Studies in Early Victorian Literature.
by Frederic Harrison.
NOTE
The following essays appeared in the _Forum_ of New York, and simultaneously in London, during the years 1894-95. They have been carefully revised and partly re-written, after due consideration of various suggestions and criticisms both in England and in America. The aim of the writer was to attempt a mature estimate of the permanent influence and artistic achievement of some of the princ.i.p.al prose writers in the earlier half of the reign of our Queen. The work of living authors has not been touched upon, nor any book of poetry, philosophy, or science.
CHARACTERISTICS OF VICTORIAN LITERATURE
That which in England is conveniently described as the Victorian Age of literature has a character of its own, at once brilliant, diverse, and complex. It is an age peculiarly difficult to label in a phrase; but its copious and versatile gifts will make it memorable in the history of modern civilisation. The Victorian Age, it is true, has no Shakespeare or Milton, no Bacon or Hume, no Fielding or Scott--no supreme master in poetry, philosophy, or romance, whose work is incorporated with the thought of the world, who is destined to form epochs and to endure for centuries. Its genius is more scientific than literary, more historical than dramatic, greater in discovery than in abstract thought.
In lyric poetry and in romance our age has names second only to the greatest; its researches into nature and history are at least equal to those of any previous epoch; and, if it has not many great philosophers, it has developed the latest, most arduous, most important of all the sciences. This is the age of Sociology: its central achievement has been the revelation of social laws. This social aspect of thought colours the poetry, the romance, the literature, the art, and the philosophy of the Victorian Age. Literature has been the gainer thereby in originality and in force. It has been the loser in symmetry, in dignity, in grace.
The Victorian Age is a convenient term in English literature to describe the period from 1837 to 1895: not that we a.s.sign any sacramental efficacy to a reign, or a.s.sume that the Queen has given any special impulse to the writers of her time. Neither reigns, nor years, nor centuries, nor any arbitrary measure of time in the gradual evolution of thought can be exactly applied, or have any formative influence. A period of so many years, having some well-known name by which it can be labelled, is a mere artifice of cla.s.sification. And of course an Englishman will not venture to include in his survey the American writers, or to bring them within his national era. The date, 1837, is an arbitrary point, and a purely English point. Yet it is curious how different a colour may be seen in the main current of the English literature produced before and after that year. In the year of the Queen"s accession to the throne, the great writers of the early part of this century were either dead or silent. Scott, Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb, Sheridan, Hazlitt, Mackintosh, Crabbe, and Cobbett, were gone. There were still living in 1837, Wordsworth, Southey, Campbell, Moore, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, De Quincey, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Mitford, Leigh Hunt, Brougham, Samuel Rogers:--living, it is true, but they had all produced their important work at some earlier date. Carlyle, d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, Macaulay, Tennyson, Browning, had begun to write, but were not generally known. The princ.i.p.al English authors who belong equally to the Georgian and to the Victorian Age are Landor, Bulwer, Disraeli, Hallam, and Milman, and they are not quite in the very first rank in either age. It is a significant fact that the reign of the Queen has produced, with trifling exceptions, the whole work of Tennyson, the Brownings, Thackeray, d.i.c.kens, the Brontes, George Eliot, Kingsley, Trollope, Spencer, Mill, Darwin, Ruskin, Grote, Macaulay, Freeman, Froude, Lecky, Milman, Green, Maine, Matthew Arnold, Symonds, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, John Morley, to say nothing of younger men who are still in their prime and promise.
Widely as these differ among themselves, they have characters which differentiate them from all men of the eighteenth century, and also from the men of the era of Goethe and Scott. Can we imagine _Sartor Resartus_ being published in the age of Johnson, or _In Memoriam_ in that of Byron? How different a land is the Italy which Ruskin sees from the Italy that Rogers knew! What a new world is that of the Brontes and George Eliot beside that which was painted by Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen! In what things would Southey and John Morley agree, except about books and pure English? Place Burke _On the Sublime and Beautiful_ beside Ruskin"s _Modern Painters_; compare the _Stones of Venice_ with Eustace"s _Cla.s.sical Tour_; compare Carlyle"s _French Revolution_ with Gibbon"s _Decline and Fall_; compare the _Book of Sn.o.bs_ with Addison"s _Spectator_; contrast _The Ring and the Book_ with Gray"s _Elegy_ or Cowper"s _Task_. What wholly different types, ideas, aims! The age of Pope and Addison, of Johnson and Gibbon, clung to symmetry, "the grand air," the "best models"; it cared much more for books than for social reforms, and in the world of letters a cla.s.sical manner was valued far more than originality of ideas. And when we come to a later age, what an irrepressible and stormy imagination do we find! Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, Scott, Coleridge, Campbell, Southey, Landor, revelled in romance and colour, in battle and phantasmagoria, in tragedy, mystery, and legend. They boiled over with excitement, and their visions were full of fight. The roar and fire of the great revolutionary struggle filled men"s brains with fierce and strange dreams.
Our Victorian Age is as different from the Virgilian and Ciceronian style of the age of Gray and Johnson, as it is from the resounding torrent which was poured forth by Byron and Scott. The social earnestness of our time colours our literature, and almost distorts our literature; while, on the other hand, our practical and scientific genius scorns the melodramatic imagery with which our grandfathers were delighted. Gibbon would have smiled a cruel epigram, if he had been expected to thrust a Latter-Day Pamphlet on the social question into one of his chapters on the Fall of Rome. But Carlyle"s _French Revolution_ is as much political rhapsody and invective as it is history. d.i.c.kens made a series of novels serve as onslaughts on various social abuses; and George Eliot"s heart is ever with Darwin, Spencer, and Comte, as much as it is with Miss Austen. Ruskin would sacrifice all the pictures in the world, if society would transform itself into a Brotherhood of St. George. Tennyson has tried to put the dilemmas of theological controversy into lyric poetry, and Psychology is now to be studied, not in metaphysical ethics, but in popular novels. The aim of the modern historian is to compile a _Times_ newspaper of events which happened three or four, eight or ten centuries ago. The aim of the modern philosopher is to tabulate mountains of research, and to prune away with agnostic _non possumus_ the ancient oracles of hypothesis and imagination.
Our literature to-day has many characteristics: but its central note is the dominant influence of Sociology--enthusiasm for social truths as an instrument of social reform. It is scientific, subjective, introspective, historical, archaeological:--full of vitality, versatility, and diligence:--intensely personal, defiant of all law, of standards, of convention:--laborious, exact, but often indifferent to grace, symmetry, or colour:--it is learned, critical, cultured:--with all its ambition and its fine feeling, it is unsympathetic to the highest forms of the imagination, and quite alien to the drama of action.
It would be a difficult problem in social dynamics to fix anything like a true date for this change in the tone of literature, and to trace it back to its real social causes. The historian of English literature will perhaps take the death of Walter Scott, in 1832, as a typical date. By a curious coincidence, Goethe died in the same year. Two years later Coleridge and Lamb died. Within a few years more most of those who belonged to the era of Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, Scott, and Sheridan were departed or had sung their last effective note. The exceptions were Wordsworth and his immediate Lakist followers, Landor and Bulwer, of whom the latter two continued to produce. The death of Scott happened in the year of the Reform Act of 1832; and here we reach a political and social cause of the great change. The reformed democratic Parliament of 1832 was itself the reaction after the furious upheaval caused by the Revolution of 1789, and it heralded the social and legislative revolution of the last sixty years. It was the era when the steam-power and railway system was founded, and the vast industrial development which went with it. The last sixty years have witnessed a profound material revolution in English life; and the reaction on our literature has been deep and wide.
The most obvious and superficial change in literature is the extreme diversity of its form. There is no standard now, no conventional type, no good "model." It is an age of "Go-as-you-please," and of _tous les genres sont bons, surtout le genre ennuyeux_. In almost any age of English literature, or indeed of any other literature, an experienced critic can detect the tone of the epoch at once in prose or verse.
There is in them an unmistakeable _Zeit-Geist_ in phraseology and form.
The Elizabethan drama, essay, or philosophy could not be mistaken for the drama, essay, or philosophy of the Restoration; the heroic couplet reigned from Dryden to Byron; Ciceronian diction reigned from Addison to Burke; and then the Quarterlies, with Southey, Lamb, Scott, De Quincey, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, and Leigh Hunt, introduced a simpler, easier tone of the well-bred _causeur_, as free from cla.s.sical mannerism as it was free from subtle mechanism or epigrammatic brilliance. Down to about the death of Scott and Coleridge, almost any page of English prose or verse could be certainly attributed to its proper generation by the mark of its style alone.
The Victorian literature presents a dozen styles, every man speaking out what is in him, in the phrases he likes best. Our _Zeit-Geist_ flashes all across the heavens at once. Let us place a page from _Sartor Resartus_ beside a page from Macaulay"s _History of England_, or either beside a page from Arnold"s _Literature and Dogma_ or one from the _Stones of Venice_. Here are four typical styles in prose, each of which has been much admired and imitated; yet they differ as widely as Sh.e.l.ley from Ovid, or Tennyson from Pope. Again, for verse, contrast _Paracelsus_ with _The Princess_--poems written about the same time by friends and colleagues. Compare a poem of William Morris with one by Lewis Morris. Compare Swinburne"s _Songs and Sonnets_ with Matthew Arnold"s _Obermann_; Rudyard Kipling"s _Ballads_ with _The Light of Asia_. Have they any common standard of form, any type of metre? The purists doubt as to the style of Carlyle as a "model," but no one denies that the _French Revolution_ and _Hero-Worship_, at least in certain pa.s.sages, display a mastery over language as splendid as anything in our prose literature. Exactly the same might be said also of _Esmond_, and again of _Silas Marner_, and again of the _Seven Lamps of Architecture_. Yet all of these differ as widely as one style can differ from another. _Fifine at the Fair_, and _The Angel in the House_, have each fervent admirers. No! there is no recognised "model"
either in verse or in prose.
In truth, we have now both in prose and in verse strongly-contrasted types, each of which commands admiration and following. Both in prose and verse we have one type which has carried subtle finish and a purism studied almost to the point of "preciousness," alongside of another type which crowds its effects without regard to tone and harmony, and by its side a third type which trots along breathless in its shirt-sleeves. Tennyson"s _In Memoriam_ has that exquisite polish of workmanship which we find in such poets as Virgil, Racine, and Milton--that perfection of phrase which we cannot conceive the poet capable of improving by any labour. Put aside for the moment any question about the ideas, inspiration, or power of the poem as a whole, and consider that, in all those hundreds of stanzas, there is hardly one line that is either careless, prosaic, or harsh, not a single false note, nothing commonplace, nothing over-coloured, but uniform harmony of phrase. This perfection of phrasing is not always to be found even in the greatest poets, for Aeschylus and Dante at times strike a fierce discord, and Shakespeare, Calderon, and Goethe sometimes pa.s.s into rank extravaganza. But this scholarly and measured speech has impressed itself on the poetry of our time--insomuch, that the Tennysonian cycle of minor poets has a higher standard of grace, precision, and subtlety of phrase than the second rank of any modern literature:--a standard which puts to shame the rugosities of strong men like Dryden, Burns, and Byron. There is plenty of mannerism in this school of our minor poetry, but no one can call it either slovenly or harsh.
The friend, contemporary, almost the rival of Tennyson, one whom some think endowed by nature with even stronger genius, on the other hand, struck notes of discord harsher, louder, and more frequent than any poet since Elizabethan times. Whatever we hold about the insight and imagination of Browning, no one can doubt that he often chose to be uncouth, crabbed, grotesque, and even clownish, when the humour was on him. There are high precedents for genius choosing its own instrument and making its own music. But, whatever were Browning"s latent powers of melody, his method when he chose to play upon the gong, or the ancient instrument of marrow-bone and cleavers, was the exact ant.i.thesis of Tennyson"s; and he set on edge the teeth of those who love the exquisite cadences of _In Memoriam_ and _Maud_. Browning has left deep influence, if not a school. The younger Lytton, George Meredith, Buchanan, here and there Swinburne and William Morris, seem to break loose from the graceful harmony which the Tennysonians affect, and to plunge headlong into the obscure, the uncouth, the ghastly, and the lurid. No one denies originality and power in many of these pieces: but they are flat blasphemy against the pellucid melody of the Tennysonian idyll. Our poetry seems to be under two contrary spells: it is enthralled at one time by the ravishing symmetry of Mozart; at another time it yearns for the crashing discords that thunder along the march of the Valkyrie through the air.
As in poetry, so in prose. We find in our best prose of to-day an extraordinary mastery over pure, nervous, imaginative language; and all this, alongside here of a riotous extravagance, and there, of a crude and garrulous commonplace. Thackeray"s best chapters, say in _Vanity Fair_, _Esmond_, the _Humourists_, contain an almost perfect prose style--a style as nervous as that of Swift, as easy as that of Goldsmith, as graceful as that of Addison, as rich as that of Gibbon or Burke. No English romances have been clothed in a language so chaste and scholarly--not even Fielding"s. Certainly not the Waverley series; for Scott, as we know, rehea.r.s.ed his glowing chronicles of the past with the somewhat conventional verbosity of the _improvisatore_ who recites but will not pause to write. George Eliot relates her story with an art even more cultivated than that of Thackeray--though, doubtless, with an over-elaborated self-consciousness, and perceptible suggestions of the laboratory of the student. Trollope tells his artless tales in perfectly pure, natural, and most articulate prose, the language of a man of the world telling a good story well. And a dozen living novelists are masters of a style of extreme ease and grace.
Side by side with this chastened English prose, we have men of genius who have fallen into evil habits. Bulwer, who knew better, would quite revel in a stagey bombast; d.i.c.kens, with his pathos and his humour, was capable of sinking into a theatrical mannerism and c.o.c.kney vulgarities of wretched taste; Disraeli, with all his wit and _savoir faire_, has printed some rank fustian, and much slip-slop gossip; and George Meredith at times can be as jerky and mysterious as a prose Browning.
Charlotte Bronte and Kingsley could both descend to blue fire and demoniac incoherences. Macaulay is brilliant and emphatic, but we weary at last of his everlasting _staccato_ on the trumpet; and even the magnificent symphonies of Ruskin at his best will end sometimes in a sort of _coda_ of fantasias which suggest limelights and coloured lenses. Carlyle, if not the greatest prose master of our age, must be held to be, by virtue of his original genius and ma.s.s of stroke, the literary dictator of Victorian prose. And, though we all know how wantonly he often misused his mighty gift, though no one now would venture to imitate him even at a distance, and though Matthew Arnold was ever taking up his parable--"Flee Carlylese as the very Devil!"--we are sliding into Carlylese unconsciously from time to time, and even _Culture_ itself fell into the trap in the very act of warning others.
Side by side with such chastened literary art as that of Thackeray and George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and John Morley, Lecky and Froude, Maine and Symonds, side by side with a Carlylese tendency to extravagance, slang, and caricature, we find another vein in English prose--the flat, ungainly, nerveless style of mere scientific research. What lumps of raw fact are flung at our heads! What interminable gritty collops of learning have we to munch! Through what tangles of uninteresting phenomena are we not dragged in the name of Research, Truth, and the higher Philosophy! Mr. Mill and Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bain and Mr.
Sidgwick, have taught our age very much; but no one of them was ever seen to smile; and it is not easy to recall in their voluminous works a single irradiating image or one monumental phrase.
There are eminent historians to-day who disdain the luminous style of Hume and Robertson, and yet deride the colour and fire of Gibbon.
Grote poured forth the precious contents of his portentous notebooks with as little care for rhythm and as little sense of proportion as a German professor. Freeman and Gardiner have evidently trained themselves in the same school of elaborate learning, till they would appear to count the graceful English of Froude, Lecky, and Green as hardly becoming the dignity of history. It would seem as if the charge which some of our historians are most anxious to avoid is the charge of being "readable," and of keeping to themselves any fact that they know.
The men who are rather pleased than pained to hear themselves called by the barbarous term of "scientists" seem to think that it matters nothing how ill-digested be their book, or how commonplace be their language. They are accustomed to lecture to students in the laboratory in their shirt-sleeves with their hands in their pockets; and they believe that immortality may be achieved if they can pile up enough facts and manufacture an adequate number of monographs. And they do this, in the teeth of excellent examples to the contrary. Huxley and Tyndall have given their brethren in science fine examples of a pure, vigorous, and well-knit style. Yet, how many of them are still quite content to go rumbling along with an interminable rigmarole of dry "memoirs." Our ponderous biographies of third-rate people tend to become mere bags of letters and waste-paper baskets. And all this with such consummate models before us, and so very high a standard of general cultivation. We have had in this age men who write an English as pure and powerful as any in the whole range of our literature; we have tens of thousands of men and women who write a perfectly correct and intelligent prose. And yet out of a million books, we find so very few which even aim at being works of art in the sense that _Tom Jones_ is a work of art, and the _Decline and Fall_ is a work of art.
It is, no doubt, this preponderance of the practical, scientific, and social energies which has checked in our Victorian Age the highest imaginative and dramatic genius. With all its achievements in lyric and psychologic poetry, it has hardly attempted to scale the empyrean of song. In the seventy-six years that have pa.s.sed since Sh.e.l.ley conceived his _Prometheus_, as he sat gazing over the sombre ruins of the Campagna, no one has ever ventured into that seventh heaven of invention. Since the _School for Scandal_ (1777) no English drama has been produced which has anything like the same hold on the stage. For more than sixty years the English stage has not known one consummate actor. Though men of real genius have in these sixty years laboured at the higher drama, they have hardly achieved even such measures of success as fell to Byron and Sh.e.l.ley with _Manfred_ and the _Cenci_.
With all its lyric and psychologic power, with all its energy and its learning, the Victorian Age has not quite equalled the age of Goethe.
It is as if its scientific spirit checked the supreme imagination: as if its social earnestness produced a distaste for merely dramatic pa.s.sion.
One of the most striking facts about our modern literature is the preponderance of the "subjective" over the "objective." The interest in external events, as the subject of imaginative work, quite pales before the interest in a.n.a.lysis of mental and moral impulse.
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Jane Austen, have completely dominated our age, and have displaced the epic and legendary themes of Scott, Byron, Campbell, and Southey. _The Two Voices_, _In Memoriam_, _The Ring and the Book_, _Silas Marner_, _Vanity Fair_, _Bleak House_, dissect brain and heart, but do not make their prime motive in any thrilling history.
The crisis of modern romance goes on in the conscience, not in the outside world. Hence the enormous multiplication of the psychologic novel, a form of art which the eighteenth century would have viewed with wonder and perplexity. The curious part of this is the striking abatement of taste for the historical romance, in spite of the immense extension of historical study and archaeological revival. We know far more about the past, both within and without, than did our fathers; and we are always seeking to realise to ourselves the habits, ideas, aspect, the very clothes and furniture of ages of old, which we study with sympathetic zeal and in the minutest detail. Yet the historical romance appears only at intervals. _Harold_ and _Esmond_ are both more than forty years old, _Romola_ more than thirty years old. They are none of them quite unqualified successes; and no later historical romance has approached these three in power and interest. Why is it, that, in an age pre-eminently historical, in an age so redundant of novels, the historical novel is out of fashion? Partly, no doubt, our romancers shun comparison with the mighty Wizard of the North; partly, the a.n.a.lytic genius of our time so greatly exceeds its synthetic genius; and mainly, the range of our historical learning inclines us to restore the past by exact scholarship and not by fiction without authority. George Eliot was so anxious to have her local colour accurate that she ended by becoming somewhat fatiguing. Some day, no doubt, the genius of romance will return to this inexhaustible field with enthusiasm equal to Scott"s, with a knowledge far more accurate than his, and a spirit quite purged from political and social bias.
From the death of Scott in 1832 until 1894 are sixty-two years; and if we divide this period into equal parts at the year 1863 (it was the year of Thackeray"s death), we shall be struck with the fact that the purely literary product of the first period of thirty-one years (1832-1863) is superior to the purely literary product of the second period of thirty-one years (1863-1894). The former period gives us all that was best of Tennyson, the Brownings, Carlyle, Thackeray, d.i.c.kens, Bulwer, the Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope, George Eliot, Kingsley, Disraeli, Dr. Arnold, Thirlwall, Grote, Hallam, Milman, Macaulay, Mill, Froude, Layard, Kinglake, Ruskin. The second period gave us in the main, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, G. H. Lewes, Maine, Leslie Stephen, John Morley, Matthew Arnold, Lecky, Freeman, Stubbs, Bryce, Green, Gardiner, Symonds, Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne. Poetry, romance, the critical, imaginative, and pictorial power, dominate the former period: philosophy, science, politics, history are the real inspiration of the latter period.
The era since the death of Scott is essentially a scientific age, a sociologic age; and this is peculiarly visible in the second half of this era of sixty-two years. About the middle of the period we see how the scientific and sociologic interest begins to over-shadow, if not to oust, the literary, poetic, and romantic interest. Darwin"s _Origin of Species_ was published in 1859; and its effect on thought became marked within the next few years. In 1862, Herbert Spencer commenced to issue his great encyclopaedic work, _Synthetic Philosophy_, still, we trust, to be completed after more than thirty years of devoted toil. Darwin"s later books appeared about the same period, as did a large body of scientific works in popular form by Huxley, Tyndall, Wallace, Lewes, Lubbock, Tylor, and Clifford. It is only needful here to refer to such scientific works as directly reacted on general literature. About the same time the later speculations of Comte began to attract public attention in England, and the _Positive Polity_ was translated in 1875.
Between the years 1860-1875, there grew up in England an absorbing interest in Social Philosophy, and a conviction that the idea of invariable law offered a solution of the progress of society.
Evolution as an idea was in the air, and it was applied to Man as much as to Nature. It is no part of our present purpose to trace its growth from the scientific aspect. It is enough to note how it acted and reacted on general literature.
Poetry began to hover round the problem of Evolution. It wrapped it in mystery, denounced it with fine indignation, and took it for the text of some rather prosaic homilies. Criticism fell into the prevailing theory: so did history, and even romance. Philosophy and Science are not the best foster-mothers of Poetry and Romance. Philosophy and Science grew more solemn than ever; and Poetry and Romance lost something of their wilder fancy and their light heart. Literature grew less spontaneous, more correct, more learned, and, it may be, more absorbed in its practical purpose of modifying social life.
The old notion of literature being a business apart from affairs, of men of letters being an order, of an absorption in books being ample work for a life--all this is far from the rule. At least twenty members of the present and late Governments have been copious writers; Mr. Gladstone and at least three or four of his late colleagues are quite in the front rank of living authors--nay, several of them began their career as literary men. It would be difficult to name an important writer of the Victorian Age who has not at times flung himself with ardour into the great social, political, or religious battles of his time. Thackeray, Trollope, Green, Symonds, are possible exceptions--examples of bookmen who pa.s.sed their lives with books, and who never wrote to promote "a cause." But all the rest have entered on the "burning questions" of their age, and most of them with the main part of their force. As a consequence "learning," as it was understood by Casaubon, Scaliger, Bentley, Johnson, and Gibbon, as it was understood by Littre, Dollinger, and Mommsen, may be said to have disappeared in England. Cardinal Newman, Mark Pattison, Dr. Pusey, were said to be very learned, but it was a kind of learning which kept very much to itself. For good or for evil, our literature is now absorbed in the urgent social problem, and is become but an instrument in the vast field of Sociology--the science of Society.
This predominance of Sociology, the restless rapidity of modern life, the omnipresence of material activity, fully account for the special character of modern literature. Literature is no longer "bookish"--but practical, social, propagandist. It is full of life--but it is a dispersive, a.n.a.lytic, erratic form of vitality. It has a most fastidious taste in form--but it often flings the critical spirit aside in its pa.s.sion for doing, in its ardour to convince and to inspire. It is industrious, full of learning and research--but it regards its learning as an instrument of influence, not as an end of thought. It can work up a poem or an essay, as carefully as Mieris or Breughel polished a cabinet picture--and it can "tear a pa.s.sion to tatters," or tumble its note-books into a volume all in a heap. It has no "standard," no "model," no "best writer"--and yet it has a curious faculty for reviving every known form and imitating any style. It is intensely historical, but so accurately historical that it is afraid to throw the least colour of imagination around its history. It has consummate poetic feeling, and copious poetic gifts--but it has now no single poet of the first rank. It has infinite romantic resources, and an army of skilful novelists--and yet it has no single living writer worthy to be named beside the great romancers of the nineteenth century.
This rich, many-sided, strenuous literature, which will place the name of Victoria higher than that of Elizabeth in the history of our language, would form a splendid subject hereafter for some one of our descendants who was equal to the task of treating our Victorian literature as a whole. In the meantime, it may be worth while for the men and women of to-day, who are full of all the excellent work around us, to be reminded of the good things produced now nearly sixty years ago. As one who can remember much that was given to the world in a former generation, I shall endeavour in these little sketches to mark some of the characteristics of the best writers in the early Victorian Age, confining myself for the present to prose literature of the imaginative kind.
It is now some time since the country of Shakespeare and of Milton has been without its poet laureate, and to the non-poetical world the absence of that court functionary is hardly perceptible. Nay, the question has begun to arise, If there is to be a laureate in poetry, why not a laureate also in prose romance? And if there were a laureate in prose romance, whom should we choose?
The same phenomenon meets us in the realm of prose fiction as in poetry: that we have vast quant.i.ties of thoughtful work produced, an army of cultivated workers, a great demand, an equally great supply, a very high average of merit--and yet so little of the very first rank.
For the first time in the present century, English literature is without a single living novelist of world-wide reputation. The nineteenth century opened with _Castle Rackrent_ and the admirably original tales of Maria Edgeworth. Jane Austen followed in the same field. And since _Waverley_ appeared, in 1814, we have had a succession of fine romances in unbroken line. Fenimore Cooper"s work is nearly contemporary with the best of Scott"s. At Sir Walter"s death Bulwer-Lytton was in full career. And Lytton, Disraeli, Hawthorne, the Brontes, d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, and Trollope were all at their best nearly together. During the last twenty years or so of this splendid period they had been joined by George Eliot; and of the whole band Anthony Trollope was the survivor. With him our language lost the last of those companions of the fireside in mansion and cottage whose names are household words, whose books are in every hand, where the English tongue is heard.
We need not engage in any critical estimate of these writers: we are but too well aware of their failures and defects. Lytton indited not a little bombast, d.i.c.kens had his incurable mannerisms, and Thackeray his conventional cynicisms. There are pa.s.sages in George Eliot"s romances which read like sticky bits from a lecture on comparative palaeontology; and Disraeli, who for fifty years threw off most readable tales in the intervals of politics, seems always to be laughing at the public behind his mask. Yet the good sense of mankind remembers the best and forgets the worst, even if the worst be four-fifths of the whole.
The place of genius is decided by its inimitable hits, and its misses evermore drop out of memory as time goes on. The world loves its bright spirits for what they give it, and it does not score their blots like an examiner marking a student"s paper. Thus the men and women of the first rank still hold the field in the million homes where English tales are a source of happiness; and it would be perverse to maintain that any living men have reached that level. We can see no trace that Pickwick or Emma, Natty b.u.mppo or Uncas, are losing their hold on the imagination of men and women, any more than Jeanie Deans and the Antiquary. _Oliver Twist_, the _Last Days of Pompeii_, _Vanity Fair_, _Jane Eyre_, have more readers than ever. And I find the Last Chronicle of _Ba.r.s.et_, _Lothair_, and _Silas Marner_ as fresh as they were a quarter of a century ago.
We all admit that there are delightful writers still. I am not about to decry our living romancers, and certainly not to criticise them. If any man choose to maintain that there is more poetry in Tess than in the entire _Ba.r.s.etshire_ series, that d.i.c.kens could not have bettered the _Two Drummer Boys_ of Rudyard Kipling, that _Treasure Island_ has a realism as vivid as _Robinson Crusoe_, that Mrs. Wood"s _Village Tragedy_ may rank with _Silas Marner_, that Howells and Besant, Ouida and Rhoda Broughton, Henry James and Mrs. Burnett, are as good reading as we need, that Bret Harte has struck a line as original as that of d.i.c.kens, and that George Meredith has an eye for character which reminds us not seldom of Thackeray and Fielding--I do not dispute it.
I am no one-book man or one-style man, but enjoy what is good in all.
But I am thinking of the settled judgment and the visible practice of the vast English-speaking and English-reading world. And judging by that test, we cannot shut our eyes to this, that we have no living romancer who has yet achieved that world-wide place of being read and welcomed in every home where the language is heard or known. George Meredith has been a prolific writer for thirty years and Stevenson for twenty years; but their most ardent admirers, among whom I would be counted, can hardly claim for them a triumph so great.
We come, then, to this, that for the first time during this whole century now ending, English literature can count no living novelist whom the world, and not merely the esoteric circle of cultured Englishmen, consents to stamp with the mark of accepted fame. One is too eccentric, obscure, and subtle, another too local and equal, a third too sketchy, this one too unreal, that one far too real, too obvious, too prosaic, to win and to hold the great public by their spell. Critics praise them, friends utter rhapsodies, good judges enjoy them--but their fame is partial, local, sectional, compared to the fame of Scott, d.i.c.kens, or Thackeray.
What is the cause? I do not hesitate to say it is that we have over-trained our taste, we are overdone with criticism, we are too systematically drilled, there is far too much moderate literature and far too fastidious a standard in literature. Everyone is afraid to let himself go, to offend the conventions, or to raise a sneer. It is the inevitable result of uniformity in education and discipline in mental training. Millions can write good grammar, easy and accurate sentences, and imitate the best examples of the age. Education has been driven at high pressure into literary lines, and a monotonous correctness in literary taste has been erected into a moral code. Tens of thousands of us can put the finger on a bit of exaggeration, or a false light in the local colour, or a slip in perfect realism. The result is a photographic accuracy of detail, a barren monotony of commonplace, and the cramping of real inventive genius. It is the penalty of giving ourselves up to mechanical culture.
If another d.i.c.kens were to break out to-morrow with the riotous tomfoolery of Pickwick at the trial, or of Weller and Stiggins, a thousand lucid criticisms would denounce it as vulgar balderdash.
Glaucus and Nydia at Pompeii would be called melodramatic rant. The _House of the Seven Gables_ would be rejected by a sixpenny magazine, and _Jane Eyre_ would not rise above a common "shocker." Hence the enormous growth of the _Kodak_ school of romance--the snap-shots at everyday realism with a hand camera. We know how it is done. A woman of forty, stout, plain, and dull, sits in an ordinary parlour at a tea-table, near an angular girl with a bad squint. "Some tea?" said Mary, touching the pot. "I don"t mind," replied Jane in a careless tone; "I am rather tired and it is a dull day." "It is," said Mary, as her lack-l.u.s.tre eyes glanced at the murky sky without. "Another cup?"
And so the modern _romance_ dribbles on hour by hour, chapter by chapter, volume by volume, recording, as in a phonograph, the minute commonplace of the average man and woman in perfectly real but entirely common situations. To this dead level of correctness literary purism has brought romance. The reaction against the photographic style, on the other hand, leads to spasmodic efforts to arouse the jaded interest by forced sensationalism, physiological b.e.s.t.i.a.lities, and a crude form of the hobgoblin and bogey business.
In all the ages of great productive work there were intense individuality, great freedom, and plenty of failures. _Tom Jones_ delighted the town which was satiated with gross absurdities, some of them, alas! from the pen of Fielding himself. Shakespeare wrote happily before criticism had invented the canons of the drama, and Sir Walter"s stories had no reviews to expose his historical blunders. In the great romance age which began to decline some forty years ago, there was not a t.i.the of such good average work as we get now; criticism had not become a fine art; every one was free to like what he pleased, and preposterous stuff was written and enjoyed. Of course it cannot be good to like preposterous stuff, and an educated taste ought to improve literature. But it is almost a worse thing when general culture produces an artificial monotony, when people are taught what they ought to like, when to violate the canons of taste is far worse than to laugh at the Ten Commandments.
With a very high average of fairly good work, an immense ma.s.s of such work, and an elaborate code of criticism, the production of brilliant and inimitable successes is usually arrested in every field. Having thousands of graceful verse-writers, we have no great poet; in a torrent of skilful fiction, we have no great novelist; with many charming painters, who hardly seem to have a fault, we have no great artist; with _mises-en-scene_, make-up costumes, and accessories for our plays such as the world never saw before, we have no great actor; and with ten thousand thoughtful writers, we have not a single genius of the first rank. Elaborate culture casts chill looks on original ideas. Genius itself is made to feel the crudeness and extravagance of its first efforts and retires with shame to take a lower place. We are all so fastidious about form and have got such fixed regulation views about form, we are so correct, so much like one another, such good boys and girls, that the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies of the inventive spirit are taught from childhood to control themselves and to conform to the decorum of good society. A highly organised code of culture may give us good manners, but it is the death of genius.