There is no inspiration in him; his style, his verse, his theme, his character, his treatment are all emphatically mediocre, and his technique as a dramatist deserves only a little, though a little, warmer praise.
Better as literature, and at least as good as drama, are the best plays of the first Lord Lytton, another of the eminent hands of Macready, who undoubtedly counted for something in the success of _The Lady of Lyons_, _Richelieu_, and _Money_, the two first produced in 1838, and the last in 1840. _Richelieu_ is the nearest to Knowles in competence without excellence, the other two perhaps excel if not positively yet relatively. Many spectators quite recently, while unable to check laughter at the grandiloquent sentimentality and the stock situations of _The Lady of Lyons_, have been unable to avoid being touched by its real though ordinary pathos, and moved by its astonishing cleverness; while _Money_ is probably the very best comic example of the hybrid kind above referred to, the modernised artificial comedy. But Bulwer"s other plays, though the unsuccessful _d.u.c.h.esse de la Valliere_ is not bad reading, were less fortunate, and one of them is the subject of perhaps the most successful of Thackeray"s early reviews in the grotesque style, preserved in the _Yellowplush Papers_.
It will be observed that, with the single and not very notable exception of Sheridan Knowles, almost all the names already mentioned are those of persons to whom drama was a mere by-work. Another exception may be found in James R. Planche (1796-1880), a man of no very exalted birth or elaborate education, but an archaeologist of some merit, and from 1854 onwards an official representative of the honourable though discredited science of Heraldry as Rouge Croix Pursuivant and Somerset Herald. From 1818 onward Planche was the author, adapter, translator, and what not, of innumerable--they certainly run to hundreds--dramatic pieces of every possible sort from regular plays to sheer extravaganzas. He was happiest perhaps in the lighter and freer kinds, having a pleasant and never vulgar style of jocularity, a fair lyrical gift, and the indefinable knowledge of what is a play. But he stands only on the verge of literature proper, and the propriety, indeed the necessity, of including him here is the strongest possible evidence of the poverty of dramatic literature in our period. It would indeed only be possible to extend this chapter much by including men who have no real claim to appear, and who would too forcibly suggest the hired guests of story, introduced in order to avoid a too obtrusive confession of the absence of guests ent.i.tled to be present.
The greater and more strictly literary names of those who have tried the stage in the intervals of happier studies, from Miss Mitford and R. H.
Horne to Tennyson, have been mentioned elsewhere; and there is no need to return to them. Dr. James Westland Marston (1820-90) was once much praised, and was an author of Macready"s. Miss Isabella Harwood, daughter of the second editor of the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, produced under the pseudonym of "Ross Neil" a series of closet-dramas of excellent composition and really poetical fancy, but wanting the one thing needful. Perhaps a few other writers might with pains be added; and of course every reviewer knows that the flow of five-act tragedies, though less abundant than of old, has continued. But, on the whole, the sentence already put in more than one form remains true and firm--that in this period the dramatic work of those who have been really men and women of letters is generally far inferior to their other work, and that, with the rarest exceptions, the dramatic work of those who have not excelled in other kinds of literature is not literature at all.
CHAPTER XII
CONCLUSION
A conclusion which avows that it might almost as well have presented itself as a preface may seem to be self-condemned; it must be the business of the following pages to justify it. In summing up on such a great matter as this it is desirable--it is indeed necessary--to indicate, in broader lines than at the mere outset would have seemed appropriate or indeed possible, the general course of thought and of speech, of literary matter and literary form, during the century and more which is submitted to the view. We can thus place individuals in their position to each other and to the whole more boldly and with less reserve; we can sketch the general character of existing movements, the movers in which have been exempt from individual consideration by virtue of their life and work being incomplete; we can at once record accomplishment and indicate tendency.
The period dealt with in the first chapter of this book ill.u.s.trates the differences in appeal of such periods to the merely dilettante and "tasting" critic, and to the student of literature in the historical and comparative fashion. To the former it is one of the most ungrateful of all such sub-periods or sub-divisions in English literature. He finds in it none, or at most Boswell"s _Johnson_, Burns, and the _Lyrical Ballads_ (this last at its extreme end), of the chief and princ.i.p.al things on which alone he delights to fix his attention. Its better poetry, such as that of Cowper and Crabbe, he regards at best with a forced esteem; its worse is almost below his disgust. Its fiction is preposterous and childish; it contributes nothing even to the less "bellettristic" departments of literature that is worth his attention; it is a tedious dead season about which there is nothing tolerable except the prospect of getting rid of it before very long.
To the latter--to the historical and comparative student--on the other hand, it has an interest of an absolutely unique kind. As was observed in a former volume of this history, the other great blossoming time of English literature--that which we call Elizabethan, and by which we mean the last five and twenty years of the Queen"s reign and the fifty or sixty after her death--was preceded by no certain signs except those of restless seeking. Here, on the contrary, with no greater advantage of looking back, we can see the old fruit dropping off and the new forming, in a dozen different kinds and a hundred different ways. Extravagance on one side always provokes extravagance on the other; and because the impatient revolt of Coleridge and some others of the actual leaders into the Promised Land chose to present the eighteenth century as a mere wilderness in respect of poetry, enjoyment of nature, and so forth, there have been of late years critics who maintained that the poetical decadence of that century is all a delusion; in other words (it may be supposed) that Akenside and Mason are the poetical equals of Herrick and Donne. The _via media_, as almost always, is here also the _via veritatis_. The poets of the eighteenth century were poets; but the poetical stream did not, as a rule, run very high or strong in their channels, and they were tempted to make up for the sluggishness and shallowness of the water by playing rather artificial and rococo tricks with the banks. The fiction of the eighteenth century was, at its greatest, equal to the greatest ever seen; but it was as yet advancing with uncertain steps, and had not nearly explored its own domain. The history of the eighteenth century had returned to the true sense of history, and was endeavouring to be accurate; but it only once attained--it is true that with Gibbon it probably attained once for all--a perfect combination of diligence and range, of matter and of style.
In all these respects the list might, if it were proper, be extended to much greater length. The twenty years from 1780 to 1800 show us in the most fascinating manner the turn of the tide, not as yet coming in three feet abreast, rather creeping up by tortuous channels and chance depressions, but rising and forcing a way wherever it could. In the poets, major and minor, of the period, omitting, and even not wholly omitting, Burns and Blake--who are of no time intrinsically, but who, as it happens, belong accidentally to this time as exponents, the one of the refreshing influence of dialect and freedom from literary convention, the other of the refreshing influence of sympathy with old models and mystical dreaming--all the restlessness of the approaching crisis is seen. Nothing in literature is more interesting than to watch the effect of the half-unconscious aims and desires of Cowper and Crabbe, to see how they try to put the new wine in the old bottles, to compare them with Goldsmith and Thomson on the one hand, with Wordsworth and Coleridge on the other. Hayley perhaps alone, or almost alone, is rebel to the comparative method. Hayley is one of these hopeless creatures who abound at all periods, and whose native cast of nothingness takes a faint fashion from the time. But even in the verse of "Monk" Lewis we see the itch for new measures, the craving for lyric movement; even in the day-flies of the Della Crusca group the desire to be "something different." And then in Bowles, with his sonnets of places, in Sayers, with his rhymeless Pindarics, we come upon the actual guides to the right way, guides the oddest, the blindest, the most stumbling, but still--as not merely chronology but the positive testimony and the still more positive practice of those who followed them show--real guides and no misleaders.
Least studied, perhaps, because of its want of positive savour in comparison with their later achievements, but more interesting than all of these, is the early work of Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth themselves, and the work, not merely early but later, of men like Rogers and Campbell. Here the spectacle already presented in Crabbe and Cowper is repeated; but the process is in a further stage, and the fermentation is determining, according to the nature of the fermenting material. On Rogers it is nearly powerless; in Campbell only in his lyrics does it succeed in breaking up and dissolving the old crust; in Southey the effect is never quite complete; in Coleridge and Wordsworth, but especially in Coleridge, the leaven changes all the latter lump.
Thenceforward the process is reversed. Instead of instances of advance amid a ma.s.s of inertia or aimless wandering we have instances of reaction amid a ma.s.s of advance. The work of the revolutionary time is done; the scholar, contrary to Goethe"s dictum, has now not merely to exercise himself but to perfect.
The phenomena of the time in fiction are of the same character, but they lead as yet to no such distinct turn. The tale-telling of Beckford is like the singing of Burns, not uncoloured by the time, but still in the main purely individual; the purpose of the novels of Holcroft, G.o.dwin, and Bage is groping in the dark; the Radcliffian romance and its exaggeration by Lewis exhibit the same uncertainty, the same application of the Rule of False. And there is for once a more philosophical and less cowardly explanation--that Scott, the Joshua in this instance, as Coleridge and Wordsworth were in the other, was occupied elsewhere before he sought the Palestine of the novel. For it must be remembered that prose fiction, though it had been cultivated in a scattered and tentative way for thousands of years, was up to this time the most inorganic of literary kinds. Poets, when they chose to give themselves up to poetry and to turn their backs on convention, were almost as well off then as now. They had but to open the great Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, the Latins such as Lucretius and Catullus, the great mediaeval, the great Renaissance examples of their own art, to see, as soon as they chose to see, where and how to go right. The adventurer in fiction was dest.i.tute of any such a.s.sistance.
Only a few examples of much real excellence in his art were before him; many of those existing (including most of the mediaeval instances) were hardly before him at all; and none of these, with the exception of the eighteenth century novel of manners and character (which, in the nature of the case, was at that special time the last thing he wanted to imitate), and the short tale of France and Italy, could be said to have been brought to anything like perfection. Hence the wanderings and the stumblings here were far greater, the touch of the groping hands far feebler and less sure than even in poetry; but the crying for the light was there too, and it was to be heard in time. Even as it was, before the century closed, Miss Edgeworth had given important new lines to fiction, and was on the eve of opening the most fertile of all its seams or veins, that of national or provincial character; the purpose-novel just referred to was full of future, though it might be a future of a perilous and disputable kind; the terror-romance, subdued to saner limits and informed with greater knowledge and greater genius, was not soon to cease out of the land; and, a detail not to be neglected, the ever increasing popularity of the novel was making it more and more certain that it would number good intellects sooner or later.
In all other directions, with the single exception of drama, in which there was neither performance nor promise, so far as literature was concerned, to any great extent, the same restlessness of effort, and not always the same incompetence of result was seen. The fact of the revolutionary war abroad and the coercive policy thereby necessitated at home may have somewhat postponed the appearance of the new kind of periodical, in all shapes from quarterly to daily, which was to be so great a feature of the next age; but the same causes increased the desire for it and prepared not a few of its const.i.tuents. It is impossible for any tolerably careful reader not to notice how much more "modern," to use an unphilosophical but indispensable term, is the political satire both in verse and prose, which has been noticed in the first chapter of this book, than the things of more or less the same kind that immediately preceded it. It was an accident, no doubt, that made the _Anti-Jacobin_ ridicule Darwin"s caricature of eighteenth century style in poetry; yet that ridicule did far more to put this particular convention out of fashion than all the attacks of the same paper on innovators like Coleridge (who at that time had hardly attempted their literary innovations) could do harm. The very interest in foreign affairs, brought about by the most universal war that had ever been known, helped to introduce the foreign element which was to play so large a part in literature; and little affection as the critic may have for the principles of G.o.dwin or of Paine, he cannot deny that the spirit of inquiry, the rally and shock of attack and defence, are things a great deal better for literature than a placid contentment with accepted conventions.
Theology indeed may share with drama the reproach of having very little that is good to show from this time, or indeed for a long time to come.
For the non-conformist sects and the Low Church party, which had resulted from the Evangelical movement in the earlier eighteenth century, were, the Unitarians excepted, for the most part illiterate.
The Deist controversy had ceased, or, as conducted against Paine, required no literary skill; and the High Church movement had not begun.
Philosophy, not productive of very much, was more active; and the intensely alien and novel styles of German thought were certain in time to produce their effect, while their working was in exact line with all the other tendencies we have been surveying.
In short, during these twenty years, literature in almost all its parts was being thoroughly "boxed about." The hands that stirred it were not of the strongest as yet, they were absolutely unskilled, and for the most part they had not even any very clear conception of what they wanted to do. But almost everybody felt that something had to be done, and was anxious--even childishly anxious--to do something. It by no means always happens that such anxiety is rewarded or is a good sign; but it is always a noteworthy one, and in this instance there is no doubt about either the fact of the reward or its goodness.
The subsequent history of poetry during the century divides itself in an exceedingly interesting way, which has not perhaps yet been subjected to full critical comment. There are in it five pretty sharply marked periods of some ten or fifteen years each, which are distinguished, the first, third, and fifth, by the appearance in more or less numbers of poets of very high merit, and of characteristics more or less distinctly original; the second and fourth by poetic growths, not indeed scanty in amount and sometimes exquisite in quality, but tentative, fragmentary, and undecided. It will of course be understood that in this, as in all literary cla.s.sifications, mathematical accuracy must not be expected, and that the lives of many of the poets mentioned necessarily extend long before and after the periods which their poetical production specially distinguishes. In fact the life of Wordsworth covers as nearly as possible the whole five sub-periods mentioned, reckoning from his own birth-year to that of almost the youngest of the poets, of whom we shall here take account. And perhaps there are few better ways of realising the extraordinary eminence of English nineteenth century poetry than by observing, that during these eighty years there was never a single one at which more or fewer persons were not in existence, who had produced or were to produce poetry of the first cla.s.s. And the more the five-fold division indicated is examined and a.n.a.lysed the more curious and interesting will its phenomena appear.
The divisions or batches of birth-years are worth indicating separately: the first comprises the eighth and ninth decades of the eighteenth century, from the birth of Scott and the Lakers to that of Sh.e.l.ley, with Keats as a belated and so to speak posthumous but most genuine child of it; the second covers about fifteen years from the birth of George Darley, who was of the same year (1795) with Keats, to the eve of that of Tennyson; the third goes from 1810 or thereabouts, throwing back to include the elder Tennysons and Mrs. Browning; the fourth extends from about 1825 to 1836; the fifth from the birth of Mr. Morris (throwing back as before to admit Rossetti) to the end.
In the first of these we see the Romantic revolt or renaissance, whichever word may be preferred, growing up under the joint influences of the opening of mediaeval and foreign literature; of the excitement of the wars of the French Revolution; of the more hidden but perhaps more potent force of simple ebb-and-flow which governs the world in all things, though some fondly call it Progress; and of the even more mysterious chance or choice, which from time to time brings into the world, generally in groups, persons suited to effect the necessary changes. The "Return to Nature," or to be less question-begging let us say the taking up of a new standpoint in regard to nature, made half unconsciously by men like Cowper and Crabbe, a.s.sisted without intending it by men like Burns and Blake, effected in intention if not in full achievement by feeble but lucky pioneers like Bowles, a.s.serts itself once for all in the _Lyrical Ballads_, and then works itself out in different--in almost all possibly different--ways through the varying administration of the same spirit by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Sh.e.l.ley and Keats, in the highest and primary rank, by Scott and Byron in the next, by Southey, Campbell, Leigh Hunt, Moore, and others in the third.
And it is again most interesting to watch how the exertion of influence and the character of it are by no means in proportion to the exact poetical strength of the agent. Scott and Byron, certainly inferior as poets to the first four mentioned, have probably had a greater bulk of poetical influence and poetical action on mankind at large certainly, and a vastly earlier, more immediate and more sweeping influence on other poets than their betters. Leigh Hunt, a poet quite of the third rank, exercised directly and indirectly, through Sh.e.l.ley and Keats, an influence on the form of poetry, on metre, cadence, phrase, greater than any of the others, save Wordsworth and Byron, and perhaps more than these. In all ways, however, by this channel and that, in straightforward or stealthy fashion, the poetic flood comes up, and by the death of Byron, Sh.e.l.ley and Keats having still more prematurely gone before, it is at its very highest spring. Six and twenty years pa.s.sed, from 1798 to 1824, from the time when the _Lyrical Ballads_ were brought out to take their chance to the time when Mr. Beddoes, Mr.
Procter, and somebody else clubbed to publish Sh.e.l.ley"s posthumous poems at their own expense or at least guarantee, and justly objected to paying for more than 250 copies, because more were not likely to be sold. In these six and twenty years such an addition had been made to English poetry as five times the s.p.a.ce had not previously seen, as perhaps was not far from equalling the glorious gains of a not very different though somewhat longer s.p.a.ce of time between the appearance of the _Shepherd"s Calendar_ and the death of Shakespeare.
But the sequel of this abnormally high tide is hardly less interesting than itself. We generally expect at such moments in literature either a decided falling off, or else a period of decent imitation, of "school work." It would be absurd to say that there is no contrast, no falling off, and no imitation in the group of poets noticed at the end of the second chapter in this volume. But they are not utterly decadent, and they are by no means purely or merely imitative. On the contrary, their note is quite different from that of mere school work, and in a sort of eccentric and spasmodic fashion they attain to singular excellence.
Hood, Praed, Macaulay, Taylor, Darley, Beddoes, Hartley Coleridge, Horne, are not to Wordsworth or Coleridge, to Byron or to Sh.e.l.ley, what the later so-called Elizabethan playwrights are to Jonson and Fletcher, the later poets of the same time to Spenser and Donne. But they almost all, perhaps all, seem forced to turn into some bye-way or backwater of poetry, to be unable or unwilling to keep the crown of the causeway, the flood of the tide. Hood and Praed--the former after actually attempting great poetry, and coming nearer to it than some great poets come in their first attempts--wander into the special borderland of humorous and grotesque verse, achieving in different parts of it something not unlike absolute and unsurpa.s.sed success. Beddoes, and to some extent Darley, adopt fantastic varieties, grim in the former"s hands, playful chiefly in the latter"s, but alike remote from everyday interests and broad appeals; while the incomparable lyrics of Beddoes are of no special time or school, their very Elizabethanism being somewhat delusive.
Taylor and Horne attempt the serious moral play with hardly any stage purposes or possibilities, and Horne in _Orion_ tries an eccentric kind of ethical or satirical epic. Macaulay--the most prominent of all, and the most popular in his tastes and aims--is perhaps the nearest to a "schoolman," adapting Scott as he does in his _Lays_; yet even here there is no mere imitation.
Thus the people of this minor transition exhibit--in a most interesting way, rendered even more interesting by the repet.i.tion of it which, as we have seen and shall see, came about twenty years later--the mixed phenomena of an after-piece and a _lever de rideau_, of precursorship and what we must for want of a better word call decadence. They were not strong enough in themselves, or were not favourably enough circ.u.mstanced, entirely to refresh or redirect the main current of poetry; so they deviated from it. But hardly in the least of them is there absent the sign and symptom of the poetic spirit being still about, of the poetic craft still in full working order. And their occasional efforts, their experiments in the half-kinds they affected, have a curious charm. English poetry would be undeniably poorer without the unearthly s.n.a.t.c.hes of Beddoes, the exquisitely urbane verse-of-society of Praed, the pathetic-grotesque of Hood, even the stately tirades of Horne and Taylor. Some of them, if not all, may at this or that time have been exaggerated in value, by caprice, by reaction, by mere personal sympathy. But no universal critic will refuse admiration to them in and for themselves.
In the next stage we are again face to face, not with half-talents, uncertain of their direction, but with whole genius, inevitably working on its predestined lines. Nothing quite like the poetical career and the poetical conception of Alfred Tennyson and of Robert Browning, so different in all respects, except that of duration and coincidence in time, meets us in English, perhaps nothing similar meets us in any literature. It is easy to overestimate both; and both have been over-estimated. It is still easier to depreciate both; and both have been depreciated. Both wrote constantly, and at frequent intervals, for some sixty years--the same sixty years--and, with not more than fair allowance for the effects of time, both wrote at the end better than at the beginning, and nearly as well as at the best time of each.
Wordsworth, it is true, wrote for nearly as long, but no one can a.s.sert the same duration of equality in his production.
In a certain sense, no doubt, neither can claim the same distinct individuality, the same unmistakable and elementary _quality_, as that which distinguishes Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Sh.e.l.ley.
The work of each is always at once recognisable by any tolerably competent judge; but the signs of ident.i.ty are more composite than atomic, more derived and literary than essentially native. Browning"s unconventional mannerisms, and his wide range of subject, have made him seem even less of a mere scholar than Tennyson; but, as a fact, each is independent enough to a certain extent and to a certain extent only. In both appears, perhaps for the first time, certainly for the first time in combination with distinct original genius, that indebtedness to the past, that relapse upon it in the very act of forming vast schemes for the future, which is more the note of the nineteenth century than anything else. They not merely have all literature and all history behind them; but they know it. Yet this knowledge does not weigh on them. They do not exactly neglect it as Wordsworth and Sh.e.l.ley were still able to do, but they keep it under. It is the attendant fiend for which they must find work, but which they never, as too many of their contemporaries and followers have done, allow to become their master.
And so they two, as it seems to me, do actually win their way to the first cla.s.s, not perhaps to the absolutely first division of it, but to a first cla.s.s still pretty rigidly limited.
It is not the object of this Conclusion to deal with the performances of individuals at any length, and therefore I must refer back to the text for a detailed indication of the position of Keats as the summer-up of the tradition of the first of the groups or periods here noticed, and the begetter, master, and teacher of the third, as well as for descriptions of the different manners in which Tennyson and Browning respectively shared and distributed between themselves that catholic curiosity in poetical subject, that exploration of all history and art and literature, which is the main characteristic of strictly nineteenth century poetry. But it is very pertinent here to point out the remarkable way in which these two poets, from the unexampled combination of length and potency in their poetical period of influence, governed all the poetry that has followed them. We shall now see that under their shadow at least two well-marked groups arose, each of magnitude and individuality sufficient to justify the a.s.signment to it of a separate position. Yet it was in their shadow that these rose and flourished, and though the trees themselves have at length fallen, the shadow of their names is almost as great as ever.
The first of these two groups, the fourth of our present cla.s.sification, renews, as has been said before, the features of its twenty or thirty years older forerunner, the group between Keats and Tennyson, in a most curious and attractive fashion. Once more we find the notes of uncertainty, of straying into paths,--not always quite blind-alleys, but bye-paths certainly,--the presence of isolated burst and flash, of effort unsuccessful or unequal as a whole. But here we find, what in the earlier chapter or section we do not find, distinct imitativeness and positive school-following. This imitation, attempting Sh.e.l.ley at times with little success (for, let it be repeated, Sh.e.l.ley is not imitable), selected in regular chronological order, three masters, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning, though in each stage the master of the preceding rather shared than yielded his chair. It has been said in a famous pa.s.sage that Wordsworth was more read about sixty years ago than at any time before or since, and this may perhaps be true. But his influence on writers has not depended on his popularity with readers, and from Sir Aubrey de Vere, who was born more than a century ago, to verse-writers who have only just published, his unmistakable tone, the tone which, so far as we can see, would never have been if Wordsworth had never existed, shows itself. The writing influence of Tennyson did not begin till the issue of the _Poems_ of 1842, but it began almost immediately then, and has remained in full force to the present day. It is an influence somewhat more external and technical than Wordsworth"s, but for that reason even more unmistakable, and some of its results are among the most curious of school-copies in literature. As for Browning, imitation there tried both the outside and the inside, not very often with happy results, but, of course, with results even more obvious to the most uncritical eye than the results of the imitation of Tennyson itself.
The attempts to be original and to break away from these and their imitations--the princ.i.p.al of them being that of the so-called Spasmodic school, which flourished at the dead waist and middle of the century--were not particularly happy, and those who incline to gloomy views may say that the imitation was less happy still. In Mr. Matthew Arnold, a recalcitrant but unmistakable Wordsworthian, sharing a partly reluctant allegiance between Wordsworth, the ancients, Goethe, and Tennyson himself, it is impossible not to think that a freer att.i.tude, a more independent and less literary aim, might have strengthened his elegance, supplied his curious mixture of stiffness and grace, and even made him less unequal than he actually is. And yet he is much the greatest poet of the period. Its effect was more disastrous still upon the second Lord Lytton, who was content to employ an excellent lyrical vein, and a gift of verse satire of the fantastic kind so distinct and fascinating, that it approaches the merit of fantasists in other kinds of the former group, like Beddoes and Darley, to far too great an extent on echoes. The fact is, that by this time, to speak conceitedly, the obsession of the book was getting oppressive. Men could hardly sing for remembering, or, at least, without remembering, what others had sung before them, and became either slavishly imitative or wilfully recalcitrant to imitation. The great leaders indeed continued to sing each in his own way, and, though with perfect knowledge of their forerunners, not in the least hampered by that knowledge. But something else was needed to freshen the middle regions of song.
It was found in that remarkable completion of the English Romantic movement, which is in relation to art called prae-Raphaelitism, and which is represented in literature, to mention only the greatest names, by Rossetti, his sister, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Swinburne. The death of the two former, and the fact that the movement itself, still active in art, has in a manner rounded itself off, though it is not necessarily finished, in literature, enable us to discuss it here as a whole, though its two chief poets are luckily still alive.
The first thing of interest in general history which strikes us, in regard to this delightful chapter of English poetry, is its ill.u.s.tration--a common one in life and letters--of the fact that there is a false as well as a true side to the question quoted by Aristotle: "If water chokes you, what are you to drink on the top of it?" "Wine,"
one kind of humourist might answer; "More water," another: and both rightly. It has been said that the group which preceded this suffered from the pressure of too constant, wide, and various reminiscence, literary, artistic, and other. The prae-Raphaelites refreshed themselves and the world by applying still more strenuously to the particular kind and period of such reminiscence which had been hitherto, despite the mediaeval excursions of many from Percy to Tennyson, imperfectly utilised. The literary pract.i.tioners of the school (with whom alone we are concerned) were not indeed by any means purely mediaeval in their choice of subject, in their founts of inspiration, or in their method of treatment. English poetry has known few if any more accomplished scholars both in the cla.s.sics and in the modern languages than Mr.
Swinburne, for instance; and something similar might be said of others.
But, on the whole, the return of this school--for all new things in literature are returns--was to a mediaevalism different from the tentative and sc.r.a.ppy mediaevalism of Percy, from the genial but slightly superficial mediaevalism of Scott, and even from the more exact but narrow and distinctly conventionalised mediaevalism of Tennyson. They had other appeals, but this was their chief.
It may seem that mere or main archaism is not a very charming or powerful thing, and in weaker hands it would not have been either one or the other; but it so happened that these hands were very strong indeed.
Mr. Rossetti had one of the most astonishing combinations ever known of artistically separate gifts, as well as a singular blend of pa.s.sion and humour. His sister was one of the great religious poets of the world.
Mr. Swinburne has never been surpa.s.sed, if he has ever been equalled, by any poet in any language for command of the more rushing and flowing forms of verse. Mr. Morris has few equals in any time or country for narrative at once decorative and musical. Moreover, though it may seem whimsical or extravagant to say so, these poets added to the very charm of mediaeval literature which they thus revived a subtle something which differentiates it from--which to our perhaps blind sight seems to be wanting in--mediaeval literature itself. It is constantly complained (and some of those who cannot go all the way with the complainants can see what they mean) that the graceful and labyrinthine stories, the sweet s.n.a.t.c.hes of song, the quaint drama and legend of the Middle Ages lack--to us--life; that they are shadowy, unreal, tapestry on the wall, not alive even as living pageants are. By the strong touch of modernness which these poets and the best of their followers introduced into their work, they have given the vivification required.
Beyond them we must not go, nor inquire whether the poets who have not come to forty years represent a new school of the masterful and supreme kind, or one of the experimental and striving sort, or something a good deal worse than this, a period of sheer interval and suspense, unenlivened even by considerable attempt. Not only our scheme, not only common prudence and politeness, but most of all the conditions of critical necessity insist on the curtain being here dropped. It is possible that a critic may be able to isolate and project himself sufficiently to judge, as posterity will judge them, the actually accomplished work of his own contemporaries and juniors. But even such a skilful and fortunate person cannot judge the work which they have not yet produced, and which may in all cases, and must in some, modify their position and alter their rank.
But what has been has been, and on this ma.s.s (not in the actual case "vulgar" by any means) of things done it is possible to p.r.o.nounce securely. And with security it may be said that for total amount, total merit, total claims of freshness and distinctness, no period of poetical literature can much, if at all, exceed the ninety years of English verse from _The Ancient Mariner_ to _Crossing the Bar_. The world has had few poets better than the best of ours during this time in degree; it has had none like Sh.e.l.ley, perhaps none exactly like Wordsworth, in kind.
The secret of long narrative poems that should interest has been recovered; the sonnet, one of the smallest but one of the most perfect of poetic forms, has been recovered likewise. Attempts to recover the poetic drama have been mostly failures; and serious satire has hardly reappeared. But lighter satire, with other "applied" poetry, has shown variety and excellence. Above all lyric, the most poetic kind of poetry, has attained a perfection never known before, except once in England and once in Greece. It has been impossible hitherto to make a full and free anthology of the lyric poets from Burns and Blake to Tennyson and Browning to match the anthologies often made of those from Surrey or Sidney to Herrick or Vaughan. But when it can be done it is a question whether the later volume will not even excel the earlier in intensity and variety, if not perhaps in freshness of charm.
And then it is needful once more to insist, even at the risk of disgusting, on the additional interest given by the subtle and delicate, but still distinctly traceable gradations, the swell and sinking, the flow and ebb, of poetical production and character during the time. As no other flourishing time of any poetry has lasted so long, so none has had the chance of developing these mutations in so extensive and attractive a manner; in none has it been possible to feel the pulse of poetry, so to speak, in so connected and considerable a succession of experiment. Poetical criticism can never be scientific; but it can seldom have had an opportunity of going nearer to a scientific process than here, owing to the volume, the connection, the duration, the accessibility of the phenomena submitted to the critic. The actual secret as usual escapes; but we can hunt the fugitive by a closer trail than usual through the chambers of her flight.
Of the highest poetry, however, as of other highest things, Goethe"s famous axiom _uber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh_ holds good. Although there is a difference between the expressions of this highest poetry in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, in the fourteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth after Christ there is also a certain quiet sameness, not indiscernibility but still ident.i.ty. The lower kinds of literature admit of more apparent and striking freshness of exterior. And perhaps the most strikingly fresh, some might even say the distinctive, product of the nineteenth century, is its prose fiction.
This, as has been shown in detail, is much later in date than the poetry in anything like a characteristic and fully developed state. Although it was busily produced during the last twenty years of the eighteenth century and the first fifteen of the nineteenth, the very best work of the time, except such purely isolated things as _Vathek_, are experiments, and all but the very best--the novels of Miss Edgeworth, those written but not till quite the end of the time published by Miss Austen, and a very few others--are experiments of singular lameness and ill success.
With Scott"s change from verse to prose, the modern romance admittedly, and to a greater extent than is generally thought the modern novel, came into being; and neither has gone out of being since. In the two chapters which have been devoted to the subject we have seen how the overpowering success of _Waverley_ bred a whole generation of historical novels; how side by side with this the older novel of manners, slightly altered, continued to be issued, with comic deviations chiefly, as in the hands of Theodore Hook; how Bulwer attempted a sort of cross between the two; how about the middle of the century the historical novel either ceased or changed, to revive later after a middle period ill.u.s.trated by the brilliant romances of Kingsley; how about the same time the strictly modern novel of manners came into being in the hands of Thackeray, Miss Bronte, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope, d.i.c.kens overlapping both periods in a fantastic and nondescript style of his own; and how more recently still both romance and novel have spread out and ramified into endless subdivisions.
There is, however, this broad line of demarcation between poetry and the novel, that they are written for different ends and from different motives. It is natural to man to write poetry; it does not appear to be by any means so certainly or unvaryingly necessary to him to read it.
Except at rare periods and for short times, poetry has never offered the slightest chance of livelihood to any considerable number of persons; and it is tolerably certain that if the aggregate number of poets since the foundation of the world had had nothing to live on but their aggregate gains as poets, starvation would have been the commonplace rule, instead of the dramatic exception, among the sons of Apollo.
On the other hand, it is no doubt also natural to man to tell prose stories, and it seems, though it was a late-discovered apt.i.tude, that it is not unnatural to him to read them; but the writing of them does not seem to be at all an innate or widely disseminated need. Until some hundred or two hundred years ago very few were written at all; the instances of persons who do but write novels because they must are exceedingly rare, and it is as certain as anything can be that of the enormous production of the last three-quarters of a century not 5, perhaps not 1 per cent would have been produced if the producing had not led, during the whole of that time, in most cases but those of hopeless incompetence to some sort of a livelihood, in many to very comfortable income, and in some to positive wealth and fame. In other words, poetry is the creation of supply and novel-writing of demand; poetry can hardly ever be a trade and in very rare cases a profession, while novel-writing is commonly a very respectable profession, and unfortunately sometimes a rather disreputable trade.
Like other professions, however, it enlists genius sometimes, talent often; and the several and successive ways in which this genius and this talent show themselves are of more than sufficient interest. But the steady demand, and the inevitable answer to it, work adversely to such spontaneous and interesting fluctuations of production as those which we have traced in reference to poetry. There have been times, particularly that between the cessation of Sir Walter"s best work and the perfecting of that of Thackeray, in which the average value of even the best novels was much lower than at other times. But even in these the average volume maintained itself very well, and, indeed, steadily increased.
It is this which, with another to be mentioned shortly, will, so far as it is possible for a contemporary to judge, be noted in the literary history of the future as the distinguishing crop or field of the nineteenth century. Sermons, essays, plays, no doubt, continue to be written; but the novel has supplanted the sermon, the essay, the play in the place which each at different times held as the _popular_ form of literature. It may be added, or repeated, that it has in part at least achieved this result by trespa.s.sing upon the provinces of all these three forms and of many others. This is true, but is of somewhat less importance than might be thought. The fable has an old trick of adjusting itself to almost every possible kind of literary use, and the novel is only an enlarged and more fully organised fable. It does not, no doubt, do best when it abuses this privilege of its ancestor, and saturates itself overmuch with "purpose," but it has at least an ancestral right to do so.