis in his life. The call of Pompilia is the 
 turning-point. Hitherto Caponsacchi has been growing " drunk 
 v/ith truth stagnant inside him." Like a great ship in shallow 
 waters he is in danger, while others around him, blessed with " no 
 brains and much faith," ride safe at anchor : what to them is 
 religion is to him a stupid convention. Pompilia calls him out 
 into the deep, to be battered by storms, but through those storms 
 to work out his own salvation, and to win from the old Pope 
 approval only less emphatic than that which he awards to Pom- 
 pilia. 
 
 The two books devoted to Count Guido Franceschini are 
 usually ranked lower than these three ; but as intellectual achieve- 
 ments they are quite as great. The character of Guido is one that 
 repels as lago repels ; but as a triumph of dramatic skill it is not 
 unworthy to be named even with lago. The one book throws 
 light upon the other. In the first, the Count is the polished man 
 of the world, heir to an ancient name, speaking to his judges as to 
 men no more than his equals, and subtly suggesting that they are 
 men who might have stood in his position. In the second book, 
 significantly entitled simply Guido, we have the man in his own 
 nature, stripped of all disguise, freed at last from the necessity of 
 that homage which vice pays to virtue. \It would be difficult to 
 find a parallel to the appalling realism of the character of Guido, 
 as soon as the last hope is gone. It is the picture of a thoroughly 
 bad man with the fear neither of God nor of man any longer before 
 his eyes ; and it is made all the more terrible by the fact that it is
 
 BROWNING 433 
 
 addressed to an audience whom he knows and who know them- 
 selves to be no better than he. The scum of a corrupt society is 
 gathered round the papal Court, and of that Guido's judges as 
 well as Guido himself are part. Realism in depicting vice has 
 often been made loathsome ; Browning does not make it so, but 
 he makes it fearful. f; 
 
 After the publication of The Ring and the Book an unfortunate 
 change came over Browning ; and though he wrote vigorously as 
 well as voluminously, very little of his subsequent work rises to 
 a high level as poetry. What ruins it is the over-development of 
 the critical and philosophical spirit to the detriment of the artistic. 
 Most of the poems are conscious and dehberate discussions of 
 problems, ethical or religious. Though, as a rule, the form of the 
 dramatic monologue is preserved, the true dramatic element sinks 
 to a secondary place. Figures like Fra Lippo Lippi, Karshish, 
 Bishop Blougram, Caliban or Caponsacchi are extremely rare. It 
 is usually not the man who wins interest, it is the situation in which 
 he is placed, or the thoughts put into his mouth. 
 
 Browning's publications followed fast upon one another in the 
 seventies. Prince Hohenstiel-Schivangau and Balaustion's Adven- 
 ture both appeared in 187 1, Fifine at the Fair in 1872, Red Cotton 
 Night-cap Cou7itry in 1873, Aristophanes' Apology and The Inn 
 Albutn in 1875, Pacchiarotto in 1876, The Agamem7ion of Aeschylus 
 in 1877, La Saisiaz and The Two Poets of Croisic'm 1878, and the 
 two series of Dramatic Idylls in 1879 ^.nd 1880. The poet had 
 never before been so prolific. But for the reflection that Shake- 
 speare crowded all his work within little more than twenty years, 
 we might be tempted to say that no poet could afford to be so 
 prolific. After the last date there was some slackening of the 
 output ; but nevertheless Browning added four more volumes 
 before his death. These were: Jocoseria (1883), FerishtaKs 
 Fancies (1884), Parley ings with certain People of Importance (1887) 
 and Asolando (1889). The last volume was published almost 
 simultaneously with the death of the poet. 
 
 The translations from the Greek are a remarkable feature of 
 this closing period. Besides Agamemnon, we have included in 
 Balaustion's Adventure "a transcript from Euripides'— a trans- 
 
 VV. • 28
 
 434 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 lation of Alcesiis. The original part of the poem is based 
 upon a legend of the influence of Browning's favourite Greek 
 tragedian over the Syracusans, who hberated some of the Athenian 
 captives after the ruin of the great expedition because of their 
 power to recite his verses. The beautiful story is well told by 
 Browning. Aristophanes^ Apology is a similar mixture of transla- 
 tion and original verse, the translation being again from Euripides, 
 — Hercules Furetts. As a translator Browning was not success- 
 ful. The rigidity of his style in the dramatic monologue showed 
 how ill adapted he was to be the mouthpiece of another man's 
 thoughts ; and besides, the whole cast of his genius was as widely 
 as possible removed from the Greek. Without being conspicuously 
 romantic, he is certainly anything but classical. The clear-cut 
 outlines, the lucidity, order and symmetry of Greek poetry, remove 
 it poles asunder from the verse of Browning. In his translation, 
 therefore, it is not surprising that he does justice neither to himself 
 nor to his original. He leaves Agamemnon hardly less obscure 
 than he found it ; and he who is befogged by the Greek had better 
 turn for light to someone other than Browning. The transcripts 
 from Euripides are less irritatingly difficult ; but they are no more 
 Euripides than Pope's Iliad is Homer. The translations are, it is 
 to be feared, among the evidences of a tendency to capriciousness 
 which abound in this closing period. Browning was never so 
 defiantly original as he was at this time ; and with him imitation 
 was akin to virtue. 
 
 It is this capriciousness and self-will which vitiates nearly all of 
 Browning's later work. The evil is conspicuous already in Prince 
 Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society. It seems to be pro- 
 claimed in the ungainliness of the title ; and a similar clumsiness 
 is repeated more than once afterwards. Red Cotton Night-cap 
 Country, and Parleyings with certain People of Importance in their 
 Day, are models of what a title ought not to be. In earlier days 
 Browning's titles had been sometimes eccentric ; but there is an 
 appropriateness or a beauty, as in Bells and Pomegranates, which 
 justifies them ; whereas Red Cotton Night-cap Country is a mere 
 freak, and no degree of appropriateness can redeem the lumbering 
 Parl<:yrngs.
 
 BROWNING 435 
 
 If this freakishness were confined to the titles it would matter 
 little ; but it permeates the substance and the mode of treatment 
 as well. Browning at all periods displayed a love of the grotesque 
 which not infrequently led him into error. Bagehot showed true 
 critical discrimination when he treated Wordsworth, Tennyson 
 and Browning as exemplars respectively of "pure, ornate and 
 grotesque art." The grotesque is a perfectly legitimate form of 
 art ; but it is not in itself a high one, and unless it be kept in due 
 subordination it must inevitably lower any work in which it 
 appears. On Browning it gradually grew to the detriment of his 
 poetry until, after TAe Ring and the Book, he seemed to revel 
 in it. 
 
 Even more important than this is the change which passes 
 over Browning's method of dealing with character. In earlier 
 years the characters really think their own thoughts and speak 
 and act in accordance with them. It is true they speak in the 
 voice of Browning, but their utterances are, as he declares, " the 
 utterances of so many imaginary personages," not his. Pippa, 
 Pompilia, Caponsacchi, Andrea del Sarto, Karshish, Paracelsus, 
 Cleon, all are beings endowed with characters distinct from the 
 character of the poet ; and he represents them dramatically. By 
 their own speech they show what is in them. As a rule it is 
 otherwise in the closing period, in which the poet gradually ceases 
 to be the dramatist and becomes the critic. Though the dramatis 
 personae are brought on the stage, they are treated as puppets, 
 not as living beings. In his own words. Browning takes his 
 stand, " motley on back and pointing-pole in hand," to explain 
 the mechanism. 
 
 This is in part a reversion to the method of Sordello, where he 
 declares himself to be forced by popular prejudice to adopt the 
 narrative form and explain his character, instead of effacing 
 himself and letting the character speak. In his closing period he 
 was certainly under no such necessity. It was as a writer of 
 poems dramatic in principle and mono-dramatic in form that he 
 won his fame. And yet the most striking change in the closing 
 period is the partial abandonment of the principle in many cases, 
 and infidelity to it in others where in appearance it is retamed. 
 
 28—2
 
 436 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Browning rarely adopts the narrative form, but he is constantly 
 critical, explanatory and argumentative. In other words, he 
 obtrudes his own opinions and his own personality in a manner 
 inconsistent with the dramatic principle. 
 
 This is often the case even where the dramatic form is preserved. 
 Thus Prince Hohenstiel- Schwangau is a poem founded upon the 
 history of Napoleon III, and the speaker ought to represent the 
 character of that singular adventurer. In point of fact he does 
 not. The name Browning has chosen is not more conspicuously 
 unlike anything French than are the sentiments unlike anything 
 which we can reasonably attribute to Napoleon. The personality 
 of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is not interesting at all, though 
 his views and arguments are. The situation of the " Saviour of 
 Society" absorbs the poet; the words he puts into the mouth of 
 the Prince are really little more than his own comments upon 
 the situation. 
 
 Evidence of this change may be found in plenty in the 
 volumes of miscellaneous poems, and especially in the Parleyings. 
 Contrast, for example, George Bubb Dodington or Bernard de 
 Mandeville with Clean or Fra Lippo Lippi. In the earlier poems 
 we have the thoughts of two men, the one on human destiny, the 
 other on art ; but the thoughts are carefully adapted to the men 
 and to their times. Cleon is a Greek, and has the interests, 
 ambitions, gifts and prejudices of a Greek. In the face of death 
 he is simply human ; for there the differences of age and race are 
 insignificant. Yet he is Greek still in his conception of what is 
 possible or credible with regard to that which lies beyond death. 
 And Fra Lippo, again, has ideas of art which could not be expressed 
 in that way except by Fra Lippo. On the other hand the Parleyings 
 are sketches critical of the personages from whom they take their 
 name. We have no character of the statesman George Bubb 
 Dodington in the poem named after him. It is no more a 
 dramatic representation of the man than a sermon on the virtues 
 and sins of King David is a dramatic representation of the King 
 of Israel. So too Bernard de Mandeville is nothing more than 
 an argument on the subject of optimism versus pessmn'sm. In 
 Ferishialis Fancies we have a collection, not of dramatic mono-
 
 BROWNING 437 
 
 logues, but of parables ; the dramatic disguise is almost com- 
 pletely dropped. The dervish Ferishtah himself cannot be taken 
 very seriously, and what he teaches is taught in the Eastern way 
 by apologue. 
 
 With only one exception the longer poems of the period 
 (excluding of course the translations) illustrate the same change. 
 Red Cotton Night-cap Country is a poem founded upon a true 
 story, and as originally written by Browning it actually contained 
 the real names of the actors, which he obliterated only when he 
 was warned that by introducing them he exposed himself to 
 danger under the law of libel. It is dramatic in so far as it 
 attempts to realise their characters and by their characters to 
 explain the events. But it also contains an important critical 
 element. The poet constantly stops the action to interpose his 
 own comments and explanations. Thus, after Miranda's leap 
 from the tower, the gardener remarks upon his action : — 
 
 " This must be what he meant by those strange words 
 While I was weeding larkspurs yesterday, 
 'Angels would take him!' Mad!" 
 
 Here the instinct of the dramatist would be to stop. The actor 
 in the scene has made his comment, and no one else has any 
 business there. But Browning goes on : — 
 
 "No! sane, I say. 
 Such being the conditions of his life, 
 Such end of life was not irrational. 
 Hold a belief you only half-believe. 
 With all-momentous issues either way, — 
 And I advise you imitate this leap. 
 Put faith to proof, be cured or killed at once ! " 
 
 And so it is constantly : the action or the narrative is stopped, 
 the poet appears personally, and tells his readers what is the 
 right thing to think about the incident which has come before 
 them. His opinions may be sound and his guidance valuable, but 
 at any rate his method is not dramatic. 
 
 In Fifine at the Fair it is even less so than in Red Cotton 
 Night-cap Country. In Fifine the reader is introduced to three 
 characters, Don Juan, his wife Elvire, and the beautiful but not 
 virtuous gipsy Fifine. In the main the poem is Don Juan's
 
 438 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 defence of his own admiration for the gipsy, which has kindled 
 Elvire's jealousy. The issue of the admiration is plainly enough 
 suggested in the name Don Juan. But what concerns us now is 
 the fact that, though the three figures come before us in name, 
 there is no serious attempt to sustain the characters or to make 
 them real by those little touches which alone can give life to the 
 figures of the imagination. Much of the argument of Don Juan 
 proves on examination to be really Browning's own. The poet's 
 favourite ideas are reiterated by Don Juan, mingled, it is true, 
 with threads of sophistry which are not Browning's, but which 
 do not give individuality to Don Juan. 
 
 Still farther removed from Browning's former method is La 
 Saisiaz, where the veil of dramatic form, as yet preserved in 
 Fifine, is dropped, and we have an undisguised dissertation on 
 immortality. The matter of the poem is extremely interesting, 
 and the argument well deserves close study. Whether the dis- 
 cussion be convincing or not, it is at any rate worth knowing what 
 were the reasons which seemed to Browning sufificient to prove 
 the truth of immortality. Unfortunately the value and the interest 
 are philosophic rather than artistic. Unfortunately too it is 
 impossible to express philosophy under artistic forms without 
 damage both to the philosophy and to the art. La Saisiaz is 
 neither a great poem nor a great philosophic treatise. The fetters 
 of verse cramp the philosophic thoughts, and the weight of the 
 thought overloads the verse. 
 
 This is the fault of nearly all Browning's later work. It was 
 not necessarily a mistake on his part to abandon the dramatic 
 principle either wholly or in part ; but if he wished to remain a 
 poet he was bound to adopt instead of it some other principle 
 within the sphere of art. But in proportion as he casts off the 
 dramatic form he also casts off art and assumes philosophy. 
 Throughout the whole of his career he was emphatically a philo- 
 sophical poet ; but throughout two-thirds of it he was first poet 
 and only in the second place philosopher. To say nothing of the 
 love-poems, Saul and The Lost Leader and The Flight of t/ie 
 Duchess and Childe Roland are wholly poetic in conception and 
 execution. So, essentially, are Faracelsus and Ihe FoJ)e, though
 
 BROWNING 439 
 
 they are loaded with thought. This is not the case with Fifine at 
 the Fair or with La Saisiaz. The numerous passages of rare 
 poetic beauty in both of them are subordinate to the general 
 conception, which is argumentative in its nature. This fact 
 makes it doubtful whether much of Browning's later verse will 
 long survive. Forcible as is the thought, few will read it for its 
 philosophic merits ; and the purple patches of poetry will not 
 induce readers who love poetry and are careless of philosophy to 
 go through the toil necessary to discover that which they seek. 
 There is no example in literature of a versified philosophic treatise 
 which has really lived. Perhaps the nearest approach to such a 
 thing is the De lierum Natura of Lucretius ; and this has been 
 saved because its magnificent poetry outweighs its philosophy. 
 Wordsworth's Excursion, noble as it is in its finer parts, is neglected 
 by many readers because of the dreary flats which must be 
 traversed in order to reach the heights of poetry. So, but in 
 a more pronounced degree, will it be with La Saisiaz and Fifine 
 at the Fair. They will be quoted and referred to by militant 
 Browningites ; but they will seldom be read by lovers of poetry 
 who have no thesis to defend. 
 
 Among the shorter poems of the closing period there are a 
 considerable number of exceptions to which this judgment does 
 not apply. Thus Clive, with its vivid presentation of the situation 
 after the pistol is fired, is as full of poetic insight and power as 
 any of Browning's earlier pieces, though it is not equally poetic in 
 style. Cristina and Monaldeschi is worthy to rank with his most 
 dramatic pieces. Numpholeptos is wholly poetic in conception; 
 and, on a lower plane, FLeT^e Kiel is a fine specimen of a heroic 
 ballad. Nevertheless these pieces are exceptions ; and in a large 
 majority even of the shorter poems the poet is merged in the 
 philosopher. 
 
 Among the longer poems there is only one, The Inn Album, 
 to which the criticism does not more or less completely apply. 
 llie Inn Aibutn is the great triumph of Browning's later career, a 
 poem in which he nearly rivals the glory of Paracelsus and The 
 Ring and the Book. And it is noticeable that when inspiration 
 comes back to hiai agam m full flood he reverts to the old
 
 440 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 dramatic method. There is no comment and there is very Httle 
 narrative. The characters are brought upon the stage, speak 
 their own thoughts and make their own impression. The reader 
 receives no extraneous assistance in interpreting them, and he 
 needs none ; for in each case the conception of the character is 
 clear and strong. Few poems of equal merit have received so 
 scanty a meed of praise as The Inn Album. The story, it is said, 
 is unpleasant ; but so is that of Othello, and yet the world would 
 be appreciably the poorer if Shakespeare had shrunk from handling 
 it. No one can say that Browning's poem tends to immorality ; 
 nor can it be pretended that the unpleasantness is needlessly 
 dragged in. It is of the very essence. The splendid heroine's 
 character is what it is by reason of the treachery that has been 
 practised upon her ; she is one of those who have been " made 
 perfect through suffering." Her capacity for love is unsurpassed 
 even in Browning : — 
 
 "I have danced through day 
 On tiptoe at the music of a word, 
 Have wondered where was darkness gone as night 
 Burst out in stars at brilHance of a smile ! 
 Lonely, I placed the chair to help me seat 
 Your fancied presence; in companionship 
 I kept my finger constant to your glove 
 Glued to my breast ; then — where was all the world ? 
 I schemed — not dreamed — how I might die some death 
 Should save your finger aching." 
 
 There is a ring of Shakespeare in the magnificent hyperbole, and 
 we have to go back to Romeo and Juliet for the parallel. But 
 the conception of the effect which her seducer's trickery produces 
 upon the heroine's mind is all Browning's own. Suddenly she 
 wakens from her dream, not to abase herself before a conventional 
 standard of purity and goodness, but to realise how immeasurably 
 she towers above the brute whom her imagination has trans- 
 figured into a god. In her scornful rejection of his advances 
 when at last he becomes conscious that he has played the fool as 
 well as the knave, there is something of the spirit of Richardson's 
 Clarissa when she too with a noble instinct rejects the awakened 
 Lovelace's suit to make " an honest woman " of her whom he has
 
 BROWNING 441 
 
 wronged but never seduced. Except in this point Browning's 
 heroine is wholly original. Her career after her betrayal is full 
 of interest. It gives occasion to the most scathing criticism ever 
 penned of the vulgar doctrine of hell — vulgar always, though it 
 was taught then by many who were far from being themselves 
 vulgar. The effect of these experiences upon the woman is 
 vividly brought before us in the words of her friend when they 
 meet after her sudden disappearance : — 
 
 " What an angelic mystery you are — 
 Now — that is certain ! when I knew you first, 
 No break of halo and no bud of wing ! 
 I thought I knew you, saw you, round and through. 
 Like a glass ball; suddenly, four years since. 
 You vanished, how and whither? Mystery! 
 Wherefore? No mystery at all: you loved. 
 Were loved again, and left the world of course: 
 Who would not? Lapped four years in fairyland. 
 Out comes, by no less wonderful a chance. 
 The changeling, touched athwart her trellised bliss 
 Of blush-rose bower by just the old friend's voice 
 That's now struck dumb at her own potency." 
 
 A false interpretation is put upon the mysterious disappearance, 
 and consequently a false cause is assigned to the " angelic mys- 
 tery." Not love and pity, but a grievous wrong and a bitter 
 sorrow, have caused the halo to break and the wing to bud. But 
 though reason is at fault in assigning the cause, observation accu- 
 rately notes the effect : the halo and the wing are really there. 
 
 The contrast between this noble poem and the other writings 
 of Browning after The Ring and the Book is the most convincing 
 proof of the wisdom of the artist when he keeps within the hmits 
 and faithfully follows the method of his art. In the other pieces 
 there is always something to pardon, because the poet is attempt- 
 ing a task which need not necessarily be done in verse, and which 
 might perhaps be better done in prose. In The Inn Album there 
 is nothing to pardon but much to praise, because what he attempts, 
 if it could be done at all in prose, could certainly not be done as 
 well as he does it in verse. 
 
 There is no nineteenth-century poet of the first rank whose
 
 442 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 ultimate position in the hierarchy is so doubtful as Browning's. 
 He is at once astonishingly great and astonishingly faulty; and 
 only time can determine how far the faults will blur and obscure 
 the greatness. On the one hand, in his finest pieces he sweeps 
 the reader away with him as Tennyson rarely does ; and he is 
 incomparably more original in thought. On the other hand, for 
 every sin against art which specks the pages of Tennyson, a 
 hundred blot those of Browning; and his very originality leads 
 him into those irritating eccentricities to which reference has 
 already been made. His style and rhythm are often intolerably 
 rough and unmusical. He is full of strained expressions, irritating 
 puns, harsh inversions. He has a provoking and really meaning- 
 less habit of clipping the particles, — "as we curtail the already 
 cur-tailed cur." Worst of all, perhaps, is his inability to select the 
 essential and to reject the unimportant. He pours out the whole 
 farrago of his thoughts, and sometimes does not take the trouble 
 to set them in order. This is the meaning of the charge of ver 
 bosity which has been brought against him. He is not verbose 
 in the sense that he takes many words to express a given idea: on 
 the contrary, he is often condensed even to a fault. But he is 
 verbose in the sense that he gives expression to many thoughts 
 when a few would suffice: the total effect might be produced in 
 less space than he takes. A conspicuous example is The Ring 
 and the Book, one half of which adds nothing that is of the 
 slightest importance. Browning is in danger, therefore, of being 
 smothered by his own luxuriance. No one who carefully 
 observes what has lived and what has failed to live in past 
 literature will dispute that faults such as these are a dangerous 
 burden for the back of any author. The world is busy, and 
 it will read short books in preference to long ones. The 
 Ring afid the Book would stand a better chance of being 
 remembered if it extended only to 10,000 lines, instead of con- 
 taining more than 20,000. Happily, in this case each reader 
 may easily make the reduction for himself; but there are 
 numerous other instances in which the weeding out is less easily 
 performed 
 
 Again, the needless harshness and obscurity of Browning will
 
 BROWNING 443 
 
 tell seriously against him. The poets who have melody, who are 
 lucid in expression, who have classical finish, are sure to find 
 readers. Virgil and Milton are perennial. Imperial Rome has 
 passed away, but the Aeneid remains. No one will turn to the 
 Georgics now for instruction in agriculture ; but the verse evoked 
 by the statesmanship of Maecenas has long survived the states- 
 man and his purpose. Milton's Puritan theology is obsolete ; but 
 the majestic lines of Paradise Lost live, not because but in spite 
 of it. Tennyson in a less degree has the same assurance of 
 vitality. He is not the equal of Vergil or of Milton, and he 
 carries seeds of decay from which they are free ; but he belongs 
 to their corps. Pope is a lesser poet than Tennyson. A century 
 ago the tide set strongly against him ; half a century ago he 
 seemed well on the way to oblivion. But his faith in the merit of 
 expressing old thoughts better than they have ever been expressed 
 has been justified : he refuses to be forgotten : we still quote 
 "willing to wound, but yet afraid to strike"; "true art is nature to 
 advantage drest " ; " die of a rose in aromatic pain " ; " means 
 not, but blunders round about a meaning"; "the right divine of 
 kings to govern wrong" : we read more than our fathers did the 
 polished couplets of the Essay on Man, the Essay on Criticism 
 and the Moral Essays. 
 
 Now Browning is in this the antithesis to Pope. He is 
 careful of the thought, but careless of the expression. It seems 
 the wise and right and manly choice — that is, if for any reason 
 it be impossible to make both perfect. Yet it is questionable 
 whether it is the choice which makes for permanence of fame. 
 Aristotle has survived for two thousand years without a style at 
 all ; but the examples are rare indeed of such survival. Browning 
 has many poems in which beauty of style is conjoined with 
 profundity of thought, and in these poems lies the hope for the 
 permanence of his fame. But he drags in his train a most 
 dangerous mass of impedimenta. Probably no greater service 
 could be done to his memory than to disencumber him of 
 it and to make a selection of his best poems such as Arnold 
 made for Wordsworth.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 
 
 The middle of the nineteenth century has been called " the 
 EngHsh Renascence." There is a touch of grandiloquence in the 
 comparison suggested with the great new birth of modern Europe; 
 but if we do not push the parallel too far, something may be said 
 for the phrase. Both in art and in literature it was a time of 
 movement and of great productiveness. If we contrast the date 
 we have now reached with the period twenty years before, the 
 change seems extraordinary. Then, the men of established 
 reputation were all old ; and though a few might prophesy great 
 things of a young man named Macaulay and a young man named 
 Carlyle, it could not be pretended that either of the two had yet 
 done great things. Twenty years later, Tennyson and Browning, 
 Carlyle, Macaulay, Mill, Ruskin, Thackeray, Dickens and Charlotte 
 Bronte had all accomplished work which the world would not 
 willingly lose, and all gave promise of much admirable work still 
 to come. 
 
 But the time was even more remarkable for the appearance of 
 new poets than for the performances of their elder brethren. 
 Within three years on one side or the other of 1850 we encounter 
 the first publications of no fewer than seven poets, the least of 
 whom even an unfavourable critic must admit to be considerable. 
 They are Edward FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh 
 Clough, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina Rossetti, 
 Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith. The last two have received 
 a nickname which will cling to them : they are the Spasmodic
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 445 
 
 Poets. Rossetti was the intellectual chief of the Pre-Raphaelite 
 Brotherhood, several of whom were men of letters as well as 
 artists. The kinship between Clough and Arnold has been 
 generally recognised, j^nd^^foL, reasons sufficiently obvious they 
 may be denominated the poets of the Sceptical Reaction. Edward 
 FitzGerald stands apart, unlike all the others, yet at one point in 
 contact with the Oxford poets. The question which has now to 
 be asked is, What did these new poets stand for? What did 
 they add to the forces which were then moulding literature? 
 
 The poetry of these men derives its flavour principally from 
 religion, art and the sentiment of nationality. Science enters too, 
 but mainly in an indirect way. It helps to mould the plan of 
 Dobell's Balder, and it is at the background of the thought of 
 Clough and Arnold, though neither of these poets shows the 
 degree and kind of interest which we find in Tennyson. As 
 regards religion, two of the three groups are intimately related, in 
 the one case positively, in the other negatively, to the Oxford 
 Movement ; and it may be noted that the relation is negative 
 where the knowledge is deepest, and where the contact has been 
 closest. It will be necessary hereafter to examine the nature of 
 this relation at some length ; here it must suffice to note that in 
 the Pre-Raphaelite group the artistic preponderated over the 
 religious element. 
 
 One peculiarity of the Pre-Raphaelite group, which indicates 
 the preponderance of art, is the close relation in which we find 
 poetry and painting. Rossetti is the most conspicuous, but he is 
 by no means the only example of this union. In his case the 
 relation was so close, and the balance was held so even, that it is 
 still doubtful in which art he is to be regarded as greatest ; and 
 one of his critics has said that it will always be a question whether 
 Rossetti " had not better have painted his poems and written his 
 pictures ; there is so much that is purely sensuous in the former, 
 and so much that is intellectual in the latter." But we find 
 this union in William Bell Scott, in Thomas Woolner and in 
 Sir J. Noel Baton as well as in Rossetti ; and it may be said, not 
 only of all the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but 
 generally of those who sympathised with them, that if they did not
 
 446 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 themselves attempt both arts, they had a marked and unusual 
 sympathy with both. And this spirit was transmitted from the 
 founders of the brotherhood to the younger generation, William 
 Morris and Burne-Jones, who took up their work. 
 
 Still more closely related to the history of the time was the 
 , manifestation in verse of the spirit of nationality. Attention has 
 already been called' to certain premonitory symptoms of this 
 spirit. But although it had long been operative beneath the 
 surface, it was not till near the middle of the century that the 
 sense of nationality emerged into clear consciousness and became 
 a force in practical politics. This it is which makes that period 
 momentous in history. The events of 1848 shook every throne 
 in Europe. Everywhere the people rose in insurrection against 
 tyrants. The system established in 181 5 was shattered. Then, 
 the nations seemed to have fought "to make one submit"-; now, 
 they gave grim earnest of their determination " to teach all kings 
 true sovereignty." The immediate consequences were chequered. 
 In France, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Spain, Italy, the revolu- 
 tionary movements were either not outwardly successful at all, or 
 were successful only for the moment ; but everywhere the actual 
 result was profoundly important. Pan-Germanism, Pan-Slavism 
 and the party of the Italian Irredentists are all living forces, and 
 all owe their vitality to this sentiment of nationality. To deal 
 with this sentiment was the great task of the statesmen of that 
 age. They all felt the gravity of the task, but few of them com- 
 prehended its real character. Many years passed before Gladstone 
 understood the real significance of the help he gave to nascent 
 Italy. Cavour, almost alone among the practical statesmen, seems 
 to have seen clearly what was taking place. 
 
 England, with a widely different history behind her, had a far 
 less menacing situation to face. There, for centuries, freedom had 
 been slowly broadening down ; and within the generation then 
 living the rising democracy had won several great triumphs. Thus, 
 although there were minor revolutionary movements in England 
 too, the general sense of the people was that what other nations 
 were trying to do by violence could in England be accomplished 
 
 ^ Part I. Chapter III.
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY : NEW INFLUENCES 447 
 
 by peaceful means. But nevertheless the nation was profoundly 
 moved, both on account of its own state, and in the cause of other 
 peoples. That cause was kept in the most literal sense before the 
 eyes of Englishmen ; for England was the common refuge of all 
 the political exiles of the Continent, and of hundreds of political 
 schemers who, if not in overt hostility against their native govern- 
 ments, feared those governments too much to stay at home. 
 Carlyle remembered the "stately tragic figures" of the Spanish 
 political refugees perambulating the broad pavements of Euston 
 Square when he first knew London. The house of Gabriele 
 Rossetti, himself a political refugee, was thronged with fellow- 
 exiles; and Mr W. M. Rossetti thinks that his brother Dante's 
 " marked alienation from current politics " may have been due to 
 reaction from the talk of these Italian revolutionaries. To London 
 they flocked, Spaniards, Italians, Hungarians, Frenchmen, — 
 Kossuth and Mazzini and Louis Napoleon, with hundreds of 
 inferior fame, or of no fame at all. 
 
 The tendency towards political and patriotic verse, natural 
 enough under such circumstances, was soon strengthened by 
 events affecting England herself. The Crimean War and the 
 Indian Mutiny gave specific meaning to the vague national 
 ardours already permeating the air. The war with Russia was the 
 more important because it was the end of a long peace, so far as 
 the great European powers were concerned. The poets' response 
 was immediate and emphatic. Tennyson's Maud, Gerald Massey's 
 War Waits, Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith's Sonnets on the 
 War, and England in titne of War by the former alone, E. C. Jones's 
 The Waves and the War, and Henry and Franklin Lushington's 
 La Nation Boufiqiiiere and Points of War, all breathe the same 
 influence. In this department of patriotic verse the first place for 
 persistency, though not for excellence, must be assigned to Gerald 
 Massey (1828-1907), a man whose name should be remembered 
 were it only for the courage with which he fought and conquered 
 difficulties. As the original of George Eliot's Felix Holt, and 
 as the associate of Matirice and Kingsley in the scheme of 
 Christian Socialism, he has other claims to remembrance. It is 
 astonishing that he, who was in childhood one of the victims of
 
 448 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the unreformed factory system, should have been able to produce 
 a volume of verse as early as 1850. The cream of his earlier 
 work, with new poems added, was collected in My Lytical Life 
 (1S89). In the latter part of his life he was diverted from poetry 
 by other interests. His patriotic pieces are fervid and stirring, but 
 a comparison with Tennyson shows that they fall considerably 
 below excellence. 
 
 In the poetry thus inspired by political and national concep- 
 tions it is easy to distinguish two predominant strains. One is the 
 strain of an insular patriotism, a sentiment centred in England and 
 inspired by her. The other is the paean or the dirge, as the case 
 may be, of that great uprising of the nations which had just been 
 convulsing Europe. Of the former the examples are innumerable. 
 It is the animating principle of the volumes above mentioned; but 
 by far the most consummate expression was given to it by Tenny- 
 son. His patriotic poems are divisible into two classes, the first 
 political, the second military; while the great Wellington Ode 
 holds an intermediate position and combines the two. 
 
 The political strain is present in Tennyson from the first. The 
 three poems of 1842, "You ask me why, tho' ill at ease," "Of old 
 sat Freedom on the height," and "Love thou thy land," are 
 examples. They are the utterance of an English patriot ; but the 
 chief ground upon which they glorify England is the great services 
 she has rendered to the cause of freedom. In the stanzas on 
 England and America in 1782 the poet prophesies that 
 
 " The single note 
 From that deep chord which Hampden smote 
 Will vibrate to the doom"; 
 
 and he rejoices that the strong sons of the "strong mother of a 
 lion line," for once unfaithful to her true cause, have "wrenched 
 their rights" from her. The Third of Februar)', 1852, gives 
 Tennyson's conception of the political rdle of England in Europe. 
 The coup d'etat had been struck two months before ; and 
 Tennyson, like other lovers of poUtical honesty and friends of 
 freedom, was horrified, and filled, not with fear, but with anxiety. 
 The blow seemed to be the triumph of all that was unprincipled
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY : NEW INFLUENCES 449 
 
 in politics : and the poet, believing the danger to be by no means 
 confined to France, condemns the tone of the English parliament 
 as beneath that which was befitting the people 
 
 ""Whom the roar of Hougomont 
 Left mightiest of all peoples under heaven." 
 
 He resented the attempts made in the House of Lords to restrain 
 and to moderate the attacks of the press upon Louis Napoleon, 
 and insisted that the very greatness of Britain laid upon her the 
 duty of plain speech :— 
 
 " No little German state are we, 
 
 But the one voice of Europe : we must speak." 
 
 Even ruin and destruction would be preferable to dodging and 
 paltering with public crime. 
 
 " Better the waste Atlantic roll'd 
 
 On her and us and ours for evermore," 
 
 than that "our Britain" should "salve a tyrant o'er." 
 
 The patriotism of Tennyson, then, is by no means selfish or 
 ignoble ; but it is distinctly insular. 
 
 " God bless the narrow seas ! 
 I wish they were a whole Atlantic broad," 
 
 exclaims "the Tory member's eldest son" in The Princess, as he 
 looks towards the coast of France and thmks how everything 
 there is unstable, while in England progress is sure and steady. 
 The same spirit manifests itself again in In Memoriam. Though 
 it seems hardly germane to the matter, we have there too the con- 
 trast between "freedom in her regal seat of England," and "the 
 schoolboy heat. The blind hysterics of the Celt." 
 
 The more distinctively warlike note in Tennyson's verse is a 
 later development. The lines on the two great Balaclava charges 
 have been mentioned elsewhere. The ballad of The Revenge, The 
 Defence of Luck?iow and several other pieces are similarly inspired. 
 Probably nothing will ever dethrone Ye Mariners of England 
 from its pride of place among poems of the navy ; but next to it 
 comes the ballad of The Revenge. And increasingly, as years went 
 on, the poet showed a tendency to make himself the spokesman of 
 W. 29
 
 450 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 army and navy. Nothing was more sure to rouse him than any 
 threat of invasion, any question of the sufficiency of the tieet, any 
 doubt whether the forces on which the safety of the nation 
 depended were being made the playthings of party. 
 
 But of all occasions Tennyson ever found for the expression of 
 his patriotic sentiment, that of which he made the grandest use 
 was the death of Wellington. The Ode is something more than a 
 piece of glorious eloquence. It is, as to its form, a triumph of skill 
 in lyrical verse, and, as to its substance, a masterly analysis of 
 character. There are more subtle melodies elsewhere among 
 Tennyson's lyrics; but nowhere in verse is there a more skilful 
 and sustained adaptation of sound to sense. The " roll of muffled 
 drums," the tramp of the great procession, sorrowful yet proud, the 
 thunder of cannon, the crash of the charge, are all heard in the 
 verse. The opening is solemn and mournful ; then the note of pride 
 rings out as the triumphs of the great soldier surge up in memory; 
 and that in turn gives place, as "the black earth yawns, the mortal 
 disappears," to the feeling of the insignificance of man before his 
 Maker. With all this is woven in the great study of Wellington's 
 character. The phrases have passed into common speech — "rich 
 in saving common-sense," "four-square to all the winds that blew," 
 "one that sought but Duty's iron crown." In respect of the 
 quotations it has furnished, the Ode will almost bear comparison 
 with Gray's great Elegy. And the phrases have not only that 
 terseness and point and fulness of meaning which recommends 
 them for quotation, but they have also the merit of truth. The 
 most careful and conscientious historian could not have chosen 
 more skilfully the characteristics which made Wellington what he 
 was. 
 
 The loving care with which Tennyson elaborated this great 
 character was due not only to his profound admiration for the 
 Iron Duke, but also to the fact that he found in him the type of 
 the English race, if a great Irishman may without offence be said 
 to be typical of the English race in the widest sense of the phrase. 
 His moderation, his "long-enduring blood," his single-minded 
 devotion, his wealth of "saving common-sense," all, in the eyes 
 of the poet, are qualities of the race as well as of its greatest
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 45 1 
 
 representative in that age. Carlyle pronounced his countrymen 
 inarticulate. So is Wellington. Too busy to talk much, he lets 
 " the turbid stream of rumour flow," and when he does utter his 
 thoughts it is after the manner of the equally inarticulate Cromwell, 
 in " language rife with rugged maxims hewn from life." His very 
 warfare bears the same stamp, and is likewise the reflection of the 
 character of the race; for its characteristic is the stubborn standing 
 at bay at Torres Vedras, or the long resistance to assault on the 
 " day of onsets of despair " at Waterloo. And yet there is another 
 side, of which also account must be taken for the nation as well as 
 for the man. He who "greatly stood at bay" at Torres Vedras 
 was also 
 
 " He that far away 
 Against the myriads of Assaye 
 Clashed with his fiery few and won." 
 
 The fiery daring is present as well as the iron tenacity, the head- 
 long spirit which stakes all on a moment as well as the patient 
 resolution which labours in the hope of a distant future. 
 
 In the patriotic verse of contemporary poets there is little that 
 is worthy of comparison with the patriotic verse of Tennyson; but 
 about the middle of the century a sentiment spreads to which 
 nothing in Tennyson corresponds. It is the love of liberty irre- 
 spective of country or race, the sentiment which swept away 
 Coleridge and Wordsworth in the early days of the French 
 Revolution, and which inspired Byron and Shelley after them. 
 To it the distinction between Celt and Saxon is unimportant, 
 and political boundaries are of interest only when an unwilling 
 people is held in subjection by one more powerful. Mrs Brown- 
 ing's Casa Guidi Windows embodies this sentiment, but its prin- 
 cipal exponent was Sydney Dobell. It is very evidently the out- 
 come of the political events which were then convulsing continental 
 Europe. 
 
 29 — 2
 
 I 
 452 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA i 
 
 § I. The Poets of the Sceptical Reaction. 
 
 It is curious that in the year 1850 both Tennyson and 
 Browning produced poems in which the religious element is 
 more prominent than it is in anything they had previously written. 
 These great poets had been formed under other influences ; but 
 now the crop of Newmanism too was ripe, and the nature of it 
 soon became apparent. As has been said, one of the groups of 
 new poets was related negatively and the other positively to 
 Tractarianism ; and as Oxford was the home of Tractarianism, so 
 too it was the home of that poetry which expresses the intellectual 
 revolt against all that the Tracts specially sought to inculcate. 
 The reaction came with extreme rapidity. Before Tractarianism 
 had grown to maturity, the seeds of opposition were already sown. 
 An exaggerated medisevalism was met by a revived classicism; 
 faith scarcely distinguishable from credulity gave birth to doubt ; 
 immoderate claims for the principle of authority were met by an 
 examination of that principle far more thoroughgoing than that 
 which was sanctioned by orthodox Protestantism. 
 
 It is not in professional theologians, nor in the arguments 
 advanced on either side in affairs like the Hampden controversy, 
 that this reaction is most clearly manifested. In such professional 
 controversies the Tractarians were the innovators. But we see 
 the influence in the spirit imparted to the University. Young 
 men of intellect and power are ranged in hostile camps : on the 
 banners of the one army are inscribed the words. Authority of 
 the Church, on that of the other, Liberty of Thought. But if faith 
 is deepened on the one side, so is scepticism on the other. The 
 'liberalism' which horrified Newman in the Noetics might pass 
 for peaceful orthodoxy compared with that to which their suc- 
 cessors of a generation later advanced. 
 
 In part this was the necessary result of time. The liberals 
 could not have stood permanently in the position of VVhately and 
 Thomas Arnold; for the liberal, whether in politics or in the 
 affairs of intellect, cannot consistently be stationary: it is an 
 article of his creed that no one can be stationary, — non progredi est 
 regredi. But in the case before us the process was hastened by
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY : NEW INFLUENCES 453 
 
 the character and claims of the opposite party; and probably 
 some individuals reached a point at which, but for their opponents, 
 they never would have arrived. The extreme forms in which the 
 case for authority was put, and above all the sophistical character 
 of many of the arguments of the Tractarians, were harmful to 
 their cause. The intellect of Oxford in the generation after 
 Newman recoiled. Stanley, Pattison and Jowett, Froude, Ruskin, 
 Clough and Matthew Arnold, men born from twelve to twenty-one 
 years after Newman, were all ultimately opponents of the New- 
 manite movement, though most of them had for a time felt its 
 attraction. 
 
 The sceptical reaction was in no small measure the outcome 
 of the teaching of Thomas Arnold ; and that particular phase of 
 it with which we are at present concerned was peculiarly his work. 
 Its two great poets were one of them his son and the other a 
 favourite pupil ; and the characters of both were moulded by him. 
 But Thomas Arnold's relation to Newmanism was by no means as 
 simple as at the first glance it appears. He was himself irrecon- 
 cilably hostile to the movement, and he said and wrote some 
 exceedingly strong things against it ; yet Bagehot in his essay on 
 Clough has a profoundly true remark, that, in spite of this hostility, 
 Arnold prepared men for Newmanism. It was not the Rugby 
 men who stood in bitterest opposition to the Tractarians. Ulti- 
 mately, the leaders of the opposition arose from among them ; 
 but they were never bitter, never unsympathetic ; and the deepest 
 tones in the poetry both of Clough and of Matthew Arnold are 
 struck by just this emotional sympathy with a creed which their 
 intellect compels them to reject. 
 
 The whole weight of Thomas Arnold's influence at Rugby 
 was thrown into the scale of religion, the whole spirit of his 
 teaching was religious. He himself held contentedly and with 
 complete sincerity the position of a liberal Protestant of the 
 Church of England. But, as has just been said, the very soul of 
 liberalism is movement ; and it was natural that the son and the 
 pupil should feel impelled to advance beyond the father and the 
 master. Yet to advance farther was to encounter questions 
 apparently going to the very root of Christianity; and it was
 
 454 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 natural enough that they who valued Christianity should consider 
 anxiously the possibility of retracing their steps, rather than 
 advancing into the unknown, chill, forbidding land of doubt. Such, 
 probably, was the secret of the attraction of Newmanism for some 
 of the pupils of Thomas Arnold. But though the attraction was 
 natural, so too was the decision to withstand it ; for Thomas 
 Arnold had taught above all things devotion to the truth; and 
 the credentials of Newmanism, when examined with a single eye 
 to that, proved unsatisfactory. 
 
 Clough and Arnold are leaders of an intellectual revolt, and 
 the basis of their poetry is intellectual. They come therefore as 
 a reinforcement to Tennyson and Browning, who had already 
 done much towards setting poetry on a foundation intellectually 
 sound. They make a partial reversion to the eighteenth century, 
 of the spirit of which they have a larger share than any other 
 English poets of the last hundred years. And it is for this reason 
 that their sympathy with Tractarianism is peculiarly important. 
 Their originality lies mainly in the combination. But for it, 
 their intellectuality might have resembled closely that of Pope. 
 But for the colours reflected from the Tractarian mysticism, but 
 for the wistfulness due to a faith longed for but not attained, 
 Matthew Arnold's classicism would have been far more like that 
 of the Queen Anne writers. The peculiar interest of the Oxford 
 poets lies in the fact that they exhibit with greater clearness and 
 in closer conjunction than any others of the time the marks of 
 those two great forces which, more than all else, made the litera- 
 ture of the nineteenth century— rationalism and the Catholic re- 
 action. Their age, their previous training, their position in Oxford, 
 all concurred in producing a unique combination. To these 
 circumstances is due the fact that, while they illustrate the reaction 
 against the Catholic reaction, they are what they are by reason of it. 
 
 Their training and their predilections led the two poets 
 naturally and necessarily to lay stress upon knowledge ; and in 
 the end this naturally and necessarily set them in opposition to 
 Tractarianism. For a system which rests upon authority can 
 never heartily and sincerely welcome the new lights which are apt 
 to reveal all too clearly the nature of its claims. And so we find
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 455 
 
 that one of the shrewdest observers of the time, Mark Pattison, 
 points out in his Memoirs that one of the effects of Tractarianism 
 was to cause a decline in the interest in knowledge at Oxford. 
 Here was a ground of difference which was bound sooner or later 
 to alienate the Rugby men, whose central principle, from first to 
 last, was love of knowledge and reverence for truth, wheresoever 
 and among whomsoever discovered. "Now, and for us," says 
 Matthew Arnold, "it is time to Hellenise, and to praise knowing, 
 for we have Hebraised too much, and have over-valued doing^" 
 And again, " The English poetry of the first quarter of this century, 
 with plenty of energy, plenty of creative power, did not know 
 enough^" So far, we seem to be in the sphere of the eighteenth 
 century, which certainly endeavoured to know. But Arnold 
 went farther. " The poetry of later paganism lived by the senses 
 and understanding ; the poetry of mediaeval Christianity lived by 
 the heart and imagination. But 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^" Here we have 
 the note of the nineteenth century, the contribution of German 
 philosophy ; and in this blend we have the special characteristic 
 of Arnold, as well as, in a less degree, that of his schoolfellow and 
 friend. 
 
 Arthur Hugh Clough (181 9-1 861), who was born at Liver- 
 pool, was at the age of four carried by his parents across the 
 Atlantic to Charleston. Five years later he was brought back to 
 England, and then, after a short time at Chester, he became a 
 pupil of Arnold of Rugby. In 1837 he entered Oxford as a 
 scholar of Balliol ; but in the degree list he sank to the second 
 class. The conjecture that he and his friend Arnold, who took 
 the same position, owed their disappointment to the unsettlement 
 and restlessness begotten of theological controversy, is probably 
 well founded as regards Clough ; but in Arnold's case the simpler 
 explanation of idleness seems to be sufficient ; at least it satisfied 
 contemporaries. Unquestionably Clough was influenced by the 
 controversies. One of his closest friends was W. G. Ward, and 
 
 * Cultiii'e and Anarchy. ' Esiuys in iJ/iUcism, isi si^ries. 
 
 ^ ibid. 
 
 -rT' 
 
 <L^
 
 456 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 whoever associated much with hiin must necessarily be in the 
 whirl of the movement. Clough himself " said afterwards that for 
 two years he had been ' like a straw drawn up the draught of a 
 chimney ^"' But his native strength of intellect and the principles 
 instilled by Dr Arnold ultimately triumphed over such influences ; 
 and the most beautiful verses he ever wrote, Qua Curstim Ventus, 
 touchingly mark the close of his friendship with Ward, and the 
 final abandonment of the hope to find intellectual satisfaction as 
 well as rest in a past which was irrevocably gone. 
 
 Notwithstanding his second class, Clough had been elected a 
 fellow and afterwards a tutor of Oriel College; but in 1848 he 
 resigned first his tutorship and afterwards his fellowship. In 
 doing so he made a great sacrifice; for he was poor, and it was 
 by no means certain that his talents, great as they were, would 
 bring him an income. The principal cause which led ClOugh to 
 this action was his feeling on questions of religion. He was 
 aware that his position as fellow and tutor gave him the appear- 
 ance of believing many things which he did not believe, and he 
 could not bear the seeming want of candour. If he was over- 
 scrupulous, he at least erred on the side of honour. " The letter 
 of the law," he writes to a friend, " is a very good thing, as the 
 spirit is apt to vary with interpretcis, but what is written is written*." 
 4. lofty moral tone was the very essence of his being ; it pervades 
 all his work ; and he had no patience with the plea that genius 
 somehow palliates looseness of living or of writing. " The name 
 of Voltaire coming to be discussed," writes Mr Thomas Arnold^, 
 " my brother said, with a wave of his hand, ' as to the coarseness 
 or sensuality of some of his writings, that is a matter to which 
 I attach little importance.' Clough bluntly replied, 'Well, you 
 don't think any better of yourself for that, I suppose.'" In after 
 years, and doubtless in his heart then, Arnold was at one with 
 Clough ; for no one has insisted more eloquently than he upon 
 the imperative need of moral soundness to literature. 
 
 The Oxford world expected from Clough some sort of theo- 
 logical manifesto to explain his position and his reasons for 
 
 ^ Foems and Prose Remains, 14. ^ Memoir, 71. 
 
 * Nindeenlh Century, January, 1898.
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 457 
 
 resigning his fellowship ; but Clough was a man of humour and 
 took pleasure in depicting to himself the surprise of friends, 
 acquaintances and opponents on reading The Bothie of Tober-na- 
 Vuolich (1848), which was written after he had quitted Oxford and 
 just before the formal resignation of his fellowship. This " long 
 vacation pastoral " is full of mirth and jest and high spirits, not 
 at all like the utterance of a man drowned in care and sinking 
 under a load of "doubts and obstinate questionings." There has 
 been some controversy as to whether Clough did or did not 
 "break away," as Dean Stanley asserted that he did, "from the 
 University and the Church with the delight of one who had 
 known more than other men the weight of the yoke which eccle- 
 siastical authority had once laid upon him." Clough's letters 
 afford conclusive proof that Stanley was right. "Will you hire 
 yourself out as a common labourer?" he writes to Thomas 
 Arnold. "I hope not; but one may do worse, undoubtedly; 'tis 
 at any rate honester than being a teacher of XXXIX Articles. I 
 rejoice to see before me the end of my servitude, yea, even as the 
 weary foot-traveller rejoices at the sight of his evening hostelry, 
 though there still Hes a length of dusty road between." And even 
 if this evidence were absent, the tone of the Bothie is hardly less 
 conclusive. It is just the work which would naturally come from 
 the enfranchised prisoner rejoicing in his liberty. Instead of an 
 'apologia,' or an 'explanation,' or a treatise on apostolical 
 succession, Clough sang a paean on his recovery of freedom. It 
 was not what the Oxford world expected ; but it was the natural 
 reaction from the strain Clough had endured there. 
 
 The Bothie of Tober-na- Vuolich was not Clough's first poem, 
 for the contents of Ambarvalia, though not published till the year 
 after the Bothie, had been earlier written. But the latter was 
 his first long poem, the first which gave the world the means of 
 judging what manner of man he was. And it still remains that 
 which gives the most comprehensive view of his character and 
 powers. It is mirthful, as becomes the humourist. But under 
 the frolic and jest there lies a deep seriousness ; and Clough 
 was essentially serious. He felt, hke all the thoughtful men of 
 the time, the urgency of the social problems which were pressing
 
 458 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 for solution ; and the Bothie is full of these problems. He felt 
 that there was something amiss in the position of women ; and 
 the Bothie treats the question more tastefully, more profoundly 
 and more wisely than Tennyson had treated it in The Princess the 
 year before. But that which gives its greatest charm to the 
 Bothie is the feeling for nature which it displays. Without 
 apparent effort, insensibly, naturally, Clough imbues the mind 
 with the spirit of Highland scenery. He seldom sets him- 
 self deliberately to make a description, and the reader is grate- 
 ful for his forbearance; but a few apposite words, just what 
 are needed for the purpose of the narrative, make the scene 
 visible. 
 
 On the other hand, perhaps the worst feature of the Bothie is 
 its metre. Clough chose the hexameter ; and, though it has the 
 serious disadvantage of being an exotic form of metre, it is in 
 many ways well adapted for a poem such as he was meditating. 
 It can be either rapid or slow, solemn or light. It was also 
 unhackneyed; and this consideration weighed with him in the 
 selection, as it doubtless weighed with other poets of that day. 
 Longfellow's Evangeline and The Cozirtship of Miles Standish and 
 Kingsley's Atidromeda are all written in this measure. Clough 
 himself used it again in Amours de Voyage. In a sense therefore 
 it may be said to be naturalised ; but it cannot be pretended that, 
 even in the best English examples, it produces the effect of the 
 Greek or Latin hexameter. Of the three poets named, Kingsley 
 is the most skilful and successful in his use of the metre ; but in 
 his verse as well as in that of Longfellow and of Clough, there is 
 an undue preponderance of the dactyl. In Clough's case, how- 
 ever, a more serious objection is the extreme harshness of the 
 verse. Verse ought always to have a more smooth and pleasing 
 melody than prose, while many of Clough's lines read like prose 
 spoilt. 
 
 Clough had been invited to become head of University Hall, 
 London, whose function was to provide a place of residence for 
 students of University College. The interval between the date of 
 the invitation and that of Clough's entry upon his duties, he spent 
 in Italy. He was in Rome during its siege by the French in 1849.
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY : NEW INFLUENCES 459 
 
 In this situation he wrote Amours de Voyage'^, which, however, was 
 not published till 1858, when it appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. 
 The reason for the delay appears to have been the unfavourable 
 opinion of a friend to whom the poem was submitted. There was 
 some reason for this friend's doubts. Afnours de Voyage is on a 
 considerably lower plane than the Bothie of Tober-na- Vuolich ; and 
 it is dangerous for any poet, but especially for one whose reputa- 
 tion is not yet established, to fall below himself. Amours de 
 Voyage is a romance in verse, told in a series of letters. The hero, 
 Claude, is emphatically a character of the nineteenth century, a 
 Hamlet in respect of incapacity to carry out his purpose — but not 
 much farther. He seems to have been designed by Clough to 
 embody his conception of the spirit of the age — the paralysis of 
 action through doubt, the lack of purpose, the superficiality. But 
 Claude is too slight and trivial, and in consequence Clough misses 
 his aim. 
 
 In 1850 Clough visited Venice, and there he began his most 
 ambitious poem, Dipsychus, which, however, was not published 
 during the author's lifetime, and must not be regarded as having 
 received his final touches. The purpose is to depict a spirit 
 divided against itself in its battlings with good and evil, pleasure 
 and pain, faith and doubt, and all the most complex problems of 
 life. The design was great, and in some points it is not unworthily 
 handled. But still it was beyond Clough's powers ; and, more- 
 over, the resemblance to Goethe's Faust was too close. Though 
 Dipsychus and his attendant Spirit are by no means identical with 
 Faust and Mephistopheles, they are constantly suggesting Goethe's 
 pair. Clough made a grave mistake in courting the comparison. 
 It was a mistake into which he was tempted by similarity of cir- 
 cumstance. Half a century of experience after Goethe's great 
 work — the years during which the lessons of the French Revolution 
 had sunk into the general heart — had brought minds of a rank con- 
 siderably below Goethe's much where he had stood. The middle of 
 the nineteenth century was consequently the time of his maximum 
 influence. No one else, perhaps, has followed him so closely as 
 
 ^ The poem itself gives the date of composition : — " I was writ in a Roman 
 chamber, When from Janiculan heights thundered the cannon of i'lauce."
 
 460 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Clough ; but the very resemblances between Difsychus and other 
 works of the time help to reveal how deep the influence of Goethe 
 had penetrated. There is in Dipsychus a kinship to Bailey's Festus 
 and to Dobell's Balder, which might momentarily tempt those who 
 class Bailey as a Spasmodic Poet to include Clough also in that class. 
 It is more interesting to note in Dipsychus Clough's expression 
 of Browning's favourite idea about the nature of evil. In all proba- 
 bility it is not a case of borrowing at all : Hegel had the idea before 
 either Clough or Browning ; and before Dipsychus was published 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne had given, perhaps, the most striking expres- 
 sion to it in The Marble Faun. Something of the kind was becoming 
 almost a necessity ; and it was especially a necessity to one who, 
 like Clough, had been driven from the old anchorage. It was a 
 necessity too, though unacknowledged, to many who still imagined 
 themselves to be riding there; for one of the most remarkable 
 features of the time is the extraordinary way in which the old words 
 have been made to express wholly new ideas. Of the millions who 
 believe in the atonement, how many understand by it what their 
 fathers understood ? Intelligent and educated men can hardly 
 now accept the crude idea that, sin having been committed, justice 
 must be satisfied, and will be satisfied if only the innocent will 
 consent to suffer for the guilty. In like manner, the conception 
 of evil as the work of a devil, who himself must be a creature of an 
 omnipotent deity, was seen to be a solution that solved nothing. 
 And hence Dipsychus, after a beautiful passage descriptive of 
 Venice, when he has taken and held and ordered on his brain 
 
 ••The faces, and the voices, and the whole mass 
 O' the motley facts of existence flowing by," 
 
 proceeds thus : — 
 
 " O perfect ! if 'twere all ! But it is not ; 
 Hints haunt me ever of a more beyond : 
 I am rebuked by a sense of the incomplete ; 
 Of a completion over soon assumed, 
 Of adding up too soon. What we call sin, 
 I could believe a painful opening out 
 Of paths for ampler virtue. The bare field, 
 Scant with lean ears of hai-vest, long had mocked
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY : NEW INFLUENCES 461 
 
 The vext laborious fnrmer ; came at length 
 The deep plough in the lazy undersoil 
 Down-driving ; with a cry earth's fibres crack, 
 And a few months, and lo I the golden leas, 
 And autumn's crowded shocks and loaded wains. 
 Let us look back on life ; was any change, 
 Any now blest expansion, but at first 
 A pang, remorse-like, shot to the inmost seats 
 Of moral being? To do anything, 
 Distinct on any one thing to decide, 
 To leave the habitual and the old, and quit 
 The easy-chair of use and wont, seems crime 
 To the weak soul, forgetful how at first 
 Sitting down seemed so too." 
 
 Ere long Clough resigned his position at University Hall, and 
 in 1852 went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the intention of 
 settling there. In less than a year, however, he was recalled to 
 England to take up an appointment in the Education Office, in 
 which he spent the short and uneventful remainder of his Hfe. 
 His official duties took up most of his time, and during those years 
 he wrote little poetry until, just before the close, he was compelled 
 to take a holiday and go south for his health. During his travels 
 he composed the tales entitled Mari Magna. But the health 
 he sought did not come, and he sank under a malarial fever in 
 November, 1861. 
 
 Besides the longer poems which have been mentioned, Clough 
 is the author of a considerable number of shorter pieces. It is 
 chiefly in these and in Dipsychus that we see the traces of the 
 intellectual and religious struggle begun at Oxford. Those traces 
 are to be found in such poems as The New Sinai ; Qui Laborat, 
 Orat ; Easter Day, Naples, 1849 ; and Easter Day. 
 
 Clough sometimes assumes an attitude which is not that of 
 dogmatic unbelief, any more than it is that of unquestioning faith. 
 As if in anticipation of the position of the agnostics, though with a 
 sentiment foreign to them, in the fine verses, Ah 1 yet consider it 
 again ! he enters a plea for suspense of judgment : — 
 
 ♦' ' Old things need not be therefore true,' 
 O brother men, nor yet the new ; 
 Ah ! still awhile the old thought retain, 
 And yet consider it again 1
 
 462 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 The souls of now two thousand years 
 Have laid up here their toils and fears, 
 And all the earnings of their pain, — 
 Ah, yet consider it again ! 
 
 We ! what do we see ? each a space 
 Of some few yards before his face ; 
 Does that the whole wide plan explain ? 
 Ah, yet consider it again! 
 Alas ! the great world goes its way, 
 And takes its truth from each new day; 
 They do not quit, nor can retain, 
 Far less consider it again." 
 
 Notwithstanding this, however, Clough's own view with regard 
 to most of the articles of the creed of Christendom was essentially 
 negative. He passes " through the great sinful streets of Naples,' 
 and sees there the result of nineteen centuries of so-called Chris- 
 tianity ; and the sight wrings from him the cry, 
 
 " Christ is not risen, no — 
 
 He lies and moulders low ; 
 Christ is not risen ! 
   » • •   
 
 What if the women, ere the dawn was grey, 
 
 Saw one or more great angels, as they say 
 
 (Angels, or Him himself)? Yet neither there, nor then, 
 
 Nor afterwards, nor elsewhere, nor at all, 
 
 Hath He appeared to Peter or the Ten ; 
 
 Nor, save in thunderous terror, to blind Saul ; 
 
 Save in an after Gospel and late Creed, 
 
 He is not risen, indeed — 
 
 Christ is not risen ! " 
 
 It is true that in the epilogue, the second part of Easter Day, we 
 read that He is 
 
 "Though dead, not dead; 
 Not gone, though fled ; 
 Not lost, though vanished. 
 In the great gospel and true creed, 
 He is yet risen indeed ; 
 Christ is yet risen." 
 
 But no careful student of Clough would interpret this as an assent 
 to the orthodox doctrine : other parts of the poem altogether 
 preclude such an interpretation. It is rather an affirmation of the 
 creed that the good dies not. Clough's view is practically identical
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 463 
 
 with that of his friend, Matthew Arnold, who teaches that Christ 
 
 lived while faith lived : — 
 
 "■V^Tiile we believed, on earth he went. 
 And open stood his grave. 
 Men call'd from chamber, church, and tent ; 
 And Christ was by to save." 
 
 But faith passes, and with it Christ passes too : — 
 
 " Now he is dead ! Far hence he lies 
 In the lorn Syrian town ; 
 And on his grave, with shining eyes. 
 The Syrian stars look down." 
 
 But though the close of the second Easter Day cannot be inter- 
 preted as an acceptance of the doctrine of the resurrection of Christ, 
 its hopefulness is noticeable. Courage was one of the virtues of 
 Clough ; and perhaps Arnold in Thyrsis has unwittingly done 
 his friend an injustice in failing to bring this out with sufficient 
 clearness. It is true Clough's " piping took a troubled sound " ; 
 but it is a mistake to suppose that he sank in the struggle or felt 
 himself vanquished by his doubts. 
 
 "Sit if ye will, sit down upon the ground. 
 Yet not to weep and wail, but calmly look around," 
 
 he cries to the women searching for their lost yet unrisen dead. 
 Whatever in any creeds may be true or false, life is still to live and 
 duty still to do. Perhaps the best of all expressions of Clough's 
 spirit is to be found in the beautiful verses which close the volume 
 of his Poems : — 
 
 " Say not, the struggle nought availeth. 
 The labour and the wounds are vain. 
 The enemy faints not, nor faileth, 
 
 And as tilings have been they remain. 
 
 If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; 
 
 It may be, in yon smoke concealed. 
 Your comrades chase e'en now tlie fliers. 
 
 And, but for you, possess the field. 
 
 For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, 
 
 Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
 Far back, through creeks and inlets makin^t 
 
 Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
 
 464 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 And not by eastern windows only, 
 
 When daylight comes, comes in the light. 
 
 In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly, 
 But westward, look, the land is bright." 
 
 In these verses there is that spirit of Stoicism which Arnold 
 grandly expresses in The Last Word. But there is a characteristic 
 difference between the pieces. Clough is the more hopeful poet 
 of the two. Arnold lays the whole stress upon courageous en- 
 durance, the doing of duty in spite of the certainty of defeat. 
 Clough sees all the western land bright in the sunshine, and the 
 tide breaking in elsewhere if not here. 
 
 What is deepest in the spirit of Clough is concentrated in 
 poems such as those which have just been quoted. But there were 
 other aspects of his nature too, and these also are disclosed in his 
 poems. He is bright and genial, as well as thoughtful and melan- 
 choly ; and the lighter aspects are attractively shown in the Bothie 
 and in Mari Magna, a collection of spirited tales, strongly in- 
 fluenced by Chaucer, especially in the introduction, which owes 
 much to the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. The numerous 
 faults of Mari Magno must be condoned because it never received 
 the author's final revision. It suggests that perhaps Clough 
 might have done better if time and circumstance had not laid 
 upon him such a task as that which he attempts in Dipsychus. 
 As it is, he leaves in all his work a certain sense of inadequacy. 
 He is rather a great Might-have-been, than great in actual 
 performance. 
 
 One or two points of similarity between the work of Clough 
 and that of his great friend Matthew Arnold have already been 
 pointed out. Occasionally, though rarely, the similarity is so close 
 that the work of the one might easily be taken for that of the 
 other. Thus, if the authorship were doubtful, the following 
 verses of Clough from Songs in Absence might be sworn to as 
 Arnold's : — 
 
 "Somewhere — but where I cannot guess — 
 Beyond, may be, the bound of space, 
 The liberated spirits press 
 
 And meet, bless heaven, and embrace.
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY : NEW INFLUENCES 4O5 
 
 It seems not either here nor there, 
 
 Somewhere between us up above, 
 A region of a clearer air, 
 
 The dwelling of a purer love." 
 
 But it is not in scattered passages, or in chance resemblances 
 of expression, that the true kinship between the two men is to be 
 discovered. On the contrary, as far as mere style and form of 
 expression go, there is contrast more frequently than resemblance. 
 But the two agree in their conception of the poet's business, their 
 deepest interests are the same, they have passed through the same 
 experiences. The views of modern life, of its complexity, and the 
 paralysis of action it produces, which we find in Dipsychus, are 
 also to be found everywhere in the poetry of Arnold. Both are 
 poets of doubt _who would fain be poets of faith. Both have to 
 rest content mainly with negations ; but, notwithstanding the 
 negations, each preaches a gospel of courage and of work. 
 
 Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) went up to Oxford four years after 
 Clough, and, like him, after the disaster of a second class in his 
 schools, became a fellow of Oriel College. In 1847 he was ap- 
 pointed private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, and in 185 1 he took 
 the office of inspector of schools. Incongruous as the post seemed 
 with Arnold's " Olympian manners " and his superb culture, in it he 
 spent his life. He found in his occupation much that was interest- 
 ing and well worth doing, as well as much that was tedious and 
 trivial ; and by the humbler work at home, as well as by his official 
 visits to France, Germany and Holland, he did great service to 
 the cause of education. Yet after all it must be confessed that 
 using such an intellect for such purposes was a little like 
 using a razor to chop sticks, and that he seems better placed 
 in his ten years' professorship of poetry at Oxford, to which 
 we owe several delightful volumes. Whether they manage such 
 things better in France or no, it does seem that, with our 
 Burnses as gaugers, and our Matthew Arnolds as inspectors of 
 elementary schools, our management in England leaves something 
 to be desired. 
 
 Matthew Arnold's poetry is in great part the work of his youth. 
 In 1840 he won a prize at Rugby with a poem on Alaric at Ronu; 
 
 w. 30
 
 465 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 and afterwards he won the Newdia^ate prize at Oxford with one 
 on Cromwell. His first volume of poems was The Strayed 
 Reveller^ a-ad other Poems (i849)'i„/ Three years later came Empe- 
 dodes on Etfia, and other PoetHS. This was followed in 1853 by a 
 volume entitled simply Poems, and consisting partly of new work 
 and partly of pieces reprinted from the earlier volumes. The 
 volume of 1855 contained only two new pieces, Balder Dead and 
 Separation ; but in the same year one of the most beautiful of all 
 Arnold's poems, the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, was 
 printed in Eraser's Magazine. In 1858 he published Merope, in 
 
 1866 Thyrsis, the exquisite elegy on his friend Clough, and in 
 
 1867 a volume entitled New Poems. It was the last volume of 
 poetry from Arnold's pen. He afterwards wrote only occasional 
 pieces, which were usually prompted by some event interesting to 
 himself Westminster Abbey, occasioned by the death of Stanley, 
 and those beautiful elegies on dead pets which contain hardly less 
 of Arnold's thought and feeling than he has consecrated to his 
 human friends, are examples. 
 
 Two causes probably concurred to produce this early silence. 
 One was the neglect and indifference with which Arnold's poems 
 
 iwere received. Even among his own friends some were far from 
 enthusiastic in their welcome : Clough himself reviewed T/ie 
 
 [^Strayed Reveller and Etn^edodes in a spirit which cannot be 
 regarded without surprise and some pain. The world paid little 
 
 \^Dr no attention. The second cause lay in the poet himself. His 
 work is exquisite, but of limited range. Arnold has not the 
 buoyancy which bears a poet on from theme to theme. The same 
 sad undertone sounds through nearly all his verse ; and it is possible 
 that he had expressed himself fully at an age when the poetical 
 powers of some poets are barely mature. The elegiac note, of 
 which he is the unsurpassed master, is one which will not bear 
 indefinite repetition. This view of the matter is confirmed by 
 observing how completely representative of Arnold the first two 
 volumes are, and how much of his best work they contain. Yet 
 the one was published when he was twenty-seven, and the other 
 when he was thirty. Along with T/ie Strayed Reveller appeared, 
 among other pieces, The lorsaken Merman, Mycerimis, To a
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY : NEW INFLUENCES 467 
 
 Gipsy Child, Resignation, and the sonnets To .1 Friend and 
 Shakespeare ; while Empedocles was accompanied with Memorial 
 Verses, A Sumtner Night, and Stanzas in Memory of the Author 
 of ' Obermanfi,' as well as with the greater part of the two series of 
 lyrics to which the titles Switzerland and Faded Leaves were 
 subsequently given. In these pieces we have pretty nearly the 
 complete range and scope of Arnold's genius. In later years he 
 amplified and varied the illustrations; but, except in narrative 
 poems in blank verse, he added very little of which there is not 
 here already more than a hint. The blank-verse poems, Sohrab 
 arid Rustum and Balder Dead, followed almost immediately, the 
 former in the volume of 1853, which contained also Tlie Scholar 
 Gipsy, the latter two years afterwards. 
 
 The question, what is the purport and teaching of Arnold's 
 poetry ? is one which is well worth investigating ; and an explicit 
 answer can be given to it ; for one of the great merits of Arnold's 
 verse is its lucidity. There are some writers whose place in 
 history is of subordinate importance. We can, if we choose, trace 
 in their work the influence of the age in which they lived, for no 
 man ever escaped that influence ; but we are not compelled to do 
 so. In others, the influence is absolutely vital, and unless we 
 attend to it we can never understand them. To the latter class 
 Matthew Arnold belongs, and his work is the roundest and most 
 complete expression of one great phase of nineteenth century 
 thought Much of it is in Clough also ; but Arnold transcends 
 Clough; and his superiority to the latter in poetic style alone 
 would make him rather than his friend the true voice of that 
 particular phase of thought. 
 
 In the beginning it is desirable to get rid of a misconception 
 which is due to Arnold's prose rather than to his poetry. Many 
 people fail to distinguish between religion and their own dogma ; 
 and as the author of Literature and Dogma and God and the 
 Bible attacked the majority of current dogmas, he has been 
 widely regarded as irreligious. Arnold disbelieved in the divinity 
 of Christ and at least doubted immortality ; and he defined God 
 as "a stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for 
 righteousness." He also insisted that it was time to Hellenise 
 
 30—2
 
 468 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 and to praise knowing, because we had Hebraised too much, and 
 had overvalued doing. But on the other hand he declared that 
 conduct was three-fourths of life; he read the Bible far more 
 carefully and thoughtfully than the great majority of the professed 
 teachers of religion ; and the most striking point in the recently- 
 published selections from his Note-Books is the immense number 
 of quotations charged with the very spirit of religion. Obviously 
 it was in this sphere that his thought loved to dwell, and it was 
 here that he found the strength for his daily work. Widely as his 
 intellect separated him from the Catholic Church, he was never 
 unsympathetic towards it On the contrary, this sympathy is one 
 of the most remarkable features of Arnold's verse. The author 
 of the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse is more than just to 
 the spirit of asceticism : he shows all its beauty, and he refrains 
 from showing its deformity. Even in the poems which express 
 his disbelief in the common faith there is a tremulous wail which 
 proves that he would fain have believed if he could. That 
 wail sounds through Obennann once Afore ; and in Dover Beach 
 the poet hears the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the 
 Sea of Faith, 
 
 "Retreating, to the breath 
 Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear 
 And naked shingles of the world." 
 
 This attitude towards religion is the most characteristic thing in 
 Arnold. He had no creed, but he had boundless sympathy. He 
 never stood as close to the Oxford Movement as Clough did, and 
 he came out of the turmoil perhaps even more completely 
 stripped of dogma ; but his regret was quite as poignant as 
 Clough's. 
 
 In Arnold this negative attitude towards dogma is closely 
 related to his position in history. He stood just far enough 
 away from the French Revolution to look back upon it and its 
 effects in a spirit of criticism. It had shattered the old world, 
 and left in the place of an ordered system only " blocks of the 
 past, like icebergs high," floating "on a rolling sea." On the 
 other hand, he was not far euou{j;h away to enable him to see
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 469 
 
 what was to be the nature of the new world which must arise 
 from the ruins. He was 
 
 "Standing between two worlds, one dead. 
 The other powerless to be bom." 
 
 There was need of the power which promised to make all things 
 new, but its advent was delayed. Arnold looked around him in 
 vain for any force capable of reconstructing society. The age 
 just past had been potent for destruction, but powerless to create. 
 It had proved to be 
 
 " Europe's dying hour 
 Of fitful dream and feverish power." 
 
 These fundamental convictions, that the faith which had shaped 
 Europe was gone, and that the feudal mould of her society was 
 shattered, are the secret of the wonderful attractive power exercised 
 over Arnold by Senancour, the author of Obermann. Senancour 
 too had felt the vastness of the change, and it is the cause of that 
 "ground-tone of human agony" which sobs through his work. 
 Men holding such convictions must inevitably be melancholy; 
 and Arnold the poet is habitually melancholy. In this respect 
 his verse is unlike his prose, which has more of the charming 
 gaiety and playfulness of his own manners. Both the gaiety and 
 the melancholy were features of his character, and J. C. Shairp 
 has touched the contrast with admirable taste in the lines which 
 describe the youthful scholar of Balliol : — 
 
 "So full of power, yet blithe and debonair, 
 
 Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay, 
 Or half-a-dream chaunting with jaunty air 
 
 Great words of Goethe, catch of Beranger : 
 We see the banter sparkle in his prose, 
 But know not there the undertone which flows. 
 So calmly sad, through all his stately lay." 
 
 Looking thus upon life, Arnold naturally could not be among 
 the optimists, either those, like Macaulay, who were at ease in 
 their Zion because of the material progress of the time, or those, 
 Hke Browning, who were convinced that " God's in his heaven," 
 and who therefore confidently drew the conclusion that "all's
 
 470 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 right with the world." Arnold could find no place among the 
 former class, because he saw that the " something that infects the 
 world" could be cured not by material but only by spiritual 
 means. It was no lack of material means that caused the decay 
 of Rome. In the magnificent contrast between East and West, 
 the Roman noble has all that external means can give — cool halls, 
 rich wines, swift horses and chariots; and all are impotent, not 
 merely to secure happiness, but to avert misery. Spiritual salva- 
 tion comes accompanied by material ruin, in the birth of a new 
 religion. Neither, on the other hand, could Arnold be among the 
 Browningite optimists. To him it meant the assertion that the 
 new religion had been born, without the proof. Still less could 
 such a man feel himself in harmony with the attempts to revert 
 to the Middle Ages. He thought the Middle Ages irrational ; 
 and he knew that any attempt to blot or blur the record of human 
 progress must end in failure. In A Summer Night he has drawn 
 imperishably, under the figure of a helmsman, the picture of him 
 who attempts to steer his way across the ocean of life by any 
 other chart than that of truth. The tempest strikes him, 
 
 "And between 
 The lightning-bursts is seen 
 Only a driving wreck, 
 
 And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck 
 With anguish'd face and flying hair 
 Grasping the rudder hard, 
 
 Still bent to make some port he knows not where, 
 Still standing for some false, impossible shore. 
 And sterner comes the roar 
 
 Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom 
 Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom, 
 And he too disappears, and comes no more." 
 
 In Arnold's opinion, that which the time demands above all 
 things is the discovery of some shore, not false or impossible, to- 
 wards which to steer. We need some Columbus to guide us over 
 a trackless ocean to a new continent which he discerns, though we 
 cannot. Our misfortune is that we can find no such pilot. 
 Goethe, the "physician" of Europe's "iron age," had laid his
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 47 1 
 
 finger on the seat of the disease, but he failed to find a cure. 
 Arnold never conceived himself to be capable of succeeding 
 where Goethe had failed. On the contrary, he rather teaches 
 that the problem has grown so complex that scarcely any intellect 
 could suffice for its solution. Herein he finds the principal 
 difference between ancient and modern civilisation. The former 
 is homogeneous. The Greek is Greek, and he thrusts the bar- 
 barian from him with a haughty wave of the hand. The Roman 
 acknowledges the title of the Greek to the treatment of an equal ; 
 but he too feels himself a being of another sort from all the rest. 
 The Jew in his own way was more exclusive than either; for 
 there is even a profounder arrogance in the division between Jew 
 and Gentile than there is in that between Greek and barbarian. 
 But Arnold finds the type of modern civilisation in Rachel : — 
 
 "Sprung from the blood of Israel's scatter'd race, 
 At a mean inn in German Aarau bom, 
 To forms from antique Greece and Rome uptorn, 
 Trick'd out with a Parisian speech and face, 
 Imparting life renew'd, old classic grace ; 
 Then, soothing with thy Christian strain forlorn, 
 A-Kempis ! her departing soul outworn, 
 While by her bedside Hebrew rites have place — 
 Ah, not the radiant spirit of Greece alone 
 She had — one power, which made her breast its home ! 
 In her, like us, there clash'd, contending powers, 
 Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome. 
 The strife, the mixture in her soul, are ours ; 
 Her genius and her glory are her own." 
 
 This feeling of almost insuperable difficulty is the secret of 
 Arnold's^^melancholy. It gives a sense of brooding pause, almost 
 of the paralysis of action, to his verse. It is the secret of his 
 attraction for some minds, and of an alienation amounting almost 
 to repulsion between him and many others. It makes him, in 
 verse as well as in prose, jciitical rather than constructive. His 
 much-condemned definition of poetry as "a criticism of life" is 
 at least true of his own poetry. Even in the literary sense, there 
 is a surprising quantity of wise criticism in his yerse. Goethe,
 
 472 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Byron, Wordsworth and Senancour are all examined with won- 
 derful insight ; and in the Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon we have 
 a discussion of the principles of the arts of music, painting and 
 poetry. But Arnold's verse is critical in a far deeper sense than 
 this. It is, in accordance with his own definition, critical of life. 
 In all his deepest poems, in Thyrsis and The Scholar Gipsy, in 
 Resignation, in the Obermann poems, in A Southern Night, 
 Arnold is passing judgment on the life of his age, the life of his 
 country, the lives of individual men. In the last-named poem the 
 fate of his brother, dying an exile in the attempt to return to the 
 country of his birth, becomes the text for a sermon on the restless 
 energy of the English, and on the " strange irony of fate " which 
 preserves for the members of such a race graves so peaceful as 
 theirs by " those hoary Indian hills " and " this gracious Midland 
 sea." 
 
 In all this Arnold is quite consistent with himself. Holding 
 that what Europe in his generation principally needed was 
 criticism, he gave this criticism in verse as well as in prose. And 
 it may be remarked that the principle underlying his literary 
 verdicts in prose is the same as that which underlies his poetic 
 view of life. He treats his author not as an isolated fact, and 
 judges him not by any abstract canons. He tries to put him 
 back in his social setting, to look from his point of view, to judge 
 him as a part of that life in which he mingled. 
 
 As regards his poetical method, Arnold is essentially classical, 
 not romantic. Not since Milton has there been any English poet 
 more deeply imbued with the classical spirit. Arnold was so by 
 native predilection ; but his innate tendency was strengthened by 
 the operation of a principle he was never tired of insisting upon — 
 the principle that what we ought to attempt should be determined 
 for us by a consideration of what is needful. He condemned 
 Carlyle in England and Gambetta in France for the error of 
 carrying coals to Newcastle, by giving the weight of their authority 
 to those qualities which their respective countrymen already 
 possessed in excess. Arnold's own design was to tone down 
 what was excessive and to supply what was deficient. It was this 
 which made him turn to France, and insist so much on the value
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 473 
 
 of French literature to England. He thought it more valuable to 
 Englishmen than German literature, just because it was more 
 remote from them, and was rich in the qualities in which they 
 were poor. Arnold has been accused of overrating French litera- 
 ture. He may have overrated individual writers, but no one ever 
 took a juster or saner view of the literature as a whole ; and 
 he certainly cannot be charged with exaggerating French merits 
 in the line, " France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme." 
 
 The same principle led him to Hellenise, to insist upon 
 the vital importance of regarding the whole, instead of being 
 content with the beauty of the separate parts, and to inculcate the 
 study of lucidity, restraint and proportion. This is the essence of 
 his classicism ; for it was only occasionally that he chose an 
 antique theme, or deliberately imitated the Greek manner; nor 
 was he always successful when he did so. Merope as a whole is 
 frigid, and the few fine passages it contains are not sufficient to 
 redeem the whole. The subject of Empedocles is ancient, but the 
 spirit is modern, and the poet himself speaks through the lips of 
 the ancient philosopher. The grand chant of Empedocles is 
 unmistakably Arnold's. So too the whole substance of Arnold's 
 thought is modern. On almost every page he proclaims himself 
 a man of the nineteenth century, and few poets could be more 
 surely dated from internal evidence alone. But he is Greek in 
 his insistence that there shall be a definite thought, which shall 
 be lucidly expressed. Neither the charms nor the defects of 
 extreme romanticism or impressionism were possible to him. 
 
 Among English poets the man to whom Arnold was most 
 indebted was Wordsworth ; and he has repaid the debt by the 
 exquisite skill of his selection from Wordsworth's writings, which 
 has probably done more than anything else to spread a love for 
 that great but most unequal poet. As a student and lover of 
 nature he followed Wordsworth ; but his method and his results 
 in some respects differ widely from those of his master. He has 
 Wordsworth's calm, but neither his cheerfulness nor his detach- 
 ment. Wordsworth lives and thinks with the hills for his sole 
 companions, but Arnold never rests in nature alone. For the 
 steady optimism of Wordsworth there is substituted in Arnold
 
 474 THE LITERATURE OP^ THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the sense that a destiny so rarely yielding great results as the life 
 of man, 
 
 "Though bearable, seems hardly worth 
 This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth." 
 
 In their wonderful accuracy Arnold's references to nature 
 illustrate that conscientiousness of the intellect which is one of 
 his most honourable distinctions. The accuracy of Tennyson has 
 been greatly and justly praised ; but an exceptionally competent 
 judge, Lord de Tabley, himself not only a poet, but one of the 
 most accomplished botanists of his time, gives Arnold the prefer- 
 ence over even Tennyson. The latter, he says, occasionally goes 
 wrong, but he can always trust Arnold. Nor is it in respect to 
 flowers alone that Arnold is accurate. Mountains, lakes, roads, 
 rivers, are all located and portrayed with precision. The 
 foundation of this accuracy is seen in the loving minuteness 
 with which in his letters Arnold notes the facts of nature. 
 This, however, was only one aspect of that passion for truth 
 which Arnold never ceased to cherish. Herein he was a disciple 
 of Goethe, the "rigorous teacher," who showed him "the high 
 white star of truth " ; and it was this passion which stood in the 
 way of his finding under the shelter of authority an easy solution 
 of the intellectual difficulties which beset him. Herein too he 
 was emphatically the child of his own age. More than Clough, 
 more than anyone else, he is the poet of agnosticism, expressing 
 its spirit in a mournful music, before the name itself had been 
 thought of. This is the outcome of his uncompromising intellectual 
 sincerity. Neither to himself nor to others will he pretend to know 
 that which he does not know ; an^LJlj^ conviction is that the pld_ 
 beliefs have been discredited, and there are none to set in their 
 placeT 
 
 Nothing in Arnold's verse is more arresting than its elegiac 
 element. It is not too much to say that there is no other English 
 poet in whom the elegiac spirit so reigns as it does in him : 
 perhaps he who approaches nearest to him in this respect is 
 Mr William Watson. Other great poets — Milton, Gray, Shelley, 
 Tennyson— have given grand expression to their sorrow in single 
 elegies; but no one else returns so frequently as Arnold to the
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY : NEW INFLUENCES 475 
 
 elegiac form. He found in the elegy the outlet of his native 
 melancholy, of the "Virgilian cry" over the mournfulness of 
 mortal destiny. It is the natural tone of an agnostic who is not 
 jubilant, but regretful of the vanished faith, — regretful of its 
 beauty, and regretful of the lost promise. 
 
 Not only are Arnold's elegiacs numerous, they are almost 
 invariably among his finest work. And always his spirit is that of 
 Gray rather than that of Milton or Shelley or Tennyson. Arnold's 
 elegies are charged with the lacritnae rerum ; they have never 
 the triumphant and inspiring ring of Milton's and Shelley's. But 
 as little are they elegies merely of the individual. The subject 
 of Rugby Chapel is his own father ; in A Southern Night it is his 
 brother ; in Westminster Abbey and in Thyrsis, his most intimate 
 friends ; but even in these instances of keen personal sorrow the 
 poet widens his view and treats of human destiny, almost as 
 much as Gray does in the Elegy written in a Country Church- 
 yard. And precisely the same spirit inspires poems which are 
 not elegiac in the sense of being laments for individual men. 
 Th} ^sis, the poem on Clough, is scarcely more elegiac in spirit 
 than The Scholar Gipsy. In both the real theme is th^ondition 
 of modern life, its fevOTshness, its " siclchurry, " and its " divided 
 aimsT^ It is so too in the ' Obermann ' poems, the Stanzas 
 from the Grande Chartreuse, the Stanzas from Carnac, Heinis 
 Grave and Memorial Verses. In all there is the same stateli- 
 ness of utterance, and the same calmly sad undertone. They 
 are the voice of a spirit almost crushed beneath the burden 
 of life. Hence Arnold's grave rebuke in verse of the materialistic 
 spirit, his plea for gentleness and quiet as against bustling energy, 
 "trenchant force, and will Hke a dividing spear." Hence too his 
 banter in prose of the " young lions of the Daily Telegraph " and 
 his fear lest " every voice not of thunder " be silenced. It is this 
 which attracts him to the monastic life, and wrings from him a 
 momentary cry for shelter in the cloister : — 
 
 " Oh, hide me in your gloom profound, 
 Ye solemn seats of holy pain ! 
 Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round. 
 Till 1 possess my soul again."
 
 476 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 This is a favourite phrase, to " possess his soul " ; and the chief 
 fault the poet finds with his countrymen is that we 
 
 "See all sights from pole to pole, 
 
 And glance, and nod, and bustle by, 
 And never once possess our soul 
 Before we die." 
 
 .^^. 
 
 ^ , The lesson he himself draws from the world is, Resignation. 
 S' J Nature herself teaches it : — 
 
 I' 
 
 " Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread. 
 The solemn hills around us spread. 
 This stream which falls incessantly, 
 The strange-scrawl'd rocks, the lonely sky. 
 If I might lend their life a voice, 
 Seem to bear rather than rejoice." 
 
 And hence his injunction is, 
 
 " Be passionate hopes not ill resign'd 
 For quiet, and a fearless mind." 
 
 I There are, however, two kinds of resignation. One is the some- 
 what ignoble resignation of the cloister, which seems to be Arnold's 
 choice in the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse. The other is 
 the stoic resignation inspired by a sense of duty unhelped by any 
 hope of reward ; and this manlier sort is really Arnold's.) As we 
 have seen, his "rigorous teachers" forbade the surrender of intel 
 lect and enjoined the facing of all difficulties at whatever cost, and 
 even although the end were failure. It was Browning who taught 
 that under apparent failure there may be hidden real success, 
 but the spirit of the teaching inspires Arnold's work. His 
 whole life, devoted as it was to the effort to elevate his 
 countrymen, by his verse and by his prose and by his practical 
 professional work, is a proof that his was the nobler sort of 
 resignation. 
 
 " The hopeless tangle of the age," which is one of the causes 
 tending to make resignation a necessity, has been already dwelt 
 upon. Another cause is the inevitable loneliness of huinanity^.
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 477 
 
 and this too is among the thoughts most constantly present to 
 Arnold's mind, and most beautifully expressed by him : — 
 
 "Yes ! in the sea of life enisled, 
 With echoing straits between us thrown, 
 Dotting the shoreless watery wild, 
 We mortal millions live alone." 
 
 The pathos of the poems on his dead pets lies in the sense 
 of their isolation from their human keepers. The " ebb of life 
 and mortal pain " in the poor canary have been altogether mis- 
 understood ; the pathetic eyes of Geist were charged with a meaning 
 we could but dimly comprehend. And this isolation of man from 
 animal is only one degree greater than that of man from man. 
 
 " Brother man's despairing sign 
 Who can trust us to divine?" 
 
 Our destiny is to spend life 
 
 " In beating where we must not pass 
 And seeking what we shall not find." 
 
 All efforts are vain to bridge "the unplumb'd, salt, estranging 
 sea " which rolls between one soul and another. And the law is 
 wider than humanity, or than animal life : the great powers of 
 nature themselves have the same loneliness : — 
 
 *• The solemn peaks but to the stars are known, 
 But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams; 
 Alone the sun arises, and alone 
 Spring the great streams." 
 
 Next, perhaps, to the elegies and the elegiac lyrics, Arnold 
 shows best in the sonnets. The severe restraint of the form was 
 hardly necessary to him ; but it suited him, and as a sonneteer in 
 the Italian form he ranks with the best in English literature. 
 Quiet Work, To a Friend and The Good Shepherd with the Kid are 
 among the treasures of poetry. And these sonnets reveal, only less 
 than the elegiac poems, the personal qualities and aspirations of 
 the author. That on Sophocles has been referred to by more than 
 one critic as containing in the line, " He saw life steadily,jjid saw 
 it whole," a perfect expression of what Arnold himself attempted 
 to djw
 
 478 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 " He is like a starry night with a touch of frost— beautiful and 
 chilly," is a judgment which many would pronpunce to be appro- 
 priate to Arnold. It is sometimes expressed otherwise in the 
 statement that his poetry is statuesque. Certainly there is some 
 truth in such judgments ; and it may be worth while to enquire 
 what precisely are the limits of their truth. In respect of passion, 
 and colour, and movement, Arnold is singularly unlike such con- 
 temporaries as Browning and Rossetti, and such predecessors as 
 Byron and Shelley. The element of passion is not wholly absent 
 from Arnold's poetry, but it is subordinate, and the mode of treat- 
 ment is quite different from that of the other poets just named. 
 Switzerland, in the hands of Shelley, would have been a series of 
 passionate love-lyrics : Arnold makes it a beautiful and pathetic 
 expression of his view of life. In Tristram and Iseiilt the poet 
 chooses, not the moment of passion, but the close of the passionate 
 life, and he ends with a warning of the fate which overtakes the 
 man who fails to govern his passions. In The Church of Brou 
 the lovers are already dead, and, waking in their tomb, they take 
 the sound of the wind for the sweep of angels' wings, and hear 
 in the rain upon the roof " the rustle of the eternal rain of love." 
 Only in The Forsaken Merman does Arnold give himself a loose 
 rein ; and this is one reason why that poem is a favourite with 
 many who are not otherwise appreciative of him. 
 
 The colour in which Arnold delights is in harmony with this 
 treatment of passion. It is all subdued and cold. We find in 
 him few of those vivid reds which Sir Philip Sidney's blind man 
 imagined to be like " the sound of a trumpet " ; and neither are 
 there any of the trumpet notes in Arnold's verse. He loves 
 moonlight more than sunlight, and the cold purity of Alpine snow 
 more than the rich glow of tropic colour. 
 
 "All is silver-grey, 
 Placid and perfect," 
 
 with Arnold's art as well as with Andrea del Sarto's ; and many 
 would be inclined to add of Arnold, as Browning makes Andrea 
 add of himself, the exclamation, the worse ! 
 
 So too of movement. Arnold himself condemned Empedocles
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 479 
 
 on Etna on the ground that a situation_in which everything was 
 to be endured and nothing to be done was faulty. Afterwards he 
 withdrew~tlTe"^rnbar^o Tie had laid upon his own work ; and 
 fortunately so, for Empedocles contains much of his finest verse. 
 Moreover, as R. H. Hutton pointed out, this principle would have 
 condemned by far the greater part, and the best, of his subsequent 
 verse. Nowhere in Arnold do we find movement. Merope has it 
 not, and, being a drama, it is marred in consequence. Even the 
 narrative poems, Sohrab and Rustum and Balder Dead, have very 
 little; but the poet has so chosen his subjects and so handles 
 them that its absence is scarcely noticed. We are grateful for the 
 beautiful blank verse, for the stately similes, for the pathos ; and 
 we turn elsewhere for story. The great majority of Arnold's pieces 
 need no movement ; but the choice of such themes is significant 
 
 All this is, not perhaps a necessity, but a very natural result of 
 Arnold's reflectiveness. In a few writers we have a perfect balance 
 between thought and action. In Shakespeare we have the breath- 
 less rapidity of Macbeth, as well as the brooding of Hamlet ; and 
 we find the one almost as much charged with thought as the other. 
 But usually where we have the sense of action and the gift of rapid 
 narrative, as in Scott, or intensity of passion, as in Byron, we have 
 relative deficiency in reflection. Arnold is on the other side of the 
 line, and in him thought raises a barrier against action. 
 
 Mr William Watson, in answer to criticisms directed against 
 himself, has justly pointed out that there is a passion of the intel- 
 lectual as well as a passion of the emotional nature. It is the failure 
 to perceive this which causes the charge of coldness to be brought 
 against such writers as Arnold and Mr Watson. Though they 
 have little of the latter kind of passion, they are full of the former; 
 and it seems to be a misuse of words to stigmatise as cold poems 
 so full of the fervour of thought as the ' Oberniann ' poems, or 
 Thyrsis, or The Father of the Forest. Perhaps on this point the 
 best test is the lyric, which is above all the poetry of emotion, and 
 to which coldness is fatal. Now it is just in the lyric that Arnold's 
 greatest triumphs have been won. The elegies already noticed are 
 lyrical ; and we have besides such pieces as the exquisite Reqidescat 
 and the song of Callicles in Empedocles on Etna, with regard to
 
 480 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 which Swinburne declared that " for the absolute loveliness of 
 sound and colour " there were " no adequate words which would 
 not seem violent." We have moreover the wonderful close of The 
 Forsaken Merman., the effect of which is certainly not chilly : — 
 
 "But, children, at midnight, 
 When soft the winds blow, 
 When clear falls the moonlight, 
 When spring-tides are low; 
 When sweet airs come seaward 
 From heaths starr'd with broom. 
 And high rocks throw mildly 
 On the blanch'd sands a gloom, 
 Up the still, glistening beaches, 
 Up the creeks we will hie, 
 Over banks of bright seaweed 
 The ebb-tide leaves dry. 
 We will gaze, from the sand-hills, 
 At the white, sleeping town, 
 At the church on the hill-side — 
 And then come back down, 
 Singing : ' There dwells a loved one, 
 But cruel is she, 
 She left lonely for ever 
 The kings of the sea.' " 
 
 § 3. Edward FitzGerald. 
 
 There is just one tie which binds Edward FitzGerald (1809- 
 1883) to the Oxford poets, from whom in most respects he differs 
 widely. Though he is not a poet of the sceptical reaction, he has 
 given the most perfect of ail expressions to the spirit and thought 
 which made the reaction inevitable, and that in the form of a trans- 
 lation from the Persian of eight hundred years ago. 
 
 Ihere is no man in recent Uterature more difficult to 'place' 
 than Edward FitzGerald. His position is unique. Professedly 
 only a translator, he was in reality an original poet as well, ranking, 
 in respect of power, after only a very few of his contemporaries. 
 " An ecceatiic man of genius," it Wcis his whim or his peculiarity
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY : NEW INFLUENCES 481 
 
 to mask and disguise his gifts ; and only a few of his friends com- 
 pletely penetrated the veil which, consciously or unconsciously, he 
 threw over himself. His diffidence partly concealed his genius 
 even from himself. He was conscious of power to do as well as 
 most ; but whether he had power sufficient to do what was worth 
 doing, of that he was uncertain. " I know," he says in his Letters, 
 " that I could write volume after volume as well as others of the mob 
 of gentlemen who write with ease : but I think unless a man can do 
 better, he had best not do at all : I have not the strong inward 
 call, nor cruel-sweet pangs of parturition, that prove the birth of 
 anything bigger than a mouse." Far more than literary fame he 
 valued the friendship of a few men of letters ; and he enjoyed that 
 of the greatest of the time. Both to Tennyson and to Thackeray 
 he was " old Fitz " or " dear old Fitz " ; and the latter, asked which 
 of his friends he loved most, at once named him along with 
 Brookfield'. He was one of the few contemporaries for whom 
 Carlyle felt nothing but kindliness. And one other friendship 
 must be noticed because, although James Spedding cannot be 
 ranked with these three, he was in FitzGerald's judgment the wisest 
 man he had ever known. 
 
 Distrust of self, indifference to literary fame, and contentment 
 with these friendships, all concurred to keep him silent. He had 
 no "spur to prick the sides of his intent." The retirement in 
 which he lived tended to the same results. His seclusion became 
 so deep that about Christmas, 1866, he wrote to Carlyle with com- 
 pliments to Mrs Carlyle, who had been dead since the previous 
 April. Nevertheless, this shy, retiring man, who looked upon 
 himself as fit only to appreciate and to select the beauties of other 
 men who were in danger of being forgotten, contrived to produce 
 one of the most remarkable poems of the epoch, and by reason of 
 that poem is more sure of immortality than any except a mere 
 handful of his contemporaries. 
 
 Everything FitzGerald wrote has the touch of the born man of 
 letters. He is excellent in prose as well as in verse. The letters 
 to his friends flow on easily, delightfully, with bits of quiet humour 
 and innumerable evidences of sincerity and kindliness of heart. 
 
 ^ M.QW\Yi€^ Life of 'r]iackeray,\\. 11. 
 W. 31
 
 482 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 The writer's whims and oddities, his waywardness, his strong and 
 absolutely unconventional likes and dislikes, all combine with the 
 most sterling qualities of head and heart to make those letters 
 among the most charming in the English language. His prose 
 dialogue, Euphranor (1851), is full of grace and of the beauty of 
 pure, limpid English; and the passage descriptive of the boat- 
 race is a model of faultless prose style. But it is as a translator of 
 Calderon, of Aeschylus, and above all of Omar Khayyam, that he 
 will live. In this department of translation the Victorian era has 
 been as copious as it has been in other branches of literature. All 
 sorts of men — scholars, statesmen, poets — have tried their hand at 
 it. Limiting the view to the three classical authors. Homer, 
 Virgil and Horace, who have most attracted translators, we 
 have, among many others, versions by Lords Derby, Lytton and 
 Bowen, Gladstone, William Morris, Theodore Martin, Conington, 
 Worsley, Norgate, Butcher and Lang, Mackail. Prose and verse — 
 blank, ballad metre, Spenserian stanza — have all been tried. But 
 the law of selection among translations is almost as severe as it is 
 in original poetry. 
 
 " A thousand poets pried at life, 
 And only one amid the strife 
 Rose to be Shakespeare." 
 
 And the number of translations which are likely to retain a 
 permanent position in literature might almost be numbered on 
 the fingers of one hand. Three, upon which time has already 
 set its seal, are the Authorised Version of the Bible, Chapman's 
 Homer and Pope's Homer; two more, which probably will receive 
 that seal, are achievements of the nineteenth century — Jowett's 
 Plato and FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam. All of these examples 
 go to show that a translation, to be literary, must not be too 
 literal. Of the five mentioned, Jowett's Plato has been severely 
 criticised on the ground that it does not accurately render 
 the Greek of Plato ; and all the immense labour of the Revised 
 Version was undergone in order to correct the inaccuracies 
 of the Authorised Version. But no competent judge would 
 assert that, as a piece of literature, the Revised Version is
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 483 
 
 fit to take the place of its predecessor ; and only prejudice can be 
 blind to the fact that if Jowett has not rendered the words of Plato 
 as accurately as some of his rivals, he has rendered his spirit far 
 better. As to the other three translations, not one of them even 
 makes a pretence of verbal accuracy. It would seem that each 
 generation will insist on re-discovering for itself what precisely a 
 great man has said in a foreign tongue, and will make its own 
 literal translation ; but it will accept from the past and permanently 
 cherish that which gives in grand bold outline the form of the 
 thing translated, or that which, like Pope's work, is " a very pretty 
 poem," though it may not be Homer. 
 
 To the latter category all FitzGerald's translations belong. 
 The liberties he takes with his text are great ; but by some subtle 
 intellectual chemistry he 'precipitates' the soul of the original 
 with a success no literal renderer ever has succeeded in rivalling. 
 The best description of the character of his work is that of 
 Professor C. E. Norton : " He is to be called ' translator ' only in 
 default of a better word, one which should express the poetic 
 transfusion of a poetic spirit from one language to another, 
 and the re-presentation of the ideas and images of the original 
 in a form not altogether diverse from their own, but perfectly 
 adapted to the new conditions of time, place, custom and 
 habit of mind in which they reappear. ...It is the work of 
 a poet inspired by the work of a poet; not a copy, but a 
 reproduction, not a translation, but the redelivery of a poetic 
 inspiration^" 
 
 The series of FitzGerald's translations began with his rendering 
 of six dramas by Calderon (1853), the only book which ever bore 
 his name on publication. He afterwards added The Mighty 
 Magician and Such Stuff as Dreams are made on, " taken from " 
 El Mdgico Prodigioso and La Vida es Sueno. The original six 
 dramas had been selected from among the less-known plays of 
 Calderon ; and apparently FitzGerald had been influenced in his 
 choice by a fear that the liberties he took with the text would be 
 resented if they were taken with the better-known plays. In the 
 Advertisement he apologises for those liberties. He curtails and 
 ^ Quoted in The Library of Literary Criticism, vii. 516. 
 
 31—2
 
 484 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 omits, and, where it is necessary, fills in by lines of his own the 
 lacunae so created. The justification of the liberties lies in their 
 success. FitzGerald succeeded in his aim of making Calderon 
 readable and interesting to those who knew no Spanish ; while 
 to those who are familiar with the language his deviations 
 from the original are harmless. The result consequently is a 
 clear gain to the great Spanish dramatist, who gets a new 
 audience which assuredly would not have been won by a literal 
 translation. 
 
 Undeterred by the far wider knowledge of his originals, 
 FitzGerald took equally great liberties when, long afterwards, he 
 came to translate, or, as he jestingly says, to make ' per-versions ' 
 from the Agametfinon of Aeschylus and the Oedipus Tyrannus 
 and Oedipris Colo7ieus of Sophocles. In these cases he had far 
 less justification. In Calderon, as he sensibly urges, there was 
 much that was likely to alienate an English reader — improba- 
 bilities, bombast, stage properties, that were better removed. But 
 such a plea is not valid with respect to the classical dramas. The 
 classical tradition was familiar to English readers, and the classical 
 form of drama was represented to them by great original works in 
 their own language. Moreover, the plays he selected were among 
 the best-known works of antiquity. These were strong reasons 
 for leaving them as he found them and translating, if not literally, 
 at least with every respect for the form and substance. But 
 FitzGerald cuts and carves, omits and adds, and takes liberties as 
 great or nearly as great as he takes with Calderon. He attempts 
 to justify himself; but the best justification is one which he does 
 not plead. This free way was the only way in which he could 
 work : he is compelled in all cases to mix himself with his author ; 
 in all cases we find in his versions much of Edward FitzGerald ; 
 at no point can we be sure, without reference to the original, that 
 we have Calderon, or Sophocles, or Omar. 
 
 FitzGerald never pretended to be a learned man. At Cam- 
 bridge he was under some anxiety as to whether he would pass 
 the examination for his poll degree. But he read in a leisurely 
 fashion what interested himself, and in the long run acquired a 
 wide knowledge of books in a considerable number of languages.
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 485 
 
 And as he walked in the by-ways of life, so he was apt to turn 
 aside from the beaten track in literature. About the time when 
 he finished his Spanish dramas he began the study of Persian 
 under the influence of his friend, E. B. Cowell, the Oriental 
 scholar. At that time few either knew or cared for Persian 
 literature, though Morier's Hajji Baba had done something to 
 spread a knowledge of Persian life and manners. FitzGerald's 
 acquaintance with Persian was never great ; but even through the 
 obscurity of a language half mastered he had the gift of detecting 
 what suited his own genius ; and he found it here. He tried his 
 hand, still 'prentice at Persian, on Jami's Saldmdn and Absdl 
 (1856); but he found his title to immortality in the great render- 
 ing of the Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam (1859). No great book 
 ever stole more silently into print. No one noticed it. Two 
 hundred and fifty copies were printed, and of these FitzGerald 
 presented some two hundred to Quaritch. He kept the rest, but 
 all except two or three long remained hidden away in his cup- 
 boards : he did not present them because he thought most 
 would be indifferent, and many would be shocked by the philo- 
 sophy and theology of the astronomer-poet. The experience of 
 the bookseller showed that the translator was not mistaken as 
 to the indifference. Quaritch disposed of the copies in his hands 
 at a penny each, because customers would pay no more ; and at 
 that price copies were bought the year after publication by 
 Rossetti and Swinburne. Now, a small library has grown up 
 round Omar, and the greater part of that library is unquestionably 
 due to the inspiration of FitzGerald. 
 
 The point in which FitzGerald's Omar surpasses almost if not 
 quite all translations of poetry is that in itself it gives the impression 
 of a great original poem. In ordinary verse translations, the 
 reader cannot forget the existence of the original, even if he has 
 never read it, because the translator is manifestly not uttering his 
 own thoughts. In FitzGerald, notwithstanding Eastern symbolism, 
 we never without an effort remember Omar. There is none of 
 the sense of loss which translation normally gives. Only the 
 freedoms which FitzGerald allowed himself could have produced 
 such a result; and these would have been unavailing had not
 
 486 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the man who took them been himself a poet of no mean 
 quaHty'. 
 
 A good deal of investigation has been made, and some 
 complaint uttered, with regard to FitzGerald's treatment of his 
 text. " Many quatrains," he himself says, " are mashed together : 
 and something lost, I doubt, of Omar's simplicity, which is such 
 a virtue m him." " It must be admitted," says his editor, with a 
 touch of solemnity, "that FitzGerald took great liberties with the 
 original in his version of Omar Khayyam I" Several later transla- 
 tions have appeared which purport to represent the true Omar 
 more faithfully than FitzGerald. As to their fidelity, only Persian 
 scholars have a right to pronounce an opinion ; but it is plain to 
 the English reader that the true Omar has small cause to be 
 thankful for the more Hteral versions. He shines out a far 
 greater poet in the free rendering of FitzGerald than in any of 
 those which claim to be more faithful. 
 
 A poem built up, hke Omar's, out of quatrains/unconnected 
 by any story and without specific theme might easily become a 
 mere jumble of atoms. Each quatrain might have a beauty of 
 its own, like a sonnet ; and, the units being short, they would be 
 apt to group themselves together like the quatrains in the sections 
 of Tennyson's In Memoriam. But they need have no unity 
 further than that. FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam has, however, a 
 unity which goes far beyond this; and herein lies its subtlest 
 charm. The parts are bound together as intimately as those of 
 In Memoriam, though by a less palpable bond. It is more like 
 the connexion between the sonnets of Shakespeare; and, as in 
 Shakespeare's case, it has to be felt rather than expressed. This 
 unity seems to have been in part the creation of FitzGerald, 
 skilfully working upon and adapting the materials supplied to 
 him by Omar. At any rate, the peculiarly modern tone, which 
 
 ' As to FitzGerald's relation to his original, the most thorough investigator, 
 Mr Heron-Allen, pronounces that " a translation pure and simple it is not, but 
 a translation in the most artistic sense of the term it undoubtedly is." The 
 materials Mr Heron-Allen furnishes prove conclusively that FitzGc-rald almost 
 always had seme original, but that he handled it with the utmost freedom. 
 
 * Leiiers.
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 487 
 
 does so much to bring home to the English reader the inner 
 meaning of the poem, is largely imparted by FitzGerald. It is 
 curious enough that that quatrain which was most obnoxious to 
 popular views of religion, and which, among others, occasioned a 
 certain awe and fear to some of FitzGerald's friends, and even to 
 FitzGerald himself \ appears to be the outcome partly of interpo- 
 lation, and partly, it is suggested, of the process of ' mashing' : — 
 
 "Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make, 
 And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake : 
 
 For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man 
 Is blacken'd — Man's forgiveness give — and take ! " 
 
 Professor Cowell says that there is no original for the line about 
 the snake ; and he adds that he has always supposed the last line 
 to be FitzGerald's mistranslation of a quatrain in Nicolas's edition, 
 which he gives. It may be so ; but it would be strange to find in 
 a mere mistranslation the origin of such a powerful and con- 
 spicuously modern line. The fact that FitzGerald never cared to 
 alter it, though his attention was called to the supposed mistake, 
 is suggestive of a very different explanation. 
 
 At the outset FitzGerald had to choose between two rival 
 interpretations of the original quatrains. According to one view, 
 all the sensuous imagery, the cup and the wine and the rest, were 
 to be taken literally, and the poem was the utterance of an 
 epicurean determined to make the best of an evanescent life 
 which was all he knew and all he might ever enjoy: — 
 
 " Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise ! 
 One thing at least is certain — This Life flies; 
 
 One thing is certain and the rest is Lies ; 
 The Flower that once has blown for ever dies." 
 
 The rival theory was that which saw in the poem an allegory, in 
 the poet a devout Stifi, in the wine an emblem of God. Fortu- 
 nately, FitzGerald had no hesitation about his interpretation. He 
 had been sceptical about the Siifism even of Ilafiz : he was fully 
 
 1 " I told Parker," he says before the publication, " he might find it rather 
 dangerous among his Divines " ; and he adds that " he thinks he will take it 
 back and add some stanzas which he had kept out for fear of being too strong " 
 {Lelten, 469).
 
 488 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 convinced that there was no Sufism at all about Omar, that the 
 wine he sang was the wine which is forbidden to the orthodox 
 Mahommedan, which maketh glad the heart of man, and which 
 also steals away his reason. In this light accordingly the transla- 
 tion represents Omar. Its spirit and character cannot be better 
 given than in FitzGerald's own words to his friend Cowell. 
 " It is," he says, " most ingeniously tesselated into a sort of 
 Epicurean Eclogue in a Persian Garden \" 
 
 Yet FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam is far from being a mere 
 drinking song. Its hold upon the mind is due to the fact that it 
 is the expression of a philosophy of life. The sum of that 
 philosophy, it is true, is no more than " eat, drink and be merry, 
 for to-morrow we die." But it is tinged with the " infinite regret 
 for all that might have been." It is full of the wistful melancholy 
 of a nature greater than its destiny. Omar — FitzGerald's Omar — 
 is best compared with Horace; and the qualities which have 
 made Horace pre-eminently the poet of the man of the world 
 give Omar too an eloquence of appeal to the heart. The Roman 
 poet garlands his brow with flowers, quaffs the Falernian and the 
 Massic wine, and bids defiance to care. And even so Omar : — 
 
 "Perplext no more with Human or Divine, 
 To-morrow's tangle to the winds resign, 
 
 And lose your fingers in the tresses of 
 The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine." 
 
 But Horace has his other mood, in which he feels the need of 
 Stoicism to buttress the Epicureanism which cannot wholly satisfy 
 a thoughtful mind : — 
 
 " O beate Sesti, 
 Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat inchoare longam. 
 
 Jam te premet nox fabulaeque Manes 
 Et domus exilis Plutonia." 
 
 Omar too has his more serious moods, and is perplexed with 
 
 obstinate questionings : — 
 
 " There was the Door to which I found no Key ; 
 There was the Veil through which I might not see : 
 
 Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee 
 There was — and then no more of Thee and Me. 
 
 ^ Leiiers.
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 489 
 
 Earth could not answer ; nor the Seas that mourn 
 In flowing Purple, of their Lord forlorn ; 
 
 Nor rolling Heaven, with all his Signs reveal'd 
 And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn." 
 
 He too has his melancholy regret at the passing of youth and 
 beauty and pleasure : — 
 
 "Yet Ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose ! 
 That Youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close ! 
 
 The Nightingale that in the branches sang. 
 Ah whence, and whither flown again, who knows ! " 
 
 There are strings in the lyre of Hoiagg which are mute in 
 that of Omar. In the latter, there is nothmg to set beside the 
 heroic odes at the opening of the third book of Horace. But 
 on the other hand, there are notes in Omar which set our deepest 
 thoughts vibrating as nothing in Horace does. Modern European 
 civilisation is founded partly upon the East as well as upon the 
 West. Horace is purely western ; but in Omar as translated by 
 FitzGerald the East is blended with the West. This is the reason 
 why Omar might have proved "dangerous" among Parker's 
 divines. They regarded with easy indifference the sceptical Epicu- 
 reanism of Horace ; for, though he is singularly modern in some 
 respects, he is nevertheless essentially of the ancient world and 
 belongs to another "dispensation." But Omar, passed through 
 the alembic of FitzGerald's mind, is a modern, and when he 
 turns his sceptical intellect upon the problems of the universe — 
 proximus ardet Ucalegon. The Rubdiydt are a " criticism of life," 
 not in some far-off country and among unfamiliar men, but here 
 and now — the life all have to live, the destiny all have to look 
 forward to, the bounds of thought against which all must beat in 
 vain. 
 
 The single work upon which FitzGerald's fame will permanently 
 rest consists of only 404 lines, and it professes to be no more 
 than a translation. He therefore lacks volume, and he lacks 
 originality, two very important wants. But the poem which the 
 world owes to Edward FitzGerald and to Omar Khayyam jointly 
 is one of the jewels of the nineteenth century. Coleridge, who 
 has one of the safest reputations among the poets of recent times,
 
 490 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 owes it all to a mere handful of verses ; but Mr Stopford Brooke 
 said of him long ago that those verses ought to be bound in pure 
 gold. And no binding less precious is worthy of the masterpiece 
 of Edward FitzGerald. 
 
 § 3. The Pre-Raphaelites. 
 
 A word of explanation, and perhaps of apology, may be 
 necessary for the application of the term Pre-Raphaelite to a 
 group of literary men. It is a term which belongs properly to 
 the history of painting, and not to that of poetry. In poetry it 
 has no specific signification, except so far as it derives meaning 
 by reflection from its use in relation to art, and indicates a certain 
 phase of the great romantic movement which governed nearly all 
 the imaginative literature of the time. Nevertheless, it serves a 
 useful purpose in binding together a group of men who had 
 common aims and whose writings were so intimately related to 
 their art that the transference of a word from one to the other 
 seems scarcely a transference at all. For not only were a number 
 of these men at once artists and writers, but they repeatedly used 
 pen to illustrate pencil, or pencil to illustrate pen. For example, 
 there is a whole group of Rossetti's sonnets illustrative of his own 
 pictures or of those of other painters. 
 
 The leading spirit in this Pre-Raphaelite group was Dante 
 Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), and it becomes important to 
 understand what manner of man he was and what were the ideals 
 which inspired him. By blood Rossetti was three-quarters Italian 
 and only one-quarter English, his father being an Italian political 
 refugee and his mother a daughter of Gaetano Polidori. Naturally 
 therefore he was from childhood intimately acquainted with the 
 Italian language, and he also came to know Italian literature well ; 
 yet he seems never to have felt that powerful attraction which has 
 drawn many Englishmen of pure blood towards Italy, as much 
 as, or even more than, towards their own country. " He liked 
 England and the English," says his brother, " better than any
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 491 
 
 Other country and nation'"; and notwithstanding his studies in 
 Dante, his mind was moulded by English more than by Italian 
 literature. 
 
 Under his father's roof Dante Rossetti heard constant talk 
 about political questions, but such questions never excited his own 
 interest. On the political side his mind appears to have been a 
 blank. One or two other lacunae in his vigorous intelligence are 
 not less noteworthy. He "dealt firmly" in the hearing of Burne- 
 Jones with a man who unwarily professed an interest in meta- 
 physics*. Living in an age of science, he "was himself not sure 
 that the earth really revolved round the sun ! ' Our senses did 
 not tell us so, at any rate, and what then did it matter whether 
 it did move or not?' What Dante knew was enough for him. 
 He then remembered Galileo, another Italian, and gave in ! It 
 might matter in a scientific way, oh yes^ ! " It is even more sur- 
 prising to find that the author of Songs of the Art Catholic, the 
 painter of the Girlhood of Mary Virgin, cared nothing about 
 Tractarianism. "If he knew anything about 'the Gorham con- 
 troversy,'" says his brother, "it was only that Carlyle coupled 
 'prevenient grace' with 'supervenient moonshine*.'" Yet if he 
 had little or no dogmatic religion he had a profound feeling for 
 the supernatural. "Any writing about devils, spectres, or the 
 supernatural generally, whether in poetry or in prose, had always 
 a fascination for him*"; and in later days, when his mind had lost 
 its balance, he fell a victim to spiritualism, and began to call up 
 the spirit of his dead wife by table-turning. 
 
 Within his own domain of art, however, Rossetti's interests 
 were keen and his intellect most active. The atmosphere of his 
 home was impregnated with literature as well as with politics ; 
 and while Dante Rossetti's mind took no colour from the latter, 
 it greedily absorbed every influence from the former. Most of 
 
 ^ Memoir, i. 158. ^ Mackail's Life of Morris, i. 10 1. 
 
 ^ W. Bell Scott's Autobiography, i. 291. 
 
 * Memoir, i. 114. I accept as authoritative Mr W. M. Rossetti's account 
 of his brother's religious opinions. Other writers, who have given widely 
 different views, are probably less fully informed. 
 
 5 W. M. Rossetti, Preface to Collected Works of Dante Rossetti.
 
 492 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the great English poets of recent times, and in addition the 
 American Edgar Allan Poe, reigned over his mind in turn. In 
 the long run, his brother tells us, he "perhaps enjoyed and 
 revered Coleridge beyond any other modern poet whatsoever." 
 But above any of them, above all other books in the world, he 
 ranked the Bible and Malory's Morte d' Arthur — a curious colloca- 
 tion, made all the more curious and instructive by the fact that 
 the latter influenced him more than the former. But Rossetti was 
 a painter as well as a poet — a painter by profession, a poet for 
 enjoyment and as a form of expression of the soul. After an 
 attempt to carry on the two arts simultaneously, Rossetti found 
 or fancied that his poetry interfered with his painting ; and about 
 the age of twenty-five, as he told Mr Hall Caine, he gave up 
 poetry, writing after that scarcely anything, except the renovated 
 Jenny, till the publication of the Poems in 1870. Rossetti's choice 
 between the two arts in which he was eminent was determined 
 by his conviction that painting was the art of the future, and 
 poetry that of the past. He was accustomed to maintain that 
 Keats was and would remain the last great English poet. "If 
 any man has any poetry in him," he said to Burne-Jones, "he 
 should paint, for it has all been said and written, and they have 
 scarcely begun to paint it^." 
 
 Evidently, then, Rossetti had two widely separated periods of 
 poetical production; one opening about 1847 and extending to 
 about 1853; the other opening shortly after the publication of 
 the Poems, and continuing, with intervals, down to the poet's death. 
 Part of his verse must therefore he considered as the work of a 
 very young man, and part of it as that of a man of middle age. 
 
 The celebrated Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 
 1848. It included at first only three painters, William Holman 
 Hunt, John Everett Millais and Rossetti, and one sculptor, 
 Thomas Woolner. With these were soon afterwards associated 
 James CoUinson, a domestic painter, Frederick George Stephens, 
 an Academy student, who was succeeded when he retired by 
 Walter Deverell, and William Michael Rossetti, the brother of 
 Dante. No one else was ever a member of the Brotherhood, but 
 ^ Mackail's Life of Morris, i. no.
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY : NEW INFLUENCES 493 
 
 several others were more or less intimately associated with them ; 
 and among these may be mentioned Christina Rossetti, Coventry 
 Patmore and William Bell Scott. The impulse which primarily 
 drew them together was an artistic, not a literary one. They were 
 moved by the " contemptible and even scandalous " condition of 
 British art; and the year of political revolution was not inappro- 
 priately, though doubtless by pure accident, selected by these 
 youths for the initiation of a revolution in art. The first pictures 
 painted under the inspiration of the new ideal were exhibited in 
 the galleries of 1849. But the Brethren felt the need of some 
 means by which they might express and illustrate their principles 
 in words as well as on canvas ; and this led to the foundation of 
 their magazine, Tfie Germ, the four numbers of which (the last 
 two under the changed title of Art and Poetry) appeared between 
 the beginning of January and the end of April, 1850. The con- 
 tributors were poor, and they found that to maintain a magazine 
 for the purpose of expounding their views on art was likely to 
 prove a costly affair \ A later periodical which, in the case of 
 Dante Rossetti, served the same purpose was The Oxford and 
 Cambridge Magazine (1856). In it appeared The Burden of 
 Ni7ieveh and The Staff and Scrip. The Blessed Damozel likewise 
 was there reprinted, with alterations, from The Germ. Before 
 this time, as we have seen, Rossetti had ceased to write poetry ; 
 and with the few exceptions contained in these two magazines his 
 poems remained unpublished. But it would be a mistake to 
 suppose that they were therefore without influence on the work of 
 others. They were well known in the circle of Rossetti's friends, 
 among whom were many of the leading writers and artists of the 
 time ; and over these they exercised a fascination similar to that 
 which Rossetti himself exercised. The Blessed Damozel was a 
 kind of poetic revelation to a select band, while to the world it 
 was still buried in The Germ, almost as effectually as the MS. 
 poems were afterwards literally buried. 
 
 In i860 Rossetti married Elizabeth Siddal, with whom he 
 had been in love since 1850. Less than two years afterwards she 
 
 ^ I take the facts relating to The Ge)-m from Mr W. M. Rossetti's preface 
 to the reprint of that magazine.
 
 494 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 died from the effects of an overdose of laudanum, a drug which 
 she had been in the habit of taking to soothe her nerves. In the 
 transport of his grief Rossetti buried the MSS. of his poems in 
 his wife's coffin. In 1869 they were disinterred, to be pu Wished 
 in the volume of 1870, Meanwhile, in 1861, Rossetti had pub- 
 lished his first volume, The Early Italian Poets, afterwards entitled 
 Dafite and his Circle. The translations were " the work almost 
 entirely of his eighteenth to his twenty-second year\" They were 
 a very valuable addition to English knowledge of the Italian poets, 
 and Rossetti was unquestionably the man best qualified to make 
 such a contribution. It is, however, by virtue of his original poetry 
 that Rossetti will live in English literature, and the volume of 1870 
 was that which first made it widely known to English readers. 
 
 In one respect it was inevitable that less than justice should 
 be done to Rossetti. His mind was the impelling force of Pre- 
 Raphaelitism, both in art and in literature. In painting he was 
 certainly not the superior, and probably he was not the equal of 
 one or two others of the Brotherhood ; and yet Ruskin was 
 undoubtedly right in declaring him to be "the chief intellectual 
 force in the establishment of the modern Romantic School in 
 England." He was so in art, where he was not the greatest, as 
 well as in poetry, where few will dispute his pre-eminence in his 
 class. He was the master of a school ; but his disciples had 
 published books before him, and he seemed to be their follower. 
 The fact that his sister Christina Rossetti had already published 
 two volumes is unimportant ; for the differences between her and 
 her brother are far more striking than the resemblances. But 
 when the Poems of Dante Rossetti appeared, William Morris's 
 Defence of Guenevere was twelve, and Swinburne's Poems and 
 Ballads four, years old. Both were deeply marked with the stamp 
 of Rossetti. In the case of Swinburne the influence was an 
 inspiration, in the case of Morris, to some extent at least, it was a 
 misleading fire. Never afterwards do we find so much of Rossetti 
 in Morris, and whoever compares this early volume with his later 
 work will be struck with the absence from The Defence of Guene- 
 vere of his characteristic merits. Morris found himself when he 
 ^ W. M. Kos^tiiV s, Memoir, i. 21 4-5.
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 495 
 
 made Chaucer his master; as a Pre-Raphaeh'te he was not quite 
 successful. He and Swinburne however had accustomed the 
 public mind to a class of themes and a style of treatment the 
 suggestion of which came from Rossetti, as the two poets them- 
 selves were generously ready to acknowledge. 
 
 To the lovers of poetry the volume of 1870 offered a rich and 
 vaiied feast; and if, on the one hand, it seemed less original than 
 it really was, on the other, the ear of readers was already attuned 
 to it. Specimens of all that is best in the work of Rossetti, 
 excepting only in the department of the historical ballad, are to 
 be found there. Such completeness and maturity are very sur- 
 prising if the poet's statement to Mr Hall Caine was strictly 
 accurate, and the whole volume is to be taken as the work of a 
 young man of twenty-five. 
 
 Such a volume, from the pen of "the chief intellectual force" 
 of the modern romantic movement, deserved and was certain to 
 attract attention. It was at first received with warm and general 
 praise ; but something more than a year afterwards it became the 
 subject of a virulent attack entitled The Fleshly School of Poetry, 
 published pseudonymously under the name of Thomas Maitland^ 
 but really by the poet Robert Buchanan. This most unjust 
 criticism not only condemned Rossetti as a poetic artist, but 
 violently denounced the moral tendency of his work ; and unfor- 
 tunately its effects were not ephemeral, as the effects of criticism 
 usually are. In the long run it corroded Ros.setti's mind, and 
 threw a deeper shade of blackness upon the dark clouds that 
 were gathering over his life. The details of this wretched story 
 are not worth repeating now; but it is pleasant to remember 
 that at last the assailant repented him of the evil he had 
 wrought, and sang his recantation in the fine verses " to an old 
 enemy" forming the dedication of his romance God and the Man. 
 The gist of Buchanan's criticism was the charge of sensuality. 
 It was exaggerated and unjust, but to say that it was wholly with- 
 out foundation would be too much. vSome of Rossetti's poems — 
 e.g. Troy Town — are certainly not free from the taint of fleshliness. 
 Buchanan's attack derived plausibility mainly from two sources : 
 first, the theme of a few pieces, and especially o{ Jmny, though 
 that is really a poem most moral in tendency; and secondly, from
 
 496 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the excessive sensuousness of many of the pieces. Now the 
 presence of a sensuous element is not a fault : on the contrary, 
 poetry not only may be, but ought to be, as Milton's well-known 
 dictum points out, sensuous as well as simple and impassioned. 
 But the cloying effect which Rossetti's verse produces on many 
 readers is mainly due to an excess of what is in itself a good 
 thing ; and the excess renders it not wholly inexcusable to 
 translate 'sensuous' into 'sensual.' Many of the poems most 
 characteristic of him are over-wrought and luscious. The Bride^s 
 Prelude, The Stream! s Secret and not a few of the sonnets of the 
 House of Life are chargeable with this fault. The Blessed Damozel 
 is not free from it. The effect aimed at is often attained. The 
 sense of the sultry noonday heat and stillness is perfectly ren- 
 dered in The Bride's Prelude; and the bride's 'tiring-chamber is 
 described with the rich suggestiveness of a Pre-Raphaelite picture. 
 
 It is 
 
 " Like the inner altar-niche 
 Whose dimness worship has made rich. 
 Within the window's heaped recess 
 
 The light was counterchanged 
 In blent reflexes manifold 
 From perfume-caskets of wrought gold 
 And gems the bride's hair could not hold 
 
 All thrust together : and with these 
 
 A slim-curved lute, which now, 
 At Amelotte's sudden passing there. 
 Was swept in somewise unaware, 
 And shook to music the close air." 
 
 The air is heavy with scent and heat; the poet has produced 
 exactly the impression he wished to produce, and he deserves the 
 praise due to success. But it is an air not wholesome to breathe 
 long, and there is too much of it in Rossetti's poetry. The 
 luscious sonnets of The House of Life, beautiful individually, 
 form together a poem from which many readers are glad to escape. 
 Take for example Sonnet xxiii. Love's Baubles : — 
 
 "I stood where Love in brimming armfuls bore 
 Slight wanton flowers and foolish toys of fruit : 
 And round him ladies thronged in warm pursuit, 
 Fingered and lipped and proffered the strange store.
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 497 
 
 And from one hand the petal and the core 
 
 Savoured of sleep ; and cluster and curled shoot 
 Seemed from another hand like shame's salute, — 
 
 Gifts that I felt my cheek was blushing for. 
 
 At last Love bade my Lady give the same : 
 And as I looked, the dew was light thereon; 
 And as I took them, at her touch they shone 
 
 With inmost heaven-hue of the heart of flame. 
 
 And then Love said : ' Lo ! when the hand is hers, 
 
 Follies of love are love's true ministers.'" 
 
 The thing is so beautifully done as almost to disarm criticism; 
 and yet it is like an excessively rich food, of which a very little 
 satisfies. The Lydian mode is not the strain to brace manhood. 
 Of sonnets like Milton's Afassacre in Piedmo?it, or Wordsworth's 
 Westminster Bridge, or Drummond's St John the Baptist, or 
 Keats's Chapmajis Homer, we cannot have too many ; but the 
 sonnets of the House of Life are unnerving. They are frequently 
 fanciful rather than imaginative, they tremble on the verge of 
 conceits, they are full of literary artifice sometimes degenerating 
 into literary trickery, the alliteration is excessive, the diction 
 occasionally recalls the worst faults of the eighteenth century 
 style. Thus, "the smooth black stream that makes thy whiteness 
 fair," which means, in plain language, the ink used in writing a 
 love-letter, is at least as bad as the "plumy people" and the 
 "bleating kind," and the other periphrases which, a century 
 and a half ago, were supposed to translate plain prose into 
 poetry. 
 
 On the other hand, there is a clearness and definiteness of 
 thought, as well as a beauty of expression, in such sonnets 
 as The Birth-bond (xv), the noble Lost Days (lxxxvi), 
 A Superscription (xcvii), and The One Hope (ci), which 
 make Rossetti's position safe among the greatest of English 
 sonnet-writers; and many other sonnets outside that poem of 
 sonnets confirm him in that position, — Thomas Chatterton, 
 Winter, The Last Three from Trafalgar. In these we find 
 the tonic quality characteristic of poetry which is at once great 
 and thoroughly wholesome. The blood is fired when we 
 read of Chatterton, " with Shakespeare's manhood at a boy's 
 w. 32
 
 49^ THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 wild heart," or of the three greybeards, destined soon to 
 greet 
 
 " The impassioned soul which on its radiant way 
 Soared through the fiery cloud of Trafalgar." 
 
 And even Wordsworth's great ode rings no clearer call to duty than 
 Lost Days : — 
 
 "The lost days of my life until to-day, 
 
 What were they, could I see them on the street 
 
 Lie as they fell? Would they be ears of wheat 
 Sown once for food but trodden into clay? 
 Or golden coins squandered and still to pay? 
 
 Or drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet? 
 
 Or such spilt water as in dreams must cheat 
 The undying throats of Hell, athirst ahvay? 
 I do not see them here ; but after death 
 
 God knows I know the faces I shall see, 
 Each one a murdered self, with low last breath. 
 
 * I am thyself, — what hast thou done to me ? * 
 •And I — and I — thyself,' (lo ! each one saith,) 
 
 ' And thou thyself to all eternity 1 ' " 
 
 The same division can be drawn between Rossetti's other 
 poems. On one side of the line would lie such pieces as The 
 Bride's Prelude, The Blessed Datnozel, Staff and Scrip, The Stream's 
 Secret, Love's Nocturn and the major part of The House of Life. 
 On the other side would lie The Burden of Nineveh, The White 
 Ship, The King's Tragedy, Stratton Water, Rose Mary, Welling- 
 tons Funeral, /en?iy and A Last Confession. The latter group 
 presents Rossetti at his best ; but it is not the Rossetti who was best 
 known and most admired by his early followers. It is interesting 
 to notice how considerable a proportion of the poems named as 
 belonging to this group appeared first in the Ballads and Sonnets 
 of i88i. Bose Mary, Wellington's Funeral, and the two great 
 ballads all did so, though the poem on Wellington was of earlier 
 composition. Evidently the inspiration of Rossetti had not failed ; 
 evidently too his poetry was gaining rather than losing in whole- 
 someness, though these were the years when health both of body 
 and of maid was being undermined by the chloral habit, and when
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY : NEW INFLUENCES 499 
 
 insane suspicions of his best friends were festering in the poet's 
 heart. 
 
 The second group of poems is distinguished from the first by 
 the clearer evolution of a story, the more definite enunciation of a 
 thought or the more dramatic realisation of a character. In none 
 of the first group is there any story of importance at all ; but the 
 ballads have all a strong backbone of narrative. Of the three, only 
 Stratton Wafer makes any attempt to imitate the old ballads ; and it 
 is the least successful. T/ie W/iite Ship and The King's Tragedy are 
 frankly modern, but while they do not imitate they magnificently 
 revivify the spirit of the ancient ballads, adding the wealth of a more 
 complex civilisation. On the story of King James I Scott would 
 have founded a poem far more like a popular ballad ; but even he 
 could not have held more firmly the threads of the narrative, and 
 his poetry would have been less rich. Rossetti has done nothing 
 better than The King's Tragedy. It is in respect of this element 
 of narrative that Rose Mary belongs to the second group rather 
 than to the first. In the mystical element it resembles these : but, 
 unlike them, it moves surely and steadily on to a clearly visible 
 goal. It is also intellectually powerful as well as Eesthetically 
 beautiful. Much the same might be said of Sister Hekfi. It 
 likewise handles mediaeval conceptions and follows the lines of 
 mediaeval models ; but the passions of hatred and revenge give it 
 a clear purpose and a dramatic interest. 
 
 Rossetti was the nineteenth-century Spirit of Art embodied. 
 He was not either the best painter or the best poet of his time, 
 but he was the man in whom the artistic spirit was least mingled 
 or diluted with other things. That which was not artistic, or 
 which did not admit of presentation from an artistic point of view, 
 did not exist for him. His very limitations are instructive. A man 
 of powerful intellect and of remarkable force of character, he was 
 yet, as we have seen, absolutely indifferent to the structure of the 
 society in which he lived, and contentedly ignorant of the greatest 
 thoughts, if they did not appeal directly to the imagination. He 
 never asked whether a thing was true or not ; to him the important 
 question was, is it beautiful ? In his verse there is no thought, ' 
 as such ; it is all pure art. He had no cause to serve, no doctrine 
 
 32 — 2
 
 500 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 to inculcate. Of him, more than of any man of his time, the 
 words of Lecky are true. Finding his impulse in the mediasvalism 
 of the Oxford Movement, he translated it from religion into poetry. 
 As dogma he cared not at all about it ; for the beauty he cared 
 intensely^ That which is beautiful is right; what is not beautiful 
 ought not to be. He cannot be described as sceptical, like Arnold; 
 but as little was he believing, like Newman and Pusey. He simply 
 had not examined the questions which to them were vital. Of 
 the Blessed Damozel it has been remarked with truth that she is 
 the most fleshly being ever transported into paradise. It is " a 
 spiritual body " (whatever that may mean) that he conceives, a 
 being under other conditions than ours, but still a being with 
 fleshly grace and beauty and moved by fleshly desires. There is 
 nothing really ethereal in the Blessed Darriozel. The subject, as is 
 well known, was suggested to Rossetti by Poe's Raven. " I saw," 
 he says, "that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with 
 the grief of the lover on earth, and I determined to reverse the 
 conditions, and give utterance to the yearnings of the loved one 
 in heaven ^" It has been generally held that Rossetti succeeded 
 splendidly ; and if this means that he wrote a fine poem, the 
 praise is clearly due. But whether he really reversed the con- 
 ditions may be questioned. He has translated into the feminine 
 what Poe left masculine ; but his Damozel is as much on earth as 
 the hero of T/ie Raven. For heaven substitute some palace of 
 boundless wealth and magnificence, and for God and Christ two 
 great lords of transcendent might, beneficent and worthy of 
 reverence ; and the whole poem moves on with perfect smooth- 
 ness. Newman's Gerontius really leaves the body, Rossetti's 
 Damozel is embodied still in paradise. 
 
 Because he is artistic with such singleness of mind, we get in 
 Rossetti the best evidence available of the drift of art untrammelled 
 and unmodified by philosophy, or science, or theology ; and we 
 find it to be strongly towards romance. But though Rossetti could 
 
 * It is said that on his death-bed he wished to confess to a priest. But even 
 if it was so, no stress can be laid on the fact, for men at the point of death 
 frequently do things quite foreign to their nature. 
 
 ^ Hall Caine's Raninisanccs.
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 50I 
 
 strip himself almost completely of all forms of thought not artistic, 
 he could not divest himself of his historical position; and the 
 very subjects both of his poems and of his paintings — The Blessed 
 Damozel itself, and The Girlhood of Mary Virgin — bear witness 
 that the Oxford Movement had intervened between hiin and Keats, 
 and had given to romance a new mediaevalism, another tone and 
 other themes. 
 
 When the cloud settled upon Rossetti's mind he found a 
 devoted friend in the person of Thomas Gordon Hake (1809- 
 1895), a fellow-poet who was also a physician ; and for the sake of 
 this association he may be briefly noticed here. Hake had before 
 drawn Rossetti's attention by his Vates, or the Philosophy of Mad- 
 ness (1840). He learnt the art of verse with the utmost dififi- 
 culty, and was an old man before he can be said to have mastered 
 it. His best pieces are contained in New Symbols (1876), and 
 perhaps the highest flight of all is The Snake-Char7ner which is 
 included in that volume. Hake is never great, but in this piece 
 and in a few others he is very good ; and success achieved after so 
 many years of effort, at an age when, in the majority of cases, the 
 spirit of poetry is dead or dying, is sufficiently remarkable to 
 deserve attention. 
 
 In some respects the significance of Dante Rossetti's work 
 will become plainer when we have considered that of the sister, 
 Christina Rossetti (i 830-1 894), who in many ways differed widely 
 from him, but who shared with him the love of and the gift for 
 art. She began writing verses at the age of twelve, and from the 
 first her compositions were carefully preserved. Some of them 
 were privately printed in 1847, and a few, under the pseudonym 
 Ellen Alleyn, appeared in The Germ; but it was not until 1862 
 that her first published volume, Goblin Market, and other Poems, 
 appeared. The Princess Progress followed in 1866, and A Pageant 
 in 1887. Besides these, she published a book of nursery rhymes, 
 and several volumes of a devotional character, of which the best is 
 T'ime Flies (1885). There is no complete edition of her works, 
 but the majority of her really good poems are gathered together 
 in the two volumes entitled respectively Poems and New Poems. 
 The latter was edited after her death by her brother, Mr W. M.
 
 502 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Rossetti, and consists largely of pieces which she had either not 
 chosen to publish, or had never gathered into any volume. 
 
 There are no strongly-marked divisions in the poetry of Chris- 
 tina Rossetti : it has to be treated as practically all one. Even the 
 distinction between the secular and the devotional pieces is only 
 partially valid ; for religion was so much her very being that most 
 of her poems are misnamed ' secular.' For the same reason we 
 cannot usefully draw any line between poems which deal with the 
 supernatural and poems whose theme is within the limits of nature. 
 It is true, there are some poems about ghosts, and some about 
 the more playful supernatural of fairyland. But again, she lives 
 so much in a realm outside the bounds of time and space, so 
 many of her poems look beyond the grave, that this division too 
 seems to vanish into air. It would be ditlicult to find any other 
 poet who has brooded so much upon death. Her most exquisite 
 songs are of death, — "When I am dead, my dearest," "We 
 buried her among the flowers " and " Too late for love, too late 
 for joy " ; her " Dream-Land " is the grave. The result might 
 have been gloomy in the extreme. It certainly is sad, but it is not 
 gloomy ; for she seems to feel easily and naturally, what so many 
 have said without feeling, that the grave is rest, and the life 
 beyond it a happiness unknown here. 
 
 *• Oh come the day of death, that day 
 Of rest which cannot pass away ! 
 When the last work is wrought, the last 
 Pang of pain is felt and past, 
 And the blessed door made fast." 
 
 No one else of her fellow-poets in her generation has this fulness 
 of faith. Arnold seems to set aside the idea of a second life as a 
 mere dream ; Browning reaches it through an argument in which 
 the logic is not altogether flawless ; Tennyson faintly trusts the 
 larger hope ; Dante Rossetti cares for none of these things. 
 
 Christina Rossetti's poetry, then, is nearly all in the minor key ; 
 and this is especially true of what is finest in it and of what comes 
 most directly from her heart. Monna /?inominafa, the sonnet of 
 sonnets iu which she challenged comparison with the Sonnets from
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 503 
 
 the Portuguese, in contrast to Mrs Browning's sonnets, deals with 
 a love which ends unhappily ; and its burden is renunciation : — 
 
 "Time flies, hope flags, life plies a wearied wing; 
 Death following hard on life gains ground apace." 
 
 " Vanity of Vanities " is the title of the most beautiful of all her 
 sonnets, and its teaching is that pleasure ends in sorrow, that glory 
 brings no gain, and that so it shall be till the last trump is blown. 
 In Looking Forward her cry is, 
 
 " Pluck me no rose that groweth on a thorn, 
 Nor myrtle white and cold as snow in June, 
 Fit for a virgin on her marriage morn : 
 But bring me poppies brimmed with sleepy death, 
 And ivy choking what it garlandeth, 
 And primroses that open to the moon." 
 
 Both The Convent Threshold and Amor Mundi dwell upon the 
 ease and pleasure of the downward path and the toilsomeness of 
 the return. The former, one of the most powerful pieces Chris- 
 tina Rossetti ever wrote, is a kind of John-the-Baptist call to 
 repentance : — 
 
 " Oh save me from a pang in heaven. 
 By all the gifts we took and gave, 
 Repent, repent, and be forgiven : 
 This life is long, but yet it ends ; 
 Repent and purge your soul and save : 
 No gladder song the morning stars 
 Upon their birthday morning sang 
 Than Angels sing when one repents." 
 
 And Amor Mundi is perhaps the best and completest epitome of 
 the poetess that can be found in any single piece : — 
 
 •" O where are you going with your love-locks flowing, 
 On the west wind blowing along this valley track?' 
 ' The downhill path is easy, come with me an it please ye, 
 We shall escape the uphill by never turning back.' 
 
 So they two went together in glowing August weather. 
 The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right ; 
 
 And dear she was to doat on, her swift feet seemed to float on 
 The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight.
 
 504 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 ' Oh, what is that in heaven where grey cloud-flakes are seven, 
 Where blackest clouds hang riven just at the rainy skirt ? ' 
 
 'Oh, that's a meteor sent us, a message dumb, portentous, 
 An undeciphered solemn signal of help or hurt.' 
 
 'Oh, what is that glides quickly where velvet flowers grow thickly. 
 Their scent comes rich and sickly?' 'A scaled and hooded worm.' 
 
 'Oh, what's that in the hollow, so pale I quake to follow?' 
 ' Oh, that's a thin dead body which waits the eternal term.' 
 
 ' Turn again, O my sweetest, — turn again, false and fleetest : 
 This beaten way thou beatest, I fear is hell's own track.' 
 
 ' Nay, too steep for hill mounting ; nay, too late for cost counting : 
 The downhill path is easy, but there's no turning back.' " 
 
 In the grandeur and gloom of this imagery there is something 
 akin to that of Lord de Tabley's powerful Song of Despair. The 
 difference between the two poets is that in De Tabley there is 
 no Advent to follow the So>ig of Despair. But though to 
 Christina Rossetti the downward path of Amor Mundi is " hell's 
 own track," her last word is, 
 
 " We weep because the night is long. 
 
 We laugh for day shall rise. 
 We sing a slow contented song 
 
 And knock at Paradise. 
 Weeping we hold Him fast, Who wept 
 
 For us, we hold Him fast ; 
 And will not let Him go except 
 
 He bless us first or last. 
 
 Weeping we hold Him fast to-night ; 
 
 We will not let Him go 
 Till daybreak smite our wearied sight 
 
 And summer smite the snow : 
 The figs shall bud, and dove with dove 
 
 Shall coo the livelong day ; 
 Then He shall say, ' Arise, My love, 
 
 My fair one, come away.' " 
 
 There is no English poet more ascetic than Christina Rossetti. 
 She sings renunciation, not only of the love of husband and wife, 
 as in Monna Innominata, but of the world and all its beauty and 
 joys. Even the note of her devotional poems is seldom that of
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 505 
 
 triumph over death. Even in these, her cry is "Out of the 
 Deep," 
 
 "Have mercy, Thou my God — mercy, my God, 
 For I can hardly bear life day by day." 
 
 In Despised and Rejected the voice pleads till break of day, and 
 then the footsteps lingeringly pass : — 
 
 " So till the break of day : 
 Then died away 
 
 That voice, in silence as of sorrow ; 
 Then footprints echoing like a sigh 
 Passed me by, 
 
 Lingering footsteps slow to pass. 
 On the morrow 
 I saw upon the grass 
 
 Each footprint marked in blood, and on my door 
 The mark of blood for evermore." 
 
 This prevailing asceticism makes her poetry somewhat mo- 
 notonous ; but it is far less gloomy than might be imagined. 
 Occasionally it is flecked with brighter lights. Goblin Market is a 
 charming excursion into fairyland, and there are a few other cheery 
 little pieces, like " No, thank you, John^' scattered through the 
 poems. The Princess Progress too, notwithstanding its sad end, is 
 lighter in tone than most of her pieces. But the exceptions are 
 not sufficiently numerous, nor sufficiently pronounced, to change 
 much the general complexion of her verse. The real reason why 
 it is not oppressive is that there is in it not the least trace of a 
 morbid spirit. Life, she thinks, is sad, but she accepts the sadness, 
 and lives on, doing what seems to her her duty. She does not ask 
 whether it is worth living. Her poetry does not weigh upon the 
 spirit as The City of Dreadful Night does. 
 
 The exquisite purity of Christina Rossetti's style and her 
 transparent sincerity are further reasons why her poetry altogether 
 escapes the taint of ghoulishness. Blair and the other funereal 
 poets of the eighteenth century have this taint. They have 
 greater merits than they are usually credited with now ; but they 
 mouth, and the reader is tempted to suspect that they make the 
 most, and the worst, of their theme. Not so Christina Rossetti.
 
 506 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Her style is simple and limpid, her diction faultless. What she 
 says is what she feels : no one was ever more free from the vice 
 of pretentiousness. " I question," says her brother, " her having 
 ever once deliberated with herself whether or not she would write 
 something or other, and then, after thinking out a subject, having 
 proceeded to treat it in regular spells of work. Instead of this, 
 something impelled her feelings, or ' came into her head,' and her 
 hand obeyed the dictation^" This account of what Christina 
 Rossetti actually did do exactly agrees with what we should infer 
 from her writings that she must have done. No poet gives a 
 stronger impression of spontaneity. 
 
 An interesting feature in Christina Rossetti's work is the wide 
 difference between it and the work of her great brother. Of the 
 same mixed blood, growing up under the same influences, having 
 many friends in common, it might have been confidently predicted 
 that the work of the two poets would present points of strong 
 resemblance ; but in fact resemblances are slight, and the differ- 
 ences are numerous and great. It is not only that Dante Rossetti 
 has the more powerful intellect and the more varied interests, but 
 his whole method is different. Christina Rossetti's style is one 
 of the simplest ever used by an English poet ; her brother's is 
 often rich to gorgeousness. Hers is pure with the purity of clear 
 spring water ; his, like a draught compounded by some cunning 
 alchemist, seems charged with all fragrances and flavours. She 
 is ascetic, he is sensuous. Her face seems for ever looking beyond 
 earth to heaven ; his Blessed Damozel gazes from heaven back to 
 earth, and her prayer is 
 
 "Only to live as once on earth 
 With Love." 
 
 The point in which it might be supposed that the brother and 
 sister would meet is really the best proof of the deep division 
 between them. They were both profoundly influenced by the 
 Catholic reaction — but in ways so different Dante Rossetti, as 
 we have seen, was influenced by it purely as an artist : he saw the 
 beauty of mediaeval religion ; its sensuousness appealed to him ; 
 
 ^ Preface to New Focms.
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 507 
 
 it was the ally of art. But no more than the men of the Italian 
 Renascence did he surrender his intellect to it. Christina Rossetti 
 is the one great English poet (after Keble and Newman, if they 
 can be called great poets) who embodied in her verse the devo- 
 tional feeling which the Oxford Movement kindled. She was a 
 devotee, and her religious poems express her veritable personal faith. 
 There is no severance between her imagination and her intellect, 
 between that which she admires as beautiful and that which she 
 believes as true. Hers is the greatest body of religious verse in 
 English since Herbert and Crashaw and Vaughan. Her poetry 
 as a whole would be judged to be rather limited in range; but in 
 devotional verse her range is astonishing. It has been admirably 
 said that some of her poems, in their simplicity, seem like " the 
 nursery songs," and others, in their splendour and exultation, like 
 "the national hymns of Heaven^" 
 
 It is curious to observe that while in the third and fourth 
 decades of the nineteenth century art fosters dogma, in the fifth 
 and sixth the relation is reversed, and dogma fosters art. The 
 historian of rationalism remarks that " the religion of one age is 
 often the poetry of the next^"; and probably this is the general 
 law. Sometimes, however, it would seem that the relation is no\, 
 one-sided, but reciprocal. The rarer phenomenon is that which 
 is exhibited in the relation between the Tractarians and the 
 romantic literature of the early years of the nineteenth century. 
 The romanticists were attracted to the Middle Ages ; but they 
 did not adopt mediaeval opinions or share the beliefs which they 
 unconsciously helped to spread. Newman, on the contrary, did 
 adopt mediceval opinions, but in his writings he was as severely 
 classical and as little romantic as any great master of English 
 prose. One type of mind borrows from the Middle Ages romance, 
 another borrows religion; and it would seem to be difficult to 
 hold in fusion in the same mind both elements of medigevalism — 
 to unite sympathy in the imagination with assent in the under- 
 standing. 
 
 This idea is confirmed by what may be observed with respect 
 
 ^ Lionel Johnson, quoted in The Library of Literary Criticism, viii. 273. 
 ^ Lecky, Rise of Rationalism, i. 360.
 
 508 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 to the Pre-Raphaelites. That medisevalism which Newman used 
 to buttress dogma becomes in them the prop of art. There were 
 exceptions : Coventry Patmore and Christina Rossetti not only 
 cherished the sentiment, but held the opinions with which it was 
 associated. But this does not seem to have been the case with 
 the Pre-Raphaelites in general : it was certainly not the case with 
 Dante Rossetti. Their art was their religion ; and if occasionally 
 they gave an apparently fervid expression to the Catholic feeling, it 
 was more for the sake of the artistic beauty of that feeling than 
 for the dogma. Thus they support also Lecky's argument that 
 the change w^hich he points out is part of the process of the 
 decay of religion : " Religious ideas die like the sun ; their last 
 rays, having little heat, are expended in creating beauty \" 
 
 The conclusion seems to be that there is some natural affinity 
 but no necessary connexion between romance and CathoHcism. 
 Romance feeds upon mystery, and Catholicism supplies the food 
 liberally ; but there are other things which supply it also. Both 
 happen to be united in the Middle Ages; and mediaevalism is 
 the true meeting-ground of the very diverse spirits who were 
 brought together by the convergence of the romantic and the 
 Catholic lines of thought and feeling. 
 
 Thomas Woolner (1825-1892) was another member of the 
 Brotherhood who cultivated poetry as well as what is more specific- 
 ally called 'art.' In his case the former is distinctly subordinate; 
 but the very vituperation which the Brotherhood originally en- 
 countered has led by reaction to an even exaggerated recognition of 
 its merits. The lyrical poem, My Beautiful Lady, part of which was 
 originally printed in The Germ, is loosely compacted, and is 
 ingenious and talented, rather than convincingly poetical. Neither 
 does the blank-verse Pygmalion (188 1), or Sikfius (1884), or Tiresias 
 (1886) vindicate Woolner's title to be treated seriously as a poet. 
 There is far more power and genuine inspiration in the verse of 
 William Bell Scott (1812-1890) ^\^o%Q\n\.Qx^%\v[\g Autobiographical 
 Notes show such a mastery of "the gentle art of making enemies," 
 that it is not surprising if he has won less recognition than his 
 worth and weight deserve. As there was ahvuys more than 
 * Lecky, Rise of Rationalism, i. ■261.
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 509 
 
 enough of gall in Scott's ink, those whom he offended either 
 in their proper person or through their friends have either ignored 
 him, or have viewed him through clouded glasses. 
 
 But for his association with the Brotherhood Scott would be 
 best considered along with the philosophical poets of the earlier 
 period ; for he belongs to an earlier date than the Pre-Raphaelites, 
 he was very little influenced by them, and his work in verse is rather 
 distinguished for weight of thought than for grace of form. He 
 had published poetry in the thirties, but his earliest notable work 
 was The Year of the ^F(?/-/(5?( 1846), an allegorical epic in five books, 
 tracing the development of religion " from the golden age in the 
 Garden of Eden, the period of instinct and innocence, to the end 
 of the race, when, all the adverse powers of nature subjugated, 
 man will have attained a happy and quiescent immortality^" 
 This sense of victory over nature is characteristic of the time 
 (of. Locksky Hall), the confidence in general but indefinite 
 progress is a special note of Scott. 
 
 Shortly after the appearance of The Year of the World Scott 
 became acquainted with Rossetti, and naturally his Poems by a 
 Painter (1854) are in some degree influenced by the association. 
 Not, however, profoundly ; for from the first Scott looked with a 
 critical eye upon Pre-Raphaelitism and, secretly or openly, held a 
 poor opinion of many of its works. He speaks somewhat con- 
 temptuously of Rossetti's early paintings ; and of Coventry Pat- 
 more's Tafnerton Church Towers he remarks caustically that it 
 belongs to that class of poems "that have no good reason for 
 existence^." More than twenty years elapsed before Poems by a 
 Painter was followed by Scott's next volume of verse. Ballads, 
 Studies from Nature, Sonnets (1875). Finally, A Poet's Harvest 
 Home (1882) gathered up the work of his old age. 
 
 All through, Scott's poetry is thoughtful and philosophic. 
 The Sphinx, perhaps the best of all his writings, is, like The Year 
 of the World, at once metaphysical and religious, treating the 
 Sphinx as the symbol of religious mystery. And Scott has the 
 power of thinking to some purpose. What he cannot do is to 
 make his thought musical. If the style and versification were 
 
 ^ Autobiography, i. 236. ^ ibid. i. 252.
 
 5IO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 not so often harsh, he would go near to being a great poet ; and, 
 faulty as they are, he is a more considerable one than he is 
 commonly reputed to be. 
 
 Sir J. Noel Paton (1821-1901) was yet another of the poet- 
 painters, whose Poems by a Painter (1861) and Spindrift (1867) 
 have that charm of style and that mastery of rhythm which are 
 lacking in Scott's. Probably Paton's work in the mass has hardly 
 vitality enough to keep it permanently in remembrance, but it 
 may be hoped that future anthologies will find a place for such 
 gems as the lovely song, 
 
 "There is a wail in the wind to-night, 
 
 A dirge in the plashing rain, 
 That brings old yearnings round my heart, 
 
 Old dreams into my brain, 
 As I gaze into the wintry dark 
 
 Through the blurred and blackened pane: 
 Far memories of golden hours 
 
 That will not come again, — 
 Alas ! 
 
 That never will come again. 
 
 Wild woodland odours wander by- 
 Warm breath of new-mown hay — 
 
 I hear the broad, brown river flow, 
 Half-hid in bowering may; 
 
 While eyes of love look through my soul, 
 As on that last sweet day; 
 
 But a chilly shadow floats between " 
 That will not pass away — 
 
 Ah, no ! 
 That never will pass away." 
 
 Coventry Patmore (1823-1896), is another writer affiliated to 
 the Rossetti group, but he wears his rue with a difi'erence. Patmore 
 was a man who took himself very seriously, and who was taken 
 seriously by others whose judgment commands respect ; and yet 
 there is probably no other nineteenth-century poet of equal repu- 
 tation whose permanent position in literature is so insecure. 
 Neither his first volume of poems, which was published in 1844, 
 nor his Tamerton Church Tower (1853) won great fame; but
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 511 
 
 with The Angel in the House (1854— 1856) he was supposed to 
 take his place among the greater poets. The success was perhaps 
 partly due to the fluency of the poem. This fluency was a gift 
 dangerous to the poet. " I have frequently," says his friend and 
 admirer, the late Dr Richard Garnett, "seen twenty or more lines 
 which he had written, he said, within the last half-hour, and 
 refashioning was rarely needfuP." If " fluent Shakespeare " 
 effaced too little, surely fluent Patmore sinned far more deeply in 
 the same way. Another reason for the success was perhaps the 
 poet's own self-complacency. He announces with great satisfac- 
 tion that he, one of the latest of poets, has found " the first of 
 themes sung last of all." The fact that this first of themes had 
 never before been sung would have put a less confident man on 
 his guard; and the need of caution is shown by the fact that 
 Patmore himself never sang it. His poem was to be a celebration 
 of wedded love; but the first part did not get beyond The 
 Betrothal, the second part stopped with The Espousals; and 
 when Faithful for Ever (i860) appeared, even partisans of 
 Patmore admitted that the quality fell, and Rossetti (an admirer 
 to an extent surprising in one so virile) caustically asked in a 
 letter to AUingham, " ' Of love which never finds its published 
 close, what sequel?' And how many?" There was one more 
 "sequel," The Victories of Love (1863); but Patmore never carried 
 out the design he had planned. The explanation, of course, was 
 that " the first of themes " was not really a fit theme for poetry on 
 the great scale. On the contrary, its singular unfitness is shown 
 by the withering ridicule of the parody in Swinburne's Hepta- 
 logia, the very headings of which — the Monthly Nurse, the 
 Caudle, the Kid — are sufficient. Hamlet has been parodied, and 
 is none the worse ; but The Atigel in the House could not stand 
 such treatment. 
 
 The pursuit of this will-o'-the-wisp had consumed many years 
 of Patmore's life, and what was even worse, it had fostered some 
 inherent weaknesses. He could undoubtedly express himself 
 with pointed sententiousness, and his satiric wit is attested by an 
 epigram the effectiveness of which will be felt by all who are old 
 ^ Quoted in 2'he Library of Literary Crilicism.
 
 512 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 enough to remember the telegrams of the first German Emperor, 
 announcing victory after victory over the French : — 
 
 "This is to say, my dear Augusta, 
 We've had another awful buster : 
 Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below ! 
 Thank God from whom all blessings flow*." 
 
 His felicity of phrase is illustrated over and over again in the 
 happier passages of The Afigel in the House. But the subject 
 tempted him to prolixity, and to a triviality or even a childishness 
 of treatment .vhich goes far to annul his merits. The effect is 
 similar to that which Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 
 exercised upon him ; but for two reasons it is likely to be much 
 greater. In the first place, it will hardly be denied that Words- 
 worth's best is incomparably finer than Patmore's best; and in 
 the second place, Wordsworth's Goody B lakes and Idiot Boys are 
 separable, while Patmore's banalities are integral parts of The 
 Angel in the House. 
 
 Probably Patmore was secretly conscious of the gravity of 
 the error into which he had fallen; for when he had shaken 
 off the incubus of a theme which refused to be handled, he 
 made his next venture anonymously in a style as unlike it as 
 possible. In the Odes (1868) and The Unknown Eros (1877) 
 few would detect the hand of the author of The Angel in the 
 House. Their complex metrical forms are far removed from the 
 simple rhythm of that work, and they demand a corresponding 
 stateliness of style which saves Patmore from the pitfalls into 
 which he had slid so readily. It would be too much to say that 
 he has been uniformly successful in avoiding other faults. Some- 
 times, perhaps, the thought is hardly great enough to correspond 
 with the stateliness of the form and expression ; sometimes the 
 meaning is far from clear. But almost always he shows great 
 technical skill, and in his greatest poem, Amelia (1878), he fills 
 in the masterly scheme with a content not unworthy of it. 
 
 ^ This is the form in which it is given in Champneys's Life of Patmore : 
 another form substitutes for " This is to say," the words, "By will divine," 
 which are better and more in character with the Emperor, but apparently not 
 authentic.
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 513 
 
 § 4. The Spasmodic Poets. 
 
 A nickname which * sticks ' usually does so by reason of its 
 wit, or its truth, or of both ; and the instructive wit of the adjective 
 'spasmodic,' applied by W. E. Aytoun to another group of poets 
 who made their appearance about the middle of the century, has 
 won for it universal acceptance. Who exactly were the spasmodic 
 poets Aytoun was not concerned to define ; but his admirable bur- 
 lesque, Firmilian (1854), leaves no doubt possible as to the meaning 
 of the word. The charm of Firfnilian is that the ridicule some- 
 times gives place to poetry, and that along with a travesty of the 
 faults of the spasmodic poets we get some insight into their 
 genuine worth. What Aytoun condemned in them was the con- 
 fusion and inequality and extravagance of their work, its passion 
 piled on passion, its thought disjointed from thought, the rant and 
 fustian of the style, the lavishly sprinkled and over-wrought meta- 
 phors. Hence the student of Badajoz rants and raves, commits 
 crimes and makes himself absurd. But Aytoun knew also that if 
 the spasmodic poets were mad, there was method in their madness ; 
 if they were formless, there was poetry in the disjecta ijiembra of 
 their verse. They themselves were manly and sensible men too. 
 Though Firmilian was one of the keenest parodies ever written, 
 Sydney Dobell, the chief victim, read it with delight and praised 
 it heartily and generously. There is a pleasant story about the 
 first meeting between the poet and his critic. Dobell had previously 
 written under the pseudonym of Sydney Yendys, and Aytoun had 
 caricatured him in Blacktvood, in the somewhat broad fashion of 
 the time, under the name of Gander Redney. They were intro- 
 duced by J. Young Simpson, the great physician. " Aytoun," says 
 Dobell, " looked puzzled and amused, and was profoundly polite, 
 but was obliged to follow the ladies of his party, who had already 
 left the room. I stepped after him, and clapping him on the 
 shoulder, said, 'The Dr. did not introduce us perfectly just now 
 — he omitted some of my styles and titles — you probably know me 
 better as Gander Redney.' How his eyes twinkled ! and Simpson 
 told me afterwards that at the bottom of the stairs he told the 
 
 W. 33
 
 514 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Story with roars of laughterV" There is hope both for the satirist 
 and his victim, both for the critic and the poet, when such things 
 are possible. 
 
 It might be contended with some show of reason that the greatest 
 of all the spasmodic poets was Tennyson ; for Maud is just a very 
 fine example of many of the faults and of more than all the merits 
 of their work. But if Alaud suggests his inclusion among them, 
 In Memortaffi, with all the mass of his other poetry, makes it im- 
 possible. Bailey, the author of Festus, has frequently been classed as 
 ' spasmodic ' ; but it hardly required his own protest to show how 
 baseless is such a classification. Those whom Aytoun had chiefly 
 y in mind were undoubtedly Dobell and Alexander Smith. The 
 only other writer in whom the same characteristics are specially 
 marked was John Stanyan Bigg (1828-1865), ^ "^^^ of less power 
 and importance, whose principal works were a poetical romance, 
 The Sea-King (1848), and a poem. Night and the »&«/ (1854), whose 
 very title is suggestive of the qualities of the spasmodic poets. 
 
 In several respects the destiny of those poets was peculiar 
 and sad. The lives of all of them were short, Dobell, the first 
 born and the last survivor of the band, reaching only the age 
 of fifty. Their splendid gifts were balanced by faults and 
 defects almost equally great. They rose to fame almost as 
 rapidly as Byron ; but their short summer of extravagant praise 
 was followed by a long winter of neglect and depreciation still 
 more unmerited. 
 
 Sydney Dobell (1824-1874) was the most gifted man of the 
 three. His work, both for good and for evil, bears traces of his 
 personal history, and a brief biographic sketch is the best intro- 
 duction to his poetry. He was born at Cranbrook in Kent, 
 whence the family migrated twelve years later to Cheltenham. 
 His father was a wine-merchant, and so in after years was the poet 
 himself. But the important thing to notice is the spiritual atmo- 
 sphere which he breathed in childhood and youth. Both his 
 father, and, still more, his maternal grandfather, were men in- 
 terested in many things besides business. John Dobell was a 
 student of political and social problems, and wrote a pamphlet 
 1 Life and Letters 0/ Dobell, i. 342.
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 515 
 
 which is said to show considerable power, entitled Man unfit to 
 govern Man. But it was the grandfather, Samuel Thompson, who 
 stamped his character on the family. He was the founder of one 
 of those small and earnest religious sects which nowhere flourish 
 so much as among the Anglo-Saxon communities on both sides of 
 the Atlantic. These sects are generally narrow in their creed, 
 but Thompson's was broad. Its official designation was *' the 
 Church of God," but the members accepted as accurately descrip- 
 tive the name popularly given to them, " Free-thinking Christians." 
 They were very few in number, and in spite of the essential 
 liberality of their opinions, they were not free from the bigotries 
 usual among small sects. Thus they held that the Anglican 
 marriage service was idolatrous ; and as it was necessary at 
 that date to submit to it, Dobell's parents were married under 
 protest. They also discouraged social relations with those who 
 were not members of the church. As time went on they seem to 
 have become gradually more exclusive, and the founder, Samuel 
 Thompson himself, had the singular experience of being expelled 
 from the church of his own creation. 
 
 At an early age young Dobell gave evidence of remarkable 
 powers, and, to his misfortune, he was looked upon as a rising 
 apostle of his grandfather's church — not merely as a pillar, but as 
 the pillar. The position was a dangerous one, and few boys could 
 have sniffed the fumes of frankincense for so many years with 
 so little injuiy. Dobell came through the trial with a nature 
 unspoilt but not uninfluenced. To this cause we may attribute 
 his overweening confidence in himself, and perhaps too his utter 
 want of the power of self-criticism. To this cause likewise is due 
 the fact that the education he received was wholly private ; for 
 there was no school or university in England which could be 
 trusted to train the future leader of " the Church of God." Further, 
 the continuous strain of religious emotion told with fatal effect 
 upon his nerves and helped to bring about that ill-health which 
 shortened his life and which practically closed his poetical career 
 long before his death. Naturally Dobell grew out of this church ; 
 and not unnaturally he found himself disqualified or indisposed 
 for membership of any other religious body. He was a deeply 
 
 33-2
 
 516 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 religious man, but in his more mature years he held aloof from all 
 churches and sects. 
 
 Dobell inherited an interest in political questions as well as 
 an interest in religion ; and while the effects of religion upon his 
 poetry, except in £a/der, are mainly indirect, those of politics 
 are direct and obvious. If it were necessary to describe him 
 in a single phrase he might best be called the poet of political 
 liberty. T/ie Rotnan, The Magyar's Neiv- Year-Eve and The Youth 
 of England to Garibaldi's Legion are all inspired by this feeling ; 
 and though the Sonnets on the War and Etigland in Time of War 
 I are more martial, the sense that the Crimean War was a struggle 
 (between autocracy and free government was never absent from 
 Dobell's mind. 
 
 The fact that Dobell's early manhood fell at the time of the 
 rising of the nations against the kings did much to foster' this 
 feeling. Italy was shaking her chains, Hungary was struggling for 
 freedom. It was especially the Italian struggle which stirred the 
 English imagination. The beauty and attractiveness of Italy com- 
 bined with her old renown to fix attention upon her. From the 
 time of Chaucer she had been a nursing mother to English poetical 
 genius. In the recent past, the names of Byron, Shelley and Keats 
 were specially linked with Italy ; at the time of the revolutionary 
 movements two of the most prominent English poets were resident 
 there. Dobell was warm and eager in the cause of Italy ; and in 
 1848 and 1849 he wrote his fervid and rhetorical dramatic 
 poem. The jRofnan (1850), which was received with a chorus of 
 applause so enthusiastic as to fix Dobell's career : he was to be 
 a poet. 
 
 The success of The Roman had other consequences as well. 
 It made the friends of Italy who were then in England turn to 
 Dobell as the man who had best expressed their aspirations ; and 
 at his residence, Coxhorne, near Cheltenham, was born the society 
 afterwards known as " the society of the friends of Italy." But he 
 bewildered the poor Italians who resorted to him by objecting 
 that, noble as their mission was, it was " too political and worldly" 
 for him. Very likely Dobell was right: he had a good deal of 
 practical shrewdnc;ss. And yet one must sympathise with the
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 517 
 
 revolutionaries. The poet was fervid to the verge of incoherency 
 in the national cause. He could create for his closet drama an 
 eloquent monk, and depict him firing with his enthusiasm fair 
 maidens, worn matrons and grey-haired fathers. But the monk 
 would not step out from the pages of the book ; and Dobell had 
 nothing practical to substitute for those plans which he condemned 
 as "too political and worldly." Afterwards however he became 
 enthusiastically hopeful about Mazzini, who was so little hopeful 
 about himself. And however scanty fruit in practice Dobell's 
 zeal bore, the poet himself would have been something widely 
 different but for this great enthusiasm, just as Campbell would 
 have been widely different but for his zeal in the cause of 
 Poland. 
 
 Four years after The Roman Dobell published a second and 
 still more ambitious poem. Balder. In a note to the second 
 edition of The Rotnan, the author modestly disclaims the title of 
 ' poem ' for that work. " The words ' Dramatic Poem ' in the 
 title are not mine," he says. " ' Poetry ' and ' A Poem ' are not 
 necessarily aequipollents. In the next few years I hope to write 
 more 'Poetry'; ten years hence, if God please, A Poem." Before 
 ten years were over his career was practically ended ; and soon 
 after he wrote these words he must have changed his mind. The 
 vast design of Balder could only have been conceived by one 
 ambitious to write ' a poem,' and convinced of his power to 
 do it. The poem was to consist of three parts, and the principal 
 subject of it was to be, as Dobell explained in the prefatory 
 note to the second edition, "the progress of a Human Being 
 from Doubt to Faith, from Chaos to Order. Not of Doubt in- 
 carnate to Faith incarnate, but of a doubtful mind to a faithful 
 mind." Only the first part was ever written, and Balder therefore 
 remains a fragment. It closes, not in the radiance of faith 
 triumphant, but in the deepest gloom of doubt sinking into 
 despair. 
 
 Balder was less favourably received than The Roman had 
 been ; and many critics, treating as a whole what was meant only 
 to be a part, condemned the entire conception. It cannot be 
 denied that Balder gives ample ground for unfavourable criticism.
 
 5l8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Of all Dobell's works it is the most unequal. It contains both the 
 best poetry and the worst he ever wrote ; and the worst is almost 
 incredibly bad. It is perplexing and incoherent. Allowance 
 must be made for its fragmentary character ; but the doubt will 
 rise whether the plan was capable of being carried to completion. 
 At any rate, while Dobell proposed to trace the progress of a man 
 from chaos to order, he unfortunately left him still in chaos. Yet, 
 notwithstanding defects of the gravest kind, a candid criticism 
 must recognise that, in the four years which intervened between 
 The Roma7t and Balder^ Dobell had made immense progress ; not 
 in construction, and not in the power to discriminate between true 
 poetry and worthless rubbish, but in weight of thought and reach 
 of imagination. The rhetorical glitter of The Romafi is gone, the 
 bombastic note is only occasionally heard ; their place is taken by 
 a powerful and daring though irregular imagination. 
 
 Balder has been compared by more than one critic to Ibsen's 
 Brand; and there are some very remarkable points of resemblance 
 between the two works. The relations of husband, wife and child 
 are closely similar — though in Ibsen's drama the child only enters 
 as an influence from the past. On the other hand, there is 
 obviously a pretty wide difference between " the splendid dreamer, 
 the philanthropic nineteenth century pagan," as Dobell called his 
 own hero, and the fanatic Brand of Ibsen. Another poem which 
 Balder resembles in its general scheme is Paracelsus. Obviously 
 the search after Knowledge undertaken by Paracelsus, with the 
 discovery that Knowledge alone is unsatisfying and that Love must 
 be added, is not unlike the life-voyage from Doubt to Faith which 
 Dobell meant to trace. 
 
 Dobell had married in 1844, and his wife, like himself, was 
 almost constantly in delicate health. They took turns, it has 
 been said, to nurse one another out of their numerous illnesses. 
 Partly that Mrs Dobell might have the benefit of the excellent 
 medical advice it afforded, and partly for the sake of the intellectual 
 stimulus it promised, the Dobells moved in 1854 to Edinburgh, 
 which remained their home for about four years. Thither Dobell 
 attracted his fellow-poet, Alexander Smith (1829-1867), the son 
 of a pattern-designer of Kilmarnock, Ayrshire. Previous to his
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 519 
 
 removal to Edinburgh Smith resided at Glasgow, a city which he 
 has celebrated in what is probably the very finest of his poems ; 
 and the year before Dobell's arrival he, a young man of twenty- 
 four, had taken the world by storm with his Life Drama. The 
 critics were by no means unanimous about this piece; but the 
 difference of opinion among them had only the effect of strengthen- 
 ing the interest generally felt in the author. Dobell was among 
 the enthusiasts. Feeling not only that this was a new poet, but 
 that he was one akin to himself, he sought Smith's acquaintance, 
 and his presence in Edinburgh was an inducement to Smith to 
 migrate. 
 
 The society of Edinburgh was, in the fifties, still a society of no 
 inconsiderable distinction, and the two poets were among the men 
 who gave it a kind of after-glow of glory. The great age was 
 past. Scott was gone, and Hogg ; Jeffrey had only recently died ; 
 Lockhart had long ago drifted away ; and both he and Christopher 
 North passed to the universal bourne in the very year when Dobell 
 first came to the city they had roused and shaken by their youthful 
 frolics. In the same year died the shrewdly-observant Lord Cock- 
 burn, one of the last of the Scottish gentlemen of the old school. 
 Carlyle, a brief sojourner, had carried his fervour and his dyspeptic 
 gloom first to Craigenputtock, and afterwards to London. But 
 Sir William Hamilton was still the philosophic chief, and the figure 
 of Hugh Miller was still to be seen in the streets. Dr John 
 Brown too walked there, intent upon his business of healing, 
 yet with a watchful and observant eye on the dogs. Ferrier 
 was an occasional visitor ; and among the residents was the 
 boisterously genial John Stuart Blackie, picturesque even then, 
 though perhaps less so than he afterwards became with his plaid 
 and his long waving silver hair. There too was William Edmond- 
 stoune Aytoun, whom Dobell met so good-naturedly. It was a 
 pleasant and a witty society. The mirth of it is attested by 
 Firmilian, by the Bon Gaiiltier Ballads, and by the raciness 
 which still characterised Blackwood} s Magazine. It was, moreover, 
 a society which, down to that date, retained the stimulus of im- 
 memorial associations and of historic names, not yet whirled away 
 to the great vortex of London. Dobell's imagination was captivated
 
 520 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 by this, which was an aspect of society hitherto unfamiHar to him. 
 He tells how, sitting at dinner, he heard that Lord Something 
 Douglas, sitting at the same table, was a lineal descendant of the 
 Douglas who started to bear the heart of Bruce to Palestine. 
 Dobell expressed his interest. " What will you say to me, then ? " 
 said the lady who sat by his side, " for I'm the lineal descendant 
 of the Bruce himself." The surroundings were thoroughly con- 
 genial to Dobell, and the three years he spent in Edinburgh were 
 among the happiest and the most active of his life. 
 
 The Crimean War supplied the theme of his next two volumes, 
 Sonnets on the War (1855) (in conjunction with Smith), and 
 England in Tvne of War (1856). The Sonnets on the War 
 are on the whole disappointing. Smith was hurried into col- 
 laboration by the influence of Dobell and by the contagion of the 
 prevailing warlike spirit ; but he was not by nature a martial poet, 
 and his contributions lower the tone. In Dobell however, as he 
 had already proved in The Roman, the martial spirit was inborn. 
 His England in Time of War contains the magnificent Evening 
 Dream. It also contains much besides martial verse, including 
 among other pieces the finest thing he ever wrote, the weird and 
 haunting ballad, Keith of Ravelston. Two fine sonnets based 
 upon rumours that America would join the conflict deserve to be 
 quoted for the sake of their theme and substance as well as for 
 their beauty : — 
 
 " Men say, Columbia, we shall hear thy guns. 
 But in what tongue shall be thy battle-cry? 
 Not that our sires did love in years gone by, 
 When all the Pilgrim Fathers were little sons 
 In merrie homes of Englaunde ? Back, and see 
 Thy satchelled ancestor 1 Behold, he runs 
 To mine, and, clasped, they tread the equal lea 
 To the same village-school, where, side by side, 
 They spell 'our Father.' Hard by, the twin-pride 
 Of that grey hall whose ancient oriel gleams 
 Thro' yon baronial pines, with looks of light 
 Our sister-mothers sit beneath one tree. 
 Meanwhile our Shakespeare wanders past and dreams 
 His Helena and Hermia. Shall we fight?
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY : NEW INFLUENCES $21 
 
 Nor force nor fraud shall sunder us ! Oh ye 
 
 Who north or south, on east or western land, 
 
 Native to noble sounds, say truth for truth. 
 
 Freedom for freedom, love for love, and God 
 
 For God ; Oh ye who in eternal youth 
 
 Speak with a living and creative flood 
 
 This universal English, and do stand 
 
 Its breathing book ; live worthy of that grand 
 
 Heroic utterance — parted, yet a whole, 
 
 Far, yet unsevered, — children brave and free 
 
 Of the great Mother-tongue, and ye shall be 
 
 Lords of an empire wide as Shakespeare's soul, 
 
 Sublime as Milton's immemorial theme, 
 
 And rich as Chaucer's speech, and fair as Spenser's dream." 
 
 When England in Time of War was published Dobell was 
 still only thirty-two, and it seemed as if his career was just 
 opening. In reality it was near its close. His health grew worse. 
 The northern climate was trying, and in 1857 he left Edinburgh. 
 In the following year he wrote Ttie Magyar's New- Year-Eve, 
 and in i860 The Youth of England to Garibaldi's Legion, both 
 stirring and impressive pieces. But he was advised to spare 
 himself the strain of composition ; and though from time to time 
 he wrote some fugitive pieces, chiefly sonnets, his subsequent 
 verse is meagre in quantity, and in quality is nowhere equal to 
 the best he had previously written. Debarred from poetry, he 
 turned again to business, and his ever-restless mind led him to 
 try the system of cooperation, of which he was one of the pioneers 
 in England. Two accidents, one in 1866 and the other in 1869, 
 shattered his already precarious health, rendered him less fit than 
 ever for work, and hastened his death in 1874. 
 
 Dobell is a poet whom it is not easy to appraise. On the one 
 hand, there is none to whom more must be forgiven ; and 
 the reader who is irritated by his gross violations of taste, and his 
 almost incredible lapses from poetry and even from sense, will be 
 inclined to resent any praise whatsoever. Unfortunately Dobell 
 seems scarcely to have tried to discriminate his own best from his 
 worst. Perhaps he held too strongly that poetry ought to be 
 spontaneous. Some of his boyish work was submitted for criticism
 
 522 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 to the poet Campbell, who pronounced that " with care there was 
 no doubt of his becoming a poet"; and the biographer tells us 
 that "later in life the notion of a 'poet' made 'with care' appealed 
 strongly to " Dobell's " sense of the ridiculous*." Milton thought 
 that no kind of man had to be ' made ' with greater care than a 
 poet ; and it would have been well had Campbell's warning been 
 seriously taken to heart. But Dobell thought that "poetry should 
 roll from the heart as tears from the eyes — unbidden^"; and so 
 he never checked the flow when it came unbidden. " What I 
 have written I have written/' he says of himself^ He was of 
 opinion that a work of youth could not be revised a few years later 
 without the risk of introducing incongruities. Whether he was 
 right, or Horace, who thought that the poet should keep his work 
 unpublished for nine years, and Tennyson, who tirelessly tinkered 
 his youthful verse, the writings of the three men sufficiently prove. 
 " He never weeded his garden," wrote Dr John Brown, " and 
 will, I fear, be therefore strangled in his waste fertility." 
 
 In another respect Dobell does more than any enemy could 
 do to his own hurt. Hardly anyone so frequently as he chal- 
 lenges damaging comparisons. He seems to do it in mere 
 wantonness ; no doubt under the belief that he was not merely 
 capable of great things, wherein he was right, but of the greatest, 
 wherein he was wrong. For example, he has a piece in The Roman 
 on the Coliseum, which naturally suggests Byron's stanzas ; and 
 another in Balder on Chamouni, inevitably bringing to mind 
 Coleridge's magnificent hymn. The test is cruelly severe, and 
 Dobell suffers under it. Again, in The Youth of England to 
 GarihaldVs Legion, he seems to go out of his way in order to 
 force comparison with llie Isles of Greece; and once more it 
 is to his own detriment. It is not plagiarism : Dobell's mind was 
 far too forcible and fertile for that. It would seem rather to 
 spring from an unmeasured confidence in himself. 
 
 And yet, on the other hand, whoever will bear with his faults 
 
 must in the long run find the poetry of Dobell both attractive 
 
 and stimulating. He is all compact of thought, and in his 
 
 ^ Life of Dobell, i. 46. - ibid. i. 133. 
 
 •* Note to the 2nd edition 01 J' he Koinan.
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 523 
 
 moments of true inspiration he handles the greatest themes with 
 masterly ease. In his company we breathe "an ampler ether, a 
 diviner air," than any but the few leaders of men can create. It 
 is true he thought and wrote by spasms, but there is a magnificent 
 energy in these spasms. 
 
 Though Alexander Smith is, rightly enough, classed with 
 Dobell as a member of the Spasmodic School, the two were, 
 both as poets and as men, widely different. It is unnecessary 
 to dwell on Smith's biography, for there is little in it, such as there 
 is in Dobell's, to throw light on his work. He has himself told 
 with great charm what is essential in the story in his almost forgotten 
 novel, Alfred Hagarfs Household (1866). For Smith wrote prose 
 as well as verse with much grace. In addition to the story just 
 named, he wrote Dreamthorp (1863), a volume of essays still 
 worth reading for their sympathetic pictures of the country, their 
 pleasant chatty criticism, and, above all, for the sake of a wonderful 
 passage in the essay entitled A Lark's Flight, where Smith rises to 
 the level of the greatest writers of prose. He wrote also A Summer 
 in Skye (1865), in which he caught the charm of Highland 
 scenery as scarcely anyone has done before or since. 
 
 Smith's poetry is principally contained in three volumes, Poems 
 (1853), City Poems (1857) and Edwin of Deira (1861). In its 
 main outlines his poetical career was an exact reproduction 
 of Dobell's. There was the same brilliant reception, the same 
 flagging enthusiasm as the years went on, and the same untimely 
 close. Smith was cut off when he was scarcely past his youth, 
 and even of his short life the last two years were almost blank 
 because of ill-health. The Life Dra7na at once awoke a contro- 
 versy which was never completely silenced so long as Smith 
 continued to write. The poet was accused of plagiarism ; but the 
 charge, annoying as it was, served only to draw attention to the 
 poem and to make it more popular. An accusation of deliberate 
 Hterary pilfering can seldom be justified. In Smith's case there 
 was neither intentional dishonesty nor lack of power and origi- 
 nality; but he seems to have had a mind of the sort which 
 sub-consciously retains what it reads, and unwittingly reproduces 
 some kind of echo of it. Such echoes are frequent in his verse ;
 
 524 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 but in spite of that, his best pieces are poems, not mere 
 bundles of quotations, out of which no true poem was ever 
 yet built. There needs but a reference to Glasgow, or to the 
 companion picture of Edinburgh^ or to some of the sonnets, 
 to reduce to its true proportions the charge of plagiarism. There 
 may be reminiscences of earlier writers in these pieces, but 
 Alexander Smith was their author. 
 
 City Poems disappointed those who had hailed the new 
 writer as a rival of Tennyson; but the fault was in the readers 
 rather than in Smith, whose best work is in this volume. The 
 verse is still overloaded with metaphor, and the style is often 
 strained ; but on the other hand there are numerous happy lines 
 and phrases, and bits of description touched with high imagina- 
 tion^ as for instance : — 
 
 "Through the rifts of ruin sternly gleamed 
 An apparition of grey windy crag, 
 Black leagues of forest roaring like a sea, 
 And far lands dim with rain." 
 
 The best examples of Smith's work in this kind are however to 
 be found in the Blaaven sonnets. The scenery of Skye, in 
 which his marriage with a Flora MacDonald of that island gave 
 him a personal interest, stirred his imagination as scarcely any- 
 thing else ever did ; and some of his finest work, in verse as well 
 as in the prose volume already mentioned, is associated with 
 it. But perhaps the very highest point Smith ever reached is 
 attained in Glasgow, a picture of a great city as imaginative as 
 any that has ever been painted. There is the magnificence of 
 Turner in the colouring. The poem belongs to the days when 
 Smith had not yet that familiarity with the country which he 
 shows in Dreafnthorp and in A Summer in Skye. But poeta 
 nascitur, and in Glasgow Smith proves that breadth of experience 
 is not indispensable. In it he frankly avows the limits of his 
 knowledge, and proclaims himself a son of the city : — 
 
 "City! I am tnie son of thine; 
 Ne'er dwelt I where great mornings shine 
 Around the bleating pens ;
 
 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 525 
 
 Ne'er by the rivulets I strayed, 
 
 And ne'er upon my childhood weighed 
 
 The silence of the glens. 
 Instead of shores where ocean beats, 
 I hear the ebb and flow of streets." 
 
 But if he had limited experience he had the gift of imaginative 
 sympathy ; and one of the great charms of the poem is its sugges- 
 tion of the contrast between the beauty of " trailing showers and 
 breezy downs," and that other beauty which dwells in " the tragic 
 heart of towns." In a different key, but almost as fine as the 
 poem on Glasgow, is the lyric Barbara^ in Horton. It is not free 
 from the 'spasmodic' faults, but the wistful melancholy of the 
 closing stanzas gives them a rare beauty. 
 
 There was more ground for disappointment with Edwin of 
 Deira ; but, oddly enough, the critics received it more favourably. 
 It is a poem of epic form founded upon a story of Saxon times ; 
 and, though it has fewer faults than the Life Drama, it is not so 
 clear that it has more or higher beauties. Many passages are 
 diffuse and weak, few rise to distinction, and the poem fails to 
 impress itself upon the memory. A comparison of it with City 
 Poems suggests that Smith's strength lay in the lyric and in short 
 narrative or introspective pieces. Had he left a considerable 
 body of verse of the type of Glasgow and Barbara and Squire 
 Maurice and The Night before the Wedding, his name would have 
 been great 
 
 Dobell, before his acquaintance with Smith began, drew a 
 contrast between himself and his future friend and comrade in 
 words which exactly hit the truth about them both. " Somebody," 
 he says, — " Samuel Brown, I think — said of me that I was ' mere 
 Thought.^ Alexander is sensuous beyond even Keatsian in tensity \" 
 In its root-principle the poetic work of the one is widely different 
 from that of the other, and they are bound together rather by the 
 presence of common faults than by the possession of common 
 merits. Dobell is spasmodically intellectual, Smith spasmodically 
 sensuous. Both are frequently extravagant and tasteless and 
 turgid in style; both are prone to "tear a passion to tatters." 
 
 ^ Life of Dobell, i. 243-4,
 
 1 
 526 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA ] 
 
 But when Dobell is good, he is good from force of mind ; when 
 Smith is good, it is because of that sensitiveness which enabled 
 him to divine nature before he had well seen her. Another j 
 criticism of Smith may be quoted, as much for what is mistaken ! 
 in it as for what is true. " The antecedents of the Zi/e Dra^na," 
 says Clough, " the one long poem which occupies almost the | 
 whole of his volume, are to be found in the Princess, in parts of '. 
 Mrs Browning, in the love of Keats, and in the /lah'f of Shake- 
 speare. There is no Pope, or Dryden, or even Milton ; no ] 
 Wordsworth, Scott, or even Byron to speak of ^" Except in one ; 
 important point this is sound. There is in Smith more of Keats I 
 than of anyone else; but there is also, in spirit rather than j 
 m phraseology, a good deal of Byron. In fact, the Spasmodic ' 
 School may be defined as a blend of Keats with Byron, differences 
 within it depending upon the proportions in which the ingredients 
 are mixed. Dobell leans towards Byron, Smith leans towards 
 Keats. 
 
 * Clough's J'rost Remains.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 The Oxford poets left no successors, except in so far as 
 Mr William Watson may be considered the successor and disciple 
 of Matthew Arnold. The Spasmodic School died with Dobell. 
 The faults indicated by the nickname are perennial in literature ; 
 but Dobell and Smith transmitted their beauties to no one ; 
 perhaps because those beauties were too fragmentary and too 
 closely associated with imperfection to be transmissible. Only 
 the Pre-Raphaelite group left a poetical progeny: it was they 
 and Tennyson who jointly moulded poetry in the sixties and 
 seventies. Over their work, however, there gradually passes a 
 change, which has been noted in Tennyson himself, in the 
 development from Locksley Hall to Locksley Hall Sixty Years 
 After, in the firmer grip of reality and the more rugged style. 
 In William Morris this shows itself in the change from pure 
 mediasvalism to the eminently modern note of Chants for Socialists. 
 This phase of poetry is derived from Carlyle and those other 
 writers who in the middle of the century urged so insistently the 
 social problems which the industrial revolution was gradually 
 forcing upon the attention of men. Another offshoot is the work 
 of the group of writers who found their themes in the slums of 
 great cities, and who would prepare the way for improvement by 
 first showing the facts in their ugliness. There is also a con- 
 tinuance and a further development of that spirit of nationality 
 which has been illustrated in Dobell ; but this is independent —
 
 528 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 not derived from him, but the outgrowth of the facts which in- 
 spired him. It manifests itself in various ways; in the poetry 
 of the Celtic Revival ] in the growing interest in Scandinavian 
 myths and legends ; in the beginnings of English imperialism, of 
 which Mr Rudyard Kipling has latterly been the most eloquent 
 mouthpiece. 
 
 § I. The later Pre-Raphaelites and their Kin. 
 
 The first poet of note who worked in tlie jpirit of Rossetti 
 was William Morris (i 834-1 896), a man of multifarious activity, 
 whose work, even when it is least literary, throws a powerful light 
 upon the conditions under which modern literature is produced, 
 and upon the forces which mould the mind of the man of letters. 
 " ' Poet, artist, manufacturer, and socialist, author of The Earthly 
 Paradise^ : — this terse unimpassioned entry in the Fasti Britannia 
 sums up, in a form of words which he would himself have accepted 
 as substantially accurate, the life and work of a remarkable man." 
 With these words the biographer of Morris opens the story of 
 his Hfe; and in "this terse unimpassioned entry" we shall find 
 the reason why Morris deserves close attention as a man, no 
 less than as a writer. The life of Morris is an epitome of 
 what Carlyle and Ruskin, Maurice and Kingsley were teaching; 
 and he shows in his own person, better than anyone else, how 
 that democracy which in 1832 began to find its footing in 
 English politics affected every form of intellectual activity. It 
 will not therefore be amiss to consider the question how he who 
 is described by a college friend as one whose "manners and 
 tastes and sympathies were all aristocratic'," came to be not only 
 a " manufacturer and socialist," but the man of many crafts, whose 
 hands often bore the tints of the dyes among which he worked, 
 or the grime of the tools he handled. 
 
 William Morris was sent first to Marlborough, and then, after 
 an interval under a private tutor, to Exeter College, Oxford, 
 where he soon struck up a close friendship with Edward Burne- 
 * R. W. Dixon, quoted in Mackail's Life of Morris, i. 46.
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 529 
 
 Jones, who was afterwards so intimately associated with him in 
 his artistic work. Both looked towards the Church as their pro- 
 fession, and both were afterwards diverted from it by the more 
 powerful attractions of art. Ten or fifteen years earlier they would 
 almost certainly have taken orders ; but the Oxford of the fifties 
 had lost the fervour which distinguished its theological discussions 
 prior to the secession of Newman. Moreover, in the case of Morris, 
 other influences sprang up to modify and counteract the High 
 Church tendencies with which he had been so deeply imbued 
 that in the early part of his undergraduate course he contemplated 
 founding a monastery. The contemporary writers who chiefly 
 swayed his mind were Carlyle, Ruskin and Rossetti, none of 
 whom was likely to lead him in the steps of Newman or of Pusey. 
 In the past his favourites were Chaucer, Malory and the Scandi- 
 navian myths, to which he was introduced by Thorpe's Northern 
 Mythology. Most of these were unknown to him when he first 
 went to Oxford. It was not till 1854 that he knew even the name 
 of Rossetti, who for a time swept him off his feet and whirled him 
 away in the stream of Pre-Raphaelitism. Previous to the full 
 development of the Rossetti influence Morris had taken the 
 momentous decision to be an artist. The art he chose was archi- 
 tecture; but Rossetti lured him temporarily to painting; and a 
 strong disapproval of the processes of ' restoration ' permanently 
 alienated him from architecture as the profession of his Hfe, though 
 he continued to be deeply interested in it. 
 
 In the meantime he had taken somewhat unwillingly to the 
 art of poetry. The first poem he ever wrote, The Willow and 
 the Red Cliff, was read to his friends in 1855, ^'^*^ '^ praised by 
 R. W. Dixon, who heard it, as almost equal to anything he ever 
 afterwards did\ Morris's own remark, " Well, if this is poetry, it 
 is very easy to write," is memorable. Facility was at once his gift 
 and his danger : there are over 42,000 lines in The Earthly Paradise. 
 More of his poems appeared in The Oxford and Cambridge Maga- 
 
 ^ Mackail's Life of Morris, i. 52. Mr Robert Bridges, however, in a note 
 to Selected Poems of R. W. Dixon, declares that the poem still exists, and that 
 it "abundantly refutes the notion that he appeared on that occasion as a full- 
 fledged poet." 
 
 w. 34
 
 530 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 zine, which ran its course through 1856 and stopped at the end of 
 the year, because the burden of expense, borne wholly by Morris, 
 was excessive. This famous magazine, though it bore the names 
 of both Universities, was in reality almost wholly an Oxford pro- 
 duction. Of the five poems which Morris contributed to it, four 
 were afterwards included in the earliest volume of his verse, The 
 Defence of Guenevere, and other Poems (1858). 
 
 In this volume Morris has not completely "found himself": 
 he is too much under the influence of Rossetti ; and the burden 
 of the Pre-Raphaelite symbolism cumbers his faculty for narrative. 
 Perhaps the most remarkable thing in the volume is the prayer 
 of Guenevere in King Arthur's Tomb. At least Guenevere is a 
 creature of flesh and blood. The picture of the penitent going 
 to meet Lancelot at the tomb of the husband they had wronged, 
 with her spirit torn between the sense of sin and the desire, 
 almost the determination, to sin again, is unforgettable : — 
 
 " 'If even I go to hell, I'cannot choose 
 
 But love you, Christ, yea, though I cannot keep 
 From loving Lancelot : O Christ, must I lose 
 My own heart's love? see, though I cannot weep, 
 
 Yet am I very sorry for my sin ; 
 
 Moreover, Christ, I cannot bear that hell, 
 I am most fain to win you and to win 
 
 A place in heaven sometime — I cannot tell. — 
 
 Speak to me, Christ ! I kiss, kiss, kiss your feet ; 
 
 Ah ! how I weep.' The maid said, ' By the tomb 
 He waiteth for you, lady,' coming fleet. 
 
 Not knowing what woe filled up all the room. 
 
 So Guenevere rose and went to meet him there." 
 
 A perusal of this volume shows why it was that to men of this 
 set Maud was " Tennyson's last poem that mattered^" Maudy^djs, 
 followed by the Idylls of the King, and these were as far as possible 
 removed in spirit and manner from Morris's Arthurian pieces. 
 While Tennyson's knights are gentlemen of the nineteenth century, 
 
 ^ R. W. Dixon, quoted in Mackail's Life of Morris, i. 44.
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 531 
 
 Morris, alike in the Arthurian poems of this volume, and in those 
 founded upon Froissart, and in all his later work in which the 
 scene is laid in the Middle Ages, is genuinely and profoundly 
 mediseval. One of his most singular characteristics is that he 
 seems always to have been more at home in distant or in purely 
 imaginary ages than he was in his own generation. His whole 
 life is an attempt to revive the past ; not to revive by slavishly 
 copying, but as it were to reincarnate the spirit of the past. 
 And it is at this point that his work as " artist, manufacturer and 
 socialist " touches his work as poet. 
 
 Morris was deeply moved by a sense of the deplorable con- 
 dition of the working classes. Hence Carlyle's Past and Fresejii 
 was one of his holy books ; hence, even in his time of Anglo- 
 Catholicism, Kingsley was more read by him than Newman. To 
 him, art was not, as it is to many, a thing severed from life : it 
 was not even a part of life, it was the whole. " Industry without 
 art is barbarity : life without industry is guilt." Morris saw modern 
 industrialism divorced from art, and his whole effort was to bring 
 back art into organic connexion with life. "Time was," he 
 says, " when everybody that made anything made a work of art 
 besides a useful piece of goods, and it gave them pleasure to make 
 it." The doctrine of work taught in Ruskin's chapter Of the 
 Nature of Gothic sank deep into the soul of Morris ; and ac- 
 cordingly that chapter was one of the earliest products of the 
 Kelmscott Press. When his marriage in 1859 caused him to set 
 about building and furnishing and decorating a house, the utter 
 impossibility of getting for money anything but ugliness was driven 
 home to him; and this led to the formation of the firm of ' 
 Morris and Co. The operations of the firm were hampered in 
 a manner almost incredible by the difficulty of getting either 
 manufactured articles or raw materials suitable to their purposes. 
 Some of the characteristics of Morris's early decorative work, which 
 were supposed to be peculiarly ' aesthetic,' were really forced upon 
 him by necessity, not adopted by choice. Such was the case with 
 the subdued colours in which he at first worked. After he had 
 become himself a dyer, he blossomed out in pure bright colours, 
 to the astonishment of the followers whom he had meanwhile 
 
 34-2
 
 532 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 accustomed to believe that the * Morris ' and therefore the ' correct ' 
 colours were dull neutral tints. "• If you want dirt, you can find 
 that in the streetV' was his impatient exclamation to a customer 
 who asked for the old neutral tints after they had been discarded. 
 
 Thus, point by point, Morris was led to revolt against the 
 modern industrial system and to adopt in place of it something, 
 not identical with, but akin to, the mediaeval system. " In half- 
 unconscious adaptation to the conditions of modern life, the 
 monastery of his Oxford dreams arose into being as a workshop, 
 and the Brotherhood became a firm registered under the Companies 
 Acts-." That thirteenth century in which his imagination loved to 
 live had, he admitted, many imperfections; but men had the 
 great consolation that they took a pleasure in their work then. 
 The aim of his industrial life was to reproduce this pleasure 
 in the nineteenth century. It was this which led him on to 
 socialism. Like Kingsley, he had no desire to see the workman 
 rise out of his class. The man who did so simply became one 
 more added to the middle class, a unit in the fierce struggle of 
 the modern commercial system. The only true reform, he held, 
 lay in the elevation of the class ; and the only way to elevate the 
 class was to retain its best members within it^ and to humanise 
 the conditions of life for all. He was quite alive to the probability 
 that, in the revolutionary upheaval which he deemed necessary, 
 all art might for the time be sacrificed ; but he maintained that 
 the sacrifice would be repaid. Art would shine out once more 
 from its eclipse with a far brighter and more wholesome light, 
 because it would rest on the sympathy of the people. 
 
 Here is the democratic note in this essentially aristocratic 
 poet and artist. The worshipper of beauty has usually been far 
 enough removed from sympathy with the people. He builds 
 himself "a lordly pleasure-house," surrounds himself with costly 
 objects of art, and dwells at ease among them for ever. It is 
 curious that Tennyson has been criticised as unfaithful to his 
 art in that he, a priest of the beautiful, in The Palace of Art 
 condemns the soul which thus surrounds itself with objects of 
 
 * Life of Morris, i. 314.. 
 
 * ii)id. i. 144.
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 533 
 
 beauty. If so, Morris is equally to blame. The conclusion of 
 Tennyson's poem is significant : — 
 
 "So when four years were wholly finished, 
 
 She threw her royal robes away. 
 'Make me a cottage in a vale,' she said, 
 'Where I may mourn and pray. 
 
 ' Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are 
 So lightly, beautifully built : 
 Perchance I may return with others there 
 When I have purged my guilt.' " 
 
 Tennyson saw dimly what Morris saw clearly. The solitary, selfish 
 worship of beauty cannot be right unless the whole life of man 
 is to be solitary and selfish too. Moreover, the truest and highest 
 beauty cannot be created except through sympathy. " I am 
 sure," says Morris, "that this lack of the general sympathy of 
 simple people weighs very heavily on" the unlucky artist, "and 
 makes his work feverish and dreamy, or crabbed and perverse^''' 
 And how can the general sympathy of simple people be got, 
 except by making them capable of appreciating what is really 
 beautiful — educating them, in a word, to a point incomparably 
 higher than anything yet attained ? Morris would have done so, not 
 by prolonging the years of the school curriculum, but by making the 
 workshop and the daily life one prolonged education and pleasure. 
 His practical work sets William Morris in a unique position. 
 " Do noble deeds, not dream them all day long," is the injunction 
 of Kingsley ; but Kingsley himself mainly dreamed. So did the 
 majority of his contemporaries : Morris did what they dreamed. 
 Carlyle set a picture of the Past over against a picture of the 
 Present and called upon all to bring back the spirit of the former 
 time ; but he did not show how it was to be done. Matthew 
 Arnold drew the picture of Barbarians, Philistines and Populace, 
 and spent a lifetime, with moderate success, in trying to convince 
 them of the defects of " our incomparable civilisation." The Trac- 
 tarians saw that what the age needed above all things was a 
 more spiritual life ; and they imagined it possible to turn them- 
 selves into primitive Christians and gain it in that way. Ruskin's 
 
 * Life of Morris, ii. 23,
 
 534 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 gang of road-makers at Hinksey and his Guild of St George were 
 of dubious value. Morris so far followed his mentor's steps that 
 he set himself to do ; but he took a more enlightened way. He 
 learnt how to make the things he professed to make, not only as well 
 as, but better than, anyone else could make them. The Hinksey 
 road was one of the worst in the country ; but the Morris glass, 
 wall papers, carpets and printed books were the very best of 
 their kind. Ruskin himself declared that in illumination Morris 
 was superior to anyone else ancient or modern. Morris's later 
 socialist propaganda was unwise and mischievous, though noble 
 in intention ; but his practical work showed that there was room 
 for the mediaeval system of handicrafts alongside of, though 
 probably not in supersession of, the modern industrial system. 
 And it is only too obvious that there is ample room for reform 
 in that system. 
 
 This practical work, carried out upon mediaeval lines, con- 
 vinced Morris still more firmly of the wisdom as well as the 
 beauty of his favourite period of history, and made him more 
 determinedly than ever mediaeval in the spirit of his Hterary work. 
 But at the outset we are struck with a singular difference, an 
 apparent contradiction between that literary work, as it shapes 
 itself down to the date of The Earthly Paradise, and the practical 
 work of which we have been speaking. A " dreamer of dreams, 
 born out of my due time," is Morris's description of himself as 
 poet; and there is truth in the line. No contemporary man of 
 letters seems less practical in his writings. Carlyle, Ruskin, 
 Tennyson, Arnold, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, all in their 
 several ways preached to their own day and generation ; but 
 Morris seemed so far to stand aloof. The Earthly Paradise and 
 Jason and Guenevere have their uses for humanity ; but they are 
 in no sense treatises on the difficulties or specifics for the diseases 
 of the nineteenth century. In this indifference to contemporary 
 questions Morris resembles the other Pre-Raphaelites ; but then 
 they either do not at all, or only in a very slight degree, share 
 Morris's practical interests. Rossetti cared for only two things, 
 poetry and pictures : all else was subordinate to these. To him 
 the mass of men existed in order to make art possible.
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 535 
 
 It is hardly conceivable that a real contradiction could run 
 through so large a part of the life of a great man, and we must 
 look below the surface for an explanation of what seems to be a 
 contradiction in the case of Morris. It is probably to be found 
 in his conception of art, which, as has been already said, he 
 regarded as the whole of life. Unlike Rossetti, he held that the 
 best art was impossible unless all life was artistic. His own true 
 Ufe lay in the poems he wrote and the beautiful things he made. 
 But they are serene, there is nothing polemical in them ; polemics 
 come in only in the struggle against conditions which are anti- 
 artistic and which make life not beautiful but ugly. Morris's 
 socialism, therefore, is a means to an end; the end itself is 
 beauty, which he realises, so far as it is possible for him, under 
 the conditions in which he is doomed to live, in his poetry and 
 his artistic products. These are positive goods : the socialistic 
 propaganda is only that sort of conditional good which consists 
 in the removal of obstructions. 
 
 In this view of beauty Morris stands closer to Keats than to 
 any other poet. Nearly all the other men of letters, regarding the 
 search for beauty as only part of their business, constantly inter- 
 mingle it with other things. They make a digression in the 
 story or they pause in the poem in order to set to rights some- 
 thing they find amiss in the world. In the end Morris followed 
 their example. The intrusion of a new spirit may be detected in 
 Sig2ird the Volsung; for Sigurd's function is the regeneration of 
 the society in which he lives. And the new spirit is unmistakable 
 in those later poems which were inspired by Morris's socialistic 
 opinions; for these have the fervour and even the fierceness of 
 Ebenezer Elliott. 
 
 It was doubtless the fact that his mind was full of so many 
 other things, the multifarious distractions of the attempt to re- 
 introduce beauty into objects of common life, that caused the long 
 blank in Morris's poetical work. Nine years passed after The 
 Defence of Guenevere before he published his next poem. The Life 
 and Death of Jason (1867). It won fame and popularity immedi- 
 ately. The Defence of Guenevere had influenced profoundly a few 
 sympathetic minds; but it had passed almost unnoticed by the
 
 536 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 critics, and was still quite unknown to the great majority of readers ; 
 after the appearance oi Jason Morris was among the best-known 
 poets of his time. 
 
 Both in design and in execution Jason was unlike the earlier 
 volume. The pieces in the latter were either dramatic or lyrical, 
 and the manner was more like Rossetti's than it was like that of 
 any other poet. Jason, on the other hand, is a narrative, and the 
 author goes back to Chaucer for a model. He proclaims his 
 discipleship in this very poem, and again in the beautiful Envoi 
 to T/ie Earthly Paradise; and the magnificent Kelmscott Press 
 edition of Chaucer is a still more conspicuous memorial of his 
 admiration and love of the great master of English narrative 
 verse. 
 
 The poem on the story of Jason was originally intended to 
 form part of The Earthly Paradise (1868-1870), but outgrew its 
 place there, and so had to be issued as an independent piece. 
 That immense collection of stories was the next production of 
 Morris. The plan proclaims at once its relation to The Canter- 
 bury Tales; but though the resemblance is indubitable, it is 
 rather one of form than of substance. In The Earthly Paradise 
 we see Morris the dreamer and the romancer. There is much in 
 it that we may reasonably compare with The Knighfs Tale ; but 
 there is nothing to set against the wonderfully humorous stories 
 of English life and character; nor is there anything in the 
 remotest degree resembling that gem of all The Canterbury Tales, 
 the Prologue. Morris was quite incapable of such robust reality ; 
 and when we compare him seriously with his master we reaUse 
 the truth of his description of himself as a '* dreamer of dreams 
 born out of his due time." He might have retorted upon such 
 criticism that it only proves the truth of his own theory. Chaucer, 
 living in a world where art and beauty were everywhere, could do 
 this thing ; Morris, the child of an age when art and beauty are 
 banished from common life, could not have done it even if he had 
 had the genius of Chaucer. There is some point in the retort — 
 but it does not explain The Wife of Bath or The Miller's Tale. 
 
 This mass of narrative poems falls into three great divisions, 
 according to the source from which they are drawn. They are
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 537 
 
 either classical, mediaeval or Scandinavian. One story in The 
 Earthly Paradise^ namely The Man who never Laughed Again, 
 is drawn from the Arabian Nights, but it is the only exception 
 falling outside this classification. As regards the classical and 
 mediaeval stories, the division is unimportant; for Morris treats 
 classical themes precisely like mediaeval ones ; and it is evident 
 that stories from both sources had in his imagination much the 
 same setting. Notwithstanding the fact that he translated the 
 ySneid and the Odyssey beautifully as well as accurately, Morris 
 is conspicuously unclassical, if not even anti-classical, in his tone 
 of mind. The story of Jason is hardly less mediaeval in its spirit 
 than is that of The Man Born to be King. 
 
 As regards the stories founded upon the Northern myths, the 
 case is different. Contemporary critics had been dimly conscious 
 of a change of tone between the earlier and the later parts of The 
 Earthly Paradise. This change is most plainly to be seen when 
 we compare the tales from Scandinavian sources with the others ; 
 and especially when we compare the most important of these 
 tales. The Lovers of Gudrun, with anything else in the whole 
 collection. Mr Mackail has acutely pointed out the significance 
 of it : it is, he says, nothing less than the passing of romance into 
 epic. The character of the northern sagas leads Morris to take 
 this important step, probably without consciousness of its signifi- 
 cance. There is a rugged reality about them which ill fits the 
 vague mysticism in which the mediaeval world wrapped itself. In 
 The Lovers of Gudrun, where Morris was translating the Laxdaela 
 Saga, this reality inevitably made itself felt ; and it is a tribute to 
 the superiority of the epic manner that this tale is commonly 
 singled out as the best in The Earthly Paradise. 
 
 In the poems translated from Northern originals or founded 
 upon Northern stories we have, then, a third division of the 
 works of Morris differing essentially from both the others. In 
 the study he made of those tales, Morris was following and 
 developing one of the notable lines of thought of the time. Not 
 so very long ago the name Scandinavian had been considered, as 
 regards literature, almost synonymous with barbarian. Gray was 
 a pioneer ; and misleading as was the impression he gave of the
 
 538 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Northern poets, he has fairly won the honour due to him who 
 opens up a fresh field. In the early Victorian period a literature, 
 both popular and scholarly, began to accumulate about the 
 subject. Various paths led towards it. The study of philology 
 turned upon the Scandinavian tongues an attention they had not 
 previously received. Shakespearean scholars had their minds 
 drawn to Saxo Grammaticus. The more careful study of our own 
 old ballads proved how close was their kinship to those of 
 Denmark. Carlyle in his Hero as Divinity pointed out the 
 unique interest which these Northern tales have for us. They 
 are the heroic legends of our own kin, and therefore they must 
 come closer to our heart than the stories of an alien race. 
 Further, he maintained that in certain important respects they 
 were intrinsically superior to the Greek myths which had hitherto 
 received almost exclusive attention. 
 
 Probably Carlyle did more than anyone else to turn general 
 attention to the Scandinavian legends ; certainly after Heroes 
 and Hero- Worship the evidences of such attention become far 
 more frequent. Benjamin Thorpe in his Northern Mythology 
 (185 1 ) and his Yule-tide Stories (1853) suppHed material which 
 proved stimulating to the imagination of more than one poet. 
 Kingsley had in himself a good deal of the old Viking spirit, 
 and dwelt with pleasure on the history of the Northern sea- 
 kings. Matthew Arnold rendered into beautiful verse the story 
 of the death of Balder. It is interesting to contrast his manner 
 with that of Morris. The latter, as we have seen, throws a 
 mediaeval atmosphere over the classical tales he tells. Arnold 
 reverses the process : his Balder Dead is Scandinavian in 
 origin, but classical in manner. It is a great tribute to the 
 force and originality of the Scandinavian stories that they will 
 not be medisevalised. In the hands of Morris they remain 
 Scandinavian. 
 
 The Lovers of Gudrun was written before Morris had any 
 personal knowledge of the land to which the Northern Sagas 
 belonged. His intense interest in the Sagas, however, naturally 
 kindled an interest in Iceland, and he took a journey thither in 
 1871, and a second one in 1873. He was infinitely more interested
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 539 
 
 and impressed than he was by Italy, which he visited in the 
 period between those two journeys. Naturally therefore he 
 returned from Iceland more Scandinavian in sympathy than ever; 
 and the outcome was his great Northern epic, Sigurd the Volsung 
 (1876). This is his high-water mark in verse. The story is told 
 with admirable spirit, though not without monotony, and it bears 
 a stamp of reality such as marks hardly any of the tales of The 
 Earthly Paradise. The heroic sentiment of the Northern legends 
 fires the poet's imagination, and he sometimes catches it grandly. 
 Sigurd the Volsung therefore is tonic and inspiriting. There is 
 no sickliness of thought in it. The heroes always dwell upon the 
 deeds done or to be done, not upon their reward. " I know that 
 the world is wide, and filled with deeds unwrought," they sing ; 
 and they go forth to do the deeds. It is perhaps in his war- 
 poetry that Morris rises highest : — 
 
 "On went the Volsung banners, and on went Sigmund before, 
 
 And his sword was the flail of the tiller on the wheat of the wheat- 
 thrashing floor, 
 
 And his shield was rent from his arm, and his helm was hewn from his 
 head : 
 
 But who may draw nigh him to smite for the heap and the rampart of 
 dead? 
 
 White went his hair on the wind like the ragged drift of the cloud. 
 
 And his dust-driven, blood-beaten harness was the death-storm's angry 
 shroud, 
 
 When the summer sun is departing in the first of the night of wrack; 
 
 And his sword was the cleaving lightning, that smites and is hurried 
 aback 
 
 Ere the hand may rise against it ; and his voice was the following thunder. 
 
 Then cold grew the battle before him dead-chilled with the fear and the 
 wonder : 
 
 For again in his ancient eyes the light of victory gleamed ; 
 
 From his mouth grown tuneful and sweet the song of his kindred streamed ; 
 
 And no more was he worn and weary, and no more his life seemed spent : 
 
 And with all the hope of his childhood was his wrath of battle blent ; 
 
 And he thought : A little further, and the river of strife is passed. 
 
 And I shall sit triumphant the king of the world at last." 
 
 This is beautiful and spirited ; but it may be worth while to 
 compare for a moment the manner with the manner of such a
 
 540 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 master of narrative as Scott. These lines of Morris are all about 
 action, yet we have little action in them, and few concrete details. 
 Their place is taken by fine imagery. Sigurd's sword is "the 
 cleaving lightning," his harness "the death-storm's angry shroud." 
 But when we ask what the hero clad in this harness and armed 
 with this sword accomplished, the answer is a song. We learn 
 indeed that he is surrounded by a heap and rampart of dead ; 
 but the dead are unnamed ; and we are not told who they were 
 who attempted to approach him behind this rampart. In short, 
 a dim, impalpable mist veils the whole action. In Scott, on the 
 contrary, everything is as definite as it can possibly be. We see 
 the Howard's banner and the shield of Tunstall, stainless knight ; 
 and Marmion dies, not with a vague thought about passing the 
 river of strife, but with a cry to charge upon his lips, and that cry 
 addressed to the leaders of the field, Chester and Stanley. So 
 too in the description of Bannockburn we see Douglas in the 
 pause for breath leaning upon his war-sword and Randolph 
 wiping his bloody brow, and we see every movement of "the 
 grim lord of Colonsay" as he writhes upon his wound and 
 deals back the death dealt to him. In this difference lies 
 the secret why Sigurd the Volsung was coldly received. Morris 
 possessed, and he displayed in this epic, poetical qualities of 
 which Scott was destitute ; but in this important respect Scott's 
 was the better method of the two. The difference moreover 
 shows the defect of Morris as a narrator. A narrative which 
 does not move mainly upon concrete facts, whether real or 
 imaginary, is false in principle ; and Morris is too apt to pause, 
 as he does in this passage, over the embroideries of the story. 
 The spirit of the decorative artist was from- first to last strong 
 within him. The yellow gleam of the sun-flowers, whose pro- 
 fusion in Morris's ' fresco ' in the Oxford Union provoked the 
 sarcasm of Rossetti, seems to be shed over all his work. 
 
 Meanwhile, in 1873, Morris had published another long poem 
 of a very different order, Love is Enough ; or, the Freei?ig of 
 Pharamond . a Morality, in which he attempted to revive the 
 forgotten form of the mediaeval drama. The curiously intricate 
 structure makes this poem a kind of test of faith among the
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 541 
 
 devotees of Morris. But the attempt was fore-doomed to failure. 
 Though .Sir Feter Harpdon's End proves that Morris was not 
 destitute of dramatic faculty, it is not probable that he would 
 under any circumstances have become a great dramatist ; and 
 assuredly the world will not revert from the developed art of 
 Shakespeare to the crude and yet complex forms of his mediaeval 
 precursors. The very attempt is a singular illustration of the 
 exclusiveness of Morris's sympathies. In his taste for all forms of 
 early art he may be fairly called catholic ; but his sympathy stops 
 abruptly with the Renascence. He was either indifferent to or he 
 actively disliked the Italian Renascence, the Elizabethans, and 
 nearly the whole of English poetry between them and the revival 
 of romance. When we add his alienation, already noted, from 
 classical literature, it is obvious how serious were his limitations. 
 The omission even of "our indispensable eighteenth century" 
 is grave enough ; but the omission of so much besides becomes 
 v;ell-nigh ruinous. 
 
 Sigurd the Volsung was the last of Morris's long poems, unless 
 we count among the number The Pilgrims of Hope, which still 
 rests, a quasi-unity, in the columns of the socialistic organ The 
 Commonweal. For ten years after Sigurd Morris was much 
 absorbed in a socialist propaganda, and his writings and utter- 
 ances were mostly lectures, tracts and journalistic articles on 
 subjects bearing upon the scheme of socialism. Much of this 
 work is of purely ephemeral interest ; but the lectures on the 
 relation between art and life are exceedingly interesting, and they 
 contain the clearest and most specific statement anywhere to be 
 found of the principles underlying Morris's work. It is evident 
 that these principles, had only been gradually brought out into 
 clear consciousness by himself, and it would be a mistake to 
 suppose that in his earUer days he deliberately set to work under 
 their guidance; but nevertheless they were implied in his life and 
 writings from the beginning. 
 
 Besides prose tracts, these years produced a considerable 
 number of miscellaneous poems, many of them devoted to the 
 socialist cause and contributed to 2''he Commonzveal, a journal 
 which Morris financed, and which he edited from 1886 until he
 
 542 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 was dismissed from his office by the extremists who won control 
 over the party in 1889. With ultra-Christian patience Morris 
 continued for some time to support the journal financially ; and it 
 was after his dismissal that he contributed to it his News from 
 Nowhere. A Death Sofjg affords a fine specimen of the work of 
 this period. It was inspired by the death of a man from injuries 
 received in Trafalgar Square on the famous " Bloody Sunday," 
 1887:— 
 
 "What Cometh here from west to east a-wending? 
 And who are these, the marchers stem and slow ? 
 We bear the message that the rich are sending 
 Aback to those who bade them wake and know. 
 Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay, 
 But one and all if they would dusk the day. 
 
 We asked them for a life of toilsome earning, 
 
 They bade us bide their leisure for our bread. 
 We craved to speak to tell our woeful learning. 
 We come back speechless, bearing back our dead. 
 Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay. 
 But one and all if they would dusk the day. 
 
 They will not learn ; they have no ears to hearken ; 
 
 They turn their faces from the eyes of fate; 
 Their gay-lit halls shut out the skies that darken. 
 But, lo ! this dead man knocking at the gate. 
 Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay, 
 But one and all if they would dusk the day. 
 
 Here lies the sign that we shall break our prison ; 
 
 Amidst the storm he won a prisoner's rest : 
 But in the cloudy dawn the sun arisen 
 
 Brings us our day of work to win the best. 
 
 Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay. 
 But one and all if they would dusk the day." 
 
 In these verses we seem to hear the voice of a wider-spirited 
 and more humane Ebenezer Elliott We may compare them with 
 the Songs of Democracy (1856- 185 7) by Ernest Charles Jones 
 (1819-1868) or with the Songs of tJu Governing Classes by Robert 
 Biirnabas Brough (1828-1870). But Brough is usually satirical, 
 and there is in other respects a very remarkable difference between
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 543 
 
 Elliott on the one hand, and Jones, and still more Morris, on the 
 other. The difference marks the rise of socialism ; for Elliott is 
 not socialistic at all. As has been pointed out in an earlier 
 chapter, he treats capitalist and workman as one in interest and 
 alike victims of the landlord. Ernest Jones condemns capitalist 
 and landlord equally. He sings The Song of the Factory Slave : — 
 
 " The land it is the landlords' ; 
 
 The traders' is the sea ; 
 The ore the usurers' coffer fills, 
 
 But what remains for me? 
 The engine whirls for master's craft, 
 
 The steel shines to defend, 
 With labour's arms, what labour raised. 
 
 For labour's foe to spend. 
 The camp, the pulpit, and the law, 
 
 For rich men's sons are free. 
 Theirs, theirs are learning, arts, and arms; 
 
 But what remains for me? 
 The coming hope, the future day, 
 
 When wrong to right shall bow, 
 And hearts that have the courage, man, 
 
 To make that future now.^' 
 
 This is the spirit of Morris too. A capitalist and an employer 
 like Elliott, his socialistic crusade was nevertheless an attack upon 
 the whole capitalist system. Of course his position exposed him 
 to unpleasant personal arguments; but his defence is perfectly 
 sound. He was but an atom in a great system, powerless to help 
 the working classes except by labouring to change the system. He 
 was more likely to succeed if he retained his capital than if he sur- 
 rendered it ; and therefore the right course, the courageous course, 
 was to retain it. Those who most strongly dissent from Morris in 
 opinion may admit this. There can be no doubt about his absolute 
 disinterestedness. Whether it was wise or unwise, his socialistic 
 career was assuredly not ignoble. 
 
 This phase is the last in the poetical life of Morris. He never 
 changed his socialistic opinions; but in 1890 he ceased to be a 
 member of the Socialist League, and for the remainder of his life 
 he was more active in literature than he had been during the years
 
 544 I^IE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 when he was a propagandist of the League. His activity, however, 
 was mostly expended on prose romances. The first of the series 
 was Ttie House of the Wolfings (1889), the last pubUshed during 
 his life, and perhaps the most highly finished, was The Well at the 
 World's End {iZc)6). Two, The Water of the Wondrous Isles {i?,()^) 
 and The Story of the Sundering Flood (1898), were posthumous. The 
 change from verse to prose is rather a change of form than of spirit 
 or substance. On the one hand, Morris's verse is never so far 
 removed from prose as is the verse of such a poet as Keats or as 
 Shelley ; on the other hand, his prose is decidedly poetical. The 
 truth seems to be that he was somewhat disappointed by the result 
 of his labours for socialism, and, thrown back upon himself, he 
 began to live once more in an imaginary world in the past, or, as 
 in News from Nowhere (1891), in the future. Much of this prose 
 work is beautiful, but it is essentially what he had already done 
 in verse, and, for the purpose, verse was the better medium of 
 the two. 
 
 With Morris may be mentioned briefly his friend and con- 
 temporary, both at school and at Oxford, Richard Watson Dixon 
 (1833-1900), who until lately was better known as the author of a 
 History of the Church of England from the Abolition of the Roman 
 furisdidion (187 8-1 902) than as a poet, but who may gain at last, 
 through the selection from his poems recently edited by Mr Robert 
 Bridges, the fame which he failed to win by the various volumes of 
 verse published during his lifetime. For Dixon, though he entered 
 the field not long after Morris — his first volume of verse, Christ's 
 Company^ was published in 186 1, — remained practically unknown 
 as a poet at his death. The reason was not solely that he was 
 inferior to, but also that he was in essentials singularly different 
 from, his fellows of the Pre-Raphaelite school. He was too 
 closely associated with them and too warm an admirer not to have 
 in some measure caught their tone. It is principally noticeable in 
 the earlier poems. St Mary Magdalene and Love's Consolation, 
 both of which were among the contents of Chrisfs Company, are 
 Pre-Raphaelite ; and there is a faint suggestion of William Morris 
 as late as Polyphemus, which was among the Odes and Eclogues 
 (1884). But all similarities are superficial. If we consider general
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 545 
 
 effect, in place of the voluptuousness of the school we have in 
 Dixon austerity, and for its amplitude condensation. This wide 
 difference doubtless told against Dixon's fame. A poet not of the 
 first rank has the best chance of recognition when he follows the 
 steps of the greatest of his time. Dixon was neither quite strong 
 enough nor quite copious enough to form a taste for himself. 
 There are flaws in his execution too. His rhymes are often 
 exceedingly faulty ; occasionally his lines are padded ; here and 
 there his diction is objectionable. The Ode on Conflicting Claims, 
 which has been singled out as one of his best pieces, recalls the 
 worst of eighteenth century verse in the phrase, "the Hquid 
 Hyblian store." But notwithstanding all this, pieces such as By 
 the Sea and Death and On Advancing Age and the sonnet Humanity 
 are indubitably the work of one who wa§ a true if not a very great 
 poet ; and the sonnet which begins, " Give me the darkest corner 
 of a cloud," may challenge comparison with all but the very greatest 
 in the English language : — 
 
 " Give me the darkest comer of a cloud, 
 
 Placed high upon some lonely mountain's head. 
 Craggy and harsh with ruin ; let me shroud 
 
 My life in horror, for I wish me dead. 
 No gentle lowland known and loved of old, 
 
 Lure me to life back through the gate of tears; 
 But long time drenched with rain and numb with cold, 
 
 May I forget the solace of the years : 
 No trees by streams, no light and warmth by day, 
 
 No white clouds pausing o'er the happy town ; 
 But wind and rain, and fogbanks slow and gray, 
 
 And stony wastes, and uplands scalped and brown; 
 No life, but only death in life : a grave 
 As cold and bleak as thine, dear soul, I crave." 
 
 The group of Oxonian Pre-Raphaelites was still unbroken, and 
 even their early triumphs were still to win, when Algernon Charles 
 Swinburne (183 7- 1909) came to Oxford from Eton. His intro- 
 duction to William Morris and Burne-Jones took place in 1857, 
 and soon he too was an avowed disciple of Rossetti. This was 
 inevitable. Few who came in contact with him were able to resist 
 Rossetti ; his followers were the men of greatest genius then in the 
 w. 35
 
 546 THp LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 University. ' To such a man Swinburne was irresistibly drawn. 
 No one was ever more quick than he to see merit, no one was ever 
 more generously lavish of praise. But for that very reason he is 
 not at any period of his career a man to be identified with Pre- 
 Raphaelitism, as Morris was at the start. He loved many forms 
 of beauty too ardently to absorb himself in one. Friendly as he 
 was with Burne-Jones and Morris, his chief friend at the University 
 was John Nichol (1833-1894), himself a poet who, in his drama of 
 Hannibal (1873) ^'^d in a few of his lyrics, has left things fine 
 enough to stir regret that he did not do better still. Swinburne, 
 a junior member of Nichol's college, Balliol, contributed to the 
 Undergraduate Papers, edited by Nichol for a short time after 
 the decease of the more memorable Oxford and Cambridge 
 Magazine. 
 
 Lady Burne-Jones gives a striking and attractive description of 
 Swinburne in his youth. " His appearance was very unusual and 
 in some ways beautiful, for his hair was glorious in abundance and 
 colour and his eyes indescribably fine. When repeating poetry he 
 had a perfectly natural way of lifting them in a rapt, unconscious 
 gaze, and their clear green colour softened by thick brown eye- 
 lashes was unforgettable : ' Looks commercing with the skies ' 
 expresses it without exaggeration. He was restless beyond words, 
 scarcely standing still at all and almost dancing as he walked, while 
 even in sitting he moved continually, seeming to keep time, by a 
 swift movement of the hands at the wrists, and sometimes of the 
 feet also, with some inner rhythm of excitement. He was courteous 
 and affectionate and unsuspicious, and faithful beyond most people 
 to those he really loved. The biting wit which filled his talk so as 
 at times to leave his hearers dumb with amazement always spared 
 one thing, and that was an absent friend \" The picture is a good 
 introduction to the poet, so generous in heart, so prone to excess 
 both in praise and in blame, so rapid and so infinitely various in 
 the movements of his verse. 
 
 Swinburne was a rebel by nature, and doubtless the rebellious 
 strain in his blood was one of the forces which drew him towards 
 the older rebel, Walter Savage Landor, whom he visited at Florence, 
 ^ Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, i. 215.
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 547 
 
 and whom he praised with the utmost warmth both while Landor 
 was aUve and after his death. To his memory Atalanta in Calydon 
 is dedicated, and in the dedicatory epistle to the collected edition 
 of Swinburne's poems he is named with Mazzini and Hugo as one 
 of the three gods of the poet's worship. This rebeUiousness was 
 the guarantee that Swinburne would do nothing exactly as other 
 men had done it, and it helps to explain the revolution which he 
 soon began to work in Pre-Raphaelite poetry. He was a man with 
 a threefold mission. In the first place, it was his function to wed 
 classicism to romance. Secondly, he was destined to re-establish 
 the vogue of French literature, which in the earlier part of the 
 nineteenth century had wielded less influence over English men 
 of letters than at any other period since the Restoration. In the 
 third place, it was Swinburne's task to demonstrate the capacity of 
 the English language for lyric measures, and to enlarge its resources 
 to such a degree that there is scarcely a hint from our older poets 
 undeveloped by him, while he furnishes examples of many forms 
 besides which are either original, or which he has imported from 
 foreign languages. 
 
 Swinburne's genius was precocious. While he was still a boy 
 he had read widely, not only in English, but in French and in the 
 classical languages as well. This early reading was the foundation 
 of a scholarship which made him in his maturity one of the most 
 profoundly learned of all our poets. His admirable memory re- 
 tained nearly everything it received When Rossetti's friends 
 attempted to piece together the poems buried in the coffin of his 
 wife, it was on Swinburne chiefly that they relied. Besides this, 
 of all English poets he was the most fluent. He might therefore 
 have been tempted to premature pubhcation, but if he ever felt the 
 inclination he repressed it Most of the verse of his boyhood and 
 of the first years of manhood was destroyed, and his first volume, 
 The Queen Mother and Rosamond (i860), did not appear until he 
 had reached the relatively mature age of twenty-four. He says 
 however that the dramas it contained were written while he was 
 yet under academic or tutorial authority. The volume passed 
 with little notice ; nor can it be said that the contents were of very 
 remarkable merit. Very different was the fate, as well as the value, 
 
 35—2
 
 548 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 o'iAtalanta in CoJydon (1865). This drama, the greatest in the clas- 
 sical form since Samson Agomsfes, at once established Swinburne 
 as one of the chief poets of the age. In the judgment of many it 
 remains even now his greatest work ; at the very least it is a full- 
 blown flower of his genius. It illustrates two of the three points 
 which have been already noted with regard to him. Classic in 
 form, Atalanta is nevertheless a poem which could only have been 
 written in an age of romance and by a writer deeply under the 
 influence of the romantic spirit; and the choruses proclaim the 
 advent of a lyrical poet of the first rank. They also show 
 him to be of the school of Shelley rather than of Keats, a 
 point wherein he diff"ers from his friends of the Pre-Raphaelite 
 group. No other poem by Swinburne ever achieved such success 
 as Atala7ita. The later Greek tragedy, Erechtheus (1876), was, 
 if not inferior, at any rate less surprising after the triumph of 
 its predecessor. 
 
 In the interval between the two Greek tragedies Swinburne 
 pubHshed Poems and Ballads (1S66). The volume was composed 
 of pieces for the most part earHer in date of composition than 
 Atalanta, and it shows the poet far more completely under the 
 influence of Rossetti than he is in Atalanta. The defiant spirit of 
 Swinburne led him to emphasise those aspects of the Rossetti 
 school which were most certain to shock English opinion. One 
 of the principal poems in the collection, Laus Veneris, a powerful 
 expression of physical passion, was treated as if it were the type of 
 the whole and even gave its tide to an American edition of the 
 collection. The outcry was so great that Moxon broke his con- 
 nexion as publisher to Swinburne. What is more to be regretted 
 is that this unfortunate flouting of a popular sentiment which is 
 not indefensible, led for a time to a general neglect of many things 
 of beauty, such as the lines, full of restrained emotion, /n Metnory 
 of Walter Savage Lander, and the exquisite Garden of Froserpine 
 with these haunting stanzas ; — 
 
 *' Pale, beyond porch and portal. 
 
 Crowned with calm leaves, she stands 
 Who gathers all things mortal 
 With cold immortal hands ;
 
 and 
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 549 
 
 Her languid lips are sweeter 
 Than love's who fears to greet her 
 To men ihat mix and meet her 
 From many times and lands " ; 
 
 •' From too much love of living, 
 
 From hope and fear set free, 
 We thank with brief thanksgiving 
 
 Whatever gods may be 
 That no life lives for ever ; 
 That dead men rise up never ; 
 That even the weariest river 
 
 Winds somewhere safe to sea." 
 
 But perhaps most characteristic of Swinburne was the Hymn to 
 Proserpine^ with its glorious ringing metre. Nowhere does the 
 paganism of the poet come out more grandly than in this hymn, 
 supposed to be sung after the proclamation in Rome of the Christian 
 faith. It would be hard to find a better specimen of his work than 
 the closing hnes : — 
 
 'o 
 
 " In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night where 
 
 thou art, 
 Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from the heart. 
 Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world, and the red rose is 
 
 white. 
 And the wind falls faint as it blows with the fume of the flowers of the night, 
 And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of gods from afar 
 Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star, 
 In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun. 
 Let thy soul with their souls find place, and forget what is done and undone. 
 Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal breath ; 
 For these give labour and slumber ; but thou, Proserpina, death. 
 Therefore now at thy feet I bide for a season in silence. I know 
 I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep ; even so. 
 For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span ; 
 A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man. 
 So long I endure, no longer ; and laugh not again, neither weep. 
 For there is no God found stronger than death ; and death is a sleep." 
 
 Evidently the writer of these lines was no mere disciple of any 
 man's. Powerful as was Rossetti's personality, he could not, if he 
 had wished, have held in thraii a spirit so independent as Swin-
 
 550 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 burne's essentially was, notwithstanding his fervour of admiration. 
 Even at the date of Poems and Ballads the Pre-Raphaelite influence 
 is conspicuous rather than profound. Swinburne was not wholly 
 absorbed in it. The deep sensuousness which characterised a 
 number of these early pieces was a note of the school, rather than 
 of the man Swinburne. Romance is a common element. But in 
 Rossetti the essence of romance is mediaevalism, while Swinburne 
 turns to France and finds his form of romance in his master Hugo. 
 He turns to Greece, and what he does not find he imports ; so that 
 Aiaianta in Calydon and even Erechtheus, as well as the minor 
 Greek themes he has handled, are Greek, but Greek with a differ- 
 ence. In Poems and Ballads he pays, it is true, perfunctory 
 obeisance to the Middle Ages in the choice of a few subjects ; but 
 his heart is not in them. In Tristram of Lyonesse the medisevalism 
 is still a thing distinct from that of Rossetti or of Morris ; and the 
 dramas founded on themes of the Middle Ages are more Shake- 
 spearean than mediaeval. Swinburne was wholly untouched by 
 catholic sentiment. He was in sympathy with the mediasvalism 
 of the sinner Villon, rather than with that which celebrates saints 
 and martyrs and Madonnas. He could admire, but it would never 
 have been his impulse to write, The Blessed Damozel. His style 
 is fundamentally different from that which is appropriate to such 
 subjects. Energy and rapidity and fire are the natural charac- 
 teristics both of his metre and of his diction. Dim lights and 
 perfume-laden air are things of an alien world. He rejoices in 
 the sea, and in storms — storms on land and ocean, storms among 
 the nations, storms in the human soul. 
 
 Swinburne's works in verse fall obviously into two great classes, 
 — the dramas, and the poems, chiefly lyrical. The choice of the 
 dramatic form for his earliest volume seems to show that his 
 personal ambition was to excel in that ; and this impression is 
 confirmed by the language and tone of the dedicatory epistle pre- 
 fixed to the collected poems. There he avows that his first if not 
 his strongest ambition had been " to do something worth doing, and 
 not utterly unworthy of a young countryman of Marlowe the teacher 
 and Webster the pupil of Shakespeare, in the line of work which 
 those three poets had lelt as a possibly unattauiable example lor
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 55 I 
 
 ambitious Englishmen " ; and he seems to have taken comfort 
 from that division among critics which caused some to prefer the 
 dramas to the lyrics. If this was his ambition he must have been 
 disappointed. jRosamond and The Qiieen Moiherhdiwe never been 
 ranked among Swinburne's great works ; and the success of 
 Atalanta in Calydon was due more to the choruses than to the 
 dramatic part proper. Swinburne however was persistent. Before 
 Poems and Ballads he had published Chastelard (1865), the first 
 part of the trilogy on Mary Queen of Scots. It was followed by 
 Both-well (1874) and by Mary Stuart (1881). But readers of 
 poetry remained obdurate in their view, not only in face of the 
 Queen Mary trilogy, but after Marino Faliero (1885) and Locrine 
 (1887) and Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards (1899). The great 
 majority were, and are, of opinion that it is Swinburne the lyrist, 
 not Swinburne the dramatist, who is the great poet. His genius 
 was not dramatic. He was misled by his ardent love for the works 
 of the Elizabethan playwrights. He apparently believed that theirs 
 was the highest form of creative work, and even to the end he 
 could not convince himself that, prodigal of gifts as nature had 
 been to him, she had denied him some that were essential to the 
 dramatist. He failed in two respects. He was not a master of 
 character, and he had not that self-restraint which the dramatist 
 must show if he would win success. The stricter laws of Greek 
 tragedy saved him in Atalanta in Calydon, the looser structure 
 of the Elizabethan drama exposed him to irresistible temptation 
 when he attempted to follow Marlowe and Shakespeare and 
 Webster. Hence the enormous mass of Bothwell, hence the in- 
 extricable confusion of Mary Stuart. No man with the dramatic 
 instinct ever wrote dramas containing speeches hundreds of lines 
 long. 
 
 Such a diversion of energy would have been serious in the 
 case of a poet less fluent than Swinburne. In his case it was not 
 so. Verses flowed from his pen without effort, and in the mass of 
 lyrical matter he has left we have probably sufficient for the full 
 illustration of his powers. The outcry occasioned by Poems and 
 Ballads did not move Swinburne ; but interests which had been 
 obscured by the objectionable pieces revealed themselves in his
 
 552 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 later work. A Song of Italy (1867), afterwards included in Sotjgs 
 of Two Nations (1875), struck a note which was erroneously sup- 
 posed to be new. It was not so. Among Swinburne's contribu- 
 tions to Undergraduate Papers was one which he himself described 
 as "a terrific onslaught on the French Empire and its Clerical 
 supporters \" Among Poems and Ballads, A Song in Time of Order 
 and A Song iti Time of Revolution showed Swinburne to be heir to 
 Shelley as the poet of liberty. In Songs before Sunrise (187 1), as 
 well as in Songs of Two Nations, the proofs were multiplied. De- 
 votion to liberty and its consequent, hatred of tyranny and oppres- 
 sion, whether of kings or of priests, were among the deepest and 
 most enduring feelings of his nature. He was profoundly stirred 
 by the great national movements of his time. The struggle to 
 secure the freedom of Italy in particular fascinated him, for it 
 gathered to one point nearly everything that was fitted to appeal 
 to him. The beauty of Italy, her unique place in history, her 
 splendid contributions to literature and art, all attracted Swinburne 
 as they had attracted Milton and Byron and Browning. His 
 ardent admiration for Mazzini, to whom is dedicated A Song of 
 Italy, added in the case of Swinburne a personal tie. He never 
 sang with more fervour than in the verses inspired by enthusiasm 
 for Italy, or by hatred of the oppressor Austria. The notes are 
 varied — notes of doubt and disappointment as well as of triumph, — 
 for the course of the struggle is chequered. It is complex as well, 
 a struggle for spiritual no less than for political freedom. Swin- 
 burne's hatred of priestcraft was, if possible, more fiery than his 
 hatred of kingcraft, and he never lost an opportunity to give it 
 utterance, sometimes with a violence which partly defeated itself, 
 occasionally with a telling restraint. 
 
 As the champion both of political freedom and of spiritual 
 freedom Swinburne is an optimist. Tiresias suggests that the 
 powers which seem to be throned on high are tottering. 
 
 " The hand that slays, the lip that mocks and lies, 
 Temples and thrones that yet men seem to see- 
 Are these dead or art thou dead, Italy?" 
 
 * Literary Amcdotes oj tnc XIX Century , ii. 294.
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 553 
 
 Messidor declares that "the dumb dread people" shall "put in 
 the sickles and reap." The Hymn of Man closes with a note of 
 jubilation : — 
 
 " Glory to Man in the highest ! for Man is the master of things." 
 
 And there is a ring of triumph in the concluding stanza of A 
 Marching Song: — 
 
 *' Rise, ere the dawn be risen ; 
 Come, and be all souls fed ; 
 From field and street and prison 
 Come, for the feast is spread; 
 Live, for the truth is living ; wake, for night is dead." 
 
 Though it was Italy that roused Swinburne's keenest interest, he 
 was ready to take fire wherever freedom was in question. This 
 was the cause of his virulence against Russia as well as against 
 Austria. In the sonnet (it is one of the finest in the language, 
 and remarkable for dignity of utterance) To Louis Kossuth (1877), 
 the Hungarian patriot is praised above all things because his hand 
 is raised to smite " men's heads abased before the Muscovite." The 
 poet saw in the great northern Empire the bulwark of tyranny, and 
 hence Russia : an Ode is full of invective which fails in its purpose 
 just because it is unmeasured. The same sentiment inspires the 
 terrible sonnets on The Launch of the Livadia, where perhaps 
 Swinburne reaches the extreme limit of vituperation which remains 
 effective. And effective it assuredly is. Few things of the kind 
 are so impressive as the closing lines of the third sonnet : — 
 
 "O heart fast bound of frozen poison, be 
 
 All nature's as all true men's hearts to thee, 
 A two-edged sword of judgment ; hope be far 
 
 And fear at hand for pilot oversea 
 
 With death for compass and despair for star, 
 
 And the white foam a shroud for the White Czar." 
 
 Like Tennyson, Swinburne was emphatically a patriotic poet. 
 His love of England was another phase of his love of freedom. 
 He saw in his own country the antithesis to Russia, and, republican 
 as he wab, a Russian intuit to the Empress of India drew from him
 
 554 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the scathing sonnets, The White Czar. His comparative estimate 
 of the two countries is indicated in the scornful exclamation, 
 
 " Thou set thy foot where England's used to stand ! 
 Thou reach thy rod forth over Indian land ! " 
 
 Not that at any time Swinburne had only smooth things to say to 
 his countrymen. To his eagerness they seemed far too remiss 
 and half-hearted in their support of Italy. In Perinde ac Cadaver 
 Liberty in a vision speaks to England asleep and rebukes her for 
 her sloth. The Halt before Rome hints at the reason. 
 
 " What matter if these lands tarry, 
 
 That tarried (we said) not of old ? 
 France, made drunken by fate, 
 England, that bore up the weight 
 Once of men's freedom, a freight 
 Holy, but heavy to carry 
 
 For hands overflowing with gold." 
 
 As time went on Swinburne became less disposed for adverse 
 criticism even of the England of his own day. The Commonweal, 
 a. fine though somewhat diffuse poem in celebration of the first 
 jubilee of Queen Victoria, might well have been weighed in the 
 balance, when the office of laureate became vacant, against his earlier 
 advocacy of tyrannicide. The splendid poem, The Armada, which 
 follows The Commoweal in the third series of Poems and Ballads, 
 celebrates an event three centuries old ; but it links the three cen- 
 turies together, and the fervid close is the voice of the poet's love 
 for the England of 1888. Much of his later work, in so far as it 
 deals with events of the time, is inspired by the wish to " keep our 
 noble England whole." The poet of the sea has A Word for the 
 Navy,z.n^ he celebrates The Centenary of the Battle of the Nile zxid, 
 Trafalgar Day. Anotlier piece. The Commoniveal, earlier than 
 that above referred to, is " a song for Unionists " ; and this, with 
 The Question and Apostasy, leaves no doubt as to Swinburne's 
 sentiment with regard to the great political problem of Gladstone's 
 later days. Still later, certain sonnets and poems inspired by the 
 Transvaal War show the old republican in the character of cham- 
 pion of a monarchy which he judcfed to be more truly a common- 
 wealth than the nominal republic of Kruger, and of the strong
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 555 
 
 whom he judged to be using their strength in the cause of liberty 
 threatened by the weak. Thus the whirligig of time brought in 
 its revenges, and the voice of the revolutionary poet was raised on 
 behalf of the policy of the Conservative party. 
 
 An ideal however must be either in the past or in the future ; 
 it implies an element of enchantment in the view which only 
 distance can give. And Swinburne's ideal England was the 
 England of the Commonwealth, The form of government grati- 
 fied his republicanism ; the masterful strength of Cromwell 
 accorded with the imperialistic strain in him ; the Protector's 
 championship of Piedmont appealed to the lover of freedom, and 
 his re-establishment of England's sea-power to the lover of the sea. 
 All this finds expression in the powerful stanzas entitled CromwelPs 
 Statue, which were evoked by the rejection by the House of 
 Commons in 1895 of the proposal to set up a statue of Cromwell 
 at Westminster. 
 
 The consideration of the notes of liberty and patriotism in 
 Swinburne has led on towards the close of his career. Among 
 the poetical publications not yet dealt with the principal were the 
 second and third series of Poems and Ballads, issued respectively 
 in 1878 and 1889, Songs of the Sprmgtides (1880), Studies in Song 
 (1880), Tristram of Lyonesse {i2>2,2), A Century of Roundels (1883) 
 and The Tale of Balen (1896). The two Arthurian pieces stand 
 apart, in some respects, from the rest of Swinburne's works. They 
 were attempts to retell the mediaeval tales with more fidelity to the 
 originals than had been shown in other contemporary versions ; 
 and The Tale of Balen is certainly superior to the weakest of 
 Tennyson's Idylls of the Kiftg. But the narrative form was not 
 well suited to Swinburne's genius, and though he disowned any 
 wish to make Tristram of Lyonesse a story, and the lyrical metre 
 makes his Baleii something different from an ordinary tale in 
 verse, there is necessarily more of the narrative in these two pieces 
 than in anything else he wrote, except the northern ballads. 
 
 A Century of Roundels well illustrates Swinburne's astonishing 
 command of metre. The fetters of the form would have cramped 
 almost any other writer and would probably have led to triviality. 
 He not only moves easily in them, but gains rather than loses by
 
 556 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the restriction ; for in his case freedom sometimes tempts to 
 license. The roundels are no mere exercises of ingenuity, but, 
 many of them, expressions of genuine thought and emotion. It is 
 however the two later series of Poems and Ballads which are the 
 most remarkable among the volumes above named ; and probably 
 they, with the first series and Atalanta in Calydon, will in the long 
 run mainly determine their author's rank as a poet. It is sometimes 
 said that Swinburne showed no development and made no advance 
 — that what he was in the first Poems and Ballads he remained to 
 the end. Possibly in one sense this is true, or nearly so. There 
 is not much in his later works that is clearly better than the best 
 of that early volume. But if there is not advance to heights 
 absolutely higher there is certainly change, and evidence of 
 mastery over a wider range of poetry. There are notable differ- 
 ences in the tables of contents of the three series of Poems and 
 Ballads, differences not so much due to the introduction of elements 
 wholly unexampled in the first series, as in relative proportions. 
 The sensuous element remains, and some of the translations from 
 Villon prove that the temptation to shock prudery was still felt. 
 But the place of chief prominence, which was held in the first 
 volume by poems like Laus Veneris and Doloixs and Faustine and 
 Fragoletta, is now taken by those memorial verses and verses 
 addressed to living artists, in which Swinburne loved to pour out 
 his generous praise, and which, whether they deal with men like 
 John William Inchbold (the subject of one of his finest poems) and 
 Sir Henry Taylor and Victor Hugo and the Two Leaders, or with 
 men like Baudelaire and Gautier, are marked by grave strength 
 and deep feeling. Nowhere does he rise higher than in Ave atque 
 Vale, the stanzas in memory of Baudelaire, the charm of which is 
 the singularly harmonious blending of the sensuous and the intel- 
 lectual. 
 
 The growth of the political interest has already been indicated. 
 The interest in nature grows too. The Four Songs of Four Seasons 
 bear witness to it ; and Winter in Northumberlafid is an evi- 
 dence of that local patriotism which was hardly less characteristic 
 of Swinburne than national patriotism, and which found grand 
 e.'vpicisiion in the poem Northumberland, included among the
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 557 
 
 group which take their title from A Channel Passage. These 
 pieces show that the object of Swinburne's supreme love among 
 things natural was the sea, and also whence he drank in that love. 
 In the former, like Kingsley, he celebrates the "stout north- 
 easter " ; and it is safe to infer that the storms of the North Sea, 
 beating in on the stern Northumbrian coast, had been the means 
 of stirring the poet's soul as fertile fields and southern suns could 
 never stir it. Ex- Voto is a fine prayer that he may find his grave 
 in the sea ; — 
 
 •' But when my time shall be, 
 O mother, O my sea. 
 Alive or dead, take me, 
 Me too, my mother." 
 
 Connected also with this local patriotism is a group of poems 
 singularly unlike the great mass of Swinburne's verse — the ballads 
 founded upon the old minstrelsy of the Border. A few pieces of 
 this kind, such as Tlie Bloody Son (though this is described as 
 Finnish) and The Sea-Swallows, were included in the first series 
 of Poems and Ballads. But whatever may be the case with other 
 phases of his work, Swinburne's culmination in this phase certainly 
 came in the third series. Finer pieces of their kind than A 
 Jacobites Farewell and A Jacobite's Exile do not exist ; perhaps it 
 is hardly too much to say that nothing so fine is anywhere to be 
 found. The pathos of both is perfect, and it is difficult to choose 
 between them, but the former may be quoted for its shortness and 
 for the consummate touch in the third stanza ; — 
 
 "There's nae mair lands to tyne, my dear, 
 And nae mair lives to gie : 
 Though a man think sair to live nae mair. 
 There's but one day to die. 
 
 For a' things come and a' things gane 
 
 What needs ye rend your hair? 
 But kiss me till the morn's morrow. 
 
 Then I'll kiss ye nae mair. 
 
 O lands are lost and life's losing, 
 
 And what were they to gie ? 
 Fu' mony a man gives all he can, 
 
 But nae man else gives ye.
 
 558 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Our king wons over the sea's water, 
 
 And I in prison sair; 
 But I'll win out the morn's morrow, 
 
 And ye'll see me nae mair." 
 
 It may be that the author of the Hymn to Proserpine never did 
 anything finer than that in the strain most peculiarly his own ; and 
 the author of the lines In AIe?nory of Walter Savage Landor had 
 already set a standard not easily surpassed in the elegiac strain. 
 But at least in respect of both he broadened immensely the basis 
 of his fame ; while in respect of the poems dedicated to liberty 
 there are in the later volumes heights not reached and depths 
 not sounded in A Song in Time of Order or A So?tg in Time of 
 Revolution, and the two Jacobite laments soar quite beyond com- 
 parison with anything of a similar nature in the early volume. 
 Though Swinburne reached his maturity soon, it is not correct to 
 say that he had no development. 
 
 Swinburne was among the most voluminous of writers. Besides 
 the mass of poetry included in the volumes noticed above, and the 
 bulky collection of dramas, he wrote a quantity of prose sufficient 
 to have absorbed in its production the energies of most men. His 
 first prose work of importance was his William Blake (1868), an 
 instance of his generous eagerness to praise, whether in prose or 
 in verse, and especially to praise genius neglected or underrated. 
 Nothing delighted him more than to rescue from neglect men like 
 Charles Jeremiah Wells and Edward FitzGerald, to both of whom 
 — in both cases guided apparently in the first instance by Rossetti — 
 he did invaluable service. But the Elizabethan dramatists were 
 his favourite field for criticism. He had read them eagerly from 
 boyhood; he wrote on Marlowe and Webster in Undergraduate 
 Papers ; and at various dates in his later career he made studies 
 of most of the leaders among them. Swinburne's criticism is 
 usually right at heart, but it suffers from one very grave defect : it 
 is all in superlatives, usually of panegyric, occasionally of censure. 
 Again and again the strongest words in the language are lavished 
 upon work, deserving indeed of praise, but not absolutely the 
 greatest. When all the resources of speech seem to the ordinary 
 man to have been spent upon Webster and Tourneur, he is apt to
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 559 
 
 ask himself what remains for Shakespeare ; and though Swinburne 
 will proceed to show that, for him, something does remain, the 
 effect is not satisfactory. Immoderate panegyric produces in the 
 reader a sense of distrust ; and when constantly repeated it wearies 
 by its monotony. 
 
 Perhaps no recent poet has equalled, and certainly none has 
 surpassed, Swinburne in force of initiation. He is remarkable not 
 only for what he has done himself, but for what he has inspired 
 others to do. In the various ways already indicated he has been 
 a leader, and recent poetry bears his mark more clearly than the 
 mark of anyone else since Tennyson. This, and not the fact that 
 he died but yesterday, is the reason why he seems still so near. 
 Though William Morris was only three years older, his work seems 
 to belong to a past considerably more distant than Swinburne's. 
 This fact increases the difficulty of judging the latter. The 
 natural and graceful tendency to silence censure and to dwell 
 only on that which is praiseworthy has been conspicuous in the 
 notices evoked by his death, and has been strengthened by the 
 sense that in some respects expiation was due. He has been 
 compared with the greatest, at least the greatest of recent times, 
 and treated as their equal. But probably posterity will refuse to 
 ratify such a judgment as this. In the technique of verse Swin- 
 burne is supreme : he is at least the equal, and possibly the superior, 
 of any English poet since Milton. In variety he unquestionably 
 surpasses all. But when we search behind technique for the 
 intellectual part, and not merely for the intellectual but for the 
 most profoundly emotional part, the result is not so satisfactory. 
 Frequently the meaning seems to be blurred by the pomp of 
 words. Magniloquent is a more appropriate word, as applied to 
 Swinburne's style, than magnificent. It is gorgeous, but it is 
 not what Matthew Arnold meant when he spoke of the grand 
 style. That implies restraint. The master of the grand style 
 is master of himself: Swinburne is carried away by his own 
 facility. Frequently his poems are too long, and while every 
 stanza may be fine, the total impression may be less than that 
 which would have been produced by a piece half the length. 
 Sometimes, especially among the memorial pieces, and above all
 
 560 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 in the great Jacobite laments, we find evidence that Swinburne 
 was capable of conquering his defect; but the very shock of 
 surprise with which such pieces are read for the first time is proof 
 of its prevalence. He is a poet who, though he is fundamentally   
 intellectual, all too frequently yields to the charm of melodious 
 words. 
 
 For the purpose of " placing " a poet there is nothing more 
 useful than Matthew Arnold's well-known test of comparison with 
 lines of supreme beauty. Applied to Swinburne this test yields 
 remarkable results. Notwithstanding the classical element in him, 
 no one can doubt that he is a poet of the romantic school. It is 
 therefore proper to compare him with other romantic poets, and, 
 by preference, with the masters of romance in the nineteenth 
 century. As specimens of their work, Arnold might have chosen 
 such lines as Coleridge's 
 
 " For he on hone3--dew hath fed, 
 And drunk the milk of Paradise," 
 
 and Keats's 
 
 "Magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." 
 
 For verse such as this the ordinary terms of panegyric are in- 
 adequate. It partakes of the magic of the faery casements and of 
 the land where the food is honey-dew. Only very great poets have 
 the secret of it, and even they only in moments of the highest 
 inspiration. If we ask where in Swinburne is to be found verse 
 with this, it is not easy to give an answer. There are heights of 
 poetry in The Ancient Mariner and the Ode to a Nightingale 
 which are beyond his reach. Beside them, even such pieces as 
 Hesperia and the great chorus, " When the hounds of spring are 
 on winter's traces," seem like superb mechanism. In the exquisite 
 close of Tristram of Lyonesse Swinburne reaches the heights : — 
 
 " And over them, while death and life shall be, 
 The light and sound and darkness of the sea." 
 
 But on the whole it must be said that he is not master of the 
 magic which the greatest of the romanticists wield. With the
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS $6l 
 
 mysticism which he rejected, or rather which he did not possess, 
 there vanished an ineffable something which is of the essence of 
 poetry. Judged by this test, and in comparison with such masters, 
 the conclusion seems to be that his place will be high, yet somewhat 
 below the highest. 
 
 Through Swinburne the influence of Rossetti passed to another 
 poet, who may perhaps be classed, though not without some 
 reserve, among the later Pre-Raphaelites. This was that little 
 appreciated man of genius, John Byrne Leicester Warren, Lord 
 de Tabley (1835-1895). Warren was one of those men who show 
 a peculiar sensitiveness to the influences of their time, and Pre- 
 Raphaelitism was neither the only nor the earliest force which 
 told upon him. He was senior to Swinburne at Oxford, and it was 
 not till some time after their college career was ended that the 
 two poets were made known to one another by Lord Houghton. 
 Tennyson and Browning left their mark upon him as well as the 
 Pre-Raphaelites. He himself declared that Tennyson appealed 
 to him more, both in youth and in middle age, than any other 
 poet ; and his verse bears out the statement. On the other hand, 
 many of his finest pieces are evidently inspired by Rossetti and 
 Swinburne ; and in his later years of authorship they were his 
 models, if he can be said to have worked on models at all. It is 
 impossible to ignore the influence of Atalanta in Calydon upon 
 Philoctetes and Orestes, or the Pre-Raphaelite note in such 
 gorgeously beautiful poems as the Hymn to Astarte and " Sire of 
 the rising Day." 
 
 Warren began to write long before he succeeded to the title 
 by which he is now best known. Between 1859 and 1862 he 
 published four volumes of poetry under the nom de plume of 
 Preston. They passed quite unnoticed ; and in fact they contain 
 very little which it would be desirable to disinter ; for the writer's 
 genius did not bloom early. Between 1863 and 1865 three more 
 volumes followed under the name of William Lancaster. They 
 showed a remarkable advance on the preceding volumes, and 
 contain a few pieces which are worthy to rank with their author's 
 best work. The Strange Parable is hardly to be matched for 
 intensity except in Browning ; and in conception it is absolutely 
 w. 36
 
 562 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 original, owing nothing to Browning or anyone else. Many of 
 the pieces show the influence of Tennyson's English Idylls. 
 Still, fame was slow to come. In 1866 he tried a more ambitious 
 venture, the classical drama of Philoctetes. This was succeeded 
 in the following year by another classical drama, Orestes. In 
 their kind, these two dramas are only surpassed, in recent times, 
 by Swinburne's Atalatita in Calydon \ but, great as is their 
 merit, they are not the sort of work which was likely to win 
 popularity. The two next volumes, Rehearsals (1870) and Search- 
 ing the Net (1873), were published under Warren's own name. 
 In them we have the poet at his best, in the full maturity of his 
 powers. Yet the real genius displayed in these volumes remained 
 unrecognised till many of the same pieces were republished in the 
 Poems Dra7}iatic and Lyrical of 1893. Then at last the lovers of 
 poetry seemed to awake, and it might have been thought that the 
 fame of De Tabley was secure. Soon however they went con- 
 tentedly to sleep again, and the second series of Poems Dramatic 
 and Lyrical (1895) ^'^^ received with comparative indifference. 
 In a few months the poet was safe from the sting of critical 
 censure or of neglect ; but the aftermath of his poetry was 
 gathered and published in a volume entitled Orpheus in TJirace 
 (1901), where pieces such as Napoleon the Great and A Song of 
 Despair prove that his faculty for writing powerful and beautiful 
 verse remained unimpaired to the last. Yet for nearly twenty 
 years this highly gifted writer had been frozen into silence by 
 public neglect. It is true he had private troubles to struggle 
 with; but the probability is that if he had been warmed and 
 encouraged by something like adequate appreciation of his real 
 greatness, De Tabley could and would have written much more 
 verse like A Woodland Grave, An Ocean Grave, Jael, Orpheus in 
 Hades, Napoleon, and the many other pieces in lyrical measures 
 or in dramatic monologue which we owe to him. 
 
 Lord de Tabley was a highly accomplished man, a botanist, 
 conchologist, numismatist and bibliophil, and was minutely and 
 accurately acquainted with every subject to which his interest 
 extended. The knowledge of a specialist in so many departments 
 might have proved a suare; but De Tablet's verse is never
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 563 
 
 pedantic, never loaded with the technicalities of his many pursuits. 
 It shows the careful and habitual student of nature, but not to 
 the detriment of the poetry. Almost if not altogether uninfluenced 
 by Wordsworth, De Tabley is yet one of the most careful and 
 skilful and accurate among English poets of nature. His own 
 wide knowledge enabled him to detect the errors of others ; and 
 his fastidious taste objected to everything that was inconsistent with 
 fact. He embodies probably a greater amount of nature-lore in 
 his verse than any other English poet. "The poets' birds" and 
 " the poets' beasts " have been shown to be a somewhat conven- 
 tional collection. Much as in heraldry we have an everlasting 
 repetition of the eagle and the lion ; much as in heraldry we have 
 these creatures represented in certain conventional postures; so in 
 poetry, birds and beasts and flowers are a species of stage property. 
 The lark, the nightingale or the thrush sings, the cuckoo ushers 
 in the spring, the rose blooms or blushes. But De Tabley has no 
 conventions. There is a great variety of birds and flowers named 
 in his poetry ; and the name is usually accompanied by some 
 descriptive epithet or phrase indicative of the accurate observer. 
 Yet the epithet or phrase is always pictorial : there is no invasion 
 of the realm of poetry by science. 
 
 Lord de Tabley has two predominant notes, whose character 
 is accurately indicated by the title of the two collections which 
 first secured for his name general recognition. He is either 
 lyrical or dramatic. The lyrical gift was of later development 
 in him than the dramatic ; and he was successful in blank verse 
 long before he had attained mastery in rhyming lyrical measures. 
 It is probably for this reason that some of his contemporaries, 
 who made acquaintance with his work as it was produced, 
 expressed doubt or disapproval of his lyrics, and advised him to 
 cultivate blank verse. Many would probably select /ael as the 
 culmination of his art, the greatest triumph he has achieved. It 
 is a wondertul piece, both in conception and in execution ; quite 
 worthy of Browning at his best. TAe Stra7ige Parable, The 
 Knight in the Wood, a marvellous piece ot impressionism, and 
 Orpheus in Hades are other examples illustrative of De Tabley's 
 mastery of blank verse. It is remarkably varied. Sometimes 
 
 36—2
 
 564 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 we have the smoothness of the Tennysonian idyll, accompanied 
 with a simplicity which Tennyson only occasionally shows. 
 Sometimes we have a Browningesque abruptness. In the best 
 pieces, like Jael, there are suggestions now of one, now of the 
 other of the senior poets ; but the dignity and force of the 
 piece are De Tabley's own. Occasionally we find specimens 
 of a gorgeousness of style which was probably suggested by, 
 but is certainly not copied from, the Pre-RaphaeHtes. Take for 
 example the opening of Orpheus in Hades : — 
 
 "Ruler and regent, to whose dread domain 
 The mighty flood of life and human woe 
 Sends down the immeasurable drift of souls, 
 As silted sands are rolled to Neptune's deep, 
 I, even I, approach your awful realms. 
 Queen of oblivion, lady of Acheron, 
 To crave one captive." 
 
 The advice given to De Tabley that he should cultivate 
 blank verse was therefore fully justified by his success in that 
 difficult measure. Not many poets have used it so well ; fewer 
 still have handled it so variously. Yet it would have been a 
 thing to be regretted had he followed the advice in the spirit in 
 which it was intended ; for it was meant to discourage him from 
 the lyric. But on a review of his whole work, taking the later 
 verse along with the earlier, it is not easy to say in which he 
 succeeded best. Possibly y<2e/ may be the most precious jewel in 
 his collection ; but the Hymn to Astarte, A Woodland Grave, An 
 Ocean Grave and Napoleon could ill be spared. In the first 
 named we have that same magnificence of style which distin- 
 guishes the blank-verse lines quoted above : — 
 
 " Regent of love and pain. 
 
 Before whose ageless eyes 
 The nations pass like rain, 
 
 And thou abidest, vidse, 
 As dewdrops in a cup 
 
 To drink thy children up." 
 
 But in the lyric too De Tabley has more styles than one. Notice, 
 for instance, the lovely interludes, which vary and relieve the
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 565 
 
 tumult of Waterloo, the tragic pain of St Helena and the majestic 
 grief of the Invalides in the great Napoleon ode. Or take the 
 beautiful pathos of the closing stanzas of An Ocean Grave \ — 
 
 "O sea-wall, mounded long and low, 
 Let iron bounds be thine ; 
 Nor let the salt wave overflow 
 That breast I held divine. 
 
 Nor float its sea-weed to her liair, 
 
 Nor dim her eyes with sands ; 
 No fluted cockle burrow where 
 
 Sleep folds her patient hands. 
 
 Tho' thy crest feel the wild sea's breath, 
 
 Tho' tide-weight tear thy root, 
 Oh, guard the treasure-house, where death 
 
 Has bound my darling mute. . 
 * * # * 
 
 And, ah, dear heart, in thy still nest, 
 
 Resign this earth of woes, 
 Forget the ardours of the west, 
 
 Neglect the morning glows. 
 
 Sleep, and forget all things but one, 
 
 Heard in each wave of sea, — 
 How lonely all the years will run 
 
 Until I rest by thee." 
 
 In poetry, though the Pre-Raphaelite spirit has its root in 
 The Germ, the two publications by which principally the influence 
 was spread and its exact character determined, are of much later 
 date. They are Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866) and 
 Rossetti's Poems (1870); so that the true order of succession is 
 reversed in the order of publication, and in respect of the 
 "general reader" the influence of the younger man precedes that 
 of the elder. William Morris also helped to spread it. To the 
 influence of one or more of these three may be traced the poetry 
 of a considerable nurnber of writers who are still living. Among 
 those who are living no longer, Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844- 
 1881) is conspicuous for the blending of all three in one. His 
 Epic on Women (1870), Lays of France (1872), Music and Moon-
 
 1 
 
 i 
 566 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA ] 
 
 J 
 /ig/it (1874), and the posthumous Songs of a Worker (1881), are j 
 all the work of a man of sensitive nature and of poetic tempera- \ 
 ment rather than of great poetic power. Their charm is the ; 
 fluency and sweetness of the verse, their defect is the absence of i 
 a proportionate weight of thought. O'Shaughnessy is essentially ! 
 a follower, if not an imitator, and he exaggerates the faults of his 
 models while he fails to capture their higher beauties. With him 
 may be named his brother-in-law, Philip Bourke Marston (1850- 
 1887), the son of Dr J. Westland Marston, who was the author of 
 Strathmore and other dramas, middling in quality, which once en- 
 joyed some reputation. Philip Marston's blindness and his early 
 death gave to his work a pathetic interest which disarmed criticism. 
 His Song- Tide and other Foetns ( 1 8 7 1 ), All in All (1875) ^'^^ Wind 
 Voices (1883) are graceful and melodious, but somewhat thin. 
 
 There is more merit in the work of Roden Noel (1834-1894) 
 who, considerably senior in years, lived less under the shadow of 
 the dominant school, and produced verse of greater strength and 
 individuality. For twenty years, from Beatrice (1868) to A 
 Modern Faust (1888), Noel worked strenuously and well; and on 
 the whole his career shows steady progress to the end. Probably 
 his best work is the Modern Faust; and next to that may be 
 ranked A Little Child's Monument, where the sorrow of a personal 
 loss gives depth and reality to the lyrical verse. Unlike O'Shaugh- 
 nessy and Marston, Noel was strong in thought rather than in 
 style, and while they are thin he is apt to be crude. Frederick 
 Myers (i 843-1 901), best known now for his work in psychical 
 research, likewise took a colour from the Pre-Raphaelites, but 
 turned their art to purposes of his own. A fine critic as well as a 
 poet, he is more often accomplished than inspired, and he not 
 infrequently falls into the error of adopting a style somewhat too 
 high-piiched for the thought. 
 
 The Pre-Raphaelite influence has been strong and widespread, 
 but not altogether wholesome. The tendency of the school 
 has been to over-value emotion and to disparage thought; and 
 on the lesser men the effect has been bad. It is strange that 
 a movement which professed to be a new return to nature, and 
 proclaimed as its principle minute and painstaking fidelity to
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 567 
 
 her, should, upon the whole, leave the impression of the highest 
 sophistication. The " nature " of the Pre-Raphaelites, in poetry, 
 is not really nature, but art or artifice. There is little of the 
 spirit of Wordsworth in them; indeed there is comparatively 
 little of external nature at all. Rossetti especially showed a 
 marked alienation from external nature. W. B. Scott declared 
 that he had never known him take any visible interest in a 
 natural spectacle; and in his biting way he speaks of Rossetti 
 "working out, with much elaboration and little inspiration, The 
 Stream's Secret ' " — a remark exactly in accord with the impression 
 produced by the poem. Neither is their humanity in the best 
 sense natural. There is something strained and forced in the 
 very earnestness which painters and poets alike strive to delineate. 
 Upon their men and women there seems to rest the weight of 
 centuries and millenniums of life and death; they scarcely ever 
 exhibit the simple joy of living. There is not in the whole range 
 of the Rossetti school a single note comparable with that of Brown- 
 ing's Said: — 
 
 '& ' 
 
 "Oh, our manhood's prime vij^our ! no spirit feels waste, 
 Not a muscle is stopped in its playing, nor sinew unbraced. 
 Oh, the wild joys of living ! the leaping from rock up to rock — 
 The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, — the cool silver shock 
 Of the plunge in a pool's living water, — the hunt of the bear, 
 And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. 
 And the meal — the rich dates yellowed over with gold-dust divine, 
 And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher ! the fliU draught of wine, 
 And the ship in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell 
 That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well. 
 How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to employ 
 All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy ! " 
 
 In contrast with this the Pre-Raphaelite seems to feel that heart 
 and soul and sense must be absorbed in the struggle with forces 
 too strong for them, and the spirit crushed beneath burdens too 
 heavy to be borne. He has Jin de Steele written legibly over all 
 his work ; and it is doubtless for this reason that he has proved 
 an unfortunate though a potent attraction. 
 
 ^ Scull, a Autooiogia^hy, ii. 114,
 
 568 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 § 2. The Celtic Pods. 
 
 The Celtic revival, noticed in Chapter III, not only continued 
 but grew wider in its range as the century grew older. The 
 rising spirit of nationality encouraged it ; and in later Pre- 
 Raphaelitism there is a good deal of the Celtic spirit. Both 
 Burne-Jones and William Morris came of Welsh blood. The 
 latter, however, was Teutonic rather than Celtic in sentiment, 
 and it was the Scandinavian race which he selected for glorifi- 
 cation. 
 
 Of the Irish writers the greatest, Edward FitzGerald (who, 
 though born in Suffolk, was of Irish parentage), has been dealt 
 with in the preceding chapter. It would be a rash criticism 
 which should ascribe to Celtic blood his peculiar qualities. The 
 younger Aubrey de Vere (i8 14-1902) is, again, Irish rather by 
 birth, and sometimes in his choice of subject, than in tone of 
 mind. He is far too faithful a Wordsworthian to be adduced as 
 illustrating the Celtic spirit, except, indeed, in respect of the 
 mystical tone which occasionally marks his verse, and which is 
 supposed to be a Celtic trait. 
 
 De Vere's literary career extends as far back as 1842, when he 
 published The IValdenses, which was followed a year later by 
 The Search after Proserpitie. The great mass of his work how- 
 ever belongs to a much later date, his publications being most 
 frequent in the sixties and afterwards. It was then, in particular, 
 that he turned to Irish subjects, publishing, among other volumes. 
 The Sisters, Inisfaii, and other Poems (1861), The Legends of 
 St Patrick (1872) and The Foray of Queen Meave (1882). His 
 works are of great variety, including essays in all the main 
 divisions of poetry — lyrical, epic and dramatic. Everywhere it is 
 marred by a fatal tendency to diffusion, and not infrequently by 
 the sort of obscurity which comes from thought imperfectly 
 comprehended by the author himself. In his dramas Alexander 
 the Great {1874) and St Thomas of Canterbury {1876) he shows 
 to disadvantage in comparison with his much more vigorous
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 569 
 
 and powerful father. His sonnets and lyrics recall Wordsworth 
 too vividly. 
 
 There is more of the Celt in Sir Samuel Ferguson (18 10- 1886), 
 who has been elevated by panegyrists not over-wise to a sort of 
 laureateship of the Irish bards. In point of fact, he had not a 
 tithe of Mangan's poetical genius. The bulk of Ferguson's verse, 
 and especially his more ambitious productions, is late ; but from 
 his early years he contributed both prose and verse to The Dublin 
 Ufiiversity Magazine, and also to Blackwood. Both the amusing 
 tale of Father Tom a?id the Pope, which is sometimes erroneously 
 attributed to Maginn, and The Forging of the Afichor, Ferguson's 
 best known and best poem, appeared in the latter periodical. 
 His Lays of the Westerfi Gael (1865), Con gal (1872) and Poems 
 (1880) contain most of his poetical work. It is, presumably, on 
 Congal, a rhymed epic in five books, that Ferguson's admirers 
 base their claims for him. But mere bulk without inspiration 
 counts for little ; and his verse is usually commonplace, and often 
 gravely defective. Thus even in The Forging of the Anchor we 
 have in a single line the intolerable jingle of "ground," "around," 
 and " bound." Two of them are part of the rhyme-scheme, but 
 for that very reason it was the more imperative to exclude the 
 third. Again, though false rhymes are common enough, they 
 rarely rival in atrocity the rhyming of " opal " with " bubble " in 
 By the Isis Clearly Ferguson had a defective ear, and was 
 hardly the man to sustain himself through the long flight of 
 an epic. 
 
 Less ambitious in design and more limited in range, William 
 Allingham (1824- 1889) is nevertheless far finer in touch than 
 Ferguson. He had a pretty light lyrical gift and a considerable 
 command of rhythm, succeeding best in the lilting strain, and 
 under the inspiration of the scenes of nature amidst which he was 
 brought up. " He sang," says his countryman Mr W. B. Yeats, 
 " Ballyshannon not Ireland ^ " ; and it may well be that the same 
 critic is right in the opinion that to "feel the entire fascination 
 of his [AUingham's] poetry, it is perhaps necessary to have spent 
 one's childhood... in one of those little seaboard Connaught 
 ^oeis and Foetry oj the Century.
 
 570 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 towns." There is a charming unsought naturalness in his little 
 lays, as if he had, in his own words, " found " them floating here 
 and there, and remembered 
 
 " Each place 
 And moment of grace, 
 In summer or spring. 
 Winter or autumn, 
 By sun, moon, stars, 
 Or a coal in the bars. 
 In market or church. 
 Graveyard or dance, 
 Where they came without search, 
 Were found as by chance/' 
 
 This sort of inspiration is genuine enough of its Ip'nd. But 
 Allingham could not sustain himself through a long poem, and 
 his Laurence Bloomfield (1864) is tedious. Naturally too when 
 the source of the inspiration was removed the song ceased. 
 Allingham added little of value after the Foems (1850) and the 
 Day and Night Songs (1854). 
 
 Arthur O'Shaughnessy has been mentioned above, and only a 
 few others of the Irish poets demand brief notice. The jPoems 
 (1891) of the historian Lecky are worthy of mention for their 
 poetic feeling and happy imagery as well as for the greatness of 
 the writer's work in prose. Denis Florence MacCarthy (1817- 
 1882), whose translation of Calderon is strongly commended 
 by Ticknor, Ellen O'Leary (i 831- 1889), the poet of the 
 Fenians, Thomas D'Arcy McGee (1S25-1S68), who was assas- 
 sinated on suspicion of treason to their cause, and Robert 
 Dwyer Joyce {1830-1883), whose Deirdre (1876) was among 
 the most popular poems of its class, can merely be named. 
 J. Boyle O'Reilly (1844- 1890) belonged to a somewhat later 
 day, and though he was by birth an Irishman, his work was 
 executed in America, where he took refuge after his escape from 
 penal servitude. But Ireland was first in his thoughts always, 
 and the Exile of the Gael finely expresses a sentiment felt by 
 thousands who cannot sing. Far superior to any and all of these 
 writers was the brilliant and unhappy Oscar Wilde, who will 
 be noticed elsewiiere.
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 57 1 
 
 Much of the work of the men who are claimed as " poets " of 
 the Irish national movement is scattered through the columns of 
 obscure magazines and newspapers, and only those who have 
 had the opportunity and the patience to examine the files of these 
 journals are fully entitled to pronounce a judgment upon it ; but 
 the collections which have been made seem to show that the 
 value of the literature of the movement has been greatly over- 
 estimated. Outside Mangan's work there is little which makes 
 the reader feel that he is in the presence of a poet. But while 
 it is not great, this Irish verse presents two features which attest 
 its genuineness, and the grip which the movement had upon the 
 people. In the first place, it tends to the ballad form, and is 
 largely founded upon memories cherished among the peasantry. 
 And in all ages the ballad has been the poetry of the people. 
 Among the Irish writers, almost in proportion to the prevalence 
 of the more complex and ambitious forms of verse — the sonnet, 
 the epic, &c. — is the distance from the true national movement. 
 In the second place, in such collections as Duffy's Ballad Poetry 
 of Ireland xh^xQ. are found an unusual number of pieces, often of 
 real merit, by authors who are known only as the writers of one, 
 or two, or three poems. No doubt the reason is that the vivid 
 interest of the national theme inspired men who were not normally 
 poetical. Wolfe (who, as it happens, was an Irishman) is re- 
 membered for only one poem, probably because he only on one 
 occasion found a theme which lifted him above himself. Similarly, 
 the spirited "Who fears to speak of '98?" is the work of a man^ 
 not otherwise known to the muses. 
 
 For a reason already indicated, the Welsh Celt had little to 
 say for himself in English verse. His chief representative in that 
 tongue is Sir Lewis Morris (1833-1907), who has enjoyed an 
 astonishing popularity. His Epic of Hades (187 6- 1877) has gone 
 through something like forty editions ; and his Songs of tzvo 
 Worlds (1871-1875), So7igs Unswtg (1883), Gycia (1886) and 
 Songs of Britain (1887) have all been bought and presumably 
 read by many thousands. But popularity is not always a test of 
 
 ^ Dr J. K. Ingram.
 
 572 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the merit of the poet, and it is probable that Lewis Morris's 
 reputation will fade before many years have passed. His facility 
 was a snare to him. He could, and he did, turn off verses 
 to order, or without order, on all sorts of occasions ; and, 
 especially in the Principality, no public event was, in the 
 bard's estimation, complete without an ode by Sir Lewis Morris. 
 He certainly cheapened the Muse. The quality of his work, 
 never very high, declined. The ideas embodied in it became 
 ordinary in the extreme, and they were stretched to the last 
 point of tenuity. He was probably read principally by those 
 who prefer verse which makes no great demands upon thought. 
 
 But the period is remarkable for the success with which the 
 Welshman's cousin, the Manxman, has vindicated his place in 
 the national literature, both in verse and prose. The laureate 
 of the little island is Thomas Edward Brown (1830-1897),- whose 
 breezy FdcsHe Yarns (1881) entitle him to no mean place among 
 the writers of dialect, while his bright and racy Letters (1900) show 
 that he could, when he chose, write classical English vigorously and 
 well. Brown's other publications were all more or less in the vein 
 of the FdcsUe Yar?ts. He chose for his field his native island, 
 which he knew thoroughly ; and his yarns are remarkable for the 
 dramatic truth and vigour of the characters they depict. Not 
 only the narrator himself, Tom Baynes, but all who are brought 
 on the scene, parson, or doctor, or sailor, are vividly realised and 
 portrayed. Brown has frequent flashes of real poetic fire, and 
 his rank as a narrator in verse is high. A certain^ tendency to 
 garrulity is explained by the character of the person into whose 
 mouth the tales are put ; but this does not justify the frequent 
 padding of lines with meaningless repetitions and exclamations. 
 These grow wearisome, and instead of giving, verisimilitude, they 
 only mar the humour and insight which really distinguish the 
 yarns. 
 
 Among the Scottish Celts, Charles Mackay (1814-1S89) wrote 
 too much to write very well. His verse is brimful of spirit and 
 energy, but in spite of the fact that he was himself a musician 
 and composer, it has a thin unattractive tinkle. John Stuart 
 Elackie (1809-1895) deserves notice for the work he accom-
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 573 
 
 plished in promoting the study of Celtic literature, and for 
 his advocacy of the Highlands, men and mountains alike, in 
 season and out of season. He deserves notice, moreover, for 
 the deep impression of his personality which he left, though it 
 was largely by a somewhat boisterous eccentricity that he did it. 
 But, though he has verve in abundance, Blackie too lacks the 
 incommunicable something which makes the poet. He is one 
 of those who seem to miss genius by a hair's breadth. Never- 
 theless, one specimen of his work may be quoted, as much for 
 the sake of the subject as of the poet. No more vigorous word 
 was uttered on the death of Carlyle, and few more wise, than 
 Blackie's : — 
 
 "Thou wert a Titan, but a Titan tossed 
 With wild tumultuous heavings in thy breast, 
 And fancy-fevered, and cool judgment lost 
 In mighty maelstroms of divine unrest. 
 What souls were drugged with doubt in sceptic time 
 Thy cry disturbed into believing life, 
 And fools that raved in prose or writhed in rhyme 
 Were sharply surgeoned by thy needful knife : 
 But if there were who in this storm of things 
 Sighed for sweet calm, and in this dark for light. 
 And in this jar for the wise Muse that sings 
 All wrong into the ordered ranks of right, 
 They thanked not thee, who didst assault their brain 
 With thunder-claps and water-spouts for rain." 
 
 Greater in literature is the name of George MacDonald (1824- 
 1905), who, though best known as a novelist, would deserve notice 
 as a poet too, were it only for the sake of the exquisite lines, 
 "Where did you come from, Baby dear?" But MacDonald 
 wrote much besides that is well worthy of attention. His first 
 volume, Withm and Without, a Dramatic Poem (1855), by its 
 concentration upon the history of a soul recalls Browning. It was 
 followed by another volume, Poems (1857), and from time to 
 time fresh pieces were added until the bulk was sufficient to fill 
 two considerable volumes. These poems are marked by a sim- 
 plicity of manner which makes the author particularly successful
 
 574 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 in pieces for and about children. But the simplicity is more 
 apparent than real ; for nearly all the poems are steeped in 
 mysticism. In such pieces as Lovers Ordeal and the Diary of 
 an Old Soul there is a depth and strength such as we rarely find 
 in rehgious verse. For to that category nearly all MacDonald's 
 best work belongs, in spirit, if not outwardly ; and if he is less 
 perfect than Christina Rossetti or Cardinal Newman, he is 
 hardly less impressive. 
 
 There remains one Celt of the most varied gifts, and of genius 
 which ought to be unquestionable, though it has been questioned — 
 Robert Buchanan (1841-1901). Of blood half Scotch, quarter 
 Welsh and quarter Enghsh, Buchanan, though born in England, 
 as it were adopted Scotland for his country. He lived and was 
 educated there for about ten years; by his choice of a subject 
 for one of the most ambitious of his poems he proclaimed himself 
 of the Celtic school; and by his power he vindicated his right 
 to be considered its head. 
 
 As the son of a Glasgow journalist, Buchanan may be said to 
 have been born on the fringe of literature; but ambition and a 
 well-founded consciousness of high gifts impelled him towards the 
 centre. Even from boyhood he was conscious of the inspiration 
 of the poet. Like many another Scot of talent, he felt his sur- 
 roundings to be too narrow for him : the world was his oyster and 
 London the place where the oyster must be opened. To this 
 decision he was helped by the friendship he had formed with 
 David Gray (1838— 186 1), whose three years' seniority were enough 
 to give him considerable influence over a character stronger than 
 his own. The two set out in 1S60 for the metropolis, — Gray to 
 creep home and die in the following year, Buchanan to fight a 
 long hard battle, to write poems, dramas and novels, and to tell 
 simply, tastefully and beautifully the pathetic story of his friend's life. 
 
 The short memoir of David Gray is a model of what a 
 biography ought to be. There are few facts to record, but the 
 story of the Kirkintilloch weaver's poet-son is lull of human 
 interest, and in some seventy or eighty pages Buchanan gives 
 a vivid impression of character and talent. Gray had a very 
 considerable, perhaps he had even a great, poetic gift. " There
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 575 
 
 was in him," says Monckton Milnes, "the making of a great 
 man " ; but poor Gray did not live to prove the soundness of 
 this judgment. Soon after he went to London he caught 
 through exposure a cold which sowed the seeds of consumption, 
 and he died at the age of twenty-three. Buchanan shows that 
 Gray was no " morbid, unwholesome young gentleman, without 
 natural weaknesses — a kind of aqueous Henry Kirke White, 
 brandied faintly with ambition"; but it is also evident from 
 his sketch that there was a certain want of stability in Gray's 
 character, which, notwithstanding his ambition, might have proved 
 disastrous. Gray's principal poem, The Luggie, was published after 
 his death ; he had seen a proof-sheet just the day before he 
 died. It is a blank-verse piece of some 1200 lines, not so 
 much descriptive of the little stream from which the name is 
 taken, as inspired by its scenery. It cannot have been com- 
 posed without some thought of the work of Thomson, and 
 there are occasional echoes of him, of Keats and of Wordsworth. 
 There is also evidence of the immaturity of the writer, and 
 perhaps of the fact that the hand of death was on him as he 
 wrote; but nevertheless The Luggie is the work of a poetic 
 spirit, keenly sensitive to the beauties of nature. The series of 
 sonnets. In the Shadows — a pathetic record of the poet's thoughts 
 and feelings as the gloom of death deepened around him — are 
 richer and stronger. 
 
 Robert Buchanan was a man of remarkable independence of 
 mind. There is even something defiant in his independence : 
 "A man's a man for a' that" may be sung with a certain blatancy. 
 And as the impulse to write came to him from the sense that he 
 had something to say which the poets of the time either could not 
 or would not say, it was to be expected that he would show 
 himself even aggressively self-reliant. And so, on the whole, he 
 does. But nevertheless even Buchanan had to pass through his 
 period of initiation. His first volume of verse, entitled Under- 
 tones (1864), is essentially imitative. It consists chiefly of studies 
 of classical themes, a sort of work suggested to him doubtless by 
 Tennyson and Arnold, but one which was ill calculated to bring 
 out his own strength.
 
 576 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Next year came the Idyls and Legends of Inverburn, where 
 Buchanan found his true field, or rather one of his true fields, 
 and made an immense stride upwards. There are still crudities 
 and evidences of imperfect training; and sometimes, in the 
 original edition, there were even gross solecisms. But the collec- 
 tion as a whole is excellent. The poems are written with great 
 force and with admirable lucidity, often with pathos, sometimes 
 with remarkable dramatic power. Willie Baird is a touching 
 little tale ; The English Huswife^ s Gossip is satisfactory evidence 
 of the author's power to realise and to portray character; Poet 
 Andrerv owes its pathos to the thought of poor Gray. Elsewhere 
 in his works two other pieces. To the Luggie and To David in 
 Heaven, are avowedly dedicated to Gray's memory. It is notice- 
 able that in the Idyls and Legends of Inverburn, the lyrical legends 
 are less successful than the idyls. Buchanan had not yet attained 
 mastery over lyrical measures. 
 
 Buchanan's next volume, London Poems (1866), broke fresh 
 ground; but in North Coast and other Poems (1868) he reverted 
 once more to something like the Inverburn poems. These and 
 the North Coast Poems belong to a type of verse which he never 
 abandoned and in which not a little of his best work was done. 
 Pieces like The Scaith d Bartle and Meg Plane are among the 
 best of modern legendary and ballad poems. Buchanan tells his 
 story rapidly and impressively, bringing both scene and actors 
 vividly before the eye. Again, in the powerful and affecting 
 ballad. The Lights of Leith, the hopes and fears of the sailor as he 
 draws near the shore and prepares to enter his old mother's hut 
 are depicted with the graphic power of a true dramatist. The 
 story is almost too painful, but it is " an ower true tale," and it is 
 well that we should be reminded still that such things were once 
 done in the name of religion. 
 
 Buchanan is the most Scottish of all recent poets : his 
 nationality is one of his distinguishing marks, the one by which 
 perhaps his work can best be discriminated from that of any of 
 his contemporaries. No other contemporary Scotchman, after 
 the death of Alexander Smith, had a mind so poetic; and nobody 
 but a Scotchman or a native of the North of England could have
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 577 
 
 written the Inverlmrn and the North Coast Poems. It is not 
 merely a matter of dialect with Buchanan. He could use dialect 
 with skill ; but the brand of nationality is on many of his poems 
 which are written in pure English. We see it in the scenery and 
 in the characters. The coast is the east coast of Scotland, the 
 people are Scotch sailors, Scotch peasants and shepherds, and 
 their mothers and wives and sisters. Another national note of a 
 very different quality is sounded in The Book of Orm; but in the 
 group of poems now under consideration the basis, as has been 
 hinted, is realism. It is, however, a realism warmed by imagina- 
 tion, and occasionally there are even hints of mysticism, fore- 
 shadowing The Book of Orm. 
 
 The London Poems, different as is their setting from that of 
 these poems of the North, have more kinship with them than is 
 at first sight apparent. The idyllic and legendary elements are 
 gone, and the realism is more pronounced ; but the tales are still 
 touched and lit with imagination which lifts them out of the 
 gutters of the " mean streets " wherein they are enacted, and sets 
 them on a higher plane than that of the more recent stories of 
 sordid London life. Buchanan was always poetic in mind, and 
 he could never descend to such depths. The conclusion of 
 Tiger Bay expresses the spirit which inspires the London Poems. 
 The human in the dens of London vice is hardly distinguishable 
 from the bestial in the Indian jungle ; but nevertheless in the 
 former there is just the spark of soul which, fanned and cherished, 
 will burn away the bestial : — 
 
 •'God said, moreover: 'The spark shall grow — 
 'Tis blest, it gathers, its flame shall lighten. 
 Bless it and nurse it — let it brighten ! 
 'Tis scattered abroad, 'tis a Seed I sow. 
 And the seed is a Soul, and the Soul is the Hum.in: 
 And it lighteth the face with a sign and a flame. 
 Not unto beasts have I given the same, 
 But to man and to woman. 
 Mark ! mark ! 
 The light shall scatter the dark : 
 Where murmur the Wind and the Rain, 
 Where the jungle darkens the plain, 
 And in street and lane.' 
 
 w. 37
 
 5/8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 .^...So faint, so dim, so sad to seeing, 
 Behold it burning ! Only a spark ! 
 So faint as yet, and so dim to mark. 
 In the tigress-eyes of the human being. 
 Fan it, feed it, in love and duty. 
 Track it, watch it in every place, — 
 Till it burns the bestial frame and face 
 To its own dim Ijeauty. 
 Mark ! mark I 
 A spark that grows in the dark ; 
 A spark that burns in the brain ; 
 Spite of the Wind and the Rain, 
 Spite of the Curse and the Stain 
 Over the Sea and the Plain 
 And in street and lane." 
 
 Though there is as much power in these London Poems as in 
 the poems of the North Country, they are not so pleasant to 
 read ; and as pleasure is one of the ends of poetry, they are for 
 that reason less poetical. The sordid streets and dens are not 
 more real than the wild northern coast and the lonely glens, while 
 they are infinitely less sweet and wholesome. The inhabitants of 
 those streets are not more, rather they are less, human than the 
 fishermen and rustics. Nell is full of strength ; but it is not the 
 kind of poem we elect to remember. If it abides in the memory 
 it does so by reason of its force, uninvited. Though none of the 
 London Poems is superior to Nell, some of the others are more 
 attractive. In spite of its sordidness, Lily is beautiful from its 
 pathos. The Little Milliner is a London love-tale, very simply 
 and pleasingly told. Edward Crowhurst has pathos of another 
 sort. It is a wonderfully terse and strong narrative of the life of 
 a labourer-poet, who is flattered, patronised, corrupted, neglected, 
 and at last becomes mad. It embodies many of the facts of the 
 life of John Clare, who was evidently in Buchanan's mind, with, 
 perhaps, Burns and his own friend Gray. His imagination had 
 been rendered sensitive by what he had witnessed in the case of 
 Gray, and the idea of " mighty poets in their misery dead " 
 touched it keenly. 
 
 From these groups of poems it is easy to detect the difference
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 579 
 
 between Buchanan and the poets who reigned in his early day. 
 It is a wide one. His cry is, back to nature and reality ; not to 
 nature as she is when cultivated and trimmed and pruned by man, 
 nor to human character as it is when smoothed and polished by 
 education and convention; but to nature free and wild, to 
 characters unsophisticated, strong of passion, rude and forcible 
 of speech. 
 
 " I have wrought 
 No garlaiiil of the rose and passion-flower 
 Grown in a careful garden in the sun ; 
 But I have gathered samphire dizzily. 
 Close to the hollow roaring of a sea." 
 
 Buchanan had no quarrel Avith the classical poets : for a moment, 
 as we have seen, he even followed their lead, though afterwards 
 he knew that their method was wrong for him. But he had a 
 quarrel with the Pre-P.-aphaelite poets ; and it is probably their 
 "careful garden in the sun" to which he refers in these lines. 
 His critical instinct was not wrong in suggesting to him the sense 
 of an irreconcilable difference between himself and the Pre- 
 Raphaelites, for he and they are in spirit poles asunder. But he 
 would have done well to reflect that Parnassus is a mountain of 
 more than one peak and of innumerable slopes and ridges. 
 There might be room for them to fulfil their mission as well as 
 for him — the word is appropriate, for both Buchanan and the 
 Pre-Raphaelites are rather obviously conscious of a mission. 
 
 The Northern poems and the London poems constitute two 
 great sections of Buchanan's work, but his restless intellect 
 impelled him to try many other things. Napoleon Fallen (187 1) 
 was among his failures. In Saint Abe and his Seven Wives (1872) 
 and in White Rose and Red (1873) ^^ crossed the Atlantic for his 
 subject. But of course he could not possess that intimacy of 
 knowledge and depth of sympathy which mark his North Country 
 poems. E. C. Stedman, who on this point speaks with authority, 
 declares that Buchanan " has succeeded only in being faithful to 
 a British ideal of American frontier life." These two poems were 
 published anonymously and the secret of their authorship was 
 very carefully guarded. Buchanan was then under the cloud 
 
 37—2
 
 580 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 caused by his virulent attack upon Rossetti in The FlesJdy School 
 of Poetry^ and he believed that only under the veil of anonymity 
 could he hope to receive fair treatment from the critics. The 
 two poems certainly were welcomed with unusual warmth ; but 
 this might be due to the fact that they are stories in verse, lucidly 
 and vigorously told. 
 
 In the opinion of many, however, Buchanan achieved his 
 highest triumphs in the Celtic poems, and especially in The Book 
 of Orm (1870), where the quondam realist showed himself a 
 pronounced mystic. Buchanan was conscious of the Highland 
 blood in his veins : he was a clansman, a Celt ; and it was this 
 clan-feeling which hurried him into the Celtic Revival, to which 
 his principal contribution was this Book of Orm. 
 
 Whatever may be the value of the distinction between the Celtic 
 and the Teutonic elements in English literature, what Buchanan 
 himself regarded as the Celtic element in this poem is plain 
 enough. The poet has declared that the object of The Book of 
 Orm is to " vindicate the ways of God to man." But the phrase 
 is far too clear and definite. We no longer know the Deity as we 
 know "the man in the next street"; and a reasoned justification like 
 that of Milton or that of Pope would be out of place, and is not 
 attempted, in Buchanan's poem. But still, beneath the veil of 
 mysticism there dimly glimmer those great problems of life and 
 death which occupied and perplexed Tennyson and Browning as 
 well as Buchanan. 
 
 Buchanan sent forth The Book of Orm as an avowed contri- 
 bution to racial poetry. Perhaps he was too conscious and 
 deliberate in his purpose to be wholly natural. The keynote is 
 struck in the prefatory lines : — 
 
 "Read these faint rimes of Mysteiy, 
 O Celt, at home and o'er the sea; 
 The bond is loosed — the poor are free — 
 The world's great future rests with thee ! 
 
 Till the soil — bid cities rise — 
 Be strong, O Celt — be rich, be wise — 
 But still, with those divine grave eyes, 
 Respect the realm of Mysteries."
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS $81 
 
 The whole poem is in the same spirit. The author evidently 
 regarded mysticism as the essence of the Celtic contiibution to 
 poetry ; and The Book of Orm is profoundly mystical. In this lies 
 at once its charm and, perhaps, its defect. Nothing makes a greater 
 draught upon the poetical powers than mysticism : it is so difficult 
 to keep it from passing into mistiness. Buchanan's powers were 
 great, but possibly not quite great enough for his purpose. For 
 one thing, he is not sufficiently a master of metre and rhythm ; 
 for in proportion as the poet leaves the world of hard fact behind 
 him, the sensuous enchantments of verse gain importance. Where 
 there is a definite story, or a definite thought addressed to the 
 understanding, the simpler harmonies of verse will suffice. Pope's 
 couplets are nearly as good as their kind could be made. But 
 Tennyson's Lotos-Eaters and Coleridge's Christabel demand a 
 very much more subtle rhythm. In this respect Buchanan was a 
 competent but not a great artist. There is a roughness, often 
 intentional, but nevertheless unpleasing, in the verse of The Book 
 of Orm. 
 
 Perhaps too Buchanan was not altogether great enough in 
 thought ; and he was certainly not spontaneous enough in his use 
 of the supernatural. He could call spirits from the vasty deep ; 
 but the depth from which they came was not so profound as that 
 from which certain mere Teutons have drawn. Sometimes (con- 
 spicuously in the Prayer from the Deeps) there is too plain a 
 revelation of the modern critical spirit, which harmonises ill with 
 mysticism. On the other hand, the section to which this prayer 
 belongs. The DeviPs Mystics, is as a whole strongly conceived 
 and strongly written ; and still more powerful is The Vision of the 
 Man Accurst. 
 
 Another group of the Celtic poems, the Coruisken Sonnets, are 
 all fine, and some of them are exceptionally beautiful. Among the 
 best are The Hills on their Thrones, King Blaabhein and Blaab- 
 hein in the Mists, — titles which remind the reader that Alexander 
 Smith found inspiration in the same scenes. Buchanan attempts 
 no transcript of scenery ; but he achieves something far greater, a 
 rendering of its spirit. 
 
 The Vision of the Man Accurst deals with a kind of theme in
 
 582 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the treatment of which Buchanan was a master. It is akin to, but 
 stronger and more original than, The Ballad of Judas Iscariot 
 Though the latter is essentially Buchanan's own, yet once and 
 again the poet draws hints from the past. Not only is it pervaded 
 with the spirit of the old ballads, but there are hints from Hood's 
 Euge?ie Ara?n and from Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. There are 
 no such echoes in The Vision of the Man Accurst ; and in depth 
 and force as well as in originality that poem seems to be the greater 
 of the two. 
 
 For the first ten years of his literary life Buchanan's work had 
 been mainly poetical ; but shortly after the publication of While 
 Rose and Red he became conspicuous both as a writer for the 
 stage, in which capacity he won fame and money, and as the author 
 of a series of novels bearing the mark of his strong personality and 
 his earnestness of purpose. These activities necessarily drew his 
 attention away from verse ; but, though he was convinced that the 
 public did not want poetry and would not reward the poet, the old 
 love survived, and the poetic output of the later period is in the 
 aggregate large. Some of it is as good as anything he ever wrote, 
 but on the whole the poet will take his place rather by virtue 
 of his earlier than of his later work. Like many others, he had 
 the ambition to write long poems ; and he thought, erroneously, 
 that it was pure perversity or dislike of poetry as such on the part 
 of the public, that made his more ambitious ventures less suc- 
 cessful than some of the shorter pieces. Though his Balder the 
 Beautiful: A Song of Divine Death (1877) contains some fine 
 poetry (best of all, perhaps, the Proem to his wife), it is not a well- 
 knit whole. Buchanan justly claimed for it the praise of originality ; 
 for it owes little to what he called " the vulgar myths of the Edda." 
 But this phrase suggests a question. Surely it must be wrong to 
 pour new wine into old bottles, thinking all the time that the bottles 
 are worthless ; and the reason why Buchanan's *' song of divine 
 death " is unsatisfactory may perhaps be found in this incongruity 
 between the original and that which is fashioned from it. 
 
 Problems such as that indicated by the sub-title were at this 
 period occupying much of Buchanan's attention, and they pro- 
 foundly influenced his prose as well as his verae. He had been
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 583 
 
 bred in ignorance of the creeds of the Churches, for his father was 
 a sceptic and a follower of Robert Owen the Socialist. Buchanan 
 had therefore no " Hebrew old clothes " to cast off; on the contrary, 
 it was in manhood that he gradually familiarised himself with, and 
 in some degree adopted, conceptions which the child generally 
 drinks in with its mother's milk. But he never approached what 
 is commonly regarded as orthodoxy, and, what is much more serious, 
 he never seems to have been able to make up his own mind. " If^^ 
 he writes on the death of his wife to his friend, Roden Noel, " z/this 
 parting is only for a time, I see its blessedness — but if, as I dread 
 and fear, it is a pa.rting forever, what then^ ? " In the following year 
 he dedicated his poems to his dead wife, " weeping and sorrowing, 
 yet in sure and certain hope of a blessed resurrection'^." This 
 looks like conviction ; but later we come again upon evidences of 
 doubt. Buchanan's next long poem, T/ie City of Dream (1888), an 
 allegory dedicated " to the sainted spirit of John Bunyan," is the 
 story of the pilgrimage of Ishmael (Buchanan himself) to seek the 
 heavenly city. The picture of Christopolis shows clearly enough 
 that the hand of Ishmael was against most men, and suggests why 
 most men's hands were against him. It is no reproach to the poet 
 that he does not answer the unanswerable. A work like The City 
 of Dream must, in the nature of things, be vague and inconclusive. 
 But it is not only inconclusive, it is unsuggestive ; the author 
 himself is in the mist, and naturally he cannot lead the reader into 
 sunlight. The curious catechism he constructed with reference to 
 The Wandering Jew (1893) illustrates the confusion of his mind. 
 There he declares his belief in a future Hfe ; but then he adds : 
 *' It is only a belief, not a certainty, a hope, a faith even, not a 
 reality. The testimony of all Science is against it*." 
 
 The Wandering Jew is the most remarkable and by far the most 
 intelligible of the poems of this class. Though it was begun long 
 before the others, it was the last to be published. As early as 
 1866 Buchanan had written part of it, and he had finished it some 
 years before its publication. The reason was not doubt as to its 
 value — it was " his favourite child " — but a fixed idea that it would 
 
 1 yi.-^\ Rob&rt Buchanath 221. ^ Hid. ^ ibid. 264.
 
 584 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 prove the end of his career. The fundamental conception of a 
 Christ old and grey, worn and weary, is impressive and pathetic. 
 The poet finds ample material to support his thesis that the pro- 
 fessed followers of Christ have, under the cloak of his name, wrought 
 all the sins and cruelties most abhorrent to his nature. Thus he 
 explains the weariness and sadness of the aged figure and makes 
 intelligible his concluding prayer for death and the answer of the 
 Judge :— 
 
 " Nay ! 
 Death that brought peace thyself didst seek to slay ! 
 Death that was merciful and very fair, 
 Sweet dove-eyed Death that hush'd the Earth's despair. 
 Death that shed balm on tired eyes like thine, 
 Death that was Lord of Life and all Divine, 
 Thou didst deny us, offering instead 
 The Soul's fierce famine that can ne'er be fed^ 
 Death shall abide to bless all things that be. 
 But evermore shall turn aside from thee." 
 
 Buchanan was the possessor of one more talent which, in 
 justice to him, must still be noticed. He had the gift of humour 
 in a higher degree than any other recent poet except Mr Rudyard 
 Kipling. Saint Abe and White Rose afid Red are richly humorous ; 
 so are a number of the North Country poems. Kitty Kemble 
 blends satire with humour, and The Wedding of Sho?i Maclean has 
 a wild rollick unequalled since Outram's Law Lyrics. It might 
 be compared to a scene from Charles O'Malky, in verse, and 
 transferred from the Irish bogs to the Highland mountains. 
 
 The range of Buchanan is such as only an extraordinary spirit 
 could have compassed. And to estimate him aright we must also 
 take account of his independence. This is the secret of his com- 
 bative career. He both felt himself to be and called himself an Ish- 
 mael,and he struck out fiercely against those whose hand he believed 
 to be raised against him. Even where he adopted current forms 
 of verse, he used them in a way of his own. He wrote idylls in an 
 age of idylls ; but his have far more of mother earth about them 
 than the Tennysonian idylls. Buchanan's are related to these as 
 his countryman Allan Ramsay's pastoral is related to the pastorals
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 585 
 
 of Pope. In his own way Buchanan was a leader of a new return 
 to nature. He was spokesman for a generation rising into man- 
 hood when the impulse of the early Victorian poets was beginning 
 to fail, and when their ideals were no longer accepted as all that 
 the heart could desire. The North Country and the London 
 poems were his attempt to satisfy the want, and of all that were 
 made it was the one which offered most hope. The principal 
 alternatives were such Neo-Pre-Raphaelitism as we find in 
 O'Shaughnessy, and the graceful society verse of Mr Austin 
 Dobson and his followers. But society verse can never be the 
 staple of great poetry ; and Pre-Raphaelitism carried within it from 
 the start the seeds of decay. A sense of the preciosity, even of 
 the masters, roused Buchanan's wrath ; and he made it his business 
 to combat this and all the other signs of decadence. But, while 
 Buchanan himself had imitators, he founded no great school. 
 This was partly owing to his fault, or rather his insufficiency. He 
 could not fuse the elements of greatness that were in him. Had 
 he been able to weld the mysticism of Orm with the realism of 
 the London Poems, the result would have been something greater 
 than English literature has produced in recent years. As it is, 
 they stand apart — opposite shores separated by a gulf across 
 which Buchanan has built no bridge. 
 
 9 3. The Poetry of Pessitnism, 
 
 In the poetry of the nineteenth century we have seen repre- 
 sented nearly every shade of faith and doubt and indifference; 
 but there still remains the phase of blank disbelief and despair ; 
 and it happens that that too has found consummate expression in 
 the verse of one of the greatest and one of the least appreciated of 
 recent poets. James Thomson (1834-1882), author of The City 
 of Dreadful Night, is, to a superficial view, a bundle of contradic- 
 tions — a man of unfeigned friendliness and attractive geniality, yet 
 emphatically the poet of gloom and despair ; one who disbelieved 
 in human progress, yet who spent great part of his life in writing, 
 often without pay, for periodicals whose end was to furdier human
 
 586 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 progress ; one of the most independent and original of men, yet 
 one who echoes in his verse a greater number of other poets than 
 almost any of his contemporaries. He has been called the English 
 Poe and the English Leopardi. The initials, B. V. (Bysshe Vanolis), 
 under which he wrote, proclaim his kinship to Shelley and Novalis 
 (of which name Vanolis is an anagram). And he has either 
 avowed, or there is evident in his work, some indebtedness to men 
 so different as Heine, a number of whose poems he translated, 
 Dante, whose imagination seems, in lower power, to be re-incarnate 
 in him, De Quincey, both the Brownings, and his namesake and 
 countryman, James Thomson, the poet of The Seasons and of The 
 Castle of Indolence. If the later Thomson had been a man of weak 
 or illogical intellect, if he had not known his own mind, or if he 
 had been insincere, much of this would have been susceptible of 
 an easy explanation. But he was none of these things. He knew 
 very definitely what he thought and meant, and he sacrificed all 
 chance of worldly advancement for the privilege of being himself 
 and speaking out. The solution of such enigmas must be sought 
 in Thomson's parentage and life; and, luckless in almost every 
 other respect, he has been fortunate in his biographer, Mr H, S. 
 Salt, and his editor, Mr B. Dobell, who have written of him with 
 sympathy and admiration, yet without the vice of special pleading 
 and groundless panegyric into which admiring biographers and 
 editors so easily fall. 
 
 James Thomson was the son of a sailor, a mate in the merchant 
 service, who was disabled by paralysis when the boy was only six 
 years old. The father lived till 1853, but was unable after his 
 illness to provide for his family, which consequently fell into 
 poverty. James Thomson was therefore admitted to the Royal 
 Caledonian Asylum, where he was educated till 1850. Shortly 
 after his admission his mother died. In later days James Thom- 
 son found no place in his scheme of thought for evolution or 
 heredity ; if he had, he would have been less gloomy. Yet there 
 is good reason to believe that he himself strikingly illustrated the 
 law of inheritance from both the paternal and the maternal strain. 
 His father, says Mr Salt, " is described by those who knew him 
 personally as a delighlful companion, bright and cheerful in dis-
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 587 
 
 position, reading and reciting well, fond of music, and singing a 
 good song in congenial society." After his misfortune the elder 
 Thomson is said to have fallen into habits of intemperance ; and 
 though Mr Salt says that " no direct evidence of such habits is 
 discoverable," he adds that " Thomson once told a friend, in after 
 years, that intemperance ran in the family, and that 'nearly all the 
 members of it who had brains, especially a gifted aunt of his, fell 
 victims to its power.' " Of the mother we are told that she was 
 "a deeply religious woman of the Irvingite faith, whose nature, 
 unlike that of her husband, seems to have been of a somewhat 
 melancholy cast." Melancholy and mystical religion on the one 
 side, on the other geniality phis a hereditary tendency to alcohol, 
 — there is so much of the poet James Thomson here that we may 
 reasonably suppose the superficial contradictions of his character 
 and career to be due to these divergent tendencies- 
 Thomson became an army schoolmaster, and for about a year 
 and a half (1851-1853) filled the post of assistant-teacher at 
 BallincoUig near Cork, where he fell in love with a beautiful girl 
 named Matilda Weller, whose death in 1853 left a profound and 
 lasting impression upon him. Some have traced his pessimism 
 to this bereavement ; and it is certain that he cherished the girl's 
 memory as long as he lived, and that many passages in his verse 
 are inspired by this early love. At BallincoUig too Thomson made 
 the acquaintance of Charles Bradlaugh, who helped him to reach 
 those negative conclusions towards which he was slowly moving. 
 On his dismissal from the army, in 1862, for a trivial offence, 
 Thomson resided with Bradiaugh, to whose paper, The National 
 Reformer, he was already a contributor ; and Bradlaugh also pro- 
 cured him a clerkship in a solicitor's office. Henceforth Thomson 
 held a succession of clerkships and secretaryships, but found no 
 sure and lasting employment. Sheer ill-luck accounted for much ; 
 but probably the intemperance which grew upon him would 
 explain still more. It was doubtless at the root of the unhappy 
 misunderstanding which in 1875 ended his long connexion with 
 Bradlaugh. Before that end came Thomson had contributed to 
 The National Reformer many of his best pieces, including TIu 
 City of Dreadful Night, which appeared in its columns in 1S74.
 
 588 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 The quarrel with Bradlaugh was disastrous to Thomson, For 
 " seven songless years " after The City of Dreadful Night he. -^xoit 
 no poetry except a few lyrics at long intervals. He had no regular 
 employment, his best literary connexion was broken, and he moved 
 rapidly towards the end now inevitable. Just before the close, 
 stimulated by the success of The City of Dreadful Night, and other 
 Poems (1880) and Vane's Story, Weddah and Om-el-Bofiaifi, and 
 other Poems (1880), Thomson once more began to write verse, and 
 in the last fev/ months of his life he produced some of the finest 
 among his shorter pieces. But it was only a parting gleam. On 
 June 3, 188?, after "four terrible weeks of intemperance, home- 
 lessness and desperation \" James Thomson died in University 
 Hospital, London, whither he had been removed from the rooms 
 of his friend, the blind poet Philip Bourke Marston. 
 
 All the volumes bearing Thomson's name are late publications. 
 Besides those already mentioned they are Essays and Phantasies 
 (1881) — he was an admirable writer of poetic and also of satiric 
 prose — and the posthumous volume, A Voice from the Nile, and 
 other Poems (1884). His writings are, however, the work of some 
 twenty-five or twenty-six years, from 1856 to 1882 ; and especially, 
 as his biographer points out, of those years, 1862 to 1875, when 
 his connexion with The National Reformer was closest. His three 
 chief poems, The City of Dreadful N^ight, IVeddah (1866-1867) 
 and Vane's Story (1864), all belong to these years; and so does 
 his prose masterpiece, A Lady of Sorrow (1862-1864). 
 
 There can be no doubt that the dominant note in Thomson is 
 the note of pessimism, and the masterpiece in which he has most 
 impressively sounded it is The City of Dreadful Night. It is a 
 relatively late poem : 'I'homson was forty years of age at its publi- 
 cation ; and the idea is natural that the sombre philosophy it 
 embodies must have been the product of years and multiplied 
 disappointments. A consideration of dates shows that there is 
 really very little ground for such a supposition. Ten years before 
 The City of Dreadful Night, in the concluding part of A Lady of 
 Sorrotv, we meet with what Thomson's biographer justly calls " the 
 prose counterpart " of that poem ; and again, before that, in The 
 * Salt's Life of Thomson, ida.
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 589 
 
 Doom of a City (1859), we have an earlier and cruder treatment 
 of the central idea of The City of Dreadful Night. In the earlier 
 poem the abode of humanity is a city of ghastly petrified figures ; 
 in the later and greater one it is a city of beings living, moving, 
 and capable of suffering under the terrible cloud of despair which 
 overhangs them. We may, if we choose, suppose that Thomson's 
 despair had its source in the death of Matilda Weller ; but it seems 
 more reasonable to conclude that it arose from a constitutional 
 tendency to melancholia, fortified by habits of indulgence in 
 alcohol, which were also constitutional, and further strengthened, 
 no doubt, by bereavement, failure and misfortune. He had more 
 resemblance to Poe, not merely in his writings, but in ais life and 
 in those predispositions which made it what it was, thein to any 
 other man who has ever written English. 
 
 On the other hand, it must be remembered that while Thomson 
 is justly described as the poet of pessimism, there is another and 
 less sombre strain in his verse, and — what is far more surprising — 
 that this too lasts to the end. In the early period the gloom is 
 lightened by such comparatively genial and bright pieces as The 
 Lord of the Castle of Indolence (1859) and the two Idylls of 
 Cockaigne, Sunday up the River and Sunday at Hampstead. At 
 the very end come three poems equally bright and beautiful, — 
 Richard Fores fs Midsummer Alight (1881), lie heard her Sing 
 (1882) and At Belvoir (1882). The last, says the host in whose 
 house he stayed, " recalls three days of incessant mirth and 
 midsummer pleasure, Thomson being chief jester '." Thus the 
 geniality survived to the end as well as the gloom ; and from first 
 to last Thomson was the same complex being in whose nature the 
 " threads of joy and woe " were always mingled. 
 
 The pessimistic side has been so emphasised that the more 
 cheerful one is sometimes wholly forgotten or ignored. It is there- 
 fore the more necessary to insist that Thomson wrote a good many 
 poems in which pessimism is not expressed. His Lord of the 
 Castle of hidolence, in its rich voluptuous metre and imagery, is 
 worthy even of his namesake's beautiful poem which suggested it. 
 The Idylls of Cockaigne are two series of very beautiful lyrics, 
 ^ Salt's Life of Thomson, 164.
 
 S90 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 full of joy in nature and beauty and life, sometimes in a rushing 
 metre singularly unlike the motionless brooding of The City of 
 Dreadful Night. The pieces are dramatic ; but nevertheless they 
 show that Thomson fully understood the philosophy of optimism 
 as well as that of pessimism. Surely the author of the following 
 lines still felt, on occasion, the zest of life : — 
 
 "Drink! drink I open your mouth I 
 
 This air is as rich as wine; 
 ' Flowing with bahii from the sunny southi 
 And health from the western brine. 
 
 Drink ! drink ! open your mouth ! 
 This air is as strong as wine : 
 ' My brain is drugged with the balm o' the soutli, 
 
 And rolls with the western brine. 
 
 Drink ! drink ! open your mouth ! 
 
 This air is the choicest wine : 
 From that golden grape the Sun, i' the south 
 
 Of Heaven's broad vine." 
 
 Of Thomson's three longest poems, two cannot be unreservedly 
 classified as pessimistic. Vanis Story and Weddah attd Om-el- 
 Bonain are both sad, but in neither is the gloom unrelieved. Of 
 Vanes Story Thomson said that he had thrown "the reins on 
 the neck of Pegasus and let him go whither he would." Never- 
 theless Pegasus was carefully guided. The poem is really a 
 fragment of autobiography, containing, under the beautiful al- 
 legory of the fountain, an accurate description of his own life. 
 The pessimistic poems therefore, though the greatest and the 
 most characteristic, are not the whole of Thomson's work. They 
 certainly need all the relief that can be found within his writings ; 
 for there is nothing in English literature more gloomy and 
 depressing than the two poems and the prose-piece already named, 
 the Mater Tetiebrarum (1859), To Our Ladies of Death (1S61), 
 The Poet to his Muse {iZ?>2) and Lisonuiia (1882). It takes all 
 the poet's powerful imagination, all his wealth of imagery, all the 
 stateliness of his style, to make these poems bearable. For 
 sustained intensity of gloom The City of Dreadful Night is 
 probably unparalleled ; and the intellectual resource displayed in
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 59I 
 
 the delineation of the city wherein the melanchoUc dwell shows 
 Thomson to have been one of the most highly gifted men of his 
 time. Insomnia, shorter and less complex, sounds perhaps even 
 deeper abysses of woe and suffering, and reveals one of the 
 causes which produced it. For many years Thomson was a 
 victim to sleeplessness, so that his poem has the dreadful reality 
 of personal experience. It is impossible to withhold from these 
 pieces the tribute of deep admiration for the masterly execution ; 
 but yet the thought forces itself upon the reader that it is not 
 good to be here. If Thomson's philosophy were true, even truth 
 itself would be dear-bought at the price of belief in it ; for it 
 must result in present misery and, sooner or later, must paralyse 
 action. 
 
 It has been already remarked that had Thomson found a 
 place for evolution in his philosophy, he might have been less 
 gloomy. For his pessimism was founded on the conviction that 
 there was no hope for humanity any more than for himself, and 
 that the appearance of progress was a mere illusion. He had 
 been taught in childhood the faith as it was delivered unto 
 Calvin ; he soon found reason to believe that that faith would not 
 bear the light of modern thought; he could discover nothing to 
 set in its place, and so he went on from negation to negation 
 until he found himself face to face with blank despair. Logically, 
 he ought never to have troubled himself about his fellow-men, 
 and perhaps, logically, he ought to have committed suicide. But 
 men, both atheist and orthodox, are often better than their 
 theories. And in spite of his failings, which were not voluntary 
 but the effects of disease, Thomson, while he was master of 
 himself, remained faithful and lovable to his friends, chivalrous 
 to women, gentle and kind and patient with little children. 
 
 § 4. The Later Poetesses. 
 
 The literary activity of women tends, as time goes on, more and 
 more to prose fiction ; and it is remarkable that of the numerous 
 female novelists comparatively few show even a slight talent for 
 poetry. Dinah Maria Craik (1826-18S7), whose beautiful Philip
 
 592 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 my King ought to preserve for her a small niche among the poets, is 
 a rare exception. But notwithstanding this diversion there have 
 been many female writers of verse, only one or two of whom, after 
 Mrs Browning and Christina Rossetti, have been mentioned. 
 For the most part they are barely worthy of mention. Sentimen- 
 tality and the fatal cult of prettiness vitiate the work of all but a 
 very few. The home-spun verse of Eliza Cook (1818-1889) 
 appeals only to the Philistine. The rhetorical Menella Bute 
 Smedley (1820-1877) repeats the faults of Mrs Hemans and has 
 far less redeeming merit. Dora Greenwell (1821-1882) has the 
 mystical piety of Christina Rossetti, without Christina Rossetti's 
 charm. Emily Pfeiffer (1827-1890), Sarah Williams (1841-1868) 
 and many others show by triviality of treatment that they are 
 versifiers rather than poets. The critic might be tempted to 
 speak of triviality of theme; but the lyrical masters, whom these 
 writers follow at a distance, have shown that the simplest theme 
 may be great in the hands of a true poet. It was wisdom on their 
 part to be content with simple subjects. A few, like Isabella 
 Harwood (Ross Neil) (i840?-i888), tried the drama and other 
 complex forms only to prove that their powers were inadequate to 
 the task. Perhaps none but Augusta Webster has shown a force 
 and breadth of mind adequate to anything. 
 
 The world from the first has refused to recognise George Eliot 
 as a poet, and the world has been right; but when the great 
 novelist chose to write verse it was impossible to ignore her. 
 The Spanish Gypsy {1868) is far below the level of her prose both 
 in force of thought and in eloquence. In The Legend of Jubal 
 (1874) the width of the gap is diminished, but it is still great It 
 is in her shorter poems that she shows best. The sonnets, Brother 
 and Sister, if they were the work of an ordinary writer, would be 
 thought good ; but in the opening chapters of The Mill on the 
 Floss George Eliot herself has given the substance of them in 
 prose so much more poetical that they only serve to prove that 
 she is out of her place among the writers of verse. The best of 
 her productions is the short blank-verse poem, " O may I join the 
 choir invisible"; and it is of such merit that if she had left any 
 considerable body of verse of similar excellence, the judgment
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 593 
 
 which ranks her among the prose-writers only would need 
 revision. 
 
 Adelaide Anne Procter (182 5- 1864) was the daughter of a 
 poet, Barry Cornwall, and almost from the cradle she betrayed to 
 the discerning her gift and her destiny. John Kemble called her 
 an elf-child, but his sister Fanny pronounced her rather " the 
 prophecy of a poet." She had an album for her favourite pieces 
 before she was mistress of the pen sufficiently to fill it with her 
 own hand. The company she met and the conversation she 
 heard at her father's table strengthened the bent of her mind and 
 developed her tastes, and had she chosen she might have found 
 through him an easy entrance into the field of letters. She pre- 
 ferred to be accepted or rejected on her own merits. After 
 publishing a few pieces elsewhere she began to send her poems 
 under the pseudonym of Mary Berwick to Household Words; 
 and it was not until he praised them at her father's table that the 
 editor, Charles Dickens, learnt who his contributor was. Her 
 writings were collected in 1858 under the title of Legends and 
 Lyrics. New poems were added in the edition published three 
 years later, another volume entitled A Chaplet of Verses appeared 
 in 1862, and in the beginning of 1864 she died, leaving her 
 veteran father to survive her for ten years. She was worn out 
 with her labours, literary and charitable : the eager soul within 
 had " fretted the pigmy body to decay." But although Adelaide 
 Procter was, in her measure, a genuine poet, she had done 
 nothing great. She had little originality. She did, on the whole 
 rather weakly, what other poets were doing better. The Cradle 
 Song of the Poor and God's Gifts touch upon those social ques- 
 tions to which everybody in those days was drawn ; but The 
 Song of the Shirt and The Cry of the Children serve the purpose 
 far better. The Voice of the Wifid is pleasant verse, but it is 
 little more. The wind has been on the field of battle, on the 
 desolate ocean, on the lonely moor, in the gloomy forest; and 
 there it has seen just what it has seen in verse a hundred times 
 over. Miss Procter was popular : ten years after her death her 
 works were in greater demand than those of any living poet 
 except Tennyson : but this popularity was probably due quite as 
 
 w. 38
 
 594 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 much to her defects as to her merits. A touch of sentimentality 
 attracts, while fiery passion terrifies, the great middle class, which 
 buys poetry for the adornment of the best parlour. Miss Procter 
 was neither too great nor too small. The sing-song of her 
 favourite measure was soothing, and promoted slumber if per- 
 chance the volume was taken up after dinner : to the more 
 fastidious ear it soon became monotonous and wearisome. Her 
 piety made her obviously safe, and her Roman Catholicism 
 (she changed her faith about the year 1851) was never so 
 thrust forward as to offend the Protestant. It was this piety, 
 combined with a good mouth-filling volume of sound, and a 
 meaning judiciously diluted, that made her two songs Sent to 
 Heaven (otherwise The Message) and The Lost Chord so widely 
 popular. It is a triumph of a kind. To the latter especially tens 
 of thousands have listened enraptured : they have felt and probably 
 have been better for it; and they who are doubtful whether it 
 means anything must suppress their doubts and do homage to 
 ^t fait accompli. 
 
 Jean Ingelow (1820-1S97) was of a higher order. Never, 
 except perhaps for one brief moment in Judge Not, did Adelaide 
 Procter show anything like the strength which we find in the 
 High Tide 07i the Coast of Lincobishire ; and though that is 
 generally reputed to be Jean Ingelow's masterpiece she has left a 
 considerable body of work at least comparable with it in excellence. 
 She was somewhat older than Miss Procter and figured earlier as 
 an authoress. Her first publication, a volume of verse, was 
 followed immediately by a novel, and throughout she carried on 
 the double career of poet and writer of fiction. It is however 
 her poetry which gives her the best chance of remembrance, and 
 her first great success was won by the volume of Poems published 
 in 1863, which was so popular that a fourth edition had to be 
 printed before the year closed. A second and a third series of 
 Poems followed in 1876 and 1885 ; and between the first and the 
 second there had been interposed the Story of Doom and otJier 
 Poems (1867). These volumes contain nearly all Jean Ingelow's 
 work that is of note, and they contain a good deal besides, for 
 few poets gain more by judicious selection than she.
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 595 
 
 It would be extravagance to call Jean Ingelow a great poet. 
 The keen wit of Calverley detected and exposed her weaknesses , 
 for he was thinking of her in the ballad, " The auld wife sat at 
 her ivied door," and " In moss-prankt dell " is a skit on Divided. 
 Yet it is not too much to say that among the women-poets of the 
 century she is surpassed only by Mrs Browning, Christina Rossetti, 
 Emily Bronte and Augusta Webster. She does not weary us with 
 distressing monotony like the other minor singers ; she has a 
 great deal of that strength which is perhaps arrogantly, yet not 
 without cause, supposed to be masculine j she is never content 
 with mere prettiness; she is daring in the treatment of rhythm 
 and metre, and even where she is almost harsh, the harshness is 
 more pleasing than the limpid trickle of Adelaide Procter or 
 Menella Smedley. Echo and the Ferry has a ring of Browning. 
 Requiescat in Face is boldly imaginative, and in its touch of the 
 supernatural recalls Rossetti. Divided shows a love of nature 
 which would have won the respect of Wordsworth, though the 
 treatment is quite different from his. Honours, Fersephone and 
 Songs of Seve?i may also be named as favourable specimens of her 
 work. These pieces not only show a fairly wide range of imagina- 
 tion, but they prove that the writer was endowed with vigour of 
 thought and a happy turn for style as well. Fortunately she con- 
 tented herself as a rule with writing short poems, lyrical or of a 
 nature akin to the lyric. When she tried longer pieces, as in the 
 Story of Doom, the quality of her work deteriorated. 
 
 Jean Ingelow was respectable, but Augusta Webster (1837- 
 1894) was great. For sheer strength she has no rival among the 
 women-poets of England except Emily Bronte, and, in respect of 
 reputation, she is farther from the place which is justly her due 
 than almost any other writer of recent years. She has been com- 
 pared to Browning, and several reasons may be given to justify 
 the comparison. Few writers, whether male or female, are less 
 distant from him in force and originality of thought. Like him, 
 she handled with great success the dramatic monologue. Like 
 him, she wrote dramas as well, some of them not unworthy to 
 stand beside his. Like him too, she was a scholar and a trans- 
 lator from the Greek. 
 
 3S-2
 
 596 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Augusta Webster began her literary career early with Blanche 
 Lisle and other Foetus (i860). But her qualities were not such as 
 mature rapidly, and she hardly became a force to reckon with 
 before the publication of Dra??iatic Studies (1S66). From this 
 date onwards there is not a volume she published that does not 
 contain matter well worthy of attention ; not a little of it must be 
 called great without qualification. Among her publications are 
 A Woman Sold (1S67) and Portraits (1870) — perhaps the most 
 remarkable of all. The Auspicious Day (1872) was her first drama. 
 In a Day (1882) and The Sentence (1887) show the scholar as 
 well as the dramatist, the scene of both being laid in imperial 
 Rome, and the matter such as only a writer well acquainted with 
 the history and literature could have handled. In these dramas 
 she comes as near success as any writer of recent years except 
 Tennyson, and that she does not achieve it completely is, perhaps, 
 as much due to her merits as to any positive defect in the plays. 
 She could not truckle or pander to the whims of the da}', and her 
 close-knit thought was ill adapted to the taste of a public which 
 wanted amusement rather than thought. 
 
 In spite of the merits of the dramas it is probably as a writer 
 of dramatic monologues that Augusta Webster will live. Here 
 she missed popularity for the same reasons that for many years 
 made Browning unpopular. She too has a super-abundance of 
 thought, and she too is often rough and harsh in her versification; 
 but she too makes splendid atonement for her faults. There is 
 austere grandeur in the conception of The Snow Waste, and A 
 Preacher and A Painter are masterly studies. But it is in the 
 studies of women that she penetrates deepest. Some of these 
 studies have scarcely a parallel in literature. Perhaps the most 
 powerful is A Castaway, but Faded and Tired are only less 
 admirable, as are also, in another style, Sister Annunciata and 
 By the Looking Glass. In some of these poems the pity and pain 
 are almost too great for verse. Mrs Webster felt deeply the pathos 
 of the destiny of her sex, and dealt with it as no man ever could 
 have dealt. A Castaway has been compared with Rossetti's yjr^wy, 
 but the points of view are wholly different : the Castaway is what 
 Jenny might have been if Jenny herself had taken the pen from
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 597 
 
 Rossetti's hand. It is therefore, though inferior in technical 
 skill, a far rarer performance than Rossetti's. For the same 
 reason Mrs Webster's other portraits of women have a quite 
 unique value, inasmuch as very few women have had the force of 
 thought necessary to draw such portraits, and none who had it 
 has used it so — at least in English. 
 
 One more writer of a later date also distinguished herself for 
 power and boldness of thought. Constance Naden (1858-1889) 
 was not, indeed, the equal of Augusta Webster, but she had a 
 genuine gift for poetry, and had she not been lured away after 
 "wandering fires," even in her short life she might have won 
 considerable fame. But she was by nature inclined to philosophy 
 and science, she fell under the influence of those who strengthened 
 her inclination ; and so, instead of a poet, we have a follower of 
 Herbert Spencer who did not live long enough to show whether 
 she could have done anything original in philosophy or not. Her 
 Pantheisfs Song of Immortality is, however, proof sufficient that 
 she was a true poet. 
 
 § 5. Miscellaneous Poets. 
 
 There remain a number of poets, sometimes of merit, some- 
 times perhaps only of notoriety, whom it would be misleading to 
 associate with any of the foregoing groups. For example, William 
 Cory (1823-1892), whose birth-name was Johnson, went his own 
 way and did his own work, and, while he moved minds that moved 
 the world, remained till the close of his life wholly unknown to 
 the wider public. As an Eton master from 1847 to 1872, Cory 
 came in contact with some of the brightest minds of the age. 
 According to the testimony of these men his influence on 
 his pupils was phenomenal. "As a teacher," says Mr Herbert 
 Paul, "he was in a class by himself, differing, not in degree but 
 in kind, from all the other teachers I, at least, have ever known. 
 
 My intellectual debt to him is such that I may be prejudiced; 
 
 but I cannot imagine that in that character he was ever sur- 
 passed ^" It is wonderful that the man to whom this emphatic 
 testimony is borne, and who numbered among his pupils so many 
 
 ^ Utray Leaves, 252, 254.
 
 598 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 of the most influential men in England, should have remained so 
 long unknown. And yet the appearance of his lonica in 1858 
 left him almost as obscure as Edward FitzGerald remained after 
 his Otiiar. A second volume under the same title in 1877 "fiet 
 with no better fate. It was not till lonica was reissued with 
 additions in 1891 that he began to draw attention as not merely 
 a teacher but a poet. 
 
 There is usually an explanation of phenomena of this sort, 
 and in the case of Cory it is not hard to find. In the first place, 
 on the testimony of his most admiring pupils, his greatness was 
 pre-eminently greatness as a teacher. There was nothing else he 
 did so well, and many things in which he completely failed. His 
 Guide to Modern English History (1880-1882) is admittedly not 
 good as a whole: the scholar's pitfall of allusiveness has 
 completely engulfed the author. The case of lonica is rather 
 different, for these poems certainly deserved an attention which 
 they have only now begun to receive. But this neglect too may 
 be explained. Cory was one of the most accomplished of scholars, 
 so accomplished that, according to Mr Herbert Paul, Munro, 
 the editor of Lucretius, pronounced him to have written the 
 best Latin lyrics since the death of Horace. And this scholarship 
 passes into lonica. Some of the best of the pieces are translations 
 from the Greek or from the Latin, and the majority of those 
 which are original are severely classical. But to induce the 
 English public to admire classical purity and severity is the most 
 difificult task the poet can set himself, and he who attempts it 
 must be prepared for disappointment Landor has never been 
 popular, and Cory, who resembles him but who has less verve and 
 energy, can never be popular either. High as are the merits of 
 many of his poems, it is only a handful, in which a subject essen- 
 tially modern is treated in the classical style, that can ever 
 command many readers. The best example is Mimnermus in 
 Church : — 
 
 "You promise heavens free from strife, 
 
 Pure truth, and perfect change of will ; 
 But sweet, sweet is this human life, 
 
 So sweet, I fain would breathe it still; 
 Your chilly stars I can forego, 
 This warm kind world is all I know.
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 599 
 
 You say there is no substance here, 
 
 One great reality above : 
 Back from that void I shrink in fear. 
 
 And child-like hide myself in love : 
 Show me what angels feel. Till then.. 
 I cling, a mere weak man, to men. 
 You bid me lift my mean desires 
 
 From faltering lips and fitful veins 
 To sexless souls, ideal quires. 
 
 Unwearied voices, wordless strains i 
 My mind with tender welcome owns 
 One dear dead friend's remembered tones. 
 
 Forsooth the present we must give 
 
 To that which cannot pass away; 
 All beauteous things for which we live 
 
 By laws of time and space decay. 
 But oh, the very reason why 
 I clasp them, is because they die." 
 
 Scholarliness of a less rare sort is shown likewise in the work 
 of Francis Turner Palgrave (1824-1897), and its product is also 
 of a lower kind. Palgrave is more sure of remembrance be- 
 cause of the fine faculty for appreciation shown in his Golden 
 Treasury of Songs and Lyrics than for any of his original work ; 
 and even in his own verse he is best where, as in the poem on 
 Wordsworth, he is intent upon giving expression to his apprecia- 
 tion. His lyrics have seldom sufficient depth of sentiment, and 
 his patriotic poems in The Visions of England (i 880-1 881) lack 
 the fire and energy indispensable to that type of poetry. In this 
 respect he falls below not only Tennyson, but Macaulay, Sydney 
 Dobell, Gerald Massey and sever al other conte mporaries. He 
 also falls far below his junior, j(VilHarn_Er nest Henj gy (1849-1903), 
 a true poet who had the good fortune to be trained under another 
 true poet, T. E. Brown. The long months which Henley passed 
 in an Edinburgh hospital found him a friend in R. L. Stevenson, 
 and also a theme. It is easy to trace the genesis of the poems Tn 
 Hospital, published many years afterwards in the £ook of Verses 
 (1888), and to explain their grim power, so far as it is explainable 
 by anything besides the native gift of the writer. They are realistic 
 poems, but the realism is no mere transcript of sordid details ; all
 
 600 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 that the patient saw was taken up into and moulded by a vivid 
 imagination. After his release from hospital Henley settled in 
 London, where he passed through the common experience of 
 daringly original men. The poems entitled In , Hospital ytere, he 
 said, rejected by every editor of standing in London. Their subse- 
 quent fate proved that the editors were wrong ; yet other facts show 
 that there was some excuse for this error. Editors, publishers and 
 newspaper proprietors must live, or at least they naturally think so, 
 and the fact that Henley's editorship proved fatal to three journals 
 is evidence enough that, commercially, the man was dangerous. 
 On the other hand, the success of The Outlook must be set to his 
 credit. It was in connexion with his journalistic work that Henley 
 wrote most of his poems as well as the criticisms of literature and 
 of art which appeared in the two series of Views and Reviews 
 (1890- 1 901). The plays with which his name is associated were 
 done in collaboration with Stevenson, and the fact of the colla- 
 boration leaves it doubtful whether Henley by himself could have 
 produced a long and complex work. It is only certain that alone 
 he never did it. Besides the Book of Verses already named, the 
 volumes entitled The Song of the Sword {i2>^2), Hawthorn and 
 Lavender (1899) and For England's Sake (1900) all contain work 
 of rare quality and all have the unmistakable note of a strong and 
 independent personality. Henley possessed this even in super- 
 abundance, and the words of his friends and acquaintances show 
 that it made personal intercourse with him difficult. He who was 
 so sensitive to criticism himself never spared his neighbour. Some- 
 times, perhaps, the edge of sympathy is thus blunted and his verses 
 robbed of a charm they would otherwise possess ; but on the other 
 hand they gain a force and an originality which are exceedingly 
 rare among latter-day poems. To an age somewhat decadent, 
 neurotic, over-finical, Henley brought into literature an untamed 
 virility which might have been more in keeping with the 
 generation of Beowulf. 
 
 The pieces of which Henley is the sole author are intense, 
 fervid and powerful, but they are not complex. They are essen- 
 tially lyrical. They show neither the story-telling power which 
 makes the epic nor the dramatic gift. On the contrary, Henley
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 6oi 
 
 seems rather strictly confined within a circle of his own. It had 
 a fairly wide radius, but beyond that radius he could do nothing 
 effectively. Hence in his criticism too he is far more trustworthy 
 where he approves than where he condemns. Condemnation may 
 mean no more than want of sympathy on the part of the critic. 
 Similarly in the poems Henley is himself always the centre of his 
 own universe. Give him a bit of experience like that of the 
 hospital, show him the life of London, stir up his warlike and 
 patriotic fire, and he could write splendidly ; but he had no share 
 of that power which enabled Browning to feel with equal intensity 
 what Guido thought, what Caponsacchi thought, and what Pom- 
 pilia thought. Yet the limitation is really a gain. It is the 
 narrowness that gives strength, as a river flows with greater force 
 through a gorge than in the open plain where its waters have 
 room to spread. Vigour, sincerity and courage are the qualities 
 which give Henley a place among the most remarkable of our 
 later poets. 
 
 There could hardly be a sharper contrast than that between 
 Henley and the second Lord Lytton (1831-1891), who is best 
 known in literature by his nom de plume of Owen Meredith ; and 
 the defiant personality of the younger man, set against the facile 
 receptiveness of the elder, serves usefully to point the difference 
 between the days when originality is rare and the influence of 
 famous names potent, and the days when a new revolt against 
 authority is beginning. While Henley carried independence to 
 excess, Lytton was a sort of literary personification of Echo. He 
 was charged with deliberate plagiarism, and there is more evidence 
 in support of the charge than can usually be adduced in such 
 cases. But a good deal may be explained by the principle of 
 heredity. The younger Lytton inherited from his father a re- 
 markable sensitiveness of mind. As a seismograph will register 
 movements of the earth which are never felt, and record shocks 
 which shock nobody, so Lytton's mind recorded the faintest move- 
 ments of taste, movements imperceptible to those less finely 
 endowed. There is scarcely a contemporary of note whose mark 
 may not be found somewhere or other in Owen Meredith's verse ;
 
 602 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 and perhaps the mark which is of most frequent occurrence is 
 that of a man widely different from the poet himself— Robert 
 Browning. 
 
 Lytton's Clytetnnestra (1855), published under the pseudonym 
 which he kep: for about two years, was the first of a series of 
 volumes of poetry which, in spite of the interruption occasioned 
 by high office, as Viceroy of India from 1876 to 1880, and as 
 Ambassador in Paris from 1887 till his death, was long enough 
 and varied enough to show the fluency, resourcefulness and wide 
 range of the author. His last work, Marah, was published 
 posthumously in 1892. 
 
 Over and over again Lytton illustrated that receptiveness 
 which has just been mentioned. Clytemnestra appeared a few 
 years after the beginning of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and it 
 was received with extraordinary enthusiasm, especially at Oxford, 
 where the Pre-Raphaelites were peculiarly strong. The favourite 
 poem of the volume was The EarVs Return, and the poet was, 
 after Tennyson, the favourite writer, his most serious rival being   
 Alexander Smith, then at the height of his fame. A little later 
 the taste for the romance in verse is indicated by such works as 
 Mrs Browning's Aurora Leigh and Tennyson's Enoch Arden ; and 
 Lytton quickly responds to it with Luciie (i860). In this he was 
 very largely indebted to George Sand. Again, his Gknaveril 
 (18S5), which is rather a novel in verse than a romance in verse, 
 indicates strikingly the change in taste which had come in the 
 interval. So, too, the Serbski Pesme (1861) reminds us of the 
 rising interest in the literature of the East, and Fables in Sofig 
 (1874) are an early instance of the cultivation of folk-lore. In 
 short, Lytton is the best of mirrors, and though he will never rank 
 high in the estimation of the reader who reads solely for the love 
 of poetry, he is invaluable to the student who wishes to see the 
 very image of the time. Sometimes, especially in Fables in Song 
 and in After Paradise ; or Legends of Exile (1887), and occasion- 
 ally in lyrics scattered here and there through his works, Lytton 
 seems almost to achieve greatness, and the reader is nearly 
 persuaded that here is a true poet, until the shock of some
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 603 
 
 meretricious touch awakens him, and convinces him that it is 
 only an imitation. For the fault of the elder Lytton was the 
 fault also of the younger. The flaw of an impure taste permeates 
 the work of both. In the elder, who worked mainly in prose, 
 it is very grave; in the younger, who worked in verse, it is 
 fatal. 
 
 That interest in the literature of the East, to which reference 
 has just been made, was, of course, no new thing in England. 
 For many generations " the gorgeous East " had exercised upon 
 the mind the fascination of mystery. The establishment of the 
 English power over India increased the interest, and began to 
 fleck the ignorance with knowledge. The imagination of Burke 
 played over it. Sir William Jones was a pioneer in solid Oriental 
 scholarship. The conversation and the habits of returned Anglo- 
 Indians scattered little seeds of information through the country, 
 and their gastronomical tastes spread the knowledge that a curry 
 was hot, and that a " chili," though it sounded cool, was not 
 the proper thing to allay its effect. Max Miiller and the philo- 
 logists advanced the bounds of knowledge enormously. The 
 study of comparative religion opened the eyes of many who had 
 imagined that the West had everything to give and nothing to 
 receive. Hajji Baba opened to the Western world the life of Persia. 
 It was also discovered that Persia had treasures of poetry, and 
 that Lalla Rookh was neither the last nor a particularly wise word 
 on the poetry of the East. Emerson found inspiration in Hafiz, 
 and Edward FitzGerald's incomparable translation made Omar 
 Khayyam one of the classics of the English language. The 
 Indian Mutiny encouraged and even compelled a closer study 
 than ever ; for the men who believed that they understood were 
 found to be hopelessly ignorant, and their ignorance had nearly 
 cost England an empire. 
 
 It is as the poetic mouthpiece of this spirit that Sir Edwin 
 Arnold (1832-1904) is most interesting. His varied career had 
 much to do with the character of his work. Two early volumes 
 of poetry neither gained nor deserved much attention, though they 
 contain a few good pieces, in particular the prettily fanciful A ma
 
 604 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Future, which, by a curious mistake, was printed among the Final 
 Eeiiqjies of Father Prout. In 1857, however, Arnold became 
 Principal of the Government College of Sanskrit at Poona, and 
 held that office during the exciting days of the Mutiny. On his 
 return to England in 1861 he became a member of the staff of the 
 Daily Telegraph, so that when Matthew Arnold was laughing at 
 the young lions, Edwin Arnold was helping to swell their roar. 
 
 For more than twenty years Edwin Arnold had written little 
 poetry, and he was scarcely known outside journalistic circles 
 before the publication of his Light of Asia in 1879. At once it 
 lifted him into fame ; but its success was at least as much 
 due to the rare felicity and timeliness of the subject as to the 
 merits of the poet. The theme was great, and it was new. 
 Arnold said with truth that, a generation before, practically 
 nothing was known in Europe about Buddhism ; and even when 
 he wrote knowledge was confined to scholars. Max Miiller's 
 translation of the Rig- Veda, completed only five years earlier, was 
 neither attractive nor accessible to the multitude ; and the works 
 of other scholars were similarly esoteric. The days of studies of 
 " the soul of a people " were not yet. And so The Light of Asia 
 came upon England like a revelation. The fact that the subject 
 was religious pleased the middle class ; the fact that the religion 
 was not Christian gave it a welcome breath of novelty. A little 
 earlier, the question might have been raised, Can any good thing 
 come except from Nazareth ? But assaults upon the fortresses 
 of orthodoxy had been frequent, and they had at least taught 
 a little caution and a little humility. Perhaps after all there 
 might be something to say for Buddhism. Arnold said it, and 
 on the whole said it well. The misfortune is that he said it 
 neither greatly nor with complete understanding of his subject. 
 Had he been able to rise to " the highth of his great argument," 
 The Light of Asia would have been one of the great poems of 
 the world. Nowhere is there grander material for the great 
 imagination ; perhaps it is not too much to say that nowhere 
 is there material so grand. It is a Paradise Regained in all its 
 first freshness, not threadbare with attrition. But what a difference
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 605 
 
 between the Miltonic treatment and the Arnoldian ! Paradise 
 Regained, iron in its strength ; The Light of Asia, fanciful rather 
 than imaginative, fluent rather than strong, pretty rather than 
 beautiful, plausible rather than convincing. It glides like a rivulet 
 where it should rush like a torrent. Arnold wdisfelix opportimitaie 
 libri, but what he wrote was only a pleasant, attractive book, not 
 a great one. 
 
 The brilliant success of The Light of Asia naturally encouraged 
 the author to make further experiments with Eastern themes. 
 Pearls of the Faith (1883) was an attempt to do for Mahom- 
 medanism something like what the former work proposed to do for 
 Buddhism. Lj)tus and Jewel (1887) contained more Eastern work, 
 and Arnold came to be regarded so much as the poet of the 
 Orient that he seems to have somewhat resented the association, 
 and tried to correct it by Selected Poems, National and Non- 
 Oriental (1888). His last work of importance was The Light of 
 the IVbrld (iSgi), which may be said to complete his trilogy of the 
 faiths. The temptation to try this subject after The Light of Asia 
 is obvious, but the attempt was predestined to failure The diffi- 
 culties were enormously greater. Even Goethe, with his genius for 
 understanding if he did not feel the religious emotion, could hardly 
 have made fresh a subject hackneyed by millions of sermons. 
 Familiarity was certain to make the audience more critical. 
 Besides, the freshness of Arnold's imagination was gone. The 
 faults of The Light of Asia return with increase, the merits have 
 shrunk. In no other of his longer works does Arnold reach the 
 standard he attains there, and rarely does he even approach it. 
 After The Light of Asia his best work is to be found in some of the 
 shorter pieces which deal with Eastern life e.g. The Rajput Nurse ; 
 but a generation that knows Sir Francis Hastings Doyle and Sir 
 Alfred Lyall and Mr Rudyard Kipling will hardly choose Edwin 
 Arnold as laureate of the secular life of the East. 
 
 Poetry is in essence grave, and for this reason the wits in 
 verse, parodists, writers of vers de societe, &c., rank, as a class, 
 after their brethren who have taken a more serious view of their 
 vocation. The best of them may be much better than mediocre
 
 6o6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 writers of the sober sort, but the best of them can never be great. 
 Besides Praed and the authors of the Bon Gaultier Ballads and 
 others who have already been mentioned, there are several writers 
 who still require notice for their wit and grace and epigrammatic 
 skill. First in time, and on the whole in rank, comes Frederick 
 Locker-Lampson (1821-1895), the successor of Praed; but he 
 comes at some distance behind the earlier writer. Praed in his 
 short thirty-seven years of life accomplished as much as Locker- 
 Lampson in exactly double the time, and he showed greater 
 strength of mind, more varied gifts, more abundance and more 
 virility of wit. Locker-Lampson quickly did all that he had the 
 power to do, and his London Lyrics (1857), with the subsequent 
 additions to it, contains the sura and substance of his contribution 
 to literature. These lyrics are excellent of their kind, and the 
 best, like the lines To my Grandmother, have a touch of serious- 
 ness amidst the sport which almost raises them to the higher rank 
 of poetry. Locker-Lampson however could not sustain himself 
 there. One or two pieces, especially the very skilful and pretty 
 love-song. At her Window, tempt the reader to believe that he 
 could ; but try this by the touchstone of a lyric of true passion, like 
 Burns's "Oh, my love is like the red red rose," or a lyric of 
 tenderness, like Shelley's " One word is too often profaned," and 
 its true character is manifest. It is the utterance, genuine enough, 
 of a spirit which has no wings to soar where such poets sit. And 
 if this be true of Locker-Lampson, it is more emphatically true of 
 Mortimer Collins (1827-1876), who was perhaps more of a 
 novelist than a poet, but who in both capacities suffered seriously 
 from the necessity laid upon him to live by his pen, which led to 
 over-production and the lowering of quality. From this necessity 
 Locker-Lampson was free. He could take time, he need not 
 publish his second-best as well as his best ; and so what he has 
 done well is not lost in the wilderness of middling work, as are, 
 unfortunately, the good things of Mortimer Collins. 
 
 Regarded as a poet, Charles Stuart Calverley (1831— 1884) 
 ranks below either of these two men, and he does not come even 
 within hailing distance of the greater poets; but yet he is far
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 607 
 
 more safe to be remembered than many of his superiors. The 
 reason is that in his own way he is supreme. Deftness is perhaps 
 the word that best describes his talents, and by reason of that 
 deftness he could turn a parody with what looks like inimitable 
 skill. Perhaps no style was ever more happily taken off by a 
 parodist than Browning's is by Calverley. The satire on snobbery 
 in Cherry Stones is delicious, and so is the banter of a certain 
 school of romance in Forever. And yet perhaps it only " looks 
 like" inimitable skill, and the judgment which has placed Calverley 
 on the throne of parody may have to be revised. It is significant 
 that those two great parodic satires, Dofi Quixote and Joseph 
 Afidrews, grew in the making to be much more than their authors 
 meant them to be; and probably the parody which pleases longest 
 will be that which contains most of the poetry of the original, or 
 that which is most riotously humorous. Now although Calverley 
 is flawless in technique, he has very little humour and practically 
 no poetry. So too his translations are technically perfect, but 
 they camiot be compared with such a masterpiece as FitzGerald's 
 Omar Khayyam. No one would ever ask whether Calverley was 
 not a greater poet than his original; and, strangely enough, we 
 feel that the paraphrast is true to his original in a deeper sense 
 than the translator who seeks to render word for word as well as 
 thought for thought. Perhaps Calverley's nearest analogue is 
 James Kenneth Stephen (1859-1892), who in Lapsus Calami 
 (1891) has sung unstintedly the praise of his senior, and whose 
 own performances rival in the same line even the best of Calverley's 
 Fly Leaves (1872). Had Stephen lived it is probable that he 
 would have done something greater than Calverley ever did. He 
 too was a skilful parodist of Browning, but in the fine Parodist's 
 Apology he showed a depth of feeling which Calverley never 
 betrayed, if he possessed it; and in the lines on Eton there 
 is affection behind the playfulness of manner. Stephen's early 
 death was a serious loss to literature ; but perhaps the same may 
 be said of the accident which partially disabled Calverley at about 
 the same age. R. F. Murray (1863- 1894), the St Andrew's 
 poet, is another "inheritor of unfulfilled renown." It is too
 
 6o8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 much to say, as has been said, that his fragments show a skill 
 not inferior to Calverley's, but they are very good, and in the 
 excellent After Waterloo there is a promise of something other 
 and greater. An older jester in verse, Henry Sambrooke Leigh 
 (1837-1883), author of Carols of Cockayne (1869), would deserve 
 mention were it but for the sake of the admirable Only Seven. 
 
 The tone of poetry is certainly lower than it was seventy 
 years ago, and it may be doubted whether there is at present any 
 budding Browning or Tennyson. But to close with the jesters 
 would be to suggest a decline far greater than that which has 
 occurred. There is, not indeed moral elevation, but a vein of 
 genuine poetry in the work of Ernest Dowson (1867-1900), 
 whose Verses (1896) excited hopes which were blighted by his 
 early death. Both in his work and in his life Dowson somewhat 
 resembled the Irish poet Mangan. There is still more .poetry, 
 and there is a far higher moral tone, in Francis Thompson (1859- 
 1907). The appearance of his Poems (1893) seemed to some 
 good judges to mark the advent of a new great poet. Then 
 followed Sister Songs (1895), then New Foe7?is (1897). If the 
 view expressed in the last chapter about Coventry Patmore be 
 sound, it is probable that his disciple will not permanently hold 
 the high place his admirers claim for him. Though it would be 
 unfair to press the words of a letter written immediately after 
 Patmore's death, in which Thompson calls him "the greatest 
 genius of the century," there can be no doubt that the younger 
 man had for the elder an extreme and almost a fanatical admira- 
 tion. Fortunately it was the Patmore of the Odes, not of The 
 Angel in the House, whom Thompson followed, and he never sank 
 to the puerihties to which the latter model might have tempted 
 him. On the contrary the besetting sin of his style is gorgeousness. 
 This fault is perhaps even more conspicuous in the interesting 
 but over-praised Essay on Shelley, which appeared posthumously 
 in The Dtiblin Review in 1908, than in the poems. Thompson's 
 diction is Latinised to excess — occasionally to the very bounds, 
 if not beyond the bounds, of meaning. Sometimes, where he 
 is really inspired, as in the splendid opening of The Hound
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 609 
 
 of Heavm, his majestic English seems the perfect garment of 
 fervid and weighty thought ; when inspiration fails the result i? 
 deplorable. The other side of this magnificence of diction is 
 contortion of language and over-elaboration of imagery. In the 
 simplest technicalities Thompson occasionally fails surprisingly. 
 He has extraordinary lapses of taste. It is scarcely credible 
 that the same poet who could bear to end a line with 
 the phrase " temerarious if ! " wrote also the grand harmonies 
 of The Hotmd of Heaven. That is his most characteristic 
 as it is his best-known poem — most characteristic because it 
 expresses best the deep mystical religion which underlies the 
 greater part of his work, and which unquestionably made him what 
 he was. For he was what many of his predecessors in the Pre- 
 Raphaelite line only seemed to be, a religious poet ; perhaps the 
 most deeply imbued with that spirit since Crashaw. 
 
 But while The Hound of Heaven is the most characteristic, 
 there may be a doubt whether it is the most poetical of Thompson's 
 pieces. Though the simple strain is more rare in him, he is 
 sometimes charming in his poems on children, and perhaps Daisy 
 may please the lovers of poetry better even than The Hound of 
 Heaven. The echo of Wordsworth is unmistakable ; but the 
 poem is no mere copy, and Wordsworth when he is inspired is 
 well worth echoing : — 
 
 • ' She went her imremembering way. 
 She went, and left in me 
 The pang of all the partings gone, 
 And partings yet to be. 
 
 She left me marvelling why my sovil 
 
 Was sad that she was glad ; 
 At all the sadness in the sweet, 
 
 The sweetness in the sad. 
 Still, still I seemed to see her, still 
 
 Look up with soft replies, 
 And take the berries with her hand, 
 
 And the love with her lovely eyes. 
 Nothing begins and nothing ends. 
 
 That is not paid with moan ; 
 For we are bom in other's pain, 
 
 And perish in oui own." 
 
 w. 39
 
 6lO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 In sharp contrast to Thompson stands John Davidson (1857- 
 1909), the latest of our " poets in their misery dead." Thompson 
 was one of the ascetics who abjure and renounce the world; 
 Davidson was in fierce revolt against a world which he would fain 
 have enjo3'ed. Thompson was a man of faith, Davidson a man 
 of doubt. Both were unhappy. Even among poets few have 
 had a career so harassed as Davidson's. This advanced sceptic, 
 born into a family where the father was an evangelical minister, 
 was foredoomed to taste of tragedy. The powerful Ballad of 
 the Making of a Poet — one of his finest pieces — reads as if it were 
 inspired by personal experience. After a chequered career as 
 a teacher he made his way to London, and threw himself upon 
 literature for a livelihood. He had previously attempted the 
 drama ; but his most characteristic work was that which is con- 
 tained in the two series of Fleet Street Eclogues (1893-1896) and 
 Ballads and So?tgs (1894), with the kindred volumes of later date. 
 He reaches his zenith in Ballads and Songs. To it, besides the 
 ballad already referred to, belong A Ballad of a Ntm, A Ballad 
 of Heaven and A Ballad of Hell, all strong and characteristic 
 pieces. So does Thirty Bob a Week, where the influence of 
 Mr Rudyard Kipling is manifest. In Romjiey Marsh and A 
 Cinque Port are in the same collection. These pieces pretty 
 nearly measure the range of Davidson's gifts ; for in subsequent 
 volumes he added few things entirely new. The two last-named — 
 poems of nature — show him in his rarer mood. The picture of 
 the Cinque Port left by the receding sea is singularly fine : — 
 
 " Where argosies have wooed the breeze. 
 
 The simple sheep are feeding now ; 
 And near and far across the bar 
 
 The ploughman whistles at the plough ; 
 Where once the long waves washed the shore. 
 Larks from their lowly lodgings soar. 
 
 Below the down the stranded town 
 
 Hears far away the rollers beat ; 
 About the wall the seabirds call ; 
 
 The salt wind murmurs through the street ■, 
 Forlorn the sea's forsaken bride 
 Awaits the end that sliall betide.''
 
 LATER DEVELOPMENTS 6ll 
 
 The ballads which have been named illustrate a far more 
 common mood of his mind. They are wrapt in an atmosphere 
 of dusky gloom, and their indubitable force may prove to be a 
 less trustworthy guarantee of permanence than the beauty of 
 the quieter pieces. This mood of stormy passion more and more 
 mastered Davidson in his later years, until in his "testaments" 
 force gives place to violence and passion to fury. 
 
 39-
 
 CREATIVE ART. B. PROSE FICTION 
 CHAPTER 1 
 
 AFTER SCOTT 
 
 That decline in the market-value of poetry, to which attention 
 has been called elsewhere, was partly due to the extraordinary rise 
 and spread of the art of prose fiction in and after the third decade 
 of the nineteenth century. Behind all other reasons for this there 
 lies the fundamental one, that it was just a stage in the develop- 
 ment of Uterature. Prose fiction is the most democratic of all 
 forms of literature, because it makes least demand for education 
 and training and puts the smallest strain upon the intelligence of 
 the reader ; and until the masses are educated to a point far above 
 any as yet attempted, and are so far relieved from the burden of 
 physical toil that at the close of the day the mind shall still keep 
 its elasticity, it must remain the staple reading of those among 
 them who read at all. Now the invention of the art of printing 
 made literature potentially democratic ; and recent changes of all 
 sorts, political, industrial, social, have tended to render it actually 
 so. In the beginning of the nineteenth century the process was 
 as yet only in its early stages ; but it had unmistakably begun. 
 
 Two secondary causes operated about the period in question 
 to strengthen and accelerate this process. One of these was the 
 rapid development of periodical literature, and the other was the 
 stimulus given to the imagination, the ambition, and sometimes 
 the cupidity of his younger contemporaries by the wonderful
 
 AFTER SCOTT 613 
 
 success of Scott. The earlier and more ambitious periodicals, 
 like 21ie Edinburgh Review, had a fairly well-defined field of 
 their own, and took no part in the publication of fiction. But 
 as one magazine after another — Blackwood's, The London, Eraser's, 
 The Dublin University, to name the chief representatives of the 
 three kingdoms — sprang into existence, the competition became 
 keener, and the net was spread wider and wider still both for 
 contributors and for readers. The very name *' magazine " was 
 suggestive of variety and invited experiment. Even the purely 
 critical Athenceum helped to support men like Henry Fothergill 
 Chorley (1808-1872), who was a critic for a livelihood and a 
 novelist by choice. And as the popular appetite grew with what 
 it fed on, every fresh step increased the demand for and the output 
 of fiction. First the short story, then loosely-compacted serials 
 like the Nodes Ambrosiance, then novels, more or less close-knit, 
 became the staple article of the magazines. Sometimes the novel 
 itself, divided into parts, stood alone as a serial publication. The 
 case of Dickens is the best known ; but the device had been tried 
 before his day ; and Pierce Egan's Life in London, better known as 
 Torn and Jerry, was published in parts like The Pickwick Papers, 
 which owes to it a few other hints as well. 
 
 The growth of the periodicals was, however, a matter of time, 
 and in the earlier years of the nineteenth century their influence 
 upon the longer works of fiction was comparatively slight. For many 
 a day the orthodox mode of publishing a novel was in the old three- 
 volume form at what would now seem the prohibitive price of a 
 guinea and a half. The great outburst of activity among writers 
 of prose fiction dates from the time of Scott. After he had shown 
 the way, it seemed not so very difficult to follow ; just as, a little 
 earlier, it had seemed not so very difficult to imitate his tales in 
 verse. Byron had accomplished the latter feat with such success 
 as to drive his predecessor from the field ; though it seems obvious 
 to the reader of the present day that it is not in the line of the 
 metrical romance that Byron is the superior, or even the equal, of 
 Scott. Among the novelists, however, there was no Byron, and 
 the world has been contented to forget the imitations of the 
 Waverley Novels which flowed plentifully from the press in the
 
 6l4 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century. On the 
 Continent work which is worthy to be remembered was produced 
 under the inspiration of Scott; but the distance which divides 
 him from his immediate successors in England is greater than that 
 between Shakespeare and the successors of Shakespeare. 
 
 There was one remarkable writer who remained uninfluenced by 
 either of these causes. Thomas Love Peacock (i 785-1866) was 
 certainly no follower of Scott, and his leisurely writing was un- 
 affected by the rise of the periodicals. Few authors are harder to 
 classify. There is, to begin with, a chronological difficulty, for 
 Peacock is not only " after Scott " but contemporary with Scott. He 
 began writing almost as early as the latter. His Palmyi-a (1806) 
 was published only one year after The Lay of the Last Minstrel, The 
 Geftms of the Thames (18 10) appeared in the same year with The 
 Lady of the Lake, and Headlong Halt (181 6) came only two years 
 later than Waverley. On the other hand, the last of Peacock's 
 works was published almost a generation after the death of Scott. 
 Peacock, like Landor, overlaps more than one age of literature. 
 He saw romanticism in its dawn and meridian, and he was still 
 living when the brightness was fading from a later romanticism. 
 
 The personal annals of Peacock are short and simple. In his 
 desultory youth he acquired a learning for which he was indebted 
 neither to public school nor to university, but the proof of which 
 is written in many a page of his works. In later days Macaulay 
 and he tried each other in Greek, and the former thought that 
 they were both "strong enough in these matters for gentlemen^" 
 Peacock had no permanent employment till the year 18 19, when 
 he procured an appointment in the East India House which 
 enabled him to settle down and marry his " Welsh turtle," Jane 
 Gryffydh. The chief event before this had been the formation of 
 a friendship with Shelley. Beginning in 18 12, it lasted as long as 
 Shelley lived, and its influence is shown in the fact that Shelley 
 was the one contemporary writer whom Peacock really liked and 
 admired. Even in the case of Shelley it was a critical admiration : 
 in Scythrop, as well as in Mr Cypress, though in far less degree, 
 surgit ama}-i aliquid. 
 
 ^ i,lAC3.\xlay's fi?n) /la/, December 31, 1851.
 
 AFTER SCOTT 6l$ 
 
 The two poems with which (setting aside a few insignificant 
 youthful pieces) Peacock opened his hterary career, though long 
 only by comparison, were too long to suit the peculiar bent of his 
 mind. What he did admirably was the short lyric or ballad, 
 commonly a satire or a parody or a drinking song, but now and 
 then profoundly serious and pathetic. The snatches of song, 
 grave and gay, interspersed through his stories are exquisite. The 
 following beautiful lines are an excellent example of his graver 
 manner, and, though included in the later editions of 2Vie Golden 
 Treasury, they are less widely known than the verses embodied in 
 the prose tales : — 
 
 " I dug, beneath the cypress shade, 
 
 What well might seem an elfin's grave ; 
 And every pledge in earth I laid, 
 That erst thy false affection gave. 
 
 I pressed them down the sod beneath ; 
 
 I placed one mossy stone above ; 
 And twined the rose's fading wreath 
 
 Around the sepulchre of love. 
 
 Frail as thy love, the flowers were dead, 
 
 Ere yet the evening sun was set ; 
 But years shall see the cypress spread, 
 
 Immutable as my regret." 
 
 It is evident that Peacock was Greek after the manner of Landor, 
 not after the manner of Keats. It is evident too that the author 
 of these lines, of the verses on " the slender beech and the sapling 
 oak " and of Love and Age, was a lyrist of exquisite touch ; while 
 the song of Mr Cypress, Seamen Three, The Pool of the Diving 
 Friar and The War-Song of Dinas Vawr prove him to have been 
 a parodist, humourist and satirist of rare power. But the longer 
 poems, both the two already named and Rhododaphne (1818), 
 are interesting chiefly for the light they throw upon Peacock's 
 mind. They show that in spirit he was a poet of the eighteenth 
 century. His classicism was not, indeed, that of Pope. It was 
 based upon independent study, and it was coloured by the work 
 of Gray. There are also ingredients involuntarily taken up 
 from the work of contemporary romanticists ; but their incon- 
 gruous mingling with the personifications suggested by the taste
 
 6iG THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 of the eighteenth century only shows more clearly how far Peacock 
 stood aloof from his contemporaries. 
 
 I'he change from verse to prose was a happy one for Peacock. 
 His first story, Headlong Hall, was not good, but Melincourt {i^i']), 
 pjightmare Abbey (1818), Maid Marian (1822), The Misfoi-tunes of 
 Elphin (1829) and Crotchet Castle (1831) proved him to possess a 
 genius not merely original but almost unique. A long silence 
 followed Crotchet Castle. When at last it was broken, perhaps 
 the most striking fact which Gryll Grange (1861) revealed was 
 that the author seemed to have slept a kind of Rip- Van-Winkle 
 sleep of thirty years, and was hardly at all changed from his former 
 state. There are, it is true, some new subjects of satire, such as 
 spirit-rapping ; but in all essentials the temper of the later book is 
 the temper likewise of Crotchet Castle. 
 
 As a literary artist Peacock stands wholly apart from his con- 
 temporaries. He is as nearly as possible free from Scott's influence. 
 It is true that there is a historical element in Maid Marian and 
 The Misfortunes of Elphin, and the former might seem to have 
 been suggested by Ivatihoe were it not for the well-established fact 
 that nearly the whole of it was written before the publication of 
 Scott's novel. Everywhere else it is obvious that Peacock and 
 Scott are opposites ; and if ever the lesser man took a hint from 
 the greater, it was only to diverge as widely as possible from his 
 line of treatment. Peacock was nearly everything that Scott was 
 not. He was the satirist of his own generation, and his genius 
 was not historical at all. He was especially interested in litera- 
 ture and literary characters, while of all men of letters ScoU was the 
 least absorbed in them. Peacock was fantastic and farcical, Scott 
 was genial and massively sensible. Peacock dealt in " humours " 
 and his method was caricature. Scott loved an occasional oddity 
 and was not averse from a touch of caricature ; but his principal 
 characters are human in the deepest sense and he depicts them as 
 they are. Peacock is polished to the last degree — his style, writes 
 one of his editors, is "rather engraved than written." Scott 
 turns off chapter after chapter, novel after novel, with little effort 
 and with no revision. Peacock's brightness and cleverness con- 
 stantly strike the reader with the pleasant surprise of a sudden
 
 AFTER SCOTT 617 
 
 gleam of sunshine from a cloud. Scott rather gives the impression of 
 a day of sunshine too diffused and general to call attention to itself. 
 
 There is little plot or story in Peacock's books, and what there 
 is has small significance. They are really fantastic satires, and the 
 story is no more than a thread on which the bits of satire may be 
 strung. In Meliiicoiirt the "return to nature" and the movement 
 for the abolition of slavery are held up to ridicule, and the Lake 
 poets are caricatured, not very successfully. Though Sir Oran 
 Haut-ton is a thoroughly characteristic specimen of Peacock's 
 mode of satirical portraiture, it is unfortunately spoilt by its excess. 
 Nightmare Abbey was meant to " make a-stand against the encroach^ 
 ments of black bile," and with that end in view it ridicules Byron 
 (Mr Cypress) and Coleridge (Mr Flosky). Southey too is pilloried 
 as Mr Sackbut, and even Peacock's friend Shelley does not escape ; 
 but the portrait of Mr Scythrop is so drawn that, notwithstanding 
 the banter about the complicated loves, Shelley himself enjoyed 
 it. The same satiric spirit pervades Crotchet Castle and Gryll 
 Grange, but the foundation is broader. The material is not merely 
 the literary, but the intellectual, political, social and religious foibles 
 and follies of the time. In the earlier books Peacock shows 
 cleverness and satiric power in abundance, but by excess of 
 caricature he partly destroys the effect of his own satire. It is 
 in this respect that The Misfortunes of Elphin and Crotchet Castle 
 and Gryll Grange show the greatest advance. Peacock had learnt 
 from experience : he knew the world better than he did in the 
 earlier part of his career. In the earlier books there is no character 
 so rich as that of the " learned and jolly" Dr FoUiott, and the satires 
 on the march of mind, the Steam Intellect Society, Brougham, 
 MacCuUoch, and all that stands for the progress of the nineteenth 
 century, are flavoured with more oil and less vinegar than we find 
 in the ingredients of the earlier books. Comfortable and pros- 
 perous himself. Peacock, satirist as he was, looked with a not 
 unkindly eye upon the follies of the world. 
 
 The peculiar point of view, the frequent extravagance of con- 
 ception and the overwhelming preponderance of the satiric element, 
 combine to set Peacock's novels in a class apart. The mind must 
 be attuned to them or they carry little meaning. The style is
 
 % 
 
 6l8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 beautiful, the wit is sparkling, there are here and there matchless 
 felicities ; but to him who does not possess the key to Peacock's 
 world the felicities are but purple patches. His method is not 
 that of other satirists. Thackeray is satirical too, but his victims 
 walk the streets of London and dwell in the houses which line 
 them. Peacock first removes his characters to some Nightmare 
 Abbey or Crotchet Castle which may possibly be situated in the 
 planet Mars, but which certainly is not to be found beneath the 
 moon. The characters are very human in their appetites and 
 passions, the things which interest them are like the things which 
 interest the inhabitants of earth. Yet somehow both the men and 
 the subjects they discuss have "suffered a sea-change." No 
 character of Peacock's is in the deepest and best sense human, 
 not even Dr Opimian, though he was drawn from the author him- 
 self; still less Dr Folliott, witty and clever as the portrait is; least 
 of all such a monstrosity as Sir Oran Haut-ton, though a critic has 
 been found to pronounce even him perfect. Out of foibles and 
 weaknesses alone human character never can be built. The great 
 satirist must go deeper. The grim figures of Tacitus, the Becky 
 Sharp and the Lord Steyne of Thackeray, are men and women ; 
 proofs, perhaps, of the agency of the devil, but indubitably denizens 
 of earth. Peacock's characters rather hail from the Limbo of Fools. 
 Not one of those he draws from contemporary literature seems 
 real. Mr Sackbut is generally forgotten. That Peacock under- 
 stood Byron in a sense is shown by that unsurpassed parody, 
 " There is a fever of the spirit " ; but though Mr Cypress could 
 tune Byron's harp, he is too evidently unfit to fill the poet's shoes. 
 Mr Flosky has been praised as a successful Coleridge, — but com- 
 pare Peacock's caricature with Carlyle's satirical portrait. The 
 truth is that in Peacock the literary quality is superior to the 
 human interest. He has knowledge, wit, humour, technical skill, 
 cleverness in abundance, some genius, he is a keen observer, a 
 caustic critic. What he lacks is humanity \ just that which is 
 the essence of the greatness of the great humourists — Cervantes, 
 Rabelais, Shakespeare. 
 
 ^ The word, of couise, is applied to Peacock's literary work, not to his 
 private character.
 
 AFTER SCOTT 619 
 
 Of the imitations of Scott some were gross and palpable 
 enough ; and in one instance the follower was not content with 
 imitation. Walladmor was a forged Waverley of German manu- 
 facture, v/hich was reviewed and condemned by De Quincey. 
 There were New Landlord's Tales, or Jedediahin the South (1825), 
 proclaiming their discipleship by their very title. Horace Smith's 
 Brambletye House (1826) is a more widely-known imitation; and 
 it and Sir John Chiverton (1826), probably the work of Harrison 
 Ainsworth, drew Scott's own attention and provoked his comments 
 on the difference between himself and his imitators. He compares 
 himself to Captain Bobadil, who trained many to fight nearly as 
 well as himself; but adds that he wrote because his mind was full 
 of what he had read, while they read in order to write. Except 
 in so far as Scott, in the comparison with Captain Bobadil, exag- 
 gerates the merits of his imitators and underrates the enormous 
 difference between himself and them, his criticism is admirable. 
 It was especially the historical element in the Waverley Novels 
 that was seized upon for imitation ; and the difference between the 
 original and the imitation was just that which Scott states. From 
 boyhood onwards he had been amassing a store of knowledge 
 about the Cavaliers, the Covenanters, the Jacobites, the Round- 
 heads, the Crusaders, not because he meant to make literary 
 capital out of it, but because he was interested; and for what 
 interested him, he possessed one of the most retentive memories 
 with which man was ever gifted. Hence when he, a man over 
 forty, began to write his great series of romances, the knowledge 
 necessary for their construction flowed easily and naturally from 
 a mind already full. There was no laborious consultation of 
 authorities. If he did not recollect a fact, he invented one to suit 
 his purpose ; just as, if he failed to call to mind a motto for his 
 chapter, he manufactured it. Scott did not take himself seriously 
 as a historian ; nor did he think it part of his contract with his 
 readers to be strictly accurate in matters of fact. He treated 
 lightly the strictures of critics on his inaccuracies, serenely con- 
 scious that the same principles of criticism would have led to 
 the condemnation equally of Shakespeare's historical plays ; and 
 instead of correcting the errors of which the critics complained.
 
 620 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 he pointed out others unnoticed by thenm. What gives value to 
 the history both of Scott and of Shakespeare is that they have 
 lived imaginatively with their creations and with the real figures 
 among which these are set, so that frequently their errors are more 
 true than the truths of Dryasdust. 
 
 This leads to another and even more important difference 
 between the original and the imitations, which is not referred to by 
 Scott. Scott had a wider and more comprehensive knowledge of 
 character than any man since Shakespeare ; and to him the figures 
 of history were not mere names in the pages of a book, but as living 
 and real as the men he daily met in the streets of Edinburgh. 
 No man who did not actually know them could have drawn his 
 James VI, or Louis XI, or Claverhouse. Whether or not these 
 are just the men who lived under those names in England, or 
 France, or Scotland, they are at any rate men, the beings- whom 
 Scott saw emerge from the books and documents he studied. He 
 had, in short, the creative imagination, and all that he read about 
 became without effort real to him. His followers, on the other 
 hand, laboriously pieced their characters together, never feeling 
 their reality at all. 
 
 Not unnaturally, the imitators of the Waverley Novels dealt 
 on a different principle with the information which they had with 
 difficulty acquired. Scott could treat lightly that which welled up 
 spontaneously from his full memory ; but their information had 
 been won with toil of brain and of eye. Hence we have in the 
 imitators a greater parade of learning, more anxious care, less 
 freedom and flexibility, far less insight into the true meaning of 
 history, — above all, far less power to bring home to the reader the 
 fact that history has been made by men of like passions with 
 ourselves. 
 
 Though Scott was not the first to write historical novels, he 
 may fairly be called the father of the historical romance ; for it 
 was the Waverley Novels which made it a recognised species in 
 Germany, France and Italy, as well as in England, where nearly 
 all the later masters of romance attempted it. Charles Reade, 
 George Eliot, Thackeray and R. L. Stevenson have all written 
 novels of this description. Only the last however is in the full
 
 AFTER SCOTT 62 1 
 
 sense Scott's successor. No one but he, by the peculiar blend of 
 romance with history and by the atmosphere of nationality in 
 which he wraps his romances, recalls the spirit and manner as 
 well as the general scheme of the author of Waverley. 
 
 WiUiam Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882) was a follower of A 
 Scott who had no real understanding of his master's method. In 
 his best-known works, The Tower of London (1840), Old St Paul's 
 (1841) and Windsor Castle (1843) he is led by Victor Hugo into 
 the error of making a place rather than a person the centre of the 
 story. As Ainsworth has neither Hugo's inspiration nor his force, 
 the result is confusion through the introduction of a mass of 
 irrelevant detail. These novels are wearisome, and the praise 
 they have won has been due rather to a sense that they must be 
 useful in building up the mind of youth, than to any real belief in 
 their merit as novels. Their educational value may, however, be 
 doubted ; while it can hardly be questioned that the acts of cruelty 
 and the horrible deaths with which they abound pander to a de- 
 praved taste and are likely to vitiate the mind that is not repelled 
 by them. 
 
 An unwholesome element of a different sort is noticeable in the 
 other class of Ainsworth's novels, those studies of criminality which 
 we find in Rookwood (1834) and in Jack Sheppard (1839). In 
 these Ainsworth was following the lead of Bulwer in his Patil 
 Clifford and Eugene Aram. Ainsworth's contributions to this 
 school of criminal romance, though poor on the whole, are not 
 without passages of merit. The celebrated ride to York, in par- 
 ticular, is, despite its impossibilities and absurdities, a very spirited 
 performance. The two novels were extremely popular, and Jack 
 Sheppard, for a short time, even eclipsed its contemporary Oliver 
 Twist. But there were vigorous and well-founded criticisms of the 
 morality of works which tended to throw a glamour of romance 
 over such characters as Turpin and Sheppard and Eugene Aram. 
 Probably through these criticisms, Ainsworth was turned once 
 more into the paths of the historical novel. In either department 
 his literary merit is extremely slight, and there is little probability 
 that he will ever again enjoy the vogue which was once his. t. 
 
 Horace Smith (1779-1849), who has been mentioned along
 
 622 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 with Ainsworth as one of the two imitators who were remarked 
 upon by Scott himself, really belongs to another department of 
 literature and to an earlier time. It is as the joint-author of Horace 
 in London and of Rejected Addresses, and as the friend of Shelley, 
 that he is likely to be remembered. He followed up Braiiibletye 
 House with a succession of novels stretching on well towards the 
 close of his own life ; but they contain nothing equal in wit or in 
 skill to those early works in which he collaborated with his brother 
 James. 
 
 Yet another imitator, whose name has acquired a kind of 
 prescriptive right to mention, was George Payne Rainsford 
 James (1801-1860), who even surpassed his original in produc- 
 tiveness. James is said to have written more than one hundred 
 novels and tales. To read one-tenth part of them would be mere 
 waste of time. His style is conventional and his morals mere 
 sentimentality, while for sameness of situation, and especially 
 of opening, his name has passed into a proverb Thackeray's 
 burlesque of Richelieu (1829) will be remembered long after all 
 that James has written is forgotten. 
 
 The patriotism of Scott exercised an influence little, if at all, 
 inferior to that of the historical element, with which in the 
 Waverley Novels it was closely associated; and the value of the 
 works due to it during Scott's own lifetime or in the years im- 
 mediately following his death, was incomparably greater. Scott 
 was not the only Scottish, any more than he was the only historical, 
 novelist of his time ; but as he stood solitary in the historical field 
 in respect of the extent of his knowledge and the sweep of his 
 imagination, so in the sphere of nationality he was alone in his 
 method. He more than once declared that his own national 
 novels were suggested by Miss Edgeworth's Irish tales ; but there 
 is a wide difference between the two writers in the principle upon 
 which they work as well as in genius. Miss Edgeworth is a realist, 
 Scott is romantic. Now though Scott was the chief source of 
 inspiration, it was Miss Edgeworth's method rather than his which 
 was followed by the other writers on Scottish life ; and this is in 
 the main true also of the Irish school which presently came into 
 existence. Tiiure is little affiniLy to IVaveriey even in Lockhart's
 
 AFTER SCOTT 623 
 
 Scottish story, Adam Blair (1822). The scene is laid in Scotland, 
 but the theme of the story is one of the elemental passions of 
 humanity, and the action might take place wherever human 
 beings are found. His Valerhis (1821) has been called a 
 kind of Roman Old Mortality'^, but the romantic glamour 
 is wanting. John Wilson's Lights and Shadoivs of Scottish 
 Life (1822) and his Trials of Margaret Lindsay (1823) stand in 
 a class by themselves, graceful and delicate, but somewhat too 
 sentimental. Susan Ferrier (i 782-1854), the friend as well as 
 the contemporary of Scott, was the humourist of the society she 
 saw around her, a kind of Scottish Miss Austen, though less fine 
 and less powerful. Her business was with the class to which her own 
 friends and associates belonged, the Scottish gentry ; and outside 
 its limits she could do little. D. M. Moir (i 798-1851), the 
 " Delta " of Black7vood, in his solitary work of fiction, Mansie 
 Wauch (1828), contents himself with writing the biography of a 
 Dalkeith tailor. John Gait (1779-1839) fulfils the same function 
 as Miss Ferrier for a lower stratum of society. There is very little 
 story and there is no romance in his excellent pictures of Scottish 
 life. Within his narrower range he is as true as Scott himself, 
 and his eye is almost as keen ; but the title of one of his books is 
 descriptive of his work — he is the annalist of the parish. His 
 portrait in The Entail {j2>2'^) of Claud Walkinshaw, Laird "Grippy," 
 is perfect, and the slighter sketch of his faithful and ill-requited 
 " bairnswoman " Maudge, is hardly less admirable, while the gar- 
 rulous "leddy " is equal to any character of that species that Scott 
 himself has drawn. But the whole novel moves as on an axis round 
 the lands of Kittlestonheugh. Scott's Morton of Milnwood is even 
 meaner than Grippy, his Cuddie Headrigg is certainly not more 
 faithful than Maudge ; but the one in spite of himself, and the 
 other by reason of his fidelity, become parts of the great contro- 
 versy between Episcopalian and Covenanter. And this is not an 
 exceptional case in Scott. However mean or commonplace or 
 unromantic his characters are in themselves, they acquire a 
 new significance from their setting. Bailie Macwheeble is woven 
 into the romantic drama of Highlands and Lowlands; Andrew 
 ^ ilQx[ox6!s Ageof 'yVordswoiih, lij.
 
 624 THE LITEI>LA.TURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Fairservice, self-seeker and money-grubber, gets whirled away on 
 an adventurous ride ; the sober Glasgow merchant, Bailie Nicol 
 Jarvie, is carried into the midst of an outlawed Highland clan, 
 and takes an involuntary share of the risk in an armed conflict 
 between the clansmen and the soldiers of the Government ; Bryce 
 Snailsfoot, pedlar just like Grippy, comes into contact with such 
 romantic personages as a pirate and a Norse prophetess. 
 
 No doubt the Scottish writers contemporary with and subse- 
 quent to Scott adopted the method of J\Iiss Edgeworth, rather 
 than that of their great countryman, of necessity and not of 
 choice. Few could successfully fill the large canvas of the 
 Waverley Novels. Gait's attempt in Ringaii Gilhaize (1823) 
 was a complete failure. The Irish writers however set before 
 themselves the more ambitious aim of doing for Ireland what 
 Scott had done for Scotland ; but they had neither the educational 
 equipment nor the native gifts necessary to complete success. 
 The deficiency in the former respect of the greatest of them, 
 William Carleton, may be measured by the trick played upon 
 him by his countryman, the poet Denis Florence McCarthy. 
 During Carlyle's visit to Ireland in 1847, Carleton was present 
 with a number of the Young Ireland party at a breakfast in 
 honour of Carlyle, when the conversation ran upon the poetry of 
 Shelley, which Carlyle and Carleton joined in depreciating. So 
 contemptuous was the opinion held of Carleton's knowledge of 
 English literature that McCarthy gravely asked him if he would 
 disparage Shelley's masterpiece. Sartor Resartus; and it needed 
 the laugh which followed to put Carleton sufficiently on his guard 
 to retort that it would be well for Shelley if he could write a book 
 like Sartor Resartus'^. Not on such foundations were the histori- 
 cal romances of Scott built, nor could any man so inadequately 
 equipped have taken Scott's broad view of public affairs and of 
 the relation of class to class. Naturally therefore it is a very 
 dwarfed and attenuated Waverley that we get from the pens of 
 the Irish followers of Scott. In the wider aspects of their work 
 they were, in spite of themselves, more like their countrywoman, 
 Miss Edgeworth. But they had energy and verve, and they often 
 ^ O'Donoghue i Lije 0/ WiUiam Carleton^ ii. iiS.
 
 AFTER SCOTT 625 
 
 contrived to give to their tales much of the breezy freshness of 
 Scott's novels. 
 
 William Carleton (1794-1869) would have won the gratitude 
 of all lovers of good literature if he had left nothing but his 
 Autobiography. Unfinished as it is, this " marvellous human 
 document " is incomparably the most interesting and instructive 
 of all the books bearing upon the Celtic revival. In explaining 
 Carleton himself, it throws a flood of light upon all the most 
 intensely Irish writers as well, and not least upon Griffin and 
 Banim, whose names Carleton associates with his ov/n as " the 
 only three names which Ireland can point to with pride'." The 
 racial gifts and defects, the sources from which all drew, the 
 spirit in which they worked, the influences which made them 
 what they were, are all shown by Carleton with unrivalled vivid- 
 ness. If it were necessary to choose only one book from which 
 to form a conception of Ireland and the Irish in the early part 
 of the nineteenth century, it would probably be wise to fix upon 
 Carleton's Autobiography. It is full of prejudices and perversities ; 
 but if it were free from them it would be less truly Irish than 
 it is ; and its overflowing life more thah atones for all its faults. 
 In the discovery and the publication of this fascinating volume, 
 Carleton's biographer, Mr D. J. O'Donoghue, has conferred 
 upon literature a boon of rare value, 
 
 "There never was any man of letters," says Carleton, "who 
 had an opportunity of knowing and describing the manners of 
 the Irish people so thoroughly as I had^"; and every reader of 
 the Autobiography must be satisfied of the truth' of the statement. 
 He was himself a peasant, and his pictures of the life of the 
 peasantry are drawn either directly from his own experience or 
 from that of the men among whom he lived. For the production 
 of these pictures he had not only extraordinary gifts, but very great 
 external advantages. Uneducated as his parents were, Carleton 
 justly describes them as "highly and singularly gifted." His 
 father " possessed a memory not merely great or surprising, but 
 absolutely astonishing." He could repeat by heart nearly the 
 whole of the Old and New Testaments, and "as a narrator of 
 1 O'Donoghue's Carleton, ii. 291. * ibid. i. 148. 
 
 w. 40
 
 626 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 old tales, legends and historical anecdotes he was unrivalled, and 
 his stock of them inexhaustible"; so much so that Carleton 
 hardly ever afterwards heard any Irish tradition, legend or usage, 
 with which he was not already familiar. His mother " possessed 
 the sweetest and most exquisite of human voices," was especially 
 celebrated for her wonderful power of raising the " keen," and 
 sang a large number of old Irish songs. 
 
 The youngest of a large family which crowded the small 
 Irish cabin', William Carleton had for birthright only his share of 
 the poverty of all. He was however, from the first, a remarkable 
 boy, and was early singled out to be educated and to become 
 a priest. The result of his first day in school certainly justified 
 the selection; for in that one day he mastered the alphabet and 
 got as far as b-a-g, bag. The teacher was Pat Frayne, who 
 afterwards sat for his portrait as Mat Kavanagh in The. Hedge 
 School. But the sequel illustrates the difficulties which beset the 
 education of the Irish peasantry in those days. Finding only 
 three scholars, Frayne, after that single day, left the neighbour- 
 hood ; and for years afterwards the boy Carleton was driven from 
 pillar to post, picking up scraps of education where and how he 
 could. At one time he set out to be himself the " poor scholar " 
 whom he has touchingly depicted in one of the most beautiful 
 of the Traits and Stories of the Irish Feasa?itry; but, moved 
 partly by an ominous dream, and probably still more by the 
 natural heaviness of heart at parting from all he held dear, he 
 turned back upon the way. 
 
 There is evidence in the Autobiography that Carleton would 
 wiUingly have gone on living an easy life with the reputation of 
 " a scholar," dressing like a rustic dandy, performing athletic feats 
 and attending wakes and dances. But his eldest brother Michael's 
 reproaches and jeers drove him to apprentice himself to a stone- 
 cutter — an engagement which he immediately broke — and then 
 to wander forth into the world, after first residing with a sister 
 until her husband made it plain that he was not disposed to 
 support Carleton indefinitely. He became a tutor in the family 
 of a farmer, and after various changes and adventures made his 
 
 * Fourteen children were born, but six were dead before the birth of Wilhain.
 
 AFTER SCOTT 627 
 
 way ultimately to Dublin, where he became clerk to the Sunday 
 School Society, married, was dismissed, reinstated, dismissed again, 
 and finally became a professional, but always a needy, man of 
 letters. Carleton, in fact, was incapable of managing his own affairs, 
 and even the Crown pension of ;3^2oo a year, which was bestowed 
 upon him in 1848, failed to relieve him from pecuniary embarrass- 
 ments. Though he was never paid in accordance with the 
 literary merit of his work, the sums he received ought, with good 
 management, and with the help of his pension, to have kept him 
 in comfort and free from the incubus of debt. 
 
 Carleton came of a Romish family; and the fact that he 
 became clerk to a Protestant society indicates a change of religion. 
 In truth, sometimes from conviction, sometimes, it is to be feared, 
 under the pressure of his needs, Carleton was in one part of 
 his life or another nearly everything that an Irishman could be. 
 He was by a trick made a Ribbonman before he had ceased to 
 be a schoolboy. He has written for landlord and for tenant, 
 for Papist and for Orangeman. This fact has diminished his 
 popularity among his countrymen, but it makes him all the 
 more interesting. His change of religion was the outcome of 
 that remarkable personal experience narrated in The Pilgrimage to 
 Lough Derg, of which, with his customary naive self-conceit, but 
 not wholly without reason, Carleton speaks as " probably one of 
 the most extraordinary productions that ever appeared in any 
 literature^" It is so by reason of its singular vividness and truth : 
 the author declares that there is " not even an exaggeration of any 
 kind" in the narrative, and that Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, who 
 made the pilgrimage long afterwards, had assured him that he 
 was surprised by its truth and accuracy. 
 
 The Pilgrimage to Lough Derg, Vv'hich appeared in The Christian 
 Exafniner in 1828, marks Carleton's entrance into literature. For 
 several years he wrote for The Examiner and for The JVatiotial 
 Magazine, and from 1833 onwards his name is prominent as a 
 contributor to The Dublin University Magazine. Meanwhile, a 
 number of his papers had been gathered into volumes. The first 
 was his Father Butler and The Lough Derg Pilgrim (1829). 
 ^ O'Donoghue's Carleton, i. loi. 
 
 40 — 2
 
 628 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 This was followed by Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry 
 (1830), to which a second series was added three years later. 
 Carleton justly calls it his greatest work. The Tales of Ireland 
 (1834) stand on a far lower level. Of Carleton's longer works, 
 among the best are Fardorougha the Miser, which first appeared 
 in The Dublin University Magazine in 183 7- 1838, Valentine 
 McClutchy (1845), The Black Prophet (1847) and The Emigrants 
 of Ahadarra (1847). There is good work also in Parra Sastha, 
 or the History of Paddy Go-easy and his wife Nancy (1845) 
 and in The Tithe Proctor (1849); but these roused much feeling 
 against Carleton in his native country. The satire on Irish shift- 
 lessness in the former was resented ; and the fact that in the 
 latter the writer took the side of the minority against the majority 
 gave still deeper offence. 
 
 But while Carleton, not unnaturally, was willing enough to 
 give expression to the views of the party of his adoption, the 
 genuine and great grievances and sufferings of the other party 
 never passed from his mind. In his old age he wrote that within 
 his own memory, under the penal laws, " there was nothing in 
 existence for the Catholics for the worship of God except the 
 mere altar, covered with a little open roof to protect the priest 
 from rain, which it was incapable of doing " ; and he could 
 recollect a time when there was " no law against an Orangeman, 
 and no \a.wf for a Papist." His Valentine McClutchy is a story 
 of the dominance of Orangeism and the oppression of the land- 
 laws, the germ of which was an Orange outrage perpetrated in 
 his father's house when Carleton was a mere boy ; and his Black 
 Prophet is an appalling picture of sufferings from famine. It 
 was founded upon a forgotten famine of Carleton's youth ; but, 
 appearing as it did when the great famine was raging, it was 
 believed to be a picture of what was then taking place. 
 
 It is Carleton's misfortune that, among his novels, the one 
 which is best known is the commonplace Willy Reilly (1855). 
 Before that was published he had passed his youth. In his 
 early novels, and in the Traits and Stories, he had used the 
 best of the materials of his own experience. He had either to 
 repeat himself, or to wander into unfamiliar ground ; and the
 
 AFTER SCOTT 629 
 
 moment he does so he becomes uninteresting. It is by the 
 Traits and Stories that his name must Uve. In these and in 
 the best of his novels the characters, both male and female, are 
 well drawn and the story is vivid. But in all his longer works 
 Carleton is irregular; something weak and flat is constantly 
 intruding to spoil what is powerful, pathetic or lively. The 
 Traits and Stories are free from such irregularities. The different 
 tales, it is true, vary widely in quality ; but when Carleton has a good 
 theme, and his imagination is fired with it, there is neither pause 
 nor decline. In literary quality the pathetic stories, such as The 
 Poor Scholar and Tubber Derg, are the best ; but the humorous 
 pictures of rough Irish life are excellent too. Their fault is exaggera- 
 tion. There is rather more than enough of extravagant humour and 
 burlesque ; but the pictures of faction fights, weddings and wakes, 
 and the characters of the hedge schoolmaster and his scholars, 
 the smuggler, the Whiteboy, the pig-driver, and the innumerable 
 oddities of Irish life, are all the more valuable because, as a 
 countryman of their creator's pointed out in The Edinburgh 
 Review in 1848, they are pictures of a class who were even then 
 passing away "from the records of history, and from the memory 
 of man for ever\" 
 
 The two men whose names Carleton associates with his own 
 were both cut off in their prime, and the work of Griffin especially 
 must be regarded rather as the promise of what he might have 
 done than as the ripe fruit of his intellect. 
 
 John Banim (i 798-1842) collaborated with his elder brother 
 Michael (1796-1874) in their most famous and best work, the 
 Tales by the CHara Family (1825-1827), and he wrote besides 
 one or two tragedies and a good deal of verse. All the Irish 
 writers of the time were more or less poets as well as writers of 
 prose. There is an unmistakable strain of poetry in Carleton's 
 prose, and, though he wrote very little verse that is worthy of 
 remembrance, his Sir Turlough deserves a high place among 
 modern ballads. On the poetic side Griffin was the most highly 
 gifted of the three. He has left a considerable body of good 
 poems, and among them are a few which approach excellence. 
 ^ Quoted in O'Donoghue's Carleton, i. 150.
 
 630 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Eileen Aroon is a piece of rare delicacy, and The Wake of the 
 Absent is at once touching and beautiful. Banim never rises to 
 this level, and most of his verse is rough and faulty. 
 
 The story of the life of John Banim is rendered beautiful by 
 the devotion of the elder brother and by the heroic fortitude of 
 the younger under intense physical suffering, his warm family 
 affections and his generous helpfulness to countrymen more needy 
 than himself. Michael seems to have been almost, if not quite, as 
 well endowed for literature as John; but it was the latter who 
 went to London, where, after some attempts, not wholly unsuc- 
 cessful, at the drama, he settled down as a writer of Irish tales ; 
 and it was only through his encouragement that the elder brother 
 became a writer too. The deliberate purpose of the Banims was 
 to do for Ireland what Scott had done for Scotland ; and though 
 they were younger men than Carleton they had the advantage of 
 anticipating him in the date of their writings. They had sufficient 
 tact and insight to be aware that no mere collection of comic 
 tales, however amusing, or of reckless adventures, however 
 exciting, would serve their purpose. The Irish have been singu- 
 larly unfortunate in some of their literary representatives. By 
 Lever and by Lover they are depicted simply as a people of 
 riotous mirth. The Banims show the tears as well as the laughter, 
 the melancholy which is no less a trait of the Celt than mirth, 
 while it unquestionably has deeper roots. But the Banims had 
 scarcely enough of the artistic gift, and they failed to fuse their 
 materials. Too often we find a grave chapter followed by a 
 humorous one for no better reason than that the writer feels it 
 necessary to illustrate the other side of character. Too often the 
 garrulity of some old peasant woman retards the progress of the 
 story at a critical point, when the reader has as little patience 
 with her as the actors in the tale. Shakespeare finds room for 
 Mrs Quickly in his Henry IV, but not between Hotspur and 
 Prince Hal on the field of Shrewsbury. Scott brings in Mause 
 Headrigg with effect at Drumclog; but her utterances are crisp 
 and vigorous and short, and she is a component part of the scene, 
 not an excrescence. This higher skill the Banims did not possess. 
 It was not wholly the fault of the writer that The Croppy (by
 
 AFTER SCOTT 63 1 
 
 Michael Banim\ a tale of the rebellion of 1798, fell so far short 
 of Scott's story of the '45. The absence of romantic glamour is 
 partly due to the fact that the events were too recent, but still 
 more to the fact that the Irish rising was, on the whole, a movement 
 of the peasantry alone, without their natural leaders. The High- 
 land host without Vich Ian Vohr and his fellow-chieftains would 
 have been sordid enough. This defect of The Croppy is rather 
 inherent in the subject than due to Banim's treatment of it ; but 
 he is certainly responsible for the lack of concentration which the 
 story shows. The same writer's earlier tale however, Crohoore of 
 the Bill-hook is vigorously written, and his brother's story, The 
 Nowlans, is powerful as well as tragic. 
 
 The other name which Carleton condescended to associate 
 with his own was that of Gerald Griffin (1803 -1840), the friend of 
 Banim. Griffin was a man of sensitive and even morbid conscience. 
 He established his footing in the world of letters after a hard 
 struggle, in the course of which he proved himself to possess no 
 ordinary capacity for delineating passion. Then he was seized 
 with scruples. He thought such delineations harmful ; and when 
 he had once convinced himself of this no persuasion could induce 
 him to continue. He abandoned literature and devoted himself 
 to the work of a charitable brotherhood of the Romish Church ; 
 and in that work he contracted the disease which carried him off 
 at the early age of thirty-seven. 
 
 The most noteworthy product of Griffin's brief literary career 
 is The CoUigians (1829), widely known as The Colleen Sawn, 
 under which title it was dramatised by Dion Boucicault. In this 
 powerful tragedy the influence of Scott is manifest. But though a 
 work of high promise it is still immature ; and we may reasonably 
 suppose that at thirty-seven Griffin could have far surpassed the 
 work of the young man of twenty-six. The defect of The Collegians 
 is precisely that which mars also the Tales by the OHara Family. 
 The anecdotes, the references to the customs of the country, all 
 that gives local colour, delay the progress of the story rather than 
 further it. In many instances the specially Irish scenes are 
 brought in by violence where they have no business to be — for 
 example, the chatter of the barber while he is cutting the hair of
 
 632 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Hardress Cregan. At the age at which Griffin wrote The Col- 
 legians, it was hardly possible for him to have a profound know- 
 ledge of character, and sometimes, as in the case of the milk-and- 
 water Kyrle Daly, he fails completely in delineation. But as a 
 rule his characters, though they are not deep studies, give the 
 impression of reality; and here too a wider experience would 
 have taught him much. His method was right, his narrative 
 good; only time and practice were needed to raise him to 
 excellence. 
 
 Carleton, like Mangan, lived and wrote in the country where 
 he was born ; but Ireland had no such literary centre as, in those 
 days, Scotland had in Edinburgh, and no such organ as The 
 Edinburgh Review or Blackwood's Magazine. The establishment 
 of The DubVm University Magazine in 1833 in some degree 
 supplied the latter want ; and The Nation newspaper, founded in 
 1842, had an influence simply incalculable in the development of 
 national spirit. It is notorious that to the latter is due a whole 
 literature in verse, of which it may be said that, though the pane- 
 gyrists of Celticism have greatly exaggerated its merits as poetry, 
 they could not exaggerate its practical importance. Meanwhile 
 however there had been a considerable leakage of literary talent 
 to the wealthier sister-island and the more attractive centre of 
 London. Darley and Banim were there, and there Gerald Griffin 
 struggled to establish himself. Thither too ultimately drifted 
 William Maginn (i 793-1 84 2), who was for a time a centre of 
 attraction to other Irishmen. His career, though far from credit- 
 able, is interesting and instructive. In early years he followed 
 his father's profession of schoolmaster at Cork, and while thus 
 engaged he established a connexion with Blackwood'' s Magazine, 
 surprising the Edinburgh men by the extraordinary vividness 
 with which he realised the life and the society which at that time 
 he had never seen. His learning, his versatility and his exuberant 
 wit made him a contributor inferior in importance only to Wilson 
 and Lockhart. But although he had many engaging qualities 
 Maginn was not a man to be relied upon ; and after many years 
 of friendly relations Blackwood and he became estranged. Mean- 
 while Maginn had moved to London, where he was for a time on
 
 AFTER SCOTT 633 
 
 terms of intimacy with Thackeray, then a young man seeking to 
 establish himself in the world of journalism. The best known 
 and probably the most life-like portrait of the Bohemian Doctor 
 is the satirist's Captain Shandon. But if Thackeray saw his 
 weaknesses he looked upon them with a kindly eye, and is said 
 to have helped him in his difficulties with a loan of ;;^5oo — 
 which, of course, was never repaid. 
 
 Maginn was unquestionably a man of brilliant gifts, but he 
 had no backbone of character. His course almost from the start 
 was downward. As early as 1826 Lockhart writes of him: "I 
 never saw a man grow more inferior to himself in a short time 
 than he has to the O'Doherty^ of former days. Newspaper 
 scribbling has totally destroyed a style that was always too light 
 and hasty. There is now little whalebone indeed remaining'." 
 Nevertheless, Maginn had still a great reputation, and whenever 
 there was a new enterprise on foot he seems to have been thought 
 of either as editor or as contributor. He was engaged on John 
 Murray's unsuccessful newspaper, The Representative; but "he 
 was better at borrowing money than at writing articles^" 
 
 The most important event in Maginn's literary life was the 
 establishment, in conjunction with his friend Hugh Fraser, of the 
 celebrated Fraser^ s Magazine (1830), the publication of which 
 was entrusted to James Fraser because he happened to bear the 
 same surname as Maginn's friend. Maginn used his acquaintance 
 with the Blackwood staff, his other literary connexions and his 
 own reputation to draw around the new magazine a band of con- 
 tributors more brilliant even than that which supported " Maga." 
 Among the older writers who lent their aid were Coleridge and 
 Southey; among Maginn's own contemporaries were Lockhart, 
 Carlyle and Edward Irving j among the younger men was 
 Thackeray. No English periodical ever possessed a more brilliant 
 staff than Fraser in its early days. 
 
 One of the older writers who, as a member of the Fraser 
 group, may be briefly noticed here, was Theodore Hook (1788- 
 
 ^ Maginn's no?n de plume in Blackwood, 
 2 Mrs Oliphant's Blackwood, i. -243. 
 * SroAts^ John Murray, ii. 209.
 
 634 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 1 841). He was already somewhat past his prime. The brilliancy 
 of his conversation, his extraordinary gift for extempore verse and 
 his exhaustless resources for entertainment made him in his youth 
 a favourite in society. Through his powerful acquaintances he 
 procured the post of Accountant-General of the Mauritius ; but 
 he returned with a cloud upon his character. Large sums of 
 money which were under his charge had disappeared, and he was 
 prosecuted for embezzlement. The matter has never been satis- 
 factorily cleared up ; but it seems probable that Hook was 
 culpably careless rather than criminally guilty. He became a 
 political journalist, editing and largely writing the John Bull. 
 To this journal Maginn contributed, and so the connexion between 
 him and Hook began. 
 
 Hook's novels belong to the later stage of his career. The 
 first part of his Sayings and Doings appeared in 1824, Maxwell, 
 the most carefully framed of them all, in 1830. Gilbert Gurney 
 (1836) has a special interest because it is to a considerable extent 
 autobiographical. But not one of Hook's novels strikes the 
 modern reader as worthy of the author's unquestionable gifts. 
 Jack Brag (1837), for example, is a somewhat coarse story of the 
 adventures and misadventures of a vulgar toady and pretender to 
 gentility. He is the son of a candle-maker, and he hears with 
 dismay any chance word that may possibly allude to his father's 
 trade, which is carried on by his mother. Matter like this, which 
 might be tolerable enough for a chapter or two, becomes nauseous 
 in the extreme when it is spread over a whole novel. Such as it 
 is, moreover, Hook treats it with far less cleverness and resource 
 than he frequently expended on a hoax, or in extemporising 
 verses for the entertainment of a dinner party. The interest of 
 his novels now is rather extrinsic than intrinsic. Dickens bor- 
 rowed one or two notable incidents and characters. Hook's 
 Kekewich is the prototype of Jingle, and more than a hint for 
 the breach of promise case in Pickwick is to be found in the 
 history of Mrs Fuggleston. It may be remarked in passing that 
 there is something regal in Dickens's "conveyances." "Bill 
 Stumps, his mark," is taken unblushingly from The Antiquary. 
 And the confidence of Dickens has been justified by the fact that
 
 AFTER SCOTT 635 
 
 the fun and humour have passed to his credit. The far more 
 masterly scene in Scott is rarely referred to, and the name Aiken 
 Drum probably carries no meaning to nine out of ten of those 
 who are delighted with Bill Stumps. 
 
 Maginn is now magni nominis umbra. Destitute of the self- 
 control which devotion to a great aim demands, writing always in 
 a hurry and often in the midst of dissipations, he squandered on 
 ephemeral journalism intellectual powers and literary gifts of a 
 rare kind. He was a man of varied learning; he had the capacity 
 to be a great critic, and in occasional articles he did excellent 
 critical work ; he was an admirable story-teller, and had he 
 possessed the gifts of concentration and perseverance he might 
 have been a great novelist. But after a life of forty-nine years all 
 these talents produce only a few volumes of fugitive writings, for 
 the greater part too thin and ephemeral to be worth reading now. 
 
 Maginn however, not only by his own writings, but by the 
 company he gathered round him, communicated a noticeable 
 Irish flavour to Fraser^s Magazine. Among his countrymen who 
 wrote for it were Francis Mahony (1804-1866) and Crofton 
 Croker, the former of whom is best known by his nom de plume of 
 Father Prout. The famous Reliques were contributions to Fraser's 
 Magazine; and it is humiliating to human taste and to the human 
 intellect to remember that while Sai-tor Resartus came near 
 bringing ruin upon the magazine, the papers of Mahony were 
 among its most powerful supports. To skim the pages of Maginn 
 is melancholy work, but to turn over those of Father Prout is 
 more melancholy still. Mahony's wit has long been stale, and he 
 deserves a passing mention not so much for his native merits as 
 because he was once a conspicuous figure in a remarkable literary 
 band. This eclipse is due less to the fault of the man than to the 
 species of literature which he cultivated. The harlequin is per- 
 manent in letters as on the stage, but each age must produce its 
 own. A new generation will no more accept the Mahony or the 
 Douglas Jerrold of the old than it would laugh at the ghost of 
 Grimaldi at its Christmas pantomime. 
 
 The connexion of T. Crofton Croker (i 798-1854) with Fraser 
 was less intimate, and he is now best remembered not as an
 
 6^6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 original writer but as a collector. His Fairy Legends and Tradi- 
 tions of the South of Ireland (1825) and his Legends of the Lakes 
 (1829) are admirable of their kind; but in the composition of 
 them he received a good deal of help, from Maginn among 
 others. 
 
 There remain two Irishmen who, though they were caricaturists 
 rather than artists, have done more than all the rest to create the 
 Irishman of Hterature. These were Samuel Lover (1797-1868) 
 and Charles Lever (1806-1872). They have some affinities; but 
 whereas the caricature of the Irish nature in Lever is relieved and 
 varied by the rapid rush of events, in Lover it is the staple, and 
 the reader becomes unpleasantly conscious of its essential falsity 
 and hoUowness. Like many of his countrymen, Lover was 
 remarkable for his versatility; and like not a few of them he 
 lowered the quality of his work by the lack of concentration 
 which that versatility indicated. He was a painter as well as an 
 author, he wrote verse as well as prose, dramas as well as novels. 
 He composed the music for his own songs, and sang them too 
 with excellent effect. He also tried the stage in Rory O'More, 
 dramatised from his own novel of that title, but speedily gave 
 it up. 
 
 Lover's talents were superficial, though brilliant. Unlike 
 Maginn, he made the most of his life and of his powers, working 
 hard in his cheery way. But his Irish stories, Rory O'More (1837) 
 and Handy Andy (1842), show how weary a thing is "gaiety 
 without echpse." The latter, which is probably his best known 
 book, is altogether formless and exceedingly tedious. The charac- 
 ters are worthless, and we feel that nature and truth are not in it. 
 Lover's supreme gift was the gift of comic verse. His serious 
 poems are poor ; but in humorous songs, such as the well-known 
 Widozv Mochree, he is equal to the best. 
 
 This gift of humorous verse is one of the points of resemblance 
 between Lover and Lever; and the latter's Widow Malone is 
 worthy of a place by the side of Lover's Widow Machree. But in all 
 other respects Lever is much superior. Carleton and Banim have 
 undoubtedly drawn the Celt more accurately than Lever ; but no 
 one else has made him so popular. There are multitudes of
 
 AFTER SCOTT 637 
 
 Englishmen whose conception of Irish life and of the Irish 
 character is drawn from Lever, and who, when they think of the 
 Irishman, do so through the medium of Lever's stories. And yet 
 it is plain that the characters are little better than farcical carica- 
 tures, and that Lever only skims the surface of Irish life. His 
 superficiality may have been partly due to the fact that by blood 
 he was more English than Irish. His father migrated from Man- 
 chester to Ireland, and his mother too was of a family originally 
 English. 
 
 Lever was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where in 183 1 P 
 he took his degree of bachelor of medicine ; but he never took 
 kindly to the medical profession, and was glad to shake it off for 
 the profession of letters, and for the post of British Consul, first 
 at Spezzia and then at Trieste, where he died. In 1836 he had 
 become a contributor to The Dublin University Magazine, and 
 from 1842 to 1845 he edited it. Another contributor to the 
 magazine in those days was Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), 
 who towards the close of his life became its proprietor and editor. 
 But Le Fanu's early stories were little noticed, and it was not till 
 nearly a generation later that he won his modest measure of 
 success as a novelist. At this time he was known chiefly for his 
 Irish ballads, some of which were sung by Lover, and are not 
 infrequently attributed to the singer. 
 
 To those early years belong what have certainly been Lever's 
 most popular novels, Harry Lorrequer (1839), Charles CAIalley 
 (1841), Jack Hinton (1843) and Tom Burke of Ours (1844). 
 In later days Lever's books showed an advance in literary skill, 
 and, though he was never a careful writer, he worked in a less 
 reckless style than he did in the beginning of his career. For 
 these reasons some, himself among the number, have preferred 
 certain of his later stories, such as Tony Butler (1865) and Sir 
 Brook Fossbrooke (1866). But the superior popularity of the 
 early tales, and especially of Charles O'Malley, seems to be well 
 deserved. No degree of care or labour could ever have made 
 Lever a great novelist. His conception of character was crude 
 and shallow, and he had little power of construction. Even in 
 his later days the change is, after all, only superficial " You ask
 
 638 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 me how I write," he says to Blackwood as late as 1863; "my 
 reply is, just as I live — from hand to mouth'." And the reply is 
 ari exact statement of the truth, and an explanation at once of 
 Lever's merits and of his defects. Not only did he write rapidly, 
 but he instantly forgot what he had written. His letters from 
 Spezzia and Trieste to the Blackwoods are full of lamentations 
 over ' copy ' which he fears has gone astray. It would not be 
 difficult to write something new, but to write what would fit in to 
 the part before and the part after — hie labor, hoc opus est. In 
 particular, he never could wind up satisfactorily. The characters 
 of a book, he says, "are like the tiresome people who keep 
 you wishing them good-night till you wish them at the devil. 
 They won't go — the step of the hall-door would seem to have 
 bird-lime on it^" Naturally therefore when the influence of the 
 time induced Lever to attempt analysis the result was unsatis- 
 factory. His charm goes as he becomes more consciously literary, 
 and his own preference for these later stories seems to be rather 
 the attempt at self-persuasion of a man who suspects that his day 
 is over than a genuine opinion. 
 
 There is however sound self-criticism in the opinion Lever 
 expresses of the series of miscellaneous papers entitled Cornelius 
 O'Dowd upon Men, Women, a?id other Things (i 864-1 865). 
 "They are," he says, "the sort of things I can do best. I have 
 seen a great deal of life, and have a tolerably good memory for 
 strange and out-of-the-way people, and I am sure such sketches 
 are far more my 'speciality' than story-writing^" Just for this 
 reason the early stories, reckless and planless, are the best. The 
 qualities which give Lever's works their value are the lively narra- 
 tive, the humour and the "rollick." He stands supreme for 
 unfailing flow of spirits. In the early tales these qualities are 
 unrestrained, and neither facts, nor character, nor plot is allowed 
 to interfere with them. Harry Lorrequer and Charles O'Malley 
 go where the whim of the author decides, and do whatever most 
 tends to entertainment. Lever naturally took first the cream of 
 that experience of life and knowledge of strange characters of 
 
 ^ Blackwood and his Sons, iii. 226. 
 
 * Downey's Charlis Lever, ii. 75-76. * ibid. ii. 14.
 
 AFTER SCOTT 639 
 
 which he speaks. Many of the most eccentric characters and 
 not a few of the most surprising adventures were real. Major 
 Monsoon was an officer in the British army, who by a legal deed, 
 for the sum of four napoleons, assigned to Lever the right to 
 make what use he pleased of himself and his adventures, or what 
 he described as his adventures. 
 
 Charles O'Malley is a story not merely of Irish life, but of the 
 great struggle which was convulsing Europe during Lever's child- 
 hood ; and when Thackeray parodied Lever in Fhil Fogarty, the 
 fighting element was one of the principal points upon which he 
 directed his good-natured satire. Lever thus belongs not only 
 to the Irish group, but to the class of military novelists, whom 
 the stir and excitement, the glory and the sufferings of the 
 Napoleonic wars called into existence. He was not the earliest 
 of the class, but he was the best, because he was most successful 
 in welding fiction with history, or perhaps rather because he 
 firmly resolved to subordinate history to fiction ; for the historical 
 element in Lever's lively tales is very slight indeed. Among the 
 other novelists of the war was Lever's countryman and friend, 
 WiUiam Hamilton Maxwell (i 792-1850), whose work helped to 
 turn the younger man's attention to the war. Maxwell had been 
 through the Peninsular campaigns and had been present at the 
 battle of Waterloo ; and his most notable productions, Stories of 
 Waterloo (1834) and The Bivouac, or, Stories of the Peninsular 
 War (1837), deal with what he had himself witnessed. For that 
 reason they are interesting ; but they are too crude and inartistic 
 to have much value as literature. 
 
 Another writer on military subjects who, like Maxwell, adopted 
 the autobiographic process, was George Robert Gleig (1796-1888), 
 whose tale The Subaltern (1826) was exceedingly popular and 
 still remains both readable and instructive. It was warmly praised 
 by Wellington ; and the correspondence started between the author 
 and the Duke on the proposed dedication of The Subaltern led 
 ultimately to the production of Gleig's Life of Wellington. These 
 are the only items of Gleig's writing that still retain any interest; 
 but his pen was extremely prolific, and Lockhart in 1828 writes 
 of him as having " some sermons, some novels, and some histories
 
 640 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 all at press in London at this moment'," besides an unknown \ 
 amount in Edinburgh. Slightly later Thomas Hamilton (1789- j 
 1842), brother of the philosopher, Sir William Hamilton, followed \ 
 in the wake of Gleig with CyrtV Thor7iton (1827), in which he j 
 carries his hero through the same struggle. The narrative is good 1 
 and vigorous, but there is not much character-drawing, and very \ 
 little plot. The conditions of the subject encouraged a story of , 
 the Defoe type rather than a modern novel. j 
 
 Considerably later in date, but still occupied with the same j 
 themes, was James Grant (1822-1887). While Maxwell and Gleig | 
 worked upon personal experience, Grant told his tales of the 
 same great conflict at second hand. His father had served in the 
 Peninsula, and the novelist himself at one time held a commission. | 
 The Romance of War (1845) is the best, as it is also the best known ' 
 of his numerous productions. Grant paid more attention to his- ' 
 torical accuracy than his predecessors. While the character and 
 adventures of his hero are fictitious. The Romance of War is an ! 
 attempt to follow faithfully the fortunes of the 92nd Highlanders 
 through the Peninsula; and herein Hes at once its interest and 
 its artistic defect. The story is sacrificed to the exigencies of fact, 
 and the result is a work which is neither a history nor a novel. 
 ^ As the Peninsular battles inspired one group of writers, so 
 the career of Nelson and the glories of the British navy inspired 
 another ; and if Lever is the laureate of the Irish soldier, Frederick 
 Marryat (i 792-1848) is the laureate of the British sailor. The ; 
 nautical novel differs somewhat widely from the stories founded i 
 upon campaigns on land. In the case of the latter we sometimes 1 
 see the influence of Defoe, and sometimes that of Scott ; but the i 
 nautical novelists are all of the school of Smollett : Roderick j 
 Random rather than Waverley was the model upon which they 
 worked. This was natural enough. Scott's only story dealing 1 
 with the sea is The Pirate, and the scene even of that is on land. i 
 When seafaring characters, like Dirk Hatteraick and Nanty Evvart, ^ 
 appear, they are always subordinate. Scott knew himself to be 
 a landsman, and he wisely refrained from committing himself too 
 far on an element unfamiliar to him. As it was, his deficiencies, 
 
 ^ William Blackwood, i. 242.
 
 AFTER SCOTT 64 1 
 
 revealed in The Pirate, provoked Fenimore Cooper, who had 
 served at sea, to write The Pilot. But though Cooper's novel 
 preceded by several years the earliest of Marryat's, the latter drew 
 nothing from it. On sea as in the forest Cooper was a romanticist, 
 while Marryat was a realist. 
 
 By profession a sailor, Marryat is in his sea stories thoroughly 
 at home with his subject. He had learnt in a school which, for the 
 accumulation of such material as he best knew how to use, was 
 better even than that of Nelson himself. His first commander 
 was the great Cochrane, afterwards Lord Dundonald, whom he has 
 depicted in the Captain Savage of Peter Simple (1834). In the 
 Imperieuse under Cochrane, Marryat in three years saw more than 
 fifty engagements and was thrice wounded. When therefore, 
 influenced perhaps by literary ambition, he gave up his sea-faring 
 life, he had accumulated in his memory an almost inexhaustible 
 fund of stories, adventures, situations and characters. At the 
 same time, he did not disdain external aid, and in Peter Simple 
 he has borrowed from the extraordinary adventures of Donat 
 O'Brien. 
 
 In respect of truth and reality, Marryat had an immense 
 advantage over Lever. The latter's Irish dragoons are drawn 
 from a merely superficial knowledge of the class ; but Marryat 
 thoroughly understood his sailors, so that even when he draws 
 a caricature it is also a likeness. It has moreover been pointed 
 out that his pictures of life at sea possess a special interest, because 
 that life as he knew it has passed away for ever. Steam and 
 machinery have completely changed the conditions. Marryat is 
 our best first-hand authority on the great age of the English navy, 
 and in the nature of things he can never be superseded. Some 
 far greater literary genius may arise who shall reconstruct that 
 life, as Scott reconstructed the life of various epochs of history, 
 as Thackeray in Esmoitd reconstructed the age of Anne, as 
 Dumas reconstructed the French musketeer, as Kingsley in 
 Westward Ho reconstructed the Elizabethan sailor. But this 
 can only be done on the basis of naval records and of the 
 writings of such men as Marryat. He had seen and known what 
 his successors can only imagine. 
 
 w. 41
 
 642 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Perhaps the best, and certainly the most popular, of Marr>'at's 
 stories are Petei- Simple, Jacob Faithful (1834) and Alidship- 
 man Easy (1836); \{h.\\e. Jap/iet in Search of a Father (1836) 
 and Masfer7nan Ready (1841) are good examples of a somewhat 
 different type of story. In the more stirring sea-stories the life 
 depicted is rude and boisterous to excess. Storm and battle, 
 fun, frolic and adventure, wild escapade and reckless practical 
 joke crowd one upon the other. The manner befits the matter. 
 Marryat's style is careless, often incorrect, never polished ; but 
 still it is effective, and its very roughness has an aflinity to the 
 subject which a style more refined and literary would have lacked. 
 Marryat makes no pretence of profundity. There is no plot, only 
 a racy story. He has no key to unlock the human heart; but 
 though his characters are not revelations, his habit of drawing 
 from the life gives them a certain convincing naturalness which 
 is often lacking in more ambitious studies. His range is 
 considerable. Newton Forster (1832) does for the merchant- 
 service what Peter Sifnple does for the royal navy. Japhet in 
 Search of a Father is a well-told story wherein the interest is 
 sustained without that rush of adventure which is characteristic 
 of the sea-novels ; and Mastermati Ready, one of the numerous 
 progeny of Robinson Crusoe, surpasses the work of the ordinary 
 writers of boys' books almost as much as it falls short of the 
 masterpiece on which it is founded. Probably few, judging from 
 the sea-stories alone, would have anticipated Marryat's success in 
 this quieter and, as regards style and tone, more domestic class 
 of novels. Like Thackeray, Marryat transmitted to a daughter, 
 Florence, a portion of his literary gifts; but it reappears in an 
 attenuated form, and is, of course, exercised in other fields. 
 
 Marr)'at was not without his rivals and imitators. Of these. 
 Captains Glascock (i 787-1847) and Frederick Chamier (1796- 
 1870) were, like Marryat himself, professional seamen and 
 thoroughly familiar witli their subject. They had not however, 
 in any marked degree, the literary gift which is even more indis- 
 pensable; for, as :.Ir Rudyard Kipling has proved, a landsman 
 may acquire sufificient knowledge for the purpose, and may even 
 satisfy the sharpest professional critic. Glascock began his career
 
 AFTER SCOTT 643 
 
 with the Naval Sketch-Book (1S26), three years before Marryat's 
 first publication, but in his subsequent writings he was in- 
 fluenced by Marryat. So was Chamier, who, through his novels 
 Ben Brace {iZt^6), The Arethiisa (1837), and Tom Bowling {\'ii\\), 
 is rather better remembered in the present day than Glascock. 
 His stories however contain little that is not better given in 
 Marryat's, and they hardly deserve a permanent place in 
 literature. 
 
 Much superior to either of these men was Michael Scott 
 (1789-1835), whose talent for description and fluent narrative 
 more than counterbalanced his inferiority in technical know- 
 ledge to the professional writers. He passed some years in the 
 West Indies, and there, and in his voyages to and fro, he acquired 
 that experience of the sea and of life in tropical climates which 
 he afterwards used to very good purpose in Tom Cringle^s Log 
 (1829-1830) and The Cruise of tlie Midge (1836). Scott was 
 one of the writers whom Blackwood enlisted in the service ot 
 his magazine, in the pages of which both of the above-named 
 books appeared. De Quincey admired Tom Cringle so greatly 
 as to declare that in some of his sketches the author had "the 
 mingled powers of Salvator Rosa and of Hogarth\" The date ot 
 Tom Cri7igle's Log is sufficient proof that Scott was not an 
 imitator of Marryat. The superficial resemblances between the 
 two writers are due to similarity of topics : in manner of treatment 
 they diverge widely. Marryat is by far the better story-teller, and 
 his books have far more unity. He is also the superior of Scott 
 in energy and rattling spirit ; but, on the other hand, Scott's style 
 is more cultivated and his tone more refined than Marryat's. 
 Neither is there much affinity between Scott and Fenimore 
 Cooper, though the Scottish writer has been affiliated to the 
 American. Probably he followed, consciously or unconsciously, 
 the method of the Nodes Ambrosianae. There is the same 
 extravagance, the same inequality, the same boisterous mirth and 
 humour, the same disregard of sequence and connexion. 
 
 After the death of Marryat, James Hannay (1827-1873) in 
 Singleton Fontenoy (1850) seemed for a moment disposed to take 
 1 Mrs Oliphant's William Blackwood, i, 443. 
 
 41—2
 
 644 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 up the novel of the sea. He had in boyhood served in the 
 navy ; but he never repeated this experiment, though he became 
 and continued to be a professional man of letters, displaying in his 
 Satire and Satirists a greater gift for criticism than he had shown 
 for fiction. 
 
 All of these writers more or less closely cohere with one another 
 in groups ; but there were besides in the latter part of the time of 
 Scott and afterwards a few who worked independently and some- 
 times in remote fields. One was Thomas Hope (i 770-1831), 
 author of the once famous Anastasius (18 19), a story which 
 illustrates better than most the tendency of prose-fiction to lose 
 its flavour. It was doubtless partly its theme — the adventures 
 of a modern Greek — which led to its being attributed to Byron ; 
 but so high was the opinon held of it that there seemed nothing 
 extravagant in the supposition that it was the work of one of the 
 two or three men of widest European reputation. Now, probably, 
 few readers get through it without weariness. 
 
 In those days the Levant was " the East " ; but James Morier 
 (1780?-! 849) went farther, and in his Adventures of Hajji Baba 
 of Ispahan (1824), with its sequel four years later, in which Hajji 
 Baba is brought to England, and in Ayesha, ike Maid of Kars 
 (1834) he produced books at once amusing, instructive and 
 genuinely literary. Hajji Baba is a sort of Eastern Gil Bias — a 
 Persian adventurer who in the course of a wandering life meets 
 with all manner of experiences, the very conception of which 
 demanded on the part of the author a familiarity with Eastern 
 life which at that date no one but himself possessed, and which 
 only two or three, like Sir Richard Burton and Mr C. M. Doughty, 
 have since rivalled. There is probably no faculty more rare than 
 that which enables a man of the West to realise the character of 
 the East, and this faculty Morier possessed in perfection. The 
 narrative in Hajji Baba is excellent; the style is simple and 
 agreeable, never pretentious, but always rising easily to the level 
 of the occasion. 
 
 Samuel Warren (1807-1870) was somewhat less isolated than 
 these two. He found his subjects in England, and he had 
 affinities with Theodore Hook before him and with Dickens after
 
 AFTER SCOTT 645 
 
 him. In his Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician he 
 origirated a type now almost as well established as the detective 
 story or the story of the sea. Like many other initiators, Warren 
 at first found difficulty in getting a hearing ; the publishers were, 
 as usual, afraid of novelty ; and it was only after the MS. had 
 been hawked about to weariness that it was accepted by Black' 
 wood. The title sufficiently indicates that the work is not a 
 regular novel. It is a series of sketches, which, beginning in 1830, 
 continued for many years to appear at intervals in the magazine. 
 The great merit of the sketches is their verisimilitude- The 
 author, a man bubbling over with harmless vanity, relates with 
 pride to his publisher how the Diary was attributed to this or 
 the other famous physician, and how overwhelmed men were 
 with admiration of the "prodigious talents" of the unknown 
 author. Once again, in Ten Thousand a Year (1839— 1841), 
 Warren won the widest popularity. Good judges compared him 
 with Dickens, not to the advantage of the latter. The book is a 
 novel, rather than a series of sketches like the Diary, and it is 
 amusing enough in a somewhat farcical way, but it was shrewdly 
 remarked that the author not only never had _;^io,ooo a year, 
 but never knew a man who had it. As the great majority of his 
 readers were in the same predicament, the defect indicated was 
 unnoticed, the book was extremely popular, and Warren seemed 
 to have good reason for regarding himself as a writer in the fore- 
 front of literature. But he had really written himself out. He 
 never again rose to the level of these two books ; and even they 
 have sunk into oblivion, because they are unsupported by those 
 other great works which were expected to come, but which never 
 came. Warren, it is true, wrote more, but never again was he 
 decidedly successful. 
 
 There still remain two novelists who attained in their own 
 generation greater fame than any of those hitherto noticed, with 
 the possible exception of Lever. These are Edward Bulwer, 
 afterwards Bulwer-Lytton and Lord Lytton, and Benjamin Disraeli, 
 afterwards Earl of Beaconsfield. There are several points of con- 
 tact between them. Both were politicians as well as men of letters, 
 and each of them changed his side in politics ; they were among
 
 646 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the most versatile as well as the keenest intellects of their time ; 
 and both were somewhat theatrical in their style. 
 ^ The first Lord Lytton (i 803-1 873) betrayed a restless character 
 and a versatile intellect from boyhood. He was an author while 
 still in his teens ; he won the Chancellor's medal at Cambridge ; 
 he disappeared from society, joined a roving band of gipsies, and 
 even married a gipsy girl after the tribal fashion. The bent of his 
 own mind as well as the tendency of the time turned him towards 
 Byron. In 1827 he published a verse-romance in the Byronic 
 style; and Byron's influence is manifest in Bulwer's first novel, 
 Falkland, a story of crime which appeared in the same year. He 
 afterwards called it his " Sorrows of Werther." The Byronic stamp 
 is also upon his second novel, Pelham (1828), and upon the two 
 famous romances of crime, Paul Clifford (1830) and Eugene Aram 
 (1832). And the resemblance extended to his life as well as to 
 his works. In 1827 Bulwer married, not in the gipsy fashion, but 
 regularly. The marriage was as unhappy as Byron's own. Husband 
 and wife separated, and accusations and upbraidings made their 
 domestic affairs unpleasantly public. Mrs Bulwer, who was brilliant 
 as well as beautiful, after the separation devoted her talents to 
 literature for the double purpose of making money and of avenging 
 her wrongs, real and imaginary. Her novels are spoilt by a violence 
 of temper and language which goes far to explain the unhappiness 
 and affords at least some excuse for Bulwer. 
 
 The estrangement from his mother which was brought about 
 by this marriage made Bulwer dependent upon his pen. As he 
 kept up an expensive establishment he was forced to work beyond 
 his strength, and in doing so wronged his intellect and lowered 
 the quality of his work. Yet the work was not enough for his 
 restless ambition. Busy as he was in literature, he found time for 
 politics. Entering Parliament as a Radical in 183 1, he changed his 
 opinions, and in 1852 passed over to the Conservative side. Six 
 years later he rose to cabinet rank as Secretary for the Colonies. 
 The success he achieved in Parliament is not the least remarkable 
 of Bulwer's performances, for it was won in spite of the most serious 
 disqualifications. Deaf, and hampered by a difficulty of utterance, 
 he yet on occasion rose almost to the level of the greatest orators
 
 AFTER SCOTT 647 
 
 of the day — at least so it seemed to those who heard him, just as 
 it seemed to contemporary readers that he was almost, if not quite, 
 the equal of the greatest authors. 
 
 A visit to Italy turned Bulwer's facile imagination towards the 
 history of that country, and to this we owe The Last Days of 
 Pompeii (1834) and Rienzi (1835). From 1836 to 1840 his prin- 
 cipal works were dramas, which are noticed elsewhere. Then he 
 broke new ground in the romance o{ Zationi (1842). Succeeding 
 on the death of his mother, in 1843, to the estates of Richard 
 Lytton of Knebworth, he assumed the surname of Lytton, by 
 which accordingly he is henceforth known, and under which he 
 was in 1866 raised to the peerage as Baron Lytton of Knebworth. 
 His romance of English history, The Last of the Barons (1843), 
 was the latest work that bore the old name, or rather the initials, 
 E. L. B. The New Tinion (1846) is now best remembered for 
 the bitter retort it provoked from Tennyson. Two years later 
 came a second romance of English history, Harold, and im- 
 mediately after it the epic. King Arthur (1848-1849), which 
 Lytton, with the proverbial perversity of authors, regarded as the 
 finest offspring of his mind. Another fresh start was made in The 
 Caxtons (1849). This, its sequel My Novel (1853), and What 
 will he do with It? (1859) form a group of domestic novels 
 altogether different in kind from Lytton's previous work. He 
 seems to have been conscious that the vogue of his earlier melo- 
 dramatic romance was passing. The Caxtons was a ballon d'essai, 
 and it was published with anxious care for the preservation of 
 anonymity. The result of the experiment was encouraging ; 
 but for some reason Lytton suddenly wheeled round again, 
 and in The Haunted and the Haunters (1859) and A Strange 
 Story (1862) passed from the domestic hearth to the domain of 
 the supernatural. The latter is an artificial mixture of dubious 
 science, metaphysics and thaumaturgy ; but the former is a ghost 
 story weird enough and powerful enough to have tried the nerves 
 of Thackeray. Some years passed during which Lytton added 
 nothing that calls for mention to the list of his works, and but for 
 the history of his closing years it might have seemed that he had 
 written himself out. But The Coming Race (187 1), another
 
 648 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 novelty, showed that he was not only capable of writing still, 
 but of writing something perfectly new. It is one of the earliest 
 and one of the best of the stories which, taking a hint from the 
 New Atlantis of Bacon, have attempted to forecast the changes to 
 be wrought in human life by the discoveries of science; but in 
 Lytton's case the satirical tone turns the edge of criticism directed 
 against the futility of prophecy. Lytton was fond of disguising 
 himself when he made an experiment, and he enjoyed the bewilder- 
 ment and the conjectures of the critics as to the authorship of a 
 work so unlike anything they knew to be his. Kenelm Chillingly 
 (1873), one of his best novels, which has some affinities with The 
 Caxtons group, was finished just before his death. 
 
 Lytton was the most versatile man of letters and the most 
 sensitive literary barometer of his time. He attempted nearly 
 everything, and in the opinion of many of his contemporaries he 
 did nearly everything better than anyone else could do it. Charles 
 Reade, adapting Byron's saying about Sheridan, declared that 
 Lytton had "written the best play, the best comedy and the best 
 novel of the age\" To his novels, his dramas, his lyrical and 
 satirical verse and his epic, must be added miscellaneous essays, a 
 history of Athens, and translations of Schiller and of Horace. And 
 besides all this he wiis a politician, a successful public speaker and 
 a figure in society. 
 
 But even if the view be limited to the novels alone, there is 
 ample evidence of Lytton's versatility ; and at several points valuable 
 light is thrown upon the changes of popular taste, which Lytton 
 either anticipates by some sort of magnetic gift, or else instan- 
 taneously responds to. Not without reason Harriet Martineau 
 called him "a woman of genius enclosed by misadventure in a 
 man's form^" There are others who have produced a greater 
 number of works of fiction ; but it may be questioned whether 
 anyone has written novels on more diverse schemes. In Fel/iatn 
 Lytton is partly apostle and partly satirist of " the dandiacal body," 
 which draws some sarcastic comment in Sartor Resartus. It is 
 not an elevated species of work ; but, such as it is, Lytton does 
 
 ^ Coleman's Life ot Keade. 
 
 * Harriet Martiiieau's Autobiogi-ap/iy, i. 352.
 
 AFTER SCOTT 649 
 
 it brilliantly. His dandy is original • not content to follow fashion, 
 he sets it. But Pelham is not a wholesome novel. There is an 
 utter want of nature in it, and the moral tone is vitiated. Still less 
 wholesome are the romances of crime, Paul Cliffoj-d and Eugene 
 Aram, which succeeded it. The former is an account of the 
 process whereby a highwayman is manufactured, and the latter 
 shows by what steps one whom we are encouraged to look upon 
 as a fine-minded scholar and gentleman is led to commit the crime 
 of murder — to say nothing of the minor sins of lying and theft. 
 Lytton was surprised at the outcry which was raised against these 
 novels on the score of morality. He defended himself vigorously, 
 repudiating the charges ; and of course his admirers have adopted 
 and developed the defence. It has been claimed that Paul 
 Clifford helped in the process of humanising the criminal law 
 which was then going on under the influence of Romilly; and 
 that E^igene Aram is a moral sermon on the danger of yielding to 
 the beginnings of vice — that the reader has only himself to 
 blame if he does not pause and reflect that he too may 
 become a thief or a murderer, should he neglect to root out 
 from his mind every prompting to evil. But it is significant that 
 Lytton wrote no more Newgate novels. For in truth the objec- 
 tions, which were shared by so vigorous a moralist as Thackeray, 
 were well-founded. In these novels Lytton blurs the distinction 
 between virtue and vice, and the whole tendency of his treatment 
 is towards the conclusion, not indeed that highway-robbery or 
 murder is commendable, but that there is much to be said in 
 extenuation of these crimes ; so much that, even in the case of a 
 deed so dastardly as that of Eugene Aram, there seems to be little 
 left to say in condemnation. Hood's handling of it in his poem 
 is infinitely more simple, manly, strong and healthy. 
 
 While the thread of Byronism runs through all Lytton's work 
 for many years, along with it is woven in one borrowed from Scott. 
 The two novels of which the scene is laid in Italy form, with the 
 romances founded upon English history, a group in which the debt 
 to Scott is obvious. But wide is the gulf which separates Lytton 
 trom Scott. The lormer said that the principle of his own art was 
 " intellectual," while he characterised Scott's as " picturesque."
 
 650 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Doubtless there is in Lytton more of conscious effort to be in- 
 structive than there is in Scott ; but if he imagined that there was 
 more to be learnt, he was profoundly mistaken. Scott is incom- 
 parably superior in ease and tact, in comprehension of the inner 
 meaning of historical movements and in insight into character. 
 Like the other imitators, Lytton loads his historical novels with 
 crude matter which clogs the movement and darkens the under- 
 standing. And they are marred by another fault as grave or even 
 graver. Nowhere is the meretricious quality of Lytton more offensive 
 than it is in the historical romances. It goes far towards spoiling 
 The Last Days of Pompeii, which is the best of the group, because 
 it is the most imaginative. Except the two vivid letters of Pliny 
 on the great eruption there was little to go upon, and the characters 
 and their setting were in the main evolved out of the author's 
 mind. 
 
 Far more marked was the change initiated by The Caxtons. 
 Hitherto Lytton had been an unmistakable romanticist. At one 
 time it was the romance of crime, at another the romance of 
 history ; now Byron and now Scott is the model ; but whatever his 
 theme, in the first twenty years of his life Lytton is never realistic. 
 Now one of the great features of those twenty years is the rise 
 of a school of realism headed by Thackeray. Romance continues 
 to exist, and even draws new strength from Pre-Raphaelitism ; but 
 then the fundamental principle of Pre-Raphaelitism itself is realistic. 
 A few dates will illustrate Lytton's extreme sensitiveness to preva- 
 lent tastes. Vanity Fair, the new gospel of realism, was issued in 
 monthly parts in 1847 ^^id 1848. Ja7ie Eyre (which is realistic 
 with a difference) appeared in the former year, and Mrs Gaskell's 
 first novel in the latter. In 1848 also the Pre-Raphaelite Brother- 
 hood was founded, and the brethren vowed to paint faithfully and 
 exactly what they saw. Nothing could have been more alien from 
 all this than Lytton's previous work. He had been mystical and 
 metaphysical, romantic and melodramatic, anything but realistic. 
 His very criminals and scoundrels had been idealised almost out 
 of knowledge. And yet, before people were well aware that there 
 was a revival of realism, Lytton was in the midst of it. Just in 
 the years when Mrs Gaskell was winning her reputation with her
 
 AFTER SCOTT 65 I 
 
 Stories founded upon the life of a Cheshire village, Lytton too was 
 depicting English country life as it was before the revolution 
 initiated by railways. It was not in Lytton's nature to do such 
 work with the exquisite literary purity and truth of Mrs Gaskell ; 
 he never could wholly get rid of affectation. There is something 
 theatrical in nearly all that he wrote, and in point of fact nearly 
 every one of his novels was first worked out as a play\ But 
 nowhere are his besetting sins so far subdued as in The Caxtons 
 and My Novel and What will he do with It ? All the influences 
 which bore upon him in this group of novels tended to correct 
 his faults. The general tone was necessarily quiet ; there was 
 nothing to encourage that Corinthian luxuriance of style to 
 which his taste leaned ; there was no temptation to paint the 
 characters either brighter or blacker than human. Hence it is 
 that many readers have found in these novels a purity and delicacy 
 both in style and in thought which they seek for in vain in the 
 rest of Lytton's works. 
 
 In the sketch of Lytton's career it has been noted that this 
 realistic phase was followed by a reversion to mysticism and the 
 supernatural, which he had treated also at an earlier date in 
 Zanoni. It has sometimes been supposed that this too was a 
 mere answer to a popular demand, and that the mind of the author 
 was only playing upon the subject because it evoked general in 
 terest. But it is a mistake to imagine that Lytton had no keen 
 personal interest in it. On the contrary, there was nothing he 
 felt more profoundly, nothing with regard to which he was more 
 thoroughly in earnest. Mesmerism, magic and all forms of the 
 mystical, the mysterious and the supernatural, fascinated him. If 
 he spoke about them he forgot all else ; and a visitor to Knebworth 
 describes how he became so absorbed in talking of spiritualism 
 and theology that, getting into a boat, " he forgot to haul up the 
 anchor, and rowed and rowed without observing that no way at all 
 was made^." Again, John Blackwood the publisher, visiting Lytton 
 in 1854, found a medium and a table-rapper in the house; while 
 " a character came down from London every day to throw Lytton 
 
 1 Letter of Earl Lytton in The Life of Tennyson, ii. 217. 
 ^ Blackwood's Ma^aziuc, January, xyo^.
 
 652 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 into the mesmeric trance for the cure of his ailments ^" Lytton 
 moreover believed himself to possess the gift of prevision, and 
 occasionally he used it at the request of friends ; but he always 
 did so unwillingly, for to him the matter was altogether real and 
 serious. Doubtless the author's profound feeling on the subject 
 contributed to give The Haunted and the Haunters its weird power ; 
 and doubtless this same quality has helped to preserve for Za?iom 
 an attractiveness which most of Lytton's novels have lost. Founded 
 upon the mysteries of the Rosicrucians, Zanoni deals with the 
 character and fortunes of a being who, having acquired the secret 
 of immortality, voluntarily surrenders it at the call of love. To 
 this human touch the book owes great part of its interest ; but it 
 moves far too much in the region of the supernatural, which may 
 be an ingredient, but which cannot without serious injury be the 
 staple, in works of art which appeal to the sympathies of rtien. 
 
 Lytton's reputation has sunk greatly since his death. While 
 he was living and writing, his abounding energy impressed the 
 world, and his remarkable versatility made him an object of per- 
 petual interest ; for it was impossible to prophesy what he would do 
 next. In his time he played so many parts, and played them 
 with such brilliancy, that he passed for a greater intellectual force 
 than he really was ; and when he died it seemed as if a star of the 
 first magnitude had vanished from the firmament. Few now 
 think that Westminster Abbey is his proper resting-place. Men 
 of letters, indeed, were never quite in accord with the multitude 
 as to Lytton's merits. Dickens admired him, but Thackeray's 
 satire has a touch of bitterness and contempt unusually deep ; and 
 Thackeray's opinion was that of the majority of literary craftsmen. 
 James Thomson, the author of The City of Dreadful Night, de- 
 nounces his " pinchbeck poetry, pinchbeck philosophy, pinchbeck 
 learning, pinchbeck sentiment ^" Meretricious, flashy, stagey, arti- 
 ficial, — tinsel, bombast, puppyism, are among the other adjectives 
 and substantives that have been flung at him. And there is justifica- 
 tion for them all. Time seems to be convincing that vague being, 
 the general reader, that in this instance the critics and men of 
 
 ^ Williatn Blackwood and his Sons, iii. 84. 
 ^ SaXi's Life of Thomson, 119.
 
 AFTER SCOTT 653 
 
 letters were right. Lytton is almost great in half-a-dozen forms 
 of literary activity — almost a great dramatist, almost a poet if not 
 a great one, almost a great novelist in three or four different styles. 
 But he just wants the little more which is so much. He has no 
 humour ; there is hardly a character in his novels whom we care 
 to remember : in his dramas we constantly meet with rhetoric 
 where there ought to be poetry. It would have been better for his 
 permanent fame had he completely achieved greatness in a single 
 field, however limited, than to have come near it in many. In 
 the long run, the Horatian maxim about mediocrity holds as true 
 of prose as of poetry. VI 
 
 The life of Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) is part of the 
 history of the nation rather than of the history of literature; 
 but there is a singular intimacy of relation between the literary 
 phase and the political phase of his work which separates him 
 from all contemporaries in whom likewise the two phases were 
 united. Macaulay and Lytton were politicians as well as men of 
 letters ; but there is no difnculty in assigning the primacy, in their 
 case, to letters. Gladstone also dabbled in literature ; but The 
 State in its Relations with the Church and Juvejitus Mundi are 
 half forgotten ; while The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture is 
 preserved from oblivion by the wit of Huxley's replies. In 
 Disraeli's case too it is plain enough that the politician who 
 brought back "peace with honour," who purchased a controlling 
 interest in the Suez Canal, and who made the Queen of England 
 Empress of India, is a greater personage than the writer of Vivian 
 Grey and Coningsby and Tancred. But the peculiarity in his 
 case is the remarkable blending of the two phases, the shading of 
 the one into the other, the sense he imparts that the man of letters 
 is a statesman, and that the statesman never ceases to be a man of 
 letters. There is no doubt that Disraeli's ambitions were from the 
 first political, and his literary enterprises had a political aspect : he 
 was, for example, a partner in Murray's abortive and financially 
 disastrous Tory paper. The Representative^, and he visited Lockhart 
 at Chiefswood with a view to inducing him to become editor of 
 the paper. But his whole mode of conception, in politics as 
 
 ^ 'iiWiii.'a'i John Murray, \\. 186.
 
 654 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 well as in his books, was artistic — usually with a dash of the 
 theatrical. 
 
 In some respects Disraeli is the most interesting of all the 
 young literary men of the third and fourth decades of the nine- 
 teenth century, as he was certainly one of the most intellectual 
 and one of the most far-sighted. The dislike, amounting to rancour 
 and even to virulent hatred, with which he was regarded alike by 
 politicians and by men of letters would be incredible were it not 
 so well attested. O'Connell's well-known suggestion that the 
 name of the impenitent thief must have been Disraeli is typical. 
 Pimch satirised him with a bitterness which is rare in those genial 
 pages, Lockhart called him "a Jew scamp," and "swab" and 
 " traitor " are among the other names of scorn and loathing which 
 were hurled at him. But in literature as in politics he lived all 
 this down, and compelled recognition by the force of great 
 qualities, moral as well as intellectual. His novels are divisible 
 into three groups, distinct from one another in substance as well 
 as separated in time. The first group includes all that he wrote 
 up to 1837, when he entered the House of Commons. This was, 
 naturally, the period of his greatest literary activity, and among 
 the fruits of it are, besides minor items, six novels : — Vivian Grey 
 (1826-1827), The Young Duke {12)2,1), Contarini Fleming {id>T,2), 
 The Wondrous Taleqf Alroy (1833), VenetiaixZn) and Henrietta 
 Temple l^\Z 11). 
 
 In this period there are several points of resemblance between 
 DisraeU and Bulwer. Both were dandies and wrote works of the 
 dandy school of literature. In later days Disraeli was more care- 
 less of dress than Gladstone ; but the glory of his youthful attire 
 was dazzling. His evening dress was "a black velvet coat lined 
 with satin, purple trousers with a gold band running down the 
 outside seam, a scarlet waistcoat, long lace ruffles falling down to 
 the tips of his fingers, white gloves with several brilliant rings 
 outside them, and long black ringlets rippling down upon his 
 shoulders\" Keeping this resplendent figure in mind, we shall 
 better understand Vivian Grey, Disraeli's novel of society, corre- 
 
 ^ Correspondence of J. L. Mciley, quoied in the Library of Literary 
 Criticism,
 
 AFTER SCOTT 655 
 
 spending to Bulwer's PeJhayn. It is a brilliant but somewhat 
 crude picture of an unscrupulous young adventurer who forces 
 himself upwards by sheer cleverness and effrontery. There 
 are curious suggestions of Disraeli himself in the portrait; but 
 Vivian Grey is detected and thrust out, a fate which Disraeli 
 certainly did not contemplate for himself. 
 
 In this early group of novels there is more variety and much 
 less unity of tone than we find in Disraeli's subsequent works. 
 They seem to be the experiments of a young man who is feeling 
 his way, and who has not yet finally decided what he shall be. 
 Already in Vivian Grey there is a political element, but it is by 
 no means so important as it came to be from Coningsby onward ; 
 for though the author's bias was to politics, he was as yet uncertain 
 whether it might not be his destiny to become a professional man 
 of letters. Contarini Fleming is in the analytical style which 
 Bulwer adopted contemporaneously in Eugene Aram, but the 
 materials out of which Disraeli's romance is built are wholly 
 different. Already the influence of blood shows itself in the 
 eagerness with which the author turns to the East and the peoples 
 of the East. Far more Oriental, however, was the wild and fanciful 
 Tale of Alroy, where the Jew is depicted, not an exile in a strange 
 land, but in his city of Jerusalem, engaged in the attempt to restore 
 the political glories of the race. The interest of Vendia lies less in 
 the story than in the attempt to portray the two great poets, Byron 
 and Shelley ; while the last novel of the group, Henrietta Temple, 
 is merely a piece of exaggerated and unwholesome sentimentalism, 
 sometimes brilliant, but sometimes silly. 
 
 Out of this miscellaneous farrago it is easy to select two items 
 which are integral parts of the true Disraeli. These are the politics 
 and the Orientalism. All the rest, including the dandyism and 
 the parade of psychological profundity, is superficial and temporary. 
 But whatever might have been the case had his political ambitions 
 been disappointed, Disraeli's entry into Parliament naturally in- 
 tensified and made permanent his political interests; and the 
 genuineness of his racial feeling is beyond doubt. Disraeli's 
 sincerity has been questioned in almost every point, but it would 
 need the very credulity of scepticism to imagine him insincere in all
 
 656 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 his rhapsodies on the great gifts of the Hebrew race and its immense 
 services to the world. Renegade though he was to the faith of his 
 fathers, loosely as both the old faith and the new sat upon him, he 
 was stirred to an ardour of emotion whenever he thought of the 
 Jewish race. A small and alien band like the Jews, disliked and 
 often persecuted, could not hold together at all unless it had 
 this feeling highly developed. Shakespeare accordingly makes 
 pride of race a feature in the character of Shylock, a Jew of a 
 very different stamp from Disraeli. 
 
 The novels of the first period are the most purely literary in 
 purpose that Disraeli ever wrote. Though there are political and 
 racial elements in them, there can hardly be said to be either 
 social or political theories expressed, or any doctrine taught. For 
 that reason they have been preferred to the others by those who 
 dislike the novel of purpose ; but the soundness of the preference 
 is questionable. The faults of Disraeli — -literary as well as other — 
 were greatest in his youth, and the very singleness of his literary 
 aim tended to exaggerate them. He gradually laid aside other 
 things as well as the gorgeous raiment of his early years. Though 
 the lash of Thackeray fell upon Co?iingsby, it is in the early novels 
 that the vices which he satirised are most developed. These 
 novels are melodramatic, bombastic, turgid in style ; the characters 
 and the sentiment are exaggerated and unnatural ; the tone of 
 thought is Eastern rather than English ; and the stamp of egotism 
 is on every chapter. 
 
 After Henrietta Temple there came an interval of seven years, 
 marked only by The Tragedy of Count Alarcos (1839). Then 
 came Coningsby (1844), which was followed by Sybil (1845) and 
 Tancred (1847). These three have certain characteristics in 
 common, and are very clearly marked off from the novels of the 
 first period. All Disraeli's indecision is gone : he writes now as a 
 politician who happens to be also a man of letters ; and his gift of 
 writing is made to subserve his purposes as a statesman. All the 
 three may be regarded as manifestoes of and to the Young England 
 party. As such they are still profoundly interesting and important 
 documents of the historj' of the time ; and he who would write the 
 histcn7 would do well to pay close attention to them. For Disraeli
 
 AFTER SCOTT 657 
 
 in after years did much to make history ; and a comparison between 
 his writings and his poHtical action proves that the former fore- 
 shadowed the latter, so that not infrequently a key to his politics 
 may be found in this intermediate group of novels. 
 
 These novels do much to qualify the doubt as to Disraeli's 
 political sincerity. Many, not only of his opponents, but of the 
 members of his own party, felt that the inventor of Tory de- 
 mocracy could hardly be a sincere Conservative, and that the 
 price of accepting it was too high to be paid even for his brilliant 
 leadership. Whether it was too high or not is not the question 
 here ; but at least, in the face of Coningsby and Sybil and Tancred 
 it is impossible to doubt that, to their author, this Tory democracy 
 was far more than a mere temporary make-shift, or a scheme for 
 catching votes at a general election. The transformed Conservatism 
 of Disraeli's later years is just a political instrument for carrying out 
 the ideas which are the substance of those three novels. It was 
 believed that the turning of the public mind to social questions 
 was a device for distracting men's attention from the reform of 
 political machinery, and much ridicule was poured upon Disraeli's 
 pronouncement that sanitation and the social improvement of the 
 working classes were the real tasks of government. In those days 
 laissez /aire was unchallenged, and it was believed that social im- 
 provement would come of itself, if only we could get ballot boxes. 
 In this declaration, however, Disraeli was simply repeating as a 
 statesman what he had written many years before as a novelist. 
 It is the doctrine of Sybil, in which he embodied the results of his 
 own investigations into the industrial condition of England. He 
 was severely taken to task for it by the champions of political and 
 economic orthodoxy ; but time has justified him, and the heresies 
 of the middle of the century are the orthodox teaching of students 
 of the industrial revolution in its latter years. Perhaps the greatest 
 of all Disraeli's gifts as a statesman was his power of prevision ; 
 and it was never more strikingly shown than in this anticipation of 
 the statesman by the novelist. He was a generation in advance 
 of the opinion of the world. Both parties have now more con- 
 fidence in social legislation than in schemes of redistribution 
 and other tinkering of the machinery of Parliament. Without 
 w. 42
 
 65b THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 intending it they have followed whither Disraeli led, and so have 
 paid the most convincing tribute to his sagacity and foresight. 
 
 Disraeli anticipated not only the politicians, but, in the main, 
 the men of letters as well. Carlyle, it is true, had preceded him 
 in his social and political criticism ; and in Oliver Twist, Nicholas 
 Nickleby and nearly all his later novels Dickens is the advocate of 
 social reform. But Disraeli is prior to Charlotte Bronte and Mrs 
 Gaskell and Charles Kingsley in the handling of social problems. 
 Sybil is as much devoted to the interest of the working man as 
 Alton Locke or Yeast, and it is on the whole more pregnant and 
 suggestive and practical than either of them. 
 
 In 1848 Disraeli became leader of the Opposition in the House 
 of Commons, and four years later he was Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer. It is not surprising that in the press of business brought 
 by such offices he found himself unable to continue his literary 
 activity, and that many years passed before he could resume 
 it. Thus the novels of the third group. Lot hair (1870) and 
 Endymion (1880), are the work of his old age. Both were pub- 
 lished in intervals when he was free from the responsibilities of 
 office. Both are disappointing, and the latter is especially so. 
 They contain brilliant passages, but they are on the whole 
 curiously flat and dull. The characters are stagey and unreal — a 
 surprising fault in one whose business it had been to understand 
 men. Both are political novels, like the intermediate group, but 
 in a less interesting way, for they contain no such clear revelation 
 of their author's mind as Coningsby and Sybil give. Now and 
 then they show the persistence of interests of which Disraeli had 
 already given evidence ; for example, the Roman Catholic element 
 in Lothair is cognate to the Puseyism of Conifigsby. But on the 
 whole they depend more on personality and less on principle than 
 the earlier group. 
 
 There are certain writings the interest of which depends partly, 
 or it may be mainly, upon the position and history of their authors. 
 The commentaries of Julius Caesar are valuable not merely in them- 
 selves, but because they are the commentaries of Julius Caesar. 
 The scribbUngs of Frederick the Great may have deserved all the 
 gibes of Voltaire; but just because they were his writings they
 
 AFTER SCOTT 659 
 
 could not be wholly worthless to the world. Herein too lies the 
 special interest of the writings of Disraeli. The earlier ones are, 
 as we have seen, a kind of prophecy of his political action, and all 
 are a revelation of his character. Viewed in this light their very 
 faults have a value. But it must be confessed that as pieces of 
 literature they are often irritating. Their pretentiousness repels, 
 their intense egotism grows wearisome, the tawdriness of style 
 disgusts the critical taste. On the other hand, there are in nearly 
 all some passages of real eloquence, as well as innumerable striking 
 phrases and witty turns which redeem the faults and attest the 
 greatness of the writer. 
 
 42-
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 
 
 p The character of early Victorian fiction was determined, not 
 
 so much by any of the writers who have just been passed in 
 review, as by two greater men who were sHghtly posterior in date 
 to most of them. The true successors to Scott, not in the sense 
 that tliey imitated him, or were very close akin to him in their 
 work, but in the sense that they became after him the leaders 
 and chiefs of prose-fiction, were Dickens and Thackeray. 
 
 A moment's comparison between them and Scott reveals the 
 nature of the change which was passing over the novel. It may 
 be summed up in a word : there is less romance, and there is 
 more realism. Dickens and Thackeray, even when they write 
 historical novels, have "no use for the Middle Ages'." The 
 scenes of Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of 2 wo Cities, Dickens's 
 two experiments in this sort, are laid just a little way behind his 
 own time ; while Thackeray's Esmond is a careful transcript, not 
 at all in the romantic vein, of life, manners and literary style of 
 that period which has least of all in common with the Middle 
 Ages. In so far as romanticism survives, it survives with a 
 difference. Even the streets of London are often treated roman- 
 tically by Dickens. " He sought," sa3^s his most sympathetic 
 critic, George Gissing, "for wonders amid the dreary life of 
 common streets'*." But from Ivanhoe to the romance of the slums 
 
 ' Beers's History of English Romanticistn «'« the Nineteenth Century, 396. 
 ^ Charles Dickens, 30.
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 66l 
 
 is a far cry indeed. The change is in the last degree significant, 
 and not the less so although many elements of romance still 
 survived. 
 
 Charles Dickens (i8 12-1870), the son of a clerk in the Navy 
 pay-office, concerns us principally in respect of his early life ; 
 for after his fame was established nothing happened to him 
 which produced any noteworthy effect on his literary work. 
 But the history of his boyhood and youth is well worth noticing ; 
 because it was then that he acquired the experience and ac- 
 cumulated the materials which afterwards formed the staple 
 of his books. The authoritative life of Dickens was written by 
 his friend John Forster (1812-1876), a good biographer and a 
 great editor, during whose tenure of office The Examiner won, 
 and deserved, an influence rarely equalled in the history of 
 journalism. In literature Forster's tastes ran to history; but to 
 him the essence of history was biography, and so his principal 
 works are a series of lives, — Lives of Eminent Statesmen (1837- 
 1839), Life of Goldsmith (1848), Life of Landor (1869), Life of 
 Dickens (1872-1874), and the unfinished Life of Swift (1875). 
 Forster is always careful and sound, and his narrative is often 
 very interesting. In the cases of Landor and Dickens he can 
 never be superseded; for he had direct personal knowledge which 
 no one else can ever acquire, and he had access to materials now 
 destroyed or dispersed. But he had not that power of penetrating 
 character which is the special gift of the great biographer, and he 
 never makes his subjects live, as Carlyle does, and Lockhart, and 
 Boswell. His Life of Dickens therefore is an interesting, but 
 hardly a great, book. It tells much about Dickens ; but for a 
 comprehension of the man it must be supplemented by a study 
 of his works. 
 
 Not the least important deduction which may be drawn from 
 Forster's biography is that the picture Dickens drew of himself 
 and his early life in David Copperfield is substantially accurate. 
 He himself was the miserable little drudge depicted in the novel. 
 He himself went through the wretched experience of the blacking 
 warehouse, and his school was the streets of London. The 
 mysterious 'deeds' which led up to the imprisonment of Micawber
 
 662 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 in the Marshalsea were actually executed by John Dickens, and 
 they resulted in his imprisonment. Charles Dickens could never 
 refer to this period of his life without bitterness. The pen which 
 wrote David Coppcrfield was often dipped in his own blood ; and 
 if he violated the law of filial piety in the picture there drawn of 
 his parents and his home, the sufferings he endured in the process 
 may be set against the sin. Assuredly few sons have had more 
 just ground of complaint on the score of an uncared-for childhood 
 and neglected education. 
 
 After a time a legacy lifted the family out of its most pressing 
 difficulties; and in 1824 Dickens was sent to a school which had 
 been selected rather for its 'gentiUty' than for educational effi- 
 ciency. He remained there for two years or rather more, and at 
 fifteen he entered a lawyer's office, in which however he stayed 
 only about a year and a half. He then became a reporter, first 
 on the staff of The True Sun, and afterwards for other papers. 
 As a reporter he acquired great skill. He was determined to 
 succeed, he had untiring industry, and he toiled at stenography 
 until he became, to use his own words, " the best and most rapid 
 reporter ever known." This result was doubtless due to that 
 quality which struck all observers of Dickens in later years — his 
 almost preternatural energy. This quality produced in many a 
 curious illusion. They imagined him to be phenomenally healthy 
 and strong : in reality, his " habits were robust, but his health 
 was not." His tireless activity was a matter rather of the spirit 
 than of the body. 
 
 Dickens however was conscious of talents for which the 
 profession of a reporter afforded no outlet. He judged himself, 
 quite correctly as he subsequently proved, to possess a gift for 
 the stage, and began to train himself to be an actor. Fortunately 
 he was diverted from his purpose, and instead started to use his 
 pen not merely to report the words of others but to write his own 
 thoughts. For this end he had acquired an education better than 
 he knew in the blacking warehouse and in the streets; he had 
 been storing his mind unconsciously with excellent literary mate- 
 rial ; and the success of his first venture fixed the whole course of 
 his life. He has himself described how tremulously he dropped
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 663 
 
 his first article into the letter-box of The Monthly Magazine, and 
 how eagerly he watched for its appearance. It was printed in 
 December, 1833, under the title of A Dinner at Poplar Walk ; 
 in the Sketches by Boz, of which it was the germ, it is now known 
 as Mr Minns and his Cousin. 
 
 For some time Dickens still continued to act as a reporter. 
 On the staff of the Morning Chronicle he was at once reporter 
 and contributor. But the success of the Sketches by Boz (1836} 
 and the inception in the same year of the scheme of The 
 Pickwick Papers made him by profession an author. The design 
 of the publishers, as is well known, was to publish a series 
 of plates of amusing sporting scenes by a popular caricaturist 
 named Seymour, and to accompany the plates with a sort of 
 running commentary of letter-press. Two other names besides 
 that of Dickens are associated with the story of Pickwick. The 
 plan, such as it was, came from Robert Smith Surtees (1803- 
 1864), and the man who was first asked by the publishers to 
 supply the letter-press was not Dickens, but Charles Whitehead 
 (1804-1862). 
 
 Surtees, who afterwards won some fame as a writer of sporting 
 novels, was at this time just at the beginning of his career. In 
 1 83 1 he started the New Sporting Magazine, which he edited for 
 about five years. It was in this periodical that his creation, John 
 Jorrocks, the hero of Jorrocks's Jaunts (1838), first appeared. 
 Though the humour of this character seems to the reader of the 
 present day not very bright or refined, its success tempted others 
 to pay Surtees the homage of imitation. Even so severe a critic 
 as Lockhart was sufficiently pleased to suggest that Surtees should 
 write a work of fiction on a more regular plan. The result was 
 Hundley Cross (1843) and the rest of the series of sporting stories 
 which still keep the name of Surtees alive. His works, however, 
 are more worthy of remembrance for the sake of Leech's illustra- 
 tions, than for their literary merit. 
 
 The other writer, Charles Whitehead, stands on a different 
 plane. His reputation, after rising to a respectable height, under- 
 went eclipse, to be revived again by the industry and research of 
 a writer of the present day, Mr Mackenzie Bell, whose critical
 
 664 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 biography. A foi-gotfen Genius : Charles Whitehead, recalled him 
 to memory. Unfortunately, most of those whom Mr Bell's volume 
 induced to study Whitehead regarded him, in virtue of The 
 Solitary (1S31), as a poet; and this has told against his fame, for 
 though The Solitary shows a real, it does not show a great, poetic 
 gift. Whitehead's true talent lay in prose-fiction ; and it was so 
 high that, but for his failing of intemperance, he would probably 
 have taken rank among the best novelists of the time after the 
 two great leaders. Whitehead's most ambitious works are Richard 
 Savage (1842) and the historical romance, The Earl of Essex 
 (1843). His masterpieces are the former and a short story full of 
 tragic power. The Confession of Jaines Wilson. Richard Savage 
 is a story in which Whitehead follows closely the life of the real 
 Savage, the friend of Johnson. The interest, especially in the 
 earlier part, is remarkably well sustained. The conception of the 
 character of Savage himself is masterly, and several of the figures, 
 both real and imaginary, by whom he is surrounded, are very 
 well portrayed. 
 
 Richard Savage was unwritten when the design was formed of 
 what in the hands of Dickens became Pickwick ; but Whitehead 
 was well known as the author of The Solitary ; and he had just 
 published the Lives and Exploits of English Highwaymen, Pirates 
 and Robbers (1834) and The Autobiography of Jack Ketch (1834) — 
 items in that literature of crime which was popular in those days. 
 Among the articles in Eraser's Magazine doubtfully attributed to 
 Thackeray is a review of the former work, which, if it was really 
 by Thackeray, establishes a literary connexion between Whitehead 
 and the great rival of Dickens. At this time then. Whitehead 
 being known as an active man of letters, the publishers asked him 
 to write the sketches which were to accompany Seymour's plates. 
 He declined, because he was afraid he could not work with 
 rapidity enough to supply month by month the necessary " copy " ; 
 but at the same time he recommended his friend Dickens as a 
 man who had the necessary faculty for rapid work. 
 
 Dickens accepted the commission ; Seymour died by suicide 
 after the issue of the first number ; and the letter-press proved so 
 rich and racy, and the characters conceived in the brain of
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 665 
 
 Dickens so amusing, that the original conception of a subordina- 
 tion of the letter-press to the plates, or at most an equilibrium in 
 importance between them, was abandoned. Dickens became the 
 author of I'he Pickwick Papers \ the plates were illustrations of 
 what he chose to write, not pictures for which he had to invent 
 suitable commentary ; and though the sporting element continued 
 to be represented in the person of Mr Winkle, it receded into the 
 background. But Pickwick still retains traces of the original 
 proposal. It is practically destitute of plan, and is not so much 
 a novel as a miscellany into which Dickens pours all his experience 
 and observation of life and character. The fact that he was thus 
 fortuitously left without a plan was a happy thing for him ; for the 
 plot is usually the weakest part of his books. In many cases the 
 crudities and improbabilities are astonishing, and but for the 
 exuberant wealth of humour they would be offensive'. Once or 
 twice in after years Dickens constructed a good plot. Thus 
 A Tale of Two Cities is admirable as a story ; the mysteriousness 
 of Edwin Drood is proved by the ingenuity which has been 
 lavished in vain to find the solution ; and if Barnaby Pudge is 
 less baffling, the coherency at least of the plot is established 
 beyond dispute by the fact that Edgar Allan Poe actually pre- 
 dicted its development. Barnaby Pudge began to run about the 
 end of January, 1841 ; and in May Poe contributed to a Phila- 
 delphia paper a prospective notice in which he "explained and 
 foretold the exact plot of the as yet unpublished story'^." No such 
 feat would have been possible if the parts of Dickens's story had 
 not been linked together in a chain of logic. And yet most 
 readers will agree with the judgment which Poe nevertheless 
 pronounced, that in making this attempt Dickens was mistaking 
 his own powers. He is never so happy as when in The Pickwick 
 Papers he wanders where he pleases and carries his creations with 
 him and his readers with them. This absolute freedom is one 
 reason why the first of his important books remains the greatest. 
 
 ^ Gissing brings together a number of instances of Dickens's abuse of 
 coincidence {Charles Dickens, 57), 
 
 2 J. H. Ingram's Biographical Sketch of Poe quoted in The Library of 
 Literary Criticism, 565.
 
 666 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 To call Pickwick natural might occasion misunderstanding, for 
 there is a great deal of caricature and exaggeration in it ; but at 
 least it is not theatrical ; and wherever he proceeds on a plan 
 Dickens becomes theatrical. 
 
 In common with all his contemporaries Dickens was indebted 
 to Scott; but his mind was cast in another mould, the circum- 
 stances of his early life were quite unlike those of Scott's, and his 
 relation to the great romancer was never intim.ate. Scott was a 
 man of immense reading; in youth Dickens had not the oppor- 
 tunity, and in manhood he does not appear to have had the taste, 
 to read much. His early repertory of books is however notice- 
 able, because his mind was so strongly influenced by them. It 
 included the three principal novels of Smollett, Tom Jones, The 
 Vicar of Wakefield, Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote and Gil Bias. 
 The predominance of the picaresque novel is the most rerharkable 
 feature of the list ; and as Smollett supplied more than any other 
 author, so Smollett's influence remained the strongest on his 
 mind. So far as nineteenth century canons of taste and morals 
 would allow him, Thackeray made it his business to revive Field- 
 ing ; and Dickens is similarly affiliated to Smollett. 
 
 The design of Pickwick, however, owes nothing to these 
 writers. It was obviously indebted not only to Jorrocks, but to 
 Tom and Jerry, which may be best described as the joint work of 
 Pierce Egan the writer and of Cruikshank the artist. Even after 
 the change made by Dickens there is still some resemblance. 
 He can hardly be sa.id to borrow from Egan, who was greatly 
 his inferior, but he adopted some suggestions from him. He 
 owed far more to George Colman the younger, who revealed to 
 him what could be made of the London streets. It was Colman 
 who taught him that the life of the streets, their most trivial 
 incidents, their sights and sounds and smells, were material for 
 literature. The mere suggestion was enough : the mind of Dickens 
 was full of such things, and when he began to write he found 
 himself faced rather with the difficulty of selection than with any 
 lack of matter. One of his faults as an artist is his tendency to 
 introduce unnecessary characters, characters who drop in from 
 nowhere, exercise no influence on the story, and sometimes
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 667 
 
 disappear unnoticed. Such excrescences would hardly have been 
 created, for the story does not suggest them. But they were 
 present already in memory, and the writer failed to notice their 
 irrelevancy. 
 
 Notwithstanding Smollett and Egan and Colman and Hook, 
 few writers have been more essentially original than Dickens. A 
 hint here and there — a turn of phrase, a situation, the outline of 
 a character — he certainly adopted; but the substance of his 
 novels comes from his own experience. Keen observation, a 
 retentive memory and a remarkable instinctive power of reading 
 character, were the gifts to which he owed his literary success. 
 He not only possessed these gifts in an extraordinary degree, but 
 they were precociously developed. His boyish insight into 
 character must have been almost unexampled; for he declared 
 in his maturity that he had never seen cause to change the secret 
 impression of his boyhood with regard to anyone whom he had 
 known then. 
 
 The extent to which Dickens built upon his own direct 
 experience may be inferred from two facts. He is pre-eminently 
 the novelist of London, and he is pre-eminently the novelist of 
 low life. But it was just in London, and just among the lower 
 classes — with the middle class at the upper extreme — that all his 
 real and vivid experience lay. He frequently wanders from 
 London, but he always seems relieved when he gets back to it. 
 Often he carries London with him into the country. The Pick- 
 wick group are cockneys through all their journeyings; the 
 wandering players and showmen, the beggars and vagabonds, who 
 abound in the novels of Dickens, are creatures of the city. Con- 
 trast with these the corresponding characters in the novels of 
 Scott — Edie Ochiltree in The Antiquary, the smugglers in Guy 
 Mannering, Wandering Willie in Redgauntlet. Scott is never so 
 happy as when he can get his city characters spirited away to the 
 mountains and the wastes. But wherever they go the Crummleses 
 and the Jarleys and the little Nells of Dickens are bits of London. 
 The great city was part of his very being ; wherever he went its 
 atmosphere was around him. Though not by birth, yet by adop- 
 tion, he was one of the truest of Londoners. He knew it as few
 
 668 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 men have ever known it. He knew it topographically, indus- 
 trially, socially — within the limits of the lower and middle classes. 
 He could penetrate into all its obscure nooks. He was familiar 
 with all its strange trades and with those who followed them — the 
 dustman, the articulator of skeletons, the marine-store dealer, the 
 man who made a living by recovering bodies from the Thames, 
 and many less innocent than he — Dickens knew them all better 
 than most of us know our next-door neighbours. It was from 
 these materials that he built up his books. It was because he 
 was absolutely free in Pickwick to use them as he liked, and 
 moreover because he was there skimming the cream of his past 
 experience, that he rose in that book to a height he never after 
 wards reached. 
 
 It has been necessary to limit the statement that Dickens 
 knew London socially. "Society" he did not know at all, and 
 above the rank of the lower middle class his knowledge grew more 
 and more scanty. This limitation is naturally most marked in the 
 early novels, but it continued to the end. The assertion that he 
 could not delineate a gentleman in the conventional sense of the 
 word is substantially true. Many of his poor have that true 
 nobility of character which is the inner meaning of the word 
 " gentleman " ; but when he tried to depict the manner, Dickens 
 totally failed. Once or twice in later days — notably in the case of 
 Sydney Carton — he was successful ; but his gentlemen were usually 
 theatrical figures or colourless abstractions. The experience of 
 his youth afforded him no foundation whereon to build, and 
 without such foundation he was helpless. It is well known that 
 his characters (at any rate his successful ones) are all portraits, or, 
 it may be, mosaics pieced together from fragments of observation ; 
 and in his case at least the maxim that what is learnt in youth is 
 best learnt evidently held good. He never assimilated experience 
 that came to him after he reached manhood as thoroughly as he 
 assimilated that of his boyhood and youth. Some writers seem to 
 possess the gift of divining that which they have never seen ; but, 
 great as was Dickens's endowment of imagination, it fell short 
 of this. Shakespeare could have known little of courts and 
 castles in his early days; and yet, from the first, his kings and
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 669 
 
 barons are every inch royal and noble. Those of Dickens 
 seem to come not from Windsor but from Wardour Street. 
 His early life told. Though the graduate of the street carried 
 from his university a rich fund of knowledge and experience, there 
 was a side of him which was not only undeveloped, but which was 
 partly atrophied, by this experience. Hence that want of refine- 
 ment, that slight strain of vulgarity which marred the goodness of 
 Dickens as it likewise mars his work. In character he was 
 .thoroughly sound — " every inch of him," as Carlyle declared, "an 
 honest man " ; but more than one observer thought that he was 
 not quite a gentleman. And there is evidence in his life that they 
 were right. Carlyle suffered agonies because he had to make a 
 public display of himself on the lecturer's platform : it is impossible 
 to imagine him going through the public readings of Dickens. 
 Whatever may have been the merits of the questions unhappily in 
 dispute between Dickens and his wife, a man of true refinement 
 would have shrunk from writing what he wrote on the subject; 
 and though he did not mean the objectionable letter to be 
 published, he ought to have known that he ran the risk of, and 
 indeed almost invited, publication. 
 
 In manner of publication as in general plan Pickwick followed 
 the example of Tom and Jerry, and was issued in twenty monthly 
 numbers between April, 1836, and November, 1837. Pickwick 
 was the earliest English novel of the first rank which was thus 
 published; but the method is that by which most novels by 
 known writers are now published ; for the fact that they appear in 
 magazines or journals, along with other matter, is an unimportant 
 detail. There can be little doubt that it tends to looseness of 
 construction. An author must be unusually methodical who is 
 not occasionally compelled to write against time; and there are few 
 men whom a forced rapidity of composition suits as it suited Scott. 
 Everyone knows that Thackeray constantly wrote while the 
 "printer's devil" waited for "copy" outside; but it is perhaps not 
 so well known that Dickens kept his finger on the public pulse 
 while his story was in progress, and did not disdain to alter his 
 plan if he found his popularity declining^ 
 
 * For an instance see Gissing's Charles Dickens, 69.
 
 670 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 The success of Pickwick amazed author and publisher alike. 
 The former, always a keen business man, had agreed to do the 
 work for ;j^i4 a month, and at the time considered the pay good. 
 " * The first order for Part i. ' that is, the first order for binding, 
 'was,' says the bookbinder who executed the work, 'for four 
 hundred copies only.' The order for Part xv. had risen to forty 
 thousand." Thus at twenty-six Dickens sprang at once to the 
 height of popularity. No man in his own day rivalled him, a^ 
 no predecessor excepting Scott. The secret was the excellej 
 the work, and in a minor degree the novelty of the subject. ^Kie* 
 endless resource displayed in Pickwick, the ready wit, the unlimited 
 humour, the enormous number of characters, all deftly touched, 
 supplied something pleasing to readers of all sorts. But the 
 matter was not only excellent, it was also essentially new. Just 
 as Scott had had predecessors in the realm of historical romance, 
 so, as we have seen, there had been writers before Dickens who 
 had attempted the theme of cockney life and character. So 
 Shakespeare had predecessors in the drama, and Homer doubtless 
 had them in the epic. Darwin was anticipated in the doctrine of 
 evolution and George Stephenson in the invention of the loco- 
 motive. In each case the common sense of men decides that the 
 tool belongs to him who can use it, the idea to him who can 
 make it effective. And so, notwithstanding Colman and Egan 
 and Hook, Dickens is rightly adjudged the father of the novel of 
 London life. 
 
 He has had a numerous progeny. Of^late years "tales of 
 mean streets " and revelations of the Ghetto liave poured from the 
 press, and whifiTs from all sorts of heaps, far more unsavoury than 
 those of the decaying cabbages which Dickens found in Colman, 
 have been blown to the nostrils. The methods of the modern 
 realistic school are not at all like those of the author of Pickwick. 
 They take themselves very seriously, as Artists with a capital letter 
 and men with a mission, and feel it their duty to depict Slumland 
 in all its repulsive sordidness. Sometimes they raise in the 
 reader's mind a suspicion that the repulsiveness is even heightened 
 and exaggerated for effect, or perhaps under misapprehension. 
 Missionaries and doctors v,'ho have worked in such districts
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 67I 
 
 declare that this is the case, that there are alleviations in the lot, 
 
 gleams of brightness shot from human nature itself, which have no 
 
 place on the canvas of the realist. Probably the error arises from 
 
 defective imagination. The realist is prone to forget that reality 
 
 is a chameleon which takes very different colours according to the 
 
 light in which it is viewed, and that Slumland, as it seems to the 
 
 native-bom, is not quite the same place as that which is visible to 
 
 Ihe eyes of the dweller in Park Lane. At the best it is unlovely 
 
 ^Rnpugh; but it may be hoped that there is no human lot which 
 
 ^^^Riot in it a little more humanity than is to be found in the 
 
 conreptions of the modern realist. 
 
 Tlie spirit of Dickens was far removed from that which 
 animates such ^works. By contrast with Scott he may be called a 
 realist; for there are no mists of time or space to throw a glamour 
 over his subjects. He takes what lies nearest to his hand, what 
 he knows best. Even in Pickwick, before he had developed a 
 ' purpose,' there is stern reality enough in the scenes in the Fleet 
 prison. But in the strict sense of the word he is not a realist at 
 all ; on the contrary, his work is rather the romance of the streets 
 of London. By way of reaction against the romantic tendency to 
 choose themes from high life, to depict distant times and to feed 
 the mind on marvels, the realist tends to lay stress upon the 
 sordidness of the streets, the depth of the miseries, the vileness 
 of the vices he depicts. He sometimes runs risk of forgetting that 
 there is anything else to depict. By a curious perversity he comes 
 to regard ugliness as more real than beauty, and vice than virtue. 
 It is not so with Dickens. His instinct is rather to pick out the 
 gleam of beauty from the midst of ugliness and the example of 
 virtue from among the multitudes of the vicious. There are many 
 vile characters in his pages, Fagin and Sikes and all their crew ; 
 and there are many sordid scenes. Frequently his taste is 
 questionable ; and at least one scene, the picture of spontaneous 
 combustion, is loathsome. But such scenes are aberrations, things 
 not at all of the essence of the method. They are partly due to 
 the fact that Dickens was himself uncertain how far his reaction 
 ought to carry him. That he was not proceeding upon a clearly- 
 understood principle is shown plainly enough by the haphazard
 
 tT2 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 origin of his masterpiece. He simply felt that common life 
 supplied excellent literary material, that he was familiar with it and 
 could handle it. He suspected that others, like himself, would 
 prefer to the Middle Ages their own time and country; but he 
 had thought out nothing, he had no views on the question of what 
 was and what was not proper material for the novelist. Spon- 
 taneous combustion might do as well as anything else. 
 
 Dickens however shares this vagueness as to principle with 
 the great majority of imaginative writers; and at the beginning hi^ ; 
 tact usually kept him right. It was when he took upon him to.be 
 a reformer of schools, of legal systems, of government offices and 
 of morals and society in general, that he committed his 'worst 
 mistakes. Prior to this stage his humour was the guide. He used 
 what was humorously effective, and rejected what was not. 
 Afterwards, his canon of inclusion or exclusion was serviceableness 
 to the purpose, or the reverse ; and as it was not a canon of art it 
 naturally led to error in art. 
 
 Notwithstanding his errors — perhaps in his errors as much as 
 elsewhere — Dickens remains the romancer of the London streets. 
 This is evident from the intrinsic qualities of his work as well as 
 from a comparison with recent realism. The statement that the 
 characters of Dickens are portraits or mosaics requires explanation 
 and qualification. They are always founded on, but they are 
 rarely transcripts of the real ; the germ lies in experience, but it 
 is nourished into life by imagination. The imagination of the 
 author harmonises the whole Pickwick group. Winkle, with 
 his lying pretence to sportsmanship, treated realistically, would 
 be repellent; treated humoristically, though he rouses the 
 justly indignant Pickwick to call him " humbug," he moves the 
 reader only to mirth. The Weller family, realistically handled, 
 might have been sordid; but under the treatment of Dickens they 
 become the very quintessence of faithful service, of wholesome 
 fun, of acuteness strangely mingled with simplicity. 
 
 If the Slumland of the realist be darker, it is to be feared that 
 that of Dickens is far brighter and better than the actual Slumland 
 of London. There is a glamour over it, a light that never was on 
 the haunts of vice and destitution. What Dickens gives us is not
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 673 
 
 the bare hard fact, but the fact suffused with the glow of a rich 
 imagination. Poetic justice reigns : the wicked are punished, and 
 the righteous get compensation for their suffering, even as Job 
 received twice over all that he had lost. There are horrors in 
 prison life ; but Pickwick descends as a liberating angel to Jingle. 
 Oliver Twist falls among thieves ; but poetic justice restores him 
 safe and uncontaminated to his true position. Abominations have 
 been perpetrated in schools ; but the good knight Nickleby 
 redresses the wrongs of Smike, and makes at least his latter days 
 peaceful. 
 
 In Gissing's admirable monograph on Dickens, to which 
 reference has several times been made, this tendency to idealisa- 
 tion is dwelt upon, and, sympathetic as the criticism is, there is a 
 consciousness of superiority and almost a touch of condescension 
 in the contrast with the sternness and unswerving truth of modern 
 realism. But now when the solid atom itself seems to be dissolving, 
 some doubt is permissible as to the degrees of reality of the "real" 
 and the "ideal." It is certain that Dickens "idealised"; but it is 
 not so certain that in doing so he wandered farther from the truth 
 than the realist. On the contrary, as has been hinted already, a 
 vivid imagination may have kept him nearer to it. The realist is 
 usually a spectator of that which he describes, whether it be 
 animate or inanimate. His characters are to him something 
 external ; he believes that he understands them^ but he does not 
 identify himself with them. This is true even of a man so great 
 as Thackeray, who constantly stops to comment on and discuss 
 his "puppets," and who is obviously quite aware of the strings by 
 which they are moved. But Dickens, according to those who 
 knew him, absolutely was for the time the character he was 
 shaping. All creative writers have in some degree a feeling of 
 intimate concern with the fortunes of their characters; but 
 probably no one else has left such evidence of it in the letters he 
 wrote and in conversation with friends as Dickens. It is at least 
 possible that the mesmeric power and the healing touch which 
 Dickens possessed may have sprung from the same root. All may 
 be forms of sympathy, and sympathy usually means understanding. 
 Dickens's mode of conception was intuitive, the realist's is critical, 
 w. 43
 
 674 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 The former is less under control than the latter, but the results it 
 yields are more sure. 
 
 After Pickwick the life of Dickens is mainly a record of 
 publications. Oliver Twist and AHcholas Nickleby were finished 
 respectively in 1838 and 1839. "^^^ ^^^ Curiosity Shop, begun in 
 1840, was completed in 1841. Then Dickens found it necessary 
 to relieve the strain of such rapid production by a holiday. It 
 was no wonder ; for though Scott, in the decade of his greatest 
 glory, had written better and nearly twice as fast, no other novelist, 
 before or since, has produced with such rapidity works com- 
 parable in merit with these. The most voluminous writers, like 
 G. P. R. James and Anthony Trollope, stand on a much lower 
 plane. To rest himself therefore Dickens in 1842 visited America. 
 He went prepared to be pleased, and his reception was magnificent; 
 but by some fatality his opinion of America and the Ajnericans 
 gradually sank throughout this first visit. Here, as in so many 
 other points, Dickens contrasts with Thackeray. The latter also 
 visited America; but he expected little, and unlike Dickens he 
 was delighted. He was even absurdly suspected of having written 
 The Four Georges in order to flatter American prejudice against 
 monarchy. 
 
 Wherever he went Dickens made literary capital, and soon 
 after his return he published his impressions and experiences in 
 the shape of Avierican Notes (1842). Frequently as the writings 
 of Englishmen about America have given offence, they have 
 seldom offended so deeply as these Notes of Dickens. The 
 indignation was not altogether reasonable. The main subjects of 
 Dickens's censure were, in the first place, slavery, which the better 
 mind of America herself practically condemned some twenty years 
 later; secondly, the political system, the corruptions of which 
 have been denounced in no sparing terms by American writers ; 
 and thirdly, spitting, a filthy habit in the suppression of which 
 America seems to be as pre-eminent now as she was fifty years ago 
 in the practice of it Slavery was a subject tabooed in those days 
 j alike to Americans and to Europeans. The other questions 
 might have been handled without offence by a native; but a 
 young people is sure to be sensitive, and the criticism of a
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 675 
 
 foreigner, if it is at all sharp, will be resented. Dickens no doubt 
 observed the Shakespearean injunction to set down naught in 
 malice ; he forgot that there are cases, of which this was certainly 
 one, when it is wise to violate the other side of it, and extenuate 
 something. He returned to the subject in Martin Chuzzlewit 
 (1843- 1 844), where he deals severely with that want of principle in 
 business which he had found to be rather admired as smart than 
 condemned as immoral. Long afterwards (1867-1868) he paid a 
 second visit to America, when he was generously forgiven his 
 unsparing criticisms, and when his own impressions were much 
 more favourable. 
 
 Several times he visited the continent of Europe, partly for 
 economy and partly to acquire new experiences. He spent a 
 great part of 1844 and 1845 in Italy; and for many months in 
 1846 and 1847 he lived first in Switzerland and afterwards in 
 Paris. To the former visit we owe Pictures from Italy (1846), 
 which were originally contributed to The Daily News ; and it is 
 probable that but for the acquaintance with Paris made on the 
 latter visit, and renewed in 1855 ^""^ 1856, A Tale of Two Cities 
 would never have been written. It must be added however that 
 that book owes more to Carlyle's French Revolution than to 
 the direct observation of Dickens. The story is far better than its 
 author's other historical tale, Barnaby Rudge. It contains no such 
 absurd caricature as the picture of Chesterfield in the latter novel. 
 But Dickens had neither the education nor the turn of mind 
 necessary for success in historical fiction, and it would be 
 ridiculous to claim for him, in this department, a position with 
 Scott or with Thackeray. 
 
 The year 1856 may be taken to be the culmination of Dickens's 
 career. The novel then in progress, Little Dorrit (1855-1857), is 
 certainly not his best; but it was in 1856 that Dickens attained 
 the summit of his boyish ambition by the purchase of Gad's Hill 
 Place; and soon after there came the signs of an unmistakable 
 decline. In 1858 occurred the separation from his wife, and just 
 before that the unfortunate readings had been initiated. Dickens 
 had given a few public readings at Birmingham in 1853, the 
 proceeds of which were devoted to a local institution ; but it was 
 
 43—2
 
 6^6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 in April, 1858, that he first read in public from his own works for 
 his own profit. Various motives united to bring him to this 
 determination. Probably he wished distraction from the thought 
 of the impending separation, and he undoubtedly found it in the 
 excitement of large and enthusiastic audiences. Besides this, 
 Dickens had been conscious from the first of histrionic talent, and 
 he had found frequent outlet for his powers in amateur theatricals. 
 His style of reading, which was eminently dramatic, gave him 
 the outlet his nature craved. Carlyle, who witnessed one of 
 the readings, saw "a whole tragic, comic, heroic theatre visible, 
 performing under one hat"; and performing extraordinarily well 
 too — for he declares that Dickens "acts better than any Macready 
 in the worlds" Dickens moreover saw in the readings a way of 
 winning wealth as well as of gratifying this taste, and also, it may 
 be, his vanity; for, though Forster denies it, there seems to be 
 little doubt that vanity was well marked in his character. He was 
 one of the recognised dandies, and his tendency to over-dress 
 was commented upon by more than one observer. On the 
 pecuniary side his expectations were more than satisfied. From 
 first to last, according to the calculation of Mr George Dolby, who 
 managed the greater number of the readings, Dickens cleared 
 
 about £aS>°°°- 
 
 Just as completely, however, the result in other respects 
 justified those who had attempted to dissuade him from his 
 purpose. On this as on nearly every other point he consulted his 
 friend Forster, suggesting, as early as 1846, that, "if it were not 
 infra dig.,'" much money might be made by giving readings from 
 his own work. Forster frankly gave his opinion that it was '^ infra 
 dig." ; and though he failed ultimately to prevent the step, he did 
 an immense service by helping to delay it for twelve years. On 
 the question of dignity, the weight of opinion has been on the side 
 of Forster. Such a relation as this between a great author and his 
 public was unprecedented, at least since the days of the minstrels; 
 and under modern conditions it seems unworthy. It is a position 
 far less dignified than that of an actor playing a part in his own 
 drama, which Shakespeare felt to be degrading. Who can imagine 
 
 1 Froude's Carlyle, iv. i^<).
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY ^'JJ 
 
 Scott touring about the country and thrilling his audiences with 
 the siege of Torquilstone, or raising a laugh with his Dominie 
 Sampson or the Baron of Bradwardine with his bootjack ? Shelley 
 declaiming Adonais, Tennyson mouthing out the sins and penitence 
 of Lancelot and Guinevere, Browning drawing tears by the sorrows 
 of Pompilia — these are figures which the imagination refuses to 
 picture. But Dickens lost far more than dignity. The readings 
 told prejudicially on his literary work, both lessening the quantity 
 and lowering the quality; and in all probability they shortened his 
 Hfe. The story of the American tour of 1867-1868 is painful 
 reading. The indomitable struggle against sleeplessness and ex- 
 haustion and manifold illnesses would be grand if the occasion 
 had been worthy. It was almost as determined as Scott's closing 
 struggle after the catastrophe of 1826; but Scott was labouring to 
 clear his name from dishonour, Dickens to add a little more to 
 what was already enough. Yet his motive was not purely merce- 
 nary, he was at the same time indulging his taste. His manager 
 declares that the pleasure Dickens derived from the readings 
 is not to be told in words. 
 
 If not the readings, then some other cause operating at the 
 same time, had a disastrous effect upon the literary work of 
 Dickens. The novels he produced after the initiation of this 
 unhappy experiment were A Tale of Two Cities (1859), The 
 Uncommercial Traveller (i860), Great Expectations (1860-1861), 
 Our Mutual Frieud (1864-1865) and the fragment of The 
 Mystery of Edwin £>rood {i^^o). Not one of these novels is of 
 the first class, and the explanation seems to be that the author 
 was overworked. The amount of nervous energy spent upon the 
 readings was enormous, and even Dickens had not an unlimited 
 fund to draw upon. He had been, besides, from the year 1850, 
 harassed by the task of editing periodicals, first Household Words 
 (1850-1855), and then All the Year Round, which he conducted 
 on his own lines till his death. When Thackeray followed the 
 example of Dickens and undertook to edit The Cornhill Magazine, 
 Tennyson lamented that so great an artist should " let his brains 
 be sucked " in such a way. The poet was right : both for Thackeray 
 and for Dickens it was a waste of first-rate powers upon second-
 
 6;/S THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 rate work. It is however necessary to bear in mind, with reference 
 to the decline in the quality of the work of Dickens, that he never 
 showed any development of faculty, but rather, on the contrary, a 
 decline even before the beginning of the readings. Nothing he 
 produced after 1850 is quite first-rate; on the whole, nothing he 
 afterwards wrote is quite so good as Pick-iuick. 
 
 The principal works of Dickens, in addition to those already 
 mentioned, are his Christmas books, the best of which are 
 A Christmas Carol (iS^^) and T/ie Cricket on the Hearth (1845); 
 Dombey and Son (1846- 1848); David Copperjield {i2>/^^-i?>e^o); and 
 Hard Times (1854). He himself thought David Copperfield the 
 best of all his writings; and in this preference he certainly showed 
 none of the proverbial fondness of authors for their weaker 
 offspring. He was probably influenced by the fact that it is the 
 novel which contains most of himself; but in purely literary merit 
 it surpasses all except Pickwick, while it is far more regular than 
 that wonderful book. 
 
 The popularity of Dickens among the rank and file of readers 
 of his own generation needs no explanation ; but there is some- 
 thing surprising in his instantaneous acceptance among critics, 
 especially when we compare his fate with that of his great con- 
 temporary and rival in the art of fiction, Thackeray. In 1837 the 
 name of Dickens was one of the best known in English literature. 
 In 1 84 1 the freedom of the city of Edinburgh was conferred upon 
 him amidst public rejoicings. The veteran critic Jeffrey, who had 
 stamped upon the something new in Wordsworth with his " This 
 will never do," and who had but grudgingly recognised even Scott, 
 was enthusiastic in praise of Dickens. Contrast the fate of 
 Thackeray. Eight years after the conclusion of Pickwick and 
 four years after those public rejoicings in Edinburgh, the editor 
 of The Ediiiburgh Revieiv (Macvey Napier) writes to Abraham 
 Hayward to ask if he knows anything of " a Mr Thackeray," who 
 has been recommended to him as "a good hand for light articles." 
 A periodical like the Edinburgh must "keep up in respect of 
 names," and its editor has to be very much on his guard " in 
 engaging with mere strangers^" At this date Thackeray had 
 ^ Melville's Life of 2'hackeray, i. 193.
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 679 
 
 written The Great Hoggarty Diamond and Barry Lyndon and 
 much besides, mostly, it is true, anonymously or pseudonymously. 
 
 There is a good deal in Dickens that offends a critical taste, 
 and not least his pathos ; but this too we find to have been 
 perfectly acceptable, to the critic as to the general reader, in his 
 own day. Macaulay shed tears over Florence Dombey. Jeffrey 
 wrote to Dickens that he had cried and sobbed over the death 
 of Paul and felt his heart purified by the tears. " Since the 
 divine Nelly was found dead on her humble couch, beneath 
 the snow and the ivy, there has been nothing like the actual 
 dying of that sweet Paul, in the summer sunshine of that lofty 
 room." Thackeray was almost as much overcome. "When 
 he read the number of Dombey containing the death of Paul, he 
 put it in his pocket, went out, and flung it down before Mark 
 Lemon at the Punch office, exclaiming excitedly, ' There's no 
 writing against this ; one hasn't an atom of chance. It's stu- 
 pendous^' " Within a few years this writer, who " hadn't an atom 
 of chance," had himself written the death-scene of Colonel New- 
 come, which is worth all the pathos of Dickens, from Pickwick to 
 Edwin Drood, many times over. America was, if possible, more 
 enthusiastic than England, and Bret Harte bears testimony to the 
 power of the story of Little Nell over the rough miners of Cali- 
 fornia. 
 
 There were one or two dissentient opinions. George Eliot 
 says that Dickens " scarcely ever passes from the humorous and 
 external to the emotional and tragic without becoming as tran- 
 scendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic 
 truthfulness^" Ruskin, writing long afterwards, but still expressing 
 the opinion of a contemporary, says that " Nell, in The Old 
 Curiosity Shop, was simply killed for the market as a butcher 
 kills a Iambi" But the opinion of Thackeray and Jeffrey and 
 Bret Harte was the normal one of the time. There has been a 
 great change since then. The majority of critics now are either 
 
 ^ Melville's Life of Thackeray, ii. 27. 
 
 2 The Natural History of German Life, quoted in The Library of Literary 
 Criticism. 
 
 "* On the uld Road: Fiction Fair and Fuui,
 
 68o THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 censorious or at best apologetic with reference to the pathos of 
 Dickens. The discrirainating but yet admiring Gissing examines 
 the question, and finds, generally, that Dickens sometimes elabo- 
 rated pathetic scenes, in the theatrical sense of the word ; and, 
 specifically, that " nothing can be said in defence of Jo," the cross- 
 ing-sweeper. About Paul Dombey's death he remarks, cautiously, 
 that " if the situation is to be presented at all, it might be much 
 worse done." Little Nell he pronounces to be "a child of romance," 
 and her death " purely symboHcal." In that light, "as a story of 
 peaceful death it is beautifully imagined and touchingly told." 
 Mr W. D. Howells, on the other hand, finds the Little Nell scenes 
 " preposterously overdone^" 
 
 The change tends to shake confidence in criticism and to 
 undermine all belief in a standard of taste. Are the older critics 
 right? Is Paul Dombey's death one of the greatest scenes of 
 pathos in literature ? Is it stupendous ? Or must we content 
 ourselves with saying that " if the situation is to be presented at 
 all, it might be much worse done " ? Generalised, the modern 
 verdict is that the pathos of Dickens is overdone and too long 
 drawn out, and that it shows a lack of self-restraint. In short, in 
 his pathos he follows his usual literary practice of exaggeration. 
 His humour rests on exaggeration; and he chose to set up his 
 pathos on the same basis. The question therefore is, Did he 
 obtain results artistically as good as he obtained in his scenes of 
 humour ? His contemporaries answered yes ; men of a later day, 
 with few exceptions, say no. 
 
 It may be permissible to refer once more to Matthew Arnold's 
 excellent habit of carrying in his mind some test-lines of poetry, 
 and of trying by their standard, as by a touchstone, that which 
 at the moment he was criticising. Such a literary touchstone 
 must obviously be of admitted excellence; and it will be all 
 the safer if it is old enough to have stood the test of time. 
 Now in all literature there is probably no single line that has 
 been more universally felt to be charged with pathos than " the 
 Virgilian cry," Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tatigutit. 
 In all literature there is no more pathetic scene than the death of 
 1 Heroines of Fiction ^ quoted in The Library of Literary Criticism.
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 68l 
 
 Cordelia. But the method of Virgil and Shakespeare is wholly 
 different from that of Dickens. There is no exaggeration, no 
 dwelling upon the subject, no beating out thin. The effect is 
 produced by the simplest and fewest words possible. Not one of 
 those gathered around the body of Cordelia makes a phrase : the 
 emotion is tense, but there is no eloquent declamation to work it 
 up. Dickens, on the other hand, " wallows naked in the pathetic." 
 He omits no circumstance, no object animate or inanimate, which 
 can add, as he conceives, to the " effectiveness " of the death-bed 
 or the funeral. The company as it assembles, the toUing bell, the 
 church, all have their place in the rhetoric wherewith the funeral 
 of Little Nell is celebrated. And it is just this which offends the 
 modern taste in the pathos of Dickens. It is not sufficiently pure. 
 The theatrical element is repellent. The author " protests too 
 much," just where he should not protest at all. 
 
 So far then, and the point is a cardinal one, the reputation of 
 Dickens has immensely declined since his death. The phenomenon 
 of a decline, followed by a recovery, partial or complete, is an ex- 
 tremely common one in literary reputations. For the reason 
 assigned, however, it seems improbable that Little Nell and Paul 
 Dombey will ever be throned again among the most pathetic 
 figures of literature. For humour, on the other hand, the reputa- 
 tion of Dickens stands almost if not quite as high as it ever did. 
 It wears well in spite of exaggeration; doubtless because the 
 feelings are less deeply engaged and the taste less sensitive. 
 Many have been more refined, but few have ever been richer, in 
 humour than Dickens. Pickivick is itself almost a library of 
 humour, grotesque in the Fat Boy, satirical in the trial scene, 
 riotous almost everywhere. Dickens was good at conceiving 
 humorous scenes ; but he was still better at delineating humorous 
 characters, and his highest creations in this sort are veritable 
 triumphs. Sam Weller and Sairey Gamp and Micawber stand 
 among the first of the humorous characters of fiction. The two 
 latter are grotesque but irresistible ; the first is equally irresistible, 
 and, as a better figure of a man, is in a higher style of art. The 
 delicately suggestive touch of Jane Austen, or Lamb, or Sterne, is 
 quite out of the range of Dickens ; his comedy is broad to the
 
 682 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 verge of farce. But it is exuberant and healthy. He can always 
 raise a laugh, and the laugh is always an innocent one. 
 
 The merits and defects of Dickens's portraiture are too obvious 
 to admit of much dispute. He is not one of the small band of 
 great artists who have been able to represent men exactly as they 
 lived. There are no fine shades or nice touches in his work ; but 
 again the reader is struck with his inexhaustible fertility. It has been 
 said somewhere that his characters would make a town populous 
 enough to send a member to Parliament, and Pierce's Dickens 
 Dictionary proves that the statement, wild as it seems, is almost 
 literally accurate. Of course the majority of these characters are 
 but slightly sketched, many make only a casual appearance, not a 
 few have nothing to do with the story and might be omitted without 
 the slightest loss ; but their mere number is a striking proof of the 
 exuberance of Dickens's imagination, of his wonderful keenness as 
 an observer and of the marvellous retentiveness of the memory in 
 which all the fruits of observation were stored. 
 
 The principle upon which this inexhaustible raw material of 
 human nature is dealt with is that which governs the work of 
 Dickens in every aspect — exaggeration. The strongest colours 
 are laid on with the largest brush. From beginning to end his 
 characters rarely, if ever, impress the reader as all-round, normal 
 men and women. The comparison with Ben Jonson has been 
 repeatedly made, and is almost inevitable. To the tribe of Ben, 
 not to the school of Shakespeare, Dickens belongs : he is a 
 delineator of humours rather than a painter of men. There is 
 usually some label attached to his characters — a habitual phrase, 
 a gesture, a physical peculiarity — like a trade-mark to goods. In 
 Pickwick the sporting proclivities of Winkle result from the original 
 plan, and so, in a minor degree, do the peculiarities of the other 
 members of the club, Snodgrass, Tupman and Pickwick himself 
 (in the first phase). But we have besides in Pickwick itself the 
 fatness and sleepiness of the Fat Boy, the broken, jerky sentences 
 of Jingle and the grotesque professionalism of Bob Sawyer. In 
 the subsequent novels the 'umbleness of Uriah Heap, the jollity 
 of Mark Tapley and the elegant profanity of Mantalini, are all 
 instances of the same sort. Among external marks or symbols
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 683 
 
 may be mentioned the chronic buttonlessness of Peggotty and 
 Sairey Gamp's umbrella. The list might be indefinitely enlarged. 
 Dickens, then, relies much on exaggeration, and is frequently 
 in the realms of the grotesque. The result is often successful, but 
 it is never in the highest style of art, except, perhaps, in the one case 
 of Sam Weller. Shakespeare makes capital out of the fatness of 
 Falstaff, but it is not the essence of his humour ; while in Dickens 
 too often the peculiarity is the essence. Silas Wegg is for ever 
 declining and falling off. Captain Cuttle flourishing his hook and 
 making a note of everything. The reader expects the recurrence, 
 and might have some difficulty in recognising the character if the 
 label by any mischance fell off. Even in Mr Micawber, though 
 he is so infinitely amusing that it is distasteful to hint a fault, 
 there is a little too much of the shiftless waiting for something to 
 turn up. 
 
 In the non-humorous characters the same fault prevails. Mr 
 Dombey is self-importance and pride of purse incarnate, Pecksniff 
 is not so much a man as Hypocrisy with a capital H. Such por- 
 traiture defeats itself It is unconvincing. Given a Pecksniff in 
 real life, even simple-minded Tom Pinch would not be deceived 
 by him ; because the very beginnings of self-deception are absent 
 from Pecksniff himself His hypocrisy is " gross as a mountain, 
 open, palpable," like Falstaff's lies. But wherever hypocrisy is 
 completely self-conscious, it must be cynical ; and Pecksniff is not 
 cynical. Burns's Holy Willie is painted in strong enough colours. 
 He too is hypocritical ; but he is uneasy, partially self-deceived, 
 anxious to deceive himself more completely. And so he makes 
 the Almighty responsible for the grossest of his sins. The 
 " fleshly thorn " may be a heavenly visitation lest the gifted 
 servant become too proud. If so, the obvious duty of the pious 
 servant is submission ; and thus indulgence in sin becomes 
 obedience to the divine will. There is nothing in Pecksniff one- 
 tenth part as subtle as this : when he asks Charity to remind him 
 to pray for Mr Anthony Chuzzlewit, who has done him an injustice, 
 he is as clear about his own hypocrisy as the reader. 
 
 Such being the way of Dickens, he naturally did not succeed 
 unless he had some strongly-marked feature to work upon;
 
 684 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 and so his novels become a collection of oddities. It is 
 this, more than the grotesqueness of any single individual, that 
 gives them an air of unreality. As we are aware that abnormal 
 beings do exist, the presence of a few such in fiction seems 
 natural enough and even gives zest; but a world peopled by 
 eccentrics and faddists is not the world we know. Dickens, of 
 course, has his ordinary men and women too ; but the misfortune 
 is that they are as a rule uninteresting, and the whole flavour of 
 his work is drawn from the abnormal. 
 
 A necessary consequence of this prevalence of exaggeration 
 and abnormality is that the characters of Dickens are either 
 eminently good or emphatically bad. As in the old Moralities, 
 we have the Vice set against the Virtue, hero opposed to villain. 
 Nicholas Nickleby and Ralph, Pecksniff and Tom Pinch, 
 Bounderby and Stephen Blackpool, are a few examples of this 
 sort of opposition. Here again the reader feels a certain unreality. 
 The elements in human character are curiously mixed, and grey 
 is a more common colour than either black or white. Dickens 
 sees only the one element or only the other. But he is essentially 
 an optimist, and so he is always ready to reform his villains — 
 with a few exceptions, necessary by way o. warning and example. 
 Pecksniff must be reduced to beggary, or the lesson would not 
 go home; but the unprincipled Jingle may become a valuable 
 member of society, with a brand-new character, because he is not 
 the text of a sermon. 
 
 At an early date in his career Dickens began to take himself 
 seriously and, to his own detriment as many believe, to exhibit a 
 purpose in his work. The novel of purpose was by no means new in 
 English. The works of Richardson are full of purpose, and it is 
 the essence of Godwin's. On the other hand, the robust under- 
 standing of Fielding, the keen artistic instinct of Jane Austen and 
 the healthy sense of Scott, all rejected it. But the sober English 
 mind always tends to introduce it anew, and the time was once 
 more ripe. Carlyle reproached Scott for want of seriousness, and 
 sneered at him as the " restaurateur " of Europe ; and possibly 
 Carlyle's sneer may have had some influence on Dickens. Just 
 before Dickens purpose reappears in the early works of Lytton,
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 685 
 
 and a little later the political novels of Disraeli show it in another 
 aspect. Kingsley's Hypatia is a document in the great High 
 Church versus Protestant controversy, and the opposite party 
 have their own documents in the shape of Newman's Callista and 
 Loss and Gain. Yet another phase appears in Kingsley's Alton 
 Locke and Yeast, in Mrs Gaskell's Mary Barton and in Charlotte 
 Bronte's Shirley. Charles Reade's // is Never too Late to Mend 
 and Hard Cash are inspired by the same spirit. Thackeray wrote 
 no novel of this class ; but there is something cognate to it in the 
 " sermons " and asides which abound in nearly all his books. 
 
 Dickens came under the sway of the same ideas, and felt that 
 he too must vindicate his dignity by teaching. Even in Pickwick 
 we see in the scenes in the Fleet prison the intrusion of purpose, 
 and in most of the later novels it is very prominent. Oliver Twist 
 deals with the administration of the poor law and the making of 
 criminals, and has thus some kinship with the " Newgate novels " 
 of Lytton and Ainsworth, from which nevertheless it is widely 
 separated. For, while they enlist sympathy on the side of the 
 criminal, Dickens is careful to give to his hero a purity almost 
 impossible under the circumstances. The obvious purpose of 
 Nicholas Nickleby is the reform of schools. Hard Times is an 
 attack upon the orthodox political economy — a Latter-Day 
 Pamphlet in the shape of a story. Other novels deal with the 
 Court of Chancery, or the government offices, or with specific 
 vices, such as selfishness, or the modern English worship of 
 wealth. 
 
 The abstract question whether purpose is or is not prejudicial 
 to art is not worth discussing. There is no reason in the nature 
 of things why it should be prejudicial, and the true question is 
 whether in a particular instance it has or has not led the author 
 astray. Of course the danger is the serving of two masters : Art 
 and Purpose may in certain cases be as irreconcilable as God and 
 Mammon. The danger which besets the writer who has a purpose 
 in view is that of exaggeration ; and this is especially prejudicial 
 in the case of a man like Dickens, whose natural tendency was 
 towards excess. Zeal for his purpose led to still greater excess. 
 He saw nothing in its natural proportions, because he was deter-
 
 686 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ER-\ 
 
 mined to see everything in the light of his purpose. In his 
 eagerness for reform he seems to forget that rule and method are 
 essential. Red tape is not a bad thing in itself, and some of the 
 ways of the Circumlocution Office are indispensable to the conduct 
 of business. Character fares in the same way. Light and shade 
 disappear. So too Dickens's style becomes overcharged, his 
 senrimentality grows imwholesome, his most offensive violations of 
 taste are committed, aU under the influence of this wish to teach. 
 For him certainly purpose was prejudicial. 
 
 There is one other reason why, for Dickens, the intrusion of 
 purpose was deplorable. For wise and successful handling it 
 demanded thought. The assailant of an educational system, the 
 critic of the poor law, or of the machinery by which the business 
 of the nation is transacted, or of the social and economic relations 
 between employer and workman, ought to be a reflective person. 
 But of all great English novelists Dickens was the least reflective. 
 It would be absurd to put him in this respect on a level with 
 Thackeray or with George EHoL By some Scott is supposed to 
 be shallower than these writers, because he never analyses Uke the 
 latter, and rarely stops to comment, like the former. But in truth 
 there is in him a larger wisdom in resp)ect both of social life and 
 public affairs and of individual character, than there is in either of 
 the others ; and whoever knows the Waverley Novels will have at 
 his coDMnand a fund of thought on many ages and countries and 
 institutions. The clan system in Scotland — vagabondage — the 
 law's delays — the relations of Saxon and Norman after the Con- 
 quest — of Christian and Jew — superstition — religious fanaticism. 
 are only a few of the subjects on which Scott, whoUy without 
 parade and in the easiest way, throws the light of his genius. 
 Dickens, on the other hand, is purely and simply an observer. 
 It has been noticed already that, outside the limits of his own 
 e^)erience, his hand loses its cunning in portraiture. It has been 
 noticed also that there is httle or no e\"idence of development in 
 his work. Slight changes indeed there are, but no evolution of 
 the higher from the lower. In both cases the reason probably is 
 that he observes with the most extraordinary keenness, but reflects 
 comparatively little. Hence too his eariy matxint) . The powers
 
 V 
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 687 
 
 of observation soon reach perfection, while the reasoning faculty 
 may go on growing till late in life. For the same reason Dickens 
 never was a reader, and suffered little from his ignorance of books. 
 No book could give him impressions half as vivid as he could derive 
 from the London streets. His manner of depicting character also 
 indicates abnormal powers of observation and comparatively little 
 reflectiveness. There is ample evidence on the subject, for his 
 correspondence, especially with Forster, is full of his books, and 
 we constantly see his characters in the making. There is abso- 
 lutely no analysis : he never reasons out a character, but he 
 identifies himself with it. He Hves in the lives of his creations, 
 suffers with them and rejoices in their good fortune. The method 
 is excellent, and doubtless the singular vividness of Dickens is due p 
 to it. 
 
 In all this however there is no ratiocination ; nor is there 
 any evidence that Dickens possessed more than an ordinary 
 endowment of the reasoning faculty. This is another point 
 in which he contrasts with his great contemporary, William 
 Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), a man of reading and of 
 culture, a man as intimately acquainted with the higher ranks of 
 society as was Dickens with the lower, as reserved and reticent 
 as Dickens was exuberant and gushing. The contrast between 
 the early history of the two men has already been touched upon. 
 The story is well known how Thackeray, artist as well as author, 
 was an unsuccessful competitor for the post of illustrator of The 
 Pickwick Papers, vacant by the death of Seymour; and it was 
 eleven years after the publication of the masterpiece of Dickens 
 before Vanity Fair raised Thackeray to a position comparable to 
 that of the younger author. Thackeray's early years were a period 
 of many trials and sorrows, but also of much happiness. Like 
 other Anglo-Indian children, he was sent home for education ; and 
 on the way had a glimpse of the great Napoleon on his lonely 
 island. At the Charterhouse he was not very happy, and his earlier 
 references to it have some satirical bitterness ; but time mellowed 
 his feelings, and in The Newcomes the Swishtail Academy is softened 
 into the Grey Friars. From the Charterhouse Thackeray in 1829 
 went to Cambridge, where he was one year junior to Tennyson,
 
 688 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 who in later days "always regarded Thackeray as the head of 
 English literature in the Victorian era^." 
 
 Thackeray does not seem to have worked very seriously at the 
 University, nor to have gained much directly from its studies, though 
 he gained incalculably from the friendships he there formed. It 
 is significant to note that, while Tennyson was the author of the 
 prize poem for 1829, Thackeray wrote a burlesque on the subject; 
 and it is curious that this was published in a paper called The 
 Snob. Leaving Cambridge in 1830, he crossed to the Continent, 
 where he made a considerable stay at Weimar. He saw and had 
 some slight intercourse with Goethe, his recollections of which 
 are given in a letter printed in Levves's Life of Goethe. Returning 
 to England in 1831, he entered a lawyer's chambers to prepare for 
 the bar; but he seems to have shown no more zeal than his 
 own Pendennis in the study of the law. His successor- in the 
 chambers is said to have found Thackeray's desk there stuffed 
 with sketches and caricatures". Thackeray was evidently unsettled 
 by the fact that he had inherited from his father a small fortune, 
 the possession of which seemed to absolve him from the necessity 
 of coming to an immediate decision as to his career in life. 
 Before he came of age he lay awake "meditating on the wise 
 and proper manner" to employ it^ A few years after he acquired 
 control, it was all lost in ill-advised newspaper speculations. In 
 1836 he married, and was radiantly happy until the sad break- 
 down of his wife's health plunged him into sorrow. Some 
 of the most touching lines of the Ballad of Boiiillabaisse point 
 the contrast between his life before and his life after this 
 disaster. 
 
 At this time Thackeray's attention was divided between 
 art and literature. He spent much of his youth in Paris as a 
 student of art, and all his life long he handled the pencil with 
 greater pleasure than the pen. His illustrations of his own books 
 are, as aids to the text, among the best ever drawn, and prove 
 that he had a very decided gift for art. But though the conception 
 
 1 The second Lord Tennyson, quoted in Melville's Life of Thackeray. 
 - Thackeray s Works, with Biographical Introductions , 111. xxviii. 
 * ibid. III. x^v.
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 689 
 
 is admirable the drawing is very faulty, and it was fortunate that 
 in the struggle literature carried the day. 
 
 The early writings of Thackeray were all contributions to 
 periodicals — Fraser's Magazine, The New Monthly Magazine, The 
 Times and other papers. A little later, from 1842 to 1854, he 
 was a regular contributor to Punch, his connexion with which 
 was broken owing to the novelist's disapproval of the attitude of 
 the great comic journal towards Napoleon III. Much excellent 
 work was done for these papers. The Book of Snobs (1848), so 
 redolent of the genius of Thackeray, is composed of articles which 
 originally appeared in the pages of Punch, where also the Ballads 
 of Policeman X were first printed ; while The Yellowplush Papers, 
 The Great Hoggarty Diamond and Barry Lyndon were introduced 
 to the world by Fraser. All these, as well as the Paris and Irish 
 Sketch- Books and the Notes of a Journey from Cor7ihiU to Grand 
 Cairo, belong to the first period of Thackeray's authorship, which 
 we may take to extend to the start of Vanity Fair. At the end 
 of the period Thackeray still remained, as we have seen, a person 
 whose name was of doubtful value to a great periodical. 
 
 There is much that is admirable in the work of those opening 
 years — keen observation, humour, satire, fun, pathos, the gifts of 
 a poet as well as those of a master of prose. All that we subse- 
 quently find in Thackeray may be detected here in germ, and 
 much of it is to be seen in full bloom. The philosophy of life 
 expounded in Vanity Fair is presented, only more crudely, in 
 The Book of Snobs ; and there are in the Sketch-Books passages 
 of mingled satire and pathos which will bear comparison with all 
 but the best of his subsequent writings. But his work was still 
 uneven, as the work of a journalist, written for daily bread, must 
 necessarily be ; and there is only one book of the period for 
 which, as a whole, any critic has ever claimed a place among 
 the greatest of Thackeray's works. Barry Lyndon was as yet 
 the only convincing proof he had given of power for sustained 
 composition ; and lor sheer intellectual force he probably never 
 surpassed it. But excellent as Barry Lyndon is, it is the sort of 
 book which wins admiration without establishing any emotional 
 rapport between the author and the reader. It never had, and 
 
 w. 44
 
 690 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 it has not to this day, a tithe of the popularity of Thackeray's 
 other, novels ; far less could it rival those of Dickens. It proved 
 however, once for all, that Thackeray possessed a marvellous 
 power of taking and consistently keeping to a point of view. The 
 life of a scoundrel, written from the scoundrel's standpoint, by a 
 man who scorns and loathes him, yet who never for a moment 
 forgets that to himself the scoundrel seems wholly admirable, who 
 makes him the sole witness against himself, and who out of his 
 own mouth convicts him of being the greatest villain since lago, is 
 surely one of the most remarkable achievements in literature. It 
 is comparable to the dramatic monologues of Browning, but these 
 are less elaborate. Still, even in Barry Ly7idon, the canvas is small. 
 There is far less variety than in an ordinary novel. There is 
 absolute proof of Thackeray's power to write a story of the Defoe 
 species ; but there might remain a doubt whether he could enter 
 with equal success into other types of character, and whether he 
 could successfully exhibit them moving and acting together. 
 
 It is the books of this period which give the strongest support 
 to the view that Thackeray was in heart and soul a cynic, about 
 which something will be said hereafter. There is certainly a 
 strong flavour of gall in nearly all his writings of the first period, 
 and there is comparatively little to sweeten it. Why, it has often 
 been asked, did Thackeray concern himself so much about snobs? 
 And it is not obscurely hinted that the most probable answer is, 
 he was a snob himself. But a better reason can be assigned. 
 Thackeray was, first, a realist, secondly, a moralist. The realist 
 saw that snobbery was, in point of fact, one of the great vices of 
 modern English society ; and the moralist (whose business is not 
 with that which is already sufficiently well, but with that which 
 is not so well) desired to cure it. The Englishman's hell, says 
 Carlyle, is chiefly not making enough money; but Carlyle knew 
 that there was another hell, the hell of not being "respectable," 
 not being a "gigman." It was from the fear of this hell that 
 Thackeray wished to deliver his countrymen, and he tried to do 
 so by making it ridiculous. In the effort he made the mistake 
 to which youth is always prone. Laying too much emphasis on 
 the one thing, he gave a false impression of life by omitting all
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 69 1 
 
 that did not seem to be to the purpose. He learnt wisdom with 
 years, and there is nothing more remarkable in his development 
 than the gradual softening of tone in the succession of the great 
 novels. 
 
 Not till the appearance of Vanity Fair did Thackeray give 
 quite indubitable proof of the greatness and of the wide range 
 of his genius. After the fashion countenanced by Dickens, 
 that novel was issued in numbers, in 1847-1848. Perhaps 
 the most convincing proof of the inherent viciousness of this 
 system is to be found in a comparison between the structure 
 of the one great novel by Thackeray which was written and 
 published as a whole, and that of his other stories, in which the 
 system of periodical publication was followed. The exception is 
 Esmo7id. Now Esmotid is one of the most perfectly constructed 
 stories in the English language. It has no intricate plot, but its 
 unity from beginning to end, the adaptation of part to part, the 
 harmony of tone, the systematic progress of the narrative, must 
 strike every reader. But no one would say this of Thackeray's 
 other works. Vanity Fair, Pendennis and The Newcomes have 
 each their advocates for the first place among his works; but 
 they are all broken, interrupted, meandering in their narrative, 
 undisguisedly so in all cases, avowedly so in the case of Vanity 
 Fair ; and they are great novels not because of this, but in spite of it. 
 The inference from these novels would be that Thackeray was 
 deficient in constructive power; but Esmond disproves that in- 
 ference, and throws us back on the other explanation, that the 
 novels were written piecemeal, in response to the printer's clamour 
 for copy. Of course, an author who had the resolution to write 
 his story beforehand, as a whole, would be independent of the 
 mode of publication ; but in a delightful Roundabout Paper 
 Thackeray has admitted that it was not so with him. Though 
 capable of strenuous work, he was indolent and inclined to 
 procrastinate. Hence most of his novels were written by snatches, 
 in varying moods, at intervals 01 a month. Some have thought 
 that Scott lowered the quality of his work by rapidity of execution ; 
 but it is far more certain that Thackeray lowered the quality of 
 his by its spasmodic character. 
 
 44—2
 
 692 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Vanity Fair is one of the most interesting novels of the 
 nineteenth century, not only for its admirable style, its power of 
 thought and its wisdom, but for the relation in which it stands to 
 other works of fiction both before and after it. Dickens, as we 
 have seen, had broken fresh ground half-unconsciously. He was 
 not fully aware of the significance of his interesting himself and 
 his readers in the scenes and the characters of the London 
 streets ; but the choice of ground in the Sketches by Boz and The 
 Pickwick Papers was the entrance of democracy into literature. 
 The element of realism in it is obvious ; but we have also seen 
 that it is superficial. 
 
 With regard to Thackeray the opposite is true. He is con- 
 sciously and deliberately a realist. He calls Vaiiity Fair "a 
 novel without a hero." No man, the old saying runs, is a hero to 
 his valet : the valet sees him too close, his defects and weaknesses 
 are too obvious. Ludovicus Rex, as Thackeray shows in a most 
 instructive series of sketches, is a very imposing figure as he 
 appears before the world ; but there is no mystery to the valet, 
 he is accustomed to handle Re.x, the trappings, too familiarly for 
 reverence, and to see the poor little shivering " forked radish " of 
 a man, Ludovicus, in all his insignificance without them. Now 
 the novelist is valet to his characters : he is omniscient \ all the 
 vices as well as all the virtues are known to him. Hence, in this 
 " vanity fair " of a world which Thackeray depicts, there is to him 
 no hero. He will set no man on a pedestal and worship him ; he 
 will impartially expose the weaknesses of all, and impartially give 
 credit for the virtues — when there are any. Carlyle's doctrine, on 
 the contrary, is that there are great men, who are almost infinitely 
 superior to the little men, and that the vital thing for little men, 
 the only way of growing out of their littleness, is to find the great 
 man, and to reverence and follow him when found. If no man is 
 a hero to his valet — so much the worse for the valet. A com- 
 parison between these two contrasted doctrines, and an examina- 
 tion of the question how far Thackeray really remained faithful to 
 his own, will bring us very near the core of his work. 
 
 By critics not in complete sympathy with him Thackeray has 
 been repeatedly charged with cynicism. Not long ago he was
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 693 
 
 branded as the apostle of mediocrity. He belittles all his 
 characters, it is said, disbelieves in grand virtues, and associates 
 goodness with pettiness of character and feebleness of intellect. 
 Contrast his clever women with his good ones — Becky Sharp and 
 Beatrix Esmond with Helen Pendennis and Amelia Sedley. The 
 two charges are at bottom closely akin, and though they are not 
 altogether true, yet they are not without some foundation. It is 
 Thackeray himself who sings 
 
 " How very weak the very wise, 
 How very small tlie very great are." 
 
 But the charge of cynicism is at least mistakenly expressed. It 
 is sufificient to appeal against it to Esmond and to the Roundabout 
 Papers, and to ask what cynic ever conceived such a scene as the 
 deathbed of Colonel Newcome, or such a character as that of the 
 man there passing to his account. To the true cynic human nature 
 is not merely faulty but essentially mean ; and a man who held 
 such a creed could never have drawn such a character as Colonel 
 Esmond, the Bayard of English fiction. There is more insight in 
 the judgment of Charlotte Bronte : " Whenever he writes, Mephis- 
 topheles stands on his right hand and Raphael on his left ; the 
 great doubter and sneerer usually guides the pen, the Angel, 
 noble and gentle, interlines letters of Hght here and there'." But 
 this still exaggerates the cynical element, and there is yet more 
 truth in the indignant repudiation which Shirley Brooks expressed 
 in Punch over the grave of its old contributor : — 
 
 " He was a cynic ! By his life all wrought 
 Of generous acts, mild words, and gentle ways ; 
 His heart wide open to all kindly thought, 
 His hand so quick to give, his tongue to praise ! 
 He was a cynic ! You might read it writ 
 In that broad brow, crowned with its silver hair, 
 In those blue eyes with childlike candour lit, 
 In that sweet smile his lips were wont to wear. 
 He was a cynic ! By the love that clung 
 About him from his children, friends, and kin ; 
 By the sharp pain light pen and gossip tongue 
 Wrought in him, chafing the soft heart within ! " 
 
 * Quoted in Shortev's Charlotte Bronte and her Circle, 418.
 
 694 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Again, though most of Thackeray's characters — like the vast 
 majority of human beings — are mediocre, it is not true that all of 
 them are. Harry Warrington is not. George Warrington is far 
 from being a faultless man, but " mediocre " is just the word that 
 will not describe him. Still less will it describe Henry Esmond ; 
 and if Colonel Newcome is mediocre in intellect, in character he 
 certainly is not. But to prove Thackeray the apostle of mediocrity it 
 would not be enough to show that all his characters were mediocre ; 
 their creator must also rest content with mediocrity, or at any rate 
 refrain from aspiring beyond it. But Thackeray was essentially 
 a preacher, and the substance of all his sermons is, cease to be 
 ^"content with mediocrity, intellectual or moral, learn its weakness, 
 its worthlessness, its powerlessness for good, its fatal potency for 
 evil. The four Georges were mediocre men, no more greatly 
 vicious than they were great in intellect. Thackeray drew masterly 
 portraits of them ; but his object is to show how benumbing, how 
 degrading, how deadly mediocrity is. 
 
 Yet the old proverb, there is no smoke without fire, is justi- 
 fied here. Thackeray is not a cynic, he is not an apostle of 
 mediocrity ; but nevertheless those who have so described him 
 have not been wholly wrong. There are in Thackeray's work 
 elements which in a less kindly, and above all in a less reverent, 
 nature would be cynicism ; and his scheme of work gives a great, 
 perhaps an undue, prominence to mediocrity. Certainly while 
 reading him we are all the better for the corrective of Carlyle's 
 hero-worship. It is true that genuine greatness is excessively 
 rare ; so far Thackeray is right, and he is justified in depicting his 
 world of commonplace beings without a hero. But it is also true 
 that when real greatness is found it is of inestimable importance ; 
 so far Carlyle is right. Once or twice in the history of the world, 
 as in the expansion of the Roman republic, we may find " an 
 interregnum of extraordinary deeds and ordinary men." But 
 there are a handful of men who by thought or action or emotion 
 have changed the course of history — Alexander and Caesar, Aris- 
 totle and Newton, Mahomet and Luther. The mere counting 
 of heads is not enough, we must also weigh brains and value 
 character. The omission of the heroic (that, as well as the con-
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 695 
 
 ventional " hero " of fiction, is excluded from Vanity Fair) is the 
 omission of that which is most vital. 
 
 Herein then lies the element of truth in these charges. They 
 apply principally to Vanity Fair and to the earlier books, though 
 they have some point in reference to the bulk of Thackeray's 
 other v/ork as well. They are especially applicable to Vanity 
 Fair, because it is an instance of reaction, and in accordance 
 with the ordinary law, reaction against any excess leads to 
 excess on the other side. Thackeray was greatly under the in- 
 fluence of the eighteenth century writers, and above all of Fielding. 
 Pamela produced by xtdLClxo'd Joseph Andrews, the sentimentalism 
 of Richardson provoked the realism of his satirist. Vanity Fair 
 is not, like Joseph Andrews, a satire on any one novel. It is 
 however a satire on romance and on sentiment, a reaction against 
 Scott and Lytton and Dickens all at once. It is a satire at the 
 same time on contemporary society ; for though the scene is laid 
 some thirty years back, the teaching is unmistakably applicable to 
 the writer's own time. 
 
 Thackeray did not design Vanity Fair to be a picture of the 
 world as a whole: it represents a particular phase of society, a 
 special type of men. " What I want is," he writes, " to make a 
 set of people living without God in the world (only that is a cant 
 phrase), greedy, pompous men, perfectly self-satisfied for the most 
 part^ and at ease about their superior virtue^" Hence the Sedleys, 
 the Osbornes, the Crawleys, Lord Steyne and Becky Sharp. If 
 it were urged that the result is a one-sided view, Thackeray 
 might reply that it was never meant to be anything else. But the 
 reply is not wholly convincing. Probably the end held in view 
 and the method adopted in Vanity Fair are faulty ; at any rate 
 the method is not that of Shakespeare. Against the treachery of 
 Macbeth he puts the fidelity of Banquo ; against the cruelty of 
 Regan and Goneril the love of Cordelia ; against the devilishness 
 of lago the simplicity of heart which makes Othello an easy victim. 
 We do not take an individual to represent society : Barry Lyndon's 
 villainy is his own. But when we find a number of people 
 gathered together by the various chances which bring men into 
 * Works, zoilh Biographical Iniroduclwns, i. xxxvi.
 
 696 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 contact with one another, we naturally suppose that we shall find 
 among them the qualities of the whole. It is not so in Vanity 
 Fair. The loyalty and truth of Dobbin are no adequate counter- 
 poise to the heartlessness of George Osborne, the meanness and 
 cowardice of Jos Sedley, the want of moral principle in Rawdon 
 Crawley and the unredeemed vice of Lord Steyne. Moreover, 
 Dobbin is made ridiculous ; while, though the vicious characters 
 are depicted, as vicious, it is only Jos Sedley against whom the 
 laugh is turned. Among the female characters, again, all the 
 intellect is bestowed upon Becky ; Amelia is mild and inane, and 
 her goodness of heart has the limits due to the weakness of such 
 a head. 
 
 In Vanity Fair Thackeray's compass does not point to 
 polar truth ; the repellent influence of realism causes a wide 
 deviation. It is easy however to make allowance for this and to 
 take the book for what it was meant to be. False as a picture 
 of society, it reveals with penetrating truth the inner soul and 
 character of certain items of society. Thackeray's men and 
 women are real. The sordid schemes of the Rawdon Crawley 
 household, the pompous emptiness of the Osbornes, and the 
 viciousness of Steyne can all be paralleled. So can the flash of 
 manhood in the empty-headed but not altogether empty-hearted 
 dragoon, Rawdon Crawley. The triumph of the book is by 
 universal consent the wonderful creation of Becky Sharp. En- 
 dowed with plenty of intellect, absolutely unencumbered with 
 moral principle, and placed in a position of dependence, she was 
 bound to develop just the vices she shows. The general con- 
 ception of the character is fairly easy ; what is beyond the reach 
 of ordinary writers is the marvellous cleverness and resource 
 which could only be bestowed by a marvellously clever and 
 resourceful author ; for in creative work no one can rise higher 
 than his own best self. No one but Shakespeare has drawn a 
 character so intellectual as Hamlet or so humorous as Falstaff, 
 because no one else possessed the intellect or the humour. 
 
 Nemesis several times overtakes Becky: the very success of 
 her own schemes brings repentance. Thackeray is too much of a 
 moralist to be at ease under the triumph of his own scoundrels,
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 697 
 
 male or female : they usually fail in the long run. But he is too 
 much of an artist to tack on the moral. The failure comes quite 
 naturally, it is unforced, there is no deus ex machina to reward 
 virtue and to punish vice. For example, Becky schemes to marry 
 Rawdon Crawley, and succeeds ; her punishment comes when she 
 has Sir Pitt Crawley at her feet. Clever as she is, she has been 
 unable to foresee the future. So all the conquests of the brilliant 
 Beatrix Esmond lead only to an unrespected age and a miser- 
 able deathbed — the inevitable results of such a life and such a 
 character. Herein Thackeray is far more true to nature, and is 
 a far more profound moralist, than Dickens. With the latter 
 sudden conversions are frequent. The villain readily repents him 
 of his villainy, and the good man is rewarded, not because he has 
 earned the reward, but because he is good. Possibly Dickens 
 followed the Psalmist^ who had " not seen the righteous forsaken, 
 nor his seed begging bread " — a rule which seems to admit of 
 exceptions in modern times. 
 
 The "novel without a hero" is, then, a commentary, not on 
 society as a whole, but only on certain aspects of it. A point of 
 view is chosen, and everything is selected and arranged with 
 reference to it. The dramatis personae are such as suit it ; what 
 they say and do is what best illustrates the vanitas vanitatntn of 
 the preacher. Thackeray frequently speaks of them as his pup- 
 pets and of himself as the showman who pulls the strings and 
 makes them move. They are not puppets, and behind the mask 
 he is a very serious-faced showman. He is essentially a moralist, 
 a preacher ; and the method of his teaching is satirical. . It has 
 even been said that he is not properly a novelist at all, but a 
 satirist. Here again we have an exaggeration of a truth. It is 
 true that Vatiity Fair has not the compact structure which we 
 look for in a novel : it is as destitute of plot as of hero. The 
 author is teacher and satirist, not only in those delightful lectures 
 and asides in which he stops the action in order to comment 
 upon the characters and upon human nature, but in the most 
 rapid action and the most racy dialogue as well. And yet, loose 
 as the structure is, the satire and the teaching would lose their 
 effect if they were detached from it. 
 
 Though he was essentially a teacher Thackeray had little to
 
 698 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 do with the novel of purpose. He never followed Dickens in his 
 hOmanitarianism, Circumlocution offices and loathsome prisons 
 and workhouses and schools found no reformer in him. He 
 looked on with a quiet smile, and rather suspected that the reform 
 was being overdone. His aim was simply to represent life, or a 
 certain phase of it, as it truly was, not irradiated by the glow of 
 romance, not brightened by the rose-spectacles of sentiment. 
 
 There is a sweep of mind, a massiveness of thought about 
 Vanity Fair which convinced all competent judges that a real 
 genius had appeared. "Scott for boys, Thackeray for men, 
 Shakespeare for heroes " was the saying of Samuel Rogers. We 
 may pass over the impertinence to Scott, one of the most manly 
 of men and of writers ; it was no more than justice to Thackeray. 
 His books are emphatically books for men ; the stamp of a 
 masculine understanding appealing to masculine understandings is 
 on every page of them, and on none more clearly than on Vanity 
 Fair. It was not only the product of a great mind, but of a 
 mature mind and of a practised hand. Thackeray was in his 
 thirty-sixth year when it began to appear. Such experience as it 
 is based upon is not rapidly accumulated. The Book of Snobs, 
 The Yellowpbish Papers, even Barry Lyndon, had all been 
 prehminary essays and studies in preparation for it. The wealth 
 which Thackeray lavishes upon Vanity Fair had been laboriously 
 accumulated in those years of apprenticeship when he had been 
 observing, reflecting, sketching, writing for journals and magazines 
 to provide daily bread for those dependent upon him. This 
 practice told upon the style as well as upon the matter of 
 Vanity Fair. It is the style of a highly cultivated man and an 
 experienced writer. It is flexible as well as strong, always 
 adequate, never overcharged, sometimes impassioned and nobly 
 eloquent. 
 
 Vanity Fair raised Thackeray to a position of rivalry with 
 Dickens, not in popularity, but in the judgment of critics and of 
 the more cultivated class of readers. The followers of the two 
 writers have always been different, and those of Dickens by far the 
 more numerous. But though Vajiity Fair did not rival Pickwick in 
 circulation, it made its author one of the most prominent writers 
 of his generation. In January 1848 he writes to a friend that he
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 699 
 
 is " all but at the top of the tree, indeed there, if the truth were 
 known, and having a great fight up there with Dickens \" He was 
 no longer a journalist ; he was a writer of books, and as such the 
 peer of the best. After Vanity Fair came Pendentiis (1848- 
 1850), which in respect of being partly an autobiography corre- 
 sponds to the contemporaneous novel of Dickens, David Copper- 
 field"^. Though still loose in construction, FendenJiis is far more 
 like the orthodox novel than Va?iity Fair. The characters are 
 not so exclusively chosen to illustrate a thesis ; they are represen- 
 tative of a wider range of life. Thackeray had in part reacted 
 against his own reaction. In Pendennis he is nearer to romance 
 and less opposed to sentiment than he is in Vardiy Fair, and he 
 is to that extent less a realist than in the earlier novel. He seems 
 to have felt that his own presentation of life in Vanity Fair was 
 at least one-sided and susceptible of misconstruction. Still more 
 is this evident in Esmond (1852) and in The Newconus (1853- 
 1855). The change in tone may be due in part to the mellowing 
 influences of time and of success. " Wait till you come to 
 forty year," he himself sings ; and time, which tames the passion 
 of youth, also tends to make the judgment more mild, especially 
 when the goal long struggled for has been attained. But another 
 cause is the fact that Thackeray has made his protest. After 
 Vanity Fair he is no longer tempted to stand in contrast to his 
 predecessors. 
 
 These four novels by general consent stand in the same 
 relation to the rest of Thackeray's works as the four great 
 tragedies do to the other works of Shakespeare ; and the common 
 opinion is sound. Thackeray was still in his prime ; there was 
 no decline in his intellectual force ; but he had put the best of 
 his experience into those books, and he could not again equal 
 them. Few have had the capacity to produce all life long works 
 of the highest class in creative literature. Had Shakespeare 
 himself this capacity? Up to the great tragedies his works are 
 
 ^ Works, with Biographical Introductions, IX. xlix. 
 
 ^ Neither Dickens nor Thackeray confined his self-revelation to one book. 
 A good deal of Thackeray's own life is given in Philip, in The Hoggarty 
 Diamond, aiid The Newcomes also.
 
 yoo THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the most marvellous in the world not only for their intrinsic worth, 
 but for the evidence of development they afford. But it cannot 
 be denied that after this there is some decline ; and in the last 
 years of his life, silence. Was the silence due solely to the satis- 
 faction of ambition ? 
 
 Meantime Thackeray had attempted another kind of literary 
 enterprise. His lectures on The Efiglish Hianourists of the 
 Eighteenth Century were first delivered in England in 185 1, and 
 afterwards repeated in America in 1852-1S53. The lectures on 
 The Four Georges were first delivered on his second visit to 
 America, 1855-1856. These two sets of lectures were the most 
 profitable of all his enterprises. In a letter to his mother written 
 in 1859 he says chat they had yielded him ;j^95oo, The Virginians 
 _;^6ooo, Vanity Fair only ;^2ooo^. The rate of remuneration is 
 not according to literary value; but nevertheless the two- sets of 
 lectures are of very high worth, and are often unduly neglected. 
 They prove that Thackeray was a critic — both moral and literary 
 — of the first rank. Criticism is of the essence of his intellect. 
 His whole work is what Matthew Arnold defined poetry to be, a 
 criticism of life. How penetrating his literary criticism could be 
 is plain from his burlesques and parodies. Rebecca and Rowena 
 is perhaps the best burlesque ever penned. Irresistibly amusing 
 as it is, the romance it travesties is left absolutely uninjured. 
 The reader laughs, and returns to Foanhoe with unabated enjoy- 
 ment. Phil Fogarty is likewise excellent ; and so is Codlingsby, but 
 in a different way. Thackeray loved Scott and he was the friend 
 of Lever. While he laughed at them there was therefore a kindly 
 ring in his laughter. But he distrusted Disraeli and disliked his 
 work ; and in Codlingsby there is a bitterness which is absent 
 from the other burlesques. 
 
 Good burlesque is impossible except through sound criticism, 
 and in these burlesques Thackeray was really criticising his 
 contemporaries and immediate predecessors. It was the same 
 faculty which he employed in his Humourists of the Eighteenth 
 Century. But here he was on his chosen and favourite field. 
 The reaction which Thackeray led was a reaction towards the 
 ^ Works, with Biopaphical Iniroduciions, xi. xv.
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 7OI 
 
 eighteenth century. Its lucidity and its respect for the realities of 
 life attracted him. Not only was Fielding his model in the novel, 
 but Hogarth was his model in art ; and anyone who has studied 
 the wonderful adaptation of Thackeray's own illustrations to his 
 books will understand how the work of his pencil and the work 
 of his pen interpenetrated one another. There is much also of the 
 spirit of The Spectator, grown greater and stronger, in his observa- 
 tions of and satirical and humorous comments on the world 
 around him. By sympathy therefore Thackeray was led to study 
 the eighteenth century systematically. He seriously contemplated 
 writing a history of the reign of Queen Anne. He saturated 
 himself in the literature of the period, how deeply Esmond proves. 
 And so in the lectures on the humourists he was pouring out 
 knowledge which he had been accumulating for years. He was 
 criticising from the best standpoint of all, that of sympathy. He 
 shows in Esmond that he could speak the speech and think the 
 thoughts of the eighteenth century writers. Thus, standing at a 
 distance which enabled him to see things in their true propor- 
 tions, and yet possessing something comparable to the familiar 
 knowledge of a contemporary, Thackeray had, in respect of these 
 writers, an unequalled equipment for criticism. And, though they 
 have been strangely depreciated, his lectures on the humourists are 
 among the richest and best criticisms in the language. No one 
 else has so penetrated the spirit of Addison and Steele. His 
 Hogarth is admirable. He disliked Swift ; yet who has done 
 more justice to Swift's wonderful genius? who has drawn a more 
 memorable picture of the man ? 
 
 In The Four Georges Thackeray's criticism was not literary, but 
 moral, a species even more familiar to him than the former. The 
 puppets here are the puppets of another Vanity Fair, only they 
 happen to be seated on a throne. Thackeray's comments in the 
 lectures are exactly in the spirit of the novel ; there is the same 
 satiric touch, the same undertone of pathos. Some of his best 
 writing is to be found in these two sets of lectures. 
 
 The Virginians (185 7-1 859) was Thackeray's next novel after 
 Esmond, of which it is a continuation. It was Thackeray's way 
 to link his stories one to another by references to characters or by
 
 702 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 their casual appearance ; but no other pair of his stories are so 
 intimately related to one another as those two. The Virginians 
 has lost a good deal of the charm of its predecessor. The second 
 part of Eolnnson Crusoe is a classical example of the danger an 
 author incurs in handling a second time a theme in which he has 
 been greatly successful. In Thackeray's case the descent is less 
 steep, but it is still great. 
 
 In 1859, following the example set by Dickens nine years 
 before, Thackeray undertook the charge of a new periodical, The 
 Cornhill Magazine, In it his latest works were published. Lovel 
 the Widower (i860) was a version from the unsuccessful play 
 The Wolves and the Lamb. The Advetitures of Philip (1861-1862) 
 is generally regarded as a failure ; and so it is as a whole, in com- 
 parison with Thackeray's greater novels ; but there are some very 
 fine passages in it. More valuable than either are the delicious 
 Roundabout Papers, the best of all revelations of Thackeray's own 
 genial, kindly, sympathetic nature. Some incident of travel, an 
 occurrence in the street, a meeting with a friend, the death of a 
 great contemporary, a mere chalk-mark on a door, may be the text. 
 The last of all is the generously indignant vindication of a great 
 man from a suspicion which could only occur to a pitiably little 
 one. But whatever it is the subject is handled with unfailing grace 
 and skill and with penetrating insight. None of these papers are 
 more delightful than those which most reveal the writer; probably 
 the best known of all is that which treats of the thorns in the 
 editorial cushion. They were very sharp thorns to the sensitive 
 novelist, but the cushion with its thorns passed to another some- 
 what more than a year and a half before Thackeray's sudden 
 death on the Christmas Eve of 1863. He left incomplete the 
 story of Denis Duval. 
 
 Thackeray said that no one ought to write a novel after fifty. 
 As he died at fifty-two we cannot judge whether he would have 
 disproved this dictum by his own example or not. There are good 
 judges who think that Denis Duval promised to be among the 
 best of his works. Dickens wrote of it : " In respect of earnest 
 feeling, far-seeing purpose, character, incident, and a certain loving 
 picturesqueness blending the whole, I believe it to be much the
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 703 
 
 best of all his works'." But Denis Duval remains a fragment; 
 and what is certain is that among Thackeray's completed works 
 all the best were produced between the ages of thirty-five 
 and foity-five. As has been already hinted, the three novels 
 which with Vanity Fair form the great quartet, differ considerably 
 from that first great product of Thackeray's genius. Pendennis 
 has a hero. He is not of very heroic proportions ; but he is a 
 centre towards which all the threads of the story converge. The 
 book gives an admirable picture of a young man of the nine- 
 teenth century, ambitious, talented, well-educated, but withal 
 self-indulgent and infirm of purpose. The good impulses as well 
 as the vanity and the weaknesses of Arthur Pendennis, and the 
 manliness of George Warrington, as well as the imprudence which 
 has marred his life, are all fairly brought before the reader. The 
 impression of the world is far more favourable than that left by 
 the Sedleys, the Osbornes and the Crawleys. The emptiness of 
 social ambitions is satirised again ; but there is a kindly side to 
 Major Pendennis which makes his worldliness half attractive. 
 There is nothing in Petidennis so fierce as the satire on Lord 
 Steyne, no character so heartless and unprincipled as Becky Sharp. 
 Helen and Laura Pendennis are of a much higher type than the 
 " good " woman of Vanity Fair, Amelia. 
 
 Much the same is true of The Newcomes. It has more in 
 common with Pendennis than anything else of Thackeray's : his 
 admirers generally class the two together, and give preference to 
 one or to the other according to personal predilections. In The 
 Newco7nes as in Pendennis we have a world of mingled good 
 and evil, but in the former the extremes are greater. In 
 Pendennis there is no character so entirely lovable and attractive 
 as Colonel Newcome, and on the contrary there is none so bad 
 as the Campaigner. So it is also with the scenes of the book. 
 Pendennis contains nothing equal to the best parts of The New- 
 comes., but on the whole it is of a more even excellence. 
 
 In Estnond, the novel intermediate in chronological order 
 between those two, Thackeray adopted a wholly different method ; 
 and in it we see most clearly how far he had drifted back from his 
 ^ Works^ with Biographical Introductions, xii. xxx, note.
 
 704 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 own position in Vanity Fair towards that of the romancers. In 
 the first place, Esmond is a historical novel. Now a historical 
 setting is unfavourable to realistic treatment, because the minute- 
 ness and familiarity of knowledge which the realist requires are 
 attainable only in respect of contemporary society. Further, the 
 very strangeness of the costumes and the manners adds an 
 element of the quaint and of the picturesque which is favourable 
 to romance and prejudicial to realism. If the swords and wigs 
 of the age of Queen Anne are not intrinsically more " romantic " 
 than the frock-coats and trousers of modern times, at least we 
 can more easily regard them in the romantic spirit. Whether he 
 foresaw it at the start or not, Thackeray evidently came to feel 
 this, and Esmond is far more akin to the romantic spirit than 
 anything he had previously written. The grand chivalrousness of 
 Henry Esmond — the loftiest character Thackeray ever drew — is, 
 we may hope, no less real than the sordid selfishness and cowardice 
 of Jos Sedley; but it is also what we call '' romantic." So too 
 there is romance in the death of the old Lord Castlewood, in the 
 character of young Frank Castlewood, and in the episode of the old 
 Pretender. The two principal female characters are among the best 
 Thackeray ever drew. Lady Castlewood, liable though she is to 
 a mad passion of jealousy, and capable under its influence of 
 gross injustice, is nevertheless a noble woman. Beatrix is, next 
 to Becky Sharp, the cleverest of all Thackeray's women, and she 
 has a fascination which Becky lacked. The palm of wickedness 
 must be given to the earlier creation, though the later one as 
 years go on follows her hard. 
 
 In Esmond Thackeray undoubtedly felt the influence of Scott 
 more deeply than he had felt it before But he handled his 
 historical materials in a diff"erent way, and his novel reproduces the 
 age it depicts with a minuteness and fidelity in style and tone 
 and substance such as Scott never attempts and nowhere rivals. 
 Thackeray's success in this respect is marvellous. Perhaps on 
 the whole Esmond is written with a more sustained excellence of 
 style than any of his other books ; and the triumph seems all the 
 greater when we bear in mind that this style was not his own, but 
 the imitated style of an age long past.
 
 DICKENS AND THACKERAY 705 
 
 On the part of Thackeray Esmond was no mere chance excur- 
 sion into the field of history. It was a new development of his 
 work which was not only significant of much, but which promised 
 to be permanent. The Virginians is also historical. So is the 
 fragment, Denis Duval ; and so was the other subject which he 
 thought about and talked about to his family, but which he did 
 not live to treat ^. The scene was to have been laid in the days 
 of Henry V, and Thackeray read for it Froissart and Brantome 
 and Monstrelet. We may reasonably conjecture that this subject 
 would have produced a novel more romantic than anything he 
 had yet written ; and it seems also reasonable to see in this growth 
 of the romantic element a partial abandonment of the canons of 
 art with which he started. To some extent, perhaps, necessity 
 determined his choice. The field he had originally chosen was 
 not very wide. He was the painter of the upper middle and the 
 upper classes ; while Dickens was the painter of the lower middle 
 and working classes. But the latter are not only far more 
 numerous than the former, their occupations are also far more 
 various. Dickens could find odd trades and occupations almost 
 without number, and they served to impart variety to his stories ; 
 Thackeray had only a fevf professions to draw upon, and there 
 was danger of at least a superficial sameness. The mere need 
 of fresh subjects therefore impelled Thackeray towards history. 
 But there was a change in his own spirit as well. Two inferences 
 may reasonably be drawn from the facts of his career. In the 
 first place, it has been seen that he started with an alienation 
 from romance produced by the excesses of the romanticists ; and 
 in reaction from those excesses he determined that he would 
 devote himself to reality. His parodies as well as his more 
 serious work point to this conclusion. In the second place, he 
 fell into the error of taking for reality that which is opposite to 
 romance. The chivalrous knight who counted all things dross 
 except love and manly honour was a delusion ; but the greedy 
 noble who sought to extort wealth by the extraction of the Jews' 
 grinders was real. Hence the preponderance through the first 
 half of Thackeray's career of what was hard and unlovely. But 
 ^ Worki, with Biographical Introductions, xil. xxiv. 
 W. 45
 
 206 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 gradually, as time went on, he recovered his balance. He dis- 
 covered that romance was not so much false as one-sided and 
 partial, and that its opposite might be equally one-sided and at 
 the same time less beautiful. The kindlier judgment and the 
 more genial views which pervade his later work indicate his 
 mature conviction that the chivalrous knight and the greedy noble 
 w€re equally real. It had been his task to lay stress upon an 
 aspect of truth which had been previously neglected, but it was 
 not to be desired that that aspect should be in turn treated as 
 the whole truth. 
 
 It may be permissible for once to violate chronology in order 
 to notice along with Thackeray his latest and most devoted 
 disciple, George du Maurier (1834-1896), whose Trilby (1894), in 
 its earlier part, contains more of the master's spirit than anything 
 else in literature. This was Du Maurier's single literary success. 
 Neither Peter Ibbetson (1891) before it, nor The Martian (1897) 
 after it, showed equal merit ; and it is questionable whether 
 Du Maurier could ever have done the like again. For into 
 Trilby he had put his own experience as an artist and the best of 
 his observation of the artist character. The consequence is that 
 the first part of the book is so excellent that, if it had kept the 
 same level to the end, it would have stood not very much below 
 Thackeray's own work. Unfortunately there is a great decline 
 from the introduction of the hypnotic influence onwards. The 
 truth is that in Du Maurier we have a Thackeray with powers 
 most singularly inverted. There was in both the same combina- 
 tion of the artist and the man of letters. But just as in Thackeray 
 the artist was obstructed by some strange disability, so in Du 
 Maurier was the man of letters. The former therefore belongs 
 to the history of literature, the latter to the history of art. Just 
 as Thackeray's illustrations, worked out with the skill of Du 
 Maurier, would have been great, so, though in a minor degree, 
 would the literary conceptions of Du Maurier touched by the pen 
 of Thackeray.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 
 
 '"I AM a great novel reader,' said Guizot, 'but I seldom read 
 German or French novels. The characters are too artificial. 
 There are too many forced situations, and the morality is generally 
 detestable. My delight is to read English novels, particularly 
 those written by women. Oest toute une ecole de morale. Miss 
 Austen, Miss Ferrier, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, 
 and many others almost as remarkable, form a school which in the 
 excellence, the profusion, and the contemporaneousness of its pro- 
 ductions, resembles the cloud of dramatic poets of the great Athenian 
 age'.'" The words of the great Frenchman are not only a testimony 
 to the excellence of the English novel, but also a reminder that the 
 question of sex may occasionally be relevant in literary criticism. 
 The development of prose-fiction called into existence a class of 
 female writers, which gained stability from the growth of a more 
 liberal public opinion with regard to the position and functions 
 of women. Fanny Burney, Mrs Radcliffe, Miss Austen, Miss 
 Edgeworth, Jane Porter, Lady Morgan, Mrs Inchbald, Mary 
 Shelley, Mrs Opie and others flourished towards the close of the 
 eifyhteenth century or in the early years of the nineteenth. Some 
 of them sheltered themselves under the veil of anonymity; but on 
 the whole the pioneers found that the barriers in front of them 
 were less formidable than they appeared. The fool might say with 
 his lips as well as in his heart that these women had " unsexed " 
 
 1 N. VV. Senior's Conversations with Thiers, &c., ii. 395. 
 
 45-2
 
 708 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 themselves ; but Johnson and Burke praised Miss Burney with 
 lavish generosity, and Scott exhausted the language of pane- 
 gyric on behalf of Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen, while he 
 made Miss Ferrier one of the chosen friends of his declining 
 years. The powers so long unnaturally pent up at last had their 
 vent, and women more and more plied the pen until, in the sphere 
 of fiction, they came to rival in quality as well as in volume the 
 work of men. Of no other form of literature can as much be said. 
 There is no English poetess whom any responsible critic would 
 rank with Keats or Shelley, to say nothing of Shakespeare and 
 Milton; but in the delineation of character Miss Austen has 
 been pronounced the inferior only of Shakespeare, and Edmond 
 Scherer regarded George Eliot as the greatest of English 
 novelists. 
 
 Some of the women who wrote novels are more noteworthy 
 for their work in other departments of literature. The name of 
 Mary Russell Mitford (17S6-1855) will Hve, not by reason of 
 her novels or her dramas, but for the sake of Our Village. 
 Harriet Martineau is more memorable for her gallant battle for 
 freedom of opinion and as the translator and condenser of 
 Comte, than for her stories. Caroline CHve's poems are of 
 finer quality than her Paul Ferroll, good as that is. Of the 
 rest, many must be passed over without notice, and others 
 must be dismissed with the most cursory mention. No other 
 form of literature necessitates such rigorous selection as fiction ; 
 in none is the revival of forgotten or fading names so futile ; 
 nowhere else is there such a pile of literary lumber. The torch 
 of the Caliph Omar, if it could be applied with a little more 
 discrimination than, according to the legend, it was applied to 
 the library of Alexandria, would do a service to mankind. 
 
 Anna Elizabeth Bray (1789-1883), a fluent and facile writer 
 of books of topography and history, of historical romances and of 
 what she herself describes as " local novels," may be mentioned 
 in passmg because of the excitement once aroused by her story, 
 The Protestant. The subject was suggested to Mrs Bray's mind 
 by Fox's Book of Martyrs ; and after the fashion of the followers 
 of Scott she diligently prepared herself for the task by a course
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 709 
 
 of reading, of \vh?ch she does not appear to have possessed even 
 the rudiments beforehand. Her purpose was simply to illustrate 
 the sufferings and the faith of the martyrs of Queen Mary's perse- 
 cution ; but the enterprising publisher, Colburn, thought he might 
 make capital out of the political situation by advertising it as a 
 book written with a view to the question of Catholic emancipation. 
 The bait took : the book was reviled — but it sold. A curious 
 illustration of the movement of thought and the changes which 
 come over the meanings of words is the fact that, just because it 
 was supposed to be written in order to prevent Catholic emanci- 
 pation, it was then spoken of as "the production of a high 
 churchman's lady," and that in recent years it has been in all 
 innocence described as a book written in what we now call the 
 High Church spirit. A better representative of the High Church 
 position, in that sense, would be Lady G. Fullerton (1812— 1885), 
 who in Ellen Middkton (1844) presented the case in a manner 
 suitable for adults, and Elizabeth Sewell (sister of that tutor of 
 Exeter College who burned Froude's Nemesis of Faith), whose 
 Amy Herbert (1844) was meant to perform the same service for 
 the young. Catherine Gore (i 799-1 861) was, about the same 
 time, the leader in the novel of fashion ; but she too, like many 
 of the women and several of the men, spoilt her work by excessive 
 rapidity of composition. They had the example of Scott before 
 them (Mrs Bray surpassed even him, writing one three-volume 
 novel — in the rough — in six weeks); but they had not Scott's 
 wealth of ideas and fulness of knowledge to work upon. Mrs 
 Marsh wrote with greater care, and her Two Old Men's Tales is 
 more readable than the majority of such half-forgotten stories; 
 but her writings have not such qualities of style, characteri- 
 sation or plot, as would entitle them to a permanent place in 
 literature. Frances TroUope (i 780-1863) too showed by her 
 voluminousness whence her son Anthony derived his wonderful 
 facility. Her career was an uncommon and, to herself, a most 
 honourable one. Up to the age of fifty she had written 
 nothing. Then, as she found her husband's affairs steadily going 
 from bad to worse, she tried literature as a means of livelihood. 
 She had gone to America in 1827, and it occurred to her that she 
 might make a book out of her experiences there. The result
 
 7IO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 was The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). There is 
 not much fire in Mrs TroUope's novels, but by this book she 
 unfortunately produced a good deal of heat in the feelings of two 
 nations towards one another. The Americans of those days were 
 unwholesomely sensitive to foreign, and especially to English, 
 criticism; and Mrs TroUope's superficial book was blameworthy 
 for its want of tact and good feeling. Yet it was effective in 
 more ways than one. It brought the money the Trollope 
 household sorely needed ; and the pungent criticisms went 
 home so well that it is said vulgar fellows were often shamed 
 into good behaviour with the cry of "Trollope, Trollope." 
 Afterwards she wrote several books of travel and many novels, 
 being responsible, between 1832 and 1857, for more than one 
 hundred volumes. 
 
 It was not however writers of this class of whom Guizot 
 was thinking when he paid his emphatic compliment to the 
 women novelists of England ; and, however harmless in substance 
 and innocent in intention might be the works of Mrs Trollope, 
 Mrs Gore and Mrs Bray, he would hardly have called them " une 
 ecole de morale." The phrase implies not merely harmlessness, 
 but a force and depth which are sometimes spoken of as mascu- 
 line, but which are characteristic also of the three writers of the 
 Victorian era whom he names — Charlotte Bronte, Mrs Gaskell 
 and George Eliot. It is accordingly they who have to be seriously 
 considered and critically examined. 
 
 The Brontes belong to that class of writers whom it is impos- 
 sible to understand except through the medium of biography. 
 The conjunction of intense feeling with a narrow range of experi- 
 ence explains their frequent violence and excess. Give a quantity 
 of gunpov/der ample space, and it may be exploded with little 
 danger ; confine it, and it will rend the solid rock to pieces. So 
 a fervid imagination and a vast capacity for wrath, operating 
 upon the cabined lives of the Brontes, produced Jane Eyre and 
 Wuthering Heights. " The action is laid in hell," said Dante 
 Rossetti of the latter novel, "only it seems places and people 
 have English names there'." It was really a picture of the places 
 
 ' Letters to Allingnam.
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 7H 
 
 and people Emily Bronte had known, rendered terrible by her 
 sombre imagination. Heathcliff himself was a transcript from 
 life, though we may hope that he was a little darker than the 
 original. 
 
 It would be out of place here to enter into the minutiae or to 
 discuss the numerous doubtful points of Bronte biography; in 
 most respects Mrs Gaskell's beautiful life of her friend Charlotte 
 Bronte is sufficient for the purpose. We have to learn elsewhere 
 that the noveUst's father was born to the name of Brunty, the 
 original of which was probably O'Prunty, and that he softened it 
 to Bronte, a form which seems to have been suggested by the title 
 conferred by the King of Naples upon Nelson. It is not worth 
 entering into the dubious romance of the Bronte genealogy; but 
 their Irish origin should all the more carefully be borne in 
 mind because they are singularly un-Irish alike in merits and in 
 defects. The secret is partly the same as that which explains the 
 cases of Swift and several other great Irishmen. Patrick Bronte 
 married an English wife (from the Celtic county of Cornwall, how- 
 ever). In still greater degree, probably, it is to be found in the 
 tendency, which man shares with some of the inferior animals, to 
 take colour from the surroundings. Though not of Yorkshire 
 blood, the Brontes show not a little of the character of Northern 
 England. 
 
 Patrick Bronte was a man of forty-three and was the father of 
 six children when, in 1820, he removed to Haworth as its incum- 
 bent. He was also himself a writer and a poet, though, but for 
 his greater daughters, his name would have been long since 
 forgotten. Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) was then not quite 
 four years old, and her two sisters were both junior to herself. 
 The place to which they now moved remained their home to the 
 end of their lives, and its mark is stamped deep upon their writings. 
 The scenery of Haworth, its atmosphere, the character of its 
 inhabitants and the stories current among and about them, have all 
 gone to the making of the Bronte novels. In the case of Emily 
 the attachment was a passion : she could hardly live away from 
 Haworth ; she never left it without suffering in health ; and some 
 of the most impressive lines of her powerfully imaginative poetry
 
 712 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 bear witness to the strong hold its wild hills and moors had upon 
 her: — 
 
 "What have these lonely mountains worth revealing? 
 More glory and more grief than I can tell. 
 The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling 
 Can centre both the worlds of heaven and hell." 
 
 The whole Bronte family was literary, and all the children 
 who grew to maturity followed in the footsteps of their father, the 
 author of College Poems (1811) and of the Rural Minstrel (18 13). 
 Patrick Branwell Bronte, the only son, who had been the pride 
 and hope of the family, lived to be its shame. The truth seems 
 to be that, though he had a certain amount of talent, he was no 
 more the equal of his sisters in intellect than he was in character. 
 Mrs Gaskell was impressed by his writings, and the fragments of 
 his composition which she quotes give some support to her favour- 
 able judgment; but it is hardly borne out by the fuller relics 
 preserved by Leyland. The three sisters all left works by which 
 they can with some confidence be judged. 
 
 Poverty narrowed the education of the Brontes and brought 
 them many a bitter grief. Probably they suffered Httle, if at all, from 
 the fact that in their early years they were taught at home by 
 their father : as Charlotte was only eight when she and her sisters 
 passed out of his care, the younger children at least can hardly 
 have been much influenced either for good or for evil. In 1824 
 they were sent to that school at Cowan Bridge, chosen not for 
 its excellence but for its cheapness, to which the genius of 
 Charlotte Bronte has given a place among schools for girls, similar 
 to that held by Dotheboys Hall among places of education for 
 boys. It is depicted in Ja7ie Eyre; the hapless Helen Burns is 
 Charlotte's sister Maria; and Miss Temple and Miss Scatcherd are 
 also drawn from the life. Less than a year after they had joined 
 this school the two eldest Brontes died, and towards the close of 
 1825 Charlotte and Emily were withdrawn from it. A second" 
 and a much happier experience of school Ufe was afterwards 
 embodied in Shirley. The stories on which were founded the 
 character of Moore and the rising of the Luddites were told by 
 the mistress of the Roe Head school, Miss Woolen It is re-
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 713 
 
 markable that each of the three main stages of Charlotte Bronte's 
 chequered education furnished her with material for a book. 
 The third stage was taken at Brussels, whither she and Emily 
 went to perfect themselves in French and in this way to qualify 
 themselves for the work of teaching, by which they hoped to win 
 their bread. Much of the history of this stage may be read in 
 Villette, as well as in The Professor, a work of earlier composition, 
 and a cruder one. The fact that so much was made out of the 
 incidents of her own limited education shows what must have 
 been the strength of an imagination Vv'hich could build so splen- 
 didly on a slight foundation ; but as the slender materials of 
 her experience were nearly exhausted when she died, it must 
 remain questionable whether length of days would have enabled 
 Charlotte Bronte to increase greatly her contribution to literature. 
 She showed no taste for the historical novel (unless her girlish 
 writings about her hero, the Duke of Wellington, are evidence of 
 such a taste), and her best characters are delineations from life. 
 
 The Brussels episode took place in 1842, and Charlotte also 
 spent 1843 there. She had already made several experiments in 
 teaching ; but as they were not very successful, and as the conduct 
 of Branwell Bronte upset the project of turning the parsonage 
 into a school, the sisters gradually drifted into literature instead. 
 It was the work for which they were best fitted, as well as that 
 which they did with the greatest love. The accidental reading 
 of Emily's verses by Charlotte led to the publication of the Poems 
 (1846) by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. After a year the 
 publishers had disposed of only two copies'. Success is not a 
 conclusive proof of merit, nor failure of the absence of it ; but it 
 is plain that only one of the three sisters, Emily, was a poet ; or 
 perhaps — for there is much that is poetic in the prose of Charlotte 
 — it would be more fair to say that she alone had the gift of 
 expressing herself in verse. 
 
 The three sisters had already written each a novel before the 
 
 modest little volume of poems appeared. Charlotte's story. The 
 
 Professor, failed to find a publisher ; but Wuthering Heights and 
 
 Agnes Grey were accepted. There was however a long delay 
 
 ^ Shorter's The Brontes, i. 329.
 
 714 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 before they appeared ; and in the meantime Jane Eyre had been 
 written and published, and had taken the world by storm. This 
 work by the unknown Currer Bell was issued in October, 1847, 
 and early in December, says Mrs Gaskell, the rush for copies 
 began. Its success was due to the spontaneous appreciation of 
 readers rather than to critical approbation. 
 
 The romance, the passionate intensity, the transparent sincerity 
 and the fresh, powerful, often poetic style of Jane Eyre, were the 
 qualities which won, as they deserved, success. The publishers 
 to whom The Professor was first offered had objected to it on 
 the score of its deficiency in excitement and incident ; and the 
 authoress, with characteristic good sense, had resolved that her 
 next work should not be open to this criticism. Accordingly 
 Jane Eyre is as far removed as possible from the domesticity of 
 Miss Austen, or Miss Ferrier, or Miss Mitford. It is the wedding 
 of romance to realism. But the realism is absolutely unlike that 
 of Miss Austen, and the romance has small affinity to that of 
 Scott. It is the realism, not of the quiet English country mansion, 
 but of a land stretching close up to the gates of the region wherein 
 the scene of Wuthering Heights is laid ; and it is the romance, not 
 of the knight in armour, with strong hand and high heart, and 
 the queen of beauty bestowing the crown for valour, but of 
 elemental human nature. 
 
 According to the prevalent conception, romance might well 
 have seemed to be something altogether beyond the reach of a 
 young woman with the mental gifts, training and experience of 
 Charlotte Bronte. To ask her to be romantic, or to furnish 
 "startling incident" and "thrilling excitement," was like demanding 
 bricks without straw. The comprehensive imagination of a Scott, 
 playing upon the great facts of national life, or the visionary 
 idealism of a Shelley, beholding all the sufferings of humanity 
 in the person of Prometheus chained to his rock — these easily 
 gave birth to romance. But Charlotte Bronte neither had that 
 comprehensive imagination, nor the wide knowledge which sup- 
 plied it with material, nor, on the other hand, the visionary 
 idealism of the poet. Her realm was all irradiated by the light 
 of a vivid imagination ; but the light played only upon what she
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 715 
 
 herself had seen and heard and known ; she could not create 
 out of airy nothing. 
 
 On the other hand, her prospect in the sphere of realism 
 seemed hardly more hopeful; for her knowledge of reality was 
 probably the most limited that has ever sufficed for a great genius. 
 Even greater geniuses, like Burns, have been hampered by poverty 
 and shut out from many advantages. But Burns came into the 
 closest contact with life at a thousand points. He had the liberty 
 of manhood, and the very lowHness of his position helped him 
 to see humanity naked and undisguised ; while the Bronte girls 
 could only gaze at it through the vicarage windows. It is the 
 special glory of Charlotte Bronte that out of her extremely limited 
 material she made a novel at once intensely romantic and pro- 
 foundly real. She did so by making her own the spirit which 
 inspires her sister's lines quoted above. The passions of humanity, 
 she knew, were capable of creating both the worlds of heaven and 
 hell. Though she could only look through the windows, she had 
 a light within which made the glance a revelation. Limited as 
 her experience was, it showed her the human heart; and out of 
 that what might not be made ? " Ay, ay," said Scott once in 
 the hearing of Lockhart, "if one could look into the heart of 
 that little cluster of cottages, no fear but you would find material 
 enough for tragedy as well as comedy. I undertake to say there 
 is some real romance at this moment going on down there, that, 
 if it could have justice done to it, it would be well worth all the 
 fiction that was ever spun out of human brains \" 
 
 Charlotte Bronte accepted her limitations and she faced her 
 difficulties, and even exaggerated them in a spirit bordering upon 
 defiance. She makes her heroine a governess, poor, plain and 
 small, like herself, — to prove to her sisters, as St Paul had long 
 ago proved to the world, how unimportant a mean presence is, 
 if the spirit within be great. This poor little governess lives in 
 a lonely house and meets only a handful of human beings ; and 
 yet from these unpromising elements there grows a romance which 
 enthralled men of the world like Thackeray and George Henry 
 Lewes and Lockhart. 
 
 ^ Life of Scoit, v. 285,
 
 7i6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 The materials are scanty, but it is- interesting to note how 
 thriftily they are used. Charlotte Bronte says that Jane Eyre is 
 not herself except in bodily appearance ; but notwithstanding this 
 denial, in the feelings of the governess and in the events of her 
 life there is much of her own experience. The position of 
 Rochester, the husband of a mad wife, who has persuaded himself 
 that because of that madness he is at liberty to marry again, is a 
 transcript of a case which had become known to Miss Bronte 
 at Miss Wooler's school at Roe Head. There is little in her 
 writings, and scarcely anything that is good, which cannot be 
 traced back to a source in her own experience. She was herself 
 quite aware that she could work only upon that, and saw clearly 
 the limitation it put to her productiveness, " I mean to 
 observe your warning," she writes to G. H. Lewes, "about 
 being careful how I undertake new works ; my stock of material 
 is not abundant, but very slender; and, besides, neither my 
 experience, my acquirements, nor my powers, are sufficiently 
 varied to justify my ever becoming a frequent writer^" 
 
 Even genius could not preserve from error a writer whose 
 range of experience was so narrow. The characteristic defects of 
 all the Bronte novels are clearly traceable to this one cause. 
 The girls had lived among a race of rude and hard and 
 violent men ; the legends current in the district were of a 
 nature befitting such men ; and if there is any reality at all 
 under the romance of the Brontes in Ireland, theirs was a tale 
 of violence and brutality. The lives of the girls had been 
 hard, cheerless and full of suffering. They knew the sting 
 of poverty and had felt the oppression of petty tyranny. They 
 had seen the lives of those they held dear sacrificed to cruelty 
 and greed. To them therefore men like Rochester, and even 
 Heathcliff and Earnshaw, seemed scarcely abnormal. Heathclifl 
 himself is not very much more brutal than that masterpiece 
 of R. L. Stevenson's portraiture, Weir of Hermiston, who is no 
 mere creature of the imagination, but a being who was once 
 clothed with flesh and blood. What is against nature is the space 
 such characters fill in the works of the Brontes and the proportion 
 * Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte, ii. j2.
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 717 
 
 they bear to others. R. L. Stevenson not only draws Alan Breck, 
 conceited, cheerful, faithful, fearless, as well as the gloomy, stern 
 and vindictive Hermiston ; but he relieves the character of the 
 latter by showing the greatness of the judge and his inflexible 
 integrity in his high office. The Brontes lacked the materials 
 for such a contrast and were not aware of the need of such 
 relief. 
 
 Charlotte Bronte, it may be repeated, was not a poet; but 
 yet her prose is charged with the spirit of poetry, just as is that 
 of Carlyle, who was equally incapable of writing verse. Nothing 
 in her writings fascinates the reader more than those passages 
 of vivid insight into character, or those descriptions of natural 
 scenery — especially scenes of tempest — which glitter in her pages 
 with a flash as of a diamond. A special manifestation of this 
 power may be found in her descriptions in Jane Eyre of imaginary 
 pictures, which show that she had the spirit, though not the 
 technical skill, of one of the greatest of painters : — 
 
 "These pictures were in water colours. The first represented 
 clouds low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea : all the distance 
 was in eclipse ; so, too, was the foreground ; or, rather, the nearest 
 billows, for there was no land. One gleam of light lifted into 
 relief a half-submerged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and 
 large, with wings flecked with foam : its beak held a gold bracelet, 
 set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my 
 palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil 
 could impart. Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned 
 corpse glanced through the green water ; a fair arm was the 
 only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or 
 torn." 
 
 The writer of this passage had the mind and eye of a painter, 
 and she had other artistic gifts as well. The wonderful description 
 of acting in Villette suggests that, had she chosen, and had circum- 
 stances favoured her, she might have been one of the greatest 
 of actresses. 
 
 Charlotte Bronte's greatest defect, the want of humour, must 
 be put down to the account of nature rather than circumstance. 
 She is always desperately in earnest, she has no lightness of touch,
 
 7l8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 she cannot believe that there are occasions when a smile is more 
 effective than a sermon and a jest more crushing than a blow. 
 And not only was she deficient in humour herself, but she was 
 incapable of appreciating it or any of the kindred qualities in 
 others. She admired Thackeray as much as she admired any 
 living man, except the Duke of Wellington. She held that it 
 lay with himself whether he should be really, what some critics 
 called him, only the second of living writers, or the first. And 
 yet she never fully understood him, and was impatient with him 
 because he was not always serious enough and direct enough for 
 her taste. This lack of humour aflFords a ground more grave than 
 any other for doubting the permanence of her fame. With few 
 exceptions they whom the world has chosen to remember have 
 been gifted with it ; but Milton is among the exceptions. 
 
 The success oi Jane Eyre fixed the career of Charlotte Bronte. 
 There was no more need to scheme about a school or to sacrifice 
 home for the trying lot of a governess, for she could certainly 
 make more by her pen. At the same time, she had experienced 
 the tribulations as well as the triumphs of an author, and had 
 been especially pained by a scandalous article in The Quarterly 
 Review, which not merely condemned the book, but reflected 
 upon the character of the writer. Her only answer was to put 
 in the mouth of a vulgar woman in Shirley some of the most 
 objectionable of the reviewer's sentences. But though such 
 articles might give pain, they did little to check the success of 
 the author of Jane Eyre. She immediately began Shirley, which 
 however was not published till two years after the appearance 
 of the former work. In the interval Charlotte Bronte had passed 
 several " black milestones " on the road of life. Her brother 
 Branwell, and her two sisters, Emily and Anne (1820-1849), were 
 now all dead ; and except for her father sh-e was left absolutely 
 alone. 
 
 Shirley is even more full of local colour than Jane Eyre ; for, 
 though the scene was laid a generation back, the actors in it were 
 nearly all persons the writer had known. It is characteristic of 
 her method that, even in such a trifle as his half-foreign blood, 
 her Moore is identical with the Cartwright who was the real
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 719 
 
 hero of the Luddite story which first set her imagination to work. 
 The Yorkes were real, the three curates were real, Mr Hall was 
 real, Shirley Keildar was her own sister Emily. Her strict fidelity 
 to fact led to the discovery of the secret of authorship. A 
 Haworth man who had migrated to Liverpool made sure of the 
 locality of the author, and then by a process of exhaustion con- 
 cluded that it could be no one but Miss Bronte. 
 
 Experience had taught Charlotte Bronte a good deal ; for her 
 style is more mature, and she is more varied and less violent in 
 the later novel. She is no less intense and earnest ; indeed there 
 are passages in the latter part of Shirley which seem to be written 
 in her own blood. The tragical history of those two years had 
 left its mark. The death of Branwell Bronte was a relief, though 
 a sad one; but when first the stern and lofty Emily and next 
 the gentle Anne departed, Charlotte was lonely indeed. "The 
 two human beings who understood me, and whom I understood, 
 are gone\" she writes. Anne died meekly, leaving as her farewell 
 to the world the verses beginning, " I hoped that with the brave 
 and strong"; but the day of Emily's death "was very terrible. 
 She was torn, conscious, panting, reluctant, though resolute, out 
 of a happy life^." No wonder that the surviving sister adds 
 emphatically, "It will not do to dwell on these things." No 
 wonder that, nevertheless, they are for ever recurring to her 
 memory, and that they lend their sombre tone to the part of 
 Shirley which was written after the losses had been borne, and 
 even to the earlier part, over which the shadows of coming events 
 are already cast. 
 
 But nevertheless, living as it is, and full as it is of the writer's 
 personality, Shirley is not fused into unity by her imagination as 
 Jane Eyre is. It remains a collection of scenes and sketches of 
 character, all real, all from the life, but not inevitably there, not 
 integral parts of a whole, as are the scenes and characters of the 
 earlier book. Even the slight distance in time and the trifling de- 
 mand on the historic imagination had a damaging effect. Charlotte 
 Bronte did not like that sort of work, and she did not do it well. 
 " I wish he could be told not to care much for dwelling on the 
 * Mrs Gaskell's Lift of Charlotte Bronte, ii. 121. ** ibid. ii. 100.
 
 720 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 political and religious intrigues of the times," is her comment on 
 Thackeray's handling of history in Esmond : it contained, in her 
 opinion, "too much history, too little story ^" The true secret 
 however of the inferiority of Shirley is the absence of the little 
 governess. The thing Charlotte Bronte could do supremely well 
 was " spiritual autobiography " ; and in Jane Eyre there is far 
 more of that than she herself was aware, or would acknow- 
 ledge. 
 
 Her life was drawing near its close before her third novel, 
 Villette (1853), appeared. Meanwhile, in 1850, she had written 
 the admirable biographical notice of her sisters which was prefixed 
 to a new edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. The 
 intense loneliness was telling on her, and the gloom of that 
 desolate parsonage which suggested to the stranger's mind that 
 joy could never have entered it since it was first built. Ill   health 
 delayed the composition of Villette ; and after it appeared the 
 pleasure of success was dashed, as it had been in each of the 
 former cases, by the intrusion of the question of sex in authorship. 
 In the case oi Jane Eyre, this question had been brought in by 
 Miss Rigby in The Quarterly Review, and in that of Shirley by 
 G. H. Lewes in The Edinburgh ; while in the case of Villette the 
 blow was struck by the author's friend Miss Martineau, who 
 pronounced it coarse. It is only just to say that in thus stating 
 her opinion she was fulfilling a promise ; but the condemnation 
 was none the less painful. 
 
 Just before this a promise of happiness had come to Charlotte 
 Bronte, only to be taken away by the unreasonable opposition of 
 her father. Mr NichoUs, his curate (not one of those satirised 
 in Shirley, though he is mentioned there under the name of 
 Mr McCarthy), proposed marriage to her, and she, who had 
 refused several proposals from other men, consented. But the 
 violence of her father, combined with the feeling due to the 
 infirmities of age, caused the project of marriage to be abandoned. 
 Ultimately however Patrick Bronte's opposition was withdrawn, 
 and in June, 1854, Charlotte became Mrs NichoUs. On March 31st, 
 1855, she died. Her last year was happy. As her life was ebbing 
 * Mrs Gaskell's Lift 0/ Charlotte Bronte, ii. 263.
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 72 1 
 
 out she " caught the sound of some murmured words of prayer 
 that God would spare her. ' Oh ! ' she whispered forth, ' I am not 
 going to die, am I ? He will not separate us, we have been so 
 happy \' " 
 
 Her literary remains were gathered up after her death. What 
 had been rejected in her life was precious now as the work of the 
 renowned novelist, and The Professor was accordingly published 
 in 1857. The story upon which she was engaged at her death 
 appeared also as a fragment, Emtna, in The Cornhill Magazine for 
 April, i860. But Charlotte Bronte (she can no more become 
 Mrs Nicholls than Francis Bacon could be lost in Lord Verulam) 
 is a woman of three books ; and the only one which requires 
 notice in addition to those which have been already discussed is 
 Villette. In merit it may be placed intermediate between the 
 other two — a more compact whole than Shirley, less inspired 
 than Jane Eyre. Here again the effects of the autobiographic 
 method are visible, for to a large extent Villette is autobiographical ; 
 less so indeed than Jane Eyre, but much more so than Shirley. 
 It is the spiritual autobiography of the Brussels period. Charlotte 
 Bronte is not to be identified with any of the characters in the 
 book ; but nevertheless her thoughts and many of her experiences 
 are unquestionably there. For instance, the scene in the con- 
 fessional is a piece of her own experience. The characters too, 
 especially the mistress of the boarding-school and her remarkable 
 professor, are portraits. 
 
 The charges of coarseness which were freely brought against 
 Charlotte Bronte by contemporaries seem to us now exaggerated 
 and strained. It is true, her characters do not all wear kid gloves, 
 eat with silver forks, or act with the grace and speak with the 
 decorum of the caste of Vere de Vere. She was unflinchingly 
 sincere, and whatever of coarseness there may be in her works 
 comes from her photographic fidelity to the life she knew, and 
 was no part of the fibre of her mind. Among the men and 
 women of her acquaintance it was the custom to speak plainly 
 and to call a spade a spade. The display of uncurbed passion 
 was familiar to her ; and hence she frequently depicted her 
 ^ Mrs Gaskell's Life of Chadoite Bioni'e, ii. 324. 
 
 W. 46
 
 722 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 characters as saying words and doing deeds which to some of her 
 readers seemed unnecessarily coarse, brutal and cruel. Even if 
 the words and the deeds were so, the tendency of the books was 
 always towards a higher purpose and a sterner morality. Charlotte 
 Bronte had no love for garbage, but she had a profound reverence 
 for truth, and her daring mind disposed her to risk everything in 
 its service. All the more on that account is she an efficient 
 teacher in the school of morals of English fiction. No pure 
 mind was ever contaminated by her works, but the weak have 
 been strengthened and the timorous encouraged. 
 
 Like her great contemporary George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte 
 had in her much that in common parlance is spoken of as 
 masculine ; but far more than George Eliot she shows at the same 
 time the characteristics of women. It is easy to understand the 
 doubt which was felt as to the sex of the anonymous writer of the 
 Scenes of Clerical Life, and even to sympathise with the general 
 view that the author must be a man ; but such doubt in the case 
 oi Jane Eyre could only indicate shallowness of criticism. Char- 
 lotte Bronte's pictures of men show the same sort of defects as 
 women find in the portraits of women drawn by men. Rochester 
 could never have been the hero in any novel written by a man, 
 and very few of her masculine characters carry the conviction of 
 truth. On the other hand, it would scarcely have been possible 
 for anyone but a woman — unless a new Shakespeare had appeared 
 — to draw such a character as Jane Eyre, or even Lucy Snowe. 
 For this reason alone, if there had been no other, there was room 
 for the growing class of female writers ; and for this reason those 
 who, like Charlotte Bronte, have done their work faithfully and 
 well have a claim upon the gratitude of their country. Those 
 very differences of character, temperament and endowment, which 
 have been so often advanced as reasons why women should con- 
 fine themselves to domestic life, are so many reasons the more 
 why some women should be poets and novelists. As "it takes 
 all sorts of people to make a world," so it needs all sorts of 
 gifts to make a round and harmonious literature. The fact that 
 domestic work must always be the primary and the most essential 
 work of women proves nothing. It is equally true that agriculture
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 723 
 
 is the primary and most essential work of men ; but it does not 
 follow that every man must be a farmer. 
 
 All that has been said in adverse criticism of Charlotte Bronte 
 might be said with much greater force of her sister Emily (18 18— 
 1848) ; and all that can be said in extenuation and excuse applies 
 to her likewise with greater force. She died at thirty ; she had 
 seen less of the world than even Charlotte; her excessive reserve 
 confined her still more narrowly within the narrow circle that was 
 open to her ; and finally, her own nature was more unyielding 
 and had closer kinship with the harsh natures around her than 
 her sister's. Her character was rather repellent than attractive ; 
 but yet it won the unstinted love and devotion of her sister. And 
 however little Emily might be loved, hers was a nature that com- 
 manded respect. Her pride was morbid : it is painful to read 
 how in her last illness even her sisters dared not notice her failing 
 step and laboured breathing and her frequent pauses as she 
 climbed the staircase. But this pride, when it took the form of 
 courage, was magnificent. An incident recorded in Shirley 
 actually occurred to her. Being bitten by a dog she believed to 
 be mad, she applied cautery with her own hand, telling no one till 
 the danger was over ; and she thrashed her own bull-dog, Keeper, 
 with the bare hands till she conquered him, though she had been 
 warned that he would spring at the throat of anyone who struck 
 him. "I have never seen her parallel in anything," writes her 
 sister in the Biographical Notice. " Stronger than a man, simpler 
 than a child, her nature stood alone." 
 
 The book she wrote stands alone too. Wuthering Heights is 
 a novel of extraordinary power, going far, with her poems, to 
 justify the opinion of Arnold, that the author's soul 
 
 " Knew no fellow for might. 
 Passion, vehemence, grief, 
 Daring, since Byron died." 
 
 But it is a book not to be read with pleasure. The first picture 
 of the Heights is revolting from its brutal inhumanity. To those 
 who know only the softer southern life, the wild stories and the 
 rugged characters of Yorkshire seem to be here exaggerated 
 
 46—2
 
 724 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 almost beyond the bounds of belief; and however those stories 
 may explain, they do not justify in art such a picture. The book 
 is spoilt because its author has not known how to humanise it. 
 If Charlotte Bronte's work is impaired because she makes too 
 deep the shadows and shows too little the lights of life, Emily 
 sins in that way tenfold more grievously. And yet there is an 
 irresistible attraction in all that remains of this austere and 
 sombre genius. What might not such " passion, vehemence, 
 grief, daring," have accomplished if years had brought a mellower 
 wisdom to guide them ? Emily Bronte was clearly the inferior 
 of her sister in artistic sense ; and what she has accomplished, 
 with the exception of her noble poems, is far less valuable. 
 Even in the hands of Time she might have proved an intractable 
 pupil, and have marred other novels as she marred Wuthering 
 Heights by the very excess of the qualities which made her great. 
 But she had immense reserves of power clamorously demanding 
 an outlet ; and it is hard to resist the belief that she would, 
 sooner or later, in verse if not in prose, have found one worthy 
 of herself. 
 
 In the life of her friend Charlotte Bronte, Mrs Gaskell added 
 one to the very small group of English biographies which their 
 grace, charm and inherent worth have made permanent parts of 
 literature. For that service alone she would have been justly 
 entitled to no mean share of praise and honour ; for there are few 
 things more difficult than to write a really good biography. But 
 Mrs Gaskell was likewise one of the foremost novelists of her 
 time ; and her fictions, though inferior in power to those of at 
 least three or four of her contemporaries, have nevertheless that 
 incommunicable literary flavour which is the surest passport to 
 immortality. Cranford belongs to the class of works of which 
 The Vicar of Wakefield and Pride and Prejudice are perhaps the 
 greatest examples ; and it is not less perfect than they. 
 
 Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (iSio-1865) was the daughter of 
 a certain William Stevenson who at one period of his life was a 
 Unitarian minister ; and her husband was a minister of the same 
 sect. Their life in Manchester gave her the materials out of which 
 she made her first novel, Mary Parion (184S), and also great part
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 725 
 
 of North and South (1855). The anomalies of the distribution of 
 wealth, which were brought about through the concentration of 
 industry by the development of machinery worked by steam, could 
 not fail to strike an observer situated as Mrs Gaskell was. She was 
 brought into daily contact with misery^ destitution and degradation 
 among the workers ; and she saw, on the other hand, the wealth 
 and luxury of the manufacturers, many of whom practically ac- 
 knowledged no duty towards their hands, and without concern 
 saw them herding together like brutes rather than human beings. 
 It is this first-hand knowledge which gives substance to Mary 
 Barton; it was the feeling that the picture was drawn from life 
 which carried the book into immediate popularity ; and it was the 
 same feeling which brought upon the anonymous author W. R. 
 Greg's charge of misrepresenting the employers^. If Carson was 
 meant to be typical of the employer, there is doubtless some 
 foundation for the charge. But in the nature of things a work of 
 fiction cannot balance all considerations like a scientific treatise. 
 The employer of the novel must be an individual man with a 
 specific character. If he is utterly abnormal, a sort of being 
 scarcely to be found in nature, the novelist may justly be blamed ; 
 but if he is a fair representative of a class, it is no sound defence 
 to say that there are many others a good deal better, and many 
 more utterly unlike him. And it can hardly be denied that there 
 were a good many employers quite as bad as Mrs Gaskell's 
 Carson ; while the history of factory legislation proves conclusively 
 that the whole class of employers needed to be roused to a more 
 lively sense of their duties to their workmen. Further, it is only 
 fair to Mrs Gaskell to set against Carson the excellent picture in 
 North and South of Thornton, an employer not by any means 
 faultless, but fair-minded, and, under all the hardness of his 
 exterior, human to the core. Possibly the colours of the latter 
 picture were in some measure brightened by the influence of 
 Greg's criticism : at any rate North and South is written in a spirit 
 of scrupulous fairness. The pathetic story of the Boucher family 
 shows the miseries to which the industrial system may give rise ; 
 but both Thornton the manufacturer and Nicholas Higgins the 
 1 See Greg's essay on Mary Barton.
 
 726 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 factory hand are men who command sympathy each for his class. 
 The lesson of the book is that the evils of the factory system are 
 due, not to the wickedness of either the one class or the other, but 
 to that absence of human relations between them which renders 
 mutual comprehension almost impossible and misjudgment almost 
 inevitable, and which dries up the springs of emotion, or makes 
 them flow with the Greek charity, not the English love. 
 
 It is not however in works of this class that Mrs Gaskell 
 appears at her best. Some critics doubted whether the writer of 
 Mary Barton possessed humour. It was in fact Mrs Gaskell's 
 most precious gift, and it is that which will longest keep her 
 writings sweet. Neither the circumstances of her own life when 
 Mary Barton was written, nor the nature of the subject-matter, 
 encouraged humorous representation ; yet even in Mary Barton 
 a careful reader will detect its presence, while in the later novels 
 it is an unfailing ingredient. Even the tragic Ritth (1853) is 
 softened by the humorous character of Sally ; and in North 
 and South there are some delicious bits, such as the faithful old 
 servant's criticism of Mr Hale, the clergyman whose conscientious 
 doubts have moved him to resign his living. " Master was born, 
 I suppose, for to marry missus. If I thought he loved her 
 properly, I might get to love him in time. But he should ha' 
 made a deal more of her, and not been always reading, reading, 
 thinking, thinking. See what it has brought him to. Many a 
 one who never reads nor thinks either, gets to be Rector, and 
 Dean, and what not ; and I dare say master might, if he'd just 
 minded missus, and let the weary reading and thinking alone." 
 But this takes us far away from the atmosphere of factories, and 
 it is in quite a different air that the flower of Mrs Gaskell's humour 
 blooms. She is one of those who have felt the charm of pro- 
 vincial England and who have given a literary immortality to 
 English village life. Cratiford (1853) is not only her masterpiece, 
 but it stands on a wholly different plane from the rest of her 
 works. In the case of Thackeray, or Dickens, or George Eliot, 
 or Charlotte Bronte, there is reasonable doubt as to which work 
 should be placed first ; and though each reader has his preference, 
 nearly all would admit that there is much to be said in favour of
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 727 
 
 the views of others ; but to prefer any other of Mrs Gaskell's 
 novels to Cranford would lay the critic open to a charge of 
 eccentricity. 
 
 Though marriage immured her in the crowded streets of 
 Manchester, Mrs Gaskell's childhood and youth had been spent 
 in the quaint and picturesque little Cheshire town of Knutsford, 
 and there lies all that remains of her. In those days, before the 
 railway touched it, Knutsford was far quieter and quainter than it 
 appears now to the eye of the pilgrim who visits it for the sake of 
 Mrs Gaskell. It lies in the midst of characteristically English 
 scenery. Great parks with stately trees and still meres, and old 
 Halls which carry the imagination back for hundreds of years, 
 surround it, and oak-timbered houses are still to be seen in the 
 streets. The little town was then a veritable Sleepy Hollow \ and 
 yet it was near enough to the great industrial centres of Lancashire 
 to feel the pulsing of *' the tragic heart of towns." Exactly this 
 is the atmosphere of Craiifoi-d. Peace is in every page of the 
 book, that peace whose growth is only possible upon the soil of 
 an ancient civilisation. And yet it is not absolute peace. The 
 young manhood of the place has been drained away, and there 
 is a dim consciousness of unrest, a brooding sense of change to 
 come, like that vague, inaudible disturbance of the atmosphere in 
 a quiet place, of which we become aware only when we contrast 
 the absolute stillness of the Sabbath of rest with the relative 
 stillness of the week. This wonderful sense of atmosphere 
 is nowhere more skilfully given than in Cranford. There is 
 something of the same nature in Our Village ; but Cranford has 
 the added charm of a story, and is an artistic whole. 
 
 The characters of Cranford are admirable. The simple and 
 manly sincerity of Captain Brown, and the crushed but indestruc- 
 tibly sweet nature of Miss Matty, make them the reader's friends 
 for ever. The book is full of delicious bits of humour and pathos. 
 The small gentilities, the petty occupations, the " much ado about 
 nothing " of a narrow society untroubled with ideas, are touched 
 with a skill hardly to be matched outside Goldsmith's master- 
 piece. The materials are as commonplace as possible, and yet 
 the result is admirable. A special leature of Mrs Gaskell's art is
 
 728 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the skilful use of juxtaposition. Take for example Miss Jenkyns s 
 indorsation of an old letter : " Letter of pious congratulation and 
 exhortation from my venerable grandfather to my beloved mother, 
 on occasion of my own birth. Also some practical remarks on 
 the advisability of keeping warm the extremities of infants, from 
 my excellent grandmother." 
 
 Through the remainder of her life Mrs Gaskell plied an active 
 pen. She was the author in all of some forty stories, long and 
 short, the most important, in addition to those already named, 
 being Sylvia's Lovers (1863), Cousin Phillis (1863-64) and Wives 
 and Daughters, which was appearing serially in The Cornhill Maga- 
 zine at the time of her death, and which was left unfinished. 
 Much of the charm of Cranford is to be found in all of them, and 
 Cousin Phillis has a rare grace, but still there is a gulf between 
 Cranford and the best of them. Had she written several stories 
 of the quality of Cranford, Mrs Gaskell must have ranked among 
 the greatest of English novelists. As it is, a writer who is always 
 good but only once indubitably great seems to be most fairly 
 classed high in the second rank. 
 
 Mrs Gaskell's stories are a testimony to the goodness of her 
 heart as well as to her genius. From beginning to end they 
 contain no ill-natured word. They have in a high degree that 
 power which specially accompanies humour, the power to excite 
 interest in the writer. No one can be indifferent to the personality 
 of those who possess it ; and when it is kindly the interest becomes 
 personal affection. Mrs Gaskell has a place along with Goldsmith 
 and Charles Lamb among writers who are not only admired but 
 loved. 
 
 Her contemporary George Eliot (1819-1880) commands 
 more admiration but less love. The very greatness of her 
 genius, by lifting her so far above the reader, tends to chill the 
 sense of personal relationship : " the solemn peaks but to the 
 stars are known." A few, greater still, have had the knack of 
 making men oblivious of the distance. Scott had it ; and in the 
 comedies at least we often forget the incomparable greatness of 
 Shakespeare in his own attractiveness. But George Eliot sat 
 upon a solitary throne, which few cared to approach.
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 729 
 
 ^lary Ann Evans, whose own name has been sunk in the nom 
 de plume which she adopted, was born in Warwickshire. She was 
 thus, Uke Shakespeare, a borderer; and she had Welsh blood in 
 her veins, as perhaps Shakespeare had in his. Her regular 
 education did not reach far, though it was quite as good as that 
 of the average middle-class girl of her time, or rather better. She 
 was sent to school first at Attleborough, then at Nuneaton, and 
 finally at Coventry, whence she was withdrawn in 1835 ; and, 
 her mother dying in 1836, the girl of seventeen found herself 
 burdened with the charge of her father's house. She took a just 
 pride in her butter-making and cheese-making and in the general 
 excellence of her household management^ ; but her mind was far 
 too active to rest content with that alone, and she continued to 
 study French, German and Italian, Latin and Greek and music. 
 
 At this time Mary Ann Evans was profoundly religious, and, 
 after the straitest sect of the Calvinists, so firm a believer as to be 
 shocked at the idea of the possible salvation of any who did not 
 reach the proper standard of orthodoxy. Her early letters are 
 full of quotations from scripture, and of evangelical piety even to 
 excess ; and she was so ascetic that on her first visit to London, 
 in 1838, she would not go to any theatre. She had breathed the 
 atmosphere of evangelicalism in the schools she had attended, 
 and their influence had been confirmed by her aunt Elizabeth, a 
 Methodist preacher, the original of Dinah Morris. On the other 
 hand, her brother Isaac had adopted High Church views, and the 
 arguments between them were frequent and sustained. It hardly 
 needs the testimony of the biography to convince us of this, for 
 George Eliot's mind was essentially argumentative, and nothing 
 in her correspondence is more remarkable than its ratiocinative 
 cast. It has no share of the easy simplicity and the light gossip 
 of the letters of Edward FitzGerald, or of Cowper, or of Horace 
 Walpole. 
 
 ^ George Eliot had to the last a high opinion of the life of practical useful- 
 ness. "Did you not then find enough to interest you in your family ? " was 
 her question addressed to a successful lady novehst who was married and had 
 children ; and if she herself had had children it is probable that her novels 
 would never have been written. [Mrs Oliphant's William Blackwood, i. 463.]
 
 730 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Miss Evans however was not the person to rest long content 
 with beliefs inherited or accepted on authority. The power of 
 her intellect brought on at an unusually early age one of those 
 spiritual crises to which original minds are liable, and which were 
 perhaps especially frequent in that age. She was driven on by 
 her intellect to question everything. '* I admit discussion," she 
 says at a later date, " on every matter except dinner and debts. I 
 hold that the first must be eaten and the second must be paid. 
 These are my only prejudices." The biography aptly quotes, as 
 applicable to herself, a sentence from Daniel Deronda : " You 
 can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in 
 you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl." The movement 
 which was now begun in her mind speedily taught her how galling 
 was the slavery. She passed through various phases within the 
 fold of the Church, but speedily arrived at the *' Anti-Supernatural," 
 and in that stage wore an anti-supernatural cap, which, whatever 
 may have been its merits as a symbol of faith, or want of faith, 
 appears to have been unbecoming as a form of head-gear. The 
 change produced a complete revolution in her tastes, so that what 
 she had formerly admired she now loathed. In 1838 she enjoys 
 Hannah More's letters, and calls hers a " blessed " character^. 
 Ten years later she writes : " I am glad you detest Hannah 
 More's letters. I like neither her letters, nor her books, nor her 
 character ^" 
 
 On this side of her intellect a pov/erful influence was exercised 
 by the Bray family, whom she came to know on the removal of 
 her father in 1841 to the neighbourhood of Coventry. Both 
 Mr and Mrs Bray, and also the brother and sister of the latter, 
 were writers of some repute and power. Charles Hennell's 
 hiquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838) especially 
 was a book of great ability whose reputation was not limited to 
 England. It had been translated into German with a preface by 
 Strauss himself. Doubts had been already suggested to Miss 
 Evans's mind by Isaac Taylor's Ajicient Christianity (1839-1840), 
 and both the man and the book, as well as his Physical Theory of 
 Another Life (1836), are worthy of remembrance were it only for 
 ^ Cross's Life 0/ George Eliot, i. 41. * ibid. i. 1 70.
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 73 1 
 
 the admiration they stirred in her mind and the influence they 
 exercised over her. Their caution and moderation serve as a 
 measure of Miss Evans's orthodoxy at this date. Her doubts 
 were greatly deepened by the discussions she now heard and the 
 Uterature to which she was introduced. With an excess of con- 
 scientiousness which she afterwards regretted. Miss Evans, finding 
 herself out of sympathy with orthodox religious teaching, deter- 
 mined not to go to church, a resolution which led to a very 
 painful breach with her father. The father and daughter were 
 ultimately reconciled by her yielding on the point of attendance 
 at church ; but her opinions never moved back towards the 
 current views of Christianity. 
 
 Miss Evans already felt the attraction of literature, and had 
 written a little and projected more. The earliest published 
 of her writings was a religious poem which appeared in The 
 Christian Observer m. January, 1840. But, like Charlotte Bronte, 
 she was no poet. " What do you think of the Progress of Archi- 
 tecture as a subject for Poetry' ? " she asks in 1841. Comment is 
 unnecessary. She proposed also to draw up a chart of ecclesias- 
 tical history, and to embody in it "an application of the apocalyptic 
 prophecies " How she meant to do it is not clear ; but that George 
 Eliot once entertained the idea is curious. It was however to 
 her connexion with the Brays that Miss Evans owed her real 
 introduction to literature. A friend of theirs, Miss Brabant, had 
 begun the translation of Strauss's Leben Jesu, and then abandoned 
 it on her marriage with Mr Hennell ; and in succession to her 
 Miss Evans was induced to undertake the work. Her version, 
 published in 1846, proves her competency at once in the German 
 language and in philosophy. In spite of the scantiness of her 
 scholastic training, she made herself a woman of very wide culture, 
 being indeed far superior in this respect not only to the women, 
 but to the men as well, who were her contemporaries in fiction. 
 She was an excellent linguist, having a wide acquaintance with 
 Greek and Latin literature, as well as with French, German and 
 Italian. In the course of her translation of Strauss she felt the 
 need of Hebrew, and forthwith taught herself that language. 
 ^ Cross's Lije oj ijeorge Eliot, i. 8i.
 
 732 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 She was moreover widely read in contemporary speculation, 
 both on its scientific and on its philosophic sides, and she took the 
 deepest intellectual pleasure in it. She was ready in appreciation 
 and keen in criticism of philosophic ideas ; but in this sphere her 
 mind was not originative. For that reason there is nothing more 
 to be regretted than the sway philosophy afterwards exercised 
 over her. In her later works there is too much theory and too 
 little observation, too much reasoning and too little intuition. 
 Besides Strauss, she translated Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity 
 (1854), the only book she ever published under her own name. 
 
 The direct remuneration Miss Evans received for the trans- 
 lation of Strauss was miserably inadequate, but the book served 
 to make her known in literary circles. Like all writers she felt 
 the attraction of London ; but so long as her father lived she 
 was bound to him. His death in 1849 set her free, and two years 
 later she became assistant editor of The Westminster Review, to 
 which she herself contributed a number of weighty articles. The 
 most celebrated was Worldliness and Other- Worldliness. Those 
 to whom it would have been most instructive were not in the 
 habit of reading The Westminster Review ; but to many even of 
 these there penetrated the knowledge that it was possible to regard 
 " other-worldliness " as a thing no less selfish and objectionable and 
 essentially irreligious than worldliness. The writer had not yet 
 found her true metier ; but yet in the essays of this period there 
 are many gleams of the wisdom and the humour which illuminate 
 the stories of later days. 
 
 It was at this time that Miss Evans made the acquaintance of 
 George Henry Lewes, her connexion with whom remains the 
 most debatable point in her career. Charlotte Bronte had in 
 Jane Eyre pronounced her verdict on just such a case ; and she 
 had incurred unreasonable blame for even stating it. Mary Ann 
 Evans felt differently, and in 1854 she consented to live as the 
 wife of Lewes. Though the connexion was a happy one, she who 
 was hereafter known to her friends as Mrs Lewes had much to 
 suffer. They who were readiest to cast stones were in most 
 cases immeasurably beneath her in moral worth ; yet there were 
 many, by no means prone to pay homage to mere respectability,
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 733 
 
 who looked grave because of the consequences to society which 
 might flow from such an act. We may see the effect of the 
 position in which she had placed herself in George Eliot's frequent 
 recurrence to problems of marriage ; and several powerful and 
 eloquent passages suggest the idea that she was never able to rid 
 her own mind of uneasiness as to the moral character of her act. 
 No writer insists more strongly on the momentous nature of the 
 conjugal relation ; no writer is more innocent of any sentence or 
 word tending to undermine it or to weaken the sense of its 
 binding force. But whatever may have been the pain to herself, 
 literature is the richer for this uneasiness of the great novelist's 
 mind. It is probably the personal emotion behind them 
 which makes the passages referred to among the most solemnly 
 impressive she has written. 
 
 In the literary sense, the influence of Lewes upon George 
 Eliot was excellent, though doubtless there was some mixture of 
 evil with the good. The bent of Lewes's mind and the nature 
 of his pursuits must have encouraged and increased her own 
 tendency to abstract thought ; and in Daniel Deronda and Theo- 
 phrastus Such we see how dangerous to her art was that tendency. 
 But it was native in her mind, Lewes did not implant it; and 
 against this problematical evil has to be set the great amount of 
 positive good he certainly did. It w^as he who first suggested to 
 her that she possessed the gift for fiction, and encouraged her to 
 write the story of Amos Barton. It was he too who afterwards 
 shielded her sensitiveness from any rude breath of criticism ; and 
 he was constantly at hand with sympathetic help and suggestion. 
 There is something charming and even touching in the spectacle 
 of this man, naturally vain and self-confident, consenting to sink 
 into the background and to devote himself to the nurture of his 
 wife's genius. 
 
 Scenes of Clerical Life ran, in Blackwood' s Magazine, through 
 the greater part of the year 1857. At first even the publisher had 
 not so much as a pseudonym on which to hang the stories. 
 A7nos Barton was introduced by Lewes as the work of a sensitive 
 and diffident friend ; whom the Blackwoods believed to be a man, 
 and guessed to be a clergyman. The name George Eliot was
 
 734 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 adopted in correspondence with the publishers while Scenes 
 of Clerical Life was appearing. The full revelation was forced 
 from the unwilling writer in 1859 by the claim of the impostor 
 Liggins to the authorship. Strangely enough, two of the most 
 trusted of Blackwood's literary advisers pronounced against Amos 
 Barton. His own approval was so cautiously expressed as slightly 
 to wound the sensitive author; but, as he sensibly remarked, 
 "criticism would assume a much soberer tone were critics com- 
 pelled seriously to act whenever they expressed an opinion \" 
 The readers of the magazine however showed no hesitation. 
 Scenes of Clerical Life was immediately reprinted, and, even before 
 she had written anything on the scale of a novel, George Eliot 
 took rank as one of the foremost writers of fiction of the time. 
 
 For a few years she. wrote rapidly as well as powerfully. 
 Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (i860) and Silas 
 Marner (1861) are, quality considered, a wonderful tale of work. 
 A visit to Italy made a slight break, and it was not till 1863 that 
 Eofnola appeared ; but the longer interval was by no means spent 
 in idleness. Romola was the most laborious of all her works. 
 She made a study of Florentine history to qualify herself for her 
 self-imposed task, and her declaration that she began the book 
 a young woman and ended it an old one indicates the strain it 
 put upon her. Whether the effect of this strain was permanent, 
 or, as is more probable, she had simply used up the cream of her 
 material, Rotnola is a turning-point in the career of George Eliot. 
 She could still write grandly, but with her it is "never glad 
 confident morning again " : the easy mastery is gone, and we see 
 marks of labour where before there is the sense of spontaneity. 
 At no time was she a facile or a naturally prolific writer like 
 Dickens ; but after the date of Rotnola the intervals between her 
 works became longer, and the sense of effort conveyed by them 
 is more marked than it is in any of them down to Silas Marner. 
 Three years separated Romola from the next novel, Felix Holt 
 (1866); and after that George Eliot made a new venture. She 
 had already written a version of The Spanish Gypsy (1868); but 
 before it was published she visited Spain and afterwards rewrote 
 * Mrs Olipliant's IVilliatn Blackwood, ii. 435.
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 735 
 
 the poem. Her only other long work of verse, The Legend of 
 Jubal, was published with other pieces in 1874. In the interval 
 between these two poems she had reverted to prose, and published 
 Middlemarch in parts, as the novels of Dickens were published, 
 in 187 1 and 1872. Her last novel, Daniel Deronda, followed 
 in 1876; and the volume of essays entitled Impressions of Theo- 
 phrastus Such (1879) closed her literary career. She died in 
 December, 1880, having in the same year married (Lewes being 
 now dead) Mr J. W. Cross. 
 
 In at least one respect George Eliot stands alone among 
 Endish novehsts. No one before her time had so combined 
 profound culture in philosophy vnih insight into character and 
 keen observation. Scott had read even more widely, but he was 
 not regularly learned; Thackeray had great knowledge, but he was 
 not a systematic thinker; Lytton was superficial and pretentious; 
 and none of the other novelists in her own age or in the generation 
 preceding it is in this respect fit to be named with her at all. 
 The combination gives richness and weight to many a passage in 
 her writings, and to some complete works. In her earlier books 
 it has the same sort of charm as a similar combination has in 
 the dialogues of Plato. Down to Silas Marner it may be regarded 
 as an unmixed boon; but afterwards evidence accumulates that 
 it was not without its dangers. Thought crushes art, and the 
 style becomes heavy and laboured. Daniel Deronda, Theophrastus 
 Such and the poems especially illustrate defects of which many 
 were conscious in George Eliot's conversation, and which force 
 themselves into notice in almost every letter that she wrote. 
 
 What preserves the earlier novels from this defect is, in the 
 first place, the element of concrete experience which is a principal 
 ingredient in all of them; and, secondly, their saving grace of 
 humour. In both respects George Eliot afterwards shows a 
 marked decline. As to the former point, it is notorious that in 
 the earlier novels George Eliot drew very freely on the stores of 
 her memory. Scene after scene, character after character, in these 
 novels has been identified with some place or person within the 
 range of her early experience. Her mansions and cottages, her 
 lanes and meadows, are those to which she had been accustomed
 
 736 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 to drive in childhood with her father, or over which she had 
 rambled with her brother. Still more are the characters of her 
 novels the figures with whom she had been familiar ; and almost 
 in proportion to the familiarity is the frequency of their appearance. 
 No other group was so often laid under contribution as her own 
 family. Her father, her mother, her brother, her sister, her aunt 
 and herself, all appear in her pages. We need not press the 
 identification too far. "There is not a single portrait in Adam 
 Bede" she says ; *' only the suggestions of experience wrought up 
 into new combinations^" But though few or none of the characters 
 are transcribed from the life without change or adaptation, there 
 can be no reasonable doubt that many of them bore a marked 
 resemblance to real men and women. Her brother Isaac had 
 no difficulty in detecting his sister's hand behind the screen of 
 her anonymity; and it is significant that the man Liggins, who 
 was put forward as the veritable author of Scenes of Clerical 
 Life and of Adam Bede, had the honour thrust upon him. He 
 at first disowned the books ; but his neighbours were so sure 
 upon the point that he yielded to their better knowledge. They 
 were sure because they saw that the author must be someone 
 from their neighbourhood, and who could it possibly be but 
 Liggins ? The premiss was right, but the conclusion was wrong. 
 They were quite right in the conviction that only a native of their 
 district could have shown such intimate local knowledge ; and 
 their only mistake lay in the belief that Liggins, and he alone, 
 possessed the power necessary to use this local knowledge. 
 
 Such treasures of memory are soon exhausted : they are rather 
 a mine, the contents of which can be used once for all, than a 
 fertile field which can be cropped year after year. And as they 
 are exhausted their possessor has to go farther afield for characters 
 and schemes. In Romola it is a foreign land and a distant age ; 
 in Felix Holt we have the problems of politics ; in Daniel Deronda 
 race and heredity. We can see therefore why it is that a certain 
 easy grace which belongs to the earlier novels is wanting to the 
 later ones. It is like writing in a foreign tongue. The language 
 may have been well learnt, the grammar may be thoroughly 
 ^ CiObss Life of George Eliot, ii. 67-68.
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 737 
 
 understood ; but it was not learnt at the mother's knee, and it 
 has not become part of the writer's very being. And so, as theory 
 and conscious thought more and more take the place of intuition 
 and of memories reaching back to the dim beginnings of conscious 
 being, George Eliot becomes more ponderous and less graceful. 
 David has put on the armour of Saul, but he was a more formidable 
 enemy with the sling and the smooth stones. After Silas Marner 
 George Eliot achieved just one great triumph, Middlemarch, and 
 in it she is back again in her own special fields the English 
 midlands. Her other works might have won the reputation of a 
 lesser writer, but they failed to sustain hers. 
 
 In the earlier novels the characters are alive in every limb. 
 Serious and comic, simple and deep, thoughtful and foolish, they 
 are all convincing. They also present astonishing scope and 
 variety. Naturally enough, the women are better than the men : 
 one of the principal grounds on which Dickens pronounced so 
 confidently on the question of the sex of the author of Scenes of 
 Clerical Life was that the women there were " more informed 
 from within " than the men ; and though that acute critic, 
 Mrs Carlyle, was deceived, she in imagination provided the 
 middle-aged author with a wife, to whom he owed "those 
 beautiful feminine touches" in Adam Bede^. Yet George Eliot 
 in her delineation of the masculine character stands far above 
 any other female writer. Adam Bede (her father) and Tom 
 Tulliver (her brother) are so good that we have to compare them 
 with Maggie Tulliver (herself), Dinah Morris (her aunt) and 
 Hetty Sorrel, to see that there are still some touches wanting, 
 such as no woman has ever given to a masculine character, and 
 as, perhaps, no man but Shakespeare has ever given to a feminine 
 one. 
 
 This dependence upon experience is common to all writers. 
 Even centaurs and Medusas and monsters of all sorts are only 
 incongruous combinations of the elements of experience ; while, 
 at the other end of the scale, the airiest sylph has to embody 
 itself, just as does the modern ghost which consents to be photo- 
 graphed, and so proves that it is something more, or less, than 
 
 ^ Life of George Eliot ^ ii. ii. 
 
 w. 47
 
 7S^ THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 mere spirit. But in the case of female writers the dependence 
 seems to be especially close ; or, at all events, it obtrudes itself 
 upon the attention. We have noticed this already in the case of 
 Charlotte Bronte and Mrs Gaskell. It is true also of Miss Austen 
 and Miss Ferrier. All these writers, as well as George Eliot, are 
 best when they keep closest to that which they most familiarly 
 know. In the case of Charlotte Bronte and Mrs Gaskell and 
 George Eliot,, it seems to have been especially the experience of 
 girlhood that was fruitful in literature ; at least not one of them 
 ever succeeded in using later experience with the ease and 
 mastery shown in the manipulation of that which came from early 
 years. The same principle holds, doubtless, in the case of men 
 like Fielding and Smollett and Scott ; but it is disguised by their 
 wider knowledge of life. Dickens, who knew nothing well but 
 the London streets, had come into contact there with an endless 
 variety of characters and had stored his memory with innumerable 
 "situations." There are signs of exhaustion in the later works 
 both of Dickens and of Scott; but their vein is not so soon 
 worked out as it inevitably is in the case of the women. George 
 Eliot unquestionably showed wisdom in writing slowly ; and most 
 writers of her sex have either shown a want of wisdom, or have, 
 like Mrs Oliphant, betrayed the pressure of necessity in writing 
 rapidly and publishing often. Probably her view changed with 
 time, but at the beginning of her career George Eliot had an 
 instinctive feeling that her surest ground was the ground of her 
 own experience. " Shall I ever," she asks in her Journal in 
 1859, "write another book as true as Adam Bede}" and the 
 doubt was well founded. Two or three of her subsequent works 
 excel Adam Bede in some other respects, but certainly none is 
 more true throughout. 
 
 With the exhaustion of the material of experience there goes, 
 in George Eliot's case, a great decline in the quantity and the 
 quality of the humour of her novels. If a critic wishes to 
 illustrate her humour, he almost invariably refers to the characters 
 of the earlier novels, to the Poysers and Gleggs, to the scene 
 at the Rainbow, or to some passage in Scenes of Clerical Life. 
 Though humour is present still in Middlemarch and Dajiiel
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 739 
 
 Deronda, and though, in the former especially, there are some 
 delicious passages, yet, if we judged by these novels alone, we 
 should not single humour out as one of George Eliot's principal 
 gifts. And yet such it is. The great charm of her rural characters 
 — farmers, inn- keepers, housewives — is their humour. 
 
 We may distinguish two different kinds of humour. One is 
 that which Shakespeare has embodied in the person of Falstaff, 
 in whom it is combined with extraordinary mental gifts. No 
 character in imaginative literature is so fertile in expedients 
 and so rich in suggestion as Falstaff: he is at once mirthful 
 himself and a cause of mirth in others. So too is Sam Weller ; 
 his wit and humour are conscious, and he laughs with, and often 
 at, his interlocutor. It is not so with the tribe of Dogberry and 
 Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Though the cause of mirth in others, 
 they are themselves far from mirthful. We read with delight 
 speeches uttered with the most sober purpose. Such characters 
 are unconsciously humorous ; and it is humour of this sort that 
 Mr Barrie has in mind when he puts into the mouth of Tammas 
 Haggart the opinion that to make humour is sufficient work 
 for one man, the labour of understanding it must be undergone 
 by someone else. 
 
 Now this is the sort of humour in which George Eliot excels. 
 There is wit as well as wisdom in her works ; there are plenty of 
 bright and illuminating phrases whose effect depends at least as 
 much upon their lively expression as upon their truth. But there 
 is no character of the Falstaff type, none even who shows the 
 roguery of a Touchstone. The humour is mainly found in 
 characters of humble rank, or of imperfect education and moderate 
 intelligence ; and greatly would they have been surprised at the 
 idea that their talk was amusing. Her greatest triumphs in humour 
 are to be found in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss ; and 
 there the talks about household linen and furniture and recipes, 
 and the disputes about family dignity, are to the speakers matter 
 of the most serious import. The novelist has done what Tammas 
 Haggart's auditor was required to do : she has understood the 
 humour which Mrs Poyser makes. This is almost literally the 
 case; for George Eliot had actually heard these conversations, 
 
 47—2
 
 740 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 or somethin^r so like them that we need not trouble about the 
 difference. 
 
 A great part of George Eliot's power is due to sympathy. She 
 was herself sensitive to excess ; but while many sensitive people 
 pay little regard to the feelings of others, George Eliot showed 
 that scrupulous forbearance of which she herself felt the need. 
 Nowhere does she show more comprehension or greater sympathy 
 than in dealing with questions of religion. She herself had com- 
 pletely thrown off dogmatic belief; but she had not done it without 
 a struggle, and she never ceased to sympathise with the beliefs she 
 could no longer share. The memory of the painful estrangement 
 from her father, which never faded from her mind, warned her 
 how the consequences of a change of creed might spread. There 
 is therefore none of the spirit of the iconoclast in her work. 
 No wanton attack upon the faith of others can be charged 
 against her; and she would have approved of the lines of her 
 contemporary, Matthew Arnold, who asks with regard to the 
 faiths which he himself can no longer share, 
 
 "Which has not taught weak wills how much they can? 
 Which has not fall'n on the dry heart like rain? 
 Which has not cried to sunk, self- weary man: 
 Thou ffiust be born again ! " 
 
 She would have argued too with Browning that love, the soul 
 of religion, is alike in the dissenting chapel, despite the intel- 
 lectual vulgarity of its doctrine, and in the Romish church, despite 
 the incredibility of its dogma. " I have too profound a conviction," 
 she writes, " of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, and the 
 spiritual blight that comes with no faith, to have any negative 
 propagandism in me." 
 
 Her own experience of the pain of divisions on the score of 
 religion is in part the secret of George Eliot's sympathetic 
 delineation of clergymen, wherein she contrasts strikingly with 
 Charlotte Bronte, The latter, though she was the daughter, and 
 though she became the wife, of a clergyman, hardly ever introduces 
 a clerical character without satire ; while George Eliot, sceptic 
 and positivist, treats with sympathy and evident liking every form 
 of Christian ministry, from Savonarola's on the one hand to
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 74I 
 
 Dinah Morris's on the other. Her very detachment from creeds, 
 no doubt, helped towards this catholicity, so unlike anything 
 usually found in what is called the ' Catholic ' spirit. But her 
 sympathy was by no means limited to extremists or to the eccentric. 
 She has a fine gallery of portraits of quiet, worthy, simple-minded 
 clergymen of the Church of England, unmoved by the great con- 
 troversy of 'High' and 'Low' and 'Broad,' neither 'Uberal' nor 
 'catholic,' but content to walk their narrow round of parish duties, 
 to love their neighbours and to minister to their wants, unostenta- 
 tiously, according to the tradition handed down to them from 
 their fathers. This is the tone of George Eliot's pictures of 
 clergymen and ministers, from Amos Barton and Maynard Gilfil 
 to Rufus Holt. In her later novels such figures are less common, 
 because the raw material of memory, from which they were drawn, 
 was used up, and it was not of a sort which could be replaced 
 from the society then open to her. George Eliot is ready enough 
 to smile gently at her clerical characters. They are not faultless, 
 and they are never men of great force; but she rarely satirises 
 them, and she is never bitter. When, as in the striking case of 
 Casaubon, she is satirical and contemptuous, the contempt is for 
 something outside the clerical character. Casaubon is a clergy- 
 man, as it were, by accident ; but " pre-ordinance and first decree " 
 made him a hide-bound pedant. All George Eliot's satire is 
 reserved for this pedantry; on it Dorothea makes shipwreck of 
 her life ; it, or rather the nature which makes it possible, dictates 
 the terms of that masterpiece of small-mindedness, Casaubon's 
 will. 
 
 On the question of marriage too the personal experience of 
 George Eliot certainly made her sympathies more keen. The 
 space it occupies in her novels is remarkable. To her, marriage 
 is the source of most of the tragedy of life. It is so in the cases 
 of Romola, of Dorothea and of Lydgate; and the tragedies of 
 Adam Bede and of The Mill on the Floss also spring from love- 
 stories. But here again she would seem to have been sobered 
 and awed by her own history, and no sentence from her pen 
 countenances connexions readily made and as readily broken. 
 The history of Maggie TuUiver is one of renunciation; and, though
 
 742 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Adam Bede is a tale of seduction, it has been truly said that the 
 author carefully refrains from exciting sympathy with Hetty, and 
 that there are few books more calculated to make the seducer 
 pause in his career. The morality of George Eliot's books is not 
 only correct, but austere. 
 
 As the materials furnished by her experience became more 
 scanty, George Eliot fell back upon the resources of her thought. 
 Hence her works became a conscious and deliberate treatment of 
 interesting problems or speculations, and the analytical element 
 gained prominence. Here lies the dividing line between two 
 great classes of the critics of George Eliot. Few, if any, dispute 
 her right to a place among the greatest of English novelists. 
 Her earlier novels, with their charming picture of the life of 
 the country and of small towns, are amply sufficient to vindicate 
 her title to that rank. But for her more devoted admirers this 
 has hardly sufficed. They would not only claim for her a place 
 beside Scott and Thackeray and Fielding, but would fain set her 
 upon a pedestal loftier than any; and to make the claim plausible 
 most of them feel themselves obliged to insist upon the excellence 
 of the later and more philosophical novels ^ Here, they argue, 
 there is a seriousness of purpose, a depth of thought and a 
 mastery of principle, not to be matched in the works of any 
 other writer of fiction ; and just as Hamlet, by reason of its 
 weight of thought, is greater than Henry IV, perfect as the 
 latter is in its own way, so Romola and Middleviarch and Daniel 
 Deronda are greater than Tom Jones, or The Anticjuary, or Old 
 Mortality, or Estfiond, or Vanity Fair, or The Cloister and the 
 Hearth. Romola, according to this view, is a great historical 
 novel, the fruit of serious study, presenting the carefully-weighed 
 conclusions of a great philosopher ; it must therefore be superior 
 to Waverley and Old Alortality, books written curreiite calamo by 
 one who claimed to do no more than amuse. It must be greater 
 
 ^ There are however some who have claimed for her this lofty position on 
 the score of the early novels alone. "This publication oi AcLiin BecU," writes 
 Sidney Lanier, " placed George Eliot decisively at the head of English novel- 
 writers, with only Dickens for second, even." [llie Ettglish Novel, quoted \i\ 
 The Library of Literary Criticism. )
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 743 
 
 even than Esmond, which was indeed written with scrupulous 
 care, but which embodies no theory and is the work of one 
 who did not pretend to be a philosopher. Neither is there 
 anything in the other novelists parallel to such deliberate studies 
 as Felix Holt, Mtddle?narck and Daniel Deronda. 
 
 One of the most remarkable features of recent criticism has 
 been the development of the systematic study of English literature 
 in France. Amongst the claims of Voltaire to gratitude must be 
 ranked the fact that he pointed out to his countrymen the greatness 
 of English literature; but notwithstandmg Voltaire, Taine, when 
 he wrote his History of Etiglish Literature, still stood almost alone. 
 Since that date, however, much of the best criticism of English 
 writers has been the work of Frenchmen. Jusserand, Texte, Bel- 
 jame, Legouis, Angellier and Morel, are names which will occur to 
 every student. Even the barrier of dialect has not prevented a 
 most sympathetic and discriminating treatment of Burns ; even a 
 poet so far below the greatest as Thomson has been exhaustively 
 examined and appreciatively criticised. It is clear, as Matthew 
 Arnold taught, that the critic who speaks another tongue and who 
 belongs to another race is likely to be free from some prejudices 
 which may beset a fellow-countryman. Arnold referred especially 
 to the judgment of Edmond Scherer on Milton; and this very 
 critic, who was unsurpassed for learning and for keenness of 
 insight, has pronounced emphatically upon the merits of George 
 Eliot, declaring that for her " was reserved the honour of writing 
 the most perfect novels yet known." Scherer takes substantially 
 the view of the thoroughgoing panegyrists, who admire equally 
 George Eliot's philosophy and her descriptive power, her analysis 
 and her intuition. Such a judgment as this, pronounced by 
 such an authority, commands respect ; but it may reasonably be 
 doubted whether it will commend itself to future ages. 
 
 Time has made it increasingly difificult to maintain the tran- 
 scendent excellence of the later and more philosophical of George 
 Eliot's novels, and the number of those who attempt to do so 
 grows smaller year by year. When Daniel Deronda was in course 
 of pubUcation, the admiring publisher thought that the author was 
 outdoing even MiddkinarJi, Allowance must be made for the
 
 744 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 complacency of criticism in private correspondence ; but a kind 
 of George Eliot superstition had grown up, and whatever the 
 great writer gave to the world was received with something of 
 the awe due to a revelation ; but the awe has gradually passed 
 away, and doubts have thickened round the revelation. There 
 are fine, even grand, materials in all the later novels, and not 
 least in Romola : the character of Tito Melema alone would lift 
 the work in which it appears to the verge of greatness, and the 
 picture of old Bardo in his library is admirable. Yet Ro7?iola does 
 not carry conviction of the historical genius of the writer. Some- 
 thing of the vividness and ready mastery of Scott is lacking. 
 Making every allowance for the mental power of George Eliot, 
 it is incredible that, in the time at her disposal, she could have 
 acquired a real mastery of her subject; but, above all, that in- 
 stinctive sympathy which was necessary for the proper handling 
 of it is not there. Dante Rossetti, one of the most competent 
 of judges as to the theme, thought that George Eliot had not 
 quite succeeded in entering into Italian life; and Negri, who 
 wrote a book in admiration of her genius, condemned as untrue 
 both the talk of her Florentines and the character of Romola 
 herself ^ She did not of her own impulse conceive scenes and 
 characters under the conditions of another country and another 
 century ; and so, while the book is stately and grand, the move- 
 ment is stiff; and the familiar touches of nature in the English 
 novels are worth more than all the learning with which the Italian 
 one is loaded. Probably it violates history less than the plays of 
 Shakespeare or the novels of Scott ; but it contains no historical 
 character fit to set beside Prince Hal or Hotspur, Louis XI or 
 King James. 
 
 Still less was George Eliot completely successful in her aim in 
 Felix Holt or in Daniel Deronda. By general consent now they 
 are put lowest in the rank of their author's novels ; and in spite 
 of the awe inspired by her name, Deronda was felt even at the 
 time of publication to mark a decline in her powers. She failed 
 to impart to others the interest she herself felt in Jewish nationality, 
 and most readers found the 'Zionism' of her characters somewhat 
 * Blackwood's Magazine, vol. i^o.
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 745 
 
 wearisome. It must be added, however, that time has shown her 
 to have been a pioneer, that since the pubHcation oi Daniel Deronda 
 some serious steps have been taken towards the replanting of the 
 Jews in Palestine, and that the idea has the support of some of 
 the best minds among the Jews of the present day. Nevertheless, 
 this fact does not make any more real the somewhat abstract 
 Jewish characters depicted by George Eliot; nor does it supply 
 any more vital bond of union between the Jewish and the English 
 parts of the novel. 
 
 But there remained one triumph in George Eliot's later 
 career which went far to redeem these comparative failures. 
 Middlemarch is a book so powerfully conceived, and in many 
 ways so admirably executed, that a good case may be made for 
 ranking it first of all George Eliot's works. The advocatus diaboli 
 may fairly plead that it is not one story, but a bundle of stories 
 loosely tied together. It is no organic bond, but a mere juxta- 
 position, which unites the story of Dorothea and Casaubon with 
 that of Lydgate and Rosamond, and both with Bulstrode and 
 with the Garths. Middlemarch is, in fact, a sermon upon a text. 
 The prelude, which is as significant as the introductory scene of 
 Tennyson's Becket, shows us how " domestic reality " in the shape 
 of an uncle swoops down upon the young Saint Theresa and 
 brings her back to common life ; and the whole of Middlemarch 
 illustrates the force of just such commonplace or even sordid 
 realities. Lydgate, gifted with great powers and fired with high 
 ambitions, is brought down by the domestic reality of Rosamond 
 Vincy to very ordinary achievement. The young and beautiful 
 idealist Dorothea marries the dry old book-worm Casaubon, be- 
 cause her imagination sees in him a great thinker, and in herself 
 as his wife the instrument to bring the world-awakening thought 
 to light. She finds that the " system of all the mythologies " is a 
 mere valley of dry bones into which its author is powerless to 
 breathe a life-giving spirit. There is no reason, except George 
 Eliot's will or convenience, why these two stories should be told 
 together. Except as they illustrate the effect of "domestic reality" 
 upon soaring ambition and lofty ideals, they are disconnected 
 Lydgate stands outside the life of Casaubon ; Dorothea has
 
 74^ THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 little influence upon Rosamond ; and it is only in deference 
 to the canons that they are in the end brought into closer 
 relation. 
 
 Lack of unity is a grave fault, but not necessarily a fatal 
 one : the charge has been brought against some of the plays of 
 Shakespeare, and they still survive. And nothing else equally 
 serious can be alleged against Middlemarch. It is less graceful, 
 less humorous, less varied than the earlier novels. It contains 
 nothing so beautiful as the childhood of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, 
 nothing so passionate as the love of Adam Bede, no rapture like 
 the religious fervour of Dinah Morris. But it is impressive from 
 beginning to end, weighty yet not heavy, often splendidly eloquent, 
 the only book which does equal justice to the two sides of George 
 Eliot, the artistic and the philosophic. There are single characters 
 in some of the other novels greater than any in Mzddkmarck; but 
 no novel she ever wrote contains so many that dwell in the memory. 
 Hence, if it were necessary to judge of her from one book, that 
 which would give the best conception of her powers would be 
 Middlejnarch. 
 
 From George Eliot's tendency to philosophy it was natural 
 that life should present itself to her, increasingly as she grew in 
 years, as a series of problems. Some of her characters are worked 
 out in this way. Tito Melema was a problem. Given a love of 
 pleasure, a shrinking from duty and a dislike of everything that is 
 disagreeable, what will result ? The same is true of Silas Marner. 
 The character was suggested to her by an early memory of a man 
 whose expression and manner caused her to regard him as, for 
 some reason, an outcast. What, she asked herself, would be the 
 effect of an unjust exclusion from society? and her answer is 
 Silas Marner. He is not born a miser. In him, the passion for 
 gold is shown to be the consequence of the treatment he receives, 
 which blights his nobler nature and drives him in upon himself. 
 Habit is second nature, and the miserly habit becomes deep- 
 rooted in Silas ; but even second nature has not the indomitable 
 force which belongs to nature herself when corroborated, as Bacon 
 phrases it, by custom. Hence the regeneration of Silas is well 
 conceived and is of a piece with the whole character ; while if the
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 747 
 
 miserliness had been instinctive and inborn, the awakening out of 
 it would have been incredible. 
 
 Tito through life, and Silas Marner through great part of the 
 time during which he figures before the reader, are essentially self- 
 centred. Casaubon is so more than either of them. The ambitions 
 he conceives are suggested to him by the society in which he lives, 
 but the shaping of them is all his own. The soul of Dryasdust is 
 as solitary in the desert where he lives as that of Shakespeare on 
 his unapproachable height. But such characters are exceptional ; 
 and to George Eliot the problem usually presented itself as social, 
 and character seemed to her a thing developed through intercourse 
 with others. There is usually some influence, most commonly 
 that of marriage or of the love which seeks its goal in marriage, 
 which powerfully modifies and perhaps almost transforms the 
 character. Dorothea and Lydgate are cases in point. So is 
 Silas Marner himself; for the period of miserly solitude is only 
 an interlude between the time before, when social forces reduce 
 him to that condition, and the time after, when he is lifted out of 
 it by his love for the child. So are Adam Bede and Mrs Transome 
 and Gwendolen and Maggie Tulliver. The last is the best instance 
 of all, as she is the subtlest of all George Eliot's heroines. Her 
 sensitiveness and her sympathetic imagination make her specially 
 responsive, and she takes her tone from every influence in turn, 
 from the time when she follows her brother's lead in their childish 
 games to the day when both are swept out of life together. The 
 writer was evidently well aware of her own "chameleon-like 
 nature," as her biographer calls it. 
 
 The great artist ought to be a philosopher, but there is danger 
 if he be too well aware of the fact. This is the significance of 
 Wordsworth's complaint that the poetry of Goethe was not 
 " inevitable " enough ; and Wordsworth himself exemplifies the 
 danger, for it is when he forgets his philosophy that he is most 
 poetical. Browning too has suffered from an excess of systematic 
 thought. And in the case of George Eliot the very quality which 
 was supposed to lift her above her compeers will, perhaps, ultimately 
 place her a little lower than the greatest of them. But her fame 
 is safe as the greatest woman who wrote the English language in 
 the nineteenth century.
 
 748 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Among the other female writers of fiction, whose name is legion, 
 there is none to rival George Eliot in power and range of thought, 
 or Charlotte and Emily Bronte in passion ; nor is there any to 
 whom literature is indebted for such a gem as Cranford; and 
 probably not a single novel they have written will be read half 
 a century hence except by a few students. There are however 
 two or three who demand notice for their temporary vogue and 
 influence, and one for powers which, if circumstances had 
 permitted her to husband them more carefully, might have won 
 her permanent fame. 
 
 The eldest of the novelists alluded to was Mrs Henry Wood 
 (1814-1887), whose sensational and melodramatic East Lynne 
 (1861) has no small share of the merits and of the faults of 
 Lord Lytton. Some of her stories are pleasant enough reading, 
 and she shows great ingenuity in the construction of plots, but 
 neither style nor characters are such as to give them a place in 
 literature. East Lynne however is noteworthy for the extra- 
 ordinary popularity which it won, and which it still in great part 
 retains, both as a novel and in the dramatised version. None of 
 Mrs Wood's other works equals East Lynne in wide popularity, but 
 several of them — e.g. Mrs LLallibm-ton^ s Troubles (1862), The 
 Chafinings (1862) and the Johnny Ludlow tales, begun in her 
 magazine The Argosy in 186S — are still read; and they are superior 
 in literary quality to their better-known predecessor. Of similar 
 calibre to Mrs Wood, though she wrote in a different strain, 
 was Dinah Maria Mulock, afterwards Craik (1826-1887), whose 
 John Halifax, Gentleman (1856) appealed to the taste of the more 
 sober part of the middle class, as East Lynne did to that of the 
 more sensation-loving. It is altogether harmless, and faultlessly 
 proper, and irredeemably commonplace. 
 
 Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823— 1901), whose very titles — The 
 Daisy Chain, The Chaplet of Pearls, &c. — proclaim her an orna- 
 ment of the namby-pamby school which, half a century ago, 
 supplied the most approved intellectual nutriment for girls, was 
 scarcely superior to these last, and might be passed over with an 
 equally cursory notice, but for the extraordinary judgments ex- 
 pressed by contemporaries about her Heir of Reddyffe (1856). 
 This book had a marvellous attraction for the band of young
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 749 
 
 Oxonians who, in those days, surrounded Burne-Jones and William 
 Morris. They thought it "unquestionably one of the greatest 
 books of the world " ; and as among those who thus judged were 
 some who afterwards rose to the first rank, the book which so deeply 
 moved and interested them deserves attention. Rossetti himself, 
 who seldom went astray in criticism, was a warm admirer. And yet 
 it is safe to say that whoever in the present generation turns fresh 
 and unbiassed to The Heir of Reddyffe will be astonished to 
 discover of what ordinary materials "one of the greatest books 
 of the world" may be composed. It may deserve the panegyric, 
 if milk, plentifully diluted with water, be one of the greatest 
 drinks. But as the opinion quoted was the opinion of extremely 
 able men, there must be a reason for it. No doubt it is to be 
 found in the fact that The Heir of Reddyffe embodied exactly 
 the views, and was written in precisely the tone and style, which 
 commended themselves to the young men who were influenced 
 by, though they were not all followers of, the Oxford Movement. 
 Miss Yonge lived in the district of which, from the year 1836, 
 Keble was the ecclesiastical head ; and she describes Keble as 
 the chief spiritual influence of her life. The young Oxonians 
 were conscious of the High Church atmosphere of her work, and 
 that being the air they breathed too, they were misled. Other- 
 wise, untrustworthy as contemporary judgments notoriously are, 
 we could scarcely explain such an amazing aberration as this. 
 
 The other writer who has been referred to as possessing, 
 perhaps, the elements of greatness was Margaret Oliphant (1828- 
 1897). She began her career with Margaret Maitland (1849), 
 about which Jeffrey wrote that nothing so true or so touching, 
 as a picture of Scottish life, had appeared since Gait's Annals 
 of the Parish. Mrs Oliphant was always on safe ground when 
 she was dealing with her countrymen ; but she by no means con- 
 fined herself to them. Among her greatest successes were the 
 stories of the series known as the Chronicles of Carlitigford (1863- 
 1876), where she is bold enough to venture upon ground not 
 unlike that which George Eliot had made her own. She was 
 a very industrious writer, producing biographies (good ones), 
 histories of literature, volumes of miscellaneous essays, and
 
 750 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 accounts of the " makers " of various cities, with a fertility which 
 was astonishing ; and yet, her friends say, it was difficult to discover 
 when she worked. She seemed to have time for everything, but 
 somehow the tale of bricks was finished. Unquestionably the 
 quality of Mrs Oliphant's work suffered. Much of it — both in 
 fiction and in miscellaneous prose — is extremely flimsy; and if 
 her gifts were really great, we must set it down to over-production 
 that she has written nothing that is likely to live. The criticism 
 made against her over and over again, and with justice, is that 
 her writings are all of a high mediocre level ; and the conclusion 
 was drawn that this was just the level of her mind. It may be so: 
 there is not enough evidence to enable anyone to controvert the 
 opinion : but there are here and there passages of a lofty tone 
 which, at any rate, suggest a doubt. The following is not from a 
 work of fiction, but is a very fine piece of criticism on a fellow- 
 craftsman, which may not be widely known, because probably the 
 Historical Sketches of the Reign of George II are already little 
 read : — 
 
 "Clarissa herself is such a type of character as could have 
 been set forth only by a man habituated to the society of women, 
 and to look upon things very much from their point of view. She 
 is a delicate creature, whose heart has but begun faintly to awaken 
 to any conception of love or individual inclinations at all, when 
 she is suddenly frozen back into herself, into the chill unopened 
 bud of her life, by such a horror as is sufficient to congeal the 
 young blood in its very fountain. Her soft insensibility to any 
 contagion of passion — the shrinking, faint, easily relinquished 
 preference which is all she is ever made to feel for her destroyer — 
 is sometimes brought as an accusation against the perfection of 
 her womanhood. But the critics who do so have not taken the 
 trouble to think that it was a woman in the bud whom Richardson 
 intended to draw — a creature forced into extraordinary develop- 
 ment, it is true, but warped by the very influences which urged 
 her life into pathetic blossom, out of that warm and tender sweet- 
 ness which comes by the natural agency of bright sunshine and 
 common rain. Her heart had begun, as we have said, softly, 
 unawares, to turn towards the man who pretended to love her,
 
 THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 751 
 
 with that shy, sweet, gradual impulsion which is one of the most 
 beautiful things in nature. Her eyes and her heart were being 
 drawn to him modestly and maidenly, in a tenderness half ac- 
 knowledged, half denied, even to herself; when Fate seized upon 
 the innocent creature, wrapt her in its fatal web, arrested in the first 
 place the rising fancy, chilled and withered it by doubts and fears; 
 and then, by a sudden violent revulsion, closed up the opening 
 bud, with all its fairy colours, and forced forward the pale splendour 
 of despair, chill maiden flower, stealing every hue of colour and 
 perfume of life out of its exquisite climax of sorrow and decay. 
 No man less acquainted with all the secret unseen sweetness of a 
 girl's heart — its brooding over itself, its soft reluctance, its delight 
 in the hesitations and tender delays which irritate passion into frenzy 
 — could have drawn the early Clarissa, so passionless and dutiful, 
 exacting nothing but the right to reject a repugnant suitor, and 
 ready to make a sacrifice of the soft beginnings of liking in her 
 heart, if her parents would have but accepted that pure yet painful 
 offering. Then, when this morning light fades— when the helpless 
 creature is caught into the vortex which is to swallow her up — the 
 reader can see the chill that comes upon the opening flower, can 
 see the soft virginal husks closing up over the arrested bud ; and 
 then the drooping and the fading, and sudden bursting forth by its 
 side of the other development, which is so different, so consistent 
 and inconsistent with the first promise of the outraged life. 
 
 " This conception stands by itself amid all the conceptions of 
 genius. No Greek, no Italian, no English poet has painted such 
 a figure in the great picture-gallery which is common to the world. 
 Neither ancient nor modern woman has ever stood before us thus, 
 pale and splendid in the shame which is not hers, sweet soul, 
 though it kills her. Almost every other victim shrinks and burns 
 with the stain of her own fault; and even Lucretia herself, if more 
 awful, is less womanly, less tender, less sweet, than the maiden 
 creature in whom nature and religion reassert their rights after the 
 first moment of frenzy; who calls for no vengeance, and can accept 
 no expiation, and dies smiling, of no external wound, but only by 
 the deadly puncture oi the shame itsell, making all other daggers 
 unnecessary."
 
 752 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 It is at least possible that the writer of such a passage as this 
 had in her the power which, under favourable circumstances, 
 would have produced a really great book. If so, we can but 
 lament the necessity which condemned her to write so rapidly 
 that she always fell short of high achievement, while we admire 
 the courage which obeyed the call of duty without murmuring, 
 and sacrificed fame to the higher claims of motherhood. 
 
 The later female writers of fiction have been innumerable, but 
 it would be tedious and would serve no good purpose to name 
 them. Some of them have been acclaimed as writers of genius. 
 But if the excessive output of fiction be an evil it carries its own 
 cure. The fame of the writers of this year is as effectually buried 
 by that of the next as one shower of autumn leaves is by another.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE LATER FICTION 
 
 The fictitious literature of the latter half of the nineteenth 
 century has been so unmanageably voluminous and so diversified 
 in character that probably no other subject in literature is less 
 susceptible of satisfactory treatment. Still, if the eye be fixed 
 steadily upon a few of the leaders only, and the great mass of 
 purveyors of that purely ephemeral stuff which is not literature at 
 all be rigidly excluded, certain general tendencies may be detected. 
 They have been in part already revealed in the chapter on 
 women novelists, the greatest of whom were all of date subsequent 
 to Dickens and Thackeray. The line of the historical novel 
 continues unbroken; but it undergoes another change, reverting 
 once again to something more closely akin to the Waverley 
 Novels than is Esmond or The Tale of Two Cities. Dickens and 
 Thackeray, as we have seen, were not attracted by the Middle 
 Ages; but The Cloister and the Hearth and Hereward diud Romola 
 prove the interest of their writers in the more distant past. Still 
 more significant were the extraordinary judgments passed upon 
 The Heir of Redclyffe, to which reference was made in the last 
 chapter. Yet the use which Reade and Kingsley and George 
 Eliot made of history was not exactly that which Scott made of 
 it. There is less romance and there is a more laborious realism 
 in these novels than in Scott's; but whether there is more that 
 is artistically valuable is not quite so certain. To Scott, all 
 history is picturesque; life is full of incidents and adventure, 
 
 W. 4S
 
 754 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 whether the scene be laid in the time of Richard I, or in that of 
 George II, in England, or in Scotland, or in France; and accuracy 
 of detail is superlatively unimportant, because he never takes 
 himself very seriously as an author. He piqued himself more, as 
 he phrased it, on his compositions for manure than on any other 
 compositions to which he was ever accessary. 
 
 But the turn of the century was a very strenuous and serious 
 period ; and south as well as north of the Tweed men joked with 
 difficulty. Even Ireland ceased to produce wits and humourists ; 
 and, as all who know the country agree, the gaiety of the nation 
 was permanently eclipsed by the great famine. The spirit of the 
 age demanded of the novelists that they should be learned, pro- 
 found, thoughtful, philosophic, teachers and guides of the people. 
 This mood of mind produced its effect : the historical novelist 
 had at least to appear high-built in his learning. He might study 
 a library of books, as Charles Reade did for The Cloister and the 
 Hearth ; or he might follow the example of George Eliot, who not 
 only read widely, but even spent six weeks at Florence in order to 
 learn what manner of men and women dwelt there. The reader's 
 gravity may be in some danger when he is asked to sympathise 
 with her disappointment on finding that, even after all this care, 
 she was not quite at home with them. Owing to the prevalence 
 of this spirit, Hypatia is crammed with the Alexandrian philosophy, 
 Romola is full of the attempt at religious reform associated with the 
 name of Savonarola, and even Reade, lover of the drama and of 
 action as he was, feels it his duty to lay bare before the reader the 
 springs of the Protestant Reformation and of humanism. Later 
 still, this phase in turn passes away, and in such works as 
 R. L. Stevenson's Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae and 
 Weir of Hermision, there is a reversion to sometliing more in the 
 spirit of Scott. 
 
 After Scott we see even in the historical novel traces of the 
 tendency to realism. But the taste for realism was more easily 
 gratified by fiction of a different sort; and accordingly, though 
 the historical novel survived, the works of this type bore a 
 diminishing proportion to the whole. The most learned and 
 the most laborious of writers could never reconstruct a past age ;
 
 THE LATER FICTION 755 
 
 the most unsparing toil and the widest reading could not teach 
 him as much about the past as he could learn concerning his 
 own day by simply looking around him. The novel of con- 
 temporary life is the natural outcome of the spirit of realism. 
 Realism led to its revival, and the discovery of its immense scope 
 and the possibilities it opened for variety of treatment tended to 
 increase its vogue. Example conduced towards the same result. 
 Just as the earlier writers followed Scott, so their successors 
 followed Thackeray, and copied the realistic parts of Dickens. 
 
 The varieties of the novel of contemporary life are almost end- 
 less ; and the realism which nearly always characterises it more or 
 less may be coloured by sentiment, as mjohn Halifax, Gentleman \ 
 or almost overlaid by romance, as in The Heir of Redely ffe ; or it 
 may be veiled by sarcasm, as in the works of Laurence Oliphant ; 
 or the experience may be so oulr/, like that recorded in the 
 writings of George Borrow, as to be hardly recognisable as a phase 
 of modern life ; or it may be psychological, as in Middlemau/i ; 
 in which case the question of time is of quite secondary im- 
 portance. There is however one variety, the novel of purpose, so 
 important and so comprehensive that it requires special mention. 
 It specially suited the serious taste of the time. Disraeli, as we 
 have seen, had already set the example of the political novel; and 
 Dickens was one of the pioneers of the sub-variety whose purpose 
 was to effect some social reform. He had so many followers that 
 perhaps it may be well to generalise somewhat the remarks upon 
 the subject which have already been made with special reference 
 to him. 
 
 The novel of purpose is, of course, anathema to the champions 
 of " art for art's sake " ; but though a purpose may so dominate a 
 writer as to mar his art, there is no inherent reason why such 
 novels should be inartistic. Something depends upon the purpose, 
 and more upon the use to which it is put. What is said to be one 
 of the most skilful pictures ever painted is Rembrandt's Butcher's 
 Shop. Here the purpose can be little higher than the artist's 
 desire to show his dexterity ; and the manner of fulfilling it is an 
 outrage upon art, since it produces a horror instead of an object 
 of beauty. But it by no means follows that all purpose is bad, or 
 
 4«— 2
 
 I'iif^ THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 that all means of fulfilling purpose are objectionable. On the con- 
 trary, a vein of purpose runs through nearly all high literature. 
 Plato was convinced that it ought to do so if it did not, and his 
 whole treatment of poetry is ruled by the conviction that art is 
 essentially educative, and that that which does not teach good 
 must of necessity teach evil. The Divine Comedy is full of 
 purpose; and Milton proclaims in plain words his resolve to 
 "justify the ways of God to men." There is some truth in the 
 argument that the errors of these great men creep in through the 
 gate of purpose ; but how much of their highest merit finds 
 entrance in the same way ! In any case, he who so errs, errs in 
 the best of company. 
 
 In dramatic art however, and in all forms of art in which 
 human character is the medium, the use of purpose must clearly 
 be subject to the condition that it does not interfere with the play 
 of character. For that reason it must be subordinate : the 
 purpose must harmonise with the character, not the character with 
 the purpose. It is because he strictly adheres to this condition 
 that Shakespeare is often put in sharp antithesis to the practi- 
 tioners of the novel or the drama of purpose. He is absolutely 
 impartial, he is content to let his characters speak and act, and 
 pronounces no judgment upon them. Yet it would be a mistake 
 to suppose that there is no lesson in them, or that the lesson is 
 made wholly by the reader, and not by the writer. "The gods are 
 just, and of our pleasant vices make whips to scourge us," is the 
 comment of Edgar, not of Shakespeare ; yet the lesson is in the 
 play, and the words have a meaning even to those who do not 
 believe in the gods. Macbeth is far more than a warning against 
 the dangers of " vaulting ambition " ; but it is that among other 
 things. 
 
 The novel is a much looser form of art than the drama. 
 Narrative may eke out the gaps of action, and the author may 
 interpose his own comments to an extent which is undefined, and 
 perhaps indefinable. Nevertheless, the same principle prevails; 
 and wherever character is delineated, purpose, to be legitimate, 
 must be the expression of the character, not something tacked on by 
 the author. But because such artistic detachment as Shakespeare's
 
 THE LATER FICTION 757 
 
 is exceedingly rare, it is here that authors frequently fall into 
 error, and by their errors bring discredit on the novel of purpose. 
 Purpose is partly responsible for the exaggeration which charac- 
 terises Dickens. Questions between capital and labour, the 
 evils of the workshop and the factory, the sins of trade unions 
 and the horrors of intemperance, when they become the motive 
 of novels, are apt to beget characters which are rather the 
 incarnation of intemperance, or the bad master and the unruly 
 workman personified, than simple human beings. And so far 
 the objection to the novel of purpose is fully justified. 
 
 The novel whose raison d'etre lies in its plot is another form 
 characteristic of this period and not very common before it. For 
 the most part, English novels are loosely constructed; and English 
 writers do not, as a class, excel in the elaboration of plots. From 
 Richardson to Thackeray the masters are all painters of manners 
 and character rather than weavers of complicated stories. Never- 
 theless, the charm of a mystery skilfully unravelled is always 
 powerful; and while Dickens is never so delightful as in the 
 plotless Pickwick, the much-debated plot of Edwin Drood 
 indicates how greatly he had been influenced by the growing taste 
 for mystery. This charm of mystery is the secret of the popularity 
 enjoyed by the detective story ; and the examples of Poe and of 
 Sherlock Holmes are sufficient to show how wide that popularity 
 may be. But while short stories of this sort have long been 
 common, novels resting upon the same principle are, if we exclude 
 the supernatural, of comparatively recent development. Complete 
 mastery in this art of carpentry, as R. L. Stevenson called it, was 
 only attained by Wilkie Collins ; but, in the period under review, 
 many others either followed the example of Collins, or worked 
 independently under the influence of the same motives ; and so 
 the sensation novel arose. Probably no kind of imaginative work 
 is easier up to a certain level; but the rarity of unqualified success 
 in it proves that to attain excellence is very difficult indeed. 
 
 Among the men who illustrate the later developments of fiction 
 Charles Reade (1814— 1S84) for power and genius is rivalled only 
 by George Meredith and R. L. Stevenson. Most of the phases 
 just indicated are more or less adequately represented in Reade's
 
 7S8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 works. He is the author of the greatest historical novel since 
 Esmond, of one of the most remarkable psychological studies, and 
 of numerous novels of purpose. Though he was never a wealthy 
 man, Reade, the son of an Oxfordshire squire, and a demy, fellow 
 and, ultimately, Vice-President of Magdalen College, was by cir- 
 cumstances exempted from the need to struggle for a living ; and 
 this is probably one reason why he began his literary career so 
 late. He had besides a high standard, and, above all, a most 
 laborious method. His passion for documents cost him dear in 
 time. As early as 1835 he began to make notes with a view to 
 writing fiction; but it was not till 1853, when he was thirty-nine 
 years of age, that he published his first novel. The delay had 
 been rendered all the longer because his ambition drew him 
 towards the drama rather than the novel ; and he had written, he 
 says, about thirteen dramas which nobody would play, before he 
 consented to write the novels which thousands were eager to read. 
 This preference for the drama lasted till the end. He held that 
 only genius could produce a play that would play, whereas 
 intelligence, combined with some artistic gift, might suffice for a 
 novel ; and he left instructions that on his tombstone he should 
 be described as "dramatist, novelist, journalist," giving the first 
 place to the art in which he was ambitious to achieve fame, rather 
 than to that in which he won it. 
 
 "Why don't you write novels?" was the penetrating question 
 of Mrs Seymour the actress, after the author had read to her a 
 scene from one of those dramas which nobody would play. Her 
 practical knowledge showed her that Reade had not mastered the 
 requirements of the stage; and her judgment is confirmed by the 
 fact that in his dramatic writings he was always apt to get into 
 difficulties unless he worked in collaboration with somebody who 
 possessed the practical knack, as well as by the fact that his work 
 always rose in quality under the freer conditions of the novel. 
 Reade's chief dramatic successes were won in collaboration, first 
 with Tom Taylor and afterwards with Dion Boucicault. Taylor 
 and he first collaborated in A Ladies' Battle, a play adapted from 
 the French ; and the excellent Masks and Faces, produced in 
 1852, was also their joint work. In its latest form, as revived by
 
 THE LATER FICTION 759 
 
 Mrs Bancroft, this play, according to Reade, contains not a single 
 line by Taylor; but the dedication of Feg M'qfflnglon, which is 
 just the play in the shape of a novel, proves out of Reade's own 
 mouth that, originally, it was a joint production. The credit of it 
 must therefore be divided. 
 
 Reade was a difificult person to collaborate with; for he was at 
 once acutely sensitive on the question of his own rights, and 
 strangely obtuse with regard to those of others. The story of his 
 numerous lawsuits shows that he was combative and masterful. 
 In answer to the charge of impatience he compared himself to 
 his "predecessor in impatience, Job"; but the impartial bystander 
 could detect a considerable difference. When, without a word to 
 his fellow-worker, he threw Masks and Faces into the form of a 
 novel, he certainly gave Taylor good ground for complaint. Years 
 afterwards he dramatised Trollope's Ralph the Heir at a time 
 when the author was inaccessible, in Australia; and he was 
 chagrined with Trollope's " ingratitude " when the latter failed to 
 appreciate the dramatist's intention to pay him half-profits — which 
 were not earned. Reade was incapable of doing what he saw to 
 be a dishonest act; but his notions of literary property were at 
 least peculiar. 
 
 Other dramas by Reade which seem worthy of mention are 
 Gold, Sera Nunquam and Drink. The first, which ran with 
 success at Drury Lane in 1853, is sufficiently described by its 
 title and by the statement that it was afterwards used as one of 
 the threads woven into It is Never too Late to Mend (1856). It 
 was wholly Reade's work, and we need but compare it with the 
 novel to be convinced wherein the author's power consists. He 
 himself however was not easy to convince. He attributed his ill- 
 success in the drama to a clique of writers who stole from the 
 French, and of critics who lauded them and refused to countenance 
 anybody else. Reade was not wholly without justification; at 
 least his work was superior to much that was far better received. 
 But in the main the fault lay with himself; and his friends 
 Dion Boucicault and Mrs Seymour were as clearly conscious of his 
 deficiencies as were those whom he rightly or wrongly considered 
 enemies.
 
 760 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 For three years after the production of Gold Reade was busy 
 with dramatic work, collaborating with Taylor or adapting from 
 the French. But the logic of events convinced him, or else he 
 had to yield unconvinced. After // is Never too Late to Mend 
 his next venture on the stage was the dramatised version of that 
 novel, which won a great success when at last it was brought out 
 in 1865, and which has retained its reputation. Finally, in 1879, 
 Drink, dramatised from Zola's B Assommoir, appeared, and 
 brought both gold and glory to the author. 
 
 Meanwhile, against his own will, Reade's literary life had 
 been developing on different lines. Peg Woffington (1853) was 
 followed in the same year by Christie Jo/uistone, the materials for 
 which he had accumulated during repeated visits to Scotland 
 between 1837 and 1847. His determined realism is well illus- 
 trated by the history of this novel. " I propose never to guess 
 where I can know," he says at the opening of his career ; and at 
 whatever cost of trouble or pain to himself he acted on the 
 principle. Christie Johnstone is a story of the fisher-folk of the 
 east of Scotland. Most men, especially if they were, like Reade, 
 severe sufferers from sea-sickness, would probably have been con- 
 tent to study them ashore; but Reade, on the contrary, repeatedly 
 accompanied the fishing fleet. Again, he hated the sight of 
 blood, and relinquished the idea of following the medical pro- 
 fession on seeing the simple operation of phlebotomy; yet he 
 lamented his ill-luck in just missing the spectacle of a fatal acci- 
 dent, because he was convinced that no description could ever 
 give the vividness of the direct impression. His rule was, if 
 possible to see and know himself that which he described, or, if 
 he could not, to converse with those who had personal know- 
 ledge ; failing both, he had perforce to be content with reading. 
 His picture of gaol life in It is Never too Late to Mend was drawn 
 from personal inspection and study of several gaols, among others 
 that very Reading gaol which, in Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading 
 Gaol, has given to literature a picture still more luridly impressive 
 than Reade's. His favourite maxim was the saying that truth is 
 stranger than faction ; and his immense compilations of cuttings 
 from newspapers served him at once as illustrations of this saying,
 
 THE LATER FICTION 761 
 
 and as materials for his novels. One result is that it is extremely 
 dangerous to challenge Reade on the score of exaggeration or 
 improbability; for the events and situations which appear most 
 improbable usually rest on documents. 
 
 Whether the compilations Reade made were worth the time 
 they cost him may be questioned ; whether he would not often 
 have done better to cut himself adrift from fact and trust to 
 imagination may also be questioned. He never knew the profound 
 truth of R. L. Stevenson's aphorism, " the actual is not the true^" 
 However much some of the incidents of the novels may be based 
 on fact, they " affect us as a lie " where they stand. On the 
 other hand, the method gives solidity and weight ; and the novels 
 produced by it, when it is worked by a man of genius, wear well. 
 Actual knowledge imparted by long study of the theatre gave 
 charm to Peg Woffington ; and it was the fact that Reade knew 
 and liked the Scottish fisher-folk which at once won the hearts of 
 readers of Christie Johnstone. 
 
 Both these stories were on a smaller scale than the orthodox 
 novel, and Reade naturally felt the ambition to try a novel in 
 three volumes. Moreover, Peg Woffington and Christie Johnstone 
 were alike innocent of purpose, and he was predestined to write - 
 novels of purpose. He had always some wrong to right, or some 
 right to vindicate ; or, if none of his own served for the moment, 
 he took up someone else's cause. This predilection had much 
 to do with the sliaping of Reade's subsequent novels. Thus, // 
 is Never too Late to Mend has for its principal object the reform 
 of prison discipline, Hard Cash (1863) is an exposure of the abuses 
 connected with lunatic asylums, and Put Yourself in his Place 
 (1870) deals with rattening and the abuses of trade unions. For 
 this reason these novels have been underrated by those who 
 
 ^ "Tibbie Bir?e in the Burial is great, but I think it was a journalist that 
 got in the word ' official.' The same character plainly had a word to say to 
 Thomas Haggard. Thomas affects me as a lie — I beg your pardon ; doubt- 
 less he was somebody you knew, that leads people so far astray. The actual 
 is not the true." (Letter to Mr J. M. Barrie — Letters, ed. Colvin, ii. 277.) 
 Stevenson's meaning — that what is true in fact is not necessarily true in art — 
 may be illustrated from Reade himself. In The Cloister and the Hearth 
 he ascribes precisely that principle to Margaret Van Eyck.
 
 ^62 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 object to "purpose" in art, and the earlier stories have been 
 preferred, or Griffith Gaunt (1866), a psychological study, or 
 The Cloister and the Hearth (1861). 
 
 It cannot be said that Reade escapes the pitfall of the purpose- 
 novel. So far as documentary proof goes, he is safe. He was 
 attacked on the ground of his picture of lunatic asylums in Hard 
 Cash, and triumphantly vindicated himself. He had chapter and 
 verse to cite for all the excesses of the trade unions depicted by 
 him. It was felt, both in the novel and still more in the original 
 dramatised version of // is Never too Late to Me?id, that the prison 
 scenes were too horrible : Reade was able to assure a correspondent 
 that, though he had invented many things, he had not invented a 
 single horror. And yet he was wrong : he had lost the sense of 
 proportion : in his too eager pursuit of purpose he had been blind 
 to the fact that "the actual is not the true." The evil shows 
 itself also in the treatment of character. Reade ceases to be 
 impartial, and becomes what the great artist is not, an advocate 
 and a partisan. He sinks below his own level. Hard Cash and 
 Fut Yourself in his Place are good and interesting stories ; but 
 they contain no character comparable to Peg Woffington or to 
 Christie Johnstone. Eden in It is Never too Late to Mend is 
 less interesting for his personality than for his theories : he is less 
 Eden the man than Eden the prison-reformer. Nevertheless, 
 if Reade erred, he erred grandly. All the three novels which 
 have been cited are the work of a powerful intellect, and // is 
 Never too Late to Afend stands very near the head of its type. 
 The story is intensely interesting ; the resources of a strong and 
 richly-stored mind are lavishly spent upon it ; and the reader 
 has himself to blame if he does not rise from the perusal of it 
 a better man. The characters too are well drawn. Notwith- 
 standing the defect already pointed out, Eden is a veritable 
 man ; and Reade has created few female characters superior to 
 Susan Morton. 
 
 The brilliant success of // is Never too Late to Mend made 
 Reade a novelist. From the maturity of his mind attd the wealth 
 of his accumulated material when at last success came, it might 
 have been expected that he would write copiously and fast. But
 
 THE LATER FICTION 763 
 
 his method was exhausting, and the lawsuits which he deemed neces- 
 sary to enforce his rights were exhausting too ; and so the books 
 which remain to notice are not numerous. Two of them, Griffith 
 Gaunt and A Terrible Temptation (187 1), dissimilar as they are 
 in value 'and in spirit^ are bound together by the fact that each of 
 them was the occasion of an attack upon Reade on moral grounds. 
 In the case of A Terrible Temptation the attack was not unreason- 
 able ; for it was, to say the least of it, an unwise production : 
 there is nothing in it which justifies the violence it did to popular 
 feeling. Griffith Gautit however is a work of a very different 
 sort. An analysis of the passion of jealousy, it contains matter 
 which was bound to be displeasing to a Puritanism not untainted 
 with hypocrisy. But no intelligent and dispassionate reader will 
 deny that the artist was here quite within the limits of his right. 
 So long as Othello is tolerated in the theatre, Griffith Gaunt, 
 vastly inferior though it is, has a right to a place among novels. 
 Notwithstanding the grave flaw pointed out by Swinburne — the 
 fact that the deception upon which the story turns is due to 
 envy, not to jealousy, — there is probably in English prose no 
 more profound analysis of the latter passion. 
 
 There is however only one work of Reade's so good that, if B 
 it does not raise him to the level of the greatest masters, the sole 
 reason is that it stands alone. The difference between novel and 
 romance may be illustrated by a comparison between the Waverley 
 Novels and The Cloister and the Hearth. Scott rightly spoke of 
 his stories as romances ; but Reade's realism clung to him in the 
 treatment of history, as well as in his tales of contemporary life. 
 It is apparent in his handling of authorities ; and, considering his 
 previous habit of mind, the success he achieved with them is 
 marvellous. Far from being, like Scott, attracted in boyhood by 
 instinct to the Middle Ages, Reade had hitherto been rather 
 markedly indifferent to and ignorant of them. He was a stranger 
 to that ecclesiastical feeling which drew so many towards them in 
 the wake of Newman. And yet the picture of the fifteenth 
 century in Holland, Germany and Italy, as it is painted in The 
 Cloister and the Hearth, rivets attention, lingers in the memory 
 and commands belief. The effect is altogether different from
 
 764 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 that produced by the Waverley Novels. Scott's tournaments and 
 fights read as if they were reported by an eye-witness; while in 
 The Cloister afid the Hearth it is evident that the scenes are com- 
 piled from documents. The reader can guess whence the medical 
 lore of Peter the father of Margaret is derived, and he feels assured 
 that Reade could quote volume and page for the inn at which his 
 travellers rest. He has not attained that highest art which con- 
 ceals art. Nevertheless, TJie Cloister and the Hearth is a mag- 
 nificent success, ranking not far below the very greatest of English 
 historical novels. Romola is heavy and dull in comparison. In 
 his own generation only Esmond, and in the generation before 
 only the best of the VVaverleys deserve to rank above Reade's 
 masterpiece. The Cloister and the Hearth is great because of its 
 broad and deep humanity and its splendid subject. It is, as the 
 title suggests, a story of the strife between two of the most potent 
 elements of humanity, religion on the one hand, and the family 
 affections on the other ; and the characters of the husband-monk 
 Gerard and his beautiful wife Margaret Brandt are creations which 
 enrich art. It is great, again, because of its immense scope and 
 variety. It traverses mediaeval Europe from the North Sea to the 
 Mediterranean, producing everywhere the same impression of reality 
 and truth ; for here at least the actual is the true. It introduces 
 an immense number of characters of different countries, races and 
 stations in life ; yet they all seem to be genuine men and women, 
 and, moreover, men and women of a time and of habits of thought 
 which are not ours. Elsewhere, there seems to be a certain 
 coarseness in the fibre of Reade's mind ; here, he is refined, 
 purified, elevated. This book, if anything, is Reade's passport to 
 <^ immortality. 
 
 That historical fiction was not at the time a very popular 
 species is shown by the warning Anthony Trollope received in the 
 vigorous words of the foreman of a publishing house to which he 
 offered The Three Clerks (1858): "I hope it's not historical, Mr 
 Trollope ? Whatever you do, don't be historical ; your historical 
 novel is not worth a damn\" Doubtless the foreman spoke the 
 
 ^ Trollope's Autobiography, i. 147-8.
 
 THE LATER FICTION 765 
 
 opinion of the trade, and doubtless the opinion of the trade was 
 based upon the taste of the public. Trollope, who was a shrewd 
 judge, and who had moreover already been warned by the 
 failure of his own historical novel, La Vendee (1850), had taken 
 the advice before it was given and turned towards new pastures. 
 But, notwithstanding the trade, there is evidence that, if only it is 
 well enough done, there is always a market for historical fiction ; 
 and Charles Kingsley, Richard Blackmore and R. L. Stevenson, 
 as well as Thackeray, George Eliot and Reade, proved by 
 their experience that there was fame as well as hard cash to be 
 gained from it. 
 
 Blackmore and Stevenson were both essentially novelists of 
 historical genius ; but Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), though he 
 was a professed historian, will probably rather be remembered for 
 works which may be classed as novels of purpose and for a few 
 beautiful ballads, and some snatches of lyric verse, than either 
 for his lectures as professor of history at Cambridge, or for his 
 historical novels. Kingsley is an interesting figure, because his 
 energy and his combative instincts brought him to the front in 
 two of the great controversies of the time. He was a Christian 
 Socialist; and, though less gifted intellectually than his friend 
 Maurice, he was far more efficient than Maurice as an exponent 
 of the cause which both had at heart. He was also intensely 
 interested in the progress of Tractarianism. This interest is 
 a factor both in Yeast ii^^Z) and in Alton Locke (1850); and his 
 earhest important poetical work. The Saifit's Tragedy (1848), 
 which some hold to be his greatest production, may not unfairly 
 be described as a Protestant pamphlet in verse. Kingsley tells 
 the story of St Elizabeth of Hungary in order to inculcate the evil 
 of asceticism, with its condemnation of family life and that un- 
 natural renunciation of the world in which saintship was supposed 
 to consist, and to show how life was made miserable to Elizabeth 
 by means of the affections and impulses which ought to have made 
 it happy ; while from time to time she is startled by a suspicion 
 that, after all, her sacrifices and abnegations are but another form 
 of selfishness ; her service to the poor, a way of using them as 
 steps to her own paradise. Kingsley's own voice is unquestionably
 
 ^66 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 to be heard in the vigorous passage addressed by Count Walter of 
 Varila to the fanatical monk, Conrad : — " I tell you, monk, if she 
 were not healthier by God's making than ever she will be by yours, 
 her charity would be by this time double-distilled selfishness; 
 the mouths she fed, cupboards to store good works in ; the backs 
 she warmed, clothes-horses to hang out her wares before God; 
 her alms not given, but fairly paid, a half-penny for every 
 half-pennyworth of eternal life; earth her chess-board, and the 
 men and women on it, merely pawns for her to play a winning 
 game— puppets and horn-books to teach her unit holiness — a 
 private workshop in which to work out her own salvation \" 
 
 This protest, supposed to be uttered in the thirteenth century, 
 was not unnecessary even in the nineteenth, and Kingsley did 
 good service by his fight against the obscurantist and anti-natural 
 tendencies of the Tractariuns ; but it was nearly all undone by 
 his disastrous personal controversy with Newman, which left him 
 a very bruised and battered champion of Protestantism. Many 
 besides Kingsley have felt that there was sophistry in the thought 
 and sophistry in the method of Newman; but in detail, at 
 least, the assailant was wholly wrong. Perhaps nothing else 
 so clearly reveals Kingsley's limitations and so forcibly illustrates 
 his faults. There was a certain coarseness in his mind as there 
 was ungainliness in his body; and in controversy his weapon was 
 the bludgeon. He said the wrong thing, he made charges which 
 could not be substantiated, and when challenged, he attempted 
 to defend that which was indefensible. If Kingsley had taken 
 up the right position at first, the quotations which he makes in 
 IV/iat, i/ien, does Dr Newman mean? would have been most 
 damaging ; but, as it was, Newman easily turned his flank. No 
 other instance probably can be found of a game in which one 
 player held all the trumps, and another took all the tricks. Had 
 Huxley been Newman's opponent the breaking of lances would 
 have been a joy to witness. But Huxley would never have made 
 Kingsley's initial mistake; and, but for that mistake Newman 
 would never have taken up the glove. He had no desire for con- 
 troversy : his purpose was to vindicate his own honour. 
 
 * Act IV. sc. ii.
 
 THE LATER FICTION 767 
 
 Kingsley's novels are, for the most part, either historical 
 romances or novels of purpose. To the latter class belong Yeas^ 
 and A//on Locke, of which the former depicts the condition of the 
 agricultural labourer, and the latter that of his brother workman 
 in the town. Both are full of fiery indignation against wrong and 
 oppression, and both are, at the same time, somewhat crude and 
 immature productions, admirable in spirit, but faulty in execution. 
 Kingsley was moved to write on these subjects by the disturbed 
 and dangerous state of the country owing to the revolutionary 
 spirit pervading Europe and the misery of the working population. 
 The Rector of Eversley was no poltroon; but in 1850 he "slept 
 with loaded pistols by his bedside, and policemen from Winchester 
 watched in and about the quiet garden by night^" He naturally 
 felt that a society so sick must need a physician ; and his con- 
 sciousness of power combined with his profession as a clergyman and 
 with his association with men like Maurice to suggest to him that he 
 might play the part of the healer. What he most earnestly sought 
 to enforce was that, if the condition of the working class was to 
 be permanently improved, it could only be by the nobler spirits of 
 that class co-operating with those of a higher class to raise their 
 fellows. Hence he taught, rather too absolutely, that the working 
 man who made it his ambition to become something else than a 
 working man was a traitor to his class. A rigid application of 
 such a rule as this would result in a system of caste. If the work- 
 ing man must always remain a working man, is the working man's 
 son justified in seeking another career? And if not, was Carlyle 
 a sinner because, being born the son of a stone-mason, he became 
 a writer of books? Or St Paul, because he sank his trade of 
 tent-making in Kingsley's own trade oi preaching? Notwith- 
 standing errors, however, and though at best they are chaotic, 
 Kingsley's novels or social reform are sound at heart and full of 
 life and energy. 
 
 Kingsley's method is noticeably different from that of Reade. 
 The latter fastens with a tenacious grip upon some particular 
 abuse, and tries with all his energy to secure its reform; but 
 
 * Mrs Kingsley's Charles Kingsley, i. 24a.
 
 768 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Kingsley had fallen under the influence of Carlyle, and though 
 afterwards, in the belief that some of the latter's pungent utter- 
 ances were directed against himself, he avoided the sage, we see 
 in his work traces of the influence of the author of Chartistn and 
 Past and Present. To Kingsley, it is not one particular abuse 
 that is to be swept away, but a whole social system which is wrong 
 and which must be set right. That is the view of Christian 
 Socialism, of which Yeast and Alton Locke are among the most 
 effective expositions. 
 
 The three principal novels in the historical class are Hypatia 
 (1853), Westivard Ho! (1855) and Hereivard the Wake (1866). 
 The second is usually regarded as Kingsley's masterpiece, and 
 those who have fallen under its spell are enthusiastic in its praise. 
 But there is a noticeable peculiarity about criticisms of Kingsley, 
 that, in a large proportion of cases, the book the critic likes best 
 is that which he happens to have read first. The explanation 
 probably is that Kingsley does not wear well ; he is a writer for 
 boys rather than for mature men. Kingsley's style is often 
 admirable for vigour and verve, his descriptions are vivid, his 
 action energetic; but it is the parts we admire rather than the 
 whole, and in time we weary of his very muscular Christianity. 
 Nothing he has written is comparable to Reade's masterpiece. In 
 Westivard Ho ! and in Hereward we get by fits the spirit of the 
 Elizabethan adventurers and of the sons of the Vikings, but we 
 are not carried back into their life. 
 
 What Kingsley does best of all is the description of scenes of 
 nature. Here, within the limits of his own experience, he is 
 excellent. He was energetic physically as well as mentally, and 
 he found an outlet for his energies in long tramps, which he loved 
 all the better if he had to battle against keen high winds. He 
 sang the praise of the " wild North-easter," and he died from its 
 effects. As an ardent and skilful fisherman he was led still more 
 into the open air and the solitudes of nature. All these tastes 
 and habits have left their mark upon his work. The scenery he 
 had lived among sank into his nature ; and it is for this reason 
 that Hereward gives such a vivid impression of the fen-country 
 and Westward Ho 1 of the sea. So too love of nature is the very
 
 THE LATER FICTION 769 
 
 soul and essence of that most beautiful fairy-tale, The Water- 
 Babies (1863), which, as a piece of pure literature, is unsurpassed 
 by anything Kingsley ever wrote. 
 
 Henry Kingsley (1830-1876), the author of The Recollections 
 of Geoffrey Hamlyn (1859), of Ravenshoe (1862), and of several 
 other works of fiction, may be briefly mentioned beside his elder 
 and greater brother. He crowded a good deal of adventure, as 
 well as a considerable number of books, into his short life. 
 Geoffrey Hamlyn is largely autobiographical, following in the main 
 the author's experiences in Australia ; and this partly explains its 
 rambling and disjointed character ; for life is not constructed like 
 a work of art. But such an excuse cannot be pleaded for 
 Ravenshoe, where we meet with the same vice of incoherence, 
 thouefh in a modified form. There is much in it which neither 
 throws light upon the characters nor furthers the progress of the 
 narrative; and the asides are often tiresome, commonplace and 
 unnecessary. It was a time when the novelist gave himself con- 
 siderable latitude in lecturing the reader; but the sermons of 
 George Eliot or of Thackeray are very different from the frequently 
 platitudinous remarks of Henry Kingsley. It is clear that he 
 appeals with considerable force and effect to certain readers, for 
 there have been found critics to rank him even above Charles 
 Kingsley; but judgments of that sort are probably the effect of an 
 unconscious revolt against the inequality of fortune in the case of 
 the two brothers — the one petted and praised, conspicuous in the 
 Church and in the country ; the other ignored and neglected, and 
 thrust aside even by his own family. Such reactions are natural, 
 and sometimes they do good ; but it is generally the business of 
 criticism to guard against them, and it seems fairly safe to say 
 that while Charles Kingsley himself is not first-rate, Henry 
 Kingsley ranks in real merit, as he ranked in popular estimation, 
 far below his more fortunate brother. 
 
 With two or three exceptions, the other novelists of the third 
 quarter of the century deserve at most only a cursory mention. 
 Francis Smedley's Frank Fairleigh (1850) and Harry Coverdale's 
 Courtship (1854) are still familiar by name, and are sometimes 
 recommended by people in middle life to their juniors, but they 
 
 W. 49
 
 770 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 hardly repay perusal. Albert Smith (1816-1860) is probably best 
 known now by the traditions of his lectures on Mont Blanc ; but 
 in the middle of the century he was a familiar figure in London 
 literary society and a celebrated wit, and his Marchioness of 
 Brinvilliers (1846), a historical romance which is little more than 
 a catalogue of crimes, was a work of considerable repute. Now, 
 most of the flavour seems to have evaporated even from his more 
 characteristic writings, TJie Adventures of ATr Ledbury (1844), 
 The Scatfergood Family (1S45) and Christopher Tadpole (1848). 
 George Alfred Lawrence (1827-1876) won great popularity with 
 his society novel, Guy Livingstone (1857) ; but it is merely a poor 
 imitation of things which other writers were doing better. In the 
 main, Lawrence followed Bulwer Lytton ; but in his hero there is 
 also something of Charlotte Bronte's Rochester. Everything has to 
 be made to fit Guy Livingstone's physical development. . He sits 
 in a "vast" easy chair and drinks out of an "immense" wine- 
 glass, presumably blown specially for him. In a word, he has 
 Rochester's absurdities; but Lawrence shows no trace of the genius 
 which redeems the absurdities in the case of Charlotte Bronte. 
 Thomas Hughes (1823-1896), agnin, was practically a man of one 
 book, Tom Brown's School Days (1857); for neither the sequel 
 nor any of his other publications ever rose to the same level. 
 And that well-known book is hardly a novel ; nor is its popularity 
 due solely to literary merit. Hughes, in fact, was the most 
 successful exponent of the work of Arnold of Rugby — a greater 
 achievement than the writing of many second-rate novels. 
 
 George John Whyte-Melville (1821-1878) was a man of much 
 greater literary gift and of superior skill as a novelist. Besides his 
 novels, he wrote verse which, though it may not raise him to the 
 rank of the poets, is pleasant to read. By profession a soldier and 
 by position a country gentleman, Whyte-Melville shows most con- 
 spicuously in his books that side of his character and tastes which 
 is associated with his calling and rank. Such novels as Digby 
 Grand (1853), Kate Coventry (1856) and Holmby House (i860), 
 are plainly the work of a man with the tastes of the squire and 
 with ample opportunity to indulge them. He was especially fond 
 of country life, he met the accident which caused his death in the
 
 THE LATER FICTION 7/1 
 
 pursuit of his favourite sport, and his hunting scenes have given 
 him a place among the very few writers who have treated sport in 
 a literary manner ; a group in which the principal figures, during 
 the Victorian period, are William Scrope, Charles St John and 
 John Colquhoun, all of whom have written delightfully, but not 
 under the guise of fiction. Whyte-Melville however, besides 
 being a fox-hunting squire, was a man of fairly wide reading and 
 of scholarly habit ; and this led him to try the historical novel as 
 well as the hunting story. The Gladiators (1863), though a little 
 heavy, is on the whole an interesting delineation of Roman society 
 in the period of decline. 
 
 Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) likewise attempted historical 
 fiction, but fell considerably below the level of The Gladiatoi's. 
 His Antonina (1850), a story of Rome in the time of Honorius, is 
 dull and poor. His powers were of a different sort; and by 
 reason of his excellence in his own department he has more 
 prospect of remembrance than many who were intrinsically his 
 superiors. The man who does best any one thing cannot readily 
 be forgotten ; and Collins is the greatest master in English fiction 
 of the art of weaving an intricate plot. It is an art in which 
 French writers have excelled more frequently than English ones, 
 few of whom have anything comparable to the " plot " as Wilkie 
 Collins understood it. In The Woman, in White (i860), 
 Armadale (1S66) and The Moonstone (1868) we find a complicated 
 story, every part of which is skilfully dovetailed into the rest, 
 while the mystery is carefully sustained until the moment comes 
 for unfolding it. The practised novel-reader can, as a rule, make 
 a shrewd guess at the denouement after reading a few chapters ; but 
 it would take no ordinary skill to penetrate the mystery of The 
 Moonstone before the author chooses to lift the veil. This is the 
 essence of the sensation novel ; and in that department Wilkie 
 Collins stands high. He could not draw character, he painted no 
 pictures of life as we know it ; and those to whom these things 
 are indispensable will never be attracted by him. But there is a 
 large number of readers who read for the story alone, and these 
 find in Collins all they seek. Not a few hints have been taken 
 from him by more recent writers of detective stories and other 
 
 49—2
 
 772 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 tales whose object is to sustain interest by a carefully-veiled 
 mystery. 
 
 Notwithstanding all the skill of Wilkie Collins, it is a relief to 
 escape from the sphere of mechanism into that of humanity, as 
 we do in the case of Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), who, though 
 he never rises to the greatest heights, stands on a plane considerably 
 higher than that of the writers who have just been noticed. He 
 can always be relied upon, not indeed for genius or eloquence, 
 but for competent literary workmanship, for spirit, for shrewd 
 observation and for a thorough wholesomeness of mind. Though 
 he lived from boyhood in an atmosphere of letters and was 
 ultimately one of the most prolific of writers, Trollope did not 
 begin his literary career early. In his frank and pleasant, but 
 never intimate, and sometimes unwittingly amusing, Autobiography, 
 he tells us that he had long cherished the ambition to become a 
 novelist; but his powers were not highly esteemed in his own 
 family, and it was with resignation rather than pleasure that his 
 mother heard of his first venture. The Macdermots of Ballydoran 
 (1847). Mrs Trollope had acted upon the principle playfully 
 avowed by Sydney Smith, who declared that to read a book 
 before reviewing it prejudiced the mind. She had not read her 
 son's MS. when she augured ill of it ; but her view seemed to be 
 confirmed by public opinion, and Trollope had to struggle for 
 many years before he won success. " I regard the book with 
 affection," he wrote to Lord Houghton when sending him a 
 copy of The Warden, " as I made ^^9. 2s. 6d. by the first year's 
 sale, having previously written and published for ten years without 
 any such golden results." From 1857 to 1884, two years after his 
 death, not a single year passed without a publication bearing 
 TroUope's name. Often there were two, sometimes three, and 
 occasionally even four, in a single year. And this amazing pile of 
 books was the work of a man who all the while was conscientiously 
 discharging his duties as a servant of the Post Office, and who, 
 besides, was for many years one of the keenest and most assiduous 
 hunters of his district. The secret was partly that of Scott — early 
 rising; partly it was method. Trollope rigorously exacted from 
 himself his tale of bricks, for no one ever believed less in "inspira-
 
 THE LATER FICTION 773 
 
 tion." To him, the production of a novel was like the making of 
 a pair of shoes ; and he held the novelist to be no more justified 
 in pausing after he had finished one work until he should feel 
 impelled to begin another, than the shoemaker would be justified 
 in waiting after he had finished his pair of shoes until the spirit 
 should move him to begin a new pair. Consequently, the day 
 after he had finished one novel, TroUope usually started another. 
 There is something refreshing in this whole-hearted repudiation 
 of what often degenerates into the cant of the man of letters 
 who takes himself very seriously as artist. Further, Trollope is 
 probably right in his own opinion that what he wrote most rapidly 
 he wrote best. Scott thought so of his own work ; and both men 
 belong to the class who have more to lose than to gain by 
 deliberation and laboriousness. But it is by no means certain 
 that the system which was good for Trollope would be suitable for 
 all other imaginative workers ; nor is it true to say that the pro- 
 duction of works of art is governed by the same laws as the 
 production of shoes. Even the shoemaker needs his night's sleep 
 to rest his muscles, and works all the better if he has an occasional 
 holiday ; and it is at least possible that the brain may take some- 
 what longer to recover its tone than the muscles. We can 
 imagine a Coleridge endowed with a strong will and with tireless 
 energy, for we know that men still more highly imaginative than 
 he have been thus gifted ; but it is difficult to imagine a Coleridge, 
 however endowed, throwing off Ancietii Mariners at so many lines 
 per diem. Even Shakespeare could not have written a succession 
 of Hamlets. Trollope makes no allowance for the "wise passive- 
 ness " of which Wordsworth so well knew the value. That taint 
 of the commonplace, which is the vice of TroUope's work, would 
 probably prove to be inseparable from such a system as his, though 
 in his own case it was not so much due to the system as it was the 
 outcome of his mind. He measured literature by the word, as a 
 draper measures cloth by the yard, and dwelt far too much on 
 mere quantity. Wolfe would rather have written Gray's Elegy than 
 have taken Quebec ; Tennyson would have given all his poetry to 
 make one song like Lovelace's Althea. Trollope never under- 
 stood the artist's sense of the immeasurable value of quality.
 
 774 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 But though Trollope was not a great noveHst, he was a 
 remarkably able one, and he seldom failed to make his stories 
 readable. He belongs to the class of painters of modern life 
 and of domestic manners, in which department his work is marked 
 by several special features. He created a county of his own, 
 Barsetshire, where he made his men live a country life with zest 
 and hunt almost as Whyte-Melville's men hunt; he made a special 
 reputation for the delineation of clergymen; and he probably 
 gave more attention than any other writer to the development of 
 character through a series of years. 
 
 Trollope had a habit of writing novels in series, the most 
 remarkable being that which embodies the chronicles of Barset- 
 shire. It consists of half-a-dozen novels, beginning with The 
 Warden (1855) and ending with The Last Chronicle of Barset 
 (1867). All are good stories, and as a whole they are the best 
 Trollope ever wrote. Sometimes we observe the character develop- 
 ing, sometimes it unconsciously changes under the writer's hand. 
 The great archdeacon is not quite the same man in Barchester 
 Towers as he is in The Warden. Trollope retains the outlines of 
 the character, but in the later novel it is softened and rendered 
 less blatant than in the cruder work. One of the great merits of 
 this series of novels is the verisimilitude of the imaginary country 
 in which the scene is laid; for though Salisbury suggested to 
 Trollope the idea of The Warden, Barsetshire is not a copy of any 
 English county. Its verisimilitude is due to the vivid realisation 
 of it in Trollope's own mind. Long practice in hunting had given 
 him an eye for country (in spite of his short-sightedness it must 
 be thus expressed), which had been improved by his habit of 
 investigating the rural postal system, both in Ireland and in 
 England, on horseback. Few who have industriously plied the pen 
 have spent so much of their life in the open air as he. And in 
 imagination Trollope lived in the country he depicted, until he 
 knew all the roads, railways and towns of his own creation as if he 
 were daily using them or passing through them. 
 
 Trollope's success in the delineation of the clerical character, 
 which is admitted by all, has an amusing aspect. He says that 
 when he first drew the picture of the society of a cathedral city he
 
 THE LATER FICTION 775 
 
 had never lived in one himself (except London) and was not 
 intimately acquainted with a single clergyman. The celebrated 
 archdeacon, who was justly praised for fidelity to nature, was 
 created by one who at that time had not even spoken to an 
 archdeacon. TroUope's marked success, in these circumstances, 
 proves him to have possessed not only the gift of observation, 
 but acute powers of inference. He understood human nature ; he 
 knew that the great elements of character would be found in 
 clergymen just as in other men ; he knew in outline the special 
 conditions of the clergyman's life ; and he reasoned rightly to the 
 modifications of character which would result from those condi- 
 tions. It was a triumph of skill which lifts Trollope nearer to the 
 level of the great masters than anything else he ever did. 
 
 It is further to TroUope's credit that he rightly lays stress upon 
 character as the principal subject for a novelist's study. He was 
 too business-like not to be aware of the value of a good plot ; but 
 he always held that plot was subordinate to character. He him- 
 self had no talent for weaving intricate stories, and the plot of 
 Doctor Thome (1858), which is his best, was drawn for him by his 
 brother. He concerned himself only to tell a simple story clearly, 
 embodying in it what was most attractive in the stores of his own 
 observation. No one is less dependent than he on incident; 
 usually nothing more exciting than a tea-party takes place. The 
 reader of The Warden will search his memory in vain for events ; 
 and even in Barchester Towers, perhaps TroUope's masterpiece, 
 life moves only a little more briskly. His own summary of the 
 elements which explain the popularity of Framley Parsonage 
 (1861) forms as good a criticism of his work as has ever been 
 written : " The story was thoroughly English. There was a little 
 fox-hunting and a little tuft-hunting, some Christian virtue and 
 some Christian cant. There was no heroism and no villainy. 
 There was much Church, but more love-making." In short, it 
 was a kind of hotch-potch ; and as most of the ingredients were 
 sweet, and some of them pleasantly pungent, the result was a very 
 palatable dish. 
 
 TroUope's women are good as well as his men, and he is by no 
 means limited to the type of the universally- quoted Mrs Proudie.
 
 ^76 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Kate Woodward in The Three Clerks (1858) is a very different 
 sort of personage; but though less amusing she is almost as 
 good; and Lady Glencora is yet another type, also very well 
 drawn. Eleanor Bold and the Signora Neroni in Barchester 
 Towers are in strong contrast, but both are good portraits. Among 
 the men, clergymen like the archdeacon and the bishop, and lay- 
 men like the Duke of Omnium, Plantagenet Palliser, Doctor 
 Thorne and Sir Raffle Baffle evince power in their creator only a 
 little short of genius. 
 
 Some of the characters just named belong to a group of novels 
 second in importance only to the Barsetshire series. It includes 
 Can You Forgive Her 7 (1864), Phineas Finn (1869), Phitieas 
 Redux (1874) and The Prime Minister (1876); and its special 
 interest lies in the deliberate attempt made in it to trace the 
 development of character. Other novelists had done the same 
 thing before. Fenimore Cooper does it in the Leather Stocking 
 tales, Dumas does it, and Balzac, and also Thackeray to a slight 
 extent ; every novelist does it who introduces the same characters 
 in different stories. But few have set themselves so conscientiously 
 and on the whole so successfully as Anthony TroUope to show 
 what is the effect upon character of different circumstances, and 
 how age changes the point of view. It is the more important to 
 note this feature of his work because the mechanical nature of 
 his method would hardly lead the student to expect it. 
 
 In these later novels there are feebler strains than any in the 
 Barsetshire series. Trollope could not rival Thackeray as a 
 delineator of the aristocracy, and he was no match for Disraeli in 
 the political novel. To expect in his Prime Minister such a study 
 as is contained in Diana of the Crossways would be like seeking 
 wine from water-melons. His natural sphere was comfortable 
 middle-class life and squirearchy — not too elevated in position, 
 or in intellect, or in morals, but good, sound-hearted, some- 
 what ordinary men and women : the heroic in any sense was 
 beyond him ; but he was always on the side of what was whole- 
 some and good and true within its limits. 
 
 At the time when the fame of Trollope was greatest, George 
 Meredith (i 828-1 909) was known even by name only to a narrow
 
 THE LATER FICTION •J'JJ 
 
 circle. No writer of the nineteenth century stands more alone 
 than he, and none is more difficult to deal with. Browning 
 himself is not more original. Here and there the reader may be 
 reminded of Carlyle, or of Thackeray, or of Browning. Meredith 
 was so friendly with Rossetti as to be invited to become one of 
 the household which abode with him in Cheyne Walk ; but there 
 is nothing of the Pre-Raphaelite in Meredith's works, nor does 
 the personal attraction which presumably drew him thither appear 
 to have been very strong. He is in a class apart. But he has 
 supplied the key to his own mind in his Essay on Comedy 
 (1877), which had been delivered as a lecture twenty years before 
 it was published as a book. It shows him to be one of the 
 profoundest of all students of comedy. His own works are an 
 embodiment of comedy. He hints as much, and he tersely >^ 
 explains what he conceives to be the essence of the comic spirit ] 
 in the opening sentences of The Egoist : — / 
 
 "Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social / 
 life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of 
 civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling 
 outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness 
 of the representation convincing. Credulity is not wooed through 
 the impressionable senses; nor have we recourse to the small 
 circular glow of the watchmaker's eye to raise in bright relief 
 minutest grains of evidence for the routing of incredulity. The 
 Comic Spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of 
 characters, and rejects all accessaries in the exclusive pursuit of 
 them and their speech. For, being a spirit, he hunts the spirit in 
 men; vision and ardour constitute his merit; he has not a thought 
 of persuading you to believe in him." 
 
 This passage throws a flood of light upon the writer's work. 
 The Comic Spirit, thus conceived, is exactly the spirit, not merely 
 of The Egoist, but of the great bulk of Meredith's prose as well ; 
 and the fact that there is often a strong infusion of tragedy no 
 more alters the character of his novels than the presence of 
 Shylock transforms The Merchant of Venice into a tragedy. Not- 
 withstanding the tragedy of Richard and Lucy, The Ordeal of 
 Richard Feverel is a conception of the Comic Spirit. So is Diana
 
 778 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 of the Crossrvays, in spite of the fact that the leading character 
 passes through fire. TJie lyagic Co?nedians is a title which might 
 have been given to more than one of Meredith's books ; and it is 
 significant that he reserved it for that story which, of all his works, 
 is most closely related to fact. 
 
 If all the light that can be got is needed for the understanding 
 of Meredith at the present day, there is no ground to wonder that 
 he was an enigma on his first appearance. The average reader 
 thinks of him as a novelist, but his earliest publication was in 
 verse, and his first volume a volume of Poetns (1851). The taste 
 and the ambition thus shown lasted throughout his life. His 
 poetry is sufficient both in bulk and in quality to give reasonable 
 foundation for the contention of those admirers who maintain that 
 he is a poet in the first place and a novelist only in the second. 
 The volumes of verse subsequent to that of 185 1 are Alodern Love, 
 and other Foe??is (1862), Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth 
 (18S3), Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life (1887), A Reading of 
 Earth (18S8), The Empty Purse, and other Poems (1892), Odes in 
 Contribution to the Song of French History (1S98) and A Reading 
 of Life, with other Poems ( 1 9 o i ) . 
 
 The very titles of these volumes proclaim that Meredith is at 
 once the poet of nature and the poet of man. His purpose is to 
 read the secret of earth; but he holds that that secret is to be 
 read completely neither in the solitude of the fields nor amidst the 
 troubled passions of turbid cities. The key 
 
 " Hangs for those who hither thither fare, 
 Close interthreading nature with our kind." 
 
 Meredith's own desire therefore is thus to interthread the two. 
 The deepest root of his interest in nature is the conviction that 
 the knowledge of nature is an indispensable condition of under- 
 standing men, and especially of tolerance of their faults. To 
 know all is to pardon all. Only a full comprehension of the 
 circumstances makes possible the smile of the Comic Muse. 
 Naturally therefore the poet rejects asceticism, and warns the world 
 
 "Not one instinct to elYace 
 Ere reason ripens for the vacant place." 
 
 Naturally also it is the union of the two kinds of know-
 
 THE LATER FICTION 779 
 
 ledge, and the benignity of spirit resulting from it, that he praises 
 in Shakespeare. The knowledge of Mother Earth enables her 
 greatest to know her sons unsoured — to probe "from hill to 
 hill of human passions " undeflowered of love. From this same 
 knowledge comes his conquering smile, and the laugh " broad as 
 ten thousand beeves at pasture." 
 
 It is not surprising to find that the poet who thought thus 
 thought also that the knowledge of nature is knowledge of some- 
 thing not wholly distinct from, but close akin to, man. That is 
 the meaning of one of the finest of the nature-poems, The Woods 
 of Westermain. Earth is 
 
 " Spirit in her clods, 
 Footway to the God of Gods." 
 
 She is, in truth, whatever the seeing eye has the capacity to find in 
 her. The observer may 
 
 "Look to loathe, or look to love; 
 Think her Lamp, or know her Flame." 
 
 To Meredith therefore the transition from nature to man is easy. 
 In the poem just quoted the two are inextricably intermingled. 
 In Hard Weather the terse and highly imaginative opening lines 
 on the east wind pass easily into those which depict the men who 
 wrestle with "this fierce angel of the air," and thence to the 
 moral that it is contention which begets the sharpened life and 
 develops brain. The same transition is made in The Thrush in 
 February. It is made too in the finest of all Meredith's poems of 
 nature. The Lark Ascenditig, but not until the poet has given 
 the most strictly faithful description of the bird to be found 
 anywhere in the English language, and one which, for poetic 
 beauty, is fit to be placed beside the great poem of Shelley : — 
 
 " He rises and begins to round, 
 He drops the silver chain of sound, 
 Of many links without a break, 
 In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake, 
 All intervolved and spreading wide, 
 Like water-dimples down a tide 
 Where ripple ripple overcurls 
 And eddy into eddy whirls;
 
 78o THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA '. 
 
 A press of hurried notes that run i 
 
 So fleet they scarce are more than one, i 
 
 Yet changeingly the trills repeat 
 
 And linger ringing while they fleet, j 
 
 Sweet to the quick o' the ear, and dear i 
 
 To her beyond the handmaid ear, 
 
 Who sits beside our inner springs, 
 
 Too often dry for this he brings, '■ 
 
 Which seems the very jet of earth 
 
 At sight of sun, her music's mirth, 
 
 As up he wings the spiral stair, j 
 
 A song of light, and pierces air j 
 
 With fountain ardour, fountain play, 
 
 To reach the shining tops of day. 
 
 And drink in everything discerned 
 
 An ecstacy to music turned. 
 
 Impelled by what his happy bill 
 
 Disperses ; drinking, showering still, . ' 
 
 Unthinking save that he may give 
 
 His voice the outlet, there to live 
 
 Renewed m endless notes of glee, ; 
 
 So thirsty of his voice is he, \ 
 
 For all to hear and all to know ' 
 
 That he is joy, awake, aglow, i 
 
 The tumult of the heart to hear , 
 
 Through pureness filtered crystal- clear. 
 
 And know the pleasure sprinkled bright 
 
 By simple singing of delight, ! 
 
 Shrill, irreflective, unrestrained, ' 
 
 Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustained ; 
 
 Without a break, without a fall, '■ 
 
 Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical, '■ 
 
 Perennial, quavering up the chord 
 
 Like myriad dews of sunny sward 
 
 That trembling into fulness shine. 
 
 And sparkle dropping argentine." 
 
 I 
 
 The fertility both of language and of imagination in 77/,? Lark \ 
 
 Ascendwg seems inexhaustible : it is perhaps Meredith's greatest i 
 
 single achievement in poetry. Yet, on the whole, he is more the j 
 
 poet of man than the poet of nature. In this phase of his work i 
 
 the reader may be struck with an apparent difference between the i 
 spirit of Meredith's verse and the spirit of his prose. He who m
 
 THE LATER FICTION 781 
 
 prose proclaims himself the disciple of the Comic Muse, is in 
 verse essentially tragic. He writes Ballads and Poems of Tragic 
 Life, and perhaps his most characteristic expression in verse is the 
 profoundly tragic Modern Love. The difference is not so wide as 
 it appears : for, as has been already noted, the comedy of 
 Meredith's prose is veined with tragedy. Doubtless, so far as the 
 difference is real, it is due to the fact that, on the whole, verse 
 tends to tragedy and that, on the whole, prose has an affinity to 
 comedy. This is evident from the work of those who, like Shake- 
 speare, are masters of both. Had Meredith elected to tell fully 
 the story underlying Modern Love, he would not improbably 
 have placed it in a setting of comedy ; but in that case it would 
 certainly have been told in prose. 
 
 Modern Love is a series of fifty connected poems, each of 
 sixteen lines arranged in four quatrains. Strictly speaking, they 
 are not sonnets ; but their effect is so near akin to that of the 
 sonnet that Swinburne did not hesitate to give them the name. 
 They suggest comparison, therefore, with other sonnet-sequences 
 such as Rossetti's House of Life and Mrs Browning's Portuguese 
 Sonnets. But, both in conception and in manner of treatment, 
 they have more in common with the poetry of Browning than with 
 either of these. The author of James Lee^s Wife might have 
 written Modern Love. It has all the subtlety of Browning; the 
 intellectual difficulties it presents are like Browning's; and, like 
 Browning's, they are worth the trouble of solution. Each of these 
 fifty poems dimly discloses a phase of a story hinted, not told, or 
 a mood of mind of the principal figure. The story is that of a 
 love all the more tragic because of the essential nobility of both 
 the man and the woman. There is no villain. 
 
 "In tragic life, God wot, 
 No villain need be ! Passions spin the plot : 
 We are betrayed by what is false within." 
 
 The two are simply "ever-diverse," and their very fineness of 
 nature makes the tragedy inevitable. A sensitive reticence raises 
 up a wall between them. In silence 
 
 "Each applied to each that fatal knife, 
 Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole,"
 
 782 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 and when at last they drink " the pure daylight of honest speech," 
 it is too late. What, at an earlier stage, might have worked a cure 
 becomes a "fatal draught." Even pure daylight may mislead eyes 
 unaccustomed to it. The revelation is only half understood. 
 Jealous devotion leads the wife to "break the mesh," and the 
 husband is left with the deeper pain of knowing all at the moment 
 of her death. 
 
 Meredith has here and there pieces and lines worthy of any 
 poet Such are the closing quatrain of Modern Love : — 
 
 "In tragic hints here see what evermore 
 Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force. 
 Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse, 
 To throw that faint thin line upon the shore;" 
 
 and these three lines quoted by Swinburne from the forty-seventh 
 sonnet, as " the grandest perhaps of the book " : — 
 
 " But in the largeness of the evening earth 
 Our spirits grew as we went side by side. 
 The hour became her husband and my bride." 
 
 Even in pieces which stand on a far lower plane than Modern Love 
 we meet with flashes of keen imaginative insight, and with 
 powerful and original metaphors and similes, as in that beautiful 
 stanza of the ballad of Archduchess Anne : — 
 
 "Between the day that struck her old, 
 And this black star of days, 
 Her heart swung like a storm-bell tolled 
 Above a town ablaze." 
 
 But, on the other hand, the style is often knotted and uncouth, 
 both theme and treatment are sometimes fantastic, and not 
 infrequently the difficulties, like some in Browning, seem to be 
 due to perversity. 
 
 The same is undoubtedly true of Meredith's prose, and 
 especially of the prose of his later years ; but it seems probable 
 that the common judgment, which puts this above his verse, will 
 be confirmed by posterity. Five years passed before the early 
 poems were followed by The Shaving of Shagpat (1856), to which 
 in turn succeeded Farina (1857). The latter, a burlesque of 
 German romance, carries an interesting reminiscence of Meredith's
 
 THE LATER FICTION y8^ 
 
 education ; for he was sent to school in Germany, where he was 
 under the care of the Moravians of Herrnhut. Whether he was 
 or was not greatly influenced by his German education is not clear 
 from his writings. There is much in them that looks like 
 "Germanism"; but that may have been due, as it was in 
 Browning's case, to native bent of mind. There can hardly have 
 been very close sympathy between Meredith and his Moravian 
 teachers ; and Farijia shows him to have been alive to the weak- 
 nesses of German romance. In later days he shows the tendency, 
 characteristic of his time, to turn more readily to French than to 
 German literature. 
 
 The Shaving of Shagpat is much more important than Farina. 
 From the publisher's point of view it failed; but George Eliot hailed 
 it as "a work of genius, and of poetical genius V' and declared that 
 in every characteristic except the exquisite delicacy of the love 
 incidents and love scenes — in exuberance of imagery, in picturesque 
 wildness of incident, in significant humour, in aphoristic wisdom. 
 The SJiaving of Shagpat was "a new Arabian Night." This judg- 
 ment seems to ignore the element of burlesque in the piece ; but 
 Meredith himself evidently felt that the kinship with the East was 
 close, for he prefixed to the first edition a note to warn readers 
 that it was not a translation. 
 
 Three years after Shagpat came Meredith's first full-blown 
 novel. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), which many regard 
 as the greatest of all his works. Yet nineteen years passed before 
 a second edition was required. The Shaving of Shagpat showed 
 the writer to be a humourist who could be either subtle or broad 
 as he pleased, but the fact that it was an avowed imitation of the 
 style and manner of the Eastern story-tellers left it doubtful what 
 place humour might hold in the works he might write in his own 
 style. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel \QXi\ovQ.di \!ciQ AoxHot- It too 
 is the work of a pronounced humourist, and one of a most original 
 sort. The humour of Meredith is obviously derived neither from 
 Dickens, nor from Thackeray, nor from Browning, nor from 
 Carlyle, nor from any other writer of the time. Neither would it 
 
 ^ George Eliot's article was reprinted from The. Leader , Jan. 1856, in 
 Literary Anecdotes of the XIX Century.
 
 784 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 be easy to find any writer in the past to whose work it is akin. It 
 ^^ is commonly ironic, frequently in touch with tragedy, seldom 
 riotous, as that of Dickens often is. Like everything in Meredith, 
 it is fundamentally intellectual. " More brain, O Lord, more 
 brain !" is the aspiration of Modern Love; and in Hard Weather 
 the poet declares that earth's 
 
 "Children of the labouring brain, 
 
 These are the champions of the race, 
 True parents, and the sole humane, 
 With understanding for their base." 
 
 The Ordeal of Richard Fevei-el is typical of Meredith in its 
 concentration of thought ; but this characteristic has not yet been 
 carried to the faulty extreme which makes his later novels almost 
 hopelessly baffling. His style, always variable, is here much more 
 lucid than it came to be in later years. It is already highly 
 epigrammatic, but the epigrams are not yet showered down with- 
 out pause or relief. A Meredithian epigram is as much more 
 brilliant than an ordinary bit of prose as a hghtning-flash is 
 brighter than a lamp. But while it is far less dazzling, the lamp is 
 more satisfactory to read by than a succession of lightning-flashes. 
 Man cannot live by epigrams alone, and plain prose has its uses. 
 In later days Meredith forgot this ; but not in Richard Feverel, 
 where the epigrammatic style appears in more perfect fusion 
 with the qualities which ought to modify it than in any of 
 Meredith's subsequent works, except perhaps Rhoda Fle7ning. 
 
 Meredith's novels are usually rich in portraiture, and none is 
 richer than the first of the series. Within the Feverel family itself 
 the wealth and the variety are great. The characters of Sir Austin, 
 Richard, Adrian Harley and Austin Wentworth are all masterly. 
 They differ widely, yet all have certain family traits in common, 
 which come out amusingly in the covert negotiations with Farmer 
 Blaize, after Richard's escapade of the hay-rick. Outside the 
 family, Lucy and Lady Blandish and Ripton Thompson are no 
 less excellent. These three are all bound closely together with the 
 Feverel family, Ripton as the boyish companion of Richard, Lucy 
 as the Miranda to his Ferdinand, Lady Blandish because she is 
 secretly in love with Sir Austin. It is in forging the links of these
 
 THE LATER FICTION 785 
 
 relations that Meredith shows the most consummate skill. The 
 picture of the boys, their friendship, their quarrel, their encounter 
 with Farmer Blaize and its sequel, is no less masterly, as a sketch, 
 than Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are as 
 finished portraits. The agony of Richard and Ripton under 
 Adrian's scalpel, and their ludicrous but, to them, desperately 
 serious stratagems, show an insight into boy-nature probably 
 unequalled except by the American writer. Twenty years after- 
 wards Meredith himself achieved a success nearly, but not quite, 
 as great in the boy Crossjay Patterne of The Egoist. 
 
 Quite different, but even more marvellous, is the relation of 
 the second pair. The famous chapter entitled " Ferdinand and 
 Miranda" depicts one of the most charming love-scenes in literature. 
 The only comparison possible is that suggested by the title. Both 
 the actors might have been inhabitants of an island of the still- 
 vexed Bermoothes — Lucy, reared in utter innocence in the solitude 
 of her uncle's farm, Richard, hedged round by the system. All the 
 fates seemed against their meeting, much more against their union. 
 Richard was doubly cut off, both by the system and by his own 
 act, from the niece of Farmer Blaize. But Meredith knew that 
 what we call chance is infinitely various, and that nature is 
 irresistibly strong. Chance brought about the meeting and nature 
 did the rest. Adrian had foreseen what Sir Austin was blind 
 to, — that the repression of the system would make Richard as 
 dangerously explosive as compressed gunpowder. The explosion 
 shattered the system ; but the system, in its turn, changed what 
 would naturally have been a story of happy love into one of the 
 most tragic in literature. And this tragedy is enacted behind the 
 mask of the Comic Muse. 
 
 The story of the third pair, if it is less charming than the other 
 two, is equally skilful ; and in Sir Austin we have the key to the 
 whole book. Meredith does not admire him, nor wish his readers 
 to admire him ; but circumstances have given him the control of 
 the destinies of all the principal characters. The comedy lies in 
 the futility of his attempt to play Providence, the tragedy in the 
 fateful consequences which that attempt, futile as it is, brings in 
 its train. Sir Austin is an egoist almost as complete as 
 w. 50 
 
 y
 
 786 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Sir Willoughby Patterne himself. He begins — as the complete 
 egoist must always begin, for otherwise he would loathe his own 
 character — by partially deceiving himself; and in the end he sees 
 or imagines himself under the necessity of playing a part too large 
 for him. Sir Austin as well as Phaethon found the danger of 
 aspiring to drive the chariot of the sun. The scientific humanist 
 thinks himself bound to ape omniscience. His pompousness 
 grows. His creator calls him a monomaniac. The word, it is 
 true, is put into the mouth of Adrian ; but, without endorsing the 
 judgment which sees Meredith himself in Adrian, it is tolerably 
 safe to ascribe this particular utterance to the novelist. The 
 strain of keeping up an appearance of superiority to ordinary 
 humanity steadily increases. Richard and Lucy are sacrificed to 
 this end. Unconsciously Sir Austin sacrifices himself. The 
 respect (it should rather be adoration, as we are dealing with 
 Providence) of those around him is the breath of his nostrils. 
 Life holds nothing else for him. Now of all who surround him 
 no one is so eagerly disposed to worship at the shrine as the 
 scheming yet fine-natured Lady Blandish ; and in the whole book 
 there is nothing more subtle than the way in which Meredith 
 traces the effect upon her of Sir Austin's attempt to shore up 
 his crumbling reputation for superhuman insight. The chapter 
 entitled " Nursing the Devil " shows the beginning of disillusion- 
 ment. The final letter, " Lady Blandish to Austin Wentworth," 
 shows how complete it was in the end : — 
 
 " Oh ! how sick I am of theories, and Systems, and the pre- 
 tensions of men ! There was his son lying all but dead, and the 
 man was still unconvinced of the folly he had been guilty of. I 
 could hardly bear the sight of his composure. I shall hate the 
 name of science till the day I die. Give me nothing but common- 
 place unpretending people!....! shall love that Mrs Berry to the 
 end of my days. I really believe she has tzvice the sense of any 
 of us — Science and all." 
 
 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is obviously a problem novel, 
 and the problem is psychological. Given a particular character 
 set in a certain relation to others, what will be the effect upon the 
 others and upon the character itself? In this respect, as well as
 
 THE LATER FICTION 787 
 
 in many others, it is typical of Meredith's work. Again and again 
 in the later novels he sets himself similar problems. He has 
 little interest in action as such. The problems are inward, 
 problems of the soul, and though circumstance may be indis- 
 pensable, it is but a setting. There is commonly extremely little 
 story in Meredith's novels. The Egoist has none worth speaking 
 about, and though the adventures of Harry Richmond are 
 sufficiently varied, even in these the true interest is in cha- 
 racter, not in incident. The subtlety with which the female 
 characters are drawn is another characteristic of The Ordeal of 
 Richard Feverel, as well as of Meredith's later work. Among 
 contemporaries, his only rivals were Browning and George Eliot, 
 and the latter was so successful probably because she was a woman 
 herself. Lucy, Lady Blandish and Mrs Berry are all drawn with 
 consummate skill. The last is Meredith's greatest triumph among 
 characters in the lower ranks of society. These he rarely attempted 
 to draw. Rhoda Flemings a story which deals chiefly with the yeo- 
 man class, is exceptional ; and characters below that rank seldom 
 play an important part. No less than Thackeray — with whom ha^ '''f 
 has more affinity than with any other writer of fiction— Meredith is 
 the novelist of the upper classes. Austin Feverel is a baronet of 
 great wealth ; so is Willoughby Patterne. Diana Warwick is the 
 friend of cabinet ministers. BeaueJiamfs Career deals with a 
 peer and the heir of a peerage. Lord Ormont speaks for itself by 
 its titie ; and The Amazing Marriage also rises to the sphere of 
 the peerage. Evan Harrington, it is true, is the son of a tailor ; 
 but if the book to which he gives his name introduces trade, it is 
 trade associated with and striving to emulate aristocracy. The 
 reason for this peculiarity is to be found in the description which 
 Meredith, in a letter which has been published, has given of his 
 own method : — " My method has been to prepare my readers for 
 a crucial exhibition of the perso?iae, and then to give the scene in 
 the fullest of the blood and brain under the stress of a fiery situa- 
 tion." Blood and brain are common to all ranks ; but we have 
 only to think of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel dead The Egoist divA 
 Diana of the Crossways in order to see that the kind of stress and 
 of fiery situation which Meredith means presuppose high position. 
 
 50—2
 
 788 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 The really poor are too much under the pressure of the material 
 needs of life. 
 
 " The Pilgrim's Scrip " is an interesting feature in The Ordeal 
 of Richard Feverel. The maxims it contains are frequently double- 
 edged ; and hence we are told that " the direct application of an 
 aphorism was unpopular at Raynham." But though Meredith is 
 prone to laugh at the wisdom of Sir Austin, the sententious 
 manner of expressing it was too much his own not to be repeated. 
 Diana of the Crossways gives the analogue from the female side in 
 Diana's epigrams, quoted from the diary of Henry Wilmers. 
 Indeed there is some equivalent in every one of the novels, for it 
 is the most striking and the most enduring characteristic of 
 Meredith's style, the terse expression of his keen and agile wit. 
 
 Meredith's next novel was the romance of the tailor's son, 
 Evan Harritigton (1861), Though it is inferior to Richard Feverel, 
 the hero is no mean character, and the Countess de Saldar 
 is admirable as a portrait, whatever may be thought of her as a 
 woman. Emilia in England (1864), now known as Sandra 
 Belloni, broke new ground with a great Italian singer for heroine, 
 though in her English surroundings there is something akin to 
 Evan Harrington. The book has, of course, to be read with its 
 sequel Vittoria (1867), which transports the reader to Italy, and 
 deals with the characters and the incidents of the rising of 1848. 
 Beauchamf s Career has been called Meredith's only political novel, 
 and it is the only one in which he greatly concerns himself with 
 the struggles of party. But it would be a profound mistake to 
 draw the inference that social interests or the greater problems of 
 politics were matters of subordinate moment to him. It would 
 be nearer the truth to say that no recent novelist has been more 
 profoundly impressed by them. Vittoria shows that Meredith was 
 alive to the importance of the problem of nationality. The scene 
 is laid in Italy in 1848, and the book deals with many of the 
 leaders on the Austrian as well as on the Italian side. Meredith's 
 sympathies are with the Italians; but he preserves his artistic 
 detachment, and bears in mind that fine character may be en- 
 listed and high virtues shown in support of a bad cause. There are 
 Austrians deserving of admiration as well as Italians, and Meredith
 
 THE LATER FICTION 789 
 
 shows that there were such Austrians in the struggle of 1848. But 
 interesting as is this aspect of Vitforia, the principal feature of the 
 two books in which Sandra appears is Sandra herself. Among 
 Meredith's love-scenes, "By Wilming Weir" is second only to 
 "Ferdinand and Miranda", and if Lucy is the sweeter, Sandra is 
 the grander, character. 
 
 Between these two connected works appeared Rhoda Fleming 
 (1865), a novel which differs considerably from the rest of Mere- 
 dith's works, and which from many of his warmest admirers has 
 received something less than justice. It is the simplest of all his 
 novels. But simplicity need not mean shallowness, and assuredly 
 it does not in the case of Rhoda Fleming. Some of the analyses 
 are as subtle as any that even Meredith has made. The character 
 of Mrs Lovell is admirable, and the explication of the effect upon 
 her of Edward Blancove's cowardice may be compared with the 
 analysis of the relations between Lady Blandish and Sir Austin 
 Feverel. The heroine Rhoda is less charming than several of 
 Meredith's heroines; but the real interest centres in the tragic 
 story of her sister Dahlia, who, like the heroine of Browning's 
 Inn Album., shows a certain kinship to Richardson's great con- 
 ception Clarissa Harlowe. In Meredith's case the kinship is closer 
 than in Browning's. After her betrayal the life of Dahlia is, like 
 Clarissa's, just a movement towards death. But it lasts for years. 
 " He killed her pride. Her taste for life is gone," is Mrs Lovell's 
 explanation of Dahlia's refusal to marry Edward. The close is 
 profoundly pathetic : — 
 
 " Dahlia lived seven years her sister's housemate, nurse of the 
 growing swarm. She had gone through fire, as few women have 
 done in like manner, to leave their hearts among the ashes ; but 
 with that human heart she left regrets behind her. The soul of 
 this young creature filled its place. It shone in her eyes and in 
 her work, a lamp to her little neighbourhood; and not less a lamp 
 of cheerful beams for one day being as another to her. In truth, 
 she sat above the clouds. When she died she relinquished 
 nothing. Others knew the loss. Between her and Robert there 
 was deeper community on one subject than she let Rhoda share. 
 Almost her last words to him, spoken calmly, but with the quaver 
 of breath resembling sobs, were: 'Help poor girls.'"
 
 790 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 After Vitforia came The Adventures of Harry Richmond 
 (1871), a book much more crowded with events than are Mere- 
 dith's novels in general. He is safer on his customary ground of 
 psychology. In The Advefiiures of Harry Ridwiond both incidents 
 and characters are fantastic, and in spite of the fertility of Roy 
 Richmond the story becomes tiresome. Beauchamfs Career 
 (1876) is of a higher order. The main theme is that of English 
 party politics shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century. 
 The old Tory Lord Romfrey and his nephew, the young Radical 
 Nevil Beauchamp, are the principal figures — the latter the pupil of 
 Dr Shrapnel and the student of Carlyle, by whom, evidently, 
 Meredith himself was considerably influenced. The likeness in 
 character between uncle and nephew, underlying wide differences 
 of opinion, is one of several indications that Meredith was a care- 
 ful student of heredity. The female figures in this story are 
 subordinate to a degree unusual with Meredith. They are 
 probably made so designedly, in order that attention may not 
 be too much drawn away from the political problems. The 
 character of Nevil Beauchamp has a peculiar interest if it em- 
 bodies, as it is said to do, the attributes of one of Meredith's own 
 friends. 
 
 The next novel, The Egoist (1879), stands nearer to The 
 Ordeal of Richard Fcverel in method, and probably in merit, than 
 any of the intervening works. Perhaps, on the whole, it is even 
 more typical and broadly representative of Meredith than Richard 
 Feverel itself. The later as well as the earlier work is a problem 
 novel, and its central figure is placed in circumstances very like 
 those of Sir Austin Feverel. Their wealth makes them both 
 practically irresponsible, and they are despots each in his own 
 sphere. But Sir Austin is a man in middle life, and the problem 
 is, how will his theories affect those whom he controls? 
 Sir Willoughby Patterne is a young man, and an important part 
 of the problem is, what sort of life will the nature with which he is 
 born fashion for himself? There is not much development in his 
 character. He is the complete egoist at the start, and this he 
 remains to the end. Surely a complete egoist with ;^5o,ooo a 
 year and a whole county paying court to him is destined to a very 
 happy life. Meredith thinks not. "The egoist surely inspires
 
 THE LATER FICTION 79I 
 
 pity. He who would desire to clothe himself at everybody's 
 expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself stark 
 naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for. the 
 actual person." And before the end he demonstrates that this is 
 true. 
 
 The stages in the evolution of egoism are best marked by the 
 three love affairs. That with Miss Durham is brief. The young 
 lady is startled by the treatment of Lieutenant Patterne, takes 
 warning in time, and jilts the handsome and wealthy baronet. 
 The story of Clara Middleton fills the greater part of the book — 
 first the engagement, then her gradual disenchantment, then her 
 struggles for release and ultimate escape. She is one of the most 
 admirably drawn of Meredith's women — bright, witty and warm- 
 hearted, as well as beautiful. Some of the finest of Meredith's 
 gems of description are lavished upon her, and he had inexhaustible 
 fancy and amazing command over language. " He placed himself 
 at a corner of the doorway for her to pass him into the house, and 
 doated on her cheek, her ear, and the soft dusky nape of her neck, 
 where this way and that the httle lighter-coloured irreclaimable 
 curls running truant from the comb and the knot — curls, half- 
 curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgeling feathers, 
 tufts of down, blown wisps — waved or fell, waved over or up or 
 involutedly, loose and downward, in the form of small silken paws, 
 hardly any of them much thicker than a crayon shading, cunninger 
 than long round locks of gold to trick the heart." 
 
 The struggle between Clara and Sir Willoughby is long and 
 severe, for the Egoist is resourceful and determined. The aged 
 and great wine staves off defeat for a time ; but at length it comes. 
 And then the third story, which has begun before the first and 
 lasted all through, is taken up, and we see how the Egoist, who 
 has used men and women alike for his own ends, has punished 
 himself. Laetitia Dale has been the victim of his selfishness from 
 the start, and his punishment is that, instead of a blindly adoring, 
 he receives a critical and an unwilling wife. She is persecuted 
 into marriage. "I vow," she says, "to do my duty by him. 
 Whatever is of worth in me is at his service. I am very tired. I 
 feel I must yield or break. This is his wish, and I submit." The
 
 792 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 unreformed Egoist speaks in the reply : " • And I salute my 
 wife,' said Willoughby, making her hand his own, and warming to 
 his possession as he performed the act." 
 
 The Tragic Comedians (i8So) is likewise a problem novel. 
 In substance the extraordinary story is not fiction at all, but fact — 
 the story of the fatal love of Ferdinand Lassalle, who figures in the 
 novel as Sigismund Alvan. The nature of the problem is clearly 
 explained. " Why this man should have come to his end through 
 love, and the woman who loved him have laid her hand in the 
 hand of the slayer, is the problem we have to study, nothing 
 inventing, in the spirit and flesh of both." This is a lucid 
 exposition of Meredith's method both here and elsewhere. 
 Whether the subject be the Scientific Humanist of Raynham 
 Abbey, or the Egoist of Patterne Hall, or the German Social 
 Democrat, whether the events take place in a world of time and 
 space or only in the world of imagination, Meredith is equally the 
 psychologist, tracing with scientific care and precision the chains 
 of cause and eff"ect in the world of spirit. 
 
 In Diana of the Crossivays (18S5) Meredith once more, but 
 for the last time, rose to his own highest level. Of all his novels, 
 this has probably been the most popular, and perhaps no other has 
 so nearly brought critical judgment and popular judgment into 
 harmony. The Meredithian who is but moderately pleased with 
 Rhoda Fleming praises Diafia of the Crossways warmly, and he 
 who is not as a rule enamoured of Meredith for once agrees. The 
 reason doubtless is that along with the characteristic Meredithian 
 features of subtle analysis and brilliant epigram there goes a 
 story better calculated than most to appeal to "the general." The 
 brilliancy of the heroine is another reason. She is " one of 
 Shakespeare's women,... another Hermione." And this creature, 
 all nerves and impulses, is finely contrasted with Redworth, the 
 embodiment of steady sense and practical competence. Yet it 
 may be suspected that in this fascinating heroine lies the principal 
 blot of the book. Is Diana's treachery to Dacier explained! 
 Could such a woman as Diana have done such a thing ? Could 
 she have been blind to its significance ? It is hazardous to difter 
 on such a point from so profound a student of character, and
 
 THE LATER FICTION 793 
 
 especially of female character, as Meredith. And he has put into 
 the mouth of Diana's dearest friend a warning to be prepared for 
 inconsistencies. "The best and bravest of us [women]," says 
 Lady Dunstane, "at bay in the world need an eye like Shake- 
 speare's to read deep, and not be baffled by inconsistencies." But 
 usually Meredith is more convincing than he is in the treatment 
 of the character at this point. Of course he believed (mistakenly) 
 that he was adhering to fact. And that may just have been the 
 reason why he fell into error, if error it was. The greatest may 
 perchance forget that "the actual is not the true." 
 
 The subordinate characters as well as the principal in Diana 
 of the Crossways are admirably drawn. The "frosty Cupid" 
 Percy Dacier is excellent throughout, but nowhere more excellent 
 than in the ebb of what served him for passion, after the frustra- 
 tion of the plan of elopement. " He did not regret his proposal 
 to take the leap; he would not have regretted it if taken. On the 
 safe side of the abyss, however, it wore a gruesome look to his 
 cool blood." Excellent too is Lady Wathin, "one of the world's 
 good women," "She would not have charged the individual 
 creature with a criminal design; all she did was to stuff the person 
 her virtue abhorred with the wickedness of the world, and that is 
 a common process in antipathy." 
 
 Meredith wrote three novels after Diana of the Crossways. 
 They are One of Our Conquerors (1891), Lord Ormont and his 
 Aminta (1894) and The Amazing Marriage (1895). They are 
 bound together by their theme, for they all treat some aspect 
 of the question of marriage, a subject in which Meredith had 
 shown his interest before ; and they all show the characteristics, 
 exaggerated into vices, of the Meredithian style. Probably no other 
 novels in the language are so difficult to read ; and even the fact 
 that very few novels contain so much thought is hardly a sufficient 
 excuse. It is not clear that they contain more thought than 
 Meredith's previous works, from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel 
 down to Diana of the Crossways, and it is clear that the difficulties 
 set in the way of the reader, though they were already great, are 
 very much increased. There is an analogy between the develop- 
 ment of Meredith and that of Browning, to whom, as has been
 
 794 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 said already, he has other affinities as well. Just as Browning, 
 after The Ring and the Book, overbalanced himself, so to speak, in 
 such a way that the greater part of the work of his last twenty 
 years is gravely damaged by the presence in excess of the qualities 
 which made him great, so Meredith too spoilt his latest writings 
 by unrestrained indulgence in epigram and by a wanton exuber- 
 ance of cryptic utterances. 
 
 The reasons why Meredith stands alone in English fiction are 
 now tolerably clear. The obvious difficulties of his method and 
 still more of his style discouraged imitation. The demand they 
 made upon the brain was enormous, and most writers were 
 modest enough to feel that their endowment was less than 
 Meredith's. It was easier to follow in the wake of Trollope. The 
 latter's place was to some extent taken by James Payn (1830- 1898), 
 whose most powerful as well as his most popular novel, By Proxy 
 (1878), appeared only a few years before the elder man's death. 
 Payn, however, had won a name years before by Lost Sir Mas- 
 smgl>erd (iS6 4), an ingenious and well-constructed tale. He was 
 more influenced by Dickens and less influenced by Thackeray than 
 Trollope, and the standard of his work is considerably lower. On 
 the other hand, George MacDonald (1824-1905) showed, possibly, 
 more genius, though less talent, than Trollope, and, in the main, 
 worked in a wholly different field. He was the best delineator of 
 Scottish life between Scott (or, at any rate. Gait) and Stevenson, a 
 poet as well as a novelist, a skilful writer for children as well as for 
 their seniors. If hard-headedness be the special characteristic of 
 his country, and above all of his native Aberdeenshire, then 
 MacDonald was an exception. He was throughout life remarkably 
 sensitive, and this quality shows itself in, and imparts a charm to, 
 both his prose and his verse. His life illustrates one of the 
 difficulties of the age. For a short time he was minister of the 
 Congregational Church of Arundel ; but the religion of this most 
 religious man was not of the brand which suited his flock : it was 
 intimated to him that his preaching was not sufficiently ortho- 
 dox, and he resigned. Thenceforward he was a man of letters ; 
 but, as his biographer indicates, he never ceased to be, in every 
 sense of the word, a preacher, and every book, nay almost every
 
 THE LATER FICTION 795 
 
 page he wrote, bears witness to the depth and sincerity of his 
 faith. 
 
 MacDonald's earliest publications were poetical ; but three 
 years after his dramatic poem, Within and Without (1855), he 
 made his debut in the realm of prose with Fhantastes, a Faerie 
 Romance (1858). In the graceful fancy, the sensitiveness to 
 nature and the mysticism of this book many will see the working 
 of the Celtic spirit. And none had better right to exhibit it than 
 MacDonald; for he was sprung from the Macdonalds of Glencoe, 
 and more than once in his writings he shows that his imagination 
 had brooded over their tragic story. His true entry into literature, 
 however, may be dated at the publication of David Elginbrod 
 (1863), the first of a series of masterly studies of Scottish Hfe, and 
 especially the life of the north-eastern counties of Scotland. The 
 chief works of the series are Alec Forbes (1865), Robert Falconer 
 (1868), Malcolm (1875) with its sequel The Marquis of Lossie 
 (1877), Sir Gibbie (1879) and Donal Grant (1883). The third, 
 Robert Falconer, is easily the best of all the books MacDonald 
 ever wrote. Elsewhere, perhaps, he shows power as great, but 
 nowhere else is he so easily great, so varied and so uniformly 
 successful in his aim. Throughout all the novels the delineations 
 of Scottish character are excellent. Sometimes the story is forced, 
 unnatural and improbable ; but the faults are always redeemed by 
 some piece of admirable portraiture. David Elginbrod, Alec 
 Forbes and Annie, Mrs Malison, Robert Falconer and Shargar, 
 Mrs Falconer and Dr Anderson, have all the stamp of reality. 
 
 In these Scottish stories the poetry of MacDonald's nature is 
 neither wasted nor in abeyance. It supplies the background to 
 the story, and it suffuses nearly all the leading characters. Its 
 effect is seen if we compare the life delineated by him with that 
 which the pages of Gait reveal, or with that which MacDonald's 
 contemporary and fellow- Aberdonian, William Alexander, depicts 
 in Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk. The life is hard and bare in Alec 
 Forbes and in David Elginbrod as well as in Johnfiy Gibb, but 
 there is a glow of romance in the former which would be utterly 
 out of keeping in the last. There could be no analogue in 
 Alexander's work to the blind piper in Malcobn. Whether this is
 
 796 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 or is not the Celtic element is, if not immaterial, at any rate of 
 secondary importance. What is of real moment is the fact that it 
 is there, and that its presence stamps MacDonald as akin to Scott 
 and Stevenson rather than to Gait and Alexander. Yet there is a 
 wide difference. Scott and Stevenson were born story-tellers ; 
 MacDonald was by nature a preacher. His stories are often 
 clumsy and are never the raison d'etre of his novels. It is the 
 moral he can convey or the religion he can teach that he values. 
 And this is at once his strength and his weakness ; for, though 
 the artist is occasionally lost in the preacher, the earnestness of 
 purpose imparts a dignity which otherwise could not have been 
 attained. 
 
 MacDonald, like Scott himself, was induced by the desire for 
 variety to turn from Scottish to English themes. But caelum non 
 aninium mutant: Thomas Wi?igfoId (1876) and its sequel Paul 
 Faber (1879) ^"^^ compounded of exactly the same ingredients as 
 the Scottish stories and are no less pervaded with religion ; while 
 Lilith (1895) is still mystical enough to proclaim the author a Celt 
 of the Celts. But his genius fades from the English stories. The 
 life MacDonald knew in childhood and the scenery which was 
 most deeply impressed upon his imagination, as well as the 
 dogma from which he shook himself free, were the indispensable 
 conditions to his best work. There is, superficially, a good deal of 
 variety in his work, yet few men of equal genius are more narrowly 
 circumscribed. Gait is not more closely identified with Ayrshire, 
 Mrs Gaskell with Lancashire and Cheshire, Mary Wilkins with 
 New England, or Mr Barrie with Kirriemuir, than is MacDonald 
 with Aberdeenshire. It might be imagined that he was born to 
 give a place in literature to a district which has been wonderfully 
 prolific of talent, but which has not been consecrated by imagina- 
 tion as Ayrshire was by the poems of Burns, the Borders by the 
 ballads, and nearly every nook of Scotland, except that north- 
 eastern corner, by the comprehensive genius of Scott. 
 
 Something akin to the Celtic element in MacDonald is to be 
 found in the work of William Sharp (1856-1905), poet, biographer 
 and critic, who concealed his identity as a romancer and student 
 of Celtic folk-lore under the pseudonym of Fiona Macleod. As a
 
 THE LATER FICTION 797 
 
 poet, Sharp belonged to the Neo-pre-Raphaelite school and was 
 much influenced by his association with Rossetti. But although 
 no reader of his Motherhood will deny that Sharp was a true, 
 if not a very original, poet, his most memorable works are 
 those prose tales which he published pseudonymously. How a 
 man born and bred in the Lowlands, among the prosaic thread- 
 mills of Paisley, acquired not only his feeling for West Highland 
 scenery, but his knowledge of the language, life and heart of the 
 Highland Celt, is an enigma ; but those mystical books. The 
 Dominion of Dreams (1895), The Sin-Eater (1899) and the 
 numerous short tales which made the name of Fiona Macleod 
 widely popular, are the guarantee that he possessed both. A 
 novelist in the ordinary sense Sharp was not. There is no evidence 
 of power of construction in the books of Fiona Macleod, nor 
 do they, properly speaking, delineate character. But whatever is 
 superstitious, uncanny, mystical. Sharp seems to have compre- 
 hended and sympathised with. This is the backbone of all his 
 tales and romances. They aim at producing one effect, and they 
 cannot rival those more complex works, like MacDonald's, in 
 which mysticism is merely one of many elements. 
 
 For about a quarter of a century after he won success, 
 Anthony TroUope was, not by any means the greatest of English 
 novelists, but the one most typical of his time. The novel of 
 manners held sway, and the Philistine strain in Trollope was in 
 harmony with the taste of the British Philistine. But there were 
 always other elements and other tastes ; and the most important 
 point to notice in the close of the period is the re-emergence of 
 romance. It is present in Blackmore, it is a factor in the work 
 of William Black, it colours the novels of Besant and Rice, and it 
 is the essence of those of R. L. Stevenson — by far the greatest of 
 the new romantic school. 
 
 Richard Blackmore (1825-1900) may be regarded, like g, 
 Thomas Hughes, as practically a man of one book ; for, though 
 he himself preferred The Maid of Sker (1872), his influence was 
 exercised through Lorna Doone (1869), ^'^d so long as his name 
 is remembered, it will live because of that romance, which is 
 certainly among the foremost historical romances of the last half-
 
 798 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 century — inferior to Esmond, The Cloister and the Hearth and 
 Weir of Hermiston, but not obviously inferior to anything else of 
 that sort in the period. There is a sense of amplitude and roominess 
 about the book, which seems somehow to be associated with the 
 gigantic body of the hero ; but yet it is in no sense a deification 
 of mere force ; and the great John Ridd himself is more remark- 
 able for his moral qualities, his gentleness and his kindness, than 
 for his immense strength. Lorna Doone bears traces of Reade, 
 but it contains elements of reviving romance to which Reade 
 was a stranger. 
 
 The connexion of Blackmore and Blackmore's masterpiece 
 with Devon suggests the mention along with his of the name of 
 a much younger and yet contemporary writer. The " marvellous 
 boy," OHver Madox Brown (1S55-1874), though a Londoner by 
 birth, has in the title of the best of his writings entwined his 
 name with Devon, " the dwale bluth " being the Devonian name of 
 the deadly nightshade. He is like Arthur Hallam for early promise 
 and for unfulfilled renown, he resembles Keats in that his death 
 was said to have been hastened by unjust criticism. But in truth 
 Oliver Madox Brown was unique. Short as was the life of Arthur 
 Hallam, it was three years longer than Brown's span ; and in the 
 Remains of the elder there is no such evidence of high imagina- 
 tive endowment as in the writings and fragments left by the son 
 of the famous artist. It is quite possible that more was buried 
 in that early grave than in any other except the grave of Chatterton 
 himself. 
 
 Romance appears in the novels of William Black (i 841-1898) 
 under a different aspect from that which it wears in Lorna Doone. 
 Though Black was about sixteen years younger than Blackmore, 
 he made his name in literature almost immediately after the 
 publication of Lorna Doone. In Blackmore, romance is asso- 
 ciated with history ; in Black, it is a sentiment clinging to a place 
 and a people. Probably Black's best work is A Daughter of 
 Heth (1871), the scene of which is laid in lowland Scotland, and 
 the effect is produced mainly by the humorous delineation of the 
 minister's family ; but his name is far more closely identified with 
 the West Highlands and especially with the Hebrides, and his
 
 THE LATER FICTION 799 
 
 most characteristic book is the pretty tale A Princess of Thule 
 (1S73). Black is never profound ; he has written no book of the 
 calibre of Lorna Doone ; he soon, in a sense, wrote himself out, 
 so that readers could too easily guess what would be the con- 
 stituents of a story bearing his name ; and sometimes his senti- 
 ment passes into sentimentality. But he is as wholesome as 
 Trollope ; and the difference of his matter and manner helps to 
 explain the decline in TroUope's popularity during his later years. 
 
 Yet another phase of the same change is apparent in the work 
 of Walter Besant (i 836-1 901) and James Rice (1843-1882), 
 whose partnership down to the death of the latter recalls to 
 mind the more famous partnership of two much greater men, 
 Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. In Besant's Dorothy 
 Forster (1884), we are, by the historical setting, reminded of 
 books like Lorna Doone ; but though Besant several times 
 went into the past for his subjects and worked a good deal 
 with documents, he and Rice on the whole figure rather as 
 novelists of contemporary manners and are of the school of 
 Trollope, with just an indefinable flavour added from the 
 new spirit of romance. Ready Money Moriiboy (1872) and The 
 Golden Butterfly (1876) are favourable specimens of the work 
 of the partnership ; All Sorts afid Conditions of Men (1882) and 
 The Children of Gibeon (1886) may be taken as representing 
 Besant's own work. The former produced an immense effect by 
 its description of the life of East London, and the People's Palace 
 there is a memorial of its influence. Again the work is good, but 
 again it falls short of genius. 
 
 The man among the later romancers who is likely longest to 
 escape oblivion is Robert Louis Stevenson {1850-1894), who for 
 several reasons is one of the most interesting as well as one of the 
 most conspicuous figures in our later literature. No man in the 
 latter half of the nineteenth century was more deeply imbued 
 with the spirit of letters, none pursued his calling as a writer with 
 more singleness of mind. Sprung from a family of civil engineers 
 and set apart to follow in their steps, Stevenson was, from the first, 
 like the "clerk foredoomed his father's soul to cross." It was 
 nature that made him a man of letters. Though the power of
 
 800 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 expression did not come without effort, the effort to attain it was 
 to him pleasure, and effort of any other sort was intolerably 
 irksome. His experiences therefore in the train of his father 
 among the Northern Lights were valuable to him not for the 
 purposes of engineering, but because they brought him into 
 contact with wild nature, and taught him that lore of the High- 
 lands and the Highlanders which was so well used afterwards in 
 Kidnapped. Possibly too the surges of Skerryvore may have 
 left their tone in the stormier passages of his eloquent prose : at 
 any rate, the sea and the mountain wielded that power over him 
 through life which they rarely acquire except over those who have 
 felt their charm in boyhood. 
 
 Stevenson's practically-minded father was bitterly disappointed 
 by his son's rejection of the profession of engineering in favour of 
 one so vague and unpromising as the career of letters. It was 
 not merely that the career was unpromising in the financial sense : 
 the mind of Thomas Stevenson, though not destitute of taste, had 
 a matter-of-fact strain which was alien from literature. Father 
 and son spent whole afternoons by the Border rivers, the former 
 looking upon them as " a chequer-board of lively forces," the latter 
 as "a pretty and various spectacle'." And it is said that when 
 the plot of Dr Jekyll afid Mr Hyde was explained to him, the old 
 man's comment was : "The man's a fool : the thing's no possible." 
 But he was still more deeply grieved by the opinions on religion 
 which his son began to entertain, and was obliged unwillingly to 
 express. To a great proportion of the more thoughtful among 
 the younger generation of Scots, much of the old Presbyterian 
 faith had become incredible ; and R. L. Stevenson was among 
 those who had thus drifted away from the ancestral creed. At an 
 early age he had formed opinions which, to Presbyterians of the 
 old school, seemed shocking and dangerous. But they were 
 certainly not ignoble. Stevenson's letters, though they are among 
 the epistolary gems of literature, contain no passage more lofty 
 and beautiful than that addressed to Mr E. Gosse in which he 
 states his belief about the ultimate destiny of man : — 
 
 " Yes, if I could believe in the immortality business, the world 
 ^ Life of Stevenson, i. 73.
 
 THE LATER FICTION 8oi 
 
 would indeed be too good to be true ; but we were put here to do 
 what service we can, for honour and not for hire : the sods cover 
 us, and the worm that never dies, the conscience, sleeps well at 
 last ; these are the wages, besides what we receive so lavishly day 
 by day ; and they are enough for a man who knows his own 
 frailty and sees all things in the proportion of reality. The soul 
 of piety was killed long ago by that idea of reward. Nor is 
 happiness, whether eternal or temporal, the reward that mankind 
 seeks. Happinesses are but his wayside campings ; his soul is in 
 the journey ; he was born for the struggle, and only tastes his life 
 in effort and on the condition that he is opposed. How, then, is 
 such a creature, so fiery, so pugnacious, so made up of discontent 
 and aspiration, and such noble and uneasy passions — how can he 
 be rewarded but by rest ? I would not say it aloud, for man's 
 cherished belief is that he loves that happiness which he con- 
 tinually spurns and passes by ; and this belief in some ulterior 
 happiness exactly fits him. He does not require to stop and 
 taste it ; he can be about the rugged and bitter business where 
 his heart lies ; and yet he can tell himself this fairy-tale of an 
 eternal tea-party, and enjoy the notion that he is both himself 
 and something else ; and that his friends will yet meet him, all 
 ironed out and emasculate, and still be lovable — as if love did 
 not live in the faults of the beloved only, and draw its breath in 
 an unbroken round of forgiveness ! But the truth is, we must 
 fight until we die ; and when we die there can be no quiet for 
 mankind but complete resumption into — what ? — God, let us 
 say — when all these desperate tricks will be spellbound at 
 last^." 
 
 This passage was written long after the period of estrange- 
 ment between parents and son, when Stevenson's heart was 
 stirred by the death of his friend Fleeming Jenkin ; but it clearly 
 indicates the nature of the difficulties which, in addition to that 
 of the choice of a profession, brought about the estrangement ; 
 and from the beautiful epitaph which he himself wrote, and 
 which is inscribed upon his grave, it would seem that to the end 
 
 ^ LeCters to his Family and Friends, ii. 13 -14. 
 W. 51
 
 802 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 he retained this conviction that sound sleep after life's fitful fever 
 is the best reward : — 
 
 "Under the wide and starry sky 
 Dig the grave and let me lie. 
 Glad did I live and gladly die, 
 And I laid me down with a will. 
 
 *' This be the verse you grave for me : 
 Here he lies where he longed to be ; 
 Home is the sailor, home from sea. 
 And the hunter home from the hill." 
 
 Stevenson bore himself admirably in the crisis, recognising that 
 his parents suffered more than himself. " Here," he writes to his 
 friend Charles Baxter, " is a good heavy cross with a vengeance, and 
 all rough with rusty nails that tear your fingers, only it is not I that 
 have to carry it alone ; I hold the light end, but the heavy burden 
 falls on these two\" But notwithstanding good sense and mutual 
 forbearance, there was a period of painful friction, which helped 
 to drive Stevenson out into the world. It was however ill-health 
 that finally severed him from his home ; but that same ill-health 
 fortunately closed the breach which had divided the son from the 
 father, and they remained the best of friends till the death of the 
 latter. 
 
 Stevenson's life was for years a gallant fight against poverty as 
 well as against illness ; for he was of a sturdily independent spirit, 
 and, having rejected the profession his father chose for him, he 
 was all the more determined to support himself in that of his own 
 selection. The combination of frugality, industry and genius 
 would soon have made him successful but for the wretched health 
 which repeatedly disabled him for work while it multiplied his 
 expenses. Several times he seemed at the point of death ; and 
 those voyages in the Pacific, which resulted in his permanent 
 settlement at Vailima, were regarded at the start as the last 
 resource of a doomed man. They added fully six years to his 
 life, and made those years on the whole a period of pleasurable 
 work. Stevenson's intellectual abundance, his variety and re- 
 
 ^ Letters to his Family and Friends, i. 41.
 
 THE LATER FICTION 803 
 
 source, and his pregnancy of expression, are imitable only by the 
 scanty band of his peers ; but his sunny courage, and his playful 
 gaiety in sickness, pain and sorrow, carry a lesson to all. Artist 
 as he was in words, he was never a dilettante, and never consented 
 to sink the man in the writer. In collaboration with Mrs Steven- 
 son he wrote the continuation of the New Arabian Nights (1885) 
 in order " to make dynamite ridiculous if he could not make it 
 horrible " ; and he was only prevented by the illness of his father 
 from going to Ireland and living upon an abandoned farm as 
 a protest against a cruel boycott. Illness drove him into exile \ 
 but, deprived of citizenship in the land of his birth, he took up its 
 duties in that of his adoption. He "bore a banner in the strife." 
 Scarcely anything of Stevenson's is more beautifully written than 
 the volume In the South Seas (1890) ; nothing is more creditable 
 to him than those writings which show how he had taken to heart 
 the interests of the islands, and how he laboured to improve the 
 condition of those around him, and to make the islanders and 
 their affairs intelligible to the world. No writer ever showed 
 more dauntless courage than he in his " open letter " in defence 
 of Father Damien. " I knew," he says, " I was writing a libel ; 
 I thought he [Dr HydeJ v/ould bring an action ; I made sure I 
 should be ruined; I asked leave of my gallant family, and the 
 sense that I was signing away all I possessed kept me up to high- 
 water mark, and made me feel every insult heroic\" 
 
 From the first Stevenson devoted himself to style, and he 
 soon made himself a master. "My style/' he says, "is from the 
 Covenanting writers'",'' a source where few would think of looking 
 for it. But in truth Stevenson was by nature and instinct an 
 artist in words, and few styles are more thoroughly individual than 
 his. He took endless pains to find the fitting phrase and the 
 perfect expression ; and years of training lie behind the beautiful 
 prose even of the early volumes. An hiland Voyage (1878), 
 Travels zviih a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), Virginibus 
 Puerisqiie (1881) and Famiiiar Studies of Alen and Books 
 (1882), all of which are prior to the romance, Treasure 
 Island (1883), with which he first won wide popularity. He 
 ^ Life, ii. 90. * Letters, ii. 312. 
 
 51-2
 
 804 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 studied cadences ; he was tireless in his experiments in diction 
 and arrangement ; the most commonplace spectacle, the simplest 
 subject of conversation, appeared to him in the light of new 
 material for literature. It might have been expected that such 
 a man would be personally priggish, and in his style pedantic 
 and stiff. On the contrary, he was a delightful companion, and 
 his is one of the easiest and most graceful of styles in our 
 literature. 
 
 Though Stevenson's early volumes won him none of the fame 
 which he deserved and little of the money which he sorely 
 needed, they are admirable. They show him to be, among other 
 things, a critic of the greatest delicacy and refinement. His long 
 reflection on the principles of stj'le bore fruit when he came to 
 write the essays of Vh-ginibus Piierisque and the Familiar Studies. 
 Even Lamb could hardly put a finer edge on criticism. • Perhaps 
 Stevenson is at times a little less than just to those writers — some 
 of them very great — who have not grace of form ; but the prin- 
 ciples on which he proceeds are always sound. Redundancy — the 
 unnecessary word — he especially loathes. "There is," he ex- 
 claims, "but one art — to omit! O if I knew how to omit I 
 would ask no other knowledge. A man who knew how to omit 
 would make an Iliad of a daily paper^" And again, "Artistic 
 sight is judicious bhndness'^." He shows also in his criticism 
 that reaction against extreme realism which is one of the most 
 interesting features of his own work. He found realism in 
 fashion. Zolaism in France and tales of the slums and the 
 gutters in England, had thrust romance for the time into the 
 background. Stevenson was one of the leaders of a revived 
 romanticism. He did not believe in the higher reality of 
 ugliness. On the contrary, "ugliness is only the prose of horror," 
 he declares. " It is when you are not able to write Macbeth that 
 you write T/iercse Jiaquin^." 
 
 Under the guidance of such principles Stevenson faced the 
 
 ' Letters to his Family and Friends, i. 289. 
 
 ^ How different from, and how infinitely sounder than, Rusl<in's advice in 
 Modem Painters : " Go to nature in all singleness of heart. ..rejecting nothing, 
 selecting nothing, and scorning nothing." ' Letters, i. 275.
 
 THE LATER FICTION 805 
 
 work of his life. We think of him first and chiefly as the writer 
 of romance, yet it would be surprising to find him not among the 
 poets. The spirit of poetry breathes through all his writings ; his 
 whole conception of nature and life is poetical ; and the melodies of 
 his style, though they were produced by one who never forgot the 
 difference between the rhythms of prose and those of verse, are sug- 
 gestive of poetry. Perhaps necessity had something to do with his 
 choice of a medium ; for he had to make his living, and he could 
 not do it by verse. Nevertheless, even from the point of view of 
 art, the choice was not a mistaken one. There is much charming 
 verse in Utidenvoods and Ballads and Songs of Travel, and 
 A Child's Garden of Verses is unsurpassed for taste and tact. 
 Occasionally the reader is astounded by touches which call to 
 mind the greatest poets. The Requiem, already quoted, would do 
 honour to Shakespeare himself, and the close of the ballad, 
 Christmas at Sea, is magical in its effect. They have just escaped 
 from the jaws of death, and every soul but one heaves a mighty 
 breath of relief. That one has been on the verge of death under 
 the windows of his old home, and in the revulsion, as they steer 
 out to sea, 
 
 "All that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold. 
 Was just that I was leaving home and my folks v/ere growing old." 
 
 But notwithstanding wonderful touches, these volumes can hardly 
 be said to contain the promise of greatness in poetry. It is 
 almost certain that, as a writer of verse, Stevenson would have held 
 a lower place than he does as a writer of prose. The poetry of 
 his nature was not wasted ; it adds an aroma to the prose ; it 
 gives Stevenson distinction ; it is great part of the difference 
 between him and the " Kailyarders." 
 
 By beauty of style, by fertility of invention and by the firm- 
 ness of the lines of character, Stevenson in Treasure Island 
 lifted a boy's book into the category of books for all ages. He 
 demonstrated at the same time that romance was not dead, and 
 that even commercially beauty might be as profitable as ugliness. 
 Though he did work of a much higher quality, he never after- 
 wards wrote anything so popular. Kidnapped (1886) owes so much
 
 8o6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 to the example of Scott that Stevenson must to some extent lose 
 the praise of originality. The contrast between the Lowland and 
 the Highland types of character had been drawn by Scott before ; 
 and it would be absurd to say that Kidnapped rivals the Waverley 
 Novels in sweep and breadth and variety. But what he attempted 
 Stevenson did excellently well. The story is admirably told, and 
 the two principal characters, Alan Breck and David Balfour, are 
 conceived and drawn in a masterly fashion, — the former, with his 
 conceit and courage, his generosity and " huffiness," a type of the 
 Highlander ; the latter, tenacious and faithful, but " dour " and 
 often repellent in manner, equally typical of the Lowlander. The 
 sequel, Catriona (1893), is built of less solid materials. Another 
 Scotch story, The Master of Ballanirae (1889), stands inter- 
 mediate between these two in quality as well as in date. The 
 character of the IVIaster is powerful, but the whole plan is far 
 less happy than that of Kidnapped, and the materials are 
 not such as to make a pleasant book. Si Ives (1897), the story 
 of a French prisoner of war, also has its scene partly laid in 
 Scotland. 
 
 At the very close of his life, in Weir of Hermiston (1896) 
 Stevenson returned for his subject and his characters to Scottish 
 soil. It was, like St Ives, left unfinished at his death; but 
 though only a fragment it has a grandeur which few complete 
 novels possess. The sombre picture of the savage father and his 
 son seems as if it were outlined with the pencil and painted with 
 the colours of Rembrandt. The character of the old Judge — 
 the brutality, combined with the clear, strong intellect and the 
 unswerving justice — is, as Stevenson himself knew, the greatest 
 he ever drew. The elder Kirstie too is grand, and the 
 " nocturnal visit " a masterpiece. The four Elliott brothers, 
 quite distinct, yet unmistakably of the same family, are also 
 great pictures. The whole book has the permanence and the 
 strength of granite. It gives Stevenson a place with the masters 
 and dwarfs everything else he ever did, admirable as much of 
 it is. It deepens infinitely the pathos of his early death. He 
 passed away at the height of his powers, brimful of every kind 
 of strength except physical strength.
 
 THE LATER FICTION 807 
 
 Patriotism was one of the passions of Stevenson's nature, and 
 it is this, combined with intimacy of knowledge, which causes him 
 to revert so frequently to Scottish subjects. Not only his books 
 bear witness to this passion, but the thousand references in his 
 letters to old memo'ries and places, to the Northern Lights, to 
 Edinburgh, to all the scenes of his boyhood and youth. Once 
 and again he was drawn back to Scotland at the risk and to the 
 detriment of his health ; and a touching passage in the Vailima 
 Letters records his sorrow that destiny will not permit him to 
 be " buried in the hills, under the heather and a table tombstone 
 like the martyrs, where the whaups and plovers are crying." 
 "Singular," he goes on, "that I should fulfil the Scots destiny 
 throughout, and live a voluntary exile, and have my head filled 
 with the blessed, beastly place all the time^ ! " The exile, how- 
 ever, was hardly voluntary, seeing that the penalty of death 
 attached to his return. 
 
 Stevenson was by far the greatest of those who in these latter 
 days have written in Lowland Scotch. He cannot be classed 
 among the writers who have been aptly, though somewhat con- 
 temptuously, nicknamed "the Kailyard School." He towers above 
 them in mere diction almost as decisively as in imagination. 
 They seem to invent sentences and even scenes for the sake of 
 some obsolete or obsolescent word like " keelivine." Sometimes 
 they are beyond their own depth as well as beyond the depth of 
 their southern readers : even Mr Barrie, in that work of true 
 genius and of infinite pathos and humour, A Window in T/irums, 
 uses again and again a word, " sepad," which never existed either 
 in Lowland Scotch or in any other tongue known to civilised 
 man. It is never so with Stevenson. His dialect is as easy and 
 natural as that of Burns. It came to his pen because it was the 
 mother tongue of his characters. When he dictated he imitated 
 the voice as well as the diction of the character, and so vivid was 
 his conception of the creature of his own fancy that on one occasion 
 he even looked in the glass in order that he might describe the 
 expression of that imaginary being, and was disconcerted to see 
 only his own features. Both his spirit and his method are 
 
 * Vailima Letters, 302.
 
 8o8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 different from those of the Kailyarders. He is in the line of 
 descent from Scott, they are the heirs of Gait ; he is national, 
 they are parochial. He knew not merely the Scotland of his own 
 day but the Scotland of history, and knew it so well that at one 
 time he even contemplated writing a book upon it ; and, notwith- 
 standing his strange mistake in the title of the Master of Ballantrae 
 (who ought to be the Master of Durrisdeer), it would have been an 
 accurate and learned as well as a readable history. In particular, 
 he thoroughly understood the periods of the Covenant and the 
 Jacobite rising. Despite his heterodoxy, that " something of the 
 Shorter-Catechist," which Henley notes in his sonnet on Steven- 
 son, was a very real and important strain in his character. 
 Beneath the artist lay the moralist. " Here lies one who meant 
 well, tried a little, failed much," is the epitaph he suggests for the 
 Faithful Failure in his last march " out of the day and the dust 
 and the ecstacy'." 
 
 The soundness of the sentiment which guided Stevenson in 
 his choice of subjects is proved by the result ; for almost as 
 decidedly as Scott he is at his best when handling the material 
 which had been familiar to him from boyhood. He disproves the 
 truth of the latter clause of the saying that " Lowland Scotland 
 came in with two warriors and went out with two poets." It is 
 critical lunacy to put Stevenson on the same level with Scott, but 
 as long as portraiture so masterly as that of Kidjiapped, and above 
 all of Weir of Ilermiston, remains possible, the country depicted 
 can hardly be said to have passed away. Nowhere else did he find 
 scenes and characters so well adapted to his genius. In his mis- 
 cellaneous works there are many charming essays and passages the 
 materials for which are drawn from the continent of Europe, from 
 America and from Polynesia, but they are rather his experiences 
 as a traveller than his imaginations ; and his biographer rightly 
 pronounces that " among the work to which Polynesia diverted 
 his attention there is nothing, as a whole, ranking as quite first-rate 
 except the Beach of Falesa"^." Fortunately his exile did not blur 
 memory, perhaps distance only made it more vivid, and so his 
 
 ^ A Christmas Sermon in Across the Plains. 
 " ^Ai^iMx^i Life of Stevenson, ii. 149.
 
 THE LATER FICTION 809 
 
 masterpiece was written in a land half a world away from that 
 where the whaups and plovers were crying. 
 
 The stay-at-home critic is probably apt to underrate the merit 
 of the Pacific stories, The Wrecker (1892) and The Ebb Tide 
 (1894), because he cannot fully appreciate them as pictures true 
 to fact and life ; but, according to travellers familiar with the 
 scenes, Stevenson's work is admirably true ; and he himself 
 claims, doubtless with justice, that The Beach of Falesa is the 
 first realistic South Sea story. " You will know more," he 
 says, "about the South Seas after you have read my little 
 tale, than if you had read a library ^" Another difficulty, 
 with regard to the two romances above-named, is that in them 
 Stevenson was not the sole author : he worked in collaboration 
 with his step-son, Mr Lloyd Osbourne. The statement of the 
 latter, quoted in Mr Balfour's Life of Stevenson, ii. 34, throws a 
 good deal of light on the question of the respective shares of the 
 two writers in the joint product. The irresistibly laughable Wro7ig 
 Box belongs nearly all to Mr Osbourne ; so do the first four 
 chapters of The Ebb Tide ; so does much of the best — and the 
 worst — of The Wrecker, — the picnics, Pinkerton, Nares, Captain 
 Brown, the storm, fight and murders on the Currency Lass. 
 Much of the credit for the spirit and vivacity of the book must 
 therefore go from Stevenson ; while, on the other hand, his name 
 is partly cleared from the stain of the sordid motive of the 
 murders, which smirches irredeemably the character of Carthew. 
 Only in part, for the elder man and the more experienced writer 
 ought to have seen that no plea that the scene is dramatic and 
 that we are not called upon to approve, can ever palliate the 
 loathsomeness of murder done in cold blood from a coward fear 
 for the murderer's own life. There are few motives in fiction so 
 revolting as this, few scenes so hard to forget and so much better 
 forgotten. 
 
 Even when he merely crossed the Border, in the historical 
 romance of The Black Arrow (1888), Stevenson lost greatly in 
 force and vividness. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 
 (1886) stands in a different category, for it is a conception essen- 
 
 ^ Vailirna Letters-, 95.
 
 8lO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 tially independent of time and place. This, by common consent, 
 is one of Stevenson's greatest achievements ; some would say the 
 greatest of all. The central idea is not the invention of Steven- 
 son : no central idea that is worth much ever is invented. The 
 conception of the double nature is as old as the distinction 
 between Ormuzd and Ahriman ; but no one before had worked 
 it out as it is worked out in Jekyll and Hyde, and Stevenson 
 has that best title to proprietorship which is based upon effective 
 use : " the tools to him who can use them." There is one grave 
 flaw in a story which otherwise would have been almost perfect. 
 The powder is a crude device for effecting the transition from one 
 phase of character to the other. It is external and mechanical, 
 whereas the imagination demands something internal and organic. 
 The author and his friends were fully conscious of the defect. 
 But Stevenson had dreamed the story, the powder had. made a 
 profound impression upon him in his dream, and we are told that 
 for this reason it had to remain. But there was probably a pro- 
 founder reason. The dream, wonderful as it was, was but the 
 outcome of his waking thoughts. He had previously spoken to 
 Mr Andrew Lang about his idea of a tale of " a Man who was 
 Two Men " ; and Mr Balfour says that Stevenson was " for 
 a long time casting about for a story to embody ' the con- 
 ception of the duality of man's nature. Everyone knows how 
 the problem which has utterly baffled the thinker the evening 
 before is miraculously solved in the morning. Stevenson's dream 
 was clearly nothing but an extraordinarily vivid and detailed 
 instance of this "unconscious cerebration." By its aid he, a 
 slow and deliberate worker, was enabled to write the first draft 
 of his story in three days. Doubtless an ingenious man could 
 imagine other *' machinery " for the solution ; but could it be solved 
 without machinery? If this be possible the subject is still 
 open, and there may come at last a work which shall surpass 
 Hamlet. 
 
 Though Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has been spoken of as a story, 
 it is really an allegory. But Stevenson was a master of the short 
 story proper. The Pavilion on the Links and Thrawn Janet 
 have been chosen out once and again as the gems of their class.
 
 THE LATER FICTION 8ll 
 
 and if we add The Beach of Falesa, we have a trio which, for merit, 
 will bear comparison with any, and by their variety illustrate 
 admirably the range of Stevenson. Dialect, slang and classical 
 English, the supernatural, the romantic, the realistic, are all there. 
 But it is not only in a few chosen specimens that Stevenson is 
 successful ; the difficulty would be to pick out any of his short 
 stories which does not show high merit. The Body Sfiaicher itself, 
 condemned though it was by friendly critics, and even by himself, 
 is, despite its excess of horror, a well-told tale. 
 
 Stevenson has been spoken of above as a slow and deliberate 
 worker. Assuredly he had not that intellectual abundance with 
 which Scott and Dickens and a few others among his superiors 
 have been gifted ; and as a craftsman he had a scrupulous 
 conscientiousness with which they were not troubled. And yet 
 his achievements are remarkable in bulk as well as in quality. 
 The days of his years were not threescore years and ten, but only 
 forty-four ; and almost all the time he was fighting against physical 
 weakness and disease. It is astonishing that in so short a time, 
 amidst such difficulties, notwithstanding his fastidiousness of taste, 
 he contrived to write the twenty-eight volumes of the Edinburgh 
 edition. They are in every sense his best monument ; they 
 enable us best to understand how the owner of that frail body 
 " laid him down with a will." 
 
 To the kailyard school belonged John Watson (i 850-1 907), 
 better known as Ian Maclaren, the creator of Drumtochty. Beside 
 the Bo7i?iie Brief- Bush (1894) and The Days of Auld Lang Syne 
 (1895) are pleasant, but they are not true to nature. Their unreality 
 provoked a far more masculine writer, George Douglas Brown 
 {1869-1902), whose early death was a serious loss to literature. 
 His House with the Green Shutters is a grim and powerful book, 
 whose harsher features are due to reaction against the senti- 
 mentality of Drumtochty. This revolt drove Brown to excess 
 on the other side ; but had he lived he would have found 
 some via media ; and the force he showed thus early gave 
 promise of a great career. 
 
 Nothing could illustrate the fallaciousness of an attempt to 
 bring the fiction of these latter years under any single formula
 
 8l2 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 better than the fact that, as an author, R. L. Stevenson was 
 strictly contemporary with Joseph Henry Shorthouse (1834-1903) ; 
 for though the latter was some sixteen years older by birth, his first 
 book was not published till i88i, the year of Virginibus Fuerisque. 
 Shorthouse had a very unusual intellectual history. The author 
 of works which seem to speak in every page of the student and 
 the recluse, he was, from the age of sixteen till his health gave 
 way, a business man in the bustling, highly modern city of 
 Birmingham. The son of Quaker parents, in an age when men 
 who changed in faith at all commonly changed to indifference or 
 to scepticism, he became a convert to High Anglicanism, and in 
 1 86 1 was baptised together with his wife. Frequently such a 
 history as this produces a deplorable narrowness of mind ; the con- 
 vert, proverbially, is more convinced of his own rightness, and 
 especially of the errors of others, than they who have been born 
 in the fold. It was not so in the case of Shorthouse ; on the 
 contrary, he seems to have learnt a larger tolerance and a truer 
 liberality from the changes through which he himself had passed. 
 He speaks in his letters of a girl agnostic, who " died in the 
 service of God, whom she fancied that she did not knowV' and 
 he thought that the agnostic ought, in certain cases, to share the 
 communion rite. 
 
 The works of Shorthouse are deeply coloured by the writer's 
 religious opinions : hence, perhaps, undue praise on the one hand, 
 and some risk of undue depreciation on the other. So few of 
 the books which are imbued with this devotional and ecclesiastical 
 spirit can claim to be literature at all, that believers are apt to 
 make more than enough of the few, while the unregenerate 
 are prone to scoff. Shorthouse however suffered little from 
 depreciation ; he was at once, for the most diverse reasons, 
 welcomed by a remarkably wide circle. Historians admired the 
 fidelity of his delineation of the seventeenth century; High 
 Churchmen were fascinated by a tone of mind so much in 
 harmony with their own ; lovers of style were attracted by the 
 melodious English. John Inglesant (18S1) was hailed as a work 
 of genius ; but probably few critics would now commit themselves 
 
 1 Life, i. 243.
 
 THE LATER FICTION 813 
 
 to the view that either it or any of its successors is destined to take 
 a place among the classics of English literature. 
 
 Shorthouse was essentially a romancer, in this point resembling 
 Stevenson ; and, even more than Stevenson, he was slow and 
 scrupulously careful in his manner of work. Thus John Ingle- 
 sant was about ten years in preparation ; but it must be remem- 
 bered that the time devoted to it was only the leisure of a man 
 whose days were absorbed in business. The points of resemblance 
 are however only superficial. Stevenson's romance is the romance 
 of action, Shorthouse's is that of thought. He calls John Inglesant 
 "a philosophical romance," and speaks of Sir Percival (1886) as 
 "almost a devotional book." He never wrote without a purpose, 
 and the purpose is as conspicuous in The Little Schoolmaster 
 Mark (1885), as it is in the other two. In the case of Shorthouse 
 the existence of the purpose will probably prevent any revival of 
 the popularity he once enjoyed. The air of the cloister hangs 
 about all he wrote, and the only air humanity can permanently 
 breathe is the free air of heaven. We have not yet moved as far 
 away from John Inglesant as from The Heir of Redclyffe, but the 
 former is as little likely as the latter to be hailed again as one of 
 the great books of the world. 
 
 The majority of the other writers of fiction in recent years 
 must be passed over, though many have done creditable, and 
 some really able, work. But there remain two who certainly 
 deserve to survive in memory longer than most. The first of 
 these is Samuel Butler (1835-1902), whose Erewhon; or. Over 
 the Range (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901) are the product 
 of the genuinely literary qualities of humour and irony, and betray 
 the hand of the scholar and the thinker ; an eccentric scholar, it 
 is true, as his theory of the feminine authorship of the Odyssey 
 proved, and a heterodox thinker ; but a man of wide knowledge 
 and of indubitable power. His strange romances are never likely 
 to be popular, but the perusal of them will repay all who are 
 interested in the workings of an original mind. Butler was more 
 than a romancer. His writings on evolution and his miscellaneous 
 essays prove him to have been a profound student of the problems 
 of his time ; and his works of fiction are just the expression of his
 
 8 14 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 philosophy in another form. Erewhon and its sequel are instances 
 of a species of criticism of society, of which Gtclliver's Travels is 
 the greatest example in English. The species has been popular 
 in recent years ; but few who have attempted it have rivalled 
 Butler in depth. Still better is The Way of all Flesh, a more 
 regular novel on which Butler laboured for about twelve years, 
 finishing it, though he did not publish it, in 1884. For subtlety 
 of psychological analysis it would be necessary to go back to 
 George Eliot and Meredith to find Butler's superior. Outside 
 their writings there has been nothing in recent years equal to the 
 study of the Pontifexes. But the very profundity of his thought 
 has militated, and will militate, against Butler's popularity. His 
 are not books which he who runs may read; and he had not 
 that power of dramatic presentation which induced " the general 
 reader " to forgive the thought in George Eliot, and even, up to 
 a certain point, in Meredith. 
 
 Equal independence and strength of mind were shown by 
 George Gissing (1857-1903), whose literary life was for many 
 years a struggle against poverty, obstruction and depreciation, 
 which left traces upon his character and writings that were only 
 beginning to be obliterated in the closing years of his life. His 
 earliest works, The Undassed {i2,^/^) and Demos (1886), show his 
 full strength if not all his mature skill ; but they failed to win 
 popularity, and it was not till the appearance of New Grub Street 
 (1891) that Gissing began to be recognised as a man to be 
 reckoned as a force in literature. He himself was not wholly 
 free from blame. The life he depicted was bare and ugly, and 
 though he could doubtless have adduced facts in justification of 
 his harshest scenes, the general impression was probably misleading. 
 His excellent critical study of Charles Dickens (1898), perhaps 
 the best book ever written about the laureate of the London streets, 
 indicates whence his inspiration came. But he made the mistake 
 of omitting altogether that which is present in Dickens even to 
 excess, the romance and the poetry of poverty. He saw the priva- 
 tions of the poor, but he was blind and deaf to that which Dickens 
 never allows his readers to forget, their joyousness. He has 
 nothing cognate to ihe happy vagabonds who brighten the pages
 
 THE LATER FICTION 815 
 
 of Nicholas Nicklehy and The Old Curiosity Shop. It is the 
 customary mistake of the modern delineator of humble life in 
 great cities. Had Gissing passed through the experiences of the 
 blacking warehouse, his memory would have retained only the 
 grief and pain and misery, and all the humour and fun would 
 have been forgotten. Towards the close Gissing seems to have 
 become conscious of his mistake, or to have outlived the bitterness 
 from which it sprang. Of all his works, the greatest, the most 
 lovable, the most truly human, is The Private Papers of Henry 
 Ryecroft (1903), in which he, in the most delightful manner, takes 
 the reader into his confidence, lifts the veil from his inner life, 
 and adds one more to the list of great autobiographic fictions. 
 
 While the writers who have hitherto been treated wrote 
 primarily for adults, there has probably been no time in the past 
 (since those far-off days when the traditional nursery stories and 
 fairy tales were invented) in which the needs of children were so 
 carefully considered, and were satisfied by work of such high 
 literary quality. Three writers, Lewis Carroll, Mrs Gatty, and 
 Mrs Ewing, may be chosen as representatives of the class ; of 
 whom it is not too much to say that they lifted fiction for children 
 as high above its former level as Scott lifted fiction for adults. 
 
 Of the three, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832—1898), who 
 framed his no7n de phmie out of his two Christian names, was the 
 most highly gifted. By profession a mathematician, who is said 
 by experts to have done some valuable original work, Lewis 
 Carroll combined with his mathematical faculty a quaint humour 
 and a riotous fancy which have secured him a perfectly safe 
 position in literature, because his gift is unique. No man is more 
 original than he. His mathematical work may be forgotten, the 
 serious verses in Phantasmagoria (1869) are known to com- 
 paratively few, even the exquisite " Child of the pure unclouded 
 brow " may be passed over by many in their hurry to get at the 
 story of Alice passing through the looking-glass ; but the author of 
 The Walrus and the Carpenter and Jabberwocky, the creator of 
 Alice and the White Rabbit, the White Knight, the Red Queen, 
 the Duchess, the Dodo, the Cheshire Cat and a hundred other 
 strange creatures, is as safe from oblivion as the author of
 
 8l6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Gulliver's Travels. Of Lewis Carroll's various works, Alices 
 Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass 
 (187 1 ) are incomparably the best. No writings were ever more 
 indubitably the outcome of a native gift. Lewis Carroll was 
 indefatigable in detail, in polishing the text, in suggestions for the 
 illustrations ; but substantially the tales were the tales which 
 welled up spontaneously in his fancy, and which he told to 
 children of flesh and blood. There is a pretty story related in 
 Mr Collingwood's Life of Dodgson which throws light upon his 
 success. Lewis Carroll had made an appointment to meet a lady 
 (an artist, successful in the drawing of fairies) in a public place. 
 They had never met, there was no one to introduce them, and 
 the lady began to wonder how they were to know each other 
 among the multitude. Presently a gentleman entered with two 
 little girls clinging to his hands. He spoke a few words to one of 
 the children and then at once came forward and introduced him- 
 self. When the lady asked how he knew her he repHed : " My 
 little friend found you. I told her I had come to meet a young 
 lady who knew fairies, and she fixed on you at once. But / knew 
 you before she spoke." It is just this vivid sense of the reality 
 of the unreal which makes Lewis Carroll's books triumphantly 
 successful, as it is just the absence of it which stamps with the 
 mark of failure his innumerable imitators, clever as some of them 
 are. They have not fed on honey-dew, nor drunk the milk of 
 Paradise. But Lewis Carroll had been thus nourished and had 
 "known the fairies" from childhood. Like so many remarkable 
 men — for precocity develops into genius far more often than is 
 supposed-^he showed the bent of his mind at a very early age, 
 and his ingenuity as a conjurer, his love of marionettes, and above 
 all of odd pets, including, his biographer says, even snails and 
 toads, all seem fit and proper characteristics of the creator of 
 Wonderland. 
 
 ' The other two, Margaret Gatty (1809-1873) and Juliana 
 Horatia Ewing (1841-1S85), afford one of the rare examples of 
 talent not only inherited, but almost exactly reproduced. They 
 were mother and daughter. Mrs Gatty was the daughter of 
 the Rev. A. J. Scott, Nelson's chaplain on board the Victory,
 
 THE LATER FICTION 817 
 
 and her first literary venture was a volume of recollections 
 of her father, written in collaboration with her husband. But 
 the children's tales initiated by Fairy Godmothers aiid other 
 Tales (1851) were the real literary work of her life. Her own 
 motherhood apparently suggested them to her, and no small part 
 of the impulse to write them came from the mind of her gifted 
 little daughter Juliana. The child was a story-teller and a mimic 
 from infancy, and the title both of Aunt Judy's Tales (1859) and 
 of Aufit Judy's Magazine, which Mrs Gatty started in 1866 and 
 edited till her death, were taken from her daughter's nursery 
 nickname. Of the two ladies, Mrs Ewing had the finer literary 
 gift. Her stories are as truly, though not as richly and whimsically, 
 humorous as Lewis Carroll's, and, like his, they are delightful 
 alike to children and to their seniors. Her range is fairly wide. 
 In Madam Liberality she displayed (unconsciously, her sister 
 says) the gift of self-portraiture. Her We and the World is 
 perhaps the best book for boys ever written by a woman. It 
 must have been intuition that enabled her to realise what she 
 depicts in it, for her delicate health made anything of the nature 
 of adventure impossible to her. But she travelled considerably. 
 Visits to her husband's relatives in the north v/ere the source of 
 Scotch stories and Scotch characters, while camp life in Canada 
 and at Aldershot accounts for that love of things military which 
 more than once shows itself in her writings. The best of these, 
 such as the two named above, The Land of Lost Toys, Jackanapes 
 and Jan of the Windmill, are pieces of genuine literature, so firmly 
 based on child-nature (which is just human nature in the bud) that 
 they must rank as classics of their kind. They are moreover 
 beautifully written. Mrs Ewing's English is based on the 
 soundest of maxims — never to use two words where one would 
 do; and as she wrote with perfect sincerity, and under the 
 guidance of an instinctive good taste, the result is admirable. 
 
 w. 52
 
 PART III 
 
 ET CETERA 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 
 
 § I. The Historians. 
 
 It has been said with truth that, so far as poetry is concerned, 
 the eighteenth century closes about 1760; for the poet is also 
 a prophet, and it is his privilege, or his doom, to feel the force of 
 conceptions which belong rather to the future than to the present. 
 Hence, in part, the difficulty frequently felt by the poet's own 
 generation in recognising his greatness. But the heavier forms 
 of literature do not in this way anticipate the course of time. 
 When the classicism of eighteenth century verse was already 
 beginning to yield to romance, eighteenth century prose was still 
 only in mid career. Pope, the incarnation of the former, died in 
 1744 ; but it was ten years later before the first volume of Hume's 
 History of Englafid was published, and more than forty years 
 later before Gibbon's Decline a?id Fall was completed. The great 
 eighteenth century historians helped to fill the gap between the 
 declining classical school and the still immature school of 
 romance. When the latter school was in its glory, history seemed 
 to undergo an eclipse, and it is not till Tennyson and Browning 
 have begun their career that we meet once more with names 
 worthy to set beside those of the leaders of an earlier day. But 
 if the change in spirit between the eighteenth century and the
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 819 
 
 nineteenth was later in coming, when it did come it was not less 
 striking in history than in poetry. Indeed, it might plausibly be 
 contended that at least the sense of change in the latter depart- 
 ment is less profound than it is in the former. Not even the 
 most pronounced of romanticists would ever have ignored Pope 
 in treating of English poetry ; but while in the beginning of the 
 nineteenth century Hume, Robertson and Gibbon were among 
 the authors " whom no gentleman's library should be without," 
 in its closing quarter Huxley, in one of the best books ever 
 written upon Hume, passed over the celebrated History of 
 Engla?id with little comment. Even Huxley would hardly have 
 ventured to ignore a work so famous had he not been conscious 
 that the feeUng of his contemporaries was on his side. Not only 
 did that sentiment condemn all eighteenth century historians, 
 with the exception of Gibbon, but, as we see in J. Cotter 
 Morison's monograph on Macaulay, it was disposed to include in 
 the black list many of the earlier nineteenth century writers as 
 well. The " blessed word " science had been pronounced, and 
 all histories which had the disadvantage of being indubitably 
 pieces of literature were under suspicion. There are however 
 curious inconsistencies in Cotter Morison's treatment. Carlyle 
 passes muster, though he is disturbingly literary and would 
 certainly have drowned in a deluge of contempt the doctrine that 
 history is " science." So does Grote ; and though Grote had a 
 saving clumsiness which might procure his acquittal on the first 
 count, he was hardly less a partisan than Mitford, and was quite 
 as blind to the virtues of those who were not democrats as 
 Macaulay was to the merits of the Tories. 
 
 It is not altogether easy to say wherein the difference consists 
 which is felt to separate thus widely the works of eighteenth 
 century historians from those of their successors ; but two or 
 three suggestions may be made towards an explanation. In the 
 first place, nearly all the historical work of the nineteenth century 
 is permeated with the idea of nationality; and it is significant 
 that The Decline and Fall, the one work of the eighteenth century 
 which is still accepted, is just that into which, from the nature of 
 the subject, the question of nationality scarcely enters. Had 
 
 52—2
 
 820 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Gibbon's theme been, not the world-wide Roman Empire, but the 
 story of some single people, would even his thoroughness have 
 sufificed to make his treatment of it satisfactory a century after his 
 death ? Between him and his successors the French Revolution 
 had intervened, asserting the right of each people, as of each 
 man, to grow freely in its own way. Down to that time mediaeval 
 theories of a universal empire and a universal church had 
 continued to sway thought, although the facts which originally 
 justified them had long been changed. The nineteenth century 
 had to build up a German nation and an Italian nation, as well 
 as to remodel France, to incorporate into its system an amorphous 
 Russia, and to witness the partial disintegration of the Austrian 
 Empire, because it was in conflict with the conception of nationality. 
 The men who had such problems to solve and who saw such changes 
 taking place could live no longer in the atmosphere of niedijeval 
 political thought. In science it is the new men, but in history 
 the old, who are uniformitarians. The new school emphasises 
 differences which were previously dismissed as of secondary 
 moment or wholly ignored. Racial and national peculiarities 
 acquire an importance they never had before. In no previous 
 age, either in the political field or in the literary, do we hear so 
 much about the characteristics of the Celt ; at no period prior to 
 the Victorian era would it have been possible for a great historian 
 to " see all things in Teutonism, as Malebranche saw all things 
 in God." 
 
 A historian who holds that the difTerences between the 
 political systems and social institutions of one nation and 
 those of another are more or less fortuitous and superficial will 
 naturally attach far less importance to certain lines of investigation 
 and groups of facts than another who believes that these differ- 
 ences indicate deep-seated and enduring varieties of character. 
 Hume would have deemed it waste of time to spend years of 
 patient investigation in attempting to trace the steps by which the 
 Engli.sh nation emerged from barbarism : in his view civilised 
 man only, and not the barbarian, was worthy of attention. But 
 the barbarian becomes important when we conceive him to be 
 organically related to civilised man; and this too is part of
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 82 1 
 
 the modern conception. The nation is the outcome of a long 
 process 01 development ; and the rude beginnings of customs and 
 institutions acquire a new meaning from the fact that they are the 
 germs from which springs the elaborate organisation of the 
 civilised community. The idea of evolution began to be applied, 
 tentatively, spasmodically, blunderingly, in history before it had 
 yet triumphed in science ; but after that triumph the power 
 of the idea and the confidence of those who used it were 
 enormously increased. And here we see a second point of 
 difference between the historical work of the eighteenth century 
 and that of the nineteenth, which, in its later stages fully and 
 consciously, in its earlier phases partially and unconsciously, is 
 guided by the idea of evolution. As a natural consequence, nine- 
 teenth century history is marked, just like evolutionary science, 
 by the attempt to trace things back to their origin. The concern 
 of the biologist with the amoeba and with protoplasm corresponds 
 with the interest of the modern historian in village communities 
 and in early land systems. There are divers kinds of micro- 
 scopes, and multifarious are their uses. 
 
 Connected with, but distinguishable from, this^ is the profound 
 respect for fact in modern history. Here the exampje and the 
 influence of physical science have been paramount. An examina- 
 tion of its method shows that the root-principle is a scrupulous 
 respect for facts as facts ; and the record of its triumphs is an 
 ample vindication of the method. The lesson, applied to history, 
 has led to the attempt to make a thorough and exhaustive investi- 
 gation of documents, and to the accumulation of vast piles of raw 
 material, which are to form the foundation for some great induc- 
 tion of the future. Yet, as the piles grow, the question whence 
 the colossal genius is to come who shall evolve order out of this 
 chaos presses more and more, and the doubt suggests itself 
 whether the modern historian is not a little like the modern 
 millionaire, who is worn and harassed by the custody of wealth far 
 beyond his capacity to use or enjoy. In some respects, modern 
 historical work seems to stand intermediate between the facile 
 theorising of the eighteenth century and the dryness of the old 
 chronicle ; and its aspiration is after the latter model rather than
 
 822 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the former. The fact is supposed to be all the better if it is 
 "hard," and the enquirer sometimes forgets that a "hard " fact 
 in human relations means only a fragment of a fact. We can 
 imagine the chronicler recording the funeral of the Duke of 
 Wellington: "November iS, 1852. This day was the Duke of 
 Wellington buried in St Paul's Cathedral. Cannons were fired, 
 and great crowds were in the streets." That is the " hard" fact. 
 Tennyson tells the story too. He does not even give the date, 
 and he gives much that is not " hard " and, in a sense, is not " fact " 
 at all. His majestic pageant of the life of the great Duke, the 
 vision of the spirit of the " mighty seaman " by whose side he is 
 to sleep till the trump of doom, the nation's lament that " the last 
 great Englishman is low," — these call up the emotions rather than 
 the "hard facts" of that great scene. And yet who can doubt which 
 of the two records contains the greater truth ? Similarly, .we can 
 imagine an Athenian chronicler recording that Socrates, condemned 
 on a specified charge, on a certain day drank a cup of hemlock. 
 Of the same events Plato has left an account "touched with 
 emotion " ; and even if it could be shown that Plato's account 
 came solely from his own imagination, it would remain true in a 
 far deeper sense than the bare narrative of the chronicler. The 
 modern historian feels convinced that many of the speeches in 
 Thucydides could never have been spoken by the men to whom 
 he ascribes them; and yet the modern historian would be far 
 poorer if Thucydides had contented himself with recording the 
 " hard fact " that at such-and-such a time and place such-and-such 
 events happened. It is tolerably certain that the fateful pause 
 of Caesar on the banks of the Rubicon never took place, and we 
 no longer intermingle our imagination with the facts in that 
 particular way ; and yet it was not only a vivid dramatic instinct, 
 but an essentially sound historical one, that inspired that famous 
 scene. 
 
 The task of a perfect philosophy, it has been said, would be 
 to re-think the great thought of creation. The task of a perfect 
 history would be to re-think the thoughts as well as to record the 
 actions of those who have made history ; and they are not merely 
 soldiers and statesmen, but all mankind. Hence the illusoriness
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 823 
 
 of the so-called " hard " fact. Even science has to discover that fact 
 is only important as it leads to law, the work of intelligence, and 
 that he who accumulates facts is the mere " hodman " to him 
 who can piece them together and make a dwelling — cottage, 
 or mansion, or palace — for the spirit. Eighteenth century 
 historians made a grave mistake in neglecting to look to the 
 solidity of their foundation ; but they were not wrong in their 
 conviction that the building was a greater thing than the pile of 
 bricks. Nineteenth century historians have been careful of the 
 foundation, but, in some cases at least, they have been neglectful 
 of the superstructure. The analogy of physical science has had 
 an influence not altogether wholesome. It has encouraged a 
 mistaken belief, in the first place, that the historical fact may be 
 " isolated " or abstracted as successfully as the chemical fact ; and, 
 in the second place, that " hard " facts thus " isolated " may be 
 recombined with results comparable in accuracy with those of 
 physical science. But in truth, whatever the future may have in 
 store, it is certain that as yet there is no such thing as a science 
 of human character ; and as human character is the raw material 
 out of which history is made, the attempt to bring it under the 
 category of science seems at least premature. 
 
 These tendencies and characteristics manifest themselves, 
 probably without the knowledge of the writers, in some of the 
 minor historians of the time. The new interest in the beginnings 
 of things, for example, is seen in the rise of the study both of 
 Old Enghsh as a language and of the early English as a people ; 
 whereby the foundations were laid for that pronounced Teutonism 
 which was one of the most conspicuous marks of the English 
 historians a little later. Sharon Turner (i 768-1847), in his 
 History of the Anglo-Saxons (i 799-1805), was a pioneer; and 
 experts are agreed that in this early work he was happier and 
 showed greater mastery than in the subsequent writings in which 
 he carried down the history of England, first through the middle 
 ages, and then to the death of Elizabeth. Turner has long been 
 superseded ; but they who have gone beyond him traversed first 
 the road which he had made. Among those who followed in his 
 footsteps were J. M. Kemble (1807-1857), author of The Saxons
 
 824 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 in England (1849), and Sir Francis Palgrave (i788-i86i)who, as 
 deputy-keeper of the Records, had much to do with rendering 
 accessible that immense mass of state documents with the help 
 of which the history of England has been largely rewritten. But 
 Palgrave was more than a diligent and careful editor, he was also 
 the author of a series of original works elucidating chiefly the 
 early history of England, and culminating in the History of Nor- 
 7nandy a?id of England (i 851— 1864), in which he showed a rare 
 combination of wide reading with the talent for generalisation. 
 Freeman declared that, as the man who discovered that the 
 Roman Empire did not end in 476 a.d., Palgrave deserved a 
 place among the foremost of historians ; and it is at least 
 undeniable that he who corrected the views of historians on a 
 point of such vital moment as this had used his learning to good 
 purpose and deserves to be held in grateful memory. 
 
 In close connexion with the study of early English history 
 went the study of the early forms of the language. For the 
 eighteenth century, English literature began with Chaucer, as it 
 may almost be said that English history began with the Conquest. 
 The nineteenth century pushed the date back in both cases by 
 centuries. Beowulf became the starting-point instead of The 
 Canterbtiry Tales ; and, as neither the writings nor the events of 
 those early centuries could be understood without the study of 
 what was practically another language, philological investigations 
 in Old English went hand-in-hand with the study of the early 
 English period. Kemble did linguistic as well as historical work, 
 editing and translating Beowulf, and also the poetry of the Codex 
 Vercellensis. Joseph Bosworth wrote a grammar and compiled 
 a dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon language. Benjamin Thorpe 
 laboured in the same field, though in such a way as to have 
 incurred the censure of others who have followed him. J. R. 
 Green roundly pronounces him "a dishonest old man\" In a 
 later stage of the language, and also at a somewhat later date, 
 philological learning is best represented by the works of the 
 accomplished Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1886), who was 
 a good, though not a great, artist in words, as well as their historian. 
 
 ^ Letters, 144.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 825 
 
 Trench's best and most widely-known works are the two vohimes 
 on the English language, On the Study of Words (1851) and 
 English^ Past and Present (1855). These have the rare merit 
 of presenting real learning in an attractive form, and, either 
 directly, or through "conveyances" effected from them to other 
 works which are at least more ponderous, they have probably 
 done more than any other volumes ever written to spread a 
 knowledge of the history of English. Philology was in those days 
 something of a hobby of the man of letters, and among those who 
 showed the tendency as well as Trench may be mentioned 
 George Borrow, and, in a rather eccentric way, William Barnes, 
 the Dorset poet. 
 
 Philology however is essentially a science "made in Ger- 
 many." Inspiration in the early period came from the great 
 Grimm; and it was not unfitting that in later days the chief 
 honours should have fallen to a countryman of Grimm's, 
 Friedrich Max Muller (i 823-1 900), who, coming to England in 
 1846, learnt to wield the language of his adopted country with a 
 grace and elegance never surpassed by any man of foreign birth. 
 He covered a field incomparably wider than that of scholars like 
 Trench. His was the science of comparative philology. His 
 domain was the whole of human speech, especially the Aryan 
 family of languages, and, above all, Sanskrit. But, besides this, he 
 was a student of comparative mythology, of the origin and growth 
 of religion and of the science of thought, on all of which subjects 
 he wrote books. In popular estimation he was the embodiment 
 of learning, vast, varied and profound. In the estimation of 
 scholars he never ranked so high as this, and in his later years 
 his reputation decidedly declined. To some extent their de- 
 preciatory criticisms must be discounted. In Max Miiller's case, 
 just as in the case of Huxley, the bemuddled and the dull found 
 it difficult to believe that wit and lucidity need not necessarily 
 connote shallowness. Allowance must be made too for a touch 
 of envy of a man who was so extraordinarily successful. For 
 Max Miiller was one of those who are gifted with the power 
 of charming all sorts and conditions of men — except their rivals. 
 Few men of letters have received more ample recognition.
 
 826 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Every nation of the West delighted to honour him, and when 
 the Japanese sent envoys to Europe in search of a religion, 
 they went to Max Miiller for advice. In the University of 
 Tokio they have given a final home to the library he collected. 
 There is something almost portentous in such a capacity for 
 winning distinction. Those who stood more or less near to 
 Max Miiller in scholarship felt, rightly, that it was not solely 
 due to those merits which are called " solid," and they were 
 inclined, more questionably, to deny that the tact which re- 
 inforced them was only one merit the more. That tact never 
 failed Max Miiller : he always knew how to do the right thing at 
 the right moment. He was one of the most alert of men — 
 perhaps the most alert of gicat scholars, a tribe rather remarkable 
 for being a year or two, if not a generation or two, behind the 
 time. Not so Max Miiller. A few years after his settlement in 
 England the Crimean war broke out, and immediately he was in 
 the field with his Lafiguages of the Seat of War in tJie East (1855). 
 And so it was to the end. No great event occurred, no question 
 was broached which interested the public mind, but he brought it, 
 if by any ingenuity the thing could be done, into relation with his 
 studies. A man with so much of the wisdom of the world was 
 a strange phenomenon among scholars, and they resented the 
 intrusion without well knowing why. 
 
 The depreciation referred to cannot, however, be altogether 
 explained away in this fashion. It seems certain that, in his 
 later years, Max Miiller showed a want of intellectual flexibility 
 which was astonishing in such a man. He clung to old views 
 with a tenacity which is not suggestive of the mental alertness 
 just spoken of, but which may, perhaps, be explained on the 
 ground that he attempted to do too much, and so failed to give 
 adequate consideration to new evidence. It is probable also that, 
 from the first, he had a higher genius for popularising than for 
 profound research. In short, he had the defects of his qualities. 
 Some of his generalisations are certainly a little shallow. Nearly 
 all critics are agreed that he puts upon the sun-myth a burden 
 greater than it will bear ; and his attempt, when Darwinism was 
 new, to erect language into an impassable barrier between the
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 827 
 
 brute and man showed a very inadequate appreciation of the 
 problem. But when all deductions are made, the man who 
 could write upon an abstruse subject with such life and charm, 
 who could interest so many, who contrived to do so much to- 
 wards breaking down the barriers between East and West, 
 deserved all the honours that were showered upon him ; and 
 if we could wish a change it would be that others might be 
 levelled up to him, not that he might be brought down to their 
 obscurity. 
 
 The philologists have led to a digression from the historians, 
 to whom it is necessary to return. Those who have hitherto been 
 mentioned were of secondary importance : the man who at the 
 beginning of the period stood highest in reputation, and whose 
 work was of most permanent value, was Henry Hallam (1777- 
 1859), author of ^ View of the State of Europe dwing the Middle 
 Ages (1818), The Constitutio7ial History of England (1827) and 
 An Introduction to the Literature of Europe (1837-1839). And 
 in this instance the order of time is probably also the order of 
 merit. For two reasons the Intro diictio7i to the Literature of 
 Europe is the least satisfactory of Hallam's works. In the first 
 place, it is too ambitious. No man could have dealt adequately 
 with such a subject ; and Hallam, whose knowledge even of 
 English writers was rather extensive and general than profound, 
 was not sufficiently accomplished as a linguist to be altogether 
 successful. But a graver reason is that he was singularly deficient 
 in one of the most essential qualities of a critic — sympathy. He 
 was " judicial," as nearly all who have written about him point 
 out\ but sympathetic he was not. Nothing stirred him to 
 enthusiasm, and he saw defects more clearly and more rapidly 
 than merits: "he is a judge," Macaulay wrote of him, "but a 
 hanging judge." It is also clear that to certain forms of literary 
 merit he was altogether blind. Whatever was neat in form and 
 
 ^ A remarkable illustration of the force of contemporary prejudice is the fact 
 that, while Macaulay in The Edinburgh Review was praising The Constitutional 
 History of England ?i% "the most impartial book that we ever read," Southey 
 in The Quarterly was doing the duty of a sound Tory and pronouncing it " the 
 production of a decided partisan."
 
 828 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 lucid in meaning, whatever was weighty and dignified, whatever 
 appealed to the reason and would bear its scrutiny, he appreciated. 
 But he was often alienated by passion, he was apt to undervalue 
 the lighter and more fanciful kinds of verse, he was wholly unable 
 to understand mysticism. In short, as a critic he belonged rather 
 to the eighteenth than to the nineteenth century. 
 
 Hallam's historical work too is a link between the two 
 centuries. He showed a readiness to undertake vast subjects 
 which betokened the spirit of an earlier time, when a man could 
 take all knowledge for his province; and yet he combined with 
 this an amount of original research, a patience with documents 
 and a sense of the importance of fresh knowledge, which belonged 
 to the new generation. He is in some danger of undue 
 depreciation, because others have done more thoroughly what 
 he did first. His picture of the middle ages is drawn from 
 sources which no one had examined till he pointed them 
 out. His treatment of the English constitution too was fresh. 
 But it has grave defects. Hallam had too much belief in 
 mechanism and too little in men : he and Carlyle stood at opposite 
 poles. How much is lost in this way is seen if we compare 
 Hallam with Bagehot, who never forgets that a machine worked 
 by a being with nerves and emotions is a different thing from one 
 which runs automatically. Further, the impartiality for which 
 Hallam was celebrated can only be acknowledged with reserva- 
 tions. He was absolutely fair in intention ; but no less than 
 other writers he carried his prepossessions with him and inter- 
 preted his facts by them. His five checks are really the principles 
 of the Whig party, and when they are granted Whig conclusions 
 necessarily follow. He puts a hundred-weight in one scale, and 
 then manifests the utmost scrupulosity in balancing the ounces 
 and the grains. 
 
 The value of an impartiality thus conditioned may reasonably 
 be doubted, and all the more so because of the manifest dis- 
 advantages of such a temperament. Few men give a stronger 
 impression of austerity and coldness than Hallam. His judg- 
 ments, as Macaulay's remark suggests, are seldom favourable. 
 •' We live in a damned wicked world," said Sir Peter Teazle, " and
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 829 
 
 the fewer we praise the better " ; and Hallam seems to have been 
 of his mind. Not that he is often unreservedly condemnatory : his 
 impartiaUty rather takes the form of showing that " black's not so 
 black, — nor white so very white." The universal grey becomes 
 wearisome, and we welcome as a relief the vivid colours of Carlyle, 
 the strong antitheses of Macaulay, or the vigorous whitewashing of 
 Froude. Hallam's work seems to come from the pen of a recluse 
 who has been so busy exercising his head that he has found no 
 time to develop a heart. And yet Hallam was neither heartless 
 nor a recluse. On the contrary, he was familiar, through Holland 
 House, with the best society of London, was one of the most 
 brilliant talkers of the brilliant group gathered there, and had 
 sharpened his judgment in frequent conversation with statesmen 
 and men of the world. 
 
 While impartiality might be called the foible of Hallam, 
 partisanship was a very necessity of the position of the Catholic 
 historian, John Lingard (1771-1851), author of Antiqiiities of the 
 Anglo-Saxon Church (1806) and of a History of England (1819- 
 1830) which carries down the narrative to the Revolution of 
 1689. A Cathohc by birth and trained at Douay, it was im- 
 possible for Lingard to be absolutely unbiassed ; indeed, his chief 
 motive in writing the history of England was that he might 
 present the case of his own communion, The firmest Protestant, 
 however, must admit that it is probable, or, rather, certain a priori, 
 that the beaten party must have a case to present and is only too 
 likely to have suffered more or less injustice at the hands of their 
 triumphant antagonists. It is to Lingard's credit that he has 
 advocated the cause of the Romanists on the whole moderately 
 and well. Macaulay quotes him as an unwilling witness to illus- 
 trate his own view of the character of James IL It is true that in 
 doing so he describes Lingard as " an able but partial writer " ; 
 and the words are fully justified ; but the fact that the passage 
 existed goes to show that in a crucial case Lingard had given an 
 honest account. More convincing is the fact that the historian 
 incurred in about equal measure the condemnation of extremists 
 on both sides. His work may be regarded as one of the English 
 documents in that Catholic revival which has been dealt with
 
 830 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 elsewliere ; but of course it was Lingard's object to conceal this 
 purpose as completely as possible. 
 ^ It is however in Carlyle and Macaulay that we first find the 
 
 characteristics of the nineteenth century historian fully developed 
 and on the great scale. The former was so large a figure, and 
 touched Victorian literature at so many points, that it has been 
 necessary to treat him elsewhere ; the latter won fame earlier and 
 more easily, but is not so indispensable to a comprehension of 
 the literature of the time. As a historian, Thomas Babington 
 Macaulay (1800-1859) was remarkably fortunate in the circum- 
 stances of his life. He grumbles occasionally in his letters and 
 diary at the chains and fetters of office and at the inroads upon 
 his time made by the House of Commons ; and probably he spent 
 too much of his life as an active politician. But his sober judg- 
 ment about the influence of public life and experience upon the 
 historian is given in the essay on Sir James Mackintosh's History 
 of the Revolution, where he quotes with approval Gibbon's remark 
 that he owed part of his success as a historian to his experience in 
 the Militia and in the House of Commons. Judged on this 
 principle, Macaulay's own life was as well adapted for the pro- 
 duction of great historical work as any ever lived by an English- 
 man. He had leisure for research, and yet from boyhood he was 
 interested in and familiar with the practical handling of great 
 public questions. His father, Zachary Macaulay, a man of 
 austere and lofty character, was one of that inner circle through 
 whose persistent labours and self-sacrifice the cause of the West 
 Indian slaves was fought and won. Zachary Macaulay had 
 acquired his knowledge of the slave system as manager of an 
 estate in Jamaica, and that knowledge induced him to give up 
 a lucrative career in order that he might devote himself heart and 
 soul to the interests of the unhappy slaves. The son of such a 
 man grew up in an atmosphere of devotion to public duty and of 
 ceaseless labour for objects entirely unselfish. 
 
 Socially, the Clapham sect were plain middle-class people, but 
 through Wilberforce, the friend of Pitt, they had contact with the 
 upper ranks of politics and society. Young Macaulay repeatedly 
 heard Wilberforce talk of Pitt and the House of Commons, and a
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 83 1 
 
 passage in the essay on Warren Hastings, describing the Prime 
 Minister's extraordinary change of front with respect to the ques- 
 tion of impeachment, is obviously drawn from his remembrance 
 of these conversations. Intellectually, the friends of Zachary 
 Macaulay were powerful, but somewhat narrow. They cared 
 little for the elegancies of culture. In religion they were intensely 
 evangelical. Possibly young Macaulay would have been narrowed 
 and stunted if he had remained long within the exclusive influence 
 of this sect. But, going into residence at Cambridge in 18 18, he 
 was fortunate enough to find himself the contemporary of a 
 number of young men not unworthy to measure themselves 
 against him. Among those who afterwards achieved some degree 
 of literary fame were John Moultrie, Winthrop M. Praed and the 
 two Coleridges, Derwent and Henry Nelson, inheritors both of a 
 great name and of a share of the genius which seems to be the 
 birthright of that wonderful family. From these men Macaulay 
 learned that there were many ways of looking at great problems, 
 and was saved from the danger of passing through life with the 
 stamp of Clapham too visibly branded upon him. 
 
 It was not however by budding men of letters that the 
 youthful society of the University was led. The predominant 
 interest of the cleverest undergraduates was political, and their 
 acknowledged chief was Charles Austin, " the only man who ever 
 dominated Macaulay," but one who, unhappily for his own per- 
 manent fame, contented himself with the worldly rewards of an 
 early and extraordinary success at the bar. The ambition of 
 these brilliant young men was to use for politics the literary gifts 
 which they undoubtedly possessed. This was true not only of 
 Austin, but to a considerable extent of Macaulay, and of Praed 
 and Henry Nelson Coleridge as well. 
 
 Charles Austin had already either imbibed from his elder 
 brother, the well-known jurist, or developed for himself, Utilitarian 
 opinions, and was imbued with the political principles of the philo- 
 sophical Radicals. He greatly admired the democratic institutions 
 of America, and he disapproved of the aristocratic and ecclesiastical 
 elements in the English system. These were the subjects of 
 formal debates, and of innumerable informal conversations as
 
 832 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the young men walked along the Trumpington road, or strolled 
 about the beautiful lawns that slope down to the Cam, or 
 sat over their College fires. Austin taught Macaulay to look no 
 longer through Tory spectacles and to consider himself a Radical, 
 He felt sure he would never be a Whig. It is amusing to re- 
 member that ere many years were gone he was one of the most 
 efficient critics of the philosophical Radicals, and that he was 
 destined to be the greatest of all panegyrists of the Whigs : " he 
 looked out upon the world, and behold, only the Whigs were 
 good^" 
 
 Fate dealt rather unkindly with this brilliant band. H. N. 
 Coleridge, the most gifted of the Coleridge family in that genera- 
 tion, with the possible exception of the hapless Hartley, and 
 Praed, the wit and poet, were cut off before they had reached the 
 fulness of their powers. Charles Austin sought for wealth only ; 
 Moultrie and Derwent Coleridge belong to the lower ranks of 
 literature ; and there remains only Macaulay to represent in its 
 higher walks a society in which he was not the first. 
 
 It is easy to trace in Macaulay's writings the operation of the 
 forces brought to bear upon him in his youth. Though he soon 
 ceased to be " dominated " by Austin, the essay on Bacon bears 
 the mark of Austin's influence in its laudation of the "philosophy 
 of fruit " ; and the effect of the political atmosphere which he had 
 breathed both at home and at the University is traceable all 
 through his career, traceable the more plainly because his native 
 tendency was so decisively to literature. There is sound self- 
 knowledge in the beautiful verses composed after his defeat at 
 Edinburgh, in which he depicts himself as deserted by the 
 Queens of Power and Wealth and Fashion, but still comforted by 
 the "glorious Lady with the eyes of light," who had cheered the 
 exile of Hyde, the captivity of Raleigh and the disgrace of Bacon. 
 Yet this typical man of letters was, through the greater part of his 
 life, a busy politician, though he felt all the time that the days 
 and the nights spent in the House of Commons were lost to 
 literature. 
 
 Soon after he left Cambridge Macaulay was called to the bar ; 
 * Birrell's Obiter Dicta.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 833 
 
 but he had begun even earlier his true career as a man of letters. 
 Twice the prize for an English poem was adjudged to him. 
 While he was still at the Uni\'€rsity he wrote for Knighfs 
 Quarterly Magazine, and shortly after he went down there 
 appeared, in 1825, his first contribution to The Editiburgh Review, 
 the essay on Milton, which won him a fame almost as sudden 
 and as dazzling as that which Byron won by Childe Harold. It 
 was the beginning of a connexion which lasted for nearly twenty 
 years, and which has enriched English literature with a number 
 of compositions among the most lively and readable, and on the 
 whole among the most valuable, of their kind. It also opened to 
 Macaulay the door of politics. In 1830 he entered the House of 
 Commons as member for Calne, and as that thing which, so brief 
 a time before, he had been certain he would never be, a Whig. 
 His power as a speaker soon raised him into prominence. 
 But he was poor, and in consequence was glad to accept a 
 seat on the Supreme Council of India. He left England 
 in 1834 and returned in 1838. He had attained his end, and, 
 though far from rich, had saved enough to be henceforward 
 independent. 
 
 Macaulay's years in India were years of strenuous work, one 
 product of which ranks among the greatest of his claims to the 
 respect and gratitude of his countrymen. It was he who drafted 
 the Indian Penal Code, which, revised by his successors, came 
 into operation in 1862. His biographer, who in this matter spoke 
 " that he did know," says of it that the younger Indian civilians 
 " carry it about in their saddle-bags, and the older in their heads"; 
 and one of Macaulay's successors on the Supreme Council, 
 Fitzjames Stephen, bears emphatic testimony to the thoroughness 
 of the work and the extraordinary grasp it shows of criminal law. 
 On the other hand, we are just beginning to understand the evil 
 of Macaulay's influence on Indian education ; for, like most of his 
 contemporaries, he had an overweening confidence in the wisdom 
 of the West, and did not adequately appreciate the enormous 
 difficulty of replacing an ancient civilisation by another, better in 
 many respects certainly, yet possibly not in all. 
 
 After his return to England Macaulay again appeared in the 
 w. 53
 
 834 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 House of Commons, and attained cabinet rank as Secretary at 
 War. At the same time he resumed the place he had gained as 
 one of the most prominent figures in the intellectual society of 
 London. He was a frequent guest at the breakfasts of Samuel 
 Rogers and the dinners of Holland House, and was famous every- 
 where for the brilliancy and copiousness of his talk. The impres- 
 sion produced depended in a considerable measure upon the 
 character and the mood of the listener ; but there is a noticeable 
 difference in the references made by diarists and memoir writers 
 which indicates that, as years went on, a change came over 
 Macaulay himself. In his early years, Charles Greville nearly 
 dropped from his chair in astonishment when he accidentally 
 discovered that the "lump of ordinary clay" beside him was 
 Macaulay; and when Carlyle was told who it was who had 
 monopolised the conversation, he held up his hands with the 
 exclamation, " Eh ! the Honourable Tom ! was that the Honour- 
 able Tom ? " The plainness and clumsiness remained to the last, 
 but they were half hidden by the tact of the man of the world, 
 and observers saw, or persuaded themselves that they saw, the 
 evidences of distinction before they knew the man. 
 
 Macaulay's political life lasted for about ten years after his 
 return from India. His defeat at Edinburgh in 1847 led to his 
 resigning office, and although he again sat in the House of 
 Commons from 1852 to 1856, he no longer took an active part in 
 politics, but devoted himself more and more to literature. In 
 1857 he became Baron Macaulay of Rothley, and two years later 
 he died. 
 
 Macaulay was first and chiefly a student of history and 
 literature. His writings, his letters, his diaries, everywhere bear 
 witness to his extraordinary passion for reading. He marvels at 
 his own persistency in devouring bad novels. He read over and 
 over again books which he already knew perfectly. He said, and 
 it was no idle boast, that if Paradise Lost were destroyed, he 
 could restore it from memory ; yet he continued to read Milton. 
 From his Indian notes we learn that he had read Plautus four 
 times within a little more than two years. There is a record of a 
 fifth and sixth reading in the latter years of his life; and how
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 835 
 
 many more there may have been before and between, who can 
 tell? He seems to have been mastered by his passion for the 
 printed page ; and we can hardly doubt that it would have been 
 better for him had he spent in quiet thought some of those 
 hours which he devoted to this reiterated reading of familiar 
 books. What he lacks is not breadth of information but depth 
 of reflection. 
 
 Lord Houghton in a happy antithesis calls Macaulay " a great 
 historical orator and oratorical historian," and one of the ablest of 
 his critics, R. C Jebb, endorses this view in the contention that 
 the writings of Macaulay are all oratorical in principle. It is, in 
 truth, the fundamental fact about him. The historical element in 
 his speeches is manifest. Though they were remarkably successful 
 as speeches, and though " the house hushed itself to hear him even 
 when Stanley was the cry," yet they do not impress the reader as 
 the utterances of a born orator, like the speeches of John Bright, 
 or the fragments which have survived from those of Chatham. 
 Neither was their effect the kind of effect which was produced by 
 Sheridan. They are unmistakably the product of the mind from 
 which proceeded the essays, and their most noteworthy feature is 
 the skill and the inexhaustible fertility shown in the use of 
 historical illustrations. Their best passages might be closely 
 paralleled from the more brilliant of the essays, out of which, 
 with trifling changes, most effective speeches might be con- 
 structed. Even in The History of England the oratorical founda- 
 tion is manifest; and the popularity of the Lays of Ancient Rome 
 for public recitation shows that the same quality underlies the 
 verse of Macaulay as well. 
 
 But while Houghton was right in insisting upon the intimate 
 relation, in the case of Macaulay, between the talent for history 
 and the gift of oratory, it would be a great mistake to put the two 
 upon the same level. Macaulay well knew where his own strength 
 lay, though perhaps he was not quite so well aware what were his 
 limitations. "I am nothing," he says, "if not historical"; and 
 the truth of this judgment is impressed upon the reader in 
 everything he ever wrote or said. It is possible to imagine the 
 history, and the essays, and the lays, cast in a less rhetorical 
 
 53—2
 
 836 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 mould ; but take away the historical element from them or from 
 the speeches, and there is scarcely anything left Nowhere is the 
 predominance of the historical spirit more marked than in the 
 essays reprinted from The Edinburgh Review. They were pub- 
 lished under the title of Critical and Histo7-ical Essays, but the 
 critical element in them is slight. The reproach sometimes 
 directed against Macaulay on this ground is needless ; for there is 
 no disguise about his method, and a man is not to be blamed for 
 not doing that which he never attempted to do, and which his 
 readers assuredly never demanded of him. Montagu's edition of 
 the works of Bacon became the occasion for a brilliant disquisition 
 on the life and philosophy of the great Lord Chancellor. The 
 poet Campbell edited two volumes on Fj-ederick the Great and 
 his Times. In the first paragraph of Macaulay's essay on 
 Frederick a compliment is paid to the author of Lochiel and 
 Hohenlinden, and the last contains a suggestion of a possible 
 second essay on the subject when the Memoirs are completed. 
 All between is Macaulay upon Frederick the Great. Such essays 
 are not, in any real sense, reviews ; and they are to be judged, not 
 as criticisms of books, but by the value of the materials they 
 contain, and by the brilliancy, vigour and skill with which those 
 materials are handled. 
 
 Macaulay had no ambition to vindicate for himself a place 
 in the ranks of critics. Wordsworth and Coleridge had proved 
 that great poets, and Carlyle that a great historian, could 
 contribute vitalising principles to literary criticism. Macaulay 
 neither did nor attempted to do anything of the sort. Not that 
 he was by any means destitute of critical power. The essay on 
 Montgomery showed that he could manage the destructive method 
 prevalent in the early part of the century as well as the best of its 
 professors ; there are passages in the essays on Madame d'Arblay 
 and Addison which display a genuine critical gift ; and while no 
 competent judge accepts Macaulay's estimate of the Baconian 
 philosophy, his treatment of the essays in their literary aspect has 
 never been surpassed. Passages like these, however, are ex- 
 ceptions to the rule. Unlike Matthew Arnold, who remains 
 a critic even in his poetry, Macaulay loves to evade the task
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 837 
 
 of literary analysis, and to treat the subject from the historian's 
 point of view instead. 
 
 But though it is not necessary to say much about Macaulay 
 as a critic, some points in the Essays may be noted for the insight 
 they afford into the man. And first, perhaps, the essential con- 
 servatism of judgment which he displays. He threw off political 
 Toryism, but not literary Toryism. He never displays en- 
 thusiasm for any writer whose methods are irreconcilable with 
 those sanctioned by time. Voracious reader as he was, the 
 number of references to contemporary authors, either in his 
 writings or in his journals, is singularly small. He was later than 
 others in coming under the new influences which moulded his 
 generation. He had still to learn German on his return voyage 
 from India, and he did so with "a sort of presentiment, a kind of 
 admonition of the Deity, which assures me that the final cause of 
 my existence, — the end for which I was sent into this vale of 
 tears, — was to make game of certain Germans^." Possibly the 
 time spent in the readings of Plautus might have been better 
 bestowed on a reading of Goethe. Here is one of the numerous 
 points of contrast between Macaulay and Carlyle. The latter was 
 emphatically of the romantic school. He was Teutonic rather 
 than classic in his tastes and sympathies, and he found spiritual 
 nurture in Scandinavian rather than in Greek mythology. He 
 was therefore a force tending towards change, possibly revolution, 
 in literature as in other things. Macaulay, on the contrary, was 
 classic, not romantic, Latin, not Teutonic. Rudeness repelled him, 
 and the earnestness which sometimes accompanies rudeness brought 
 him no adequate compensation, as it did to Carlyle. In English 
 literature it was the men with a classical bent who attracted him, — 
 Milton more than Shakespeare, Addison far more than the incom- 
 parably greater Carlyle. It is this which makes Macaulay less 
 alien than Carlyle from the French mind. " To reach the 
 English intellect," says Taine, "a Frenchman must make two 
 voyages. When he has crossed the first interval, which is wide, 
 he comes upon Macaulay. Let him re-embark ; he must accom- 
 plish a second passage, just as long, to arrive at Carlyle for 
 * Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay, i. 460.
 
 838 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 instance, — a mind fundamentally Germanic, on the genuine 
 English soil'." 
 
 Another characteristic which strikes the reader of the Essays is 
 the almost complete absence of the speculative spirit. Macaulay 
 thought that history ought to contain a philosophic element, and 
 it is a tribute to his power that by his criticism he convinced 
 John Stuart Mill of the inadequacy of James Mill's political 
 theories. But, notwithstanding this isolated success, Macaulay 
 himself was essentially unphilosophical. It has been said that no 
 one has ever understood metaphysics who never doubted the 
 reality of matter. What Macaulay doubted was rather the reality 
 of ideas ; and here we touch another of the contrasts between 
 him and Carlyle. To the latter, the whole earth is but the 
 embodiment of an idea, and in all the works and contrivances of 
 man what is important is the thought in accordance with which 
 they have been shaped. Macaulay, on the other hand, lays stress 
 rather upon the contrivance itself than upon the thought behind it. 
 His favourite illustrations to prove the advance of mankind and 
 the superiority of the nineteenth century to earlier times are 
 mechanical. His whole treatment of the Baconian "philosophy 
 of fruit " is tainted with a shallow materialism. The contrast he 
 draws between Bacon and a man still greater, Aristotle, would 
 have been impossible to anyone with a comprehension either of 
 the method or of the aim of philosophy. It is questionable 
 whether any man who ever lived has produced so much " fruit " as 
 Aristotle; and the fact that Macaulay could choose him to 
 illustrate the unfruitfulness of the speculative hfe betrays a weak- 
 ness which was bound to mar much of his work, even when he 
 was not consciously and explicitly discussing philosophical 
 problems. And the danger of contemporary criticism is well 
 illustrated by the fact that the essay in which this gigantic 
 blunder is committed was received at the time almost as an 
 inspired production. "What mortal," writes Jeffrey to Macvey 
 Napier, " could ever dream of cutting out the least particle of this 
 precious work, to make it fit better into your Review ? It would 
 be worse than paring down the Pitt Diamond to fit the old setting 
 ^ Engush LiUralure, translated by Van Laun, iv. ■26^
 
 inSTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 839 
 
 of a Dowager's ring. Since Bacon himself I do not know that 
 there has been anything so fine\" 
 
 Macaulay was a severe judge of his own Assays. Some of 
 them were, he thought, immature ; and many had been written in 
 haste and without that care which a conscientious writer gives 
 when he feels that he is writing for future times as well as for the 
 present. He collected and published them under a kind of 
 compulsion. Students of the present day are conscious in 
 addition of defects of which Macaulay himself was not aware. 
 Some of the most brilliant of the Essays are, in the judgment of 
 those who are best informed on the subjects about which they 
 treat, radically unsound. This is especially true of the Indian 
 essays, and above all of the essay on Warren Hastings. The 
 stories of Nuncomar and of Impey have been rewritten, and the 
 judgments of Macaulay on many of the most important points 
 reversed. Deficiency of another kind is visible in the essay on 
 Boswell's Johnson. The theory that the greatest biography in the 
 English language owes its success to the weaknesses of the 
 biographer has been frequently refuted. It is so irrational that 
 the marvel is that such a theory was ever advanced. A similar 
 superficiality has been pointed out in Macaulay's treatment of 
 Johnson himself and in his setting of the life of Frederick the 
 Great, in contrast with the treatment and setting which we find in 
 Carlyle. Evidently Macaulay had not in the highest degree the 
 power to comprehend character. In the description of externals 
 he was admirable, and to a certain degree he could penetrate 
 motives, but he had not that intuitive insight which gives life to 
 the historical figures of Shakespeare and Scott and Carlyle. 
 
 In spite of Macaulay's own judgment, and in spite of all that 
 the most hostile critic can add, it is matter for rejoicing that the 
 pressure of which the author complained was applied, and that 
 he was forced to collect his contributions to The Edinburgh 
 Review. No such collection has ever been so brilliantly success- 
 ful, and very few have so well deserved success. Probably few 
 men of culture would choose the Essays as the traditional one 
 book for the traditional desert island ; but very many would find 
 ^ Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay, i. 454.
 
 840 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 a place for them in a box of limited dimensions, and nearly all 
 would acknowledge that they have been among the most widely 
 useful of the works of the nineteenth century. " You have done 
 a great deal," said the wise Johnson, "when you have brought 
 him [a boy] to have entertainment from a book." And this 
 Macaulay has done for a vast number of boys and for multitudes 
 of men as well. That collection of essays has served for many 
 thousands of minds as an introduction to history. There is truth 
 in the saying that Macaulay was the man who first succeeded in 
 teaching the English people a part of their own history. It is a 
 service so great that, in gratitude for it, sins worse than the worst 
 he has committed might well be forgotten, and all the honours he 
 won might be deemed well earned. But this is not all. IVIacaulay's 
 range of reading was extraordinary, his memory marvellous, and, 
 as he wrote, illustrations from every age and country welled up 
 almost to superabundance. There are few books that touch more 
 diverse subjects than the Essays; there are few minds too sluggish 
 and inert to be stimulated to interest by some of the multifarious 
 suggestions. Even Macaulay's faults and errors are partly re- 
 deemed by the fact that they are so vivifying. What he says 
 about Boswell at any rate inclines the reader to turn to Boswell 
 himself. His treatment of Bacon has impelled many a man to 
 acquire a first-hand knowledge of the philosophy which the 
 essayist misinterprets. 
 
 The merits and defects of the Essays are repeated in The 
 History of England, the former heightened and the latter subdued 
 by the greater labour bestowed. The style is essentially the 
 same, but is more chastened. There are the same tricks and 
 mannerisms, the same brilliant colouring, the same tendency to 
 exaggeration, the same fondness for antithesis. At first the reader 
 is probably swept away by admiration of its rapid facility, its rush 
 and brilliancy, its fertihty of illustration, its strength and effective- 
 ness. Afterwards he may gradually become conscious of those 
 defects which are suggested by the adjective "metallic," which 
 Arnold applies in censure to Macaulay's prose and Mrs Browning 
 by way of praise to his verse. The softer tones are wanting, 
 everything is painted either in glare or in gloom. It is the style
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 84I 
 
 of an advocate, not of a judge. All that tells on the side 
 Macaulay is championing is heightened, whatever is adverse is 
 omitted or slurred over. Thus he has to depict the pass of Glencoe. 
 The description is made much more effective, the situation of 
 the clan that lived there becomes more impressive, by raising 
 the mountains to a height they never attain in Scotland, and by 
 depicting a gloom and desolation in the valley such as may 
 indeed be found elsewhere, but not there. The quiet purity of 
 Goldsmith, the severe perfection of Landor, the long harmonies 
 of Ruskin, are outside the range of Macaulay. 
 
 But the faults of Macaulay's style, upon which, since Arnold 
 wrote, it has been too much the fashion to dwell, are, after all, 
 but a slight offset to merits far greater and more important. 
 Jeffrey's admiring wonder, on the first discovery of the new 
 writer, where he could have " picked up that style," may have 
 indicated a want of critical balance, but he was more nearly right 
 than the carping critic. It is idle to deny to Macaulay the name 
 of a great writer of English. Whether in his familiar letters, or in 
 the carefully elaborated sentences of The History, we see every- 
 where the master of language. His account, in a letter to Ellis, of 
 the celebrated division in 183 1 when the Reform Bill was carried 
 in the House of Commons by a majority of one, is unsurpassed 
 for fire and vividness. The narrative is perfect, not a word 
 superfluous, not a telling detail omitted ; and there runs through 
 it all a joyous confidence in the reformed machine of Parliament 
 which may have been unphilosophical, but which is very refresh- 
 ing. This admirable letter has the roughness which was natural 
 and not unpleasing under the circumstances; but in his more 
 formal compositions Macaulay is careful and polished, and some- 
 times he rises to a solemn eloquence which can only be paralleled 
 from the writings of the greatest masters of the English language. 
 The description of the burial-place of Monmouth, St Peter's 
 Chapel in the Tower, is one of the gems of English prose : — 
 
 " In truth there is no sadder spot on the earth than that little 
 cemetery. Death is there associated, not, as in Westminster 
 Abbey and St Paul's, with genius and virtue, with public venera- 
 tion and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest
 
 842 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 churches and churchyards, with everything that is most endearing 
 in social and domestic charities ; but with whatever is darkest in 
 human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of 
 implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the 
 cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and 
 of blighted fame. Thither have been carried, through successive 
 ages, by the rude hands of gaolers^ without one mourner following, 
 the bleeding relics of men who had been the captains of armies, the 
 leaders of parties, the oracles of senates, and the ornaments of 
 courts. Thither was borne, before the window where Jane Grey 
 was praying, the mangled corpse of Guilford Dudley. Edward 
 Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and Protector of the realm, reposes 
 there by the brother whom he murdered. There has mouldered 
 away the headless trunk of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester and 
 Cardinal of Saint Vitalis, a man worthy to have lived in a better 
 age and to have died in a better cause. There are laid John 
 Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, Lord High Admiral, and 
 Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, Lord High Treasurer. There, 
 too, is another Essex, on whom nature and fortune had lavished 
 all their bounties in vain, and whom valour, grace, genius, royal 
 favour, popular applause, conducted to an early and ignominious 
 doom. Not far off sleep two chiefs of the great house of Howard, 
 Thomas, fourth Duke of Norfolk, and Philip, eleventh Earl of 
 Arundel. Here and there, among the thick graves of unquiet 
 and aspiring statesmen, lie more delicate sufferers ; Margaret of 
 Salisbury, the last of the proud name of Plantagenet, and those 
 two fair Queens who perished by the jealous rage of Henry. 
 Such was the dust with which the dust of Monmouth mingled \" 
 
 This passage is not only an excellent specimen of Macaulay's 
 style, but a typical example of his historical method. The essence 
 of that method lies in the use which is made of detail. Wherever 
 in The History a new personage is introduced or a new place 
 named, the subject is immediately vivified with biographical facts, 
 with a description of the place, or with references, as in the 
 passage just quoted, to its past history. No one ever realised 
 more clearly than Macaulay that names and facts are in themselves 
 ^ History of England, i, 623-624.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 843 
 
 dead and dry ; no one ever succeeded more marvellously in giving 
 them sap and life. Nothing was too trivial and unimportant for 
 his wonderful memory to retain and to supply. If he has to 
 describe a gorgeous ceremonial, the dresses of the actors rise 
 before his eyes and he describes them. In the ballad of Horatius 
 he is reminded that the Etruscans wrote from right to left, and he 
 mentions that. Perhaps at times such details might have been 
 omitted without loss ; but Jebb has pointed out that the character- 
 istic is of the very essence of Macaulay's plan. It was the 
 condition under which alone The History could be made as 
 interesting as a novel. With equal justice the same critic has 
 added that it is also the secret of the unmanageable length of 
 that work. The style is not diffuse, and yet it takes five large 
 volumes to tell the story of some sixteen years. 
 
 There were always, even during his lifetime, some who dis- 
 sented from the popular view of Macaulay. A few, like Brougham 
 and Croker, had personal grudges, and they wreaked them in 
 private or in public. Some were alienated by his real deficiencies. 
 Sir George Cornewall Lewis (who, however, lived to change his 
 opinion) pronounced the treatment of ancient philosophy in the 
 essay on Bacon " shallow and ignorant in the extreme," and pro- 
 phesied that Macaulay would "never be more than a rhetorician^" 
 Others, again, were roused to suspicion by the mere popularity 
 of The History. There must be something wrong with a book, 
 not a novel, which was so widely read ; there was impropriety in 
 the very aim of making a history as popular as a novel. But all 
 these classes united were a mere handful in comparison with the 
 multitude who, during the life of Macaulay, regarded him as the 
 first of English prose writers. After his death the inevitable 
 reaction set in, and it became the fashion to condemn his style, 
 to question his accuracy and fairness, to denounce his Philis- 
 tinism, to pour contempt upon his philosophy, or the want of it. 
 Of late years there have been numerous indications that the 
 prevailing opinion, which is likely to be also the opinion ot 
 posterity, is intermediate between the two extremes, but a good 
 deal nearer the favourable than the unfavourable one. If 
 ^ Letters of Sir G. C. Le-uds, 93.
 
 844 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Macaulay is inferior to the greatest historians, he is inferior to them 
 alone. He has not the breadth and range of Gibbon : he would 
 have lost his way in the wilderness of The Decline a?2d Fall : his 
 method was incapable of producing such a stately and monumental 
 record of momentous events. He has not the vivid poetic gift 
 of Carlyle, or his wonderful power of penetrating character. He 
 is no rival to Thucydides in the art of tracing the sequence of 
 cause and effect in human history, or to Tacitus in the keen and 
 terse wisdom of his utterances. But he is a consummate master 
 of narrative, and in this respect is probably surpassed only by 
 Herodotus. His skilful transitions are a study in art, and afford 
 a striking contrast to the clumsy devices of the commonplace 
 writer. He has embodied in his pages an astonishing number 
 of facts, and has shown a wonderful skill in making them no 
 longer ' hard.' The reader is occasionally tempted to think that 
 they are flung together at haphazard, and it is difficult even to 
 imagine a mind so richly stored with detail as to afford material 
 for selection. But no mere medley ever produced such an effect. 
 It is certain that behind the enormous mass of knowledge embodied 
 in The History of England there lay, in the mind of the writer, a 
 mass incomparably greater still. 
 
 Such a method as Macaulay's exposes the writer to attack at 
 every turn, and his accuracy has frequendy been impugned ; yet, 
 on the whole, few have better stood the test of investigation. 
 They who have glibly condemned him have not been the men 
 who, by reason of labour bestowed and knowledge amassed, might 
 claim to sit in judgment as his peers. No one insisted more 
 than Freeman on the paramount obligation of the historian to 
 accuracy; but he had the most hearty respect for Macaulay's 
 facts. Of course he fell into error; no man ever wrote history 
 without doing so; but when we consider that almost every 
 sentence states a fact, not an opinion, the rarity of his mistakes 
 becomes astonishing. 
 
 The real weaknesses of Macaulay are to be found elsewhere. 
 He was by no means free from bias ; but perhaps the historian who 
 is free from it has yet to be discovered, and his works may not, 
 after all, be very hvely or even enlightening reading. Thucydides
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 845 
 
 himself had a prejudice against Cleon and a predilection for 
 Nicias. The influence of eighteenth century deism is obvious in 
 Gibbon. It needs a robust faith in modern 'science' to accept 
 Mommsen's pictures of Caesar and of Cicero as altogether free 
 from prejudice. But, however good may be the company in 
 which he finds himself, the fact that Macaulay shows political 
 bias in his History is undeniable. Neither, it must be admitted, 
 was there anything very attractive in the objects of his admiration. 
 The English Whigs were a useful class of people, but they were 
 neither intellectually great nor morally inspiring. They were the 
 apotheosis of the commonplace, and the selection of them as 
 heroes proves that there was some foundation for the charge of 
 Philistinism which was brought against the historian. It was 
 men of this stamp whom Macaulay could best comprehend, and 
 to whom he was rather more than fair. He was apt to see 
 through a magnifying-glass what told in their favour, and to look 
 through the wrong end of the telescope at whatever militated 
 against them. He far more frequently gives wrong impressions 
 through a misleading selection of facts than through mistaken 
 statements. 
 
 A mind which is powerfully attracted by the normal is rarely 
 sympathetic with that which is exceptional ; and while few have 
 written about enthusiasm more wisely than Macaulay, he him- 
 self could never understand enthusiasts. The Quakers, not 
 without cause, objected to his treatment of William Penn, the 
 High Anglicans thought him less than just to Laud and unfair 
 to the Church in the era of the Revolution. He was outwardly 
 more respectful of the Puritans ; but his sympathy with them was 
 rather political than religious, and it is doubtful how far he 
 entered into the spirit of those Independents who found in the 
 Old Testament their stern theory of the universe ; or whether he 
 comprehended the religious zeal of the Scottish Covenanters, whose 
 sufferings he depicted, any more than the chivalric enthusiasm of 
 their persecutor Claverhouse. His very choice of a period was, 
 perhaps unconsciously, dictated by this consideration. The 
 English Revolution of 1689 was the triumph of moderation and 
 ot" steady common sense. The reigns of William and Mary and
 
 846 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 of Anne are a period of great achievements but, for the most 
 part, of ordinary men. It is difficult to imagine Macaulay dealing 
 with such a volcanic era as that of the French Revolution ; it is 
 evident that he never absorbed Elizabethan literature as he 
 absorbed the literature of the age of Queen Anne. Of course 
 he knew with the intellect that the former was the greater; but 
 it was the latter that appealed to his heart. 
 
 In spirit and aim Macaulay was on one side akin to the 
 historians of the eighteenth century, on another to his contem- 
 poraries and successors of the nineteenth. His profound respect 
 for facts is a point of similarity between him and the latter class, 
 while the literary nature of his ambition connects him with the 
 former ; and this is one reason why many have looked upon him 
 with suspicion. Though no one has more jubilantly celebrated 
 the triumphs of applied science, and though his devotion to details 
 was fostered by the scientific spirit, yet he never unreservedly 
 accepted the creed of science in its application to history. 
 
 One or two of the ways in which science has influenced the 
 modern conception of history have already been briefly indicated ; 
 but the triumphs achieved in the various branches of physics 
 made it certain that, ere long, attempts would be made to apply 
 their methods more widely and generally. What more natural 
 and what more proper than that the conceptions which have done 
 so much to extend the dominion of man over nature should be 
 applied also to the study of human life, and thus, perhaps, 
 similarly extend his dominion over himself? If recent historical 
 work is superior to earlier histories in patient thoroughness, in 
 the manner of handling materials, in the sense of the importance 
 of beginnings, this, as has been already indicated, is largely due 
 to the scientific spirit. But before we accept the theory that 
 history is just science applied to human life, it is necessary to 
 consider the differences between the problems which physical 
 science has to face, and those which arise in the investigation of 
 political society. The great category of physical science is the 
 category of cause, and its methods are fully adequate to the end 
 contemplated. The problems of science often admit of absolute 
 demonstration, and there is, nearly always, the prospect of sooner
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 847 
 
 or later approaching demonstration. But it is not so with respect 
 to the relations of men in society. Mill himself insists on the 
 utter inadequacy of induction to deal with such problems as these, 
 and the necessity of resorting to the deductive or a priori method. 
 This, no doubt, is still within the sphere of science. But it is 
 likewise a method which, in its ratiocinative part, has been 
 applied with the utmost acuteness to history and to every other 
 subject of human interest ever since men began to reason at all. 
 The really new feature of the ' scientific method ' is the greater 
 solidity with which the inductive foundation is built ; and if the 
 inductive part takes us, as Mill believed, only a very little way, it 
 is clear that the importance of the application of the methods of 
 science to history has been greatly exaggerated. 
 
 Mill's strictures on the application of those methods to 
 sociological problems are severe. "Nothing," he says, "can be 
 more ludicrous than the sort of parodies on experimental reasoning 
 which one is accustomed to meet with, not in popular discussion 
 only, but in grave treatises, when the affairs of nations are the 
 theme. ' How,' it is asked, ' can an institution be bad when the 
 country has prospered under it ? ' ' How can such and such 
 causes have contributed to the prosperity of one country, when 
 another has prospered without them ? ' Whoever makes use of 
 an argument of this kind, not intending to deceive, should be 
 sent back to learn the elements of some one of the more easy 
 physical sciences^" Concrete instances of the sort of argument 
 Mill ridicules abound. Thirty or forty years ago grave statesmen 
 and economists confidently inferred the advantages of free trade 
 from the rapid increase of British commerce. They took no 
 account of such vast concurrent changes as the development of 
 railways and the multiplication of steamships. Travellers to 
 America used invariably to be asked whether they did not see, in 
 the prosperity of a country which the government of the Turk 
 could hardly ruin, the advantages of ' free institutions.' It is not 
 at all necessary to dispute the advantages of free institutions, or 
 the benefits accruing from free trade ; but the expansion of 
 British commerce does not demonstrate the one, nor does the 
 ^ Mill's Logict Book iii. ch. x.
 
 848 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 prosperity of the United States establish the other. To point to 
 such facts and then arbitrarily to refer them to one out of a 
 number of possible causes, is a mere travesty of proof But 
 while it is easy to detect the flimsiness of the argument, it is 
 far less easy to suggest how any method that may reasonably be 
 called scientific is to be made available for the solution of such 
 problems. The life of a nation cannot be suspended while in- 
 vestigation is made, the operation of other causes cannot be 
 controlled, the inventor will not stay his hand, he who enjoys the 
 blessing of free institutions will not submit to despotism in order 
 to discover whether, perchance, he might not thrive under that 
 also. 
 
 The question may reasonably be asked whether mistakes of 
 this kind have been made solely by statesmen and economists ; 
 and a very cursory examination of the so-called scientific historians 
 shows that they were no less liable to error. The measureless 
 sway of the Teutonic idea over the mind of Freeman, which 
 occasioned the gibe already quoted from Arnold, is as unphilo- 
 sophical as the ordinary American's conviction that all good 
 things flow from free institutions. The extraordinary statement 
 of Stubbs that the literature of mediseval Italy drew its inspiration 
 from north of the Alps betrays a similar want of balance and 
 obsession by one thought. So do his theories of Church history. 
 Evidently therefore the scientific method leaves possible mistakes 
 as great, not merely as any committed by the poet-historian 
 Carlyle, or the popular Macaulay, but even as those committed 
 by the historians of the eighteenth century. The new method is 
 not really new, and it is no more miracle-working than was the 
 Novum Organum of Bacon. 
 
 The department of ancient history, in which the standard of 
 English scholarship was deplorably low, was the first to feel deeply 
 the influence of the so-called scientific method. For many years 
 after the opening of the nineteenth century the accepted history 
 of Greece was still that of Mitford, a work whose political bias 
 was exposed by Grote in The Westminster Review. In Roman 
 history the antiquated Nathaniel Hooke reigned ; and, in spite of 
 the work of the French scholar Beaufort in the first half of the
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 849 
 
 eighteenth century, many of the legends of early Roman history 
 were still uncritically accepted as records of literal facts. Upon 
 minds in this state the work of German scholars came as a reve- 
 lation, Thomas Arnold was startled and aroused by what he 
 found in Niebuhr's History of Rome. " It opened wide before 
 my eyes," he said, "the extent of my own ignorance^" It con- 
 firmed the doubts he already entertained as to early Roman 
 history, and suggested further doubts where he had previously 
 rested in contented certainty. An article by Arnold in The 
 Quarterly Review of 1825 was, according to Niebuhr himself, 
 the means of first introducing his history to the English'^. 
 
 The soil was ready for the seed. Julius Hare and Thirlwall, 
 assisted by other Cambridge scholars, undertook the translation 
 of Niebuhr's History; and for a time the German writer enjoyed 
 an authority which no one ventured to challenge. Not until 
 after the turn of the century was any serious attempt made to 
 traverse his theories, and the feeling for him in many cases was 
 that of a disciple for a master too deeply admired and revered 
 for criticism. Niebuhr's theory, said Freeman in a review of 
 Mommsen, " acted like a spell : it was not to argument or evidence 
 that it appealed : his followers avowedly claimed for him a kind 
 of power of * divination ^"' A few years earlier Freeman himself 
 had conceded this power to Niebuhr, and used that very word 
 to describe it. The instrument by which the German historian's 
 authority was shattered in England was Sir George Cornewall 
 Lewis (1806 — 1863), who, in his Liquiry on the Credibility of 
 early Roman History {1855), insisted upon that evidence which 
 trusting disciples had been contented to forgo, and who pointed 
 out that the ' divination ' of the man who accepted as genuine the 
 forgery of the Abbe Soulaire stood in need of confirmation. It is 
 curious that Lewis himself was in turn the victim of a forgery : he 
 edited Minoides Menas's spurious fables of Babrius. 
 
 Along with this foreign influence there went one of native 
 growth, which was a little later in manifesting itself. George 
 Grole (1794— 187 1 ), who was slightly older than either Arnold 
 
 ^ Stanley's Life of Arnold, i. 44. ^ ibid. i. 45. 
 
 ' Quoted in Stephen's Life of Freeman, i. 203. 
 
 W. 54
 
 850 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 or Thirlwall, applied the ideas of the Utilitarian philosophy to 
 the study of ancient history, with results in some respects not 
 unlike those arrived at under German influence. The recognition 
 that statements hitherto taken upon trust needed critical exami- 
 nation, the prominence of the category of cause and the 
 thoroughness in the sifting of materials, are features in common. 
 Excessive addiction to theory is peculiar to Niebuhr^ while in 
 Grote's case a certain aridity of tone, as if facts were all the 
 better for being dry, and an evident distrust of the faculty of 
 imagination, are features suggestive of Utilitarian influence. 
 
 By these men and under these influences ancient history was 
 rewritten in EngHsh. We may judge the magnitude of the 
 service they performed by the completeness with which the 
 work of their predecessors has been forgotten. The march of j 
 knowledge has, indeed, left Arnold and Grote too behind, but i 
 the advance has been made largely by their help, not, as in the j 
 case of the writers whom they superseded, in spite of the false 
 views supported by their authority. ' 
 
 Thomas Arnold (1795-1842) was in some respects the most | 
 interesting of the three historians of the ancient world. His ! 
 short life was one of manifold activity ; and as a clergyman and '■ 
 a schoolmaster, even more than as a writer, he left his mark upon I 
 his time. It was certainly in the capacity of teacher that he was 1 
 greatest and wielded the profoundest and most enduring influence. ; 
 From an early age he seems to have felt that the school was his 1 
 true sphere. Ordained at Oxford in 18 18, he settled in 181 9 at ! 
 Laleham on the Thames, where the remains of his great poet-son j 
 now rest. But the business of his nine years of life there was , 
 the tuition of youths who came to him to be prepared for the { 
 University. When, in 1827, he was elected to the head-mastership \ 
 of Rugby, he was simply exchanging one educational office for ; 
 another. Arnold's election was largely brought about by a letter 
 of Hawkins, Provost of Oriel College, to the trustees, " in which 1 
 it was predicted that, if Mr Arnold were elected to the head- | 
 mastership of Rugby, he would change the face of education all 
 through the public schools of England'." Seldom has so bold , 
 
 * Li/e ojArtwid, i. 55.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 85 1 
 
 a prophecy been so completely justified. When Arnold went to 
 Rugby, it ranked only among the second-class public schools of 
 England, and not particularly high among these. When he died 
 in 1842, in educational reputation it stood first of all. More- 
 over, his work had even then reacted powerfully upon the 
 other public schools ; and to this day his influence is felt. What 
 Arnold aimed at, and what he succeeded in accomplishing, was 
 not merely to imbue his pupils with learning, but still more to 
 mould their character. Tom Brown^s School Days shows how 
 wonderful was his success. So do the records of Oxford Uni- 
 versity. The youths who, year after year, came up from Rugby, 
 all bore a certain stamp which marked them out from their fellow- 
 undergraduates. The unfriendly whispered that they were ' prigs.' 
 In C. H. Pearson's phrase, " they were taught to be always feeling 
 their moral muscles^" Some trace of this defect is noticeable in 
 Oakfield {i?>sz), the youthful work of William Delafield Arnold ; but 
 still more noticeable is the essential manliness of the book. Though 
 the Rugby boys had their faults and mannerisms, they grew into 
 high-minded young men. Intellectually, they were far above the 
 general level. Their master had imbued them with his own love 
 of history, and their highest attainments when they came to the 
 University were in that domain. They were also keenly interested 
 in theology : no one at Oxford in those days could fail to be so, 
 least of all a pupil of Dr Arnold. For Arnold was stirred to the 
 very soul by dislike and dread of the Tractarian movement. He 
 wrote and he preached against it; but he served the cause of 
 liberaUsm still more potently by the pupils he trained. Clough 
 and A. P. Stanley and Arnold's own son Matthew were Rugby's 
 great contribution to liberalism in Oxford and to literature in 
 England, while Rugby remained under the government of its 
 great head-master. 
 
 Arnold's own literary works represent only a fraction of his 
 power. His life was short, it was busy, and his literary faculty 
 developed late. Certain volumes of sermons, a variety of 
 pamphlets and articles on miscellaneous subjects, a volume of 
 lectures on modern history, an edition of Thucydides and a 
 
 1 Memorials of Pearson, ij. 
 
 54—2
 
 852 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 history of Rome, broken off in the middle of the Second Punic 
 War, are the sum of his writings. Under the circumstances it is 
 a remarkable record of work, even although not much of it is of 
 permanent interest. The sermons are vigorous, manly com- 
 positions, distinguished by that moral grandeur which was Arnold's 
 greatest gift ; and so deeply is this impressed upon the Lectures on 
 Modern History (1S42) that some of the hsteners were moved 
 even to tears. But nevertheless, as a man of letters, Thomas 
 Arnold lives by the History of Rome (1838-1843) alone, and 
 time has obscured the fame even of that. Arnold came early 
 in the history of the new movement, and much of his work has 
 since been eclipsed by the profounder research and more brilliant 
 exposition of INIommsen, not to speak of lesser scholars. His 
 excessive and uncritical admiration of Niebuhr betrayed Arnold 
 into many errors, especially in the treatment of the early history 
 of Rome; and with the decline in the reputation of Niebuhr 
 there has necessarily gone a decline in the estimation of Arnold's 
 history. After he emerges from the legendary period his work 
 has more permanent value, but even there so much has been 
 done since his day that it is largely out of date. The constitutional 
 history of Rome has been rewritten. Native sagacity and keen 
 interest in political developments were powerless to anticipate the 
 results of a laborious deciphering of monuments, of wider com- 
 parison on grounds of philology and anthropology, and of the 
 closer investigation of the early history of institutions. What 
 Arnold did best was the description of military operations, and 
 it is this part of his work which has most satisfactorily stood the 
 test of time. He was a combative clergyman: he would have 
 made an admirable soldier. His accounts of campaigns are 
 admitted by military men to show the insight of a soldier, and 
 they have a literary charm which is rarely found in the writings 
 of men of action. And yet Arnold had not that instinctive 
 literary talent which has been displayed by more than one member 
 of his family. In early days his English was clumsy and crude. 
 Practice enabled him to write always with force and sometimes 
 with eloquence ; but with him the first consideration was invariably 
 the thing to be said, and never the mannt;r 01 saying it
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 853 
 
 Arnold, throughout his life and in every phase of his activity, 
 was a teacher of principles. Follower though he was of Niebuhr, 
 he presents a point of view which is first of all peculiarly English, 
 and in the second place characteristically his own. He would 
 not have thought it v/orth while to retell the story of Rome if 
 he had looked upon it as merely an interesting tale of old days. 
 But he had the English regard for the practical and the useful, 
 and he hoped that, without sacrificing impartiality, his history 
 might be the means of teaching sound political principles. This 
 hope rested upon his fundamental conception of ancient history 
 as being still essentially modern. It was from Arnold that 
 Freeman learnt that principle of the unity of history, which he 
 sometimes applied with a want of discretion such as his teacher 
 would never have shown ; and in his edition of Thucydides 
 Arnold expresses the conviction that the history of Greece and 
 Rome is not an idle inquiry fitted only to excite the curiosity of 
 scholars, but a practical subject from which the statesman and 
 the citizen may derive instruction. 
 
 Arnold believed also, not without reason, that an Englishman 
 had exceptional advantages for reading aright the lesson of Roman 
 history. " It is not," he says in the preface, " claiming too much 
 to say, that the growth of the Roman commonwealth, the true 
 character of its parties, the causes and tendency of its revolutions, 
 and the spirit of its people and its laws, ought to be understood 
 by none so well as by those who have grown up under the laws, 
 who have been engaged in the parties, who are themselves citizens 
 of our kingly commonwealth of England." And this preface 
 contains yet another indication of the way in which Arnold carried 
 into his historical work the opinions and prepossessions of his 
 daily life. He proposed to carry his narrative down to the 
 coronation of Charlemagne at Rome. At this point, he says, 
 we see the elements of the old western empire organised again 
 into a new form, and we find that form marked by the " division 
 between the so-called secular and spiritual powers " which has 
 ever since prevailed. In this we hear the voice of him who could 
 "understand no perfect Church, or perfect State, without their 
 blending into one " in the ultimate form of " the Kingdom of God,
 
 854 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 for the most effective removal of all evil, and the promotion of all 
 good^" 
 
 To Arnold then human history was one continuous record, 
 every part of which lived on into the present and carried its 
 lesson for living men in their practical life. Nothing ever came 
 to an end, and chronological divisions had only a conditional 
 validity. And if human life was one throughout history, a fortiori 
 it was one and indivisible in any given epoch. All such divisions 
 as that into temporal and spiritual, sacred and secular, were mis- 
 leading and false, and it was the business of the writer and teacher 
 to lay bare their fallaciousness. At the same time, the historian 
 had his own special sphere, which was not identical with the 
 sphere either of the theologian or of the philosopher. His 
 theme was the life of the State or Commonwealth, which 
 Arnold would by no means identify with the sum of the lives of 
 the citizens. He did not believe, with Carlyle, that history is 
 a collection of biographies. He would hardly have accepted the 
 Platonic view that the State is the individual writ large. It was 
 something greater than the individual, or than any collection of 
 individuals. Arnold bowed down before it in reverence. He 
 insisted upon its moral character : its true interest, he held, could 
 never be advanced by action which was morally indefensible. 
 This conception of the State was cognate to his conception of the 
 Church ; and we can see why he who held it objected so strongly 
 to the suggestion of a separation between the two. To contem- 
 poraries such ideas were fascinating, but also puzzling. It is 
 clear that, in more modern language, Arnold meant to teach that 
 the State was an organism ; but perhaps he was not himself fully 
 master of the idea, and by an age which trusted rather in 
 mechanical metaphors and formulae, the meaning was not easily 
 comprehended. 
 
 Contemporaneously with the studies of Arnold in Roman 
 history, Thirlvvall and Grote had been devoting themselves to the 
 history of Greece. They had been friends and schoolfellows^, 
 
 1 Life of Arnold, ii. 187. 
 
 " They were destined finally to a yet ciooer uniou. They rest in the same 
 grave in Westminster Abbey.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 855 
 
 yet, curiously enough, they carried on their investigations unknown 
 to one another until the results began to appear in print. Thirl- 
 wall's History of Greece (i 835-1847) was originally meant for 
 Lanhter's Cyclopaedia, and when the scope was afterwards en- 
 larged it was, as the author admits in the Advertisement, impossible 
 wholly to remove the traces of the original plan. They show them- 
 selves in a certain want of proportion, and perhaps in a citation 
 of authorities more sparing than Thirlwall's learning could easily 
 have afforded. 
 
 It was mainly the defects due to the original design of Thirl- 
 wall that gave George Grote (i 794-1 871) his opportunity. In 
 native power of mind, in scholarship and in literary capacity, he 
 was Thirlwall's inferior ; but he was, if not more laboriously, at 
 least more single-mindedly, industrious. He devoted far more 
 time to the history of Greece than Thirlwall did. He had been 
 at work for twenty years before, in 1846, he published the first two 
 volumes, and the last did not appear till 1856. Indeed it may be 
 said that his whole literary life was devoted to this subject ; for, 
 according to his conception of history, Plato and the other Com- 
 pa?iions of Socrates (1865) and the incomplete Aristotelian studies 
 issued posthumously in 1872 were simply appendages of the 
 history. The result of this single-minded devotion is apparent 
 when we compare his history point by point with that of Thirlwall. 
 Take, for example, Grote's thorough treatment of the momentous 
 revolution of Cleisthenes, and put alongside of it the comparatively 
 meagre and inadequate account of Thirlwall. Or set side by side 
 the accounts given by the two historians of the battle of Leuctra. 
 Grote detects and makes evident to his readers the vital nature of 
 the change in tactics initiated by Epaminondas. The Theban 
 phalanx is enormously deep (Napoleon's principle of throwing an 
 irresistible mass on the decisive point), and the advance is en 
 echelon. Thirlwall is puzzled. He has a partial vision of the 
 truth, but not a clear enough view to enable him to show it to his 
 readers. "It was the object of Epaminondas to bring his mass to 
 bear upon the enemy's right wing, where the Spartans were posted; 
 and he seems to have succeeded in detaching it from the main 
 body so that it had to sustain the whole brunt of the first onset."
 
 8S6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 The misty phrase, "he seems to have succeeded in detaching it 
 from the main body," represents the attack en echelon. 
 
 Contrasts of this kind might be indefinitely multiplied; and 
 they show clearly why it was that Thirlwall's history was immedi- 
 ately superseded by Grote's : the more thorough necessarily over- 
 came the less thorough. But it is also true that, in some respects, 
 Thirl wall is decidedly superior to Grote. Though he was not a 
 great master of English, his style is more luminous and nervous 
 than that of his rival. He is also far more judicial. Grote's 
 judgment was warped by his prepossession in favour of the 
 Athenian democracy, and in consequence his treatment of the 
 Macedonian power which overthrew it is less fair and less satis- 
 factory than Thirlwall's. 
 
 While Thirlwall was in the current of German influence, 
 Grote's thought was English in its source. He was one of the 
 most orthodox of the Utilitarian school ; and indeed the fidelity 
 of his discipleship may be supposed to indicate a certain lack of 
 originality. He carried the principles and temperament of the 
 Utilitarians into his historical work as well as into politics ; and, 
 while the solid worth of his History is a proof of their value, the 
 absence of historical imagination and the even ostentatious 
 disregard of artistic principles are indications of the defects and 
 Hmitations of the school. 
 
 According to Langlois and Seignobos (quoted by Leslie 
 Stephen) Grote "produced the first model of a history in the class 
 to which it belongs ^" It may be questioned whether this judg- 
 ment will be long acquiesced in, even by those who adopt " the 
 conception of history as now accepted by the best writers." The 
 absence of imagination, which Grote esteemed an advantage, was 
 really a source of grave danger. Imagination sometimes leads 
 men into error, but it saves them from errors more numerous and 
 far graver. The nature of the impulse which moved Grote to 
 write might have made critics cautious, if not suspicious. That 
 impulse was anger, righteous enough, at the Toryism of Mitford's 
 History of Greece. Now Grote was a member of the extreme left. 
 Rarely has any party in English politics shown more of the 
 ^ Slephen's English Utiliiariatis, iii. 338.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 857 
 
 doctrinaire spirit, rarely has any been more eager to proselytise, 
 than the philosophical Radicals. The unscientific historian 
 Macaulay has been loudly blamed for his whiggery. Is there no 
 reason to suspect the scientific Grote of a similar error ? Dealing 
 with the history of a state and of a civilisation which had passed 
 away, Grote had far less temptation to partisanship than Macaulay; 
 and yet we can detect again and again the tones of the Radical 
 reply to the Tory Mitford. All the pains that Alison took to 
 prove that Providence was on the side of the Tories, Grote took to 
 prove that the same power had decreed from all eternity that 
 democracy was the proper form of government. As regards the 
 fundamental principles of his history, he was not judicially minded. 
 He held a brief for Athens. Justice had still to be done to that 
 great city; for the gratitude which mankind owes to her had never 
 been adequately acknowledged. But Grote swings to the other 
 extreme. He will not admit the obvious faults of the Athenian 
 people, faults which their own greatest men not only admitted but 
 insisted upon. Where he cannot excuse, his desire to palliate is 
 obvious. His account of the atrocious Mitylenean decree shows at 
 least as much prejudice as Macaulay's excuses for the share of 
 William III in the Glencoe massacre. With regard to the theoric 
 fund he was more sure of the wisdom of the Athenians than 
 Demosthenes was. 
 
 These are matters of comparatively unimportant detail ; but 
 they are indications of Grote's attitude of mind towards democracy, 
 and that is fundamental. Grote had a right to his opinion, even 
 as Macaulay had a right to his faith in the Whigs, Thiers to his 
 cult of the Revolution, Mommsen to his belief in Caesarism, 
 Michelet to his semi-religious faith in France. But then, this is 
 not removed from the category of personal predilections by calling 
 the history in which it appears 'scientific' The element of 
 prejudice is all the more manifest when we consider the vast 
 difference between ancient democracy and modern. Ancient 
 democracy rested upon slavery. In Athens there was a slave 
 population outnumbering the free. The achievements of the 
 Athenian democracy were made possible only by the labours of 
 the enslaved majority, by the sacrifice of the many to the few.
 
 8S8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Aristotle was perfectly right in teaching that slavery was indis- 
 pensable — indispensable, that is, to the only civilisation within his 
 experience which secured political Hberty within the bounds of a 
 class tolerably numerous. How else, except by the help of slaves, 
 could the Greek citizen get the leisure necessary to discharge the 
 duties which his system threw upon him ? But a democracy 
 resting on slavery is not, in the modern sense, a democracy at all. 
 The problem of enabling the cultured, leisured, comparatively 
 well-to-do Athenian citizen to take part, without doing mischief, 
 in public affairs, was totally different from the problem of enabling 
 the ignorant toiling masses of modern states to do so. And yet 
 Grote nowhere points out that democracy in the ancient world 
 meant something wholly different from what we now call democracy. 
 The natural conclusion from his silence is that the words are used 
 in the same sense, and the whole tone of the History of Greece 
 favours that conclusion. The nineteenth century Radical is all 
 along strengthening his own convictions by the lessons he draws 
 from the success of Athens. A more vivid imagination might have 
 saved him from this mistake ; and the fact that he could make it 
 is a proof that the " model history " still leaves a good deal to be 
 desired. 
 
 Mention has already been made of Sir G. C. Lewis's (1806- 
 1863) Inquiry on the Credibility of early Roman History ; and 
 so great was the revolution in opinion brought about by this book 
 that, though Lewis's works seem, at least superficially, rather mis- 
 cellaneous, the author may probably be best classified among writers 
 on ancient history. There is no literary figure of the time who so 
 strangely combines interest with aridity, none probably in whom 
 the balance between the practical and the speculative is so perfect. 
 Macaulay and Lytton were politicians as well as men of letters, 
 Gladstone and Disraeli were men of letters as well as politicians ; 
 but in Sir George Lewis's case it is difficult to say which aspect 
 is the more prominent. By temperament, no doubt, he was 
 primarily a scholar; but the man who was successively Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and Secretary for War, and 
 whose works so largely deal with questions within the sphere of 
 practical politics, was clearly, in a very pregnant sense, a politician
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 859 
 
 as well. The most wonderful thing about Lewis was the pro- 
 fundity of the scholarship which he contrived to acquire and to 
 retain. Milman declared that he might " have done honour, as 
 professor of Greek, to the most learned University in Europe \" and 
 his works are loaded, even to excess, with evidences of his erudi- 
 tion. " No German professor," says Bagehot, " from the smoke 
 and study of many silent years, has ever put forth books more 
 bristling with recondite references, more exact in every technicality 
 of scholarship, more rich in matured reflection, than Sir George 
 Lewis found time, mind, and scholarlike curiosity to write in the 
 very thick of eager English life^." 
 
 It is the width of his learning rather than versatility of mind 
 which gives to Lewis's works their multifarious character. There 
 were few subjects about which he did not know a good deal, and 
 there were several besides Greek, as the editor of his Letters 
 remarks, in respect to which he was well fitted to become a pro- 
 fessor. Scarcely anything could occur in the world of learning 
 which did not interest him ; scarcely anything, either practical or 
 theoretical, could be suggested about which he did not possess 
 knowledge. His practical side is shown in his Remarks on the 
 Use and Abuse of some Political Terms (1832), a work still useful 
 because of its clearness and good sense. Raynouard's book on 
 the Roman de Rou drew from him an examination. On the Origin 
 of the Romance Languages (1S35), j^st as Niebuhr's theories 
 caused him, twenty years later, to write the Inquiry. So too, in his 
 Survey of the Astronomy of the Ancients (1862), he is led to examine 
 the then current theories of the Egyptologists. His political 
 interests show themselves in essays on British administrations 
 from 1783 to 1830, in dissertations on foreign jurisdiction and on 
 a number of Irish questions, and, above all, in the work On the 
 Government of Dependencies (1841), which is still valuable, notwith- 
 standing all the changes due to time, as an exceedingly keen and, 
 at the same time, dispassionate examination of one of the greatest 
 problems of English statesmanship. The philosophical side of 
 Lewis's mind is best represented in the treatises On the Ijifouence 
 
 ^ Letters of Sir G. C, Lewis, Preface, bi.
 
 860 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 of Authority in Matters of Opinion (1849) and On the Methods of 
 Observation and Reasoning ifi Politics (1S52). 
 
 Widely as they vary in subject, all these works are very 
 obviously the product of the same intellect. They are all externally 
 dry and hard. Their author evidently had a profound reverence 
 for truth, but he seems to have had no other passion whatever, 
 nor any prejudice at all. He was ready to examine anything and 
 everything, his own opinions included, with the same impartiality. 
 Nothing disturbed his serenity in the pursuit of truth, nothing 
 could induce him to swerve aside in the least degree. Several 
 historians of the time — Hallam, Stubbs, Creighton — have been 
 praised each as excelling all others in impartiality ; but the 
 praise properly belongs to Lewis alone. To him it meant no 
 effort, it was a matter of temperament. He has, of course, to pay 
 the penalty as well as to reap the benefit ; for the coldness of 
 temperament which makes it possible does not conduce to 
 interest. 
 
 There is no writer more consistently rationalistic than Lewis. 
 Whatever may be the subject under discussion, the question asked 
 is invariably whether the evidence for a particular conclusion is or 
 is not sufficient. Usually the answer is in the negative. Niebuhr 
 has set vain imaginings in the place of facts, the Egyptologists 
 have blown empty bubbles of theory, the claims of Churches to 
 teach their doctrines authoritatively are found to be untenable. 
 The work of examining pretensions such as these was necessary, 
 and Lewis did it admirably ; but the generally negative character 
 of the results is another reason for his unpopularity. The average 
 reader demands warmth and colour, and in Lewis neither is to be 
 found, only a light of truth as clear as sunlight but as cold as 
 moonlight. 
 
 No other English historian of the ancient world can be set 
 beside Arnold and Grote and Thirlwall. Probably someone 
 would have attempted to accomplish what Arnold had left half 
 done ; but ere long the great work of Mommsen warned all weaker 
 men off the field, and the most ambitious achievement of Charles 
 Merivale (i 808-1 893), his History of the Romans under the 
 Empire (1850— 1862), fills the gap, not between Arnold and
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 86l 
 
 Gibbon, but rather between Mommsen and Gibbon. In quality 
 however it cannot be compared with the work of either of these 
 two giants. Since Grote, no Englishman has told on the great 
 scale the story of ancient Greece ; but there was one remarkable 
 man, described by Freeman as " the most truly original historian 
 of our time and language'," and of whom J. S. Mill was accus- 
 tomed to say that a page of him was worth a chapter of Gibbon^. 
 He devoted his life to the history of the Greek people during the 
 two thousand years between the Roman conquest and his own 
 day, showing that originality which Freeman justly commends 
 both in his choice of a subject and in his conception of, and his 
 equipment for, his task. The fame of George Finlay (1799-1875) 
 has suffered from this choice of a theme in which, important as it 
 unquestionably is, few feel deep interest. Most men are contented 
 to follow the later fortunes of Greece in such an outline of them 
 as Gibbon affords. But Finlay was an enthusiast. He probably 
 caught the spark of zeal from his uncle, Kirkman Finlay, who was 
 killed in 1828 in the Greek war of independence. George Finlay 
 himself took part in that war, and for two months he was in close 
 association with Byron, leaving Missolonghi just nine days before 
 the poet's death. After the conclusion of the war he settled in 
 Greece, where he had purchased an estate ; and from that time 
 till his death the greater part of his life was spent among the 
 people whose cause he had espoused and whose history he was 
 studying. 
 
 Finlay's work was published in sections or periods between 
 1844 and 1 86 1, and all the parts were gathered up into the 
 History of Greece from its Conquest by t/ie Romans to the Present 
 Ti?ne, B.C. 146 to a.d. 1864, which was published posthumously in 
 1877. Its merits were such as might be expected from the 
 author's life and character. He was not a great writer, and 
 his history is not a work of art. On the contrary, it has a special 
 flaw, inasmuch as he did not pursue the same plan throughout. 
 Experts say that in mere erudition Finlay is surpassed by several 
 of the Germans ; but in the combination of learning with practical 
 
 ^ Quoted in The Library of Literary Criticism. 
 Lord Morley, in Life oj Gladstone.
 
 862 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 knowledge it is admitted that he stands alone. He knew thoroughly 
 the people about whom he wrote. Often he wrote in the history, 
 as in his private relations with them he spoke and acted, as a friend 
 more candid than flattering. He had the largeness of view which 
 is born of the knowledge of affairs. Having played his own part in 
 practical life, he could value the successes and understand the 
 failures of practical men. In particular, he intimately knew the 
 economic conditions under which the Greek people lived, and 
 many a passage in the history shows his sense of their importance. 
 "I lost my money and my labour," he says of his own experiments 
 in farming, " but I learned how the system of tenths has produced 
 a state of society, and habits of cultivation, against which one man 
 can do nothing." It is this practical experience and this familiarity 
 with the people that give Finlay his unique position among the 
 writers who have dealt with the Byzantine Empire and the later 
 history of the Greek people. 
 
 Finlay traces one of the lines of connexion between the ancient 
 world and the modern ; Henry Hart Milman made it the business 
 of his later life to trace another. We have already met Milman as 
 a poet ; and though his work in verse is far inferior to his history, 
 it is easy to see in the latter the influence of the poetic manner of 
 conception, which is none the less present although in many 
 passages the style is complex and ungainly. The turning-point in 
 Milman's life came with the publication of his Histoiy of the Jews 
 (1829). Up to that point he had been almost exclusively a poet 
 and dramatist, and he still was, and for two years more continued 
 to be, professor of poetry at Oxford. But the decline of his 
 popularity induced him to seek another outlet for his energies. 
 Had he desired to make a commotion his ambition would 
 have been gratified to the full. His History of the Jews has 
 been called " epoch-making " by a writer who yet regarded it as 
 "not of extraordinary merit'." And there is reason for the descrip- 
 tion. For learning and thoroughness it cannot be compared with 
 the great work of Ewald, which appeared not very many years 
 later. But in conception, Milman's History of the Jews was, as 
 regards England at least, profoundly original. It treated the Jews 
 * R. Garnett, in The Dictionary of i^ationai Biogiaphy.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 863 
 
 as members of the human family, subject to the ordinary laws of 
 historical development, and to be studied by the ordinary methods 
 of historical research. The commotion was so great that Murray 
 found it necessary to stop the series, entitled The Family Library, 
 in which the pestilent work appeared. "The History of the Jews 
 was pronounced unsound; it was alleged that the miracles had 
 been too summarily disposed of; Abraham was referred to as an 
 Arab sheik, and Jewish history was too sacred to be submitted to 
 the laws of ordinary investigation \" Worse still, if possible, was 
 the suspicion that the historian's weapons were drawn from the 
 German armoury ; for it was the time of the controversy between 
 Pusey and Rose, and all things German were even more than 
 usually obnoxious to English orthodoxy. Milman was roused. 
 He denied that he had followed the Germans ; truly, no doubt, as 
 regards details ; but certainly the fundamental conception was 
 familiar enough to the Germans, while it was a startling novelty in 
 England. On another point he had, it seems, an answer which 
 would have been entertaining had he produced it. One man, says 
 the proverb, may steal a horse, while another dares not look over 
 the wall. Among the assailants who impugned Milman's treat- 
 ment of miracles was Bishop Mant. "If I am driven to it, I 
 will show them," he says, " not whence I have derived my notion 
 of the miracles, but where precisely the same explanations are to 
 be found — in Bishop Mant and Dr D'Oyly's Bible — and if I am 
 forced I will print in parallel columns ^" But he grew tired of the 
 uproar and almost wished the Jews " were with the Egyptians at 
 the bottom of the Red Sea^" 
 
 This outcry was in some degree a measure of Milman's inde- 
 pendence and originality. It stopped his promotion for a time , 
 but he was a man of rare courage and intellectual integrity, and 
 neither obloquy nor the obscuration of worldly prospects ever 
 induced him to recant. The fundamental conception is so 
 familiar now and so completely beyond dispute that it takes some 
 reflection to do full justice to Milman and to recognise that a book 
 which seems in the present day to be of no extraordinary merit 
 
 ^ Smiles's Memoirs of John Murray, ii. 298. " ibid. ii. 300. 
 
 ' ibid, ii. 301.
 
 864 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 may nevertheless be "epoch-making," and may give its author a 
 title to the lasting gratitude of his countrymen. Not only the 
 soldiers who storm the fort, but they whose bodies fill the ditch 
 for the conquerors to march over, are worthy of honour. 
 
 From this time onward it is as a historian that Milman figures 
 in the annals of literature. His edition of The Decline and Fall 
 (1838-1839) and his Life of Gibbon (1839) indicated the direction 
 his studies were taking ; and their character was fully revealed in 
 his History of Ckristianily from the Birth of Christ to the Abolition 
 of Pagajiism in the Roman Efnpire (1840). It is characterised by 
 the same breadth of view which had given so deep offence in The 
 History of the Jews ; but, though intrinsically superior to the earlier 
 work, it neither occasioned such excitement nor is so memorable 
 for its effects. There was enough in the book to alarm all sects 
 and parties except a few Broad Churchmen ; but, while the 
 Tractarians were perhaps even more shocked than they had been 
 by The History of the Jews, the Protestant majority in England 
 regarded with comparative indifference the exposure of the very 
 human instruments and devices by which the infallible Church 
 had grown to power and greatness. What made them anxious was 
 the suspicion that, in other hands if not in Milman's, the same 
 principles of criticism might be applied to some phases of the 
 history of the Protestant Reformation. The majority at both 
 extremes therefore condemned Milman as an extremist; yet, in 
 truth, his error was not an excess of the rationalistic spirit, but 
 rather an excessive conservatism which can scarcely be justified to 
 reason, and which stopped him short before the consequences of 
 his own thought were fully unfolded to himself. He reserved from 
 investigation " the things necessary to salvation " : he omitted to 
 explain how it is to be determined what these things are. 
 
 The History of Christianity mentioned above proved to be only 
 an introduction to The History of Latin Christianity, including that 
 of the Popes to Nicholas ^(1854-1855), which is Milman's greatest, 
 as well as his most ambitious, work. Here the significance of the 
 author's studies in Gibbon and of the authorities whom Gibbon 
 used becomes apparent. No two works of equal magnitude in the 
 English language run more closely parallel as do The History of
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 865 
 
 Latin Christianity and The Decline and Fall. They deal with 
 much the same period, and necessarily the characters who figure 
 in the one reappear in the other. And yet they are widely 
 different. Gibbon aptly characterised his work as the history of 
 the decline and fall of the Roman Empire ; had Milman desired 
 to show that, while he tells the story of the same period, his 
 object is by no means to rewrite Gibbon, he might have done so 
 by using the words " rise and progress." Gibbon is concerned 
 with the secular state of Rome which decayed and disappeared, 
 Milman with that great spiritual empire which sprang up and 
 flourished on its ruins. The comparison, which is almost in- 
 evitable, is somewhat hard upon Milman; but an inferiority 
 which he shares with all other English historians is no discredit, 
 and the very possibility of making the comparison indicates the 
 rare strength and massiveness of his work. One of the most 
 thoughtful of those critics whose studies have turned them 
 towards theological and ecclesiastical writings, pronounced him, 
 in respect of the combination of genius with learning, easily first 
 of modern English churchmen'. 
 
 All these men, with the exception of Merivale, who is slightly 
 junior, were the contemporaries or seniors of Macaulay and 
 Carlyle. The immense superiority of their work to that of the 
 predecessors whom they superseded gives colour to the 
 idea that they wrote history upon a new method and had 
 adopted some principle which clearly marked them off from the 
 historians of the eighteenth century. But in truth this idea is 
 rather the growth of a later day ; and when the question is 
 investigated it becomes manifest that the sole important difference 
 is that the later writers were more thorough and more painstaking 
 than the earlier ones — a difference of great practical importance, 
 but not one which gives rise to a new species of history. When 
 however we turn to men twenty or thirty years younger, we find 
 a conflict between two great schools, the literary and the so-called 
 scientific. Of the former school the most conspicuous repre- 
 sentative was James Anthony Froude (1818-1894), while the 
 other is seen at its best in William Stubbs (1825-1901), Edward 
 ^ Tulloch, Movcinmts of Religious Thought. 
 
 w. 55
 
 866 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA I 
 
 Augustus Freeman (1823-1892), Samuel Rawson Gardiner (1829- 1 
 
 1902), and Mandell Creighton (1843-1901). John Richard Green ^ 
 
 (1837-1883) stood in some respects intermediate, but his personal , 
 
 connexions ally him with the scientific group. , 
 
 Froude, the son of a clergyman, was educated with great care I 
 and, naturally, on the lines of orthodox belief. But his father's 
 
 religion, though so far tainted with bigotry that he " would not \ 
 
 have a copy of T/ie jPt'/grim's Progress in his houseV' was never- 1 
 
 theless practical rather than dogmatic; and so, when, in 1836, ' 
 
 young Froude went into residence at Oriel College, Oxford, he i 
 
 found himself in a whirl of theological speculation which was 1 
 
 wholly new to him. As his elder brother was one of the most j 
 
 conspicuous of the Tractarians, young Froude was brought into j 
 
 close connexion with that party, and for a time he was profoundly ! 
 
 influenced by them. The influence never passed away (no influence | 
 
 ever does pass away), but its effects changed. He was enlisted j 
 
 by Newman in the work of writing the Lives of the Saints, and j 
 
 contributed a biography of St Neot. But the childish fables dis- ! 
 gusted him, and, becoming distrustful of the reasoning of Newman, 
 he soon ceased to be, if he ever was, a Newmanite. He had 
 read Carlyle's French Revolution, but failed to understand it, until 
 John Sterling, whom he met in the winter of 1 841-1842, gave him 
 the key to the mystery. From Carlyle he went to the Germans, 
 and so passed for ever from under the sway of Newman's ideas. 
 
 There was however an interval before the teaching of Carlyle and ' 
 the Germans sank into Froude's mind In 1845 ^e was still 
 
 sufficiently orthodox to be ordained deacon ; but doubts grew so ; 
 
 rapidly that he never proceeded to priest's orders, and, when a ] 
 
 change in the law allowed him, he cast off the fragment of 1 
 
 clericalism which till then he had worn of necessity. j 
 
 Froude's literary career opened with a volume of autobiographic 1 
 
 fiction. Shadows of the Clouds (1847); but The Nemesis of Faith j 
 
 (1849) was his first book that is likely to be remembered. It too \ 
 
 has, to a large extent, the interest of a spiritual autobiography ; for ; 
 
 there can be little doubt that the mind whose development is i 
 
 there traced was essentially Froude's own. P'orty years passed \ 
 
 1 Paul's Life oj Froude, 3. i
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 867 
 
 before he again made an excursion into the field of fictitious 
 literature. The Two Chiefs of Dunboy (1S89), a romance of Irish 
 history, deserves more praise than it has received, and goes far to 
 prove that, had the author chosen, he might have won a very high 
 place as a novelist. About nearly all things Irish opinion is 
 hopelessly divided ; but many who know Ireland well declare that 
 Froude, besides writing a most interesting story, has shown great 
 insight into the country and its inhabitants. 
 
 The Nemesis of Faith was a blow not only to the Tractarians 
 but to orthodoxy in general. The inspiration of the Bible has 
 since been so often disputed that one attack more causes little 
 excitement ; but matters were different in a generation when it 
 was dangerous even to call Abraham a sheik ; and the fact that 
 Froude was in holy orders naturally made the resentment all the 
 more keen. The book was burned in the hall of Exeter College, 
 of which Froude was a fellow, by the senior tutor, Sewell, who, in 
 his zeal for orthodoxy, forgot the rights of property, the copy which 
 he burned being a borrowed one. Froude resigned his fellowship, 
 but he was still pursued with malignant hostility. Means were 
 taken, successfully, to oust him from the headship of a Tasmanian 
 college, which he had accepted, and men who had hitherto been 
 his friends publicly disowned him. His father even stopped his 
 allowance. He had to sell his books, and his financial position 
 was very precarious, when an unknown donor saved him from 
 worse distress by the gift, through Max Miiller, of ;,^2oo'. Such, 
 in those days, were the penalties for freedom of thought and 
 freedom of expression. 
 
 The capital required for the profession of letters is a bottle of 
 ink, a pen and a sheet of paper. Froude, cut adrift from the 
 profession for which he had been trained and forbidden to teach, 
 was forced to try to make his living by his pen. The struggle 
 was hard, but, after an interval shorter than many have to go 
 through, it was successful. The most powerful influence in his 
 literary life was that of Carlyle, whom he came to know personally 
 in 1849. It was Carlyle who inspired Froude to write his history; 
 it was to Carlyle that he owed his conception of Henry VIII j 
 ^ Max Miiller's A uld Lang Syne. 
 
 5 5-2
 
 868 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 1 
 
 1 
 
 ;l 
 I 
 
 and it was to Carlyle that he looked as his mentor and critic. ; 
 " If I wrote anything," he says, " I fancied myself wTiting it to i 
 him, reflecting at each word what he would think of it, as a check ; 
 on affectations." Discipleship of this kind is often a snare and a ! 
 source of all manner of absurdities ; but Froude's is an evidence ; 
 of his sanity and good sense. He knew what to take and what to ' 
 leave. Carlyle's dramatic conception of history, his contempt for i 
 the machine-theory of the universe, his belief in the incalculable 1 
 importance of great men, even his vivid power of realising i 
 character, might afford lessons which others could learn, however i 
 imperfectly ; but his style was wholly his own, and no one ever 
 attempted to imitate it without suffering injury. This Froude ! 
 saw quite clearly : he adopted Carlyle's ideas, but he formed his | 
 own style, or else he borrowed the germ of it from Newman. ' 
 
 After the victory was won, as well as during the years of i 
 struggle, Froude put through his hands a great deal of miscel- < 
 laneous literary work. The growth of periodical literature i 
 furnished a new sort of occupation to a considerable number of i 
 men of letters^ and Froude filled the office of editor of Fraser's 
 Magazine from i86i to 1874. The best products of this miscel- 
 laneous activity were gathered together in four series of Short \ 
 Studies on Great Subjects (1867-1883), which are comparable to, ' 
 and are surpassed in popularity only by, the essays of Macaulay. j 
 In these Short Studies Froude appears at his best. No more than , 
 his other works are they free from his besetting sin, and perhaps ; 
 this is not less vitiating in reality than it is in his longer works, j 
 but at least it seems so ; and on the other hand his admirable style, '■ 
 his tact and his instinct for all that is attractive and interesting ; 
 tell with full force. j 
 
 In order of publication, however, Froude's first important | 
 production, after the works of the Oxford period, was the 
 History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of • 
 the Spanish A?'?>iada (1856-1870). A sound understanding : 
 of the scope and purpose of this work throws a flood of 1 
 light upon the author's subsequent writings and supplies a j 
 principle under which most of them may be classified. The : 
 History is not a mere fragment of the history of England, begin- i
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 869 
 
 ning anywhere and ending when the author is tired. Froude 
 originally intended to carry the story down to the death of 
 Elizabeth ; and he changed his plan, not that he might shorten 
 his labour, but because he became aware that the defeat of the 
 Armada, not the death of Elizabeth, was the true conclusion of 
 the subject he had proposed to himself. The fall of Wolsey was 
 the beginning of the Reformation movement in England, the 
 defeat of the Armada marks its definitive triumph. Not only so, 
 but the victory of England secured to Protestantism a per- 
 manent place in Europe. Had the issue of the contest been 
 different, the probability is that the Counter-Reformation would 
 have swept all Protestant Europe back into the fold of Catholi- 
 cism, with consequences not only to Protestant countries but 
 to Catholic ones as well, which are simply incalculable. The 
 struggle, of course, did not end with the Armada; but its issue 
 was then determined, and Froude's dramatic instinct led him to 
 close with the decisive conflict. 
 
 One great object then of the History is to elucidate the story 
 of the Protestant Reformation, especially in England, and to show 
 by what means it was finally established as the ruling force over 
 great part of Europe. This was among the causes of the bitter- 
 ness of Freeman, who, as well as Stubbs, was influenced in his 
 conception of history by the Tractarian atmosphere of Oxford. 
 This too is what is meant by those who say that Froude never 
 shook off" the influence of Tractarianism. From partisanship, they 
 contend, he swung round to opposition : the sun shone upon the 
 other side of the hill ; but, whether in shade or in sunshine, the hill 
 before his eyes was still the same. However this may be, an 
 important group of his later works deals with the Reformation and 
 the character of Protestantism. Among independent works of this 
 class, not to mention essays included in Short Studies, we find 
 Calvinism (1871), Bwiya7i (1880), Luther (1883), Life and Letters 
 of Erasmus (1894) and Lectures on the Council of Trent (1896). 
 
 The idea of the Reformation was undoubtedly the primary 
 one in the mind of Froude ; but he was an Englishman, proud 
 of his country, and his patriotism deepened with the conviction, 
 which grew with his studies, of the great part she had played in
 
 870 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 securing permanently for the world the benefits of the Reforma- 
 tion. Placed between the anvil of France and the hammer of 
 Spain, the position of England and of Elizabeth at the opening of 
 her reign seemed almost desperate. The final triumph was partly 
 due to good fortune; but it was also a tribute to the courage, 
 tenacity, sense and statesmanlike qualities alike of rulers and of 
 people. Froude saw the possibility opening for that great imperial 
 expansion which characterises the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- 
 turies of English history ; and so the seeds were sown from which 
 sprang Two Lectures on South Africa (1880), Oceana (1886) and 
 The English in the West Itidies (1888); while The English in 
 Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (1872-1874), though it has 
 another tale to tell, is nevertheless animated by the same spirit. 
 
 These works may fairly be regarded as offshoots of the great 
 trunk history. Others are appendages to it : The Divorce of 
 Catharine of Aragon (1891), The Spanish Story of the Armada 
 (1892) and English Seamen in the Sixtee?ith Century (1895). 
 The only other important works of Froude are his Thomas 
 Carlyle (1882-1884) and the documents preliminary to and 
 consequent upon it. 
 
 The most diverse judgments about Froude may be success- 
 fully defended, not, indeed, as expressions of the whole truth, but 
 as embodying part of it. As a literary artist he has had among 
 historians few superiors ; in point of accuracy and trustworthiness, 
 hardly any other writer of equal standing is so deplorably lax. 
 But wide as are the varieties of view which may be justified, no 
 excuse can be pleaded for the virulence with which Freeman 
 pursued Froude, his grotesque exaggeration of frequently petty 
 errors, and his outrageous rudeness of expression. Froude gains 
 greatly in dignity by his long silence under reiterated attacks ; and 
 when at last he hit back, the honours of the controversy certainly 
 did not rest with Freeman. Nevertheless, there is reason in the 
 contention that the primary obligation of the historian is truth ; 
 and, among men who have specially investigated the various 
 subjects upon which Froude has written, there is a remarkable 
 consensus as to his astonishing inaccuracy. Those who have 
 delved after him among the materials of English history from
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 87 1 
 
 Henry VIII to Elizabeth have found his citations and quotations 
 to be crammed with inaccuracies. Westcott pronounced upon him 
 a judgment of unwonted severity. Sir Bartle Frere'^ characterised 
 what Froude wrote about South Africa as a succession of bril- 
 liantly expressed truths sandwiched with utterly misleading errors. 
 The Dutch denounced his Erasmus as a tissue of misstatements, 
 and Mr W. S. Lilly showed that his "abbreviated translations" 
 frequently distorted the meaning of the great humanist. The 
 impassioned expressions of the majority of Irish writers about 
 Froude's English in Ireland will not, by most Englishmen, be 
 accepted without large deductions ; but all must be impressed 
 when a historian so learned, so able and so impartial as Lecky 
 pronounces one of the judgments of a brother historian to be 
 " utterly unfounded," and, as regards one of the persons implicated, 
 " almost grotesquely untrue'." Close students of the life of Car- 
 lyle are unanimous in their judgment upon Froude's biography. 
 Professor Norton called it "a story 'founded upon fact,'" and 
 Mr David Wilson thought he could prove about as many errors 
 as there were pages. It ought however to be added that others 
 as well as Freeman seem to have been irritated by Froude into 
 exaggerating very trivial mistakes. There is no common measure 
 between small inaccuracies of diction and spelling, and those 
 great blunders and misrepresentations that pervert the course of 
 history. 
 
 The charge of inaccuracy is one which has been brought 
 against every historian in turn, and it can invariably be estab- 
 lished. In dealing with masses of facts the man of the greatest 
 learning, of the most untiring industry and of the keenest insight, 
 cannot escape errors. Carlyle was deceived about the Squire 
 letters ; Macaulay, less excusably, went wrong about the Christian 
 name of Grahame of Claverhouse ; the great apostle of accuracy. 
 Freeman, was hardly in his grave before the battle raged over 
 him ; and the advocatus diaboli proved his case. But it is utterly 
 unjust to judge a man by isolated errors ; and Froude's case is 
 dift'erentiated from the case of the other historians named by the 
 
 ^ Quoted in The Dictionary of National Biography. 
 
 * Leck.y's History oj the Eighteenth Century, 11. vii. 308, n. 2.
 
 872 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 extraordinary number of mistakes which have been proved to 
 exist in his works. His own defence, given in A Siding at a 
 Railway Station^ is practically that the actual facts of history are 
 undiscoverable. " ' What is truth ? ' said jesting Pilate " ; and the 
 metaphysician could easily prove that he might have waited long 
 for an answer. But the plain man feels that the difficulty of 
 arriving at truth absolute is a poor excuse for inaccurate quotation, 
 for a paraphrase which ordinary intelligence cannot reconcile with 
 the meaning of the text, or for a statement of fact contradicted by 
 the authorities on which it is supposed to be based. It is hardly 
 possible to resist the conclusion that Froude was constitutionally 
 inaccurate, and that he often neglected to bestow the care due 
 to his readers upon the discovery of the facts. In this respect 
 he did not follow his master. Carlyle worshipped truth, while 
 Froude doubted whether it could be discovered. Carlyle gave a 
 poetic presentation of the truth founded upon a careful study of 
 the prosaic facts, while Froude would seem at times to have given 
 a literary presentation of it in defiance of the facts. 
 
 Froude denied the charge of habitual misstatement ; but there 
 was another accusation levelled against him which he did not feel 
 concerned to deny. This was the charge that he read history in 
 the light of his own theories and judged under the influence of 
 his own emotions. To do so was in fact necessary on Froude's 
 theory of history; and there is great example in his favour. 
 Neither Carlyle nor Michelet sees the French Revolution in a dry 
 light, nor does Tacitus see the Roman emperors thus. The "per- 
 sonal equation " cannot be wholly eliminated from any subject 
 less demonstrably certain than mathematics ; and it is questionable 
 whether the distortion of truth caused by it be not greater in the 
 plodding prosaic nature, unconscious of theories, than in the 
 intense poetic one which produces them as a fruitful field grows 
 wheat. The ordinary reader feels that it is just the personal 
 element in great historians that he most values ; and his instinct 
 is sound. The application of the Newtonian rule, "hypotheses 
 non fingo," would lead back to the method of the chronicles and 
 would strip history of nearly all its interest. Nobody can posi- 
 tively know what manner 01 man was Henry VHI, as science
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 873 
 
 knows the chemical composition of water or of air ; and yet a 
 conception of his character is essential to the comprehension of 
 the period in which he lived. Only in rare cases can it be shown 
 beyond doubt what were the motives behind a certain action, a 
 treaty or a war ; yet there were motives, through which alone we 
 can understand the action. 
 
 The indictment which is brought against Froude is one of 
 the weightiest that has ever been levelled against a great writer ; 
 and yet, even from the point of view of scientific history, there 
 is another side of the account. In the first place, it must be 
 repeated that most of the inaccuracies alleged against him are 
 trivial. It is absurd to treat the misprint of Guienne for Guisnes 
 as if it were a serious blunder, or to magnify into a fact of capital 
 importance Froude's ignorance of the identity of Lexovia with 
 Lisieux. Even his objectionable habit of marking abridgements 
 with inverted commas is seriously reprehensible only if the 
 abridgement does not fairly represent the meaning of the original. 
 But further, whatever may have been Froude's errors, he un- 
 questionably advanced the bounds of knowledge in relation to his 
 period ; and if original research be the true test of the value of a 
 historian, he bears it far better than his inveterate critic. Freeman 
 trusted almost wholly to printed authorities and very rarely 
 examined a manuscript ; while not only was Froude the first 
 Englishman to examine the great collections at Simancas, but he 
 laboured assiduously at the Record Office and at Hatfield House 
 as well. The sand which he found glistening upon the ink often 
 proved that his eye had been the first which had seen the docu- 
 ment since it was put away. " I had," he says, " to cut my way 
 through a jungle, for no one had opened the road for me\" The 
 service which he did was a great one, and gratitude for it might 
 have tempered the keenness of censure where he fell into error ; 
 while mere candour ought to have dictated an acknowledgment 
 of the proof he gave of integrity of purpose by depositing in the 
 British Museum his transcripts of the Simancas papers. 
 
 It is however on the purely literary side that Froude is at his 
 best. He never fails to be interesting. The History may be a 
 
 *■ Paul's Life oj Froude, 192.
 
 874 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 "romance," Thomas Carlyle a "story 'founded upon fact,'" The 
 English in Ireland a storehouse of "froudacities," and all the 
 minor works similarly unsound ; but they are fascinating 
 " romances," excellent " stories," eminently readable " froudaci- 
 ties." Froude's admirable English gives a charm to everything 
 he ever wrote. His is one of the purest prose styles of the nine- 
 teenth century, less mannered than Macaulay's or Matthew 
 Arnold's, less laboured and " poetical " than Ruskin's or De 
 Quincey's. Perhaps he never rises so high as these writers at 
 times do ; but his English is always in perfect taste, never sinking 
 beneath the subject nor rising above it — neither mean nor turgid, 
 but always exactly adequate. He is great on a great occasion 
 and sufficient on an ordinary one. This unerring fitness is 
 probably due to the fact that he never troubled himself about 
 style as style ; he was concerned merely to express his m.eaning, 
 and hence he remained wholly free from affectation. 
 
 One of Froude's greatest gifts, which has been just touched 
 upon, and vi^hich serves as salt to give savour to his writings and 
 to preserve them, was his talent for the delineation of character. 
 Not only his Henry VHI, but his Mary Tudor, his Mary Stuart, 
 his Elizabeth, and, generally, all the leading characters of his 
 history, are profoundly interesting studies. Possibly the docu- 
 ments do not bear out his views ; Froude's Henry and Mary and 
 Elizabeth may not be the Tudor sovereigns as they lived ; but 
 they have that interest which always attaches to dramatic 
 creations ; just as Shakespeare's King John and Richard HI are 
 interesting still, even though we may believe that the real John 
 was more able and less mean and the real Richard more human. 
 And if Froude's characters fail to convince they are not therefore 
 ineffectual. Those who cannot accept his Henry VI H as the 
 real man will almost certainly find their own conception of the 
 imperious Tudor altered. It is not too much to say that 
 Henry VIII has been a different figure in English history since 
 Froude wrote about him. 
 
 The same gift is shown in the delineation of the greatest 
 character Froude ever attempted to portray, Thomas Carlyle. 
 The character, as he paints it, is deficient in several fine qualities
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 875 
 
 which the real Carlyle possessed, — deficient in generosity, in 
 consideration for others, unlovable. And yet from the beginning 
 of the long biography to the end the reader is held entranced. 
 Working with consummate skill upon magnificent materials, 
 Froude has constructed a character and has left a picture of life 
 enthralling in its interest. If his Carlyle be one of the most 
 misleading of biographies, it is also one of the most fascinating, 
 and should it ever be superseded and consigned to the literary 
 lumber-room, English readers will be the poorer by the loss of 
 one of the most readable books in the language. In sheer 
 literary skill even Froude never surpassed it. 
 
 Another literary masterpiece of Froude's later years was 
 Oceana, the most perfect outcome (among his works) of that 
 imperialism which ranked next to the Reformation among his 
 historical interests. It had been fostered by his study of the 
 Elizabethan age, and when he won greater leisure on the con- 
 clusion of his history, one of his leading objects was the develop- 
 ment of it. The principal purpose (not very wisely pursued) of 
 his lectures in the United States was to set England right with 
 the great American republic. He went to Cape Colony on a 
 political errand in 1874. He afterwards visited Australia. Few 
 have done so much as he towards fostering that interest and 
 pride in the colonies and that sense of their importance to the 
 mother country which are so conspicuous in the present day, and 
 which were so conspicuous by their absence thirty or forty years 
 ago. Oceana is perhaps the most perfect piece of literature in 
 which these feelings are expressed, though in depth and intrinsic 
 importance it is far surpassed by Seeley's Expatision of England 
 and still farther by his Growth of British Policy. 
 
 The transition from Froude to Freeman and Stubbs, who, with 
 Mr Goldwin Smith and J. R. Green, were the leaders of the 
 Oxiord school of history, is like passing into a new atmosphere. 
 For Froude, though an Oxford man, did not belong to the Oxford 
 school, and his spirit was that of an older time. Like all recent 
 historians, he made an investigation of authorities more elaborate 
 and extensive than any of the eighteenth century historians, 
 except Gibbon, deemed necessary. But his habit was to read
 
 ZyG THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 largely, to let the impressions produced by his reading take 
 possession of his mind, and then to write with as little interruption 
 for reference to authorities as possible. The Oxford historians, 
 on the other hand, made constant reference to, and the accurate 
 citation of, authorities a matter of conscience and duty ; and they 
 had their reward in an accuracy which caused them, for a time, to 
 be regarded by admiring disciples as the superiors of all their 
 predecessors. Whatever might be the case with other men, they 
 at least might boast, like the Homeric hero, to be much better 
 than their fathers. "Blunders or questionable statements," says 
 the biographer of Freeman, "may be discovered in Gibbon, in 
 Hallam, in Thirlwall, in Arnold, and, occasionally, even in 
 Bishop Stubbs\" That Gibbon should be fallible is natural 
 enough, but that Stubbs should share his fallibility is discon- 
 certing. 
 
 After Froude it is convenient to take Freeman, who presents 
 the sharpest contrast to him, and who was also the eldest of the 
 Oxford group. Perhaps some of the bitterness which Freeman 
 showed in criticism was due to disappointment. His two great 
 ambitions were to be a professor of history, by preference at 
 Oxford, and to be a member of Parliament. The former ambition 
 was gratified in 1S84 when he succeeded Stubbs, and the latter 
 might have been gratified, had he chosen, two years later. But he 
 was then old and indifferent, and he might have adapted to his own 
 case the celebrated words of Johnson to Chesterfield. In the 
 long interval between his marriage and retirement from Oxford in 
 1847 and his return as regius professor, he had contributed 
 voluminously to periodicals of all sorts, weekly, monthly, quarterly; 
 he had studied architecture and historical geography and written 
 about them ; he had published The History aiid Conguests of the 
 Saracens (1856) ; he had begun and left unfinished The History of 
 Federal Government {yo\. i, 1863); and, above all, he had completed 
 the great work of his life. The History of the Norman Cofiquest 
 (1867-1879), as well as its sequel. The Reign of William Rufus 
 (1883). Though afterwards he had the courage to undertake The 
 History of Sicily (1891-1894), he felt, not without reason, that his 
 
 ^ Life oj Freeman, ii. 466.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 877 
 
 work was done, and contemplated with shrinking rather than with 
 delight the change which the Oxford professorship must make in 
 his life. His anticipations were justified. Few lecturers are in a 
 more trying position than those who hold professorial chairs at 
 the two oldest English Universities, and rare are they who can 
 make their courses popular. Freeman had not the gifts. About 
 a year before his death he recorded that he had tried every kind 
 of lecture he could think of, and put his best strength into all, 
 and nobody earned 
 
 Freeman was a man of strong passions and opinions, and of 
 intense personal likes and dislikes. His fidehty to his convictions 
 was of that sort which does not shrink from making sacrifices for 
 their sake. In 1878 he gave up a lucrative and agreeable 
 connexion with The Saturday Review, because he believed its 
 politics to be mischievous. But while he was undoubtedly 
 honest in his opinions and manful in his acceptance of their 
 consequences, the question whether he was judicious in the 
 expression of them is by no means so easily settled in his favour. 
 Those who differed from him on matters of historical detail were 
 rated in terms which would have better befitted some capital 
 matter of morals ; and it is not beside the point to note that the 
 violence of his language with regard to the Eastern question 
 alienated many of his own party. From such a man we may 
 confidently look for work thoroughly honest and conscientious ; 
 but we may reasonably doubt whether it will always be conceived 
 and carried out in a judicial spirit. 
 
 Freeman was rather markedly averse from philosophic 
 speculation ; and, though nothing interested him more than 
 ecclesiastical questions, he was impatient even of theology. 
 Perhaps for this very reason the few general ideas he possessed 
 had an extraordinary hold upon his mind ; for the best way to 
 keep one theory within proper bounds is to balance it with 
 another. As we have already seen, Freeman learnt from Arnold 
 the idea of the unity of history, and he insisted upon it even 
 to weariness. When it was proposed to set up a school of 
 modern history at Oxford the future regius professor argued 
 
 ^ Life 0/ Freeman, ii. 429.
 
 878 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 with his customary vehemence that such a step would be a 
 violation of all principle and must prove utterly fruitless. The 
 doctrine of unity thus insisted upon by Freeman was not 
 only true, but it may now seem almost a truism. All human 
 history is so clearly one that it would be waste of energy to 
 demonstrate the unity. But in Freeman's youth history was 
 commonly divided into water-tight compartments ; ancient and 
 modern, sacred and secular. Arnold's conception was a novelty, 
 and time was well spent in expounding it. Freeman however fell 
 into a characteristic mistake. He exaggerated the unity, and he 
 insisted upon it out of season as well as in season, much as the 
 modern school of naval strategists insists unduly upon the truth 
 that " the sea is all one." So it is, just as the earth is all one ; 
 but on land or sea the question where a force is placed may be of 
 vital importance. So too, while there are between the ancient 
 world and the modern many lines of connexion — through the law 
 of Rome, through the literature and philosophy of Greece, through 
 the religion of Judaea, — there are also deep divisions which fully 
 justify a broad distinction, though not complete separation. A 
 man who was not liable to the obsession of a single idea would 
 have tempered his doctrine of unity with this practical considera- 
 tion, and would have escaped the error of denying the value 
 of modern history as an instrument of academic education. But 
 while Freeman fell thus into error, in another way he derived 
 great benefit from his doctrine of unity. If some of his con- 
 temporaries have not escaped the vice of excessive specialisation, 
 that fault cannot be charged against the historian whose special 
 period was the Norman Conquest of England, but who has 
 written learnedly on the Achaean League and the Swiss Bund, 
 on the Sicels and on the Saracens. Freeman has been charged 
 with narrowness of mind, but so far as historical lore is concerned, 
 narrow he certainly was not. 
 
 Another general idea with which the mind of Freeman was 
 filled was that of the supreme importance of the Teutons and 
 their institutions in the history of England. The Teutons play as 
 great a part in his history as the Pelasgians do in that of Niebuhr; 
 and it is almost certain that the force and persistency of his
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 879 
 
 conception of Teutonism led him unconsciously to exaggerate on 
 the one side and to underrate on the other. The prejudice 
 shows itself occasionally in quaint and absurd forms ; there was 
 a sacredness about the Saxons which made Freeman follow them 
 in the most uncouth forms of spelling ; but he had no hesitation 
 in i\nglicising the names of the French, whom he disliked. It is 
 to be feared that his prejudice shows itself also in matters 
 infinitely more important. His account of the Teutonic conquest 
 of the Celts is almost pure theory; and further, it is singularly 
 unconvincing theory : — " Though the literal extirpation of a 
 nation is an impossibility, there is every reason to believe that the 
 Celtic inhabitants of those parts of Britain which had become 
 English at the end of the sixth century had been as nearly 
 extirpated as a nation can be. The women would doubtless be 
 largely spared, but as far as the male sex is concerned, we may 
 feel sure that death, emigration, or personal slavery were the only 
 alternatives which the vanquished found at the hands of our 
 fathers. The nature of the small Celtic element in our language 
 would of itself prove the fact. Nearly every Welsh word which 
 has found its way into English expresses some small domestic 
 matter, such as women and slaves would be concerned with; 
 nearly all the words belonging to the nobler occupations, all the 
 terms of government and war, and nearly all the terms of 
 agriculture, are thoroughly Teutonic. In short, everywhere but 
 in Britain an intruding nation sat down by the side of an elder 
 nation, and gradually lost itself in the mass. In Britain, so far as 
 such a process is possible, the intruding nation altogether sup- 
 planted the elder nation^" 
 
 It is proverbial that "there is none so blind as he who 
 will not see " ; or, as it is otherwise expressed, 
 
 **He that complies against his will 
 Is of his own opinion still." 
 
 But there ought to be, if there is not, a converse proverb teaching 
 what a tiny ray of light will suffice for him who is determined to 
 see. The tenuity of evidence here, and the greatness of the 
 superstructure built upon such a meagre foundation of fact, 
 
 1 The Norman Conquest, i. i8.
 
 88o THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 are amazing. From the extent (which he underrates) and 
 the character of the Welsh element in the En2;lish lansuase 
 Freeman draws the gigantic inference of a practical extirpation 
 which he admits to be unexampled. But events which are un- 
 exampled ought to be established by unusually rigorous evidence : 
 it is just the fact that miracles are unexampled in our experience 
 that renders all ordinary evidence ineffectual to prove them. 
 Further, almost in the very breath in which he alleges practical 
 extirpation, Freeman reveals that what he himself believes in is 
 something widely different. A race is not " nearly extirpated " if 
 its women remain ; still less is it so if the males have the alterna- 
 tive of " personal slavery," as well as those of death and emigra- 
 tion. Had those women no children? If they had children, 
 what becomes of the Teutonic theory? With regard to the 
 linguistic argument, it is worth asking what, on Freeman's prin- 
 ciples, would be the natural inference could all the evidence as to 
 the effects of the Norman Conquest be swept away, except only 
 the evidence of language. In a delightful passage in Ivanhoe 
 Wamba the Jester demonstrates to Gurth the Swineherd that 
 pigs and sheep and oxen, so long as they are alive and a source 
 of trouble, are Saxon ; but the same animals, as soon as they are 
 prepared for the table, take Norman names and pass to the use of 
 the Normans. So it was then, and so it has remained to this day. 
 What more plain, then, than that the Saxons who were not 
 slaughtered were enslaved, and remained slaves ever after? It 
 is true the Normans adopted their language, but that was 
 evidently for convenience of giving orders to their serfs; and 
 they showed their lordship by imposing their own terms as the 
 vocabulary of the nobler occupations. 
 
 Freeman would have searched the English language for words 
 strong enough to denounce such a travesty of argument had it 
 been used by another historian in support of any thesis unwelcome 
 to him. Its presence in his own work is serious, because it shows 
 to what an extent he was capable of being blinded by his 
 prepossessions, and how carefully his inferences, if not his facts, 
 have to be sifted. The point is absolutely fundamental. The 
 whole History of the Norman Conquest is a glorification of
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 88 1 
 
 Teutonism, and that work is gravely compromised if the Saxon 
 Conquest was not such as Freeman believed it to be, or if he has 
 not made out a reasonable case for believing it to be so. There 
 seems to be better foundation for the view of a more recent 
 historian, that the Norman Conquest, instead of being the triumph 
 of Teutonism, was really the triumph of Latin civilisation over 
 barbarism'. 
 
 It has already been pointed out that the idea of nationality 
 during this period attained an importance it never had before. 
 No one was more completely under its influence than Freeman. 
 Unity of race was almost as much a fundamental conception with 
 him as unity of history ; and he seems to have been incapable of 
 treating dispassionately either the races he admired or the races 
 he disliked. He is more than just to the Teutons, and a good 
 deal less than just to the Celts and the French. Wherever the 
 dry light of history may be found, it is notf in the works of 
 Freeman. 
 
 Freeman's admiration for Macaulay might have been expected 
 to preserve him from some of the faults with which he is justly 
 chargeable. His admiration was however based primarily on 
 Macaulay's mastery of facts, wherein he was certainly a worthy 
 follower. But there were two curious limitations to his learning. 
 In the first place, he had an extraordinary distaste for the use of 
 manuscript authorities : the documents on which he relied were 
 nearly all printed. In the second place, his abhorrence of public 
 libraries almost deprived him of such great collections as the 
 British Museum and even the Bodleian. On the literary side he 
 has little in common with Macaulay. His English is generally 
 heavy. He is habitually over-emphatic and prone to the use of 
 superlatives. He is diffuse and altogether ignorant of the art of 
 omission. His repetitions become tedious, though it has been 
 said that great part of his effectiveness was due to this very trick 
 of repetition. His work often loses all form from the excessive 
 length and number of his notes, — disjecta membra of history 
 which he has failed to work up. But while Freeman's theories 
 are questionable and his literary execution poor, those who are 
 ^ Davis's England under the Normans and Angevins. 
 
 W. 56
 
 882 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 most competent to form an opinion are emphatic in their testi- 
 mony to the value of the materials gathered together and sifted 
 by him. Even if the judgment of posterity be, as is probable, 
 that he has written no great history, it will certainly be also that 
 he has done much to make great history possible of execution by 
 some successor. 
 
 With the name of Freeman there is commonly associated that 
 of William Stubbs, who succeeded Freeman in the fellowship of 
 Trinity College vacated by the latter on his marriage, but who 
 preceded him in the office of regius professor of modern 
 history. This post Stubbs held from 1866 till 1884, when he 
 was made Bishop of Chester. Five years later his translation to 
 the see of Oxford brought him back to the city which is most 
 intimately associated with his fame. His absorption for the last 
 seventeen years of his life in the administrative work of a diocese 
 necessarily diminished his productiveness as a historian and 
 causes the student to lament a promotion which, however well 
 deserved and well intended, was so costly to scholarship. 
 
 There are good and sufticient reasons for the association of 
 
 the name of Stubbs with that of Freeman. They were the most 
 
 learned English historians of their day, they were in general 
 
 agreement as to aims and methods, they were friends whose 
 
 mutual admiration sometimes provoked a smile. But in almost 
 
 all respects Stubbs was the greater of the two. He was by far 
 
 the more attractive character. What in Freeman bordered on 
 
 ferocity was in Stubbs softened and humanised into wit and 
 
 humour. He could be sufficiently biting, but he was never, like 
 
 Freeman, merely abusive. Both men were learned, but probably 
 
 Stubbs was the more learned of the two. Each won, and 
 
 deserved, a high reputation for accuracy ; but the warmest friend 
 
 of Freeman would not claim for him superiority over Stubbs. 
 
 Neither the one nor the other merits great praise for literary art ; 
 
 but the work of Stubbs is less dry and formless than that of 
 
 Freeman, the best passages are better, and there is far less 
 
 repetition. Indeed, the style of Stubbs was naturally good, and 
 
 on occasion he could rise almost to eloquence. He had a rare 
 
 gift for delineating a character in a few incisive sentences. There
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 883 
 
 is some lively and excellent writing in the introductions to the 
 volumes of the Rolls Series edited by him. But in general he is 
 too heavily loaded with learning to be a good historical artist, and 
 his works as a whole seem, like those of Freeman, amorphous. 
 Caring little for the things of art, he chose the service of historical 
 science as the better part, and deemed it incompatible with sitting 
 at the feet of the muse of literature. 
 
 Stubbs was not only younger than Freeman but he was also, 
 on the whole, later in his work. When he was elected professor 
 in 1866 he had done nothing of importance except the Registrum 
 Sacrum Anglicanum (1858) and the editorial work on certain 
 volumes of the Rolls Series. It is however agreed that the intro- 
 ductions to those volumes are Stubbs's masterpiece ; and already 
 his reputation was so great that the professorship was offered to 
 him although he was not a candidate. Seldom has an appoint- 
 ment been so amply justified by results. The Select Charters 
 (1870) and The Constitutional History of England (1874-1878) 
 belong to the period of the professorship. So do The Early 
 Plantagenets (1876) and the Lectures ofi the Study of Medieval and 
 Modern History (1886), though he was a bishop before the latter 
 was published. 
 
 The chief interests of Stubbs in history were ecclesiastical and 
 constitutional, and his fame with the general reader, to whom 
 the Rolls Series is inaccessible, must rest mainly upon his 
 Constitutional History. This work forms, with the constitutional 
 histories of Hallam and of May, one of a series of three which 
 together cover the whole course of English constitutional history 
 from the beginning down to a time within living memory. The 
 fact that the later work deals with the earlier period is illustrative 
 of the drift of historical investigation in the time of Stubbs. 
 Hailam began in the middle, and May, whose interest was in the 
 present rather than the past and was practical rather than specula- 
 tive, took up the thread where he dropped it. The purpose of 
 Stubbs, on the other hand, is to trace the constitutional history 
 of England "in its origin and development"; and his whole 
 work is inspired with the conviction that the beginning is more 
 than half of the whole. In a more moderate and a wiser form he 
 
 56 — 2
 
 884 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 shares the belief of Freeman, whose thesis in his Growth of the 
 English Constitution (1872) is that practically the whole English 
 constitution was in operation in Saxon times, and that subsequent 
 changes have been mere changes in detail. The work of Stubbs 
 was unquestionably of first-rate importance. He revealed much 
 that was previously quite unknown, and set many facts in their 
 proper place and presented them in their true proportions. And 
 yet, rare as was the author's talent for research, it is melancholy 
 to reflect in what great measure his views have, even within 
 a generation, been superseded. The life of a work of learning 
 is scarcely longer than that of a modern battleship, the only 
 object which rivals it in ponderousness. If we look for the work 
 on the English constitution which is still the most living and 
 valuable, we shall find it, not in Plallam, or in Stubbs, or in May, 
 or in Freeman, but in Bagehot, and in Professor Dicey's Law of 
 the Constitution. 
 
 In no department except that of constitutional history has the 
 name of Stubbs been so authoritative as in all that relates to the 
 history of the Church ; and in his treatment of ecclesiastical 
 history may be found a striking illustration of the superlative 
 importance of the eye which sees and the mind which interprets. 
 For a time his great reputation won acceptance for almost any 
 view he countenanced ; and when, in the appendix to the Report 
 of the Ecclesiastical Courts Co?nmission, he supported the doctrine, 
 popular with, and perhaps vital to, the Anglican High Church 
 party, that there was in the Middle Ages a fundamental distinction 
 between Anglican church law and Papal canon law, so that the 
 latter was never authoritative, though it was profoundly respected, 
 in England, the matter was regarded as settled. The oracle had 
 spoken, the utterance was satisfactory to clerical opinion, and, 
 difficult as it was to bring the theory into harmony with the broad 
 facts of history, as seen by the average layman, no one ventured 
 to contradict him. And yet never was confidence more mis- 
 placed. In the six essays by F. W. Maitland which are gathered 
 together in his Roman Canon Law in the Church of England 
 (1898) the ground is re-examined; and while the author regards 
 Stubbs's discourse " with reverence and admiration," he shows its
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 885 
 
 main conclusions to be absolutely untenable. In recent times 
 there has been no such complete subversion of what may be 
 described as a system rather than a particular conclusion. 
 Captain Mahan's books, which have radically changed the con- 
 ception of sea power, are the only ones which have produced an 
 effect comparable to that produced by Maitland's essays. The 
 difference between him and Stubbs is no mere point of detail, 
 nothing analogous to a mistake as to a date, or the misquotation 
 of a document, or a misjudgment of character. It goes to the 
 very core of a great department of history. It is singular that 
 this vital correction was made, not by a rival specialist in eccle- 
 siastical history, but by a student of law who, having to write 
 a chapter on marriage, found himself compelled to make an 
 incursion into the unfamiliar region of ecclesiastical jurisprudence. 
 If the method of Stubbs was scientific, its vaccine was pathetically 
 impotent to ward off the germ of error. The worst that has been 
 alleged against Macaulay is trivial by the side of this colossal 
 blunder ; no single charge made against Froude is comparable to 
 it'. Yet there were inherent elements of greatness in Stubbs 
 which go far to redeem even an error so gigantic ; and the hand 
 which dealt this staggering blow was the hand which also penned 
 the words : " In his power of marshalling legal details so as to 
 bring to view some living principle or some phase of national 
 development he [Stubbs] has no rival and no second among 
 Englishmen^." 
 
 When the foundation of Stubbs's ecclesiastical history crumbles 
 at a touch and the edifice of Freeman's Teutonism (which was 
 Stubbs's also) proves to be built on sand, the enquirer may well 
 ask, where is assurance to be found? Ranke thought that the 
 business of history was to record " was eigentlich geschehen ist " ; 
 but evidently the most difficult task of all is just to discover what 
 
 ^ The editor of Stubbs's Letters has persuaded himself that the world has 
 been too hasty in coming to the conclusion that Maitland's book has settled the 
 question against Stubbs's view. It may be so ; but an unsupported expression 
 of opinion such as this is of little value in the face of the weighty evidence 
 adduced by Maitland. The only way to meet that is by evidence on the other 
 side. And whence is it to come ? 
 
 * Maitland's English Law and the Kenaissance, 19.
 
 886 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 this is. Stubbs and Freeman were esteemed the foremost 
 historians of tneir time for knowledge of facts and for accuracy 
 in the statement of them. But they found that facts without an 
 interpretation were but an insignificant part of "was eigentlich 
 geschehen ist"; and all their learning and industry and ability 
 gave them no immunity from the most serious misapprehensions. 
 The results hardly seem to justify the claim that their method is 
 the only sound one, and it is safer to adopt the conclusion of 
 Jebb, that " the Muse of History is the queen of a varied realm ; 
 and various gifts may be brought to her shrined" The master of 
 narrative, the dramatist, the seer, the satirist, the student of social 
 science, the antiquary, each may bring his gift; and none can 
 claim that his alone is worthy of acceptance. 
 
 The spirit and method of these two writers, and especially 
 those of his master Freeman, are curiously combined in John 
 Richard Green with some of the characteristics of Froude and 
 with a style which, by its brilliancy and picturesqueness, recalls 
 that of Macaulay. Green was a man of great personal attractive- 
 ness, a vivacious and entertaining talker, a delightful letter-writer, 
 a master of sarcasm and of paradox. He threw himself with 
 extreme energy and eagerness into any work which he found to 
 do, and probably sowed the seeds of the disease which carried 
 him off, during the years which he spent as a curate in East 
 London, before increasing alienation from orthodox opinions led 
 him to abandon the clerical life. His interest in history was of 
 old date, but it was only after this event that he had much leisure 
 for historical investigation ; and ere long that had to be carried 
 on under the ditficulties inseparable from invalidism partial or 
 complete. Much of his writing had to be done at the health 
 resorts to which he was driven by the disease which doomed him 
 to an early death. In the firmness with which he faced it and 
 the gallantry with which he continued to labour in spite of 
 weakness and suffering he resembled another victim of the same 
 disease, Robert Louis Stevenson. Like Stevenson too Green 
 wrote his own epitaph, — "he died learning." 
 
 The first book which won fame for Green was A Short 
 ^ -Jebb's Macaulay, 1 5.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 887 
 
 History of the English Peoph (1874), which is by far the most 
 popular of all such summaries. This was afterwards expanded 
 into a History of the English People (187 7-1 880) in four volumes, 
 which is among the best of the histories on a considerable scale 
 embracing the whole story of England; and yet, though it 
 corrects many of the errors of the earlier work, it is probably, on 
 the whole, farther removed from perfection. 
 
 In these two books Green necessarily worked mainly upon the 
 materials supplied by other men, and he has been described as 
 a populariser rather than an original historian. If the word 
 " populariser " is intended to state a fact, it is accurate ; but if it 
 is meant to suggest a charge, it is misleading. Under modern 
 conditions the writer who attempts to narrate the whole of English 
 history cannot but work upon the materials supplied by other 
 historians. No man has ever yet been so learned as to exhaust 
 the original authorities for all periods alike. Macaulay chose one 
 epoch. Freeman another, Froude a third, Gardiner yet a fourth. 
 He who would embrace all four periods, with others which they 
 have not touched, must either unite and surpass the learning of 
 all four men, or else take a great deal on trust and at second- 
 hand. This unquestionably Green has done. But if his design 
 was legitimate, as will hardly be denied, and if this was the 
 necessary consequence of it, then this too was legitimate. 
 
 Green however aspired also to the honours of the historian 
 who bases his work principally, if not exclusively, upon his own 
 independent examination of original documents. The Maki?tg of 
 England (1881), written, as his wife says, "under the shadow of 
 death," and The Conquest of England (1883), which he left incom- 
 plete, are the outcome of original research. The former is less 
 learned than Elton's Origins of English History, which was 
 published only a year after it, and both of Green's books have 
 been shown to contain numerous mistakes. No work of the sort, 
 produced under such conditions as those in which Green was 
 placed, could possibly be other than faulty; but, all things 
 considered, the marvel is not that they are imperfect, but that 
 they are so good. 
 
 Though Green vva.6 surpassed in learning by a considerable
 
 888 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 number of contemporaries and predecessors, he has enough of 
 independent merit and individuality to give him an assured place 
 among historians. No one ever had a more vivid sense of the 
 quasi-independent life of the component parts of a great state. 
 A town was to him a real entity with an existence of its own, not 
 a mere part of a greater whole ; and Freeman declares that it was 
 from Green that he learnt to look in this way upon cities^ This 
 however is only a special illustration of a characteristic which 
 pervades all Green's work. He was a poet almost as much as 
 a historian, and that vitality which Wordsworth found in external 
 nature was equally evident to him in all the parts and elements 
 whose union constituted national life. Hence in great measure 
 his popularity. In his hands nothing was, or at least nothing 
 could long remain, dry. A bare hint, a mere fragment of evidence, 
 was sufficient to call up before his mental eye a complete picture. 
 No doubt this was the source of many of his mistakes. He did 
 not sufficiently discriminate for his readers, nor probably for 
 himself, between that which rested on solid evidence and that 
 which was due to reconstruction by a poetic mind. The fact that 
 he, perhaps more than any contemporary, threw his own personality 
 into his work is at once his strength and his weakness ; but it is 
 strength far more than weakness. 
 
 Somewhat apart from these men, alike in personal history, in 
 opinions and in methods, stood Charles Henry Pearson (1830- 
 1894), whose Naiioiml Life and Character (1893) ^O" '^i'^? j^st 
 before his death, the fame which his scholarly and able Early 
 and Aliddle Ages of England (1S61) had failed to gain. The 
 latter brought him into conflict with Freeman, who attacked 
 it with characteristic virulence in an article in The Fortnightly 
 Review and was answered by Pearson in a pamphlet which he 
 afterwards admitted to be " more savage than is justifiable," but 
 which made Freeman "very careful after this to write anony- 
 mously '." In the interval between this book and National Life 
 and Character Pearson had spent many years in Australia; 
 and his active political life there and his practical study of 
 
 ^ Life of Freeman, i. 303. 
 '■'■ Memorials 0/ Pear son, 131,
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 889 
 
 social problems profoundly influenced his later work. It is 
 a brilliant and most suggestive production ; but it is also 
 excessively discursive, and, perhaps, a little too easy in its 
 generalisations. There is therefore room for doubt as to whether 
 it will wear well, or long retain its reputation, though it has the 
 support of a good style. The mournful conclusion is stated with 
 an impressiveness which is partly due to dignity of language, and 
 partly to the moral elevation of the writer : " It is now more than 
 probable that our science, our civilisation, our great and real 
 advance in the practice of government, are only bringing us 
 nearer to the day when the lower races will predominate in the 
 world, when the higher races will lose their noblest element, 
 when we shall ask nothing from the day but to live, nor from the 
 future but that we may not deteriorate. Even so, there will still 
 remain to us ourselves. Simply to do our work in life, and to 
 abide the issue, if we stand erect before the eternal calm as cheer- 
 fully as our fathers faced the eternal unrest, may be nobler training 
 for our souls than the faith in progress." 
 
 There are obvious reasons why Froude, though he was an 
 Oxford man, should not be regarded as a member of the Oxford 
 school of history, but those reasons do not apply to Mandell 
 Creighton. It is true,, he became professor of ecclesiastical history 
 at Cambridge, but prior to that he had been fellow and tutor of 
 an Oxford college, had taken part in the development of the 
 historical school of that University and had published The Age 
 of Elizabeth (1876), Sijtion de Montfort (1876), The Tudor s and 
 the Reformation (1876) and the first two volumes of his great 
 work, the History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reforjna- 
 tion ( 1 882-1 894), a title which became inaccurate when the 
 author found that the pressure of other duties would prevent 
 him from carrying the narrative farther down than the sack of 
 Rome. Creighton was, in short, fully formed at Oxford, his 
 methods and ideals were those of the Oxford school, and when 
 he migrated as a professor to Cambridge it was to transplant 
 these and let them take root with such change as the new soil 
 might produce in them. 
 
 In its main lines the career of Creighton runs closely parallel
 
 890 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 to that of Stubbs. Both, after a brief period of tutorial work at 
 Oxford, retired to country livings, both were elevated to the 
 episcopal bench, and through their absorption in administrative 
 business both were, in the main, lost to scholarship. Stubbs how- 
 ever was fifty-nine when he became a bishop, while Creighton was 
 only forty-eight; and moreover Creighton had the greater taste 
 and talent for administration and threw himself into it with the 
 greater zest. He had also the more difficult sphere of labour. 
 Stubbs's dioceses of Chester and Oxford were comparatively 
 peaceful. So was Creighton's first diocese, Peterborough ; but 
 on his translation to London he found himself in the midst of 
 the most difficult ecclesiastical problems of the time. On the 
 whole, his four years' administration showed an admirable com- 
 bination of firmness with conciliation, illustrating that "common 
 sense amounting to genius " which was said to be his special gift. 
 But the controversies he could not escape completely absorbed 
 his energies, and even had his life been prolonged Creighton 
 could have accomplished no more work of importance in history. 
 His fame must rest on the History of the Papacy. 
 
 When Creighton went to Cambridge in 1884 as professor of 
 ecclesiastical history, Seeley had already been for fifteen years 
 professor of modern history. The ideas and methods of the two 
 men clashed. To Seeley's conception of history, it has been 
 remarked with truth, the saying, "history is past politics and 
 politics present history," applied more strictly than it did to its 
 author, Freeman's. Seeley's aim was practical, his method philo- 
 sophical. He thought that the highest part of the work of a 
 university was to train up useful citizens, and that this could be 
 done only by the moulding of character through ideas. It was 
 the ideas he extracted from history, not the facts wherein 
 they were embedded, which interested him. Thus, while the 
 most influential of his contemporaries mined for their material 
 in a distant past, Seeley by preference investigated recent history ; 
 while they laid enormous stress on the knowledge of detail, he 
 made his most awakening books out of facts of common know- 
 ledge. 
 
 Creighton's conception of history was wholly unlike this ; and
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 89I 
 
 in his inaugural lecture he defined his own view and contrasted 
 it with its opposite in terms which show that he had Seeley in 
 his mind. "All differences of historical judgment," he said, 
 " resolve themselves into differences of the conception of progress. 
 Historians mainly differ according as their conception of progress 
 is historical or political. By a political conception I mean one 
 which is directly derived from the political movements or political 
 theories of the present day, which takes as its starting-point ideas 
 which are now prevalent, or problems which are now pressing for 
 solution. According to this view the student of history knows 
 exactly what he wants to find in the past. He wishes to trace 
 the development of the principles which he himself holds and 
 which he believes to be destined to succeed. To him the past 
 was a failure so far as it did not follow those principles. . . . He has 
 no doubt that the perspective of the present is the true perspective, 
 and draws the sketch according to its rules. 
 
 •'The historical conception of progress is founded on historical 
 experience of the evolution of human affairs. Its object is to 
 understand the past as a whole, to note in every age the thing 
 which was accomplished, the ideas which clothed themselves 
 with power. It tries to estimate them in reference to the 
 times in which they occurred. It knows no special sympathies, 
 for it sees everywhere the working of great elemental forces which 
 are common to human society at all times. It strives to weigh the 
 problems of the past in their actual relations to their times, it tries 
 to strip them of their accidental forms, and show their funda- 
 mental connexion not merely with present ideas, but with the 
 process of man's development.... I will not defend but will only 
 state my own preference for the historical rather than the political 
 view of progress. I turn to the past to learn its story without 
 any preconceived opinion about what that story may be. I do 
 not assume that one period or one line of study is more instruc- 
 tive than another, but I am ready to recognise the real identity of 
 man's aspiration at all times\" 
 
 Of course the contrast is here far too broadly drawn. Neither 
 Seeley nor any other historian worthy of the name ever went to 
 ^ Quoted in The Life 0/ Creighion, i. 279-280.
 
 892 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 history knowing exactly what he wanted to find; and on the other 
 hand we have already seen in the cases of Freeman and Stubbs 
 the value of that supposed superiority to preconceived opinion 
 on which Creighton prided himself. Immunity from preconceived 
 opinion depends less upon the conception of progress than upon 
 breadth of mind and upon temperament. Still, exaggerated though 
 it is, the contrast usefully indicates the difference between the 
 two historical professors of Cambridge. The genius loci was on 
 the side of Creighton, for Cambridge has always been devoted to 
 research and patient of minutiae. "I will tell you," says the 
 Cambridge scholar of the tale, "what Aristotle says\ if you want 
 to know what he means, you must go to Oxford." 
 
 Creighton tried to embody his own conception in his great 
 work on the papacy, and his remarkable success is shown in the 
 commendation of men of views opposed to his own in politics 
 and religion. Lord Acton, the most highly qualified of all critics, 
 though he severely criticised the third and fourth volumes, de- 
 clared that the first and second were marked by a fulness and 
 accuracy which were "prodigious in volumes which are but the 
 prelude to an introduction, and have been composed in the 
 intervals of severer duty'." But the work has all the vices as well 
 as the merits of the school to which it belongs. It is dry and 
 hard reading. Except a few summaries of character there is 
 little in it that can be read with pleasure; and considering the 
 character of Creighton, his incisiveness of phrase, his turn for 
 epigram, his versatility, it is surprising that he has succeeded 
 so completely in washing out all colour from his work. He seems, 
 unfortunately, to have considered that literary grace and liveliness 
 were snares, and that if he fell into them he would somehow 
 become incapable of telling the truth. 
 
 Perhaps however the characteristics of the Oxford school of 
 history are to be found in the most perfect balance not in either 
 Stubbs or Freeman, but in Samuel Rawson Gardiner (1829-1902), 
 a historian who recalls Hallam more than any other. The whole 
 life of Gardiner bears witness to his disinterested and incorruptible 
 love of truth. He had neither the power nor the desire to achieve 
 ^ Quoted in the Lije 0/ Creighton, 1. 327.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 893 
 
 popularity, and no contemporary of equal eminence was worse 
 rewarded. For more than forty years he laboured at his design 
 of writing a history of England from 1603 to 1660, fragments of 
 which were published at various dates between 1863 and 1901. 
 Though these publications were for a long time hardly noticed, 
 Gardiner never for a moment suffered himself to be diverted from 
 his purpose, except in so far as it was necessary to earn a modest 
 living by work as a lecturer, an examiner, and a writer of text- 
 books. When at last recognition came, and in 1894 he was 
 offered the regius professorship at Oxford vacated by the death 
 of Froude, he declined, because the work of the chair would have 
 interfered with the task which he had set himself. He was 
 within sight of the end at his death; but unfortunately the 
 narrative of the last four years remained unfinished, and the 
 historian had failed even to reach the death of Cromwell. 
 
 What makes Gardiner the best representative of his school, if 
 not its greatest figure, is his conspicuous fairness and his success 
 in keeping his own personality out of his work. In this he was 
 just the opposite of Green, and he differed widely from Freeman 
 too. Here lies the secret of his want of popularity. His work 
 is colourless. It contains no lively delineations of character, no 
 animated narrative, no eloquence. It is the dispassionate and 
 level statement of the conclusions laboriously reached by one 
 who has given unsparing labour through a lifetime to the subject. 
 In contrast once more with Green, the impression conveyed is 
 that of mechanism, not organism, of death, not life ; and so, 
 unjust as was the popular neglect, it was not without excuse. 
 
 No one carried to a greater extreme than Gardiner that 
 specialisation which the methods of modern history render in- 
 dispensable. He had chosen the period of the early Stuarts and 
 the Commonwealth, and he would not willingly go beyond it 
 even in the least degree. Perhaps in this respect he made a 
 mistake; Freeman certainly would have thought so. If there 
 be a real unity in history, there must be some danger of mis- 
 apprehension where the attention is concentrated exclusively on 
 a small part of it. 
 
 Gardiner stood singularly alone. Though he was only slightly
 
 894 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 junior to Freeman and Stubbs, while he was senior to Green, it 
 is remarkable that not a single letter from or to him is to be 
 found in The Life of Freeman, or in the Letters of Stubbs or of 
 Green, while innumerable evidences are to be found of constant 
 intercourse between the other three. Unquestionably Gardiner 
 was the loser in the worldly sense, while it seems probable that 
 by their mutual support and hearty praise of one another the 
 other three were raised to a reputation perhaps beyond the 
 deserts of any of them. This feeling was expressed by Thorold 
 Rogers in a well-known epigrammatic couplet : — 
 
 "See, ladling butter from alternate tubs, 
 Stubbs butters Freeman, Freeman butters Stubbs." 
 
 It is at least certain that the Oxford school of history acquired 
 a pre-eminence of fame which it seems now to be hard to justify. 
 Whatever may have been the opinion of professed students, 
 twenty years ago the world at large did not know that the names 
 of Lecky and Seeley were quite worthy to stand beside those of 
 the Oxford trio ; but recent years have witnessed a marked decline 
 in the reputation of the Oxford men and a steady rise in that of 
 the other two. 
 
 The Oxonians were indifferent to or averse from philosophy. 
 Vigorous as was the intelligence of Stubbs, it nowhere betrays the 
 least inclination to, or any considerable knowledge of, philosophic 
 thought. Freeman seems to have disliked it and to have been 
 incapable of it ; and of Creighton one of the most competent of 
 judges, Edward Caird, his tutor for the final school of literae 
 humanjores, declared that " he was not specially attracted towards 
 philosophical studies^" In the cases of Seeley and Lecky, on the 
 other hand, one of the facts that first strike the student is that they 
 are almost as much philosophers as historians. The first notable 
 work by Lecky was The Rise and Liifliience of Rationalism in Europe 
 (1865), and the first of Seeley's which won great fame was the 
 philosophico-theological Ecce Homo (1866). And, throughout, both 
 play to the keynote thus struck. They are historians to whom 
 ideas are more than facts, and the ideas are of the sort which imply a 
 theory of human history, if not of the universe, in the background. 
 
 * Life of Creighton, i. 27.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 895 
 
 John Robert Seeley (1834— 1895) was the son of a pubUsher 
 who was himself a historian of considerable power, the author 
 of a work, The greatest of all the Plantagenets (i860), which has 
 been occasionally attributed to his more famous son. The 
 younger Seeley began life not as a historian, but as a classical 
 lecturer in Trinity College, Cambridge, whence he passed as 
 professor of Latin to University College, London, in succession 
 to Francis W. Newman. It is curious that two successive occu- 
 pants of the same chair should have been the authors of two such 
 famous heretical books as Phases of Faith and Ecce Homo. In 
 1869 he succeeded Kingsley as professor of history at Cambridge, 
 and the second and greater aspect of his career opens. He 
 proved himself an admirable lecturer and teacher as well as a 
 great historian. The Lectures and Essays (1870) and the Intro- 
 duction to Political Science (1896) are conclusive evidence of the 
 high quality of his professorial work, while The Life and Times 
 of Stein (1878), The Expansion of Englaftd (1883), A Short 
 History of Napoleon I (1886) and The Growth of British Policy 
 (1895) a-fford a solid foundation for his fame as a historian. 
 
 Seeley's works fall readily into two divisions, in the first of 
 which are Ecce Homo and Natural Religion (1882), while all the 
 others which have been named fall under the second. The 
 theological works are of interest here because they reveal at once, 
 and more clearly than any others, that love of ideas which is the 
 soul of Seeley's history as well. They were a puzzle to their 
 readers, who could hardly make out what manner of man their 
 anonymous author was, nor well understand with what purpose 
 he had written. Ecce Homo seemed to stand midway between 
 the orthodox and the purely rationalist views. It was an attempt 
 to strip from the conception of Christ the accretions of centuries, 
 and to view him as he might be supposed to appear to those 
 who simply knew the facts of his life, or such facts as would be 
 considered well attested if they referred to any other historical 
 character. The method was the ordinary method of historical 
 criticism: the result was, as has been said, puzzling to both 
 parties. If the anonymous author believed no more than he 
 affirmed, his position v/as highly unsatisfactory to the orthodox;
 
 896 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 1 
 
 but what he affirmed was a great deal more than numbers of j 
 
 rationalists were prepared to concede. Ecce Homo dwelt almost I 
 
 exclusively upon the aspect of Christ as man ; but it laid such , 
 
 stress and emphasis upon his character and influence as might | 
 
 have satisfied the most exacting, and necessarily suggested that . 
 
 the writer had not expressed his whole beHef. In the preface he i 
 
 spoke of the book as a fragment, and promised to deal in another , 
 
 volume with "Christ as the creator of modern theology and | 
 
 religion " — phraseology which itself suggested a considerable j 
 
 measure of agreement with the doctrines of the Churches. And ! 
 
 the suggestion is powerfully strengthened by the eloquent close : 
 
 of the book : — i 
 
 "The achievement of Christ, in founding by his single will ' 
 
 and power a structure so durable and so universal, is like no other ; 
 
 achievement which history records. The masterpieces of the men ] 
 
 of action are coarse and common in comparison with it, and the i 
 
 masterpieces of speculation flimsy and insubstantial. When we : 
 
 speak of it the commonplaces of admiration fail us altogether. ' 
 
 Shall we speak of the originality of the design, of the skill I 
 
 displayed in the execution? All such terms are inadequate. I 
 
 Originality and contriving skill operated indeed, but, as it were, 1 
 
 implicitly. The creative effort which produced that against which, ' 
 
 it is said, the gates of hell shall not prevail, cannot be analyzed.   
 
 No architects' designs were furnished for the New Jerusalem, no ; 
 
 committee drew up rules for the Universal Commonwealth. If j 
 
 in the works of Nature we can trace the indications of calculation, 
 
 of a struggle with difficulties, of precaution, of ingenuity, then in 
 
 Christ's work it may be that the same indications occur. But ; 
 
 these inferior and secondary powers were not consciously exer- > 
 
 cised; they were implicitly present in the manifold yet single , 
 
 creative act. The inconceivable work was done in calmness; 
 
 before the eyes of men it was noiselessly accompHshed, attracting 1 
 
 little attention. Who can describe that which unites men ? Who j 
 
 has entered into the formation of speech which is the symbol of 
 
 their union? Who can describe exhaustively the origin of civil 
 
 society ? He who can do these things can explain the origin of 
 
 the Christian Church. For others it must be enough to say,
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 897 
 
 'the Holy Ghost fell on those that believed.' No man saw the 
 building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen crowded together, 
 the unfinished walls and unpaved streets : no man heard the 
 clink of trowel and pickaxe : it descended out of heaven from God." 
 It is a far cry from the fifteenth chapter of Gibbon to this. If 
 the author of Ecce Homo had not traversed the whole distance 
 back to the position of the Churches, it might seem that he had 
 at least gone a long way. But the promised sequel, when it 
 appeared, was calculated to shake confidence in that conclusion. 
 Natural Religion, indeed, is not properly a sequel to Ecce Homo 
 at all : it is not the promised volume dealing with " Christ as the 
 creator of modern theology and religion." It still bears witness 
 to the author's profound sense of the importance of religion, 
 which he declares to be "the principle by which alone life is 
 redeemed from secularity and animalism " ; and it insists upon 
 the insufficiency of science unless science is itself religious. But 
 then the religion which remains and which is so important is 
 wholly devoid of the supernatural. Natural Religion is an attempt, 
 not to show how much of that which is commonly conceived to be 
 Christianity is true, but that, even if the creeds of the Churches 
 become wholly incredible, what is vital in religion will still remain. 
 Had the opinions of Seeley himself changed in the interval of 
 sixteen years ? The difference between the two books suggests an 
 affirmative answer ; and in the later we seem to see rather the 
 student of Goethe than the disciple of Christ. Natural Religion 
 never attained the popularity of Ecce Homo. There was less 
 warmth in the style, not because Seeley wrote less skilfully, 
 but because the character of the book demanded a colder and 
 more colourless treatment. But what was lost in attractiveness 
 was gained in philosophic depth. The author of Natural Religion 
 had conclusively proved his rare capacity for handling whatsoever 
 abstract ideas he might choose to take up. 
 
 In the meantime Seeley had made the transition to history, 
 and had produced his longest and, in point of research and 
 learning, his greatest book, the Life and Times of Stein. But if in 
 this respect the greatest, from some other points of view it is the 
 least satisfactory, of his works. It neither is nor attempts to be a 
 
 w. 57
 
 898 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 great biography, for Seeley never shared Carlyle's interest in 
 the biographic side of history. The emphasis therefore is on 
 the times, rather than on the Ufe, of Stein. The theme is 
 really the revival of Prussia and her rise against Napoleon, for 
 whom Seeley had a moral dislike, and whom he underrated 
 intellectually. 
 
 Even in Stchi Seeley's predilection for ideas rather than 
 narrative, though obscured by the complexity of the subject, is 
 evident enough to the careful reader : it is obtruded upon the 
 most careless in his highly characteristic Expansion of Englajid 
 and Growth of British Policy. The two books are closely con- 
 nected with one another. The former deals with the foreign 
 policy of England in the eighteenth century, calling special atten- 
 tion to the marvellous growth of the British Empire and to the 
 vital importance of that growth as a fact in the history of the 
 world. The latter takes a wider and more complete view of 
 foreign policy from the accession of Elizabeth to the union of the 
 Parliaments of England and Scotland. In substance it is the 
 greater of the two ; but it was incomplete when Seeley died, and 
 in style it cannot be compared with his finished work. 
 
 No two books illustrate better than these the value of a guiding 
 conception and a point of view. Rough and unfinished as is The 
 Growth of British Policy, it is fascinating from beginning to end. 
 The author keeps steadily in mind what he wants to accomplish 
 and rigidly excludes whatever is extraneous to his object. The 
 consequence is that few historical works are more effective. No 
 two books, again, better illustrate how much can be done, simply 
 by the skilful interpretation of the commonly known facts of 
 history. In one sense there is little or nothing 'original' in 
 them ; there is no such amassing of fresh material as we find in 
 Stubbs and Freeman, and in Seeley's own Stein. But in another 
 and a deeper sense there are probably no historical works of the 
 nineteenth century which are more profoundly original. The 
 facts, familiar to historians as nearly all of them were, are regarded 
 in a new light and take a new meaning from the setting in which 
 they are placed. For England, Seeley may be said to have 
 created Foreign Policy as a department of history. " While we
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 899 
 
 have," he says, " entered early into the conception of constitutional 
 history, and have seen in this department first a Hallam and then 
 a StubbSj we have scarcely yet perceived that Constitutional 
 History requires the History of Policy as its correlative \" It 
 was Seeley's work to supply the deficiency ; and, whether from 
 the nature of the subject or on account of his own skill, in doing 
 so he contrived to impart to his books incomparably greater 
 interest than either of the constitutional historians gave to his. 
 To Seeley, as to the great artists in history of old, history is living, 
 not dead, and his readers too feel the pulse of life. 
 
 The conception which inspired all Seeley's work was the 
 conception of the State, not as an abstraction, or as a mechanical 
 system of wheels and pinions, but as a great organic reality, the 
 inspiration of the higher life, something which could be felt, but 
 which could by no means be reduced to logical formulae. " Who 
 can describe that which unites men?... Who can describe ex- 
 haustively the origin of civil society ? " The key to his teaching 
 is the conviction that his business as a professor was to train 
 citizens, not merely to impart learning. It is the key also to his 
 religion. Central in position in Ecce Homo, and central also in 
 importance, is the chapter on " the enthusiasm of humanity." It 
 is the social side of Christianity that attracts him ; and in Natural 
 Religion it is the power of religion, not to ' save,' as it is phrased, 
 an individual soul, but to elevate the life of man as a social being, 
 which causes him to treat that wherein this power inheres as the 
 supremely important thing. And so it is too in his historical 
 work. In The Growth of British Policy he dwells upon the pride 
 and confidence in England which sprang from the defeat of 
 Spain, and that pride and confidence are the inspiration of his 
 own work. He was one of the earliest and most efficient of the 
 workers who have combated the conception, prevalent in the 
 middle of the nineteenth century, that colonies were a burden 
 and a danger, and who have advocated the federation of the 
 British Empire. Probably no single work has done so much 
 towards this end as The Expansion of England. 
 
 The philosophic tastes and tendency of Seeley were shared to 
 * Growth of British Folicy, i. 2, 
 
 57-2
 
 900 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the full by William Edward Hartpole Lecky (i 838-1 903) ; and it 
 may be remarked in passing that the two had also in common 
 a touch of the poetic spirit. Seeley's first publication was a 
 volume of verse entitled David and Jonathan, while Lecky a 
 generation later published a volume of Poems (1891) of consider- 
 able, if not very high, merit. In Lecky's case also, as in Seeley's, 
 the philosophic side showed itself first, his earliest work of note 
 being the History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of 
 Ratioitalism in Europe. It is a work of high value in itself, 
 and quite marvellous when regarded as the production of a 
 young man of twenty-seven. The world asked in astonishment 
 by what magic he had been able to crowd into so few years such 
 a mass of reading, and wondered still more perhaps at the 
 character than at the extent of the reading. There had been 
 no pioneers, in English at least, on the road the young author 
 had traversed. He had been regularly educated at Trinity 
 College, Dublin, and had taken his degree there ; but the reading 
 shown in Rationalism in Europe lay far out of the beaten track of 
 colleges and universities. In point of fact, Lecky had browsed at 
 his own will among the libraries of Northern Italy, had found his 
 own way and developed his own interests. To this must be 
 ascribed that freshness which is one of the great charms of the 
 book. Very rarely has a man so young written a book so fully 
 his own. The rationalistic spirit was, of course, no new thing, or 
 there would have been no history of it to write ; but Lecky had 
 gathered the facts and opinions for himself, and he marshalled them 
 in a way entirely his own. No English writer had yet treated the 
 subject in the spirit of a historian. Hurst's History of Rationalism, 
 which was published in the same year with Lecky's book, is 
 the work of a partisan ; and though Draper's Intellectual 
 Development of Europe (1862) has some points in common with 
 Lecky's Rationalis7ti, it does not substantially detract from the 
 originality of the latter. His book seemed to be the outcome of a 
 mind neither purely philosophical nor purely historical. On the 
 one hand, Leckv showed little interest in abstract ideas as such ; 
 on the other hand, the facts he culled out were facts which 
 either embodied or could be used to illustrate ideas. Although
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 9OI 
 
 his purely philosophic endowment was not of the highest order, 
 probably no man then living had shown the power to combine in 
 equal degree a grasp of facts with mastery of principle. 
 
 The same tendencies, in greater maturity and combined with 
 still wider learning, are visible in the History of European Morals 
 from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869), which many regard as the 
 greatest of all Lecky's works. The very title proclaims that this 
 is not a " history " in the sense of a narrative of events. Still less 
 is it a treatise on ethics or a history of ethical systems. Its aim 
 is to extract from the period reviewed the moral conceptions 
 which actually prevailed then, to explain their rise and influence, 
 to trace the changes they underwent, and to account for the decay 
 of such as did decay. The task was a gigantic one, and the 
 success of the writer is all the more astonishing because here 
 again he had no predecessors. There were histories of ethics, 
 histories of institutions and general histories of the period, but 
 there was no history of morals in the sense in which Lecky 
 conceived it. The high value of his performance was at once 
 recognised by the translation of his book into German and by 
 its adoption as a text-book in German universities. 
 
 The point of view of Lecky is more sceptical than that of 
 Seeley. Though the historian of rationalism was one of the most 
 impartial of men, there can be no doubt that his own sympathies 
 are all with the rationalists ; and in the History of European 
 Morals the treatment of monasticism is certainly not sympathetic. 
 One of Lecky's greatest faults is his tendency to judge the past 
 too much by the standard of the present. He was far too well 
 read and far too thoughtful to do this in a gross way, but in his 
 treatment of the monks he seems to make inadequate allowance 
 for the difference between modern and mediaeval times. 
 
 The longest and most purely historical of Lecky's works, 
 the History of England in the Eighteenth Century (1878- 
 1890), is a work so planned and executed that it scarcely 
 comes into competition with the histories of Lord Stanhope 
 (1805-1875) or with the Reign of Queen Anne (1880) by John 
 Hill Burton (i 809-1 881) the historian of Scotland. Burton's 
 book, like his History of Scotland (1867-1S70), is a plain,
 
 902 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Straightforward, conscientious, but unadorned and somewhat 
 uninspiring, narrative, which justly lays great stress on the 
 immense importance of the union of the Parliaments. Stan- 
 hope's series of works, which together cover the greater part of 
 the eighteenth century, are probably, in their pedestrian way, the 
 best general account of the period conceived as a simple succes- 
 sion of events. Lecky's aim is different, and the value of his 
 work incomparably higher. Both in plan and in execution it 
 shows the hand, not of the annalist, but of the philosophic 
 historian. There were great wars during the period ; but the 
 reader must go elsewhere for a satisfactory account of them. 
 What the historian aims at is " to disengage from the great mass 
 of facts those which relate to the permanent forces of the nation, 
 or which indicate some of the more enduring features of national 
 life." The student whose principal interest is in political philosophy 
 will find Lecky admirable. 
 
 Lecky has been already spoken of as one of the most impartial 
 of men. As an Irishman, he had need of all his impartiality in 
 writing his history. Much of it deals with the affairs of Ireland ; 
 and, whether as to the relations of England with Ireland, or as to 
 the relations between Protestant and Catholic in Ireland itself, 
 few writers, either English or Irish, have been able to preserve 
 even the semblance of fairness. Lecky almost alone completely 
 succeeds. It is evident that his history is the work of a patriotic 
 Irishman ; but his patriotism is thoroughly sane and sensible, and 
 there is no distortion of facts. 
 
 In his later years Lecky reverted once again to the more 
 directly philosophic mode of treatment. His Democracy and 
 Liberty (1896) is one of the best criticisms of modern democracy 
 by one who does not believe in it ; and the much weaker Map of 
 Life (1899) is likewise the work of a reflective spirit. Though 
 Lecky was a Liberal in politics there was a fundamental con- 
 servatism in his mind which is nowhere more plainly seen than in 
 Democracy afid Liberty. He had looked upon the development 
 of modern democracy not without anxiety. He saw the fallacy of 
 the argument from ancient to modern democracy ; and his object 
 was to point out certain dangers which he believed to be involved
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 903 
 
 in a continuance of the democratic development, and even to be 
 inherent in the existing condition of affairs. The danger which 
 he specially dreaded was that of interference with the liberty of 
 the individual. While he would have admitted that there was a 
 certain fanaticism in the assertion by the Manchester school of 
 the rights of the individual, he thought that there was a tendency 
 to underestimate the truth contained in its teaching and to go too 
 far in the opposite direction. Even those who differ from him 
 must admit that his case is well stated and vigorously argued. 
 
 The great historians of the older time rarely filled professorial 
 chairs. Neither Hume nor Gibbon nor Macaulay nor Carlyle 
 ever did so. But the increased prominence given to history as 
 an item in education brought about a great change, and in the 
 intermediate and later parts of the Victorian era what had 
 previously been exceptional became the rule. We have already 
 had numerous examples, and two more still remain to notice. 
 The death of Seeley did not produce that decline in the historical 
 standard of Cambridge which many at the time anticipated. On 
 the contrary, in point of learning at least, it was distinctly raised 
 by the appointment of John Dalberg Acton, Lord Acton (1834— 
 1902). Of two Cambridge theologians, Lightfoot and Hort, 
 Acton has declared that they " were critical scholars whom 
 neither German nor Frenchman has surpassed." The words 
 might be adapted to himself. Probably Europe possessed no 
 man more deeply versed in historical lore than he. His position 
 as a writer, however, is much lower than that which he deserves 
 as a scholar ; and it is unfortunate that the greater part of his 
 immense learning was buried in his grave. The history of liberty 
 which he planned was left unfinished ; and that fragment, with 
 the posthumous volume of lectures, the letters of Quirinus on the 
 CEcumenical Council of 1869— 1870 and some scattered articles 
 here and there, very inadequately represents his profound scholar- 
 ship and his great force. 
 
 A man who reads an octavo volume a day and writes little or 
 nothing usually belongs to the tribe of Dryasdust, and it has 
 sometimes been assumed that Acton too belonged to it. But 
 the lectuies prove the assumption to be wholly unfounded. No
 
 904 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 historian of recent times is richer in ideas, none more successfully 
 subordinates detail to general conceptions. The lecture on Peter 
 the Great and the Rise of Prussia is an illustration ; so is the 
 inaugural lecture, by far the finest of the literary remains of 
 Acton. It embodies his conception of the function of history, 
 which he held to be primarily ethical. " I exhort you," he says, 
 " never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of 
 rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your 
 own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the 
 undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on 
 wrong."..." If, in our uncertainty, we must often err, it may be 
 sometimes better to risk excess in rigour than in indulgence, for 
 then at least we do no injury by loss of principle."..." Opinions 
 alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is 
 written on the tablets of eternity^" The writer of these sentences 
 evidently contemplated the moral law with an awe as profound as 
 Kant's ; and all that he has written goes to show that they express 
 principles which were always before his mind. No one has in- 
 sisted more upon the historian's duty to judge ; and, alas, all his 
 learning only led him to the conclusion that he would probably 
 have to condemn. He quotes with approval Bayle's saying, " It 
 is more probable that the secret motives of an indifferent action 
 are bad than good^" 
 
 If he did not stand alone as a historical moralist, Acton at 
 least carried the theory that the function of history is ethical farther 
 than any one else, except perhaps a man whom he did not 
 admire, Carlyle. For, though his judgments are expressed in a 
 widely different way, Carlyle too is always a judge, and his 
 judgments are always grounded on ethical conceptions. In other 
 respects also Acton stood apart from the majority of his con- 
 temporaries. Surrounded by nationalist historians, he drew his 
 lessons from universal history. In a period of specialisation, 
 when each man had his field marked out, and the field was 
 usually defined by chronological limits, Acton refused to be so 
 bound. " Study problems in preference to periods," he says ; 
 " for instance : the derivation of Luther, the scientific influence of 
 1 Inaugural Lecture. * ibid.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 905 
 
 Bacon, the predecessors of Adam Smith, the mediaeval masters of 
 Rousseau, the consistency of Burke, the identity of the first 
 Whig\" And he honoured his own advice by selecting for the 
 work of his life the history of liberty. 
 
 It would be wrong to say that Acton escaped the errors which 
 beset the man of immense learning. If he had been less insatiable 
 for knowledge he would have been more productive. And the 
 "cloud of witnesses" whom he adduces in the notes in support and 
 in illustration of the inaugural lecture show, at least incipiently, 
 the tendency of mere learning to lose the sense of proportion and 
 the capacity to measure relative importance. The stores carried 
 in the memory which could supply those illustrations must have 
 been prodigious, but in many cases the reader is tempted to ask 
 whether the point was worth illustrating. 
 
 The second of the two historians referred to was also a 
 Cambridge professor ; but the chair held by Frederic William 
 Maitland (1850-1906) was one of law, not of history. Notwith- 
 standing the proverbial danger of prophecy, it is safe to say that 
 no English scholar of the last half-century is more likely than 
 Maitland to stand higher in reputation in the year 2000 than he 
 does now. Several reasons may be given for this judgment. In 
 the first place, most of his writings are highly technical, so that, 
 while the verdict of scholars, both in England and on the 
 Continent, has already been given emphatically in his favour, he 
 remains practically unknown to the personage called ' the general 
 reader.' He is not known even as Stubbs and Freeman are 
 known ; and the notices of his untimely death made it evident 
 that, though the writers were aware that a great scholar had passed 
 away, most of them did not know him as even the peer of either of 
 these men, still less as their superior. The History of English Law 
 before Edward 1 (1895) which he wrote in conjunction with 
 Sir F. Pollock, Domesday Book and Beyond (1897), consisting of 
 essays originally intended for, but not incorporated in, the former 
 work, and the Ford lectures on Township and Borough (1898), all 
 deal with subjects which are caviare to the general. Many, who 
 would delight in Maitland's pungency and would keenly appreciate 
 
 ^ Inaugural Lecture.
 
 go6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 his lightness of touch, are prevented from making acquaintance 
 with them by fear of the dryness of the subject. In Maitland's 
 hands no subject is dry; and this fact is another ground for 
 confidence in the permanence of his reputation. Few men have 
 ever possessed such a gift for making everything he dealt with 
 readable. Perhaps still fewer have possessed his masterly power 
 of handling evidence. Domesday Book is full of instances. Out- 
 side Maitland's own writings it would be difficult to produce a 
 parallel to the treatment of the question of old English land 
 measures, such as the hide. It is penetrating, it is lucid, it is 
 terse. Without a word of needless ornament, without the omission 
 of an item of evidence, the subject is made to yield new meaning 
 to the ripest scholar, while it becomes interesting to the reader 
 whose knowledge is all derived from Maitland himself English 
 historical literature contains no better example of the importance 
 of the mind which is brought to bear on a document. Domesday 
 Book is open to all, but it will no more yield its meaning without 
 a genius for interpretation than the flower will yield its honey 
 except to the bee. 
 
 By reason of these gifts, Maitland, notwithstanding the tech- 
 nicality of his subjects and the scientific severity of his method, is 
 an ornament to literature as well as to scholarship. He is never 
 smothered under facts, he has always an outlook beyond the 
 particular point he has in view. When, for a too brief moment, he 
 gives himself free scope on the heights, as in Efiglish Law and 
 ike Renaissance (1901), he is delightful. But his greatest achieve- 
 ment is his Ro7nan Canon Law in England, which has been 
 already mentioned in connexion with Stubbs. The rank of a 
 historian must depend, to a considerable extent, upon the in- 
 fluence of his work ; and, measured in this way, Maitland stands 
 easily first among his contemporaries. It falls to the lot of few 
 historians, even of the highest rank, to overthrow a great theory 
 and to sweep into the rubbish heap a whole literature. But this 
 is what Maitland has done. Unless the future brings some 
 answer of which there is as yet not so much as a hint, and the 
 Hnes of which it is difficult even to conceive, all that has been 
 written about ecclesiastical history on the basis of the report of
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 907 
 
 the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission of 1883 is as antiquated 
 as the pre-Copernican astronomy, and the foundation of the High 
 Anglican theory in vogue since the Tractarian movement has 
 crumbled into ruin. Yet nothing is more remarkable than the 
 bhndness to these facts displayed in most of the obituary notices 
 of Maitland. They are the greatest facts of his life and work ; 
 professional historians know them well, and, except where they 
 are swayed by clerical prejudice, acknowledge them freely and 
 teach in accordance with them. But many of the writers of 
 obituary notices of historians are not professional historians. 
 
 Here then is another, and the chief, reason for the conviction 
 that Maitland is destined to a higher and wider fame in the 
 future than he now enjoys. The profound significance of his 
 work is at present concealed. The policy of the ostrich with 
 his head in the sand is followed in many, probably in most, of 
 the dioceses of England, and the Church history which is taught 
 to and required of candidates for ordination is that which 
 Maitland has demonstrated to be erroneous. Nelson proved 
 once that there might be wisdom in putting the telescope to the 
 blind eye ; but no one has ever shown that shutting the eyes will 
 extinguish the sun at noon-day. When the light which Maitland 
 sheds at last penetrates to places at present artificially darkened, 
 it will be found that no modern historian whatsoever has effected 
 a more momentous revolution. 
 
 Among the numerous historians who have been mentioned, it 
 seems strange at first sight that there is none, except Carlyle, who 
 devoted any capital work to the tremendous events which, at the 
 close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth 
 centuries, transformed Europe. In French and German Taine 
 and Thiers and Michelet and Sybel told the story of the 
 Revolution ; but English writers preferred to go farther back, 
 or, when they did study the period, like Seeley, they threw 
 their work into biographic form. They were deterred, doubtless, 
 by the feeling that the events were not yet sufficiently distant to 
 be seen in true historical perspective, and perhaps, in part, by the 
 sense that the ground was already occupied by a writer of 
 secondary rank. Sir Archibald Alison (i 792-1867), son of the
 
 908 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Archibald Alison who was once famous as the author of an Essay 
 on Taste, laboriously wrote a History of Europe during the French 
 Revolution (1833-1842) which won great popularity because, with 
 all its verbosity and dulness and Toryism, it was the best account 
 in English of events in which all were profoundly interested. 
 Alison afterwards continued the narrative from 1815 to 1852, 
 traversing in this latter part the ground covered also by Harriet 
 Martineau's equally prejudiced, but far more lively, History of 
 England during the Thirty Years' Peace (1849- 1850). 
 
 If however the period has given us no great general history 
 of the gigantic contest, there are few of its historical products 
 more valuable in themselves than Napier's great History of the War 
 in the Peninsula and the South of France (1828-1840) and fewer 
 still of as high literary quality. Rich as the period has been in 
 historians, in no department has it so clearly surpassed all previous 
 times as in that of military history. Napier's Peninsular War is 
 the best of all military histories in the English language, and 
 the works of Kinglake, of Sir Edward Bruce Hamley, of 
 C. C. Chesney and of George Francis R. Henderson, form a 
 group which it would be hard to equal in any other period. 
 Henderson's Stonewall Jackson stands as eminent among military 
 biographies as Napier's work among military histories; and though 
 Kinglake's Crimea has obvious faults, it is probably the most 
 adequate account of a war ever written by a civilian. 
 
 Sir William Francis Patrick Napier (1785-1860) was one of 
 those favoured men on whom nature seems to have showered 
 every gift. His physical development was magnificent, and he 
 was so handsome that, his biographer says, "in his youth his 
 head and face might have served for a portrait of the war god." 
 His books show clearly enough the greatness of his intellectual 
 endowment, but hardly its full scope. He was a painter and 
 a sculptor of sufficient ability to be elected an honorary member 
 of the Royal Academy, and many a passage in the History shows 
 how valuable was the artist's eye to the author. He was not only 
 by profession a soldier, but a member of a family than which 
 none has been more prominent in the military history of Britain. 
 He was brother to the great Sir Charles Napier the story ot whose
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 909 
 
 campaigns he tells in his Conquest of Scinde (1845), a book which, 
 for the sake of the author's fame as a historian, would be better 
 forgotten. Not only is it inferior in literary merit to the history 
 of the Peninsular War, but still more in tone and temper. It is 
 pervaded with the spirit of controversy ; and though in essentials 
 Napier was in the right, the want of the judicial spirit is every- 
 where too patent. 
 
 As historian of the Peninsular War Napier enjoyed rare 
 advantages. Not only was he a soldier, but he was also a 
 scientific student of his profession. He had himself fought in 
 the Peninsula. He understood the difficulties and advantages of 
 the ground ; he understood the character of the people ; he 
 familiarly knew many actors in the stirring scenes which he 
 depicts ; he had seen and talked with others, through some of 
 whom he had access to valuable papers, on the French side as 
 well as on the English. The papers of Soult were placed at his 
 disposal ; and though Wellington did not accede without reserve 
 to his request for documents, he gave the historian very con- 
 siderable help, both by papers and by conversation. On 
 the whole, Napier made excellent use of his opportunities. 
 It is true he cannot be called an unprejudiced historian. He 
 had strong likes and dislikes, and never hesitated to express 
 them. No one could pay a more magnificent compliment, and, 
 on the other hand, no one was more fearless in censure when he 
 thought censure was deserved. The one tendency is seen in his 
 panegyrics on the Light Division, and especially in his emphatic 
 praise of one of the regiments of that division, the 52nd, which 
 he declared to be "unsurpassed in arms since arms were borne 
 by men." It is seen also in his idealisation of Napoleon — an 
 honourable fault when we consider the virulence of English 
 public opinion at that time — and in the noble sentences in which 
 he sketches the person and character of Sir John Moore. The 
 other side is seen in nearly every reference to the Spaniards. 
 " No good act," says the latest historian of the war, " done by a 
 Spanish Junta or a Tory minister is ever acknowledged by 
 Napier^" It is seen no less in his censures on individual 
 ^ Oman's Peninsular IVar, i. 499 a.
 
 9IO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 officers, as for example Beresford. Disapproval of some of these 
 strictures was one of the motives which induced Wellington to 
 consent to the publication of his Dispatches. 
 
 But though Napier's colours may be a little too black in one 
 place and too bright in another, his history is likely to remain for 
 ever the classical account of the great contest in the Spanish 
 Peninsula. His technical skill enables him to go at once to the 
 heart of a military problem, and to discriminate between what is 
 essential and what is subordinate. His analyses of campaigns are 
 always illuminative. His judgments, notwithstanding the faults 
 already mentioned, are never ungenerous in spirit. He is careful 
 to avoid the vulgar error of imputing blame to a general merely 
 because he has been unsuccessful. Soult was unsuccessful ; but 
 Napier does full justice to his great quaUties. Indeed, one of the 
 most pleasant characteristics of the history is its generous tone 
 towards the French. Napier rightly refused to believe a great 
 many of the charges which were brought against them of outrages 
 on the Spaniards. He shows that many of the complaints were 
 absolutely baseless, while others were founded upon actions which 
 were almost forced upon the French by the nature of their 
 struggle with the guerillas; and he points unanswerably to the 
 fact that, though Wellington denounced such treatment when it 
 was directed against his Spanish allies, he himself was forced to 
 threaten similar action against the French peasants when the 
 course of the war brought him among them. 
 
 In style Napier is habitually plain and unpretentious. He 
 tells a simple story with soldier-Hke directness, and the impression 
 generally produced is that of exact sufficiency for the purpose. 
 But while this is true of the ordinary level of the narrative, no 
 one is more capable than he of rising to the height of a great 
 occasion. The fame of his battle-pieces is due to the fact that 
 the sense of conflict stirs his blood like the sound of a trumpet, 
 and the plain narrative passes by an unforced transition into lofty 
 eloquence. The celebrated description of Albuera, which by 
 itself would secure to Napier a position among the masters of 
 English prose, is only the greatest of many great pictures of 
 battle.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 91I 
 
 The next European war in which England was engaged after 
 the fall of Napoleon found its historian in Alexander William 
 Kinglake (i 809-1 891). While Napier was a soldier who was led 
 by interest in his profession to write books, Kinglake was a man 
 of letters whom circumstances and an adventurous disposition led 
 to write the history of a war. To this adventurous disposition 
 was due likewise that other book upon which, in the opinion of 
 many, Kinglake's position in literature is more securely based 
 than on his Invasion of the Crimea (1863-1887). He travelled in 
 the East at a time when the East was much less known and far 
 more difficult of access than it is now. In Syria and the neigh- 
 bouring countries he had his share of adventures; but Eothen 
 (1844) is not a story of adventure, nor is it an ordinary narrative 
 of a traveller's journeys from one interesting place to another. 
 Neither does it describe the places visited. But it holds a higher 
 place in literature, and shows a talent far rarer, than books which 
 do all these things. Eotheti charms because, in the first place, it 
 is a masterpiece of literary craftsmanship, and because, in the 
 second place, it nevertheless gives the impression of being, as it 
 really is, a work of quite unusual sincerity. This was the aspect 
 of it which most forcibly struck the readers of the time. In 
 particular it struck Eliot Warburton, author of The Crescent and 
 the Cross (1845), one of the few books of travel which have some 
 share of the fascination of Eothen. In a remarkably able review 
 in The Quarterly Warburton says emphatically, "This is a real 
 book — not a sham." What, it may be asked, is the source of this 
 impression? And the answer is that of all books dealing with 
 the oldest regions in history, Eothen is the least conventional. 
 The author is always himself the centre, and what he records with 
 unshrinking fidelity are his own emotions and impressions in face 
 of the most famous scenes on earth. The fact that their nature 
 can never be predicted heightens the charm of the book : it has 
 the same kind of attraction as a masterly — that is, a perfectly 
 sincere— autobiography. This is a quality rare in itself : it is still 
 more rare in combination with careful literary art. The style of 
 Eothen seems easy, at times almost careless. But Kinglake was 
 in reality a fastidious and laborious writer, and never more so
 
 912 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 than in this volume. The journey which it records was under- 
 taken in 1835, ^"d great part of the nine years intervening 
 between it and the publication of his book was devoted to the 
 writing and rewriting of EotJun. 
 
 This was the practised and polished writer who became the 
 historian of the Crimean War. Though Kinglake was a civilian, 
 he had already made acquaintance with military operations. He 
 had been in Algiers in 1845, had accompanied the forces of 
 St Arnaud, and had carried away impressions of the man and of 
 his methods, and of other Frenchmen as well, which are deeply 
 stamped upon his history. In 1854 the stir of war attracted him 
 once more, and, though he had no official position in connexion 
 with the English army, he accompanied the allied forces on their 
 voyage across the Black Sea. A man so interesting and so 
 accomplished naturally attracted notice. He became acquainted 
 with Lord Raglan, and after Raglan's death Lady Raglan put in 
 his hands her husband's papers. He thus became, in a sense, the 
 apologist of the English general, and, without conscious falsification, 
 he certainly showed himself willing enough to play the part of an 
 advocate. 
 
 These two great military histories. The Invasion of the Crimea 
 and the War in the Peninsula do not differ widely in length, but 
 they are totally different in scale. Kinglake's period embraces 
 less than two years, Napier's about six. The invasion of the 
 Crimea was conducted along a single line and there were 
 practically no digressions. Napier has to give the history of 
 campaigns on the Douro, on the Tagus, in Andalusia, in Valencia, 
 in Galicia. Three great battles and a siege constitute the sub- 
 stance of the Crimean operations. A dozen battles, innumerable 
 combats and three great sieges constitute the English share alone 
 of the operations in the Peninsula. Kinglake gives the bulk of a 
 volume to each battle ; Napier can spare to each only a few 
 pages. Albuera and Inkerman were both emphatically soldiers' 
 battles. In Napier the description of Albuera, with the immortal 
 passage at the close, occupies about eight pages; while that of 
 Jnkerman, in the cabinet edition of Kinglake, fills more than four 
 hundred. The contrast is similar if we take a general's battle.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 913 
 
 Napier considered Salamanca the greatest of Wellington's battles; 
 and he describes it in nine pages. Kinglake labours, not very 
 successfully, to prove that the Alma was won by the genius of 
 Raglan; and he dwells on the battle through three hundred 
 pages. In a word, although the History of the War in the 
 Peninsula is long, it is nevertheless a very condensed account of 
 a vast and complicated struggle, while The Invasion of the Crimea 
 is not only long but diffuse. This was a vice of the time as well 
 as of the man. We are accustomed to think of the last generation 
 or two as a peculiarly strenuous and busy period ; but neverthe- 
 less they have produced a number of literary works, and especially 
 works of a historical character, on a scale hardly paralleled by 
 anything written in earlier ages. Macaulay shows the same weak- 
 ness. Ten pages are devoted to the death of Charles I ; the siege 
 of Londonderry fills nearly one hundred ; five large volumes are 
 required for the history of some sixteen years. The whole 
 world would hardly contain its own history written upon this 
 scale. 
 
 The result is, no doubt, due in part to the more exhaustive 
 research of modern writers ; but it cannot be ascribed solely, or 
 even principally, to that cause. The facility for the diffusion of 
 books on a great scale, which is afforded by the art of printing 
 and by the cheapening of production, has tempted authors to 
 forget the great arts of condensation and omission. Tacitus and 
 Thucydides were forced to be brief, and, in consequence, they 
 aimed at revealing the soul and inner meaning of the history of 
 their period, while the two moderns are far more concerned about 
 picturesqueness. And they assuredly attain their end. 
 
 In this point again there is a vital difference between Napier 
 and Kinglake. The former is preoccupied with questions of 
 military science. He does not frequently name subordinate 
 officers, and scarcely ever unless there is strong reason for 
 doing so. He rarely narrates those isolated incidents and ad- 
 ventures in which war is so prolific, yet, when he does, it is 
 with an effect which shows that his abstinence is due to no want 
 of skill. The reader does not readily forget his story of the 
 French cavalry officer who, discovering at the moment of making 
 
 w. 53
 
 914 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 a cut at an Englishman that his adversary had only one arm, 
 chivalrously raised his sword to the salute and rode on ; still less 
 can he forget that ghastly story of Massena's retreat, which in two 
 or three sentences reveals all the horrors of war : — " During this 
 march, in an obscure place among the hills, a large house was 
 discovered filled with starving persons. Above thirty women and 
 children were already dead, and sitting by the bodies were fifteen 
 or sixteen living beings, of whom only one was a man, and all so 
 enfeebled as to be unable to swallow the little food that could be 
 offered to them. The youngest had fallen first, all the children 
 were dead, none were emaciated, but the muscles of their faces 
 were invariably drawn transversely, giving a laughing appearance 
 unimaginably ghastly. The man seemed most eager for life, the 
 women patient and resigned, and they had carefully covered and 
 arranged the bodies of the deadM" 
 
 Had Kinglake told these stories he would have given the 
 name, rank and regiment of the one-armed Englishman, and 
 specified the battle in which he lost his arm ; and he would have 
 moved heaven and earth to discover like details about the French- 
 man too. Probably he would have avoided the gruesome story, 
 but had he narrated it, he would certainly not have done so in 
 the terse style of Napier. And the anecdotes he tells are incom- 
 parably more numerous. He takes a Homeric delight in the 
 personal exploits of his fighters, and, unlike Napier, he never 
 passes over a name that has any relevance to the struggle he is 
 describing, or omits a detail which may help to give it vividness. 
 Thus, in the description of the charge of the Heavy Brigade at 
 Balaclava, the three companions of Scarlett in front of the ad- 
 vancing line are carefully specified ; and when, in the midst of 
 the fight, it became necessary to rally the Greys, this is how the 
 attempt is described : — 
 
 "Alexander Miller, the acting Adjutant of the Greys, was 
 famous in his regiment for the mighty volume of sound which he 
 drove through the air when he gave the word of command. Over 
 all the clangour of arms, and all the multitudinous uproar, his 
 
 ^ The War in the Peninsula, ill. xii. iii.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPFIY 915 
 
 single voice got dominion. It thundered out ' Rally ! ' Then, 
 still louder, it thundered, ' The Greys ! ' 
 
 " The Adjutant, as it chanced, was so mounted that his vast, 
 superb form rose high over the men of even his own regiment, 
 and rose still higher over the throng of the Russians. Seized at 
 once by the mighty sound, and turning to whence it came, 
 numbers of the Scots saw their towering Adjutant with his 
 reeking sword high in the air, and again they heard him cry, 
 'Rally!' — again hurl his voice at 'The Greys \"' 
 
 Here we learn in many words the great facts that Adjutant 
 Miller was a large man, that he had a mighty voice, and that he 
 shouted out, "Rally, the Greys!" Though this is an unusually 
 pronounced specimen of an extremely verbose style, it is charac- 
 teristic. There is far too much of this sort of inflation in The 
 Invasion of the Crif?iea. And yet the style has great merits too. 
 It is lucid, it is interesting, and it is highly pictorial. No one 
 who cares for military history at all will voluntarily lay down one 
 of Kinglake's battle volumes until he has finished it. Thanks to 
 him, the Crimean battles are known as no other battles in English 
 history, Waterloo not excepted, are known. Possibly Inkerman, 
 so heroic but so destitute of thought or of plan, could not have 
 been adequately described in any other way; and few would 
 willingly forgo that thrilling story of dauntless gallantry. The 
 condensed style of Napier's Albuera is far greater, but it cannot 
 give that knowledge of the daring and endurance of the individual 
 soldier which Kinglake's ample narrative conveys. 
 
 There are thus compensations for the vices, serious as they 
 are, of Kinglake's style ; but The Invasion of the Crimea has 
 other faults for which there are no compensations. Kinglake 
 was very far from being an impartial writer. As has been already 
 hinted, he obviously held a brief for Raglan, as he did also for 
 Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. It is difficult to believe that anybody 
 ever exercised quite such an overwhelming personal ascendancy 
 as he ascribes both to the general and to the diplomatist. On 
 the other hand, he was equally whole-hearted in his dislikes. In 
 Napoleon III and in Marshal St Arnaud he could see no virtues ; 
 ^ 1 he Invasion of the Crimea, v. 153. 
 
 58—2
 
 gi6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 but, though the portrait of the former is etched with vitriol, it is 
 masterly. On the political side his history is untrustworthy. 
 Gladstone declared that, as to the matter within his cognisance, 
 it was entirely void of resemblance to the truth, and pronounced 
 the book "too bad to live, and too good to die\" 
 
 The accomplished Edward Bruce Hamley (i 824-1 893), 
 novehst and parodist as well as military historian, told long after- 
 wards in more compendious form the story of the Crimean War 
 in which he had personally played a part ; and Sir John William 
 Kaye (1814-1876) left unfinished for Colonel Malleson the History 
 of the Sepoy War in India. But the only other work in this 
 department which may fitly be put in line with the great histories 
 of Napier and Kinglake is G. F. R. Henderson's Stonewall Jackson 
 and the Civil War (1898), an admirable biography and a masterly 
 study of that part of the great American Civil War in which 
 Jackson figured. Few biographies are more human, and probably 
 no descriptions of campaigns are at once more satisfying to the 
 professional reader and more clear to the layman. There has 
 scarcely in recent years been a better example of a great theme 
 treated greatly. 
 
 The writers who have been mentioned are only a few among 
 the multitude of those who, during this prolific period, have 
 laboured in the field of history. Many who are unnoticed have 
 done solid and valuable work ; some have thrown the results of 
 their studies into good literary form ; but the destiny probably of 
 all is to be built into the fabric of the work of some great historian 
 of the future. Here, almost as much as in the region of fiction, 
 there is need for selection ; for no clearer or more intelligent view 
 of the historical literature of the period would be gained from the 
 consideration of a larger number of the contributors to it 
 
 This mass of historical literature is indubitably of very high 
 average quality. No previous age has produced nearly so much 
 historical work of genuine worth ; only in this department of 
 literature can we say with confidence that, on the whole, we 
 surpass all our predecessors. At the same time, the assertion 
 of superiority has been made far too absolutely, and the claim 
 ^ Morley's Life of Gladstone, Book iv. ch. iii.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 917 
 
 to the possession of a radically different method cannot be sus- 
 tained. What really distinguishes the work of recent years from 
 that of the more distant past is the deeper sense of the historian's 
 responsibility to his readers — that, and the far more complete 
 command of the materials of history. It must be further re- 
 marked that the superiority of recent historical work would be 
 far less clear were we to eliminate the names of such 'Hterary' 
 historians as Carlyle, Macaulay and Froude. And the assertion 
 of superiority must be further qualified as being general and not 
 specific. Thucydides and Gibbon have not yet lost their pre- 
 eminence. Bacon's History of Henry VII is still the best book 
 on that reign. Knox's History of the Reformation in Scotland, 
 steeped in prejudice as it is, is still incomparably the best account 
 of the period with which it deals. In short, now as always, far 
 more depends upon the man than upon the method. The right 
 man will somehow forge a satisfactory method ; and, as we have 
 seen in the cases of Freeman and Stubbs, no method yet devised 
 can bar the possibility of the most far-reaching mistakes. 
 
 § 2. The Biographers. 
 
 The art of biography has a very close and obvious connexion 
 with the art of history ; but, though apparently the simpler of the 
 two, it is nevertheless of later development. The father of history 
 is older than the father of biography. Plutarch's Lives were a 
 late production, and the class to which they belong is not well 
 represented in classical literature. Neither are biographies at 
 all common until a late period in English literature. Johnson's 
 Lives of the Poets were on a scale quite unusual at that time, and 
 concerning many of the poets of whom he wrote he found no con- 
 secutive and systematic account. No mere man of letters had 
 previously been dealt with so fully as Johnson himself was treated 
 by Boswell. Our ignorance of the personal history of Shakespeare 
 and his contemporaries is notorious ; even the statesmen of those 
 days are, with few exceptions, known, not as individual men but 
 rather as figures in history. Charming lives and autobiographies
 
 9l8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 had appeared from time to time, — Roper's Life of More^ the 
 Autobiography of Roger North, the biographical works of Isaak 
 Walton, The Life of Col. Hutchinson, and the lives of herself and 
 her husband by Lamb's favourite, the Duchess of Newcastle. 
 But the business of biography may be said to start with the 
 nineteenth century, and a very large proportion of the master- 
 pieces belong to it. More even than the development of history, 
 and not less than the development of fiction, it has been charac- 
 teristic of the time. 
 
 Some of the best of these biographies are noticed elsewhere. 
 Carlyle's Sterling was the work of a man who was much more 
 than a biographer, and Froude's Carlyle is most conveniently 
 discussed along with the other works of its author. So also 
 Mrs Gaskell's Charlotte Bronte is best taken in connexion with 
 the works of the two great novelists, the author and her subject. 
 Two very remarkable autobiographies, that of John Stuart Mill 
 and Newman's Apologia, are inseparable from the other work of 
 men who wrote a great deal more. Other biographies again, like 
 Sir George Trevelyan's delightful Life of Macaiilay, are excluded 
 because the authors of them are still alive. But, after all exclusions, 
 there remain at least one masterpiece and several works of high rank, 
 besides a host of competent biographies and a library of memoirs 
 and reminiscences, the bulk of which must be passed without 
 notice. 
 
 The journals, memoirs and reminiscences of recent times will 
 furnish ample raw material to the historian of a future generation ; 
 but there is no Pepys among the writers. As a rule, they have 
 had in mind more or less clearly the thought of the press 
 and the publisher ; and self-consciousness destroys the charm of 
 that sort of composition. Yet there is much that is readable 
 as well as instructive in them. Political are apt to be better 
 than literary reminiscences, for they have often solidity of 
 substance if they have not grace of style. Perhaps the best 
 of all are the Greville Memoirs, because the writer, Charles 
 Greville, had exceptional opportunities for associating with the 
 men who in his time made history, as well as a distinct gift for 
 that sort of composiuou. la these memoirs there is nothing
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 919 
 
 more remarkable than the revolution in the writer's opinion of 
 the Duke of Wellington, and no panegyric on the great soldier 
 could be so convincing as the gradual change from coldness and 
 suspicion to perfect trust and warm devotion. The Conversations 
 of Nassau William Senior are another specimen of the raw material 
 of history which may be noticed as also literature. They were 
 the work of a man who had other claims to notice too, an econo- 
 mist and essayist of considerable power; but by far his best claim 
 rests upon these remarkable and often fascinating conversations 
 with great and interesting men. Of reminiscences and journals 
 dealing more particularly with literary men and literary topics 
 among the best are those of Caroline Fox ; Fanny Kerable's are 
 thinner, and reveal a less attractive character. 
 
 Among the regular biographies by far the highest place belongs 
 to Lockhart's Life of Scott (1836-1838). Lockhart, about whose 
 life and character something will be said in the chapter on criti- 
 cism, had already essayed biography in his Life of Burns (1828), 
 where a task, beset with pitfalls well described by Mr Andrew Lang, 
 was accomplished with complete success. " The immense diffi- 
 culty," says Mr Lang, " of writing on the great Scottish poet is, 
 no doubt, best known to Scotchmen. To avoid mere fulsome 
 rhetoric ; to keep within due limits the patriotic Muse ; to shun 
 engoiiement and the Bacchic dithyramb on one side, and the 
 temptation to moralise on the other; to beware of right-hand 
 political bias, and of left-hand literary fastidiousness — these are 
 only a few of the duties of the biographer of Burns. Taste, 
 tact, tolerance in its best sense, sympathy national and personal, 
 are all required. The slips and stumbles of writers on the darling 
 of the Scottish people recur to the memory as one pens these 
 lines. Of all Burns's biographers, Lockhart is he who 'divides 
 us least \' " Though these words were written before the appear- 
 ance of Henley's brilliant essay on Burns, it still remains true that 
 " Lockhart is he who ' divides us least.' " 
 
 But admirable as is his Life of Burns, The Life of Scott is an 
 incomparably greater performance. For the writing of it Lockhart 
 possessed great advantages ; but he had also formidable difficulties 
 
 ^ Lijc 0/ Lockhari, ii. iG-zj'
 
 920 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 to overcome. Among the advantages must be set, first and chiefly, 
 the character of Scott himself, the most largely human of all the 
 figures in English literature since Shakespeare. All the materials 
 Scott provided, in letters, in the admirable fragment of auto- 
 biography, in the wonderful Jouimal^ since published in exte?iso, 
 were of the rarest quality. He had relations with nearly 
 every memorable man of his day. For years he was a kind 
 of host in ordinary for all Scotland, and Abbotsford was the 
 Mansion House of the nation. He was full of shrewd sense 
 and grave wisdom, and at the same time he overflowed with 
 anecdote and fun. The man who could do justice to him was 
 bound to make a great biography; but to do justice to him 
 required a man who had greatness in himself. It required also 
 a man who, knowing Scott well and loving him, retained never- 
 theless his clearness of vision and sanity of judgment. 
 
 From 1818 onwards for fourteen years Lockhart knew Scott 
 with an intimacy ever growing till it could grow no longer ; and 
 in 1820 his marriage with Sophia Scott made him a member of 
 the family. He had the further advantage of knowing well the 
 society in which Scott moved. He was by blood and birth 
 Scotch, by adoption an Edinburgh man, by profession a lawyer. 
 He, if any one, could understand what had gone to make the 
 blood and bone of Scott. Above all, perhaps, Lockhart had 
 the priceless gift of sympathy with his subject. He loved the man 
 and honoured his memory (as Ben Jonson says with reference to 
 Shakespeare) on this side idolatry as much as any. " Lockhart," 
 says his biographer, " had been born to love Scott and, beyond 
 even that regard which Scott's works awaken in every gentle heart, 
 to make him by all men yet more beloved ^" 
 
 Had Lockhart been a man of less faith or of inferior intellect 
 these very advantages might have made him stumble. The man 
 who almost idolises another can rarely keep his judgment clear 
 where that other is concerned ; a very intimate friend is often 
 a partisan ; and he who, from the standpoint of familiar inter- 
 course, writes the life of one whom he feels to be greatly his 
 superior runs some risk of impairing his own dignity. Froude 
 
 ^ Life of Lockhart , ii. 7a.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 92 1 
 
 quite needlessly made himself the champion of Mrs Carlyle 
 against her husband. Macaulay's theory that Boswell wrote a 
 very great biography because he himself was a very little man is 
 ridiculous ; and yet assuredly Boswell is not himself an impressive 
 or dignified figure, nor does his Life of Johnson win for him that 
 respect which so great a work ought to command. Of the 
 partisanship of biographers the examples are so numerous that 
 it would be superfluous to specify them. 
 
 The remarkable absence of these faults from The Life of Scoit 
 proves the soundness and sanity and penetration of Lockhart's 
 judgment. Carlyle, a critic by no means too laudatory, praised 
 the biography for its candour ; and indeed that candour brought 
 upon Lockhart the censure of those men of Uttle faith who could 
 not believe that Scott's genius and virtues would shine undimmed 
 even if his weaknesses were told and his faults revealed. Nothing 
 is more surprising than the clearness of vision with which Lockhart 
 saw what those faults and weaknesses were, and their precise sig- 
 nificance as elements in his character. Take, for example, his 
 treatment of the strain of worldliness in Scott, and compare his 
 judgment on this point with that of men who had far less tempta- 
 tion to go astray. Scott was, says Macaulay in declining Macvey 
 Napier's invitation to review Lockhart's book, " perpetually sacri- 
 ficing the perfection of his compositions, and the durability of his 
 fame, to his eagerness for money ; writing with the slovenly haste 
 of Dryden, in order to satisfy wants which were not, Uke those of 
 Dryden, caused by circumstances beyond his own control, but 
 which were produced by his extravagant waste or rapacious 
 speculation^" "He treats his mind," says Taine, "like a coal- 
 mine, serviceable for quick working and for the greatest possible 
 gain : a volume in a month, sometimes in a fortnight even, and this 
 volume is worth one thousand pounds*." 
 
 Lockhart is infinitely wiser, more just, more faithful to the 
 truth. He admits the fact that Scott laid an unbecoming stress 
 upon worldly things, and among them wealth. But half a truth 
 is often no truth at all ; and Lockhart goes on to point out how 
 
 ^ Life of Macaulay, ii. 9. 
 
 » History of English Literature, iii. 435.
 
 922 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the whole training of Scott's mind, fancy and character had been 
 such as to stimulate active external ambition ; with what noble 
 generosity his wealth had been used ; how far from vulgar 
 snobbery was his respect for rank. " His imagination had been 
 constantly exercised in recalling and embellishing whatever 
 features of the past it was possible to connect with any pleasing 
 ideas, and a historical name was a charm that literally stirred his 
 blood. But not so a mere title. He reverenced the Duke of 
 Buccleuch — but it was not as a Duke, but as the head of his clan, 
 the representative of the old knights of Branxholm. In the 
 Duke of Hamilton he saw not the premier peer of Scotland, 
 but the lineal heir of the heroic old Douglasses; and he had 
 profounder respect for the chief of a Highland Clan, without 
 any title whatever, and with an ill paid rental of two or three 
 thousand a year, than for the haughtiest magnate in a blue 
 ribbon, whose name did not call up any grand historical remi- 
 niscenced" 
 
 The difference between this and the preceding quotations is 
 the difference between portraiture and caricature; a single feature, 
 in the one case, taken and exaggerated till it obscures everything 
 else, in the other case reduced to its proper proportions and set in 
 its proper relation to the whole. The worldliness of Scott, as 
 it was falsely conceived by Macaulay and Taine, was vulgar; 
 as it is truly explained by Lockhart, we see how it is bound 
 up with his whole imaginative Hfe, how the fancy which re- 
 created the life of Border moss-trooper and of Highland clansman, 
 and which saw once more the pageant of the feudal knights, was 
 only finding for itself another expression in the "romance in stone 
 and lime " and in the lavish hospitality of Abbotsford. 
 
 Contemporaries blamed Lockhart, not only on the ground, 
 which seems so strange to us, of malignity towards Scott, but on 
 the score of indifference to the private feelings of others ; and on 
 this count of the indictment he was defended by the very man in 
 the case of whose own biography, long afterwards, the loudest 
 outcry of the century was raised. Carlyle points out that liability 
 to this sort of pain is part of the penalty of associating with the 
 
 •^ Lije of Scott, vi. xoo.
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 923 
 
 great. "They that will crowd about bonfires may, sometimes 
 very fairly, get their beards singed; it is the price they pay for 
 such illumination ; natural twilight is safe and free to all." The 
 biographer's duty is to set down naught in malice, to leave unsaid 
 much that, though true, is non-essential, but at all costs to tell the 
 truth when it is essential. In Lockhart's book the test case is 
 that of the Ballantynes. How indispensable to the understanding 
 of Scott was the treatment of that strange chapter in his history 
 every one must feel ; how admirable are the etchings of the 
 Ballantynes all readers of The Life of Scott know. The whole 
 library of biography contains nothing more masterly than the 
 passages in which Lockhart draws these portraits; and though, 
 perhaps, they show a touch of malice, in substance justice appears 
 to be done to the Ballantynes as well as to Scott. 
 
 Perhaps the subtlest test of the genius of a biographer is the 
 manner in which he uses the common incidents and the familiar 
 everyday relations of life to bring out character and to give reality 
 to his picture; and few bear the test so well as Lockhart. His 
 delineation of the ordinary routine of Abbotsford, the hunting and 
 fishing expeditions, the joyous picnics, the stream of life flowing 
 through the house, the personality of Scott as centre and soul of 
 all, his friendliness with his humble neighbours and their grateful 
 love of him, his position among them as 'the Shirra,' not the 
 great man of letters, his animal pets — dogs, horses, even pigs and 
 hens; in Edinburgh, his daily industry in the trivial round of 
 Parliament House duties, his slow drives up the historic streets, 
 every stone of which was fraught with meaning to him; all go 
 towards the making of a figure which, but for Johnson, would be 
 unique in our literary annals. 
 
 Through the whole book Lockhart's style is excellent. It is 
 simple and unstrained, and wholly free from self-consciousness. 
 There is no attempt at fine writing; the excellence consists in 
 doing with complete success what is attempted, in expressing in 
 the most translucent phrase the meaning intended to be conveyed. 
 For this reason the reader seldom stops to notice how high is the 
 quality of the English. If his attention be arrested at all, it is in 
 those passages where the sorrow and tragedy rouse the biographer
 
 924 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 to a restrained and sober eloquence. The concluding estimate 
 of character is equally beautiful and just ; and the death scene is 
 one of the finest passages in the whole range of English prose. 
 
 The greatness of Lockhart comes out most vividly by contrast. 
 Read in the arm-chair, The Life of Scott might seem to be a work 
 within the compass of any man having access to the materials and 
 the power to write good English. In point of fact, it is an achieve- 
 ment which has very rarely been rivalled. If only good material 
 and literary capacity had been needed, Moore's Byron (1830) 
 ought to have been great. The author was a practised and a 
 skilful writer ; Byron's letters are among the best in the English 
 language ; his life had been varied and adventurous to a degree 
 hardly paralleled among literary men ; his character, however it 
 may be judged, is at any rate profoundly interesting. Carlyle, or 
 Carlyle's biographer, would have made a book on him fascinating. 
 But Moore was too petty for his subject, and he gives no dis- 
 tinct impression of that stormful personality. His Byron has a 
 permanent interest inasmuch as it contains a great deal of 
 information for which Moore was the first, as for some of it he 
 remains the sole, authority. But wherever * the real Lord Byron ' 
 may be, he is certainly not to be found in the pages of Moore. It 
 is fair to add that Moore seems himself to have felt his in- 
 sufficiency, and he only professes to add ' notices ' of the life of 
 Byron to his letters and journals. 
 
 It has sometimes been said that the lives of literary men are, as 
 a rule, too uneventful to be suitable for more than a biographic 
 sketch, that the men whose biographies can be profitably written 
 on the large scale are men of action — soldiers, statesmen, 
 travellers and adventurers. No judgment could be more mistaken. 
 Nearly all the really great biographies are biographies of men of 
 letters. Great soldiers and statesmen, like Frederick the Great 
 and Napoleon and Marlborough and Pitt, are rather integral parts 
 of history than individual men. Great explorers like Columbus 
 and Cook are lost in the leagues they traverse or absorbed 
 among the strange tribes whose existence they reveal. Personal 
 details, which are the soul of biography, in their case seem paltry. 
 Very often they have been too busy in action to leave the
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 925 
 
 materials. The literary man, on the contrary, is all his life long 
 multiplying matter for the biographer. His formal works, his 
 letters, the journals which he is more prone to keep than the man 
 of action, all throw light upon his personality. His conversation 
 too is far more illuminative than that of the soldier or even the 
 statesman. Great talkers have nearly all been writers, not men 
 of action. The statesman's lips are often sealed by considerations of 
 policy ; the soldier rarely possesses by nature, and still more rarely 
 has cultivated, the art of expression. Action in the field or in 
 the senate shows the inner life of the spirit ; but it has to be trans- 
 lated, as it were, by the biographer into a different language. In 
 the case of the man of letters the translation is already made. 
 Hence to write well the life of a man of action is more difficult 
 even than it is to write well the life of an author, and while there 
 are at least a handful of the latter sort of true excellence, of the 
 former kind there is hardly one. Even the fierce light which has 
 been turned upon Napoleon has not revealed the man as a few 
 men of letters have been revealed. 
 
 Except Carlyle's Sterling and Froude's Carlyle, there is no 
 biography of the period which does not seem poor beside 
 Lockhart's masterpiece ; but among biographies least distant 
 from The Life of Scott is Stanley's Life of Arnold (1844). It was 
 Stanley's first work of importance, and it proved to be his best. 
 He loved Arnold, and all his powers were on the strain to do 
 justice to the great Head Master. He was accustomed to say 
 that the work was by far the hardest he ever underwent. For two 
 years it filled his whole mind and occupied all his time. And he 
 had his reward. The Life of Arnold is the one book by Stanley 
 that is Ukely to live. Perhaps its only conspicuous defect, and 
 certainly its most obvious one, is the rigidity of plan which cuts 
 the letters absolutely apart from the narrative, arranging them in 
 blocks at the end of the several chapters. Such a plan is really a 
 confession of failure. The book lacks unity, and the work of 
 weaving the letters into the narrative, which ought to have been 
 performed by the biographer, is left to the imagination of the 
 reader. 
 
 The character of Arnold was a strong but not a complex one,
 
 926 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 and therefore Stanley was not called upon to face the gravest 
 difficulty of biography. There are no inconsistencies, such as 
 those which perplex the biographer of "the wisest, brightest, 
 meanest of mankind"; nor even such as those which have just 
 been touched upon in the case of Scott. There was nothing to 
 conceal about Arnold, nothing which would greatly have tempted 
 even an unwise biographer to concealment. The nearest approach 
 to a problem of this kind was, perhaps, the position in the Church 
 of a man holding Arnold's broad views. But for Stanley the 
 problem was easy ; he had no doubts on the subject ; he did not 
 see why Roman Catholics should not be members of the Church 
 of England if it were only made legal ; and he was naturally even 
 less disposed to exclude extreme breadth of view. Neither was 
 he called upon to follow Arnold into unfamiliar fields of thought 
 and activity. Arnold's interests were scholastic, historical and 
 ecclesiastical. At every point Stanley found himself on familiar 
 ground. Further, the decision of Arnold's character served to 
 strengthen Stanley. Arnold always knew his mind, and Stanley, 
 following reverentially in his wake, learnt to know his too 
 with exceptional clearness. What he did was to narrate a 
 life and to depict a character of high, though not the highest, 
 rank, and to do this with excellent taste and in English clear 
 and forcible. He did it also with commendable condensation. 
 In his Life of Goethe (1855) George Henry Lewes undertook a 
 far more difficult task than Stanley's, and on the whole achieved 
 a wonderful success. Perhaps of all modern men Goethe is 
 the one whose biography presents the greatest difficulties. No one 
 else touches life at so many points, no one else is so toweringly 
 superior to his fellows. In this task the versatility of Lewes stood 
 him in good stead. He took great pains. He visited Weimar ; he 
 examined Goethe's library, finding in it the very copy of Taylor's 
 Historical Survey of German Poetry which had been sent by 
 Carlyle, with a bit of Carlyle's own handwriting on a piece of 
 paper which marked the place; he saturated his mind with all 
 that had been written by or about Goethe ; and he listened to all 
 the anecdotes and reminiscences he could find. He used his 
 material judiciously. While the anecdotal element gives vividness 
 
 '1
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 927 
 
 and interest, there is plenty of matter of solid worth to give weight 
 to the book. The fact that for many years Lewes's life of the 
 great German was regarded as an authority in Germany itself is the 
 highest compliment that could be paid to the author. It has been 
 to some extent superseded now. The laborious examination of 
 masses of documents then inaccessible has disclosed many things 
 that were not known to Lewes; but The Life of Goethe is neverthe- 
 less a book still worth reading. 
 
 Though none of the numerous biographies written by John 
 Forster (18 12-1876) is equal to those which have been mentioned, 
 they nevertheless deserve notice, and their author was too con- 
 spicuous in the literary circles of his time to be passed over. 
 Forster was by profession a barrister ; but he never practised, and 
 his interest lay rather in history and literature than in law. Towards 
 these he made his way by the avenue of journalism. He con- 
 tributed to or edited a number of periodicals — notably The 
 Examiner, of which he was editor for about eight years. 
 Mrs Carlyle refers to him as one " not unknown to fame as ' the 
 second worst critic of the age\"' but at the same time indicates 
 her own respect for his judgment ; and the decision with which, on 
 the score of Paracelsus, he named Browning at once with Shelley, 
 Coleridge and Wordsworth, showed that as a critic he had both 
 insight and courage. He was however simply a man of sound 
 sense, of great industry and of solid attainments, not of brilliant 
 talents, and still less of genius. Though he usually wrote 
 vigorously, his style is at times bald ; and though a conscientious 
 student, he was not free from the vice of partisanship. 
 
 Forster is a conspicuous instance of the historical student who 
 can do nothing except through the medium of biography : to him, 
 the personal element was indispensable. This characteristic is 
 clearly illustrated in the group of works which he devoted to the 
 period of conflict between Charles I and the ParUament. He 
 edited and partly wrote the Lives of Eminent British Statesmen 
 (1837-1839), and afterwards expanded one of the biographies into 
 an independent work, Sir John Eliot, A Biography (1864), which 
 long took rank as one of the most important works on that period 
 ^ Letters and Memorials, i. 100.
 
 928 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 of histor)'. Gradually however he drifted into literary biography, 
 probably because he discovered that, for a man with his interest in 
 the individual, the richest material was to be found there. His 
 Life and Adventures [afterwards Life and Times] of Oliver Gold- 
 smith (1848) added greatly to men's knowledge of a very interesting 
 character; and if his Life of Swift (1876) (never completed) did 
 not contribute much original matter, it at least gathered together 
 in a convenient way the results of previous investigations. 
 
 Forster's fame however, if it lasts at all, must last by reason of 
 his Life of Landor (1869) and his Life of Dickens (1872-1S74). 
 Forster was known to most of the literary men of his day, and 
 with the two who are the subjects of these biographies he was 
 exceedingly intimate. Landor made him his literary executor, 
 and he had sources of information as well as personal knowledge 
 which must render his book permanently indispensable to the 
 student of Landor. But just for this reason it brings out more 
 strikingly than any of his previous publications the deficiencies of 
 Forster as a biographer. Strongly marked as are the features of 
 Landor's character, the impression left by the Life is not the 
 impression of a man, but rather of a bundle of eccentricities ; and 
 yet it is plain that the biographer was animated by the most 
 friendly spirit towards Landor. The truth seems to be that, not- 
 withstanding Forster's interest in individuals, and although his 
 first boyish venture in literature was of a dramatic character, he 
 lacked just that touch of the dramatist's insight which is indis- 
 pensable to biography of the highest class. 
 
 With respect to The Life of Dickens this criticism requires some 
 modification, and yet it remains substantially true. More even 
 than The Life of Landor, it will always remain the mine from 
 which later students must perforce dig their material. The friend- 
 ship between Dickens and Forster was unsurpassed in intimacy. 
 It lasted through the greater part of their lives, and during its 
 continuance there seems to have been absolutely nothing reserved 
 by Dickens from his friend; the very beating of his heart was laid 
 bare to Forster's eyes. There is something undignified and 
 almost indecent on the part of Dickens in this unmeasured self- 
 exposure ; and though it gave Forster unparalleled advantages, in
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 929 
 
 one respect it put him in an apparently false position. Every 
 reader of The Life of Dickens is struck with the extraordinary 
 frequency with which the biographer himself is brought into the 
 narrative, and contemporary criticism blamed him for egotism. 
 The fault seems to have been in Dickens, not in Forster. The 
 great novelist, self-reliant as he was towards the world, and well as 
 he proved his capacity to fight his own battle, leant upon Forster 
 like a little child ; and the biographer could not, without falsifying 
 the story, suppress the part he himself had played in shaping the 
 life of Dickens. 
 
 With such perfect knowledge of the man and his motives, his 
 affections and his aversions, Forster could scarcely fail to produce 
 a likeness ; and indeed Dickens is far more like a real man than 
 anyone else about whom his friend has written. Yet Forster is 
 not entirely successful. The materials are there from which the 
 reader can reconstruct Dickens if he will ; we have valuable and 
 helpful views of phases and aspects of his character ; but he does 
 not stand out "in his habit as he lived." The touch which 
 imparts life is wanting. 
 
 Forster was regarded as a sort of blographer-in-chief of his 
 time; but his high reputation depended at least as much upon 
 the quantity as upon the quality of his work. No one else made 
 biography so much his business. David Masson (1822-1907) 
 was a man of profounder learning, and his monumental Life of 
 Miltofi (185 9- 1 880) will long remain a treasure to students. His 
 character and his great attainments shed honour for many a day 
 upon Edinburgh University; but Masson was rather a man of 
 learning than of marked literary gifts, and it is scholarship which 
 gives The Life of Milton its high value. 
 
 In the case of Margaret Oliphant, a great talent for biography 
 was obscured by indefatigable activity in another field of letters. 
 She is chiefly thought of as a novelist, but she may be re- 
 membered by her Life of Edward Lrving (1862), her Memoirs 
 of Laurence Oliphant and of Agnes, his Wife (1891) and her 
 William Blackwood and his Sons (1897), when her numerous 
 novels have sunk into oblivion. Mrs Oliphant showed the gift 
 for biography again and again in the magazine articles which 
 
 w. 59
 
 930 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 she wrote during her busy hfe. Wherever she had a character- 
 sketch to do, it was well done. Even where her knowledge 
 was far from profound a kind of instinct seemed to lead her to 
 what would be not only effective but really illuminative. She did 
 not possess the creative gift in the highest degree ; probably no 
 creature of her imagination will permanently keep a place in the 
 gallery of fiction. But she had the power of appreciation and of 
 understanding, and she had also a wide range of sympathy. Her 
 Edward Innng satisfied even so exacting a critic as Irving's 
 friend Carlyle. It is indeed a striking portrait, especially in the 
 earlier part, when Irving was still sane and sensible ; yet perhaps 
 still greater ability was needed for the treatment of the later phase. 
 Mrs Oliphant did not share Irving's beliefs, but she handled the 
 worst of his extravagances with comprehension and with delicate 
 sympathy. It may have been merely a coincidence, or possibly 
 such problems had a fascination for her and attracted her to write 
 about them, but at any rate, in her biography of Laurence Oliphant 
 (who was very distantly related to her family), she had, in his 
 extraordinary subjection to the Prophet Harris, the same sort of 
 problem to deal with, and she treated it with the same sympathetic 
 delicacy. 
 
 In William Blackwood and his Sons Mrs Oliphant had very 
 different material to handle ; and here too, in spite of some 
 diffuseness and occasional repetitions, she was successful. The 
 portrait of William Blackwood, the founder of the house, is vivid. 
 He died in 1834, and of course the biographer did not know him; 
 but she had evidently penetrated beneath the documents to the 
 heart of the man. Nor is this the only good portrait in the book. 
 Lockhart and Wilson, who, with Blackwood himself, made the 
 magazine, are admirably drawn and admirably contrasted; and the 
 slighter sketches too are nearly all well done. 
 
 This history of a publishing firm had been preceded, in 1891, 
 by a similar history of the other publishing house in Britain which 
 most closely rivalled that of Blackwood, in that its members were 
 not merely traders in books, but in no unimportant sense producers 
 of literature. Samuel Smiles's (i Br 2-1904) yb/^« Murray has less 
 of the charm of portraiture than Mrs Ohphant's Blackwood, but it
 
 HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 931 
 
 is more concentrated; and it too deserves honourable mention 
 as a most valuable contribution to the literary history of the 
 nineteenth century. The two works are a monument to the great 
 change which passed over the financial and material conditions of 
 literature in the eighteenth century, and which reached maturity 
 in the nineteenth. Though " Barabbas was a publisher," the 
 publisher has been only one degree less necessary to the author 
 than the author has been to the publisher, and the grumblings of 
 authors have just the same degree and kind of foundation as the 
 grumblings of producer and consumer at the costly but indis- 
 pensable middleman. It was fortunate for literature that among 
 its middlemen were two men not only so sane and sensible, but so 
 high-spirited and liberal, as John Murray and William Blackwood. 
 Smiles, Hke Forster, was a veteran in the biographer's craft. 
 His long literary life was devoted mainly to biographical studies. 
 The works by which he is best known, Self-help and Thrift, are 
 biographic in principle. Though the ideals they inculcate are 
 not, perhaps, the loftiest, they are wholesome books, they have 
 a practical bearing upon the lives of the toiling multitudes to 
 whom primarily they are addressed, and they have had a wide 
 influence for good. They are among the phenomena which 
 accompany the widening of the class of readers through the 
 cheapening of books and the diffusion of a certain measure of 
 education. The deepest interest of Smiles lay in the problems 
 suggested by the organisation of modern industry, and the greater 
 part of his biographical work — Lives of the Engi?teers (1877), 
 George Stephenson (1857), Industrial Biography (1863), &c. — 
 bore upon this. Artistically however his greatest successes were 
 achieved in the delineation of humble characters who, amidst 
 their daily toil for daily bread, contrived to keep alive an interest 
 in nature and science. His Life of a Scotch Naturalist (1876) 
 and his Robert Dick, Baker, of Thurso, Geologist and Botanist 
 (1878) are delightful sketches, as genuinely didactic as any of his 
 books, and all the better for being less obtrusively didactic. 
 
 59—2
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 
 
 § I. Literary Criticistn. 
 
 In most departments of literature the tendency is to de- 
 preciate the present and to look back to a golden age of great 
 men in the past ; but the critics as well as the historians of 
 recent times have been exceptions to the rule. While they are 
 not merely ready to acknowledge, but eager to proclaim on the 
 house-tops, that the poets and the novelists of ancient days tower 
 above their dwarfish successors, in respect of their own art of 
 criticism they have had no doubt of their own superiority to 
 their predecessors. In text-books on literature we are constantly 
 reminded of Jeffrey's " This will never do," and of the Quarterly 
 and B lackzvood a.ri\c\es which were long supposed to have 'snuffed 
 out' Keats; and there is a clear implication, if not an explicit 
 claim, that such wild aberrations of critical judgment would be 
 impossible in these more enlightened days. But, unless they are 
 balanced with something else, such quotations and references 
 give a one-sided and essentially false view of criticism in the 
 opening decades of the nineteenth century. Southey — a critic 
 as well as a poet — met Jeffrey with the retort, '■^ He crush The 
 Excursion ! Tell him he might as well fancy he could crush 
 Skiddaw " ; and while The Edinburgh and The Quarterly and 
 Blackivood were vainly attempting to crush Skiddaw, Lamb and 
 Coleridge and Hazlitt were doing critical work of a quality which 
 has rarely been surpassed. If therefore there was much un- 
 satisfactory criticism, there was albo some of the very best.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 933 
 
 \ 
 
 Neither is it safe to assume that errors as gross as those which 
 were made about Keats and Wordsworth have ever been, or are 
 now, impossible. Sartor Resartus was as little to the taste of the 
 new generation as The Excursion was to Jeffrey's; Tennyson at 
 first received either censure or lukewarm praise ; Arnold was 
 neglected; and one of the grossest attacks ever made was 
 directed against Rossetti. It is at least possible that similar 
 blunders and oversights are being made now. 
 
 The critics who ruled the reviews and magazines in the early 
 days of the nineteenth century were men of great ability and 
 of wide reading; and the secret of their errors, monstrous and 
 almost grotesque as they appear now, must be sought rather in 
 the prepossessions with which they approached their subject 
 than in their own deficiencies. It should be remembered that 
 even Byron, though he was both a victim of the reviewers and 
 one of the greatest of the new school of poets, was essentially 
 in agreement with the more conservative critics. The Bowles- 
 Pope controversy is symptomatic. In criticism, as in theology, 
 in philosophy, in poetry, there existed side by side two opposite 
 * schools,' if we may thus call them. It would be more accurate 
 to say that two contrasted types and tendencies of mind and 
 character were illustrated. The division of 'romantic' and 
 ' classic ' is permanent and world-wide T'as IF showed itself at 
 the opening of the last century, it is only a particular illustration 
 of a divergence which never ends and which is always beginning 
 anew. The revolution which is supposed to have taken place in 
 literary criticism consists ipi the triumph of 'romantic' principles; 
 but the triumph does not mean the complete disappearance, still 
 less the permanent extinction, of the opposed 'classical' principles. 
 Neither is it true that all critical merit belongs to the former set, 
 or that nothing but error is to be found in the latter. Jeffrey and 
 Gifford were simply critics who were thoroughly contented with 
 the standards and the ideals of the past, and who were convinced 
 beforehand that what was new must be wrong in so tar as it did 
 not conform to those ideals. The opposition between creative art 
 and criticism is made to appear peculiarly sharp because the 
 great and influential periodicals, The Edinburgh, 2'he Quarterly
 
 934 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 and Blackwood, were under the control of such men as these. It 
 is easy to forget Hunt's Examiner, hidicator and Liberal, and even 
 the admirable London Magazine ; for their influence was far less 
 wide. 
 
 Periodical literature was at that time practically a new de- 
 velopment. Newspapers and other periodicals were still few in 
 number. The Gentleman^ s Magazine and The Monthly Review 
 had already run a long course. The Times existed; but it was 
 infantile in proportions and limited in scope, compared with 
 the great journal of the present day. When, in 1802, the famous 
 four, Francis Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Henry Brougham and Francis 
 Horner, along with some others less known, met in Edinburgh 
 and determined to found a critical periodical, they were conscious 
 that they were taking a new departure. Nothing which then 
 existed filled the place they proposed to occupy. There was 
 also about their meeting something of the spirit of conspiracy. 
 It would be a good joke — so it evidently struck them — to air their 
 wit at the expense of their elder and more solemn neighbours. 
 Anonymity was the cloak of darkness under which they walked; 
 and it tempted them to poke fun and satire when, perhaps, 
 writing openly under their own names, they would have hesitated 
 to do so. The editorial ' we ' fostered also a tone of Olympian 
 superiority. The individual contributor might have shrunk from 
 pronouncing sentence like a judge upon a criminal in the dock ; 
 but ' we,' The Edinburgh Review, were above ordinary humanity. 
 The shock must have been rude when, as occasionally happened, 
 'we' caught a Tartar, and were repaid in the coin of English 
 Bards and Scotch Reviewers. 
 
 The Edinburgh Review soon became a more important 
 periodical than its founders dreamed of at its inception. It grew 
 to be a force in the country ; power developed the sense of 
 responsibility ; the position of the editor became a great one, 
 and his business was serious. The veil of anonymity soon wore 
 thin ; but its silent influence endured ; and when the success 
 of this first venture led to imitation, the same history was 
 repeated in the case of other periodicals. 
 
 At the start, 2'he Edinburgh Review did not profess to be
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 935 
 
 the organ of one political party only ; but its founders were, in 
 point of fact, Whigs; Toryism had no chance of fair represen- 
 tation in its columns ; and Tories like Scott were soon driven to 
 withdraw support from a publication which encouraged principles 
 in their view prejudicial to the country. This feeling led in 1808 
 to the founding of The Qiiarterly Review, which was designed 
 to do for Toryism what The Edinburgh was doing for Whig 
 principles. Under Murray, its pubUsher, and Gifford, its editor 
 from 1809, The Quarterly proved that there was room for a 
 second publication of the kind. A few years later another group 
 of Edinburgh men became convinced that there was room even 
 for a third, and the result was the appearance of the celebrated 
 Blackwood's Magazine (181 7). It occupied ground rather different 
 from that taken by the great quarterlies. It was published more 
 frequently, took a lighter tone and gave itself more to jest and 
 revelry. Moreover, though Blackwood has furnished at least as 
 many examples as either The Edinburgh or The Quarterly of the 
 false style of criticism supposed to have been characteristic of 
 the early part of the nineteenth century, it was really far more 
 imbued than they were with the romantic spirit, and far less a 
 consistent exponent of eighteenth century principles. 
 
 So different in spirit was The Retrospective Review (1820) 
 that Professor Saintsbury declares of it that "good taste, good 
 manners, good temper and good learning abound throughout." 
 Apparently they were not popular, for it only lived eight years 
 (1820-1828). Magazines serious and heavy, like The Westtninster 
 Review (1824), or light and witty, like Eraser's Magazine (1830) ; 
 and weekly papers, like The Spectator (1828) and The Aihenceum 
 {1827), appeared one after another. The removal of fiscal burdens 
 upon journals greatly stimulated the development of the news- 
 paper. The age of periodical literature had come. From the 
 first it has exercised a profound influence upon miscellaneous 
 prose of all kinds. Essays of every sort — criticisms, sketches of 
 character, descriptions of scenery, short stories — have found 
 their natural refuge in the columns of magazines. For a time, 
 works of greater length were invariably published apart ; but long 
 ago the novel came within the sphere of the magazine, and there
 
 930 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 have been occasional examples of the publication in serial form 
 of long works not fictitious. Lyrical verse has also been cherished 
 by the periodical press. It is certain that the development of the 
 periodical has enormously increased the volume of writing. A 
 less dubious advantage is that it has also raised the average 
 quality. Setting works of genius aside, it is clear that the 
 journey-work of literature is, on the whole, more competently done 
 now than it was a century or two ago. But further, the magazines 
 seem to have been the means of calling into being some work 
 which has undoubtedly the stamp of genius. But for The London 
 Magazine we might never have had Charles "Lamb's exquisite 
 essays or Miss Mitford's delightful sketches. It was the encourage- 
 ment of The Witness which led Dr John Brown to write the 
 beautiful papers of Horae Subsccivae; and if Thackeray had 
 not edited The Corjihill Magazine he would probably never have 
 written the Roundabout Papers. Macau lay, Carlyle, P'roude, 
 Lockhart, Wilson and Hazlitt were all in various ways and 
 degrees indebted to the periodicals of their time. On the other 
 side of the account must be set a tendency to haste and half- 
 work and a temptation to crop the soil too frequently. The 
 " leisure to grow wise " is among the things our latter days lack, 
 and the writer must be singularly resolute who can take time to 
 do his best when the printer's devil is waiting at the door for ' copy.' 
 What we have specially to consider at present is the influence 
 which this growth of the periodical exercised upon criticism. 
 One point which must strike the observer of the history of 
 periodicals is the almost inevitable absence in the critic of that 
 " disinterestedness " which Matthew Arnold pronounced to be 
 the one rule of criticism. The various periodicals, as ae pointed 
 out, spoke each for a party, not for the truth. The Edinburgh 
 was Whig, The Quarterly and Blackwood were Tory, The West- 
 minster was the organ of the philosophical Radicals. Literary 
 criticism was supposed to stand apart, and in many cases, no 
 doubt, it did so. But by no means always. Can there any good 
 thing come out of Nazareth? How shall a benighted Tory produce 
 that which is acceptable to the Whig reviewer? The orthodox 
 Tory was as sure that there must be something unwholesome in
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 
 
 937 
 
 a Whig book as he was that an adder secreted poison. It was 
 the business of the writers of one party to warn its members 
 against the insidious approaches of the other. The politics of 
 Leigh Hunt had something to do with the virulence of the 
 attack upon "the Cockney school." In Macauiay's eyes the 
 vices of Croker's Boswell and of Southey's Colloquies on Society 
 were all the more flagrant because the authors were Tories. 
 Religion gave a bias sometimes more powerful than even that 
 of politics. It was more difficult to pardon Byron the heterodoxy 
 of Cain than the morals of Don Juan \ and Scott incurred blame 
 for accepting the dedication of the former work. The Utilitarians 
 were at least as much dreaded, disliked and vilified for their 
 heresies as for their radicalism. The obscure but appalling charge 
 of 'Germanism' was enough to blight a man's career. Obviously, 
 all this militates against disinterestedness, and tends to modify 
 the critical judgment by "regards that stand aloof from the 
 entire point." The point of view is not that of pure art ; the 
 question asked is not, Ts this' beautiful? but, Is it safe? does it 
 harmonise with 'correct' opinions? 
 
 Two objections (though they are not always clearly distin- 
 guished) are commonly taken against what is supposed to be 
 the typical criticism of the early years of the nineteenth century. 
 In the first place, these criticisms are not consonant with modern 
 taste, and in the second place, they are rude in manner. 
 
 With respect to taste, the fault of the critics was, as has been \ 
 already indicated, that they were too conservative. Living at a 
 time when a great revolution in literature was taking place, they 
 failed to appreciate the merits of the innovators, and this not 
 merely when the persons who exhibited those merits were in- 
 different or distasteful to the critics. Even from the organ of 
 his own party, though it relied not a little on his strength, 
 Scott himself sometimes received scanty justice. The case was 
 analogous to the battle of the metres in the beginning of the 
 Elizabethan period. The classicists thought the hexameter the 
 model of all verse for all time, and Spenser a barbarian because, 
 in preference to it, he evolved for his great poem the stanza which 
 is indissolubly associated with his name, just in the same way, to
 
 X 
 
 938 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Jeffrey and Gifford, Pope had pronounced the last word, and 
 no progress seemed possible beyond the Essay on Man and The 
 Dunciad and the Satires and Epistles. Just in the same way, 
 to the end of time there will be some who will champion 
 the old and fight with all their strength against the new. 
 
 The charge of hectoring roughness, amounting even to 
 virulence and brutality, stands on a different footing; and in 
 this respect certainly there has been great improvement. The 
 tone and temper of many of the criticisms of those days cannot 
 be defended ; but they may be explained. Anonymity, as has 
 been indicated already, is part of the explanation. Critical 
 journalism was a new thing ; its etiquette was unformed, its 
 moral code undetermined. Many things which no gentleman 
 would do now were then done by men who were undoubtedly 
 gentlemen. The critics stood in a perilous position. Experience 
 has shown again and again that when men are freed from the 
 check of public opinion they are apt to overstep the limits they 
 keep so long as they are subject to it. In such a position of 
 dangerous freedom the anonymous critics stood; and that pro- 
 fessional etiquette of journalism, which has since taken the place 
 of public opinion, had not developed. This inherent tendency 
 of anonymous writing was strengthened by the youth of some 
 of the writers. But the importance of this consideration has 
 frequently been exaggerated. Sydney Smith was thirty-one and 
 Jeffrey twenty-nine at the birth of The Edinburgh Review; and 
 though Horner was only twenty-four, no one ever charged Horner 
 with the sins of youth. There is more force in this plea when 
 it is urged for Blackwood. In 1817 Lockhart was only twenty- 
 three ; and though Wilson was thirty-two, he was one of those 
 men who never cease to be boys. Youths pronouncing judgment 
 upon their elders, masquers jeering and gibing behind their 
 dominoes, — it is little wonder that for a while they ran riot, or 
 that it took years of time, actions and threats of action, duels or 
 threats of duels, to bring home to them the full meaning of their 
 words and to develop a sense of responsibility. The faults in 
 question were confined to no single school or set or party. There 
 is no critical aberration worse than that of The Edinburgh Review
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 939 
 
 article on Christahel and the poems published along with it, 
 which Coleridge attributed to Hazlitt ; yet, notwithstanding this 
 experience, Coleridge himself could be as virulently abusive as 
 any writer in Blackwood. 
 
 The lessons of the early Edinburgh and Quarterly Review 
 critics are more by way of warning than of example to us, while 
 the critics of the other school are still rich in positive instruction. 
 The difference is sometimes said to be that, whereas the critics 
 of the traditional school relied upon fixed rules and believed in 
 permanent and unalterable canons, those of the romantic school 
 denied the existence of any such canons. This difference is real, 
 but it may easily be misinterpreted. The critics of the new, no 
 more than those of the old, school denied the existence and the 
 necessity of law in criticism ; but the two conceptions of law were 
 distinguished as the static from the dynamic, or the mechanical 
 from the organic. It is true, Lamb was almost purely intuitive 
 in his criticisms ; and though he worked upon principles, he would 
 have been puzzled to explain them. But Coleridge, as sensitive 
 in intuition as Lamb, consciously followed the lines of German 
 philosophical criticism, and imported into England the principles 
 of Lessing and Schlegel. It was the introduction into literary 
 criticism of that which we know in philosophy as Transcenden- 
 talism, in religion as Mysticism, in poetry as Romanticism. Onlj? 
 thus could the new literature be intelligently criticised. The absurd 
 mistakes of the old school were due to the fact that their standards 
 were utterly incongruous with that to which they were applied. 
 It was like measuring some volatile essence by a foot-rule and a 
 compass and square. 
 
 Most of the men who have been named belong to the Revolu- 
 tionary period rather than to the Victorian era. Gifford died 
 in 1826, Hazlitt and Coleridge and Lamb within the decade 
 following. Jeffrey resigned the editorship of The Edinburgh 
 Review in 1829. The Blackwood group were intermediate, and 
 lived well into the later period. Their history, and that of the great 
 magazine with which their names are associated, must have a 
 place, not inconspicuous, in any account of the literature which 
 was growing up when the period of the Revolution was on the wane.
 
 940 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 The history of Blackwood'' s Magazine brings to mind, even 
 more forcibly than the story of the origin of The Edinburgh 
 Review, the fact that, in the early part of the nineteenth century, 
 London was not what it has since become, practically the sole 
 centre of literature. The mere fact that The Edinhirgh Review 
 was first established in the city from which it takes its name is 
 itself of little importance ; and though the Revieiv for many years 
 took a tone from the place of its birth, it was never redolent 
 of Edinburgh, and it soon became rather the Whig review 
 than the Edinburgh review. But one of the noteworthy features 
 of Blackivood^s Magazi?te is that for many years it was emphatically 
 the Edinburgh magazine. It was mainly written by Edinburgh 
 men, and in no small measure it was written primarily for an 
 audience of that city. That article in the opening number, the 
 celebrated Chaldee Manuscript, which caused probably greater 
 commotion than any other magazine article has ever produced, was 
 wholly topical in its character; and though the Nodes Ambrosianae 
 treat of all things in heaven and earth and in the waters under the 
 earth, no small part of these papers too relates specially to Edin- 
 burgh, its citizens, its neighbours and its surroundings. 
 
 The prominence in literature of the northern capital was 
 rendered possible only by the high talent, amounting in some 
 cases to genius, of a group of the inhabitants. They had behind 
 them a century of literary tradition. Allan Ramsay and the 
 hapless Fergusson made Edinburgh the home of Scottish ver- 
 nacular literature until the richer and robuster genius of Burns 
 came upon the scene. Hume, Robertson and Adam Smith gave 
 the city a European fame. Dugald Stewart carried on into the 
 nineteenth century the spirit of Scottish philosophy. The genius 
 of Scott drew out the younger writers as plants are drawn by the 
 light and warmth of the sun ; and the fact that, of the three most 
 enterprising and far-sighted publishers of the time, two had their 
 residence in Edinburgh, was not without importance ; for it 
 ensured a ready market for the productions of the clever young 
 men who walked the Parliament House unburdened with briefs. 
 Those publishers were Constable, memorable for his connexion 
 with the great Waverley series, and William Blackwood, the
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 94I 
 
 founder of the great publishing house which bears his name. 
 The famous magazine was the outcome of his enterprise. It 
 succeeded another periodical of his, The Edi?iburgh Monthly 
 Magazine, which ran a brief and not a bright career under two 
 editors, Pringle and Cleghorn, who were ridiculed by their high- 
 spirited successors in the Chaldee Maiiuscript. 
 
 This celebrated jeu d'esprit struck the key-note of the new 
 periodical. It was daringly personal, sparing neither eminence 
 nor insignificance. A wild uproar followed upon its appearance ; 
 and even now references to it are sometimes made with bated 
 breath, as if it were a thing too terrible for the pages of any 
 respectable periodical. Not even its authors in after years 
 defended its wisdom ; but it is an extremely clever and amusing 
 production and, though utterly reckless, is essentially innocent 
 and free from malevolence. As it is still, when many of the 
 allusions require a commentary to explain them, a source of mirth 
 to the reader, we can understand how irresistible it must have been 
 when every touch had its instant effect. It was the work of 
 Lockhart and Wilson. Others — Hogg, and even the philosopher 
 Hamilton — are said to have had a hand ; but Lockhart's specific 
 statement leaves no doubt that to the two first-named belong 
 practically all the honour and all the responsibility. It is they in 
 particular whom Blackwood's Magazine brings upon the stage as 
 authors and critics. 
 
 The elder of the pair, John Wilson (1785- 1854), was already 
 an author and a poet. The son of a Paisley manufacturer of 
 considerable wealth, he had gone to Magdalen College, Oxford, 
 as a gentleman-commoner, had won there an extraordinary repu- 
 tation for talent and a reputation higher still for his wonderful 
 athletic powers, and had afterwards in 1807 settled at Elleray on 
 Windermere, where he became intimate with the Lake poets ; of 
 which so-called ' school ' Wilson used to be ranked as a member. 
 His first volume was the rather commonplace Isle of Fahns (181 2), 
 which was followed by the stronger and richer City of the Plague 
 (1816). In the interval Wilson had lost his money, and the 
 disaster forced him to take steps to make his own living. He 
 moved to Edinburgh and was called to the bar; but he never
 
 942 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 practised, and he is said to have regarded with consternation a 
 solitary brief which somehow came to him : he did not know what 
 to do with it. He was therefore ready and willing, like Lockhart, 
 to be enlisted in the service of Blackwood's new periodical. He 
 was long supposed to have been the editor of it ; but in its early 
 days ' Maga ' could scarcely be said to have an editor. It was 
 the product mainly of the pens and the advice of Wilson and 
 Lockhart, with Blackwood himself in the background as the final 
 authority on everything, when he chose to assert himself. 
 
 Except with regard to the Chaldee Manuscript, Wilson had per- 
 haps a smaller share than Lockhart in the early indiscretions of 
 'Maga' and a larger part in what — on the critical side — can be put to 
 her credit. It was Lockhart who wrote the objectionable articles on 
 The Cockney School of Poetry ; and it was Wilson who honoured 
 himself and the magazine alike by probably the very first really 
 enthusiastic and adequate criticism of Wordsworth. Strangely 
 enough, in after years, in the Noctes, he said that Wordsworth often 
 wrote "like an idiot," that he was "a good man and a bad poet," 
 and that The Excursion was " the worst poem of any character in 
 the language." He is responsible too for an article on Coleridge's 
 Biographia Literaria, which was one of the early sins of Black- 
 wood. But on the whole there was less of the " scorpion " in 
 Wilson than in Lockhart. A large geniality characterised his 
 mind as well as his body. Though he sometimes used the 
 bludgeon, he was at least as apt to praise extravagantly as to deal 
 out unmeasured blame ; and both his native disposition and his 
 former residence in the Lake district inclined him to look with 
 favour on the writers who were the special butts of The Edinburgh 
 and The Quarterly. It was the inconsistency due to the want of 
 '' the central tie-beam " which sometimes led him to unsay what he 
 had formerly said well. 
 
 The close connexion which Wilson formed with Blackwood 
 was the most important fact in his literary life, and a very large 
 portion of the twelve volumes of his collected writings consists of 
 reprints from the magazine. Its appearance served as a recurring 
 and much-needed stimulus to his genius. He was highly erratic. 
 One day he would work with intense energy and with extraordinary
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 943 
 
 speed, and the next day he would be absolutely idle. Occasionally 
 he would sit with pen in hand diligently wooing a deaf muse ; but 
 this was probably an experience which only came when the month 
 had been wasted and Blackzvood was on the point of publication. 
 Such a disposition was not favourable to the production of 
 sustained works, and there is reason to believe that the periodical 
 drew from Wilson the best that was in him. Especially happy, 
 for him and also for Blackwood, was the design of the celebrated 
 Noctes Ambrosianae, the only work by Wilson which has still a 
 certain vitality. It is not clear whose was the original idea of the 
 Nodes: certainly the papers were not at first exclusively Wilson's: 
 Lockhart, Maginn and others had fingers in the pie. But as 
 time went on the Noctes became more and more identified with 
 Wilson, until in the end they became not only his almost alone, 
 but his own personality threatened to be absorbed in that of the 
 fictitious Christopher North. 
 
 The felicity of plan of the Noctes might, in Hibernian fashion, 
 be said to consist in the want of plan. They were an olla podrida 
 of prose and verse, criticism, description, sport, Bacchic revelry, 
 into which all that was best and much of what was commonplace 
 in the writer's mind might be poured. Few books that have lived 
 so long are so extraordinarily uneven. As we read them in 
 Ferrier's reprint, the wit seems often forced and the eloquence 
 rings false. Yet, on the other hand, there are passages of rare 
 beauty, numerous evidences of large-hearted generosity, a 
 buoyancy of spirit and a flowing abundance of power, which 
 are singularly attractive ; and there is one marvellous character, 
 the Ettrick shepherd, which is hardly over-praised by Ferrier as 
 "one of the finest and most finished creations which dramatic 
 genius ever called into existence." The Noctes as a whole give a 
 perfectly accurate picture of Wilson's mind, with its mixture of 
 fine gold and miry clay. It is vain to wish that he had winnowed 
 the chaff from his wheat, or had burnt away the dross from the 
 gold. The mixture was in his very nature, and the precious could 
 not have been isolated from the worthless without invading the 
 seat of life itself. 
 
 In his other works Wilson shows similar qualities. As a rule.
 
 944 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 his touch is unmistakable : it would have been impossible long 
 to conceal from those who knew him his connexion with Black- 
 wood ; and, except at the very start, no serious attempt was made 
 to do so. Ttie Recreations of Christopher North (1842) is 
 similar in spirit to the Noctes. In TJie Trials of Margaret Lindsay 
 (1S23) and Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life (1822), he never 
 rises so high as he does in the Noctes : it is probably true also that 
 he never sinks so low. They are much weaker than might have 
 been expected from a man of his abounding vigour, and they are 
 not free from a taint of sentimentality. 
 
 In his criticism Wilson cannot be said to belong exclusively 
 to either the old school or the new. He was torn asunder between 
 the native tendency of his mind and his recollections of the Lakes 
 on the one hand, and his Blachvood connexion on the other. 
 He had no real principles in criticism. He was prone to take 
 colour from his surroundings, and to content himself with express- 
 ing the mood which happened to be dominant at the moment of 
 writing ; and so his oracles are often — as in his criticism of Words- 
 worth — contradictory, his taste is unsure, his praise and censure 
 are alike indiscriminate. He lauded extravagantly that dull poem, 
 Pollok's Course of Time, and he made Tennyson wince by a review 
 of the Foe?ns of 1832. Alike when Wilson was wrong and when 
 he was right, it seems to be by chance ; and if he was more 
 frequently right than wrong, it was because his nature was healthy, 
 not because he could render a reason. His criticism is an 
 unweeded garden. It would not be trae to say that " things 
 rank and gross in nature possess it merely " ] but things rank and 
 gross are there, as well as flowers, sometimes delicately beautiful, 
 often a little flaunting, but beautiful still. 
 
 Wilson's companion figure in Blackwood, John Gibson Lock- 
 hart (i 794-1854), fills a larger space in literature, not on account 
 of his criticism, but because of his biographical work. Seldom 
 have a pair of comrades and coadjutors been more obviously 
 complementary to one another, for they contrasted in almost every 
 respect, physical, intellectual and moral. Lockhart was spare and 
 dark, Wilson fair, florid and large of limb. Lockhart was evidently 
 the product of an old civilisation, Wilson reminded more than one
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 945 
 
 observer of the first man Adam, because he had so much of the 
 freshness of nature about him. Lockhart was reticent to a fault, 
 Wilson a little apt to wear his heart upon his sleeve. Lockhart 
 was severe and restrained even in passages of the highest 
 eloquence written through a mist of tears, Wilson always 
 rhetorical — sometimes grandly, sometimes faultily so. 
 
 Lockhart was the son of a Lanarkshire minister of good 
 old family but of small means. From Glasgow University he 
 went as a Snell exhibitioner to Balliol College, Oxford ; and he 
 had just been called to the bar in Edinburgh when the famous 
 Magazine was started. He was an excellent scholar, both in 
 classics and in modern languages. His spirited translation of the 
 Spanish Ballads (1823) proves his acquaintance with a literature 
 not commonly studied in England ; and he was one of the 
 very few who at that time knew and appreciated German litera- 
 ture. This accomplishment helped to establish the memorable 
 friendship between Scott and Lockhart The latter had visited 
 Germany, and there had met Goethe. Scott was interested, 
 invited Lockhart to Abbotsford, and so laid the foundation of a 
 friendship which has already been touched upon. Lockhart's 
 marriage in 1820 drew him into another circle, and somewhat 
 loosened his connexion with Blackwood. His acceptance in 
 1825 of the editorship of The Quarterly Revieiv, causing his 
 removal to London and filling his hands with other work, neces- 
 sarily cut him off still more from his old companions, though he 
 continued to contribute occasional articles, or fragments for the 
 Nodes. He remained editor of The Quarterly for twenty-eight 
 years, and resigned the office only a few months before his death, 
 weary, melancholy, solitary, having lived to see not only Scott 
 himself, but all Scott's children and all but one of his own, as well 
 as Blackwood and Wilson, laid in their graves. 
 
 Lockhart's literary work was multifarious. He is great as a 
 biographer and more than respectable as a novelist, while the 
 Spanish Ballads give him a creditable place as a translator gifted 
 with true poetic feeling ; and, besides all this, he was by profession 
 a critic and the author of innumerable magazine and review 
 articles. It is not however in his criticism that Lockhart is seen 
 
 w. 60
 
 946 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 at his best. He was so much younger than Wilson at the start of 
 Blackwood that he was, in that respect, more excusable for the 
 indiscretions then committed. But although in later years he 
 avoided the extremes of his youth, he could never be absolutely 
 trusted to keep within the limits of good taste in his criticisms ; 
 and he never learnt, what Matthew Arnold knew and illustrated 
 so well, the power of perfect urbanity and politeness. And yet, 
 though he is, in much of his critical work, indefensible, more 
 sins are laid to his charge than he ever committed. He was 
 guiltless, as we have seen, of the Blackwood article on Bio- 
 graphia Literaria ; and it was I\iiss Rigby, not he, who many 
 years later wrote the offensive article in Tke Qiuirterly on Jane 
 Eyre. In the latter case, of course, Lockhart was responsible 
 as editor for its appearance. The review of Tennyson's early 
 poems, though excessively severe, is not altogether indefensible. 
 Anything that was suggestive of Keats seems in his youth to have 
 irritated him\ and, as a rule, he was not attracted by new poets, 
 especially if they followed new paths. Yet under his editorship, 
 if not in articles from his pen, quite a considerable number of 
 poets are treated with praise and appreciation fully equal to 
 their deserts. Among them may be mentioned Fanny Kemble, 
 Hartley Coleridge, Henry Taylor, John Sterling, Aubrey de Vere, 
 Elizabeth Barrett, Mrs Norton, and a whole group of other 
 poetesses. The articles on Taylor and on Fanny Kemble at least 
 were by Lockhart himself^ 
 
 The truth however is that literary criticism was not Lockhart's 
 metie?- ; and it was an unkind fate which, in the connexion first 
 with Blaekivood and afterwards with The Quarterly, made it his 
 daily occupation. Still more unfortunate for him was the spirit 
 of the time which allowed and even encouraged him to cultivate 
 that stinging style to which he owed his sobriquet of " the scor- 
 pion." On the other hand, all this is more than balanced by the 
 singular good fortune which made him the biographer of Scott, of 
 whom Lockhart declared that his peers could only be found " in 
 the roll of great sovereigns and great captains, rather than in that 
 
 ^ Lockhart, However, lived to repent. 
 * L,a.r\^s Life of Lockhart, ii. 255, 402.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 947 
 
 of literary genius ^" Such a man appealed to Lockhart. It was 
 the many-sidedness of Scott which gave the biographer the scope 
 for his brilliant success. In dealing with him, Lockhart is at his 
 best as a critic also ; his remarks on the successive Waverleys 
 are always sound and good, and often excellent. The same is 
 true of the criticisms interspersed through his biography of Burns. 
 It may be conjectured that in his case sympathy with, and com- 
 prehension of, the character was a condition of, or at least a great 
 aid to, sound criticism. 
 
 There is neither space nor necessity to follow the development 
 of the periodicals which devoted themselves to literature. The 
 most important have been already named. But there remains one 
 journal which, though not primarily critical of literature, deserves 
 special mention because it is unique. The foundation of Punch 
 (1841) is a fact no less worthy to be chronicled than is the 
 foundation of The Edinburgh Review. For the remaining sixty 
 years of the century it was, as it still is, a power in the literature, as 
 well as in the social life, of the country. We involuntarily think of 
 this power as personified : Punch speaks of himself as an individual, 
 a man ; and it is as an individual that the world thinks of him. 
 Probably more than any other periodical, Mr Punch has impressed 
 his own personality on his staff. The great writers and artists who 
 have made him what he was, and is, have certainly not lost their 
 own individuality ; and yet as his servants they have become in some 
 subtle way — Mr Punch. To their honour and to his, the immense 
 power of this remarkable personage has been rarely used, in serious 
 matters, without a sense of responsibiUty. He has generally been 
 right, and when he has erred he has been upright in purpose. 
 He has always been much more than a jester; an undertone of 
 seriousness pervades him ; but it does not make him less witty or 
 more dull. Quite the contrary : it is just this seriousness which 
 has set Punch on his pinnacle, unapproachable by any other 
 comic journal. He is the critical observer of life, never un- 
 interested ; no partisan, yet never indifferent to the question of 
 right or wrong. Upon any grave occurrence he has always been 
 ready to take off the jester's mask and to speak in weighty, or even 
 * Lang's Life of Lockhart, i. 305. 
 
 60 — 2 
 
 J
 
 948 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 in solemn, tones ; and more than once or twice, when the heart of 
 the nation has been deeply moved, his has been the voice that has 
 best expressed the general emotion. He mourned in noble verse 
 the deaths of Havelock and of Lincoln and the fate of Franklin. 
 He made a parody on The Isles of Greece the vehicle of doubt as 
 to the nobility of a conception of life whose highest ideal was to 
 buy where goods were cheap and to sell where goods were high ; 
 and, like Tennyson and Ruskin, he clearly was of opinion that, 
 in some circumstances, war might be morally preferable to peace. 
 The same seriousness is indicated by Thackeray's resignation of 
 his position on the staff of Punch on a political question. It is 
 visible in the same writer's Book of Snobs, and in innumerable 
 cartoons from Leech to Tenniel, and from Tenniel to the present 
 day. Similarly, though his primary business has not been literary 
 criticism, Punch has always shown his interest in literature, and 
 has always, from the days of Thackeray's parodies, which are 
 indirect criticisms, down to the admirable papers of the Baron de 
 Bookworms, done all within his power to humanise, to elevate 
 and to ennoble it. 
 
 The new periodicals unquestionably provided a medium for 
 English criticism far more convenient than any that had previously 
 existed ; but the nature and quality of criticism depend upon 
 men, not upon mechanism. And the facts do not support the 
 belief in such a vast improvement as is sometimes vaguely supposed 
 to have taken place. The school of eighteenth century criticism 
 died away ; but the leaders of the romantic school passed away 
 too. The world was free for the younger men to bustle in ; but 
 who were they whose activity was to transform it ? The death of 
 Gifford and the retirement of Jeffrey may have been a relief ; but 
 critics capable of taking the place of men like Coleridge and 
 Lamb and Hazlitt are not easily to be found in any age. Carlyle, 
 whose critical work has been dealt with elsewhere, was the only 
 man then writing whose power was comparable to that of the men 
 of the expiring generation. Ruskin enters upon the stage in 
 1S43 with the first volume of Modern Painters; Arnold first 
 appears as a critic in the introduction to the Poefns of 1853. 
 These are the men who fill the gap left by the great of the
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 949 
 
 preceding generation; and as Carlyle soon turned aside from 
 literary criticism and Ruskin's criticism is mainly incidental, 
 while Arnold's work is mostly of far later date, the generation 
 after 1830 is really not strong in criticism. Insensibility almost 
 as gross as Jeffrey's in the case of Wordsworth was shown in the 
 treatment of Arnold ; impertinence as offensive as that of The 
 Cockney School of Poetry in the criticism of Charlotte Bronte; but 
 we look in vain for anything comparable to the penetrating insight 
 of Coleridge or of Lamb. Much of the best critical work that 
 continued to be done came from the pens of two survivors of 
 their generation, Leigh Hunt and De Quincey. 
 
 Although De Quincey wrote copiously for The Quarterly 
 Review as well as for Blackzuood, both these men belong to the 
 critical school opposed to that which is usually associated with 
 these journals. De Quincey was for a time a dweller among the 
 Lakes, and was one of the earliest to appreciate the genius of 
 Wordsworth ; and Leigh Hunt did more than anyone else during 
 the poets' lives for the fame of Shelley and Keats. Fate has 
 dealt unequally with them. De Quincey's works were collected, 
 and his reputation in literature is above rather than below his 
 deserts ; but no complete edition of Hunt's works exists, and 
 much of his prose is buried in half-forgotten journals. Yet few 
 men during the first half of the nineteenth century laboured more 
 assiduously for literature, or on the whole more successfully, than 
 James Henry Leigh Hunt (i 784-1859), whose most attractive 
 Autobiography (1850) ought to keep his memory fresh, even if all 
 the rest that he has written be forgotten. The record of Hunt's 
 journalistic adventures is amazing. He edited The Examiner, The 
 Reflector, The Indicator, The Liberal, The Companion, The latler, 
 Leigh Hunfs London Journal and The Monthly Repository. Most of 
 them had a very short life, and, of course, a great deal of the editor's 
 work was meant merely for the moment and has perished with 
 the day ; but the fertility of mind which he displayed, especially 
 in writing, practically single-handed, The Taller, a daily paper of 
 four pages, is astonishing. By far the most valuable of this 
 journalistic work was, however, done for The Examiner, which 
 was started jointly by himself and his brother John in 1808.
 
 9SO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 It was meant to be, and at the start really was, independent of 
 party though liberal in sympathy. It took a motto from Swift : 
 "Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few." As time 
 went on the attractions of party proved irresistible ; but at no 
 time did it deserve the repute which it acquired for republicanism, 
 ' Bonapartism ' and other evil ' isms.' In literature it really was 
 more fair and tolerant than the other journals of the time, and 
 few, if any, of the contemporary editors and writers of them showed 
 such intellectual detachment, and such disinterested love of beauty 
 for its own sake, as Hunt displayed. 
 
 Hunt as a critic is most easily judged in the present day by 
 the books which he published in his later years — Imagination and 
 Fancy (1844), Wit and Humour (1846) and Men, Women, and 
 Books (1847), — the last consisting of articles reprinted from The 
 Edinburgh and Westminster Reviews, AinswortK s Magazine and 
 other periodicals. But justice can never be done to him unless 
 it be remembered that much of his most original work is buried in 
 the journals which he himself edited ; for it was there, in his own 
 youth, that he welcomed the young poets whom the world seemed 
 to have conspired to ignore. In days when The Edinburgh Review 
 could declare concerning the volume which gave to the world 
 Coleridge's Christabel and other poems, that it contained only 
 one couplet which could be reckoned poetry or even sense, and 
 when Blackwood could still pour insult upon the names of Keats 
 and Shelley, Hunt was already enchanted with the magical 
 beauty of the cadences and suggestions of "Down to a sunless 
 sea " and " Ancestral voices prophesying war." The " fairy case- 
 ments " were open to him almost as soon as to the poets them- 
 selves. He could not create such things (though as a poet he 
 was more than respectable), but his heart and soul were ready to 
 respond to every suggestion of romance, and his ear was keen for 
 every melody. 
 
 Hunt was a critic because he was a poet ; but he is greatest in 
 the former capacity. The Story of Rimini (18 16) proves that he 
 could tell a tale in verse gracefully, and Abou Ben Adhem is a 
 beautiful little piece; yet their author was only a minor poet. 
 Still, he was poet enough to have a most sensitive appreciation of
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM '• 95 1 
 
 poetry in others. This is his great merit as a critic. To say that 
 he had no critical principles would be most unjust. Imagination 
 and Fancy and Wit and Humour show that he could draw a 
 distinction with admirable precision, and few critical books give 
 with greater clearness the reasons for admiration or for dis- 
 approval. But their main value consists in their copiousness of 
 illustration. They are, indeed, books of selections with illustrative 
 essays ; and even the essays are full of quotation. This is Hunt's 
 strength. To him, poetry was a delight ; and he is far more at 
 home in praise than in censure. One of his special critical gifts 
 was his skill in metre and his sensitiveness to it. He perfectly 
 understood — and he was almost, if not quite, the first critic who 
 did this — what Keats and Coleridge aimed at. His analysis of 
 vowel and consonant sounds, and his examination of the pause, 
 mechanical and uniform in Pope, more varied in Dryden, masterly 
 in Milton, are admirable. 
 
 Unlike Hunt, Thomas De Quincey (1785 — 1859) was greater 
 in other things than in criticism. It is to his impassioned prose 
 in parts of the English Opium Eater (1822) and in Suspiria de 
 Frofimdis (1822) that he owes his place in literature. These and 
 a few other things, such as his tale of the Eevolt of the Tartars, 
 have been praised quite up to, if not beyond, their deserts ; 
 for the fatal vice of diffuseness weakens nearly everything he has 
 done, and, master as he is of prose harmonies, the reader becomes 
 at last impatient to get to some point, or to the end. On the 
 other hand, the Autobiographic Sketches have seldom been 
 adequately appreciated. They show De Quincey at the very 
 best. His garrulity is amiable and pleasant, he has touches of 
 humour, and his more masculine elder brother is an admirable 
 foil to himself. The picture of a sensitive and highly imaginative 
 childhood, with its unsuspected sources of terror and suffering, 
 has rarely if ever been better drawn. 
 
 De Quincey made the acquaintance of John Wilson while he 
 was living at the Lakes, and Wilson introduced him to Blackwood, 
 both as a contributor and as a figure in the Nodes, where he is 
 skilfully and sympathetically depicted. He was at once a valuable 
 and a troublesome recruit ; troublesome, because he hardly knew
 
 952 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the meaning, and certainly did not appreciate the need, of 
 punctuality, though he showed wonderful ingenuity in devising 
 excuses for the absence of it ; valuable, because of his knowledge, 
 his taste and his command of language. He was just the man 
 for an age of periodicals. He could work upon an immense 
 variety of subjects; but he had not the strength of will or the 
 power of concentration to do more than write 'articles' upon 
 them. His besetting sin of diffuseness mars him in criticism as 
 in everything else. He meanders on indefinitely in harmonious 
 prose, and only too often drowns the thought under a flood of 
 words. There are excellent things in his Style, in Homer and the 
 Homeridae and in the article on Pope; but these papers are all 
 too long. On the Germans, poets as well as philosophers, he is 
 usually superficial. Occasionally he draws a happy distinction, as 
 in the famous division between the literature of knowledge and 
 the literature of power; occasionally too his imagination illumi- 
 nates a dark passage as in the paper On the Knocking at the Gate 
 in Macbeth. But the recollection of such things only serves to 
 deepen the regret that, like his fellow-victim of the opium habit, 
 Coleridge, he so seldom produced what was worthy of his great 
 powers. 
 
 It is impossible to pass to the younger men without being 
 conscious of a descent, the nature and extent of which is perhaps 
 most clearly seen if we compare A New Spirit of the Age (1844) 
 with the work of Hazlitt published nineteen years before. The 
 two books stand in a different relation to the periods criticised. 
 Hazlitt's was the summing up of an era of literature at its close ; 
 for most of the writers with whom he dealt had done their 
 greatest work before he wrote. Home, who edited the later 
 book, and his coadjutors, dealt, for the most part, with men who 
 were only at the opening of their career. This, no doubt, helps 
 to account for the fact that in their case the selection is less sure 
 and happy and the treatment less firm ; but it does not account 
 for the decline in quality throughout the book. This impression 
 of decline is confirmed when we observe the changes in the 
 management of the great periodicals. Macvey Napier was a man 
 of far less talent than Jeffrey, and Elwin was unmistakably inferior
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 953 
 
 to Lockhart. The Mo7ithly Repository, for many years the organ 
 of the Unitarians, had unusual good fortune in its editors. 
 William Johnson Fox (i 786-1864) has the distinction of being 
 the first man who welcomed Browning, and fully deserves the 
 praise due to keenness of judgment and to courage ; for he never 
 shrank from expressing an unpopular opinion. On his retirement, 
 the Repository was edited successively by men so highly gifted as 
 Leigh Hunt and R. H. Home; but Fox had changed its role 
 from that of a party organ to that of an impartial advocate of 
 truth ; and, alas, the change did not pay. But the Repository was 
 exceptional. As a rule, the editors were undistinguished, and so 
 was the work of the contributors. Though the name of Abraham 
 Hayward (1801-1884), author of The Art of Dining (1852), 
 carried weight, his Biographical and Critical Essays are not 
 stimulating. James Hannay (1827-1873) wrote with vigour and 
 insight in his lectures on satire and satirists, and not a little fancy 
 is shown in the suggestive comparisons ; but his scholarship was 
 defective. Had he been granted a longer life and better health, 
 George Brimley (1819-1857) might have made a great name; 
 but his actual achievement was little more than a very suggestive 
 essay on Tennyson {Cambridge Essays, 1855) and a volume of 
 essays posthumously published. 
 
 E. S. Dallas (1828-1879), in his extremely able and interesting 
 book, The Gay Science (i866), itself an admirable contribution to 
 critical literature, divides criticism into three classes, editorial, 
 biographic and scientific. The first, which he ranks lowest, 
 received a great development during the period with which we 
 have to deal. One of the marked characteristics of the Revolu- 
 tionary period was the revival of interest in Elizabethan literature, 
 which showed itself both in the creative work of the time and in 
 the illuminative criticism of Coleridge and Lamb. The interest 
 continued, but its manifestation in criticism became more 
 editorial and biographic, and less aesthetic. Shakespeare was 
 edited and re-edited, the minor dramatists received their share of 
 attention, and Bacon absorbed the life of one whom the best 
 judges of the time pronounced capable of important original 
 work.
 
 954 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 A spice of a kind of interest not unexampled, but happily 
 uncommon, was contributed to Shakespeare criticism by John 
 Payne Collier (i 789-1 883), whose History of English Dramatic 
 Poetry (1831) is a work of such solid merit as to deepen greatly 
 the regret at the stain upon the author's name. At that time 
 Collier was honoured by every scholar, and to all appearance 
 deserved honour. His edition of Shakespeare (1842— 1844) was 
 received with the respect due to the work of one who had proved 
 his capacity to deal with the subject. Not till 1852 was the 
 notorious Perkuis Folio heard of; and in the following year some 
 of its readings were embodied in Notes and Emendatiotis to the 
 Flays of Shakespeare. On the word of Collier they were, naturally 
 enough, received as genuine even by such a competent judge as I 
 James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (1820-1889), who had already 
 made considerable progress in those studies which made him the 
 foremost authority of his generation on the life of Shakespeare. 
 Halliwell, as he then was, felt the scholar's debt to an elder 
 scholar who had pointed him the way ; and to the end he refused 
 to believe that Collier was not himself deceived. Others were 
 less chivalrous, or more clear-sighted. Singer, who afterwards 
 issued a useful edition of Shakespeare, gave the first public 
 utterance to scepticism in his Text of Shakespeare Vindicated 
 (1853). Collier, for his part, buttressed one dubious story with 
 another, contradicted himself, issued complete lists of the Perkins 
 readings which proved to be incomplete, made another wonderful 
 discovery of a set of long-lost notes on Coleridge's lectures on 
 Shakespeare and Milton, and in the end left no doubt in any 
 impartial mind that he was one of the victims of the curious 
 mania for literary fraud. But though this taint vitiates all of 
 Collier's own work, even the forgeries of the Perkins Folio did 
 good indirectly, for they deepened the interest in the text of 
 Shakespeare, and had some influence on the work of Howard 
 Staunton (18 10-1874), famous for his chess, and of Alexander 
 Dyce ( 1 798-1 869), as well as of Singer. Dyce, who was perhaps 
 the best of this group of critics, was a wide, as well as an accurate, 
 student of the Elizabethan drama, and he edited Middleton, 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, Marlowe, and Webster, as well as
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 955 
 
 Shakespeare. As regards the text however the greatest and 
 completest work of the generation is the well-known Cambridge 
 Shakespeare (1863-1866),, which was reissued in 1887. 
 
 The Concordajice (1879) of Mary Cowden-Clarke can hardly 
 be ranked as either literature or criticism; but it was a most 
 useful aid to criticism and a very solid and creditable piece of 
 work. Her husband's lectures on Shakespeare, delivered between 
 1854 and 1856, had considerable influence in their day in 
 popularising the great poet, and the parts which have been pub- 
 lished are still worth reading. A union at once matrimonial and 
 literary was a thing no longer rare. S. C. Hall and his wife, 
 Henry Nelson and Sara Coleridge and William and Mary Howitt 
 are examples, as well as the Brownings and G. H. Lewes and 
 George Eliot. 
 
 This was a natural enough result of the adoption by women 
 of the profession of letters. Another result was the study of the 
 problem of sex from a new point of view. Consciously or 
 unconsciously, this problem influences the work of nearly all the 
 women of the time ; and a curious illustration of it is afforded by the 
 group of women who have written about Shakespeare. We see it 
 in Mrs Jameson's Characteristics of Shakespeare's Women (1832), 
 and in Lady Martin's book On some of Shakespeare's Female 
 Characters (1885); and though Mary Cowden-Clarke is an 
 exception in her Concordance, she betrays the influence in a way 
 of her own in her Girlhood of Shakespeare' s Heroines (1851). 
 
 Anna Brownell Jameson (i 794-1 860) fills a larger place in 
 literature by virtue of the series of works beginning with Sacred 
 and Legendary Art (1848), treating in similar fashion the legends 
 of the saints, of the monastic orders and of the Madonna, and 
 ending with The History of Our Lord (1864) which was left 
 incomplete at her death and was finished by Lady Eastlake ; but 
 it is doubtful whether she ever did better work than in her early 
 Shakespearean studies. Her art-criticism was partly an inherit- 
 ance from her father, a miniature painter, partly the result of the 
 stimulus given by Ruskin to such studies ; but good judges 
 condemn her as inaccurate and deficient in technical knowledge. 
 In the Shakespeare criticisms she knew her ground; she brought
 
 956 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 to the subject certain special gifts which men could not possess — 
 unless they rivalled Shakespeare himself; and as she also wrote 
 well, the result is a very fresh, interesting and suggestive book 
 Helena Savile Faucit, Lady Martin (i 817-1898), had qualifications 
 even higher ; for she possessed not only literary skill, and the 
 sympathy and understanding of a woman for women, but the long 
 training of the stage as well, on which she was perhaps the 
 greatest interpreter, since Mrs Siddons, of the very characters 
 whom she had to consider critically in her book. 
 
 More criticism of the editorial and biographical kinds has 
 been expended upon Shakespeare than upon any other English 
 writer. The editorial work has been fruitful; but though portly 
 volumes have been written, there is still a " plentiful lack " of ! 
 ascertained facts of the biographical sort. To the great contem- : 
 porary whose name has been so curiously associated with   
 Shakespeare's, one man in the Victorian era devoted himself j 
 completely. Of criticism of the editorial sort there is no more i 
 remarkable example than James Spedding's (1808-1881) edition | 
 of the works of Bacon. Spedding was stirred by Macaulay's j 
 celebrated essay, which he answered pungently and in many : 
 points convincingly in Evenings with a Reviewer (1848). From 
 this he was led on to edit the works with an exhaustive but | 
 formless biography. He did the work with such characteristic | 
 deliberation that it occupied his whole life. There is room j 
 to doubt whether Spedding's unsparing devotion has, after all, ; 
 attained its end. It was easy enough to show that Macaulay ' 
 was wrong with regard to the Baconian philosophy, and not ^ 
 difficult to point out the one-sidedness and exaggeration of 
 his criticisms of Bacon's life. But to win acceptance for a 1 
 fundamentally different view of the life was a much harder task. 
 Englishmen like R. W. Church and foreign scholars like Brandes \ 
 remained unconvinced, and the question of the character of Bacon ; 
 must be regarded as still unsettled. Spedding sacrificed forty years, ; 
 says FitzGerald, "to re-edit his [Bacon's] Works, which did not need ' 
 such re-edition, and to vindicate his Character which could not \ 
 be cleared^." And those forty years were years of the life of one ! 
 
 ^ EitzGerald's Letters.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 9$/ 
 
 who, in the judgment of FitzGerald himself, of Thackeray and of 
 Tennyson, was among the ablest men of the time. 
 
 Scholarly work of the editorial species is indispensable ; but it 
 would be extravagance of praise to assign to such work a high 
 rank as literature. It belongs to the literature of knowledge, not 
 to the literature of power, and recalls the schools of Alexandria 
 rather than the great creative ages of Greece. This may, indeed, 
 be said of all criticism. But the division between the two kinds 
 of literature is not fixed and definite, and as the creative may 
 sink towards the critical, so the critical may rise towards the 
 creative. In the hands of the greatest masters criticism becomes 
 a new sort of creation ; in Lessing's, unfolding great principles ; 
 in Goethe's, turning upon genius the flash-light of a genius in 
 most cases greater than that which is criticised. Editorial 
 criticism, however, can in no case rise to this level, and is not 
 to be censured for not being that which in the nature of things it 
 cannot be. But, tested by its own canons, it reveals the mediocre 
 character of criticism after the age of the Revolution was ended. 
 For not only do we fail to discover any critical intuition com- 
 parable to that of Lamb or of Coleridge, but there is no display 
 of editorial acumen equal to that of Theobald, and no work of 
 monumental learning like the great variorum edition of Dr H. 
 Howard Furness in the present day. Neither is the kind of work 
 to which the majority devote themselves the highest, nor is that 
 which they accomplish of the best quality in its kind. 
 
 As time goes on, however, the depleted ranks are filled once 
 more, and soon after the middle of the century a number of men 
 of high genius in poetry, in fiction, or in other forms of literature, 
 have to be ranked as critics likewise. Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, 
 Thackeray and Rossetti are all critics as well as great creative 
 writers. Walter Bagehpt and John Brown are men of inferior 
 rank to these, yet still of great gifts. Bagehot ranks primarily as 
 an economist and constitutional writer, and is discussed elsewhere; 
 but in the fifties and sixties he was a power in criticism likewise. 
 Sound judgment, a sense of humour, sympathy, and a gift for 
 epigrammatic expression, make his criticisms at once instructive 
 and eminently readable.
 
 958 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Dr John Brown (1810-1882) of Edinburgh is less easily 
 placed, either as to his rank or as to his class. He was not 
 a great genius, yet he was too exquisite to be fairly denominated 
 a minor writer. Though he wrote of many things, he did not 
 write much on any one subject ; but a vein of criticism runs 
 through a great deal of his work, and it is clear that he possessed 
 the critical gift in a very uncommon degree. He was one of 
 those men, more common at the bar than in the medical pro- 
 fession, who, while regarding their own occupation as the business 
 of their lives, consider themselves imperfectly qualified for that 
 business unless they can feel and cherish intellectual and Hterary 
 interests outside its bounds. He never looked upon himself as a 
 man of letters ; his papers were " horae subsecivae " ; and yet he 
 felt that while he was writing them he was fitting himself all the 
 better for his work as a physician. In the essays on professional 
 subjects included in Horae Subsecivae there is no point more 
 frequently insisted on than this. It was however reading and 
 thinking on extra-professional subjects that he considered neces- 
 sary, rather than writing upon them. He drifted into writing, 
 never took himself seriously, and never was fully conscious how 
 wonderful was the gift of style which he possessed. But for his 
 wife it is probable that many of his papers would never have been 
 written. In 1846 Brown started on his career as a writer with a 
 series of essays on art. An article on Ruskin's Modern Painters 
 followed ; after that came Locke and Syde?iham ; and so gradually 
 the materials for the three volumes of Horae Subsecivae were 
 compiled. These volumes give Brown a niche among those 
 authors who are not only admired but loved. There is not a 
 little in them, in their humour and exquisite felicity of style, 
 which calls to mind Charles Lamb ; and the reader's feeling for 
 Brown has that quality of personal friendship of which almost all 
 readers of Lamb are conscious. Another author whom they 
 frequently suggest is Brown's fellow-physician, Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes, a writer stronger, richer and more varied than he, but 
 hardly so delicately beautiful. 
 
 Brown's writings are always unpretentious. There is no 
 straining for effect, no display of learning, not the slightest
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 959 
 
 apparent effort even to write well. The simple limpid English 
 seems to flow quite naturally from the pen. It is either a triumph 
 of the art of concealing art, or, more probably, a wonderful 
 example of a natural gift refined and perfected by constant 
 intercourse with the best writers, old and new. There is much 
 that is more ambitious and more eloquent in the prose of his 
 time; but there is nothing more flawless than the prose oi 
 Dr John Brown. Probably the perfection of his work will 
 preserve his name when the names of many who made far more 
 noise in their day have been forgotten. That unobtrusive modesty 
 which pervades Brown's writings, as it marked his daily Hfe, begets 
 a tendency to underrate the serious worth of Ho7-ae Subsecivae. 
 The author claims so little for his essays that we are in danger of 
 accepting them too nearly at his own estimate ; and it takes an 
 effort of reflection to realise how great is their range and how 
 solid their value, as well as how beautiful their style. His essays 
 on Locke and Sydenham and Free Competition in Medicine are 
 serious contributions to medical literature, full, not of that medical 
 science in which he did not much believe, but of that benign 
 wisdom which is the crowning grace of the experienced physician. 
 And perhaps Brown's command over character is due to the 
 medical experience whence this wisdom springs. At least his 
 theory was that the physician had to treat the man, not the 
 disease ; and he could not treat him without understanding him. 
 
 As an art critic, though he had no pretensions to technical 
 training, Brown had few equals. All that he wrote on painting 
 and on literature was the outcome of a singularly refined and 
 sensitive natural taste. He felt instinctively the meaning of the 
 painter or of the poet, and he explained it in the aptest words. 
 There is no more sympathetic bit of criticism in the English 
 language than his comments on the song, " Oh, I'm wat, wat ! " 
 There are few more simply touching pieces than the paper on 
 Thackeray's death. A most refined sense of the poetical breathes 
 in the essay on Henry Vaughan. It was not capacity, but only 
 time, and perhaps inclination, that were wanting to make Brown 
 one of the greatest critics of his generation. The pity is that time 
 did not serve or inclination move him more frequently. His
 
 9^0 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 criticisms of the men who made Edinburgh great during his own 
 boyhood would have been a precious possession. He knew some 
 of them. Jeffrey had called to ofier his congratulations on Locke 
 and Sydenham. He had listened to the eloquence of Wilson in 
 his lecture-room. He had often with boyish reverence watched 
 Scott limp along Princes Street to his house in Castle Street. 
 And he loved what they, and especially what Scott, loved. He 
 was almost as deeply imbued as Scott himself with the love of the 
 Border scenery — and of dogs. He thought that only Homer, or 
 King David, or Sir Walter could have worthily rehearsed the 
 battle of the Game Chicken with Yarrow, and his death by the 
 bite of Rab ; but he proves that at least one more was quite 
 worthy to treat the theme. It is with papers of this sort, neither 
 professional nor critical, that Brown's name is most closely, and 
 in the minds of many almost exclusively, associated. Rab atid his 
 Friends, Our Dogs and Marjorie Fleming — these are the titles 
 that most readily rise to the mind when we think of him. No 
 doubt he was fortunate in his subjects. There has only been one 
 Marjorie Fleming ; but there was only one John Brown, who 
 could have so delicately handled her touching little story. And 
 how common in a coarser hand might have been the story of 
 Rab and his friends I Just a big mastiff, a carrier and his suffering 
 wife; but man, woman and dog are alike immortal. Brown is 
 the prince of all writers on dogs : there is probably nothing of its 
 kind in literature equal to Our Dogs. The animals all have 
 characters and stand apart from one another in the memory, 
 distinct and individual. Wolfe's name lives in literature for the 
 sake of his Burial of Sir John Moore; Campbell's would be safe 
 if he had written nothing but Ye Mariners of Etigland; and 
 Gray's, if it were only for the great Elegy. Brown's three essays 
 are as unique and perfect, each in its way, as any of these; and 
 though small bodies of prose are a less sure guarantee of 
 permanent remembrance than short pieces of verse, it may be 
 hoped that they will keep his memory green for generations yet 
 to come. 
 
 Most of the greater men who have been named were critics of 
 literature only by tiie way, yet even their by-work served to ennoble
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 961 
 
 criticism. No one who has read Thackeray's English Humourists 
 can doubt the greatness of his critical faculty. It is attested also 
 by numerous detached papers, by his parodies and by many 
 passages in the novels. The Pre-Raphaelites created a school in 
 criticism as well as in painting and poetry. Ruskin was one of 
 the greatest forces of the century in all matters of tastef He and 
 the Tre-Raphaelites, however, are more particularly critics of art 
 in the narrower sense than critics of literature ; and as such they 
 will be considered in the next section of this chapter. There 
 remains only Arnold, the true successor, by reason of the quality 
 and the influence of his work, of Coleridge and Lamb. 
 
 Matthew Arnold is one of the few men who are almost equally 
 important in poetry and in prose. The majority of those who 
 are keenly conscious of his charm will rank his verse higher than 
 his prose ; but it was not as a poet that he had most influence 
 upon his own generation and upon the young men who were 
 rising to maturity as he grew old. In his case, the line between 
 the period of verse and the period of prose is less precisely drawn 
 than it is in the case of Scott ; but there is, nevertheless, a clear 
 predominance of poetry during the earlier part of his career, and 
 a clear predominance of prose for the last twenty years of his life. 
 His poetical career came practically to an end in 1867. As a 
 prose writer he made his first appearance in 1853, when the 
 striking preface to the Foetfis of that year proclaimed, to the 
 discerning, the advent of a new force in criticism and of a new 
 master of prose ; but the influence most potent in turning him 
 towards prose was, perverse as the fact appears, his tenure of the 
 chair of poetry at Oxford, which began in 1857 and lasted for ten 
 years. The reason is plain enough. Arnold held that the main 
 effort of the intellect of Europe had been for many years a 
 critical effort, while English literature was singularly deficient in 
 criticism. By " criticism " he meant a good deal more than literary 
 criticism. He defined it as "the endeavour, in all branches of 
 knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the 
 object as in itself it really is'." But though literary criticism 
 was not the whole, it was an indispensable part of this critical 
 
 ^ On 'Translaiin^ Homer. 
 
 w. 6i
 
 962 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 movement. Matthew Arnold inherited the teacher's instinct, and 
 he was profoundly influenced by his sense of what his country 
 needed. To be useful to England was always one of his greatest 
 ambitions ; and he knew that the way to be useful was to supply 
 that wherein England was deficient. 
 
 To Arnold's tenure of the professorship of poetry we owe 
 directly On Translating Homer (1861), Last Words on Trans- 
 lating Ho77ier (1862) and On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) ; 
 indirectly, we owe to it also the classical drama Merope {iZc^Z), 
 which Mr Herbert Paul characterises as "the real inauguration" 
 of the professorship. Merope itself may be regarded as a sort of 
 critical essay (an unfortunate one) in verse ; and there went with 
 it a long and carefully-reasoned preface, in which Arnold advo- 
 cated the cause of classical as against romantic poetry, as he had 
 already done in the preface to the poems of 1853. From the 
 year 1863 onwards Arnold was a frequent contributor to periodi- 
 cals. In the latter part of his life he was much in request for 
 lectures and addresses, the most important of which — including 
 the Speech at Eton, Emerson and the fine address on Milton, 
 delivered only a few weeks before Arnold's death — have been 
 reprinted in one or other of the volumes of essays. 
 
 All Arnold's prose is critical in the wider sense, and the most 
 important part of it is devoted to the criticism of literature. To 
 ' this class belong parts of the Mixed Essays (1879) and Discourses 
 in America (18S5), as well as the two series of Essays in Criticism 
 (1865 and 1888). It is these latter books, with the lectures on 
 Homer and the admirable preface to the poems of 1853 (after- 
 wards somewhat incongruously appended to the Irish Essays) 
 which show Arnold at his best in criticism. Of all the books he 
 ever wrote, the first series of Essays on Criticism has been the 
 most widely and deeply influential. It is no richer in critical 
 insight and wisdom than the second series, but to many young 
 men it came with much of the force of a revelation. Arnold's 
 later writings reiterated the lesson, but they could not convey a 
 lesson so fresh and so original as that carried by the volume of 
 1865. Even where the writer's views did not win assent, the 
 wealth of thought and of illubtraiion, the charm of style, the
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 963 
 
 persuasiveness, the perfect breeding, commanded attention. For 
 thirty years there had been no such criticism in English. Man of 
 genius as he was, Ruskin's was marred by capriciousness, and the 
 show of principle which he spread over his criticisms was largely 
 illusory. No one else, not even Bagehot, combined the necessary 
 knowledge with sympathetic insight and the power to write 
 English, in nearly as high a degree as Arnold. Other critics 
 made happy hits, but no other critic of the time worked so much 
 upon principles fully understood and clearly explained. 
 
 Arnold, the panegyrist of classical lucidity, proportion and 
 restraint, may be regarded as at once the complement and the 
 corrective of the great critics of the Revolutionary epoch. Their 
 revolt against the eighteenth century had at last been completely 
 successful. Principles akin to theirs reigned in poetry, in painting 
 and in architecture, and were increasingly influential in religion. 
 Only in the sphere of science, and in politics, where Benthamism 
 was now supreme, may the eighteenth century be said to have 
 retained its influence. Arnold thought that romanticism had 
 been overdone, and that a new classicism was imperatively 
 needed. It must not however be the classicism of the Queen 
 Anne writers. They and their successors down to the Revolution 
 lived in an age of prose. " A sort of spiritual east wind was at 
 that time blowing'." " Dryden and Pope are not classics of our 
 poetry, they are classics of our prose ^" The difference between 
 genuine poetry and the poetry of their school is that "their poetry 
 is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is con- 
 ceived and composed in the souP." Nevertheless, their time is 
 " our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century " ; and in the 
 light they give the nineteenth must correct its own mistiness and 
 mysticism. 
 
 Arnold's objections to romanticism were partly due to the 
 nature of the thing itself, and partly to the sense that there were 
 in it special dangers to the country which it was his constant wish 
 to serve. The classicist and the romanticist are, it has been said, 
 born, not made ; and this is clearly true in the case of Arnold. 
 Living when he did, he could not escape the influence of romance, 
 
 1 Essay on Gray. ^ The Study of Poeii-y. '^ Essay on Gray. 
 
 61 — 2
 
 964 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 even if he had wished to do so ; and he was far too catholic in 
 taste, far too intelligent, to wish it. His sense of its value is 
 shown in the lovely apostrophe to Oxford, perhaps the finest 
 passage in the whole of his prose, where it is as a " queen of 
 romance," " whispering from her towers the last enchantments of 
 the Middle Age," that he does homage to this most potent of all 
 combatants against his special enemies, the Philistines. Occa- 
 sionally he shows the influence in his own poems, as in Tristram 
 and Iseult. But there is usually something grudging in his admis- 
 sion of the merits of romance, and, when they win him at all, the 
 great romanticists win him by force. He quotes with approval 
 from " the most delicate of living critics : * Comme tout genre de 
 composition a son ecueil particulier, cehci du genre romanesgue, 
 dest lefaux^.^ " He was never a lover of Shelley ; it was late before 
 he became ardent in admiration of Keats ; he was always at least 
 as fully conscious of the defects of Coleridge as of his merits. He 
 admired the spirit and power of Elizabethan literature, but found 
 it "steeped in humours and whimsicality up to its very lipsV' and 
 pronounced Chapman's translation of Homer faulty because, for 
 Homer's plainness and directness, it substituted the fancifulness 
 characteristic of the translator's time. And though Arnold has 
 praised Shakespeare in a noble sonnet, even Shakespeare is un- 
 sparingly censured for a style in many passages tortured and 
 faultily difficult and a diction fantastic and false. Once and again 
 Arnold insists that, for England, Milton is a safer model than the 
 greatest of dramatists. 
 
 Arnold then was by nature unsympathetic towards romantic 
 poetry. For a hundred years romance had been turning more 
 and more towards the Middle Age, of which in Arnold's eyes the 
 characteristics are "its grotesqueness, its conceits, its irrationality ^" 
 Romance encourages eccentricity, arbitrariness, self-will. Romance 
 is negligent of unity, and attaches extravagant importance to 
 beautiful passages — purple patches. " We have poems which seem 
 to exist merely for the sake of single lines and passages ; not for 
 the sake of producing any total impression. We have critics who 
 seem to direct their attention merely to detached expressions, to 
 ^ On Translating Homer. " ibid. ^ ibid.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 965 
 
 the language about the action, not to the action itself^" Keats's 
 Isabella is "a perfect treasure-house of graceful and felicitous 
 words and images-" ; but the effect of the story itself " is abso- 
 lutely null." Arnold thought that, even when they prided them- 
 selves on their fidelity, the romanticists were apt to go wrong by 
 attending only, or too much, to the parts. The Pre-Raphaelites, 
 he held, did not understand "that the peculiar effect of nature 
 resides in the whole and not in the parts'." 
 
 These evils of the romantic tendency seemed to Arnold 
 especially dangerous in the case of England, because they are the 
 innate tendency of the English race. The habit of doing things 
 by bits, distrust of ideas and idealism, an exaggerated individualism 
 which takes pride in each man's being a law unto himself, are 
 characteristic, and are fostered by lawlessness in literature. 
 England is "the native home of intellectual eccentricity of all 
 kinds\" a country where in 1829 an elaborate book was published, 
 " which enchanted the English reverends, to make out that Ma- 
 homet was the little horn of the he-goat that figures in the eighth 
 chapter of Daniel, and that the Pope was the great hornl" This 
 is provinciality in the extreme, the spirit whence springs "the 
 dissidence of dissent." It is essential to find a corrective. 
 
 Arnold's corrective, on its literary side, is classicism as op posed 
 to r omanticism. In the preface to the poems of 1853, in the lec- 
 tures on translating Homer, in the address on Milton, from the 
 earliest of his published essays to the latest, he stated and reiterated 
 his conviction of the vital importance of the classical spirit and 
 style to a race and a literature so rich and so great as he knew 
 the English to be, yet deplorably deficient — as he thought — in 
 what the classical spirit could impart. He found the characteris- 
 tics of the Greeks to be " calm, cheerfulness, disinterested objec- 
 tivity*." He found Greek literature to be dominated by the idea 
 of the whole. Above all he found classical literature to be per- 
 vaded by " the grand style," which he could discover in only two 
 poetical works in the modern languages, Dante's Divine Comedy 
 
 ' Preface to Poems, 1853. '^ ibid. 
 
 •* On lyaiislaiiftg Bomer. '' Literary Injittence of Academies. 
 
 " ibid. ® Preface to Poems, 1853.
 
 966 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 and Milton's Paradise Losf. Here then was something not super- 
 fluous, but specially needed. This sense of the whole is, in Arnold's 
 opinion, just what is most lacking in the English poets ; this grand 
 style is the rarest of all things in the whole range of modern litera- 
 ture. And students of Arnold's poetry know how highly he valued 
 calm and cheerfulness as the best means to cure the " sick hurry " 
 and " divided aims " of modern life, and to enable the modern 
 man to " possess his soul." 
 
 It was a cognate feeling which led Arnold to turn to France 
 rather than to Germany for models and instruction. The English 
 fault lay in being too Teutonic ; and therefore Germany, rich as 
 she was in ideas, was for England a dangerous guide. France, on the 
 contrary, with her Latin culture, her lucidity, her love of logical 
 completeness, possessed just what England lacked. Arnold 
 therefore made the first serious effort of the century to turn 
 England back to that study of French literature which had been 
 so influential in the previous century. He neither underestimated 
 German nor overestimated French literature. He was one of the 
 most ardent admirers of Goethe. While he thought poetry the 
 flower and consummation of literature, he had a low opinion of 
 French poetry ; and its great instrument, the Alexandrine, seemed 
 to him poor and tinkling in comparison with the hexameter or 
 with English blank verse. " France, famed in all great arts, in 
 none supreme," indicates his belief that French literature never 
 soars where Shakespeare and where Milton are. Genius, he says, 
 " is mainly an affair of energy^" ; and therefore England, which is 
 pre-eminent for energy, has produced some of the greatest geniuses 
 of all time. Clearly then it was no belief in the inherent or 
 general superiority of Frenchmen which made Arnold turn for 
 instruction to France. It was his persistent utilitarianism, his 
 conviction of the vanity of dwelling boastfully upon that which we 
 possess and of the utility of searching out and trying to remedy 
 our deficiencies. Our true business was " to see ourselves as 
 others see us." France, with less capacity than England for the 
 
 ^ On Translating Homer. 
 
 * Literary Influence of Academies. Landor before him had declared energy 
 to be " the soul of poetry." Southey and Person.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 967 
 
 highest flights of genius, was eminent for certain qualities which 
 Ensland had not, or had in much inferior degree. " Openness of 
 mind and flexibility of intelligence were very signal characteristics 
 of the Athenian people in ancient times ; everybody will feel that. 
 Openness of mind and flexibility of intelligence are remarkable 
 characteristics of the French people in modern times ; at any rate, 
 they strikingly characterise them as compared with us ; I think 
 everybody, or almost everybody, will feel that\" English energy 
 can produce the genius of Shakespeare ; but when it takes the 
 wrong road it is capable of identifying Mahomet with the little 
 horn and the Pope with the great horn. If openness of mind and 
 flexibility of intelligence can be grafted on it, absurdities of this 
 sort will become impossible. 
 
 Arnold was attracted all the more strongly towards France 
 because of his conviction that what Europe specially needed was 
 criticism, combined with his perception that the qualities of intel- 
 lect and style characteristic of the French writers were such as to 
 . make them great in the field of criticism. In France therefore, 
 more than elsewhere in the modern world, was to be found the 
 aid necessary towards filling a great void in English literature. 
 For the spiritual nurture of England, modern France was the 
 complement of ancient Athens. 
 
 A similar predilection is manifest in what Arnold has to say 
 
 about the literature of Germany. He thinks that Carlyle made a 
 
 mistake in attaching too much importance to Tieck, Novalis, 
 
 Richter, and the romantic writers generally. Goethe was "the 
 
 manifest centre of German literature*"; but from him as spring, 
 
 the main stream was that which flowed, not through the romance 
 
 writers, but through Heine, who was destined to destroy the 
 
 romantic school. The great value of Goethe, as he himself 
 
 declared, was that he had been the liberator of the Germans and 
 
 especially of the German poets. And this he was, in Arnold's 
 
 opinion, because his "profound, imperturbable naturalism is 
 
 absolutely fatal to all routine thinking ^" The great work of 
 
 Heine, in his turn, was that he brought the genius of France to 
 
 bear upon the genius of Germany. " Germany, that vast mine of 
 
 ^ Literary Influence of Academies. ^ Heine. ^ ibid.
 
 968 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 ideas, had no need to import ideas, as such, from any foreign 
 country ; and if Heine had carried ideas, as such, from France to 
 Germany, he would but have been carrying coals to Newcastle, 
 But that for which France, far less meditative than Germany, is 
 eminent, is the prompt, ardent, and practical application of an 
 idea, when she seizes it, in all departments of human activity 
 which admit it And that in which Germany most fails, and by 
 failing in which she appears so helpless and impotent, is just the 
 practical application of her innumerable ideas... Heine was, as he 
 calls himself, a ' Child of the French Revolution,' an ' Initiator,' 
 because he vigorously assured the Germans that ideas were not 
 counters or marbles, to be played with for their own sake ; because 
 he exhibited in Hterature modern ideas applied with the utmost 
 freedom, clearness and originality^." Mutatis mutandis, the work 
 here attributed to Heine is exactly the work which Arnold was 
 attempting to do for England. Once more we are impressed by 
 Arnold's practical instinct, his utilitarianism ; we are impressed 
 also by his love for definiteness of meaning and clearness of 
 expression. He will have nothing to do with the mystics ; he is 
 full of admiration for those who can make a practical use of ideas 
 which have a meaning for the modern world. 
 
 There is nothing else in Arnold's criticism so deep-rooted as 
 his intense practicality ; but this is combined with another charac- 
 teristic rarely found along with it, an almost complete detachment 
 of mind from what are usually called ' practical considerations.' 
 The practical man is generally self-centred ; he can take no man's 
 view but his own. But in Arnold's opinion, to be self-centred or 
 self-willed is absolutely incompatible with useful criticism. The 
 Greeks are valuable to us because one of the qualities of the Greek 
 spirit is "disinterested objectivity." An often-quoted passage in 
 the essay On the Function of Criticism at the Present Time declares 
 that the rule for English criticism may be summed up in one 
 word — disinterestedness, and further explains that disinterestedness 
 is shown by "keeping aloof from what is called 'the practical view 
 of things.' " The criticism of Hterature, he means, must not be 
 deflected from its course by considerations of politics, or religion, 
 
 1 Heine.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 969 
 
 or of anything extraneous whatsoever. All this must be eliminated. 
 Caprice, waywardness, " provinciality," must be eliminated. " I 
 wish to decide nothing of my own authority; the great art of 
 criticism is to get oneself out of the way and to let humanity 
 decide'." Only thus can criticism be valuable and teach anything 
 worth learning. To keep aloof from " what is called ' the practical 
 view of things ' " is the indispensable condition of being practical 
 in the better sense ; for the practical view, so-called, is the view 
 distorted by irrelevant considerations. It precludes flexibility of 
 mind ; while " to try and approach truth on one side after another, 
 not to strive or cry, nor to persist in pressing forward, on any one 
 side, with violence and self-will, — it is only thus, it seems to me, 
 that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious 
 Goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline, but only thus 
 even in outlined" 
 
 Disinterestedness then is the first and greatest rule of 
 criticism. But the critic cannot be disinterested, to any purpose, 
 in vacuo. An indispensable part of his equipment is knowledge, — 
 knowledge of the best that has been thought and said in the world. 
 Deficiency in this respect has been a frequent cause of disaster in 
 England. " We show, as a nation, laudable energy and persis- 
 tence in walking according to the best light that we have, but are 
 not quite careful enough, perhaps, to see that our light be not 
 darkness^" The equipment of knowledge is as indispensable 
 even for the poet as it is for the critic. " The English poetry of 
 the first quarter of this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of 
 creative force, did not know enough^" And again: "The true 
 key to how much in our Byron, even in our Wordsworth, is this ! 
 — that they had their source in a great movement of feeling, not 
 in a great movement of mind^" In the same spirit, Arnold 
 declares in the Letters that " no modern poet can make very much 
 of his business unless he is pre-eminently strong '' in intellectual 
 power ; and even Tennyson fell below his standard in this respect. 
 
 The critic must know the best that has been thought and said, 
 
 ^ Pagan and Medictval Religious Sentiment. 
 
 ^ Preface to Essays in Criticism. ^ Culture and Anarchy. 
 
 ^ Function of Criticism. * ihid.
 
 970 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 both in ancient and in modem times, not only in his own language, 
 but in the languages from which his native literature is derived, 
 and in those which are producing literature concurrently. It is 
 thus, by the comparative method, by seeing how others do what 
 we also are impelled to attempt, that " provinciality " is avoided. 
 But although he insisted on the need of knowledge, Arnold was 
 fully alive to the dangers of a vast load of learning. What it was 
 vital to know was not everything that had been thought and said, 
 but the best. He was aware that " the historical estimate " often 
 resulted in strange freaks, and that the discoverer of some for- 
 gotten poetaster was under temptation to magnify the value of his 
 discovery. He was serious in his answer to the antagonist who 
 charged him with ignorance. Pleading guilty to the charge, he 
 added : " And yet, perverse as it seems to say so, I sometimes 
 find myself wishing, when dealing with these matters of poetical 
 criticism, that my ignorance were even greater than it is. To 
 handle these matters properly there is needed a poise so perfect 
 that the least overweight in any direction tends to destroy the 
 balance. Temper destroys it, a crotchet destroys it, even erudi- 
 tion may destroy it. To press to the sense of the thing itself 
 with which one is dealing, not to go off on some collateral issue 
 about the thing, is the hardest matter in the world. The ' thing 
 itself with which one is here dealing, — the critical perception of 
 poetic truth, — is of all things the most volatile, elusive, and 
 evanescent ; by even pressing too impetuously after it, one runs 
 the risk of losing it. The critic of poetry should have the finest 
 tact, the nicest moderation, the most free, flexible, and elastic 
 spirit imaginable ; he should be indeed the ' ondoyant et divers,' 
 the undulatifig and diverse being of Montaigne. The less he can 
 deal with his subject simply and freely, the more things he has to 
 take into account in dealing with it, — the more, in short, he has 
 to encumber himself, — so much the* greater force of spirit he 
 needs to retain his elasticity. But one cannot exactly have this 
 greater force by wishing for it ; so, for the force of spirit one has, 
 the load put upon it is often heavier than it will well bear. The late 
 Duke of Wellington said of a certain peer that ' it was a great pity 
 his education had been so far too much tor his abiUties.' In like
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 97 1 
 
 manner, one often sees erudition out of all proportion to its 
 owner's critical faculty. Little as I know, therefore, I am always 
 apprehensive, in dealing with poetry, lest even that little should 
 prove ' too much for my abilities^"* 
 
 In the essay on the Literary Influence of Academies Arnold 
 criticises the provincial spirit, and, in contrasting with it " the tone 
 of the centre," he, whether consciously or unconsciously, portrays 
 his own critical method. " The provincial spirit exaggerates the 
 value of its ideas for want of a high standard at hand by which to 
 try them. Or rather, for want of such a standard, it gives one 
 idea too much prominence at the expense of others ; it orders its 
 ideas amiss ; it is hurried away by fancies ; it likes and dislikes too 
 passionately, too exclusively. Its admiration weeps hysterical 
 tears, and its disapprobation foams at the mouth. So we get the 
 eruptive and the aggressive manner in literature ; the former 
 prevails most in our criticism, the latter in our newspapers. For, 
 not having the lucidity of a large and centrally placed intelli- 
 gence, the provincial spirit has not its graciousness ; it does 
 not persuade, it makes war; it has not urbanity, the tone of 
 the city, of the centre, the tone which always aims at a spiritual 
 and intellectual effect, and not excluding the use of banter, 
 never disjoins banter itself from politeness, from felicity." No 
 more admirable account could be penned, both of what Arnold 
 consistently avoided, and of what he aimed at and did. He 
 never weeps hysterical tears, never foams at the mouth, never 
 makes war. He is always gracious and urbane, and his banter is 
 never disjoined from politeness. Arnold's wit could be extremely 
 cutting, as the essay on Shelley proves ; but it is always scrupu- 
 lously courteous. He grievously provoked some of his antagonists ; 
 but his own good-nature was never ruffled, and no one could ever 
 say of him that he had overstepped the bounds of perfect breed- 
 ing. He is separated by the diameter of the ecliptic from the 
 bludgeon and blunderbuss criticism of the early periodicals. No 
 one was more persistent in opinion when he felt himself to be 
 right. His warfare against Philistinism, for example, was life-long 
 (though he first imported the term from Germany in the essay on 
 ^ Last. Words on Translating Homer.
 
 972 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Heine). His advocacy of "the grand style " begins in his earliest 
 critical essay ; and in the latest thing he ever wrote we find it set 
 over against that Philistinism : " All the Anglo-Saxon contagion, all 
 the flood of Anglo-Saxon commonness, beats vainly against the 
 great style but cannot shake it, and has to accept its triumph^" Yet 
 it is the truth of the opinions that he values, not the fact that the 
 opinions are his own ; it is the falsity of other views that raises his 
 opposition, and the fact that they are the views of certain persons 
 with whom he has crossed swords is unimportant. He had little 
 of that combativeness which is conspicuous in Huxley. " It is 
 not in my nature, — some of my critics would rather say, not in 
 my power, — to dispute on behalf of any opinion, even my own, 
 very obstinatelyV is a judgment which shows sound insight into 
 himself. He did not dispute on behalf of his opinions ; but so 
 long as he retained them he reiterated them. He knew enough 
 about education to be aware that in many cases the truth can 
 only prevail by being frequently repeated. 
 
 The whole of Arnold's prose, as well as much of his verse, is, 
 as has been already said, critical in spirit and substance. But 
 besides the volumes which criticise literature, there are three other 
 groups of his prose writings which require some notice. One 
 embraces the works which he wrote in his professional character 
 as an inspector of schools, an office which he held from 1851 till 
 just two years before his sudden death in April, 1888. In the 
 course of this occupation he wrote numerous reports which are 
 buried in blue-books, but he also wrote several volumes which 
 have been published separately. Some of the work of which they 
 are the record Arnold thoroughly enjoyed. He was foreign 
 assistant-commissioner under the commission which was charged 
 with the duty of enquiring into the state of popular education in 
 England ; and he entered with zest into his duties of investigating 
 the schools and universities of France and Germany. The 
 volumes which embody the results at which he arrived have all 
 the lucidity and much of the attractiveness which characterised 
 their author ; but it is hardly in the nature of things that parlia- 
 
 ' Milton. 
 
 * Preface to Essays in Criticism, v.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 973 
 
 mentary reports, even when they are the work of the most 
 eminent authors, should live. 
 
 Of greater importance are the social and political and theo- 
 logical criticisms of Arnold. His first separate publication in 
 prose was a political pamphlet, England and the Italian Question 
 (1859), and the political interest is manifest in his literary criticisms. 
 It finds varied expression in Culture and Anarchy (1869), which 
 is described as " an essay in political and social criticism," in 
 Mixed Essays (1879), in Irish Essays (1S82) and in Discourses in 
 America (1885). The very best of Arnold's criticism on the 
 social rather than the political side is contained in Friendshifs 
 Garland (187 1), which he was curiously unwilling to reprint. 
 These letters, which were first printed in The Pall Mall Gazette 
 between 1866 and 1870, are the richest of all Arnold's writings in 
 wit and humour. But though the manner is light the purpose is 
 serious, and there is far more wisdom in the easy banter than in 
 many tomes of solemn disquisition. 
 
 Many of the political essays have suffered more or less from 
 the change of political interests or the solution of the problems 
 discussed ; but there is much in them that has a permanent value. 
 Arnold was a liberal who kept himself detached from party. He 
 thought .that current politics had little bearing upon what really 
 interested him, — English civilisation. He was not without his 
 prejudices, and his opposition to the Burials Bill, which removed 
 a monstrous injustice, cannot be recalled now without astonish- 
 ment. No doubt, too, he was sometimes academic. But, on the 
 whole, a review of his opinions shows the value of detachment and 
 disinterestedness. Take, for example, the triple thesis of Ecce, 
 convertimur ad Gentes. It is admirable for its frankness. Ad- 
 dressing an assembly of working men, Arnold, with perfect 
 candour, declares his conviction that the present system in 
 England materialises the upper class, vulgarises the middle class 
 and brutalises the lower class ^ ; but he does it in the way which 
 is least offensive. To remedy this evil he says that ever since, 
 twenty years before, he went about the Continent to learn what 
 
 1 One is reminded of Mill's answer when h« was ' heckled ' at Westminster : 
 '• Did you say that the English working men were liars ? " "I did."
 
 974 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the schools were like there, he had " felt convinced that for the 
 progress of our civilisation, here in England, three things were 
 above all necessary : — a reduction in those immense inequalities 
 of condition and property amongst us, of which our land-system is 
 the base ; a genuine municipal system ; and public schools for 
 the middle classes." It was especially the last point that he 
 brought before his audience of working men ; and his special 
 object was, having failed to convince the middle class in their 
 own interest, to prove to the working men that the education of 
 the class above them was their interest as well. The genuine 
 municipal system, in Arnold's sense, has come ; the system of 
 secondary education is coming ; the levelling of inequalities is still 
 a task for the future, but it seems nearly certain that it will be 
 carried out. Did any practical politician thirty years ago show 
 greater foresight? The interest in civilisation rather than in 
 'practical' politics seems to have justified itself. 
 
 The theological group of writings includes Sf Paul and 
 Protestantism {i?,-]o), Literature and Dogma (1873), God and the 
 Bible (1S75) and Last Essays on Church a?id Religion (1877). 
 The obvious criticism, that these volumes are works on theology 
 by one who was not a theologian is, from Arnold's point of view, 
 inconclusive, to say the least of it. For Arnold believed that 
 religion had suffered greatly in the past, and was likely to suffer 
 still more in the future, from the influence of a stereotyped 
 theology. He was the opponent of all creeds ; he held that 
 religion had hardened itself into formulae which the growth of 
 knowledge was rendering more and more incredible, and that in 
 order to make it real and vital once more it must be freed from 
 this incubus of the incredible. Those who regarded Arnold as 
 an irreligious man were profoundly mistaken. The m.ost pious 
 soul could hardly show deeper religious feeling than his Note- 
 Books (1892) show. But it required either personal knowledge 
 of the man, or exceptional keenness of insight, to perceive this 
 to be true of one who defined God as " a stream of tendency, 
 not ourselves, which makes for righteousness." 
 
 Such a man was certainly heterodox, and his treatment of the 
 Bible could not be welcome 10 those who heartily accepted
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 975 
 
 the standards of the Church, or who were satisfied with the 
 formulae of Protestant dissent. It is also true that the scholarship in 
 Arnold's books of this class is largely second-hand. He had not the 
 equipment of a Harnack or a Wellhausen. Yet he was remark- 
 ably well qualified for the end he had in view ; and surely that 
 end was one worth pursuing. His principal thesis is that the true 
 interpretation of the Bible must be a literary, not a scientific, one. 
 The hard measure he dealt to Colenso was due to his dislike of 
 the scientific interpretation. Doubtless he went to excess ; for 
 there is scope for a scientific as well as for a literary interpretation. 
 But his view is essentially correct, and theology has committed 
 grave mistakes in ignoring the fluidity of a great work of literature, 
 and interpreting its utterances as if they were the precise and 
 definite premises of a syllogism. 
 
 Literature and Dogma, the greatest of Arnold's books on 
 religion, created a good deal of commotion, passing through three 
 editions within the year in which it was published. Objection 
 was taken, not altogether without ground, to its levity of tone; 
 but Arnold's answer was that he wrote in the manner which was 
 natural to him. " Ponderous works," he says, " produce no 
 effect; the religious world which complains of me would not read 
 me if I treated my subject as they say it ought to be treated....! 
 do not mean them to prescribe a mode of treatment of my subject 
 to me which would lead to my being wholly ineffective both with 
 them and with everybody else'." He was fully convinced that 
 his work would not injure, but would further, religion, and he 
 pointed to the fact that while, on the one hand, he was blamed for 
 being too negative, on the other, he was taken to task for being 
 too positive. " It will more and more become evident how 
 entirely religious is the work I have done in Literature and Dogma. 
 The enemies of religion see this well enough already. It is odd 
 that while I was in my recent article blaming a new book. Super- 
 natural Religion, for being purely negative in its Bible criticism, 
 Morley in The Fori?iightly was praising the book for this very 
 thing, which he says is all we want at present, and contrasting my 
 
 ^ Letters of Matthew Arnold, ii. 120.
 
 976 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 book unfavourably with it as not insisting enough on the negative 
 side and on disproof." 
 
 Arnold's theological works were signs of the time, and as 
 such they have a position in the development of thought. Those 
 who care for religion may be divided into two classes. Some, in 
 their conviction of its importance, are prepared to subordinate 
 everything to it. Others, who perhaps esteem it no less highly, 
 feel that in the sphere of religion, as everywhere, reason must 
 be supreme. Within the last half-century the latter class has 
 gained a weight it never had before ; and to it are addressed 
 such books as Arnold's, and as Seeley's Ecce Homo and his 
 Natural Religion. These books are spoken of here, for con- 
 venience, as theological ; but they might, with greater accuracy, be 
 described as documents in the revolt against theology. They are 
 the layman's protest against the assumption that any profession, or 
 that the students of any particular branch of learning, could have 
 a quasi-monopoly of the questions of deepest import in life. Work 
 like that of Arnold, or of Seeley, or of Oliver Wendell Holmes 
 in America, rests ultimately upon the conviction that there are 
 a hundred ways to the truth about religion, and that the 
 student of history, or of literature, or of science, or of philosophy, 
 may just as likely reach the truth as the student of theology. 
 Nay more, such books imply a deep distrust of the conclu- 
 sion actually reached by theology, a belief that theology has, 
 as it were, materialised itself in error, and that the business of 
 thought is to cut religion free from a connexion which is damaging 
 to its health, if not dangerous to its existence. They face the 
 question of the possible disappearance of all existing forms of 
 faith, and the rejection of what is called ' supernaturalism ' ; and 
 they indicate the belief of the writers that even if theology were 
 swept into the rubbish-heap of forgotten literature, and miracles 
 were universally rejected, what is life-giving and sustaining in 
 religion would still remain. 
 
 Among contemporary and later critics there is none com- 
 parable to Arnold in weight and originality and suggestiveness, 
 but there have been many who have done valuable woik. Irancis 
 
 ^ Letters, ii. 117.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 977 
 
 Turner Palgrave (1824-1897), the poet, would be noteworthy were 
 it only as the editor of the best of all English anthologies, The 
 Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics (1861), in the selection of 
 which he displayed a critical faculty of a very rare sort. Though 
 he had far less critical insight, Sir John Skelton (1831-1897), 
 long known by his pseudonym of Shirley, had a very pleasant 
 style and a deft touch. He was a man of varied gifts, a good 
 story-teller, critic, historian and essayist. His Table Talk (1895), 
 Nugae Criticae (1862) and A Campaigner at Home (1865) are 
 readable and interesting volumes, light, pleasant, witty and, at 
 the same time, wise with a wisdom deeper than is to be found in 
 multitudes of the most solemn books. The defence of Mary 
 Stuart, whatever may be thought of its historical merits, is an 
 admirable piece of composition, and Maitland of Lethington 
 (188 7- 1 888) is a fascinating biography, skilfully displaying the 
 workings of an exceedingly keen and subtle mind, and presenting 
 a picture of the age scarcely rivalled in recent years for vividness 
 and pictorial brilliancy. In his criticisms Skelton is happiest when 
 he is easy and informal. Literary allusions lightly intermingled 
 with discussions on sport and passages of observation of nature ; 
 illustrations of the credibility of history from the judgments passed 
 on such debated characters as Montrose and Claverhouse; pic- 
 tures of men, like the admirable one of Sir Charles Napier in 
 A Campaigner at Home ; these were the things in which Skelton 
 excelled. Another side of his work, illustrated/^^^m in Table Talk 
 and here and there in the miscellaneous essays, invites comparison 
 with the work of a St Andrews contemporary, A. K. H. Boyd, the 
 " country parson," a kind of " babbling brook," whose Recreations 
 (1859) and Graver Thoughts (1862) and Critical Essays (1865) 
 contain a good deal of skilful writing marred by garrulity and 
 a petty love of gossip. 
 
 In the more serious critical work of recent years there are two 
 chief strands, which may be distinguished as, respectively, the 
 intellectual and the emotional. The latter was of the more recent 
 growth. It was associated specially with the University of Oxford, 
 was akin to the "movement" and to the Pre-Raphaelitism which 
 also grew there, and was largely indebted to Ruskin, but with this 
 \v, 62
 
 9/8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 profound difference, that whereas the ethical element was vital 
 with Ruskin, it was completely cast out by the aesthetic critics, 
 who held the introduction of moral conceptions to be foreign to 
 art. The chief of this school was Walter Pater, who is treated 
 elsewhere; but John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) may be 
 taken as a not inadequate representative both of the strength and 
 of the weakness of the school. Symonds's magnum opus, The 
 Renaissatice in Italy (1875— 1886), belongs to the domain of 
 history, but the history is treated in a characteristic fashion. The 
 first interest of the writer is not politics, nor even religion, but 
 literature and art In other historians these are, quite rightly, 
 made side issues : Symonds makes them the chief theme. He 
 was partly justified by the peculiar character of the period of which 
 he had chosen to treat ; but even at the Renascence they had not 
 quite the prominence he gives them. Even on this side of his 
 work Symonds is too purely aesthetic, and fails to give a fully 
 comprehensive view of the intellectual movement : Mr F. Harrison 
 has acutely remarked that he scarcely mentions the science of the 
 Renascence. There is, in short, a certain lightness in the intellec- 
 tual foundations which augurs ill for the permanence of the super- 
 structure, pleasing as it is. 
 
 The same holds true of Symonds's minor works. His mono- 
 graphs on Shelley (1878), Sir Philip Sidney (1886) and Ben 
 Jonson (1886) are not much more than good journey-work, 
 brilliant in parts, but by no means great as wholes. His Shake- 
 speare^ s Predecessors in th£ English Drama (1884) is not sufficiently 
 thorough. Perhaps his best work is to be found in Essays Specu- 
 lative and Suggestive (1890), where he was not called upon to 
 sustain his flight after he was tired. The ' speculation ' is that of 
 a man with scarcely even an average gift for philosophy, but the 
 ' appreciations ' of art show catholicity as well as delicacy of taste, 
 and wide knowledge. The style is apt to be too elaborate, and it 
 is matter for regret that Symonds, in common with all his school, 
 showed too much anxiety about the manner of saying things, and 
 too little about the thing said. Few have been able to ponder about 
 style, as R. Ljtevenson did, without sustaining damage. The healthy 
 impatience of the subject which Froude showed is usually safer.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 979 
 
 The aesthetic school of criticism did a real service to litera- 
 ture. It was one phase of "the renascence of wonder"; it told in 
 favour of sympathy as against hard rule, of freedom against con- 
 vention ; yet we must rejoice that it never at any time obtained 
 real predominance in England. However good emotions may be, 
 they are safer under the guidance of intellect ; and while freedom 
 is indispensable to excellence, care must be taken that it does not 
 degenerate into license. The habitual moderation of the English 
 mind led to a middle course. Except in a few cases aestheticism 
 was merely an influence, not an uncurbed power. It had force 
 to modify the old judicial style, but not to replace it. The two 
 are blended in Matthew Arnold. They are blended in R. L. 
 Stevenson also, notwithstanding his deep sympathy with aestheti- 
 cism ; while in Stevenson's friend and coadjutor William Ernest 
 Henley (1849-1903) — greater in verse than in prose — there is 
 even a rebound to the opposite extreme. No criticism, even of 
 the early days of the reviews, is more dogmatic, more crudely and 
 even brutally denunciatory, than much of Henley's in Views and 
 Reviews (1890- 190 2). The judge is in his chair, and the black 
 cap is by his side. The brilliant essay on Burns would deserve 
 the highest praise were it not so hard and unsympathetic. His 
 nearest analogue is Heine, whom he follows, longo intervallo, 
 in keenness of intellect. 
 
 In the closing years of the nineteenth century Henley swayed 
 many of the younger men, but the steadiest influence was rather 
 that of two older men, Richard Holt Hutton (1826-1897) and 
 Leslie Stephen (1832-1904). H. D. Traill (1842-1900) belongs to 
 the same class, but stands on a lower plane. 
 
 Hutton's spiritual history is interesting. He was one of the 
 band of intellectual men, astonishingly numerous considering how 
 small the sect was and is, who started life a Unitarian. For a 
 time he edited a Unitarian magazine; but, hke Maurice, whom 
 he admired and by whom he was influenced, and whom in some 
 ways he resembled, he worked his way through Unitarianism to 
 Anglicanism. Latterly reports were current that he tended 
 towards Romanism. They were probably quite unfounded ; but 
 undoubtedly in the course of his developn:ient Hutton's intellect 
 
 62 — 2
 
 98o THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN" ERA | 
 
 I 
 
 received a kind of twist or bias which rendered his judgment on i 
 
 matters theological not wholly trustworthy. This was amusingly I 
 
 illustrated on the publication of Darwin's book on earthworms, i 
 
 when The Spectator took occasion to remark upon the wonderful j 
 
 evidence of providential government afforded by the fact that the i 
 
 worms were made to do so much work purely for the benefit of 
 
 humanity. The critic had completely mistaken the drift of 
 
 Darwin's argument, and failed to observe that the worms derive j 
 
 their own nourishment from the matter which passes through their 1 
 
 bodies. 
 
 In the earlier part of his career Hutton was closely associated i 
 
 with Walter Bagehot, along with whom he edited TJie National \ 
 
 Review from 1855 to 1864. And most loyal he proved himself I 
 
 to the fame of his coadjutor. Long before the true greatness of j 
 
 Bagehot was understood Hutton declared it ; and the firm estab- j 
 
 lishment of Bagehot's fame now is largely due to his influence. ' 
 
 So too he was one of the most consistent and intelligent admirers \ 
 
 of Matthew Arnold's poetry, in days when there were few who j 
 
 understood it. But the great fact of Hutton's life was his con- j 
 
 nexion with The Spectator, of which journal he was joint-editor ' 
 along with Meredith Townsend from 1861 to 1897. Hutton took 
 special charge of the literary side. In this capacity he may be 
 
 said to have formed a school. No English journal had a more : 
 
 marked individuaHty than The Spectator under Hutton's guidance, ' 
 
 and that individuality must have been due not merely to what he ' 
 
 himself wrote, but to the influence which he exercised over the { 
 
 other contributors. J 
 
 Judged merely by his books Hutton suffers as all journalists j 
 
 are bound to suffer. Much of the work is necessarily ephemeral, | 
 
 nearly all of it must be influenced for evil by the conditions \ 
 
 under which it is produced. Hutton's Essays, Theological a/id \ 
 
 Literary (187 1) and his Criticisms on Contemporary Thought and *'\ 
 
 Thinkers (1894) are sound and sensible, but hardly great; and to 1 
 do justice to him we have to remember that he was not merely 
 the author of these and other works, but the man who, for more 
 than a generation, inspired one of the best and most influential of 
 EngHsh literary periodicals.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 98 1 
 
 In pure literature Sir Leslie Stephen is a larger figure. He 
 married Harriet Thackeray the year after the death of her father, 
 and for eleven years (i 871-1882) he sat in that very editorial 
 chair which Thackeray had found so thorny. His greatest editorial 
 task, however, was that which he undertook in connexion with The 
 Dictionary of National Biography, a work which was under his 
 charge from 1882 to 1891, when advancing years and failing 
 strength caused him to relinquish it. 
 
 Leslie Stephen was much more than a literary critic, but for 
 thirty years he was among the most prominent and competent of 
 his time in that capacity among others. Perhaps the most striking 
 merit of his criticism is a broad sanity of judgment, expressed in 
 lucid, vigorous and occasionally humorous English, and always 
 securely based on a knowledge of the facts. The Hours in a 
 Library (187 4- 1879) ^^e excellent reading, and if at times the 
 opinions expressed may seem questionable, they are always 
 worthy of consideration. From the first Stephen shows the 
 historian's and scholar's respect for the solid fact. Hence his 
 tendency to the biographic form, hence, doubtless, his acceptance 
 of the editorial chair of The Dictionary of National Biography. 
 He wrote no fewer than four monographs, on Johnson, Pope, 
 Swift and George Eliot, for the English Men of Letters series ; and 
 in these the biographical element takes precedence of the critical. 
 Few were equal to Stephen in this art of condensed biography ; 
 perhaps in the whole series only Mark Pattison's Milton is clearly 
 superior to Stephen's Johnson. His Studies of a Biographer 
 (1898) show the same sort of mastery; though in the shorter 
 studies, especially those of his later years, there is some tendency 
 to slur facts — to leave undone, or to do imperfectly, the indi- 
 spensable * hodman ' work. Stephen was by temperament 
 inclined to suspect and to avoid those ' appreciations ' which 
 were, not exactly popular, but comme il faut, through most of 
 his career. He distrusted impressionism : he had no confidence 
 in that which could render no reason more definite than " I 
 feel it." 
 
 Stephen was a rationalist, and his greatest works lie outside 
 the domain of literary criticism. The author of English Thought
 
 982 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 in the Eighteenth Century (1876) and The English Utilitarians 
 (1900) was a bigger man than the author of a few literary 
 monographs. But in these greater works we see just the same 
 characteristics, and from them we learn to understand more 
 clearly what precisely was the position of Stephen as a critic. 
 We are particularly impressed with the fact that the author, like 
 Johnson, was fundamentally a moraHst. The only questions into 
 which he threw himself whole-heartedly were moral questions. 
 His knowledge, his wide reach of thought, his acuteness, were all 
 at the service of moral truth; so too was something else, — a 
 poignancy of personal feeling which gives to a few of the essays, 
 in particular An Agnostic's Apology and Wordsworth's Ethics, a 
 fervour of tone which makes them almost poetical. 
 
 A great part of Stephen's task was the rehabilitation of the 
 eighteenth century. He had studied its thought, and he under- 
 stood it as few of his contemporaries did. More than enough, 
 he believed, had been made of its deficiencies ; it was time to 
 insist once more upon its merits and its services, its sanity and its 
 lucidity. He carried his favourite Hume with him to the country 
 which he has charmingly described in his Playground of Europe 
 (1871), and though, happily, among the snows of the Alps he was 
 sometimes able to forget all books, there or elsewhere he read 
 " David," as he affectionately calls him, closely and intelligently. 
 The work on the Utilitarians was practically a continuation of the 
 history of eighteenth century thought, and the love of the latter 
 is natural in the lover of the former. The same taste is shown 
 in Stephen's criticism. He never could believe that all merit 
 was summed up in romanticism. He was for comprehension ; 
 but he evidently thought that it was more important to lay 
 stress upon what was represented by Pope and Swift and Johnson 
 than upon what was represented by Coleridge and Shelley and 
 Keats. 
 
 Less of a journalist than Hutton, less of a philosopher than 
 Leslie Stephen, but more of a poet than either, was Richard Garnett 
 (1835-1906), who for many years adorned the British Museum as 
 the keeper of its printed books. Garnett began his literary career 
 with a volume of poems, Primula and other Lyrics (185S;, which
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 983 
 
 was succeeded in the following year by lo in Egypt, and other 
 Poe?ns. After that for many years Garnett wrote little verse except 
 translations ; and, though he had a real lyrical gift, his highest 
 endowments were not poetical. It was as a critic that he did his 
 best work. His Carlyle (1887) is the best of all the volumes of 
 the kind which have been written about that much-debated man; 
 and his little monograph on Coleridge (1904) is also a model. It 
 was in the fine tone and taste it gave to his criticism that Garnett's 
 poetical turn told best. No man of his time excelled him in this 
 respect. 
 
 § 2. Aesthetic Criticism. 
 
 Close as is the relation between literature and what are called 
 the fine arts, the latter lie, in themselves, beyond the province of 
 the historian of literature ; and until the nineteenth century they 
 never had, in England, a literature of their own. In the 
 eighteenth century the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds were 
 the most considerable writings of their class, and none but an 
 extravagant panegyrist could pretend that the literature of that 
 time would be seriously impoverished if they were lost. In truth, 
 though Sir Joshua was admitted to an honoured place in the 
 literary club, the great dictator of letters was profoundly convinced 
 of the superiority of his own craft to that of his friend ; and the 
 majority of Johnson's subjects agreed with him. "I had rather," 
 said he, " see the portrait of a dog that I know than all the 
 allegorical paintings they can show me in the world." If Sir 
 Joshua had not painted men and women, all his technical skill 
 would have helped him httle to win Johnson's favour and respect. 
 
 Before the nineteenth century was very old, evidences of a 
 change of sentiment began to accumulate. Lamb was a warm 
 admirer of Hogarth as well as of Shakespeare. Wordsworth 
 immortalised Sir George Beaumont in his verse. Hazlitt in 
 numerous essays, and above all in the Conversations of Northcote 
 (1830), illustrated the union of the criticism of art with literary 
 criticism; and the Conversations won from E.uskin the praise of
 
 984 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 being " the best piece of existing criticism founded on the prin- 
 ciples of Sir Joshua's school^" 
 
 Contemporaneously with the Coiiversations of Northcote^ 
 Benjamin Haydon (17S6-1846), with a self-confidence half 
 sublime, half grotesque, and a courage wholly admirable, was 
 devoting himself to the task he had chosen as the work of his 
 life, the elevation of the art of England, Ruskin declares that 
 "nothing except disgrace and misguidance will ever be gathered 
 from such work as that of Haydon""; and unless a man is prepared 
 to defy the great apostle of art, he must not rank Haydon as a 
 painter. Nevertheless, if not in the paintings, then in the Atito- 
 biography, there remains an imperishable memorial of all that 
 courage and self-devotion. No form of composition is rarer than 
 a perfectly sincere autobiography, and none is more interesting 
 when, once or twice in a hundred years, it is found. And such 
 is the autobiography of Haydon. Benvenuto Cellini himself is 
 not more naked and unashamed. Haydon is absolutely open just 
 because he never dreams that there is anything to be ashamed of; 
 and as, in point of fact, he was, in many respects, a man of rare 
 nobility, the book in which his character is enshrined is one of 
 surpassing interest. If it be true that he never with the brush 
 painted a picture which deserved to live, he at least painted one 
 with the pen. Some may find significance in the fact that 
 two of the handful of great autobiographies are autobiographies of 
 artists; but they must explain why it is that a third is that of 
 Benjamin Franklin, the man of science, and a fourth that of Gibbon 
 the historian, and that two others were written by Augustine the 
 saint and by Rousseau the sinner. One more service of Haydon's 
 deserves commemoration. He was the first to see the beauty of 
 the Elgin Marbles. He studied them unweariedly when they lay 
 neglected in a dirty pent-house in Park Lane, and it was largely 
 through his ceaseless eftbrts that they were secured for the nation. 
 As surely as Ruskin was the first of his time to recognise the great- 
 ness of Tintoret, so surely was Haydon the first professional artist 
 to see and proclaim the matchless beauty of the Greek sculptures. 
 
 Whatever may be the delect of Haydon's work as a painter, 
 ^ Praterita., i. 327. "^ Modern Painters, v. 196.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 985 
 
 there is no reason to lament that he did not devote himself to 
 literature instead. It is not probable that he could have pro- 
 duced another consummate work like the Autobiography. That 
 work shows, it is true, a powerful intellect, and its author might 
 have written many vigorous and interesting books; but it presents 
 no evidence of unusual literary skill. Its excellence consists in the 
 portraiture of one man, Haydon himself. He had but one life to 
 live, but one self to paint ; and there, probably, his literary faculty 
 in Its highest phase began and ended. The reader can hardly 
 even wish the poor painter success ; for the less amiable qualities 
 which are readily pardoned in a record of grim effort would be 
 intolerable if they appeared as the self-sufficiency of a prosperous 
 man. 
 
 Haydon is an example of a man who failed after mighty effort 
 in one art, and achieved success, as it were by accident, in 
 another. If he has won a name in literature, it is a thing he 
 never purposed : what he wrote was meant to immortalise the 
 painter, not the scribe ; it was to turn the attention of men to 
 the genius who imagined the Raising of Lazarus and the Judg- 
 ment of Solomon ; it was to do for Benjamin Robert Haydon 
 what Modern Painters did for Turner. There were others who, 
 like Haydon, tried both arts, and, unlike him, consciously and 
 deliberately abandoned one for the other. Thackeray, because 
 he could not draw, gave up the ambition to be an artist and 
 became a novelist instead. Ruskin would have been an artist 
 but for certain defects, in particular the lack of the power of 
 design, of which he became conscious. In Rossetti, the gifts of 
 painting and of poetry were almost equally developed ; and atten- 
 tion has already been called to a similar blending of the two arts 
 in many others of the Pre-RaphaeUte group. 
 
 This conjunction of the arts, then, is a characteristic of the 
 time. Nothing parallel to it is to be found in the eighteenth 
 century; probably no relation so intimate could be pointed to at 
 any time. It was not by accident that the conjunction showed 
 itself just then. The spirit of romance had moved the whole 
 emotional nature, and when the nature was complex and many-sided 
 it inevitably sought various modes of expression. It is not extrava-
 
 986 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 gantly fanciful to imagine a kinship between the word-visions of 
 Shelley and the colour-visions of Turner. It was, perhaps, partly 
 habit and tradition which kept the arts of the poet and the painter 
 asunder in the case of these men. A generation later the tradition 
 had lost much of its force, and the actual kinship of the arts was 
 becoming more and more manifest. Men felt dimly what they 
 have only in recent years come to realise clearly. Their hearts 
 burned within them, they knew not why; but the power which 
 made them burn was, under all its multifarious shapes, funda- 
 mentally the same. Classic and romantic in poetry, utilitarian 
 and idealist in philosophy, evangelical and tractarian in religion, 
 were all names indicating different aspects of one great opposition, 
 the opposition of the spirit of the nineteenth century to the spirit 
 of the eighteenth. The Bowles-Pope controversy has its analogue 
 in the opposition, which is not a controversy, between the 
 classical theories of Haydon and the Gothic ones of Ruskin. 
 
 " It is not possible," Ruskin writes, " that the classical spirit 
 should ever take possession of a mind of the highest order^" 
 Here the word " classical " is used in the sense which it bore in 
 the eighteenth century. But even in presence of a grander 
 classicism, Ruskin is comparatively cold. "I would not," he 
 writes, "surrender, from an architectural point of view, one mighty 
 line of the colossal, quiet, life-in-death statue mountains of Egypt 
 with their narrow fixed eyes and hands on their rocky limbs, nor 
 one Romanesque fagade with its porphyry mosaic of indefinable 
 monsters, nor one Gothic moulding of rigid saints and grinning 
 goblins, for ten Parthenons"." The italics are Ruskin's ; but when 
 the fullest allowance is made for the qualification, the statement 
 is sufficiently remarkable. It would be tedious and superfluous 
 to quote his words of vituperation and contempt for the Renas- 
 cence. It would be equally superfluous to demonstrate his 
 admiration of the Gothic. No one knew better than he the 
 crudity, the affectations and the inconsistencies of the early Gothic 
 revival. He points them out in his favourite Scott himself : " He 
 had some confused love of Gothic architecture, because it was 
 dark, picturesque, old, and like nature ; but could not tell the 
 
 ^ Modern PainUrs, v. 267. ^ ibid. ii. 21 y 220.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 987 
 
 worst from the best, and built for himself perhaps the most incon- 
 gruous and ugly pile that gentlemanly modernism ever designed ; 
 marking, in the most curious and subtle way, that mingling of 
 reverence with irreverence which is so striking in the age; he 
 reverences Melrose, yet casts one of its piscinas, puts a modern steel 
 grate into it, and makes it his fire-place\" Yet such conceptions 
 of Gothic, crude as they were, with the still cruder conceptions of 
 Horace Walpole, were the necessary foundations for Ruskin's work. 
 
 " The first step," says Ruskin, " to the understanding either 
 the mind or position of a great man ought, I think, to be an 
 inquiry into the elements of his early instruction, and the mode 
 in which he was affected by the circumstances of surrounding 
 life." Such an inquiry is certainly fruitful in his own case ; and 
 in Prater ita and Fors Clavigera we have ample materials, 
 presented in attractive but characteristically garrulous fashion. 
 
 John Ruskin (i 819— 1900) was three-quarters Scotch by blood, 
 and wholly evangelical Protestant by religious training. His 
 father migrated to London as a clerk to a firm of wine merchants, 
 on the dissolution of which he became himself head of a new 
 firm which was founded to take its place. Through his paternal 
 grandmother he was related to the Maitlands of Kenmore Castle 
 and the Agnews of Lochnaw, and his great-grandmother had at 
 one time had custody of that precious document, the National 
 Covenant. John James Ruskin married his cousin, Margaret 
 Cox. Their son, John Ruskin, was an only child. He was 
 reared in the quietest of homes, and naturally its teaching sank 
 deep into his nature. Superficially, at least, he seemed to be 
 influenced more by his mother than by his father. She was 
 rigidly evangelical, and she cherished the dream of making her 
 son an evangelical clergyman. Both father and son acquiesced 
 in the evangelicalism rather than shared it. "Though he went 
 to church with a resigned countenance, I knew very well that he 
 liked going just as little as I did^" The purpose of making young 
 Ruskin an evangelical clergyman was frustrated by the still more 
 rigid evangelicalism of an aunt, his father's sister, who gave him 
 cold mutton for Sunday's dinner, " which — as I much preferred it 
 ^ Modern Fai,nUrs, iii. z'ii. * FraUrita, lii. 10.
 
 988 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 hot — greatly diminished the influence of The Pilgrim's Progress'^" 
 Nevertheless, faith in the maternal doctrines was slow to decay, 
 and their influence lasted for life. Sabbatarianism held the most 
 enduring power. The father and son, on their foreign tours, 
 indulged in walks on Sunday with unholy joy, dashed with a 
 sense that they were children of perdition. Not till 1858 did 
 Ruskin go so far as to draw on Sunday, " with a dimly alarmed 
 sense of its being a new fact in existence"" for him. And he adds, 
 " Come to pass how it might, the real new fact in existence for 
 me >as that my drawings did not prosper that year, and, in 
 deepest sense, never prospered again." One is reminded of Scott's 
 story of witchcraft in connexion with Laird Nippy, and his com- 
 ment after its fulfilment in the bankruptcy of the Laird : " And 
 now, think whatever we choose of it, my good friend Nippy 
 is a bankrupt I" Lockhart evidently thought that Scott had a 
 lingering half-belief in something "no canny" behind the story; 
 and Raskin's manner suggests a similar relic of belief in his 
 case. 
 
 Probably by this teaching Mrs Ruskin was injuriously cramp- 
 ing and fettering her son's mind and life; but there can be no 
 question as to the value of the unceasing training in the Bible 
 which she gave him from the dawn of his intelligence till he went 
 to Oxford. The method was as mechanical as possible. The 
 mother and son began with the opening of Genesis and read 
 steadily through, day by day, omitting nothing, till they reached 
 the end of the Apocalypse ; when they began over again. But 
 the result was that Ruskin acquired a marvellous knowledge of the 
 Bible, and that this supplies a backbone to his thought and style, 
 which otherwise might have been fatally invertebrate. 
 
 As the sense of religion remained profound in Ruskin even 
 after he had almost wholly discarded dogma, it is important to 
 understand the ideas of religion which went to form his growing 
 mind. But in the earlier and greater part of his career it was his 
 destiny to be the apostle of the religion of beauty; and it is there- 
 fore not less important to understand how his sense of beauty 
 
 1 Prceterita, i. 2. * ibid. iii. 34. 
 
 « Lockharfs Lift of Scott, ii. 187-188.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 989 
 
 was awakened and nourished. This was mainly the work of his 
 father, a person of greater intellectual power and of more varied 
 gifts, though of less concentrated strength, than his mother. The 
 son speaks of his father's " high natural powers, and exquisitely 
 romantic sensibility ^" Those powers were considerable enough 
 to draw the attention of the Edinburgh philosopher, Thomas 
 Brown, and to induce him to write with marked respect to the 
 elder Ruskin. The romantic sensibility showed itself in a love 
 of natural scenery, of paintings and drawings, and of romantic 
 literature. Scott was a prime favourite ; and the taste was trans- 
 mitted from the father to the son. " I can no more recollect the 
 time," says the latter, " when I did not know them [the Waverley 
 Novels] than when I did not know the Bible"." Pope's Homer 
 had been another book in which the boy delighted ; and, a little 
 later, Byron was added by the father, who also had an ambition 
 for his gifted son. It was that he would " write poetry as good 
 as Byron's, only pious ^" There was nothing inconsistent between 
 this and the mother's design to make him an evangelical clergy- 
 man ; for another part of the father's dream was that his son 
 should "preach sermons as good as Bossuet's, only Protestant." 
 The father's pride in Modern Paijiters never quite reconciled him 
 to the loss either of the verses or of the sermons. The gorgeous 
 prose seemed to him scarcely equivalent to the poetry which 
 was never written ; and " he would have been a bishop* " was his 
 sad remark to a friend, when contrasting what was with what 
 might have been. 
 
 Under his father's guidance, then, Ruskin read the right books. 
 It is also important to notice that, in the course of his business, 
 the elder Ruskin showed the boy much of the finest scenery in 
 England. The family custom was to take a coaching tour in 
 the summer, combining business with pleasure, calling upon 
 customers, and inspecting all noteworthy mansions and castles on 
 the route. A little later, in 1833, Prout's Sketches in Flanders and 
 Germany suggested a longer journey; and the tour to the Rhine 
 and Switzerland was the first of many wanderings for pleasure 
 only, or for pleasure and education combined. Thus the young 
 
 1 PneUriia, i. 127. * ibid, 43. '^ ibid. 284. * ibid. 20.
 
 990 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Ruskin gradually became familiar with the best Europe had to 
 show both in nature and art, and much of his after work would 
 have been impossible but for this training of eye and hand (for 
 he drew diligently on his travels) in the knowledge and love of 
 the beautiful. 
 
 Besides all this, the elder Ruskin possessed and transmitted 
 to his son a keen and sensitive taste in art. Another man, his 
 partner Telford, introduced young Ruskin to the work of Turner 
 by the gift of the illustrated edition of Rogers's Italy \ but it was 
 the common joy of the father and son in Prout which suggested 
 the tour just mentioned. In later days the two diverged in taste, 
 but during Ruskin's period of growth he could count upon a 
 singularly keen and delicate sympathy at home. 
 
 Fortunate in his home, Ruskin was no less fortunate in the 
 time of his birth. "A very few years, — within the hundred, — 
 before that, no child could have been born to care for mountains, 
 or for the men that lived among them, in that way. Till Rous- 
 seau's time there had been no ' sentimental ' love of nature ; and 
 till Scott's, no such apprehensive love of 'all sorts and conditions 
 of men,' not in the soul merely, but in the flesh. St Bernard of 
 La Fontaine, looking out to Mont Blanc with his child's eyes, 
 sees above Mont Blanc the Madonna; St Bernard of Talloires, 
 not the lake of Annecy, but the dead between Martigny and 
 x\osta. But for me, the Alps and their people were alike beautiful 
 in their snow, and their humanity; and I wanted, neither for them 
 nor myself, sight of any thrones in heaven but the rocks, or of 
 any spirits in heaven but the clouds ^" 
 
 In 1837 Ruskin went into residence at Christ Church, Oxford. 
 Hitherto his education had been wholly private, and its quality 
 had been very uneven. As regards art, it could hardly have been 
 improved ; for besides the advantages already mentioned, the boy 
 had had the benefit of lessons from Copley Fielding. In litera- 
 ture too it was excellent. His father, whom the son — himself a 
 most accomplished reader — declares to have been "an absolutely 
 beautiful reader of the best poetry and prose V read aloud "all 
 the Shakespeare comedies and historical plays again and again, 
 ^ PrceUrita, i. 164-165. * ibid. i. 79.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 991 
 
 all Scott, and all Don Quixote." In respect of Greek he was less 
 fortunate. Dr Andrews, in whose chapel in Walworth the Ruskin 
 family worshipped, had a local reputation as a scholar, and Mr 
 Ruskin thought he would be a fit and proper person to instruct 
 his son in the classics. It proved that " he knew little more of 
 Greek than the letters, and declensions of nouns'"; and though 
 " he wrote the letters prettily," his instruction hardly tended to 
 high scholarship in his pupil. Consequently, the young Ruskin 
 carried to Oxford a mixture of knowledge and ignorance almost 
 as puzzling as that of Gibbon. Already at eighteen he knew 
 some things better, probably, than any man in England ; of other 
 things he was so ignorant that it was questionable whether he 
 could pass his responsions. For unfortunately the things which 
 Ruskin knew were things which did not count at Oxford, and the 
 things of which he was ignorant were essential. 
 
 It is needless to dwell upon the life at Oxford. Intimate as 
 was to be the connexion of Ruskin with the University, the 
 influence of Oxford upon him was slight, and he never bore her 
 stamp, as Newman did, and Arnold. It is not merely that his 
 studies were other than the prescribed studies of the place : even 
 the beauty of Oxford failed to impress him as it impressed her 
 chosen sons. When in Frceterita he names the "three centres of 
 his life's thought," no one is surprised that Oxford is not one of 
 them, though probably all feel, not merely surprise but astonish- 
 ment that Venice and Florence are not named, and that all the 
 work he did in the former city is described as "bye-workl" The 
 three centres in question are Rouen, Geneva and Pisa. In 
 Ruskin's own judgment therefore the vital part of his education 
 was derived from those sojourns on the Continent to which 
 reference has already been made. 
 
 They were periods not of idleness, nor of mere indulgence, but 
 of strenuous though pleasurable work. It was only by this means 
 that Ruskin could have amassed that knowledge of art in all its 
 forms which is the ground-work of his great books, Modern Painters, 
 The Stones of Venice and The Seven Lamps of Architecture, as well 
 as of the various courses of lectures, &c., by which in later days 
 1 Prteterila, i. 99. ' ibid. i. 235.
 
 992 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 he discharged his duties as Slade Professor. But all this time 
 Ruskin was doing more than extend his knowledge of colours 
 and forms, and of the use made of these in art. To him, art 
 was always full of meaning, it expressed ideas, it was a part of 
 life, and all life was a unity. "However mean or inconsiderable 
 the act," he says truly and finely, "there is something in the 
 well doing of it, which has fellowship with the noblest forms 
 of manly virtue'." It is one of his foibles to see the meaning 
 of every stone in a building, of every tint in a picture, of 
 every twig on a tree ; and a disciple's confidence in the master 
 is somewhat shaken by the discovery that he is given to denying 
 flatly what ten years before he had most confidently afiirmed. 
 But though Ruskin frequently carried his principles to excess, his 
 faith that in all true art there is a meaning which may be expressed 
 in words gives inexhaustible interest to his criticisms. It also 
 made his study of art profoundly influential upon himself. There 
 were no water-tight compartments in his mind. He could not 
 disjoin his aesthetic sense from his moral nature; or rather, 
 though he could, he held it wrong to do so. He objects to the 
 identification of truth with beauty. " One," he says, " is a 
 property of statements, the other of objects." While however 
 they are separable, "it is wrong to separate them ; they "are to be 
 sought together in the order of their worthiness ; that is to say, 
 truth first, and beauty afterwards. High art differs from low art 
 in possessing an excess of beauty in addition to its truth, not 
 in possessing excess of beauty inconsistent with truth^" Believing 
 as he did that the scenes of nature, the pictures and the buildings 
 which he studied and loved, became part of himself and modified 
 that self, he could not possibly be indifterent to their moral 
 
 aspect. 
 
 As Ruskin therefore brought the whole contents of his mind 
 to bear upon his criticism, the question what his views were, not 
 on art alone, but on everything, is strictly relevant to the inter- 
 pretation of that criticism. And this is especially the case with 
 regard to his deepest convictions. In an indispensable section of 
 Fors Clavigera (Letter Lxxvi.) Ruskin has reviewed his own 
 1 Sevin Lamps, Introd. 7. ^ Modern Painters, iii. 55 11.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 993 
 
 spiritual history. He divides it into three parts. Up to 1858, it 
 was, with him, Protestantism or nothing. Then he was " uri-con- 
 verted" by the sermon of "a little squeaking idiot" in a Walden- 
 sian chapel. He had previously discovered that "all beautiful 
 prayers were Catholic, — all wise interpretations of the Bible 
 Catholic ; — and every manner of Protestant written services what- 
 soever either insolently altered corruptions, or washed-out and 
 ground-down debris of the great Catholic collects, litanies, and 
 songs of praise'." Yet he could not become a Catholic because 
 he "no more believed in the living Pope than he did in the 
 living Khan of Tartary"." For sixteen years, from 1S58 to 1874, 
 he lived " with ' the religion of humanity ' for rough and strong 
 and sure foundation of everything." Then came the final change, 
 which made J^ors " much more distinctly Christian in its tone." 
 " I am myself much of a Turk, more of a Jew; alas, most of all, — 
 an infidel ; but not an atom of a heretic : Catholic I of the 
 Catholics," is Ruskin's summing up about himself^ 
 
 This summary of the development of Ruskin's religious beliefs 
 has led us many years forwards. Retracing our steps, we find 
 Ruskin's Oxford career interrupted in 1840 by a serious illness 
 which forced him to go abroad, and so rather advanced than 
 retarded his true education. In 1842 he at last went up for his 
 degree. He entered only for a pass, and his Latin was so bad 
 that his success was questionable ; but bad Latin was forgiven for 
 the sake of good divinity, philosophy and mathematics ; and the 
 examiners gave him "a complimentary double-fourth." 
 
 But the humble degree was soon to be rendered illustrious ; 
 for in the following year appeared Modern Painters^ by a Graduate 
 of Oxford, the first of the five volumes which were destined to 
 fill a large part of the author's life till i860. This volume was 
 not Ruskin's earliest venture in authorship, though it was by far 
 the most important and ambitious hitherto. From 1834 to 1836 
 various articles of his had appeared in the Magazitte of Natural 
 History; and between 1835 ^"<i 1844 he contributed a number 
 of poems to Friendship's Offering, a periodical edited by Thomas 
 
 ^ FrceUrita, iii. 31. ^ ibid. 
 
 ^ Fors Clavigera, Ixxvu 
 
 w. 61
 
 994 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Pringle, a minor but, within his limits, a genuine poet. These 
 poetical efforts were continued for a year or two longer in The 
 Keepsake and Heath's Book of Beauty ; but Ruskin convinced 
 himself, to his father's sorrow, that verse was not, for him, the 
 proper medium of expression. Though his solitary academical 
 success was the winning of the Newdigate prize in 1839 with the 
 poem, Sahette atid Elepha7ita, he gradually dropped metrical 
 composition. Probably the most noteworthy writings of those 
 early years were the series of articles begun in Loudon's Archi- 
 tectural Magazine in 1837, under the title of Introduction to t/ie 
 Poetry of Architecture, a subject which, as the author himself says, 
 half his future life was to be spent in discoursing of. 
 
 All these writings were trifling compared with the volume 
 which in 1843 roused universal curiosity about the anonymous 
 author. The impulse to write it came from the depreciation of 
 Turner by the school of art then reigning. Of "the two paths" 
 concerning which Ruskin afterwards wrote, this reigning school 
 took the path of convention ; and then, as always, Ruskin was 
 the panegyrist of natural art. Nothing that is natural can be 
 ugly, nothing that is not natural can be beautiful, was his favourite 
 dogma. While this gave the impulse, the power to write was 
 largely due to Ruskin's familiarity with the drawings of Turner in 
 the collection of Godfrey Windus, a retired coach-builder living 
 at Tottenham. Of course Ruskin's own collection was then 
 unformed: it was not till 1839 that the family got its second 
 Turner drawing. Windus however was a collector, and his 
 collection was always open to his fellow-enthusiast ; for " nobody, 
 in all England, at that time,— and Turner was already sixty, — 
 cared, in the true sense of the word, for Turner, but the retired 
 coachmaker of Tottenham, and I^" The common feeling with 
 regard to the great painter was expressed by the article in Black- 
 wood's Magazine which first stirred Ruskin to write a reply. 
 
 Upon this state of taste and feeling Modern Painters burst 
 like a thunderclap. It riveted attention, and it astonished readers 
 both by the novelty and the decision of the opinions expressed, 
 and by the extraordinary eloquence of the language. Whoever 
 
 ^ Fmtcrita,n. 16-17.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 99$ 
 
 the Graduate of Oxford might be, he was clearly not a person to 
 be despised : the critic of art was himself an artist, at least in 
 words. In all literature, there was no such word-painting as his : 
 the colours were as dazzling as those of his favourite Turner 
 himself. Take, for example, the great storm-picture 'from the 
 Alban Mount: — "Not long ago, I was slowly descending this 
 very bit of carriage-road, the first turn after you leave Albano, 
 not a little impeded by the worthy successors of the ancient 
 prototypes of Veiento. It had been wild weather when I left 
 Rome, and all across the Campagna the clouds were sweeping in 
 sulphurous blue, with a clap of thunder or two, and breaking 
 gleams of sun along the Claudian aqueduct lighting up the infinity 
 of its arches like the bridge of chaos. But as I climbed the long 
 slope of the Alban Mount, the storm swept finally to the north, 
 and the noble outlines of the domes of Albano, and graceful 
 darkness of its ilex grove, rose against pure streaks of alternate 
 blue and amber; the upper sky gradually flushing through the 
 last fragments of rain-cloud in deep palpitating azure, half aether 
 and half dew. The noonday sun came slanting down the rocky 
 slopes of La Riccia, and their masses of entangled and tall 
 foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure of 
 a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with rain. 
 I cannot call it colour, it was conflagration. Purple, and crimson, 
 and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle, the rejoicing 
 trees sank into the valley in showers of light, every separate leaf 
 quivering with buoyant and burning life ; each, as it turned to 
 reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an 
 emerald. Far up into the recesses of the valley, the green vistas 
 arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, 
 with the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks for foam, and 
 silver flakes of orange spray tossed into the air around them, 
 breaking over the grey walls of rock into a thousand separate 
 stars, fading and kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted and 
 let them fall. Every blade of grass burned like the golden floor 
 of heaven, opening in sudden gleams as the foliage broke and 
 closed above it, as sheet-lightning opens in a cloud at sunset; 
 the motionless masses of dark rock — dark though flushed with 
 
 63—2
 
 996 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 scarlet lichen, casting their quiet shadows across its restless 
 radiance, the fountain underneath them filling its marble hollow 
 with blue mist and fitful sound ; and over all, the multitudinous 
 bars of amber and rose, the sacred clouds that have no darkness, 
 and only exist to illumine, were seen in fathomless intervals 
 between the solemn and orbed repose of the stone pines, passing 
 to lose themselves in the last, white, blinding lustre of the 
 measureless line where the Campagna melted into the blaze of 
 the sea\" 
 
 The style of Ruskin is unquestionably in great part the secret 
 of his power. It would be superfluous to comment upon the 
 magnificent eloquence : whatever could be effected by a gorgeous 
 embroidery of words was evidently within the competence of the 
 writer. The danger was rather that he might have been seduced 
 into an excess of ornaments. A style of this sort is clopng, and 
 the limpid simplicity of a page of Goldsmith is more universally 
 and more permanently pleasing. But from the first Ruskin 
 varied his majestic periods with piquant phrases and sly touches 
 of humour ; and, fortunately, the development of his style tended 
 rather to simplicity than to increase of splendour. No one has 
 been more severe than himself upon the excess and exaggeration 
 into which this gift of expressive words occasionally led him. 
 "See the mischief of fine writing," is his own comment in a note 
 upon a passage in the second volume of Modern Painters, and 
 its substance is repeated many times in his works. No one was 
 ever more frank in self-criticism, and even in self-contradiction. 
 Both as to style and as to substance he pours out the vials of 
 wrath no less copiously upon himself than upon others. 
 
 The success of the first volume of Moder?i Painters fixed 
 the career of Ruskin. The vision of the evangelical clergyman 
 faded from before his mother's eyes, and that of the poet writing 
 verse as good as Byron's, only pious, ceased to delight his father. 
 They listened even with tears to the reading of the finer passages 
 of Modern Painters in manuscript; yet they were never fully 
 reconciled to the new mode of life. The education of foreign 
 travel and art study went on as before. In 1844 Ruskin was in 
 ^ Modern Painten, i. 16+-166.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 997 
 
 Switzerland, in 1845 i" Italy, and again in 1846 we find him back 
 at his beloved Chamouni. In that year the second volume of 
 Modern Painters appeared. The press notices, says the author, 
 were "either cautious or complimentary, — none, to the best of 
 my memory, contemptuous^" No one will wonder : there would 
 have been ground for surprise had it been otherwise. For in the 
 interval the second edition of the first volume had been published, 
 and it contained a new preface, in which the critics were vigorously 
 dealt with. Most of them are passed over in comprehensive 
 contempt ; but the Blackwood critic is singled out for special 
 honour. It may be doubted whether he enjoyed it much : — 
 " Writers like the present critic of Blackwood's Magazine deserve 
 more respect; the respect due to honest, hopeless, helpless 
 imbeciUty. There is something exalted in the innocence of their 
 feeblemindedness ; one cannot suspect them of partiality, for it 
 implies feeling; nor of prejudice, for it implies some previous 
 acquaintance with their subject. I do not know that, even in 
 this age of charlatanry, I could point to a more barefaced instance 
 of imposture on the simplicity of the public, than the insertion of 
 those pieces of criticism in a respectable periodical. We are not 
 so insulted with opinions on music from persons ignorant of its 
 notes; nor with treatises on philology by persons unacquainted 
 with the alphabet ; but here is page after page of criticism, which 
 one may read from end to end, looking for something which the 
 writer knows, and finding nothing," — and so on. Evidently the 
 Graduate of Oxford was very well able to take care of himself, 
 and the critics were wise in showing respect for his teeth and 
 claws. 
 
 Ten years passed before the next two volumes of Modern 
 Painters were published, and yet four after that before it was 
 ended, not " concluded," by the publication of the fifth and last 
 volume in i860. No wonder the author's father feared he would 
 be dead before it was done. But the delay was due to no lack 
 of industry. The cause lay in the discursiveness of the author's 
 mind, the width of his sympathies, and his passion for thorough- 
 ness when he was roused to interest. Modern Painters alone would 
 
 ^ Pr<£terita, ii. 2S6.
 
 998 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 have been no mean achievement even for a period so long as 
 seventeen years. But it was far from being the only production 
 of those years. The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) was 
 " thrown together during the preparation of one of the sections of 
 Modern Painters^." The Stones of Venice (i 851-185 3) w^as also a 
 bye-work. And there were many things in addition of less 
 importance, — Notes on the Construction of Shecpfolds (185 1), 
 Pre-Raphaelitism (1851), Lectures on Architecture and Fainting 
 (1854), The Political Eco7iomy of Art (1S57), T'he Two Paths 
 (1859), &c. 
 
 To the year i860 belong not only the concluding volume of 
 Modern Painters, but also Unto this Last (as a separate volume, 
 1862). It is the point of separation between the two great 
 branches of Ruskin's work. After i860 Ruskin the art critic 
 lived on, it is true; and as Slade Professor there still remained 
 for him much work, both brilliant and solid, to do. But this 
 work mainly illustrated in detail, or reiterated, the principles the 
 author had already laid down. There are no more books of art- 
 criticism on the great scale. On the other hand, Ruskin the 
 Social Reformer, with all his fervour, his high aims, his unselfish- 
 ness, his keen insight and his astonishing blindness, his wisdom 
 and his perversity, emerged into view. It would be a profound 
 mistake to look upon this interest in social reform as something 
 new : all that is new is the prominence given to it. There is no 
 real break anywhere in the life of Ruskin ; it is a continuous 
 development, partly concealed by the superficial contradictions of 
 a whimsical, self-willed and arrogantly self-confident nature, — the 
 nature with which he was born, and which was nourished by his 
 solitary education. 
 
 There are few important points connected with the work of 
 Ruskin about which mistakes are more frequently made than 
 about this. Ruskin the art critic is looked upon as a different 
 man from Ruskin the social reformer. The truth is that the 
 social reformer was latent in his character from the first. In 
 i860 his work for art was in its great outlines done; and his 
 restless intellectual energy forced him into the other field. The 
 1 i'reface to The Seven Lamps of Architecture.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 999 
 
 organic connexion between the two phases is evident if we con- 
 sider only the importance of the moral element in Ruskin's 
 criticisms. But there are many indications more specific than 
 this. Take, for example, this passage from The Seven Lamps : — 
 "We have just spent, for instance, a hundred and fifty millions, 
 with which we have paid men for digging ground from one place 
 and depositing it in another. We have formed a large class of 
 men, the railway navvies, especially reckless, unmanageable, and 
 dangerous. We have maintained besides (let us state the benefits 
 as fairly as possible) a number of ironfounders in an unhealthy 
 and painful employment; we have developed (this at least is 
 good) a very large amount of mechanical ingenuity; and we have, 
 in fine, attained the power of going fast from one place to another. 
 Meantime we have had no mental interest or concern ourselves 
 in the operations we have set on foot, but have been left to the 
 usual vanities and cares of our existence. Suppose, on the other 
 hand, that we had employed the same sums in building beautiful 
 houses and churches. We should have maintained the same 
 number of men, not in driving wheelbarrows, but in a distinctly 
 technical, if not intellectual employment; and those who were 
 more intelligent among them would have been especially happy 
 in that employment, as having room in it for the development of 
 their fancy, and being directed by it to that observation of beauty 
 which, associated with the pursuit of natural science, at present 
 forms the enjoyment of many of the more intelligent manu- 
 facturing operatives. Of mechanical ingenuity, there is, I imagine, 
 at least as much required to build a cathedral as to cut a tunnel 
 or contrive a locomotive : we should, therefore, have developed 
 as much science, while the artistical element of intellect would 
 have been added to the gain. Meantime we should ourselves 
 have been much happier and wiser by the interest we should have 
 taken in the work with which we were personally concerned ; and 
 when all was done, instead of the very doubtful advantage of the 
 power of going fast from place to place, we should have had the 
 certain advantage of increased pleasure in stopping at home\" 
 Are not the germs both of the truths and of the fallacies of the 
 ^ Seven Lamps : Lamp of Obedience.
 
 lOOO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 economic and social teaching of Ruskin present here? In 1849 
 the thoughts were in his mind, and only time and the impulse 
 were needed. 
 
 The economical and social essays, lectures and pamphlets, were 
 the outcome of that * religion of humanity ' which was Ruskin's 
 chief stay for sixteen years. The development is perfectly natural; 
 but it was much helped by the intimacy which grew up between 
 Ruskin and Carlyle, whom Ruskin loved in latter days to call 
 his "master," and whom he read so constantly as to find himself 
 "perpetually falling into his modes of expression*." This influence 
 increased greatly after 1850, when the personal acquaintance 
 between the two men became intimate; and in Ruskin's views 
 of the condition of England, in his contempt for the existing 
 political economy and for John Stuart Mill as its apostle, in the 
 principles of the political economy which he wished to substitute 
 for that, in his Toryism and his Radicalism, in his sympathy with 
 the people and his faith in the leadership of the Hero or King, 
 we see innumerable traces of Carlyle's teaching. 
 
 Ruskin was " ever a fighter." His youth had been spent in 
 
 the battle against conventionalism in art ; in his prime he began 
 
 a battle against orthodoxy in political economy. The latter was 
 
 far the more formidable affair of the two. The critics of art had 
 
 been speedily reduced to "caution"; the economists were not 
 
 so easily silenced or overawed. They were numerous, and they 
 
 were in possession of the field. U7ito this Last first appeared 
 
 in the form of essays in The Corfihill Magazine, then edited by 
 
 Ruskin's friend Thackeray. The outcry was so great that after 
 
 three papers had been printed Thackeray had the painful task 
 
 of writing that he could admit only one more. Opposition 
 
 made Ruskin more dogmatic and determined. " After turning 
 
 the matter hither and thither in my mind for two years more, 
 
 I resolved to make it the central work of my life to write an 
 
 exhaustive treatise on Political Economy ^" Another friend in the 
 
 editorial chair, Froude, who was then conducting Fraser's Magazine, 
 
 thought he might risk publishing the unpopular principles, not- 
 
 * Modern Painters, Appendix iii. 
 ^ Munera Fulvcns, Preiace, xxviii.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM lOOI 
 
 withstanding the experience of Thackeray. Ruskin accordingly 
 sent him the preface of the projected work. It was printed in 
 four articles in the years 1862 and 1863; and then once more 
 the author had to be informed that it must be discontinued. 
 These articles were afterwards published together under the name 
 Munera Pulveris^ the title chosen for the larger work which was 
 never written. 
 
 But though the systematic treatise remains unwritten, the 
 most important of Raskin's later works are devoted to the ex- 
 position and expansion and practical application of the principles 
 laid down in the essays contributed to The Cornhill and to 
 Fr user's Magazvie. The Crown of Wild Olive (1866) works 
 out certain fundamental principles of labour, commerce and 
 war. Time and Tide (1867), in the shape of a series of letters 
 to a working man, develops with greater freedom the principles 
 laid down in Munera Fulveris, considering them in their social 
 rather than in their purely economic aspect. And of course the 
 long series of letters entitled Fors Clavigera, which ran on with 
 some breaks from 187 1 to 1884, had for its principal purpose the 
 enforcement and the illustration of the author's economic and 
 social ideas. Sesa77ie and Lilies (1865) is informed with the same 
 spirit, which likewise pervades the greater part even of the art work 
 done in connexion with the Slade professorship. Ruskin's own 
 classification of his works is instructive, though the divisions 
 must not be too rigidly insisted upon : — " Modern Painters" he 
 says, "taught the claim of all lower nature on the hearts of 
 men ; of the rock, and wave, and herb, as a part of their necessary 
 spirit life ; in all that I now bid you to do, to dress the earth and 
 keep it, I am fulfilling what I then began. The Stones of Venice 
 taught the laws of constructive Art, and the dependence of all 
 human work or edifice, for its beauty, on the happy life of the 
 workman. Unto this Last taught the laws of that life itself, and 
 its dependence on the Sun of Justice : the Inaugural Oxford 
 lectures, the necessity that it should be led, and the gracious 
 laws of beauty and labour recognized, by the upper, no less than 
 the lower, classes of England; and lastly Fors Clavigera has 
 declared the relation of these to each other, and the only possible
 
 I002 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 conditions of peace and honour, for low and high, rich and 
 poor, together, in the holding of that first Estate, under the only 
 Despot, God, from which whoso falls, angel or man, is kept, not 
 mythically nor disputably, but here in visible horror of chains 
 under darkness to the judgment of the great day : and in keeping 
 which service is perfect freedom, and inheritance of all that a 
 loving Creator can give to His creatures, and an immortal Father 
 to His children \" 
 
 The events of later life seldom have that spiritual importance 
 which frequently belongs to the history of youth. The man is 
 formed, and he can neither be un-formed nor re-formed. There 
 is however one event in Ruskin's middle life which cannot be 
 passed over. In 1869 he was elected Slade professor of art at 
 Oxford, and in February, 1870, he delivered his inaugural lecture 
 in the Sheldonian Theatre, whither he was forced to adjourn 
 because the crowd was too great for the Museum, the place 
 originally designated for the lecture. Between that date and 
 1877 Ruskin delivered at Oxford numerous courses of lectures. 
 His final tenure of the Slade professorship in 1883 and 1884 
 produced two more courses, The Art of England and The 
 Pleasures of England; the latter of which was, through the 
 influence of friends, stopped before it was completed. 
 
 A large number of Ruskin's later works were either originally 
 lectures delivered by him as Slade professor of fine art, or they 
 originated from what he conceived to be the indirect duties of 
 the professorship. To the former class belong A?-atra Pentelici 
 (1872), a course of lectures on sculpture which he delivered in 
 1870; The Eaglets Nest (1872), a discussion of the relation 
 between art and science; Ariadne Florentina (1873), which 
 treats of engraving on wood and metal; and Val d'Arno (1874), 
 a study of Tuscan art. To this class too belong the Lectures on 
 Art (1870) ; and they are the most important of all, because they 
 give the best and most compendious view of Ruskin's principles 
 of art as he held them in later years. Among the writings 
 indirectly connected with his chair are Morfiings in Florence 
 
 * Fors Clavii/era. Ixxviii.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 1003 
 
 (1875-77), Sf Mark's Rest (1877-84) and The Bible of Amiens 
 (1880-85), all written with the purpose of teaching travellers 
 what to admire in those shrines of art. 
 
 It might seem on the surface as if Ruskin had forgotten the 
 economic interests of the decade 1860-1870, and gone back to 
 his original love of art. In reality, there was no abandonment 
 and no reversion. The love of art had never ceased, and the 
 interest in social and economic problems had always been present. 
 Rather, after 1870, we find a more perfect fusion of them, so long 
 as Ruskin's mind retained its full power. The spirit of the art- 
 teaching of this period is forecast in the first course of lectures 
 at Oxford, where Ruskin calls upon the young men of England 
 to make their country a source of light to the whole world, a 
 temple of peace, the mistress of the sciences and the arts. On 
 the other hand, the continuance of his social interests is amply 
 attested by many of his public activities. Indeed, while he was 
 less occupied than in the preceding decade with purely economic 
 problems, he was more than ever devoted heart and soul to 
 moral and social questions. Occasionally the manifestations of 
 his interest were a little grotesque. The making of the road 
 at Hinksey was somewhat eccentric. The Guild of St George, 
 established in 187 1, absorbed a great deal of Ruskin's time and 
 energy ; and its results have scarcely conduced to the acceptance 
 of his theories. The agricultural experiments have been no more 
 successful than was their American precursor. Brook Farm ; and 
 though the industrial experiments have in a few cases succeeded, 
 they give little promise of a regeneration of society. 
 
 At the same time, that extraordinary series of letters, Fors 
 Clavigera, was running its course. It contains many passages 
 of great wisdom as well as beauty; but it exhibits in an 
 exaggerated form most of the author's defects, and here and 
 there in the latter part it bears traces of a mind unhinged. 
 Ruskin was, in truth, dangerously overworking himself during 
 those years, and he paid the penalty in the breakdown in 1878. 
 He recovered, but never so far as to regain the full force of his 
 intelligence. The interesting Prceterita, which in some passages 
 shows all the old beauty of style, was written subsequently; but
 
 I004 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the garrulity which marks it is not wholly due to its autobio- 
 graphical character: it is a symptom also of lessened force. 
 Ruskin was then in the third of the periods which he regarded 
 as the normal divisions of men's lives. " Note these three great 
 divisions — essentially those of all men's lives, but singularly 
 separate in his [Scott's], — the days of youth, of labour, and of 
 death. Youth is properly the forming time — that in which a 
 man makes himself, or is made, what he is for ever to be. Then 
 comes the time of labour, when, having become the best he can 
 be, he does the best he can do. Then the time of death, which, 
 in happy lives, is very short : but always a time. The ceasing to 
 breathe is only the end of deaths" As Ruskin's French critic, 
 M. Bardoux, points out, this last happiness was not his. The 
 "jours de mort" extended far beyond even the seven years which 
 he assigned to Scott. 
 
 This sketch of the life and work of Ruskin sufficiently explains 
 the two divergent views which have been taken of him, and the 
 modes of treatment to which he has been subjected. One writer 
 looks upon him as primarily and principally a teacher of aesthetics; 
 to another he is above all a moralist and social reformer. In 
 France, the foreign country in which Ruskin has been most 
 influential and most closely studied, the former view prevails. 
 For many years it prevailed in England too; and long after 
 Ruskin had begun to write on political economy, what he said 
 on that subject was regarded as not much more than a vagary 
 of an eccentric man of genius. Latterly the tendency has been 
 to regard the ethical and social phases in Ruskin's work as 
 fundamental, and to look upon the aesthetic element as only 
 secondary and derivative. Both views are partly true, but 
 they have to be united before we get the full truth. The 
 later English view is that which most accurately represents 
 Ruskin as he was in himself; the French and the early English 
 view best indicates his place in literature. Modern Painters 
 remains not only his largest, but, vehemently as he would have 
 denied it, his greatest work. This book. The Stones of Venice, 
 Tfie Seven Lamps and the Lectures on Art, are likely to be longer 
 
 ^ Fors Clavigera, Ixxxii.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM IOO5 
 
 remembered than Unto this Last (which '^Ruskin himself pre- 
 ferred to all his other writings), Mufiera Pulveris and Fors 
 Clavigera. 
 
 In the aesthetic theory, or, more accurately, in the aesthetic 
 feeling of Ruskin, nothing is more remarkable than the controlling 
 influence of the spirit of mediaevalism. He might be called the 
 Newman of the aesthetic movement. Like Newman, he was 
 repelled by the pure rationalism of the eighteenth century. To 
 him, as to Newman, mediaeval times were not the dark ages, but 
 the bright ages. He did in art a work similar in kind to that 
 which Newman was busy doing in religion. At first he did it 
 unconsciously and unwittingly. As late as 185 1 he received 
 comfort from the confession of Protestant faith by the Pre- 
 Raphaelites, though he was by that time already shaken in the 
 faith himself. In truth, it was from the first external to him, 
 something he had been taught, something which never became 
 part of himself. In the second volume of Modern Painters we 
 see this in the contrast he draws between Christian art and Greek 
 art He holds it for certain that shortcoming must "be visible in 
 every Pagan conception, when set beside Christian." Not only 
 so, but there is such difference of kind "as to make all Greek 
 conception full of danger to the student in proportion to his 
 admiration of it"; and he points to the fatal effect of its "pernicious 
 element" on the "solemn purity" of the Italian schools. "The 
 Greek could not conceive a spirit ; he could do nothing without 
 limbs ; his God is a finite God, talking, pursuing, and going 
 journeys ; if at any time he was touched with a true feeling of the 
 unseen powers around him, it was in the field of poised battle; for 
 there is something in the near coming of the shadow of death, 
 something in the devoted fulfilment of mortal duty, that reveals 
 the real God, though darkly. That pause on the field of Plat^a 
 was not one of vain superstition ; the two white figures that 
 blazed along the Delphic plain, when the earthquake and the 
 fire led the charge from Olympus, were more than sunbeams 
 on the battle dust; the sacred cloud, with its lance light and 
 triumph singing, that went down to brood over the masts at 
 Salamis, was more than morning mist among the olives; and
 
 I006 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 yet what were the Greek's thoughts of his God of Battle ? No 
 spirit power was in the vision: it was a being of clay strength, 
 and human passion, foul, fierce, and changeful ; of penetrable 
 arms, and vulnerable flesh. Gather what we may of great from 
 Pagan chisel or Pagan dream, and set it beside the orderer of 
 Christian warfare, Michael the Archangel : not Milton's ' with 
 hostile brow and visage all inflamed'; not even Milton's in 
 kingly treading of the hills of Paradise ; not Rafiaelle's with the 
 expanded wings and brandished spear ; but Perugino's with his 
 triple crest of traceless plume unshaken in heaven, his hand 
 fallen on his crossleted sword, the truth girdle binding his un- 
 dinted armour; God has put His power upon him; resistless 
 radiance is on his limbs ; no lines are there of earthly strength, 
 no trace on the divine features of earthly anger; trustful, and 
 thoughtful, fearless, but full of love, incapable except of the 
 repose of eternal conquest, vessel and instrument of Omnipotence, 
 filled like a cloud with the victor light, the dust of principalities 
 and powers beneath his feet, the murmur of hell against him 
 heard by his spiritual ear like the winding of a shell on the far 
 off" sea shored" 
 
 At this period, as we have seen in an earlier part of this book, 
 there was the same division between mysticism and rationalism 
 in the thought of England as that which prevailed in Greece 
 in the sixth century B.C. Ruskin essayed to play the part of 
 Pythagoras, and to combine the religious and the philosophic 
 movements. Notwithstanding his early Protestantism and his 
 later freedom from dogma, the above passage indicates in which 
 scale his weight would tell. " In such unions," says Professor 
 Bury, "the mystic element always wins the preponderance." In 
 the case of Ruskin it certainly did so in that curious 'Catholicism' 
 which was his final faith. Already in 1846 we see in the passage 
 just quoted the trend of his mind ; in 185 1 it is more manifest in 
 the grotesque "excommunication" of the Notes on the Construction 
 of Sheep/olds; and in 1877 we see the final stage, when he 
 speaks of "the magnificent cheat which the Devil played 
 on the Protestant sect, from Knox downwards," which was 
 ^ Modern FainUrs, ii. 237-238.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM lOO/ 
 
 " the consummation of his great victory over the Christian 
 Church, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries \" 
 
 Manifestly, the path of Ruskin Hes parallel to that of Newman. 
 The starting-point is different, and the goal is different; but 
 movement in both cases is in the same direction. Read "liberal" 
 for "Greek" in the passage quoted above from Modern Painters y 
 and translate the language of art into that of theology, and we 
 have in effect this passage from the Apologia : — 
 
 *' The Evangelical party itself, with their late successes, seemed 
 to have lost that simplicity and unworldliness which I admired so 
 much in Milner and Scott. It was not that I did not venerate 
 such a man as Ryder, the then Bishop of Lichfield, and others 
 of similar sentiments, who were not yet promoted out of the ranks 
 of the Clergy, but I thought little of the Evangelicals as a class. I 
 thought they played into the hands of the Liberals. With the 
 Establishment thus divided and threatened, thus ignorant of its 
 true strength, I compared that fresh vigorous Power of which I 
 was reading in the first centuries. In her triumphant zeal on 
 behalf of that Primeval Mystery, to which I had had so great a 
 devotion from my youth, I recognized the movement of my 
 Spiritual Mother. 'Incessu patuit Dea.' The self-conquest of 
 her Ascetics, the patience of her Martyrs, the irresistible determi- 
 nation of her Bishops, the joyous swing of her advance, both 
 exalted and abashed me. I said to myself, 'Look on this 
 picture and on that'; I felt affection tor my own Church, but 
 not tenderness ; I felt dismay at her prospects, anger and scorn at 
 her do-nothing perplexity. I thought that if Liberalism once got a 
 footing within her, it was sure of the victory in the event. I saw 
 that Reformation principles were powerless to rescue her. As to 
 leaving her, the thought never crossed my imagination ; still I 
 ever kept before me that there was something greater than the 
 Established Church, and that that was the Church Catholic and 
 Apostolic, set up from the beginning, of which she was but the 
 local presence and the organ. She was nothing, unless she was 
 this. She must be dealt with strongly, or she would be lost. 
 There was need of a second reformation." 
 
   Fors Clavigera, Ixxxii., nu
 
 I008 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Ruskin was unconscious of the parallelism ; but he was never 
 tired of moralising, or of making religious, art and that nature on 
 which healthy art is based. It is true, he declares that the love 
 of nature is a separate thing from moral principle, but he main- 
 tains that it is inconsistent with evil passions. He sees a con- 
 nexion — though he admits exceptions — between things innocent 
 and things brightly coloured. He especially associates nature 
 with humanity. The famous passage on the Jura in The Seven 
 Lamps is an assertion of this intimate association ; and we find 
 the same doctrine in many another passage. Mountains, he 
 maintains, mould character and implant religion ; and indeed this 
 is true of the love of nature in all her forms. " Supposing all 
 circumstances otherwise the same with respect to two individuals, 
 the one who loves nature most will be always found to have more 
 faith in God than the other\" 
 
 If nature appeals to men and forms character, the things 
 which men have made must inevitably express character. The 
 painters whom Ruskin judges are ranked higher or lower accord- 
 ing to the ethical qualities their works express. Turner is exalted 
 for his truth, Claude abased for falsity. Religion is the source 
 of Giotto's strength ; irreligion is the weakness of Titian. It is, 
 Ruskin tells us, a characteristic of the great school of art that it 
 "introduces in the conception of its subject as much beauty as is 
 possible, consistently with truth." But "the corruption of the 
 schools of high art... consists in the sacrifice of truth to beauty. 
 Great art dwells on all that is beautiful ; but false art omits or 
 changes all that is ugly. Great art accepts Nature as she is, but 
 directs the eyes and thoughts to what is most perfect in her; false 
 art saves itself the trouble of direction by removing or altering 
 whatever it thinks objectionable"." 
 
 So too when Ruskin turns to architecture, it is moral or 
 religious qualities for the evidence of which he seeks in the stones. 
 The very titles of the chapters of The Seven Lamps of Architecture 
 bear witness to this. The " lamps " are the lamps of Sacrifice, of 
 Truth, of Power, of Beauty, of Life, of Memory, of Obedience. 
 
 1 Modern Pimters, iii. 317. The italics are Kiiskin's. 
 
 2 Modem PamUrs, iii. 36-37.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM IOO9 
 
 The Stones of Venice everywhere bears similar evidence. In the 
 comparison between the fourteenth and fifteenth century work 
 on the Ducal Palace, the point upon which most stress is laid is 
 the difference between the figure of Hope on the ninth capital 
 and its imitation on the twenty-ninth. On the earlier, " Hope is 
 praying, while above her a hand is seen emerging from sunbeams 
 — the hand of God (according to that of Revelation, ' The Lord 
 giveth them light'); and the inscription above is 'Spes optima in 
 Deo.'" On the later capital, "she is still praying, but she is 
 praying to the sun only; The hand of God is gofie^." And the 
 same conception is expressed in more general terms where Ruskin 
 notes the effect of the rise of the Renascence spirit, " the change 
 to which London owes St Paul's, Rome St Peter's, Venice and 
 Vicenza the edifices commonly supposed to be their noblest, and 
 Europe in general the degradation of every art she has since 
 practised." 
 
 " This change," he goes on, " appears first in a loss of truth 
 and vitality in existing architecture all over the world. ...All the 
 Gothics in existence, southern or northern, were corrupted at 
 once : the German and French lost themselves in every species 
 of extravagance ; the English Gothic was confined, in its in- 
 sanity, by a strait- waistcoat of perpendicular lines; the Italian 
 effloresced on the mainland into the meaningless ornamentation 
 of the Certosa of Pa via and the Cathedral of Como (a style some- 
 times ignorantly called Italian Gothic), and at Venice into the 
 insipid confusion of the Porta della Carta and wild crockets of 
 St Mark's. This corruption of all architecture, especially eccle- 
 siastical, corresponded with, and marked, the state of religion 
 over all Europe, — the peculiar degradation of the Romanist 
 superstition, and of public morality in consequence, which brought 
 about the Reformation^." In short, the statement in The Crown 
 of Wild Olive is no exaggeration : — " The Stones of Ve?iice had, 
 from beginning to end, no other aim than to show that this Gothic 
 architecture of Venice had arisen out of, and indicated in all its 
 features, a state of pure national faith and of domestic virtue; 
 
 ^ Stones of Venice: The Quui iji, xlviii. The italics are Ruskin's. 
 " ibid. XXXV. 
 
 W. 64
 
 lOIO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 and that its Renaissance architecture had arisen out of, and in 
 all its features indicated, a state of concealed national infidelity 
 and of domestic corruption." 
 
 It is necessary to dwell on these points, for in them we see 
 the true unity of Ruskin's work. There is no sharp break at 
 Unto this Last, only a development. The emphasis which has lain 
 upon Beauty passes to Truth. We look more frequently beneath 
 the symbol to the thing symbolised. It is necessary also, because 
 here we find the central significance of Ruskin's art-criticism. He 
 is no preacher of 'art for art's sake'; it is rather 'art for the use 
 of man and the glory of God.' This is indeed, in Ruskin's 
 conception, the true aim of all human action and not of art only. 
 He expressed the latter part of it in the opening chapter of the 
 second volume of Modern Painters in a manner which startled 
 some of his readers south of the Tweed, though it w'as familiar 
 enough to the dwellers north of the river ; for it is suggested by, 
 and the very phraseology is closely imitated from, the Shorter 
 Catechism. "Man's use and function... are, to be the witness of 
 the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable 
 obedience and resultant happiness." The former part had already 
 found expression more than once in the first volume. His praise 
 of art is not measured by its technical perfection, but by its power 
 of conveying ideas , and ideas in their turn are valuable in pro- 
 portion as they tend to develop the noblest faculties. " The art 
 is greatest which conveys to the mind of the spectator, by any 
 means whatsoever, the greatest number of the greatest ideas ; and 
 I call an idea great in proportion as it is received by a higher 
 faculty of the mind, and as it more fully occupies, and in occupy- 
 ing, exercises and exalts, the faculty by which it is received^" 
 Ruskin did not yet pause to investigate the idea of utility; but 
 when in later years he did so, it is just in such a service as this 
 that he finds true utility. 
 
 At the start, Ruskin contemplated a systematic treatment 
 of the question of aesthetics. In the first volume of Modern 
 Painters he discriminates between the ideas of power, of imitation, 
 of truth, of beauty and of relation which can be received from 
 
 1 Modern Painters, i. 12-13.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM lOII 
 
 works of art, and declares his intention of investigating especially 
 the three last. The plan is followed, though discursively, in the 
 first volume, and also, though still less strictly, in the second ; 
 but in the third it is specifically renounced. " I do not intend 
 now," he says, " to pursue the inquiry in a method so laboriously 
 systematic ; for the subject may, it seems to me, be more usefully 
 treated by pursuing the different questions which arise out of it 
 just as they occur to us, without too great scrupulousness in 
 marking connections, or insisting on sequences. Much time is 
 wasted by human beings, in general, on establishment of systems ; 
 and it often takes more labour to master the intricacies of an 
 artificial connection, than to remember the separate facts which 
 are so carefully connected^" In the interval of ten years between 
 the second and the third volumes Ruskin had discovered the 
 " harmfulness " of philosophy; but probably both the discovery 
 itself and the abandonment of system were due to the growing 
 conviction that the discursiveness which had characterised him 
 from the start was a necessity of his nature. His criticism of 
 art, therefore, is essentially unsystematic. One thing suggests 
 another. He turns aside to formulate the principles of architec 
 ture and to investigate the great buildings of Venice; and he 
 weaves in with these self-imposed tasks principles of literary 
 criticism, of morals and of religion. The ^ame is true still more 
 emphatically of the later courses of lectures, in which we find a 
 hotch-potch of the thought and emotion of Ruskin. 
 
 It was most fortunate for Ruskin that he did thus abandon 
 system. It is where he is most systematic that he is most per- 
 verse, and that he falls into the most glaring blunders. Where 
 he follows his own fine taste and feeling he is usually right; 
 where he is supporting a theory or formulating a definition he is 
 capable of being most egregiously wrong. In all literature there 
 is hardly a greater absurdity than his definition of architecture. 
 " It is very necessary," he says, " in the outset of all inquiry, to 
 distinguish carefully between Architecture and Building^" And 
 he proceeds to do so with amazing results. Architecture as a fine 
 art, it seems, is "that art which, taking up and admitting, as 
 ^ Modern Faintcrs, iii. 2. * Ssven LamJ>s. 
 
 64— a
 
 IOI2 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 conditions of its working, the necessities and common uses of 
 the building, impresses on its form certain characters venerable or 
 beautiful, but otherwise unnecessary." "Thus, I suppose," he 
 goes on, " no one would call the laws architectural which deter- 
 mine the height of a breastwork or the position of a bastion. 
 But if to the stone facing of that bastion be added an unnecessary 
 feature, as a cable moulding, that is architecture. It would be 
 simply unreasonable to call battlements or machicolations archi- 
 tectural features, so long as they consist only of an advanced 
 gallery supported on projected masses, with open intervals beneath 
 for offence. But if these projecting masses be carved beneath 
 into rounded courses, which are useless, and if the headings of the 
 intervals be arched and trefoiled, which is useless, that is Archi- 
 tecture ^" 
 
 In The Republic Socrates shows that, on the principles of 
 Polemarchus, justice is useful only where money is useless, and 
 he rightly regards this as a reductio ad absurdum. The unso- 
 phisticated man must be content to be ''simply unreasonable," 
 and to go on feeling that architecture is all the greater architecture 
 and all the more nobly a " fine art " if it produces its effect without 
 the added grace of something useless. And that it can do so is 
 obvious. It would be "simply unreasonable" to pretend that 
 the bastion depends for its effect upon the useless cable moulding 
 more than upon the battlements or machicolations. But we 
 may appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober. If it be true of 
 art in general that "that art is greatest which conveys to the 
 mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest 
 number of the greatest ideas," then surely it is true of architecture. 
 If useless ornament be the test of architecture, many modern 
 buildings are smothered with it, and modern architecture must be 
 surpassingly great. The laying down of principles of this sort is 
 positively mischievous, for it encourages effort of the wrong sort 
 and distracts attention from what is important and vital. 
 
 In matters of detail Ruskin is seldom as far astray as he is in 
 this matter of fundamental principle ; yet he is not infrequently 
 wrong-headed. His foible is omniscience; and it is often difficult 
 ' Seven Lamps: The Lamp of Sacrijice,
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM IOI3 
 
 to believe that he has penetrated the mind of the artist as 
 thoroughly as his criticisms would imply. Further, when he once 
 takes the wrong road he follows it to the end. His colours are 
 strong : the wholly admirable on the one hand is too often 
 opposed to the wholly vile on the other. He is an advocate : the 
 contrast of Claude with Turner is unfair to the former. When he 
 once sets out to find faults he finds them everywhere ; when it 
 suits him to point out merit, everything is a virtue. Except where 
 he is sympathetic he is a very unsafe guide. Sometimes he would 
 seem to have founded his judgment upon the first of a man's 
 works which he happened to come across, and never to have 
 overcome the prepossession, whether favourable or adverse, so 
 created. Sheer caprice is probably the cause of many of his self- 
 contradictions. But account must be taken also of a curious 
 limitation of his power of comprehension. He concentrated so long 
 and so intensely on the study of inanimate nature that he failed 
 to develop the capacity (if indeed he possessed it in germ) for an 
 equal understanding of life. There is truth in the judgment of 
 the great painter Watts: "The higher the art, the less he [Ruskin] 
 seemed capable of comprehending it. He had no sympathy with 
 the human or divine ; and was incapable of appreciating either 
 Michael Angelo or Titian \" And yet he was of opinion that 
 " the intense love of nature is, in modern times, characteristic of 
 persons not of the first order of intellect, but of brilliant imagina- 
 tion, quick sympathy, and undefined religious principle, suffering 
 also usually under strong and ill-governed passions^"; and he 
 would have explained the preponderance of nature in his own 
 work (supposing him to have admitted it) as due to his weak- 
 nesses. 
 
 Ruskin figures in literature primarily as a critic of painting 
 and architecture, but he was also a ready and a skilful critic 
 of literature ; and though his literary criticisms are sporadic and 
 unsystematic, they are among the most important since the death 
 of Lamb. His opinions on Homer, on Shakespeare and on 
 Scott are expressed as freely and as frequently as his opinions on 
 any artist, with the exception of Turner. They are based upon 
 ^ Lift qfjowett, ii. 109. * Modern Fainters, iii. 303.
 
 I0I4 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 the same principle, and they are less important only because 
 Ruskin was not in this department a pioneer. The core of his 
 criticism, in literature as in art, is the principle of Naturalism. 
 He interrogates both painter and poet in order to discover how 
 far each interprets (not necessarily imitates) nature ; and so he is 
 himself, above and beyond all, an interpreter of nature. "The 
 more I think of it," he says, " I find this conclusion more 
 impressed upon me, — that the greatest thing a human soul ever 
 does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a 
 plain way. Plundreds of people can talk for one who can think, 
 but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is 
 poetry, prophecy, and religion, — all in one^." To this test there- 
 fore he is constantly bringing all the writers whom he touches 
 upon, just as it is by this test that he tries Turner and Claude. 
 So too he is continually gibing at German philosophy, because 
 he thinks it has let go the guiding thread of naturalism. In 
 naturalism also lie the roots of the doctrine of the "pathetic 
 fallacy"; and the sense that he is the apostle of nature repeatedly 
 tempts Ruskin, poetic and imaginative as his own mind is, to the 
 verge of literalism. Even his favourites incur censure if they 
 forget the relation of humble subjection in which they stand to 
 nature. One of those favourites, he says, had "a vague notion 
 that Nature would not be able to get on well without Words- 
 worth-" ; and he thinks the worse of the poet for it. 
 
 Naturalism was no new thing in poetry when Ruskin adopted 
 it as the principle of his criticism. There lay behind him two 
 generations of poetry imbued with this spirit, and he was enabled 
 to analyse it, to set it in its place, to assign its limits and to deter- 
 mine the conditions of its validity. This is his principal service 
 to criticism; and his deliberate effort to turn away the English 
 mind from what he believed to be its excessive addiction to 
 German thought is only another aspect of it. But it deserves 
 special mention, because it indicates a new trend of criticism. 
 Under Coleridge and Carlyle, criticism had looked towards 
 Germany; under Ruskin, it looks away from Germany with her 
 idealistic philosophy to nature herself; under Arnold, the gaze is 
 1 Modern Painters, iii. 278. '* ii>id. iii. aSj.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM IO15 
 
 turned towards France, as the country which, by reason of the very 
 differences between her and us, can best supply our deficiencies. 
 
 The thing seen however, on which Ruskin lays stress, must 
 be interpreted to include the object of the mental, as well as 
 that of the bodily, eye. It means a respect and reverence for 
 fact of any sort, or for truth, and is opposed to empty fancies 
 or to "imaginations as one would," whether they be found in the 
 idealistic dreams of German philosophy, or in those attributions 
 of human feeling to inanimate nature which are characteristic of 
 modern poetry. To the highest order of mind as well as to the 
 lowest, "a primrose by the river's brim" is just a primrose. 
 Intermediate stands " the man who perceives wrongly, because 
 he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a 
 primrose : a star, or a sun, or a fairy's shield, or a forsaken maiden^" 
 
 Ruskin shows wonderful fertility in the application of his 
 critical principles. The literary illustration wells up from the rich 
 stores of his mind while he is laying down the laws of art, or 
 fulminating against those of political economy, or advising the 
 workmen or the maidens of England, or reviewing the facts of his 
 own life ; and in most cases the criticism is enriched and made 
 more suggestive by the context in which it is placed. Yet a 
 plausible case could easily be made out for pronouncing it worth- 
 less. To criticise means to judge ; and few men have been more 
 wilful and capricious in judgment than Ruskin. He was full of 
 prejudice. Though his sympathies were fairly wide, they were 
 not all-embracing, and outside their range he was untrustworthy. 
 He was too completely a man of his own age to be just to the 
 eighteenth century; for when he was at the zenith of his powers, 
 that century was at the nadir of its reputation. That excessive 
 self-confidence which is a feature of his criticism of art mars his 
 criticism of literature also. Highly as he valued reverence, it is 
 to be feared that he sometimes forgot it. No shadow of doubt 
 disturbs him : the meaning is what he says it is, and ought to be 
 what he goes on to indicate. And yet it would not infrequently 
 be possible to suggest very plausible criticisms in a sense exactly 
 contrary to his. 
 
 ^ Modern Painters, iii. 168.
 
 IOl6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 But though to criticise is to judge, it sometimes proves that an 
 erroneous judgment is more helpful than a correct one. " Errare 
 mehercule malo cum Platone quam cum istis vera sentire," is not 
 the expression of an insane devotion to authority; it rather im- 
 plies the conviction that the great man is " always profitable 
 company." And so it is with Ruskin's criticisms. We may 
 question the doctrine of the "pathetic fallacy," and point out in- 
 consistencies in the author's treatment of it. We may think his 
 praise of Scott excessive and his appreciation of Shelley inadequate. 
 We may think the colours lurid in which he paints Dickens and 
 the other novelists who represent " foul " fiction. We may differ 
 from him in a thousand ways ; but the fact remains that his 
 criticism is always stimulating and that we learn more from him 
 even when he is most wrong-headed, than we do from multitudes 
 of criticisms to which no exception can be taken, but which lack 
 the vitalising quality of Ruskin. 
 
 Notwithstanding all its perversities and inconsistencies, the 
 permanent worth of Ruskin's work is immense. His very success 
 makes it difficult to rate sufficiently high the daring originality of 
 his art-criticism. Not only did he discover Turner, but the great 
 Venetians as well. "Tintoret," he says, "was virtually unseen, 
 Veronese unfelt, Carpaccio not so much as named, when I began 
 to study them •^." To have brought them to the light and to have 
 supplied the eyes wherewith to see them, is itself a great achieve- 
 ment. And if in his later treatment of social and economic 
 problems he achieved no such complete success, it would be a 
 profound mistake to suppose that what he wrote produced no 
 effect. He was one of the leaders in the revolt against orthodox 
 political economy, and to him, in no small measure, are due the 
 decay of individualism and the rise of socialism in these latter 
 days. He saw the ugliness of the modern industrial system at a 
 time when the great majority of his contemporaries were under the 
 spell of its power. Though few of his peculiar opinions have been 
 adopted exactly as he held them, yet for thirty years the whole 
 tendency of English thought has been towards conclusions 
 cognate to thoae which he could hardly get liberty to express. 
 
 ^ Fraurila, i. 255.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM TO! 7 
 
 Even where he seems, and is, least practical, there is an under- 
 lying truth in his doctrines ; and his most violent excesses are the 
 corrective of an opposite excess at least as far removed from the 
 perfect balance. This test of the practical is that which he can 
 least bear ; but it is also that which, for him, is least just. " He 
 writes," said Charlotte Bronte, with keen insight, " Hke a conse- 
 crated priest of the Abstract and Ideal'." This was his true 
 function, — to be, for a materialising age and a practical nation, 
 the priest of the visionary and impalpable, and to prove that this 
 too is real by showing how it moulds character. 
 
 Though the influence of Ruskin was powerful upon all the 
 art critics who came after him, it would be a mistake to suppose 
 that he was the sole impulsive force, or that if he had not written 
 their work would not have been done. Books like Pugin's 
 Contrasts (1836) prove that the time was ripe for such work. 
 The love of mediaevalism in art was now sufficiently old to 
 examine itself and to feel the need of understanding the reasons 
 upon which it rested. Hence, soon after Ruskin began to write, 
 and at first independently of him, the Pre-Raphaelites began to 
 formulate their principles. Among the contents of their magazine, 
 The Germ, were two very able articles on The Subject in Art by 
 John Lucas Tupper, a sculptor and a friend of Holman Hunt; 
 and above all there was the exceedingly striking and beautifully 
 written allegorical tale by Dante Rossetti entitled Hand and 
 Soul, which contains the whole essence of Pre-Raphaelitism 
 both in art and in poetry. The story of the blind gropings of 
 Chiaro dell' Erma recalls the aspirations of Browning's Paracelsus, 
 by which Rossetti's article may have been influenced ; for before 
 this date he had become one of Browning's most ardent admirers. 
 Chiaro at first aims at fame, and wins it, only to find it unsatisfy- 
 ing. He starts anew with the purpose of impressing the beholder 
 by the presentment of moral greatness ; and to do this " he did 
 not choose for his medium the action and passion of human life, 
 but cold symbolism and abstract impersonation." Again he has 
 gone astray; his works have no power of appeal to the general 
 heart j and the frescoes presenting a moral allegory of Peace are 
 ^ Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte,
 
 IOl8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 crimsoned with the blood of brawlers. Chiaro himself, moreover, 
 remains as unsatisfied as ever. In his helplessness and bewilder- 
 ment there appears to him a vision, the image of his own soul, 
 which addresses him, exhorts him, explains how far and why 
 he has failed in the past, and how he may win real success in 
 what may yet remain to him of a future. It is in the utterances 
 of Chiaro's soul that we find the core of the Pre-Raphaelite 
 creed. 
 
 "Seek thine own conscience (not thy mind's conscience, but 
 thine heart's), and all shall approve and suffice."..." Look well 
 lest this also be folly, — to say, ' I, in doing this, do strengthen 
 God among men.' When at any time hath he cried unto thee, 
 •My son, lend me thy shoulder, for I fall ?'"..." Give thou to 
 God no more than he asketh of thee, but to man also, that which 
 is man's. In all that thou doest work from thine own heart, 
 simply j for his heart is as thine, when thine is wise and humble; 
 and he shall have understanding of thee." And the closing 
 injunction of the vision is, "Chiaro, servant of God, take now 
 thine Art unto thee, and paint me thus, as I am, to know me : 
 weak, as I am, and in the weeds of this time; only with eyes 
 which seek out labour, and with a faith, not learned, yet jealous of 
 prayer. Do this ; so shall thy soul stand before thee always, and 
 perplex thee no more." 
 
 The doctrine meant to be conveyed is unmistakable. First we 
 have the abjuration of the old false motives of art. The strife 
 for fame and the direct aim to embody faith and to teach morality, 
 are alike wrong. All external canons are renounced. The artist's 
 true guide is his own soul, his true business is to work from his 
 own heart, the rules which are binding on him are the rules which 
 he finds written there. What is there he is to paint : that, to him, 
 is at once nature and the true and only religion. It is in this 
 sense that the Pre-Raphaelite movement is a return to nature. 
 The Pre-Raphaelites did not primarily interest themselves in 
 external nature ; and it is significant that, in his brother's list of 
 those poets who had greatly influenced Dante Rossetti, we do not 
 find the name of Wordsworth. Herein it is manifest that Rossetti 
 is widely different from Ruskin, who was not only a disciple of
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM IOI9 
 
 Wordsworth, but was, almost in his own despite, a devotee of 
 external nature. 
 
 A similar doctrine is taught in a group of three sonnets entitled 
 The Choice, which were afterwards embodied in The House of Life. 
 They are primarily ethical, but they are quite in harmony with 
 such a theory of art as this. They present three alternatives of 
 life. The first is, " Eat thou and drink," the second, " Watch 
 thou and fear," and the third, " Think thou and act " ; and it is 
 manifest that Rossetti deems the third the true choice. Man's 
 business is neither to live for the pleasure of the moment, nor to 
 watch and pray in awe of a power above him, but to think and 
 act in the sphere in which he finds himself. It is Goethe's self- 
 realisation over again ; and if the result is different, it is because 
 the self to be realised is different to begin with. It is in essence a 
 conception intensely individualistic ; and it reminds us that, if the 
 Pre-Raphaelites were in some respects in harmony with the party 
 of the Catholic reaction, they also came into being when the most 
 individualistic of English schools of thought was at the summit of 
 its power. 
 
 Inferior only to Ruskin and Rossetti in his influence upon the 
 aesthetic movement was Walter Pater (1839- 1894), a man whose 
 work it is impossible to read without admiration tinged with a 
 certain regret ; it is so admirable for the end in view, and yet it 
 carries so unmistakably the marks of decadence. Pater was one 
 of those fastidious writers condemned, like Gray, by what is 
 strongest as well as by what is weakest in their own nature to a 
 certain meagreness of production, and his native tendency was 
 increased by the view he took of the circumstances of the age in 
 which he lived. Not Arnold himself was more impressed by its 
 complexity. " That imaginative prose," he says, " should be the 
 special and opportune art of the modern world results from two 
 important facts about the latter: first, the chaotic variety and 
 complexity of its interests, making the intellectual issue, the really 
 master currents of the present time incalculable — a condition of 
 mind little susceptible of the restraints proper to verse form, so 
 that the most characteristic verse of the nineteenth century has 
 been lawless verse; and secondly, an all-pervading naturalism a
 
 I020 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 curiosity about everything whatever as it really is, involving a 
 certain humility of attitude, cognate to what must, after all, be 
 'the less ambitious form of literature'." This passage from the 
 essay on Style belongs to the later period of Pater's authorship ; 
 but the ideas were his from the start, and it is evident that 
 the man who was thus impressed by the complexity of the issues, 
 and humbled by the wide range of curiosity, was not likely to 
 rush prematurely into print, or to be very copious and facile as 
 an author. His earliest contribution to literature was the essay 
 on Coleridge, first printed in 1866; and from that date onwards 
 he slowly produced the papers gathered together in Studies in the 
 History of the Renaissance (1873), Imaginary Portraits (1887), 
 Appreciations (1889), Greek Studies (1895) and Miscel/ajieous 
 Studies (1895). Flaio and Platonism (1893) was the outcome of 
 lectures which he delivered with almost as much suffering as 
 Carlyle, though lecturing was part of the business of Pater's life. 
 His most ambitious, and on the whole his greatest, work, Marius 
 the Epicurean (1885), was the fruit of six years of the most 
 concentrated labour he ever gave. Gaston de Latour (1896), 
 which might have rivalled Marius, remained unfinished at his 
 death. 
 
 With the exception of Marius, the lectures on Plato and the 
 unfinished Gaston de Latour, the whole of Pater's work belongs to 
 the class of miscellaneous writings, and formally it is critical 
 rather than creative; but, though the subjects are various, the 
 impression conveyed is remarkably uniform. All that Pater wrote 
 is as deeply marked with the personality of the writer as is the 
 work of Ruskin himself. In both cases we may doubt whether 
 the interpretation of the critic would have been accepted by the 
 artist ; but also in both cases the work has a value independent 
 of the question of the soundness of the interpretation. We may 
 reasonably think Pater's description of La Gioconda over-wrought, 
 we may suspect that it puts too much into the picture, we may 
 even doubt whether it be not, as an interpretation of Leonardo, 
 wholly misleading ; but, even so, it remains a very beautiful piece 
 of writing and in itself a valuable work of art. Pope's Homer 
 
 ^ A^preciaiions, 7.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 1 02 1 
 
 may not be Homer, but if it is " a very pretty poem," it has a 
 solid value of its own. 
 
 Pater illustrates the complexity of the age, which so deeply 
 impressed him, by the multitude of strands which are twined 
 together in his own work. The Middle Ages and the Italian 
 Renascence, painting and poetry, classicism and romanticism, all 
 contribute to it. No one carries the suggestion of more numerous 
 and more various writers. The influence of Plato is pervasive, 
 and that of Goethe only less so. Traces of Ruskin and the Pre- 
 Raphaelites are less numerous than might be expected; for, 
 though Pater had many sympathies in common with them, his 
 methods were different. Breaths or whiffs of Sir Thomas Browne 
 and Lamb and Hawthorne and Arnold, widely diflferent as they 
 are from one another and from Pater, are also borne by his sen- 
 tences. And yet through all this he remains highly original and 
 individual. Few writers are more completely non-dramatic than 
 Pater. Whatever the character he depicts, it is always really Pater 
 who appears upon the canvas. This is true of all the Imaginary 
 Portraits, of The Child in the House, of Emerald Uthwart and 
 of Marius'the Epicurean. The mirror which Pater holds up to 
 nature is one which can reflect only himself. There is nothing in 
 the least degree objective in his work ; it is hardly too much to say 
 that the whole of it, whether intentionally or not, is autobiographic. 
 The very artists and poets whom he passes in review have to take 
 his colour, and it may be questioned whether he ever succeeded 
 in putting himself in the place of the man he criticised. Hence 
 he is best when he deals with men who have a large share of his 
 own introspective, brooding nature, and he is unsatisfactory in 
 dealing with a genius of the free and objective type, like Shake- 
 speare. It can hardly be doubted that the elaborate passage in 
 which he describes the effect of Oxford upon Uthwart is a tran- 
 script from his own experience. Uthwart, we are told, cares for 
 the beauties of Oxford, in themselves, and except through asso- 
 ciation, less when he is among them than in retrospect. But then, 
 "It was almost retrospect even now, with an anticipation of 
 regret, in rare moments of solitude perhaps, when the oars 
 splashed far up the narrow streamlets through the fields on May
 
 1022 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 evenings among the fritillaries— does the reader know them? 
 that strange remnant just here of a richer extinct flora— dry 
 flowers, though with a drop of dubious honey in each. Snakes' 
 heads, the rude call them, for their shape, scale-marked too, and 
 in colour like rusted blood, as if they grew from some forgotten 
 battle-field, the bodies, the rotten armour— yet delicate, beautiful, 
 waving proudly^" 
 
 It would be hard to find a passage more characteristic of 
 Pater's peculiar imagination than this, or more illustrative both of 
 his merits and his defects. There is a kind of uncanniness in it, 
 as there is sometimes in Hawthorne, and in spite of its beauty the 
 reader is tempted to ask whether it is altogether wholesome. 
 This, certainly, would hardly do for " human nature's daily food." 
 It is the product of a highly artificial, perhaps a decadent, life, it 
 is the air of the hot-house, to be breathed now and then for the 
 sake of the strange and beautiful flowers that grow there, but 
 whence the escape into the free air of heaven is a joy and a relief. 
 
 In the case of Pater then, the " personal equation " is a thing 
 for which liberal allowance must be made, and his judgments both 
 of painters and of writers commend themselves rather to a coterie 
 than to the world at large. They are, in short, "appreciations" 
 rather than judgments. There is however another aspect to 
 Pater's critical work. He can hardly be called technically a 
 philosopher ; his Plato and Platonism is essentially an attempt to 
 get at the thought through sympathy with the thinker ; and so far 
 as he deals with abstract principles, he prefers principles of the 
 emotional nature to principles of the understanding. But few 
 have written more wisely upon style, and the sentence in which 
 he concentrates the essence of his doctrine is unimpeachable : — 
 " Say what you have to say, what you have a will to say, in the 
 simplest, the most direct and exact manner possible, with no 
 surplusage : — there, is the justification of the sentence so fortu- 
 nately born, 'entire, smooth, and round,' that it needs no punc- 
 tuation, and also (that is the point !) of the most elaborate period, 
 if it be right in its elaboration ^" Few, again, have more wisely 
 discriminated between the romantic and the classical elements in 
 i Miscellaueous Studies, 331. "'' A^prccialions, ^%.
 
 LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM IO23 
 
 literature. He finds the essential elements of the romantic spirit 
 to be " curiosity and the love of beauty," that of the classical spirit, 
 "a comely order." He quotes with qualified approval Stendhal's 
 saying that " all good art was romantic in its day " ; and his own 
 love for and affinity to the romantic spirit is obvious. But the 
 true function of Pater is to make the romantic once more classical, 
 to superimpose the "comely order "upon beauty, and in doing so 
 inevitably to reduce the strangeness. This he does almost in 
 spite of himself, and yet with the approval of his own judgment. 
 The influence of Goethe upon him is due to his sense that Goethe 
 too, in a far larger way, did the same. In the essay on Winckel- 
 mann he points out that Goethe illustrates the union of the 
 romantic spirit with Hellenism, and the preponderance of the 
 Hellenic element. Of this union, says Pater, the art of the nine- 
 teenth century is the child. His point of view therefore is 
 similar to that of Matthew Arnold ; but that breath from the outer 
 world which Arnold brings is never felt in Pater. He is cloistered, 
 — a recluse looking out from the windows of a College upon a 
 world in which he has no part or lot. The whole moral atmo- 
 sphere of the two men is also different. Pater, from first to last, 
 is epicurean, while through the playful banter of Arnold there is 
 always audible the undertone of Stoicism.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 
 
 The miscellaneous prose of this period presents almost as 
 difficult a problem of selection as the fiction, and is even more 
 baffling in respect of arrangement. There is however no diffi- 
 culty about the first figure. For age, for copiousness and for 
 distinction, Walter Savage Landor (i 775-1 864) clearly deserves 
 the precedence; and though a poet so considerable may seem 
 out of place among miscellaneous writers, yet his greatest work is 
 in prose, and it can only be classified in this way. 
 
 Landor was throughout his long life a strange union of contra- 
 dictions. A republican and yet a born aristocrat, a polished 
 gentleman who dropped his h's, a life-long rebel who was by 
 nature a despot, a man of the most exquisite tenderness yet of 
 ungovernable violence, a classical scholar and a model of classical 
 style yet of ultra-romantic freakishness, there is scarcely anything 
 that may be said of him which has not to be qualified by some- 
 thing that seems almost to annul it. The key-note of Landor's life 
 is struck in his rustication from Oxford for an act of violence in 
 1794. In 1808 he went to Spain to support the cause of Spanish 
 independence ; but neither independence nor anything else can 
 be supported without some control of temper, which Landor 
 could not or would not exercise. Returning to England, he 
 bought the estate of Llanthony Abbey in Monmouthshire. He 
 had great and generous plans for its improvement ; but in the 
 end he quarrelled with all around him, lost his own capital, and 
 effected nothing. In 181 1 he married in haste, and found 
 leisure to repent in the fifty-three years of life which remained to
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE IO25 
 
 him. He went abroad in 1814, and from 1815 to 1835 he lived 
 in Italy, during the latter part of the period at Florence. A 
 violent quarrel with his wife drove him back to England, where he 
 settled at Bath. Twenty-three years later he was once more 
 driven into exile by an action of libel which he had provoked. 
 In Florence, to which he returned, he died, and there he lies 
 buried in the cemetery which holds so much memorable English 
 dust. 
 
 There are few English writers about whom opinion is more 
 sharply divided than it is about Landor. He never has been and 
 he never can be popular, "I shall dine late, but the dining- 
 room will be well lighted, the guests few and select," is the well- 
 known expression of his own opinion about his own ultimate 
 position. It calls to mind Milton's " fit audience, though few" ; 
 but there is this difference between the two poets, that about 
 Milton critical opinion, at least, is undivided, and the multitude 
 buy Paradise Lost though they do not read it; while about 
 Landor critics dispute and the multitude are indifferent because 
 they know him not. The reason of the difference is that, just as 
 in Landor's character immense force was conjoined with a weak- 
 ness almost childish, so in his works elements of grandeur scarcely 
 to be surpassed are found in union with weaknesses and in- 
 capacities which are almost fatal to true excellence. 
 
 Landor's immensely long life gives him a peculiar interest. 
 When he began to write. Lyrical Ballads was not yet published, 
 and before he ended all his own great contemporaries as 
 well as many younger men were dead. Carlyle had almost 
 finished his literary career. Macaulay was dead. Thackeray 
 died within a few months of the appearance of the Heroic 
 Idylls (1863); and Dickens had only seven more years to 
 live. The Brontes had come and gone, and George Eliot was in 
 mid-career. Browning and Tennyson had been writing for thirty 
 years. Darwin's great work was shaking the world. In short, 
 Landor, having lived through the whole of one great era, had 
 survived to see a second past its meridian. No one else in an 
 equal degree belongs at once to the Revolutionary period and to 
 the Victorian. At the same time, scarcely any one stands so 
 aloof from both. 
 
 w. 
 
 65
 
 1026 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Landor's earliest publication was a volume of poems in 1795 > 
 but it was three years later before his first work of note, Gebir^ 
 was published. A few years afterwards he translated it into 
 Latin, and this interchange of tongues was repeated subsequently 
 when the Idyllia Heroica were translated and incorporated in 
 the Hellenics (1847). Landor was one of the most skilful, as 
 well as one of the last, of those who have practised the exotic art 
 of Latin verse. Love of the art and pleasure in the exercise of his 
 own skill were, no doubt, the real causes of his writing Latin 
 verses ; but it is amusing and also instructive to read that one 
 object of the Latin translation of Gebir was to make the English 
 original popular. What might not be expected of a man who 
 could conceive and carry out such a scheme ? But this story of 
 the legendary prince who gave his name to Gibraltar was neither 
 by its substance nor by its treatment calculated for popularity. It 
 remains fragmentary, much of it is episodic, and the "statuesque" 
 quality in the style, which struck both Southey and De Quincey, 
 though it is eminently literary, had little attraction for the average 
 reader. And the average reader could plead for himself that, though 
 it is easy to extract fine fragments from Gebir, it is not easy to 
 maintain that the whole is a fine poem. Throughout this remained 
 one of Landor's greatest defects. Classical as he was in style, he 
 had a most unclassical incapacity for constructing a whole. 
 
 Count Julian (181 2) is Landor's earliest attempt in the drama. 
 Long afterwards he followed it up with the trilogy on the story of 
 Queen Giovanna of Naples (i 839-1 841) and the Siege of Ancona 
 (1846), the last of which has been pronounced by some good 
 judges his best drama. Probably however the majority will agree 
 with Mr Crump in preferring Count Julian. But in truth all 
 Landor's dramas are compositions which have only a distant rela- 
 tion to the stage, and they are correctly described by himself as 
 " no better than Imaginary Conversations in metre." In spite of 
 the fact that much of his best work, both in prose and verse, is 
 dramatic in form, Landor had not really the essentials of dramatic 
 genius. He could never get himself out of the way. As Browning 
 (who recognised the kinship, and declared that he "owed more as 
 a writer to Landor than to any contemporary^") always wrote like 
 * Mrs Brownings Letters, edited by K-enyon.
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE IO27 
 
 Browning, so Landor's style is always Landor's, whoever may be 
 the speaker. And it must be added that he is far from being as 
 successful as Browning in losing himself in the other characters. 
 Browning's characters speak the words of Browning, but their 
 sentiments are their own ; in the case of Landor, we are always 
 liable to see Landor as well as to hear his voice. Such success as 
 he achieves is won when the character in some degree resembles 
 himself. This is the cause of the superiority of Count Julian. 
 The passions which sway Julian's nature and the revenge he plans 
 are just such as Landor himself would have felt and might have 
 planned under such a wrong as that which Julian suffered. Hence 
 the sympathy with which Landor enters into this character and its 
 superiority to the other dramatis personae. But it is the extrava- 
 gance of injudicious praise to couple Count Julian, as De Quincey 
 did, with Milton's Satan and the Prometheus of Aeschylus. 
 
 Up to the Tdyllia Heroica, published in 18 14 and reprinted 
 with additions in 1820, Landor had figured exclusively as a poet; 
 but he had not before found where his true strength as a poet 
 lay. The management of the narrative in Gebir proves that he 
 had not epic genius, and even C omit Julian is not satisfactory as 
 a drama. In the Idyllia Heroica he struck his true vein. They 
 were dramatic scenes, not dramas, or short tales, not narratives of 
 epic proportions; and in them Landor's weakness in the con- 
 structive faculty is hid, while his noble style gives them dignity 
 and weight. He had already tried this style in Chrysaor, which 
 first appeared in an anonymous volume of poetry published in 
 1802. It is in pieces like this, and the Hamadryad, and The 
 Shades of Agamemnon and Iphigeneia, and in the pieces entitled 
 To Corinth and Regeneration, that Landor's real greatness as a 
 poet appears. There must be added the epigrams, in which he 
 has scarcely an equal in English, and some snatches of lyrical 
 verse, including such gems as the magical Rose Aylmer, and the 
 majestic lines, 
 
 " I strove with none, for none was worth my strife; 
 Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art ; 
 I warmed both hands betore the fire of life, 
 It sinks and I am ready to depart." 
 
 65—2
 
 1028 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 In such short pieces Landor at his best is unsurpassed ; and a 
 rigorous selection of these, with choice passages from the longer 
 poems, might give him the appearance of a great poet. But 
 great as a poet he in truth is not. There is too much dross 
 mingled with the gold of the shorter poems, and the longer ones 
 are too faulty in construction, to give him a good title to that 
 rank. 
 
 Landor wrote poetry all through his career, and the lines 
 above quoted, which read like an old man's farewell to life, were 
 printed in a volume which was published when he was seventy- 
 eight. But in the main, poetry was the pursuit of Landor's youth 
 and early middle age, and prose was the form which he chose by 
 preference in later years. Certainly the greatest of his works are 
 the Imaginary Conversations (182 4- 1853). 
 
 The form which best suited Landor was the dialogue, or that 
 cognate form employed in Pericles and Aspasia (1836), where we 
 seem to have a dialogue conducted by letters. He had plenty of 
 predecessors. He was no admirer of Plato, and would not have 
 been attracted to the dialogue by the fact that Plato had employed 
 it. Lyttelton's Dialogues of the Dead have a closer resemblance 
 to Landor's design ; and he may have been influenced by the 
 fact that Southey, whom he admired and loved above all contem- 
 poraries, had in mind his Colloquies on Society at the time when 
 Landor began to work on his Conversations. 
 
 The dialogue could be made as episodic as Landor pleased ; 
 for a chance suggestion is sufficient to turn a conversation in 
 a new direction. He rarely develops one train of thought sys- 
 tematically, as Plato does. The longer dialogues often reflect his 
 whims and caprices, while the shorter ones are consistent and 
 coherent because of their shortness. There is one important 
 exception in Pericles and Aspasia, certainly the best-sustained 
 work that Landor ever produced, and one singularly consistent 
 in its development of the characters of both Pericles and Aspasia. 
 If Browning meant to acknowledge indebtedness to Landor in 
 respect of dramatic intuition, he probably had this work in mind. 
 There is however a striking similarity between the two in one 
 other point. Both show the same indifference to action, and the
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE IO29 
 
 same concentrated interest in a dranaatic situation just before or 
 just after fateful action. 
 
 It is in the classical dialogues that Landor is happiest; for 
 there his knowledge was ripest, and there too his sympathies, 
 both as man and as artist, were keenest. In these also his style 
 is at its best; for there is a kind of pre-established harmony 
 between the subject and the treatment. As a master of severe 
 yet magnificent English, Landor has no superior and hardly an 
 equal. jEsop and Rhodope is an acknowledged masterpiece for 
 the tender beauty of the story and the perfection of the language. 
 Less celebrated, but hardly less excellent, is the praise of Greece 
 put into the mouth of Panaetius in the dialogues with Scipio 
 Aemilianus and Polybius; and there are many other passages, 
 especially in the Roman dialogues, which have the same austere 
 beauty. The Greek dialogues are more flexible, as the Greek 
 character was, and the best soar even higher than the Roman. 
 Probably Landor was right in his own preference for the con- 
 versation of Epicurus with Leontion and Ternissa. 
 
 Even in the Conversations, however, the shortcomings of the 
 poems reappear. The parts are superior to the whole : Landor is 
 master of the paragraph rather than the complete dialogue, and 
 of the sentence rather than the paragraph. There is scarcely a 
 dialogue he has written from which sentences of the highest 
 excellence could not be quoted, and there are few which are not 
 marred by flaws of taste. His prejudices, of inordinate admira- 
 tion or unmeasured dislike, appear in the most unexpected places. 
 In Gebir, the hero visits the under-world, and there he finds the 
 shade of the King of England who was reigning when Gebir was 
 written. In this violent way Landor constantly drags in his own 
 loves and hates, — more frequently, as was natural, in the modern 
 than in the classical dialogues ; and this difference is among the 
 causes of the superiority of the latter. 
 
 One of Landor's special gifts is the power of giving memorable 
 expression to thoughts which may be stigmatised as commonplace, 
 but which are so only because they have regard to the common 
 destiny of mankind. One of his favourite reflections, driven home 
 to him, perhaps, by his own unpopularity, is on the fate of the great
 
 I030 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 man to be fully known only when he is dead. The fine couplet 
 about "the gates of fame and of the grave," quoted in the intro- 
 duction to this book, is his, and in the Conversations he reiterates 
 the thought once and again. " The voice comes deepest from the 
 sepulchre, and a great name hath its roots in the dead body." 
 " The sun colours the sky most deeply and most diffusely when 
 he hath sunk below the horizon ; and they who never said, ' How 
 beneficently he shines ! ' say at last, ' How brightly he set ! ' " The 
 close of the dialogue of Alexander and the priest of Hammon (a 
 poor dialogue, because it is filled with Landorian prejudice) is a 
 wonderful example of this use of the commonplace. There is no 
 idea more trite than that of the kinship of man with the dust ; yet it 
 can be handled with magnificent literary effect. The burial service 
 of the Church of England shows one way of doing it : Landor 
 found another. The interlocutors are just issuing from the cavern 
 where Alexander has been shown the horrible serpent which is 
 declared to be the daughter of Jupiter. The conversation 
 originally ended with the words of Alexander, "Glory to Jupiter 
 the Ram ! " By a happy afterthought Landor added, 
 
 ^^ Priest. Thou stoppest on a sudden thy prayers and praises 
 to Father Jupiter. Son Alexander, art thou not satisfied ? What 
 ails thee, drawing the back of thy hand across thine eyes ? 
 
 Alexander. A little dust flew into them as the door opened. 
 
 Priest. Of that dust are the sands of the desert and the Kings 
 of Macedon." 
 
 " Ripeness is all." There never was a better illustration of the 
 fact that setting may make all the difference between the common- 
 place and the great, or of the fact that the knowledge when to be 
 silent is sometimes the truest eloquence. 
 
 It would be easy to multiply examples. In prose as in verse 
 Landor is one of the most quotable of writers. He gains by 
 having his gems taken from their setting, for they are perfect in 
 themselves. There are other writers, like Scott, who cannot be 
 adequately represented in fragments, because they neither aim at 
 nor achieve perfection in the parts, but rather rely upon general 
 effects. The difference illustrates the uncertainty of judgment by 
 selections. It would be easy by means of extracts to exhibit
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 
 
 Landor as a much greater man than Scott. Regarded purely as a 
 prose stylist, he is indeed far greater; and his best verses are 
 technically much more perfect than Scott's. And yet, both in verse 
 and in prose, the more faulty writer is the greater man. 
 
 There is one aspect of Lander's prose work which demands 
 special notice, — his literary criticism, upon which a scathing judg- 
 ment has been pronounced by one of the latest critics of critics. 
 "Of judicial quality or qualities," writes Professor Saintsbury\ 
 "he had not one single trace, and, even putting them out of the 
 question, his intelligence was streaked and flawed by strange veins 
 of positive silliness." Though the judgment requires some qualifica- 
 tion (and receives it from Professor Saintsbury himself), it contains . 
 an amount of truth fatal to Landor's pretensions as a critic. He ' 
 is best judged, not by the formal criticisms, but by the conversa-   
 tions devoted to critical themes, of which the principal are the 1 
 dialogues between Southey and Porson on Wordsworth, and those ' 
 between Southey and Landor on Milton. In these dialogues 
 there is indeed ample evidence of acumen, but it is often mis- 
 directed, and gives an impression of carping peevishness altogether 
 destructive of the dignity of the subject. Of the dialogues on 
 Wordsworth, the second, which is of nearly twenty years later date 
 than its predecessor, reads almost like a recantation of the praise 
 bestowed in the first, and constitutes, in effect, a most ungenerous 
 attacl upon the old poet. The fact that many of the criticisms 
 are ir. themselves sound is no justification. No other great poet 
 can be made ridiculous so easily as Wordsworth; and this fact 
 lays upon the critic the obligation to accompany the censure 
 whict. is just with the praise which is still more just. It is no 
 real defence of Landor that the criticisms are put into the mouth 
 of Po'son and are therefore to be regarded as dramatic utterances. 
 He was under no obligation to write them. They are in them- 
 selves as offensive as any of the early critical attacks upon 
 Wordsworth, and, if they had been made early, would probably 
 have been more harmful, because they are enforced by numerous 
 quotations. 
 
 Many have felt that one of the difficulties in the study of 
 * History of Criticism t iii. 2761
 
 1032 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Landor is the extraordinary contrast, as it seems to them, between 
 his life and character on the one hand, and his works on the 
 other. Superficially, the contrast is complete; and though in 
 reality we may trace the man in his works, there are still very 
 remarkable differences. Such inconsistences as this which his 
 just been mentioned about Wordsworth, such violence as appears 
 m his unmeasured censure of Canning, the prejudice which shiies 
 through every reference to Pitt, the utter untrustworthiness of 
 judgment visible almost everywhere in the Conversations ^ are just 
 what might be expected from such a man as Landor was. The 
 contradiction between the man and his works lurks in the style 
 rather than the substance. A priori, Landor's style might have 
 been expected to be turbid and lawless ; in reality, the adjectives 
 which have been applied to it are " monumental," " statuesque," 
 "severe," "austere," whatever may suggest the very opposite of 
 turbidity or lawlessness. Little more can be said by way of 
 explanation than that the love of high and restrained literature 
 and the instinct for language were as much inborn in him as tne 
 violent passions with which these qualities seem so inconsistent. 
 It was no case of gradual development and of force turning na:ure 
 from her path. Landor was incapable of the consistent and per- 
 severing exercise of such force; and his earliest writings, alike in 
 verse and in prose, exhibit the qualities which distinguished him 
 through the whole of his long career. 
 
 Of all the writers of his time Landor stands most alone. 
 Coming at the moment of the great romantic revival, a generous 
 admirer of Southey and in his saner moments of Wordsvorth 
 (though he was always unjust to Coleridge), Landor nevertheless 
 was through life a classicist rather than a romanticist. In nany 
 ways he was akin to the eighteenth century, and may be regarded as 
 a link between it and the nineteenth. His preference of Aristotle to 
 Plato is significant of much. "His religion," says Leslie Stephen, 
 "was that of the eighteenth century noble." His classicism it is 
 true, was founded on deeper and far more comprehensive sckolar- 
 ship than that of Pope; yet this too serves to connect him witi the 
 past. 
 
 Another link with a past age is supplied by Mary Russell
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE IO33 
 
 Mitford (i 787-1855), whose tragedies are briefly noticed else- 
 where. Her works are both varied and of considerable bulk, 
 including stories and poems of many kinds besides the dramas. 
 Among the rest is one of those curious notes of sex which female 
 writers can seldom refrain from introducing — Narrative Poems on 
 the Fe77iale Character (181 3). But in these spheres she must take 
 a subordinate position, while she has her own little niche in 
 literature where she is queen. The author of Our Village (1824— 
 1832) has a position safer than that of many far more preten- 
 tious figures, for her sketches are quite the best of their kind, except 
 Cranford. They originally appeared in The London Magazine ; and 
 there is something in the shrewd observation of the writer, as well 
 as in the humour, which calls to mind along with her the special 
 glory of The Lofidon Magazine, Charles Lamb. The closest affinity 
 however is that between Miss Mitford and the American writer who 
 is still best known as Miss Mary Wilkins, and who has done for the 
 rural life of New England, with almost equal grace and with quite 
 equal humour, what the elder writer did some half a century earlier 
 for the rural life of Old England. 
 
 The powers with which Miss Mitford was most richly endowed 
 might be expected to give merit to anything from her pen of a 
 reminiscent or autobiographic nature, and her letters confirm the 
 expectation. But anyone who turns with high hopes to her 
 Recollections of a Literary Life (1852) will be disappointed. The 
 little local pictures and the fragments of autobiography are, it is 
 true, excellent. No reader can forget how she, a little girl, was 
 taken by her imprudent and somewhat unprincipled, though 
 kindly, father to a lottery office, where she chose a number, 
 obstinately insisted upon it in spite of difficulties, and by means ot 
 that number won a large prize, — which speedily slipped through 
 her father's fingers, as her mother's fortune had slipped through 
 them before. But the criticism, of which the book principally 
 consists, though not without grace, is of small intrinsic value, and 
 deals mainly with subjects which have been treated with more 
 insight by others. 
 
 In Our Village, on the other hand. Miss Mitford is almost 
 faultless. She never strikes a wrong note : style and thought are
 
 I034 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 completely in harmony with the nature of the subject-matter. Her 
 close observation of the character of villagers and of the incidents 
 of village life, her love of nature and of animals, her kindliness of 
 tone combined with a gently sarcastic humour, and her charmingly 
 pure and easy English, make the book delightful to read. She is 
 a keener and closer observer of inanimate nature, of animals and 
 of incidents, than her fellow-artist. Miss Wilkins ; but perhaps in 
 the delineation of humours the advantage lies on the whole with 
 the latter. Another writer with whom Miss Mitford may be 
 usefully compared is Mrs Gaskell, many of the qualities of whose 
 masterpiece, Cranford, are present also in Our Village. In all 
 three there is an unmistakably feminine touch ; but in their case 
 " feminine " does not mean " weak " or " inferior." 
 
 The foundation of Miss Mitford's art is sympathy, by reason 
 of which she ranks among those writers who are even more beloved 
 than they are admired. It is sympathy which guides her observa- 
 tion, and it is sympathy too which inspires her humour. Ati 
 Admiral on Shore, with all its lively and gently amusing detail, is 
 full of sympathy; so is My School- Fellows; so is The Vicar's Maid. 
 But perhaps the best illustration of the humour and pathos, which 
 are the two manifestations of this sympathy, is to be found in Modern 
 Antiques. It is impossible to read without a smile the description 
 of the little old maid in the presence of her lover of bygone 
 years : — " She blushed and bridled ; fidgeted with her mittens on 
 her apron ; flirted a fan nearly as tall as herself, and held her 
 head on one side with that peculiar air which I have noted in the 
 shyer birds, and ladies in love." For delicacy of observation the 
 comparison of the old lady in love with a shy bird is unsurpassed. 
 But Miss Mitford's sympathy is too deep to stop with laughter 
 alone : — " She manoeuvred to get him next her at the tea-table ; 
 liked to be his partner at whist; loved to talk of him in his absence ; 
 knew to an hour the time of his return ; and did not dislike a 
 little gentle raillery on the subject — even I — But, traitress to my 
 sex, how can I jest with such feelings ? Rather let me sigh over 
 the world of woe, that in fifty years of hopeless constancy must 
 have passed through that maiden heart ! The timid hopes ; the 
 sickening suspense; the slow, slow fear; the bitter disappoint-
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE I035 
 
 ment ; the powerless anger ; the relenting ; the forgiveness ; 
 and then again, that interest, kinder, truer, more unchanging 
 than friendship, that lingering woman's love — Oh how can I 
 jest over such feelings? They are passed away — for she is 
 gone, and he — but they clung by her to the last, and ceased only 
 in death." 
 
 Somewhat younger, but still old enough to supply another 
 link between the eighteenth century and the nineteenth, was 
 Julius Hare (i 795-1855) who, in conjunction with his brother 
 Augustus (1792-1834), wrote the once-celebrated Guesses at Truth 
 (1827), but who is now most widely known by reason of his con- 
 nexion with John Sterling, and through Sterling with Carlyle. 
 Hare was in his earlier days an associate of Thirlwall, and was 
 one of those who helped to popularise German literature and 
 philosophy in England. In his time he played a considerable 
 part in controversy. He crossed swords with Sir William Hamilton, 
 the metaphysician, on behalf of Luther, whose character for 
 orthodoxy he considered to have been impugned by Hamilton; 
 and as Archdeacon of Lewes he sought in his charges to with- 
 stand the Romanising influence of Newman and his followers. 
 Guesses at Truth is a collection of aphorisms on a wide variety 
 of subjects, — theology, morals, literature, politics, philosophy. 
 Many of them are well written, but few have that compression 
 which befits an aphorism : the tendency of the Hares was to 
 expand rather than to condense. In short, though good, the 
 Guesses are not the best; and the aphoristic form, even more 
 than the poetic, demands the highest excellence. Perhaps the 
 very absence of any striking originality contributed to their 
 popularity. They expressed attractively thoughts just a little 
 beyond the reach of the average man, but not too complex for 
 his comprehension. 
 
 The stamp of the commonplace is still more clear upon the 
 works of Sir Arthur Helps (181 3- 1875), the most characteristic 
 of which are not unlike Guesses at Truth. In his lifetime Helps 
 won a reputation far higher than he deserved ; and they were no 
 ordinary men who praised him. Ruskin in one passage names 
 him along with Wordsworth and Carlyle as one of the three
 
 1036 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 moderns to whom he owed most; and elsewhere he is linked with 
 Plato and Carlyle as one of those thinkers who by their sincerity 
 become in some sort seers. The association of Helps with such 
 names as these seems ludicrous now, and his numerous volumes, 
 historical, biographical, dramatic and aphoristic, will be searched 
 in vain for a justification. Judgments such as Ruskin's must either 
 be passed over as among the enigmas of contemporary criticism, 
 or we must suppose that even the man of genius has a hking for 
 the commonplace when it happens to be seasoned to his taste. 
 Of all that Helps attempted, that which he did best was the 
 essay or dialogue of social criticism and the minor ethics. This 
 is the substance of his Friends in Council (i 847-1 859) and 
 Compafiions of my Solitude (185 1). These books are not without 
 value for their common sense, but the thought is somewhat 
 attenuated. 
 
 There is more solid substance in the writings of William 
 Rathbone Greg (1809-1881), although he never won such praise 
 as was showered upon Helps. The reason was, perhaps, partly 
 the acerbity of his literary manner, and partly the fact that he 
 was usually on the unpopular side. He rarely said smooth things, 
 and his opinions, both on religion and on politics, were of the sort 
 which are accepted unwillingly if they are accepted at all. In 
 religion, Greg was one of those thoughtful Unitarians who were 
 and are numerous in his native county of Lancashire, and his 
 Creed of Christendom (185 1), which caused considerable stir when 
 it was published, expressed opinions which were by no means 
 in harmony with those of the majority. His Enigmas of Life 
 (1872), a book which dealt with cognate problems, attained a far 
 wider popularity, passing in twenty years through no fewer than 
 eighteen editions. It bears on every page the impress of the 
 writer's profound sincerity, and is on the whole his most valuable 
 work. But Greg handled political and economic as well as ethical 
 and religious topics, and here too he made himself the champion 
 of unpopular views. In politics, he was a doctrinaire of the 
 Manchester school, condemning all interference between master 
 and man, and, in his Rocks Ahead (1874), taking a gloomy view of 
 the future because he saw how inevitable such interference was.
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE IO37 
 
 It can hardly be said that Greg was gifted with great speculative 
 originality, but he was distinguished for the intellectual quality of 
 lucidity and the moral quality of sincerity ; and the combination 
 brings it about that his books are among the best adapted to 
 afford a view of the contemporary problems upon which they touch, 
 as these problems appeared to a remarkably keen intelligence. 
 
 We rise to a higher plane of literature in the bright, terse, 
 humorous sentences of William Brighty Rands (1823-1882), a man 
 as much under-rated as Helps has been over-rated. He found no 
 one to link his name with the names of Plato and Carlyle and 
 Wordsworth. Many, both children and adults, who were delighted 
 with his Lilliput Levee (1864) and Lilliput Lectures (187 1), never 
 knew the name of the man who had given them pleasure; 
 for Rands wrote anonymously or under the pseudonyms of 
 Matthew Browne and Henry Holbeach, and the world was not 
 sufficiently interested to penetrate his disguise. He wrote poetry 
 as well as prose. The above-named volumes are among the best 
 collections of children's verses in the language, and the name of 
 Rands ought to be associated with the names of Lewis Carroll and 
 R. L. Stevenson among the authors of that library of juvenile 
 literature which is one of the most graceful and beautiful products 
 of recent years. Like those of the other two, the verses of Rands, 
 though meant for children, are none the less true poetry, and 
 delightful to adults as well. The anthology must be indeed select 
 in which the little girl's address to the earth would not deserve a 
 place : — 
 
 " Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful World, 
 With the wonderful water round you curled. 
 And the wonderful grass upon your breast — 
 World, you are beautifully dressed. 
 
 The wonderful air is over me, 
 
 And the wonderful wind is shaking the tree, 
 
 It walks on the water, and whirls the mills. 
 
 And talks to itself on the top of the hills. 
 
 You friendly Earth ! how far do you go, 
 
 With the wheat-fields that nod, and the rivers that flow, 
 
 With cities, and gardens, and cliifs, and isles. 
 
 And people upon you for thousands of miles?
 
 1038 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Ah, you are so great and I am so small, 
 
 I tremble to think of you, World, at all ; 
 
 And yet when I said my prayers to-day, 
 
 A whisper inside me seemed to say, 
 
 ' You are more than the Earth, though you are such a dot : 
 
 You can love and think, and the Earth cannot ! ' " 
 
 In his prose Rands is always thoughtful and often distin- 
 guished. His Chaucer's England (1869) is a sound and scholarly 
 work; but he is seen at his best in Views and Opinions (1866) 
 and above all in Henry Hoibeach, Student in Life and Philosophy 
 (1865), where, much in the fashion of Hare and Helps, but with 
 more power and depth than either, he utters keen and original 
 criticisms on the politics, society and religion of contemporary 
 England, in a style of mingled humour and sarcasm which is 
 exceedingly attractive. Rands either did not possess or did not 
 care to exercise the dramatic gift of creation ; but no one could put a 
 keener edge upon a distinction, and he could describe and contrast 
 types of character with rare felicity. He knew the English mind 
 thoroughly in all its social and religious distinctions. He had the 
 subtlety of observation with respect to classes which George Eliot 
 brings to bear upon individuals, and George Eliot must have 
 delighted in, if she ever read, his description of the minister of the 
 Little Meeting, " a very energetic, active man, wiry in frame ; but a 
 shoe-maker, self-taught; his heart amply supplied with the milk of 
 human-kindness, and his creed blazing with damnation." Per- 
 haps there is nothing else in Rands altogether so beautiful as the 
 verses quoted, or so clearly etched as the picture of the minister 
 of the Little Meeting, but there is much that may fairly be com- 
 pared with them. He is a man who will bear study, and whose 
 works might with advantage be resuscitated. 
 
 In a time so late as the nineteenth century of the Christian 
 era it might be expected that the literature of travel must have 
 lost its zest through the exhaustion of the material ; and it is true 
 that the kind of mystery which shrouded the course of Columbus 
 was gone, and great part even of that which spread round Captain 
 Cook was dispelled. But there was still abundant possibility of 
 adventure, and it is surprising to reflect how small a part of the
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE IO39 
 
 earth's surface was really known in the year 1800. Mungo Park 
 had just begun to open the interior of Africa, the Far East was 
 known only superficially, Central Asia and the interior of Australia 
 not at all. Even so old a country as Egypt was very imperfectly 
 understood. It was not till 1883 that the Egypt Exploration 
 Fund was founded, largely through the exertions of the most 
 distinguished of female Egyptologists, Amelia Blandford Edwards 
 (183 1- 1 892), whose A Thousand Miles up the Nile (iS-jy) 
 shows a profound interest in the ancient history of Egypt, and 
 possesses an uncommon power of awakening interest in the reader. 
 The extreme North and the extreme South were at that date both 
 beyond human ken. The bulk of the work which has since been 
 done belongs rather to the history of discovery than to the history 
 of literature; but two or three incidents and characters stand out so 
 prominently that they have become a part both of history and of 
 literature. The tragic story of Sir John Franklin and the heroic 
 efforts to discover and relieve him profoundly impressed the 
 English-speaking world in the middle of the nineteenth century. 
 The honour of discovery belongs to Sir F. L. McClintock, who, in 
 The Voyage of the Fox (1859), narrates how he solved the mystery 
 of the fate of Franklin; but the literary honours belong to the 
 American Elisha Kent Kane, whose Arctic Explorations (1856) is 
 one of the most fascinating books of travel in the English language. 
 It is quite worthy to stand as a rival to Curzon's Monasteries of the 
 Levant (1849), which Ruskin pronounced to be "the most 
 delightful book of travels I ever opened \" or indeed to anything 
 except Eothen. 
 
 A somewhat similar tie links the great missionary, David 
 Livingstone (1813-1873), with the bold and adventurous news- 
 paper correspondent, Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), who 
 sought and found him in the heart of Africa, and who afterwards 
 headed two of the most successful exploring expeditions ever 
 undertaken in Africa. The writings of Livingstone are perfectly 
 simple. He makes no pretence to eloquence, nor does he try 
 by any artifice to heighten the effect, but this absence of effort 
 renders the effect all the greater. Stanley, on the other hand, 
 * Stones of Venice, Introd. L 23 n.
 
 I040 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 always retained the instincts and habits of the newspaper corre- 
 spondent and had a keen eye to effect. Partly for this very 
 reason the writings of the elder man are the more pleasing to 
 read. 
 
 That missionary zeal which carried Livingstone in the footsteps 
 of Robert Moffat has been one of the great incentives to the 
 exploration of Africa; another has been that sense of mystery 
 which, from before the days of Herodotus, surrounded the question 
 of the sources of the Nile. No river in the whole world has had 
 such a fascination for the human intellect. The Nile has been in 
 touch with the oldest civilisations, and it has been, and is, of vital 
 importance to one of the most interesting regions of the earth's 
 surface. As its rise and fall brought plenty or starvation, all who 
 dwelt upon or who even visited its banks were bound, if they had 
 any intellectual curiosity at all, to wonder what was the unseen 
 cause of its fluctuations. This problem fascinated, among others, 
 John Hanning Speke (1827-1864), Richard Burton (1821-1890) 
 and Samuel Baker (1821-1893). Explorers have not, as a class, 
 been very articulate, and what they have written often owes its 
 merit to plenitude of adventures and of new information rather 
 than to skill in arrangement or expression. But no one of 
 the whole class could be worse as a writer than Speke. His 
 Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863) was his as 
 regards its substance, but it owes whatever merit it possesses to 
 the labour of his editor, who turned his shapeless sentences into 
 English and brought order out of chaos. Baker's works, The 
 Albert JVyanza (1866), The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia (1867), 
 Ismailia (1874), &c., are full of interest ; but he too may be left to 
 the geographer and explorer. 
 
 The case is very difierent with Sir Richard Burton, scholar 
 and soldier, gentleman and adventurer, a knight-errant astray by 
 some strange chance from the Middle Ages, his head filled with 
 the lore which was foreign to his predecessors, but his heart as 
 hotly athirst for adventures as Don Quixote's own. In his 
 verses on Burton's death Swinburne suggests a comparison with 
 Raleigh, and in all history and fiction there is probably no figure 
 so like Burton's as that of the great Elizabethan adventurer.
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE IO4I 
 
 Burton's private education in France and Italy perhaps laid the 
 foundation of that love of languages which afterwards distinguished 
 him. His career at Oxford was brought to a close after a year's 
 residence by a sentence of rustication. After a short period of 
 service in India he began that life of travel with which his name 
 will always be chiefly associated. The journey recorded in the 
 Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah (1855-1856) took place in 
 1852. The book has that stamp of individuality which Burton 
 never failed to give to his works, and it proves him to have 
 possessed an intimacy of knowledge of Eastern life and compre- 
 hension of the Eastern character almost unexampled among the 
 men of the West; for at every moment the traveller's life depended 
 upon the success of a disguise which few Europeans could have 
 worn for a day without detection. Probably Burton's only rival 
 in completeness of knowledge is Mr Doughty, the author of 
 Travels in Arabia Deserta. 
 
 In 1854, and again in 1856, Burton was in Africa with Speke; 
 but the two travellers quarrelled violently, and it was Speke who 
 had the honour at last to discover the sources of the Nile. There 
 was evidently something intractable in Burton : he could not act 
 with others ; and so he was time and again shunted on to a siding, 
 and his immense knowledge of languages and of science, his 
 energy, daring, enterprise and originality, all ended in failure, 
 judged by the world's measure of success and failure. He was 
 born to quarrel with officialdom. His name was struck off the army 
 list, and he was dismissed from the consular service, though in 
 the latter case he was soon reinstated. Curiously enough, he suc- 
 ceeded at Trieste another man of letters, Charles Lever, who, 
 like himself, " drank fierce and fast " of the cup of life ; and, like 
 Lever, he lived and died there lamenting the fate which had 
 consigned him to this quiet nook of the Adriatic. His latter 
 years however were not without the relief of travel in Midian 
 and in Africa. 
 
 Burton's books of travel, whether they deal with Asia, or 
 Africa, or America, apart from their stores of fact and their 
 records of adventure, have all a special value from the deep 
 impress of individuality which they bear. It is this which gives 
 
 w, 66
 
 1042 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 his books the cachet of literature. His style, if it were possible to 
 disjoin it from the man, would not be very good; but it is Burton, 
 and therefore just the fittest and best for his purpose. And the 
 record of a personality comparable to Raleigh's, inscribed by his 
 own hand, is clearly a precious possession. On the side of 
 scholarship, Burton's most remarkable performance was, doubt- 
 less, the translation of The Arabian Nights (1885-1888); but the 
 truth is that the interest in that translation rests largely upon 
 ethnological grounds ; and it has been shown since Burton's 
 death that, simply as a translator, he was indebted, a good deal 
 more than he had a strict right to be, to his predecessor Edward 
 William Lane (i 801-1876), the first man who made a version 
 directly from the Arabic into English, a most accomplished Eastern 
 scholar, and the author of an admirable book on the Manners and 
 Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). Regarded simply 
 as a translation, and apart from the interest alluded to, there 
 is probably as much merit in Burton's version of Camoens 
 (i 880-1 S84) as in the more celebrated Arabian Nights. The 
 former at least reads well, and has won the praise of those 
 Portuguese scholars who are entitled to an opinion about its 
 merits as a translation. 
 
 Besides such professional or quasi-professional travellers and 
 explorers as these, there were two literary nondescripts of the 
 period, Borrow and Laurence Oliphant, who had a full share of 
 the wanderer and adventurer in their blood, and who put enough 
 of it into their writings to give them a close kinship with this 
 group. 
 
 George Borrow (i 803-1 881) is certainly one of the most 
 interesting, and in some respects one of the most puzzling, figures 
 in recent literature. There are several points of contact between 
 him and Burton. Both were notable linguists, though Burton's 
 scholarship was much more accurate than that of Borrow, whose 
 philology was ingenious and sometimes erratic conjecture rather 
 than science. Both were men of splendid physique, daring to 
 the verge of foolhardihood, sworn foes to convention, friends to 
 the outcast and ' gangrel ' classes of all countries. Both were "first- 
 class fighting men " ; but there is a difference between the hero of
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE IO43 
 
 the bouts of fisticuffs narrated in Lavengro and the author of The 
 Book of the Sword (18S4). Whether it be the weapon that makes 
 the difference or no, it is certain that the comparison with the 
 knight-errant, which is inevitable in the case of Burton, would 
 never be suggested in that of Borrow, Both, finally, had a 
 marked strain of the gypsy character if not of gypsy blood, and 
 both were as restless as gypsies under any sort of restraint, and 
 as eager for a free wandering life. 
 
 Burton's most adventurous travels took place in lands, not 
 indeed very far off when distance is measured by parasangs, but 
 morally distant by all the breadth of that gulf which separates 
 East from West. Borrow in his earlier years might seem to have 
 made it his task to show that characters and scenes almost as 
 strange, and adventures scarcely less thrilling, might be encountered 
 without crossing the narrow seas. It was long a moot point how 
 far his books were faithful to fact and how far they were simply 
 fictitious ; but his biographer, Mr W. J. Knapp, who has followed 
 his footsteps with patient industry and devotion, declares that 
 "no truer books were ever penned than The Bible in Spain and 
 Lavengro — Romany-jRye." He admits, indeed, that Borrow is un- 
 trustworthy in dates and such-Hke details, and it is possible that 
 an element not of literal fact may have escaped the biographer ; 
 but his judgment of the essential truth of Lave?igro (1851) and its 
 sequel The Romany-Rye (1857) establishes these strange books as 
 parts of an autobiography \ These two stories, however, only carry 
 the narrative down to 1825, when Borrow was twenty-two years old. 
 The travels there narrated were of the kind in which Borrow 
 delighted all through his life. He always chose the byway and 
 shunned the highway. He traversed, first and last, the greater 
 part of Europe and much of the East; but his chosen companions 
 were always wanderers and outcasts, and the scenes he delighted 
 in were those which no other foreigner had ever visited. His 
 special friends were the gypsies, and the greater part of his 
 literary work, from The Zincali (1841), an account of the gypsies 
 of Spain, to Roiiiano Lavo-Lil (1874), a glossary of the English 
 
 ^ He is confirmed by Francis Hindes Groome {1857-1902), the editor of 
 the former book and one of the greatest English authorities on gypsies. 
 
 66—3
 
 1044 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 gypsy language, was more or less intimately associated with 
 them. 
 
 The charm of Lavengro and, in a less degree, of The Romany- 
 Rye lies in their singular freshness of tone, their defiance of 
 convention, their wealth of curious information, the exceeding 
 strangeness that such things could happen and such lives could 
 be led in a country so hedged in and plotted out as England, 
 above all in the sense of abounding vitality which Borrow imparts. 
 There is nothing like the joy of physical life which glows through 
 his pages, except that which animates also the works of Christo- 
 pher North. But keen as was his relish for a wandering and 
 adventurous life. Borrow seems to have cared little for nature in 
 the Wordsworthian sense. He enjoyed alike breezy mountain 
 and shady lane, but he took them very much for granted : they 
 were his environment, and there was no need to fuss and worry 
 about them. The material upon which he worked was man, as 
 man is when he is formed by contact with nature. 
 
 Borrow was not however wholly absorbed by his passion for 
 the outcast races, but retained an interest also in the literary, 
 political and social questions of civilised society. Above all, he 
 was through life profoundly interested in the religious questions 
 which were then dividing England. He was violently anti-Papal, 
 and hated with a bitter hatred all that tended to draw England 
 nearer to Rome. It was this passion, combined with his know- 
 ledge of languages, that induced him to turn towards the Bible 
 Society, and commended him to it. The employment was in 
 some respects highly congenial, for he had to travel in many 
 countries, as well as to translate the Scriptures for their inhabi- 
 tants, and to distribute copies among them. From this occupa- 
 tion Borrow's greatest book, The Bible in Spain (1843), took its 
 origin. This narrative of his travels as a colporteur in Spain was 
 the most astonishing as well as the most literary of all the reports 
 the Bible Society ever received from its agents. The Society 
 doubtless expected an elaborate and edifying tract, full of piety, 
 of zeal for the scriptures and of assurances of their wonderful 
 influence upon a benighted population. There are indeed such 
 things in the book, but there is also a breezy worldliness which.
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE IO45 
 
 probably, the Society took with an uneasy pleasure — surprised 
 and pained that so much of the Old Adam should survive, yet 
 interested against their will. There are many books about Spain 
 which describe Madrid and Seville and Cordova and Cadiz, the 
 Alhambra, the Escurial, the cathedrals, the art-galleries ; but there 
 is probably no other — at least none written by an Englishman — 
 which so lays open the heart of the country, the character of the 
 people, the mode of life, not only off the beaten track, but among 
 classes about whom the vast majority of Spaniards themselves 
 probably know nothing. If The Bible in Spain be " one of the 
 truest books ever penned" (and it has the stamp of truth), it is 
 easy to believe that, in great part, it was not less surprising to the 
 Spaniard than Lavetigro was to the Englishman. 
 
 If any man of the nineteenth century might dispute with 
 Burton the title of the modern Raleigh it would be Laurence 
 Oliphant (i 829-1 888). Both the Victorians, as well as the Eliza- 
 bethan, were in some sense visionaries ; but Oliphant was more 
 spiritual and less 'sensible,' in two meanings of the word, than 
 the others. Like Burton's, his life is a record of apparent failure. 
 Nothing that he did, nothing that he wrote, seems to realise the 
 possibilities that were in him ; and yet everything from his hand 
 bears, more or less clearly, the stamp of genius, even if it be 
 sometimes a genius near allied to madness. 
 
 Oliphant seemed to be a predestined wanderer. He was born 
 at Cape Town, and, after a brief school career at Salisbury, he 
 spent far more of his life abroad than in England. In his boy- 
 hood he travelled in company with his parents ; but from early 
 manhood he roamed over the world by himself, visiting Russia, 
 America and the Far East, acting as newspaper correspondent in the 
 Crimea and again in the Franco-Prussian War, and coming through 
 many strange and thrilling adventures. It is amazing to reflect 
 that only half-a-century has passed since he found a mediaeval 
 system of civilisation prevalent in Japan, and since he barely 
 escaped with his life from the extraordinary attack of Japanese 
 swordsmen narrated in his Episodes in a Life of Adventure (1887). 
 After his return wounded from the legation to Japan there followed 
 the longest of his residences during manhood within the shores of 
 
 ^■^
 
 1046 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 Britain. It was a period of literary and political activity. He was 
 one of the founders oiThe Owl; his frequent papers in Blackwood'' s 
 Magazine were among its most attractive features in the sixties \ 
 he was gathering the materials for his most remarkable book, 
 Piccadilly (1870); from 1865 to 1867 he was member of Parlia- 
 ment for the StirUng Burghs. Then, suddenly, he resigned and 
 went to America to join the religious community of the 
 "Prophet" Thomas Lake Harris. 
 
 This action brings into startHng prominence one of the two 
 sharply-contrasted aspects of Oliphant's character. On the one 
 hand, he was among the most practical of men, shrewd in business, 
 a keen financier, a subtle diplomatist. On the other hand, he 
 was a dreamer and a mystic, capable of surrendering himself to the 
 most absurd delusions and, when under their influence, utterly 
 destitute of judgment. This polished gentleman, accomplished 
 writer and shrewd man of the world, pronounced Harris "the 
 greatest poet of the age," and submitted to be, for the benefit of 
 a vulgar schemer, what he disdained to be for his own sake,— an 
 instrument for money-making. For not the least curious part of 
 the strange story is that Oliphant's occupations as a member of 
 the community were of the most worldly sort, and the most 
 conspicuous difference between the life of religion, as he was 
 instructed to lead it, and the life of the world, was that in the 
 former the gains went to another man. Irritating however as is 
 this connexion with Harris in the eye of common sense, it was 
 just the combination of an enthusiasm bordering upon insanity 
 with a keen practical intellect that made Oliphant the man of 
 genius he was. The literary outcome of his religious enthusiasm 
 is to be found in Sympneumata (1885) and Scientific Religion 
 (1888), the former of which purports, and undoubtedly was 
 believed by them, to be a revelation to his wife, which she dictated 
 to him. They are not great books, but they are very remarkable 
 psychological documents. 
 
 As a man of letters, Oliphant will rank neither as a religious 
 philosopher, nor as a traveller, nor as a novelist, but as a satirist 
 of society. His books of travel, The Russian Shores of the Black 
 Sea (1853), Episodes in a Life of Adventure, &c., interesting
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE IO47 
 
 as they are, are not unique like Burton's. His Piccadilly and 
 Altiora Peto {xZ%i) have the form of novels, but not the reality. 
 Their vitality lies in the satire which runs through them. English 
 society is keenly analysed and criticised in Piccadilly and in 
 Fashionable Philosophy (1887). In The Autobiography of a Joint - 
 Stock Company America is treated in a similar way. As a satirist, 
 Oliphant had the great advantage of adequate knowledge. To 
 him, as one of the most fascinating personalities of the time, 
 every grade of society was open. To a man so profoundly 
 religious, a visionary who thought the world well lost for the 
 guidance of the prophet Harris, the ideals of society seemed mean 
 and sordid ; and if society is justified in criticising what seem to 
 be his aberrations, it might be worth its while considering whether 
 there be not an element of truth in his criticism too. 
 
 Knowledge of the Far East was scanty when Laurence 
 Oliphant published his Narrative of the Earl of Elgin^s Mission 
 to China and Japan (1859), but in the half-century which has 
 since elapsed great additions have been made to it. As regards 
 Japan, no one has contributed more than Lafcadio Hearn (1850- 
 1904), a man remarkable alike for his life and for his writings. 
 He owed his peculiar Christian name to the place of his birth, 
 Leucadia in the Ionian Islands. From his youth he was a 
 wanderer and a rebel against the conventions of society. In the 
 beginning of his literary career he made his living by journalism 
 on the staff of an American paper. What was wanted by the 
 readers was scarcely literature ; but Hearn was by instinct a man 
 of letters, and in the teeth of circumstance he forced his way 
 to recognition in the profession of his choice. His American 
 experiences made him familiarly acquainted with the Southern 
 States and with the French West Indies, about which he has 
 written with great vividness and charm. But he had heard the 
 call of the East, and, leaving America, he accepted a position as 
 lecturer on English literature in the University of Tokio. He 
 married a Japanese wife, adopted in great measure the habits of 
 the people among whom he lived, and thus acquired an intimacy of 
 knowledge such as none can hope to gain who are content to 
 look on from the outside. There has lately been some exaggera-
 
 1048 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 tion of Hearn's literary merit, but his Glimpses of Unfamiliar 
 Japan (1894), Kokoro (1896), Gleanings in Buddha-Fields (1897), 
 Japan: an Attetnpt at Interpretation (1904), as well as his other 
 works dealing with that country, are books of value alike for 
 5^ubstance and for form. 
 
 If it is only occasionally that the traveller deserves notice as a 
 man of letters, the cases are still more rare in which the pure 
 sportsman does so. There are however three or four in this 
 class whom it would be unjust to pass over. William Scrope 
 (1772-1852) describes The Art of Deer- Stalking (1838) with a 
 complete absorption in the subject, and a conviction of its suffi- 
 ciency to satisfy the soul of man, which would move the most 
 apathetic. John Colquhoun (i 805-1 885) in The Moor and the 
 Loch (1840), though his English is not impeccable and his 
 occasional verses are little better than doggerel, shows the spirit 
 of the poet as well as of the sportsman, and gives fascinating 
 descriptions of the arts of fishing and grouse-shooting as practised 
 in their older and, as some hold, their finer forms in the High- 
 lands of Scotland. Still greater praise is due to Charles St John 
 (1809-1856), who added to the merits of Colquhoun a higher 
 grade of accomplishment as a field naturalist, and whose Wild 
 Sports and Natural History of the Highlands (1846), Tour in 
 Sutherlandshire (1849) ^"d Natural History and Sport in Moray 
 (1863) are among the most delightful of all the books of their 
 class. St John's best-known piece of work is the story of the 
 Muckle Hart of Ben More, which was the means of first bringing 
 him to the notice of men whom he, in his modesty, considered 
 more literary than himself; but there is much besides in his 
 books which is hardly less attractive than that admirable story. 
 Finally, William Bromley-Davenport's Sport (1885), for its spirit 
 and vivacity, well deserves a place beside these classics. In 
 particular, the story of salmon-fishing in Norway is in its kind 
 unsurpassed, and the speechless grief of the fisherman on the 
 escape of the 'record' salmon is among the things which cannot 
 be forgotten. 
 
 There is plainly a certain relation between these men and the 
 author of The Gamekeeper at Home {i^iZ\ Wild Life in a Southern
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE IO49 
 
 County (1879), The Amateur Poacher (1879), The Life of the Fields 
 {1884), and many other works of the same type. But in truth 
 Richard Jefferies (1848- 188 7) belongs, not to the class of sports- 
 men, but to that of field-naturalists and observers, like Gilbert 
 White of Selborne. There is a good deal of poetic feeling in the 
 works named. This scion of a Wiltshire yeoman stock united in 
 a degree scarcely paralleled the tastes of the observer of nattire 
 and of the man of books, and it is that union which gives him his 
 place in literature. No English writer has ever possessed a more 
 minute acquaintance with the facts of nature. But this, which is 
 his strength, is also his weakness. His matter, in great part, is 
 trivial, and many of the admired passages are little better than 
 catalogues of the common sights and sounds of the country. 
 The books are pleasant reading, but the reader who is not an 
 expert in natural history will find that he has carried little away 
 from them. 
 
 Perhaps it was a half-consciousness of this defect which led to 
 a gradual change in the later works of Jefferies, to the intro- 
 duction of a mystical element and to the freer play of imagination. 
 This is exemplified in Wood Magic (1881) and in the later of his 
 two books of autobiography. The Story of my Heart (1883). Its 
 predecessor, Bevis (1882), the story of an imaginative boyhood, 
 is a widely different production, which needs only concentration 
 in order to rival even Mark Twain's admirable To7n Sawyer. 
 The difference between this and The Story of my Heart brings 
 out with great clearness one of the defects of Jefteries. Under 
 an appearance of simplicity he conceals a high degree of sophisti- 
 cation. Accordingly, when he passes beyond childhood, he is 
 not content to narrate the facts of his life ; and in The Story of 
 my Heart he seems to be perpetually straining after something 
 which he cannot reach. If his books on nature chronicle small 
 beer, they have the advantage over the mystical volumes in that 
 they are more sincere and genuine. 
 
 It is desirable that the last name of all should be of greater 
 weight than those which have just been mentioned ; and it will 
 be not unfit if it carries also that suggestion of mournfulness 
 which we associate with the end of an age. The sense that here
 
 1050 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 and now is fin de sihle is illusory. Every year begins and ends a 
 century ; every year is the start as well as the close of an age. 
 Yet what is never true of the whole may be true of the part. The 
 individual dies though the race lives on; and there are phases 
 and aspects of the work of the race too in which we see the 
 evidence of decadence and death. Certainly never in recent 
 years, perhaps never in the history of literature, have these been 
 more conspicuous than in the case of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). 
 Mournfulness of the deepest is linked with his name, but so 
 also is genius in a degree rarely surpassed in this generation. 
 He is the gleaner of fieurs de mal. He brings to mind that 
 creation of Hawthorne's weird fancy, the fungus brilliant but fatal, 
 which can only grow from a dead man's heart. 
 
 The son of distinguished parents, Wilde seemed from boyhood 
 to be marked out for a great career. At school, at Trinity College, 
 Dublin, and at Oxford, he took without effort that foremost position 
 which others win with sweat of brain. It would have been well 
 for him had success been less easy. In his last and greatest book 
 he tells how his mother had loved to quote Carlyle's translation 
 of Goethe's lines, 
 
 " Who never ate his bread in sorrow, 
 Who never spent the midnight hours 
 Weeping and waiting for the morrow, — 
 He knows you not, ye heavenly powers." 
 
 He says that he had utterly rejected this doctrine, and loved only 
 the sunny side of the garden of life. He learnt at last that life 
 without shadow is as incomplete as life without sunshine. "Those 
 who know what beauty is " had always interested him ; he learnt 
 to be interested also in "those who know what sorrow is." But 
 before he did so his days were drawing to an end, and his great 
 powers had been frittered away on work which was only occasion- 
 ally worthy of them. His fatal defect is that he was, almost 
 through life, what he calls himself, z. flaneur^ di poseur; and it is 
 the sincere and the earnest which endures. 
 
 Even in what was best in the Oxford of Wilde's day there 
 were elements which nourished the unwholesome part of his
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE IO51 
 
 nature. It was the time when Ruskin's influence was at its 
 height ; and Wilde was a disciple, but an eclectic one. The basis 
 of Ruskin's aestheticism is ethical : Wilde adopted the aestheticism, 
 but eliminated the morals. The affectations of the new aesthetic 
 school are hardly worth recalling. Theirs was a religion of beauty 
 alone. Art was to be cultivated for its own sake and not for 
 anything extraneous. In Wilde's case we have proof from the 
 start that there was affectation at the root of all this ; from time 
 to time some strong emotion sweeps the affectation away, and we 
 feel the beating of the poet's heart. The noble apostrophe to 
 England, Ave Imperatrix, was the product of such a moment, and 
 is to be found in the early volume o{ Poems (1881), written in the 
 full tide of the aesthetic movement. So is the touching and pro- 
 foundly sincere Requiescat: — 
 
 "Tread lightly, she is near 
 Under the snow, 
 Speak gently, she can hear 
 The daisies grow. 
 
 All her bright golden hair 
 
 Tarnished with rust, 
 She that was young and fair 
 
 Fallen to dust. 
 
 Lily-like, white as snow, 
 
 She hardly knew 
 She was a woman, so 
 
 Sweetly she grew. 
 
 Coffin-board, heavy stone, 
 
 Lie on her breast, 
 I vex my heart alone. 
 
 She is at rest. 
 
 Peace, peace, she cannot hear 
 
 Lyre or sonnet, 
 All my life's buried here, 
 
 Heap earth upon it." 
 
 But Wilde far too seldom struck such notes, and though he was 
 capable of rising above affectation, the habit of insincerity grew 
 upon him and emasculated the greater part of his writings. The
 
 1052 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA 
 
 bulk of his verse is over-wrought, and we tire of it, and long for 
 something less sophisticated. 
 
 Wilde was versatile, and he soon turned aside from Ivrical 
 verse to prose and the drama. His dramas are productions of 
 extraordinary skill and talent which have won a place in the 
 esteem of continental critics scarcely rivalled by those of any 
 contemporary English dramatist. Lady Windermere's Fan (1893) 
 is a miracle of wit; and A Woman of no Importance (1894) and 
 The Importance of being Earnest (1899) are monuments of 
 almost exhaustless ingenuity and resource. They are all " trivial 
 comedies for serious people." It pleased Wilde to pose as a 
 trifler ; but he was a trifler who thought, and there is often a won- 
 derful suggestiveness in his lightest banter and his wildest paradox. 
 In non-dramatic prose too Wilde showed the highest skill. He 
 was an artist in words in whose person the traditional wit of his 
 countrymen seemed to be concentrated. His stories and his 
 critical essays alike are brilliant with epigram. The Decay of 
 Lying, in the volume of critical essays entitled Intentions {i2>()i\ is 
 hardly to be matched for pungent wit. Notwithstanding the air of 
 persiflage it is easy to detect a serious purpose beneath. Occa- 
 sionally, as in The Soul of Man under Socialism, which appeared 
 in The Fortnightly Review in 1891, the seriousness comes close to 
 the surface. 
 
 But the great overthrow which befell Wilde in 1895, ^^^ 
 condemnation to imprisonment with hard labour for two years, 
 made him almost a new man ; and the two productions which we 
 owe to that awful experience. The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), 
 written after his release, and the prose work De Frofundis {1905), 
 which was composed in prison, overshadowed everything else he 
 ever wrote. They are unique in English literature, perhaps in 
 all literature ; for probably no one else, gifted like Wilde, ever 
 underwent such an experience. 
 
 These two works bring home to the most thoughtless the 
 tragic difference which may underlie sentences verbally identical. 
 Experience proves that habitual criminals, hardened by custom 
 and coarse of nerve, may pass through periods of imprisonment 
 longer than Wilde's with little change. But to the sensitive,
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE IOS3 
 
 delicately-nurtured poet the two years stretched out into an age 
 of agony. His whole mental horizon changes. If unreality is 
 the vice of his earlier work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol is even 
 appallingly real. Though the style is rhetorical, the emotions 
 which it expresses are grimly genuine ; even Wilde's extraordinary 
 cleverness could not have invented such feelings. Here at last 
 the conventions of an artificial age are flung aside, and we are 
 face to face with naked humanity. Even greater is De Profundis. 
 Surely no such cry ever before came from the deeps. In contact 
 with stern facts, Wilde unlearns all the philosophy of pleasure to 
 which he had devoted his life, and is forced to acknowledge the 
 truth of his mother's teaching. Almost, it would seem, he was 
 delivered from his own nature. He stood on the verge of moral 
 salvation. In thought at least he reached heights whither he had 
 never soared in the days of his facile and brilliant success, and 
 his greatest literary bequest is this cry of a soul in agony. But 
 the trial which made him anew also broke him. He turned from 
 the prison a doomed man, and some two years later, on Novem- 
 ber 30, 1900, he died, — he who had loved youth and dreaded 
 age, old at forty-five. The curtain falls in gloom at once upon 
 the century and upon the most brilliant figure of its closing years. 
 But to him who reads De Profundis thoughtfully and sympatheti- 
 cally, it is a gloom which is flecked with light, a death which 
 carries with it the promise of resurrectioa
 
 INDEX 
 
 Acton, Lord, quoted, 892 ; 903-905 
 
 Adams, Sarah Flower, 361 
 
 Aikin, Lucy, 182 
 
 Ainsworth, Harrison, 619, 621, 685 
 
 Alexander, William, 795 
 
 Alison, Sir Archibald, 907 f. 
 
 Allingham, William, 569-570 
 
 Aristophanes, 332 
 
 Aristotle, quoted, 117; 838, 858 
 
 Arnold, Sir Edwin, 603-605 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 12,96 ; quoted, 100, 
 119; 321, 328; quoted, 354; 413, 
 444 f-' 453 ff-; quoted, 455; 464, 
 465-480; and Clough, 464-465, 
 467 ; his abandonment of poetry, 
 466-467 ; his attitude to religion, 
 467-470 ; his position in history, 
 468-469 ; on modern life, 470-471 ; 
 his melancholy, 471 ; his verse 
 critical, 471-472; classical, not 
 romantic, 472 f. ; and French 
 literature, 472-473; and Words- 
 worth, 473 ; his passion for truth, 
 474; his elegiac verse, 474-476; 
 his sense of loneliness, 476-477 ; 
 the charge of coldness, 478-480 ; 
 502, 527, 533, 538, 560, 604; 
 quoted, 723 ; 836, 840, 874, 946, 
 948 f., 957, 961-976; on classicism 
 and romanticism, 963-966 ; on 
 France and Germany, 966-968; 
 on disinterestedness, 968-969 ; on 
 knowledge, 969-971; on the pro- 
 vincial spirit, 971-972 ; his political 
 essays, 973-974 ; his theological 
 writings, 974-976 ; 979, 1014, 
 1019, 1023 
 
 Arnold, Thomas, 96, 103, 453 ff. ; 
 quoted, 849; 850-854, 877 f., 925 f. 
 
 Arnold, Thomas, junior, quoted, 456 
 
 Arnold, William Delafield, 851 
 
 Austen, Jane, 623, 681, 684, 708 
 
 Austin, Charles, 153, 831 f. 
 
 Austin, John, 153 ff., 196, 203 
 Aytoun, W. E., 328 f., 336, 513 
 
 Bacon, quoted, 117, 332; 648, 836, 
 
 838, 917. 926, 956 
 Bagehot, Walter, 156, 164, 197, 
 
 203-208, 435, 453, 828 ; quoted, 
 
 859; 884, 957, 963, 980 
 Bailey, P. J., 343, 346-349, 460 
 Baillie, Joanna, 361 
 Bain, Alexander, 157 n., 174 
 Baker, Samuel, 1040 
 Balfour, Graham, quoted, 8io 
 Balladists, the, 328-333 
 Ballantynes, the, 923 
 Balzac, 776 
 Bamford, Samuel, 350 
 Banim, John, 625, 629-631, 636 
 Banim, Michael, 630 f. 
 Barbauld, Anna L., 182 
 Barham, R. H., 331, 338 
 Barnes, William, 399-402, 825 
 Barrett, E. See Browning, E. B. 
 Barrie, J. M., 739, 761 n., 807 
 Barton, Bernard, 240 f. 
 Bayly, T. H., 334 
 Beaufort, Louis de, 848 
 Beddoes, T. L., quoted, 30; 240, 263, 
 
 273-282, 283, 343 
 Beers, H. A., 17 n., 274, 
 
 quoted, 660 
 Benn, A. W., 98 n., 120 
 Bentham, Jeremy, 152 f., 155, 
 Berkeley, Bishop, 185 
 Besant, VValter, 797, 799 
 Bigg, J. Stanyan, 514 
 Black, William, 798-799 
 Blackie, J. S., 519, 572-573 
 Blackmore, Richard, 765, 797-798 
 Blackwood, John, quoted, 651 
 Blackwood, William, 930 f. 
 Blackwood''s Magazine, 283, 932, 
 
 935 ff-. 950. 997 
 
 427: 
 
 lOl
 
 1056 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Blair, Robert, 505 
 
 Blanchard, Laman, 334 
 
 Bodley, J. E. C, quoted, 8 
 
 Bon Gaultier Ballads, 329, 332 f. 
 
 Borrow, George, 20, 755, 825, 1042- 
 1045 
 
 Boswell, James, 661, 839, 917 
 
 Bosworth, Joseph, 824 
 
 Boucicault, Dion, 758 f. 
 
 Bouhours, D. , 25 
 
 Bowles, W. L., 367 
 
 Bowring, John, 258 
 
 Boyd, A. K. H., 977 
 
 Bradlaugh, Charles, 587 
 
 Bray, A. E., 708, 710 
 
 Bridges, Robert, quoted, 529 n. 
 
 Brimley, George, 953 
 
 Broad Church Movement, the, 93 fF., 
 98.ff., 103 ff. 
 
 Bromley-Davenport, W. , 1048 
 
 Bronte, Charlotte, 362, 372, 658, 685, 
 710, 711-722; her childhood and 
 education, 71 1-7 13; Jane Eyre, 
 714-717; romance and realism, 
 714-715 ; her want of humour, 
 7 1 7-7 1 8 ; Shirley, 7 1 8-7 1 9 ; Villette, 
 720, 72 r; 732, 738, 740, 770 
 
 Bronte, Emily, 372 f., 595, 710 f., 
 719, 723-724 
 
 Bronte, Patrick, 711 
 
 Bronte, Patrick Branwell, 713 
 
 Brooke, Stopford, 490 
 
 Brooks, Shirley, 333 
 
 Brough, Robert, 349, 543 
 
 Brougham, Henry, 934 
 
 Brown, George Douglas, 811 
 
 Brown, Dr John, 86, 87 ; quoted, 
 349"> 3'55. 519; quoted, 522; 957, 
 958-960 
 
 Brown, Oliver Madox, 798 
 
 Brown, Thomas, 29, 142, 143, 989 
 
 Brown, T. E., 21, 572 
 
 Browning, E. B., 252, 327, 344, 360, 
 
 362, 365, 366-372 ; her Sonnets 
 
 from the Portuguese, 369 ; Aurora 
 
 Z^^'//, 370-371; 413,414,451, 503, 
 
 602, 781, 840 
 
 Browning, Robert, 12; quoted, 17; 
 57, 72, 107, 113, 122, 128; quoted, 
 254; 272, 283, 288; quoted, 
 297 n. ; 309-326; his early life, 
 309-310; and Italy, 311, 412, 426- 
 427, 429; PattUne, 311-312; and 
 Shelley, 312, 411; and Tennyson,. 
 3i--3i3'326, 383f-. 4". 442,443". 
 
 racehus, (=1I3-^L P, fT-t C \\ his 
 mas, 3i6-3-2'2"; arid Shakespeare, 
 
 Para 
 
 dramas, 310-322^ aRci bnakespeare, 
 317 ff-; 327. 343. 368, 372, 383 f., 
 385. 394' 397. 404- 411-443; his 
 Germanism, 412, 414; Christmas 
 Eve and Easter Day, 413-415, 
 427-428; his view of asceticism, 
 415-416; his dramatic monologues, 
 417 ff., 435 ff.; poems of love, 
 417-419 ; poems dealing with 
 religion, 419-423; poems on art, 
 423-427 ; and mediaevalism, 427- 
 429 ; The Ring and the Book, 430- 
 433; his later poems, 433, 439; 
 his translations from the Greek, 
 433-434; The Inn Album, 439- 
 441; his merits and defects, 44I- 
 443; 452, 460, 469, 478, 502, 561, 
 567. 595. 601, 607, 747, 777, 781, 
 787, 789, 793 f., 1017, 1026 tf. 
 
 Buchanan, Robert, 495, 574-585; 
 his independence, 575, 584; his 
 Northern poems, 576-577; Lotidon 
 Poems, 576, 577-578; The Book of 
 Orm, 577, 580-581 ; and Pre- 
 Raphaelitism, 579 f. ; his religion, 
 583 ; the leader of a new return 
 to nature, 585 
 
 Buckle, H. T., 197-202, 224 n. 
 
 Bulwer, E. L. See Lytton, E. 
 Bulwer 
 
 Burke, 174, 37S, 603, 707 
 
 Burne-Jones, Edward, 446, 52S f. 
 
 Burne-Jones, Lady, quoted, 546 
 
 Burns, 58, 333, 361, 378, 388, 399 ff., 
 418, 683, 715, 807, 947 
 
 Burton, J. H., 901 f. 
 
 Burton, Sir Richard, 644, 1040-1042, 
 
 1043 
 Bury, J. B., quoted, 14, 15, 1006 
 Butler, Samuel, 813-814 
 Byron, 26, 44, 240, 272, 293 ff., 
 
 321, 347, 367, 478 f., 613, 61S, 
 
 644, 650, 655, 861, 924, 937, 969, 
 
 989 
 
 Caine, Hall, quoted, 492 ; 495 
 Caird, Edward, 191-193 
 Caird, John, 109- no 
 Cairnes, J. E., 207, 209 
 Calverley, C. S., 333, 595, 606-607 
 Cambridge Shakespeare, The, 955 
 Cambridge University, 291 ff., S3if. 
 Campbell, Dykes, quoted, 29 
 Campbell, J. McLeod. 92-93
 
 INDEX 
 
 1057 
 
 Campbell, John, Lord, 131 
 Campbell, Thomas, 522, g6o 
 Canterbury Tales, The, 332 
 Carleton, W., 357, 624, 625-629, 
 
 636 
 Carlyle, Jane Welsh, 35, 37 f., 100, 
 
 737; quoted, 927 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 4, 8; quoted, 10; 
 12 ff., 20, 22, 30-79; his early 
 life, 30-32; his style, 31, 49-51; 
 his humour, 31, 33, 50; and 
 Froude, 33 ff. ; and Lady Ash- 
 burton, 38 ; on genius, 38 ; and 
 German literature, 39 ff. ; on Cole- 
 ridge, 40 ; on German philosophy, 
 41 ; on French Philosophism, 42 ; 
 and Goethe, 43 ff. ; on philosophy, 
 43; on art, 46; and religion, 47 ff., 
 76; at Craigenputtock, 51-52; his 
 criticism, 52--59; on biography, 53, 
 69 ff. ; on history, 53, 69 ff. ; on 
 Scott, 56; on Voltaire, 56-57; on 
 Burns, 58 ; on Johnson and Hume, 
 59-61 ; at Cheyne Row, 61 ; Sartor 
 Resartus, 61 ; French Revolution, 
 62-63, 67 ff- ; Heroes, 64 ; Chartism, 
 64 f. ; Cromwell, 65 ; Past and 
 Present, 65, 77; Laiter-Day Pam- 
 phlets, 65, 77 ; Life of Sterling, 
 65, 76 ; Frederick the Great, 65, 
 71 fF. ; his supposed worship of 
 success, 71-73; on might and right, 
 73 f. ; and Aristotle, 74 ; his 
 idealism, 75 ; his politics, 76 ; 
 charged with self-contradiction, 77 ; 
 his influence, 78 ; on the organisa- 
 tion of labour, 78-79; 86, 92, 
 99 f.; quoted, loi, 122; 145, 153, 
 158, r6i, 200 f., 209, 246, 288; 
 quoted, 334, 335; 356, 397, 447, 
 451, 472, 481, 527, 533, 538, 573, 
 618, 624, 633, 658, 66i; quoted, 
 669; 675; quoted, 676; 684, 694, 
 768, 777' 790. 8^9' 828 ff., 834, 
 836 ff., 844, 866, 868 f., 871 f , 
 874 f., 904; quoted, 922-923, 926, 
 '; 948 f., icoo, 1014 
 Carroll, Lewis. See Dodgson, C. L. 
 Catholic Poets, the, 339-342 
 Catholic Reaction, the, 14 ff., iii ff., 
 
 349' 454. 506 ff. 
 Cavour, 446 
 Celtic Revival, the, 276, 353-360, 
 
 568-585, 625 ff. 
 Cervantes, 378, 618 
 
 W. 
 
 Chaldee Manuscript, The, 144, 940 f. 
 
 Chalmers, Thomas, 82, 85, 86-9 r ; 
 his oratory, 87 ; his statesmanship, 
 88 ff. ; and the Disruption, 89 f. ; 
 and German thought, 91; 113 
 
 Chambers, Robert, 215-217 
 
 Chamier, Frederick, 642-643 
 
 Chapman, 482 
 
 Chateaubriand, quoted, la 
 
 Chatterton, 798 
 
 Chaucer, 495, 536 
 
 Chesney, C. C, 908 
 
 Chorley, H. F., 613 
 
 Church, R. W., quoted, 129; r35-i37 
 
 Clapham sect, the, 84 
 
 Clare, John, 241-245 
 
 Classicism, 275, 933, 963 ff., 986 
 
 Clive, Mrs Archer, 365-366, 708 
 
 Clough, A. H., 204, 413, 444, 4.53 f-. 
 455-465 ; The Bothie of Tober-na- 
 Vuolich, 457-458; Dipsychus, 459- 
 461 ; his attitude to religion, 454, 
 461-464 ; and Matthew Arnold, 
 464-465, 467, 474 
 
 Colburn, publisher, 709 
 
 Colenso, J. W., iio-iii, 414 
 
 Coleridgeans, the, 98 ff., 161 
 
 Coleridge, Derwent, 831 f. 
 
 Coleridge, Hartley, 254-257 
 
 Coleridge, Henry Nelson, 831 f. 
 
 Coleridge, S. T., 24, 27 ff., 40 f., 
 43 f., 98 f. ; quoted, 255, 375; 
 489 f., 560, 633, 773, 836, 932, 
 
 939' 1014 
 Coleridge, Sara, 364, 365 
 Collier, J. P., 954 
 Collins, J. Churton, his Early Poems 
 
 of Tennyson, 297 n. 
 Collins, Mortimer, 606 
 Collins, Wilkie, 757, 771 
 Colman, George, 666, 670 
 Colquhoun, John, 771, 1048 
 Commonweal, The, 541 f. 
 Comte, 112, 167, 178 ff., 221, 377 
 Congreve, Richard, 178-179 
 Cook, Eliza, 592 
 Cooper, Fenimore, 641, 643, 776 
 Cooper, Thomas, 350, 352 
 Copleston, E., 93, 95 f., 130 
 Corn-Law Rhymes, 58 f., 240, 245— 
 
 249 
 Cornwall, Barry. See Procter, B. W. 
 Corson, Hiram, quoted, 383 
 Cory, William, 597-599 
 Cowden- Clarke, Charles, 955 
 
 67
 
 1058 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Cowden-Clarke, Mary, 955 
 Cowell, E. B., 485, 487 
 Crabbe, 400 
 
 Craik, Dinah Maria, 591, 748 
 Crashaw, Richard, 609 
 Creighton, Mandell, 866, 889-892 
 Croker, Crofton, 357, 635 f. 
 Cruikshank, 666 
 Cunningham, Allan, 240 f. 
 Curzon, Robert, 1039 
 
 Dallas, E. S., 953 
 
 Dante, 756 
 
 Darley, George, 263, 276-277, 357, 
 
 632 
 Darwin, C, 12, 21; quoted, 33; 196, 
 
 213 f., 216, 220, 222, 223-232; 
 
 \\vi Journal of Researches, 2 2 5-2 2 6 ; 
 
 Coral Reefs, 226; The Origin of 
 
 Species, 227-230; The Descent of 
 
 Man, 230-231 ; on earthworms, 
 
 231 ; 235 f., 980 
 Davidson, John, 610-61 1 
 Decline in literatrure, periods of, 4 fif. 
 Defoe, Daniel, 640 
 Democracy, modern, 9 ff., 252, 377, 
 
 542 f., 612, 857 f. 
 De Quincey, quoted, 23 ; 27 ; quoted, 
 
 28, 44-45; 619; quoted, 643; 
 
 874, 949, 951-952 
 De Tabley, J. B. Leicester Wan-en, 
 
 Lord, 254, 321, 474, 504, 561- 
 
 565 
 De Tocqueville, 3 
 
 De Vere, Sir Aubrey, 266-267, 
 
 De Vere, Aubrey, 100; quoted, 120; 
 260 ; quoted, 304 ; 358, 568 
 
 Dicey, A. V., 884 
 
 Dickens, Charles, 13, 183, 317, 613, 
 634, 652, 658, 660, 661-687; his 
 early history, 661-663 5 Sketches by 
 Boz, 663 ; Pickwick, 663, 664-666, 
 669 f. ; his plots, 665 ; an original 
 writer, 667 ; the novelist of London 
 and of low lite, 667-669; and 
 modem tales of mean streets, 670- 
 671 ; realistic and romantic ele- 
 ments, 671-673 ; and America, 674- 
 675, 677 ; as a historical novelist, 
 675 ; his pubHc readings, 675-677; 
 his later novels, 677; his pathos, 
 679-681; his humour, 681-683; 
 his exaggeration, 682-684 ; and the 
 novel of purpose, 6S4-686 ; 697, 
 
 705. 737. 755, 757. 783 f-. 811, 
 
 814, 928 f. 
 Digby, Kenelm, 19 
 DisraeU, B., 334 f., 645, 653-659, 
 
 685, 700, 755, 776 
 Dixon, R. W., 529, 544-545 
 Dobell, B., 586 
 Dobell, Sydney, 349, 413, 444 f., 
 
 447» 451. 460, 513, 514-523; 
 
 quoted, 525 
 Dobson, Austin, 334, 585 
 Dodgson, C. L., 815-S16, 817, 
 
 1037 
 Dolby, George, 676 
 Domett, Alfred, 324-325 
 Don Quixote, 383 
 Doughty, C. M., 644, 1041 
 Dowson, Ernest, 608 
 Doyle, F. H., 293 f., 329-330, 
 
 605 
 Dramatic literature of the nineteenth 
 
 century, the, 263 ff., 318!?., 361 f., 
 
 406 ff. 
 Draper, J. W., 900 
 Dryden, 378 
 
 Dublin University Magazine, The, 62,1, 
 Duff, Sir M. G., quoted, 100 
 Dufferin, Lady, 364 
 Duffy, C. G., quoted, 38 
 Dumas, Alex., 641, 776 
 Du Maurier, George, 706 
 Dumont, E., 160 
 Dyce, Alexander, 954 
 
 Eastlake, Lady. See Rigby, Elizabeth 
 Eckermann's Conversations of Goethe 
 
 quoted, 48 
 Edgeworth, Maria, 356, 622, 624 
 Edinburgh literary society, 519 
 Edinburgh Review, The, 613, 934 ff., 
 
 950 
 Edwards, Amelia B., 1039 
 Egan, Pierce, 613, 666, 670 
 Eliot, George, 133, 180 f., 362, 447, 
 592, 621, 679, 708, 710, 722, 728- 
 747 ; her early life, 728-731 ; her 
 learning, 731, 735; her religion, 
 729-730, 740 f. ; translates Strauss, 
 731 ; her relations with Lewes, 
 732-733; Scenes of Clerical Life, 
 
 733-734; ^'''''''^^«> 734' 744; sources 
 of her characters, 735-738 ; her 
 humour, 738-739; her sympathy, 
 740; her clerical characters, 740- 
 741; on marriage, 741-742; be-
 
 INDEX 
 
 1059 
 
 comes more philosophical, 742- 
 744 ; Middlemarch, 745-746 ; her 
 psychological problems, 746-747 ; 
 753 f. ; quoted, 783 ; 787, 814, 1038 
 
 Elizabethan Revival, the, 240, 263, ' 
 280 ff., 343 
 
 Elliott, Ebenezer, 245-249, 252, 349, 
 
 535> 542 f- 
 Elton, C. I., 887 
 Emerson, 40, 63 f., 185, 603 
 Erskine, Thomas, 92 
 Essays and Reviews, 107, no, 414 
 Evangelical theologians, the, 82 ff. 
 Evolution, 21 f., 173, 177 ff., 214 ff., 
 
 382, 387, 821 
 Ewald, G. H. A. v., 862 
 Ewing, Juliana Horatia, 816-817 
 Examiner^ The, 661 
 
 Faber, F. W., 127, 260, 341 
 
 Facetious verse, 331-333 
 
 Faraday, Michael, 238 f. 
 
 Ferguson, Sir S., 358, 569 
 
 Ferrier, J. F., quoted, 146, 148; 185- 
 186; quoted, 943 
 
 Ferrier, Susan, 623 
 
 Feuerbach, Ludwig A., 732 
 
 Fielding, H., 378, 666, 684, 695 
 
 Finlay, George, 861-862 
 
 Fischer, Kuno, quoted, 392 
 
 FitzGerald, Edward, 296; quoted, 
 305; 360, 444 f., 480-490; his 
 translation of Calderon, 483-484 ; 
 of Aeschylus and Sophocles, 484 ; 
 of Omar Khayyam, 485-490 ; and 
 Horace, 488-489 ; 568, 603 ; quoted, 
 
 956 
 Fitz-Roy, R., 224 
 Forster, John, 661, 676, 927-929 
 Forster, W. E., quoted, 334 
 Fox, Caroline, quoted, 37 ; 160 ; 
 
 quoted, 183, 357 ; 919 
 Fox, W. J., quoted, 312, 313, 953 
 Eraser, A. C., quoted, 144, 146 
 Eraser's Magazine, 633, 635 
 Freeman, E. A., 824, 844, 848 f., 
 853 ; quoted, 861 ; 866, 869 ff., 
 873, 875, 876-882 ; his aversion 
 from philosophy, 877 ; on the unity 
 of history, 878 ; his Teutonism, 
 878, 881; 882 ff., 892 ff., 917 
 French critics of English literature, 
 
 743 n r r 
 
 French literature, mnuence of, 23 f., 
 472 f., 547, 966 fl". 
 
 French Revolution, the, 3, 7 ff., i?, 
 68, 468 f. 
 
 Frere, Sir Bartle, quoted, 871 
 
 Froude, J. A., and Carlyle, 33 ff- ; 
 ' 125 f., 453, 829, 865, 866-876; 
 and the Tractarians, 866 ; The 
 Nemesis of Eaith, 866 f. ; the 
 influence of Carlyle, 866, 867-868 ; 
 his Short Studies, 868 ; his History 
 of England, 868-874 ; on the 
 Reformation, 869 ; his patriotism, 
 869-870; his inaccuracy, 8 70-87 3; 
 his literary merits, 873-875 ; his 
 imperialism, 875 ; 885, 1000 
 
 Froude, R. H., quoted, 116; 117 f. 
 
 FuUerton, Lady G., 709 
 
 Gait, John, 623-624, 795 f., 808 
 Gardiner, S. R., 866, 892-894 
 Garnett, Richard, quoted, 58, 511; 
 
 982-983 
 Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghom, 650 f., 
 
 658, 685, 710 ff., 724-728, 738, 
 
 1034 
 Gatty, Margaret, 815, 816-817 
 Germ, The, 493, 565, 1017 
 "Germanism," 48 ff., 91, 98 f., 191, 
 
 863 
 German literature and philosophy, 
 
 2.3 ff-, 39 ff-' 98 f-. 103 ff-, 133, 
 
 139, 147, 184 ff., 280, 455, 966 ff. 
 Gibbon, 39; quoted, 63; 818 ft"., 830, 
 
 844, 861, 864 f., 876, 897, 917 
 Gifford, William, 935, 938 
 Gissing, George, quoted, 660; 66511. 
 
 680, 814-815 
 Gladstone, W. E., 82, 446, 653 
 Glascock, W. N., 642 
 Gleig, G. R., 639 
 Goethe, 13, 18, 26, 28, 30, 44 ff., 59, 
 
 329, 347, 420, 459, 470 f., 474, 
 
 605, 688, 747, 897, 926 f., 957, 
 
 967 f., 1023, 1050 
 Goldsmith, O., 996 
 Gore, Catherine, 709 f. 
 Gosse, E., quoted, 278 
 Gothic revival, the, 24, 274 
 Grahame, James, 258 
 Grant, James, 640 
 Gray, David, 335, 574-575 
 Gray, Thomas, 450, 474 f., 537 f., 
   615, 960, 1019 
 Green, J. R., quoted, 115, 824; 866, 
 
 886-888, 893 f. 
 Green, T. H., 177, 189-191
 
 io6o 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Greenwell, Dora, 592 
 Greg, W. R., 183, 725, 1036-1037 
 Greville, Charles, 834, 918 f. 
 Griffin, Gerald, 357, 625, 629, 631- 
 
 632 
 Grimm, Jacob, 825 
 Grote, George, 153 ff., 173, 819, 
 
 848 ff., 854, 855-858 
 Guest, Lady Charlotte, 354 
 Guiney, L. L, quoted, 359 
 Guizot, quoted, 707 ; 710 
 Guthrie, Thomas, 82, 91, 215 
 
 Hake, T. G., 501 
 
 Hall, Robert, 83 
 
 Hall, S. C, quoted, 242 
 
 Hallam, A. H. , 293 f. , 300-301, 
 
 798 
 Hallam, H., 827-829, S83 f., 892 
 Halliwell-PhiUipps, J. O., 954 
 Hamilton, Thomas, 640 
 Hamilton, Sir William, 30, 144-151, 
 
 163 f., 219, 941, 1035 
 Hamilton, Sir \V. Rowan, 238 f. 
 Hamley, E. B., 908 
 Hampden, R. D., 93, 96 
 Hannay, James, 643-644, 953 
 Hare, Julius, 29, 99, 849, 1035, lOsS" 
 Harrison, F., 978 
 Harte, Bret, 679 
 Harwood, Isabella, 361, 592 
 Hawker, R. S-, 260, 328, 330 f., 342 
 Hawkins, Edward, 850 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 397, 460, 
 
 1022 
 Haydon, Benjamin, 984-9S5, 986 
 Hayward, Abraham, 953 
 Hazlitt, W., quoted, 87; 932, 939, 
 
 952, 983 
 Head, Sir F. B., quoted, 362 
 Hearn, Lafcadio, 222, 1047-1048 
 Heber, Reginald, 259 f. 
 Hegel, quoted, 57; 105, no, 196, 460 
 Hegelians, the English, 184 ff., 218 
 Heine, 274, 967 f., 979 
 Helps, Sir Arthur, 1035-1036, 1038 
 Hemans, F. D., 362 f., 366 
 Henderson, G. F. R., 90S, 916 
 Henley, W. E., 599-601, 808, 979 
 Hennell, Charles, 730 
 Henslow, J. S., 213, 223 
 Herbert, Lord, of Cherbury, 384 
 Herodotus, 844 
 
 Heron-Allen, E., quoted, 4S6 n. 
 Herschel, Sii J., 164, 224 
 
 Herzfeld, G., 25 
 
 HofiFding, H., 23 
 
 Hogarth, 701 
 
 Hogg, James, 941 
 
 Holmes, O. W., 310, 958, 976 
 
 Hood, Thomas, 249-254, 333, 338, 
 649 
 
 Hook, Nathaniel, 84S 
 
 Hook, Theodore, 33S, 633-634, 670 
 
 Hook, W. F., 1 30-1 3 1 
 
 Hooker, J., 214, 216 
 
 Hope, Thomas, 644 
 
 Horace, 488 f. 
 
 Home, R. H., 343-346, 95^ 
 
 Horner, Francis, 934, 938 
 
 Hort, F. J. A., 140, 903 
 
 Houghton, Lord. See Milnes, R. M. 
 
 Howells, W. D., quoted, 680 
 
 Tlughes, Thomas, 770 
 
 Hugo, Victor, 621 
 
 Humboldt, 224 
 
 Hume, David, 24 f., 59 ff., 141 ff., 
 148, 150, 153, 166 f., 818 ff. 
 
 Hunt, Leigh, 934, 937, 949-951 
 
 Hutton, James, 213 
 
 Hutton, R. H., 479, 979-980 
 
 Huxley, T. H., quoted, 100; 121 n. ; 
 quoted, 123; 135, 151,171,201,214, 
 216, 220, 229, 231, 232-238; his 
 style, 232-233; his love of truth, 
 233-234; as a controversialist, 234, 
 237 f.; quoted, 302 ; 766, 819, 972 
 
 Ibsen, 351, 518 : 
 
 Ingelow, Jean, 594 f. 
 
 Ingram, J. K., 571 
 
 Irving, Edward, 91 f., 633, 930 
 
 Ivajihoe, 8S0 
 
 James, G. P. R., 622 
 
 Jameson, Anna, 955 
 
 Jebb, R. C, 835, "^843; quoted, 886 
 
 Jefferies, Richard, 104S -1049 
 
 Jeffrey, Francis, 44, 51, 75, 678 f., 
 
 749; quoted, 838, 841, 932; 934, 
 
 938 f. 
 Jenkyns, Richard, 129 
 Jerrold, Douglas, 635 
 Johnson, Lionel, quoted, 507 
 Johnson, S., 10 f., 59 ff-, 707, 917; 
 
 quoted, 9S3 
 Jones, Ebenezer, 352-353 
 Jones, E. C, 349, 447, 542 f. 
 Jones, Richard, 209 n. 
 Jones, Sir William, O03
 
 INDEX 
 
 IO61 
 
 Jonson, Ben, 384 
 
 Jowett, B., quoted, 94 f- ; 105-107, 
 
 134, 186-188; quoted, 313; 453, 
 
 482 
 Joyce, J. B., 570 
 
 " Kailyarders, the," 805, 807 f. 
 Kane, E. K., 1039 
 Kant, 28 ff., 147 
 Kaye, J. W., 916 
 
 Keats, 282 f., 293, 296, 312, 345, 
 
 352. 375. 409. 535> 560, 615, 798 
 
 Keble, J., 115 ff., 259, 260-263, 339 f., 
 
 749 
 Kemble, Fanny, 361-362, 919 
 Kemble, J. M., 823 f. 
 Kinglake, A. W., 908, 911-916 
 Kingsley, C, 98, 100, 123,458, 532 f., 
 
 538, 641, 658, 685, 753, 7 6 5-;^ 6^ 
 Kingsley, flenry, 769 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 528, 605, 642 
 Knapp, W. J., quoted, 1043 
 Knowles, Sheridan, 263, 264-265 
 Knox, John, 917 
 
 Lamarck, 214 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 68r, 932, 939, 958, 
 
 983- 1033 
 Landon, L. E. , 363, 366 
 
 Landor, W. S., 338, 546 f., 59S, 615, 
 
 928, 1024-1032 
 Lane, E. W., 1042 
 Langlois and Seignobos, quoted, 856 
 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 792 
 Lawrence, G. J., 770 
 Lecky, W. E. H., 19, 197, 500; 
 
 quoted, 508; 570; quoted, 871; 
 
 900-903 
 Le Fanu, J. S., 637 
 Leigh, H. S., 608 
 Leslie, T. E. Cliffe, 210 
 Lessing, 957 
 Lever, Charles, 357, 636-639, 641, 
 
 700, 1 04 1 
 Lewes, G. H., 179-180, 720, 732 ff., 
 
 926-927 
 Lewis, Sir G. Comewall, 205 ; quoted, 
 
 843; 849, 858-860 
 Liddon, H. P., 137-139 
 Liggins, Mr, 734, 736 
 Lightfoot, J. B., 108, 140, 903 
 Lilly, W. S., 871 
 Lingard, John, 829-S30 
 Literary Anecdotes of the XIX Cen- 
 tury, 391 
 
 Livingstone, David, 1039 
 Locker-Lampson, F., 334, 337, 606 
 Lockhart, J. G., quoted, 26 ; 44, 
 
 64 ; quoted, 145 ; 282, 296; quoted, 
 
 303-304; 622 f.; quoted, 633; 653; 
 
 quoted, 654; 661, 663, 921-924, 
 
 930, 938, 941, 943, 944-947> 988 
 Lockyer, Norman, quoted, 302 
 Lofft, Capel, 3!;o-352 
 Longfellow, H.^W.,' 458 
 Lover, Samuel, 636 
 Lovett, W., 350 
 Lucretius, 423, 439 
 Lushington, Franklin, 447 
 Lushington, Henry, 447 
 Lyall, Sir Alfred, 605 
 Lyell, Sir Charles, 212-214 
 Lyrical poetry of the nineteenth 
 
 century, the, 322 
 Lyttelton, George, Lord, 1028 
 Lytton, E. Bulwer, 271-273, 366, 
 
 389, 621, 645, 646-653, 659, 684 f,, 
 
 770 
 Lytton, Robert, Lord, 601-603 
 
 Mabinogion, The, 354, 392 f. 
 Macaulay, T. B., 84 f., 137, 203, 
 328 f., 336 f., 354, 469, 614, 653, 
 679; quoted, 827; 829, 830-846; 
 and the Clapham sect, 830 f . ; at 
 Cambridge, 83 1-833; in Parliament, 
 833-835 ; in India, 833 ; his passion 
 for reading, 834 f. ; "an oratorical 
 historian," 835 ; his essays, 836, 
 839-840; his criticism, 836; his 
 literary conservatism, 837 ; not 
 philosophical, 838, 843 ; his His- 
 t07y, 840-846 ; his style, 840-842 ; 
 his use of detail, 842-843 ; his bias, 
 844-845 ; his treatment of enthu- 
 siasts, 845; 857, 868, 871, 874, 
 881, 885 f., 913; quoted, 921; 
 922, 956 
 Macaulay, Zachary, 830 
 Maccallum, M. W., 392 
 MacCarthy, D. F., 570, 624 
 M^Clintock, Sir F. L., 1039 
 MacDonald, George, 573-574, 794- 
 
 796 
 M'^Gee, T. D'Arcy, 570 
 Mackail, J. W., quoted, 491 f., 529, 
 
 532 f. ; 537 
 Mackay, Charles, 572 
 Maclaren, Ian. See Watson, John 
 Macleod, Fiona. See Sharp, William
 
 io62 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Maginn, William, 356, 632-633, 635, 
 
 943 
 
 Mahan, A. T., 885 
 Mahony, Francis, 357, 635 
 Maine, H. S., 155 f., 197, -201-203 
 Maitland, F. W., 86, 884 f., 905- 
 
 907 
 Malleson, G. B., 916 
 Mallock, W. H., 83 n. 
 Malory, 392 f. 
 Malthus, 160, 168, 208 
 Mangan, J. C, 356, 358-360, 571, 
 
 608 
 Mann, Miss K., 276 
 Manning, H. E., 127, 129 f., 294 
 Mansel, H. L., 125, 146, 148, 151 f., 
 
 219 
 Mant, Bishop, 258, 863 
 Marryat, Florence, 642 
 Marryat, Frederick, 640-642, 643 
 Marsh, Anne, 709 
 Marston, J. Westland, 566 
 Marston, Philip Bourke, 566, 588 
 Martin, Lady, 955 f. 
 Martin, Theodore, 329 
 Martineau, Harriet, 64, 178, 180, 
 
 181-184, 196, 208; quoted, 350 f., 
 
 648 ; 708, 720, 908 
 Martineau, James, 181, 193-196 
 Massey, Gerald, 349, 447-448 
 Masson, David, 929 
 Maurice, F. D., 29, 99-102, 151 f., 
 
 765 
 
 Maxwell, W. Hamilton, 639 
 
 May, Sir T. E., 883 f. 
 
 Meredith, George, 365, 757, 776- 
 794; on comedy, 777; his poetry, 
 778-782; The Ordeal of Richard 
 Feverel, 783-786 ; his humour, 
 783 f. ; his style, 784, 793 ; psycho- 
 logical problems, 786-787, 792 ; 
 his female characters, 787, 789, 
 791 f. ; his feeling for nationality, 
 788 ; Rhoda Fleming, 789 ; The 
 Egoist, 790-792 ; Diana of the 
 Crossways, 792-793 ; 814 
 
 Meredith, Owen. See Lytton, Robert, 
 Lord 
 
 Merivale, Charles, 860 
 
 Michelet, 857, 872 
 
 Mill, James, 142 f. 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, 30, 44, 65, 100; 
 quoted, loi ; 122, 151 ff., 156- 
 174; his education, 156-157; his 
 emotional nature, 157 ff. ; and Mrs 
 
 Taylor, 159, 162; his Autobio- 
 graphy, 159; his marriage, 161; 
 member of Parliament, 162 ; his 
 aim in writing, 162 ; his Logic, 
 163-167 ; his Political Economy, 
 167-169; his Utilitarianism, 170; 
 and Comte, 170-171 ; his Exarni- 
 nation of Hamilton, 171-172; his 
 Liberty, 172-173; 175 f., 178 f-, 
 189 f., 196 f. , 208 f., 838 ; quoted, 
 847, 861 ; 1000 
 
 Miller, Hugh, 91, 214-215, 217 f. 
 
 Milman, H. H., 263, 266, 351, 859, 
 862-865 
 
 Milnes, R. M., Lord Houghton, 
 quoted, 128; 292 f., 334-336, 561 ; 
 quoted, 575, 835 
 
 Milton, 294, 345 ff., 375; quoted, 
 380; 382, 389, 392, 443, 472, 
 474 f., 496, 522, 559, 756, 1025 
 
 Mitchel, John, quoted, 358 
 
 Mitford, M. R., 267, 361 ; quoted, 
 365 f.; 388, 708, 1033-1035 » 
 
 Mitford, William, 819, 848, 856 
 
 Moir, D. M., 623 
 
 Mommsen, 845, 857, 860 
 
 Montesquieu, 196 
 
 Montgomery, James, 259 
 
 Montgomery, Robert, 240 
 
 Moore, Thomas, 333, 357, 924 
 
 More, Hannah, 730 
 
 Morier, James, 485, 644 
 
 Morison, j. Cotter, 819 
 
 Morley, Lord, quoted, 171; 975 
 
 Morris, Lewis, 571-572 
 
 Morris, William, 446, 494 f., 527, 
 528-544; his early poetry, 529- 
 530; his media;valism, 530-531, 
 537 ; his view of art, 531-533 ; and 
 social questions, 53i-.';34>' 53.=>. 
 541-544; Jason, 535-536; The 
 Earthly Paradise, 536-538; and 
 Scandinavian literature, 537-540 ; 
 Sigurd the Volsung, 539-540 ; and 
 Scott, 539-540 ; his prose romances, 
 
 544; 559' 565 
 Motherwell, W., 328, 330 
 Moultrie, John, 831 f. 
 Mozley, J. B., 135 
 Mozley, Thomas, 135 
 MuUer, Max, 603 f., 825-827, 867 
 Murray, John, 12, 863, 931 
 Murray, R. F., 608 
 Myers, Frederick, 566 
 Mylne, James, 144
 
 INDEX 
 
 1063 
 
 Naden, Constance, 597 
 
 Nairne, Lady, 360 
 
 Napier, Macvey, 76 ; quoted, 678 
 
 Napier, Sir W. F. P., 908-910, 
 911 ff.; quoted, 914; 915 
 
 Nation, The, 632 
 
 Nationality, spirit of, 20, 353 ff-. 
 445 ff., 516, 527-528, 819-820, 881 
 
 National Refortncr, The, 587 
 
 Neale, J. M., •260, 341 f. 
 
 Negri, Gaetano, 744 
 
 Neil, Ross. See Harwood, Isabella 
 
 Newman, F.W., 117, 119, 193^,895 
 
 Newman, J- H., 20, 83, 85, 94, 96 
 104, 1 14-127; his Apologia, 114- 
 115 ; and Oxford, 115 ; his letters, 
 120; his Development of Christian 
 Doctrine, 120; his choice of ' rest,' 
 121-122 ; his alternatives. Atheism 
 or CathoUcity, 122-123; his so- 
 phistry, 123-126; his style, 126- 
 127; 128, 130, 133, 136 ff., 260, 
 
 339-340. 397. 414. 453. 500, 
 
 507, 685, 766, 866, 868, 1005 ; 
 
 quoted, 1007 
 New Monthly Magazine, The, 249 f. 
 New Spirit of the Age, A, 343 
 Nichol, John, quoted, 52 ; 546 
 Niebuhr, 849, 852, 859, 878 
 Nodes Ambrosianae, 643 
 Noel, Roden, 566 
 Noetics, the, 93-95, 45^ 
 North, Christopher. See Wilson, 
 
 John 
 Norton, C E., quoted, 483, 871 
 Norton, Hon. Mrs, 362, 364-365 
 
 Oakeley, F., quoted, 127 
 O'Connell, Daniel, 654 
 O'Donoghue, D. T-. quoted, 358 n. ; 
 
 625 
 O'Leary, Ellen, 570 
 Oliphant, Laurence, 755, 930, 1042, 
 
 1045-1047 
 Oliphant, Margaret, 749-752. 9^9" 
 
 931 
 
 Oman, C. W. C, quoted, 909 
 
 O'Reilly, J. B., 57° 
 Orinda, the Matchless, 360 
 Osboume, Lloyd, 809 
 O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 565-566, 585 
 Ossian, 26 f., 354, 378 
 Outram, George, 333 
 Owen, Robert, 18, 256 
 
 Owenites, the, 161 
 
 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The, 
 
 493, 529 f- 
 Oxford Movennent, the, 20, tii ff., 
 
 118 ff., 127 ff., 137 f., 445, 452. 
 
 454 ff., 500 f., 506 ff. 
 Oxford school of history, the, 875 ff. 
 
 Pain, James, 794 
 
 Palgrave, Sir F., 824 
 
 Palgrave, F. T., 599, 977 
 
 Pastoral poetry, 387 f. 
 
 Pater, Walter, 978, 1019-1023 
 
 Patmore, Coventry, 493, 508 f., 510- 
 
 512, 608 
 Paton, J. Noel, 445, 510 
 Patriotic verse, 447, 449 ff., 553 ff- 
 Pattison, Mark, 108-109, 137 f., 453, 
 
 455 
 Paul, Herbert, quoted, 597 ; 598 ; 
 
 quoted, 962 
 Peacock, T. Love, 614-618 
 Pearson, Charles, quoted, 81, 851; 
 
 888-889 
 Periodical literature, 612 f., 932-937 
 Pessimism, the poetry of, 585-591 
 Petrarch, 385 
 Pfeiffer, Emily, 592 
 Philosophic Poets, the, 343-349 
 Philosophy and literature, 14, 21 
 Planch^, J. R., 264 ff. 
 Plato, 756, 822; quoted, 1012 
 Plutarch, 917 
 Poe, E. A., quoted, 345; 360, 500, 
 
 665, 757 
 Poetesses, the, 360-373 
 Political poetry, 349-353, 448-449 
 PoUok, Robert, 259-260 
 Pope, Alexander, 367, 378, 443, 454, 
 
 482 f., 61S, 818 
 Popularity in poetry, 400-402 
 Positivists, the, 21, 170 f., 178 ff. 
 Praed, W. M., 334, 33<5-339' 606, 
 
 831 f. 
 Pre-Raphaelites, the, 288, 343, 418, 
 445, 490-512, 527, 528-567, 650, 
 961, 1005, 1017 ff. 
 Prior, M., 333, 337 
 Procter, A. A., 593-594 
 Procter, B. W. (Barr}' Cornwall), 268 
 Prout, Father. See Mahony, Francis 
 Pugin, A. W. N., 1017 
 Punch, 689, 947-948 
 Purpose, the novel of, 755-757
 
 1064 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Pusey, E. B., 105, 107, 130 ff., 
 137 f- 
 
 Quarterly Review, The, 298, 365, 
 718, 932, 935 ff. 
 
 Rabelais, 618 
 
 Ramsay, Allan, 3S8, 584 
 
 Randall, J. R., 359 
 
 Rands, W. B., 1037-1038 
 
 Ranke, L. von, quoted, 885 
 
 Rationalism, 14 ff., 900 
 
 Raynouard, Fran9ois, 859 
 
 Reade, Charles, 020 ; quoted, 648 ; 
 
 685, 753 f., 757-764; as dramatist, 
 
 758> 7.59-760 ; his realism, 760, 
 
 763; his novels of purpose, 761 f.; 
 
 The Cloister and the Hearth, 763- 
 
 764; 768 
 Reid, Thomas, 142, 148 
 Rejected A-ddre nei, 331 f. '-~^, 
 
 eligion and literature, 14 ^ 
 Religious poetry, 257-263 ^ ^ 
 Rembrandt, 755 
 Renan, E., 175 
 Retrospective Review, The, 935 
 Reynolds, J. H., 249, 2s i, 283 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 983 
 Ricardo, D., 167 ff., 208 f. 
 Rice, James, 797, 799 
 Richardson, S., 440, 684, 695, 789 
 Richter, 45 
 Rigby, Elizabeth (Lady Eastlake), 
 
 720, 946 
 Ritchie, D. G., 222 
 Robertson, F. W., 101-X02 
 Robertson, J. M., 199 
 Robinson, H. Crabb, 44, 204 
 Rogers, Samuel, 385 ; quoted, 698 
 Rogers, Thorold, 210; quoted, 894 
 Romanticism, 19 ff., 26 ff, 274-275, 
 
 933, 963 ff- 
 Rose, H. J., 118 
 Rossetti, Christina, 260, 360, 366, 
 
 444, 493 f., 501-507; and Dante 
 
 Rossetti, 506-507 ; 508 
 Rossetti, D. G., 283, 31X, 313, 328, 
 
 413, 444, 478, 485, 490-501; and 
 Tractarianism, 491, 500; literary 
 influences upon him, ^gi-^gi; his 
 inlluence upon others, 494 ; the 
 charge of tleshliness, 495 ; his 
 sensuousness, 496-497 ; his strength, 
 
 497-499; his ^ballads, 499; the 
 typical artist, 499-500; 502; and 
 Christina Rossetti, 506-507 ; 508 f.; 
 quoted, 511 ; 529, 530, 534 f., 
 536, 545, 547, 558, 561, 565, 
 567, 596; quoted, 710; 744, 749, 
 777, 781, 957, 985, 1017-1019 
 Rossetti, W. M., quoted, 447, 490 f., 
 
 494 
 
 Ruskin, John, quoted, 100, iir; 209, 
 211, 311 ; quoted, 323 f., 427, 494; 
 531, 533 f- ; quoted, 679; 874, 
 948 f., 957, 961, 963, 977 f., 985, 
 986-1017; on the classical spirit, 
 986, 1005-1006 ; his early life, 
 987-990; and Oxford, 990-991, 
 993 ; his conception of art, 992, 
 1008-1010 ; his spiritual history, 
 993, 1006 ; Modern Painters, 993, 
 994-998, 1004 ; as social reformer, 
 998-1002,' 1003 ; his relation to 
 Carlyle, 1000; as Slade professor, 
 1002; and Newman, 1005, 1007; 
 unsystematic, toio-ioii ; on aichi- 
 tecture, 1011-1012; his limitations, 
 1012-1013; his literary criticisms, 
 
 \1013-1016; his permanent worth, 
 1016-1017 ; 1020, 1035 f. ; quoted, 
 1039; 105 1 
 
 St John, Charles, 771, 1048 
 Saintsbury, George, quoted, 935, 
 
 1031 
 Salt, H. S., quoted, 586 f., 589 
 Sand, George, 602 
 Sartor Resartiis, 32, 49, 61, 158, 635, 
 
 933 
 Sceptical Reaction, Poets of the, 445, 
 
 452-480 
 Scherer, Edmond, quoted, 51, 171. 
 
 743 
 Schiller, 44 ff. 
 
 Scott, Michael, 643 
 
 Scott, Thomas, 83 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 19 f., 25 f., 44, 56, 
 142, 206, 260, 328, 356 f., 361, 
 479' 499' 540, 613 f., 616, 619 ff., 
 641, 649!"., 660, 666 f., 670 f., 674, 
 677, 684f., 698, 700, 704, 708, 714; 
 quoted, 715; 738, 753 f., 773, 
 795 f., 806, 808, 811, 880, 921 ff., 
 926, 937, 945, 960, 986, 988 ff., 
 1004, 1030 f. 
 
 Scrope, William, yyi, 1048
 
 INDEX 
 
 1065 
 
 Sedgwick, A., -216, 228 
 
 Seeley, J. R., 890 i., 895-899, Qoof., 
 
 903> 976 
 
 Senancour, 469 
 
 Senior, N. W., 919 
 
 Sewell, Elizabeth, 709 
 
 Sewell, W., 867 
 
 Seymour, R., 663 f., 687 
 
 Seymour, Mrs, 758 f. 
 
 Shairp, J. C, quoted, 469 
 
 Shakespeare, it, 2S3 f., 317 ff., 327, 
 389, 392 f., 407, 418, 432, 440, 
 479, 4S6, 618 f., 630, 656, 668, 
 680, 683, 695, 698 ff., 739, 756, 
 
 763. 779> 7S1 
 £harp, William, 796-797 
 /Shelley, 18, 269, 281 ff., 293 ff., 312, 
 
 [ 321, 352, 3S2, 409' 474 f-. 478, 
 \ 614, 655, 714, 779 
 \Shorthouse, J., 83, 812-813 
 
 Sidgwick, Henry, 175-177 
 
 Simeon, Charles, 83 
 
 Singer, S. W., 954 
 
 Skelton, Sir John, 977 
 
 Smedley, Francis, 769 
 
 Smedley, Menella B., 592, 595 
 
 Smetham, James, quoted, 49; 349 
 
 Smiles, S., quoted, 12; 930-931 
 
 Smith, Albert, 770 
 
 Smith, Alexander, 349, 444, 447, 
 514, 518, 523-526, 603 
 
 Smith, H. M., 83 n. 
 
 Smith, Horace, 619, 621 f. 
 
 Smith, Sydney, 772, 934, 938 
 
 Smith, William, 213 
 
 Smollett, 378, 640, 666 
 
 Southey, 388, 633; quoted, 827 n., 
 932; 1028 
 
 Spasmodic School, the, 288, 349, 
 513-526 
 
 Spedding, James, 137; quoted, 309; 
 
 481, 957 
 Speke, J. H., 1040 f. 
 Spencer, Herbert, 151, 173 n., 196, 
 
 218-222 
 Spenser, Edmund, 387, 937 
 Stanhope, Lord, 901 f. 
 Stanley, A. P., 105 ff., 109, 121, 453; 
 
 quoted, 457; 925-926 
 Stanley, H. M., 1039-1040 
 Staunton, Howard, 954 
 Stedman, E. C, quoted, 579 
 Stendhal, quoted, 1023 
 Stephen, Fitzjames, 833 
 
 Stephen, J. K., 333, 607 
 
 Stephen, Leslie, 19, 157 n., 188, 979, 
 
 981-9S2 
 Stephens, W. R. W., quoted, 876 
 Sterling, John, 12, 29, 62, 99, 866 
 Sterne, Lawrence, 681 
 Stevenson, R. L., 222, 599 t., 620, 
 
 717. 754. 757, .761, 765. 795 f-, 
 797, 799-811 ; his heterodoxy, 800- 
 
 802 ; his interest in public questions, 
 
 803 ; his style, 803-804 ; his 
 criticism, 804 ; his poetry, 805 ; 
 his romances, 805-808; his patrio- 
 tism, 807-808 ; his South Sea 
 stories, 808-809 ' ■^'' J^kyll and 
 Mr Hyde, 809-810 ; his short 
 stories, 8io-8ir; 812 f., 886, 
 978 f., 1037 
 
 Stewart, Dugald, 29, 142 f. 
 Stirling-Maxwell, Sir W., 365 
 Strauss, D. F., 112, 731 
 Stuart, Wilson, quoted, 157 
 Stubbs, William, 848, 865, 869, 875 f., 
 
 882-886, 890, S92f., 906, 917 
 Sunderland, Thomas, 292 
 Surtees, R. S., 663 
 Swift, 701 
 Swinburne, A. C, 292; quoted, 480; 
 
 485. 494 f-; 5". 545-561; his 
 threefold mission, 547 ; his pre- 
 cocity, 547; Atalanta in Calydon, 
 548, 556 ; Poems and Ballads 
 548-550; his romanticism, 550; 
 his medisevalism, 550; his dramas, 
 550-551 ; and the national move- 
 ment, 552-553 ; his patriotism, 
 553-555; his Jove of the sea, 554, 
 657 ; his development, 556 ; his 
 Jacobite poems, 557-558 ; his 
 prose writings, 558-559; his power 
 of initiation, 559; his rank as a 
 poet, 560-561 ; 562, 565, 763, 1040 
 Symonds, J. A., 978 
 
 Tacitus, 844, 872, 913 
 
 Taine, 49, 51 ; quoted, 837, 921; 922 
 
 Tait, A. C, 82 
 
 Talfourd, T. N. , 263, 270-271 
 
 Taylor, Sir Henry, quoted, 34, 71, 97; 
 
 160, 240, 263, 268-270, 272 f., 
 
 275, 277, 295 
 Taylor, Isaac, 730 f. 
 Taylor, Tom, 758 ff. 
 Taylor, William, 25, 30, 44, 182
 
 io66 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, 8, 12, 14: quoted, 
 37 ; 99, 267, 283, 287, 288-309 ; his 
 early life, 288-289; Poems, chiefly 
 Lyrical, 294, 297 ff. ; Poems (1832), 
 294, 297 ff.; Poems (1842), 294, 
 297 ff.; his development, 295 ff., 
 398, 404 ff. ; and religion, 302, 383 ; 
 and science, 302 ; and A. H. 
 Hallam, 300-301, 303 ; and Ar- 
 thurian legend, 302, 389-390; and 
 Browning, 312 f., 326, 383 f., 
 411, 442 f. ; 327, 335; 374-410; 
 his patriotism, 375, 409 ; his 
 learning, 375 f . ; his peerage, 376; 
 and medisevalism, 376 f., 393, 
 397; The Princess, 377-380; In 
 Memoriam, 380-385, 386 f.; Maud, 
 386 f., 514, 530 ; the English 
 Idylls, 387-388 ; Idylls of the King, 
 390-398; Enoch Arden, 398 ; poems 
 in dialect, 398, 403 ; the dramatic 
 element, 399, 403-404, 406-409; 
 413, 435, 447 ; his patriotic poems, 
 
 448-45' ; 452.458, 474 f., 481,486, 
 
 502, 514, 527, 530, 532 f., 559, 561, 
 596, 602; quoted, 677, 688; 773, 
 822, 969 
 
 Tennyson, Charles. See Turner, C. T. 
 
 Tennyson, Frederick, 290-291 
 
 Teutonic theory, the, 353, 355, 878- 
 881 
 
 Thackeray, W. M., 84, 179, 292, 333, 
 481, 618, 620, 622, 633, 639, 641, 
 642, 649 f., 652, 656, 660, 664, 
 666, 669, 673 f., 677 ff., 685 f., 
 687-706 ; his early life, 687-689 ; 
 Barry Lyndon, 689-690 ; his 
 realism, 690, 695-696, 704 ; how in- 
 fluenced by periodical publication, 
 691 ; Vanity Fair, 692-693, 695 ff. ; 
 called a cynic, 693-694 ; and me- 
 
 • diocrity, 694; "not a novelist, but 
 a satirist," 697 ; change in the later 
 novels, 699 ; his lectures, 700-701 ; 
 Esmond, 701, 703-704; as editor, 
 702 ; and romance, 704 ff. ; and 
 the historical novel, 704 f. ; 718, 
 720, 776 f., 787, 948, 957, 961, 
 1000 
 
 Thiers, L. A., 8, 857 
 
 Thirlwall, Connop, 103-104, 849, 
 854 ff. 
 
 Thorn, William, 241 
 
 Thompson, Francis, 608-609, 610 
 
 Thomson, James, author of The 
 
 Seasons, 378 
 Thomson, James, pessimist, 585-591; 
 
 quoted, 652 
 Thorpe, B., 529, 538, 824 
 Thucydides, 822, 844 f., 913, 917 
 Tom Broivn^s School Days, 851 
 Tractarianism. See Oxford Movement 
 Traill, H. D., 979 
 Transcendentalism, 28 ff., 43, X19, 
 
 129, 131 
 Trench, R. C. , 357, 824-825 
 Trevelyan, Sir G., quoted, 84 
 Trollope, Anthony, 759, 764 f., 772- 
 
 776, 797 
 Trollope, Frances, 709-710, 772 
 Tupper, J. L., 1017 
 Tupper, M., 12, 343, 355 
 Turner, C. Tennyson, 289-290 
 Turner, J. M. W., 994 
 Turner, Sharon, 823 
 Twain, Mark, 785, 1049 
 Tyndall, John, 238 
 
 Undergraduate Papers, 546, 552 
 Utilitarians, the, 21 f., 152 ff., 173 ff., 
 190, 397, 850, 937 
 
 Veitch, John, 146 
 
 Venturi, Madame, quoted, 34-36 
 
 Vers de Societe, 333-339 
 
 Vestiges of Creation, 215 f., 228 
 
 Vico, 196 
 
 Virgil, 443, 680 f. 
 
 Voltaire, 39, 56 f., 59, 743 
 
 Wade, Thomas, 240, 263, 285-286 
 Wallace, A. R., 227 f., 230 
 Walpole, Horace, 987 
 Warburton, Eliot, 911 
 Ward, James, 221 f. 
 Ward, W. G., 127, 120, 455 f. 
 Warren, Samuel, 644-64.5 
 Watson, John, 811 
 Watson, William, 474, 479, 527 
 Watts, G. F., quoted, 1013 
 Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 274 
 Waugh, Edwin, 402 
 Webster, Augusta, 592, 595-597 
 Wells, C. J., 240, 263, 272, 283-285, 
 343
 
 INDEX 
 
 1067 
 
 Werner, A. G., 213 
 
 Westcott, B. F., 140 
 
 Westminster Review, The, 161, 218, 
 
 258, 935 f- 
 Whately, R., 96-98 
 Whewell, W., 164 f. 
 White, Blanco, 97 
 White, H. K., 258 f. 
 Whitehead, Charles, 663-664 
 Whitworth, Prebendary, 83 n. 
 Whyte-Melville, G. J., 770-771, 774 
 Wilberforce, S., in, 131 i. , 134, 
 
 229 
 Wilde, Oscar, 570, 760, 1049-1053 
 Wilkins, M. E., I033 f. 
 Williams, Isaac, 132, 260, 341 
 Williams, Sarah, 592 
 Wilson, David, quoted, 32, 34; 871 
 
 Wilson, John, 144, 361, 623, 930, 
 938, 941-944, 951. 1044 
 
 Wingate, David, 402 
 
 Wiseman, N. P., 127-129, 414, 423 
 
 Witness, The, 91, 936 
 
 Wolfe, Charles, 571, 960 
 
 Wolfe, General, 773 
 
 Women's rights, 377-379 
 
 Wood, Mrs Henry, 748 
 
 Woolner, Thomas, 445, 508 
 
 Wordsworth, 24, 21 r, 260 f., 293, 
 341 ; quoted, 363, 369 ; 388, 401, 
 435. 439' 473. 498. 512, 563, 609, 
 747, 836, 888, 933, 969, 9S3, 1014, 
 1018, 1031 
 
 Yeats, W. B., quoted, 569 
 Yonge, C. M., 748-749 
 
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