Mr. Pater was not tempted by such popularity as his book received to hasten publication; indeed it was understood that after beginning to print a second collection of Essays, he became dissatisfied with them, and caused the type to be broken up. But the advance of so-called aestheticism was too strong an invitation, and prepared for him too large and eager an audience, so that the last decade of his life saw several books, _Marius the Epicurean_, _Imaginary Portraits_, _Appreciations_, while others appeared posthumously. Of these the first-named is unquestionably the best and most important. Although Greek had been the indispensable--almost the cardinal--principle in Mr. Pater"s own literary development, he had been so strongly affected by modern thought and taste, that he could hardly recover a dispa.s.sionate view of the older cla.s.sics. _Imaginary Portraits_, an attempt at constructive rather than critical art, required qualities which he did not possess, and even made him temporarily forget his impeccable style: _Appreciations_, good in itself, was inferior to the first book. But _Marius the Epicurean_ far excelled all these. It, too, took the form of fiction, but the story went for so little in it that deficiencies therein were not felt. The book was in effect a reconstruction, partly imaginative, but still more critical, of a period with which Mr. Pater was probably more in sympathy than with any other, even the Renaissance itself, to wit the extremely interesting and strangely modern period when cla.s.sicism and modernity, Christianity and Paganism, touched and blended in the second century after Christ after the fashion revealed to us in the works of Apuleius most of all, of Lucian to some extent, and of a few others. Mr. Pater indeed actually introduced the philosopher-novelist of Madaura in the book, though he was not the hero; and his own peculiar style proved itself admirably suited to the period and subject, whether in description and conversation, or in such translation or paraphrase as that of the famous and exquisite _Pervigilium Veneris_.
For this style, however, in perfection we must still go back to the _Studies of the Renaissance_, which is what Mr. Arnold liked to call a _point de repere_. The style, less exuberant, less far-reaching and versatile, and, if any one pleases to say so, less healthy than Mr.
Ruskin"s, is much more chastened, finished, and exquisite. It never at its best neglects the difference between the rhythm of prose and the metre of verse; if it is sometimes, and indeed usually, wanting in simplicity, it is never overloaded or gaudy. The words are picked; but they are seldom or never, as has been the case with others, not only picked but wrenched, not only adjusted to a somewhat unusual society and use, but deliberately forced into uses and societies wholly different from those to which readers are accustomed. Above all, no one, it must be repeated, has ever surpa.s.sed, and scarcely any one has ever equalled Mr. Pater in deliberate and successful architecture of the prose-paragraph--in what may, for the sake of a necessary difference, be called the scriptorial in opposition to the oratorical manner. He may fall short of the poetic grandeur of Sir Thomas Browne, of the phantasmagoric charm of De Quincey at his rare best, of the gorgeous panoramas of Mr. Ruskin. But his happiest paragraphs are like _flamboyant_ chantries, not imposing, not quite supreme in quality, but in their own kind showing wonderful perfection of craftsmanship.
Of the same school, though a less exact and careful pract.i.tioner in it, was John Addington Symonds, who was born in Bristol on the 5th of October 1840, and died at Rome on 19th April 1893. He was the son of a famous doctor whose name figures often in literary history, inasmuch as he made Clifton a frequent resort for persons of consumptive tendencies.
Mr. Symonds himself lived there for a great part of his life.
Unfortunately the disease which his father had combated revenged itself upon him; and it was only by spending the greater part of his later years at Davos that he staved it off as long as he did. Educated at Harrow and at Balliol, a Fellow of Magdalen, and succeeding tolerably young to an affluent fortune, Mr. Symonds was able to indulge his tastes, literary and other, pretty much as he chose. The result was fortunate in one way, unfortunate in another. He could hardly have made a living by literature, in which though an eager worker he was a thorough dilettante. But if he had been at less liberty to write what and howsoever he pleased, he might or rather would have been obliged to compress and chasten the extreme prolixity and efflorescence of his style.
His largest work, the _History of the Renaissance in Italy_, is actually one of great value in information, thought, and style; but its extreme redundance cannot be denied, and has indeed already necessitated a sort of boiling down into an abstract. Both in prose essays (which he wrote in great numbers, chiefly on Greek or Renaissance subjects) and in verse (where he was not so successful as in prose) Mr. Symonds was one of the most characteristic and copious members of the rather foolishly named "aesthetic" school of the last third of the century, the school which, originally deriving more or less from Mr. Ruskin, more and more rejected the ethical side of his teaching. But Mr. Symonds, who had been very much under the influence of Professor Jowett, had philosophical velleities, which have become more generally known than they once were through the interesting biography published after his death by Mr.
Horatio Brown. But for the redundance above mentioned, which is all pervading with him both in thought and style, and which once suggested to a not unfriendly critic the remark that he should like "to squeeze him like a sponge," Symonds would probably or rather certainly occupy a much higher place than he has held or ever will hold. For his appreciation both of books and of nature was intense, and his faculty of description abundant. But the _ventosa et enormis loquacitas_ of his style was everywhere, so that even selection would be hard put to it to present him really at his best.
William Minto, who was born in 1846 and died in 1893, Professor of Logic and English Literature at Aberdeen, showed fewer marks of the joint direction of "aesthetic" criticism to art and letters than these two, and had less distinct and original literary talent. He had his education mainly at Aberdeen itself, where he was born and died; but he made a short visit to Oxford. Subsequently taking to journalism, he became editor of the _Examiner_, and considerably raised the standard of literary criticism in that periodical, while after quitting it he wrote for some time on the _Daily News_. His appointment to the professorship enabled him to devote himself entirely to literature, and he produced some novels, the best of which was _The Crack of Doom_. He had much earlier executed two extremely creditable books, one on _English Prose_, and one on part of the History of English verse, the only drawbacks to which were a rather pedagogic and stiff arrangement; he was a frequent contributor to the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and after his death some of his professorial Lectures on the Georgian era were published, but without his final revision. The strongest side of Minto"s criticism lay in his combination of sufficiently sound and wide knowledge of the past with a distinct and rather unusual sympathy with the latest schools of literature as they rose. He was untainted by the florid style of his day, but wrote solidly and well. If it were necessary to look for defects in his work they would probably be found in a slight deficiency of comparative estimate, and in a tendency to look at things rather from the point of view of modern than from that of universal criticism. But this tendency was not in him, as it so often is, a.s.sociated with ignorance or presumptuous judgment.
CHAPTER X
SCHOLARSHIP AND SCIENCE
The remarks which were made at the beginning of the chapter on Philosophy and Theology apply with increasing force to the present chapter; indeed, they need to be restated in a much more stringent and exclusive form. To give some history of English philosophy and theology in the nineteenth century, by noticing its literary expression, was possible, though it had to be done, so to speak, in shorthand. To do the same thing with science, or even with what is technically called scholarship, would be simply impossible. Much of their expression is hardly susceptible of literary form at all, hardly any ever receives such form, while the subdivision of the branches of physical science is now so great and their shadow so wide that no systematic sketch of them is to be thought of. It is only possible to mention a few distinguished writers, writers who would have been distinguished whatever their subject, but who happen to have devoted themselves, solely or mainly, to scientific writing, or to cla.s.sical criticism and philology.
A curious independent study might be made of the literary gradations of cla.s.sical scholarship. In the Middle Ages, though the complete ignorance of the cla.s.sics, once imagined as prevailing, has been shown to be a figment, scarcely anybody could claim to be a scholar. During the Renaissance almost every man of letters had necessarily some tinge of scholarship, and some of the greatest in its earlier period, such as Erasmus, were scholars first of all. The growth of vernacular literature, the constant increase and subdivision of subjects, and the advance in minute study of the Greek and Latin languages, brought about an inevitable cleavage, and from the seventeenth century onwards scholarship became an independent profession or vocation. For some considerable time, however, it was the almost indispensable novitiate of a literary career, and the tradition that a scholar must be first applied to, for no matter what literary work, was still potent in the times of Salmasius, and cannot be said to have been discredited in those of Bentley, who would undoubtedly have been as formidable in purely political or general controversy as he was on _Phalaris_ or on his own private interests. The eighteenth century, however, saw the divorce nearly completed, and by the period of our present volume it was an accomplished fact.
Even then, however, though for men of letters it was not customary to turn first to scholars, scholars had not ceased to be men of letters, and philology (or the mere study of language, as apart from literature) had not absorbed them.
During that part of our period which is still concerned with the last century, there were many excellent scholars in England, but perhaps only three--two of whom as scholars were of no great account--who make much figure in purely literary history. Jacob Bryant (1715-1804), an odd person of uncritical judgment but great learning, who belongs more to the last volume than to the present, devoted himself chiefly to mythology, a subject which had not yet attracted general interest, and which was treated by him and others in a somewhat unhistorical manner.
Gilbert Wakefield (1756-1801) was one of the characteristic figures of the Revolutionary time. He was a Cambridge man, and took orders, but left the church, became a violent Jacobin, and went to prison for a seditious libel. He was one of those not very uncommon men who, personally amiable, become merely vixenish when they write: and his erudition was much more extensive than sound. But he edited several cla.s.sical authors, not wholly without intelligence and scholarship, and his _Silva Critica_, a sort of _variorum_ commentary from profane literature on the Bible, was the forerunner, at least in scheme, of a great deal of work which has been seen since.
A very different person from these in scholarly attainments, in natural gifts, and (it must unfortunately be added) in personal respectability, was Richard Porson, who is generally bracketed with Bentley as the greatest of English scholars, not of our own day, and who might have been one of the most brilliant of men of letters. He was born in Norfolk on Christmas Day 1759, of low station, but was well educated by the parson of the parish, and sent to Eton by a neighbouring squire. In 1779 he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, obtained a scholarship, did brilliantly in University contests and became fellow in 1782. Although he was almost a boy the genius of his papers in scholarship attracted notice at home and abroad, and he made some excursions into general literature wherein, as in his recorded conversations, he showed epigrammatic wit of the first rank. He lost his fellowship because he would not take orders; but was made Regius Professor of Greek, an appointment which unluckily was then, in both Universities, almost honorary as regards income. The Whig party accepted his partisanship, but had no opportunity of rewarding it, and after receiving the Librarianship of the London Inst.i.tution in Moorfields, he died of apoplexy in 1808. He possessed in almost the highest degree that power of divination, based on accurate knowledge, which distinguishes the scholar, and it is, as has been said, nearly certain that he would have been a brilliant writer in English on any subject he chose to take up.
But he was a hopeless drunkard, an offensive sloven, rude and aggressive in society--in short a survival of the Grub Street pattern of the century of his birth. This period, which was that of Burney, Elmsley, Gaisford, and other scholars, robust but not very literary (except in the case of Elmsley, who was a contributor both to the _Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly Reviews_), was succeeded by one in which the English Universities did not greatly distinguish themselves in this department.
Gaisford indeed lived till 1855 at Oxford, and Cambridge produced among other respectable scholars the already mentioned Malden and George Long (1800-79), a Lancashire man, who went to Trinity, distinguished himself greatly, but found such preferment as he met with outside his university, in America, at University College, London, and elsewhere.
Long was a great diffusion-of-useful-knowledge man, and edited the _Penny Cyclopaedia_: but he did more germane work later in editing the _Bibliotheca Cla.s.sica_, an unequal but at its best excellent series of cla.s.sics, and in dealing with the great stoics Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. He was also one of the mainstays of the most important enterprise of the middle of the century in cla.s.sical scholarship, the _Cla.s.sical Dictionaries_ edited by the late Sir William Smith and published by Mr. Murray; and he wrote an extensive but not extraordinarily valuable _Decline of the Roman Republic_. Long appears to have been one of those men who, with great ability, vast knowledge, and untiring industry, somehow or other miss their proper place, whether by fault or fate it is hard to say.
About 1860 three remarkable persons ill.u.s.trated scholarship in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh respectively, with a combination of literary and linguistic knowledge which had been growing rarer up to their time, and which has grown rarer still since.
The Oxford representative was John Conington, who was born at Boston on 10th August 1825. He went to Rugby and to Magdalen College, Oxford, whence he migrated to University College, and there obtained a fellowship, making nearly a clean sweep of the chief University prizes meanwhile. He became in 1854 the first Professor of Latin, and held the post till his death in 1869. He edited Virgil, aeschylus (part) and Persius, translated Horace, Homer, and Virgil, and did a certain amount of miscellaneous literary work. He was neither a very exact nor a very great scholar: his scholarship indeed took rather the character of that of foreign nations, other than Germany, than the dogged minuteness of German, or the large but solid strength of English study of the cla.s.sics. But he was an exceedingly stimulating professor; and coming at the time when it did, his work was valuable as a reminder that the cla.s.sics are live literature, and not so much dead material for science.
Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro, a native of Elgin, where he was born in 1819, a Shrewsbury boy and a scholar and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who became Professor of Latin there in 1869 and died in 1882, was an incomparably greater verbal scholar than Conington, and may fairly be said to have taken up the torch of Bentley and Porson. His great edition (with a less great translation) of Lucretius, his work on Horace and Catullus, and his scattered papers, all come up to a very high standard; and in the delightful art of Greek and Latin composition in verse, where England has long stood paramount, and which, since she has abandoned it, remains uncultivated throughout Europe, he was almost supreme. But Munro, though he never surrendered wholly to the philological heresy, was affected thereby; and some of his Lucretian readings were charged with a deficiency in ear such as that with which he justly reproached his German predecessors.
The most strictly literary of the three has yet to be mentioned. William Young Sellar, born near Golspie in the same year as Conington, was educated at the Edinburgh Academy, at the University of Glasgow, and (as a Snell exhibitioner) at Balliol. After holding an Oriel fellowship for some years, and doing professorial or a.s.sistant-professorial work at Durham and St. Andrews, he became in 1863 Professor of Humanity at Edinburgh, and remained so till his death in 1890. In the year of his election to the professorship appeared his _Roman Poets of the Republic_, quite the best book of its kind existing in English; and this was followed up by others on Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius--good, but less good, the mannered correctness of the Augustans evidently appealing to the author less than the more strictly poetic excellence of Lucretius and Catullus. Attempts, too few but noteworthy, have since been made to handle cla.s.sical literature in the style of the _Roman Poets of the Republic_, but it has never been surpa.s.sed, and it has very seldom been equalled.
On another scheme and in other circ.u.mstances names like those of Kennedy and Shilleto, of Linwood and Burges, of Monk and Blomfield, would cry for admission here, but as it is they must be ruled out. And it is not possible to widen the scope much, so as to take in some eminent students who have given not unliterary expression to the study of languages and subjects other than the cla.s.sical. It has indeed been a constantly increasing feature of the century that fresh studies--aegyptology, the study of the Semitic languages, the study of the older forms not merely of English but of the other modern tongues, the enormous range of knowledge opened to Englishmen, and as it were forced on them by our possession of India and our commerce and connection with other nations of the East, as well as the newer subjects of comparative mythology, folk-lore, and the like, all more or less offshoots of what may be generally termed scholarship, have been added to the outer range of the Humanities. Some of these appeal to very few, none of them to more than few persons; and literature, in its best description if not exactly definition, is that which does or should appeal to all persons of liberal education and sympathies. Yet one exponent of these studies (and of more than one of them) must have a place here, as well for the more than professionally encyclopaedic character of his knowledge as for his intellectual vigour and his services to letters.
William Robertson Smith was born in 1846, and died in 1894. A native of Aberdeenshire, the son of a Free Kirk minister, and educated at Aberdeen and elsewhere, he became Professor of Hebrew in the Free Church College of that city, and for some years discussed his subject, in the manner of the Germans, without hindrance. His articles in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, however, gave offence, and after much controversy he was deprived of his chair in 1881. Two years later, however, he was made Lord Almoner"s Professor of Arabic at Cambridge, where he also became Fellow of Christ"s and University Librarian. And from a contributor he proceeded to be first a.s.sistant-editor and then editor in chief of the _Encyclopaedia_. His health, never very strong, became worse and worse, and he finally succ.u.mbed to a complication of diseases. It was understood that the theological scandal connected with his name was anything but a pleasure to him, and the justice of it does not concern us; but his repute as an Orientalist is uncontested. Besides works directly bearing on the Bible, he wrote two important books on _Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia_ and on _The Religion of the Semites_. He was at least as remarkable for general as for special learning, and if not actually a great man of letters, had a knowledge of literature rivalled by few of his contemporaries.
To turn to physical science, Sir Humphry Davy, a great chemist and no mean writer, was born at Penzance in December 1778. His father was a wood-carver, but he himself was apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary, and betook himself seriously to chemistry. Fortunately for him, Dr. Beddoes, the father of the poet, a physician of great repute at Clifton, took him to be his a.s.sistant there, and Davy, in his twentieth year, not only had much improved opportunities of study, but made valuable friends, both among the persons of rank who then frequented Clifton for health, and among the literary society of which Coleridge and Southey were then the ornaments in Bristol. This part of his sojourn was noteworthy for his experiments with nitrous oxide ("laughing gas"). These attracted a great deal of attention, and in 1801, being then barely twenty-three, he was appointed to a lectureship in the Royal Inst.i.tution, London. His appointment was the beginning of a series of brilliant lectures in the same place during almost the whole of the century, first by Davy himself, then by his a.s.sistant Faraday, and then by Faraday"s a.s.sistant Tyndall. He was knighted in 1812, and soon afterwards married Mrs.
Apreece, a lively, pretty, and wealthy widow. His later years were occupied, first by the investigations which led to the perfecting of his famous safety-lamp for coal-mines (these brought him a handsome testimonial and a baronetcy), and later by electrical researches. He had not reached middle age when his health began to fail, and he died in 1829, aged little more than fifty. In connection with literary science or scientific literature Davy was perhaps more remarkable as a lecturer than as a writer, but his accomplishments as the latter were considerable, and in his later years he wrote two non-scientific books, _Salmonia_ and _Consolations in Travel_. These (though the former was attacked as the work of an amateur and a milksop by Christopher North) were very popular in their day. Davy always kept up his friendship with men of letters, especially the Lake Poets and Scott (who was a connection of his wife"s), and he was no very small man of letters himself.
A contemporary (though very much longer lived) of Davy"s and the most famous Englishwoman who has ever written on scientific subjects, was Mary Fairfax, better known from the name of her second husband as Mrs.
Somerville. She was born at Jedburgh on 26th December 1780, and when twenty-four married her cousin, Captain Greig, a member of a family of Scotchmen who had settled in the Russian navy. Her first husband died two years afterwards, and six years later she married Dr. William Somerville, also her cousin. She had already devoted much attention, especially during her widowhood, to mathematics and astronomy; and after her second marriage she had no difficulty in pursuing these studies. She adapted Laplace"s _Mecanique Celeste_ in 1823, and followed it up by more original work on physics, astronomy, and physical geography. Her life was prolonged till 1872, and an interesting autobiography appeared a year later. It is possible that Mrs. Somerville profited somewhat in reputation by her coincidence with the period of "diffusion of useful knowledge." But she had real scientific knowledge and real literary gifts; and she made good use of both.
Of at least respectable literary merit, though hardly of enough to justify the devoting of much s.p.a.ce to them here, were Sir David Brewster (1781-1868), Sir John Herschel (1792-1871), Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875), Sir Roderick Murchison (1792-1871), the first a mathematician and physicist, the second an astronomer, the third and fourth geologists, and all more or less copious writers on their several subjects. John Tyndall (1820-1893), a younger man than any of these, had perhaps a more distinctly literary talent. Born in Ireland, and for some time a railway engineer, he gave himself up about 1847 to the study and teaching of physics, was remarkable for the effect of his lecturing, and held several Government appointments. His Presidential Address to the British a.s.sociation at Belfast in 1874 was not less noteworthy for materialism in substance than for a brilliant if somewhat bra.s.sy style.
But the chief Englishmen of science who were men of letters during our period were Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley. The opinions of the first of these, their origin, the circ.u.mstances of their first expression, and the probabilities of their future, have been the subject of about as much controversy as in a given time has been bestowed upon any subject, certainly on any similar subject. But we enjoy here the privilege of neglecting this almost entirely. Darwin is to the literary historian a very interesting subject, for he was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, who himself, besides being the capital example of the polished mediocrity of eighteenth century verse when all freshness had gone out of it, was a man of science and an evolutionist in his way. Charles (who was also christened Robert) was the son of yet another Dr. Darwin, an F.R.S. He was born on 12th February 1809 at Shrewsbury, and his mother was (as was afterwards his wife) a daughter of the Wedgwoods of Etruria. After pa.s.sing through the famous school of his native town, Darwin went to Edinburgh for some years and then entered Christ"s College, Cambridge, in 1828. Here he devoted himself to physical science, and after taking his degree was, in 1831, appointed to the _Beagle_, which was starting on a scientific cruise. He spent five years in the South Seas and did not return to England till late in 1836--a voyage which perhaps prejudicially affected his health, but established his knowledge of nature. After his return he settled down to scientific work, alone and in the scientific societies, married in 1839, and was busy for many years afterwards in publishing the results of the voyage. He possessed considerable means, and for the last forty years of his life lived at his ease at Down near Beckenham, experimenting in crossing species and maturing his views. These took form, under circ.u.mstances interesting but foreign to our theme, in the famous _Origin of Species_, published in 1859, and this was followed by a great number of other books, the most noteworthy of which, if not the scientifically soundest, was _The Descent of Man_ (1871). Darwin died after many years of continuous ill-health on 19th April 1882.
Late in life he is said to have confessed that his relish for Shakespeare and for pure literature generally, which had in earlier days been keen, had entirely vanished. But there was perhaps nothing very surprising in this, seeing that he had for half a century given himself up with extraordinary and ever-increasing thoroughness to a cla.s.s of investigations the most remote possible from literature, and yet not, as pure mathematical study not seldom induces its votaries, inducing men to cultivate letters by mere contrast. Yet the ancestral literary tendency had only fallen dormant in him then; and earlier it had been active. It can indeed hardly be said that either his contribution to the _Voyage of the Beagle_, or _The Origin of Species_, or _The Descent of Man_, or any of the others, is absolutely remarkable for style in the ordinary sense of that phrase. The style of Darwin attempts no ornateness, and on the other hand it is not of those extremely simple styles which are independent of ornament and to which ornament would be simply a defacement. But it is very clear; it is not in the least slovenly; and there is about it the indefinable sense that the writer might have been a much greater writer, simply as such, than he is, if he had cared to take the trouble, and had not been almost solely intent upon his matter.
Such writers are not so common that they should be neglected, and they may at least stand in the Court of the Gentiles, the "provincial band"
of literature.
A very remarkable book which was in a way Darwinism before Darwin, which attracted much attention and violent opposition in 1844, the year of its publication, and which for a long time remained unowned, was the _Vestiges of Creation_, subsequently known to be the work of Robert Chambers, the younger of two brothers who did great things in the popular publishing trade at Edinburgh, and who founded a house which has always been foremost in the diffusion of sound and cheap literature, information, and amus.e.m.e.nt. Robert was born at Peebles in 1802 and died at St. Andrews in 1871, having been, besides his publishing labours, a voluminous author and compiler. Nothing he did was quite equal to the _Vestiges_, a book rather literary than scientific, and treating the still crude evolution theory rather from the point of view of popular philosophy than from that of strict biological investigation; but curiously stimulating and enthusiastic, with a touch of poetry in it not often to be found in such books, and attractive as showing the way in which doctrines which are about to take a strong hold of the general mind not infrequently communicate themselves, in an unfinished but inspiring form, to persons who, except general literary culture and interest, do not seem to offer any specially favourable soil for their germination. Purely scientific men have usually rather pooh-poohed the _Vestiges_, but there is the Platonic quality in it.
The _Vestiges_, like its more famous successor, was violently attacked as irreligious. One of its opponents, from a point of view half orthodox and half scientific, was Hugh Miller, a man of sterling excellence, of an interesting and in its close melancholy career, of real importance as a geologist, and possessed of an extremely agreeable literary faculty.
Miller was born at Cromarty in 1802, and though more than fairly educated, held till he was past thirty no higher position than that of a stone-mason. He had begun to write, however, earlier than this, and, engaging in particular in the two rather dissimilar subjects of geology and "Free Kirk" polemic, he was made editor of the _Witness_, a newspaper started in the interest of the new principles. After nearly twenty busy years of journalism and authorship he shot himself in December 1856, as it is supposed in a fit of insanity brought on by overwork. Miller was a very careful observer, and his _Old Red Sandstone_ (1841) made a great addition to the knowledge of fossils. He followed this up by a great number of other works, some merely polemical, others descriptive of his own life and travels. In all the better parts of Hugh Miller"s writings there is a remarkable style, extremely popular and unpretentious but never trivial or slipshod, which is not far below the best styles of the century for its special purpose, though in some respects it smacks more of the eighteenth, and has a certain relation with that of White of Selborne.
The most considerable literary gifts of the century among men of science probably belonged to a man more than twenty years younger than Miller, and more than fifteen younger than Darwin, who died so recently that until the greater part of this book was written it seemed that he would have no place in it. Thomas Henry Huxley, born in May 1825, at Ealing, studied medicine, and becoming a navy doctor, executed like Darwin a voyage to the South Seas. His scientific work, though early distinguished, met with no great encouragement from the Admiralty, and he left the service, though he held many public appointments in later life. He became F.R.S. at six-and-twenty, and from that time onwards till his sixtieth year he was a busy professor, lecturer, member of commissions, and (for a time) inspector of fisheries. In the ever greater and greater specialising of science which has taken place, Huxley was chiefly a morphologist. But outside the range of special studies he was chiefly known as a vigorous champion of Darwinism and a something more than vigorous aggressor in the cause of Agnosticism (a word which he himself did much to spread), attacking supernaturalism of every kind, and (though disclaiming materialism and not choosing to call himself an atheist) unceasingly demanding that all things should submit themselves to naturalist criticism. A great number of brilliant essays and lectures were composed by him on different parts of what may be called the debateable land between science, philosophy, and theology.
And one of his most characteristic and masterly single studies was a little book on Hume, contributed to the series of "English Men of Letters" in 1879.
This varied, copious, and brilliant polemic may or may not have been open in substance to the charge which the bolder and more thoroughgoing defenders of orthodoxy brought against it, that it committed the logical error of demanding submission on the part of supernaturalism to laws and limits to which, by its very essence, supernaturalism disclaimed allegiance. But the form of it was excellent. Mr. Huxley had read much, and had borrowed weapons and armour from more than one Schoolman and Father as well as from purely profane authors. He had an admirable style, free alike from the great faults of his contemporaries, "preciousness" and slipshodness, and a knack of crisp but not too mannered phrase recalling that of Swift or, still more, of Bentley. It has been said, with some truth as well as with some paradox, that a literary critic of the very first cla.s.s was lost in him, at the salvage only of some scientific monographs, which like all their kind will be antiquated some day, and of some polemics which must suffer equally from the touch of time.
CHAPTER XI
DRAMA
At no period, probably, in the history of English literature, from the sixteenth century until that with which we are now dealing, would it have been possible to compress the history of the drama during a hundred years into the s.p.a.ce which it is here proposed to give it. If we were dealing with the works of living men the historian might be justly charged with arrogant incompetence in not taking more notice of them.
But, fortunately, that is not the case; and the brevity of the treatment is equally compatible with a belief that the plays of the present day are masterpieces, and with a suspicion that they are not. As to the past we have, with the exception of a few protesters, general consent that the English drama of the nineteenth century has displayed one curious and disastrous characteristic. The plays, as a rule, which have been good literature have either never been acted or have seldom succeeded as plays; the plays that have been acted and have been successful have seldom been good literature.
The best idea of the state of the drama between 1790 and 1810 may perhaps be obtained by any one who cares to look through--it would require a monomania, a desert island, or at least a succession of wet days in a country inn to enable any one to _read_ through--the ten volumes of Mrs. Inchbald"s _Modern British Theatre_, printed in 1811 "from the prompt-books of the Theatres Royal." This publication, supplementing the larger _British Theatre_ of the same editor, contains more than two volumes of the works of Frederick Reynolds, a prolific playwright who was responsible for the English version of _Werther_ in drama; another of Mrs. Inchbald"s own writing and adaptation; one of Holcroft"s later works; one of c.u.mberland"s; and the other five made up of lesser pieces by Colman the younger, Dibdin, and others, serious plays in blank verse such as Hannah More"s _Percy_, and the Honourable John St. John"s _Mary Queen of Scots_, etc. More than one of these was a person of talent, more than one a person even of very great talent; while Holcroft and Colman, if not others, had displayed special ability for drama. Yet there is, perhaps, in the fifty plays of the ten volumes only one that can be called a good play, only one which is readable, and that is the _Trip to Scarborough_, which Sheridan simply adapted, which he did little more than edit, from Vanbrugh"s _Relapse_. Outside these volumes the acting drama of the period may be best studied in the other and better work of the pair just mentioned, and in O"Keefe.
John O"Keefe, or O"Keeffe (for the name is spelt both ways), was a very long-lived man, who was born at Dublin in 1748 and died at Southampton in 1833. But in the later years of his life he suffered from blindness; and the period of his greatest dramatic activity almost exactly coincided with that of our first chapter. He is said to have written some fifty pieces, of various kinds, between 1781 and 1798; and in the latter year he published a collection of about thirty, referring in the preface to others which "an inconsiderate disposal of the copyright"
prevented him from including. O"Keefe was to a certain extent a follower of Foote; but his pieces--though he was a practised actor--depended less upon his own powers of exposition than Foote"s. They range from rather farcical comedies to pure farces and comediettas much interspersed with songs for music; and their strictly literary merit is not often great, while for sheer extravagance they require the utmost license of the boards to excuse them. There is, however, something much more taking in them than in most of the dramatic work of the time. For instance, the "wild farce" (referred to but not named by Lamb in his paper on Munden) of _The Merry Mourners_, though as "improbable" as Mrs. Barbauld thought _The Ancient Mariner_ to be, has a singular hustle and bustle of sustained interest, and not a few shrewd strokes such as the following, which perhaps does not only apply to the end of the _eighteenth_ century. "Your London ladies are so mannified with their switch rattans and coats, and watch-chain nibbities, and their tip-top hats and their cauliflower cravats, that, ecod! there"s no mark of their being women except the petticoat." _The Castle of Andalusia_ (1782) is an early and capital example of the bandit drama, and _The Poor Soldier_ of the Irish comic opera. _Wild Oats_ supplied favourite parts to the actors of the time in Rover and Ephraim Smooth; and, with a little good will, one may read even slight things like _A Beggar on Horseback_ and _The Doldrum_ with some amus.e.m.e.nt. But O"Keefe has few gifts beyond knowledge of the stage, Irish shrewdness, Irish rattle, and an honest, straightforward simplicity; and that one turns to him from other dramatists of the period with some relief, is even more to their discredit than to his credit.
A curious and early fruit of this gradual divorce between drama and literature was Joanna Baillie, a lady whose virtues, amiability, and in a way talents, caused her to be spoken of by her own contemporaries with an admiration which posterity has found it hard to echo as concerns her strictly literary position in drama--some of her shorter poems were good. She was born in 1762 at Bothwell, of a good Scotch family, and her mother was a sister of the great surgeon Hunter. This gift descended to her elder brother Matthew, who was very famous in his own day as an anatomist and physician. Partly to be near him, Joanna and her sister Agnes established themselves at Hampstead, where she often entertained Scott and other great people, and where she lived till 23rd February 1851. In 1798 she published the first of a series of _Plays on the Pa.s.sions_, in which the eighteenth century theory of the ruling pa.s.sion was carried out to the uncompromising and even whimsical extent of supplying a brace of dramas, a tragedy and a comedy, on each of the stronger pa.s.sions, Hatred, Fear, Love, etc. The first volume, which opened with the rather striking closet drama of _Basil_, sometimes spoken of as _Count Basil_, was prefaced by an introductory discourse of considerable ability. The book, coming at a dead season of literature, was well received. It reached its third edition in the second year from its appearance, and one of its plays, _De Montfort_, was acted, with Kemble in the t.i.tle part, not without success. A second volume followed in 1802, and a third in 1812. In 1804 one of _Miscellaneous Plays_ had been issued, while others and some poems were added later. Joanna"s plays in general, it was admitted, would not act (though the Ettrick Shepherd in the _Noctes Ambrosianae_ denies this), and it requires some effort to read them. The blank verse of the tragedies, though respectable, is uninspired; the local and historical colour, whether of Byzantine, Saxon, or Renaissance times, is of that fatal "property"
character which has been noticed in the novel before Scott; and the pa.s.sion-scheme is obviously inartistic. The comedies are sometimes genuinely funny; but they do not display either the direct and fresh observation of manners, or the genial creation of character, which alone can make comedy last. In short Miss Baillie was fortunate in the moment of her appearance, but she cannot be called either a great dramatist or a good one.
The school of Artificial Tragedy--the phrase, though not a consecrated one, is as legitimate as that of artificial comedy--which sprung up soon after the beginning of this century, and which continued during its first half or thereabouts, if not later, is a curious phenomenon in English history, and has hardly yet received the attention it deserves.
The tragedy of the eighteenth century is almost beneath contempt, being for the most part pale French echo or else transpontine melodrama, with a few plaster-cast attempts to reproduce an entirely misunderstood Shakespeare. It was impossible that the Romantic movement in itself, and the study of the Elizabethan drama which it induced, should not lead to the practise of tragedy, while the existence of the Kembles as players and managers, might be thought to promise well for the tragic stage.
Yet there has always been something out of joint with English nineteenth century tragedy. Of Lamb"s _John Woodvil_ and G.o.dwin"s _Antonio_ mention has been made. Byron"s tragedies are indeed by no means the worst part of his work; but they also shared the defects of that work as poetry, and they were not eminently distinguished for acting qualities. Scott had no dramatic faculty; Sh.e.l.ley"s _Cenci_, despite its splendid poetry, is not actable; indeed the only one of the great English nineteenth century _Pleiade_ who was successful on the stage was Coleridge; and _Remorse_ and _Zapolya_ are not masterpieces.
Yet the fascination of the theatre, or at least of the drama, seemed to continue unaltered, and the attempts on or in it varied from the wild fantasy pieces of Beddoes (which no stage but the Elizabethan--if even that--could ever have welcomed) to the curious academic drama of which types extend not merely from Milman"s _Fazio_ in 1815 to Talfourd"s _Ion_ twenty years later, but further still. Of Milman notice has been taken in his far truer vocation as historian. Talfourd was a good lawyer, a worthy man, and as noted above, the friend and editor of Lamb.
But his tragedies are very cold, and it is difficult to believe that _Ion_ can have had any other attraction besides the popularity and skill of Macready, who indeed was greatly responsible for the appearance both of this and of better plays. In particular he stood usher to divers productions of Browning"s which have been mentioned, such as the rather involved and impossible _Strafford_, and the intensely pathetic but not wholly straightforward _Blot in the "Scutcheon_. This last is the one play of the century which--with a certain unsubstantiality of matter, a defect almost total in character, and a constant provocation to the fatal question, "Why are all these people behaving in this way?"--has the actual tragic _vis_ in its central point.
The character, however, and the condemnation of the English drama of the first half of this century from the literary point of view, are summed up in the single statement that its most prominent and successful dramatist was James Sheridan Knowles. Born in 1784, and son of the great Sheridan"s cousin at Cork, Knowles was introduced to London literary society pretty early. He tried soldiering (at least the militia) and medicine; but his bent towards the stage was too strong, and he became an actor, though never a very successful one, and a teacher of acting, though never a manager. He was about thirty when he turned dramatist, and though his plays justify the theatrical maxim that no one who has not practical knowledge of the stage can write a good acting play, they also justify the maxim of the study that in his day literary excellence had in some mysterious way obtained or suffered a divorce from dramatic merit. Not that these plays are exactly contemptible as literature, but that as literature they are not in the least remarkable. The most famous of his tragedies is _Virginius_, which dates, as performed in London at least, from 1820. It was preceded and followed by others, of which the best are perhaps _Caius Gracchus_ (1815), and _William Tell_ (1834). His comedies have worn better, and _The Hunchback_ (1832), and the _Love Chase_ (1836), are still interesting examples of last-century artificial comedy slightly refreshed. Independently of his technical knowledge, Knowles really had that knowledge of human nature without which drama is impossible, and he could write very respectable English. But the fatal thing about him is that he is content to dwell in decencies for ever.