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THE LITERATURE
OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
BY
HUGH WALKER, LL.D., D.Litt.
Cambridge :
at the University Press
1921
(X.5.3-3V ^
First Edition 1910
ic)[0, 1913, 1921

PREFACE
'
I
^HE purpose and scope of this book will be rendered
plainer by a glance at the table of contents than I
could hope to make it here, except by anticipating what

will be found in the following chapters. And as nobody
is likely to be interested in the reasons which led me
to undertake the task which is now, at last, ended, if
not accomphshed, I should be disposed to write no

preface at all. But it is my pleasant duty to thank those
who have been good enough to help me in my work. I
am greatly indebted to Professor Henry Jones, of Glasgow,

and to Professor T. Stanley Roberts, of Aberystwyth, who
each read part of the manuscript, and made valuable
suggestions. Mr A. R. Waller, of Peterhouse, read the
whole of the proofs with a patience and care for which,
as I can make no adequate acknowledgment, I must
thankfully rest his debtor. For the errors and short-
comings of the book as it now stands I, of course, am
alone responsible. That the errors are not more numerous
and the shortcomings greater is due to the generous help
of the three men whom I have named.
VI PREFACE
I have dealt only with writers who have passed away.

The task of selection from among the living is peculiarly
invidious ; and the death of Swinburne and of Meredith

has greatly reduced the temptation to cross the line which
divides the two worlds.
HUGH WALKER.
Lampeter,
December, 1909.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
) YtoJeii 1
INTRODUCTION
CHAPS. _ ..,0-t. ,.,J0:-rTEji3-,3lf,>i
PAGE
I. The New Age i
II. The German Influence : Thomas Carlyle .

Z-t . . 23
PART I
SPECULATIVE THOUGHT
I. Theology 80
II. Philosophy ... 141
III. Science 211
PART 11
CREATIVE ART. A. POETRY

I. The Interregnum in Poetry 240
II. The New Kings: Tennyson and Browning 287
.... .
.
III. The Minor Poets: Earlier Period 327

IV. Tennyson 374
V. Browning 411
VI. The Turn 01 the Century : New Influences .
444
VII. Later Developments 527
vm TABLE OF CONTENTS
CREATIVE ART. B PROSE FICTION

CHAPS. PAGE
I. After Scott 612
II. Dickens and Thackeray 660
III. The Women Novelists 707
IV. The Later Fiction 753
PART III
ET CETERA
History and Biography 818
....
I.
II. Literary and Aesthetic Criticism 932

III. Miscellaneous Prose 1624
Index 1055
1, fii fij
,;;H ;,
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY.
This summary is intended to be used closely with the text of the book
without reference to the text the classification would in many c^ses be mis-
leading. The order is the order of treatment in the book. Wljere for any
reason a writer has been dealt with along with a group to which he does not
naturally belong, the fact is indicated by the use of square brackets. If however
the connexion be close, though the writer may not be strictly withinthe group,
brackets are not used. ,
INTRODUCTION.
CHAPTER II. THE GERMAN INFLUENCE.
Thomas Carlyle, 179S-1881. ^
Life of Schiller, 1823-1824.
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (Transldiion), 1824.
Sartor Resartus, 1833-1834.
The French Revolution, 1837.
Chartism, 1839.
Heroes and Ilero-Worship, 1840.
Past and Present, 1843.
Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, 1845.
Latter-Day Pamphlets, 1850.
Life of Sterling, 1851.
Frederick the Great, 1858-1865.
PART I.
CHAPTER I. THEOLOGY.
The Evangelicals.
Robert Hall, 1764-1831.
Thomas Scott, 1747-1821.
Charles Simeon, 1759-1836.
Thomas Chalmers, 1780-1847.
Discourses on the Christian Revelation, iSi'j.
Thomas Guthrie, 1803-1873.
Robert Smith Candlis'h, 1806^1873. :
Edward Irving, 1792-1834.

John M^Leod Campbell, 1800-1872. , .
- The Nature of the Atoneinent; 1855,

Thoughts on Revelation, 1862.
Thomas Erskine, 1788-1S70.
W.
X CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY
The Noetics.
Edward Copleston, 1776-1S49.
Renn Dickson Hampden, 1793-1868.
The Scholastic Philosophy in its relation to Christian Theology, 1832.
Thomas Arnold, 1795-1842.
The Principles of Church Reform, 1S33.
See also Pavt III, Chapter I.
Richard Whately, 1787-1863.
Logic, 1826.
Rhetoric, 1828.
Essays on some Difficulties in Paul, 1828.
Essays on the Errors of Romanism, 1830.
The Kingdom of Christ Delineated, 1841.
The Coleridgeans.
Julius Hare, 1799-1855.
See also Part III, Chapter III.
Charles Kingsley, 1819-1S75.
See also Part II B, Chapter IV.
Frederick Denison Maurice, 1805-1872.
The Kingdom of Christ, 1838.
Prophets and Kings, 1853.
The Doctnne of Sacrifice, 1854.,
F. W. Robertson, 1S16-1853.
The Broad- Churchmen.
Connop Thirlwall, 1797-1875.
See also Part III, Chapter I.
Benjamin Jowett, 1817-1893.
Epistles to the Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans, 1855.
See also Part I, Chapter II.
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, 1815-1881.
Epistles to the Corinthians, 1855.
Sinai and Palestine, 1856.
Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church, j86l..
Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church, 1863-1865.
See also Part III, Chapter, I.
Mark Pattison, 1813-1884.
Tendencies of Religious Thought in England (in Essays and Reviews,
i860).
Isaac Casaubon, 1875.
Milton, 1879.
John William Colenso, 1814-1883.
The Pentateuch and Joshua critically Examined, 1862-1879.
Scottish Theologians.
John Caird, 1820-1898.
Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 1880.
Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1900.
The Theologians of the Oxford Movement.
John Keble, i79'2-i866.
Life of Bishop Wilson, 1863.
See also Part II A, Chapter I.
Richard Hurrell Froude, 1803-1836.
Hugh James Rose, 1795-1838.
Discourses on the State of the Protestant Religion in Germany, 1825.
John Henry Newman, i8oi-i890.»'
The Avians of the .Fourth Century, 1833
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY xi
John Henry Newman {continued). : , i .
Tracts for the Times (with others), 1833-1841.

An Essay on the Miracles recorded in the Ecclesiastical History of
the Early Ages, ,.iii,%. ,
>•
,
,
- ,
The Development of Christian Doctrine, 1845.

Loss and Gain, 1S4S.
Callista, 1856.
Apologia pro Vita Sua, 1864.
A Grammar of Assent, 1870.
See also Part II A, Chapter III.
Frederick Oakeley, 1802-1880.
Historical Notes on the Tractarian Movement, 1865.
William George Ward, 1812-1882.
Jdeal of a Christian Church, 1844.
Henry Edward Manning, 1808-1892. ,
Nicholas Patrick Wiseman, 1803-1865.

The Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion, 1836.
Fabiola, 1854.
Walter Farqiihar Hook, 1798-1875.
Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, 1860-1876.
Samuel Wilberforce, 1805-1873. i
;
Life of William Wilberforce. (with his brother),. 1838.

Agatha, 1839.
Edward Bouverie Pusey, 1800-1S82.
Historical Enquiry into the Causes of the Rationalist Character of
German Theology, 1828^1836.
Thomas Mozley, 1800^1893.
Reminiscences of Oriel, 1882.
James Bowling Mozley, 1813-1878.
The Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination, 1855.
<
The Primitive Doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration, 1856.

Lectures on Miracles, 1865.
Richard William Church, 1815-1889.
St Anselm, 1870.
Dante, 1879.
Spenser, 1S79.
Bacon, 1884.
The Oxford Movement, 1891,
Henry, Parry Liddon, 1829-1890.
The Divinity of Jesiis, 1867.
Life of Pusey, 1 893-1 894,
The Cambridpe Theologians. '
Brooke Foss Westcott, 1825-1901.

Joseph Barber Ligbtfoot, 1828-1889.
Fenton J. A. Hort, 1828-1892.
CHAPTER II. PHILOSOPHY.

The Scottish School.
Dugald Stewart, 1753-1828.
Thomas Brown, 1778-1820.
Inquiry into the Relation of Cause dnd Effect, 1818.
James Mackintosh, 1765-1832.
William Hamilton, 1788-1856.
Discussions on Philosophy' and Literature, 1852.
Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, 1859-1861.
b2.
Xll CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY
Henry Longueville Mansel, 1820-1871.
Prolegomena Logica, 1851.
The Limits of Jieligioui Thought, 1859.
77te Philosophy of the Conditioned, 1 86(5.
The Utilitarians.
Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832.
James Mill, 1773-1836.
John Austin, 1790-1859.
The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, 1832.
Lectures on Jurisprudence, 1 863.
John Stuart Mill, i8o6-i873.v^
A System of Logic, 1843.
The Principles of Political Economy, 1848.
On Liberty, 1859.
Representative Government, 1861.
Utilitarianism, 1863.
Comte and Positivism, 1865.
An Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy, 1865
The Subjection of Women, 1869. '
Autobiography, 1873.
[William Whewell, 1794- 1866.
History of the Inductive Sciences, 1837.
Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 1840.]
Alexander Bain, 1818-1903.
The Senses and the Intellect, 1855.
The Emotions and the Will, 1859.
Henry Sidgwick, 1838-1900.
The Methods of Ethics, 1874. '
The Principles of Political Ecortomy, 1883.

The Elements of Politics, i8gi.
The Positivists.
Richard Congreve, 1818-1899.
George Henry Lewes, 1817-1878.
A Biographical History of Philosophy, 1845-1846.
Comte' s Philosophy of the Sciences, 1853.
Problems of Life arid Mind, 1874-1879.
George Eliot, 1819-1880.
See also Part II A, Chapter VII, and Part II B, Chapter III.
Harriet Martineau, 1802-1876.
Illustrations of Political Economy, 1832-1834.
Deerbrook, 1839.
The Positive Philosophy of Augtiste Comte freely Translated and
Condensed, 1853.
The English Hegelians.
James Frederick Ferrier, 1808- 1864.
Institutes of Metaphysic, 1854.
Benjamin Jowett, 1817-1893.
The Dialogues of Plato, 187,1.
See also Part I, Chapitef I.
Thomas Hill Green, 1836-1882.
The Works of Hume (edited), 1874-1875.
Prolegomena to Ethics, 1883.
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY xiii
Edward Caird, 183S-1908,

A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant, 1877.
The Evolution of Religion, 1893.
The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, 1904.
James Mattineau, 1805-1900. '
Rationale of Religious Inquiry, 1836.

Studies of Christianity, 1858.
Types of Ethical Theory, 1885, ,
,
The Seat of Authority in Reliôn, 1890.

Francis William Newman, 1805-1897.
Phases of Faith, 1850.
Writers on the Philosophy of History.
Henry Thomas Buckle, 1821-1862. ^
History of Civilisation, 1857-186(5.

Henry Sumner Maine, 1822-1888.
Ancierit Law, 1861.
Village Communities, 1871. ,
The Early History of Institutions, 1S75.

Popular Government, 1885.
Walter Bagehot, 1826-1877.
The English Constitution, 1865-1867.
Physicsand Politics, 1872.
Lombard Street, 1873.
The Economists.
John Elliott Cairnes, 1824-1876.
The Slave Power, 1862.
Richard Jones, 1790-1855.
J. E. Thorold Rogers, 1833-1890. l
History of Agriculture and Prices in England, 1866-1887.

T. E. Cliffe Leslie, 1827 ?-i882.
CHAPTER III. SCIENCE.

Charles Lyell, 1797-1875.
Principles of Geology, 1830-1833.
Geological Evidences of the Antiquity pf Man, 1863^
Hugh Miller, 1802-1856.
The Old Red Sandstone, 1840.
Footprints of the Creator, 1849. '...
My Schools and Schoolmasters, 1854,

The Testimony of the Rocks, 1857.
Robert Chambers, 1802-1871. \
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 1844;'

Herbert Spencer, 1820-1903.
Principles of Psychology, 1855 (revised, i876'-i872).
First Principles, 1862.
Principles of Biology, 1864-1867..
Principles of Sociology, 1876-1896.
Principles of Ethics, 1892-1893.
Charles Darwin, 1809-1882.
foumal of Researches during the Voyage df the Beagle, 1839.
The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, 1842.
The Origin of Species, 1859.
The Descent of Man, 1871.
The Formation of Vegetdble Mould through the Action of Worms, iSSi.
XIV CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY
Thomas Henry Huxle)', 1825-1895.
Man's Place in Nature, 1863.
Lay Sermons, 1870.
Hume, 1879.
PART II A.
CHAPTER I. THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY.

Allan Cunningham, 1784-1842.
Bernard Barton, 1784-1849.
John Clare, 1793-1864.
Poems, descriptive of Rural Life,' iSio.
'
William Thorn, i798?-i848.

Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom Wedver, 1844.
Ebenezer Elliott, 1781-1849.
Corn- Law Rhymes, 1828.
Thomas Hood, 1 799-1845.
Lycus the Centaur, 1822.
The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, \%'i'].
'
Hartley Coleridge, 1796-1S49.

Poems, 1833.
Religious Poetry.
John Bowring, 1792-1872-
James Montgomeiy, 1771-1854.
Reginald Heber, 1783-1826.
Robert Pollok, 1798-1827.
John Keble, 1 792-1 866.
The Christian Year, 1827.
Lyra Innocentium, 1846.
See also Part I, Chapter I.
The Dramatic Poets.
James Sheridan Knowles, 1784-1862.
Virginius, 1820.
The Beggar's Daughter of Bethnal Green, 1828.
The Hunchback, 1832.
James Robinson Planche, 1796-1880.
Henry Hart Milman, 1791-1868.
T!ie Apollo Belvidere, 1812.
Fazio, 181 g.
The Fall of Jerusalem, 1820.
The Martyr of Antioch, 1821.
Belshazzar, 1822.
Anne Boleyn,'x826.'
Aubrey de Vere the Elder, 1 788-1846.
Julian the Apostate, 1822.
The Duke of Mercia, 1823.
Mary Tudor, 1847.
Mary Russell Mitford, 1786-1855.
Julian, 1823.
The Foscari, 1826.
Rienzi, 1828.
See also Part III, Chapter III.
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY XV
Biyan Waller Procter, 1787-1874.

Mirandola, 1821.
English Songs, 1832.
Henry Taylor, 1800-1886.
Isaac Cimnenus, 1827.
Philip van Artivclde, 1834.
Edwin the Fair, iZî.
TTie Virgin Widow, 1849.
St CUtiunes Eve, 1862.
Thomas Xoon Talfonrd, 1795-1854.
Ion, 1836.
The Atkacian Captive, 1838.
GUncoe, 1840.
Bnlwer Lytton (Lord Lytton), 1803-1873.
The Dtuhesse de la Valliere, 1836.
The Lady of Lyons, 1838.
Richeliat, 1838.
See also Part II B, Chapter I.
Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 1803-1849.
The Brides Tragedy, 1822.
Death's Jest Book, 1850.
George Dadey, 1 795-1 846.
Sylvia, 1827.
Nepaithe, 1835.
Charles Jeremiah Wills, 1 800-1879.
Joseph and his Brethren, 1823.
Thomas Wade, 1805-1875.
Mundi et Cordis Carmina, 1835.
CHAPTER n. THE NEW KINGS.

Alfred TemiysoD, 1809-1892.
Poems by Two Brothers (with Frederick and Charles Tennyson), 1827.
Poems, chiefly Lyrical, 1830.
Poems, 1832.
Poems, 1842.
The Princess, 1847.
In Memoriam, 1850.
Maiid, 1855.
Idylls of the King, 1857-1885.
Enoch Arden, 1864.
Qiuen Mary, 1875.
Harold, 1876.
Becket, 1884.
Tiresias, 1885.
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, 1886.
Demeter, 1889.
The Death cf (Erume, 1892.
Charles Tennyson (afterwards Tomer), 1808-1879.
Frederick Tennyson, 1807—1898.
Days and Hours, 1854.
The Isles of Greece, 1890.
Robert Browning, 1812-1889.
Pauline, 1833
Paracelsus, 1835.
XVI CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY
Robert Browning (continued),
Strafford, 1837.
Sordello, 1840.
Pippa Passes, 1841.
Dramatic Lyrics, 1842.
A Blot in the ^Scutcheon, 1843.
Colombe's Birthday, 1844.
Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1845.
Luria, 1846.
A SouVs Tragedy, 1846.
Christmas Eve and Easter Day, 1850.
Men and Women, 1855.
Dramatis Personae, 1864.
The Ring and the Book, 1868-1869.
Baiaustion's Adventure, 1871.
Fifine at the Fair, 1873.
The Inn Album, 1875.
La Saisiaz, 1878.
Dramatic Idyls, 1879-1880.
Ferishtak's Fancies, 1884.
Parleyings with certain People of Importance, 1887.
Asolando, 1889.
Alfred Domett, 1811-1887.
CHAPTER in. THE MINOR POETS.

The Balladists.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1800-1859.
Lays of Ancient Rome, 1842.
William Edmondstoune Aytoun, 1813-1865.
Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, 1848.
Firmilian, 1854.
Bon Gaultier Ballads (with Sir Theodore Martin), 1855.
Francis Hastings Doyle, 1810-1888.
William Motherwell, 1797-1835.
Robert Stephen Hawker, 1803-1875.
The Quest of the Sangraal, 1863.
Richard Harris Barham, 1788-1845.
The Ingoldsby Legends, 1837-1847,
Writers of Vers de Socii;TE.
Thomas Haynes Bayly, 1797-1839.
Laman Blanchard, 1804-1845.
Winthrop Mackworth Praed, 180^-1839.
Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), 1805-1885.
Memorials of a Tour in Greece, 1834.
Poems, Legendary and Historical, 1844.
Palm Leaves, 1844.
The Catholic Poets.
John Henry Newman, 1801-1890.
Lyra Aposiolica (with others), 1836.
The Dream of Gerontius, 1865.
Verses on various Occasions, 1868.
Frederick William Faber, 18 14-1863.
Isaac Williams, 1803-1865.
John Mason Neale, 18 18-1866.
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY
The Philosophic Poets.
Richard Henry Home, 1803-1884.
Cosmo de' Medici, 1837.
The Death of Marlowe, 1837.
Gregory VII, 1840.
Orion, 1843.
A New Spirit of the Age (with others), 1844.
,
Philip James Bailey, 18x6-1902.

Festus, 1839.
The Political Poets.
Thomas Cooper, 1 805-1892.
The Purgatory of Suicides, 1845.
Capel Lofft,1806-1873.
Self- Formation, 1837. -.1
Ernest, or Political Regeneration, 1839.

Ebenezer Jones, 1820-1860.
Studies of Sensation and Event, 1843.
Poets of the Celtic Revival.
Richard Chenevix Trench, 1807-1886.
James Clarence Mangan, 1803-1849.
The Poetesses.
Sarah Flower Adams, 1805-1848.
Isabella Harwood, 1840-1888.
Fanny Kemble, 1809-1893.
Francis the First, 1832.
Poems, 1844, 1866, 1883.
An English Tragedy, 1863.
Felicia Dorothea Hemans, 1793-1835.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon, 1 802-1 838.
Sara Coleridge, 1802-1852.
Phantasmion, 1837.
Lady Dufferin, 1807-1867.
Caroline Norton, 1808-1877.
Caroline Clive, 1801-1873.
IX Poems by V, 1840.
Paul Ferroll, 1855.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, i8o5-i86l.
An Essay on Mind, 1826.
The Seraphim, 1838. '
Poems, 1844.
Sonnets from the Portuguese, 1850.
Casa Guidi Windows, 1851.
Aurora Leigh, 1857.
Poems before Congress, i860.
Last Poems, 1862.
The Brontes.
Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, 1846.
See also Part II B, Chapter III.
CHAPTER IV. TENNYSON.

For the works of Tennyson see Summary of Part II A, Chapter II.
William Barnes, 1801-1886.
Poems of Rural Life in the Dorstt Dialect, 1844, 1858, 1863.
Edwin Waugh, 1817-1890.
XVlIl CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY
CHAPTER V. BROWNING.
For the works of Browning see Summary of Part II A, Chapter II.
CHAPTER VL THE TURN OF THE CENTURY.

Patriotic Verse.
Gerald Massey, 1828-1907.
The Ballad of Babe Christabel, 1854.
War Waits, 1855.
Henry Lushington, 1812-1855.
La Nation Bontiquiire, 1855.
Franklin Lushington, 1823-1901.
Points of War, 1855.
The Poets of the Sceptical Reaction.
Arthur Hugh Clough, 1819-1861.
The Bothie of Tober-na- Vuolich, 1848.
Ambarvalia (with T. Burbidge), 1849.
Dipsychus, 1862.
Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888.
The Strayed Reveller, 1849.
Empedocles on Etna, 1852.
Poems, 1853.
Merope, 1858.
Thyrsis, 1866.
New Poems, 1867.
See also Part III, Chapter II.
Edward FitzGerald, 1809-1883.

Eufhranor, 185 1.
Calderon, 1853.
Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyim, 1859.
The Pre-Raphaelites.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828-1882.
Poems, 1870.
The Early Italian Poets, 1861.
Ballads and Sonnets, 1881.
Thomas Gordon Hake, 1809-1895.
Vaies, or the Philosophy of Madness, 1840.
New Symbols, 1876.
Christina Rossetti, 1830-1894.
Goblin Market, 1862.
The Princess Progress, 1866.
Time Flies, 1885.
A Pageant, 1887.
Thomas Woolner, 1825-1892.
My Beautiful Lady, 1866.
William Bell Scott, 1812-1890.
The Year of the World, 1846.
Poems by a Painter, 1854.
Poefns: Ballads, Studi.es from Nature, Sonnets, 1875.
A Poefs Harvest Home, 1882.
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY xix
J. Noel Patoil, 1821-1901.

Poems by a Painter, 1861.
Spindrift, 1867.
Coventry Patmore, 1823-1896.
Tamerton Church Tower, 1853.
The Angel in the House, 1854-1856.
Odes, 1868.
The Unknown Eros, 1877.
Amelia, 1878.
The Spasmodic Poets.
John Stanyan Bigg, 1828-1865.
The Sea-King, 1848.
Night and the Soul, 1854.
Sydney Dobell, 1824-1874.
The Roman, 1850.
Balder, 1854.
Sonnets on the War (with Alexander Smith), 1855.
England in Time of War, 1856.
The Magyar's New-Year-Eve, 1858.
The Youth of England to Garibaldi! s Legion, i860.
Alexander Smith, 1829-1867.
Poems, 1853.
City Poems, 1857.
Edwin of Deira, 1861.
Dreamthorf, 1863.
A Summer in Skye, 1865.
Alfred Hagarfs Household, 1866.
CHAPTER VII. LATER DEVELOPMENTS.

The Later Pre-Raphaelites.
William Morris, 1834-1896.
The Defence of Guenevere, 1858.
The Life and Death of Jasoh, 1867.
The Earthly Paradise, 1868-1870.
Sigurd the Volsung, 1876.
The House of the Wolfngs, 1888.
News from Nowhere, 1891.
The Well at the World! s End, 1896.
The Water of the Wondrous Isles, 1897.
The Sundering Flood, 1898.
[Ernest Charles Jones, 1819-1868.
Songs of Democracy, 1856-1857.
Robert Barnabas Brough, 1828-1870.
Songs of the Governing Classes, 1855.]
Richard Watson Dixon, 1833-1900.
Chrisfs Company, 1861.
Odes and Eclogues, 1884.
Histojy of the Church if England, 1878-1902^
Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1837-1969. ' '
The Queen Mother, Rosamond, l86b.

Atalanta in Calydon, 1865.
Chastelard, 1865.
Poems and Ballads, 1866, 1878, 1889.
XX CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY
Algernon Charles Swinburne {continued).
Songs before Sunrise, 1871.
Bothwell, 1874.
Erechtheus, 1876.
Songs of the Springtides, 1880.
Studies in Song, 1880.
Mary Stuart, 1881.
Tristram of Lyonesse, 1882.
A Century of Roundels, 1883.
Marino Faliero, 1885.
Locrine, 1887.
The Tale of Balen, i8q6.
Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards, 1899.
J. B. Leicester
Warren (Lord de Tabley), 1835-1895.
Philoctetes, 1866.
Orestes, 1867.
Rehearsals, 1870. 1
Searching the Net, 1873.

Orpheus in Thrace, 190 1.
Arthur O'Shaughnessy, 1844-1881.
An Epic on Women, 1870.
Lays of France, 1872.
Music and Moonlight, 1874.
Songs of a Worker, 1881.
Philip Bourke Marston, 1850-1887.
Song- Tide, 1871.
Roden Noel, 1S34-1894.
Beatrice, 1868.
A, Modern Faust, 1888.
Frederick Myers,' 1843-1901.
The Celtic Poets.
Aubrey de Vera the Younger, 1814-1902.
The Sisters, Inisfail, and other Poems, 1861,
The Legends of St Patrick, 1872.
Alexander the Great, 1874.
St Thomas of Canterbury, 1876.
The Foray of Queen Meave, 18S2.
Samuel Ferguson, 1810-1886.
Lays of the Western Gael, 1865.',
Congal, 1872.
Poems, 1880.
William AUingham, 1824-1889.
Poems, 1850.
Day and Night Songs, 1854.
Lewis Morris, 1833-1907.
Songs of Two Worlds j i87i-i8'75.
The Epic of Hades, 1876-1877.
Songs Unsung, 1883.
Gycia, 1886,
Songs of Britain, 1887.
Thomas Edward Brown, 1830-1897.
Fo'cs'le Yams, 1881."
Charles Mackay, 18 14-1889.
John Stuart Blackie, 1809-1895.
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY 5
George MacDonald, 1 824-1 895.

WUhin and Without, 1855.
Poems, 1857.
See also Part II B, Chapter IV.
David Gray, 1838-1861.
Robert Buchanan, 1841-igoi.
Idyls and Legends of Inverbum, 1865.
London Poems, 1866.
North Coast and other Poems, 1868.
The Book of Orm, 1870.
Saint Abe and his Seven Wives, 1872.
White Rose and Red, 1873.
Balder the Beautiful, 1877.
The City of Dream, 1886.
The Wandering Jew, 1893.
The Poetry of Pessimism.
James Thomson, 1834-1882.
A Lady of Sorrow, 1862-1864.
Vane's Story, 1864.
Weddah and Om-el-Bonain, 1866-1867.
The City of Dreadful Night, 1874.
The Later Poetesses.
Dinah Maria Craik, 1826-1887.
Eliza Cook, 1818-1889.
Menella Bute Smedley, 1820-1877.
Dora Greenwell, 1821-1882.
Emily Pfeiffer, 1827-1890.
Sarah Williams, 1841-1868.
Isabella Harwood, 1840?- 1888.
George Eliot, 1819-1880.
The Spanish Gypsy, 1868.
The Legend of Jubal, 1869.
See also Part I, Chapter II, and Part II B, Chapter III.
Adelaide Anne Procter, 1825-1864.
Legends and Lyrics, 185S.
A Chaplet of Verses, 1862.
Jean Ingelow, 1820-1897.
Poems, 1863, 1876, 1885.
A Story of Doom, 1867.
Augusta Webster, 1837-1894,
Dramatic Studies, i860.
A Woman Sold, 1867.
Portraits, 1870.
The Auspicious Day, 1872.
In a Day, 1882.
The Sentence, 1887.
Constance Naden, 1858-1889.
Miscellaneous Poets.
William Cory, 1 823-1 892.
lonica, 1858.
Francis Turner Palgrave, 1824-1897.
William Ernest Henley, 1 849-1903.
A Book of Verses, 1888.
The Song of the Sword, 1892.
For England's Sake, 1900.
XXU CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY
William Ernest Henley {eonttHued).
Hmvlhom and Laven.ii-r, iSoi.
Robert, Earl of Lytton (Owen Meredith), iSjr-'iSpi.
Clytemiiestra, 1853.
LvciU, i860.
Fables in Son^, 1874.
Gienitviri/, 1885.
vi/?<r Paraoisi, or Legends of Exile, 1887.
Edwin Arnold, 183^-1904.
The Ught of Asia, 1879.
Pearls of the Faith, 1883.
The Light of the World, 1891.
Frederick Locker- Lampson, 1821-1895.
London Lyrics, 1857.
Mortimer Collins, 1827-1876.
Charles Stuart Calverley, 1831-1884.
Fly Leaves, 187a.
James Kenneth Stephen, 1859-1895.
Lapsus Calami, 1891.
R. F. Murray, 1863-1894.
Henry Sambrooke Leigh, 1837-18S3.
Carols of Cockayne, 1869.
Ernest Dawson, 1867-1900.
Francis Thompson, 1859-1907.
Poems, 1893.
Sister Songs, 1895.
Neno Poems, 1897.
John Davidson, 1 85 7-1 909.
Fleet Street Eclogues, 1893-1896.
Ballads and Songs, 1S94.
PART II B.
CHAPTER L AFTER SCOTT.

Henry Fothergill Ctiorley, 1808-1873.
Thomas Love Peacock, 1785-1866.
Headlong Hall, 1816.
Melincourt, 1817,
Nightmare Abbey, 1818.
Maid Marian, i8aa.
Tlu Misfortunes of Elfin, 1839,
Crotchet Castle, 1831.
Gryll Grange, 1861.
Imitators of Scott.
William Harrison Ainsworth, 1805-1881.
Rookwood, 1834.
Jack Sheppard, 1839.
The Tower of London, 1840.
Old St Paul's, 1841.
Windsor Castle, 1843.
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY XXIU
Horace Smith, 1779-1849.

Rejeded Addresses (with James Smith), i8n.
Brambletye House, 1826.
G. P. R. James, 1801-1860.
Novelists of Scottish Life.
John Gibson Lockhart, 1 794-1854.
Valerius, 1821.
Adam Blair, 1822.
See also Part III, Chapters I and II.
John Wilson, 1785-1834.
Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life, 1822.
The Trials of Margaret Lindsay, 1823.
Susan Ferrier, 1782-1854.
David Macbeth Moir, 1798-1851.
Mansie Wauch, 1828.
John Gait, 1779-1839.
Annals of the Parish, 1821.
The Ayrshire Legatees, 1821.
The Entail, 1823.
Irish Writers.
William Carleton, 1794-1869.
The Pilgrimage to Lough Derg, 1828.
Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, 1830-1833.
Fardarougha the Miser, 1837-1838.
Valentine M'Clutchy, 1845.
Parra Sastha, 1845.
The Emigrants of Ahadarra, 1847.
The Tithe Proctor, 1849.
WUlyReilly, 1855.
Autobiography (in Life by D. J. O'Donoghue), 1896.
John Banim, 1798-1842.
Tales by the O'Hara Family (with Michael Banim, 1796-1874),
1825-1827.
Gerald Griffin, 1803-1840.
The Collegians, 1829.
William Maginn, 1793-1842.
[Theodore Hook, 1798-1841.
Sayings and Doings, 1824-1831.
Maxwell, 1830.
Gilbert Gurney, 1836.
Jack Bray, 1837.]
Francis Mahony, 1804— 1866.
The Reliqws of Father Prout, 1836.
T. Crofton Croker, 1798-1854.
Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, 1825.
Legends of the Lakes, 1829.
Samuel Lover, 1797-1868.
Rory O'More, 1837.
Handy Andy, 1842.
Charles Lever, 1806-1872.
Harry Lorrequer, 1839.
Charles O'Malley, 1841.
/ack Hinton, 1843.
Tom Burke of Ours. 1844.
XXIV CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY
Charles Lever (coniinuai).
ConieHus 0'Z>i>md u/m JWtn, If'omtn, and tiitr ZS/Vytr, 1804-1865.
Tony Butler, 1865.
.Sw- Brook Fossbrooif, i856.
Joseph Sheridan le Fanu, 1814-1873.
Novelists of \Yar.
William Hamilton Maxwell, 179^-185*
Ston'is of Jf'atcrloo, 1SJ4.
TAt Biroittu, 1837.
George Robert Gleig, 1 796-1 SSS.
TAo SuMtem, i8»6.
Life of IlWhngton, i86a.
Thomas fiamilton, 1789-1841.
Cyi-il ThonUon, itij?.
James Grant, i8»a-i8S7.
Tlu Romance of If'ar, 1845.
Novelists of Sea Life.
Frederick Moirj-at, 1 791-1848.
A'ewlon Foster, 183a.
Peter Sivtple, 1834.
facob Fail/iful, 1S34.
Japket in Search if a Father, 1836.
Midshipman £asy, 1S36.
Masfermaii Ready, 1841.
W. N. Glascoclj, 1787- 1847.
Frederick Chamier, j 796-1 S70.
Ben Brace, 1836.
The Arethusa, 1837.
Tom Bowling, 1S41.
Michael Scott, 1 789-1835.
Tom Cringle's Log, 1819-1830.
The Cruise of the Midge, 1S36.
James Hannay, 1827-1873.
Singleton Fontenoy, 1850.
See alsj Part III, Chapter II.
Thomas Hope, 1770-1S31.

Anasiasius, 1819.
'
James Morier, 17 So?- 1849.

Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, 1S34.
Ayesha, the Maid of Jârs, 1834.
Samuel Warren, 1807-1870.
Passages from the Diary of a late Physician, 1833-1838.
Ten Thousand a Year, 1839-1841.
Bulwer Lytton (Lord Lytton), 1803-1S73.
Falkland, 1837.
Pelhaiii, i8s8.
Paul Clifford, 1830.
Eugene Aram, 1832.
The Last Days of Pompeii, 1834.
Pienzi, 183=..
Zaneni, 184a.
The Last of the Barons, 1843.
BarolJ, 1848.
The Caxtons, 18+9.
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARy XXV
Bulwer Lytton (Lord Lytton) (contimud).
My Novel, 1853.
IVhat will He do with It ? 1859.
The Coming Race, 1871.
Kenelm Chillingly, 1873.
Benjamin Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield), 1804-1881.
Vivian Grey, 1826-1827.
The Young Duke, 1831.
Contarini Fleming, 1832.
The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, 1833.
Venetia, 1837.
Henrietta Temple, 1837.
Coningsby, 1844.
Sybil, 1845.
Tancred, 1846.
Lothair, 1870.
Endymion, 1880.
CHAPTER II. DICKENS AND THACKERAY.

Charles Dickens, 1812-1870.
Sketches by Boz, 1836. ^
The Pickwick Papers, 1836-1837.

Oliver Twist, 1837-1838.
Nicholas Niekleby, 1838-1839.
The Old Curiosity Shop, 1840-1841.
Bamaby Rudge, 1841.
Martin Chuxzlewit, 1843-1844.
Dombey and Son, 1846-1848.
David Copperjield, 1849-1850.
Bleak House, 1852-1853.
Hard Times, 1854.
Little Dorrit, 1855-1857.
A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
Our Mutual Friend, 1864-1865.
The Mystery of Edwin Dreod, 1870.
Robert Smith Surtees, 1803-1864.
Jorrocks's Jaunts, 1838.
Handley Cross, 1843.
Charles Whitehead, 1804-1862.
The Solitary, 1831.
Lives and Exploits of English Highwaymen, Pirates and Robbers, 1S34.
The Autobiography of Jack Ketch, 1834.
Richard Savage, 1842.
The Earl of Essex, 1843.
William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811-1863.
The Great Hoggarty Diamond, 1841.
Barry Lyndon, 1844.
Vanity Fair, 1847-1848.
The Book of Snobs, 1848 (in Punch, 1846-1847).
Pendennis, i849-r850.
The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, 185 1.
Esmond, 1852.
The Newcomes, 1853-1855.
W. e
XXVI CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY
William Makepeace Thackeray (continued).
The Four Georges, 1855-1856.
The Virginians, 1857-1859.
The Adventures of Philip, 1861-1862.
Denis Duval, 1867.
George du Maurier, 1834-1896.
Peter Ibbetson, 1891.
Trilby, 1894.
CHAPTER III. THE WOMEN NOVELISTS.

Anna Elizabeth Bray, 1 789-1883.
The Protestant, 1838.
Lady Georgina FuUerton, 1812-1885.
Ellen Middleton, 1844.
Elizabeth Sewell, 1815-1906.
Amy Herbert, 1844.
Catherine Gore, 1799-1861.
Anne Marsh, 1791-1874.
Two Old Men's Tales, 1844. I
Frances TroU'ope, 1 780-1863.

The Domestic Manners oj the Americans, 1831.
Charlotte Bronte, 1816-1855.
Jane Eyre, 1847.
Shirley, 1849.
Villette, 1853.
The Professor, 1857.
Emily Bronte, 1818-1848.
Wuthering Heights, 1847.
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, 1810-1865.
Mary Barton, 1848.
Ruth, 1853.
Cranford, 1853.
North and South, 1855.
Sylvia's Lovers, 1863.
Cousin Phillis, 1863-1864.
W'ives and Daughters, 1866,
George Eliot, 18 19-1880.
Scenes of Clerical Life, 1857.
Adam Bede, 1859.
The Mill on the Floss, i860.
Silas Marner, 1861.
Romola, 1863.
Felix Holt, 1866.
Middlemarch, 1871-1872.
Daniel Deronda, 1876.
See also Part I, Chapter II, and Part II A, Chapter VII.
Mrs Henry Wood, 1814-1887.
East Lynne, 1861.
Mrs Halliburton's Troubles, 1862.
The Channings, 1862.
Johnny Ludlow, 1874-1885.
Dinah Maria Craik, 1826-18S7.
John Halifax, Gentleman, 1856.
Charlotte Mary Yonge, 1823-igoi.
The Heir of Redelyffe, 1856.
Margaret Oliphant, 1 828-1 897.
Margaret Maitland, 1849.
The Chronicles of Carlingford, 1863-1876.
CHAPTER IV. THE LATER FICTION.

Charles Reade, 1814-1884.
Peg Woffmgton, 1853.
Christie Johnstone, 1853.
It is Never too Late to Mend, 1856.
The Cloister and the Hearth, 1861.
Hard Cash, 1863.
Griffith Gaunt, 1866.
Put Yourself in his Place, 1870.
A Terrible Temptation, 1871.
Charles Kingsley, 1819-1875.
Yeast, 1848.
The Saint's Tragedy, 1848.
Alton Locke, 1850.
Hypatia, 1853.
Westward Ho t 1855.
The Water Babies, 1863.
Hereward the Wake, 1866.
Henry Kingsley, 1830-1876.
The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn, 1859.
Ravenshoe, 1862.
Francis Smedley, 1818-1864.
Frank Fairleigh, 1850.
Harry Coverdale's Courtship, 1854.
Albert Smith, 1816-1860.
The Adventures of Mr Ledbury, 1844.
The SccUtergood Family, 1845.
The Marchioruss of Brinvilliers, 1846.
Christopher Tadpole, 1848.
George Alfred Lawrence, 1827-1876.
Guy Livingstone, 1857.
Thomas Hughes, i8»3-i896.
Tom Brown's School Days, 1857.
G. J. Whyte-MelviUe, 1821-1878.
Digby Grand, 1853.
Kate Coventry, 1855.
Holmby House, i860.
The Gladiators, 1863.
Wilkie Collins, 1824-1889.
Antonina, 1850.
The Woman in White, i860.
Armadale, 1866.
The Moonstone, 1868.
Anthony Trollope, 1815-1882.
The Macdermots of Ballycloran, 1 847.
The Warden, 1855.
Barchester Towers, 1857.
XXviii CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY
Anthony TroUope (continued).
Doctor Thome, 1858.
The Three Clerks, 1858.
Framley Parsonage, 1861.
The Small House at Allington, 1864.
Can You forgive Her? 1864.
The Last Chronicle of Barset, 1867.
Phineas Finn, 1869.
Phineas Redux, 1874.
The Prime Minister, 1876.
Autobiography, i88$.
George Meredith, 1828-1909.
Poems, 1851.
The Shaving of Shagpat, 1856.
The Ordeal of Richard Feveril, 1859.
Evan Harrington, 1861.
Modern Love, 1863.
Emilia in England [Sandra Belloni\ 1864.
Rhoda Fleming, 1865.
Vittoria, 1867.
The Adventures of Harry Richmond, 1871.
Beauchamp's Career, 1876.
y^^ Egoist, 1879.
7%^ Tragic Comedians, 1880.
Poems and Lyrics of the foy of Earth, 1883.
Diana of the Crossways, 1885.
Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life, 1887.
A Reading of Earth, 1888.
One of our Conquerors, 1891.
The Amazing Marriage, 1895.
Orf« in contribution to the Song of French History,
A Reading of Life, 1901.
James Payn, 1830-1898.
Lost Sir Massingbred, 1864.
By Proxy, 1878.
George Macdonald, 1824-1905.
David Elginbrod, 1863.
Alec Forbes, 1865.
Robert Falconer, 1868.
Malcolm, 1875.
The Marquis of Lossie, 1877.
Sir Gibbie, 1879.
Donal Grant, 1883.
William Alexander.
fohnnie Gibb of Gushetneuk, 1871.
William Sharp, 1856-1905.
The Dominion of Dreams, 1895.
The Sin-Eater, 1899.
The New Romantic Novel.
Richard Blackmore, 1825-1900.
Lorna Doone, 1869.
The Maid of Sker, 1872.
Oliver Madox Brown, 1855-1874.
Gabriel Denver, 1873.
The Dwale Bluth, 1876.
CHR0N0L06ICAL SUMMARY XXIX
William Black, 1841-T898.

A Daughter of Heth, 1871.
A Princess of Thule, 1S73.
Walter Besant, 1836-1901.
Ready-Money Mortiboy (with James Rice, 1843-1882), 187a.
The Golden Butterfly (with Rice), 1876.
All Sorts and Conditions of Men, 1882.
Dorothy Forster, 1884.
The Children of Gibeon, 1886.
Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850-1894.
An Inland Voyage, 1878.
Virginibus Puerisque, 1881.
Familiar Studies of Men and Books, 1882.
New Arabian Nights, i88a.
Treasure Island, 1883.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Byde,. iS85.
Kidnapped, 1886.
The Master of Ballantrae, i88g.
The Wrecker (with Mt Lloyd Osbourne), 1892.
Catriona, 1893.
Island Nights Entertainments, 1893. ,
The Ebb Tide (with Mr Lloyd Osbourne), 1894.

Weir of Hermiston, 1896.
St Ives, 1899.
In the South Seas, 1900,
John Watson, 1850-1907.

Beside the Boitnie Brier Bush, 1894.
The Days of Auld Lang Syne, ,1895.
George Douglas Brown, 1863-1902.'
The House with the Green Shutters, 1901.
Joseph Henry Shorthouse, 1834-1903.
fohn Inglesant, 1881.
Sir Percival, 1886.
Samuel Butler, 1 835-1902.
Erewhon, 1872.
Erewhon Revisited, 1901.
The Way of all Flesh, 1903.
George Gissing, 1857-1903.
The Unclassed, 1884.
Demos, 1886.
New Grub Street, 1891.
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, 1903.
Writers for Children.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), 1832-1898.
Alicis Adventures in Wonderland, 1865.
TTtrough the Looking-Glass, 1871.
Margaret âtty, 1809-1873.
Fairy Godmothers and other Tales, 185 1.
Aunt Judys Tales, 1859.
Juliana Horatia Ewing, 1841-1885.
The Land of Lost Toys, 1869.
Madam Liberality, 1873.
Jan of the Windmill, 1876.
We and the World, 1877-1879.
Jackanapes, 1879.
XXX CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY
PART III.
CHAPTER L HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY.

§ I. The Historians.
Sharon Turner, 1 768-1 847.

History of the Anglo-Saxons, 1799-1805.
J. M. Kemble, 1807-1857.
The Saxons in England, 1849.
Francis Palgrave, 1788-1 861.
History of Normandy and of England, 1851-1864.
[The Philologists.
Joseph Bosworth, 1789-1876.
Benjamin Thorpe, 1782-1870.
Richard Chenevix Trench, 1807-1886.
On the Study of Words, 185 1.
English Past and Present, 1855.
Friedrich Max Milller, 1823-1900.]
Henry Hallam, 1777-1859.

The State of Europe during the Middle Ages, 1818.
The Constitutional History of England, 1827.
An Introduction to the Literature of Europe, 1837-1839'.
'
John Lingard, 1771-1851. '
History of England, 1819-1830.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1800-1859V'
Critical and Historical Essays, 1843.
Writers on Ancient History.
Thomas Arnold, 1795-1842.
History of Rome, 1838-1843.
Connop Thirlwall, 1797-1875.
History of Greece, 1835-1847.
George Grote, 1794-1871.
History of Greece, 1846-1856.
George Comewall Lewis, 1806-1863.
On the Government of Dependencies, 1841.
On the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion, 1844.
Inquiry on the Credibility of Early Roman History, 1855.
Charles Merivale, 1808-1893.
History of the Romans under the Empire, 1850-1862.
George Finlay, 1799-1875.
History of Greece from its Conquest by the Romans, 1844-1861.
Henry Hart Milman, 1 791-1868.
History of the Jews, 1829.
History of Christianity, 1840.
History of Latin Christianity, 1850-1855.
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY xxxi
James Anthony Froude, 1818-1894.

The Nemesis of Faith, 1849.
Short Studies in Great Subjects, 1867-X883.
The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, 1872-1874.
Thomas Carlyle, 1882-1884.
Oceana, 1 886.
The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, 1889.
The Oxford Historians.
Edward Augustus Freeman, 1823-1892.
History of the Norman Conquest, 1867-1879.
The Reign of William Rufus, 1882.
The History of Sicily, 1891-1894.
William Stubbs, 1825-1901.
The Constitutional History of England, 1874-1878.
The Early Plantagenets, 1876.
John Richard Green, 1837-1883.
A Short History of the English People, 1874.
A History of the English People, 1877-1880.
The Making of England, 1881.
[CharlesHenry Pearson, 1830-1894!
The Early and Middle Ages of England, 1861.
National Life and Character, 1893.]
Mandell Creighton, 1843-1901.
Simon de Montfort, 1876.
History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation,, 1882-
1897-
Samuel Rawson Gardiner, 1829-1902.
History of England from the Accession of James I... to the Year
1656, 1863-1901.
John Robert Seeley, 1834-1895.

Ecce Homo, 1866.
The Life and Times of Stein, 1878.
Natural Religion, 1882.
The Expansion of England, 1883.
The Growth of British Policy, 1895..
'
W. E. H. Lecky, 1838-1903.
The Rise and Infltience of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, 1865.
History of European Morals, 1869.
History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 1878-1890.
Democracy and Liberty, 1896.
John Hill Burton, 1809-1881.
History of Scotland, 1867-1870.
John Dalberg Acton (Lord Acton), 1S34-1902.
Frederick William Maitland, 1850-1906.
The History of English Law i«/?)r«£fl'i(/a>Y^/(withSirF. Pollock),/895.
Domesday Book and Beyond, 1897.
Township and Borough, 1898.
Roman Canon Law in England, 1898.
Archibald Alison, 1792-1867.
History of Europe during the French Revolution, 1833-1842.
Harriet Martineau, 1802-1876.
History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace, 1849-1850.
Xxxii CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY
Military Historians.
W. F. P. Napier, 1785-1860.
History of the War in the Peninsula, 1828-1840.
Alexander William Kinglake, 1809-1891.
JSoihen, 1844.
The Invasion oj the Crimea, 1863-1887.
Edward Bruce Hamley, 1824-1893.
John William Kaye, 1814-1876.
History of the Sepoy War in India, 1 864-1 876.
G. F. R. Henderson.
Stonewall Jackson and the Civil War, 1898.
§ 1. The Biographers.
John Gibson Lockhart, 1794-1854.
Life of Bums, 1828.
Life of Scott, 1836-1838.
See also Part H
B, Chapter I, and Part III, Chapter II.
Thomas Moore, 1779-1852.
Life of Byron, 1830.
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, 1815-1881.
Life of Thomas Arnold, 1844.
George Henry Lewes, 1817-1878.
Life of Goethe, 1855.
John Forster, 1812-1876.
Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith, 1848.
Sir John Eliot, 1864.
Life of Landor, 1869.
Life OJ Dickens, 1 872-1874.
Life of Swift, 1875.
David Masson, 1822-1907.
Life of Milton, 1859-1880.
Margaret Oliphant, 1828-1897.
Life of Edward Irving, 1862.
Memoirs of Laurence Oliphant, 1891.
William Blackwood and his Sons, 1897.
See also Part II B, Chapter III.
Samuel Smiles, 1812-1904.
Life of George Stephenson, 1857.
Life of a Scotch Naturalist, 1876.
Lives of the Engineers, 1877.
Robert Dick, Baker, of Thurso, 1878.
Memoir of John Murray, 1891.
CHAPTER H. LITERARY AND AESTHETIC

CRITICISM.
§ r. Literary Criticism.
John Wilson, 1 785-1854.
The Isle of Palms, 18x2.
The City of the Plague, 18 16.
Nodes Ambrosianae, 1822-1833.
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY xxxiii
Jolrn Wilson {continued).

Tie Rarealums of Christopher North, 1843.
John Gibson Lockhart, 1794-1854.
See also Part II B, Chapter I, and Part III, Chapter I.
Leigh Hunt, 1 784-1 859.
ImagiTtation and Fancy, 1S44.
Wit and Sumour, 1846.
Men, Women, and Books, 1847.
Autobiography, 1850.
Thomas de Qoincey, 1785-1859.
Cmfessions of an English Opium Eater, 1822.
Autobiographic Sketches, 1853.
William Johnson Fox, 1 786-1 864-
Abraham Hayward, 1801-1884.
The Art of Dining, 1852.
Biographical and Critical Essays, 1858-
James Hannay, 1827-1873.
Satire arid Satirists, 1854.
George Brimley, 1819-1857.
Eneas Sweetland Dallas, 1818-1879.
The Gay Science, 1866.
Shakbspeaaean Critics.
John Payne Collier, 1789-1883.
Sistory of English Dramatic Poetry, 183 1.
Notes and Emendations to the Plays of Shakespeare, 1853.
J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, 1820-1889.
Samuel Weller Singer, 1783-1858.
The Text of Shakespeare Vindicated, 1853.
Howard Stannton, 1810-1874.
Alexander Dyce, 1798-1869.
Charles Cowden-CIarke, 1787-1877.
Mary Cowden-CIarke, 1809-1898.
The Girlhood of Shaiespeari s Heroines, 1851.
Anna Brownell Jameson, 1794— 1860.
Characteristics of Shakespear^s Women, 1832.
Sacred and Legendary Art, 1848.
Helena SavUe Fancit (I^y Martin), 1817-1898.
On some of Shakespear^s Female Characters, 1885.
James Spedding, 1808-1881.
Evenings tuith a Reviewer, 1848.
Letters and Life of Bacon, 1861-1874.
John Brown, 1810-1882.
Sbrae Subsecivae, 1858-1882.
Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888.'
On Translatittg Homer, x86i.
Essays in Criticism, 1865, 1888.
The Study of Celtic Literature, 1867.
Culture and Anarchy, 1869.
St Paul and Protestantism, 1870.
Friendships Garland, 1871.
Literature and Dogma, 1873.
God and the Bible, 1875.
XXXIV CHRONOr.OcnCAL SUMMARY
Mntthcw Arnold (iDtilimii-J).
Mixtd A'.(j.ri'.r, 1879.
Irish Assays, iSSi.
Discourses in .ti>i(>i,ii, 1SM5,
See also Pail II A, Clmplcr VI.
Francis Turner I'uljjravc, 1814 itfgy.
John Skilton, i8,(i 1897.
Nugat Criliiae, iSin.
A CampainHtr at ffomi\ iNdj.
Maitland of Lethinslon, i887-i,SS3.
Mary Stiiarl, 1893.
Tilt Tablt Talk <f Shirliy, 1 Si;5.
A. K. II. lioyd, i8as-iS(;9.
KtcreatioHS of a Couiitiy /\irson, 1859.
Graver Thoiig/tis of a Conn/iy /\iis,<ii, i86».
Crititiil Hssnys by a Country Parson, 18C5.
[olin Addington Symonds, if<.|9-i8i).i.
The Xenaissanct in Italy, 1875 i8S(i.
Essays Sfieiiilntivt and Sni^^rslivi; Sgo. 1
William Ernest Jlonlcy, iS,|() 1903.

Views and liei'inv.i, iSyo.
See also Part II A, Chopter VU.
Richard Holt Hutton, iSart-iHyy.
Essays, 'J'hcological and Literarv, 1S71.
Criticisms on Contfmporary Thoiijilil and Thinhtrs, 1894.
Leslie Sleplien, iH,',a-r904.
Hours in a Liirnry, 1874-1H79,
English ThoKi^hl in the l':i;>lit.etnth Century, 1876.
Studies of a Binffni/'hi-r, i.SyS.
The English (l/ili/iiriaiis, 1900.
Richard Garnett, 1835-1006.
Primula and other Lyrics, 1858.
lo in Egypt, 1859.
Carlyle, 1887.
§ «. AiiSTiiKTic Criticism.
Henjamin Haydon, 178C-1S46.
Autoliiography, 1853.
John Ruskin, 1819-1900. \/
Modern Painters, 1843-1860.
The Seven Lamps of 'Architecture, 1849.
TIte Stones of Vi-iihy, 1851-1853.
Prc-Iiiiphaclitisin,85 1 1
Lectures on Architcrlnre and Painting, 1854.

The Political I'Wonoiny of Art, 18J7.
Unto this Last [i8r)oj, 1865.
Munera Pulveris [1861-1863], 1871.
Sesame and Lilies, i86s.
The Crown y Wild Olive, i86fi.
Time and Tide liy Wear and Tyne, 1867.
on Art, JS70.
/.ritiircs
Fors Clavigtra, rH7t-i884.
1 885- 1 889.
Praeteriia,
Dante Gabriel Komjcttl, 1818-1 88a.
Hand and Soul, 1850,
See also Part II A, Chajjlcr VI.
Walter Pater, 1839-1894.
Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 1873,
Marius the Epicurean, 1S85.
Imaginary Portraits, 1887.
Appreciations, 1889.
Plato and Platonism, 1893.
Gaston de Latour, 1896.
CHAPTER III. MISCELLANEOUS PROSE.

Walter Savage Landor, 1775-1864.
Gebir, 1798.
Count Julian, 1812.
Imaginary Conversations, 1824-1853.
Pericles and Aspasia, 1836.
The Pentameron, 1837.
Andrea of Hungary, Giovanna of Naples, and Fra Rupert : a Trilogy,
1839-1841.
The Siege of Ancona, 1846.
Hellenics, 1847.
The last Fruit off an Old Tree, 1853.
Heroic Idyls, 1863.
Mary Russell Mitford, 1 786-1855.
Our Village, 1824-1832.
Recollections of a Literary Life, 1852.
Julius Hare, 1795-1855.
Guesses at Truth (with Augustus Hare, i792-i834)i 1827.
Arthur Helps, 1813-1875.
Friends in Council, 1847-1859.
Companions of my Solitude, 1851.
William Rathbone Greg, 1809-1881.
The Creed of Christendom, 1851.
Enigmas of Life, 1872.
William Brighty Rands, 1823-1882.
Lilliput Levee, 1864.
Henry Holbeach, Student in Life and Philosophy, 1865.
Views and Opinions, 1866.
Chaucer's England, 1869.
Travellers and Explorers.
Amelia Blandford Edwards, 1831-1892.
A Thousand Miles up the Nile, iSt;.
F. L. M'CIiutock, 1819-1907.
The Voyage of the Fox, 1859.
Robert Curzon (Baron Zouche), 1810-1873.
Visits to Monasteries in the Levant, 1849.
David Livingstone, 1813-1873.
Missionary Travels in South Africa, 1857.
Henry Morton Stanley, 1841-1904.
How 1 found Livingstone, 1872.
Through the Dark Continent, 1878.
In Darkest Africa, 189a.
XXXVl CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY
John Hanning Speke, 1827-1864.
Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, 1863.
Samuel Baker, 1821-1893.
The Albert N'yanza, 1866.
The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, 1867.
Ismailia, 1874.
Richard Burton, 1821-1890.
A Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah, 1855-1856.
The Arabian Nights, 1885-1888.
Edward William Lane, 1801-1876.
Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 1836.
George Borrow, 1 803-1 881.
The Ziruttli, 1841.
The Bible in Spain, 1S43,
Lavengro, 185 1.
The Romany Rye, 1857.
Wild Wales, 1862.
Laurence Oliphant, 1 829-1 888.
Piccadilly, 1870.
Altiora Peto, 1883.
Episodes in a Life of Adventure, 1887.
Lafcadio Heam, 1850-1904.
Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 1894.
Kokoro, 1896.
Gleanings in Buddha- Fields, 1897.
Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation, 1904.
Thb Literature of Sport.
William Scrope, 1772-1852.
The Art of Deer-Stalking, 1838.
John Colquhoun, 1805-1885.
The Moor and the Loch, 1840.
Charles St John, 1809-1856.
Wild Sports and Natural History of the Highlands, 1846.
A Tour in Sutherlandshire, 1849.
Natural History and Sport in Moray, 1863.
William Bromley-Davenport.
Sport, 1885.
Richard JefFeries, 1848-1887.
The Gamekeeper at Home, 1878.
The Amateur Poacher, 1879.
Wood Magic, 1881.
Bevis, 1882.
The Story of my Heart, 1883.
The Life of the Fields, 1884.
Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900.

Poems, 1 88 1.
Intentions, 1891.
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1893.
A Woman of no Importance, 1894.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1898.
The Importance of beUig Earnest, 1899.
De Profundis, 1905.
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
THE" NEW AGE
At the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria the English nation

grew "drunk with' sight of power."- There were miles of war-
ships gathered at 'Spithead^; feudatory princes from India and
representatives of free- peoples ruling over territories such as had
never before owned allegiance to a single flag were assembled
'
to do homage to the aged sovereignfi' The newspapers whose

"frantic boast and foolish word " gave utterance to the feeling of
the nation, and the nation from which those newspapers took
their spirit, were not without excuse. But suddenly, upon ears
still ringing with the blare of trumpets' and hearts still elate with the
proofs of material power, there fell th& arresting voice which pro-
claimed the insufficiency and theevahescence of all such power :
" Far called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headlandi sinks the fire
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre I
No more masterly expression was ever given to that sense of

reaction which follows uppn feyei;ish activity ^rid exalted hope.
That si}ch, must come is a law of life, arid it is also
reaction , .
a, law that its depth must be proportional to the exaltation which
has gone, before. The mightier the wave, the greater and the
rnore desolate is the stretch of riaked shingle its reflux leaves
exposed. ,
AH shows that jugt as a physical stimulant
history
exacts payment in the shape of a subsequent depression, so the
w. I
2 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
moral or intellectual stimulant must be followed sooner or later
by a temporary lowering of spiritual vitality. The example of a
St. Francis of Assisi for a time lifts his followers to a height
altogether beyond the reach of the ordinary world ; but literary
satire and the sober documents of history are at one in their
testimony that in the sixteenth century their successors had sunk

below that world's level.
We see the same law at work in The

political history.
magnificent panegyric which Thucydides puts into the mouth of

Pericles stands in sharp contrast with the laments of Demos-
thenes a century later for the want of those very qualities which
the great historian represents as the special endowment of his
countrymen. Both conceptions of the Athenian character are
probably just : they are certainly the conceptions of the men best
qualified to discover the truth and to express it acc\irately. But
if so, is it not probable that the depression was largely due to
reaction from the abnormal energy of the earlier Athenians ? A
still more familiar instance be found in the history of
is to
England. We know how deep and sincere were the moral
earnestness and the religious feeling of the Puritans ; and we
know likewise the price which was paid when the Restoration
relaxed the strain.
The same principle unquestionably holds in literature ; and,
as the artistic is the most sensitive of all types of human character,
it would not be surprising to find the principle exemplified
there more strikingly than anywhere else. We cannot ascribe to
accident the fact that in the literatures of Greece, of Spain, of
France, of England, the dominant forms have varied from age
to age. Now the drama prevails, now the lyric, now the novel;
in this generation poetry, in that prose; one century addresses
itself mainly to the understanding, another to the imagination.
It is no mere coincidence that chivalric romance has so prevailed
in Spain, the land of the romantic conflict of Moor and Christian.
There more than bare chance in the fact that the golden age
is
of the drama, par excellence the literature of action, was con-

temporaneous, alike in Athens and in England, with the period
of highest political and individual energy; or again in the fact
THE NEW AGE 3
that when England was arrayed in hostile camps we have on the

one hand the cavalier literature of persiflage and on the other the
lofty strain of Milton.
After each of these times of activity there has followed, in
literature as in national life, a period of depression, sometimes,
but not always, succeeded by a fresh revival. For Athens, after
the glory of the drama and of history had passed, there still
remained the glory of philosoptiy and of oratory. In Spain, the
eclipse of romance was permanent. In France, the great age
of Louis XIV passes into the lower phase of the Encyclopaedia,
only to revive again in the marvellous burst of political life in
which she led, and of literature in which she shared with, the
rest of Europe. In England, the many-sided activity of the
Elizabethans changes into the factional spirit and
of Cavalier
Roundhead, and that again sinks with the debasement of the
court and of society into the ribaldry and license of the Restora-
tion drama.
The same spectacle of rise and fall meets the eye when we
turn to the great age of the French Revolution and compare it
with the period immediately after its force was spent No one
can doubt that the Revolution was for Europe in general, both
in national life and in literature, a time of heightened energy
and productiveness. For more than twenty years the sword was
hardly ever sheathed, and the whole Continent shook with the
tramp of armies. It is true, war in itself is not productive;
but De Tocqueville's L'Ancien R'egime shows that the political
ideas which set the armies in motion were eminently fertile. And
who can doubt that in literature the thirty years or so during
which "the gospel of Jean Jacques" swayed the thought of
Europe were among the most productive in the history of the
world? But when we look a generation forward, we see once
more innumerable evidences of decline. War is exhausting; and
in 1815 the nations found themselves the richer by a prisoner
whom they feared even in captivity, and the poorer by hundreds
of thousands of lives, by countless millions of money, and by
multitudes of shattered hopes. For however might be
clea:r it
to De Tocqueville that the ideas of the Revolution were still

alive, for the moment its failure seemed to be complete, and the
fascinating vision of liberty, fraternity and equality faded into
the light of common day.
England had suffered from the great struggle far less than the
continent of Europe. She had never felt the pressure of hostile,
armies on her soil, and for her the measureless waste of war had,
been in great part made good by the extraordinary development
of her commerce. Yet even in England the reaction after the
war was severe. Prices were high ; the artificial stimulus to trade
was gone ; the evils inherent in that industrial revolution which
had been in progress for half a century were becoming more
conspicuous ; and there was as yet little or no factory legislatiori
to check them. Moreover, the poor law has never, either before
or since, been so unwisely administered : it was sapping the
manhood of the nation, pauperising the poor, demoralising the
well-to-do. There were bread-riots. Necessary and inevitable
political reforms were delayed till, as the Duke of Wellington
warned the nation, the choice lay between concession and civil
war. In truth, the state of things was not far removed from a
state of civil war. The windows of Apsley House were broken
by an infuriated mob; there was a crisis when troops and artillery
were held in readiness to sweep the streets of London; the C hartist

movement grew; that warlike spirit in the civilian, which in the
opening years of the century had been directed against a foreign
foe, was now absorbed in contemplated civil strife. " You should
have the like of this," said a young lawyer equipped as a volunteer
to Thomas Carlyle. " Hm,
yes," was the reply ; " but I haven't
yet quite settled on which side." The continuance of such a
social state meant the death of hope, which is as.indispensabje
ih literature and art as Bacon knew it to be in politics.
A time of stress and strain, far ftom being inimical to literature
and art, is in the highest degree stimulating, provided the ferment
is due to the leaven of great ideas and of ennobling conflicts.
The greatest periods of the world's literature have followed upon

such times. The effect is due, not to the turmoil, but to the
operation of the ideas which occasion the turmoil, or which are
evoked by it. But there is nothing dignified, nothing vivifying,
THE NEW AGE 5
in the social struggles of England during the third and fourth

decades of the nineteenth century. So far, then, as the outward
and visible circumstances of national life are concerned, we should
riot be surprised to find those decades to be a period of com-
/ parative sterility. And such is in fact their character. But this
phenomenon of rise and fall in literature is so universal, and is
in itself so interesting, that it may be not amiss to examine it
more carefully and to attempt, in some measure at least, to

account for it.
In the first place, it is to be observed that the phenomenon is
by no means confined to literature. At one time the whole stream

of life seems to flow on in a single triumphant and irresistible
current ;at another the movement is slow, uncertain, purposeless,
as if in some "backwater of the souL" The facts of history, and
especially of literature, often suggest the analogy of the life of the
individual We seem to see years of growth, years of highest
energy, years of decline, just as we see the individual man wax
and and wane. The explanation is doubtless to be sought
flourish
in the rise and decay of ideas. Though the stream of human life
flows on, unlike the life of the individual, ia a steady and equable
volume, those ideas which, like the winds, agitate its surface or
stir it to its depths, are variable. To and dis-
their appearance
appearance due the semblance of the kind of change which
is
marks the individual life. When a dominant idea or group of

ideas is in full vigour, we seem to be as it were on the crest of a
wave of life. But the interest sinks, the power lessens, the fervour
is lost, the whole tone of life becomes lower. The race, we
imagine, has aged, though the men are as young as they ever were.
We imagine so, and it may be the case. A nation which has
marched in the van may fall permanently behind ; it may pass into
the winter of its days ; and, with nations as with men, there is no
following spring to renew the vigour of life. Rome went down
before the onslaught of the barbarians because Roman life was
already debased. It was not the ridicule of Don Quixote that
killed Spanish romance, it was the disease already inherent in it
But in the case of a nation in normal social health and enjoying
a vigorous spiritual life, it will be found that the times of apparent
decline in literature are really what we may call periods of germina-
tion. When the great French writers of the age of Louis XIV
gradually passed away, they seemed to leave a vacancy ; and no
doubt for a time they did so. It was a vacancy never to be filled
again by men of their stamp, men pursuing their aims or dominated
by their ambitions. Moliere, Corneille and Racine, the men
who made the French drama, and who gave France her literary
pre-eminence in Europe, died, the first in 1673, the last in 1699;
but in no long time Voltaire and Rousseau, who did so much to
determine the course of French history during the eighteenth

century, were ripe to take their place; and already before the
death of Racine, Bayle's Dictionary, that curious armoury from
which so many of their weapons were drawn, was collected and
arranged. The old descend to the grave with the laurels on their
brow, and the world laments the loss; the young, with their
laurels still to win, are already preparing to take their place ; but
the world will not and cannot take the laurels upon trust. It is a
law of life that we know the greatest only when it is passing or has
already passed away.
" The' gates of fame and of the grave

Stand under the same architrave."
h If we turn to England, we are confronted more than once in

the not distant past by the same spectacle of rise and decline.
Within a period of twenty-one years are recorded the deaths of
Hume, Johnson, Adam Smith, Gibbon and Burke ; and with them
the eighteenth century in its literary aspect passes away. But
again we see how the losses are made good. Wordsworth,
Scott and Coleridge were all born before the death of the first of
the men named; Byron, Shelley and Keats, before the death of
the last. The work of these men may be said, yvith sufficient
accuracy for the present purpose, to form the English contribution
to the great romantic revival, or the Literature of the Revolution.
They are separated from one another by very wide differences
yet the world is not mistaken in believing that they were stirred
to work by common impulses, and that there are points of con-
nexion between them which do not and cannot exist between
THE NEW AGE 7
men of different generations. They were, sometimes in spite of

themselves, children of the Revolution, and the ideas of the
Revolution- were fermenting in their minds.
When we look onwards once more some fifty years we see
the old order changing; it is only faith, or else a glance at the
productions of still more recent days, that assures us it is "giving
place to new." It is plain that in the third decade of the nine
teenth century the impulse given by, or at least associated with/
the French Revolution rapidly failed. Whether it would have
done so with such speed had the younger men survived, cannqt
be determined. But Keats died in 182 1, Shelley in the following
year, and Byron in 1824. The elder men had for the most part
already done their work, and, except Wordsworth and Landor,
they did not very long survive their younger contemporaries. So
far as it is possible to fix a date, we may say that the period ends
wi th the jfgar 1832^ the year of the death of Scott at Abbotsford,
of Goethe in Germany and of Cuvier in France, the year after
the death of Hegel, whose thought so profoundly influenced the
nineteenth century.
The years 1825 to 1840 show a comparatively meagre list of
memorable works. In the writings of the younger generation we
have only a partial counterpoise to the loss caused by failing
powers and thinning ranks among their elders. We can see in
it numerous beginnings and rich promise, but the actual per-
formance is poor beside that of the preceding fifteen years, which
includes all that matters of Byron, the best of Scott's prose, and
Miss Austen's, and all of Shelley and Keats, together with much
of Coleridge and Wordsworth. But the true significance of the
be missed unless we bear in mind that they
years after 1825 wiU
were the seed-time of all the rich literature of the early and
intermediate Victorian era. By the greatness of that literature
we must estimate the importance of the years in which it was
germinating.
It is interesting to notice that the men who in England
governed thought during the second quarter of the nineteenth
century, conceived of their social and political relations with the
immediate past as largely negative. The French Revolution
seemed to them to have failed. Some of them, like Carlyle,
would have refused to characterise it as a failure absolute; but
to others, like Tennyson, there appeared to have flowe'd little or
nothing but evil from "the red fool-fury of the Seine," a phrase —
evoked, it is true, by a 'later revolutionary mo-\êment, but still
descriptive, to its author's mind. Of the earlier and greater one.

In this respectEngland stood in contrast to the couritry of the
Revolution itself, where faith in it and in its principles had been
transmitted, almost as a religious' cult, through all political changes.
"He must take care not to touch tny Revolution," is the phfise
attributed to Thiers when he heard that Taine was engaged on
the Origines de la France conteinporaine; and the historiah -
who
quotes it adds: "By the expression 'my Revolution' the aged
statesman did not refer to his owri history of the change of things
with which, as a youth, he won a front place in the brilliant
literary group of the Restoration. He was giving expression to
the sentiment cherished to the period of his death by rnost ,
Frenchmen excepting the fanatics Of Legitimism, that the Revo-

lution was a sacred manifestation which might be diversely
interpreted, but never profoundly assailed'."
There was a time when in England too the Revolution ap-
peared to some a "sacred manifestation "; 'and their feeling cari
be traced momentarily in the verse of Coleridge and Wordsworth,
permanently in that of Shelley, and in the political philosophy of
his father-in-law Godwin. To Others it seemed much more like
a manifestation of diabolic power; and view found unre- this
strained expression in the later writings Of Burke, while it gave a

tone to the work of Scott, and imparted' a deeper meaning to that
revived interest in mediaeval history' which he did so much to
excite. But on all, on its oppohents- as well as on its advocates,
the Revolution acted as a tremendous impulsive force. The
intense political and military activity 'of the time seems to find an
echo in the swing and the rush and the vigour which characterise
the literature produced during those years. But before the close
of the first qiiarter oi the century aU this was changed. There
were not many who would have taken,' with Burke, the diabolic'
' Bodley's France, i. 83.
THE NEW AGE '9
view of the Revolution; there were still fewer who would have
accepted it as a " sacred manifestation." It had become a subject
for study and criticism. The great victory which freed Englatid
from danger made it easier for the conservative side to take a
moderate and dispassionate view, while reflection on the "fatal
Saturnalia" of France chastened and sobered those who had at
one time maintained that even a French invasion was a thing to
be hoped for rather than to be dreaded. The fierce energy of
opposition on the one side and the fervour of hope on the other
were alike gone. If the Revolution had produced fruit, it was
certainly not the fruit which enthusiasts had expected. What was
immediately visible was the wreck of the ancien regime ; and the
task before men was to construct a new world out of the ruins of
had hoped, by the wave of an enchanter's
the old, not, as they
wand, but by slow and painful toil. Hence, as has been said,
the mental attitude of men towards the past was negative. The
events of the preceding generation showed what was no longer
possible in politics and society ; it remained to discover what was
possible.
But after two generations more we can see that while the
outward failure of the Revolution was complete, its real failure
was only partial. Modern democracy, a political developtnerit of
absorbing interest because it is unexampled in history, had already
taken its rise in America ; but in Europe the movement towards
it has been profoundly influenced by the French Revolution.
What has been, and what is likely to be, the effect of this
democratic movement upon literature ? Few questions can be
propounded that are better worth investigating. The supreme
political interest of the nineteenth century is the picture it pre-
sents of an ever-widening harmony between order and freedom.
The chief steps in this progress are clearly marked — in England,
in the successive reform bills, in Catholic Emancipation, in the
abolition of the Corn Laws, and in the various constructive
measures which in later days have helped to humanise the lives
of the industrial multitudes. Of special importance from the

literary point of view was the enfranchisement of the press ; for
the abolition of the paper tax and of the stamp duty upon
lO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
newspapers was in effect an enfranchisement. Moreover, we too
readily forget the numerous causes, trivial as they seem to us
now, which less than a century ago exposed newspapers and
authors and pubUshers to the risk of prosecution, and which,
down to a far later date, brought less definite but no less real
on all who dared to think unpopular

penalties thoughts. Leigh
Hunt was imprisoned from 1813 to 181 5 for criticisms of the
Prince Regent, whose chief fault was that they were scandalously
true ; and if these criticisms were injudicious, it might be pleaded
in excuse that they were provoked by panegyrics which were
scandalously false. The trial of Richard Carlile for " blasphemous
libel" in publishing the works of Thomas Paine took place in
18 19; and the sentence against Thomas Pooley, which roused the
indignation of Mill and of Buckle, was pronounced in 1857.
Later Huxley found it necessary to devote a considerable
still,
portion of his life to an effort to secure for himself and others

unfettered liberty of thought. In the part of the field where he
fought the battle has been won j but would be rash to conclude
it
that the evil has ceased to exist. Intolerance can be practised in

the name of science as well as in that of religion, and recent trials
have come perilously near to disputing the mature and sane man's
right even to die except secuffdum artem. It is, however, certain
that in this direction progress has been great and rapid.
What have been and what be the effects upon literature
will
of a political, social and intellectual development and enfranchise-

ment such as this, are questions which have never been fully
investigated. That these effects must be profound and far-
reaching is obvious. The mere multiplication of the number of
readersis a fact of great significance. More important still is the
change in their social position, their ambitions, their training,
their character. In the middle of the eighteenth century Johnson
fought his desperate way —reduced at one time to living upon
^d. a day — from the system of patronage to that of direct
dependence upon a reading public. Carlyle, in the middle of the
nineteenth century, saw in this fact the birth of the Hero as Man
of Letters " Much had been sold and bought, and left to make
:
its own bargain in the market-place ; but the inspired wisdom of

THE NEW AGE II
a Heroic Soul never till then, in that naked manner." And he

proclaimed, as the greatest task before mankind, the problem of
organising the chaotic profession of letters. The problem is still
unsolved, the profession and while the public has
is still chaotic ;
grown far wider and the dependence of the men of letters upon it
has becorne more and more direct, the price of the Heroic Soul
is as uncertain as ever. The problem which was too great and
too complicated for the intellect of Carlyle remains too great and
too complicated for his successors.
Can this state of things fail to exercise the profoundest
influence? Even in literature the souls are few which serenely
dwell apart, and it may he questioned whether we should desire
them to be many. Shakespeare himself was not of the number.
The majority of writers must always be influenced by a conscious
or an unconscious consideration of the character of their audience;
and though there is danger in the influence, there can be no
danger comparable to that which attaches to the cutting of
literature adrift from life and from reality. It is such freaks as
the "metaphysical" element in poetry, or the fantastic romance
satirised by Cervantes, which stand permanently condemned in
critical judgment. Their practitioners suppose that they are
addressing a band of the elect, and are apt to value themselves in
proportion as they leave the common earth behind ; but what has
saved them, in so far as they have found salvation, has been their
failure to attain their end.
But if there is good there is unquestionably evil as well in the

present state of matters. Johnson thought that even in bis time
there lurked a risk to literature in the multiplicity of books. If
so, the danger has vastly grown. In the introduction of slang, in
roughness of style, in crudity of thought, sometimes in a certain
vulgarity of we seem to see the influence of modern
tone,
conditions. Walt Whitman would have been impossible in an
aristocracy, and Mr Rudyard Kipling must have undergone many
changes. We are by no means destitute of examples of repose
and dignity but no one would single these out as characteristic
;
qualities of recent literature. The great predominance of the

novel, which is certainly connected with the character and
circumstances of the mass of readers, is not a matter for un-
mingled satisfaction.
Probably, however, the most serious danger arises from the

absurd disproportion which may frequently be noticed between
.the quality of the work done and the magnitude of the reward
reaped, -ârlyle, the foremost man of letters of his time, was fain
at forty-five to earn by lecturing, a task he loathed, the money
necessary to make ends meet and to save himself from exile.
Had he not possessed a private fortune Darwin could never have
devoted himself to science. -^Browning for many years made no-
and Matthew Arnold throughout his life made
thing by his writings,
very y Although
little, Tennyson became the most popular poet of
his day, he was compelled for ten years to suspend relations with
Emily Sellwood, because he could not afford to marry. So low
at the beginning of the period was the repute of poetry, the finest
flower of literature, that Murray, the most liberal and the most
enterprising of publishers, made it his rule " to refuse all original
works of this kind'." 'Chateaubriand, a few years later, declared

the only popular English poet to be " a political verse-writer, who
was a working blacksmith"; and in 1841 John Sterling wrote to
Emerson that there was not one man then living whose verse
would pay the expense of publication. Sterling was wrong: then,
or soon afterwards, Martin Tupper was drawing from ;^Soo to
;£8oo a year for Proverbial Philosophy, and the price which the
English public ultimately paid to the author of this "inspired
wisdom" was something like îo,ooo. Unfortunately there is
no sign of improvement. The author of a new Proverbial Philo-

sophy is likely now as he was sixty years ago to receive
as
_;îo,ooo, and the author of a new Paracelsus to receive nothing
whatsoever. It is just as likely now as it was then that a new
Richard Feverel will be neglected, and a new Heir of Redclyffe

hailed as one of the greatest books ever written.
All the revolution in thought which we associate with the
I
Iname of Darwin hangs upon the chance that the man who wrought
/it possessed a private fortune Nothing else is required to prove
!
/ how clamant is the need to reduce the present chaos to ordet.

' Smiles's Memoir ofJohn Murray, ii.
374.
THE NEW AGE 1
And yet, as Carlyle again insists (and he spoke from experience),

there might be far worse evils than poverty in the lot of the man
of letters. Worse infinitely was the sceptical and negative spirit
of the eighteenth century ; for literature in all ages must live by

its ideas, or die from the want of them. And for the evils which
democracy brings in its train will not compensation be found in
the volume of life ? If the results are not yet fully satisfactory,
the reason may be that we have not yet learnt how to manage the
forces which produce them. The poetry of Walt Whitman in
America, the novels of Zola in France, and in England the sordid
stories of the London streets, seem to be the work of men
intellectually and artistically overburdened with their subject.
But Dickens is a hopeful example of what may be done, and in
the future men greater than he may make a yet greater use of
their inexhaustible material. It is no light thing that the millions
have now a place and an influence in literature, where a century
still hardly more than hundreds
ago only the thousands, and earlier
had it. Here, no doubt, lies the task of the present and of the
immediate future for literature as well as for politics, Gpethe,
with his usual insight, saw that only half the man could,, be
developed unless he threw himself into the stream of life
" Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,

Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt."
Character is necessary no less than talent for the highest litera-

ture ; and the stream of that life in which it must he fashioned
flows now in the democratic channel.
In a,ll'this democratic movement we have entered upon the
inheritance of the Revolution ; but we have done so in an altered
spirit. no longer the Revolution regarded as a "sacred
It is
manifestation," but the Revolution seen under the critical micro-

scope. Principles which enthusiasts a hundred years ago regarded
as self-evidentj and their opponents as manifestly false, have
proved to be erninently in need of interpretation. We have to
ask how liberty can bci reconciled with order, how far fraternity
is consistent with the stern law of universal competition, what
remains of equality when we have allowed for the infinite diversity
14 THE LITJiRATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
of faculties and of needs. Questions such as these form the

substance not merely of systematic political philosophy, but of
the work of " seers " like Carlyle and of poets like Tennyson.
But if literature has relations with politics, it has relations still
more intimate and vital with the conceptions which underlie
religion and philosophy#JÎn order to understand the Victorian
age we must ask here again what are the points of resemblance
and of difference between it and the preceding generation which ;
of the fundamental ideas of religion and philosophy lived on into

it which of them were rejected, reversed, changed or developed.
;
In respect of religion, the relation of the Victorian age

to the era of the Revolution is extremely interesting and curious.
On a superficial view, it presents an aspect wholly different from
that presented by politics; more closely considered, it is seen
to be explainable by the same principles. The science of
politics lends itself to compromise. Hence the extreme views
inherited from the previous age blend and run together in a
kind of amalgam which partakes of the character of both. But
compromise is far less easy in ideas than it is in practical life;
experience teaches rather that the tendency of a purely logical
development is always towards extremes. On this principle we
can explain what at first sight is so puzzling — the co-existence
throughout the Victorian era of a powerful school of rationalism,
the inheritor of the deistic spirit of the eighteenth century, with
that Catholic reaction which manifested itself early in the nine-
teenth century, and whose influence is not yet exhausted.
The opposition of these two schools gives its supreme interest
to the English literature of the nineteenth century; all else will
be found in the long run to be subordinate. It is not the only
case in history in which such an opposition has existed, nor is it
the only case in which momentous questions have depended upon

the result of the conflict. The most profoundly thoughtful of
the recent historians of Greece has been struck with just such
a contrast and conflict in the latter part of the sixth century
B.C., and has depicted it in a few masterly paragraphs. Having
told the story of the great struggle against the Persian monarchy,
he proceeds: "We have now to see how another danger was
THE NEW AGE 1
averted, a danger which, though it is not h'ke the Persian invasion

written large on the face of history, threatened Greece with a no
less terrible disaster. This danger lay in the dissemination of a
new religion, which, ifhad gained the upper hand, as at one
it
time it seemed would have pressed with as dead

likely to do,
and stifling a weight upon Greece as any oriental superstition.

Spiritually the Greeks might have been annexed to the peoples of
the orient'." He goes on to narrate how the age of Solon
witnessed the beginning of a rationalistic movement due to
"intellectual dissatisfaction with the theogony of Hesiod as an
explanation of the origin of the world^"; the result being the
birth of the Ionian philosophy. On the other hand, " men began
to feel a craving foran existence after death, and intense curiosity
about the world of shades, and a desire for personal contact with
the supernatural " ; and this craving " led to the propagation of a
new religion, which began to spread about the middle of the sixth
century'." This was the Orphic religion ; and the antidote to it
"was the philosophy of Ionia. In Asiatic Greece, that religion
never took root; and most fortunately the philosophical move-
—
ment the separation of science from theology, of 'cosmogony'
—
from 'theogony' had begun before the Orphic movement was
disseminated. Europe is deeply indebted to Ionia for having
founded philosophy; but that debt is enhanced by the fact that
she thereby rescued Greece from the tyranny of a religion inter-
preted by priests. Pythagoras, although he and his followers
made important advances in science, threw his weight into the
scale of mysticism ;by both the religious and the philo-
affected
sophical movements, he sought to combine them ; and in such
unions the mystic element always wins the preponderance. But
there were others who pursued, undistracted, the paths of reason,
and among these the most eminent and influential were Xenophanes
and Heraclitus*." To the men who "pursued, undistracted, the
paths of reason," Greece owed her salvation. " It is not without
significance," says the historian in summing up, " that, when the
Orphic agitation had abated, Greece should have enshrined the
1 Bury's History of Greece, ch. vii. § 1
» ibid. » ibid. * ibid. % 14.

l6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
worldly wisdom of men who stood wholly aloof from mystic
excitements and sought for no revelation, in the fiction of the
Seven Sages'."
There not in all history a more exact parallel than that
is
which between Greece in the sixth century B.C., when thus

exists
interpreted, and Western Europe in the nineteenth century a.d.
The saying that "history repeats itself" is stupid, if we take it au
pied de la letfre ; but, read with intelligent freedom^ it conveys a
profound truth. Substitute for the Ionian philosophy the deistic
philosophy of the eighteenth century, for the Orphic religion the
Catholic Reaction, and the words written by the historian of the
one may be applied with little change to the other. The springs
of the opposing movements were in both cases precisely the same.
The principal difference is that the danger in the modern case
was far less, because philosophy was no longer staggering on
infant limbs ; but the danger did, and to some extent does still,
exist.
There are few things more interesting in literature than the

contrasts it so frequently presents; and there is nothing in recent
literature which more demands or which will more richly repay

investigation than the extraordinary contrast now in question.
It goes deep down towards the roots of human nature, which
demands satisfaction for the eimotions as well as for the intellect.
The investigation is necessary, if it were only because we are here
in contact with one of the " idols " of the human mind, which, as
Bacon long ago pointed out, tends to grasp prematurely at unity.
We are prone to forget the wide diversity of human thought We
call certain ages, and others again, ages of reason.
ages of faith,
When they are employed with due care, the phrases are useful,
and have their own important element of truth but the danger is ;
that they may be supposed to represent the whole truth and the
exact truth. This is by no means the case. Patient investigation
shows that in the very midst of the ages of faith there was plenty
of the rationalising though from motives of prudence it
spirit,
might refrain from obtruding itself. We have only to look round

and observe in order to become convinced that in what is usually
' Buiy's History oj Greece, ch. vii. § 14.
THE NEW AGE I7
described as an age of reason there is abundance of the spirit
which leads to beUef in things beyond and above reason, or even

in things contrary to it It has always been thus, and thus, until
human nature is radically changed, it always will be. We have
laboriously constructed our system of the universe, we are con-
vinced that we have solved its secrets, there is no mystery beyond
which brings us to a pause. But
"Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a. flower-beU, some one's death,
A chonis-ending from Euripides,
And that's enough for fifty hopes and feais
As old and new at once as nature's self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,

Take hands and dance there, a fantastic rin^
Round the ancient idol on his base again,
The grand Perhaps.''
So it proved conspicuously at the opening of the nineteenth |l
century. All the omens seemed and complete

to point to the early
victory of rationalism. It was in the very air. Not long ago the
Goddess of Reason had been throned in France. She was the
creature of a whole century of work by the ablest minds, work —
attended, as it seemed, by the most triumphant results. Hume,
with his calm, cold, clear logic, —
Gibbon, "the lord of irony,''
"sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer'," Voltaire with his —
piercing wit, his dangerous and deadly power of ridicule, these —
were the typical spirits of the eighteenth century. X^The French
Revolution was the tremendous birth which marked their triumph
at its close. All forces seemed to be working in harmony towards
one end. Science had begun her conquering march, and every
fresh discovery with regard to the true nature and constitution of
the universe appeared to make the old conception of man's place
in it less and less credible. There was scarcely a human being
but felt the influence of the forces at work. The ministers of
religion themselves betrayed it in their conduct The Church, it
' This passage was written before I had read Mr H. A. Beeis's extremely
able and interesting History of English Romanticism in the Eightetnih
Century. I have let it stand, although I have since found that he has used
precisely the same quotations in a very similar context.
W. 2
has often been said, was asleep ; and loud are the denunciations
against the officials who permitted and shared the slumber.
Certain it is that if the sheep looked up hungry they were not
fed. But the denunciations are perhaps a little unjust. The
clergy were, after all, only yielding to forces which hardly any
were powerful enough to resist. Even when the tide was already
on the turn, we find a poet so intensely spiritual as Shelley was,
imagining himself to be, and loudly proclaiming himself, an
atheist. Robert Owen the socialist, like Lucretius of old, held
religion to be the great obstacle to human progress. And yet
Robert Owen was a man filled with that enthusiasm of humanity
which under other influences would have made him zealous,
perhaps a fanatic, in religion.
No wonder that in such an atmosphere the vision of the
clearest eyes was blurred and dimmed. Goethe was the wisest
man then living in Europe, the one most likely to see the truth
through the mists of futurity; and Goethe thought that the
Catholic Church was doomed and could hardly survive long.
Yet even as Goethe spoke, the Counter-Revolution was in progress
and towards the close of the century which was then beginning
the greatest statesman of the mighty empire of united Germany
received at the hands of the Catholic party the most damaging
defeat of his life; while in France Thiers prophesied that the
Republic would fall if ever it quarrelled completely with the
Catholic Church. The quarrel has taken place, and one of the
most interesting questions of the future is, what will be the issue ?
The causes of such reversions are obscure. The arguments

of the Encyclopaedists had not been answered. It is true, Kant
had put philosophy on a new foundation; but it is a far cry
from the Kantian philosophy to the dogma of the Catholic
Church. Probably the explanation lies partly in the fact that
the success of the rationalistic school had never been as cornplete
as it appeared to the superficial observer. Even in France itself,
men no longer believe that the Catholic Church had lost its hold
on the people as completely as was once supposed. Though
the Encyclopaedists had carried with them the tbinkers and the
multitudes of the cities, it is by no means so clear that they had
THE NEW AGE 19
won the rural population. But in the main we must be content

to attribute the change to one of those silent and mysterious
movements qf thought of which we only feel the effects without
being able to trace them to a cause. Both Lecky in his History
of Rationalism and Leslie Stephen in his English Thought in the
Eighteenth Century remark how modes of thought pass away
and the latter adds, how superstitions revive —without direct
proof or disproof. Beliefs draw
nourishment from the at-
their
mosphere of thought, just as truly as plants draw theirs from the
air around them. And this doubtless is the element of truth in
the common saying that certain ideas are "in the air." The
mental conditions are favourable, and the ideas spring up and
seed and multiply, like plants in a suitable soil and climate.
Not only did this movement give birth to a literature, not
only did it influence far more than it produced ; it is interesting
also as an illustration of the close connexion between the most
various manifestations of intellect. It is the most striking
aspect of an all-pervading contrast. A multitude of other things,

outwardly unconnected, are really in close affinity with this Catholic
movement. All romanticism is, often unconsciously, cognate to
it The revival of Gothic architecture; the change in the spirit
of poetry —the consciousness of the supernatural in Coleridge, the

sensuousness of Keats, the feeling in Shelley of a spiritual element
in all things, in the west wind, in the cloud, in mountains, seas
and streams, —these were kindred manifestations. Above all, this
Catholic revival was stimulated by, as it in turn stimulated, that

imaginative sympathy with the Middle Ages, of which the most
curious and in some Kenelm
respects the profoundest products are
Digby's (1800-1880) Broad Stone of Honour (1826-182 7) and
Mores Catholici (1831-1840). The former in its four books,
Godefridus, Tancredus, Morus and Orlandus, as it were incarnates
the cardinal virtues of the Middle Ages as they appear to the eye
of a believer, and suggests, as effectively in its way as Carlyle's
Fast and Present, that the changes of modern times are by no
means all improvements.
It was, however, Scott who gave the most powerful and the
most vivid expression to this imaginative sympathy with the
3—2
Middle Ages. He was himself innocent enough of Popery, and
would have been more astonished at the charge of Romanising
than he probably was when Thomas McCrie denounced him for
his picture of the Scottish Covenanters in Old Mortality. And
yet we have testimony to his Romanising influence on the one
side from Cardinal Newman, and on the other from that champion
of Protestantism, George Borrow. The former in the Apologia
notes the effect Scott's novels had in promoting in him a Catholic
frame of mind; and the latter in the appendix to The Romany
Rye denounces Scott as the man who had brought back to life
again Jacobitism and Laudism and Popery. All were dead

and buried, in the " home of lost causes " as elsewhere through
England, till he called them from their graves. The so-called
Oxford Movement, therefore, according to Borrow, was really a
movement originating in the Waverley Novels. Carlyle, for his

part, traces "spectral Puseyisms" to Coleridge; while others have
suspected that Carlyle himself was not wholly unconnected with
such phenomena. If he wished to keep his hands perfectly
clean, he ought to have had no dealings with Novalis. Scornful
as he was of Puseyism, when he insists that we go from mystery
to mystery, that the age of miracle is not past, but that on the
contrary there is miracle all around us, he is just giving expression,
in his own language, to that which Puseyites were trying to express
in theirs. There may be the widest possible difference in the
degree of intellectual truth contained in the two forms of ex-
pression, but the kinship is none the less real. Both Carlyle
and the Puseyites were in revolt against the reign of the logical
understanding.
All these genealogies are instructive so long as they are taken
only to indicate an affinity, but if they are pressed too far they
become misleading. Notwithstanding Borrow, it is desirable still
to treat the English phase of the reaction as the Oxford Move-

ment, and to regard it, not as the effect of any single cause, but
as one manifestation of a change in the human spirit so wide in

its range that we might well ask where its influence is not to
be found. We call it romance, and for the last hundred years

romance has been everywhere. For example, the Manxman,
THE NEW AGE 21
T. E. Brown, ascribes to it the rise of the spirit of nationality,

and speaks of a suspicion, which is gradually becoming a belief
on his part, that the intense national feeling of the Welsh and
their determination to keep their own language are matters of the
nineteenth century romance movement. In the eighteenth century,
he believes, the Welsh desired nothing more than to be thoroughly
English^
The Catholic Reaction, then, is an integral part, or an aspect,
of the great Romantic Revival. Both rest in the last resort
on the sense of mystery surrounding human life; both are irre-
concilably opposed to the spirit which regards the universe as
explainable, or which would dismiss as outside our sphere that
in it which cannot be explained. On the contrary, it is just the
inexplicable which is important: nothing worth proving can be
proved.
But philosophy also has to be listened to; for philosophy is not
only itself a part of literature, but, like religion, it wields power
far beyond the limits of its own domain. Besides, philosophy
deals, more directly than anything else, with ideas ; and in it the
thought which in poetry or painting may only be seen as through
a glass darkly, frequently comes into full view. Now, philosophy
bears the same witness as religious thought to the two-fold
current running through the whole intellectual and moral life
of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, we find in it the

various forms of rationalism, carrying on the characteristic and
dominant thought of the eighteenth century. We find in par-
ticular the powerful school of the Utilitarians, disciples of
Jeremy Bentham, but owning the paternity of Hume, and
all
essentially English in spirit as in origin. With them must be

classed many of the physicists, especially those of the earlier
part of the century. Cognate to them in some respects, though
deeply coloured by the mind of France, are the Positivists, whose
singular religion is, not perhaps a very profound, but certainly a
very interesting manifestation of thehuman spirit. Kinship may
be claimed for them also with the scientific evolutionists, Herbert
Spencer, Darwin, and their followers; for the theory of Darwin
' Letters, Aug. i8, 1886.
took its rise from the speculations of Malthus, and the classical
economists were all in more or less intimate relation with the
Utilitarians. Further, the agnostic tendencies of the biological

evolutionists are in harmony with the scepticism of the school of
Mill. On the other hand, however, the fundamental conception
of evolution has no place at all in the earlier phases of the utili-
tarian system, while it is the master-thought of the other great
school which struggled with the Utilitarians and their allies for
the allegiance of thinking men; and so supremely important is
this conception in the thought of the century that disagreement

with regard to it is of more moment than agreement in all
other respects.
The greatest of the opponents of .Utilitarianism went back for
their inspiration to Germany. Not Hume but Immanuel Kant,

the great thinker who was roused by Hume from his "dogmatic
slumber," was their spiritual father. To describe them we must
discard the adjective "utilitarian" and substitute for it "tran-
scendental." The word is probably most familiarly known from
the works of Emerson, but the thing it signifies inspires also the
prose of Coleridge and of Carlyle. This too lets in once more

that sense of mystery which is scarcely consistent with a concep-
tion of life as made up of pleasures and pains capable of being
weighed and numbered, added, multiplied and divided. Through
their transcendentalism the philosophers share, with the poets, the
architects, the painters and the Catholic party, that verycomplex
thing which we call the spirit of romance. So powerful, indeed,
is the romantic strain that Hoifding in his History of Modern
Philosophy calls Hegel and the Hegelians "the romantic school."
They, however, make a momentous addition to transcendentalism,
the addition of the conception of development, which, more than
anything else, has made modern thought what it is. Like all
grea:t conceptions it many

has a long history and springs from
roots but, except Darwin, no single man has done so much as
;
Hegel to establish its authority over the human mind. Hence

immense significance of that intellectual affiliation
in part the to
Germany which must be discussed in the next chapter.
CHAPTER II
THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE
Every literature, says De Quincey, unless it be crossed by

some other of different breed, tends to superannuation ; and he
points to the French as an example of one which has suffered so
as to be, in his opinion, on the point of extinction, because it has
"rejected all alliance with exotic literature'." Writing in 182
he asks what^ with this example before their eyes, the English
should do ; arid he answers :
" Evidentlywe should cultivate an
intercourse with that literature of Europe which has most of a
juvenile constitution." That, he adds, is the German literature.
The leaders of English literature have at all times acted in the

spirit of De Quincey's advice ; and, frequently as she is charged
with insularity, England has been, in literature at least, far more
willipg than France to learn from foreign nations. While no
modern literature is more richly original than English, it is also
true that none is more deeply indebted to foreign influences.
The great classical literatures of Greece and Rome have exercised
a constant power which has been in the aggregate greater than
that of all other external influences whatsoever. But besides,
there has always been in concurrent operation some dominant
force of modern Europe. In the period of Chaucer it was at one
time French and at another Italian ; in the Elizabethan period
itwas again Italian; in the eighteenth century, French. The
almost fanatical dislike of Coleridge for all things French, and the
* John Paul Frederick Richter,
depreciations of De Quincey from
himself, are merely the reaction
an opposite excess. So strong had been the French influence
that it almost made the greatest of English historians a writer in
the French language ; while Hume, another, typical man of the
eighteenth century, was so steeped in French opinions as to be
deaf and blind to whatever was not in accordance with French
canons of taste. Coleridge declared of him that he "compre-
hended as much of Shakespeare as an apothecary's phial would,
placed under the falls of Niagara."
The advice De Quincey gave was only a way of stating and
stamping with his approval what had already been done. More
than twenty years before he wrote^Wordsworth and Coleridge had
made Germanythe influence of which on the
that journey to
latter and through him on England, was momentous.
at least,
Circumstances had been weakening the hold of France upon the
English mind. The events of 1789 and the years which followed
shocked and alienated nearly all. Those who, like Wordsworth,
faced the first excesses undismayed, were gradually estranged as
one act of outrage followed another, and even if they were not
horrified by bloodshed they were dismayed by the violence done
to liberty in the name of liberty. The following of Burke therefore
increased while that of Mackintosh diminished, and the long years
of war between the two countries steadily widened the spiritual
gulf between them.
The causes of estrangement, however, were by no means
exclusively political : we have to take account also of the fact that
the rising taste of England was of a kind which could not
itself
find its appropriate nutriment in France. The French genius

had had its great period of romance in the past, and was destined
to have another in the future ; but it was through classicism, not
through romance, that France in the eighteenth century had held
sway over the English mind. The Gothic revival, which had
been for some time was a thing alien from the French
in progress,
genius, while it found sympathy and encouragement in the rising
literature of Germany. Not that it was due to Germany ; rather
Germany first borrowed from England, and afterwards repaid the
debt. Macpherson's Ossian, Percy's Rtliques and Walpole's
THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 2$
Castle of Otranto were all antecedent to the period of German

influence upon England.
There are two periods of borrowing from the Germans, sepa-
rated from one another by only a short interval. Before the middle
of the eighteenth century it would be difficult to demonstrate any
interest whatever on the part of England in the literature of
Germany in truth, for many years
; after that date such literature
was commonly supposed not to exist. Carlyle quotes P^re
Bouhours' pregnant question : un Alkmand peut avoir de
si
resprit 1 and records his negative answer. Our own Hume was
no better. To the end of his life he coupled " the barbarians,
Goths and Vandals of Germany" with those of Russia, and
lamented that these two states should be rising in power, while
the two most civilised nations, the English and French, were, as
he believed, on the decline'. The Frenchman and the Scot had
whatever excuse the Germans themselves could give. The great
Frederick's ignorance of his native language is notorious. The
works of Leibnitz were written in Latin or in French. In the
vernacular there was, this side the Middle Ages, little literature
except of the popular and this is not likely of itself to attract

sort,
a foreigner's attention. But a vernacular literature was quickly

growing up, and in the latter part of the century England began
to show interest in it by translations from Gessner, from Klopstock
and from Lessing. The culminating point in this period came in
the closing decade of the century; and among the names we
encounter in connexion with it are those of "Monk" Lewis,
Walter Scott and William Taylor of Norwich. The last named
constituted himself especially the interpreter of Germany to
England, and a German scholar of the present day has deemed
it worth while to devote a special work to him and to associate
his name with the " Einfluss der neueren deutschen Litteratur in
England." Taylor translated indefatigably, from Burger, from
Lessing, from Goethe, and wrote a large number of reviews of
German works which were ultimately strung together, chiefly, as
Carlyle says, by the bookbinder's packthread, in that "jail-
delivery,'' the Historic Survey of German Poetry (1830).

^ Burton's Hume, ii. 497.
So far as this group of writers was concerned, the centre of
interest in German literature lay in its most pronounced roman-
ticism.Goetz von Berlichingen, The Robbers, &nA Biirger's Lenore,

were among the works which most profoundly moved them. But
had this been the vogue would soon have passed.
all It was
already on the wane when Scott's translation of Goetz appeared,
its decline having been hastened by the pungent satire of The
Robbers which appeared in The Anti-Jacobin two years before '
Scott's translation." To have given Goethe anything like a fair

chance with the iEnglish public," says Lockhart, " his first drama
ought to have been translated at least ten years before. The
imitators had been more fortunate than the master, and this work
...had not come even into Scott's hands, until he had familiarised
himself with the ideas which it first opened, in the feeble and
puny mimicries of writers already forgotten^."
Ghosts, and diablerie, and dramas like The Robbers were,
however, only a part of the German influence in the earlier period.
Just as Goethe, through Goetz, gave an impulse to Scott in the
direction of the romances in verse and prose which filled his busy
literary life, so what Carlyle calls
by another stream of influence —
Wertherism— he gave an impulse no less powerful to the Byfotiic
school. Byron did not know German, but he knew something of
Goethe's work and regarded him with profound admiration. In
1820 he speaks of him as " thx greatest man of Germany perhaps —
of Europe'"'; and in 182 1 he dedicates to him Sardanapalus zs
an offering from " a literary vassal to his liege lord."
Both these streams were merged and lost in the copious and
powerful flood of the English literature of the first quarter of the
nineteenth century. This earlier German influence is interesting
and noteworthy, but scarcely for a moment did it threaten to
become dominant It could not do so. There was an English
romanticism older than the romanticism of Germany; and the
Germans themselves had borrowed from Percy and from Ossian,
and above all from Shakespeare, before they began to give back
by the hands of Goethe and Schiller. While we admit the truth
' Life of Scott, vol. i. chap. ix.
' Moore's Life of By yon, t. 320.

THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 27'
of Carlyle's assertion that Werther stands " prominent among the

causes, or, at the very least, among the signals, of a great change
in modern LiteratureV' it is well to remember that Werther itself
was inspired by Ossian, and that Werther's dirge is borrowed from
Macpherson. When De Quincey wrote the essay above quoted
he felt, and rightly felt, that the borrowed element was of secondary
importance ; but he felt also that behind the " Goetzism " and
" Wertherism " lay the solid substance of German thought, and
that it was of first-rate importance. He wrote on the verge of the
second period of German influence, which differed in certain very
important respects from the first, and which, though l6ss striking
produced a far greater effect.

to the superficial view, in reality
The connecting link between the two periods, both chrono-
logically and by reason of the nature of his interests, was Coleridge.
He was as decidedly romantic as the most romantic of the Germans,
and he could handle the supernatural more exquisitely than any
of them. But what he imported into England was not the spirit
of The Robbers, or of Goetz, or of the balladists that had been —
done before him it was the spirit of German philosophy. In
:
this field he was a pioneer. The poet-philosopher was led to the

German philosophers by his perception of the fundamental identity
between the spirit of the poetry and that of the philosophy of the
eighteenth century, and his conviction that the Romantic Revival
in poetry must come to naught unless it could justify itself to
thought. Coleridge would hardly allow the typical verse of the
eighteenth century to be poetry at all. He was fully conscious of
its brilliancy he called Pope's Iliad an " astonishing product of
:
matchless talent and ingenuity""; but he would by no means

allow that even this made Pope a poet. And with regard to
eighteenth century philosophy, in that History of Metaphysics
which is one of the numerous books Coleridge did not write,
Hume is " besprinkled copiously
from the fountains of Bitterness
and Contempt'."
We have learnt once more to respect "our indispensable
^ Goethe {Miscellanies^ vol. i.).
^ Biographia Literaria, chap. i.

'^
Dykes Campbell, Life of Coleridge, 137,
eighteenth century" without ceasing to respect the Romantic
Revival. That has amply justified itself; but in many of its
earlier phasesit was open to attack and stood need of ex-

in
planation. The frequently tumid rhetoric, the enchanted castles,
spectres, blood and thunder of the early romanticists were things
not in themselves admirable. The greater men speedily became
ashamed of all that this machinery represented and of all that was
associated with it. Goethe, once the leader of the Sturm und
Drang movement, returned from Italy separated from it by a
whole hemisphere of thought and feeling. Schiller in later years

loathed the popularity of The Robbers. Coleridge himself shows
everywhere by his infinitely more subtle handling of the super-
natural his aversion from the crudeness and barbarism of the
work of this period. His artistic instinct was always right ; but it
was not he passed under the influence of Kant that he could

until
explain the principle upon which he worked.
For a time Coleridge was completely dominated by Kant.
He tells us that the Critique of Pure Reason took possession of
him with a giant's hand^; and the marks of Kant's influence are
stamped deep upon all Coleridge's prose works. The Friend, the
various series of lectures, the Biographia Literaria and the Aids
to Reflection initiated into the mysteries of the transcendental
philosophy those who read or heard them. But it was the tran-
scendental philosophy filtered through the intellect of Coleridge
and enveloped in a Coleridgean mist as hard to penetrate as that
which wraps the original. " It is," says De Quincey with truth,
"characteristic of Mr Coleridge's mind that it never gives back
anything as it receives it'." De Quincey accordingly undertook
to play the part of mirror, and to clear away the mists which had
hitherto dimmed the reflection. Unfortunately, if in Coleridge
we suffer from obscurity, in De Quincey we suffer from a worse
evil, tenuity of thought. Kant, passing through the mind of
Coleridge, is transmuted "into something rich and strange": the
mind of De Quincey reduces him to insignificance.
The importance of the Coleridgean influence is amply attested.
Transcendentalism, as interpreted by Coleridge, at once justified
* Biographia Lileraria, chap. ix. " Works, xiii. 90-gi.
THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 29
romantic poetry, and furnished the groundwork for a philosophy

widely different from that of the eighteenth century, or from
Utilitarianism. It appealed alike to the imagination and to the
reason and through different channels it reached poetry and art,

;
philosophy and religion. The Aids to Reflection was read by few

yet it stirred some who afterwards stirred the nation. "To
Julius Hare it appeared to crown its author as ' the true sovereign
of modern English thought'; while some younger men, as yet
—
unknown to the author Maurice and Sterling among others
felt that to this book they 'owed even their own selves^'"
Before Coleridge's Highgate throne passed nearly all the promis-
ing youth of England. He moulded modern English criticism,
he coloured poetry through the next generation, and his impress
is evident in the Oxford Movement.
That transcendentalism through which mainly Coleridge
wrought these effects was a specially German birth. Though
Goethe was the greatest man of letters in Europe, France, Italy
and England had names which might reasonably be put beside
those of Schiller and Richter. But all Europe had none to match
with Kant, Fichte and Hegel. Their thought, filtered through the
ttiinds of poets (for Carlyle's mode of conception is essentially
poetical), is the thing which most of all has given its special
significance to the second period of German influence, and more
than all else, except only the tremendous fact of the French
Revolution, has given to the English literature of the last two
generations its special tone. This thought has become so in-
grained with our own that an effort isneeded to realise the time
when for England it did not exist. But in the early years of the
nineteenth century even professional philosophers knew little or
nothing about Edinburgh was in those days the chief focus
it.
of philosophic thought, and when in 1803 Thomas Brown under-

took there to expound Kant's Kritik, he /^.rew his information not
from the original German, but from a French translation. Dugald
Stewart's chapter on Kant proves that he, as late as 1821, was
little better equipped. Their countryman, James Mackintosh,
took Kant and Fichte with him on his voyage to India in 1806,
^ Dykes Campbell, op. cit. 256.
but his writings show that his knowledge too remained supeificial.
Even Sir William Hamilton, wide as was his reading, did not go
deep into German thought. The other great school, that of
Bentham, practically ignored it. Bentham himself had reached
maturity before the German influence began to tell. John Stuart
Mill learnt German, but he admits that the reading of German
logic went much against the grain with him, and he bases his
theory of induction upon Hume, practically ignoring Kant.
The important fact, however, was that an intellectual inter-
course had been established between England and Germany, and

for his share in that work William Taylor deserves to be gratefully
remembered. men made pilgrimages to Weimar.

Eager young
One, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, too much neglected in this as in
other respects, made Germany his home for more than twenty
years. He went, it is true, primarily to study medicine, but he
carried him a poet's heart, and his judgments, though
with
whimsical and inconsistent, are worthy of attention. He advises
his friend Kelsall by all means to learn German " its literature," ;
he says, "touches the heaven of Greek in many places\" He

puts Goethe above Schiller as superior in originality. He calls
Tphigenie auf Tauris "a poem faultlessly delightful"," but adds

with regard to the author, " I never felt so much disgust or much
more admiration for any poet than for this Goethe""; which
recalls Carlyle's impatient exclamation in the throes of the transla-
tion of Wilhelm Meister :
" Goethe is the greatest genius that has
lived for a century, and the greatest ass that has lived for three*."
Beddoes, however, lived and died unknown. The really
efficient intermediary between the mind of Germany and that of
England was Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), and it is not less for
this fact than because of his own intrinsic greatness that Carlyle
is the best introduction to the literature of the Victorian era.
No one else touches it at so many points no one else combines ;
in the same degree the vital principles of poetry and of prose;

no one else did so much to make it what it was. And not the
least important aspect of the German influence is the fact that, if
' Letters, 57. '*

ibid. do.
* ibid,(M, * Early Letters, \\. t.^^.
Carlyle re vealed Ge rmair^tp England. Germany revealed Qailylfi

~tb hi mself.
What, then, we must ask, was the source and nature of the
new power which Carlyle imparted to literature ? So intimately
are all his works and his whole spiritual nature bound up with
his early surroundings that for answer some reference to them is
essential. Born on the edge of the wild moorlands of southern
Scotland, brought up in the stern Calvinism which was still
dominant there, the rugged son of a rugged sire, Carlyle bears
upon him to.the_endjthe^jieeply_gray,fiILJ3iarks_of_
One might imagine that as his father's chisel shaped the stones
for the bridges and the houses of his native district, so by those
very strokes, strong, true, decisive, he shaped_course by course
the years _pf his son's life . And the son's aspiration~that he"
might build as well as his father built has been gratified ; for his
books are as it were piled from blocks hewn from the granite.
He wandered far enough away from the conceptions and beliefs
of his simple kindred ; but the essence of all that made Thomas
Carlyle may be traced back to that little village of Ecclefechan.
People ask whence came Carlyle's strange style. Notwithstanding
its German colour there is evidence for the belief that it is just
the nervous speech of his father lighted by the rays of genius;
and it has an unmistakable kinship with the vigorous, racy, native
eloquence of many a Scottish peasant of the olden days, before
his vernacularbegan to decay, and with it his power of dry
humour and biting satire and thunderous denunciation. Whence,
it is asked, came Carlyle's humour ? Whence came the humour
which serves as the salt of all Scottish literature from Dunbar and
Lyndsay and Knox himself down to Burns and Scott ? Whence
came his moral earnestness and his religious belief ? It is, as has
been well said, just Calvinism without the Christianity; and no
one familiar with the character of the two men will doubt that
John Knox had much to do with the shaping of Carlyle.
Carlyle went out into the world. He went to the "worst of
all hitherto discovered Universities," locally situated at Edinburgh.
There, but especially in that Collection of Books which he declared
in Hero- Worship, and repeated long afterwards in the Inaugural
Address in Edinburgh itself, to be "the true University of these
days," —there he accumulated the knowledge indispensable to his
subsequent career. There in particular he made acquaintance

with that German literature which, next to his family and his
native country, did most to form his mind. With this mental
freight, as all the world knows, he retired after a troubled interval
to Craigenputtock, the German leaven working wildly in his
Scottish soul. At Craigenputtock he remained for six years, there
he wrote Sartor Resartus, there he brooded over the French
Revolution, there in a word his genius grew to maturity. It
was the complete and perfect Carlyle who migrated to London

in 1834; and the broad Scotch accent was but the outward
symbol of the fact that this stormful personality, who came to
combat, and then to astonish, and ultimately to dominate the
Metropolis, had been begotten in far different surroundings and
nourished under far different influences.
Carlyle's was a life of the spirit, not a life of events. From
his migration to London until his body was borne away for
burial among his kindred in the kirkyard of Ecclefechan, his one

home was No. 5, now No. 24, Cheyne Row. But a perverse
fate has attended Carlyle beyond the grave, and it is impossible
wholly to ignore the controversy which, for twenty years, has
raged around his character more fiercely than it has ever raged
round any one else in the annals of English literature.
Himself one of the most skilful of biographers, a historian
who viewed history as in principle biographical, a philosopher
who sought the key to the great problems of human society in
the lives and actions of heroes, Carlyle inconsistently enough
condemned biography as applied to himself, and many times
expressed the wish that no life of himself should be written. It
became obvious, however, to himself, as it always was to others,

that this wish could not be gratified; and when his sister,
Mrs Aitken, told him many would write biographies of him,
that
"there wjis," says one who was there, "a 'far-away' look on his
face, and he said softly, as if half in soliloquy, 'Yes, there will be
many bio.^graphies^'" There have been many biographies. No
I Wilson's Froucie and Carlj/U.
poor rag of reticence has been left to him who of all English
writers most fiercely denounced the morbid curiosity and pru-
riency of those who sought to penetrate the privacy of others'
Kves. And by a curious irony the 'chief sirmer, he to whom
the whole commotion is due, was Carlyle's own chosen literary
executor, Froude.
So far as Fronde fell into error in his handling of Carlyle, his
mistakes seem to have spnmg mainly from three sources. He
had to delineate a man with an extraordinary gift of humour,
and he was himself destitute of that quality. Carlyle, though he
could not write verse, was a poet, and, superb artist as Froude
was in prose, he had little or no poetic gift. In the third place,
Carlyle had a command of vivid words and teUing phrases un-
equalled in his own generation and unsurpassed by any one who
has ever written in English; and Froude never learnt to make
adequate allowance into which this gift
for the exaggerations
constantly betrayed its For Carlyle was fiilly conscious

possessor.
of the power which his humour and his command of language
gave him, and he enjoyed their effects. He was the most brilliant
conversationalist of his time Occasionally his tongue, as the
phrase goes, ran away with him; and Darwin records how, after
every one at a dinner party had been made dumb by a harangue
on the advantage of silence, "Babbage, in his grimmest manner,
thanked Carlyle for his interesting lecture on silence." Biit few
wished Carlyle to stop. The most distinguished of his con-
temporaries listened enthralled by his eloquence and by his
originality. "The and ostlers at inns," he says of Bums,
waiters
"would get out of bed, and come crowding to hear this man
—
speak! Waiters and ostlers: they too were men, and here was
a man'!" Such scenes could be paralleled from Carlyle's own
life. The servants who waited at tables where he dined ran from
the room choking down their laughter at his bursts of humour.
His phrases could sear like hot iron, or illuminate like a sudden
burst of sunshine. This power of phrase-making is among the
greatest of literary gifts. Many of Carlyle's epigrams are inimitably
racy; sometimes they are pregnant with a wisdom shared by many,
* Heroes and Hero- Worship.
W. 3
but consummately expressed only by him. Jewels of description,
especially descriptions of persons, are lavished on his letters and
journals: Mazzini is "a small, square-headed, bright-eyed, swift,
yet still, Ligurian figure; beautiful, and merciful, and fierce ;
Tennyson is "a fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-coloured,
shaggy-headed man;... dusty, smoky, free and easy°."

The dangers of this gift of language are sufficiently obvious.
Carlyle repeatedly succumbs to temptation, studying effect more
than truth, and sometimes ruining effect through exaggeration.
Mill is a man of aridities and negations; Newman has not the
intellect of a moderate-sized rabbit. As a rule, such exaggera-
tions may be passed over as of trivial consequence, but sometimes
they are serious. The tremendous civil war in America was to
Carlyle merely "a smoky chimney which had taken fire," and his
view of it was unfortunately published in the Ilias Americana in
Nuce.
Perhaps the instance just adduced is the least pardonable of
all Carlyle's aberrations of this kind. Usually his phrases are
either harmless in themselves, or else the offence is palliated by
some quality of the expression. SirHenry Taylor tells how
Carlyle received the doctor sent to him by Lady Ashburton with
a volley of invectives against his profession, declaring that "of all
the sons of Adam they were the most eminently unprofitable, and
that a man might as well pour his sorrows into the long hairy ear
of a jackass." Taylor acutely remarks that "the extravagance and
the grotesqueness of the attack sheathed the sharpness of it, and
the little touch of the picturesque, —the 'long hairy ear,' —seemed
to give it the character of a vision rather than a vituperation'."
But the best of all illustrations of this point is to be found in

the story which Mr David Wilson quotes from Madame Venturl.
The quotation is rather long, but it does so much to set right
what Froude has put elaborately wrong, that it is worth making
"I was sitting," says Madame Ventur\, "with Mrs Carlyle in
the drawing-room one day, when — owing, I think, to the error of
' Froude's Life of Carlyle, iii. 454.

° ibid. iii. 190.
' Autobiography, i. 33a.
a new servant insufficiently impressed with the inviolability of the

'silent apartment,' —an unfortunate German gentleman was shown
up into that sanctuary, at a moment, as it afterwards appeared,
when the Worker therein was even especially unable to endure
interruption. Mrs Carlyle, hearing the step of an intruder pass
the drawing-room door and ascend the stairs beyond, gazed at me
with a face expressive of horror, and, running to the door, inquired
anxiously of the servant whom she had shewn into the presence.
" Oh, it is all right,' said the unconscious sinner, ' for the
'
gentleman had a letter of introduction'; a reply which increased

her mistress' dismay. After a very few moments we heard the
precipitate steps of the unfortunate German stumbling down the
; we heard the house door closed with a loud
stairs in full retreat
bang, andwe saw from the window the ill-starred intruder rushing
down Cheyne Row as if desirous of vanishing as rapidly as possible
from a scene of disaster and defeat.
"Before we had time to compose ourselves, Mr Carlyle entered

the room like a living thunder-clap : he in no way acknowledged
my humble presence; I do not think he looked at me; he certainly
addressed himself neither to me nor to his wife, but apparently

to the adverse Fates as, raising his eyes and his clenched hands
to the ceiling, —
he passionately asked what had he done that God
—
Almighty should send a d d German all the way from Weimar
for no earthly or human purpose but to wrench off the handles of
his cupboard doors? The tragedy of manner, voice, and gesture,

was worthy of CEdipus, and the unconscious comedy of the words,
so ludicrously out of all proportion to the subject-matter, and to
the fierce glare of his magnificent eyes, that I burst into a fit of
the most irreverent laughter, which I found it impossible to
restrain even when he turned upon me with the look of a lion
about to spring upon and rend his prey.
"A moment's pause followed, during which I continued to
laugh, while Mrs Carlyle looked ready to cry; he then inquired
with much scorn,'And pray, what does this little lady find to
laugh at?' Making a desperate effort to control myself, I gasped
out that it really did appear to me to be an exceedingly un-
dignified interference with human affairs on the part of God
3—2
Almighty, to despatch even the most insignificant citizen of
Weimar all the way to London on so very paltry a mission as

that of wrenching off the handles of anybody's cupboard door.
The extreme absurdity of the incident itself then seemed to strike
him it had struck me, and he laughed at his own
as forcibly as
share in it as cordially and heartily as I had dohe ; and to our
earnest inquiry whether the unfortunate German was a lunatic,
answered that he 'believed the poor soul was at least as sane
as himself.'
"It appeared that the luckless visitor had arrived at a monient
when Mr Carlyle was undergoing much mental Sturm und Drang
over the intricacies of his subject, and it was clear to us, after
listening to his calmer account of the matter, that he had received

the poor man with icy coldness; had taken from him the intro-
ductory and, after reading it, had uttered no word
letter in silence,
ofwelcome or even of comment; had, in fact, simply looked at

him and said, 'Well, sir, proceed!' The unfortunate missionary
from Weimar rose in great embarrassment, saying that he feared
he had called at an unfortunate moment, and offering to retire.
Mr Cariyle, who seemed, in relating the scene, to be perfectly

unconscious of the cruelty of his own part in it, had shewn his
approvar of the proposal by rising from his seat. The 'silent
apartment' was octagon in foirm", the doors of the cupboards were

similar in size and shape to the entrance door, and when that
door was shut, indistinguishable from it. The Germafl, 6ager to
escape, attempted to turn the handle of one of the cupboard
doors. was locked, and in his confusion he had, in very truth,
It
wrenched the handle off. The same thing happened on his next
attempt, and then Mr Carlyle pointed out his only exit, saying
severely, 'That, sir, is the door.'"
" He laughed at his own share in it as cordially and heartily
as I had done.'' The words ought
be borne constantly in
to
mind as the corrective to Froude's solemn treatment of Carlyle's
grotesquely exaggerated complaints, objurgations and denuncia-
tions. The artist in words is carried away by his own power, just
as an athlete will perform feats of strength for the mere pleasure
' A mistake on Madame Venturi's part.
of doing them, or a spirited horse will gallop round a field from

sheer delight in his own speed. We may be sure too that
Mrs Carlyle understood perfectly how to reduce the words to
the ordinary power of human speech. Not only was she an
extraordinarily cleverwoman, but she was a coiner of phrases
almost as vivid as her husband's, and characterised by a similar
exaggeration, sometimes at his expense. Caroline Fox quotes
her as saying that "Carlyle has to take a journey always after
writing a book, and then gets so weary with knocking about that
he has to write another book to recover from it'"; and the same
journalist quotes Sterling as her authority for the statement that
Mrs Carlyle played all manner of tricks on her husband, and told
wonderful stories about him in his presence, he vainly trying to
interrupt, until he was forced to join in the laugh against himself.
deep and ready sympathy must also be remembered
Carlyle's
as a corrective to Froude. "No doubt he is a son of Gehenna,"
Froude himself tells us he would say, when remonstrated with for
charity to some scoundrel, "but you can see
it is very low water
with him." he heard a tale of sorrow he could not rest tUl

If
he knew all about it and saw whether it was or was not within
his power to cure or to mitigate it; and sometimes, with that
end in view, he showed a simple-minded impulsiveness which
was at once comical and touching. Tennyson^ tells how, "hav-
ing heard that Henry Taylor was ill, Carlyle rushed oflF from
London to Sheen with a bottle of medicine, which had done
Mrs Carlyle good, without in the least knowing what was ailing
Henry Taylor, or for what the medicine was useful." And a
whole life of kindliness to humble neighbours lay behind the
admiration of the omnibus conductor who said to Froude, " We
thinks a deal on him down in Chelsea, we does"; and when he
was told that the Queen had just offered the "fine old gentleman"
the Grand Cross of the Bath, added, "Very proper of she to think
of it, and more proper of he to have nothing to do with it. 'Tisnt
that as can do honour to the hkes of he^." There is something
^ journals ii. 21.

t
' Life of Tennyson, i. 334, n.

^ Froude's Carlyle, iv. 434.
to be set against even the charges of impatience and irritabihty,
though there is better foundation for these than for most of the
others. In 1849 Carlyle travelled in Ireland with Charles Gavan
Duffy, and the testimony of his companion is that during a tour
of six weeks there was "of arrogance or impatience not a shade"
on Carlyle's part.
/ No man of letters has ever been subjected to a more unsparing
and uncharitable scrutiny than that which has been turned upon
Carlyle; and yet as the smoke of battle rolls away and the dust
settles, it becomes more and more clear that he was not only in
essentials noble, like his books, but good and kindly and lovable
in the little things of daily life as well. His faults have been
viewed under a magnifying-glass, and he has borne the blame of
many which were not his. His life was not happy: there needs
no Froude to tell us that: the portraits by Watts and Millais and
Whistler tell it far more convincingly. The cause of the sorrow
written on that most pathetic face was partly the almost life-long
indigestion which wrung from him the exclamation that he could
wish Satan nothing worse than "to try to digest for all eternity
with my stomach^." A deeper cause was those domestic troubles

which Froude does not invent, though he exaggerates and com-
pletely misinterprets them. The Ashburton unhappiness was a
reality, but neither Carlyle nor Lady Ashburton was responsible
for it. The cause lay in Mrs Carlyle's mind; and she in turn was
only responsible in the sense in which Carlyle was responsible for
the condition of his stomach. But the deepest cause of all was
his genius. Carlyle would never have agreed with
Dryden that
great wits are near allied to madness: on the contrary, he nobly
defines genius as "the clearer presence of God Most High in a
man'." But as the divine has appeared most manifest on earth
in the person of the Man of Sorrows, it need occasion no surprise
that this "clearer presence" proved, in Carlyle's case, incompatible
* C. Yoyi's/oumals, i. 220.
* Pastand Present. Carlyle is credited also with the stupid definition
of genius as "an infinite capacity for taking pains.'' What he really said was
that genius "means transcendent capacity of taking trouble _/??-rf 0/ all."
(Frederick, Bk. iv. ch. iii.)
with happiness. He himself warns men that what they ought to

seek is not happiness, but blessedness. Every page of his writings
bears witness that he was not one who was born to be at ease
in Zion. Each of his books was the fruit of birth-pangs which
seemed almost to threaten life itself; to each 'in succession he
an ever-lengthening "valley of the Shadow of
travelled through
Death." Surely not the least of the legacies he has left to
posterity is the lesson afforded by the stubborn courage with
which he faced the rugged road he had to traverse.
Turned from divinity by " his grave prohibitive doubts," and
barred from the law because he became convinced that it and
all connected with it were "mere denizens of the kingdom of
dulness," Carlyle was by a sort of compulsion driven towards

literature. That alone promised what was indispensable to him,
freedom and an opening to the ideal. But the literature which
would serve Thomas Carlyle must be a literature of thought and
of spiritual truth, not of mere form. He had already absorbed
what the literature of England in the eighteenth century could
give him. He had found it to be essentially destructive, and the
influence of Gibbon had merely deepened the doubts which beset
him. Neither could he find help from France. Her negative
attitude of mind, the scepticism of the Encyclopaedists, the
persiflage of Voltaire, were objects of life-long dislike to him.
There was much in the recent literature of England which might
have served him better; but while, as the essays on Voltaire and
on Diderot prove, Carlyle could be wonderfully just to characters
most diverse from his own, a necessary condition was that they
must be sufficiently removed from him in time or space or both.
The calm wisdom of Wordsworth and the manly sense of Scott
were to him of no avail, because these men stood too near him.
Carlyle was adrift. Some one told him that German literature
would give him what he wanted, and he turned to it. This
was in 18 19, a time of deep despondency, two years before that
"Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism," which took
place in the Rue Saint-Thomas de I'Enfer, known on earth as
L«ith Walk. In spite of what had been already done, those who
knew German were still few, and German books were still scarce.
40 THE LITERATURE OP THE VICTORIAN ERA,
It was through the kindness of a Kirkcaldy friend that Carlyle

procured hiq from Hamburg. Here at last he found what he had
been seeking. ,,,!,- -.,
,
,,
When, Carlyle began Jiis literary career Coleridge was in un-

disputed possession of the German field; and when the former
,
ijiov^d to London, with Sartor Resartus in his pocket, the latter

was still and still uttering his famous monologues. The
living
pungent criticism of Coleridge in the Life of Sterling shows how
English transcendentalism, as it was embodied in the person of
its greatest prophet of the passing generation, appeared to the
keenest eyes of that which was just rising. Severe as it is, the
true, and it is especially important as
criticism is essentially
coming from the pen of him who was to be and who was —
—
when the passage was written the successor to Coleridge iin the
leadership of the German party. Carlyle Jn England and Epierson
in A^lerica were destined to infuse into English literature in the
;
generation Ibllowing the death of Coleridge the spirit of tran-

scendentalism. They differed widely from one another, but they
differed more widely from the father of English transcenden-
still
talism; and in the difference lies one of the chief points of

contrast between the early and the intermediate periods of the
niheteenth century. i
easy to discover what Carlyle considered to be the

It is
weakness of Coleridge's transcendentalism. " He [Coleridge] says
once, he 'had skirted the howling, deserts of Infidelity';. this was

evident enough: but he had not had the courage, in defiance of
pain and terror, to press resolutely across said deserts to the
new firm lands of Faith beyond; he preferred to create logical
fatamorganas for himse¥ on this hither side, and laboriously

i
solace' himself with these."..." What the light of your mind,

which is the direct inspiration of' the Almighty, pronounces in-
credible,: — that, in God's name, leave uncredited; at your peril

do not try believing that No subtlest hocus-pocus of 'reason'
versus 'understanding' will avail for that feat; —and it is terribly
perilous to try it in these provinces ^"
* Life of Sterling, viii'.

THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 4I
Nearly always there is in Carlyle an oppositio n, either covert

or explicit, to the philosophy of the eighteenth centuiy — what
he calls scornfully the causcrand-effect philosophy, —and it is in
terms of opposition to that, not to Coleridge, that he indicates
what i n his opinionJg_ iniBor tajLin German philosophy. English
philosophy, if there was such a thing — for Carlyle in his essay on
the State of German Literature (1827) denied its existence:— was
still dominated by the principles, of the eighteenth century; and
Carlyle in that essay explains with singular lucidity wherein pre-
cisely the philosophy of Germany was different :
— "The Kantist, in
direct contradiction to Locke and all his followers, both of the
French and English or Scotch school, commences from within,
and proceeds outwards; instead of commencing from without
and, with various precautions and hesitations, endeavouring to
proceed inwards. The ultimate aim of all Philosophy must be
Jto interpret .aCTeaian£es,,from., the given symbol to ascertain the
thing. Now the first step towards this, the aim of what may be
called Primary or Critical Philosophy, must be to find some
indubitable principle; to fix ourselves on some unchangeable
bagisj_to discover wfaat^Jihe Germans call the Urwahr, the
Primitive Truth, the necessarily, absolutely and eternally True.
This necessarily True, this absolute basis of Truth, Locke silently,
and Reid and his followers with more tumult, find in a certain
modified Experience, and evidence of Sense, in the universal and
natural persuasion of all men. Not so the Germans: they deny
that there is here any absolute Truth, or that any philosophy
whatever can be built on such a basis; nay they go to the length
of asserting, that such an appeal even to the universal persuasions
of mankind, gather them with what precautions you may, amounts
to a total abdication of Philosophy, strictly so called, and renders
not only its farther progress, but its very existence, impossible.
What, they would say, have the persuasions, or instinctive beliefs,
or whatever they are called, of men, to do with the matter? Is
it not the object of Philosophy to enlighten, and lectify, and
many times directly contradict these very beliefs? Take, for

instance, the voice of all generations of men on the subject
of Astronomy. Will there, out of any age or climate, be one
dissentient against the fact of the Sun's going round the Earth ?
Can any evidence be clearer; is there any persuasion more

universal, any belief more instinctive? And yet the Sun moves
no hair's-breadth; but stands in the centre of his Planets, let us
vote as we please. So is it likewise with our evidence for an
external independent existence of Matter, and, in general, with
our whole argument against Hume; whose reasonings, from the
premises admitted both by him and us, the Germans afifirm to
be rigorously consistent and legitimate; and, on these premises,

altogether uncontroverted and incontrovertible. British philosophy
since the time of Hume, appears to them nothing more than a
'laborious and unsuccessful striving to build dike after dike in front
of our Churches aiid Judgment-halls, and so turn back from them
the deluge of Scepticism, with which that extraordinary writer over-
flowed us, and still threatens to destroy whatever we value most.'"
There was never penned a more admirable popular exposition
of the difference between the two systems; and the difference is
of vital importance in practice; for the old philosophy gives us
the French Revolution:
— "French Philosophism has arisen; in
which little word how much do we include ! Here, indeed, lies
properly the cardinal symptom of the whole widespread malady.

Faith is gone out; Scepticism is come in. Evil abounds and
accumulates; no man has Faith to withstand it, to amend it,
to begin by amending himself; must go on ever accumulating.

it
While hollow languor and vacuity is the lot of the Upper, and
want and stagnation of the Lower, and universal misery is very
certain, what other thing is certain? That a Lie cannot be
believed Philosophism knows only this her other belief is
! :
mainly, that in spiritual supersensual matters no Belief is possible.

Unhappy ! Nay, as yet the Contradiction of a Lie is some kind of
Belief; but the Lie with its Contradiction once swept away, what
will remain? The five unsatiated Senses will remain, the sixth
insatiable Sense (of vanity); the whole damonic nature of man
will remain, —hurled forth to rage blindly without rule or rein;
savage itself, yet with all the tools and weapons- of civilisation;
a spectacle new in History^"

' French Revolution, I. i. i. 13,
The children have asked for bread and received a stone. The
function of idealism is to replace the doubt that by the faith
kills
which makes alive. All this, Carlyle held, could be done by

religion, and by that alone; and he valued German idealism
because he found in it the basis of a religion still possible to men
of the nineteenth century. He disdained the shallow view that
history repeats
itself. —
Faith must return but not the old faith.
Reason must dominate understanding but not to bring back—
what understanding had conclusively disproved. Just here lay
the difference between his transcendentalism and the tran-
scendentalism of Coleridge. In spite of Carlyle's sarcasm, the
distinction between Verstand and Vernunft is as vital to him as it
is to Coleridge : Carlyle's denunciations of the eighteenth century

philosophy rest upon the ground that it is a philosophy of the
understanding only. But while Coleridge uses the distinction to
bring back by an intellectual jugglery an impossible past, Carlyle
uses it to build up a new world out of the ruins of the old.
But though the substance of Carlyle's thought is always philo-
sophical, he seldom chooses to express himself in the technical
language of philosophy. On the contrary, he frequently reveals
his distrust of it. " In the perfeQt state, all Thought were but the
picture and inspiring symbol of Action; Philosophy, except as
Poetry and Religion, would have no being."..." It is a chronic
malady that of Metaphysics."... "A region of Doubt hovers for ever
in the background ; in Action alone can we have certainty. Nay
properly Doubt is the indispensable inexhaustible Material where-
on Action works, which Action has to fashion into Certainty and
Reality; only on a canvas of Darkness, such is man's way of
being, could the many^coloured picture of our Life paint itselt
and shine^"
No wonder that the man who thought and felt thus should
have found his inspiration rather in a thoughtful poet than in a
professional philosopher. Not only is the English conception of
German transcendentalism transformed as we pass from the first
to the second period of German influence, but a highly significant
change occurs at the same time in the character of the influence
' Characteristics.
exercised by German poetry. Coleridge's Walknstein was a fine
tribute to Schiller, but in the earlier period it stood alone. Both
Schiller and Goethe were, for the most part, known by cruder
productions of their youth. Lockhart believed that Scott himself
did not know Faust, in a complete form till the year 1818.
Further, notwithstandirig "Goetzism" and " Wertherism," nothing
in the earlier period is more noteworthy than the secondary posi-
tion taken by Goethe ; in the later period, nothing is more note-
worthy than his predominance. This change likewise was largely
due to Carlyle. and Byron had, it is true, proclaimed their
Scott
allegiance to Goethe; but Crabb Robinson found himself a prophet
crying in the wilderness when he proclaimed his admiration of the
author of Faust. John Stuart Mill retained till his death that
preference for Schiller which he had found common in his youth.
William Taylor preferred Wieland to Goethe. From the vantage-
ground of a comprehensive ignorance Jeffrey, impartially disparag-
ing all Germans, but with more particular reference to Goethe,
told Carlyle that there were nobler tasks for a man like him " than
to vamp up the vulgar dreams of these Dousterswivels you are so
anxious to cram down our throats," and predicts that " England
never will admire, nor indeed endure," his German divinities^.
Above all, Coleridge was a Schillerite. He condemned some scenes
of Faust as " mere magic-lantern pictures," and pronounced the
whole play a canting story of seduction. It is Schiller, not Goethe,
—
whom he couples with Shakespeare and Wordsworth as reveal- —
ing the profoundest secrets of the human heart. De Quincey,
speaking of Schiller, remarks that "in the land of his birth, by
those who undervalue him most, he is ranked as the second name
in German literature everywhere else, he is ranked as the first."
;
"For us," he adds, "who are aliens to Germany, Schiller is the

representative of the German intellect in its highest form ; and to
him, at all events, whether first or second, it is certainly due, that
German intellect has become a known power, and a power of
growing magnitude, for the great commonwealth of Christendom''."
On the other hand, he asks us to believe that Goethe's strongest
^ Froude's Carlyle, ii. 39.
' Essay on Schiller.
claim to our notice is "extravagant partisanship put forward on

his behalf for the last forty years"; and that one of the causes
which explain the disproportionate" interest attaching to him is
" the quantity of enigmatical and unintelligible writing which he
has designedly thrown irito his later works, by way of keeping up

a system of discussion and strife upon his own meaning amongst
the critics of his country'."
Carlyle himself, in the preface to his translation of Wilhelm
Mehter, declares that to the English Goethe's name "is sound
and nothing more: it excites no definite idea in almost any mind";
and lecturing on the Hero as Man of Letters he said that he would

have chosfen Goethe as his hero had he not been hopeless of giving
any impression but a false one about him. So late as 1840, then,
notwithstandihg all he and others had done, Carlyle considered
the work to be still very incomplete and the gulf between England
and Germany Very imperfectly bridged. No wonder that twenty
years earlier he himself, then starting his study of German, was
content to follow the received opinion and make Schiller the first
object of his attention. His offer to translate the whole of Schiller's
works was declined by the booksellers, but he wrote that charming
Life of Schiller (1823-1824) which Goethe procured to be trans-
lated into German and pronounced to show an insight surprising
in a native of another country. But Schiller was not great enough
to hold Carlyle long. He could not be " physician of the iron
age " of Europe. He was neither in sufficiently close contact
With the reial nor sufficiently daring in handling the ideal. What
did permanently hold Carlyle was the shadowy mysticism' of
Novalis, the round and perfect naturalness of Gp6the, and the
bold humour of Richter, his "intellect vehement, rugged,
irresistible," his "imagination vague, sombre, splendid, or appal-
ling''." His later works are besprinkled with quotations from,
references to, reminiscences of these men, not of Schiller. But
the greatest of these is Goethe, and it was to him more than to
any one else that Carlyle owed his ihtellectual salvation. Already
in 1823 Goethe is to him "the only living model of a great
' Essay on Goethe.
' Essay on Ridhter.
writer ^" Goethe, he wrote to his brother in 1832,
"was my
due earnestness,
evangelist. His works, if you study them with
are the day-spring visiting us in the dark night"."
Goethe was more profoundly natural than Schiller', and
this
mines of
was one reason why Carlyle continued to dig from the
valuable to
the former long after he had exhausted all that was
others was that he
him in the latter. But the reason above all
found Goethe profoundly philosophical, while Schiller was essenti-
ally an artist,— and even as artist was second to
Goethe. Now
what Carlyle above all things sought for was something to believe
about the universe, some ground of truth to rest upon. " In my

heterodox heart," he writes in 1833, "there is yearly growing ug^^
the strangest, crabbed, one-sided persuasion^ that _g/-^ is but a
reminiscence now :..that for us irj„the§.eday£ prophecy (well_und«;-
stood)^ not poetry, is_the things wanted^ How can wej^g_and

/«?«/ when we cannot yet6e&vea.ndsde''7 Not to learn how to
sihg'and paint, but to learn how to believe and see, Carlyle had
studied German. That was the "what you want" which his
friendhad told him he would find there. He found it amply
in Goethe, but only in a minor degree in Schiller; and his
countrymen under his guidance transferred their allegiance from
the smaller to the greater man, with consequences not unim-
portant.
work on Goethe followed with scarcely any interval
Carlyle's
upon he devoted to Schiller. He translated Wilhelm
that which
Meistet's Apprenticeship (1824). The book took a deeper hold of
him as he worked at it ; and when, three years later, the transla-
tions entitled German Romance appeared, there was included
among them the less interesting second part, Wilhelm Meistet's
Travels. Besides these translations, a number of articles on
Goethe in various magazines, ranging in date from 1828 to 1832,
helped to fix attention upon the great German.
It would be difficult to conceive two men outwardly more
unlike than the master and the disciple the son of the Scottish
:
• Early Letters, ii. 191. ' Froude's Carlyle, ii. 260.
' Readers of Eckermann's Conversations, or of Lewes's Life of Goethe, will

call to mind the story of the rotten apples.
peasant in contrast with the brilliant ornament of the court of

Weimar J the seamed and haggard sage of Chelsea on the one
hand, on the other a pattern of manly grace, in youth a radiant
Apollo. And in many respects the difference was spiritual also.
Carlyle cared comparatively little for the artist in Goethe. What
interested him supremely, what he valued as a gospel, was
Goethe's answer to the "obstinate questionings'' which neces-
sarily arise in the thoughtful mind. Behind Carlyle lay the
negations of the eighteenth century, so hateful to him. He
could neither rest in them, nor go on, like most of his contem-
poraries, passively accepting beliefs which the "understanding"
had rejected as incredible. In Goethe he found an escape from
the negations. Goethe had no prejudices, held nothing sacred
from investigation, wore no " Hebrew old-clothes." Yet he stood
as far as possible from the materialism of the eighteenth century
and from the machine theory of the universe which Carlyle saw
in possession in the nineteenth.
To Carlyle, the supreme interest of Goethe lay in his religion.
The "Calvinist without the Christianity" held that "a man's
religion is the chief fact with regard to him." Religion is " the
thing a man does a man does
practically believe;... the thing
practically lay to heart and know for certain, concerning his vital
relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duties and destiny
there^" It " consists not in the many things he is in doubt of
and tries to believe, but in the few he is assured of, and has no
need of effort for believing'." It is something which lies over the
religious man "like an all-embracing heavenly canopy, like an
atmosphere and life-element, which is not spoken of, which in all
things is presupposed without speech'." Of it he asks, "Is not
serene and complete Religion the highest aspect of human nature
as serene Cant, or complete No-religion, is the lowest and miser-
ablest ? Between which two all manner of earnest Methodisms,
introspections, agonising inquiries, never so morbid, shall play
their part, not without approbation*."
' Heroes and Hero- Worship,

' Latter-Day Pamphlets,
' Past and Present. * liiii.
'
Carlyle saw around him, and he had himself gone through!
the earnest Methodisms, introspections, agonising inquiries. When
he first turned to Germany and found his gospel in Goethe he
had not yet seen the "spectral Pus^yisms" which roused his
scorn in later days. But the antidote to both, and to the deifica-
tion of machinery; lay in Goethe. It lay in Goethe, because he
alone among the moderns had resolutely faced the problems of
the universe, and solved them. A man of the eighteenth century,
he was never under the dominion of its negations and unbeliefs.

The three typical heroic men Of letters of that century, Johnson;
Rousseau and Burns, were men who " fought bravely, andj ell."
Goethe fought and conquered. He had sounded a.11 the depths
i
of human experience. The Confessions of a Beautiful Soul are

felt by the pietist to be a perfect picture, because Goethe had
experienced those feelings himself. And yet the tnost thorough-
going rationalist could not be more unsparing than he in criticism
of worn-out dogmas. The issue of all was a religion profound
and true, a 'religion of things "known for certain," yet absolutely
divorced from all creeds, independent of all churches ; certain just
because it was personal. "God," said Goethe in the last year of
his life, "did hot retire to rest after the' well-knbwh six days of
on tbe contrary, is constantly active as on the flrSt.

creation, but,
It would have been for Him a poor occupation to compbs^ this
heavy world out of simple elements, and to keep it rolling in the

sunbeams from year to year, if He had not had the plan of '
founding a nursery for a world of spirits upon this material basis.

So He' is now constantly active in higher natures to attract the
lower ones'."
,_ This was the religion essential to Carlyle, here lay the secrfet
of his spiritual salvation, this was the Germanism he introduced

into Eiiglish literature. How different from the Germanism of
thie previous generation, with its spectres and goblins, its enchant-
ments and didblerie\ It will be found that all that Carlyle
borrowed from other Germans, from Richter and from Novalis
and from Kant and from Fichte, is in substance the same as this.
' Eckermann, translated by Oxenford.

It finds the best expression in his favourite quotation, the song of

the Earth Spirit in Faust,
" 'Tis thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the garment thou see*st him by."
Far from bottling-up the Creator in a Leyden jar, we find that He

can no longer be confined within the covers of a book or the
communion of a Church. There is a promise that religion may
prove to be no longer a thing which has seen its best days, a thing
whose function is to give respectability to the decorous idleness
of Sunday, but the vital part of the business of life, a real atmo-
sphere, a heavenly canopy. It was this enlarged idea of religion,
a religion not of the first century, or of the sixteenth, but of the
nineteenth, that Carlyle absorbed into himsel£ To transmit this
from Germany to England, to convince the English mind that
there is an alternative to the garb of Hebrew old-clothes on the
one hand, and the nakedness of atheism on the other, was the
main part of his function in literature. It was thus that he
interpreted the mind of Germany. This is the thing which makes
the dominance of Germany so significant in the Victorian period.
The ten or twelve years after 1820 were Carlyle's formative
period, and the change brought about, in thought and still more
in style, is extraordinary. Sartor Resartus was finished in 1831;
in the same year Characteristics appeared in the Edinburgh
Review, and in these we have the mature Carlyle, the most
potent personality in English literature for the next half-century.
It is an unconventional personality. To an unsympathetic French-
man, Taine, Carlyle is " a strange animal, a relic of a lost family,
a sort of mastodon, who has strayed in a world not made for him."
Even to a countryman, James Smetham, he is a "great Gothic
whale lumbering and floundering in the Northern Seas, and
spouting his 'foam fountains' under the crackUng Aurora and
the piercing Hyperborean stars^" And yet in the early part of
this formative period we find the Life of Schiller a very model of
simple, limpid English.
It would be a profound mistake to refer that style, which has
i Smetham's JLetUrs, 213.
W. 4
so THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
been such a cause of offence to numberless readers, exclusively or
even principally, to Carlyle's Germanism. Assuredly he did not
learn it from Goethe; probably he took something of it from
Richter; more still perhaps from Reinecke Fuchs. He declared
that hardly any book in the world had sunk so deep into him as
that; and he added that perhaps his whole speculations about
clothes arose out of it^. But in its essence Carlyle's style is the
outcome of his own wrestlings with life and its mystery. Para-
doxical as it seems to say so, no English style is more natural.
Addisonian English could never have expressed Carlyle's meaning;
however excellent it may have been for AddisoHj to Carlyle it
would always have remained a false style. Carlyle conquered his
spiritual kingdom with difficulty, and his words bear the marks
of his strivings, as his face through life, in its seams and wrinkles,
bore them too.
The truth is, the style of the Life of Schiller is an imitated
style, that of Sartor Resartus is natural, and has its roots in a
more distant but a more intimate past. Carlyle told Froude that
it originated in the old farmhouse in Annandale. "The humour
of it came from his mother. The form was his father's common
mode of speech, and had been adopted by himself for its brevity
and emphasis ^" How true this is we shall better understand if we
turn to Carlyle's own description of his father's style, in that
beautiful section of the Reminiscences which is devoted to
James Carlyle :
— " None of us will ever forget that bold glowing
style of his, flowing free from his untutored soul, full of metaphors
(though he knew not what a metaphor was), with all manner of
potent words which he appropriated and applied with a surprising
accuracy you often would not guess whence — brief, energetic, and
which I should say conveyed the most definite picture, definite,
clear, not in ambitious colours but in full white sunlight, of all
the dialects I have ever listened to. Nothing did I ever hear him
undertake to render visible which did not become almost ocularly
so....Emphatic I have heard him beyond all men. In anger he
had no need of oaths, his words were like sharp arrows that smote
1 Journal, quoted by Froude, ii. 374.
' Froude's Carlyle, iii. 40.
into the very heart. The fault was that he exaggerated (which
fault I also inherit), yet only in description and for the sake chiefly
of humorous effect^" Except for one point, nearly every word
of this might have been written about James Carlyle's great son.
The style of Thomas Carlyle cannot be compared to " pure bright
sunshine " : the colour with which it is full charged is fre-
quently lurid. He accurately indicated its character in declaring

his intention, with respect to the French Revolution, to splash
down what he knew " in large masses of colour, that it may look
like a smoke-and-flame conflagration in the distance"." But all
the other points —the boldness and glow, the metaphors, the
potency and piercing sharpness of the words, the emphasis, the
marvellous pictorial power, the exaggeration —are features of the
style of Thomas Carlyle.
This consideration, that the style in which Carlyle wrote was
really the vesture in which, to him, thought naturally clothed
itself, ought to be decisive of the frequently but fruitlessly debated
question whether Carlyle ought to have written in such a style or not.
Most of his contemporaries, and many in later days, have arraigned
him at the bar of criticism on the score of this style; and the
gravamen of the charge, implicit if not explicit, usually is that the
style is unnatural, contorted, fantastic. Jeffrey remonstrated with
him, evidently under the belief that the thought expressed and the
manner of expression were alike the outcome of perversity and
wrong-headedness. Edmond Scherer, under the same impression,
spoke of Carlyle as "demeaning himself like a mystagogue,"
Taine called his style " demoniacal."
•
After his marriage in 1826 Carlyle lived for a short time at
Comely Bank, near Edinburgh; but in 1828 he removed to the
now famous moorland farmhouse of Craigenputtock, where he
remained until the removal in 1834 to Cheyne Row. There is
no period in all his life more important or more really fruitful
than the six years spent at Craigenputtock. It would be tiresome
to enter again into the controversy as towhether he was or was
not unkind to his wife in taking her there ; but it may be safely
^ Reminiscences, i. S. ' Quoted in Nichol's Carlyle, 71.
4—3
said that whatever justification can come from doing what was
best for his own genius, was his. The actual literary output of
the period is considerable ; its influence on Carlyle's subsequent
career was incalculable. The best of the essays were written

there. Besides the Characteristics, already mentioned, there were
written at Craigenputtock, among others, Burns, Voltaire, Diderot,
Johnson, Novalis, the second essay on Richter, The Diamond

Necklace and Signs of the Time.
To the Craigenputtock period and the years immediately pre-
ceding it belongs, then, much the greater part of Carlyle's work
in criticism, and it will be well to pause and consider its signifi-
cance. This has been occasionally exaggerated, but far more

frequently underrated. There is some exaggeration when we are
told that Carlyle marks "the beginning of a new era in the history
of British criticism'." Undoubtedly he does, as contrasted with
Jeffrey and Giffbrd and the Blackwood group. The professional
reviewing of the day was done in a style altogether foreign to
Carlyle, a stylewhich he did more, perhaps, than anyone else to
render impossible. But Lamb and Coleridge and Shelley and
Landor had written before Carlyle, or were writing contem-
poraneously with him ; and though they are all unlike him, still
the germs of the revolution in criticism lay in them. The essence
of the new criticism is sympathy, that of the old is rule. The
eighteenth century and those of the early nineteenth
critics,
century who followed in their steps, wrote under the conviction

that there were certain canons in literature, valid at all times and
under all circumstances, by which the writer could be tried, and
under which he ought to be condemned if he were found guilty
of infringement. Hence criticism was apt to consist either of
mere laudation or of mere censure; or if the two were mingled
they were equally dogmatic. Wordsworth was simply condemned;
Shakespeare, having passed through the fires of censure, was
merely lauded. " Nine-tenths of our critics," says Carlyle, "have

told us little more of Shakspeare than what honest Franz Horn
says our neighbours used to tell of him, 'that he was a great
"
spirit, and stept majestically along^'
^ Nichol's Carlyle, i68. " Miscellanies, i. 221,
To must be neither pure panegyric nor bare

Carlyle, criticism
censure. Goethe must do something more than "step majestically
along''; Voltaire must at least be understood. The first and chief
thing needful is comprehension, sympathy ; only on that basis is
wise praise or wise censure possible. "No man can pronounce
dogmatically, with even a chance of being right, on the faults of a
poem, till he has seen its very best and highest beauty;... the
beauty of the poem as a whole in the strict sense ; the clear view
of it as an indivisible Unity\" And this could only be done by
viewing it from the author's own standpoint.
In all the works of Carlyle there is no idea so deep-rooted or
so multifariously expressed as that of the supreme importance of
biography. This is the essence of his Hero- Worship. It is
reaffirmed with hardly less emphasis in Past and Present and in

Latter-Day Pamphlets. "There is no Biography of a man," he
says, "much less any History, or Biography of a Nation, but
wraps in it a message out of Heaven^" It is the core of his
conception of history. "History,'' he quotes, "is the essence of

innumerable biographies\" In Heroes and Hero- Worship he
declares that the history of the world is the biography of great
men. In Sartor Resartus we are told that "Biography is by

nature the most universally profitable, universally pleasant of all
things especially Biography of distinguished individuals* " ; and
:
again, " Great Men are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts
of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is com-
pleted firom epoch to epoch, and by some named History"." And
he not only preached this doctrine, but he practised it as well.
His Cromwell and his Frederick are both practical illustrations of
the doctrine of hero-worship. The French Revolution itself is
made, not always without some suspicion of violence, to revolve
round persons, above all the person of Mirabeau.
Carlyle's literary criticism comes under the same all-embracing
conception : it too is essentially biographia " There is no heroic
poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a
1 Miscdlania, i. 219-220. ' Latter-Bay Pamphlets, il"].
' Miscellanies, iv. 53. * Sariar Hesartus, 51.
' ibid. I3».
man'"; and conversely, "there is no life of a man, faithfully
."
recorded, but is a heroic poem df its sort, rhymed or unrhymed
The biographic element may be
purely spiritual, as in Carlyles
own "spiritual autobiography," Sartor Resartus, but in all cases

we shall find that it is not only present but is essential. He
conceives himself to be successful when he has got to the man s
own inner meaning, as it appeared to himself. Till that is done
nothing is accomplished ; and that can only be done through the
power of sympathy. "No character, we may affirm, was ever

rightly understood till it had first been regarded with a certain
feeling, not of tolerance only, but of sympathy. For here, more
than in any other case, it is verified that the heart sees farther
than the head. Let us be sure, our enemy is not that hateful
being we are too apt to paint him. His vices and basenesses lie
combined in far other order before his mind than before ours;
and under colours which palliate them, nay perhaps exhibit them
as virtues. Were he the wretch of our imagining, his life would
be a burden to himself; for it is not by bread alone that the
basest mortal lives; a certain approval of conscience is equally
essential even to physical existence; is the fine all-pervading
cement by which that wondrous union, a Self, is held together'."
The first qualification of the critic, then, must be sympathy,
the determination and the capacity to understand the thing
criticised, in the light of its creator's purpose. Carlyle was warned
of the importance of this because he saw so much of what he
himself admired, of what had nourished his own spirit, condemned
from sheer lack of comprehension. The favourite adjective de-
preciatory of German was the adjective mystical; and
literature,
"mystical," writes Carlyle in the essay on the State of German

Literature, " in most cases, will turn out to be merely synonymous
with not understood."
A second qualification, equally necessary, is reverence ; and
that implies a radical change in, almost a reversal of, the attitude
habitually assumed by the critic towards the thing criticised. The
reviewer was in the habit of pronouncing his judgments ex
* Essay on Scott. ''
ibid.
' Essay on Voltaire.
cathedra : he was the judge, and the author came before him for
sentence. In Carlyle's view, the critic, qua critic at least, is the
inferior. His function is only to understand, that of the author
is to create. "Criticism stands like an interpreter between the
inspired and the uninspired ; between the prophet and those who
hear the melody of his words, and catch some glimpse of their
material meaning, but understand not their deep if«p5rt'."
Sympathy is good, reverence is good ; but neither one nor the
other, nor even both together, are sufificient. The fact remains
that the critic has the function of judge. Sympathy is good in so
far as it leads to comprehension, not if it produces confusion

between right and wrong, wise and foolish. Reverence must be
directed to that which is worthy of respect The greatest of "men
are faulty and their works imperfect, and it is part, though a
subordinate part, of the duty to point out the imperfections.
critic's
In order to do so correctly he must act on some principle. " To

determine with any infallibility whether what we call a fault is in
very deed a fault, we must previously have settled two points,

neither of which may be so readily settled. First, we must have
made plain to ourselves what the poet's aim really and truly was,
how the task he had to do stood before his own eye, and how far,
with such means as it afforded him, he has fuliBUed it. Secondly,
we must have decided whether and how far this aim, this task of
his, accorded, —not with us, and our individual crotchets, and the
crotchets of our little senate where we give or take the law,—but
with human nature, and the nature of things at large; with the
universal principles of poetic beauty, not as they stand written in
our text-books, but in the hearts and imaginations of all men^"
It was in this spirit and under the guidance of this principle,
that Carlyle approached the task of criticism. He was successful

in it exactly in proportion to his fidelity in following the laws he
had himself down. On the whole he showed himself surpris-
laid
ingly catholic. His principal limitation was with reference to his
own countrymen and contemporaries, whom he rarely judged
generously or even justly. What he has said or written in letters
or reminiscences about Lamb and Coleridge is well known. Of
1 State of German Literature. ' Goethe, Miscellanies, i. 219.
S6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
the formal essays published in his lifetime the least satisfactory is
that on Scott, whose success he seemed hard to pardon.

to find it
He could not indeed blind himself to Scott's deep manliness, but he

almost completely ignored his genius. A few cheap sneers at the
restaurateur of Europe are a poor acknowledgment for a gallery
of portraits unmatched for fulness and variety, and on the whole
for quality, since Shakespeare.
Scott's great fault, in Carlyle's view, was the want of sufficient
seriousness. It is the lack of sympathy resulting from this idea

which makes Carlyle's criticism of his great countrymen so in-
adequate : Carlyle for once has been false to his own principle,
and the result is to demonstrate the truth and the importance of

the 'principle. Had he been always as easily repelled, Carlyle
would assuredly not have deserved the praise of catholicity ; but
if his subject were only removed sufficiently from himself, he
could treat not only tolerantly but with generosity talents and
aims the most widely opposed to his own. None of his essays
is more creditable to him, though some are profounder, than
those on the Frenchmen, Voltaire and Diderot. Voltaire was
nearly everything that Carlyle most detested ; he had hardly any
of the gifts which won his critic's spontaneous admiration. He
speaks with truth of Voltaire's " inborn levity of nature, his entire
want of Earnestness." He "was by birth a mocker, and light
Pococurante^." " He isno great man, but only a great Persifleur;
a man for whom life, and all that pertains to it, has, at best, but
a despicable meaning ; who meets its difficulties not with earnest
force, but with gay agility; and is found always at the top, less
by power in swimming, than by lightness in floating"." Voltaire's
results are mainly negative ; and Carlyle loathed mere negation.
In all man is as wide as the poles removed from

points this
Carlyle and from all that Carlyle instinctively admires. But he
is French, and he belongs to a slightly earlier time and instead ;
of railing, Carlyle resolutely sets himself to understand him.

He finds that great part of what he dislikes in Voltaire is not
really the fault of Voltaire, but is the outcome of his surround-
ings. He cannot place Voltaire on such a pedestal as that on
1 Voltaire, ' ibid.
THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE S7
which he elevates Goethe; but he can and he does do justice

to the much that is admirable in Voltaire's intellect, and gives
generous recognition to his lucidity, his method and the wide
sweep of his knowledge. "From Newton's Prindpia to the
Shaster and Vedam, nothing has escaped him : he has glanced
into all literatures and all sciences ; nay studied in them, for he
can speak a rational word on alL It is known, for instance, that
he understood Newton when no other man in France understood
him indeed his countrymen may call Voltaire the discoverer of
:
intellectual England j —
a discovery, it is true, rather of the Curtis
than of the Columbussort, yet one which in his day still remained
to be made. Nay, from all sides he brings new light into his
country now, for the first time, to the upturned wondering eyes
:
of Frenchmen in general, does itThought has

become clear that
actually a kind of existence in that some
other kingdoms;
glimmerings of civilisation had dawned here and there on the
human species, prior to the Siecle de Louis Quatorze'."
Three conspicuous features mark the criticism of Carlyle its :
profound humanity, its penetration, and its reach.

Its humanity springs from his conviction of the essentially
biographic character of all books worth calling books. To him,

as to Hegel, " ideas are living things, and have hands and feet."
Everything in existence is the embodiment of thought ; and " of
all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the
most momentous, wonderful and worthy are the things we call

Books," because a book "is ^q purest embodiment the thought of
man can have"." One of the numerous points of contact between
Carlyle and Browning is the conviction, held by both, that nothing
is much worth study but the development of soul. This conviction
deeply influences Carlyle' s criticism. The man and his work are
always viewed in relation; the one throws a light on the other;
and hence the book is no less vital than the writer. It is by this
method that Carlyle is enabled to bridge the gulf between himself
and writers like Voltaire and Diderot. It is thus that he fathoms
the meaning of Goethe. It is in this spirit that he achieves such
^ Voltaire. * Hero as Man oj Letters.

a triumph of criticism as the essay on Burns. Carlyle had drunk
in with his mother's milk the knowledge necessary for the triumph
in the last case. Scotch himself, and sprung from the class to
which Burns belonged, he knew the poet's meaning by instinct,
without needing to reason it out Every word that Burns wrote
was to him a revelation of the spirit of the man. His essay has
rather the value of a piece of creative literature than of a mere
criticism.
The second point, the penetrative character of Carlyle's criti-
cism, is closely connected with the first. He is absolutely

indifferent to superficial and subordinate matters. Until he has
reached the heart, he conceives himself to have achieved nothing;
and usually he gains his end through groanings and travail.
Dr Garnett has admirably pointed out how, " another Jacob, he

wrestled with Goethe, and would not let him go till he had won
his blessing " and how in the translation of Wilhelm Meister he
;
gradually advanced from the view that " Goethe is the greatest
genius that has lived for a century, and the greatest ass that has
lived for three," to the avowal that the principal demerit of his
Wilhelm Meister is " the disfigurement of a translation." It is by
a similar process that all Carlyle's successes are won. Occasionally,
as in the case of Burns and partly of Richter and Johnson, by
natural sympathy; sometimes, as in the case of the French
writers, by a violent intellectual effort ; sometimes again, as with
Goethe, by a mixed process, Carlyle wins the actual standpoint of

his author, or what he believes to be such, and interprets his works
from thence.
The last point in connexion with Carlyle's criticism is its
reach. He is scarcely ever purely critical ; there is almost always

something creative
in his essays. The writers he values are those
who give him an outlook over history and an insight into
human nature ; and he values them in proportion as they do
that. Mere elegance of form and phrase he cares little for; rather,
he has no patience with it; but genuineness, whether in a Corn-
Law Rhymer deems of incalculable worth.
or in a Goethe, he
Both are emphatically men. " Here is an earnest truth-speaking
man; no theoriser, sentimentaliser, but a practical man of work
THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE $9
and endeavour, man of sufferance and endurance^." Goethe is
"the Strong One of his time." And both, with the many inter-
mediate between them in gifts and importance, are valued for the
insight they give into their own country or the world. The history
of Goethe's mind "is, in fact, at the same time, the history of
German culture in his day""; and the Corn-Law Rhymes are rich
in suggestions for the author of Latter-Day Pamphlets. Behind
literature there always lies to Carlyle something greater than
literature. He cites the correspondence between Frederick and
Voltaire, and then adds his comment: — "We can perceive what
kind of Voltaire it was to whom the Crown-Prince now addressed
himself; and how luminous an object, shining afar out of the
solitudes of Champagne upon the ardent young man, still so
capable of admiration. Model Epic, Henriade; model history,
Charles Douze; sublime tragedies, Char, Alzire and others, which
readers still know though with less enthusiasm, are blooming forth
in Friedrich's memory and heart such Literature as man never
:
saw before ; and in the background Friedrich has inarticulately a

feeling as if, man, there were something grander than all
in this
Literatures: a Reform of human Thought itself; a new 'Gospel,'
good-tidings or God's Message, by this man; which Friedrich —
does not suspect, as the world with horror does, to be a Ba'spel,
!"
or Devil's-Message of bad-tidings'
This feeling, inarticulate in Frederick, is articulate in Carlyle.
He quotes with approval the saying of Novalis that "the highest

problem of Uterature is the Writing of a Bible*"; and that of
Fichte, that the "Literary Man" is the "Priest" of these Modern
Epochs" To Carlyle therefore there is nothing of dilettantism in
literature that is worthy of the name. Its function is to reveal the
Divine Idea of the World ; and it is valuable just in proportion
as it performs that function. A typical example of Caxlyle's mode
of criticism is the contrast he draws between Johnson and Hume.
Brushing aside subordinate matters he goes straight to the
all
heart of each; and he views both in relation to the life of Europe

in their time:
' Corn-Law Rhymes. 2 Miscellanies, i. 176.
s Friedrich, *
iii. 225. Latter-Day Pamphlets, 240. » ibid. 270.
6o THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
"It is worthy of note that, in our little British Isle, the two
grand Antagonisms of Europe should have stood embodied,
under their very highest concentration, in two men produced
simultaneously among ourselves. Samuel Johnson and David
Hume were children nearly of the same year; through life they
were spectators of the same Life-movement; often inhabitants of
the same city. Greater contrast, in all things, between two great
men, could not be. Hume, well-born, competently provided for,
whole in body and mind, of his own determination forces a way
into Literature: Johnson, poor, moonstruck, diseased, forlorn, is
forced into it 'with the bayonet of necessity at his back.' And

what a part did they severally play there! As Johnson became
the father of all succeeding Tories; so was Hume the father of all
succeeding Whigs, for his own Jacobitism was but an accident, as

worthy to be named Prejudice as any of Johnson's. Again, if
Johnson's culture was exclusively English; Hume's, in Scotland,
became European ; — for which reason too we find his influence
spread deeply over all quarters of Europe, traceable deeply in all
speculation, French, German, as well as domestic; while Johnson's

name, out of England, is hardly anywhere to be met with. In
spiritual stature they are almost equal; both great, among the
greatest; yet how unlike in lilceness! Hume has the widest,

methodising, comprehensive eye; Johnson the keenest for per-
spicacity and minute detail: so had, perhaps chiefly, their education
ordered it Neither of the two rose into poetry; yet both to some
approximation thereof:Hume to something of an Epic clearness
and method; as in his delineation of the Commonwealth Wars;
Johnson to many a deep Lyric tone of plaintiveness and impetuous
graceful power, scattered over his fugitive compositions. Both,
rather to the general surprise, had a certain rugged humour shining
through their earnestness: the indication, indeed, that they were
earnest men, and had subdued their wild world into a kind of
temporary home and Both were, by principle and
safe dwelling.
habit. Stoics: yet Johnson with the greater merit, for he alone
had very much to triumph over; farther, he alone ennobled his
Stoicism into Devotion. To Johnson Life was as a Prison, to
be endured with heroic faith: to Hume it was little more than a
THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 6l
foolish Bartholomew-Fair Show-booth, with the foolish crowdings

and elbowings of which it was not worth while to quarrel; the
whole would break up, and be at liberty, so soon. Both realised
the highest task of Manhood, that of living like men; each did
not unfitly, in his way: Hume as one, with factitious, half-false
gaiety, taking leave of what was wholly but a Lie: Johnson
itself
as one, with awe-struck, yet resolute and piously expectant heart,

taking leave of a Reality, to enter a Reality still higher. Johnson
had the harder problem of it, from first to last: whether, with
some hesitation, we can admit that he was intrinsically the better
gifted, may remain undecided^"
The removal to Cheyne Row in the summer of 1834 was the

last great change in Carlyle's life. Henceforth, in locality, as well
as in profession, his destiny was fixed; but trials and struggles

stern enough were still to be endured. The available capital with
which he and his wife faced the change to London amounted
only to about ;£^2oo; and in February, 1835, he records "as a
fact and document for the literary history of this time," that "it
is now some three-and-twenty months since I have earned one
penny by the craft of literature'." But writing to his brother

John in January, 1834, Carlyle mentions receipt of money from
Fraser for Sartor. The statement quoted therefore must apparently
mean that he had not been paid for anything written within
twenty-three months. Such, at the age of thirty-nine, was the
financial condition of the greatest literary genius of his time.
Twice before Carlyle had paid visits of considerable duration
to London; the first in 1824-1825; the second in 1831-1832.
On the latter occasion his object had been to arrange for the
publication of Sartor Resartus. It proved no easy task. Sartor
was offered to John Murray, among others, and actually accepted
by him. But Byron's m/a^ of publishers had lost some of his
youthful daring, and drew back. All the world knows how it
ultimately appeared in Fraset's Magazine in 1833-1834, and
justified, from their own point of view, the publishers who re-
jected it,by proving to be "beyond measure unpopular." Cash
scanty — no prospect of more except through literature and his —
1 Miscellanies, iv. 129-130. ^ Froude's Carlyle, iii. 19.
principal work threatening on its publisher
to bring disaster
the prospect was gloomy enough. But Carlyle held doggedly on,
and had the courage to decline an offer of employment on the
Times, procured for him by his friend John Sterling.
Before Carlyle moved to London he had determined upon
his next subject. He had spent the early months of 1833 in
Edinburgh^ "reading violently" in the Advocates' Library, on
John Knox as well as on the French Revolution, until he finally
settled down to the latter subject. The possibility of settling in
Edinburgh had been in his mind, but when he revisited them he
found himself not sufficiently attracted by those with whom it
would have been necessary to associate. "As to the men here,
they are beautiful to look upon after mere black-faced sheep; yet
not persons of whom instruction or special ediiication in any way
is to be expected. From a Highlander you once for all cannot
get breeches ^"
It was therefore with a mind full of the Revolution that
Carlyle made his migration. A few months later he began writing
his history, not without the usual stress. On September 21, 1834,
he records that "after two weeks of blotching and bloring"
—
he has produced "two clean pages*!" He had to struggle, not
only with the natural difficulties of his subject, but with officialdom
and red-tape as well. The BritishMuseum contained the finest
collection in the world of pamphlets on the Revolution ; but
Carlyle failed to get access to it. Nevertheless, early in 1835
the first volume was finished. It was the MS. of this volume
which, lent to Mill, who had been generously helpful in finding
and lending books, was accidentally destroyed. Carlyle bore the
loss nobly —
he never failed to meet the great troubles of life
with dignity. Setting himself resolutely to re-write it, he finished
it just a year after he began the composition of the first version.
The last sentence of the third volume was written on January 1 2,

1837, and Carlyle went out for a walk, saying to his wife, "I
know not whether this book is worth anything, nor what the
world will do with it, or misdo, or entirely forbear to do, as is
* Froude's Carlyle, ii. 332. ' Hid.
' ibid. ii. 456.
likeliest; but this I could tell the world: You have not had for a
hundred years any book that comes more direct and flamingly from
the heart of a living man. Do what you like with it, you \"
Almost exactly half a century earUer, Edward Gibbon had written
the last sentences of the greatest history in the English language;
and the record of his emotions forms an instructive contrast: "It
was on the day, or rather night, of the 2 7th of June, 1 787, between
the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the
last page, in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down
my pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of
acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and
the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the
silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all
nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy
on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment
of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober
melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had
taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion,
and that whatsoever might be the future date of my History, the
life of the historian must be short and precarious." The core of
the differences between The French Revolution and The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire is contained in these two passages.
There could be no more convincing proof of theûth_rf£aElylfi^
doctrine that what a man srrites in his bAQkS-i4-i*i«w«^6—^ -~—
The reception of The French Revolution was very different
from that which had been accorded to Sartor. The most pro-
minent men of the time, even those who least agreed with Carlyle,
recognised its author as now one of the iirst of English men of
letters. But meanwhile finances were running low; and though

the essays on Mirabeau and on The Diamond Necklace brought in
something, it was difficult to bridge the time till the history could
be printed and become remunerative; and Carlyle turned his
eyes towards America, as his countryman Burns, in distress for
widely different reasons, had formerly turned his. Emerson had
visited him at Craigenputtock in 1833, and afterwards more than
once urged him to migrate across the Atlantic, where, he was
1 Froude's Carlyle, iii. 84.
64 TPIE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
assured, he could make income suflficient for his needs by lecturing.

Sartor Resartus had been published there in book form (1836)
before England was ready to receive it in that shape. Carlyle
would probably have gone; but Harriet Martineau and several

others determined to make an effort to keep him in England;
and the outcome was a series of six lectures on German literature
delivered in 1837. The experiment was completely successful,

and the £>y.iS i' brought in solved for the Carlyles the problem
of the material means of life. A second set followed in 1838, a
third in 1839, and the fourth and last in 1840. The subject of
the last course was Heroes and Hero- Worship. They were the
only lectures which were published in full and during Carlyle's
life ; but the second course, on the History of European Literature,
was printed from notes after his death.

Before this last course of lectures was delivered, Chartism
(1839) had been written and published. It was offered first to the
Quarterly Review, because the author's notions differed intensely
both from those of the speculating Radicals and from those of
the Whigs, and he thought he might most hopefully address
himself to the better class of Conservatives'. Lockhart felt
obliged to decline it ; but he did so in such a way that the two

men, who were very slightly known to one another previously,
remained friends ever after. When Mrs Welsh died, Carlyle
turned to Lockhart for comfort, and the latter in response sent
him his own beautiful lines, which Carlyle frequently repeated in
his declining years :
"It is an old belief

That on some solemn shore
Beyond the sphere of grief
Dear friends shall meet once more
Beyond the sphere of Time
And Sin and Fate's control,
Serene in changeless prime
Of Body and of Soul.
That creed I fain would keep,

This hope I'll not forego
Eternal be the Sleep
Unless to waken so."
' Lang's Lockhart, ii. 227.

THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 6$
Before he wrote Chartism Carlyle had already fixed in his

mind that his next subject should be Oliver Cromwell; but no
book he ever undertook longer refused to be written. The
subject was suggested to him by Mill, who asked him to write an
article on the great Protector for the London and Westminster
Review. Carlyle consented; but Mill went abroad, and in his

absence his sub-editor, an Aberdonian named Robertson, imperti-
nently wrote to Carlyle that he " meant to do Cromwell himself^."
Carlyle in anger determined to expand the article into a book.
Early in 1839 he was busy gathering authorities; and in the
course of his quest he set on foot the movement which resulted
in the establishment of the London Library. But as late as
October, 843, not a word had been written. It was not until Carlyle
1
had completely changed his plan that he made any progress.

He had designed a life of Cromwell and, practically, a history of
the Commonwealth; what he ultimately produced was a sort of
glorified and inspired piece of editorial work, Oliver Cromwell's
Letters and /Speeches: with Elucidations (1845). From the plan,
there necessarily less of Carlyle tha,n in any other of his great
is
works. There is therefore some loss of vividness ; for the Lord-

General was not such an artist in words as his editor. But it is a
wonderful piece of portraiture ; and here and there we come upon
passages, like the Battle of Dunbar, as vivid and picturesque as
any Carlyle ever wrote.
Two years before the appearance of Cromwell, Carlyle pub-
lished that remarkable irdpe.pyov, J'ast and Present. —remarkable
not only for its intrinsic merits but as one of the only two books
Carlyle ever wrote which he found easy of composition. It was
the fruit of seven weeks' work, and it has left, says Froude, not a
single cry of, complaint in his correspondence. This book, its pre-
decessor. Chartism, and its successor, the Latter-Day Pamphlets,
fgiin,g:Jli£LJ2Lj?.?iM.'RgEi?ed bjL-the, sociaLcondition nf F.nglanH

iaJârlyk!a-Qwajda^.asdJuU_ofJhat_peculi^^ which
cutCarljle off from the party to which the E nglis h aristocracy
belonged, and yet left him jnotônly tlw most vigorous advocate
of aristocratic or rather autocratic government, Jaut a believer in
^ Froude's Carlyle, iii. 145,
W. S
the English aristocracyjtg^lf,. as atjny.rate.the mos^ capable and_
the most conscientious class the country possessed.
—The TearrSji was markea ByThe Z"^«V Sterling, the purest
work of produced, and one of the most beautiful
art Carlyle ever
biographies in English, —
probably the one which best of all
satisfies own conception of what a biography ought to
Carlyle's
be. Like Past and Present it was written swiftly and with ease
standing thus in strong contrast to its successor, the last important
work of Carlyle, the History of Friedrich II of Prussia, called
Frederick the Great (1858-1865). Frederick had been in Carlyle's
mind as a possible subject soon after the completion of his
Cromwell; and y^hsn/ohn Sterling was out of his hands he began
reading. It was by far the largest subject Carlyle had ever
attempted, and the difficulties were proportionate. " If they were

to offer me all Prussia, all the solar system," he said, " I would
not write Frederick again."About the end of 185 1 Carlyle was
deep in study. In September, 1852, he was in Germany for the
purpose of gathering materials. For five years more he was
completely immersed in the subject; and it was not until 1858
that the world saw the fruit of this labour in the first two volumes
of Friedrich. In the same year he took his second journey to

Germany, his principal object being to visit the battle-fields of
Frederick. Carlyle was always scrupulously careful in studying
topography, and he had an eye for country almost as penetrating
as his eye for human physiognomy. No journey of his failed to
leave its mark on his books. A visit to Paris in 1825 contributed
to the vividness of the French Revolutioti ; and without this
second visit to Germany the magnificent battle-pieces which enrich
Friedrich must have missed great part of their efiect. He landed
atHamburg on August 24, and he was back again at Chelsea
on September 22. The work accomplished in the time was
marvellous ; andno higher compliment was ever paid to a
surely
historian than that which is imphed in the German belief that,
down to the opening of the German archives, and the publication
of the correspondence of Frederick in the eighties, Carlyle's work
was the best, not only as a general history of Frederick, but as a
study of his campaigns.
THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE 6^
The remaining years of Carlyle's life crept through gloom

towards the grave. The triumph of the rectorship of Edinburgh
University was clouded immediately by the tragedy of his wife's
death. He was condemned to idleness, for his hand trembled so
that he could not write. He tried dictation, but no one who in
the least degree understands Carlyle will be surprised that the
experiment failed: for him it was impossible. He occasionally
showed an interest in public affairs, such as the agitation over
General Eyre ; and he wrote a few slight things, the Early Kings —
of Norway and the essay on the portraits of Knox, but sub- —
stantially his work was done when he finished Frederick; and
when he died in 1881 he had already for fifteen years belonged

to the past of English literature.
The effective literary life of Carlyle is comprised, then, within
the forty-two years between 1823, the date of the series of articles
on Schiller's Life and Works in the London Magazine, and 1865,
when Frederick ike Great was completed. Throughout, under
was singularly of a piece gradual develop-
superficial differences, it :
ments can be traced, but no fundamental change of principle.

Carlyle "made himself" at Craigenputtock, and what he became
there he remained tiU the end. As an apostle of Germanism and
as a critic he has been already considered it remains to notice
:
the longer works, and those in which he speaks more directly in

his own name. It will be possible to dismiss them with com-
parative brevity ; for, as has just been indicated, under aU forms
and guises we find the same Carlyle.
The works now in question may be divided into two principal
groups, —
the histories, and that group of writings in which Carlyle
either openly or under the veil of myth spoke to and advised his
own generation. The division however does not go as deep as it
may seem to go. Carlyle's histories are, like his other works,
intensely personal, —and also intensely practical. What he said
of his French Revolution was true came direct and flaming
: it
from his heart And it did so because to him the facts were not
dead, but alive for lesson and for warning. He was a John the
Baptist, faring hard, girt with rough skins, and from his desert
retreat calling upon the world to repent. His whole works are
s—
a sermon on the text that what men sow that shall they reap,
whether as individuals or as nations. The French Revolution
was to him simply the most impressive illustration of that truth
afforded by modern Europe :
" So many centuries, say only from Hugh Capet downwards,

had been adding together, century transmitting it with increase to
century, the sum of Wickedness, of Falsehood, Oppression of
man by man. Kings were sinners, and Priests were, and People.
Open Scoundrels rode triumphant, bediademed, becoronetted,
bemitred; or the still fataler species of Secret-Scoundrels, in
their fair-sounding formulas, speciosities, respectabilities, hollow
within : the race of Quacks was grown many as the sands of the
sea. Till at length such a sum of Quackery had accumulated
the Earth and the Heavens were weary of. Slow
itself as, in brief,
seemed the Day of Settlement; coming on, ail imperceptible,

across the bluster and fanfaronade of Courtierisms, Conquering-
Heroisms, Most Christian Grand-Monarque-istas, Well-beloved
Pompadourisms yet behold it was always coming; behold it
:
has come, suddenly, unlocked for by any man The harvest of !
long centuries was ripening and whitening so rapidly of late ; and

now it is grown white, and is reaped rapidly, as it were, in one
day. Reaped, in this Reign of Terror; and carried home, to
Hades and the Pit !
—
Unhappy sons of Adam it is ever so ; and :
never do they know it, nor will they know it. With cheerfully
smoothed countenances, day after day, and generation after
generation, they, calling cheerfully to one another, Well-speed-ye,
are at work, sowing the wind. And yet, as God lives, they shall
reap the whirlwind:no other thing, we say, is possible, since —
God is a Truth, and His World is a Truth'."
This is no mere rhapsody; it was a belief firmly held by
Carlyle; it was the belief which made all history so intensely
alive to him. He is profoundly impressed by the scientific fact
that no slightest action fails of its effect; that the casting of a
pebble world; and that the effect

alters the centre of gravity of the
goes on producing other effects for ever. And what was true in
the physical was equally, or if possible was more deeply true in
- ^ French Revolution, in. v. i. 172-173.
the moral sphere; for the spiritual is the real, and the so-called
real is only appearance, the vesture of the spiritual. It was
largely, if not principally, to preach this doctrine that Carlyle
wrote his French Revolution ; and this purpose goes far to explain
the plan of that book, which is rather, as it has been variously

called, the "epic" or the "drama" than the "history" of the
Revolution. Carlyle's is, historically viewed, an extremely solid
piece of work. Much has been discovered since which he did not
know ; many mistakes into which he fell have been revealed ; yet
having regard to what was known and what was possible to be
known seventy years ago, the book fully deserves the praise of
accuracy. It no new discoveries of
has other and deeper merits ;
fact can ever make antiquated the pictures drawn by Carlyle ; no

future historian can afford to ignore his delineations of the men
of the Revolution. But even when it was new, Carlyle's history
was not and did not pretend to be a record of the facts. The
method is rather that of an apocalypse than that of a narrative.
It assumes much knowledge in the reader; if he possesses that
knowledge, the book throws a flood of light upon the subject ; if
he does not, it remains itself in some respects a mystery. For the

soul of it, however, the only knowledge which is indispensable is a
knowledge of human nature, the only indispensable power is the
power to appreciate thought. Nothing but the heart to feel and
the mind to think are needed for the appreciation of Mirabeau
and Danton and Robespierre, of the taking of the Bastille, the
flight to Varennes, the death of Louis XV, the carnage of the

Swiss. All those wonderful pictures are so poetical that we can
only marvel why the man who painted them could not express
himself through the usual vehicle of poetry. But he tried and
failed.
If there were no specific declaration of Carlyle's belief in the

importance of biography to be found, it would be amply attested
by the character of his histories. They are emphatically histories

of men, living, acting, failing, triumphing. No "machine theory"
of the universe will do for him ; on nothing are the phials of his
wrath emptied more copiously than on that In the Hero as
Divinity he pictures beautifully Igdrasil, the Ash-tree of Existence,
and, with a sigh, contrasts with it "the Machine theory of the
Universe." He has no belief in the doctrine that the time calls
forth the great man. "The Time call forth? Alas, we have
known Times call loudly enough for their great man but not find ;
him when they called He was not there Providence had not
! ;
sent him the Time, calling its loudest, had to go down to con-
;
fusion and wreck because he would not come when called'."

Hence history is nothing to Carlyle until he has found his great
man; and when he has found him he has to realise him as a man,
clothed in flesh and blood. His outward appearance even was
important as an index of inward character. Carlyle was skilled
in physiognomy, and relied much upon it. "Aut Knox aut
Diabolus," he said of what he believed to be the genuine portrait
of the Reformer ; " if not Knox who can it be ? man with that A
face left his mark behind him''." And in 1854 he wrote with
reference to a project of a National Exhibition of Scottish Portraits:
" In all my poor Historical investigations it has been, and always is,
one of the most primary wants to procure a bodily likeness of the
personage inquired after ; a good Portrait if such exists ; failing
that, even an indifferent if sincere one. In short, any representa-
tion,made by a faithful human creature, of that Face and Figure,
which he saw with his eyes, and which I can never see with mine,
is now valuable to me, and much better than none at all'."
The moving force in history, then, is the Great Man. Carlyle
would have scoffed a " science " of history ; for as
at the idea of
no science of human character. For parlia-
yet, at least, there is
ments, assemblies and the machinery of government Carlyle had

little respect —too little. To him, the struggle between King and
Parliament in England summed itself up in the character of
Cromwell. He could interest himself in nothing elsej and the
history of the Commonwealth refused to be written by him. He
could not interest himself even in the other human actors, much
less in the " machinery " it was more tolerable to him to rescue
:
the speeches of Cromwell from their "agglomerate of opaque
1 Hero as Divinity. 2 Froude's Carlyle, jv. 417.

' Miscellanies, vii. 129.
confusions, printed and reprinted; of darkness on the back of

darkness, thick and threefold \"
The method of hero-worship has its dangers, as all methods
have. Carlyle has not escaped the tendency to idealise the hero.
It is probable that Cromwell, in the latter part of his career, is
less defensible against the charge of "vaulting ambition" than
Carlyle would make him. But it was with reference to Frederick
that he had to do most violence to himself. Here too he felt the
need of the hero ; but neither in respect of the man nor in respect
of the period was his choice altogether happy. Few periods of
the world's history could be found with which Carlyle was less in
sympathy than he was with the eighteenth century ; and Frederick
was in many ways the incarnation of the eighteenth century. But
in two points Frederick satisfied Carlyle's needs; and in other
respects the historian squaredhim as best he could with those
requirements. The
and chief point was that Frederick was
first
the man who placed the Prussian monarchy on a firm footing and
raised it to the rank of a great Power. Carlyle already foresaw
how much that would mean to Europe ; and his history was hardly
complete when the practical proof of his prescience came. Thus,
in writing the history of Frederick he was dealing with no dead
past, but with matters of vital moment to the Europe of his own
day.
The second point was the strength of Frederick. No man
ever attracted Carlyle unless he was strong ; and for the sake of
strength he was prepared to pardon many things. Sir Henry Taylor
in his Autobiography remarks on the strangeness of what he believes
to be the fact that such a man as Carlyle should have chosen as
the object of his idolatry "'iste stultorum magister' — Success,"
and tells an amusing story in illustration. "Long before his life
of Cromwell came out, I heard him insisting in conversation on
the fact that Cromwell had been invariably successful ; and having
with much satisfaction traced the long line of his successes to the
end, he added, 'it is true they got him out of his grave at the
Restoration and they stuck his head up over the gate at Tyburn,
but not till he had quite done with it'.'" This conversation
^ Cromivdl, i. ^4. " Taylor's Atilobiografhy, i. 329.
evidently remained in Carlyle's memory, for the concluding phrase
appears in his Cromwell.
The story is thoroughly characteristic, but Taylor has mis-
interpreted it Success was never a god of Carlyle's idolatry
such idolatry on his part would be more than strange ; it would
be inconceivable, because contradictory of his whole nature.

Mere success, measured by any ordinary standard, he regarded
with contempt. Sauerteig finds the word Hell in frequent use
among the English people and investigates its meaning ; for " the
Hells of men and Peoples differ notably. With Christians it is
the infinite terror of being found guilty before the Just Judge.
With old Romans, I conjecture, it was the terror not of Pluto, for
whom probably they cared little, but of doing unworthily, doing
unvirtuously, which was their word for unlawfully. And now
what is you pierce through his Cants, his oft-repeated Hear-
it, if
says, what he calls his Worships and so forth, what is it that —

the modern English soul does, in very truth, dread infinitely, and
contemplate with entire despair ? What is his Hell, after all these
reputable, oft-repeated Hearsays, what is it? With hesitation,
with astonishment, I pronounce it to be: The terror of 'Not
succeeding ' ; of not making money, fame, or some other figure in
the world, — chiefly of not making money ! Is not this a some-
what singular HelP?" Notice again that the two heroes whom he
chooses as representatives of the class of men of letters are men
whom he declares to have fought bravely and fallen. Goethe
fought and won, and would therefore, but for other considerations,
have been the better hero; but failure does not annul the heroism.
One of the many thoughts of Browning which might have been
thoughts of Carlyle —which were thoughts of Carlyle— îs that which
finds such noble expression in Rabbi Ben Ezra. It is not on the
vulgar mass called " work " that sentence must be pronounced
"All I could never be,
AH, men ignored in me
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped."
Except by an accident of expression, it was not " success " that
Carlyle valued in Cromwell ; but he saw that success won through
' Past mid Present, 125.
such strife as Cromwell passed through was the voucher for the
power behind by which it was won. It was the fruit by which the
tree might be known.
Carlyle valued Might, but not Success. The close relation
which he asserted to exist between Might and Right was a
many
difficulty to his erf' and an offence to multitudes
disciples
who were not disciples. " Might and Right do differ fr^htfuUy
from hour to hour ; but give them centuries to try it in, they are
found to be identical*." "All fighting... is the dusty conflict of
strengths, each thinVing itself the strongest, or in other words, the
justest ; —of Mights which do in the long-run, and forever will in
this just Universe in the long-run, mean Rights'." The repulsion

with which many have regarded this doctrine, which they look
upon as a mere deification of bare force, has arisen from their
failure to see that the order of the words may be reversed, and
that with quite as much truth it may be said that Right is Might
In a passage immediately following the one last quoted, Carlyle
himself points this out :
— " Howel Davies dyes the West-Indian
Seas with blood, piles his decks with plimder ; ajjproves himself
the expertest Seaman, the daringest Seafighter : but he gains no
lasting victory, lasting victory is not possible for him. Not, had
he fleets larger than the combined British Navy all united with
him in bucaniering. He, once for all, cannot prosper in his duel
He strikes down man yes ; but his man, or his man's
his :
representative, has no notion to lie struck down ; neither, though

slain ten times, wiU he keep so lying; ^nor has the Universe any —
notion to keep him so lying On the contrary, the Universe and
!
he have, at all moments^, all manner of motives to start up again,

and desperately fight again. Your Napoleon is flung out, at last,
to St Helena; the latter end of him sternly compensating the
beginning. The Bucanier strikes down a Tnan^ a hundred or a
million men : but what profits enemy never to
it ? He has one
be struck down ; nay two enemies Mankind and the Maker of :
Men*." Siurely there was never a more robust &ith in the justice
of the Universe. Might is Right only in the sense in which the
' Chartism, ijS. ^ Past and Present, 164. ' ibid. 1S4-1S5.
two terms are convertible. So interpreted, the phrase may seem
to be an identical proposition ; but it is not so.
Froude states that Carlyle had never read Aristotle's Politics.
If he had read it, he would have found there several of his own
theories. Aristotle said that " the conqueror is always superior in
respect of some good or other." Carlyle's idea of the relation
between power and right is similar in meaning to Aristotle's,
though it is differently expressed. The condition "give them
—
centuries to try it in ''
—
way of ensuring that the force
is Carlyle's
shall really is based upon virtue.
be that most powerful kind which
Some of his applications of the doctrine were, it must be admitted,
terribly dangerous. But he could have found in Aristotle too an
analogue to the fundamental principle on which he defended
negro slavery and insisted on the privilege of the weak to be
governed by the strong, the foolish by the wise. "It is the
everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise;
to be guided on the right path by those who know it better than
they. This is the first right of man ; compared with which all
'
'
other rights are as nothing."

Admiring this strength, which, by the solidity and permanence
of its results, he conceived to have proved its kinship if not its
identity with virtue, Carlyle seized upon Frederick, and in that

spirit treated his There is again something of the
history.
exaggeration of the worshipper. Sometimes Carlyle was tempted
to make the worse appear the better reason, and to gloss over
his hero's questionable actions. But when all deductions on this
account are made, Carlyle's Frederick the Great remains probably
on the whole the greatest of all his works. It is certainly the most
massive. Nowhere else has he achieved such triumphs in the
handling of materials for nowhere else has he attempted such a
;
task. It is the most extensive of all his galleries of portraits ; and

they are no less vivid than those contained in the earlier works.
Frederick himself and his father, his generals and his opponents,
the ambassadors at his court, Voltaire, Belleisle, Pitt, George II,
Maria Theresa, Catherine II, Wilhelmina, high and low, men and
women, are depicted, sometimes at length, sometimes in a sentence
or two, but always admirably. There are fewer brilliant passages
THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE /S
than the French Revolution presents ; but on the other hand there
is nothing in the latter book quite as great as the treatment of
Frederick's campaigns.
Chartism, Past and Present and the Latter-Day Pamphlets
obviously belong to the group of works which deal with Carlyle's
own So does Sartor Resartus, of all his books the
generation.
most and in some ways the greatest.
original, In Heroes and
Hero- Worship he goes back in history as far as Odin ; but his own
timeis never absent from his mind. And the Life of Sterling, at
once so charged with religion and so repugnant to orthodoxy, is
as characteristic of Carlyle himself and as full of lessons to his
own generation as anything he ever wrote. Among these books
are included both the most popular, and, in their day, the most
bitterly resented of all Carlyle's works.
In Heroes and Hero- Worship Carlyle quotes with approval the

declaration of Fichte: "That all things which we see and work
with on this Earth, especially we ourselves and all persons, are as
a kind of vesture or sensuous appearance : that under aU there
lies, as the essence of them, what he calls the '
Divine Idea of the
World.' " His favourite lines of verse were those spoken by the
Earth Spirit in Faust, and already quoted, and Shakespeare's :
" We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
Idealistic conceptions envelope all his thought, and make him

loathe the "dismal sciences" and " cause-and-effect philoso-
phies" of his time. These, he was convinced, dealt only with
appearance, with the mere mechanism of the world, while the
moving principle lay altogether deeper ; and the whole treatment
was made false by the failure to recognise its character, or even
its existence. The whole clothes-philosophy is a humorous and
fantastic application of this principle. It was this which put
Carlyle in such pronounced opposition to the popular opinion of
his time. He had to create the mind to understand and the taste
to enjoy himself. Jeffrey, a survival of the eighteenth century

school of criticism, told him at an early stage of his career that he
was "a sectary in taste and literature." Napier of the Edinburgh

Review, in accepting the great essay entitled Characteristics,
confessed that he did not understand it, though he saw in it
the stamp of genius ^

In every respect Carlyle was to his contemporaries an enigma.
He was an enigma in his politics. believed himself to be, and
He
in truth he was, one of the most thoroughgoing of Radicals; and
yet he poured contempt on those who called themselves by that
name, and on all their nostrums. For "Ballot-boxes, Reform
Bills, winnowing machines"" he has little respect. He declares
democracy to be inevitable, to be indeed here; and he adds that
it is not a form of government at all. No ballot-boxes will guide
the state aright, any more than unanimity of voting will navigate a
ship round Cape Horn. "On this side of the Atlantic and on
that. Democracy, we apprehend, is for ever impossible!... The
Universe itself is a Monarchy and Hierarchy.... The Noble in the

high place, the Ignoble in the low, that is, in all times and in aU
countries, the Almighty Maker's Law'." For Conservatives, on
the other hand, he had the warning that "Truth and Justice alone
are capable of being 'conserved' and preserved*."
In religion likewise all parties in turn found Carlyle im-
practicable. He
had no belief whatever in the dogmatic part of
Christianity. While he regarded the whole universe as miraculous,
he was utterly incredulous of the specific miracle which consisted
in a violation or suspension of the law of that universe. The
Life of Sterling was a revelation to many, especially to men of the
Coleridgean school, of the negative character of Carlyle's views on
this question ; but the fact that a revelation was needed is a proof
how ill they had comprehended his earlier works. yet, on And
the other hand, was plain on almost every page that Carlyle was
it
one of the most religious of men. To him, religion was the chief
fact about a man; and his quarrel with the eighteenth century had
its root in the irreligion of that time.
Carlyle then was to all sects and parties a speaker of things
unwelcome. It is no matter for surprise that he was long un-
1 Froude's Carlyle, ii. 245.
'''
Past and Present, 72.
* Latter-Day Pamphlets, 19. * Past and Present, 142.
THE GERMAN INFLUENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE "jy
popular; it is rather the most eloquent tribute to his vast

power and to the fundamental rightness and goodness and truth
of his doctrine that at length he won recognition and conquered
popularity. His services have been great, greater than they have
ever yet been acknowledged to be. Two charges have been often
brought against him which demand a brief investigation. The
first is the charge of self-contradiction. It is easily enough
established by following the plan of taking this passage and

that from different parts of his writings and setting them against
one another. In this way, for example, he might be made to
appear a pronounced individualist or a rampant socialist. To
the orthodox, as we have just seen, he is irreligious; to the
he might seem superstitious. He denounced laissez
materialist,
faire,"Competition and Devil take the hindmost," and, in a
word, poured anathemas on all political economy. Yet he admitted
that the regulation of life by the wisest of mediaeval religious
minds would have made modern Europe a Thibet. In his own

day he saw men under a system of laissez faire distributing them-
selves over a new continent; and he declared that it was done on
the whole with wonderful success.
To some extent the contradiction is real and is a flaw in
Carlyle. In his emphatic way he exaggerated that which threatened
to be neglected, and depreciated or ignored what he conceived to
figure too prominently. In a democratic society he thought the
more imgortant_thanthat of_freedorni_and hence
lesso n of order
he sometimes wrote as if the latter need not_be considered at al l.
The defect ol Past a«(? ^''^y^'z^ js- that the. past is iiealisedi^nd
the present painted is h,ttes o£ unriatural blackness. In Latter-
Day Pamphlets the denunciations are and unmeasured.
shrill
But to a larger extent Carlyle can be defended on the ground

that the seeming contradictions are both true. He had not
studied Kant's antinomies in vain. Thus, there is no real con-
tradiction between the individualistic and the socialistic elements
in his political philosophy; pure individualism and pure socialism
being alike impossible extremes, and mse statesmanship consisting
in discovering the just mean between them.
The second and, if it were true, by far the more serious
objection to Carlyle work has borne no fruit in practice,
is that his
that he denounced modern society and yet failed to show how it
was to be improved. The answer of more sympathetic critics is
the true one. It seems to us as if this were the case because
in so many denounced has been reformed,
instances what Carlyle
and what he recommended has been done or is in process of
being done. No one any longer defends laissez faire as alone
a suflScient principle of government; and no one did so much as
Carlyle to turn the mind of the country against it. He insisted
upon the organisation of labour as "the universal vital Problem of

the World'." When
he wrote, labour was regarded as a thing
which would organise itself and must be left to do so. Now, it
is recognised by all that, however difficult it may be of solution,
this problem does exist and must be faced. The difference between
the politicaleconomy of the present day and that which he de-

nounced is a tribute to the wisdom of Carlyle in no small degree :
it is due to his influence. The science of abstract laws has

disappeared; a science based on concrete facts is taking its place.
With Carlyle's aid we see as it was never seen before how much is
assumed in the phrase "free competition"; but if the freedom
be real, the law of competition is perhaps the safest of all laws.
There may be a doubt whether Carlyle would have admitted this;

and yet he has stated the principle clearly enough in pointing out
the possible effects of "benevolence." "Incompetent Duncan
M'Pastehorn, the hapless incompetent mortal to whom I give
the cobbling of my boots, —and cannot find in my heart to refuse
it, the poor drunken wretch having a wife and ten children; he
withdraws the job from sober, plainly competent, and meri-
torious Mr Sparrowbill, generally short of work too; discourages
Sparrowbill; teaches him that he too may as well drink and
loiter and bungle; that this is not a scene for merit and demerit
at all, but for dupery, and whining flattery, and incompetent
cobbling of every description; — clearly tending to the ruin of
poor Sparrowbill! What harm had Sparrowbill done me that I
should so help to ruin him? And I couldn't save the insalvable
M'Pastehorn; I merely yielded him, for insufficient work, here and
' Latter-Day Pamphlets, 31.
there a half-crown, —
which he oftenest drank. And now Sparrowbill
also is drinkingM" Bastiat's " What we see" and "What we do not
see," is not more vivid. There is nowhere a better argument for
really 79-«e competition.
Elsewhere, in Past and Present, he points out with faultless
accuracy the real aim to be kept in view, and defines the true
work of this vast "organisation of labour." "Day's work for day's
wages?... The Progress of Human Society consists even in this
same, The better and better apportioning of wages to work. Give
me you have given me all. Pay every man accurately what
this,
he has worked for, what he has earned and deserved, to this —

man broad lands and honours, to that man high gibbets and
tread-mills; what more have I to ask? Heaven's Kingdom, which
we daily pray for, Ms come; God's will is done on Earth even as
it is in Heaven! This is the radiance of Celestial Justice; in the
Ught or in the fire of which all impediments, vested interests,
iron cannon, are more and more melting like wax, and dis-
appearing from the pathways of men^."

Behind everything in Carlyle lay an unalterable belief in the
Law of the Universe, which was his Religion, and a conviction
that this law was identical with Truth and Justice the only —
things capable of being conserved. No one ever preached this
doctrine more consistently; and, what is more difficult, no one
ever lived more consistently in accordance with it. No higher
standard of truth than Carlyle's has ever been held before the
world. Neither by word, nor by action, nor by refraining from
action, would he palter with the truth. For this lesson alone, if
it owed him nothing else, the world would have cause to rank him
among its great men.
1 LaiUr-Day Pamphlets, 57-58. ' Past and Present, 17.
PART I
SPECULATIVE THOUGH!
CHAPTER I
THEOLOGY
The surest and easiest way to penetrate the thought of any
age is to study it The same ideas
in the systematic thinkers.
may possibly be more profoundly expressed in poetry; but they
will certainly be more elusive; for, while it is the philosopher's
business to express definite opinions, no one reproaches the poet

if he only sees visions and dreams dreams.
Speculative thought falls into three great divisions, closely

related in theory, but in practice often widely divergent. Science
in most of its branches stands apart, and as a rule scarcely
infringes upon literature at all; but in the nineteenth century it
cannot be ignored. Theology ought to be the complement of

philosophy, holding towards the latter the place of high-minded-
ness in the Aristotelian scheme of the virtues,
and in fact Aristotle
uses the word êoXoynoj as equivalent to ontology. But we must
set it down as one of the results of creeds that the true relation
is always obscured and sometimes completely lost. In England
especially, the connexion of theology with philosophy is often very
slight.
It will be most convenient to take the theologians first. In

earlier times they themselves might have claimed priority on the
THEOLOGY 8
score of the rdignity of "the queen of the sciences"; but such

assertions of superiority are a little discredited, and of late "the
queen of the sciences" has fallen on evil days. A better reason
for priority can, however, be assigned; for, whatever may be
thought of the comparative endowments of the philosophers and
the theologians, the latter have in the Victorian period exercised
the more potent influence upon literature.
The theologians of this period are divisible into four groups,

the Evangelicals, who at the start were by far the most powerful;
the Noetics, and their successors of the Broad Church; the
followers of Coleridge; and, by far the most interesting of all,
the exponents of the Catholic Reaction, iwhich is known in

England as the Oxford Movement.
The feet of menihave travelled far from the ground on which
they stood at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It would
be compare the opinions of men who simply rejected

fruitless to
supernatural religion.There were multitudes who did so then,

as there are multitudes still. But ex nihilo nihil fit we learn :
nothing from a mere negation: we may learn much from the

differences between those who are in partial, agreement. In a
passage published in 1893, Charles Pearson gave some data from
which may be measuredf.the distanee that separates the thought of
the*present day from thought just a little less modem: ^"Professor —
Agassiz, .whorn inany still living can remember with affection 'and
reverence, was brought up under teachers who held that God
had scattered |ossils about the world as la test of faith'; and an
Oxford teacher of the, highest local repute a:t least thirty years
later published his belief thajt the typical vertebra— a column with
lateral processes —
was multiplied all over the world as a proof of
the Crucif^xion^ A Ettle later an Oxford divine, the accredited
head of a great party in the Church, was consulting with an
Oxford anatomist to know if it was not possible to point to a
whale that might, have swallowed' Jonah °." Illustrations might
' Professor AgaSsiz told me this himself. (The notes are Pearson's.)
* Christian Ethics, by the Rev. W. Sewell. '
'
' National Life and Character, goj.

w. 6
easily be multiplied. In 1859, the year of Darvdn's ^reat b66k,
the Bampton lecturer, Rawlinson; gravely assumed the accuracy
of the biblical chronology from Adam. In 1864, eleven thousand
clergy signed a declaration on inspiration and eternal punishment,
the effect of which, according to Archibald Campbell Ta.it, then
Bishop of London, and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury,
was that "all questions of physical science should be referrfed
to the written words of Holy Scripture." Still later, in 1890,
no less a person than William Ewart Gladstone wrote The Im-

pregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, whose purpose was, not indeed
to test physical science by Scripture, but to show that, after all
the assaults of astronomy, geology and biology, the early' chapters
of Genesis stood undamaged.
Gladstone, however, was contemporary with Agassiz, and had
been educated in an age when was not impossible for intelligent
it
men meant to be a test of faith. There

to believe that fossils were
are numerous evidences of change withiri the Churches themselves.
In 1843, Chalmers, Guthrie and the other leaders of the Scottish
Disruption, went out into the wilderness, a Bible in one hand
and the Westminster Confession of Faith in the othef. The
doctrine of predestination had no terrors to them. Holy Williis
Prayer \izA been written; but the "New Licht" succumbed 'to
the "Auld Licht"; and it is certain that men who put everything
to the touch, as they did, believed in all sincerity of mind the
creed they professed. And in those days the interpretation of the
creed in question was that which Burns so vigorously expresses.
Fifty years later their successorshave become uneasy, and a
Declaratory Act needed to disburden troubled consciences.
is
Now, the doctrine of 1843 seems to find its only safe home
among some score of Highland congregations; In England;
evidences of similar change may be seen on every side. It is
unnecessary to go to the heterodox or to the doubtfully Orthodox.'
The biblical chronology is abandoned; the word "inspiration"
has wholly changed its meaning; a profound silejjce, is observed

with regard to the doctrine of eternal punishment. Bishops and
dignitaries of the Church pick and choose among the miracles,
THEOLOGY 83
and invent marvellous hypotheses to reconcile the doctrine of the

fell with the theory of evolution'.
If this great change —almost a reivolution —be not borne in
mind, it will be difHcult to understand the position at the be-
ginning of the nineteenth century. Then, the idea of an 'infallible
Book was easy and simple it was readily accepted with little or
:
no qualification. On the other hand, the conception of an infallible

Church had scarcely any hold in England; and no one yet dreamed
of attempting to reduce the Reformation, so far as the Anglican
Communion is concerned, to the dimensions of a storm in a tea-
cup. Circumstances therefore were favourable for the Evangelicals;
and accordingly we find them throned in high places. It is true,
their power had passed its zenith, and their fervour was already de-
clining. The disintegrating forces of eighteenth century philosophy
told upon the theologians; and even Christian apologists, like
Butler, were profoundly influenced by them. Nevertheless, they
were in. the main stream of ecclesiastical life. In the Baptist
Robert Hall (i 764-1831) they possessed the most powerful preacher
of the time, and, in the opinion of Coleridge, the master of the
best style in -English. It was they who made converts. When
Thomas became convinced of the error of
Scott (1747-1821)
Uhitarianism, it was to the Calvinistic Evangehcals that he attached
himself; and his commentary on the Bible is written on strictly
evangelical principles. Scripture is the sole test of Scripture: there
is no appeal against the infallible Book; and the only criticism
permissible is that which throws light upor> one part by showing
how it is' explained by another. Newman speaks of Scott as
the man "to whom (humanly speaking) I almost owe my soul'."
Charles Simeon (1759-1836) of Cambridge, who is commemo-
rated in Shorthouse's Sir Percival, is said to have had a following
of young men 'larger even than that of Newman. It was the
Evaiigelicals also who produced the most scholarly work of the
time. No contemporary divines did work as soUd as Scott's
Commentary, already mentioned, or Simeon's Horae Homileticae.
' See articles by Mr W. H. Mallock in XIX Century for September,
November and December, 1904, and replies by the Rev. Prebendary

Whitworth and the Rev. H. Maynard Smith. ' A^logia, %.
6—
The foundation is unsatisfactory, the method unphilosophical,
and the conclusions often quaint; but, granted their presuppo-
sitions, these men were thorough.
An interesting feature of the Evangelicals is the ease with
which the Church and the Dissenting sections of the party
fraternise'. Thackeray in the Newcomes has drawn a picture of
Clapham which gives the impression that the " sect " which had
its centre there was a sect of Dissenters. Macauky, who knew the
place and the
sect thoroughly, declared that this was a mistake.
"The leading people of the place," says his biographer, "with
the exception of Mr William Smith, the Unitarian member of
Parliament, were one and staunch Churchmen; though they
all
readily worked in concert with those religious communities which

held in the main the same views and pursued the same objects
as themselves''." But in truth, among the evangelical party the
question of Church or Dissent was a small matter in comparison
with that of unity or difference of aim. Their theory of the
Church emphasised its Protestant character and minimised the
points of resemblance between it and the Church of Rome. The
more earnest among them devoted themselves to efforts for moral
and social reform, and above all to the great struggle for the
emancipation of slaves. In this they got little help from the
bench of bishops or from the aristocracy, while they got much
from nonconformist minisiters and from the wealthy laymen who
were influenced by these. It is the lasting glory of the evangelical
party that this great reform was mainly their work. Whatever
may be the merits or the faults of their theology, or of their views
about the Church, they gave to the Christian doctrine of the
brotherhood of man one of the greatest practical appUcations it
has ever received.
The Evangelicals are also by far the richest of all the divisions of
theologians in literary connexions. Carlyle, Macaulay, Browning,
Ruskin and George Ehot all came under Calvinistic and evan-
' It must be observed that this is true only of the Evangelicals. Gladstone
alwajrs believed that at Oxford he had run risk of rustication for the offence of
attending Dissenting chapels. (Doyle's Rendniscencet, loi.)
' Life of Macaulay, i. 6i.
THEOIjOGY 85
gelkal inSnences : and dton^ some of them wriisdered rery far

fiom the fcM, they aQ boie to the end the marks of thor eaily
trainii^ and assodatioiis. Evea Macanlaj, die least ^lecolatiTe
of than,qwke in later davs oi "the braj of Exeter Hall'°; bat it
was Macanlay also nho crew the pciated contrast b^ween the
condition ot Protestant Eonqie and that of Cathcdic Enrope,
which has been to many the most con-rindng at aD aigoments
against Fcêxj.
Yii, Aoogfa the Evangefcals were the heis of the past and
the possessors of the pvesoit they had not the rower to transmit
tbdr inhontance to the comir^ geneiaticMi in their own hne.
The Kngtish Simeots and Scotts and Halb begat no sons. Ff>r
TqKesentatives ci their school of a later day we most look nsrth-
waid, to Soatiand, where, ance the days of Kaox, their modes of
thov^t had been far mote firmly rooted thin they erer were in
&igland.
No one can &£i to be impressed by the striking simibrity, and
die difference no less striking, between the ecdesiastkal position
in Scodand and diat in Ki^fand during the foordi and fifth
decades d
ttie ninêaitfa century. In the latter coontry, die
Oxford MoTement bân in 1833 and we may date its cnlmi-
:
nation eidier in 1843, ^hen Newman resigned hK diarge of

St Maiys, Oxford, and rerracted the strictTires which he had
fomieily passed on die Chnrch <^ Rome; or in 1S45, when he
was formally received into die Roman CommonicHi. In Scotland,
die Ten Years' Conflict issued in 1843 in the great IKsnqidon
wliit^ drove 453 oot cS rooo or iioo ministers fiom the Estab-
lished OnutJi^ In Rr^land, Newman towers head and shonldas
above an rivals ao eitfa^' sde; in Scotland, Thomas Chalmos is
as indis|Hitably {He-ODoinent. In both coontries, one eifect was to
stimiilate the zeal and oaeigy of all sections. Bnt there the
resemUance aods. In Scotland, the dispote was merely about the
relation betweoi Qinrdi and Sta:e, the minsters and cac^câtions
ctf die DKrtqition holding that the esistitig law of patronage com-
promised their spiritaal fieedom. They introdnced no new type

(^ Fiesbytciianism, and denied no dogma which had {sevionslv
1 Codkbam's mnnbecs (Z^ ^J<^Ttj, 380).
been accepted. On the contrary, their influence tended rather to
retard than to accelerate change. In England, on the other hand,
the whole principle of the Reformation was at stake. To Newman
and judgment was anathema.
his followers the right of private
They wished to emphasise authority: .quod semper, quod ubique,
quod ab omnibus. They have attempted to re-write ecclesiastical
history, maintaining that before the Reformation the English
Church was a National Church, with a law of its own, and that
though the canon law of Rome was " always regarded as of great
authority in England," it "was not held to be binding on the
Courts." And they seemed to have succeeded, —
at any rate, the
pronouncement of what were regarded as the highest authorities

—
was to that effect, until Maitland's, Roman Canon Law in the
Church of England shivered the theory into fragments. -
Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847) was the most massive figure

in ecclesiastical history during the nineteenth century. In mere
learning many surpassed him. The flippant of his own day hinted
,
that he was one of those who confounded Augustine of Hippo

with Augustine of Canterbury^; and':;though this was doubtless a
calumny, Carlyle was right in his stricture upon him as " a man
essentially of little culture, of narrow sphere, all his life'." He
was great in another and a larger sphere,
—" a native ava^ dvSpiSv,"
as the author of Horae Subsecivae well calls him. Like his
countryman and contemporary, Scott, Chalmers would always
have preferred the fame of the doer of great deeds to that of the
writer of great books. And such was the fame, that he won. If
he were judged merely as a writer of books, he would hold but a
secondary place. Neither in philosophy nor in theology did he
originate anything. His Moral and Mental Philosophy leaves the
science of ethics, where he found it; his Institutes of Theology
expounds the Calvinistic doctrine of his country with a docility
remarkable in a man who had won his way to Calvinism thfpugh
doubts that at one time verged upon atheism. Even the style
does not support the author's contemporary reputatipn. It is
rhetorical, often inflated, sometimes clumsy. He wrote in haste,
* Doyle's Reminiscences, 10?.
* Reminiscences: Edward Irving,
THEOLOGY 87
and wrote far too copiously it would have been well for his
:
permanent fame if he had blotted three paragraphs out of every

four which bear hjs name.
Yet Chalmers had unquestionably a gift for words as well as
for action, and his best passages deserve a place in any anthology
of prose. But his was the gift of the orator, rather than that of
the writer. The touch of personal contact and sympathy was
needed to kindle his imagination. Like sunlight on a landscape,
it brightens what is already beautiful and irradiates with colour
what is misty and obscure. The judgment of contemporaries
proves Chalmers to have been one of the greatest orators who
ever used the English language and though a speech which is
;
read never produces the eflfect of the same speech when spoken,
there is ample evidence in his printed works that the judgment of
contemporaries was sound.
Chalmers won this great reputation in spite of grave physical
disadvantages. He was rugged, almost coarse, both in face and
person, his movements were ungracefiil, his accent strong and, to
an English ear, extremely unpleasant In his method of oratory
he resembled those who take the kingdom of heaven by storm.
Hazlitt compares him to Balfour of Btirley in his cave, " with his
Bible in one hand and his sword drawn in the other, contending
with the imaginary enemy of mankind, gasping for breath, and
with the cold moisture running down his face'." Yet audiences
aristocratic and polished to the last degree, audiences who had
no sympathy with the orator's theology, and to whom his accent
was at first a pain, forgot aU in the fervour and earnestness and
sincerity of his eloquence, and saw in the uncouth figure in the
pulpit not a mere man but an inspired prophet. "Fervit im-
mensusque ruit," Dr John Brown quotes as illustrative of the
compelling force of his eloquence. His London lectures (1838)
were as strikingly successful as his Discourses on the Christian
Revelation (1817), and these when they were published ran a
neck-and-neck race for the prize of popularity with Scott's Old-
Mortality, which was published almost simultaneously^
» The Spirit of the Age, ' Rev. Mr Irving.'

* Hanna's Memoirs ffDr Chalmers, ii. 89.
There was one gift greater still which Chalmers possessed, the
gift of ecclesiastical statesmanship; It is this which best ensures
the permanency of his fame. Had he been an English politician,
he might have left one of the greatest names in history ; on the
narrower stage of Scottish Churchmanship, he is the biggest figure
since Knox. In his first parish of Kilmany he had little oppor-
tunity for the exercise of talents of this sort ; but the bent of his
mind revealed itself in the subject of an early work, the Inquiry
into the Extent and Stability of the National Resources (1808), the
purpose of which was to estimate the staying-power of England in
the great struggle against Napoleon. With what a
would the zest
author have taken up the work of had opened
Pitt, if fortune
such a career to him! In 18 15 Chalmers left Kilmany for the
Tron parish, Glasgow, whence he migrated in 1820 to St John's,
the most populous of the Glasgow parishes. There he first had
the opportunity of showing his statesmanlike qualities ; and the
three or four years he spent in Glasgow are memorable not
only in the history of Chalmers but in the social history of
Scotland.
In the time of Chalmers Glasgow was a comparatively small
plaJce, its population in 1821 being only 147,000. But though
the total population' was not Very great, the Industrial Revo-
lution had already come; and no one as yet knew, few had
seriously thought,, how to deal with it. High prices, and the
reaction after the great war, intensified the sufferings
of the
poor. Chalmers' parish included a larger percentage of the
destitute than was to be found in any other quarter of the city.
At the beginning of his administration the annual expenditure for
the relief of the poor of St John's parish amounted to ;î4oo.
Chalmers asked and obtained from the Town Council a free hand
to deal with the problem' in his own way. In three years he had
reduced the expenditure to ;^28o; and he had at the same time
greatly raised the standard of comfort among the poor. His
principle was simple. Never a voluntary in matters of religion,
Chalmers was always a voluntary in respect of poor-relief. He
strongly opposed the levying of a poor-rate. He held that the
rate not only lowered the character of the recipients, but dried up
THEOLOGY 89
the fountain of natural charity. Uphold the character of the poor

at all costs, he urged and bring home to the well-to-do their
;
obligations towards their poorer neighbours, and above all towards

their relatives. No one gave more striking evidence than he
before the Commission appointed in 1832 to inquire into the
administration of the poor-law ; and, though the Commission did
not go as far as Chalmers would have gone, the changes recom-
mended and afterwards carried into effect went in the direction
to which he pointed. It may be that such success as his could
only have been achieved by a genius for adiliinistration like his

own; but at least he proved that, in the right hands, his system
was the right system.
While he was still at QlasgOv!, Chalmers conceived another
scheme for improving the administration of the Church. He was
a warm admirer of the parochial system: his whole scheme for
the relief of the poor was based upon it; but he saw that the
parochial system had come to need revision. His own parish
was much too populous to be successfully administered by one
man; and there were other parishes of Glasgow in almost
as bad case. Chalmers came forward with a bold proposal to
—
add twenty parishes to Glasgow alone, or rather, by' dividing
the existing pkrishes number by twenty.
to increase the total
The scheme was rejected at the time ; but afterwards it was
taken up again and extended to the whole of Scotland, with
the result that some 200 parishes quoad sacra were constituted.
In 1823 Chalmers Glasgow for the chair of moral philo-
left
sophy in St Andrews; and

in 1828 he became professor of theo-
logy in the University of Edinburgh. His powerful personality,
his eloquence and his transparent sincerity; gave him immense
influence over his pupils ; but it seemed improbable that he would
ever again have the opportunity of bringing into play his greatest
talent. The Disruption however gave him one more chance;
and again he showed himself equal to the occasion. The task of
organising 453 congregations and of making adequate provision
for their ministers was a gigantic one. No single' man, however
great, could have accomplished it; only the united labours, the
liberality and the self-denial of thousands, could have made the
Free Kirk of Scotland what she is —or was. But while this is
true,Chalmers was the organising brain behind all. He invented
the Sustentation Fund. His plan was the very genius of simplicity.
By a simple arithmetical calculation he showêd that a contribution
of a penny a week from each member of the Kirk would provide
a stipend of ;!î5o a year for every minister. The iron was hot,
and he struck. From the first the people recognised that; if they;
THrould have independence they must pay for it And
spiritual
they paid. At the date of the union of the Free and the United
Presbyterian Kirks of Scotland, the minimum fixed by Chalmers
was considerably exceeded.
It has seemed worth while to give this brief account of the
work of Chalmers, because this is the essence both of his life and
of his voluminous writings. Sustentation funds and schemes for
the relief of the poor are not literature ; neither are they theology
but they are highly practical Christianity, and they give the best
insight into the spirit of the evangelical party — or rather of the
evangelical great man; for to judge any party by its great man
is to flatter that party. ,
Moreover, they explain the narrowness,
surprising in such a man, which Chalmers, shows in speculation.
It is impossible to read without a smile his quaint conception of
the duty of the State to choose out one from among the rival sects,
and to make The summary
that the organ of the national religion.
rejection of the Church of Rome, as obviously outside the sphere
of choice, presents no difficulty to hjs mind; and the statesman,
rather than the theologian, is apparent in the tolerance which
would accept Episcopacy as the national form of religion in

England ; though of course Chalmers maintains the national form
in Scotland to be Presbyterianism. In the earnestness of his
desire for the moral and social good of the nation, Chalmers
threw off all the rancour of the sectarian, and forgot all the logic
of schemes of salvation rigidly limited to orthodox believers.
Such latitudinarianism would have Shocked alike his own pre-
decessors, whose hatred of " black prelacy " found expression in
many a fiery discourse, and his English Tractarian contemporaries,
THEOLOGY 9I
who would, have found few indeed of the " notes " of a Church in
the State establishments contemplated by Chalmers.
The same speculative narrowness is manifested in the relationi
of Chalmers to German thought. He
had long dreaded it,
without knowing what it At the very close of his life he
meant.
believed himself to have discovered that it was all verbiage, and
the last of his writings was an article in the North British Review
explaining the vanity of the German philosophy, " It was," says
Professor A. Campbell Fraser, "the first half of the nineteenth
century in Scotland in a preparatory encounter with the second'."
Great as Chalmers was, some of those who supported him in
the crisis of the Disruption were not unworthy of him. Probably
the layman, Hugh Miller, deserves the second place. He claims
notice elsewhere; but from 1840 till1856 he edited
his death in
a, bi-weekly paper. The Witness, which became the organ of the
Free Kirk party, and which did excellent service to that party.
Among the ministers, Chalmers' most powerful supporter was
Thomas Guthrie (1803-1873), who on the death of the great
leader became by repute the most eloquent of Scottish preachers.
A reader of the sermons may detect a certain thinness of texture
but it is certain that they produced a great effect upon those who
heard them. Guthrie's theological works are strictly popular in
their character. It was, however, not Guthrie but Robert Smith
Candlish (1806-1873) who inherited the mantle of statesmanship,,
and who was from the death: of Chalmers to his own death the
most influential man of the Free Kirk. Though less prominent
as a theologian than as an ecclesiastical leader, he crossed swords
with Maurice, not without credit, in an examination of the latter's
TTteological Essays.
For two or three years Edward Irving (r792-i834) was assis-
tant to Chalmers in Glasgow; and for that reason his singular
career may be briefly discussed here. His natural gifts were

great. Chalmers and Connqp Thirlwall were
Carlyle, all judges
of unquestionable competence, and two of them at least were
inclined to severity ;
yet they have all borne witness to Irving's
^ Biografhia Philoscphica, 131,

powers. But there was probably from the first a want of balance
in his mind; and he was swept away by his own success as a
preacher. Shortly after his removal to London in 1822, he
became a whose mysticism fostered the latent
disciple of Coleridge,
mysticism in Irving's own mind. The latter soon announced his
belief that the second advent of Christ was imminent. His
followers prepared ascension robes, and made sparing provision
for the needs of a world which was soon to pass away\ Delusion
drew delusion in its train. The faithful spoke with tongues, which
to the profane ear of Carlyle sounded like " a shrieky hysterical
'lall-lall-lall.'" There was little or nothing left of the sober Scottish
Presbyterianism ; and Irving's expulsion from his London church
and from the presbytery of Annan was the natural consequence
of his own excesses. A sadder result was the ruin of his brain.
His works are little better than empty rhapsodies, and the
founder of the Catholic Apostolic Church is merely magni
nominis umbra.
Among the friends of Irving was one, John McLeod Campbell
(1800-1872), who did far more for the liberalising of theological
thought than has ever been adequately recognised. He was
among the first to recoil from the generally accepted doctrine
of the atonement, and he met the fate which so often befalls men
who are in advance of their time, being in 1831 deprived of his
ministerial charge. In this crisis he was warmly supported by
Thomas Erskine (i 788-1870) of Linlathen, one of those men
who by their lives and by what they are rather than by what they
write mould the thoughts of others. Erskine's views were perhaps
most akin to those of Maurice, and the two were friends from
their first meeting in 1838 till the death of the former. But while
in Maurice there was something which repelled the intellect even
though it won the heart, Erskine maintained his hold upon men
of the most diverse opinions. He was, to begin with, among the
most liberal of men, the friend not only of Irving and of Campbell
and Maurice, but of Carlyle, who in turn loved and admired him
^ Persons still living in Irving's native town remember believers who

bought coal by the hundredvi'eiglit, thinking it waste to buy tons when the
end of the world vfas so near.

THEOLOGY , 93
to the end. He speaks of Erskine as "one of the gentlest,

kindliest, best bred of men," and compares him to "a draught
of sweet rustic ?nead, served in cut glasses and a silver tray^"
Campbell's views were first expressed in Sermons and Lectures
(1832), and afterwards more fully in The Nature of the Atonement

(1856) and in Thoughts on Revelation (1862). The chief point in
his speculation was the universality of the atonement. It was a
conception which cut across too many prejudices to be generally
accepted either in Scotland or in England ; but yet Campbell did
not work in vain. Even those who would reject his doctrine do
not think as they would have thought had he never lived and
written.
Men like these transgress the bounds of evangelicalism in one
way; the Noetics did so in another. Though between the greatest
of the Evangelicals and the Noetics there is a manifest kinship,
yet the latter breathed a different atmosphere. They were the
"intelligent" of the Church, the men who laid emphasis on the
" intelligible," the men to whom credo quia impossibile would itself
have been impossible. In short, "Noetic" is "rationalistic"

softened through the mist of the Greek language, so that to
clerical ears it did not suggest all the dire associations of the
latter word. It is difiicult to read without a smile the explanations
of friends of the Noetics that their rationalism is not the bad sort
of rationalism'. They seem to find the same sort of comfort in
this that the child, fascinated and yet terrified by the story of
a bear, finds in the assurance that this particular animal is a good
bear.
At first the Noetics belonged to rio single section of the
Church ; still less were they a section by themselves. Copleston,
opposed as he was to Tractarianism, is best described as a High
Churchman of the old school ; and Hampden's affinities were with
the Evangelicals. But as the sense came home to men that
voijTiKos, in some of its developments, seemed twin brother to
"rationalistic," both the orthodox High and the orthodox Evan-
gelical were alike eager to repudiate those who, shortly after the
1 Froude's Carlyle, iii. 137.

" Cf.
J. T. Coleridge, in Stanley's Life of Arnold, i. 20.
middle of the century, came to be known as the Broad Church-
men. If Noetic was a translation of Rationalist into Greek, it is
significant to notice that Broad Churchman' is a translation of
Latin into Saxon; for as the years rolled on, there was 'less
disposition to be diffident or apologetic in the application of that

dreaded instrument, reason, to matters of religion ;
perhaps there
was a more generous confidence that what was essentiail in religion
had nothing to fear from the application^
The Noetics made' no original contributions to thought, but
they are interesting for their very deficiencies, no less than for
their merits. They were excessively insular. They knew nothing
about Kant; nor was this ignorance of German philosophy, which
they shared with the majority of their English contemporaries,
tedeemed by any profound acquaintance with the thought of
France. They knew very little about the theories which had
given birth to the French Revolution; but they had unconsciously
adopted their central principle. They are interesting because
they are among the earliest and among the most uncompromising
advocates at Oxford of reason as against authority. They were
the "liberals" who at a later date were the objects of the dislike
and dread of Newman and the Tractarians ; and fear of the results
of their teaching had no small influence in causing, or at any rate
in precipitating, the Tractarian reaction. The Noetics themselves
did not foresee all the consequences of their own teaching, nor
was its full effect manifest for many years after. Jowett as an
undergraduate saw but the rudiments of the changes initiated by
them. In a letter written in 1865, he comments upon the signifi-
cance of the development which had subsequently taken place.

"When I was an undergraduate," he says, "we were fed upon
Bishop Butler and Aristotle's Ethics, and almost all teaching
leaned to the support of doctrines of authority. Now there are
new subjects. Modern History and Physical Science, and more
important than these, perhaps, is the" real study of metaphysics in
the Literae Humaniores school — every man in the last ten years
who goes in for honours has read Bacon, and probably Locke,
1 "Church,'' of course, is ultimately Greek; but the distinguishing word

here is "broad."
THEOLOGY 95
Mill's Logic, Plato, Aristotle, and the history of ancient philosophy.

See how impossible this makes a return to the old doctrines of
authority'."
In the ecclesiastical battle the victory lay with the reactionaries,
and Jowett well knew it. Five years after the date of the letter
just quoted we find him prophesying that " in another ten years
half the English clergy will be given up to a fetish-worship of
the Sacrament " ; and time has proved the substantial truth of
his words. The Broad- Churchmen have founded no school;
there are no crowds following in the steps of Copleston and
Arnold, of Jowett and Stanley ; but the name of those who follow
and who strive to outdo Keble and Pusey, is legion. The fact is
not suiprising. It is far easier to think the thoughts (or at any
rate to repeat the formulae) of ten centuries ago, than to think
the thoughts of ten years in advance. The victors in the ecclesi-
astical strife have been conquered in the field of thought; arid
the battle for influence over the minds of the young has gone
irretrievably against the principle of authority. The change to
which Jowett calls attention is of incalculable importance. It is
a change of spirit, not of subjects. There are no better subjects
than Aristotle and Butlen But Aristotle and Butler, treated as
semi-inspired "authorities," are very different from the same
philosophers treated as factors in a " real study of metaphysics."
Now, so far as, Oxford was concerned, the initiators of this change
were the Noetics ; and therefore, though we can trace to them no
original contribution to thought, though they are very evidently
hampered, and though.^ their use'fulness is lessened, by their
ignorance pf the development of European philosophy, they
deserve an honourable place in the history of, English thought
in the nineteenth century.
Oriel College, Oxford, was the centre of the Noetics, as it was
afterwards of Tractarianism. Copleston ,was its Provost from
181410 1828; and Whately, Hampden and Thomas Arnold were
among the fellows. Copleston was a man of powerful intellect, of
profouivd |Sch,olarship and of varied interests; but he left his mark
' Life and LttUi i, i. û.

less on literature than on the College which he ruled and on the
diocese —Llandaff—which he administered in his later years.
Hampden is recollected mainly because of the envenomed con-

troversy of which he, an amiable and mild man, became the
subject when, in 1836, he was made by Lord Melbourne Regius
Professor of Divinity at Oxford. It was a controversy in which
Hampden suffered in. feeling, and in which some of his opponents
—among them Newman — suffered in reputation; for they were
unscrupulous in their choice of weapons. Arnold is remeiiibered
as a great schoolmaster and a historian, rather than as a theologian.
But he was intensely interested in religion, watched the Tractariin
movement closely, and was far too vehement to keep clear Of the
controversies it occasioned. He objected strongly to the doctrine
of apostolical succession, and thought the argument from primitive
episcopacy to episcopacy as it existed in the nineteenth century
absurd. In more ways than one, Arnold stood between two
extremes. On the one hand, he was a Uberal (in the ecclesiastical
as well as in the political sense of the word), and on the other he
was profoundly, religious. He was a convinced Churchman ; and
yet he looked with favour on the idea of a comprehension' of

Dissenters, provided it were "comprehension without cbmpronlise.''
His views were expressed in a pamphlet on The Principles of
Church Reform (1833), which was condemned alike by Church
and by Dissent. Whether Arnold's position was ultimatelj^tenable
or not may be questioned. Carlyle thought it was not ; and there
is a passage in the letters of Matthew Arndld which suggests that
he shared But there can be no question about
Carlyle's doubt.
Thomas He was fully convinced of
Arnold's perfect sincerity.
the essential Tightness of the Church of England, and he never
doubted that there was a place within its fold for people who, like
himself, reasoned upon its dogmas boldly, and, as he bdieved,
without such bias as to warp the judgment.
The Noetic spirit was incarnate in Richard Whately (1787-
1863), who is better known as a philosopher than as a theo-
logian. But he contributed no new principle to ph^bsophy,
and his influence was chiefly the influence of a teacher. His
Logic (1826) and his Rhetoric (1828) are both excellent little text-
THEOLOGY 97
books; and the former is especially noteworthy for its effect in
reviving a study which had fallen into neglect. The best part of
it is the treatment of fallacies, where Whately shows qualities of
mind of which he had given a foretaste in his Historic Doubts

relative to Napoleon Buonaparte (1819). Though the Rhetoric
and the Logic are not permanent possessions of philosophy, yet
their author left a lasting mark, and a deeper one than any
other of the Noetics except Arnold. His powerful intellect and
his masterful personality, which became despotic after he had risen
to be Archbishop, attracted some and repelled others, but left
'
none indifferent. His wit, generally pungent and sometimes

corrosive, branded his sayings on the memory. His extraordinary
manners, or want of manners, deepened the effect. " He ate and
drank and joked," says Blanco White in a letter to Newman,
"like Hercules in the Alcestis^" Sir Henry Taylor ascribes his
eccentricities to "a strange unconsciousness of the body''; and it
is not easy to account otherwise for the things he did. Taylor
was assured by the wife of one of the Lord-Lieutenants of
Ireland, next to whom Whately's rank placed him when he
dined at the Castle, that "she had occasionally to remove the
Archbishop's foot from her Such doings would have
lap*"."
blasted the career of an ordinary man

but Whately rose in spite
;
of them, and as it was impossible to ignore him or to dismiss him

as a lunatic, they fixed interest and attention upon him all the
more. The growing imperiousness of his character did however
in later years limit his circle chiefly to weakUngs and sycophants.
But though the tendency was always there, those whom he in-
fluenced in his Oxford days were neither weaklings nor sycophants.
Newman, his Vice-Principal at Alban Hall, was one; and
though they were too diverse in disposition to remain friends
permanently, Newman continued to be Whately's disciple long
enough to draw weapons from the armoury of the latter which
he afterwards used for ends by no means congenial to Whately.
In theology, Whately's principal work was the Kingdom of
Christ Delineated (1841). Among his formal works may be
mentioned Essays on the Errors of Romanism (1830) and Essays
^ Newman's Xeîsrji, i. 187. ' Autpiiography, i. 322,
w. 7
on some Difficulties in Paul (1828). These and his other theo-
logical writings are exceedingly acute ; but they do not, any more
than his philosophical works, embody any great original thought.
Like most of the productions of the Noetic school, they are too
negative. Powerful for destruction when turned against either
Low Church or High Church, Whately's arguments substitute
nothing for the systems which he shows to be untenable. The

truth seems to be that Whately, though sincere in his religion,
was deficient in fervour. He believed with the head it would be :
unfair and untrue to say that he did not feel with the heart ; but
at least the emotional was less than the intellectual part. The
defect was fatal. Whately's influence was great; but it showed
itself more, perhaps, in the reaction which he helped to provoke,
than in the winning of converts and followers. He was destitute
of that personal attractiveness which drew boys to the side of
Arnold, and kept them there after they had grown to be men.
Something was needed to supplemeiit and to enrich the
positive teaching of the Noetics; and it was supplied by the
importation of the ideas of German philosophy. Henceforth, the
most vital distinction in English theology is that between those
who know and who accept the principles of Kant and Hegel and
Fichte and Schleiermacher, and those who either do not know
or do not understand them, or who are afraid to apply them.
" Germanism " was dreaded in the circles of the orthodox at least
as much as rationalism :
" omne ignotum pro — horribili." As
seen, however, through the cloudy magnificence of the prose
monologues of Coleridge, "Germanism" took the shape of a
friend to faith, rather than an enemy \ The principal disciples
were Julius Hare, Maurice and Kingsley; but many who were not
disciples felt the influence of Coleridge, and some became imbued
with "Germanism who did not understand the German language.
''
Even a man so widely different as John Stuart Mill was influenced.

"
Germanism " in theology reached out one hand towards the
Tractarians, and the other towards the Broad Churchmen. The
I refer to the impression left by Coleridge upon contemporaries.

^
Mr Benn's History of English Rationalism in the XIX

Century shows clearly
enough that Coleridge was a dangerous ally to the Church party.
THEOLOGY 99
Tractarians were usually innocent of knowledge of the meaning
all
of "Germanism"; but the mystic element, that in

it which appealed
to feeling rather than understanding, that which might be called

the romanticism of philosophy, was akin to their spirit. Hence
the baseless supposition that Coleridge or that Carlyle was re-
sponsible for the Oxford Movement. At a later date too German
idealism hasbecome acquainted with strange bedfellows, and has
been used as an instrument by the modern High Church party.
Nevertheless, its true relations are with the other side ; its true
function has been to mediate the transition from the older Noetics
to the more recent Broad Churchmen.
A certain ineffectiveness characterises the Coleridgeans, just as
it characterised Coleridge himself. Even Kingsley, it has been
said with truth, remained a boy, though a glorious boy, all his life.
Sterling's failure may be set down to ill-health and to his early

death; but the remains he has left certainly fall short of greatness;
and man, was disappointed
Carlyle, the affectionate friend of the
in the author. Sterling's first biographer and quondam rector,
Julius Hare, joint author with his brother Augustus of Guesses at

Truth, has lost that power over the mind which the testimony of
contemporaries assures us that he once possessed. But the most
typical Coleridgean was Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872),
who himself passed through some of the spiritual experiences of
his master. He came of a Unitarian family, left Cambridge with-

out a degree, then, after an interval, went to Oxford, graduated,
and took holy orders. His theological opinions were too liberal
for the time; and in 1853 he was dismissed from his professorship
of theology in King's College, London. He was unsound on the

question of eternal punishment; and to save a doctrine so precious
his services were dispensed with. But though he was judged
unfit in 1853 to teach theology in London, the University of
Cambridge thirteen years later was proud to receive him as a
teacher of morals.
Maurice best illustrates the ineffectiveness of the Coleridgeans.
Those who knew the man testify convincingly to the greatness of
his powers; but the consensus as to the unsatisfactory character
of the result is still more remarkable. On the one hand, Tennyson
7—2
lOO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
thought him the greatest mind of all the Metaphysical Society^
"For merely intellectual power, apart from poetical genius," Mill
considered Maurice to be decidedly superior even to his master,
Coleridge; and Kingsley pronounced him "a great and rare
thinker." On the Other hand, Mill thought his power was wasted;
Carlyle found him "one of the most entirely uninteresting men
of genius"; and Mrs Carlyle was "never in his company without
being attacked with a sort of paroxysm of mental cramp." Ruskin,
again, pronounces Maurice "puzzle-headed, and, though in a
beautiful manner, wrong-headed." The Carlyles had a pungent
style, and in their judgments of contemporaries they seldom
erred on the side of leniency; while Ruskin might possibly be
prejudiced by the correspondence on the Notes on the Con-
structionof Sheep/olds, wherein Maurice certainly held his own.
But their judgment is borne out by multitudes of others. Sir
Mountstuart Grant Duff "never carried away one clear idea, or
even the impression that he [Maurice] had more than the faintest
conception of what he himself meant." Aubrey de Vere compared

listening to him to eating pea-soup with a fork. Matthew Arnold
speaks of him as "always beatirig the bush with profound emotion,
but never starting the hare"; and Huxley writes in 1863, probably
with reference to The Claims of the Bible and of Science: "Maurice
has sent me his book. I have read it, but I find myself utterly
at a loss to comprehend his point of view^"
A perusal of Maurice's works confirms these unfavourable
opinions. The mistiness, as well as the mysticism, of Coleridge
hangs about them; and it is not so evident that they have the per-
manent suggestiveness of the great poet's prose. Since Maurice's
death, the circle — never very wide-ôf those who are directly
influenced by him has greatly narrowed. He was greater as a
man than as a writer; it was mainly those who felt the magnetism
of his pure, unselfish character who read his works; and that
generation has almost passed away. His Kingdom of Christ
(1838) ; his presentation to a Quaker of his own views regarding
^ Life of Tennyson, ii. 168.

* Most of these quotations will Idc found in the Library of Literary
Criticiiftt.
THEOLOGY >
lOI
the Catholic Church; his Doctrine of Sacrifice (1854), wherein

with questionable success he attempted to buttress the doctrine
of the atonement by showing how often one being suffers for the
act of another; his Theological Essays (1853), which occasioned
his ejection from King's College; and his Prophets and Kings
( 1 85 3),f though.it is less chargeable than the Others with the
author's usual fault, are likely to be more and more left at peace
upon their shelves. Still less will the Moral and Metaphysical
Philosophy (1871— 1872) stand the test of time.
In view of the testimony to Maurice's extraordinary powers,
the disappointing nature of the product requires explanation.
The wisest words ever written about him are those of Mill; and
they are all the more remarkable because of the evident un-
willingness with which Mill expresses an opinion in any way
unfavourable to one whose character and intellect he admired
so greatly. " Great powers of generalization, rare ingenuity and
subtlety, and a wide perception of important and unobviouB
truths, served him not for putting something better into the
place of the worthless heap of received opinions on the great
subjects of thought, but for proving to his own mind that the
Church of England had known everything from the first, and
that all the truths on the ground of which the Church and
orthodoxy have been attacked (many of which he saw as clearly
as any one) are not only consistent with the Thirty-nine Articles,
but are better understood and expressed in those Articles than
by any one who rejects them. I have never been able to find
any other explanation of this, than by attributing it to that

timidity of conscience, combined with original sensitiveness of
temperament, which has so often driven highly gifted men into
Romanism from the need of a firmer support than they can find
in the independent conclusions of their own judgment^"
Maurice, like many another, having put his hand to the
plough, looked back. He built upon reason, but he feared to
trust his foundation to the full. He thought he had learned from
Coleridge what Carlyle contemptuously calls "the sublime secret
of believing by 'the reason' what 'the understanding' had been
^ Mill's Autobiography, 153-154.
obliged to fling out as incredible'." Hence that amazing torturing
of the Thirty-nine Articles; hence that reconciliation of the Bible
with science which Huxley failed to understand. Maurice was
"German" enough to see that eighteenth century orthodoxy and
eighteenth century scepticism were alike incomplete; but he was
not "German" enough boldly to cut his cable and sail into any
sea of thought whither his logic would carry him. He was still
fastanchored to the Thirty-nine Articles; and his task was, not

to discover truth, but to show that the truth had been already
proclaimed. The well-meaning and in many ways admirable
scheme known as Christian Socialism shows again how, in regard
to fundamental principles, Maurice's mind was wrapped in fog'.
It was inspired by the heart-felt desire to help the poor, and it
was productive of not a little good; but it was in no intelligible
sense Socialism at all. It recognised the right of private

property; it depreciated rather than exaggerated the power of
the state to effect reform; it insisted upon the profoundly in-
dividualistic principle that the whole world could not do so much

for the reformation of any man as the man himself. Confusion
was common then, asnow, with regard to Socialism; but
it is
for a leader there cannot be pleaded that excuse for confusion

which may be urged in defence of his followers. Robert Owen
and Pierre Leroux had already lived and taught; and to call
by the name appropriated to their systems, principles so widely
different as those of Maurice and Kingsley, was to court mis-
understanding.
In some ways Frederick William Robertson (1816-1853)
resembles Maurice. In literary form, and in the glow of his
eloquence, he is superior; but, dying as he did at thirty-seven,
the work he actually accomplished was necessarily much less
considerable. The
celebrated Brighton sermons, though not his
only productions, are those by which he stands the best chance
of being remembered. He resembles Maurice in the compre-
hensiveness of his Churchmanship; and in consequence of it, he,
like Maurice, was regarded with distrust both by the Evangelicals
and by the High Churchmen. He has also Maurice's tendency
^ Life of Sterling, chap. viii.
THEOLOGY IO3
to find new and strange meanings in, old formulae; and there is
an element pf truth in the complaint brought against him by
less original theologians, that he sometimes blurs the division
between truth and error. Robertson did a service to thought in

pointing out how impossible it is to maintain the hard alterna-
tives in which the commonplace thinker delights, and in insisting
that forms of expression, seemingly inconsistent, are often merely
different ways of expressing the same truth. But perhaps he
Carried the process too far; on many minds, at least,' his form
of faith after a time produces an effect akin to that produced by
scepticism. Men long for firm earth under their feet, for the
certain knowledge that this is right and that wrong, this correct
and that mistaken ; and they distrust a system of reconciliations
carried so far that it seems to leave nothing unreconciled.
From the point of view of philosophy, there is a distinct
advance from Maurice to. the younger group of Broad Church-
men who were so influential at Oxford about the middle of the
nineteenth century. They too were influenced by "Germanism,"
but it filtered to them from different fountains. The bolder
thought of Carlyle h^d by this time made men less timorous in
touching the accursed thing; and Connop Thirlwall (1797-1875),
one of the widest and profoundest scholars of the century, had
done much to open the flood-gates. The greatness of Thirlwall's
intellect and the extent of his influence are hardly yet recognised.
In precocity he rivalled Mill himself, reading Latin at three and

Greek at four; and, far from withering as precocious intellect
often does, Thirlwall's grew with his growth. In his maturity,
he far surpassed Mill in the extent of his knowledge. There
were few languages of any importance which he had not studied.
He was one of the Englishmen least removed from Carlyle in
knowledge of German thought and literature. At a time when
Arnold was learning German in order to read Niebuhr, Thirlwall
was already profoundly versed in German theology, was making
translations from the German, and then or very soon afterwards
was preparing to translate Niebuhr himself. The translation of
Schleiermacher's Critical Essay on Luke (1825), with his own
introduction, was th,e first thing which marked his power. The
I04 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
doubts as to Thirlwall's orthodoxy raised by this introduction
were, according to the standard of orthodoxy of that day, not
surprising; for it abandons the then accepted theory of verbal
inspiration. But it interested Lord Melbourne, and induced him,
after he had himself of the essential orthodoxy of the
satisfied
author, to recommend Thirlwall in 1840 for the bishopric of

St David's. More than once Thirlwall as bishop showed the
old spirit He was the occupant of the bench who
solitary
refused to sign the address calling upon Colenso to resign, and

he alone voted for the disestablishment of the Irish Church. On
the other hand, it is somewhat surprising to recall that he was
among those who took proceedings against Essays and Reviews.
To his acceptance of the bishopric must be ascribed Thirlwall's
failure toredeem the promise of the introduction to Schleiermacher.

He was hampered in two ways. His time was much taken up with
official duties (he preached, for example, in the Welsh language,
though was whispered that the Welsh people hardly understood

it
the sermons); and his position necessarily fettered his freedom of
thought. Able as the episcopal charges are, they hardly show

that daring which might have been expected of the man who in
1834 wrote in favour of the admission of Dissenters to degrees^

and who resigned his office in Trinity College rather than com-
promise his independence. Perhaps the most interesting memorial
of his later days is the collection of Letters to a Young Friend.
They show that Thirlwall always retained the tastes of the scholar
and the remarkable capacity for omnivorous reading which dis-
tinguished him at Cambridge; they are easy, frank and genial;
and they reveal a most attractive side of a character outwardly
somewhat hard and stern.
Kant distilled through the mind of Coleridge, Niebuhr and
Schleiermacher rendered accessible by Thirlwall, Goethe and
Schiller and Richter made names by Carlyle, these
familiar —
were sufficient to wield a mighty influence upon thought. The
best men were not content to take them at second hand. From
the middle of the century onwards, the line between the progressive
and the unprogressive may almost be drawn where the knowledge
of German ceases. There were exceptions. While Newman was
THEOLOGY lOS
ignorant of German, Pusey knew it, and was at one time deeply
interested in German theology. To hishonour be it said, Pusey
had a wide knowledge of the theology^ and a considerable know-
ledge of the philosophy, at a date when very few in England knew
anything about either. In later years, however, he looked with
suspicion on all who had drunk of the polluted stream, and never
referred to his own volumes on the causes of the rationalistic
character of German theology. The leaders of the liberal party
were undeterred by such suspicions, and unhesitatingly imperilled
their worldly prospects by incurring them. In 1844 Arthur Penrhyn
Stanley (1815-1881) and Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893) made a
tour inGermany. They studied Kant and Hegel, and they met
some of the most distinguished German scholars and philosophers
then living.
In their knowledge of Hegel the two friends brought back to

England the most powerful of all solvents of theological dogma.
It was so just because it permitted, and indeed encouraged, the
recognition, of the truth which usually underlies even a false way
of expressing human thought. It led the leaders themselves in-
sensibly on to a goal the prospect of which would have frightened
them at the start. Jowett at the close of his life rejected nearly
all supernatural religion, at least in the forms in which it is
commonly taught We shall never return, he says, writing in

1886, "to the belief in facts which are disproved, e.g. miracles,
the narratives of creation, of Mount Sinai'." And again, "We
believe in a risen Christ, not risen, however, in the sense in
which a drowning man is restored to life, nor even in the sense
inwhich a ghost is supposed to walk the eajrth, nor in any sense
which we can define or explain. We pray to God as a Person, a
larger self; but there must always be a sub-intelUgitur that He is
not a Person. Our forms of worship, public and private, imply

some interference with the course of nature. We know that the
empire of law permeates all Whether a man holding
things^"
such views ought to have remained a clergyman of the Church
of England is a question that may fairly be asked: it may be
taken for certain that Jowett never would have been a clergyman
* Life, ii. 310. ^ ibid. 313.
Io6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
if he had held such views at the beginning. But in his youth he
was far less heterodox. Writing to Stanley in 1845, the year
in which he took priests' orders, he says that he has "not any
tendency to doubt about the miracles of the New Testament."
Not only does he not disbelieve them; he has no tendency to
doubt them. From this point he was insensibly led on to the
disbelief in nearly everything that, to the majority, constitutes
Christianity. To Jowett, however, the word Christianity still
had a vital meaning, and in his own sense he was most sincerely
Christian.
Ten years after the date of the letter to Stanley quoted above,
Jowett published his first work, an edition of the epistles to the
Thessalonians, Galatians ^nd Romans, with notes and disserta-
tions ; which appeared on the same day with his friend's edition of
the epistles to the Corinthians. In these ten years Jowett had

doubtless advanced considerably beyond the position in which he
stood in 1845 i but he was still far from that to which he finally
came. He " disbelieved in the story of Jonah and the whale ";
but "he kept his judgment in suspense as to whether the Law
had or had not been given from Sinai"; and "even when he felt
most sceptical, his belief in immortality had never wavered ^" His
heresies therefore were likely to be mild in comparison with those
to which he could have given utterance in later days. But yet it
was no food for babes that his edition provided. The principles
suggested in the essay On the Imputation of the Sin of Adam
would consign to the rubbish-heap whole libraries of theology.
But above all the essay on the atonement, wherein he powerfully
denounced the absolute immorality of the doctrine as commonly
received, roused a storm of vituperation, and sowed the seeds of
difficulties which sprang up to beset for years the path of the
author. On the other hand, the transparent honesty of the man,

the literary finish of his work and the weight of his thought,
won
him a reputation which was not confined to England. His book
was deemed important enough to require an answer, and a volume
of sermons on Christian Faith and the Atonement was published,
1 Tollemache's_/ijz»<a, 7.
THEOLOGY 107
among the contributors to which were the Bishop of Oxford

(Wilberforce) and Pusey. One essay which had been partly
prepared for Jowett's work had to be kept back because the
author's health did not permit him to finish it. This circum-
stance gave rise to further trouble, for the paper in question was
the £ssay on Interpretation which was published in i860 in the
celebrated volume entitled Essays and Reviews. It is probable
enough that had Jowett not had the paper already by him, he
would have declined to contribute.
The stir caused by Essays and Reviews is still well remembered.
Of the seven contributors only two, Rowland Williams and H. B.
Wilson, were prosecuted. One of the charges against Wilson was
that he denied the doctrine of eternal punishment. The Privy
Council found that he had only expressed a "hope" that "a
judgment of eternal misery may not be the purpose of God," and
declined to visit with penal consequences the holding of such a
hope. Pusey was alarmed. " In regard to that awful doctrine of
the Eternity of Punishment," he wrote to Keble, "their Judgment
is most demoralising in itself and in its grounds^." Evidently thte
scathing denunciation of the doctrine which Browning wrote a few

years later in TIw Inn Album was not as needless as some critics
have supposed. The defendants won their case, but all who were
concerned suffered in public opinion. The essays, read at the
present day, seem to many who are not anti-ecclesiastical mild and
innocent ; but while on that account they are unexciting^ they are
all the more valuable as a measure of progress. The mops to stay
the tide are now wielded much farther up the shore. But in one
respect at least the uproar produced the effects its authors in-
tended. Jowett. was turned aside from theology, which was his
primary intellectual interest ; the great translation of Plato became
the work of his life; and, except within his College, he was for
many years almost completely excluded from the pulpit.
Jowett's fellow-traveller, Stanley, though a far more voluminous
author, had much less influence upon the development of thought.
The two friends gave one another the warmest support; but, if
we except their common liberalism, the differences between them
* Life of Pusey, iv. 48.
were more apparent than the resemblances. While Jowett was a
philosopher, Stanley had an essentially historical mind. Lightfoot's
criticisms of both were directed chiefly against the inaccuracies of
Stanley ; and when the latter brought the criticisms to the notice
of Conington, his friend's advice was "to surrender at discretion."
Stanley did so with perfect grace, and gave up the scheme which
had been in his mind for further critical editions of the epistles,
devoting himself rather to the writing of picturesque books of

travel, combined with research, like his Sinai and Palestine (1856),
and on the History of the Eastern
historical works, like his Lectures
Church (1861) and his Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church
(1863-1865). These works won and deserved a wide popularity.
They have the great merit of being emphatically readable; the
English is always pleasant, and in the finest passages really
eloquent. They have charm ; but, brought to the test by com-
parison with histories truly great, they appear only second-rate.
Stanley's picturesqueness is occasionally excessive, he plays too
much on the surface of things, too seldom seeks to penetrate the
depths.
With the two celebrated Oxonians there is usually joined a
third, very different from either of them, — Mark Pattison (1813-
1884), who was Rector of Lincoln College from 1861 till his
death, â man who, like Jowett, was at one point in his career
disappointed of his legitimate ambition, but who, unlike Jowett,
suffered himself to be embittered and partly spoilt by the dis-
appointment. Pattison is rather a scholar and a critic than a

theologian. His greatest work is his Isaac Casaubon (1875), a
biography which exhibits a depth of learning in humanism such
as no contemporary could equal. His monograph on Milton
(1879) is perhaps the best of all the numberless books of the
kind which have been produced during the last thirty years. His
single considerable contribution to theology (or rather philosophy)
was the paper in Essays and Reviews entitled Tendencies of Re-
ligious Thought in England, 1688-1750, of which it is too little
to say that it is the most memorable of all the papers contained

in that volume. Like Pattison's other productions, it was quite
the best thing on its subject in English. It was a dispassionate
THEOLOGY 109
inquiry into the subject of deism, -^the causes which led to its
rise,and afterwards to its decay ; it made no pronouncement

whatever upon dogma. There was iii it, therefore; no real ground
for offence ; the clergy ought to have accepted it gratefully as a
contribution to knowledge. They were left quite at liberty, if
they only had the capacity, to use the material for the support of
the Catholic faith. Partly, however, because the paper was found
in bad company, partly, it may be suspected, because many of the
readers had not inteUigence enough to comprehend the writer's
purpose, Pattison was involved in the suspicion which attached
to the whole band. Doubtless this tended to silence him, and
may be the cause of the deplorable fact that a man who did so
he attempted should, in a life of over
superlatively well all that
seventy years, have accomplished so little.
North of the Tweed a similar work to that of Jowett was done,
and from the philosophic side done more thoroughly, by John
Caird (1820-1898). Caird, however, though only three years
younger than Jowett, was muCh he wrote anything
later before
that appreciably influenced thought, and he has not that special

importance which belongs to a pioneer. He first won fame as a
preacher, and it may be doubted whether in his best days he had,
as a pulpit orator, any equal in Great Britain. Stanley pronounced
his Meligion in Common Life, preached before the Queen and
published by her command, to be " the greatest single sermon of
the century." Caird won his reputation as a preacher at once,
and to a man less strong and lessimbued with the spirit of
thoroughness it might easily have proved fatal. But he recognised
the danger, and after ministering for two years to an Edinburgh
congregation, he retired to the country parish of Errol in Perth-
shire. The eight years (1849-1857) which he spent there were
his seed-time. Perceiving .the importance of the Gferman philo-
sophy, he learnt the language in order to make acquaintance at
first hand with the great thinkers. When, therefore, he emerged

from his retirement, he had a knowledge of modern thought such
as was by no means common either in Scotland or in England
and when in 1S62 he became professor of divinity in Glasgow
University, the doctrine which he taught was as alarming to the
no THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
more old-fashioned of his countrymen as it was inspiring to the
younger generation. Apart from sermons, his publications all
belong to the close of his life. The Croall lectures, which he
delivered in 1878-1879, were the basis of his Introduction to the
Philosophy of Religion (1880), and his Fundamental Ideas of
Christianity (1900) was the product of his tenure of the Gifford
lectureship. He was the author also of a monograph on Spinoza
(1888). Caird's teaching is mainly based on Hegel. It is inspired
by the conviction that the old formulae are wholly inadequate

— —
indeed it may be roundly said, untrue to modern thought.
The alternative is, therefore, either to find new principles, or to
surrender to the materialists. Caird believed that Hegelianism
supplied the new principles, and that the doctrine of development
might be applied in such a way as to rejuvenate Christianity.
His purpose was, of course, widely different from that of Newman
in his Development of Christian Doctrine, and also from that of
the recent Anglican school which has sought to buttress sacer-
dotalism by the aid of the great German. Caird gave no such
twist to the philosopher's meaning ; but whether he succeeded in
bringing it into harmony with any interpretation of Christianity as
a supernatural religion, is perhaps open to question.
The time of Essays and Reviews was one of unrest for theo-
logians. That volume made its appearance when the excitement
about the Origin of Species was at its height; and the second
turmoil had not had time to settle when J. W. Colenso (1814-
1883), Bishop of Natal, set a new stone of stumbling in the path.
From the simplicity and definiteness of the arithmetical tests
applied by Colenso, the effect of his critical examination of the
Hexateuch (1862-1879) was at the time extraordinary. Kuenen
proiiounced it to be "simply annihilating'." The subsequent
advance of knowledge and opinion has tended to obscure the
merit of Colenso and to make many of his criticisms seem obvious.
If his writings are no longer read, it is because they have reached
what Huxley called the euthanasia of scientific work, and are
built into the temple of thought. The judgment of Kuenen is
sufficient proof that Colenso's examination was not idle, even to
' Quoted in Benn's History of English Rationalism, ii. 143.
THEOLOGY 1 1
the greatest scholars of the time ; while the treatment meted out
tohim shows that it had stirred many who stood somewhat below
Kuenen. Colenso was deposed from his see by the Bishop of
Capetown; the Privy Council declared the deposition to be null
and void ; and the Bishop then excommunicated Colenso. His
inhibition by the Bishop of Oxford (Wilberforce) from preaching
at Carfax drew from Ruskin the question, " Is there a single
statement of the Bishop of Natal's, respecting the Bible text,
which the Bishop of Oxford dares to contradict before Professor

Max Miiller, or any. other leading scholar of Europe'?" It ill
becomes those who have entered upon the inheritance of freedom
to depreciate the men who bore the burden and heat of the day,
though their bodies may lie by the walls of forts long since carried
and far in the rear.
"Thoughts that great hearts once broke for, we
Breathe cheaply in the common air."
The subject of the Broad Churchmen has led us far on

towards the close of the period with which we have to deal. It is
necessary to return to the beginning, and to trace another thread
of causation. For while in a sense the Broad Churchmen were
the heirs of the Noetics, they were related in a negative way to
the Tractarians, reacting against the latter, just as the Tractarians
reacted against the Noetics.
That great Catholic Reaction of which in Germany the con-
version of Frederick Schlegel and in France the movements of
Lamennais and Lacordaire were symptoms, took in Eiiglaiid the
characteristic form of an attempted compromise, to which we owe
the theological road-making of Newman's via media. It is one of
the many attempts to bring back that faith which the eighteenth
century had disowned, and the absence of which Ruskin declared
to be the great defect of the early nineteenth century.
Whether this particular attempt was wisely made or not remains
to be seen. Having regard to the time and the circumstances, it
is one of the strangest, and therefore one of the most interesting,
of all the manifestations of the human mind. To the great mass
1 Fors Clavigera, IL.etter xlix.

of the rationalising thought of the time, it seemed no better than
a conspiracy to put back the clock of thought by some centuries
a diligent search inspired by the extraordinary hope of discovering
in the ages which the world has agreed to call dark, the light of
heaven^the astonishing belief that in respect of the highest of all
subjects it was the duty of modern man to sit humbly at the feet
of those who, in nearly all other matters, were demonstrably

inferior to the great intellects of Greece and Rome. Such was
the aspect which the Oxford Movement wore to poets like
Browning and Arnold, to theologians like Jowett, to philoisophers
like Spencer and Mill. Such, it seemed to them, was the extrava-
gant demand made upon the heirs of Shakespeare and Bacon
and Newton, of Kant and Hegel and Goethe.
There are two points of view from which the Oxford Mover
ment may be regarded, and from which it may present, to the
same mind, very different aspects. These are respectively the
intellectual pofntDf-vieând the aesthetic. Many who are wholly
destitute of sympathy with the movement on its intellectual side
who would perhaps roundly declare its whole aim and method to
—
be radically and irredeemably false are by no means deficient in
synipathy with it on the aesthetic side. As regards the intel-
lectual foundation, they would argue that, supposing the purpose
of the Tracts for the Times accomplished, supposing the language
of the XXXIX Articles to be reconciled with Catholic truth as
conceived by Newman, — still, the only effect would be to excite
-wonder at the eccentricity of the men who framed those articles
and who used such language for such a purpose. At this point
the task would only be beginning. They would proceed to ask
how Catholic truth in this Newmanite sense was to be reconciled
with truth Kaff oXou in its and it is safe to say that
secular sense;
they would receive no answer which would satisfy them. In ,
Germany, Strauss's Leben Jesu was published ; in France, Comte's

Cours de Philosophie positive was issued, contemporaneously with
the Tra(.ts for the Times. The former subjects the life of Jesus
to a thoroughly rationalistic examination; the latter calls the
dogma of exclusive salvation a "fatal declaration," pronounces
the dogma of the condemnation of mankind through Adam to be
THEOLOGY II3
"morally more revolting than the other,'' and traces to political

necessity the dogma of the divinity of Christ. Even in the British
Isles, and within the circle of believers, Thomas Chalmers, the
only theologian who rivalled and in some ways surpassed Newman
in greatness, was, as we have seen, in those very years conducting
a religious movement on radically different principles from those

of Tractarianism. How could the leaders of the Catholic Reaction
appeal to such men ? To their reason they could not appeal at
all : possibly they might captivate their emotions.
Many who were only alienated intellectually by the Catholic
Reaction have shown considerable sympathy with its aesthetic
phase. Some of its manifestations appear to them paltry enough.
With an amused glance Browning passes by the figure of the
ritualist,
"All Peter's chains about his waist, his back

Brave with the needlework of Noodledom'";
and he leaves " thrilling views of the surplice question " to those
who care to deal with them. But there are more important
aspects. Nothing is plainer than that the Catholic Reaction
was to a great extent an aesthetic movement. It is one form of
the manifold" protest against the hardness and bareness of the
eighteenth century. The intellect had been fed, but not the
ernotions ; the understanding, but not the imagination ; the head
was full, but the heart was empty. The dearth of lyrical poetry
is significant, the character oT that which was written is more
significant still. Contrast the metallic brilliancy of Dryden's
Alexander's Feast or of Pope's Ode on St Cecilia's Day with the
cloudy wizardry of the Ancient Mariner, the enchanting move-
ment of Kubla Khan, or the languorous beauty of the Ode to a
Nightingale; and put alongside of this the contrast between the
bare sternness of Puritanism, or the cold decorum which often
passed for religion after Puritanism had decayed, and the sensuous
beauty of the Catholic worship. The highest beauty is spiritual,
and the bare walls of a hideous chapel, or the desolate, mist-clad

hill-side where the persecuted found their retuge, might be made
' Bishop Biougranh
w. 8
grander than the interior of St Peter's. But lofty cathedrals
aglow with the colours of painting, "storied windows," stately
processions in gorgeous vestments and with swinging censers, and
all the pomp and
circumstance of a ceremonial religion, attract
even such Puritanic minds as Milton's, and are almost the only
attraction to the multitudes whose God must take a visible shape
and be not too removed above humanity. With this aspect of
far
the Reaction, with the bringing back of colour and beauty into
religious life, with the appeal to the imagination and the feelings,
many who are only alienated by the arguments for it may well be
in sympathy. No one who understands it can fail to be inter-
ested; forit is one of the best exam ples in history of th^ imperious
demand^ of human nature that it shaSTBF'satisfied as a whole.

They who reject the demand do so at their peril. The eighteenth
century offered the feelings not bread, but" a stone. One section
of the nineteenth retaliates with the attempt to monopolise all the
bread for feeling, and to put off intellect in its turn with mock
nutriment. How will the reaction here again show itself? The
answer has been partly given already, in tracing the Broad Church
movement : it will be given more fully when we come to deal
with the Oxford poets of doubt, Clough and Arnold.
The Oxford Movement was initiated in 1833, at least that is,
the date which Newman adopts as its starting-pointî. There had,

however, been silent and to a great extent unconscious preparation
for it ever since Newman, sixteen years before, had entered Oxford
as an undergraduate. It reached a crisis in 1845, when Newman
was received into the Romish communion; but it was not at
an end, nor is it at an end now. The literary product of the
movement is not great, except that which Comes from the pen of
John Henry Newman (1801— 1890). We owe to it a little poetry,
which will be noticed in its place. Its great prose document is
Newman's fascinating Apologia (1864). There has grown up
about the movement a whole prose literature but most of the ;
contents of this literature are, except as historical documents,

what Charles Lamb calls biblia-a-biblia, books which are no
books. They do not even rise to the level of " Hume, Gibbon,
Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and, generally, all those
THEOLOGY II5
volumes which 'no gentleman's library should be without.'"

Unless he specially wishes to investigate the Oxford Movement,
any gentleman's library may quite well be without the great
majority of the books which have been written about it. But it
may not be without the Apologia : that is eminently and emphati-

cally literature. Every reader must be grateful to Newman for
the palpitating humanity which vivifies every line. It is the
revektioiL of aêatandafiery_soul, its fires covered and banked,
it is true, by the sense of priestly duty, but breaking out now and
then with scorching heat and blazing coruscations all the more
effective for the previous suppression. Newman has often been
described as saintly, but he is of the type of the older and greater
saints, rather than of the later, as they are discriminated in
J. R. Green's letters : " The devotees of the later hagiology could

fast and weep and whimper, but they could not get into one of
St Columba's grand wrath-explosions'." Newman could, and it
is this fact which keeps him so human under all the weight of
eCclesiasticism. Many years after he left Oxford he wrote to
Isaac Williams that of all human things Oxford was perhaps
nearest his heart; yet in his room at the Oratory there hung a
view of Oxford, and over that dream of Church spire and College
pinnacle he had inscribed from the vision of Ezekiel the words,
"Son of Man, can these dry bones live?" Beneath was the
answer, " O
Lord God, thou knowest'." Intense passion vibrates
in the words. The iron must have entered deep indeed before
the man whose spirit has perhaps, of all during the last century,
been most deeply penetrated, whose geniushas been most
by the influence of Oxford, could write thus.
irradiated
Newman was the one great man, the one genius, of the Oxford
Movement. Froude calls him the "indicating number," all the
rest being but as ciphers ; and the judgment is sound. Newman
himself with characteristic modesty ascribes to Keble the initiation
of the movement, and he "ever considered and kept the day" of
Keble's assize sermon on National Apostasy as the start of what
came to be known as Tractarianism. But the preparations for the
movement had gone a long way before the sermon was preached.
'^
p. 75. • Prothero's Ziji ofSianky, ii. 340.
8-3
Il6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
Hurrell Froude, who accompanied Newman on the famous journey

in 1832-18J3, writes with regard to their visit to Rome that they
had got an introduction to Wiseman "to find out whether they
[the Romish Church] could take us in on any terms to which we
could twist our consciences'." The words are the words of
Froude ; but unless he has used the plural number unwarrantably
they throw an unpleasant light on an early use of " economy " by
Newman too ; for the date is prior to the sermon on National
Apostasy, prior to the Tracts, prior by years to any outward
indication of a tendency on the part of Newman to secede to the
Romish communion.
The exaggerated respect in which John Keble (1792-1866)
was held was characteristic of the party, though some of it was
doubtless due simply to the precocious learning of "the boy
bachelor." When Newman went to Oxford there was already a
kind of halo of sainthood about Keble's head, and it was the type
of sainthood which is measured rather by the inches of aberration

than by the diameter of the orbit. When Keble walked the
streets it was with " eagerness " that the youth who knew him by
sight pronounced his name, and with "awe" that he who was
not so privileged — Newman himself—heard it. Even a Master
of Arts —sublime being though he be — is "almost put out of
countenance" by the gentleness, courtesy and unaffectedness of
Keble. Alas! the trebly hundred triumphs. The conquests,
triumphs, spoils of Keble are indeed shrunk to
glories, little
measure ; and we can now pronounce his name without the least
eagerness, and hear it without a particle of awe. He was a man
of many attractive qualities, simple, kind, unassuming, almost the
embodiment of that negative conception of goodness which lays
greater stress upon sins avoided than upon great deeds done. It
is true, Keble in his own parish did much good both by precept
and by example but there is nothing great either in his life or in

;
his works. In prose, he is the author of a finely sympathetic

Life of Bishop Wilson (1863) and of divers volumes of sermons
which give expression, often beautifully, to the thoughts of a
good, true and pious man. But there is nothing in them to rouse
' Ward's Life of Wiseman, i. 117. ^
THEOLOGY 117'
orstartle, little reach of thought, no evidence of originality. Keble
was not the man to head a great movement, and if there had not
been more virile spirits behind, the sermon on National Apostasy
would soon have been forgotten. But there is a profound truth,
noted by both Aristotle and Bacon in political affairs, which holds
equally in the movements of religion. Viyvovrai ix,lv ovv ai o-racreis
ov irepi jxiKp&v aXX' «k juikjowv, (rraxnatfiivtri Se irepl fityoKusv^, sayS
Aristotle. "If there be fuel prepared," says Bacon, "it is hard
to tell whence the spark shall come that shall set it on fire'."
The spark is a trivial thing in itself; but the conJHagration may

be great, .ô
was in the case of the Oxford Movement fuel
it :
had been gathering for years, and Keble chanced to light it3
The case of the two brothers Newman is interesting. From
their common starting-point they diverged as wide as the poles
so that, while the elder brother surrendered his judgment to an
infallible Church and then to an infallible Pope, we find the
younger discussing the defective morality of the New Testament,

and giving reasons why he cannot call himself a Christian. This
wide divergence had its source in an innate difference of character.
"I am more thankful on your account than on his," writes the
mother to J. H. Newman on the younger brother winning a
fellowship at Balliol. " He is a piece of adamant. You are such
a sensitive being'." But the difference is also illustrative of the
two great currents of thought of the century; the one brother
hears and obeys the call of reason, the other takes shelter under
authority.
V It w as in 1826 that the memorable friendship between Newman

and Hurrell Froude bega^Tj Froude has left no writing worthy of
his high reputation. He was the author of only two of the Tracts
for the Times; ihs. ' Remains (18387-1839), published after his
death, are disappointing; and the few pieces from his pen in
Lyra Apostolica do not suffice to lift him to the rank of the poets.
Froude had bad health, and his mind seems to have been critical
rather than creative. Though these two causes sufficed to check
his productiveness, contemporaries bear emphatic testimony to
1 Politics, viii. 4. 1. " Essay Of Seditions and Troubles.
' Newman's Letters, i. 134.
Xl8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
the greatness of his powers. \ Much as Newman admired Keble,

he writes that in variety and perfection of gifts, he thinks Froude
far exceeds even him^^^Jêither can the greatness of Froude's
influence on the movement be doubted. It was a personal and
impelling influence he caused others to do what he himself could
:
not, or at least did not do. Moreover, he was bold to the verge
of rashness, and boldness was needed if the friends were to succeed.
"If the times are troublous, Oxford will want hot-headed men,
and such I mean to be, and I am in my place^" wrote Newman.
Froude would have concurred.
(j;he mainspring of the Oxford Movement was the dread of
rationality The majority knew it only as it was exemplified in
the Noetics ; but they saw, some dimly, others with greater clear-
ness, that the principles of the Noetics, logically carried out, led a
long way. The history of the French Revolution showed how
much authority had to fear from the application of such principles.
A few, with wider knowledge, perceived that Germany was the

home of a school of theology working upon those principles, a
school of wider learning and of more boldly speculative spirit than
that which was springing up in England. was to counteract It
this German school and to warn religious minds against it that
Hugh James Rose and published his Discourses on the
delivered
State of the Protestant Religion in Germany (1825), to which
Pusey replied in a work already alluded to'. Pusey was as hostile
as Rose to rationalism, and his quarrel with the latter was only on
certain errors into which Rose had fallen, and certain misrepresenta-
tions of individual German theologians into which he had been led
by imperfect knowledge of the subject.
It was not, however, along this line that the Oxford Movement
was destined to advance for Newman hi&self was ignorant of

;
German. pThe problem for him was how to check the growth of
rationalism as he saw it in England, ^^ê set to work as soon as
he returned from his sojourn on the Continent; the Avians of the
Fourth Century, at which he had been labouring before he left,
was published within a few months of his return; and before the
close of the year 1833 the first of the celebrated Tracts for the
' Letters, ii. 174. " iiid. i. 250. ^ ante, p. 105.
THEOLOGY lig
Times (1833-1841) appeared. Newman was, as is well known,

the soul of the Tracts, writing twenty-nine of them, and more or
less inspiring many of the rest. The notorious Tract XC was
fiom his pen.\The tone of the Tracts had been steadily becoming
more and more Romish; not without reason, the suspicions of
Protestants had been growing deeper and deeper ; and Tr<xct XC
was a little more than they could bear. The story of the commo-
tion it excited is so well known that it need not be retold. \lt^
drove Newman to Littlemore ;| the surprising thing is that it did
not drive him farther ; and weTian only accept with astonishment,
as another illustration of the mysterious working of the human
mind, the statement that he regarded Littlemore as his Torres
Vedras, whence, like Wellington, he was to advance once more
and conquer. The younger Newman expresses a very natural
surprise that it took his brother ten years to discover to what goal
he was going. After the last of the Tracts, four years had still to
elapse before he was received within the fold of the Romish Church.
Before the close of the Anglican period Newman had written,
besides the works mentioned. Lectures on Justification (1838) and
an Essay on tlie Miracles recorded in the Ecclesiastical History of
theEarly Ages (1843), ^s well as a large number of sermons.
The Essay on Miracles drew from Macaulay the remark that " the
times require a Middleton'." It is an attempt to secure for the
miracles of the early Church the same credence which, until lately.
Protestantism readily gave to those of the Scriptures. Just as the
latter were becoming incredible the former were to be added,
not a mere straw, but a huge bundle, to an overburdened back.
Nothing can more strikingly illustrate the hopelessness of the task
in which Newman was
engaged. " Our popular religion," writes
Matthew Arnold, "at present conceives the birth, ministry and
death of Christ, as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracle;
-ând miracles do not happen^."
The works of Newman after his secession are very numerous.
His delightful purity of style is the charm of them alliBut no
man can surrender his freedom without danger to the iateUecfl
^ Macvey Napier's Correspondence, 437. '
' The italics are Arnold's.

I
and it may be doubted whether Newman ever produced anything
quite worthy of the powers with which he was endowed, except —
the Apologia, which illustrates how indignation bursts all bonds
and makes eloquence as well as verse. The process of deteriora-
tion had begun long before the close of the Anglican period.
Few great men have left letters more disappointing and barren
than those of Newman during that period. They give the impres-
sion, not of a man, but of an ecclesiastical machine. There is no
humour, little satire, recommend them except
hardly anything to
limpid English. The same impression is left by Newman's two
disappointing tales. Loss and Gain (1848) and Callista (1856),
both of which were intended to further the cause of Catholicism,
and neither of which has any other value.
Next to the Apologia, the most remarkable of Newman's works
is the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). It well illustrates
Newman's quickness Mr Benn^

in apprehending an advantage.
ascribes to the French Catholic reactionary Bonald the credit of
introducing the idea of development into theology. Newman felt
at once what an advantage it gave a Catholic in attacking the
Protestant position. The Protestant — and the Tractarian—argu-
ment was Rome had
that introduced innovations on primitive
practice. ( Newman replies that in every living institution, as in
every living being, there is a natural principle of growth, and that
the changes which this growth brings are not to be regarded as
corruptions or perversions ; the final state is as natural as the
primitive state; it is indeed that for which the primitive state
existed. And this law of development supplied, to Newman's
mind, a remarkable proof of the truth of Roman Catholicism.]
Properly understood, it showed that Rome was in the direct line
of succession from primitive Christianity; not the same as that,

but an outgrowth from it as natural and necessary as branch and
twig and leaf are from the trunk. All Protestantism, on the
contrary, including Anglicanism, was an aberration, a thing off
the true line of development. Possibly Newman might have
needed all his ingenuity to stop the argument just at the point
when it would have become dangerous to his own position ; but
* English Rationalism in the XIX Century, ii. 7.
THEOLOGY 121
at least it was not easy to meet him on the lines of orthodox

Protestantism. The great idea for which he contended was the
master-thought of the century; and the principle of Protestantism
was was a point far in the
that, in respect of religious truth, there
past where development had ceased'.

<,This was Newman's one great principle for the future. There
is no further growth. The step which he took in 1 845 sacrificed
his freedom and could not but tend to belittle his mindX Stanley
felt this. His interview with Newman in 1864 "left the impres-
sion, not of unhappiness or dissatisfaction, but of a totally wasted
life, unable to read, glancing at questions which he could not
handle, rejoicing in the caution of the Court of Rome, which had
(like the Privy Council) kept open question after question that he
enumerated as having been brought before it"." On such crumbs
from the rich table of truth had that great intellect to feed, —always
with a glance to this side and that he might find the icrumb
lest
claimed by a mightier power, never certain when the open question

might be pronounced to be open no longer. He was forced to
bow his head in 1870 to the dogma of papal infallibilityJL5uch is
the price paid for the abnegation of intellectual duw. QJewman

says that his entry into the Romish Church was "like coming into
port after a stormy sea." Doubtlessit was.3 The sea was the sea
of Truth, and the storms were the storms of doubt which inevitably
sweep it for those who boldly spread their sails and steer towards
the sunrise. Those storms could blow no longer in the still haven
sheltered all round by the breakwaters of authority. , But what a

false idea of life, —what a pitiable conception of duty, as contrasted
with the conceptions of the other great intellects of the time
" Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well," writes Arnold :
and Emerson declares that every man has some time or other to
choose between rest and truth. LNewman chose the ignoble
alternative.V He seems never to have suspected or, if he did, —
1 Huxley, who approached the doctrine of development without theological
prepossessions, in the article on Agnosticism and Christianity, uses Newman's
work to enforcei his argument against both Newman himself and Newman's
Protestant opponents.
' Life of Sfai^ley, ii. 344.
he never dared to face the suspicion — that his own law of de-
velopment, more widely and fearlessly applied, would have shown

that the doubt he discarded was an evidence of progress, not of
decay. He never felt the confidence expressed in Tennyson's
well-known lines, and Rabbi Ben Ezra, that
in Browning's noble
it is the "finished and finite clod" which "untroubled with a
is
spark." Still less could he rise to the conception, embodied in
one of the latter poet's latest pieces, Rephan, that evil itself,
because of the struggle it evokes, is to be welcomed in preference
to a "neutral best." Carlyle tells us that "Man's Unhappiness...
comes of his Greatness ; it is because there is an Infinite in him,
which wjth all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite."
Mill, in a passage eloquent with passion, declares that he will brave
hell itself rather than what is highest within himself, or
be false to
assert to be true what that highest pronounces false. It was with
such intellects that Newman was meant to stand; but he has

pronounced his own doom, and, beautiful as is his English, he
has left no legacy worthy to be treasured along with theirs. If
ever there was a "lost leader," it was Newman. His place by
right of intellect was with " the van and the freemen " ; his choice
of "rest" instead of "truth" condemned him to "sink to the
rear and the slaves'."
Trhe central principle of Newmanism is expressed in a sentence
in the Apologia,which declares that there is " nQ.medium, in true
philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicity".^*^ The Grammar
of Assent {\?)']o), a subtle and interesting but essentially sonh^tical
book, was written principally to enforce this proposition. Jjt was
this belief, growing more and more fixed in his mind, which led
Newman from Calvinism along the via media to Rome. Step
after step, the ground sank beneath him, until at last he saw no
refuge but the complete abandonment of himself to authority^ If

he ever thought of a reversal of the process, like Carlyle's bold
defiance to the Everlasting No, he did not venture upon itTJ
Strange if it never occurred to him that his pyramid was resting
' I do not mean to suggest that Newman was personally untruthful: I use
the word " truth " in the sense in which Emerson, in the passage referred to
above, contrasted it with "rest." « Apologia, 198.
THEOLOGY I 23
on its apex ; for however safe a man may feel under the shelter of
authority, he is logically bound to ask himself on what principle
he selects the authority. There are many claimants for his
allegiance. "There is but one God, and Mahomet is his pro-
phet." Why not this refuge rather than the Catholic Church?
Why not Buddhism, which presents so many analogies to the
theology of Europe that the early Romish missionaries were driven
to conjecture an intervention of the devil for the confusion of the
faithful? Whynot any other refuge? In spite of Newman's
belittling of reason and repudiation of the right of private judg-
ment, there must be an act of reason and an implicit assertion of
that right in the first and most momentous step of all, the deter-
mination of the question, which of the claimants is the Infallible
Authority ? If so, why does the right cease at that point ? The
hardness of the alternative therefore vanishes ; and authority itself
is completely undermined if the person subject to it is to choose

the sovereign.
Newman has been praised for the subtlety of his logic; and
within certain limits he did possess a most subtle gift of reasoning.
But before we praise it unreservedly, we should do well to note
what are the limits within which this logical power is confined.
It speedily appears that the use of it is, not so much to discover
truth, as to support and buttress a foregone conclusiqn. Hence
Kingsley's charge of dishonesty ; hence the effect Newman pro-
duced upon the mind of Huxley, who, writes " After an hour or :
two of him I began to lose sight of the distinction between truth

and falsehood^", Newman was npt consciously or intentionally
dishonestjÛt he used reason to maintain beliefs which had been
reached without its aidj This is the secret of his constant use
of arguments which rnust be described by the phrase "special
pleading." The vital thing has tajfen place before; the arguments
are altogether subordinate. Science has "little of a religious
tendency; deductions have no power of persuasion. The heart
is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the
imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of

facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us,
^ Life offfuxly/, ii. 225.
voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man
will live and die upon a dogma : no man will be a martyr for a
conclusion. A conclusion is but an opinion; it is not a thing
which is, but which we are and it has often
^ quite sure about' ;
been observed, that we never say we are sure and certain without
implying that we doubt. To say that a thing must be, is to admit
that it may not be. No one, I say, will die for his own calculations
he dies for realities. This is why a literary religion is so little to
be depended upon ; it looks well in fair weather ; but its doctrines

are opinions, and, when called to suffer for them, it slips them
between its folios, or burns them at its hearth ^"
This passage, written in 1841, and emphasised by the author's
quoting it from himself in 1870, is very significant. Few would
deny that much of it is true, and the truth is admirably expressed.
"Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds
inflame us." Such things are not susceptible of demonstration,
yet we feel their profound reality. It would be absurd to apply
logical formulae to voices and looks, and often even to persons

and deeds ; yet these are the sort of realities for which men die.
Everything, however, depends upon the application. What are
the " dogmas " and the " mysteries " for which it is worth living
and dying, the " realities " which are so far superior to the things
we are "quite sure about" as to need no proof? Many have felt
a shock on discovering that central among them is the Athanasian

Creed. This " is not a mere collection of notions, however mo-
mentous. It is a psalm or hymn of praise, of confession, and
of profound, self-prostrating homage, parallel to the canticles of
the elect in the Apocalypse. It appeals to the imagination quite
as much as to the intellect. It is the war-song of faith, with which
we warn first ourselves, then each other, and then all those who
are within and the hearing of the Truth, who our God
its hearing,
is, and how we must worship Him, and how vast our responsibility
will be, if we know what to believe, and yet believe it not.... For
myself, I have ever felt it as the most simple and sublime, the
most devotional formulary to which Christianity has given birth,
more so even than the Vent Creator and the Te Deum'."
* Grammar of Assent, 92-93. * Hid, 133.
THEOLOGY I2S
After this amazing declaration it is difficult to proceed. Surely

the force of self-persuasion can go no farther ; surely he who could
speak thus had gone into a region of thought or feeling where
words had lost their common meaning. It might reasonably be
pleaded that to measure the Te Deum with logical compass and
square would be as misleading as would be the same process if it
were applied to Shakespeare's " We are such stuff as dreams are
made on." But the Athanasian Creed is cast in as hard, precise,
logical terms, as are the propositions of Euclid.' It purposely
seeks to constrain the reason; and Newman has given no good
ground for refraining to test it by the reason.
Tliis is, unfortunately, typical. First an illustration which
commands assent —then a dexterous twist in the process of
thought — then under shelter of the illustration something is
brought in which is wholly alien from it. This is why so many

have felt that Newman is not so much a logician as a sophist.
His mind is made up from the start, and his logic is not that
of a seeker for truth. Hence, he is sometimes contented with
reasoning which, to such an intellect as his, ought to have been
contemptible. Occasionally, those who had been fascinated into
discipleship >
by the attractiveness of his personality, the plausi-
bility of his argument and the charm of his style, won their
deliverance so. J. A. Froude owed his to a sophism of Newman's
about the word motion. "Scripture,"' said Newman, in a sermon,
"says the earth and the sun moves; science, that the
is stationary
sun is stationary and the earth moves, and we shall never know
which is true until we know what motion is." Froude argued
that if Scripture did not mean by "motion" what all men intend
to convey by the word, he could never be sure what it did mean;
and he turned his back upon Newmanism^.
Sophistry of this kind, however, is by no means confined to
Newman, or to Newman's party. When Mansel roused the in-
dignation of Mill by arguing that the "justice" of God may be
something different — not higher or purer, but wholly diiferent in
quality —from the "justice" of man, he was using exactly the
same sophism; and all the numerous tribe of the reconcilers of
* Nemesis of Faith,
Genesis with science use it too when they put upon the words of
Genesis a non-natural meaning. It is seldom just to accuse them
of dishonesty or conscious disingenuousness; they feel that they

must defend what has been imparted to them as vital truth, and
they do it with the best weapons they can find.
In Newman's case the sophistry is the more frequent, because
it was by imagination, not by reason, that he reached what he
believed to be the truth. In him, the use of reason is always

subordinate. He long concealed the fact from his readers and
hearers, and partly from himself; because he must always clothe
his imaginings in the garb of reason. In more ways than this he
had great powers of self-deception. He was impulsive, and yet

he made himself believe that he was cautious and deliberate.
The long delay before he joined the Romish communion was
really a sort of veil hung. before his own eyes. Any dispassionate
observer could see from a very early date what the result must
inevitably be.
While in other respects Newman must be sorrowfully pro-
nounced a doubtful steward of the great talents committed to
;
him, in one point he deserves unqualified praise. L£Jo English
I
',
of the nineteenth century surpasses Newman's exquisite pros^

Some other writers may have equalled (though very rarely) ms
highest flights; but probably no other has continuously, from first
to last, written prose so pure, so flawless. Among contemporaries,

he who comes nearest to him is Froude; among writers of the
eighteenth century. Goldsmith. uThere is all the scholar's severity
in his choice of words and in the concision of his sentences;
nothing loud, nothing exaggerated, nothing importunate.^ Those
who listened to his conversation were impressed with the sense of a
force kept under severe restraint; and this impression is conveyed
also by his writings. One observer's description of the man might
stand almost equally well for a description of the style: "Nothing
more characterised Newman than his unconscious refinement.
It would have been impossible for him to tolerate coarse society,
or coarse books, or manners seriously deficient in self-respect and

tespect for others. There was also in him a tenderness marked
by a smile of magical sweetness, but a sweetness that had in it
THEOLOGY 1 27
nothing of softness. On the contrary, there was a decided severity

in his face, that severity which enables a man alike to exact from
others, and himself to render, whatever painful service or sacrifice
justice may claim.... The saying, 'Out of the strong came forth
sweetness,' was realised in Newman more than in anyone else
whom I have known^." Refinement—severity strength sweet- — —
ness, — all of these words are truly descriptive of the style as well
as of the character of Newman. One more characteristic deserves

specially emphatic notice, — its extraordinary range. In this respect
Newman surpasses both Goldsmith and Froude. In general, his
English flows on with such limpid simplicity that its excellence
escapes attention; but the finest distinction, the most elusive
subtlety, easily finds expression. Cold sarcasm, biting irony and
glowing passion are also within its scope. The note sinks and
rises apparently without effort; for Newman's art is perfectly con-
cealed.
An obvious distinction among the minor Tractarians (and,
compared with Newman, all the rest are minor) is that which
separates those who, like Newman, went over to the Roiriish
Church, from those who remained in the Anglican communion.
Among the former were F. W. Faber (1814-1863), best known as
a writer of religious verse, which is meritorious but by no means
great, and Frederick Oakeley, one of the historians of Trac-
tarianism, who tells us that, whatever the Tractarians might be
on the English side of the Channel, "there could be no doubt of
their perfect Catholicity on the other," and that they 'lused to
distinguish themselves by making extraordinarily low bows to
priests, and genufiecting, even in public places, to every one who
looked in the least like a Bishop"." To the same class belong

W. G. Ward (1812-1882), and H. E. Manning (1808-1892).
Perhaps before any of these notice ought to be taken of
Nicholas Patrick Wiseman (1802-1865), who, though not a Trac-
tarian, was, as the most distinguished English-speaking Roman
Catholic, the natural centre towards which the more advanced
Tractarians gravitated. Wiseman will always retain a place in
' Aubrey de Vere's Recollections, 278-279.
' Historical Notts on the Tractarian Movement, 73.
it were only for the fact that he was the original from
literature, if
which Browning drew Bishop Blougram; and, according to Father

Prout, Wiseman himself reviewed the volume in the Romanist
journal. The Rambler. He did it in the most good-natured fashion,
praising the "fertility of illustration and felicity of argument" of
Blougram. Though much of the matter of the poems, says
the reviewer, "is extremely offensive to Catholics, yet beneath
the surface there is an under-current of thought that is by no
means inconsistent with our religion ; and if Mr Browning is a

man of will and action, and not a mere dreamer and talker, we
should never feel surprise at his conversion^." Wiseman was
wrong, but the thought was suggested by the perception of a tone
of feeling which is really present in Browning.
Wiseman perhaps took from Newman's Loss and Gain the
idea that the novel might be used as a vehicle for disseminating
Catholic truth; and with this purpose in view he wrote Fabiola
(1854), a tale of theChurch of the Catacombs. It won immense
success, and was soon translated into all the principal and not
a few of the less important European languages. By this book
Wiseman is far more widely known than by his Connection between
Science and Revealed Religion (1836), or by any of his theological
or controversial writings. But he was not a great writer. His
style was impure and verbose; for he had spent so much of his
time abroad that he had got out of touch with the English
language as well as with English life. According to Monckton
Milnes", he was described by a German translator of his Horx
Syriacce as a "from-an-Irish-family-descended-in-Spain-born-in-
England-educated-in-Italy-consecrated-Syrian-Scholar"; and that
remarkable polysyllabic creation not inaptly indicates the pro-
portion of England in him.
Wiseman is credited by Newman with a perception of what
was coming when, in 1835, he lectured in London on The
Principal Doctrines and of the Catholic Church; and
Practices
Newman adds that he "created an impression through the
country, shared in by ourselves, that we had for our opponents
' Quoted in Fumivall's Biblicgraphy of Browning, 54.
' Monographs, quoted in the Library of Literaiy Criticism.
THEOLOGY 1 29
in controversy, not only our brethren, but our hereditary foes\"

Wiseman's was at this time a name known throughout the Catholic
world ; the names of the Oxford band were only beginning to be
known outside Oxford itself. In the University, the reputation
of W. G. Ward was second only to Newman's. A brilliant
talker, a daring controversialist, scornful of compromise, he fixed
attention upon himself; and he held it by his intellect. In
after years he was one of the most extreme advocates of the
ultramontane doctrine of infallibility. Anti-rationalist as he was,
he might almost from one point of view be regarded as the
" reasoning machine " which the Utilitarians were said to be.
"He used," says Church, "to divide his friends, and thinking
people in general, into those who had facts and did not know
wha;t to do with them, and those who had in perfection the
logical faculties, but wanted the facts to reason upon"." Church
adds that Ward belonged to the latter class. He afterwards used
these faculties to good purpose in the Essays on the Philosophy
of Theism (collected in 1884), in which he crossed swords with
Mill. But the book by which he is best known is his Ideal of
a Christian Church (1844), which led to his degradation from
the degrees of B.A. and M.A. The book is a sort of gospel
of Tractarianism in its utmost development; but though it had
great influence at the time, as a piece of literature it is poor.
If Ward's friend Newman was almost the best of English stylists,
Ward himself was not very far removed from the worst. The
words of Jenkyns, the Master of Balliol, were critically accurate
"Well, Ward, your book is like yourself, fat, awkward, and un-
gainly*."
Though Manning has been named as one of those Tractarians
who passed over to Rome, it is not strictly correct to call him a
Tractarian; not correct, at least, if we mean by that either a
contributor to Tracts for the Times, or a man closely associated
with the contributors. Manning did not know Ward till after the
latter's degradation in 1845; he condemned Tract XC as being
casuistical ; and it was not till he had travelled on th© Continent
1 Apologia, 64. " Church's Oxford Movement, JOJ.

' W.G. Ward and the Oxford Mmiement.
W. Q
in 1847-1848 that he began to doubt whether the position of the
High Church Anglicans could be maintained. He was troubled,
because he found it always difificult and sometimes impossible to
make foreigners understand why men holding such views should
not be Roman Catholics. The Gorham controversy, turning as
it did upon the question of baptismal regeneration, in which
Manning had always shown a special interest, further weakened
his shaken faith; and in 185 1 he followed Newman into the
Romish Church.
Manning, who was, after Newman, the greatest of those who
went over to Rome, presents a strong contrast to the latter ; and
it is notorious that there was little love lost between the two
Cardinals. Newman was the typical student and scholar, almost
the recluse,
—" nunquam minus solus qualn cum solus," as
Copleston finely said of him. Manning was essentially the man

of affairs. His delight was in practical and administrative work.
He played an important part in the CEcumenical Council of 1870,

the history of which he has told in the True Story of the Vatican
Council (1877); and he threw himself zealously into such social
questions as the great London dock strike of 1889. He had
not the ambition, and probably he had not the power, to excel in
literature.
Along with the other class —the class of those who remained
content with the via media although its great engineer himself
deserted it — may, for the sake of convenience, be included one
or two who, though more or less in sympathy with the fundamental
ideas, could not be described as members of the Tractarian party.
One of these was Walter Farquhar Hook (1798-1875), who became
Dean of Chichester. Hook was one of the pioneers of " High
views ; but he shrank from extremes, and though from his vicarage
of iLeeds he lookedupon the Tracts with sympathetic interest,
developments thoroughly frightened him. There is a
their later
comic element in a correspondence between him and Pusey,
Hook, on the eve of Newman's secession, suggesting to Pusey
that " We ought to put forward the Protestant view ot our Church
in the strongest way'." It was a time of rapid movement, and
^ Life of Pusey, ii. 488.
THEOLOGY I 31
he who had been yesterday in the van was in danger of finding

himself to-morrow a mere unnoticed fragment of the main body.
Hook's only book of note is the bulky Lives of the Archbishops
of Canterbury (1860-1876), which carries the narrative down to
Archbishop Juxon. It is not a great work. The plan promised
neither the advantages of great history nor of good biography.
For the highest kind of biography, personal acquaintance with
the subject of the biography is indispensable ; and great history
demands a kind of unity. On one condition only could the Lives
of the Archbishops have been raised into a great history of the
Church in England. That condition was that all the Archbishops
must have been really as well as officially the heads and centres
of Church life in their time. In point of fact, they were not.
Some of the Archbishops of Canterbury were great men ; others
were mediocrities. The interest, therefore, of Hook's work is inter-
mittent ; it is a collection of fragments. The same inherent vice

of plan mars Lord, Campbell's Lives of the Lord Chancellors
(1845-1869), which afforded a precedent to Hook.
Samuel, Wilberforce (1805-1873), the celebrated Bishop of
Oxford, stood at a greater distance from the movement than
Hook, and, though sympathetic, was from the first cautious a,nd
reserved in his attitude towards it. His High Churchmanship
was derived, not from the Tractarians, but rather from the older
Anglican tradition. The Clapham associations of his birth arid
1
early life tended to moderation ; and the strongly practical and

mind made him suspicious of speculative
sta,te§manlike cast of his
conclusions when they threa.tened to create practical difficulties.
Long before Tract XC, therefore, .he began to show his dis:
approbation of much of the work that the Tractarians were doing.
Tract LXVLI'm particular, dealing with sin after baptism, incurred
his disapproval. Half of his University Sermons (1839) were in
effectan examination of its doctrijnei; and he wrote to his brother
Robert in strong terms about the defence afterwards issued by
Pusey, the author of the tract, denouncing part of the argument
as "special pleading and quibbling, of which I could not have
l?,elieved Pusey capable^'' :
^ AshweU's Life, of Wilberforce, i, 155.
9-2
It was as an administrator, as a preacher and orator, and as
a brilliant conversationist, that Wilberforce most impressed men.

In the unanimous opinion of his contemporaries, very few equalled
and scarcely any surpassed him in these respects. So deep is the
mark he has left by his practical work that he has been called
"the remodeller of the episcopate"; and there remain sufficient
relics of his ready and witty conversation to prove that he only
needed a Boswell to be assured of a rank among talkers second

only, in his generation, to that of Carlyle. His published sermons
and especially those preached
scarcely sustain his reputation. They,
afterhe became bishop, were the productions of an extremely busy
man who was often forced to rely upon his readiness to supply the
lack of preparation. Nevertheless, his position even in literature
is a respectable one. The Life of William Wilbetforce (1838),
which he wrote in conjunction with his brother, is a bright and
readable biography. He was one of the most successful of the
ecclesiastical story-writers, and his allegorical tale, Agathos (1839),
as well as its successor. Rocky Island (1840), won a very wide

popularity. He was, however, most conspicuous as a writer of
articles in the Quarterly Review on topics of controversy. These
were collected and republished in 1874; but they are not among
the small number of such collections which have become a
permanent possession of literature. Wilberforce was too often
on the side which was popular in clerical circles at the time, and
which has not won the suffrage of later years. He was the author
of a celebrated review of Darwin's Origin of Species, to which
referenceis made elsewhere; and in an article on Essays and
Reviews he championed another " lost cause."

Of the actual contributors to Tracts for the Times, the only
ones calling for notice, besides Newman and Keble and Hurrell
Froude, were Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882) and Isaac
WilliamSj of whom
the last has won a reputation, such as it is,
chiefly in poetry.Pusey was the chief man of the section of
the Tractarians who remained in the English, as decidedly as
Newnlan was the chief of those who seceded to the Romish
Church. He was a man of profound learning, which was by no
means confined, as the learning of theologians in that age too fre-
THEOLOGY 1 33
quently was, to professional and quasi-professional subjects. His

familiarity with the German language and with German philosophy
has been already mentioned. In his hands was the key which to
so many others of that time opened the door of intellectual
salvation,and showed a way as remote from the bare negation
of the spiritual, on the one hand, as it was from Catholicism
on the other. ^The reason why the result in Pusey's case was
so different is probably to be found in a certain confusion of
mind lying behind all his learning, certainly unremoved by it,
possibly increased by its very greatness. ^ George Eliot's caustic
description of Casaubon contains a trutfi'which may be generalised,
—a truth vigorously expressed in the great Duke of Wellington's
regret that a certain peer's education had been " so far too much
for his abilities." Casaubon was too highly educated for his in-
tellect; he had accumulated knowledge until he had lost the
power to use it, or even to understand it He could not see the
wood for the trees. was with Pusey, to whom above
Even so it
all men of the nineteenth century the moral of Casaubon is appli-
cable. CHis books are, in a literary sense, contemptible, the style

crude, ungainly and confusedrj His judgment was far inferior to
his knowledge. He had no penetration he seemed to be on the
;
verge of the discovery of great truths; he might even be said

to have them in his hand; and he never suspected the fact.
"He never knew when he burned V
said Newman of him,
alluding to the children's game in which the blindfolded searcher
is guided by the words, "warm," "hot," "you bum/\ To this
obtuseness, if it may be called so without offence, was added

another cause, an obstinate prepossession in favour of authority.
He objected to the German theologians that their theories " pull
to pieces what has been received for thousands of years," as if
the antiquity of a belief were a sufficient ground for accepting it
Under the influence of this obstinate prepossession, the mind of
Pusey was hermetically sealed against German philosophy. He
knew it, and yet he knew it not Where it began to diverge
from the things which had been received for thousands of years,
there he ceased to regard it as possibly true. Hence it came that,
* A. de Vere's Recollectiom, -iT;.
notwithstanding all Pusey was all his life a drag upoh
his learning,
the wheel of progress. ^ He
was always to be found among the
reactionaries, his language was often violent, and sometimes he
stooped to actions which many of his friends would wish to be
forgotten. He was one of those who opposed the proper endow-
ment of the chair of Greek at Oxford, because the holder of the
chair was Jowett, with whose opinions Pusey was, of course, in
bitter antagonism ; and he denounced in no measured terms the
appointment of Temple to the bishopric of Exeter, declaring it to
be "the most frightful enormity that has ever been perpetrated
by a Prime Minister'," and severing himself from Gladstone, who
was the minister responsible for this " enormity."
V There is distinctly traceable in Pusey's work a gradual deteriora-
tionJ His Historical Enquiry into the Causes of the Rationalist
Character of German Theology (1828-1830) is fair-minded as well
as learned ; and it brought upon Pusey an amount of abuse for
heterodoxy which ought to have taught him sympathy with others.
Ten years later, as we have seen, a man so well disposed to High
Church principles as Wilberforce denounces his "special pleading
and quibbling"; and six years later still, while he believes Pusey
to be "a very holy man," he thinks " his last letter about Newman
...deeply painful, utterly sophistical and false"." The later rela-
tions between Wilberforce and Pusey were not always very friendly,
and there may be some exaggeration in this language; but the
impartial critic will discern a diminution of candour in the progress
from the work on German rationalism to the tract on Sin after
Baptism, the teaching on the Eucharist and on Penitence, and
the critical principles (or the absence of them) in such writings
as the Commentary on Daniel. The Nemesis of an essentially
sophistigial position overtook Pusey, as it overtook Newman. It
is not easy to reconcile the refusal "to renounce any doctrine

formally decreed by the Roman Church'," with the candid
acceptance of Articles which declare a certain Romish doctrine
to be "a, fond thing vainly invented," and which further, without
any hint of a distinction between theory and practice, declare
• Life of Stanley, ii. 371. « Life of Wilberforce, i. 311.

' Life of Pusey, iii. 43.
THEOLOGY 135
certain other parts of the system to be " blasphemous fables and

dangerous deceits.'' No mind can go on arguing that " Black's
not so black, T-^nor white so very white," without suffering for it.
The boundary-line between truth and falsehood becomes blurred

Pusey was personally quite honest in intention ; but long habit
of making the worse appear the better reason, acting upon an
intellect inherently disinclined to probe questions to the bottom,
rendered him a most unsafe guide.
Among lesser figures, the two brothers Mozley deserve notice.
The elder, Thomas (i 806-1 893), is most likely to be remembered
as the author of one of the most spirited and readable accounts
of the Oxford Movement, the Reminiscences of Oriel (1882).
Bright and pleasantly written as is:Mozley's book, valuable as it
is in substance, because it gives an account of the movement from

the inside, and yet from another standpoint than Newman's, it has
not the perennial charm of that great spiritual autobiography, the
Apologia ; and nothing else left by its author rivals it in interest.
The younger brother; James Bowling Mozley (1813-1878), less
brilliant, but more profound, did work more solid, though less
likely to be remembered. He was among those who as time went
on became alienated from the extreme doctrines of the Tractarians.
He accepted the Gorham judgment with satisfaction, and traversed
the position of the Ritualists as to baptism in three publications.
The Augustinian -Doctrine of Predestination (1855), The Primitive
Doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration (1856), and A Review of the
Baptismal Controversy (1862). His best-known work, however,
is the volume of the Bampton Lectures On Miracles (1865), in
which he sets himself to prove the credibility of miracles, but
unfortunately leaves almost untouched that which was more and
more becoming the question of the men of science when they
—
thbught of the theme at all, ^viz., Are they proved? He thus
leaves uni-mpugned the criticisms of such a ' man as Huxley, who
abandons altogether the a priori argument against miracles, and
proceeds to examine the evidence for and against any alleged
miracle. "
Last among the personal disciples of Newman may be
mentioned Richard William Church (1815-1889); and he, the
youngest of the band, one least distant from Newman
is also the
in excellence as a and charm
writer, as a man. in His volume,
The Oxford Movement, published posthumously in 1891, is the
best succinct account which we possess, better as a history than—
even the Apologia ; for while the latter simply professes to trace the
development of Newman's own mind, Church's book is singularly
impersonal. It has been remarked that he is perhaps the only
writer who has ever written a history of events in which he played

a prominent part, and yet never mentioned his own name. Cer-
tainlyChurch showed modesty, and he had in a high degree the
power of self-effacement. But perhaps this, which was said in his
praise, was really his chief defect. After all, the business of a
historian is to tell the truth; and it is hard to see how that
can be satisfactorily done without giving to every actor his due
prominence. Probably we should do well to go back sometimes
from the Christian, or at least the popular, conception of humility,
to the Aristotelian conception of highmindedness. There could
be no greater contrast than that which exists, on this point, between
Church's book and an incomparably greater book, Knox's History
of the Reformation. And yet the egotism of the latter is one of its
greatest charms, and perhaps not the least element in its value.
Of all the men of the Tractarian party, Church was the most
Catholic, in a sensewhich they rarely gave to the word. He is
remarkably comprehensive, large and generous in his judgment of
men and things outside the range of his special sympathies. This
characteristic is seen in his references to contemporaries, where it is
most difficult to show such a virtue. An opponent is sure to have

fair treatment at the hands of Church ; there is no shibboleth to
be pronounced in order to win his sympathy. In this respect he
differs from the majority even of the best men on both sides
of the heated controversy in which he took part, and his only

rival in generosity of judgment is Stanley. This is the secret
of the excellence of his literary monographs.Whoever may be
his subject St Anselm (1870), Dante (1879), Spenser. (i&T 9) or
—
Bacon (1884), what Church has to say is worthy of the most
careful attention. The very choice of these men indicates
catholicity of taste; the sympathetic treatment of them all demon-
THEOLOGY 1 37
strates it. The severe Dante, the rich and sensuous Spenser, the
saintly Anselm, the not too
saintly Bacon^ all receive equal justice
at his hands. Yet he is not guilty of indiscriminate laudation.
In his judgment of Bacon, for example, he is as far removed from
the hero-worship of Spedding as he is from the excessive severity
ofRJacaulay.
Vlt has sometimes been said that the secession of Newman
stopped the Oxford Movement; but the statement requires ex-
planation and limitation, f The secession was a blow to the
movement in Oxford itself, but its progress in the country at
large was not stopped. On the contrary, the progress was prob-
ably greater and more rapid after, than before 1845. Doctrines
of confession and absolution, of the " sacrifice " of the Eucharist,
and all the rest of the sacerdotal system, have gone on propagating
themselves rapidly, and they are far more widespread now than
they were sixty years ago. But it is true that in Oxford itself the
effect of the secession was like that of an earthquake : men were
stunned; they hardly knew whether they were injured or un-
injured, alive or dead. As they recovered their senses, each had
to bethink himself of the ground on which he stood. A few
followed Newman; more were driven backwards to the position
of the moderate High Church; yet othersbecame bolder in
rationalism than their predecessors had ventured to be. Only a
very few, like Pusey, were hardly influenced in their opinions at
all. But the seed which had been sown, whether for good or for
evil, wasstill in the ground; and in due season it bore fruit
again, —
a fruit of somewhat different flavour from that of the
Newmanite school It must suffice to take one example, that of
Henry Parry Liddon (1829-1890).
Mark Pattison, in his Memoirs, remarks on the decline in the
interest in knowledge in Oxford after the rise of Tractarianism.
This remark seems, at first sight, to be contradicted by the facts.
Tractarianism led to a great outburst of speculation, to a ransacking
of the Fathers, to an investigation of the early history of the
Church, such as had been undreamed of by the old school of
contented orthodoxy. It was primarily a critical movement. But,
in the first place, the criticism was like a boxing-match with gloves
on. It was never pushed home. So long as its results tended
to support "catholic" doctrine, they were accepted; when they
threatened it, Pusey did not answer
the criticism was stopped.
German he simply pointed out that the ground was
rationalism :
forbidden ground, that the business of criticism was to agree with,

and by no means to dissent from, "what has been received for
thousands of years.'' Any real pursuit of knowledge under such
conditions is impossible. Science is a jealous mistress ; sh^ will
admit no rival ; her votary must swear

"To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought."
No such vow was possible to the Tractarians ; and therefore,
though the seed sown was Knowledge, the crop reaped was
Ignorance.
It may seem shocking to name, as an illustration of this war-
fare against knowledge, a man of such attractive personality, of so
great gifts and so great attainments, as Liddon; and yet that
is and work. He was the most eloquent
just the lesson of his life
English preacher of his day, and for twenty years he made the
pulpit of St Paul's a force to be reckoned with. Whenever there
was need, his powerful voice was raised for justice and for mercy.
His mind was highly cultivated ; his knowledge, in his own field,
was extensive. But it is just because he was the consummate
flower of his party, that he best illustrates the inherent antipathy
between Tractarianism and science, in the widest sense of the
word. Liddon seems to have had no searchings of heart, no
hesitation as to what he should believe or not believe. He at
once became a follower of Pusey, and he remained a follower
all his life. The point of interest about him is that his mind
seems, properly, to have no history at all. Pusey, as we have
seen, shrinks back from the comparative liberalism of his youth
Newman finds that there is no room for him within the bounds of
Anglicanism; Mark Pattison recoils from the verge of the gulf
which swallowed Newman, and becomes a thoroughgoing liberal.
Liddon passes through no such process. A development of thought
which is almost unparalleled takes place in his day ; but it moves
him not at all. The whole criticism of the Bible, from the points
THEOLOGY I39
of view of geology, of astronomy and of biology, leaves him un-

affected. He is indifferent to what is called the "higher criticism."
German idealism rises and flourishes in Oxford; and his only
feeling for it is a feeling of dislike. He does not take the trouble
to understand it.
This singular passivity is all the more remarkable because it is

not at all characteristic of the men of theHigh Church party still
younger than Liddon. In the career of the great preacher there
is! nothing more instructive than his attitude to Lux Mundi. He
loathed the doctrine of inspiration there taught, because he felt it
to be a manifestation of a new critical movement. In it, the

German philosophy, which Liddon had learned from Pusey to
dread and to hate, is translated into terms of theology, much as —
Bottom was " translated " ; it is reconciled with High Churchism
as '
successfully as Genesis has been reconciled with science.

Liddon's instinct was to leave things alone. Many labour to
introduce new ideas; he rather strove to avoid them. He 'was
from first to last opposed to putting the new wine of modern
thought into the old bottles of the creeds and formulae of the
Church. And from his own point of view, as an Anglo-Catholic,
who shall say that he was wrong ? Perhaps the process which he
set hisi face against may lead to strange results.
Tliis feature of Liddon's work renders his writings disap-
pointipg. In them, there is no thought in the making. The
popularity of the Bampton Lectures on the Divinity ofJesus (1867)
was diue, in the first place to their eloquence, and in the second
place to the very fact that they were destitute of originality. His
inordinately long Life of Pusey (1893-1894) shows that he could
not clondense ; and
not redeemed in the book, as it
this fault is
was iih charm of voice and manner.

the author's sermons, by
N'o other recent theologians have produced anything like as
great an effect upon general life, and consequently upon literature,
as thkC men of the Oxford Movement; but, though their work
mereily touches the skirts of literature, the great Cambridge trio,
Wesicott, Lightfoot and Hort^, cannot be passed over in silence.
1 BrookeFossWestcott(i8'35-i9oi); Joseph Barber Lightfoot (1828-1889);
Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828-1892).

In scholarship they were the profoundest of their time in England)
and they almost alone were fit to measure swords with the critics
of Germany, the greatest of whom spoke of them with respect.
They were remarkable not only in themselves, but in their alliance.
Two of them, Westcott and Lightfoot, were pupils of the same
—
school,— King Edward's, Birmingham, all three were members
and became Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; from 1872
to 1879 they were all teaching together at Cambridge; and for
the last year of that period they were all professors of divinity
there. The intimacy of the alliance was lessened, though the
friendship was in no way impaired, when Lightfoot in 1889
accepted the bishopric of Durham. This close intercourse of
minds essentially inharmony was beneficial to all ; and especially
to Westcott and Hort, whose joint work in the critical revision
of the text of the New Testament, originally undertaken when

they were resident apart, was much promoted by the intimacy
of their intercourse at Cambridge. It was in this department
probably that the work of the three friends was most valuable.
They were not highly gifted for philosophical speculation, nor
were they great on the literary side. Westcott at least had
singular difficulty in expressing himself clearly; and the value
of his judgment in things literary may be gauged by hi^ extra-
ordinary pronouncement that " a verse of Keble is worth vblumes
of Tennyson." But all had in a remarkable degree the teinpera-
ment of the scholar. The work which they did was perhaps that
which most demanded to be done. Both on the side of orthôdoxy
and on that of scepticism, there had been abundance of splecula-
tion it was time to take account of what was accurately known,
:
or could be discovered, with regard to the subjects in dispute.

For this end, no one did more than the three Cambridge men |
but for that very reason their work is in the main highly technical
and hardly belongs to literature. 1

CHAPTER II
PHILOSOPHY
Under the conditions which prevail in England, philosophy

is less subject to preconceptions than theology. Whatever may
be the value, or even the imperative necessity of creeds, their very
existence must to some extent hamper freedom of thought: where,
as in England, the accredited teachers of the subject in the great
Universities were until quite recently invariably men who had
accepted a whole system, their fettering power cannot fail to be
exceedingly great,^the simple fact that " free thought " is a term
of reproach, and a "free thinker" a person much more to be
avoided than a mere drunkard or liar, sufficiently indicates how
great. There no "articles" of philosophy; but
are, fortunately,
of course philosophy, like all forms of thought, is modified by its

historical setting; and it is no less necessary in the case of philo-
sophy than in the case of poetry, to get a clear conception of

the state of things about the close of the first quarter of the
nineteenth century.
Ever since the publication of Hume's Treatise of Human
Nature, the contribution of Scotland to philosophic thought has
been far greater than her population or her general culture would
justify anyone in expecting. At times it has rivalled, and perhaps
even surpassed, that of England. For some generations before
the opening of the nineteenth century, the study of philosophy
had been a tradition in the Scottish Universities ; indeed, it had
been so from their very foundation ; but in earlier days philosophy
was rather the handmaid of theology than a spirit of free and un-
trammelled investigation of the fundamental laws of the universe.
It is, therefore, necessary to ask what was the condition of philo-
sophic thought in Scotland in the early part of the nineteenth
century.
With the exception of Kant, the two most original thinkers of
the latter half of the eighteenth century were the Scotsmen,
David Hume
and Adam Smith. Their death left a blank which
was never and the development of what is called the Scottish
filled;
philosophy was on the line of opposition to Hume, not of agree-

ment with him or development from him. James Beattie and
Thomas Reid, both professors of the University of Aberdeen',
undertook the defence of orthodoxy against the assaults of the
sceptic. Beattie's book was just good enough to win the praise
of that sturdy bundle of prejudices, Samuel Johnson ; but it was
not good enough to be remembered. Reid, on the other hand,
founded a school, and is still well known as the father of the
Scottish philosophy. His disciple, Dugald Stewart (1753-1828),
was the chief of this school in the first quarter of the nineteenth
century. He had small power of original speculation, and added
little or nothing to the principles of Reid ; but his eloquence and
the moral elevation of his character made him a force not in
Scotland only, but throughout the English-speaking world. He
would have a claim to remembrance if it were only for the sake
of the greatmen whom he influenced. Among his pupils who
afterwardswon distinction in philosophy were Thomas Brown,
Sir James Mackintosh and James Mill. The founders of the
Edinburgh Review, Sydney Smith, Jeffrey, Brougham and Horner,
also owed much to his teaching; and the greatest of all his
pupils was Walter Scott. Most of the Senators of the College of
Justice for a generation also passed through his hands. It is a
convincing testimony to the charm of Stewart that with scarcely
an exception they speak in the warmest terms of his teaching
and influence. Scott writes that the "striking and impressive
eloquence" of Stewart "riveted the attention even of the most
1 Reid migrated in 1764 to Glasgow, where he succeeded Adam Smith in
the chair of moral philosophy.
PHILOSOPHY 143
volatile student'." Lord Cockburn declares that his excellence as

a lecturer was "so great that it is a luxury to recall it^"; and he
quotes with approval the saying of Mackintosh that " the peculiar
glory of Stewart's eloquence consisted in its having '
breathed the
love of virtue into whole generations of pupils^.' " Cockburn went
so far as to say that there was eloquence in Stewart's very spitting
(he was asthmatic). "Then," said the philosopher, to whom the
saying was repeated, " I am glad there was at least one thing in
which I had no competitor*."
Notwithstanding the charm of style and the personal attractive-
ness of Stewart, Scottish philosophy in his day was in its decline.
As has been already said, he added nothing to the substance
of Reidj and death rapidly swept away those who might have
supplied his deficiencies. Thomas Brown (1778-1820), who was
a poet as well as a philosopher, died before his teacher, to whom
he had acted as colleague from t8io to 1820, when Stewart
resigned. His speculative gifts were superior to those of Stewart,
and amalgam of Hume with Reid, is more
his system, a kind of
original; but the great fame and the wide popularity of his
Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect (1818) have long
been forgotten. Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832) was a man
of whom, if he had died young, it would have been said with
confidence that he had the capacity to do great work either in
philosophy or inhistory. He attained the age of sixty-seven, and
the work he actually accomplished must be admitted to be a little
disappointing. No due to him

fresh philosophical conception is
though he had a great reputation for learning, his knowledge both

of Greek and of German philosophy was superficial ; and his work
fares ill under the scrutiny of James Mill. The critic survived the
subject of his criticism only four years and with ; his death the
last great Scot of philosophic temperament seemed to have gone.
The clearance was as complete as that of the poets in the third
and fourth decades of the century.
The academical status of philosophy had fallen deplorably.
' Lockhart's Life of Scott, I. chap. i. " Memorials of his Time, 19.
' Life ofJeffrey, 49. "^
Memorials of his^Time, 21.
Professor Alexander Campbell Fraser declares that "in 1836
philosophy was at a lower ebb in Scotland than at any time since
the advent of Francis Hutcheson from Ireland to Glasgow, rather
more than a century before^"j and Professor Fraser speaks from
personal experience of two of the Scottish Universities. At
Glasgow indeed there was Mylne, whom he regards as " probably
the most independent thinker in the Scottish philosophical pro-
fessoriate of that time'," —a man who wrote no books but who
could evidently form the minds of his pupils. But in Edinburgh,
he found in the chair of logic David Ritchie, who treated the

subject "more as an appendage to his ministerial charge than as
the professor's supreme interest'." It is true that contempo-
raneously with Ritchie's tenure of the chair of logic, the brilliant
John Wilson held that of moral philosophy ; but, poet and man
of genius though Wilson was, he was not a philosopher. Indeed,
the fact that on the death of Brown he was elected to the chair
of moral philosophy in preference to Hamilton, is itself a proof
that the serious study of philosophy had ceased.
If Professor Fraser is right in fixing upon 1836 as the year in
which philosophy in Scotland had sunk lowest, this is a case in
which the darkest hour was just before the dawn; for in 1836
Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856) was appointed professor of
logic and metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh, and for

the remaining twenty years of his life he was generally regarded
as the foremost man in British philosophy. Hamilton had the
advantage of the double training of a Scottish University and of
an English one. Upon the metaphysical stock of the former he
grafted the scholarly culture of Oxford, but not perhaps her
scholarly grace ; for his learning sat somewhat heavily upon him.
Trained for the bar, he acquired sufficient legal skill to establish
his own title to a baronetcy ; but his true interest was always in
philosophy. He was an associate of that group of young men of
literary tastes who then abounded in Edinburgh. He shared
their full-blooded vitality, took part in the wild fun of the Chaldee
MS; is credited with the composition of one verse of it, and is
^ Biographia Philosophica, 46.

* ibid. 42. * ibid.
46.
PHILOSOPHY 145
said to have fallen off his chair with laughter at his own jest. A
mysterious estrangement between him and Lockhart was the cause
of life-long pain to both.
Hamilton had already reached middle age when he was
appointed professor of logic and metaphysics.For years he
had enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most learned
—
men in Britain, perhaps the most learned of all. He had
written little, but he had read enormously. Scarcely any subject
came amiss to him; no "authority"' was too mean to be consulted.
At Oxford he studied witchcraft: " He seriously considers it as worth
his while," says Lockhart, "to pore over Wierus and Bodinus, and
all the believers in witchcraft from St Augustine downwards ^"
He was familiar with the German revival of animal magnetism

when Carlyle knew him in 1824 ox 1825, long before the know-
ledge of it had spread to England'. Notwithstanding all this mass
of learning, at forty-eight Hamilton was still reading with the
voracious appetite of a man who is mastered by the instinct for
accumulating knowledge. In the interval between his appoint-
ment and the beginning of his duties, the reading went on at an
accelerated pace. The opening of the session found him with
little or nothing written, and the lectures afterwards so celebrated
were, his biographer says, the product of the night's toil before the
morning on which each was deUvered. Their history explains
some of the characteristics which strike the reader, but it hardly
excuses Hamilton's failure to remedy their defects in subsequent
years. The substance of thought is beaten out very thin, and the
excessive use of quotation seriously tells against Hamilton's claim
to originality.
During the twenty years of his professoriate Hamilton added
little to the substance of his lectures as they were originally
delivered. Neither did he write very much. An elaborate edi-
tion, with notes, of the works of Thomas Reidj an edition, less
important, of the works of Dugald Stewart; and a volume of
Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, reprinted (1852) from
periodicals, were the sole important publications of Hamilton's
life. His influence was mainly based upon the lecture room, and
^ Lang's Lockhart, i. 57. ' Veitchs Life of Hamilton.
w. 10
it is by the Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, published after his
death (1859-1861), that he is still best known.
The immense influence which, for about a generation, Hamilton

exercised over philosophic thought, was mainly due to two causes.
First and greatest was the personal magnetism of the man, which
was greatly increased by his position in the chair of metaphysics
in the metropolitan University of Scotland. Nearly all the ablest
men who passed through that University during Hamilton's tenure
of office bore his stamp through
life. PupUs of speculative pro-
Mansel and Veitch, the editors of the Lectures, were
clivities, like
often moulded in Hamilton's own image, and followed him with a

fidelity only too unquestioning. But they who largely disagree
with Hamilton bear testimony no less emphatic to his personal
attractiveness and his mental power. " I owe more to Hamilton,"
says the Berkeleian Professor Fraser, "than to any other intel-
lectual influenced" "Morally and intellectually," says J. F. Ferrier,
"Sir William Hamilton was among the greatest of the great A
simpler and a grander nature never arose out of darkness into
human life ; a truer and a manlier character God never made'."
And he who is thus warm in his praise adds that he knew Hamilton
"better than any other man ever did." The sway of Hamilton
was not, however, confined to men of philosophic tastes. A
Scottish professor of philosophy holds a position of almost match-
less power, if he only knows how to use it. Year after year scores
of young men, on the whole the ilite of the country, pass under
his influence, — ^nearly all more or less imbued with the national
taste for speculation, nearly all disposed to regard the professor as
an oracle. They become in after life, each in his own little sphere,
the leaders of the nation. The advocate at the bar, the village
minister, doctor, lawyer, schoolmaster, thus receive their education;
and through them the influence of one powerful mind may filter
down to hundreds and thousands who never. heard so much as
the name of the teacher. Ever since the revival of the Scottish
Universities in the eighteenth century, there have been a few such
men; and Hamilton was one of the greatest of them. He has left
* Biographia Philosophica, 58.
' Ferriei's Philosophical Works, i. £55.
PHILOSOPHY 147
no written work half as valuable as that which was inscribed on

the lives and characters of his pupils, and through them on the
nation.
The second source of Hamilton's influence (second in im-
portance, though first in time) was his learning. Years before he
had written anything of note, his name was known not in Britain
only, but in Germany as well, as that of one of the most learned
of living men in classics and philosophy. Since Hamilton's death,
doubts have been raised about the depth and accuracy of his
learning. But the question is not important ; for it is plain that,
though he had read enormously, he had not always read wisely
and his permanent fame is more likely to be damaged than
increased by his learning. Probably no Englishman at that time
had made so wide a study of German philosophy; but unfortunately
it was not a fruitful study. For comprehension of the mind of
Germany, Hamilton is not to be compared either with Coleridge
or with Carlyle. It is strange that> though Hamilton was an
admirable German scholar, he seems to have been content to

take his knowledge of Kant largely at second-hand ; but the fact
goes far to explain his blindness to the real significance of the
critical philosophy. He saw that it was important, and he turned
the attention of others to it ; but the man who wrote as he did
about the distinction between Reason and Understanding had not
penetrated deeply into it. "Why distinguish Reason {Vernun/t),"
he asks, " from Understanding ( Verstand), simply on the ground
that the former is conversant about, or rather tends towards, the
Unconditioned; when it is sufficiently apparent, that the Uncon-
ditioned is conceived only as the negation of the Conditioned,
and also that the conception of contradictories is one? In the
Kantian philosophy both faculties perform the same function,
both seek the one in the many; the Idea {Idee) is only the
Concept {Beg9iff) sublimated into the inconceivable ; Reason
only the Understanding which has 'overleaped itself \"' All
his reading of the Germans never revealed to Hamilton that the
significance of Kant lay in his going back to principles prior to
Reid, prior to Hume, prior to Locke. His attempt to weld the
* Discussions on Philosophy, 16-17.
10—2
incompatibles, Scottish and German philosophy, entangled him in
a hopeless maze.
" For thirty years past, I have been of opinion that the dedica-
tion of his powers to the service of Dr Raid was a perversion of
his genius, that this was the one mistake of his career, and that
he would have done far better if he had built entirely on his own
foundation \" So wrote Ferrier shortly after Hamilton's death,
and we can only repeat his words now. Led astray, perhaps, by
a mistaken patriotism, and an equally mistaken conception of
orthodoxy, Hamilton spent his life in a vain attempt to establish
the principles of the philosophy of common sense. That philo-
sophy was in its inception an attempt to buttress faith against the
sceptic battery of Hume, and that motive influenced nearly every
member of the school from Reid himself down to Mansel. Un-
fortunately, the essence of the attempt lay, not in an answer to
Hume, but in the assertion that no answer was needed. To
Hume's argument that we have no guarantee of any real nexus
between cause and effect, but only an experience of invariable
sequence, Reid in effect replies that the nexus is real, because he
and all plain men feel it to be so. No amount of rarefying of
common sense changes the essence of the argument, or meets the
objection that the same argument supports the belief that the sun
goes round the earth. Unquestionably our senses tell us so, and
no unsophisticated man ever thought otherwise.
This fundamental mistake vitiates all Hamilton's philosophy,
and makes his influence, both in logic and in metaphysics, some-
what unwholesome. His only important contribution to logical
doctrine (supposing the question of priority to be settled in his
favour) was the theory of the quantified predicate ; and its effect
was to force logic still farther along the barren path of formalism,
and to widen the breach between logical theory and the facts of
human thought The full advantages (such as they were) which
Hamilton claimed for quantification could be secured only at the
price of setting up propositional forms which no human being
ever used in practice ; and quantification further strengthened the
tendency among logicians, already far too strong, to regard the
' FeiTier's Philosophical Works, i. 556.
PHILOSOPHY 149
predicate equally with the subject as a class notion, ignoring the

fact that in the immense majority of significant judgments it is an
attribute. Even the person who uses the familiar example, Man
is mortal, seldom concerns himself with the question whether man
is all mortal or only some mortal ; and it is safe to assume that
Adam did not ask it when the death of Abel brought the fact of
human mortality home to him. Neither did the discoverer of the
X-rays, or of argon, or of radium, pause before announcing his
discovery, to ask whether his proposition was simply convertible,
or convertible only by limitation. The presence in the subject of
the attribute indicated by the predicate is sufficient : qua attribute,
it is all there, if it is there at all. The question whether it may

or may not be in something else is a later and a minor one.
In Hamilton's theory of perception we see the result of an
attempt to harmonise irreconcilables. While admitting that know-
ledge is subjective and relative, he tries to maintain the position
of "natural realism"; in other words, our minds make the
knowledge which we possess, and at the same time we know
an external world independent of our minds. A similar desire
to "run with the hare and hunt with the hounds" may be
detected in his theory of the conditioned. According to this,
human thought in the last resort is always driven to choose

between two contradictory alternatives, neither of which is con-
ceivable, and yet one of which must be true. For example,

space must either be limited or unlimited, and we can conceive
neither the one alternative nor the other. If we attempt to
imagine a limited space, we are driven immediately to ask, what
is the nature of the boundary, and what is outside of it ? If there
is something outside, what contains that something? if there is
nothing, how can nothing abut upon the boundary of space ?

On the other alternative of an unlimited space, the difficulty is
equally insuperable. We can conceive a space stretching on and
on indefinitely, but when we have widened our imagination to
the utmost, and conceived the distance between earth and the
remotest star multiplied by millions, we are still only at the
beginning oi infinity. In the same way, moral freedom and
necessity are alike unthinkable j
" but practically, our conscious-
ness of the moral law, which, without a moral liberty in man,
would be a mendacious imperative, gives a decisive preponderance
to the doctrine of freedom over the doctrine of fate. We are free
to act, if we are responsible for our actions'."
No doctrine more profoundly sceptical than this was ever
promulgated. The intellect is brought helplessly to a pause
before the two contradictory and inconceivable alternatives. And
yet one of them must be true. Hamilton's system supplies no
answer to the natural question, which ? So far as intellect is
concerned, might be determined by tossing a penny. In the

it
case of freedom versus necessity, indeed, an apparent success is

gained by the appeal to the moral imperative; but there is no
imperative to appeal to in the case of the inconceivables, bounded
or unbounded space, infinite or finite time. Neither is it clear
that such an appeal is possible as between the conception of a

world God-created or a world self-begotten or unbeginning. The
choice seems to be arbitrary. would appear that there may
It
be two systems of philosophy, absolutely contradictoryj and yet

standing on precisely the same plane, as regards the evidence of
their truth. But if the foundation is thus uncertain, what are
we to think of the superstructure ? Should we have chosen the
wrong alternative, surely no castle in the air could be more unreal
than the system built upon it. Hume himself was less destructive,
for he left undisputed the fact of invariable sequence. Yet there
can be no doubt that Hamilton's doctrine was advanced with the
desire to aid faith against unbelief,and under the honest con-
viction that would do so. Here, at the foundation of our
it
intellectual life, was mystery; and the addition of a few other

mysteries in its progress would matter little. If reason is so
impotent, what temptation is there to rebel against authority?
Hamilton accordingly expressed the conviction that the philosophy
of the conditioned would be found to be "the most useful auxiliary
of theology'." "A world of false, and pestilent, and presumptuous
reasoning, by which philosophy and theology are now equally dis-
credited, would be at once abolished, in the recognition of this
rule of prudent nescience'." Unfortunately, the author of the
' Discussions, Sao. ' ibid. 6»i. " Hid,
PHILOSOPHY 1 5
rule forgot that in retaining the positive teaching of theology

he was himself transgressing the rule. Others, less swayed by
prepossessions, were more logical; and the philosophy of the
conditioned becajme the foundation of the agnosticism of Herbert
Spencer and of Huxley.
Hamilton did not himself apply the philosophy of the con-
ditioned to the fundamental conceptions of theology ;' but he
distinctly suggested its application ; and he quoted with approval
—
"the declarations of a pious philosophy: 'A <jod understood
—
would be no God at all'; 'To think that God is, as we can
think him to be, is blasphemy'.'" The actual adaptation of
the Hamiltonian philosophy to theology was the work of Henry
Longueville Mansel (1820-187 1), the ablest of all Hamilton's
pupils. Mansel's great power and aeuteness of mind soon raised
him to prominence in the Church of England. At Oxford he
was successively reader in philosophy, Waynflete professor, and
professor of ecclesiastical history; and shortly before his death
he was appointed Dean of St Paul's. His chief works were the
Prokgomena Logtca ( 185 1 ), The- Limits of Religious Thought (1859),
which had been delivered in the year preceding their publication
as lectures under the Bampton foundation, and the Philosophy
of the Conditiomd {i?>66). In all of them, Mansel shows himself
the pupU of Hamilton; in the first-named, he expounds again with
great aeuteness the principles of the Hamiltoniain logic; in the
last, he defends both his mentor and himself from the strictures
of Mill, whose Examination of Hamilton had appeared shortly
before. But the work in which Mansel showed most originality,
and he is best known, is his Limits of Religious
that by which
Thought. The popular favour which this book won was balanced
by the powerful dislike it excited in the minds of men of the
most diverse views who saw the unsoundness of the foundation.
It was attacked by Maurice, who considered his controversy with
Mansel the most important work of his life. Mill called it a
" loathsome " book, and indignantly disowned all allegiance to
the God of Mansel. And Huxley Compared Mansel to the
drunken fellow in Hogarth's Contested Election, who is sawing
1 Discussions, ij, n.
through the sign-post on the outer end of which he is himself
sitting'.
What roused Mill's loathing was Hansel's distinction between

the relative morality of man and the absolute morality of God j
which seems to introduce the possibility that

in its application
absolute or divine morality may bear a strange resemblance to
human immorality. What stirred Maurice, as well as
relative or
many simple-minded pious people, was the perception that the
application of 'the Hamiltonian principle of the conditioned to
the conception of Deity, really makes it illogical to assert the
existence of a God at all. Numbers who had not the wit to

think of Hogarth's drunkard and his sign^post, felt dimly what
Huxley saw and were uneasily conscious that the foot-
clearly,
hold of faith was giving way. The wheel was come full circle:
Hamilton had dug a pit for Reason, and Faith was in danger
of falling in. It would not be easy to find a more striking
example of an intellectual Nemesis.

The first half of the nineteenth century was the period of the
sway of the Scottish school, but in the third quarter of the century
itwas ousted from the pride of place by the Utilitarians, whose
tenets were for a time receiyed as something like a philosophic
revelation.These Utilitarians form one of the most clearly-
marked groups in early Victorian They grew up

literature.
under the personal influence of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832),

the founder of the school, and for many years they grouped
themselves round his devoted disciple James Mill (1773-1836).
The dates of Bentham are noteworthy.. Though he Uved for
nearly a generation into the nineteenth century he was in all
essentials a man His Fragment on Govern-

of the eighteenth.
ment appeared in 1776, the year of the death of Hume, and his
Principles of Morals and Legislation was privately printed in 1780,
the year when the Encycloptdie was completed. The substance
of his thought is in harmony with the dates of these works. It
is essentially the thought of the eighteenth century; and thus

Bentham makes his disciples^ radical as tjiey were, in some
respects the most old-fashioned among the thinkers of the time.
' Lê of Huxley, i. toi.
PHILOSOPHY 153
More than anywhere else in the nineteenth century we find in

them the intellectual atmosphere of the eighteenth. They are
none of that glow from romance
inheritors of the Revolution with
which brightened others who were inspired by it. Theirs is still
the sphere of the understanding to the almost total exclusion of
imagination and of "reason" in the sense which it bears in
German philosophy. A cold, hard, clear and somewhat narrow
logic is the instrument of their thought. Suffrages, majorities,
ballot-boxes, the " machinery " upon which Carlyle poured his
ridicule, form their panacea for all social and political evils.
For metaphysical groundwork they go back to Hume and found
upon him in almost complete oblivion that the criticism of Kant
had intervened.
The founder of the Utilitarian school was a man who, more
perhaps than any other of equal distinction who ever lived,
needed an interpreter; and an interpreter he found in James

Mill, one of the earliest and assuredly one of the most efficient
of his disciples. Mill did not a little to import into English
thought a quality of his countrymen commonly believed to be more
characteristic ofthem than the mysticism of Carlyle. The phrase
"hard-headed Scot" is never better used than when it is applied
to the historian of British India. It indicates both his merits
and his defects ; and both alike attracted him to Bentham. Soon
after the beginning of the personal acquaintance between the two
men in 1808, Mill came to be recognised as the mouthpiece of
Bentham; and as his powerful intellect attracted men with tastes
and tendencies similar to bis own, while certain features of his
character, which show conspicuously in the autobiography of his
son, rather repelled an opposite type, his house became the chief
centre in London of the Benthamite thinkers. They derived all
the benefits which arise from intercourse with sympathetic minds;
but perhaps at the same time they suffered some of the evils from
which the association of a coterie is rarely free.
Among the men who frequented the house of James Mill were
John Austin (1790-1859), the philosophical jurist, and George
Grote, the historian of Greece ; and the influence of the former
introduced, a little later, his brilliant brother Charles, who gave
1 54 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
the Utilitarians a connexion with a remarkable set of Cambridge
men. More important than any of these was Mill's own son,
John Stuart Mill.
The bond which united these men was the bond of common
opinions. They all held the philosophical creed of Utilitarianism,
—
though they had come to it in different ways, John Mill by in-
heritance, Grote as a pupil of the elder Mill, Austin, as John
Mill tells us, by independent thought and investigation. Like
the founder of the philosophy himself, like English thinkers in
general, they were not content with speculation as an end in
itself. They philosophised that they might the better know how
to legislate and to govern; and so they were united also as a
political party, "the philosophical radicals." Though their doctrines
were at the time thought to be extreme, most of them would
appear moderate now. They were too deeply imbued with the
principles ofeconomics to lose hold of practical considerations,
and readers of Mill's Liberty need not be told that they were far
from desiring the subversion of order.
They were also united in what they rejected and in what they
lacked, as well as in the qualities they possessed and the opinions
they held in common. In religion, they were all sceptics more
or less complete. In respect of education, Grote, John Austin
and John Stuart Mill were all alike destitute of those University
associations and free from the influence of those University
traditions which as a rule do so much to mould the thought of
intellectual men. The fact that they had no share in those
associations and traditions made it easier for them to adopt
radical opinions, and perhaps made them more original. Possibly
the same fact may help to account for the tendency which they
show in their schemes and theories to forget or to underrate the
human element. The mingling in youth with equals of different
types and of contrary opinions would have helped to correct
this error. Though not solitary thinkers, they were essentially a
coterie, in spite of what John Mill did in the Utilitarian Society
to introduce other elements. No doubt the absence of University
training influenced their conceptions of what such training oughf
to be. Their educational ideals were German rather than English.
PHILOSOPHY 1 55
Further, all the Utilitarians (with the exception of John Stuart

Mill) showed the same striking deficiency on the imaginative and
emotional sides. They were too exclusively " reasoning machines "
and the defect is seriously felt in their works. It is this defect
which condemns Austin to creep along the ground, andj while
doing valuable work in reducing jurisprudence to a science, to
enunciate new principles so that they seem commonplaces.
Perhaps Grote suffered most of all. A little imagination would
have lighted up his drab and dreary style, and might have saved
him from the fundamental error of his history,, the naive belief
that it is possible to draw lessons direct from the Athenian
democracy of the fifth century b.c. to the English democracy
of the nineteenth century a.d.
The Utilitarians, then, inherit a philosophy for whose source
we must seek in the eighteenth century. On its basis they
and work zealously for the develop-
establish a political tradition,
ment of that democracy whose advent to power is the great
political feature of the nineteenth century. They are pioneers
in the movement for popular education. They are champions
of free thought; and for this reason they are regarded by the
majority of their contemporaries with deep distrust. They are
not by predilection literary at all, and they write books only
because they have to use language in order to communicate their
thoughts. Their literary sympathies are consequently Umited,
and, except in the case of John Stuart Mill, their literary gift is
not great The name Utilitarian is admirably descriptive of the

aim and spirit of the school; and whether their fundamental
principle be philosophically sound or not, at any rate the steady
pursuit of the end indicated by that name saved them from mere
logomachies and gave substance and body to their work. The
primary interest of Bentham himself lay, as is well known, in
legislation; and in respect of the theory of legislation his work
was carried on by John Austin, the most celebrated of English
writers on jurisprudence until, in Leslie Stephen's phrase, his star
set as the star of Maine rose.
Austin belonged to the class of men who enjoy among con-
temporaries a great reputation which can hardly be justified to
I $6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
after ages. TAe Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832) and

the Lectures on Jurisprudence, posthumously published in 1863,
do not bear out the opinion his friends held of him. They are
arid and verbose. Mill ascribes Austin's comparative failure to
over-elaboration: "When his task ought to have been completed,
he had generally worked himself into an illness, without having
half finished what he undertook." There must, however, have
been a deeper reason in mental deficiencies not suspected by
Austin's friends; for, in their literary aspect at least, his works
could well have borne more elaboration than they received, and
they are by no means conspicuous for that vigour and richness
of expression which, we are told, distinguished their author's
conversation. It cannot be pleaded that his subject did not
admit of attractive treatment ; for the example of Maine proves
the contrary. But comparison with Maine suggests that the
impression of aridity which Austin conveys to the modern mind
is due partly, not to his fault, but to a change in taste. He lived
before the rise of the historical school. He is highly abstract in
his method: his definitions of "sovereignty" and "law" are given
as things absolute, without, apparently, a suspicion that definitions
sound in a certain historical setting might elsewhere and under
other circumstances be quite misleading. Bagehot has aptly com-
pared jurisprudence so conceived with the economics of Ricardo.
Distrust of the method has led to doubt about the conclusion
in both cases. Granted the conditions presupposed, and the
reasoning is spund enough. But do the facts square with the
presuppositions ?
It was, however, to John Stuart Mill (i 806-1 873) that there
fell the task of carrying on the work of Bentham through the

period with which we have to deal, and to his influence must be
ascribed the temporary supremacy of Utilitarianism.
John Stuart Mill was a Benthamite from the cradle. For his
benefit his father devised, wholly under Benthamite ideas, the

extraordinary system of education described in the Autobiography.
Never was system more successful from the point of view of the
man who devised it, seldom have the efifects of an experiment
upon the subject of it been more debatable. In after years
PHILOSOPHY 157
we seem to see the soul of Mill, like Milton's lion at creation,

struggling to get free. Whether he ever succeeded, as the lion
did, is doubtful. "It may be questioned," writes a thoughtful
essayist, " whether the real John Stuart Mill ever did exist ; such
had been the effect of the force employed to impress the mould
of other minds on his\"
Mill himself estimated very highly the benefit he derived from
his father's system. Taught Greek at three, he grew up a prodigy
of precocious learning. " I started," he says, "I may fairly
say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my con-
temporaries"; and when we find men of talent and even genius,
who were twelve or fifteen years his seniors, treating him even in
boyhood as an equal, we see that there must have been good
ground for the assertion. Yet there were drawbacks whose im-
portance Mill may not have fully realised. " I am thus,'' he says
again, " one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who
has not thrown off religious belief, but never had it." This he
never regretted. But there was another omission which he did
live to lament. He confesses that his father's training led to "an
undervaluing of poetry, and of Imagination generally, as an element
of human nature," and that the common notion of a Benthamite
as " a mere reasoning machine " was, during two or three years,
not altogether untrue of him. He who bends nature too far
must beware of the rebound. The violent repression, for such
it really was, of one side of Mill's nature led, in 1826 and 1827,
to a spiritual crisis", and it is interesting to learn that in this crisis

Mill found comfort in the "healing influence" of that poetry which
his father and Bentham had depreciated, and especially in the
poetry of one so far removed from his teachers as Wordsworth.
Mill affords one of the best examples of the value of the study
of character as furnishing a key to the interpretation of writings,
1 Wilson Stuart's English Philosophical Styles.

' Bain and, following him, Leslie Stephen, ascribe this crisis to over-work;
but though over-work may have been the occasion, Mill's own account
(Autobiography, 132 sqq.) suggests that there was a deeper cause behind,
namely, dissatisfaction with what had hitherto been Iiis ideal of life, as a thing
too limited to yield satisfaction.
IS8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
even when they are of an abstract, philosophic kind. Critics of
his philosophyhave observed in how great a degree a con-

it is
glomerate of materials derived from all sources, and sometimes

imperfectly fused with its Benthamite basis. Critics of his style
have noticed how he frequently passes from an exact but ponderous
technical phraseology to an infinitely more telling but not always
exact form of popular statement These would be strange charac-
teristics if they belonged to a mere "reasoning machine"; but
they are explainable when we observe that the reasoning machine

was of James Mill's manufacture, and that the real John Stuart
Mill was a being highly emotional, sensitive to many influences,
not a mystic, as Carlyle at first took him to be, but with elements
in him which under other training might have developed into
mysticism. The man who found the balm for his spiritual trouble
in Wordsworth, the hero-worshipper who sat at the feet succes-
sively of Bentham, Comte, Mrs Taylor and her daughter,
Carlyle,
could be no mere machine for the manufacture of syllogisms. He
might be acute in handling them ; but he would never be either
wholly destitute of that inspiration which apprehends truths that
cannot be proved, or wholly free from the danger of sudden lapses
and inconsistencies. And it is just such inconsistencies which
form a trap for the unwary in Mill's writings.
MUl's engaging docility, the humility of mind which left him
open to the most diverse impressions, is by the
well illustrated
story of his relations with Carlyle. He found Carlyle hard to
understand. On reading Sartor Resartus he "made little of it";
but afterwards, when it was published, he "read it with enthusiastic
admiration and the keenest delight" He never did understand
Carlyle completely, and he never made any close approach to
Carlyle's opinions. " I did not, however," he says, "deem myself
a competent judge of Carlyle. I felt that he was a poet, and that

I was not ; that he was a man of intuition, which I was not ; and
that as such, he not only saw many things long before me, which
I could only, when they were pointed out to me, hobble after and
prove, but that it was highly probable he could see many things
which were not visible to me even after they were pointed out
I knew that I could not see round him, and could never be certain
PHILOSOPHY 1 59
that I saw over him'." The transparent candour of these sentences,

the unruffled evenness of judgment with which Mill compares
himself with his great contemporary, and the ready frankness with
which he admits the certainty of Carlyle's superiority in some
respects and the possibility of his superiority in others, are
admirable.
This passage illustrates well the possibilities for good inherent
in Mill's receptivity, and in his freedom from any overweening
egotism. The possibilities for evil also inherent in these qualities
are equally well illustrated by the continuation of the passage :
"I never presumedito judge him with any definiteness, until he was
interpreted tome by one greatly the superior of us both who —
was more a poet than he, and more a thinker than I whose own —
mind and nature included his, and infinitely more*." Needless to
say, this phoenix, who was more a poet than the writer of the
storming of the Bastille, and more a thinker than the author of the
Logic, was Mrs Taylor. In his references to her, Mill loses all
sense of measure and proportion, and it is keep due

difficult to
patience, even with the help of the reflection that the words are
the words of a doting husband about his dead wife. They are
also the words of a man who was liable to lose his judgment.
The book in which this interesting and attractive character
may best be studied is the invaluable Autobiography (1873); which
is not only, in the purely literary sense, one of the best of Mill's
works, but one of the most intferesting revelations of a great
mind ever given to the world. All the influences which went to
form Mill's intellect and character, all that he thought, all that he
was and aspired to be, are here explained with uncompromising
frankness. No form of literature is more attractive than auto-
biography when it is thoroughly sincere, as Mill's is. Whether
he always understood others, or even himself, may be doubted;
but in the Autobiography he always sets down what he really
believes. It is this, combined with the fact that the style is
throughout Mill's simpler, more homely style, that gives the book
charm. Without effort, without inflation or pretence,
its literary
but never meanly, he tells his story;; .and lew things in recent
1 Autobiography, 176. ' ibid.
l6o THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
literature are more worthy of attention than the narrative of the
way in which the powerful young mind grew under his father's
influence; how Dumont's Traiti de Legislation came upon him
; how " Philip Beauchamp's
almost as a revelation " Analysis of
the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of

Mankind had power upon him only inferior to that; how he
struggled to burst his bonds ; and how forces the most diverse,
some of them poles asunder from Benthamism, Wordsworthian,
Coleridgean and Comtist forces, produced their effect upon him;
and how finally a nature inherently emotional passed under the
sway of two women, Mrs Taylor and her daughter.
It is evident that from the first there were germs in Mill of
something richer than the hard and dry, though powerful, intellect
of his father could coinprehend. His face, as it may be seen
depicted by Watts on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery,
might pass for that of a mediaeval saint; and Gladstone, who
called him " the saint of rationalism," must have been impressed
by him in the same way as the painter was. In youth, Sir Henry
Taylor declared. Mill seemed so naturally and necessarily good
that men hardly thought of him as having occasion for a con-
science. Caroline Fox more than once remarks on the extreme
refinement of his expression; and in a letter to her Mill probably
betrays the secret of that refinement, in laying down the "one
plain rule of life eternally binding, and independent of all variation
in creeds," which is this : "Try thyself unweariedly till thou findest
the highest thing thou art capable of doing, faculties and outward
circumstances being both duly considered, and then do it.''
A man so constituted could not be bound within the limits
of any single formula or system. He had found in Dumont "a
creed, a doctrine, a philosophy ; in one of the best senses of the
word, a religion'"; but to the Gospel according to Bentham and
Dumont he soon added the Gospel according to Malthus, declaring
the population principle to be "quite as much a banner" as any
Benthamite principle. He added also many things much more
widely divergent from Benthamism. He took every opportunity
of cultivating the friendship of men of ability and character,
1 Autobiography, 67.
PHILOSOPHY l6l
however diverse He dates from meetings and

their opinions.
room his "real inauguration as an original and
discussions in Grote's
independent thinker^" He met and debated with the Owenites,
differing widely from them, but respecting their zeal for the social
improvement of the working classes. He made the acquaintance
also of the Coleridgeans, Maurice and Sterling, breathing in their
society an intellectual atmosphere wholly different from that to
which he had been accustomed; and we have already seen how
he wrestled with Carlyle, and, like Jacob of old, would not let
him go without a blessing. Mill judged correctly when he pro-
nounced himself much superior to most of his contemporaries " in
willingness and ability to learn from everybody °."
For thirty-four years of his life Mill was a busy official in the
India Office ; and, like many other men of letters, he valued highly
the practical experience so acquired. His labours in literature
and philosophy were carried on concurrently with this official

work. They began early. From the foundation of the Wesf-
minster Reuiew in 1824 the younger Mill was an active contributor.
The Review was established by Bentham as the organ of his
opinions ; but it was from the first as disappointing to the Utilit-
arians as it was disquieting to many of their opponents. In 1828
MUl ceased to write for it. He afterwards contributed to the
Examiner, and in 1834 became editor of the newly-established
London Review (known in later days as the London and West-
mipster) ; an office which absorbed nearly all his spare time and
energy till 1840.
The was now fully formed, and his ap-
character of Mill
and philosophy served- He had written
prenticeship in literature -
much, but he had, hitherto published no independent book. In

the comparative leisure following his resignation of the editorship
of the Review, he was about to enter upon a new phase of his
career; and henceforth the landmarks of his life are, with two
exceptions, the dates of the publication of his books.
The two exceptions are his marriage, and his election to
Parliament as member for Westminster. It was in 1830 that
1 Autobiography, nj. ' ibid. 242.

Mill first met Mrs Taylor. Her first husband was then alive;
but within a few years a very unusual and scarcely defensible

—
though, Mill assures us, a morally pure relation sprang up between
her and Mill. It was the cause of endless difficulties and of several
estrangements between Mill and his friends. At last, in 1849,

Mr Taylor died, and two years later his widow married Mill. One
of Mill's encomiums on his wife has already been quoted. He
was never weary of sounding her praises in the most extravagant
fashion. The dedication of the treatise on Liberty, the inscription
upon her grave at Avignon and numerous passages in the Auto-
biography, bear witness to his complete infatuation. If we could
trust his judgment, we must ascribe some of the most important
of his works at least as much to her as to himself. But there is
no evidence of a revolution in Mill's thought after he came under

Mrs Taylor's influence. Some years passed before the acquaintance
became intimate; and though Mill was still young and had written
little, his mind was mature far beyond his years. All the elements
which afterwards showed themselves were already present in it.
The probability is that Mrs Taylor rather adopted her opinions
from Mill, and that the latter was led to overrate her by hearing
his own views echoed back by a beloved voice. It may well be
that on some points, especially in The Subjection of Women, her

influence was important; but she was neither the author of Mill's
philosophy, nor did she greatly modify its substance.
The history of Mill's election as member of Parliament for
Westminster is alike honourable to the body of Liberals who
invited him to stand, and to him who accepted their invitation.
He stipulated that he should not be expected to canvass, and he
was returned simply on the ground of his eminence in philosophy
and his life long interest in good government. At the election of
1868, however, he was defeated; and unfortunately the men of
Westminster had not the opportunity to repair their error, as the
electors of Edinburgh had done in the case of Macaulay. Mill's
life was drawing to a close. He retired to Avignon, where he

died in 1873.
The remarkable unity of aim pervading Mill's writings makes
the simplest classification of them also the best ; while all divisions
PHILOSOPHY 163
must be recognised as of only partial validity. Like all the

Utilitarians, in everything he wrote Mill had in view a
that
practical end ; but sometimes the end was nearer, and sometimes
more remote. He was conscious that no great and far-reaching
purpose could be achieved except upon a basis of principle.
Some of his works, therefore, are primarily concerned with theory;
that they are philosophical, and map out the field of thought.
is,
In other works Mill applies the principles he has laid down in his
philosophy, and is directly practical. And the sphere of his
practice is social life, the science of government The second
class of his works, therefore, and deals with the
is political,
machinery of government. It must be added that the philo-

sophical writings exist for the sake of the political ones, and the
author is never happier than when he can mingle a practical
element with theory. Mill shows little interest in philosophic
speculation in and for itself. In his Political Economy he is
more concerned with the thrown by the science upon

light
society, than with the science itself. It was Benthamism in its
bearing upon legislation which furnished him with "a creed,

a doctrine, a philosophy, a religion " \ it was the very practical
aspect of Malthusianism which made that too "a banner."
For a statement of Mill's philosophical principles we naturally
turn to the System of Logic ( 1 843), the Principles ofPolitical Economy
(1848) and Utilitarianism {i?,6^), where they are directly expounded.
In Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865) and in the Examination of
Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865) they have partly to
be inferred from the criticisms passed upon other thinkers.
The System of Logic remains the most original as it was the
first important work of Mill. In itself a remarkable book, it is
still more remarkable when viewed in relation to the state of
philosophic thought in England. When Mill began the study of
logic, the antiquated Aldrich, Whatel/s little text-book and
Hobbes's Computatio sive Logica were the only authorities he,
could find to work upon. Hamilton's lectures were then acces-
sible own pupils. On the Continent things were
only to his
Hegel had lived and written his logic and died. Mill,
different.
who knew German, was induced by Sterling to study the German

II— 2
philosophers; but, like many Englishmen of that time, he failed
to enter into the spirit of their thought, To this failure we may
trace his worst mistakes.
The wish which had been forced upon
to supply the deficiency
his notice by his own was one of the motives which
early studies
induced Mill to write his Logic. Apart from its intrinsic merits,
the extraordinary influence it exercised would of itself suffice to
make one of the most noteworthy books of the nineteenth
it
century. Bagehot did not exaggerate when, on the death of Mill,

he wrote that half the minds of the younger generation of
Englishmen had been greatly coloured by it, and would have
been sensibly had not received its influence.
different if they
The secret of this influence doubtless to be found in the
is
breadth of Mill's view, in the decision with which he cuts himself

loose from mere formalism, and in the close connexion between
his logical principles and the intellectual work of his own
generation. While Hamilton's teaching was tending to more
and more rigid formalism. Mill shook off the fetters of the
scholastic logicians. He maintained that the syllogism involved
a petitio principii; and in the emphasis which he laid upon
" things " and " real kinds," he showed his conviction that reasoning
in vacuo was likely to prove misleading.
It was, however, in the books devoted to induction that Mill
was most original. Little had been done since the time of Bacon
towards a theory of scientific method ; but the rapid accumulation
of the material of science rendered some effort to this end
necessary. The attempt was made several times within a few
years. Scattered through Sir John Herschel's writings are many
reflections on method ; and in his treatise On the Study of Natural
Philosophy (1830) he discusses the question systematically. A little
later William Whewell (1794— 1866) did so again on a far more
ambitious scale. Whewell was specially well informed about the

history of science. He embodied his knowledge in his History of
the Inductive Sciences (1837), which was followed by the Philosophy
of the Inductive Sciences (1840). Perhaps he is most widely known

by his Novum Organum Renovatum, which was the second part of
the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences.
PHILOSOPHY 165
Mill's theory of induction therefore was not without rivals;
and though on the whole it deserved the success it has won over
them, in two important respects the work of Whewell is superior.
In the first place, Whewell's richer knowledge of the history of
science enabled him to illustrate more copiously and more
suggestively. Secondly, in respect of the fundamental principle
of his philosophy, Whewell appears to be nearer the truth than
Mill. The philosophy of the was wholly empirical in
latter :
the second book of the Logic he even maintains that the axioms
of geometry are generalisations from observation. And to Mill
experience meant something which came to the mind from without,
something in the reception of which the mind was passive. His
was, in short, the empiricism of Hume. Whewell maintained, on
the other hand, that besides empirical truth we must recognise
necessary truth. The distinction, as he drew it, was crude, and
his doctrine far too much resembled the untenable theory of
innate ideas, or the " common sense " of the Scottish philosophy
but nevertheless he was right in the conviction, which pervades
all his philosophical treatises and runs through his controversy
with Mill, that pure empiricism is impotent. Kant's reductio ad
absurdum of the principles adopted by Hume from Locke remains
unanswered.
On the other hand, in the details of his inductive theory
Whewell is deplorably vague. Induction as conceived by him is
nothing more than hypothesis subjected to certain tests. This

might be satisfactory enough, provided the tests were at once
sufficient and generally applicable. Unfortunately for Whewell
they are not. The test of prediction is certainly insufficient ; and
the test of consilience is as certainly inapplicable in the great
majority of cases. Mill's theory has the advantage of being more
definite and more adequate. But it is only a relative superiority
that can be granted to him. Few of the men of science acknow-
ledge any debt to the canons ; they have been severely damaged
by the critical examination of logicians like Mr Bradley; and
even the most cursory reader must be struck by the immense gulf
between the canons and some of the instances especially under —
—
the method of agreement which are supposed to exemplify them.
l6$ THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
It is impossible to acquit Mill of a slovenly and dangerous looseness
of reasoning in this section of his work.
In view of the strongly practical bent of Mill's mind it would
hardly be surprising to discover that his talent for abstract specu-
lation fell short of the standard of greatness ; and there are several
indications in the System of Logic that this was the case. A
comparatively small but nevertheless significant indication in the
chapter " Of Names " is the doctrine of non-con notative terms. It
is scarcely credible that a man with the metaphysical instinct
would have confused thus between the etymological meaning and
the actual significance of proper names, or have failed to discover
that it is just because they are more deeply connotative than class
names, that proper names can subserve their purpose. A far
more important point is Mill's absolute severance of " things" from

"thought."' German idealism long ago demonstrated the im-
possibility of maintaining such complete separation; and the
latest scientific theories about the nature of matter powerfully
support the idealistic criticism.
Mill's conception of the two laws of uniformity of nature and
universal causation betrays the same deficiency. On the one
hand, we are asked to regard them as the foundation of all
scientific on the other hand, we are told that they are

induction ;
themselves the outcome of induction, —

necessarily of unscientific,
and presumably therefore of insecure, induction. Mill never
penetrates down what would human experience
to the question,
be if these laws and all principles of relation were eliminated?
In point of fact, there would be no experience at all ; the isolated,
independent, self-existent "idea" or "impression"
is a mere figment.
But probably the most convincing proof of Mill's weakness on the

metaphysical side may be found in his treatment of the law of
causation. He sees the inadequacy of Hume's definition of cause.
A mere invariable antecedent does not answer to our conception
of cause ; for night is the invariable antecedent, but it is assuredly
not the cause, of day. Instead, however, of abandoning Hume's
definition. Mill proceeds to tinker it, and re-defines cause as the
invariable and unconditional antecedent. Thus, day follows upon
night only on condition that the sun rises, and not night but the
PHILOSOPHY 167
rise of the sun is the condition invariably and unconditionally

antecedent to the effect, day. Good and well; but Mill does not
comprehend the full eiFect of his own alteration which is no
; less
than the substitution for the sensationalism of Hume of some kind
of intellectual conception of an ordered universe. There is no
room for ah " unconditional " in pure empiricism. In improving
Hume Mill has unconsciously but completely shifted his ground.
This one of a number of cases, and perhaps the most important,
is
in which we find side by side in Mill's system, unexplained and

unharmonised, elements of the diverse influences through wTiich
hismind passed.
At the time when the Lo^c was nearing completion. Mill was
under the sway of Comte, and it became his ambition to formulate
a science of sociology. To this, however, he conceived a necessary
preliminary to be a science of ethology, or the formation of
character; a subject to which he devotes a chapter in the sixth
book of the Logic. Baffled in the attempt to formulate such a
science, he fell back upon political economy as a pis alkr. He
had already paid a good deal of attention to the subject. As
early as 1830-31 the five Essays on some Unsettled Questions in
Political Economy were written, though it was not till 1844, after
the success of the Lo^c was assured, that they were published.
Once free from the toil of the Lo^c, and convinced that,, for him at
least, the science of ethology was unattainable, Mill turned all his
powers to economics and the ; fruit of his labour was the Principles
of Political Economy. Here again, more obviously though not
more really than in the Logic, Mill was obeying his instinct for
practice. The development of commerce was no less characteristic
of the age than the advance of science; and a theory of commerce

was as much a need of the time as an organon of science. Mill
accordingly set himself to fill the gaps in the theories of Adam
Smith and Ricardo, to supply what time had shown to be lacking,
and above all to enquire how the principles he had reached might
be brought to bear on society with practical effect. Essentially,
Mill is a disciple of Ricardo; but he is more human than Ricardo,
and the Ricardian laws frequently gain in truth while they lose in
rigidity under Mill's handling. He himself was most interested
in those parts of his work which were in a strictly scientific sense
extra-economical and in none more than in the chapter on the
;
probable future of the labouring classes'. Here he applied that

Malthusian doctrine which had so profoundly interested him, in a
way directly opposite to that in which the author of the doctrine
had used it. For while Malthus originally advanced it to prove
the unsoundness of ideas such as Godwin's concerning the bound-
less possibilities of human improvement, Mill sought to show that
the understanding of the law, the acceptance of it, and a voluntary
restriction of numbers, gave to the working classes the one chance
of a general and permanent elevation of their position.
The Principles of Political Economy is a far less original book
than the Logic. The leading ideas are accepted by Mill from his
predecessors, and scarcely anything is wholly his own. Within
the stricter limits of the science, probably his most original con-
tribution was the theory of foreign exchanges and even that is ;
the development of ideas to be found in Ricardo. Mill's great

merits as an economist are, not originality, but lucidity of expression
and copiousness of illustration. He explains with a fulness which
occasionally borders upon verbosity ; but the impatience which he
now and then excites is checked by the reflection that at any rate
he has made it almost impossible to misapprehend the meaning.
He is less abstract than his master Ricardo, and sometimes
particularly in his theory of rent —while accepting the Ricardian
doctrine in substance, introduces modifications or qualifications
suggested by actual experience. ' But in this department too there
is occasionally a certain incongruity between the abstract theory
which Mill advocates and the concrete experience with which ,he
illustrates it.
The period of Mill's predominance in philosophy is also the

golden age of the classical school of political economy soon : after
his death the credit of the science began to decay. The high
position which it then held was due in part to Mill's own influence;
but in far larger measure it was the result of the circumstances
of the time. The great development of commerce was in mid

> This chapter was an addition suggested. Mill tells us, by his guide and
counsellor^ Mrs Taylor,
PHILOSOPHY 169
career; machinery was transforming the conditions of industry;

railways and steamships were working a revolution in the conditions
of transport;' the capitalist class ruled; the great political question
of the time was an economic one. And after the triumph of free
trade, men were for many years content to utter jubilations and
to refer the whole growth of wealth to it, oblivious of the fact that
those engines and railways and steamships might have something
to do with it too. Mill himself seems to stand, half consciously,
at the parting of the ways. With one hand he is linked to Ricardo
and that political economy which dictated " laws of nature " with
the confidence of a Newton. But Mill was never quite contented
with the "economic man," never satisfied to regard the getting of
wealth as in itself a sufficient end of human life; and so with the
other hand he seems to reach out towards the historical and
a posteriori school of economics. He never follows its methods,
but its rise might almost be prophesied from his writings.
After the publication of the Political Economy, there is a long
blank in Mill's literary history. For eleven years he published no
independent work; and- even his contributions to periodicals were
far less frequent than of old. The cause was partly a loss of
health, which may be attributed to over-strain ; while in the latter
part of the period a contributory cause was the worry of his official
work at the India Office, increased as it was by the Mutiny and
preparations for the transference of the administration from the
Company to the Crown. Upon that event Mill retired ; and from
1858 onwards, except for the three years of his parliamentary life,
he was free to devote himself to literature and philosophy.
The result of Mill's freedom is seen immediately in the record
of his literary work. Liberty and Thoughts on Parliamentary
Reform both appeared in 1859, Representative Government two
and Utilitarianism after another interval of two years.
years later,
Then, after the books on Comte and Hamilton, came The Sub-
jection of Women (1,869), the last work published during Mill's
life. After his death, besides the Autobiography, there appeared
three Essays on Religion and Chapters on Socialism, all that he
had been able to do of a projected book on socialism.
Of these works the most important as a contribution to
philosophy is Utiliiarianism, the only one of Mill's works which
is devoted to ethics. It is one of the best books in which to
study the history of Mill's mind. The core of it is Benthamism;
but round that core cluster the accretions Mill had gathered in his
course through the world. The consequence is that Mill's theory
is ethically far richer than Bentham's ; but on the other hand it
is far less simple and far less consistent. The greatest point of
diflference between him and his master lies in Mill's contention
that pleasures differ from one another in quality as well as in
quantity. Bentham denied any difference but a quantitative one,

and thus greatly simplified the "calculus of pleasures." "The
greatest happiness of the greatest number" was a thing which
(apparently at least) could be estimated without undue difficulty.
But in Mill the idea of " happiness " is sublimated. It becomes
doubtful whether it can be identified with pleasurable sensation
at all \ and at any rate Mill cannot bring himself to maintain that
the highest intellectual pleasure, or the pleasure of the philan-
thropist in an act of benevolence, is the same in kind with that
derived from the grossest indulgence of sensual appetite. But if
there are differences in kind among pleasures, how are they to be

reduced to a common measure ?
Though Mill's mental receptiveness led to the introduction
into his system of elements of thought whose right to stand there
may well be disputed, it was nevertheless to this receptiveness,
and perhaps even to the presence of these incongruities, that he
owed great part of his influence. This aspect of his intellectual
character is well illustrated by
Comte.
his relations with
Mill
had been largely instrumental in making the French philosopher
known in England. Already in 1830 he had been attracted by
the early writings of Comte, and when the Positive Philosophy
came was powerfully influenced by the social system
into being he
there expounded, and made generous acknowledgment of his obli-
gations. For some years before and after the publication of the
Logic Mill was in close correspondence with Comte; but he found
the connexion as troublesome as Hume had found the friendship
of Rousseau, and the two philosophers became estranged. Long
before he wrote the book on Comte Mill's view of the philosophy
PHILOSOPHY 171
as well as of the philpsppher had changed. He was no longer

moved by the chivalrous desire, which at first he felt, to say all
that could be said in favour of a neglected thinker. The English
Positivists were now a body, not indeed large in numbers, but
wielding a considerable influence. had grown in-
Further, Mill
creasingly conscious of certain differences between Comtism and
the system which underlay all his own thought. Lord Morley
has called Comtism simply " Utilitarianism crowned by a fantastic;
decoration," and Edmond Scherer remarks that in passing from
Bentham to Comte Mill was " merely following the course of
utilitarian ideas to the point where they debouch and lose them-
selves in a vaster system." But notwithstanding this affinity, the

author of Liberty could hardly be at ease within the limits of the
system which Huxley, condensing Comte's own words, described
as "Catholicism minus Christianity," i.e. a system destitute of
Catholic dogma, but based upon an ultra-Catholic org3,nisation.
Mill, in fact, was gradually driven to recognise the existence of
incongruous elements in his own scheme.. He was hopeful of the
and he was attracted by economic
results of social organisation,
socialism. Yet on the other hand he was an economist of the
school of Adam Smith and RicardOj and he set an almost im-
measurable value upon the freedom of the individual. Naturally,
therefore, as he became conscious of the degree in which Comtism
threatened what he valued so highly. Mill was impelled to point
out what he considered the defects, as well, as the merits, of the
system, and its insufficiency for that regeneration of society which
he valued above all things.
The examination of Hamilton, which is much more elaborate

than that of Comte^ and a more profound piece of philosophy,
was also in a manner forced upon Mill. Hamilton's philosophy
ranked in England as the great rival system to Utilitarianism,
and, for reasons noted in connexion with Mansel, Mill thought
its influence highly prejudicial. Therefore, unwilling though hp
was to give himself the appearance of disparaging a man no longer
living, Mill, in obedience to his, practical instinct, put all his
force into the, examination of the rival school,, and especially of
' It preceded the articles on Comte.
Hamilton's cardinal doctrine, the philosophy of the conditioned.
What chiefly roused Mill's dislike was the essentially negative and
destructive character of this philosophy, and it is interesting to
find the " atheist " and disciple of the sceptic Hume here taking
up arms in defence of faith against its own defenders. But it
would be a mistake to regard the Examination of Hamilton as
purely critical. It contains not only Mill's refutation of Hamil-
tonianism, but also a great deal of positive doctrine not to be
found elsewhere. Indeed, after the System of Logic, the Exami-
nation of Hamilton is the book by which Mill can be most
adequately judged, and the fact that it is not usually so regarded
is to be explained by its critical character. Its very success tended
to its own eclipse: people are slow to interest themselves in
criticisms of philosophy, and above all of philosophies which have
no longer any vitality.
All Mill's works which have not hitherto been noticed are, in
different *ays and degrees, political.Those which deal with the
machinery of government — even the important volume on Repre-
sentative Government — have
in great measure lost their interest
But the value of Liberty is permanent, and The Subjection of
Women, though much inferior, is inspired with the same spirit.
The theme of the latter book is just a special case of that dealt
with in the earlier. On Liberty discusses the rights of the in-
dividual generally ; The Subjection of Women is an impassioned

plea for the enfranchisement of one sex from the domination of
the other ;and if the passion at times exceeds measure, the fault
ismore than redeemed by the generous spirit of the book.
In the volume On Liberty too Mill is profoundly in earnest.
Nothirig roused him to fiercer wrath than an infringement of
liberty, whether it was in the name of the sovereign or of the
mob, of religion or of law. His readiness to champion the cause
of a negro, or to denounce an act of judicial oppression, was in
keeping with his whole history; but his anxious care for the
rights of minorities shows that he was equally alive to the
dangers which might threaten individual liberty in a democracy.
Mill's Liberty is in more respects than one a landmark. It is
among the last and the best statements of the principles of
PHILOSOPHY 173
individualism ',and a comparison between it and political writings

of the present day, even by those who do not profess socialism,
affords a measure of the distance traversed by thought within the
last half century. MUl himself had taken tints, it is true, from
socialism; but Benthamism is fundamentally individualistic, and
Liberty proves that the later influences upon Mill were superficial
compared with those which governed his youth. He insists strongly
upon the great importance of allowing the free development of
the greatest possible variety of characters; and though he would
have given more scope to government than the Manchester school
was disposed to concede, he held that the burden of proof always
lay upon those who advocated interference with the individual.
In another respect too this book marks the end of an epoch.
Published in the same year with the Origin of Species, it is con-
spicuous, as are all Mill's works, for the total absence of the sense
of heredity. The a certain environment,
individual stands in
but we are not taught to regard him made what
as having been
he is by the generations which have gone before. Had he taken
this view Mill must of necessity have modified his individualism.
Not only so, but he must have revised the fundamental principles
of his philosophy. Perhaps the gravest defect whidi in the present
day strikes the student of the Utilitarian philosophy from Bentham
to Mill is the complete failure of its adherents to assimilate the
greatest constructive idea of the nineteenth century, that of
evolution. Bentham himself was too early for it; but his disciples
lived within its influence. Hegel, Comte and Herbert Spencer in
philosophy, Lamarck, Lyell and Darwin in science, all live and
breathe in this atmosphere. The idea had been applied to the
physical structure of the earth, to animal life, to human society;
but notwithstanding all this, the Utilitarians remain unconscious

and unmoved. Their work has in consequence suffered in other
fields as well as in philosophy. If Grote had been able to apply
the idea of evolution to history, he would never have fallen into
the blunder of treating ancient democracy as a thing on the same
plane with modem dempcracy. There is no other line of clea,vage,
^ Herbert Spencer's The Man versus ihi State (1884) is however far
more individualistic.
in modem thought so deep as this. Philosophies in which the
idea of evolution reigns have still some message to the present
those which have it not belong to the past.
In the future Mill will probably rank as a thinker somewhat
lower than he stood in the estimation of his contemporaries ; but
after all deductions have been made he remains upon the whole
the greatest English publicist since Burke. He has neither the
weight of thought, nor the sweep of imstgination, nor the fervour
of eloquence of the great Irishman ; but through his whole life he
devoted himself with unwearied earnestness to public questions;
and he treated them with a largeness of spirit which no con-
temporary and no successor has equalled.
Notable among the younger contemporaries of Mill who
worked upon the theory of Utilitarianism was Alexander Bain
(1818-1903), perhaps the best of all illustrations of the "reasoning
machine," at once in power and in its weakness. Strength of
its
spirit and of intellect he undoubtedly possessed; otherwise, he
could never have made his way against the difficulties which beset
his youth ; nor could he have been, as he was for many years,
the weightiest man in the University of Aberdeen. Neither is it
possible to read his works without perceiving that he was gifted

with a singular clearness of mind. The Senses and the Intellect
(1855) and The Emotions and the Will (1859) are lucid as well as
solid contributions to Utilitarian psychology. There was no mist
about the things Bain saw. On the other hand, there were
many things which he did not see at all. Few books are more
arid than Bain's Autobiography ; the reader travels through' a dry
parched land. Yet it is valuable, because it gives the key to
Bain's philosophy. We discover that it is highly personal, that the
system in its hardness and dryness exactly reflects the hardness
and dryness of the philosopher's mind. There were, however,

other qualities as well in Bain's mind. The Autobiography bears
witness to an inflexible integrity, which also inspires the philosophy.
No man of the time sought truth with more perfect singleness of
mind, no one was more courageously ready to suffer for it if need
were. It cannot be said that Bain made any great Original con-
tribution to Utilitarianism; but he did sound work in detail. His

PHILOSOPHY 1 75
knowledge of science especially was valuable, because it enabled

him to fill by Mill.
gaps left
Among the names of those who in later days have, with more
or less divergence and originality followed Mill, there is none
more honoured or more honourable than that of Henry Sidgwick
(1838-1900), a disciple who in the three great works of his life
showed the same mixture of speculative with practical interests,
and the same devotion to the former for the sake of the latter, as
Mill himself. Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics (1874) is an attempt
to restate the philosophic principles of Utilitarianism in the light
of criticism and reflection. So too the Principles of Political
Economy (1883) starts from the work which Mill had published
just a generation before, but at the same time shows very clearly
the influence of that spirit of scepticism which declined any longer
"laws" of political economy as conceptions in the
to accept the
same category with the law of gravitation. And, finally, the
Elements of Politics (1891) indicates the persistence in the disciple
of that practical interest in government which had been charac-
teristic of the whole Utilitarian school
While, however, Mill was deliberately trained in abstract
thought, Sidgwick rather drifted into philosophy. His first studies
were classical, and his earliest academical employment was a
classical lectureship. It was
membership of the Society of
his
the Apostles which revealed Sidgwick to himself, convinced him

that the true bent of his mind was towards the investigation of
the ultimate problems of hfe, and made him one of the earliest
workers in the newly created tripos of moral science at Cam-
bridge. His classical lectureship was exchanged for a lectureship
in moral philosophy in 1869, and ultimately, in 1883, he became
professor of that subject in his own university. And Sidgwick
did not reach this position without passing throiigh that period
of stress and doubt which few of his contemporaries escaped. He
was a man of strong religious instincts, reared in the atmosphere
of orthodoxy, but in days when orthodoxy was becoming less and
less credible to the thoughtful. The reading of Renan's Etudes
d'Histoire Religieuse in 1862 powerfully influenced Sidgwick's mind.
He turned to the study of Arabic and Hebrew for a solution
of the questions which had been thus suggested to him, and
persevered in it for more than two years. Ultimately, however,
he abandoned this line of enquiry, mainly because he became
convinced that the most complete mastery of these languages
would qualify him only for the investigation of secondary problems.
The key to the problem lay, he believed, in philosophy, not in
linguistic science. The trend of his thought was clearly shown
by his resignation of his Trinity fellowship in 1869, a step which
he felt called upon to take because of the change which had
passed over his opinions since he had made the declaration which
was the condition of his admission to the fellowship. The re-
signation was two ways, characteristic in the

characteristic in
steadiness and caution with which he paused to see whether
there might possibly be any swing backwards towards his former
position, and characteristic too in the scrupulous honour with
which, having convinced himself that there could be none, he
faced all the consequences of his own views.
This beautiful sincerity is the most striking feature in the
character of Sidgwick, and it is the root-principle of his whole
method of philosophising. No
one gave himself more whole-
heartedly to the pursuit of truth, no one more courageously
accepted unwelcome conclusions. He was repelled by the negative
aspect of the philosophy of Mill, and so far as he accepted Mill
as a guide, it was because he beUeved himself to find in him a
larger portion of the truth than in any other. But he always
estimated highly the value of positive beliefs for practical life.
His conviction of the importance of the belief in immortality

induced him to become one of the founders of the society for
psychical research ; his rigorous conception of the character of the
evidence required made him dubious about most of the results
and, eager as he was for a positive answer, he describes himself in
1887 as drifting steadily to the conclusion that we have not and
are never likely to have empirical evidence of the existence 01 the
individual after deaths
This same characteristic is at once the strength of Sidgwick's
philosophy and, in a sense, its weakness. It is a source of
^ Life, 466.
PHILOSOPHY 177
weakness in so far as he is never likely to be as popular or as

widely influential as a man more dogmatic would be. He
habitually pauses and balances, sometimes even when he is hardly
in doubt, just from a caution almost in excess. And this native
tendency was strengthened by the sense that the philosophy at

which he had arrived was not that which he would have chosen
to teach had the choice been his. But itwas not his choice, it
was intellectual constraint. The truth as he saw it was not the
truth as he wished it to be. In a remarkable passage in his
journal at the close of 1884 he contrasts himself with T. H. Green,

the meagre numbers whom he influenced with the many who bore
the stamp of Green and he adds what we may be sure is at least
;
part of the explanation. " Feeling,'' he says, " that the deepest
truth I have to by no means 'good tidings,' I naturally
tell is
shrink from exercising on others the personal influence which

would make men [resemble] me, as much as men more opti-
mistic and prophetic naturally aim at exercising such influence'."

Cautious, then, by nature and from a sense of duty, and rendered
still more cautious by the doubt whether what he had to teach
would be practically inspiring and elevating, Sidgwick habitually

expresses himself in such a way as to blur the outlines of his
thought, to give a sense of inconclusiveness, and to alienate
the reader who longs for decision and definiteness. But the
conclusions he does reach are all the more impressive on this
account, and the fact that his allegiance was given on the whole
to the Utilitarian school (modified though it is in his case by
elements of intuitionalism) is an indication of the continued
vitality of that philosophyand it may well be that if Sidgwick
;
had not felt himself hampered as he did, in the days after the
death of Mill, the battle might not have gone as decidedly as it
seemed to go in favour of the idealists.
The thinkers who were most powerfully influenced by the idea
of evolution may be most conveniently classified by the countries
from which they drew their inspiration. Both the Utilitarians
and the Scottish philosophers worked upon native materials, but
^Lift, 395.
W. 12
some of the evolutionists were inspired by France, others by
Germany, while yet a third group were essentially English.
It will be most convenient to discuss first the Anglo-French
school, for it reached maturity earlier than the others, it was

most closely akin to the school last reviewed, and it made the
smallest breach with the older systems of thought. There is,
indeed, truth in the criticisms already quoted from Scherer and

Lord Morley; but the evolutionary conception must not be
ignored. The law of the three stages is evidently evolutionary,
and if this aspect of it had been made prominent it would have
been of vast importance. Unfortunately, the significance of the
law as an evolutionary doctrine did not come home to the English
Positivists, nor even fully to Comte himself; and though it was
this vivifying conception of history which attracted the disciples,
both they and their master went astray after that very strange god,
the "fantastic decoration." Comte himself was to blame, partly

because of the decoration, and partly for a deficiency in expression
almost unparalleled among Frenchmen. The fact that Harriet
Martineau's paraphrase of the thought — for it is not a translation

of the words —of Comte hasbeen rendered into French, and has
become one of the principal means by which Comte's own country-
men acquire a knowledge of his system, is at once one of the most
emphatic compliments ever paid to such a performance, and one
of the most trenchant criticisms ever passed upon the writings of
a great man.
Mill's partial discipleship to Comte has been already spoken
of ; but Mill could not at any time be reckoned as an unqualified
Comtist. Among those who may be fairly described as Posi-
tivists, not more than four require notice here. They are George
Henry Lewes, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau and Richard
Congreve.
Richard Congreve (1818-1899) claims the first place, not as
the earliest English Comtist, but as the founder of the Positivist
community in London. Comte's works are said to have been
first introduced into England in 1837, and Mill certainly read
them shortly after that date. A visit to Paris in 1848, during
which he met the great philosopher himself, converted Congreve,
PHILOSOPHY 179
and convinced him so thoroughly that in 1855 he resigned the

fellowship he held at Wadham College, Oxford, in order to
devote himself to the Positivist religion. Congreve, as his edition
of Aristotle's Politics shows, was an excellent scholar, as well as
a man of great gifts, and the group which gathered round him
included a considerable number of the most talented men then
living in England. Soon, however, the cult of Humanity, instead
of spreading, began to lose ground, for the sober English mind
was alienated by its artificiality.
None of the other three was absorbed in Positivism as Congreve

was. George Eliot had her own creative work to do, and Lewes
and Harriet Martineau were both persons of singularly varied
activity. George Henry Lewes (1817-1878) was, indeed, one of
the most versatile men of his time. He did so many things that
nothing he attempted could astonish those who knew him ; and
Thackeray expressed a general feeling when he declared that he
would not be surprised to see Lewes riding down Piccadilly on
a white elephant. But the suggestion of mere meaningless eccen-
tricity The versatility of Lewes was the out-
has to be corrected.
come of an exceedingly active intellect, continually on the watch
for new ideas and seeking new openings for its energy. Thus he
was at once novelist, dramatist, critic, biographer, philosopher
and man of science. If he did not attain a high position in
all, he reached at least a respectable one, and in biography some-
thing a good deal beyond that. The biographical part is the best
element in the Biographical History of Philosophy (1845-1846);
and the Life of Goethe is an extraordinarily able delineation of
one of the most complex of literary figures.
A man so alert as Lewes was naturally one of the first in
England to master the ideas of Comte; and, with the exception
of Mill, he was the first who made any serious attempt to in-
troduce those ideas to his countrymen. The Cours de Philosophic
Positive was completed in 1842 ; and already in the Biographical
History of Philosophy Lewes is a convinced disciple, and a warm
advocate of the system of Comte. The book is a stimulating
and interesting one, bright and lucid, rather than weighty and
profound. The standpoint of the Positivist was not the best for
12 —
l8o THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
a historian of philosophy. It is notorious that Comte regarded
the metaphysical stage as merely a time of transition between the
effete theological period and that positive stage towards which
humanity was moving. Fully accepting this view, and the de-
finition of metaphysics as merely "the art of amusing oneself
with method," Lewes was obviously not particularly well qualified
to appreciate the metaphysicians, and it is not surprising that his
treatment of them is superficial.
Lewes remained faithful all his life to the Positivist principles.

In Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences (1853) he devoted himself
exclusively to the explication of the system ; and in the last
philosophical work published during his life, Problems of Life and
Mind (1874-1879), he shows himself still an ardent Positivist.
In his capacity of advocate his gifts told and his defects were
unnoticed; so that though he was rather a clever popular expositor
than a profound original thinker, no one did more to establish
Comtism in England.
Notwithstanding the fantastic character of the "decoration,"
the fact that Comte's system is at once a philosophy and a religion
made it minds which would have
attractive to a certain class of
been comparatively indifferent to a mere philosophy. For it is
an attempt to satisfy the two-fold need of human nature, and to
shun at once the pitfall whereinto the Catholic Church had fallen,
and the opposite error of the pure rationaUsts. The balance
between intellect and feeling is redressed in the Religion of
—
Humanity, wherein each finds a place, Feeling as the superior,
Intellect as the subordinate, but a subordinate with rights and a
fixed position in the scheme of things.
Obviously such a system must have been attractive to souls
torn asunder in the conflict between the head and the heart. The
fact is significant that two of the most conspicuous among the early
English Positivists were women; and though Harriet Martineau
was of a somewhat masculine type of mind, George Eliot was
feminine to the core. They, like many others, wished at once
to be true to their reason and to find an object of worship.
Perhaps they were not inclined to enquire very closely how far
Humanity, with a big H, was such an object. The disintegrating
PHILOSOPHY l8l
forces of modem
thought were at work on the old beliefs, and
some was imperiously demanded.
substitute
It was not Lewes alone, it was also the force of a kind of
natural selection which impelled George Eliot towards Positivism.
She stands on a wholly different plane from the other two. We
may quite justly and fairly label and ticket them " Positivists "
but we cannot do so in her case. They were primarily philo- '
sophical, she was artistic. They were people of talent; she, a

woman of genius. Positivism was the air they breathed ; it was
but an odour in her ampler atmosphere. On that very account
its presence there is peculiarly interesting. The history of
the spiritual struggles of Mary Ann Evans must be traced
elsewhere —the orthodoxy of her early years —the Unitarian in-
fluence —the sway of German biblical criticism —the connexion

with Lewes, and the importation into her mind of the element of
Positivism. We see throughout the working of two contrasted sides
of her character. On the one hand is an intellect of the most
masculine strength, on the other, a sensibility even tremulously
feminine ; on the one hand, a resolute will to probe life and the
universe to their depths, on the other, a yearning wish to discover
after all that the old faith was true. The translator of the ZeSen
Jesu found comfort at her work in looking at a crucifix which she

had fixed over her desk. To such a soul, Positivism was, not
perhaps absolutely satisfying, but at any rate more comforting
than any other system of philosophy. Philosophical she was
bound demanded it her emotions imperiously
to be, her intellect :
called for a religion. The double demand was more nearly

satisfied by the system of Comte than by any other.
Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), whose useful and able para-

phrase and condensation of the Comtist philosophy gives her an
important place in the history of Positivism in England, came of
a Unitarian family and her younger brother, James Martineau,
;
was, throughout his long life, the just pride and the ornament of
the sect to which he belonged. Norwich, their place of abode,

was, in the end of the eighteenth and the early part of the nine-
teenth centuries, the seat of one of those local literary coteries
which had not yet been completely swallowed up in London.
It was also the seat of a better known and a far greater school
of art. Of the literary coterie the principal figure was William
Taylor; and Mrs Barbauld and her niece Lucy Aikin, persons
who were then considered by no means insignificant, were drawn
Thus Miss Martineau grew up in
thither as occasional visitors.
an atmosphere wherein literature disputed the pre-eminence with
commerce, and under influences which set her in opposition to
the prevailing creed of the country. Such influences generally,
to the credit of human nature, produce an intense loyalty to the
small, and frequently the despised and contemned sect. In the
case of Harriet Martineau (for reasons not at all to her discredit)
they had the opposite effect. The fact that she was in opposition
to the majority of her contemporaries led her to examine the
ground upon which she stood. In consequence, doubt succeeded
doubt; but the spiritual effect was not that which the process
would have had on many masculine and on nearly all feminine
minds. There is a ring of jubilation in her record of the final
issue. "At length," she says, "I recognised the monstrous super-
stition [she means Christianity] in its true character of a great fact
in the history of the race, and found myself, with the last link
of my chaiij snapped, —a free rover on the broad, bright, breezy
common of the universe'."
But even for a Harriet Martineau the "breezy common of the
universe" proved a little cold and comfortless. There is ample
evidence that, in spite of the masculine strain in her intellect,
she had the clinging feminine nature too. If she could not find
much of a God in heaven, she was skilful in fashioning gods on
earth, — and also demons, for she had many pet aversions. Now
mesmerism, which had cured her physical ailments, was the
object of worship ; now it was the wonderful Mr Atkinson, whose
somewhat ordinary intellect, seen through the vapours of her
imagination (not the brightest of her faculties), was magnified to
gigantic proportions and clothed in the splendours of the rainbow.
What could be more natural than for a person like Miss Martmeau
to turn for comfort to a philosophy which was also a religion?
^ Autobiography, i. ii6.
PHILOSOPHY 183
Miss Martineau did so with a zeal sufficient to carry her through

her toilsome task of translation and condensation, which was
completed in 1853. The place given to emotion, the idea of
service to humanity as a duty, the insistence upon unity in the
world and in —
human nature, in a word the religious spirit of the
Comtian philosophy, was the thing which made the "breezy
common of the universe more home-like and habitable.
''
An interesting but not an attractive personality is that of

Harriet Martineau. "Dogmatic,"' "hasty," "imperious," W. R.
Greg has called her; and the adjectives are well chosen. The
judgments upon contemporaries recorded in the Autobiography
bear that stamp; and they are moreover as a rule uninstructive
and shallow. Nevertheless, Miss Martineau compels respect by
reason of her force, her earnestness, her indomitable activity and
her dauntless courage. Further, she could at times turn a very
different face to the world. A lady so tender and pious as
Caroline Fox praises Deerbrook (the best of Miss Martineau's
stories — so admirably constructed out of commonplace materials)
as "a brave book," and one which "inspires trust and love,
faith in its fulness, resignation in its meekness." Surprising as
these words are with reference to a book by Harriet Martineau,
they are aptly applied to Deerbrook. On a first impression it is
not less surprising to learn that she was a sufferer for a book
which was judged to be too favourable to the Catholics. Dickens
declined her story. The Missionary, for Household Words, because
he objected to publishing anything in their favour.
Miss Martineau's literary career was an active and prolific
one. Besides the books already mentioned, she wrote several

works of fiction, numerous tales illustrative of political economy,
several books and pamphlets on questions of government and

economics, two works on the history of England during the
period of her own life, a number of volumes on miscellaneous
subjects,and an ambitious but not profound work on Eastern Life,
Present and Past (1848), the purpose of which was to illustrate the
origin and rise of the Egyptian,, Hebrew, Christian and Moham-
medan faiths. Perhaps the most interesting of all these works
are the Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-1834). They are
a collection of tales illustrating the principal doctrines of political
economy as they were then understood. Miss Martineau was led

to form the plan of this work by the discovery that in certain
earlier tales which she had written she had been unconsciously
teaching political economy. She claims that in the Illustrations

she has sacrificed no principle of economics to the exigencies of
the story. The claim appears to be well founded ; and the method
has the advantage of vividness. The tales were an effective
means of popularising the outlines of political economy, and they
might still be read with advantage. At the same time, there are
inevitable disadvantages in this way of illustrating a science by
means of fiction. The systematic development suffers; and in
spite of the summary of principles illustrated, some of these are
necessarily in danger of being lost in the story.
Highly gifted as she was, Harriet Martineau lacked the
crowning gift of genius, and had she not linked her own with a
greater name she might be in danger of oblivion. But her
Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte is a great work, and, for the
reason already indicated, it has no small share of originality.
She is no mere but an interpreter at the same time.
translator,
The other evolutionary school of foreign parentage has exer-
cised a far profounder influence than the Comtists upon English
thought, principally because it has been in touch with a far more
vitalising form of the doctrine. Tracing descent from Hegel, and
in the farther past from Kant, it has been borne along by the
most powerful current of modern thought and it has done a great

work in familiarising England with that thought.
Attention has already been called to the extraordinary way in
which Mill, Hamilton and their contemporaries missed the real
significance of German speculation. In spite of the work of
Coleridge and Carlyle, and of the ardent discipleship of Maurice
and Sterling, there was still little systematic knowledge of German
philosophy and scanty infiltration of its principles into English
speculation.It was the English Hegelians who completed the
work which Coleridge and Carlyle had begun, and by means of

German thought potently swayed the minds of a generation of
Englishmen; for even those who have not been disciples have
PHILOSOPHY 185
been to some degree moulded by their influence. Probably never

before has a foreign philosophy (Greek philosophy excepted) been
so powerful over England. English Hegelianism was later in
developing than the other schools, and the works in which it is
embodied are of comparatively recent date. In earlier days it
gave a point of view and supplied principles for teaching, but it
was rarely reduced to writing. The importance of that point of

view and of those principles can be correctly estimated only by
those who have been trained first under a system which had them
not,and then under that which gave them. Many still alive have
had that experience, and they can testily that the result has been
nothing less than an intellectual new birth.
On the threshold it may be well to notice briefly a philosopher
who can be identified with no school and who left no followers,
but whom it would be unjust to ignore. The literary connexions
of James Frederick Ferrier (1808— 1864) are interesting. A
nephew of Miss Ferrier the noveUst and of Christopher North,
he had by birth the right of entry into the literary society of
Edinburgh. He was too late, however, to see much of its brightest
ornament, Scott From the first, Ferrier's interest centred in
philosophy; and, though it was not tiU 1854 that he published
his Institutes of Metaphysic, he had long before drawn the atten-

tion of the thoughtful by his philosophical essays. One of the
things which Emerson "not to forget," is
in 1844 enjoins Carlyle
to send information about the author of the essay on conscious-
ness in Blackmood's Magazine.
Ferrier, with a touch of patriotic prejudice, described his
philosophy as "Scottish to the core"; but, happily for his fame,
the accuracy of the description must be challenged, if it means
that he is in the direct line of descent from Reid and Stewart,
and is an exponent of the philosophy of common sense. That
he certainly is not. Among British thinkers, Ferrier has most in
common with Berkeley; for his theory is a form of subjective
ideaUsnL But it is Berkeley read in the light of a later day,
crossed with German thought and remoulded in Ferrier's own mind;
so that if by the phrase "Scottish to the core," Ferrier meant
to claim that his philosophy was essentially original, the claim is
well founded. There are elements him not only of Berkeley,
in
but of Spinoza, of Kant and of Hegel. But Ferrier was far too
powerful merely to reproduce the thought of another man.
Nothing passes unchanged through the alembic of his mind.
Further, there was an originality even in his borrowings from the
Germans. He was perhaps the first of the professional philo-
sophers to enter into the spirit of German thought ; and the
Institutes of Metaphysic is the earliest systematic work into which
that spirit largely enters. The difference between Ferrier's manner
of dealing with itand that of Brown or of Hamilton, is a striking
indication of the way in which thought was moving.
Ferrier had perhaps a finer gift for metaphysical speculation
than any man of his time. This was his distinctive sphere ; and
it is largely for this reason that he is so much less known and has
been so much less influential than other men who were certainly
not his superiors in genius for speculation. No British thinker
has had less than Ferrier of that practical instinct which has been
noticed in Mill. Pure Being was a conception not too abstract
for him, and he was content to breathe that rarefied air not merely
for a moment but alwaysL Such a devotion to unpractical con-
ceptions is a thing which England does not readily forgive ; and
for that reason this bold, subtle and original thinker, in spite of
the brilliancy of his style, has been recognised by and has been
influential over only a handful of specialists.
The English Hegelians had their home originally at Oxford,

where the most influential of them was Jowett, some aspects of
whose work have been noticed already in the chapter on the
theologians. In thought, Jowett was an eclectic. At no period
of his life was he disposed to bind himself to any party, creed
or faction in philosophy, and least of all in the later stages,
when his aversion from dogmatic systems became exaggerated to
a fault. But though he would have objected to being called a
Hegelian, it was the background of Hegelian and Kantian thought
which gave life to his teaching, which made his commentaries
on Thessalonians, Galatians and Romans stimulating when they
first appeared, and which gave pregnancy to his introductions to
Plato. And for a long time Hegelianism had a most powerful

PHILOSOPHY 187
hold upon Jowett In 1845 he writes to a friend with reference

to his study of Hegel :
" One must go on or perish in the attempt,
that is to say, give up Metaphysics altogether. It is impossible

to be satisfied with any other system after you have begun with
this'."
Jowett's most important work, the translation of the Dialogues

of Plato (1871), has been subjected to a good deal of rather
carping criticism, the main outcome of which is that it is not
ideally well-adapted for the purposes of a " crib." The suflScient
answer is that Jowett never meant it for that purpose, and that it
is something far greater, a noble rendering for the English reader

of one of the greatest writers of antiquity. There have been
many men superior to Jowett in minute accuracy of scholarship
but if there have been any superior to him in the power to
reproduce the meaning of a great author, they have unfortunately
hidden their light. We could spare many
discussions on points of
grammar and more renderings such as
verbal criticism for a few
that of the Dialogues of Plato. Thanks to Jowett, Plato is a
classic of the English language as well as of the Greek; and
whatever may happen to the study of Greek, his tame and in-
fluence are secure as long as the English language lives. Taking
the translation and the introductions together, with their charm
of style and their mass of suggestive thought, this work may
fairly be ranked as one of the greatest contributions to English
speculation.
The translation was not Jowett's only service to the memory
of Plato. Perhaps his greatest achievement as a teacher was the
introduction of the Republic into the schools of Oxford, where
previously the only Greek philosophy studied had been the Ethics
and Rhetoric of Aristotle. Jowett was evidently drawn to Plato
by a kind of natural attraction ; and this affinity partly explains
the wonderful success of the translation. That success led him

on to the translation of others with whom he was less in sympathy,
and whom he failed to handle with equal skill. Neither his
Thucydides (1881) nor his Politics of Aristotle (1885) will bear
' Life, i. 92, u.

comparison with the translation of Plato. The latter was both
a strange and an unfortunate choice of subject. Apparently
he who is born a Platonist cannot be an Aristotelian. Jowett
was unsympathetic towards the thought of Aristotle; and he
found in Aristotle none of those fine turns of phrase which
gave scope in Plato to the translator's skill in the manipulation
of language.
Many, Uke Leslie Stephen, have been puzzled to explain the
admittedly great influence exercised by Jowett over English
thought in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is objected
that his original writings are comparatively scanty, and that it is

impossible to point to any great thought which was emphatically
his own. He had a great reputation in philosophy ;
yet, it is said,
the answer to the question, "Is any phase of speculation

marked by Jowett's personal stamp?" must be in the negative.
Three suggestions may be made towards the solution of this
difficulty. The first is that it is a mistake to judge Jowett in his
character of author wholly or even chiefly by his original writings.

He is emphatically a translator, the greatest of his time and one
of the greatest of all time ; and he who successfully naturalises in
another language such a classic as Plato, performs a service
greater than the production of original work of the second class.
Secondly, although Jowett has not left his own stamp on any
phase of speculation, although he has not even affiliated himself
to any school, he has here also performed a service analogous to
that of translation. Almost in spite of himself the atmosphere of
Hegelianism clung to him. It was under his shadow that the
English Hegelian school grew, and among his pupils were its
leaders' found. Herein Jowett served his generation better than
he knew. German thought, in contrast with the hardness of
Benthamism, and the aridity of Hamiltonianism, was like romance
in the sphere of metaphysics. There it subserved the same
function as that mysticism which had overspread religion and
poetry, painting and architecture. It was the proper antidote
to the merely reactionary mediaevalism of the Oxford Movement.
^ With the exception of Dr Hutchison Stirling, the author of the Secret of
Hegel.
PHILOSOPHY 189
This fitness of his teaching to time, place and circumstance goes

far to explain the influence of Jowett.
The third suggestion is that Jowett's influence was primarily a

personal influence exercised over young men and it was strongest
;
in the days when he was simply tutor and not yet Master of
Balliol. His conception of education had some of the character-
istics of his translation of Plato. He was not indifferent to
scholarship, but he did not put it in the first rank. He conceived
a college to be a place for the training of men for life and for the
service of their fellow-men. So far as the proper basing of ovv
and the true doctrine of the enclitic 8e helped to that end, he was
interested beyond that point, he cared little. The realisation of
;
this conception was the great purpose of his life ; and his success
is enough in itself to explain a high reputation. The men who
knew him and who felt themselves indebted to him were men whose
task it was to mould the thought and the history of the nation.
Jowett's pupil, Thomas Hill Green (1836-1882), was superior
to his master in speculative capacity, and ranks as one of
the most powerful English thinkers of the nineteenth century.
Unfortunately, a deficiency in the power of expression greatly
curtailed the influence of his teaching ; and the shortness of his
life prevented him from doing the great work which, given longer
time, he could have done. Green's first important production

was the edition of Hume's works which he issued (1874-1875) in
conjunction with T. H. Grose. The elaborate introduction to the
Treatise on Human Nature makes this not merely a fine edition
of a classic, but the most important application which had up
to that date been made in English of Kantian and Hegelian
principles. Though the uncouthness of the style throws irritating
the way of the reader, those who have the patience
difficulties in
to overcome them reap their reward. Most of Green's other

works were published posthumously, the greatest of them all being
the profound Prolegomena to Ethics (1883).
Mill's philosophy was dominant in England when the Oxford
philosopher began his work; and though Green consistently
avoided polemics, an undercurrent of opposition to Mill runs
through his writings. He respected and admired the man; but
igo THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
in the Introduction to Hume and in the Prolegomena to Ethics, as
well as in the lectures on Mill's logic, his dissent from the

philosophy is made manifest. He points out the inadequacy of
Mill's conception of cause; in the introduction to Hume he makes
a somewhat contemptuous reference to the "juggle which the
modern popular logic performs with the word 'phenomenon*'";
and from the ethical theory of Utilitarianism his dissent is
,
absolute and unqualified. It is true, he generously recognises
the practical value of Utilitarianism. This is the theory, he

says, which has given the conscientious modern Europe
citizen in
"a vantage-ground for judging of the competing claims on his

obedience, and enabled him to substitute a critical and intelligent
for a blind and unquestioning conformity""; and he pronounces
that "there is no doubt that the theory of an ideal good, con-
sisting in the greatest happiness of the greatest number, as the
end by reference to which the claim of all laws and powers and
rules of action on our obedience is to be tested, has tended to
improve human conduct and character'." But nevertheless he
utterly rejects the idea of pleasure being the one true end of
moral action, and instead places the summum bonum for man
in "some perfection of human life, some realisation of human
capacities*." The improvement in conduct and character is
sufficient in itself, whether it be accompanied with pleasure or
not. Both in his metaphysics and in his ethics Green was irre-
concilably at variance with the Utilitarians. His function was to
substitute for their empiricism an idealistic interpretation both of
the universe and of human life.
Green's philosophy lent itself to purposes which were not his,
all the more readily because of his dislike of polenjics and his
studied avoidance of unnecessary controversy with his contem-

poraries. In particular, he carefully abstained from attacking
religious dogma, and was remarkably conservative in his attitude
towards the Christian faith. The spirit was excellent, but the
result has not been altogether happy. There are few symptoms
of the state of contemporary Enghsh thought more melancholy
' Humis Works, i. g 202. » Prolegomena, 361.
' ibid. 363. * ibid. 390.
PHILOSOPHY 191
than that afforded by the popularity which is enjoyed by the

very peculiar " Germanism " of the modern High Church school.
For much of this Green is indirectly responsible. It grew up
under the shadow of his authority ; its essence is a perversion of
his ideas ; and the natural conclusion is that plainer speech on
his part would have gone far to prevent it.
Green's contemporary and friend, Edward Caird (1835-1908),
was unquestionably superior to the great Oxford professor as a
teacher and writer, though not in originality and power. It was
somewhat later in his case than in Green's before the impact of
his work began to be felt outside the college class-room. His
first independent publication was A Critical Account of the Philo-
sophy of Kant (1877), a work afterwards revised, expanded and

completed in The Critical Philosophy of Kant (1889). Among his
later works TTie Evolution of Religion (1893) and The Evolution
of Theology in the Greek Philosophers (1904) are specially worthy

of note. The former in particular is among the profoundest as
well as the most readable works dealing with the philosophy of
religion in the English language.
Gaird had a marvellous gift of exposition. He was perhaps
the greatest teacher of his generation; at least it is safe to say
that he had no superior. And greater than any of his printed
works is the personal influence which he wielded, first at Glasgow
as professor ofmoral philosophy from 1866 to 1893, and after-
wards at Oxford as Master of Balliol CoUege from 1893 to 1907.
In the former place especially his influence over the successive
generations of students was extraordinary. The situation was
striking. The Scottish philosophy, though discredited, was not
yet dead; and local prejudice told, of course, against the repre-
sentative of the foreign system. Notwithstanding this, Caird won
to himself year after year the allegiance of all who were capable
of forming a judgment on the points at issue. He seldom or
never attacked the dying school. He was content calmly and
temperately to express his own views, leaving his teaching to
germinate in the minds of his students as surely as the seed
germinates in the earth. A similar reserve and temperance
marked his attitude towards popular religious doctrines. The
philosophy he taught was profoundly religious, but yet it was a
most powerful solvent of the dogmas which were still taught from
the Scottish pulpit. This was dimly felt with respect to the
teaching of both the brothers Caird. They went calmly on their
way, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left, uttering
hardly a word of direct criticism, and yet surely and not slowly
making the retention of the old beliefs in the old form impossible.
The change in the religious beliefs of Scotland within the last
generation has probably been due to Edward Caird in a greater
degree than to any other single cause; for the men whom he
taught became themselves, in one way or another, teachers. If
this had been all, Caird himself would have deplored the result of
his own teaching. P'undamentally, his mind was anything but
sceptical. A purely negative result he considered always incom-
plete, and sometimes possibly worse than useless. But he knew
that in this case the negative result was inevitable : if not
philosophy, then science would surely bring it about. Quietly,
therefore, but with unhesitating firmness, he brushed aside the
familiar plea on behalf of the simple
faith of the simple soul, and
went on labouring, not to achieve a negative, but for the sake of

the positive beyond. Idealism, he believed, was the antidote to
the materialistic poison of the age ; and for twenty-seven years he
persevered in inviting his countrymen to abandon a "common
sense " which could give no account of itself, to strike out boldly
if we may borrow Carlyle's metaphor — for the distant shore of
truth, and to show their faith, not by a parrot repetition of belief
in the incredible, but by staking all on the existence of that shore,
even though they could not see it.
Caird's mind was essentially historical. Unlike Ferrier, he

never dwelt long in the regions of Piire Being. He loved best to
instil his own teaching through the medium of an examination of
the thinkers of the past. Hence, for example, his examination
of Comtism, his enquiry into the theology of the Greek thinkers,
his critical examination of Kant himself. In all cases he was
admirably fair-minded. He was more prone to discover agreement
than difference —sometimes, it may be, by giving unconsciously
some twist to the philosophy he was examining. In this respect
PHILOSOPHY 193
the difference between him and Green is wide. Green brings

out his own thought by setting it in opposition to that of the
thinker he is criticising ; so much so that, in the case of Hume,
the hasty reader may occasionally be tempted to ask whether it
was worth while elaborately to examine a philosopher with

whom the critic had little in common. Not so in the case of
Caird : the surprise is rather to discover how much there is in
common between the most diverse systems.

Few philosophers have written so well as Caird. His style
often gives an appearance of simplicity to ideas which are really
difficult. The work on Kant is, it is true, rather heavily loaded
with technicalities ; but this charm of style is certainly a feature
of Caird's later writings. For he had the literary instinct as well
as the philosophical; and he had the wisdom to diversify his
studies in abstract thought with studies in the poets. He seems
to have felt it necessary to justify to himself his literary studies
by some association with philosophy ; but for all that, the literary
interest is unmistakable in the essays on Dante and Goethe,
Wordsworth and Carlyle.
The distinguished Unitarian, James Martineau (i 805-1 goo),
cannot be classed among the English Hegelians, but nevertheless
he may conveniently be noticed in company with them. While
he differed from them in philosophic principle and method, he
agreed with them in opposing the agnosticism of the time, and
like them too he may be said to owe himself to Germany. In
common many other thinkers of the nineteenth century,
with
Martineau dates "a new intellectual birth" from a visit to the
country of Kant and Hegel. Martineau began his career as a
Unitarian minister. In 1841 he became professor of mental and
moral philosophy at Manchester New College, in which ofBce he
found himself a colleague of Francis William Newman (1805-1897),
a man who, from a widely different starting-point, moved to a
position not dissimilar to that of Martineau. Newman, however,
though a person of remarkable gifts, will be remembered chiefly
for the contrasts he affords to his greater brother. His Phages of
Faith (1850), indeed, retains the interest which must always belong
to a sincere account of spiritual experiences j but its predecessor,
w. 13
The Soul (1849), which was enthusiastically welcomed by
Martineau among others, is hardly remembered. On the other
hand, unfortunately for Newman, the ill-advised translation of
Homer cannot be forgotten as long as Arnold's On Translating
Homer is read.
Though he remained to the end a member of the Unitarian
body into which he was born, Martineau traversed a long range
of thought in the course of his career. The scientific bias
which was originally given to his education —he was to be a civil
engineer — clung to him for some time and made him attach him-
self to the Utilitarians. Nevertheless, in his first book, the
Rationale of Religious Inquiry (1836), which was spoken of, with
some extravagance of praise, as one of the most wonderful works
of the time, he expressed the view that those who did not believe
in the miracles recorded in the Gospels ought not to be called
Christians. If in later years he became more religious he also
became more liberal, for the passage in which this opinion was
expressed was ultimately struck out. It was a sense of the ethical
inadequacy of the empirical school which led him to abandon

determinism and to revise his conception of causation'; and a
furlough of fifteen months, in 1848- 1849, spent largely under Tren-
delenburg in Berlin, completed the process which was already
begun. He studied chiefly Plato and Aristotle, but they had the
effect of lifting " the darkness from the pages of Kant and even
Hegel'." " The metaphysic of the world had come home to me,"
says Martineau, " and never again could I say that phenomena, in
their clusters and chains, were all, or find myself in a universe
with no categories but the like and unlike, the synchronous and
successive *."
This is the vital change which links Martineau with the
Hegelians and which colours all his later work. The priricipal
fruits of his thought were Studies of Christianity (1858), A Study

of Spinoza (1882), Types of Ethical Theory (1885) and The Seat
of Authority in Religion (1890). By these works, with others in
the same vein, and by numerous essays, sermons and addresses,
' Preface to Types of Ethical Theory, xU.

s ibid. xiii. * ibid.
PHILOSOPHY 195
Martineau rose to one of the highest positions in the philosophy

of the time. He was essentially a moralist. Too broad-minded
not to perceive the interdependence of all forms of speculation, too
penetrating to misapprehend the importance of the final questions
of ontology, his own interests were nevertheless almost wholly
ethical and and his investigations into the background
religious,
of being were somewhat perfunctory. To such investigations he

contributed little or nothing of his own ; neither was he the disciple
of any one school. He was eclectic in his tendency, culling from
all sources what suited his own intellect and his emotional nature;
and laying for his ethical and religious system a somewhat

miscellaneous foundation. But whatever doubt may be felt
about the groundwork, the main lines of the superstructure are
perfectly distinct. The great conceptions which Martineau up-
holds are those of God, freedom and immortality. He strenuously
fought against the sensationalism and materialism which the
influence of physical science made prevalent in the middle
period of the nineteenth century. He contended that without the
conception of God there could be no unity in the intellectual
nature of man, no moral imperative, no sure foundation for social

order. And he maintained his position in English which, though
sometimes less terse than it might have been, was always attractive
and In method perhaps his greatest vice
occasionally poetical.
was discursiveness. His mind was remarkably open to suggestions,
and he was seldom able to resist the temptation of following
out a thought although it only bore indirectly on the main
theme.
Martineau's high reputation was due partly to his great
intellectual force, and partly to his lofty character and noble
life
—" a life," said the remarkable birthday address presented to
him "which has never been distracted by controversy,
in 1888,
and which personal interests and ambitions have never been
in
allowed to have a place." But partly also it was due to his central
position. At an earlier time Martineau the Unitarian would have
been anathema to the orthodox ; but while the rank and file were
still absorbed in Gorham controversies and Jerusalem bishoprics,
the more intelligent saw that the main battle was raging round
13—2
the central positions, and were glad welcome an ally who would
to
help to hold these. Martineau's unhappy difference with his
sister Harriet showed how he was from the extreme. No one
far
probably did more work than he in opposition to

effective
materialism, altruism, positivism, and all the schemes of thought
which seemed to threaten the very existence of Christianity ; and
therefore many, even of those who found all the truth within the
limits of the Thirty-nine Articles or the Westminster Confession,
learnt to look upon him as the champion of a cause which was
theirs as well as his.
Of even wider and deeper significance than either the French
or the German was the native English school of evolution but ;
this will be best treated in the chapter on science, because by far

the greatest man of the school, Charles Darwin, was a man of
science; and the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, who is second
only to him in importance, is closely linked to science.
After the evolutionists, no recent philosopliic writers are
more interesting than those who treat of the philosophy of history.
They belong to a class sparsely represented in the literature of the
past Vico has been called the father of the philosophy of
history ; Montesquieu's great work, E
Esprit des Lois, is one of
the classics of the subject ; more recently, Hegel had thrown the
light of his genius upon a series of lectures which have
it in
profoundly influenced subsequent thought. But there was as yet
no beaten path; only a few choice spirits had perceived the
possibility of a philosophy of history. Gradually, however, the
imperative need for it was forced upon men by the enormous
and unmanageable accumulation of materials, under the load of

which intelligible and intelligent history was in danger of being
smothered. The need was felt first in the sphere of law, and
Austin's work was an attempt to satisfy it. The whole school of
the Benthamitesfelt the need, and especially John Mill, the great
aim of whose philosophy was to formulate a science of man in

society. The Comtists were influenced by the same desire. But
the desire could not be gratified unless
some principles could be
enunciated that would reduce the chaos to order; and accordingly
the attempt is made to discover such principles. In England the
PHILOSOPHY 197
principal names associated with this attempt are those of Buckle,

Maine, and Bagehot.
Henry Thomas Buckle (1821— 1862) was one of that small band
of men who have devoted themselves through life to the unswerving
pursuit of a great ideal. A delicate child, he received but little
regular education, leaving school at the early age of fourteen and ;
though afterwards he passed a short time under a private by tutor,
far the greater part of his vast store of knowledge was accumulated
by himself without guidance from anyone. Some have sought to

account thus for the deficiencies of Buckle's great work; but there
is a good deal of pedantry in this. It is probable that the
History of Civilisation gained as much as it lost from the absence,
in Buckle's case, of a regular University training. It has an in-
describable freshness which is rarely found except in the works of
self-taught genius ; recalling, in this respect, Lecky's Rationalism,
which, though the writer was regularly trained, was largely the
product of self-directed browsings in the libraries of Italy. The
death of his father in 1842 left Buckle hisown master and,
happily, the possessor of a small fortune, which enabled him to
follow the bent of his own mind. He read everything he could
lay his rapidity, and retaining
hands upon, devouring books with a
their contents with a tenacity of memory, like that of Macaulay.
His capacity for acquisition was enormous though the irregularity
:
of his education made him rather backward than otherwise in

boyhood, by the year 1850 he knew no fewer than nineteen
languages, seven of them so that he could either converse in
them or write them, and the rest well enough to read them
without trouble'.
A plan of his great work seems to have been formed in some
dim way soon after his father's death; and to the realisation of
this scheme the whole of his manhood was given up. He would
rarely suffer himself to be diverted even for a moment ; but his
admiration for Mill, whom he considered the greatest of living
men, led to an exception. Onthe publication of Mill's Liberty,
Buckle reviewed the book in Fraser's Magazine. Mill mentions
one of the most outrageous cases of judicial oppression in recent
1 Huth's Life of Buckle, i. 38.
igS THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
history, the sentence of twenty-one months' imprisonment pro-
nounced by Sir John Coleridge upon a half-witted man named
Pooley for writing upon a gate offensive words about Christianity.
Buckle, roused to indignation, enquired into the matter, satisfied
himself of Mill's accuracy, and attacked Coleridge with a
vehemence all the greater because of the prominence of the
latter's position. Many of Buckle's own friends doubted the
wisdom of his attack ; but he held his ground.
Like many another explorer in an untravelled world. Buckle
found the margin fade before him. In 1852 he thought himself
on the verge of publication ; and in 1853, in a letter to Lord
Kintore', he explains with admirable clearness the plan of the
book as it actually appeared. Already the scope of the work has
been greatly curtailed, the idea of a history of civilisation in
general giving place to that of a history of English civilisation.
It is to be an "attempt to rescue history from the hands of
annalists, chroniclers, and antiquaries " ; and the root idea of
the detection of the laws that govern progress. " I have been
it is
long convinced," says Buckle, " that the progress of every people
is regulated by principles — or, as they are called, laws — as regular
and as certain as those which govern the physical world. To
discover those laws is the object of my work."
The publication in 1857 of the first volume of the History of
Civilisation in England raised Buckle at once to a high rank
among men of letters. The second volume in 1861 was equally
well received. The edition in three volumes, which bears the
title. History of Civilisation in France and England, Spain and
Scotland (1866), was posthumous.
Buckle's work has already passed through two phases in public
opinion, and it seems to be entering upon a third. They are phases
thrbugh which many another great man's reputation has passed.
At first, the boldness and originality of the design and the
brilliancy of the execution swept readers away ; they thought that
the riddle was already read, and that the laws enunciated by
Buckle were the veritable laws under which human progress had
' Life tf Buckle, i. 63.

PHILOSOPHY 199
been made. There were hostile criticisms in plenty; but, as

Buckle says, "if men are not struck down by hostility, they
always thrive by it'." The critics were brushed aside, and for a
time Buckle passed as a sort of prophet, and the History of
Civilisation as an inspired utterance. Then came the reaction
which inevitably follows upon excess. Calmer consideration
awakened the suspicion that all the incalculable complexity of
human history could not be brought under the comparatively
simple laws laid down in the History of Civilisation. It was
perceived moreover that Buckle was a man of prejudices; and
that; in particular, his account of civilisation in Scotland was
vitiated by the anti-ecclesiastical bias of his mind. Hence came
an opposite excess; and twenty or thirty years after his death
Buckle was as much underrated as he had been at first over-
estimated. Of late years there have been signs of a tendency for
opinion to down in a position intermediate between the
settle
two extremes. Mr J. M. Robertson's Buckle and his Critics is a

powerful and in many points a successful vindication of the great
historian; and it is seen that, after full allowance is made for
errors and exaggerations, enough remains to establish a very
solid reputation. Buckle was a man of real genius ; and if he has
not founded a science of history, he has at any rate formulated a
number of very fruitful generalisations.
As is not infrequently the case, some of the best of these
generalisations were among those most fiercely attacked when
they were first promulgated. In particular, no doctrine of the
History of Civilisation was so vehemently impugned as Buckle's
assertion of the superior efficacy of the intellectual to the moral
element as a cause of progress. The former, he taught, is dynamic,
the latter, static. Buckle was by no means disposed to underrate
morality; he held that, it was far more im-
for the individual,
portant to be moral than to be clever; and he thought that
education ought to aim more at the development of character
than of intellect; but when he looked abroad upon history and
considered men in the mass, he saw that the great discoveries
» Life, ii. 86.

which had raised the condition of mankind had been the work of
intellect. Buckle had the grim satisfaction of being told by a
later critic, that this conception, which was vehemently denounced
when he first promulgated it, was " a truism."
Probably nothing has done so much to foster doubt about the
soundness of the History of Civilisation as the treatment of the
individual; and this is no mere subordinate matter, but a thing
absolutely fundamental. If Carlyle's view, that history is essentially
no " science of history " in the

biographic, be correct, there can be
sense in which Buckle used the phrase. These two stand in the
most pronounced opposition; and the fact that Frederick the
Great and the History of Civilisation were published contempo-
raneously vividly illustrates the danger of laying down general
rules as to the thought of any age. In the former, it is hardly too
much to say that the history of the whole continent of Europe is
centred in Frederick; in the latter we are taught the insignificance

of the individual. " In the great march of human affairs," says
Buckle, " individual peculiarities count for nothing " and he ;
means not only ordinary individuals but the greatest men as welli
If this proposition be not true, then it is impossible to reduce
history under law; for the individual is incalculable as well as
indefinable. If it be possible to merge the individual

in the mass
and to reason by averages, then the conception of law prevails ; in
so far as it is not possible to do so, its scope is limited.
Buckle had great faith in the statistical method. If we take
men one by one, each seems to act in accordance with his own
good pleasure. He adopts this profession or that, marries or re-
mains celibate, emigrates or stays at home, as seems good to himself.
If we widen the view, the soundness of this conclusion seems
to become doubtful. It appears that the number of emigrants
varies through causes beyond the control of the individual, and
that marriages are few or many according as food is dear or cheap.
For such reasons as these Buckle argued that the individual could
be eliminated. Take a wide enough view, he urges, and it is
possible to detect the laws that govern human action, irrespective
of the supposed freedom of the individual. Even as regards the
average man, it may be doubted whether the argument is valid
PHILOSOPHY 20
though for many purposes averages yield results suflSciently

accurate, and often they are the only means by which results can
be attained at all. But with regard to exceptional men the fallacy
isobvious. It may be possible to determine the average brain-
power of a million men but if each man possessed exactly the

;
average, the result would be widely different from that which

would follow if one man possessed a thousand times as much as
any of his fellows. It is just the exceptional man who makes
those intellectual discoveries to which, as Buckle insists, all pro-
gress is due. Suppose the French Revolution without Napoleon.
And what law of averages shall guarantee a Napoleon ? We take
him after he has appeared, and he becomes part of that material
from which the average is struck. Perhaps even his brain-power
does not appreciably alter the world's average ; but its concentra-
tion in one head changes the world's history. There is exaggeration
in both extremes, but Carlyle's hero-worship is sounder after all
than Buckle's science of history. It is not true that Julius Caesar
and Napoleon and Luther and Shakespeare and Newton count for
nothing in the great march of human affairs ; and no law has ever
been formulated which entitles us to count upon such men
appearing when they are needed. No calipers yet devised can
take the diameter of a spirit. Averages are often delusive. It
would be easy to tabulate the heights of the peaks of the Alps and
to strike an average ; but the summit of Mont Blanc would not
be a foot the lower, and it would still be the only spot from which it
would be possible to overlook all the others. Within a few years
of Buckle, Huxley, approaching the problem from a sounder basis
of science, writes " The advance of mankind has everywhere
:
depended on the production of men of genius ; and that produc-

tion is a case of spontaneous variation becoming hereditary, not
'
'
by physical propagation, but by the help of language, letters and

the printing press'." History can never become purely scientific,
and the individual can never be eliminated; but on the other

hand his presence does not mean the reign of lawlessness and
caprice.
What Leslie Stephen said about Austin and Sir Henry Maine
' Life of Huxley, i. 240,
(182Z-1888) might be repeated with regard to the relation between
Maine and Buckle ; for Buckle's star too shone dimmer after the
appearance of the new light. The publication of Maine's Ancient

Law (1861) at once established his reputation. It was followed
by a series of works bearing upon cognate problems, Village —

Communities (1871), The Early History of Institutions (1875) and
Dissertations on Early Law and Custom (1883). The only im-
portant work of Maine which stands somewhat apart is his
Popular Government (1885). In his other works he deals with

the distant past and treats his material in a purely scientific spirit.
In Popular Government he turns the mind stored with the

thoughts thus accumulated upon the present, and even seeks to
forecast the future. It is not surprising that many of those who
disliked his unfavourable conclusions as to modern democracy
regarded the Popular Government as little better than a political
pamphlet.
Maine's plan is much less ambitious than was Buckle's, and
partly for that very reason he has been more successful. He takes
for his subject not the whole of civilisation, even in any one
country, but only laws and political institutions. These he
regards in the spirit of a philosopher : he is not content merely, to
ask what they are, but he seeks to show their place in
life and
thought, and meaning by tracing them back to

to penetrate their
their primitive forms. It is not too much to say that Maine
revolutionised jurisprudence by bringing it into organic connexion

with history. One of the great merits of his mode of treatment is
that it is thoroughly evolutionary. Whether he was consciously

influenced by The Origin of Species or not, it is certain that the
spirit of that book informs all Maine's works. The reader of
Ancient Law is made to feel that, however distant in time the
subject under discussion may be, it bearing upon the
has a vital
present. To this is due much of the which Maine never

interest
fails to inspire. He has in him nothing of the mere antiquary.
The progress from status to contract is just a step in a great
process which is still going on; the study of the village com-
munity throws a flood of light on laws actually in force and
customs actually followed at the present day. This practical
PHILOSOPHY 203
aspect of his speculations was characteristic of Maine. He never

philosophised purely for the sake of philosophising ; but no one
was more vividly conscious that a mere fact was nothing until it
was interpreted. One of his highest gifts was his remarkable

power of reasoning back from scanty remnants of the past to the
system in which they had a place.
Another of Maine's great merits is the charm of his style,
—
which is even better than Buckle's as clear, and more uniformly
bright Scarcely any other writer on juridical subjects is com-
parable with him. Macaulay made Indian codification fascinating;
but probably only he and Maine have ever performed such a feat
Conceptions which, in writers like Austin, are of the hardest and
most arid kind, are in Maine fuU of interest. The reason is that
he always looks at them in relation to the life of the community
in which they prevail. It is this which makes Maine's books
so eminently readable; it is the underlying evolutionary con-

ception which makes him always sparkling and vivacious.
There is strictly no past to him, for the past lives on in the
present
The youngest of the three, Walter Bagehot (1826-1877), is a
man whose works do not suggest, to outward view, that unity of
aim which characterises Buckle and Maine. He was a journalist,
and his writings have something of the multifarious character
which is fostered by journalism. But he is too great a man to be
treated as a writer of miscellaneous prose ; and when the attempt
is made to weigh and measure the importance of the various items
of his work, it becomes manifest that his fame must rest on what
he accomplished as a publicist
Bagehot received his education at University College, London,
and afterwards read law with a view to the bar ; but, though he
was called, he soon abandoned the intention of making the law
his profession, and joined his father, who was a partner in Stuckey's
bank. He entered upon this career with zest " Business," said :
he, " is much more amusing than pleasure " ; and he is probably
the only writer who has ever succeeded in making business
amusing even to the reader who is not a business man. It seems
clear that his education was for him a fortunate one. If he had
gone to Oxford or Cambridge, whatever he had gained, he would

certainly have been in less familiar touch with commerce and
with statesmanship than he was in London. And what specially
distinguishes Bagehot is just the breath of real life which he
communicates to his treatment of these subjects. On the literary
was by no means unfortunate ; for in
side of his education too he
those days Clough was the head of University Hall, and Bagehot
was strongly drawn to him.
Nearly all Bagehot's work is critical in spirit, but the essays
devoted to though they are among the best of

literary criticism,
the time, rich, suggestive, pointed, and enlivened here and there
by a pungent humour, are nevertheless little more than a by-play
of his mind. Like all he did, they are philosophical in essence,
and rest upon a wholly different foundation from that which
underlies the criticisms of Jeffrey and his school. Bagehot always
seeks to penetrate to the principle on which a writer's art is based,
in the conviction that by it he will be able to explain all special
characteristics. This, for example, is the manner of procedure in
the essay on Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning, or Pure,
Ornate and Grotesque Art. Here and elsewhere there is a feeling
of abundance about the criticism the words seem to flow out of
;
the fulness of the critic's mind ; and wealth makes him careless.
His good things are often dropped casually, as the ostrich drops
its eggs. It would not be easy to find a more illuminative
criticism than his remark that sacred poets thrive by translating

the weaker portions of Wordsworth and Coleridge into the speech
of women. He is notable too for wise, pregnant maxims:
"Though it is false and mischievous to speak of hereditary
vice, it is most true and wise to observe the mysterious fact of
hereditary temptation." And he is rich in incidental humour, e.g.
"A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk
wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself"; or the
grotesque description of H. Crabb Robinson: "The nose was
one of the most slovenly which nature had ever turned out, and
the chin of excessive length, with portentous power of extension."
The Biographical Studies are even more happy than the
literary criticisms. Dealing by preference with statesmen and
PHILOSOPHY 2oS
publicists, Bagehot is here upon the ground which he had studied

most minutely. In the subjects he selects, in the praise he
bestows or in the censure he passes, the reader may frequently
find hints of Bagehot's own likesand dislikes. He admired
learning; but he admired still more capacity for affairs and the
power to apply knowledge to the practical needs of life. The
combination of the two is the secret of his strong admiration of
Sir G. Cornewall Lewis. "No German professor," Bagehot de-
clares, " from the smoke and study of many silent years, has ever
put forth books more bristling with recondite references, more
exact in every technicality of scholarship, more rich in natural
reflection, than Sir George Cornewall Lewis found time, mind, and
scholar-like curiosity, to write in the very thick of eager English
life. And he was never busy, or never seemed so." But
yet
perhaps Bagehot is seen at his best in the essay on Sir Robert
Peel, the whole of which is an admirable specimen of shrewd

wisdom, while scattered through it are many happy touches of
humour. Not the least of his merits is his capacity of expressing
in a memorable way truths which are or ought to be familiar.
"A constitutional statesman," he tells us, "is in general a man of
common opinions and uncommon abilities." We feel that this
not only is but must be true. If he were not a man of common

opinions,how could he ever gain his position ? if he were not a
man of uncommon abilities, how could he escape disaster? Many
had blundered round the meaning before Bagehot: it is the
essence of the criticism made against not a few constitutional
statesmen, that they follow rather than lead, adopt the opinions
of the multitude rather than show them something better. But
though many had dimly felt the truth, no one had ever expressed
it so tersely and so well.
These essays, however, whether the date of the individual
papers be early or late, are of the nature of preparatory
studies to the main work of Bagehot's life. He was a publicist,
and his most valuable work was economic and political in
character. His two greatest books are his English Constitution
and his Lombard Street. A third. Physics and Politics (1872), is
sometimes preferred to these; but it is more interesting as a
symptom than for its intrinsic merits. It is an attempt, not
completely successful, to apply the idea of development to
politics. Though the scheme is promising the book as a whole

is than most of Bagehot's writings.
less suggestive
The English Constitution was published as a series of essays in

the Fortnightly Review between May, 1865, and June, 1867 ; and
the essays were collected into a volume in the latter year. Lombard
Street: a description of the Money Market, first appeared in 1873.
These were the subjects upon which Bagehot had been training
himself all his life to write, and on them all the wealth of his
thought is lavished. He shows in the highest degree the power
of writing on great and serious subjects weightily, but not in the
least heavily. No writer has ever made the money-market half as
attractive as he; there is no book on the English Constitution
comparable to his in interest for the general reader. And yet
this is not due to superficiality ; rather the opposite. The living
interest which Bagehot infuses into economics and constitutional
problems alike is due to the fact that he begins by treating his
subject as a living thing. He brushes aside the cobwebs of old

theory, and asks himself what is the genuine fact beneath. He had
himself much
of that vivid power of realisation which he justly
ascribed to Scott " If he [Scott] had given the English side of
:
the race to Derby, he would have described the Bank of England

paying in sixpences, and also the loves of the cashier." Though
the loves of the cashier did not come in Bagehot's way, he wrote
in the spirit of this quotation.
In Bagehot's Lombard Street there is very little about the
Bank Charter Act ; but there is a great deal about the operation
of financial facts in times of crisis on the minds of merchants and
bankers. The human element, not the mechanical one, is the
vital thing ; and no system, however plausible, can possibly work,
if it fails to take account of that vital thing. Lombard Street owes
its impressiveness to the constancy with which the human element
is kept in view. It is written in the clearest and simplest style,
almost wholly free from technicalities. The concentration of

money in banks acts as a bounty on trading with borrowed money,
and so produces a " democratic structure of commerce," which
PHILOSOPHY 207
renders men prompt to seize advantages. Hence, "all sudden

trades come to England," because money is readily lent. Hence
too comes the extraordinary centralisation of the commercial
system of the country, which turns on the reserve of the Bank of
England as on a pivot ; so that, in Bagehot's own words, " on the
wisdom of the directors of that one Joint Stock Company, it
depends whether England shall be solvent or insolvent\" Bagehot's
book had an influence such as few economic works have ever
produced. It ranks with Cairnes's Slave Power as a demonstra-
tion of a particular economic theme and the work it did was
;
done once for alL Circumstances have changed, partly through

lapse of time, but not a little through the influence of Bagehot.
He educated not merely public opinion, but Government and
the Bank itself, as to the true position of the Bank of England
and its functions and duties. The facts were open to everybody,
yet no one understood their true significance till Bagehot explained
it. Probably Lombard Street has either averted or mitigated more
than one commercial crisis during the generation which has passed
since it was written.
Much the same holds true of Bagehot's discussion of the
English constitution. Noone has done more than he to get rid
of the theory of checks and balances ; and he did so once more
because he insisted upon digging down to the fact beneath the
show; he shares the interest he ascribes to science in "stupid"
for
facts. But on the other hand no one knew better than he that
sentiment also is a fact. The sound system of finance and the
sound constitution must alike act on the imagination. This is
necessary in finance, because if all were to insist upon the hard
fact i.e. the solid money —there does not exist enough to satisfy
one-tenth part of the claims. It is necessary in politics, because

the average man, or the man ignorant and stupid beyond the
average, can underst9.nd the " august " part of a constitution, for
he can see it ; but he cannot understand its operative part, for to
do so he must assimilate an abstract idea. The conception of

government by a monarch is simple, ior the monarch may be seen
in the streets of the capital, and the sceptre and crown are on
1 The italics are Bagehot's.
2o8 '
THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
show in the Tower of London, to prove that he is not as other
men are. But the cabinet is a mere board of gentlemen, without
insignia, clothed with no legal powers, theoretically, it may almost
be said, non-existent.
Great originality and independence of mind, imagination,

clearness of conception, a vivid style and a power of lucid
exposition were Bagehot's special gifts. What he accomplished
was due, above all, to his determination to see the truth for him-
self, probe things to the bottom. He took no theory upon
to
trust. Theory told him that the Bank of England was a joint
stock bank, like any other fact convinced him that the Bank of
:
—
England was indeed a joint stock bank, but not like any other.
The bank which kept the only reserve in the country must
necessarily be different from all others. Theory again told him
that the constitution of England was a system of balances in which
King, Lords and Commons were played off against one another:
fact showed him that a body of gentlemen called a Cabinet,
unrecognised in the constitution, exercised more power than any
one of them. In both cases, so much the worse for the theory.
Bagehot follows the guidance of fact, and his readers follow
him.
In Mill, in Harriet Martineau, and in Bagehot notice has
already been taken of certain phases of economic theory. No
other economist of the period rises to their level in literature, nor
does any one rival Mill in eminence in the science of economics;
but this form of thought was too characteristic of the time to
be passed over without further notice. One economist, Malthus,

moved the mind which moved the world; another, Ricardo,
though himself a thinker only of the third rank, for half a century
wielded an influence which has rarely been exercised even by the
greatest. The change in the conditions of industry produced by
the introduction of machinery and the improvement of the means
of locomotion, rendered inevitable the investigation of economic
problems. The development of democracy exercised a remarkable
influence upon the character of the theories which resulted from
this investigation. For the most striking fact in the history of
^gnomics is the change which gradually comes about between
PHILOSOPHY 209
the beginning of the, period and the end.,, In the beginning, the
theorists represent, in the main, the views of triumphant and
prosperous capitalism; in the end, those of the labouring popula-
tion have become prominent. In the beginning, the sway of Ricardo
is it still prevails, though not with-
nearly absolute; in the middle,
out challenge ; in the end, his authority is all but absoljitely
superseded. Mill may be described as a Ricardian in spite of
himself His sympathy with the working classes made him shrink
from some of the results of ab^t^£ict gconomic theory,, and Qomte
suggested thoughts alien from the Ricardian system. But Mill
was essentially an "orthodox," or "classical," or "deductive" econo-
mist; he added little to the theory and omitted
little from it;
ifhe had even assimilated Adam Smith as completely as he had

assimilated Ricardo, he might have found within the bounds of
orthodox economics the germs of a more liberal tlieory. But
Mill was among the last of the economists who were in the fullest
sense "orthodox." His John Elliott Cairnes (1824-1875),
disciple,
remained, indeed, firm in the faith, and expounded it with great

ability in Some Leading Principles of Political Economy newly
Expounded (1874); while The Slave Power (1862) is a singularly
brilliant monograph and a remarkably successful application of
the principles of science to a great practical question.

Long before Cairnes, however, and before even Mill, there can
be detected the beginnings of a revolt against the Ricardian
doctrines. Richard Jones (1790-1855), the successor of Malthus
at Haileybury, showed that the celebrated theory of rent held
good only under certain conditions, and that what he called
"peasant rents" were fixed not by competition but by custom.
He may be regarded as a precursor of the historical school,
which for thirty years has been steadily gaining ground at the
expense of the abstract economists. To this result forces out-
side —
England the theories of Marx and Lassalle for example
— and forces extra-economic contributed. Carlyle poured his
contempt upon what he called a philosophy of dirt, and Ruskin
followed him with no less vehemence and with greater persis-
tency. Under such influences the popular faith in "laws" was
shaken, and the historical method began to prevail over the
w. 14
deductive. Vast compilations of facts, like Thorold Rogers'
History of Agriculture and Prices in England (1866-188 7) and
Six Centuries of Work and Wages (1884) are sympitomatic ; and
T. E. Cliffe Leslie (i827?-i882) in Essays Moral and Political
(1879) expounds the theory upon which men had already begun
to act. The general result is the substitution for the old "laws"
of a body of teaching far less dogmatic, —
teaching imbued with
the conviction that, for the most part, economic truth is a thing
which varies with degrees of latitude and longitude and is n6t
necessarily the same yesterday, to-day and and cautious
for ever ;
of asserting anything until abstract reasoning has been confirmed

by the appeal to experience.
Note : —This chapter was in print before the death of the veteran
Hegelian, J. Hutchison Stirling,
CHAPTER III
SCIENCE
If every book were 'literature,' it would be necessary to
discuss Bradshaw. Fortunately, there are multitudes of volumes i
which can be at once and without hesitation dismissed as not

coming within the denotation of the word. In many cases,: how-
ever, there is some difficulty in determiningi what ought to be
included, and what may be safely dismissed as outside the pale.
It will iprobably be agreed that the great majority of scientific
works belong to the latter category, and that science in genersil

impinges upon literature only in the same way that every otheir
force which moves humanity does so. But last century was
pre-eminently the century of science. Never before was its
influence so potent, and never before were so many books
written which were literary as well as scientific. Since thfe
beginning of the Victorian era the spirit of science has permeated
literature in every department. Its mark is to be seen in poetry.
It is seen too in imaginative prose : Ruskin, who declares that
he himself might have been the first geologist of his time, reproaches
Wordsworth because "he could not understand, that to break a
rock with a hammer in search of crystal may sometimes be an act
not disgraceful to human nature, and that to dissect a flbwer
may sometimes be as proper as to dream over it' "; and, unlike
the poet, he bases his own conception; of beauty upon scientific
study.
* Modern Painters^ iii., xvii. § 7.
14—2
But it is only in men's attitude towards truth and in their

conception of the universe that the influence of science can be
truly seen. The idea of the reign of law is the work of science.
Quite recently, "chance" was not a mere name for our ignorance,
but a positive conception. Dimly and confusedly it was felt that
there was in real existence a ''reign of Chaos and old Night."
The winds blew where they listed ; and few conceived that they
were as strictly links in the great chain of causation as were the
fall of the apple and the rise of water in the Torricellian tube.
On reflection, doubtless, all educated men, then as now, would
have admitted that every event had a cause ; but they would have
been much less sure than we are that the cause must be natural,
and they would have had no adequate conception of the "orderli-
ness" of nature, of the true "reign of law." They regarded violent
breaches of continuity as things ,of relatively frequent occurrence.
It requires an effort to remember that before the publication of
Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-1833), the science of geology
was taught as essentially "catastrophic."
The change has been of results far beyond the bounds
fruitful
of the theses propounded and the propositions established. It

has created a tone of mind, a habit of thought, whose influence is
by no means limited to science. Science, strictly interpreted, has
little to say about the problems of profoundest interest to humanity
but the spirit and the method of science have influenced the
treatment of those problems. Multitudes of things have silently
but surely become impossible of belief, not because they have

been disproved by science, but because the scientific habit of
mind has been fatal to them as sunlight is fatal to the bacillus
which loves the dark. In the nineteenth century the battle for
freedom of thought was won ; and the very opprobrium formerly
attaching to the phrase "free thought," proves how necessary it
was to fight it. '
Under such circumstances it is not only relevant and legiti-
mate, but essential, to pay some attention to the development of

science, particularly in those branches which have been most
directly influential in producing this revolution in thought. These
are geology and biology, with the kindred science of anthropology.
SCIENCE 213
Itwas the change in the former which paved the way for the great
development of the latter; and it has been the new ideas originated
in the latter which, more than any other single cause, have
revolutionised modern thought.
In the early part of the nineteenth century the science of
geology was in its infancy.
still Important discoveries had been
made and work had been done. Werner had done much
solid
for minera,logy; Hutton had attempted to explain the earth by
the operation of causes still at work ; and William Smith had
proved that certain strata were characterised by the presence in
them of fossil species not to be found at all in other strata. But
the full corisequences of this last discovery were not perceived : it
remained a fact waiting for its interpretation. Even the founda-

tion of the science was hardly yet secure. Though there were
uniformitarians before Lyell, the accepted basis of geology was
still catastrophic ; that is, in cases of difificulty there was constantly
resort to causes, natural indeed but not orderly. Earthquakes
and volcanic eruptions and floods (partial ones) are phenomena
which actually occur ; but a world shaped by such forces must be
regarded as the product of a series of spasms rather than of a
process of growth. Substitute for these glacial action, the slow
denudation by subsidence and elevation, and the like, and
rivers,
we have all the difference between order and chaos, between law
and caprice. This great change was brought about by Lyell's
Principles of Geology, which made manifest the immense superiority
of the uniformitarian doctrine. The older men were naturally
slow to accept thenew views ; and Darwin's teacher, the bptanist
Henslow, while advising him to take Lyell's book with him on the
Beagle, warned him against accepting its teaching. The warning
was vain ; for at the very first place where he had the opportunity
to geologise, Darwin became convinced of the " immense superi-
ority " of Lyell's views*.

Lyell therefore, though he was not the founder of geology
even in the modified sense in which Adam Smith is spoken of as
the founder of political economy, may be compared to some
reformer of a state, some great legislator, a Lycurgus or a Solon,
^ Life of Darwin, 1. 73.
who has set it on a new path of honour and of progress. To him
more than to any other man is due the present state of the science;
and to his agency is due the fact that a great domain of nature
has been effectually brought under the conception of law. Except
Darwin, no one else has contributed so greatly to the revolution
of thought which we have ascribed to science. It is not necessdry
to pronounce him a greater man of science than Faraday, or

Joule, or Kelvin ; but the principles he enunciated did result in
a revolution ; theirs were just the orderly development out of the
laws of Newton.
Biological evolution is only the extension to the otiganic world
of the principles which Lyell maintained to be dominant in the
inorganic. ' Lyell had to face the question in his examination of
Lamarck, whose speculations at once fascinated and repelled him;
for he viewed with great repugnance the theory of the descent of
man from the lower forms of life. It was largely this feeling
which led to his negative judgment on Lamarck ; and it was this
which for nearly a generation kept him in the position he had

taken up in the Principles of Geology. Before the appearance of
his second great work, the Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of
Man (1863), Dairwin's book had been published. Lyell, who,
with Huxley and Hooker, had been mentally fixed upon by
Darwin as one of the judges by whose verdict he would consider
his own theory to stand or fall, was a convert ; and the new book
necessarily showed the influence of the Darwiilian theory. But it
also showed the influence of the old feeling of repugnance, and
Darwin was disappointed. Lyell could not bring himself to adopt
the theory of the descent of man from the bruteS; which he saw
clearly to follow from the admission of the modification of species.
Purely as a man of science Hugh Miller (1802-1856) would
certainly not deserve mention along with Lyell. He inculcated no
new principle; and he was far too imperfectly educated to be capable
of forming valuable opinions on the great questions opened up by
gedlogy; but on the other hand the rugged stone-mason was not
only a Writer of vigorous and beautiful English, but was himself a
very striking and interesting figure. The materials for his first
noteworthy book, the Scenes and Legends of tJu North of Scotland

SCIENCE 215
(183s), were drawn from his native Cromarty. So in great part

were those from which the Old Red Sandstone (1840) was con-
structed. Miller's great merit in science was that he gave with
entire candour the results of his own observation. He might
misinterpret ; anatomy might make some of his
his ignorance of
conclusions worthless^ but he had looked with his own eyes, and
he faithfully described what he saw. "I have been," he said
towards the close of his life, "an honest journalist I have never
once given expression to an opinion which I did not conscientiously
regard as sound, nor stated a fact which, at the time at least, I
did not believe to be true."
Miller had migrated from Cromarty to Edinburgh in 1839
and he found himself plunged there into the midst of a theological
turmoiL He became pars magna of the Scottish Disruption
Guthrie calls him "the greatest of all the men of the Ten Years'
Conflict" except Chalmers. For sixteen years, from 1840 till his
death, he edited TAe Witness, a paper issued twice a week to
advocate the principles of the anti-patronage party, while it
incidentally did a service to literature by encouraging such talent

as the editor could discover. His next independent book, I^bot-
prints of the Creator (1849), also bore evidence of theological

interests. It was a reply to the Vestiges of Creation, and an
attempt, in opposition to it, to maintain the accepted and orthodox
doctrine of special creation as against the form of evolution
advocated in the Vestiges.
The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

(1844) remained
for a long time anonymous, and it was not till 1884 that the veil
was completely withdrawn and the authorship of Robert Chambers
(1802-187 1) avowed. Chambers was one of those Scots of active
intellect and indomitable industry who have come to be regarded
as typical of their country. A thirst for knowledge and an interest

inbooks and in education characterised his brother WiUiam as
and determined the direction of their activity.
well as himself
They founded the publishing house of W. and R. Chambers,
devoted themselves especially to the diffusion of useful knowledge,
and were both active with their own pens. Robert, however, was
much the more copious and the more distinguished as a writer.
2l6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
As early as 1823 he published his Traditions of Edinburgh, which
made Scott ask with wonder where the boy had got all his
information. From that date to the end of his life Chambers
produced a prolific crop of histories, biographies, and antiquarian
compilations. He is seen at his best in books of the last class,
such as the Traditions of Edinburgh and the Book of Bays. But

oftall his writings anonymous Vestiges is the most remarkable.
the
Even if it be not a great book it is a memorable one. Chambers
had scarcely the' bare elements of the knowledge necessary to deal
with the subject. Huxley was irritated by "the prodigious ignor-
ance and thoroughly unscientific habit of mind manifested' by the
writer'." Hooker was amused. Darwin thought the writing and
arrangement admirable, but the geology bad and the zoology far
worse'. Sedgwick, who wrote a crushing criticism of the book in
the Edinburgh Review, ungallantly argued that the author was
probably a woman, " paftly from ^the fair dress and agreeable
exterior of the Vestiges; and partly from the utter ignorance the
book displays of all sound physical logic"." On the other hand,
Richard Owen refused to write a hostile revieW, and declared
the zoology and anatomy of the book to be on the whole
correct*.
But book was exceed-
in spite of all the weight of authority the
ingly popular, and by the year 1853 had passed through ten
it
editions. Nor were the reasons solely those suggested by Sedgwick,

— the shallowness of the fashionable reading world and the dogmatic
form of the work. Darwin, with his customary justice, points out
merits as well as defects. The Vestiges 'is well written and admir-
ably arranged; no reader could fail to understand the central idea;
and this is a most striking one. It was not new Erasmus Darwin :
and Lamarck had both given expression to the hypothesis of a

gradual riiodification of specleS by natural causes; but, for what-
ever reason, the ground was now more ready for the seed than it
had been in those earlier days. Chambers deserves for the
Vestiges the kind and degree of credit which belongs to one who
1
Life of Darwin, ii. 188. ' Hid. i. 33.
" Correspondence of Macvey Napier, 491.
'
Life of Owen, quoted in Benn's English Rationalism, ii. 12.
SCIENCE 217
has been among the first to grasp a great conception, and who
has had the skill to make it interesting. He could not buttress it
with anything like the immense mass of evidence accumulated by

Darwin.
Itwas not owing to Chambers that the idea of evolution
ultimately prevailed, but nevertheless he had very effectually
fluttered the dovecots both of science and of orthodoxy. The
Vestiges was just the sort of work to rouse a " theologian studying
geology " like Miller. The latter, always distinguished for a full
share of the perfervidum ingenium of his countrymen, seldom
wrote with more force and warmth of conviction than in the Foot-
prints. His case was strong, his feelings were excited, and he
poured out the stores of his observation with energy and effect.
It was the last book of geology published during his life. Tlie
Testimony of the Rocks (1857) maintained the same thesis ; but in
the year before it appeared Miller, his mind upset by overwork
and by physical suffering due to the hardships of his youth, had
died by his own hand.
Miller's best book is the admirable autobiography. My Schools
and Schoolmasters (1854), with its picture of himself, strong-willed,
self-reliant, high-minded, indomitable. His is not the least noble
figure in that band of leaders of the Disruption, every man of
whom commands respect; and though he was not, like the
ministers, called upon to surrender home and income, it is safe to
say that he had the high sense of duty and the courage which
would have nerved him to sacrifice everything for conscience'
sake. The picture of such a man drawn by his own hand was
bound to be among the treasures of literature.
Chambers in the, Vestiges had broached an idea which in the
hands of an incomparably greater man was destined to prove the
most influential among all the ideas originated or maintained in
the nineteenth century. Few periods in the history of the world
have been intellectually more active, none has ever been more
copious in literary production, and none has more numerous
names of high, if not of the highest, rank. At the close of this
century a London daily paper asked its readers to send
lists of
the ten books, English or foreign, produced during the century,

which had been in their judgment most influential. The lists
varied greatly, but in one respect they all agreed. In every list
returned stood the name of The Origin of Species. No great
importance need be attached to plebiscites of this sort; but

such remarkable unanimity of judgment as this, after an interval
of forty years, comes as near, in weight and authority, to the
judgment of remote posterity, as anything we can conceive. And
yet the idea of evolution was not new. It had been more than
once mooted by men of science ; it can be traced far back in
philosophy; and through two distinct sources, Herbert Spencer

and the English Hegehans, it was penetrating English thought in
philosophic form.
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) ought strictly to be classed
with the philosophers rather than with the men of science, but
his is so peculiarly the philosophy of science and his connexion
with the theory of evolution is so intimate, that there is an
obvious convenience in discussing him here. It is to him we
must go if we wish to see the theory of evolution stretched to
the utmost reach, and perhaps beyond it; and however various
may be the views as to the intrinsic worth of his system, all
must acknowledge that there is something singularly impressive in

the vast scope of his design and in the dauntless persistence with
which, thrusting aside all secondary ends and resolutely struggling
against feeble health, he devoted his life to its execution.
The speculative bent of Spencer's mind was for a time
obscured by the circumstances of his life. For nearly ten years
he acted as a railway engineer ; and as they were the years from
1837 to 1846, he saw great part of the process which revolu-
tionised the internal means of communication in England. More
than almost anything else, such an experience was calculated to
make a man contented with what in the common English and
not in the Aristotelian sense is called the practical ; but Spencer
turned from it at the earliest opportunity. From 1848 to 1853
he was sub-editor of the Economist, and for some years after he
was an active contributor to the Westminster Review. More and
more he devoted himself to the exclusive study of philosophy,
and by the year i860 he had planned the Synthetic Philosophy,
SCIENCE 219
to the accomplishment of which the rest of his life was devoted.

His earlier works, Social Statics (1851), Over-Legislation (1854)
&€., may be regarded as preliminary studies for this system, and
his Principles of Psychology (1855), in an enlarged and developed
form, actually became . part of it. As a complete system the
Synthetic Philosophy is composed of five parts : First Principles
(1862), Principles of Biology (1864-1867), the revised Principles
of Psychology (1870-1872), Principles of Sociology (1876-1896)
and Principles of Ethics (1892—1893).
Most important and also most questionable of all are the
First Principles, with their fundamental division into the Un-
knowable and the Knowable. Spencer, as is well knownj derived
this distinction directly from Hansel's Bampton Lectures, and
so mediately firom Hamilton's philosophy of the conditioned,

and it has been, already touched upon in the last chapter. The
criticisms are obvious and have been frequently repeated. If a
thing is unknown what is there to say about it ? If we can even
affirm that a thing exists, surely it is not completely unknowii
and if it were, surely it would be a most unsatisfactory foundation
on which to base all knowledge, a flimsy material on which to
rest the imposing structure of the Synthetic Philosophy. In-
tellectually, the Unknowable = nothing, and Spencer is therefore
placed in the absurd position of devoting half of the first and
most vital part of his philosophy to sheer vacuity. But of course

the Unknowable purely as such would not have furnished material
even for a sentence, and Spencer is in reality, though unconsciously,
engaged in showing that the Unknowable is not only in some
sense knowable but known. It is really a kind of deus ex machina,
a new Ding an sich, a substratum for the dance of phenomena,
whose dim tenuity is an advantage to the philosopher; for from
such very raw material anything whatever may be fashioned.
The whole philosophy of Spencer is really contained in the
First Principles, but it is obvious that these principles are im-
portant to him only for the sake of the subsequent parts. His
real design is to trace the operation of the single principle of
evolution from the simplest to the most complex forms; and hence
obviously the progress from biology to psychology, sociology and
ethics. Darwin's design was large, but he confined himself to
the origin of species
; he had nothing to say about the origin of
he never professed to be master of any principle which would
life,
show how inorganic matter became organic. But Spencer believed

that he could account for everything by means of the single law
of the persistence of force. He regarded evolution as "the law
of the continuous re-distribution of matter and motion"; a law
which governs the inorganic equally with the organic, and which,
we are to understand, continues unchanged in essence from the
beginning of the universe to the end, if the universe can be said
to have either beginning or end. If this could be shown,
it would
be a triumph which would dwarf the achievements even of Darwin

and Newton. But in point of fact, though the scheme of the
Synthetic Philosophy is nominally complete and the ten volumes
originally promised are all in existence, there is really a gigantic
gap in the system : there is no attempt to trace the evolution of
the inorganic into the organic. Spencer excused this omission
on the plea that the matter was less pressing than that of the
higher grades of evolution; but the plea will not bear examination.
For a philosophy which explains all things as the outcome of one
continuous process, it is just this which is the most pressing of
all. Others as well as Spencer could show good grounds for
believing that themore complex forms of life had been evolved

from simpler forms, and some have done it more convincingly
than he. But there was and is no plausible theory to account
from that which has not life to that which has.
for the transition
Huxley towards the close of his life declared his belief that the
gap would ultimately be bridged ; but this was an act of faith, and
he confessed that the feat had not yet been done. Biologists,
then, were groping in the dark in vain; and the only rational
explanation of Spencer's omission to throw light upon the problem
is that he had none to throw. Here, therefore, at the very founda-
tion of his philosophy, lies an immense assumption. The living
and the two severed worlds, and the attempt to

lifeless are still
explain the universe on mechanical principles is so far foiled.

Behind evolution itself there lies, for Spencer, the Persistence
of Force, from which he says the phenomena of evolution have
SCIENCE 221
to be deduced. On this point Professor Ward's criticism seems

to be unanswerable : "So far from accounting for all the phenomena
of evolution, the doctrine of the persistence of energy alone will
not account for a single one.The celestial, organic, social, and
other phenomena which make up what Mr Spencer calls cosmic
evolution are so many series of qualitative changes. But the
conservation of energy is not a law of change, still less a law of
qualities. It does not initiate events, and furnishes absolutely
no clue to qualitative diversity. It is entirely a quantitative law.
When energy is transformed, there is precise equivalence between
the new form and the old but ; of the circumstances determining
transformation and of the possible kinds of transformation the
principle tells us nothing. If energy is transferred, then the
system during work loses precisely what some other part of the
universe gains; but again the principle tells us nothing of the
conditions of such transferences'."
It is singular that the century which, of all in human history,
has witnessed the greatest development of specialised knowledge,

should also have produced two of the boldest of encyclopasdic
thinkers. Comte in France and Spencer in England without
hesitation took all knowledge for their province, and the very
audacity- of their attempt awed contemporaries and helped to
win for them a position which can never be wholly lost. For
there an element of greatness in the very magnitude of their
is
schemes, and even if their doctrines were completely rejected
the mere fact that they were able to conceive them is a proof
of rare endowment But time has certainly obscured the fame
of Comte, and it seems to be in process of obscuring that of
Spencer too. Men begin to suspect that the strain put upon
persistency of force is greater than it will bear, and that the word
evolution is pronounced like a sort of magic incantation. The
whole process is suspiciously simple ; and when we ask what has
really been explained by this deduction of the universe from the
law of the persistence of force, we find that the true answer is.
Nothing whatever. Life is as much a mystery as ever; we do
not know how it originates or what it is. The process is not only
1 Naluralism and Agnosticism, i. 213-214.
not explained, it is not even described: there is only the assertion,
wrapped in a haze of vague technical or fuasi-technical words,
; that, the process has taken place. How, why, under what impulse,
these are questions to which there is leally no answer.

Spencer,may be suspected, falls between two stools. Living
it
in an age of men of science, he is not sufficiently scientific ; the

author of a new theory of the universe, he is not sufficiently
metaphysical. remarkable that he does not satisfy the
It is
specialists eitheron the one side or on the other. Literary men

like R. L. Stevenson and Lafcadio Hearn are impressed by him :
the latter has no doubt that Spencer is the wisest man in all the
world: his whole intellectual life moves round the Synthetic
Philosophy like a satellite round its sun. So too he commends
himself to a people like the Japanese, who are just beginning to
familiarise themselves with the conceptions in which the western
world has been steeped for generations. When they turn to the
West for advice, it is of Spencer that they ask it, and they get —
much that is extremely sagacious and far-sighted. But with the
specialists the case is different. Men like Professors Ritchie and
Ward show the unsoundness of Spencer's metaphysit; physicists
and biologists lament that he is not more accomplished in science.
"If," says Darwin, "he had trained himself to observe more,

even if at the expense, by the law of balancement, of some loss
of thinking power, he would have been a wonderful man\" With

all his defects he was a wonderful man, and if he has left the
riddle of the universe unread, he has but failed in common with
all who have attempted the task.
The proverb, the half is greater than the whole, could hardly
be better illustrated than by a comparison of Spencer with Darwin.
Partly because he attempted less the latter accomplished much
more. The two great evolutionists were not much indebted to
one another. Already, before the publication of TAe Origin of
Species, Spencer was an evolutionist, and in the early fifties,
when Darwin was absorbed, in the work^ Spencer was one of the
very few whom he found already convinced of the truth of the
principle. In consequence Spencer's evolutionism retains to the
Life of Darwin, iii. 56.
SCIENCE 223
end traces of its Lamarckian parentage. On the other hand,

Darwin of course was in no sense indebted to Spencer for the
idea. It had dawned upon him before he ever knew Spencer
and before Spencer had published anything upon the subject.

But apart from the question of originality, what distinguished
Darwin from all others who had handled or who were handling
the idea, was his explicit theory of the manner in which evolution
had operated, and the masterly marshalling of evidence in support
of it. ,
Charles Darwin (1809-1832) had through his grandfather,

Erasmus Darwin, a kind of hereditary right to the theory of
evolution. His love of science was early developed. The seven
years which he spent at Shrewsbury Grammar School, where the
boys nicknameci him " Gas " on account of his chemical ex-
periments, were alraost, wasted, because the school was classical
and set no value on gas. His loathing of the sight of blood
turned him from his father's profession. Two operations which
he witnessed (before the days of chloroform) " fairly haunted him
for many a long year.'' He afterwards lamented as an "irreme-
diable evjil " that he had never learnt to dissect.
After two years at Edinburgh, therefore, he was sent in 1828
to Cambridge, with the object of preparing to be a clergyman.
If there be truth in phrenology he would have been a good one,
for he was pronounced in after years to possess " the bump of
reverence developed enough; for ten priests." The results he had
carried up from Edinburgh were chiefly negative. Of the lectures
there,he says some were "fearful to remember,'' others "in-
credibly dull";and he shunned lectures as much as possible at
Cambridge, though he liked those of Henslow on botany. At
the end of three years he took a humble pass degree; and he
declares the time at Cambridge to have been wasted, academically,
as much as that at Edinburgh. He had, however, been training
himself all the time. It is clear that the man of science is some-
times born, as well as the poet. At Darwin
this period of his life
had other tastes besides the love of science. Though he was
utterly destitute of ear, his "backbone would sometimes shiver"
listening to the anthem in King's College Chapel; and he read
the poets, and especially Shakespeare, with appreciation. He

deeply regretted the complete loss of these tastes in later years.
But his master-passion was science. The books by which he was
most profoundly influenced were scientific,— Humboldt's Personal
Narrative and Herschel's Introduction to the Study of Natural
Philosophy. At Edinburgh he had gone trawUng with the New-
haven fishermen, and by the law which draws like to like he
had become the friend of Macgillivray the ornithologist. At
Cambridge he was a collector of beetles, and even then showed
a certain originality in devising new methods of capture.
The turning-point in Darwin's career was his selection as
on the Beagle.
naturalist He owed the post to the friendship of
Henslow; and he almost lost it owing to the shape of his nose.
Fitz-Roy, he says, " doubted whether any one with my nose could
possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyaged"
Fitz-Roy, however, resolved to risk taking the owner of the nose,
and inDecember, 1831, Darwin embarked on the memorable
voyage from which he returned five years later with an immense
mass of fresh information, and with the germs of the theory 'of
evolution seething in his brain. He had laboured and thought
so intensely that on his return his father, whom he describes
as the most acute observer he ever saw, remarked that the very
shape of his head was altered^.
Darwin's own development was now nearly complete, and,
for the future, the landmarks of his life are the dates of the
publication of his books. For five or six years after his return
he lived principally in London. In 1839 he married; and in
1842 he removed to Down, in Kent, his home for the rest of his
life. Unfortunately, the voyage which had done so much for him
intellectually had seriously impaired his constitution. For the
rest of his life he was more or less an invalid, and all his work
was accomplished under that disadvantage.

• Perhaps Darwin had this incident in his mind when, years afterwards, he
asked Lyell, in answer to an objection against his theory, whether he supposed

that the shape of his (Darwin's) nose was designed.
' It is interesting to notice that Buckle called attention to the way in which
thought had developed his own forehead, originally rather low, ultimately very
high and broad.
SCIENCE 225
Darwin's first task after his return to England was the pre-
paration of his Journal of Researches, which, originally published
in 1839 ^s part of Fitz-Roy's narrative, was, six years later,
issued independently in a second edition. Its immediate success
"tickled" the author's "vanity," and its long-continued popularity

surprised him ; but they can be explained without difficulty.
Simple, direct, suggestive, full of matter, it is a book which

cannot be read without interest. , It is a storehouse of facts, but
it is also something more. Darwin had passed the stage of the
mere collector, and. had learnt that ''science consists in grouping
facts so that general laws or conclusions can be drawn from
them\" The Journal was rather the place for facts than for
the enunciation of great principles; but the charm of it lies in
the feeling that the writer regards every fact as something having
a meaning which it is his business to discover. It is a glimpse into
a great man's mind in process of formation. The self-revelation
on Darwin's part is unconscious, or at least is unintentional; many
readers are probably but dimly aware of it; yet the fact that the
revelation takes place gives theJournal a peculiar fascination.
In style, the book Darwin himself, the simple, modest,
is just —
courteous gentleman, wholly free from self-consciousness, con-
cerned only to say what he has to say clearly and briefly, neither
desirous nor, in his own opinion, capable of fine writing.
Few men of science have written so well as Darwin. With no
pretence to the brilliancy of Huxley, he had an extraordinary power
of rnaking plain even to the uninstructed the meaning of techni-
calities. Doubtless his utter fidelity to truth helped towards this
result. His earnest wish to say exactly what he saw and knew
necessitated care in the choice of language. Probably his diffi-
dence helped also he had no confident belief in his own power
:
to convince, he felt that he could only

do so by the hope to
exercise of the utmost care. And
must go to the
part of this care
formation of style. "No nigger with lash over him," he says,
" could have worked harder at clearness than I have done'." He
had his reward. It seems to be true that Darwin had not by

nature the gift of style. His is formed by sheer hard work ; and
' Life of Darwin, i. 57, * ibid. ii. 156.
w. n
itbecomes better with practice. Though ihe. Journal ofResearches
isa charming book, the English of it is decidedly inferior to that
of the book on earthworms ; and though the difficulties of The
Origin of Species are mainly due to the extreme condensation of
thought, it too is not free from occasional obscurity and clumsiness
of expression.
From Darwin's marriage till the removal to Down, the greater
part of the time during which he was well enough to do anything

was devoted to the Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (i 842).
"No other work of mine," he says, "was begun in so deductive a

spirit as this, for the whole theory was thought out on the west
coast of South America, before Ihad seen a true coral reef ^" but ;
he adds that for two years previously he had been incessantly

observing and reflecting upon the effects of elevation, denudation
and the deposition of sediment. Subsidence is necessarily
suggested by elevation, and the growth of coral comes in to play
the part of the deposition of sediment. In truth, the Coral Reefs
is no exception to Darwin's ordinary method. It differs from the
others, not in the use of deduction, nor in any special prominence
given to it, but only in the fact that deduction was so prominent
at the beginning. All the greater works of Darwin illustrate what
Mill calls the deductive method. They are based upon an immense
accumulation of facts, the inductive foundation ; these are grouped
together and explained by some great speculative principle, like
the theory of the coral reefs, or of natural selection, or of the
action of earthworms in the formation of vegetable mould ; and
finally, the theory is tested by its agreement with phenomena. It
is the largeness and the luminousness of the deductive principles

that give the speculations of Darwin their fascination; it is the
width of the induction that gives them their solidity. This
speculation as to coral reefs, if it be not an accepted dogma of
science, is at any rate, sixty years after its promulgation, still a
subject of enquiry, and is still helpful to thought.
Darwin had already begun the great work of his life. His first
note-book for facts bearing upon the origin of species was opened
in July, 1837, immediately after he had finished the writing of his
' Life, i. 70.
SCIENCE 227
Journal. But already he had " long reflected " on the subject
and although in the Journal h.t occasionally uses language implybg
special creation, it is clear that before the end of the voyage of the
Beagle, his belief in the traditional view was shaken. He had at
this date no theory as to the manner in which the mutation of
species had taken place ; he only guided his observations by the

general hypothesis that species might not be permanent and
unalterable entities. In October, 1838, he read Malthus on the
Principle of Population, and the idea dawned upon him that here
lay the solution. Given a state of matters in which population
increases faster than food, there necessarily follows a struggle for
existence. Variations, however caused, do occur; and in this
struggle favourable variations will tend to be preserved and
unfavourable ones to be eliminated. That is Natural Selection,
or the Survival of the Fittest.
No scientific thinker was ever more bold than Darwin ; few if
any have known better how to combine caution with boldness.

Though the theory was now clear in his mind, in order to avoid
prejudice, he refrained for nearly four years from writing it. His
first abstract was written in June, 1842. Two years later it was
much enlarged. In 1856 he began writing on a scale three or
four times as large as that adopted in The Origin of Species;
and yet even this was only an abstract of the materials which he
had collected. He had got about half way through this task when
in 1858 he received from Mr A. R. Wallace an essay On the
Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type^
The sequel is well known. An abstract from Darwin's MS. was
published at the same time with Mr Wallace's essay ; and the
former set himself at once to re-write his book on a smaller scale.
The Origin of Species was published in November, 1859.

" So thought on thought is piled till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations echo round."
In the whole history of science thereis no better example than
that afforded by The Origin of Species of the patient piling up of

facts, observations and thoughts. The author was fifty, and he
1 It is remarkable that Mr Wallace, like Darwin himself, had found the
key to the problem of evolution in Malthus.
15-2
had devoted twenty years of his life consciously, and the rest of it
unconsciously, to this great end. Neither have the nations ever

echoed more loudly with the result. The theory of the evolution
of species was a great constructive idea ; but it was also destructive,
and it came close home men. In the first place, it
to all sorts of
ran directly counter to all the orthodox views of religion, as they
then were. Genesis distinctly states that the world was created in
six days, and that the various kinds of living things, plants and
beasts and birds and fishes, were created during those days.
There are probably few men over fifty who cannot remember the
denunciations of the book for impiety and absurdity, which rang
from the pulpits of England and Scotland ; and the views expressed
in print may still be read by those who care to examine the files of
old journals. It had not then been discovered that the whole
theory is contained in the Old Testament ; and we may imagine

that Darwin smiled, as grimly as it was in his nature to smile, when
he wrote in his Autobiography that there had even appeared an
essay in Hebrew to demonstrate this.
Hardly anything, as Galileo found to his cost, is apt to stir up
so great excitement as the publication of a theory in real or apparent
conflict with the accepted dogmas of religion. But in Darwin's
case there was a prejudice still wider than this to struggle against
His view involves the doctrine of the pithecoid origin of mankind;

and even among men of science there were many who loathed
this. It is evident that some of Sedgwick's virulence against the
Vestiges was due to this loathing. Lyell felt the prejudice
powerfully, and it was probably the cause why in his Antiquity
of Man he disappointed Darwin by the caution of his utterances.

Mr Wallace's contention for a special treatment of humanity rests
on a different ground; yet it is possible that that too has been
influenced by the same feeling.
But the very strength of the opposition it excited was among

the causes of the immediate success of The Origin of Species.
Its friends were warm, its foes bitter, few were indifferent; and
though the active friends were not at first numerous, there were
among them some whose names commanded respect. All the
three men whom Darwin had fixed upon beforehand as the judges
SCIENCE 229
whose decision he would accept as the test of success or failure,

were convinced by his arguments. Huxley's adhesion was especi-
ally important. " Poor dear Darwin," he says, " neither would nor
could defend himself." Huxley therefore becomes, as he himself

phrases it, " Darwin's bulldog," or, as he elsewhere says, " maid-
of-all-work and gladiator-general of science." In the troubles
which were to come he proved himself a very present help.
The story of the meeting of the British Association at Oxford
in i860 has been told by several eye-witnesses; and while there
are numerous small discrepancies in their accounts, the main facts
are beyond dispute. Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, as the
champion of orthodoxy, made an attack upon the Darwinian
theory, in the course of which he referred insolently to Huxley's
descent from an ape, and apparently asked him whether it was on
the grandfather's side or the grandmother's that he claimed that
descent. "The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands,"
whispered Huxley to his neighbour, and he justified the quotation
by his stinging retort. ". I asserted," he said, — " and I repeat— that
a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for a grand-
father. were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in
If there
recalling it —
would rather be a man -a man of restless and versatile
intellect —
who, not content with an equivocal success in his own
sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he
has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless
rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real
point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to

religious prejudice'." This reply produced an immense sensation
in the arena in which the battle was fought; nor did the effect
stop there. Darwinism, which "was to have been pulverised, was

proved to be more than able to hold its own ; and Huxley was
drawn from relative obscurity into the fore-front of the struggle.
After fifty years of effort, immensely stimulated by Darwin's

own speculation, there is a disposition in many quarters to modify
^ Life of Huxley, i. 185. No perfectly accurate version of Huxley's retort

exists ; but that quoted in the text, which
is
J. R. Green's, is probably the best.
Huxley, however, disowned the word "equivocaL"
the view of evolution expressed in The Origin of Species. There
are Mendelists and Mutationists as well as Darwinians. But even
if the particular theory of evolution embodied in The Origin of
were disproved or shown to be highly improbable, the
Species
name of Darwin would still remain among the most memorable
in the annals of science. The idea of evolution is far greater
than any theory of the manner in which evolution has operated
and Darwin has practically made this idea his own. Others, as
we have seen, had enunciated it before. But they left it bare;
he alone has supported it with evidence which, after half a century,
men are still examining, sifting and adding to. The consequence is
that he has worked a complete revolution in thought. Before the
publication of The Origin of Species Darwin himself could find no
naturalist who doubted the permanence of species now, all are :
evolutionists, though not all are Darwinians. No such change

has taken place since the days of Newton; and even Newton's
great law did not touch mankind as closely as Darwin's.
AU Darwin's subsequent books take their place in relation to
this great central work. The Descent of Man (187 1) may be
regarded as its completion, and the others as buttresses or out-
works. Darwin had seen from the first that the law of descent
which governed other animals must hold with respect to man as
well,and he had all along been collecting facts in illustration of
his view. But in The Origin of Species his object was, not to
trace the evolution of either man or any other animal, but to
explain and illustrate the laws under which, as he believed,
evolution had taken place. In The Descent of Man he applies
those laws specifically to the human race ; and it is here that
he parts company with his great co-discoverer, Mr A. R. Wallace.
Mr Wallace believes indeed that man is descended from the
lower forms of life, but he holds that "natural selection could
only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to
; and he argues that some other principle must
that of an ape "
be supposed in order to account for the higher moral and intel-
lectual powers of humanity. Darwin thought, and the great
majority of naturalists agree with him, that the difficulty of
accounting for the higher faculties of man was far less than the
SCIENCE 231
difficulty involved in the conception that while all nature had

developed under the action of one law, just at the end that law
was superseded by a wholly different one. It seems reasonable
to doubt whether, if the supernatural does not govern the whole
of life, its introduction to explain the last stage is necessary. It
is however worth remembering that Darwinism is silent as to the
origin of life and as to the cause of variation.
The respectful reception of The Descent of Man was one of the
evidences of the progress of the theory of evolution. The day
formere abuse was gone by; and though the theory expounded
was even more distastefiil to aversige opinion than that expressed
in the earlier book, in nearly every quarter worthy of attention it
was treated as a thing to be temperately discussed. Although

Huxley was called into the field once more gainst the old
adversary, the Quarterly Review, he remarks upon the general
absence of " the mixture of ignorance and insolence which at first
characterised a laige proportion of the attacks with which he
[Darwin] was assailed*."
None comparable in importance to
of Darwin's other books is
these ; and though they all have an and nearly aU illustrate

interest,
some engaging characteristic of the man, they may be left aside as

diings belonging to the domain of science rather than to literature.
That which is perhaps in scientific importance almost the least of
them is, however, an exception. Whatever possesses the power of
fascination is literature, and The Formation of Vegetable Mould
through the Action of Worms (1881) is fascinating. Darwin
thought the enthusiasm with which it was received "almost laugh-
able "; but in truth it was only reasonable and right. The book is
admirably written, and it is perhaps the most striking illustration

in EngUsh of the importance of the unimportant It is " little
drops of water, little grains of sand," illuminated and glorified by
the light of genius; a creature so low in the scale as the earth-
worm becomes one of the great agents in moulding the world.
This was Darwin's last work. He had Uved to see his theory
accepted by a large proportion of naturalists and respectfully
considered by aU; and he was known as the greatest force in
' Life of Huxley, L 364.
modern thought. He owed this great position com-
to a rare
bination of qualities, —the capacity for patient and accurate

observation, united with a powerful and daring imagination capable
of conceiving the largest generalisations, and both with a complete
sanity of mind which perceives how unsatisfying are mere facts so
long as they are isolated, and how misleading may be imagination
if it is not brought to the test of facts. Many have had as great
powers of observation as Darwin, a few have been as largely
gifted with imagination; but not more than a mere handful of
the greatest have possessed the two gifts in such harmonious
combination.
It is an easy transition from Darwin to the great disciple who,
next to him, did most for the diffusion of evolutionary ideas.
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) has not Darwin's claim to
recognition in a history of literature on the score of the supreme
greatness of his contribution to thought j but he has the claim
that he was himself a man of letters almost as much as a man
of science. Everything he wrote has the literary flavour to such
a degree that he has successfully undergone one of the severest
of tests, the collection of his lectures, addresses aind miscellaneous
articles into volumes. In the best and most honourable sense he
was a populariser of science. Himself among the profoundest in
scientific knowledge, he had in an unsurpassed degree the power

of making what he said or wrote intelligible and perspicuous. In
this respect he contrasts pleasantly with many writers on science,
because these have seldom studied the art of expression. His
style is the antithesis of that which, in one of his bright and
sparkling letters, he ascribes to a fellow-worker in science. "From
a literary point of view, my dear friend, you remind me of nothing
so much as a dog going home. He has a goal before him which
he will certainly reach sooner or later, but first he is on this side
of the road, and now on that; anon, he stops to scratch at an
ancient rat-hole, or maybe he catches sight of another dog, a
quarter of a mile behind, and bolts off to have a friendly, or
inimical sniff. In fact, his course is... (here a tangled maze is
drawn) not \" Huxley himself never forgot that a straight
1 Life, i. 415.
SCIENCE 233
line is the shortest distance between any two points; and to

reach his point he took the straight line. He had early con-
vinced himself of the importance of expression, and he studied
it. According to his own account, he was deficient in facility*
but we may assume that his standard was a lofty one, for his
published writings give the impression of a perfectly easy flow.
His high success was probably due to his concentration on a
single point, lucidity. Valuing the manner for the sake of the
matter, he doubtless believed that if he could be clear all the
other graces would be added unto him; and he was right.
Never aiming at fine writing, or attempting eloquence such as
Ruskin's, Huxley in his writings impresses us as a building does
which is destitute of ornament, but beautiful by reason of its
outline and proportions. The perfect fitness of his words and

phrases for their purpose is their beauty. But though there is
no ornament for its own sake, the style is illuminated by the
brilliance of the writer's wit. He knew well the value of a
telling phrase, and the gift of coining phrases was his by nature.
It is this which makes his letters, as well as his writings intended
for publication, among the most racy of the last half century.
The wit is invariably illuminative : take for example his admirable
simile written to Darwin, when roused by the criticisms directed
against the discourse On the Physical Basis of Life :
" A good
book is comparable to a piece of meat, and fools are as flies who
swarm to it, each for the purpose of depositing and hatching his
own particular maggot of an idea"." He is felicitous in metaphor
and phrase "There is always a Cape Horn in one's life that one
:
either weathers or wrecks one's self on''."

On this basis of natural gifts and with this deliberate training
in the art of luminous expression Huxley worked. He added to

it, of course, unsparing devotion to his scientific studies. This
would have been necessary on his theory of style alone, for the
indispensable condition precedent to saying a thing clearly is to

have something to say. was indispensable also from Huxley's
It
moral theory. The virtue he loved above all others was truth.
' Life, i. 118. * ibid. 300.
''
ibid. 117.
Carlyle taught him to hate humbug, and his own nature chimed
in with the teaching of Carlyle. In a letter written on the death
of his eldest child to Kingsley —one of the noblest that ever
passed between man and man — he bids men welcome to call him
"atheist, infidel and all the other usual hard names." But, he
adds, " one thing people shall not call me with justice and that
is —a liar'." And in the solitude of his own study, on the last
night of the year, while waiting for the birth of this very child,
we find him writing " To smite all humbugs, however big ; to
:
give a nobler tone to science; to set an example of abstinence

from petty personal controversies, and of toleration for everything
but lying ; to be indifferent as to whether the work is recognised

as mine or not, so long as it is done :
—are these my aims''?"
Huxley's life shows that they were his aims. His many con-
troversies were never on petty personal points, and though he had
a healthy enough personal ambition, he always subordinated it
to that love of truth which was the keystone of his character.

The resolution "to smite all humbugs, however big,'' promised
a life of combat; and the promise was redeemed. Though he was
accustomed to say that he never but twice began a controversy, it
is evident that Huxley loved fighting. And in controversy he was

unmatched. It was this, and his ability to interest and to win
large audiences, which made him an ideal complement to Darwin,
who was both by disposition and by reason of his ill health un-
fitted for such work. From the time of the Oxford meeting of
the British Association onwards, Huxley constituted himself the
protagonist of evolution. For this, the chief work of his life,
he had been preparing himself for nearly twenty years. During

the voyage of the Rattlesnake and in the years afterwards he
had gradually piled up a great mass of scientific knowledge;
and the circumstances of his life had diversified the knowledge
beyond his own wish or purpose. To win his own bread he fotmd
it necessary to make a profound study of palaeontology, although
originally he "did not care for fossils'." Without this study of the
fossils his work for evolution could never have been done.
' Life, i. 231. ' ibid. 151.
' ibid. 132.

SCIENCE 235
That work again was its own reward. Darwin's debt to

Huxley was great, but Huxley's to Darwin was greater still.
Huxley was a man of essentially philosophical intellect. He
early studied Hamilton's philosophy of the conditioned; he
mastered the positive philosophy, and "put it away into one of
the pigeon-holes of his brain" till it was wanted; his book on
Hume was written con amore; and he plunged with avidity into
the Jesuit Suarez in order to answer Mivart. He looked upon
facts as the raw material of philosophy, things indispensable
indeed, but valuable only for the conclusions that could be

drawn from them. Consequently the great central idea of The
Origin of Species was to him priceless. It unified the various
fragments of his knowledge, and gave a new meaning to the fossils

which made them once for all objects of intense interest.
In other ways as well as in disposition Huxley was the com-
plement of Darwin. He was strong in knowledge where Darwin
was comparatively weak. The latter laments his own ignorance
of anatomy: Huxley was a trained and accomplished anatomist,
whose knowledge enabled him to make important additions to
the evidence for Darwinism, and to combat criticisms with success.
For example, it enabled him both to give and to justify a direct
contradiction of the assertion of RichardOwen at the famous
Oxford meeting of the British Association in i860, that the
difference between the brain of man and that of the highest ape
was greater than the difference between the brains of the highest
and the lowest of the quadrumana.
Huxley's earliest writings were of purely technical interest,
and were chiefly the fruit of that voyage in the Rattlesnake, which
holds to his life the same relation as the voyage of the Beagle
holds to Darwin's. On the scientific value of such writings only
men of science are entitled to an opinion. Some of them have
shown a tendency Huxley; but Haeckel in 1874
to depreciate
emphatically declared his work on the comparative anatomy of
vertebrates to be the only thing which could "be compared with
the otherwise incomparable investigations of Carl Gegenbaur^";
and the editors of The Scientific Memoirs of T. H. Huxley, Sir
* Quoted in the Library of Literary Criticism, viii. 324,
Michael Foster and Professor E. Ray Lankester, pronounce him
to be "in some respects the most and most fertile in
original
discovery of all his same branch of science^."
fellow-workers in the
In Man's Place in Nature (1863), Huxley with characteristic
boldness devoted himself to the most unpopular aspect of an
unpopular theory; for he was the first frankly and undisguisedly
to apply the Darwinian doctrine to man. The application had
been plainly suggested The Origin of Species ; but it was not
in
within the scope of that book to carry out the suggestion. Man's
Place in Nature was, of course, abused, —
but was unharmed by
the abuse. Writing a preface to the reprint, thirty years later, the
author could note with pardonable satisfaction that it had "achieved
the fate, which is the euthanasia of a scientific work, of being
inclosed among the rubble of the foundations of later knowledge,
and forgotten."
The years immediately following are filled with active scientific
work and with an active polemic. Some of the fruits of this
polemic, along with other things, were included in the volume
of Lay Sermons (1870), which won an audience wider, probably,
than any other of Huxley's writings,- — an audience, however, at-
no small measure by opposition rather than by agreement.

tracted in
The keenest interest was concentrated on the paper on the Physical
Basis of Life, the substance of which had shortly before been
delivered as an address in Edinburgh. Having, as he humorously
explains in the prefatory letter to Tyndall, intended the paper for
a plain statement of a great tendency of modern biology, with
a protest against what is commonly called materialism, he found
himself "generally credited with having invented 'protoplasm' in
the interests of 'materialism.'" Huxley's pugnacity —a trait about
which Darwin gently warned him, while Huxley humorously dis-
—
claimed it^ had caused him to be regarded as more Darwinian
than Darwin. His caution was forgotten, his boldness was
remembered to his prejudice. His contention that until varieties
unfertile when crossed could be produced by selection, the proof
of Darwinism was incomplete, scarcely counted for righteousness;
while the fact that he brushed aside and rejected all arguments
' Quoted in the Library of Literary Criticism, viii. 327.
SCIENCE 237
tending to set man in a place apart from the rest of the animal
kingdom, made a profound impression. When Darwin, moving,
ohne rast, produced The Descent of Man,
like the stars, ohne hast,
he found that a great part of the odium had already been ex-
pended on his "bull-dog"; and Huxley was chivalrous enough to
rejoice that it was so.
The strong firm thread of scientific work in laboratories and

lecture-rooms which ran through all the life of Huxley was little
known to the public except when it furnished matter for some

essay or address, usually controversial. Occasionally he made
mistakes; and when he did the consequence of his pugnacity
became evident. His error about " Bathybius " was in itself
trifling ; but it was seized upon with and small allowance avidity,
was made for the author's manlyBut besides being

recantation.
a man of science, Huxley was a public character, serving on many
commissions, and doing excellent work for science, for education
and for society. His place in literature however depends upon
those essays and lectures in which science is brought to bear upon
the interpretation of life, or in which the critical intellect, trained
through long years of labour, is turned to the examination of old
beliefs. Such is the general character of those Collected Essays
gathered from the papers of many years and reissued near the
close of Huxley's life. The titles are a fair index to the contents
of Science and Education, Science and Hebrew
the volumes,
and Christian Tradition, &c. The volume on
Tradition, Science
Hume (1879), which Huxley undertook and wrote with zest for
the English Men of Letters str\s&, is of the same class ; for Hume
supplied a foundation to the empiricists of the nineteenth century.
Many of the papers contained in these volumes have been
criticised as somewhat wantonly polemical ; and Huxley certainly
felt the joy of battle. " I really can't give up tormenting ces drdles^,"
he says of one group of his controversial enemies. But through

all the controversies he was steadily, doing his real life-work. His
function was, not merely to be the man of science, but to vindicate
for scientific thought, and for all thought, complete, and unfettered
freedom. If the kind of criticism which Darwin originally met
1 l.ife, li. 269.
would be almost impossible now, the change is largely to be
ascribed to Huxley. No one ever battled more valiantly for
freedom of thought, or rather (since that could never be denied)
for freedom to express thought ; and under his controversies there
always lay this or some other serious justification. On this plea
he successfully defended his share in the later phase of the cele-
brated controversy with Gladstone, against a critic who objected

that both he and Gladstone might employ their time better than
in quarrelling about the Gadarene swine. If the swine, said
Huxley, " were the only parties to the suit, I for my part should
fully admit the justice of the rebuke. But the real issue is whether
the men of the nineteenth century are to adopt the demonology
of the men of the first century, as divinely revealed truth, or to
reject it as degrading falsity^" Huxley might also have pleaded
fairly that a man is justified in doing that which he can do
supremely well. His gift for controversy has probably never been
surpassed, and it has very rarely been equalled.
During the
from the encounter with Wilberforce to his death,
thirty-five years
Huxley was engaged in numberless literary and scientific battles,

and in not one did he fail. Wherever he crossed swords with an
antagonist —
Wilberforce, or Owen, or Gladstone, Huxley re- —
mained master of the field ; and his manner of fighting the duel
is a model which may be commended to the careful study of all
who are minded to go and do likewise.

All the wonderful development of science along other lines
must be left with the briefest notice. It does not belong to
literature as the works of Darwin and of Huxley do. Great
in his own sphere, a mathematician like Sir William Rowan
Hamilton or a physicist like Lord Kelvin counts for little in the
domain of John Tyndall (1820-1893), indefinitely smaller
letters.
than the latter as a man of science, had a far superior gift of

expression. Michael Faraday (1791-1867) had that gift too, and
did much to popularise chemistry ; but neither he nor any of the
others had that influence upon the substance of literature which
the evolutionists and the geologists exercised. Still, their work
lies behind literature, as it were, giving a tone of mind, holding
' Collected Essays, v. 414 —quoted in the Life of Huxley, ii. 271.
SCIENCE 239
up a standard of truth, helping to render much impossible which

in earlier days seemed not only possible but necessary. One
remarkable fact may be noted. As early as 1834 two of the men
named, Hamilton and Faraday, seem to have had already some
prevision of the most modern scientific conception of the nature
of the external world. In a remarkable letter to his sister
Hamilton expresses his pleasure in finding that Faraday from

the side of induction and experiment had reached the same
anti-material view that he himself had arrived at by deduction.
Both apparently were disposed to reject the conception of atoms,
and to regard matter rather as a centre of forces than as some-
thing fundamentally inert
PART II
CREATIVE ART. A. POETRY ,
CHAPTER I
THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY
In the temporary absence of any fresh " Kings of Song " about
the close of the first and the beginning of the second quarters of
the nineteenth century, a special interest attaches to the minor
writers whoin those discouraging years had the courage to
meditate what usually proved a very thankless muse. The
shadows of many coming events may be seen in the work of
those poets of the interregnum. The Christian Year is so mani-
festly imbued with the spirit of the Tractarians that an effort of
memory is needed to was published six

realise the fact that it
years before the birth of the Oxford Movement. Henry Taylor's

Isaac Comnenus heralds a classical reaction from Byron ; and it
is curious that the reaction should be specially directed against
him who had championed the classical school of the eighteenth
century at a time when few had a word to say in its favour. Even
before the Reform Bill, democracy begins to find voice in the
Com Law Rhymes. But above all, the revival of the Elizabethan
spirit is manifest in Beddoes and Wells and Wade, who may
be regarded as the product of the critical teaching of Coleridge,

Lamb and Hazlitt It is melancholy to reflect that while these men
were silenced by neglect and indifference, "Satan"' Montgomery
was flourishing and spreading his branches until they were
effectually pruned by the critical knife of Macaulay.
The "large-hearted Scot," Allan Cunningham (1784-1842),
belongs essentially to the Revolutionary period; and so does
the Quaker poet, Bernard Barton (1784—1849), who is more
memorable with Lamb and his connexion with
for his friendship
THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 24I
Edward FitzGerald than for his own pleasant but hardly inspired
verse. Cunningham is in the Une from Bums, Barton sometimes
brings Cowper to mind. But there is one poet of those years,
John Clare (i 793-1864), who stands absolutely alone, a figure of
singular interest, at once like and strangely unlike what a man of
poetic gifts, in circumstances such as his, might be expected to
be. He deserves carefiil consideration, not only for his pathetic
story,but for the high poetic merit of his writings. Clare has
found generous panegyrists, but their encomiums have failed to
Uft him to the position in the history of literature which he well
deserves. Men are ready enough to praise and to wonder at
humble aspirants for literary honours ; but their praise is apt to
have a touch of condescension, and Clare had not the force to
show, like Bums in Edinburgh, that the condescension was un-
called for*.
No other English poet has bad quite so sad a life as Clare,
though there is gloom enough in many, and that of a much
smaller versifier, his contemporary William Thom (1798 ?-i848) of
Inverury presents some points of resemblance. Thom tells his own
pathetic story in Rhymes and Recolkctions of a Hcmdloom Weaver
(1844). Though the author of The Blind Btr/s Franks was
clearly not a great poet, he was no ordinary man who, bom and
bred as Thom had been, could win from the well-known critic
W. J. Fox the emphatic declaration that he had the richest vein
of humour Fox had ever known. Thom, however, had some
support from the tradition of his country, where verse-writing
ploughmen and weavers have been numerous; Clare had none.
The son of a day-labourer who, from failure of health, was forced
to seek relief from his parish, Clare from the age of seven had to
do such rural tasks as his years and strength permitted. He had
had almost no education, but his zeal for knowledge led him,
even in childhood, to undertake extra work in order that he might
earn enough to pay the fee for an evening school. But his true
education was drawn from nature, the love of which was inborn
' Since the paragraphs foUowing were written Mr A. Symons has done
a fresh service to English Uteiatoie by re-editing the poems of Clare, with a
sympathetic introductioa. I have corrected the quotations by his text
W. 16
in him. Clare was fortunate in having this taste strengthened by
the influence of an old woman of a type almost unknown in rural
England, though it is Wales and in

occasionally to be met in
Scotland. She had a taste for verse, and a memory full of it and ;
from her the boy got his first ideas of what poetry is. At the
age of thirteen he bought a copy of Thomson's Seasons; and it is
Thomson's influence, more than that of any other poet, which
is felt in his early pieces. But essentially they are original and
independent J Clare's authorities were his ears and eyes. He
wrote "with his eye on the object," as we should expect a man
with so few books and so little training to do — if he wrote at all.
By the ignorant boors among whom he lived Clare's passion

for scribbling was despised. His mother, who thought he was
wasting his time, used the scraps of paper on which he had written
; and he was dismissed from a lime-kiln
his verses to light her fire
on which he was employed, because he was suspected, rightly or

wrongly, of neglecting his work in order to write. But the verses
which his fellows held so cheap at last drew the attention of
some men who were better instructed ; and through them Clare's
first volume, Poems, descriptive of Rural Life, was published in
1820. Southey criticised it generously in the Quarterly Review.

Interest in the poet was roused, he was taken to London, and on
the whole treated with wisdom as well as with kindness. A sum
was raised, the interest of which —;^4S a year —ought to have
sufficed, with the supplement of his own labour, to keep a man in
his position above want ; and he returned to that rural life in
which whole soul was centred, and to the wife, " Patty of the
his
Vale," whom he had married. But a shrewd observer, S. C. Hall,
notes that "his huge, overburdening head might ha;ve dreamed
dreams and seen visions, but obviously was not the throne of
productive thought." He
had neither much strength, nor much
competence which was his destiny; and he fell
for the labour
under the influence of the prevailing vice of his country and class,
drink. His mind gave way probably the "huge, overburdening
:
head" indicated a tendency to brain disease, as well as exceptional

endowment. He was placed, first in a private asylum, and then
in the County Lunatic Asylum of Northamptonshire, where he
THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 243
spent the last twenty-two years of his

life. In intervals of sanity
he had expressed the wish to be buried in his native village of
Helpstone, near Peterborough ; and on his death a subscription
was raised by the aid of which his wish was gratified.
Had Clare's book of verse been also his last, that achieve-
first
ment of a man starved alike in body and in soul would have been
suflSciently remarkable to win him a place far above Bloomfield.
But it was followed by The Village Minstrel (1823) and the
Shepherd's Calendar (1827). Even after his burial in the living
tomb of the asylum, he continued to write, and, inexplicable as
the fact is, his finest pieces date from that place. Christopher
Smart and William Blake are the closest parallels. Not the least
remarkable point about Clare is that he bears triumphantly a test
under which even Bums breaks down. In his early verse Clare
used dialect with some freedom ; in his later writings he confined
himself almost wholly to the diction of classical English ; yet his
poems lost nothing in ease and naturalness. He even ventured
on imitations of some of the older English poets ; and, strange to
say,he succeeded. The success proves that his poetic gift was
something more and greater than a narrow compass of " native
wood-notes wild"; and the proof is clinched by the dignity, almost
unsurpassed, of at least one of his pieces. Surely, if the over-
burdening head portended disease, that head was also the home of
a genius which needs no excuse from circumstance, but demands
homage simply on the ground of its own greatness. There are
no better tests of a poet than the power to write a lyric, and the
power to impress the reader with the sense of the dignity and
greatness of the verse, —to write, in short, in "the grand style.''
The first of the two following quotations is a lyric of wonderful

sweetness and charm ; the second, for grandeur, would do honour
to any poet of the nineteenth century. Clare's biographer, Martin,
is not using words amiss when he calls it "a sublime burst of
poetry." It is almost uncanny to find, in the poor poet of the
asylum, a reminder of that most dauntless of souls, Emily Bronte.
" O the evening's for the fair, bonnie lassie O !
To meet the cooler air and join an angel there.

With the dark dishevelled hair,
Bonnie lassie O !
16 —
The bloom's on the brere, bonnie lassie O !
Oak apples on the tree ; and wilt thou gang to see

The shed I've made for thee,
Bonnie lassie 1
'Tis agen the running brook, bonnie lassie O !
In a grassy nook hard by, with a little patch of sky.

And a bush to keep us dry,
Bonnie lassie O I
There's the daisy all the year, bonnie lassie O

There's the king-cup bright as gold, and the speedwell never cold,
And the arum leaves unrolled,
Bonnie lassie O
meet me at the shed, bonnie lassie O
With the woodbine peeping in, and the roses like thy skin
Blushing, thy praise to win,
Bonnie lassie O 1
1 will meet thee there at e'en, bonnie lassie O

When the bee sips in the bean, and grey willow branches lean,
And the moonbeam looks between,
Bonnie lassie O !
" I am ! yet what I am who cares or knows ?

My friends forsake me like a memory lost
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost
And yet I am ! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest —that I loved the best
Are strange —nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod;

For scenes where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, GOD,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below —above the vaulted sky."
There was one other poet, Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849), who

during the greater part of his life stood almost as much alone
as Clare, but who, unlike Clare, left heirs to carry on his work.
Like Clare too, Elliott belongs to the class of unlettered poets, and
in youth he was only a little less straitened in circumstances than
the poor labourer's son. Like Clare again, he found in Thomson
his earliest poetical model. But here almost all resemblance
between the two ceases. Elliott was strong where Clare was
weak, and what in the latter bred a gentle melancholy, roused the
former to a saeva indignatio almost as intense as Swift's.
In all Elliott's verse there are just two notes, —a keen sense
of natural beauty and a profound feeling for man. Elliott was
first stirred to interest in the beauty of nature by the picture of
a primrose in Sowerby's English Botany. This sent him from
the ironworks among which his life was passed to wander along
the streams and over the moors of Yorkshire ; and the inspiration
of Thomson's Seasons, acting upon what he saw there, made him
a poet His earliest piece, the Vernal Walk, was written at the
age of seventeen, contemporaneously with the Lyrical Ballads.
Elliott hardly knew what "the return to nature " was, but he felt
the impulse no less than Wordsworth and Coleridge. As a nature

poet he is true but not great, and though he does not deserve
complete oblivion, he would hardly be remembered for that alone.
His verse, if less faulty than Clare's, is also less spontaneous,
and his touch is not so sure ; for Clare's whole life was a com-
munion with nature, while Elliott knew it only by glimpses.
This youthful outburst was followed by twenty years of silence.
In his early manhood Elliott was too fully occupied in the struggle
for life to indulge his taste for verse. Long years of frustrated
effort were atcrowned with success; for Elliott had, as he
last
claims in A Poefs Epitaph, "a hand to do, a head to plan."

When hope grew brighter, he began once more to write. The
Vernal Walk itself was not published till 1821. Two years later
came Love : a Poem ; and then, in rapid succession. The Ranter
(1827), Corn-Law Rhymes (1828) and The Village Patriarch
(1829).
Elliott's daily contact with the life of the poor, his intimate
acquaintance with their sufferings, and his own long struggle from
poverty to affluence, had left deep marks on a nature originally
sensitive and sympathetic, but imperfectly controlled. Without
losing his love of nature, he became far more emphatically the
poet of man. He is above all the Corn-Law Rhymer; and it
was as such that Carlyle hailed him in an essay of considerable
length, printed in the Edinburgh Review, in which he likens the
poet's work to "hues of joy and harmony, painted out of troublous
tears." Elliott knew " the tragic heart of towns " ; and his name
will live in literature as that of one of 'the first poets of modern
democracy. His nervous organisation made him keenly sensitive
to the evils and the suffering which he saw around him, and in
fierce wrath he thundered for a remedy. He has glaring faults
he often mistakes mere abuse for vigour and ill-temper for strength;
but the very intensity which leads him wrong raises him on
occasion to lofty heights : the light which leads astray is, after
all, " light from heaven."
There is in Elliott a remarkable combination of keen vision

with complete blindness. He sees with crystal clearness one
aspect of the eternal antithesis between wealth and poverty,
another he does not see at all. The view which he takes is
different from that which has been most commonly taken' in

recent years. We are familiar enough with the conflict between
employer and workman ; but to Elliott the two are fellow-sufferers,
and the indignation which fires his verse is directfed against the
landowner, not against the master. " Let us contrast," he says
in a note to The Ranter, " the fortunes of the owner [of the land]
with those of his neighbour, the patient, long-eared iron master.
The capital of the latter is reduced from ;£ioo,ooo to ;,îo,ooo,
and he would be glad to receive 2^ °/, on the reduced sum. Yet he
maintains scores of families, while the unproductive, corctplaining
landowner, without risk, and without exertion, is obtaining about
forty times his profits." The struggles against the introduction of
machinery had shown, before Elliott's day, how real, under the
wages system, is the conflict between capital and labour, and how
bitter it may easily become; but there no hint of this in
is
Elliott's verse. To him, as A Poefs Epitaph shows, there are

two classes of the rich :
" the rich who make the poor man's
little more''; and, in contrast with these, "the rich who take
from plunder'd labour's store." The former are the employers,

the latter the landowners. In the deeply pathetic " Child, is thy
father dead ? " master and man are represented as partners in
misfortune. The father " clams " thrice a week ; and then the
"
significant question is asked, " Why did his master break ?
There is a great deal of unconscious prejudice in this anti-
between the classes of the rich. Himself an ironmaster

thesis
moved by the best motives towards his workmen, Elliott sees the
master in a rosy light, and ignores the possible conflict between
his interest and the interest of his employee. He is also greatly

influenced by the circumstances of the time. The long wars had
left England strained and exhausted ; and the system of protection
helped to make bread excessively dear at a time when the poor

had little with which to pay for it. Matters were made worse by
an administration of the poor-laws which had raised the rates
for relief inordinately. It is impossible to determine how far,
under the conditions of production and of transport then pre-

vailing, even free trade in corn would have proved effectual as
a remedy. But when many of the people were starving, and still
more were undergoing the moral degradation of poor relief, a
system which laid a crushing tax upon the most necessary article
of food was indefensible. Elliott was one of the first who not
only saw this, but devoted himself heart and soul to the task
of reform. The " bread-tax " became to him an obsession. He
traced to it all the sufferings of the time, he became blind to
every other source of evil ; and his profound pity and fierce anger
made him the lyrist of the cause. This obsession made him
narrow —but and vivid. It inspired
also intense his masterpiece,
the grand Battle Song of modern democracy :
"Day, like our souls, is fiercely dark;

What then? 'Tis day!
We sleep no more; the cock crows — hark I
To arms away
!
They come they come the knell is rang

! !
Of us or them
Wide o'er their march the pomp is flung
Of gold and gem.
What coUar'd hound of lawless sway,
To famine dear
What pension'd slave of Attila
Leads in the rear?
Come they from Scythian wilds afar,

Our blood to spill?
Wear they the livery of the Czar ?
They do his will.
Nor tassell'd silk, nor epaulet,

Nor plume, nor torse
No splendour gilds, all sternly met.
Our foot and horse.
But, dark and still, we inly glow,

Condens'd in ire 1
Strike, tawdry slaves, and ye shall know

Our gloom is fire.
In vain your pomp, ye evil powers,

Insults the land;
Wrongs, vengeance, and the cause are ours,
And God's right hand
Madmen ! they trample into snakes

The wormy clod
Like fire, beneath their feet awakes
The sword of God
Behind, befoire, above, below.
They rouse the brave
Where'er they go, they make a foe.
Or find a grave."
This spirit was the legacy of the French Revolution, and

Elliott's battle-song iiiight have been the Marseillaise of an
English version of it. The history of Chartism proves that
there wanted only the spark to set the fuel aflame. The passing
of the danger was due to the united wisdom of all classes, in
which the visions and warnings of seers and prophets, the songs
of the poets, the novels of the novelists, the moderation of the
multitude, as well as the laws passed in the legislature, all played
their part. If the result falls pitiably short of what could be
desired, there has been at any rate an advance. The horrors
of the earlier period of the industrial revolution are no longer
possible ;
yet it is melancholy to reflect that Elliott's full pro-
gramme has been and there still remains so much of
carried out,
the evil he denounced. The Com Laws were repealed ; England
passed under the sway of capital, which ought, according to Elliott,
to rule the world ; all the blessings oilaissez fture were experienced.
And Marx and denounce
Lassalle arise to capital as bitterly as
ever Elliott denounced landlordism.
In his discipleship to Thomson Elliott belonged to the past ;
in respect of his social interests he was a pioneer, for these
interests are a special feature of literature in the years after the
close of Elliott's life. On this point there is just a slight contact
between him and a widely different writer, Thomas Hood (1799-
1845), the most richly endowed of all the poets intermediate
between Shelley and Keats on the one hand, and Tennyson and
Browning on the other.
As a youth Hood was apprenticed to an engraver; but the
confinement necessitated by the occupation told on a delicate
constitution, and, as change was necessary, his taste led him to
become at twenty-one sub-editor of the London Magazine. His
Lycus the Cenfaur W3is published in 1822, and, working in con-
junction with John Hamilton Reynolds, he issued Odes and
Addresses to Great Feopk in 1825. This was followed by Whims
and Oddities (1826-1827). In 1827 there appeared also the Plea
of the Midsummer by the author himself
Fairies, a piece regarded
with special affection. A year
Dream of Eugene
afterwards The
Aram was printed in an annual. The Gem, of which Hood himself
was then editor. To 1830 belongs the first of Hood's Comic
Annuals. In 1834 he published his only novel, Tylney Hall.
Soon afterwards one of his greatest misfortunes befell him,—
heavy pecuniary loss through the failure of a firm in which he
was interested. He went abroad, hoping to live economically
and to work off the debt; but the passage across to Holland,
though short, was extremely trying, and Hood's health was per-
manently injured. The rest of his life was a struggle against
poverty and disease. On the death of Theodore Hook in 1841
he became editor of the New Monthly Magazine. In 1843 The
Song of the Shirt was published in the Christmas number of
Punch. Hood's Magazine was started in 1844, and his own poem,
The Haunted House, came out in the first number. In the-same
year a pension of ;£ioo, offered by Sir Robert Peel in a manner
which made it alike honourable to the giver and to the receiver,
relieved him ; but he only lived to enjoy it for a year. " The
Bridge of Sighs was his Corunna," says Thackeray, "his heights
—
of Abraham sick, weak, wounded, he fell in the full blaze of
that great victory'."
Much of Hood's verse is of the humorous sort. The comic
vein was native in him : he was perpetually playing practical jokes
in his own home, —persuading his wife, for example, that the red
or orange spots on the plaice were the signs of advanced decom-
position, and that fish so marked were dangerous for food. But
he was no mere jester, and when he seemed to become so he
was acting not from choice but of necessity. He found that puns
paid better than poetry, and in order to win bread for his wife
and children, in a manly without complaint, he provided
spirit,
the public that for which was willing to pay. We may regret
it
that so much of Hood's genius was devoted to such work, but we

cannot blame him.
The longest of Hood's poems, Miss Kilmansegg, one of his
contributions to the New Monthly. Magazine, stands quite alone.
For originality of conception and execution it is unsurpassed in
English. Though it belongs to the humorous class of poems, it
was written in no mere jesting spirit. A profound sense of the

besetting evils of Hood's ageand country inspires it throughout.
Under the grotesqueness of the conception there shine satire and
criticism of life, the satire mingled with pity of a man not bitter
but sad, of one whose sweetness of temper had been in no

way spoilt by the struggle through which he had passed and
was passing. The fertility and resource with which Hood keeps
up the play upon gold are marvellous : the metal glitters in
every line of the poem but the satirist has read St Paul more
;
accurately than many preachers it is not money, but the love of

:
money, that is the root of all evil. Money itself, Hood teaches,
' Roundabout Papers.

like the man of sense he was, may be as potent for good as for
evil :-^
"Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Good or bad a thousand fold!
How widely its agencies vary
To save — to ruiri—to corse —to bless
As even its minted coins express,
Now stamped with the image of Good Queen Bess,
And now of a Bloody Mary."
Miss Kilmansegg cieaxly belongs in spirit rather to Hood's later

than to his earlier period, more to the serious than to the purely
comic poems. The comic element runs all through ; it was as we
have seen natural to Hood and came out in his private life. But
still we must distinguish. In his earlier years, before he was quite
so hard pressed for the means of living as he afterwards came to
be, Hood showed a disposition to take himself seriously. Then
came an intermediate period, during which qecessity drove him to
play the jester almost exclusively. Finally, in the last four or five
years of his life he emerged from this state, and to these years
belongs a great proportion of his most memorable pieces.

The serious poems of Hood's earlier years are far less earnest
and less original than those of the closing period. Lycus the
poem founded on the myth of Circe, is
Centaur, a the work of a
young man of poetic sensibility, responsive to the influences
around him. Perhaps the traces of Keats which
it shows are
due tq the influence of Hood's friend and future brother-in-law

Reynolds, himself a poet. The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, a
gracefully fanciful poem, in its way admirable.
is It is more
original than Lycus, and more masterly in metre. But it is not

far
yet representative of the true Hood,, whom the Ode to Rae Wilson
discloses as neither a jester nor a denizen of fairyland, but a man
deeply impressed with the realities of life. He was gradually dis-
covering himself; and in the weird Mugene Aram's Dream, a poem
ineffaceable' from the memory, one phase of his genius found its
perfect expression. Ruth likewise, one of his most beautiful

poems, belongs to this earlier period. But with these exceptions,
the pieces by which Hood is likely to be remembered as a serious
poet are the work of his closing years. Passing over two or three
exquisite lyrics, there are, besides Miss Kilmansegg, three to be

specially noted,— 772« Bridge of Sighs, The Song of the Shirt,
and The Haunted House. These are the voice of the Hood we
love to remember. He was well aware that the two pieces first
named were of all his writings most likely to keep his memory
green and he directed that the words, " He sang the Song of
;
the Shirt," should be engraved on his tombstone.

In industry there is a terrible gamut or scale of comparison,
which allots always the greater misery to the more helpless. We
have had the positive already in Ebenezer Elliott. Hood's
championship of the suffering seamstress gives the comparative.
The superlative finds utterance in Mrs Browning's exceeding bitter
Cry of the Children. Never was there despair more poignantly
expressed than in the lines :
" They know the grief of man, without its wisdom

They sink in man's despair without its calm."
These poems are among the signs of advancing democracy ; and

there are many others. This inspires the prose of Carlyle and
of Frederick Maurice. The novels of Dickens and of Charles
Kingsley are full of it. The New Lanark of Robert Owen was its
practical outcome in industry. In politics it was the motive of the
work of Lord Shaftesbury. It started the memorable commission
on the working of the poor law; it initiated our factory legislation;
it swept away horrors so great that we have already almost forgotten
that they could ever be.

It was a manly instinct which guided Hood in his choice of
theme, and the fact that his social poems were practically useful is
one more point to his honour. But we have to consider them

here chiefly from the point of view of art In metre and rhythm
they are masterly; for in technique Hood went on improving to the
end of his life. In tone too they are exactly right. Full of
sentiment, as the subject demands that they should be, they are
yet never sentimental. The Bridge of Sighs, with its charitable
and pitiful humanity, is perhaps rather the finer of the two ; but
The Song of the Shirt is also one of the best poems that have ever
been devoted to the alleviation of the lot of the weak, and it
remains one of the greenest leaves in the honourable chaplet of

Mr Punch, whose voice on great national occasions and for great
national causes has more than once or twice rung the truest of alL
The Haunted House is a poem of a widely different class, yet it
too is among the very best of Hood's productions, and if it stood

alone would be sufficient evidence of a highly poetical mind. It is
poetry of the sort which only masters can create. In some

respects it is suggestive of Eugene Aram's Dream both manifest :
the same sway over the awe and terror. But the
feelings of
Dream narrates facts, while the Haunted House merely produces
impressions ; and if he who produces impressions be an im-
pressionist, then in this piece Hood is among the greatest of the
class. But he does his work by strokes perfectly definite and
precise. The object is to create a sense of the supernatural :
"O'er all there hung a shadow and a fear;

A sense of mystery the spirit daunted.
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear.
The place is Haunted I"
It is done by a careful selection of the objects the explorer — or

the dreamer — and of those he would expect to see a
sees, in
human home, but does not see the Haunted House, — "a
in
dwelling-place, — and yet no habitation '' :
" Unhinged the iron gates half open hung,

Jarr'd by the gusty gales of many winters,
That from its crumbled pedestal had flung
One marble globe in splinters.
No dog was at the threshold, great or small

No —
pigeon on the roof ^no household creature
No cat demurely dozing on the wall
Not one domestic feature.
No human figure stirred, to go or come.
No face looked forth from shut or open casement;
No chimney smoked—there was no sign of Home
From parapet to basement.
With shatter'd panes the grassy court was starr'd;

The time-worn coping-stone had tumbled after
And through the ragged roof the sky shone, barr'd
With naked beam and rafter."
This fine piece makes no such appeal to popular feeling as the
other two, or as Eugene Aram with its intelligible story. But it
may be doubted whether Hood has ever written better poetry. It
invitescomparison with Browning's baffling, yet pictorially definite,

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, or with Lord de Tabley's
weird Knight in the Wood. Compare this stanza from the former
poem ;
"As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair

In leprosy ; thin dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood
One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,
Stood stupefied, however he came there
!
Thrust out past service from the devil's stud
Hood is a poet who just falls short of greatness. With better

fortune, better health and longer life, one is tempted to say, he
would have achieved it. And yet it is possible that the " veined
humanity " of his later pieces is in some degree due to the battles
he fought and the sufferings he endured. We have seen that he
worked his way from the older style to the newer, from the fading
influence of the classical school to the glow of the most burning
and the most modern of questions. He is therefore a natural
medium of transition from the school of the past to that of the
present; from those who sought their models among the Eliza-
bethans or in the eighteenth century, to those whose first care was
to express, whether in the tones of Keats or of Shelley or of
Wordsworth, the poets then most influential, some need or
aspiration, thought or longing, of their own life and time.

In substance Hood's work belonged rather to the age which
was to come than to that which had just ended ; and in this
respect he contrasts with a notable contemporary, Hartley Coleridge
(1796-1849), whose very name is a link with earlier days, although
the dates of his publications associate him with the years under
review. Working under the shadow of the genius of his father
and of Wordsworth, Hârtley Coleridge seemed to rest satisfied
with the ideals of the recent past, the chief differences between
his work and that of his models being apparently due to tempera-
ment. Though he admired the Elizabethans, he was scarcely
touched by the Elizabethan revival. He had a strange mixture of

good and bad fortune in his birth and early surroundings. The
son of one of the most highly gifted of English poets, he inherited
both his father's genius and his father's fatal defect of character.
He breathed an atmosphere of poetry from his infancy. While he
was still a child Wordsworth's beautiful lines inscribed to him, and
the lines of his father, scarcely less beautiful, in Frost at Midnight,
bad ensured him a place in literature. Unfortunately, his father's
lines are not merely a lovely fancy, they are also a theory of
education for the boy, and whether from belief in it or from
remissness the theory was actually carried into practice. After
reference to his own early life, spent in the great city, Coleridge
goes on,
" But thou, my babe ! shall wander like x breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds.
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags so shalt thou see and hear
:
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself."
Such a system, if system it can be called, was probably the worst

that could be conceived for a creature like Hartley Coleridge.
From his earliest infancy he was imaginative to excess. At the
age of five he had already the metaphysician's doubt as to the
reality of matter. Asked a question about his being called
Hartley, "'Which Hartley?' asked the boy. 'Why, is there more
than one Hartley?' 'Yes,' he replied, 'there's a deal of Hartleys.'
'How so?' 'There's Picture-Hartley (Hazlitt had painted a
portrait of him) and Shadow-Hartley, and there's Echo-Hartley,
and there's Catch-me-fast Hartley,' at the same time seizing his own
arm very eagerly."
The desultory education of Hartley Coleridge left his will
undisciplined and his fancy unrestrained; and the sad story of his
later years is but the natural sequel to a childhood and youth
unwisely guided. He won a fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford,
but at the end of his year of probation forfeited it for intemperance.
His after-life was principally spent wandering irresponsibly in the
Lake district There his name is associated with the cottage
called the Nab, in which he died in 1849. It had previously been
inhabited by Thomas De Quincey, and it was within easy reach
of Wordsworth's home at Rydal Mount.
Hartley Coleridge, "a sun-faced little man," as Tennyson
called him', won the hearts of the country people by his genial
friendliness. They thought him a greater poet than Wordsworth,
and with a fine indifference to dates they ascribed to the help of
" lir Hartley o' the Nab " the best work of the latter. In reality
his besetting weaknesses prevented him from producing anything,
except sonnets, worthy of his real powers. About 1820 he wrote

a dramatic fragment, Prometheus, of high promise. He con-
tributed in prose and London Magazine and to
in verse to the
Blackwood, showing among other qualities a power of delicate
criticism. His Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire appeared
under its first title of Biographia Borealis in 1832 ; and in 1833
came a volume of Poems. The rest of Hartley Coleridge's
poetry was published posthumously in 1851, with an interesting
biographical sketch by his brother Derwent.
Hartley Coleridge is at his best in the sonnets. A few of his
lyrics are very good, but his touch is unsure. In longer composi-
tions, like Leonard and Susan, he fails; and his "playful and
humorous " pieces are contemptible. But the best of his sonnets
will bear comparison with almost any in the English language.
They are exquisitely musical, they show a keen sense of natural

beauty, a fine human sympathy, and they are touching from the
pathetic sense of failure they often suggest Wordsworth proved
that he fathomed Hartley Coleridge's character and foresaw his
destiny ; but no one knew him better than he knew himself, and
no one has more wisely depicted his character. His own beautitul
sonnet is as full of insight as of poetry :
"Long time a child, and still a child, when years

Had painted manhood on my cheek, was I,
For yet I lived like one not bom to die;
A thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears,
'
Life of I'mnyson, i. 154.
No hope I needed, and I knew no fears.
But sleep, thongh sweet, is only sleep, and waking,

I waked to sleep no more, at once o'ertaking
The vanguard of my age, with all arrears
Of duty on my back. Nor child, nor man.
Nor youth, nor sage, I find my hair is grey,
For I have lost the race I never ran
A rathe December blights my la^ng May;
And still I am a child, though I be old.
Time is my debtor for my years untold."
An irresponsible being like Hartley Coleridge carries the

reader far away from those political and social interests which may
sometimes be associated with work poetically inferior. In The
Christian Year the historical interest is felt once more, though in
this case the sphere of interest is not politics, as it was in the
Corn-Law Rhymes, but religious thought, and still more religious
emotion.
Critics have sometimes remarked how strange it is that so
little poetry of the first class, at least among Europeans either of
ancient or of modem times, can be classified as "religious."
Poetry seems, nay is, The Treasury
closely cognate to religion; yet
of Sacred Song is weak and poor and pale beside The Golden
Treasury of Songs and Lyrics. The ancient Hebrews possessed
the secret of making their religion poetry and their poetry religion;
but we have lost it, or rather we never had it. There is a religious
element in Paradise Lost; but though the great epic attempts
perhaps partly because it attempts —to "justify the ways of God to
man," it is not what we mean when we speak of a religious poem.
As regards this general inferiority of purely religious verse, the
nineteenth century was no exception to the rule. The volume of
Sacred, Moral and Religious Verse is the most bulky in Mr Miles's
valuable collection. The Poets and the Poetry of the Century ; and
it is also, not the dreariest, but the only dreary volume of the ten.
How few are the grains of wheat and how plentiful the chaff in
such collections as Hymns Ancient and Modern, which are
supposed to be receptacles of the precious grain after the rubbish
has been carefully eliminated Probably the boards of selection
!
have not been ideally qualified for their task; but they have
w. l^
2S8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
had " glimmerings of sense," like Scott's " Dougal cratur."
certainly
It may be granted that they might have done better; but the
broad fact remains that the material does not exist which alone
would have enabled them to do well.
In this depressing department of verse, where hardly anything
is of first-rate quality and the great bulk is intolerably flat and
tedious, there is in the present instance the exceptional interest of
a great change, which was itself a reaction against an opposite
change in the preceding century. In the seventeenth century
there is the name of Milton on the Puritan side; but there is
no compartment of English religious verse large enough to hold
Milton; while all the group of three, Crashaw, Herbert and
Vaughan, usually classified as religious poets, are catholic and
mystical. Crashaw became by creed a Roman Catholic, and the
other two unmistakably share the catholic spirit. In the
eighteenth century, on the other hand, the great writers of devo-
tional and religious verse were either dissenters by birth, like
Isaac Watts, or were driven into dissent, like the Wesleys, or, like
Cowper, were attached to that Calvinistic section of the Church

which is regarded with a sorrowful and not always a very willing
tolerance by the more catholic section. This strain of dissenting
or Protestant-Anglican religious verse was carried on into the early
part of the nineteenth century ; for the season of "catholic" poetry
was not yet. It was carried on feebly enough by Henry Kirke
White ; by the excellent but not very poetical Bishop Mant, who
versified the miracles of theGospels as well as the Psalms, and of
whose hymns a few are still in use; and by James Grahame, author
of The Sabbath. Another who deserves mention if it were only
for the surpriseof finding him in such company is John Bowring
(1792-1872), who in 1854 was knighted for his diplomatic services;
As poetry, Bowring's hymns are of little value; but the fact that
the friend of Bentham's old age, and the first editor of the
Westminster Review, wrote hymns is curious enough to be worth
recording. It is true that his editorship gave little satisfaction to
the more stalwart utilitarians, and that he felt impelled by religious

scruples to exclude certairi of Bentham's works from the collected
edition. But though Bowring was no poet, and a puzzling and
possibly puzzled Benthamite, he was a great linguist and intro-
duced to English readers specimens of Russian, Spanish, Polish,

Servian, Magyar and Cheskian poetry.
The great representative, however, of Protestant religious
poetry in the early part of the nineteenth century was James
Montgomery (1771-1854), the Moravian, whose lines on home
(from The West Indies) formerly were, and perhaps still are, a
favourite selection for recitation among the middle classes of —
society and of education. From the close of the eighteenth
century to the eve of his own death Montgomery was an active
and diligent writer. His volumes of verse and prose are numerous,
—
and all tend to edification, morally, but not so certainly in the
literary sense. In his own day he was much overrated, and his
great popularity wasdue less to merit than to the fact that he so
exactly and accurately expressed in verse the spirit of English
dissent; but it would be unjust to deny him a share, though a
small one, of the poetic spirit. The best of his hymns, such as
"Hail to the Lord's Anointed," and "For ever with the Lord,"
are good, and there are grains of gold, though rarely without
among his miscellaneous pieces.
alloy,
The year 1827 was a kind of annus mirabilis of religious verse.

The fact that one of Montgomery's volumes, The Christian Poet,
appeared then, is of little moment; for most years witnessed a
volume by him. But in that year the hymns of Reginald Heber
(1783-1826) were published posthumously. The Course of Time by
Robert PoUok (1798-1827) appeared just a few months before the
young author was laid in the grave, and The Christian Year by
John Keble (1792-1866) started the Anglo-Catholic school of the
nineteenth century.
PoUok is sometimes bracketed with Kirke White, chiefly because
both died young, and both were of a religious turn of mind. But
there seems to have been more true poetic stuff in PoUok than in
his English predecessor. The plan of his poem —a review of
human history from Adam downwards — is absurd, and much of
the verse is fustian ; but there are passages which show genuine,
though immature and undisciplined, power. Had he lived he
would have run risk of being ruined by the extraordinary popu-
17 —
larity of his first made The Course
achievement, a popularity which
of Time for many one of the most saleable of books ; but
years
there are evidences of strength in PoUok which render it at least
as probable that he would have " deposited his mud," and flowed
on in a strong and clear stream of verse. It is to be feared, how-
ever, that the success of his only poem was due almost as much to
defects as to merits. He did not soar too high above his audience;
like Montgomery, he versified the religious sentiment of Presby-
terian Scotland and Nonconformist England.

Of the three volumes of 1827, the Hymns of Heber may be
regarded as a connecting link between the volume of the
Presbyterian Pollok and that of the High Church Keble for the ;
great missionary bishop was almost as far removed from the one
as from the other. Scott met him at Oxford in 1803 ; and, reading
'S.ê.x^s Journal in the sad evening of his life, was reminded of the
time when his own laurels were beginning to bloom, and both
were " madcaps," and Heber was " a gay young fellow, a wit and a
satirist, and burning for literary fame." Heber's poetical career
was just beginning. He read to Scott the MS. of his prize poem,
Palestine; and it was on Scott's suggestion that the lines describing
the silent rise of Solomon's Temple were added, " No hammer —
fell, no ponderous axes rung," &c. The circumstances of Heber's
life gave httle scope for the " madcap " quality, the gaiety, wit and
satire of his youth ; but an occasional effusion shows the presence

of the qualities detected by Scott. Though the literary promise
he gave in those early years was never fully redeemed, Hebei: is
one of the best of modern hymnologists, and in his happier efforts
he contrives to put into his lines a rare majesty of sound.
So far, however, as religious verse is concerned, the future

belonged neither to Montgomery, nor to Heber, nor to any of
their kin, but to the school founded by Keble, who, whether he
was or was not the real originator of the Oxford Movement, was
certainly its corypheus in verse. We see his spirit rather than
theirs in the verse of Newman, Isaac Williams, Neale, Faber,
R. Hawker, Christina Rossetti and the younger Aubrey de
S.
Vera. To a certain extent they were all anticipated by Wordsworth,

who, as inspiration waned, became more and more didactic, and
who in his Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1821) versified many phases of

religious life and history, doctrine and custom. This collection is,
to the superficial, the chief of Wordsworth's contributions to

religious verse ; but in reality there is far less religion in it than
in those earlierpoems where he allows nature to speak through a
reverent heart. Wordsworth himself felt his kinship with the
Catholic party and was interested in their poetical work. Of The
Christian Year he said, characteristically, "It is very good; so
good, that, if it were mine, I would write it all over again."
The Christian Year still remains the most satisfactory expres-

sion in poetry of the spirit which inspired the Oxford Movement,
and is the work by which Keble is most likely to be remembered,
though there is higher poetry in the Lyra Innocentium (1846),
and though the Miscellaneous Poems, posthumously published in

1869, give refreshing glimpses of the poet stripped of his eccle-
siastical robes. It would be a critical extravagance to call Keble
a great poet; but he is a true and a good one. He would have
been better if he could have made himself, not less religious, but,
in his poetry, less conscious of his religion. The plan of The

Christian Year clogs and hampers the freedom of the poetic
movement ; yet, beyond doubt, it has given the poet a popularity
he would not otherwise have enjoyed. A volume which carries

the devout reader round and through all the Church fasts and
festivals must, if it be competently done at all, be in request ; and
there is far more than competence in Keble's execution. Never-

theless, even to a devout mind, to follow such a plan must be at
times something of a task. It has not the sustaining power of a
great subject which has an inherent unity, and which by the

force of that unity lifts the poet to the " highth " of his "great
argument." As a laureate manufacturing odes on public occasions
isprone to sink beneath himself; as a preacher preaching that
which is appropriate to the season, rather than that which comes
home to his own bosom, is apt to seem vapid to his hearers ; so
the poet of The Christian Year sinks not infrequently to the
commonplace. Homer may nod; but the more frequently he
—
nods "the less Homer he." All are familiar with the Morning
and Evening hymns ; and such pieces are sufficient guarantee
that Keble's poetry at its best is worthy of high praise. Yet even
at its best it often suffers from the religious purpose. Take, for
example, the beautiful lines, "Red o'er the forest peers the setting
sun." The first stanza is a perfect picture of a beautiful natural
scene :
"Red o'er the forest peers the setting sun,

The line of yellow light dies fast away
That crowned the eastern copse and chiU and : dut»
Falls on the moor the brief November day."
But the next stanza betrays the fact that the picture has not been
painted from disinterested love of its beauty. We are called
upon to
" See the calm leaves float
Each to his rest beneath their parent shade.''
This naturally suggests the likeness to decaying life; and then the
difference between the life of man and the life of plants is pointed
out; they have in store "no second spring"; but "man's portion
is to die and rise again." After this come the reflections which
naturally occur to the pious mind. All this is unobjectionable.
It is within any poet's right, and it may be one of his highest merits,
to " moralise his song." But in order to be perfectly successful it
must be done naturally, spontaneously, inevitably. Shakespeare's
nature-pictures grow out of the The flowers which add
situation.
so much to the pathos of the mad Ophelia come there of them-
selves; the references of Duncan and Banquo to the site of
Macbeth's castle, effective as they are from the contrast between
the peace suggested by the " loved mansionry " of " the temple-
haunting martlet," and the deed of blood which is to follow, are
just the natural, unforced utterances of travellers; the scene
between Florizel and Perdita is almost as beautiful in its absolute
fitness and its perfect ease as in the imaginative treatment of the
daffodils and the violets. When Burns disturbs the nest of the
poor mouse, there is nothing forced in the transition of his
thoughts from mice to men; once started upon such a train of
reflection, it is to the imaginative mind inevitable. So too in the
best of Wordsworth the fervour of imagination holds in perfect
fusion the two elements of natural beauty and of human feeling.
So it is always with the greatest masters; but so it is not with

Keble. After the making of the ring of virgin gold there remains
necessary, Browning tells us, "just a spirt o' the proper fiery
acid " to unfasten the alloy indispensable to the craftsman in the
process of manufacture. It is this which Keble seems unable to
supply. The elements of his verse lieside by side, mingled, but
not fused. We see the nature-poet in one stanza, the religious
poet in the next He lacks the art to conceal art, or, better, the
glow of feeling which effects the concealment unconsciously. A
little coldness is the defect of his verse, just as it is the defect of
a most amiable and virtuous life. We are tempted to speculate
whether he might not, like the monster of fable, have gained
strength by touching earth. But he belongs to that class of
saintly characters who are innocent, rather than greatly virtuous
by conquest over evil; he is of Rephan rather than of earth.
The progress in poetry of the movement of which Keble's
work was an anticipation must be traced later. That move-
ment has been referred to in the introduction as a ; and reaction
in matters intellectual it is correctly so called. Essentially an
attempt to substitute authority for reason, it could not but be
reactionary in the sphere of intellect, where no divided empire
is possible. But it was far from being wholly reactionary in the
domain of poetry and art; on the contrary, it did much to breathe
new life into them. we shall find, closely related to
It was, as
the great pre-Raphaelitemovement alike in art and in literature

it just touched Browning and Tennyson ; and it furnishes the key
to much of the work of Clough and Arnold, as well as to some of

that of Ruskin.
The remaining poets of the interregnum, though they show
the widest differences, are all bound together by a common
interest in the drama. Some, like Milman, carried on the Byronic
tradition. A little later the new Elizabethan school rose into
prominence; and to it belong Beddoes, Wells, Wade and Darley,
some of whom, in their work for the drama, seem to have done
almost as much violence to their genius as did Lord Brooke in
the Elizabethan age itself. Taylor, and him Talfourd, may
after
be called dramatists 01 the study ; while Sheridan Knowles and
Planchd owe their position in the history of the drama not to
poetic gift but to stagecraft.
The misfortune of the time, in regard to the drama, is that
the qualities requisite for success in dramatic art are not found
united in any single individual. One has plenty of poetry, another,
abundance of technical skill, a third, a gift of very serviceable
rhetoric; but no one has all that is required. And so, there is
no drama of the time, which, as at once a poetic work and a
piece to be presented on the stage, is fit to compare, not with the
masterpieces of Shakespeare, but with the best of Byron or of
Shelley. Beddoes rivalled them on the poetic side, and Sheridan
Knowles surpassed them in technique; but it would have required
a union of the two to produce a great dramatist.
James Sheridan Knowles (1784-1862) had the will and
purpose to revive the poetical drama, and he lacked only one
thing needful to carry out the design. He had stagecraft; for,
deserting the medical profession for which he was trained, he
appeared in 1809 as an actor. He was an adept at the con-
struction of plots, and few have been better able to sustain the
interest and to conceal the issue until it is ripe for disclosure.
The one thing needful which he did not possess was, unfortunately,
just a flash of the divine fire. His other gifts are rendered
nugatory by the mediocrity erf his imagination. His poverty may
be detected, not exclusively but most easily, in the stiff metre
and ordinary conceptions of the lyrics scattered through the
dramas. Knowles is a bondman of the commonplace, content
to trudge along the earth when he ought to be soaring into the
empyrean. The mirror which the dramatist holds up to nature
is of the magic sort, which either, as in the case of Shakespeare,
reflects an infinity more than is visible to ordinary humanity, or
just so much as the average man realises ; and that is incompar-

ably less than the whole of nature. Moreover, in order to make
the poetical drama, to the naturalism which Hamlet enjoins upon
the players there must be added the. supernaturalism hinted at in
Wordsworth's "light that never was on sea or land." And of this
Knowles has no conception.
The career of Knowles as a dramatist began in 1810, his
Caius Gracchus was acted in 1815, and his Virginius, which won
him fame, in 1820. From that time onwards until 1843 he
produced a large number of plays of the most varied kinds,
historical and domestic, tragic and comic. In the latter part of
his life an exaggerated evangelicalism turned him from the drama.

Knowles was a man of little scholarship and of narrow reading.
He was almost entirely uninfluenced by the Elizabethan revival,
in the midst of which he lived ; and though superficial resem-
blances to Shakespeare may be detected in his works, he is not
in any real sense Shakespearean. We are told that from the time
when he started authorship he purposely refrained from reading
in order that he might not be led into plagiarism. But ignorance
never was the parent of originality ; and the result of this singular
precaution was, not so much to eliminate reminiscences of his
predecessors, as to impoverish his ideas. In no case could he
have risen to high literary rank; but if he had read more he would
probably have attained a somewhat wider reach of mind.
The high reputation of Knowles as a writer of tragedy has
long passed away; and whoever reads his works at the present
day will marvel how it was ever won. There is doubtless vigour
and power in Virginius; but Caius Gracchus is poor, and the
other historical dramas, William Tell (182^) and Alfred the Great
(1831) are not much better. The lack of the poetic element is a
fatal defect in tragedy ; and it was a happy change when, in the
middle of his career, Knowles turned to comedy. His first
attempt in that line was The Beggar's Daughter of Bethnal
Green (1828), his most successful. The Hunchback (1832). The
Love Chase (1837) and Old Maids (1841) are also favourable
examples of the comedy of Knowles. He was a follower of the
eighteenth century school, and in comedy his practical knowledge
was of great value.
The amiable and good James Robinson Planch^ (i 796-1880)
scarcely deserves more than a passing notice, for his pleasant
extravaganzas and burlesques have not the " body " necessary to
secure permanence in literature; and his more ambitious design
to naturalise on the English stage a comedy of the type of
Aristophanes was wholly unsuccessful His archaeological studies
led, however, to one reform on the stage. On the revival of King
John Planche designed the costumes in accordance with
in 1823,
the fashion of the age in which the scene of the play was laid;
and it was largely due to him that the gross anachronisms which
had hitherto prevailed were gradually swept away.
Among the more literary writers of drama, the first place
chronologically, and for a time in reputation, belongs to Henry
Hart Milman (1791-1868) who, though far greater as a historian,
first made his name as a writer of verse. Milman possessed more

of the poetic spirit than he is now credited with. He is among
the best of our hymn-writers; and his prize poem, the Apollo
Belvidere (1812) is the very best prize poem ever written. If the
style is rhetorical, the rhetoric is of the best sort. The secret
of Milman's loss of popularity is not want of poetry, but rathei
deficiency of dramatic power. There are splendid passages in
most of his plays ;
yet the plays cannot be described as splfendid
wholes, for the author fails to impart action. Milman's dramatic
career began with Fazio (1815), which was brilliantly successful,
and culminated with The Fall of Jerusalem (1820), a "Sacred
Tragedy," which the author described to the publisher as neither
intended for nor capable of being adapted to public representation'.
Milman gradually lost reputation in his later dramas, The Martyr
of Antioch (1821), Belshazzar (1822) and Anne Boleyn (1826).
At the zenith of his success he seems to have over-estimated his
own work, and narrowly escaped being the first author who ever
leftJohn Murray on account of money'.
Sir Aubrey de Vere (i 788-1846) was slightly senior to Milman,
but he was considerably less precocious. A contemporary of

Byron at Harrow, it is remarkable that he completely escaped
the dominant influence of his early manhood. He was rather a
follower of Wordsworth, who held a very high opinion of De Vere's
sonnets. His first drama ^âs Julian the Apostate (1822). The
Duke of Mercia (1823) followed ; and then De Vere almost
ceased to write till near the close of his life. Though by reason
of the works already named he is a poet of the interregnum, his
^ Memoirs of John Murray, iL 102.

' ibid. 106.
place in literature depends mainly upon Mary Tudor, which was

written in the last year of his and published posthumously.
life
This powerful and moving tragedy (which was meant to be

part of a trilogy, to be entitled The Daughters of Tudor) is not
altogether unworthy of the emphatic praise of Gladstone, who
ranked Mary Tudor next to Shakespeare'. The conception of
the Queen's character is admirable. De Vera delineates Mary
as a character by nature at once strong and good, but gradually
warped by the influence of the deepest and in themselves the
finest feelings of humanity, —
love for her husband, combined with
the womanly yearning to win the love which he did not give her
in return; and reverence for religion, degenerating in her case
under evil guidance to superstition and cruelty. Nor is Mary's
the only well-drawn character of the play. Pole stands out clear
and strong; and so does Gardiner, a churchman of a very different
type. This distinct and sometimes subtle characterisation, along
with the excellence of the plot, gives De Vere's work a high place
among the few poetical dramas of the period and the vividness ;
of the metaphors and similes renders its place the more sure. A
curious circumstance in literary history is that Tennyson entered
into a sort of competition, doubtless unintentional, with the
dramatic work of the De Veres, father and son. His Queen
Mary treats again, less successfully, the subject which Sir Aubrey
may fairly be said to have made his own in Mary Tudor; and
his Becket traverses once more the ground of the younger De Vere's
Saint Thomas of Canterbury, which had only been published a
few years before.
Mary Russell Mitford would deserve a word in this connexion
were it only for the excellence of her descriptive prose. She took
herself very seriously as a dramatist, and, perversely enough,
valued herself in that capacity more highly than as the writer of
the exquisite sketches inOur Village. From Julian (1823) on
through the Foscari (1826) to the culminating point in Rienzi
(i8z8), she was conceived to rank among the first of English
tragedians. The flavour is however evaporated from her dramas.
1 A. de Vere's Recollections, 215.

The gentle, shrewd, humorous power of observation, which Our
Village shows to be her true gift, was not that which could supply
the materials for tragedy ; and, beautiful as is her prose style, she
had not the gift of verse.
So too Bryan Waller Procter (1787-1874), better known by
his nom deplume of Barry Cornwall, in his earlier days aspired to
fame in the drama, and, though he is now remembered solely as
the writer of English Songs (1832), his tragedy of Mirandola was
in 1 82 1 performed with great success at Covent Garden. Procter,
however, is already no more than a name in literature. Nothing
he has done is really noteworthy, and his name survives rather for
its associations with greater names than for his own sake. The
author of " The Sea, the Sea, the open Sea " might be forgotten,
!
for it is only spirited verse; but the schoolfellow of Byron, the

steady friend of the hapless Beddoes and the early admirer of
Browning will be remembered for their sake.
But by far the most interesting figure among the group of
dramatists of the closet was Henry (afterwards Sir Henry) Taylor
(1800— 1886), who by reason of his Isaac Comnenus (1827) belongs
to the interregnum, though his greatest and most memorable pro-
duction was published after the appearance of Tennyson and
Browning. Taylor is interesting not only, perhaps not even chiefly,
for the value of his writings, but also because he is the representa-
tive of a tendency, and because he made a deliberate and conscious
effort to do what many were vaguely striving to do without being
aware of their own purpose. The age was gradually emancipating
itself from Byron. One way of emancipation lay along the path
traversed by Shelley and Keats ; and this was taken by Beddoes
and those akin to him. The other was by the cultivation of a
spirit of thoughtfulness, restraint and lucidity; and this was chosen
by Taylor. The great leaders of the period afterwards steered an

intermediate course, with a leaning towards the romantic side
rather than the classical.
Taylor's theory and purpose were proclaimed in the introduc-
tion to Philipvan Artevelde (1834). His theory was that the
poetry which was popular in his own day was a weakened
Byronism, sensational in its character rather than intellectual.
Further, with an interesting anticipation of the judgment of

Matthew Arnold, Taylor pronounced Shelley to be wanting in
reality, and declared that the mind was no more enriched by
reading his verse than by gazing on "gorgeously-coloured clouds in

an evening sky'." Current poetry, then, in Taylor's opinion, had
passion and fervour and colouring : what it lacked was the
intellectual and immortal part of poetry, its philosophy.
Taylor contrasts with his contemporaries in character and
circumstances, as well as in dramatic theory. He entered the
Colonial Office in 1824, lived an easy life of official routine,
gradually rose in the service, was knighted in 1869, and retired in

1872 on a comfortable pension, to die at last full of years and
honours. He began his literary career as a contributor to the
Quarterly Review, then edited by Gifford, and adopted at first,
but afterwards regretted and abandoned, that tone of sarcastic

superiority which in those days was customary with anonymous
critics. His Isaac Comnenus won the praise of Southey, but
failed to achieve popularity ; and the loss involved in the publica-
tion of it led Murray to decline Philip van Artevelde when it was
offered to him a few years later. Though the latter is separated
from its predecessor by seven years in date of publication,
it was
begun almost immediately after Isaac Comnenus appeared. It was

hammered out and laboxured at and polished in the leisure hours
of six years. This dehberateness of composition was natural to
Taylor, and was enforced by his theory of the function of verse.
I7u Virgin Widow (1849), one of his latest compositions, was on
hand for four years. Philip van Artevelde won immediate success,
and made Taylor a lion of society. The triumph was all the
more surprising because it followed upon the conscious and
deliberate defiance of popular taste, which is proclaimed in the
preface. From the vantage-ground of seventy years we can see
clearlyenough that success came because the time was ripe, and
because the popular taste was waiting for new men, new methods
1 Some nine years later we shall find Ruskin teaching in Modem Painters
that there are few things which will more enrich the mind than just this
cloud-gazing.
and new ideals. For the moment, it seemed as if Taylor was to
be the man, and his the methods.
A prose volume, The Statesman (1836), helped to check
Taylor's popularity, and brought upon him, through the sarcasm
of certain passages, the hostility of those who felt the possible
application to themselves. Edwin Fair followed in 1842, and
the
then, thirteen years after The Virgin Widow, came the last of his
dramatic compositions, Si Clements Eve (1862).
Taylor never equalled Philip van Artevelde. Isaac Comnenus
was immature. Edwin the Fair was similar to Philip, but less
striking and less strong ; and both the romantic comedy of The
Virgin Widow and the much better as well as more popular
St Clements Eve were of slighter materials. Taylor was a man
of great talent; but his dramatic scheme demanded superlative
ability. His solitary success exhausted him, and there remained
no more for him do but
to repeat himself.
to By an intel-
lectual tour de forcehe built up an admirable play; but he had
not the material wherewith to construct a second. And it was a
case of conscious construction. The element which is underrated,
if not forgotten, in his theory of poetry, is that which, for want of
a better name, is called "inspiration." He
left no room for "the
inevitable " in plotand characterisation. His men and women are

not like paintings, where the colours melt into one another ; they
are rather mosaics, laboriously pieced together; and though the
work is skilfully done, the seams are visible. Neither had Taylor
the instinct for action ; frequently the piece stands still while the
characters brood and moralise and reflect.
It may be well to do some little violence to chronology in
order to notice with Taylor two or three other dramatists who
belong more completely than he to the later period. One of
them, Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795-1854), has, on more than
one ground besides his own work, a claim upon the gratitude
of lovers of literature. He was among the early champions of

Wordsworth, and he was the friend and literary executor of
Charles Lamb, whose and memorials he edited with care
letters
and taste. Talfourd's work at the bar left him only the odd
moments of a busy life to devote to literature. Hence, although
THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY 2/1
the drama had been with him a passion from early years, it was
not till 1836 that his first tragedy, Ion, was performed. Its
success stimulated him so that The Athenian Captive followed

in 1838, and Glencoe in 1840.
The subject of fon, Talfourd's best-known work, is classical
but in form the drama shows the influence of the classics as

filtered through France and modified also by the higher traditions
of the English stage. Macready detected in it the qualities
necessary for success, and the event proved him to be right.
Nevertheless, an ordinary reader would be tempted to say that
the play was one which would appeal to the student rather than
to a popular audience. Talfourd is a sort of Henry Taylor
considerably weakened. His work is essentially psychological.
The whole play is constructed for the sake of Ion, in whom we
see the representation of an innocent but noble-minded inex-
perience awakening to heroism through contact with the tragical
facts of The Athenian Captive is another classical theme
life.
handled in much the same spirit and exhibiting similar merits
and the similarity is preserved still in Glencoe: or. The Fate of

the Macdonalds, in spite of the fact that it deals with the modem
world instead of the ancient, and with the north instead of the
south. In all these plays the scheme is ambitious. Talfourd's
purpose, .avowed in the somewhat wordy and self-conscious prefaces,
was to re-create a poetical drama. But for this he was inadequately
endowed. He was a man of poetical mind rather than a poet.
His statuesque characters are almost invariably frigid in their
speech. Under the influence of Wordsworth descriptions of
nature are sometimes dragged in without much regard to poetic
fitness;and there is in all the plays rather too little action,
combined with a superfluity of sentiment. The style is redundant
and overloaded with ornament. Nowhere is there the least touch
of comedy or of humour.
Between Talfourd and Bulwer Lytton there is a point of
connexion in the fact that the second and most successful play
of the latter. The Lady of Lyons, was dedicated to Talfourd.
Lytton fills a larger space in the department of fiction than in
that of verse, whether dramatic or other; but nevertheless the
man who wrote two of the very few plays which have kept the
stage from their appearance till the present day, and which enjoy
a steady popularity that has not been equalled since the comedies
of Sheridan, is clearly a person deserving of some attention and
study.
In the beginning of his career Lytton was decidedly Byronic
and, though he repudiated the connexion, there is throughout
more of the Byronic spirit than of any other in his works. It is
certainly so in the case of the dramas. When Heiuy Taylor

was declaring, with much truth, that the day of Byron was past,
Lytton with his sure instinct was discovering just how far Byronism
was antiquated, and how far it could still be made popular. He
found the solution in the dramas. In the period of his early
novels Lytton was too close a follower of Byron for the taste of
the rising generation : he was speaking to the generation which
was passing away. The dramas are an intermediate stage, still
Byronic, but with a Byronism written up to the new taste.
Lytton's first play. The Duchess de la Valliire (1836) was,

notwithstanding the help of Macready in the cast of actors, one
of his few failures. On the other hand, The Lady of Lyons (1838),
written in a fortnight for Macready, and represented on the stage
by him Claude Melnotte, won a dazzling success.
in the part of
Richelieu (1838) was almost equally popular; and both these
plays have ever since remained favourites on the stage. The
Sea Captain (1839) was not so well liked; but even that was
good enough in respect of stage effect to be revived thirty years
later at the Lyceum. Money (1840), a prose comedy, and Not
so Bad as we Seem (1851), another, complete the tale of Lytton's
dramatic compositions.
Few lovers of poetry and of the poetical drama will rank any
of Lytton's plays very high. There is nothing in them that rivals
in poetic quality the best of Beddoes, nothing comparable in force
to the most powerful scenes of Wells, nothing equal to the best
character-studies of Henry Taylor, nothing so profound as A Blot
in the ^Scutcheon, nothing even approaching the passion of Ottima
and Sebald. All Lytton's plays are melodramatic. When he strives
for stage effect he becomes theatrical, and there is tinsel in nearly

everything that he writes.The plot of The Lady of Lyons trembles

on the verge of absurdity, the hero is about the poorest creature
who was ever elevated to such a position. In Richelieu, the great
statesman is a shadow. And yet in spite of all this, there is in
these dramas the incommunicable something which makes them
act and go. Better poets compose dramas^ which fail;
far richer
but Lytton somehow hits the nail at which he aims, and drives it
home.
It is strange that in the lyric the false taste and false sentiment
of Lytton are less felt than in the other forms of his work, although
the ear is more sensitive to such faults in lyrical poetry than in
anything else. Expecting glare in the theatre, men pardon some
measure of it in dramatic work ; and fiction is not usually judged
by very rigid canons of art. But the lyric is emotion seven times
refined, and unless all dross is burnt and purged away it stands
condemned. Lytton's lyrics do not always bear the test. They
are often hard and sometimes false ; but on the whole there is in
them far less of the meretricious than we should expect. There
are many echoes and imitations, conscious and unconscious, echoes
of most of the great contemporary and recent poets, of Byron,
Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, and many more. There is also a
good deal of rhetoric. But when all deductions have been made,
in such pieces as The First Violets, Is it all Vanity i The Love of
Maturer Years and Absent yet Present there is sufficient evidence
that Lytton had in considerable measure the lyrical gift.
There is a great gulf between Taylor and the group of which
Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) was the brightest ornament.
The two, contrast at every, point.. While Taylor was somewhat
deficient in imagination, Beddoes was "of imagination all compact."
Taylor constructed everything by line and rule: Beddoes took
a perverse pleasure in defying, not merely literary conventions,
but often the vital laws of art. Taylor was too conscious and
deliberate : pf all writers of the nineteenth century, Beddoes is
the man whose best pieces most impress us as having "written

themselves." Taylor was classical, Beddoes ultra-romantic; but
although Taylor was successful and honoured, while Beddoes
died by his own hand, and his extraordinary masterpiece was
w. 18
not printed till he was in his grave, it was nevertheless Beddoes
who was in the main stream, while Taylor was in only a side
current.
Numerous attempts have been made, with very limited success,
to define that romanticismwhich so powerfully moved the mind
of Europe in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and which
has been the life and soul of the literature of the nineteenth.
Heine described it as the re-awakening of the spirit of the Middle

Ages; and one of the latest writers on the subject finds nothing
better he can do than to adopt this as "a rough working definition."
But such a definition explains nothing. In truth, it is no definition
at all, being really equivalent to the assertion that romanticism
prevailed also in the Middle Ages, and so reducible to the
tautologous proposition, "romanticism is romanticism." A phrase
such as Heine's, however, though worthless as a definition, may be
useful enough when the purpose is, like that of Mr Beers in the
passage referred to, to enquire what works manifest the romantic
spirit. It fulfils the function of what is called the "characteristic"
in the classifications of botanists. But being purely artificial it

has also the limitations of the characteristic, and tells us nothing
of the spirit or inner meaning of romanticism, any more than
the symptomatic hectic cough tells the nature of phthisis. We
come nearer to the essence in Mr Theodore Watts-Dunton's
phrase, "the renascence of wonder"; in fact we have here
probably as much of the essence as a single phrase will carry.
We can see the operation of wonder in all the manifestations
of the romantic spirit. It explains the spectres and goblins
and enchantments of poetry and fiction. It explains the rising
admiration of Gothic in opposition to classical architecture,
the one with its vaguely grand vistas and its endless variety;
the other a harmony created from a few simple principles.
It explains the cloudy visions of Turner in contrast with the
realism of the Dutch school, and the tense emotion of the
figuresdrawn by the Pre-Raphaelites in contrast with the calm
of a Greek statue. It explains the reversion to the Catholic
mythology with its appeal to the feelings, in contrast with the

Protestant appeal to the judgment
The subtler manifestations of the romantic spirit might be

illustrated indefinitely by quotations from Coleridge and Shelley
and Keats side by side with quotations from Dryden and Pope.
In the former company we find ourselves in a world of faery
casements, of mysterious, untraversed, silent seas, of clouds
piloted over earth and ocean by the lightning. And when we
turn from the treatment of nature to the treatment of moral
problems, we find a similar spirit prevalent among the romantic
poets. Such problems are either wrapped in a haze of mystery;
or their proportions are so gigantic that the human mind can
hardly grapple with them. Prometheus on his crag, Hyperion
flaring on "from stately nave to nave, from vault to vault," are
figures not to be measured with a foot-rule. They carry the' mind
back, not to the immediate predecessors of their creators, but to
Milton and to Michael Angelo. Christabel in the midnight wood
the Ancient Mariner on the shrinking deck —the subtle suggestions
of sin, the incalculable consequences of a deed of cruelty or of
love — such are the problems which the poets of the Romantic
Revival love, not to treat, but to suggest, and then leave to bear
their fruit in the mind. Such work stands in the strongest possible
contrast to the philosophy of the Essay on Man or the hard
outlines of the character of Achitophel. The earlier poets present
us with a series of syllogisms, the later ones create an atmosphere.
Although they are in eternal warfare, the two schools are
the necessary complement one of the other. Eighteenth century
classicism had to give place to romanticism, because the former
had cut itself away from
" the root of the matter." " Our in-
dispensable eighteenth century " had to be rediscovered, because
without it romanticism was in danger of wandering aimlessly in
a fog. The two spirits are never completely separated, because
they are not really two, but only different aspects of one spirit.
Perfection means perfect equipoise and due proportion between
them ; imperfection is the loss of balance and proportion. Taylor
inclined to the one side, and was barren; Beddoes inclined to the
other, and was ineffective. The with far higher
could
latter, gifts,
make nothing round and whole; the former has nothing com-
parable to the inspired snatches of Beddoes.
18—2
The first to appreciate the greatness of Beddoes's gift for-
poetry was George Darley (1795-1846), himself a poet, who in
the London Magazine sang the praise of The Brides Tragedy in

terms rendered all the more striking by the author's unsparing
censure of some men of much greater fame than Beddoes. Darley,
an Irishman, was one of the leaders of that Celtic revival to which we
owe a great body of recent verse; and though he early left his native
island,he never ceased to look back with fond affection to the
country of his birth. His Ufe was unfortunate. A shy and sensitive
man afflicted with a distressing stammer, he cut himself off almost
completely from society. He had the ambition of a poet, but he
never could be sure of the adequacy of his own
and littlegift,
encouragement came to him from without. There is deep pathos

in his statement to Miss Mitford, who had written in "kindly
praise" of Nepenthe (1835), that for seven long years he had lived
"on a charitable saying of Coleridge's, that he sometimes liked
to take up Sylvia" (1827). The latter work, a fairy pastoral, part
prose, part lyrical verse, was aptly described by Miss Mitford as
" something between The Faithful Shepherdess and A Midsummer
Nighfs Dream." But Barley's connexions are rather with the
Cavaliers than with the Elizabethans ; and his well-known piece,
" It is not beauty I demand," was the best of all imitations of the
Cavalier style until Miss K. Mann, in Old Songs of the. Elizabethans

with new Songs in Reply, caught the tone again and again.
It is the lyrical snatches which give charm to Sylvia, a lyrical
drama which shows little power of construction, but by fits and in
fragments displays a rare grace of fancy, a keen eye for the beauty
of nature, and a delicate ear for rhythm. The description of the
army of the fairies is spirited, and the lines which usher it in are
nature-poetry of very high merit. The song, "O May, thou art a
pleasant time," and the dirge, "Wail! wail ye o'er the dead!" are
specimens of Darley's art scarcely, if at all, inferior. More than
twice or thrice Darley rose into the higher regions of lyrical verse,
and he never deserved the almost complete oblivion which till
lately had overtaken him. The unfinished Nepenthe, though less
charming and perhaps still more uneven than Sylvia, was stronger
and more daring. It showed no trace of exhaustion of the poetic
faculty ;
yet, except a few lyrics, it was the last work of Darley that
is worth naming. It failed as Sylvia had failed. Jacob had at least
Leah when he served a second seven years for Rachel; but Darley
could hardly live for another seven years on such unsubstantial
fare as a chance phrase of approval. His career was practically
at an end and eleven years after the publication of Nepenthe he
;
died a disappointed and broken man. Darley was partly to blame

for his own failure, for h^ showed something less than common
sense in the management of his works at their publication. But
his contemporaries can hardly be acquitted of an almost Boeotian
dulness in their failure to appreciate the exquisite grace of his
lyrics.
Beddoes was the only one of the writers of the interregnum

who may be fairly described as a "lost leader," an "inheritor of
unfulfilled renown"; and the reason was that he, like Taylor,
lacked unum necessariwm. A great statesman has said that " the
great statesman —
must have two qualities, the first is prudence,
the second imprudence''; and the saying may be adapted to the
poets. The great poet likewise must have two qualities; and the
first is obedience to law, the second disobedience. Henry Taylor
had the first, Beddoes had the second ; and the union of the two
would have made a very great poet. But Beddoes's wonderful
imagination was always unrestrained, and the volumes of his
poetry are little more than the scraps and fragments of what he
might have produced. His career was strange and irregular, like
his verse. His first literary venture was The Improvisatore (182 1),
a poem in three "fyttes," published when he was only eighteen;
and it was immediately followed by The Bride's Tragedy (1S22),
a play written not for the stage, but for the study. Both of these
appeared while Beddoes was still an undergraduate of Oxford.
For some three years more he continued to write busily, intending
to make literature his profession. He executed many fragments.
In the spring of 1825 he writes to his friend Kelsall that he is
"thinking of a very Gothic-styled tragedy,'' Death's Jest-Book;

and in October, 1826, he declares it to be finished. Yet after
The Bride's Tragedy nothing except one or two fugitive pieces
was published during the lifetime of Beddoes. He could hardly
have been seriously discouraged by the treatment of his two
volumes; for The Bridis Tragedy was fairly well received. But
he was conscious that he could never win popularity : "Of course
no one will ever read it," he says of Death's Jest-Book ; and he
suddenly determined to abandon literature and follow his father's
profession of medicine. This resolution led to that residence in
Germany to which reference has been made in an earlier chapter.
There or in Switzerland he spent nearly all the rest of his life. He
died by suicide in the hospital of Basel. Death's Jest-Book was
published in the year after the author's death by his friend and
literary executor, Kelsall ; and a volume of miscellaneous poems
followed in 1851.
Beddoes is an extraordinary inixture of the highly artificial
and the absolutely inevitable in poetry. Of his Death's Jest-Book,
his editor, Mr Gosse, declares that " no play in literature was less
of a spontaneous creation, or was further from achieving the ideal
of growing like a tree'"; and this is undoubtedly true of it as a
whole. It is forced and tortured into the appearance of a tragedy.
There is only one "whole"' among the works of Beddoes, The
Brides Tragedy; and the abortive fragments of The Second Brother
and Torrismond and The Last Man, as well as the numerous
beginnings, endings and middles of Death's Jest-Book, show how
difficult the art of construction was to him. In the letter dedicatory
of The Brides Tragedy he "the flourishing condition of
affirms
dramatic literature" in his own day; and all his ambitious efforts
were of the dramatic sort. Yet all his genius failed to make
him a He could write noble blank verse and glorious
dramatist.
lyrics,and could throw the most striking lights upon character;
but in the art of construction he was hopelessly inferior to men
who had scarcely a gleam of his poetic insight.
His works, then, including Death's Jest-Book, are really a
collection of fragments ; but the judgment pronounced upon the
fragmerits must be widely different from that passed upon the
whole. The best of them are singularly spontaneous in the true
sense; which does not at all imply that they were written "with
the graceful and negligent ease of a man of quality." Spontaneity
' Poetical Works of Beddoes, IntrodtuHon, xxxvii.
in literature is achieved when the author, having something to

say, says it in the manner most perfectly fitting its character,
whether that manner be reached with labour or mastered easily,
It is as much a property of the high-wrought lyrics of Shelley as

of the simple songs of Bums. The ''conceits" of the seventeenth-
century poets are frequently wrong only because they are in the
wrong place ; the metaphors of Shakespeare in scenes of intense
passion are often of the same order. We call the former artificial
because they are arbitrary ; the latter are natural, though they
must have been won with sweat of soul. It is in this sense that
the fragments of Beddoes, both lyrical and dramatic, are among
the most spontaneous verse of recent times. Any of Beddoes's
better-known lyrics, such as Dream-Pedlary, or Wolfram's Dirge,
would illustrate what is meant. The following dirge, which is
inferior to none of them, is less known and is equally good for
illustration :
"To-day is a thought, a fear is to-morrow.

And yesterday is our sin and our sorrow
And life is a, death,

Where the body's the tomb,
And the pale sweet breath
Is buried alive in its hideous gloom.
Then waste no tear.
For we are the dead; the living are here.
In the stealing earth, and the heavy bier.
Death lives but an instant, and is but a sigh,
And his son is unnamed immortality.
Whose being is thine. Dear ghost, so to die
Is to live, —and life is a worthless lie.
Then we weep for ourselves, and wish thee good-bye.''
Death's Jest-Book is strange, wild and chaotic, yet wonderfully

interesting throughout. Beddoes, says Mr Gosse, even as a child
displayed a "precocious tendency to a species of mocking meta-
physics^" boy was in this case emphatically father of
If so, the
the man; both thq mockery and the metaphysics are here,
for
Beddoes disguised his thought under the Gothic garb of the

grotesque, but the charm of his work is its rare power of sugges-
^ Introduction, xx.
tion. Carried back in imagination to the date of its composition,
DeatKs Jest-Book becomes one of the earliest and most remark-
able manifestations of the spirit of the rising generation.The
German influence is already there. The preferences of Beddoes,
when he became thoroughly familiar with the Germans, are in-
structive. Goethe wrung admiration from him; but his heart
went out spontaneously to Tieck and the ultra-romantic writers.
The first was a genius too sane and round and orderly for him,
while the lawlessness and morbidness of the ultra-romantic writers
answered to something in his own nature.
But the most remarkable thing in Beddoes is the Elizabethan
note in his work ; which is also a note of the time. It is heard
alike in the lyrics, in the blank verse of all the dramatic pieces,
and in the prose passages of Death' s Jest-Book. Especially in his
lyrics,Beddoes has the note of Elizabethan song in a degree
which is unequalled. He caught the tone, not once or twice, but
many times. He was probably induced to study the Elizabethans
by Coleridge and Lamb and Hazlitt; but it is not mere imitation:
it is rather the Elizabethan spirit re-incarnate in a man of the
nineteenth century. Beddoes was far too daring for imitation ; and
he had also too sound a conception of what was needed in order
to give life to the literature of his own age. Just about the time
when the idea of DeatKs Jest-Book was budding
in his mind,
he an Elizabethan revival " These re-
writes to Kelsall about :
animations are vampire-cold. Such ghosts as Marloe (sic), Webster,

etc., are better dramatists, better poets, I dare say, than any
contemporary of ours, but they are ghosts the worm is in their —
pages, —
and we want to see something that our great-grandsires
did not know. With the greatest reverence for all the antiquities
of the drama, I still think that we had better beget than revive,
attempt to give the literature of this age an idiosyncrasy and spirit

of its own, and only raise a ghost to gaze on, not to live with'."
The man who wrote thus was the last who would have set himself
the task of writing in a by-gone style ; and we must ascribe the
remarkable similarity of tone between his work and that of the
Elizabethans to a kinship of birth, not one of adoption. His
' introduciion, xxiv.
mind was cast in their mould; conceptions came to him in the

same fashion as they came to them. Take, for example, the
speech of Isbrand to Siegfried over the body of Wolfram :
"Dead and gone! a scurvy burthen to this ballad of life.

There lies he, Siegfried ; my brother, mark you and I weep not, ;
nor gnash the teeth, nor curse ; and why not, Siegfried ? Do you
see this? So should every honest man be: cold, dead, and leaden-
cofifined. This was one who would be constant in friendship, and
the pole wanders: one who would be immortal, and the light
that shines upon his pale forehead now, through yonder gewgaw
window, undulated from its star hundreds of years ago. That is
constancy, that is life. O moral nature"!"
Or, in verse, take Athulf s description of Amala :
"So fair a creature! of such charms compact

As nature stints elsewhere; which, you may find
Under the tender eyelid of a serpent,
Or in the gurge of a kiss-coloured rose,
By drops and sparks but when she moves, you
: see.
Like water from a crystal overfilled,
Fresh beauty tremble out of her and lave

Her fair sides to the ground. Of other women,
(And we have beauteous in this court of ours,)
I can remember whether nature touched
Their eye with brown or azure, where a vein
Runs o'er a sleeping eyelid, like some streak
In a young blossom ; every grace count up, ,
Here the round turn and crevice of the arm,

There the tress-bunches, or the slender hand
Seen between harpstrings gathering music from them
But where she is, I'm lost in her abundance,
And when she leaves me I know nothing more,
(Like one from whose awakening temples rolls
The cloudy vision of a god away,)
Than that she was divine '^."
This almost Shakespearean opulence is unquestionably the

outflow of Beddoes's own mind; and as certainly it has the boldness
and the massiveness of "the spacious days." But besides the
Elizabethan strain we detect in Beddoes the note of Shelley and
1 Death's fesi-Book, II. i. ' ibid. 11. ii.
Keats; and herein again he was a pioneer, for the new age was
the age of their disciples. He has indeed been called "a Gothic
Keats"; and it is possible that he was fundamentally more akin
to Keats than to Shelley ; but on the other hand his resemblance
to the latter is more obvious. It would not be easy to find a
passage as redolent of Keats as the song from Torrismond, "How
many times do I love thee, dear?" is But
redolent of Shelley.
the traces of both are evident; and the very union is again
characteristic of the time. Shelley and Keats are poets between
whom there are very wide differences. The one is intellectual,
the other sensuous; the one is abstract, the other concrete; the
one is in the clouds, the other, without being in the least earthy,
has a firm footing on earth. Shelley, like Byron, was a poet of
revolt, keen to solve the problem of the rights of man, and all on
fire to redress social wrongs; Keats, absorbed in the religion of

beauty, cared for none of these things. It was to him no mere
figure of speech, but a literal fact, that beauty was truth, and he
could hardly understand how truth could be reached by a process
of reasoning; but the son-in-law of Godwin, devotee as he was of
beauty, understood the mystery very well. He was a critic and
philosopher as well as a poet. Yet notwithstanding all this, those
who have been influenced by Shelley have almost without ex-
ception been influenced by Keats; and while Beddoes was drawn
towards the former by his intellect, he was drawn towards the
latter by his imagination.
The growth
in popularity of Shelley and Keats is a subject
worthy of a moment's attention; and the group to which Beddoes
belonged were among the earliest and most devoted of their
followers. In the fourth decade of the century the growth was
considerable; but their popularity was then quite recent, and it
was not In his review of Tennyson's Poems in 1833,

really wide.
Lockhart ironically retracted the censures which had been psissed

by Tke Quarterly Review upon Keats, and spoke of "the un-
bounded popularity which has carried it {Endymioti] through we
know not how many editions which has placed it on every table;
;
and, what is still more unequivocal, familiarized it in every mouth."

But there must have been great exaggeration in this; at least.
Blackwood's Magazine in 1844 misspelt the name of Keats and ;
Rossetti, who began to study him about 1845 or 1846, imagined

himself to be "one of the strenuous admirers of Keats ^."
earliest
Rossetti was certainly wrong; but he never could have made such
a mistake if Keats had been well and widely known. About
Shelley, Tennyson knew nothing until he went to Cambridge.
Browning at the age of fourteen accidentally saw in a second-hand
book-shop a little volume described as " Mr Shelley's Atheistical
Poem, very scarce." He begged his mother to get him Shelley's
works; but no local bookseller had ever heard the name, and
they had to be procured from London. Along with them,
Mrs Browning "brought also three volumes of the still less known
John Keats, on being assured that one who liked Shelley's works
would like these also^" Thus early were the two names linked
together, and so deep was the ignorance about the two poets even
after they were both in the grave. The few who were better
instructed were without influence. Peacock, the satirist as well
knew ; so did John Hamilton Reynolds,

as the friend of Shelley,
whose portrait hangs now in the National Portrait Gallery inscribed
with the words, "the friend of Keats"; so did Charles Jeremiah
Wells; so, of course, did Beddoes, the student of everything
romantic. But these men had no following and hardly any
audience they had nothing but poetic taste. The fact that they
:
gave their suffrages to the neglected poets was an indication that

the day of those poets would come ; but it did little to bring that
day nearer. Their " discovery " by the Cambridge contemporaries
of Tennyson was more effectual.
The same union of the Elizabethan spirit with sornething
derived from Keats and Shelley is to be found in the work of
Charles Jeremiah Wells (1800-1879) and in that of Thomas
Wade (1805-1875); and unfortunately there is to be found in
them also the same ostentatious defiance of or indifference to the
requirements of the stage. Herein, of course, the nineteenth
century writers were unfaithful to the Elizabethan tradition ; and
the difference is highly interesting. Shakespeare is almost as
1 D. G. Rossetti : his Family Letters, i. 100.
^ Mrs Sutherland Orr's Life of Browning, 40.
remarkable for his practical sagacity as he is for his poetic gift
but the of the Elizabethan revival sometimes seem to value

men
themselves on the absence of that practical sagacity, as applied to
matters of the theatre. The fact is a sure proof that they lacked
the true dramatic instinct, the end of which is to find its expression
on the stage. All pleas for the closet drama are conclusively
answered by the appeal to experience, which shows that in all
ages and in all countries the really great dramatists have been
able to satisfy the requirements of representation, and have con-
trived to be poetical without ceasing to be practical.
In 1822 Wells published a volume in the vein of Boccaccio
entitled Stories after Nature; but the work on which his fame
must wholly rest is Joseph and Ms Brethren (1823), the history
of which is too curious to be omitted. On its publication, Joseph
and his Brethren passed unnoticed, except, as the event proved,
by a discerning few; and Wells seems to have calmly accepted
himself as a literary failure, and ceased to write. About twenty
or thirty years afterwards, however, he was induced by the urgency
of two or three admirers to revise the book ; but before it could
be published the copy was lost. Later still, the warm praise of
two great poets, Rossetti and Swinburne, induced Wells to under-
take a second revision, and in 1876 the poem was issued in the
form in which it is now known.
Joseph and his Brethren is not a true drama, and Wells can
hardly be said to have seriously attempted to make it one ; but it
is a very fine dramatic poem. The action often pauses for

dialogue and soliloquy which are incredible under the given
circumstances and the scenes might be added to, or diminished,
;
or changed in their order, indefinitely. The poem therefore must
be judged rather by its parts than as a whole. The characterisa-

tion, in Joseph and Reuben, and above all in Phraxanor,
Potiphar's wife, is excellent. The last is a profound and subtle

study of a woman unprincipled and sensuous, but great in
intellect, in beauty, and in a certain evil charm which is not
wholly lost even in the scene where she woos Joseph. That
scene, the most difficult to manage, is likewise the triumph of the
book. The introductory dialogue between Phraxanor and her
attendant is wholly admirable, and Phraxanoi's two speeches, on

the power of love and on the want of truth in women, are great
Scarcely less excellent is when he
the stormy outburst of Reuben,
turns upon his brethren after searching the pit
and finding no
Joseph. The general mode of conception recalls Marlowe ; but
there are constant suggestions of Shakespeare throughout the
poem, —not imitations, but rather instances of community of
thought. There is often a Shakespearean breadth in single lines or
phrases; thus,
" A little secret is a tempting tiling

Beyond wide truth's confession."
And there is a Shakespearean ring in this metaphor :
" Great Conscience is task-master to the will,

And lets it forth as men hold bears in chains,
To have them back, and whip them at the fault."
Along with the name of Wells is commonly mentioned that of

one of his earliest panegyrists. Wade, who, in a note to TAe Con-
tention of Death and Love, speaks of the verse of Wells as in " the
same stream of sublime, subtle and unsurpassed poetry" as

Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes and Antony and Cleopatra. But
a better justification of the conjunction of the names is the
similarity between the two men, though it is a similarity which is
striking rather than close. Both illustrate the influence of the

Elizabethan revival ; both follow Marlowe, of whom and of —
Webster there is more than of Shakespeare in the movement;
and both are influenced by Keats ; though Wells was affected by
him far less than Wade. Here the resemblance ends. Wells,
though not a dramatist, was essentially dramatic in the type of his
mind, while Wade was not. Wells was the more forcible. Wade
by far the more polished and regular in his work. In Wells there
of the influence of Shelley, in Wade there is a great deal.
is little
Wade's career opened with a volume of Poems (1825), which

was followed by two dramas, Woman's Love (1828) and The Jew
of Arragofi (1830). The latter is interesting both for its motif axid
for the fate which that Tnotif brought upon it. Dealing with the
persecution of the Jews by the Christians, the author clearly shows
that his sympathies are on the side of the former. The result had
been predicted by Mrs Kemble. The play was damned by an
audience which could not tolerate the championship of the Jews,
and which had seen The Merchant of Venice without a suspicion
that possibly Shakespeare might have thought there was something
to say on the side of Shylock.
Wade wrote at least one play afterwards, but it remains un-
published ; and the fact that he was by this failure diverted from
the stage is not to be regretted. Though there is poetry in his
dramas, Wade's true gift was rather of the lyrical order. He had
been for some years contributing to The Monthly Repository; and
in 183 s he gathered his contributions together in a volume which
is usually known by its shortened title, Mundi et Cordis Carmina.
The contents of this volume, certain miscellaneous sonnets, and
four poems which were published separately in pamphlet form in
1837 and 1839, are Wade's best contributions to literature.
The sonnets, which are somewhat free in construction, are
often good, and occasionally they reach excellence. Birth and
Death, for example, is fine alike in conception and in execution.
But on the whole, Wade is at his best in the lyrics and miscel-
laneous poems whose metre is somewhat simpler than that of the
sonnet. Probably he never wrote anything finer than Helena.
Modelled on Keats's Isabella, it bears the stamp of imitation on its
face ; but this fact detracts little from its value. When poetry is
genuine, and is the sincere expression of the poet's own spirit,
very little importance need be attached to similarities, or even to

conscious imitation. There are in Milton and Tennyson a
thousand resemblances to Virgil, but no one thinks the less of
those two poets on account of them.

CHAPTER II
THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING

" The King is dead : long liye the King," is the cry of the
citizen intimes of political change; but the kings of thought
succeed each other with no such startling rapidity. " The king is
dead," was the cry of contemporaries when Byron died at
Missolonghi, but they could only gaze helplessly around and ask,
" Whom shall we crown ? " Looking back with the wisdom bom
of years we can see that the answer came in 1833, the date printed
on the title-page of Tennyson's second volume of verse, which
closes his apprentice period of authorship, the year of Browning's
Pauline, the year when began to run its
Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
course in Fraser's Magazine. But the wisdom born of years is
not granted till the years have passed. There was a time of
struggle yet between Carlyle and any adequate recognition of his
power, it was not till 1842 that Tennyson achieved popularity, and
it was longer still before the world became conscious of the great-
ness of Browning.
In respect of poetry, the period between the close of the
interregnum and the end of the nineteenth century may be
roughly divided into three parts. The first, extending to about
1850, is marked by the rise of two great poets, Tennyson and
Browning. The second, from 1850 to 1875, is the period of their
greatest predominance, though even at the latter date Browning
had not yet reached In 1875 Tennyson's
his widest popularity.
dramatic period began, and by that date all Browning's greatest

work was done. flourished and
The Spasmodic School had
faded, the had produced their best poems,
Pre-Raphaelites
Clough was dead and Matthew Arnold had written nearly all his
verse. The third period is too close to our own time for detailed
examination. It will concern us chiefly for the sake of those who
had won fame before it began. Tennyson and Browning are
still the leading names ; but in a certain sense their day is past,
and in the younger poets we detect the struggle after ideals which
are not the ideals of the older men.
Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) deserves that close attention
which is due to one who was not merely a great man but, with
the exception of Carlyle, the most complete and comprehensive
representative of his age. He was born in the Lincolnshire
rectory of Somersby, in the trjidst of beautiful and character-
isticallyEnglish scenery, which has left its mark on many a line
of his verse. The " English home " depicted on the arras in The
Palace of Art might have been drawn from the rectory:
"Gray twilight pour'd
On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep— all things in order stored,
A haunt of ancient Peace."
So profound was the "ancient peace" that even the thunder of

Waterloo failed to break it, and while England was jubilant with
victory, Somersby remained ignorant that the battle had been
fought^ This seclusion doubtless helped to deepen the native
Teutonic reserve into that shyness which characterised Tennyson
through life. Little or no sympathy came to his boyhood or
youth from the outside world. The bucolic mind of Lincolnshire
neither knew nor cared about the literary tasks of the Tennyson
family. Notwithstanding the fact that Alfred Tennyson was
" Hercules as well as Apollo," and could beat the rustics in their
rustic feats of strength, such impression as the Tennysons made
was due more to the father than to the sons. And it was an
impression of wonder rather than of sympathy. An old parish
clerk described him as "a fine owd gentleman," but had nothing
definite to say except that he " remembered on 'im dying." An
' Lije 0/ Tennyson, i. 5.
THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 289
old housekeeper described him " glowering ' ' in his study, the
walls of which were covered '
wi' 'eathen gods and goddesses
wi'out cloas^'"
But if and life enough
there was quiet without;. there was bustle
within the home. Alfred Tennyson was the fourth of a family of
eight sons and four daughters, all of whom, with the exception of
the first-born, a boy, survived to maturity. Such a family made a
society in itself, which was the more satisfying to the young Alfred
because his two elder brothers showed strong literary tastes. The
overshadowing greatness of Alfred Tennyson paralysed his brothers.
felt his superiority, and comparison
Fastidious in their taste, they
with his work convinced them that their own fell short of the
highest standard. This was partly the reason why, although both,
Frederick as well as Charles, joined with Alfred in the early
venture of the Poems by Two Brothers (1827), the eldest had
reached middle life before he published anything independently,
while the published work of Charles Tennyson Turner is limited
to a volume of sonnets and a handful of lyrics.
Charles Tennyson (1808-1879), who took
the name of Turner
on his succession to his great-uncleSamuel Turner's estate, was
decidedly the more independent and original of the two minor
poets. He had true genius, but his qualities were fineness of
,
perception and of touch ra.ther than largeness of view. Naturally

and rightly enough therefore he confined himself to the shorter
kinds of verse, and preferred before all others the sonnet form.
This was Charles Tennyson's choice from the first. He published
in 1830 a slender volume of fifty sonnets; and his literary history
is summed' up in successive additions to these, until in the

Collected Sonnets, Old and New (1880), the number has grown to
considerably more thari three hundred.
The sonnet suited Charles Tennyson as it suited Wordsworth,
but for the opposite reason. It suited Wordsworth because he
was compelled to select only the best fromamong the suggestions

of a mind which tended to redundancy. It suited Charles
Tennyson because his thoughts, true and beautiful in themselves,
1 Literary Anecdotes of the XIX Cent, ii. 423.

w. 19
were of narrow range and limited in number. And the circum-
stances of his tended not to change, but rather to confirm and
life
strengthen his innate disposition. He took orders, and passed the

greater part of his life as vicar of Grasby in Lincolnshire, another
"haunt of ancient peace," near to which lay the estate he had
inherited. In tone and substance the sonnets befit the pastor of
such a place. Some of them were suggested by the controversies
which rent the Church and the criticisms which assailed her, but
these are not the most happy. It is when he allows himself to be
inspired by and sounds, by the human incidents of

rural sights
by the charm of childhood, that
his professional experience, or
Charles Tennyson deserves the praise bestowed on his sonnets by
so competent a judge as Coleridge, and repeated by Alfred
Tennyson, who declared a few of them to be "among the noblest
in our language.'' "Noblest" is perhaps not a very happily
chosen word; for the quality which raises the best sonnets of
Charles Tennyson into high poetry is not that which thrills and
awes in Drummond
of Hawthornden's sonnet on John the
on the massacre in Piedmont, or in that of
Baptist, or in Milton's
Wordswôrth written upon Westminster Bridge ; it is rather com-
parable to the charm of Wordsworth in a somewhat lowlier and
homelier strain, some of the best of
or to the gentle beauty of
Hartley Coleridge's sonnets. Edward FitzGerald hit upon the
right image when he compared them to violets.
Frederick Tennyson (1807— 1898) published his first volume.
Days and Hours, in 1854. After a long interval The Isles of
Greece (1890) followed, then Daphne and other Poems (1891), and
finally Poems of the Day and Year (1895). As regards date of
publication, therefore, most of his work is the verse of an old
man ; but much of it is known to have been written, and some
of was printed, many years before its publication. As Scott
it
declared that Campbell was " afraid of the shadow that his own
fame cast before him," so, it is probable, was Frederick Tennyson
afraid of the shadow of his brother's fame. And not without
reason; for there is sufficient similarity between the poetic note
of Frederick and that of Alfred Tennyson to make it probable
that the weaker poet would have been accused of imitation and
THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 29I
condemned as an echo. At a later date, however, the fact that

Frederick Tennyson was brother of the laureate had quite the
opposite influence. Alfred Tennyson's fame was founded deep
and built high; and his brother's productions were certain to be
received sympathetically and to be studied with a natural curiosity,
not merely for their own sake, but to see whether any light was
thrown on the greater man's mind by the writings of one so near
akin to him. And so it is probable that at the present day
Frederick Tennyson's name is better known and his verse more
read than they would have been but for his connexion with the
most widely popular of recent English poets. For of the three
poet-brothers he is decidedly the least. He not only falls far
short of the greatness of Alfred, but he is destitute also of the

exquisite touch of Charles. His verse is the outflow of a mind
accomplished and sensitive, but hardly capacious enough to make
the product memorable for its substance, and hardly delicate
enough to give it the compensating grace of form. Its diffuseness
will probably doom it to an early oblivion. Frederick Tennyson
had more fluency than force. It was far easier for him: to write
many lines than to concentrate their meaning in a phrase; and

when at last he was induced to publish, he did not eliminate
what was redundant.
We have already seen the nature of the early influences which
were brought to bear upon the three poet-brothers. Through
the next stage also the influences were common
them all for to ;
they passed from their father's home to Cambridge, and became

members of the society of Trinity College in one of the most
flourishing periods of the University. It will be worth while to
pause a little over the Cambridge of that time,, for English litera-
ture was in no small degree moulded by the young men who were
gathered there.
For the birth of great men 1809 is the annus mirabilis of
English history. Alfred Tennyson and William Ewart Gladstone
and Charles Darwin all first saw the light then. If we look across
the Atlanticwe have to add Abraham Lincoln, the saviour of the
Union, and, among men of letters, O. W. Holmes and E. A. Poe.
In England, to the names of the giants we have to add those of
19—2
A. W. Kinglalce,. R. Monckton Milnes and Edward FitzGerald.
Now it so happens that all the Englishmen except Gladstone went
to Cambridge. Even if they had stood alone they would have
sufficed to make an epoch in the intellectual history of the
University. And they did not stand alone. Taking Alfred
Tennyson, who matriculated at Trinity College in February, 1828,
as the centre of the group, we find among his University contem-
poraries his two brothers, Frederick and Charles, both, like
himself, poets. Three more members of the band, R. C. Trench,
John Sterling and A. H. Hallam, were likewise endowed with
more or less of the poetic faculty. Thackeray, too was there,
and, but for the overshadowing greatness of his gift for fiction and
satire, there can be little doubt that he had the capacity to
surpass them all in verse, Alfred Tennyson alone excepted. It
was veritably "a nest of singing-birds." Besides these, James

Spedding, Charles Merivale, J. M. Kemble, F. D. Maurice and
Julius Hare all subsequently won distinction, and all were con-
temporaries of Alfred Tennyson. So was the witty and brilliant
Charles Buller, who died in 1848 on the threshold of a parlia-
mentary career which promised to raise him to the first rank of
statesmen. And yet, though these were men of the highest
talent,some for writing, some for speech, some for both, when in
1866 Lord Houghton, inaugurating the new club-house of the
Cambridge Union Society, referred to the greatest speaker he had
ever listened to, he meant none of them, but another contemporary
whose name few have heard except through their biographies
Thomas Sunderland. Sunderland's brain gave way soon after
his University career was over, and all the hopes which had
clustered round him were blighted. Nearly all these men were
known to one another, and many of them were united in the
small club known from the number of its members as the
Apostles.
Readers of The Life of Macaulay must be struck with the fact
that the ruling passion in the Cambridge of his day was not
literature but politics. Between his time and the time of Tennyson
a great change had passed over the spirit of the University, and
for literature the omens, as we read them now, were of the
THE NEW KINGS: TEKNVSON AND BROWNING 293
brightest kind. There was power in abundance, it yms power of

the right sort,and it was stimulated by the right ambitions.
Further, we can see now that it was power not imitative but
essentially independent. This is manifest from the critical canons
which more or less consciously governed these young men. They
showed a marked Cambridge was the
originality in their taste.
centre of the growing cult of Wordsworth ; and while Shelley
and Keats were still unknown to the British public, Cambricê
did much to draw them from their obscurity. It was through
the agency of A. H. Hallam that Adonais was first printed in
England. Yoimg men as a rule are either iconoclasts or prose-
lytisers, and the Cambridge youths were of the latter dass.
They bân by spreading and confirming the faith within their

own circle. Poems by Two Brothers affords sufficient evidence
that down to the year before his entrance at Trinity the predomi-
nant influence over Tennyson was that of Byron. It soon ceased
to be so. had not already found critical salvation before he
If he
went to the University he speedily found it there; for the cult of
Shelley and Keats was the cult of the elect of Cambridge, and
Alfred Tennyson was of the number.
The next step was to convert others. In their crusade they
were fired by the chivalrous zeal of youth in the cause of men
contemned and vilified, or at best neglected. They had to fight
against popular indifference and critical disparagement. They
had to fight against even the sister University. They proclaimed
their alliance and proved their zeal in a celebrated debate
which took place at Oxford, whither delegates were sent by Cam-
bridge. The delegates were Hallam, Sunderland and Mihies;
and the last always suspected that he owed his exeat to a certain
mist which he had allowed to rest on the mind of the Master,
Dr Wordsworth, as to the particular poet who was to be defended
by the Cambridge men. At the Oxford Union Francis Hastings
Doyle had brought forward a motion, which he calls " an echo of
Cambridge thought and feeling," and which was quite contrary to
the almost universal opinion of Oxford, that Shelley was a greater
poet than Byron. The purpose of the Cambridge men was to
champion the poet whom Oxford had formerly expelled and
whom she still neglected. Manning summed up for Oxford, and
according to Doyle the backbone of his speech was just this
"Byron is a great poet, we have all of us read Byron; but... if
Shelley had been a great poet we should have read him also; but
we none of us have done so. Therefore Shelley is not a great
poet a fortiori he is not so great a poet as Byron'." The argu-
ment from ignorance carried the day, as it has often done before
and since ; but nevertheless the seed dropped by the Cambridge
enthusiasts germinated and grew.
This story is worth dwelling upon, because it indicates a most
momentous change which was passing over English literary taste.
The sun of Byron was set, the day of Wordsworth and Shelley
and Keats was just about to dawn. The Oxford men were
clinging to the past, the future was for the undergraduates of
Cambridge. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that they were
the future. Such was the genius of this group of young men that
they could make the imaginative literature of England for the
next generation in no small measure what they chose. In this
contest they had indicated plainly enough the use to which they
were likely to put their power, enthusiasm and genius.
At Cambridge, then, Tennyson's poetical education really
began. The reading in English poetry of the authors of Poems
by Two Brothers had certainly been narrow; but under the
stimulus of the Apostles, and especially of Arthur Hallam, it soon
widened. Tennyson grew surprisiiigly in intellectual stature.
Timbuctoo, the prize poem of 1829, was by admiring friends and
contemporaries judged to be "certainly equal to most parts of
Milton^"; and though no one now would echo that opinion, the
piece shows a great advance upon the Poems by two Brothers, and
is perhaps almost as much above the average level of prize poems
as it is below the standard of Milton. In the following year ap-
peared Tennyson's first independent volume, Poems, chiefly Lyrical
(1830), containing a number of pieces which were afterwards
reprinted by Tennyson himself unchanged or with only minor
alterations. Towards the close of 1832 a second volume was
* Reminiscences, 113.
* Life of Lord Houghton, i. 72.
published, bearing on the title-page the date 1833. This also

was written under the influence of his early and of Cambridge.
life
Then followed a long silence of nearly ten years, broken only by

The Lover's Tale, privately printed, and by the publication in
periodicals of two short but exquisite poems, St Agne^ Eve and
that lovely lyric which formed the germ of Maud, "O that —
'twere possible." Finally, in 1842, appeared the two volumes
which have been declared to mark Tennyson's "decisive" appear-
ance in poetry, and which close the first period of his poetic life.
No poet, not even Shakespeare, has a more consistent develop-
ment than Tennyson; and the line of his development is from
the purely artistic to the blend of thought with art. Tennyson
agreed in substance with the criticism quoted in the preceding
chapter from Henry Taylor; and his agreement is important as
well as interesting, because he was great enough to supply what
both he and Taylor considered to be lacking in their immediate
predecessors. " I close with ,him," says Tennyson in a letter to
Spedding, " in most that he says of modern poetry, the' it may be

that he does not take sufficiently into consideration the peculiar
strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley, who,
however mistaken they may be, did yet give the world another
heart and new pulses'." This acquiescence in Taylor's criticism
indicates the fact that Tennyson was never of the school of
Shelley; and though he did for a moment belong to that of Byron,
the Byronic influence soon vanished. His opinion about Shelley
was permanent he repeated it long afterwards. Shelley, he said,
:
"is often too much in the clouds for me*"; and there is very little
of his own work that has the ring of Shelley. The Lover's Tale
has been singled out as an instance ; and rightly enough, notwith-
standing the fact that it was written before Tennyson had ever
seen a copy of Shelley's works'; for the germs of other things as
well as disease may be carried in the air, and there are many
ways in which new pulses may be started to beat
The Leaver's Tale, however, is exceptional. The poet who,
among Tennyson's immediate predecessors, had by far the greatest
' Life of Tennyson, i. 141. ' ibid. ii. 285. * Hid.

influence over him, was Keats, and next to him perhaps Coleridge.
He put Keats, says his son, on a lofty pinnacle, declaring that
"there is something of the innermost soul of poetry in almost
everything he ever wrote'." The secret of the attraction is easily
discovered; and the point of difference between the two poets

also is not far to seek. The sensuousness of Keats attracted
Tennyson, for no poet was more keenly alive than he to the
importance of the sensuous element in verse, and none was more
readily responsive to the suggestions of sense. His early poems
were criticised for the excessive minuteness of observation they
displayed. Lockhart ridiculed the "gummy" chestnut buds of
The Millet's Daughter in the original version, the water-rat that
plunged in the stream and the long green box of mignonette.
The long green box remains, but the water-rat is gone now, and
the literal fact of the gum is indicated by its effects, the glistening
of the buds to the breezy blue. enough
This literalness is far
removed from the style of Keats, but it indicates that sensitiveness
to impression on which the style of Keats is based. This was the
quality which was earliest developed in Tennyson; and it was
doubtless love of it which caused Edward FitzGerald to look back
upon the poems of 1842 and the earlier volumes as embodying
the true and the great Tennyson. FitzGerald never fully approved
of the later poems, partly because he thought that from The
Princess onwards Tennyson tried to put too much thought into
his verse and overloaded it with politics and social philosophy
and theology, things good in themselves, but in FitzGerald's
opinion detrimental to poetry. This other element too was in
Tennyson from the start, but it grew in importance. "One
must," he said, " distinguish Keats, Shelley and Byron from the
great sage poets of all, who are both great thinkers and great
artists, like .^schylus, Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe"." Here
is just Taylor's criticism in another form; and it shows clearly
enough that Tennyson's ambition was to be, if not equal to, yet
like, " the great sage poets of all."
By analysing the work of the most influential of Victorian

poets and by observing the trend of change in him we may see,
1 Life, ii. 286. ' ibid. ii. 287.
with a vividness unrivalled elsewhere, both what poetry was at the

beginning of this period, and what it was tending to become^. In
the first two volumes the poet's art is, at its best, already exquisite;
but it is as yet uncertain and immature. Tennyson, always an
unsparing critic of himself —though he was impatient of other
criticism, — ^judged his work in those volumes with a severity he
never afterwards showed. Of the total number of eighty-six
pieces he permanently rejected thirty-two. Moreover, of those
which passed muster and were included among the poems of
1842, a considerable number underwent very extensive altera-
tions. In the cases of CEnone and The Palace of Art the revision
was so free as to make them almost new poems. Several other
permanent favourites, — for example, A Dream of Fair Women, The
Lady of Shalott and The Miller's Daughter, —were likewise greatly
changed. No one who is familiar with these five poems only in
their final form can judge of them as they appeared in the text of
1832 ; for no small portion of the charm of all of them is due to
the poet's alterations, additions and excisions. Tennyson's amend-
ments well repay study. They are as a rule singularly judicious'.
In most cases they are suggested by his own maturing taste and
growing skill, but he does not disdain to lea;m from his critics.
The best thing that can be said for Lockhart's famous criticism
in The Quarterly Review is that Tennyson himself has in a
measure stamped it with approval by altering or omitting most of
the pieces and passages objected to.
Omission and revision on a scale so extensive as occurs with

the contents of the volumes of 1830 and 1832 seem to justify the
^ Every one who takes up Tennyson with this object in view will find
himself deeply indebted to the scholarly edition of the early poems of
Tennyson, by J. Churton Collins. It contains all the poems up to 1842, with
complete materials for tracing all the changes of reading, omissions and
additions, to that date.
' Browning, however, thought othermse. Writing to Alfred Domett he
says of the Poems of 1842 ' The alterations are insane. Whatever is touched
: '
is spoiled. There is some woeful mental infirmity in the man he was months —
buried in correcting the press of the last volume, and in that time began
spoiling the new poems (in proof) as hard as he could." Kenyon's Robert
Browning and Alfred Domett, p. 40.
inference that Tennyson felt himself to be still an apprentice in

the art of poetry. The fact that the process of re-writing never
afterwards took place in anything like an equal degree may be
taken to indicate that by 1842 he judged himself to have attained
maturity. It is also significant that of all the pieces in the
collection of 1842, only one was afterwards denied by the poet
a place in his collected works. But a closer examination of the
contents of the two early volumes, and a more minute comparison
of the text with that of the poems of 1842, suggests further
inferences. In the first place, it is remarkable that of the twenty-
four pieces adopted from the volume of 1830 into the Poems of
1842, not one was vitally or even considerably altered. Tennyson's
second volume contributed sixteen pieces to the collection of
1842, and of these seven had undergone important alterations.
At sight the conclusion would seem to be that the poet felt
first
that in 1832 he had fallen back in his art. A sounder inference

would be that he had changed, and that he was less master of
that which he attempted to do in 1832 than of what he had
attempted two years earlier. The characteristic subjects of the
Poems, chiefly Lyrical are much lighter than those of the volume
which followed it. In the earlier volume an occasional grand note
is struck, as in The Poet, an occasional tone of passion is heard, as
in The Ballad of Oriana, or of deep human sorrow, as in Mariana.
But the more prevalent note is one of light, airy, playful grace.
Most of the "moonshine maidens," as The Quarterly Review a.-pt\y
called them, are there, —
Claribel, Lilian, Madeline and Adeline.
So are The Merman and The Mermaid. Some of these pieces are
exquisite, but none of them is or attempts to be profound. None
of them was subsequently changed in any important way.
Very different is the table of contents in the later volume.
The portrait-gallery was indeed enlarged by the addition of
Elednore, of Margaret and of Rosalind. But the keynote of the
volume was struck rather in the five pieces which have already
been named as examples of Tennyson's careful revision. Along
with these may be mentioned, as among the most important of the
contents of the volume. The Lotos-Eaters and The May Queen.
To the last was added in 1842 the third part; but it is the only
one of the seven which remains otherwise without change of
importance. The exquisitely musical Lotos-Eaters had its charac-
teristic charm in the first version; but the substitution in 1842 of
the present conclusion for the original one removed blemishes and
added beauties which raise it to the first rank among the poems of
Tennyson and of Tennyson's century.
The points which distinguish all these poems from the contents
of the earlier volume (except perhaps The Poet) are their more
ambitious design and their greater force. The difference is un-
mistakable in A Dream of Fair Women and The Palace of Art.
It is plain enough too in such idyllic pictures as we find in. CEnone
and The Millei's Daughter; and, though less obvious, it is not less
real in those pieces of pure loveliness, Tlie Lady of Shalott and
Th* Lotos-Eaters. It might be unwise to insist much on the

allegorical interpretation of the former; but he who can read such
poems and feel his life and character unenriched has still to learn
how to use poetry. As truly as an " impulse from a vernal wood"
was a form of teaching to Wordsworth, so truly, to him who has
brain and heart to understand, is the beauty of such poems
instructive beyond all sermons on the deepest problems of life.
And this is the real significance of the change of which we see
the beginnings in Tennyson in the two years between the issue of
his first and the issue of his second volume of poems. In 1830
he is not indeed frivolous, but still less is he distinguished for
"high seriousness." A Keatsian worship of beauty, without as yet
Keats's full conviction of its identity with truth, is his characteristic.
The task which he set himself in 1832 was the exhibition of their
identity. Hence the larger scope of his subjects and the greater
weight of his style. Hence too the comparative failure, the
necessity of unsparing revision afterwards. The Tennyson of
1830 contented himself with a lower aim, and he hit his mark.
The Tennyson of 1832 aimed at the sun. The arrow fell short;
but the very effort taught him more than the earlier success, and
prepared the way for the triumph of 1842.
This attempt to supply the intellectual deficiency of contempo-
rary poetry gives interest to the comparison between the two early
volumes. Another interest emerges when we set these volumes
beside the Poems of 1842. It is the interest of comparing promise

with performance, effort with achievement. In 1842 Tennyson
has attained the fulness of his stature as a poet. In the opinion
of some good judges he never afterwards did so good work.
Coventry Patmore seems to have agreed with Edward FitzGerald;
for he declared that the greatest part of all that was essential in
Tennyson's work was contained in the second of the two volumes
of 1842 ^ The intervening ten years had transformed the youth
of twenty-three into the mature man of thirty-three. But life is
better measured by experience than by time; and during those

ten years Tennyson had come in contact with the great facts of
life. A brief biographical sketch will help towards an under-
standing of the new qualities displayed in 1842.
In 1831 Tennyson left Cambridge, and soon afterwards his
father died. In 1833 an even heavier blow fell in the death of

Arthur Henry Hallam (1811-1833), his own chosen friend and
the betrothed of his sister Emily. Though Hallam was the
younger man of the two, his had been the leading mind in the
friendship. Under the guidance of his distinguished father, he
had enjoyed a culture wider than Tennyson's, and he was able to
open up to his friend new fields of thought and to suggest fresh
lines of study. It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence
exercised over Tennyson by the life, and still more by the death,
of this friend. Hallam's Remains in Verse and Prose (1834)
necessarily leaves undecided the question, what would have been
his place in English literature if he had lived ; but it indicates
that it would have been at least a considerable and might have
been a great one. The book contains nothing that is intrinsically
great, but some things which are highly promising; and the
unanimous judgment of all, both seniors and coaevals, who knew
the author, is still more impressive than the Remains. His
father, judicial-minded as he was, might have been misled by the
a parent; but Henry Hallam's opinion of his son's
partiality of
talentswas not a whit higher than that of the members of the
Apostles Club, all of whom were themselves men of rare ability,
1 Memmrs of Patmore, i. 198.

and some of them men of genius ; and the fact that Hallam
dominated Tennyson is perhaps the most impressive of all.
But great as was the influence of the living Hallam, that of
Hallam dead was more potent still. The friendship between the
two young men was one of that kind, almost as rare as the highest
genius, of which the classical instance is the friendship of David
and Jonathan. It produces all the effects of the ideal friendship
of the Greek philosophers; it spreads beyond and towers above
everything embraced under the same name in ordinary parlance
it surpasses the tie of blood, though that is much more powerful
than ordinary friendship, and even rivals the love of sex for sex. It
is not /« Memoriam alone which bears witness to the astorlishing
depth and the all-potent influence of this friendship. After the

death of Hallam the whole tone of Tennyson's poetry changes. As
if an effacing sponge had been drawn across the past, the
dilettante disappears. The artist remains, but he is an artist
full of serious purpose: there are no more puerilities like the
" Darling room." The Two Voices, originally entitled Thoughts of
a Suicide, shows what a struggle it cost Tennyson to rise above the
depression caused by the death of his friend; but still more
significant is the seriousness and the lofty tone of such poems as
Ulysses and Lucretius and Morte cP Arthur, the passionate grief of
"O that 'twere possible," and the mournful wail of "Break, break,
break."
. Other cares and sorrows followed the death of Hallam. The
parting from Somersby was painful; but far deeper was the pain
of parting enforced by poverty between Tennyson and Emily
Sellwood. They had been lovers from the time of the marriage
of Charles Tennyson in 1836, but on account of the poor pros-
pects of the poet all correspondence between them ceased in
1840. They did not meet again till 1850, when the success of In
Memoriam had so improved Tennyson's position that he could
once more think of marriage.
During those ten years therefore the discipline of life had come
to Tennyson in ample measure. Much reading had also been
crowded into them. His scholarship, of which the foundation had
been laid at Cambridge, had been widened and deepened. Many
a line of his verse bears witness to his careful reading both of the
classics and of the literature of modern languages, especially that
of his own country. He read thoughtfully and with purpose. His
friends urged, and he believed, that it was his function to penetrate,
and as an artist to interpret, the inner meaning of the modern
spirit — its religion and for its
to find a poetic expression alike for
science. That he won no small measure of success in what must
have been the more difificult part of his purpose is attested by the
fact that Norman Lockyer declared Tennyson's mind to be
"saturated with astronomy'," and that Huxley pronounced him to
be " the first poet since Lucretius who has understood the drift of
science'." As to the other side. In Memoriam has been as a
gospel to thousands of souls who have felt the movement of
modern thought and yet been conscious of the need of religion.
Of the two volumes of 1842, the first consisted almost wholly
of pieces which had been published before, while the second
contained only two poems which were not new. It is, then,
mainly to the second that we must turn for evidence of Tennyson's

development. We find in it the continuation of many things the
beginnings of which are seen in the volume of 1832. The
English idyllic strain, first heard in The Miller's Daughter and
The May Queen, is sounded again in The Gardener's Daughter
and Dora and Audley Court. Arthurian legend had already won
the poet's attention in The Lady of Shalott a serious study of it :
is indicated by Sir Galahad, Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere,
and above all by Morte d' Arthur, perhaps Tennyson's greatest

achievement in blank verse. The same volume contains also
many things of which Tennyson had given no previous example.
"Break, break, break," the most perfect and thoughtful of his
songs hitherto published, is in this volume. There too is. that
marvellous classical idyll, Ulysses, and there are Locksley Hall and
The Two Voices and The Vision of Sin. v
It cannot be doubted that these poems embody a serious
philosophy of life, and that the author of them must be regarded
both as an artist and as an intellectual force. In Tennyson's own
' Quoted in The Quarterly Review, Jan. 1907.
' Life of Huxley, ii. 338.
judgment, the attempt made ten years previously to write verse in

the grand style had failed. From the fact that no changes of
importance were found necessary afterwards, we may conclude
that he considered the second attempt successful ; and the world
has ratified his judgment. We might naturally suppose that
this success was the slow result of ten years' labour; but the
known facts point rather to the conclusion that it came of a
sudden. Ulysses was written soon after the death of Hallam,
and so were some of the stanzas of In Memoriam ; Spedding saw
Tke Two Voices and Sir Galahad in 1834 and the Morte ;
d' Arthur was read to Edward FitzGerald in 1835. Moreover,

the grand political poems, "You ask me why, tho' ill at ease,"
" Of old sat Freedom on the heights " and " Love thou thy land
with love far brought," can all be traced back to the years 1833
and 1834. It is uncertain how far any or all of these poems may
have undergone revision between the date of their composition
and that of their publication but at least it seems clear that in
;
1833 and 1834 Tennyson made the greatest advance of his life,
and that this advance was connected with the death of Arthur
Hallam. We know that Ulysses and The Two Voices and "O that
'twere possible," as well as the early fragments of In Memoriam,
were directly associated in Tennyson's mind with him.
A marked feature of the poems of 1842 is their unity and
completeness. In the earlier pieces, as Tennyson's own altera-
tions show, there are frequent irrelevances and redundancies.
The young poet seems to be unable to bear the pain of suppress-
ing any of his verses ; and this weakness was the occasion of one
of Lockhart's gibes, which went home. " Mr Tennyson," he
says, "manages this delicate business [the introduction of re-
dundant matter] in a new and better way; he says, with great
candour and simplicity, If this poem were not already too long,
'
I should have added the following stanzas,' and then he adds them
— or, '
the following lines are manifestly superfluous, as a part of
the text, but they may be allowed to stand as a separate poem,'
which they do — or, '
I intended to have added something about
statuary, but I found it very difficult;... but I had finished the
statues of Elijah and C^;«//a.r—judge whether I have succeeded'
— and then we have these two statues." Tennyson's good sense
told him that Lockhart was right. Aubrey de Vera relates a story
which shows what importance he attached in later days to the
unity of his poems. "One night, after he had been reading
aloud several of his poems, all of them short, he passed one of
them to me and said, 'What is the matter with that poem?' I
read and answered, 'I see nothing to complain of.' He laid

it
his finger on two stanzas of it, the third and fifth, and said, 'Read
it again.' After doing so I said, It has more completeness and
'
totality about it; but the two stanzas you cover are among its
best' '
No matter,' he rejoined, '
they make the poem too long-
backed; and they must go, at any sacrifice.' 'Every short poem,'
he remarked, 'should have a definite shape, like the curve,
sometimes a single, sometimes a double one, assumed by a
severed tress or the rind of an apple when flung on the floor^'"
It may be questioned whether Tennyson ever well understood
the building up of long poems ; but he was extremely skilful in
the construction of short pieces, and after 1832 he studied the

art with the greatest care. The lighter pieces from the beginning,
and from 1832 onwards the weightier ones as well, owe a great
deal of their charm to the unity of impression which they convey.
Always a poet of the fitting word and the exquisite phrase,
Tennyson in his maturity never forgot the importance of the
setting. Thus, Ulysses is the round and flawless delineation of
the stoical mind,
"Strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
Few jf any poems of equal length contain a greater number of

gems of expression. It is absolutely free from anything that could
be wished away, and to add anything to it would be " wasteful
and ridiculous excess." St Simeon Stylites is a poem of a lower
order ; yet it is almost equally perfect in its own way as a picture
of the diseased asceticism of the early saint. Again, The Two
Voices and The Vision of Sin have the unity which belongs to a
mental state vividly conceived. In The Palace of Art there is
1 Appendix to Life, i. 506-7.

greater complexity; but there is a. unity no less real. Every

stanza is made to illustrate the soul centred in itself, proud of its
own strength, feeding upon and satisfied with beauty, looking not
beyond this world. A comparison between the text of 1832 and
that of 1842 shows how far this unity is due to transposition here,
and to excision or addition there. Whether Beckford was or was
not the prototype of him who buUt his soul a lordly pleasure-
house, at least it is clear that Tennyson had in his mind a con-
ception of character as distinct as if he drew from life.
Perhaps the only important poem of 1842 which has not this
convincing completeness is A Dream of Fair Women; and even
in that there is a notable advance as compared with the original
text. The " balloon stanzas " are cut out, of which Edward Fitz-
Gerald said that "they make a perfect poem by themselves without
affecting the '
dream.' " But the best proof of the great advance
which Tennyson had made in the art of construction is to be
found in The Lotos-Eaters, a piece which can hardly be paralleled
except in Spenser or in Thomson's Castle of Indolence. It was a
delicious poem even as it stood originally ; and few, if Tennyson
had not helped them, would have been conscious of any want.
It is the poem of sensuous indulgence and enjoyment. In the
land of the lotos-eaters it seems "always afternoon." Work is
hateful, "dreamful ease'' is the only object of desire. Nay, so

deep a drowsiness broods over the land that desire itself is a
word too suggestive of action and effort to be appropriate. Now,
in 1832 The Lotos-Eaters was already nearly perfect within its
compass as a picture of this life of " dreamful ease." But by
,
1842 Tennyson had convinced himself that it was incomplete.

To use his own figure, it ought to have been a double curve
rather than a single one. A moral being may resolve to lead
a life of voluptuous enjoyment ; but, if he does, such a life will
influence him morally as well as physically. The moral influence

had been omitted in 1832 : it is recognised in § 6 of the Choric
Song, beginning, " Dear is the memory
wedded lives," of our
which was added in 1842. same reason the
Partly for the
original conclusion was omitted and a new one was substituted.
The introduction of the epicurean gods suggests thoughts reach-
w. 20
ing far beyond the lotos-land. But there were other grounds
as well for this change. By Tennyson not
the substitution
only enriched The Lotos-Eaters in thought, but ennobled it in
style. The two versions are worthy of comparison as a specimen
of the numerous changes whereby from his youthful standard the
poet struggled upward towards perfection. The closing lines in
1832 ran as follows:
" We have had enough of motion,

Weariness and wild alarm,
Tossing on the tossing ocean,
Where the tusked sea-horse walloweth
In a stripe of grass-green calm.
At noontide beneath the lee ;
And the monstrous narwhale swalloweth

His foam-fountains in the sea.
Long enough the wine-dark wave our weary bark did carry.
This is lovelier and sweeter.
Men of Ithaca, this is meeter,
In the hollow rosy vale to tarry,
Like a dreamy Lotos-eater, a delirious Lotos-eater 1
We will eat the Lotos, sweet

As the yellow honeycomb,
In the valley some, and some
On the ancient heights divine;
And no more roam.
On the loud hoar foam,
To the melancholy home
At the limit of the brine.
The little isle of Ithaca, beneath the day's decline.
We'll lift no more the shattered oar,
No more unfurl the straining sail
With the blissful Lotos-eaters pale
We will abide in the golden vale
Of the Lotos -land till the Lotos fail
We will not wander more.

Hark ! how sweet the homed ewes bleat
On the solitary steeps,
And the merry lizard leaps,
And the foam-white waters pourj
And the dark pine weeps.
And the lithe vine creeps,
And the heavy melon sleeps
On the level of the shore >
Oh ! islanders of Ithaca, we will not wander more,

Surely, surely slumber is ttiore sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the ocean, and rowing with the oar,
Oh I islanders of Ithaca, we will return no more'."
It was a sound judgment which substituted for this passage the
following beautiful lines :
" We have had enough of action, and bf motion we,

RoU'd to starboard, roU'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free,
Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.

Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an etjual mind.
In the hollow Lotos-land to, live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods mankind.
together, careless of
For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd
Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl'd
Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery. sapds,
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships and praying hands.
But they Smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song
Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong.
Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong
Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,
r S°w the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil
Till they perish and they suffer —
some, 'tis whisper'd down — in hell
Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,

Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more."
It would be easy to multiply examples of similar improvement

in substance and style and rhythm. Thus, in the text of The
Palace of Art now received a well-known stanza runs,
" One seem'd all dark and red^-a tract of sand,

And some one pacing there alone.
Who paced for ever in a glimmering land,
Lit with a low large moon."
1 From J. Churton CoUins's edition,

20—3
In 1832 it stood thus :
"Some were all dark and red, a glimmering land

Lit with a low round moon,
Among brown rocks a man upon the sand
Went weeping all alone."
And the three stanzas, among the finest in the poem, which now
follow this, were an addition.
But in other respects still the later volumes contrast with the
earlier. They show a far wider range of interests, a more catholic
spirit, a deeper humanity. The young Tennyson betrays some-
thing of the temper of a dilettante; but in 1842, while he is more
than ever an exquisite artist, he is also a profoundly earnest man,
absorbed in his task of manufacturing, in Carlyle's phrase, some
fragment of chaos into cosmos. Nearly all that Tennyson subse-
quently cared for is represented in the volumes of 1842. Few
poets have been more patriotic; and we find there the three grand
political poems, with their pride in England, scarcely equalled
since Shakespeare glorified "this royal throne of kings, this
sceptred isle." Social as well as political questions always filled
Tennyson's mind; and here we have Locksky Hall. He was
interested in character and we have studies of moods of mind,
;
like Ulysses and St Simeon Stylites. He was a student of the

ultimate problems of religion and of ethics; and we have The
Two Voices, The Vision of Sin and The Palace of Art. We have
also, in a widely different strain, such gems as St Agnei Eve and
Sir Galahad. Finally, he was always, as a poet ought to be, a

dreamer of dreams; and so we find in these volumes such a piece
of pure fancy as The Day-Dream.
Southey died in 1843, and the laureateship vacated by him
was very properly conferred upon Wordsworth. But the aged
poet's day was past; and though, the formal coronation was
deferred for eight years longer, the majority of competent judges
held that the name
of the new king of English verse was Alfred
Tennyson. He
was worthy of the position not only as an artist,
but because, emphatically and in the best sense, he was the most
representative poet of his age. He was no less worthy in character.
In the authoritative biography it is to be regretted that a natural,
but none the lesa mistaken, piety has smoothed away the scars and
wrinkles, and with them not a Uttle of the man. Tennyson could
perfectly well afford to have the moodiness and gruffness frankly
acknowledged; and there is in some of the authentic stories of
such moods a raciness and humanity which give the poet a share
of the charm of those authors who are loved as men and not
merely as writers. The author of In Memoriam never comes so
close to us as he does in such a story as that which Spedding tells,
of how he dined with Tennyson at the Cock Tavern, on two

chops, one pickle, two cheeses, one pint of stout, one pint of port
and three cigars; and when they had finished Spedding had to
take the poet's regrets to the Kembles ; he could not go because
he had the influenza'. The rich humanity of this tale prepares
us, as nothing in Tennyson's earlier writings does, for the humorous
pictures of rural characters in his later volumes. \/^
In the case of Robert Browning (1812-1889) the intellectual
element was even from the first excessive, and the purely artistic
was always in danger of being crushed ur^dpr it. There was there-
fore no room for the kind of development which we observe in
Tennyson. But Browning too had a period of apprenticeship to
serve, errors to commit and experiments to try, before he " found
himself"; and in his case the first period may be taken as
extending to 1846, the date of Luria and A Soul's Tragedy. After
that he seems to have convinced himself that the method of the
regular drama was not for him; for In a Balcony (1855) is his. only
composition of later date which takes that form. ' The year i8j.6
was a turning-point also in Browning's private life, for it was the
date of his marriage with Elizabeth Barrett.
Browning came of a family of modest means and modest
position,and yet he owed not a little to his birth. The genius of
the boy showed itself early, and the father's pride in his son is
indicated by the fact that as early as 1824 he privately printed a
small collection of his son's verses under the title of Incondita.,
The family were dissenters in religion, and in those days this fact
cut a boy off from the public schools and the universities. Young
• Letter of Spedding, 1837, quoted in Reid's Life of Houghton, i. 19*.

3IO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
Browning was educated under a private tutor from 1826 to 1829 ;
and in 1829-1830 he attended lectures at the University of

London, afterwards University College. But what ruled his
intellectual development was the fact that his father, a man of
taste and culture, had filled his house with the best of books, in
English and French, Latin and Greek. The poet's knowledge
of German was never very great, but the Scotch and German
blood in his veins was sufficient guarantee for the development of
the Teutonic element in him, and no reader of his poetry needs to
be assured of its presence. Growing up, then, in the language of
O. W. Holmes, as familiar with books as a stable-boy is with
horses,Robert Browning carried about with him through life the
aroma of learning. Not only so, but his learning was something
individual, independent, unexpected. He knew the beaten paths
well, though not perhaps so well as some men more regularly
trained; but he knew also many by-ways which few feet but his
own had trodden. It is characteristic and instructive that when
it was finally decided that he should adopt the profession of letters
" he qualified himself for
it by reading and digesting the whole of
Johnson's dictionary^" Thus Browning gained the advantage of
wide knowledge without the drawback of having his mind cast in
He would not have been a better poet,
any traditional mould.
and he might have been a more commonpkce one, had he
graduated double first at Oxford or senior classic at Cambridge.
His independence of the associations of the national Church and

the national universities tended to foster and preserve that striking
originality of mind for which he was always distinguished.
Possibly, at the same time, it tended to give to his originality its
almost aggressive character.
Browning's regular education closed with the single session of
the University of London mentioned above ; but though his
father, a clerk in the Bank of England, had little! money to spare,
it was determined to make the promising son an author by pro-
* Mrs Sutherland Orr's Life of Browning, 53. The curious taste here
indicated survived to the close of his life. Just as in his youth he read and
digested Johnson, so in his old age he read and digested the portion of
Dr Murray's great dictionary which had appeared before his death.
THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 3 II
fession. Browning, therefore, belongs, with Milton, to that very

small band of Englishmen who have been deliberately dedicated
to literature. It was wisely resolved to widen his mind by
travel, and in 1833-1834 he visited Russia and Italy. In later

days he became intimately acquainted with the latter country, and
after his marriage for long years made his home there. His
knowledge became extraordinary. Sordello, The Ring and the
Book and numbers of the shorter poems bear witness to his
familiarity with Italian history and literature. In preparation for
Sordello, to the sorrow of his readers, he read all the books
bearing upon the period in the British Museum. Rossetti com-

pares his scholarship with that even of Ruskin, much to the
disadvantage of the latter :
" I found his [Browning's] knowledge
of early Italian art beyond that of anyone I ever met encyclo-
pcedically beyond Ruskin himself." Notwithstanding his
that of
irregular education, therefore, Browning is to be ranked among
the most learned of English poets ; and his learning was woven
into the fabric of his work as closely as Milton's own.
Browning's first publication, Pauline, appeared in 1833. The
young Tennysons had received ;îo from the Jacksons of Louth
for Poems by Two Brothers; but the fact that any printers had
been willing to pay any sum whatever for a volume of boyish

poems has been a puzzle to the biographers and critics of
Tennyson. Browning had no such good fortune : the expenses of
publication were defrayed by an aunt. In after years the poet
would fain have let Pauline sink into oblivion, and it was not until
1868 that, with the fear of piracy before his eyes, he suffered it to
be reprinted. Though the poem is immature we must rejoice that
the author's wish was balked ; for it is thoroughly characteristic of
him, and for that reason alone would be worthy of study. It is
described as " a fragment of a confession " ; and unquestionably
the confession is Browning's own. The youthful idealsand
ambitions of his mind are here disclosed, and the models
upon which he is forming himself are revealed. And in these we
find much more than the germs of the mature Browning. All the
' Letters to Allingham, 160.

essentials of his method are already present, — immense scope,
boldness, concentration upon character. As the poet's first
favourable reviewer noticed, it is " of the spirit, spiritual^ " ; and

this befits the work of one who from first to last, that little
held,
else besides the incidents in the development of a soul was worth
notice. Again, Pauline is a monologue, and so far is in the form
which Browning in his maturity found specially suitable to his
genius. But it is hardly a dramatic monologue ; and if we com-
pare it with many of the poems in Men and Women or in
Dramatic Romances, we see at a glance how much it loses in
vividness from the absence of the dramatic element. From the
beginning Browning's poetry is dramatic in principle, but it is
not yet dramatic in execution ; and hence mainly his deep dis-
satisfaction with his first poem.

Pauline throws a valuable light upon the author's literary
genealogy. It was remarked in the opening chapter on poetry
that nearly all the rising poets of that time were more or less
obviously and dehberately followers of Keats or of Shelley ; and

there are parts of Pauline redolent of the latter. The young
poet's enthusiasm for the " sun-treader," as he calls Shelley, is
explicitly declared. And it was lasting. Even in later days,

merely to have " seen Shelley plain " was to be marked out from
others and crowned. But though Browning continued to admire
him, all direct evidence of Shelley's influence soon disappears.
Even in Pauline it is hardly more than superficial. The two
poets were essentially unlike, and Browning followed his own
original and independent course.
Browning, then, was of the tribe of Shelley ; Tennyson, as we
have seen, belonged to that of Keats ; and this was only one of a
multitude of differences which separated the two poets. Never,
perhaps, have two great writers of the same age diflfered more
widely. They were as unlike in personal appearance as in their
work. Tennyson looked every inch a poet. One observer,
perhaps with a touch of malice, likened his head to that of "a
dilapidated Jove""; but probably the most vivid thing ever said
^ W. J. Fox,
quoted in Furnivall's Bibliography of Browning, 41.
^ Bayard Taylor, quoted in The Library of Literary Criticism,
ofhim was the remark of Sydney Dobell: "If he were pointed out
to you as the man who had written the Iliad, you would answer,
'I can well believe it^.'" But if Browning had been pointed
out as the author of the Iliad, the answer would have been an
ejaculation of surprise. He impressed the observer as a capable
and successful man of the world, a man distinguished for good
sense rather than for imagination. Until he met Browning, Jowett
"had no idea that there was a perfectly sensible poet in the world."
But the two poets were different in points far more important than
outward appearance. While Tennyson at the start sometimes
sank to triviality, Browning's designs were always ambitious and
daring, even to excess. Browning is uniformly "dramatic in
principle"; but there is not much in literature that is less dramatic
than Tennyson's early poetry. Browning chisels out his work
with the daring strokes of a Michael Angelo ; Tennyson cuts with
the fineness needed for a cameo. Th e one depends upon broad
,
pffprts^j:hp ntber u pnn.Tninii te hf;a,ut;iPs-V^
Pauline, passed not wholly without recognition for, on the ;
evidence of Fox in The Monthly Repository emphatically pro-

it,
nounced the anonymous author to be a poet. But it was little

read and soon forgotten. Many years afterwards Dante Rossetti
found it in the British Museum, divined by the style that it was
Browning's, and was suflHciently interested to copy it; but only the
fame won by later works effectually revived this youthful essay.
The poem, however, opened to the author the pages of The
Monthly Repository, and he contributed a few pieces to that
periodical. His next work of importance was Paracelsus (1835),
in which the complete Browning at once leaps' to light. He
ascribes his own failure in Pauline to the extravagance of the
scheme and the impracticability of the scale. In Paracelsus the
scheme is not less ambitious, yet the poet comes as near complete
success as he ever came in any of his larger works. A difference
even of two years counts for much between twenty-one and
twenty-three ; but far more is due to the fact that the method is
right. Paracelsus, though not a drama, is dramatic. Slender as
1 Quoted in The Lifi of Tennyson, i. 355, n.

is the skeleton of facts, it is sufficient for the purpose. The soul
whose development is traced in Paracelsus is in contact with the
world ; while in Pauline it might as well be a disembodied spirit.
Paracelsus is one of the greatest poems of the nineteenth century.

In grandeur of design, in depth of thought and in intellectual
and ethical significance, it may bear comparison even with
Goethe's Faust, with which indeed Home, in A New Spirit of
the Age, actually did compare it. If contemporary poetry was
deficient in philosophy, the want is here magnificently supplied.
Paracelsus embodies a coherent and profound theory of life,
powerfully and at the same time artistically expressed. Beauty
and power, love and knowledge, these, we are taught, are the
threads which must be woven together to make the fabric of life
complete.
This philosophy of life is expressed in Paracelsus in a dramatic
form; but notwithstanding the fact that there are four inter-
locutors, the poem has more affinity with the dramatic monologue,
which Browning gradually found to be the best form for him, than
it has with the regular drama. Two of the interlocutors, Festus
and Michal, merely serve to throw into relief the character and
purpose of Paracelsus himself; while the third, Aprile, is his
complement, through whom is brought home to him his essential
error, acknowledged in the exclamation,
" Are we not halves of one dissevered world,
Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part never!
Till thou, the lover, know ; and I, the knower,
Love — until both are saved."
The character of Paracelsus, as depicted by Browning, is at once

thoroughly ori ginal , and extraordinarilx_great. The historical
Paracelsus was generally believed to be a mere charlatan; and
Browning himself thought, erroneously, that the word bombast
was simply the proper name of Paracelsus (Bombast von Hohen-
heim) adapted to a new use on account of the inflated style of his
lectures. Just as Carlyle refused to believe that a charlatan could
have done the work of Mahomet, so to Browning it seemed
incredible that a mere impostor could have filled so large a place
in the mediseval mind, or could have given a start to so much
THE NEW KINGS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING 3x5
sound science. An examination of the original documents con-

vinced him that the common view of the man was mistaken, and
led to the creation of the character familiar to us from the poem.
Whether the true Paracelsus was the charlatan of common belief,
or the dauntless seeker after truth and the profound philosopher

of Browning's conception, is a question historically important, but
unimportant for the appraisement of the poet's work. The
estimate of that must depend upon what he has made of his own
conception; and, tried by any test, the poem emerges triumphant.
It is rich in beauties of imagery and expression ; it contains a
glorious lyrici in " Over the sea our galleys went" But all the
beauties of parts are subordinate to the beauty and the profound
meaning of the whole. Matthew Arnold complained that the
modern poet was apt to forget the whole and to content himself if
the parts were fine ; and he contrasted with this attitude of mind
that of the aricient poet who said that he had finished his poem
when he had only planned it. The criticism is just ; but in the
case of Paracelsus the central conception is as clear and as
coherent as that of any poem of antiquity.
Paracelsus, the seeker after truth, starts upon his quest with
full appreciation of all that he is sacrificing. His friend Festus,
who at first doubts this, is afterwards forced to acknowledge it :
" The value of repose and love,

I meant should tempt you, better far than I
You seem to comprehend ; and yet desist
No whit from projects where repose nor love
Has part."
But, great as he knows the sacrifice to be, in his own view

Paracelsus has no choice. Like other men who have opened up
new realms of action, or burst into unknown seas of thought, he
believes himself to be but an instrument with no share in the
selection of his own lot beyond his " ready answer to the will of
God," whose organ he is. There is nevertheless an element of
pride and self-will in him, and we are from the first prepared for
failure, or for a success hardly less disastrous than failure. He
haughtily cuts himself off from his fellows, and sets out to accom-
plish single-handed what ought to be the achievement of united
3l6 TEtE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
humanity. "I never will be served by those I serve," he declares;

and Festus lays his finger on the flaw when he points out that the
better course would be for the seeker to make failure impossible
by raising a rampart of his fellows.
Paracelsus commits two fatal mistakes. Vast as his purpose is,
it is in one sense not great enough. He seeks an unbounded

satisfaction of the intellect; but even that would be insufficient
unless it were accompanied with an equal satisfaction of the heart.

In another sense, his ambition is inordinate; for, as has been
hinted, the work he seeks

do is the work not of an individual,
to
but of the human race. Bagehot somewhere quotes a great
statesman who said that there is someone " Who is greater than
—
Napoleon, wiser than Voltaire, c'est tout le monde." This is a
truth hid from Browning's Paracelsus, and his ignorance of it is
one of the, great causes of his catastrophe.
The essential error of Paracelsus is revealed in Part ii., where
the man of science meets the poet, Aprile, and where the one
declares that he aspires to know, and the other that he would love
infinitely, and be loved. Paracelsus awakens suddenly to the one-
sidedness of his own aim he has sacrificed " love, hope, fear,
:
faith," aind these "make humanity." Plence his impassioned

appeal to Aprile :
"Love me henceforth, Aprile, while I learn

To love ; and, merciful God, forgive us both I
We wake at length from weary dreams but both ;
Have slept in fairy-land though dark and drear

:
Appears the world before us, we no less

Wake with our wrists and ankles jewelled still.
I too have sought to KNOW as thou to LOVE
Excluding love as thou refusedst knowledge.
Still thou hast beauty and I power. We wake
What penance canst devise for both of us?"
Probably no youth of twenty-three ever wrote a poem greater

than Paracelsus ;
probably no other poet ever made so great an
advance in two years as Browning did between Pauline and
Paracelsus. Such a rate of progress could not be maintained;
and in fact, only once afterwards, in The Ring and the Book, did
Browning do work which is clearly greater than this youthful
THE NEW KINGS: tENNYSON AND BROWNING 317
production. At the publication of Paracelsus he stood, unknown

to himself, at the parting of the ways. He had found the form
which best of all suited his genius; but he was hardly aware of the
fact himself. His friend and admirer Maoready asked the poet
to write a play and keep him from going to America'; and the
request led to the production of Strafford (1837). Doubtless
Macready's suggestion was only the seed sown in prepared soil.
Browning was conscious of the possession of dramatic genius ; he
had cause to wish for the material rewards of literature ; and if he
could write a successful play he was likely to gain them in more
liberal measure than by any other sort of work. It was natural
that the experiment should be tried, and natural too that it should
be repeated several times; but it was nevertheless unfortunate that
for eight years the bulk of Browning's work took the form of plays.
Of the eight numbers of Bells and Pomegranates six were plays.
Among these is included Pippa Passes (1841), which is rather a
series of dramatic scenes than a drama ; but all the others are in
regular form. They include Jiang Victor and King Charles (1842),
The Return of the Druses (1843), A Blot in the 'Scutcheon (1843),
Colombe's Birthday (1844), ^nd Luria and A SouPs Tragedy
(1846).
There can be no doubt that Browning possessed in the
highest degree some of the elements of dramatic genius, and that
in his dramas there is much admirable work. Nowhere out of
Shakespeare, and rarely even in Shakespeare, can there be found
a scene more intensely dramatic than the tremendous incident
of Ottima and Sebald in Pippa Passes. The murder of Duncan
is not more more vivid.
terrific or Colombe's Birthday is a
thrilling dramatic romance of perennial charm, and it is almost
completely free, at least as regards its general meaning and

purpose, from the customary difficulty and obscurity of Browning.
A Soul's Tragedy is a thoroughly dramatic conception, and is
equally clear; and of A Blot in the' Scutcheon Dickens emphatically
declared that no man living, and not many dead, could produce
such a work. Arid yet, notwithstanding all this, most critics are
1 Literary Anecdotes of the XIX Century, i. 524.

agreed that Browning is not at his best in the dramjis, and that the
energy he devoted, during those eight years, to the writing of
plays, would have produced better results if it had been otherwise
directed. There is at least no gainsaying the fact that Browning's
plays have failed to keep the stage. There have been occasional
revivals of A Blot in the ^Scutcheon and one or two others ; but
none of them has ever become a stage favourite. Attenapts have
been made to account for the failure by the badness of the acting;
but Macready and Helen Faucit played in Strafford; the latter,
with Phelps and Mrs Stirling, was on the cast of A Blot in the
'Scutcheon ; and she and Barry Sullivan took the principal parts in
Colombos Birthday. Whatever may have been the deiiciencies of

some of these actors, they were among the best of their day. It is
vain to plead that they missed the subtle meaning of Browning's

verses, and that if he had been less intellectual and less great, they
would have succeeded better. No doubt in a sense that is true

but these very players managed to represent Shakespeare in a way
which, if not flawless, was at any rate adequate to the demands of
the audience.
It is probable that the true reasons for the very modified
success of Browning's dramas are to be found partly in th6
character of his genius, and partly in the age in which he lived.
He undoubtedly "possessed in the highest degree some of the
elements of dramatic genius " ; but he did not possess ^hem all.
No one since Shakespeare has surpassed him in the power to
illuminate some striking phase of character. Ottima and Sebald
in Pippa Passes, Colombe and Valence in Colombe^s Birthday, the
Moor Luria in the play which bears his name, the surly patriot
Chiappino and the Papal legate Ogniben in A Soul's Tragedy, are
all masterly; and yet not one of the plays has, in kind, not to
speak of degree, the sort of masterliness which we find in Macbeth,
or in As You Like It. Ottima and Sebald are, as has been said,
equal to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth themselves in the great
murder-scene ; and Browning had any complete drama equal to
if
that single scene, he would rank, at least in respect of it, along

with the greatest playwright of all time. But, while it would be
difficult to overpraise the poetry of Pippa Passes, it is not a drama,
but only a collection of dramatic scenes. The dramatic motive
comes from without. In each case it is the song of Pippa passing
outside, and wholly unconscious of the drama which is being
enacted within, that bring the crisis. In Macbeth everything
the promptings of the witches, the conception and germination of
the guilty purpose in Macbeth's mind, his wife's whetting of it, the
tremendous revulsion after the crime and its different effects on
the two great characters— is within.
It may be urged that Pippa Passes is not a play, and that it
should be judged for what it is, not by reference to a standard to

which it does not profess to conform. This is true ; though on
the other hand it an inherent
might be argued that there is
inferiority external device such as Browning employs in

in an
Pippa Passes, as compared with the natural evolution which we
see in Shakespeare's dramas. But the case does not stand alone,
and we get a result not dissimilar if we compare Colombis Birth-
day with As You Like It. Each is romantic in the highest degree,
and each is about the best of its kind among the authors' works.
The significant difference lies in the enormous amount of argu-
mentation in Browning's play, and the complete absence of it from
Shakespeare's. In As You Like It, the characters live and act, or
live and dream, as befits their "golden world," and the conclusion
flows with the ease of a placid stream from their actions and their
dreams. In Colombe's Birthday hammered out by reasoning
it is
and discussion. A similar characteristic may be noticed in Luria.

The Moor is an unconscionaible time dying, and there is inor-
dinate discussion during the process. In both plays the argument
is rhetoric, splendid rhetoric, indeed, but still something different
from the Shakespearean method of unfolding a character as a
flower unfolds its petals. Again it may be pleaded that Browning's
method suits Browning's theme, as Shakespeare's siiits his. And
again it must be replied that even if it be so the choice of theme
is instructive. Shakespeare never selects themes which demand
such treatment. The nearest approach is probably in the great
speeches in Julius Caesar; and even they bear a far smaller pro-
portion to the whole play than that borne by Valence's arguments
to the play of Colombo s Birthday. The question is, of course, not
merely, nor principally, a question of the number of lines, but far
more one of vital connexion.^
This method of evolving character and dramatic situations by
argument is not a device used once by Browning and abandoned;
it is rather his habitual method, and that in which he best suc-
ceeds. It is in essence the method of his greatest works after he
has abandoned the drama. Pompilia, Caponsacchi, Guido, the

heroine of The Inn Album, all tell their own story and argue their
own cause. It is safe, then, to infer that the method had a close
affinity with the genius of Browning. For him it was the right
method, and his first and greatest task as an artist was to discover
under what conditions it could be best applied. Just this discovery,
more than anything else except the fact that his fortune had been
so chequered, finally turned him from the drama. For while
argumentation right and natural in the dramatic monologue,
is
there may be too much of it in a play.

easily ,
A second cause which unfitted Browning for the regular drama

lay in his style. Many critics have pointed out that whoever the
speaker may be, he speaks in the voice of Browning; and the fact
is too obvious to require much discussion. No dramatist ever
possessed a style less flexible. The simple mill-girl Pippa and the
magnificent Ottima use the English language in the same way.
Thorold, Luria, Djabal, Valence, all speak Browningese. The
defect a grave one in the drama, and at once shuts out
is
from Browning's range all that variety of minor characters who

immensely enrich the plays of Shakespeare. A Browningesque
Touchstone, or Aguecheek, or Dogberry, is hardly conceivable.
And this perhaps is one reason for the fact that Browning's plays
tend so often to become one-character plays. In Strafford the
title-role, in Luria the Moorish general, and in A Soul's Tragedy
Chiappino, absorb all the interest. It is the proverbial pre-
dominance of Hamlet repeated in play after play; and the
predominance is unmodified by any such masterly presentation of
the minor characters as we find in Hamlet.
Perhaps it is only another way of expressing the first cause, if
we point out, as another reason for Browning's limited success in

the drama, the fact that though he is profoundly interested in
character, he cares little for action as such. And yet the drama is
essentially the literature of action. In narrative we are told what

occurs, in the drama we see the actual occurrence. Shakespeare's
mastery of character is so great that he has almost fixed the belief
that the first business of the drama is the delineation of human
nature j but his own example, carefully considered, shows that in
reality action is coordinate and of equal importance. It is in and
through action that character, in the Shakespearean drama, reveals
itself; for indispensable as are the soliloquies, they are still excep-
tional The soliloquy and the "aside" are implied confessions
that not everything in character can express itself in action or in
dialogue. The Elizabethans refused to impoverish themselves by
the exclusion of that which is most inward; but they never
wavered in the conviction that the drama is essentially the
literature of action. Browning on the other hand prefers to take
the action as past. In his plays little happens, though much is
said.
But, as has been already hinted, the personal qualities of

Browning are probably not the sole explanation of his failure. It
is at least remarkable how many highly gifted men of the nine-
teenth century attempted the drama without success. Coleridge,
Scott, Byron and Shelley all wrote plays. Shelley wrote one. The
Cenci, which, but for the nature of the subject, would have been
as successfulon the stage as it is in the closet. Bjnron put some
admirable work into Cain and Manfred; but they are not acting
dramas. Few who have studied their writings would deny to
Beddoes and Wells genius, and dramatic genius too ; but, though
they both tried dramatic art, neither of them wrote what would be
tolerable on the stage. The explanation assuredly is not that they
thought it better not to write for the stage. Beddoes distinctly
expressed his conviction that a play was meant to be acted, and
ought to be fit for its end ; and generally, it may safely be said
that no dramatist who could write for the stage was ever content
to do less. Later on we have the same tale of failure, relieved by
only a few partial and chequered and never first-rate successes.
In the classical revivals of Matthew Arnold and Swinburne and
Lord de Tabley we have an almost explicit confession of the
w. 21
writers' incapacity to be practical playwrights. In a word, the
poverty of the nineteenth century drama is a commonplace: in the
midst of abundant genius there is scarcely any to enrich the
stage.
The "blessed word" evolution has been so much misused

that it needs some courage to pronounce it once more ; and yet
probably the simple fact is that the Uterary evolution of England
had gone beyond the dramatic stage. There does seem to be a
succession of literary forms, corresponding broadly to the stages
of development in the mind. The famous Aristotelian classifica-
tion of poetry into epic, dramatic and lyric, corresponds to three
such stages. The first in its simplest elements demands no more
than mere observation and the record of events, whether imaginary
or real. The second implies the projection of the mind into
another personality ; it deals with action, but even in its simplest
form it must do so reflectively. In the third the introspective
and reflective element is greatly increased, and action has become
subordinate. Now, in its highest manifestations, the English
poetry of the nineteenth century is lyrical : it is often so in
principle, even when it is not in form. Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Arnold, Rossetti, Swinburne, — all these
are first and foremost lyrists. Even in the case of Browning,
though "dramatic in principle," a very great
his poetry is always
deal of it is But this predominance of the lyric
also lyrical.
implies a development of feeling and reflection, which must have
taken place at the expense of something. In point of fact, it did
take place largely at the expense of action. The great mass of
nineteenth century poetry is brooding and slow in movement.
Scott and Morris are the only great masters of narrative verse; for
though Byron could tell a story with great vigour, the true Byron
is to be found not in the narrative poems, but in the introspective
and reflective Childe HaroM and Don Juan.
in the satirical
'
Thus, in shunning action in his dramas, Browning was not

merely revealing an individual trait, but illustrating a tendency of
the time. In a sophisticated age " the native hue of resolution "
becomes "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," and the
balance between the two which the drama demands is destroyed.
Though the dramas are the bulkiest portion of Browning's

work in the ten years after Paracelsusy they are by no means
the whole of it. After Strafford came the long, involved and
contorted narrative poem Sordello (1840), which was a bitter
disappointment to many of the poet's warmest admirers, has been
a stumblingblock to nearly all since, and remains a ready weapon
in the hand of the enemy. There is a well-known story to the
effect that Douglas Jerrold, reading it in illness and finding
himself utterly unable to understand it, was thrown into panic
with the belief that he had lost his reason ; and Harriet Mar-
tineau in her Autobiography relates that for the same cause she
thought she must be ill. Attempts have been made to defend
the poem, but it is really indefensible. Though many poetic
beauties, of high quality may be found scattered through its
pages, they are scarcely worth the toil of the search, and even
students of Browning who have read it once will as a rule content
themselves with that experience. The poet at one time intended
to re-write it, and by nothing short of that process could he have
given it a chance of life. The intention was never carried out
probably he found that to write a new poem would not be more
toilsome than to give form to the formless.
The two numbers of Bells and Pomegranates which were not
filled with dramas were Dramatic Lyrics (1842) anA Dramatic
Rofifances and Lyrics (1845). These contained some of Brown-
ing's finest work. In a Gondola, Porphyria's Lover, The Lost
. Leader, Homf J'houghts fro'n^ Abroad axid from the Sea, The Plight
of the Duchess and Night and Morning form a group of dramatic
lyrics and dramatic romances which of themselves would secure
for their author an honourable place among poets. But perhaps

the gem of the two collections was the magnificent Saul; though
only the first was given in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics,
half
the second part being added in Men and Women. Besides the
pieces just named, there appeared in these collections the two
spirited narrative poems. The Pied Piper of Hamelin and How x
they brought theGood News from Ghent to Aix, and, most

characteristic of all, The Bishop orders his Tomb at St Praxed^s
Church, of which Ruskin wrote: "I know no other piece of
modern English prose or poetry, in which there is so much told,
as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit,^ts worldliness,

inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of
luxury, and of good Latin'."

One more of these lyrical pieces may be mentioned for the
sake of an interesting literary association. Waring, as is well
known, is Browning's expression of surprise and regret at the
sudden disappearance of a friend of whose gifts he held a high
opinion. Alfred Domett (1811-1887) had been a student of
Cambridge contemporaneously with Tennyson ; but, notwithstand-
ing his poetical tastes, he does not appear to have been known to
the literary group there. He published a volume of poems in
1833, followed this up with some pieces published in Blackwood's
Magazine in 1837, was called to the bar in 1841, and in the
following year suddenly left England for New Zealand, where he
rose to high office, being Prime Minister in 1862- 1863. His
political work put a stop for a generation to his poetry ; but in
1872 he published a long poena, Ranolf and Amohia, founded

upon Maori legends and descriptive of the scenery of New
Zealand. It was followed hy Flotsam and Jetsam, Rhymes Old
and New (1877). Had Domett devoted his life to poetry he

might have made a great name. He had many of the qualities
of the poet, an observant eye, a light touch, the power to write
melodious verse. He had above all a strong intellect, and his
verse always proclaims itself the work of a thoughtful man.
Though Ranolf and Amohia is Antipodean in subject, it deals in
masterly fashion with some of the profoundest and most difficult
problems of the modern intellect But Domett is not at his best
in a long piece. Ranolf and Amohia is rather a poem of striking
passages than a fine whole. And among the short pieces there
is not enough of the quality of A Christmas Hymti and The
Portrait zxiA Hougoumont, to make his fame safe. True poet as
he was, he is most
be remembered through Browning.
likely to
The verses entitled Hougoumont may, however, be quoted as

evidence of his power :
' Modern Painters, IV. xx. § 34,

"The air is sweet and bright and hot,

And loaded fruit-trees lean around;
There black unmoving shadows spot
The twinkling grass, the sunny ground;
No sound of mirth or toil to wrong
The orchard's hush at Hougoumont I
And silver daisies simply deck
With meek bright eyes that orchard-plot;
And therein lurks, an azure speck,
The tiny starred Forget-me-not
Fond type of hearts that love and long
In lonely faith, at Hougoumont.
At every step the beetles run,

Where none pursue, in vain concealed;
Each mailed coat glistens in the sun,
Where none attack, an idle shield 1
And ants unheeded scour pnd throng
The velvet sward at Hougoumont.
The headlong humble-bee alone
Assaults the old and crumbling wall
His busy bugle faintly blown,
With many a silent interval
Unchecked he tries each nook along
The moss-grown walls at Hougoumont.
Aloft the moaning pigeons coo.
One gurgling note unvaried still
The faltering chimes of Braine-le-Hei
The meads with hollow murmurs fill;
And skylarks shower out all day long
Swift-hurrying bliss o'er Hougoumont.
With transport lulled in dreamy eyes,
June woos you to voluptuous ease
At every turn love smiling sighs
Dear Nature does her best to please!
How sweet some loved one's loving song,
Couched in green shade a.t... Hougoumont I
—Oh, God what are we ? Do we

! then
Form part of this material scene?
Can thirty thousand thinking men
Fall—and but leave the fields more green?
'Tis strange —but Hope, be staunch and strong!

It seems so at sweet Hougoumont."
The world did not conceive Browning to have established
himself as "decisively" in 1845 as it judged Tennyson to have
done in 1842 ; and possibly there may for a long time be more
doubt about his position among poets than about Tennyson's.
But when we look back now it seems evident that the man who
had written Paracelsus and Pippa Passes and the Dramatic
Romances and Lyrics must prove a power of the first importance
in literature. Force, originality, philosophy even in superabund-
ance, all these he promised to add to the literature of the future
and in large measure he had already added them. Besides all
this, his cosmopolitanism must not be forgotten. Here, as in

many other points, he contrasts with Tennyson. While the latter
is intensely patriotic, the note ofjiationality is-.rare in Browning.

He is Nelson's to command at any time in prose or rhyme ; off
Cape Trafalgar he drinks the< great Admiral's health deep in

British beer ; and, viewed in a loftier mood, the same scene gives
birth to the noble Home Thoughts, from the Sea. But as a rule
Browning cosmopolitan in his championship of liberty as in
is
other things. His mixed blood seems to predestine him for this.
There is in fact more of Italy, at least in respect of subject-
matter, than of England in his verse. So he himself felt when he
adapted to himself the old story of Queen Mary, and said that
the word Italy would be found engraved on his heart. Yet
notwithstanding the immense part which Italy played in furnishing
Browning's mind, it would be a' profound mistake to regard his
genius as Italian in type. In the substance of his mind he was
essentially Teutonic.
was a good omen for English literature that the two leaders
It
from one another so widely it could not be a
in poetry differed :
bad omen that while the one was fervidly patriotic, the other
was frankly cosmopolitan.
CHAPTER III
THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD

There is something unpleasant in the phrase, minor poets ;
and yet it is hardly possible to dispense with the use of it. In

the present chapter there will be .found included names, such as
that of Mrs Browning, to whicli its application may seem almost
insulting; and it may be well therefore to explain at the start
that it is merely meant to convey the view that the poets so
designated are of lesser rank than Tennyson and Browning. It
hjas been said that English literature is not a republic but a
monarchy of letters, and that all its members are the subjects of
King Shakespeare. In comparison with him, all others might
fairly be described as " minor " writers. Adapting this saying, we
have taken Tennyson and Browning to be the joint monarchs of
early Victorian song. In the general opinion their reign lasted
through the whole length of the period ; and as they themselves
may be called minor in relation to Shakespeare, so all their
contemporaries in verse may be called minor in relation to them.
In spite of the fact that the vogue of poetry had passed, an
immense amount of poetical work was executed in the twenty
years or so which preceded the turn of the century. Some of it
was of kinds long rooted in our literature; some may be said to

illustrate the transition between the age which was passing away
and that which was coming into being. Other sections of it,
again, are marked by the special qualities which we have already
found to be, in one way or another, distinctive of this period;
and yet others are prophetic of qualities not up to this point fully
revealed.
§ I. The Balladists.
There can be no hesitation in ranking the writers of ballads

among those who look to the past rather than to the future ; and
this not merely, nor even chiefly, because the ballad form is one of
the oldest in our literature. A more cogent reason in the present
instance is that all the early Victorian writers of ballads are more
or less closely akin to Scott, and contentedly accept him as their
model. Neither Macaulay, nor Aytoun, nor Motherwell, nor
R. S. Hawker would have written such verse as they did if Scott
had not revived the Border Ballads, and written splendid speci-
mens of the modern ballad as well.
At the head of this group stands Macaulay by virtue of the
Lays af Ancient Rome (1842), in the preface to which the debt to
Scott and to the old ballads is explicitly acknowledged. The Lays
have, like the rest of Macaulay's works, passed through a period
of undue depreciation, and seem now to be read in a faij and
just spirit. They were criticisedby Matthew Arnold, with a
harshness and injustice rare in him, as " pinchbeck." But pinch'-
beck is something which, superficially, looks better than it is;
while the Lays pretend to be nothing but just exactly what they
are. They are not great poetry: no competent judge ever claimed
that they were. They are not even among the best of their kind;
for there are heights in such ballads as Scott's Cadyow Castle and
Harlaw and Rossetti's King's Tragedy, to which Macaulay could
never soar. But his Lays are nevertheless extremely spirited
verse, altogether admirable for the purpose he had in view, and

an excellent example of the historical spirit transfused into verse.
For here as always Macaulay is essentially the historian. So he
is also in the English ballads, The Armada and The Battle, of
Naseby; so he is in the lay of Lvry; so in great measure he is in

the beautiful verses written after his defeat at Edinburgh ; and it
is evident that the historical spirit inspires even the finest of all
his poems, the Epitaph on a Jacobite. This is the true spirit of

THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 329
the balladist; and Macaulay succeeds in his verse just because he

calls into play his own strongest faculties. The popular taste
which raised the Lays into favour was neither an ignoble nor a
mistaken one. They have a fine martial ring, such as is hardly
to be found except in Homer or in Scott or in William Morris,
they are altogether wholesome in tone, and they are exactly the
right thing for the purpose in view.
The influence of the striking success of the Lays of Ancient
Rome is seen, six years later, in the appearance of the Lays of
the Scottish Cavaliers (1848). This was the work of William
Edmondstoune Aytoun (1813-1865), the brilliant professor of
English literature in the University of Edinburgh. Aytoun, though
not a great writer, did several things very well. He was a good
critic, an excellent story-teller, and one of the best of parodists. His
novel, Norman Sinclair, though ill-constructed, has much of the
interest of a ^«<a.fz-autobiography, and is enlivened with the
humour which seasons the Blackwood tales, for
best of his —
example, the famous Glenmutchkin Railway. Contemporaneously
with the Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers Aytoun was writing, in
conjunction with Mr (now Sir) Theodore Martin, the Bon
Gaultier Ballads, a collection of humorous pieces, including, with
much besides that is good, the admirable Massacre of the Mac-
pherson.
In the Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers Aytoun is ; hardly so
successful. Though inspiriting, they are far inferior to the ballads
of Scott, on which they are modelled. The verse is highly rhe-
toricaland sometimes inflated. The material is frequently beaten
out too thin, and the poetic feeling is less pure and true than it is
in the Lays of Ancient Rome. Nevertheless, The Burial March
of JDundee, Edinburgh after Flodden and The Island of the Scots
are all inspired by a fine feeling of chivalry which ought long to
preserve them. That beautiful poem Hermotimus shows powers
of a different and in some respects of a higher order. It is written
in the difficult measure of The Bride of Corinth by Goethe, of
whom Aytoun was one of the earliest admirers, and of whose
Faust he made a translation which was never published.
As in Aytoun so too in Sir Francis Hastings Doyle (1810-
1888) there is a nobly clear martial and heroic strain, which Well
beseemed the descendant of a family of soldiers. Doyle's rare
gifts and high accomplishments are indicated by the fact that he
succeeded Matthew Arnold in the chair of poetry at Oxford, and

by the expectations formed of him by his friends, among whom
were the most distinguished men of his time, both of Oxford and
Cambridge. But Doyle never quite justified those expectations.
It is more than most poets he depended upon
evident that
" inspiration," and while his best pieces are unsurpassed in their
kind, the whole bulk of his really good verse is very small. If
the subject stirred his blood as in The Private of the Buffs and
The Red Thread of Honour he wrote splendidly. In the Z>^«-
caster St Leger he is carried away by the rush and excitement of
the race, and he makes the reader feel his own enthusiasm.
These pieces were evidently written at a white heat, and Doyle
has a few others scarcely less admirable ; but no other strain of
his work is comparable to this.
Another balladist of somewhat earlier date, William Mother-
well (1797-1835), may be named for the sake of a few Spirited
pieces such as The Cavaliet's Song and The Trooper's Ditty, and
for the fine Norse poems which helped to keep alive the interest
in Scandinavian literature which had been felt since Gray. It
would, however, be a mistake to regard Motherwell as in any
appreciable degree the means of importing a Scandinavian element
into our literature. That was the work of greater men.
Of the ballad sort is likewise much of the verse Of Robert
Stephen Hawker (1803-1875), a good poet and a very interesting
man. Hawker spent forty years of his life in the lonely Cornish
parish of Morwenstow, but, in spite of the loneliness, the story of
hiswork there is of thrilling interest. It deserves to be had in
remembrance at least as much as even his best verse. He prac-
tically Christianised a population previously Uttle better than
savages; and his poetry everywhere bears traces of the nature of
his work, of the scenery of Cornwall, and of the character of the
people among whom he lived, their habits, legends, superstitions,
virtues. Shipwrecks, and the giving up of the dead by the sea,

were frequent incidents in his experience, and both in prose and
in verse he has depicted them vividly. Many of his best pieces

are founded upon such incidents, or upon local legends, by which
his mind was deeply impressed. To the former class belong,
for instance. The Figure-head of the Caledonia, th& Death Song
and the Burial Hour; to the latter. The Death-Race, Annot of

Benallay and The Silent Tower of Bottreau. As a rule, Hawker's
pieces, though full of the ballad spirit, are undisguisedly modern
but he could imitate the tone of antiquity when he chose, and he
notes with pardonable pride that his best-known piece. The Song
of the Western Men, deceived three such good judges as Sir
Walter Scott, Macaulay and Dickens.
From humour is an easy
the serious ballad to the ballad of
transition,and already passing mention has been made of it in
connexion with Aytoun. In this domain the most widely popular
work was that of Richard Harris Barham (1788-1845). He was
by profession a clergyman, and he had been a man of letters as
well for many
years before he struck the vein by which he won
renown. was in 1837 that the celebrated Ingoldsby Legends
It
began to appear in Bentlefs Miscellany, then edited by Charles

Pickens. They had a wonderful vogue, and for more than a
generation after Barham's death they were regarded as models of
what such pieces ought to be. In some ways they well deserved
their reputation. They are exceedingly clever, especially in the
matter of rhymes ; the stories are skilfully told ; the ingenuity of
the author seems to be well-nigh inexhaustible ; and the best of
the legends, such as The Jackdaw of Rheims and A Lay of St
Nicholds, are in their own way almost perfect And yet we soon
come to an end of their merits. There is a hard clank in
Barham's verse, and his light is never softened with shade. His
humour grows monotonous ; only two or three subjects on which
to exercise it seem to occur to him, and they are subjects which,
when constantly reiterated, leave an unpleasant taste. Of poetry
the Legends are almost completely destitute, and but for the
beautiful "last lines," As I laye a-Thynkynge, it might be
suspected; that Barham had none of the poetic faculty;^
There are few things in the study of literature so saddening as

to turn over again the leaves of books of verse which have once
enjoyed a reputation for fun and frolic. To borrow Thackeray's

similCj it is like the aspect of an expired feast after the heel-taps
have been exposed all night to the air. In the pure light of day
the relics of gaiety and festivity seem poor and tawdry and
nauseous. And so it is with the revelries of literature, especially
when they are versified. The best of the Rejected Addresses and
of the Bon Gaultier Ballads still retain their power to please, in
most cases because they have caught a gleam from the very
poems they mimic; but a considerable part even of these
volumes has lost the racy flavour which we must believe it once
possessed. Much of the wit of George Colman, of Theodore
Hook, of Francis Mahony, of William Maginn and of Douglas
Jerrold leaves us cold and indifferent; and some of it even
repels. Though they stand comparatively near our own time,
their day is irretrievably gone. It was not altogether their faultj
for they were masters of their craft; it is rather the almost
inevitable consequence of working in that particular ^f«r«. We
see this the more clearly the farther we go back in literature. No
race more quick-witted than the Greeks has ever existed and yet ;
nothing can be more vapid than some of those jests which have
been carried down the stream of time as if Bacon had indeed —
been right when he compared fame to a river which bears up
" things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid."
The truth seems to be that literature is like wine, it will not keep
unless it has a certain "body"; and wit alone, unstrengthened by
other qualities, seldom suffices to give it that body.
Nevertheless it is certain that fun in verse can be made to
keep sweet for centuries. Aristophanes is still delightful reading
and there no lack of flavour in the humorous pieces among Tlie
is
Canterbury Tales. But it is to be noticed that these works' are

humorous even more than they are witty; and it is their rich
setting of human nature which makes them permanently valuable.
Humour wears well, wit in isolation^ it would seem, does not.
The pieces which we still care to remember are not strings of
puns or sparkling sayings, but pieces richly freighted with associa-
tion, like the best of the parodies; pieces resting upon some
human feeling, however ludicrously presented, as in George
Outram's Annuity ; or, best of all, pieces in which a touch of

pathos softens the humour and the wit, as in Thackeray's Ballad
of Bouillabaisse. Compare the mere play of wit in the famous
Ass-ass-ination, from John Bull, or in Hood's Faithless Nellie
Gray, with Bon Gaultier's delightful parody, redolent of the
old ballads, The Queen in France, or with the parodies on Scott
and Wordsworth in Rejected Addresses, or with Calverley's or
J. K. Stephen's parodies,
or with that admirable travesty of the
Idylls of the King, Sir Tray; and the superiority of the latter class
is at once apparent. Nowhere is, it more apparent than in
Shirley Brooks's " More luck to honest poverty," because that so
well illustrates how the parodist may make his verses the vehicle
of wisdom. Buins's song, "A man's a man for a' that," is the
very essence of manliness; yet it can be made to do service to
mere cant, and Brooks's retort is sound and wise as well as
clever,:
"More luck to honest poverty,

'
and a' that
It claims respect,
But honest wealth's a better thing,
We dare be rich for a' that.
For a' that, and a' that.
And spooney cant, and a' that,

A man may have a ten pun note.
And be a brick for a' that."
§ 2. Vers de SociH'e.
The light and elegant verse of society is another of those

species which are characteristic of no particular age. It is the
symptom of a sophisticated civilisation, and is sure to appear
whenever the conditions favourable to it exist. In English litera-
ture, however, it has never held a place so prominent as in French;

and previous to the nineteenth century Matthew Prior reigned
unchallenged, with no rival near the throne. During the nine-
teenth century several writers have won high distinction for this
form of verse. It was a factor in the reputation of Moore, and
Moore had influence over nearly all the lighter poets of the
earlier part of the century. This influence is conspicuous both in
the wit and in the sentimentality of Thomas Hajmes Bayly
(1797-1839), whose gift of facile versification won for some of his
songs a popularity they have not yet wholly lost. So too the
gentle and amiable Laman Blanchard (1804-1845) impressed
upon verses of no great distinction his own kindly gaiety and
humour. But in the earlier half of the century the best writer of
light verse was Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-1839), to whose
primacy, in the latter part of it, Frederick Locker-Lampson and

Mr Austin Dobson have succeeded.
With Praed ought perhaps to be classed a younger man,
'Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton (1805-1885). Milnes,
whose portrait has been etched skilfully, though not without
acid, in the Vavasour of Tancred, was one of the most interest-
ing figures of his generation. Prominent at once in society,
in politics and in literature, he was just a little injured in the
latter two by the inability to throw himself resolutely into one
kind of work. The "catholic sympathies and eclectic turn of
mind" noted by Disraeli in Mr Vavasour led Milnes astray;
because, as the same pungent satirist proceeds, the capacity to see
something good in everything and everybody " disqualifies a man
in some degree for the business of life, which requires for its con-
duct a certain degree of prejudice.'' It was this foible which led
Carlyle to say to him, "There is only one post fit for you, and
that is the ofifice of perpetual president of the Heaven and Hell
Amalgamation Society'." But the foible was no ignoble one ; or
rather, it was more the expression of a generous and widely
tolerant character than a foible. "I have many friends,'' said
W. E. Forster of Milnes, " who would be kind to me in distress,

but only one who would be equally kind to me in disgrace'." To
the memory of Milnes there clings the fragrance of a thousand
generous deeds. It was to him that everybody turned when in
Life of Lord Houghton, i. 187.

'^
' ibid. 44. It was pure kindness of heart, not laxity of principle, that
made Milnes lenient to evil-doers, and he could be severe enough on ocoision.

After the coup d'dtat he broke off friendly relations with Napoleon III, and
did not resume them till the Emperor had been stripped of all the ill-gotten
gains of that crime.
need. To a rich man the giving of money was easy, but Milnes
also gave sympathy and took trouble. He was the untiring and
delicately generous benefactor of the hapless poet David Gray,
and so many others did he befriend that he was regarded as the
natural champion of the struggling man of letters. Carlyle had
asked him to get a pension for Tennyson, and when Milnes
—
pleaded that it was not easy to do so his constituents knew nothing
about Tennyson and would believe the pension to be a job
Carlyle burst out, "Richard Milnes, on the Day of Judgment, when
the Lord asks you why you did not get that pension for Alfred
Tennyson, it will not do to lay the blame on your constituents; it
jsyou that will be damned'."
When Milnes was still at Cambridge a College friend and
warm admirer, Stafford O'Brien, wrote to him words which show
an almost uncanny prescience: "I often wonder what will be your
future destiny, and I think you are near something very glorious,
but you will never reach it. I wish it were in my power to give
you all the good I possess, and which you want, for I would
willingly pull down my hut to build your palace'." These words
were fully justified in the sequel. Milnes had splendid gifts, and
he was always "near something very glorious," but he never
reached it The cause lay, no doubt, in that eclecticism which
—
was noted by Disraeli, a fatal facility in the reception of impres-
sions and influences, which usually implies a want of depth in the
impressions received. Milnes was attracted by Newmanism, and
pleaded eloquently for it in One Tract More \ but when he went
to the East he was equally ready to be charmed by Mahom-
medanism. In fact, he was so ready to see truth in anything that
he was rarely impressed by any one truth with the intensity of
conviction necessary to great work. He. never put his fortune to
the touch, " to win or lose it all." He played upon the surface,
wrote gracefully, not powerfully, touched — and adorned —many
things, rather than made any one all his own.
Milnes began his poetical careerearly. One of his best-known
pieces,The Brook-side, was written in 1830, and the rhythm of it

was hammered out to the tramp of a horse's hoofs and the rattle
* Life of Houghton, i. 496. ' ibid. 85,
of an Irish jaunting-car.He versified his travels in Greece in the
Memorials (1834) of his tour, while his travels in Egypt and the
Levant were similarly commemorated in Palm Leaves (1844). In
Poems, Legendary and- Historical (1844),' he entered into competi-
tion, not very successfully, with Macaulay and Aytoun. There
is great similarity between Milnes's Death of Sarsfield and
Aytoun's Island of the Scots; but the former leaves the reader
perfectly cold, while the latter impresses him, if not as great poetry,
at any rate as stirring chivalrous verse. It would however be
unjust to judge Houghton by this. He is best in one of his later
poems, -the beautiful and pathetic Strangers Yet.
"Strangers yet I
After years of life together,

After fair and stormy weather,
After travel in fair lands,
Aftet touch of wedded hands,
Why thus joined? why ever met.
If they must be strangers yet?
Strangers yet I
After childhood's winning ways,

After care and blame and praise,
Counsel asked and vrisdom given,
After mutual prayers to Heaven,
Child and parent scarce regret
When they part— are strangers yet.
Strangers yet!
After strife for common ends,
After title of '
old friends,'
After passions fierce and tender,
After cheerful self-surrender,
Hearts may beat and eyes be met.
And the souls be strangers yet,"
Milnes never elsewhere rose so high as this. But that which he

did with the most uniform success was the vers de socikti.
. Praed resembled Milnes
in the fact that he united literature
with In that respect he resembled also a greater writer
politics.
than either of them, Macaulay, between whom and Praed there

are other interesting associations : Praed, who was two years

Macaulay's junior at Cambridge, read classics with the elder man;
and in Parliament the Radical of the Cambridge Union was
looked upon as a bulwark of the constitution against the innova-
tions of his former coach, the Cambridge Tory.
Praed's literary faculty was very early developed, and it was
cultivated until became the ready instrument of every thought
it
which he chose to put into verse. From his boyhood at Eton, till
—
he died, he was continually writing, iirst for school magazines,
including the famous Etonian, of which he was the chief supporter,
and afterwards for Knight's Quarterly Magazine. But in spite of
his brilliancy and of his early success, he seems to have recognised
that there was a limit to his powers which he could not psiss. He
never attained, and it does not appear that he earnestly airned at,
greatness any serious form of

in literature. Occasionally the
reader of Praed is tempted to regretthis. There is austere force
in The Covenanter's Lament, and The Red Fisherman shows
imagination of a very rare sort. But probably Praed judged well.
Though he died young, his seven-and-thirty years were the years
also of Burns, and his circumstances were incomparably more
favourable for production than those of the ploughman-poet.
Mariy others have done great work in a space still more brief.
The Praed did not write great poems may be

fact therefore that
taken as evidence that he did not possess the power, though
contemporaries like Miss Mitford believed that if he had lived
longer he would have won distinction in the higher kinds of
poetry. As it is, he is clearly first in his own line, and his niche
in the temple of fame is more secure than that of many prouder
figures. The author of Quince and The Vicar and A Letter of
Advice is safe from oblivion. In work of this kind Praed at his
best is and neither Prior, who reigned before him,
nearly perfect ;
nor Locker-Lampson, who came after, can be ranked as his

equal. Native gifts and acquired skill unite to give him the
primacy. The atmosphere of scholarship and high culture
envelops all he wrote. A playful and not too piercing wit, ready
but not mordant sarcasm, sympathy genuine but not painfuUy
acute, a mind by habit fanciful rather than imaginative, these are
w. 22
the qualities the combination of which makes Praed the most
perfect writer of society verse in English literature ; or perhaps it
would be more accurate to say that his only rival is Landor, a
man who has done things so much greater that we easily forget to
regard him in this light at all, but who on rare occasions showed
that he could write vers de societi to perfection. If we take
Praed's masterpiece, The Vkar, we see at once the secret of his

excellence. It is a character-sketch, touched with exquisite
lightness and delicacy. Few poems are so witty, but there is more
than wit in it. Compare it with anything by Theodore Hook or
Barham. Hook was one of the wittiest men who ever lived ; but
wit was the end as well as the beginning of his verse. Praed,
especially in The Vicar, has feeling as well as brightness, humour
as well as wit, he is a pOet, not merely a jester. There is a
remarkable resemblance, and also a remarkable diffetence, between
him and Hood. He is a Hood at once weaker and stronger;
weaker far as a serious poet, yet more masterly as a writer of
light verse. But the point of difference is that in Hood we find
side by side, but seldom fused, a comic writer and a sombre, nay,
a tragic one; in Praed, grave and gay are habitually combined.
Judged by Mary's Ghost and John Trot and Tim Turpin, it
would appear that Hood was never serious: The 'Song of the Shirt
and Eugene Aram and The Haunted House would be equally good
evidence that he never laughed. The truth is that, except in
Miss Kilmansegg, Hood is a poet witty rather than humorous;
and he is grave, even melancholy, far more than either. But
Praed mingled humour with his wit, and there are suggestions of
gravity in some of his lightest pieces. Sometimes, it is true, the
touch of the one poet is scarcely distinguishable from that of the

other. There is a Hood-like tone in Praed's lines about the time
of King Richard, when
" Saracens and liquor ran
Where'er he set his foot";
and we seem to be reading Hood at his happiest in the lines,
" And he spurred Sir Guy o'er mount and moor,

With a long dull journey all before,
And a short gay squire behind him."

There is still much of Hood in
"Sound was —
and his head;
his claret
Warm was his double-ale and feelings;—
His partners at the whist-club said
That he was faultless in his dealings."
But we notice even here that the puns are made to serve in the
and in some of the stanzas of Quince and
delineation of character;
The Vicar the serious poet and the shrewd kindly observer of
human nature stand pretty cleairly revealed:
"While decay
Came, like a tranquil moonlight, o'er him,
And found him gouty still, and gay,
With no fair nurse to bless or bore him.
His rugged smile and easy chair,
His dread of matrimonial lectures,
His wig, his stick, his powdered hair,
Were themes for very strange conjectures.''
• « ' * * « •
"And he was kind, and loved to sit
In the low hut or garnished cottage.

And praise the farmer's homely wit.
And share the widow's homelier pottage:
At his approach complaint grew mild
And when his hand unbarred the shutter.
The clammy lips of fever smiled
The welcome which, they could not utter."
% I. The Catholic Poets.
While poets like, Praed might belong to almost any age, the
group which has next to be considered could hardly have flourished
before the second quarter of the nineteenth century. By reason of
the, date of his principal work, been classed
its leader, Keble, has
with the poets of the interregnum; but he and a few others whose
interests were primarily religious and largely ecclesiastical form a
homogeneous class which may conveniently be denominated
Catholic. First and chief among the followers is Keble's great,
companion of the early days of the Oxford Movement, John
Henry Newman. His poetry, though slight, indeed, almost insig-
nificant in bulk, is of high imaginative quality. Unfortunately,
Newman never regarded himself as a poet, and almost the whole
of his verse is the work of his earlier years. Even The Dream cf
Gerontius, though it was not published till 1865, had been written
many years before that date and thrown aside and forgotten, until
Newman, rummaging for something to gratify the editor of a

magazine, came upon it and sent it as his contribution : in so
little esteem was one of the subtlest of modem religious poems
held by itsHis own saying that " poetry is the refuge of
author.
those who have not the Catholic Church to flee to and repose
upon," probably indicates the reason for the scantiness of his pro-
duction as a poet.
Besides The Dream of Gerontius, Newman wrote a number of
poems which appeared, mingled with pieces from other pens,
in Lyra Apostolica (1834). A volume of Verses on Various
Occasions (1868) .consists exclusively of his work, and there the
greater part of his poetry is to be found. His most prolific years
were the early thirties, before his mind was immersed in the
turmoil of the Tracts too completely for poetical composition. The
period of his voyage in the Mediterranean was especially fruitful
and to it belongs in particular the piece by which he is and will
remain best knowri, the beautiful hymn, "Lead, kindly Light."

The Dream of Gerontius is by far his longest poem, and, with the
possible exception of that most poetical of hymns, it is his best
title to the name of poet. It is the vision of a dying soul,
beautiful with that severe beauty which always characterised
Newman, and fascinating from its austere imagination. The
lyrical parts are not wholly satisfactory, but the blank verse is
grand in its restraint and strength. Newman had a reach of

thought and a boldness of imagination which none of the other
Catholic poets could rival. By reason of his greater devotion to
the art and the greater quantity of his work, Keble must take
rank as a poet above Newman; but Newman had the higher
endowment, and if he had chosen, or had found time, he would
have left work superior to the best that The Christian Year
contains.
It is unnecessary to delay long over the other writers of this
THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 34I
group. Without any exception but Newman they show mediocrity

of intellect; and their emotional fervour could not alone produce
great poetry. One of them, Frederick William Faber (1814-1863)
found refuge, in the same year as Newman, in the bosom of the
Church of Rome. Both before and after his reception into the
Romish communion he was a diligent writer of verse ; but sub-
sequently to that event he devoted himself in his verse exclusively
to the service of his Church. Wordsworth lamented the change
and declared that in England lost a poet. In spite of this judg-
it
ment, it is not easy to discover in Faber the qualities which under

any circumstances would have entitled him to the name of poet
and he is not likely to be remembered, except with that dubious
immortality which clings to the hymn-writer who has secured
entrance into popular collections. His verse is commonly weak,
and often exaggerated in tone and tainted with sentimentality.
As little or even less can Isaac Williams (1802-1865) claim a
place in the ranks of those "salcred bards" who are so far
removed from the writers of what passes for religious poetry.

While Faber went with Newman, Williams remained with Keble,
among those who did not feel the via media slipping from under
their feet ; and after Keble he is usually ranked as a minor poet
of the Oxford Movement. But Williams was a weak man, and
nothing he has written is likely to survive, or deserves to survive.
He was the author of the papers on Reserve in the Tracts for the
Times. His Autobiography is a feeble book, and not altogether a
pleasant one. More than any other of Newman's Anglican friends,
Williams kept up relations with him after the secession; and
the unamiable acerbity of some of the references to Newman
which are sprinkled through the Autobiography ill befits one who
continued to profess friendship.
John Mason Neale (1818-1866), though a Cambridge man, was
one of those who came under the influence of the Tractarians
while the tracts were still running their course. By virtue of his
History of the Eastern Church and of two or three other historical
works, he claims a minor place among historians but he is best
;
known as a writer, and especially as a translator, of hymns. A

number of his translations from the Greek have been incorporated
from Yas Hymns of the Eastern Church into Hymns Ancient and
Modern and other widely-used collections. The best are very
good J but even here Neale's touch is uncertain, and his choice
from among the originals is not discriminating. The volume
contains, for example, the beautiful and popular " Art thou weary,
art thou languid ? " and also the absurd, though likewise popular,
" Christian, dost thou see them ? "
Of far higher quality was the poetry of R. S. Hawker, whose
ballads have been already noticed. The Quest of the Sangraal, by
virtue ofwhich principally he claims notice here, was published
incomplete in 1863, and incomplete it still remained at his death
in 1875. But had begun and his mind had
his poetical career
been formed Such changes as occurred in him were
far earlier.
the result of lonely communings with his own soul ; and naturally
enough they came more slowly than they came to others who
lived more among their fellows. The nature of his broodings may
be conjectured from the fact that within a few hours of his death
he was received within the Romish communion. Such a change
under such circumstances is suggestive; but it would be unjust to
Hawker to lay stress on it. No one can tell how far a dying man
responsible for his actions.
is really In his full health and vigour
thisconsummation might never have been reached on the other
:
hand, had he lived in close contact with the world it might have
been reached years before. By the cast of his mind and his
imagination there was a pre-established harmony between Hawker
and the High Church revival, though he disliked those who
merely emphasised ritual. He had the Tractarians' ready
credulity, their mysticism, their appetite for legends, with more
than their power of turning legends into poetry. Such tendencies,
combined with his residence in Cornwall, naturally drew Hawker
towards the more mystical side of the Arthurian legends ; and the
result was the Quest.
§ 4. The Philosophic Poets.
The Catholic poets are important chiefly as premonitory of

thatwhich was to come under the reign of the Pre-Raphaelites,
and these belong to the later part of the period. With the ;
philosophic movement the case was different; for as soon as

Browning appears it has to be taken most seriously into account.
It claimed the allegiance of the greatest minds of the £ige, who
naturallydrew to themselves followers as time went on. But even
from the first the intellectual element in verse fascinated some of
the minor writers. Of these we may take as representatives Philip
James Bailey (1816-1902) and Richard Henry (or Hengist) Home
{1803-1884).
After Beddoes and Wells there is no one so deeply imbued
with the Elizabethan spirit as Hotne, whose life as well as his
writings brings to mind the great Queen's time ; for he seems to
have been akin to ,the sea-dogs and -adventurers as well as to the
dramatists. No literary man of the nineteenth century lived a
fuller life than he. Though, of small stature, he was endowed
with immense strength, and was proud of the athletic feats which
he was still able to perform almost to the close of his life. He was
destined for the army, but riotous conduct cut short his career at
Sandhurst. He then joined the Mexican navy as a midshipman,
and saw service in the war with Spain. After numerous, perils,
among which were a narrow escape from a shark and another
from a still more dangerous enetiiy, a mutinous ship's crew.
Home returned to England and began a career of letters ; but
nearly ten years passed before he produced înything of permanent
importance. In 1837 appeared Cosmo de' Medici and The Death
of Marlowe, the latter of which has no small share of the fire and
strength of Marlowe himself. In 1840 they were followed by
another tragedy, Gregory VII, and that again three years later by
HoTBie's best known work, Orion, an Epic Poem in three Books.
In scorn of the public, which had long ceased to buy poetry, but
which was buying Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy, the,, author
fixed the price at one farthing. Next came A New Spirit of
the Age (1844), an interesting collection of essays, in which
Home collaborated with Elizabeth Barrett and others. Ballad
Romances (1846) was the only other publication worthy of
note before the life of adventure began again. In 1852 the
gold fever drew Home to Australia, where he played many
parts and ran many risks. It was at this time that for some
obscure reason he dropped his baptismal name of Henry and

assumed that of Hengist. He returned to England in 1869;
and the rest of his Ufe was filled with miscellaneous literary
work, all of it of less importance than that which he had
previously done, — unless indeed Home himself was right in the
opinion that the still unpublished poem entitled Ancient Idols; or,
the Fall of the Gods was the greatest of his writings'.

Home wasa man who gave the stamp of distinction to all he
wrote, and who scomed any aim below the highest. In the
drama, he held the highest aim to be representation on the stage,
and consequently his tragedies were written with that end in view.
At the same time, he was convinced that prostitution of poetry
and art was the price to be paid for admission to the English
stage; and so he contemplated representation only as the possi-
bility of a distant future. The intensity of Home's dramas goes
far to justify his assertion, quoted from Goethe, that they "were
written with his blood." No man who values high thought and is
capable of sympathy with deep passion and suffering can read

them with indifference. And yet it was not wholly the fault of
the stage that Home's dramas were excluded from it. Their high
merit as tragic conceptions is marred by stiffness of movement;
along with their elevation of thought goes a certain monotony;
and the characters are somewhat crudely delineated. All this is
tme not only of Cosmo de' Medici, but also, though in a less
degree, of The Death of Marlowe and of Gregory the Great. The
faults grow again in Laura Dibalzo (1880), where there is besides
a marked lowering of the dignity of the author's style.

Home's
genius, however, was not essentially dramatic. Occa-
he rose high in the lyric, as in Genius (Gulf of Florida)
sionally
and the Ballad of Delora is admirable. But by far the most
memorable of his works is the epic of Orion. Its history shows
' Literary Anecdotes of the XIX Century, i. 245.
that the readers of the time were not quite so contemptible as

Home thought them. They exhausted three editions at the
original price of a farthing, and three more at higher rates, within
the year of its publication'.
Orion is an allegorical epic. Its object. Home explains, is
" to present a type of the struggle of man with himself, i.e. the
contest between the intellect and the senses " ; and this is done
under the veil of classical myths. The scheme was well adapted
to Home's type of mind. He worked best on a broad canvas
and in the case of Orion he could make the canvas as broad as
he pleased. Notwithstanding his life of adventure, his literary
strength lay in thought, not in action ; and in Orion there was no
such necessity for movement as there was in the dramas. Though
never likely to be widely read, the poem will always command the
admiration of those who love great thoughts expressed in sonorous
verse ; and they will find in it many passages of remarkable power.
No one probably would echo the extravagant praise of Poe, who
ranked iHorne next to Tennyson, and pronounced his Orion
" superior even to Milton's Paradise Lost' " ; but at least he is a
poet of no mean order.
Though Home was essentially original it is evident that he
was under the influence of Keats. No doubt the echo is conscious
and intentional in the lines :
"Never renew thy vision, passionate lover

Heart-rifled maiden —nor the hope pursue
If once it vanish from thee."
Probably it is so too in :
"Oinopion strode about his pillared hall,

And the dim chequers of its marble floor
Counted perplexed."
Occasionally something overwrought in the style suggests the

kind of error into which a disciple is apt to fall:
" Old memories

Slumbrously hung above the purple line
' Literary Anecdotes of the XIX

Century, i. 240.
» The Poe-Chivers Papers, edited by G. E. Woodberry, in The Century
Magazine.
Of distance, to the east, while odorously
Glistened the tear-drops of a new-fallen shower;
And sunset forced its beams through strangling boughs,
Gilding green shadows, till it blared athwart
The giant-caves, and touched with watery fires
The heavy foot-marks which had plashed the sward
On vacant paths, through foliaged vistas steep.
Where gloom was mellowing to a grand repose."
Bold and ambitious as was Home in his plans, still bolder

was Philip James Bailey, whose Festus startled the literary world
in 1839. No poet has forgotten more completely the injunction
to think about Noah and be brief. Already at twenty-three he
gave the world a poem of some nine or ten thousand lines, and
by additions gradually made through a long life it grew to about
forty thousand. Even The Ring and the Book is a pigmy by the
side of Festus.
In one respect Bailey resembles Milton; for he deliberately
trained himself from boyhood for the function of a poet. But
there is also a striking difference. At thirty-four, when the Civil
War -began, Milton was still meditating his great work ; while at
twenty-three Bailey was confident that he had adequately executed
one of the most ambitious poetical schemes ever conceived. It
is,the poet tells the reader in the preface to the fiftieth-anniversary

edition, " a summary of the world's combined moral and physical
conditions, estimated on a theory of spiritual things." Struc-
turally, he goes on to say, the poem resolves itself "not into
books, or acts, but into twelve or more groups, celestial, astral,
interstellar and terrestrial, solar, planetary and one other, the

sphere of the Infernals ; that is to say, into so many clusters of
sections subordinated into seven classes, finally reducible into
three. Heavenly, firmamental, earthly." This vast plan the author
carries out in fifty-two " scenes," the poem being a sort of drama
in which the principal actors —or interlocutors, for it is rather
speech than action —are Lucifer and Festus ; while a number of
supernatural beings, from the Deity downwards, take part.
Festus is not likely ever again to arouse the interest and to
win the praise it once gained. Men were awed by the daring of
the poet who could not only conceive and resolve to carry out
such a design, but who in the course of it shrank not from

challenging comparison with the greatest of modern poets. The
whole structure is suggestive of Goethe, and indeed Festus owes
not a little to Faust. Again, the prominence given to the
supernatural turns the; thoughts to Milton, though the differ-
ence between Festus and Paradise Lost is very wide. Neither

was it possible, within twenty years of the publication of Cain,. to
handle such a subject without bringing Byron to mind. Far
from concealing all this, Bailey rather drags it to the front.
The very name of Festus recalls Faust; and as if to invite
comparison with one of the sublimest passages of Paradise
Lost, we have, parallel with Satan's address to the sun, an
address by Festus to the same luminary. Here is the opening
of it :—
"Parent of spheres, who filling once all space,
God bidding, threwest off all cloaking clouds.
To thee intolerable, of nebulous heat,
The planetary fires ; which, gathered there
In narrowing circlets, imminent o'er the void,
Each in one common sky, thou centering all,
Reign'st o'er, their lord and sire ; so hailed by earth
First of heaven's stars reflective of the light
And favourite of the sun sole source and end
All turn to; I too like thyself, a liege
But God, who gave us both
spiritual, of
To be ; me ; in law
but in free obedience
Inirangible thee, the law of light through space ;
Darting thy quickening ray from orb to orb,

!
Leaping, like thought ; behold, I seek thee. Sun
The thought in this passage (a favourable specimen of the style

and substance of Festus) is but a poor counterpoise to the grand
harmonies of the Miltonic address, even as the world-philosophy
of Bailey seems commonplace beside that of Goethe.
Perhaps about a tenth part of Festus is good, and a tenth of
that tenth part js really admirable ; but what is good is so, lost
and buried in a superincumbent mass of the mediocre and the
worthless, that we are reminded of Gratiano's reasons, and doubt
whether the grains of wheat \re worth the search through all the
chaflF. Bailey is capable of writing noble lines and fine passages.
There is grandeur in the opening :
"Eternity hath snowed its upon them;

years
And the white winter of their age is come,
The world and all its worlds, and all shall end."
He has gleams of splendid thought perfectly expressed, e.g.,
"I am," says Lucifer, "the shadow which creation casts From
God's own light." And again in the Proem we read, " Evil and
good are God's right hand and left." Occasionally there are
longer passages which are equally elevated in thought and right
in expression :
"Life's more than breath and the quick round of blood,

It is a great spirit and a busy heart.
The coward and the small in soul scarce do live.
One generous feeling, one great thought, one deed
Of good, ere night would make life longer seem
Than if each year might number a thousand days'.
We live in deeds, not years, in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a. dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best."
But Bailey was incapable of and the changes he

self-criticism,
made were For example, the

often lamentably for the worse.
lines after "Evil and good are God's right hand and left,"
originally ran :
"By ministry of evil good is clear.

And by temptation virtue" ;
and they served to make the thought clearer and to deepen the
effect In the final version, however, ten dreary and inharmonious
lines are interposed between the first of these lines and the
second, which again is ruined by expansion into four. It is this
unfortunate deficiency in the critical faculty which makes Fesius
so extraordinarily uneven and therefore on the whole so weari-
some.
^ But compare this with

" One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name."

Bailey had a very faulty sense of style, and he cannot be said
to have possessed an ear at all. His metre is nearly always

rough, and not infrequently it is execrable. The style is often
vitiated by specimens of the worst sort of eighteenth-century
taste. Clumsy phrases, harsh inversions, pauses too numerous
and ill placed, wear out the patience of the reader who has any
ear for the melodies of Keats James Smetham
and Coleridge.
in his delightful letters has recorded that Fesius was the only
book he ever flung to the other side of the room ; and there are
many passages irritating enough to provoke such an explosion
of wrath. The adjectives, " tremendous, absurd, raw, loud and
fuliginous," which Dr John Brown of the Horae Subsecivae hurls
iX Festus are all justified.
Bailey is sometimes spoken of as the "father of the Spasmodic
School "; but the criticism which classifies him with Dobell and
Alexander Smith is superficial, and he was fully justified in repu-
diating it We have seen that Bailey is excessively uneven ; and
so are the Spasmodic poets. But few poems were ever written
less "spasmodically" than Fesius. It is an exhaustive philo-
sophical treatise in verse ; and whatever we may think of the

philosophy, we must grant that the work is far too laboriously
hammered out to be fairly described as "spasmodic."
§ 5. The Political Poets.
In religion, the great movement of the early nineteenth

century was the Catholic Reaction ; and corresponding to it we
find in poetry Keble and Newman. In philosophy, the greatest
fact was the attraction to Germany ; and we find Bailey challeng-
ing comparison with Goethe. So too in politics, the movement
to democracy finds its poet in Ebenezer Elliott, and after him
several of the minor poets draw their inspiration from the political
questions of the time. Associated with the Chartist movement
there is a small literature, both in prose and in verse, which is by
no means destitute of merit. The best of the poetry is of rather
later date; for Robert Brough, E. C. Jones and Gerald Massey
all belong to the period after the middle of the century; but
Ghartism and the radicalism which led up to it have left their
memorial in the interesting autobiographies of Samuel Bamford,'

William Lovett and Thomas Of these the best is that
Cooper.
of Bamford, whose style uncommonly good simple, lively
is —
and pointed. A few imperfections of grammar and the occasional
misuse of words betray the imperfect education of the man ; but
his; gift of rapid and interesting narrative, his keen observation,
his frankness, and the dash of poetry evinced in such^ passages as

his vivid description of a storm at sea, would have redeemed far
worse faults.
Cooper in his Autobiography shows considerably less of the
literary faculty than Bamford, and he appears to have been a man

of altogether less sane and safe judgment than that very acute and
sensible radical He supported the wild scheme for a total
cessation of work; but he had the penetration to see that, if
carried out, it meant civil war. Cooper, however, was a writer of
verse as well as of prose, and has left as a memorial of his literary
ambition a lengthy work entitled The Purgatory of Suicides, It
is a poem in the Spenserian stanza, divided into ten' books, and
extending to about eight thousand lines. The ambition to write
it had a considerable time by Cooper, and the
be'en cherished for
leisure to do so came during an imprisonmerit of two years, from
1843 to 1845, to which he was condemned because of his support
of the Chartist movement. The Purgatory of Suicides has many
faults. The Miltonic inversions and complexity of sentence,
imitated by an ill-educated man, produce a deplorable effect.
The style, in short, is inartistic and bad, and the tone generally
too shrill to be dignified. Cooper had a good deal of self-esteem,
which sometimes bears a close resemblance to self-conceit, and
sometimes vents itself in abuse of those of whom he disapproves.
Of somewhat greater note in literature is Capell Lofft (1806-
1873), a man once the object of extravagant praise and of equally
extravagant dread and horror. Part of this may have been
hereditary, for his father had been an author, a reformer, and a
friend ofGodwin. Lofft was the author of a prose work, Self
Formation (1837), and of an agrarian epic, Ernest (1839). Harriet
Martineau in her autobiography refers to the former as "a wonder-
THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD 3$
fill book/' and to the latter as "a poem of prodigious power, but
too seditious for publication." The adjectives " wonderful " and
"prodigious" s.eem considerably too strong for the occasion.
Though Self-Formation shows in parts marked ability, on the
whole it is pretentious and wearisome. The author is always on
the strain, and the importance of his work is not at all propor-
tioned to his own and Miss Martineau's conception of it.
Ernest, or Political Regeneration, the Chartist epic in twelve

books, was reviewed by Milman in the Quarterly in a spirit of the
warmest admiration of the poetry and of the greatest horror of the
politics. The political opinions expressed in Ernest are violent
enough. There is to be nationalisation of the land without com-
pensation, except so much as will yield the latidlords a bare
subsistence; and the people are to rule directly, not through
representatives. But opinions as violent have often been expressed
with at least as great force as Lofft could command, and without
any terrific consequences. At the present time we should hardly
deem such a poem "too seditious for publication." But as the
Chartist principles have lost their terror, so, it is to be feared, has
the poem in which they are enshrined lost its savour. There are
beautiful passages and powerful passages in Ernest but there are ;
also passages in which the verse is harsh and tuneless in the

extreme. There is, however, force and fervour in the lyrical out-
burst of Hermann, when by the treachery of his father he is driven
into the arms of the revolutionists ; and in the rush and energy of
this passage there is a resemblance to Ibsen's Brand, for the sake
of which part of the passage may be quoted :
"No; I will redeem the shame

Of our vile, dishonoured name:
Now that name throughout the land
Is charactered in felon brand
Soon it shall be pure and bright,
Written in a sunbeam's light,
Uttered in the thunder's voice-

Hear it and quake, my foes, and ye, my friends, rejoice'j
For there shall live a spirit in that name,
Who breathes it forth shall breathe a fiery flame
Evermore proclaim'd aloud
In the council and the crowd
Strong to comfort and to save,

To cheer the faint, to steel the brave
Soul of the battle shout,
Rallying here and scattering there in rout.
But what strange cloud o'erhung my brow,
That I was blind till even now?
I saw it not, yet was it there,
That precious truth so heavenly faiTi
AU in vain did Love and Hope

Point me to this glorious scope.
Till another counsel came,
Muttered in my ear by shame.
Yes, Honour, unto thee
I bow my knee,
To redeem the foul disgrace
Lowering o'er my name and race:
Thy bidding have I done,
So be the Sire forgotten in the Son!"
Both Cooper and Lofft carried their Chartism into their h'terary
work. Ebenezer Jones (1820-1860) did so in a far less marked
degree ; and circumstances greatly curtailed his poetic work. So
cold was the reception of his Studies of Sensation and Event (1 843)
that he burned the poems he had written and devoted himself to
newspapers on topics which interested the radicals
articles in the
of the time. His volume is dedicated to the spirit of Shelley, not

to that of Keats ; but, though it is far too crude and immature to
resemble either poet closely, there is far more of Keats in it than
of Shelley. Jones's struggling painful life, his grinding toil, his
"lamentable" domestic relations, all plead for recognition as

generous as possible for the work he did in circumstances so
untoward. His youth when Studies of Sensation and Event
appeared is an excuse for many faults; and the manly strength
which he showed in other ways makes it probable that had he
lived longer, or rather, had he been in a position to use for
literature his forty years of life, he would have left a considerable
name. He who, toiling from the age of seventeen for twelve hours
daily for daily bread, nevertheless had the resolution to devote
part of the other twelve hours to the higher life of literature,
instead of contenting himself with sleeping through them, was
assuredlyno weakling. Some of his pieces, such as the Song of the

Kings of Gold and the Song of the Gold Getters, show how his soul
was wrung by the ethics of trade. Some others, in particular The
Face, deserve high praise as poetry. Yet on the whole the book
needs all the excuses that charity can plead and all the praise that
indulgence can bestow. For a heavy indictment might be framed
against it. The phrase, "studies of sensation," is well chosen;
and the sensations are often of a kind best passed over in silence.
Many of the pieces are morally unwholesome. The best that can
be said of them is that they are the voice of youthful defiance, and
that if Jones had been able to write in maturer years his native
strength and rectitude of purpose would have led him to a wiser
choice of theme. Certainly his life was not that of a decadent
but it is no matter for regret that he was unable to write more
poems of this fleshly sort
§ 6. The Celtic Revival.
But the nineteenth century witnessed a deeper sort of political

movement than that which manifested itself in Reform Bills and
People's Charters. It is emphatically the century of nationalism,
and the unification of Italy and the semi-disintegration of Austria-
Hungary are among the results; for obviously nationalism may,
according to circumstances, either be a force of union or a force
of disruption. In Britain this spirit has shown itself in a growing
consciousness of self on the part of the different races (partial
though the distinction is) of which the United Kingdom is com-
posed. literature, we know it as the Teutonic theory among
In
historians,and as the Celtic Revival among imaginative writers.
A good deal, perhaps more than enough, has been heard of
late years about the Celtic Revival. It has been mainly Irish,
though Scottish, Welsh and Manx Celts also have played their
part. In its wide diffusion it is of recent date; but before as well
as during the period with which we have to deal there were poets
of Celtic blood who, by the subjects they chose, or the qualities of
imagination they displayed, or in both ways, showed the influence
of the race to which they belonged. The Scottish Celt had
w. 23
through Macpherson's Ossian made his voice heard not in
England alone but through Europe; and much of the work of
Sir Walter Scott tended to his glorification. Macaulay long ago
pointed out the extraordinary result of this romantic presentation
of the Celtic character and of Celtic history, in that KiUiecrankie, a
victory of Highlands over Lowlands, has come to be regarded as
a national victory; and the poorer and more backward division of
the kingdom has been invested with such a glamour and charm of
romance that all the sympathies of the Lowland Scot are with
those against whom his fathers fought, and who, when they could,
drove his fathers' beeves to their mountain fastnesses. Lady
Charlotte Guest's translation of the Mabinogion (1838-1849) in
part did for theWelsh Celt what Ossian had done for the High-
lander. But Europe could not be captured a second time ; and
the very tenacity with which the Welshman has clung to his
native language, and his success in cultivating it, have disguised
from the English reader the real vigour of the Celtic spirit in the
principality. Matthew Arnold was right in pointing to Wales as
the true home of the Celtic genius, and in .fixing upon Welsh
institutions as its most perfect embodiment.
On the Study of Celtic Literature has done more
Arnold's essay
than anything else to render familiar the idea that there is such a
thing as the Celtic spirit, that this spirit shows itself markedly in
literature, and that it is widely different from the Teutonic spirit.
" Certainly," says Arnold, " the Jew —the Jew of ancient times at
least, —seemed a thousand degrees nearer than the Celt to us.
Puritanism had so assimilated Bible ideas and phraseology;

names like Ebenezer, and notions like that of hewing Agag in
pieces, .came so natural to us, that the sense of affinity between
the Teutonic and the Hebrew nature was quite strong a steady, ;
middle-class Anglo-Saxon much more imagined himself Ehud's

cousin than Ossian's." Then the "steady, middle-class Anglo-
Saxon" was assured that there was something in his neighbourhood
which he did not comprehend and which it was important for him
to comprehend, something which in certain respects was of a finer
temper than himself. The middle-class Anglo-Saxon is obstinate
enough in his own view of things which he rightly or wrongly
believes himself to understand; but he is extremely docile in

respect of things which he knows that he does not understand,
and among these things is literature. The middle-class Anglo-
Saxon has his own tastes. When Arnold wrote he still read and
liked Martin Tupper, because the Philistine in Tupper spoke to
the Philistine in himself; but when he was assured that it was bad
taste to like Tupper, he believed, obeyed and ceased to read.
The Celt on his part was ready enough to take himself
seriously. We have had Celtic twilights since then we have had;
—
more than hints that Shakespeare was a Celt or at least was good
enough to be one ; we have had demonstrations that nearly every-
thing worthy of the name of poetry in English is due to the Celtic
strain. It is the extreme opposite of the Teutonism of the
historical school of Freeman ; and probably both extremes are
about equally exaggerated and misleading. The fundamental

fact is that except in a few remote and isolated Welsh or Highland
or Irish valleys, all blood in these islands is mixed blood ; and the
qualities displayed by the race, in literature and in active life, are,
by all the laws of heredity, the result of the mixture. It is in the
highest degree probable that neither the native Britons nor the
Teutonic inva,ders, if they had remained pure, would have dis-
played the great qualities of the English race. But when we come
to disentangle the elements, and to label this Celtic and that
Teutonic, we on very doubtful ground. /It is said that a high
are
idealising spirit and a rich imaginative glow are marks of the Celt.
But Turner was the son of a London barber (who however
came from Devon), and his mother was a native of Islington. Yet
in the whole range of art there are no paintings more distinguished
for these qualities than his. In the case of one individual mere
birth-place counts for little. But when we observe similar gifts
manifested by Spenser, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Shelley and
Keats, the theory which makes those gifts peculiarly Celtic is surely
strained to the breaking. The Celt, again, is said to be gifted
with the power of seeing apocalyptic visions which are hid from
the Saxon. Blake was a Londoner. Possibly his blood was
mixed; but it would be interesting to learn where, among pure
Celts, the power is more strikingly developed than it is in him,
23—2
More generally, it is asserted that wherever there is mysticism we
may suspect the presence of the Celtic spirit. Now, since the
revival of romance, mysticism has been extremely widespread, and
the claim is therefore a large one. Carlyle, for example, shared
it ; and the Celtic school would ascribe it to the Celtic blood in
his veins. But Carlyle's mysticism was, if not derived from, at

least strongly influenced by, the Germans. Where, then, did the
Germans get theirs ? Was Novalis a Celt ? And if all the higher
and more ethereal qualities of English poetry are due to the Celtic
strain, whence come the more ethereal qualities in the poetry of
Goethe, who is surely not wholly mundane ? Above all, why is it

that German poetry, which is unquestionably Teutonic, is richer
in those ethereal qualities than French poetry, which has at least
more of the Celtic element than German ?
The more extravagant claims of the eulogists of the Celtic
spirit are not borne out by the work of those who are specially
claitned as Celtic poets. Some of that work is highly poetical,
much of it is respectable, but none of it is absolutely first-rate.
None of it, for example, is equal to the best of Tennyson, who is
as markedly Teutonic as Mangan is Celtic.
Ireland had in the eighteenth century contributed a number

of great writers to the national literature, though some of them,
like Swift, were rather Irish by the accident of birth than in any
deeper sense. But the Irish writers, unlike their Scottish brethren,
had usually been absorbed in the greater mass of the English. It
was not merely that there was no distinctive language or cultivated
dialect to mark them off as Lowland Scotch did: but they seemed
also to drop many of their national qualities in writing for an
English public. We detect Irish characteristics in the ready and
brilliant wit of Sheridan, in the genial humour of Goldsmith and
in the fervour and passion of Burke; yet these writers are not
strongly national in the sense in which Burns and Scott are so.
Still, to a certain degree Ireland and Irish life already enjoyed that
citizenship of literature which Scott is said to have conferred on
Scotland. The of Miss Edgeworth are Irish in every sense
tales
of the word. But the brilliant success of the Waverley Novels

brought home to men more fully the possibilities opened up by the
THE MINOR POETS : EARLIER PERIOD 357
delineation of national character ; and Charles Lever in his lively

stories painted certain types of Irishmen, not indeed with the
and verve.
insight of a Scott, but at least with a great deal of dash
He, together with Samuel Lever, William Maginn, Father Prout,
Crofton Croker, William Carleton and Gerald Griffin, gave a
noticeable Irish flavour to the fiction of the period ; and though
most of them wrote verse with some degree of success, it is mainly
as writers of prose fiction that they must be judged.
What we have to consider here, however, is the Irish element,
not in prose, but in verse. It has been the fashion of late to
insist much, and not without exaggeration, on this Irish element.
A dispassionate review seems to lead to the conclusion, first, that

none of the writers is of the highest power ; and secondly, that in
some cases, notwithstanding Irish birth, Irish characteristics aire
not very conspicuous. In the early part of last century Thomas
Moore was considered a great poet, and probably the Irish
Melodies would have been named as the best gift of Ireland to
England. Now would seem but a poor compliment to any
it
race to say that Moore's thin tinkle was its characteristic note in
poetry. A little later George Darley showed both a higher poetic
giftand more true Celtic fervour, though he never won a tithe of
Moore's fame. Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1886), well
known as Archbishop of Dublin and as the author of some very
bright and interesting books on the study of the EngUsh language,
was another writer of verse who was of Irish birth. But there is
nothing great in Trench's poetry, nor is there much that is speci-
fically Irish. It is the verse of an accomplished man, rather than
of one inspired, and the model on which it is framed is supplied
by Wordsworth. The most individual and characteristic thing in it
is that vein of pensive melancholy which fits the "large melancholy

of earnestness and capacity for woe
face, full that Caroline Fox
''
saw. —
But Tennyson and Arnold to name only contemporaries
show that this is not an exclusively Celtic gift.
What has been said of Trench may be repeated of 'Sir Aubrey
de Vere, elsewhere noticed as a dramatist. Though Irish by birth
he was of English ancestry, and while he always retained a faithful
love of his native country, his ideals were essentially English. He
went to English history for the subject of his greatest drama, and
in the very un-Irish Wordsworth he found the model for his non-
dramatic verse. So too Aubrey de Vera the younger, in spite of
his Irish themes, is essentially a Wordsworthian. He belongs
moreover, as does also Sir Samuel Ferguson, mainly to the^ later
period. There remains in the early part of the Victorian era only
one figure rising above the mass of inferior versifiers, and at the
same time displaying in his verse genuinely Irish characteristics.
This is James Clarence Mangan (1803- 1849), whose harassed life
and pathetic death add to the interest of his intrinsically interesting
poetry. Mangan lived in poverty and toil so much is certain, even
:
if we hesitate to accept his own statement that for seven years he

laboured as a copyist eighteen hours a day. A few years before the
close of his life he found more congenial employment in the library
of Trinity College, Dublin. By that time, however, he was a victim
of the opium habit; and in spite of his struggles he remained in
bondage to it or to alcohol till his death. The circumstances of his
life are Mangan's best excuse. A highly-gifted and sensitive man,
with the artistic temperament abnormally developed, was under no
common temptation to seek such a refuge from his miseries. The
result was the usual one. "No purer and more benignant spirit,"
says his friend, John Mitchel, "ever alighted upon earth; no

more abandoned wretch ever found earth a purgatory and a hell.
There were... two Mangans one well known to the Muses, the
:
other to the police; one soared through the empyrean and sought
the stars, the other lay too often in the gutters of Peter Street and
Bride Street^." Such a man was foredoomed to an early death.
Mangan died in 1849 in a hospital, whither he had been removed
suffering from cholera.
The nationality of the author is written large on the face of
Mangan's works. He attached himself to the Young Ireland
party and wrote patriotic songs for it. He translated, adapted or
imitated the relics of Erse poetry ; although till near the close of
his life his knowledge of the language appears to have been
superficial. His best-known piece. My Dark Rosaleen, a love-song
' Mr D. J. O'Donoghue, however, remarks in a note that Mitchel here
exaggerates, and adds that Mangan's weaknesses were not publicly known.
THE MINOR POETS : EARLIER PERIOD 3S9
allegorising the poet's passion for his country, is one of those

translations from the Irish, and doubtless its excellence is the
greater because of the fervour with which Mangan realised the
feeling of the original. The fine Lament for the Princes of Tyrone
and Tj/rconnel, also a translation, draws its inspiration from the
same source ; and so do some of the best of his original poems,
for example, the admirable Soul and Country, a piece which has a
fire, intensity and concentration not easily to be surpassed. And
yet one of Mangan's editors^ calls attention to the strange fact
that " his genius is happier on Saxon than on Celtic ground."
For Mangan was among those who felt the influence of German
literature; and he translated, or pretended to translate, not only
from Erse, but from the Oriental languages, German, Welsh,
Danish, Frisian, Swedish, Spanish and Bohemian ; and the
general level of his German translations is at least as high as that
of his versions from the Erse, though perhaps there are two or
three pieces in the latter class superior to anything in the former.
Nothing however among the Irish poems surpasses, if indeed any-
thing equals, the best of the Oriental section. The Karamanian
Exile with its daring imagination, its fine swinging rhythm, its
skilful use of the proper name and of Mangan's favourite device of

repetition.
" I see thee ever in my dreams,

Karaman
Thy hundred hills, thy thousand streams,
Karaman, O Karaman !
As when thy gold-bright morning gleams,

As when the deepening sunset seams
With lines of light thy hills and streams,
Karaman !
So thou loomest on my dreams,

Karaman
On all my dreams, my homesick dreams,
Karaman, O Karaman !
This beautiful poem, ringing in the ears of the American,
J. R, Randall, led, on the occasion of the occupation of Baltimore

by Northern troops, to his writing the stirring song, Maryland,
* Miss Guiney.
my Maryland. The repetition of the refrain is a favourite device
of Mangan's. was consciously imitated by Poe from
Whether it
Mangan or by Mangan from Poe, or whether its presence in

both is just a coincidence due to kinship of genius, cannot be
determined.
was inevitable that a poet with such a history as Mangan's
It
should be unequal. Much that he has written is of little or no
value; a considerable portion even of his Selected Poems might
well be spared. But at his best he rises high. Under favourable
circumstances he would have left a great name in literature;
as it is, he be remembered only by a few pieces which

is likely to
well deserve, and which it may be hoped will receive more
frequently in the future than they have received in the past, a
place in the anthologies.
§ 7. The Poetesses.
One of the features of the nineteenth century is a development

both in the quantity and in the quality of the verse written by
women which is sufificiently remarkable to call for special notice.
In earlier times the verse —and for that matter the prose too —written
by women was very scanty, and it was often published furtively.
The seventeenth century, it is true, boasted its " matchless Orinda,"

who made no secret of her productions but the far more highly- ;
gifted group of Scottish songstresses, Lady Nairne and the

authoresses of the two versions of The Flowers of the Forest, con-
cealed the fact of their authorship as if it had been a crime. They
listened demurely to the singing of their own songs, and to the
conjectures of the company as to the authorship of the beautiful
words. But sentiment changed with time ; and their successors,
Elizabeth Browning and Christina Rossetti, women no less sensitive
than they, took with just pride their share of literary fame.
Edward FitzGerald thought that women in literature were only
doing what men could do much better, while they were leaving
undone what men could only do worse than they, or else could not
do at all. He was certainly so far right that no woman hitherto has
written poetry of the highest kind, and that none except Sappho
(whose achievement is vouched for by the judgment of a critical
race) is entitled to a place among the giants, while even she can
hardly be classed among the gods of song. But nevertheless the
work of the Scottish poetesses alone goes far to answer FitzGerald.
Though there are grander instruments of poetry than Scottish
song, yet in that Burns breathed the music of his soul ; and a
,
number of the songs written by women rival the best of his.

Auld Robin Gray, The Land d the Leal, The Auld House and
Caller Herriri, are songs which have gained and which will retain
as firm a hold on the affections of the Scottish people as John
Anderson and Bonnie Doon.
It was a Scottish songstress too, Joanna Baillie, who, towards
the close of the eighteenth century, took the lead among what we
may call the professional poetesses. Her plays were extrava-
gantly praised by Scottand by John Wilson ; and they have been
described, in a phrase which may provoke a smile, as the best
ever written by a woman. In truth they are somewhat common-
place productions; but the success and fame won by Miss Baillie,
evanescent though they have proved, were among the influences
which encouraged women to make literature their profession.
She was a pioneer of the poetesses, just as Fanny Burney was a
pioneer of the novelists.
Few of Miss Baillie's successors were ambitious enough to
follow her footsteps in the attempt to revive the Shakespearean
drama, and none of those who did so attained her measure of
success. remembered as the writer of Our Village,
Miss Mitford is
not as the authoress of The Foscari and oi Julian. Sarah Flower

Adams (1805-1848) will more probably live as a writer of hymns,
and especially of the beautiful " Nearer, my God, to Thee," than
as the authoress of the Isabella Harwood
drama, Vivia Perfeiua.
(1840-1888), who wrote under pseudonym of Rose Neil, is
the
not likely to be long remembered; but it was she who made
the most persistent effort to revive the poetical drama. More
noteworthy as a dramatist, and in many other ways, was Fanny
Kemble (1809-1893), who, as a grand-niece of the great Mrs
Siddons, had a kind of hereditary right to work for the theatre.
Herself a distinguished actress, Fanny Kemble is best remem-
bered for her appearances on the stage and her readings, and
above all for her chequered and interesting life, which yielded
those racy journals and volumes of reminiscences aptly charac-
terised by Sir F. B. Head as " full of cleverness, talent, simple-
heartedness, nature and nakedness^" Nevertheless, she deserves
a place in the history of dramatic literature and- of poetry as weU.
Her Francis the First, written when she was seventeen, is not
only a marvellous production for a girl of her years, but a good
one in itself Few plays of that period vie with it in sustained
interest; and not the least surprising fact about it is that it is
faulty rather from superabundance of energy than from poverty or

thinness. In her English Tragedy there is less advance than
might have been expected from her greater maturity when it
was written ; but it is a common enough experience that the

minds of those who show precocious power early lose the capacity
of growth. Yet An English Tragedy is a very creditable work.
The story, though an unpleasant one, is well told. The characters
have not perhaps those fine shades which indicate genius for
dramatic art, but they are happily conceived and consistently
drawn.
Fanny Kemble wrote poems as well as plays, and in successive
volumes dated 1844, 1866 and 1883, she poured out her soul in
verse. As a poetess she shows considerable accomplishment, and
a few of her sonnets in particular are of high quality and finish.
Yet the poetry as a whole is a little superficial, and its value
would be slight were it not that the vein of naturalness which
marks th& Journals runs through the verse as well.
The marriages of literary women have frequently been unhappy.
The three greatest in English literature, Mrs Browning, Charlotte
Bronte and George Eliot, have indeed been otherwise. But Caroline
Sheridan had bitter cause to rue that she ever changed that name
for the name of Norton Fanny Kemble was
; driven to seek divorce
from her American husband, Pierce Butler; and the two poetesses
who in the middle period of the nineteenth century were the
poetic oracles of the middle class of culture were both unhappy
in their domestic lives. One of these, Felicia Dorothea Hemans
' Memoirs ofJohn Murray, ii. 404.
(1793-1835), is best known by the name which became hers

by marriage; the other, Letitia Elizabeth Landon (i 802-1 838),
remains known by that which she surrendered on a union still
more unhappy than the marriage of Mrs Hemans. Her death
from poison at Cape Coast Castle, where her husband was
governor, remains to this day unexplained. Her poetry would be
hardly worth mentioning but for its former fame. She wrote
with something that seemed like energy and spirit, and she was
"romantic" as those are who neither share nor can comprehend
the spirit of Coleridge and of Keats; but she has left nothing
that any human being can now be the richer for remembering.
Wordsworth wrote some well-known verses on the death of
Hogg, where, after naming the poet whose death was the occasion
of his writing, he calls upon the reader not to sigh for him, but to
"Mourn lather for that holy Spirit,

Sweet as the spring, as ocean deep
For Her who, ere her summer faded,
Has sunk into a breathless sleep."
No poet of Wordsworth's calibre would now refer to Mrs Hemans

in such terms ; no one with any critical faculty would compare
her to the ocean for depth. It is on the contrary a rather super-
ficial sentimentality which is the worst fault of her verse. But if
she was once extravagantly praised she is now unduly depreciated;
and for that reason it is necessary to insist that the vein of her
poetry was genuine though somewhat thin. Weak in thought,
verbose in style, in her longer pieces deficient in constructive
power, she nevertheless had at her best the unmistakable lyrical
touch. The Graves of a Household is pathetic; in England's
Dead and The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers there mingles with
the sentiment a note of heroism. We may condemn the popular
tastewhich was insensible to the weakness and diffuseness of
Mrs Hemans's work; but the popular instinct, in fastening upon
such pieces as these, was sound.
Among the minor songstresses of the time were three who had
a quasi-hereditary right to a place in literature, like that which Fanny
Kemble had to a place on the stage; and, like her, they vindicated
their right by their performances. The eldest of the three, Sara

Coleridge (1802-1852) shared with her brother Hartley the
inheritance of their father's wonderful intellectual and imaginative
gifts. Richard Garnett goes so far as to pronounce hers, " after
George Eliot's... the most powerful female mind which has as yet
addressed itself to English literature'." This is a judgment whose
soundness can neither be proved nor disproved; but when we
remember the two Brontes, it is at least doubtful. There can
however be no doubt that Sara Coleridge was a highly gifted
woman. She proved that she possessed considerable learning by
translating, at the age of twenty, DobrizhofTer's Account of the
Abipones ; and both learning and acuteness were required for the
work of editing her father's literary remains, a task to which she
succeeded on the death of her cousin and husband Henry Nelson
Coleridge in 1843. She had helped in the work during her
husband's lifetime too, and probably it was in part the reason for
the fact that her only original contribution to English literature is
Phantasmion (1837), a fairy tale of mingled prose and verse, the

lyrical snatches of which awaken regret that their author wrote so
little.
The other two of the trio, Helen Sheridan, afterwards Lady
Dufferin (1807-1867), and Caroline Sheridan, afterwards the Hon.

Mrs Norton (1808-1877), were grand-daughters of Richard
Brinsley Sheridan. These two sisters united in an extraordinary
degree the charms of person and of intellect. They and another
sister, who became Duchess of Somerset, were known for their
beauty as " the three Graces,'' and their writings sufficiently attest
their intellect. Lady Dufferin wrote little in comparison with her

younger sister, probably because she had never that need to write
which drove the other on. What she did write suggests also that
she may have been by nature less energetic than Mrs Norton.
Her poems were collected and published in 1894 by her son, the
late Marquis of Dufferin ; but two or three of them, in particular
the Lavient of the Irish Emigrant, had before attained wide
popularity as songs. Her poetic style is purer and less rhetorical
than that of her sister but it has also less rush and energy.
;
Mrs Norton, who, only a few months before her death, became
* Poets and Poetry of the XIX Century,
the wife of the learned and accomplished Sir William Stirling-

Maxwell, was forced to write systematically and with serious
purpose ; for she won by her pen the means of life. Under this
stimulus she poured out a copious stream both of prose and of
verse ; but it is possible that, in the long run, her name wUl be
remembered not so much for anything she wrote herself as for the
fact that part of her unhappy story forms the ground-work of
George Meredith's Diana of the Crossways. Her novels are of

little merit, and her verse is variable. Her longer works are all
beaten out rather thin, and the earlier ones especially are tainted
with the sentimentality which appealed to the taste of that time.
At a later date she turned to those social problems which were
then becoming popular. But she is at her best in ballads and
occasional poems, where her high spirit and chivalrous feeHng
teU. Bingen onRhine is not unworthy of its popularity.
the
In an article in The Quarterly Review for September, 1840,
there were grouped together a number of poetesses, including
among others Elizabeth Barrett, Mrs Norton and Sara Coleridge.
Along with their poems the writer noticed a sUm anonymous
volume entitled IX Poems by V, which he greeted with the
emphatic compliment, jScua /»«', oAAa poSo. This praise was
echoed a few years afterwards by one of the finest and most
sensitive of critics, Dr John Brown. The writer of the poems
was Mrs Archer Clive (1801-1873). She gradually added to
her small handful of poems, but the whole volume of her verse
is very slender. Like so many other female writers, she also
essayed prose fiction and in Paul Ferroll (1855) did work which
;
is scarcely surpassed by more than three or four of them. In

poetry too she deserved the praises of the reviewers ; and, though
she has never become popular, she is much superior to not a few
of the poets and poetesses whose names are stiQ famUiar. There
is masculine force and a rare dignity of thought and expression
in The Grave and in Hearts Ease and in The Queen's Ball.
Possibly thereis also something morbid. Mrs Clive is at least
habitually gloomy; but then she is never commonplace, and
there is always meaning in her gloom. She is said to have" been
personally the very reverse of her poems: "There is no resisting,"
says Miss Mitford, "the contagious laughter of those dancing
eyes." It is the other side of the familiar story of the melancholy
clown.
These female writers have been grouped together partly by
reason of their sex. The emergence of woman into literature is
practically an occurrence of the nineteenth century, and it is

sufficiently important to demand special recognition. But besides,
it is a fact that all of them, with the possible exception of Mrs
Hemans and L. E. Landon, who died early in the period, illus-
trate the transition. On the one hand they point to the past : as
a rule they are more Byronic than the poets. On the other hand,
perhaps because of their sex, they show a remarkable sensitiveness
to new influences. The only male writer who does so in equal or
greater degree is Lytton.
Accomplished as these women were, pleasant as much of their
verseand thoughtful as some of it is, the view taken of the work
of women in poetry must depend mainly upon the opinion which
may be formed with respect to two poetesses of a larger growth,
namely, Mrs Browning and Christina Rossetti, the latter of whom
belongs to the later part of our period.
The life of Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861) was uneventful,
"a bird in a cage," she said, "would have as good a story."
After the injury to her spine which crippled her at fifteen, for
many years she never left her couch, and for the whole of her life
she was to the last degree fragile and delicate. Her marriage
with Robert Browning in 1846, their settlement at Florence for
the sake of Mrs Browning's and her
health, the birth of a son,
death in 1861, are all there is But the very absence of
to record.
incident is instructive here. The young poet of The Batik of
Marathon, which was printed for private circulation before she
had left the schoolroom, and of An Essay on Mind, which was
published in 1826, was precocious. She had read widely for her
years, and at the age of eight had acquired some knowledge of
Homer in the original. At a later time she read Plato in the original
and all the Greek poets, as well as the whole Bible in Hebrew.
Her translation of Prometheus Bound attests her scholarship.
But she was a recluse who saw nobody beyond the domestic
circle, except one or two very intimate friends ; and the sole
influence in the formation of her mind, outside the family, was
that of the blind scholar to whom she owed her knowledge of
Greek. A person so situated —a girl too —was not likely to
initiate any new movement ; she was rather likely to look farther
back than most of her contemporaries.
And this is just what Elizabeth Barrett did. One influence
upon her, as we should expect, is that of Byron. The volume
named from the Essay on Mind contained stanzas on his
death, and certain other stanzas " occasioned by a passage in
Mr Emerson's which related to him. It also contained a
journal,"
poem The Dream, which was modelled with a child-like
entitled
naivety on a greater and more famous Dream. But notwithstanding
this, there is really nothing of the Byronic spirit here. Far more
significant is the title-poem, An Essay on Mind, the very name of
which is an imitation of Pope. So too, as far as the author's

power went, is the treatment; and she long retained Pope's
fondness for antitheses, though she had not his skill in framing
them. This discipleship serves to remind us of the fact that the
controversy as to the merits of Pope, in which Bowles was the
protagonist on one side and Byron on the other, was but newly
ended, and that there were still here and there a few, like Miss
Barrett, secluded by fortune or by inclination, who looked back
for their models to the eighteenth century. Another small group
of poems appeared in 1833, and then two more important publi-
cations. The Seraphim, and other Poems (1838) and Poems (1844).
The last-named volume brings us to the point where the influence
of Robert Browning begins.
The Seraphim is correctly described by the author as "a
dramatic lyric rather than a lyrical drama." The subject, a
dialogue between two seraphs hovering over Calvary at the
crucifixion, ischosen with more daring than wisdom. The poem,
rather more "than a thousand lines long, is in a variety of lyrical
metres, some of them of an exceedingly trying and difficult kind.
It was a sort of work for which Miss Barrett was ill suited, for she
was always prone to' lapse into faults of rhyme and rhythm, and
always apt, even in simple poems, to be lengthy. Such faults are
Still more ambitious and far more successful Drama
present in the
of Exile, the and longest of the poems of 1844. Here there
first
are passages of powerful thought, intense feeling and vivid con-

ception, —
and yet in the very opening song of Lucifer, where a
glaring fault is least pardonable, we meet with the intolerable
rhyme of " strangles and " angels/' and a little further on with "its
''
fellow in vileness, " raiment " and " lament." So it is always in

Mrs Browning. She is one of the most irregular of writers.
Side by side with beautiful poetry we find commonplace
thought, verbose diction, inharmonious verse. Such unhappy
conjunctions are illustrated even in the shorter poems of those
early volumes. In T}ie Poet's Vow we have beautiful things
like
"His changing love —with stars above,

His pride —with graves below,"
and
"The old eyes searching, dim with life,
The young ones dim with death."
And along with these we have, again conspicuously placed at

the end,
"Hold it in thy constant ken
That God's own unity compresses
(One into one) the human many,
And that his everlastingness is
The bond which is not loosed by any."
Most of the characteristics of Mrs Browning are present in

those early volumes. Her religious feeling is manifest every-
where, and especially in the very subjects of the two most
ambitious poems. Some of the class who consider such a thing
as religion too good for use except on Sundays, even thought that
this feeling was made too prominent. The romantic spirit inspires
The Romauntof Margret, The Romaunt of the Page, The Lay of the
Brown Rosary, Lady Geraldine's Courtship and Bertha in the
Lane. Her deep social sympathies find voice in The Cry of the
Children and The Cry of the Human ; and the special emotions of
her own art are in The Poets Vow, A Vision of Poets and Lady
Geraldin^s Courtship, — the last noteworthy as containing her
first published praise of Robert Browning. But perhaps the
most perfect piece those two volumes contained was Camper's

Grave.
No student of Mrs Browning, remembering the Sonnetsfrom the
Portuguese, can doubt that the influence which Browning brought
into her life was on the whole good ; but probably few who care-
fully compare her earlier with her later work will question that
along with the good there was an element of evil. Mrs Browning
never excelled in long compositions of complex structure; but her
ambition disposed her from the first to make the attempt, and
Browning strengthened the inclination. She was thoroughly
feminine ; but under the impulse from him she unconsciously
adopted a more masculine tone. She imagined herself a thinker;
and in the attempt to translate her feeling into
in reality sYiefelt,
thought she fell into numerous mistakes. She is at her best when
she gives free play to her emotions, and it is only then that she
attains felicity of style. She does so in the pathetic Camper's
Grave; she does it sometimes in the uneven but still beautiful
Cry of the Children ; she does it again in Bertha in the Lane.
Mrs Browning's first publication after her marriage was the
wonderful Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), her greatest work
and her best title to the rank of premier English poetess. They
are not only a great but a unique collection of poems. " Good as
they are, these sonnets have neither massiveness and subtlety of
thought on the one hand, nor melody and charm on the other,
sufficient to secure a place beside the greatest poetry. But they
are the genuine utterance of a woman's heart, at once humbled
and exalted by love ; and in this respect they are unique. The
woman's passion, from the woman's point of view, has seldom
found expression at and this particular aspect of
all in literature,
it never. Hence, whilewould be too much to say that these

it
sonnets are, as pieces of poetry, equal to the sonnets of Wordsworth

or of Milton, it is not so unreasonable to question whether their
removal would not leave a more irreparable gap in literature."
The sonnet suitedMrs Browning's genius well, for the same
.
reason that it suited Wordsworth's. Her besetting sin was diffuse-

and the
ness, sonnet forced upon her concentratioh and selection.
Even her best pieces in freer forms are marred by excessive
w. 24
length. The Cry of the Children, The Lay of the Brown Rosary
and The Rhyme of the Duchess May would all be better if they
were shorter. Lady Geraldinis Courtship "a sort of Lord of —
—
Burleigh from the other side " cries aloud for condensation. In
the sonnet, with its rigid limit to fourteen lines, there was no
choice concentration was imperative.
: And hence we have such
faultless pieces as A Soul's Expression, where there is not a word
too much nor a word wrong. As a rule in Mrs Browning's

works we have to pardon the faults in consideration of the
beauties.
Casa Guidi Windows (1851) followed the Sonnets from the
Portuguese, and this in turn was followed by Aurora Leigh (1857).
Poems before Congress (i860) was the last volume published during
Mrs Browning's life; and the posthumous Last Poems (1862)
gathered up the remaining fragments of her verse.
Two of these volumes, Casa Guidi Windows and Poems
before Congress, are inspired by Italy. Her residence in that
country naturally gave her an interest in its condition and
prospects, which was deepened by the influence of her husband.
But the choice of subject was for Mrs Browning unfortunate.
Casa Guidi Windows is long and diffuse. The writer speaks
disparagingly of Byron as " not the best kind of second " in the
grades of poets; but the passages in his poerris which were
inspired by Italy have a far clearer and more sonorous ring than
Mrs Browning's.
The ambitious metrical romance of Aurora Leigh suffers, like
much of Mrs Browning's poetry besides, from excessive length.
He who has read it once shrinks from travelling again through its
many flats of commonplace. As a poem which dealt with questions
of the day, as the work of one of the most prominent writers of the
time, it was read when it was new. But one of that class of
it is
poems which after times are content to talk about and take as
read. Its length saves it from complete oblivion ; but that same
length hinders it from reaching the heart. And yet there are
beautiful oases of poetry in Aurora Leigh, lively descriptions,
wise maxims, clear-cut phrases, telling sarcasms. Few have dealt
more justly and appreciatively than Mrs Browning with English
landscape. Nowhere is its character more tersely expressed than

in the simple words,
"The ground's most gentle dimplement

(As if God's finger touched but did not press
In making England)."
She is sensible of what it lacks.
"All the fields

Are tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like
The hills are crumpled plains, the plains parterres.
The trees, round, woolly, ready to be clipped.
And if you seek for any wilderness
You find, at best, a park. A nature tamed
And grown domestic like a barn-door fowl."
But on the other hand the passage which immediately follows

corrects the injustice which this, if it stood alone, would do, and
proves the writer to have been equally sensible of the extreme
beauty of English scenery.
In spite of its frequent flatness probably none of Mrs Browning's
longer poems contains so great a proportion of memorable phrases
as Aurora Leigh. There are striking images and comparisons :
"Those hot fire-seeds of creation held

In Jove's clenched palm before the worlds were sown";
"Life, struck sharp on death.
Makes awful lightning "
"Young
As Eve with nature's daybreak on her face."
There are paradoxes conveying truth : fathers love " not as wisely,
since less fooUshly " than mothers. There are pungent and witty
sayings
"We are of one flesh, after all,
And need one flannel (with a proper sense

Of difference in the quality)."
It is worth dweUing upon such lines and phrases in

JVlrs Browning's case more than in the case of most poets, for
they represent that in which she
is weakest. She has both fervid
emotion and intellectual abundance, but she is deficient in art
She is far too expansive. She will not restrain herself, select or
24—2
condense. She was prone to this error from the first ; and
unfortunately the influence of Browning tended to foster rather
than to check it. He too suffers from the same mistake. Most
of his long poems are too long. But his intellectual vigour is
sufficient, not to make the fault a merit, but to make it com-

paratively unimportant. It is not so in Mrs Browning's case.
Though she is vigorous, she is far less vigorous than her husband
though she is no mere imitator, she has not his unsurpassed
originality. Some of Browning's thoughts are to be found no-
where except in ; many more are nowhere else so powerfully
him
expressed. Mrs Browning's were the thoughts of her own time,
and people will be increasingly prone to turn from her diffuse
expression of them to some more concentrated presentation. Her
memory is safe by reason of the Sonnets from t/ie Portuguese,' sach
a beautiful piece of pathos as A Child's Grave at Florence, and
such a spirited romance as The Rhyme of the Duchess May. But
her poems will be severely weeded, and her ultimate place will
probably be less lofty than that which her contemporaries were
disposed to claim for her.
There remains to notice one other female writer who, though
best known for her prose, had the capacity to win very high
distinction in poetry. Emily Bronte rarely misses the poetic note,
and her verse, if sometimes rough, is nearly always inspired. In
the volume of Poems: by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell{x%ifi\
little
only the pieces by Ellis were, as Charlotte Bronte frankly admitted,

worthy of that notice which neither they nor the others received.
But, neglected as they were, the poems of Emily Bronte bear the
stamp of genius even more unmistakably than Wuthering Heights,
and the best of them are far more satisfying than it. Emily Bronte
has a strength, a reach of thought and an austerity of imagination

which lift her very near the level of the greatest of her contem-
poraries. She has not volume and she sometimes not always —
lacks polish ; but nothing else is wanting. Such pieces as " The
linnet in the rocky dells," Often Rebuked, Remembrance and The
Old Stoic are great poetry. The noble Last Lines may be quoted;
for they are the best memorial we possess of the dauntless spirit
of their author:
"No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And futh shines equal, arming me from fear.
O God within my breast.

Almighty, ever-present Deity I
Life —that in me has rest,
As I —undying Life—have power in thee I
Vain are the thousand creeds

That move men's hearts: unalterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.
To waken doubt in one

Holding so fast by thine infinity;
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of immortality.
With wide-embracing love

Thy spirit animates eternal years.
Pervades and broods above.
Charges, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.
Though earth and man were gone.

And stars and universes cease to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void

Thou Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed."
CHAPTER IV
TENNYSON
The career of Tennyson has already been traced down to the
issue of the two volumes of poetry His subsequent life
in 1842.
was altogether uneventful; for he devoted himself with unswerving
persistence and industry to the art of poetry, and he found no
disturbing circumstances to turn him from his task. He lived .
retiredand solitary; but yet it would be a profound mistake to

regard him as a mere recluse, pursuing art for art's sakg alone, and
indifferent to the life of the world a,rpund him, of his own nation,
or of those among whom his lot was cast. In respect of his own
immediate neighbours, he was in later lifeômething of a hermit.
He rarely sought their society, and his gruff manner did not
encourage familiarity. The very distinction of his air and appear-
ance kept men aloof even while it attracted them. The man who
might have written the Iliad was a person too awe-inspiring to be
approached without encouragement ; and from Tennyson the
encouragement did not come. Nevertheless, Tennyson's poems
work of a iiian keenly alive to evgiy^ human iiiterest In
are, the
no other poet is the thought of the agejnore faithfully mirrored;

and the poems in dialect are sufficient proof of interest in the
humbler aspects and phases of life. It is evident that in youth
Tennyson had listened with an acute ear to the speech of the
plain men around him, and had observed their manners and
character with a penetrating eye. If he did not add much in later
years to such stores of knowledge, he at least preserved with a
tenacious memory what he had before accumulated.
TENNYSON 375
With respect to the wider concerns of human society, Tenny-

son's interest never declined, but rather grew almost to the end.
He was among the most patriotic of poets, and he lost no
opportunity of singing__ê glories of England, whether for her
politicaTitaBility or for her renown in arms. Every political change,
every'gfeat national event, was noted by him, and often such events
became the theme of his verse. The revolutionary year 1848,
the coup diktat in France, the rumours of a French invasion, the
question of the sufiSciency of the fleet, the .death of Wellington,
the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, have all left their mark
on his poetry. But this by no means measures the full range of
his interests. Readers of In Memoriam know how earnestly the
attempt is jnade to reconcilejhe «:iancejwhich^he had studie.d so
deeply with the religion which many believed to be undermined
by~itr Readers of Locksley Haiti Sixty Years After \n<ys how
passionately he protested agaiijgtthe merelyjffi^fiiiaL interpretation
of the aniverse.
Tennyson ranks high among the .leajflied poets; and one of the
most remarkable features of. his verse is the union in it of two
sortsoflearning. He is learned in his own art. Coleridge declared,
with respect to the early poems, that Tennyson had "''begun to write
verse before he well knew what metre was^"; but he studied till
he became one of the subtlest metrists who have ever handled the
English language. He is less enchanting than Coleridge himself or
than Keats; but probably no one except Milton has surpassed
him in the conscious art of verse-construction. He is learned also
in the works of other poets. His verse is full of haunting sugges-
tions of his predecessors in Greek and Latin, Italian and English;
so full that if we dwell upon this aspect of his work exclusively we
are tempted to deny him the quality of originality. Ample justice
has been done to this side of Tennyson's learning ; indeed it has
been exaggerated, and echoes have been heard and reminiscences
suggested in many cases where there is probably no connexion
except that which must always bind the thought of one mind to
the thought of another. But justice has not been done to the
other side ; and the full truth is not told about him till it is said
1 Tabk Talk.
3/6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
that he studied almost as deeply the thought, the aspirations and

the needs of his own day, and applied all the lore of his art to
these. has been objected against the Idylls of the King that
It
they are the Arthurian legends expressed in the language and

adapted to the sentiment of the nineteenth century ; and whether
thisbe a fault or not, the statement is true. When Tennyson goes
back to the Middle Ages he usually does so in obedience to a
fashion of the time, rather than because his imagination naturally
leads him thither ; and so little is he at home in those ages that
even his imagination does not save him from occasional absurdity.
In he made it the great end of his art to express the modern
short,
spirit,and the delineation of other times only a means to that end.
And this is one great reason for his popularity. Every age is
primarily interested in itself; and Tennyson had things to say
which went home alike to the statesman of his time, to the man
of science, to the man who doubted and to the man who believed.
In the traces of this learning we read the real history of
Tennyson's life. After he left Cambridge almost its only land-
marks are the dates of the publication of his books. Besides these
the sole points worth mentioning are his accession to the laureate-
ship in 1850, his marriage in the same year and his elevation to
the peerage in 1884. His acceptance of a title was the subject of
some criticism ; and it is true enough that no peerage could add
to the dignity of Alfred Tennyson. Yet public as well as private
reasons could be given in favour of the poet's decision. Public
honours do encourage service in and
art as well as in other things;
England has been only too little pirone to bestow them. Peerages
had been conferred plentifully for political reasons, or on success-
ful brewers for distinction in the art of accumulating money ; but
the countrymen of Shakespeare and of Milton had never yet
bestowed suchhonour on any man merely because he
an
happened to man of letters. Macaulay's case is no
be a great
exception; for he was a politician as well as a historian, and it
may be doubted whether he would not have passed unnoticed, like
Gibbon, had his parliamentary career been as undistinguished «s
that of the latter. Tennyson therefore might well have argued
that it was good for his countrymen to learn to think that the
TENNYSON 377
highest honours ought to be bestowed on the highest talents and

services, in whatever field they might be displayed. Whether he
did argue so or not, his acceptance of the peerage was itself of the
nature of a public service.
The modern spirit grew stronger in Tennyson as the years
passed. Much of the early verse might belong to any age, and
some of it really breathesJhe spirit of the past : there is more of
liiedisevalism in The Lady of Shalott than in all the Idylls of t%e
King. But after i842__tlm_ig. rare;^ TenxiysQj}, is the poet of.,his
ownlime. The change is manifest in The Princess (1847). This

is The first long poem its author had produced, and though it
ranks low among his works, in several respects it is worthy of

attention. It is in a tone between jest and earnest of which the
examples are rare ; it is an attempt to deal in verse with a great
modern problem; and it affords the earliest evidence of that
deficiency in power of construction which mars all Tennyson's'
more ambitious poems.
The questions of the proper position of women in society, the
functions they might legitimately and usefully en3eavour lo
discharge in additlonTo" those "oT'the fariJily^ which obviously fall
to them, and the education which would fit them for' those
functions, were just ^beginning to be agitated in England. They
areTKfbfispring of that .democratic development which had .won
its earliest triumphs a few years before; and they received point
from that utilitarian doctrine which taught that in striking the
balance between good and evil everybody was to count for one, no
more and no less. If this were the proper princTple, TTwarpretty
oBviouslthat hitKerto half the human race had counted for con-
siderably less, and consequently that here there
was crying need
of reform. Jiaturally ther^rejQany_of_the earliest champions of
women were jciund_among_tiie Utilitarians^ and thougE~Hiirs
Subjection of Women belongs to a later date, the principles it
embodies had been taught long before. Comte's exaltation of the
feminine element in the universe tended in the same direction.
So did that revived mediae valism to which Tennyson in this very
goem^^rorcj^ himself un faithful. S o did the religious movement
which was one of the forms of mediasvalism. The "saints"
of Puritanism were of the masculine gender, and their hand was
often on the sword ; but many of the saints of Anglo-Catholicism
were feminine, and far more were effeminate. The position
assigned to the Virgin Mary necessarily reacted on her sex.
Burke's celebrated lament for the decay of chivalry came, oddly
enough, just at the time when that chivalry was starting into a
renewed, and, as it seemed, a vigorous life. If we look back at
either the poetry or the prose fiction of the eighteenth century,

before it was touched with romance, we see little or no chivalry in
the relations of the sexes. It does not exist in the verse of Dryden
or of Pope. The episode of Musiddra in Thomson's Seasons, once
much admired, seems to the modern mind coarse and false in
taste. Still less do we find chivalry towards women in Fielding or
Smollett. But the moment romance revives it comes again. The
Celtic strain of Ossian did something to bring it back. We find
it in the love-songs of Burns. would be superfluous to point to
It
the evidences of it in Shelley and Keats and Scott and their con-
temporaries in England and on the Continent. The lay of the
lady-love was evidently inseparable from lays of war and knightly

worth.
There had however always been an element of unreality in that
knightly worship of womanhood. Cervantes had ridiculed it in
his Dulcinea del Toboso; and the most romantically inclined
could not wholly blind themselves to the sordid facts which
marred the picturesqueness of the Middle Ages. When, therefore,
it came to applying the lessons of the past to the present, and
translating these romantic imaginations into fact (for the most
ethereal imaginations do influence facts), men, and still more
women themselves, were struck with the glaring incongruity
between the dream and the reality. The woman of romance was
a queen of love and beauty, and the knight of romance was a
being whose principal business was to worship her and to right
her wrongs. The man of reality led a much more mundane and
prosaic existence. The woman of reality was a being of no
political power, and of very little real power of any sort. Her
education was narrow : it consisted chiefly of " accomplishments."
She could embroider, paint a Utile, and play commonplace music
TENNYSON 379
in a manner worthy of the music. She was barred from the pro-
fessions; if she married, herown property passed out of her hands;
if she did anything outside her own home, she ran the risk of being
criticised as " unsexed " and hence, as we have seen, the earUest
;
female writers carefully concealed the sins of their pen. In short,

a woman had the high privilege to "suckle fools and chronicle
small beer.'' It was neither possible nor desirable that one half of
the human race should be queens of love and beauty and the
other half their servants; but it might be both possible and
desirable to attain to something less like the reverse of all this
than the actual condition of things.
Considerations of this sort were confusedly fermenting in the
minds of men about the middle of the nineteenth century, and
Tennyson in The Princess gives voice to some of them. For him it
was a great change. The delicately-fanciful portraits of maidens
in the early poems are all touched with romance of a somewhat
dilettante sort. The very names, Claribel, Mariana, Oriana,
Madeline, Rosalind, Fatima, are redolent of romance. But these
"airy fairy," "ever varying,'' "faintly smiling" or "rare pale"
damsels are shadowy and unreal; they are not "for human
all
nature's daily food"; they themselves have not been nourished on

such food, they have fed on honey-dew and drunk the milk of
Paradise. They would not stand the wear and tear of hfe. The
only thing possible is to set them apart, like china ornaments on a
bracket or in a cupboard.
The t)ê of woman for and by whom " the woman question"
was raised was far different In The Princess Tennyson partly sees
this. But the great defect of the poem is that it is in every respect
half-hearted. Bunyan's Mr Facing-both-ways was not more divided
in mind as to his choice of the road to heaven or the road to hell
than is Tennyson in The Princess. This is the reason why it is "a
medley'': no close-knit plan was possible until the poet had

cleared his own mind, and when he wrote he had not done so. To
the same cause is due the hybrid mixture of the modern idea
and the mediaeval story. This too is the reason why the poem
hovers midway between jest and earnest. The author has not
quite made up his mind about anything. He never gets clear
away from the atmosphere of the picnic, he never knows how to

regard his own " sweet girl-graduates." The conventional ending
of love and marriage seems to hint that after all there is notmuch
in this "woman question," that the one great profession for women
is that which always has been and always must be open to them
-^matrimony. This doubtless is true, but it is not very illumi-
native : it throws no light upon the path of that considerable
minority for whom the profession in question is not open. Still, the
doctrine of the close good sense admirably versified. It is a
is
little difficult, perhaps, to do it full justice, for the thoughts are well
within the range of much smaller minds than Tennyson's. They

are so now; but they were so in a much less degree then.
'"Tis sixty years since"; and Tennyson's recognition of the
woman's sphere was then unusually liberal. It seems all the more
creditable to him when we bear in mind the predilections apparent
in the portraits of those fancy-maidens of the early poems. And
we become conscious of the distance traversed when we compare
the Tennysonian ideal with the Miltonic.
The Princess is an exception among the poems subsequent to
1842 in respect of the alterations it has undergone. These have
been great, and perhaps we may infer that Tennyson himself was
not quite satisfied with his production. The most noticeable
change was the insertion of the beautiful lyrics which stand now
between the parts. The highest grace of TTie Princess was absent
from the version of 1847 the songs were added in 1850, and
'
some of them are worthy to rank among the best even Tennyson,
always a master of the lyric, ever wrote. Apart from the songs.
The Princess contained nothing calculated to add to the reputation
won by the volumes of 1842. The problems of construction
presented by a lengthy work had been rather shirked than
solved.
Three years later the disappointment faded from the minds of
nearly all admirers of Tennyson. Milton calls a good book " the
precious life-blood of a master spirit," and to few books is the
phrase more applicable than to In Memoriam (1850). It is the
result of the long brooding of seventeen years. The history of its
composition is known only in outline; but from that outline, from
TENNYSON 38
what is known of Tennyson's method in general, and from the

internal evidence of style and substance, the gaps can be filled
with considerable confidence. Besides the sections of In Memoriam
which are known to have been composed shortly after the death
of Arthur Hallam, many others, whether written or not, must
have been meditated and shaped in the poet's " study of imagina-
tion.'' At Christmas, 1841, Edmund Lushington (Dean of West-
minster) found that "the memorial poems had largely increased"'
since he had seen the poet. Even outside In Memoriam, some of
the profoundest of. his work in those years is known to have been
the product of the feelings which inspired the great elegy Ulysses.
In short, the subject had full possession of him, and In Memoriam
may be taken to be the best that Tennyson's head and heart could
frame in the long labour of seventeen years, years which found —
him in the prime of youthful manhood and left him on the verge
of middle age.
Many readers approach In Memoriam with a certain degree of
scepticism as to the reality of the feeling expressed by it. " All
this about a friend dead seventeen years?" they ask. A little
examination shows that they are not required to understand it
thus. In Memoriam is a poetic philosophy of life and death, as

well as an elegy on Arthur Hallam. Only so can a poem of nearly
three thousand lines on such a subject be justified ; and even so
the faults of In Memoriam are first, the monotony due to long
dwelling upon thoughts, profound indeed and of universal and
vital importance, but still all in one key ; and secondly, the sense
of something not altogether wholesome in this long brooding over

the grave; for all the light which Tennyson imparts does not avail
to dispel the gloom. After all, and in spite of generations of
preachers, the business of life is living, not dying; and there
is a fallacy in all attempts to convince men that eternity is
infinitely more important than time. At least time is the way to

eternity; and it has never been shown that there can be any
preparation for it better than doing what our hand finds to do here
and now. Though Tennyson does not teach the preachers' doctrine,
he moves in this sphere of thought, and the long Ungering in it tends
' Life of Tennyson, i. 101.
to sap the will and to weaken the springs of action. In one way
its length and its complexity lift In Memoriam above all other
English elegies ; in another they place it at a disadvantage with

those of Milton and Shelley. Adonais is like a trumpet-call to
action ; and the reader of Lycidas rises from it ready to grasp the
" two-handed engine " and smite ; though he may be doubtful
what the engine is, and what is to be smitten. It is not so with In

Memoriam. The difference may be partly explained by the
character of the personal relation between the authors and the
subjects of the three elegies ; for the connexion between Shelley
and Keats, or between Milton and Edward King, was slight in
comparison with the love of Tennyson for Hallam. Perhaps it is
partly due also to the influence of the time at any rate Arnold's :
Thyrsis tends to the same paralysis of action, though its shortness

makes the eflfect comparatively slight.
Less than half of In Memoriam bears direct reference to the
sorrow of Alfred Tennyson for his dead friend ; and the portion is
ample for every tone of grief, from the first crushed feeling when
the blow falls to the calm regret when years have passed and
reflection has done its work and the manifold interests and duties
of life have made their claim. The rest of the poem (with many
of the sections referring more
Hallam) contains that
directly to
poetic .philosophy to which reference has been made. It is a
wide one ; for In Memoriam is Tennyson's best title to the rank

of a thinker in verse, —a lofty rank, wheii the thinker does not
lower the melody or the poetic charm of his verse, as Tennyson
has certainly not done in this poem. Science, religion, patriotism,
all find their place here. Most of all the poems of Tennyson, In
Memoriam is "saturated" with astronomy. The teaching of
geology has gone home to the writer, and the sound of streams
suggests to his mind how they
" Draw down Ionian hills, and sow
The dust of continents to be."
He has glimmerings of evolution before the birth of evolution : a

proof how well he "understood the drift of science"; for the
embryo is contained in Lyell's Principles of Geology.
TENNYSON 383
The religious element in In Memoriam is all-pervading. The

true theme of the poem is the group of problems which are the
soul of all religion. Any death inevitably suggests those problems
the death of Hallam — the brilliant mind blighted before it was
fully opened, the promising career cut short ere it was well begun
—forced them upon Tennyson. All his study of nature is
ancillary to this. The sense of mystery awes him. Life seems to

him, as it did to Carlyle, a moment between two eternities man :
is " an infant crying in the night." There is no solution of the

problem, no creed that makes all things clear. We only trust
that "somehow good will be the final goal of ill." This attitude
of mind was one of the causes of the popularity of the poem.
In Memoriam contained something that appealed to all; to the
man of science, who was pleased to find himself understood to ;
the man oppressed with doubts, who found many of his own diffi-
culties powerfully and beautifully expressed by the poet ; and to
the orthodox believer,who was gratified by the final victory of faith.
It may be questioned whether the victory was quite legitimately
won. The heart standing up like a man in wrath suggests
Alexander's masterful way of dealing with the Gordian knot.
Some of the sceptical arguments are not pressed home, and the
reader reminded of Don Quixote's treatment of his helmet.
is
With the first stroke by which he meant to test its strength he
damaged it sorely ; so after he had repaired it he refrained from

testing it again. It was doubt which made Don Quixote cautious,
and perhaps doubt made Tennyson cautious too. Hence the
suggestion, surprising enough to the superficial reader, that "/«
Memoriam may almost be said to be the poem of nineteenth
century scepticism \"
In his final standpoint Tennyson contrasts with Browning.
His is the attitude of faith, just because it is also that of doubt
he does not see how good can be the goal of ill, but he trusts.
Even Browning not always faithful to knowledge, but in essence
is
his is the attitude of philosophy: he faces the difficulty and

reasons it out. " Is evil a result less necessary than good ? " he
asks, and he brings both good and evil into reasoned connexion
* Hiram Corson, quoted in The Library oj Literary Criticism,
with the scheme of the universe. Much may be learnt as to the
between the two poets by comparing
difference La Saisiaz with
In Memoriam. The former, inferior as a poem, is a far weightier
piece of reasoning.
On its artistic side, In Memoriam is full of interest. It is one
of the metrical triumphs of the language. The stanza is not
Tennyson's invention, for Ben Jonson had used it, and so had
Lord Herbert of Cherbury. But if Tennyson did not invent the
measure, he unquestionably made it his own. "Property to whom
proper," says Ruskin and so masterly is the skill with which this
;
peculiar quatrain is used that we may consider the title established.

It is now one of the classical stanzas of the English language, and
till Tennyson showed what could be made of it, to all intents and
purposes it was unknown. Not a little of the effect is due to the

admirable adaptation of the metre to the subject. The slow
movement of the verse suits the brooding thought as perfectly as
even Spenser's stanza suited him.
In Memoriam is also one of the most learned of English
poems, not only in the sense already indicated, but by reason of
the wealth of literary allusion embodied in it. This does not
mean borrowing, still less stealing ; but during those seventeen
years Tennyson studied hard and read widely, and all this study
and reading blends in his verse. As the air of a garden full of
flowers is loaded with all their mingled scents, so is the verse of
In Memoriam fraught with reminiscences, indicated by a word, a
turn of phrase, a point of view, from numberless poets and from
not a few prose-writers whom the poet had studied. The rich and
high-wrought style, the extraordinary felicities of expression, are
among Few poems contain
the results of this poetic learning.
more " jewels five words long " no other poem of recent times has
;
given so many familiar quotations to the language. And on the

whole the taste which and passes current these quotations
selects
is remarkably sure : their number

is no bad test of merit. On the
other hand, it must be confessed that Tennyson does not always
escape the faults which usually accompany such a style. It is
sometimes not merely high-wrought but over-wrought j the ex-
pression is too weighty for the thought, or the words are tortured.
TENNYSON 385
Thus, "eaves of wearied eyes" is an aSected expression, and

"mother town" for metropolis is hardly English.
The great elegy is no
than The Priruess in
less noticeable
respect of its more a long poem leaves

construction j for once
unsettled the question whether Tennyson had or had not the
power of creating a great artistic whole. Such a whole In
Memoriam is not It has a unity of its own, sufficient for the
purpose, and the poet is in no way to blame because it has no
more. StUl, the fact remains that it has not a unity like that of a
great epic such as the Aeneid or Paradise Lost, or a great tragedy

such as Antigone or Othello. It has only the unity which belongs
to a series of moods of one person, and is therefore comparable
rather to that which binds together the sormets of Shakespeare, or
better, those of Petrarch to Laura, from the scheme of which
Tennyson borrowed hints. The separate sections are, like the
sonnets, independent poems as well as parts of one great poem
and it would be affectation to pretend that none could be omitted
without leaving an appreciable gap.
The election of Tennyson to the throne left vacant by the
death of Wordsworth was natural after In Memoriam. As we
look back, he seems to tower, latis humeris et toto vertice, above all
his contemporaries except Browning; and although Browning
had been warmly praised by critics, one at least of whom in 1845
had claimed for him pre-eminence among the poets of the day,
he had never been popular. The laureateship was, in point of
fact, first gracefully offered to, and as gracefully declined by, the
aged Samuel Rogers ; but apart from the compliment to such a

veteran of letters, there was a difference of opinion as to the
proper recipient of the honour which seems surprising now. The
appointment of Tennyson was, however, generally welcomed ; and
the choice proved to be a happy one, not only because of the
eminence of the p)oet, but because few if any have ever excelled
him in the art of turning those complimentary verses on ceremonial
occasions which it falls to the laureate officially or ^(«inW)fficially
to celebrate.
The death of Wellington, occurring not long after Tennyson's
appointment to the laureateship, gave him a splendid opportunity
w, 25
for the ^«a«-official exercise of his function. The great Ode,
however, was received with a coldness at which we can only
wonder now. Three years later came Maud (1855). Of all
his longer Works, except The Princess, this lyrical monodrama
is the least satisfactory. Nowhere do we find more splendid
fragments of poetry; but Maud too is loosely compacted.
The thread of connexion is the character of the hero, whose
mind, in an unwholesome state from the start, is followed
through passion, exaltation and disaster to madness. In respect
of the general scheme, therefore, there some resemblance to
is
In Memoriam. Both poems are But in In

studies of a soul.
Memoriam the soul is the poet's own and the method is the
method of reflection, while in Maud the method is dramatic.
Tennyson had already made tentative advances towards the
dramatic method, for The May Queen and Locksley Hall are
dramatic lyrics. These poems had attained a popularity some-
what beyond their deserts ; they were perhaps the best known of
all their author's writings ; but they were by no means the finest
poetry he had produced. The May Queen borders upon the

namby-pamby, and the hero of Locksley Hall is unworthy of the
splendid verse. The same mistake is repeated in Maud. The
picture of reason overthrown may be made impressive, but there
ought to be a grandeur in the reason before its overthrow. There
is no grandeur in the peevish, querulous, scolding hero of Maud;
and therefore, even if the scenes of madness had been skilfully
managed, they would have failed to produce their proper effect.
When we descend from the whole to the parts the verdict
must be very different ; for among those parts are some of the
loveliest lyrics, including the most splendid Tennyson ever wrote,
"Come into the garden, Maud," and another, "O that 'twere
possible,'' which for exquisite pathos is only rivalled by "Break,
break, break." It is in these lyric fragments that the merit of
Maud lies, and probably the work it embodies would have helped
his fame more if he had never attempted to bind the pieces
together.
Nevertheless the attempt to build up the fragments into a
whole is significant, and so are the contents of many of the parts.
TENNYSON 387
The poet, though a lyrist, will not rest in the emotion of the
moment. The purpose, the didactic element, traceable, some-
times to its detriment, in nearly all his work after the death of
Hallam, is prominent here. Science has left its mark, and the
evolutionary tendencies of the poet are unmistakable :
"A monstrous eft was of old the Lord and Master of Earth,
For him did the high sun flame, and the river billowing ran.
And he felt himself in his force to be Nature's crowning race.
As nine months go to the shaping an infant ripe for his birth,
So many a million of ages have gone to the making of man
He now is first, but is he the last? is he not too base?"
The has left its mark too, and the poet is awake
state of society
to the evilswhich stirred the spirits of Carlyle and Kingsley and
Mill. The " Mammonite mother " killing " her babe for a burial
fee," the poor "hovell'd and hustled together, each sex, like
swine," the society in which " only the ledger lives, and only not
all men lie," —we hear of similar things to these long afterwards
in some of Tennyson's most powerful poems. He was still only
learninghow to use such material. The poet's defence of war has
been loudly condemned ; but it is to be remembered that it is a
defence of war conceived as bringing to an end not the peace of
the golden age, but peace based on lies and fraud and oppression,
and substituting for the self-seeking of the trading trickster that
which at any rate unites the nation in a common pursuit of a
single end not meanly selfish.
Hitherto the great bulk of Tennyson's work had been lyrical.

TAe Princess is the only exception on a large scale. Maud is a
bundle of lyrics, and In Memoriam is lyrical throughout both in
structure and in principle. So are the majority of the poems in
the earlier volumes. The principal exceptions are the English
/i/yZ/j which form a group remarkable in themselves and influen-
tial upon. subsequent poetry.
Poems dealing with rural subjects have held a place in literary
tradition from the time of Theocritus. Spenser made the fashion
English. But the pastoral of literature was a highly conventional
form of copiposition, and the shepherds and shepherdesses were
creatures of an Arcadia where their business was to " fleet the time
25—2
carelessly, as they did in the golden world." Allan Ramsay
transferred them to Scotland, and, though he still retained many
conventions, he made the figures of his pastoral real Scottish
shepherd lads and lasges. Ramsay, however, presented them
dramatically; and it was not until the close of the eighteenth
and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries that the narrative
of rural life as it is in reality was rooted in English verse by
Southey and Wordsworth. It was in their footsteps that Tennyson
followed; but he made a deviation too, and after his fashion
introduced a new convention, so that, of the group of poems
called English Idylls there is only one, the tale of Dora, which
can be considered simply a tale qf rural life, and that closely
follows Miss Mitford's. Tale of Dora CresweW. The artists
of The Gardener's Daughter, and Edwin Morris, who knows
"long names of agaric, moss and fern," and who forges "a
thousand theories of the rocks," and Letty, who looks "like
Proserpine in Enna gathering flowers," are beings from another
world.
The truth is that Tennyson, especially in his earlier years,
was eminently a poet of the study. His habitual diction was
ornate, sometimes it was artificial, contorted, almost fantastic.
He fould write with great simplicity when he chose, as the idyll
of Dora shows ; but even there the flavour of the verse is not
that of the upturned clod, but of the library. Burns holds the
plough himself, and with his own hand " turns the weeder-clips
aside " to spare the symbol of his country. He finds poetry in his
own life: he has muse who wreathes his brow with
his vision of the
holly,— but it is in an "auld clay biggin" the smoke of which

irritates the reader's throat and nostrils. His jolly beggars sing
jolly songs ; but their rags are of the raggedest. We are a long
way from this sort of reality in Tennyson. We have escaped
from Arcadia only to get into the land of a new convention,
whose latitude and longitude have not yet been taken. But for
his Northern Farmer and Northern Cobbler and a few other pieces
of the same kind, all of them the product of later years, his ability
to get into closer contact with reality might have been questioned.
'
J. Churton Collins pointed this out in his Illustrations of Tennyson.
TENNYSON 389
The English Idylls were noteworthy experiments in blank

verse. In these, in Ulysses, and afterwards on a larger scale in
The Princess, Tennyson proved that he could handle the metre

not merely with skill, but with a mastery of varied effects probably
unequalled by any English poet except Shakespeare. Milton has
made the measure all his own for epic purposes, and he has no
rival in the stately music of his lines ; but in respect of variety of
types of blank verse There is a vast
Tennyson surpasses him.
difference between the simple measure of Dora and that of the
rich and musical classical idyll of (Enone, or the subtle suggestive-
ness of Ulysses, or the force of Lucretius ; and there is an immense

of the King.
variety within the limits of the Idylls
We have already seen that Tennyson had from an early date
shown a strong interest in those Arthurian romances which have
so powerfully attracted the imaginative minds of England, France
and Germany from the Middle Ages downwards. In England,
Spenser had made use of them ; and Milton at one time thought
of Arthur as a possible subject for the great poem which was to
be the magnum opus of his life and to justify the dedication of
his talents to what many Puritans regarded as the unprofitable
art of poetry. But Milton abandoned the design ; and none of
those who touched the Arthurian story afterwards had succeeded
in making a great poem from it. Just a few years previous to the
appearance of the first group of the Idylls, Lytton had written an
epic on King Arthur; but Tennyson could safely ignore this and
treat the subject as still open. The poems he had previously
written upon episodes or characters of Arthurian romance, except
in one instance, were lyrics. The Lady of Shalott and Sir
Galahad are lyrical wholes which do not admit of expansion.
Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere is described as a fragment,
but it is evidently one vjhich could never grow into a long poem.
These poems, jtherefore, delightful and beautiful as they are, for
,tbe present purpose are no more than items of evidence bearing
'Witness to the attraction the Arthurian legends had for Tennyson.

appears however, from the biography by his son, that from
It
an early date the poet had contemplated making Arthur the
subject of a long work, and had written out prose sketches of the
Story. The first hint in verse of such a design is given in the
Morte d^ Arthur, which was originally published as one of the
English Idylls, where it is introduced as the only one of the
twelve books of the poet's epic, "his King Arthur," which has
escaped burning. This may be pure playfulness, but it is alsfii
possible that there was some foundation for it, and that Tennyson
had failed to satisfy himself in an attempt to treat the subject.
At any rate, alone among the early Arthurian poems, this is in
blank verse, and proves to be capable of indefinite expansion ; for
as The Passing of Arthur it becomes the last book or idyll of the
Idylls of the King. FitzGerald heard Morte d' Arthur read,
without the introduction and epilogue, in 1835'; and it is remark-
able that in this early experiment in a measure so difficult as
blank verse Tennyson showed a skill and mastery he never
afterwards surpassed. Probably In Memoriam thrust aside the
Arthurian epic ; but not long after the great elegy was finished the
mind of the poet was again busy with the subject. Excepting
Morte d^ Arthur, no part of the Idylls was published till 1859,
when Enid, Vivien, Elaine and Guinevere appeared; but in 1857
two of them had been privately printed under the title of Enid
and Nimu'e.
So far as non-dramatic forms are concerned, the question
whether Tennyson possessed constructive power must be taken
to be finally settled in the negative by the Idylls. The most
ingenious attempts have been made to find a unity in them.
Sometimes the narrative is deemed sufficient, and we are asked to
iregard the collection as constituting an epic, though, it is ad-
mitted, a somewhat episodic one. At other times the unifying
principle is found in allegory. All such theories, however, are
obviously forced. When they are re-read with an open mind,
the Idylls obstinately persist in keeping their character of twelve
short stories, all, it is true, united by the fact that they move
round King Arthur as a But though this gives unity of a
centre.
sort, it is not the unity of a great work of art; it is certainly hot
such a unity as makes the books of the Iliad, the Aeneid and the
Paradise Lost obviously only parts of the poems to which they
' Life of Tennyson, i. 194.
TENNYSON 391
belong. The bare history of the publication of the Idylls ought

want of unity. After 1859 there was
to suffice to establish their
a pause of ten years, until The Holy Grail, and other Poems was
published. The " other " idylls in the volume were The Coming
of Arthur, Pelleas and Ettarre and The Passing of Arthur, as

Morte d' Arthur was now called. In 187 1 The Last Tournament
and in 1872 Gareth and Lynette appeared; then, after a long
pause, the structure was completed by the addition oi Balin and

Balan (1885). If anyone still imagines that there is true unity
in a poem which begins at the end, reaches the beginning in mid-
course, and the middle at the close, he should turn to the amusing
and instructive article on " the Building of the Idylls " in Literary
Anecdotes of the XIX Century, y
There is certainly an element of truth in the allegoric theory.
iNo one who reads Gareth and Lynette and The Holy Grail can
doubt the presence of allegory there. Moreover, the theory has
the countenance of Tennyson himself, who speaks of the tales as
"new-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul"; and this
might seem to be conclusive. But on the other hand, he also
protested against being tied down to any one meaning, saying,
very sensibly, that "poetry is like shot-silk with many glancing
colours. Every reader must find his own interpretation accord-
ing to his ability, and according to his sympathy with the poet^"
It is not clear, therefore, how far Tennyson meant to press

the allegorical interpretation. An examination of the dates of
publication deepens the doubts. It so happens that the earliest
idylls are those in which the allegorical element is least prominent.

Only towards the end do we see the unmistakable marks of
symbolism. The idea of allegorical treatment had certainly been
present in Tennyson's mind many years before he took the
Arthurian story seriously in hand, for one of the early prose
sketches is allegorical*. But he seems to have let it sink into the
background, and to have brought it into prominence again only
when the want of a more organic unity began to be seriously felt.
In any case, the allegory is vague, shadowy and of dubious inter-
^ Life of Tennyson, ii. 127.

^ Hid. ii. uj.
pretation. Where, except in Bunyan's great work, does allegory

not exhibit these defects ?
For the materials of his Idylls Tennyson drew principally

upon two sources, Malory's Morte d^ Arthur and the Mabinogion,
supplementing them occasionally from Geoffrey of Monmouth
and other sources. He derived his knowledge of the Mabinogion
from Lady Charlotte Guest's translation. In most of the tales he
follows his original pretty closely, and the fact has been urged
against him as a reproach. But in truth he would have fallen
into a great error had he done otherwise. "Genuine poetic
material is handed down in the imagination of man from genera-
tion to generation, changing its spirit according to the spirit of
each age, and reaching its full development when in the course of
time the favourable conditions coincide'"; and the man who
prefers to invent rather than to use the material thus^provided for
him dooms himself to oblivion. Uftt^Y^ Jô^^
• >
Tennyson's course, therefore, was determined for him by his

choice of a subject. The great cycles of romance have become
part of the raw material of literature, just as the stories of Troy,
of Pelops and of Oedipus had for the Greeks. How large has
been the part played by the Arthurian legends in the literature
not only of England but of Europe is admirably shown in Pro-
fessor Maccallum's Tennyson's Idylls and Arthurian Story. Such
being the subject-matter, any wide deviation from it would have
given a shock to the feelings. If the adoption of a story be
plagiarism, then Shakespeare is the most unblushing of plagiarists.
He hardly ever invents the framework of his dramas, and in the
case of the Roman he draws very freely indeed upon his
plays
original. Neither do we impute it for blame to Milton that he
owes the framework of Paradise Lost to the Bible and the

Talmudic legends, or to Aeschylus and Sophocles that they are
similarly indebted to the legends of their own race. Such instances
(they might easily be multiplied) give strong support to Kuno
Fischer's theory of poetic material. The question of the value
and the true originality of a poem depends upon the way in
' Quoted from Kuno Fischer in Professor Richard Jones's scholarly mono-
graph, Tke Grmith of the Idylls of the King.
TENNYSON 393
which the poet handles his material. Just as the ruler who
finds a city brick and leaves it marble may be regarded as its
second founder, so the poet who by his touch transmutes his

baser materials into gold may justly claim property in what he has
so transmuted. And much depends upon the nature of the
material. Tennyson's relation to his authorities is like Shake-
speare's relation to Plutarch rather than his relation to Holinshed.
Both Malory's Morte d' Arthur
and Lady Charlotte Guest's
Mabinogion are excellent and Tennyson, recognising their excel-
;
lence, has in many passages been content to versify them, as

Shakespeare has versified Plutarch.
At the same time, he introduced many changes, and in
particular he threw round the Idylls a wholly different atmosphere
from that either of the Welsh tales or of Malory. This has been
a ground of complaint against the poet. It has been urged with
truth that the Idylls are not really mediasval, that King Arthur is
a modern English gentleman, and that the knights apd ladies are
as indubitably Victorian as is the poem in which their valour and
their beauty are sung. They wear the armour and are dressed in
the garments of the Middle Ages, but they speak the speech and
think the thoughts of the nineteenth century; their sentiment,
their morality, all that belongs to them except the barest externals,
are modern. In truth Tennyson was never mediaeval. He
firequently went back to the Middle Ages for a theme ; but if he
entered into their he certainly never reproduced it in
spirit at all,
his poems. It is doubtful whether he seriously tried or wished

to do so. He
is an intensely modern poet; in spite of his
elaborate he often seems almost utilitarian in his spirit He

art,
has a " message," like his friend Carlyle ; and he can make it more
intelligible in the language of his own time than in that of centuries
ago. The point is not of much significance. The Idylls are
anachronistic, and there is an end. If Tennyson imagined they
were mediaeval, he was mistaken ; if a reader is unable to find
pleasure except in the mediaeval, the Idylls are not for him.
There remain the great majority who are content to take a thing
for what it is, and who are as little disturbed by Teimyson's
modernism as they are when Shakespeare makes Ulysses quote
Aristotle, or when Leonardo sets the table-appointments of his own
time upon the board on which is spread the Last Supper.
The question of the quality of the work is infinitely more
important than that of its fidelity to the time in which the scene is
laid. Granted that Arthurbut a modern gentleman, the larger

is
question remains whether he is a good type of modern gentleman.

The two questions have frequently been confused. We are told
inone breath that he is a piece of colourless perfection and that
he is no mediaeval knight as if the two statements were of the
same kind. They are not: the former is a criticism of the drawing
of a character; the latter only of its appropriateness to a particular
time. A figure, painted on canvas or delineated in words, may be
"no mediaeval knight" and yet a very excellent type of man; but
" colourless perfectiofi " belongs to no age or race of humanity.
Now it is hardly possible to deny that this is a real flaw of the
Idylls. The " blameless king " is vapid ; a little blameworthiness
would do him a world of good ; we long for some of the " blessed
evil " of Browning. And something of unreality clings to all the
figures of the Idylls, male and female, without exception. The
stained and guilty but always knightly Lancelot is the most
interesting, because of his very sins ; and yet in spite of those sins
he too, in respect of his chivalry, is flawed as a character by the
very absence of flaw, —
"faultily faultless.'' Tennyson had not yet
acquired the knack of delineating men and women; indeed he
never succeeded in the idyllic form, though some of the Idylls
were written after he had won conspicuous success in other forms
of verse. In the Idylls he is as unsuccessful with the very bad as
with the very good. No one can say that Vivien lacks her due
share of human frailty, but she very poorly represents the witchery
of an unprincipled woman. We have only to compare her with
Shakespeare's Cleopatra to realise what consummate. work is, and
how great is the gulf between it and anything less excellent.
In the whole of the Idylls there is nothing more remarkable,

nothing more distinctively Tennyson's own, than the treatment of
the Quest of the Grail. Originally no part of the Arthurian legend,
obscure in origin, it early passed into the cycle, and attained so
prominent a place that it threatened to subordinate all the rest to
TENNYSON 395
itself. Nothing in the whole cycle is more characteristic of the

mediaeval spirit than this. It is profoundly mystical. It is the
element of the Church coming in to ennoble and purify and

sanctify the world. It makes the Arthurian legends, according to
mediaeval ideas, a round and complete whole, a world in them-
selves. For the mediseral mind honoured just two forms of life;
the life of arms, idealised in the system of chivalry represented

here by the Round Table, as it is in the Charlemagne cycle by
"Roland brave and Oliver" and all the paladins and peers who fell
at Roncesvalles ; and secondly the life of the Church, here intro-
duced by the Quest of the Grail. And that the scripture might be
fulfilled the last was first. Wherever the Church entered she
claimed precedence: the call to seek the Grail overcame the
knightly sense of loyalty to Arthur.
The hero of this legend. Sir Galahad, is the subject of one
of Tennyson's early Arthurian poems. He is, as becomes his
character, an ascetic
" I never felt the kiss of love,

Nor maiden's hand in mine."
One half of the knightly life is closed to him by the Quest ; but
another vista opens which more than compensates him for it. He
is a visionary, a mystic, and in his visions he finds happiness as
perfect as is possible until the Grail, and heaven, are found :
" Sometimes on lonely mountain-meres
I find ai magic bark
I leap on board no helmsman

: steers
I float till all is dark.
A gentle sound, an awful light I
Three angels bear the holy Grail
With folded feet, in stoles of white,
On sleeping wings they sail."
The
incidents of this Quest are not original with Tennyson
he i
nowhere more indebted to his authorities on matters of
is
detail. And yet by a few skilful turns and adaptations, by the

setting he gives it in the cycle, he has made the whole spirit his
own. It was not possible for the mediasval mind to conceive of
evil in connexion with the Quest of the Grail; it was in itself

good, pure, holy. Nearly all the knights failed, many of them toet
disaster in the Quest ; but this was through their own unworthi-
ness. In the Quest itself there was nothing unreal; there could be
no abrogation of duty in the fact that a knight elected to follow it.
In the hands of Tennyson the Quest of the Grail becomes one
of the two causes which bring about the disruption of the Round
'Table. The corruption of the court, the sin of Lancelot and
Guinevere, the vices of many of the knights, are of course one
cause. How deep the vice has eaten and how deplorable has
been the fall from the height of a great ideal we see when we
contrast the song of the knights in The Coming of Arthur with the
last sad tourney of the " dead innocence." Contrast
"The King will follow Christ, and we the King

In whom high God hath breathed a secret thing,"
with the mournful question of Laiicelot to Tristram, victor in this

" Tournament of the Dead Innocence " :
"Hast thou won?

Art thou the purest, brother? See, the hand
Wherewith thou takest this is red I
But corruption is not the only cause that breaks up Arthur's

chivalry: the Quest itself leads to the same result. The king
foresees the effect. It is "a sign to maim this Order which I
made " ; the knights are following " wandering fires." The Quest
is proper for men like Galahad or Percivale, for those in whom
saintliness is inborn. It is a mere misleading will-o'-the-wisp to
the ordinary stained and spotted man, sinful, yet capable of work
useful for the world,
"Men
With strength and will to right the wrong'd, of power
To lay the sudden heads of violence flat."
The evil of the Quest is that it takes such men from the work they
can do and leads them to attempt needlessly and fruitlessly that
which they cannot do.
This treatment of the legend is extremely significant, especially*
with reference to the time at which Tennyson wrota It is the
best standard for measuring the distance which separated the

TENNYSON 397
poet, intellectually, from the Middle Ages* He had no part or lot

in that movement which was drawing so many of his contem-
poraries to think the thoughts of those ages.. We see the effect of
this attraction in Newman, in the extravagant importance he
attaches to the very conception of sin; in the assertion that it
would be better the whole world should go to ruin than that the
most venial sin should be committed, or that anything should be
done which would lead to the commission of such sin. No doubt
theology has always been tempted to extravagance on this point
probably many excellent and sensible clergymen would still
hesitate to repudiate Newman's But if we are to refrain

language.
not only from doing that which is sinful, but from that which will
produce sin, we must refrain from action altogether and we shall —
not succeed then. The greatest minds among Newman's con-
temporaries altogether reject such teaching. Carlyle taught that
a man was to be measured, not by the negative standard of absence
of fault, error, sin, but by a far nobler st£uidard —the presence of
good. The proper question to ask is not, how few sins has the
man committed? but, how much good has he accomplished?
Browning taught that evil was necessary for the evolution of good.
In a similar spirit Hawthorne, in his great romance, Transforma-
tion, makes sin the parent of the moral nature of Donatello. All
the Utilitarians too recognise the necessary mingling of evil with
good and call that action best which produces the greatest balance
of good.
Tennyson in the Idylls teaches this doctrine too. Arthur finds
himself in a world chequered and shadowed with evil as the hills
are shadowed with clouds. His task is to make bad better, not to
produce perfection ; and the tools with which he works are, like
the world in which he lives, feulty and of mixed materiaL The
head of gold or of iron may be joined to feet of miry clay but the ;
king is content to make the best of his instruments, such as they

are, and in the process to make the instruments themselves better.
He is a statesman, not a visionary. It is to be borne in mind that

he, not Sir Galahad, is Tennyson's ideal; and though he is too
&ultless, his perfection is not the pale perfection of Sir Galahad.
The mediaeval mind, whatever it might have felt in secret, must
have made obeisance to the ideal of saintliness : Tennyson is
thoroughly modern in his refusal to do so. When at last
Guinevere recognises the highest, it is "not Lancelot, nor another,

but the King." Not Galahad any more than Lancelot, but the
man who lives in the world and best does the work of the world.
During the long period between the beginning and the comple-
tion of the Idylls Tennyson did not concentrate himself on this
one work as far as he did on In Memoriam in the seventeen years

from the death of Arthur Hallam to its publication ; for interspersed
between the successive parts of the Idylls were many important
publications which had no bearing upon them. Excluding the
Idylls, the productions of the last thirty years of Tennyson's life
are divisible into two classes — on the one hand dramas, and on the
other miscellaneous poems, all more or less short. After the four
Idylls the volume of the latter class was that which took its
first
title from Enoch Arden (1864). Other poems were included with
The Holy Grail {iS6g). The Lover's Tale, an early piece which
had been printed and then suppressed, was published in 1879.
Ballads and other Poems (1880), Tiresias (1885), Locksley Hall:
Sixty Years After (1886), Demeter (1889) and The Death of (Enone
(1892), are the other volumes which contain the later miscellaneous
poems.
Enoch Arden belongs to the idyllic class, not of the Arthurian
type, but rather like the English Idylls. The strain of sentimen-
tality which pervades it made it popular, just as the same fault had
increased the popularity oi The May Queen; but it is not among
the poems of Tennyson which will live. The volume however
contained also pieces of a very different stamp. It contained The
Grandmother (yihich had appeared some years earlier in Once a
Week) and The Northern Farmer, Old Style. These poems, and
especially the latter, indicate a change in Tennyson of the utmost
importance.
A comparison between the miscellaneous poems of these later
years and those published up to 1842 yields very interesting
results. Through the sixty years of Tennyson's literary life we can
trace a steady development ; in the opinion of many good judges,

not a steady improvement ; but certainly a series of changes pro-
TENNYSON 399
ceeding upon a principle and tending towards a definite goal.

Among these changes there is none more certain to arrest the
attention than the gradual development of the dramatic element
even in poems which are not dramatic in form. In the early
poems, as we have seen, this element is rather conspicuously
absent, and even where we might expect some evidence of
dramatic power we fail to find it. None of the figures in The
Princess, for example, is in the least interesting as a character.
Tennyson first proved that he possessed the power of characterisa-
tion by the two fine studies of The Northern Farmer; and as these
are poems in dialect we may conjecture that the freedom and
unconventionality of dialect helped to reveal the power to
Tennyson himself. If so, the dialect poems are important for
other reasons besides their own high merits.
Perhaps the use of dialect was suggested to Tennyson by the
Dorset Poems (1844-1863) of William Barnes (1801-1886), a man
of note alike for the intrinsic value of his poetry and for the fact
that he is the first of English dialect poets. Scottish vernacular

poetry stands on a different footing. It is supported by a national
tradition, and through the existence of Scotland for centuries as an
independent political entity the northern dialect of English, there'
established, never wholly lost the character of a language. Very,
different was the fate of the dialects of the south. Occasional
poems of a popular sort might be written in the speech of the
people, but the dialects of the English counties have seldom been
and never on a considerable scale or with
cultivated in literature,
marked success till Barnes showed the way. Thus, though Burns
was altogether a greater, more powerful and more varied poet, the
exploit of Barnes, simply on the linguistic side, was more remark-
able than his. It was the raising at once to literary rank of a
mode of speech which had hitherto been used only by peasants, i;
Barnes was descended from a family which for generations had

been rooted in the soil of Dorset, and he had a mother who was
gifted with tastes for poetry such as are rarely found among the
wives of farmers ;but unfortunately she died when the boy was
only five. He was, however, physically too feeble for the drudgery
of farm life; and his active mind made such good use of his
40O THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
opportunities of education that he was soon marked out for a
career of letters in some shape or other. He became a school-
master in 1823, and in 1827 began contributing to periodicals. In
middle he took orders, was presented to the rectory of Came
life
in 1862, and died there twenty-four years afterwards.

Barnes had a mania for linguistic studies, learning, besides the
more ordinary languages, Welsh, Russian, Hindustani and Persian.
These studies bore fruit in after years in various philological
publications, among them a Philological Grammar, dealing mainly
with English, Latin and Greek, but based upon a comparison of no
fewer than sixty languages. But it is by his Poems in the Dorset
Dialect that Barnes will be remembered. He began writing them
in 1833, and the first of them were published in the Dorset County
Chronicle. Three separate collections were issued in 1844, 1858 —
and 1863; and the poet was induced, two years after the first
issue, to try the experiment of a volume of poems on such subjects
in national English. It was unsuccessful, and is only interesting
as showing how completely poetry is a matter of expression.

No verses more sincere and natural than those of Barnes
were ever penned. The poet's intellectual endowments enabled
him to express admirably the feelings of the rustic population
and all had raised no barrier between him and
his learning
them, as such and accomplishments often do. When he

gifts
was induced to give readings, the effect upon local audiences is

said to have been extraordinary. They recognised the pictures of
scenes, people and occupations, as being true to the very life the :
poet had not ceased to be in heart and mind one of themselves.

Crabbe has greater strength; but even Crabbe has not profounder
knowledge of that about which he writes, and even Crabbe is not
more unfalteringly true. Burns has a force of passion to which
there is nothing comparable in Barnes; but even Burns is not
more genuinely than he the poet of rural life and feeling.
And here perhaps we may find a hint as to the secret of
popularity in poetry. It is hardly toomuch to say that since the

decline of Athens the only great poet who has been popular in the
widest sense of the word Robert Burns. Other poets have had
is
audiences wider or narrower; but no one else, at least in our

TENNYSON 4OI
country, has spoken to the heart of a whole nation j no -one else is
known by the people, as Burns is known by every class of the

inhabitants of Lowland Scotland. Barnes, it is pretty certain, has
already lost part of his hold on Dorset —the absence of the
literary tradition there tells against the permanence of his
influence. But the success of his readings showed that his

poetry did go home to the heart even of the most uncultivated
audience. Now the point in common between the two poets is that
they bpth deal with the life and the scenes which are most familiar
to their audiencej and so deal with them that no barrier is raised
bptween poet and people. Many other poets have handled rural
subjects ; but usually their manner of doing so has practically had
the effect of translating them into another language. It woujid be
unfair to insistupon the thoroughly sophisticated pastorals of

writers such as Pope. But even Wordsw;orth, notwithstanding his
theory of poetic diction and his life among the Cumberland
"statesmen," and Tennyson, notwithstanding the simplicity of his
English idylls, speak in a tongue not understanded of the people.
The culture and the literary associations of three thousand years
are behind their simplest utterance; and hence the uneducated
feel the chill of unfamiliarity and turn aside. It is not that they
are unresponsive to poetry as such, for most human hearts feel
dumbly the poetry of life and of nature. This seems to be proved
by the fact that the spa,rse population of a Welsh valley will yield
its score of competitors in an eisteddfodic competition ; that three
generations after the death of Burns there iahardly a Scottish village
which cannot boast of several who know the poet's works really
well, and probably of one or two who write verse themselves ; that
the Dorset rural audiences listened to Barnes, perhaps with most
delight to thehumorous pieces, but still with appreciation to those
of quieter beauty. Burns in Scotland and Barnes in Dorset have
the happy knack of weaving language into beautiful poetry with-
out making of their own intellectual superiority a wall between
themselves and the syrnpathies of the people. In Tennyson's
JDora the chisel of the artist has smoothed away all the rugged
homeliness of the rustic. It belongs to another worid, it can
never stir the emotions which almost any of the eclogues of
w. 26
Barnes will rouse. For an ordinary English rustic audience, it
might almost as well be written in Greek.
What Barnes did best was the eclogue; but it would be a
complete mistake to compare him with the writers of conventional
pastoral verse. He depicts no Arcadia, with shepherds piping
upon oaten reed, and tending their sheep when they have leisure
from the serious business of poetry, but a very real work-a-day
Dorset. To this world he is confined, and the range afforded by
it is not -wide ; but, such as it is, Barnes knew it in every part and
aspect. There is humour in A bit o' sly Coortin', there is good
sense mingled with satire in The Times, and there is pathos in
Woak Hill. The Dorset Poems moreover display a lyrical gift
which, if not very great, is nevertheless such that the greatest

would own kinship with its possessor. A Wold Friend may be
called a Dorset Auld Lang Syne, and 77ie Slanten Light (f Fall
brings pleasantly to mind the Tennysonian idyllic poems.
Perhaps "the Lancashire Burns," Edwin Waugh (i8i 7-1890),
may also have helped to turn Tennyson's mind towards dialect.
Less gifted than Barnes, he had still a touch of the authentic fire;
and even if it were less than it is, his gallant struggle with adver-
sity, his success in educating himself and the sweetness of
nature which remained unimpaired when fame was won, would
of themselves entitle him to honourable remembrance. These
moral excellences mind the Scottish collier-poet, David
call to
Wingate ; but Wingate's verse must be read with an indulgence

which Waugh's does not require. The latter first became known
through his Sketches of Lancashire Life and Localities (1855).
Soon after his .charming "Come whoam to thi childer and
me " gained a success which encouraged him to issue Poems
and Songs (1859). Afterwards his publications were frequent,
and his collected works fill eleven volumes. Waugh would gain
greatly by selection. At his best, though not indeed excellent, he
is very good ; for he had sympathy and humour and an observant
eye, and also that understanding of others which is the natural

outcome of these qualities.' But his real ability is apt to be
underrated because of the mass of commonplace work with which
he has loaded himself.
TENNYSON 403
If was the example of Barnes which suggested poetry in

it
mind of Tennyson, our debt to the former is all the

dialect to the
greater; for there is an unfettered vigour and life about the
dialect poems to which there is no parallel in Tennyson's earlier
works. The success of The Northern Farmer was repeated in The
Northern Cobbler, The Spinster's Sweet-Arts, Owd Rod and the
delightful Church- Warden and the Curate, with its fine touches
of humour and its shrewd worldly wisdom :
,, "If ever tha means to gil 'igher,

MTha mun tackle the sins o' the Wo'ld, an' not the faults o' the Squire."
These poems are all intensely dramatic, and it is remarkable that

most of the characters seem to have been suggested by single
expressions carried in the poet's mind for many years. Thus, The
Northern Farmer, Old Style, is founded upon the dying words of
a farm-bailiff: "God A'mighty little knows what He's about, a-
taking me. An' Squire will be so mad an' all." " I conjectured
the man from that one sentence," said Tennyson. So too the
farmer of the new style was founded on a sentence reported to
him, "When I canters my 'erse along the ramper (highway), I
'ears proputty, proputty, proputty'." Again, The Northern Cobbler
sprang from a story of a man who " set up a bottle of gin in his
window when he gave up drinking, in order to defy the drink'."
And the pathetic Grandmother, which is a kind of pioneer to
such pieces, is based upon the saying of an old lady, "The spirits
of my children always seem to hover about me*."

The art of delineating character once learnt, it proved possible
to apply it, not only in poems where the dialect makes something
like a new language, but where, as in the noble Rizpah, it is
unimportant, or even where there is no dialect at all. Examples

of the latter kind are the masterly sketch of Sir John Oldcastle,
Lord Cobham, and Romney's Remorse. Because of the language
these are more akin than the dialect poems to the classical
sketches of earlier days but they are far more dramatic than the
;
latter. Sir John Oldcastle is an individual man ; so is Romney.

Ulysses is a type: he is the stoical soul. Neither is it the
' Life af Tennyson, ii. g. ' ibid. ii. 251.
' ibid. i. 432.
26—2
individuality of the man that impresses us in Lucretius. Powerful
and exquisitely beautiful as these poems are, they do not read
like the work of a man of dramatic genius.
This movement towards the dramatic form of art is one of
several changes which during the last fifteen or twenty years of
his life gave Tennyson's work more of Browning's "veined
humanity"; and perhaps Browning's example helped to bring
about the change. The thought too continues to grow in weight.
While the greater number of the early poems have no theme
which could find expression in prose at all, a large proportion of
the later ones have subjects on which essays or dissertations
might be written. They are never prosaic: Tennyson was far
too good an artist to fall into that mistake. But he has passed
the boundary line which divides two great classes of the lovers of
verse. To some, Kubla Khan and The Ancient 'Mariner are the
very acme of poetry would not give a single one of the
; others
Canterbury Tales for whole volumes of such dreams. Those
who prefer poems which are poems and nothing else like best the
Tennyson of the earlier days; those who prefer a theme, turn
rather to the later Tennyson. To some the shadowy, mystical,
elusive Lady of Shalott may seem more precious than all the
Idylls of the King.
Tennyson has himself supplied a measure of the change in
the two poems, Locksley Hall and Locksley Hall: Sixty Years
After; and these two accordingly are found to divide readers
much in the way suggested. Another feeling, however, enters
here as well. An old favourite is not easily displaced, and a
second treatment of a subject once successfully dealt with by a
great writer is rarely received with thankfulness. Even change is
dangerous, as Addison pointed out to Pope sensibly enough,

though he proved to be mistaken in the particular instance.
Another instance of this unconscious partiality occurs in the
works of Tennyson himself. He wrote his well-known Charge of
the Light Brigade when the whole country was ringing with the
glory and throbbing with the grief of the charge. The verses are
not great poetry, but they are extremely spirited, and they echo
the tramp of charging horse. Therefore they won their place in
TENNYSON 40S
the heart of the nation when it was open to receive them. Some
thirty years later the poet celebrated in verses not quite so
impetuous and rushing, but far more skilful, far more subtly
adapted to the subject, the charge of the Heavy, Brigade. But
the earlier poem still holds the field. Everyone knows it, while
only the lovers and readers of poetry know the later one.
The same prejudice tells powerfully in favour of the earlier
Locksley Hall. It too. is far more widely known than the later
poem is ever likely to be; and yet on its merits there is much to
be said for Locksley Hall: Sixty Years After. The question here,
however, is not the relative merits of the two poems, but the
measure they afford of the distance traversed by Tennyson, in art,
between 1842 and 1886. Both, of course, are dramatic utter-

ances, but they are none the less representative. Now the essen-
tial difference between the two poems is just that the earlier one
IS of much slighter substance, more visionary, less realistic. The
young man is a dreamer, optimistic at heart in spite of the
bitterness due to thwarted passion. He is sanguine of the
progress of science, sanguine of the establishment of universal
peace, sanguine of a steady progress through the ages
— " Let the
great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change'."
In the later poem the old man is far less optimistic, and for the
visions of heavens filled with commerce and of "airy navies
grappling in the central blue," he substitutes the sad comment of
his eighty years'. experience :
"Half the marvels of iny morning, triumphs over time and space,
Staled by frequence, shrunk ty usage into commonest commonplace."
The hope of universal peace has faded away into a future too dim
and distant to influence actipn or to inspire hope. Science has
not, cured the evils under, which men groan. The slums of the
cities, their dirt and show to the old man that
vice and disease,
the process the youth thought nearly ended is hardly even begun.
The picture is gloomy but it is powerful. If it is less attractive
• The phrase " grooves of change " was suggested to Tennyson by a ride in
the first train from Liverpool to Manchester, when he thought that the wheels
ran in a groove.
than the one which is drawn in the earlier poem, it has that
strength which fidelity to the real always gives.
Along with these changes in substance there goes a change in
versification also. The two poems just spoken of are again
typical. The later is less smooth than the earlier ; and in many
other pieces as well Tennyson seems to have sought to produce
the impression of rugged strength either by his choice of metre or
by his method of handling it. The reason is not decline of skill,
for the metre is admirably adapted to the end in view ; and when
he has another purpose the poet can be as smooth as of old,
witness the beautiful Crossing the Bar, or the exquisite lullaby in
The Foresters, which for delicacy of touch will bear comparison
with any of Tennyson's songs :
"To sleep to sleep! The long bright day

1 is done,
And darkness rises from the fallen sun.
J To sleep to sleep
! !
Whate'er thy joys, they vanish with the day

Whate'er thy griefs, in sleep they fade away.
To sleep ! to sleep !
Sleep, moumfdl heart, and let the past be past t
Sleep, happy soul all life 1 will sleep at last.

To sleep! to sleep!"
There remain to notice only the dramas, which are the most
remarkable, though also in the opinion of many the most unfortu-
nate, of the later developments of Tennyson's work. But whatever
we may think of the quality of Tennyson's dramas, a careful
examination of his work makes it evident that they were the
natural goal to which he was bound to come. Writing for the
stage is just the last step in the we see
process which in the
dialect poems. The dramas open with Queen Mary (1875),
which was speedily followed by Harold (1876); then came
Beckef^, The Cup and The Falcon, all in 1884. The Foresters,
published in the year of the poet's death, bears marks of declining
powers. The other shorter plays are all more or less faulty also.
Neither The Falcon nor The Promise of May would vindicate
the poet's claim to the title of dramatist. Of the minor dramatic
' It had been printed in 1879.
TENNYSON 407
pieces the best is TTie Cup, which is powerfully written, and in

which the characters are well and clearly drawn.
But upon Tennyson as a dramatist judgment must pass in
respect of the three English historical plays. As a rule it has
been given decisively against him Mr Stopford Brooke has even
:
written a large volume of criticism on Tennyson alone, without

deeming it necessary to criticise the dramas at all Here again,
however, we may suspect the influence of unconscious prejudice.
Just as the popularity of The Charge of the Light Brigade operates
against the acceptance of The Charge of the Heavy Brigade, and
the earlier Locksley Hall against the later, so the very greatness
and the deep-rooted fame of Tennyson as a lyrist, as author of
In Memoriam and of Idylls of the King, make it at first a little
difficult to think of him as also a dramatist. If Shakespeare had
spent a long life in writing exquisite songs and sonnets and narra-
tive poems, had been recognised for many years as facile princeps
in his art, and then had suddenly produced Hamlet, possibly his
contemporaries would have resented it. Probably too in 1875 no
critic opened Queen Mary without a more or less conscious
expectation that it would prove, if not a failure, at any rate some-

thing below its author's level. That certainly was the critical
verdict, and it cannot be denied that the verdict was sound.
Queen Mary showed that Tennyson had still a good deal to learn
about dramatic art. It contains matter enough for two plays.
The stage is overcrowded, and one character jostles out another,
so that all but a few of the chief ones remain undeveloped.
There is bustle without movement, and where there ought to be
excitement the reader is cold and listless. What is perhaps most
disappointing of all is the fact that Queen Mary is not a specially
poetical play.
Harold showed that, though he was nearer seventy than sixty
when he wrote Queen Mary, the poet was not yet too old to learn.
He reduced the figures of his drama to manageable numbers, he
made the action more rapid, he put life into the characters. The
figure of Harold himself is admirably drawn —
bold, frank, truthful,
yet led by an inevitable destiny into lies and the breach of his oath.
He stands between two worlds, the last of the old r^ce ^nd it?
champion, yet with gleams in his thought from the new world
which is to rise from its ashes. Half-sceptic, he yet feels the
force of dreams and prophecieis and portents which he less than
half believes.
"They seem to me too narrow, all the faiths

Of this grown world of ours, whose baby eye
Saw them sufficient."
He scoffs at the portent of the comet. Yet the knowledge that he
has sworn falsely on the bones of the saints almost palsies his
arm, and he is saddened by the bowing of the Holy Rood, even
while he remains uncertain whether it bowed at all or no, or what
was signified if it The other figures too are good.

did bow.
William of Normandy, though much more lightly sketched than
Harold, forms an effective contrast. So does Edith to Aldvyyth.
The former is perhaps the most charming of all Tennyson's
women.
Becket showed still further advance, both in dramatic manage-
ment and in respect of the delineation of character. It is indeed
the greatest literary draiHa of recent years. The prologiie is
perhaps questionable in art ; for it seems hardly proper for the

dramatist to reveal so much of his purpose ere the action begins.
But it is admirably written, and whether proper or not for the
spectator in the theatre, it is useful to the student in the closet
No commentary in the same space can reveal so much of the
mind and purpose of the writer. In Becket Tennyson is happy
in the first place in his choice of subject. The crisis of the
struggle between Church and State in the reign of Henry II
is not only one of the most important, but one of the most
strikingly dramatic, in English history, and it is surprising that
it had not been used up before. Moreover, the great question
is, for draniatic purposes, very happily embodied in the two
characters of Henry and Becket, whom Tennyson brings to-
gether with excellent effect. There are striking points both of
resemblance and of difference between them, — of resemblance
principally by nature, and of difference arising from circumstance
and training. By nature, Becket is a stronger Henry; and the
Churchman's superiority is further increased by better discipline
TENNYSON 409
and by self-restraint The femalfe characters, Eleanor and

Rosamund, are on the other hand contrasted, the hard glitter
of the former showing up the gentleness of the latter. In this
play and in Harold lies the justification of Tennyson's experiments
in the drama. He had acquired the dramatic skill which he did not
possess when he wrote Queen Mary, and the poetry which seemed
to have deserted him in that play had returned. The best part of
ten years of his life had been devoted —
or so it seemed to these —
experiments, and not unnaturally his admirers grudged the time.
But he judged better than they. He could hardly have surpassed
himself in other forms of verse, or added anything strikingly new
while the figures of Harold and Becket, of Edith and Eleanor,
are memorable additions to the dramatic gallery of England.
Of all the poetical writings of the Victorian era, those just
passed in review are the most broadly representative of the age to
which they belong. It was this fact, quite as much as the excellence
of his work, which made Tennyson the most popular poet of his
time : he gained the ear of the age, because, as we have seen, he
spoke with its voice. The excellences are obvious. With less
fervour and inspiration than Shelley, he has a more certain touch.

His best work is hardly equal to the best of Keats, but he has left
so much more good and even excellent as to fill a bigger

that is
place in literature. But in some respects the causes which brought

about his popularity are likely to tell against his permanent fame.
He is too prone to echo back the thoughts of his own time and
country. Patriotism is good ; but it is not a pure good when
there goes along with it a hard, unsympathetic tone of mind
towards other races Tennyson we hear rather too much
; and in
and " the red fool-fury of the
of " the blind hysterics of the Celt,"
Seine." He lived under the sway of the Teutonic idea, and
already the Teutonic idea is discredited. Shakespeare is no less
patriotic, but in the universal range of his sympathies are em-
braced the Italian, the Jew and the Moor, as well as the English-
man. A similar impression is left when we examine Tennyson'?
intellectual range. In Memoriam is in one aspect an essay in
apologetics. For this reason it appealed to his contemporaries,
but it will survive in spite of this, not because of it. While
beauty is independent of time, particular forms of doubt and
belief are not. Men may agree to use the same phrases, but
there can be no effectual agreement to mean the same thing
by them.
Such special causes of temporary popularity will tend not to
remembrance 'but to oblivion in ages to come. It is a great thing
to have expressed best of all the thought and feeling of one
century; but it is not so great as to have expressed the thoughts of
all centuries. When the time is gone the interest passes away.
There remains, however, to be set against this the pure and
exquisite beauty of much of Tennyson's work, the melody of his
verse, the perennial charm of the literary associations which he,
better thanany contemporary, knew how to impart to his poetry.
There remains also the mass of thought which is not of one age
but of alL By virtue of these Tennyson's memory is safe.
CHAPTER V
BROWNING
Browning's poems vary in quality at least as widely as
Tennyson's ; and there are differences in tone between the works
of one period as a whole and those of another. But there is no
such revolution as that which is implied in the development of the
dramatic element in Tennyson. On the contrary, the principle
upon which Browning's work is based remains singularly uniform
from beginning to end: he never swerved from the conviction
that his genius was fundamentally dramatic. He contrasts with
Tennyson also in his remarkable independence. Only a few great
poets owe so much to their predecessors as Tennyson, while hardly
any are so entirely self-sustained as Browning. Tennyson is full of
echoes from the classics; but though Browning knew aU the
Greek and Latin poets, there are few lines or phrases in his works
which can be traced back to them. Browning could when he
pleased interweave among his lines literary reminiscences drawn
from his vast reading. But his method of conception was
essentially his own, and his work did not readily amalgamate with
the work of others. The echoes of Shelley in his early poetry
seem not quite in keeping with the context. He felt the incon-
gruity, and early learnt to rely upon himself alone.
Even his marriage with a poetess had little influence upon
Browning's work. Though there is a change after 1846, the
greater part of seems to be due not to her but to himself: it
it
was something which would have come whether he had married

or not. The scanty success achieved after many efforts made his
abandonment of the drama almost inevitable. No doubt the long

residence in Italy was a result of the marriage, and no doubt it
strengthened the Italian influence. But this was no new thing:
Browning had visited Italy before, and had already felt the charm
of the Italian Renascence. Further, although he knew and loved
Italian literature, his own work remains Teutonic in spirit. Per-
haps no English poet ever knew any foreign country as well as
Browning knew Italy ; certainly none has ever dedicated more of
his best work to a land which was not his own. Pippa Passes,
Luria, A Soul's Tragedy, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Lippo Lippi, The
Bishop at St Praxed's, with many more of the shorter poems, and
the great Ring and the Book itself, are all Italian in subject-matter;
they show an infinity of knowledge; and yet not one of them
could for a moment be conceived to be the work of an Italian.
Tennyson's knowledge of the country, the people and the literature
was far narrower, but there is a great deal more of the spirit of
Italian poetry embodied in his verse. Byron is far less alien.
The Elizabethan dramatists seem more in harmony with Venice
or Verona than Browning ever is.
If Keats was born a Greek, Browning was born a Goth the —
author of The City of Dreadful Night has said so in other words.
His case proves how much spiritual affinity has to do with literary
resemblances, and how dangerous is the argument that such
resemblances indicate direct influence. Anyone familiar with
German philosophy Browning would be tempted
as well as with
to argue that the latter had been powerfully swayed by the
philosophers, and that some of his most characteristic and most
frequently reiterated ideas were borrowed from them. And yet
the poet " was emphatic in his assurance that he knew neither the
German philosophers nor their reflection in Coleridge'." Why,
then, is it that there is in his poetry far more of the spirit of that
Germany in which he never lived, and whose language and
literature he knew very imperfectly, than there is of Italy, though
he knew it thoroughly and lived in it for many of the best years of
his life ? No answer can be given more definite than that, some-
1 Mrs Sutherland Orr's Life of Browning, io8.
BROWNING 413
how, the poet was born a Goth. But stress must not be laid on
blood; for English, Scotch, German and Creole meet in Robert
Browning ; and some believe that there was a Jewish element as
welL
The Brownings settled in Italy, partly for the sake of
Mrs Browning's health, and partly because the unhappy relations
between her and her father, on account of his violent and un-
reasonable opposition to the marriage, made it desirable that,
father and daughter should live far apart. Their home, till
Mrs Browning's death, was at Florence, whence Browning sent
his two next works, Christmas Eve and Easter Day (1850) and
Men and Women (1855).
The former of these poems is the only work of Browning's in
which we may with probability trace the influence of Mrs Brown-
ing ; and even in this instance the influence is conjectural. The
manner is Browning's, and the subject is one which would
naturally attract him. It may, therefore, be no more than a
coincidence that the poet's first publication after his marriage

is that in which he most explicitly deals with questions of
religion, or rather of theology, for he is religious throughout
But whatever may be the secret of its genesis, Christmas Eve and
Easier Day is a poem of peculiar interest as that in which the
poefs own views are most clearly revealed; for in spite of the
dramatic principle we may safely ascribe to himself a large part of
its substance. It is further interesting because of a connexion,
unusually close for Browning, with contemporary thought. In
this respect Browning is unlike all his chief contemporaries.
Tennyson, Arnold, Clough, Rossetti and Dobell, all betray them-
selves not only as poets of the nineteenth century, but of a
particular decade or, at widest, a particular quarter of it The
themes which caught their imagination would not have caught it
a little earlier or a little later, or else they would have been treated
differently. But Browning did not much love to work on topics
connected with his own generation. To him, time was a matter
almost of indifference ; for the human soul, in which his interest
was centred, has remained much the same since the days of
Adam. If he had a preference, it was for the Italian Renascence
4H THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
rather than for any other age or country. Nevertheless, he kepi
open to what was taking place around him. Sludge t?ie
his eyes
Medium shows that he was awake to the rise of spiritualism
perhaps because Mrs Browning would not allow him to slttep;
He was also interested, in a scornful way, in the ecclesiastical

ferment caused by Newman. He was familiar with all the
"thrilling views of the surplice question," and he was con-
temptuously amused by the clerical figure with the chains of
Peter round his waist, and his back "brave with the needle-
work of noodledom." So too he noted the effect of Essays and
Reviews and of Colenso's work as well as the negative criticism
of the German school ; while he showed no more inclination to
accept this without reserve than to give over his intellect into the
keeping of the Catholic party.
'
It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that Browning should
have chosen in Christmas Eve to make his comments upon the
two extreme forms of faith which divide his countrymen, and upon
the form of scepticism which was threatening both. As the
representatives of faith he chooses, on the one hand, ultra-Protes-
tantism, "the dissidence of dissent," and, on the other, Roman

Catholicism. In both he finds much to question and to reject,
but in both he finds present the " one thing needful," love. This
is where churches and chapels have the decisive advantage over
the German professor's lecture-room. The last speaks only to the

intellect, they address the heart; and Browning is always disposed
to give the heart a higher place than the head. Stupid as is the
doctrine of the Nonconformist preacher, and gross as is the yoke
of Rome, either is preferable to the negations of the German
professor. The two former may "poison the air for healthy
breathing,"
"But the Critic leaves no air to poison;

Pumps out with ruthless ingenuity
Atom by atom, and leaves you vacuity." —
It will be observed that, proceeding from a diiferent starting-point,
Paracelsus reaches a similar conclusion. The difference between
the two poems is that the earlier is fundamentally philosophical,

BROWNING 415
the later one, religious. In this case at least the change is not an
improvement. In the shadowy figure of Christ which guides the
speaker, warns him against contempt for faith, even stupid faith,
and deserts him when he goes where no faith is, there is no
adequate counterpoise to the loss of the free discussion and the
dramatic evolution of Paracelsus.
There are two artistically excellent pieces in Christmas Eve.
One is the admirably humorous description of the gathering of
the congregation in the little chapel. It is an imaginary scene,
but it is convincing. Browning's picture, taken from nowhere, has,
nevertheless, the fidelity of a photograph, and in scores and
hundreds of places in England it is reproduced, year in year out,
in all its details, except the presence of the poet. And the
triumph of the poet is that out of all this ugliness he has made
something which is, though faithful, yet artistically beautiful, and
through all the vulgarity of the doctrine he has retained sympathy.
The second passage, scarcely less admirable, is the picture of the
German professor himself. Little as Browning likes the teaching,
he cannot but admire the "mart}^: to mild enthusiasm," even

though it be enthusiasm for destruction.
Easter Day is less varied than the companion piece, and on
the whole it is less successful as a poem. Superficially viewed, it
seems to teach a doctrine of asceticism, for the soul in the vision

is condemned because it has refused to renounce the pleasures of
the world. But not the meaning. Browning was
this is certainly
no ascetic. To him, the world "means intensely, and m^kns'""-

good"; and no one has sung more fervidly than he the .delight of
-life . "How good is man's life, the mere living," criesJQapiJn
Saul; and not only David, but Pippaj. J he gipsy Duchess. Fr a
Lippo Lippi, and the Bishop of St Praxgd's characters morally —
Ibfty and morally low —
are all alike keenly alive to the pleasures.,
di sense. Neither does the poet impute it to them for blame ; on
the contrary, to the end of his life he teaches that it is a merit.
The pleasures the world yields, wisely used, are instruments to the
mind, as food is an instrument to the body both are equally :
and may be equally necessary. In Two Camels it is the

legitimate
abstemious animal that breaks down, and he does so because of
foolish abstinence. Rabbi Ben Ezra condemns the opposition

between soul and flesh :
"Let us not always say

'
Spite of this flesh to-day
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole !
As the bird wings and sings,

Let us cry • All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!'"
The poet was capable of sympathy with asceticism when directed

to higher ends ;ût for asceticism as an end in itself he had
nothing but dislike^*) So it is in Easter Day as well. A careful
reading shows thatnere too what the poet really- teaches is not
asceticism. The condemnation of the erring soul is pronounce,d,
not because the world has been enjoyed, but because the enjoy-
ment of it has stood in the way of something higher. The soul in
its complete contentment with the beauty and delight of the world
has forgotten what is greater still, the love of the Maker of it and ;
sentence passes in vindication of :j;his higher thing. The analogy

with Paracelsus is again manifest. Neither truth nor beauty, far
less pleasure, is the central point of Browning's systerfl, but

love.
Five years after these two poems Browning published Men and
Women, the collection which gained, and on the whole has retained,
the widest popularity of all his , works. Not that the poems so
named in the collected editions of his works are to be identified
with the volume so named in 1855. Then, the "men and women"
were fifty in number, and there was an additional poem, the
beautifulOne Word More, addressed to his wife. Many of them
are now be found among the Dramatic Lyrics and Dramatic
to
Romances; while the one-act drama. In a Balcony, stands by itself.
Various causes may be assigned for the popularity of Men and
Women. The poet was in the full maturity and vigour of his
powers, and the method he adopted was that which best suited
his genius. Moreover, he is here less difficult to understand, less
crabbed and eccentric than he too frequently is. The quality
therefore is very high, and the average level is perhaps more
uniformly sustained than it is anywhere else. Even those, there-
BROWNING 417
fore, who think that Browning has done still greater things, will
admit that the admirers of Men and Women have much to say in
justification of their preference.
But Men and Women does not stand alone. In substance and
principle its contents are closely akin to the Dramatic Lyrics
and Dramatic Romances of Bells and Pomegranates, and also to
Dramatis Fersonae (1864). They are akin likewise to the
Facchiarotto, the Dramatic Idylls, the Farleyings, and other
volumes of later days. But the later groups are all marred by the
growing eccentricity and, as it would seem, the wilfulness, of
Browning, so that, except for a few pieces here and there, they are
hardly worthy to be put beside the earlier collections. These
collections form together one of the most precious and pro-
foundly original of all the contributions to the poetic literature
of the nineteenth i-pntnry Browning r\\ri nnt mn»nt-dia..diaMwftri<-

,
monolo gue. but he madfiJt-speeiaHvbis-ewBi and no one else has

ever put such rich and varied material into it. The defects whidh
prevented his complete success in the regular drama are not
apparent in this cognate form. He takes just what interests him,
and consequently he is nearly always inspired, nearly always at his
best. Ixhe style, indeed, is invariably his own and does not change
with the character as it shouldj/ but under such conditions the

fact matters little. Few poems are long enough to render
of the
the fault conspicuous, and a monologue cannot present that
contrast of characters which would make it wholly unnaturaL
All that is best and all that is most characteristic of Browning
is represented in these dramatic monologues. They include the
finest of his poems of love, and in nothing is Browning more
distinguished than in these. Evelyn Hope, The Last Ride Together,

One Way of Love, Any Wife to any Husband, A Woman's last
Word, By the Fireside, In a Gondola, The Worst of It, Forphyricis
Lover, James Leis Wife, One Word More and Lyric Love, are a
collection not to be paralleled in English poetry, nor, probably, in
the poetry of any language. The most remarkable thing about
them all is their complete independence of convention and
their elevation of tone. The ordinary love-song is inspired by
desire and has no small element of physical passion. This
w. 27
sensuousness characterised, in particular, the poetry of the Pre-
Raphaelites, a few years after the date we have reached. But in
Browning/the intellectual element is too powerful to allow this

predominance of sense even when the poet is dealing with the
relations of the sexe^ All these poems throb with emotion, yet
none of them, except In a Gondola, can be said to be absorbed in
it. Porphyrids Lover, though a study of madness, is, like all the
rest, inspired by intellect.
Connected with this point is the fact that while Minnesinger

and Troubadour and Cavalier sing the song of desire not gratified,
many of Browning's are poems of fruition, the utterance of the
husband or the wife, of a love happy or unhappy, but, in either
case, of one which looks to the present and the past at least as
much as to the future. Connected with it too is the fact that
nearly all Browning's pieces are dramatic. One Word More is
the expression of the poet's love for his wife, and the beautiful
apostrophe, Lyric Love, is addressed to her disembodied spirit.
For this reason these two pieces have not only the charm of a rare
beauty, but that peculiar interest which belongs to the personal
utterance of a poet who is habitually dramatic. All the others are
dramatic. A poet like Burns is never dramatic ; and as a rule the
lyric utterance of love has not been genuinely dramatic even when
it has been so in form. /^But Browning's pieces are dramatic in
essence and not merely in show. He coaceives—some-defipite
_ pihiatTrir]^ his poem gives the emoBons of the persona dramatis
placed in that situation, and thus the individuality of the speaker
is brought out. Perhaps, because of its wider range, James Le^s
Wife is the best illustration. It traces the woman's mind
dramatically through all the stages, from the first dawning of
suspicion that her husband's love is gone from her until the
separation. Its success depends wholly upon Browning's realisa-
tion of the character. The fundamentals of human nature are

merely the groundwork : the passion of love is individualised by
Browning as much as the passion of avarice is individualised by
Shakespeare in the person of Shylock.
One result of this dramatic conception is that Browning has
greatly the advantage in point of variety over all the other lyrists
BROWNING 419
of love. '•
The only limits are the possibilities of dramatic situation
and of variety of character within the poet's range of conception.
And in Browning's case the range is wide. James Lee's Wife gives
one phase of jealousy; but there is a widely different one in
Cristina and Monaldeschiznd Again ia The Worst of It. In Cristina
it leads to revenge, an end true to nature, but common enough.
In TTie Worst of It we have one of the most striking examples of
Browning's originality. It is the utterance of a man whose wife
has been unfaithful to him ; but instead of breaking out into wild
rage at the wrong done to him, Browning's speaker is agonised to
think of the degradation the guilty wife has brought upon herself.
His love survives the wrong he has suffered : what he can hardly
wrong she has done against herself
realise is the :
"She mined? How? No heaven for her?

Crowns to give, and none for the brow
That looked like marble and smelt like myrrh?
Shall the robe be worn, and the palm-branch borne.
And she go graceless, she graced now
Beyond all saints, as themselves aver?"
Equal self-command, exercised in a widely different spirit and with
another shown in A Forgiveness. In Porphyria's Lover,

result, is
In a Gondola and Evelyn Hope there is scarcely less originality

and freshness. The first depicts the lover and murderer sitting
with the murdered girl's head on his shoulder; the second, the
death-scene of the lover stabbed by the side of her he loves ; and
the third, loveliest perhaps of all, is the old man's declaration of
his love for the dead girl, the emblem of their secret enclosed
within the " sweet cold hand," and his confidence that she will
" wake, and remember, and understand."
^c^c^l^^SSSXi^.^n^^/B^^^^f^^^^'^'^ to" the' pi3gffisTreaHng"of
love are those which d,gaLwirirTeligftJ^"and in pieces of this class
the group of publications under consideration is remarkably rich.
The principal poems can be arranged in a sort of order, according

to the character or situation conceived; and when they are so
arranged we see that they cover ne arly the whole rari ê nfrelwiitg
tho ught from the firgt-dim-gFepings-o£-t'he-TTattn:aA''THan for some-
-TTTJn£ above-himsplf np tQ f^ftmpl'i'tMTTtltrnnfl thence downwards
27—2
again_to scepticism. Thus that profoundly interesting poem,
~Caliban upon Setebos, has its purpose revealed by its secondary
title, " Natural Theology in the Island." The hint is taken from
Shakespeare ; and the deity, Setebos, whom Caliban evolves from
his own mind, is such as might be conceived by a brutal savage,
iiotjidtlK«it-4BtelteeM3u|^TOmpIetely-jdest^^
The poem might serve as a sermon on Goethe's text, "Man never
knows how anthropomorphic he is," and it goes to show that each
man has the god whom he deserves. As Caliban's deity is created
entirely out of his own nature, the motives attributed to him are
those upon which Caliban himself would act. He spares or
destroys his creatures, " loving not, hating not, just choosing so,"
even as Caliban twenty crabs go and crushes the twenty-first.
lets
The covert satireon theology is highly effective. The satiric

vein is rare in Browning; but Caliban upon Setebos, Sludge the
Medium and Bishop Blougrams Apology, prove that he possessed
the gift and only lacked the will to use it
Above Caliban stand poems such as Clean and the Epistle of
Karshish, which express the mood of mind of a heathen brough t
former the contact is of the slightest. Cleon, a Greek of the

highest gifts and accomplishments, has heard of Paulus, who,
however, proves to be " a mere barbarian Jew," possibly identical
with Christus; and Cleon has all a Greek's contempt for barbarians.
It is inconceivable that anything hid from him can be known to
such as they. Nevertheless, Cleon bears witness to the natural

craving for that which Christianity promises, namely immortality.
It seems so natural and so right that he could accept it all,
were not the circumstances incredible: were it true, Jove surely
must have revealed it to the Greeks. In the Epistle of Karshish,
a closer contact comes to a man by nature more prone to believej
for Karshish is not a rationalising Greek, but an Arab physician
who has a touch of the mysticism of his race, which holds in
check the sceptical tendency of his scientific training. He has
seen and talked with Lazarus, the story of the raising from the
dead impresses him in spite of himself, and something not
altogether earthly in the bearing of Lazarus compels him to pay
BROWNING 421
an attention to the story which a mere ordinary tale of miracle

would not deserve. The character of Karshish as a reasoner and
a man of science obliges him to thrust this story aside; but it
recurs' again and again in spite of him. What most deeply

impresses him is the conception of the love of God, and of the
union of human attributes with omnipotence. Granting the truth
of Lazarus' story, that Christ was very God, then " the All-Great
were the All- Loving too"; and the temptation to believe this is so
strong that Karshish is almost prepared to bear the scofiFs and
jeers of his sceptical friends and accept the new faith.
Two other poems, Saul and Rabbi Ben Ezra, are the utter-
ances of Israelites ; but the latter is so highly idealised that it may
be regarded as almost independent of time, place and circumstance.
Saul, a poem unsurpassed for lyrical fervour and beauty, evidently
occupied Browning's thoughts for a long time. The first half of
itappeared among Bells and Pomegranates; but it had to wait ten
years for completion, and the whole was carefully revised. The
speaker is David, and the poemJs-A—piophec5Z_o£_tlieJM£Ssia]l.
who had been promised to the line of Jesse — not, however, the
Messiah of Jewish tradition, but the Christian Messiah. The two
great points of Karshish, the humanity in Godhead and the union
of infinite love with infinite power, are in Saul likewise. But
there is a difference. What in Karshish is no more than a hope
— is hardly even that —becomes in Saul a confident prophecy.
Though the time is pre-Christian, the fulness of conviction makes
it essentially a Christian poem.
We reach the culmination in Rabbi Ben Ezra, one of the
greatest poems Browning ever wrote. It is put into the mouth of
a Jew ; but for once Browning, is not anxious to individualise, his
aim is rather to idealise. Rabbi Ben Ezra isan old man, the type
of all that is best and wisest in his race. There is no dogma in
his utterances, nothing distinctive of the Jewish or even of the
Christian faith. What he says might be appropriately put into the
mouth of a Socrates or of a St Francis of Assisi ; for the purest
religion is of any creed, or of none. The poem is the embodiment
of all that is deepest in Browning's philosophy of religion, and all
that is highest in his morality. Nowhere else, except in the Pope
of The Ring and the Book, can we be so sure that we have Brown-
ing's own thought, just the best that he can conceive, unaltered
and unmodified by dramatic conditions. What induced Browning
to ascribe these thoughts to Rabbi Ben Ezra may have been the
fact that the Rabbi was one of those Jews who taught the doctrine
of immortality ; for this is the teaching of the poeih too. No more
confident and triumphant poem was ever written ; it has the mag- .
nificent faith of certain of the Psalms. The Rabbi welcomes age

it is "the last of life, for which the first was made.'' He welcomes
pain and doubt they indicate kinship to God, closer than that of
:
the brutes which are undisturbed by them. He refuses to accept

"apparent failure": better high aim than low achievement "a —
brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.'' And
all is summed up in the doctrine of a universe divinely governed.
Carpe diem is folly :
" Fool ! All that is, at all,

Lasts ever, past recall ;
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:

What entered into thee,
That was, is, and shall be:
Time's wheel runs back or stops : Potter and clay endure."
Browning afterwards expanded this teaching, and made it argu-

mentative in La Saisiaz ; but he never improved upon it, never,
perhaps, touched the subject so wisely again.
A Death in the Desert belongs, like Rabbi Ben Ezra, to the
volume of Dramatis Personae, and is also notable among the
religious poems. It is lower, as theology is lower than religion
but adds one thing of importance which is absent from the
it
other poem, the element of definite Christian doctrine. As a rule,

Browning is disposed to shun this ; but in A Death in the Desert
St John, dying solitary in extreme old age, the last of all who have
personally known the Christ, argues out his faith on the ground of
what he has seen and known. In doing so he gives expression to
the thoughts rather of Browning's time than of the historical
St John. The poet's purpose was not so much to carry back the
mind to the first century of the Christian era, as to put in the
most impressive way the arguments which were likely to carry
conviction to his own generation. The poem, therefore, while it
is dramatic in its accessories —
the cave in which the old man lies
BROWNING 423
dying, his attendants —

and the Bactrian sentinel is hardly more
dramatic in thought than Rabbi Ben Ezra ; but the scene and the
character add impressiveness to the statement of difficulties and
the emphatic assertion of knowledge on the part of the dying
man.
Lucretius thought that religion was the great bane of the
human race, and he could give striking support to his opinion.
Widely as Browning differed, he too was conscious of the element
of evil, and he shows part of it in Holy- Cross Day. Another
aspect, again, is shown in Bishop Blougram's Apology. The
apology is put into the mouth of a man who is not quite sure
whether to believe or not. Seventy years ago men were certain
on the and Blougram would have been a sceptic; but
subject,
times have changed, and he is a man of the time. It is safer to
beUeve ; there can be no harm in it ; whereas there is disastrous
harm to the sceptic if the creeds happen to be right. Moreover,
it pays to believe —
or to act belief. By so acting Blougram has
got all the best the earth affords, and he points out to Gigadibs,
who values himself on his unbelief, how much more practically
wise his own course has been and how much more fruit it has
yielded. Hardly ever has Browning sustained dramatic propriety
better than in this piece :it rivals Sludge the Medium and ITie
Bishop at St Prasad's, each a masterpiece in its way, and is

perhaps clearly surpassed only by Guido. Browning, of coiuê,
knows that the argument is sophistical. A faith assumed not
because it is believed, but because it would be safe to beUeve it,
is, in the real sense sA the word faith, absurd. But Blougram is
allowed to speak for himself without the least interference from
his creator; he scores a triumph over Gigadibs; and it is not even
clear that Browning does not sympathise with him rather than
with Gigadibs, though the latter is the honester man of the two.
Certainly Blougram has won worldly success, and within its limits
worldly success is a good thing. But the poet must have smiled
sardonically when Wiseman expressed the opinion that possibly
the author of the collection of poems among which his own
portraitappeared might be converted to the Catholic faith.
There is no other group of poems which holds so much of the
snnl of the Doet as these two ; but the ooems on art are inferior in
importance only to them. Like the great leaders of the Italian
Renascence, Browning did not confine his interest within the
limits of one art. As Raphael wrote his solitary poem, and as
Dante prepared to paint his single angel, so Browning felt the

impulse to express himself through another medium than words.
He even studied the arts of painting and modelling, and though the
labour he spent probably yielded nothing worth preserving in the
shape of picture or bust, it gave him knowledge of which he has
made good use in his poetry.
In his own proper art too Browning was not content with
practice merely he was all through his life a profound student of
;
the theory as well. Evidences of this study are to be found as

early as Pauline, and in Paracelsus we have the figure of the poet
Aprile, who is far indeed from representing Browning's conception
of the perfect artist-character, but who certainly embodies his view
of some of its tendencies and dangers. Long afterwards, in Fifint
at the Fair and in Aristophanes Apology, he gives an elaborate and
carefully reasoned theory of poetic art. And among the produc-
tions of this intermediate period are quite a large number which
deal, mostly in a dramatic way, with poetry or with painting or
with music. Thus Transcendentalism and How it Strikes a Con-
temporary relate to poetry, the latter showing that Browning's
conception of the dignity of the poet's function might have
satisfiedMilton himself; for the threadbare poet is no less than
the " general-in-chief " for a whole life-campaign.
Subtlety is one of the most marked characteristics of Browning's
mind, and it is among the reasons for the obscurity often really
present but occasionally only imagined to exist in his works.
There are few better examples of this quality than the little poem.
Deaf and Dumb, that exquisite interpretation, through the force of
sympathy, of the meaning of 4 piece of sculpture :
"Only the prism's obstruction shows aright

The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light
Into the jewelled bow from blankest white :
So may a glory from defect arise :
Only by Deafness may the vexed Love wreak

on brow and cheek,
Its insuppressive sense
Only by Dumbness adequately speak
As favoured mouth could never, through the eyes."
BROWNING 425
Youth and Art is interesting for a wholly different reason,

teaching that life holds things of higher worth than any art.
The end of ambition is attained, and the life is empty : as in

Teimyson's Romnefs Remorse, substance has been sacrificed for
shadow.
As usual, however, Browning's favourite and most successful
mode of expression is dramatic, and the most remarkable poems
of this group are three in which he embodies his ideas of painting
and of music in the persons of individual painters and musicians.
They are Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea del Sarto and AM VogUr.
Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha might be added to make the
balance even between the two arts; but it is not worthy of a place
beside the other three. Neither is A Toccata of Galuppi^s, which
is somewhat overloaded with technicalities another cause of —
obscurity. But the soul of music is in Abt Vogler. The
musician's sense of the reality of his work is wonderfully rendered.
It is a palace of sound that he rears; and the reaction, the starting
of the tears as the palace vanishes away, is followed immediately by

the faith that " there shall never be one lost good " what is lost :
in time wiU be found again in eternity :
" All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist,

Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity confirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard.
The passion thatleft the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sentup to God by the lover and the bard;

Enough that he heard it once : we shall hear it by-and-by."
Fra Lippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto are not written in this
high-strung lyrical strain; but what they lose in oneway they gain
in another. They and the two painters
are intensely dramatic,
are among the most admirably portrayed of Browning's men.
FiUppo Lippi is a sensualist, in the main quite contented with his
sensualism, yet not without sympathy with things higher, which
sometimes get into his work in a way he himself does not under-
stand. Trained in a convent, he yet finds afterwards that all he
knows which is worth the knowing has been drank in uncon-

sciously during his life in the gutter, before he saw the convent
What he experienced in the street is real to him, and by virtue of
it he is enabled afterwards to give life to the lifeless figures of the

monkish pictures. Browning's dislike of the monastic abandon-
ment of the world is shown in this poem. Faulty and stained as
is the character of Filippo Lippi, he has much of the poet's
—
sympathy far more than the respectable Bishop Blougram. He
has hold of reality and he is at heart sincere. The world which
he finds good, is a good thing. When he declares that
" This world's no blot for us,
Nor blank ; It means intensely, and means good,"
he is speaking the opinion of Browning, as well as his own

experience.
Andrea del Sarto is a character of a higher order, and the
depth of his fall is proportioned to the height whence he came.
While Filippo Lippi has realised the best that was in him,
chequered as it is, Andrea has not. He has been unfaithful to
his art; he has bartered his gifts for gold and for the semblance of
love; and all his life is poisoned by the sense of the wrong he has
done his own higher nature. Technically perfect, he can correct
the faults even of Raphael, — "but all the play, the insight, and
the stretch — out of me, out of me!" He imagines
"Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,

Meted on each side by the angel's reed,
For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo and me
To cover.''
But even while he imagines it he knows it to be impossible. He

has chosen his reward on and it is earthy. He whose
earth,
reach does not exceed his grasp has no use for a heaven. The
Grammarian is " for the morning " because there is something of
the infinite in his aspiration ; Andrea, who has not aspired, must
rest on the lower slopes.
These two poems deal with the Italian Renascence, and move
in it with an easy mastery which shows how far Browning had
BROWNING 437
advanced since SordeUo. There was no period of history he knew

so well, and somewhere or other in his verse every aspect of it is
represented— its art, its learning, its luxury and brilliance and its
heartlessness. Andrea and Filippo Lippi are men of their time,
and their ambitions and aspirations, their strength and their
weakness belong to Italy and to no other country, to the
—
Renascence and to no other period, always, however, to these as
seen by the eyes of a Goth. Another aspect of it is seen in My
Last Duchess, a perfect picture of cold-blooded heartlessness, a
thing possible in any age, though fortunately rare in all ages. But
in its circumstances this is indubitably Italian, and unmistakably
tinged with the spirit of the Renascence. Again, the mixture of
paganism with Christianity in The Bishop at St Praxed's, and the
Bishop's worldliness and luxuriousness, combined with his sense
of the beauty of form and colour and his fine taste in Latinity,
are characteristic of the same age. So too in 7%« Grammarian's
Funeral, the old scholar's zeal in the pursuit of knowledge even in
itsdriest forms and the determination which spurs him on, in spite
of sinking frame and failing sense, to settle the " business " of the
Greek particles, bespeaks the day when Greek learning was new,
and when it seemed to hold out almost limitless promise to the
human race.
Mr Beers' quotes with obvious dissent the saying of Ruskin
that " Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of
the Middle Ages." He on the ground that Browning
dissents, not
erred, but thathe was indifferent and seldom touched upon the
Middle Ages at all. And indeed the dictum is surprising, unless
we suppose that Ruskin extends the term " Middle Ages " a little
beyond the ordinary bounds, so as to include at least the early
part of the Renascence. The Middle Ages proper make but
slight appeal to Browning. To him, chivalry counted for little,
and the faith of the Middle Ages perhaps for even less. He has
caught a few points. One is which is illustrated
their grotesquerie,
in Holy-Cross Day and The Heretics Tragedy; and perhaps we
may reckon the vividness of their faith in a future world as
another. If time enters into Easter Day at all, it is a poem of the
' History of English Romanticism in the XIX Century, !•]•].
the picture of the day of judgment
might
poet's own age; but
:
have been painted by the brush of a mediaeval artist
"Sudden there went,

Like horror and astonishment,
A fierce vindictive scribble of red
Quick flame across, as if one said
(The angry scribe of Judgment) There- '
Bum it!' and straight I was aware

That the whole ribwork round, minute
Cloud touching cloud beyond compute.
Was tinted, each with its own spot
Of burning at the Core, till clot
Jammed against clot, and spilt its fire
Over all heaven, which 'gan suspire

As fanned to measure equable,
Just so great conflagrations kill
Night overhead, and rise and sink
Reflected. Now the fire would shrink
And wither off the blasted face
Of heaven, anfl I distinct might trace
The sharp black ridgy outlines left
—
Unbumed like network then, each cleft
The had been sucked back into
fire
Regorged, and out it surging flew

Furiously, and night writhed inflamed.
Till, tolerating to be tamed
No longer, certain rays world-wide

Shot downwardly."
This is just the picture of the Judgment which the mediasval mind
conceived, and here Browning might be said to enter into the
of medisevalism. But so much is common knowledge, and
spirit
ifa source were needed he might have got all this through the
medium of the Renascence, when it was still the business of the
great artists to represent in stone or on canvas the ideas they no
longer shared.
Except for such superficial points, Browning has perhaps less
of the mediaeval spirit than any other poet of his time. He has
been called a mystic, but the word hardly fits ; and in any case
the mysticism with which he sympathises is not of the mediaeval
sort : it is transcendentalism rather than mysticism. He remains
BROWNING 429
singularly unmoved by the religious revival^ or reaction, which so

powerfully influenced the imagination of the Pre-Raphaelites; and
large as is the place filled by reUgion in his verse, there is hardly
a piece that is 'catholic' in a sense which would have satisfied
Newman or Manning. To them, dogma and authority were

essential : to Browning they were an obstruction. Even his Pope
is almost as free from them as his Rabbi Ben Ezra: he is universal,
but not '
catholic'
Just as Browning attracted by the system of chivalry.
little is
We hear little tournaments and feats of arms. A

in his verse of
deed of heroism or devotion appeals to him no more in the
knightly Count Gismond vindicating a lady's honour than in the
simple Breton sailor, Herve Riel, steering the fleet of his country
into safety ; and ifhe seems to stamp the chivalric
in the former
spirit with his approval, in The Glove he reveals one of the
absurdities to which it was apt to lead. Mere daring had for him
only the attraction which he felt towards any form of intense life :
he preferred infinitely themes which opened out some problem

beyond, like that of Cliisie. And just as he cared little for the warlike
side of the spirit of chivalry, so he was indifferent to its amatory
aspect. There is nothing in common between the love-poems of
Browning and those of the troubadours, and the fantastic devotion
of the knights to their ladies was more likely to stir him to con-
tempt than to win his admiration.
Instead, then, of representing Browning as a master of the lore
of the Middle Ages, seems more consistent with the facts to say
it
that no man of his time was more completely free from their
influence. This was not due to ignorance ; it was rather due to
alienation of mind.
Though the death of Mrs Browning led to the migration of
the poet back to England, he never ceased to love " the land of
lands " as he calls it.
"What I love best in all the world

Is a castle, precipice-eneurled,
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine."
To Italy therefore he finally returned to die; and to Italy, also,

he went back for the subject of his pext poem after Dramatis
Personae. It was The Ring and the Book (1868-1869), the
longest and the greatest of all, with which closes the second period
of his work. During these two decades, from 1850 to 1870,

Browning had moved beyond the experimental stage, had dis-
covered what he could best do, and was doing it with powers in
the fullest maturity and with experience steadily growing richer.
Afterwards, unfortunately, his work is injured, and much of it is
almost ruined, by a loss of balance between the artistic and the
philosophic elements ; and the poet sinks into the preacher of a

doctrine.
The plan of The Ring and the Book is unique. Theoretically
indefensible, its sufficient justification is that practically it succeeds,
except in one respect which is in no way essential, and must be set
down as Browning's great error of judgment. Each of the ten
books regards the same story, from beginning to end, from a
different point of view. Superficially, then, the plan seems to
involve an intolerable amount of repetition ; but in point of fact
there is very little. The introductory book tells the story, a know-
ledge of which is afterwards assumed, so that what we get is not a
reiterated narrative of the facts, but the comments of the various
speakers upon them. Thus there is really very little action : the
whole object of the poem is the revelation of character, with the
advantage that it is character elicited in all the different cases by
the same set of circumstances. The five great books, Pompilia,
Count Guido Franceschini, Guido, Caponsacchi and The Pope are
never wearisome and never seem to repeat The wearisomeness
of the other five (which few, having read them once, will ever read
again) is due to the quality of the matter Browning puts into them.
His mistake lay in writing them they are no way essential to his
:
purpose and it is scarcely credible that they could have been

;
made good poetry Browning at least has not made them so.
;
The Ring and the Book, then, is a group of dramatic mono-

logues closely bound together. All the speakers have been con-
cerned in the same events, and they necessarily throw light upon
one another. Thus Caponsacchi owes to Pompilia what is vir-
tually a new birth, and in learning to understand her we are helped
to understand him. But in most respects the five books, are
BROWNING 431
practically five different poems ; and the merit of The Ring and
the Book lies mainly in the excellence of these five dramatic mono-
logues.
Pompilia is certainly the best of Browning's female characters :
her only rival is Pippa, who is altogether a lighter sketch. The

triumph is all the more remarkable, because this simple, uneducated
girl speaks in the language of Robert Browning. It would be vain to
deny that many of her utterances are dramatically out of character.
She is endowed with a range of thought and a power of expression
we can hardly conceive a girl so bred and trained to have pos-

sessed, and thus far Browning falls short of the highest dramatic
gift. But the fundamental conception of the character is faultless,
and in the beauty of it the reader willingly forgets the poet's failure
to adapt his style to her. The development in her nature,
brought about by the sense of coming motherhood, is infinitely
touching. Hitherto she has been first the simple, harmless,
colourless girl, and then the patient, down-trodden wife. Now
she suddenly reveals herself the heroine. The Patient Griselda is
not a type of character which wins the modern mind ; and Browning
was the lastman to exalt patience without limit and without con-
dition. The moment Pompilia feels that she has another life
to protect, her obedience ends. She is defiant of convention,

fertile in resource, a possible tigress in defence of her trust. The
instinct which turns the tree " away from the north wind with what
nest it holds " turns her from all the courses her life has followed
hitherto. It is a transformation almost like the change from
chrysalis to butterfly ; and yet it is so managed that we feel there
isno break in the character.

The Pope is perhaps the greatest book of all. The figure of the
old Pope has less charm than the picture of the girl-wife, but it has
more grandeur. Called upon in extreme old age to pronounce the
doom of a fellow-creature, he never hesitates, though he recognises
the possibility that, black as the case against Guido looks, there
may yet be a mistake. He has done his best ; he believes Guido
to be guilty and he sends him to execution.
; But though in form
a dramatic monologue like the other books, and though dramatic
in conception too. The Pope is in substance the utterance of
Browning himself. It is his philosophy of life that is here em-
bodied ; it is on the characters that are put into the
his criticisms
mouth of the Pope. It could not be otherwise. The Pope is not
so much a character as the embodiment of ideal wisdom and justice.
The book, therefore, is simply the best that Browning could con-
ceive about life. We have already found the same characteristic
in Rabbi Ben Ezra, and something of the same charm ; but, on the
whole, the palm of greatness belongs to The Pope^
Each of the other books has likewise a beauty and a greatness
of its own. The character of Caponsacchi is magnificently drawn.
It resembles Pompilia's in the fact that all the grander features are
evoked by one great crisis in his life. The call of Pompilia is the
turning-point. Hitherto Caponsacchi has been growing "drunk
with truth stagnant inside him." Like a great ship in shallow
waters he is in danger, while others around him, blessed with " no
brains and much faith," ride safe at anchor what to them is :
religion is to him a stupid convention. Pompilia calls him out

into the deep, to be battered by storms, but through those storms
to work out his own salvation, and to win from the old Pope
approval only less emphatic than that which he awards to Pom-
pilia.
The two books devoted to Count Guido Franceschini are

usually ranked lower than these three ; but as intellectual achieve-
ments they are quite as great. The character of Guido is one that
repels as lago repels ; but as a triumph of dramatic skill it is not
unworthy to be named even with lago. The one book throws
light upon the other. In the first, the Count is the polished man
of the world, heir to an ancient name, speaking to his judges as to
men no more than his equals, and subtly suggesting that they are
men who might have stood in his position. In the second book,
significaHtly entitled simply Guido, we have the man in his own
nature, stripped of all disguise, freed at last from the necessity of
that homage which vice pays to virtue. It would be difi&cult to
find a parallel to the appalling realism of the character of Guido,

as soon as the last hope is gone. It is the picture of a thoroughly
bad man with the fear neither of God nor of man any longer before
his ey^ \ and it is made all the more terrible by the fact that it is
BROWNING 433
addressed to an audience whom he knows and who know them-

selves to be no better than he. The scum of a corrupt society is
gathered round the papal Court, and of that Guide's judges as

well as Guido himself are part. Realism in depicting vice has
often been made loathsome ; Browning does not make it so, but
he makes it fearful.
Ring and the Book an unfortunate

After the pubhcation of The
change came over Browning ; and though he wrote vigorously as
well as voluminously, very little of his subsequent work rises to
a high level as poetry. What ruins it is the over-development of
and philosophical spirit to the detriment of the artistic.
the critical
Most of the poems are conscious and deliberate discussions of
problems, ethical or religious. Though, as a rule, the form of the
dramatic monologue is preserved, the true dramatic element sinks
to a secondary place. Figures like Fra Lippo Lippi, Karshish,
Bishop Blougram, Caliban or CaponsacChi are extremely rare. It
is usually not the man who wins interest, it is the situation in which
he is placed, or the thoughts put into his mouth.
Browning's publications followed fast upon one another in the
seventies. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau and Balaustion^s Adven-
ture both appeared in 1871, Fifine at the Fair in 1872, Red Cotton
Night-cap Country in 1873, Aristophanes' Apology and The Inn
Album in 1875, Facchiarotto in 1876, The Agamemnon of Aeschylus
in 1877, La and The Two Foets of Croisic'm 1878, and the
Saisiaz
two series of Dramatic Idylls in 1879 ^'^'i 1880. The poet had
never before been so prolific. But for the reflection that Shake-
speare crowded all his work within little more than twenty years,
we might be tempted to say that no poet could afford to be so
prolific. After the last date there was some slackening of the
output ; but nevertheless Browning added four more volumes
before his death. These were Jocoseria (1883), FerishtaKi,
:
Fancies (1884), Farley ings with certain People of Importance (1887)

and Asolando (1889). The last volume was published almost
simultaneously with the death of the poet.
The translations from the Greek are a remarkable feature of
this closing period. Besides Agamemnon, we have included in
Balaustion's Adventure "a transcript from Euripides' —a trans-
w. 28
4-34 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
lation of Akestts. The original part of the poem is based
upon a legend of the influence of Browning's favourite Greek
tragedian over the Syracusans, who liberated some of the Athenian
captives after the ruin of the great expedition because of their
power to recite his verses. The beautiful story is well told by
Browning. Aristophanes' Apology is a similar mixture of transla-
tion and from Euripides,
original verse, the translation being again
—Hercules Furens. As a Browning was not success-
translator
ful. The rigidity of his style in the dramatic monologue showed
how ill adapted he was to be the mouthpiece of another man's
thoughts ; and besides, the whole cast of his genius was as widely
as possible removed from the Greek. Without being conspicuously
romantic, he is certainly anything but classical. The clear-cut
outlines, the lucidity, order and symmetry of Greek poetry, remove
it poles asunder from the verse of Browning. In his translation,
therefore, it is not surprising that he does justice neither to himself
nor to his original. He leaves Agamemnon hardly less obscure
than he found it ; and he who is befogged by the Greek had better
turn for light to someone other than Browning. The transcripts
from Euripides are less irritatingly difficult ; but they are no more
Euripides than Pope's Iliad is Homer. The translations are, it is
to be feared, among the evidences of a tendency to capriciousness

which abound in this closing period. Browning was never so
defiantly original as he was at this time ; and with him imitation
was akin to virtue.
It is this capriciousness and self-will which vitiates nearly all of

Browning's later work. The evil is conspicuous already in Prince
Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society. It seems to be pro-^
claimed in the ungainliness of the title ; and a similar clumsiness

is repeated more than once afterwards. Red Cotton Night-cap
Country, and Parleyings with certain People of Importance in their
Day, are models of what a title ought not to be. In earlier days
Browning's titles had been sometimes eccentric ; but there is an
appropriateness or a beauty, as in Bells and Pomegranates, which
justifies them ; whereas Red Cotton Night-cap Country is a mere
freak, and no degree of appropriateness can redeem the lumbering
Parleyings,
BROWNING 435
If this freakishness were confined to the titles it would matter

little ; but it permeates the substance and the mode of treatment
as well. Browning at all periods displayed a love of the grotesque
which not infrequently led him into error. Bagehot showed true
critical discrimination when he treated Wordsworth, Tennyson
and Browning as exemplars respectively of "pure, ornate and
grotesque art." The grotesque is a perfectly legitimate form of
art ; but it is not in itself a high one, and unless
it be kept in due
subordination itmust inevitably lower any work in which it

appears. On Browning it gradually grew to the detriment of his
poetry until, after The Ring and the Book, he seemed to revel
in it.
Even more important than this is the change which passes

over Browning's method of dealing with character. In earlier
years the characters really think their own thoughts and speak
and act in accordance with them. It is true they speak in the
voice of Browning, but their utterances are, as he declares, " the
utterances of so many imaginary personages,'' not his. Pippa,
Pompilia, Caponsacchi, Andrea del Sarto, Karshish, Paracelsus,
Cleon, all endowed with characters distinct from the
are beings
character of the poet and he represents them dramatically. By
;
their own speech they show what is in them. As a rule it is

otherwise in the closing period, in which the poet gradually ceases
to be the dramatist and becomes the critic. Though the dramatis
personae are brought on the stage, they are treated as puppets,
not as living beings. In his own words. Browning takes his
stand, "motley on back and pointing-pole in hand," to explain
the mechanism.
This is in part a reversion to the method of Sordello, where he
declares himself to be forced by popular prejudice to adopt the
narrative form and explain his character, instead of effacing
himself and letting the character speak. In his closing period he
was certainly under no such necessity. It was as a writer of
poems dramatic in principle and mono-dramatic in form that he
won his fame. And yet the rnost striking change in the closing
period is the partial abai;donment of the principle in many cases,
and infidelity to it in others where in appearance it is retained.
28—
Bl-owning rarely adopts the narrative form, hut he fs constantly
critical, explanatory and argumentative. In other words, he
obtrudes his own opinions and his own personality in a manner
inconsistent with the dramatic principle.
This is often the case even where the dramatic form is preserved.
Thus Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is a poem founded upon the
history of Napoleon III, and the speaker ought to represent the
character of that singular adventurer. In point of fact he does
not. The name Browning has chosen is not more conspicuously
unlike anything French than are the sentiments unlike anything
which we can reasonably attribute to Napoleon. The personality
of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau not interesting at all, though
is
his views and arguments are. The situation of the " Saviour of
Society " absorbs the poet ; the words he puts into the mouth of
the Prince are really little more than his own comments upon
the situation.
Evidence of this change may be found in plenty in the
volumes of miscellaneous poems, and especially in the Parleyings.
Contrast, for example, George Bubb Dodington or Bernard de
Mandeville with Clean or Fra Lippo LippL In the earlier poems
we have the thoughts of two men, the one on human destiny, the
other on art ; but the thoughts are carefully adapted to the men
and to their times. Cleon is a Greek, and has the interests,
ambitions, gifts and prejudices of a Greek. In the face of death

he is simply human ; for there the differences of age and race are
insignificant. Yet he is Greek still in his conception of what is
possible or credible with regard to that which lies beyond death.

And Fra Lippo, again, has ideas of art which could not be expressed
in that way except by Fra Lippo. On the other hand the Parleyings
are sketches critical of the personages from whom they take their
name. We have no character of the statesman George Bubb
Dodington in the poem named after him. It is no more a
dramatic representation of the man than a sermon on the virtues
and King David is a dramatic representation of the King
sins of
of Israel. So too Bernard de Mandeville is nothing more than

an argument on the subject of optimism versus pessmiism. In
Ferishiak's Fancies we have a collection, not of dramatic mono-
BROWNING 437
logues, but of parables ; the dramatic disguise is almost com-

pletely dropped. The dervish Ferishtah himself cannot be taken
very seriously, and what he teaches is taught in the Eastern way
by apologue.
With only one exception the longer poems of the period
(excluding of course the translations) illustrate the same change.
Red Cotton Night-cap Country is a poem founded upon a true
story, and as originally written by Browning it actually contained
the real names of the actors, which he obliterated only when he

was warned that by introducing them he exposed himself to
danger under the law of libel. It is dramatic in so far as it
attempts to realise their characters and by their characters to
explain the events. But it also contains an important critical
element. The poet constantly stops the action to interpose his
own comments and explanations. Thus, after Miranda's leap
from the tower, the gardener remarks upon his action :
"This must be what he meant by those strange words

While I was weeding larkspurs yesterday,
'Angels would take him!' Mad!"
Here the instinct of the dramatist would be to stop. The actor

in the scene has made comment, and no one else has any
his
business there. But Browning goes on :
"No! sane, I say.

Such being the conditions of his life.
Such end of life was not irrational.
Hold a belief you only half-believe,
With all-momentous issues either way,
And I advise you imitate this leap.
Put faith to proof, be cured or killed at once !
And so it is constantly : the action or the narrative is stopped,

the poet appears personally, and tells his readers what is the
right thing to think about the incident which has come before
them. His opinions may be sound and his guidance valuable, but
at any rate his method is not dramatic
In Kfine at the Fair it is even less so than in Red Cotton
Night-cap Country. In Fifine the reader is introduced to three
characters, Don Juan, his wife Elvire, and the beautiful but not
virtuous gipsy Fifine. In the main the poem is Don Juan's
defence of his own admiration for the gipsy, which has kindled
Elvira's jealousy. The issue of the admiration is plainly enough
suggested in the name Don Juan. But what concerns us now is
the fact that, though the three figures come before us in name,
there is no serious attempt to sustain the characters or to make
them real by those little touches which alone can give life to the
figures of the imagination. Much of the argument of Don Juan

proves on examination to be really Browning's own. The poet's
favourite ideas are reiterated by Don Juan, mingled, it is true,
with threads of sophistry which are not Browning's, but which

do not give individuality to Don Juan.
Still farther removed from Browning's former method is La
Saisiaz, where the veil of dramatic form, as yet preserved in
Fifine, is dropped, and we have an undisguised dissertation on
immortality. The matter of the poem is extremely interesting,
and the argument well deserves close study. Whether the dis-
cussion be convincing or not, it is at any rate worth knowing what

were the reasons which seemed to Browning sufficient to prove
the truth of immortality. Unfortunately the value and the interest

are philosophic rather than artistic. Unfortunately too it is
impossible to express philosophy under artistic forms without

damage both to the philosophy and to the art. La Saisiaz is
neither a great poem nor a great philosophic treatise. The fetters
of verse cramp the philosophic thoughts, and the weight of the

thought overloads the verse.
This is the fault of nearly all Browning's later work. It was
not necessarily a mistake on his part to abandon the dramatic
principle either wholly or in part ; but if he wished to remain a
poet he was bound to adopt instead of it some other principle
within the sphere of art. But he casts off the
in proportion as
dramatic form he also casts off art and assumes philosophy.
Throughout the whole of his career he was emphatically a philo-
sophical poet ; but throughout two-thirds of it he was first poet
and only second place philosopher. To say nothing of the
in the
love-poems, Saul and The Lost Leader and The Flight of the
Duchess and Childe Roland are wholly poetic in conception and
execution. So, essentially, are Paracelsus and The Pope, though
BROWNING 439
they are loaded with thought. This is not the case with Fifine at
the Fair or with La Saisiaz. The numerous passages of rare
poetic beauty in both of them are subordinate to the general
conception, which is argumentative in its nature. This fact
makes it doubtful whether much of Browning's later verse will
long survive. Forcible as is the thought, few will read it for its
philosophic merits and the purple patches of poetry will not
;
induce readers who love poetry and are careless of philosophy to

go through the toil necessary to discover that which they seek.
There is no example in literature of a versified philosophic treatise
which has really lived. Perhaps the nearest approach to such a
thing is the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius ; and this has been
saved because its magnificent poetry outweighs its philosophy.
Wordsworth's Excursion, noble as it is in its finer parts, is neglected
by many readers because of the dreary flats which must be
traversed in order to reach the heights of poetry. So, but in
a more pronounced degree, be with La Saisiaz and Fifine
will it
at the Fair. They will be quoted and referred to by militant

Browningites ; but they will seldom be read by lovers of poetry
who have no thesis to defend.
Among poems of the closing period there are a
the shorter
considerable number of exceptions to which this judgment does
not apply. Thus Clive, with its vivid presentation of the situation
after the pistol is fired, is as full of poetic insight and power as
any of Browning's earlier pieces, though it is not equally poetic in

style. Cristina and Monaldeschi is worthy to rank with his most
dramatic pieces. Numpholeptos is wholly poetic in conception;
and, on a lower plane, Herve Riel is a fine specimen of a heroic
ballad. Nevertheless these pieces are exceptions ; and in a large
majority even of the shorter poems the poet is merged in the
philosopher.
Among the longer poems there is only one, The Inn Album,
to which the criticism does not more or less completely apply.
The Inn Album is the great triumph of Browning's later career, a
poem in which he nearly rivals the glory of Paracelsus and The
Ring and the Book. And it is noticeable that when inspiration
comes back to him again in full flood he reverts to the old
dramatic method. There is no comment and there is very little
narrative. The characters are brought upon the stage, speak
their own thoughts and make their own impression. The reader
receives no extraneous assistance in interpreting them, and he
needs none ; for in each case the conception of the character is
clear and strong. Few poems of equal merit have received so
scanty a meed of praise as The Inn Album. The story, it is said,
is unpleasant ; but so is that of Othello, and yet the world would
be appreciably the poorer if Shakespeare had shrunk from handling

it. No one can say that Browning's poem tends to immorality
nor can it be pretended that the unpleasantness is needlessly
dragged in. It is of the very essence. The splendid heroine's
character is what it is by reason of the treachery that has been
practised upon her ; she is one of those who have been " made
perfect through suffering." Her capacity for love is unsurpassed

even in Browning :
"I have danced through day

On tiptoe at the music of =• word',
Have wondered where was darkness gone as night
Burst out in stars at brilliance of a smile
Lonely, I placed the chair to help me seat
Your fancied presence; in companionship
I kept my finger constant to your glove
—
Glued to my breast ; then where was all the world ?
— —
I schemed not dreamed ^how I might die some death
Should save your finger aching."
There is a ring of Shakespeare in the magnificent hyperbole, and

we have to go back "to Romeo and Juliet for the parallel. But
the conception of the effect which her seducer's trickery produces
upon the heroine's mind is all Browning's own. Suddenly she
wakens from her dream, not to abase herself before a conventional
standard of purity and goodness, but to realise how immeasurably
she towers above the brute whom her imagination has trans-
figured into a god. In her scornful rejection of his advances
when at last he becomes conscious that he has played the fool as
well as the knave, there is something of the spirit of Richardson's
Clarissawhen she too with a noble instinct rejects the awakened
Lovelace's suit to make " an honest woman " of her whom he has
BROWNING 441
wronged but never seduced. Except in this point Browning's

heroine is wholly original. Her career after her betrayal is full
of interest. It gives occasion to the most scathing criticism ever

penned of the vulgar doctrine of hell vulgar always, though it —
was taught then by many who were far from being themselves
vulgar. The effect of these experiences upon the woman is
vividlybrought before us in the words of her friend when they

meet after her sudden disappearance :
" What an angelic mystery you are

Now—that is certain ! when I knew you first,
No break of halo and no bud of wing !
I thought I knew you, saw you, round and through.
Like a glass ball; suddenly, four years since.

You vanished, how and whither? Mysteiyl
Wherefore? No mystery at all: you loved.
Were loved again, and left the world of course:
Who would not? Lapped four years in fairyland.
Out comes, by no less wonderful a chance.
The changeling, touched athwart her trellised bliss
Of blush-rose bower by just the old friend's voice
That's now struck dumb at her own potency.''
A false interpretation is put upon the mysterious disappearance,
and consequently a false cause is assigned to the "angelic mys-

tery.'' Not love and pity, but a grievous wrong and a bitter
sorrow, have caused the halo to break and. the wing to bud. But
though reason is at fault in assigning the cause, observation accu-
rately notes the effect and the wing are really there.
: the halo
The poem and the other writings
contrast between this noble
of Browning after The Ring and the Book is the most convincing
proof of the wisdom of the artist when he keeps within the hmits
and faithfully follows the method of his art In the other pieces
there is always something to pardon, because the poet is attempt-
ing a task which need not necessarily be done in verse, and which
might perhaps be better done in prose. In The Inn Album there
isnothing to pardon but much to praise, because what he attempts,
if it could be done at all in prose, could certainly not be done as
well as he does it in verse.
There is no nineteenth-century poet of the first rank whose
ultimate position in the hierarchy is so doubtful as Browning's.
He is at once astonishingly great and astonishingly faulty; and
only time can determine how far the faults will blur and obscure
the greatness. On the one hand, in his finest pieces he sweeps
the reader away with him as Tennyson rarely does and he is
;
incomparably more original in thought. On the other hand, for

every sin against art which specks the pages of Tennyson, a
hundred blot those of Browning; and his very originality leads
him into those irritating eccentricities to which reference has
already been made. His style and rhythm are often intolerably
rough and unmusical. He is full of strained expressions, irritating
puns, harsh inversions. He has a provoking and really meaning-
less habit of clipping the particles,
—" as we curtail the already
cur-tailed cur." Worst of all, perhaps, is his inability to select the
essential and to reject the unimportant. He pours out the whole

farrago of his thoughts, and sometimes does not take the trouble
to set them in order. This is the meaning of the charge of ver
bosity which has been brought against him. He is not verbose
in the sense that he takes many words to express a given idea: on
the contrary, he is often condensed even to a fault. But he is
verbose in the sense that he gives expression to many thoughts

when a few would suffice: the total effect might be produced in
less space than he takes. A conspicuous example is T}ie Ring
and the Book, one half of which adds nothing that is of the
Browning is in danger, therefore, of being
slightest importance.
smothered by his own luxuriance. No one who carefully

observes what has lived and what has failed to live in past
literature will dispute that faults such as these are a dangerous
burden for the back of any author. The world is busy, and
it will read books in preference to long ones.
short The
Ring and the Book would stand a better chance of being
remembered if it extended only to 10,000 lines, instead of con-
taining more than 20,000. Happily, in this case each reader
may easily make the reduction for himself; but there are
numerous other instances in which the weeding out is less easily

performed.
Again, the needless harshness and obscurity of Browning will
BROWNING 443
tell seriously against him. The poets who have melody, who are
lucid in expression, who have classical finish, are sure to find
readers. Virgil and Milton are perennial. Imperial Rome has
passed away, but the Aeneid remains. No one will turn to the
Georgics now for instruction in agriculture ; but the verse evoked
by the statesmanship of Maecenas has long survived the states-
man and his purpose. Milton's Puritan theology is obsolete ; but
the majestic lines of Paradise Lost live, not because but in spite
of it Tennyson in a less degree has the same assurance of
vitality. He is not the equal of Vergil or of Milton, and he
carries seeds of decay from which they are free ; but he belongs
to their corps. Pope is a lesser poet than Tennyson. A century
ago the tide set strongly against him ; half a century ago he
seemed well on the way to oblivion. But his faith in the merit of
expressing old thoughts better than they have ever been expressed
has been justified : he refuses to be forgotten : we still quote
"willing to wound, but yet afraid to strike"; "true art is nature to
advantage drest"; "die of a rose in aromatic pain"; "means
not, but blunders round about a meaning"; "the right divine of
kings to govern wrong" : we read more than our fathers did the
polished couplets of the Essay on Man, the Essay on Criticism
and the Moral Essays.
Now Browning is in this the antithesis to Pope. He is
careful of the thought, but careless of the expression. It seems

the wise and right and manly choice —
that is, if for any reason
it be impossible to make both perfect. Yet it is questionable
whether it is the choice which makes for permanence of fame.
Aristotle has survived for two thousand years without a style at
all ; but the examples are rare indeed of such survival. Browning
has many poems in which beauty of style is conjoined with
poems lies the hope for the
profundity of thought, and in these
permanence of his fame. But he drags in his train a most
dangerous mass of impedimenta. Probably no greater service
could be done to his memory than to disencumber him of
it and to make a selection of his best poems such as Arnold
made for Wordsworth.

CHAPTER VI
THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES
The middle of the nineteenth century has been called "the
English Renascence." There is a touch of grandiloquence in the
comparison suggested with the great new birth of modern Europe;
but if we do not push the parallel too far, something may be said
for the phrase. '^Both in art and in literature it was a time of
movement an^ of great productiveness. If we contrast the date
we have now reached with the period twenty years before, the
change seems extraordinary. Then, the men of established
reputation were all and though a few might prophesy great
old ;
things of a young man named Macaulay and a young man named

Carlyle, it could not be pretended that either of the two had yet
done great things. Twenty years later, Tennyson and Browning,
Carlyle, Macaulay, Mill, Ruskin, Thackeray, Dickens and Charlotte
Bronte had all accomplished work which the world would not
willingly lose, and all gave promise of much admirable work still
to come.
But the time was even more remarkable for the appearance of
new poets than for the performances of their elder brethren.
Within three years on one side or the other of 1850 we encounter
the first publications of no fewer than seven poets, the least of
whom even an unfavourable must admit to be considerable.
critic
They are Edward Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh

FitzGerald,
Clough, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina Rossetti,
Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith. The last two have received
a nickname which will cling to them they are the Spasmodic
:
THE TURN OF THE CENTURY : NEW INFLUENCES 44$
Poets. Rossetti was the intellectual chief of the Pre-Raphaelite

Brotherhood, several of whom were men of letters as well as
artists. The kinship between Clough and Arnold has been
generally recognised, and for reasons sufficiently obvious they
may be denominated the poets of the Sceptical Reaction. Edward
FitzGerald stands apart, unlike all the others, yet at one point in
contact with the Oxford poets. The question which has now to
be asked is, What did these new poets stand for? What did
they add to the forces which were then moulding literature?
The poetry of these men derives its flavour principally from
religion, art and the sentiment of nationality. Science enters too,
but mainly in an indirect way. It helps to mould the plan of
Dobell's Balder, and it is at the background of the thought of
Clough and Arnold, though neither of these poets shows the
degree and kind of interest which we find in Tennyson. As
regards religion, two of the three groups are intimately related, in
the one case positively, in the other negatively, to the Oxford
Movement; and it may be noted that the relation is negative
where the knowledge is deepest, and where the contact has been
closest. It will be necessary hereafter to examine the nature of
this relation at some length here it must suffice to note that in

:
the Pre-Raphaelite group the artistic preponderated over the

religious element.
One peculiarity of the Pre-Raphaelite group, which indicates
the preponderance of art, is the close relation in which we find
poetry and painting. Rossetti is the most conspicuous, but he is
by no means the only example of this union. In his case the

relation was so close, and the balance was held so even, that it is
still doubtful in which art he is to be regarded as greatest ; and
one of his critics has said that it will always be a question whether
Rossetti " had not better have painted his poems and written his
pictures ; there is so much that is purely sensuous in the former,
and so much that is intellectual in the latter." But we find
this union in William Bell Scott, in Thomas Woolner and in
Sir J. Noel Baton as well as in Rossetti ; and it may be said, not
only of all the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but
generally of those who sympathised with them, that if they did not
themselves attempt both arts, they had a marked and unusual
sympathy with both. And this spirit was transmitted from the
founders of the brotherhood to the younger generation, William
Morris and Burne-Jones, who took up their work.
Still more closely related to the history of the time was the
manifestation in verse of the spirit of nationality. Attention has
already been called' to certain premonitory symptoms of this
spirit. But although it had long been operative beneath the

surface, it was not till near the middle of the century that the
sense of nationality emerged into clear consciousness and became
a force in practical politics. This it is which makes that period
momentous in history. The events of 1848 shook every throne
in Europe. Everywhere the people rose in insurrection against
tyrants. The system established in 18 15 was shattered. Then,
the nations seemed to have fought " to make one submit " ; now,
they gave grim earnest of their determination " to teach all kings
true sovereignty." The immediate consequences were chequered.
In France, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Spain, Italy, the revolu-
tionary movements were either not outwardly successful at all, or

were successful only for the moment ; but everywhere the actual
resultwas profoundly important. Pan-Germanism, Pan-Slavism
and the party of the Italian Irredentists are all living forces, and
all owe their vitality to this sentiment of nationality. To deal
with this sentiment was the great task of the statesmen of that
age. They all felt the gravity of the task, but few of them com-
prehended its real character. Many years passed before Gladstone
understood the real significance of the help he gave to nascent
Italy. Cavour, almost alone among the practical statesmen, seems
to have seen clearly what was taking place.
England, with a widely different history behind her, had a far
less menacing situation to face. There, for centuries, freedom had

been slowly broadening down and within the generation then
;
living the rising democracy had won several great triumphs. Thus,
although there were minor revolutionary movements in England
too, the general sense of the people was that what other nations
were trying to do by violence could in England be accomplished
1 Part I. Chapter III,
THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 447
by peaceful means. But nevertheless the nation was profoundly
moved, both on account of its own state, and in the cause of other
peoples. That cause was kept in the most literal sense before the
eyes of Englishmen ; for England was the common refuge of all
the political exiles of the Continent, and of hundreds of political
schemers who, if not in overt hostility against their native govern-

ments, feared those governments too much to stay at home.
Carlyle remembered the "stately tragic figures" of the Spanish
political refugees perambulating the broad pavements of Euston
Square when he first knew London. The house of Gabriele
Rossetti, himself a political refugee, was thronged with fellow-
exiles and Mr W. M. Rossetti thinks that his brother Dante's
;
" marked alienation from current politics " may have been due to
reaction from the talk of these Italian revolutionaries. To London
they flocked, Spaniards, Italians, Hungarians,
Frenchmen,
Kossuth and Mazzini and Louis Napoleon, with hundreds of
inferior fame, or of no fame at all.
The tendency towards political and patriotic verse, natural

enough under such circumstances, was soon strengthened by
events affecting England herself The Crimean War and the
Indian Mutiny gave specific meaning to the vague national
ardours already permeating the air. The war with Russia was the
more important because it was the end of a long peace, so far as
the great European powers were concerned. The poets' response
was immediate and emphatic. Tennyson's Maud, Gerald Massey's
War Waits, Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith's Sonnets on the
War, and England in time of War by the former alone, E. C. Jones's
The Waves and the War, and Henry and Franklin Lushington's
La Nation Boutiquiire and Points of War, all breathe the same
influence. In this department of patriotic verse the first place for
persistency, though not for excellence, must be assigned to Gerald
Massey (1828-1907), a man whose name should be remembered
wereit only for the courage with which he fought and conquered
difficulties. As the George Eliot's Felix Holt, and

original of
as the associate and Kingsley in the scheme of
of Maurice
Christian Socialism, he has other claims to remembrance. It is
astonishing that he, who was in childhood one of the victims of

the unreformed factory system, should have been able to produce
a volume of verse as early as 1850. The cream of his earlier
work, with new poems added, was collected in My Lyrical Life
(i88g). In the latter part of his life he was diverted from poetry
by other interests. His patriotic pieces are fervid and stirring, but
a comparison with Tennyson shows that they fall considerably
below excellence.
In the poetry thus inspired by political and national concep-
tions it is easy to distinguish two predominant strains. One is the
strain of an insular patriotism, a sentiment centred in England and
inspired by her. The other is the psean or the dirge, as the case
may be, of that great uprising of the nations which had just been
convulsing Europe. Of the former the examples are innumerable.
It is the animating principle of the volumes above mentioned; but
by far the most consummate expression was given to it by Tenny-
son. His patriotic poems are divisible into two classes, the first
political, the second military; while the great Wellington Ode
holds an intermediate position and combines the two.
The political strain is present in Tennyson from the first. The
three poems of 1842, "You ask me why, tho' ill at ease," "Of old
sat Freedom on the height," and "Love thou thy land," are
examples. They are the utterance of an English patriot ; but the

chief ground upon which they glorify England is the great services
she has rendered to the cause of freedom. In the stanzas on
England and America in 1782 the poet prophesies that
"The single note

From that deep chord which Hampden smote
Will vibrate to the doom";
and he rejoices that the strong sons of the " strong mother of a
once unfaithful to her true cause, have " wrenched
lion line," for
their rights" from her. The Third of February, 1852, gives
Tennyson's conception of the political rdk of England in Europe.
The coup d'itat had been struck two months before; and
Tennyson, like other lovers of political honesty and friends of
freedom, was horrified, and filled, not with fear, but with anxiety.
The blow seemed to be the triumph of all that was unprincipled
THE TURN OF THE CENTURY : NEW INFLUENCES 449
in politics; and the poet, believing the danger to be by no means

confined to France, condemns the tone of the English -parliament
as beneath that which was befitting the people
" Whom the roar of Hougomont

Left mightiest of all peoples under heaven.''
He resented the attempts made in the House of Lords to restrain

and to moderate the attacks of the press upon Louis Napoleon,
and insisted that the very greatness of Britain laid upon her the
duty of plain speech :
" No little German state are we,

But the one voice of Europe : we must speak."
Even ruin and destruction would be preferable to dodging and

paltering with public crime.
" Better the waste Atlantic roU'd
On her and us and ours for evermore,"
than that "our Britain" should "salve a tyrant o'er."

The patriotism of Tennyson, theny is by no means selfish or.
ignoble ; but it is distinctly insular.
" God bless the narrow seas !
I wish they were a whole Atlantic broad,"
exclaims "the Tory mamber's eldest son" in The Princess, as he

looks towards the coast of France and thinks how everything
there is ;Urisf;able, is sure and steady.
while in England progress
The same spirit manifests itself agîn in In Memorianif Though
it seems hardly germane to the inatter, we have there too the con-
trast between "freedom in her regal seat of England," and "the
schoolboy heat. The blind hysterics of the Celt."

The more distinctively warlike note in Tennyspn's, verse is a
later development, The
qn the two great Balaclava charges
lines
have been mentioped ejsewhere. The ballad of The Revenge, The
Defence of Lucknow and several other pieces are similarly inspired.
Probably nothing will ever dethrone Ye Mariners of England
ôm its pride of place among poems of the navy; but ne3^t to it
comes the ballad of The, Revenge, And increasingly, as years went

on, the poet showed a tendency to make himself the spokesrnan of
w. 29
4SO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
army and navy. Nothing was more sure to rouse him than any
threat of invasion, any question of the sufficiency of the fleet, any
doubt whether the forces on which the safety of the nation
depended were being made the playthings of party.
But of all occasions Tennyson ever found for the expression of
which he made the grandest use
his patriotic sentiment, that of
was the death of Wellington. The Ode is something more than a
piece of glorious eloquence. It is, as to its form, a triumph of skill
in lyrical verse, and, as to its substance, a masterly analysis of

character. There are more subtle melodies elsewhere among
Tennyson's lyrics; but nowhere in verse is there a more skilful
and sustained adaptation of sound to sense. The " roll of muffled
drums," the tramp of the great procession, sorrowful yet proud, the
thunder of cannon, the crash of the charge, are all heard in the
verse. The opening is solemn and mournful then ; the note of pride
rings out as the triumphs of the great soldier surge up in memory;
and that in turn gives place, as " the black earth yawns, the mortal
disappears," to the feeling of the insignificance of man before his
Maker. With all this is woven in the great study of Wellington's
character. The phrases have passed into common speech — "rich
in saving common-sense," "four-square to all the winds that blew,"
"one that sought but Duty's iron crown.'' In respect of the
quotations it has furnished, the Ode will almost bear comparison
with Gray's great Elegy. And the phrases have not only that
terseness and point and fulness of meaning which recommends
them for quotation, but they have also the merit of truth. The
most careful and conscientious historian could not have chosen
more skilfully the characteristics which made Wellington what he
was.
The loving care with which Tennyson elaborated this great
character was due not only to his profound admiration for the
Iron Duke, but also to the fact that he found in him the type of
the English race, if a great Irishman may without offence be said
to be typical of the English race in the widest sense of the phrase.-
His moderation, his "long-enduring blood," his single-minded
devotion, his wealth of "saving common-sense," all, in the eyes'
of the poet, are qualities Of the race as well as of its greatest
representative in that age. Carlyle pronounced his countrymen

inarticulate. So is Wellington^ Too busy to talk much, he lets
"the turbid stream of rumour flow,'' and when he does utter his
thoughts it is manner of the equally inarticulate Cromwell,

after the
in " language rife with rugged' maxims hewn from life." His very
warfare bears. the same stamp, and is likewise the reflection of the
character of the race; for its characteristic is the stubborn standing
at bay at Torres VedraSj or the long resistance to assault on the
" day of onsets of despair "^ at Waterloo. And yet there is another
side, of which also account must be taken for the nation as well as
for the man. He who "greatly stood at bay" at Torres Vedras'
was also
' ' " He that far away
Against the myriads of Assaye
Clashed with his fiery few and won."
The fiery daring is present as well as the iron tenacity, the head-
long spirit which stakes all on a moment as well as the patient
resolution which labours in the hope of a distant future.

In the patriotic verse of contemporary poets there is little that
is worthy of comparison with the patriotic verse of Tennyson; but
about the middle of the century a sentiment spreads to which
nothing in Tennyson cdrresponds. It is the love of liberty irre-
spective of country or race, the sentiment which swept awky

Coleridge and Wordsworth in the early days of the French
Revoltltion, and which inspired Bpon and Shelley after them.
To it the' '
distinction between Celt' and Saxon is unimportant,
and political boundaries are of interest only when an unwilling
people is held in subjection by one more powerful! Mrs Brown-
ing's Casa Guidi Windows embodies this sentiment, but its prin-
cipal exponent was Sydney Dobell. It is Very evidently the out-
come of the political events which were then convulsing continental
'
Eurtipe;
29—2
§ I. The Poets of the .Sceptical Reaction.
It is curious that in the j'ear 1850 both Tennyson and

Browning produced poems in which the religious element is
more prominent than it is in anything they had previously writtfen.
These great poets had been formed under other influences j but
now the crop of Newmanism too was ripe, and the nature of it
soon became apparent. As has been said, one of the groups of
new poets was related negatively and the other positively to
Tractarianism ; and as Oxford was the home of Tractarianism, so
too it was the home of that poetry which expresses the intellectual
revolt against all that the Tracts specially sought to inculcate.
The reaction came with extreme rapidity. Before Tractarianism
had grown to maturit)', the seeds of opposition were already sown.
An exaggerated medisevalism was met by a revived classicism;
faith scarcely distinguishable
, from credulity gave birth to doubt
immoderate claims for the principle of authority were met by an
examination of that principle far more thoroughgoing thai) that
which was sanctioned by orthodox Prptestantism.
It is not in professional theologians, nor in, the arguments;
advanced on either si(ie in affairs like the Hampden controversy,
that this reaction is most clearly manifested. In such professional
controversies the Tractarians were the innovators. But we see
the influence in the spirit imparted to the University. Young
men of intellect and power are ranged in hostile! camps : on the
banners of the one army are inscribed the words, Authority of
the Church, on that of the other, Liberty of Thougbt. But if faith
is deepened on the one side, so is scepticism on the other. The
'liberalism' which horrified Newman in the Noetics might pass
fqr peaceful orthodoxy compared with that to which their suc-
cessors of a generation later advanced.
In part this was the necessary result of time. The liberals,
could not have stood permanently in the position of Whately and

Thomas Arnold; for the liberal, whether in politics or in the
affairs of intellect, cannot consistently be it is an
stationary:
article of his creed that no one can be stationary,
non progredi est
regredi. But in the case before us the process was hastened by
THE TURN OF THE CENTURY : NEW INFLUENCES 4S3
the character arid claims of the opposite party; and probably

some individuals reached a point at which, but for their opponents,
they never would have arrived. The extreme forms in which the
case for authority was put, and above all the sophistical character
of many of the arguments of the Tractarians, were harmful to
their cause. The intellect of Oxford in the generation after
Newman recoiled. Stanley, Pattison and Jowett, Froude, Ruskin,
Clodgh and Matthew Arnold, men born from twelve to twenty-bne
years after Newman, were all ultimately opponents of the New-
manite movement, though most of them had for a time felt its
attraction.
The sceptical reaction was in no small measure the outcome

of the teaching of Thomas Arnold ; and that particular phase of
it we are at present concerned was peculiarly his work.
with which
Its two .great ipoets were one of them his son and 'the other a
favourite pupil and the characters of both were moulded by him.
;
But Thomas Arnold's relation to Newmanism was by no means as

simple as at the first glance it appears. He was himself irrecon-
cilably* hostile to the movement,
; and he said and wrote some
exceedingly strong things against it;yet Bagehot in his essay on
Clough has a profoundly true remark, that, in spite of this hostility,
Atnold prepared men for Newmanism. It was not the Rugby

men whb stood in bitterest opposition to the Tractarians. Ulti-
mately, the leaders of the opposition arose from among them;
but they were never bitter, never unsympathetic ; a,iid the deepest
tones in the poetry both of Clough and of Matthew Arnold are
struck by just this emotional sympathy with a creed which their
intellect compels them to reject.
The. whole weight of Thomas Arnold's influence at' Rugby

was 'thrown into the scale of religion, the whole spirit of his
teaching was religious. He himself held contentedly and with
oconqpl^te, sincerity the position of a. liberal Protestant Of the
Church of England. But, as has just been said, the very soul of
, liberalism is movement; and it was natural that the son and the
pupil should feel limpelled to advance /beyond the father and the
master. Yet to j'advance farther was to encounter questions
apparently going to the very root of 'Christianity; and it was
natural enough that they who valued Christianity should consider
anxiously the possibility of retracing their steps, rather than
adyancing into the unknown, chill, forbidding land of doubt. Such,
probably, was the secret of the attraction of Newmanism for some
of the pupils of Thomas Arnold. But though the .attraction was
natural, so too was the decision to withstand it ; for Thomas
Arnpld had taught above all things devotion to the truth; and
the credentials of Newmanism, when examined with a single eye
to that, proved unsatisfactory.
Clough and Arnold are leaders of an intellectual revolt, and
the basis of their poetry is intellectual. They come therefore as
a reinforcement to Tennyson and Browning, who had already
done much towards setting poetry on a foundation intellectually
sound. They make a partial reversion to the eighteenth century,
of the spirit of which they have a larger share than any other
English poets of the last hundred years. And it is for this reason
that their sympathy with Tractarianism is peculiarly important,
yheir originality lies mainly in the combination. But for it,
might have resembled closely that of Pope.

their intellectuality
But for the colours reflected from the Tractarian mysticism, but
for the wistfulness due to a faith longed for but not attained,
Matthew Arnold's classicism would have been far more like that
of the Queen Anne writers. The peculiar interest of the Oxford
poets lies in the fact that they exhibit with greater clearness and
in closer conjunction than any others of the time the marks of
those two great forces which, more than all else, inade the litera-
ture of the nineteenth century —
rationalism and the Catholic re-
action. Their age, their previous training, their position in Oxford,
all concurred in producing a unique combination. To these
circumstances is due the fact that, while they illustrate the reaction
against the Catholic reaction, they are what they are by reason of it.
Their training and their predilections led the two poets
naturally and upon knowledge ; and in
necessarily to lay stress
the end this naturally and necessarily set them in opposition to
Tractarianism. For a system which rests upon authority can
never heartily and sincerely welcome the new lights which are apt
to reveal all too clearly the nature of its claims. And so we find
that one of the shrewdest observers of. the time, Mark Pattison,
points out in his Memoirs that one of the effects of Tractarianism
was to cause a decline in the interest in knowledge at 0?cford.
Here was a ground of difference which was bound sooner or later
to alienate the Rugby men, whose central principle, from first to
,last, was love of knowledge and reverence for truth, wheresoever
and .among whomsoever discovered. "Now, and for us," says
Matthew Arnold, " it is time to Hellenise, and to praise knowing,
for we have Hebraised too much, and have over-valued doing^."
And again, " The English poetry of the first quarter of this century,
with plenty of energy, plenty of creative power, did not know
enough'." So far, we seem to be in the sphere of the eighteenth
century, which certainly endeavoured to know. But Arnold
went farther. " The poetry of later paganism lived by the senses
and understanding ; the poetry of mediaeval Christianity lived by

the heart and imagination. But the main element of the modern
spirit's life is neither the senses and understanding nor the heart
and imagination ; it is the imaginative, reason'." Here we have '
the note of the nineteenth century, the contribution of German

philosophy; and in this blend we have the special characteristic
of Arnold, as well as, in a less degree, that of his schoolfellow and
friend.
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), who was bom at Liver-

pool, was at the age of four carried by his parents across the
Atlantic to Charleston. Five years later he was brought back to
.England, and then, after a short time at Chester, he became a
pupil of Arnold of Rugby. In 1837 he entered Oxford as a
scholar of Balliol ; but in the degree list he sank to the second
class. The conjecture that he and his friend Arnold, who took
the same position, owed their disappointment to the unsettlement
and restlessness begotten of theological controversy, is probably
well founded as regards Clough ; but in Arnold's case the simpler
explanation of idleness seems to be sufficient ; at least it satisfied
contemporaries. 1 Unquestionably Clough was influenced by the

controversies. One of his closest friends was W. G. Ward, and
* Culture and Anarchy. "
Essays in CrUicLsm, 1st series.
.^ ibid.
4S6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORrAN ERA
whoever associated much with him must necessarily be in the
movement. Clough himself " said afterwards >that for
whirl of the
two years he had been 'like a straw drawn up the draught of a
chimney^'" Butihis native strength of intellect and the principles
instilled by Dr Arnold ultimately triumphed over such influences;
and the most beautiful verses he ever wrote, Qua Cursum Ventus,
touchingly mark the cloSe of his friendship with Ward, and the
final abandonment of the hope to find intellectual satisfaction as
well as rest in a past which was irrevocably gone.

Notwithstanding his second class, Clough had been elected a
fellow and afterwards a tutor of Oriel College; but in 1848 he

resigned first his tutorship and afterwards his fellowship. In
doing so he made a great sacrifice ; for he was poor, and it was
by no means certain that his talents, great as they were, would
bring him an income. The principal cause which led Clough to
this feeling on questions of religion.
action was his He was
aware that his position as fellow and tutor gave him the appear-
ance of believing many things which he did not believe, and he
could nbt bear the seeming want of candour. If he was over-
scrupulous, he at least erred on the side of honour. " The letter
of the law," he writes to a friend, " is a very good thing, as the
spirit is apt to vary with interpreters, but what is written is written^"
A lofty moral tone was the very essence of his being ; it pervades
all his work; and he had no patience with the plea that genius
somehow palliates looseness of living or of writing. "The name
of Voltaire coming to be discussed," writes Mr Thomas Arnold',
" my brother said, with a wave of his hand, '
as to the coarseness
or sensuality of some of his writings, that is a matter to which
I attach little importance.' Clough bluntly
'Well, youreplied,
don't think any better of yourself for that, I suppose.'" In after
years,and doubtless in his heart then, Arnold was at one with
Clough ; for no one has insisted more eloquently than he upon
the imperative need of moral soundness to literature.
The Oxford world expected from Clough some sort of theo-
logical manifesto to explain his position and his reasons for
' Poems and Prose Remains, 14. ^ Memoir, 71.
' Nineteenth Century, January,, 1898.
itesigning his fellowship ; but Clough was a man of humour and

took pleasure in depicting' to himself the surprise of friends,
acquaintances and opponents on reading The Bothie of Tober-na-
Vuolich (1848), which was written after he had quitted Oxford and
-jilst before the formal resignation of his fellowship. This " long
vacation pastoral" is full of mirth and' jest and high spirits, not
at all like the utterance of a man drowned
and sinking in care
under a load of "doubts and obstinate questionings." There has
been some controversy as to whether Clough did or did not
"break away," as Dean Staliley asserted that he did, "from the
University and the Church with the delight of one who had
known more than other men the weight of the yoke which eccle-
siastical authority had once laid upon him." Clough's letters
afford conclusive proof that Stanley was right. " Will you' hire
yourself out as a common labourer?" he writes to Thomas
Arnold. "I hope not'; but one may do worse, undoubtedly; 'tis
at any rate honfester than being a teacher'of XXXIX Articles. I
rejoice to see before me the end of my servitude, yea, even as the

weary foot-traveller' rejoices at the sight of his evening hostelry,
though there still lies a length of dusty road between." Alid even
if this evidence were absent, the tone of the Bothie is hardly less
conclusive. It is just the work which would rlaturally come from
the enfranchised prisoner rejoicing in his liberty. Instead of an
'apologia,' or an 'explanation,' or a treatise on apostolical
succession, Clough sang a p%an on his recovery of freedom. It
was not what the Oxford world expected; but it was the natural
reaction from the strain Clough had endured there.
The Bothie of Tober-na- Vuolich was not Clough's first poem,
for the contents of Ambarvdlia, though not published till the year
after the Bothie, had been earlier written. But the latter was
his first long poem, the first which gave the world the means of
judging what manner of man he was. And it still remains that
which gives the most comprehensive view of his character and
i
powers. It is mirthful, as becomes the humourist. But under

the frolic and jest there lies a deep seriousness ; and Clough
was essentially serious. He felt, like all the thoughtful, men of
the tin[ie, the urgency of the social problems which were pressing
for solution ; and the Bothie is full of these problems. He felt

that there was something amiss in the position of women ; and
the Bothie treats the question more .tastefully, more profoundly
and more wisely than Tennyson had treated it in The Princess 'Cae.
year before. But that which gives its greatest charm to the
Bothie is the feeling for nature which it displays. Without
apparent effort, insensibly, naturally, Clough imbues the mind
with the spirit of Highland scenery. He, seldom sets him-
self deliberately to make a description, and the reader is grate-
ful for his forbearance; but a few apposite words, just what
are needed for the purpose of the narrative, make the scene
visible.
On the other hand, perhaps the worst feature of the Bothie is
its, metre. Clough chose the hexameter; and, though it has the
serious disadvantage, of being an exotic form of metre, it is in
many ways well adapted for a poem such as he was meditating.
It can be either rapid or slow, solemn or light. It was also
unhackneyed; and this consideration weighed with him in the

selection, as it doubtless weighed with other poets of that day.
Longfellow's Evangeline and The Courtship of Miles Standish and
Kingsley's Andromeda are all written in this measure. Clough
himself used it again in Amours de Voyage. In a sense therefore
it may be said to be naturalised ; but it cannot be pretended that,
even in the best English examples, it produces the effect of the

Greek or Latin hexameter. Of the three poets named,i Kingsley
is the most skilful and successful in his use of the metre; but in
his verse as well as in that of Longfellow and of Clough, there is
an undue preponderance of the dactyl. In Clough's case, how-

ever, a more serious objection is the extreme harshness of the
verse. Verse ought always to have a more smooth and pleasing
melody thin prose, while many of Clough's lines read like prose
.spoilt.
Clough bad been invited to become head of University Hall,

London, whose function was to provide a place of residence for
students of University College. The interval between the date of
the invitation and that of Clough's entry upon he spent
his duties,
in Italy. He was in Rome during its siege by the French in 1849.

,In this situation he wrote Amours de Voyage^, which, however, was

not published till 1858, when it appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.
The reason for the delay appears to have been the unfavourable
.opinion of a friend to whom the poem was submitted. There was
some reason for this friend's doubts. Amours de Voyage is on a
considerably:lower plane than the Bothie of Tober-na- Vuolich ; and
it is dangerous for any poet, but especially for one whose reputa-
tion is not yet established, to fall below himself Amours de
Voyage a romance in verse, told in a series of letters. The hero,
is
Claude, is emphatically a character of the nineteenth century, a

Hamlet in respect of incapacity to carry out his purpose —but not
much farther. He seems to have been designed by Clough to
embody his conceptiori of the spirit of the age — ^the paralysis of
action through doubt, the lack of purpose, the superficiality. But
Claude is too slight and trivial, and in consequence Clough misses
his aim.
In 1850 Clough visited Venice, and there he began his most

ambitious poem, Dipsychus, which, however, was not published
,
during the author's lifetime, and must not be regarded as having

received his final touches. The purpose is to depict a spirit
good and evil, pleasure
fliyided against itself in its battlings with
,^nd pain, faith and doubt, and all, the most complex problems of
life. T^^ Resign was .great, and in some points it is not unworthily
handle^. But still it was beyond Clough's powers ; and, more-
over, the resemblance to Goethe's Faust was too close. Though
Dipsychus and his attendant; Spirit are by no means identical. with
Faust and Mephistopheles, they are constantly suggesting Goethe's
pair. Clough made a grave mistake in courting the comparison.
It was a mistake into which he was tempted by similarity of cir-
cumstance. Half a century of experience after Goethe's great

work — the years during which the lessons of the French Revolution
—
had sunk into the general heart had brought minds of a rank con-
siderably below Goethe's much where he had stood: The middle of
the nineteenth century was consequently the time of his maximum
influence. No one else, perhaps, has followed him so closely as
' The poem itself gives the date of composition : —" I was writ in a Roman
ctiamber, When from Janiculan heights, thundered the cannon of France."
Clough ; but the very resemblances between Dipsychus and other
works of the time help to reveal how deep the influence of Goethe
had penetrated. There is in Dipsychus a kinship to Bailey's FeStus
and to Dobell's Balder, which might momentarily tempt those who
class Bailey as a Spasmodic Poet to include Clough also in that class.
It is more interesting to note in Dipsychus Clough's expression
of Browning's favourite idea about the nature of evil. In all proba-

bility it is not a case of borrowing at all : Hegel had the idea before
either Clough or Browning; and before Z'//5jj'<:^«f was published
•
Nathaniel Hawthorne had given, perhaps, the most striking expres-
sion to it in The Marble Faun. Something of the kind was becoming
almost a necessity ; and it was especially a necessity to one who,
like Clough, had been driven from the old anchorage. It was a
necessity too, though unacknowledged, to many who still imagined
themselves to be riding there; for one of the most remarkable
features of the time is the extraordinary way in which the old words
have been made to express wholly new Of the millions who
ideas.
believe in the atonement, how many understand by it what their

fathers understood? Intelligent and educkted men can hardly
now accept the crude idea that, sin having been committed, justice
must be satisfied, and will be satisfied if only the innocent will
consent to suffer for the guilty. In like manner, the conception
who himself must be a creature of an
of evil as the work of a devil,
omnipotent was seen to be a solution that solved nothing.
deity,
And hence Dipsychus, after a beautiful passage descriptive df
Venice, when he has taken and held and ordered on his brain
"The faces, and the voices, and the whole mass

O' the motley facts of existence flowing by,"
proceeds thus :
'
" O perfect I if 'twere all ! But it is not
Hints haunt me ever of a more beyond :
I am rebuked by a sense of the incomplete

Of a completion over soon assumed,
Of adding up too soon. What we call sin,
I could believe a painful opening out

Of paths for ampler virtue. The bare field,
Scant with lean ears of harvest, long had mocked

THE XURN OP THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 461,
The vext laborious farmer came at length ;
The deep plough in the lazy undersoil

Down-driving j with a, cry earth's fibres crack,
And a few months, and lo 1 the golden leas,
And autumn's crowded shocks and loaded iîns.
Let us look back; on life ; was any change,
Any now blest expansion, but at first
A pang, remorse-like, shot to the inmost seats

Of moral being? To do anything,
Distincton any one thing to decide,
To leave the habitual and the old, and quit
The easy-chair of use and wont, seems crime
To the weak soul, forgetful how at first
Sitting down seemed so too."
Ere long Clough resigned his position at University Hall, and

in 1852. went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the intention of
settling there. In less than a year, however, he was recalled to
England to take up an appointment in the Ediication Office, in
which he spent the short and uneventful remainder of his life.
His official duties took up most of his time, and during those years
he wrote little poetry until, just before the close, he was compelled
to take a holiday and go south for his health. During his travels
he composed the tales entitled Mart Magno. But the health
he sought did not come, and he sank under a malarial fever in
November, 1861.
Besides the longerpoems which have been mentioned, Clough
is the author of a considerable number of shorter pieces. It is
chiefly in these and in Dipsychus that we see the traces of the
intellectual and religious struggle begun at Oxford. Those traces
are to be found in such poems as The New- Sinai; Qui LaboraP,
Orat; Easter Day, Naples, 1849 ^"d Easter Day. j
Clough sometimes assumes an attitude which is not that of

dogmatic unbelief, any more than it is that of unquestioning faith.
As if in anticipation of the position, of the agnostics, though with a
sentiment foreign to them, in the fine versesj Ah I yet consider it
again I he enters a plea for suspense of judgment :
" Old
' things need not be therefore true,'
O brother men, nor yet the new
Ah ! still awhile the old thought retain, '
v
And yet consider it agiun 1
The souls of now two thousand years
Have laid up here their toils and fears,
And all the earnings of their pain,
Ah, yet consider it ' again !
We what do we see ? each a space

!
Of some few yards before his face

Does that the whole wide plan explain?
Ah, yet consider it again I
Alas ! the great world goes its way,

And takes its truth from each new day;,
They do not quit, nor can retain.
Far less consider it again."
Notwithstanding this, however, dough's own view with regard

to most of the articles of the creed of Christendom was essentially
negative. He passes " through the great siriful streets oif Naples,'
and sees there the result of nineteen centuries of so-called Chris-
tianity ; and the sight wrings from him the cry,
" Christ is not risen, no
He lies and moulders low
Christ is not risen
# * #
What if the women, ere the dawn was grey,

Saw one or more great angels, as they, say
(Angels, or Him himself)? Yet neither there, nor theil,
Not afterwards, nor elsewhere, nor at all.

Hath He appeared to Peter or the Ten ;
Nor, save in thunderous terror, to blind Saul

Save in an after Gospel and late Creed, '
He is not risen, indeed

Christ is not risen !
It is true that in the epilogue, the second part of Easter Day, we

read that He is •
"Though dead, not dead;

Not gone, though fled ;
Not lost, though vanished.

'
In the great gospel and true creed,

He is yet risen indeed;
.Christ is yet risen."
But no careful student of Clough would interpret this as an assent

to the orthodox doctrine : other parts of the poem altogether
preclude such an interpretation: It is rather an affirmation of the
creed that the good dies not. Clough's view is practically identical
with that of his friend, Matthew Arnold, who teaches that Christ
lived while faith lived :
"While we believed, on earth he went,

And open stood his grave.
Men call'd from chamber, church, and tent
And Christ was by to save.''
Butfaith.passes, and with it Christ passes too :
I
i
" Now he is dead Far hence he lies
!
In the lorn Syrian town;

And on his grave, vrith shining eyes.
The Syrian stars look down."
But though the close of the second Easter Day cannot be inter-
preted as an acceptance of the doctrine of the resurrection of Christ,
its hopefulness
is noticeable. Courage was one of the virtues of
Clough and perhaps Arnold in Thyrsis has unwittingly done
;
his friend an injustice in failing to bring this out with sufficient
clearness. It is triie Clough's " piping took a troubled sound "
but it is a mistake to suppose that he sank in the struggle or felt

himself vanquished by his doubts.
"Sit if ye will, sit down upon the ground.

Yet not to weep and wail, but calmly look around,"
he:,erieg to the women searching for their lost yet unrisen dead.
Whatever in any creeds may be true or false, life is still to live and
duty still to do. Perhaps the best, of all expressions of Clough's
spirit is to be found in the beautiful verses which close the volume
of his Poems —
" Say not, the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth.
And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;

It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers.
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking.

Seem here no painfulinch to gain.
Far back, through creeks and inlets making.
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
4^4 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light.
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly.
But westward, look, the land is bright."
In these verses there is that spirit of Stoicism which Arnold

grandly expresses in The Last Word. But there is a characteristic
difference between the pieces. Clough is the more hopeful poet
of the two. Arnold lays the whole stress upon courageous en-
durance, the doing of duty in spite of the certainty of defeat.
Clough sees all the western land bright in the sunshine,
'
and the
tide breaking in elsewhere if not here.
What is deepest in the spirit of Clough is concentrated in
poems such as those which have just been quoted. But there were
other aspects of his nature too, and these also are disclosed in his
poems. He is bright and genial, as well as thoughtful and melan-
choly; and the lighter aspects are attractively shown in Xh^ Bothie
and in Mart Magna, a collection of spirited tales, strongly, in-
fluenced by Chaucer, especially in the introduction, which owes
much to the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. The numerous
faults of Mari Magna must be condoned because it never received
the author's final revision. It suggests that perhaps Clough
might have done better if time and circumstance had not Md
upon him such a task as that which he attempts in Dipsychus.'
As it is, he leaves in all his work a certain sense of inadequacy.
He is rather a great Might-have-been, than great in actual
performance.
One or two points of similarity between the work of Clough
and that of his great friend Matthew Arnold have already been
pointed out. Occasionally, though rarely, the similarity is so close
that the work of the one might easily be taken for that of the
other. Thus, if the authorship were doubtful, the following
verses of Clough from Songs in Absence might be sworn to as
Arnold's ;
"Somewhere —but where I cannot guess

Beyond, may be, the bound of space,
The liberated spirits press
And meet, bless heaven, and embrace.
It seems not either here nor there.

Somewhere between us up above, ;
A region of a clearer air,
The' dwelling of a' purer love."
But it is not in scattered passages, or in chance resemblances

of expression, that the true kinship between the two men is to be
discovered. On the contrary, as far as mere style and form of
expression go, there is contrast more frequently than resemblance.
But the two agree in their- conception of the poet's business, their
deepest interests are the same, they have passed through the same
experiences. The views of modern life, of its complexity, and the
paralysis of action it produces, which we find in Dipsychus, are
also to be found everywhere in the poetry of Arnold. Both are
poets of doubt who would fain be poets of faith. Both have to
rest content mainly with negations; but, notwithstanding the
negations, each preaches a gospel of courage and 'of work.
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) went up'to Oxford four years after
Clough, and, like him, after the disaster of a second class in his
schools, became a fellow of Oriel College. In 1847 he was ap-
pointed private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, and in 1851 he took
the office of inspector of schools. Incongruous as the post seemed
with Arnold's " Olympian manners " and :his superb culture, in it he
spent his life. He found in his occupation much that was interest-
ing and well worth doing, as well as much that was tedious and
trivial and by the humbler work at home, as well as by his official
;
visits, to France, Germany and Holland, he did great service to
the cause of education. Yet after all it must be confessed that

:
using such an intellect for such purposes was a little like

using a razor to chop sticks, and that he seems better placed
in his ten years' professorship of poetry at Oxford, to which
we owe several delightful volumes. Whether they manage such
things better in France or no, it does seem that, with our
Bumses as gaugers, and our Matthew Arnolds as inspectors of
elementary schools, our management in England leaves something
to be desired.
Matthew Arnold's poetry is in great part the work of his youth;
In 1840 he won a prize at Rugby with a poem on Alaric at Rov^;
w. 30
and afterwards he won the Newdigate prize at Oxford with one
on Cromwell. His first volume of poems was The Strayed
Reveller, and other Poems (1849). Three years later came Empe-
docles on Etna, and other Poems, This was followed in 1853 by a
volume entitled simply Poems, and consisting partly of new work
and. partly of pieces reprinted from the earlier volumes: The
volume of 1855 contained only two new pieces, Balder Dead and
Separation; but in the same year one of the most beautiful of all
Arnold's poems, the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, was
printed in Fraset's Magazine. In 1858 he published Merope, in
1866 Thyrsis, the exquisite elegy on his friend Clough, and in
1867 a volume entitled New Poems. It was the last volume of
poetry from Arnold's pen. He afterwards wrote only occasional
pieces, which were usually prompted by some event interesting to
himself. Westminster Abbey, occasioned by the death of Stanley,
and those beautiful elegies on dead pets which contain hardly less
of Arnold's thought and feeling than he has consecrated to his

human friends, are examples.
, Two causes probably concurred to produce this early silence.

One was the neglect and indifference with which Arnold's poems
were f eceivedi Even among his own friends some were
from far
enthusiastic in their welcome: Clough himself reviewed The
Strayed Reveller and Empedodes in a spirit which cannot be
regarded without surprise and some pain. The world paid little
Or no attention; The second cause lay in the poet himself. His
work is exquisite, but of limited range. Arnold has not the
buoyancy which bears aipoeton from theme to theme. The same
sad [Undertone sounds through nearly all his verse ; and it is possible
that he had expressed himself fully at an age when the poetical
powers of some poets are barely mature. The elegiac note, of
which he is the unsurpassed master, is one which will not bear
iîdefiiiite repetition. This view gf the matter is confirmed by
observing how completely representative ,of Arnold the first two
volumes are, and how much of his best ;\yoj;k they contain. Yet
the one was published when he was twenty-seven, and ,the othe;i;
wihen he was thirty. ;
Along with The Strayed Reveller appeared,
among other pieces, The J'hrsaken .Mefman, Mycerinus, To «
Gipsy Child, Resignation, z.tA the sonnets To ^ Friend and

Shakespeare; while Empedocles was accompanied with Memorial
Verses, A Summer Night; and Stanzas in Memory of the Author >
of Obermann,' as well as with the greater part of the two series of

'
lyrics to which the titles Switzerland and Faded Leaves were
subsequently given. In these pieces we have pretty nearly the

complete range and scope of Arnold's genius. In later years he
amplified and varied the illustrations; but, except in narrative
poems in blank verse, he added very little of which there is not
here already more than a hint. The blank-verse ôexas, Sohrab
and Rustum and Balder Dead, followed almost immediately, the
former in the volume of 1853; which contained also The Scholar
6^/)>s;;,, the latter two years afterwards.
The question, what is the purport and teaching of Arnold's
poetry? is one which is well worth investigating and an explicit
;
answer can he given to it ;one of the great merits of Arnold'^

for
verse is its lucidity. There are some writers whose .place in
history is of subordinate importance. We can, if we choosCj trace
in thîr which they lived, for no
work the influence of the age in
man ever escaped that influence ; but we are not compelled to do
so. In others, the influence is absolutely vital, and unless we
attend to it we can never understand them. '
To the latter class

Matthew Arnold belongs, and his work is the roundest and most
complete expression of one great phase of nineteenth century
thought Much of it is in Clpugh also,; but Arnold transcends
Clough; and his superiority to the latter in, poetic style, alone
would make him rather than his friend the true voice of that
particularphase of thought. ,
In the beginning it is desira,ble to get rid of a misconception

which due to Arnold's prose rather than to his poetry,, Many
is ,
people fail to distinguish between religion and their own dogma ,
and as the author of Literature and Dogma and God and the,
Bible attacked the majority of current dogmas, he has been
widely regarded as irreligious,, Arnold disbelieved in the divinity
of Christ and at least dpubted immortality ; arid he defined God
as "a stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for
righteousness." He also insisted that it was time to Hellenige
30 —
and to praise knowing, because we had Hebraised too much, and
had overvalued doing. But on the other hand he declared that
conduct was three-fourths of life; he read the Bible far more
carefully and thoughtfully than the great majority of the professed
teachers of religion ; and the most striking point in the recently-
published selections from his Note-Books is the immense number
of quotations charged with the very spirit of religion. Obviously
it was in this sphere that his thought loved to dwell, and
it was
here that he found the strength for his daily work. Widely as his
intellect separated him from the Catholic Church, he was never
unsympathetic towards it. On the contrary, this sympathy is one
of the most remarkable features of Arnold's verse.
. The author
of the Stanzas from Grande Chartreuse is more than just to
the
the spirit of asceticism he shows all its beauty, and -he refrains
:
from showing its deformity. Even in the poems which express

his disbelief in the common faith' there is a tremulous wail which
proves that he would fain have believed ifhe could. That
wail sounds through Obermann once More ; and in Dover Beach
the poet hears the " melancholy, long, withdrawing roar " of 'the
Sea of Faith,
"Retreating, to the breath i
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world."
This attitude towards religion the most characteristic thing in

is
Arnold. He had no he had boundless sympathy. He

creed, but
never stood as close to the Oxford Movement as Clough did, and
'
he came out of the turmoil perhaps even more completely

stripped of dogma ; but his regret was quite as poignant as
Clough'sj- '
In 'Arnold this negative attitude towards dogma is closely

related to his position in history. He stood just far enough
away from the French Revolution to look back upon it and its
effects in a spirit of criticism. It had shattered the old world,
and left in the place of an ordered system only " blocks of the
past, like icebergs high," floating "on a rolling sea." On the
Other hand, he was not far enough away to enable him to see
what was to be th& nature of the new world which must arise
from the ruins. He was i
"Standing between two worlds, one dead.

The other powerless to be. bom."
There was need of the power which promised to make all things
new, but its advent was delayed. Arnold looked around him in
Win for any force capable of reconstructing society. The age
j'ust past had been potent for destruction, but powerless to create.
It had proved to be
"Europe's dying hour
Of fitful dream and feverish power."
These fundamental convictions, that the faith which had shaped

Europe was gone, and that the feudal mould of her society was
shattered, are the secret of the^wonderful attractive power Exercised
over Arnold by, Senancour, the author of Obermann. Senancour .
too had felt, the vâstness of the change, and it is the cause of that
"ground-tone pf human agony" which sobs through his work.
Men holding such, convictions must inevitably be melancholy ,
,;
and Arnold the poet is habitually melancholy. In this respect

his verse is unlike his prose,which has more of the charming
gaiety and playfulness of his own manners.
Both the gaiety and
the melancholy were features of his character, and J. C. Shairp
has touched the contrast with admirable taste in the lines which
describe the youthful scholar of Balliol :t—
"So full of power, yet blithe and debonair,

Rallying his friends with pleasaiit banter gay.
Or half-a-dream chaunting with jaunty air
Great words of Goethe^ catch of Beranger
We see the banter sparkle in his pirose,
But know not there the undertone which flows,
So calmly sad, through all his stately lay."
Looking thus upon life, Arnold naturally could not be among

the optimists; either those, like Macaulay, who were at ease in
their Zion because Of the materiail progress of the time, or thdse,
like Browning, who were convinced that " God's in his heaven,"
andiwho therefore' confidently drew the conclusion that "all's
right with the world." Arnold could find no place among the
former class, because he saw that the " something that infects the
world" could bes, cured not by material but only by spiritual
means. It was no lack of material means that caused the decay

of Rome. In the magnificent contrast between East and West,
the Roman noble has all that external —
means can give cool halls,
rich wines, swift horses and chariots; and all are impotent, iiot
merely to secure happiness, but to avert misery. Spiritual salva-
tion comes accompanied by material ruin, in the birth of a new
religion. Neither, on the other hand, could Arnold be among the
Browningite optimists. To him it meant the assertion that the
new religion had been born, without the proof. Still less could
such' a man feel himself in harmony with the attempts to revert
to the Middle Ages. He thought the Middle Ages irrational
and he knew that any attempt to blot or blur the record of human
progress must end in failure. In A Summer Night he has drawn
imperishably, under the figure of a helmsman, the picture of him
who attempts to steer his way across the ocean of life by any
other chart than that of truth. The tempest strikes him,
"And between
The lightning-bursts is seen
,
Only a driving wreck,
And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck
With anguish'd face and flying hair
Grasping the rudder hard,
Still bent to make sojne port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false, impossible shore.
And comes the roar
sterner
Of and wind, and through the deepening gloom
sea
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,
And he too disappears, and comes no more.''
In Arnold's opinion, that which the time demands, above all
things is,, the, discovery of some shore, not false or impossible, tp-
wards which to steer. We need some Columbus to guide us over

a, tracklessocean to a new continent which he discerns, though we
cannot, iîjOur misfortune is that we can find no such pilot.
,
Goethe, the "physician" of Europe's "iron age," had laid his

THE TURN OF THE, CENTURY : '
NEW INFLUENCES 471
fingeron the seat of the disease, but he failed to find a cure.

' '
Arnold never conceived himself to be capable of succeeding

where Goethe had failed. On the contrary, he rather teaches
that the problem has grown so complex that scarcely any intellect
could suffice for its solution. Herein he finds the principal
difference between ancient and modern civilisation. The former
is homogeneous. The Greek is Greek, and he thrusts the bar-
barian from him with; a haughty wave of the hand. The Roman
acknowledges the titlebfthe Greek to the. treatment of an equal;
but he too feels himself a being of another sort from all the rest
The Jew in his own way was more exclusive than either; for
thereis even a profounder arrogance in the' division between Jew
and Gentile 'than there is in that between Greek and barbarian.

But Arnold finds the type of modern civilisation in Rachel :~^
"Sprung from the blood of Israel's scatter'd race.

At a mean inn in German Aarau born,
Tfo forms froni antique Greece ,^nd RoRie uptornj
.Trick'd out, with a Parisian speech and face.
'
Imparting life renew'd, old classic grace

Then, soothing with thy Christian strain forlorn,
'
A-Kempis'! her departing soul outworn,
.
'
While by hsr bedside Hebrew rites have place

Ah, not the radiant spirit of Greece alone
—
She had one power, which made her breast its home
In her, like us, there clash'd, contending powers,
Gerrhany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome.
The strife, the mixture in her soul, are ours;
Hei genius and her glory are her pwn.''
This feeling of almost .insuperable

,
difficulty is the secret of
Arrjold's melancholy. It gives a sense of brooding pause, almost
of ithe paralysis of action, to his verse. : It is the secret of his
attraction for some minds, and of an alienation amounting almost
to repulsion between him and many others. It makes him, in
verse; as well as in prose,, critical rather than constructive.
I His
much-condemned definition of poetry as " a criticism of life " is
at least true of his own poefcry, Even in the literary sense^ there
is a surprising quantity of wise criticisni in his verse, Goethe,

Byron, Wordsworth and Senancour are all examined with won-
derful insight; and in the! Epilogue to Lessings Laocoon we have
a discussion of the principles of the arts of music, paiiiting and
poetry. But Arnold's verse is critical in a far deeper sense than
this. It is, in accordance with his own definition, critical 6i life.
In all his deepest poems, in Thyrsis and The Scholar Gipsy, m

Resignation, Obermann poems, in A Southern Night,
in the
Arnold is passing judgment on the life of his age, the life of his
country, the lives of individual men. In the last-named poem the
fate of his brother;^ dying: an exile in the attempt to retura to the
becomes the text for a sermon on the restless
country; of his birth,
energy of the English, and on the "strange irony of fate" which
preserves for the members of such a race graves so peaceful as
i
theirs by " those hoary Indian hills " and " this gracious Midland
sea.''
In Arnold is quite consistent with himself. Holding

all this
that what Europe in his genieration prindipally needed was

criticism, he gave this criticism in verse as well as in prose. And
it may be remarked that the principle underlying his literary
verdicts in prose is the same as that which underlies his poetic

view of life. He treats his author not as an isolated fact, and
judges him not by any abstract canons. He tries to put him
back in his social setting, to look from his point of view, to judge
him as a part of that life in which he mingled.
As regards his poetical method, Arnold is essentially classical,
not romantic. Not since Milton has there been any English poet
more deeply imbued with the classical spirit. Arnold was so by
native predilection ; but his innate tendency was strengthened by
the operation of a principle he was never tired of insisting upon
the principle; that what we ought to attempt should be determined
for us by a consideration of what is needful. He condemned
Carlyle; in England and Gambetta in France for the error of
carrying coals to Newcastle, by giving the Weight of their authority
to those qualities Which their respective countrymen already
possessed in excess. Arnold's own design was to tone down
what was excessive and to supply what was deficient. It was this
which made him turn to France, and insist so much on the value
of French literature to England. He thought it more valuable td
Englishmen than German literature, just because it was more
remote from them, and was rich in the qualities in which they
were poor. Arnold has been accused of overrating French Htera-
ture. He may have overrated individual writers, but no one ever
took a juster or saner view of the literature as a whole ; and
he certainly cannot be charged with exaggerating French tnerits
in theJine, "France, famed în all great arts, in none supreme."
The same principle led him to Hellenise, to insist upon
the vital importance of regarding the whole, instead of being
content with the beauty of the separate parts, and to inculcate the
and proportion. This is the essence of
.study of lucidity, restraint
his classicism; forwas only occasionally that he chose an
it
antique. theme, or deliberately imitated the Greek manner; nor

was he always successful when he did so. Meropt as a whole is
frigid, and the few fine passages it contains are not suflficient to
redeem the whole. The subject of Bmpedocles is ancient, but the

spirit is modern, and the poet himself 'speaks through the lips df
the ancient philosopher. The grand chant of Empedocles is

unmistakably. Arnold's. So too the whole substance of Arnold's
thought is modern. On almost every page he proclaims himself
a man of the nineteenth century, and few poets could be more
surely dated from internal evidence alone. But he is Greek in
Jais insistence that there shall be a definite thought, which shall
be lucidly expressed. Neither the charms nor the defects of

extreme romanticism or impressionism were possible to him.
Among English poets the man to whom Arnold was most
indebted was Wordsworth; and he has repaid the debt by the
exquisite skill of his selection from Wordsworth's writings, which
has probably done more than anything else to spread a love for
that great but most unequal poet. As a student and lover of
nature he followed Wordsworth ; but his method and his results
in some respects differ widely from those of his master. He has
.Wordsworth's calmjibut neither his cheerfulness nor his detach-
ment.: Wordsworth lives and thinks with the hills for his sole
companions, but Arnold never rests in nature alone. For the
steady optimism of Wordsworth there is substituted ' in Arnold
.the sense that a destiny so rarely yielding great results as the life
-of man,
"Though bearable, seems hardly worth
This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth.''
In their wonderful accuracy Arnold's references to nature

illustrate that conscientiousness of the intellect which is one of
his most honourable distinctions. The accuracy of Tennyson has
been greatly and justly praised ; but an eicceptionally coinpetent
,
judge, Lord de Tabley, himself not only a poet, but one of the
most accomplished botanists of his time, gives Arnold the prefer-
ence over eveti Tennyson. The latter, he says, occasionally goes
wrong, but he can always trust Arnold. Nor is it in respect to
flowers alone that Arnold is accurate. Mountains, lakes, roads,
rivers, are all located and portrayed with precision. The
foundation of this accuracy is seen in the loving minuteness
,with which in his letters Arnold notes the facts of nature. j
This, however, was only one aspect of that passion for truth
which Arnold never ceased to cherish. Herein he was a disciple
;0f Goethe, the "rigorous teacher," who showed him "the high
white star of truth " ; and it was
which stood in the
this passion
way of his finding under the shelter of authority an easy solution

of the intellectual difficulties which beset him. Herein too he
was emphatically the child of his own age. More than Clough,
more than anyone else, he is the poet of iignosticism, expressing
jjtg spirit in a mournful music, before the name
. itself had been
thought of. This is the outcome of his uncompromising intellectual
sincerity. Neither to himself nor to others will he pretend to know
that which he does not know ; and his conviction is that the old
beliefs have^ been discredited, and there are none to set in their
place-
Nothing in Arnold's verse is more arresting than its elegiac
element. It is not too much to say that there is no other English
poet in whom the elegiac spirit so reigns as it does in him
perhaps he who approaches nearest to him in this respect is
Mr William Watson; Other great poets Milton, Gray, Shelley, —

—
Tennyson have given grand expression to their sorrow in single
elegies; but no one else returns so frequently as Arnold to the
elegiac form. He found in the elegy the outlet of his ilative

melancholy, of the "VirgiUan cry" over the mournfulness of
mortal destiny. It is the natural tone of an agnostic who is not
jubilant, but regretful of the vanished faith, — regretful of its
beauty, and regretful of the lost promise.

Not only are Arnold's elegiacs numerous, they are almost
invariably among his finest work. And always his spirit is that of
Gray rather than that of Milton or Shelley or Tennyson. Arnold's •
elegies are charged with the lacrimae rerum; they have never
the triumphant and inspiring ring of Milton's and Shelley's. But
as little are they elegies merely of the individual. The subject
of Rugby Chapel is his own father ; in A Southern Night it is his
brother ; in Westminster Abbey and in Thyrsis, his most intimate
friends ; but even in these instances of keen personal sorrow the
poet widens his view and treats of human destiny, almost as
much as Gray does in the Elegy written in a Country Church-
yard. And precisely the same spirit inspires poems which are
not elegiac in the sense of being laments for individual men.
Thyrsis, the poem on Clough, more elegiac in spirit
is scarcely
than The Scholar Gipsy. theme is the condition
In both the real
of modern life, its feverishness, its "sick hurry," and its "divided
aims." It is so too in the ' Obermann poems, the Stanzas '
from the Grande Chartreuse, the Stanzas from Carnae, Heinis

Grave and Memorial Verses. In all there is the satne stateli-
ness of utterance, and the same calmly sad undertone. They
are the voice of a spirit almost crushed beneath the burden
of life. Hence Arnold's grave rebuke in verse of the materialistic
spirit, his plea for gentleness and quiet as against bustling energy,
" trenchant force, and will like a dividing spear." Hence too his
banter in prose of the "young lions of the Daily Telegraph" and
his fear lest " every voice not of thunder " be silenced. It is this
which attracts him to the monastic life, and wrings from him a
momentary cry for shelter' in the cloister :
" Oh, hideme in yonr gloom profound,

Ye solemn seats of hfjy pain
Take me|, cowl'd forms, apd fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again."
47,6 • THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
This isa favourite phrase, to " possess his soul " ; and the chief
fault the poet tods with his countrymen is that we
"See all sights from pole to pole,

And glance, and nod, and bustle by,
And never once possess our soul
Before we die.
The lesson he himself draws from the world is, Resignation.

iNature herself teaches it :
;
"Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread.
The solemn hills around us spread,
This stream which falls incessantly.
The strange-scrawl'd rocks, the lonely sky,
'
If I might lend their life a voice,
;
'
Seem to bear rather than rejoice;"
,i^nd henqe his injunction is, i
"^
' ' "Be passionate hopes not ill resign'd
For quiet, and a fearless mind."
There are, hqwever, two kinds of resignation. One is the somer

what ignoble resignation of the cloister, which seems to be Arnold's
choice in the Stanzas from, the Grande Chartreuse. The other is
the stoic ;:esignation inspired by a sense of duty unhelped by any

.hope of reward ; and this manlier sort is really Arnold's. As we ;
have seen, his " rigorous teachers " forbade the surrender of intel-
lect and enjoined, the facing of all difficulties at whatever cost, and
even although tlê end were failure. It was Browning whO; taught
that under apparent failure there may be hidden real success,
but the spirit of the work. His
teaching inspires Arnold's
whole ,
was to the effort to elevate his
life, devoted as it
countrymen, by his verse and by his prose and by his practical

professional work, is a proof that his was the nobler sort of
resignation.
" The hopeless tangle of the age," which isone of the causes
tending to make resignation a necessity, has been already dwelt
upon. Another cause is the inevitable loneliness of humanity;
and this too is among the thoughts most constantly present to

Arnold's mind, and most beautifully expressed by him :
*' Yes in the sea of life enisled,

!
With echoing straits between us thrown.

Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone"
The pathos of the poems on his dead pets lies in the sense
of their isolation from their human keepers. The " ebb of life
and mortal pain " in the poor canary have been altogeAer mis-
understood ; the pathetic eyes of Geist were charged with a meaning
we could but dimly comprehend. And this isolation of man from
animal is only one degree greater than that of man from man.
"Brother man's despairing sign
Who can trust us to divine?"
Our destiny is to spend life
.« "In beating where we must not pass

And seeking what we shall not find."
All efforts are vain to bridge "the unplumb'd, salt, estranging

sea " which rolls between one soul and another. And the law is
wider than humanity, or than animal life : the great powers of

nature themselves have the same loneliness :
"The solemn pealcs but to the stars are known.

But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams;
Alone the sun arises, and alone
Spring the great streams."
Next, perhaps, to the elegies and the elegiac lyrics, Arnold

shows best in the sonnets. The severe restraint of the form was
hardly necessary to him ; but it suited him, and as a sonneteer in
the Italian form he ranks with the best in English literature.
Quiet Work, To a Friend s.n6. The Good Shepherd with theKidaze
among the treasures of poetry. And these sonnets reveal, only less
than the elegiac poems, the personal qualities and aspirations of
the author. That on Sophocles has been referred to by more than
one critic as containing in the line, " He saw life steadily, and saw
it whole," a perfect expression of what Arnold himself attempted
to dow
478 THE LITERATURE OE THE VICTORIAN ERA
.
" He is like a starry night with a touch of frost— beautiful and
chilly," is a judgment which many would pronounce to he appro-
priate to Arnold. It is sometimes expressed otherwise in the
statement that his poetry is statuesque. Certainly there is some
truth in such judgments ; and it may be worth while to enquire
what precisely are the limits of their truth. In respect of passion,
and and movement, Arnold, is singularly: unlike such con-
colour,
temporaries as Browning and Jiossetti, and such predecessors as
,
Byron apd Shelley. The element of passion is not wholly absent

from Arrôld's,, poetry, but it is subordinate, and the mode of treat-
ment, is, quite different from that of the other poets just named.
Switzerland, in the hands of Shelley, would have been a series of
passionate love-lyrics Arnold makes it a beautiful and pathetic
:
expression of his view of life. In Tristram and Iseult the poet

chooses, not the moment of passion, but the close of the passionate
life, and he ends with a warning of the fate which overtakes the
man who fails to In The 'Church of Brou
govern his passions.
the lovers are already dead, and, waking in their tomb, they take
the sound of the wind for the sweep of angels' wings, and hear
in the rain upon the roof " the rustle of the eternal rain of love."
Only inThe Forsaken Memtixn does Arnold give himself a loose
rein ; and this is one reason why that poem is a favourite with
many who are not otherwise appreciative of him.
The colour in which Arnold delights is in harmony with this
treatment of passion. subdued and cold. We find in
It is all
him few of those vivid redfe which Sir Philip Sidney's blind man
iiiaagined to be like " the sound of a trumpet " ; and neither are
there any of 'the trumpet notes in Arnold's verse. He loves

moonlight more than sunlight, and the cold purity of Alpine snow
more than the rich glow of tropic colour.
"All is silver-grey,
Placid and perfect,"
with Arnold's art as well as with Andrea del Sarto's ; and many
would' be' inclined to add of Arnold, as Browning makes Andrea
add of himself, the exclamation, the worse !
So too of movement Arnold himself condemned Empedodes

on Etna on the ground that a situation in which everything was
to be endured and nothing to be done was faulty. Afterwards he
withdrew the embargo he had laid upon his own work ; and
fortunately so^ for Einpedodes contains much of his finest verse.
Moreover, as R. H. Hutton pointed out, this principle would have
condemned by far the greater part, and the best, of his subsequent
verse. Nowhere in Arnold do we find movement. Merope has it
not, and, being a drama, it is marred in consequence. Even the
narrative poems, Sohrab and Rustum and Balder Dead, have very
Uttle; but the poet has so chosen his subjects and so handles
them that its absence is scarcely noticed. We are grateful for the
beautiful blank verse^ for the stately similes, fqr the pathos ; and
we turn elsewhere for story. The great majority of Arnold's pieces
need no movement but the choice of such theiiies is significant
;
All this is, not perhaps a necessity^ but a very natural result of
Arnold's reflectiveiiess. In a few writers we haye a perfect balance
between thought and action. In Shakespeare we have the breath-
less rapidity of Macbeth, as well as the brooding of Hamlet; and
we find the one almost as much charged with thought as the other.
But usually where we have the sense of action and the gift of rapid
narrative, as in Scott, or intensity of passion, as in Byron, we have
relative deficiency in reflection. Arnold is on the other side of the
line, and in him thought raises a barrier against action.
Mr William Watson, in answer to criticisms directed against
himself, has justly pointed out that there is a passion of the intel-
lectual as well as a passion of the emotional nature. It is the failure

to perceive this which causes the charge of coldness to be brought
against such writers as Arnold and Mr Watson. Though they
have little of the latter kind of passion, they are full of the former ;
and it seems to be a misuse of words to stigmatise as cold poems
so full of the fervour of thought as the Obermann poems, or
'
'
Thyrsis, or The Father of the Forest. Perhaps on this point the

best test is the lyric, which is above all the poetry of emotion, and
to which coldness is fatal. Now it is just in the lyric that Arnold's
:
greatest triumphs have been won. The elegies already noticed are
lyrical ; and we have besides such pieces as the exquisite Requiescat.
and. the song of Callicles in Emjiedocles on Etna, with regard to

which Swinburne declared that " for the absolute loveliness of
sound and colour" there were "no adequate words which would
riot seem violent." We have moreover the wonderful close of The
Forsaken Merman, the effect of which is certainly not chilly i^
"But, children, at midnight,

When soft the winds blow,
When clear falls the moonlight, '
When springtides are low;

When sweet airs come seaward
From heaths starr'd with broom,
And high rocks thrpw mildly
'On the blanch'd sands a gloom.
Up the still, 'glistening beaches, '
Up the creeks we will hie.

Over banks of bright seaweed „ .
The ebb-tide leaves dry.

We will gaze, from the sand-hills,
At the white, sleeping town.
At the church on the hiU-side
— '
'•
And then come back down,

Singing There dwells a loved one.
:
'
But cruel is she,

She left lonely for ever
The kings of the sea.'
§ 2. Edward FitzGerald.
There is just one tie which binds Edward FitzGerald (1809-

1883) to the Oxford poets, from whom in most respects he differs
widely. Though he is not a poet of the sceptical reaction, he has
given the most perfect of all expressions to the spirit and thought
which made the reaction inevitable, and that in the, form of a trans-
lation from the Persian of eight hundred years ago.
There is no man in recent literature more difficult to 'place'
than Edward FitzGerald. His position is unique. Professedly
only a translator, he was in reality an original poet as well, ranking,.;
in respect of power, after only a very few of his contemporaries.
" An eccentric man of genius," it was his whim or his peculiarity
to mask and disguise his gifts ; and only a few of his friends com-
pletely penetrated the veil which, consciously or unconsciously, he
threw over himself His diffidence partly concealed his genius
even from himself. He was conscious of power to do as êU as
most ; but whether he had power sufficient to do what was worth
doing, of that he was uncertain. " I know," he says in his Letters,

" that I could write volume after volume as well as others of the mob
of gentlemen who write -with ease : but I think unless a man can do
better, he had best not do at all : I have not the strong inward
call, nor cruel-sweet pangs of parturition, that prove the birth of
anything bigger than a mouse." Far more than literary fame he
valued the friendship of a few men of letters ; and he enjoyed that
of the greatest of the time. Both to Tennyson and to Thackeray
he was " old Fitz " or " dear old Fitz " ; and the latter, asked which
of his friends he loved most, at once named him along with
Brookfield'. He was one of the few contemporaries for whom
Carlyle felt nothing but kindliness. And one other friendship
must be noticed because, although James Spedding cannot be
ranked with these three, he was in FitzGerald's judgment the wisest
man he had ever known.
Distrust of self, indifference to literary fame, and contentment
with these friendships, aU concurred to keep him silent He had
no "spur to prick the sides of his intent." The retirement in
which he lived tended to the same results. His seclusion became
so deep that about Christmas, 1866, he wrote to Carlyle with com-
pliments to Mrs Carlyle, who had been dead since the previous
April Nevertheless, this shy, retiring man, who looked upon
himself as fit only to appreciate and to select the beauties of other
men who were in danger of being forgotten, contrived to produce
one of the most remarkable poems of the epoch, and by reason of
that poem is more sure of immortality than any except a mere
handful of his contemporaries.
Everything FitzGerald wrote has the touch of the born man of
letters. He is excellent in prose as well as in verse. The letters
on easily, delightfully, with bits of quiet humour
to his friends flow
and innumerable evidences of sincerity and kindliness of heart.
^ Melville's Life of Thacktray, ii 71.
w. 31
The writer's whims and oddities, his waywardness, his strong and
and dislikes, all combine with the
absolutely unconventional likes
most head
sterling qualities ofand heart to make those letters
among the most charming in the English language. His prose
dialogue, Euphranor is full of grace and of the beauty of
(1851),
pure, limpid English; and the passage descriptive of the boat-
race is a model of faultless prose style. But it is as a translator of
Calderon, of Aeschylus, and above all of Omar Khayydm, that he
will live. In this department of translation the Victorian era has
been as copious as it has been in other branches of literature. All
sorts of men — scholars, statesmen, poets hand at — have tried their
it. Limiting the view to the three classical authors, Homer,
Virgil and Horace, who have most attracted translators, we
have, among many others, versions by Lords Derby, Lytton and
Bowen, Gladstone, William Morris, Theodore Martin, Conington,
Worsley, Norgate, Butcher and Lang, Mackail. Prose and verse
blank, ballad metre, Spenserian stanza — have all been tried. But
the law of selection among translations is almost as severe as it is
in original poetry.
'A thousand poets pried at life,
And only one amid the strife
Rose to be Shakespeare."
And the number of translations which are likely to retain a

permanent position in literature might almost be numbered on
the fingers of one hand. Three, upon which time has already
set its seal, are the Authorised Version of the Bible, Chapman's
Homer and Pope's Homer two ; more, which probably will receive
that seal, are achieveihents of the nineteenth century —Jowett's

Plato and FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam. All of these examples
go to show that a translation, to be literary, must not be too
literal. Of the five mentioned, Jowett's Plato has been, severely
criticised on the ground that it does not accurately render
the Greek of Plato ; and all the immense labour of the Revised
Version was undergone in order to correct the inaccuracies
of the Authorised Version. But no competent judge would
assert that, as a piece of literature, the Revised Version is
fit to take the place of its predecessor; and only prejudice can be
blind to the fact that if Jowett has not rendered the words of Plato
as accurately as some of his rivals, he has rendered his spirit far
better. As to the other three translations, not one of them even

makes a pretence of verbal accuracy. would seem that each It
generation will insist on re-discovering for itself what precisely a
great man has said in a foreign tongue, and will make its own
literal translation ; but it will accept from the past and permanently
cherish that which gives in grand bold outline the form of the
thing translated, or that which, like Pope's work, is " a very pretty
poem," though it may not be Homer.
To the latter category all FitzGerald's translations belong.
The liberties he takes with his text are great ; but by some subtle
intellectual chemistry he 'precipitates' the soul of the original
with a success no literal renderer ever has succeeded in rivalling.
The best description of the character of his work is that of
Professor C. E. Norton :
" He is to be called '
translator ' only in
default of a better word, one which should express the poetic
transfusion of a poetic spirit from one language to another,
and the re-presentation of the ideas and images of the original
in a form not altogether diverse from their own, but perfectly
adapted to the new conditions of time, place, custom and
habit of mind in which they reappear.... It is the work of
a poet inspired by the work of a poet; not a copy, but a
reproduction, not a translation, but the redelivery of a poetic
inspiration^."
The began with his rendering
series of FitzGerald's translations
by Calderon (1853), the only book which ever bore
of six dramas
his name on publication. He afterwards added Ttie Mighty
Ma^dan and Such Stuff as Dreams are made on, " taken from "
El Mdgico Prodigioso and La Vida es Sueno. The original six
dramas had been selected from among the less-known plays of
Calderon ; and apparently FitzGerald had been influenced in his
choice by a fear that the liberties he took with the text would be
resented if they were taken with the better-known plays. In the
Advertisement he apologises for those liberties. He curtails and
' Quoted in The Library oj Literary Criticism, vii. 516.
omits, and, where it is necessary, fills in by lines of his own the
lacunae so created. The justification of the liberties lies in their
success. FitzGerald succeeded in his aim of making Calderon
readable and interesting to those who knew no Spanish; while
to those who are familiar with the language his deviations
from the original are harmless. The result consequently is a
clear gain to the great Spanish dramatist, who gets a new
audience which assuredly would not have been won by a literal
translation.
Undeterred by the far wider knowledge of his originals,
FitzGerald took equally great liberties when, long afterwards, he
came to translate, or, as he jestingly says, to make per-iversions '
*
from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus and the Oedipus Tyrannus

and Oedipus Coloneus of Sophocles. In these cases he had far
In Calderon, as he sensibly urges, there was
less justification.
much that was likely to alienate an English reader improba^ —

bilities, bombast, stage properties, that were better removed. But
such a plea is not valid with respect to the classical dramas. The
classical tradition was familiar to English readers, and the classical
form of drama was represented to them by great original works in
their own language. Moreover, the plays he selected were among
the best-known works of antiquity. These were strong reasons
for leaving them them and translating, if not literally,
as he found
at least with every respect for the form and substance. But
FitzGerald cuts and carves, omits and adds, and takes liberties as
great or nearly as great as he takes with Calderon. He attempts
to justify himself; but the best justification is one which he does
not plead. This free way was the only way in which he could
work he is compelled in all cases to mix himself with his author;
:
in all cases we find in his versions much of Edward FitzGerald;

at no point can we be sure, without reference to the original, that
we have Calderon, or Sophocles, or Omar.
FitzGerald never pretended to be a learned man. At Cam-
bridge he was under some anxiety as to whether he would pass
the examination for his poll degree. But he read in a leisurely
fashion what interested himself, and in the long run acquired a
wide knowledge of books in a considerable number of languages.
And as he walked in the by-ways of life, so he was apt to turn

aside from the beaten track in literature. About the time when
he finished his Spanish dramas he began the study of Persian
under the influence of his friend, E. B. Cowell, the Oriental
scholar. that time few either knew or cared for Persian
At
though Morier's Hajji Baba had done something to
literature,
spread a knowledge of Persian life and manners. FitzGerald's

acquaintance with Persian was never great ; but even through the
obscurity of a language half mastered he had the gift of detecting
what suited his own genius and he found it here. He tried his
;
hand, still 'prentice at Persian, on Jami's Saldmdn and Absdl

(1856) ; but he found his title to immortality in the great render-
ing of the Rubdiydt of Omar Khayydm
(1859). No great book
ever stole more silently into print. No one noticed it Two
hundred and fifty copies were printed, and of these FitzGerald
presented some two hundred to Quaritch. He kept the rest, but
all except two or three long remained hidden away in his cup-
boards he did not present them because he thought most

:
would be indifferent, and many would be shocked by the philo-

sophy and theology of the astronomer-poet. The experience of
the bookseller showed that the translator was not mistaken as
to the indifference. Quaritch disposed of the copies in his hands
at a penny each, because customers would pay no more ; and at
that price copies were bought the year after publication by
Rossetti and Swinburne. Now, a small library has grown up
round Omar, and the greater part of that library is unquestionably
due to the inspiratiotj of FitzGerald.
The point in which FitzGerald's Omar surpasses almost if not
quite all translations of poetry is that in itself it gives the impression
of a great original poem. In ordinary verse translations, the
reader cannot forget the existence of the original, even if he has
never read it, because the translator is manifestly not uttering his
own thoughts. In FitzGerald, notwithstanding Eastern symbolism,
we never without an effort remember Omar. There is none of
the sense of loss which translation normally gives. Only the
freedoms which FitzGerald allowed himsdf could have produced
such a result; and these would have been unavailing had not
the man who took them been himself a poet of no mean
quality \
A
good deal of investigation has been made, and some
complaint uttered, with regard to FitzGerald's treatment of his
text. " Many quatrains," he himself says, " are mashed together
and something lost, I doubt, of Omar's simplicity, which is such
a virtue in him." " It must be admitted," says his editor, with a
touch of solemnity, " that FitzGerald took great liberties with the
original in his version of Omar Khayydm"." Several later transla-
tions have appeared which purport to represent the true Omar
more than FitzGerald. As to their fidelity, only Persian
faithfully
scholars have a right to pronounce an opinion ; but it is plain to
the English reader that the true Omar has small cause to be
thankful for the more literal versions. He shines out a far
greater poet in the free rendering of FitzGerald than in any of

those which claim to be more faithful.
A poem built up, like Omar's, out of quatrains unconnected
by any story and without specific theme might easily become a
mere jumble of atoms. Each quatrain might have a beauty of
its own, like a sonnet ; and, the units being short, they would be
apt to group themselves together like the quatrains in the sections

of Tennyson's In Memoriam. But they need have no unity
further than that. FitzGerald's Omar Khayydm has, however, a
unity which goes far beyond this; and herein lies its subtlest
charm. The parts are bound together as intimately as those of
In Memoriam, though by a less palpable bond. It is more like
the connexion between the sonnets of Shakespeare; and, as in
Shakespeare's case, it has to be felt rather than expressed. This
unity seems to have been in part the creation of FitzGerald,
skilfully working upon and adapting the materials supplied to
him by Omar. At any rate, the peculiarly modern tone, which
'As to FitzGerald's relation to his original, the most thorough investigator,

Mr Heron-Allen, pronounces that " a translation pure and simple it is not, but
a translation in the most artistic sense of the term it undoubtedly is." The
materials Mr Heron- Allen furnishes prove conclusively that FitzGerald almost
always had some original, but that he handled it with the utmost freedom.
* Laurs.
does so much to bring home to the English reader the inner
meaning of the poem, is largely imparted by FitzGerald. It is
curious enough that that quatrain which was most obnoxious to
popular views of religion, and which, among others, occasioned a
certain awe and fear to some of FitzGerald's friends, and even to
FitzGerald himself^, appears to be the outcome partly of interpo-
lation, and partly, it is suggested, of the process of ' mashing '
:
"Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,

And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake:
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken'd —Man's forgiveness —and take
give 1
Professor Cowell says that there is no original for the line about
the snake ; and he adds that he has always supposed the last line
to be FitzGerald's mistranslation of a quatrain in Nicolas's edition,
which he gives. It may be so ; but it would be strange to find in
a mere mistranslation the origin of such a powerful and con-
spicuously modern line. The fact that FitzGerald never cared to
alter it, though his attention was called to the supposed mistake,
is suggestive of a very different explanation.
At the outset FitzGerald had to choose between two rival
interpretations of the original quatrains. According to one view,
all and the wine and the rest, were
the sensuous imagery, the cup
to be taken and the poem was the utterance of an
literally,
epicurean determined to make the best of an evanescent life

which was ^11 he knew and all he might ever enjoy:
" Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise !
One thing at least is certain This Life flies;

One thing is certain and the rest is Lies
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies."
The rival theory was that which saw in the poem an allegory, in
the poet a devout Silfi, in the wine an emblem of God. Fortu-
nately, FitzGerald had nohesitation about his interpretation. He
had been sceptical about the Siifism even of Hafiz he was : fully
' " I told Parker," he says before the publication, " he might find it rather
dangerous among his Divines " ; and he adds that " he thinks he will take it
back and add some stanias which he had kept out for fear of being too strong "
[Letters, 469).
convinced that there was no Siifism at all about Omar, that the
wine he sang was the wine which is forbidden to the orthodox
Mahommedan, which maketh glad the heart of man, and which
also steals away his reason. In this light accordingly the transla-
tion represents Omar. Its spirit and character cannot be better
given than in FitzGerald's own words to his friend Cowell.

"It is," he says, "most ingeniously tesselated into a sort of
Epicurean Eclogue in a Persian Garden^."
Yet FitzGerald's Omar Khayydm is far from being a mere
drinking song. Its hold upon the mind is due to the fact that it
is the expression of a philosophy of life. The sum of that

philosophy, it is true, is no more than " eat, drink and be merry,
for to-morrow we die." But it is tinged with the "infinite regret
for all that might have been." It is full of the wistful melancholy
of a nature greater than its destiny. Omar — FitzGerald's Omar
is best compared with Horace; and the qualities which have
made Horace pre-eminently the poet of the man of the world
give Omar too an eloquence of appeal to the heart. The Roman
poet garlands his brow with flowers, quaffs the Falernian and the
Massic wine, and bids defiance to care. And even so Omar :
"Perplext no more with Human or Divine,

Tp-morrow's tangle to the winds resign.
And lose your fingers in the tresses of
The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine."
But Horace has his other mood, in which he feels the need of
Stoicism to buttress the Epicureanism which cannot wholly satisfy
a thoughtful mind :
" O beate Sesti,

Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat inchoare longam.
Jam te premet nox fabulaeque Manes
Et domus exilis Plutonia.''
Omar too has his more serious moods, and is perplexed with
obstinate questionings :
"There was the Door to which I found no Key;

There was the Veil through which I might not see
Some little talk awhile of Me andThee
There was — and then no more of Thee and Me.
^ Letters.
Earth could not answer; nor the Seas that mourn
In flowing Purple, of their Lord forlorn ;
Nor rolling Heaven, with all his Signs reveal'd

And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn."
He too has his melancholy regret at the passing of youth and

beauty and pleasure :—
"Yet Ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose !
That Youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close

The Nightingale that in the branches sang,
Ah whence, and whither flown again, who knows !
There are strings in the lyre of Horace which are mute in

that of Omar. In the latter, there is nothing to set beside the
heroic odes at the opening of the third book of Horace. But
on the other hand, there are notes in Omar which set our deepest
thoughts vibrating as nothing in Horace does. Modern European
civilisation is founded partly upon the East as well as upon the
West. Horace is purely western ; but in Omar as translated by
FitzGerald the East is blended with the West. This is the reason
why Omar might have proved "dangerous" among Parker's
divines. They regarded with easy indifference the sceptical Epicu-
reanism of Horace ; for, though he is singularly modern in some
respects, he is nevertheless essentially of the ancient world and
belongs to another "dispensation." But Omar, passed through
the alembic of FitzGerald's mind, is a modern, and when he
turns his sceptical intellect upon the problems of the universe
proximus ardet Ucalegon. The Rubdiydt are a criticism of life,"
'"'
not in some far-off country and among unfamiliar men, but here
and now — the life all have to live, the destiny all have to look
forward to, the bounds of thought against which all must beat in
vain.
The work upon which FitzGerald's fame will permanently
single
rest consists of only 404 lines, and it professes to be no more
than a translation. He therefore lacks volume, and he lacks
originality, two very important wants. But the poem which the
world owes to Edward FitzGerald and to Omar Khayyam jointly
is one of the jewels of the nineteenth century. Coleridge, who
has one of the safest reputations among the poets of recent times.
owes to a mere handful of verses ; but Mr Stopford Brooke
it all
said ofhim long ago that those verses ought to be bound in pure
gold. And no binding less precious is worthy of the masterpiece
of Edward FitzGerald.
§ 3. The Pre-Raphaelites.
A word of explanation, and perhaps of apology, may be

necessary for the application of the term Pre-Raphaelite to a
group of literary men. It is a term which belongs properly to
the history of painting, and not to that of poetry. In_poetry it
has no specific signification, except so far a^ it derives meaning

byTreHection from its use in relationtoajt and indicates a certain
pha.se of the great romantic^ movement which governed nearly all
_ tti& inagioative literaturejof the time. Nevertheless, it serves a

useful purpose in binding together a group o f men who had
comrnon aims aiid„B'lJose writings , were so intimatglyÊglated^ to
their art that the transference of a word from one to the other
seems scarcely a transference at all._^For not only were a number
of these men at once artists and writers, but they repeatedly used
pen to illustrate pencil, or pencil to illustrate pen. For example,
there is a whole group of Rossetti's sonnets illustrative of his own
pictures or of those of other painters.
The leading spirit in Jjiis .PreJR^phaelite group was Dante
Gabriel .Eossetti. (1828-1882), and it becomes important to
understand what manner of man he was and what were the ideals
which inspired him. By blood Rossetti was three-quarters Italian
and only one-quarter English, his father being an Italian political
refugee and his mother a daughter of Gaetano Polidori. Naturally
therefore he was from childhood intimately acquainted with the
Italian language, and he also came to know Italian literature well
yet he seems never to have felt that powerful attraction which has
drawn many Englishmen of pure blood towards Italy, as much
as, or even more than, towards their own country. " He liked
England and the English," says his brother, "better than any
Other country and nation'"; and notwithstanding his studies in

Dante, his mind was moulded by English more than by Italian
literature.
Under his father's roof Dante Rossetti heard constant talk

about political questions, but such questions never excited his own
interest. On the political side his mind appears to have been a
blank. One or two other lotcunae in his vigorous intelligence are
not less noteworthy. He "dealt firmly" in the hearing of Burne-
Jones with a man who unwarily professed an interest in meta-
physics". Living_in_an age of science, he " was himself.not §ure.
that the earth reallvrevolved_round the sun !_JjOurjenses did

not tell us so, at any rate, and whatthenjdi^t matter-whethgr^
It did move or not?'. What Dante knew was enough for him.
He then remembered Galileo, another Italian, and gave in ! It
might matter in a scientific way, oh yes* " !
It is even more sur-
prising to find that the author of Songs of the Art Catholic, the
painter of the Girlhood of Mary Virgin, cared nothing about
Tractarianism. "If he knew anything about 'the Gorham con-
troversy,'" says his brother, "it was only that Carlyle coupled
'prevenient grace' with 'supervenient moonshine^.'" Yet if he
had little or no dogmatic religion he had a profouad-feelingJor
the superriatural~""^ny "writing about devils, spectres, or the
supernaJEilfargenerally, whether in poetry or in prose, had always
a fascination for him'"; and in later days, when his mind had lost
its balance, he fell a victim to spiritualism, and began to call up
the spirit of his dead wife by table-turning.

Within his own domain of art, however, Rossetti's interests
were keen and his intellect most active. The atmosphere of his
home was impregnated with literature as well as with politics;
and while Dante Rossetti's mind took no colour from the latter,
it greedily absorbed every influence from the former. Most of
1 Memoir, i. 158. ^ Mackail's Life ef Morris, i. loi.

' W. Bell Scott's Autobiography, i. 291.
* Memoir, i. 114. I accept as authoritative Mr W. M. Rossetti's account
of his brother's religious opinions. Other writers, who have given widely
different views, are probably less fully informed.
' W. M. Rossetti, Preface to Collected Works of Dante Rossetti.
49^ THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
the great English poets of recent times, and in addition the
American Edgar Allan Poe, reigned over his mind in turn. In
the long run, his brother tells us, he "perhaps enjoyed and
revered Coleridge beyond any other modern poet whatsoever."
But above any of them, above all other books in the world, he
ranked the Bible and Malory's Morte cPArthur a curious colloca- —
tion, made all the more curious and instructive by the fact that
the latter influenced him more than the former. But Rossetti was
a painter as well as a poet —
apainter by profession, a poet for
enjoyment and as a form of expression of the soul. After an
attempt to carry on the two arts simultaneously, Rossetti found
or fancied that his poetry interfered with his painting ; and about
the age of twenty-five, as he told Mr Hall Caine, he gave up
poetry, writing after that scarcely anything, except the renovated
Jenny, till the publication of the Poems in 1870. Rossetti's choice
between the two which he was eminent was determined
arts in
by his conviction that painting was the art of the future, and
poetry that of the past. He was accustomed to maintain that
Keats was and would remain the last great English poet. "If
any man has any poetry in him,'' he said to Burne-Jones, "he
should paint, for it has all been said and written, and they have
scarcely begun to paint it^."
had two widely separated periods of
Evidently, then, Rossetti
poetical production; one opening about 1847 and extending to
about 1853; the other opening shortly after the publication of
the Poems, and continuing, with intervals, down to the poet's death.
Part of his verse must therefore he considered as the work of a
very young man, and part of it as that of a man of middle age.
The celebrated Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in
1848. It included at first only three painters, Williarri Holman
Hunt, John Everett Millais and Rossetti, and one sculptor,
Thomas Woolner. With these were soon afterwards associated
James Collinson, a domestic painter, Frederick George Stephens,
an Academy student, who was succeeded when he retired by
Walter Deverell, and William Michael Rossetti, the brother of
Dante. No one else was ever a member of the Brotherhood, but
* Mackail's Life of Morris, i. 1 10.
several others were more or less intimately associated with them

and among these may be mentioned Christina Rossetti, Coventry
Patmore and William Bell Scott. The impulse which primarily
drew them together was an artistic, not a literary one. They were
moved by the " contemptible and even scandalous " condition of
British art; and the year of political revolution was not inappro-
priately, though doubtless by pure accident, selected by these
youths for the initiation of a revolution in art. The first pictures

painted under the inspiration of the new ideal were exhibited in
the galleries of 1849. ût the Brethren felt the need of some
means by which they might express and illustrate their principles
in words as well as on canvas ; and this led to the foundation of
their magazine, The Germ, the four numbers of which (the last
two under the changed title of Art and Poetry) appeared between
the beginning of January and the end of April, 1850. The con-
tributors were poor, and they found that to maintain a magazine
for the purpose of expounding their views on art was likely to
prove a costly affair'- A later periodical which, in the case. of
Dante Rossetti, served the : T}ie Oxford and
same purpose was
Cambridge Magazine (1856). In it appeared The Burden of
Nineveh and The Staff and Scrip. The Blessed Damozel likewise
was there reprinted, with alterations, from The Germ. Before
this time, as we have seen, Rossetti had ceased to write poetry ;
and with the few exceptions contained in these two magazines his
poems remained unpublished. But it would be a mistake to
suppose that they were therefore without influence on the work of
others.They were well known in the circle of Rossetti's friends,
among whom were many of the leading writers and artists of the
time ; and over these they exercised a fascination similar to that
which Rossetti himself exercised. The Blessed Damozel was a
kind of poetic revelation to a select band, while to the world it
was still buried in The Germ, almost as effectually as the MS.

poems were afterwards literally buried.
In i860 Rossetti married Elizabeth Siddal, with whom he

had been in love since 1850. Less than two years afterwards she
' I take the facts relating to The Germ from Mr W. M. Rossetti's preface
to the reprint of that magazine.
died from the effects of an overdose of laudanum, a drug which
she had been in the habit of taking to soothe her nerves. In the
transport of his grief Rossetti buried the MSS. of his poems in
his wife's coffin. In 1869 they were disinterred, to be published
in the volume of 1870. Meanwhile, in 1861, Rossetti had pub-
lished his first volume, The Early Italian Poets, afterwards entitled
Dante and his Circle. The translations were " the work almost
entirely of his eighteenth to his twenty-second year^." They were
a very valuable addition to English knowledge of the Italian poets,
and Rossetti was unquestionably the man best qualified to make
such a contribution. It is, however, by virtue of his original poetry
that Rossetti will live in English literature, and the volume of 1870
was that which first made it widely known to English readers.
In one respect it was inevitable that less than justice should
be done to Rossetti. His mind was the impelling force of Pre-
Raphaelitism, both in art and in literature. In painting he was
certainly not the superior, and probably he was not the equal of
one or two others of the Brotherhood ; and yet Ruskin was
undoubtedly right in declaring him to be " the chief intellectual
force in the establishment of the modern Romantic School in
England." He was so in art, where he was not the greatest, as
well as in poetry, where few will dispute his pre-eminence in his
class. He was the master of a school; but his disciples had
published books before him, and he seemed to be their follower.
The fact that his sister Christina Rossetti had already published
two volumes is unimportant ; for the differences between her and
her brother are far more striking than the resemblances. But
when the Poems of Dante Rossetti appeared, William Morris's
Defence of Guenevere was twelve, and Swinburne's Poems and
Ballads four, years old. Both were deeply marked with the stamp
of Rossetti. In the case of Swinburne the influence was an
some extent at least, it was a
inspiration, in the case of Morris, to
misleading Never afterwards do we find so much of Rossetti
fire.
in Morris, and whoever compares this early volume with his later
work will be struck with the absence from The Defence of Guene-
vere of his characteristic merits. Morris found himself when he
^ W. M. Rossetti's Memoir, i. 214-5.
made Chaucer ; as a Pre-Raphaelite he was not quite

his master
successful. He
and Swinburne however had accustomed the
public mind to a class of themes and a style of treatment the
suggestion of which came from Rossetti, as the two poets them-
selves were generously ready to acknowledge.
To the lovers of poetry the volume of 1870 offered a rich and
varied feast and if, on the one hand, it seemed less original than
;
it really was, on the other, the ear of readers was already attuned
to it Specimens of all that is best in the work of Rossetti,
excepting only in the department of the historical ballad, are to
be found there. Such completeness and maturity are very sur-
prising if the poet's statementto Mr Hall Caine was strictly
accurate, and the whole volume is to be taken as the work of a
young man of twenty-five.
Such a volume, from the pen of " the chief intellectual force "
of the modern romantic movement, deserved and was certain to
attract attention. It was at first received with warm and general
praise ; but something more than a year afterwards it became the

subject of a virulent attack entitled 2%« Fleshly School of Poetry,
published pseudonymously under the name of Thomas Maitland,
but really by the poet Robert Buchanan. This most unjust
criticism not only condemned Rossetti as a poetic artist, but
violently denounced the moral tendency of his work ; and unfor-
tunately its effects were not ephemeral, as the effects of criticism
usually are. In the long run it corroded Rossetti's mind, and
threw a deeper shade of blackness upon the dark clouds that
were gathering over his life. The details of this wretched story
are not worth repeating now; but it is pleasant to remember
that at last the assailant repented him of the evil he had
wrought, and sang his recantation in the fine verses " to an old
enemy'' forming the dedication of his romance God and the Man.
The gist of Buchanan's criticism was the charge of sensuality.
It was exaggerated and unjust, but to say that it was wholly with-
out foundation would be too much. Some of Rossetti's poems
e.g. Troy Town —are certainly not free from the taint of fleshliness.
Buchanan's attack derived plausibility mainly from two sources
first, the theme of a few pieces, and especially oi Jenny, though
that is really a poem most moral in tendency; and secondly, from
the excessive sensuousness of many of the pieces. Now the
presence of a sensuous element is not a fault ; on the contrary,
poetry not only may be, but ought to be, as Milton's well-known
dictum points out, sensuous as well as simpleand impassioned.
But the cloying which Rossetti's verse produces on many
effect
readers is mainly due to an excess of what is in itself a good

thing; and the excess renders it not wholly inexcusable to
translate '
sensuous ' into '
sensual' Many of the poems most
characteristic of him are over-wrought and luscious. The Bridis
Prelude, The Stream's Secret and not a few of the sonnets of the
House of Life are chargeable with this fault. The Blessed Damozel
is not free from it. The effect aimed at is often attained. The
sense of the sultiy noonday heat and stillness is perfectly ren-
dered in The Bride's Prelude and the bride's 'tiring-chamber is
;
described with the rich suggestiveness of a Pre-Raphaelite picture.

It is
,
"Like the inner altar-niche
Whose dimness worship has made rich.
Within the window's heaped recess

The light was counterchanged
In blent reflexes manifold
From perfume-caskets of wrought gold
And gems the bride's hair could not hold
All thrust together : and with these

A slim-curved lute, which now,
At Amelotte's sudden passing there.
Was swept in somewise unaware,
And' shook to music the close air."
The air is heavy with scent and heat; the poet has produced
exactly the impression he wished to produce, and he deserves the
praise due to success. But it is an air not wholesome to breathe
long, and there is too much of it in Rossetti's poetry. The
luscious sonnets of The House of Life, beautiful individually,
form together a poem from which many readers are glad to escape.
Take for example Sonnet xxrii, Love's Baubles —
"I stood where Love in brimming armfuls bore
Slight wanton flowers and fooUsh toys of fruit
And round him ladies thronged in warm pursuit,

Fingered and lipped and proffered the strange store.
And from one hand the petal and the core
Savoured of sleep and cluster and curled shoot
;
Seemed from another hand like shame's salute,

Gifts that I felt my cheek was blushing for.
At last Love bade my Lady give the same:
And as I looked, the dew was light thereon;
And as I took them, at her touch they shone
With inmost heaven-hue of the heart of flame.
And then Love said ' Lo when the hand is
: ! hers,
Follies of love are love's true ministers.'"
The thing is so beautifully done as almost to disarm criticism

and yet it is like an excessively rich food, of which a very little
satisfies. The Lydian mode is not the strain to brace manhood.

Of sonnets like Milton's Massacre in Piedmont, or Wordsworth's
Westminster Bridge, or Drummond's St John the Baptist, or
Keats's Chapmatis Homer, we cannot have too many but the ;
sonnets of the House of Life are unnerving. They are frequently

fanciful rather than imaginative, they tremble on the verge of
conceits, they are full of hterary artifice sometimes degenerating
into literary trickery, the aUiteration is excessive, the diction
occasionally recalls the worst faults of the eighteenth century
style. Thus, " the smooth black stream that makes thy whiteness
fair," which means, in plain language, the ink used in writing a
love-letter, is at least as bad as the "plumy people'' and the
"bleating kind," and the other periphrases which, a century
and a half ago, were supposed to translate plain prose into
poetry.
On the other hand, there is a clearness and definiteness of
thought, as well as a beauty of expression, in such sonnets
as The Birth-bond (xv), the noble Lost Days (lxxxvi),
A Superscription (xcvii), and The One Hope (ci), which
make Rossetti's position safe among the greatest of English
and many other sonnets outside that poem of
sonnet- writers ;
sonnets confirm him in that position, Thomas Chatterton,
Winter, The Last Three from Trafalgar. In these we find
the tonic quality characteristic of poetry which is at once great
and thoroughly wholesome. The blood is fired when we
i;ead of Chatterton, "with Shakespeare's manhood at a boy's
w. 32
wild heart," or of the three greybeards, destined soon to
greet
"The impassioned soul which on its radiant way

Soared through the fiery tloud of Trafalgar."
And even Wordsworth's great ode rings no clearer call to duty than
Lost Days —
"The lost days of my life until to-day,
What were they, could I see them on the street
Lie as they fell? Would they be ears of wheat

Sown once for food but trodden into clay?
Or golden coins squandered and still to pay?
Or drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet ?
Or such spilt water as in dreams must cheat
The undying throats of Hell, athirst alway?
I do not see them here; but after death
God knows I know the faces X shall see,
Each one a murdered self, with low last breath.
'I am thyself, —what hast thou done to me?'

'
And I —and I — thyself,' (lo !each one saith,)
'And thou thyself to all eternity 1'"
The same drawn between Rossetti's other

division can be
poems. On one would lie such pieces as The
side of the line
Bride' s Prelude, The Blessed Damozel, Staff and Scrip, The Stream's
Secret, Lov^s Nocturn and the major part of The House of Life.
On the other side would lie The Burden of Nineveh, The White
Ship, The King's Tragedy, Stratton Water, Rose Mary, Welling-
tons Funeral, Jenny and A Last Confession. The latter group
presents Rossetti at his best ; but it is not the Rossetti who was best
known and most admired by his early followers. It is interesting
to notice how considerable a proportion of the poems named as
belonging to this group appeared first in and Sonnets
the Ballads
of i88i. Rose Mary, Wellington's Funeral, and the two great
ballads all did so, though the poem on Wellington was of earlier
composition. Evidently the inspiration of Rossetti had not failed

evidently coo his poetry was gaining rather than losing in whole-
someness, though these were the years when health both of body
and of mind was being undermined by the chloral habit, and when
insane suspicions of his best friends were festering in the poet's

heart.
The second group of poems is distinguished from the first by

the clearer evolution of a Story, the more definite enunciation of a
thought or the more dramatic realisation of a character. In none
of the first group is there any story of importance at all ; but the
ballads have all a strong backbone of narrative. Of the three, only
Stratton Water makes any attempt to imitate the old ballads ; and it
is the least successful. TAe White Ship and The King's Tragedy axt
frankly modern, but while they do not imitate they magnificently
adding the wealth of a more
revivify the spirit of the ancient ballads,
complex civilisation. On the story of King James I Scott would
have founded a poem far more like a popular ballad ; but even he
could not have held more firmly the threads of the narrative, and
his poetry would have been less rich. Rossetti has done nothing
better than The King's Tragedy. It is in respect of this element
of narrative that Rose Mary belongs to the second group rather
than to the first. In the mystical element it resembles these ; but,
unlike them, it moves surely and steadily on to a clearly visible

goal. It is also intellectually powerful as well as aesthetically
beautiful. Much the same might be said of Sister Helen. It
likewise handles mediaeval conceptions and follows the lines of

medieval models ; but the passions of hatred and revenge give it
a clear purpose and a dramatic interest.

Rossetti was the nineteenth-century Spirit of Art embodied.
He was not either the best painter or the best poet of his time,
but he was the man in whom the artistic spirit was least mingled
or diluted with other things. That which was not artistic, or
which did not admit of presentation from an artistic point of view,
did not exist for him. His very limitations are instructive. A man
of powerful intellect and of remarkable force of character, he was
yet, as we have seen, absolutely indifferent to the structure of the
society in which he lived, and contentedly ignorant of the greatest
thoughts, if they did not appeal directly to the imagination. He
never asked whether a thing was true or not him the important
; to
question was, is it beautiful ? In his verse there is no thought,.
as such ; it is aU pure art. He had no cause to serve, no doctrine

32 —
SOO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
to inculcate. Of him, more than of any man of his time, the
words of Lecky are true. Finding his impulse in the mediaevalism
of the Oxford Movement, he translated it from religion into poetry.
As dogma he cared not at all about it ; for the beauty he cared
intensely'. That which is beautiful is right; what is not beautiful
ought not to be. He cannot be described as sceptical, like Arnold;
but as little was he believing, like Newman and Pusey. He simply
had not examined the questions which to them were vital. Of
the Blessed Damozel it has been remarked with truth that she is
the most fleshly being ever transported into paradise. It is " a
spiritual body " (whatever that may mean) that he conceives, a

being under other conditions than ours, but still a being with
fleshly grace and beauty and moved by fleshly desires. There is
nothing really ethereal in the Blessed Damozel. The subject, as is
well known, was suggested by Poe's Raven. " I saw,"
to Rossetti
he says, " that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with
the grief of the lover on earth, and I determined to reverse the
conditions, and give utterance to the yearnings of the loved one
in heaven"." It has been generally held that Rossetti succeeded
splendidly ; and if this means that he wrote a fine poem, the

praise is clearly due. But whether he really reversed the con-
ditions may be questioned. He has translated into the feminine
what Poe left masculine ; but his Damozel is as much on earth as
the hero of TAe Raven. For heaven substitute some palace of
boundless wealth and magnificence, and for God and Christ two
great lords of transcendent might, beneficent and worthy of
reverence and the whole poem moves on with perfect smooth-
;
ness. Newman's Gerontius really leaves the body, Rossetti's

Damozel is embodied still in paradise.
Because he is artistic with such singleness of mind, we get in
Rossetti the best evidence available of the drift of art untrammelled
and unmodified by philosophy, or science, or theology; and we
find it to be strongly towards romance. But though Rossetti could
' It is said that on his death-bed he wished to confess to a priest. But even
if it was so, no stress can be laid on the fact, for men at the point of death
frequently do things quite foreign to their nature.
* Hall Caine's Reminiscences.
THE TORN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES $01
strip himself almost completely of all forms of thought not artistic,
he could not divest himself of his historical position; and the

very subjects both of his poems and of his paintings The Blessed
Damozel itself and The Girlhood of Mary Virgin bear witness —
that the Oxford Movement had intervened between him and Keats,
and had given to romance a new medisevalism, another tone and
other themes.
When the cloud settled upon Rossetti's mind he foimd a
devoted friend in the person of Thomas Gordon Hake (i8og-
1895), a fellow-poet who was also a physician ; and for the sake of
this association he may be briefly noticed here. Hake had before

drawn Rossetti's attention by or the Philosophy of Mad-
his Vates,
ness (1840). He learnt the art of verse with the utmost diffi-
and was an old man before he can be said to have mastered
culty,
it. His best pieces are contained in New Symbols (1876), and
perhaps the highest flight of all is The Snake- Charmer which is
included in that volume. Hake is never great, but in this piece
and in a few others he is very good ; and success achieved after so
many years of effort, at an age when, in the majority of cases, the
spirit of poetry is dead or dying, is sufficiently remarkable to
deserve attention.
In some respects the significance of Dante Rossetti's work
will become when we have considered that of the sister,
plainer
who in many ways differed widely
Christina Rossetti (i 830-1 894),
from him, but who shared with him the love of and the gift for
art. She began writing verses at the age of twelve, and from the
first her compositions were carefully preserved. Some of them
were privately printed in 1847, and a few, under the pseudonym
Ellen AUeyn, appeared in The Germ; but it was not until 1862
that her first published volume. Goblin Market, and other Poems,
appeared. The Princes Progress followed in 1866, and A Pageant
in 1887. Besides these, she published a book of nursery rhymes,
and several volumes of a devotional character, of which the best is
Time Flies (1885). There is no complete edition of her works,
but the majority of her really good poems are gathered together
in the two volumes entitled respectively Poems and New Poems.
The latter was edited after her death by her brother, Mr W. M.
Rossetti, and consists largely of pieces which she had either not
chosen to publish, or had never gathered into any volume.
There are no strongly-marked divisions in the poetry of Chris-
tina Rossetti it has to be treated as practically all one.
: Even the
distinction between the secular and the devotional pieces is only
partially valid ; for religion was so much her very being that most
of her poems are misnamed secular.' For the same reason we
'
cannot usefully draw any line between poems which deal with the
supernatural and poems whose theme is within the limits of nature.
It is true, there aresome poems about ghosts, and some about
the more playful supernatural of fairyland. But again, she lives
so much in a realm outside the bounds of time and space, so
many of her poems look beyond the grave, that this division too
seems to vanish into air. It would be difficult to find any other
poet who has brooded so much upon death. Her most exquisite
songs are of death, — " When I am dead, my dearest," " We
buried her among the flowers " and " Too late for love, too late
"
for joy ; her " Dream-Land " is the grave. The result might
have been gloomy in the extreme. It certainly is sad, but it is not
gloomy ; for she seems to feel easily and naturally, what so many
have said without feeling, that the grave is rest, and the life
beyond it a happiness unknown here.
" Oh come the day of death, that day

Of rest which cannot pass away !
When the last work is wrought, the last
Pang of pain is felt and past.

And the blessed door made fast."
No one else of her fellow-poets in her generation has this fulness

of faith.Arnold seems to set aside the idea of a second life as a
mere dream ; Browning reaches it through an argument in which
the logic is not altogether flawless; Tennyson faintly trusts the
larger hope ; Dante Rossetti cares for none of these things.
Christina Rossetti's poetr)', then, is nearly all in the minor key
and this is especially true of what is finest in it and of what comes
most directly from her heart. Monna Innominata, the sonnet of
sonnets in which she challenged comparison with the Sonnets from
THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES S03
the Portuguese, in contrast to Mrs Browning's sonnets, deals with

a love which ends unhappily ; and its burden is renunciation :
"Time flies, hope flags, life plies a wearied wing;
Death following hard on life gains ground apace.''
" Vanity of Vanities " is the title of the most beautifiil of all her
sonnets,and its teaching is that pleasure ends in sorrow, that glory

brings no gain, and that so it shall be till the last trump is blown.
In Looking Forward her cry is,,
" Pluck me no rose that groweth on a thorn,

Nor myrtle white and cold as snow in June,
Fit for a virgin on her marriage morn :
But bring me poppies brimmed with sleepy death,

And ivy choking what it garlandeth,
And primroses that open to the moon."
Both The Convent Threshold and Amor Mundi dwell upon the
ease and pleasure of the downward path and the toilsomeness of
the return. The former, one of the most powerful pieces Chris-
tina Rossetti ever wrote, is a kind of John-the-Baptist call to
repentance ;
"Oh save me from a pang in heaven.

By all the gifts we took and gave.
Repent, repent, and be forgiven :
This life is long, but yet it ends

Repent and purge your soul and save
No gladder song the morning stars
Upon their birthday morning sang
Than Angels sing when one repents.''
And Amor Mundi is perhaps the best and completest epitome of

the poetess that can be found in any single piece :
" ' O
where are you going with your love-locks flowing,
On
the west wind blowing along this valley track?'
'The downhill path is easy, come with me an it please ye,
We shall escape the uphill by never turning back.'
So they two went together in glowing August weather.
The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right;
And dear she was to doat on, her swift feet seemed to float on
The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight.
'
Oh, what is that in heaven where grey cloud-flakes are seven,
Where blackest clouds hang riven just at the rainy skirt ?

'Oh, that's a meteor sent us, a message dumb, portentous,
An undeciphered solemn signal of help or hurt.'
'Oh, what is that glides quickly where velvet flowers grow thickly,
Their scent comes rich and sickly?' 'A scaled and hooded worm.'
' Oh, what's that in the hollow, so pale I quake to follow ?
,
'Oh, that's a thin dead body which waits the eternal term,'
' Turn again, O my sweetest, —turn again, false and fleetest
This beaten way thou beatest, I fear is hell's own track.'

'
Nay, too steep for hill mounting nay, too late for cost counting
;
The dovmhill path is easy, but there's no turning back.'
In the grandeur and gloom of this imagery there is something

akin to that of Lord de Tabley's powerful Song of Despair. The
between the two poets is that in De Tabley there is
difference
np Advent to follow the Song of Despair. But though to
Christina Rossetti the downward path of Amor Mundi is " hell's
own track," her last word is,
" We weep because the night is long,

We laugh for day shall rise.
We sing slow contented song
a.
And knock at Paradise.

Weeping we hold Him fast, Who wept
For us, we hold Him fast
And will not let Him go except
He bless us first or last.
Weeping we hold Him fast to-night

We will not let go Him
Till daybreak smite our wearied sight
And summer smite the snow :
The figs shall bud, and dove with dove

Shall coo the livelong day;
Then He shall say, '
Arise, My love.
My fair one, come away.'"
There is no English poet more ascetic than Christina RossettL

She sings renunciation, not only of the love of husband and wife,
as in Monna Innominata, but of the world and all its beauty and
joys. Even the note of her devotional poems is seldom that of
triumph over death. Even in these, her cry is "Out of the

Deep,"
"Have mercy, Thou my God —mercy, my God,
For I can hardly bear life day by day."
In Despised and Rejected the voice pleads till break of day, and
then the footsteps lingeringly pass :
" So till the break of day

Then died away
That voice, in silence as of sorrow
Then footprints echoing like a sigh
Passed me by,
Lingering footsteps slow to pass.
On the morrow
I saw upon the grass
Each footprint marked in blood, and on my door
The mark of blood for evermore.''
This prevailing asceticism makes her poetry somewhat mo-

notonous ; but it is far less gloomy than might be imagined.
Occasionally it is flecked with brighter lights. Goblin Market is a
charming excursion into fairyland, and there are a few other cheery
little ,
pieces, like " No, thank you, John," scattered through the
poems. The Prince's Progress too, notwithstanding its sad end, is
lighter in tone than most of her pieces. But the exceptions are
not sufficiently numerous, nor sufficiently pronounced, to change
much the general complexion of her verse. The real reason why
it is not oppressive is that there is in it not the least trace of a
morbid spirit. Life, she thinks, is sad, but she accepts the sadness,
and lives on, doing what seems to her her duty. She does not ask
whether it is worth living. Her poetry does not weigh upon the
spirit as The City of Dreadful Night does.
The exquisite Rossetti's style and her
purity of Christina
transparent sincerity are further reasonswhy her poetry altogether
escapes the taint of ghouhshness. Blair and the other funereal
poets of the eighteenth century have this taint. They have
greater merits than they are usually credited with now; but they
mouth, and the reader is tempted to suspect that they make the
most, and the worst, of their theme. Not so Christina Rossetti.
5o6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
Her style is simple and limpid, her diction faultless. What she
says is what she feels : no one was ever more free from the vice
of pretentiousness. " I question,'* says her brother, " her having
ever once deliberated with herself whether or not she would write
something or other, and then, after thinking out a subject, having
proceeded to treat it in regular spells of work. Instead of this,
something impelled her feelings, or • came into her head,' and her
hand obeyed the dictation^." This account of what Christina
Rossetti actually did do exactly agrees with what we should infer
from her writings that she must have done. No poet gives a
stronger impression of spontaneity.
An work is the wide
interesting feature in Christina Rossetti's
difference between and the work of her great brother. Of the
it
same mixed blood, growing up under the same influences, having

many friends in common, it might have been confidently predicted
that the work of the two poets would present points of strong
resemblance ; but in fact resemblances are slight, and the differ-
ences are numerous and great. It is not only that Dante Rossetti
has the more powerful intellect and the more varied interests, but
his whole method is different. Christina Rossetti's style is one
of the simplest ever used by an English poet ; her brother's is
often rich to gorgeousness. Hers is pure with the purity of clear
spring water ; his, like a draught compounded by some cunning
alchemist, seems charged with all fragrances and flavours. She
is ascetic, he is sensuous. Her face seems for ever looking beyond
earth to heaven ; his Blessed Damozel gazes from heaven back to
earth, and her prayer is
"Only to live as once on earth

With Love."
The point in which it might be supposed that the brother and

sister would meet is really the best proof of the deep division
between them. They were both profoundly influenced by the
Catholic reaction —but in ways so different. Dante Rossetti, as
we have seen, was influenced by it purely as an artist he saw the
:
beauty of mediaeval religion ; its sensuousness appealed to him j
* Preface to Mmi Poems,

THE TTON'OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 507
it was the ally of art. But no more than the men cif the Italian
Renascence did he surrender his intellect to it. Christina Rossetti
is the one great English poet (after Keble and Newman, if they
can be called great poets) who embodied in her verse the devo-
tional feeling which the Oxford Movement kindled. She was a
devotee, and her religious poems express her veritable personal faith.
There no severance between her imagination and her intellect,
is
between that which she admires as beautiful and that which she
believes as true. Hers is the greatest body of religious verse in
English since Herbert and Crashaw and Vaughan. Her poetry
as a whole would be judged to be rather limited in range ; but in
devotional verse her range is astonishing. It has been admirably
said that some of her poems, in their simplicity, seem like " the
nursery songs," and others, in their splendour and exultation, like
"the national hymns of Heaven^."
It is curious to observe that while in the third and fourth
decades of the nineteenth century art fosters dogma, in the fifth

and sixth the relation is reversed, and dogma fosters art. The
historian of rationalism remarks that "the religion of one age is
often the poetry of the next^"; and probably this is the general
law. Sometimes, however, it would seem that the relation is noV.
one-sided, but reciprocal. The rarer phenomenon is that which
is exhibited in the relation between the Tractarians and the
romantic literature of the early years of the nineteenth century.
The romanticists were attracted, to the Middle Ages ; but they
did not adopt mediaeval opinions or share the beliefs which they
unconsciously helped to spread. Newman, on the contrary, did
adopt mediaeval opinions, but in his writings he was as severely
classical and as little romantic as any great master of English
prose. One mind borrows from the Middle Ages romance,
type of
another borrows religion; and it would seem to be difficult to
hold in fusion in the same mind both elements of medisevalism
to unite sympathy in the imagination with assent in the under-
standing.
This idea is confirmed by what may be observed with reject
' Lionel Johnson, quoted in The Library of Literary Criticism, viii. 273.
' Lecky, Rise of Rationalism, i. »6o.
So8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
to the Pre-Raphaelites. That medisevalism which Newman used
to .buttress dogma becomes
in them the prop of art. There were
exceptions Coventry Patmore and Christina Rossetti not only
:
cherished the sentiment, but held the opinions with which it was
associated. But this does not seem to have been the case with
the Pre-Raphaelites in general it was certainly not the case with
:
Dante Rossetti. Their art was their religion ; and if occasionally

they gave an apparently fervid expression to the Catholic feeling, it
was more for the sake of the artistic beauty of that feeling than
for the dogma. Thus they support also Lecky's argument that
the change which he points out is part of the process of the
decay of religion :
" Religious ideas die like the sun ; their last
rays, having little heat, are expended in creating beauty'."
The conclusion seems to be that there is some natural afBnity
but no necessary connexion between romance and Catholicism.
Romance upon mystery, and Catholicism supplies the food
feeds
liberally ; but there are other things which supply
it also. Both
happen to be united in the Middle Ages; and medisevalism is
the true meeting-ground of the very diverse spirits who were
brought together by the convergence of the romantic and the
Catholic lines of thought and feeling.
Thomas Woolner (1825-1892) was another member of the
Brotherhood who cultivated poetry as well as what is more specific-
ally called 'art.' In his case the former is distinctly subordinate;
but the very vituperation which the Brotherhood originally en-
countered has led by reaction to an even exaggerated recognition of
its merits. The lyrical poem. My Beautiful Lady, part of which was
originally printed in The Germ, is loosely compacted, and is
ingenious and talented, rather than convincingly poetical. Neither
does the blank-verse Pygmalion (1881), or Silenus{i&^^), or Tiresias
(1886) vindicate Woolner's title to be treated seriously as a poet
There is far more power and genuine inspiration in the verse of
William Bell Scott (1812-1890) whoseirAer&sting Autobiographical
Notes show such a mastery of "the gentle art of making enemies,''
that it is not surprising if he has won less recognition than his
worth and weight deserve. As there was always more than

' Lecky, Rise of nationalism, i. 261.
enough of gall in Scott's ink, those whom he offended either

in their proper person or through their friends have either ignored
him, or have viewed him through clouded glasses.
But for his association with the Brotherhood Scott would be
best considered along with the philosophical poets of the earlier
period ; for he belongs to an earlier date than the PrerRaphaelites,
he was very little influenced by them, and his work in verse is rather
distinguished for weight of thought than for grace of form. He
had published poetry in the thirties, but his earliest notable work
was Ttie Yearoftlie JFt'A-Z:f(i846), anallegorical epic in five books,
tracing thedevelopment of religion " from the golden age in the
Garden of Eden, the period of instinct and innocence, to the end
of the race, when, all the adverse powers of nature subjugated,
man have attained a happy and quiescent immortality'."
will
This sense of victory over nature is characteristic of the time

(cf. Locksley Hall), the confidence in general but indefinite
progress is a special note of Scott.
Shortly after the appearance of The Year of the World Scott
became acquainted with Rossetti, and naturally his Poems by a
Painter (1854) are in some degree influenced by the association.
Not, however, profoundly ; for from the first Scott looked with a
critical eye upon Pre-Raphaelitism and, secretly or openly, held a
poor opinion of many of its works. He speaks somewhat con-
temptuously of Rossetti's early paintings ; and of Coventry Pat-
more's Tamerton Church Towers he remarks caustically that it
belongs to that class of poems "that have no good reason for

existence"." More than twenty years elapsed before Poems by a
Painter was followed by Scott's next volume of verse, Ballads,
Studies from Nature, Sonnets (1875). Finally, A Poet's Harvest
Home (1882) gathered up the work of his old age.
All through, Scott's poetry is thoughtful and philosophic.
The Sphinx, perhaps the best of all his writings, is, like The Year
of the World, at once metaphysical and religious, treating the
Sphinx as the symbol of religious mystery. And Scott has the
power of thinking to some purpose. What he cannot do is to
make his thought musical. If the style and versification were
' Autobiography, i. 236. 2 j^/^_ j_ ^j^^
SIO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
not SO often harsh, he would go near to being a great poet and, ;
faulty as they are, he is a more considerable one than he is

commonly reputed to be.
Sir J. Noel Paton (1821-1901) was yet another of the poet-
painters, whose Poems by a Painter (1861) and Spindrift (1867)
have that charm of style and that mastery of rhythm which are
lacking in Scott's. Probably Paton's work in the mass has hardly
vitality enough to keep it permanently in remembrance, but it
may be hoped that future anthologies will find a place for such
gems as the lovely song,
"There is a wail in the wind to-night,

A dirge in the plashing rain,
That brings old yearnings round my heart,
Old dreams into my brain,
As I gaze into the wintry dark
Through the blurred and blackened pane:
Far memories of golden hours
That will not come again,
Alas I
That never will come again.
Wild woodland odours wander by

Warm breath of new-mown hay
I hear the broad, brown river flow,
Half-hid in bowering may;
While eyes of love look through my soul.
As on that last sweet day;

But a chilly shadow floats between
That will not pass away
Ah, no I
That never will pass away."
Coventry Patmore (1823-1896), is another writer affiliated to
the Rossetti group, but he wears his rue with a difference. Patmore
was a man who took himself very seriously, and who was taken
seriously by others whose judgment commands respect ; and yet
there is probably no other nineteenth-century poet of equal repu-
tation whose permanent position in literature is so insecure.
Neither his first volume of poems, which was published in 1844,
nor his Tamerton Church Tower (1853) won great fame; but
THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 51I
with The Angel in the House (1854-1856) he was supposed to

take his place among the greater poets. The success was perhaps
partly due to the fluency of the poem. This fluency was a gift
dangerous to the poet. " I have frequently," says his friend and
admirer, the late Dr Richard Garnett, "seen twenty or more lines
which he had written, he said, within the last half-hour, and

refashioning was rarely needful'." If "fluent Shakespeare"
effaced too little, surely fluent Patmore sinned far more deeply in
the same way. Another reason for the success was perhaps the
poet's own self-complacency. He announces with great satisfac-
tion that he, one of the latest of poets, has found " the first of
themes sung last of all." The fact that this first of themes had
never before been sung would have put a less confident man on
his guard; and the need of caution is shown by the fact that
Patmore himself never sang it. His poem was to be a celebration
of wedded love; but the first part did not get beyond The
Betrothal, the second part stopped with The Espousals; and
when Faithful for Ever (i860) appeared, even partisans of
Patmore admitted that the quality fell, and Rossetti (an admirer
to an extent surprising in one so virile) caustically asked in a
letter to AUingham, " Of love which never finds its published
'
close, what sequel?' And how many?" There was one more
"sequel," The Victories of Love (1863); but Patmore never carried
out the design he had planned. The explanation, of course, was
that " the first of themes " was not really a fit theme for poetry on
the great scale. On the contrary, its singular unfitness is shown
by the withering ridicule of the parody in Swinburne's Hepta-
logia, the very headings of —
the Monthly Nurse, the
which
Caudle, the Kid —are sufficient.Hamlet has been parodied, and
is none the worse ; but The Angel in the House could not stand
such treatment.
The pursuit of this will-o'-the-wisp had consumed many years
of Patmore's life, and what was even worse, it had fostered some
inherent weaknesses. He could undoubtedly express himself
with pointed sententiousness, and his satiric wit is attested by an
epigram the effectiveness of which will be felt by all who are old
* Quoted in The Library of Literary Criticism,
SI2 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
enough to remember the telegrams of the first German Emperor;
after victory over the French
announcing victory :
"This is to say, my dear Augusta,

We've had another awful buster
Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below
Thank God from whom all blessings flow*."
His felicity of phrase is illustrated over and over again in the

happiqr passages of The Angel in the House. But the subject
tempted him to prolixity, and to a triviality or even a childishness
of treatment svhich goes far to annul his merits. The effect is
similar to that which Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction

exercised upon him ; but for two reasons it is likely to be much
greater. In the first place, it will hardly be denied that Words-
worth's best is incomparably finer than Patraore's best; and in
the second place, Wordsworth's Goody Blakes and Idiot Boys are
separable, while Patmore's banalities are integral parts of The
Angel in the House.
Probably Patmore was secretly conscious of the gravity of
the error into which he had fallen; for when he had shaken
off the incubus of a theme which refused to be handled, he
made his next venture anonymously in a style as unlike it as
possible.In the Odes (1868) and The Unknown Eros (1877)
few would detect the hand of the author of The Angel in the
House. Their complex metrical forms are far removed from the
simple rhythm of that work, and they demand a corresponding
stateliness of style which saves Patmore from the pitfalls into
which he had slid so readily. It would be too much to say that
he has been uniformly successful in avoiding other faults. Some-
times, perhaps, the thought is hardly great enough to correspond
with the stateliness of the form and expression; sometimes the
meaning is from clear. But almost always he shows great
far
technical and in his greatest poem, Amelia (1878), he fills

skill,
in the masterly scheme with a content not unworthy of it.
1 This is the form in which it is given in Champneys's Life of Patmore :
another form substitutes for " This is to say," the words, "By will divine,"
which are better and more in character with the Emperor, but apparently not
authentic.
§ 4. The Spasmodic Poets.
A nickname which '

usually does so by reason of its
sticks '
wit, or its truth, or and the instructive wit of the adjective

of both ;
'
spasmodic,' applied by W. E. Aytoun to another group of poets
who made their appearance about the middle of the century, has
won for it universal acceptance. Who exactly were the spasmodic
poets Aytoun was not concerned to define ; but his admirable bur-
lesque, Firmilian (1854), leaves no doubt possible as to the meaning
of the word. The charm of Firmilian is that the ridicule some-
times gives place to poetry, and that along with a travesty of the
faults of the spasmodic poets we get some insight into their
genuine worth. What Aytoun condemned in them was the con-
fusion and inequality and extravagance of their work, its passion
piled on passion, its thought disjointed from thought, the rant and
fustian of the style, the lavishly sprinkled and over-wrought meta-
phors. Hence the student of Badajoz rants and raves, commits
crimes and makes himself absurd. But Aytoun knew also that if
the spasmodic poets were mad, there was method in their madness ;
if they were formless, there was poetry in tHe disjecta membra of
their verse. They themselves were manly and sensible men too.
Though Firmilian was one of the keenest parodies ever written,
Sydney Dobell, the chief victim, read it with delight and praised
it heartily and generously. There is a pleasant story about the
first meeting between the poet and his critic. Dobell had previously
written under the pseudonym of Sydney Yendys, and Aytoun had

caricatured him in Blackwood, in the somewhat broad fashion of
the time, under the name of Gander Redney. They were intro-
duced by J. Young Simpson, the great physician. " Aytoun," says
Dobell, " looked puzzled and amused, and was profoundly polite,
but was obliged to follow the ladies of his party, who had already
left the room. I stepped after him, and clapping him on the
shoulder, said, '

The Dr. did not introduce us perfectly just now
—he omitted some of my styles and you probably know me
titles
better as Gander Redney.' How his eyes twinkled and Simpson !
told me afterwards that at the bottom of the stairs he told the
w. 33
Story with roars of laughter'." There is hope both for the satirist
and his victim, both for the criticand the poet, when such things
are possible.
It might be contended with some show of reason that the greatest
of all the spasmodic poets was Tennyson ; for Maud is just a very
fine example of many of the faults and of more than all the merits
of their work. But if Maud suggests his inclusion among them,
In Memoriam, with all the mass of his other poetry, makes it im-
possible. Bailey, the author of Festus, has frequently been classed as
'
spasmodic ; but it hardly required his own protest to show how
'
baselessis such a classification. Those whom Aytoun had chiefly

in mind were undoubtedly Dobell and Alexander Smith. The
only other writer in whom the same characteristics are specially
marked was John Stanyan Bigg (1828-1865), a man of less power
and importance, whose principal works were a poetical romance,
The Sea-King (1848), and a poem, Night and the Soul (1854), whose
very title is suggestive of the qualities of the spasmodic poets.
In several respects the destiny of those poets was peculiar
and sad. The lives of all of them were short, Dobell, the first
born and the last survivor of the band, reaching only the age
of fifty. Their splendid gifts were balanced by faults and
defects almost equally great. They rose to fame almost as
rapidly as Byron; but their short summer of extravagant praise
was followed by a long winter of neglect and depreciation still
more unmerited.
Sydney Dobell (1824-1874) was the most gifted man of the
three. His work, both for good and for evil, bears traces of his
personal history, and a brief biographic sketch is the best intro-
duction to his poetry. He was born at Cranbrook in Kent,
whence the family migrated twelve years later to Cheltenham.
His father was a wine-merchant, and so in after years was the poet
himself. But the important thing to notice is the spiritual atmo-
sphere which he breathed in childhood and youth. Both his
father, and, still more, his maternal grandfather, were men in-
terested in many things besides business. John Dobell was a

student of political and social problems, and wrote a pamphlet
' Life and Letters of Dobell, i. 342.
which is show considerable power, entitled Man unfit to

said to
govern Man. But it was the grandfather, Samuel Thompson, who
stamped his character on the family. He was the founder of one
of those small and earnest religious sects which nowhere flourish
so much as among the Anglo-Saxon communities on both sides of
the Atlantic. These sects are generally narrow in their creed,
but Thompson's was broad. Its official designation was "the
Church of God," but the members accepted as accurately descrip-
tive the name popularly given to them, " Free-thinking Christians."
They were very few in number, and in spite of the essential
liberality of their opinions, they were not free from the bigotries
usual among small sects. Thus they held that the Anglican
marriage service was idolatrous; and as it was necessary at
that date to submit to it, Dobell's parents were married under

protest. They also discouraged social relations with those who
were not members of the church. As time went on they seem to
have become gradually more exclusive, and the founder, Samuel
Thompson himself, had the singular experience of being expelled
from the church of his own creation.
At an early age young Dobell gave evidence of remarkable
powers, and, to his misfortune, he was looked upon as a rising
apostle of his grandfather's church —not merely as a pillar, but as
the pillar. The position was a dangerous one, and few boys could
have sniffed the fumes of frankincense for so many years with
so little injury. Dobell came through the trial with a nature
unspoilt but not uninfluenced. To this cause we may attribute
his overweening confidence in himself, and perhaps too his utter
want of the power of self-criticism. To this cause likewise is due
the fact that the education he received was wholly private ; for
there was no school or England which could be
university in
trusted to train the future leader of " the Church of God." Further,
the continuous strain of religious emotion told with fatal effect
upon his nerves and helped to bring about that ill-health which
shortened his life and which practically closed his poetical career
long before his death. Naturally Dobell grew out of this church ;
and not unnaturally he found himself disqualified or indisposed

for membership of any other religious body. He was a deeply
33-2
Sl6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
religious man, but in his more mature years he held aloof from all
churches and sects.
Dobell inherited an interest in political questions as well as

an interest in religion ; and while the effects of religion upon his
poetry, except in Balder, are mainly indirect, those of politics
are directand obvious. If it were necessary to describe him
in a single phrase he might best be called the poet of political
liberty. The Roman, The Magyar's New- Year-Eve and The Youth
of England to Garibaldi's Legion are all inspired by this feeling ;
and though the Sonnets on the War and England in Time of War
are more martial, the sense that the Crimean War was a struggle
between autocracy and free government was never absent from
Dobell's mind.
The fact that Dobell's early manhood fell at the time of the
rising of the nations against the kings did much to foster this
feeling. Italy was shaking her chains, Hungary was struggling for
freedom. It was especially the Italian struggle which stirred the
English imagination. The beauty and attractiveness of Italy com-

bined with her old renown to fix attention upon her. From the
time of Chaucer she had been a nursing mother to English poetical
genius. In the recent past, the names of Byron, Shelley and Keats
were specially linked with Italy ; at the time of the revolutionary
movements two of the most prominent English poets were resident
there. Dobell was warm and eager in the cause of Italy ; and in
1848 and 1849 he wrote his fervid and rhetorical dramatic
poem. The Roman (1850), which was received with a chorus of
applause so enthusiastic as to fix Dobell's career : he was to be
a poet.
The success of The Roman had other consequences as well.
It made the friends of Italy who were then in England turn to
Dobell as the man who had best expressed their aspirations ; and
at his residence, Coxhorne, near Cheltenham, was born the society
afterwards known as " the society of the friends of Italy." But he
bewildered the poor Italians who resorted to him by objecting
that, noble as their mission was, it was
" too political and worldly "
for him. Very likely Dobell was right :he had a good deal of
practical shrewdness. And yet one must sympathise with the
revolutionaries. The poet was fervid to the verge of incoherency

in the national cause. He could create for his closet drama an
eloquent monk, and depict him firing with his enthusiasm fair
maidens, worn matrons and grey-haired fathers. But the monk

would not step out from the pages of the book ; and Dobell had
nothing practical to substitute for those plans which he condemned
as "too political and worldly." Afterwards however he became
enthusiastically hopeful about Mazzini, who was so little hopeful
about himself. And however scanty fruit in practice Dobell's
zeal bore, the poet himself would have been something widely
different but for this great enthusiasm, just as Campbell would
have been widely different but for his zeal in the cause of
Poland.
Four years after The Roman Dobell published a second and
still more ambitious poem. Balder. In a note to the second
edition of The Roman, the author modestly disclaims the title of
'
poem for that work. " The words Dramatic Poem in the
' ' '
title are not mine," he says. " Poetry and A Poem are not
' ' '
'
necessarily aequipoUents. In the next few years I hope to write

more Poetry' ; ten years hence, if God please, A Poem." Before
'
ten years were over his career was practically ended ; and soon
after he wrote these words he must have changed his mind. The
vast design of Balder could only have been conceived by one
ambitious to write a poem,' and convinced of his power to
'
do it. The poem was to consist of three parts, and the principal
subject of it was to be, as Dobell explained in the prefatory
note to the second edition, "the progress of a Human Being
from Doubt to Faith, from Chaos to Order. Not of Doubt in-
carnate to Faith incarnate, but of a doubtful mind to a faithful
mind." Only the first part was ever written, and Balder therefore
remains a fragment. It closes, not in the radiance of faith
triumphant, but in the deepest gloom of doubt sinking into
despair.
Balder was less favourably received than The Roman had
been ; and many critics, treating as a whole what was meant only
to be a part, condemned the entire conception. It cannot be
denied that Balder gives ample ground for unfavourable criticism.

Sl8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
Of all Dobell's works
it is the most unequal. It contains both the
best poetry and the worst he ever wrote ; and the worst is almost
incredibly bad. It is perplexing and incoherent. Allowance
must be made for its fragmentary character ; but the doubt will
rise whether the plan was capable of being carried to completion.
At any rate, while Dobell proposed to trace the progress of a man
from chaos to order, he unfortunately left him still in chaos. Yet,

notwithstanding defects of the gravest kind, a candid criticism
must recognise that, in the four years which intervened between
TAe Roman and Balder, Dobell had made immense progress ; not
in construction, and not in the power to discriminate between true
poetry and worthless rubbish, but in weight of thought and reach
of imagination. The rhetorical glitter of The Roman is gone, the
bombastic note is only occasionally heard ; their place is taken by
a powerful and daring though irregular imagination.
Balder has been compared by more than one critic to Ibsen's
Brand; and there are some very remarkable points of resemblance

between the two works. The relations of husband, wife and child
are closely similar —though in Ibsen's drama the child only enters
as an influence from the On
the other hand, there is
past.
obviously a pretty wide difference between " the splendid dreamer,
the philanthropic nineteenth century pagan," as Dobell called his
own hero, and the Brand of Ibsen. Another poem which
fanatic
Balder resembles scheme is Paracelsus. Obviously
in its general
the search after Knowledge undertaken by Paracelsus, with the
discovery that Knowledge alone is unsatisfying and that Love must
be added, is not unlike the life-voyage from Doubt to Faith which
Dobell meant to trace.
Dobell had married in 1844, and his wife, like himself, was
almost constantly in delicate health. They took turns, it has
been said, to nurse one another out of their numerous illnesses.
Partly that Mrs Dobell might have the benefit of the raccellent
medical advice it afforded, and partly for the sake of the intellectual
stimulus it moved in 1854 to Edinburgh,
promised, the Dobells
which remained their home
about four years. Thither Dobell
for
attracted his fellow-poet, Alexander Smith (1829-1867), the son
of a pattern-designer of Kilmarnock, Ayrshire. Previous to his
THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: NEW INFLUENCES 5^9
removal to Edinburgh Smith resided at Glasgow, a city which he
has celebrated in what is probably the very finest of his poems
and the year before Dobell's arrival he, a young man of twenty-
four, had taken the world by storm with his Life Drama. The
critics were by no means unanimous about this piece; but the
difference of opinion among them had only the effect of strengthen-

ing the interest generally felt in the author. Dobell was among
the enthusiasts. Feeling not only that this was a new poet, but
that he was one akin to himself, he sought Smith's acquaintance,
and his presence in Edinburgh was an inducement to Smith to
migrate.
The society of Edinburgh was, in the fifties, still a society of no
inconsiderable distinction, and the two poets were among the men
who gave it a kind of after-glow of glory. The great age was
past. Scott was gone, and Hogg ; Jeffrey had only recently died
Lockhart had long ago drifted away ; and both he and Christopher
North passed to the universal bourne in the very year when Dobell
came to the city they had roused and shaken by their youthful
first
frolics. In the same year died the shrewdly-observant Lord Cock-

burn, one of the last of the Scottish gentlemen of the old school.
Carlyle, a brief sojourner, had and his dyspeptic
carried his fervour
gloom first to Craigenputtock, and afterwards
London. But to
Sir William Hamilton was still the philosophic chief, and the figure
of Hugh Miller was still to be seen in the streets. Dr John
Brown too walked there, intent upon his business of healing,
yet with a watchful and observant eye on the dogs. Terrier
was an occasional visitor; and among the residents was the
boisterously genial John Stuart Blackie, picturesque even then,
though perhaps than he afterwards became with his plaid
less so
and his long waving silver hair. There too was William Edmond-
stoune Aytoun, whom Dobell met so good-naturedly. It was a
pleasant and a witty society. The mirth of it is attested by
Firmilian, by the Bon Gaultier Ballads, and by the raciness
which still characterised \5/a<:/4zc/o<>i^'f Magazine. It was, moreover,
a society which, down to that date, retained the stimulus of im-
memorial associations and of historic names, not yet whirled away
London. Dobell's imagination was captivated
to the great vortex of
by which was an aspect of society hitherto unfamiliar to him.
this,
He how, sitting at dinner, he heard that Lord Something

tells
Douglas, sitting at the same table, was a lineal descendant of the

Douglas who started to bear the heart of Bruce to Palestine.
Dobell expressed his interest. " What will you say to me, then ? "
said the lady who sat by his side, " for I'm the lineal descendant
of the Bruce himself." The surroundings were thoroughly con-
genial to Dobell, and the three years he spent in Edinburgh were
among the happiest and the most active of his life.
The Crimean War supplied the theme of his next two volumes.
Sonnets on the War (1855) (in conjunction with Smith), and
England in Time of War (1856). The Sonnets on the War
are on the whole disappointing. Smith was hurried into col-
laboration by the influence of Dobell and by the contagion of the
prevailing warlike spirit
; but he was not by nature a martial poet,
and his contributions lower the tone. In Dobell however, as he
had already proved in The Roman, the martial spirit was inborn.
His England in Tim^ of War contains the magnificent Evening
Dream. It also contains much besides martial verse, including
among other pieces the finest thing he ever wrote, the weird and
haunting ballad, Keith of Ravelston. Two fine sonnets based
upon rumours thatAmerica would join the conflict deserve to be
quoted for the sake of their theme and substance as well as for
their beauty :—
"Men say, Columbia, we shaU hear thy guns.

But in what tongue shall be thy battle-cry?
Not that our sires did love in years gone by.
When all the Pilgrim Fathers were little sons
In merrie homes of Englaunde ? Back, and see
Thy satchelled ancestor Behold, he runs
1
To mine, and, clasped, they tread the equal lea

To the same village-school, where, side by side,
They spell 'our Father.' Hard by, the twin-pride
Of that grey hall whose ancient oriel gleams
Thro' yon baronial pines, with looks of light
Our sister-mothers sit beneath one tree.
Meanwhile our Shakespeare wanders past and dreams
His Helena and Hermia. Shall we fight?
THE TURN OF THE CENTURY : NEW INFLUENCES $21
Nor force nor fraud shall sunder us ! Oh ye

Who north or south, on east or western land,
Native to noble sounds, say truth for truth,
Freedom for freedom, love for love, and God

For God; Oh ye who in eternal youth
Speak with a living and creative flood
This universal English, and do stand
Its breathing book j live worthy of that grand
Heroic utterance —parted, yet a whole.
Far, yet unsevered, — children brave and free
Of the great Mother-tongue, and ye shall be

Lords of an empire wide as Shakespeare's soul,
Sublime as Milton's immemorial theme,
And rich as Chaucer's speech, and fair as Spenser's dream."
When England in Time of War was published Dobell was

still only thirty-two, and it seemed as if his career was just
opening. In reality it was near its close. His health grew worse.
The northern climate was trying, and in 1857 ^'^ 1^^* Edinburgh.
In the following year he wrote The Magyar's New-Year-Eve,
and in i860 The Youth of England to Garibaldi's Legion, both
stirring and impressive pieces. But he was advised to spare
himself the strain of composition ; and though from time to time
he wrote some fugitive pieces, chiefly sonnets, his subsequent
verse is meagre in quantity, and in quality is nowhere equal to
the best he had previously written. Debarred from poetry, he
turned again to business, and his ever-restless mind led him to
try the system of cooperation, of which he was one of the pioneers
in England. Two accidents, one in 1866 and the other in 1869,
shattered his already precarious health, rendered him less fit than
ever for work, and hastened his death in 1874.
Dobell is a poet whom it is not easy to appraise. On the one
hand, there is none to whom more must be forgiven; and
the reader who is irritated by his gross violations of taste, and his
almost incredible lapses from poetry and even from sense, wiU be
inclined to resent any praise whatsoever. Unfortunately Dobell
seems scarcely to have tried to discriminate his own best from his
worst. Perhaps he held too strongly that poetry ought to be
spontaneous. Some of his boyish work was submitted for criticism
to the poet Campbell, who pronounced that " with care there was
no doubt of his becoming a poet " ; and the biographer tells us
that "later in life the notion of a 'poet' made 'with care' appealed
strongly to " Dobell's " sense of the ridiculous'." Milton thought
that no kind of man had to be made ' with greater care than a
'
poet and it would have been well had Campbell's warning been
;
seriously taken to heart. But Dobell thought that "poetry should

roll from the heart as tears from the eyes —
unbidden^"; and so
he never checked the flow when it came unbidden. "What I
have written I have written/' he says of himself. He was of
opinion that a work of youth could not be revised a few years later
without the risk of introducing incongruities. Whether he was
right, or Horace, who thought that the poet should keep his work
unpublished for nine years, and Tennyson, who tirelessly tinkered
his youthful verse, the writings of the three men sufficiently prove.
"He never weeded his garden," wrote Dr John Brown, "and
be therefore strangled in his waste fertility."
will, I fear,
In another respect Dobell does more than any enemy could

do to his own Hardly anyone so frequently as he .chal-
hurt.
lenges damaging comparisons. He seems to do it in mere
wantonness ; no doubt under the belief that he was not merely
capable of great things, wherein he was right, but of the greatest,
wherein he was wrong. For example, he has a piece in The Roman,
on the Coliseum, which naturally suggests Byron's stanzas ; and
another in Balder on Chamouni, inevitably bringing to mind
Coleridge's magnificent hymn. The test is cruelly severe, and
Dobell suffers under it. Again, in The Youth of England to
Garibaldi's Legion, he seems to go out of his way in order to

force comparison with The Isles of Greece; and once more it
is to his own detriment. It is not plagiarism Dobell's mind was :
far too forcible and fertile for that. It would seem rather,, to
spring from an unmeasured confidence in himself.

And yet, on the other hand, whoever will bear with his faults
must in the long run find the poetry of Dobell both attractive
and stimulating. He is all compact of thought, and in his
* ^ ibid. i.
Life of Dobell, i. 46. 133.
' Note to the 2nd edition of T'he Roman.
moments of he handles the greatest themes with

true inspiration
masterly ease. In his company we breathe " an ampler ether, a
diviner air," than any but the few leaders of men can create. It
is true he thought and wrote by spasms, but there is a magnificent

energy in these spasms.
Though Alexander Smith is, rightly enough, classed with
Dobell as a member of the Spasmodic School, the two were,
both as poets and as men, widely different. It is unnecessary
to dwell on Smith's biography, for there is little in it, such as there
is in Dobell's, to throw light on his work. He has himself told
with great charm what is essential in the story in his almost forgotten
novel, Alfred Hagarfs Household (1866). For Smith wrote prose
as well as verse with much grace. In addition to the story just
named, he wrote Dreamthorp (1863), a volume of essays still
worth reading for their sympathetic pictures of the country, their

pleasant chatty criticism, and, above all, for the sake of a wonderful
passage in the essay entitled A Lark's Flight, where Smith rises to

the level of the greatest writers of prose. He wrote also A Summer
in Skye (1865), in which he caught the charm of Highland
scenery as scarcely anyone has done before or since.
is principally contained in three volumes, Poems
Smith's poetry
(1853), City Poems (1857) and Edwin of Deira (1861). In its
main outlines his poetical career was an exact reproduction
of Dobell's. There was the same brilliant reception, the same
flagging enthusiasm as the years went on, arid the same untimely
close. Smith was cut off when he was scarcely past his youth,
and even of his short life the last two years were almost blank
because of ill-health. The Life Drama at once awoke a contro-
versy which was never completely silenced so long as Smith
continued to write. The poet was accused of plagiarism ; but the
charge, annoying as it was, served only to draw attention to the
poem and to make it more popular. An accusation of deliberate
literary pilfering can seldom be In Smith's case there
justified.
was neither intentional dishonesty nor lack of power and origi-

nality; but he seems to have had a mind of the sort which
sub-consciously retains what it reads, and unwittingly reproduces
some kind of echo of it. Such echoes are frequent in his verse
but in spite of that, his best pieces are poems, not mere
bundles of quotations, out of which no true poem was ever
yet built. There needs but a reference to Glasgow, or to the
companion picture of Edinburgh, or to some of the sonnets,
to reduce to its true proportions the charge of plagiarism. There

may be reminiscences of earlier writers in these pieces, but
Alexander Smith was their author.
CityPoems disappointed those who had hailed the new
writer as a rival of Tennyson; but the fault was in the readers
rather than in Smith, whose best work is in this volume. The
verse is still overloaded with metaphor, and the style is often
strained ; but on the other hand there are numerous happy lines
and phrases, and bits of description touched with high imagina-
tion, as for instance :
"Through the rifts of ruin sternly gleamed

An apparition of grey windy crag,
Black leagues of forest roaring like a sea,
And far lands dim with rain."
The best examples of Smith's work in this kind are however to

be found in the Blaaven sonnets. The scenery of Skye, in
which his marriage with a Flora MacDonald of that island gave
him a personal interest, stirred his imagination as scarcely any-
and some of his finest work, in verse as well
thing else ever did ;
as in the prose volume already mentioned, is associated with
it. But perhaps the very highest point Smith ever reached is
attained in Glasgow, a picture of a great city as imaginative as
any that has ever been painted. There is the magnificence of
Turner in the colouring. The poem belongs to the days when
Smith had not yet that familiarity with the country which he
shows in Dreamthorp and in A Summer in Skye. But poeta
nascitur, and in Glasgow Smith proves that breadth of experience
is not indispensable. In it he frankly avows the limits of his

knowledge, and proclaims himself a son of the city :
"City! I am true son of thine;

Ne'er dwelt I where great mornings shine
Around the bleating pens;
Ne'er by the rivulets I strayed,

And ne'er upon my childhood weighed
The silence of the glens.
Instead of shores where ocean beats,
I hear the ebb and flow of streets."
But if he had limited experience he had the gift of imaginative

sympathy ; and one of the great charms of the poem is its sugges-
tion of the contrast between the beauty of " trailing showers and
breezy downs," and that other beauty which dwells in " the tragic
heart of towns.'' In a different key, but almost as fine as the
poem on Glasgow, is the lyric Barbara, in Horion. It is not free
from the 'spasmodic' faults, but the wistful melancholy of the
closing stanzas gives them a rare beauty.
There was more ground for disappointment with Edwin of
Deira ; but, oddly enough, the critics received it more favourably.
It is a poem of epic form founded upon a story of Saxon times
and, though it has fewer faults than the Life Drama, it is not so
clear that it has more or higher beauties. Many passages are
diffuse and weak, few rise to distinction, and the poem fails to
impress itself upon the memory. A comparison of it with City
Poems suggests that Smith's strength lay in the lyric and in short
narrative or introspective pieces. Had he left a considerable
body of verse of the type of Glasgow and Barbara and Squire
Maurice and The Night before the Wedding, his name would have
been great,
Dobell, before his acquaintance with Smith began, drew a
contrast between himself and his future friend and comrade in
words which exactly hit the truth about them both. " Somebody,"
he says, — —
" Samuel Brown, I think said of me that I was mere '
Thought.^ Alexander is sensuous beyond even Keatsian intensity'."

In its root-principle the poetic work of the one is widely different
from that of the other, and they are bound together rather by the
presence of common faults than by the possession of common
merits. Dobell is spasmodically intellectual, Smith spasmodically
sensuous. Both are frequently extravagant and tasteless and

turgid in style; both are prone to "tear a passion to tatters.''
' Life of Dobell, i. 243-4.

$26 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
But when Dobell is good, he is good from force of mind ; when
Smith is good, it is because of that sensitiveness which enabled
him to divine nature before he had well seen her. Another
criticism of Smith may be quoted, as much for what is mistaken
in it as for what is true. "The antecedents of the Life Drama"
says Clough, " the one long poem which occupies almost the
whole of his volume, are to be found in the Princess, in parts of
Mrs Browning, in the love of Keats, and in the habit of Shake-
speare. There is no Pope, or Dryden, or even Milton; no
Wordsworth, Scott, or even Byron to speak of." Except in one
important point this is sound. There is in Smith more of Keats
than of anyone else; but there is also, in spirit rather than
in phraseology, a good deal of Byron. In fact, the Spasmodic
School may be defined as a blend of Keats with Byron, differences
within it depending upon the proportions in which the ingredients
are mixed. Dobell leans towards Byron, Smith leans towards
Keats.
* Clongh's Prose Remains.

CHAPTER VII
LATER DEVELOPMENTS
The Oxford poets left no successors, except in so far as
Mr William Watson may be considered the successor and disciple
of Matthew Arnold. The Spasmodic School died with Dobell.
The faults indicated by the nickname are perennial in literature
but Dobell and Smith transmitted their beauties to no one;
perhaps because those beauties were too fragmentary and too
closely associated with imperfection to be transmissible. Only
the Pre-Raphaelite group left a poetical progeny:
it was they
and Tennyson who jointly moulded poetry in the sixties and

seventies. Over their work, however, there gradually passes a
change, which has been noted in Tennyson himself, in the
development from Locksley Hall to Locksley Hall Sixty Years
After, in the firmer grip of reality and the more rugged style.
In William Morris this shows itself in the change from pure
medisevalism to the eminently modern note of Chantsfor Socialists.
This phase of poetry is derived from Carlyle and those other
writers who in the middle of the century urged so insistently the
social problems which the industrial revolution was gradually
forcing upon the attention of men. Another offshoot is the work
of the group of writers who found their themes in the slums of
and who would prepare the way for improvement by
great cities,
first showing the facts in their ugliness. There is also a con-
tinuance and a further development of that spirit of nationality
which has been illustrated in Dobell ; but this is independent
not derived from him, but the outgrowth of the facts which in-
spired him. It manifests itself in various ways; in the poetry
of the Celtic Revival; in the growing interest in Scandinavian

myths and legends j in the beginnings of English imperialism, of
which Mr Rudyard Kipling has latterly been the most eloquent
mouthpiece.
§ I. The later Pre-Raphaelites and their Kin.
The first poet of note who worked in the spirit of Rossetti

was William Morris (1834-1896), a man of multifarious activity,
whose work, even when it is least literary, throws a powerful light
upon the conditions under which modern literature is produced,
and upon the forces which mould the mind of the man of letters.
" Poet, artist, manufacturer, and socialist, author of The Earthly
'
Paradise ' — this terse unimpassioned entry in the Juzsti Britannia

sums up, in a form of words which he would himself have accepted
life and work of a remarkable man.''
as substantially accurate, the
With these words the biographer of Morris opens the story of
his life; and in "this terse unimpassioned entry" we shall find
the reason why Morris deserves close attention as a man, no
less than as a writer. The life of Morris is an epitome of
what Carlyle and Ruskin, Maurice and Kingsley were teaching;
and he shows in his own person, better than anyone else, how
that democracy which in 1832 began to find its footing in
English politics affected every form of intellectual activity. It
will not therefore be amiss to consider the question how he who
is described by a college friend as one whose "manners and
tastesand sympathies were all aristocratic'," came to be not only
a " manufacturer and socialist," but the man of many crafts, whose
hands often bore the tints of the dyes among which he worked,
or the grime of the tools he handled.
William Morris was sent first to Marlborough, and then, after
an interval under a private tutor, to Exeter College, Oxford,
where he soon struck up a close friendship with Edward Bume-
» R. W. Dixon, quoted in Mackail's Life of Morris, i. 46.
LATER DEVELOPMENTS 529
Jones, who was afterw'ards so intimately associated with him in

his artistic work. Both looked towards the Church as their pro^
fession, and bcSth were afterwards diverted from it by the more
powerful attractions of art. Ten or fifteen years earlier they would
almost certainly have. taken orders; but the Oxford of the fifties
had lost the fervour which distinguished its theological discussions

prior to the secession of Newman. Moreover, in the case of Morris,
other influences sprang up to modify and counteract the
High
Church tendencies, with which he had been so deeply imbued
that, in the early part of his undergraduate course he contemplated
founding, a monastery. The contemporary writers who chiefly
swayed his mind were Carlyle, Ruskin and Rossetti, none of
whom was likely to lead him in the steps of Newman or of Pusey.
Ill the past his favourites were Chaucer, Malory and the Scandi-
navian myths, to which he was introduced by Thorpe's Northern

Mythology. Most of these were unknown to him when he first
went to Oxford. 1854 that he knew even the name

It was not till
of Rossetti, who for a time swept him oif his feet and whirled him
away in the stream of Pre-Raphaelitism. Previous to the full
development of the RoSsetti influence Morris had taken the
momentous decision to be an artist. The art he chose was archi-
tecture; but Rossetti lured him ternporarily to painting; and a
strong disapproval of the processes Of '
restoration ' permanently
alienated him from architecture as the profession of his life, though
he continued to be deeply interested in it.
In the meantime he had taken somewhat unwillingly to the

art of poetry. The first poem he ever wrote, T/ie Willow and
the Red Cliff, was read to his friends in 1855, and is praised by
R. W. Dixon, who heard it, as almost equal to anything he ever
afterwards did\ Mbrris's own remark, " Well, if this is poetry, it
isvery easy to write," is memorable. Facility was at once his gift
and his danger there are over 42,000 lines in TTie Earthly Paradise.
:
More of his poems appeared in The Oxford and Cambridge Maga-
' Mackail's Life of Morris, i. 52. Mr Robert Bridges, however, in a note

to 'Selected Poems of R. W. Dixofij declares that the poem still exists, and that
it
'
' abundantly refiites the notion that he appeared on that occasion as a full-
fledged poet," '.
W. 34
530 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN EBIA
zine, which ran its course through 1856 and stopped at the end of
the year, because the burden of expense, borne wholly by Morris,
was excessive. This famous magazine, though it bore the names
of both Universities, was in reality almost wholly an Oxford pro-
duction. Of poems which Morris contributed to it, four
the five
were afterwards included in the earliest volume of his verse, The
Defence of Guenevere, and other Poems (1858).

In this volume Morris has not completely "found himself'^:
he is too much under the influence of Rossetti ; and the burden
of the Pre-Raphaelite symbolism cumbers his faculty for narrative.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing in the volume is the prayer
of Guenevere in King Arthur's Tomb. At least Guenevere is a
creature of flesh and blood. The picture of the penitent going
to meet Lancelot at the tomb of the husband they had wronged,
with her spirit torn between the sense of sin and the desire,
almost the determination, to sin again, is unforgettable :
" 'If even I go to hell, I cannot choose

But love you, Christ, yea, though I cannot keep
From loving Lancelot : O Christ, must I lose
My own heart's love? see, though I cannot weep,
Yet am I very sorry for my sin

Moreover, Christ, I cannot bear that hell,
I p.m most fain towin you and to win
A place in heaven sometime I cannot — tell.
Speak to me, Christ ! I kiss, kiss, kiss your feet

Ah! how I weep.' The maid said, 'By the tomb
He waiteth for you, lady,' coming fleet.
Not knowing what woe filled up all the room.
So Guenevere rose and went to meet him there."
A perusal of this volume shows why it was that to men of this

set Maud was " Tennyson's last poem that mattered'." Maud was
followed by the Idylls of the King, and these were as far as possible
removed in spirit and manner from Morris's Arthurian pieces.
While Tennyson's knights are gentlemen of the nineteenth century,
' R. W. Dixon, quoted in Mackail's Life of Morris, i. 44.

LATER DEVELOPMENTS S3
Morris, alike in the Arthurian poems of this volume, and in those

foimded upon and in all his later work in which the
Froissart,
scene is laid in the Middle Ages, is genuinely and profoundly
mediaeval One of his most singular characteristics is that he
seems always to have been more at home in distant or in purely
imaginary ages than he was in his own generation. His whole
life is an attempt to revive the past; not to revive by slavishly
copying, but as it were to reincarnate the spirit of the past

And it is at this point that his work as " artist, manufacturer and
socialist" touches his work as poet.
Morris was deeply moved by a sense of the deplorable con-
dition of the working classes. Hence Carlyle's Past and Present
was one of his holy books ; hence, even in his time of Anglo-
Catholicism, Kingsley was more read by him than Newman. To
him, art was not, as it is to many, a thing severed from life it :
was not even a part of life, it was the whole. " Industry without
art is barbarity : life without industry is guUt." Morris saw modem
industrialism divorced from art, and his whole eflTort was to bring
back art into organic connejdon with life. "Time was," he
says, " when everybody that made anything made a work of art
besides a useful piece of goods, and it gave them pleasure to make
it." The doctrine of work taught in Ruskin's chapter Of the
Nature of Gothic sank deep into the soul of Morris ; and ac-
cordingly that chapter was one of the earliest products of the
Kelmscott Press. When his marriage in 1859 caused him to set
about building and furnishing and decorating a house, the utter
money anything but ugliness was driven
impossibility of getting for
home him; and this led to the formation of the firm of
to
Morris and Co. The operations of the firm were hampered in
a manner almost incredible by the difficulty of getting either
manufactiured articles or raw materials suitable to their purposes.
Some of the characteristics of Morris's early decorative work, which
were supposed to bg peculiarly 'jesthetic,' were really forced upon
him by necessity^ not adopted by choice. Such was the case with
the subdued colours in which he at first worked. After he
had
become himself a dyer, he blossomed out in pure bright colours
to the astonishment of the followers whom he had meanwhile
34-2
532: THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
accustomed to believe that the Morris and therefore the correct
'
' '
colours were dull neutral tints. " If you want dirt, you can find
that in the street^" was his impatient exclamation to a customer
who asked for the old neutral tints after they had been discarded.
Thus, point by point, Morris was led to revolt against, the
modern industrial system and to adopt in place of it -something,
not identical with, but akin to, the mediasval system, i

" In half-
unconscious adaptation to the conditions of modern life, the
monastery of his Oxford dreams arose into being as a workshop,
and the Brotherhood became a firm registered under the Companies
Acts^." That thirteenth century in which his imagination loved to
live had, he admitted, many imperfections ; but men had the
great consolation that they took a pleasure in their work then.

The aim of his industrial life was to reproduce this pleasure
in the nineteenth century. It was this which led him on to
socialism. Like Kingsley, he had no desire to see the workman
rise out of his class. The man who did so sidiply became one
more added to the middle class, a unit in the fierce struggle of
the modern commercial system. The only. true reform, he held,
lay in the elevation of the class ; and the only way toi elevate the
class was to retain its best members within it, and to humanise
the conditions of life for all. He was quite alive to the probability
that, in the revolutionary upheaval which he deemed necessary,
all artmight for the time be sacrificed] but he maintained that
the sacrifice would be repaid. Art would shine out once more
from its eclipse with a far brighter and more wholesome light,
because it would rest on the sympathy of the people.

Here is the democratic note in this essentially aristocratic '
poet and artist. The worshipper of beauty has usually been far
enough removed from sympathy with the people. He builds
himself "a lordly pleasure-house," surrounds himself with costly
objects of art, and dwells at ease among them f6r ever. It is
curious that Tennyson has been criticised as unfaithful to his
art in that he, a priest of the beautiful, in'TAe Palace of Art
Condemns the soul which thus surrounds- itself with -objects of '
^ Life of Morris, i. 314..

' ibid. i. 144.
beauty. If so, Morris is equally to blame. The conclusion of

Tennyson's poem is signiiicant :
"So when four years were wholly finished,

She threw her royal robes away.
'Make me a cottage in a vale,' she said,
'Where I may mourn and pray.

'Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are
So lightly, beautifully built:
Perchance I may return with others there
When I have purged my guilt.' "
Tennyson saw dimly what Morris saw clearly. The solitary, selfish
worship of beauty cannot be right unless the whole life of man
is to be solitary and selfish too. Moreover, the truest and highest
beauty cannot be created except through sympathy. "I am
sure," says Morris, "that this lack of the general sympathy of
simple people weighs very heavily on" the unlucky artist, "and
makes his and dreamy, or crabbed and perverse'."
work feverish
And how can the general sympathy of simple people be: got;
except by making them capable of appreciating what is really
beautiful — educating them, in a word, to a point incomparably
higher than anything yet attained ? Morris would have done so, not
by prolonging the years of the school curriculum, but by making the

workshop and the daily life one prolonged education and pleasure.
His practical work sets William Morris in a unique position.
" Do noble deeds, not dream them all day long,'' is the injunction
of Kingsley; but Kingsley himself mainly dreamed. So did the
majority of his contemporaries : Morris did what they dreamed.
Carlyle set a picture of the Past over against a picture of the
Present and called upon all to bring back the spirit of the formei:
time ; but he did not show how it was to be done. Matthew
Arnold drew the picture of Barbarians, Philistines and Populace,
and spent a lifetime, with moderate success, in trying to convince
them of the defects of " our incomparable civilisation." The Trac-
tarians saw that what the age needed above all things was a
more and they imagined it possible to turn them-
spiritual life;
selves into primitive Christians and gain it in that way. Ruskin's
1 Life of Morris, ii. 2a.
gang of road-makers at Hinksey and his Guild of St George were
of dubious value. Morris so far followed his mentor's steps that
he set himself to do but he took a more enlightened way. He
;
learnt how to make the things he professed to make, not only as well
as, but better than, anyone else could make them. The Hinksey
road was one of the worst in the country; but the Morris glass,
wall papers, carpets and printed books were the very best of
their kind. Ruskin himself declared that in illumination Morris
was superior to anyone else ancient or modern. Morris's later
socialist propaganda was unwise and mischievous, though noble
in intention ; but his practical work showed that there was room
for the mediaeval system of handicrafts alongside of, though
probably not in supersession of, the modern industrial system.
And it is only too obvious that there is ample room for reform
in that system.
This practical work, carried out upon mediseval lines, con-
vinced Morris still more firmly of thewisdom as well as the
beauty of his favourite period of history, and made him more
determinedly than ever mediaeval in the spirit of his literary work.
But at the outset we are struck with a singular difference, an
apparent contradiction between that literary work, as it shapes
itself down The Earthly Paradise, and the practical
to the date of
work of which we have been speaking. A " dreamer of dreams,
born out of my due time,'' is Morris's description of himself as
poet; and there is truth in the line. No contemporary man of
letters seems less practical in his writings. Carlyle, Ruskin,
Tennyson, Arnold, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, all in their
several ways preached to their own day and generation ; but
Morris seemed so far to stand aloof. The Earthly Paradise and
Jason and Guenevere have their uses for humanity ; but they are
in no sense treatises on the difficulties or specifics for the diseases
of the nineteenth century. In this indifference to contemporary
questions Morris resembles the other Pre-Raphaelites ; but then
they either do not at all, or only in a very slight degree, share

Morris's practical interests. Rossetti cared for only two things,
poetry and pictures : all else was subordinate to these. To him
the mass of men existed in order to make art possible.
It is hardly conceivable that a real contradiction could run

through so large a part of the life of a great man, and we must
look below the surface for an explanation of what seems to be a
contradiction in the case of Morris, It is probably to be found
in his conception of art, which, as has been already said, he
regarded as the whole of life. Unlike Rossetti, he held, that the
best art was impossible unless all life was artistic. His own true
life lay in the poems he wrote and the beautiful things he made.
But. they are serene, there is nothing polemical in them ; polemics
come in only in the struggle against conditions which are anti-
artistic and which make life not beautiful but ugly. Morris's
socialism, therefore, is a means to an end; the end itself is
beauty, which he realises, so far as it is possible for him, under

the conditions in which he is doomed to live, in his poetry and
his artistic products. These are positive goods : the socialistic
propaganda is only that sort of conditional good which consists
in the removal of obstructions.
In this view of beauty Morris stands closer to Keats than to
any other poet. Nearly all the other men of letters, regarding the
search for beauty as only part of their business, constantly inter-
mingle it with other things. They make a digression in the
story or they pause in the poem in order, to set to rights some-
thing they find amiss in the world. In the end Morris followed
their example. The intrusion of a new spirit, may be detected in
Sigurd the Volsung; for Sigurd's function is thq regeneration of

the society in which he lives. And the new spirit is unmistakable
in those later poems which were inspired by Morris's socialistic
opinions; for these have the fervour and even the fierceness of
Ebenezer Elliott.
It was doubtless the fact that his mind was full of so many
other things, the multifarious distractions of the attempt to re- \
introduce beauty into objects of common life, that caused the long
blank in Morris's poetical work. Nine years passed after The
Defence of Guenevere before he published his next poem. The Life
and Death ofJason (1867). It won fame.and popularity immedi-
ately. The Defence of Guenevere h&d. influenced profoundly a few
;
sympathetic minds; but it bad, passed almost unnoticed by the

critics,^ and was still quite unknown to the great majority of readers
after the appearance of Jason Morris was amohg the best-known
poets of his time.
Both in design and in ejfeeution y!7W«' was unlike the earlier
volume. The pieces in the latter were either dramatic or lyrical,
and the manner was more like Rossetti's than it was like that of
any other poet. Jason, on the other hand, is a narrative, and the
author goes back to Chaucer for a model. He proclaims his
discipleship in this very poem, and again in the beautiful Envoi
to The Earthly Paradise; and the magnificent Kelmscott Press
edition of Chaucer is a still more conspicuous rhemorial of his
admiration and love of the great master of English narrative
verse.
The poem on the story of Jason was originally intended to
form part of The Earthly Paradise (i 868-1 870), but outgrew its
and so had to be issued as an independent piece.
place there,
That immense collection of stories was the next productibii of
Morris. The plan proclaims at once its relation to The Canter-
bury Tales; but though the resemblance is indubitable, it is
rather one of form than of substance. In The Earthly Paradise

we see Morris thfe dreamer and the romancer. There is much in
it that we may reasonably compare with The Knighfs Tale; but
there is nothing to set against the wonderfully humorous' stories

of English life and character; nor is there anything in the
remotest degree resembling that gem of all The Canterbury Tales,
the Prologue. Morris was quite incapable of such robust reialityj
and when we compare him seriously with his master we realise

the truth of his description of himself as a " dreamer of dreams
born out of his due time." He might have retorted upon such
criticism that it own theory. Chaucer,
only proves the truth of his
living ina world where art and beauty were everywhere, could do
this thing ; Morris^ the child of an age when art and beauty are
banished from comriion life, could not have done it even if he had
had the genius of Chaucer. There is some point in the retort-
but it does not explain The Wife of Bath or The Millet's Tale.
This mass of narrative poems falls into three great divisions,
according to the source from which they are drawn. They are
either classical, One story in The

mediaeval or .Scandinavian.
Eq,rth,ly\ Paradise,namely Th£ Man who never Laughed Again,
is (dr^wji from the Arabian Nights, but it is the only exception
falling outside this classification. As regards the classical and

medieval stories, the division is unimportant ; for Morris, treats
classical themes, precisely like mediaeval ones; and it is evident
1
that stories from both sources had in his imagination much the
same setting. Notwithstanding the fact that he translated the
^neid a.nA the Odyssey beautifully as well as accurately, Morris
is .conspicuously unclassical, if not even anti-classical, in his tone
of mind. The story of Jason is hardly less medijeval in its spirit
than ig tj;iat of Tfie Man Born to be King.

,, As upon the Northern myths, the
regards the stories founded
case is different. Cqntemporary critics had been dimly conscious
,
of a change of tone between the earlier and the later parts of The
Earthly Paradise. This change is most plainly to be seen when
,
we compare the tales from Scandinavian sources with the others

and ^specially when we compare, the most important of these
tales, The fâwrs of. Gudrun, with anything else in the whole
collection. Mr Mackail has acutely pointed out the significance

of it: it is, ,he says, npthing less than the passing of romance into
epic The character of, the northern sagas leads Morris to take
this important step, probably without consciousness of its signifi-
cance. There is a rugged reality about them which ill fits the
vague mysticism in which the medieval world wrapped itself. In
The Lovers of Gudrun, -vrhQre Morris was translating the Laxdaela
Saga, this reality inevitably made itself felt ; and it is a tribute to
the superiority of the epic manner that this tale is commonly
sipgled out as the best in The Earthly Paradise.
In the poems translated from Northern originals or founded
.
upon Northern stories, we have, then, a third division of the

works of Morris differing essentially from both the others. In
the study he made ,
pf those tales, Morris was following and
developing one of the nptable lines of thought of the time. Not
so verjy long, ago the name Scandinavian had been considered, as
regards, literature, almost synonymous with barbarian. Gray was
a pioneer ; and misleading as was the impression he gave of the
538 THE LITERATURE OF THK VICTORIAN ERA
Northern poets, he has fairly won the honour due to him who
oj)ens up a In the early Victorian period a literature,
fresh field.
both popular and scholarly, began to accumulate about the
subject. Various paths led towards it The study of philology
turned upon the Scandinavian tongues an attention they had not
previously received. Shakespearean scholars had their minds
drawn to Saxo Grammaticus. The more careful study of our own
old ballads proved how close was their kinship to those of
Denmark. Hero as Divinity pointed out the
Carlyle in his
unique interest which these Northern tales have for us. They
are the heroic legends of our own kin, and therefore they must
come closer to our heart than the stories of an alien race.
Further, he maintained that in certain important respects they
were intrinsically superior to tlie Greek myths which had hitlierto
received almost exclusive attention.

Probably Carlyle did more than anyone else to turn general
attention to the Scandinavian legends ; certainly after Heroes
and Hero- Worship the evidences of such attention become far
more frequent. Benjamin Thorpe in his Northern Mythology
(1851) and his Yule-tide Stories {1853) supplied material which
proved stimulating to the imagination of more tlian one poet.
Kingsley had in himself a good de.al of the old Viking spirit,
and dwelt with pleasure on the history of the Northern sea-
kings. Matthew Arnold rendered into beautiful verse the story
of the death of Balder. It is interesting to contrast hjs manner
with that of Morris. The latter, as we have seen, throws a
mediaeval atmosphere over the classical tales he tells. Arnold
reverses the process : his Balder Dead is Scandinavian in
origin, but classical in manner. It is a great tribute to the
force and originality of the Scandinavian stories that they will
not be medisevalised. In the hands of Morris they remain

Scandinavian.
77ie Lovers of Gudnin was written before Morris had any
personal knowledge of the land to which the Northern Sagas
belonged. His intense interest in the S.igas, however, naturally
kindled an interest in Iceland, and he took a journey thither in
1871, and a second one in 1873. He was infinitely more interested
and impressed than he was by Italy, which he visited in the

period between those two journeys. Naturally therefore he
returned from Iceland more Scandinavian in sympathy than ever
and the outcome was his great Northern epic, Sigurd the Vblsuttg
(1876). This is his high-water mark in verse. The story is told
with admirable spirit, though not without monotony, and it bears
a stamp of reality such as marks hardly any of the tales of The
Earthly Paradise. The heroic sentiment of the Northern legends
fires the poet's imagination, and he sometimes catches it grandly.
Sigurd the Volsung therefore is There is
tonic and inspiriting.
no sickliness of thought in it. The heroes always dwell upon the

deeds done or to be done, not upon their reward. " I know that
the world is wide, and filled with deeds unwrought," they sing ;
and they go forth to do the deeds. It is perhaps in his war-
poetry that Morris rises highest:
"On went the Volsung banners, and on went Sigmund before,

And his sword was the flail of the tiller on the wheat of the wheat-
thrashuig floor,
And his shield was rent from his arm, and Ms helm was hewn from his
head
But who may draw nigh him to smite for the heap and the rampart of
dead?
White went his hair on the wind like the ragged drift of the cloud.
And his dust-driven, blood-beaten harness was the death-storm's angry
shroud,
When the summer sun is departing in the first of the night of wrack;
And his sword was the cleaving lightning, that smites and is hurried
aback
Ere the hand may rise against it ; and his voice was the following thunder.
Then cold grew the battle before him dead-chilled with the fear and the
wonder
For again in his ancient eyes the light of victory gleamed
From his mouth grown tuneful and sweet the song of his kindred streamed
And no more was he worn and weary, and no more his life seemed spent
And vrith all the hope of his childhood was his wrath of battle blent
And he thought A little further, and the river of strife is passed,
:
And I shall sit triumphant the king of the world at last.''
This is beautiful and spirited ; but it may be worth while to

compare for a moment the manner with the manner of such a
master of narrative as Scott. These lines of Morris are all about
action^ yet we have little action in them, and few concrete details.,
Their place is taken by fine imagery. Sigurd's sword is "the
cleaving lightning," his harness "the death-storm's angry shroud."
But when we ask what the hero clad in this harness and armed
with this sword accomplished, the answer is a song. We learn
indeed that he is surrounded by a heap and rampart of dead
but the dead are and we are not told who they were
unnamed ;
who attempted him behind this rampart. In short,

to approach
a dim, impalpable mist veils the whole action. In Scott, on the
contrary, everything is as definite as it can possibly be. We see
the Howard's banner and the shield of Tunstall, stainless knight
and Marmion dies, not with a vague thought about passing the
river of strife, but with a cry to charge upon his lips, and that cry
addressed to the leaders of the field, Chester and Stanley. So
too in the description of Bannockburn we see Douglas in the
pause for breath leaning upon his war-sword and Randolph
wiping his bloody brow, and we see every movement of "the
grim lord of Colonsay" as he writhes upon his wound and
deals back the death dealt to him. In this difference lies
the secret why Sigurd the Volsung was coldly received. Mcirris
possessed, and he displayed in this epic, poetical qualities of
which Scott was destitute ; but in this important respect Scott's
was the better method of the two. The difference moreover
shows the defect of Morris as a narrator. A narrative which
does not move mainly upon concrete facts, whether real or
imaginary, is false in principle ; and Morris is too apt to pause,
as he does in this passage, over the embroideries of the story.
The spirit of the decorative artist was from first to last strong
within him. The yellow gleam of the sun-flowers, whose pro-
fusion in Morris's ' fresco ' in the Oxford Union provoked the
sarcasm of Rossetti, seems to be shed over all his work.
Meanwhile, in 1873, Morris had published another long poem
of a very different order, Love is Enough ; or, the Freeing of
Pharamond. a Morality, in which he attempted to revive the
forgotten form of the mediaeval drama. The curiously intricate
structure makes this poem a kind of test of faith among the
LATER DEVELOPMENTS 54I
devotees of Morris. But the attempt was fore-doomed to failure.

Though Sir Peter Harpdon's End proves that Morris was not
destitute of dramatic faculty, it is not probable that he would
under any circumstances have become a great dramatist ; and
assuredly the world will not revert from the developed art of
Shakeispeare to the crude and yet complex forms of his mediaeval
precursors. The very attempt is a singular illustration of the
exclusiveness of Morris's sympathies. In his taste for all forms of
early art he may be fairly called catholic ; but his sympathy stops
abruptly with the Renascence. He was either indifferent to or he
actively disliked the Italian Renascence, the Elizabe}:hans, and
nearly the whole of English poetry between them and the revival
of romance. When we add his alienation, already noted, from
classical literature, it is obvious how serious were his limitations.
The omission even of "our indispensable eighteenth century"
is grave enough ; but the omission of so much besides becomes
well-nigh ruinous.
Sigurd the Volsung was the last of Morris's long poems, unless
we count among the number The Pilgrims of Hope, which still
rests, a quasi-unity, in the columns of the socialistic organ The
Commonweal. For ten years after Sigurd Morris was much

absorbed in a socialist propaganda^ and his writings and utter-
ances were mostly lectures, tracts and journalistic articles on
subjects bearing upon the scheme of socialism. Much of this
work is of purely ephemeral interest; but the lectures on the
relation between art and life are exceedingly interesting, and they
contain the clearest and most specific statement anywhere to be
found of the principles underlying Morris's work. It is evident
that these principles had only been gradually brought out into
clear consciousness by himself, and it would be a mistake to
suppose that in his earlier days he deliberately set to work under
their guidance; but nevertheless they were implied in his life and
writings from the beginning.
Besides prose tracts, these years produced a considerable
number of miscellaneous poems, many of them devoted to the
cause and contributed to The Commonweal, a journal
socialist
which Morris financed, and which he edited from 1886 until he
was dismissed from his by the extremists who won control
ofifice
over the party in 1889. With ultra-Christian patience Morris

continued for some time to support the journal financially ; and it
was after his dismissal that he contributed to it his News from
Nowhere. A Death Song affords a fine specimen of the work of
this period. It was inspired by the death of a man from injuries
received in Trafalgar Square on the famous " Bloody Sunday,"

1887 :—
"What Cometh here from west to east a- wending?

And who are these, the marchers stem and slow?
We bear the message that the rich are sending
Aback to those who bade them wake and know.
Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay.
But one and all if they would dusk the day.
We asked them for a life of toilsome earning,

They bade us bide their leisure for our bread,
We craved to speak to tell our woeful leamirig;
We come back speechless, bearing back our dead.
Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay,
They will not learn ; they have no ears to hearken

They turn their faces from the eyes of fate
Their gay-lit halls shut out the skies that darken.
But, lo ! this dead man knocking at the gate.
Here lies the sign that we shall break our prison

Amidst the storm he won a prisoner's rest
But in the cloudy dawn the sun arisen
Brings us our day of work to win the best. .
But one and all if they would dusk the day."
In these verses we seem to hear the voice of a wider-spirited

and more humane Ebenezer Elliott We may compare them with
the Songs of Democracy (1856-1857) by Ernest Charles Jones
(1819-1868) or with the Songs of the Governing Classes by Robert
Barnabas Brough (1828-1870). But Brough is usually satirical,
and thereis in other respects a very remarkable difference between
Elliott on the one hand, and Jones, and still more Morris, on the
other. The difference marks the rise of socialism ; for Elliott is
not socialistic at As has been pointed out in an earlier

all.
chapter, he treats capitalist and workman as one in interest and

alike victims of the landlord. Ernest Jones condemns capitalist
and landlord equally. He sings TAe Song of the Factory Slave —
" The land it is the landlords'
The traders' is the sea
The ore the usurers' coffer fills,
But what remains for me?

The engine whirls for master's crafti
The steel shines to defend.
With labour's arms, what labour raised.
For labour's foe to spend.
The camp, the pulpit, and the law.
For rich men's sons are free.
Theirs, theirs are learning, arts, and arms;

But what remains for me?
The coming hope, the future day.
When wrong to right shall bow,
I
And hearts that have the courage, man,
To make that fiiture now."
This is the spirit of Morris too. A capitalist and an employer

like Elliott, his socialistic crusade, was nevertheless an attack upon
the whole capitalist system. Of course his position exposed him
to unpleasant personal arguments; but his defence is perfectly
sound. He was but an atom in a great system, powerless to help
the working classes except by labouring to change the system. He
was more likely to succeed if he retained his capital than if he sur-
rendered and therefore the right course, the courageous course,
it ;
was to retain it. Those who most strongly dissent from Morris in
opinion may admit this. There can be no doubt about his absolute
disinterestedness. Whether it was wise or unwise, his socialistic
career was assuredly not ignoble.
.
This phase is, the last in the poetical life of Morris. He never
changed his socialistic opinions; but in 1890 he ceased to be a
member of the Socialist League, and for the remainder of his life
he was more active in literature than he had been during the years
when he was a propagandist of the League. His activity, however,
was mostly expended on prose romanced. The first of the series
was The House of the Wolfings (1889), the last published during
his life, and perhaps the most highly finished, was The Well at the
World's End {i2.<)6). Two, The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1^)
andTke Story of the Sundering Flood {iS^?,), were posthumous. The
change from verse to prose is rather a change of form than of spirit
or substance. On the one hand, Morris's verse is never so far
removed from prose as is the verse of such a poet as Keats or as

Shelley ; on the other hand, his prose is decidedly poetical. The
truth seems to be that he was somewhat disappointed by the result
of his labours for socialism, and, thrown back upon himself, he
began to live once more in an imaginary world in the past, or, as
in News from Nowhere (1891), in the future. Much of this prose
work is beautiful, but it is essentially what he had already done
in verse, and, for the purpose, verse was the better medium of
the two.
With Morris may be mentioned briefly his friend and con-
temporary, both at school and at Oxford, Richard Watson Dixon
(1833-1900), who until lately was better known as the author of a
History of the Church of England from the Abolition of the Roman
furisdidion (1878-1902) than as a poet, but who may gain at last,
through the selection from his poems recently edited by Mr Robert
Bridges, the fame which he failed to win by the various volumes of
verse published during his lifetime. For Dixon, though he entered
the field not long after Morris — his first volume of verse, Christ's
Company, was published in 1861, —remained practically unknown
as a poet at his death. The reason was not solely that he was
inferior to, but also that he was in essentials singularly different
from, his fellows of the Pre-Raphaelite school. He was too
closely associated with them and too warm an admirer not to have
in some measure caught their tone. It is principally noticeable in
the earlier poems. St Mary Magdalene and Love's Consolation,

bothiof which were among the contents of Chris fs Company, are
Pre-Raphaelite ; and there is a faint suggestion of William Morris
as late as Polyphemus, which was among the Odes and Eclogues
(1884). But all similarities are superficial. If we consider general
effect, in place of the voluptuousness of the school we have in

Dixon austerity, and for its amplitude condensation. This wide
difference doubtless told against Dixon's fame. A poet not of the
first rank has the best chance of recognition when he follows the
steps of the greatest of his time. Dixon was neither quite strong
enough nor quite copious enough to form a taste for himself.
There are flaws in his execution too. His rhymes are often
exceedingly faulty ; occasionally his Hnes are padded ; here and
there his diction is objectionable. The Ode on Conflicting Claims,
which has been singled out as one of: his best pieces, recalls the
worst of eighteenth century verse in the phrase, "the liquid
Hyblian But notwithstanding all this, pieces such as By
store."
the Sea and Death and On Advancing Age and the sonnet Humanity
are indubitably the work of one who was a true if not a very great
poet ; and the sonnet which begins, " Give me the darkest corner
of a cloud," may challenge comparison with all but the very greatest
in the English language :
" Give me the darkest comer of a cloud,

Placed high upon some lonely mountain's head,
Craggy and harsh with ruin let me shroud ;
My life in horror, for I wish me dead.

No gentle lowland known and loved of old.
Lure me to life back through the gate of tears;
But long time drenched with rain and numb with
' cold,
May I forget the solace of the years :
No trees by streams, no light and warmth by day.

No white clouds pausing o'er the happy town
But wind and rain, and fogbanks slow and gray,
And stony wastes, and uplands scalped and brown
No life, but only death in life : a grave
As cold and bleak as thine, dear soul, I crave.''
The group of Oxonian Pre-Raphaelites was still unbroken, and
even their early triumphs were still to win, when Algernon Charles
Swinburne (1837-1909) came to Oxford from Eton. His intro-
duction to William Morris and Burne-Jones took place in 1857,
and soon he too was an avowed disciple of Rossetti. This was
inevitable. Few who came in contact .with him were able to resist
Rossetti ; his followers were the men of greatest genius then in the
w. 35
University. To such a man Swinburne was irresistibly drawn.
No one was ever more quick than he to see merit, no one was ever
more generously lavish of praise. But for that very reason he is
not at any period of his career a man to be identified with Pre-
Raphaelitism, as Morris was at the start. He loved many forms
of beauty too ardently to absorb himself in one. Friendly as he
was with Burne-Jones and Morris, his chief friend at the University
was John Nichol (1833-1894), himself a poet who, in his drama of
Hannibal (1873) and in a few of his lyrics, has left things fine
enough to stir regret that he did not do better still. Swinburne,
a junior member of Nichol's college, Balliol, contributed to the
Undergraduate Papers, edited by Nichol for a short time after
the decease of the more memorable Oxford and Cambridge

Magazine.
Lady Burne-Jones gives a striking and attractive description of
Swinburne in his youth. " His appearance was very unusual and
in some ways beautiful, for his hair was glorious in abundance and
colour and his eyes indescribably fine. When repeating poetry he
had a perfectly natural way of lifting them in a rapt, unconscious
gaze, and their clear green colour softened by thick brown eye-
lashes was unforgettable Looks commercing with the skies
:
'
expresses it without exaggeration. He was restless beyond words,

scarcely standing still at all and almost dancing as he walked, while
even in sitting he moved continually, seeming to keep time, by a
swift movement of the hands at the wrists, and sometimes of the
feet also, with some inner rhythm of excitement. He was courteous
and affectionate and unsuspicious, and beyond most people
faithful
to those he really loved. The biting wit which filled his talk so as
at times to leave his hearers dumb with amazement always spared
one thing, and that was an absent friend'." The picture is a good
introduction to the poet, so generous in heart, so prone to excess
both in praise and in blame, so rapid and so infinitely various in
the movements of his verse.
Swinburne was a rebel by nature, and doubtless the rebellious
strain in his blood was one of the forces which drew him towards
the older rebel, Walter Savage Landor, whom he visited at Florence,
' Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, i. aij.
and whom he praised with the utmost warmth both while Landor
was alive and after his death. To his memory Atalanta in Calydon
is dedicated, and in the dedicatory epistle to the collected edition
of Swinburne's poems he is named with Mazzini and Hugo as one
of the three gods of the poet's worship.
This rebelliousness was
the guarantee that Swinburne would do nothing exactly as other
men had done it, and it helps to explain the revolution which he
soon began to work in Pre-Raphaelite poetry. He was a man with
a threefold mission. In the first place, it was his function to wed
classicism to romance. Secondly, he was destined to re-establish
the vogue of French literature, which in the earlier part of the
nineteenth century had wielded less influence over English men
of letters than at any other period since the Restoration. In the
third place, it was Swinburne's task to demonstrate the capacity of
the English language for lyric measures, and to enlarge its resources
to such a degree that there is scarcely a hint from our older poets
undeveloped by him, while he furnishes examples of many forms
besides which are either original, or which he has imported from
foreign languages.
Swinburne's genius was precocious. While he was still a boy
he had read widely, not only in English, but in French and in the
classical languages as well. This early reading was the foundation
of a scholarship which made him in his maturity one of the most
profoundly learned of all our poets. His admirable memory re-
tained nearly everything it received When Rossetti's friends

attempted to piece together the poems buried in the cofiSn of his
wife, it was on Swinburne chiefly that they relied. Besides this,
of all English poets he was the most fluent. He might therefore

have been tempted to premature publication, but if he ever felt the
inclination he repressed it Most of the verse of his boyhood and
of the first years of manhood was destroyed, and his first volume,
The Queen Mother and Rosamond (i860), -did not appear until he
had reached the relatively mature age of twenty-four. He says
however that the dramas it contained were written while he was
yet under academic or tutorial authority. The volume passed
with little notice ; nor can it be said that the contents were of very
remarkable merit. Very different was the fate, as well as the value,
35-2
oiAtalania in Calydon (1865). This drama, the greatest in the clas-
sicalform since Samson Agonistes, at once established Swinburne
as one of the chief poets of the age- In the judgment of many it
remains even now his greatest work ; at the very least it is a full-
blown flower of his genius. It illustrates two of the three points

which have been already noted with regard to him. Classic in
form, Atalanta is nevertheless a poem which could only have been
written in an age of romance and by a writer deeply under the
influence of the romantic spirit ; and the choruses proclaim the
advent of a lyrical poet of the first rank. They also show
him to be of the school of Shelley rather than of Keats, a
point wherein he differs from his friends of the Pre-Raphaelite
group. No otherpoem by Swinburne ever achieved such success
as Atalanta. The later Greek tragedy, Erechtheus (1876), was,
if not inferior, at any rate less surprising after the triumph of
its predecessor.
In the interval between the two Greek tragedies Swinburne
published Poems and Ballads (1866). The volume was composed
of pieces for the most part earlier in date of composition than
Atalanta, and it shows the poet far more completely under the
influence of Rossetti than he is in Atalanta. The defiant spirit of
Swinburne led him to emphasise those aspects of the Rossetti
school which were most certain to shock English opinion. One
of the principal poems in the collection, Laus Veneris, a powerful
expression of physical passion, was treated as if it were the type of
the whole and even gave an American edition of the
its title to
collection. The outcry was so great that Moxon broke his con-
nexion as publisher to Swinburne. What is more to be regretted
is that this unfortunate flouting of a popular sentiment which is
not indefensible, led for a time to a general neglect of many things

of beauty, such as the lines, full of restrained emotion. In Memory
of Walter Savage Landor, and the exquisite Garden of Froserpine
with these haunting stanzas :
" Pale,beyond porch and portal.

Crowned with calm leaves, she stands
Who gathers all things mortal
With cold immortal hands;
Her languid lips are sweeter
Than love's who fears to greet her
To men that mix and meet her
From many times and lands "
and
" From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That, no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea."
But perhaps most characteristic of Swinburne was the Hymn to

Proserpine, with its Nowhere does th^
glorious ringing metre.
paganism of the poet come out more grandly than in this hymn,
supposed to be sung after the proclamation in Rome of the Christian
faith. It would be hard to find a better specimen of, his work than
the closing lines :
" In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven; the night where
thou art.
Where the silence is more tlian all tunes, where sleep overflov?s from the heart.
Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world, and the red rose is
white.
And the wind falls faint as it blows with the fume of the flowers of the night.
And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of gods from afar
Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star.
In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun,
Let thy soul with their souls find place, and forget whatis done and undone.
Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal breath ;
For these give labour and slumber ; but thou, Proserpina, death.
Therefore now at thy feet I bide for a season in silence. I know
I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep ; even so.
For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span
A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man.
So long I endure, no longer ; and laugh not again, neither weep.
For there is no God found stronger than death and death is a sleep.'' ;
Evidently the writer of these lines was no mere disciple of any

man's. Powerful as was Rossetti's personality, he could not, if he
had wished, have held in thrall a spirit so independent as Swin-
5 so THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
burne's essentially was, notwithstanding his fervour of admiration.
Even at the date of Poems and Ballads the Pre-Raphaelite inflnence
isconspicuous rather than profound. Swinburne was not wholly
absorbed in it. The deep sensuousness which characterised a
number of these early pieces was a note of the school, rather than
of the man Swinburne. Romance is a common element. But in
Rossetti the essence of romance is medisevalism, while Swinburne

turns to France and romance in his master Hugo.
finds his form of
He and what he does not find he imports ; so that
turns to Greece,
Atalania in Calydon and even Erechtheus, as well as the minor
Greek themes he has handled, are Greek, but Greek with a differ-
ence. In Poems and Ballads he pays, it is true, perfunctory
obeisance to the Middle Ages in the choice of a few subjects ; but
his heart is not in them. In Tristram of Lyonesse the medisevalism
a thing distinct from that of Rossetti or of Morris ; and the
is still
dramas founded on themes of the Middle Ages are more Shake-

spearean than mediaeval. Swinburne was wholly untouched by
catholic sentiment. He was in sympathy with the medievalism
of the sinner Villon, rather than with that which celebrates saints
and martyrs and Madonnas. He could admire, but it would never
have been his impulse to write. The Blessed Damozel. His style
is fundamentally different from that which is appropriate to such
subjects. Energy and rapidity and fire are the natural charac-
teristics both of his metre and of his diction. Dim lights and
perfume-laden air are things of an alien world. He rejoices in
—
the sea, and in storms storms on land and ocean, storms among
the nations, storms in the human soul.
Swinburne's works in verse fall obviously into two great classes,
—the dramas, and the poems, chiefly lyrical. The choice of the
dramatic form for his earliest volume seems to show that his
personal ambition was to excel in that; and this impression is
confirmed by the language and tone of the dedicatory epistle pre-

fixed to the collected poems. There he avows that his first if not
his strongest ambition had beeti " to do something worth doing, and
not utterly unworthy of a young countryman of Marlowe the teacher
and Webster the pupil of Shakespeare, in the line of work which
those three poets had left as a possibly unattainable example for
ambitious Englishmen " ; and he seems to have taken comfort

from that division among critics which caused some to prefer the
dramas to the lyrics. If this was his ambition he must have been
disappointed. Rosamond and The Queen Mother have never been
ranked among Swinburne's great works ; and the success of
Atalanta in Calydon was due more to the choruses than to the
dramatic part proper. Swinburne however was persistent. Before
Poems and Ballads he had published Chastelard (r865), the first
part of the trilogy on Mary Queen of Scots. It was followed by
Bothwell (1874) and by Mary Stuart (1881). But readers of

poetry remained obdurate in their view, not only in face of the
Queen Mary trilogy, but after Marino Faliero (1885) and Locrine
(1887) and Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards (1899). The great
majority were, and are, of opinion that it is Swinburne the lyrist,
not Swinburne the dramatist, who is the great poet. His genius
was not dramatic. He was misled by his ardent love for the works
of the Elizabethan playwrights. He apparently believed that theirs
was the highest form of creative work, and even to the end he
could not convince himself that, prodigal of gifts as nature had
been to him, she had denied him some that were essential to the
dramatist. He failed in two respects. He was not a master of
character,and he had not that self-restraint which the dramatist
must show if he would win success. The stricter laws of Greek
tragedy saved him in Atalanta in Calydon, the looser structure
of the Elizabethan drama exposed him to irresistible temptation
when he attempted to follow Marlowe and Shakespeare and
Webster. Hence the enormous mass of Bothwell, hence the in-
extricable confusion of Mary Stuart. No man with the dramatic
instinct ever wrote dramas containing speeches hundreds of lines
long.
Such a diversion of energy would have been serious in the
case of a poet less fluent than Swinburne. In his case it was not
so. Verses flowed from his pen without effort, and in the mass of
lyrical matter he has left we have probably sufficient for the fiill
illustration of his powers. The outcry occasioned by Poems and
Ballads did not move Swinburne ; but interests which had been
obscured by the objectionable pieces revealed themselves in his
later work. A
Song of Italy (1867), afterwards included in Songs
of Two
Nations (1875), struck a note which was erroneously sup-
posed to be new. It was not so. Among Swinburne's contribu-
tions to Undergraduate Papers was one which he himself described
as "a terrific onslaught on the French Empire and its Clerical
supporters^" Among Poems and Ballads, A Song in
Time of Order
and A Song in Tim^ of Revolution showed Swinburne to be heir to
Shelley as the poet of liberty. In Songs before Sunrise (187 1), as
yrell as in Songs of Two Nations, the proofs were multiplied. De-
votion to liberty and its consequent, hatred of tyranny and oppres-
sion, whether of kings or of priests, were among the deepest and
most enduring He was profoundly stirred
feelings of his nature.
by the great national movements of his time. The struggle to

secure the freedom of Italy in particular fascinated him, for it
gathered to one point nearly everything that was fitted to appeal
to him. The beauty of Italy, her unique place in history, her
splendid contributions to literature and
art, all attracted Swinburne
as they had attracted Milton and Byron and Browning. His

. ardent admiration for Mazzini, to whom is dedicated A Song of
Italy, added in the case of Swinburne a personal tie. He never
sang with more fervour than in the verses inspired by enthusiasm
for Italy, or by hatred of the oppressor Austria. The notes are
—
varied notes of doubt and disappointment as well as of triumph,
for the course of the struggle is chequered. It is complex as well,
a struggle for spiritual no less than for political freedom. Swin-

burne's hatred of priestcraft was, if possible, more fiery than his
hatred of kingcraft, and (he never lost an opportunity to give it
utterance, sometimes with a violence which partly defeated itself,
occasionally with a telling restraint.

As the champion both of political freedom and of spiritual
freedom Swinburne is an optimist. Tiresias suggests that the
powers which seem to be throned on high are tottering.
"The hand that slays, the lip that mocks and lies,
Temples and thrones that yet men seem to see-
Are these dead or art thou dead, Italy?"
' Literary Anecdotes of the XIX Century, ii, 394.

Messidor declares that " the dumb dread people " shall " put in
the sickles and reap." The Hymn of Man. closes with a note of
jubilation :
" Gloiy to Man in the highest ! for Man is the master of things."
And there is a ring of triumph in the concluding stanza of A

Marching Song: —
"Rise, ere the dawn be risen;
Come, and be all souls fed
From field and street and prison
Come, for the feast is spread;
Live, for the truth is living; virake, for night is dead."
Though it was Italy that roused Swinburne's keenest interest, he

was ready to take fire wherever freedom was in question. This
was the cause of his virulence against Russia as well as against
Austria. In the sonnet (it is one of the finest in the language,
and remarkable for dignity of utterance) To Louis Kossuth (1877),

the Hungarian patriot is praised above all things because his hand
is raised to smite " men's heads abased before the Muscovite." The
poet saw in the great northern Empire the bulwark of tyranny, and
hence Russia : an Ode is full of invective which fails in its purpose
just because it is unmeasured. The same sentiment inspires the
terrible sonnets on The Launch of the Livadia, where perhaps
Swinburne reaches the extreme limit of vituperation which remains
effective. And effective it assuredly is. Few things of the kind
are so impressive as the closing lines of the third sonnet :
"O heart fast boimd of frozen poison, be

All nature's as all true men's hearts to thee,
A two-edged sword of judgment ; hope be far
And fear at hand for pilot oversea
With death for compass and despair for star,
And the white foam a shroud for the White Czar."
Like Tennyson, Swinburne was emphatically a patriotic poet.

His love of England was another phase of his love of freedom.
He saw in his own country the antithesis to Russia, and, republican
as he was, a Russian insult to the Empress of India drew from him
SS4 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
the scathing sonnets, The White Czar. His comparative estimate
of the two countries is indicated in the scornful exclamation,
" Thou set thy foot where England's used to stand 1
Thou reach thy rod forth over Indian land !
Not that at any time Swinburne had only smooth things to say to
his countrymen. To his eagerness they seemed far too remiss
and half-hearted In Perinde ac Cadaver
in their support of Italy.
Liberty in a vision speaks to England asleep and rebukes her for
her sloth. The Halt before Rome hints at the reason.
"What matter if these lands tarry,

That tarried (we said) not of old ?
France, made drunken by fate,
England, that bore up the weight

Once of men's freedom, a freight
Holy, but heavy to carry
For hands overflowing with gold."
As time went on Swinburne became less disposed for adverse

criticism even of the England of his own day. The Commonweal,
a fine though somewhat diffuse poem in celebration of the first
jubilee of Queen Victoria, might well have been weighed in the
balance, when the office of laureate became vacant, against his earlier
advocacy of tyrannicide. The splendid poem. The Armada, which
follows The Commoweal in the third series of Poems and Ballads,
celebrates an event three centuries old ; but it links the three cen-
turies together,and the fervid close is the voice of the poet's love
for the England of 1888. Much of his later work, in so far as it
deals with events of the time, is inspired by the wish to " keep our
noble England whole." The poet of the sea has A Word for the
Navy,z.nA. he celebrates The Centenary of the Battle of the Nile zx\A
Trafalgar Day. Another piece, The Commonweal, earlier than
that above referred to, is " a song for Unionists " ; and this, with
The Question and Apostasy, leaves no doubt as to Swinburne's
sentiment with regard to the great political problem of Gladstone's
later days. Still later, certain sonnets and poems inspired by the
Transvaal War show the old republican in the character of cham-
pion of a monarchy which he judged to be more truly a common-
wealth than the nominal republic of Kruger, and of the strong
whom he judged to be using their strength in the cause of liberty

threatened by the weak. Thus the whirligig of time brought in
its revenges, and the voice of the revolutionary poet was raised on
behalf of the policy of the Conservative party.
An ideal however must be either in the past or in the future
it implies an element of enchantment in the view which only
distance can give. And Swinburne's ideal England was the
England of the Commonwealth. The form of government grati-
fied '
his republicanism ; the masterful strength of Cromwell
accorded with the imperiaUstic strain in him ; the Protector's
championship of Piedmont appealed to the lover of freedom, and
his re-establishment of England's sea-power to the lover of the sea.
All this finds expression in the powerful stanzas entitled CromwelFs
Statue, which were evoked by the rejection by the House of
Commons in 1895 of the proposal to set up a statue of Cromwell
at Westminster.
The consideration of the notes of liberty and patriotism in
Swinburne has led on towards the close of his career. Among
the poetical publications not yet dealt with the principal were the
second and third series of Poems and Ballads, issued respectively
in 1878 and 1889, Songs of the Springtides (1880), Studies in Song
(1880), Tristram of Lyonesse (\%%2), A Century of Roundels (1883)
and The Tale of Balen (1896). The two Arthurian pieces stand
apart, in some respects, from the rest of Swinburne's works. They
were attempts to retell the mediaeval tales with more fidelity to the
originals than had been shown in other contemporary versions
and The Tale of Balen is certainly superior to the weakest of
Tennys&n's Idylls of the King. But the narrative form was not
well suited to Swinburne's genius, and though he disowned any
wish to make Tristram of Lyonesse a story, and the lyrical metre
makes his Balen something different from an ordinary tale in
verse, there is necessarily more of the narrative in these two pieces
than in anything else he wrote, except the northern ballads.
A Century of Roundels well illustrates Swinburne's astonishing
command of metre. The form would have cramped
fetters of the
almost any other writer and would probably have led to triviality.
He not only moves easily in them, but gains rather than loses by
SS6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
the restriction ; for in his case freedom sometimes tempts to
license. The roundels are no mere exercises of ingenuity, but,
many of them, expressions of genuine thought and emotion. It is
however the two later series of Poems and Ballads which are the
most remarkable among the volumes above named ; and probably
they, with the first series and Atalanta in Calydon, will in the long
run mainly determine their author's rank as a poet. It is sometimes
said that Swinburne showed no development and made no advance
•^-that what he was in the first Poems and Ballads he remained to
the end. Possibly in one sense this is true, or nearly so. There
is not much in his later works that is clearly better than the best
of that early volume. But if there is not advance to heights
absolutely higher there is certainly and evidence of
change,
mastery over a wider range of poetry. There are notable differ-
ences in the tables of contents of the three series of Poems and
Ballads, differences not so much due to the introduction of elements
wholly unexampled in the first series, as in relative proportions.
The sensuous element remains, and some of the translations from
Villon prove that the temptation to shock prudery was still felt.
But the place of chief prominence, which was held in the first
volume by poems like Laus Veneris and Dolores and Faustine and
Fragoletta, is now taken by those memorial verses and verses
addressed to living artists, in which Swinburne loved to pour out
his generous praise, and which, whether they deal with men like
John William Inchbold (the subject of one of his finest poems) and
Sir Henry Taylor and Victor Hugo and the Two Leaders, or with
men like Baudelaire and Gautier, are marked by grave strength

and deep feeling. Nowhere does he rise higher than in Ave atque
Vale, the stanzas in memory of Baudelaire, the charm of which is
the singularly harmonious blending of the sensuous and the intel-

lectual.
The growth of the political interest has already been indicated.

The interest in nature grows too. The Four Songs of Four Seasons
bear witness to it; and Winter in Northumberland is an evi-
dence of that local patriotism which was hardly less characteristic

of Swinburne than national patriotism, and which found grand
expression in the poem Northumberland, included among the
group which take their title from A Channel Passage. These

pieces show that the object of Swinburne's supreme love among
things natural was the sea, and also whence he drank in that love.
In the former, like Kingsley, he celebrates the "stout north-
easter " ; and it is safe to infer that the storms of the North Sea,
beating in on the stern Northumbrian coast, had been the means
of .stirring the poet's soul as fertile fields and southern suns could
never stir it. Ex- Voto is a fine prayer that he may find his grave
in the sea :
"But when my time shall be,

O mother, O my sea,
Alive or dead, take me.

Me too, my mother,"
Connected also with this local patriotism is a group of poems
singularly unlike the great mass of Swinburne's verse the ballads —

founded upon the old minstrelsy of the Border. A few pieces of
this kind, such as The Bloody Son (though this is described as
Finnish) and The Sea-Swallows, were included in the first series
of Poems and Ballads. But whatever may be the case with other
pliases ,of his work, Swinburne's culmination in this phase certainly
came in the third series. Finer pieces of their kind than A
Jacobite's Farewell and A JacoUtis Exile do not exist ;
perhaps it
is hardly too much to say that nothing so fine is anjrwhere to be

found. The pathos (A both is perfect, and it is difficult to choose
between them, but the former may be quoted for its shortness and
for the consummate touch in the third stanza :
"There's nae mair lands to tyne, my dear.

And nae raair lives to gie:
Though a man think sair to live nae mair.

There's but one day to die.
For a' things come and a' things gane

What needs ye rend your hair?
But kiss me till the morn's morrow,
Then I'll kiss ye nae mair.
O lands are lost and life's losing,
And what were they to gie ?
Fu' mony a man gives all he can,
But nae man else gives ye.
Our king wons over the sea's water.
And I in prison sairj
But I'll win out the morn's morrow,
And ye'U see me nae mair."
It may be that the author of the Hymn to Proserpine never did

anything finer than that in the strain most peculiarly his own and ;
the author of the lines In Memory of Walter Savage Landor had

already set a standard not easily surpassed in the elegiac strain.
But at least in respect of both he broadened immensely the basis
of his fame ; while in respect of the poems dedicated to liberty
there are in the later volumes heights not reached and depths
not sounded in A Song in Time of Order or A Song in Time of
Revolution, and the two Jacobite laments soar quite beyond com-
parison with anything of a similar nature in the early volume.
Though Swinburne reached his maturity soon, it is not correct to
say that he had no development.
Swinburne was among the most voluminous of writers. Besides
the mass of poetry included in the volumes noticed above, and the
bulky collection of dramas, he wrote a quantity of prose sufficient
to have absorbed in its production the energies of most men. His
firstprose work of importance was his William Blake (1868), an
instance of his generous eagerness to praise, whether in prose or
in verse, and especially to praise genius neglected or underrated.
Nothing delighted him more than to rescue from neglect men like
Charles Jeremiah Wells and Edward FitzGerald, to both of whom
— in both cases guided apparently in the first instance by Rossetti
he did invaluable But the Elizabethan dramatists were
service.
He had read them eagerly from

his favourite field for criticism.
boyhood; he wrote on Marlowe and Webster in Undergraduate
Papers ; and at various dates in his later career he made studies
of most of the leaders among them. Swinburne's criticism is
usually right at heart, but it suffers from one very grave defect : it
is all in superlatives, usually of panegyric, occasionally of censure.

Again and again the strongest words in the language are lavished
upon work, deserving indeed of praise, but not absolutely the
greatest. When all the resources of speech seem to the ordinary
man to have been spent upon Webster and Tourneur, he is apt to
ask himself what remains for Shakespeare ; and though Swinburne

will proceed to show that, for him, something does remain, the
effect is not satisfactory. Immoderate panegyric produces in the
reader a sense of distrust ; and when constantly repeated it wearies
by its monotony.
Perhaps no recent poet has equalled, and certainly none has
surpassed, Swinburne in force of initiation. He is remarkable not
only for what he has done himself, but for what he has inspired
others to do. In the various ways already indicated he has been
a leader, and recent poetry bears his mark more clearly than the
mark of anyone else since Tennyson. This, and not the fact that
he died but yesterday, is the reason why he seems still so near.
Though WiUiam Morris was only three years older, his work seems
to belong to a past considerably more distant than Swinburne's.
This fact increases the difBculty of judging the latter. The
natural and graceful tendency to silence censure and to dwell
only on that which is praiseworthy has been conspicuous in the
notices evoked by his death, and has been strengthened by the
sense that in some respects expiation was due. He has been
compared with the greatest, at least the greatest of recent times,
and treated as their equal. But probably posterity will refuse to
ratify such a judgment as this. In the technique of verse Swin-
burne is supreme he is at least the equal, and possibly the superior,
:
of any English poet since Milton. In variety he unquestionably

surpasses all. But when we search behind technique for the
intellectual part, and not merely for the intellectual but for the
most profoundly emotional part, the result is not so satisfactory.
Frequently the meaning seems to be blurred by the pomp of
words. Magniloquent is a more appropriate word, as applied to
Swinburne's style, than magnificent. It is gorgeous, but it is
not what Matthew Arnold meant when he spoke of the grand

style. That implies restraint. The master of the grand style
is master of himself; Swinburne is carried away by his own
facility. Frequently his poems are too long, and while every
stanza may be fine, the total impression may be less than that
which would have been produced by a piece half the length.
Sometimes, especially among the memorial pieces, and above all
in the great Jacobite laments, we find evidence that Swinburne
was capable of conquering his defect; but the very shock of
surprise with which such pieces are read for the first time is proof
of its prevalence. He is a poet who, though he is fundamentally
intellectual, all too frequently yields to the charm of melodious
words.
For the purpose of " placing " a poet there is nothing more
useful than Matthew Arnold's well-known test of comparison with
lines of supreme beauty. Applied to Swinburne this test yields
remarkable results. Notwithstanding the classical element in him,
no one can doubt he is a poet of the romantic school. It is
that
therefore proper tocompare him with other romantic poets, and,
by preference, with the masters of romance in the nineteenth
century. As specimens of their work, Arnold might have chosen
such lines as Coleridge's
" For he on honey-dew hath fed.

And drunk the milk of Paradise,"
and Keats's
"Magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."
For verse such as this the ordinary terms of panegyric are in-
adequate. magic of the faery casements and of

It partakes of the
the land where the food is honey-dew. Only very great poets have
the secret of it, and even they only in moments of the highest
inspiratioii. If we ask where in Swinburne
to be found verse
is
with this, it is not easy to give an answer.

There are heights of
poetry in The Ancient Mariner and the Ode to a Nightingale
which are beyond his reach. Beside them, even such pieces as
Hesperia and the great chorus, " When the hounds of spring are
on winter's traces," seem like superb mechanism. In the exquisite
close of Tristram of Lyonesse Swinburne reaches the heights :—
" And over them, while death and life shall be,
The light and sound and darkness of the sea."
But on the whole it must be said that he is not master of the

magic which the greatest of the romanticists wield. With the
mysticism which he rejected, or rather which he did not possess,

there vanished an ineffable something which is of the essence of
poetry. Judged by this test, and in comparison with such masters,
the conclusion seems to be that his place will be high, yet somewhat
below the highest
Through Swinburne the influence of Rossetti passed to another
poet, who may perhaps be classed, though not without some
reserve, among the later Pre-Raphaelites. This was that little
appreciated man of genius, John Byrne Leicester Warren, Lord
de Tabley (1835-1895). Warren was one of those men who show
a peculiar sensitiveness to the influences of their time, and Pre-
Raphaelitism was neither the only nor the earliest force which
told upon him. He was senior to Swinburne at Oxford, and it was
not till some time after their college career was ended that the
two poets were made known to one another by Lord Houghton.
Tennyson and Browning left their mark upon him as well as the
Pre-Ra:phaelites. He himself declared that Tennyson appealed
to him more, both in youth and in middle age, than any other
poet ; and his verse bears out the statement. On the other hand,
many of his finest pieces are evidently inspired by Rossetti and
Swinburne ; and in his later years of authorship they were his
models, if he can be said to have worked on models at all. It is
impossible to ignore the influence of Atalanta in Calydon upon
Fhil'octetes and Orestes, or the Pre-Raphaelite note in such
gorgeously beautiful poems as the Hymn to Astarte and " Sire of
the rising Day."
Warren began he succeeded to the title
to write long before
by which he is now Between 1859 and 1862 he
best known.
published four volumes of poetry under the now, de plume of
Preston. They passed quite unnoticed ; and in fact they contain
very little which it would be desirable to disinter ; for the writer's
genius did not bloom early. Between 1863 and 1865 three more
vplumes foUo^ved under thp name of William La,ncaster. They
showed a remarkable advance on the preceding volumes, and
coiîtain a few pieces which are worthy to rank with their author's ;
best work. The Strange Parable is hardly to be matched for

intensity except in Browning ; and in conception it is absolutely
W. 36
original, owing nothing to Browning or anyone else. Many of
the pieces show the influence of Tennyson's English Idylls.
Still, fame was slow to come. In 1866 he tried a more ambitious
venture, the classical drama of Philoctetes. This was succeeded
in the following year by another classical drama, Orestes. In
their kind, thesetwo dramas are only surpassed, in recent times,
by Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon; but, great as is their
merit, tjiey are not the sort of work which was likely to win
popularity. The two next volumes. Rehearsals (1870) and Search-
ing the Net (1873), were published under Warren's own name.
In them we have the poet at his best, in the full maturity of his
powers. Yet the real genius displayed in these volumes remained
unrecognised many of the same pieces were republished in the
till
Poems Dramatic and Lyrical of 1893. Then at last the lovers of

poetry seemed to awake, and it might have been thought that the
fame of De Tabley was secure. Soon however they went con-
tentedly to sleep again, and the second series of Poems Dramatic
and Lyrical (1895) was received with comparative indifference.
In a few months the poet was safe from the sting of critical
censure or of neglect ; but the aftermath of his poetry was
gathered and published in a volume entitled Orpheus in Thrace
(1901), where pieces such as Napoleon the Great and y4 Song of
Despair prove that his faculty for writing powerful and beautiful
verse remained unimpaired to the last. Yet for nearly twenty
years this highly gifted writerhad been frozen into silence by
public neglect. he had private troubles X.o struggle
It is true
with; but the probability is that if he had been warmed and

encouraged by something like adequate appreciation of his real
greatness, De Tabley could and would have written much more
verse like A Woodland Grave, An Ocean Grave, Jael, Orpheus in
Hades, Napoleon, and the many other pieces in lyrical measures
or in dramatic monologue which we owe to him.
Lord de Tabley was a highly accomplished man, a botanist,
conchologist, numismatist and bibliophil, and was minutely and
accurately acquainted with every subject to which his interest
extended. The knowledge of a specialist in so many departments
might have proved a snare; but De Tabiey's verse is never
pedantic, never loaded with the technicalities of his marly pursuits.

It shows the careful and. habitual student of nature, but not to
the detriment of the poetry. Almost if not altogether uninfluenced
by Wordsworth, De Tabley is yet one of the most careful and
skilful and accurate among English poets of nature. His own
wide knowledge enabled him to detect the errors of others ; and
his fastidious taste objected to everything that was inconsistent with
fact. He eijibodies probably a greater amount of nature-lore in
his verse than any other English poet. " The poets' birds " and
" the poets' beasts " have been shown to be a somewhat conven-
tional collection. Much as in heraldry we have an everlasting

repetition of the eagle and the lion ; much as in heraldry we have
these creatures represented in certain conventional postures; so in
poetry, birds and beasts and flowers are a species of stage property.
The lark, the nightingale or the thrush sings,' the cuckoo ushers
in the spring, the rose blooms or blushes. De Tabley has no
But
conventions. There is a great variety of birds and flowers named
in his poetry; and the name is (iisually accompanied by some
descriptive epithet'or phrase indicative of the accurate observer.
Yet the epithet or phrase is always pictorial there is no invasion
:
of the realm of poetry by science.

Lordi de Tabley has^ two predominant notes, whose character
is accwately indicated by the title of the two collections Which
first secured for his name general recognition. He is either
lyrical or dramatic. The lyrical gift was of later development
in him than the dramatic and he was successful in blank verse
;
long before he had attained mastery in rhyming lyrical measures.

It is probably for this reason that some of his contemporaries,
who made acquaintance with his work as it was produced,

expressed doubt or disapproval of his lyrics, and advised him to
cultivate blank verse. Many would probably select Joel as the
culmination of his art, the greatest triumph he has achieved. It
isa wonderful piece, both in conception and in execution ; quite
worthy of Browning at his best. The Strange Parable, The
Knight in the Wood, a marvellous piece of impressionism, and
Orpheus in Haês are other examples illustrative of De Tabley's
mastery of blank verse. It is remarkably varied. Sometimes
36—2
we have the smoothness of the Tennysonian idyll, accompanied
with a simplicity which Tennyson only occasionally shows.
Sometimes we have a Browningesque abruptness. In the best
pieces, like Jaiel, there are suggestions now of one, now of the
other of the senior poets; but the dignity and force of the
piece are De Tabley's own. Occasionally we find specimens
of a gorgeousness of style which was probably suggestfed by,
but is certainly not copied from, the Pre-Raphaelites. Take for
example the opening of Orpheus in Hades :
"Ruler and regent, to whose dread domain

The mighty flood of life and human woe
Sends down the immeasurable drift of souls,
As silted sands are rolled to Neptune's deep,
I, even I, approach your awful realms,
Queen of oblivion, lady of Acheron, ,
To crave one captive."
The advice given to De Tabley that he should cultivate
blank verse was therefore fully justified by his success in that
difficult measure. Not many poets have used it so well ; fewer

still have handled it so variously. Yet it would have been a
thing to be regretted had he followed the advice in the spirit in
which it for it was meant to discourage him from
was intended ;
the lyric. But on a review of his whole work, taking the later
verse along with the earlier, it is not easy to say in which he ,
succeeded best. Possibly yae/ may be the most precious jewel in

his collection ; but the Hymn to Astarte, A Woodland Grave, An
Ocean Grave and Napoleon could ill be spared. In the first
named we have that same magnificence of style which distin-
guishes the blank-verse lines quoted above :
" Regent of love and pain.

Before whose ageless eyes
The nations pass like rain.
And thou abidest, vrise,
As dewdrops in a qup
To drink thy children up."
But in the lyric too De Tabley has more styles than one. Notice,
for instance, the lovely interludes, which vary and relieve the
tumult of Waterloo, the tragic pain of St Helena and the majestic

grief of the Invalides in the great Napoleon ode. Or take the
beautiful pathos of the closing stanzas of An Ocean Grave ;
" O sea-wall, mounded long and low,

Let Iron bounds be thine
Nor let the salt wave overflow
That breast I held divine.
Nor float its sea-weed to her hair,

Nor dim her eyes with sands;
No fluted cockle burrow where
Sleep folds her patient hands.
Tho' thy crest feel the wild sea's breath,

Tho' tide-weight tear thy root,
Oh, guard the treasure-house, where death
Has bound my darling mute.
* * * *
And, ah, dear heart, in thy still nest,

Resign this earth of woes,
Fo;-get the ardours of the west,
Neglect the morning glows.
Sleep, and forget all things but one.

Heard in each wave of sea,
How lonely all the years will run
Until I rest by thee."
In poetry, though the Pre-Raphaelite spirit has its root in

The Germ, the two publications by which principally the influence
was spread and its exact character detennined, are of much later
date. They are Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866) and

Rossetti's Poems, (1870); so that the true order of succession is
reversed in the order of publication, and in respect of the
"general reader" the influence of the younger man precedes that
of the elder. William Morris also helped to spread it. To the
influence of one or more of these three may be traced the poetry
of a considerable number of writers who are still living. Among
those who are living no longer, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, (1844-
188 1) is conspicuous for the blending of all three in one. His
Epic on Women (1870), Lays of France (1872), Music and Moon-
light (1874),and the posthumous Songs of a Worker (1881), are
all man of sensitive nature and of poetic tempera-
the work of a
ment rather than of great poetic power. Their charm is the
fluency and sweetness of the verse, their defect is the absence of
a proportionate weight of thought. O'Shaughnessy is essentially
a follower, if not an imitator, and he exaggerates the faults of his
models while he fails to capture their higher beauties. With him
may be named his brother-in-law, Philip Bourke Marston (1850-
1887), the son of Dr J. Westland Marston, who was the author of
Strathmore and other dramas, middling in quality, which once en-
joyed some reputation. Philip Marston's blindness and his early
death gave to his work a pathetic interest which disarmed criticism.
His Song-Tide and other Poems (1871), Allin All (1875) and Wind
Voices (1883) are gracefuland melodious, but somewhat thin.
There is more merit work of Roden Noel (1834-1894)
in the
who, considerably senior in years, lived less under the shadow of
the dominant school, and produced verse of greater strength and
individuality. For twenty years, from Beatrice (1868) to A
Modern Faust (1888), Noel worked strenuously and well; and on
the whole his career shows steady progress to the end. Probably
his best work Modern Faust; and next to that may be
is the
ranked A Little Child's Monument, where the sorrow of a personal
loss gives depth and reality to the lyrical verse., Unlike O'Shaugh-
nessy and Marston, Noel was strong in thought rather than in
style, and while they are thin he is apt to be crude. Frederick
Myers (1843-1 901), best known now for his work in psychical
research, likewise took a colour from the Pre-Raphaelites, but
turned their art to purposes of his own. A fine critic as well as a
poet, he is more often accomplished than inspired, and he not
infrequently falls into the error of adopting a style somewhat too
high-pitched for the thought.
The Pre-Raphaelite influence has been strong and widespread,
but not altogether wholesome. The tendency of the school
has been to over-value emotion and to disparage thought; and
on the lesser men the effect has been bad. It is strange that
a movement which professed to be a new return to nature, and

proclaimed as its principle minute and painstaking fidelity to
LATER DEVELOPMENTS 5^7
her, should, upon the whole, leave the impression of the highest
sophistication. The "nature" of the Pre-Raphaelites, in poetry,
is not really nature, but art or artifice. There is little of the
spirit of Wordsworth in them; indeed there is comparatively
Uttle of external, nature at all. Rossetti especially showed a
marked alienation from external nature. W. B. Scott declared
that he had never known him take any visible interest in a
natural spectacle; and in his biting way he speaks of Rossetti
"working out, with much elaboration and little inspiration, The
—
Stream's iSecret'^" a remark exactly in accord with the impression
produced by the poem. Neither is their humanity in the best
sense natural. There is something strained and forced in the
very earnestness which painters and poets alike strive to delineate.
Upon their men and women there seems to rest the weight of
centuries and millenniums of life and death ; they scarcely ever
exhibit the simple joy of living. There is not in the whole range
pf the Rossetti school a single note comparable with that of Brown-
ing's Saul: —
"Oh, our manhood's prime vigour no spirit feels waste,
!
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing, nor sinew unbraced.

Oh, the wild joys of living ! the leaping from rock up to rock
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, —the cool silver shock
Of the plunge in a poors living water, —the hunt of the bear.
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.
And the meal —the rich dates yellowed over with gold-dust divine,
And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher! the full draught of wine,
And the ship in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.

How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ
!
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy
In contrast with this the Pre-Raphaelite seems to feel that heart

and soul and sense must be absorbed in the struggle with forces
too strong for them, and the spirit crushed beneath burdens too
heavy to be borne. He has fin de .siecle written legibly over all
his work ; and
doubtless for this reason that he has proved
it is
an unfortunate though a potent attraction.
1 Scott a Autoiiiograpky, ii. 114.

§ 2. The Celtic Poets.
The Celtic revival, noticed in Chapter III, not only continued

but grew wider in its range as the century grew older. The
rising spirit of nationality encouraged it; and in later Pre-
Raphaelitism there is a good deal of the Celtic spirit. Both
Burne-Jones and William Morris came of Welsh blood. The
latter, however, was Teutonic rather than Celtic in sentiment,
and it was the Scandinavian race which he selected for glorifi-
cation.
Of the Irish writers the greatest, Edward FitzGerald (who,
though born in Suffolk, was of Irish parentage), has been dealt
with in the preceding chapter. It would be a rash criticism
which should ascribe to Celtic blood his peculiar qualities. The

younger Aubrey de Vere (1814-1902) is, again, Irish rather by
birth, and sometimes in his choice of subject, thain in tone of
mind. He is far too faithful a Wordsworthian to be adduced as
illustrating the Celtic spirit, except, indeed, in respect of the
mystical tone which occasionally marks his verse, and which is
supposed to be a Celtic trait.
De Vere's literary career extends as far back as 1842, when he

published, The Waldenses, which was followed a year later by
The Search after Proserpine. The great mass of his work how-
ever belongs to a much later date, his publications being most
frequent in the sixties and afterwards. It was then, in particular,
that he turned to Irish subjects, publishing, among other volumes.
The Sisters, Inisfail, and other Poems (1861), The Legends of
St Patrick (1872) and The Foray of Queen Meave (1882). His
works are of great variety, including essays in all the main
divisions of poetry —
lyrical, epic and dramatic. Everywhere it is
marred by a fatal tendency to diffusion, and not infrequently by
the sort of obscurity which comes from thought imperfectly
comprehended by the author himself. In his dramas Alexander
the Great (1874) and St Thomas of Canterbury (1876) he shows
to disadvantage in comparison with his much more vigorous
and powerful father. His sonnets and lyrics recall Wordsworth

too viyidly.
There is more of the Celt in Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-1886),
who has been elevated by panegyrists not over-wise to a sort of
laureateship of the Irish bards. In point of fact, he had not a
tithe of Mangan's poetical genius. The bulk of Ferguson's verse,
and especially his more ambitious productions, is late ; but from
his early years he contributed both prose and verse to The Dublin
University Magazine, and also to Blackwood. Both the amusing
tale of Father Tom and the Pope, which is sometimes erroneously
attributed to Maginn, and The Forging of the Anchor, Ferguson's

best known and poem, appeared in the latter periodical
best
Hi^ Lays of the Western Gael (1865), Congal (1872)1 and Poems
(1880) contain most of his poetical work. It is; presumably, on
Congal, a rhymed epic in five books, that Ferguson's admirers

base their claims for him. But mere bulk without inspiration
counts for little ; and his verse is usually commonplace, and often
gravely defective. Thus even in The Forging of the Anchor we
have in a single line the intolerable jingle of "ground," "around,"
and " bound." Two of them are part of the rhyme-scheme, but
for that very reason it was the more imperative to exclude the
third. Again, though false rhymes are common enough, they
rarely rival in atrocity the irhyming of " opal " with " bubble '' in
By the Isis Clearly Ferguson had a defective ear, and was
hardly the man to sustain himself through the long flight of
an epic.
Less ambitious in design and more limited in range, William

AUuigham (-1824-1889) is nevertheless far finer in touch than
Ferguson. He had a pretty light lyrical gift and a considerable
command of rhythm, succeeding best in the lilting strain, and
under the inspiration of the scenes of nature amidst which he was

brought up. " He sang,'' says his countryman Mr W. B. Yeats,
" BatUyshannon not Ireland^'"; and it may well be that the same
critic is right in the opinion that to " feel the entire fascination
of his [Allin^ham's] poetry, it is perhaps necessary to have spent
one's childhood... in one of those little seaboard Connaught
Fbets and Poetry of the Century,
57° THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
towns." There is a charming unsought naturalness in his little
he had, in his own words, "found" them floating here
lays, as if
and there, and remembered

" Each place
And moment of grace,
In summer or spring,
Winter or autumn,
By sun, moon, stars.
Or a coal in the bars,

In market or church.
Graveyard or dance.
Where they came without search,
Were found as by chance."
This sort of inspiration is genuine enough of its kind. But

AUingham could not sustain himself through a long poem, and
his Laurence Bloomfield {i?,6/i^ is tedious. Naturally too when
the source of the inspiration was removed the song ceased.
AUingham added little of value after the Poems (1850) and the
Day and Night Songs (1854).
Arthur O'Shaughnessy has been mentioned above, and only a
few others of the Irish poets demand brief notice. The Poems
(1891) of the historian Lecky are worthy of mention for their
poetic feeling and happy imagery as well as for the greatness of
the writer's work in prose. Denis Florence MacCarthy (1817-
1882), whose translation of Calderon is strongly commended
by Ticknor, Ellen O'Leary (1831-1889), the poet of the
Fenians, Thomas D'Arcy McGee (1825-1868), who was assas-
sinated on suspicion of treason to their cause, and Robert

Dwyer Joyce (1830-1883), whose Deirdre (1876) was among
the most popular poems of its class, can merely be named.
J. Boyle
O'Reilly (1844-1890) belonged to a somewhat later
day, and though he was by birth an Irishman, his work was
executed in America, where he took refuge after his escape from
penal servitude. But Ireland was first in his thoughts always,
and the Exile of the Gael finely expresses a septiment felt by
thousands who cannot sing. Far superior to any and all of these
writers was the brilliant and unhappy Oscar Wilde, who will
be noticed elsewhere.
LATER DEVELOPMENTS 57I
Much of the work of the men who are claimed as " poets " of
the Irish national movement is scattered through the columns of
obscure magazines and newspapers, and only those who have
had the opportunity and the patience to examine the files of these
journals are fully entitled to pronounce a judgment upop it but ;
the collections which have been made seem to show that the
value of the literature of the movement has been greatly over-
estimated. Outside Mangan's work there is little which makes
the reader feel that he is in the presence of a poet. But while
it is not great, this Irish verse presents two features which attest
its genuineness, and the grip which the movement had upon the
people. In the first place, it tends to the ballad form, and is

largely founded upon memories cherished among the peasantry.
And in all ages the ballad has been the poetry of the people.
Among the Irish writers, almost in proportion to the prevalence
of the more complex and ambitious forms of verse —the sonnet,
the epic, &c.—is the distance from the true national movement.
In the second place, in such collections as Duffy's Ballad Poetry
0/ Ireland there axe found an unusual number of pieces, ofteri of
real merit, by authors who are known only as the writers of one,
or two, or three poems. No doubt the reason is that the vivid
iiiterest of the national theme inspired men who were not normally
poetical. Wolfe (who, as it happens, was an Irishman) is re-
membered one poem, probably because he only on one

for only
occasion found a theme which lifted him above himself. Similarly,
thfe spirited "Who fears to speak of '98?" is the work of a man^
not Otherwise known to the muses.

For a reason already indicated, the Welsh Celt had little to
say for himself in English verse. His chief representative in that
torigue is Sir Lewis Mortis (1833-1907), who has enjoyed an
astonishing popularity. His Epic of Hades (1876-1877) has gone
through something like forty editions ; and his Songs of two
Worlds (1871-1875), Songs Unsung (1883), Gyna (1886) and
Songs of Britain (1887) have all been bought and presumably
read by many thousands. But popularity is not always a test of
1 Dr J. K. iDgram.
the merit of the poet, and it is probable that Lewis Morris's
reputation will fade before many years have passed. His facility
was a snare to him.

''
He could, and he did, turn off verses
to order, or without order, on all sorts of occasions; and,

especidly in the Principality, no public event was, in the
bard's estimation, complete without an ode by Sir Lewis Morris.
He certainly cheapened the Muse. The quality of his work,
never very high, declined.
' The ideas embodied in it became
ordinary in the extreme, and they were stretched to the last
point of tenuity. He was probably read principally by those

who prefer verse which makes no great demands upon thought.
But the period is remarkable for the success with which the
Welshman's cousin, the Manxman, has vindicated his place in
the national literature, both in verse and prose. The laureate
of the little island is Thomas Edward Brown (1830-1897), whose
breezy Po'csUe Yarns (1881) entitle him to no mean place among
the writers of dialect, while his bright and racy Letters (1900) show
that he could, when he chose, write classical English vigorously and
well. Brown's other publications were all more or less in the vein
of the Fo'cs'le Yarns. He chose for his field his native island,
which he knew thoroughly ; and his yarns are remarkable for the
dramatic truth and vigour of the characters they depict. Not
only the riarrator himself, Tom Baynes, but all who are brought
on the scene, parson, or doctor, or sailor, are vividly realised and
portrayed. Brown has frequent flashes of real poetic fire, and
his rank as a narrator in verse is high. A certainj tendency to
garrulity is explained by the character of the person into whose
mouth the tales are put; but this does not justify the frequent
padding of lines with meaningless repetitions and exclamations.
These grow wearisome, and instead of giving verisimilitude, they
only mar the humour and insight which really distinguish thp
yarns.
Among the Scottish Celts, Charles Mackay (i8r4-i889) wrote
too much to write very well. His verse is brimful of spirit and
energy, but in spite of the fact that he was himself a musician
and composer, it has a thin unattractive tinkle. John Stuart
Blackie (1809-1895) deserves notice for the work he accom-
plished in promoting the study of Celtic literature, and for

his advocacy of the Highlands, men and mountains alike, in
season and out of season. He deserves notice, moreover, for
the deep impression of his personality which he left, though it
was largely by a somewhat boisterous eccentricity that he did it.
But, though he has verve in abundance, Blackie too lacks the

incommunicable something which makes the poet. He is one
of those who seem by a hair's breadth. Never-
to miss genius
theless, one specimen ofwork may be quoted, as much for
his
the sake of the subject as of the poet. No more vigorous word
was uttered on the death of Carlyle, and few more wise, than
Blackie's :
"Thou wert a Titan, but a Titan tossed

With wild tumultuous heavings in thy breast,
And fancy-fevered, and cool judgment lost
In mighty maelstroms of divine unrest.
What souls were drugged with doubt in sceptic time
Thy cry disturbed into believing life,
And fools that raved in prose or writhed in rhyme
Were sharply surgeoned by thy needful knife
But if there were who in this stprm of things
Sighed for sweet calm, and in this dark for light,
And in this jar for the wise Muse that sings

Allwrong into the ordered ranks of right,
i
I
They thanked not thee, who didst assault their brain
With thunder-claps and water-spouts for fain."
Greater in literature is the name of George MacDonald (r824-

19,05), who, thoughbest known as a novelist, would deserve notice
as a poet too, were it only for the sake of the exquisite lines,
"Where did you come from, Baby dear?" But MacDonald
wrote much besides that is well worthy of attention. His first
volume, Within and Without^ a Dramatic Poem (1855), by its
concentration upon the history of a soul recalls Browning. It was
followed by another volume. Poems (1857), and from time to
time fresh pieces were added until the bulk was sufficient to fill
two considerable volumes. These poems are marked by a sim-
plicity of manner which makes the author particularly successful
in pieces for and about children. is more
But the simplicity
apparent than real ; for poems are steeped in
nearly all the
mysticism. In such pieces as Lovis Ordeal and the Diary of
an Old 5o«/ there is a depth and strength such as we rarely find
in religious verse. For to that category nearly all MacDonald's
best work belongs, in spirit, if not outwardly ; and if he is less
perfect than Christina Rossetti or Cardinal Newman, he is
hardly, less impressive.

There remains one Celt of the most varied gifts, and of genius
which Qught to be unquestionable, though it has been questioned—
Robert Buchanan (1841-1901). Of blood half Scotch, quarter
Welsh and quarter English, Buchanan, though born in England,
as it were adopted Scotland for his country. He lived and was
educated there for about ten years ; by his choice of a subject
for one of the most ambitious of his poems he proclaimed himself
of the Celtic school; and by his power he vindicated his right
to be considered its head.
As the son of a Glasgow journalist, Buchanan may be said to
have been born on the fringe of literature; but ambition and a
well-founded consciousness of high gifts impelled him towards the
centre. Even from boyhood he was conscious of the inspiration

of the poet. Like many another Scot of talent, he felt his sur-
roundings to be too narrow for him : the world was his oyster and
London the place where the oyster must be opened. To this
decision he was helped by the friendship he had formed with

David Gray (1838— 1861), whose three years' seniority were enough
to give him considerable influence over a character stronger than
his own. The two set out in i860 for the metropolis, Gray to —
creep home and die in the following year, Buchanan to fight a
loîg hard battle, to write poems, dramas and novels, and to tell
simply, tastefuUyand beautifully the pathetic story of his friend'slifei

The short memoir of David Gray is a model of what a
biography ought to be. There are few facts to record, but the
story of the Kirkintilloch weaver's poet-son is lull of human
itrterest, and in some seventy or Buchanan gives
eighty pages
a vivid impression of character and talent. Gray had a very
cpflsiderable, perhaps he had even a great, poetic gift "There
was in him," says Monckton Milnes, "the making of a great

man ; but poor Gray did not live to prove the soundness of
''
this judgment. Soon after he went to London he caught

through exposure a cold which sowed the seeds of consumption,
and he died at the age of twenty-three. Buchanan shows that
Gray was no " morbid, unwholesome young gentleman, without
natural weaknesses —
a kind of aqueous Henry Kirke White,
brandied faintly with ambition " ; but it is also evident from
his sketch that there was a certain want of stability in Grass's
character, which, notwithstanding his ambition, might have proved
disastrous. Gray's principal poem, T/ie Luggie, was published after
his death ; he had seen a proof-sheet just the day before he
died. It is a blank-verse piece of some 1200 lines, not so
much descriptive of the little stream from which the name is
taken, as inspired by its scenery. It cannot have been com-

posed without some thought of the work of Thomson, and
there are occasional echoes of him, of Keats and of Wordsworth.
There is also evidence of the immaturity of the writer, and
perhaps of the fact that the hand of death was on him as he
wrote; but nevertheless The Luggie is the work of a poetic
spirit, keenly sensitive to the beauties of nature. The series of
sonnets. In the —
Shadows a pathetic record of the poet's thoughts
and feelings as the gloom of death deepened around him are —
richer and stronger.
Robert Buchanan was a man of remarkable independence of
mind. There is even something defiant in his independence:
"A man's a man for a' that" may be sung with a certain blatancy.
And as the impulse to write came to him from the sense that he
had something to say which the poets of the time either could not
or would not say, it was to be expected that he would show
himself even aggressively self-reliant. And so, on the whole, he
does. But nevertheless even Buchanan had to pass through his
period of initiation. His first volume of verse, entitled Under-
tones (1864), is essentially imitative. It consists chiefly of studies
work suggested to him doubtless by
of classical themes, a sort of
Tennyson and Arnold, but one which was ill calculated to bring
out his own strength.
Next year came the Idyls and Legends of Ittverburn, where

Buchanan found his true field, or rather one of his true fields,
and made an immense stride upwards. There are still crudities
and evidences of imperfect training; and sometimes, in the
original edition, there were even gross solecisms. But the collec-
tion as- a whole is excellent. The poems are written with great
force and with admirable lucidity, often with pathos, sometimeis
with remarkable dramatic power. Willie Baird is a touching
little tale; The Engliih Huswife's Gossip is satisfactory evidence
of the author's power to realise and to portray character; Poet
Andrew owes its pathos to the thought of poor Gray. Elsewhere
in his works two other pieces, To the Luggie and To David in
Heaven, are avowedly dedicated to Gray's memory. It is notice-
able that in the Idyls and Legends of Inverburn, the lyrical legends
are less successful than the idyls. Buchanan had not yet attained
mastery over lyrical measures.
Buchanan's next volume, London Poems (1866), broke fresh
ground; but in North Coast and other Poems (1868) he reverted
once moire to something like the Inverburn poems. These and
the North (ôast Poems belong to a type of verse which he never
abandoned and in which not a little of his best work was done.
Pieces like The Scaith 0' Bartie and Meg Blane are among the
best of modern legendary and ballad poems. Buchanan tells his
story rapidly ^nd impressively, bringing both scene and actors
vividly before the eye. Again, in the powerful and affecting
ballad, The Lights of Leith, the hopes and fears of the sailor as he
draws near the shore and prepares to enter his old mother's hut
are depicted with the graphic power of a true dramatist. The
story is almost too painful, but it is " an ower true tale,'' and it is
well that we should be reminded still that such things were once
done, in th^ name of religion.
Buchanan most Scottish of all recent poets
is the his :
nationality one of his distinguishing marks, the one by which

is
perhaps his work can feest be discriminated frpm that of any of

his contemporaries. No other contemporary Scotchman, after
the death of Alexander Smith, had a mind so poetic; and nobody
but a Scotchman or a native of the North of England could have
written the Inverbum and the North Coast Poems. It is not

merely a matter of dialect with Buchanan. He could use dialect
withskill ; but the brand of nationality is on many of his poems
which are written in pure English. We see it in the scenery and

in the characters. The coast is the east coast of Scotland, the
people are Scotch sailors, Scotch peasants and shepherds, and
their mothers and wives and
sisters. Another national note of a
sounded in The Book of Orm ; but in the
very different quality is
group of poems now under consideration the basis, as has been

hinted, is realism. It is, however, a realism warmed by imagina-
tion, and occasionally there are even hints of mysticism, fore-

shadowing The Book of Orm.
The London Poems, different as is their setting from that of
these poems of the North, have more kinship with them than is
at first sight apparent. The idyllic and legendary elements are
gone, and the realism is more pronounced ; but the tales are still
touched and lit with imagination which lifts them out of the
gutters of the " mean streets " wherein they are enacted, and sets
them on a higher plane than that of the more recent stories of
sordid London life. Buchanan was always poetic in mind, and
he could never descend to such depths. The conclusion of
Tiger Bay expresses the spirit which inspires the London Poems.
The human in the denS of London vice is hardly distinguishable
from the bestial in the Indian jungle ; but nevertheless in the
former there is just the spark of soul which, fanned and cherished;
will burn away the bestial :
"God said, moreover: 'The spark shall grow

•
'Tis blest, it gathers, its flame shall lighten.
Bless it and nurse it —let it brighten 1
Tis scattered abroad, 'tis a Seed I sow.

And the seed is a Soul, and the Soul is the Human:
And it lighteth the face with a sign and a flame.
Not unto beasts have I given the same.
But to man and to woman.
Mark ! mark I
The. light shall scatter the dark :
Where murmur the Wind and the Rain,

Where the jungle darkens the plain.
And in street and lane.'
W. 37
._...So feint, so dim, so sad to seeing,
Behold it burning Only a spark,!
!
So feint as yet, and so dim to mark,

In the tigress-eyes of the human being.
Fan it, feed it, in love and duty.
Track it, watch it in every place,
Till it burns the bestial frame and face

To its own dim beauty.
Mark I mark I
A spark that grows in the dark

A spark that burns in the brain
Spite of the Wind and the Rain,
Spite of the Curse and the Stain
Over the Sea and the Plain
And in street and lane."
Though there is as much power in these London Poems as in
the poems of the North Country, they are not so pleasant to

read ; and as pleasure is one of the ends of poetry, they are for
that reason less poetical. The sordid streets and dens are not
more real than the wild northern coast and the lonely glens, while
they are infinitely less sweet and wholesome. The inhabitants of
those streets are not more, rather they are less,human than the
fishermen and rustics. Nell is full of strength ; but it is not the
kind of poem we elect to remember. If it abides in the memory
itdoes so by reason of its force, uninvited. Though none of the
London Poems is superior to iV^//, some of the others are more
attractive. In spite of its sordidness, Zz'iTc is beautiful from its
pathos. The Little Milliner is a London love-tale, very simply

and pleasingly told. Edward Crowhurst has pathos of another
sort. It is a wonderfully terse and strong narrative of the life of
a labourer-poet, who is flattered, patronised, corrupted, neglected,
and at last becomes mad.
embodies many of the facts of the
It
life of John Clare, who was evidently in Buchanan's mind, with,
perhaps, Burns and his own friend Gray. His imagination had
been rendered sensitive by what he had witnessed in the case of
Gray, and the idea of "mighty poets in their misery dead"
touched it keenly.
From these groups of poems it is easy to detect the difference
between Buchanan and the poets who reigned in his early day.
It is a wide one. His cry is, back to nature and reality ; not to
nature as she is when cultivated and trimmed and pruned by man,
nor to human character as it is when smoothed and polished by
education and convention; but to nature free and wild, to
characters unsophisticated, strong of passion, rude and forcible
of speech,
'
' I have wrought
No irose and passion-flower
garland of the
Grown a careful garden in the sun;
in
But I have gathered samphire dizzily,
Close to the hollow roaring of a sea."
Buchanan had no quarrel with the classical poets for a moment, :
as we have seen, he even followed their lead, though afterwards

he knew that their method was wrong for him. But he had a
quarrel with the Pre-Raphaelite poets ; and it is probably their
"careful garden in the sun" to which he refers in these lines.
His critical instinct was not wrong in suggesting to him the sense
of an irreconcilable difference between himself and the Pre-
Raphaelites, for he and they are in spirit poles asunder. But he
would have done well to reflect that Parnassus is a mountain of
more than one peak and of innumerable slopes and ridges,
There might be room for them to fulfil their mission as well as
for him —
the word is appropriate, for both Buchanan and the
Pre-Raphaelites are rather obviously conscious of a mission.
The Northern poems and the London poems constitute two
great sections Buchanan's work, but his restless intellect
of
impelled him to try many other things. Napoleon Fallen (1871)
was among his failures. In Saint Abe and his Seven Wives (1872)
and in White Rose and Red (1873) he crossed the Atlantic for his
subject. But of course he could not possess that intimacy of
knowledge and depth of sympathy which mark his North Country
poems. E. C. Stedman, who on this point speaks with authority,
declares that Buchanan " has succeeded only in being faithful to
a British ideal of American frontier life." These two poems were
published anonymously and the secret of their authorship was
very carefully guarded. Buchanan was then under the cloud
37—2
caused by his virulent attack upon Rossetti in The Fleshly School
of Poetry, and he believed that only under the veil of anonymity
could he hope to receive fair treatment from the critics. The
two poems certainly were welcomed with unusual warmth; but
this might be due to the fact that they are stories in verse, lucidly
and vigorously told.

In the opinion of many, however, Buchanan achieved his
highest triumphs in the Celtic poems, and The Book
especially in
of Orm (1870), where the quondam realist showed himself a

pronounced mystic. Buchanan was conscious of the Highland
blood in his veins : he was a clansman, a Celt ; and
it was this
clan-feeling which hurried him into the Celtic Revival, to which

his principal contribution was this Book of Orm.
Whatever may be the value of the distinction between the Celtic
and the Teutonic elements in English literature, what Buchanan
himself regarded as the Celtic element in this poem is plain
enough. The poet has declared that the object of The Book of
Orm is to " vindicate the God to man." But the phrase
ways of
is far too clear and definite. We
no longer know the Deity as we
know "the man in the next street"; and a reasoned justification like
that of Milton or that of Pope would be out of place, and is not
attempted, in Buchanan's poem. But still, beneath the veil of
mysticism there dimly glimmer those great problems of life and
death which occupied and perplexed Tennyson and Browning as
well as Buchanan.
Buchanan sent forth The Book of Orm as an avowed contri-
bution to racial poetry. Perhaps he was too conscious and
deliberate in his purpose to be wholly natural. The keynote is
struck in the prefatory lines :
"Read these faint rimes of Mystery,

O home and o'er the sea;
Celt, at
—
The bond is loosed the poor are free—
The world's great future rests with thee i
Till the soil —bid cities rise-
Be strong, O Celt — be be wise^
rich,
But still, with those divine grave eyes,

Respect the realm of Mysteries."
The whole poem is in the same spirit. The author evidently

regarded mysticism as the essence of the Celtic contribution to
poetry ; and The Book of Orm is profoundly mystical. In this lies
at once its charm and, perhaps, its defect, Nothing makes a greater
draught upon the poetical powers than mysticism : it is so difiScult
tokeep it from passing into mistiness, Buchanan's powers were
great, but possibly not quite great enough for his purpose. For
one thing, he is not sufficiently a master of metre and rhythm
for in proportion as the poet leaves the world of hard fact /behind
him, the sensuous enchantments of verse gain importance. Where
there is , a definite story, or a definite thought addressed to the
understanding, the simpler harmonies of verse will suffice. Pope's
couplets are nearly as good as their kind could be made. But
Tennyson's Lotos-Eaters and Coleridge's Christabel demand a
very much more subtle rhythm. In this respect Buchanan was a
competent but not a great artist. There is a roughness, often
intuitional, but, nevertheless unpleasing, in the verse oi The Soqk
of Orm.
Perhaps too Buchanan was not altogether great enough in
thought ; and he was certainly not spontaneous enough in his use
of the supernatural. He could call spirits from the vasty deep ;
but the depth from which they came was not so profound as that
from which certain mere Teutons have drawn. Sometimes (con-
spicuously in the Prayer from the Deeps) there is too plain a
revelation of the modern critical spirit, which harmonises ill with
mysticism. On the other hand, the section to which this prayer
belongs. The Devits Mystics, is as a whole strongly conceived
and strongly written ; and still more powerful is The Vision of the
Man Accurst.
Another group of the Celtic poems, the Coruisken Sonnets, are
all fine, and some of them are exceptionally beautiful. Among the
best are The Hills on their Thrones, King Blaabhein and Blaab-
hein in the J/w/j, -^titles which remind the reader that Alexander
Smith found inspiration in the same scenes. Buchanan attempts
no transcript of scenery ; but he achieves something far greater, a
rendering of its spirit.
The Vision of the Man Accurst deals with a kind of theme in

the treatment of which Buchanan was a master. It is akin to, but
stronger and more The Ballad of Judas Iscariot.
original than,
Though the latter is essentially Buchanan's own, yet once and
again the poet draws hints from the past. Not only is it pervaded
with the spirit of the old ballads, but there are hints from Hood's
Eugene Aram, and from Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. There are
no such echoes in The Vision of the Man Accurst ; and in depth
and force as well as in originality that poem seems to be the greater
of the two.
For the first ten years of his literary life Buchanan's work had
bfeen mainly poetical ; but shortly after the publication of White
•
Rose and Red he became conspicuous both as a writer for the

stage, in which capacity he won fanle and money, and as the author
of a series of novels bearing the mark of his strong personality and
his earnestness of purpose. These activities necessarily drew his
attention away from verse ; but, though he was convinced that the
public did not want poetry and would not reward the poet, the old
love survived, and the poetic output of the later period is in the
aggregate large; Some of it is as good as anything he ever wrote,
_
but on the whole the poet will take his place rather by virtue
of his earlier than of his later work. Like many others, he had
the ambition to write long poems ; and he thought, erroneously,
that it was pure perversity or dislike of poetry as such on the part
of the public, that made his more ambitious ventures less suc-
cessful than some of the shorter pieces. Though his Balder the
Beautiful : A Song of Divine Death (1877) contains some fine
poetry (best of all, perhaps, the Proem to his wife), it is not a well-
knit whole. Buchanan justly claimed for it the praise of originality
for it owes little to what he called " the vulgar myths of the Edda."
But this phrase suggests a question. Surely it must be wrong to
pour new wine into old bottles, thinking all the time that the bottles
are worthless ; and the reason why Buchanan's " song of divine
death " is unsatisfactory may perhaps be found in this incongruity
between the original and that which is fashioned from it.
Problems such as that indicated by the sub-title were at this
period occupying much of Buchanan's attention, and they pro-
foundly influenced his prose as well as his verse. He had been
bred in ignorance of the Creeds of the Churches, for his father was
a sceptic and a follower of Robert Owen the Socialist. Buchanan
had therefore no " Hebrew old clothes " to cast off; on the contrary,
it was in manhood that he gradually familiarised himself with, and
in some degree adopted, conceptions which the child generally

drinks in with its But he never approached what
mother's milk.
is commonly regarded as orthodoxy, and, what is much more serious,
he never seems to have been able to make up his own mind. " If"
he writes on the death of his wife to his friend, Roden Noel, " j/this
parting is only for a time, I see its blessedness —but if, as I dread
and fear, it is a parting forever, what then ? " In the following year
"^
he dedicated his poems to his dead wife, " weeping and sorrowing,
yet in sure and certain hope of a blessed resurrection"." This
looks like conviction ; but later we come again upon evidences of
doubt. Buchanan's next long poem, The City of Dream (1888), an
allegory dedicated " to the sainted spirit of John Bunyan," is the
story of the pilgrimage of Ishmael (Buchanan himself) to seek the
heavenly city. The enough
picture of Christopolis shows clearly
that the hand of Ishmael was against most men, and suggests why
most men's hands were against him. It is no reproach to the poet
that he does not answer the unanswerable. A work like The City
of Dream nriust, in the nature of things, be vague and inconclusive.
But it is not only inconclusive, it is unsuggestive ; the author
himself is in the mist, and naturally he cannot lead the reader into
sunlightl The curious catechism he constructed with reference to
The Wandering jew (1893) illustrates the confusion of his mind.
There be declares his belief in a future life ; but then he adds
" It is only a belief, not a certainty, a hope, a faith even, not a
reality. The testimony of all Science is against it'."
The Wandering Jew is the most remarkable and by far the most
intelligible of the poems of this class. Though it was begun long
before the others, it was the last to be published. As early as
1866 Buchanan had written part of it, and he had finished it some
years before its publication. The reason was not doubt as to its
— —
value it was "his favourite child" but a fixed idea that it would
1 ^s.y'& Robert Buchanan, 221. " ibid. * ibid. 264.

prove the end of his career. The fundamental conception of a
Christ old and grey, worn and weary, is impressive and pathetic.
The poet finds ample material to support his thesis that the pro-
fessed followers of Christ have, under the cloak of his name, wrought
all the sins and cruelties most abhorrent to his nature. Thus he
explains the weariness and sadness of the aged figure and makes
intelligible his concluding prayer for death and the answer of the
Judge :—
" Nay I
Death that brought peace thyself didst seek to slay

Death that was merciful and very fair, •
,
Sweet dove-eyed Death that hush'd the Earth's despair,

Death that shed balm on tirM eyes like thine,
Death that was Lord of Life and all Divine,
Thou didst deny us, offering instead
The Soul's fierce famine that can ne'er be fed
Death shall abide to bless all things that be.
But evermore shall turn aside from thee."
Buchanan was the possessor of one more talent whip,h, in

justice to him, must still be noticed. He had the gift of humour
in a higher degree than any other recent poet except Mr Rudyard
Kipling. Sai'ni Abe and White Rose and Red are richly humorous
so are a number of the North Country poems. Kitty Kemble
blends satire with humour, and The Wedding of Shon Maclean has
a wild rollick unequalled since Outram's Law Lyrics. It, might
be compared' to a scene from Charles O'Malley, in verse, and
transferred from the Irish bogs to the Highland mountains.
The range of Buchanan is such as only an extraordinary spirit
could have compassed. And to estimate him aright we must also
take account of his independence. This is the secret of his com-
bative career. He both felt himself to be arid Called himself an Ish-
mael, and he struck out fiercely against those whose ha,nd he believed
to be raised against him. Even where he adopted current forms
of verse, he usedthem in a way of his own. He wrote idylls in an
age of idylls; but his have far more of inother earth about them
than the Tennysonian idylls. Buchanan's are related to these as
his countryman Allan Ramsay's pastoral is related to the pastorals
LATER DEVELOPMENTS 58$
of Pope. In his own way Buchanan was a leader of a new return

to nature. He was spokesman for a generation rising into man-
hood when the impulse of the early Victorian poets was beginning
to fail, and when their ideals were no longer accepted as all that
the heart could desire. The North Country and the London
poems were his attempt to satisfy the want, and of all that were
made it was the one which offered most hope. The principal
alternatives were such Neo-Pre-Raphaelitism as we find in
O'Shaughiiessy, and the graceful society verse of Mr Austin
Dobson and, his followers. But society verse can never be the
staple of great poetry ; and Pre-Raphaelitism carried within it from
the start the seeds of decay. A sense of the preciosity, even of
the masters, roused Buchanan's wrath ; and he made it his business
tocombat this and all the other signs of decadence. But, while
Buchanan himself had imitators, he founded no great school.
This was partly owing to his fault, or rather his insufficiency. He
could not fuse the elements of greatness that were in him. Had
he been able to weld the mysticism of Orm with the realism of
the London Poems, the result would have been something greater
than English literature has produced in recent years. As it is,
—
they stand apart opposite shores separated by a gulf across
which Buchanan has built no bridge.
§ 3. The Poetry of Pessimism.
In the poetry of the nineteenth century we have seen repre-

sented nearly every shade of faith and doubt and indifference;
but there still remains the phase of blank disbelief and despair
and happens that that too has found consummate expression in

it
the verse of one of the greatest and one of the least appreciated of
recent poets. James Thomson (1834-1882), author of The City
of Dreadful Night, is, to a superficial view, a bundle of contradic-
tions —a man of unfeigned friendliness and attractive geniality, yet
emphatically the poet of gloom and despair; one who disbelieved
in human progress, yet who spent great part of his life in writing,
often without pay, for periodicals whose end was to further human
progress ; one of the most independent and original of men, yet
one who echoes in his verse a greater number of other poets than
almost any of his contemporaries. He has been called the English
Poe and the English Leopardi. The initials, B. V. (Bysshe VanoHs),
under which he wrote, proclaim his kinship to Shelley and Novalis
(of which name Vanolis is an anagram). And he has eithe?
avowed, or there is evident in his work, some indebtedness to men
so different as Heine, a number of whose poems he translated,
Dante, whose imagination seems, in lower power, to be re-incarnate
in him, De Quincey, both the Brownings, and his namesake and
countryman, James Thomson, the poet of The Seasons and of The
Castle of Indolence. If the later Thomson had been a man of weak
or illogical intellect, if he had not known his own mind, or if he
had been insincere, much of this would have been susceptible of
an easy explanation. But he was none of these things. He knew
very definitely what he thought and meant, and he sacrificed all
chance of worldly advancement for the privilege of being himself
and speaking out. The solution of such enigmas must be sought
in Thomson's parentage and life; and, luckless in almost every
other respect; he has been fortunate in his biographer, Mr H. S.
Salt, and his editor, Mr B. Dobell, who have written of him with
sympathy and admiration, yet without the vice of special pleading

and groundless panegyric into which admiring biographers and
editors so easily fall.
James Thomson was the son of a sailor, a mate in the merchant

service, who was disabled by paralysis when the boy was only six
years old. The father lived till 1853, but was unable after his
illness to provide for his family, which consequently fell into
poverty. James Thomson was therefore admitted to the Royal

Caledonian Asylum, where he was educated till 1850. Shortly
after his admission his mother died. In later days James Thom-
son found no place in his scheme of thought for evolution or
heredity; if he had, he would have been less gloomy. Yet there
is good reason to believe that he himself strikingly illustrated the
law of inheritance from both the paternal and the maternal strain.
His father, says Mr Salt, "is described by those who knew him
personally as a delightful' companion, bright and cheerful in dis-
position, reading and reciting well, fond of music, and singing a

good song in congenial society.'' After his misfortune the elder
Thomson is said to have fallen into habits of intemperance ; and
though Mr Salt says that " no direct evidence of such habits is
discoverable," he adds that " Thomson once told a friend, in after

years, that intemperance ran in the family, and that * nearly all the
members of it who had brains, especially a gifted aunt of his, fell
victims to its power.' " Of the mother we are told that she was
"a deeply religious woman of the Irvingite faith, whose nature,
unlike that of her husband, seems to have been of a somewhat
melancholy cast." Melancholy and mystical religion on the one
side, on the other geniality plus a hereditary
tendency to alcohol,
—there is so much of the poet James Thomson here that we may
reasonably suppose the superficial contradictions of his character
and career to be due to these divergent tendencies.
Thomson became an army schoolmaster, and for about a year
and a half (1851-1853) filled the post of assistant-teacher at
Ballincbllig near Cork,where he fell in love with a beautiful girl
named Matilda Weller, whose death in 1853 left a profound and
lasting impression upon him. Some have traced his pessimism
to this bereavement ; and it is certain that he cherished the girl's
memory as. long as and that many passages in his verse

he lived,
are inspired by this early love. At Ballincollig too Thomson made

the acquaintance of Charles Bradlaugh, who helped him to reach
those negative conclusions towards which he was slowly moving.
On his dismissal from the army, in 1862, for a trivial offence,
Thomson resided with Bradlaugh, to whose paper. The National
Reformer, he was already a contributor ; and Bradlaugh also pro-
cured him a clerkship in a solicitor's office. Henceforth Thomson
held a succession of clerkships and secretaryships, but found no
sure and lasting employment. Sheer ill-luck accounted for much;
but probably the intemperance which grew upon him would
explain still more. It was doubtless at the root of the unhappy
misunderstanding which in 1875 ended his long connexion with
Bradlaugh. Before that end came Thomson had contributed to
The National Reformer many of his best. pieces, including The
City of Dreadful Night, which appeared in its columns in 1874.
The quarrel with Bradlaugh was disastrous to Thomson. For
"seven songless years" The City of Dreadful Nighf^f^xott
after
no poetry except a few lyrics at long intervals. He had no regular

employment, his best literary connexion was broken, and he moved
rapidly towards the end now inevitable. Just before the close,
stimulated by the success of The City of Dreadful Night, and other
Poems (t88o) and Vane's Story, Weddah and Om-el-Bonain, and
other Poems (1880), Thomson once more began to write verse, and
in the last few ,months of his life he produced some of the finest
among his shorter pieces. But it was only a parting gleam. On

June 3, 1882, after "four terrible weeks of intemperance, home-
lessness and desperation \" James Thomson died in University
Hospital, London, whither he had been removed from the rooms
of his friend, the blind poet Philip Bourke Marston.
All the volumes bearing Thomson's name are late publications.
Besides those already mentioned they are Essays and Phantasies
—
(t88i) he was an admirable writer of poetic and also of satiric
—
prose and the posthumous volume, A Voice from the Nile, and
other Poems (1884). His writings are, however, the work of some
twenty-five or twenty- six years, from 1856 to 1882; and especially,
as his biographer points out, of those years, 1862 to 1875, when
his connexion with The National Reformer was closest. His three
chief poems, The City of Dreadful Night, Weddah (1866-1867)
and Van^s Story (1864), all belong to these years; and so does
his prose masterpiece, A Lady of Sorrow (1862-1864).
There can be no doubt that the dominant note in Thomson is
the note of pessimism, and the masterpiece in which he has most
impressively sounded it is The City of Dreadful Night. It is a
relatively late poem : Thomson was forty years of age at its publi-
cation and the idea is natural that the sombre philosophy it
;
embodies must have been the product of years and: multiplied

disappointments. A consideration of dates shows that there is
really very little ground for such a supposition. Ten years before
The City of Dreadful Night, in the concluding part oi'A Lady of
Sorrow, we meet with what Thomson's biographer justly calls "the
prose counterpart " of that poem ; and again, before that, in The
1 Salt's Life of Thomson, i8o.
Doom of a City (1859), we have an earlier and cruder treatment

of the central idea of The City of Dreadful Night. In the earlier
poem the abode of humanity is a city of ghastly petrified figures
in the later and greater one it is a city of beings living, moving,
and capable of suffering under the terrible cloud of despair which
overhangs them. We may, if we choose, suppose that Thonlson's
despair had its source in the death of Matilda Weller ; but it seems
more reasonable to conclude that it arose from a constitutional
tendency to melanchoha, fortified by habits of indulgence in
alcohol, which were also constitutional, and further strengthened,
no doubt, by bereavement, failure and misfortune. He had more
resemblance to Poe, not merely in his writings, but in his life and
in those predispositions which made it what it was, than to any

other man who has ever written English.
On the other hand, it must be remembered that while Thomson
is justly described as the poet of pessimism, there is another and
less sombre strain in his verse, and —what is far more surprising
that this too lasts to the end. In the early period the gloom is
lightened by such comparatively genial arid bright pieces as The

Lord of Castle of Indolence (1859) and the two Idylls of
the
Cockaigne,Sunday up the River and Sunday at Hampstead. At
the very end come three poems equally bright and beautiful,
Richard Foresfs Midsummer Night (1881), He heard her Sing
(1882) and At Belvoir (1882). The last, says the host in whose
house he stayed, "recalls three days of incessant mirth and
midsutnmer pleasure, Thomson being chief jester '." Thus the
geniality survived to the end as well as the gloom ; and from first
to lastThomson was the same complex being in whose nature the
" threads of joy and woe " were always mingled.
The pessimistic side has been so emphasised that the more
cheerful one is sometimes wholly forgotten or ignored. It is there-
fore the more necessary to insist that Thomson wrote a good many
poems in which pessimism is not expressed. His Lord of the
Castle- of Mdolence, in its rich voluptuous metre and imagery, is
wotthy even of his namesake's beautiful poem which suggested it.
The Idylls of Cockaigne are two series of very beautiful lyrics,
' Salt's Life of Thomson, 164.
fullof joy in nature and beauty and life, sometimes in a rashing
metre singularly unlike the motionless brooding of The City of
Dreadful Night. The pieces are dramatic ; but nevertheless they
show that Thomson fully understood the philosophy of optimism
as well as that of pessimism. Surely the author of the following
lines still felt, on occasion, the zest of life :
" Drink ! open your mouth

drink ! 1
This wine;
air is as rich as
Flowing with balm from the sunny south,

Aiid health from the western brine.
Drink ! drink open your mouth

!
This air is as strong as wine :

My brain is drugged with the balm o' the south,
And rolls with the western brine.
Drink ! drink ! open your mouth !
This air is the choicest wine

From that golden grape the Sun, i' the south
Of Heaven's broad vine."
Of Thomson's three longest poems, two cannot be unreservedly

classified as pessimistic. Vanis Story and Weddah and Om-el-
Bonain are both sad, but in neither is the gloom unrelieved. Of
Vane's Story Thomson said that he had thrown "the reins on
the neck of Pegasus and let him go whither he would." Never-
theless Pegasus was carefully guided. The poem is really a
fragment of autobiography, containing, under the beautiful al-
legory of the fountain, an accurate description of his own life.
The pessimistic poems though the greatest and the

therefore,
most characteristic, are not the whole of Thomson's work. They
certainly need all the relief that can be found within his writings
for there is English literature more gloomy and
nothing in
poems and the prose-piece already named,
depressing than the two
the Mater Tenebrarum (1859), To Our Ladies of Death (1861),
The Poet to his Muse (1882) and Insomnia (1882). It takes all
the poet's powerful imagination, all his wealth of imagery, all the
stateliness of his style, to make these poems bearable. For
sustained intensity of gloom The City of Dreadful Night is
probably unparalleled; and the intellectual resource displayed in

the delineation of the city wherein the melancholic dwell shows

Thomson to have been one of the. most highly gifted men of his
time. Insomnia, shorter and less complex, sounds perhaps even
dfeeper abysses of woe and suffering, and reveals one of the
causes which' produced it. For many years Thomson was a
victim to sleeplessness, so that his poem has the dreadful reality
of personal experience. It is impossible to withhold from these
pieces the tribute of deep admiration for the masterly execution
but yet the thought forces itself upon the reader that it is not
good tobe here. If Thomson's philosophy were true, even truth

itself would be dear-bought at the price of belief in it; for it
must result in present misery and, sooner or later, must paralyse
action.
It has been already remarked that had Thomson found a
place' for evolution in his philosophy, he might have been less
gloomy. For his pessimism was founded on the conviction that
there was no hope for humanity any more than
for himself, and
that the appearance of progress was a mere illusion. He had
been taught in childhood the faith as it was delivered unto
Calvin ; he soon found reason to believe that that faith would not
bear the. light of modern thought; he could discover nothing to
set in its place, and so he went on from negation to negation
until he found himself face to face with blank despair. Logically,
he ought' never to have troubled himself about his fellow-men,
and perhaps, logically, he ought to have committed suicide. But
men, both atheist and orthodox, are often better than their
theories. And in spite of his failings, which were not voluntary
but the effects of disease, Thomson, while he was master of
himself, remained faithful and lovable to his friends, chivalrous
to women, gentle and kind and patient with little children.
§ 4. The Later Poetesses.
The literary activity of women tends, as time goes on, more and
more to prose fiction ; and it is remarkable that of the numerous
female novelists comparatively few show even a slight talent for
poetry. Dinah Maria Craik (1826-1887), whose beautiful Philip
my King ought to preserve for her a small niche among the poets,is
a rare exception. But notwithstanding this diversion there have
been many female writers of verse, only one or two of whom, after
Mrs Browning and Christina Rossetti, have been mentioned.
For the most part they are barely worthy of mention. Sentimen-
tality and the fatal cult of prettiness vitiate the work of all but a
very few. The home-spun verse of Eliza Cook (i 818-1889)

appeals only to the Philistine. The rhetorical; Menella Bute
Smedley (1820-1877) repeats the faults of Mrs Hemans and has
redeeming merit. Dora Greenwell (1821-1882) has the
far less
mystical piety of Christina Rossetti, without Christina Rossetti's

charm. Emily Pfeiffer (1827-1890), Sarah Williams (1841-1868)
and many others show by triviality of treatment that they are
versifiers rather than poets. The critic might be tempted to
speak. of triviality of theme; but the lyrical masters, whom these

writers follow at a distance, have shown that the simplest theme
may be great in the hands of a true poet. It was wisdom on their
part to be content with simple subjects. A few, like Isabella
Harwood (Ross Neil) (i84o?-i888), tried the drama and other

complex forms only to prove that their powers were inadequate to
the task. Perhaps none but Augusta Webster has shown a force
and breadth of mind adequate to anything.
The world from the first has refused to recognise George Eliot
as a poet, and the world has been right; but when the great
novelist chose to write verse it was impossible to ignore her.
The Spanish Gypsy (1868) is far below the level of her prose both
in force of thought and in eloquence. In The Legend of Jubal
(1874) the width of the gap is diminished, but it is. still great It
is in her shorter poems that she shows best. The sonnets, Brother
and Sister, if they were the work of an ordinary writer, would be
thought good ; but in the opening chapters of The Mill on the
Floss George Eliot herself has given the substance of them m

prose so much more poetical that they only serve to prove that
she is out of her place among the writers of verse. The best of
her productions is the short blank-verse poem, " O
may I join the
and it is of such merit that if she had left any
choir invisible";
considerable body of verse of similar excellence, the judgment
which ranks her among the prose-writers only would need

revision.
Adelaide Anne Procter (1825-1864) was the daughter of a
poet, Barry Cornwall, and almost from the cradle she betrayed to
the. discerning her gift and her destiny. John Kemble called her
an elf-child, but his sister Fanny pronounced her rather " the
prophecy of a poet.'' She had an album for her favourite pieces

before she was mistress of the pen suflSciently to fill it with her
own hand. The company she met and the conversation she
heard at her strengthened the bent of her mind and
father's table
developed her and had she chosen she might have found
tastes,
through him an easy entrance into the field of letters. She pre-
ferred to be accepted or rejected on her own merits. After
publishing a few pieces elsewhere she began to send her poems
under the pseudonym of Mary Berwick to Household Words;
and it was not until he praised them at her father's table that the
editor, Charles Dickens, learnt who his contributor was. Her
writings were collected in 1858 under the title of Legends and
Lyrics. New poems were added in the edition published three
years later,, another volume entitled A Chapkt of Verses appeared
in i862ji and in the beginning of 1864 she died, leaving her
veteran father to survive her for ten years. She was worn out
with her labours, literary and charitable.: the eager soul within
had " fretted the pigmy body to decay." But although Adelaide
Procter was, in her measure, a genuine poet, she had done
nothing great She had little originality. She did, on the whole
rather weakly, what other poets were doing better. The Cradle
Song of the Poor and God's Gifts touch upon those social ques-
tions to which everybody in those days was drawn ; but The
Song of the Shirt and The Cry of the Children serve the purpose
far better. The Voice of the Wind is pleasant verse, but it is
little more. The wind has been on the field of battle, on the
desolate ocean, on the lonely moor, in the gloomy forest; and
there it has seen just what it has seen in verse a hundred times
over. Miss Procter was popular ten years after her death her
:
works were in greater demand than those of any living poet

except Tennyson : but this popularity was probably due quite as
w. 38
much to her defects as to her merits. A touch of sentimentality
attracts, while fiery passion terrifies, the great middle class, which
buys poetry for the adornment of the best parlour. Miss Procter
was neither too great nor too small. The sing-song of her
favourite measure was soothing, and promoted slumber if per-
chance the voliime was taken up after dinner: to the more
fastidious ear it soon became monotonous and wearisome. Her
piety made her obviously safe, and her Roman Catholicism
(she changed her faith about the year 185 1) was never so
thrust forward as to offend the Protestant. It was this piety,
combined with a good mouth-filling volume of sound, and a

meaning judiciously diluted, that made her two songs Sent to
Heaven (otherwise The Message) and The Lost Chord so widely •
popular. It is a triumph of a kind. To the latter especially tens

felt and probably
of thousands have listened enraptured; they have
have been better and they who are doubtful whether it
for it;
means anything must suppress their doubts and do homage to
\h&fait accompli.
Jean Ingelow (1820-1897) was of a higher order. Never,
except perhaps for one brief moment
Judge Not, did Adelaide
in
Procter show anything like the strength which we find in the
High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire; and though that is
generally reputed to be Jean Ingelow's masterpiece she has '
left a
body of work at least comparable with it in excellence.
(Considerable
She was somewhat older than Miss Procter and figured earlier as
an authoress. Her first publication, a volume of verse, was
followed immediately by a novel, and throughout she carried on
the double career of poet and writer of fiction. It is however
her poetry which gives her the best chance of remembrance, and
her first won by the voXum&oi Poems published
great success was
in 1863, which was so popular that a fourth edition had to be
printed before the year closed. A second and a third series of
Poems followed in 1876 and 1885 and between the first and the
;
second there had been interposed the Story of Doom and other
Poevis (1867). These volumes contain nearly all Jean Ingelow's
work that is of note, and they contain a good deal besides, for
few poets gain more by judicious selection than she.
It would be extravagance to call Jean Ingelow a great poet.

The keen wit of Calverley detected and exposed her weaknesses ,
for he was thinking of her in the ballad, " The auld wife sat at
her ivied door/' and "In moss-prankt dell" is a skit on Divided.
Yet it is not too much to say that among the women-poets of the
century sheis surpassed only by Mrs Browning, Christina Rossetti,
Emily Bronte and Augusta Webster. She does not weary us with
distressing monotony like the other minor singers; she has a
great deal of that strength which is perhaps arrogantly, yet not
without cause, supposed to be masculine; she is never content
with mere prettiness ; she is daring in the treatment of rhythm
and metre, and even where she is almost harsh, the harshness is
more pleasing than the limpid trickle of Adelaide Procter or
Menella Smedley. Echo and the Ferry has a ring of Browning.
Requiescat in Pace is boldly imaginative, and in its touch of the
supernatural recalls Rossetti. Divided shows a love of nature
which would have won the respect of Wordsworth, though the
treatment is quite different from his. Honours, PersephoHe and
Songs of Seven may also be named as favourable specimens of her
work. These pieces not only show a fairly wide range of imagina-
tion, but they prove that the writer was endowed with vigour of
thought and a happy turn for style as well. Fortunately she con-
tented herself as a rule with writing short poems, lyrical or of a
nature akin to the lyric. When she tried longer pieces, as in the
Story of Doom, the quality of her work deteriorated.
Jean Ingelow was respectable, but Augusta Webster (1837-
1894) was great. For sheer strength she has no rival among the
women-poets of England except Emily Bronte, and, in respect of
reputation, she is Ifarther from the place which is justly her due
than almost any other writer of recent years. She has been com-
pared to Browning, and several reasons may be given to justify
the comparison. Few writers, whether male or female, are less
distant from him in force and originality of thought. Like him,
she handled with great success the dramatic monologue. Like
him, she wrote dramas as well, some of them not unworthy to
stand beside his. Like him too, she was a scholar and a trans-
lator from the Greek. ,,
38—2
Augusta Webster began her> literary career' early with Blanche
Lisle and other Poems (i860). But her qualities were not such as
mature rapidly, and she hardly became a force to reckon with
before the publication of Dramatic Studies (1866); From. this
date onwards there is not a volume she published that does not
contain matter well worthy of attention ; not a little of it must be
called great without qualification. Among her publications are
A Woman —
Sold (1867) and Portraits (1870) perhaps the most
remarkable of all. The Auspicious Day (1872) was her first drama.
In a Day (1882) and The Sentence (1887) show the scholar as
well as the dramatist, the scene of both being laid in imperial
Rome, and the matter such as only a writer well acquainted with
the history and literature could have handled. In these dramas
she comes as near success as any writer of recent years except
Tennyson, and that she does not achieve it completely is, perhaps,
as much due to her merits as to any positive defect in the plays.
She could not truckle or pander to the whims of the day, and her
close-knit thought was ill adapted to the taste of a public which
wanted amusement rather than thought.
In spite of the merits of the dramas it is probably as a writer
of dramatic monologues that Augusta Webster will live. Here
she missed popularity for the same reasons that for many years
made Browning unpopular. She too has a super-abundance of
thought, and she too is often rough and harsh in her versification;
but she too makes splendid atonement for her faults. There is
austere grandeur in the conception of The Snow Waste, and A
Preacher and A Painter are masterly studies. But it is in the
studies of women that she penetrates deepest. Some of these
studies have scarcely a parallel in literature.Perhaps the most
powerful is A Castaway, but Faded and Tired are only less
admirable, as are also, in another style, Sister Annunciata and
By the Looking Glass. In some of these poems the pity and ,pain
are almost too great for verse. Mrs Webster felt deeply the pathos
of the destiny of her sex, and dealt with it as no man ever could
have dealt. A
Castaway has been compared with Rossetti'sye««y,
but the points of view are wholly different the Castaway is what
:
Jenny might have been if Jenny herself had taken the pen from
>
Rossetti's hand. It is therefore, though infenor in technical
skill, a far rarer performance than Rossetti's. For the same
reason Mrs Webster's other portraits of women have a quite
unique value, inasmuch as very few women have had the force of
thought necessary to draw such portraits, and none who had it
has used it so — at least in English.
One more writer of a later date also distinguished herself for

power and boldness of thought. Constance Naden (1858-1889)
was not, indeed, the equal of Augusta Webster, but she had a
genuine gift for poetry, and had she not been lured away after
"wandering fires," even in her short life she might have won
considera;ble fame. But she was by nature inclined to philosophy
and science, she fell under the influence of those who strengthened
her inclination ; and so, instead of a poet, we have a follower of
Herbert Spencer who did not live long enough to show whether
she could have done anything original in philosophy or not. Her
Pantheisfs Song of Immortality is, however, proof sufficient that
she was a true poet.
§ 5. Miscellaneous Poets.
There remain a number of poets, sometimes of merit, some-

times perhaps only of notoriety, whom it would be misleading to
associate withany of the foregoing groups. For example, William
Cory (i?23-i892), whose birth-name was Johnson, went his own
way and did his own work, and, while he moved minds that moved
the world, remained till the close of his life wholly unknown to
the wider public. As an Eton master from 1847 to 1872, Cory

came in contact with some of the brightest minds of the age.
According to the testimony of these men his influence on
his pupils was phenomenal. "As a teacher," says Mr Herbert
Paul, "he was in a class by himself, differing, not in degree but
in kind, from all the other teachers I, at least, have ever known.
My intellectual debt to him is such that I may be prejudiced;
but I cannot imagine that in that character he was ever sur-
passed^" It is wonderful that the man to whom this emphatic
testimony is borne, and who numbered among his pupils so many
' Stray Leaves, 252, 254.
of the most influential men in England, should have remained so
long unknown. And yet the appearance of his lonica in 1858
lefthim almost as obscure as Edward FitzGerald remained after
his Omar. A second volume under the same title in 1877 °is*
with no better fate. It was not till lonica was reissued with
additions in 189 1 that he began to draw attention as not merely

a teacher but a poet
There is usually an explanation of phenomena of this sort,
and in the case of Cory it is not hard to find. In the first place,
on the testimony of his most admiring pupils, his greatness was
pre-eminently greatness as a teacher. There was nothing else he
did so well, and many things in which he completely failed. His
Guide to Modern English History (i 880-1882) is admittedly not
good as a whole the scholar's pitfall of allusiveness has
:
completely engulfed the author. The case of lonica is rather

poems
different, for these- certainly deserved an attention which
they have only now begun to receive. But this neglect too may
be explained. Cory was one of the most accomplished of scholars,
so accomplished that, according to Mr Herbert Paul, Munro,
the editor of Lucretius, pronounced him to have written the
best Latin lyrics since the death of Horace. And this scholarship
passes into lonica. Some of the best of the pieces are translations
from the Greek or from the Latin, and the majority of those
which are original are severely classical. But to induce the
English public to admire classical purity and severity is the most
difficult task the poet can set himself, and he who attempts it
must be prepared for disappointment Landor has never been

popular, and Cory, who resembles him but who has less verve and
energy, can never be popular either. High as are the merits of
many of his poems, it is only a handful, in which a subject essen-
tially modern is treated in the classical style, that can ever
command many readers. The best example is Mimnermus in
Church —
"You promise heavens free from strife,
Pure truth, and perfect Change of will;

But sweet, sweet is this human life,
So sweet, I fain would breathe it still;
Your chilly stars I can forego,

This warm kind world is all I know.
Yon say there is no substance here,

One great reality above:
Back from that void I shrink in fear.
And child-like hide myself in love :
Show me what angels feel. Till then,
I cling, a. mere weak man, to men.

You bid me lift my mean desires
From faltering lips and fitful veins
To sexless souls, ideal quires.
Unwearied voices,, wordless strains s
My mind with tender welcome owns

One dear dead friend's remembered tones.
Forsooth the present we must give
To thatwhich cannot pass away;
All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay-
But oh, the very reason why
I clasp them, is because they die."
Scholarliness of a less rare sort is shown likewise in the work

of Francis Turner Palgrave (1824-1897), and its product is also
of a lower kind. more sure of remembrance be-
Palgrave is
cause of the fine faculty for appreciation shown in his Golden

Treasury of Songs and Lyrics than for any of his original work ;
and even in his own verse he is best where, as in the poem on
Wordsworth, he is intent upon giving expression to his apprecia-
tion. His lyrics have seldom suiBcient depth of sentiment, and
his patriotic poems in The Visions of England (1880-1881) lack
the and energy indispensable to that, type of poetry. In this
fire
respect he falls below not only Tennyson, but Macaulay, Sydney
Dobell, Gerald Massey and several other contemporaries. He

also falls far below his junior, William Ernest Henley (1849-1903),
a true poet who had the good fortune to be trained under another
true poet, T. E. Brown. The long months which Henley passed
in an Edinburgh hospital found him a friend in R. L. Stevenson,
and also a theme. It is easy to trace the genesis of the poems In
Hospital, published many years afterwards in the Book of Verses
(1888), and to explain their grim power, so far as it is explainable
by anything besides the native gift of the writer. They are realistic
poems, but the realism is no mere transcript of sordid details ; aU
that the patient saw was taken up into and moulded by a vivid
imagination. After his release from hospital Henley settled in
L&ndon, where he passed through the common experience of
daringly original men. The poems In Hospital were, he
entitled
said, rejected by every editor of standing in London. Their subse-
quent fate proved that the editors were wrong ; yet other facts show
that there was some excuse for this error. Editors, publishers and
newspaper proprietors must live, or at least they naturally think so,
and the fact that Henley's editorship proved fatal to three journals
is evidence enough that, commercially, the man was dangerous.

On The Outlook must be set to his
the other hand, the success of
credit. It was in connexion with his journalistic work that Henley
wrote most of his poems as well as the criticisms of literature and
of art which appeared in the two series of Views and Reviews
(1890- 1901). The plays with which his name is associated were
done in collaboration with Stevenson, and the fact of the colla-
boration leaves it doubtful whether Henley by himself could have
produced a long and complex work. It is only certain that alone
he never did it. Besides the Book of Verses already named, the
volumes entitled The Song of the Sword (1892), Hawthorn and
Lavender (1899) and For England^s Sake (1900) all contain work
of rare quality and all have the unmistakable note of a strong and
independent personality. Henley possessed this even in super-
abundance, and the words of his friends and acquaintances show
that it made personal intercourse with him difficult. He who was
so sensitive to criticism himself never spared his neighbour. Some-
times, perhaps, the edge of sympathy is thus blunted and his verses
robbed of a charm they would otherwise possess ; but on the other
hand they gain a force and an originality which are exceedingly
rare among latter-day poems. To an age somewhat decadent,
neurotic, over-finical, Henley brought into literature an untamed
virility which might have been more in keeping with the
generation of Beowulf.
The pieces of which Henley is the sole author are intense,
fervid and powerful, but they are not complex. They are essen-
tially lyrical. They show neither the story-telling power which
makes the epic nor the dramatic gift. On the contrary, Henley
LATER DEVELOPMENTS 6oi
seems rather strictly It had

confined within a circle of his own.
a fairly wide radius, butbeyond that radius he could do nothing
effectively. Hence in his criticism too he is far more trustworthy
where he approves than where he condemns. Condemnation may
mean no more than want of sympathy on the part of the critic.
Similarly in the poems Henley is himself always the centre of his
own universe. Give him a bit of experience like that of the
hospital, show him the life of London, stir up his warlike and
patriotic fire, and he could write splendidly ; but he had no share
of that power which enabled Browning to feel with equal intensity
what Guido thought, what Caponsacchi thought, and what Pom-
pilia thought. Yet the limitation is really a gain. It is the
narrowness that gives strength, as a river flows with greater force
through a gorge than in the open plain where its waters have
room to spread. Vigour, sincerity and courage are the qualities
which give Henley a place among the most remarkable of our
later poets.
There could hardly be a sharper contrast than that between
Henley and the second Lord Lytton (1831-1891), who is best
known in literature by his nom de plume of Owen Meredith ; and
the defiant personality of the younger man, set against the facile
receptiveness of the elder, serves usefully to point the difference
between the days when originality is rare and the influence of
famous names potent, and the days when a new revolt against
authority is beginning. While Henley carried independence to
excess, Lytton was a sort of literary personification of Echo. He
was charged with deliberate plagiarism, and there more evidence
is
in support of the charge than can usually be adduced in such

cases. But a good deal may be explained by the principle of
heredity. The younger Lytton inherited from his father a re-
markable sensitiveness of mind. As a seismograph will register
movements of the earth which are never felt, and record shocks
which shock nobody, so Lytton's mind recorded the faintest move-
ments of taste, movements imperceptible to those less finely
endowed. There is scarcely a, contemporary of note whose mark
may not be found somewhere or other in Gwen Meredith's verse
and perhaps the mark which is of most frequent occurrence is
that of a man widely different from the poet himself — Robert

Browning.
Lytton's Clytemnestra (1855), published under the pseudonym
which he kepi for about two years, was the first of a series of
volumes of poetry which, in spite of the interruption occasioned
by high office, as Viceroy of India from 1876 to 1880, and as
Ambassador in Paris from 1887 till his death, was long enough
and varied enough to show the fluency, resourcefulness and wide
range of the author. His last work, Marah, was published
posthumously in 1892.
Over and over again Lytton illustrated that receptiveness
which has just been mentioned. Clytemnestra appeared a few
years after the beginning of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and it
was received with extraordinary enthusiasm, especially at Oxford,

where the Pre-Raphaelites were peculiarly strong. The favourite
poem of the volume was The EarPs Return, and the poet was,
after Tennyson, the favourite writer, his most serious rival being
Alexander Smith, then at the height of his fame. A little later
the taste for the romance in verse is indicated by such works as

Mrs Browning's Aurora Leigh and Tennyson's Enoch Arden ; and
Lytton quickly responds to it with Lucile (i860). In this he was
very largely indebted to George Sand. Again, his Glenaveril
(1885), which is rather a novel in verse than a romance in verse,
indicates strikingly the change in taste which had come in the
interval. So, too, the Serbski Fesme (1861) reminds us of the
rising interest in the literature of the East, and Fables in Song
(1874) are an early instance of the cultivation of folk-lore. In
short,Lytton is the best of mirrors, and though he will never rank
high in the estimation of the reader who reads solely for the love
of poetry, he is invaluable to the student who wishes to see the
very image of the time. Sometimes, especially in Fables in Song
and in After Paradise ; or Legends of Exile (1887), and occasion-
ally in lyrics scattered here and there through his works, Lytton
seems almost to achieve greatness, and the reader is nearly
persuaded that here is a true poet, until the shock of some
LATER DEVELOPMENTS 6O3
meretricious touch awakens him, and convinces him that it is
only an imitation. For the fault of the elder Lytton was the
fault also of the younger. The flaw of an impure taste permeates
the work of both. In the elder, who worked mainly in prose,
it is very grave ; in the younger, who worked in verse, it is
fatal.
That interest in the literature of the East, to which reference

has just been made, was, of course, no new thing in England.
For many generations " the gorgeous East " had exercised upon
the mind the .fascination of mystery. The establishment of the
English power over India increased the interest, and began to
fleck the ignorance with knowledge. The imagination of Burke
played over it. William Jones was a pioneer in solid Oriental
Sir
scholarship. The conversation and the habits of returned Anglo-
Indians scattered little seeds of information through the country,
and their gastronomical tastes spread the knowledge that a curry
was hot, and that a " chili," though it sounded cool, was not
the proper thing to allay its effect. Max Miiller and the philo-
logists advanced the bounds of knowledge enormously. The

study of comparative religion opened the eyes of many who had
imagined that the West had everything to give and nothing to
receive. JIajJi Baha opened to the Western world the life of Persia,
It was also discovered that Persia had treasures of poetry, and
that Lalla Rookh was neither the last nor a particularly wise word
on the poetry of the East. Emerson found inspiration in Hafiz,
and Edward EitzGerald's incomparable: translation made Omar
KhayydM one of the classics of the English language. The
Indian Mutiny encouraged and even compelleid a closer study
than ever J for the men who believed that they understood were
found to be hopelessly ignorant, and their ignorance had nearly
cost England an empire.
It is as the poetic mouthpiece of this spirit that Sir Edwin
Arnold (1832-1904) is most interesting. His varied career had

much to do with the character of his work. Two early volumes
of poetry neither gained nor deserved much attention, though they

contain a few good pieces, in particiilar the prettily fanciful A ma
Future, which, by a curious mistake, was printed among the Final
Reliques of Father Prout. In 1857, however, Arnold became
Principal of the Government College of Sanskrit at Poona, and
held that office during the exciting days of the Mutiny. On his
return to England in 1861 he became a member of the staff of the
Daily Telegraph, so that when Matthew Arnold was laughing at
the young lions, Edwin Arnold was helping to swell their roar.
For more than twenty years Edwin Arnold had written little
poetry, and he was scarcely known outside journalistic circles
before the publication of his Light of Asia in 1879. At once it
lifted him into fame ; but its success was at least as much
due to the rare felicity and timeliness of the subject as to the
merits of the poet. The theme was
great, and it was new.
Arnold said with truth that, a generation before, practically

nothing was known in Europe about Buddhism ; and even when
he wrote knowledge was confined to scholars. Max Miiller's
translation of the Rig- Veda, completed only five years earlier, was
neither attractive nor accessible to the multitude ; and the works
of other scholars were similarly esoteric. The days of studies of
" the soul of a people " were not yet. And so The Light of Asia
came upon England like a revelation. The fact that the subject
was religious pleased the middle class ; the fact that the religion
was not Christian gave it a welcome breath of novelty. A little
earlier, the question might have been raised. Can any good thing
come except from Nazareth ? But assaults upon the fortresses

of orthodoxy had been frequent, and they had at least taught
a little caution and a little humility. Perhaps after all there
might be something to say for Buddhism. Arnold said it, and

on the whole said it well. The misfortune is that he said it
neither greatly nor with complete understanding of his subject.

Had he been able to rise to " the highth of his great argument,"
The Light of Asia would have been one of the great poems of
the world. Nowhere is there grander material for the great
imagination; perhaps it is not too much to say that nowhere
is there material so grand. It is a Paradise Regained in all its
first freshness, not threadbare with attrition. But what a difference

between the Miltonic treatment and the Arnoldian ! Paradise

Regained, iron in its strength; The Light of Asia, fanciful rather
than imaginative, fluent rather than strong, pretty rather than
beautiful, plausible rather than convincing. It glides like a rivulet
where it should rush like a torrent. Arnold \izsfelix opfortunitate
libri, but what he wrote was only a pleasant, attractive book, not
a great one.
The brilliant success of The Light of Asia naturally encouraged
the author to make further experiments with Eastern themes.
Pearls of the Faith (1883) was an attempt to do for Mahom-
medanism something like what the former work proposed to do for
Buddhism. Lotus and Jewel (1887) contained more Eastern work,
and Arnold came to be regarded so much as the poet of the
Orient that he seems to have somewhat resented the association,
and tried to correct it by Selected Poems, National and Non-
Oriental (1888). His last work of importance was The Light of
the World (1891), which may be said to complete his trilogy of the
faiths. The temptation to try this subject after The Light of Asia
is obvious, but the attempt was predestined to failure The diffi-
culties were enormously greater. Even Goethe, with his genius for
understanding if he did not feel the religious emotion, could hardly
have made fresh a subject hackneyed by millions of sermons.
Familiarity was certain to make the audience more critical.
Besides, the freshness of Arnold's imagination was gone. The

faults of The Light of Asia return with increase, the merits have
shrunk. In no other of his longer works does Arnold reach the
standard he attains there, and rarely does he even approach it.
After The Light of Asia his best work is to be found in some of the
shorter pieces which deal with Eastern life e.g. The Rajput Nurse;
but a generation that knows Sir Francis Hastings Doyle and Sir
Alfred Lyall and Mr Rudyard Kipling will hardly choose Edwin
Arnold as laureate of the secular life of the East.
Poetry is in essence grave, and for this reason the wits in
verse, parodists, writers of vers de sociitk, &c., rank, as a class,

after their brethren who have taken a more serious view of their
vocation. The best ofthem may be much better than mediocre
writers of the sober sort, but the best of them can never be great
Besides Praed and the authors of the Bon Gaultier Ballads and
others who have already been mentioned, there are several writers
who still require notice for their wit and grace and epigrammatic
skill. First in time, and on the whole in rank, comes Frederick
Locker-Lampson (1821-1895), the successor of Praed; but he
comes at some distance behind the earlier writer. Praed in his
short thirty-seven years of life accomplished as much as Locker-
Lampson in exactly double the time, and he showed greater
strength of mind, more varied gifts, more abundance and more
virility Locker-Lampson quickly did all that he had the
of wit.
power to do, and his London Lyrics (1857), with the subsequent
additions to it, contains the sum and substance of his contribution
to literature. These lyrics are excellent of their kind, and the
best, like the lines To my Grandmother, have a touch of serious-
ness amidst the sport which almost raises: them to the higher rank
of poetry. Locker-Lampson however could not sustain himself
there. One or two pieces, especially the very skilful and pretty
love-song. At her Window, tempt the reader to believe that he
could ; but try this by the touchstone of a lyric of true passion, like
Burns's "Oh, my love is like the red red rose," or a lyric of
tenderness, like Shelley's " One word is too often profaned," and
its true character is manifest. It is the utterance, genuine enough,
of a spirit which has no wings to soar where such poets sit. , And
if this be true of Locker-Lampson, more emphatically true of
it is
Mortimer Collins (1827-1876), who was perhaps more of a

novelist than a poet, but who in both capacities suffered seriously
from the necessity laid upon him to live by his pen, which led to
over-production and the lowering of quality. From this necessity
Locker-Lampson was free. He could take time, he need not

publish his second-best as well as his best ; and so what he has
done well is not lost in the wilderness of middling work, as are,
unfortunately, the good things of Mortimer Collins.

Regarded as a poet, Charles Stuart Calverley (1831-1884)
ranks below either of these two men, and he does not come even
within hailing distance of the greater poets; but yet he is far
more safe to be remembered than many of his superiors. The

reason is that in his own way he is supreme. Deftness is perhaps
the word that best describes his talents, and by reason of that
deftness he could turn a parody with what looks like inimitable
skill. Perhaps no style was ever more happily taken off by a
parodist than Browning's by Calverley. The satire on snobbery

is
in Cherry Stones is delicious, and so is the banter of a certain

school of romance in Forever. And yet perhaps it only " looks
like" inimitable and the judgment which has placed Calverley
skill,
on the throne of parody may have to be revised. It is significant

that those two great parodic satires, Don Quixote and Joseph
Andrews, grew in the making to be much more than their authors
meant them tobe; and probably the parody which pleases longest
will be that which contains most of the poetry of the original, or
that which is most riotously humorous. Now although Calverley
is flawless in technique, he has very little humour and practically
no poetry. So too his translations are technically perfect, but

they cannot be compared with such a masterpiece as FitzGerald's
Omar Khayydm. No one would ever ask whether Calverley was
not a greater poet than his original; and, strangely enough, we
feel that the paraphrast is true to his original in a deeper sense
than the translator who seeks to render word for word as well as
thought for thought. Perhaps Calverley's nearest analogue is
James Kenneth Stephen (1859-1892), who in Lapsus Calami

(1891) has sung unstintedly the praise of his senior, and whose
own performances rival in the same line even the best of Calverley's
Fly Leaves (1872). Had Stephen lived it is probable that he
would have done something greater than Calverley ever did. He
too was a skilful parodist of Browning, but in the fine Parodisfs
Apology he showed a' depth of feeling which Calverley never
betrayed, if he possessed it; and in the lines on Eton there
is affection behind the playfulness of manner. Stephen's' early
death was a serious loss to literature ; but perhaps the same may
be said of the accident which partially disabled Calverley at about
the same age. R. F. Murray (1863-1894), the St Andrew's
poet, is another "inheritor of unfulfilled renown.'' It is too
much to say, as has been said, that his fragments show a skill
not inferior to Calverley's, but they are very good, and in the
excellent After Waterloo there is a promise of something other
and greater/ An older jester in verse, Henry Sambrooke Leigh
(1837-1883), author of Carols of Cockayne (1869), would deserve
mention were it but for the sake of the admirable Only Seven.
The is certainly lower than it was seventy
tone of poetry
years ago, and it may be doubted whether there is at present any
budding Browning or Tennyson. But to close with the jesters
would be to suggest a decline far greater than that which has
occurred. There is, not indeed moral elevation, but a vein of
genuine poetry in the work of Ernest Dowson (1867-1900),
whose Verses (1896) excited hopes which were blighted by his
ârly death. Both in his work and in his life Dowson somewhat
resembled the Irish poet Mangan. There is still more poetry,
and there is a far higher moral tone, in Francis Thompson (1859-
1907). The appearance of his Poems (1893) seemed to some
good judges to mark the advent of a new great poet. ,Then
followed Sister Songs (1895), ^^^^ -^^ Poems (1897). If the
view expressed in the last chapter about Coventry Patmore be
sound, it is probable that his disciple will not permanently hold
the high place his admirers claim for him. Though it would be
unfair to press the words of a letter written immediately after
Patmore's death, in which Thompson calls him "the greatest
genius of the century," there can be no doubt that the younger
man had for the elder an extreme and almost a fanatical admira-
tion. Fortunately it was the Patmore of the Odes, not of The
Angel in the House, whom Thompson and he never sank
followed,
to the puerilities to which the latter model might have tempted
him. On the contrary the besetting sin of his style is gorgeousness.
This fault is perhaps even more conspicuous in the interesting
but over-praised Essay on Shelley, which appeared posthumously
in TTie Dublin Review in 1908, than in the poems. Thompson's
diction is Latinised to excess — occasionally to
the very boundSj
if not beyond the bounds, of meaning. Sometimes, where he
is really inspired, as in the splendid opening of The Hound
of Heaven, his majestic English seems the perfect garment of

fervid and weighty thought ; when inspiration fails the result i»
deplorable. The other side of this magnificence of diction is
contortion of language and over-elaboration of imagery. In the

simplest technicalities Thompson occasionally fails surprisingly.
He has extraordinary lapses of taste. It is scarcely credible
that the same poet who could bear to end a line with
the phrase " temerarious
!
if " wrote also the grand harmonies
of The Hound of Heaven. That is his most characteristic
as it is his best-known poem^ — most characteristic because it
expresses deep mystical religion which underlies the

best the
greater part of his work, and which unquestionably made him what
he was. For he was what many of his predecessors in the Pre-
Raphaelite line only seemed to be, a religious poet ;
perhaps the
most deeply imbued with that spirit since Crashaw.
But while The Hound of- Heaven is the most characteristic,
there may be a doubt whether it is the most poetical of Thompson's
pieces. Though the simple strain is more rare in him, he is
sometimes charming in his poems on children, and perhaps Daisy
may please the lovers of poetry better even than The Hound of
Heaven. The echo of Wordsworth is unmistakable; but the
poem is no mere copy, and Wordsworth when he is inspired is
well worth echoing :
"'She went her unremembering way,

She went, and left in me
The pang of all the partings gone,:
And partings yet to be.
She left me marvelling why my soul

Was sad that she was glad
At all the sadness in the sweet,
The sweetness in the sad.
Still, still I seemed to see her, still
Look up with soft replies,
And take the berries with her hand.

And the love with her lovely eyes.
Nothing begins and nothing ends.

That is not paid with moan;
For we are bom in other's pain.
And perish in oui own."
w. 39
6lO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
In sharp contrast to Thompson stands John Davidson (1857-
1909), the latest of our " poets in their misery dead." Thompson
was one of the ascetics who abjure and renounce the world;
Davidson was in fierce revolt against a world which he would fain
have enjoyed. Thompson was a man of faith, Davidson a man
of doubt. Both were unhappy. Even among poets few have
had a career so harassed as Davidson's. This advanced sceptic,
born into a family where the father was an evangelical minister,
was foredoomed to taste of tragedy. The powerful Ballad of
the Making of a Poet—ône of his finest pieces —reads as if it were
inspired by personal experience. After a chequered career as
a teacher he made his way to London, and threw himself upon
literature for a livelihood. He had previously attempted the
drama; but his most characteristic work was that which is con-
tained in the two series of Fleet Street Eclogues (1893-1896) and
Ballads and Songs (1894), with the kindred volumes of later date.
He reaches his zenith in Ballads and Songs. To it, besides the
ballad already referred to, belong A Ballad of a Nun, Ballad A
of Heaven and A Ballad of Hell, all strong and characteristic
pieces. So does Thirty Bob a Week, where the influence of
Mr Rudyard Kipling is manifest. In Romney Marsh and A
Cinque Port are in the same collection. These pieces pretty
nearly measure the range of Davidson's gifts ; for in subsequent
volumes he added few things entirely new. The two last-named
poems of nature — show him in his rarer mood. The picture of
the Cinque Port left by the receding sea is singularly fine :
" Where argosies have wooed the breeze.

The simple sheep are feeding now;
And near and far across the bar
The ploughman whistles at the plough ;
Where once the long waves washed the shore.

Larks from their lowly lodgings soar.
Below the down the stranded town

Hears far away the rollers beat
About the wall the seabirds call;
The salt wind murmurs through the street
Forlorn the sea's forsaken bride
Awaits the end that shall betide.''
LATER DEVELOPMENTS 6l I
The ballads which have been named illustrate a far more

common mood of his mind. They are wrapt in an atmosphere
of dusky gloom, and their indubitable force may prove to be a
less trustworthy guarantee of permanence than the beauty of
the quieter pieces. This mood of stormy passion more and more
mastered Davidson in his later years, until in his "testaments"
force gives place to violence and passion to fury.
39-2
CREATIVE ART. B. PROSE FICTION
CHAPTER 1
AFTER SCOTT
That decline in the market-value of poetry, to which attention
has been called elsewhere, was partly due to the extraordinary rise
and spread of the art of prose fiction in and after the third decade
of the nineteenth century. Behind all other reasons for this there
lies the fundamental one, that it was just a stage in the develop-
ment of literature. Prose fiction is the most democratic of all

forms of literature, because it makes least demand for education
and training and puts the smallest strain upon the intelligence of
the reader ; and until the masses are educated to a point far above
any as yet attempted, and are so far relieved from the burden of
physical toil that at the close of the day the mind shall still keep
its elasticity, it must remain the staple reading of those among
them who read at all. Now the invention of the art of printing
made literature potentially democratic ; and recent changes of all
sorts, political, industrial, social, have tended to render it actually
so. In the beginning of the nineteenth century the process was

as yet only in its early stages ; but it had unmistakably begun.
Two secondary causes operated about the period in question

to strengthen and accelerate One of these was the
this process.
rapid development of periodical literature, and the other was the

stimulus given to the imagination, the ambition, and sometimes
the cupidity of his younger contemporaries by the wonderful
AFTER SCOTT 613
success of Scott The earlier and more ambitious periodicab,

like The Edinburgh Review, had a fairly well-defined field of
their own, and took no part in the publication of fiction. But
as one magazine after another Blackwood's, TTie London, Fraser's,
The Dublin University, to name the chief representatives of the
three —
kingdoms sprang into existence, the competition became
keener, and the net was spread wider and wider still both for
contributors and for readers. The very name " magazine " was
suggestive of variety and invited experiment Even the purely
critical Athenaum helped to support men like Henry FothergiU
Chorley (1808-1872), who was a critic for a livelihood and a
novelist by choice. And as the popular appetite grew with what
it fed on, every fresh step increased the demand for and the output
of fiction. First the short story, then loosely-compacted serials
like the Nodes AmbrosiancB, then novels, more or less close-knit,
became the staple article of the magazines. Sometimes the novel
itself, divided into parts, stood alone as a serial publication. The
case of Dickens is the best known ; but the device had been tried
before his day ; and Pierce Egan's Life in London, better known as
Tom and Jerry, was published in parts like The Pickwick Papers,
which owes to it a few other hints as weU.
The growth of the periodicals was, however, a matter of time,
and in the earlier years of the nineteenth century their influence
upon the longer works of fiction was comparatively slight For many
a day the orthodox mode of publishing a novel was in the old three-
volume form at what would now seem the prohibitive price of a
guinea and a half. The great outburst of activity among writers
of prose fiction dates from the time of Scott After he had shown
the way, it seemed not so very difficult to follow ; just as, a little
earlier, it had seemed not so very difficult to imitate his tales in
verse. Byron had accomplished the latter feat with such success
as to drive his predecessor from the field ; though it seems obvious
to the reader of the present day that it is not in the line of the
metrical romance that Byron is the superior, or even the equal, of
Scott Among the novelists, however, there was no Byron, and
the world has been contented to forget the imitations of the
Waverley Novels which flowed plentifully firom the press in the
third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century. On the
Continent work which is worthy to be remembered was produced
under the inspiration of Scott; but the distance which divides

him from his immediate successors in England is greater than that
between Shakespeare and the successors of Shakespeare.
Thêre was one remarkable writer who remained uninfluenced by
either of these causes. Thomas Love Peacock (i 785-1 866) was
certainly no follower of Scott, and his leisurely writing was un-
affected by the rise of the periodicals. Few authors are harder to
classify. There is, to begin with, a chronological difficulty, for
Peacock is not only " after Scott " but contemporary with Scott. He
began writing almost as early as the latter. His Palmyra (1806)
was published only one year after The Lay of the Last Minstrel, The
Genius of the Thames (1810) appeared in the same year with The
Lady of the Lake, and Headlong Hall (1816) came only two years
later than Waverley. On the other hand, the last of Peacock's
works was published almost a generation after the death of Scott.
Peacock, like Landor, overlaps more than one age of literature.
He saw romanticism in its dawn and meridian, and he was still
living when the brightness was fading from a later romanticism.

The personal annals of Peacock are short and simple. In his
desultory youth he acquired a learning for which he was indebted
neither to public school nor to university, but the proof of which
is written in many a page of his works. In later days Macaulay
and he tried each other in Greek, and the former thought that
they were both " strong enough in. these matters fqr gentlemen^"
Peacock had no permanent employment till the year 1819, when

he procured an appointment in the East India House which
;
enabled him to settle down and marry his " Welsh turtle," Jane
Gryffydh. The chief event before this had been the formation of
a friendship with Shelley. Beginning in 181 2, it lasted as long as
Shelley lived, and its influence is shown in the fact that Shelley
was the one contemporary writer whom Peacock really liked and
ladmired. Even in the case of Shelley was a critical admiration
it
in Scythrop, as well as in Mr Cypress, though in far less degree,

surgit apiari aliquid.
* yia.c&'ala.y's Jou>-nal, December 31, 1851.
AFTER SCOTT 61$
The two poems with which (setting aside a few insignificant

youthful pieces) Peacock opened his literary career, though long
only by comparison, were too long to suit the peculiar bent of his
mind. What he did admirably was the short lyric or ballad,
commonly a satire or a parody or a drinking song, but now and
then profoundly serious and pathetic. The snatches of song,
grave and gay, interspersed through his stories are exquisite. The
following beautiful lines are an excellent example of his graver
manner, and, though included in the later editions of 7'/te Golden
Treasury, they are less widely known than the verses embodied in
the prose tales :
" I dug, beneath the cypress shade,

What well might seem an elfin's grave ;
And every pledge in earth I laid.
That erst thy false affection gave.
I pressed them down the sod beneath

I placed one mossy stone above
And twined the rose's fading wreath
Around the sepulchre of love.
Frail as thy love, the flowers were dead.

Ere yet the evening sun was set
But years shall see the cypress spread,
Immutable as my regret."
It is evident that Peacock was Greek after the manner of Lander,

not after the manner of Keats. It is evident too that the author
on " the slender beech and the sapling
of these lines, of the verses
oak " and of Love and Age, was a lyrist of exquisite touch ; while
the song of Mr Cypress, Seamen Three, The Pool of the Diving
Friar and The War-Song of Dinas Vawr prove him to have been
a parodist, humourist and satirist of rare power. But the longer
poems, both the two already named and Rhododafhne (1818),
are interesting chiefly for the light they throw upon Peacock's
mind. They show that in spirit he was a poet of the eighteenth
century. His classicism was not, indeed, that of Pope. It was
based upon independent study, and it was coloured by the work
of Gray. There are also ingredients involuntarily taken up
from the work of contemporary romanticists ; but their incon-
gruous mingling with the personifications suggested by the taste
of the eighteenth century only shows more clearly how far Peacock
stood aloof from his contemporaries.
The change from verse to prose was a happy one for Peacock.
His Headlong Hall, was not good, but MelincourtiYZxi),
first story,
Jsfightmare Abbey (1818), Maid Marian (1822), The Misfortunes of

Elphin (1829) and Crotchet Castle (1831) proved him to possess a
genius not merely original but almost unique. A long silence
followed Crotchet Castle. When
was broken, perhaps
at last it
the most striking fact which Gryll Grange (1861) revealed was
that the author seemed to have slept a kind of Rip- Van- Winkle
sleep of thirty years, and was hardly at all changed from his former
state. There are, true, some new subjects of satire, such as
it is
spirit-rapping ; but in all essentials the temper of the later book is

the temper likewise of Crotchet Castle.
As a literary artist Peacock stands wholly apart from his con-
temporaries. He is as nearly as possible free from Scott's influence.
It is true that there is a historical element in Maid Marian and
The Misfortunes of Elphin, and the former might seem to have
been suggested by Ivanhoe were it not for the well-established fact
that nearly the whole of it was written before the publication of
Scott's novel. Everywhere else it is obvious that Peacock and
Scott are opposites ; and if ever the lesser man took a hint from
the greater, it was only to diverge as widely as possible from his
line of treatment. Peacock was nearly everything that Scott was
not. He was the satirist of his own generation, and his genius
was not historical at all. He was especially interested in litera-
ture and literary characters, while of all men of letters Scott was the
least absorbed in them. Peacock was fantastic and farcical, Scott
was genial and massively sensible. Peacock dealt in " humours "
and his method was caricature. Scott loved an occasional oddity
and was not averse from a touch of caricature ; but his principal
characters are human in the deepest sense and he depicts them as
they are. Peacock is polished to the last degree — his style, writes
one of his editors, is "rather engraved than written." Scott
turns off chapter after chapter, novel after novel, with little effort
and with no revision. Peacock's brightness and cleverness con-

stantly strike the reader with the pleasant surprise of a sudden
AFTER SCOTT 617
gleam of sunshine from a cloud. Scott rather gives the impression of

a day of sunshine too diffused and general to call attention to itself.
There is little plot or story in Peacock's books, and what' there
is They are really fantastic satires, and the
has small significance.
story is no more than a thread on which the bits of satirfe may be
strung. In Melincourt the " return to nature " and the movement
for the abolition of slavery are held up to ridicule, and the Lake
poets are caricatured, not very successfully. Though Sir Oran

Haut-ton is a thoroughly characteristic specimen of Peacock's
mode of satirical portraiture, it is unfortunately spoilt by its excess.
Nightmare Abbey was meant to " make a stand against the encroach-
ments of black bile/' and with that end in view it ridicules B)Ton
(Mr Cypress) and Coleridge (Mr Flosky). Southey'too is pilloried

as Mr Sackbut, and even Peacock's friend Shelley does not escape ;
but the portrait of Mr Scythrop is so drawn that, notwithstanding
the banter about the complicated loves, Shelley himself enjoyed
it. The same satiric spirit pervades Crotchet Castle and Gryll
Grange,i)ut the foundation is broader. The material is not merely
and religious -foibles
the literary, but the intellectual, political, social
and follies of the time. In the earlier books Peacock shows
cleverness and satiric power in abundance, but by excess of
caricature he partly destroys the effect of his own satire.- It is
in this respect that The Misfortunes of Elphin and Crotchet Castle
and Gryll Grange show the greatest advance. Peacock had learnt
from experience : he knew the world better than he did in the
earlier part of his career. In the earlier books there is no character
so rich as that of the " learned
and jolly" Dr FoUiott, and the satires
on the march of mind, the Steam Intellect Society, Brougham,
MacCuUoch, and all that stands for the progress of the nineteenth
century, are flavoured with more oil and less vinegar than we find
in the ingredients of the earlier books. Comfortable and pros-
perous himself, Peacock, satirist as he was, looked with a not
unkindly eye upon the follies of the world.
The peculiar point of view, the frequent extravagance of con-
ception and the overwhelming preponderance of the satiric element,
combine to set Peacock's novels in a class apart. The mind must
be attuned to them or they carry little meaning. The style is
beautiful, the wit is sparkling, there are here and there matchless
felicities ; but to him who does not possess the key to Peacock's
world the felicities are but purple patches. His method is not
Thackeray is satirical too, but his victims
that of other satirists.
walk the streets of London and dwell in the houses which line
them. Peacock first removes his characters to some Nightmare
Abbey or Crotchet Castle which may possibly be situated in the
planet Mars, but which certainly is not to be found beneath the
moon. The characters are very human in their appetites and
passions, the things which interest them are like the things which
interest the inhabitants of earth. Yet somehow both the men and
the subjects they discuss have "suffered a sea-change." No
character of Peacock's is and best sense human,
in the deepest
not even Dr Opimian, though he was drawn from the author him-
self ; still less Dr FoUiott, witty and clever as the portrait is ; least
of all such a monstrosity as Sir Oran Haut-ton, though a critic has

been found to pronounce even him perfect. Out of foibles and
weaknesses alonehuman character never can be built. The great
must go deeper. The grim figures of Tacitus, the Becky
satirist
Sharp and the Lord Steyne of Thackeray, are men and women ;
proofs, perhaps, of the agency of the devil, but indubitably denizens
of earth. Peacock's characters rather hail from the Limbo of Fools.
Not one of those he draws from contemporary literature seems
real Mr Sackbut is generally forgotten. That Peacock under-
stood Byron in a sense is shown by that unsurpassed parody,
" There is a fever of the spirit " ; but though Mr Cypress could
tune Byron's harp, he is too evidently unfit to fill the poet's shoes.
Mr Flosky has been praised as a successful Coleridge, — but com-
pare Peacock's caricature with Carlyle's satirical portrait The
truth is that in Peacock the literary quality is superior to the
human interest. He has knowledge, wit, humour, technical skill,
cleverness in abundance, some genius, he is a keen observer, a

caustic critic. What he lacks is humanity^ just that which is
the essence of the greatness of the great humourists — Cervantes,
Rabelais, Shakespeare.
1 The word, of course, is applied to Peacock's literary work, not to his
private character.
AFTER SCOTT 619
Of the imitations of Scott some were gross and palpable

enough ; and in one instance the follower was not content with
imitation. Walladmor was a forged Waverley of German manu-
facture, which was reviewed and condemned by De Quincey.
There were New Landlord's Tales, or Jedediahin the South (1825),
proclaiming their discipleship by their verytitle. Horace Smith's
Brambletye Souse (1826) a more widely-known imitation ; and
is
it and Sir John Chiverton (1826), probably the work of Harrison
Ainsworth, drew Scott's own attention and provoked his comments

on the difference between himself and his imitators. He compares
himself to Captain Bobadil, who trained many to fight nearly as
well as himself; but adds that he wrote because his mind was full
of what he had read, while they read in order to write. Except

in so far as Scott, in the comparison with Captain Bobadil, exag-
gerates the merits of his imitators and underrates the enormous
difference between himself and them, his criticism is admirable.
It was especially the historical element in the Waverley Novels
that ; and the difference between the
was seized upon for imitation
originaland the imitation was just that which Scott states. From
boyhood onwards he had been amassing a store of knowledge
about the Cavaliers, the Covenanters, the Jacobites, the Round-
heads, the Crusaders, not because he meant to make literary
capital out of it, but because he was interested; and for what
interested him, he possessed one of the most retentive memories
with which man was ever gifted. Hence when he, a man over
forty, began to write his great series of romances, the knowledge
necessary for their construction flowed easUy and naturally from
a mind already There was no laborious consultation of
full.
authorities. If he did not recollect a fact, he invented one to suit

his purpose ; just as, if he failed to call to mind a motto for his
chapter, he manufactured it Scott did not take himself seriously
as a historian ; nor did he think it part of his contract with his
readers to be strictly accurate in matters of fact. He treated
lightly the strictures of critics on his inaccuracies, serenely con-
scious that the same principles of criticism would have led to
the condemnation equally of Shakespeare's historical plays ; and
instead of correcting the errors of which the critics complained,

he pointed out others unnoticed by them. What gives value to
the history both of Scott and of Shakespeare is that they have
lived imaginatively with their creations and with the real figures
among which these are set, so that frequently their errors are more
true than the truths of Dryasdust.
This leads to another and even more important difference
between the original and the imitations, which is not referred to by
Scott. Scott had a wider and more comprehensive knowledge of
man since Shakespeare ; and to him the figures
character than any
mere names in the pages of a book, but as living
of history were not
and real as the men he daily met in the streets of Edinburgh.
No man who did not actually know them could have drawn his
James VI, or Louis XI, or Claverhouse. Whether or not these
are just the men who lived under those names in England, or
France, or Scotland, they are at any rate men, the beings whom
Scott saw emerge from the books and documents he studied. He
had, in short, the creative imagination, and all that he read about
became without effort real to him. His followers, on the other
hand, laboriously pieced their characters together, never feeling
their reality at all.
Not unnaturally, the imitators of the Waverley Novels dealt

on a different principle with the information which they had with
difficulty acquired. Scott could treat lightly that which welled up
spontaneously from his full memory ; but their information had
been won with toil of brain and of eye. Hence we have in the
imitators a greater parade of learning, more anxious care, less
freedom and flexibility, far less insight into the true meaning of
history, — above all, far less powerto bring home to the reader the
fact that history has been made by men of like passions with
ourselves.
Though Scott was not the first to write historical novels, he
may fairly be called the father of the historical romance ; for it
was the Waverley Novels which made it a recognised species in

Germany, France and England, where nearly
Italy, as well as in
all the later masters of romance attempted it. Charles Reade,

George Eliot, Thackeray and R. L. Stevenson have all written
novels of this description. Only the last however is in the full
AFTER SCOTT 62 1,
No one but he, by the peculiar blend of

sense Scott's successor.
romance with history and by the atmosphere of nationality in
which he wraps his romances, recalls the spirit and manner as
well as the general scheme of the author of Waverky^
William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882) was a follower of
Scott who had no real understanding of his master's method. In
hisbest-known works. The Tower of London (1840), Old St PauPs
(1841) and Windsor Castle (1843) he is led by Victor Hugo into
the error of making a place rather than a person the centre of the
story. As Ainsworth has neither Hugo's inspiration nor his force,
the result is confusion through the introduction of a mass of
irrelevant detail. These novels are wearisome, and the praise
they have won has been due rather to a sense that they must be
useful in building up the mind of youth, than to aqy real belief in
their merit as novels. Their educational value may, however, be
doubted ; while it can hardly be questioned that the acts of cruelty
and the horrible deaths with which they abound pander to a der
praved taste and are likely to vitiate the mind that is not repelled
by them.
An unwholesome element of a different sort is noticeable in the
other class of Ainsworth's novels, those studies of criminality which
we find in Rookwood (18-34) and m. Jack Sheppard (1839). In
these Ainsworth was following the lead of Bulwer in his Paul
Clifford and Eugene Aram. Ainsworth's contributions to this
school of criminal romance, though poor on the whole, are not
without passages of merit. The celebrated ride to York, in par-
ticular, is, despite its impossibilities and absurdities, a very spirited
performance. The two novels were extremely popular, and Jack
Sheppard, for a short time, even eclipsed its contemporary Oliver
Twist. But there were vigorous and well-founded criticisms of the
morality of works which tended to throw a glamour of romance
over such characters as Turpin and Sheppard and Eugene Aram.
Probably through these criticisms, Ainsworth was turned once
more into the paths of the historical novel. In either department
his literary merit is extremely slight, and there is little probability
that he will ever again enjoy the vogue which was once his.
Horace Smith (17 79-1 849), 'who has been mentioned along
with Ainsworth as one of the two imitators who were remarked
upon by Scott himself, really belongs to another department of
literature and to an earlier time. It is as the joint-author of Horace
in London and of Rejected Addresses, and as the friend of Shelley,

that he is likely to be remembered. He followed up Brambletye
House with a succession of novels stretching on well towards the
close of his own life ; but they contain nothing equal in wit or in
skill to those early works in which he collaborated with his brother
James.
Yet another imitator, whose name has acquired a kind of
prescriptive right to mention, was George Payne Rainsford
James (1801-1860), who even surpassed his original in produc-
tiveness. James is said to have written more than one hundred
novels and tales. To read one-tenth part of them would be mere
waste of time. His style is conventional and his morals mere
sentimentality, while for sameness of situation, and especially
of opening, his name has passed into a proverb, Thackeray's
burlesque of Richelieu (1829) will be remembered long after all
that James has written is forgotten.

The patriotism of Scott exercised an influence little, if at all,
inferior to that of the historical element, with which in the

Waverley Novels it was closely associated ; and the value of the
works due to it during Scott's own lifetime or in the years im-
mediately following his death, was incomparably greater. Scott
was not the only Scottish, any more than he was the only historical,
novelist of his time ; but as he stood solitary in the historical field
in respect of the extent of his knowledge and the sweep of his
imagination, so in the sphere of nationality he was alone in his
method. He more than once declared that his own national
novels were suggested by Miss Edgeworth's Irish tales ; but there
isa wide difference between the two writers in the principle upon
which they work as well as in genius. Miss Edgeworth is a realist,
Scott is romantic. Now though Scott was the chief source of
it was Miss Edgeworth's method rather than his which
inspiration,
was followed by the other writers on Scottish life ; and this is in
the main true also of the Irish school which presently came into
existence. There is little affinity to Waverky even in Lockhart's
AFTER SCOTT 623
Scottish story, Adam Blair (1822). The scene is laid in Scotland,

but the theme of the story one of the elemental passions of
is
humanity, and the action might take place wherever human

beings are found. His Valerius (1821) has been called a
kind of Roman Old Mortality^, but the romantic glamour
is wanting. John Wilson's Lights and Shadows of Scottish
Life (1822) and his Trials of Margaret Lindsay (1823) stand in
a class by themselves, graceful and delicate, but somewhat too
sentimental. Susan Ferrier (1782-1854), the friend as well as
the contemporary of Scott, was the humourist of the society she
saw around her, a kind of Scottish Miss Austen, though less fine
and less powerful. Her business was with the class to which her own
friends and associates belonged, the Scottish gentry; and outside
its limits she could do little. D. M. Moir (1798-1851), the
"Delta" of Blackwood, in his solitary work of fiction, Mansie
Wauch (1828), contents himself with writing the biography of a

Dalkeith tailor. John Gait (1779-1839) fulfils the same function
as Miss Ferrier for a lower stratum of society. There is very little
story and there is no romance in his excellent pictures of Scottish
life. Within his narrower range he is as true as Scott himself,
and his eye is almost as keen ; but the title of one of his books is
descriptive of his work —he is the annalist of the parish. His

portrait inThe Entail {i?>2^ of Claud Walkinshaw, Laird "Grippy,"
is and the slighter sketch of his faithful and ill-requited
perfect,
" bairnswoman " Maudge, is hardly less admirable, while the gar-
rulous " leddy " is equal to any character of that species that Scott
himself has drawn. But the whole novel moves as on an axis round
the lands of Kittlestonheugh. Scott's Morton of Milnwood is even
meaner than Grippy, his Cuddie Headrigg is certainly not more
faithful than Maudge ; but the one in spite of himself, and the
other by reason of his fidelity, become parts of the great contro-
versy between Episcopalian and Covenanter. And this is not an
exceptional case in Scott. However mean or commonplace or
unromantic his are in themselves, they acquire a
characters
new from their setting. Bailie Macwheeble is woven
significance
into the romantic drama of Highlands and Lowlands; Andrew
' HetioiA'i Age of Wordsworth, aj.
Eairservice, self-seeker and money-grubber, gets whirled away on
an adventurous ride ; the sober Glasgow merchant, Bailie Nicol
Jarvie, is carried into the midst: of an outlawed Highland clan,
and takes an involuntary share of the risk in an armed conflict

between the clansmen and the soldiers of the Government ; Bryce
Snailsfoot, pedlar just like Grippy, comes into contact with such
romantic personages as a pirate and a Norse prophetess.
No doubt the Scottish writers contemporary with and subse-
quent to Scott adopted the method of Miss Edgeworth, rather
than that of their great countryman, of necessity and not of
choice. Few could successfully fill the large canvas of the
Wavqrley Novels. Gait's attempt in Ringan Gilhaize (1823)
was a complete failure. The Irish writers however set before
themselves the more ambitious aim of doing for Ireland what
Scott had done for Scotland ; but they had neither the educational
equipment nor the native gifts necessary to complete success.
The deficiency in the former respect of the greatest of them,
William Carleton, may be measured by the trick played upon
hirn by his- countryman, the poet Denis Florence McCarthy.
During Carlyle's visit to Ireland in 1847, Carleton was present
with: a,, number of the Young Ireland party at a breakfast in
honour of Carlyle, when the conversation ran upon the poetry of
Shelley,which Carlyle and Carleton joined in depreciating. So
contemptuous was the opinion held of Carleton's knowledge of
English literature that McCarthy gravely asked him if he would
disparage Shelley's masterpiece, Sartor Resartus; and it needed
the laugh which followed to put Carleton sufficiently on his guard
to retort that would be well for Shelley if he could write a book
it
like Sartor. Resartus^. Not on such foundations were the histori-

cal romarjces of Scott built, nor could any man so inadequately
equipped have taken Scott's broad view of public affairs and of
the relation of class to class.
,
Naturally therefore it is a very
dwarfed and attenuated Waverley that we get from the pens of
the Irish followers of Scott. In the wider aspects of their work
they were, in spite of themselves, more like their countrywoman.
Miss Edgeworth. But they had energy and verve, and they often
' O'Donoghue's Life of William Carleton, ii. 118.
AFTER SCOTT 625
contrived to give to their tales much of the breezy freshness of

Scott's novels.
William Carleton (1794-1869) would have won the gratitude
of alllovers of good literature if he had left nothing but his
Autobiography. Unfinished as it is, this "marvellous human
document " is incomparably the most interesting and instructive
of all the books bearing upon the Celtic revival. In explaining
Carleton himself, it throws a flood of light upon all the most
intensely Irish writers as well, and not least upon GriflSn and
Banim, whose names Carleton associates with his own as "the
only three names which Ireland can point to with pride'." The
racial gifts and defects, the sources from which all drew, the
spirit in which they worked, the influences which made them

what they were, are all shown by Carleton with unrivalled vivid-
ness. If it were necessary to choose only one book from which

to form a conception of Ireland and the Irish in the early part
of the nineteenth century, would probably be wise to fix upon
it
Carleton's Autobiography. and perversities

It is full of prejudices
but if it were free from them it would be less truly Irish than
it is ; and its overflowing life more than atones for all its faults.
In the discovery and the publication of this fascinating volume,

Carleton's biographer, Mr D. J. O'Donoghue, has conferred
upon literature a boon of rare value.
" There never was any man of letters," says Carleton, " who
had an opportunity of knowing and describing the manners of

the Irish people so thoroughly as I had* " ; and every reader of
the Autobiography must be satisfied of the truth of the statement.
He was himself a peasant, and his pictures of the life of the
peasantry are drawn either directly from his own experience or
from that of the men among whom he lived. For the production
of these pictures he had not only extraordinary gifts, but very great
external advantages. Uneducated as his parents were, Carleton
justly describes them as "highly and singularly gifted." His
father " possessed a memory not merely great or surprising, but
absolutely astonishing." He could repeat by heart nearly the
whole of the Old and New Testaments, and " as a narrator of
•-
O'Donoghue's Carleton, ii. 291. * ibid. L 148.
W. 40
old tales, legends and historical anecdotes he was unrivalled, and
his stock of them inexhaustible''; so much so that Carleton
hardly ever afterwards heard any Irish tradition, legend or usage,
with which he was not already familiar. His mother " possessed
the sweetest and most exquisite of human voices," was especially
celebrated for her wonderful power of raising the "keen,"' and
sang a large number of old Irish songs.
The youngest of a large family which crowded the small
Irish cabin', William Carleton had for birthright only his share of
the poverty of all. He was however, from the first, a remarkable
boy, and was be educated and to become
early singled out to
a priest. The result of his first day in school certainly justified
the selection ; for in that one day he mastered the alphabet and
got as far as b-a-g, bag. The teacher was Pat Frayne, who
afterwards sat for his portrait as Mat Kavanagh in The Hedge
School. But the sequel illustrates the difficulties which beset the
education of the Irish peasantry in those days. Finding only
three scholars, Frayne, after that single day, left the neighbour-
hood ; and boy Carleton was driven from
for years afterwards the
up scraps of education where and how he

pillar to post, picking
could. At one time he set out to be himself the "poor scholar"

whom he has touchingly depicted in one of the most beautiful
of the Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry; but, moved
partly by an ominous dream, and probably still more by the
natural heaviness of heart at parting from all he held dear, he
turned back upon the way.
There is evidence in the Autobiography that Carleton would
willingly have gone on living an easy life with the reputation of
"a scholar," dressing like a rustic dandy, performing athletic feats
and attending wakes and dances. But his eldest brother Michael's
reproaches and jeers drove him to apprentice himself to a stone-
cutter —
an engagement which he immediately broke and then —
to wander forth into the world, after first residing with a sister
until her husband made it plain that he was not disposed to
support Carleton indefinitely. He became a tutor in the family
of a farmer, and after various changes and adventures made his
^ Fourteen children were born, but six were dead before tlie birth of William.
AFTER SCOTT 627
way ultimately to Dublin, where he became clerk to the Sunday

School Society, married, was dismissed, reinstated, dismissed again,
and finally became a professional, but always a needy, man of
letters. was incapable of managing his own affairs,
Carleton, in fact,
and even the Crown pension of ;£^2oo a year, which was bestowed
upon him in 1848, failed to relieve him from pecuniary embarrass-
ments. Though he was never paid in accordance with the
work, the sums he received ought, with good
literary merit of his
management, and with the help of his pension, to have kept him
in comfort and free from the incubus of debt
Carleton came of a Romish family; and the fact that he
became clerk to a Protestant society indicates a change of religion.
In truth, sometimes from conviction, sometimes, it is to be feared,
under the pressure of his needs, Carleton was in one part of
his life or another nearly everything that an Irishman could be.
He was by a trick made a Ribbonman before he had ceased to
be a schoolboy. He has written for landlord and for tenant,
for Papist and for Orangeman. This fact has diminished his
popularity among his countrymen, but it makes him all the
more interesting. His change of was the outcome of
religion
that remarkable personal experience narrated in The Pilgrimage to
Loiigh Derg, of which, with his customary naive self-conceit, but
not wholly without reason, Carleton speaks as "probably one of
the most extraordinary productions that ever appeared in any
literature'." It is so by reason of its singular vividness and truth :
the author declares that there is " not even an exaggeration of any
kind " in the narrative, and that Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, who
made the pilgrimage long afterwards, had assured him that he
was surprised by its truth and accuracy.
The Pilgrimage to Lough Derg, which appeared in The Christian
ExamiTier in 1828, marks Carleton's entrance into literature. For
several' years he wrote for The Examiner and for The National
Magazine, and from 1833 onwards his name is prominent as a

contributor to The Dublin University Magazine. Meanwhile, a
number of his papers had been gathered into volumes. The first
was his Father Butler and The Lough Derg Pilgrim (1829).
^ O'Donoghue's Carleton, i. loi.
40 —
This was followed by Traits and Stones of the Irish Peasantry
(1830), to which a second series was added three years later.
Carleton justly calls it his greatest work. The Tales of Ireland
(1834) stand on a far lower level Of Carleton's longer works,
among the best are Fardorougha the Miser, which first appeared
in The Dublin University Magazine in 1837-1838, Valentine
McClutchy (1845), The Black Prophet {i?>^'j) and The Emigrants
of Ahadarra (1847). There is good work also in Parra Sastha,
or the History of Paddy Go-easy and his wife Nancy (1845)
and in The Tithe Proctor (1849); but these roused much feeling
against Carleton in his native country. The satire on Irish shift-
lessness in the former was resented ; and the fact that in the
latter the writer took the side of the minority against the majority
gave still deeper offence.
But while Carleton, not unnaturally, was willing enough to
give expression to the views of the party of his adoption, the
genuine and great grievances and sufferings of the other party
never passed from his mind. In his old age he wrote that within
his own memory, under the penal laws, "there was nothing in
existence for the Catholics for the worship of God except the
mere altar, covered with aopen roof to protect the priest
little
from rain, which it was incapable of doing"; and he could

recollect a time when there was " no law against an Orangeman,
and no law^^ a Papist." His Valentine McClutchy is a story
of the dominance of Orangeism and the oppression of the land-
laws, the germ of which was an Orange outrage perpetrated in
his father's house when Carleton was a mere boy ; and his Black
Prophet is an appalling picture of sufferings from famine. It
was founded upon a forgotten famine of Carleton's youth ; but,
appearing as it did when the great famine was raging, it was
believed to be a picture of what was then taking place.
It is Carleton's misfortune that, among his novels, the one
which is best known
commonplace Willy Reilly (1855),
is the
Before that was published he had passed his youth. In his '
early novels, and in the Traits and Stories, he had used the
best of the materials of his own- experience. He had either to
repeat himself, or to wander into unfamiliar ground; and the
AFTER SCOTT 629
moment he does so he becomes uninteresting. It is by the

Traits and Stories that his name must live. In these and in
the best of his novels the characters, both male and female, are
well drawn and the story isBut in all his longer works
vivid.
Carleton is irregular; something weak and flat is constantly

intruding to spoU what is powerful, pathetic or lively. The
Traits and Stories are free from such irregularities.The different
tales, it is true, vary widely in quality; but when Carleton has a good
theme, and his imagination is fired with it, there is neither pause
nor decline. such as The
In literary quality the pathetic stories,
Poor Scholar and Tubber Derg, are the best ; but the humorous
pictures ofrough Irish life are excellent too. Their fault is exaggera-
tion. There is rather more than enough of extravagant humour and
burlesque ; but the pictures of faction fights, weddings and wakes,
and the characters of the hedge schoolmaster and his scholars,
the smuggler, the Whiteboy, the pig-driver, and the innumerable
oddities of Irish life, are all the more valuable because, as a
countryman of their creator's pointed out in The Edinburgh
Review in 1848,; they are pictures of a class who were even then
passing away " from the records of history, and from the memory
of man for ever\"
The two men whose names Carleton associates with his own
were both' cut off in their prime, and the work of Griffin especially
must be regarded rather as the promise of what he might have
done than as the ripe fruit of his intellect.
John Banim (1798-1842) collaborated with his elder brother
Michael (1796-1874) in their most famous and best work, the
Tales by the O'Hara Family (1825-1827), and he wrote besides
one or two tragedies and a good deal of verse. All the Irish
writers of the time were more or less poets as well as writers of
prose. There is an unmistakable strain of poetry in Carleton's
prose, and, though he wrote very
little verse that is worthy of
remembrance, his Sir Turlough deserves a high place among

modern; ballads. On the poetic side Griffin was the most highly
He has left a considerable body of good
gifted of the three.
poems, and among them are a few which approach excellence.
'Quoted in O'Donoghue's Carleton, i. 150.
Eileen Aroon is a piece of rare delicacy, and The Wake of thfi
Absent is at once touching_and beautiful. Banim never rises to
this level, and most of his verse is rough and faulty.
The story of the life of John Banim is rendered beautiful by
the devotion of the elder brother and by the heroic fortitude of

the younger under intense physical suffering, his warm family
affections and his generous helpfulness to countrymen more needy
than himself. Michael seems to have been almost, if not quite, as
wellendowed for literature as John; but it was the latter who
went to London, where, after some attempts, not wholly unsuc-
cessful, at thedrama, he settled down as a writer of Irish tales
and it was only through his encouragement that the elder brother
became a writer too. The deliberate purpose of the Banims was
to do for Ireland what Scott had done for Scotland ; and though
they were younger men than Carleton they had the advantage of
anticipating him in the date of their writings. They had sufficient
tact and insight to be aware that no mere collection of comic
tales, however amusing, or of reckless adventures, however
exciting, would serve their purpose. The Irish have been singu-
larly unfortunate in some of their literary representatives. By
Lever and by Lover they are depicted simply as a people of
riotous mirth. The Banims show the tears as well as the laughter,
the melancholy which is no less a trait of the Celt than mirth,
while it unquestionably has deeper roots. But the Banims had
scarcely enough of the artistic gift, and they failed to fuse their
materials. Too often we find a grave chapter followed by a
humorous one for no better reason than that the writer feels it
necessary to illustrate the other side of character. Too often the
garrulity ofsome old peasant woman retards the progress of the
story at a critical point, when the reader has as little patience
with her as the actors in the tale. Shakespeare finds room for
Mrs Quickly in his Henry IV, but not between Hotspur and
Prince Hal on the field of Shrewsbury. Scott brings in Mause
Headrigg with; effect at Drumclog but her utterances are crisp
;
and vigorous and short, and she is a component part of the scene,
not an excrescence. This higher skill the Banims did not possess.
It was not wholly the fault' of the writer that The Croppy (by
AFTER SCOTT 63
Michael Banim), a tale of the rebellion of 1 798, fell so far short

of Scott's story of the '45. The absence of romantic glamour is
partly due to the fact that the events were too recent, but still
more on the whole, a movement

to the fact that the Irish rising was,
of the peasantry alone, without their natural leaders. The High-
land host without Vich Ian Vohr and his fellow-chieftains would
have been sordid enough. This defect of The Croppy is rather
inherent in the subject than due to Banim's treatment of it ; but
he is certainly responsible for the lack of concentration which the
story shows. The same writer's earlier tale however, Crohoore of
the Bill-hook is vigorously written, and his brother's story. The
Nbwlans, is powerful as well as tragic.
The other name which Carleton condescended to associate

with his own was that of Gerald Griffin (1803-1840), the friend of
Banim. Griffin was a man of sensitive and even morbid conscience.
He established his footing in the world of letters after a hard
struggle, in the course of which he proved himself to possess no
ordinary capacity for delineating passion. Then he was seized
with scruples. He thought such delineations harmful and when ;
he had once convinced himself of no persuasion could induce

this
him to continue. He abandoned literature and devoted himself

to the work of a charitable brotherhood of the Romish Church ;
and in that work he contracted the disease which carried him off
at the early age of thirty-seven.
The most noteworthy product of Griffin's brief literary career
is The Collegians (1829), widely known as The Colleen Bawn,
under which title it was dramatised by Dion Boucicault. In this
powerful tragedy the influence of Scott is manifest. But though a
work of high promise it is still immature ; and we may reasonably
suppose that at thirty-seven Griffin could have far surpassed the
work of the young man of twenty-six. The defect of The Collegians
is precisely that which mars also the Tales by the CHara Family.
The anecdotes, the references to the customs of the country, all

that gives local colour, delay the progress of the story rather than
further it. In many instances the specially Irish scenes are
brought in by violence where they have no business to be^ for —
example, the chatter of the barber while he is cutting the hair of
Hardress Cregan. At the age at which Griffin wrote The Col-
legians, it was hardly possible for him to have a profound know-
ledge of character, and sometimes, as in the case of the milk-and-
water Kyrle Daly, he fails completely in delineation. But as a
rule his characters, though they are not deep studies, give the
impression of reality; and here too a wider experience would
have taught him much. His method was right, his narrative
good; only time and practice were needed to raise him to
excellence.
Carleton, like Mangan, lived and wrote in the country where
he was born ; but Ireland had no such literary centre as, in those
days, Scotland had in Edinburgh, and no such organ as The
Edinburgh Review or Blackwood's Magazine. The establishment
of The Dublin University Magazine in 1833 in some degree
supplied the latter want ; and The Nation newspaper, founded in
1842, had an influence simply incalculable in the development of
national spirit. It is notorious that to the latter is due a whole
literature in verse, of which it may be said that, though the pane-
gyrists of Celticism have greatly exaggerated its merits as poetry,
they' could not exaggerate its practical importance. Meanwhile
however there had been a considerable leakage of literary talent
to the wealthier sister-island and the more attractive centre of

London. Darley and Banim were there, and there Gerald Griffin
struggled to establish himself. Thither too ultimately drifted
William Maginn (1793-1842), who was for a time a centre of
attraction to other Irishmen. His career, though far from credit-
able, is interesting and In early years he followed
instructive.
his father's profession of schoolmaster at Cork, and while thus
engaged he established a connexion with Blackwood's Magazine,
surprising the Edinburgh men by the extraordinary vividness
with which he realised the life and the society which at that time
he had never seen. His learning, his versatility and his exuberant
wit made him a contributor inferior in importance only to Wilson
and Lockhart But although he had many engaging qualities
Maginn was not a man to be relied upon ; and after many years
of frierjdly relations Blackwood and he became estranged. Mean-
while Maginn had moved to London, where he was for a time on
AFTER SCOTT 633
terms of intimacy with Thackeray, then a young man seeking to

establish himself in the world of journalism. The best known
and probably the most life-like portrait of the Bohemian Doctor
is the satirist's Captain Shandoni But if Thackeray saw his
weaknesses he looked upon them with a kindly eye, and is said
to have helped him in his difficulties with a loan of ;£soo
which, of course, was never repaid.
Maginn was unquestionably a man of brilliant gifts, but he
had no backbone of character. His course almost from the start
was downward. As early as 1826 Lockhart writes of him: "I
never saw a man grow more inferior to himself in a short time
than he has to the O'Doherty'^ of former days. Newspaper
scribbling has totally destroyed a style that was always too hght
and hasty. There is now little whalebone indeed remaining"."
Nevertheless, Maginn had still a great reputation, and whenever
there was a new enterprise on foot he seems to have been thought
of either as editor or as contributor. He was engaged on John
Murray's unsuccessful newspaper. The Representative; but "he
was better at borrowing money than at writing articles'."
The most important event in Maginn's literary life was the

eistablishment, in conjunction with his friend Hugh Fraser, of the
celebrated Fraser' sMagazine (1830), the publication of which
was entrusted to James Fraser because he happened to, bear the
same surname as Maginn's friend. Maginn used his acquaintance
with the Blackwood staff, his other literary connexions and his
own reputation to draw around the new magazine a band of con-
tributors more brilliant even than that which supported " Maga."
Among who lent their aid were Coleridge and
the older writers
Southey; among Maginn's own contemporaries were Lockhart,
Carlyle and Edward Irving; among the younger men was
Thackeray. No English periodical ever possessed a more brilliant
staff than Fraser in its early days.
One of the older writers who, as a member of the Fraser
group, may be briefly noticed here, was Theodore Hook (1788-
' Maginn's no7n deplume in Blackwood,
^ Mrs Oliphant's Blackwood, i. 242.
* Smiles'sybAre Murray, ii. iog.
1841). He was already somewhat past his prime. The brilliancy
extempore verse and
of his conversation, his extraordinary gift for
his exhaustless resources for entertainment made him in his youth
a favourite in society. Through his powerful acquaintances he
procured the post of Accountant-General of the Mauritius ; but
he returned with a cloud upon his character. Large sums of
money which were under his charge had disappeared, and he was
prosecuted for embezzlement. The matter has never been satis-
factorily cleared up; but it seems probable that Hook was

culpably careless rather than criminally guilty. He became a
political journalist, editing and largely writing the John Bull.
To this journal Maginn contributed, and so the connexion between
him and Hook began.
Hook's novels belong to the later stage of his career. The
firstpart of his Sayings and Doings appeared in 1824, Maxwell,
the most carefully framed of them all, in 1830. Gilbert Gumey
(1836) has a special interest because it is to a considerable extent
autobiographical. But not one of Hook's novels strikes the
modern reader as worthy of the author's unquestionable gifts.
Jack Brag (1837), for example, is a somewhat coarse story of the

adventures and misadventures of a vulgar toady and pretender to
gentility. He is the son of a candle-maker, and he hears with
dismay any chance word that may possibly allude to his father's
trade, which is carried on by his mother. Matter like this, which
might be tolerable enough for a chapter or two, becomes nauseous
in the extreme when it is spread over a whole novel. Such as it
is, moreover, Hook treats it with far less cleverness and resource
than he frequently expended on a hoax, or in extemporising
verses for the entertainment of a dinner party. The interest of
his novels now is rather extrinsic than intrinsic. Dickens bor-
rowed one or two notable incidents and characters. Hook's
Kekewich is the prototype of Jingle, and more than a hint for
the breach of promise case in Pickwick is to be found in the
history of Mrs Fuggleston. It may be remarked in passing that
there is something regal in Dickens's "conveyances." "Bill

Stumps, his mark," is taken unblushingly from The Antiquary.
And the confidence of Dickens has been justified by the fact that
AFTER SCOTT 635
the fun and humour have passed to his credit. The far more
masterly scene in Scott is rarely referred to, and the name Aiken
Drum probably carries no meaning to nine out of ten of those
who are delighted with Bill Stumps.
Maginn is now magni nominis umbra. Destitute of the self-
control which devotion to a great aim demands, writing always in

a hurry and often in the midst of dissipations, he squandered on
ephemeral journalism intellectual powers and literary gifts of a
rare kind. He was a man of varied learning; he had the capacity
to be a great critic, and in occasional articles he did excellent
critical work ; he was an admirable story-teller, and had he -
possessed the gifts of concentration and perseverance he might

have been a great novelist. But after a life of forty-nine years all
these talents produce only a few volumes of fugitive writings, for
the greater part too thin and ephemeral to be worth reading now.
Maginn however, not only by his own writings, but by the
company he gathered round him, communicated a noticeable
Irish flavour to Fraser's Magazine. Among his countrymen who
wrote for it were Francis Mahony (1804-1866) and Crofton
Croker, the former of whom is best known by his nom de plume of
Father Prout. The famous Reliques were contributions to Fraser's
Magazine) and it is humiliating to human taste and to the human
in;tellect to remember that while Sartor JResartus came near
bringing ruin upon the magazine, the papers of Mahony were

among it^ most powerful supports.. To skim the pages of Maginn
is melancholy work, but to turn over those of Father Prout is
more melancholy still. Mahony's wit has long been stale, and he
deserves a passing niention not so much for his native merits as
;because he was once a conspicuous figure in a remarkable literary
band. This eclipsedue less to the fault of the man than to the
is
species of hterature which he cultivated. The harlequin is per-

manent in letters as on the stage, but each age must produce its
own. A new generation will no more accept the Mahony or the
Douglas Jerrold of the •old than it would laugh at the ghost of
Grimaldi at its Christmas pantomime.
The connexion of T. Crofton Croker (1798-1854) yiith Fraser
was less intimate, and he is now best remembered not as an
original writer but as a collector.His Fairy Legends and Tradi-
tionsof the South of Ireland (1825) and his Legends of the Lakes
(1829) are admirable of their kind; but in the composition of
them he received a good deal of help, from Maginn among
others.
There remain two Irishmen who, though they were caricaturists
rather than artists, havedone more than all the rest to create the
Irishman of literature. These were Samuel Lover (1797-1868)
and Charles Lever (1806-1872). They have some affinities; but
whereas the caricature of the Irish nature in Lever is relieved and
varied by the rapid rush of events, in Lover it is the staple, and
the reader becomes unpleasantly conscious of its essential falsity
and hollowness. Like many his countrymen. Lover was

of
remarkable for his versatility and like not a few of them he
;
lowered the quality of his work by the lack of concentration

which that versatility indicated. He was a painter as well as an
author, he wrote verse as well as prose, dramas as well as novels.
He composed the music for his own songs, and sang them too
with excellent effect. He also tried the stage in Rory O'More,
dramatised from his own novel of that title, but speedily gave
it up.
Lover's talents were superficial, though brilliant. Unlike
Maginn, he made the most of his life and of his powers, working
hard in his cheery way. But his Irish stories, Jiory O'More (1837)
and Handy Andy (1842), show how weary a thing is "gaiety

without eclipse." The latter, which is probably his best known
book, is altogether formless and exceedingly tedious. The charac-
ters are worthless, and we feel that nature and truth are not in it
Lover's supreme gift was the gift of comic verse. His serious
poems are poor ; but in humorous songs, such as the well-known
Widow Machree, he is equal to the best.
This gift of humorous verse is one of the points of resemblance
between Lover and Lever ; and the latter's Widow Malone is
worthy of a place by the side of Lover's Widow Machree. But in all
other respects Lever is much superior. Carleton and Banim have
undoubtedly drawn the Gelt more accurately than Lever; but no
one else has made him so popular. There are multitudes of
AFTER SCOTT 637
Englishmen whose conception of Irish life and of the Irish

character is drawn from Lever, and who, when they think of the
Irishman, do so through the medium of Lever's stories. And yet
it is plain that the characters are little better than farcical carica-
tures, and that Lever only skims the surface of Irish
life. His
superficiality may have been due to the fact that by blood
partly
he was more English than Irish. His father migrated from Man-
chester to Ireland, and his mother too was of a family originally
English.
Lever was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where in 1831
he took his degree of bachelor of medicine ; but he never took
kindly to the medical profession, and was glad to shake it off for
the profession of letters, and for the post of British Consul, first
at Spezzia and then at Trieste, where he died. In T836 he had
become a contributor to The Dublin University Magazine, and
from 1842 to 1845 he edited it. Another contributor to the
magazine in those days was Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873),
who towards the close of his life became its proprietor and editor.
But Le Fanu's early stories were little noticed, and it was not till
nearly a generation later that he won his modest measure of
success as a novelist. At this time he was known chiefly for his
Irish ballads, some of which were sung by Lover, and are not
infrequently attributed to the singer.
To Jhose early years belong what have certainly been Lever's
most popular novels, Harry Lorrequer (1839), Charles O'Malley
(1841), Jack Hinton (1843) and Tom Burke of Ours (1844).
In, later days Lever's books showed an advance in literary skill,
and, though he was never a careful writer, he worked in a less

reckless style than he did in the beginning of his career. For
these reasons some, himself among the number, have preferred
certain of his later stories, such as Tony Butler (1865) and Sir
,
Brqok Fossbrooke (1866). But the superior popularity of the

early tales, and especially of Charles CMfilley, seems to be well
deserved. No degree of care or labour could ever have made
Lever a great novelist. His conception of character was crude
and shallow, and he had little power of construction. Even in
his later days the change is, after all, only superficial " You ask
me how I write,'' he says to Blackwood as late as 1863 j "my
reply is, just as I live — from hand to mouth'." And the reply is
an exact statement of the truth, and an explanation at once of
Lever's merits and of his defects. Not only did he write rapidly,
but he instantly forgot what he had written. His letters from
Spezzia and Trieste to the Blackwoods are full of lamentations
over 'copy' which he fears has gone astray. It would not be
difficult to write something new, but to write what would fit in to

the part before and the part after hie labor, hoc opus est. In
particular, he never could wind up satisfactorily. The characters
of a bookj he says, "are like the tiresome people who keep
you wishing them good-night till you wish them at the devil.
They won't go —
the step of the hall-door would seem to have
bird-linieon it''." Naturally therefore when the influence of the
time induced Lever to attempt analysis the' result was unsatis-
factory. His charm goes as he becomes more consciously literary,
and his own preference for these later stories seems to be rather
the attempt at self-persuasion of a man who suspects that his day
is over than a genuine opinion.
There is however sound self-criticism in the opinion Lever
expresses of the series of miscellaneous papers entitled Cornelius
O'Dowd upon Men, Women, and oth^r Things {1864-1865).
" They are," he says, " the sort of things I can do best. I have
seen a great deal of and have a tolerably good memory for
life,
strange and out-of-the-way people, and I am sure such sketches

are far more my 'speciality' than story-writing'." Just for this
reason the early stories, reckless and planless, are the best The
qualities which give Lever's works their value are the lively narra-
tive, the humour and the "roUick." He stands supreme for
unfailing flow of spirits. In the early tales these qualities are
unrestrained, and neither facts, nor character, nor plot is allowed
to interfere with them. Harry Lorrequer and Charles O'Malley
go where the whim of the author decides, and do whatever most
tends to entertainment. Lever naturally took first the cream of
that experience of life and knowledge of strange characters of
Blackwood and his Sons, iii. 226.

' '
'
' Downey's Charles Lever, ii. 75-76- ° ibid. ii. 14.

AFTER SCOTT 639
which he speaks. Many of the most eccentric characters and

not a few of the most surprising adventures were real. Major
Monsoon was an officer in the British army, who by a legal deed,
for the sum of four napoleons, assigned to Lever the right to
make what use he pleased of himself and his adventures, or what
he described as his adventures.
Charles O'Malley is a story not merely of Irish life, but of the
great struggle which was convulsing Europe during Lever's child-
hood ; and when Thackeray parodied Lever in Fkil Fogarty, the
fighting element was one of the principal points tfpon which he
directed his good-natured satire. Lever thus belongs not only
to the Irish group, but to the class of military novelists, whom
the stir and excitement, the glory and the sufferings of the
Napoleonic wars called into existence. He was not the earliest
of the class, but he was the best, because he was most successful
in welding fiction with history^ or perhaps rather because he
firmly resolved to subordinate history to fiction ; for the historical
element in Lever's lively tales is very slight indeed. Among the
other novelists of the war was Lever's countryman and friend,
William Hamilton Maxwell (i 792-1850), whose work helped to
turn the younger man's attention to the war. Maxwell had been
through the Peninsular campaigns and had been present at the
battle of Waterloo and his most notable productions. Stories of
;
Waterloo (1834) and The Bivouac, or. Stories of the Peninsular

War (1837), deal with what he had himself witnessed. For that
reason they are interesting ; but they are too crude and inartistic
to have much value as literature.
Another writer on military subjects who, like Maxwell, adopted
the autobiographic process, was George Robert Gleig (1796-1888),
whose tale The Subaltern (1826) was exceedingly popular and
still remains both readable and instructive. It was warmly praised
by Wellington ; and the correspondence started between the author
and the Duke on the proposed dedication of The Subaltern led

ultimately to the production of Gleig's Life of Wellington. These
are the only items of Gleig's writing that still retain any interest ;
but his pen was extremely prolific, and Lockhart in 1828 writes
of him as having " some sermons, some novels, and some histories
all at press in London at this moment'," besides an unknown
amount in Edinburgh. Slightly later Thomas Hamilton (1789-
1842), brother of the philosopher, Sir William Hamilton, followed
in the wake of Gleig with Cyril Thornton (1827), in which he
carries his hero through the same struggle. The narrative is good
and vigorous, but there is not much character-drawing, and very
little plot. The conditions of the subject encouraged a story of
the Defoe type rather than a modern novel.
Considerably later in date, but still occupied with the same
themes, was James Grant (1822-1887). While Maxwell and Gleig
worked upon personal experience. Grant told his tales of the
same great conflict at second hand. His father had served in the
Peninsula, and the novelist himself at one time held a commission.
The Romance of War (1845) is the best, as it is also the best known
of his numerous productions. Grant paid more attention to his-
torical accuracy than his predecessors.While the character and

adventures of his hero are fictitious. The Romance of War is an
attempt to follow faithfully the fortunes of the 92nd Highlanders
through the Peninsula ; and herein lies at once its interest and
its artistic defect. The story is sacrificed to the exigencies of fact,
and the result is a work which is neither a history nor a novel.
As the Peninsular battles inspired one group of writers, so
the career of Nelson and the glories of the British navy inspired
another ; and if Lever is the laureate of the Irish soldier, Frederick
Marryat (1792-1848) is the laureate of the British sailor. The
nautical novel differs somewhat widely from the stories founded
upon campaigns on land. In the case of the latter we sometimes
see the influence of Defoe, and sometimes that of Scott ; but the
nautical novelists are all of the school of Smollett : Roderick
Random rather than Waverley was the model upon which they
worked. This was natural enough. Scott's only story dealing
with the sea The Pirate, and the scene even of that is on land.
is
When seafaring characters, like Dirk Hatteraick and Nanty Ewart,

appear, they are always subordinate. Scott knew himself to be
a landsman, and he wisely refrained from committing himself too
far on an element unfamiliar to him. As it was, his deficiencies,
^ William Blackwood, i. 242.
AFTER SCOTT 64!
revealed in The Pirate, provoked Fenimore Cooper, who had

served at sea, to write The Pilot. But though Cooper's novel
preceded by several years the earliest of Marryat's, the latter drew
nothing from it. On sea as in the forest Cooper was a romanticist,
while Marryat was a realist.
By profession a sailor, Marryat is in his sea stories thoroughly

at home with his subject. He had learnt in a school which, for the
accumulation of such material as he best knew how to use, was
better even than that of His first commander
Nelson himself.
was the great Cochrane, afterwards Lord Dundonald, whom he has
depicted in the Captain Savage of Peter Simple (1834). In the
Imperieuse under Cochrane, Marryat in three years saw more than
fifty engagements and was thrice wounded. When therefore,
influenced perhaps by literary ambition, he gave up his sea-faring
life, he had accumulated in his memory an almost inexhaustible
fund of stories, adventures, situations and characters. At the

same time, he did not disdain external aid, and in Peter Simple
he has borrowed from the extraordinary adventures of Donat
O'Brien.
In respect of truth and reality, Marryat had an imniense
advantage over Lever. The latter's Irish dragoons are drawn
from a merely superficial knowledge of the class ; but Marryat
thoroughly understood his sailors, so that even when he draws
a caricature it is also a likeness. It has moreover been pointed
out that his pictures of life at sea possess a special interest, because
that life as he knew it has passed away for ever. Steam and
machinery have completely changed the conditions. Marryat is
our best first-hand authority on the great age of the English navy,
and in the nature of things he can never be superseded. Some
far greater literary genius may arise Who shall reconstruct that
as Scott reconstructed the life of various epochs of history,
life,
asThackeray in Esmond reconstructed the age of Anne, as

Dumas reconstructed the French musketeer, as Kingsley in
Westward Ho reconstructed the Elizabethan sailor. But this
can only be done on the basis of naval records and of the

writings of such men as Marryat. He had seen and known what
his successors can only imagine.
«' 41
Perhaps the best, most popular, of Marryat's

and certainly the
stories are and Midship-
Peter Simple, Jacob Faithful (1834)
man Easy (1836) ; while Japhet in Search of a Father (1836)
and Masterman Ready (1841) are good examples of a somewhat
different type of story. In the more stirring sea-stories the life
depicted is Storm and battle,

rude and boisterous to excess.
fun, and adventure, wild escapade and reckless practical
frolic
joke crowd one upon the other. The manner befits the matter.
Marryat's style is careless, often incorrect, never polished; but
still it is and its very roughness has an affinity to the
effective,
subject which a style more refined and literary would have lacked.
Marryat makes no pretence of profundity. There is no plot, only
a racy story. He has no key to unlock the human heart; but
though his characters are not revelations, his habit of drawing
from the life gives them a certain convincing naturalness which
is often lacking more ambitious studies. His range is
in
considerable. Newton Forster (1832) does for the merchant-
service what Peter Simple does for the royal navy. Japhet in
Search of a Father is a well-told story wherein the interest is
sustained without that rush of adventure which is characteristic
of the sea-novels ; and Masterman Ready, one of the numerous
progeny of Robinson Crusoe, surpasses the work of the ordinary
writers of boys' books almost as much as it falls short of the
masterpiece on which it is founded. Probably few, judging from
the sea-stories alone, would have anticipated Marryat's success in
this quieter and, as regards style and tone, more domestic class
of novels. Like Thackeray, Marryat transmitted to a daughter,

Florence, a portion of his literary gifts; but it reappears in an
attenuated form, and is, of course, exercised in other fields.
Marryat was not without his rivals and imitators. Of these.
Captains Glascock (1787-1847) and Frederick Chamier (1796-

1870) were, like Marryat himself, professional seamen and
thoroughly familiar with their subject. They had not however,
in any marked degree, the literar)' gift which is even more indis-
pensable; for, as Mr Rudyard Kipling has proved, a landsman
may acquire sufficient knowledge for the purpose, and may even
satisfy the sharpest professional critic. Glascock began his career
AFTER SCOTT 643
with the Naval SkeUh-Book (1826), three years' before Marryafs

first publication, but in his subsequent writings he was in-
fluericed by Marryat. So was Chamier, who, through his novels

'
Ben Brace {t.Z^6), The Arethusa (1837), and Tom Bowling {i%/î),
is rather better remembered in the present day than Glascock.
His rstories however contain little that is not better given in

Marryat's, and they hardly deserve a permanent place in
literature.
Much superior to either of these men was Michael Scott

(1789-1835), whose talent for description and fluent narrative
more than counterbalanced his inferiority in technical know-
ledge to the professional writers. He passed some years in the
West Indies, andand in his voyages to and fro, he acquired
therCj
that experience of the seaand of life in tropical climates which
he afterwards used to very good purpose in Tom Cringle's Log
(1829-1830) and., The Cruise of the Midge (1836). Scott was
one of the writers whom Blackwood enlisted in the service of
his magazine, in the pages of which both of the above-named
books appeared. De Quincey admired Tom Cringle so greatly

as to declare that in some of his sketches the author had "the
mingled powers of Salvator Rosa and of Hogarth'." The date of
Tom Cringles Log is sufficient proof that Scott was not an
imitator of Marryat. The superficial resemblances between the
two writers are due to similarity of topics : in manner of treatment
they diverge widely. Marryat is by far the better story-teller, and
his books have far more unity. He is also the superior of Scott
in energy and rattling spirit; but, on the other hand, Scott's style
is, more cultivated and his tone more refined than Marryat's.
Neither is there much affinity between Scott^ and Fenimore
Cooper, though the, Scottish writer has been affiliated to the
American. Probably he followed, consciously or unconsciously,
the method of the Noctes Ambrosianae. There is the same
extravagance, the same inequality, the same bojsterous mirth and
humour, the same disregard of sequence and connexion.
After the death of Marryat, James Hannay (1827-1873) in
Singleton Fontenoy (1850) seemed for a momeiit disposed to tak^
' Mi;s Oliphant's William Blackwood, i. 443.
41—
up the novel of the sea. He had in boyhood served in the
navy ; but he never repeated this experiment, though he became
and continued to be a professional man of letters, displaying in his
Satire and Satirists a greater gift for criticism than he had shown
for fiction.
All of these writers more or less closely cohere with one another
in groups ; but there were besides in the latter part of the time of
Scott and afterwards a few who worked independently and some-
times in remote fields. One was Thomas Hope (1770-1831),
author of the once famous Anastasius (1819), a story which
illustrates better than most the tendency of prose-fiction to lose
its flavour. It was doubtless partly its theme— the adventures

of a modern Greek —which led Byron
to its being attributed to
but so high was the opinon held of seemed nothing
it that there
extravagant in the supposition that it was the work of one of the
two or three men of widest European reputation. Now, probably,
few readers get through it without weariness.
In those days the Levant was " the East " ; but James Morier
(i78o?-i849) went farther, and of Hajji Baba
in his Adventures
of Ispahan (1824), with its sequel four years later, in which Hajji
Baba is brought to England, and in Ayesha, the Maid of Kars
(1834) he produced books at once amusing, instructive and
genuinely literary. Hajji Baba is a sort of Eastern Gil Bias —
Persian adventurer who in the course of a wandering life meets
withall manner of experiences, the very conception of which
demanded on the part of the author a familiarity with Eastern

life which at that date no one but himself possessed, and which
only two or three, like Sir Richard Burton and Mr C. M. Doughty,
have since rivalled. There is probably no faculty more rare than
that which enables a man of the West to realise the character of
the East, and this faculty Morier possessed in perfection. The
narrative in Hajji Baba is excellent; the style is simple and
agreeable, never pretentious, but always rising easily to the level
of the occasion.
Samuel Warren (1807-1870) was somewhat less isolated than
these two. He found his subjects in England, and he had
affinities with Theodore Hook before him and with Dickens after
AFTER SCOTT 645
him. In his Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician he

origirated a type now almost as well established as the detective
story or the story of the sea. Like many other initiators, Warren
at first found difficulty in getting a hearing ; the publishers were,
as usual, afraid of novelty;and it was only after the MS. had
been hawked about to weariness that it was accepted by Black-
wood. The title sufficiently indicates that the work is not a
regular novel. It is a series of sketches, which, beginning in 1830,
continued for many years to appear at intervals in the magazine.
The great merit of the sketches is their verisimilitudfr The
author, a man bubbling over with harmless vanity, relates with
pride to his publisher how theDiary was attributed to this or
the other famous physician, and how overwhelmed men were
with admiration of the "prodigious talents" of the unknown
author. Once again, in Ten Thousand a Year (1839— 1841),
Warren won the widest popularity. Good judges compared him
with Dickens, not to the advantage of the latter. The book is a
novel, rather than a series of sketches like the Diary, and it is
amusing enough in a somewhat farcical way, but it was shrewdly

remarked that the author not only never had ;£io,ooo a year,
but never knew a man who had it. As the great majority of his
readers were in the same predicament, the defect indicated was
unnoticed, the book was extremely popular, and Warren seemed
to have good reason for regarding himself as a writer in the fore-
front of literature. But he had really written himself out. He
never again rose to the level of these two books ; and even they
have sunk into oblivion, because they are unsupported by those
other great works which were expected to come, but which never
came. Warren, it is true, wrote more, but never again was he
decidedly successful.
There still remain two novelists who attained in their own
generation greater fame than any of those hitherto noticed, with
the possible exception of Lever. These are Edward Bulwer,
afterwards Bulwer-Lytton and Lord Lytton, and Benjamin Disraeli,
afterwards Earl of Beaconsfield. There are several points of con-
tact between them. Both were politicians as well as men of letters,
and each of them changed his side in politics ; they were among
the most versatile as well as the keenest intellects of their time
and both were somewhat theatrical in their style.
The first Lord Lytton (1803-1873) betrayed a restless character
and a versatile intellect from boyhood. He was an author while
still in his teens ; he won the Chancellor's medal at Cambridge
he disappeared from society, joined a roving band of gipsies, and

even married a gipsy girl after the tribal fashion. The bent of his
own mind as well as the tendency of the time turned him towards
Byron. In 1827 he published a verse-romance in the Byronic
style; and Byron's influence is manifest in Bulwer's first novel,
Falkland, a story of crime which appeared in the same year. He
afterwards called it his " Sorrows of Werther." The Byronic stamp
is upon his second novel, Felkam {i?>2^), and upon the two
also
famous romances of crime, Paul Clifford {li-ô) din.A Eugene Aram
(1832). And the resemblance extended to his life as well as to
his works. In 1827 Bulwer married, not in the gipsy fashion^ but
regularly.The marriage was as unhappy as Byron's own. Husband
and wife separated, and accusations and upbraidings made their
domestic affairs unpleasantly public. Mrs Bulwer, who was brilliant
as well as beautiful, after the separation devoted her talents to

literature for the double purpose of making money and of avenging
her wrongs, real and imaginary. Her novels are spoilt by a violence
of temper and language which goes far to explain the unhappiness
and affords at least some excuse for Bulwer.
The estrangement from his mother which was brought about
by this marriage made Bulwer dependent upon his pen. As he '
kept up an expensive establishment he was forced to work beyond

his strength, and in doing so wronged his intellect and lowered
the quality of his work. Yet the work was not enough foir his
restless ambition. Busy as hewas in literature, he found time for
politics. Entering Parliament as a Radical in 1831, he changed his
opinions, and in 1852 passed over to the Conservative side. Six
years later he rose to cabinet rank as Secretary for the Colonies.
The success he achieved in Parliament is not the least remarkable
of Bulwer's performances, for it was won in spite of the most serious
disqualifications. Deaf, and hampered by a difficulty of utterance,
he yet on occasion rose almost to the level of the greatest orators
AFTER SCOTT 647
of the day — at least so it seemed to those who heard him, just as
it seemed to contemporary readers that he was almost, if not quite,

the equal of the greatest authors.
A visit to Italy turned Bulwer's facile imagination towards the
history of that country, and to this we owe The Last Days of
Pompdi{\Z-i)\) and Rienzi (1835). From 1836 to 1840 his prin-
cipal works were dramas, which are noticed elsewhere. Then he
broke new ground in the romance of Zanoni (1842). Succeeding
on the death of his mother, in 1843, to the estates of Richard
Lytton of Knebworth, he assumed the surname of Lytton, by
which accordingly he is henceforth known, and under which he
was in 1866 raised to the peerage as Baron Lytton of Knebworth.
His romance of English history, The Last of the Barons (1843),
was the latest work that bore the old name, or rather the initials,
E. L. B. The New Timon (1846) is now best remembered for
the bitter retortprovoked from Tennyson. Two years later

it
came a second romance of English history, Harold, and im-

mediately after it the epic, King Arthur (1848- 1849), which
Lytton, with the proverbial perversity of authors, regarded as the
finest offspring of his mind. Another fresh start was made in The
Caxtons (1849). This, its sequel My Novel (1853), and What
will he do with It? (1859) form a group of domestic novels
altogether different in kind from Lytton's previous work. He
seems to have been conscious that the vogue of his earlier melo-
dramatic romance was passing. The Caxtons was a ballon d'essai,
and it was published with anxious care for the preservation of

anonymity. Th* result of the experiment was encouraging
but for some reason Lytton suddenly wheeled round again,
and in The Haunted and the Haunters (1859) and A Strange

Story (1862) passed from the domestic hearth to the domain of
the supernatural. The latter is an artificial mixture of dubious
science, metaphysics and thaumaturgy; but the former is a ghost
story weird enough and powerful enough to have tried the nerves
of Thackeray. Some years passed during which Lytton added
nothing that calls for mention to the list of his works, and but for
the history of his closing years it might have seemed that he had
written himself out. But The Coming Race (1871), another
novelty, showed he was not only capable of writing still,
that
but of writing something perfectly new. It is one of the earliest
and one of the best of the stories which, taking a hint from the
New Atlantis of Bacon, have attempted to forecast the changes to
be wrought in human life by the discoveries of science ; but in
Lytton's case the satirical tone turns the edge of criticism directed
against the futility of prophecy. Lytton was fond of disguising
himself when he made an experiment, and he enjoyed the bewilder-
ment and the conjectures of the critics as to the authorship of a
work so unlike anything they knew to be his. Kenelm Chillingly
(1873), one of his best novels, which has some affinities with The
Caxtons group, was finished just before his death.
Lytton was the most versatile man of letters and the most
sensitive literary barometer of his time. He attempted nearly
everything, and in the opinion of many of his contemporaries he
did nearly everything better than anyone else could do it. Charles
Reade, adapting Byron's saying about Sheridan, declared that
Lytton had " written the best play, the best comedy and the best
novel of the age^" To and
his novels, his dramas, his lyrical
satirical verse and must be added miscellaneous essays, a
his epic,
history of Athens, and translations of Schiller and of Horace. And
besides all this he was a politician, a successful public speaker and
a figure in society.
But even if the view be limited to the novels alone, there is
ample evidence of Lytton's versatility ; and at several points valuable
light is thrown upon the changes of popular taste, which Lytton
either anticipates by some sort of magnetic gift, or else instan-
taneously responds to. Not without reason Harriet Martineau
called him " a woman of genius enclosed by misadventure in a
man's form^" There are others who have produced a greater
number of works of fiction ; but it may be questioned whether'
anyone has written novels on more diverse schemes. In Pelham
Lytton is partly apostle and partly satirist of " the dandiacal body,"
which draws some sarcastic comment in Sartor Resartus. It is
not an elevated species of work ; but, such as it is, Lytton does
•*
Coleman's Life 0/ Reade.
2 Harriet Martiiieau's Autobiography, i. 352,
AFTER SCOTT 649
it. His dandy is original not content to follow fashion,

brilliantly. :
he But Pelham is not a wholesome novel. There is an

sets it.
utter want of nature in it, and the moral tone is vitiated. Still less
wholesome are the romances of crime, Paul Clifford and Eugene

Aram, which succeeded it. The former is an account of the
process whereby a highwayman is manufactured, and the latter
shows by what steps one whom we are encouraged to lopk upon
as a fine-minded scholar and gentleman is led to commit the crime
—
of murder to say nothing of the minor sins of lying and theft.
Lytton was surprised at the outcry which was raised against these
novels on the score of morality. He defended himself vigorously,
repudiating the charges ; and of course his admirers have adopted
and developed the defence. It has been claimed that Paul
Clifford helped in the process of humanising the criminal law
which was then going on under the influence of Romilly; and
that Eugene Aram is a moral sermon on the danger of yielding to
the beginnings of vice — that the reader has only himself to
blame if he does not pause and reflect that he too may
become a thief or a murderer, should he neglect to root out
from his mind every prompting to evil. But it is significant that
Lytton wrote no more Newgate novels. For in truth the objec-
tions, which were shared by so vigorous a moralist as Thackeray,
were well-founded. In these novels Lytton blurs the distinction
between virtue and vice, and the whole tendency of his treatment
is towards the conclusion, not indeed that highway-robbery or
murder is commendable, but that there is much to be said in
extenuation of these crimes ; so much that, even in the case of a
deed so dastardly as that of Eugene Aram, there seems to be little
to say in condemnation.
left, Hood's handling of it in his poem
more simple, manly, strong and healthy.
is infinitely
While the thread of Byronism runs through all Lytton's work

.
for many years, along with it is woven in one borrowed from Scott.
The two novels of which the scene is laid in Italy form, with the
romances founded upon English history, a group in which the debt
to Scott is obvious. But wide is the gulf which separates Lytton
trom Scott. The lormer said that the principle of his own art was
"intellectual," while he characterised Scott's as "picturesque."
Doubtless there is in Lytton more of conscious effort to be in-

structive than there is in Scott ; but if he imagined that there was
more to be learnt, he was profoundly mistaken. Scott is incom-
parably superior in ease and tact, in comprehension of the inner
meaning of historical movements and in insight into character.
Like the other imitators, Lytton loads his historical novels with
crude matter which clogs the movement and darkens the under-
standing. And they are marred by another fault as grave or even
graver. Nowhere is the meretricious quality of Lytton more offensive
than it is in the historical romances. It goes far towards spoiling
TTie Last Days of Pompeii., which is the best of the group, because
it is the most imaginative. Except the two vivid letters of Pliny
on the great eruption there was little to go upon, and the characters
and their setting were in the main evolved out of the author's
mind.
Far more marked was the change initiated by The Caxtons.
Hitherto Lytton had been an unmistakable romanticist. At one
time it was the romance of crime, at another the romance of
history ; now Byron and now Scott is the model ; but whatever his
theme, in the first twenty years of his life Lytton is never realistic.
Now one of the great features of those twenty years is the rise
of a school of realism headed by Thackeray. Romance continues
to exist, and even draws new strength from Pre-Raphaelitism ; but
then the fundamental principle of Pre-Raphaelitism itself is realistic.
A few dates will illustrate Lytton's extreme sensitiveness to preva-

lent tastes. Vanity Fair; the new gospel of realism, was issued in
monthly "parts in 1847 and 1848. Jane Eyre (which is realistic
with a difference) appeared in the former year, and Mrs Gaskell's
first novel in the latter. In 1848 also the Pre-Raphaelite Brother-
hood was founded, and the brethren vowed to paint faithfully and
exactly what they saw. Nothing could have been more alien from
all this than Lytton's previous work. He had been mystical and
metaphysical, romantic and melodramatic, anything but realistic.
His very criminals and scoundrels had been ideaUsed almost out
of knowledge. And yet, before people were well aware that there
was a revival of realism, Lytton was in the midst of it. Just in
the years when Mrs Gaskell was winning her reputation with her
AFTER SCOTT 6$ I
Stories founded upon the life of a Cheshire village, Lytton too was
depicting English country life as it was before the revolution
initiated by railways. It was not in Lytton's nature to do such
work with the exquisite literary purity and truth of Mrs Gaskell
he never could wholly get rid of affectation. There is something
he wrote, and in point of fact nearly
theatrical in nearly all that
every one of his novels was first worked out as a play^ But
nowhere are his besetting sins so far subdued as in The Caxtons-
and My. Novel Sind What will he do with Itl All the influences
which bore upon him in this group of novels tended to correct
his faults. The general tone was necessarily quiet there was ;
nothing to encourage that Corinthian luxuriance of style to

which his taste leaned ; there was no temptation to paint the
characters either brighter or blacker than human. Hence it is
that many readers have found in these novels a purity and delicacy
both in style and in thought which they seek for in vain in the
rest of Lytton's works.
In the sketch of Lytton's career it has been noted that this
realistic phase was followed by a reversion to mysticism and the
supernatural, which he had treated also at an earlier date in
Zanoni. It has sometimes been supposed that this too was a

mere answer demand, and that the mind of the author
to a popular
was only playing upon the subject because it evoked general in
terest. But it is a mistake to imagine that Lytton had no keen

personal interest in it. On the contrary, there was nothing he
felt more profoundly, nothing with regard to which he was more
thoroughly in earnest. Mesmerism, magic and all forms of the

mystical, the mysterious and the supernatural, fascinated him. If
he spoke about them he forgot all else ; and a visitor to Knebworth
describes how he became so absorbed in talking of spiritualism
and theology that, getting into a boat, " he forgot to haul up the
anchor, and rowed and rowed without observing that no way at all
was made''." Again, John Blackwood the publisher, visiting Lytton
in 1854, found a medium' and a table-rapper in the house ; while
"a character came down from London every day to throw Lytton
1 Letter of Earl Lytton in The Life of Tennyson, ii. 217.
'^
Blackwood's Magazine, January, itjoj.
into the mesmeric trance for the cure of his ailments ^" Lytton
moreover believed himself to possess the gift of prevision, and
occasipnally he used it at the request of friends ; but he always
did so unwillingly, for to him the matter was altogether real and
serious. Doubtless the author's profound feeling on the subject
contributed to give The HattnUd and the Haunters its weird power;
and doubtless same quality has helped to preserve for Zanoni
this
an attractiveness which most of Lytton's novels have lost. Founded
upon the mysteries of the Rosicrucians, Zanoni deals with the
character and fortunes of a being who, having acquired the secret
of immortality, voluntarily surrenders
it at the call of love. To
thishuman touch the book owes great part of its interest but it ;
moves far too much in the region of the supernatural, which may
be an ingredient, but which cannot without serious injury be the
staple, in works of art which appeal to the sympathies of men.
Lytton's reputation has sunk greatly since his death. While

he was living and writing, his abounding energy impressed the
world, and his remarkable versatility made him an object of per-
petual interest ; forwas impossible to prophesy what he would do
it
next. In his time he played so many parts, and played them

with such brilliancy, that he passed for a greater intellectual force
than he really was ; and when he died it seemed as if a star of the
firstmagnitude had vanished from the firmament. Few now
think that Westminster Abbey is his proper resting-place. Men
of letters, indeed, were never quite in accord with the multitude
as to Lytton's merits. Dickens admired him, but Thackeray's
satire has a touch of bitterness and contempt unusually deep ; and
Thackeray's opinion was that of the majority of literary craftsmen.
James Thomson, the author of The City of Dreadful Night, de-
nounces his "
pinchbeck poetry, pinchbeck philosophy, pinchbeck
learning, pinchbeck sentiment''." Meretricious, flashy, stagey, arti-
ficial, —
tinsel, bombast, puppyism, are among the other adjectives
and substantives that have been flung at him. And there is justifica-
tion for them all. Time seems to be convincing that vague being,
the general reader, that in this instance the critics and men of
' William Blackwood and his Sons, iii. 84.
* SaXi's Life of Thomson, 119.
AFTER SCOTT 653
letters were right Lytton is almost great in half-a-dozen forms

of literary activity —almost a great dramatist, almost a poet if not
a great one, almost a great novelist in three or four different styles.
But he just wants the little more which is so much. He has no
humour there is hardly a character in his novels whom we care
;
to remember in his dramas we constantly meet with rhetoric

:
where there ought to be poetry. It would have been better for his
permanent fame had he completely achieved greatness in a single
field, however limited, than to have come near it in many. In
the long run, the Horatian maxim about mediocrity holds as true
of prose as of poetry.
The life of Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) is part of the
history of the nation rather than of the history of literature;
but there is a singular intimacy of relation between the literary
phase and the political phase of his work which separates him
from all contemporaries in whom likewise the two phases were
united. Macaulay and Lytton were politicians as well as men of
letters ; but there is no difficulty in assigning the pfrimacy, in their
case, to letters. Gladstone also dabbled in literature
; but The
State in its and Juventus Mundi are

Relations with the Church
half forgotten ; while The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture is
preserved from oblivion by the wit of Huxley's replies. In
Disraeli's case too it is plain enough that the politician who
brought back "peace with honour," who purchased a controlling

interest in the Suez Canal, and who made the Queen of England
Empress of India, is a greater personage than the writer of Vivian

Grey and Coningshy and Tancred. But the peculiarity in his
case is the remarkable blending of the two phases, the shading of
the one into the other, the sense he imparts that the man of letters
is a statesman, and that the statesman never ceases to be a man of
letters. There is no doubt that Disraeli's ambitions were from the
first political, and his literary enterprises had a political aspect he :
was, for example, a partner in Murray's abortive and financially

disastrous Tory paper, The Representative^, and he visited Lockhart
at Chiefswood with a view to inducing him to become editor of
the paper. But his whole mode of conception, in politics as
' ?sxaAii\ John Murray, ii. 186.
well as in his books, was artistic — usually with a dash of the
theatrical.
In some respects Disraeli the most interesting of all the

is
young literary men and fourth decades of the nine-

of the third
teenth century, as he was certainly one of the most intellectual
and one of the most far-sighted. The dislike, amounting to rancour
and even to virulent hatred, with which he was regarded alike by
politicians and by men of letters would be incredible were it not
so well attested. O'Connell's well-known suggestion that the
name of the impenitent thief must have been Disraeli is typical.
Punch him with a bitterness which is rare in those genial

satirised
pages, Lockhart called him "a Jew scamp," and "swab" and
" traitor " are among the other names of scorn and loathing which
were hurled at him. But in literature as in politics he lived all

this down, and compelled recognition by the force of great
qualities, moral as well as intellectual. His novels are divisible
into three groups, distinct from one another in substance as well

as separated in time. The first group includes all that he wrote
up to 1837, when he entered the House of Commons. This was,
naturally, the period of his greatest literary activity, and among
the fruits of it are, besides minor items, six novels : — Vivian Grey
(1826-1827), The Young Duke (1831), Contarini Fleming (r832).
The Wondrous Taleqf Alroy (1833), Venetia (jiî) and Henrietta
Temple (1837).
In this period there are several points, of resemblarjce between
Disraeli and Bulwer. Both were dandies and wrote works of the
dandy school of literature. In later days Disraeli was more care-
less of dress than Gladstone ; but the glory of his, youthful attire
was dazzling. His evening dress was " a black velvet coat lined
with satin, purple trousers with a gold band running down the
outside seam, a scarlet waistcoat, long lace ruffles falling down to
the tips of his fingers, white gloves with several brilliant rings
outside them, and long black ringlets rippling down upon his
shoulders ^" Keeping this resplendent figure in mind, we shall
better understand Vivian Grey, Disraeli's novel of society, corre-
' Correspondence of J. L. Motley, quoted in the Library of Literary
Criticism.
AFTER SCOTT 6$ 5
spending to Bulwer's Pelham. It is a brilliant but somewhat

crude picture of an unscrupulous young adventurer who forces
himself upwards by sheer cleverness and effrontery. There
are curious suggestions of Disraeli himself in the portrait; but
Vivian Grey is detected and thrust out, a fate which Disraeli
certainly did not contemplate for himself.
In this early group of novels there is more variety and much
less unity of tone than we find in Disraeli's subsequent works.
They seem to be the experiments of a young man who is feeling
his way,and who has not yet finally decided what he shall be.
Already in Vivian Grey there is a political element, but it is by
no means so important as it be from Conifigsby onward
came to
for though the author's bias was to politics, he was as yet uncertain
whether it might not be his destiny to become a professional man
of letters. Contarini Fleming is in the analytical style which
Bulwer adopted contemporaneously in Eugene Aram, but the
materials put of which Disraeli's romance is built are wholly
different. Already the influence of blood shows itself in the
eagerness with which the author turns to the East and the peoples
of the East. Far more Oriental, however, was the wild and fanciful
Tale of Alroy, where the Jew is depicted, not an exile in a strange
land, but in his city of Jerusalem, engaged in the attempt to restore
the political glories of the race. The interest of Venetia lies less in
the story than in the attempt to portray the two great poets, Bjnron
and Shelley ; while the last novel of the group, Henrietta Temple,
is merely a piece of exaggerated and unwholesome sentimentalism,
sometimes brilliant, but sometimes silly.
Out of this miscellaneous farrago

it is easy to select two items
which are integral parts of the true Disraeli. These are the politics
and the Orientalism. All the rest, including the dandyism and
the parade of psychological profundity, is superficial and temporary.
But whatever might have been the case had his political ambitions
been disappointed, Disraeli's entry into Parliament naturally in-
tensified and made permanent his political interests; and the
genuineness of his racial feeling is beyond doubt. Disraeli's
sincerity has been questioned in almost every point, but it would
need the very credulity of scepticism to imagine him insincere in all
his rhapsodies on the great gifts of the Hebrew race and its immense
services to the world. Renegade though he was to the faith of his
fathers, loosely as both the old faith and the new sat upon him, he
was stirred to an ardour of emotion whenever he thought of the

Jewish race. A small and alien band like the Jews, disliked and
often persecuted, could not hold together at all unless it had
this feeling highly developed. Shakespeare accordingly makes
pride of race a feature in the character of Shylock, a Jew of a
very different stamp from Disraeli.
The novels of the first period are the most purely literary in
purpose that Disraeli ever wrote. Though there are political and
racial elements in them, there can hardly be said to be either
social or political theories expressed, or any doctrine taught. For
that reason they have been preferred to the others by those who
dislike the novel of purpose ; but the soundness of the preference
is questionable. The faults of Disraeli — literary as well as other
were greatest in his youth, and the very singleness of his literary
aim tended to exaggerate them. He gradually laid aside other

things as well as the gorgeous raiment of his early years. Though
the lash of Thackeray fell upon Coningsby, it is in the early novels
that the vices which he satirised are most developed. These
novels are melodramatic, bombastic, turgid in style ; the characters
and the sentiment are exaggerated and unnatural ; the tone of
thought is Eastern rather than English and the stamp of egotism
;
is on every chapter.
After Henrietta Temple there came an interval of seven years,
marked only by The Tragedy of Count Alarcos (1839). Then
came Coningsby (1844), which was followed by Sybil (1845) and
TancreU (1847). These three have certain characteristics in
common, and are very clearly marked off from the novels of the
first period. All Disraeli's indecision is gone he writes now as a
:
politician who happens to be also a man of letters ; and his gift of

writing is made to subserve his purposes as a statesman. All the
three may be regarded as manifestoes of and to the Young England
party. As such they are still profoundly interesting and important
documents of the history of the time ; and he who would write the
history would do well to pay close attention to them. For Disraeli
AFTER SCOTT 657
in after years did much to make history ; and a comparison between

his writings and his political action proves that the former fore-
shadowed the latter, so that not infrequently a key to his politics
may be found in. this intermediate group of novels.
These novels do much to qualify the doubt as to Disraeli's
political sincerity. Many, not only of his opponents, but of the
members of his own Tory de-
party, felt that the inventor of
mocracy could hardly be a sincere Conservative, and that the
price of accepting it was too high to be paid even for his brilliant
leadership. Whether it was too high or not is not the question
here ; but at least, in the face of Coningsby and Sybil and Tancred
it is impossible to doubt that, to their author, this Tory democracy
was far more than a mere temporary make-shift, or a scheme for
catching votes at a general election. The transformed Conservatism
of Disraeli's later years is just a political instrument for carrying out
the ideas which are the substance of those three novels. It was
believed that the turning of the public mind to social questions
was a device for distracting men's attention from the reform of
political machinery, and much ridicule was poured upon Disraeli's
pronouncement that sanitation and the improvement of the
social
working classes were the real tasks of government. In those days
/aire was unchallenged, and it was believed that social im-
laissez
provement would come of itself, if only we could get ballot boxes.

In this declaration, however, Disraeli was simply repeating as a
statesman what he had written many years before as a novelist.
It is the doctrine of Sybil, in which he embodied the results of his
own investigations into the industrial condition of England. He
was severely taken to task for by the champions of political and
it
economic orthodoxy ; but time has justified him, and the heresies
of the middle of the century are the orthodox teaching of students
of the industrial revolution in its latter years. Perhaps the greatest
of all Disraeli's gifts as a statesman was his power of prevision
and it was never more strikingly shown than in this anticipation of
the statesman by the novelist. He was a generation in advance
of the opinion of the world. Both parties have now more con-
fidence in social legislation than in schemes of redistribution
and other tinkering of the machinery of Parliament. Without
w. 43
6s 8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
intending it they have followed whither Disraeli led, and so have
paid the most convincing tribute to his sagacity and foresight.
Disraeli anticipated not only the politicians, but, in the main,
the men of letters as well. Carlyle, it is true, had. preceded him
in his social and political criticism ; and in Oliver Twist, Nicholas
Nickleby and nearly all his later novels Dickens is the advocate of
social reform. But Disraeli is prior to Charlotte Bronte and Mrs
Gaskell and Charles Kingsley in the handling of social problems.
Sybil is as much devoted to the interest of the working man as
Alton Locke or Yeast, and it is on the whole more pregnant and
suggestive and practical than either of them.
In 1848 Disraeli became leader of the Opposition in the House
of Commons, and four years later he was Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer. It is not surprising that in the press of business brought
by such he found himself unable to continue his literary
offices
activity, and that many years passed before he could resume

it. Thus the novels of the third group, Lothair (1870) and
Endymion (1880), are the work of his old age. Both were pub-
lished in intervals when he was free from the responsibilities of
office. Both are disappointing, and the latter is especially so.
They contain brilliant passages, but they are on the whole
curiously flat and dull. The characters are stagey and unreal—
surprising fault in one whose business it had been to understand
men. Both are political novels, like the intermediate group, but
in a less interesting way, for they contain no such clear revelation
of their author's mind as Coningsby and Sybil give. Now and
then they show the persistence of interests of which Disraeli had
already given evidence ; for example, the Roman Catholic element
in Lothair is cognate to the Puseyism of Coningsby. But on the
whole they depend more on personality and less on principle than
the earlier group.
There are certain writings the interest of w^hich depends partly,
or it may be mainly, upon the position and history of their authors.
The commentaries of Julius Caesar are valuable not merely in them-
selves, but because they are the commentaries of Julius Caesar.
The may have deserved all the
scribblings of Frederick the Great
gibes of Voltaire; but just because they were his writings they
AFTER SCOTT '659
could not be wholly worthless to the world. Herein too lies the
special interest of the writings of Disraeli. The earlier ones are,
as we have seen, a kind of prophecy of his political action, and all
are a revelation of his character. Viewed in this light their very

faults have a value. But it must be confessed that as pieces of
literature they are often irritating. Their pretentiousness repels,
their intense egotism grows wearisome, the tawdriness of style
disgusts the critical taste. On the other hand, there are in nearly
allsome passages of real eloquence, as well as innumerable striking
phrases and witty turns which redeem the faults and attest the
greatness of the writer.
42-
CHAPTER II
DICKENS AND THACKERAY

The character of early Victorian fiction was determined, not
so much by any of the writers who have just been passed in
review, as by two greater men who were slightly posterior in date
to most of them. The true successors to Scott, not in the sense

that they imitated him, or were very close akin to him in their
work, but in the sense that they became after him the leaders
and chiefs of prose-fiction, were Dickens and Thackeray.
A moment's comparison between them and Scott reveals the
nature of the change which was passing over the novel. It may
be summed up in a word there is less romance, and there is

:
more realism. Dickens and Thackeray, even when they write

historical novels, have "no use for the Middle Ages'." The
scenes of Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens's
two experiments in this sort, are laid just a little way behind his
own time ; while Thackeray's Esmond is a careful transcript, not
at all in the romantic vein, of lifCj manners and literary style of
that period which has least of all in common with the Middle
Ages. In so far as romanticism survives, it survives with a
difference. Even the streets of London are often treated roman-
by Dickens. "He sought," says his most sympathetic
tically
George Gissing, "for wonders amid the dreary life of

critic,
common streets^" But from Ivanhoe to the romance of the slums

'
Beers's History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century, 396.
" Charles Dickens, 30.
DICKENS AND THACKERAY 66l
is a far cry indeed. The change is in the last degree significant,

and not the less so althoughmany elements of romance still
survive^.
Charles Dickens (i8i 2-1870), the son of a clerk in the Navy
pay-'office, concerns us principally in respect of his early life;
for after fame was established nothing happened to him

his
which produced any noteworthy effect on his literary work.
But the history of his boyhood and youth is well worth noticing
because it was then that he acquired the experience and ac-
cumulated the materials which afterwards formed the staple
of his books. The authoritative life of Dickens was written by
his friend John Forster (181 2-1876), a good biographer and a
whose tenure of office The Examiner won,
great editor, during
and deserved, an influence rarely equalled in the history of
journalism. In literature Forster's tastes ran to history; but to
him the essence of and so his principal
history was biography,
works are a series of lives, Lives of Eminent Statesmen (1837-
1839), Life of Goldsmith (1848), Life of Landot (1869), Life of
Dickens (1872-1874), and the unfinished Life of Swift (1875).
Fojster is always careful and sound, and his narrative is often
very interesting. In the cases of Landor and Dickens he can
never be superseded; for he had direct personal knowledge which
no one else can ever acquire, and he had access to materials now
destroyed or dispersed. But he had not that power of penetrating
character which is gift of the great biographer, and he
the special
never makes his subjects live, as Carlyle does, and Lockhart, and
Boswell. His Life of Dickens therefore is an interesting, but
hardly a great, book. It tells much about Dickens; but for a
comprehension of the man it must be supplemented by a study

of his works.
Not the least important deduction which may be drawn from
Forstier's biography is that the picture Dickens drew of himself
and his early life in David Copperfield is substantially accurate.
He himself was the miserable little drudge depicted in the novel.
He himself went through the wretched experience of the blacking
warehouse, and his school was the streets of London. The
imysterious 'deeds' which led up to the imprisonment of Micawber
in the Marshalsea were actually executed by John Dickens, and
they resulted in his imprisonment. Charles Dickens could never
refer to this period of his life without bitterness. The pen which
wrote David Copperfield was often dipped in his own blood ; and
if he violated the law of filial piety in the picture there drawn of
his parents and his home, the he endured in the process
sufferings
may be set against the sin. Assuredly few sons have had more
just ground of complaint on the score of an uncared-for childhood
and neglected education.
After a time a legacy Ufted the family out of its most pressing
difficulties; and in 1824 Dickens was sent to a school which' had
been selected rather for its 'gentility' than for educational effi-
ciency. He remained there for two years or rather more, and at

fifteenhe entered a lawyer's office, in which however he stayed
only about a year and a half. He then became a reporter, first
on the staff of The True Sun, and afterwards for other papers.
As a reporter he acquired great skill. He was determined to
succeed, he had untiring industry, and he toiled at stenography
until he became, to use his own words, " the best and most rapid
reporter ever known." This result was doubtless due to that
quality which struck all observers of Dickens in later years — his
almost preternatural energy. This quaUty produced in many a

curious illusion. They imagined him to be phenomenally healthy
and strong: in reality, his "habits were robust, but his health
was not." His tireless activity was a matter rather of the spirit
than of the body.

Dickens however was conscious of talents for which the
no outlet. He judged himself,
profession of a reporter afforded
quite correctly as he subsequently proved, to possess a gift for
the stage,and began to train himself to be an actor. Fortunately
he was diverted from his purpose, and instead started to use his
pen not merely to report the words of others but to write his own
thoughts. For this end he had acquired an education better than
he knew in the blacking warehouse and in the streets; he had
been storing his mind unconsciously with excellent literary mate-
rial ; and the success of his first venture fixed the whole course of
his life. He has himself described how tremulously he dropped

DICKENS AND THACKERAY 663
his first article into the letter-box of The Monthly Magazine, and
how eagerly he watched for its appearance. It was printed in
December, 1833, under the title of A Dinner at Poplar Walk

in the Sketches by Boz, of which it was the germ, it is now known
as Mr Minns and his Cousin.
For some time Dickens still continued to act as a reporter.
On the staflf of the Morning Chronicle he was at once reporter
and contributor. But the success of the Sketches by Boz (1836)
and the inception in the same year of the scheme of The
Pickwick Papers made him by profession an author. The design
of the publishers, as is well known, was to publish a series
of plates of amusing sporting scenes by a popular caricaturist
named Seymour, and to accompany the plates with a sort of
running commentary of letter-press. Two other names besides
that of Dickens are associated with the story of Pickwick. The
plan, such as it was, came from Robert Smith Surtees (1803-
1864), and the man who was first asked by the publishers to
supply the letter-press was not Dickens, but Charles Whitehead
(i8o4-r862).
Surtees, who afterwards won some fame as a writer of sporting
novels, was at this time just at the beginning of his career. In
1 83 1 he started the New Sporting Magazine, which he edited for
about five years. It was in this periodical that his creation, John
Jorrocks, the hero of Jorrock^s Jaunts (1838), first appeared.
Though the humour of this character seems to the reader of the
present day not very bright or refined, its success tempted others
to pay Surtees the homage of imitation. Even so severe a critic
as Lockhart was sufficiently pleased to suggest that Surtees should
write a work of fiction on a more regular plan. The result was
Handley Cross (1843) and the rest of the series of sporting stories
which still keep the name of Surtees alive. His works, however,
are more worthy of remembrance for the sake of Leech's illustra-
tions, than for their literary merit.
The other writer, Charles Whitehead, stands on a different
plane. His reputation, after rising to a respectable height, under-
went echpse, to be revived again by the industry and research of
a writer of the present day, Mr Mackenzie Bell, whose critical
biography. A forgotten Genius : Charles Whitehead, recalled him
to memory. Unfortunately, most of those whom Mr Bell's volume
induced to study Whitehead regarded him, in virtue of The
Solitary (1831), as a poet; and this has told against his fame, for
though The Solitary shows a real, it does not show a gre^t, poetic
gift. Whitehead's true talent lay in prose-fiction ; and it was so

high that, but for his failing of intemperance, he would probably
have taken rank among the best novelists of the time after the
two great leaders. Whitehead's most ambitious works are Richard
Savage (1842) and the historical romance, The Earl of Essex
(1843). His masterpieces are the former and a short story full of
tragic power. The Confession of James Wilson. Richard Savage
is a story in which Whitehead follows closely the life of the real
Savage, the friend of Johnson. The interest, especially in the
earlier part, is remarkably well sustained. The conception of the
character of Savage himself is masterly, and several of the figures,
both real and imaginary, by whom he is surrounded, are very
well portrayed.
Richard Savage was unw:ritten when the design was formed of
what in the hands of Dickens became Pickwick ; but Whitehead
was well known as the author of The Solitary ; and he had just
published the Lives and Exploits of English Highwaymen, Pirates
and Robbers (1834) and The Autobiography ofJack Ketch (1834)
items in that literature of crime which was popular in those days.
Among the articles in Eraser's Magazine doubtfully attributed to
Thackeray is a review of the former work, which, if it was really
by Thackeray, establishes a literary connexion between Whitehead
and the great of Dickens.
rival At this time then, Whitehead
being known an active man of letters, the publishers asked him
as
to write the sketches which were to accompany Seymour's plates.
He declined, because he was afraid he could not work with
rapidity enough to supply month by month the necessary " copy " ;
but at the same time he recommended his friend Dickens as a
man who had the necessary faculty for rapid work.
Dickens accepted the commission ; Seymour died by suicide
after the issue of the first number ; and the letter-press proved so
rich and racy, and the characters conceived in the brain of
Dickens so amusing, that the original conception of a subordina-

most an equilibrium in
tion of the letter-press to the plates, or at
importance between them, was abandoned. Dickens became the
author of Tfie Pickwick Papers; the plates were illustrations of
what he chose to write, not pictures for which he had to invent
suitable commentary ; and though the sporting element continued
to be represented in the person of Mr Winkle, it receded into the
background. But Pickwick still retains traces of the original
proposal. It is practically destitute of plan, and is not so much
a novel as a miscellany into which Dickens pours all his experience
and observation of life and character. The fact that he was thus
fortuitously left without a plan was a happy thing for him ; for the
plot is usually the weakest part of his books. In many cases the
crudities and improbabilities are astonishing, and but for the
exuberant wealth of humour they would be Once or
offensive'.
twice in after years Dickens constructed a good plot.' Thus

A Tale of Two Cities is admirable as a story ; the mysteriousness
of Edwin Drood is proved by the ingenuity which has been
lavished in vain to find the solution; and if Bamaby Rudge is
less baffling, the coherency at least of the plot is estabhshed

beyond dispute by the Edgar Allan Poe actually pre-
fact that
dicted its Barnaby Rudge began to run about the

development.
end of January, 1841 ; and in May Poe contributed to a Phila-
delphia paper a prospective notice in which he "explained and
foretold the exact plot of the as yet unpublished story'." No such
featwould have been possible if the parts of Dickens's story had
not been linked together in a chain of logic. And yet most
readers will agree with the judgment which Poe nevertheless
pronounced, that in making this attempt Dickens was mistaking
his own powers. He is never so happy as when in The Pickwick
Papers he wanders where he pleases and carries his creations with
him and his readers with them. This absolute freedom is one
reason why the first of his important books remains the greatest.
1 Gissing brings together a number of instances of Dickens's abuse of

coincidence (Charles Dickens, 57).
'
J. H. Ingram's Biographical Sketch of Poe quoted in The Library of
Literary Criticism, 565.
To call Pickwick natural might occasion misunderstanding, for
there is a great deal of caricature and exaggeration in it ; but at
least it is not theatrical; and wherever he proceeds on a plan
Dickens becomes theatrical.

In common with all his contemporaries Dickens was indebted
to Scott ; but his mind was cast in another mould, the circum-
stances of his early life were quite unlike those of Scott's, and his
relation to the great romancer was never intimate. Scott was a
man of immense reading ; in youth Dickens had not the oppor-
tunity, and in manhood he does not appear
to have had the taste,
to read much. His early repertory of books is however notice-
able, because his mind was so sti'ongly influenced by them. It
included the three principal novels of Smollett, Tom Jones, The
Vicar of Wakefield, Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote and Gil Bias.
The predominance of the picaresque novel is the most remarkable
feature of the list ; and more than any other
as Smollett supplied
author, so Smollett's influence remained the strongest on his
mind. So far as nineteenth century canons of taste and morals
would allow him, Thackeray made it his business to revive Field-
ing; and Dickens is similarly affiliated to Smollett.
The however, owes nothing to these

design of Pickwick,
writers. was obviously indebted not only to Jorrocks, but to
It
Tom and Jerry, which may be best described as the joint work of
Pierce Egan the writer and of Cruikshank the
artist Even after
the change made by Dickens some resemblance.
there is still
He can hardly be said to borrow from Egan, who was greatly

his inferior, but he adopted some suggestions from him. He
owed far more to George Colman the younger, who revealed to
him what could be made of the London streets. It was Colman
who taught him that the life of the streets, their most trivial
incidents, their sights and sounds and smells, were material for
literature. The mere suggestion was enough : the mind of Dickens
was full of such things, and when he began to write he found
himself faced rather with the difficulty of selection than with any
lack of matter. One of his faults as an artist is his tendency to
introduce unnecessary characters, characters in from who drop
nowhere, exercise no influence on the story, and sometimes
DICKENS AND THACKERAY 66j
disappear unnoticed. Such excrescences would hardly have been

created, for the story does not suggest them. But they were
present already in memory, and the writer failed to notice their
irrelevancy.
Notwithstanding Smollett and Egan and Colman and Hook,
few writers have been more essentially original than Dickens. A
hint here —
and there a turn of phrase, a situation, the outline of
—
a character he certainly adopted; but the substance of his
novels comes from his own experience. Keen observation, a
retentive memory and a remarkable instinctive power of reading
character, were the gifts to which he owed his literary success.
He not only possessed these gifts in an extraordinary degree, but
they were precociously developed. His boyish insight into
character must have been almost unexampled; for he declared
in his maturity that he had never seen cause to change the secret
impression of his boyhood with regard to anyone whom he had
known then.
The extent to which Dickens built upon his own direct
experience may be inferred from two facts. He is pre-eminently
the novelist of London, and he is pre-eminently the novelist of
low life. But it was just in London, and just among the lower
classes-^with the middle class at the upper extreme —that all his
real and vivid experience lay. He frequently wanders from

London, but he always seems relieved when he gets back to it.
Often he carries London with him into the country. The Pick-
wick group are cockneys through all their joumeyings; the
wandering players and showmen, the beggars and vagabonds, who
abound in the novels of Dickens, are creatures of the city. Con-
trast with these the corresponding characters in the novels of
Scott —
Edie Ochiltree in The Antiquary, the smugglers in Guy
Mannering, Wandering Willie in Redgauntlet. Scott is never so
happy as when he can get his city characters spirited away to the
mountains and the wastes. But wherever they go the Crummleses
and the Jarleys and the little Nells of Dickens are bits of London.
The great city was part of his very being ; wherever he went its
atmosphere was around him. Though not by birth, yet by adop-
tion, he was one of the truest of Londoners. He knew it as few
men have ever known it. He knew it topographically, indus-
trially, socially — within the and middle classes.
limits of the lower
He could penetrate into all its obscure nooks. He was familiar

with all its strange trades and with those who followed them the —
dustman, the articulator of skeletons, the marine-store dealer, the
man who made a living by recovering bodies from the Thames,
—
and many less innocent than he Dickens knew them all better
than most of us know our next-door neighbours. It was from
these materials that he built up his books. It was because he
was absolutely free in Pickwick to use them as he liked, and

moreover because he was there skimming the cream of his past
experience, that he rose in that book to a height he never after
wards reached.
It has been necessary to limit the statement that Dickens
knew London socially. "Society" he did not know at all, and
above the rank of the lower middle class his knowledge grew more
and more scanty. This limitation is naturally most marked in the
early novels, but it continued to the end. The assertion that he
could not delineate a gentleman in the conventional sense of the
word is substantially true. Many of his poor have that true
nobility of character which is the inner meaning of the word
" gentleman " ; but when he tried to depict the manner, Dickens
totally failed. —
Once or twice in later days notably in the case of
Sydney Carton —he was successful ; but his gentlemen were usually
theatrical figures or colourless abstractions. The experience of
his youth afforded him no foundation whereon to build, and
without such foundation he was helpless. It is well known that
his characters (at any rate his successful ones) are all portraits, or,
it may be, mosaics pieced together from fragments of observation

and in his case at least the maxim that what is learnt in youth is
best learnt evidently held good. He never assimilated experience
that came to him after he reached manhood as thoroughly as he
assimilated that of his boyhood and youth. Some writers seem to
possess the gift of divining that which they have never seen ; but,
great as was Dickens's endowment of imagination, it fell short
of this.Shakespeare could have known little of courts and
castles in his early days ; and yet, from the first, his kings and
barons are every inch royal and noble. Those of Dickens

seem to come not from Windsor but from Wardour Street.
His early life told. Though the graduate of the street carried
from his university a rich fund of knowledge and experience, there
was a side of him which was not only undeveloped, but which was
partly atrophied, by this experience. Hence that want of refine-
ment, that slight strain of vulgarity which marred the goodness of
Dickens as it likewise mars his work. In character he was
thoroughly sound —
" every inch of him," as Carlyle declared, " an
honest man"; but more than one observer thought that he was
not quite a gentleman. And there is evidence in his hfe that they
were right. Carlyle suffered agonies because he had to make a
public display of himself on the lecturer's platform : it is impossible
to imagine him going through the public readings of Dickens.
Whatever may have been the merits of the questions unhappily in
dispute between Dickens and his wife, a man of true refihement
would have shrunk from writing what he wrote on the subject;
and though he did not mean the objectionable letter to be
published, he ought to have known that he ran the risk of, and
indeed almost invited, publication.
In manner of publication as in general plan Pickwick, followed
the example of Tom and Jerry, and was issued in twenty monthly
numbers between April, 1836, and November, 1837. Pickwick
was the earliest English novel of the first rank which was thus
published; but the method is that by which most novels by
known writers are now published ; for the fact that they appear in
magazines or journals, along with other matter, is an unimportant
detail. There can be little doubt that it tends to looseness of
construction. An author must be unusually methodical who is
not occasionally compelled to write against time; and there are few
men whom a forced rapidity of composition suits as it suited Scott.
Everyone knows that Thackeray constantly wrote while the
"printer's devil" waited for"copy" outside; but it is perhaps not
so well known Dickens kept his finger on the public pulse
that
while his story was in progress, and did not disdain to alter his
plan if he found his popularity declining^.
^ For an instance see Gissing's Charles Dickens, ()^.
The success of Pickwick amazed author and publisher alike.
The former, always a keen business man, had agreed to do the
work for ;£i4 a month, and at the time considered the pay good.
"' The first order for Part I.' that is, the first order for 'binding,
'was,' says the bookbinder who executed the work, 'for four
hundred copies only.' The order for Part xv. had risen to forty
thousand." Thus at twenty-six Dickens sprang at once to the
height of popularity. No man in his own day rivalled him, and
no predecessor excepting Scott. The secret was the excellence of
the work, and in a minor degree the novelty of the subject. The
endless resource displayed in Pickwick, the ready wit, the unlimited
humour, the enormous number of characters, all deftly touched,
supplied something pleasing to readers of all sorts. But the
matter was not only excellent, it was also essentially new. Just
as Scott had had predecessors in the realm of historical romance,
so, as we have
seen, there had been writers before Dickens who
had attempted the theme of cockney life and character. 86
Shakespeare had predecessors in the drama, and Homer doubtless
had them in the epic. Darwin was anticipated in the doctrine of
evolution and George Stephenson in the invention of the loco-
motive. In each case the common sense of men decides that the
tool belongs to him who can use it, the idea to him who can
make it effective. And so, notwithstanding Colman and Egan
and Hook, Dickens is rightly adjudged the father of the novel of
London life.
He has had a numerous progeny. Of late years "tales of

mean and revelations of the Ghetto have poured from the
streets ''
press, and whiffs from all sorts of heaps, far more unsavoury than
those of the decaying cabbages which Dickens found in Colman,
have been blown to the nostrils. The methods of the modern
'
realistic school are not at all like those of the author of Pickwick.
They take themselves very seriously, as Artists with a capital letter
'
and men with a mission, and feel it their duty to depict Slumland
in all its repulsive sordidness. Sometimes they raise in the
reader'smind a suspicion that the repulsiveness is even heightened
and exaggerated for effect, or perhaps under misapprehension.
Missionaries and doctors who have worked in such districts
DICKENS AND THACKERAY 67I
declare that this is the case, that there are alleviations in the lot,
gleams of brightness shot from human nature which have no

itself,
place on the canvas of the realist. Probably the error arises from
defective imagination. The realist is prone to forget that reality
is a chameleon which takes very different colours according to the
light in which it is viewed, and that Slumland, as it seems to the
native-born, is not quite the same place as that which is visible to
the eyes of the dweller in Park Lane. At the best it is unlovely
enough; but it may be hoped no human lot which
that there is
has not in it a little more humanity than is to be found in the

conceptions of the modern realist.
The spirit of Dickens was far removed from that which
animates such works. By contrast with Scott he may be called a
realist; for no mists of time or space to throw a glamour
there are
over his subjects. He takes what lies nearest to his hand, what
he knows best., Even in Pickwick, before he had developed a
'
purpose,' there is stern reality enough in the scenes in the Fleet
prison. But in the strict sense of the word he is not a realist at
all ; on the contrary, his work is rather the romance of the streets
of London. By way of reaction against the romantic tendency to

choose themes from high life, to depict distant times and to feed
the mind on marvels, the realist tends to lay stress upon the
sordidness of the streets, the depth of the miseries, the vileness
of the vices he depicts. He sometimes runs risk of forgetting that
there is anything else to depict. By a curious perversity he comes
to regard ugliness as more real than beauty, and vice than virtue.-
It is not so with Dickens. His instinct is rather to pick out the

gleam of beauty from the midst of ugliness and the example of
virtue from among the multitudes of thei vicious. There are many
vile characters in his pages, Fagin and Sikes. and all their crew;
and there are many sordid scenes. Frequently his taste is
questionable; and at least one scene, the picture of spontaneous

combustion, is loathsome. But,such scenes are aberrations, things
not at all of the essence of the method.. They are partly due to
the fact that Dickens was himself uncertain how far his reaction
ought to carry him. That he was not proceeding upon a dearly-
understood principle is shown plainly enough by the haphazard
origin of his masterpiece. He simply felt that common life
and
supplied excellent literary material, that he was familiar with it
could handle it. He suspected that others, like himself, would

prefer to the Middle Ages their own time and country; but he
had thought out nothing, he had no views on the question of what
was and what was not proper material for the novelist. Spon-
taneous combustion might do as well as anything else.
Dickens however shares this vagueness as to principle with
the great majority of imaginative writers; and at the beginning his
tact usually kept him right. It was when he took upon him to be
a reformer of schools, of legal systems, of government offices and
of morals and society in general, that he committed his worst
mistakes. humour was the guide. He used
Prior to this stage his
what was humorously effective, and rejected what was not.
Afterwards, his canon of inclusion or exclusion was serviceableness
to the purpose, or the reverse ; and as it was not a canon of art it
naturally led to error in art.

Notwithstanding his errors —perhaps in as much as his errors
elsewhere — Dickens remains the romancer of the London streets.
This is evident from the intrinsic qualities of his work as well as

from a comparison with recent realism. The statement that the
characters of Dickens are portraits or mosaics requires explanation
and qualification. They are always founded on, but they are
rarely transcripts of the real ; the germ lies in experience, but it
is nourished into life by imagination. The imagination of the

author harmonises the whole Pickwick group. Winkle, with
his lying pretence to sportsmanship, treated realistically, would
be repellent; treated humoristically, he rouses the
though
justly indignant Pickwick to call him "humbug," he moves the
reader only to mirth. The Weller family, realistically handled,
might have been sordid; but under the treatment of Dickens they
become the very quintessence of faithful service, of wholesome
fun, of acuteness strangely mingled with simplicity.
If the Slumland of the be darker, it is to be feared that
realist
that of Dickens is far and better than the actual Slumland

brighter
of London. There is a glamour over it, a light that never was on
the haunts of vice and destitution. What Dickens gives us is not
the bare hard fact, but the fact suffused with the glow of a rich
imagination. Poetic justice reigns : the wicked are punished, and
the righteous get compensation for their suffering, even as Job
received twice over all that he had lost. There are horrors in
prison life ; but Pickwick descends as a liberating angel to Jingle.
Oliver Twist falls among thieves ; but poetic justice restores him
safe and uncontaminated to his true position. Abominations have

been perpetrated in schools ; but the good knight Nickleby
redresses the wrongs of Smike, and makes at least his latter days
peaceful.
In Gissing's admirable monograph on Dickens, to which

reference has several times been made, this tendency to idealisa-
tion is dwelt upon, and, sympathetic as the criticism is, there is a
consciousness of superiority and almost a touch of condescension
in the contrast with the sternnessand unswerving truth of modern
realism. But now when the solid atom itself seems to be dissolving,
Some doubt is permissible as to the degrees of reality of the "real"
and the "ideal." It is certain that Dickens "idealised"; but it is
not so certain that in doing so he wandered farther from the truth
than the realist. On the contrary, as has been hinted already, a
vivid imagination may have kept him nearer to it. The realist is
usually a spectator of that which he describes, whether
it be
animate or inanimate. His characters are to him something

external; he believes that he understands themi but he does not
identify himself with them. This is true even of a man so great
as Thackeray, who constantly stops to comment on and discuss
his " puppets,"
and who is obviously quite aware of the strings by
which they are moved. But Dickens,, according to those who
knew him, absolutely was for the time the character he was
shaping. All creative writers have in some degree a feeling of
intimate concern with the fortunes of their characters; but
probably no one else has left such evidence of it in the letters he
wrote and in conversation with friends as Dickens. It is at least
possible that the mesmeric power and the healing touch which
Dickens possessed may have sprung from the same root. All may
be forms of sympathy, and sympathy usually means understanding.
Dickens's mode of conception was intuitive, the realist's is critical.
w. 43
The former is less under control than the latter, but the results it
yields are more sure.

After Pickwick the life of Dickens is mainly a record of
publications. and Nicholas Nickleby were finished
Oliver Twist
respectively in 1838 and 1839. The Old Curiosity Shop, begun in
1840, was completed in 1841. Then Dickens found it necessary
to relieve the strain of such rapid production by a holiday. It
was no wonder ; for though Scott, in the decade of his greatest

glory, had written better and nearly twice as fast, no other novelist,
before or since, has produced with such rapidity works com-
parable in merit with these. The most voluminous writers, like
G. P. R. James and Anthony TroUope, stand on a much lower
plane. To rest himself therefore Dickens in 1842 visited America.
He went prepared to be pleased, and his reception was magnificent;
but by some fatality his opinion of America and the Americans
gradually sank throughout this first visit. Here, as in so many
other points, Dickens contrasts with Thackeray. The latter also
visitedAmerica; but he expected little, and unlike Dickens he

was delighted. He was even absurdly suspected of having written
The Four Georges in order to flatter American prejudice against
monarchy.
Wherever he went Dickens made literary capital, and soon
after his returnhe published his impressions and experiences in
the shape of American Notes (1842). Frequently as the writings
of Englishmen about America have given offence, they have
seldom offended so deeply as these Notes of Dickens. The
indignation was not altogether reasonable. The main subjects of
Dickens's censure were, in the first place, slavery, which the better
mind of America herself practically condemned some twenty years
later; secondly, the political system, the corruptions of which
have been denounced in no sparing terms by American writers
and thirdly, spitting, a filthy habit in the suppression of which
America seems to be as pre-eminent now as she was fifty years ago
in the practice of it Slavery was a subject tabooed in those days
alike to Americans and to Europeans. The other questions
might have been handled without offence by a native; but a
young people is sure to be sensitive, and the criticism of a
foreigner, if it is at all sharp, will be resented. Dickens no doubt

observed the Shakespearean injunction to set down naught in
malice ; he forgot that there are cases, of which this was certainly
one, when it is wise to violate the other side of it, and extenuate
something. He returned to the subject in Martin Chuzzlewit
(1843-1844), where he deals severely with that want of principle in
business which he had found to be rather admired as smart than
condemned Long afterwards (1867-1868) he paid a
as immoral.
second visit to America, when he was generously forgiven his
unsparing criticisms, and when his own impressions were much
more favourable.
Several times he visited the continent of Europe, partly for
economy and partly to acquire new experiences. He spent a
great part of1844 and 1845 in Italy; and for many months in
1846 and 1847 he lived first in Switzerland and afterwards in
Paris. To the former visit we owe Pictures from Italy (1846),
which were originally contributed to The Daily News ; and it is
made on the
probable that but for the acquaintance with Paris
and renewed in 1855 and 1856, A Tale of Two Cities
latter visit,
would never have been written. It must be added however that

that book owes more to Carlyle's French Revolution than to
the direct observation of Dickens. The story is far better than its
author's other historical tale, Bamaby Rudge. It contains no such

absurd caricature as the picture of Chesterfield in the latter novel.
But Dickens had neither the education nor the turn of mind
necessary for success in historical fiction, and it would be
ridiculous to claim for him, in this department, a position with
Scott or with Thackeray.
The year 1856 may be taken to be the culmination of Dickens's
career. The novel then in progress. Little Dorrit (1855-1857), is
certainly not his best; but it was in 1856 that Dickens attained
the summit of his boyish ambition by the purchase of Gad's Hill

Place ; and soon after there came the signs of an unmistakable
decline. In 1858 occurred the separation from his wife, and just
before that the unfortunate readings had been initiated. Dickens
had given a few public readings at Birmingham in 1853, the
proceeds of which were devoted to. a local institution; but it was
43-3
in April, 1858, that he first read in public from his own works foi
his own profit. Various motives united to bring him to this

determination. Probably he wished distraction from the thought
of the impending separation, and he undoubtedly found it in the
excitement of large and enthusiastic audiences. Besides this,
Dickens had been conscious from the first of histrionic talent, and
he had found frequent outlet for his powers in amateur theatricals.
His style of reading, which was eminently dramatic, gave him
the outlet his nature craved. Carlyle, who witnessed one of
the readings, saw "a whole tragic, comic, heroic theatre visible,
performing under one hat" ; and performing extraordinarily well
too — he declares that Dickens "acts better than any Macready
for
in the worlds" Dickens moreover saw in the readings a way of
winning wealth as well as of gratifying this taste, and also, it may
be, his vanity; for, though Forster denies it, there seems to be
doubt that vanity was well marked in his character. He was
little
one of the recognised dandies, and his tendency to over-dress

was commented upon by more than one observer. On the
pecuniary side his expectations were more than satisfied. From
first to last, according to the calculation of Mr George Dolby, who
managed the greater number of the readings, Dickens cleared
about .;^4S,ooo.
Just as completely, however, the result in other respects
justified those who had attempted to dissuade him from his
purpose. On this as on nearly every other point he consulted his
friend Forster, suggesting, as early as 1846, that, "if it were not
infra dig." much money might be made by giving readings from
his own work. it was "infra
Forster frankly gave his opinion that
dig." and though he failed ultimately to prevent the step, he did
;
an immense service by helping to delay it for twelve years. On

the question of dignity, the weight of opinion has been on the side
of Forster. Such a relation as this between a great author and his
public was unprecedented, at least since the days of the minstrels;
and under modern conditions it seems unworthy. It is a position
than that of an actor playing a part in his own
far less dignified
drama, which Shakespeare felt to be degrading. Who can imagine
1 Froude's Carlyle, iv. 229.
DICKENS AND TKACKERAY 6']'^
Scott touring about the country and thrilling his audiences with
the siege of Torquilstone, or raising a laugh with his Dominie
Sampson or the Baron of Bradwardine with his bootjack ? Shelley
declaiming Adonais, Tennyson mouthing out the sins and penitence
of Lancelot and Guinevere, Browning drawing tears by the sorrows
of Pompilia —these are figures which the imagination refuses to
picture. But Dickens lost far more than dignity. The readings
told prejudicially on his literary work, both lessening the quantity
and lowering the quality; and in all probability they shortened his
life. The story of the American tour of 1867-1868 is painful
reading. The indomitable struggle against sleeplessness and ex-
haustion and manifold illnesses would be grand if the occasion
had been worthy. It was almost as determined as Scott's closing
struggle after the catastrophe of 1826; but Scott was labouring to
clear his name from dishonour, Dickens to add a little more to
what was already enough. Yet his motive was not purely merce-
nary, he was at the same time indulging his taste. His manager
declares that the pleasure Dickens derived from the readings
is not to be told in words.
If not the readings, then some other cause operating at the

same time, had a disastrous effect upon the literary work of
Dickens. The novels he produced after the initiation of this
unhappy experiment were A Tale of Two Cities (1859), The
Uncommercial Traveller (i860), Great Expectations (1860—1861),
Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865) and the fragment of The
Mystery of Edwin Drood (\?>ô). Not one of these novels is of
the first class, and the explanation seems to be that the author
was overworked. The amount of nervous energy spent upon the
readings was enormous, and even Dickens had not an unlimited
fund to draw upon. He had been, besides, from the year 1850,
harassed by the task of editing periodicals, first Household Words
(1850-1855), and then All the Year Round, which he conducted
on his own lines till his death. When Thackeray followed the
example of Dickens and undertook to edit The Cornhill Magazine,
Tennyson lamented that so great an artist should " let his brains
be sucked " in such a way. The poet was right both for Thackeray
:
and for Dickens it was a waste of first-rate powers upon second-

rate work. It is to bear in mind, with reference
however necessary
quahty of the work of Dickens, that he never
to the decline in the
showed any development of faculty, but rather, on the contrary, a
decline even before the beginning of the readings. Nothing he
produced after 1850 is quite first-rate; on the whole, nothing he
afterwards wrote is quite so good as Pickwick.
The principal works of Dickens, in addition to those already
mentioned, are his Christmas books, which are
the best of
A Christmas Carol {i?>/^^) and The Hearth (1845);
Cricket on the
Dombey and Son (1846^1848); David Copperfield (\%\()-\?>ô)\ and
Hard Times (1854). He himself thought David Copperfield the
best of all his writings ; and in this preference he certainly showed
none of the proverbial fondness of authors for their weaker
offspring. He was probably influenced by the fact that it is the
novel which contains most of himself; but in purely literary merit
it surpasses all except Pickwick, while it is far more regular than
that wonderful book.
The popularity of Dickens among the rank and file of readers
of his own generation needs no explanation ; but there is some-
thing surprising in his instantaneous acceptance among critics,
especially when we compare his fate with that of his great con-
temporary and rival in the art of fiction, Thackeray. In 1837 the
name of Dickens was one of the best known in English literature.
In 1 84 1 the freedom of the city of Edinburgh was conferred upon
him amidst public rejoicings. The veteran critic Jeffrey, who had
stamped upon the something new in Wordsworth with his " This
will never do," and who had but grudgingly recognised even Scott,
was enthusiastic in praise of Dickens. Contrast the fate of

Thackeray. Eight years after the conclusion of Pickwick and
four years after those public rejoicings in Edinburgh, the editor
of The Edinburgh Review (Macvey Napier) writes to Abraham
Hayward to ask if he knows anything of " a Mr Thackeray," who
has been to him as "a good hand for light articles."
recommended
A Edinburgh must "keep up in respect of
periodical like the
names," and its editor has to be very much on his guard "in
engaging with mere strangers \" At this date Thackeray had
^ Melville's Lift of Thackeray, i. 193.
writtenThe Great Hoggarty Diamond and Barry Lyndon and

much it is true, anonymously or pseudonymously.
besides, mostly,
There is a good deal in Dickens that offends a critical taste,
and not least his pathos ; but this too we find to have been
perfectly acceptable, to the critic as to the general reader, in his
own day. Macaulay shed tears over Florence Dombey. Jeffrey
wrote to Dickens that he had cried and sobbed over the death
of Paul and felt his heart purified by the tears. "Since the
divine Nelly was found dead on her humble couch, beneath
the snow and the ivy, there has been nothing like the actual
dying of that sweet Paul, in the summer sunshine of that lofty
room." Thackeray was almost as much overcome. "When
he read the number of Dombey containing the death of Paul, he
put it in his pocket, went out, and flung it down before Mark
Lemon at the Punch office, exclaiming excitedly, '
There's no
writing against this ; one hasn't an atom of chance. It's stu-
pendous^.' " Within a few years this writer, who " hadn't an atom
of chance," had himself written the death-scene of Colonel New-
come, which is worth all the pathos of Dickens, from Pickwick to
Edwin Drood, many times over. America was, if possible, more

enthusiastic than England, and Bret Harte bears testimony to the
power of. the story of Little Nell over the rough miners of Cali-
fornia.
There were one or two dissentient opinions. George Eliot

says that Dickens " scarcely ever passesfrom the humorous and
external to the emotional and tragic without becoming as tran-
scendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic
Ruskin, writing long afterwards, but still expressing
truthfulness''."
the opinion of a contemporary, says that " Nell, in The Old

Curiosity Shop, was simply killed for the market as a butcher
kills a lamb'." But the opinion of Thackeray and Jeffrey and
Bret Harte was the normal one of the time. There has been a
great change since then. The majority of critics now are either
* Melville's Life of Thackeray, ii. 27.

" TTie Natural History of German Life, quoted in The Library of Literary
Criticism*
* On the Old Road: Fiction Fair and J'oul.
censorious or at best apologetic with reference to the pathos of
Dickens. The discriminating but yet admiring Gissing examines
the question, and finds, generally, that Dickens sometimes elabo-
rated pathetic scenes, in the theatrical sense of the word ; and,
specifically, that " nothing can be said in defence of Jo," the cross-
ing-sweeper. About Paul Dombey's death he remarks, cautiously,
that " if the situation is to be presented at all, it might be much

worse done." Little Nell he pronounces to be "a child of romance,"
and her death ''
purely symbolical." In that light, " as a story of
peaceful death it is beautifully imagined and touchingly told."
Mr W. D. Howells, on the other hand, finds the Little Nell scenes

" preposterously overdone^"
The change tends to shake confidence in criticism and to
undermine all belief in a standard of taste. Are the older critics
right? Is Paul Dombey's death one of the greatest scenes of
pathos in literature ? Is it stupendous ? Or must we content
ourselves with saying that " if the situation is to be presented at
all, it might be much worse done " ? Generalised, the modern
verdict is that the pathos of Dickens is overdone and too long
drawn out, and that it shows a lack of self-restraint In short, in
his pathos he follows his usual literary practice of exaggeration.
His humour rests on exaggeration; and he chose to set up his
pathos on the same basis. The question therefore is, Did he
obtain results artistically as good as he obtained in his scenes of
humour ? His contemporaries answered yes ; men of a later day,
with few exceptions, say no.
It may be permissible to refer once more to Matthew Arnold's
excellent habit of carrying in his mind some test-lines of poetry,
and of trying by by a touchstone, that which
their standard, as
at the moment he was Such a literary touchstone
criticising.
must obviously be of admitted excellence; and it will be all

the safer if it is old enough to have stood the test of time.
Now in all literature there is probably no single line that has
been more universally felt to be charged with pathos than " the
Virgilian cry," Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.
In all literature there is no more pathetic scene than the death of
1 Heroines of Fiction, quoted in The Library of Literary Criticism.
Cordelia. But the method of Virgil and Shakespeare is wholly

different from that of Dickens. There is no exaggeration, no
dwelling upon the subject, no beating out thin. The effect is
produced by the simplest and fewest words possible. Not one of

those gathered around the body of Cordelia makes a phrase the :
emotion is no eloquent declamation to work it

tense, but there is
up. Dickens, on the other hand, " wallows naked in the pathetic."
He omits no circumstance, no object animate or inanimate, which
can add, as he conceives, to the " effectiveness " of the death-bed
or the funeral. The company as it assembles, the tolling bell, the
church, all have their place in the rhetoric wherewith the funeral
of Little Nell is celebrated. And it is just this which offends the
modern taste in the pathos of Dickens. It is not sufficiently pure.
The theatrical element is repellent. The author " protests too
much," just where he should not protest at all.
So far then, and the point is a cardinal one, the reputation of
Dickens has immensely declined since his death. The phenomenon
of a decline, followed by a recovery, partial or complete, is an ex-
tremely common one in literary reputations. For the reason
assigned, however, it seems improbable^ that Little Nell and Paul
Dombey will ever be throned again among the most pathetic
figures of literature. For humour, on the other hand, the reputa-
tion of Dickens stands almost if not quite as high as it ever did.
It wears well in spite of exaggeration; doubtless because the
feelings are less deeply engaged and the taste less sensitive.
Many have been more refined, but few havp ever been richer, in
humour than Dickens. Pickwick is itself almost a library of

humour, grotesque in the Fat Boy, satirical in the trial scene,
riotous almost everywhere. Dickens was good at conceiving
humorous scenes ; but he was still better at delineating humorous
characters, and his highest creations in this sort are veritable
triumphs. Sam Weller and Sairey Gamp and Micawber stand

among the first of the humorous characters of fiction. The two
latter are grotesque but irresistible ; the first is equally irresistible,
and, as a better figure of a man, is in a higher style of art. The

delicately suggestive touch of Jane Austen, or Lamb, or Steriie, is
quite out of the range of Dickens ; his comedy is broad to the
verge of farce. But it is exuberant and healthy. He can always
raise a laugh, and the laugh is always an innocent one.
The merits and defects of Dickens's portraiture are too obvious
to admit of much dispute. He is not one of the small band of
great artistswho have been able to represent men exactly as they
lived. There are no fine shades or nice touches in his work ; but
again the reader is struck with his inexhaustible fertility. It has been
said somewhere that his characters would make a town populous
enough to send a member to Parliament, and Pierce's Dickens
Dictionary proves that the statement, wild as it seems, is almost
literally accurate. Of course the majority of these characters are
but slightly sketched, many fnake only a casual appearance, not a
few have nothing to do with the story and might be omitted without
the slightest loss ; but their mere number is a striking proof of the
exuberance of Dickens's imagination, of his wonderful keenness as
an observer and of the marvellous retentiveness of the memory in
which all the fruits of observation were stored.
The principle upon which this inexhaustible raw material of
human nature is dealt with is that which governs the work of
Dickens in every aspect— exaggeration. The strongest colours
are laid on with the largest brush. From beginning to end his
characters rarely, if ever, impress the reader as all-round, normal
men and women. The comparison with Ben Jonson has been
repeatedly made, and is almost inevitable. To the tribe of Ben,
not to the school of Shakespeare, Dickens belongs : he is a
delineator of humours rather than a painter of men. There is
usually some label attached to his characters —a habitual phrase,
a gesture, a physical peculiarity — like a trade-mark to goods. In
Pickwick the sporting proclivities of Winkle result from the original
plan, and so, in a minor degree, do the peculiarities of the other
members of the club, Snodgrass, Tupman and Pickwick himself
(in the first phase). But we have besides in Pickwick itself the
fatness and sleepiness of the Fat Boy, the broken, jerky sentences
of Jingle and the grotesque professionalism of Bob Sawyer. In
the subsequent novels the 'umbleness of Uriah Heap, the jollity
of Mark Tapley and the elegant profanity of Mantalini, are all
instances of the same sort. Among external marks or symbols

may be mentioned the chronic buttonlessness of Peggotty and

Sairey Gamp's umbrella. The list might be indefinitely enlarged.
Dickens, then, relies much on exaggeration, and is frequently
in the realms of the grotesque. The result is often successful, but
it is never in the highest style of art, except, perhaps, in the one case
of Sam Weller. Shakespeare makes capital out of the fatness of
Falstaff, but it is not the essence of his humour ; while in Dickens
too often the peculiarity is the essence. Silas Wegg is for ever
declining and falling off, Captain Cuttle flourishing his hook and
making a note of everythirig. The reader expects the recurrence,
and might have some difficulty in recognising the character if the
label by any mischance fell off. Even in Mr Micawber, though
he is so infinitely amusing that it is distasteful to hint a fault,
there is a little too much of the shiftless waiting for something to
turn up.
In the non-humorous characters the same fault prevails. Mr
Dombey is self-importance and pride of purse incarnate, Pecksniff
is not so much a man as Hypocrisy with a capital H. Such por-
traiture defeats itself It is unconvincing. Given a Pecksniff in
real life, even simple-minded Tom Pinch would not be deceived
by him ; because the very beginnings of self-deception are absent
from Pecksniff himself His hypocrisy is " gross as a mountain,
open, palpable," like Falstaff's lies. But wherever h5rpocrisy is
completely self-conscious, it must be cynical and Pecksniff is not
;
cynical. Burns's Holy Willie is painted in strong enough colours.

He too is hypocritical ; but he is uneasy, partially self-deceived,
anxious to deceive himself more completely. And so he makes
the Almighty responsible for the grossest of his sins. The
" fleshly thorn " may be a heavenly visitation lest the gifted
servant become too proud. If so, the obvious duty of the pious
servant is submission; and thus indulgence in sin becomes
obedience to the divine will. There is nothing in Pecksniff one-
tenth part as subtle as this when he asks Charity to remind him
:
to pray for Mr Anthony Chuzzlewit, who has done him an injustice,

he is as clear about his own hypocrisy as the reader.
Such being the way of Dickens, he naturally did not succeed
unless he had some strongly-marked feature to work upon;
and so his novels become a collection of oddities. It is
this, more than the grotesqueness of any single individual, that
gives them an air of unreaUty. As we are aware that abnormal

beings do exist, the presence of a few such in fiction seems
natural enough and even gives zest; but a world peopled by
eccentrics and faddists is not the world we know. Dickens, of
course, has his ordinary men and women too ; but the misfortune
is that they are as a rule uninteresting, and the whole flavour of
his work is drawn from the abnormal.

A necessary consequence of this prevalence of exaggeration
and abnormality is that the characters of Dickens are either
eminently good or emphatically bad. As in the old Moralities,
we have the Vice set against the Virtue, hero opposed to villain.
Nicholas Nickleby and Ralph, Pecksniff and Tom Pinch,
Bounderby and Stephen Blackpool, are a few examples of this
sort of opposition. Here again the reader feels a certain unreality.
The elements in human character are curiously mixed, and grey
is a more common colour than either black or white. Dickens
sees only the one element or only the other. But he is essentially
an optimist, and so he is always ready to reform his villains
with a few exceptions, necessary by way Oi warning and example.
Pecksniif must be reduced to beggary, or the lesson would not
go home; but the unprincipled Jingle may become a valuable
member of society, with a brand-new character, because he is not
the text of a sermon.
At an early date in his career Dickens began to take himself
seriously and, to his own detriment as many believe, to exhibit a
purpose in his work. The novel of purpose was by no means new in
English. The works of Richardson are full of purpose, and it is
the essence of Godwin's. On the other hand, the robust under-

standing of Fielding, the keen artistic instinct of Jane Austen and
the healthy sense of Scott, all rejected it. But the sober English
mind always tends to introduce it anew, and the time was once
more ripe. Carlyle reproached Scott for want of seriousness, and
sneered at him as the " restaurateur " of Europe ; and possibly
Carlyle's sneer may have had some influence on Dickens. Just
before Dickens purpose reappears in the early works of Lytton,
and a little later the political novels of Disraeli show it in another

aspect. Kingsley's Hypatia is a document in the great High
Church versus Protestant controversy, and the opposite party
have their own documents in the shape of Newman's Callista and
Loss and Gain. Yet another phase appears in Kingsley's Alton
Locke and Yeast, in Mrs Gaskell's Mary Barton and in Charlotte
Bronte's Shirley. Charles Reade's It is Never too Late to Mend
and Hard Cash are inspired by the same spirit. Thackeray wrote
no novel of this class ; feut there is something cognate to it in the
" sermons " and asides which abound in nearly all his books.
Dickens came under the sway of the same ideas, and felt that
he too must vindicate his dignity by teaching. Even in Pickwick
we see in the scenes in the Fleet prison the intrusion of purpose,
and in most of the later novels it is very prominent. Oliver Twist
deals with the administration of the poor law and the making of
"
criminals, and has thus some kinship with the " Newgate novels
of Lytton and Ainsworth, from which nevertheless it is widely
separated. For, while they enlist sympathy on the side of the
criminal, Dickens is careful to give to his hero a purity almost
impossible under the circumstances. The obvious purpose of
Nicholas Nickleby is the reform of schools. Hard Times is an
attack upon the orthodoxeconomy a Latter-Day
political —
Pamphlet in the Other novels deal with the
shape of a story.
Court of Chancery, or the government offices, or with specific

vices, such as selfishness, or the modern English worship of
wealth.
The abstract question whether purpose is or is not prejudicial
to art is not worth discussing. There isno reason in the nature
of things why it should be prejudicial, and the true question is
whether in a particular instance it has or has not led the author
astray. Of course the danger is the serving of two masters Art :
and Purpose may in certain cases be as irreconcilable as God and

Mammon. The danger which besets the writer who has a purpose
in view is that of exaggeration and this is especially prejudicial
;
in the case of a man like Dickens, whose natural tendency was

towards excess. Zeal for his purpose led to still greater excess.
He saw nothing in its natural proportions, because he was deter-
mined to see everything in the light of his purpose. In his
eagerness for reform he seems to forget that rule and method are
essential. Red tape is not a bad thing in itself, and some of the
ways of the Circumlocution OfiSce are indispensable to the conduct
of business. Character fares in the same way. Light and shade
disappear. So too Dickens's style becomes overcharged, his
sentimentality grows unwholesome, his most offensive violations of
taste are committed, all under the influence of this wish to teach.
For him certainly purpose was prejudicial*
There is one other reason why, for Dickens, the intrusion of
purpose was deplorable. For wise and successful handling it
demanded thought. The assailant of an educational system, the
critic of the poor law, or of the machinery by which the business
of the nation is transacted, or of the social and economic relations
between employer and workman, ought to be a reflective person.
But of all great English novelists Dickens was the least reflective.
It would be absurd to put him in this respect on a level with
Thackeray or with George Eliot. By some Scott is supposed to

be shallower than these writers, because he never analyses like the
latter, and rarely stops to comment, like the former. But in truth
there is in him a larger wisdom in respect both of social life and
public affairs and of individual character, than there is in either of
the others ; and whoever knows the Waverley Novels will have at
his command a fund of thought on many ages and countries and
institutions. The clan system in Scotland —vagabondage—the
law's delays — the relations of Saxon and Norman the Con-
after
quest — of Christian and Jew — superstition — religious fanaticism,
are only a few of the subjects on which Scott, wholly without
parade and in the easiest way, throws the light of his genius.
Dickens, on the other hand, is purely and simply an observer.
It has been noticed already that, outside the limits of his own
experience, his hand loses its cunning in portraiture. It has been
noticed also that there is little or no evidence of ;development in
his work. Slight changes indeed there are, but no evolution of
the higher from the lower. In both cases the reason probably is
that he observes with the most extraordinary keenness, but reflects
comparatively little. Hence too his early maturity. The powers
of observation soon reach perfection, while the reasoning faculty

may go on growing For the same reason Dickens
till late in life.
never was a reader, and suffered from his ignorance of books.

little
No book could give him impressions half as vivid as he could derive

from the London streets. His manner of depicting character also
indicates abnormal powers of observation and comparatively little
reflectiveness. There is ample evidence on the subject, for his
correspondence, especially with Forster, is full of his books, and
we constantly see his characters in the making. There is abso-
lutely no analysis : he never reasons out a character, but he
identifies himself with it. He lives in the lives of his creations,
suffers with them and rejoices in their good fortune. The method
is excellent, and doubtless the singular vividness of Dickens is due
to it.
In all this however there is no ratiocination nor is there ;
any evidence that Dickens possessed more than an ordinary

endowment of the reasoning faculty. This is another point
in which he contrasts with his great contemporary, WilUam
Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), a man of reading and of
culture, a man as intimately acquainted with the higher ranks of
society as was Dickens with the lower, as reserved and reticent
as Dickens was exuberant and gushing. The contrast between
the early history of the two men has already been touched upon.
The story is well known how Thackeray, artist as well as author,
was an unsuccessful competitor for the post of illustrator of The
Pickwick Papers, vacant by the death of Seymour; and it was
eleven years after the publication of the masterpiece of Dickens
before Vanity Fair raised Thackeray to a position comparable to
that of the younger author. Thackeray's early years were a period
of many trials and sorrows, but also of much happiness. Like
other Anglo-Indian children, he was sent home for education ; and
on the way had a glimpse of the great Napoleon on his lonely
island. At the Charterhouse he was not very happy, and his earUer
references to it have some satirical bitterness ; but time mellowed
his feelings, and in The Newcomes the Swishtail Academy is softened
into the Grey Friars. From the Charterhouse Thackeray in 1829
went to Cambridge, where he was one year junior to Tennyson,
who in later days "always regarded Thackeray as the head of
English literature in the Victorian era^"
Thackeray does not seem to have worked very seriously at the
University, nor to have gained much directly from its studies, though
he gained incalculably from the friendships he there formed. It
is significant to note that, while Tennyson was the author of the
prize poem for 1829, Thackeray wrote a burlesque on the subject;

and it is curious that this was published in a paper called The
Snob. Leaving Cambridge in 1830, he crossed to the Continent,
where he made a considerable stay at Weimar. He saw and had
some slight intercourse with Goethe, his recollections of which
are given in a letter printed in Lewes's Life of Goethe. Returning
to England he entered a lawyer's chambers to prepare for
in 1831,
the bar; but he seems to have shown no more zeal than his
own Pendennis in the study of the law. His successor in the
chambers is said to have found Thackeray's desk there stuffed
with sketches and caricatures Thackeray was evidently unsettled
''.
by the fact that he had inherited from his father a small fortune,
the possession of which seemed to absolve him from the necessity
of coming to an immediate decision as to his career in life.
Before he came of age he lay awake "meditating on the wise

and proper manner " to employ it^ A few years after he acquired
control, it was all lost in ill-advised newspaper speculations. In
1836 he married, and was radiantly happy until the sad break-
down of his wife's health plunged him into sorrow. Some
of the most touching lines of the Ballad of Bouillabaisse point
the contrast between his life before and his life after this
disaster.
At this time Thackeray's attention was divided between

art and literature. He spent much of his youth in Paris as a
student of art, and all his life long he handled the pencil with
greater pleasure than the pen. His illustrations of his own books
are, as aids to the text, among the best ever drawn, and prove
that he had a very decided gift for art. But though the conception
1 The second Lord Tennyson, quoted in Melville's Life of Thackeray.

2 Thackeray's Works, with Biographical Introductions, iii. xxviii.
^ ibid. HI. XXV.
is admirable the drawing is very faulty, and it was fortunate that

in the struggle literature carried the day.
The early writings of Thackeray were all contributions to
periodicals Fraser's Magazine, The New
Monthly Magazine, The
Times and other papers. A little later, from 1842 to 1854, he
was a regular contributor to Punch, his connexion !with which
was broken owing to the novelist's disapproval of the attitude of
the great comic journal towards Napoleon III. Much excellent
work was done for these papers. The Book of Snobs (1848), so
redolent of the genius of Thackeray, is composed of articles which
originallyappeared in the pages of Punch, where also the Ballads

of Policeman X
were first printed ; while The Yellowplush Papers,
The Great Hoggarty Diamond and Barry Lyndon were introduced
to the world by Fraser. All these, as well as the Paris and Irish
SketchrBooks and the Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand
Cairo, belong to the first period of Thackeray's authorship, which
we may take to extend to the start of Vanity Fair. At the end
of the period Thackeray still remained, as we have seen, a person
whose name was of doubtful value to a great periodical.
There is much that is admirable in the work of those opening
years —
keen observation, humour, satire, fun, pathos, the gifts of
a poet as well as those of a master of prose. All that we subse-
quently find in Thackeray may be detected here in germ, and
much of it is to be seen in full bloom. The philosophy of life
expounded in Vanity Fair is presented, only more crudely, in
The Book of Snobs; and there are in the Sketch-Books passages
of mingled satire and pathos which will bear comparison with all
but the best of his subsequent writings. But his work was still
uneven, as the work of a journalist, written for daily bread, must

necessarily be; and there is only one book of the period for
which, as a whole, any critic has ever claimed a place among
the greatest of Thackeray's works. Barry Lyndon was as yet
the only convincing proof he had given of power for sustained
composition; and lor sheer intellectual force he probably never
surpassed it. But excellent as Barry Lyndon is, it is the sort of
book which wins admiration without establishing any emotional
rapport between the author and the reader. It never had, and
w. 44
it has not to this day, a tithe of the popularity of Thackeray's
other novels ; far less could it rival those of Dickens. It proved
however, once for all, that Thackeray possessed a marvellous
power of taking and consistently keeping to a point of view. The
life of a scoundrel, written from the scoundrel's standpoint, by a
man who scorns and loathes him, yet who never for a moment
forgets that to himself the scoundrel seems wholly admirable, who
makes him the sole witness against himself, and who out of his
own mouth convicts him of being the greatest villain since lago, is
surely one of the most remarkable achievements in literature. It
is comparable to the dramatic monologues of Browning, but these

are less elaborate. Still, even in Barry Lyndon, the canvas is small.
There is far less variety than in an ordinary novel. There is
absolute proof of Thackeray's power to write a story of the Defoe

species ; but there might remain a doubt whether he could enter
with equal success into other types of character, and whether he
could successfully exhibit them moving and acting together.
It is the books of this period which give the strongest support
to the view that Thackeray was in heart and soul a cynic, about
which something will be said hereafter. There is certainly a
strong flavour of gall in nearly all his writings of the first period,
and there is comparatively little to sweeten it. Why, it has often
been asked, did Thackeray concern himself so much about snobs ?
And it is not obscurely hinted that the most probable answer is,
he was a snob himself. But a better reason can be assigned.

Thackeray was, first, a realist, secondly, a moralist. The realist
saw that snobbery was, in point of fact, one of the great vices of
modern English society ; and the moralist (whose business is not
with that which is already sufficiently well, but with that which
is not so well) desired to cure it. The Englishman's hell, says
Carlyle, is chiefly not making enough money; but Carlyle knew

that there was another hell, the hell of not being " respectable,''
not being a "gigman." It was from the fear of this hell that
Thackeray wished to deliver his countrymen, and he tried to do
so by making it ridiculous. In the he made the mistake
effort
to which youth is always prone. much emphasis on

Laying too
the one thing, he gave a false impression of life by omitting all
that did not seem to be to the purpose. He learnt wisdom with

years, and there is nothing more remarkable in his development
than the gradual softening of tone in the succession of the great
novels.
Not till the appearance of Vanity Fair did Thackeray give
quite indubitable proof of the greatness and of the wide range
of his genius. After the fashion countenanced by Dickens,
that novel was issued in numbers, in 1847-1848. Perhaps
the most convincing proof of the inherent viciousness of this
system is to be found in a comparison between the structure
of the one great novel by Thackeray which was written and
published as a whole, and that of his other stories, in which the
system of periodical publication was followed. The exception is
Esmond. Now Esmond is one of the most perfectly constructed

stories in the English language. It has no intricate plot, but its
unity from beginning to end, the adaptation of part to part, the

harmony of tone, the systematic progress of the narrative, must
strike every reader. But no one would say this of Thackeray's
other works. Vanity Fair, Pendennis and The Newcomes have
each their advocates for the first place among his works; but
they are all broken, interrupted, meandering in their narrative,
undisguisedly so in all cases, avowedly so in the case of Vanity
Fair ; and they are great novels not because of this, but in spite of it.
The inference from these novels would be that Thackeray was
deficient in constructive power; but Esmond disproves that in-
ference, and throws us back on the other explanation, that the

novels were written piecemeal, in response to the printer's clamour
for copy, Of course, an author who had the resolution to write
a whole, would be independent of the
his story beforehand, as
mode of publication; but in a delightful Roundabout Paper
Thackeray has admitted that it was not so with him. Though
capable of strenuous work, he was indolent and inclined to
procrastinate. Hence most of his novels were written by snatches,
in varying moods, month. Some have thought
at intervals ot a
work by rapidity of execution
that Scott lowered the quality of his
but it is far more certain that Thackeray lowered the quality of
his by its spasmodic character.
44—2
i
Vanity Fair one of the most interesting novels of tihe

is
nineteenth century, not only for its admirable style, its power of
thought and its wisdom, but for the relation in which it stands! to
other works of fiction both before and after it. Dickens, as|we
have seen, had broken fresh ground half-unconsciously. He (Was
not fully aware of the significance of his interesting himself /and
his readers in the scenes and the characters of the London
streets but the choice of ground in the Sketches by Boz and The
;
Pickwick Papers was the entrance of democracy into literature.

The element of realism in it is obvious ; but we have also seen
that it is superficial.
With regard to Thackeray the opposite is true. He is con-

sciously and deliberately a realist. He calls Vanity Fair "a
novel without a hero." No man, the old saying runs, is a hero to
his valet the valet sees him too close, his defects and weaknesses
:
are too obvious. Ludovicus Rex, as Thackeray shows in a most

instructive series of sketches, is a very imposing figure as he
appears before the world ; but there is no mystery to the valet,
he accustomed to handle Rex, the trappings, too familiarly for
is
reverence, and to see the poor little shivering " forked radish of ''
a man, Ludovicus, in all his insignificance without them. Now

the novelist is valet to his characters : he is omniscient ; all the
vices as well as all the virtues are known to him. Hence, in this
" vanity fair " of a world which Thackeray depicts, there is to him
no hero. He no man on a pedestal and worship him ; he

will set
will impartially expose the weaknesses of all, and impartially give
credit for the virtues —

when there are any. Carlyle's doctrine, on
the contrary, is men, who are almost infinitely
that there are great
superior to the men, and that the vital thing for little men,
little
the only way of growing out of their littleness, is to find the great
man, and to reverence and follow him when found. If no man is
—
a hero to his valet so much the worse for the valet. A com-
parison between these two contrasted doctrines, and an examina-
tion of the question how far Thackeray really remained faithful to
his own, will bring us very near the core of his work.
By- critics not in complete sympathy with him Thackeray has
been repeatedly charged with cynicism. Not long ago he was
branded as the apostle of mediocrity. He belittles all his

characters, it is said, disbelieves in grand virtues, and associates
goodness with pettiness of character and feebleness of intellect.
Contrast his clever women with his good ones — Becky Sharp and
BeatrixEsmond with Helen Pendennis and Amelia Sedley. The
two charges are at bottom closely akin, and though they are not
altogether true, yet they are not without some foundation. It is
Thackeray himself who sings
"How very weak the very wise,
How very small the very great are."
But the charge of cynicism is at least mistakenly expressed. It
is sufficient to appeal against it to Esmond and to the Roundabout

Papers, and to ask what cynic ever conceived such a scene as the
deathbed of Colonel Newcome, or such a character as that of the
man there passing to his account. To the true cynic human nature
is not merely faulty but essentially mean ; arid a man who held
such a creed could never have drawn such a character as Colonel
Esmond, the Bayard of English fiction. There is more insight in
the judgment of Charlotte Bronte " Whenever he writes, Mephis-
:
topheles stands on his right hand and Raphael on his left ; the
great doubter and sneerer usually guides the pen, the Angel,
noble and gentle, interlines letters of light here and there'." But
this still exaggerates the cynical element, and there is yet more
truth in the indignant repudiation which Shirley Brooks expressed
in Punch over the grave of its old contributor :
" He was a cynic ! By his life all wrought

Of generous acts, mild words, and gentle ways
His heart wide open to all kindly thought.
His hand so quick to give, his tongue to praise !
He was a cynic You might read it writ

!
In that broad brow, crowned with its silver hair.

In those blue eyes with childlike candour lit.
In that sweet smile his lips were wont to wear.
He was a cynic By the love that clung
!
About him from his children, friends, and kin

By the sharp pain light pen and gossip tongue
Wrought in him, chafing the soft heart within
!
* Quoted in Shortet's Charlotte Bronte and her Circle, 418.

Again, though most of Thackeray's characters — like the vast
majority of human beings —are mediocre, it is not true that all of

them Harry Warrington is not. George Warrington is far
are.
from being a faultless man, but " mediocre " is just the word that
will not describe him. Still less will it describe Henry Esmond ;
and if Colonel Newcome is mediocre in intellect, in character he
certainly isBut to prove Thackeray the apostle of mediocrity it
not.
would not be enough to show that all his characters were mediocre ;
their creator must also rest content with mediocrity, or at any rate
refrain from aspiring beyond it. But Thackeray was essentially
a preacher, and the substance of all his sermons is, cease to be
content with mediocrity, intellectual or moral, learn its weakness,
its worthlessness, its powerlessness for good, its fatal potency for
evil. The four Georges were mediocre men, no more greatly
vicious than they were great in intellect. Thackeray drew masterly
portraits of them ; but his object is to show how benumbing, how
degrading, how deadly mediocrity is.
Yet the old proverb, there is no smoke without fire, is justi-

fied here. Thackeray is not a cynic, he is not an apostle of
mediocrity; but nevertheless those who have so described him
have not been wholly wrong. There are in Thackeray's work
elements which in a and above all in a less reverent,
less kindly,
nature would be cynicism ; and his scheme of work gives a great,

perhaps an undue, prominence to mediocrity. Certainly while
reading him we are all the better for the corrective of Carlyle's
hero-worship. It is true that genuine greatness is excessively
rare ; so far Thackeray is right, and he is justified in depicting his
world of commonplace beings without a hero. But it is also true
that when real greatness is found it is of inestimable importance
so far Carlyle is right. Once or twice in the history of the world,
as in the expansion of the Roman republic, we may find " an
interregnum of extraordinary deeds and ordinary men." But
there are a handful of men who by thought or action or emotion
have changed the course of history —Alexander and Caesar, Aris-
totleand Newton, Mahomet and Luther. The mere counting
of heads is not enough, we must also weigh brains and value
character. The omission of the heroic (that, as well as the con-
ventional " hero " of fiction, is excluded from Vanity Fair) is the
omission of that which is most vital.
Herein then lies the element of truth in these charges. They

apply principally to Vanity Fair and to the earlier books, though
they have some point in reference to the bulk of Thackeray's
other work as well. They are especially applicable to Vanity
Fair, because it is an instance of reaction, and in accordance
with the ordinary law, reaction against any excess leads to
excess on the other side. Thackeray was greatly under the in-
fluence of the eighteenth century writers, and above all of Fielding.

Pamela produced by reaction Joseph Andrews, the sentimentalism
of Richardson provoked the realism of his satirist. Vanity Fair
is not, like Joseph Andrews, a satire on any one novel. It is
however a on romance and on sentiment, a reaction against

satire
Scott and Lytton and Dickens all at once. It is a satire at the
same time on contemporary society ; for though the scene is laid

some thirty years back, the teaching is unmistakably applicable to
the writer's own time.
Thackeray did not design Vanity Fair to be a picture of the
world as a whole it represents a particular phase of society, a
:
special type of men. " What I want is,'' he writes, " to make a
set of people living without God in the world (only that is a cant
phrase), greedy, pompous men, perfectly self-satisfied for the most
part, and at ease about their superior virtue^" Hence the Sedleys,
the Osbornes, the Crawleys, Lord Steyne and Becky Sharp. If
it were urged that the result is a one-sided view, Thackeray
might reply that it was never meant to be anything else. But the
reply is not wholly convincing. Probably the end held in view
and the method adopted in Vanity Fair are faulty ; at any rate
the method is not that of Shakespeare. Against the treachery of
Macbeth he puts the fidelity of Banquo ; against the cruelty of
Regan and Goneril the love of Cordelia ; against the devilishness
of lago the simplicity of heart which makes Othello an easy victim.
We do not take an individual to represent society Barry Lyndon's :
villainy ishis own. But when we find a number of people

gathered together by the various chances which bring men into
^ Works, with Biographical Iniroduclions, I. xxxvi.
contact with one another, we naturally suppose that we shall find
among them the qualities of the whole. It is not so in Vanity

Fair. The loyalty and truth of Dobbin are no adequate counter-
poise to the heartlessness of George Osborne, the meanness and
cowardice of Jos Sedley, the want of moral principle in Rawdon
Crawley and the unredeemed vice of Lord Steyne. Moreover,
Dobbin is made ridiculous ; while, though the vicious characters
are depicted as vicious, it is only Jos Sedley against whom the
laugh is turned. Among the female characters, again, all the
intellect is Amelia is mild and inane, and
bestowed upon Becky ;
her goodness of heart has the limits due to the weakness of such
a head.
In Vanity Fair Thackeray's compass does not point to
polar truth ; the repellent influence of realism causes a wide
deviation. It is easy however to make allowance for this and to
take the book for what it was meant to be. False as a picture
of society, it reveals with penetrating truth the inner soul and
character of certain items of society. Thackeray's men and
women are real. The sordid schemes of the Rawdon Crawley
household, the pompous emptiness of the Osbornes, and the
viciousness of Steyne can all be paralleled. So can the flash of
manhood in the empty-headed but not altogether empty-hearted

dragoon, Rawdon Crawley. The triumph of the book is by
universal consent the wonderful creation of Becky Sharp. En-
dowed with plenty of intellect, absolutely unencumbered with
moral principle, and placed in a position of dependence, she was
bound to develop just the vices she shows. The general con-
ception of the character is fairly easy; what is beyond the reach
of ordinary writers is the marvellous cleverness and resource
which could only be bestowed by a marvellously clever and
resourceful author; for in creative work no one can rise higher
than his own best self. No one but Shakespeare has drawn a
character so intellectual as Hamlet or so humorous as Falstaff)
because no one else possessed the intellect or the humour.
Nemesis several times overtakes Becky: the very success of
her own schemes brings repentance. Thackeray is too much of a
moralist to be at ease under the triumph of his own scoundrels,
male or female : they usually fail in the long run. But he is too
much of an artist to tack on the moral. The failure comes quite
naturally, it is unforced, there is no deus ex machina to reward
virtue and to punish vice. For example, Becky schemes to marry

Rawdon Crawley, and succeeds; her punishment comes when she
has Sir Pitt Crawley at her feet. Clever as she is, she has been
unable to foresee the future. So all the conquests of the brilliant
Beatrix Esmond and a miser-
lead only to an unrespected age
able deathbed — the and such a
inevitable results of such a life
character. Herein Thackeray is far more true to nature, and is

a far more profound moralist, than Dickens. With the latter
sudden conversions are frequent. The villain readily repents him
of his villainy, and the good man is rewarded, not because he has
earned the reward, but because he is good. Possibly Dickens
who had " not seen the righteous forsaken,
followed the Psalmist,
nor his seed begging bread" —a rule which seems to admit of
exceptions in modern times.
The "novel without a hero" is, then, a commentary, not on
society as a whole, but only on certain aspects of it. A point of
view is chosen, and everything is selected and arranged with
reference to it. The dramatis personae are such as suit it ; what
they say and do is what best illustrates the vanitas vanitatum of
the preacher. Thackeray frequently speaks of them as his pup-

pets and of himself as the showman who pulls the strings and
makes them move. They are not puppets, and behind the mask
he is a very serious-faced showman. He is essentially a moralist,
a preacher ; and the method of his teaching is satirical. It has
even been said that he is not properly a novelist at all, but a
satirist. Here again we have an exaggeration of a truth. It is
true that Vanity Fair has not the compact structure which we
look for in a novel : it is as destitute of plot as of hero. The
author is teacher and satirist, not only in those delightful lectures
and asides in which he stops the action in order to comment
upon the characters and upon human nature, but in the most
rapid action and the most racy dialogue as well. And yet, loose
as the structure is, the satire and the teaching would lose their
effect if they were detached from it.
Though, he was essentially a teacher Thackeray had little to

/
698 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA ;
do with the novel of purpose. He never followed DickenS/iT]( ,his
humanitarianism. Circumlocution offices and loathsome prisons

and workhouses and schools found no reformer in him. He
looked on with a quiet smile, and rather suspected that the reform
was being overdone. His aim was simply to represent life, or a
certain phase of it, as it truly was, not irradiated by the glow of
romance, not brightened by the rose-spectacles of sentiment.
There is a sweep of mind, a massiveness of thought about
Vanity Fair which convinced all competent judges that a real
genius had appeared. "Scott for boys, Thackeray for men,

Shakespeare for heroes " was the saying of Samuel Rogers. We
may pass over the impertinence to Scott, one of the most manly
of men and of writers it was no more than justice to Thackeray.
;
His books are emphatically books for men; the stamp of a

masculine understanding appealing to masculine understandings is
on every page of them, and on none more clearly than on Vanity

Fair. At was not only the product of a great mind, but of a
mature mind and of a practised hand. Thackeray was in his
thirty-sixth year when it began Such experience as it
to appear.
is based upon is not rapidly accumulated. The Book of Snobs,
The Yellowplush Papers, even Barry Lyndon, had all been
preliminary essays and studies in preparation for it. The wealth
which Thackeray lavishes upon Vanity Fair had been laboriously
accumulated in those years of apprenticeship when he had been
observing, reflecting, sketching, writing for journals and magazines
to provide daily bread for those dependent upon him. This
practice told upon the style as well as upon the matter of
Vanity Fair. It is the style of a highly cultivated man and an
experienced writer. It is flexible as well as strong, always

adequate, never overcharged, sometimes impassioned and nobly
eloquent.
Vanity Fair raised Thackeray to a position of rivalry with
Dickens, not in popularity, but in the judgment of critics and of
the more cultivated class of readers. The followers of the two
writers have always been different, and those of Dickens by far the
more numerous. But though Vanity Fair did riot rival Pickwick in
circulation, it made its author one of the most prominent writers
of his generation. In January 1848 he writes to a friend that he

I
is "all but at the top of the tree, indeed there, if the truth weye
known, and having a great fight up there with Dickens^" He wis
no longer a journalist ; he was a writer of books, and as such the
peer of the best. After Vanity Fair came Pendennis (1848-
1850), which in respect of being partly an autobiography corre-
sponds to the contemporaneous novel of Dickens, David CdJ>per-
field". Though still loose in construction, Pendennis is far 'more
like the orthodox novel than Vanity Fair. The characters are
not so exclusively chosen to illustrate a thesis ; they are rfepresen-
tative of a wider range of Hfe. Thackeray had in part reacted
against his own reaction. In Pendennis he is nearer to romance
and less oppoisd to sentiment than he is in Vanity Fair, and he
is to that extent less a realist than in the earlier novel. He seems
to have felt that his own presentation of life in Vanity Fair was
at least one-sided and susceptible of misconstruction. Still more
is this Esmond (1852) and in The Newcomes, (1853-
evident in
1855). The change in tone may be due in part to the mellowing
influences of time and of success. " Wait till you come to
forty year," he himself sings ; and time, which tames the passion
of youth, also tends to make the judgment more mild, especially
when the goal long struggled for has been attained. But another
cause is the fact that Thackeray has made his protest. After
Vanity Fair he is no longer tempted to stand in contrast to his
predecessors.
These four novels by general consent stand in the same
relation to the rest of Thackeray's works as the four great
tragedies do to the other works of Shakespeare ; and the common
opinion is sound. Thackeray was stUl in his prime ; there was
no decline in his intellectual force; but he had put the b^st'ôf
his experience into those books, and he could not again equal
them. Few have had the capacity to produce all life.-iong works
of^the highest class in creative literature. Had (Shakespeare-
himself this capacity? Up to the great tragedies his works are
' Works, with Biographical Introductions, IX. xlix.
Neither Dickens nor Thackeray confined his self-revejation to one book.

''
A good deal of Thackeray's own life is given in Philip, in The Uoggarty

Diamond, and The Newcomes also.
the most marvellous in the world not only for their intrinsic worth,
but for the evidence of development they afford. But it cannot
be denied that after this there is some decline; and in the last
years of his life, silence. Was the silence due solely to the satis-
faction of ambition ?
Meantime Thackeray had attempted another kind of literary

enterprise. His lectures on The English Humourists of the
Eighteenth Century were first delivered in England in 1851, and
afterwards repeated in America in 1852-1S53. The lectures on
The Four Georges were first delivered on his second visit to
America, 1855-1856. These two sets of lectures were the most
profitable of all his enterprises. In a letter to his mother written
in 1859 he says that they had yielded him ;£95oo. The Virginians
j[fiooo. Vanity Fair only ;^2ooo ^. The rate of remuneration is
not according to literary value ; but nevertheless the two sets of
and are often unduly neglected.

lectures are of very high worth,
They prove that Thackeray was a critic both moral and literary —
— of the first rank. Criticism is of the essence of his intellect.
His whole work is what Matthew Arnold defined poetry to be, a
criticism of life. How penetrating his literary criticism could be
is plain from his burlesques and parodies. Rebecca and Rowena
is perhaps the best burlesque ever penned. amusing Irresistibly
as it is, romance it travesties is left absolutely uninjured.

the
The reader laughs, and returns to Ivanhoe with unabated enjoy-
ment. PhilFogarty is likewise excellent ; and so is Codlingsby, but
in a different way. Thackeray loved Scott and he was the 'friend
of Lever. While he laughed at them there was therefore a kindly
ring in his laughter. But he distrusted Disraeli and disliked his
work; and in Codlingsby there is a bitterness which is absent
from the other burlesques.
Good burlesque is impossible except through sound criticism,
and in these burlesques Thackeray was really criticising his
contemporaries and immediate predecessors. It was the same
faculty which he employed in his Humourists of the Eighteenth
Century. But here he was on his chosen and favourite field.
The reaction which Thackeray led was a reaction towards the
* Works, with Biographical Introductions, XI. xv.
DICKENS AND THACKERAY 70I
eighteenth century. Its lucidity and its respect for the realities of
life Not only was Fielding his model in the novel,
attracted him.
but Hogarth was his model in art and anyone who has studied
;
the wonderful adaptation of Thackeray's own illustrations to his

books will understand how the work of his pencil and the work
of hispen interpenetrated one another. There is much also of the
spiritof The Spectator, grown greater and stronger, in his observa-
tions of and satirical and humorous comments on the world
around him. By sympathy therefore Thackeray was led to study
the eighteenth century systematically. He seriously contemplated
writing a history of the reign of Queen Anne. He saturated
himself in the literature of the period, how deeply Esmond proves.
And so in the lectures on the humourists he was pouring out
knowledge which he had been accumulating for years. He was
criticising from the best standpoint of all, that of sympathy. He
shows in Esmond that he could speak the speech and think the
thoughts of the eighteenth century writers. Thus, standing at a
distance which enabled him to see things in their true propor-
tions, and yet possessing something comparable to the familiar
knowledge of a contemporary, Thackeray had, in respect of these
writers, an unequalled equipment for criticism. And, though they
have been strangely depreciated, his lectures on the humourists are
among the richest and best criticisms in the language. No one
else has so penetrated the spirit of Addison and Steele. His
Hogarth is admirable. He disliked Swift; yet who has done
more justice to Swift's wonderful genius? who has drawn a more
memorable picture of the man ?
In The Four Georges Thackeray's criticism was not literary, but
moral, a species even more familiar to him than the former. The
puppets here are the puppets of another Vanity Fair, only they
happen to be seated on a throne. Thackeray's comments in the
lectures are exactly in the spirit of the novel ; there is the same
satiric touch, the same undertone of pathos. Some of his best
writing is to be found in these two sets of lectures.
The Virginians (1857-1859) was Thackeray's next novel after

Esmx)nd, of which it is a continuation. It was Thackeray's way
to link his stories one to another by references to characters or by

their casual appearance ; but no other pair of his stories are so
intimately related to one another as those two. The Virginians
has lost a good deal of the charm of its predecessor. The second
part of Robinson Crusoe is a classical example of the danger an
author incurs in handling a second time a theme in which he has
been greatly successful. In Thackeray's case the descent is less
steep, but it is still great.

In 1859, following the example set by Dickens nine years
before,Thackeray undertook the charge of a new periodical, The
Cornhill Magazine. In it his latest works were published. Lovel
the Widower (i860) was a version from the unsuccessful play
The Wolves and the Lamb. The Adventures of Philip (1861-1862)
is generally regarded as a failure and so it is as a whole, in com-
;
parison with Thackeray's greater novels ; but there are some very
fine passages in it. More valuable than either are the delicious
Roundabout Papers, the best of all revelations of Thackeray's own
genial, kindly, sympathetic nature. Some incident of travel, an
occurrence in the street, a meeting with a friend, the death of a
great contemporary, a mere chalk-mark on a door, may be the text.
The last of all is the generously indignant vindication of a great
man from a suspicion which could only occur to a pitiably little
one. But whatever it is the subject is handled with unfailing grace
and and with penetrating insight. None of these papers are
skill
more delightful than those which most reveal the writer ; probably
the best known of all is that which treats of the thorns in the
editorial cushion. They were very sharp thorns to the sensitive
novelist, but the cushion with its thorns passed to another some-
what more than a year and a half before Thackeray's sudden
death on the Christmas Eve of 1863. He left incomplete the
story of Denis Duval.
Thackeray said that no one ought to write a novel after fifty.
As he died at fifty-two we cannot judge whether he would have
disproved this dictu?n by his own example or not. There are good
judges who think that Denis Duval promised to be among the
best of his works. Dickens wrote of it :
" In respect of earnest
feeling, far-seeing purpose, character, incident, and a certain loving

picturesqueness blending the whole, I believe it to be much the
best of all his works'." But Denis Duval remains a fragment;

and what is certainamong Thackeray's completed works
is that
all the bestwere produced between the ages of thirty-five
and forty-five. As has been already hinted, the three novels
which with Vanity Fair form the great quartet, differ considerably
from that first great product of Thackeray's genius. Pendennis
has a hero. He is not of very heroic proportions ; but he is a
centre towards which all the threads of the story converge. The
book gives an admirable picture of a
, young man of the nine-
teenth century, ambitious, talented, well-educated, but withal
self-indulgentand infirm of purpose. The good impulses as well
as the vanity and the weaknesses of Arthur Pendennis, and the
manliness of George Warrington, as well as the imprudence which
has marred his life, are all fairly brought before the reader. The
impression of the world is far more favourable than that left by
the Sedleys, the Osbornes and the Crawleys. The emptiness of
social ambitions is satirised again ; but there is a kindly side to
Major Pendennis which makes his worldliness half attractive.
There is nothing in Pendennis so fierce as the satire on Lord
Steyne, no character so heartless and unprincipled as Becky Sharp.
Helen and Laura Pendennis are of a much higher type than the
" good " woman of Vanity Fair, Amelia-
Much the same is true of The Newcomes. It has more in

common with Pendennis than anything else of Thackeray's : his
admirers generally class the two together, and give preference to
one or to the other according to personal predilections. In The
Newcomes as in Pendennis we have a world of mingled good
and evil, but in the former the extremes are greater. In
Pendennis there no character so entirely lovable and attractive
is
as Colonel Newcome, and on the contrary there is none so bad

as the Campaigner. So it is also with the scenes of the book.
Pendennis contains nothing equal to the best parts of The New-
comes, but on the whole it is of a more even excellence.
In Esmond, the novel intermediate in chronological order
between those two, Thackeray adopted a wholly different method
and in it we see most clearly how far he had drifted back from his
* Works, with Biographical Introductions, xii. xxx, note.
own position in Vanity Fair towards that of the romancers. In
the first place, Esmond is a historical novel. Now a historical
setting is unfavourable to realistic treatment, because the minute-
ness and familiarity of knowledge which the realist requires are
attainable only in respect of contemporary society. Further, the

very strangeness of the costumes and manners adds an the
element of the quaint and of the picturesque which is favourable
to romance and prejudicial to realism. If the swords and wigs
''
of the age of Queen Anne are not intrinsically more " romantic
than the frock-coats and trousers of modern times, at least we

can more easily regard them in the romantic spirit. Whether he
foresaw it at the start or not, Thackeray evidently came to feel
this,and Esmond is far more akin to the romantic spirit than

anything he had previously written. The grand chivalrousness of
—
Henry Esmond the loftiest character Thackeray ever drew is, —
we may hope, no less real than the sordid selfishness and cowardice
of Jos Sedley; but it is also what we call "romantic." So too
there is romance in the death of the old Lord Castlewood, in the
character of young Frank Castlewood, and in the episode of the old
Pretender. The two principal female characters are among the best
Thackeray ever drew. Lady Castlewood, liable though she is to
a mad passion of jealousy, and capable under its influence of
gross injustice, is nevertheless a noble woman. Beatrix is, next
to Becky Sharp, the cleverest of all Thackeray's women, and she
has a fascination which Becky lacked. The palm of wickedness
must be given to the earlier creation, though the later one as
years go on follows her hard.
In Esmond Thackeray undoubtedly felt the influence of Scott
more deeply than he had felt it before But he handled his
historical materials in a different way, and his novel reproduces the

age it depicts with a minuteness and tone
and fidelity in style
and substance such and nowhere rivals.

as Scott never attempts
Thackeray's success in this respect is marvellous. Perhaps on
the whole Esmond is written with a more sustained excellence of
style than any of his other books ; and the triumph seems all the
greater when we bear in mind that this style was not his own, but
the imitated style of an age long past.
On the part of Thackeray Esmond was no mere chance excur-

sion into the field of history. It was a new development of his
work which was not only significant of much, but which promised
to be permanent. The Virginians is also historical. So is the
fragment, Denis Duval; and so was the other subject which he
thought about and talked about to his family, but which he did
not live to treat*. The scene was to have been laid in the days
of Henry V, and Thackeray read for it Froissart and Brantome
and Monstrelet. We may reasonably conjecture that this subject
would have produced a novel more romantic than anything he
had yet written and it seems also reasonable to see in this growth
;
of the romantic element a partial abandonment of the canons of

art with which he started. To some extent, perhaps, necessity
determined his choice. The field he had originally chosen was
not very wide. He was the painter of the upper middle and the
upper classes ; while Dickens was the painter of the lower middle
and working classes. But the latter are not only far more
'
numerous than the former, their occupations are also far more
various. Dickens could find odd trades and occupations almost
without number, and they served to impart variety to his stories
Thackeray had only a few professions to draw upon, and there
was danger of at least a superficial sameness. The mere need
of fresh subjects therefore impelled Thackeray towards history.
But there was a change in his own spirit as well. Two inferences
may reasonably be drawn from the facts of his career. In the
first place, it has been seen that he started with an alienation
from romance produced by the excesses of the romanticists and ;
in reaction from those excesses he determined that he would

devote himself to reality. His parodies as well as his more
serious work point to this conclusion. In the second place, he
fell into the error of taking for reality that which is, opposite to
romance. The chivalrous knight who counted all things dross

except love and manly honour was a delusion ; but the greedy
noble who sought to extort wealth by the extraction of the Jews'
grinders was real. Hence the preponderance through the first
half of Thackeray's career of what was hard and unlovely. But

^ Works, with Biographical Introductions, xil. xxiv.
w. 45
gradually, as time went on, he recovered his balance. He dis-

covered that romance was not so much false as one-sided and
partial, and that its opposite might be equally one-sided and at
the same time less beautiful. The kindlier judgment and the
more genial views which pervade his later work indicate his
mature conviction that the chivalrous knight and the greedy noble
were equally real. It had been his task to lay stress upon an
aspect of truth which had been previously neglected, but it was

not to be desired that that aspect should be in turn treated as
the whole truth.
It may be permissible for once to violate chronology in order
to notice along with Thackeray his latest and most devoted
disciple, George du Maurier (1834-1896), whose Tri/lry (1894), in
its earlier part, contains more of the master's spirit than anything
else in literature. This was Du Maurier's single literary success.
Neither Fefer Ibbetson (1891) beforeit, nor The Martian (1897)
after it, showed equal merit

and it is questionable whether
;
Du Maurier could ever have done the like again. For into
Trilby he had put his own experience as an artist and the best of
his observation of the artist character. The consequence is that
the first part of the book is so excellent that, if it had kept the
same level to the end, it would have stood not very much below
Thackeray's own work. Unfortunately there is a great decline
from the introduction of the hypnotic influence onwards. The
truth is that in Du Maurier we have a Thackeray with powers
most singularly inverted. There was in both the same combina-
tion of the artist and the man of letters. But just as in Thackeray
the artist was obstructed by some strange disability, so in Du
Maurier was the man of letters. The former therefore belongs
to the history of literature, the latter to the history of art. Just
as Thackeray's worked out with the skill of Du
illustrations,
Maurier, would have been great, so, though in a minor degree,

would the literary conceptions of Du Maurier touched by the pen
of Thackeray,
CHAPTER III
THE WOMEN NOVELISTS

"'I AM a great novel reader,' said Guizot, 'but I seldom read
German or French novels. The characters are too artificial.
There are too many forced situations, and the morality is generally
detestable. My delight is to read English novels, particularly
those written by women. C'est toute une kole de morale. Miss
Austen, Miss Ferrier, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell,
and many others almost as remarkable, form a school which in the
excellence, the profusion, and the contemporaneousness of its pro-
ductions, resembles the cloud of dramatic poets of the great Athenian
age '.'" The words of the great Frenchman are not only a testimony
to the excellence of the English novel, but also a reminder that the
question of sex may occasionally be relevant in literary criticism.
The development of prose-fiction called into existence a class of
female writers, which gained stability from the growth of a more
liberal publicopinion with regard to the position and functions
of women. Fanny Bumey, Mrs Radcliife, Miss Austen, Miss
Edgeworth, Jane Porter, Lady Morgan, Mrs Inchbald, Mary
Shelley, Mrs Opie and others flourished towards the close of the
eighteenth century or in the early years of the nineteenth. Some
of them sheltered themselves under the veil of anonymity; but on
the whole the pioneers found that the barriers in front of them
were less formidable than they appeared. The fool might say with
his lips as well as in his heart that these women had "unsexed"
' N. W. Senior's Conversations with. Thiers, &c., ii. 395.
4S-2
themselves ; but Johnson and Burke praised Miss Bumey with
lavish generosity,and Scott exhausted the language of pane-
gyric on behalf of Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen, while he
made Miss Ferrier one of the chosen friends of his declimng
years. The powers so long unnaturally pent up at last had their
vent, and women more and more plied the pen until, in the sphere
of fiction, they came to rival in quality as well as in volume the
work of men. Of no other form of literature can as much be said.
There is no English poetess whom any responsible critic would
rank with Keats or Shelley, to say nothing of Shakespeare and
Milton; but in the delineation of character Miss Austen has
been pronounced the inferior only of Shakespeare, and Edmond
Scherer regarded George Eliot as the greatest of English
novelists.
Some of the women who wrote novels are more noteworthy
for their work in other departments of literature. The name of
Mary Russell Mitford (1786-1855) will live, not by reason of
her novels or her dramas, but for the sake of Our Village.
Harriet Martineau more memorable for her gallant battle for

is
freedom of opinion and as the translator and condenser of

Comte, than for her stories. Caroline Clive's poems are of
finer quality than her Paul Ferroll, good as that is. Of the
rest, many must be passed over without notice, and others
must be dismissed with the most cursory mention. No other

form of literature necessitates such rigorous selection as fiction
in none is the revival of forgotten or fading names so futile;

nowhere else is there such a pile of literary lumber. The torch
of the Caliph Omar, if it could be applied with a little more
discrimination than, according to the legend, was applied to it
the library of Alexandria, would do a service to mankind.

Anna Elizabeth Bray (1789-1883), a fluent and facile writer
of books of topography and history, of historical romances and of
what she herself describes as " local novels," may be mentioned
in passing because of the excitement once aroused by her story,
The Protestant. The subject was suggested to Mrs Bray's mind
by Fox's Book of Martyrs ; and after the fashion of the followers
of Scott she diligently prepared herself for the task by a course

THE WOMEN NOVELISTS 709
of reading, of which she does not appear to have possessed even

the rudiments beforehand. Her purpose was simply to illustrate
the sufferings and the Queen Mary's perse-
faith of the martyrs of
cution; but the enterprising publisher, Colburn, thought he might
make capital out of the political situation by advertising it as a
book written with a view to the question of Catholic emancipation.
—
The bait took the book was reviled but it sold. A curious
:
illustration of the, movement of thought and the changes which
come over the meanings of words is the fact that, just because it
was supposed to be written in order to prevent Catholic emanci-

pation, it was then spoken of as "the production of a high
churchman's and that in recent years it has been in all
lady,''
innocence described as, a book written in what we now call the
High Church spirit. A better representative of the High Church

position, in that sense, would be Lady G. FuUerton (1812-1885),
who in Ellen Middleton (1844) presented the case in a manner
suitable for adults, and Elizabeth Sewell (sister of that tutor of
Exeter College who burned Froude's Nemesis of Faith), whose
Amy Herbert (1844) was meant to perform the same service for
the young. Catherine Gore (1799-1861) was, about the same
time, the leader in the novel of fashion ; but she too, like many
of the women and work by excessive
several of the men, spoilt her
rapidity of composition. They had the example of Scott before
them (Mrs Bray surpassed even him, writing one three-volume
—
novel in the rough— in six weeks); but they had not Scott's
wealth of ideas and fulness of knowledge to work upon. Mrs
Marsh wrote with greater care, and her Two Old Men's Tales is
more readable than the majority of such half-Forgotten stories;
but her writings have not such qualities of style, characteri-
sation or plot, as would entitle them to a permanent place in
literature. Frances TroUope (1780-1863) too showed by- her
voluminousness whence her son Anthony derived his wonderful
facility. Her career was an uncommon 'and, to herself, a most
honourable one. Up to the age of fifty she had written
nothing. Then, as she found her husband's affairs steadily going
from bad to worse, she tried literature as a means of Uvelihood.
She had gone to America in 1827, and it occurred to her that she
might make a book out of her experiences there. The result
was The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). There is
not much fire in Mrs TroUope's novels, but by this book she
unfortunately produced a good deal of heat in the feelings of two
nations towards pne another. The Americans of those days were
unwholesomely sensitive to foreign, and especially to English,
criticism; and Mrs TroUope's superficial book was blameworthy

for its want of tact and good feeling. Yet it was effective in
more ways than one. It brought the money the TroUope
household sorely needed; and the pungent criticisms went

home so well that it is said vulgar fellows were often shamed
into good behaviour with the cry of "Trollope, Trollope."
Afterwards she wrote several books of travel and many novels,
being responsible, between 1832 and 1857, for more than one
hundred volumes.
It was not however writers of this class of whom Guizot
was thinking when he paid his emphatic compliment to the

women novelists of England and, however harmless in substance
;
and innocent in intention might be the works of Mrs Trollope,

Mrs Gore and Mrs Bray, he would hardly have called them " une
dcole de morale." The phrase implies not merely harmlessness,
but a force and depth which are sometimes spoken of as mascu-
line, but which are characteristic also of the three writers of the
Victorian era whom he names — Charlotte Bronte, Mrs Gaskell
and George Eliot. It is accordingly they who have to be seriously
considered and critically examined.
The Brontes belong to that class of writers whom it is impos-
sible to understand except through the medium of biography.
The conjunction of intense feeling with a narrow range of experi-
ence explains their frequent violence and excess. Give a quantity
of gunpowder ample space, and it may be exploded with little
danger ; confine and it will rend the solid rock to pieces. So

it,
a fervid imagination and a vast capacity for wrath, operating

upon the cabined lives of the Brontes, produced Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights. " The action is laid in hell," said Dante
Rossetti of the latter novel, "only it seems places and people

have English names there'." It was really a picture of the places
' Leiiers io Allingfiam.
and people Emily Bronte had known, rendered terrible by her

sombre imagination. Heathcliff himself was a transcript from
life, though we may hope that he was a little darker than the
original.
It would be out of place here to enter into the minutiae or to

discuss the numerous doubtful points of Bronte biography; in
most respects Mrs Gaskell's beautiful Ufe of her friend Charlotte
Bronte is sufficient for the purpose. We have to learn elsewhere
that the novelist's father was born to the name of Brunty, the
original of which was probably O'Prunty, and that he softened it
to Bronte, a form which seems to have been suggested by the title
conferred by the King of Naples upon Nelson. It is not worth

entering into the dubious romance of the Bronte genealogy; but
their Irish origin should all the more carefully be borne in
mind because they are singularly un-Irish alike in merits and in
defects. The secret is partly the same as that which explains the
cases of Swift and several other great Irishmen. Patrick Bronte
married an English wife (from the Celtic county of Cornwall, how-
ever). In still greater degree, probably, it is to be found in the
tendency, which man shares with some of the inferior animals, to
take colour from the surroundings. Though not of Yorkshire
blood; the Brontes show not a little of the character of Northern
England.
Patrick Bronte was a man of forty-three and was the father of
six children when, in 1820, he removed to Haworth as its incum-
bent. He
was also himself a writer and a poet, though, but for
his greater daughters, his name would have been long since
forgotten. Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) was then not quite
four years old, and her, two sisters were both junior to herself.
The place to which they now moved remained their home to the
end of their lives, and its mark is stamped deep upon their writings.
The scenery of Haworth, its atmosphere, the character of its
inhabitantsand the stories current among and about them, have all
gone to the making of the Bronte novels. In the case of Emily
the attachment was a passion she could hardly live away from
:
Haworth she never left it without suffering in health ; and some

;
of the most impressive lines of her powerfully imaginative poetry

bear witness to the strong hold its wild hills and moors had upon
her:
"What have these lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell.
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of heaven and hell."
The whole Bronte family was literary, and all the children
who grew to maturity followed in the footsteps of their father, the
author of College Poems (1811) and of the Rural Mhistrel (1813).
Patrick Branwell Bronte, the only son, who had been the pride
and hope of the family, lived to be its shame. The truth seems
to be that, though he had a certain amount of talent, he was no
more the equal of his sisters in intellect than he was in character.
Mrs Gaskell was impressed by his writings, and the fragments of
his composition which she quotes give some support to her favour-
able judgment; but it is hardly borne out by the fuller relics
preserved by Leyland. The three sisters all loft works by which
they can with some confidence be judged.
Poverty narrowed the education of the Brontes and brought
them many a bitter grief. Probably they suffered little, if at all, from
the fact that in their early years they were taught at home by
their father : as Charlotte was only eight when she and her sisters
passed out of his care, the younger children at least can hardly
have been much influenced either for good or for evil. In 1824
they were sent to that school at Cowan Bridge, chosen not for
its excellence but for its cheapness, to which the genius of
Charlotte Bronte has given a place among schools for girls, similar
to that held by Dotheboys Hall among places of education for
boys. It is ; the hapless Helen Bums is
depicted in Jane Eyre
Charlotte's sister Maria; and Miss Temple and Miss Scatcherd are
also drawn from the life. Less than a year after they had joined
this school the two eldest Brontes died, and towards the close of
1825 Charlotte and Emily were withdrawn from it. A second

and a much happier experience of school life was afterwards
embodied in Shirley. The stories on which were founded the
character of Moore and the rising of the Luddites were told by
the mistress of the Roe Head school. Miss Wooler. It is re-
markable that each of the three main stages of Charlotte Bronte's

chequered education furnished her with material for a book.
The third stage was taken at Brussels, whither she and Emily
went to perfect themselves in French and in this way to qualify
themselves for the work of teaching, by which they hoped to win
their bread. Much of the history of this stage inay be read in
Villette, as well as in The Professor, a work of earlier composition,
and a cruder one. The fact that so much was made out of the
incidents of her own limited education shows what must have
been the strength of an imagination which could build so splen-
didly on a slight foundation; but as the slender materials of
her experience were nearly exhausted when she died, it must
remain questionable whether length of days would have enabled
Charlotte Bronte to increase greatly her contribution to literature.
She showed no taste for the historical novel (unless her girlish
writings about her hero, the Duke of Wellington, are evidence of
such a taste), and her best characters are delineations from life.
The Brussels episode took place in 1842, and Charlotte also
spent 1843 there. She had already made several experiments in

teaching; but as they were not very successful, and as the conduct
of Branwell Bronte upset the project of turning the parsonage
into a school, the sisters gradually drifted into literature instead.
It was the work for which they were best fitted, as well as that
which they did with the greatest love. The accidental reading
of Emily's verses by Charlotte led to the publication of the Poems
(1846) by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. After a year the
publishers had disposed of only two copies'. Success is not a
conclusive proof of merit, nor failure of the absence of it ; but it
is plain that only one of the three sisters, Emily, was a poet ; or
perhaps — for there is much that is poetic in the prose of Charlotte
—it would be more fair to say that she alone had the gift of
expressing herself in verse.
The had already written each a novel before the
three sisters
modest volume of poems appeared. Charlotte's story. The
little
Professor, failed to find a publisher ; but Wuthering Heights and

Agnes Grey were accepted. There was however a long delay
^ Shorter's The Brontes, i. 329.
before they appeared and in the meantime Jane Eyre had been
;
writtenand published, and had taken the world by storm. This

work by the unknown Currer Bell was issued in October, 1847,
and early in December, says Mrs Gaskell, the rush for copies
began. Its success was due to the spontaneous appreciation of
readers rather than to critical approbation.

The romance, the passionate intensity, the transparent sincerity
and the fresh, powerful, often poetic style of Jane Eyre, were the
qualities which won, as they deserved, success. The publishers
to whom The Professor was had objected to it on
first offered
the score of its deficiency in excitement and incident ; and the
authoress, with characteristic good sense, had resolved that her
next work should not be open to this criticism. Accordingly
Jane Eyre is as far removed as possible from the domesticity of
Miss Austen, or Miss Ferrier, or Miss Mitford. It is the wedding
of romance to realism. But the realism is absolutely unlike that
of Miss Austen, and the romance has small affinity to that of
Scott. It is the realism, not of the quiet English country mansion,
but of a land stretching close up to the gates of the region wherein
the scene of Wuthering Heights is laid ; and it is the romance, not
of the knight in armour, with strong hand and high heart, and
the queen of beauty bestowing the crown for valour, but of
elemental human nature.
According to the prevalent conception, romance might well
have seemed to be something altogether beyond the reach of a
young woman with the mental gifts, training and experience of
Charlotte Bronte. To ask her to be romantic, or to furnish
"startling incident" and "thrilling excitement," was like demanding
bricks without straw. The comprehensive imagination of a Scott,
playing upon the great facts of national life, or the visionary
idealism of a Shelley, beholding all the sufferings of humanity
in the person of Prometheus chained to his rock these easily —
gave birth to romance. But Charlotte Bronte neither had that
comprehensive imagination, nor the wide knowledge which sup-
plied it with material, nor, on the other hand, the visionary
idealism of the poet. Her realm was all irradiated by the light
of a vivid imagination ; but the light played only upon what she
herself had seen and heard and known; she could not create
out of airy nothing.
On the other hand, her prospect in the sphere of realism
seemed hardly more hopeful; for her knowledge of reality was
probably the most limited that has ever sufficed for a great genius.
Even greater geniuses, like Bums, have been hampered by poverty
and shut out from many advantages. But Burns came into the
closest contact with life at a thousand points. He had the liberty
of manhood, and the very lowliness of his position helped him
to see humanity naked and undisguised; while the Bronte girls
could only gaze at it through the vicarage windows. It is the
special glory of Charlotte Bronte that out of her extremely limited
material she made a novel at once intensely romantic and pro-
foundly She did so by making her own the spirit which
real.
quoted above. The passions of humanity,

inspires her sister's lines
she knew, were capable of creating both the worlds of heaven and
hell. Though she could only look through the windows, she had
a light within which made the glance a revelation. Limited as
her experience was, it showed her the human heart; and out of
that what might not be made? "Ay, ay," said Scott once in
the hearing of Lockhart, "if one could look into the heart of
that little cluster of cottages, no fear but you would find material
enough for tragedy as well as comedy. I undertake to say there
is some real romance at this moment going on down there, that,
if it could have justice done to it, it would be well worth all the
fiction that was ever spun out of human brains ^"
Charlotte Bronte accepted her limitations and she faced her
difficulties, and even exaggerated them in a spirit bordering upon
defiance. She makes her heroine a governess, poor, plain and
small, like herself,—to prove to her sisters, as St Paul had long
ago proved to the world, how unimportant a mean presence is,
if the spirit within be great This poor little governess lives in
a lonely house and meets only a handful of human beings ; and
yet from these unpromising elements there grows a romance which
enthralled men of the world like Thackeray and George Henry
Lewes and Lockhart.
' Life of Scott, V. 285.
The materials are scanty, but it is interesting to note how
thriftily they are used. Charlotte Bronte says that Jane Eyre is
not herself except in bodily appearance ; but notwithstanding this

denial, in the feelings of the governess and in the events of her
life there is much own experience. The position of
of her
Rochester, the husband of a mad wife, who has persuaded himself
that because of thatmadness he is at liberty to marry again, is a
transcript of a case which had become known to Miss Bronte
at Miss Wooler's school at Roe Head. There is little in her
writings, and scarcely anything that is good, which cannot be
traced back to a source in her own experience. She was herself
quite aware that she could work only upon that, and saw clearly
the limitation it put to her productiveness. "I mean to
observe, your warning,'' she writes to G. H. Lewes, "about
being careful how I undertake new works ; my stock of material
is . not abundant, but very slender; and, besides, neither my
experience, my acquirements, nor my ppwers, a,re sufficiently
varied to jlistify my eVer becoming a frequent writer^"
Even genius could not preserve from error a writer whose
range of experience was. so narrow. The characteristic defects of
all the Bronte novels are clearly traceable to one cause.
this
The girls had lived among a race of rude and hard and
violent men; the legends current in the district were of a
nature befitting such men ; and if there is any reality at all
under the romance of the Brontes in Ireland, theirs was a tale
of violence and brutality.. The lives of the girls had been

hard, cheerless and full of suffering. , They knew the sting
of poverty and had felt the oppression of petty tyranny. They
had seen the lives of those they held dear sacrificed to cruelty
and greed. To them therefore men like Rochester, and even
Heathcliff and Earnshaw, seemed scarcely abnormal. Heathcliff
himself is not very much more brutal than that masterpiece
of R. L. Stevenson's portraiture. Weir of Hermiston, who is no
mere creature of the imagination, but a being who was once
clothed with flesh and blood. What is against nature is the space
such characters fill in the works of the Brontes and the proportion
1 Mrs Gaskell's Li/i of Charlotte Bronte, ii. 53.
THE WOMEN NOVELISTS /I/
they bear to others. R. L. Stevenson not only draws Alan Breck,

stem
conceited, cheerful, faithful, fearless, as well as the gloomy,
,
and vindictive Hermiston; but he relieves the character of the

latter by showing the greatness of the judge and his inflexible
integrity in his high office. The Brontes lacked the materials

for such a contrast and were not aware of the need of such
relief.
Charlotte Bronte, it may be repeated, was not a poet ; but

yet her prose is charged with the spirit of poetry, just as is that
of Carlyle, who was equally incapable of writing verse. Nothing
in her writings fascinates the reader more than those passages
of vivid insight into character, or those descriptions of natural
—
scenery— especially scenes of tempest which glitter in her pages
with a flash as of a diamond. A special manifestation of this
power may be found in her descriptions in Jane Eyre of imaginary
pictures, which show that she had the spirit, though not the
technical skill, of one of the greatest of painters :
" These pictures were in water colours. The first represented

clouds low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea all the distance :
was in eclipse ; so, too, was the foreground ; or, rather, the nearest
billows, for there was no land. One gleam of light lifted into
relief a half-submerged mast, on which sat a corniorant, dark and
large, with wings flecked with foam its beak held a gold bracelet,
:
set with gems, that had touched with as brilliant tints as my

I
palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil

could impart. Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned
corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the
only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or
torn."
The writer of this passage had the mind and eye of a painter,
and she had other artistic gifts as well. The wonderful description
of acting in Villette suggests that, had she chosen, and had circum-
stances favoured her, she^ might have been one of the greatest
of actresses.
Charlotte Bronte's greatest defect, the want of humour, must
be put do^NTi to the account of nature rather than circumstance.
She is always desperately in earnest, she has no lightness of toucl^
she cannot believe that there are occasions when a smile is more
effective than a sermon and a jest more crushing than a blow.
And not only was she deficient in humour herself, but she was
incapable of appreciating it or any of the kindred qualities in
others. She admired Thackeray as much as she admired any
living man, except the Duke of Wellington. She held that it
lay with himself whether he should be really, what some critics
called him, only the second of living writers, or the first. And
yet she never fully understood him, and was impatient with him
because he was not always serious enough and direct enough for
her taste. This lack of humour affords a ground more grave than
any other for doubting the permanence of her fame. With few
exceptions they whom the world has chosen to remember have
been gifted with it ; but Milton is among the exceptions.
The Eyre fixed the career of Charlotte Bronte.
success oljane
There was no more need to scheme about a school or to sacrifice
home for the trying lot of a governess, for she could certainly
make more by her pen. At the same time, she had experienced
the tribulations as well as the triumphs of an author, and had
been especially pained by a scandalous article in T?ie Quarterly
Review, which not merely condenined the book, but reflected
upon the character of the writer. Her only answer was to put
in the mouth of a vulgar woman some of the most
in Shirley
objectionable of the reviewer's sentences. But though such
articles might give pain, they did check the success of
little to
the author of Jane Eyre. She immediately began Shirley, which
however was not published till two years after the appearance
of the former work. In the interval Charlotte Bronte had passed
several "black milestones'' on the road of life. Her brother
Branwell, and her two sisters, Emily and Anne (1820-1849), were
now all dead ; and except for her father she was left absolutely
alone.
Shirley is even more full of local colour than Jane Eyre ; for,
though the scene was laid a generation back, the actors in it were
nearly all persons the writer had known. It is characteristic of
her method that, even in such a trifle as his half-foreign blood,

her Moore is identical with the Cartwfight who was the real
hero of the Luddite story which first set her imagination to work.
The Yorkes were real, the three curates were real, Mr Hall was
real, Shirley Keildar was her own sister Emily. Her strict fidelity
to fact led to the discovery of the secret of authorship. A

Haworth man who had migrated to Liverpool made sure of the
locality of the author, and then by a process of exhaustion con-
cluded that it could be no one but Miss Bronte.
Experience had taught Charlotte Bronte a good deal ; for her
style is more mature, and she is more varied and less violent in
the later novel. She is no less intense and earnest ; indeed there
are passages in the latter part of Shirley which seem to be written
in her own blood. The tragical history of those two years had
left its mark. The death of Branwell Bronte was a relief, though
a sad one; but when first the stern and lofty Emily and next
the gentle Anne departed, Charlotte was lonely indeed. "The
two human beings who understood me, and whom I understood,
are gone^" she writes. Anne died meekly, leaving as her farewell
to the world the verses beginning, " I hoped that with the brave
and strong"; but the day of Emily's death "was very terrible.
She was torn, conscious, panting, reluctant, though resolute, out
of a happy life I" No wonder that the surviving sister adds
emphatically, "It will not do to dweU on these things." No
wonder that, nevertheless, they are for ever recurring to her
memory, and that they lend their sombre tone to the part of
Shirley which was written after the losses had been borne, and
even to the earlier part, over which the shadows of coming events
are already cast.
But nevertheless, living as it is, and full as it is of the writer's
personality, Shirley is not fused into unity by her imagination as
Jane Eyre is. It remains a collection of scenes and sketches of
character, all real, all from the life, but not inevitably there, not
integral parts of a whole, as are the scenes and characters of the
earlier book. Even the slight distance in time and the trifling de-
mand on the historic imagination had a damaging efifect. Charlotte
Bronte did not like that sort of work, and she did not do it well.
" I wish he could be told not to care much for dwelling on the
^ Mis Gaskell's Lift Cff Charlotte Bronte, ii. lai. ' Uiid. U. 100.
political and religious intrigues of the times," is her comment on
Thackeray's handling of history in Esmond : it contained, in her
opinion, "too much history, too little story'." The true secret
however of the inferiority of Shirley is the absence of the little
governess. The thing Charlotte Bronte could do supremely well

was " spiritual autobiography '' ; and in Jane Eyre there is far
more of that than she herself was aware, or would acknow-

ledge.
Her life was drawing near its close before her third novel,
Villette (1853), Meanwhile, in 1850, she had written
appeared.
the admirable biographical notice of her sisters which was prefixed
to a new edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. The
intense loneliness was telling on her, and the gloom of that
desolate parsonage which suggested to the stranger's mind that

joy could never have entered it since it was first built. Ill health
delayed the composition of Villette ; and after it appeared the
pleasure of success was dashed, as it had been in each of the
former cases, by the intrusion of the question of sex in authorship.
In the case of Jane Eyre, this question had been brought in by
Miss Rigby in The Quarterly Review, and in that of Shirley by
G. H. Lewes in The Edinburgh ; while in the case of Villette the
blow was struck by the author's friend Miss Martineau, who
pronounced it coarse. It is only just to say that in thus stating
her opinion she was fulfilling a promise ; but the condemnation
was none the less painful.
Just before this a promise of happiness had come to Charlotte

Bronte, only to be taken away by the unreasonable opposition of
her father. Mr Nicholls, his curate (not one of those satirised
in Shirley, though he is mentioned there under the name of
Mr McCarthy), proposed marriage to her, and she, who had
refused several proposals from other men, consented. But the
violence of her father, combined with the feeling due to the
infirmities of age, caused the project of marriage to be abandoned.
Ultimately however Patrick Bronte's opposition was withdrawn,
and in June, 1 854, Charlotte became Mrs Nicholls. On March 3 1 st,
1855; she died. Her last year was happy. As her life was ebbing
* Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte, ii. 263.
out she " caught the sound of some murmured words of prayer
that God would spare her. '
Oh !
' she whispered forth, '
I am not
going to die, am I ? He will not separate us, we have been so
happy^.'
Her literary remains were gathered up after her death. What
had been rejected in her life was precious now as the work of the
renowned novelist, and The Professor was accordingly published
in 1857. The story upon which she was engaged at her death
appeared also as a fragment, Emma, in The Cornhill Magazine for
April, i860. But Charlotte Bronte (she can no more become
Mrs Nicholls than Francis Bacon could be lost in Lord Verulam)
is a woman of three books ; and the only one which requires
,
iiotice in addition to those which have been already discussed is
Villette. In merit it may be placed intermediate between the

—
other two a more compact whole than Shirley, less inspired
than Jane Eyre. Here again the effects of the autobiographic
method are visible, for to a large extent Villette is autobiographical
less so indeed than Jane Eyre, but much more so than Shirley.
It is the spiritual autobiography of the Brussels period. Charlotte

Bronte is not to be identified with any of the characters in the
book ; but nevertheless her thoughts and many of her experiences
are unquestionably there. For instance, the scene in the con-
fessional is a piece of her own experience. The characters too,
especially the mistress of the boarding-school and her remarkable
professor, are portraits.
The charges of coarseness which were freely brought against
Charlotte Bronte by contemporaries seem to us now exaggerated
and strained. It is true, her characters do not all wear kid gloves,
and speak with the
eat with silver forks, or act with the grace
decorum of the caste of Vere de Vera. She was unflinchingly
sincere, and whatever of coarseness there may be in her works
comes from her photographic fidelity to the life she knew, and
was no part of the fibre of her mind. Among the men and
women' of her acquaintance it was the custom to speak plainly
and to call a spadfe a spade. The display of uncurbed passion
was familiar to her and hence she frequently depicted her
;
1 Mrs Gaskell's Lift of Charlotte Bronte, ii. 334.
W. 46
characters as saying words and doing deeds which to some of her
readers seemed unnecessarily coarse, brutal and cruel. Even if
the words and the deeds were so, the tendency of the books was
always towards a higher purpose and a sterner morality. Charlotte
Bronte had no love for garbage, but she had a profound reverence
for truth, and her daring mind disposed her to risk everything in
its service. All the more on that account is she an efficient
teacher in the school of morals of English fiction. , No pure
mind was ever contaminated by her works, but the weak have
been strengthened and the timorous encouraged.
Like her great contemporary George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte
had in her much that in common parlance is spoken of as
masculine ; but far more than George Eliot she shows at the same
time the characteristics of women. It is easy to understand the
doubt which was felt as to the sex of the anonymous writer of the
Scenes of Clerical Life,and even to sympathise with the general
view that the author must be a man but such doubt in the case
;
oi fane Eyre could only indicate shallowness of criticism. Char-

lotte Bronte's pictures of men show the same sort of defects as
women find in the portraits of women drawn by men. Rochester

could never have been the hero in any novel written by a man,
and very few of her masculine characters carry the conviction of
truth. On the other hand, it would scarcely have been possible
for anyone but a woman —
unless a new Shakespeare had appeared
— to draw such a character as Jane Eyre, or even Lucy Snowe.
For this reason alone, if there had been no other, there was room
for the growing class of female writers ; and for this reason those
who, like Charlotte Bronte, have done their work faithfully and
well have a claim upon the gratitude of their country. Those
very differences of character, temperament and endowment, which
have been so often advanced as reasons why women should con-
fine themselves to domestic life, are so many reasons the more
why some women should be poets and novelists. As "it takes
all sorts of people tomake a world," so it needs all sorts of
gifts to make a round and harmonious literature. The fact that
domestic work must always be the primary and the most essential
work of women proves nothing. It is equally true that agriculture
is the primary and most essential work of men ; but it does not
follow that every man must be a farmer.
All that has been said in adverse criticism of Charlotte Bronte
might be said with much greater force of her sister Emily (1818-
1848) ; and all that can be said in extenuation and excuse applies
to her likewise with greater force. She died at thirty ; she had
seen less of the world than even Charlotte; her excessive reserve
confined herstill more narrowly within the narrow circle that was
open to Rer; and finally, her own nature was more unyielding
and had closer kinship with the harsh natures around her than
her sister's. Her character was rather repellent than attractive;
but yet it won and devotion of her sister. And
the unstinted love
however Emily might be loved, hers was a nature that com-
little
manded respect. Her pride was morbid it is painful to read :
how in her last illness even her sisters dared not notice her failing
step and laboured breathing and her frequent pauses as she

climbed the staircase. But this pride, when it took the form of
courage, was magnificent. An incident recorded in Shirley
actually occurred to her. Being bitten by a dog she believed to
be mad, she applied cautery with her own hand, telling no one till
the danger was over and she thrashed her own bull-dog. Keeper,
;
with the bare hands till she conquered him, though she had been
warned that he would spring at the throat of anyone who struck
"him. "I have never seen her parallel in anything," writes her
sister in the Biographical Notice. " Stronger than a man, simpler
than a child, her nature stood alone."
The book she wrote stands alone too. Wuthering Heights is
a novel of extraordinary power, going far, with her poems, to

justify the opinion of Arriold, that the author's soul
" Knew no fellow for might.

Passion, vehemence, grief.
Daring, since Byron died."
But it is a book not to be read with pleasure. The first picture

of the Heights is revolting from its' brutal inhumanity. To those
who know only the softer southern life, the wild stories and the
rugged characters of Yorkshire seem to be here exaggerated
46 —
almost beyond the bounds of belief; and however those stories
may explain, they do not justify in art such a picture. The book
is spoilt because its author has not known how
humanise it to
If Charlotte Bronte's work is impaired because she makes too
deep the shadows and shows too little the lights of life, Emily
sins in that way tenfold more grievously. And yet there is an
irresistible attraction in all that remains of this austere and
sombre genius. What might not such " paission, vehemence,

grief, daring," have accomplished if years had brought a* mellower
wisdom to guide them? Emily Bronte was clearly the inferior
of her sister in artistic sense ; and what she has accomplished,
with the exception of her noble poems, is far less valuable.
Even in thehands of Time she might have proved an intractable

pupil, and have marred other novels as she marred Wuthering
Heights by the very excess of the qualities which made her great.
But she had immense reserves of power clamorously demanding
an outlet ; and it is hard to resist the belief that she would,
sooner or later, in verse if not in prose, have found one worthy
of herself
In the life of her friend Charlotte Bronte, Mrs Gaskell added
one to the very small group of English biographies which their
grace, charm and inherent worth have made permanent parts of
literature. For that service alone she would have been justly
entitled to no mean share of praise and honour ; for there are few
things more difficult than to write a really good biography. But
Mrs Gaskell was likewise one of the foremost novelists of her
time and her fictions, though inferior in power to those of at
;
least three or four of her contemporaries, have nevertheless that

incommunicable literary flavour which is the surest passport to
immortality. Cranford belongs to the works of which
class of
The Vicar of Wakefield and Pride and Prejudice are perhaps the
greatest examples ; and it is not less perfect than they.
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865) was the daughter of
a certain William Stevenson who at one period of his life was a
Unitarian minister ; and her husband was a minister of the same
sect. Their life in Manchester gave her the materials out of which
she made her first novel, Mary Barton (1848), and also great part
of North and South (1855). The anomalies of the distribution of

wealth, which were brought about through the concentration of
industryby the development of machinery worked by steam, could
not fail Mrs Gaskell was. She was
to strike an observer situated as
brought into daily contact with misery, destitution and degradation
among the workers and she saw, on the other hand, the wealth
;
and luxury of the manufacturers, many of whom practically ac-

knowledged no duty towards their hands, and without concern
saw them herding together like brutes rather than human beings.
It is this knowledge which gives substance to Mary
first-hand
Barton; it was the feeling that the picture was drawn from life
which carried the book into immediate popularity ; and it was the
same feeling which brought upon the anonymous author W. R.
Greg's charge of misrepresenting the employers^. If Carson was
meant to be typical of the employer, there is doubtless some
foundation for the charge. Biit in the nature of things a work of
fiction cannot balance all considerations like a scientific treatise.
The employer of the novel must be an individual man with a
specific character. If he is utterly abnormal, a sort of being
scarcely to be found in nature, the novelist be blamed may justly
but if he is a fair no sound defence

representative of a class, it is
to say that there are many others a good deal better, and many
more utterly unlike him. And it can hardly be denied that there
were a good many employers quite as bad as Mrs Gaskell's
Carson ; while the history of factory legislation proves conclusively
that the whole class of employers needed to be roused to a moie
lively sense of their duties to their workmen. Further, it is only
fair Mrs Gaskell to set against Carson the excellent picture in'
to
North and South of Thornton, an employer not by any means
faultless, but fair-minded, and, under all the hardness of his
exterior, human to the core. Possibly the colours of the latter
picture were some measure brightened by the influence of
in
Greg's criticism any rate North and South is written in a spirit
: at
of scrupulous fairness. The pathetic story of the Boucher family

shows the miseries to which the industrial system may give risei
but both Thornton the manufacturer and Nicholas Higgins the
^ See Greg's essay on Mary Barton,
factory hand are men who command sympathy each for his class.
The book is that the evils of the factory system are
lesson of the
due, not to the wickedness of either the one class, or the other, but
to that absence of human relations between them which renders
mutual comprehension almost impossible and misjudgment almost
inevitable, and which dries up the springs of emotion, or makes
them flow with the Greek charity, not the English love.
It is not however in works of this class that Mrs Gaskell
appears at her best. Some critics doubted whether the writer of

Mary Barton possessed humour. It was in fact Mrs Gaskell's
most precious gift, and it is that which will longest keep her
writings sweet. Neither the circumstances of her own life when
Mary Barton was written, nor the nature of the subject-matter,
encouraged humorous representation ; yet even in Mary Barton
a careful reader will detect its presence, while in the later novels
it is Even the tragic Ruth (1853) is

an unfailing ingredient.
softened by the humorous character of Sally; and in North
ancl South there are some delicious bits, such as the faithful old
servant's criticism of Mr Hale, the clergyman whose conscientious
doubts have moved him to resign his living. " Master was born,
I suppose, for to marry missus. If I thought he loved her
properly, I might get to love him But he should ha'
in time.
made a deal more of and not been always reading, reading,
her,
thinking, thinking. See what it has brought him to. Many a
one who never reads nor thinks either, gets to be Rector, and
Dean, and what not ; and I dare say master might, if he'd just
minded missus, and let the weary reading and thinking alone."
But this takes us far away from the atmosphere of factories, and
it is in quite a. different air that the Jlower of Mrs Gaskell's humour
blooms. She is one of those who have felt the charm of pro-
viricial England and who have given a literary immortality to
English village life. Cranford (185.3) is not only her masterpiece,

but it stands on a wholly different plane from the rest of her
works. In the case of Thackeray, or Dickens, or George Eliot,
or Charlotte Bronte, there is reasonable doubt as to which work
should be placed first and though each reader has his preference,
;
nearly all would admit that there is much to be said in favour of

the views of others; but to prefer any other of Mrs Gaskell's

novels to Cranford would lay the critic open to a charge of
eccentricity.
Though marriage immured her in the crowded streets of
Manchester, Mrs Gaskell's childhood and youth had been spent
in the quaint and picturesque little Cheshire town of Knutsford,
and there lies all that remains of her. In those days, before the
railway touched it, Knutsford was far quieter and quainter than it
appears now to the eye of the pilgrim who visits it for the sake of
Mrs Gaskell. It lies in the midst of characteristically English
scenery. Great parks with stately trees and still meres, and old
Halls which carry the imagination back for hundreds of years,
surround and oak-timbered houses are still to be seen in the
it,
streets. The little town was then a veritable Sleepy Hollow ; and
yet it was near enough to the great industrial centres of Lancashire
to feel the pulsing of " the tragic heart of towns." Exactly this
is the atmosphere of Cranford. Peace is in every page of the
book, that peace whose growth is only possible upon the soil of
an ancient civilisation. And yet it is not absolute peace. The
young manhood of the place has been drained away, and there
is a dim consciousness of unrest, a brooding sense of change to
come, like that vague, inaudible disturbance of the atmosphere in

a quiet place, of which we become aware only when we contrast
the absolute stillness of the Sabbath of rest with the relative
stillness of the week. This wonderful sense of atmosphere
is nowhere more skilfully given than in Cranford. There is
something of the same nature in Our Village ; but Cranford has

the added charm of a story, and is an artistic whole.
The characters of Cranford are admirable. The simple and

manly sincerity of Captain Brown, and the crushed but indestruc-
tibly sweet nature of Miss Matty, make them the reader's friends
for ever. The book is full of delicipjis bits of humour and pathos.
The small gentilities, the petty occupations, the "much ado about
nothing " of a narrow society untroubled with ideas, are touched
with a skill hardly to be matched outside Goldsmith's master-
piece. The materials are as commonplace as possible, and yet
the result is admirable. A special I'eature of Mrs Gaskell's art is
the skilful use of juxtaposition. Take for example Miss Jenkyns s
indorsation of an old letter " Letter of pious congratulation and
:
exhortation from my venerable grandfather to my beloved mother,

on occasion of my own birth. Also some practical remarks on
the advisability of keeping warm the extremities of infants, from
my excellent grandmother."
Through the remainder of her life Mrs Gaskell plied an active
pen. She was the author in all of some forty stories, long' and
short, the most important, in addition to those already named,
being Sylvia's Lovers (1863), Cousin PhilHs (1863-64) and Wives
and Daughters, which was appearing serially in T?ie Cornhill Maga-
zine at the time of her death, and which was left unfinished.
Much of the charm of Cranford is to be found in all of them, £uid
Cousin Phillis has a rare grace, but still there is a gulf between
Cranford and the best of them. Had she written several stories
of the quality of Cranford, Mrs Gaskell must have ranked among
the greatest of English novelists. As it is, a writer who is always
good but only once indubitably great seems to be most fairly
classed high in the second rank.

Mrs Gaskell's stories are a testimony to the goodness of her
heart as well as to her genius. From beginning to end they
contain no ill-natured word. They have in a high degree that
power which specially accompanies humour, the power to excite
interest in the writer. No one can be indifferent to the personality
of those who possess it ; and when it is kindly the interest becomes
Mrs Gaskell has a place along with Goldsmith
personal affection.
and Charles Lamb among writers who are not only admired but
loved.
Her contemporary George Eliot (1819-1880) commands
more admiration but less love. The very greatness of her
genius, by lifting her so far above the reader, tends to chill the
sense of personal relationship :
" the solemn peaks but to the
stars are known." A few, greater still, have had the knack of
making men oblivious of the distance. Scott had
it ; and in the
comedies at leastwe often forget the incomparable greatness of

Shakespeare in his own attractiveness. But George Eliot sat
upon a solitary throne, which few cared to approach.
Mary Ann Evans, whose own name has been sunk in the nom
deplume which she adopted, was bom in Warwickshire. She was
thus, like Shafcespearej a borderer j and she had Welsh 'blood in
her veins, as perhaps Shakespeare had in his. Her regular
education did not reach far, though it was quite as good as that
of the average middle-class girl of her time, or rather better. She
was sent to school first at Attleborough, then at Nuneaton, and
finally at Coventry, whence she was withdrawn in 1835; and,
her mother dying in 1836, the girl of seventeen found herself

burdened with the charge of her father's house. She took a just
pride in her butter-making and cheese-making and in the general
excellence of her household management^ ; but her mind was far
too active to rest content with that alone, and she continued to
study French, German and Italian, Latin and Greek and music.
At this time Mary Ann Evans was profoundly religious, and,
after the straitest sect of the Calvinists, so firm a believer as to be
shocked at the idea of the possible salvation of any who did not
reach the proper standard of orthodoxy. Her early letters are
full and of evangelical piety even to
of quotations from scripture,
excess and She was so ascetic that on her first visit to London,
;
in 1838, she would not go to any theatre. She had breathed the
atmosphere of evangelicalism in the schools she had attended,
and their influence had been confirmed by her aunt Elizabeth, a
Methodist preacher, the original of Dinah Morris. On the other
hand, her brother Isaac had adopted- High Church views, and the
arguments between them were frequent and sustained. It hardly
needs the testimony of the biography to convince us of this, for
George Eliot's mind was essentially argumentative, and nothing

in her correspondence is more remarkable than its ratiocinative
cast. It has no share of the easy simplicity and the light gossip
of the letters of Edward FitzGerald, or of Cowper, or of Horace
Walpole.
^ George Eliot had to the last a high opinion of the life of practical useful-
ness. "Did you not then find enough to interest you in your family ? " was
her question addressed to a successful lady novelist who was married and had
bhildren and if she herself had had children it is probable that her novels
;
would never have been written. [Mrs Oliphant's William Blackwood, i. 463.]
Miss Evans however was not the person to rest long content
with beliefs inherited or accepted on authority: The power of
her intellect brought on at an unusually early age one of those
spiritual crises to which original minds are liable, and which were
perhaps especially frequent in that age. She was driven on by
her intellect to question everything. " I admit discussion," she
says at a later date, " on every matter except dinner and debts. I
hold that the first must be eaten and the second must be paid.
These are my only prejudices." The biography aptly quotes, as
applicable to -herself, a sentence from Daniel Deronda :
" You
can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in

you,and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl." The movement
which was now begun in her mind speedily taught her how galling
was the slavery. She passed through various phases within the
fold of the Church, but speedily arrived at the " Anti-Supernatural,"
and in that stage wore an anti-supernatural cap, which, whatever
may have been its merits as a symbol of faith, or want of faith,
appears to have been unbecoming as a form of head-gear. The
change produced :a complete revolution in her tastes, so that what
she had formerly admired she now loathed. In 1838 she enjoys
Hannah More's letters, and calls hers a " blessed " character^
Ten years later she writes :
"I am glad you detest Hannah
More's letters. I like neither her letters, nor her books, nor her
character^."
On this side of her intellect a powerful influence was exercised
by the Bray family, whom she came to know on the removal of
her father in 1841 to the neighbourhood of Coventry. Both
Mr and Mrs Bray, and also the brother and sister of the latter,
were writers of some repute and power. Charles Hennell's

Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838) especially
,
was whose reputation was not limited to

a. book of great ability
England. had been translated into German with a preface by

It
Strauss himself. Doubts had been already suggested to Miss

Evans's mind by Isaac Taylor's Ancient Christianity (1839-1840),
and both the man and the book, as well as his Physical Theory of
Another Life (1836), are worthy of remembrance were it only for
• Cross's Life of George BUot, i. 41, " ibid. i. 170.
the admiration they stirred in her mind and the influence they
exercised over her. Their caution and moderation serve as a
measure of Miss Evans's orthodoxy at this date. Her doubts
were greatly deepened by the discussions she now heard and the
literature to which she was introduced. With an excess of con-
scientiousness which she afterwards regretted, Miss Evans, finding
herself out of sympathy with orthodox religious teaching, deter-
mined not to go to church, a resolution which led to a very
painful breach with her father. The
and daughter were
father
ultimately reconciled by her yielding on the point of attendance
at church ; but her opinions never moved back towards the
current views of Christianity.
Miss Evans already felt the attraction of literature, and had
written a little and projected more. The earliest pubhshed
of her writings was a religious poem which appeared in The
Christian Observer in January, 1840. But, like Charlotte Bronte,
she was no poet " What do you think of the Progress of Archi-
tecture as a subject for Poetry' ? " she asks in r84i. Comment is
unnecessary. She proposed also to draw up a chart of ecclesias-

and to embody in it "an application of the apocalyptic
tical history,
prophecies " How she meant to do it is not clear ; but that, George
Eliot once entertained the idea is curious. It was however to
her connexion with the Brays that Miss Evans owed her real
introduction to literature. A friend of theirs, Miss Brabant, had
begun the translation of Strauss's Leben Jesu, and then abandoned
it on her marriage with Mr Hennell ; and in succession to. her
Miss Evans was induced to undertake the work. Her version,

published in 1846, proves her cornpetency at once in the German
language and in philosophy. In spite of the scantiness of her
scholastic training, she made herself a woman of very wide culture,

being indeed far superior in this respect not only to the women^
who were her contemporaries in fiction.
but to the rnen as well,
She was an excellent linguist, having a wide acquaintance with
Greek and Latin literature, as well as with French, German and
Italian. In the course of her translation of St;rauss she felt the
need of Hebrew, and forthwith taught herself that laijguage.
^ Cross's Life oj George Eliot, i. 81,
She was moreover widely read in contemporary speculation,

both on its scientific and on its philosophic sides, and she took the
deepest intellectual pleasure in it. She was ready in appreciation

and keen in criticism of philosophic ideas ; but in this sphere her
mind was not originative. For that reason there is nothing more
to be regretted than the sway philosophy afterwards exercised
over her. In her later works there is too much theory and too
little observation, too much reasoning and too little intuition.
Besides Strauss, she translated Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity

(1854), the only book she ever published under her own name.
The direct remuneration Miss Evans received for the trans-
lation of Strauss was miserably inadequate, but the book served
to make her known in literary circles. Like all writers she felt
the attraction ofLondon; but so long as her father lived she
was bound to him. His death in 1849 set her free, and two years
later she became assistant editor of The Westminster Review, to
which she herself contributed a number of weighty articles. The
most celebrated was Worldliness and Other- Worldliness. Those
to whom it would have been most instructive were not in the
habit of reading The Westminster Review but to many even of
\
these there penetrated the knowledge that it was possible to regard

" other-worldliness " as a thing no less selfish and objectionable and
essentially irreligious than worldliness. The writer had not yet
found her true metier ; but yet in the essays of this period there
are many gleams of the wisdom and the humour which illuminate
the stories of later days.
It was at this time that Miss Evans made the acquaintance of
George Henry Lewes, her connexion with whom remains the
most debatable point in her career. Charlotte Bronte had in
Jane Eyre pronounced her verdict on just such a case ; and she
had incurred unreasonable blame for even stating it. Mary Ann
Evans felt differently, and in 1854 she consented to live as the
wife of Lewes. Though the connexion was a happy one, she who
was hereafter known to her friends as Mrs Lewes had much to
suffer. They who were readiest to cast stones were in most
cases immeasurably beneath her in moral worth ; yet there were
many, by no means prone to pay homage to mere respectability,
who looked grave because of the consequences to society which

might flow from such an act. We may see the effect of the
position inwhich she had placed herself in George Eliot's frequent
recurrence to problems of marriage; and several powerful and
eloquent passages suggest the idea that she was never able to rid
her own mind of uneasiness as to the moral character of her act.
No more strongly on the momentous nature of the
writer insists
is more innocent of any sentence or
conjugal relation; no writer
word tending to undermine it or to weaken the sense of its
binding force. But whatever may have been the pain to herself,
literature is the richer for this uneasiness of the great novelist's
mind. It is probably the personal emotion behind them
which makes the passages referred to among the most solemnly
impressive she has written.
In the literary sense, the influence of Lewes upon George
Eliot was excellent, though doubtless there was some mixture of
evil with the good. The bent mind and the nature
of Lewes's
of his pursuits must have encouraged and increased her own
tendency to abstract thought and in Daniel Deronda and Theo-
;
phrastus Such we see how dangerous to her art was that tendency.
But it was native in her mind, Lewes did not implant it; and
against this problematical evil has to be set the great amount of
positive good he certainly did. It was he who first suggested to
her that she possessed the gift for fiction, and encouraged her to
write the story of Amos Barton. It was he too who afterwards
shielded her sensitiveness from any rude breath of criticism ; and

he was constantly at hand with sympathetic help and suggestion.
There is something charming and even touching in the spectacle
of this man, naturally vain and self-confident, consenting to sink
into the background and to devote himself to the nurture of his
wife's genius.
Scenes of Clerical Life ran, in Blackwood's Magazine^ through
At first even the publisher had
the greater part of the year 1857.
not so much pseudonym on which to hang the stories.
as a
Amos Barion was introduced by Lewes as the work of a sensitive
and diffident friend whom the Blackwoods believed to be a man,
;
and guessed to, be a clergyman. The name George EUot was

adopted in correspondence with the publishers while Scenes
of Clerical Life was appearing. The full revelation was forced

from the unwilling writer in 1859 by the claim of the impostor
Liggins to the authorship. Strangely enough, two of the most
pronounced against Amos
trusted of Blackwood's literary advisers
Barton. His own approval was so cautiously expressed as slightly
.
to wound the sensitive author; but, as he sensibly remarked,

"criticism would assume a much soberer tone were critics com-
pelled seriously to act whenever they expressed an opinion'."
The readers of the magazine however showed no hesitation.
Scenes of Clerical Life '<sz.% immediately reprinted, and, even before
she had written anything on the scale of a novel, George Eliot
took rank as one of the foremost writers of fiction of the time.
For a few years she wrote rapidly as well as powerfully.
Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (i860) and Silas
Marner (1861) are, quality considered, a wonderful tale of work.
A visit to Italy made a slight break, and it was not till 1863 that
Romola appeared ; but the longer interval was by no means spent
in idleness. Romola was the most laborious of all her works.
She made a study of Florentine history to qualify herself for her
self-imposed task, and her declaration that she began the book
a young woman and ended it an old one indicates the strain it
put upon her. Whether the effect of this strain was permanent,
or, as is more probable, she had simply used up the cream of her
material, Romola is a turning-point in the career of George Eliot.

She could still write grandly, but with her it is "never glad
confident morning again " the easy mastery is gone, and we see
:
marks of labour where before there is the sense of spontaneity.

At no time was she a facile or a naturally prolific writer like
Dickens ; but after, the date of Romola the intervals between her
works became longer, and the sense of effort conveyed by them
is more marked than it is in any of them down to Silas Marner.
Three years separated Romola from the next novel, Felix Holt
(1866); and after that George Eliot made a new venture. She
had already written a version of The Spanish Gypsy (1868); but
before it was published she visited Spain and afterwards rewrote
* Mrs Oliphant'fe JîZ/jaOT' jS/«<:i5w*tfrf, ii, '
43 J.
the poem. Her only other long work of verse, The Legend of
Jubal, was published with other pieces in 1874. In the interval
between these two poems she had reverted to prose, and published
Middlemarch in parts, as the novels of Dickens were published,
in 1 87 1 and 1872. Her last novel, Daniel Deronda, followed
in 1876; and the volume of essays entitled Impressions of Theo-
phrastus Such (1879) closed her literary career. She died in
December, 18S0, having in the same year married (Lewes being
now dead) Mr J. W. Cross.

In at least one respect George Eliot stands alone among
English novelists. No one before her time had so combined
profound culture in philosophy with insight into character and
keen observation. Scott had read even more widely, but he was
not regularly learned; Thackeray had great knowledge, but he was
not a systematic thinker ; Lytton was superficial and pretentious j
and none of the other novelists in her own age or in the generation
preceding it is in this respect fit named with her at all.
to be
The combination gives richness and weight to many a passage in
her writings, and to some complete works. In her earlier books
it has the same sort of charm as a similar combination has in
the dialogues of Plato. Down to Silas Marner it may be regarded
as an unmixed boon; but afterwards evidence accumulates that
it was not without its dangers. Thought crushes art, and the
style becomes heavy and laboured. Daniel Deronda, Theofhrastus
Such and the poems especially illustrate defects of which many
were conscious in George Eliot's conversation, and which force
themselves into notice in almost every letter that she wrote.
What preserves the earlier. novels from this defect is, in the
first place, the element of concrete experience which is a principal
ingredient in all of them; and, secondly, their saving grace of
humour. In both respects George Eliot afterwards shows a
marked decline. As to the former point, it is notorious that in
the earlier novels George Eliot drew very freely on the stores of
her memory. Scene after scene, character after character, in these
novels has been identified with some place or person within the
range of her early experience. Her mansions and cottages, her
lanes and meadows, are those to which she had been accustomed
to drive in childhood with her father, or over which she had
rambled with her brother. Still more are the characters of her
novels the figures with whom she had been familiar ; and almost
in proportion to the familiarity is the frequency of their appearance.
No other group was so often laid under contribution as her own
family. Her father, her mother, her brother, her sister, her aunt
and herself, all appear in her pages. We need not press the
identification too far. "There is not a single portrait in Adam
Bede," she says ; " only the suggestions of experience wrought up
into new combinations'." But though few or none of the characters
are transcribed from the life without change or adaptation, there
can be no reasonable doubt that many of them bore a marked
resemblance to real men and women. Her brother Isaac had
no difficulty in detecting his sister's hand behind the screen of
her anonymity; and it is significant that the man Liggins, who
was put forward as the veritable author of Scenes of Clerical
Life and of Adam Bede, had the honour thrust upon him. He
at first disowned the books ; but his neighbours were so sure
upon the point that he yielded to tiieir better knowledgei They
were sure because they saw that the author must be someone
from their neighbourhoodj and who could it possibly be but
Liggins ? The premiss was right, but the conclusion was wrong.
They were quite right in the conviction that only a native of their
district could have shown such intimate local knowledge; and
their only mistake lay in the belief that Liggins, and he alone,
possessed the power necessary to use this local knowledge.
Such treasures of memory are soon exhausted : they are rather
a mine, the contents of which can be used once for all, than a
which can be cropped year after year. And as they
fertile field
are exhausted their possessor has to go farther afield for characters

and schemes. In Romola it is a foreign land and a distant age
in Felix Holt we have the problems of politics ; in I)aniel Deronda
race and heredity. We can see therefore why it is that a certain
easy grace which belongs to the earlier novels is wanting to the
later ones. It is like writing in a. foreign tongue. The language
may have been well learnt, the grammar may be thoroughly
' Cross's Life of George Eliot, ii. 67-68.
understood; but it was not learnt at the mother's knee, and it
has not become part of the writer's very being. And so, as theory
and conscious thought more and more take the place of intuition
and of memories reaching back to the dim beginnings of conscious
being, George Eliot becomes more ponderous and less graceful.
David has put on the armour of Saul, but he was a more formidable
enemy with the sling and the smooth stones. After Silas Marner
George Eliot achieved just one great triumph, Middle7}iarch, and
in, it she is back again in her own special field, the English
midlands. Her other works might have won the reputation of a
lesser writer, but they failed to sustain hers.
In the earlier novels the characters are alive in every limb.
Serious and comic, simple and deep, thoughtful and foolish, they
are all convincing. They also present astonishing scope and
variety. Naturally enough, the women are better than the men :
one of the principal grounds on which Dickens pronounced so

confidently on the question of the sex of the author of Scenes of
Clerical Life was that the women there were " more informed
from within" than the men; and though that acute critic,
Mrs Carlyle, was deceived, she in imagination provided the
middle-aged author with a wife, to whom he owed "those
htSiaixi\A feminine touches" in Adam Bede^. Yet George Eliot
in her delineation of the masculine character stands far above
any other female writer. Adam Bede (her father) and Tom
TuUiver (her brother) are so good that we have to compare them
with Maggie TuUiver (herself), Dinah Morris (her aunt) and
Hetty Sorrel, to see that there are still some touches wanting,
such as no woman has ever given to a masculine character, and
as, perhaps, no man but Shakespeare has ever given to a feminine
one.
This dependence upon experience is common to all writers.
Even centaurs and Medusas and monsters of all sorts are only
incongruous combinations of the elements of experience ; while,
at the other end of the scale, the airiest sylph has to embody
itself, just as does the modern ghost which consents to be photo-
graphed, and so proves that it is something more, or less, than

^ Life of George Eliot; ii. il.
W. 47
mere spirit. But in the case of female writers the dependence
seems to be especially close or, at all events, it obtrudes itself
;
upon the attention. We have noticed this already in the case of

Charlotte Bronte and Mrs Gaskell. It is true also of Miss Austen
and Miss Ferrier. All these writers, as well as George Eliot, are
best when they keep closest to that which they most familiarly
know. In the case of Charlotte Bronte and Mrs Gaskell and

George Eliot, it seems to have been especially the experience of
girlhood that was fruitful in literature ; at least not one of them
ever succeeded in using later experience with the ease and
mastery shown in the manipulation of that which came from early
years. The same principle holds, doubtless, in the case of men
like Fielding and Smollett and Scott ; but it is disguised by their
wider knowledge of life. Dickens, who knew nothing well but
the London streets, had come into contact there with an endless
variety of characters and had stored his memory with innumerable
"situations." There are signs of exhaustion in the later works
both of Dickens and of Scott; but their vein is not so soon
worked out as it inevitably is in the case of the women. George
Eliot unquestionably showed wisdom in writing slowly ; and most
writers of her sex have either shown a want of wisdom, or have,
like Mrs Oliphant, betrayed the pressure of necessity in writing
rapidly and publishing often. Probably her view changed with
time, but at the beginning of her career George Eliot had an
instinctive feeling that her surest ground was the ground of her
own experience. " Shall I ever," she asks in her Journal in
1859, "write another book as true as Adam BedeV and the

doubt was well founded. Two or' three of her subsequent works
excel Adam Bede in some other respects, but certainly none is
more true throughout.
With the exhaustion of the material of experience there goes,
in George Eliot's case, a great decline in the quantity and the
quality of the humour of her novels. If a critic wishes to
illustrate her humour, he almost invariably refers to the characters
of the earlier novels, to the Poysers and Gleggs, to the scene
at the Rainbow, or to some passage in Scenes of Clerical Life.
Though humour is present still in Middlemarck and Daniel
Deronda, and though, in the former especially, there are some

delicious passages, yet, if we judged by these novels alone, we
should not single humour out as one of George Eliot's principal
gifts. Arid yet such it is. The

charm of her rural characters
great
— farmers, inn-keepers, housewives —
is their humour.
We may distinguish two different kinds of humour. One is

that which Shakespeare has embodied in the person of Falstaff,
in whom it is combined with extraordinary mental gifts. No
character in imaginative literature is so fertile in expedients
and so rich in suggestion as Falstafif: he is at once mirthful
himself and a cause of mirth in others. So too is Sam Weller
his wit and humour are conscious, and he laughs and often
with,
at, his interlocutor. It is not so with the tribe of Dogberry and
Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Though the cause of mirth in others,
they are themselves far from mirthful. We read with delight
speeches uttered with the most sober purpose. Such characters
are unconsciously humorous ; and it humour of this sort that
is
Mr Barrie has in mind when he puts into the mouth of Tammas

Haggart the opinion that to make humour is sufficient work
for one man, the labour of understanding it must be undergone
by someone else.
Now this is the sort of humour in which George Eliot excels.

There is wit as well as wisdom in her works ; there are plenty of
bright and illuminating phrases whose eifect depends at least as
much upon their lively expression as upon their truth. But there
is no character of the Falstaff type, none even who shows the
roguery of a Touchstone. The humour is mainly found in

characters of humble rank, or of imperfect education and moderate
intelligence; and greatly would they have been surprised at the
idea that their talk was amusing. Her greatest triumphs in humour
are to be found in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss ; and
there the talks about household linen and furniture 'and recipes,
and the disputes about family dignity, are to the speakers matter
of the most serious import. The novelist has done what Tammas
Haggart's auditor was required to do: she has understood the
humour which Mrs Poyser makes. This is almost literally the
case ; for George Eliot had actually' heard these conversations,
47—2
or something so like them that we need not trouble about the
difference.
A great part of George Eliot's power is due to sympathy. She
was herself sensitive to excess ; but while many sensitive people
pay little regard to the feelings of others, George Eliot showed
that scrupulous forbearance of which she herself felt the need.
Nowhere does she show more comprehension or greater sympathy
than in dealing with questions of religion. She herself had com-
pletely thrown off dogmatic belief; but she had not done it without
a struggle, and she never ceased to sympathise with the beliefs she
could no longer share. The memory of the painful estrangement
from her father, which never faded from her' mind, warned her
how the consequences of a change of creed might spread.There
is none of the spirit of the iconoclast in her work.
therefore
No wanton attack upon the faith of others can be charged
against her; and she would have approved of the lines of her
contemporary, Matthew Arnold, who asks with regard to the
faiths which he himself can no longer share,
"Which has not taught weak wills how much they can?
Which has not fall'n on the diy heart like rain?
Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man
Thou must be born again!"
She would have argued too with Browning that love, the soul
of religion, is alike in the dissenting chapel, despite the intel-
lectual vulgarity of its doctrine, and in the Romish church, despite
the incredibility of its dogma. " I have too profound a conviction,"
she writes, " of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, and the
spiritual blight that comes with no faith, to have any negative
propagandism in me."
Hei; own experience of the pain of divisions on the score of
religion is in part the secret of George Eliot's sympathetic
delineation of clergymen, wherein she contrasts strikingly with,
Charlotte Bronte. The
though she was the daughter, and
latter,
though she became the wife, of a clergyman, hardly ever introduces

a clerical character without satire; while George Eliot, sceptic
and positivist, treats with sympathy and evident liking every form
of Christian ministry, from Savonarola's on the one hand to
Dinah Morris's on the other. Her very detachment from creeds,

no doubt, helped towards this catholicity, so unlike anything
usually found in what is called the 'Catholic' spirit. But her
sympathy was by no means limited to extremists or to the eccentric.
She has a fine gallery of portraits of quiet, worthy, simple-minded
clergymen of the Church of England, unmoved by the great con-
troversy of 'High' and 'Low' and 'Broad,' neither 'liberal' nor
'catholic,' but content to walk their narrow round of parish duties,
to love their neighbours and to minister to their wants, unostenta-

tiously, according to the tradition handed down to them from
their fathers. This is the tone of George Eliot's pictures of

clergymen and ministers, from Amos Barton and Maynard Gilfil
to Rufus Holt. In her later novels such figures are less common,
because the raw material of memory, from which they were drawn,
was used up, and it was not of a sort which could be replaced
from the society then open to her. George Eliot is ready enough
to smile gently at her clerical characters. They are not faultless,
and they are never men of great force ; but she rarely satirises
them, and she is never bitter. When, as in the striking case of
Casaubon, she is satirical and contemptuous, the contempt is for
something outside the clerical character. Casaubon is a clergy-
man, as it were, by accident; but "pre-ordinance and first decree''
made him a hide-bound pedant. All George Eliot's satire is
reserved for this pedantry; on it Dorothea makes shipwreck of
her life ; it, or rather the nature which makes it possible, dictates
the terms of that masterpiece of small-mindedness, Casaubon's
will.
On the question of marriage too the personal experience of

George Eliot certainly made her sympathies more keen. The
space it occupies in her novels is remarkable. To her, marriage
is the source of most of the tragedy of life. It is so in the cases
of Romola, of Dorothea and of Lydgate; and the tragedies of

Adam Bede and of The Mill on the Floss also spring from love-
stories.But here again she would seem to have been sobered
and awed by her own history, and no sentence from her pen
countenances connexions readily made and as readily broken.
The history of Maggie TuUiver is one of renunciation; and, though
Adam Bede is a tale of seduction, it has been truly said that the
author carefully refrains from exciting sympathy with Hetty, and
that there are few books more calculated to make the seducer
pause in his career. The morality of George Eliot's books is not
only correct, but austere.
As the materials furnished by her experience became more
scanty, George Eliot fell back upon the resources of her thought.
Hence her works became a conscious and deliberate treatment of
interesting problems or speculations, and the analytical element
gained prominence. Here lies the dividing line between two
great classes of the critics of George Eliot. Few, if any, dispute
her right to a place among the greatest of English novelists.
Her earlier novels, with their charming picture of the life of
the country and of small towns, are amply sufficient to vindicate
her title to that rank. But for her more devoted admirers this
has hardly sufficed. They would not only claim for her a place
beside Scott and Thackeray and Fielding, but would fain set her
upon a pedestal loftier than any; and to make the claim plausible
most of them feel themselves obliged to insist upon the excellence
of the later and more philosophical novels^ Here, they argue,
there is a seriousness of purpose, a depth of thought and a
mastery of principle, not to be matched in the works of any
other writer of fiction ; and just as Hamlet, by reason of its
weight of thought, is greater than Henry IV, perfect as the

own way, so Romola and Middkmarch and Daniel
latter is in its
Deronda are greater than Tom Jones, or The Antiquary, or Old

Mortality, or Esmond, or Vanity Fair, or The Cloister and the
Hearth. Romola, according to this view, is a great historical
novel, the fruit of serious study, 'presenting the carefully- weighed
it must therefore be superior
conclusions of a great philosopher ;
to Waverleyand Old Mortality, books written currente calamo by
one who claimed to do no more than amuse. It must be greater
' There are however some who have claimed for her this lofty position on
the score of the early novels alone.
'
' This publication of Adam Bede," writes
Sidney Lanier, " placed George Eliot decisively at the head of English novel-
writers, with only Dickens for second, even." (77i« English .Miw/, quoted in '
The Library of Literary Criticism.)

even than Esmond, which was indeed written with scrupulous

care, but which embodies no theory and is the work of one
who did not pretend to be a philosopher. Neither is there
anything in the other novelists parallel to such deliberate studies
as Felix Holt, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda.
One of the most remarkable features of recent criticism has
been the development of the systematic study of English literature
in France. Amongst the claims of Voltaire to gratitude must be
ranked the fact that he pointed out to his countrymen the greatness
of English literature; but notwithstanding Voltaire, Taine, when
he wrote his History of English Literature, still stood almost alone.
Since that date, however, much of the best criticism of English
writers has been the work of Frenchmen. Jusserand, Texte, Bel-
jame, Legouis, Angellier and Morel, are names which will occur to
every student Even the barrier of dialect has not prevented a
most sympathetic and discriminating treatment of Burns ; even a
poet so far below the greatest as Thomson has been exhaustively
examined and appreciatively criticised. It is clear, as Matthew
Arnold taught, that the critic who speaks another tongue and who
belongs to another race is hkely to be free from some prejudices
which may beset a fellow-countryman. Arnold referred especially
to the judgment of Edmond Scherer on Milton; and this very
critic, who was unsurpassed for learning and for keenness of
insight, has pronounced emphatically upon the merits of George
Eliot, declaring that for her " was reserved the honour of writing
the most perfect novels yet known.'' Scherer takes substantially
the view of the thoroughgoing panegyrists, who admire equally
George Eliot's philosophy and her descriptive power, her analysis
and her intuition. Such a judgment as this, pronounced by
such an authority, commands respect ; but it may reasonably be
doubted whether it will commend itself to future ages.
Time has made it increasingly difficult to maintain the tran-
scendent excellence of the later and more philosophical of George
Eliot's novels, and the number of those who attempt to do so
grows smaller year by year. When Daniel Deronda was in course
of publication, the admiring publisher thought that the author was
outdoing even Middlemarch. Allowance must be made for the
744 THE LITERATURE OF THK VICTORIAN V.\i\
complacency of criticism in private correspondence ; bill a kind

of George Eliot superstition had grown up, and whatc'vir the
great writer gave to the world was rcciMved with something of
the awe due to a revelation; but awe has gradually pusscd
llic
away, and doubts have thickened round the revelation. There

are line, even grand, materials in all the later novels, and not
least in Somola the character of Tito Meleni.i alone would lift
:
the work in which it appears to tlie verge of gieatness, and the

picture of old Bardo in his library is atlmirable. Yet Romola does
not carry conviction of the historical genius of the writer. Some-
thing of the vividness and ready mastery of Scott is lacking.
Making every allowance for the mental power of George Eliot,
it is incredible that, in the time at her disposal, she could have
acquired a real mastery of her subject; but, aljove all, that in-
stinctive sympathy which was necessary for the proper handling
of it is' not there. Dante Rossetti, one of the most compete] it
of judges as to the theme, thought that George Eliot had not
quite succeeded in entering into Italian life; and Negri, who
wrote a book in admiration of her genius, condemned un untrue
both the talk of her Florentines and the character of Komola
herself. She did not of her own impulse conceive scenes and
characters under the conditions of another country and another
century ; and so, while the book is stately and urand, the move-
ment is stiff; and the familiar touches of nature in the English
novels are worth more than all the learning with which the Italian
one is loaded. Probably it violates history less than the plays of
Shakespeare or the novels of Scott; but it contains no historical
character fit to set beside Prince Hal or Hotspur, Louis XI or
King James.
Still less was George ICliot com|)letely successful in her aim in
Felix Holt or in Daniel Deronda. By general consent now they

are put lowest in the rank of their author's novels and in spite ;
of the awe inspired by her name, Deronda was felt even at the
time of publication to mark a decline in her powers. She failed
to impart to others the interest she herself felt in Jewish nationality,
and most readers found the 'Zionism' of her characters somewhat
' lilackwood's Magazine, vui, ijo.
wearisome. It must be added, however, that time has shown her
to have been a pioneer, that since the publication oi Daniel Deronda

some serious steps have been takeii towards the replanting of the
Jews in Palestine, and that the idea has the support of some of
the best minds among the Jews of the present day. Nevertheless,
this fact does not make any more real the somewhat abstract
Jewish characters depicted by George Eliot; nor does it supply
any more vital bond of union between the Jewish and the English
parts of the novel.
But there remained one triumph in George Eliot's later
career which went far to redeem these comparative failures.
Middlemarch is a book so powerfully conceived, and in many

ways so admirably executed, that a good case may be made for
ranking it first of all George Eliot's works. The advocatus diaboli
may fairly plead that it is not one story, but a bundle of stories
loosely tied together. It is no organic bond, but a mere juxta-
position, which unites the story of Dorothea and Casaubon with

that of Lydgate and Rosamond, and both with Bulstrode and
with the Garths. Middlemarch is, in fact, a sermon upon a text.
The prelude, which is as significant as the introductory scene of
Tennyson's Becket, shows us how " domestic reality " in the shape
of an uncle swoops down upon the young Saint Theresa and
brings her back to common life ; and the whole of Middlemarch
illustrates the force of just such commonplace or even sordid
realities. Lydgate, gifted with great powers and fired with high
brought down by the domestic reality of Rosamond
ariibitions, is
Vincy to very ordinary achievement. The young and beautiful

idealist Dorothea marries the dry old book-worm Casaubon, be-
cause her imagination sees in him a great thinker, and in herself

as his wife the instrument to bring the world-awakening thought
to light. She finds that the " system of all the mythologies " is a
mere valley of dry bones into which its author is powerless to
breathe a life-giving spirit. There is no reason, except George
Eliot's will or convenience, why these two stories should be told
together. Except as they illustrate the effect of "domestic reality"
upon soaring ambition and lofty ideals, they are disconnected .
Lydgate stands outside the life of Casaubon; Dorothea has

little influence upon Rosamond; and it is only in deference
to the canons that they are in the end brought into closer
relation.
Lack of unity is a grave fault, but not necessarily a fatal
one : the charge has been brought against some of the plays of
Shakespeare, and they still survive. And nothing else equally
serious can be alleged against Middlemarch. It is less graceful,
less humorous, less varied than the earlier novels. It contains

nothing so beautiful as the childhood of Tom and Maggie Tulliver,
nothing so passionate as the love of Adam Bede, no rapture like
the religious fervour of Dinah Morris. But it is impressive from

beginning to end, weighty yet not heavy, often splendidly eloquent,
the only book which does equal justice to the two sides of George
Eliot, the artisticand the philosophic. There are single characters
in some of the other novels greater than any in Middlemarch but ;
no novel she ever wrote contains so many that dwell in the memory.
Hence, if it were necessary to judge of her from one book, that
which would give the best conception of her powers would be
Middlemarch.
From George Eliot's tendency to philosophy it was natural
that life should present itself to her, increasingly as she grew in
years, as a series of problems. Some of her characters are worked
out in this way. Tito Melema was a problem. Given a love of
pleasure, a shrinking from dutyand a dislike of everything that is
disagreeable, what will result The same is true of Silas Marner.
?
The character was suggested to her by an early memory of a man

whose expression and manner caused her to regard him as, for
some reason, an outcast. What, she asked herself, would be the
effect of an unjust exclusion from society? and her answer is
Silas Marner. He is not born a miser. In him, the passion for

gold is shown to be the consequence of the treatment he receives,
which blights his nobler nature and drives him in upon himself.
Habit is second nature, and the miserly habit becomes deep-
rooted in Silas ; but even second nature has not the indomitable
force to nature herself when corroborated, as Bacon
which belongs
phrases by custom. Hence the regeneration of Silas is well
it,
conceived and is of a piece with the whole character ; while if the

miserliness had been instinctive and inborn, the awakening out of

itwould have been incredible.
Tito through life, and Silas Marner through great part of the
time during which he figures before the reader, are essentially self-
centred. Casaubon is so more than either of them. The ambitions
he conceives are suggested to him by the society in which he lives,
but the shaping of them is all his own. The soul of Dryasdust is
as solitary in the desert where he lives as that of Shakespeare on

his unapproachable height. But such characters are exceptional
and to George Eliot the problem usually presented itself as social,
and character seemed to her a thing developed through intercourse
with others. There is usually some influence, most commonly
that of marriage or of the love which seeks its goal in marriage,
which powerfully modifies and perhaps almost transforms the
character. Dorothea and Lydgate are cases in point. So is
Silas Marner himself; for the period of miserly solitude is only
an interlude between the time before, when social forces reduce
him to that condition, and the time after, when he is lifted out of
it by his love for the child. So are Adam Bede and Mrs Transome
and Gwendolen and Maggie TuUiver. The last is the best instance
of all, as she is the subtlest of all George Eliot's heroines. Her
sensitiveness and her sympathetic imagination make her specially
responsive, and she takes her tone from every influence in turn,
from the time when she follows her brother's lead in their childish
games to the day when both are swept out of life together. The
writer was evidently well aware of her own "chameleon-like
nature," as her biographer calls it.
The great artist ought to be a philosopher, but there

is danger
ifhe be too well aware of the fact. This is the significance of

Wordsworth's complaint that the poetry of Goethe was not
"inevitable" enough; and Wordsworth himself exemplifies the
danger, for it is when he forgets his philosophy that he is most
poetical. Browning too has suffered from an excess of systematic

thought. And in the case of George Eliot the very quality which
was supposed to lift her above her compeers will, perhaps, ultimately
place her a little lower than the greatest of them. But her fame
is safe as the greatest woman who wrote the English language in
the nineteenth century.
'
Among the other female writers of fiction, whose name is legion,
there is none to rival George Eliot in power and range of thought,
or Charlotte and Emily Bronte in passion; nor is there any to
whom literature is indebted for such a gem as Cranford; and

probably not a single novel they have written will be read half
a century hence except by a few students. There are however
two or three who demand notice for their temporary vogue and
influence, and one for powers which, if circumstances had
permitted her to husband them more carefully, might have won
her permanent fame.
The eldest of the novelists alluded to was Mrs Henry Wood
(1814-1887), whose sensational and melodramatic East Lynne
(1861) has no small share of the merits and of the faults of
Lord Lytton. Some of her stories are pleasant enough reading,
and she shows great ingenuity in the construction of plots, but
neither style nor characters are such as to give them a place in
literature. East Lynne however is noteworthy for the extra-
ordinary popularity which it won, and which it still in great part
retains, both, as a novel and in the dramatised version. None of
Mrs Wood's other works equals East Lynne in wide popularity, but
several of them— eg. Mrs Halliburton's Troubles (1862), The
Channings (1862) and the Johnny Ludlow tales, begun in her
—
magazine The Argosy in 1868 are still read; and they are superior
in literary quality to their better-known predecessor. Of similar
calibre to Mrs Wood, though she wrote in a different strain,
was Dinah, Maria Mulock, afterwards Craik (1826-1887), whose
John Halifax, Gentleman (1856) appealed to the taste of the more
sober part of the middle class, as East Lynne did to that of the
more sensation-loving. It is altogether harmless, and faultlessly
proper, and irredeemably commonplace.
Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823— 1901), whose very titles The
—
Daisy Chain, The Chaplet of Pearls, &c. proclaim her an orna-
ment of the namby-pamby school which, half a century ago,
supplied the most approved intellectual nutriment for girls, was
scarcely superior to these last, and might be passed over with an
equally cursory notice, but for the extraordinary judgments ex-
pressed by contemporaries about her Heir of Redclyffe (1856).
This book had a marvellous attraction for the band of young
Oxonians who, in those days, surrounded Burne-Jones and William
Morris. They thought it "unquestionably one of the greatest
books of the world " and as among those who thus judged were
;
some who afterwards rose to the first rank, the book whifih so deeply
moved and interested them deserves attention. Rossetti himself,
who seldom went astray in criticism, was a warm admirer. And yet
it is whoever in the present generation turns fresh
safe to say that
and unbiassed The Heir of Reddyffe will be astonished to
to
discover of what, ordinary materials " one of the greatest books
of the world" may be composed. It may deserve the panegyric,
if milk, plentifully diluted with water, be one of the greatest
drii^ks. But as the opinion quoted was the opinion of extremely

able men, there must be a reason for it. No doubt it is to be
found in the fact that The Heir of Reddyffe embodied exactly,
the views, and was written in precisely the tone and style, which
commended themselves to the young men who were influenced
by, though they were not all followers of, the Oxford Movement.
Miss Yonge lived in the district of which, from the year 1836,
Keble was the ecclesiastical and she describes Keble as
head ;
the chief spiritual influence of her life. The young Oxonians

were conscious of the High Church atmosphere of her work, and
that being the air they breathed too, they were misled. Other-
wise, untrustworthy as contemporary judgments notoriously are,
we could an amazing aberration as this.

scarcely explain such
The other writer who has been referred to as possessing,
perhaps, the elements of greatness was Margaret Oliphant (1828-
1897). She began her career with Margaret Maitland (1849),
about which Jeffrey wrote that nothing so true or so touching,
as a picture of Scottish life, had appeared since Gait's Annals
of the Parish. Mrs Oliphant was always on safe ground when

she was dealing with her countrymen ; but she by no means con-
fined herself to them. Among her greatest successes were the
stories of the series known as the Chronides of Carlingford (1863-
1876), where she is bold enough to venture upon ground not
unlike that which George Eliot had made her own. She was
a very industrious writer, producing biographies (good ones),
histories of literature, volumes of miscellaneous essays, and
accounts of the " makers " of various cities, with a fertility which
was astonishing ; and yet, her friends say,'it was difficult to discover
when she worked. She seemed to have time for everything, but
somehow the tale of bricks was finished. Unquestionably the
quality of Mrs Oliphant's work suffered. Much of it both in —
fiction and prose—is extremely flimsy; and if
in miscellaneous
her gifts were really great, we must set it down to over-production
that she has written nothing that is likely to live. The criticism
made against her over and over again, and with justice, is that
her writings are all of a high mediocre level ; and the conclusion
was drawn that this was just the level of her mind. It may be so
there is not enough evidence to enable anyone to controvert the
opinion : but there are here and there passages of a lofty tone
which, at any rate, suggest a doubt. The following is not from a
work of fiction, but is a very fine piece of criticism on a fellow-
craftsman, which may not be widely known, because probably the
Historical Sketches of the Reign of George II are already little
read :
"Clarissa herself is such a type of character as could have

been by a man habituated to the society of women,
set forth only
and to look upon things very much from their point of view. She
is a delicate creature, whose heart has but begun faintly to awaken
to any conception of love or individual inclinations at all, when

she is suddenly frozen back into herself, into the chill unopened
bud of her life, by such a horror as is sufficient to congeal the
young blood in its very fountain. Her soft insensibility to any
contagion of passion — the shrinking, faint, easily relinquished
preference which is all she is ever made to feel for her destroyer
is sometimes brought as an accusation against the perfection of
her womanhood. But the critics who do so have not taken the
trouble to think that it was a woman in the bud whom Richardson
intended to draw —a creature forced into ejrtraordinary develop-
ment, it is true, but warped by the very influences which urged
her life into pathetic blossom, out of that warm and tender sweet-
ness which comes by the natural agency of bright sunshine and
common rain. Her heart had begun, as we have said, softly,
unawares, to tiurn towards the man who pretended to love her.

with that shy, sweet, gradual impulsion which is one of the most
beautiful things in nature. Her eyes and her heart were being
drawn to hiin modestly and maidenly, in a tenderness half ac-
knowledged, half denied, even to herself; when Fate seized upon
the innocent creature, wrapt her in its fatal web, arrested in the first
place the rising fancy, chilled and withered it by doubts and fears;
and then, by a sudden violent revulsion, closed up the opening
bud, with all its fairy colours, and forced forward the pale splendour
of despair, chill maiden flower, stealing every hue of colour and
perfume of life out of its exquisite climax of sorrow and decay.
No man less acquainted with all the secret unseen sweetness of a
girl's heart — its brooding over itself, its soft reluctance, its delight
and tender delays which irritate passion into frenzy
in the hesitations
— could have drawn the early Clarissa, so passionless and dutiful,
exacting nothing but the right to reject a repugnant suitor, and
ready to make a sacrifice of the soft beginnings of liking in her
heart, if her parents would have but accepted that pure yet painful
offering. Then, when this morning light fades —when the helpless
creature is caught into the vortex which up the is to swallow her —
reader can see the chill that comes upon the opening flower, can
see the soft virginal husks closing up over the arrested bud ; and
then the drooping and the fading, and sudden bursting forth by its
side of the other development, which is so different, so consistent
and inconsistent with the first promise of the outraged life.
" This conception stands by itself amid all the conceptions of

genius. No Greek, no Italian, no English poet has painted such
a figure in the great picture-gallery which is common to the world.
Neither ancient nor modern woman has ever stood before us thus,
pale and splendid shame which is not hers, sweet soul,
in the
though it killsAlmost every other victim shrinks and burns
her.
with the stain of her own fault; and even Lucretia herself, if more
awful, is less womanly, less tender, less sweet, than the maiden
creature in whom nature and religion reassert their rights after the
first moment of frenzy; who calls for no vengeance, and can accept
no expiation, and dies smiling, of no external wound, but only by

the deadly puncture ot the shame itself, making all other daggers
unnecessary."
It is at least possible that the writer of such a passage as this
had in her the power which, under favourable circumstances,
would have produced a really great book. If so, we can but
lament the necessity which condemned her to write so rapidly
that she always fell short of high achievement, while we admire
the courage which obeyed the call of duty without murmuring,
and sacrificed fame to the higher claims of motherhood.
The later female writers of fiction have been innumerable, but
itwould be tedious and would serve no good purpose to name
them. Some of them have been acclaimed as writers of genius.
But if the excessive output of fiction be an evil it carries its own
cure. The fame of the writers of this year is as effectually buried
by that of the next as one shower of autumn leaves is by another.
CHAPTER IV
THE LATER FICTION
The fictitious literature of the latter half of the nineteenth
century has been so unmanageably voluminous and so diversified
in character that probably no other subject in literature is less
susceptible of satisfactory treatment. Still, if the eye be fixed
steadily upon a few of the leaders only, and the great mass of
purveyors of that purely ephemeral stuff which is not literature at
all be rigidly excluded, certain general tendencies may be detected.
They have been in part already revealed in the chapter on
women novelists, the greatest of whom were all of date subsequent
to Dickens and Thackeray. The line of the historical novel
continues unbroken ; but it undergoes another change, reverting
once again to something more closely akin to the Waverley
Novels than is Esmond or The Tale of Two Cities. Dickens and
Thackeray, as we have seen, were not attracted by the Middle
Ages; but The Cloister and the Hearth and Hereward a.nd Romola
prove the interest of their writers in the more distant past. Still
more significant were the extraordinary judgments passed upon

The Heir of Redclyffe, to which reference was made in the last
chaipter. Yet the use which Reade and Kingsley and George
Eliot made of history was not exactly that which Scott made of
it There is less romance and there is a more laborious realism
in these novels than in Scott's; but whether there is more that
is artistically valuable is not quite so certain. To Scott, all
history is picturesque; life is full of incidents and adventure,
W. 48
whether the scene be laid in the time of Richard I, or in that of
George II, in England, or in Scotland, or in France; and accuracy
of detail is superlatively unimportant, because he never takes
himself very seriously as an author. He piqued himself more, as
he phrased it, on his compositions for manure than on any other
compositions to which he was ever accessary.
But the turn of the century was a very strenuous and serious
period ; and south as well as north of the Tweed men joked with
difficulty. Even Ireland ceased to produce wits and humourists
and, as all who know the country agree, the gaiety of the nation
was permanently eclipsed by the great famine. The spirit of the
age demanded of the novelists that they should be learned, pro-
found, thoughtful, philosophic, teachers and guides of the people.
This mood of mind produced its effect : the historical novelist
had He might study
at least to appear high-built in his learning.
a library of books, as Charles The Cloister and the
Reade did for
Hearth ; or he might follow the example of George Eliot, who not
only read widely, but even spent six weeks at Florence in order to
learn what manner of men and women dwelt there. The reader's
gravity may be
in some danger when he is asked to sympathise
with her disappointment on finding that, even after all this care,
she was not quite at home with them. Owing to the prevalence
of this spirit, Hypatia is crammed with the Alexandrian philosophy,
Romola is full of the attempt at religious reform associated with the
name of Savonarola, and even Reade, lover of the drama and of
action as he was, feels it his duty to lay bare before the reader the
springs of the Protestant Reformation and of humanism. Later
still, this phase in turn passes away, and in such works as
R. L. Stevenson's Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae and
Weir of Hermiston, there is a reversion to something more in the
spirit of Scott.
After Scott we see even in the historical novel traces of the
tendency to realism. But the
taste for realism was more easily
gratified by a different sort; and accordingly, though
fiction of
the historical novel survived, the works of this type bore a

diminishing proportion to the whole. The most learned and
the most laborious of writers could never reconstruct a past age
THE LATER FICTION 755
the most unsparing toil and the widest reading could not teach
him as much about the past as he could learn concerning his
own day by simply looking around him. The novel of con-
temporary Hfe is the natural outcome of the spirit of realism.
Realisin led to its revival, and the discovery of its immense scope
ahd the possibilities itopened for variety of treatment tended to
increase its vogue. Example conduced towards the same result.
Just as the earlier writers followed Scott, so their successors
followed Thackeray, and copied the realistic parts of Dickens.
The varieties of the novel of contemporary life are almost end-
less and the realism which nearly always characterises it more or
;
less may be coloured by sentiment, as in John Halifax, Gentleman;
or almost overlaid by romance, as in The Heir of Redelyffe; or it

may be veiled by sarcasm, as in the works of Laurence Oliphant
or the experience may be so outri, like that recorded in the
Writings of 'George Borrow, as to be hardly recognisable as a phase
of modern life ; or it may be psychological, as in Middlemarch
in which case the question of time is of quite secondary im-
portance. There is however one variety, the liovel of purpose, so
important and so comprehensive that it requires sjpecial mention.
It specially suited the serious taste of' the time. Disraeli, as we
have seen, had already set the example of the political novel; and
Dickens was one of the pioneers of the sub-variety whose purpose
was to effect some social reform. Hehad so many followers that
perhaps it may be well to generalise somewhat the remarks upon
the isubject which have already been made with special reference
to hitn.
The novel of phrpose is, of course, anathema to the champions
of "art for art's sake " ; but though a purpose may so dominate a
writer as to mar no inherent reason why such
his art, there is
novels should be inartistic. Something depends upon the purpose,

and more upon the use to which it is put. What is said to be one
of the most skilful pictures ever painted is Rembrandt's Butcher's
Shop. Here the purpose can be little higher than the artist's
desire to show his dexterity ; and the manner of fulfilling it is an
outrage upon art, since it produces a horror instead of an object
of beauty. But it by no means follows that all purpose is bad, 'or
48—2
that all means of fulfilling purpose are objectionable. On the con-
trary, a vein of purpose runs through nearly all high literature.
Plato was convinced that it ought to do so if it did not, and his

whole treatment of poetry is ruled by the conviction that art is
essentially educative,and that that which does not teach good

must of necessity teach evil. The Divine Comedy is full of
purpose; and Milton proclaims in plain words his resolve to
"justify the ways of God to men." There is some truth in the
argument that the errors of these great men creep in through the
gate of purpose; but how much of their highest merit finds
entrance in the same way ! In any case, he who so errs, errs in
the best of company.

In dramatic art however, and in all forms of art in which
human character is the medium, the use of purpose must clearly
be subject to the condition that it does not interfere with the play
of character. For that reason it must be subordinate: the
purpose must harmonise with the character, not the character with
the purpose. It is because he strictly adheres to this condition
that Shakespeare is often put in sharp antithesis to the practi-
tioners of the novel or the drama of purpose. He is absolutely
impartial,he is content to let his characters speak and act, and
pronounces no judgment upon them. Yet it would be a mistake
to suppose that there is no lesson in them, or that the lesson is
made wholly by the reader, and not by the writer. "The gods are
just,and of our pleasant vices make whips to scourge us," is the
comment of Edgar, not of Shakespeare yet the lesson is in the
;
play, and the words have a meaning even to those who do not
believe in the gods. Macbeth is far more than a warning against
the dangers of " vaulting ambition " but it is that among other
;
things.
The novel is a much looser form of art than the drama.
Narrative may eke out the gaps of action, and the author may
interpose his own comments to an extent which is undefined, and
perhaps indefinable. Nevertheless, the same principle prevails;
and wherever character is delineated, purpose, to be legitimate,
must be the expression of the character, not something tacked on by
the author. But because such artistic detachment as Shakespeare's
is exceedingly rare, it is here that authors frequently fall into

error, and by on the novel of purpose.
their errors bring discredit
Purpose is partly responsible for the exaggeration which charac-
terises Dickens. Questions between capital and labour, the
evils of the workshop and the factory, the sins of trade unions
and the horrors of intemperance, when they become the motive

of novels, are apt to beget characters which are rather the
incarnation of intemperance, or the bad master and the unruly
workman personified, thaii sirhple human beings. And so far
the objection to the novel of purpose is fully justified.
The novel whose raison d'itre lies in its plot is another form
characteristic of this period and not very common before it. For
the most part, English novels are loosely constructed; and English
writers do not, as a class, excel in the elaboration of plots. From
Richardson to Thackeray the masters are all painters of manners
and character rather than weavers of complicated stories. Never-
theless, the charm of a mystery skilfully unravelled is always
powerful; and while Dickens is never so delightful as in the
plotless Pickwick, the rhuch-debated plot of EdwiH Drood
indicates how had been influenced by the growing taste
greatly he
for mystery. This charm of mystery is the secret of the popularity
enjoyed by the detective story ; and the examples of Ppe and of
Sherlock Holmes are sufficient to show how wide that popularity
may be. But while short stories of this sort have long been
common, novels resting upon the same principle are, if we exclude
the supernatural, of comparatively recent development. Complete
mastery in this art of carpentry, as R. L. Stevenson called it, was
only attained by Wilkie Collins ; but, in the period under review,

many othfers either followed the example of Collins, or worked
iiidependently under the influence of the same motives; and so
the sensation novel arose. Probably no kind of imaginative work
is easier up to a certain level; but the rarity of unqualified success
in it proves that to attain excellence is very difficult indeed.
Among the men who illustrate the later developments of fiction
Charles Reade (1814— 1884) for power and genius is rivalled only
by George Meredith and R. I-. Stevenson. Most of the phases
just indicated are more or less adequately represented in Reade's
works. He is the author of the greatest historical novel since
Esmond, of one of the most remarkable psychological studies, and
of numerous novels of purpose. Though he was never a wealthy
man, Reade, the son of an Oxfordshire squire, and a demy, fellow
and, ultimately, Vice-President of Magdalen College, was by cir-
cumstances exempted from the need to struggle for a living ; and
this is why he began his literary career so
probably one reason
late. He
had besides a high standard, and, above all, a most
laborious method. His passion for documents cost him dear in
time As early as 1835 he began to make notes with a view to
writing fiction; but it was not till 1853, when he was thirty-nine
years of age, that he published his first novel. The delay had
been rendered aU the longer because his ambition drew him
towards the drama rather than the novel and he had written, he
:
says, about thirteen dramas which nobody would play, before he

consented to write the novels which thousands were eager to read.
This preference for the drama lasted till the end. He held that
only genius could produce a play that would play, whereas
intelligence, combined with some artistic gift, might suffice for a
novel and he left instructions that on his tombstone he should
;
be described as "dramatist, novelist, journalist," giving the first

place to the art in which he was ambitious to achieve fame, rather
than to that in which he won it.
"Why don't you write novels?" was the penetrating question

of Mrs Seymour the actress, after the author had read to her a
scene from one of those dramas which nobody would play. Her
practical knowledge showed her that Reade had not mastered the
requirements of the stage ; and her judgment is confirmed by the
fact that in his dramatic writings he was always apt to get into
difficulties unless he worked in collaboration with somebody who
possessed the practical knack, as well as by the fact that his work
always rose in quality under the freer conditions of the novel.
Reade's chief dramatic successes were won in collaboration, first
with TomTaylor and afterwards with Dion Boucicault. Taylor

and he first collaborated in A Ladies' Battle, a play adapted from
the French; and the excellent Masks and Faces, produced in
1852, was also their joint work. In its latest form, as revived by
Mrs Bancroft, this play, according to Reade, contains not a single

line by Taylor; but the dedication of Peg Woffington, which is
just the play in the shape of a novel, proves out of Reade's own
mouth that, originally, it was a joint production. The credit of it
must therefore be divided.
Reade was a difficult person to collaborate with; for he was at
once acutely sensitive on the question of his own rights, and
strangely obtuse with regard to those of others. The story of his
numerous lawsuits shows that he was combative and masterful.
In answer to the charge of impatience he compared himself to
his "predecessor in impatience, Job"; but the impartial bystander
could detect a considerable difference. When, without a word to
he threw Masks and Faces into the form of a
his fellow-worker,
good ground for complaint Years
novel, he certainly gave Taylor
afterwards he dramatised Trollope's Ralph the Heir at a time
when the author was inaccessible, in Australia; and he was
chagrined with Trollope's " ingratitude " when the latter failed to
appreciate the dramatist's intention to pay him half-profits —which
were not earned. Reade was incapable of doing what he saw to
be a dishonest act; but his notions of literary property were at
least peculiar.
Other dramas by Reade which seem worthy of mention are

Gold, Sera Nunquam and Drink. The first, which ran with
success at Drury Lane in 1853, is sufificiently described by its
titleand by the statement that it was afterwards used as one of
the threads woven into It is Never too Late to Mend (1856). It
was wholly Reade's work, and we need but compare it with the
novel to be convinced wherein the author's power consists. He
himself however was not easy to convince. He attributed his ill-
success in the drama a clique of writers who stole from the

to
French, and of critics who lauded them and refused to countenance
anybody else. Reade was not wholly without justification; at
least his work was superior to much that was far better received.
But in the main the fault lay with himself; and his friends
Dion Boucicault and Mrs Seymour were as clearly conscious of his
deficiencies as were those whom he rightly or wrongly considered
enemies.
For three years after the production of Gold Reade was busy
with dramatic work, collaborating with Taylor or adapting from
the French. But the logic of events convinced him, or else he
had to yield unconvinced. Never too Late to Mend
After // is
his next venture on the stage was the dramatised version of that
novel, which won a great success when at last it was brought out
in 1865, and which has retained its reputation. Finally, in 1879,
Drink, dramatised from Zola's L'Assommoir, appeared, and
brought both gold and glory to the author.
Meanwhile, against his own will, Reade's literary life had
been developing on different lines. Peg Woffington (1853) was
followed in the same year by Christie Johnstone, the materials for
which he had accumulated during repeated visits to Scotland
between 1837 and 1847. His determined realism is well illus-
tratedby the history of this novel. " I propose never to guess

where I can know," he says at the opening of his career ; and at
whatever cost of trouble or pain to himself he acted on the
principle. Christie Johnstone is a story of the fisher-folk of the
east of Scotland. Most men, especially if they were, like Reade,
severe sufferers from sea-sickness, would probably have been con-
tent to study them ashore; but Reade, on the contrary, repeatedly
accompanied the fishing fleet. Again, he hated the sight of
blood, and relinquished the idea of following the medical pro-
fession on seeing the simple operation of phlebotomy; yet he
lamented his ill-luck in just missing the spectacle of a fatal acci-
dent, because he was convinced that no description could ever

give the vividness of the direct impression. His rule was, if
possible to see and know himself that which he described, or, if
he could not, to converse with those who had personal know-
ledge ; failing both, he had perforce to be content with reading.
His picture of gaol life in // is Never too Late to Mend was drawn
from personal inspection and study of several gaols, among others
that very Reading gaol which, in Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading
still more luridly impressive
Gaol, has given to literature a picture
than Reade's. His favourite maxim was the saying that truth is
stranger than fiction; and his immense compilations of cuttings
from newspapers served him at once as illustrations of this saying,
and as materials for his novels. One result is that it is extremely

dangerous to challenge Reade on the score of exaggeration or
improbabiUty; for the events and situations which appear most
improbable usuallyrest on documents.
Whether the compilations Reade made were worth the time
they cost him may be questioned ; whether he would not often
have done better to cut himself adrift from fact and trust to
imagination may also be questioned. He never knew the profound
truth of R. L. Stevenson's aphorism, " the actual is not the true\"
However much some of the incidents of the novels may be based
on fact, they " aflfect us as a lie " where they stand. On the
other hand, the method gives solidity and weight ; and the novels
produced by it, when it is worked by a man of genius, wear well.
Actual knowledge imparted by long study of the theatre gave
charm to Peg Woffington; and it was the fact that Reade knew
and liked the Scottish fisher-folk which at once won the hearts of
readers of Christie Johnstone.
Both these stories were on a smaller scale than the orthodox
novel, and Reade naturally felt the ambition to try a novel in
three volumes. Moreover, -Pi?^ Woffington and Christie Johnstone
were alike innocent of purpose, and he was predestined to write
novels of purpose. He had always some wrong to right, or some
right to vindicate ; or, if none of his own served for the moment,
he took up someone else's cause. This predilection had much
to do with the shaping of Reade's subsequent novels. Thus, It
is Never too Late to Mend has for its principal object the reform
of prison discipline, Hard Cash (1863) is an exposure of the abuses

connected with lunatic asylums, and Put Yourself in his Place
(1870) deals with rattening and the abuses of trade unions. For
this reason these novels have been underrated by those who
^ "Tibbie Birse in the Burial is great, but I think itwas a journalist that
got in the word '
The same character
official.' plainly had a word to say to
Thomas Haggard. Thomas affects me as a lie — I beg your pardon ; doubt-
less he was somebody you knew, that leads people so far astray. The actual
is not the true." (Letter to Mr J. M. Barrie Letters, ed. Colvin, ii. 277.)
Stevenson's meaning —that what is true in fact is not necessarily true in art^
may be illustrated from Reade himself. In Tke Cloister and the Hearth
he ascribes precisely that principle to Margaret Van Eyck.
object to "purpose" in art, and the earlier stories have been
preferred, or Griffith Gaunt (1866), a psychological study, or
The Cloister and the Hearth (1861).
It cannot be said that Reade escapes the pitfall of the purpose-
novel. So far as documentary proof goes, he is safe. He was
attacked on the ground of his picture of lunatic asylums in Hard
Cfish, and triumphantly vindicated himself. He had chapter and
verse to cite for all the excesses of the trade unions depicted by
him. It was felt, both in the novel and still more in the original
dramatised version of It is Never too Late to Mend, that the prison

scenes were too horrible Reade was able to assure a correspondent
:
that, though he had invented many things, he had not invented a
single horror. And yet he was wrong he had lost the sense of
:
proportion in his too eager pursuit of purpose he had been blind

:
to the fact that "the actual is not the true." The evil shows
itself also in the treatment of character. Reade ceases to be
impartial, and becomes what the great artist is not, an advocate
and a partisan. He sinks below his own level. Hard Cash and
Put Yourself in his Place are good and interesting stories ; but
they contain no character comparable to Peg WofBngton or to
Christie Johnstone. Eden in It is Never too Late to Mend is
less interesting for his personality than for his theories : he is less
Eden the man than Eden the prison-reformer. Nevertheless,

if Reade erred, he erred grandly. All the three novels which
have been cited are the work of a powerful intellect, and // is
Never too Late to Mend stands very near the head of its type.
The story is intensely interesting ; the resources of a strong and
richly-stored mind are lavishly spent upon it; and the reader
has himself to blame if he does not rise from the perusal of it
a better man. The characters too are well drawn. Notwith-

standing the defect already pointed out, Eden is a veritable
man; and Reade has created few female characters superior to
Susan Morton.
The brilliant success of // is Never too Late to. Mend made
Reade a novelist. From the maturity of his mind a!ld the wealth
of his accumulated material when at last success came, it might

have been expected that he would write copiously and fast. But
his method was exhausting, and the lawsuits which he deemed neces-
sary to enforce his rights were exhausting too ; and so the books
which remain to notice are not numerous. Two of them, Griffith

Gai/int and A Terrible Temptation {1871), dissimilar as they are
in value and in spirit^ are bound together by the fact that each of
them was the occasion of an attack upon Reade on moral grounds.
In the case of A Terrible Temptation the attack was not unreason-
able ; for it was, to say the least of it, an unwise production
there is nothing in it which justifies the violence it did to popular
feeling. Griffith Gaunt however is a work of a: very different
sort. An analysis of the passion of jealousy, it contains matter
which was bound to be displeasing to a Puritanism not untainted
with hypocrisy.But no intelligent and dispassionate reader will
deny that the artist was here quite within the limits of his right.
So long as Othello is tolerated in the theatre, Griffith Gaunt,
vastly inferior though it is, has a right to a place among novels.
Notwithstanding the grave flaw pointed out by Swinburne— the
fact that the deception upon which the story, turns is due to
envy, npt to jealousy,

, —
there is probably in English prose no
more profound analysis of the latter passion.
There is however only one work of Reade's so good that, if
it does not raise him to the level of the greatest masters, the sole
reason is that it stands alone. The difference between novel and

romance may be illustrated by a comparison between the Waverley
Novels and The Cloister and the Hearth. Scott rightly spoke of
his stories as romances ; but Reade's realism clung to him in the
treatment of ^Jiistory, as well as in his tales of contemporary life.
It is apparent in his handling of authorities ; and, considering his

previous habit of mind, the success he achieved with them is
marvellous. Far from being, boyhood by
like Scott, attracted in
instinct to the Middle Ages, Reade had hitherto been rather
markedly indifferent to ,and ignorant of them. He was a stranger
to that ecclesiastical feeling which drew so many towards them in
the wake of Newman. And yet the picture of the fifteenth
century in Holland, Germany and Italy, as it is painted in The
and the Hearth, rivets attention, lingers in the memory
Cloister
and commands belief. The effect is altogether different from

that produced by the Waverley Novels. Scott's tournaments and
fights read as if they were reported by an eye-witness; while' in
The Cloister and the Hearth it is evident that the scenes are com-
piled from documents. The reader can guess whence the medical
lore of Peter thd father of Margaret is derived, and he feels assured
that Reade could quote volume and page for the inn at which his
travellers rest. He has not attained that highest art which con-
ceals art. Nevertheless, The Cloister and the Hearth is a mag-
nificent success, ranking not below the very greatest of English
far
historical novels. Romola is heavy and dull in comparison. In

his own generation only Esmond, and in the generation before
only the best of the Waverleys deserve to rank above Reade's
masterpiece. The Cloister and the Hearth is great because of its
broad and deep humanity and its splendid subject. It is, as the
title suggests, a story of the strife between two of the most potent
elements of humanity, religion on the one hand, and the family
affections on the other ; and the characters of the husband-monk
Gerard and his beautiful wife Margaret Brandt are creations which
enrich art. It is great, again, its immense scope and
because of
variety. Europe from the North Sea to the
It traverses mediseval
Mediterranean, producing everywhere the same impression of reality

and truth ; for here at least the actual is the true. It introduces
an immense number of characters of different countries, races and
stations in life ; yet they all seem to be genuine men and women,
and, moreover, men and women of a time and of habits of thought
which are not ours. Elsewhere, there seems to be a certain
coarseness in the fibre of Reade's mind; here, he is refined,
purified, elevated. This book, if anything, is Reade's passport to
immortality.
That was not at the time a very popular
historical fiction
species is shown by the warning Anthony TroUope received in the
vigorous words of the foreman of a publishing house to which he
offered The Three Clerks (1858): "I hope it's not historical, Mr
Trollope ? Whatever you do, don't be historical ; your historical
novel is not worth a damn'." Doubtless the foreman spoke the
* Trollope's Autobiography, i, 147-8.

opinion of the trade, and doubtless the opinion of the trade was
b^sed upon the taste of the public. TroUope, who was a shrewd
judge, and who had moreover already been warned by the
failure of his own historical novel, La Vendie (1850), had taken
the advice before it was given and turned towards new pastures.
But, notwithstanding the trade, there is evidence that, if only it is
well enough done, there is always a market for historical fiction

and Charles Kingsley, Richard Blackmore and R. L. Stevenson,
as well as Thackeray, George Eliot and Reade, proved
by
their experience that there was fame as well as hard cash to
be
gained from it.
Blackmore and Stevenson were both essentially novelists of

historical genius but Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), though he
;
was a professed historian, will probably rather be remembered for

works which may be classed as novels of purpose and for a few
beautiful ballads, and some snatches of lyric verse, than either
Cambridge, or for his
for his lectures as professor of history at
historical novels. an interesting figure, because his
Kingsley is
energy and his combative instincts brought him to the front in

two of the great controversies of the time. He was a Christian
Socialist; and, though less gifted intellectually than his friend
Maurice, he was far more efficient than Maurice as an exponent
of the cause which both had at heart. He was also intensely
interested in the progress of Tractarianism. This interest is
a factor both in Yeast (1848) and in Alton Locke (1850); and his
earliest important poetical work, The Saint's Tragedy (1848),
which some hold to be his greatest production, may not unfairly

be described as a Protestant pamphlet in verse. Kingsley tells
the story of St; Elizabeth of Hungary in order to inculcate the, evil
of asceticism, with condemnation of family life and that un-
its ,
natural renunciation of the world in which saintship was supposed

to consist, and to show how life was made miserable to Elizabeth
by means of the affections and impulses which ought to haveimade
it happy; while, from time to time she is startled by a suspicion
that, after all, her sacrifices and abnegations are but another form
of selfishness; her service to the poor, a way of using them as
steps to her own paradise. Kingsley's own voice is unquestionably
to be heard addressed by Count Walter of
in the vigorous passage
Varila to the fanaticalmonk, Conrad :
—
" I tell you, monk, if she
were not healthier by God's making than ever she will be by yours,
her charity would be by this time double-distilled selfishness;
the mouths she fed, cupboards to store good works in ; the backs
she warmed, clothes-horses to hang out her wares before God;
her alms not given, but' fairly paid, a half-penny for every
half-pennyworth of eternal life; earth her .chess-board, and the
men and women on it, merely pawns for her to play a winning
game —puppetsand horn-books to teach her unit holiness —
privateworkshop in which to work out her own salvation ^."
This protest, supposed to be uttered in the thirteenth century,
was not unnecessary even in the nineteenth, and Kingsley did
good service by his fight against the obscurantist and anti-natural
tendencies of the Tractarians ; but it was nearly all undone by
hi^ disastrous personal controversy with Newman, which left him
a very bruised and battered champion of Protestantism. Many

besides Kingsley have felt that there was sophistry in the thought
and sophistry in the method of Newman; but in detail, at
least, the assailant was wholly wrong. Perhaps nothing else
and so forcibly illustrates
so clearly reveals Kingslfey's limitations
his faults. There was a certain coarseness in his mind as there
was ungainliness in his body; and in controversy his weapon was
the bludgeon.' He said the wrong thing, he made charges which
could not be substantiated, and when challenged, he attempted
to defend that which was indefensible. If Kingsley had taken
up the right position at first, the quotations which he makes in
WTiaf, then, does Dr Newman meanl would have been most
damaging; but, as it was, Newman easily turned his flank. No
other instance probably can be found of a game in which one
player held all the trumps, and another took all the tricks. Had
Huxley been Newman's opponent the breaking of lances would
have been a joy to witness. But Huxley would never' have made
Kingsley's initial mistake; and, but for that mistake Newman
would never have taken up the glove. He had no desire for Con-
troversy his purpose was to vindicate

; his own honour.
> Act IV. sc. ii.
THE LATER FICTION '}6'J
Kingsley's novels are, for the most part, either historical
romances or novels of purpose. To the latter class belong Yeast

and Alton Locke, of which the former depicts the condition of the
agricultural labourer, and the latter that of his brother workman
in the town. Both are full of fiery indignation against wrong and
oppression, and both are, at the same time, somewhat crude and
immature productions, admirable in spirit, but faulty in execution.
Kingsley was moved to write on these subjects by the disturbed
and dangerous state of the country owing to the revolutionary
spirit pervading Europe and the misery of the working population.
The Rector of Eversley was no poltroon ; but in 1850 he "slept

with loaded pistols by his bedside, and policemen from Winchestler
watched in and about the quiet garden by night'." He naturally
felt that a society so sick must need a physician; and his con-
sciousness of power combined with his profession as a clergyman and

with his association with men like Maurice to suggest to him that he
might play the part of the healer. What he most earnestly sought
to enforce was that, if the condition of the working class was to
be permanently improved, it could only be by the nobler Spirits of
that class co-operating with those of a higher class to raise their
fellows.Hence he taught, rather too absolutely, that the working
man who made it his ambition to become something else than a
working man was a traitor to his class. A rigid application of
such a rule as this would result in a system of caste. If the work-
ing man must always remain a working man, is the working man's
son justified in seeking another career ? And if not, was Carlyle
a sinner because, being born the son of a stone-mason, he became
a writer of books? Or St Paul, because he sank his trade of
tent-making in Kingsley's own trade oi preaching? Notwith-;
standing errors, however, and though at best they are chaotic,
Kingsley's novels o't social reform are sound at heart and full of
life and energy.
Kingsley's method is noticeably differept from that of Reade.
The latter fastens with a tenacious grip upon some particular
abuse, and tries with all his energy to secure its reforrnj but
' Mis Kingsley's Charles Kingsley, i. 241.

Kingsley had fallen under the influence of Carlyle, and though
afterwards, in the belief that some of the latter's pungent utter-
ances were directed against himself, he avoided the sage, we see

in his work traces of the influence of the author of Chartism and
East and Present. To Kingsley, it is not one particular abuse
that is to be> swept away, but a is wrong
whole social system which
and which must be set right. That is the view of Christian
Socialism, of which Yeast and Alton Locke are among the most
effective expositions.
I The three principal novels in the historical class are Hypaiia
(1853), Westward Hoi (1855) and Hereward the Wake (1866).
The second is usually regarded as Kingsley's masterpiece, and
those who have fallen under its spell are enthusiastic in its praiSe.
But there is a noticeable peculiarity about criticisms of Kingsley,

that, in a large proportion of cases, the book the critic likes best
is that which he happens to have read first. The explanation

probably is that Kingsley does not wear well ; he is a writer for
boys rather than for mature men. Kingsley's style is often
admirable for vigour and verve, his descriptions are vivid, his
action energetic; but it is the parts we admire rather than the
whole, and in time we weary of his very muscular Christiainity.
Nothing he has written is comparable to Reade's masterpiece. In
Westward Ho 1 and in Hereward we get by fits the spirit of the
Elizabethan adventurers and of the sons of the Vikings, but we
are not carried back into their life.
What Kingsley does best of all is the description of scenes of

nature. Here, within the limits of hisown experience, he is
excellent. He
was Energetic physically as well as mentally, and
he found an outlet for his energies in long tramps, which he loved
all the better if he had to battle against keen high winds.' He
sang the praise of the " wild North-easter," and he died from its
effects. As an ardent and skilful fisherman he was led still more
into the open air and the solitudes of nature. All these tastes
and habits have left their mark upon his work. The scenery he
had lived among sank into his naJture and it is for this reason;
thatHereward gives such a vivid impression of the fen-country

and Westward Hoi oi the sea. So too love of nature is the very
soul and essence of that most beautiful fairy-tale, The Water-

Babies (1863), which, as a piece of pure literature, is unsurpassed
by anything Kingsley ever wrote.
Henry Kingsley (1830-1876), the author of The Recollections
of Geoffrey Hamlyn (1859), of Ravenshoe (1862), and of several

other works of fiction, may be briefly mentioned beside his elder
and greater brother. He crowded a good deal of adventure, as
well as a considerable number of books, into his short life.
Geoffrey Hamlyn is largely autobiographical, following in the main

the author's experiences in Australia ; and this partly explains its
rambling and disjointed character ; for life is not constructed like

a ,wprk of But such an excuse cannot be pleaded for
art.
Ravenshoe, where we meet with the same vice of incoherence,

though in a modified form. There is much in it which neither
throws light upon the characters nor furthers the progress of the
narrative ; and the asides are often tiresome, commonplace and
unnecessary. was a time when the novelist gave himself con-
It
siderable latitude in lecturing the reader; but the sermons of

George Eliot or of Thackeray are very different from the frequently
platitudinous remarks of Henry Kingsley. It is clear that he
appeals with considerable force and effect to certain readers, for
there have been found critics to rank him even above Charles
Kingsley; but judgments of that sort are probably the effect of an
unconscious revolt against the inequality of fortune in the case of
the two brothers —the one petted and praised, conspicuous in the
Church and in the country ; the other ignored and neglected, and
thrust aside even by his own family. Such reactions are natural,
and sometimes they do good ; but it is generally the business of
criticism to guard against them, and it seems fairly safe to say
that while Charles Kingsley himself is not first-rate, Henry
Kingsley ranks in real merit, as he ranked in popular estimation,
far below his more fortunate brother.
With two or three exceptions, the other novelists of the third
quarter of the century deserve at most only a cursory mention.
Francis Smedley's Frank Fairleigh (1850) and Harry Coverdalis
Courtship (1854) are still familiar by name, and are sometimes
recommended, by people in middle life to their juniors, but they
W. 49
TJO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
hardly repay perusal. Albert Smith (1816-1860) is probably best
known now by the traditions of his lectures on Mont Blanc ; but
in the middle of the century he was a familiar figure in London
literary and a celebrated wit, and his Marchioness of
society
romance which is little more than
Brinvilliers (1846), a historical
a catalogue of crimes, was a work of considerable repute. Now,
most of the flavour seems to have evaporated even from his more
characteristic writings. The Adventures of Mr Ledbury (1844),
The Scattergood Family (1845) and Christopher Tadpole (1848).
George Alfred Lawrence (1827-1876) won great popularity with
his society novel, Guy Livingstone (1857) ; but it is merely a poor
imitation of things which other writers were doing better. In the
main, Lawrence followed Bulwer Lytton ; but in his hero there is
also something of Charlotte Bronte's Rochester. Everything has to

be made to fit Guy Livingstone's physical development. He sits
in a "vast" easy chair and drinks out of an "immense" wine-
glass, presumably blown specially for him. In a word, he has
Rochester's absurdities; but Lawrence shows no trace of the genius
which redeems the absurdities in the case of Charlotte Bronte.
Thomas Hughes (1823-1896), again, was practically a man of one
book, Tom Brown's School Days (1857); for neither the sequel
nor any of his other publications ever rose to the same level.
And that well-known book is hardly a novel ; nor is its popularity

due solely to literary merit. Hughes, in fact, was the most
successful exponent of the work of Arnold of Rugby a greater —
achievement than the writing of many second-rate novels.
George John Whyte-Melville (1821-1878) was a man of much
greater literary gift and of superior skill as a novelist. Besides his
novels, he wrote verse which, though itmay not raise him to the
rank of the poets, is pleasant to read. By profession a soldier and
by position a country gentleman, Whyte-Melville shows most con-
spicuously in his books that side of his character and tastes which
is associated with his calling and rank. Such novels as Digby
Grand (1853), Kate Coventry (1856) and Holmby House (i860),
are plainly the work of a man with the tastes of the squire and
with ample opportunity to indulge them. He
was especially fond
of country life, he met the accident which caused his death in the
and his hunting scenes have given

pursuit of his favourite sport,
him a place among the very few writers who have treated sport in
a literary manner ; a group in which the principal figures, during
the Victorian period, are William Scrope, Charles St John and
John Colquhoun, all of whom have written delightfully, but not
under the guise of fiction. Whyte-Melville however, besides
being a fox-hunting squire, was a man of fairly wide reading and
of scholarly habit ; and this led him to try the historical novel as
well as the hunting story. The Gladiators (1863), though a little
heavy, is on the whole an interesting delineation of Roman society

in the period of decline.
Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) likewise attempted historical
fiction, but fell considerably below the level of The Gladiators.

His Antonina (1850), a story of Rome in the time of Honorius, is
dull and poor. His powers were of a different sort; and by
reason of his excellence in his own department he has more
prospect of remembrance than many who were intrinsically his
superiors. The man who does best any one thing cannot restdily
be forgotten; and Collins isthe greatest master in English fiction
of the art of weaving an intricate 'plot. It is an art in which
French writers have excelled more frequently than English ones,
few of whom have anything comparable to the "plot" as Wilkie
Collins understood it. In The Woman in White (i860),
Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868) we find a complicated
story, every part of which is skilfully dovetailed into the rest,
while the mystery is carefully sustained until the moment comes

for unfolding it. The practised novel-reader can, as a rule, make
a shrewd guess at the denouement after reading a few chapters ; but
itwould take no ordinary skill to penetrate the mystery of The
Moonstone before the author chooses to lift the veil. This is the
essence of the sensation novel ; and in that department Wilkie
Collins stands high. He could not draw character, he painted no
pictures of life as it ; and those to whom these things
we know
are indispensable will never be attracted by him. But there is a
large number of readers who read for the story alone, and these
iind in Collins all they seek. Not a few hints have been taken
from him by more recent writers of detective stories and other
49-2
tales whose object is to sustain interest by a carefully-veiled
mystery.
Notwithstanding all the skill of Wilkie Collins, it is a relief to
escape from the sphere of mechanism into that of humanity, as

we do in the case of Anthony TroUope (1815— 1882), who, though
he never rises to the greatest heights, stands on a plane considerably
higher than that of the writers who have just been noticed. He
can always be relied upon, not indeed for genius or eloquence,
but for competent literary workmanship, for spirit, for shrewd
observation and
a thorough wholesomeness of mind. Though
for
he lived from boyhood in an atmosphere of letters and was
ultimately one of the most prolific of writers, TroUope did not
begin his literary career early. In his frank and pleasant, but
never intimate, and sometimes unwittingly amusing, Autobiography,
he tells us that he had long cherished the ambition to become a
novelist; but his powers were not highly esteemed in his own
family, and it was with resignation rather than pleasure that his
mother heard of his first venture. The Macdermots of Ballydoran
(1847). Mrs TroUope had acted upon the principle playfully
avowed by Sydney Smith, who declared that to read a book
before reviewing it prejudiced the mind. She had not read her
son's MS. when she augured ill of it ; but her view seemed to be
confirmed by public opinion, and TroUope had to struggle for
many years before he won success. "I regard the book with
affection," he wrote to Lord Houghton when sending him a
copy of The Warden, " as I made fy. 2s. 6d. by the first year's
sale, having previously written and published for ten years without
any such golden results." From 1857 to 1884, two years after his
death, not a single year passed without a publication bearing
TroUope's name. Often there were two, sometimes three, and
occasionally even four, in a single year. And this amazing pile of
books was the work of a man who aU the while was conscientiously
discharging his duties as a servant of the Post Offite, and who,
besides, was for many years one of the keenest and most assiduous
hunters of his district. The secret was partly that of Scott— early
rising; partly it was method. TroUope rigorously exacted from
himself his tale of bricks, for no one ever beUeved less in "inspira-
tion." To him, the production of a novel was like the making of

a pair of shoes ; and he held the novelist to be no more justified
in pausing after he had finished one work until he should feel
impelled to begin another, than the shoemaker would be justified
in waiting after he had finished his pair of shoes until the spirit
should move him to begin a new pair. Consequently, the day
after he had finished one novel, TroUope usually started another.
There is something refreshing in this whole-hearted repudiation
of what often degenerates into the cant of the man of letters

who takes himself very seriously as artist. Further, Trollope is
probably right in his own opinion he wrote most rapidly

that what
he wrote best. Scott thought so of his own work ; and both men
belong to the class who have more to lose than to gain by
deliberation and laboriousness. But it is by no means certain
that the system which was good for Trollope would be suitable for
all other imaginative workers ; nor is it true to say that the pro-
duction of works of art is governed by the same laws as the

production of shoes. Even the shoemaker needs his night's sleep
to rest his muscles, and works all the better if he has an occasional
holiday ; and it is at least possible that the brain may take some-
what longer to recover its tone than the muscles. We can
imagine a Coleridge endowed with a strong will and with tireless
energy, for we know that men still more highly imaginative than
he have been thus gifted ; but it is difficult to imagine a Coleridge,
however endowed, throwing off Ancient Mariners at so many lines
per diem. Even Shakespeare could not have written a succession
of Hamlets. Trollope makes no allowance for the "wise passive-
ness " of which Wordsworth so well knew the value. That taint
of the commonplace, which is the vice of TroUope's work, would
probably prove to be inseparable from such a system as his, though
in his own case it was not so much due to the system as it was the
outcome of his mind. He measured literature by the word, as a
draper measures cloth by the yard, and dwelt far too much on
mere quantity. Wolfe would rather have written Gray's Eiegy than
have taken Quebec; Tennyson would have given all his poetry to
make one Song like Lovelace's Althea. Trollope never undei--
stood the artist's sense of the immeasurable value of quaUty.
But though Trollope was not a great novelist, he was a
remarkably able one, and he seldom failed to make his stories
readable. He belongs to the class of painters of modern life
and of domestic manners, in which department his work is marked
by several special features. He created a county of his own,
Barsetshire, where he made his men live a country life with zest
and hunt almost as Whyte-Melville's men hunt; he made a special
reputation for the delineation of clergymen; and he pyrqbably
gave more attention thap any other writer to the development of
character through a series of years.
Trollope had a habit of writing novels in series, the most
remarkable being that which embodies the chronicles of Barset-
shire. It consists of half-a-dozen novels, beginning with The
Warden (1855) and ending with The Last Chronicle of Barset

(1867). All are good stories, and as a whole they are the best
Trollope ever wrote. Sometimes we observe the character develop-
ing, sometimes it unconsciously changes under the writer's hand.
The great archdeacon is not quite the same man in Barchester
Towers as he is in The Warden. Trollope retains the outlines of
the character, but in the later novel it is softened and rendered
less blatant than in the cruder work. One of the great merits of
this series of novels is the verisimilitude of the imaginary country
in which the scene is laid; for though Salisbury suggested to
Trollope the idea of The Warden, Barsetshire is not a copy of any
English county. Its verisimilitude is due to the vivid realisation
of it in TroUope's own mind. Long practice in hunting had given
him an eye for country (in spite of his short-sightedness it must
be thus expressed), which had been improved by -his habit of

investigating the rural postal system, both in Ireland and in
England, on horseback. Few who have industriously plied the pen
have spent so much of their life in the open air as he. And in
imagination Trollope lived in the country he depicted, until he
knew all the roads, railways and towns of his own creation as if he
were daily using them or passing through them.
TroUope's success in the delineation of the clerical character,
which is admitted by all, has an amusing aspect. He says that
when he first drew the picture of the society of a cathedral city he
had never lived in one himself (except London) and was not
intimately acquainted with a single clergyman. The celebrated
archdeacon, who was justly praised for fidelity to nature, was
created by one who at that time had not even spoken to an
archdeacon. Trollope's marked success, in these circumstances,
proves him to have possessed not only the gift of observation,
but acute powers of inference. He understood human nature ; he
knew that the great elements of character would be found in
clergymen just as in other men
he knew in outline the special
;
conditions of the clergyman's and he reasoned rightly to the

life ;
modifications of character which would result from those condi-

tions. It was a triumph of skill which lifts Trollope nearer to the
level of the great masters than anything else he ever did.

It is further to Trollope's credit that he rightly lays stress upon
character as the principal subject for a novelist's study. He was
too business-like not to be aware of the value of a good plot ; but
he always held that plot was subordinate to charalcter. He him-
self had no talent for weaving intricate stories, and the plot of
Doctor Thome (1858), which is his best, was drawn for him by his
brother. He concerned himself only to tell a simple story clearly,
embodying in what was most attractive in the stores of his own

it
observation. No one is less dependent than he on incident;

usually nothing more exciting than a tea-party takes place. The
reader of The Warden will search his memory in vain for events;
and even in Barchester Towers, perhaps Trollope's masterpiece,
life moves only a little more briskly. His own summary of the
elements which explain the popularity of Framley Parsonage
(1861) forms as good a criticism of his work as has ever been
written " The story was thoroughly English.
: There was a little
fox-hunting and a little tuft-hunting, some Christian virtue and
some Christian cant. There was no heroism and no villainy.
There was much Church, but more love-making." In short, it
was a kind of hotch-potch ; and as most of the ingredients were
sweet, and some of them pleasantly pungent, the result was a very
palatable dish.
Trollope's women are good as well as his men, and he is by no
means limited to the type of the universally-quoted Mrs Proudie.
TJ6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
Kate Woodward in The Three Clerks (1858) is a very different
sort of personage; but though less amusing she is almost as
good and Lady Glencora is yet another type, also very well
;
drawn. Eleanor Bold and the Signora Neroni in Barchester

Towers are in strong contrast, but both are good portraits. Among
the men, clergymen like the archdeacon and the bishop, and lay-
men like the Duke of Omnium, Plantagenet Palliser, Doctor
Thome and Sir Raffle Baffle evince power in their creator only a
little short of genius.
Some of the characters just named belong to a group of novels
second in importance only to the Barsetshire series. It includes
Can You Forgive Her? (1864), Phineas Finn (1869), Phiruas

Redux (1874) and The Prime Minister (1876); and its special
interest lies in the deliberate attempt made in it to trace the
development of character. Other novelists had done the same
thing before. Fenimore Cooper does it in the Leather Stocking
tales, Dumas does it, and Balzac, and also Thackeray to a slight
extent ; every novelist does it who introduces the same characters

in different stories. But few have set themselves so conscientiously
and on the whole so successfully as Anthony Trollope to show
what is the effect upon character of different circumstances, and
how age changes the point of view. It is the more important to
note this feature of his work because the mechanical nature of
his method would hardly lead the student to expect it.
In these later novels there are feebler strains than any in the
Barsetshire series. Trollope could not rival Thackeray as a
delineator of the aristocracy, and he was no match for Disraeli in
the political novel. To expect in his Prime Minister such a study

as is contained in Diana of the Crossways would be like seeking
wine from water-melons. His natural sphere was comfortable

middle-class life and squirearchy — not too elevated in position,
or in intellect, or in morals, but good, sound-hearted, some-
what ordinary men and women: the heroic in any sense was
beyond him ; but he was always on the side of what was whole-
some and good and true within its limits.
At the time when the fame of Trollope was greatest, George
Meredith (1828-1909) was known even by name only to a narrow
THE LATER FICTION Tjy
circle. No writer of the nineteenth century stands more alone

than he, and none is more difHcult to deal with. Browning
himself is not more original. Here and there the reader may be
reminded of Carlyle, or of Thackeray, or of Browning. Meredith
was so friendly with Rossetti as to be invited to become one of
the household which abode with him in Cheyne Walk ; but there
is nothing of the Pre-Raphaelite in Meredith's works, nor does
the personal attraction which presumably drew him thither appear
to have been very strong. He is in a class apart. But he has
supplied the key to his own mind in his Essay on Comedy
(1877), which had been delivered as a lecture twenty years before
it was published as a book. It shows him to be one of the
profoundest of all His own works are an

students of comedy.
embodiment of comedy. He
much, and he tersely
hints as
explains what he conceives to be the essence of the comic spirit
in the opening sentences of The Egoist :
"Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social

life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of
civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling

outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness
of the representation convincing. Credulity is not wooed through
the impressionable senses; nor have we recourse to the small
circular glow of the watchmaker's eye to raise in bright relief
minutest grains of evidence for the routing of incredulity. The

Comic Spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of
characters,and rejects all accessaries in the exclusive pursuit of
them and their speech. For, being a spirit, he hunts the spirit in
men; vision and ardour constitute his merit; he has not a thought
of persuading you to believe in him."
This passage throws a flood of light upon the writer's work.
The Comic Spirit, thus conceived, is exactly the spirit, not merely
of The Egoist, but of the great bulk of Meredith's prose as well
and the fact that there is often a strong infusion of tragedy no
more alters the character of his novels than the presence of
Shylock transforms The Merchant of Venice into a tragedy. Not-
withstanding the tragedy of Richard and Lucy, The Ordeal of
Richard Feverel is a conception of the Comic Spirit. So is Diana
of the Crossways, in spite of the fact that the leading character
passes through fire. The Tragic Comedians is a title which might
have been given to more than one of Meredith's books ; and it is
significant that he reserved it for that story which, of all his works,
ismost closely related to fact.
If all the light that can be got is needed for the understanding
of Meredith at the present day, there is no ground to wonder that
he was an enigma on his first appearance. The average reader
thinks of him as a novelist, but his earliest publication was in
verse, and his first volume a volume of Poems (1851). The taste
and the ambition thus shown lasted throughout his life. His
poetry is sufficient both in bulk and in quality to give reasonable
foundation for the contention of those admirers who maintain that
he is a poet in the first place and a novelist only in the second.
The volumes of verse subsequent to that of 1851 are Modern Love,
and other Poems (1862), Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth
(1883), Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life (1887), A Reading of
Earth (1888), The Empty Purse, and other Poems (1892), Odes in
Contribution to the Song of French History (1898) and Reading A
of Life, with other Poems (1901).
The very titles of these volumes proclaim that Meredith is at
once the poet of nature and. the poet of man. His purpose is to
read the secret of earth ; but he holds that that secret is to be
read completely neither in the solitude of the fields nor amidst the
troubled passions of turbid cities. The key
"Hangs for those who hither thither fare.
Close interthreading nature with our kind."
Meredith's own desire therefore is thus to interthread the two.

The deepest root of his interest in nature is the conviction that
tlieknowledge of nature is an indispensable condition of under-
standing men, and especially of tolerance of their faults. To
know all is to pardon all. Only a full comprehension of the
,
circumstances makes possible the smile of the Comic Muse.

Naturally therefore the poet rejects asceticism, and warns the world
"Not one instinct to efface
Ere reason ripens for the vacant place."
Naturally also it is the union of the two kinds of know-
ledge, and the benignity of spirit resulting from it, that he praises
in Shakespeare. The knowledge of Mother Earth enables her
greatest to know her sons unsoured —
to probe "from hill to
hill of human passions " undeflowered of love. From this same
knowledge comes his conquering smile, and the laugh " broad a?
ten thousand beeves at pasture."
It is not surprising to find that the poet who thought thus
thought also that the knowledge of nature knowledge of some- is
thing not wholly distinct from, but close akin to, man. That is
the meaning of one of the finest of the nature-poems, The Woods
of Westermain. Earth is
" Spirit in her clods,
Footway to the God of Gods."
She is, in truth, whatever the seeing eye has the capacity to find in
her. The observer may
"Look to loathe, or look to love;
Think her Lamp, or know her Flame."
To Meredith therefore the transition from nature to man is easy.

In the poem just quoted the two are inextricably intermingled.
In Hard Weather the terse and highly imaginative opening lines
on the east wind pass easily into those which depict the men who
wrestle with "this fierce angel of the air," and thence to the
moral that it is contention which begets the sharpened life and
develops brain. The same transition is made in The Thrush in
February. It is made too in the finest of all Meredith's poems of
nature. The Lark Ascending, but not until the poet has given
the most strictly faithful description of the bird to be found
anywhere in the English- language, and one which, for poetic
beauty, is fit to be placed beside the, great poem of Shelley :
"He rises and begins to round,

He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,
All intervolved and spreading wide,
Like water-dimples down' a tide
Where ripple ripple overcurls
And eddy into eddy whirls;
A press of hunied notes that run
So fleet they scarce are more than one, •
Yet changeingly the trills repeat

And linger ringing while they fleet.
Sweet to the quick o' the ear, and dear
To her beyond the handmaid ear,
Who sits beside our inner springs,
Too often dry for this he brings,
Which seems the very jet of earth
At sight of sun, her music's mirLh,
As up he wings the spiral stair,
A song of light, and pierces air
With fountain ardour, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day,
And drink in everything discerned
An ecstacy to music turned.
Impelled by what his happy bill .
Disperses ; drinking, showering still,
Unthinking save that he may give

His voice the outlet, there to live
Renewed m endless notes of glee.
So thirsty of his voice is he.

For all to hear and all to know
That he is joy, awake, aglow.
The tumult of the heart to hear
Through pureness filtered crystal- clear,
And know the pleasure sprinkled bright

By simple singing of delight.
Shrill, irreflective, unrestrained,
Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustained

Without a break, vnthout a fall,
Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical,

Perennial, quavering up the chord
Like myriad dews of sunny sward
That trembling into fulness shine,
And sparkle dropping argentine."
The fertility both of language and of imagination in The Lark

Ascending seems inexhaustible it is perhaps Meredith's greatest
:
single achievement in poetry. Yet, on the whole, he is more the

poet of man than the poet of nature.In this phase of his work
the reader may be struck with an apparent difference between the
spirit of Meredith's verse and the spirit of his prose. He who in
prose proclaims himself the disciple of the Comic Muse, is in

verse essentially tragic. He writes Ballads and Poems of Tragic
Life, and perhaps his most characteristic expression in verse is the-
profoundly tragic Modern Love. The difference is not so wide as

it appears: for, as has been already noted, the comedy of
Meredith's prose is veined with tragedy. Doubtless, so far as the
difference due to the fact that, on the whole, verse
is real, it is
tends to tragedy and

on the whole, prose has an affinity to
that,
comedy. This is evident from the work of those who, like Shake-
speare, are masters of both. ,Pad Meredith elected to tell fully
the story underlying Modem Love, he would not improbably
have placed it in a setting of comedy; but in that case it would
certainly have been told in p'rose.
Modern Love is a series of fifty connected poems, each, of
sixteen lines arranged in four quatrains. Strictly speaking, they
are not sonnets ; but their effect is so near akin to that of the
sonnet that Swinburne did not hesitate to give them the name.
They suggest comparison, therefore, with other sonnet-sequences
such as Rossetti's House of Life and Mrs Browning's Portuguese
Sonnets. But, both in conception and in manner of treatment,
they have more in common with the poetry of Browning than with
either of these. The author of James Leis Wife might have
written Modern Love. It has all the subtlety of Browning; the
intellectual difficulties it presents are like Browning's ; and, like

Browning's, they are worth the trouble of solution. Each of these
poems dimly discloses a phase of a story hinted, not told, or
fifty
a mood of mind of the principal figure. The story is that of a

love all the morfe tragic because of the essential nobility of both
the man and the woman. There is no villain.
"In tragic life, God wot,

No need be ! Passions spin the plot
villain :
We, are betrayed by what is false within."
The two are simply " ever-diverse," and their very fineriess of
nature makes the tragedy inevitable. A sensitive reticence raises
up a wall between them. In silence
"Each appliedto each that fatal knife.
Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole,"
and when at last they drink " the pure daylight of honest speech,"
too late.
it is What, at an earlier stage, might have worked a cure
becomes a "fatal draught." Even pure daylight may mislead eyes
unaccustomed to it. The revelation is only half understood.
Jealous devotion leads the wife to "break the mesh," and the
husband is left with the deeper pain of knowing all at the moment
of her death.
Meredith has here and there pieces and lines worthy of any
poet. Such are the closing quatrain of Modern Love —
"In tragic hints here see what evermore
Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force.
Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore ;
and these three lines quoted by Swinburne from the forty-seventh
sonnet, as "the grandest perhaps of the book":
"But in the largeness of the evening earth

Our spirits grew as we went side by side.
The hour became her husband and my bride."
Even in pieces which stand on a far lower plane than Modern Love
we meet with flashes of keen imaginative insight, and with
powerful and original metaphors and similes, as in that beautiful
stanza of the ballad of Archduchess Anne :
"Between the day that struck her old,

And this black star of days.
Her heart swung like a storm-bell tolled
Above a town ablaze."
But, on the other hand, the style is often knotted and uncouth,
both theme and treatment are sometimes fantastic, and not

infrequently the difficulties, like some in Browning, seem to be
due to perversity.
The same is undoubtedly true of Meredith's prose, and
especially of the prose of his later years ; but it seems probable
that the common judgment, which puts this above his verse, will
be confirmed by posterity. Five years passed before the early
poems were followed by The Shaving of Shagpat (1856), to which
in turn succeeded Farina (1857). The latter, a burlesque of
German romance, carries an interesting reminiscence of Meredith's
education ; for he was sent to school in Germany, where he was
under the care of the Moravians of Herrnhut. Whether he was

or was not greatly influenced by his German education is not clear
from his writings. There is much in them that looks like
" Germanism ; but that may have been due, as it was in
"
Browning's case, to native bent of mind. There can hardly have
been very close sympathy between Meredith and his Moravian
teachers and Farina shows him to have been alive to the weak-
;
nesses of German romance. In later days he shows the tendency,

characteristic of his time, to turn more readily to French than to
German literature.
The Shaving of Shagfat is much more important than Farina.
From the publisher's point of view it failed; but George Eliot hailed
it as "a work of genius, and of poetical genius^," and declared that
in every characteristic except the exquisite delicacy of the love
incidents and love scenes — in exuberance of imagery, in picturesque
wildness of incident, in significant humour, in aphoristic wisdom.
The Shaving of Shagpaf was " a new Arabian Ni^ht." This judg-
ment seems to ignore the element of burlesque in the piece; but
Meredith himself evidently felt that the kinship with the East was
close, for he prefixed to the first edition a note to warn readers
that it was not a translation.
Three years after Shagpat came Meredith's first full-blown
novel. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), which many regard
as the greatest of all his works. Yet nineteen years passed before
a second edition was required. The Shaving of Shagpat showed
the writer to be a humourist who could be eitlier subtle or broad
as he pleased, but the fact that was an avowed imitation of the
it
style and manner of the Eastern story-tellers left it doubtful what
place humour might hold in the works he might write in his own
style. The Ordeai of Richard Feverel leraoytd. the Aouhi. It too
is the work of a proriounced humourist, and one of a most original
sort. The humour of Meredith is obviously derived neither from

Dickens, nor from Thackeray, nor from Browning, nor from
Carlyle, nor from any other writer of the time. Neither would it
' George Eliot's article was reprinted from The Leader, Jan. 1856, in
Literary Anecdotes of the XIX Century.
'
be easy to find any writer in the past to whose, work it is akin. It
is coqwnonly ironic, frequently in touch with tragedy, seldom
riotous, as that of Dickens often is. Like everything in Meredith,
it is fundamentally intellectual. "More brain, O Lord, more
brain " !
is the aspiration of Modern Love ; and in Hard Weather
the poet declares that earth's
"Children of the labouring brain,
These are the champions of the race,
True parents, and the sole humane,
With understanding for their base."
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is typical of Meredith in its
concentration of thought ; but this characteristic has not yet been

carried to the faulty extreme which makes his later novels almost
hopelessly baffling. His style, always variable, is here much more
lucid than it came to be in later years. It is already highly
epigrammatic, but the epigrams are not yet showered down with-
out pause or relief. A Meredithian epigram is as much more
brilliMt than an ordinary bit of prose as a lightning-flash is
brightef than a lamp. But while it is far less dazzling, the lamp is
more satisfactory to read by than a succession of lightning-flashes.
Man cannot live by epigrams alone, and plain prose has its uses.
In later days Meredith forgot this ; but not in RicJiard Feverel,
where the epigrammatic style appears in more perfect fusion
with the qualities which ought to modify it than in any of
Meredith's subsequent works, except perhaps Rhoda Fleming.
Meredith's novels are usually rich in portraiture, and none is
richer than the first of the series. Within the Feverel family itself
the wealth and the variety are great. The characters of Sir Austin,
Richard, Adrian Harley and Austin Wentwprth are all masterly.
They differ widely, yet all have certain family traits in common,
which come out amusingly in the covert negotiations with Farmer
Blaize, after Richard's escapade of the hay-rick. Outside the
family, Lucy and Lady Blandish and Ripton Thompson are no
less.excellent. These three are all bound closely together with the
Feverel family, Ripton as the ]boyish companion of Richard, Lucy
as the Miranda to his Ferdinand, Lady Blandish because she is
secretly in love with Sir Austin. It is in fprging the links of these
relations that Meredith shows the most consummate skill. The

picture of the boys, their friendship, their quarrel, their encounter
with Farmer Blaize and its sequel, is no less masterly, as a sketch,
than Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are as
finished portraits. The agony of Richard and Ripton under
Adrian's scalpel, and their ludicrous but, to them, desperately
serious stratagems, show an insight into boy-nature probably
unequalled except by the American writer. Twenty years after-
wards Meredith himself achieved a success nearly, but not quite,

as great in the boy Crossjay Patterne of The Egoist.
Quite different, but even more marvellous, is the relation of
the second pair. The famous chapter entitled " Ferdinand and
Miranda" depicts one of the most charming love-scenes in literature.
The only comparison possible is that suggested by the title. Both
the actors might have been inhabitants of an island of the still-
vexed Bermoothes —Lucy, reared in utter innocence in the solitude

of her uncle's farm, Richard, hedged round by the system. All the
fates seemed against their meeting, much more against their union.
Richard was doubly cut off, both by the system and by his own
act, from the niece of Farmer But Meredith knew that
Blaize.
what we call chance is and that nature is

infinitely various,
irresistibly strong. Chance brought about the meeting and nature

did the rest. Adrian had foreseen what Sir Austin was blind
to, —
that the repression of the system would make Richard as
dangerously explosive as compressed gunpowder. The explosion
shattered the system ; changed what
but the system, in its turn,
would naturally have been a story of happy love into one of the
most tragic in literature. And this tragedy is enacted behind the
mask of the Comic Muse.
The story of the third pair, if it is less charming than the other
two, is equally skilful ; and in Sir Austin we have the key to the
whole book. Meredith does not admire him, nor wish his readers
to admire him ; but circumstances have given him the control of
the destinies of all the principal characters. The comedy lies in
the futility of his attempt to play Providence, the tragedy in the

fateful consequences which that attempt, futile as it is, brings in
its train. Sir Austin is an egoist almost as complete as
w. 5°
Sir Willoughby Patterne himself. He begins as the complete —
egoistmust always begin, for otherwise he would loathe his own
—
character by partially deceiving himself; and in the end he sees
or imagines himself under the necessity of playing a part too large
for him. Sir Austin as well as Phaethon found the danger of
aspiring to drive the chariot of the sun. The scientific humanist
thinks himself bound to ape omniscience. His pompousness
grows. His creator calls him a monomaniac. The word, it is
true, is put into the mouth of Adrian ; but, without endorsing the
judgment which sees Meredith himself in Adrian, it is tolerably
safe to ascribe this particular utterance to the novelist. The
strain of keeping up an appearance of superiority to ordinary
humanity steadily increases. Richard and Lucy are sacrificed to
this end. Unconsciously Sir Austin sacrifices himself. The
respect (it should rather be adoration, as we are dealing with
Providence) of those around him is the breath of his nostrils.
Life holds nothing else for him. Now
of all who surround him
no one is so eagerly disposed to worship at the shrine as the
scheming yet fine-natured Lady Blandish ; and in the whole book
there is nothing more subtle than the way in which Meredith
traces the effect upon her of Sir Austin's attempt to shore up
his crumbling reputation for superhuman insight. The chapter
entitled " Nursing the Devil " shows the beginning of disillusion-
ment. The final letter, " Lady Blandish to Austin Wentworth,"
shows how complete it was in the end :
" Oh how sick I am of theories, and Systems, and the pre-

!
tensions of men There was his son lying all but dead, and the
!
man was still unconvinced of the folly he had been guilty of. I
could hardly bear the sight of his composure. I shall hate the
name of science till the day I die. Give me nothing but common-
place unpretending people!....! shall love that Mrs Berry to the
end of my days. I really believe she has twice the sense of any
of us — Science and all."
Ttie Ordeal of Richard Feverel obviously a problem novel,

is
and the problem is Given a particular character

psychological.
set in a certain relation to others, what will be the effect upon the
others and upon the character itself? In this respect, as well as
in many others, it is typical of Meredith's work. Again and again

in the later novels he sets himself similar problems. He has
little interest in actionThe problems are inward,
as such.
problems of the soul, and though circumstance may be indis-
pensable, it is but a setting. There is commonly extremely little
story in Meredith's novels. The Egoist has none worth speaking
about, and though the adventures of Harry Richmond are
sufficiently varied, even in these the true interest is in cha-
racter, not in incident. The subtlety with which the female
characters are drawn is another characteristic of The Ordeal of
Richard Feverel, as well as of Meredith's later work. Among
contemporaries, his only rivals were Browning and George Eliot,
and the latter was so successful probably because she was a woman
herself. Lucy, Lady Blandish and Mrs Berry are all drawn with
consummate skill. The last is Meredith's greatest triumph among

characters in the lower ranks of society. These he rarely attempted
to draw. Rhoda Fleming, a story which deals chiefly with the yeo-
man class; is exceptional ;and characters below that rank seldom
play an important part. —
No less than Thackeray with whom he
has more affinity than with any other writer of fiction —Meredith is
the novelist of the upper classes. Austin Feverel is a baronet of

great wealth ; so is Willoughby Patterne. Diana Warwick is the
friend of cabinet ministers. Beauthamfs Career deals with a
peer and the heir of a peerage. Lord Ormont speaks for itself by
its title and Tin Amazing Marriage also rises to the sphere of
;
the peerage. Evan Harrington, it is true, is the son of a tailor

but if the book to which he gives his name introduces trade, it is
trade associated with and striving to emulate aristocracy. The
reason for this peculiarity is to be found in the description which
Meredith, in a letter which has been published, has given of his
own method :
—
" My method has been to prepare my readers for
a crucial exhibition of the personae, and then to give the scene in
the fullest of the blood and brain under the stress of a fiery situa-
tion." Blood and brain are common to all ranks ; but we have
only to think of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and. The Egoist anA
Diana of the Crossways in order to see that the kind of stress and
of fiery situation which Meredith means presuppose high position.
50—3
The really poor are too much under the pressure of the material
needs of life.
" The Pilgrim's Scrip " is an interesting feature in The Ordeal

of Richard Feverel. The maxims it contains are frequently double-
edged ; and hence we are told that " the direct application of an
aphorism was unpopular at Raynham." But though Meredith is
prone to laugh at the wisdom of Sir Austin, the sententious
manner of expressing it was too much his own not to be repeated.
Diana of the Crossways gives the analogue from the female side in
Diana's epigrams, quoted from the diary of Henry Wilmers.
Indeed there is some equivalent in every one of the novels, for it
is the most striking and the most enduring characteristic of
Meredith's style, the terse expression of his keen and agile wit.
Meredith's next novel was the romance of the tailor's son,
Evan Harrington (1861). Though it is inferior to Richard Feverel,
the hero is no mean character, and the Countess de Saldar
is admirable as a portrait, whatever may be thought of her as a
woman. Emilia in England (1864), now known as Sandra
Belloni, broke new ground with a great Italian singer for heroine,
though in her English surroundings there is something akin to
Evan Harrington. The book has, of course, to be read with its
sequel Vittoria (1867), which transports the reader to Italy, and

deals with the characters and the incidents of the rising of 1848.
Beauchamfs Career has been called Meredith's only political novel,
and it is the only one in which he greatly concerns himself with
the struggles of party. But it would be a profound mistake to
draw the inference that social interests or the greater problems of
politics were matters of subordinate moment to him.
It would
be nearer the truth to say that no recent novelist has been more
profoundly impressed by them. Vittoria shows that Meredith was
alive to the importance of the problem of nationality. The scene
is laid in Italy in and the book deals with many of the
1848,
leaders on the Austrian on the Italian side. Meredith's
as well as
sympathies are with the Italians; but he preserves his artistic
detachment, and bears in mind that fine character may be en-
listed and high virtues shown in support of a bad cause. There are
Austrians deserving of admiration as well as Italians, and Meredith
shows that there were such Austrians in the struggle of 1848. But
interesting as is this aspect of Vittoria, the principal feature of the
two books in which Sandra appears is Sandra herself. Among
Meredith's love-scenes, "By Wilming Weir" is second only to
"Ferdinand and Miranda", and if Lucy is the sweeter, Sandra is
the grander, character.

Between these two connected works appeared Rhoda Fleming
(1865), a novel which differs considerably from the rest of Mere-
dith's works, and which from many of his warmest admirers has
received something less than justice. It is the simplest of all his
novels. But simplicity need not mean shallowness, and assuredly

it does not in the case of Rhoda Fleming. Some of the analyses
are as subtle as any that even Meredith has made. The character
of Mrs Lovell is admirable, and the explication of the effect upon
her of Edward Blancove's cowardice may be compared with the
analysis of the relations between Lady Blandish and Sir Austin
Feverel. The heroine Rhoda is less charming than several of
Meredith's heroines ; but the real interest centres in the tragic
who, like the heroine of Browning's
story of her sister Dahlia,
Inn Album, shows a certain kinship to Richardson's great con-
ception Clarissa Harlowe. In Meredith's case the kinship is closer
than in Browning's. After her betrayal the Ufe of Dahlia is, like
Clarissa's, just movement towards death. But it lasts for years.
a
" He killed her pride. Her taste for life is gone," is Mrs Lovell's
explanation of Dahlia's refusal to marry Edward. The close is
profoundly pathetic :
" Dahlia lived seven years her sister's housemate, nurse of the
growing swarm. She had gone through fire, as few women have
done in like manner, to leave their hearts among the ashes ; but
with that human heart she left regrets behind her. The soul of
this young creature filled its place. It shone in her eyes and in
her work, a lamp to her little neighbourhood; and not less a lamp
of cheerful beams for one day being as another to her. In truth,
she sat above the clouds. When she died she relinquished
nothing. Others knew the loss. Between her and Robert there
was deeper community on one subject than she let Rhoda share.
Almost her kst words to him, spoken calmly, but with the quaver
of breath resembling sobs, were Help poor girls.'"
:
'
After Vittoria came The Adventures of Harry Richmond
(1871), a book much more crowded with events than are Mere-
dith's novels in general. He is safer on his customary ground of
psychology. In The Adventures of Harry Richmond both incidents
and characters are fantastic, and in spite of the fertility of Roy
Richmond the story becomes tiresome. Beauchamfs Career
(1876) is of a higher order. The main theme is that of EngUsh
party politics shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century.
The old Tory Lord Romfrey and his nephew, the young Radical
Nevil Beauchamp, are the principal figures —the latter the pupil of
Dr Shrapnel and the student of Carlyle, by whom, evidently,

Meredith himself was considerably influenced. The likeness in
character between uncle and nephew, underlying wide differences
of opinion, is one of several indications that Meredith was a care-
ful student of heredity. The female figures in this story are
subordinate to a degree unusual with
Meredith. They are
probably made so designedly, in order that attention may not
be too much drawn away from the political problems. The
character of Nevil Beauchamp has a peculiar interest if it em-
bodies, as it is said to do, the attributes of one of Meredith's own
friends.
The next novel, The Egoist (1879), stands nearer to The
Ordeal of Richard Feverel \n method, and probably in merit, than
any of the intervening works. Perhaps, on the whole, it is even
more typical and broadly representative of Meredith than Richard
Feverel itself. The later as well as the earlier work is a problem
novel, and its central figure is placed in circumstances very like
those of Sir Austin Feverel. Their wealth makes them both
practically irresponsible, and they are despots each in his own
sphere. But Sir Austin is a man in middle life, and the problem
is, how will his theories affect those whom he controls?
Sir Willoughby Patterne is a young man, and an important part
of the problem is, what sort of life will the nature with which he is
born fashion for himself? There is not much development in his
character. He is the complete egoist at the start, and this he
remains to the end. Surely a complete egoist with _;^5o,ooo a
year and a whole county paying court to him is destined to a very
happy life. Meredith thinks not. "The egoist surely inspires
pity. He who would desire to clothe himself at everybody's

expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself stark
naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the
actual person." And before the end he demonstrates that this is
true.
The stages in the evolution of egoism are best marked by the

three love affairs. That with Miss Durham is brief. The young
lady is startled by the treatment of Lieutenant Patterne, takes
warning in time, and jilts the handsome and wealthy baronet.
The story of Clara Middleton fills the greater part of the book
first the engagement, then her gradual disenchantment, then her
struggles for release and ultimate escape. She is one of the most
admirably drawn of Meredith's women — bright, witty and warm-
hearted, as well as beautiful. Some of the finest of Meredith's
gems of description are lavished upon her, and he had inexhaustible
fancy and amazing command over language. "He placed himself
at a corner of the doorway for her to pass him into the house, and
doated on her cheek, her ear, and the soft dusky nape of her neck,
where this way and that the little lighter-coloured irreclaimable
curls running truant from the comb and the knot curls, half- —
curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgeling feathers,
tufts of down, blown wisps —
waved or fell, waved over or up or
involutedly, loose and downward, in the form of small silken paws,
hardly any of them much thicker than a crayon shading, cunninger
than long round locks of gold to trick the heart."
The struggle between Clara and Sir Willoughby is long and
severe, for the Egoist is resourceful and determined. The aged
and great wine staves off defeat for a time ; but at length it comes.
And then the third story, which has begun before the first and
lasted all through, is taken up, and we see how the Egoist, who
has used men and women alike for his own ends, has punished
himself. Laetitia Dale has been the victim of his selfishness from
the start, and his punishment is that, instead of a blindly adoring,
he receives a critical and an unwiUing wife. She is persecuted
into marriage. "I vow,'' she says, "to do my duty by him.
Whatever is of worth in me is at his service. I am very tired. I
feel I must yield or break. This is his wish, and I submit." The
unrefortned Egoist speaks in the reply: '"And I salute my
wife,' said Willoughby, making her hand his own, and warming to
his possession as he performed the act."
The Tragic Comedians (1880) is likewise a problem novel.
In substance the extraordinary story is not fiction at all, but fact
the story of the fatal love of Ferdinand Lassalle, who figures in the
novel as Sigismund Alvan. The nature of the problem is clearly
explained. " Why this man should have come to hisend through
love, and the woman who loved him have laid her hand in the
hand of the slayer, is the problem we have to study, nothing
inventing, in the spirit and flesh of both." This is a lucid
exposition of Meredith's method both here and elsewhere.
Whether the subject be the Scientific Humanist of Raynham
Abbey, or the Egoist of Patterne Hall, or the German Social
Democrat, whether the events take place in a world of time and
space or only in the world of imagination, Meredith is equally the -
psychologist, tracing with scientific care and precision the chains

of cause and effect in the world of spirit.
In Diana of the Crossways (1885) Meredith once more, but

for the last time, rose to his own highest level. Of all his novels,
this has probably been the most popular, and perhaps no other has
so nearly brought critical judgment and popular judgment into
harmony. The Meredithian who is but moderately pleased with
Rhoda Fleming praises Diana of the Crossways warmly, and he
who is not as a rule enamoured of Meredith for once agrees. The
reason doubtless is that along with the characteristic Meredithian
features of subtle analysis and brilliant epigram there goes a
story better calculated thanmost to appeal to "the general." The
brilliancy of the heroine another reason. She is "one of
is
Shakespeare's wo men,... another Hermione." And this creature,

all nerves and impulses, is finely contrasted with Redworth, the
embodiment of steady sense and practical competence. Yet it

may be suspected that in this fascinating heroine lies the principal
blot of the book. Is Diana's treachery to Dacier explained}
Could such a woman as Diana have done such a thing ? Could
she have been blind to its significance ? It is hazardous to differ
on such a point from so profound a student of character, and
especially of female character, as Meredith. And he has put into

the mouth of Diana's dearest friend a warning to be prepared for
inconsistencies. "The best and bravest of us [women]," says
Lady Dunstane, "at bay in the world need an eye like Shake-
speare's to read deep, and not be baffled by inconsistencies." But
usually Meredith is more convincing than he is in the treatment
of the character at this point. Of course he believed (mistakenly)
that he was adhering to fact. And that may just have been the
reason why he fell into error, if error it was. The greatest may
perchance forget that "the actual is not the true."
The subordinate characters as well as the principal in Diana
of the Crossways are admirably drawn. The " frosty Cupid
Percy Dacier is excellent throughout, but nowhere more excellent
than in the ebb of what served him for passion, after the frustra-
tion of the plan of elopement. " He did not regret his proposal
to take the leap; he would not have regretted it if taken. On the
safe side of the abyss, however, it wore a gruesome look to his
cool blood." Excellent too is Lady Wathin, " one of the world's
good women." "She would not have charged the individual
creature with a criminal design; all she did was to stuff the person
her virtue abhorred with the wickedness of the world, and that is
a common process in antipathy."
after Diana of the Crossways.
Meredith wrote three novels
They are One of Our Conquerors (1891), Lord Ormont and his
Aminta (1894) and The Amazing Marriage (1895). They are
bound together by their theme, for they all treat some aspect
of the question of marriage, a subject in which Meredith had
shown his interest before ; and they all show the characteristics,
exaggerated into vices, of the Meredithian style. Probably no other
novels in the language are so difficult to read ; and even the fact
that very few novels contain so much thought is hardly a sufficient
excuse. It is not clear that they contain more thought than
Meredith's previous works, from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
down to Diana of the Crossways, and it is clear that the difficulties
set in the way of the reader, though they were already great, are
very much increased. There is an analogy between the develop-
ment of Meredith and that of Browning, to whom, as has been
said already, he has other affinities as well. Just as Browning,

afterThe Ring and the Book, overbalanced himself, so to speak, in
such a way that the greater part of the work of his last twenty
years is gravely damaged by the presence in excess of the qualities
which made him great, so Meredith too spoilt his latest writings
by unrestrained indulgence in epigram and by a wanton exuber-
ance of cryptic utterances.
The reasons why Meredith stands alone in English fiction are
now tolerably clear. The obvious difficulties of his method and
still more of his style discouraged imitation. The demand they
made upon the brain was enormous, and most writers were
modest enough to feel that their endowment was less than
Meredith's. It was easier to follow in the wake of Trollope. The
latter's place was to some extent taken by James Payn (1830-1898),
whose most powerful as well as his most popular novel, By Proxy

(1878), appeared only a few years before the elder man's death.
Payn, however, had won a nameyears before by Lost Sir Mas-
singberd (1864), an ingenious and well-constructed tale. He was
more influenced by Dickens and less influenced by Thackeray than
Trollope, and the standard of his work is considerably lower. On
the other hand, George MacDonald (1824-1905) showed, possibly,
more genius, though less talent, than Trollope, and, in the main,
worked in a wholly different field. He was the best delineator of
Scottish life between Scott (or, at any rate. Gait) and Stevenson, a
poet as well as a novelist, a skilful writer for children as well as for
their seniors. If hard-headedness be the special characteristic of
his country, and above all of his native Aberdeenshire, then
MacDonald was an exception. He was throughout life remarkably
sensitive, and this quality shows and imparts a charm to,
itself in,
both his prose and his verse. illustrates one of the

His life
difficulties of the age. For a short time he was minister of the

Congregational Church of Arundel ; but the religion of this most
religious man was not of the brand which suited his flock it was :
intimated to him that his preaching was not sufficiently ortho-

dox, and he resigned. Thenceforward he was a man of letters ;
but, as his biographer indicates, he never ceased to be, in every
sense of the word, a preacher, and every book, nay almost every
page he wrote, bears witness to the depth and sincerity of his

faith.
MacDonald's earliest publications were poetical; but three

years after his dramatic poem,Within and Without (1855), he
made his dkbut in the realm of prose with Phantasies, a Faerie
Romance (1858). In the graceful fancy, the sensitiveness to
nature and the mysticism of this book many will see the working
of the Celtic spirit. And none had better right to exhibit it than
MacDonald; for he was sprung from the Macdonalds of Glencoe,
and more than once in his writings he shows that his imagination
'
had brooded over their tragic story. His true entry into literature,
however, may be dated at the publication of David Elginbrod
(1863), the first of a series of masterly studies of Scottish life, and
especially the life of the north-eastern counties of Scotland. The
chief works of the series are Alec Forbes (1865), Robert Falconer
(1868), Malcolm (1875) with its sequel The Marquis of Lossie
(1877), Sir Gibbie (1879) and Donal Grant (1883). The third,
Robert Falconer, is easily the best of all the books MacDonald
ever wrote. Elsewhere, perhaps, he shows power as great, but
nowhere else is he so easily great, so varied and so uniformly
successful in his aim. Throughout all the novels the delineations
of Scottish character are excellent. Sometimes the story is forced,
unnatural and improbable; but the faults are always redeemed by
some piece of admirable portraiture. David Elginbrod, Alec
Forbes and Annie, Mrs Malison, Robert Falconer and Shargar,
Mrs Falconer and Dr Anderson, have all the stamp of reality.
In these Scottish stories the poetry of MacDonald's nature is
neither wasted nor in abeyance. It supplies the background to
the story, and it suffuses nearly all the leading characters. Its
effect, is seen if we compare the life delineated by him with that

which the pages of Gait reveal, or with that which MacDonald's
contemporary and fellow-Aberdonian, William Alexander, depicts
m Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk. The life is hard and bare \a. Alec
Forbes and: in David Elginbrod as well as in Johnny Gibb, but
there is a glow of romance in the former which would be utterly
out of keeping in the
: last. There could be no analogue in
Alexander's work to the blind piper in Malcolm. Whether this is
or is not the Celtic element is, if not immaterial, at any rate of
secondary importance. What is of realmoment is the fact that it
is there, and that its presence stamps MacDonald as akin to Scott
and Stevenson rather than to Gait and Alexander. Yet there is a
wide difference. Scott and Stevenson were born story-tellers;
MacDonald was by nature a preacher. His stories £ire often
clumsy and are never the raison d'itre of his novels. It is the
moral he can convey or the religion he can teach that he values.
And this is at once his strength and his weakness ; for, though
the artist is occasionally lost in the preacher, the earnestness of
purpose imparts a dignity which otherwise could not have been
attained.
MacDonald, like Scott himself, was induced by the desire for
variety to turn from Scottish to English themes. But caelum non
animum mutant: Thomas Wingfold (1876) and its sequel Paul
Faber (1879) are compounded of exactly the same ingredients as
the Scottish stories and are no less pervaded with religion ; while
Lilith (1895) is still mystical enough to proclaim the author a Celt
of the Celts. But his genius fades from the English stories. The
life MacDonald knew in childhood arid the scenery which was
most deeply impressed upon his imagination, as well as the

dogma from which he shook himself free, were the indispensable
conditions to his best work. There is, superficially, a good deal of
variety in his work, yet few men of equal genius are more narrowly
circumscribed. Gait is not more closely identified with Ayrshire,
Mrs Gaskell with Lancashire and Cheshire, Mary Wilkihs with
New England, or Mr Barrie with Kirriemuir, than is MacDonald
with Aberdeenshire. It might be imagined that he was bom to

give a place in literature to a district which has been wonderfully
prolific of talent, but which has not been consecrated by imagina-
tion as Ayrshire was by the poems of Burns, the Borders by the
ballads, and nearly every nook of Scotland, except that north-
eastern corner, by the comprehensive genius of Scott.
Something akin to the Celtic element in MacDonald is to be
found in the work of William Sharp (1856-1905), poet, biographer
and critic, who concealed his identity as a romancer and student
of Celtic folk-lore under the pseudonym of Fiona Macleod. As a
poet, Sharp belonged to the Neo-pre-Raphaelite school and was

much influenced by his association with Rossetti. But although
no reader of his Motherhood will deny that Sharp was a true,
if not a very original, poet, his most memorable works are
those prose tales which he published pseudonymously. How a

man born and bred in the Lowlands, among the prosaic thread-
mills of Paisley, acquired not only his feeling for West Highland
scenery, but his knowledge of the language,
life and heart of the
Highland Celt, is an enigma; but those mystical books, The

Dominion of Dreams (1895), The Sin-Eater (1899) and the
numerous short ;tales which made the name of Fiona Macleod
widely popular, are the guarantee that he possessed both. A
Sharp was not. There is no evidence
novelist in the ordinary sense
of power of construction in the books of Fiona Macleod, nor
do they, properly speaking, delineate character. But whatever is
superstitious, uncanny, mystical, Sharp seems ,to have compre-
heiided and sympathised with. This is the backbone of all his
tales and romances. They aim at producing one effect, and they
cannot rival those more complex works, like MacDonald's, in
which mysticism is, merely one of many elements.
For about a quarter of a century after he won success,
Anthony TroUope was, not by any means the greatest of English
novelists, but the one most typical of his time. The novel of
manners held sway, and the Philistine strain in TroUope was in
harmony with the taste of the British Philistine. But there were
always other elements and other tastes ; and the most important
point to notice in the close of the period is the re-emergence of
romance. It is present in Blackmore, it is a factor in the work
of William Black, it colours the novels of Besant and Rice, and it
is: the essence of those of R. L. Stevenson —by far the greatest of

the new romantic school.
Richard Blackmore (1825-1900) may be regarded, like
Thomas Hughes, as practically a man of one book ; for, though

he himself preferred The Maid of Sker (1872), his influence was
exercised through Lorna Doone (1869), and so long as his name
is remembered, it will live because of that romance, which is
certainly among the foremost historical romances of the last half-

century —
inferior to Esmond, The Cloister and the Hearth and
Weir of Hermiston, but not obviously inferior to anything else of
that sort in the period. There is a sense of amplitude and roominess
about the book, which seems somehow to be associated with the
gigantic body of the hero ; but yet it is in no sense a deification
of mere force ; and the great John Ridd himself is more remark-
able for his moral qualities, his gentleness and his kindness, than
for his immense strength. Lorna Doone bears traces of Reade,
but it contains elements of reviving romance to which Reade
was a stranger.
The connexion of Blackmore and Blackmore's masterpiece
with Devon suggests the mention along with his of the name of
a much younger and yet contemporary writer. The " marvellous
boy," Oliver Madox Brown (1855-1874), though a Londoner by
birth, has in the titleof the best of his writings entwined his
name with Devon, " the dwale bluth" being the Devonian name of
the deadly nightshade. He is like Arthur Hallam for early promise
and for unfulfilled renown, he resembles Keats in that his death
was said to have been hastened by unjust criticism. But in truth
Oliver Madox Brown was unique. Short as was the life of Arthur
Hallam, it was three years longer than Brown's span ; and in the
Remains of the elder there is no such evidence of high imagina-
tive endowment as in the writings and fragments left by the son
of the famous artist. It is quite possible that more was buried
in that early grave than in any other except the grave of Chatterton
himself.
Romance appears in the novels of William Black (1841-1898)
under a different aspect from that which it wears in Lorna Doone.
Though Black was about sixteen years younger than Blackmore,
he made his name in literature almost immediately after the
publication of Lorna Doone. In Blackmore, romance is asso-
ciated with history ; in Black, it is a sentiment clinging to a place
and a people. Probably Black's best work is A Daughter of
Heth (187 1), the scene of which is laid in lowland Scotland, and
the effect is produced mainly by the humorous delineation of the
minister's family ; but his name is far more closely identified with
the West Highlands and especially with the Hebrides, and his
most characteristic book is the pretty tale A Princess of Thule

(1873). Black is never profound ; he has written no book of the
calibre of Lorna Doone ; he soon, in a sense, wrote himself out,
so that readers could too easily guess what would be the con-
stituents of a story bearing his name ; and sometimes his senti-
ment passes into sentimentality. But he is as wholesome as
TroUope ; and the difference of his matter and manner helps to
explain the decline in TroUope's popularity during his later years.
Yet another phase of the same change is apparent in the work
of Walter Besant (r836-i9oi) and James Rice (1843-1882),
whose partnership down to the death of the latter recalls to
mind the more famous partnership of two much greater men,
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. In Besant's Dorothy
Forster (1884), we are, by the historical setting, reminded of
books like Lorna Doone; but though Besant several times
went into the past for his subjects and worked a good deal
with documents, he and Rice on the whole figure rather as
novelists of contemporary manners and are of the school of
Trollope, with just an indefinable flavour added from the
new spirit of romance. Ready Money Mortiboy (1872) and The
Golden Butterfly (1876) are favourable specimens of the work
of the partnership ; All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) and
The Children of Gibeon (1886) may be taken as representing
Besant's own work. The former produced an immense effect by
its description of the life of East London, and the People's Palace
there is a memorial of its influence. Again the work is good, but

again it falls short of genius.
The man among the later romancers who is likely longest to
escape oblivion is Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), who for
several reasons is one of the most interesting as well as one of the
most conspicuous figures in our later literature. No man in the
latter half of the nineteenth century was more deeply imbued
with the spirit of letters, none pursued his calling as a writer with
more singleness of mind. Sprung from a family of civil engineers

and set apart to follow in their steps, Stevenson was, from the first,
like the "clerk foredoomed his father's soul to cross." It was
nature that made him a man of letters. Though the power of
expression did not come without effort, the effort to attain it was
to him pleasure, and effort of any other sort was intolerably
irksome. His experiences therefore in the train of his father
among the Northern Lights were valuable to him not for the
purposes of engineering, but because they brought him into
contact with wild nature, and taught him that lore of the High-
lands and the Highlanders which was so well used afterwards in
Kidnapped. Possibly too the surges of Skerryvore may have
left their tone in the stormier passages of his eloquent prose : at
any rate, the sea and the mountain wielded that power over him
through life which they rarely acquire except over those who have
felt their charm in boyhood.
Stevenson's practically-minded father was bitterly disappointed
by his son's rejection of the profession of engineering in favour of
one so vague and unpromising as the career of letters. It was
not merely that the career was unpromising in the financial sense
the mind of Thomas Stevenson, though not destitute of taste, had
a matter-of-fact strain which was alien from literature. Father
and son spent whole afternoons by the Border rivers, the former
looking upon them as " a chequer-board of lively forces," the latter
as "a pretty and various spectacle'." And it is said that when
the plot of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was explained to him, the old
man's comment was "The man's a fool the thing's no possible."
: :
But he was still more deeply grieved by the opinions on religion

which his son began to entertain, and was obliged unwillingly to
express. To a great proportion of the more thoughtful among
the younger generation of Scots, much of the old Presbyterian
faith had become incredible ; and R. L. Stevenson was among
those who had thus drifted away from the ancestral creed. At an
early age he had formed opinions which, to Presbyterians of the
old school, seemed shocking and dangerous. But they were
certainly not ignoble. Stevenson's letters, though they are among
the epistolary gems of literature, contain no passage more lofty
and beautiful than that addressed to Mr E. Gosse in which he
states his belief about the ultimate destiny of man :
" Yes, if I could believe in the immortality business, the world

I Life of Stevenson, i. 73.
THE LATER FICTION 80I
would indeed be too good to be true but we were put here to do ;
what service we can, for honour- and not for hire the sods cover :
us, and the worm that never dies, the conscience, sleeps well at
last ; these are the wages, besides what we receive so lavishly day
by day and they are enough for a man who knows his own
;
frailty and sees all things in the proportion of reality. The soul
of piety was killed long ago by that idea of reward. Nor is
happiness, whether eternal or temporal, the reward that mankind
seeks. Happinesses are but his wayside campings ; his soul is in
the journey ; he was born for the struggle, and only tastes his life
in effort and on the condition that he is opposed. How, then, is
such a creature, so fiery, so pugnacious, so made up of discontent
and aspiration, and such noble and uneasy passions how can he —
be rewarded but by rest ? I would not say it aloud, for man's
cherished belief is /that he loves that happiness which he con-
tinually spurnsy-and passes by ; and this belief in some ulterior
happiness exactly fits him. He does not require to stop and
taste he can be about the rugged and bitter business where
it /.
his heari lies ; and yet he can tell himself this fairy-tale of an
eternal tle^-party, and enjoy the notion that he is both himself
and something else; and that his friends will yet meet him, all
ironed oiit and emasculate, and still be lovable as if love did —
not Uve in the faults of the beloved only, and draw its breath in
an unbrokdn round of forgiveness But the truth is, we must
!
fight until we die ; and when we die there can be no quiet for
mankind but complete resumption into what? God, let us — —

—
say when all these desperate tricks will be spellbound at
last'."
This passage was written long after the period of estrange-
ment between parents and son, when Stevenson's heart was

stirred by the death of his friend Fleeming Jenkin ; but it clearly
indicates the nature of the difficulties which, in addition to that
of the choice of a profession, brought about the estrangement ;
and from the beautiful epitaph which he himself wrote, and

which is inscribed upon his grave, it would seem that to the end
' Letters to his Family and Friends, ii. 13-1+.
w. 51
he retained this conviction that sound sleep after life's fitful fever
is the best reward :
"Under the wide and starry sky

Dig tlie grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.
" This be the verse you grave for me

Here ht lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea.
And the hunter home from the hill." .
Stevenson bore himself admirably in the crisis, recognising that

his parents suffered more than himself. " Here," he writes to his
friend Charles Baxter, " is a good Heavy cross with a vengeance, and
all rough with rusty nails that tear your fingers, only it is not I that
have to carry it alone ; I hold the light end, but the heavy burden
falls on these two\"But notwithstanding good sense anc^ mutual
forbearance, there was a period of painful friction, which helped
to drive Stevenson out into the world. It was however Sll-health
that finally severed him from his home ; but that samA Jill-health
fortunately closed the breach which had divided the son. from the
father, and they remained the best of friends till the deatl) of the
latter.
Stevenson's life was for years a gallant fight against poverty as

well as against illness ; for he was of a sturdily independent spirit,
and, having rejected the profession his father chose for him, he
was all the more determined to support himself in that of his
own
selection. The combination of frugality, industry and genius
would soon have made him successful but for the wretched health
which repeatedly disabled him for work while it multiplied his
expenses. Several times he seemed at the point of death ; and
those voyages in the Pacific, which resulted in his permanent
settlement at Vailima, were regarded at the start as the last
resource of adoomed man. They added fully six years to his
and made those years on the whole a period of pleasurable
life,
work. Stevenson's intellectual abundance, his variety and re-
* Letters to his Family and Friends, i. 41.

source, and his pregnancy of expressionj are imitable only by the

scanty band of his peers ; but his sunny courage, and his playful
gaiety in sickness, pain and sorrow, carry a lesson to all. Artist
as he was in words, he was never a dilettante, and never consented

to sink the man in the writer. In collaboration with Mrs Steven-
son he wrote the continuation of the New Arabian Nights (1885)
in order " to make dynamite ridiculous if he could not make it
horrible " and he was only prevented by the illness of his father
;
from going to Ireland and living upon an abandoned farm as

a protest against a cruel boycott. Illness drove him into exile
but, deprived of citizenship in the land of his birth, he took up its
duties in that of his adoption. He "bore a banner in the strife."
Scarcely anything of Stevenson's is more beautifully written than
the volume In the South Seas (1890); nothing is more creditable
to him than those writings which show how he had taken to heart
the interests of the islands, and how he laboured to improve the
condition of those around him, and to make the islanders and
their affairs intelligible to the world. No writer ever showed
more dauntless courage than he in his " open letter " in defence
of Father Damien. " I knew," he says, " I was writing a libel
I thought he [Dr Hyde] would bring an action ; I made sure I
should be ruined; I asked leave of my gallant family, and the

sense that I was signing away all I possessed kept me up to highr
water mark, and made me feel every insult heroic\"
From the first Stevenson devoted himself to style, and he
soon made himself a master. " My style/' he says, " is from the
Covenanting writers ^" a source where few would think of looking
for it. But in truth Stevenson was by nature and instinct an
artist in words, and few styles are more thoroughly individual than
his. He took endless pains to find the fitting phrase and the
perfect expression ; and years of training lie behind the beautiful
prose even of the early volumes, An Inland Voyage (1878),
Travels a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), Virginibus
with
Puerisque (1881) and Familiar Studies of Men and Books
(1882), all of which are prior to the romance. Treasure
Island (1883), -K-ith which he first won wide popularity. He
' Life, ii. 90. ^ Letters, ii. 312.
51-2
Studied cadences ; he was tireless in his experiments in diction
and arrangement ; the most commonplace spectacle, the simplest
subject of conversation, appeared to him in the light of new
material for literature. It might have been expected that such
a man would be personally priggish, and in his style pedantic
and stiff. On the contrary, he was a delightful companion, and
his is one of the easiest and most graceful of styles in our
literature.
Though Stevenson's early volumes won him none of the fame

which he deserved and little money which he sorely
of the
needed, they are admirable. They show him to be, among other
things, a critic of the greatest delicacyand refinement. His long
reflection on the principles of fruit when he came to
style bore
write the essays of Virginibus Puerisque and the Familiar Studies.
Even Lamb could hardly put a finer edge on criticism. Perhaps
Stevenson is at times a little less than just to those writers some —
—
of them very great who have not grace of form ; but the prin-
ciples on which he proceeds are always sound. Redundancy the —
—
unnecessary word he especially loathes. "There is,'' he ex-
claims, " but one art to omit —
O if I knew how to omit I
!
would ask no other knowledge. A man who knew how to omit

would make an Iliad of a daily paper^." And again, "Artistic
sight is judicious blindness''." He shows also in his criticism
that reaction against extreme realism which is one of the most
interesting features of his own work. He found realism in
fashion. Zolaism in France and tales of the slums and the
gutters in England, had thrust romance for the time into the
background. Stevenson was one of the leaders of a revived
romanticism. He did not believe in the higher reality of
ugliness. On the contrary, " ugliness is only the prose of horror,"
he declares. " It is when you are not able to write Macbeth that
you write Therese Raqui7i*."
Under the guidance of such principles Stevenson faced the
' Letters to his Family and Friends, i. 289.

^ How different from, and how infinitely sounder than, Ruskin's advice in
Modem Painters :
" Go to nature in all singleness of heart. ..rejecting nothing,
selecting nothing, and scorning nothing." ° Letters, i. 275.
THE LATER FICTION 80$
work of his life. We think of him first and chiefly as the writer
of romance, yet it would be surprising to find him not among the
poets. The spirit of poetry breathes through all his writings ; his
whole conception of nature and life is poetical ; and the melodies of
his style, though they were produced by one who never forgot the
diiference between the rhythms of prose and those of verse, are sug-
gestive of poetry. Perhaps necessity had something to do with his
choice of a medium ; for he had to make his living, and he could
not do it by verse. Nevertheless, even from the point of view of
art, the choice was not a mistaken one. There is much charming
verse in Underwoods and Ballads and Songs of Travel, and
A Child's Garden of Verses is unsurpassed for taste and tact.
Occasionally the reader astounded by touches which call to
is
mind the The Reqiuem, already quoted, would do

greatest poets.
honour to Shakespeare himself, and the close of the ballad,
Christmas at Sea, is magical in its effect. They have just escaped
from the jaws of death, and every soul but one heaves a mighty
breath of relief. That one has been on the verge of death under
the windows of home, and in the revulsion, as they steer
his old
out to sea,
"All that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold,
Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old."
But notwithstanding wonderful touches, these volumes can hardly

be said to contain the promise of greatness in poetry. It is
almost certain that, as a writer of verse, Stevenson would have held
a lower place than he does as a writer of prose. The poetry of
his nature was not wasted ; it adds an aroma to the prose ; it
gives Stevenson distinction ; it is great part of the difference

between him and the " Kailyarders."
By beauty of style, by fertility of invention and by the firm-
ness of the lines of character, Stevenson in Treasure Island
lifted a boy's book into the category of books for all ages. He
demonstrated at the same time that romance was not dead, and
that even commercially beauty might be as profitable as ugliness.
Though he did work of a much higher quality, he never after-
wards wrote anything so popular. Kidnapped {i^&6) owes so much
to the example of Scott that Stevenson must to some extent lose
the praise of originality. The Lowland and
contrast between the
the Highland types of character had been drawn by Scott before
and it would be absurd to say that Kidnapped rivals the Waverley
Novels in sweep and breadth and variety. But what he attempted
Stevenson did excellently well. The story is admirably told, and
the two principal characters, Alan Breck and David Balfour, are
conceived and drawn in a masterly fashion, the former, with his—
conceit and courage, his generosity and " huffiness," a type of the
Highlander ; the latter, tenacious and faithful, but " dour " and
often repellent in manner, equally typical of the Lowlander. The
sequel, Catriona (1893), is built of less solid materials. Another
Scotch story, The Master of Ballantrae (1889), stands inter-
mediate between these two in quality as well as in date. The

character of the Master is powerful, but the whole plan is far
less happy than that of Kidnapped, and the materials are

not such as to make a pleasant book.
St Ives (1897), the story
of a French prisoner of war, also has its scene partly laid in
Scotland.
At the very close of his life, in Weir of Hermiston (1896)
Stevenson returned for his subject and his characters to Scottish
soil. It was, like St Ives, left unfinished at his death; but
though only a fragment it has a grandeur which few complete
novels possess. The sombre picture of the savage father and his
son seems as if it were outlined with the pencil and painted with
the colours of Rembrandt. The character of the old Judge
the brutality, combined with the clear, strong intellect and the
unswerving justice — is, as Stevenson himself knew, the greatest
he ever drew. The elder Kirstie too is grand, and the
" nocturnal visit " a masterpiece. The four Elliott brothers,
quite distinct, yet unmistakably of the same family, are also

great pictures. The whole book has the permanence and the
strength of granite. Stevenson a place with the masters
It gives
and dwarfs everything else he ever did, admirable as much of

it is. It deepens infinitely the pathos of his early death. He
passed away at the height of his powers, brimful of every kind
of strength except physical strength.
Patriotism was one of the passions of Stevenson's nature, and

it is this, combined with intimacy of knowledge, which causes him
to revert so frequently to Scottish subjects. Not only his books
bear witness to this passion, but the thousand references in his
letters to old memories and places, to the Northern Lights, to
Edinburgh, to all the scenes of his boyhood and youth. Once
and again he was drawn back to Scotland at the risk and to the
detriment of his health ; and a touching passage in the Vailima
Letters records his sorrow that destiny will not permit him to
be " buried in the hills, under the heather and a table tombstone
like the martyrs, where the whaups and plovers are crying."
"Singular,'' he goes on, "that I should fulfil the Scots destiny

throughout, and live a voluntary exile, and have my head filled
with the blessed, beastly place all the time^ " The exile, how-
!
ever, was hardly voluntary, seeing that the penalty of death

attached to his return.
Stevenson was by far the greatest of those who in these latter
days have written in Lowland Scotch. He cannot be classed
among the writers who have been aptly, though somewhat con-
temptuously, nicknamed " the Kailyard School." He towers above
them in mere diction almost as decisively as in imagination.
They seem to invent sentences and even scenes for the sake of
some obsolete or obsolescent word like " keelivine." Sometimes
they are beyond their own depth as well as beyond the depth of
their southern readers even Mr Barrie, in that work of true
:
genius and of infinite pathos and humour, A Window in Thrums,

uses again and again a word, " sepad," which never existed either
in Lowland Scotch or in any other tongue known to civilised
man. It is never so with Stevenson. His dialect is as easy and
natural as that of Burns. It came to his pen because it was the
mother tongue of his characters. When he dictated he imitated

the voice as well as the diction of the character, and so vivid was
his conception of the creature of his own fancy that on one occasion
he even looked in the glass in order that he might describe the
expression of that imaginary being, and was disconcerted to see
only his own features. Both his spirit and his method are
* Vailima Letters, 301.
dififerent from those of the Kailyarders. He is in the line of
descent from Scott, they are the heirs of Gait ; he is national,
they are parochial. He knew not merely the Scotland of his own
day but the Scotland of and knew it so
history, well that at one
time he even contemplated writing a book upon it ; and, notwith-
standing his strange mistake in the title of the Master of Ballantrae
(who ought to be the Master of Durrisdeer), it would have been an
accurate and learned as well as a readable history. In particular,
he thoroughly understood the periods of the Covenant and the
Jacobite rising. Despite his heterodoxy, that " something of the
Shorter-Catechist," which Henley notes in his sonnet on Steven-
son, was a very real and important strain in his character.
Beneath the artist lay the moralist. " Here lies one who meant
well, tried a little, failed much," is the epitaph he suggests for the
Faithful Failure in his last march " out of the day and the dust
and the ecstacy'."
The soundness of the sentiment which guided Stevenson in
his choice of subjects is proved by the result; for almost as
decidedly as Scott he is at his best when handling the material
which had been familiar to him from boyhood. He disproves the
truth of the latter clause of the saying that " Lowland Scotland
came in with two warriors and went out with two poets." It is
critical lunacy to put Stevenson on the same level with Scott, but
as long as portraiture so masterly as that of Kidnapped, and above
all of Wdr of Hermiston, remains possible, the country depicted
can hardly be said to have passed away. Nowhere else did he find
scenes and characters so well adapted to his genius. In his mis-
cellaneous works there are many charming essays and passages the
materials for which are drawn from the continent of Europe, from
America and from Polynesia, but they are rather his experiences
as a traveller than his imaginations ; and his biographer rightly
pronounces that " among the work to which Polynesia diverted
his attention there is nothing, as a whole, ranking as quite first-rate
except the £each of Falesa^." Fortunately his exile did not blur
memory, perhaps distance only made it more vivid, and so his
' A Christmas Sermon in Across the Plains.

" Balfour's Life of Stevensofi, ii. 149.
masterpiece was written in a land half a world away from that

where the whaups and plovers were crying.
The stay-at-home critic is probably apt to underrate the merit
of the Pacific stories, The Wrecker (1892) and The Ebb Tide
(1894), because he cannot fully appreciate them as pictures true
to fact and life ; but, according to travellers familiar with the
scenes, Stevenson's work is admirably true ; and he himself
claims, doubtless with justice, that The Beach of Falesa is the
first realistic South Sea story. " You will know more," he
says, "about the South Seas after you have read my little
tale, if you
than had read a library^." Another difficulty,
with regard to the two romances above-named, is that in them
Stevenson was not the sole author he worked in collaboration
:
with his step-son, Mr Lloyd Osbourne. The statement of the

latter, quoted in Mr Balfour's Life of Stevenson, 34, throws a ii.
good deal of light on the question of the respective shares of the

two writers in the joint product. The irresistibly laughable Wrong
Box belongs nearly all to Mr Osbourne ; so do the first four
chapters of The Ebb Tide ; so does much of the best and the —
—
worst of The Wrecher,^-the picnics, Pinkerton, Nares, Captain
Brown, the storm, fight and murders on the Currency Lass.
Much of the credit for the spirit and vivacity of the book must
therefore go from Stevenson while, on the other hand, his name
;
is partly cleared from the stain of the sordid motive of the
murders, which smirches irredeemably the character of Carthew.

Only in part, for the elder man and the more experienced writer
ought to have seen that no plea that the scene is dramatic and
that we are not called upon to approve, can ever palliate the
loathsomeness of murder done in cold blood from a coward fear

for the murderer's own life. There are few motives in fiction so
revolting as this, few scenes so hard to forget and so much better
forgotten.
Even when he merely crossed the Border, in the historical
romance of The Black Arrow (1888), Stevenson lost greatly in
force and vividness. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886) stands in a different category, for it is a conception essen-
1 Vailima Letters, 95.
8lO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
tially independent of time and place. This, by common consent,
is one of Stevenson's greatest achievements ; some would say the
greatest of all. The central idea is not the invention of Steven-
son : no central idea that is worth much ever is invented. The
conception of the double nature is as old as the distinction
between Ormuzd and Ahriman ; but no one before had worked
it out as it is worked out in Jekyll and Hyde, and Stevenson
has that best title to proprietorship which is based upon effective

use " the tools to him who can use them." There is one grave
:
flaw in a story which otherwise would have been almost perfect.

The powder is a crude device from one
for effecting the transition
phase of character to the other. and mechanical,
It is external
whereas the imagination demands something internal and organic.
The author and his friends were fully conscious of the defect.
But Stevenson had dreamed the story, the powder had made a
profound impression upon him in his dream, and we are told that
for this reason it had to remain. But there was probably a pro-
founder reason. The dream, wonderful as it was, was but the
outcome of his waking thoughts. He
had previously spoken to
Mr Andrew Lang about his idea of a tale of " a Man who was
Two Men " ; and Mr Balfour says that Stevenson was " for
a long time casting about for a story to embody ' the con-
ception of the duality of man's nature. Everyone knows how
the problem which has utterly baffled the thinker the evening
before is miraculously solved in the morning. Stevenson's dream
was clearly nothing but an extraordinarily vivid and detailed
instance of this "unconscious cerebration." By its aid he, a
slow and deliberate worker, was enabled to write the first draft
of his story in three days. Doubtless an ingenious man could
imagine other " machinery " for the solution ; but could it be solved
without machinery? If this be possible the subject is still
open, and there may come a work which shall surpass
at last
Hamlet.
Though Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has been spoken of as a story,
it is really an allegory. But Stevenson was a master of the short
story proper. The Pavilion on the Links and Thrawn Janet
have been chosen out once and again as the gems of their class,
THE LATER FICTION 8 II
and if we add The Beach of Falesa, we have a trio which, for merit,
will bear comparison with any, and by their variety illustrate
admirably the range of Stevenson. Dialect, slang and classical
English, the supernatural, the romantic, the realistic, are all there.
But it is not only in a few chosen specimens that Stevenson is
successful ; the difficulty would be to pick out any of his short

stories which does not show high merit. The Body Snaicher itself,
condemned though it was by friendly critics, and even by himself,
is, despite its excess of horror, a well-told tale.
Stevenson has been spoken of above as a slow and deliberate

worker. Assuredly he had not that intellectual abundance with
which Scott and Dickens and a few others among his superiors
have been gifted ; and as a craftsman he had a scrupulous
conscientiousness with which they were not troubled. And yet
his achievements are remarkable in bulk as well as in quality.
The days of hisyears were not threescore years and ten, but only
forty-fourand almost all the time he was fighting against physical
;
weakness and disease. It is astonishing that in so short a time,
amidst such difficulties, notwithstanding his fastidiousness of taste,
he contrived to write the twenty-eight volumes of the Edinburgh

edition. They are in every sense his best monument ; they
enable us best to understand how the owner of that frail body
" laid him down with a will."
To the kailyard school belonged John Watson (1850-1907),
better known as Ian Maclaren, the creator of Drumtochty. Beside
theBonnie Brier Bush (1894) and The Days of Auld Lang Syne
(1895) ^re pleasant, but they are not true to nature. Their unreality
provoked a far more masculine writer, George Douglas Brown
{1S69-1902), whose early death was a serious loss to literature.
His House with the Green Shutters is a grim and powerful book,
whose harsher features are due to reaction against the senti-
mentality of Drumtochty. This revolt drove Brown to excess
on the other side; but had he lived he would have found
some via media ; and the force he showed thus early gave
promise of a great career.
Nothing could illustrate the fallaciousness of an attempt to
bring the fiction of these latter years under any single formula
better than the fact that, as an author, R. L. Stevenson was
contemporary with Joseph Henry Shorthouse (1834-1903)
strictly
for though the latter was some sixteen years older by birth, his first
book was not published till 1881, the year of Virginibus Puerisque.
Shorthouse had a very unusual intellectual history. The author
of works which seem to speak in every page of the student and
the recluse, he was, from the age of sixteen till his health gave
way, a business man in the bustling, highly modern city of
Birmingham. The son of Quaker parents, in an age when men
who changed in faith at all commonly changed to indifference or
to scepticism, he became a convert to High Anglicanism, and in
1 86 1 was baptised together with his wife. Frequently such a
history as this produces a deplorable narrowness of mind ; the con-
vert, proverbially, is more convinced of his own rightness, and
especially of the errors of others, than they who have been born
in the fold. It was not so in the case of Shorthouse ; on the
contrary, he seems have learnt a larger tolerance and a truer
to
liberality from the changes through which he himself had passed.
He speaks in his letters of a girl agnostic, who "died in the
service of God, whom she fancied that she did not know \" and
he thought that the agnostic ought, in certain cases, to share the
communion rite.
The works of Shorthouse are deeply coloured by the writer's
religious opinions : hence, perhaps, undue praise on the one hand,
and some risk of undue depreciation on the other. So few of
the books which are imbued with this devotional and ecclesiastical
spirit can claim to be literature at all, that believers are apt to
make more than enough of the few^ while the unregenerate

are prone to scoff. Shorthouse however suffered little from
depreciation ; he was at once, for the most diverse reasons,
welcomed by a remarkably wide circle. Historians admired the
fidelity of his delineation of the seventeenth century; High
Churchmen were fascinated by a tone of mind so much in

harmony with their own ; lovers of style were attracted by the
melodious English. John Inglesant (1881) was hailed as a work
of genius ; but probably few critics would now commit themselves
1 Life, i. 443.
to the view that either it or any of its successors is destined to take

a place among the classics of English literature.
Shorthouse was essentially a romancer, in this point resembling
Stevenson ; and, even more than Stevenson, he was slow and
scrupulously careful in his manner of work. Thus John Ingle-
sant was about ten years in preparation ; but itmust be remem-
bered that the time devoted to it was only the leisure of a man
whose days were absorbed in business. The points of resemblance
are however only superficial. Stevenson's romance is the romance
is that of thought.
of action, Shorthouse's He calls John Inglesant
"a philosophical romance," and speaks of Sir Ferdval (1886) as
" almost a devotional book." He never wrote without a purpose,
and the purpose is as conspicuous in The Little Schoolmaster
Mark (1885), as it is in the other two. In the case of Shorthouse

the existence of the purpose will probably prevent any revival of
the popularity he once enjoyed. The air of the cloister hangs
about all he wrote, and the only air humanity can permanently
breathe is the free air of heaven. We have not yet moved as far
away from John Inglesant as from The Heir of Redclyffe, but the
former is as little likely as the latter to be hailed again as one of
the great books of the world.
The majority of the other writers of fiction in recent years
must be passed over, though many have done creditable, and
some really able, work. But there remain two who certainly
deserve to survive in memory longer than most. The first of
these Samuel Butler (1835-1902), whose Erewhon; or. Over
is
the Range (1872) and Erewhon Revisited, (1901) are the product
of the genuinely literary qualities of humour and irony, and betray

the hand of the scholar and the thinker; an eccentric scholar, it
is true, as his theory of the feminine authorship of the Odyssey
proved, and a heterodox thinker ; but a man of wide knowledge
and of indubitable power. His strange romances are never likely
to be popular, but the perusal of them will repay all who are
interested in the workings of an original mind. Butler was more
than a romancer. His writings on evolution and his miscellaneous
essays prove him to have been a profound student of the problems
of his time ; and his works of fiction are just the expression of his
philosophy in another form. Erewhon and its sequel are instances
of a species of criticism of society, of which Gulliver's Travels is
the greatest example in English. The species has been popular

in recent years; but few who have attempted it have rivalled
Butler in depth. Still better is The Way of all Flesh, a more
regular novel on which Butler laboured for about twelve years,
finishing it, though he did not pubhsh it, in 1884. For subtlety
of psychological analysis it would be necessary to go back to
George Eliot and Meredith to find Butler's superior. Outside

been nothing in recent years equal to the
their writings there has
study of the Pontifexes. But the very profundity of his thought
has militated, and will militate, against Butler's popularity. His
are not books which he who may
read; and he had not
runs
that power of dramatic presentation which induced " the general
reader " to forgive the thought in George Eliot, and even, up to
a certain point, in Meredith.
Equal independence and strength of mind were shown by
George Gissing (1857-1903), whose literary life was for many
years a struggle against poverty, obstruction and depreciation,
which left traces upon his character and writings that were only
beginning to be obliterated in the closing years of his life. His
earliest works. The Undassed {i&di/^ and Demos (1886), show his
full strength if not all his mature skill ; but they failed to win
popularity, and it was not till the appearance of New Grub Street
(1891) that Gissing began to be recognised as a man to be
reckoned as a force in literature. He himself was not wholly
free from blame. The life he depicted was bare and ugly, and
though he could doubtless have adduced facts in justification of
his harshest scenes, the general impressionwas probably misleading.
His excellent critical study of Charles Dickens (1898), perhaps
the best book ever written about the laureate of the London streets,
indicates whence his inspiration came. But he made the mistake
of omitting altogether that which is present in Dickens even to
excess, the romance and the poetry of poverty. He saw the priva-
tions of the poor, but he was blind and deaf to that which Dickens
never allows his readers to forget, their joyousness. He has
nothing cognate to the happy vagabonds who brighten the pages
of Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop. It is the

customary mistake of the modern delineator of humble life in
great cities. Had Gissing passed through the experiences of the

blacking warehouse, his memory would have retained only the
grief and pain and misery, and all the humour and fun would
have been forgotten. Towards the close Gissing seems to have
become conscious of his mistake, or to have outlived the bitterness
from which it sprang. Of all his works, the greatest, the most
lovable, the most truly human, is The Private Papers of Henry
Ryecroft (1903), in which he, in the most delightful manner, takes
the reader into his confidence, lifts the veil from his inner life,
and adds one more to the list of great autobiographic fictiops.

While the writers who have hitherto been treated wrote
primarily for adults, there has probably been no time in the past
(since those far-off days when the and
traditional nursery stories
fairy tales which the needs of children were so
were invented) in
carefully considered, and were satisfied by work of such high
literary quality. Three writers, Lewis Carroll, Mrs Gatty, and
Mrs Ewing, may be chosen as representatives of the class ; of
whom it is not too much to say that they lifted fiction for children
as high above its former level as Scott lifted fiction for adults.
Of the three, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832— 1898), who

framed his nom de plume out of his two Christian names, was the
most highly gifted. By profession a mathematician, who is said
by experts to have done some valuable original work, Lewis
Carroll combined with his mathematical faculty a quaint humour
and a riotous fancy which have secured him a perfectly safe
position in literature, because his gift is unique. No man is more
original than he. His mathematical work may be forgotten, the
serious verses in Phantasmagoria (1869) are known to com-
paratively few, even the exquisite " Child of the pure unclouded
brow " may be passed over by many in their hurry to get at the
story of Alice passing through the looking-glass ; but the author of

The Walrus and the Carpenter and Jabberwocky, the creator of
Alice and the White Rabbit, the White Knight, the Red Queen,
the Duchess, the Dodo, the Cheshire Cat and a hundred other
strange creatures, is as safe from oblivion as the author of
Gulliver's Travels. Of Lewis Carroll's various works, Alici^s
Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through Looking-Glass the
(187 1) are incomparably the best. No writings were ever more

indubitably the outcome of a native gift. Lewis Carroll was
indefatigable in detail, in polishing the text, in suggestions for the
illustrations; but were the tales which
substantially the tales
welled up spontaneously in his fancy, and which he told to

children of flesh and blood. There is a pretty story related in
Mr CoUingwood's Life of Dodgson which throws light upon his
success. Lewis Carroll had made an appointment to meet a lady

(an artist, successful in the drawing of fairies) in a public place.
They had never met, there was no one to introduce them, and
the lady began to wonder how they were to know each other
among the multitude. Presently a gentleman entered with two
little girls clinging to his hands. He spoke a few words to one of
the children and then at once came forward and introduced him-
self. When the lady asked how he knew her he replied " My :
little friend found you. I told her I had come to meet a young
lady who knew fairies, and she fixed on you at once. But / knew
you before she spoke.'' It is just this vivid sense of the reality
of the unreal which makes Lewis Carroll's books triumphantly

stjccessful, as it is just the absence of it which stamps with the
mark of failure his innumerable imitators, clever as some of them
are. They have not fed on honey-dew, nor drunk the milk of
Paradise. But Lewis Carroll had been thus nourished and had
" known the fairies " from childhood. Like so many remarkable
men—for precocity develops into genius far more often than is
supposed —he showed the bent of his mind at a very early age,
and his ingenuity as a conjurer, his love of marionettes, and above
all of odd pets, including, his biographer says, even snails and
toads, all seem fit and proper characteristics of the creator of
Wonderland.
The other two, Margaret Gatty (1809- 1873) and Juliana
Horatia Ewing (18,^1-1885), afTord one of the rare examples of
talent not only inherited, but almost exactly reproduced. They
were mother and daughter. Mrs Gatty was the daughter of
the Rev. A. J. Scott, Nelson's chaplain on board the Victory,
THE LATER FICTION Si?
and her first literary venture was a volume of recollections

of her father, written in collaboration with her husband. But
the children's tales initiated by Fairy Godmothers and other
Tales (185 r) were the real literary work of her life. Her own
motherhood apparently suggested them to her, and no small part
of the impulse to write them came from the mind of her gifted
little daughter Juliana. The child was a story-teller and a mimic
from infancy, and the title both of Aunt Judy's Tales (1859) and
of Aunt Judy's Magazine, which Mrs Gatty started in 1866 and
edited till her death, were taken from her daughter's nursery
nickname. Of the two ladies, Mrs Ewing had the finer literary
gift. Her, stories are as truly, though not as richly and whimsically,
humorous as Lewis Carroll's, and, like his, they are delightful
alike to children and to their seniors. Her range is fairly wide.
In Madam Liberality she displayed (unconsciously, her sister
says) the gift of self-portraiture. Her We and the World is
perhaps the best book for boys ever written by a woman. It
must have been intuition thit enabled her to realise what she
depicts in it, for her delicate health made anything of the nature
of adventure impossible to her. But she travelled considerably.
Visits to her husband's relatives in the north were the source of
Scotch Stories and Scotch characters, while camp life in Canada
and at Aldershot accounts for that love of things military which
more than once shbws itself in her writings. The best of these,
such as the two named above, The Land of Lost Toys, Jackanapes
ax\AJan of the Windmill, are pieces of genuine literature, so firmly
based on child-nature (which is just human nature in the bud) that
they must rank as classics of their kind. They are moreover
beautifully written. Mrs Ewing's English is based
on the
soundest of maxims —never to use two words where one would
do; and as she wrote with perfect sincerity, and under the
guidance of an instinctive good taste, the result is admirable.
w. 52
PART III
ET CETERA
CHAPTER I
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
§ I. The Historians.
It has been said with truth that, so far as poetry is concerned,

the eighteenth century closes about 1760; for the poet is also
a prophet, and it is his privilege, or his doom, to feel the force of
conceptions which belong rather to the future than to the present
Hence, in part, the difficulty frequently felt by the poet's own
generation in recognising his greatness. But the heavier forms
of literature do not in this way anticipate the course of time.
When the classicism of eighteenth century verse was already
beginning to yield to romance, eighteenth century prose was still
only in mid career. Pope, the incarnation of the former, died in
1744 ; but it was ten years later before the first volume of Hume's
History of England was published,' and more than forty years
later before Gibbon's Decline and Fall was completed. The great
eighteenth century historians helped to fill the gap between the
declining classical school and
immature school of
the still
romance. When the latter school was in seemed

its glory, history
to undergo an eclipse, and it is not till Tennyson and Browning
have begun their career that we meet once more with names
worthy to set beside those of the leaders of an earlier day. But
if the change in spirit between the eighteenth century and the
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 819
nineteenth was later in coming, when it did come it was not less
striking in history than in poetry. Indeed, it might plausibly be

contended that at least the sense of change in the latter depart-
ment is less profound than it is in the former. Not even the
most pronounced of romanticists would ever have ignored Pope
in treating of English poetry ; but while in the beginning of the
nineteenth century Hume, Robertson and Gibbon were among
the authors " whom no gentleman's library should be without,"
in its cldsing quarter Huxley, in one of the best books ever
written upon Hume, passed over the celebrated History of
England with little comrnent. Even Huxley would hardly have
ventured to ignore a work so famous had he not been conscious
that the feeling of his contemporaries was on his side. Not only
did, that sentiment condemn all eighteenth century historians,
with the exception of Gibbon, but, as we see in J. Cotter
lôrison's monograph on Macaulay, it was disposed to include in
the black list many of the earlier nineteenth century writers as
well. The "blessed word" science had been pronounced, and

all histories which had the disadvantage of being indubitably
pieces of literature were under suspicion. There are however
curious inconsistencies in Cotter Morison's treatment. Carlyle
passes muster, though he is disturbingly literary and would
certainly have drpwned in a deluge of contempt the doctrine that
history is " science."
So does Grote ; and though Grote had a
saving clumsiness which might procure his acquittal on the first
count, he was hardly less a partisan than Mitford, and was quite
as blind to the virtues of those who were not democrats as
Macaulay was to the merits of the Tories.
Itis not altogether easy to say wherein the difference consists
which is felt to separate thus widely the works of eighteenth
century historians from those of their successors ; but two or

three suggestions may be made towards an explanation. In the
first place, nearly all the historical work of the nineteenth century
is permeated with the idea of nationality; and it is significant
.that The Decline and Fall, the one work of the eighteenth century
which is still accepted, is just that into which, from the nature qf
the subject, the question of nationality scarcely enters. Had
52—2
Gibbon's theme been, not the world-wide Roman Empire, but the
story of some single people, would even his thoroughness have
sufficed to make his treatment of it satisfactory a century after his
death? Between him and his successors the' French Revolution
had intervened, asserting the right of each people, as of each
man, to grow freely in its own way. Down to that time mediaeval
theories of a universal empire and a universal church had
continued to sway thought, although the facts which originally
justifiedthem had long been changed. The nineteenth century
had up a German nation and an Italian nation, as well
to build
as to remodel France, to incorporate into its system an amorphous
Russia, and to witness the partial disintegration of the Austrian
Empire, because it was in conflict with the conception of nationality.
The men who had such problems to solve and who saw such changes
taking place could live no longer in the atmosphere of mediaeval
political thought. In science it is the new men, but in history
the old, who are uniformitariahs. The new school emphasises
differences which were previously dismissed as of secondary
moment or wholly ignored. Racial and national peculiarities
acquire an importance they never had before. In no previous
age, either in the political field or in the literary, do we hear so
much about the characteristics of the Celt ; at no period prior to
the Victorian era would it have been possible for a great historian
to " see all things in Teutonism, as Malebrandie saw all things

in God."
A historian who holds that the differences between the
political and social
systems institutions of one nation and
those of another are more or less fortuitous and superficial will
naturally attach far less importance to certain lines of investigation
and groups of facts than another who believes that these differ-
ences indicate deep-seated and enduring varieties of character.
Hume would have deemed it waste of time to spend years of
patient investigation in attempting to trace the steps by which the
English nation emerged from barbarism : in his view civilised
man only, and not the barbarian, was Worthy of attention. But
the barbarian becomes important when we conceive him to be
organically related to civilised man and this too is part of
;
the modern conception. The nation is the outcome of a long

process of development and the rude beginnings of customs and
;
institutions acquire a new meaning from the fact that they are the
germs from which springs the elaborate organisation of the
civilised community. The idea of evolution began to be applied,
tentatively, spasmodically, blunderingly, in history before it had
yet triumphed in science ; but after that triumph the power
of the idea and the confidence of those who used it were
enormously increased. And here we see a second point of
difference between the historical work of the eighteenth century
and that of the nineteenth, which, in its later stages fully and
consciously, in its earlier phases partially and unconsciously, is
guided by the idea of evolution. As a natural consequence, nine-

teenth century history is marked, just like evolutionary science,
by the attempt to trace things back to their origin. The concern

of the biologist with the amoeba and with protoplasm corresponds
with the interest of the modern historian in village communities
and in early land systems. There are divers kinds of micro-
scopes, and multifarious are their uses.
Connected with, but distinguishable from, thiSj is the profound
respect for fact in modern history. Here the example and ttie
mfluence of physical science have been paramount. An examina-
tion of its method shows that the root-principle is a scrupulous
respect for facts as facts; and the record of its triumphs is an
ample vindication of the method. The lesson, applied to history,
has led to the attempt to make a thorough and exhaustive investi-
gation of documents, and to the accumulation of vast piles of raw
material, which are to form the foundation for some great induc-
tion of the future. Yet, as the piles grow, the question whence
the colossal genius is to come who shall evolve order out of this
chaos presses more and more, and the doubt suggests itself
whether the modern historian is not a little like the modern

millionaire, who is worn and harassed by the custody of wealth far
beyond his capacity to use or enjoy. In some respects, modern
historical work seems to stand intermediate between the facile
theorising of the eighteenth century and the dryness of the old
chronicle ; and its aspiration is after the latter model rather than
the former. The fact is supposed to be all the better if it is
" hard," and the enquirer sometimes forgets that a " hard " fact
in human relations means only a fragment of a fact. We can

imagine the chronicler recording the funeral of the Duke of
Wellington :
" November i8, 1852. This day was the Duke of
Wellington buried in St Paul's Cathedral. Cannons were fired,
and great crowds were in the streets." That is the " hard ". fact.
Tennyson tells the story too. He does not even give the date,
and he gives much that is not " hard " and, in a sense, is not " fact
at all. His majestic pageant of the life of the great Duke, the
vision of the spirit of the " mighty seaman " by whose side he is
to sleep till the trump of doom, the nation's lament that " the last
great Englishman is low," —
these call up the emotions rather than
the "hard facts" of that great scene. And yet who Can doubt which
of the two records contains the greater truth ? Similarly, we can
imagine an Athenian chronicler recording that Socrates, condemned
on a specified charge, on a certain day drank a cup of hemlock.
Of the same events Plato has left an account "touched with
emotion ; and even if it could be shown that Plato's account
''
came solely from his own imagination, it would remain true in a

far deeper sense than the bare narrative of the chronicler. The
modern historian feels convinced that many of the speeches in
Thucydides could never have been spoken by the men to whom
he ascribes them; and yet the modern historian would be far
poorer if Thucydides had contented himself with recording the
" hard fact " that at such-and-such a time and place such-and-such
events happened. It is tolerably certain that the fateful pause

of Caesar on the banks of the Rubicon never took place, and we
no longer intermingle our imagination with the facts in that
particular way ; and yet it was not only a vivid dramatic instinct,
but an essentially sound historical one, that inspired that famous
scene.
The task of a perfect philosophy; it has been said, would be
to re-think the great thought of creation. The task of a perfect
history would be to re-think the thoughts as well as to record the
actions of those who have made history ; and they are, not merely
soldiers and statesmen, but all mankind. Hence the, illusoriness
of the so-called " hard " Even science has to discover that fact
fact.
is only important as it work of intelligence, and

leads to law, the
that he who accumulates facts is the mere " hodman " to him
who can piece them together and make a dwelling cottage, —
or mansion, or palace^-for the spirit. Eighteenth century
historians made a grave mistake in neglecting to look to the
'
solidity of their foundation; but they were not wrong in their

conviction that the building was a greater thing than the pile of
bricks. Nineteenth century historians have been careful of the
foundation, but, in some cases at least, they have been neglectful
of the superstructure. The analogy of physical science has had
an influence not altogether wholesome.
•
It has encouraged a
mistaken belief, in the first place, that the historical fact may be
" isolated " or abstracted as successfully as the chemical fact ; and,
in the second place, that " hard " facts thus " isolated " may be
recombined with results comparable in accuracy with those of
physical science. But in truth, whatever the future may have in
store, it is certain that as yet there is no such thing as a science
of human characterand as human character is the raw material
;
out of which history is made, the attempt to bring it under the
category of science seems at least premature.

These tendencies and characteristics manifest themselves,
probably without the knowledge of the writers, in some of the
minor historians of the time. The new interest in the beginnings
of things, for example, is' seen in the rise of the study both of
Old English as a language and of the early English as a people ;
whereby the foundations were laid for that pronounced Teutonism

which was one of the most conspicuous marks of the English
historians a little later. Sharon Turner (1768-1847), in his
History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799-1805), was a pioneer; and
experts are agreed that- in this early work he was happier and
showed greater mastery than iii the subsequent writings in which
he carried down the history of England, first through the middle
ages,and then to the death of Elizabeth. Turner has long been
superseded ; but they who have gone beyond him traversed first
the' road which he had 'made. Among those who followed in his
footsteps were J. M. Kemble (1807-1857), author of The Saxons
in England (1849), and Sir Francis Palgrave (1788-1861) who, as
deputy-keeper of the Records, had much todo with rendering
accessible that immense mass of state documents with the help
of which the history of England has been largely rewritten. But
Palgrave was more than a diligent and careful editor, he was also
the author of a series of original works elucidating chiefly the
early history of England, and culminating in the History of Nor-
mandy and of England (1851-1864), in which he showed a rare
combination of wide reading with the talent for generalisation.
Freeman declared that, as the man who discovered that the
Roman Empire did not, end in 476 A.D., Palgrave deserved a
place among the foremost of historians ; and it is at least
undeniable that he who corrected the views of historians on a
point of such vital moment as this had used his learning to good
purpose and deserves to be held in grateful memory.
In close connexion with the study of early English history
went the study of the early forms of the language. For the
eighteenth century, English literature began with Chaucer, as it
may almost be said that English history began with the Conquest.
The nineteenth century pushed the date back in both cases by
centuries. Beowulf became the starting-point instead of The
Canterbury Tales ; and, as neither the writings nor the events of
those early centuries could be understood without the study of
what was practically another language,, philological investigations
in Old English went hand-in-hand with the study of the early
English period. Kemble did linguistic as well as historical work;
editing and and also the poetry of the Codex

translating Beowulf,
Vercellensis.Joseph Bosworth wrote a grammar and compiled
a dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon language. Benjamin Thorpe
laboured in the same field, though in such a way as to have
incurred the censure of others who have followed him. J. R.
Giieen roundly pronounces him "a dishonest old man^" In a
later stage of the- language, and also at a somewhat later date,
learning is best represented by the works of the
philological
accompUshed Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1886), who was
a good, though not a great, artist in words, as wfeU as their historian.
^ Letters, 144.
Trench's best and most widely-known works are the two volumes
on the English language, On the Study of Words (1851) and
English, Past and Present (1855). These have the rare merit
of presenting real learning in an attractive form, and, either
directly, or through "conveyances" effected from them to other
works which are at least more ponderous, they have probably
done more than any other volumes ever written to spread a
knowledge of the history of English. Philology was in those days
something of a hobby of the man of letters, and among those who
showed the tendency as well as Trench may be mentioned
George Borrow, and, in a rather eccentric way, William Barnes,
the Dorset poet.
Philology however is essentially a science "made in Ger-
many." Inspiration in the early period came from the great
Grimm ; and it was not unfitting that in later days the chief
honours should have fallen to a countryman of Grimm's,
Friedrich Max coming to England in
Miiller (1823-1900), who,
1846, learnt to wield the language of his adopted country with a
grace and elegance never surpassed by any man of foreign birth.
He covered a field incomparably wider than that of scholars like
Trench. His was the science of comparative philology. His
domain was the whole of human speech, especially the Aryan
family of languages, and, above all, Sanskrit. But, besides this, he
was a student of comparative mythology, of the origin and growth
of religion and of the science of thought, on all of which subjects
he wrote books. In popular estimation he was the embodiment
of learning, vast, varied and profound. In the estimation of
scholars he never ranked so high as this, and in his later years
his reputation decidedly declined. To some extent their de-
preciatory criticisms must be: discounted. In Max Miiller's case,
just as in the case of Huxley, the bemuddled and the dull found
it difficult to believe that wit and lucidity need not necessarily
connote shallowness. Allowance must be made too for a touch

of envy of a man who was so extraordinarily successful. For
Max Miiller was one of those who are gifted with the power
—
of charming ajl sorts and conditions of men except their rivals.
Few men of letters have received more ample recognition.
Every nation of the West delighted to honour him, and when
the Japanese sent envoys to Europe in search of a religion,
they went to Max Miiller for advice. In the University of
Tokio they have given a final home to the library he collected.'
There is something almost portentous in such a capacity for
winning distinction. Those who stood more or less near to
Max Miiller felt, rightly, that it was not solely
in scholarship
due to those merits which are called " solid," and they were
.
inclined, more questionably, to deny that the tact which re-

inforced them was only one merit the more. That tact never
failed Max Miiller he always knew how to do the right thing at
:
the right moment. He was one of the most alert of men^—

perhaps the most alert of great scholars, a tribe rather remarkable
for being a year or two, if not a generation or two, behind the
time. Not so Max Miiller. A few years after his settlement in
England the Crimean war broke out, and immediately he was in
the field with his Languages of the Seat of War in the East (1855).
Arid so it was to the end. No great event occurred, no questioh
'
was broached which interested the public mind, but he brought it,
if by any ingenuity the thing could be done, into relation with his
studies. A man with so much of the wisdom of the world was

a strange phenomenon among scholars, and they resented the
intrusion without well knowing why.
The depreciation referred to cannot, however, be altogether
explained away in tliis fashion. It seems certain that, in his
latdr years. Max Miiller showed a want of intellectual flexibility
which was astonishing in such a man. He clung to old views

with a tenacity which is not suggestive of the mental alertness
just spoken of, but which may, perhaps, be explained on the
ground that he attempted to do too much, and so failed to give
adequate consideration to new evidence. It is probable also that,
from the first, he had a higher genius for popularising than for
profound research. In Short, he had the defects of his qualities.
Some of his generalisations are certainly a little shallow. Nearly
all critics are agreed that he puts upon the sun-myth a burden
greater than it will bear ; and his attempt, when Darwinism was
new, to erect language into an impassable bai'rier between the
brute and man showed a very inadequate appreciation of the

problem. But when all deductions are made, the man who
could write upon an abstruse subject with such life and charm,
who could interest so many, who contrived to do so much to-
wards breaking down the barriers between East and West,
deserved all the honours that were showered upon him; and
if we could wish a change it would be that others might be
levelled up to him, not that he might be brought down to their

obscurity.
The philologists have led to a digression from the historians,
to whom it is necessary to return. Those who have hitherto been
mentioned were of secondary importance : the man who at the
beginning of the period stood highest in reputation, and whose
work was of most permanent value, was Henry Hallam (1777-
1859), author of ^ View of the State of Europe during the Middle
Ages (1818), The Constitutional History of England (1827) and
An Intt-odudion to the Literature of Europe (1837-1839). And
in this instance the order of time is probably also the order of
merit. For two reasons the Introduction' to the Literature of
Europe is the least satisfactory of Hallam's works. In the first
place, it is too ambitious. No man could have dealt adequately

with such a subject ;and Hallam, whose knowledge even of
English writers was rather extensive and general than profound,
was not accomplished as a linguist to be altogether
sufficiently
successful. But a graver reason is that he was singularly deficient

in one of the most essential qualities of a critic sympathy. He —
was " judicial," as nearly all who have written about him point
ovit^ but sympathetic he was not. Nothing stirred him to
enthusiasm, and he saw defects more clearly and more rapidly
thari merits: "he is a judge," Macaulay wrote of him, "but a
hanging judge." It is also clear that to certain forms of literary

merit he was altogether blind. Whatever was neat in form and
' A remarkable illustration of the force of contemporary prejudice is the fact

that,while Macaulay in The Edinburgh Review was praising The Constitutional
History of England 3S "the most impartial book that we ever read," Southey
in The Qitarteflyvr^s doing the duty of a sound Tory and pronouncing it " the
prpduction of a decided partisan."
lucid in meaning, whatever was weighty and dignified, whatever
appealed to the reason and would bear its scrutiny, he appreciated.
But he was often alienated by passion, he was apt to undervalue
and more fanciful kinds of verse, he was wholly unable
the lighter
to understand mysticism. In short, as a critic he belonged rather
to the eighteenth than to the nineteenth century.
Hallam's work too is a link between the two
historical
centuries. Heshowed a readiness to undertake vast subjects

which betokened the spirit of an earlier time, when a man could
take all knowledge for his province; and yet he combined with
this an amount of original research, a patience with documents
and a sense of the importance of fresh knowledge, which belonged

to the new generation. He is in some danger of undue
depreciation, because others have done more thoroughly what
he did first. His picture of the middle ages is drawn from
sources which no one had examined till he pointed them
out. His treatment of the English constitution too was fresh.
But it has grave defects. Hallam had too much belief in
mechanisiri and too little in men he and Carlyle stood at opposite
:
poles. How much is lost in this way is seen if we compare

Hallam with Bagehot, who never forgets that a machine worked
by a being with nerves and emotions is a different thing from one
which runs automatically. Further, the impartiality for which
Hallam was celebrated can only be acknowledged with reserva-
tions. He was absolutely fair in intention ; but no less than
other writers he carried his prepossessions with him and inter-
preted his facts by them. His five checks are really the principles
of the Whig party, and when they are granted Whig conclusions
necessarily follow. He puts a hundred-weight in one scale, and
then manifests the utmost scrupulosity in balancing the ounces
and the grains.
The value of an impartiality thus conditioned may reasonably
be doubted, and all the more so because of the manifest dis-
advantages of such a temperament. Few men give a stronger

impression of austerity and coldness than Hallam. His judg-
ments, as Macaulay's remark suggests, are seldom favourable.
" We live in a damned wicked world," said Sir Peter Teazle, "and
the fewer we praise the better " ; and Hallarn seems to have been
of his mind. Not that heoften unreservedly condemnatory his
is :
irripartiality rather takes the form of showing that " black's not so
blackj^nor white so very white." The universal grey becomes
wearisome, and we welcome as a relief the vivid colours of Carlyle,
the strong antitheses of Macaulay, or the vigorous whitewashing of
Froude. Hallam's work seems to come from the pen of a recluse
who has been so busy exercising his head that he has found no
time to develop a heart And yet Hallam was neither heartless
nor a recluse. On the contrary, he was familiar, through Holland
House, with the best society of London, was one of the most
brilliant talkers of the brilliant group gathered there, and had
sharpened his judgment in frequent conversation with statesmen
and men of the world.
While impartiality; might be called the foible of Hallam,
partisanship was a very necessity of the position of the Catholic
historian, John Lingard (1771-1851), author of Antiquities of the
Anglo-Saxon Church (1806) and of a History of England (1819-
1830) which carries down the narrative to the Revolution of
1689. A Catholic by birth and trained at Douay, it was im-
possible for Lingard to be absolutely unbiassed ; indeed, his chief
motive in writing the history of England was that he might
present the case of his own communion. The firmest Protestant,
however, must admit that it is probable, or, rather, certain a priori,
that the beaten party must have a case to present and is only too
likely to have suffered more or less injustice at the hands of their
triumphant atitagonists. It is to Lingard's credit that he has
advocated the cause of the Romanists on the whole moderately

and well. Macaulay quotes him as an unwilling witness to illus-
own view of the character of James II. It is true that in
trate his
doing so he describes Lingard as " an able but partial writer "

and the words are fully justified ; but the fact that the passage
existed goes toshow that in a crucial case Lingard had given an
honest account. More convincing is the fact that the historian
incurred in about equal measure the condemnation of extremists
on both sides. His work may be regarded as one of the English
documerits in that Catholic revival which has been dealt with
elsewhere ; but of course it was Lingard's object to conceal this
purpose as completely as possible.

It is however in Carlyle and Macaulay that we first find the
characteristics of the nineteenth century historian fully developed
and on the great scale. The former was so large a figure, and
touched Victorian many points, that it has been
literature at so
necessary to treat him elsewhere ; the latter won fame earlier and
more easily, but is not so indispensable to a comprehension of
the literature of the time. As a historian, Thomas Babington
Macaulay (1800-1859) was remarkably fortunate in the circum-
stances of his life. He grumbles occasionally in his letters and
diary at the chains and fetters of office and at the inroads upon
his time made by the House of Commons ; and probably he spent
too much of his life as an active politician. But his sober judg-
ment about the influence of public life and experience upon the
historian is given in the essay on Sir James Mackintosh's History
of the Revolution, where he quotes with approval Gibbon's remark

that he owed part of his success as a historian to his experience in
the Militia and in the House of Commons. Judged on this
principle, Macaulay's own life was as well adapted for the pro-
duction of great historical work as any ever lived by an English-
man. Hehad leisure for research, and yet from boyhood he was
interested in and familiar with the practical handling of great
public questions. His father, Zachary Macaulay, a man of
austere and lofty character, was one of that inner circle through
whose persistent labours and self-sacrifice the cause of the West
Indian slaves was fought and won. Zachary Macaulay had
acquired his knowledge of the slave system as manager of an
estate in Jamaica, and that knowledge induced him to give up
a lucrative career in order that he might devote himself heart and
soul to the interests of the unhappy slaves. The son of such a
man grew up in an atmosphere of devotion to public duty and of
ceaseless labour for objects entirely unselfish.
Socially, the Clapham sect were plain middle-class people, but
through Wilberforce, the friend of Pitt, they had contact with the
upper ranks of politics and society. Young Macaulay repeatedly
heard Wilberforce talk of Pitt and the House of Commons, and a
passage in the essay on Warren Hastings, describing the Prime

Minister's extraordinary change of front with respect to the ques-
tion of impeachment, is obviously drawn from his remembrance
of these conversations. Intellectuallyj the friends of Zachary
Macfiulay were powerful, but somewhat narrow. They cared
little for the elegancies of culture. In religion they were intensely
evangelical. Possibly young Macaulay would have been narrowed
and stunted if he had remained long within the exclusive influence
of this sect. But, going into residence at Cambridge in 18 18, he
was fortunate enough to find himself the contemporary of a
number of young men not unworthy to measure themselves
against him. Among those who afterwards achieved some degree
of literary fame were John Moultrie, Winthrop M- Praed and the
two Coleridges, Derwent and Henry Nelson, inheritors both of a
great name and of a share of the genius which seems to be the
birthright of that wonderful family. From these men Macaulay
learned that there were many ways of looking at great problems,
and was saved from the danger of passing through life with the
stamp of Clapham too visibly branded upon him.
It was not however by budding men of letters that the
youthful society of the University was led. The predominant
undergraduates was political, and their
interest of the cleverest
acknowledged chief was Charles Austin, " the only man who ever
dominated Macaulay," but one who, unhappily for his own per-
manent fame, contented himself with the worldly rewards of an
early and extraordinary success at the bar. The ambition of
these brilliant young men was to use for politics the literary gifts
which they undoubtedly possessed.
; This was true not only of
and of Praed
Austin, but to a considerable extent of Macaulay,
and Henry Nelson Coleridge as well.
Charles Austin had already either imbibed from his elder
,
brother, the wellrknown jurist, or developed for himself, Utilitarian

opinions,and was imbued with the political principles of the philo-
sophical Radicals. He greatly admired the democratic institutions
of America, and he disapproved of the aristocratic and ecclesiastical
elements in the English system. These were the subjects of
formal debates, and of innumerable informal conversations as
the young men walked along the Trumpington road, or strolled
about the beautiful lawns that slope down to the Cam, or
sat over their College fires. Austin taught Macaulay to look no
longer through Tory spectacles and to consider himself a Radical.
He felt sure he would' never be a Whig.It is amusing to re-
member that ere many gone he was one of the ttiost
years were
eflScient critics of the philosophical Radicals, and that he was
destined to be the greatest of all panegyrists of the Whigs " he :
looked out upon the world, and behold, only the Whigs were
good^"
Fate dealt rather unkindly with this brilliant band. H. N.
Coleridge, the most gifted of the Coleridge family in that genera-
tion, with the possible exception of the hapless Hartley, and '
Praed, the wit and poet, were cut off before they had readhed the
fulness of their powers. Charles Austin sought for wealth only
Moultrie and Derwent Coleridge belong to the lower ranks of
literature ; and there remains only Macaulay to represent in its
higher walks a society in which he was not the first.
It is easy to trace in Macajulay's writings the operation of the

forces brought to bearupon him in his youth. Though he soon
ceased to be " dominated" by Austin, the essay on Bacon bears
the mark of Austin's influence in its laudation of the "philosophy
of fruit" and the effect of the political atmosphere which he had
;
breathed both at home and' at the University is traceable all
through his career, traceable the more plainly because his native
tendency was so decisively to literature. There is sound self-
knowledge in the beautiful verses composed after his defeat at
Edinburgh, in which he depicts himself as deserted by the
Queens of Power and Wealth and Fashion, but still comforted by
the "glorious Lady with the eyes of light," who had cheered the
exile of Hyde, the captivity of Raleigh and the disgrace of Bacon.
Yet this typical man of letters was, through the greater part of his
life, a busy politician, though he felt all the time that the days
and the nights spent in the House of Commons were lost to
literature.
Soon after he left Cambridge Macaulay was called to the bar
' Birrell's' Obiter Dicta.
but he had begun even earlier his true career as a man of letters.
Twice the prize for an English poem was adjudged to him.
While he was still at the University he wrote for Knighfs
Quarterly Magazine, and shortly after he went down there
appeared, in 1825, his first contribution to The Edinburgh Review,
the essay on Milton, which won him a fame almost as sudden
and as dazzling as that which Byron won by Childe Harold. It
was the beginning of a connexion which lasted for nearly twenty
years,and which has enriched English literature with a number
of compositions among the most lively and readable, and on the
whole among the most valuable, of their kind. It also opened to
Macaulay the door of politics. In 1830 he entered the House of
Commons as member for Calne, and as that thing which, so brief
a time before, he had been certain he would never be, a Whig.
His power as a speaker soon raised him into prominence.
But he was poor, and in consequence was glad to accept a
seat on the Supreme Council of India. He left England
in 1834 and returned in 1838. He had attained his end, and,
though far from rich, had saved enough to be henceforward
independent.
Macaulay's years in India were years of strenuous work, one
product of which ranks among the greatest of his claims to the
respect and gratitude of his countrymen. It was he who drafted
the Indian Penal Code, which, revised by his successors, came
into operation in 1862. His biographer, who in this matter spoke
"that he did know,'' says of it that the younger Indian civilians
" carry it about in their saddle-bags, and the older in their heads";
and one of Macaulay's successors on the Supreme Council,

Fitzjames Stephen, bears emphatic testimony to the thoroughness
of the work and the extraordinary grasp it shows of criminal law.
On the other hand, we are just beginning to understand the evil
of Macaulay's influence on Indian education ; for, like most of his
contemporaries, he had an overweening confidence in the wisdom
of the West, and did not adequately appreciate the enormous
difficulty of replacing an ancient civilisation by another, better in
many respects certainly, yet possibly not in all.
After his return to England Macaulay again appeared in the

w. 53
at
House of Commons, and attained cabinet rank as Secretary
gained as
War. At the same time he resumed the place he had
society of
one of the most prominent figures in the intellectual
of Samuel
London. He was a frequent guest at the breakfasts
Rogers and the dinners of Holland House, and was famous
every-
where for the brilliancy and copiousness of his talk. The

impres-
sion produced depended in a considerable measure upon the
character and the mood of the listener ; but there is a noticeable
difference in the references made by diarists and memoir writers

which indicates that, as years went on, a change came over
Macaulay himself. In his early years, Charles Greville nearly
dropped from his chair in astonishment when he accidentally
discovered that the "lump of ordinary clay" beside him was
Macaulay; and when Carlyle was told who it was who had
monopolised the conversation, he held up his hands with the
exclamation, " Eh the Honourable Tom
! was that the Honour-
!
able Tom ? " The plainness and clumsiness remained to the last,
but they were half hidden by the tact of the man of the world,
and observers saw, or persuaded themselves that they saw, the
evidences of distinction before they knew the man.
Macaulay's political life lasted for about ten years after his
return from India. His defeat at Edinburgh in 1847 led to his
resigning office, and although he again sat in the House of

Commons from 1852 to 1856, he no longer took an active part in
politics, but devoted himself more and more to literature. In
1857 he became Baron Macaulay of Rothley, and two years later
he died.
y/ Macaulay was first and chiefly a student of history and
literature. His writings, his letters, his diaries, everywhere bear
witness to his extraordinary passion for reading. He marvels at
his own persistency in devouring bad novels. He read over and
over again books which he already knew perfectly. He said, and
it was no idle boast, that if Paradise Lost were destroyed, he
could restore it from memory ; yet he continued to read Mijton.
From his Indian notes we learn that he had read Plautus four
times within a little more than two years. There is a record of a
fifth and sixth reading in the latter years of his life; and how
many more there may have been before and between, who can
tell? He
seems to have been mastered by his passion for the
printed page ; and we can hardly doubt that it would have been
better for him had he spent in quiet thought some of those
hours which he devoted to this reiterated reading of familiar
books. What he lacks is not breadth of information but depth
of reflection.
Lord Houghton in a happy antithesis calls Macaulay " a great
historical oratorand oratorical historian," and one of the ablest of
his critics, R. C. Jebb, endorses this view in the contention that
the writings of Macaulay are all oratorical in principle. It is, in
truth, the fundamental fact about him. The historical element in
his speeches is manifest. Though they were remarkably successful
as speeches, and though " the house hushed itself to hear him even
when Stanley was the cry," yet they do not impress the reader as
the utterances of a born orator, like the speeches of John Bright,
or the fragments which have survived from those of Chatham.
Neither was their effect the kind of effect which was produced by
Sheridan. They are unmistakably the product of the mind from
which proceeded the essays, and their most noteworthy feature is
the skill and the inexhaustible fertility shown in the use of

historical illustrations. Their best passages might be closely
paralleled from the more brilliant of the essays, out of which,
with trifling changes, most effective speeches might be con-
structed. Even
The History of England the oratorical founda-
in
tion is and the popularity of the Lays of Ancient Rome
manifest ;
for public recitation shows that the same quality underlies the
verse of Macaulay as well.

But while Houghton was right in insisting upon the intimate
relation, in the case of Macaulay, between the talent for history
and the gift of oratory, it would be a great mistake to put the two
upon the same level. Macaulay well knew where his own strength
lay, though perhaps he was not quite so well aware what were his
limitations. "I am nothing," he says, "if not historical"; and

the truth of this judgment is impressed upon the reader in
everything he ever wrote or said. It is possible to imagine the
history, and the essays, and the laySj cast in a less rhetorical
53—2
mould ; but take away the historical element from them or from
the speeches, and there is scarcely anything left. Nowhere is the
predominance of the historical spirit more marked than in the
essays reprinted from The Edinburgh Review. They were pub-
lished under the title of Critical and Historical Essays, but the
critical element in them is slight. The reproach sometimes
directed against Macaulay on this ground is needless ; for there is
no disguise about his method, and a man is not to be blamed for
not doing that which he never attempted to do, and which his
readers assuredly neverdemanded of him. Montagu's edition of
the works of Bacon became the occasion for a brilliant disquisition
on the life and philosophy of the great Lord Chancellor. The
poet Campbell edited two volumes on Frederick the Great and
his Times. In the first paragraph of Macaulay's essay on
Frederick a compliment is paid to the author of Lochiel and
Hohenlinden, and the last contains a suggestion of a possible
second essay on the subject when the Memoirs are completed.
All between is Macaulay upon Frederick the Great. Such essays
are not, in any real sense, reviews ; and they are to be judged, not
as criticisms of books, but by the value of the materials they

contain, and by the brilliancy, vigour and skill with which those
materials are handled.
Macaulay had no ambition to vindicate for himself a place
Wordsworth and Coleridge had proved
in the ranks of critics.
that great poets, and Carlyle that a great historian, could
contribute vitalising principles to literary criticism. Macaulay
neither did nor attempted to do anything of the sort. Not that
he was by any means destitute of critical power. The essay on
Montgomery showed that he could manage the destructive method
prevalent in the early part of the century as well as the best of its
professors ; on Madame d'Arblay

there are passages in the essays
and Addison which display a genuine critical gift ; and while no
competent judge accepts Macaulay's estimate of the Baconian
philosophy, his treatment of the essays in their Uterary aspect has
never been surpassed. Passages like these, however, are ex-
ceptions to the rule. Unlike Matthew Arnold, who remains
a critic even in his poetry, Mac^.ulay loves to evade the task
of literary analysis, and to treat the subject from the historian's

point of view instead.
But though it is not necessary to say much about Macaulay
some points in the Essays may be noted for the insight
as a critic,
they afford into the man. And first, perhaps, the essential con-
servatism of judgment which he displays. He threw off political
Toryism, but not literary Toryism. He never displays en-
thusiasm for any writer whose methods are irreconcilable with
those sanctioned by time. Voracious reader as he was, the
number of references contemporary authors, either in his
to
writings or in his journals, is singularly small. He was later than
others in coming under the new influences which moulded his
generation. He had still to learn German on his return voyage
from India, and he did so with, "a sort of presentiment, a kind of
admonition of the Deity, which assures me that the final cause of
—
my existence, the end for which I was sent into this vale of
tears, —
was to make game of certain Germans'." Possibly the
time spent in the readings of Plautus might have been better
bestowed on a reading of Goethe. Here is one of the numerous
points of contrast between Macaulay and Carlyle. The latter was
emphatically of the romantic school. He was Teutonic rather
than classic in his tastes and sympathies, and he found spiritual
nurture in Scandinavian rather than in Greek mythology. He
was therefore a force tending towards change, possibly revolution,
in literature as in other things. Macaulay, on the contrary, was
classic, not romantic, Latin, not Teutonic. Rudeness repelled him,
and the earnestness which sometimes accompanies rudeness brought
him no adequate compensation, as it did to Carlyle. In English
literature it was the men with a classical bent who attracted him,
Milton more than Shakespeare, Addison far more than the incom-
parably greater Carlyle. It is this which makes Macaulay less
alien than Carlyle from the French mind. "To reach the
English intellect," says Taine, "a Frenchman must make two
voyages. When he has crossed the first interval, which is wide,
he comes upon, Macaulay. Let him re-embark ; he must accom-
plish a second passage, just as long, to arrive at Carlyle for
' Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay, i. 460.
instance, —a mind fundamentally Germanic, on the genuine
English soil'."
Another characteristic which Essays is

strikes the reader of the
the almost complete absence of the speculative Macaulay spirit.
thought that history ought to contain a philosophic element, and

it is a tribute to his power that by his criticism he convinced
John Stuart Mill of the inadequacy of James Mill's political

theories. But, notwithstanding this isolated success, Macaulay
himself was essentially unphilosophical. It has been said that no
one has ever understood metaphysics who never doubted the
of matter.
reality What Macaulay doubted was rather the reality
of ideas and here we touch another of the contrasts between
;
him and Carlyle. To the latter, the whole earth is but the
embodiment of an idea, and in all the works and contrivances of
man what is important is the thought in accordance with which
they have been shaped. Macaulay, on the other hand, lays stress
rather upon the contrivance itself than upon the thought behind it.
His favourite illustrations to prove the advance of mankind and
the superiority of the nineteenth century to earlier times are
mechanical. His whole treatment of the Baconian "philosophy
of fruit " is tainted with a shallow materialism. The contrast he
draws between Bacon and a man still greater, Aristotle, would
have been impossible to anyone with a comprehension either of
the method or of the aim of philosophy. It is questionable
whether any man who ever lived has produced so much " fruit " as
Aristotle; and the fact that Macaulay could choose him to
illustrate the unfruitfulness of the speculative life betrays a weak-
ness which was bound to mar much of his work, even when he
was not consciously and explicitly discussing philosophical
problems. And the danger of contemporary criticism is well
illustrated by the fact that the essay in which this gigantic
blunder is committed was received at the time almost as an
inspired production. "What mortal," writes Jeffrey to Macvey
Napier, " could ever dream of cutting out the least particle of this
precious work, to make it fit better into your Review ? It would
be worse than paring down the Pitt Diamond to fit the old setting
^ English LiUrature, translated by Van Laun, iv. 284.
of a Dowager's ring. Since Bacon himself I do not know that

there has been anything so fine^."
Macaulay was a severe judge of his own Essays. Some of
them were, he thought, immature ; and many had been written in
haste and without that care which a conscientious writer gives
when he feels that he is writing for future times as well as for the
present He collected and published them under a kind of
compulsion. Students of the present day are conscious in
addition of defects of which Macaulay himself was not aware.
Some of the most brilliant of the Essays are, in the judgment of
those who are best informed on the subjects about which they
treat, radically unsound. This is especially true of the Indian
essays, and above all of the essay on Warren Hastings. The
stories of Nuncomar and of Impey have been rewritten, and the
judgments of Macaulay on many of the most important points
reversed. Deficiency of another kind is visible in the essay on
Bos well's Johnson. The theory that the greatest biography in the
English language owes its success to the weaknesses of the
biographer has been fi-equently refuted. It is so irrational that
the marvel is that such a theory was ever advanced. A similar

superficiality has been pointed out in Macaulay's treatment of
Johnson himself and in his setting of the life of Frederick the
Great, in contrast with the treatment and setting which we find in
Carlyle. Evidently Macaulay had not in the highest degree the
power to comprehend character. In the description of externals
he was admirable, and to a certain degree he could penetrate
motives, but he had not which gives life to
that intuitive insight
the historical figures of Shakespeare and Scott and Carlyle.
In spite of Macaulay's own judgment, and in spite of all that
the most hostile critic can add, it is matter for rejoicing that the
pressure of which the author complained was applied, and that
he was forced to collect his contributions to The Edinburgh
Review. No such collection has ever been so brilliantly success-
and very few have so weU deserved success.

fid, Probably few
men of culture would choose the Essays as the traditional one
book for the traditional desert island ; but very many would find
* Tievelyan's Life of Macaulay, i. 454.
a place for them in a box of limited dimensions, and nearly all
would acknowledge that they have been among the most widely
useful of the works of the nineteenth century. "You have done
a great deal," said the wise Johnson, "when you have brought
him [a boy] to have entertainment from a book." And this
Macaulay has done for a vast number of boys and for multitudes
of men as well. That collection of essays has served for many
thousands of minds as an introduction to history. There is truth
in the saying that Macaulay was the man who first succeeded in
teaching the English people a part of their own history. It is a
service so great that, in gratitude for it, sins worse than the worst
he has committed might well be forgotten, and all the honours he
won might be deemed well earned. But this is not all. Macaulay 's
range of reading was extraordinary, his memory marvellous, and,
as he wrote, illustrations from every age and country welled up
almost to superabundance. There are few books that touch more
diverse subjects than the Essays; there are few minds too sluggish
and inert to be stimulated to interest by some of the multifarious
suggestions. Even Macaulay's faults and errors are partly re-
deemed by the fact that they are so vivifying. What he says
about Boswell at any rate inclines the reader to turn to Boswell
himself. His treatment of Bacon has impelled many a man to
acquire a first-hand knowledge of the philosophy which the
essayist misinterprets.
The merits and defects of the Essays are repeated in The
History of England, the former heightened and the latter subdued
by the greater labour bestowed. The style is essentially the '
same, but is more chastened. There are the same tricks and
mannerisms, the same brilliant colouring, the same tendency to
exaggeration, the same fondness for antithesis. At first the reader
is probably swept away by admiration of its rapid facility, its rush
and brilliancy, its fertility of illustration, its strength and effective-
ness. Afterwards he may gradually become conscious of those
defects which are suggested by the adjective "metallic," which
Arnold applies in censure to Macaulay's prose and Mrs Browning
by way of praise to his verse. The softer tones are wanting,
everything is painted either in glare or in gloom. It is the style
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 84 1 .
of an advocate, not of a judge. All that tells on the side

Macaulay is championing is heightened, whatever is adverse is
Thus he has to depict the pass of Glencoe.

omitted or slurred over.
The description is made much more effective, the situation of
the clan that lived there becomes more impressive, by raising
the mountains to a height they never attain in Scotland, and by
depicting a gloom and desolation in the valley such as may
indeed be found elsewhere, but not there. The quiet purity of
Goldsmith, the severe perfection of Landor, the long harmonies
of Ruskin, are outside the range of Macaulay.
But the faults of Macaulay's style, upon which, since Arnold
wrote, it has been too much the fashion to dwell, are, after all,
but a slight offset to merits far greater and more important.

Jeffrey's admiring wonder, on the first discovery of the new
writer, where he could have " picked up that style," may have
indicated a want of critical balance, but he was more nearly right
than the carping critic. It is idle todeny to Macaulay the name

of a great writer of English. Whether in his familiar letters, or in
the carefully elaborated sentences of Tke History, we see every-
where the master of language. His account, in a letter to Ellis, of
the celebrated division in 1831 when the Reform Bill was carried
in the House of Commons by a majority of one, is unsurpassed
for fire and vividness. The narrative is perfect, not a word
superfluous, not a telling detail omitted; and there runs through
it all a joyous confidence in the reformed machine of Parliament
which may have been unphilosophical, but which is very refresh-
ing. This admirable letter has the roughness which was natural
and not unpleasing under the circumstances; but in his more
formal compositions Macaulay is careful and polished, and some-
times he rises to a solemn eloquence which can only be paralleled
from the writings of the greatest masters of the English language.
The description of the burial-place of Monmouth, St Peter's
Chapel in the Tower, is one of the gems of English prose :
" In truth there is no sadder spot on the earth than that little
cemetery. Death is there associated, not, as in Westminster
Abbey and St Paul's, with genius and virtue, with public venera-
tion and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest
842 THE LITERATURK OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
churches and churchyards, with everything that is most endearing
in social and domestic charities ; but with whatever is darkest in
human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of
implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the
cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and
of bhghted fame. Thither have been carried, through successive
ages, by the rude hands of gaolers, without one mourner following,
the bleeding reHcs of men who had been the captains of armies, the
leaders of parties, the oracles of senates, and the ornaments of
courts. Thither was borne, before the window where Jane Grey
was praying, the mangled corpse of Guilford Dudley. Edward
Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and Protector of the realm, reposes
there by the brother whom he murdered. There has mouldered
away the headless trunk of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester and
Cardinal of Saint Vitalise a man worthy to have lived in a better
age and to have died in a better cause. John There are laid
Dudley, Duke of Northumberland,Lord High Admiral, and
Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, Lord High Treasurer. There,
too, is another Essex, on whom nature and fortune had lavished
all their bounties in vain, and whom valour, grace, genius, royal
favour, popular applause, conducted to an early and ignominious

doom. Not far off sleep two chiefs of the great house of Howard,
Thomas, fourth Duke of Norfolk, and Philip, eleventh Earl of
Arundel. Here Eind there, among the thick graves of unquiet
and aspiring statesmen, lie more delicate sufferers; Margaret of
Salisbury, the last of the proud name of Plantagenet, and those
two fair Queens who perished by the jealous rage of Henry.
Such was the dust with which the dust of Monmouth mingled'."
This passage is not only an excellent specimen of Macaulay's
style, but a typical example of his historical method. The essence
of that method lies in the use which is made of detail. Wherever
in The History a new personage is introduced or a new place
named, the subject is immediately vivified with biographical facts,
with a description of the place, or with references, as in the

passage just quoted, to its past history. No one ever realised
more clearly than Macaulay that names and facts are in themselves
1 liistory of England, i. 653-624.
dead and dry no one ever succeeded more marvellously in giving

;
them sap and life. Nothing was too trivial and unimportant for
his wonderful memory to retain and to supply. If he has to
describe a gorgeous ceremonial, the dresses of the actors rise
before his eyes and he describes them. In the ballad oi Horatius
he reminded that the Etruscans wrote from right to left, and he
is
mentions that. Perhaps at times such details might have been

omitted without loss ; but Jebb has pointed out that the character-
istic is of the very essence of
Macaulay's plan. It was the
condition under which alone The History could be made as
interesting as a novel. With equal justice the same critic has
added that it is also the secret of the unmanageable length of
that work. The style is not diffuse, and yet it takes five large
volumes to tell the story of some sixteen years.
There were always, even during his lifetime, some who dis-
sented from the popular view of Macaulay. A few, like Brougham
and Croker, had personal grudges, and they wreaked them in
private or in public. Some were alienated by his real deficiencies.
Sir George Cornewall Lewis (who, however, lived to change his
opinion) pronounced the treatment of ancient philosophy in the
essay on Bacon " shallow and ignorant in the extreme," and pro-
phesied that Macaulay would " never be more than a rhetorician'."
Others, again, were roused to suspicion by the mere popularity
of The History. There must be something wrong with a book,
not a novel, which was so widely read ; there was impropriety in
the very aim of making a history as popular as a novel. But all
these classes united were a mere handful in comparison with the
multitude who, during the life of Macaulay, regarded him as the
first of English prose writers. After his death the inevitable
reaction set in, became the fashion to condemn his style,
and it
to question his accuracy and fairness, to denounce his Philis-

tinism, to pour contempt upon his philosophy, or the want of it.
Of late years there have been numerous indications that the
prevailing opinion, which is hkely to be also the opinion of
posterity, is intermediate between the two extremes, but a good
deal nearer the favourable than the unfavourable one. If
^ Letters of Sir G. C. Leuois^ 93.
Macaulay is inferior to the greatest historians, he is inferior to them
alone. He has not the breadth and range of Gibbon : he would
have lost his way in the wilderness of ^The Decline and Fall: his
method was incapable of producing such a stately and monumental
record of momentous events. He has not the vivid poetic gift
of Carlyle, or his wonderful power of penetrating character. He
is no rival to Thucydides in the art of tracing the sequence of
cause and effect in human history, or to Tacitus in the keen and

terse wisdom of his utterances. But he is a consummate master
of narrative, and in this respect is probably surpassed only by
Herodotus. His skilful transitions are a study in art, and afford
a striking contrast to the clumsy devices of the commonplace
writer. He has embodied in his pages an astonishing number
of facts, and has shown a wonderful skill in making them no
longer '
hard.' The reader is occasionally tempted to think that
they are flung together at haphazard, and it is difficult even to
imagine a mind so richly stored with detail as to afford material
for selection. But no mere medley ever produced such an effect.
behind the enormous mass of knowledge embodied
It is certain that
in The History of England there lay, in the mind of the writer, a

mass incomparably greater still.
Such a method as Macaulay's exposes the writer to attack at
every turn, and his accuracy has frequently been impugned ; yet,
on the whole, few have better stood the test of investigation.
They who have glibly condemned him have not been the men
who, by reason of labour bestowed and knowledge amassed, might
claim to sit in judgment as his peers. No one insisted more
than Freeman on the paramount obligation of the historian to
accuracy; but he had the most hearty respect for Macaulay's
facts. Of course he fell into error; no man ever wrote history
without doing so; but when we consider that almost every
sentence states a fact, not an opinion, the rarity of his mistakes
becomes astonishing.
The real weaknesses of Macaulay are to be found elsewhere.
He was by no means free from bias ; but perhaps the historian who
is free from it has yet to be discovered, and his works may not,
after all, be very lively or even enlightening reading. Thucydides
himself had a prejudice against Cleon and a predilection for

Nicias. The influence of eighteenth century deism is obvious in
Gibbon. It needs a robust faith in modern science
'
' to accept
Mommsen's and of Cicero as altogether free
pictures of Caesar
from prejudice. But, however good may be the company in
which he finds himself, the fact that Macaulay shows political
bias in his History is undeniable. Neither, it must be admitted,
was there anything very attractive in the objects of his admiration.
The English Whigs were a useful class of people, but they were
neither intellectually great nor morally inspiring. They were the
apotheosis of the commonplace, and the selection of them as
heroes proves that there was some foundation for the charge of
Philistinism which was brought against the historian. It was
men of this stamp whom Macaulay could best comprehend, and
to whom he was rather more than fair. He was apt to see
through a magnifying-glass what told in their favour, and to look
through the wrong end of the telescope at whatever militated
against them. He far more frequently gives wrong impressions
through a misleading selection of facts than through mistaken
statements.
A mind which is powerfully attracted by the normal is rarely
sympathetic with that which is exceptional ; and while few have
written about enthusiasm more wisely than Macaulay, he him-
self could never understand enthusiasts. The Quakers, not
without cause, objected to his treatment of William Penn, the
High Anglicans thought him less than just to Laud and unfair
td the Church in the era of the Revolution. He was outwardly
more respectful of the Puritans ; but his sympathy with them was
rather political than religious, and it is doubtful how far he
entered into the spirit of those Independents who found in the
Gld Testament their stern theory of the universe ; or whether he
comprehended the religious zeal of the Scottish Covenanters, whose
sufferings he depicted, any more than the chivalric enthusiasm of
their persecutor Claverhouse. His very choice of a period was,
perhaps unconsciously, dictated by this consideration. The
English Revolution of 1689 was the triumph of moderation and
01"steady common sense. The reigns of William and Mary and
of Anne are a period of great achievements but, for the most
part, of ordinary men. It is difficult to imagine Macaulay dealing
with such a volcanic era as that of the French Revolution ; it is
evident that he never absorbed Elizabethan literature as he

absorbed the literature of the age of Queen Anne. Of course
he knew with the intellect that the former was the greater; but
it was the latter that appealed to his heart.
In and aim Macaulay was on one side akin to the
spirit
historians of the eighteenth century, on another to his contem-

poraries and successors of the nineteenth. His profound respect
for facts is a point of similarity between him and the latter class,
while the literary nature of his ambition connects him with the
former ; and this isone reason why many have looked upon him
with suspicion. Though no one has more jubilantly celebrated
the triumphs of appKed science, and though his devotion to details
was fostered by the scientific spirit, yet he never unreservedly
accepted the creed of science in its application to history.
One or two of the ways in which science has influenced the
modern conception of history have already been briefly indicated
but the triumphs achieved in the various branches of physics
niade it certain that, ere long, attempts would be made to apply
theirmethods more widely and generally. What more natural

and what more proper than that the conceptions which have done
so much to extend the dominion of man over nature should be
applied also to the study of human life, and thus, perhaps,
similarly extend his dominion over himself? If recent historical
work is superior to earlier histories in patient thoroughness, in
the manner of handling materials, in the sense of the importance
of beginnings, this, as has been already indicated, is largely due
to the scientific spirit. But before we accept the theory that
history is just science applied to human life, it is necessary to
consider the differences between the problems which physical
science has to face, and those which arise in the investigation of
political society. The great category of physical science is the
category of cause, and its methods are
adequate to the end
fully
contemplated. The problems of science often admit of absolute

demonstration, and there is, nearly always, the prospect of sooner
or later approaching demonstration. But it is not so with respect

to the relations of men in society. Mill himself insists on the
utter inadequacy of induction to deal with such problems as these,
and the necessity of resorting to the deductive or a priori method.
This, no doubt, is still within the sphere of science. But it is
likewise a method which, in its ratiocinative part, has been
applied with the utmost acuteness to history and to every other
subject of human interest ever since men began to reason at all.
The really new feature of the 'scientific method' is the greater

solidity with which the inductive foundation is built ; and if the
inductive part takes us, as Mill believed, only a very little way, it
is clear that the importance of the application of the methods of

science to history has been greatly exaggerated.
Mill's on the application of those methods to
strictures
sociological problems are severe.
"Nothing," he says, "can be
more ludicrous than the sort of parodies on experimental reasoning-
which one is accustomed to meet with, not in popular discussion
only', but in grave treatises, when the affairs of nations are the
theme. ' How,' can an institution be bad when the
it is asked, '
country has prospered under it ? How can such and such

'
'
causes have contributed to the prosperity of one country, when

another has prospered without them ? ' Whoever makes use of
an argument of not intending to deceive, should be
this kind,
sent back to learn the elements of some one of the more easy
physical sciences^" Concrete instances of the sort of argument
Mill ridicules abound. Thirty or forty years ago grave statesmen
and economists confidently inferred the advantages of free trade
from the rapid increase of British commerce. They took no
account of such vast concurrent changes as the development of
railways and the multiplication of steamships. Travellers to
America used invariably to be asked whether they did not see, in
the prosperity of a country which the government of the Turk
could hardly ruin, the advantages of '
free institutions.' It is not
at all necessary to dispute the advantages of free institutions, or
the benefits accruing from free trade ; but the expansion of
British commerce does not demonstrate the one, nor does the
^ MUl'b Logu, Bgok 111. ch. x.
prosperity of the United States establish the other. To point to
such facts and then arbitrarily to refer themone out of a
to
number of possible causes, is a mere travesty of proof. But
while it is easy to detect the flimsiness of the argument, it is
far less easy to suggest how any method that may reasonably be
called scientific is to be made available for the solution of such
problems. Theof a nation cannot be suspended while in-
life
vestigation made, the operation of other causes cannot be

is
controlled, the inventor will not stay his hand, he who enjoys the
blessing of free institutions will not submit to despotism in order
to discover whether, perchance, he might not thrive under that
also.
The
question may reasonably be asked whether mistakes of
thiskind have been made solely by statesmen and economists
and a very cursory examination of the so-called scientific historians
shows that they were no less liable to error. The measureless
sway of the Teutonic idea over the mind of Freeman, which
occasioned the gibe already quoted from Arnold, is as unphilo-
sophical as the ordinary American's conviction that all good
things flow from free institutions. The extraordinary statement
of Stubbs that the literature of mediaeval Italy drew its inspiration
from north of the Alps betrays a similar want of balance and
obsession by one thought. So do his theories of Church history.
Evidently therefore the scientific method leaves possible mistakes
as great, not merely as any committed by the poet-historian
Carlyle, or the popular Macaulay, but even as those committed
by the historians of the eighteenth century. The new method is
not really new, and it is no more miracle-working than was the
NoVlim Organum of Bacon.
The department of ancient history, in which the standard of
English scholarship was deplorably low, was the first to feel deeply
the influence of the so-called scientific method. For many years
after the opening of the nineteenth century the accepted history
of Greece was still that of Mitford, a work whose political bias
Was exposed by Grote in The Westminster Review. In Roman

Kistofy the antiqiiated Nathaniel Hooke reigned ; and, in spite of
the work of the French scholar Beaufort in the first half of the
eighteenth century, many of the legends of early Roman history

were still uncritically accepted as records of literal facts. Upon
minds in work of German scholars came as a reve-
this state the
lation. Thomas Arnold was startled and aroused by what he

found in Niebuhr's History of Rome. " It opened wide before
my eyes," he said, " the exfcent of my own ignorance'^." It con-
firmed the doubts he already entertained as to early Roman
history, and suggested further doubts where he had previously
rested in contented certainty. An article by Arnold in TTie
Quarterly Review of 1825 was, according to Niebuhr himself,
the means of first introducing his history to the English^.
The soil was ready for the seed. Julius Hare and Thirlwall,
assisted by other Cambridge scholars, undertook the translation
of Niebuhr's History \ and for a time the German writer enjoyed
an authority which no one ventured to challenge. Not until
after the turn of the century was any serious attempt made to
traverse his theories, and the feeling for him in many cases was
that of a disciple for a master too deeply admired and revered
for criticism. Niebuhr's theory, said Freeman in a review of
Mommsen, " acted like a spell it was not to argument or evidence
:
that it appealed his followers avowedly claimed for him a kind

:
of power of 'divination'.'" A few years earlier Freeman himself

had conceded this power to Niebuhr, and used that very word
to describe it. The instrument by which the German historian's
authority was shattered in England was Sir George ComewaU
—
Lewis (r8o6 1863), who, in his Inquiry on the Credibility of
early Roman History (1855), insisted upon that evidence which
trusting disciples had been contented to forgo, and who pointed
out that the ' divination ' of the man who accepted as genuine the
forgery of the Abbe Soulaire stood in need of confirmation. It is
curious that Lewis himself was in turn the victim of a forgery : he

edited Minoides Menas's spurious fables of Babrius.
Along with this foreign influence there went one of native
growth, which was a little later in manifesting itself. George
Grote (r794— 1871), who was slightly older than either Arnold
' Stanley's Life 0/ Arnold, i. 44. ^ ibid. i. 45.
• Quoted in Stephen's Life of Freeman, i. 203.
W. 54
or Thirlwall, applied the ideas of the Utilitarian philosophy to

the study of ancient history, with results in some respects not
unlike those arrived at under German influence. The recognition
that statements hitherto taken upon trust needed critical exami-
nation, the prominence of the category- of cause and the
thoroughness in the sifting of materials, are features in common.
Excessive addiction to theory is peculiar to Niebuhr; while in
Grote's case a certain aridity of tone, as if facts were all the
better for being dry, and an evident distrust of the faculty of
imagination, are features suggestive of Utilitarian influence.
By these men and under these influences ancient history was
rewritten in English. We may
judge the magnitude of the
service they performedby the completeness with which the
work of their predecessors has been forgotten. The march of
knowledge has, indeed, left Arnold and Grote too behind, but
the advance has been made largely by their help, not, as in the
case of the writers whom they superseded, in spite of the false
views supported by their authority.
Thomas Arnold (r 795-1 842) was in some respects the most
interesting of the three historians of the ancient world. His
short was one of manifold activity ; and as a clergyman and
life
a schoolmaster, even more than as a writer, he left his mark upon

his time. It was certainly in the capacity of teacher that he was
greatest and wielded the profoundest and most enduring influence.

From an early age he seems to have was his
felt that the school
true sphere. Ordained
Oxford in 18 18, he settled in 1819 at
at
Laleham on the Tham.es, where the remains of his great poet-son
now rest. But the business of his nine years of life there was
the tuition of youths who came to him to be prepared for the
University. When, in 1827, he was elected to the head-mastership
of Rugby, he was simply exchanging one educational office for
another. Arnold's election was largely brought about by a letter
of Hawkins, Provost of Oriel College, to the trustees, " in which
it was predicted that, if Mr Arnold were elected to the head-
mastership of Rugby, he would change the face of education all
through the public schools of England'." Seldom has so bold

' Life of Arnold, i. 55.
I , HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY '8'5I
a,prophecy been so completely justified. When Arnold went to

Rugby, it ranked only among the second-class public schools of
England, and not particularly high among these. When he died
in 1842, in educational reputation it stood first of all. More-
over, work had even then reacted powerfully upon the
his
other public schools; and to this day his influence is felt. What •
Arnold aimed at, and what he succeeded in accomplishing, was

not merely to imbue his pupils with learning, but still more to
mould their character. Tom Brown's Seliool Days shows how
wonderful was his success. So do the records of Oxford Uni-
versity. , The youths who, year after year, came up from Rugby,
all bore a certain stamp which marked them out from their fellow-
undergraduates. The unfriendly whispered that they were 'prigs.'
In C. H. Pearson's phrase, "they were taught to be always feeliiig
their moral muscles^" Some trace of this defect is noticeable in
Oakfield (i9,sz), the youthful work of William Delafield Arnold ; but
still more rioticeable is the essential manliness of the book. Though
the Rugby boys had their faults and mannerisms, they grew into
high-minded young men. Intellectually, they were far above the
general level: Their master had imbued them with his own love
gf history, and their highest attainments
1 when they came to the
University were in that domain. They were also keenly interested
in theology : no one at Oxford in those days could fail to be so,
least of all a pupil of Dr Arnold. For Arnold was stirred to the
very soul by dislike and dread of the Tractarian movement. He

wrote and he preached against but he served the cause ofit ; '
liberalism still more potently by the pupils he trained. Clough

and A. P. Stanley and Arnold's own son Matthew were Rugby's
great contribution to liberalism in Oxford and to literature in
England, while Rugby remained udider the government of
,
its
great, head-master.
Arnold's own literary works represent only a fraction of his
power. His life was short, it was busy, and his literary faculty
developed late..: >

Certain volumies of sermons, a variety of
pamphlets and articles on miscellaneous volume of
subjects, a
lectures on modern history, an edition of Thucydides and a

1 Memorials of Pearson, ij.
54—2
history of Rome, broken off in the middle of the Second Punic
War, are the sum of his writings. Under the circumstances it is
a remarkable record of work, even although not much of it is of

permanent interest. The sermons are vigorous, manly com-
positions, distinguished by that moral grandeur which was Arnold's
greatest gift ; and so deeply is this impressed upon the Lectures on
Modern History (1842) that some of the listeners were moved

even to tears. But nevertheless, as a man of letters, Thomas
Arnold by the History of Rome (1838-1843) alone, and
lives
time has obscured the fame even of that. Arnold came early
in the history of the new movement, and much of his work has
since been eclipsed by the profounder research and more brilliant
exposition of Mommsen, not to speak of lesser scholars. His

excessive and uncritical admiration of Niebuhr betrayed Arnold
into many errors, especially in the treatment of the early history
of Rome and with the decline in the reputation of Niebuhr
;
there has necessarily gone a decline in the estimation of Arnold's

history. After he emerges from the legendary period his work
has more permanent value, but even there so much has been
done since his day that it is largely out of date. The constitutional
history of Rome has been rewritten. Native sagacity and keen
interest in political developments were powerless to anticipate the
results ofa laborious deciphering of monuments, of wider com-
parison on grounds of philology and anthropology, and of the
closer investigation of the early history of institutions. What
Arnold did best was the description of military operations, and
it is this part of his work which has most satisfactorily stood the
test of time. He was a combative clergymanhe would have

:
made an admirable His accounts of campaigns are

soldier.
admitted by military men to show the insight of a soldier,. and
they have a literary charm which is rarely found in the writings
of men of action. And yet Arnold had not that instinctive
literary talent which has been displayed by more than one member
of his family. In early days his English was clumsy and crude.
Practice enabled him to write always with force and sometimes
with eloquence ; but with him the first consideration was invariably
the thing to be said, and never the manner of saying it.
Arnold, throughout his life and in every phase of his activity,

was a teacher of principles. Follower though he was of Niebuhr,
he presents a point of view which is first of all peculiarly English,
and in the second place characteristically his own. He would
not have thought it worth while to retell the story of Rome if
he had looked upon it as merely an interesting tale of old days.
But he had the English regard for the practical and the useful,
^nd he hoped that,, without sacrificing impartiality, his history
might be the means of teaching sound political principles. This
hope rested upon his fundamental conception of ancient history
as being still essentially modern. It was from Arnold that
Freeman learnt that principle of the unity of history, which he
sometimes applied with a want of discretion such as his teacher
would never have shown ; and in his edition of Thucydides
Arnold expresses the conviction that, the history of Greece and
Rome is not an idle inquiry fitted only to excite the curiosity of
scholars, but a practical subject from which the statesman and
the citizen may derive instruction.
Arnold believed also, not without reason, that an Englishman
had exceptional advantages for reading aright the lesson of Roman
history. " It is not," he says in the preface, " claiming too much
to say, that the growth of the Roman commonwealth, the true

character of its parties, the causes and tendency of its revolutions,
and the spirit of its people and its laws, ought to be understood
by none so well as by those who have grown up under the laws,
who have been engaged in the parties, who are themselves citizens
of our kingly commonwealth of England." And this preface
contains yet another indication of the way in which Arnold carried
into his historical work the opinions and prepossessions of his
daily , life. He proposed to carry his narrative down to the
coronation of Charlemagne at Rome. At this point, he says,
we see the elements of the old western empire organised again
into a new form, and we find that form marked by the " division
between the so-called secular and spiritual powers" which has
ever since prevailed. In this we hear the voice of him who could
"understand no perfect Church, or perfect State, without their
blending into one " in the ultimate form of " the Kingdom of God,
for the most effective removal of all evil, and the promotion of all
good'."
To Arnold then human history was one continuous record,
every part of which lived on into the present and carried its
lesson for living men in their practical life. Nothing ever came
to an end, and chronological divisions had only a conditional
validity. And if human hfe was one throughout history, a fortiori
it was one and indivisible in any given epoch. All such divisions
as that into temporal and spiritual, sacred and secular, were mis-
leading and false, and it was the business of the writer and teacher
to lay bare their fallaciousness. At the same time, the historian
had his own special sphere; which was not identical with the
sphere either of the theologian or of the philosopher. His
theme was the life of the State or Commonwealth, which
Arnold would by no means identify with the sum of the lives of
the citizens. He did not believe, with Garlyle, that history is
a collection of biographies. He
would hardly have accepted the
Platonic view that the State is the individual writ large. It was
something greater than the individual, or than any collection of
individuals. Arnold bowed down before it in reverence. He
upon its moral character its true interest, he held, could
insisted :
never be advanced by action which was morally indefensible.

This conception of the State was cognate to his conception of the
Church ; and we can see why he who held it objected so strongly
to the suggestion of a separation between the two. To contem-
poraries such ideas were fascinating, but also puzzling. It is
clear that, in more modern language, Arnold meant to teach that
the State was an organism; but perhaps he was not himself fully
master of the idea, and by an age which trusted rather in
mechanical metaphors and formulae, the meaning was not easily
comprehended.
Contemporaneously with the studies of Arnold in Roman
history, Thirl wall and Grotehad been devoting themselves to the
history of Greece. They had been friends and schoolfellows'',
' Life of Arnold, ii. 187.

= They were destined finally to a yet closer uiiiou. They rest in the same
grave in Westminster Abbey,
yet, curiously enough, they carried on their iilvestigations unknown

to one another until the results began to appear in print. Thirl-
wall'sHistory of Greece (1835-1847) was originally meant for
Lardner's Cyclopaedia, and when the scope was afterwards en-
larged it was, as the author admits in the Advertisement, impossible
wholly to remove the traces of the original plan. They show them-
selves in a certain want of proportion, and perhaps in a citation
of authorities more sparing than Thirlwall's learning could easily
have afforded.
was mainly the defects due to the original design of Thirl-
It
wall that gave George Grote (i 794-1871) his opportunity. In

native power of mind, in scholarship and in literary capacity, he
was Thirlwall's inferior ; but he was, if not more laboriously, at
least more single-mindedly, industrious. He devoted far more
time to the history of Greece than Thirlwall did. He had been
at work for twenty years before, in 1846, he published the first two
volumes, and the last did not appear till r856. Indeed it may be
said that his whole literary life was devoted to this subject ; for,
according to his conception of history, Flato and the other Com-

panions of Socrates (1865) and the incomplete Aristotelian studies
issued posthumously in 1872 were simply appendages of the
history. The result of this single-minded devotion is apparent
when we compare his history point by point with that of Thirlwall.
Take, for example, Grote's thorough treatment of the momentous
revblution of Cleisthenes, and put alongside of it the comparatively
meagre and inadequate account of Thirlwall. Or set side by side
the accounts given by the two historians of the battle of Leuctra.
Grote detects and makes evident to his readers the vital nature of
the change in tactics initiated by Epaminondas. The Theban
phalanx is enormously deep (Napoleon's principle of throwing an
irresistible mass on the decisive point), and the advance is en
echelon. Thirlwall is puzzled. He has a partial vision of the
truth, but, not a clear enough view to enable him to show it to his
readers. "It was the object of Epaminondas to bring his mass to
bear upon the enemy's right wing, where the Spartans were posted;
and he seems to have succeeded in detaching it from the main
body so that it had to sustain the whole brunt of the first onset."
The misty phrase, "he seems to have succeeded in detaching it
from the main body," represents the attack en ichelon.

Contrasts of this kind might be indefinitely multiplied; and
they show clearly why it was that Thirlwall's history was immedi-
ately superseded by Grote's : the more thorough necessarily over-
came the less thorough. But it is also true that, in some respects,
Thirlwall is decidedly superior to Grote. Though he was not a
great master of English, his style is more luminous and nervous
than that of his rival. He is also far more judicial. Grote's
judgment was warped by his prepossession in favour of the
Athenian democracy, and in consequence his treatment of the
Macedonian power which overthrew it is less fair and less satis-
factory than Thirlwall's.
While Thirlwall was in the current of German influence,
Grote's thought was English in its source. He
was one of the
most orthodox of the Utilitarian school ; and indeed the fidelity
of his discipleship may be supposed to indicate a certain lack of
originality. He carried the principles and temperament of the
Utilitarians into his historical work as well as into politics ; and,
while the solid worth of his History is a proof of their value, the
absence of historical imagination and the even ostentatious
disregard of artistic principles are indications of the defects and
limitations of the school.
According to Langlois and Seignobos (quoted by Leslie
Stephen) Grote "produced the first model of a history in the class
to which it belongs'." It may be questioned whether this judg-
ment will be long acquiesced in, even by those who adopt " the
conception of history as now accepted by the best writers." The

absence of imagination, which Grote esteemed an advantage, was
really a source of grave danger. Imagination sometimes leads
men into error, but it saves them from errors more numerous and
far graver. The nature of the impulse which moved Grote to
write might have made critics cautious, if not suspicious. That
impulse was anger, righteous enough, at the Toryism of Mitford's
History of Greece. Now Grote was a member of the extreme left.
Rarely has any party in English politics shown more of the
^ Stephen's English Utilitarians, iii. 338.
doctrinaire spmt, rarely has any been more eager tx) proselytise,
than the philosophical Radicals. The unscientific historian
Macaulay has been loudly blamed for his whiggery. Is there no
reason to suspect the scientific Grote of a similar error? Dealing
with the history of a state and of a civilisation which had passed
away, Grote had far less temptation to partisanship than Macaulay;
and yet we can detect again and again the tones of the Radical
reply to the Tory Mitford. All the pains that Alison took to
prove that Providence was on the side of the Tories, Grote took to
prove that the same power had decreed from all eternity that
democracy was the proper form of government. As regards the
fundamental principles of his history, he was not judicially minded.
He held a brief for Athens. Justice had still to be done to that
great city; for the gratitude which mankind owes to her had never
been adequately acknowledged. But Grote swings to the other
extreme. He will not admit the obvious faults of the Athenian
people, faults which their own greatest men not only admitted but
insisted upon. Where he cannot excuse, his desire to palliate is
obvious. His account of the atrocious Mitylenean decree shows at
least as much prejudice as Macaulay's excuses for the share of
William III in the Glencoe massacre. With regard to the theoric
fund he was more sure of the wisdom of the Athenians than
Demosthenes was.
These are matters of comparatively unimportant detail; but
they are indications of Grote's attitude of mind towards democracy,
and that is fundamental. Grote had a right to his opinion, even
as Macaulay had a right to his faith in the Whigs, Thiers to his
cult of the Revolution, Mommsen to his belief in Caesarism,
Michelet to his semi-religious faith in France. But then, this is
not removed from the category of personal predilections by calling

the history in which it appears 'scientific' The element of
prejudice is more manifest when we consider the vast
all the
difference between ancient democracy and modern. Ancient
democracy rested upon slavery. In Athens there was a slave
population outnumbering the free. The achievements of the
Athenian democracy were made possible only by the labours of
the enslaved majority, by the sacrifice of the many to the few.
Aristotle was perfectly right in teaching that slavery was indis-
pensable — indispensable, that is, to the only civilisation within his

experience which secured political liberty within the bounds of a
class tolerably numerous. How else, except by the help of slaves,
could the Greek citizen get the leisure necessary to discharge the
duties which his system threw upon him ? But a democracy
on slavery is not, in the modern sense, a democracy at all.
resting
The problem of enabling the cultured, leisured, comparatively
well-to-do Athenian citizen to take part, without doing mischief;
in public affairs, was totally different from the problem of enabling
the ignorant toiling masses of modern states to do so. And yet
Grote nowhere points out that democracy in the ancient world
meant something wholly different from what we now call democracy.
The natural conclusion from his silence is that the words are used
in the same sense, and the whole tone of the History of Greece
favours that conclusion. The nineteenth century Radical is all
along strengthening his own convictions by the lessons he draws
from the success of Athens. A more vivid imagination might have
saved him from this mistake ; and the fact that he could make it
is a proof that the " model history " still leaves a good deal to be
desired.
Mention has already been made of Sir G. C. Lewis's (1806-
1863) Inquiry on the Credibility of early Roman History; and
so great was the revolution in opinion brought about by this book
that, though Lewis's works seem, at least superficially, rather mis-
cellaneous, the author may probably be best classified among writers
on ancient history. There is no literary figure of the time who so
strangely combines interest with aridity, none probably in whom
the balance between the practical and the speculative is so perfect.
Macaulay and Lytton were politicians as well as men of letters,
Gladstone and Disraeli were men of letters as well as politicians
but in Sir George Lewis's case it is difficult to say which aspect
is the more prominent. By temperament, no doubt, he was
primarily a scholar ; but the man who was successively Chancellor
of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and Secretary for War, and
whose works so largely deal with questions within the sphere of
practical politicSj was clearly, in a very pregnant sense, a politician
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 8S9
as well. The most wonderful thing about Lewis was the pro-
fundity of the scholarship which he contrived to acquire and to
retain. Milman declared that he might " have done honour, as
professor of Greek, to the most learned University in Europe^," and
his works are loaded, even to excess, with evidences of his erudi-
tion. "No German professor," says Bagehot, "from the smoke
and study of many silent years, has ever put forth books more
bristling with recondite references, more exact in every technicality
of scholarship, more rich in than Sir George
matured reflection,
Lewis found time, mind, and scholarlike curiosity to write in the

very thick of eager English life^."
It is the width of his learning rather than versatiHty of mind

which gives to Lewis's works their multifarious character. There
were few subjects about which he did not know a good deal, and
there were several besides Greek, as the editor of his Letters
remarks, in respect to which he was well fitted to become a pro-
fessor. Scarcely anything could occur in the world of learning
which did not interest him ; scarcely anything, either practical or
theoretical, could be suggested about which he did not possess
knowledge. His practical side is shown in his Remarks^ on the
Use and Abuse of some Political Terms (1832), a work still useful
because of its clearness and good sense. Raynouard's book on
the Roman de Rou drew from him an examination. On the Origin
of the Romance Languages (1835), just as Niebuhr's theories

caused him, twenty years later, to write the Inquiry. So too, in his
Survey of the Astronomy of the Ancients (1862), he is led to exarriine
the then current theories of the Egyptologists. His political
interests show themselves in essays on British administrations
from 1783 to 1,830, in dissertationsôn foreign jurisdiction and on
a number of Irish questions, and, above all, in the work On the
Gover^nment of Dependencies (1841), which is still valuable, notwith-
standing all the changes due to time, as an exceedingly keen and,
at the same time, dispassionate ex3.raination of one of the greatest
problems of English statesmanship. The philosophical side of
Levyis's mind is best representedfin the treatises On the Influence
* Litters of Sir G. C. Lewis', Preface, ix

* idid. -;
;,j
of Authority in Matters of Opinion (1849) and On the Methods of

Observation and Reasoning in Politics (1852).
Widely as they vary in subject, all these works are very

obviously the product of the same intellect. They are all externally
dry and hard. Their author evidently had a profound reverence
for truth, but he seems to have had no other passion whatever,
nor any prejudice at all. He was ready to examine anything and
everything, his own opinions included, with the same impartiality.
Nothing disturbed his serenity in the pursuit of truth, nothing

could induce him to swerve aside in the least degree. Several
historians of the time —Hallam, Stubbs, Creighton — have been
praised each as excelling all others in impartiality; but the
praise properly belongs to Lewis alone. To him it meant no
effort, it was a matter of temperament. He has, of course, to pay
the penalty as well as to reap the benefit; for the coldness of
temperament which makes it possible does not conduce to
interest.
There is no writer more consistently rationalistic than Lewis.

Whatever may be the subject under discussion, the question asked
is invariably whether the evidence for a particular conclusion is or
is not sufificient. Usually the answer is in the negative. Niebuhr

has set vain imaginings in the place of facts, the Egyptologists
have blown empty bubbles of theory, the claims of Churches to
teach their doctrines authoritatively are found to be untenable.
The work of examining pretensions such as these was necessary,
and Lewis did it admirably ; but the generally negative character
of the results is another reason for his unpopularity. The average
reader demands warmth and colour, and in Lewis neither is to be
found, only a light of truth as clear as sunlight but as cold as
moonlight.
No other English historian of the ancient world can be set
beside Arnold and Grote and Thirlwall. Probably someone
would have attempted to accomplish what Arnold had left half
done ; but ere long the great work of Mommsen warned all weaker
men off the field, and the most ambitious achievement of Charles
Merivale (1808-1893), his History of the Romans under the
Empire (1850-1862), fills the gap, not between Arnold and
Gibbon, but rather between Mommsen and Gibbon. In quality

however it cannot be compared with the work of either of these
two giants. Since Grote, no Englishman has told on the great
scale the story of ancient Greece
; but there was one remarkable
man, described by Freeman as " the most truly original historian
of our time and language'," and of whom J. S. Mill was accus-
tomed to say that a page of him was worth a chapter of Gibbon".
He devoted his life to the history of the Greek people during the
two thousand years between the Roman conquest and his own
day, showing that originality which Freeman justly commends
both in his choice of a subject and in his conception of, and his
equipment for, his task. The fame of George Finlay (1799-1875)
has suffered from this choice of a theme in which, important as it
unquestionably is, few feel deep interest. Most men are contented
to follow the later fortunes of Greece in such an outline of them
as Gibbon affords. But Finlay was an enthusiast. He probably
caught the spark of zeal from his uncle, Kirkman Finlay, who was
killed in1828 in the Greek war of independence. George Finlay
himself took part in that war, and for two months he was in dose
association with Byron, leaving Missolonghi just nine days before
the poet's death. After the conclusion of the war he settled in
Greece, where he had purchased an estate ; and from that time
till his death the greater part of his life was spent among the
people whose cause he had espoused and whose history he was
studying.
Finlay's work was published in sections or periods between
1844 and and all the parts were gathered up into the
1 86 1,
History of Greece from its Conquest by the Romans to the Present

Time, B.C. 146 to a.d. 1864, which was published posthumously in
1877. Its merits were such as might be expected from the
author's life and character. He was not a great writer, and
his history, is not a work of art. On the contrary, it has a special
flaw, inasmuch as he did not pursue the same plan throughout.
Experts say that in mere erudition Finlay is surpassed by several
of the Germans; but in the combination of learning with practical
^ Quoted in The Library cf Literary Criticism.

Lord Morley, in Life 0/ GlacLlone.
knowledge it is admitted that he stands alone. He knew thoroughly
the people about whom he wrote. Often he wrote in the history,
as in his private relations with them he, spoke and acted, as a friend
more candid than flattering. He had the largeness of view which
is born of the knowledge of affairs. Having played his own part in
practical: life, he could value the successes and understand the
failures of practical men. In particular, he intimately knew the
economic conditions under which the Greek people lived, and
many a passage in the history shows his sense of their importance.
"I lost my money and my labour," he says of his own experiments
in farming, "but I learned how the system of tenths has produced
a state of society, and habits of cultivation, against which one man
can do nothing." It is this practical experience and this familiarity
with the people that give Finlay his unique position among the
writers who have dealt with the Byzantine Empire and the later
history of the Greek people.

,
Finlay traces one of the lines of connexion between the ancient
world, and the modern ; Henry Hart Milman made it the business
of his later life to trace another. We have already met Milman as
a poet; and though his work in verse is far inferior to his history,
it is easy to see in the latter the influence of the poetic manner of
conception, which isnone the less present although in many
passages the style is complex and ungainly. The turning-point in
Milman's life came with the publication of his History of the Jews
(1829). Up to that point he had been almost exclusively a poet

and dramatist, and he still was, and for two years more continued
to be, professor of poetry at Oxford. But the decline of his
popularity induced him to seek another outlet for his energies.
Had he make a commotion his ambition would
desired to
have been gratified to the full. His History of the Jews has
been called " epoch-making " by a writer who yet regarded it as
"not of extraordinary merit'." And there is reason for the descrip-
tion. For learning and thoroughness it cannot be compared with
the great work of Ewald, which appeared not very many years
later. But in conception, Milman's History of the Jews was, as
regards England at least, profoundly original It treated the Jews
'
R. Gatnett, in The Dutionary of Hational Biograph)/.
as members of the human family, subject to the ordinary laws of

historical development, and to be studied by the ordinary methods
of historical research. The commotion was so great that Murray
found it necessary to stop the series, entitled The Family 'Library,
in which the pestilent work appeared. "The History of the Jews
was pronounced unsound; it was alleged that the miracles had
been too summarily disposed, of; Abraham was referred to as an

Arab sheik, and Jewish history was too sacred to be submitted to
the laws of ordinary investigation \" Worse still, if possible, was
the suspicion that the historian's weapons were drawn from the
German armoury ; for it was the time of the controversy between
Pusey and Rose, and all things German were even more than
usually obnoxious to English orthodoxy. Milman was roused.
He denied that he had followed the Germans ; truly, no doubt, as
regards details; but certainly the fundamental conception was
enough to the Germans, while it was a startling novelty in
familiar
England. On another point he had, it seems, an answer which
would have been entertaining had he produced it. One man, says
the proverb, may steal a horse, while another dares not look over
the wall. Among who impugned Milman's treat-
the assailants
ment of miracles was Bishop Mant. "If I am driven to it, I
will show them," he says, " not whence I have derived my notion
of the miracles, but where precisely the same explanations are to

—
be found in Bishop Mant and Dr D'Oyly's Bible and if I am —
forced I will print in parallel columns"." But he grew tired of the
uproar and almost wished the Jews " were with the Egyptians at
the bottom of the Red Sea*."
This outcry was in some degree a measure of Milman's inde-
pendence and originality. It stopped his promotion for a time
but he was a man of rare courage and intellectual integrity, and
neither obloquy nor the obscuration of worldly prospects ever
induced him to recant. The fundamental conception is so
familiar now and so completely beyond dispute that it takes some
do full justice to Milman and to recognise that
reflection to a book
which seems in the present day to be of no extraordinary merit
* Smiles's Memoirs ofJohn Murray, ii. 298. ' ibid.)!. 300.
' ibid. ii. 301.
may nevertheless be " epoch-making," and may give its author a
title to the lasting gratitude of his countrymen. Not only the
soldiers who storm the fort, but they whose bodies fill the ditch
for the conquerors to march over, are worthy of honour.
From this time onward it is as a historian that Milman figures
in the annals of literature. His edition of The Decline and Fall

(1838-1839) and his Life of Gibbon (1839) indicated the direction
were taking ; and their character was fully revealed in
his studies
his History of Christianity from the Birth of Christ to the Abolition
of Paganism in the Roman Empire (1840). It is characterised by

the same breadth of view which had given so deep offence in The
History of the Jews ; but, though intrinsically superior to the earlier
work, it neither occasioned such excitement nor is so memorable
for its effects. There was enough book to alarm all sects
in the
and parties except a few Broad Churchmen ; but, while the \
Tractarians were perhaps even rhore shocked than they had been
by The History of the Jews, the Protestant majority in England
regarded with comparative indifference the exposure of the very
human instruments and devices by which the infallible Church
had grown power and greatness. What made them anxious was
to
the suspicion that, in other hands if not in Milman's, the same
principles of criticism might be applied to some phases of the

history of the Protestant Reformation. The majority at both
extremes therefore condemned Milman as an extremist; yet, in
truth, his errorwas not an excess of the rationalistic spirit, but

rather an excessive conservatism which can scarcely be justified to
reason, and which stopped him short before the consequences of
his own thought were fully unfolded to himself. He reserved from
investigation " the things necessary to salvation " : he omitted to
explain how be determined what these things are.
it is to
The History of Christianity mentioned above proved to be only
an introduction to The History of Latin Christianity, including that
of the Popes to Nicholas ^(1854-1855), which is Milman's greatest,
as well as his most ambitious, work. Here the significance of the
author's studies in Gibbon and of the authorities whom Gibbon
used becomes apparent. No two works of equal magnitude in the
English language run more closely parallel as do The History of
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 86$
Latin Christianity and The Decline and Fall. They deal with
much the same period, and necessarily the characters who figure
in the one reappear in the other. And yet they are widely
different. Gibbon aptly characterised his work as the history of
the decline and fall of the Roman Empire ; had Milman desired
to show that, while he tells the story of the same period, his
object is by no means to rewrite Gibbon, he might have done so
by using the words "rise and progress." Gibbon is concerned
with the secular state of Rome which decayed and disappeared,
Milman with that great spiritual empire which sprang up and
flourished on its ruins. The comparison, which is almost in-
evitable, is somewhat hard upon Milman; but an inferiority
which he shares with all other English historians is no discredit,
and the very possibility of making the comparison indicates the
rare strength and massiveness of his work. One of the most
thoughtful of those critics whose studies have turned them
towards theological and ecclesiastical writings, pronounced him,
in respect of the combination of genius with learning, easily first
of modern English churchmen'.

All these men, with the exception of Merivale, who is slightly
junior, were the contemporaries or seniors of Macaulay and
Carlyle. The immense superiority of their work to that of the
predecessors whom they superseded gives colour to the
idea that they wrote upon a new method and had
history
adopted some principle which clearly marked them off from the
historians of the eighteenth century. But in truth this idea is
rather the growth of a later day; and when the question is
investigated it becomes manifest that the sole important difference
is that the later writers were more thorough and more painstaking
than the earlier ones —a difference of great practical importance,

but not one which' gives rise to a new species of history. When
however we turn to men twenty or thirty years younger, we find
a conflict between two great schools, the literary and the so-called
scientific. Of the former school the most conspicuous repre-
sentative was James Anthony Froude (1818-1894), while the
other is seen at its best in William Stubbs (1825-1901), Edward
' TuUoch, Movements of Religious Thought.
w. SS
Augustus Freeman (1823-1892), Samuel Rawson Gardiner (1829-
1902), and Mandell Creighton (1843-1901). John Richard Green
(1837-1883) stood in some respects intermediate, but his personal
connexions ally him with the scientific group.
Froude, the son of a clergyman, was educated with great care

and, naturally, on the lines of orthodox belief. But his father's
religion, though so far tainted with bigotry that he " would not
have a copy of The FilgrMs Progress in his houseV' was never-
dogmatic; and so, when, in 1836,
theless practical rather than
young Froude went into residence at Oriel College, Oxford, he
found himself in a whirl of theological speculation which was
wholly new to him. As his elder brother was one of the most
conspicuous of the Tractarians, young Froude was brought into
close connexion with that party, and for a time he was profoundly
influenced by them. The influence never passed away (no influence
ever does pass away), but its effects changed. He was enlisted
by Newman in the work of writing the Lives of the Saints, and
contributed a biography of St Neot. But the childish fables dis-
gusted him, and, becoming distrustful of the reasoning of Newman,
he soon ceased to be, if he ever was, a Newmanite. He had
read Carlyle's French Revolution, but failed to understand it, until
John Sterling, whom he met 1841-1842, gave him
in the winter of
the key to the mystery. From Carlyle he went to the Germans,
and so passed for ever from under the sway of Newman's ideas.
There was however an interval before the teaching of Carlyle and
the Germans sank into Froude's mind In 1845 ^^ was still
sufficiently orthodox to be ordained deacon but doubts grew so
;
rapidly that he never proceeded to priest's orders, and, when a

change in the law allowed him, he cast off the fragment of
clericalism which till then he had worn of necessity.
Froude's literary career opened with a volume of autobiographic
fiction, Shadows of the Clouds (1847); but The Nemesis of Faith
(1849) was his first book that is likely to be remembered. It too

has, to a large extent, the interest of a spiritual autobiography ; for
there can be little doubt that the mind whose development is
there traced was essentially Froude's own. Forty years passed

1 Paul's Life of Froude, 3.
before he again made an excursion into the field of fictitious

literature. The Two Chiefs of Dunboy (1889), a romance of Irish
history, deserves more praise than it has received, and goes far to
prove that, had the author chosen, he might have won a very high
place as a novelist. About nearly all things Irish opinion is
hopelessly divided ; but many who know Ireland well declare that
Froude, besides writing a most interesting story, has shown great
insight into the country and its inhabitants.
The Nemesis of Faith was a blow not only to the Tractarians
but to orthodoxy in general. The inspiration of the Bible has
since been so often disputed that one attack more causes little
excitement ; but matters were different in a generation when it
was dangerous even to call Abraham a sheik ; and the fact that
Froude was in holy orders naturally made the resentment all the
more keen. The book was burned in the hall of Exeter College,
of which Froude was a fellow, by the senior tutor, Sewell, who, in
his zeal for orthodoxy, forgot the rights of property, the copy which
he burned being a borrowed one. Froude resigned his fellowship,

but he was still pursued with malignant
hostility. Means were
him from the headship of a Tasmanian
taken, successfully, to oust
college, which he had accepted, and men who had hitherto been
his friends publicly disowned him. His father even stopped his
allowance. He had to sell his books, and his financial position
was very precarious, when an unknown donor saved him from
worse distress by the gift, through Max Miiller, of ;£2oo'. Such,
in those days, were the penalties for freedom of thought and
freedom of expression.
The capital required for the profession of letters is a bottle of
ink, a pen and a sheet of paper. Froude, cut adrift from the
profession for which he had been trained and forbidden to teach,
was forced to try to make his living by his pen. The struggle
was hard, but, after an interval shorter than many have to go
through, it was successful. The most powerful influence in his
literary life was that of Carlyle, whom he came to know personally
in 1849., It was Carlyle who inspired Froude to write his history;
it was to Carlyle that he owed his conception of Henry VIII
* Max MuUer's Auld Lang Syne.
SS—
and it was to Carlyle that he looked as his mentor and critic.
" If I wrote anything," he says, " I fancied myself writing it to
him, reflecting at each word what he would think of it, as a check
on affectations." Discipleship of this kind and a
is often a snare
source of all manner of absurdities but Froude's is an evidence
;
of his sanity and good sense. He knew what to take and what to
leave. Carlyle's dramatic conception of history, his contempt for
the machine-theory of the universe, his belief in the incalculable

importance of great men, even his vivid power of realising
character, might afford lessons which others could learn, however
imperfectly ; but his style was wholly his own, and no one ever
attempted to imitate it without suffering injury. This Froude
saw quite clearly : he adopted Carlyle's ideas, but he formed his
own style, or else he borrowed the germ of it from Newman.
After the victory was won, as well as during the years of
struggle, Froude put through his hands a great deal of miscel-
laneous literary work. The growth of periodical literature
furnished a new sort of occupation to a considerable number of
men of letters, and Froude filled the office of editor of Fraser's
Magazine from 1861 to 1874. The best products of this miscel-
laneous activity were gathered together in four series of Short
Studies on Great Subjects (1867-1883), which are comparable to,
arid are surpassed in popula!rity only by, the essays of Macaulay.

In these Short Studies Froude appears at his best No more than
his other works are they free from his besetting sin, and perhaps
this is not less vitiating in reality than it is in his longer works,
but at least it seems so ; and on the other hand his admirable style,
his tact and his instinct for all that is attractive and interesting
tell with full force.
In order of publication, however, Froude's first important

production, after Oxford period, was the
the works of the
History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of
the Spanish Armada (1856-1870). A sound understanding
of the scope and purpose of this work throws a flood of
light upon the author's subsequent writings and supplies a
principle under which most of them may be classified. The
History is not a mere fragment of the history of England, begin-
ning anywhere and ending when the author is tired. Froude

originally intended to carry the story down to the death of
Elizabeth j and he changed his plan, not that he might shorten
his labour, but because he became aware that the defeat of the
Armada, not the death of Elizabeth, was the true conclusion of
the subject he had proposed to himself.The fall of Wolsey was
the beginning of the Reformation movement in England, the
defeat of the Armada marks its definitive triumph. Not only so,
but the victory of England secured to Protestantism a per-

manent place in Europe. Had the issue of the contest been
different, the probability is that the Counter-Reformation would
have swept all Protestant Europe back into the fold of Catholi-
cism, with consequences not only to Protestant countries but
to Catholic ones as well, which are simply incalculable. The
struggle, of course, did not end with the Armada; but its issue
was then determined, and Froude's dramatic instinct led him to

close with the decisive conflict.
One great object then of the History is to elucidate the story
of the Protestant Reformation, especially in England, and to show
by what means it was finally established as the ruling force over
great part of Europe. This was among the causes of the bitter-
ness of Freeman, who, as well as Stubbs, was influenced in his

conception of history by the Tractarian atmosphere of Oxford.
This too is what is meant by those who say that Froude never
shook off the influence of Tractarianism. From partisanship, they
contend, he swung round to opposition : the sun shone upon the
other side of the hill ; but, whether in shade or in sunshine, the hill
before his eyes was still the same. However this may be, an
important group of his later works deals with the Reformation and
the character of Protestantism. Among independent works of this
class, not to mention essays included in Short Studies, we find
Calvinism (1871),Bunyan (1880), Luther (1883), Life and Letters
of Erasmus (1894) and Lectures on the Council of Trent (1896).
The idea of the Reformation was undoubtedly the primary
one in the mind of Froude ; but he was an Englishman, proud
of his country, and his patriotism deepened with the conviction,
which grew with his studies, of the great part she had played in
securing permanently for the world the benefits of the Reforma-
tion. Placed between the anvil of France and the hammer of
Spain, the position of England and of Elizabeth at the opening of
her reign seemed almost desperate. The final triumph was partly
due to good fortune; but it was also a tribute to the courage,
tenacity, sense and statesmanlike qualities alifee of rulers and of
people. Froude saw the possibility opening for that great imperial
expansion which characterises the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies of English history ; and so the seeds were sown from which
sprang Two Lectures on South Africa (1880), Oceana (1886) and
The English in the West Indies (1888) ; while The English in
Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (18 7 2-1 874), though it has
another tale to tell, is nevertheless animated by the same spirit
These works may fairly be regarded as offshoots of the great
trunk history. Others are appendages to it The Divorce of
:
Catharine of Aragon (1891), The Spanish Story of the Armada

(1892) and English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century (1895).
The only other important works of Froude are his Thomas
Carlyle (1882-1884) and the documents preliminary to and
consequent upon it.
The most diverse judgments about Froude may be success-
fully defended, not^ indeed, as expressions of the whole truth, but
as embodying part of it. As a literary artisthe has had among
historians few superiors ; in point of accuracy and trustworthiness,
hardly any other writer of equal standing is so deplorably lax.
But wide as are the varieties of view which may be justified, no

excuse can be pleaded for the virulence with which Freeman
pursued Froude, his grotesque exaggeration of frequently petty
errors, and his outrageous rudeness of expression. Froude gains
greatly in dignity by his long silence under reiterated attacks ; and
when at last he honours of the controversy certainly
hit back, the
did not rest with Freeman. Nevertheless, there is reason in the

contention that the primary obligation of the historian is truth
and, among men who have specially investigated the various
subjects upon which Froude has written, there is a remarkable
consensus as to his astonishing inaccuracy. Those ,who have
delved after him among the materials of English history from
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 8/1
Henry VIII to Elizabeth have found his citations and quotations

to be crammed with inaccuracies. Westcott pronounced upon him
a judgment of unwonted severity. Sir Bartle Frere^ characterised
what Froude wrote about South Africa as a succession of bril-
expressed truths sandwiched with utterly misleading errors.
liantly
The Dutch denounced his Erasmus as a tissue of misstatements,
and Mr W. S. Lilly showed that his "abbreviated translations"
frequently distorted the meaning of the great humanist The
impassioned expressions of the majority of Irish writers about
Froude's English in, Ireland will not, by most Englishmen, be
accepted without large deductions must be impressed
; but all
when a historian so learned, so able impartial as Lecky

and so
pronounces one of the judgments of a brother historian to be
" utterly unfounded," and, as regards one of the persons implicated,
" almost grotesquely untrue"." Close students of the life of Car-
lyle are unanimous in their judgment upon Froude's biography.
Professor Norton called it "a story 'founded upon fact,'" and
Mr David Wilson thought he could prove about as many errors
as there were pages. It ought however to be added that others
as well as Freeman seem to have been irritated by Froude into
exaggerating very trivial mistakes. There is no common measure
between small inaccuracies of diction and spelling, and those
great blunders and misrepresentations that pervert the course of
history.
The charge of inaccuracy is one which has been brought
against every historian in turn, and it can invariably be estab-
lished. In dealing with masses of facts the man of the greatest

learning, of the most untiring industry and of the keenest insight,
cannot escape errors. Carlyle was deceived about the Squire
letters ; Macaulay, less excusably, went wrong about the Christian
name of Grahame of Claverhouse ; the great apostle of accuracy,

Freeman, was hardly in his grave before the battle raged over
him ; and the advocatus diaboli proved his case. But it is utterly
unjust to judge a man by isolated errors ; and Froude's case is
differentiated from the case of the other historians named by the
1 Quoted in The Dictionary of National Biography
* Lecky's History of the Eighteenth Century, II. vii. 308, u. i.
extraordinary number of mistakes which have been proved to
exist in his works. His own defence, given in A Siding at a
Railway Station, is practically that the actual facts of history are
undiscoverable. " '
What is truth ? ' said jesting Pilate " j and the
metaphysician could easily prove that he might have waited long
for an answer. But the plain man feels that the difficulty of
arriving at truth absolute is a poor excuse for inaccurate quotation,
for a paraphrase which ordinary intelligence cannot reconcile with
the meaning of the text, or for a statement of fact contradicted by
the authorities on which it is supposed to be based. It is hardly
possible to resist the conclusion that Froude was constitutionally
inaccurate, and that he often neglected to bestow the care due
to his readers upon the discovery of the facts. In this respect
he did not follow his master. Carlyle worshipped truth, while
Froude doubted whether it could be discovered. Carlyle gave a
poetic presentation of the truth founded upon a careful study of
the prosaic facts, while Froude would seem at times to have given
a literary presentation of it in defiance of the facts.
Froude denied the charge of habitual misstatement ; but there

was another accusation levelled against him which he did not feel
concerned to deny. This was the charge that he read history in
the light of his own theories and judged under the influence of
his own emotions. To do so was in fact necessary on Froude's
theory of history; and there is great example in his favour,
Neither Carlyle nor Michelet sees the French Revolution in a dry
light, nor does Tacitus see the Roman emperors thus. The " per-
sonal equation " cannot be wholly eliminated from any subject

less demonstrably certain than mathematics ; and it is questionable
whether the distortion of truth caused by it be not greater in the
plodding prosaic nature, unconscious of theories, than in the
intense poetic one which produces them as a fruitful field grows
wheat. The ordinary reader feels that it is just the personal
element in great historians that he most values ; and his instinct
is sound. The application of the Newtonian rule, "hypotheses

non fingo," would lead back to the method of the chronicles and
would strip history of nearly all its interest. Nobody can posi-
tively know what manner of man was Henry VIII, as science
knows the chemical composition of water or of air and yet a ;
conception of his character comprehension of

is essential to the
the period in which he lived. Only in rare cases can it be shown
beyond doubt what were the motives behind a certain action, a
treaty or a war ; yet there were motives, through which alone we
can understand the action.
The indictment which is brought against Froude is one of
the weightiest that has ever been levelled against a great writer ;
and yet, even from the point of view of scientific histdry, there
is another side of the account. In the first place, it must be

repeated that most of the inaccuracies alleged against him are
trivial. It is absurd to treat the misprint of Guienne for Guisnes
as if it were a serious blunder, or to magnify into a fact of capital
importance Froude's ignorance of the identity of Lexovia with
Lisieux. Even his objectionable habit of marking abridgements
with inverted commas is seriously reprehensible only if the
abridgement does not fairly represent the meaning of the original.
But further, whatever may have been Froude's errors, he un-
questionably advanced the bounds of knowledge in relation to his
period ; and if original research be the true test of the value of a
historian, he bears it far better than his inveterate critic. Freeman
trustedalmost wholly to printed authorities and very rarely
examined a manuscript ; while not only was Froude the first
Englishman to examine the great collections at Simancas, but he
laboured assiduously at the Record Office and at Hatfield House
as well. The sand which he found upon the ink often glistening
proved that his eye had been the first which had seen the docu-
ment since it was put away. " I had," he says, " to cut my way
through a jungle, for no one had opened the road for me'." The
service which he did was a great one, and gratitude for it might
have tempered the keenness of censure where he fell into errors-
while mere candour ought to have dictated an acknowledgment
of the proof he gave of integrity of purpose by depositing in the
British Museum his transcripts of the Simancas papers.
It is however on the purely literary side that Froude is at his
best. He never fails to be interesting. The History may be a
^ VaMy^ Life of Froude, 192.
"romance," Thomas Carlyle a "story 'founded upon fact,'" The
English in Ireland a storehouse of " froudacities," and all the
minor works similarly unsound ; but they are fascinating
"romances,"' excellent "stories," eminently readable "froudaci-
ties.'' Froude's admirable English gives a charm to everything
he ever wrote. one of the purest prose styles of the nine-
His is
teenth century, less mannered than Macaulay's or Matthew

Arnold's, less laboured and " poetical " than Ruskin's or De
Quincey's. Perhaps he never rises so high as these writers at
times do ; but his English is always in perfect taste, never sinking
beneath the subject nor rising above it — neither mean nor turgid,
but always exactly adequate. He
great on a great occasion
is
and on an ordinary one. This unerring fitness is

sufficient
probably due to the fact that he never troubled himself about

style as style he was concerned merely to express his meaning,
;
and hence he remained wholly free from affectation.

One of Froude's greatest gifts, which has been just touched
upon, and which serves as salt to give savour to his writings and
to preserve them, was his talent for the delineation of character.
Not only his Henry VHI, but his Mary Tudor, his Mary Stuart,
his Elizabeth, and, generally, all the leading characters of his
history, are profoundly interesting studies. Possibly the docu-
ments do not bear out his views ; Froude's Henry and Mary and
Elizabeth may not be the Tudor sovereigns as they lived ; but
they have that interest which always attaches to dramatic
creations just as Shakespeare's King John and Richard III are
;
interesting still, even though we may believe that the real John
was more able and less mean and the real Richard more human.
And if Froude's characters fail to convince they are not therefore
ineffectual. Those who cannot accept Henry VIII as the
his
real man will almost certainly find their own conception of the
imperious Tudor altered. It is not too much to say that
Henry VIII has been a different figure in English history since
Froude wrote about him.

The same gift is shown in the delineation of the greatest
character Froude ever attempted to portray, Thomas Carlyle.
The character, as he paints it, is deficient in several fine quaUties
which the real Carlyle possessed, — deficient in generosity, in

consideration for others, unlova)3le. And yet from the beginning
of the long biography to the end the reader is held entranced.
Working with consummate skill upon magnificent materials,
Froude has constructed a character and has left a picture of life
enthralling in its interest. If his Carlyle be one of the most
misleading of biographies, it is also one of the most fascinating^
and should it ever be superseded and consigned to the literary
lumber-room, English readers will be the poorer by the loss of
one of, the most readable books in the language. In sheer
literary skill even Froude never surpassed it.
Another literary masterpiece of Froude's later years was

Oceana, the most perfect outcome (among his works) of that
imperialism which ranked next to the Reformation among his
historical interests. It had been fostered by his study of the
Elizabethan age, and when he won greater leisure on the con-
clusion of his history, one of his leading objects was the develop-
ment of it. The principal purpose (not very wisely pursued) of
.his lectures in the United States was to set England right with
the great American republic. He went to Cape Colony on a

political errand in 1874. He afterwards visited Australia, Few
have done so much as he towards fostering that interest and
pride in the colonies and that sense of their importance to the
rnqther country which are so conspicuous in the present day, and
which were so conspicuous by their absence thirty or forty years
ago. Oceana is perhaps the most perfect piece of literature in
which these feelings are expressed, though in depth and intrinsic
importance it is far surpassed by Seeley's Expansion ef England
and still his Growth of British Policy.

farther by
The from Froude to Freeman and Stubbs, who, with
transition
Mr Goldwin Smith arid J. R. Green, were the leaders of the
Oxford school of history, is like passing into a new atmosphere.
For Froude, though an Oxford man, did not belong to the Oxford
schoo^, and his spirit was that of an older time. Like all recent
he made an investigatipn of authorities more elaborate
historians,
and extensive than any of the, eighteenth century historians,
except Gibbon, deemed necessary. But his habit was to read
largely, to let the impressions produced by his reading take
possession of his mind, and then to write with as little interruption
for reference to authorities as possible. The Oxford historians,
on the other hand, made constant reference and the accurate to,
citation of, authorities a matter of conscience and duty ; and they

had their reward in an accuracy which caused them, for a time, to
be regarded by admiring disciples as the superiors of all their
predecessors. Whatever might be the case with other men, they
at least might boast, Hke the Homeric hero, to be much better
than their fathers. " Blunders or questionable statements," says
the biographer of Freeman, "may be discovered in Gibbon, in
Hallam, in Thirlwall, in Arnold, and, occasionally, even in
Bishop Stubbs^." That Gibbon should be fallible is natural
enough, but that Stubbs should share his fallibility is discon-
certing.
.. After Froude it is convenient to take Freeman, who presents
the sharpest contrast to him, and who was also the eldest of the
Oxford group. Perhaps some of the bitterness which Freeman
showed in criticism was due to disappointment. His two great
ambitions were to be a professor of history, by preference at
Oxford, and to be a member of Parliament. The former ambition
was gratified in 1884 when he succeeded Stubbs, and the latter
might have been gratified, had he chosen, two years later. But he
was then old and indifferent, and he might have adapted to his own
case the celebrated words of Johnson to Chesterfield. In the
long interval between his marriage and retirement from Oxford in
1847 and his return as regius professor, he had contributed
voluminodsly to periodicals of all sorts, weekly, monthly, quarterly;
he had studied architecture and historical geography and written
about them ; he had published The History and Conquests of the
Saracens (1856) ; he had begUn and left unfinished The History of
Federal Government (y(A. i, 1863); and, above all, he had completed
the great work of his life. The History of the Norman Conquest
(1867-1879), as well as its sequel. The Reign of William Rufus
(1882). Though afterwards he had the courage to undertake The
History of Sicily (1891-1894), he felt, not without reason, that his
' Life of Freeman, ii. 466.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 8/7
work was done, and contemplated with shrinking rather than with
delight the change which the Oxford professorship must make in
his hfe. His anticipations were justified. Few lecturers are in a
more trying position than those who hold professorial chairs at
the two oldest English Universities, and rare are they who can
make their courses popular. Freeman had not the gifts. About
a year before his death he recorded that he had tried every kind
of lecture he could think of, and put his best strength into all,
and nobody earned
Freeman was a man of strong passions and opinions, and of
intense personal likes and dislikes. His fidelity to his convictions
was of that sort which does not shrink from making sacrifices for
their sake. In 1878' he gave up a lucrative and agreeable

connexion with The Saturday Review, because he believed its
politics to be mischievous. But while he was undoubtedly

honest in his opinions and manful in his acceptance of their
consequences, the question whether he was judicious in the
expression of them is by no means so easily settled in his favour.
Those who differed from him on matters of historical detail were

rated in terms which would have better befitted some capital
matter of morals ; and it is not beside the point to note that the
violence of his language with regard to the Eastern question
alienated many of his own party. From such a man we may
confidently look for work thoroughly honest and conscientious
but we may reasonably doubt whether it will always be conceived
and carried out in a judicial spirit.
'
Freeman was rather markedly averse from philosophic
speculation ; and, though nothing interested him more than
ecclesiastical questions, he was impatient even of theology.
Perhaps for this very reason the few general ideas he possessed
had an extraordinary hold upon his mind; for the best way to
keep one theory within proper bounds is to balance it with
another. As we have already seen, Freeman learnt from Arnold
the idea of the unity of history, and he insisted upon it even
to weariness. When it was proposed to set up a school of
modern history at Oxford the fiiture regius professor argued
^ Life of Freeman, ii. 429.
with his customary vehemence that such a step would be a
violation of all principle and must prove utterly fruitless. The
doctrine of unity insisted upon by Freeman was not
thus
only true, but it may now seem almost a truism. All human
history is so clearly one that it would be waste of energy to
demonstrate the unity. But in Freeman's youth history was
commonly divided into water-tight compartments ancient and ;
modem, sacred and secular. Arnold's conception was a novelty,

and time was well spent in expounding it. Freeman however fell
into a characteristic mistake. He exaggerated the unity, and he
insisted upon it out of season as well as in season, much as the
modern school of naval strategists insists unduly upon the truth
that " the sea is all one." So it is, just as the earth is all one
but on land or sea the question where a force is placed may be of
vital importance. So too, while there are between the ancient
—
world and the modern many lines of connexion through the law
of Rome, through the literature and philosophy of Greece, through
the religion of Judaea, —
there are also deep divisions which fully
justify a broad distinction, though not complete separation. A
man who was not liable to the obsession of a single idea would
have tempered his doctrine of unity with this practical considera-
tion, and would have escaped the error of denying the value
of modern history as an instrument of academic education. But
while Freeman fell thus into error, in another way he derived
great benefit from his doctrine of unity. If some of his con-
temporaries have not escaped the vice of excessive specialisation,
that fault cannot be charged against the historian whose special
period was the Norman Conquest of England, but who has
written learnedly on the Achaean League and the Swiss Bund,
on the Sicels and on the Saracens. Freeman has been charged
with narrowness of mind, but so far as historical lore is concerned,
narrow he certainly was not.
Another general idea with which the mind of Freeman was
filled was that of the supreme importance of the Teutons and
their institutions in the history of England. The Teutons play as
great a part in his history as the Pelasgians do in that of Niebuhr;
and it is almost certain that the force and persistency of his
conception of Teutonism led him unconsciously to exaggerate on

the one side and on the other. The prejudice
to underrate
shows itself and absurd forms ; there was
occasionally in quaint
a sacredness about the Saxons which made Freeman follow them
in the most uncouth forms of spelling ; but he had no hesitation
in Anglicising the names of the French, whom he disliked. It is
to be feared that his prejudice shows itself also in matters

infinitely more important.
His account of the Teutonic conquest
of the Celts is almost pure theory ; and further, it is singularly
—
unconvincing theory: "Though the literal extirpation of a
nation is an impossibility, there is every reason to believe that the
Celtic inhabitants of those parts of Britain which had become
English at the end of the sixth century had been as nearly
extirpated as a nation can be. The women would doubtless be
largely spared, but as far as the male sex is concerned, we may
feel sure that death, emigration, or personal slavery were the only
alternativeswhich the vanquished found at the hands of our
fathers. The
nature of the small Celtic element in our language
would of itself prove the fact. Nearly every Welsh word which
has found its way into English expresses some small domestic
matter, such as women and slaves would be concerned with;
nearly all the words belonging to the nobler occupations, all the
terms of government and war, and nearly all the terms of
agriculture, are thoroughly Teutonic. In short, everywhere but
in Britain an intruding nation sat down by the side of an elder
nation, and gradually lost itself in the mass. In Britain, so far as
such a process is possible, the intruding nation altogether sup-
planted the elder nation'."
It is proverbial that "there is none so blind as he who
will not see " ; or, as it is otherwise expressed,
"He that complies against his will
Is of his own opinion still.
But there ought, to be, if there is not, a converse proverb teaching

what a tiny ray of light will suffice for him who is determined to
see. The tenuity of evidence here, and the greatness of the

superstructure built upon such a meagre foundation of fact,
1 The Norman Conquest, i. 18.
are amazing. From the extent (which he underrates) and
the character of the Welsh element in the English language
Freeman dra.ws the gigantic inference of a practical extirpation
which he admits to be unexampled. But events which are un-
exampled ought to be established by unusually rigorous evidence
it is just the fact that miracles are unexampled in our experience
that renders all ordinary evidence ineffectual to prove them.
Further, almost in the very breath in which he alleges practical
extirpation, Freeman reveals that what he himself believes in is
something widely different. A race is not " nearly extirpated " if
its women remain ; still less is it so if the males have the alterna-
tive of "personal slavery," as well as those of death and emigra-
tion. Had those women no children? had children,
If they
what becomes of the Teutonic theory? With regard to the
linguistic argument, it is worth asking what, on Freeman's prin-
ciples,would be the natural inference could all the evidence as to
the effects' of the Norman Conquest be swept away, except only
the evidence of language. In a delightful passage in Toanhoe
Wamba the Jester demonstrates to Gurth the Swineherd that
pigs and sheep and oxen, so long as they are alive and a source
of trouble, are Saxon ; but the same animals, as soon as they are
prepared for the table, take Norman names and pass to the use of
the Normans. So it was then, and so it has remained to this day.
What more plain, then, than that the Saxons who were not
slaughtered were enslaved, and remained slaves ever after? It
is true the Normans adopted their language, but that was

evidently for convenience of giving orders to their serfs ; and
they showed their lordship by imposing their own terms as the
vocabulary of the nobler occupations.
Freeman would have searched the English language for words
strong enough to denounce such a travesty of argument had it
been used by another historian in support of any thesis unwelcome
to him. Its presence in his own work is serious, because it shows
to what an extent he was capable of being blinded by his

prepossessions, and how carefully his inferences, if not his facts,
have to be sifted. The point is absolutely fundamental. The
whole History of the Norman Conquest is a glorification of
Teutonism, and that work is gravely compromised if the Saxon

Conquest was not such as Freeman believed it to be, or if he has
not made out a reasonable case for believing it to be so. There
seems to be better foundation for the view of a more recent
historian, that the Norman Conquest, instead of being the triumph
of Teutonism, was really the triumph of Latin civilisation over
barbarism'.
It has already been pointed out that the idea of nationality
during this period attained an importance it never had before.
No one was more completely under its influence than Freeman.
Unity of race was almost as much a fundamental conception with
him as unity of history ; and he seems to have been incapable of
treating dispassionately either the races he admired or the races
he disliked. He is more than just to the Teutons, and a good
deal less than just to the Celts and the French. Wherever the
dry light of history may be found, it is not in the works of
Freeman.
Freeman's admiration for Macaulay might have been expected
to preserve him from some of the faults with which he is justly
chargeable. His admiration was however based primarily on
Macaulay's mastery of facts, wherein he was certainly a worthy
follower. But there were two curious limitations to his learning.

In the first place, he had an extraordinary distaste for the use of
manuscript authorities the documents on which he relied were
:
nearly all printed. In the second place, his abhorrence of public

libraries almost deprived him of such great collections as the
British Museum and even the Bodleian. On the literary side he
has little in common with Macaulay. His English is generally
heavy. He is and prone to the use of
habitually over-emphatic
superlatives. He and altogether ignorant of the art of
is diffuse
omission. His repetitions become tedious, though it has been
said that great part of his effectiveness was due to this very trick
of repetition. His work often loses all form from the excessive
length, and number of his notes, disjecta membra of history
which he has failed to work up. But while Freeman's theories

are questionable and his literary execution poor, those who are
^ Davis's England under the Normans and Angetiitu.
w. 56
most competent to form an opinion are emphatic in their testi-
mony to the value of the materials gathered together and sifted
by him. Even if the judgment of posterity be, as is probable,

no great history, it will certainly be also that
that he has written
he has done much to make great history possible of execution by
some successor.
With the name of Freeman there is commonly associated that
of William Stubbs, who succeeded Freeman in the fellowship of
Trinity College vacated by the latter on his marriage, but who
preceded him in the office of regius professor of modern
history. This post Stubbs held from 1866 till 1884, when he
was made Bishop of Chester. Five years later his translation to
the see of Oxford brought him back to the city which is most
intimately associated with his fame. His absorption for the last
seventeen years of his life work of a diocese
in the administrative
necessarily diminished his productiveness as a historian and
causes the student to lament a promotion which, however well
deserved and well intended, was so costly to scholarship.
There are good and sufficient reasons for the association of
the name of Stubbs with that of Freeman. They were the most
learned English historians of their day, they were in general
agreement as to aims and methods, they were friends whose
mutual admiration sometimes provoked a smile. But in almost
all respects Stubbs was the greater of the two. He was by far
the more
attractive character. What in Freeman bordered on
was in Stubbs softened and humanised into wit and
ferocity
humour. He could be sufficiently biting, but he was never, like
Freeman, merely abusive. Both men were learned, but probably
Stubbs was the more learned of the two. Each won, and
deserved, a high reputation for accuracy ; but the warmest friend
of Freeman would not claim for him superiority over Stubbs.
Neither the one nor the other merits great praise for literary art
j
but the work of Stubbs is less dry and formless than that of
Freeman, the best passages are better, and there is far less
repetition. Indeed, the style of Stubbs was naturally good, and
on occasion he could rise almost to eloquence. He had a rare
gift for delineating a character in a few incisive sentences. There
is some lively and excellent writing in the introductions to the

volumes of the Rolls Series edited by him. But in general he is
too heavily loaded with learning to be a good historical artist, and
his, works as a whole seem, like those of Freeman, amorphous.
Caring little for the things of art, he chose the service of historical
science as the better part, and deemed it incompatible with sitting
at the feet of the muse of literature.
Stubbs was not only younger than Freeman but he was also,
on the whole, later in his work. When
he was elected professor
in 1866 he. had done nothing of importance except the Registrum
Sacrum Anglicanum (1858) and the editorial work on certain
volumes, of the Rolls Series. It is however agreed that the intro-
ductions to those volumes are Stubbs's masterpiece ; and already
his reputation was so great that the professorship was oifered to
him although he was not a candidate. Seldom has an appoint-
ment been so amply justified by results. The Select Charters
(1870) and The Constitutional History of England (i 874-1878)
belong to the period of the professorship. So do The Early
Blmntageneis (1876) and the Lectures on the Study of Medieval and
Modern History (1886), though he was a bishop before the latter
was published.
The chief interests of Stubbs in history were ecclesiastical and
constitutional, and his fame with the general reader, to whoni
the Rolls Series is inaccessible, must rest mainly upon his
Constitutional History. This work forms, with the constitutional
histories of Hallam and of May, one of a series of three which
together cover the whole course of English constitutional history
from the beginning down to a time within living memory. The
fact that the later work deals with the earlier period is illustrative
of the drift of historical investigation in the time of Stubbs.

Hallam began in the middle, and May, whose interest was in the
present rather than the past and was practical rather than specula-
tive, took up the thread where he dropped it. The purpose of
Stubbs, on the other hand, is to trace the constitutional history
of England "in its origin and development"; and his whole

work is inspired with the conviction that the beginning is more
than half of the whole. In a more moderate and a wiser form he
56—2
shares the belief of Freeman, whose thesis in his Growth of the
English Constitution (1872) is that practically the whole English
constitution was in operation in Saxon times, and that subsequent
changes have been mere changes in detail. The work of Stubbs
was unquestionably of first-rate importance. He revealed much
that was previously quite unknown, and set many facts in their
proper place and presented them in their true proportions. And
yet, rare as was the author's talent for research, it is melancholy
to reflect in what great measure his views have, even within

a generation, been superseded. The life of a work of learning
is scarcely longer than that of a modern battleship, the only
object which rivals it in ponderousness. If we look for the work
on the English constitution which is still the most living and
valuable, we shall find it, not in Hallam, or in Stubbs, or in May,
or in Freeman, but in Bagehot, and in Professor Dicey's Law of
the Constitution.
In no department except that of constitutional history has the
name of Stubbs been so authoritative as in all that relates to the
history of the Church; and in his treatment of ecclesiastical
history may be found a striking illustration of the superlative
importance of the eye which sees and the mind which interprets.
For a time his great reputation won acceptance for almost any
view he countenanced ; and when, in the appendix to the Report
of the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission, he supported the doctrine,

popular with, and perhaps vital to, the Anglican High Church
party, that there was in the Middle Ages a fundamental distinction
between Anglican church law and Papal canon law, so that the
latter was never authoritative, though it was profoundly respected,
in England, the matter was regarded as settled. The oracle had
spoken, the utterance was satisfactory to clerical opinion, and,
difficult as it was to bring the theory into harmony with the broad
facts of history, as seen by the average layman, no one ventured
to contradict him. And yet never was confidence more mis-
placed. In the six essays by F. W. Maitland which are gathered
together in his Roman Canon Law in the Church of England
(1898) the ground is re-examined; and while the author regards
Stubbs's discourse " with reverence and admiration," he shows its
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 88$
main conclusions to be absolutely untenable. In recent times

there has been no such complete subversion of what may be
described as a system rather than a particular conclusion.
Captain Mahan's books, which have radically changed the con-
ception of sea power, are the only ones which have produced an
effectcomparable to that produced by Maitland's essays. The
difference between him and Stubbs is no mere point of detail,
nothing analogous to a mistake as to a date, or the misquotation
of a document, or a misjudgment of character. It goes to the
very core of a great department of history. It is singular that
this vital correction was made, not by a rival specialist in eccle-
siastical history, but by a student of law who, having to write

a chapter on marriage, found himself compelled to make an
incursion into the unfamiliar region of ecclesiastical jurisprudence.
If the method of Stubbs was scientific, its vaccine was pathetically
impotent to ward off the germ of error. The worst that has been
alleged against Macaulay is trivial by the side of this colossal
blunder ; no single charge made against Froude is comparable to

kK Yet there were inherent elements of greatness in Stubbs
which go far to redeem even an error so gigantic ; and the hand
which dealt this staggering blow was the hand which also penned
the words :
" In his power of marshalling legal details so as to
bring to view some living principle or some phase of national
development he [Stubbs] has no rival and no second among
Englishmen I"
When the foundation of Stubbs's ecclesiastical history crumbles
at a touch and the edifice of Freeman's Teutonism (which was
Stubbs's also) proves to be buUt on sand, the enquirer may well
ask, assurance to be found? Ranke thought that the
where is
business of history was to record " was eigentlich geschehen ist "
but evidently the most difficult task of all is just to discover what
' The editor of Stubbs's Letters has persuaded himself that the world has
been too hasty in coining to the conclusion that Maitland's book has settled the
question against Stubbs's view. It may be so but an unsupported expression
;
of opinion such as this is of little value in the face of the weighty evidence
adduced by Maitland. The only way to meet that is by evidence on the other
side. And whence is it to come ?
' Maitland's English Law and t/'ie Jiataissance, 19.
this: is. Stubbs and Freeman were esteemed the foremost
historians of tneir time for knowledge of facts and for accuracy
in the statement of them. But they found that facts without an
interpretation were but an insignificant part of "was eigentlich
geschehen and all their learning and industry and ability
ist " ;
gave them no immunity from the most serious misapprehensions.

The results hardly seem to justify the claim that their method is
the only sound one, and it is safer to adopt the conclusion of
Jebb, that " the Muse of History is the queen of a varied realm
and various gifts may be brought to her shrined" The master of
narrative, the dramatist, the seer, the satirist, the student of social
science, the antiquary^ each may bring his gift; and none can
claim that his alone is worthy of acceptance.
The spirit and method of these two writers, and especially
those of his master Freeman, are curiously combined in John
Richard Green with some of the characteristics of Froude and
with a style which, by its brilliancy and picturesqueness, recalls
that of Macaulay. Green was a man of great personal attractive-

ness, a vivacious and entertaining talker, a delightful letter-writer,
a master of sarcasm and of paradox. He threw himself with
extreme energy and eagerness into any work which he found to
do, and probably sowed the seeds of the disease which carried
him off, during the years which he spent as a curate in East
London, before increasing alienation from orthodox opinions led
him to abandon the clerical life. His interest in history was of
old date, but it was only after this event that he had much leisure
for historical investigation; and ere long that had to be carried
on under the difficulties inseparable from invalidism partial or
complete. Much of his writing had to be done at the health
resorts towhich he was driven by the disease which doomed him
to an early death. In the firmness with which he faced it and
the gallantry with which he continued to labour in spite of
weakness and suffering he resembled another victim of the same
disease, Robert Louis Stevenson. Like Stevenson too Green
wrote his own epitaph, — "he died learning."
The first book which won fame for Green was A Short
^ Jebb's Macaulay, i j.
History of the English People (1874), which is by far the most

popular of all such summaries. This was afterwards expanded
into a History of the English People (1877-1880) in four volumes,
which is among the best of the histories on a considerable scale
embracing the whole story of England; and yet, though it

corrects many of the errors of the earlier work, it is probably, on
the whole, farther removed from perfection.
In these two books Green necessarily worked mainly upon the
materials supplied by other men, and he has been described as
a populariser rather than an original historian. If the word
" populariser " is intended to state a fact, it is accurate ; but if it
is meant to suggest a charge, it is misleading. Under modern

conditions the writer who attempts to narrate the whole of English
history cannot but work upon the materials supplied by other
historians. No man has ever yet been so learned as to exhaust
the original authorities for all periods alike. Macaulay chose one
epoch, Freeman another, Froude a third, Gardiner yet a fourth.
He. who would embrace all four periods, with others which they
have not touched, must either unite and surpass the learning of
all four men, or else take a great deal on trust and at second-
hand. This unquestionably Green has done. But if his design

was legitimate, as will hardly be denied, and if this was the
necessary consequence of it, then this too was legitimate.
Green however aspired also to the honours of the historian
who bases his work upon his own
principally, if not exclusively,
independent examination of original documents. The Making of
England (1881), written, as his wife says, "under the shadow of
death,'' and The Conquest of England (1883), which he left incom-
plete, are the outcome of original research. The former is less
learned than Elton's Origins of English History, which was
published only a year after it, and both of Green's books have
been shown to contain numerous mistakes. No work of the sort,
produced under such conditions as those in which Green was
placed, could possibly be other than faulty; but, all things
considered, the marvel is not that they are imperfect, but that
they are so good.
Though Green was surpassed in learning by a considerable
number of contemporaries and predecessors, he has enough of
independent merit and individuality to give him an assured place
among historians. No one ever had a more vivid sense of the
quasi-independent life of the component parts of a great state.
A town was to him a an existence of its own, not
real entity with
a mere part of a greater whole and Freeman

; declares that it was
from Green that he learnt to look in this way upon cities^ This
however is only a special illustration of a characteristic which
pervades all Green's work. He was a poet almost as much as
a historian, and that vitality which Wordsworth found in external
nature was equally evident to him in all the parts and elements
whose union constituted national life. Hence in great measure
his popularity. In his hands nothing was, or at least nothing
could long remain, dry. A bare hint, a mere fragment of evidence,
was sufficient to call up before his mental eye a complete picture.
No doubt this was the source of many of his mistakes. He did
not sufficiently discriminate for his readers, nor probably for
himself,between that which rested on solid evidence and that
which was due to reconstruction by a poetic mind. The fact that
he, perhaps more than any contemporary, threw his own personality
into his work is at once his strength and his weakness ; but it is
strength far more than weakness.
Somewhat apart from these men, alike in personal history, in
opinions and in methods, stood Charles Henry Pearson (1830-
1894), whose National Life and Character (1893) won him, just
before his death, the fame which his scholarly and able Early
and Middle Ages of England (1861) had failed to gain. The
latter brought him into conflict with Freeman, who attacked
it with characteristic virulence in an article in The Fortnightly
Review and was answered by Pearson in a pamphlet which he

afterwards admitted to be " more savage than is justifiable," but
which made Freeman "very careful after this to write anony-
mously^." In the interval between this book and National Life
and Character Pearson had spent many years in Australia;
and his active political life there and his practical study of
^ Life of Freeman, i. 303.
* Memorials of Pearson, 131,
social problems profoundly influenced his later work. It is
a brilliant and most suggestive production; but it is also

excessively discursive, and, perhaps, a little too easy in its
generalisations. There is therefore room fordoubt as to whether

it will wear well, or long retain its reputation, though it has the
support of a good style. The mournful conclusion is stated with
an impressiveness which is partly due to dignity of language, and
partly to the moral elevation of the writer: "It is now more than
probable that our science, our civilisation, our great and real
advance in the practice of government, are only bringing us
nearer to the day when the lower races will predominate in the
world, when the higher races will lose their noblest element,
when we shall ask nothing from the day but to livej nor from the
future but that we may not deteriorate. Even so, there will still
remain to us ourselves. Simply to do our work in life, and to
abide the issue, if we stand erect before the eternal calm as cheer-
fully as our fathers faced the eternal unrest, may be nobler training
for our souls than the faith in progress."
There are obvious reasons why Froude, though he was an

Oxford man, should not be regarded as a member of the Oxford
school of history, but those reasons do not apply to Mandell
Creighton. It is true, he became professor of ecclesiastical history
at Cambridge,, but prior to that he had been fdlow and tutor of

an Oxford college, had taken part in the development of the
historical school of that University and had published The Age
of Elizabeth (1876), Simon de Montfort (1876), The Tudors and

the Reformation (1876) and the first two volumes of his great
work; the History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformat
Hon (1882-1894), a title which became inaccurate when the
author found that the pressure of other duties would prevent
him from carrying the narrative farther down than the sack of
Rome. Creighton was, in short, fully formed at Oxford, his
methods and ideals were those of the Oxford school, and when
he migrated as a professor to Cambridge it was to transplant
thege and let them take root with siich change as the new soil
might produce in them.
In its main lines the career of Creighton runs closely parallel
to that of Stubbs. Both, after a brief period of tutorial work at
Oxford, retired to country livings, both were elevated to the
episcopal bench, and through their absorption in administrative
business both were, in the main, lost to scholarship. Stubbs how-

ever was fifty-nine when he became a bishop, while Creighton was
only forty-eight and moreover Creighton had the greater taste
J
and talent for administration and threw himself into it with the
greater zest. He had also the more difficult sphere of labour.
Stubbs's dioceses of Chester and Oxford were comparatively
peaceful. So was Creighton's first diocese, Peterborough; but
on his translation to London he found himself in the midst of
the most difficult ecclesiastical problems of the time. On the
whole, his four years' administration showed an admirable com-
bination of firmness with conciliation, illustrating that " common
sense amounting to genius " which was said to be his special gift.
But the controversies he could not escape completely absorbed

his energies, and even had his life been prolonged Creighton
could have accomplished no more work of importance in history.
His fame must rest on the History of the Papacy.
When Creighton went to Cambridge in 1884 as professor of
ecclesiastical history, Seeky had already been for fifteen years
professor of modern history. The ideas and methods of the two

men clashed. To Seeley's conception of history, it has been
remarked with truth, the saying, "history is past politics and
politics present history," applied more strictly than it did to its
author. Freeman's. Seeley's aim was practical, his method philo-

sophical. He thought that the highest part of the work of a
university was to trainup useful citizens, and that this could be
done only by the moulding of character through ideas. It was
the ideas he extracted from history, not the facts wherein
they were embedded, which interested him. Thus, while the
most influential of his contemporaries mined for their material
in a distant past, Seeley by preference investigated recent history
while they laid enormous stress on the knowledge of detail, he
made his most awakening books out of facts of common know-
ledge.
Creighton's conception of history was wholly unlike this ; and
in his inaugural lecture he defined his own view and contrasted

it with its opposite in terms which show that he had Seeley in
his mind. "All differences of historical judgmeflt," he said,
" resolve themselves into differences of the conception of progress.
Historians mainly differ according as their conception of progress

is historical or political. By a political conception I mean one
which is directly derived from the political movements or political
theories of the present day, which takes as its starting-point ideas
which are now prevalent, or problems which are now pressing for
solution. According to this view the student of history knows
exactly what he wants to find in the past. He wishes to trace
the development of the principles, which he himself holds and
which he believes to be destined to succeed. To him the past
was a failure so far as it did not follow those principles.... He has
no doubt that the perspective of the present is the true perspective,
and draws the sketch according to its rules.
-'•
"The historical conception of progress is founded on historical
experience of the evolution of human affairs. Its object is to
understand the past as a whole, to note in every age the thing

which' was accotnplished, the ideas which clothed themselves
with power. It tries to estimate them in reference to the
times in which they occurred. It knows no spetial sympathies,
sees everywhere the working of great elemental forces which
f<Jr it
ate common to human society at all times. It strives to weigh the

problems of the past in their actual relations to their times, it tries
to strip them of their accidental forms, and show their funda-
mental connexion not merely with present idSas, but with the
process of man's development.... I will not defend but will only
state my own prefererice for the historical tather than the political
view of progress. I turn to the past to learn its story without
any preconceived opinion about what that story ihay be. I do
riot assume that one period or one line of study is more instruc-
tivethan another, but I am ready to recognise the real identity of

' '
man's aspiration at all times^."

Of course the contrast is here fa;r too broadly drawn. Neither
Seeley nor any other historian worthy of the name ever went to
1 Quoted in The Life of Creighton, i. 179-280.
knowing exactly what he wanted to find ; and on the other
history
hand we have aheady seen in the cases of Freeman and Stubbs
the value of that supposed superiority to preconceived opinion
on which Creighton prided himself. Immunity from preconceived
opinion depends less upon the conception of progress than upon
breadth of mind and upon temperament. Still, exaggerated thotigh
it is, the contrast usefully indicates the difference between the
two historical professors of Cambridge. The genius loci was on

the side of Creighton, for Cambridge has always been devoted to
research and patient of minutiae. " I will tell you," says the
Cambridge scholar of the tale, "what Aristotle says; if you want
to know what he means, you must go to Oxford."
Creighton tried to embody his own conception in his great
work on the papacy, and his remarkable success is shown in the
commendation of men of views opposed to his own in politics
and religion. Lord Acton, the most highly qualified of all critics,
though he severely criticised the third and fourth volumes, de-
clared that the first and second were marked by a fulness and
accuracy which were "prodigious in volumes which are but the
prelude to an introduction, and have been composed in the
intervals of severer duty'." But the work has all the vices as well
as the merits of the school to which it belongs. It is dry and
hard reading. Except a few summaries of character there is
little in it that can be read with pleasure; and considering the
character of Creighton, his incisiveness of phrase, his turn for

epigram, his versatility, it is surprising that he has succeeded
so completely in washing out all colour from his work. He seems,
unfortunately, to have copsidered that literary grace and liveliness
were snares, and that if he fell into theni he would somehow
become incapable of telling the truth.
Perhaps however the characteristics of the Oxford school of

history are to be found in the most perfect balance not in either
Stubbs or Freeman, but in Samuel Rawson Gardiner (1829-1902),
a historian who recalls Hallam more than any other. The whole
life of Gardiner bears witness to his disinterested and incorruptible
love of truth. He had neither the power nor the desire to achieve
' Quoted in the Life oj Creighton, i, 227.
popularity, and no contemporary of equal eminence was worse

rewarded. For more than forty years he laboured at bis design
of writing a history of England from 1603 to 1660, fragments of
which were published at various dates between 1863 and 1901.
Though these publications were for a long time hardly noticedj
Gardiner never for a moment suffered himself to be diverted from
his purpose, except in so far as it was necessary to earn a modest
living by work as a lecturer, an examiner, and a writer of text-
books. When at last 1894 he was
recognition came, and in
offered the regius professorship at Oxford vacated by the death
of Froude, he declined, because the work of the chair would have
interfered with the task which he had set himself. He was
within sight of the end at his death; but unfortunately the
narrative, of the last four years remained unfinished, and the
historian had failed even to reach the death of Cromwell.
What makes Gardiner the best representative of his school, if
not its greatest figure, is his conspicuous fairness and his success
in keeping his own personality put of his work. In this he was
just the opposite of Green, and he differed widely from Freeman
too. Here lies the secret of his want of popularity. His work
is colourless. It contains no lively delineations of character, no
animated narrative, no eloquence. It is the dispassionate and

level statement of the conclusions laboriously reached by one
who has given unsparing labour through a lifetime to the subject.
In contrast once more with Green, the inipression conveyed is
that of mechanism, ijot organism, of death, .not life; and so,
unjust as was the popular neglect, it was not without excuse.
No one carried to a greater extreme than Gardiner that

specialisation which the methods of modern history render in-
dispensable. He had chosen the period of the early Stuarts and
the Commonwealth, and he would not willingly go beyond it
even in the least degree. Perhaps in this respect he made a

mistake; Freeman certainly would have thought sa If there
be a real unity in. history, there must be some danger of mis-
apprehension where the attention is concentrated exclusively on
a small part of it.
Gardiner stood singularly alone. Though he was only slightly

junior to Freeman and Stubbs, while he was senior to Green, it

is remarkable that not a single from or to him is to be
letter
found in The Life of Freeman, or in the Letters of Stubbs or of

Green, while innumerable evidences are to be found of constant
intercourse between the other three. Unquestionably Gardiner
was the loser in the worldly sense, while it seems probable- that
by their mutual support and hearty praise of one another the
other three were raised to a reputation perhaps beyond the
deserts of any of them. This feeling was expressed by Thorold
Rogers in a well-known epigrammatic couplet :
"See, ladling butter from alternate tubs,
Stubbs butters Freeman, Freeman butters Stubbs."
It is at least certain that the Oxford school of history acquired

a pre-eminence of fame which it seems now to be hard to justify;
Whatever may have been the opinion of professed students,

twenty years ago the world at large did not know that the names
of Lecky and Seeley were quite worthy to stand beside those of
the Oxford trio ; but recent years have witnessed a marked decline
in the reputation of the Oxford men and a steady rise in that of
the other two.
The Oxonians were indifferent to or averse from philosophy.
Vigorous as was the intelligence of Stubbs, nowhere betrays the
it
least inclination to, or any considerable knowledge of, philosophic

thought. Freeman seems to have disliked it and to have been
incapable of it ; and of Creighton one of the most competent of
judges, Edward Caird, his tutor for the final school of literae
humaniores, declared that " he was not specially attracted towards
philosophical studies^." In the cases of Seeley and Lecky, on the
other hand, one of the facts that first strike the student is that they
are almost as much philosophers as historians. The first notable
work by Lecky was The Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe
(1865), and the first of Seeley's which won great fame was the
philosophicb-theological ^f« ^(?/«s (1866). And, throughout, both
play to the keynote thus struck. They are historians to whom
ideas are rriore than facts, and the ideas are of the sort which imply a
theory of human history, if not of the universe, in the background.
1 Life of Creighton, i. i"}.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 89S
John Robert Seeley (1834—1895) was the son of a publisher

who was himself a historian of considerable power, the author
of a work, The greatest of all the Plantagenets (i860), which has
been occasionally attributed to his more famous son. The
younger Seeley began life not as a historian, but as a classical
lecturer in Trinity College, Cambridge, whence he passed as
professor of Latin to University College, London, in succession
to Francis W. Newman. It is curious that two successive occu-
pants of the same chair should have been the authors of two such
famous heretical books as Phases of Faith and Ecce Homo. In
1869 he succeeded Kingsley as professor of history at Cambridge,
and the second and greater aspect of his career opens. He
proved himself an admirable lecturer and teacher as well as a
great historian. The Lectures and Essays (1870) and the Intro-
duction to Political Science (1896) are conclusive evidence of the
high quality of his professorial work, while The Life and Times
of Stein (1878), The Expansion of England (1883), Short A
History of Napoleon I (1886) and The Growth of British Policy
(1895) afford a solid foundation for his fame as a historian.
Seeley's works fall readily into two divisions, in the first of
which are Ecce Homo and Natural Religion (1882), while all the
others which have been named fall under the second. The
theological works are of interest here because they reveal at once,
and more clearly than any others, that love of ideas which is the
They were a puzzle to their
soul of Seeley's history as well.
readers, who could hardly make out what manner of man their
anonymous author was, nor well understand with what purpose
he had written. Ecce Homo seemed to stand midway between
the orthodox and the purely rationalist views. It was an attempt
from the conception of Christ the accretions of centuries,
to strip
and to view him as he might be supposed to appear to those
who simply knew the facts of his life, or such facts as would be
considered well attested if they referred to any other historical
character. The method was the ordinary method of historical
criticism: the result was, as has been said, puzzling to both
parties. If the anonymous author believed no more than he
affirmed, his position was highly unsatisfactory to the orthodox;
but what he affirmed was a great deal more than numbers of
rationalists were prepared to concede. Ecce Homo dwelt almost
exclusively upon the aspect of Christ as man but it laid such ;
stress and emphasis upon his character and influence as might
have satisfied the most exacting^ and necessarily suggested that

the writer had not expressed his whole belief. In the preface he
spoke of the book as a fragment, and promised to deal in another
volume with "Christ as the creator of modern theology and
religion "^-phraseology which itself suggested a considerable
measure of agreement with the doctrines of the Churches. And
the suggestion is powerfully strengthened by the eloquent close
of the book :
"The achievement of Christ, in founding by his single. will

and power a structure so durable and so universal, is like no other
achievement which history records. The masterpieces of the men
of action are coarse and common in comparison with and the
it,
masterpieces of speculation flimsy and insubstantial. When we

speak of it the commonplaces of admiration fail us altogether.
Shall we speak of the originality of the design, of the skill
displayed in the execution? All such terms are inadequate.

Originality and contriving skill operated indeed, but, as it were,
implicitly. The creative effort which produced that against which,
it is said, the gates of hell shall not prevail, cannot be analyzed.
No architects' designs were furnished for the New Jerusalem, no
committee drew up rules for the Universal Commonwealth. If
in the works of Nature we can trace the indications of calculation,
of a .struggle with difficulties, of precaution, of ingenuity, then in
Christ's work it may be that the same indications occur. But
these inferior and secondary powers were not consciously exer-
cised; they were implicitly present in the manifold yet single
creative act. The inconceivable work was done in calmness
before the eyes of men it was noiselessly accomplished, attracting
little attention. Who can describe that which unites men ? Who
has entered into the formation of speech which is the symbol of
their union? Who
can describe exhaustively the origin of civil
society ? He who can do these things can explain the origin of
the Christian Church. For others it must be enough to say,
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 89/
'
the Holy Ghost fell on those that believed.' No man saw the
building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen crowded together,
the unfinished walls and unpaved streets no man heard the :
clink of trowel and pickaxe it descended out of heaven from God."

:
It is a far cry from the fifteenth chapter of Gibbon to this. If

the author of Ecce Homo had not traversed the whole distance
back to, the position of the Churches, it might seem that he had
at least gone a long way. But the promised sequel, when it
appeared, was calculated to shake confidence in that conclusion.
Natural Religion, indeed, is not properly a sequel to Scce Homo
at all: it is not the, promised volume dealing with "Christ as the
creator of modern theology and religion." It still bears witness
to the author's profound sense of the importance of religion,

which he declares be "the principle by which alone life is
to
redeemed from secularity and animalism " ; and it insists upon
the insufficiency of science unless science is itself religious. But
thgn the religion which remains and which is so important is
wholly devoid of the supernatural. Natural Religion is an attempt,

not to show how much of that which is commonly conceived to be
Christianity is true, but that, even if the creeds of the Churches
become wholly incredible, what is vital in reUgion will still remain.
Had the opinions of Seeley himself changed in the interval of
sixteen years ? The difference between the two books suggests an
affirmative answer ; and in the later we seem to see rather the
student of Goethe than the disciple of Christ. Natural Religion
never attained the popularity of Ecce Homo. There was less
warmth in the style, not because Seeley wrote less skilfully,
but because the character, of the book demanded a colder and
more colourless treatment. But what was lost in attractiveness
was gained in philosophic depth. The author of Natural Religion
had conclusively proved his rare capacity for handling whatsoever
abstract ideas he might choose to take: up.
In the ineantime Speley had made the transition to history,
and had produced his longest and, in point of research and
learning, his greatest book, the Life and Times of Stein. But if in
this respect the greatest, from some other points of view it is the
least satisfactory, of his works. . It neither is nor attempts to be a
w. 57
great biography, for Seeley never shared Carlyle's interest in
the biographic side of history. The emphasis therefore is on

the times, rather than on the life, of Stein. The theme is
really the revival of Prussia and her rise against Napoleon, for
whom Seeley had a moral dislike, and whom he underrated

intellectually.
Even in Stdn Seeley's predilection for ideas rather than

narrative, though obscured by the complexity of the subject, is
evident enough to the careful reader is obtruded upon the
: it
most careless in his highly characteristic Expansion of England

and Growth of British Policy. The two books are closely con-
nected with one another. The former deals with the foreign
policy of England in the eighteenth century, calling special atten-
tion to the marvellous growth of the British Empire and to the
vital importance of that growth as a fact in the history of the
world. The latter takes a wider and more complete view of
foreign policy from the accession of Elizabeth to the union of the
Parliaments of England and Scotland. In substance it is the
greater of the two ; but it was incomplete when Seeley died, and
in style it cannot be compared with his finished work.
No two books illustrate better than these the value of a guiding
conception and a point of view. Rough and unfinished as is The
Growth of British Policy, it is fascinating from beginning to end.
The author keeps steadily in mind what he wants to accomplish
and rigidly excludes whatever is extraneous to his object. The
consequence is that few historical works are ' more effective. No
two books, again, better illustrate how much can be done, simply
by the skilful interpretation of the commonly known facts of
history. In one sense there is little or nothing 'original' in
them ; there is no such amassing of fresh material as we find in
Stubbs and Freeman, and in Seeley's own Stein. But in another
and a deeper sense there are probably no historical works of the
nineteenth century which are more profoundly original. The
facts, familiar to historians as nearly all of them were, are regarded
in a new light and take a new meaning from the
setting in which
they are placed. For England, Seeley may be said to have
created Foreign Policy as a department of history. " While we
have," he says, "entered early into the conception of constitutional

history, and have seen in this department first a Hallam and then
a Stubbs, we have scarcely yet perceived that Constitutional
History requires the History of Policy as its correlative^." It
was Seeley's work to supply the deficiency ; and, whether from
the nature of the subject or on account of his own skill, in doing
so he contrived to impart to his books incomparably gireatef
interest than either of the constitutional historians gave to his.
To Seeley, as to the great artists in history of old, history is living,
not dead, and his readers too feel the pulse of life.
The conception which inspired all Seeley's work was the

conception of the State, not as an abstraction, or as a mechanical
system of wheels and pinions, but as a great organic reality, the
inspiration of the higher life, something which could be felt, but
which could by no means be reduced to logical formulae. " Who
can describe that which unites men?... Who can describe ex-
haustively the origin of civil society ? " The key to his teaching
is the conviction that his business as a professor was to train
citizens, not merely to impart learning. It is the key also to his
religion. Central in position in Ecce Homo, and central also in
importaiice, is the chapter on " the enthusiasm of humanity." It
is the social side of Christianity that attracts him and ; in Natural

Religidn it is the power of religion, not to '
save,' as it is phrased,
an individual soul, but to elevate the life of man as a social being,
which causes him to treat that wherein this power inheres as the
supremely important thing. And so it is too in his historical
work. In The Growth of British Policy he dwells upon the pride
and confidence in England which sprang from the defeat of
Spain, and that pride and confidence are the inspiration of his
own work. He was one of the earliest and most efficient of the
workers who have combated the conception, prevalent in the
middle of the nineteenth century, that colonies were a burden
and a danger, and who have advocated the federation of the
British Empire. Probably no single work has done so much
towards this end as The Expansion of England.
The philosophic tastes and tendeilcy of Seeley were shared to
1 Growth of British, Folicy, L i.
57—2
goo THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
the full by William Edward Hartpole Lecky (i 838-1903); and it
may. be remarked in passing that the two had also in common

a touch of the poetic spirit. Seeley's first publication was a
volume of verse entitled David and Jonathan, while Lecky a
generation later published a volume of Poems (1891) of consider-
able, if not very high, merit. In Lecky's case also, as in Seeley's,
the' philosophic side showed itself first, his earliest work of note
being the History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of
Rationalism in Europe. It is a work of high value in itself,
and quite marvellous when regarded as the production of a

young man of twenty-seven. The world asked in astonishment
by what magic he had been able to crowd into so few years such
a mass of reading, and wondered still more perhaps at the
character than at the extent of the reading. There had been
no pioneers, in English at least, on the road the young author
had traversed. He had been regularly educated at Trinity
College, Dublin, and had taken his degree there ; but the reading
shown in Rationalism in Europe lay far out of the beaten track of
colleges and universities. In point of fact, Lecky had browsed at
his own will among the libraries of Northern Italy, had found his
own way and developed his own interests. To this must be
ascribed that freshness which is one of the great charms of the
book. Very rarely has a man so young written a book so fully
his own. The rationalistic spirit was, of course, no new thing, or
there would have been no history of it to write ; but Lecky had
gathered the facts and opinions for himself, and he marshalled them
in a, way entirely his own. No English writer had yet treated the
subject in the spirit of a historian. "Sxiti/is History of Rationalism,
which was published in the same year with Lecky's book, is
the work, of a partisan; and though Draper's Intellectual
Development of Europe (1862) has some points in common with
Lecky's Rationalism, it does not substantially detract, from the
originality of the latter. His book seemed to be the outcome of a
mind neither purely philosophical nor purely historical. On the
one hand, Lecky showed little interest in abstract ideas as such
on the other hand, the facts he culled out were facts which
either embodied or could be used to illustrate ideas. Although
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 90I
his purely philosophic endowment was not of the highest order,

probably no man then living had shown the power to combine in
equal degree a grasp of facts with mastery of principle.
The same tendencies, in greater maturity and combined with
wider learning, are visible in the History of European Morals
still
from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869), which many regard as the

greatest of all Lecky's works. The very title proclaims that this
is not a " history " in the sense of a narrative of events. Still less
is it a treatise on ethics or a history of ethical systems. Its aim
is to extract from the period reviewed the moral conceptions
which actually prevailed then, to explain their rise and influence,
to trace the changes they underwent, and to account for the decay
of such as did decay. The task was a gigantic one, and the
success of the writer is all the more astonishing because here
again he had no predecessors. There were histories of ethics,
histories of institutions and general histories of the period, but
there was no history of morals in the sense in which Lecky
conceived it. The high value of his performance was at once
recognised by the translation of his book into German and by
its adoption as a text-book in German universities.
The . point of view of Lecky is more sceptical than that of
Seeley. Though
the historian of rationalism was one of the most
men, there can be no doubt that his own sympathies
itnpartial of
are all with the rationalists ; and in the History of European

Morals'Xhs treatment of monasticism is certainly not sympathetic.
One of Lecky's greatest faults is his tendency to judge the past
too much by the standard of the present. He was far. too well
read and far too thoughtful to do this in a gross way, but in his
treatment of the monks he seems to make inadequate allowance
for the difference between modern and mediaeval times.
The longest and most purely historical of Lecky's works,
the History of England in the Eighteenth Century (1878-
1890), is a work so planned and executed that it. scarcely
comes into competition with the histories of Lord Stanhope
(1805-1875) or with the Reign of Queen Anne (1880) by John
\
Hill Burton (1809-1881) the historian of Scotland. Burton's

book, like his History of Scotland (1867-1870), is a plain,
Straightforward, conscientious, but unadorned and somewhat
uninspiring, narrative, which justly lays great stress on the
immense importance of the union of the Parliaments. Stan-
hope's series of works, which together cover the greater part of
the eighteenth century, are probably, in their pedestrian way, the
best general account of the period conceived as a simple succes-
sion of events. Lecky's aim is different, and the value of his
work incomparably higher. Both in plan and in execution it
shows the hand, not of the annalist, but of the philosophic
historian. There were great wars during the period ; but the
reader must go elsewhere for a satisfactory account of them.
What the historian aims at is " to disengage from the great mass
of facts those which relate to the permanent forces of the nation,
or which indicate some of the more enduring features of national
life.'' The student whose principal interest is in political philosophy
Lecky admirable.
will find
Lecky has been already spoken of as one of the most impartial

of men. As an Irishman, he had need of all his impartiality in
writing his history. Much of it deals with the affairs of Ireland ;
and, whether as to the relations of England with Ireland, or as to

the relations between Protestant and Catholic in Ireland itself,
few writers, either English or Irish, have been able to preserve

even the semblance of fairness. Lecky almost alone completely
succeeds. It is evident that his history is the work of a patriotic
Irishman ; but his patriotism is thoroughly sane and sensible, and
there is no distortion of facts.
In his Lecky reverted once again to the more
later years
directly philosophic mode
of treatment. His Democracy and
Liberty (1896) is one of the best criticisms of modern democracy
by one who does not believe in it ; and the much weaker Map of
Life (1899) is likewise the work of a reflective spirit. Though
Lecky was a Liberal in politics there was a fundamental con-
servatism in his mind which is nowhere more plainly seen than in
Democracy and Liberty. He had looked upon the development
of modern democracy not without anxiety. He saw the fallacy of
the argument from ancient to modern democracy ; and his object
was to point out certain dangers_which he believed to be involved
in a continuance of the democratic development, and even to be

inherent in the existing condition ofaffairs. The danger which
he specially dreaded was that of interference with the liberty of
the individual. While he would have admitted that there was a
certain fanaticism in the assertion by the Manchester school of
the rights of the individual, he thought that there was a tendency
to underestimate the truth contained in its teaching and to go too
far in the opposite direction. Even those who differ from him
must admit that his case is well stated and vigorously argued.
The great historians of the older time rarely filled professorial
chairs. Hume nor Gibbon nor Macaulay nor Carlyle
Neither
ever did so. But the increased prominence given to history as
an item in education brought about a great change, and in the
intermediate and later parts of the Victorian era what had
previously been exceptional became the rule. We have already
had numerous examples, and two more still remain to notice.
The death of Seeley did not produce that decline in the historical
standard of Cambridge which many at the time anticipated. On
the contrary, in point of learning at least, it was distinctly raised
by the appointment of John Dalberg Acton, Lord Acton (1834—
1902). Of two Cambridge theologians, Lightfoot and Hort,
Acton has declared that they " were critical scholars whom
neither German nor Frenchman has surpassed." The words
might be adapted to himself. Probably Europe possessed no
man more deeply versed in historical lore than he. His position
as a writer, however, is much lower than that which he deserves
as a scholar ; and it is unfortunate that the greater part of his
immense learning was buried in his grave. The history of liberty
which he planned was and that fragment, with
left unfinished ;
the posthumous volume of lectures, the letters of Quirinus on the

CEcumenical Council of 1869-1870 and some scattered articles
here and there, very inadequately represents his profound scholar-
ship and his great force.
A man who reads an octavo volume a day and writes little or
nothing usually belongs to the tribe of Dryasdust, and it has
sometimes been assumed that Acton too belonged to it But
the lectures prove the assumption to be wholly unfounded. No
historian of recent times is richer in ideas, none more successfully
subordinates detail to general conceptions. on PeterThe lecture

the Great and the Rise of Prussia is an illustration; so is the
inaugural lecture, by far the finest of the literary remains of
Acton. It embodies his conception of the function of history,
which he held to be primarily ethical. " I exhort you,'' he says,

" never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of
rectitude, but to try othersby the final maxim that governs your
own lives, and no man and no cause to escape the
to suffer
undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on

wrong."..." If, in our uncertainty, we must often err, it maybe
sometimes better to risk excess in rigour than in indulgence, for
then at least we do no injury by loss of principle."... ".Opinions
alter,manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is
written on the tablets of eternity^" The writer of these sentences
evidently contemplated the moral law with an awe as profound as
Kant's ; and all that he has written goes to show that they express
principles which were always before his mind. No one has in-
sisted more upon the historian's duty to judge ; and, alas, all his
learning only led him to the conclusion that he would probably
have to condemn. He quotes with approval Bayle's saying, " It
is more probable that the secret motives of an indifferent action
are bad than good^"
If he did not stand alone as a historical moralist, Acton at
least carried the theory that the function of history is ethical farther
than any one else, except perhaps a man whom he did not
admire, Carlyle. For, though his judgments are expressed in a
widely different way, Carlyle too is always a judge, and his
judgments are always grounded. on ethical conceptions. In other
respects also Acton stood apart from the majority of his con-
temporaries. Surrounded by nationalist historians, he drew his
lessons from universal history. In a period of specialisation,
when each man had his field marked out, and the field was
usually defined by chronological limits, Acton refused to be so
bound. " Study problems in preference to periods," he says
" for instance : the derivation of Luther, the scientific influence of
' Inaugural Lecture, ' ibid.
Adam Smith, the mediseval masters of

Bacon, the predecessors of
Rousseau, the consistency of Burke, the identity of the first
Whig'." And he honoured his own advice by selecting for the
work of his life the history of liberty.
It would be wrong to say that Acton escaped the errors which
beset the man of immense learning. If he had been less insatiable

forknowledge he would have been more productive. And the
"cloud of witnesses'' whom he adduces in the notes in support and
in illustration of the inaugural lecture show, at least incipiently,
the tendency of mere learning to lose the sense of proportion and
the capacity to measure relative importance. The stores carried
in the memory which could supply those illustrations must have
been prodigious, but in many cases the reader is tempted to ask
whether the point was worth illustrating.
The second of the two historians referred to was also a

Cambridge professor; but the chair held by Frederic William
Maitland (1850-1906) was one of law," not of history. Notwith-
standing the proverbial danger of prophecy, it is safe to say that
no English scholar of the last half-century is more likely than
Maitland to stand higher in reputation in the year 2000 than he
does now. Several reasons may be given for this judgment In
the first place, most of his writings are highly technical, so that,
while the verdict of scholars, both in England and on the
Continent, has already been given emphatically in his favour, he
remains practically unknown to the personage called the general '
reader.' He is not known even as Stubbs and Freeman are

known ; and the notices of his untimely death made it evident
that, though the writers were aware that a great scholar had passed
away, most of them did not know him as even the peer of either of
these men, still less as their superior. TAe History of English Law
before Edward I (1895) which he wrote in conjunction with
Sir F. Pollock, Domesday Book and Beyond (1897), consisting of
essays originally intended for, but not incorporated in, the former
work, and the Ford lectures on Township and Borough (1898), all
deal with subjects which are caviare to the general. Many, who
would delight in Maitland's pungency and would keenly appreciate
' Inaugural Lecture.
his lightness of touch, are prevented from making acquaintance
with them by fear of the dryness of the subject. In Maitland's
hands no subject is dry; and this fact is another ground for
confidence in the permanence of his reputation. Few men have
ever possessed such a making everything he dealt with
gift for
readable. Perhaps still fewer have possessed his masterly power

of handling evidence. Domesday Book is full of instances. Out-
side Maitland's own writings it would be difficult to produce a
parallel to the treatment of the question of old English land
measures, such as the hide. It is penetrating, it is lucid, it is
terse. Without a word of needless ornament, without the omission

of an item of evidence, the subject is made to yield new meaning
to the ripest scholar, while it becomes interesting to the reader
whose knowledge is all derived from Maitland himself English
historical literature contains no
example of the importance
better
of the mind which is brought to bear on a document. Domesday
Book is open to all, but it will no more yield its meaning without
a genius for interpretation than the flower will yield its honey
except to the bee.
By reason of these gifts, Maitland, notwithstanding the tech-
nicality of his subjects and the
scientific severity of his method, is
an ornament to literature as well as to scholarship. He is never
smothered under facts, he has always an outlook beyond the
particular point he has in view. When, for a too brief moment, he
gives himself free scope on the heights, as in English Law and
the Renaissance (1901),! he is delightful. But his greatest achieve-
ment is his Roman Canon LawEngland, which has been
in
already mentioned in connexion with Stubbs. The rank of a
historian must depend, to a considerable extent, upon the in-
fluence of his work ; and, measured in this way, Maitland stands
easily first among his contemporaries. It falls to the lot of few
historians, even of the highest rank, to overthrow a great theory
and to sweep into the rubbish heap a whole literature. But this
is what Maitland has done. Unless the future brings some
answer of which there is as yet not so much as a hint, and the
lines of which it is difficult even to conceive, all that has been
written about ecclesiastical history on the basis of the report of
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY -
907
the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission of 1883 is as antiquated

as the pre-Copernican astronomy, and the foundation of the High
Anglican theory in vogue since the Tractarian movement has
crumbled into ruin. Yet nothing is more remarkable than the
blindness to these facts displayed in most of the obituary notices
of Maitland. They are the greatest facts of his life and work;
professional historians know them well, and, except where they
are swayed by clerical prejudice, acknowledge them freely and
teach in accordance with them. But many of the writers qf
obituary notices of historians are not professional historians.
Here then is another, and the chief, reason for the conviction
that Maitland is destined to a higher and wider fame in the
future than he now enjoys. The profound significance of his
work is at present concealed. The policy of the ostrich with
his head in the sand is followed in many, probably in most, of
the dioceses of England, and the Church history which is taught
to and required of candidates for ordination is that which
Maitland has demonstrated to be erroneous. Nelson proved
once that there might be wisdom in putting the telescope to the
blind eye ; but no one has ever shown that shutting the eyes will
extinguish the sun at noon-day. When the light which Maitland
sheds at last penetrates to places at present artificially darkened,
it will be found that no modern historian whatsoever has effected
a more momentous revolution.
Among the numerous historians who have been mentioned, it
seems strange at first sight that there is none, except Carlyle, who
devoted any capital work to the tremendous events which, at the
close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth
Europe. In French and German Taine
centuries, transformed
and Thiers and Michelet and Sybel told the story of the
Revolution; but English writers preferred to go farther back,
or, when they did study the period, like Seeley, they threw
their work into biographic form. They were deterred, doubtless,
by the feeling that the events were not yet sufficiently distant to
be seen in true and perhaps, in part, by the

historical perspective,
sense that the ground was already occupied by a writer of

secondary rank. Sir Archibald Alison (1792-1867), son of the
Archibald Alison who was once famous as the author of an Essay
on Taste, laboriously wrote a Histoty of Europe during the French
Revolution (1833-1842) Which won great popularity because, with
all its verbosity and dulness and Toryism, it was the best account
in English of events in which all were profoundly interested.
Alison afterwards continued the narrative from 1815 to 1852,
traversing in this latter part the ground covered also by Harriet
Martineau's equally prejudiced, but far more lively, History of
England during the Thirty Years' Peace (1849-1850).
If however the period has given us no great general history
of the gigantic contest, there are few of its historical products
more valuable in themselves than Napier's great History of the War
in the Peninsula and the South of France (1828-1840) and fewer
still of as high literary quality. Rich as the period has been in
historians, in no department has it so clearly surpassed all previous
times as in that of military history. Napier's Peninsular War is
the best of all military histories in the English language, and

the works of Kinglake, of Sir Edward Bruce Hamley, of
C. C. Chesney and of George Francis R. Henderson, form a
group which it would be hard to equal in any other period.
Henderson's Stonewall Jackson stands as eminent among military
among military histories; and though
biographies as Napier's work
Kinglake's Crimea has obvious faults, it is probably the most
adequate account of a war ever written by a civilian.
Sir William Francis Patrick Napier (1785-1860) was one of
those favoured men on whom nature seems to have showered
every His physical development was magnificent, ^nd he
gift.
was so handsome that, his biographer says, "in his youth his
head and face might have served for a portrait of the war god."
His books show clearly enough the greatness of his intellectual
endowment, but hardly its full scope. He was a painter and
a sculptor of sufficient ability to be elected an honorary member
of the Royal Academy, and many a passage in the History shows
how valuable was the artist's He was not only
eye to the author.
by profession a soldier, but a member of a family than which
none has been more prominent in the miUtary history of Britain.
He was brother to the great Sir Charles Napier the story ot whose
campaigns he tells in his Conquest of Scinde (1845), ^ book which,

for the sake of the author's fame as a historian, would be better
forgotten. Not only is it inferior in literary merit to the history
of the Peninsular War, but
, still more in tone and temper. It is
pervaded with the spirit, of controversy; and though in essentials

Napier was in the right, the want of the judicial spirit is every-
flfhere too patent.

As historian of the Peninsular War Napier enjoyed rare
advantages. Not only was he a soldier, but he was also a
scientific student of his profession. He had himself fought in
the Peninsula. He understood the difficulties and advantages of
the ground; he understood the character of the people; he
familiarly knew many actors in the stirring scenes which he
depicts; he had seen and talked with others, through some of
whom he had access to valuable papers, on the French side as
well as on the English. The papers of Soult were placed at his
disposal ; and though Wellington did not accede without reserve
to his request for, documents, he gave the historian very con-i
siderable help, both by papers and by conversation. On
th^; whole, Napier made excellent use of his opportunities.
It is true he cannot be called an unprejudiced historian. He
had strong likes and dislikes; and never hesitated to express
them. No one could pay a more magnificent complimen^^ and,
on the other hand, no one was more fearless in censure when he
thought censure was deserved. The one tendency is seen in his,
panegyrics on the Light Division, and especially in his emphatic
praise of one of the regiments of that division, the 52nd, which
he declared to be "unsurpassed in arms since arms were borne
by men.'' It is seen also in his idealisation of Napoleon —an
honourable fault when we consider the virulence of English
—
public opinion at that time and in the noble sentences in which
he sketches the person and character of Sir John Moore. The
other side is seen in nearly every refejcence to the Spaniards.
" No good act," says the latest historian of the war, " done by a
Spanish Junta or a Tory minister is ever acknowledged by
Napier'." It is seen no less in his censures on individual
' Oman's Peninsular War, i. 499 a.
officers, as for example Beresford. Disapproval of some of these
strictures was one of the motives which induced Wellington to
consent to the publication of his Dispatches.
But though Napier's colours may be a little too black in one
place and too bright in another, his history is likely to remain for
ever the classical account of the great contest in the Spanish

Peninsula. His technical enables him to go at once to the
skill
heart of a military problem, and to discriminate between what is

essential and what is subordinate. His analyses of campaigns are
always illuminative. His judgments, notwithstanding the faults
already mentioned, are never ungenerous in spirit. He is careful
to avoid the vulgar error of imputing blame to a general merely
because he has been unsuccessful. Soult was unsuccessful ; but
Napier does full justice to his great qualities. Indeed, one of the
most pleasant characteristics of the history is its generous tone
towards the French. Napier rightly refused to believe a great
many of the charges which were brought against them of outrages
on the Spaniards. He
shows that many of the complaints were
absolutely baseless, while others were founded upon actions which
were almost forced upon the French by the nature of their
struggle with the guerillas; and he points unanswerably to the
though Wellington denounced such treatment when it
fact that,
was directed against his Spanish allies, he himself was forced to
threaten similar action against the French peasants when the
course of the war brought him among them.
In style Napier is and unpretentious. He
habitually plain
tells a simple story with soldier-like directness, and the impression
generally produced is that of exact sufficiency for the purpose.
But while this is true of the ordinary level of the narrative, no
one is more capable than he of rising to the height of a great
occasion. The fame of his battle-pieces is due to the fact that
the sense of conflict stirs his blood like the sound of a trumpet,
and the plain narrative passes by an unforced transition into lofty
eloquence. The of Albuera, which by
celebrated description
itself would secure to Napier a position among the masters of
English prose, is only the greatest of many great pictures of
battle.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 91I
The next European war in which England was engaged after

the fall of Napoleon found
its historian in Alexander William
Kinglake While Napier was a soldier who was led

(i 809-1 891).
by interest in his profession to write books, Kinglake was a man

of letters whom circumstances and an adventurous disposition led
to write the history of a war. To this adventurous disposition
was due likewise that other book upon which, in the opinion of
many, Kinglake's position in literature is more securely based
than on his Invasion of the Crimea (1863-1887). He travelled in
the East at a time when the East was mtich less known and far
more difficult of access than it is now. In Syria and the neigh-

bouring countries he had his share of adventures; but Ebthen
(1844) is not a story of adventure, nor is it an ordinary narrative
of a traveller's journeys from one interesting place to another.
Neither does it But it holds a higher
describe the places visited.
place in literature,and shows a talent far rarer, than books which
do all these things. Eothen charms because, in the first place, it
is a masterpiece of literary craftsmanship, and because, in the
second place, it nevertheless gives the impression of being, as it
really is, a work of quite unusual sincerity. This was the aspect
of it which most forcibly struck the readers of the time. In
particular it struck Eliot Warburton, author of The Crescent and
the Cross (1845), one of the few books of travel which have some
share of the fascination of Eothen. In a remarkably able review
in The' Quarterly Warburton says emphatically, "This is a real
book — not a sham."
What, it may be asked, is the source of this
impression? And the answer is that of all books dealing with
the oldest regions in history, Eothen is the least conventional.
The author is always himself the centre, and what he records with
unshrinking fidelity are his own emotions and impressions in face
of the most famous scenes on earth. The fact that their nature
can never be predicted heightens the charm of the book it has :
the same kind of attraction as a masterly that is, a perfectly —

sincere— autobiography. This is a quality rare in itself: it is still
more rare in combination with careful literary art. The style of
Eothen seems easy, at times almost careless.' But Kinglake was
in reality a fastidious and laborious writer, and never more
so
than in this volume. The journey which it records was under-
taken in 1835, ^"d great part of the nine years intervening
between it and the publication of his book was devoted to the
writing and rewriting of Eothen.

This was the practised and polished writer who became the
historian of the Crimean War. Though Kinglake was a civilian,
he had already made acquaintance with military operations. He
had been in Algiers in 1845, had accompanied the forces of
St Arnaud, and had carried away impressions of the man and of
his methods, and of other Frenchmen as well, which are deeply
stamped upon his history. In 1854 the stir of war attracted him
once more, and, though he had no official position in connexion
with the English army, he accompanied the allied forces on their
voyage across the Black Sea. A man so interesting and so
accomplished naturally attracted notice. He became acquainted
with Lord Raglan, and after Raglan's death Lady Raglan put in
his hands her husband's papers. He thus became, in a sense, the
apologist of the English general, and, without conscious falsification,

he certainly showed himself willing enough to play the part of an
advocate.
These two great military histories, The Invasion of the Crimea
and the War in the Peninsula do not differ widely in length, but
they are totally different in scale. Kinglake's period embraces
lessthan two years, Napier's about six. The invasion of the
Crimea was conducted along a single hne and there were
practically no digressions. Napier has to give the history of
campaigns on the Douro, on the Tagus, in Andalusia, in Valencia,
in Galicia. Three great battles and a siege constitute the sub-
stance of the Crimean operations- A dozen battles, innumerable
combats and three great sieges constitute the English share alone
pf the operations in the Peninsula. Kinglake gives the bulk of a
volume to each battle ; Napier can spare to each only a few
pages. Albuera and Inkerman were both emphatically soldiers'
battles. In Napier the description of Albuera, with the immortal
passage at the close, occupies about eight pages; while that of
Inkerman, in the cabinet edition of Kinglê, fills more than four
hundred. The contrast is similar if we take a general's battle.
Napier considered Salamanca the greatest of Wellington's battles;

and he describes it in nine pages. Kinglake labours, not very
successfully, to prove that the Alma was won by the genius of
Raglan; and he dwells on the battle through three hundred
pages. In a word, although the History of the War in the
,Peninsula is long, it is nevertheless a very condensed account of
a vast and complicated struggle, while The Invasion of the Crimea
is not only long but diffuse. This was a vice of the time as well
as of the man. We are accustomed to think of the last generation
or two as a peculiarly strenuous and busy period ; but neverthe-
less they have produced a number of literary work% and especially
works of a historical character, on a scale hardly paralleled by
anything written in earlier ages. Macaulay shows the same weak-
ness. Ten pages are devoted to the death of Charles I ; the siege
of Londonderry fills nearly one hundred ; five large volumes are
required for the history of some sixteen years. The whole
world would hardly contain its own history written upon this
scale.
The result is, no doubt, due in part to the more exhaustive

research of modern writers but ; it cannot be ascribed solely, or
even principally, to that cause. The facility for the diffusion of
books on a great scale, which is afforded by the art of printing
apd -by the cheapening of production, has tempted authors to
forget the great arts of condensation and omission. Tacitus and
Thucydides were forced to be brief, and, in consequence, they ,
aimed at revealing the soul and inner meaning of the history of

their period, while the two moderns are far more concerned about
pictucesqueness. And they assuredly attain their end.
In this point again there is a vital difference between Napier
and Kinglake. The former is preoccupied with questions of
military science. He does not frequently name subordinate
oflScers, and scarcely ever unless there is strong reason for
doing so. He rarely narrates those isolated incidents and ad-
ventures in which war is so prolific, yet, when he does, it is
with an effect which shows that his abstinence is due to no want

of skill. The reader does not readily forget his story of the
French cavalry officer who, discovering at the moment of making
w. 58
a cut at an Englishman that his adversary had only one arm,
chivalrously raised his sword to the salute and rode on still less ;
can he forget that ghastly story of Massena's retreat, which in two
or three sentences reveals all the horrors of war " During this:
—
march, in an obscure place among the hills, a large house was
discovered filled with starving persons. Above thirty women and
children were already dead, and sitting by the bodies were fifteen
or sixteen living beings, of whom only one was a man, and all so
enfeebled as to be unable to swallow the little food that could be
offered to them. The youngest had fallen first, all the children
were dead, none were emaciated, but the muscles of their faces
were invariably drawn transversely, giving a laughing appearance
unimaginably ghastly. The man seemed most eager for life, the
women patient and resigned, and they had carefully covered and
arranged the bodies of the dead'!"
Had Kinglake told these stories he would have given the
name, rank and regiment of the one-armed Englishman, and
specified the battle in which he lost his arm ; and he would have
moved heaven and earth to discover like details about the French-
man too. Probably he would have avoided the gruesome story,
but had he narrated he would certainly not have done so in
it,
the terse style of Napier. And the anecdotes he tells are incom-
parably more numerous. He takes a Homeric delight in the
personal exploits of his fighters, and, unlike Napier, he never
passes over a name that has any relevance to the struggle he is
describing, or omits a detail which may help to give it vividness.
Thus, in the description of the charge of the Heavy Brigade at
Balaclava, the three companions of Scarlett in front of the ad-
vancing line are carefully specified ; and when, in the midst of
the fight, it became necessary to rally the Greys, this is how the
attempt is described :
"Alexander Miller, the acting Adjutant of the Greys, was

famous in his regiment for the mighty volume of sound which he
drove through the air when he gave the word of command. Over
all the clangour of arms, and all the multitudinous uproar, his
' The War in the Peninsula, III. xii. iii.

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY 9IS
single voice got dominion. It thundered out '

Rally !
' Thijn,
still louder, it thundered, '
The Greys !
" The Adjutant, as it chanced, was so mounted that his vast,
superb form rose high over the men of even his own regiment,
and rose still higher over the throng of the Russians. Seized at
once by the mighty sound, and turning to whence it came,
numbers of the Scots saw their towering Adjutant with his
reeking sword high in the air, and again they heard him cry,
—
'Rally!' again hurl his voice at 'The Greys
\"'
Here we learn in many words the great facts that Adjutant

Miller was a large man, that he had a mighty voice, and that he
shouted out, "Rally, the Greys!" Though this is an unusually
pronounced specimen of an extiremely verbose style, it is charac-
teristic. There is far too much of this sort of inflation in The
Invasion of the Crimea. And yet the style has great merits too.
It is lucid, it is interesting, and it is highly pictorial. No one
who cares for military history at all will voluntarily lay down one
of Kinglake's battle volumes until he has finished it. Thanks to
him, the Crimean battles are known
no other battles in English
as
history, Waterloo not excepted, are known. Possibly Inkerman,
so heroic but so destitute of thought or of plan, could not have
been adequately described in any other way; and few would
willingly forgo that thrilling story of dauntless gallantry. The
condensed style of Napier's Albuera is far greater, but it cannot
give that knowledge of the daring and endurance of the individual
soldierwhich Kinglake's ample narrative conveys.
There are thus compensations for the vices, serious as they
are, of Kinglake's style; but The Invasion of the Crimea has
other faults for which there are no compensations. Kinglake

was very far from being an impartial writer. As has been already
hinted, he obviously held a brief for Raglan, as he did also for
Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. It is difScult to believe that anybody
ever exercised quite such an overwhelming personal ascendancy
as he ascribes both to the general and to the diplomatist. On
the other hand; he was equally whole-hearted in his dislikes. In
Napoleon III and in Marshal St Arnaud he could see no virtues
' The Invasion of the Crimea, v. 153.
58-2
gi6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
but, though the portrait of the former is etched with vitriol, it is
masterly. On the political side his history is untrustworthy.

Gladstone declared that, as to the matter within his cognisance,
itwas entirely void of resemblance to the truth, and pronounced
the book " too bad to live, and too good to die^."
The accomplished Edward Bruce Hamley (i 824-1 893),
novelist and parodist as well as military historian, told long afterr

wards in more compendious form the story of the Crimean War
in which he had personally played a part and Sir John William ;
Kaye (1814-1876) left unfinished for Colonel Malleson the History

of the Sepoy War in India. But the only other work in this
department which may fitly be put in line with the great histories
of Napier and Kinglake is G. F. R. Henderson's StonewallJackson
and the Civil War (1898), an admirable biography and a masterly
study of that part of the great American Civil War in which
Jackson figured. Few biographies are more human, and probably
no descriptions of campaigns are at once more satisfying to the
professional reader and more clear to the layman. There has
scarcely in recent years been a better example of a great thenie
treated greatly.
The writers who have been mentioned are only a few among
the multitude of those who, during this prolific period, have
laboured in the field of history. Many who are unnoticed have
done solid and valuable work ; some have thrown the results of
their studies into good literary form ; but the destiny probably of
all is to be built into the fabric of the work of some great historian
of the future. Here, almost as much as in the region of fiction,
there is need for selection ; for no clearer or more intelligent view
of the historical literature of the period would be gained from the
consideration of a larger number of the contributors to it.
This mass of historical literature is indubitably of very high
average quality. No previous age has produced nearly so much

historical work of genuine worth; only in this department of
literature can we say with confidence that, on the whole, we
surpass all our predecessors. At the same time, the assertion
of superiority has been made far too absolutely, and the claim
'
Morley's Life of Gladstone, Book iv. ch. iii.
to the possession of a radically different method cannot be sus-

tained. What really distinguishes the work of recent years from
that of the more distant past is the deeper sense of the historian's
responsibility to his readers — and the
far more complete
that,
command must be further re-
of the materials of history. It
marked that the superiority of recent historical work would be
far less clear were we to eliminate the names of such 'literary'
Macaulay and Froude. And the assertion

historians as Carlyle,
of superioritymust be further qualified as being general and not
specific. Thucydides and Gibbon have not yet lost their pre-
eminence. Bacon's History of Henry VII is still the best book
on that reign. Knox's History of the Reformation in Scotland,
Steeped in prejudice as it is, is still incomparably the best account
of the period with which it deals. In short, now as always, far
more depends upon the man than upon the method. The right
man will somehow forge a satisfactory method; and, as we have
seen in the cases of Freeman and Stubbs, no method yet devised
can bar the possibility of the most far-reaching mistakes.
§ 2. The Biographers.
The art of biography has a very close and obvious connexion

with the art of history ; but, though apparently the simpler of the
two, it is nevertheless of later development. The father of history
is older than the father of biography. Plutarch's Lives were a
late production, and the class to which they belong is not well
represented in classical Uterature. Neither are biographies at
ail common until a late period in English literature. Johnson's
Lives of the Poets were on a sCale quite unusual at that time, and
concerning many of the poets of whom he wrote he found no con-
secutive and systematic account. No mere man of letters had
previously been dealt with so fully as Johnson himself was treated
by Boswell; Our ignorance of the personal history of Shakespeare
and his contemporaries is notorious ; even the statesmen of those

days are, with few exceptions, known, not as individual men but
rather as figures in history. Charming lives and autobiographies
—
had appeared from time to time, Roper's Life of More, the
Autobiography of Roger North, the biographical works of Isaak
Walton, The Life of Col. Hutchinson, and the lives of herself and
her husband by Lamb's favourite, the Duchess of Newcastle.
But the business of biography may be said to start with the
nineteenth century, and a very large proportion of the master-
pieces belong to it. More even than the development of history,
and not less than the development of fiction, it has been charac-
teristic of the time.
Some of the best of these biographies are noticed elsewhere.
Carlyle's Sterling was the work of a man who was much more
than a biographer, and Froude's Carlyle is most conveniently
discussed along with the other works of its author. So also

Mrs Gaskell's Charlotte Bronte is best taken in connexion with
the works of the two great novelists, the author and her subject.
Two very remarkable autobiographies, that of John Stuart Mill
and Newman's Apologia, are inseparable from the other work of
men who wrote a great deal more. Other biographies again, like
Sir George Trevelyan's delightful Life of Macaulay, are excluded
because the authors of them are still alive. But, after all exclusions,
there remain at least one masterpiece and several works of high rank,
besides a host of competent biographies and a library of memoirs
and reminiscences, the bulk of which must be passed without
notice. .,
The journals, memoirs and reminiscences of recent times will

furnish ample raw material to the historian of a future generation
but there is no Pepys among the writers. As a rule, they have
had in mind more or less clearly the thought of the press
and the publisher ; and self-consciousness destroys the charm of
that sort of composition. Yet there is much that is readable
as well as instructive in them. Political are apt to be better
than literary reminiscences, for they have often solidity of
substance if they have not grace of style. Perhaps the best
of all are the Greville Memoirs, because the writer, Charles
Greville, had exceptional opportunities for associating with the
men who in his time made history, as well as a distinct gift for
that sort of composition. In these memoirs there is nothing

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY gig
more remarkable than the revolution in the writer's opinion of

the Duke of Wellington, and no panegyric on the great soldier
could be so convincing as the gradual change from coldness and
and warm devotion. The Conversations
suspicion to perfect trust
of Nassau William Senior are another specimen of the raw material
of history which may be noticed as also literature. They were
the work of a man who had other claims to notice too, an econo-
mist and essayist of considerable power ; but by far his best claim
rests upon tliese remarkable and often fascinating conversations
with great and interesting men. Of reminiscences and journals

dealing more particularly with literary men and literary topics
among the best are those of Caroline Fox ; Fanny Kemble's are
thinner, and reveal a less attractive character.
Among the regular biographies by far the highest place belongs
to Lockhart's Life of Scott (1836-1838). Lockhart, about whose
lifeand character something will be said in the chapter on criti-
cism, had already essayed biography in his Life of Burns (1828),

where a task, beset with pitfalls well described by Mr Andrew Lang,
was accomplished with complete success. "The immense diffi-
culty," says Mr Lang, "of writing on the great Scottish poet is,
no doubt, best known to Scotchmen. To avoid mere fulsome

rhetoric ; to keep within due limits the patriotic Muse ; to shun
engouement and the Bacchic dithyramb on one side, and the
temptation to moralise on the other; to beware of right-hand
political bias,, and of left-hand literary fastidiousness — these are
only a few of the duties of the biographer of Burns. Taste,
tact, tolerance in its best sense, sympathy national and personal,
are all required. The slips and stumbles of on the darling
writers
of the Scottish people recur to the memory as one pens these
lines. Of all Burns's biographers, Lockhart is he who 'divides
us least'.'" Though these words were written before the appear-
ance of Heqley's brilliant essay on Burns, it still remains true that
" Lockhart is he who divides us least.'
'
But admirable as is his Life of Burns, The Life of Scott is an

incomparably greater performance. For the writing of it Lockhart
possessed great advantages ; but he had also formidable difficulties
' Life of Lockhart, ii. i(i~%i.
to overcome. Among the advantages must be set, first and chiefly,
the character of Scott himself, the most largely human of all the
figures in English literature since Shakespeare. All the materials
Scott provided, in letters, in the admirable fragment of auto-
biography, in the wonderful Journal, since published in externa,
were of the rarest qilality. He
had relations with nearly
every memorable man For years he was a kind
of his day.
of host in ordinary for all Scotland, and Abbotsford was the
Mansion House of the nation. He was full of shrewd sense
and grave wisdom, and at the same time he overflowed with
anecdote and fun. The man who could do justice to him was
bound to make a great biography; but to do justice to him
required a man who had greatness in himself. It required also
a man who, knowing Scott well and loving him, retained never-
theless his clearness of vision and sanity of judgment.
Frbrn 1818 on'VVârds for fourteen years Lockhart knew Scott
with an intimacy ever growing till it could grow no longer ; and
in 1820 his marriage with Sophia Scott made him a member of
the family. He had the further advantage of knowing well the
society in which Scott moved. He
was by blood and birth
Scotch, by adoption an Edinburgh man, by profession a lawyer.
He, if any one, could understand what had gone to make the
blood and bone of Scott. Above all, pferhaps, Lockhart had
the priceless gift of sympathy with his subject. He loved the man
and honoured his memory (as Ben Jonson says with reference to
Shakespeare) on this side idolatry as much as any. " Lockhart,"
says his biographer, "had been born to love Scott and, beyond
even that regard which Scott's works awaken in every gentle heart,
to make him by all men yet more beloved^."
Had Lockhart been a man of less faith or of inferior intellect
these very advantages might have made him stumble. The man
who almost idolises another can rarely keep his judgment clear
where that other is concerned; a very intirriate friend is often
a partisan; and he who, from the standpoint of familiar inter-
course, writes the life of one whom he feels to be greatly his
superior runs some risk of impairing his own dignity. Froude
^ Life of Lockhart, ii. 7a.
quite needlessly made himself the champion of Mrs Garlyle

against her husband. Macaulay's theory that Boswell wrote a
very great biography because he himself was a very little man is
ridiculous ; and yet assuredly Boswell is not himself an impressive

or dignified figure, nor does his Life of Johnson win forhim that
respect which so great a work ought to command. Of the
partisanship of biographers the examples are so numerous that
it would be superfluous' to specify them.
The remarkable absence of these faults from The Life of Scott
proves the soundness and sanity arid penetration of Lockhart's
judgment Carlyle, a critic by no means too laudatory, praised
the biography for its candour; and indeed that candour brought
upon Lockhart the censure of those men of little faith who could
not believe that Scott's genius and virtues would shine undimmed
even if his weaknesses were told and his faults revealei Nothing
is more surprising than the clearness of vision with which Lockhart
saw what those faults and weaknesses were, and their precise. sig-
nificance as elements in his character. Take, for example, his
treatment of the strain of worldliness in Scott, and compare his-
judgment on this point with that of men who had far less tempta-
tion togo astray. Scott was, says Macaulay in declining Macvey
Napier's invitation to review Lockhart's book, " perpetually sacri-
ficing the perfection of his compositions, and the durability of his
fame, to his eagerness for money j writing with the slovenly haste
of Dryden, in order to satisfy wants which were not, Uke those of
Dryden, caused by circumstances beyond his own control, but
which were produced by his extravagant waste or rapacious
speculation^." "He treats his mind," says Taine,,"like a coal-
mine, serviceable for quick working and for the greatest possible
gain a volume in a month, sometimes in a fortnight even, and this
:
volume is worth one thousand pounds'."

Lockhart is infinitely wiser, more Just, more faithful to the
truth. He admits the fact that Scott laid an unbecoming stress
upon worldly things, and among them wealth. But half a truth
is often no truth at aU ; and Lockhart goes on to point out how •
' Life of Macaulay, ii. 9.

• History of English Literature, iii. 435.
the whole training of Scott's mind, fancy and character had been
such as to stimulate active external ambition; with what noble
generosity his wealth had been used ; how far from vulgar
snobbery was his respect for rank. " His imagination had been
constantly exercised in recalling and embellishing whatever
features of the past it was possible to connect with any pleasing
ideas, and a historical name was a charm that literally stirred his
blood. But not so a mere title. He reverenced the Duke of
—
Buccleuch but it was not as a Duke, but as the head of his clan,
the representative of the old knights of Branxholm. In the
Duke of Hamilton he saw not the premier peer of Scotland,
but the lineal heir of the heroic old Douglasses; and he had
profounder respect for the chief of a Highland Clan, without
any title whatever, and with an ill paid rental of two or three
thousand a year, than for the haughtiest magnate in a blue
ribbon, whose name did not call up any grand historical remi-
niscenced"
The difference between this and the preceding quotations is
the difference between portraiture and caricature; a single feature,

in the one case, taken and exaggerated till it obscures everything
else, in the other case reduced to its proper proportions and set in
its proper relation to the whole. The worldliness of Scott, as
it was falselyconceived by Macaulay and Taine, was vulgar;
as it is truly explained by Lockhart, we see how it is bound
up with his whole imaginative life, how the fancy which re-
created the life of Border moss-trooper and of Highland clansman,
and which saw once more the pageant of the feudal knights, was
only finding for itself another expression in the "romance in stone
and lime " and in the lavish hospitality of Abbotsford.
Contemporaries blamed Lockhart, not only on the ground,
which seems so strange to us, of malignity towards Scott, but on
the score of indifference to the private feelings of others ; and on
thiscount of the indictment he was defended by the very man in
the case of whose own biography, long afterwards, the loudest
outcry of the century was raised. Carlyle points out that liability
to this sort of pain is part of the penalty of associating with the
^ Lift of Scott, vi. loo.
great. "They crowd about bonfires may, sometimes

that will
very fairly, get their beards singed;
it is the price they pay for
such illumination ; natural twilight is safe and free to all." The

biographer's duty is to set down naught in malice, to lea,ve unsaid
much that, though true, is non-essential, but at all costs to tell the
truth when it is essentiaL In Lockhart's book the test case is
that of the Ballantynes. How indispensable to the understanding
of Scott was the treatment of that strange chapter in his history
every one must feel ; how admirable are the etchings of the
Ballantynes all readers of The Life of Scott know. The whole
library of biography contains nothing more masterly than the
passages in which Lockhart draws these portraits; and though,
perhaps, they show a touch of malice, in substance justice appears
tobe done to the Ballantynes as well as to Scott.
Perhaps the subtlest test of the genius of a biographer is the
manner in which he uses the common incidents and the familiar
everyday relations of life to bring out character and to give reaUty
to his picture; and few bear the test so well as Lockhart. His
delineation of the ordinary routine of Abbotsford, the hunting and
fishing expeditioiis, the joyous picnics, the stream of life flowing
through the house, the personality of Scott as centre and soul of
all, his friendliness with his humble neighbours and their grateful
love of him, his position among them as 'the Shirra,' not the
great man of letters, his animal pets —dogs, horses, even pigs and
hens; in Edinburgh, his daily industry in the trivial round of
Parliament House duties, his slow drives up the historic streets,
every stone of which was fraught with meaning to him; all go
towards the making of a figure which, but for Johnson, would be
unique in our literary annals.
Through the whole book Lockhart's style is excellent. It is

simple and unstrained, and wholly free from self-consciousness.
There is no attempt at fine writing; the excellence consists in
doing with complete success what is attempted, in expressing in
the most translucent phrase the meaning intended to be conveyed.
For seldom stops to notice how high is the
this reason the reader
quality of the English. be arrested at all, it is in
If his attention
those passages where the sorrow and tragedy rouse the biographer
to a restrained and sober eloquence. The concluding estimate
of character is equally beautiful and just ; and the death scene is
one of the whole range of English prose.

finest passages in the
The greatness of Lockhart comes out most vividly by contrast.

Read in the arm-chair, The Life of Scott might seem to be a work
within the Compass of any man having access to the materials and
the power to write good English. In point of fact, it is an achieve-
ment which has very rarely been rivalled. If only good material
and literary capacity had been needed, Moore's Byron (1830)'
ought to have been great. The author was a practised and a
skilful writer ; Byron's letters are among the best in the English
language ; his life had been' varied and adventurous to a degree
hardly paralleled among literary men ; his character, however it
may be judged, any rate profoundly interesting.

is at Carlyle, or
Carlyle's biographer, would have made a book on him fascinating.
But Moore was too petty and he gives no dis-
for his subject,
tinct impression of that stormful personality. His Byroti has a
permanent interest inasmuch as it contains a great deal of
information for which Moore was the first, as for some of it he
remains the sole, authority. But wherever 'the real Lord Byron'
may be, he is certainly not to be found in the pages of Moore. It
is fair to add that Moore seems himself to have felt his in-
sufficiency, and he only professes to add notices of the life of '

'
B5Tron to his letters and journals.

It has sometimes been'^said that the lives of literary men are, as
a rule, too uneventful to be suitable for more than a biographic

sketch, that the men whose biographies can be profitably written
on the large scale are men of action — soldiers, statesmen,
travellers and adventurers. No judgnaent could be more mistaken.
Neariy all the really great biographies are biographies of men of
letters. Great soldiers and statesmen, like Frederick the Great
and Napoleon and Marlborough and Pitt, are rather integral parts
of history than individual men. Great explorers like Columbus
and Cook are lost in the leagues they traverse or absorbed
among the strange tribes whose existence they reveal. Persoiial
details, which are the soul of biography, in their case seem paltry.
Very often they have been too busy in action to leave the
materials. The literary man, on the contrary, is all his life long
multiplying matter for the biographer. His formal works, his
letters, the journals which he is more prone to keep than the man
of action, all throw light upon his personality. His conversation
too is far more illuminative than that of the soldier or even the
statesman. Great talkers have nearly all been writers, not men
of action. The statesman's lips are often sealed by Considerations of
policy ; the soldier rarely possesses by nature, and still more rarely
has cultivated, the art of expression. Action in the field or in
the senate shows the inner life of the spirit ; but it has to be trans-
lated, as it were, by the biographer into a different language. In
the case of the man of letters the translation is already made.
Hence to write well the life of a man of action is more difficult
even than it is to write well the life of an author, and while there
are at least a handful of the latter sort of true excellence, of the
former kind there is hardly one. Even the fierce light which has
been turned upon Napoleon has not revealed the man as a feyy
men of letters have been revealed.
Except Carlyle's Sterling and Froude's Carlyk, there is no
biography of the period which does not seem poor beside
Lockhart's masterpiece ; but among biographies least distant
from The Life of Scott is Stanley's Life of Arnold (1844).
It was
Stanley's work of importance, and it proved to be his best.

first
He loved Arnold, and all his powers were on the strain to do

justice to the great Head Master. He was accustomed to say
that the work was by far the hardest he ever underwent For two
years it filled his whole mind and occupied all his time. And he
had his reward. The Life of Arnold is the one book by Stanley
that is likely to live. Perhaps its only conspicuous defect, and
certainly its most obvious one, is the rigidity of plan which cuts
the letters absolutely apart from the narrative, arranging them in
blocks at the end of the several chapters. Such a plan is really a
confession of failure. The book lacks unity, and the work of
weaving the letters into the narrative, which ought to have been
perforrned by the biographer, is left to the imagination of the
reader.
The character of Arnold was a strong but not a complex one,
and therefore Stanley was not called upon to face the gravest
difficulty of biography. There are no inconsistencies, such as
those which perplex the biographer of "the wisest, brightest,
meanest of mankind"; nor even such as those which have just
been touched upon in the case of Scott. There was nothing to
conceal about Arnold, nothing which would greatly have tempted
even an unwise biographer to concealment. The nearest approach
to a problem of this kind was, perhaps, the position in the Church
of a man holding Arnold's broad views. But for Stanley the
problem was easy ; he had no doubts on the subject ; he did not
see why Rorrian Catholics should not be members of the Church
of England if it were only made legal ; and he was naturally even
less disposed to exclude extreme breadth of view. Neither was
he called upon to follow Arnold into unfamiliar fields of thought
and activity. Arnold's interests were scholastic, historical and
etclesiastical. At every point Stanley found himself on familiar
ground. Further, the decision of Arnold's character served to
strengthen Stanley. Arnold always knew his mind, and Stanley,
following reverentially in his wake, learnt to know his too
with exceptional clearness. What he did was to narrate a
life and to depici a character of high, though not the highest,
rank, and to do this with excellent taste and in English clear
and forcible.' He did it also with commendable condensation;
In his Life of Goethe (1855) George Hehry Lewes undertook a
far more difficult task than Stanley's, and on the whole achieved
a wonderful success. Perhaps of all modern men Goethe is
the one whose biography presents the greatest difficulties. No one
else touches life at so many points, no one else is so toweringly
superior to his fellows. In this task the versatility of Lewes stood
him in good stead. He took great pains. He visited Weimar j he
examined Goethe's library, finding in it the very copy of Taylor's
Historical Survey of German Poetry which had been sent by • .
Carlyle, with a bit of Carlyle's own handwriting on a piece of

paper which marked the place; he saturated his mind with all
that had been written by or about Goethe ; and he listened to all
the anecdotes and reminiscences he could find. He used his
material judiciously. While the anecdotal element gives vividness
and interest, there is plenty of matter of solid worth to give weight

to the book. The fact that for many years Lewes's life of the
great German was regarded as an authority in Germany itself is the
highest compliment that could be paid to the author. It has been
to some extent superseded now. The laborious examination of
masses of documents then inaccessible has disclosed many things
that were not known to Lewes; but The Life of Goethe is neverthe-
less a book still worth reading.
Though none of the numerous biographies written by John
Forster (1812-1876) is equal to those which have been mentioned,
they nevertheless deserve notice, and their author was too con-
spicuous in the literary circles of his time to be passed over.
Forster was by profession a barrister ; but he never practised, and
his interest lay rather in history than in law. Towards
and literature
these he made way by the avenue of journalism. He con-
his
tributed to or edited a number of periodicals notably The —
Examiner, of which he
was editor for about eight years.
Mrs Carlyle refers to him as one " not unknown to fame as the '
second worst critic of the age^,' " but at the same time indicates
her own respect for his judgment
; and the decision with which, on
the score of Paracelsus, he named Browning at once with Shelley,

Coleridge and Wordsworth, showed that as a critic he had both
insight and courage. He was however simply a man of sound
sense, of great industry and of solid attainments, not of brilliant
talents, and still less of genius. Though he usually wrcjte
vigorously, his style is ; and though a conscientious
at times bald
student, he was not from the vice of partisanship.
free
Forster is a conspicuous instance of the historical student who
can do nothing except through the medium of biography : to him,
the personal element was indispensable. This characteristic is
group of works which he devoted to the
clearly illustrated in the
period of conflict between Chairles I and the Parliament. He
edited and partly wrote the Lives of Eminent British Statesmen
and afterwards expanded one of the biographies into
(i 837-1 839),
an independent work. Sir John Eliot, A Biography {i?,6Ar), which
long took rank as one of the most important works on that period
1 Letters and Memorials, i. 100.
of history. Gradually however he drifted into literary biography,
probably because he discovered that, for a man with his interest in
the individual, the richest material was to be found there. His
Lift and Adventures [afterwards Life and Times] of Oliver Gold-
smith (1848) added greatly to men's knowledge of a very interesting
character; and if his Life of Swift (1876) (never completed) did
not contribute much original matter, it at least gathered together
in a convenient way the results of previous investigations.
Forster's fame however, if it lasts at all, must last by reason of
his Life of Landor (1869) and his Life of Dickens (1872-1874).
Forster was known to most of the literary men of his day, and
with the two who are the subjects of these biographies he was
exceedingly intimate. Landor made him his literary executor,
and he. had sources of information as well as personal knowledge
which must render his book permanently indispensable to the
Student of Landor. But just for this reason it brings out more
strikingly than any of his previous publications the deficiencies of
Fprster as a biographer. Strongly marked as are the features of
L^ndpr's character, the impression left by the Life is not the
impression of a man, but rather of a bundle of eccentricities ; and
yet it is was animated by the most

plain that the biographer
friendly spirit towards Landor. The truth seems to be that, not-
withstanding Forster's interest in individuals, and although his
first boyish venture in literature was of a dramatic char3.cter, he
laciked just that touch of the dramatist's insight which is indis-

pensable to biography of the highest class.
With respect to The Life of Dickens this criticism requires some

modification, and yet it remains substantially true. More even
than The Life of Landor, it will always remain the mine from
which later students must perforce dig their material. The friend-
ship betvêen Dickens and Forster was unsurpassed in intimacy.
It lasted through the greater part of their lives, and during its
continuance there seems to have been absolutely nothing reserved
by Dickens from was laid
his friend; the very beating of his heart
bare to Forster's eyes. There is something undignified and
almost indecent on the part of Dickens in this unmeasured self-
exposure ; and though it gave Forster unparalleled advantages, in
one respect it put him' in an apparently false position. Every

reader of The Life of Dickens is struck with the extraordinary
frequency with which the biographer himself is brought into the
narrative, and contemporary criticism blamed him for egotism.
The fault seems to have been in Dickens, not in Forster. The
great novelist, self-reliant as he was towards the world, and well as
he proved his' capacity to fight his own battle, leant upon Forster
like a little child ; and the biographer could not, without falsifying
the story, suppress the part he himself had played in shaping the
life of Dickens.
With such perfect knowledge of the man and his motives, his
affections and his aversions, Forster could scarcely fail to produce
a likeness; and indeed Dickens is far more like a real man than
anyone else about whom his friend has written. Yet Forster is
not entirely successful. The materials are there from which the
reader can reconstruct Dickens if he will ; we have valuable and
helpful views of phases and aspects of his character ; but he does
not stand out " in his habit as he lived." The touch which
'
imparts life is wanting.

Forster was regarded as a sort of biographer-in-chief of his
time; but his high reputation depended at least as much upon
the quantity as upon the quality of his work. No
one else made
biography so much his business. David Masson (1822— 1907)
was a man of profounder learning, and his monumental Life of
Milton (1859-1880) will long remain a treasure to students. His
character and his great attainments shed honour for many a day
upon Edinburgh University; but Masson was rather a man of
learning than of marked literary gifts, and it is scholarship which
gives The Life of Milton high value. '
its
'In the case of Margaret Oliphant, a great talent for biography

was obscured by indefatigable activity in another field of letters.
She is chiefly thought of as a novelist, but she may be re-
membered by her Life of Edward Irving (1862), her Memoirs

of Laurence Oliphaht and of Agnesl his Wife (1891) and her
William Blackwood and his Sons (1897), when her numerous
novels have sunk into oblivion. Mrs Oliphant showed the gift
for' biography again and again in the magazine articles which
w. 59
she wrote during her busy Wherever she had a character-
Hfe.
sketch to do, it was well

done. Even where her knowledge
was far from profound a kind of instinct seemed to lead her to
what would be not only effective but really illuminative. She did
not possess the creative gift in the highest degree probably no ;^
creature of her imagination will permanently keep a place in the

gallery of fiction. But she had the power of appreciation and of
understanding, and she had also a wide range of sympathy. Her
Edward Irving satisfied even so exacting a critic as Irving's
friend Carlyle. It is indeed a striking portrait, especially in the
earlier part, when Irving was still sane and sensible ;

yet pei-haps
still greater ability was needed for the treatment of the later phase.
Mrs Ohphant did not share Irving's beliefs, but she handled the
worst of his extravagances with comprehension and with delicate
sympathy. It may have been merely a coincidence, or possibly
such problems had a fascination for her and attracted her to write
about them, but at any rate, in her biography of Laurence Oliphant
(who was very distantly related to her family), she had, in his
extraordinary subjection to the Prophet Harris, the same sort of
problem to deal with, and she treated it with the same sympathetic
delicacy.
In William Blackwood and his Sons Mrs Oliphant had very
different material to handle; and here, too, in spite of some
diffuseness and occasional repetitions, she was successful. The
portrait of William Blackwood, the founder of the house, is vivid.
He died in 1834, and of course the biographer did not know him;
but she had evidently penetrated beneath the documents to the
heart of the man. Nor is this the only good portrait in the book.
Lockhart and Wilson, who, with Blackwood himself, made the
magazine, are admirably drawn and admirably contrasted; and the
slighter sketches too are nearly all well done.
This history of a publishing firm had been preceded, in 1891,
by a similar history of the other pubhshing house in Britain which
most closely rivalled that of Blackwood, in that its members were
not merely traders in books, but in no unimportant sense producers
of literature. Samuel Smiles's {i?ii2-igo4) John Murray has less
of the charm of portraiture than Mrs Oliphant's Blackwood, but it

is more concentrated; and it too deserves honourable mention

as a most valuable contribution to the literary history of the
nineteenth century. The two works are a monument to the great
change which passed over the financial and material conditions of
literature in the eighteenth century, and which reached maturity
in the nineteenth. Though " Barabbas was a publisher," the

publisher has been only one degree less necessary to the author
than the author has been to the publisher, and the grumblings of
authors have just the same degree and kind of foundation as the
grumblings of producer and consumer at the costly but indis-
pensable middleman. It was fortunate for literature that among
its middlemen were two men not only so sane and sensible, but so
high-spirited and liberal, as John Murray and William Blackwood.

Smiles, like Forster, was a veteran in the biographer's craft.
His long literary life was devoted mainly to biographical studies.
The works by which he
' is best known, Self-help and Thrift, are
biographic in principle. Though the ideals they inculcate are

not, perhaps, the loftiest, they are wholesome books, they have
a practical bearing upon the lives of the toiling multitudes to
whom primarily they are addressed, and they have had a wide
influence for good. They are among the phenomena which
accompany the widening of the class of readers through the
cheapening of books and the diffusion of a certain measure of
education. The deepest interest of Smiles lay in the problems
suggested by the organisation of modern industry, and the greater
part of his biographical work Lives of the Engineers (1877),
George Stephenson (1857), Industrial Biography (1863), &c.
bore upon this. Artistically however his greatest successes were
achieved in the delineation of humble characters who, amidst
their daily toil for daily bread, contrived to keep alive an interest
in nature and science. His Life of a Scotch Naturalist (1876)
and his Robert Dick, Baker, of Thurso, Geologist and Botanist
(1878) are delightful sketches, as genuinely didactic as any of his

books, and 'all the better for being less obtrusively didactic.
S9—
CHAPTER II
LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM
§ I. Literary Criticism.
In most departments of literature the tendency is to de-

and to look back to a golden age of great
preciate the present
men in the past ; but the critics as well as the , historians of
recent times have been exceptions to the rule. Wihile they are
not merely ready to acknowledge, but eager to proclaim on the
house-tops, that the poeits and the novelists of ancient days tower
above their dwarfish successors, in respect of their own art of
criticism they. have had no doubt of their
; own superiority to
their predecessors. In text-books on literature we are constantly
reminded of Jeffrey's " This wiU never do/' and of th^ Quarterly
and JSiackwoo^ Siiticles which were long supposed to have 'snuffed
out' Keats; and there is a clear implication, if not an explicit
claim, that such wild aberrations of critical judgment would be
impossible in these more enlightened days. But, unless they are
balanced with something else, such quotations aiid references
give a one-sided and essentially false view j of criticism in the
opening' decades of the nineteenth century. Southey^ —a critic
as well as a poet —met Jeffrey with; the retort, "He crush TAe
Excursion ! Tejl hiom he might as well fancy he could crush
Skiddaw"; and while The Edinburgh and The Quarterly and
Blackwood were vainly attempting to crush Skiddaw, Lamb and
Coleridge and Hazlitt were doing critical work of a quality which
has rarely been surpassed. If therefore there was much un-
satisfactory criticism, there was also some of the very best.
LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 933
Neither is it safe to assume that errors as gross as those which

were made about Keats and Wordsworth have ever been, or are
now, impossible. Sartor Resartus was as little to the taste of the
new generation as The Excursion was to Jeffrey's; Tennyson at
first received either censure or lukewarm praise Arnold was
;
neglected; and one of the grossest- attacks ever made was

directed against Rossetti. It is at least possible that similar
blunders and oversights are being made now.
The critics who ruled the reviews and magazines in the early
days of the nineteenth century were men of great ability and
of wide reading; and the secret of their errors, monstrous and
almost grotesque as they appear now, must be sought rather in
the prepossessions, with which they approached their subject
than in their own deficiencies. ^
It should be remembered that
even Byron, though he was both a victim of the reviewers and
one of the greatest of the new school of poets, was essentially
in agreement .with the more conservative critics. The Bowles-
Pope controversy is symptomatic. In, criticism, as in theology,
in; philosophy, in poetry, there existed side by side two opposite
'
schools,' if we may thus call them. It would be more accurate
to say that two contrasted types and tendencies of mind and
character were illustrated. The division of 'romantic' and
'
classic ' is permanent and world-wide : as it showed itself at
the opening of the last century, it is only a particular illustration
of a divergence which never ends and v?hich is always begirming
anew. The revolution which, is supposed tp have taken place in
literary criticism consists in the triumph of 'romantic' principles;
but the triumph does not mean the complete disappearance, still
less the permanent extinction, of .the opposed 'classical' principles.

Neither is it true that all critical merit belongs to the former set,
or that nothing but error is to. be found in the latter. Jeffrey and
Gifford were simply critics who were thoroughly contented with
the standards and the ideals of the past, and who were convinced
beforehand that what was new must be wrong in so tar as it did
not conform to those ideals,^. The opposition between creative art
and criticism is made to appear peculiarly sharp because the
great and influential periodicals. The Edinburgh, The Quarterly ,
and Blackwood, were under the control of such men as these. It
is easy to forget Hunt's Examiner, Indicator and Liberal, and even
the admirable London Magazine ; for their influence was far less
wide.
Periodical literature was at that time practically a new de-
velopment. Newspapers and other periodicals were still few in
number. TAe Genlleman's Magazine and The Monthly Review
had already run a long course. The Times existed ; but it was-
infantile and limited in scope, compared with
in proportions
the great journal of the present day. When, in 1802, the famous
four, Francis Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Henry Brougham and Francis
Horner, along with some others less known, met in Edinburgh

and determined to found a critical periodical, they were conscious
that they were taking a new departure. Nothing which then
existed filled the place they proposed to occupy. There was
also about their meeting something of the spirit of conspiracy.
It would be a good joke —so it them to air their
evidently struck —
wit at the expense of their elder and more solemn neighbours.
Anonymity was the cloak' of darkness under which they walked;
and it tempted them to poke fun and satire when, perhaps,
writing openly under their own names, they would have hesitated
to do so. The editorial we fostered also a tone of Olympian
'
'
superiority. The individual contributor might have shrunk from

pronouncing sentence like a judge upon a criminal in the dock
but '
The Edinburgh Review, were above ordinary humanity.
we,'
The shock must have been rude when, as occasionally happened,
'we' caught a Tartar, and were repaid in the coin of English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers.
The Edinburgh Review soon became a more important
periodical than its founders dreamed of at its inception. It grew
to be a force in the country ; power developed the sense of

responsibility ; the position of the editor became a great one,
and his business was serious. The veil of anonymity soon wore
thin ; but its silent influence endured ; and when the success
of this first venture led to imitation, the same history was
repeated in the case of other periodicals.
At the start, I'he Edinburgh Review did not profess to be
the organ of one political party only j but its founders were, in
point of Whigs Toryism had no chance of fair represen-
fact, ;
tation in its columns ; and Tories like Scott were soon driven to
withdraw support from a publication which encouraged principles
in their view prejudicial to the country. This feeling led in 1808
to the founding of The Quarterly Review, which was designed
to do for Toryism what The Edinburgh was doing for Whig
principles. Under Murray, its publisher, and Gifford, its editor
from 1809, The Quarterly proved that there was room for a
second publication of the kind. A
few years later another group
of Edinburgh men became convinced
that there was room even
for a and the result was the appearance of the celebrated
third,
Blackwood's Magazine (1817). It occupied ground rather different
from that taken by the great quarterlies. It was published more
frequently, took a lighter tone and gave itself more to jest and
revelry. Moreover, though Blackwood has furnished at least as
many examples as either The Edinburgh or The Quarterly of the
false style of criticism supposed to have been characteristic of
the early part of the nineteenth century, it was really far more
imbued than they were with the romantic spirit, and far less a
consistent exponent of eighteenth century principles.
So differentwas The Retrospective Review (1820)
in spirit
it that "good taste, good
that Professor Saintsbury declares of
manners, good temper and good learning abound throughout.''
Apparently they were not popular, for it only lived eight years
(1820-1828). Magazines serious and heavy, like The Westminster
Review (1824), or light and witty, like Eraser's Magazine (1830) ;
and weekly papers, like The Spectator (1828) and The Athenceum
(1827), appeared one after another. The removal
of fiscal burdens
upon journals development of the ijews-
greatly stimulated the
paper. The age of periodical literature had come. From the
first it has exercised a profound influence upon miscellaneous
prose of all kinds. Essays of every sort — criticisms, sketches of
character, descriptions of scenery,

stories have found
short —
their natural refuge in the columns of magazines. For a time,
works of greater length were invariably published apart ; but long
ago the novel came within the sphere of the magazine, and there
have been occasional examples of the publication in serial form
of long works notfictitious. Lyrical verse has also been cherished
by the periodical press. It is certain that the development of the

periodical has enormously increased the volume of writing. A
less dubious advantage is that it. has also raised the average
quality. Setting works of genius
•
aside, it is clear that the
journey-work of literature on the whole, more competently done
is,
now than it was a century or two ago. But further, the magazines
seem to have ..been the means of calling into being some work
which has undoubtedly the stamp of genius. But for The London
Magazine we might never have had Charles Lamb's exquisite
essays or Miss Mitford's delightful sketches. It was the encourage-
ment of The Witness which led Dr John Brown to write the
beautiful papers of Horae Subsecivae ; and, if Thackeray had
not edited Tlie Cornhill Magazine he would probably never have,,
written the Roundabout Papers. Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude,
Lockhart, Wilson and Hazlitt were all in various ways and
degrees indebted to the periodicals of their time. On the other
side of the account must be set a tendency to haste and half-
work and a temptation to crop the soil too frequently. The
" leisure to grow wise " is among the things our latter days lack,
and the writer must be singularly resolute who can take time to
do his best when the printer's devil is waiting at the door for copy.' '
What we have specially to consider at present is the influep.ce

which this growth of the periodical exercised upon criticism.
One point which must strike the observer of the history of
periodicals is the almost inevitable absence in the critic of that
" disinterestedness " which Matthew Airnold pronounced to be
the one rule of criticism. The various periodicals, as iie pointed
out, spoke each for a party, not for the The Edinbiirgh
truth.
was Whig, The Quarterly and Blackwood were Tory, The West-
minster was the organ of the philosophical Radicals. Literary
criticism was supposed to stand apart, and in many cases, no
doubt, it did so. But by no means always. Can there any good
thing come out of Nazareth? How shall a benighted Tory produce
that which is acceptable to the Whig reviewer? The orthodox
Tory was as sure that there must be something unwholesome in
a Whig book as he was that an adder secreted poison. It was

the business of the writers of one party to warn its members
against the insidious approaches of the other. The politics of
Leigh Hunt had something to do with the virulence of, the

attack uppn " the
Cockney school." In Macaulay's eyes the
vices of Croker's Boswell and of Southey's Colloquies on Society
were all the more flagrant, because the authors were Tories.
Religion gave a bias sometimes, more powerful than even that
of politics. It, was more difficult to pardon Byron the heterodoxy,
of Cain than the morals of Don Juan ; and Scott incurred blame
for accepting the dedication of the former work, The Utilitarians
were at least as much dreaded, disliked and vilified ,for their
heresies as for their radicalism. The obscure but appalling charge
of ; Germanism' was enough to blight a man's career. Obviously,
all this militates against disinterestedness,, and tends to modify
the critical judgment by "regards that stand aloof from the
entire point." The point of view is not that of pure a,rt; the
question asked is not, Is this ,beautiful ? but. Is it safe ? does it
harmonise with '

correct ' opinions ? ; ,
- , ;
Two objections (though, they are not always ^

cl,early distin-
guished) are commonly taken against what is supposed to be
the typical criticism of the early years of the niiieteenth century.
In the first place, these criticisms are not consoiiant with modem ,
taste, and in the second place, they are rude in manner.

With respect to taste, the fault of the critics was, as has been
already indicated, that they were too conservative. Living, at a
time when a great revolution in literature was taking place, they
failed to appreciate the merits of the innovators, and this not
merely when the persons who exhibited those merits were in-
different or distasteful to the critics. ,
Even from the organ of
his own party, though it relied not a little on his strength,
Scott himself sometimes received scanty justice. The case was

analogous to the battle of the metres in the beginning of the
Elizabethan period. The classicists thought the hexameter the
model of all verse for aU time, and Spenser a barlsarian because,
in preference to it, he evolved for his'great poem the stanza which
is indissolubly associated with his name. Just in the same way, to
Jeffrey and Gifford, Pope had pronounced the last word, and
no progress seemed possible beyond the Essay on Man and The
JDunciad and the Satires and Epistles. Just in the same way,
to the end of time there will be some who will champion
the old and fight with all their strength against the new.
The charge of hectoring roughness, amounting even to
virulence and brutality, stands on a different footing; and in
this respect certainly there has been great improvement. The
tone and temper of many of the criticisms of those days cannot
be defended; but they may be explained. Anonymity, as has
been indicated already, is part of the explanation. Critical
journalism was a new thing; its etiquette was unformed, its
moral code undetermined. Many things which no gentleman

would do now were then done by men who were undoubtedly
gentlemen. The critics stood in a perilous position. Experience
has shown again and again that when men are freed from the
check of public opinion' they are apt to overstep the limits they
keep so long as they are subject to it. In such a position of
dangerous freedom the anonymous stood; and that pro-
critics
fessional etiquette of journalism, which has since taken the place

of public opinion, had not developed. This inherent tendency
of anonymous writing was strengthened by the youth of some
of the writers. But the importance of this consideration has
frequently been exaggerated. Sydney Smith was thirty-one and
Jeffrey twenty-nine at the birth of The Edinhurgh Review ; and
though Horner was only twenty-four, no one ever charged Horner
with the sins of youth. There is more force in this plea when
it is urged for Blackwood. In 1817 Lockhart was only twenty-
three; and though Wilson was thirty-:two, he was one of those
men who never cease to be boys. Youths pronouncing judgment
upon their elders, masquers jeering and gibing behind their
—
dominoes, it is little wonder that for a while they ran riot, or
that it took years of time, actions and threats of action, duels or
threats of duels, to bring home to them the full meaning of their
words and to develop a sense of responsibility. The faults in
question were confined to no single school or set or party. There
is no critical aberration worse than that of The Edinburgh Review
article on Christabel and the poems published along with it,
which Coleridge attributed to Hazlitt; yet, notwithstanding this

experience, Coleridge himself could be as virulently abusive as
any writer in Blackwood.
The lessons of the early Edinburgh and Quarterly Review '•
critics are more by way of warning than of example to us, while

the critics of the other school are still rich in positive instruction.'
The difference is sometimes said to be that, whereas the critics
of the traditional school relied Upon fixed rules and believed in

permanent and unalterable canons, those of the romantic school
denied the existence of any such canons. This difference is real,
but it may easily be misinterpreted. The critics of the new, no
more than those of the old, school denied the existence and the
necessity of law in criticism; but the two conceptions of law were
distinguished as the static from the dynamic, or the mechanical
from the organic. It is true. Lamb was almost purely intuitive
in his criticisms and though he worked upon principles, he would
;
have been puzzled to explain them. But Coleridge, as sensitive

in intuition as Lamb, consciously followed the lines of German
philosophical criticism, and imported into England the principles
of Lessing and Schlegel. It was the introduction into litierary
criticism of that which we know in philosophy as Transcenden-
talism, in religion as Mysticism, in poetry as Romanticism. Only
thus could the new literature be intelligently criticised. The absurd
mistakes of the old school were due to the fact that theirstandards
were utterly incongruous with that to which they were applied.
It was like measuring some volatile essence by a foot-rule and a
compass and square.
Most of the men who have been named belong to the Revolu-
tionary period rather than to the Victorian era. Gifford died
in 1826, Hazlitt and Coleridge and Lamb within the decade
following. Jeffrey resigned the editorship of The Edinburgh
Review in 1829. The Blackwood group were intermediate, and
Their history,' and that of the great
lived well into the later period.
magazine with which their names are associated, must have a
place, not inconspicuous, in any account of the literature which
was growing up when the period of the Revolution was on the wane.
The history of Blackwood's Magazine brings to mind, even
more forcibly than the story of the origin of. The Edinburgh
Review^ the fact that, in the early part of the nineteenth century,
London was not what it has since become, practically the sole
centre of literature. The mere fact that The Edinburgh Review
was first established in the city from which it takes its name is
itself of little importance ; and though the Review for many years
took a tone from the place of its birth, it was never redolent
of Edinburgh, and it soon became rather the Whig review
than the Edinburgh review. But one of the noteworthy features
oi Blackwood's. Magazine is that for many years it was emphatically
the Edinburgh magazine. It was mainly written by Edinburgh
men, and in no small measure it was written primarily for an

audience of that city. That article in the opening number, the
celebrated Chaldee Manuscript, which caused probably greater
commotion than any other magazine article has ever produced, was
vfholly topical in its character ; and though the Nodes Ambrosianae
treat of all things in heaven and earth and in the waters under the
earth, no small part of these papers too relates specia,Ily to Edin-

burghj its citizens, its neighbours and its sui;roundings. :
.The prominence in literature of the northern capital was

rendered possible only by the high talent, amounting in some
cases to genius, of a group of the inhabitants. They had behind
them a century of literary tradition. Allan Ramsay and the .
hapless Fergusson made Edinburgh the home of Scottish verr

, :
nacular literature until the richer and robuster genius of Burns

:
came upon the scene. Hume, Robertson and Adam Smith gave
the city a European fame. Dugald Stewart carried on into the
nineteenth century the spirit of Scottish philosophy. The genius
of Scott drew out the younger writers as plants, are drawn by the
light aftd warmth of the sun ; and the fact that, of the three most
enterprising and far-sighted publishers) of the time, two had their
residence in ;
Edinburgh, was not without importance ; for it
ensured a ready market for the productions of the, clever young,

men who walked the Parliament House unburdened with briefs.
Those pubhshers were Constable, memorable for his connexion
with the great Waverley series, and William Blackwood, the
LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 94I
founder of the greaf publishing house which bears his name.

The 'famous magazine was the outcome of his enterprise. It
succeeded another periodical of \m,- The Eiinburgk Monthly •
Magazine, which ran a brief and not >a bright career under two
'
editors, Pringle and Cleghorn, who were ridiculed. by their \{v^-

s^mXsA safx.&is,Cix^ m. \!a& Chaidee Manuscript. '
'•:"•''
' t'
; This celebrated y«< d'esp'Ht struck the key-note of the new
periodical. It was daringly personal, sparing neither eminence
nor insignificance. A wild uproar followed upon its appearance

and even now refereiices to it are sometimes riiade' with bated
breath, as if it were a thing too terrible for the pages of any
respectable periodical. Not even its authors in 'a!fter yfears
defended its wisdom ; but it' is an extreitiely clever and amusing

production aind, though utterly reckless, is essentially innocent
and free from "tnalevolence. As it is still, when many of the
allusions require a commentary to explain them, a source of mirth
to the reader, we caii understand how irresistible it must have been
when every touch had its instant effect. It was the work of
'Lockhart and Wilson. Others— Hogg, and even the philosopher
Hamilton-âre skid to have had a hand; but'Lockhart's specific
statement leaves no doubt that to the two 'first-named belong
practically all the honour and all the responsibility'. It is they in
particular whom Blackuiood's Magazine brings upon the Stage' as
authors and critics:'
'
'
'"'
The elder of the pair, John Wilson (i 785-1854), was already

'
an author and a poet. The son of a Paisley manufactureff of

tohsiderable wealth, he had gone tci Magdalen College, Oxford,
as a gentlemari-commoner, had wori there an extraordinary repu-
tatiot) for talent knd a reputatiori higher still for his wonderful
athletic ptowers, and had afterwards in 1807 settled at Elleray on

Windermere, where he became intimate with the Lakd pbets ; of '
which so-called '

school be ranked as a oie'mber.
' Wilsoft used to
His first volume *as the rather commonplace Isle of Palms (1812),
which was followed by the stronger and richer City of the Plague
(i8i6). In the interval Wilson had lost his money, and' the
disaster forced him to take steps to make his own living. He
ihoved to Edinfaiirgii and was called to the bar; but he never
practised, and he is said to have regarded with consternation a
solitary brief which somehow came to him he did not know what :
to do with it. He was therefore ready and willing, like Lockhart,

to be enlisted in the service of Blackwood's new periodical. He
was long supposed to have been the editor of it ; but in its early
days '
Maga ' could scarcely be said to have an editor. It was
the product mainly of the pens and the advice of Wilson and
Lockhart, with Blackwood himself in the background as the final
authority on everything, when he chose to assert himself.
Except with regard to the Chaldee Manuscript, Wilson had per-
haps, a smaller share than Lockhart in the early indiscretions of
'Maga and a larger part in what
' —
on the critical side can be put to—
her credit. It was Lockhart who wrote the objectionable articles on
The Cockney School of Poetry ; and it was Wilson who honoured
himself and the magazine alike by probably the very first really
enthusiastic and adequate criticism of Wordsworth. Strangely

enough, in after years, in the Noctes, he said that Wordsworth often
wrote " like an idiot," that he was " a good man and a bad poet,"
and that The Excursion was " the worst poem of any character in
the language." He is responsible too for an article on Coleridge's
Biographia, Literaria, which was one of the early sins of Black-
wood. But on the whole there was less of the " scorpion " in
Wilson than in Lockhart. A large geniality characterised his
mind as well as his body. Though he sometimes used the
bludgeon, he was at least as apt to praise extravagantly as to deal
put unmeasured blame and both his native disposition and his
j
ifpTpier residence in the Lake district inclined him to look with

favour on the writers who were the special butts of The Edinburgh
and The Quarterly. It was the inconsistency due to the want of
" the central tie-beam which sometimes led him to unsay what he
''
had formerly said well.
The close connexion which Wilson formed with Blackwood

was the most important fact in his literary life, and a very large
portion of the twelve volumes of his collected writings consists of
reprints from the magazine. Its appearance served as a recurring
and much-needed stimulus to his genius. He was highly erratic.
One day he would work with intense energy and with extraordinary
speed, and the next day he would be absolutely idle. Occasionally

he would sit with pen in hand diligently wooing a deaf muse ; but
this was probably an experience which only came when the month
had been wasted and Blackwood was on the point of publication.

Such a disposition was not favourable to the production of
sustained works, and there is reason to believe that the periodical
drew from Wilson the best that was in him. Especially happy,
for him and also for Blackwood, was the design of the celebrated
Nodes Ambrosianae, the only work by Wilson which has still a
certain vitality. It is not clear whose was the original idea of the
Nodes : certainly the papers were not at first exclusively Wilson's
Lockhart, Maginn and others had fingers in the pie. But as
time went' on the Nodes became more and more identified with
Wilson, until in the end they became not only his almost alone,
but his own personality threatened to be absorbed in that of the
fictitious Christopher North.
The felicity of plan of the Nodes might, in Hibernian fashion,
be said to consist in the want of plan. They were an olla podrida
of prose and verse, criticism, description, sport, Bacchic revelry,
into which that was best and much of what was commonplace
all
in the writer's mind might be poured. Few books that have lived
so long are so extraordinarily uneven. As we read them in
Ferrier's reprint, the wit seems often forced and the eloquence
rings false. Yet, on the other hand, there are passages of rare
beauty, numerous evidences of large-hearted generosity, a
buoyancy of spirit and a flowing abundance of power, which
are singularly attractive and there is one marvellous character,
;
the Ettrick shepherd, which is hardly over-praised by Ferrier as

"one of the finest and most finished creations which dramatic
genius ever called into existence.'' The Nodes as a whole give a
perfectly accurate picture of Wilson's mind, with its mixture of
fine gold and miry clay.' It is vain to wish that he had winnowed
the chaff from his wheat, or had burnt away the dross from the
gold. The mixture was in his very nature, and the precious could
not have been isolated from the worthless without invading the
seat of life itself.
In his other works Wilson shows similar qUaUties. As a rule,

his touch unmistakable it would have been impossible long
is :
to conceal from those who knew him his connexion with Black-
wood; and, except at the very start, no serious attempt was made
to do so. Tfie Recreations of Christopher JSforth (1842) is
similar in spirit to the Nodes. In The Trials of Margaret Lindsay
(1823) and Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life (1822), he never
high as he does in the Nodes it is probablytrue also that
rises so :
he never sinks so low.' They are much weaker than might have
been expected from a man of his abounding vigour, and they are
not free from a taint of sentimentality.
In his criticism Wilson cannot be said to belong exclusively
to either the old school or the new. He was torn asunder between
the native tendency of hismind and his recollections of the Lakes
on the one hand, and his Blackwood connexion on the other.
He had no real principles in criticism. He was prone to take
colour from his surroundings, and to content himself with express-
ing :the mood which happened to be dominant at the moment of
writing and so his oracles are often
; —
as in his criticism,of Words-
—
worth contradictory, his taste is unsure, his praise and censure
are alike indiscriminate. He lauded extravagantly that dull poem,
PoUok's Course of Time, and he made Tennyson wince by a review
of the Poems of 1832. Alike when Wilson was wrong and when
he was right, it seems to be by chance; and if he was more
frequently right than wrong, it was because his nature was healthy,
not because he could render a reason. His criticism is an
unweeded garden. It would not be true to say that " things
rank and gross in nature possess it merely " ; but things rank and
gross are there, as well as flowers, sometimes delicately beautiful,
often a little flaunting, but beautiful still.
Wilson's companion figure in Blackwood, John Gibson Lock-

hart ('1794-1854), fills a larger space in literature, not on account
of his criticism, but because of his biographical work.
1
Seldom
have- a pair of comrades and coadjutors been more obviously
complementary to one another, for they contrasted in almost every
respect, physical, intellectual and moral. Lockhart was spare and
dark, Wilson fair, florid and large of limb. Lockhart was evidently
the product of an old civilisation, Wilson reminded more than one
observer of the first man Adam, because he had so much of the

freshness of nature about him. Lockhart was reticent to a fault,
Wilson a httle apt to wear his heart upon his sleeve. Lockhart
was severe and restrained even in passages of the highest
eloquence written ' through a mist of tears, Wilson always
rhetorical —sometimes grandly, sometimes faultily so.
Lockhart was the son of a Lanarkshire minister of good
old family but of small means. From Glasgow University he
went as a Snell exhibitioner to BaUiol College, Oxford; and he
had just been called to the bar in Edinburgh wh^n the famous
Magazine was started. He was an excellent scholar, both in
classics. and in modern languages. His spirited translation of the
Spanish Ballads (1823) proves his acquaintance with a literature
not commonly studied in England ; and he was one of the
very few who at that time knew and appreciated German litera-
ture. This accomplishment helped to establish the memorable
friendship between Scott and Lockhart. The latter had visited
Germany, and there had met Goethe. Scott was interested,
invited Lockhart to Abbptsford, and so laid the foundation of a
friendship which has already been touched upon. Lockhart's
marriage in 1820 drew him into another circle, and somewhat
loosened his connexioti with Blackwood. His acceptance in
1825 of the editorship of The Quarterly Review, causing his •
removal to London and filling his hands with other work, neces-
sarily cut him off still more from his old companions, though he
continued to contribute occasional articles, or fragments for the
Nodes. He remained editor of The Quarterly for twenty-eight
years, and resigned the office only a few months before his death,
weary, melancholy, solitary, having lived to see not only Scott
and a,ll but one of his own, as well
himself, but all Scott's children
as Blackwood and Wilson, laid in their graves.
Lockhart's literary work was multifarious. He is great as a
biographer and more than respectable as a novelist, while the
Spanish Ballads give hjm a creditable place as a translator gifted
iWith true poetic feeling ; and, besides all this, he was by profession
a critic and the author of innumerable magazine and review
articles. It is not however in his criticism that Lockhart is seen
w. 60
at his best. He was so much younger than Wilson at the start of
Blackwood that he was, in that respect, more excusable for the
indiscretions then committed. But although in later years he
avoided the extremes of his youth, he could never be absolutely
trusted to keep within the limits of good taste in his criticisms
and he never learnt, what Matthew Arnold knew and illustrated
so well, the power of perfect urbanity and politeness. And yet,
though he is, in much of his critical work, indefensible, more
sins are laid to his charge than he ever committed. He was
guiltless, as we have seen, of the Blackwood article on Bio-
graphia Literaria; and it was Miss Rigby, not he, who many
years later wrote the offensive article in The Quarterly on Jam
Eyre. In the latter case, of course, Lockhart was responsible
as editor for its appearance. The review of Tennyson's early
poems, though excessively severe, is not altogether indefensible.
Anything that was suggestive of Keats seems in his youth to have
irritated him', and, as a rule, he was not attracted by new poets,
especially if they followed new paths. Yet under his editorship,

if not in articles from his pen, quite a considerable number of
poets are treated with praise and appreciation fully equal to

their deserts. Among them may be mentioned Fanny Kemble,
Hartley Coleridge, Henry Taylor, John Sterling, Aubrey de Vere,
Elizabeth Barrett, Mrs Norton, and a whole group of other
poetesses. The on Taylor and on Fanny Kemble at least
articles
were by Lockhart himself^

The truth however is tha:t literary criticism was not Lockhart's
m'eiier; and it was an unkind fate which, in the connexion first
with Blackwood alid afterwards with The Quarterly, made it his

daily occupation. Still more unfortunate for him was the spirit
of the time which allowed and even encouraged him to cultivate

that stinging style to which he owed his sobriquet of " the scor-
pion." On the other hand, all this is more than balanced by the
singular good fortune which made him the biographer of Scott, of
whom Lockhart declared that his peers could only be found " in
the roll of great sovereigns and great captains, rather than in that
^ Lockhart, however, lived to repent.
" 'Laxig's Life of Lockhart, ii. 255, 403.
of literary genius \" Such a man appealed to Lockhart. It was

the many-sidedness of Scott which gave the biographer the scope
for his brilliant success. In dealing with him, Lockhart is at his
best as a critic also; on the successive Waverleys
his remarks
are always sound and good, and often excellent. The same is
true of the criticisms interspersed through his biography of Burns.
It may be conjectured that in his case sympathy with, and com-
prehension of, the character was a condition of, or at least a great
aid to,sound criticism.

There is neither space nor necessity .to follow the development
of the periodicals which devoted themselves to literature. The
most important have been already named. But there remains one
journal which, though not primarily critical of literature, deserves
specialmention because it is unique. The foundation of Funch
(1841) is a fact no less worthy to be chronicled than is the
foundation of Ttie Edinburgh Review. For the remaining sixty

years of the century it was, as it still is, a power in the literature, as
well as in the social life, of the country. We involuntarily think of
thispower as personified Punch speaks of himself as an individual,
:
a man ; and it is as an individual that the world thinks of him.

Probably more than any other periodical, Mr Punch has impressed
his own personality on his staff. The great writers and artists who
have made him what he was, and is, have certainly not lost their
own and yet as his servants they have become in some

individuality;
subtle way — Mr Punch.
To their honour and to his, the immense
power of this remarkable personage has been rarely used, in serious
matters, without a sense of responsibility.He has generally been
right,and when he has erred he has been upright in purpose.
He has always been much more than a jester; an undertone of
seriousness pervades him ; but it does not make him less witty or
more dull. Quite the contrary it is just this seriousness which
:
has set Punch on his pinnacle, unapproachable by any other

comic journal. He is the critical observer of life, never un-
interested;no partisan, yet never indifferent to the question of
right or wrong. Upon any grave occurrence he has always been
ready to take off the jester's mask and to speak in weighty, or even
* Lang's Life of Lockhart, i. 305.
60 —
in solemn, tones ; and more than once or twice, when the heart of
the nation has been deeply moved, his has been the voice that has
best expressed the general emotion. He mourned in noble verse
the deaths of Havelock and of Lincoln and the fate of Franklin.
He made a parody on TAe Isles of Greece the vehicle of doubt as
to the nobility of a conception of life whose highest ideal was to
buy where goods were cheap and to sell where goods were high;
and, like Tennyson and Ruskin, he clearly was of opinion that,
in some circumstances, war might be morally preferable to peace.
The same seriousness is indicated by Thackeray's resignation of
his position on the staff of Punch on a political question. It is
visible in the same writer's Book of Snobs, and in innumerable
cartoons from Leedh to Tenniel, and from Tenniel to the present
day. Similarly^ though his primary business has not been literary
criticism. Punch has always shown his interest in literature, and
has always, from the days of Thackeray's parodies, which are

indirect criticismsj down to the admirable papers of the Baron de
Bookworms, done all within his power to humanise, to elevate
and to ennoble it.
The new periodicals unquestionably provided a medium for
English criticism far more convenient than any that had previously
existed; but the nature and quality of criticism depend upon
men, not upon mechanism. And the facts do not support the
belief in such a vast improvement as is sometimes vaguely supposed
to have taken place. The school of eighteenth century criticism
died away ; but the leaders of the romantic school passed away
too. The world was free for the younger men to bustle in ; but
who were they whose activity was to transform it ? The death of
Gifford and the retirement of Jeffrey may have been a relief ; but
critics capable of taking the place of men like Coleridge and
Lamb and Hazlitt are not easily to be found in any age. Carlyle,
whose work has been dealt with elsewhere, was the only
critical
man then writing whose power was comparable to that of the men
of the expiring generation. Ruskin enters upon the stage in
1843 with the first volume of Modem Painters; Arnold first
appears as a critic in the introduction to the Poems of 1853.
These are the men who fill the gap left by the great of the
preceding generation; and as Carlyle soon turned aside from
literary criticism and Ruskin's criticism is mainly incidental,
while Arnold's work is mostly of far later date, the generation
after 1830 is really not strong in criticism. Insensibility almost
as gross as Jeffrey's in the case of Wordsworth was shown in the
treatment of Arnold ; impertinence as offensive as that of The
'Cockney School of Poetry in the criticism of Charlotte Bronte; but
we look in vain for anything comparable to the penetrating insight
of Coleridge or of Lamb. Much of the best critical work that
continued to be done came from the pens of two survivors of
their generation, Leigh Hunt and De Quincey.
Although De Quincey The Quarterly
wrote copiously for
Review as wellas for Blackwood, both these men belong to the
critical school opposed to that which is usually associated with
these journals. De Quincey was for a time a dweller among the

Lakes, and was one of the earliest to appreciate the genius 'of
Wordsworth ; and Leigh Hunt did more than anyone else during
the poets' lives for the fame of Shelley and Keats. Fate has
dealt unequally with them. De Quincey's works were collected,
and his reputation in literature is above rather than below his
dfeserts ; but no complete edition of Hunt's works exists, and
much, of his prose is buried in half-forgotten journals. Yet few
men during the first half of the nineteenth century laboured more
assiduously. for literature, oron the whole more successfully, than
James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784—1859), whose most attractive
Autobiography (1850) oughbto keep his memory fresh, even if all
the rest that he has written be forgotten. The record of Hunt's
journalistic adventures is amazing. He edited Th^ Examiner, The
Reflector,^ The Indicator, The Liberal, The Companion, The Tatler,
Leigh Hunts London Journal and The Monthly Repository. Most of
them had a very short life, and, of course, a great deal of the editor's
work was meant merely for the moment and has perished with
the day; but the fertility, of mind which he displayed, especially
in writing, practically single-handed. The Tatler, a daily paper of
four pages, is astonishing. By far the most valuable of this
. :
journalistic work was, however, done for The Examiner, which

was started jointly by himself and his brother John in 1808.
It was meant to be, and at the start really was, independent of
party though liberal in sympathy. It took a motto from Swift
" Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few." As time
went on the attractions of party proved irresistible but at no ;
time did it deserve the repute which it acquired for republicanism,

'
Bonapartism ' and other evil '
isms.' In literature it really was
more fair and tolerant than the other journals of the time, and
few, if any, of the contemporary editors and writers of them showed
such intellectual detachment, and such disinterested love of beauty
for its own sake, as Hunt displayed.
Hunt as a critic is most easily judged in the present day by
the books which he published in his later years Imagination and
Fancy (1844), Wit and Humour (1846) and Men, Women, and
—
Books (1847), the last consisting of articles reprinted from The
Edinburgh and Westminster Reviews, Ainsworth's Magazine and
other periodicals. But justice can never be done to him unless
it be remembered that much of his most original work is buried in
the journals which he himself edited; for it was there, in his own
youth, that he welcomed the young poets whom the world seemed
to have conspired to ignore. In days when The Edinburgh Review
could declare concerning the volume which gave to the world
Coleridge's Christabel and other poems, that it contained only
one couplet which could be reckoned poetry or even sense, and
when Blackwood could still pour insult upon the names of Keats
and Shelley, Hunt was already enchanted with the magical
beauty of the cadences and suggestions of " Down to a sunless
sea "and " Ancestral voices prophesying war." The "fairy case-
ments " were open to him almost as soon as to the poets them-
selves. He could not create such things (though as a poet he
was more than respectable), but his heart and soul were ready to
respond to every suggestion of romance, and his ear was keen for
every melody.
Hunt was a critic because he was a poet ; but he is greatest in
the former capacity. The Story of Rimini (1816) proves that he
could tell a tale in verse 'gracefully, and Abou Ben Adhem is a
beautiful little piece; yet their author was only a minor poet.
Still, he was poet enough to have a most sensitive appreciation of
poetry in others. This is his great merit as a critic. To say that

he had no would be most unjust. Imagination
critical principles
and Fancy and Wit and Humour show that he could draw a
distinction with admirable precision, and few critical books give
with greater clearness the reasons for admiration or for. dis-
approval. But their main value consists in their copiousness of

illustration. They are, indeed, books of selections with illustrative
essays ; and even the essays are full of quotation. This is Hunt's
strength. To him, poetry was a delight; and he is far more at
home in praise than in censure. One of his special critical gifts
was his skill in metre and his sensitiveness to it. He perfectly
understood —and he was almost, if not quite, the first critic who
did this — what Keats and Coleridge aimed at. His analysis of
vowel and consonant sounds, and his examination of the pause,
mechanical and uniform in Pope, more varied in Dryden, masterly
in Milton, are admirable.
Unlike Hunt, Thomas De Quincey (1785 — 1859) was greater
in other things than in criticism. It is to his impassioned prose
in parts of the English Opium Eater (1822) and in Suspiria de
Profundis (1822) that he owes his place in literature. These and
a few other things, such as his tale of the Eevolt of the Tartars,
have been praised quite up to, if not beyond, their deserts
for the fatal vice of diffuseness weakens nearly everything he has
done, and, master as he is of prose harmonies, the reader becomes
at last impatient to get to some point, or to the end. On the
other hand, the Autobiographic Sketches have seldom been
adequately appreciated. They show De Quincey at the very
best. His amiable and pleasant, he has touches of
garrulity is
humour, and his more masculine elder brother is an admirable
foil to himself. The picture of a sensitive and highly imaginative
childhood, with its unsuspected sources of terror and suffering,
has rarely if ever been better drawn.
De Quincey made the acquaintance of John Wilson while he
.
was living at the Lakes, and Wilson introduced him to Blackwood,

both as a contributor and as a figure in the Noctes, where he is
skilfully and sympathetically depicted. He was at once a valuable
and a troublesome recruit \ troublesome, because he hardly knew
the meaning, and certainly did not appreciate the need, of

punctuality, though he showed wonderful ingenuity in devising
excuses for the absence of it ; valuable, because of his knowledge,
his taste and his command of language. He was just the man
for an age of periodicals. He could work upon an immense
variety of subjects; but he had not the strength of will or the
power of concentration to do more than write 'articles' upon
them. His besetting sin of diffuseness mars him in criticism as
in everything else. He meanders on indefinitely in harmonious

prose, and only too often drowns the thought under a flood of
Words. There are excellent things in his Style, in Homer and the
Homeridae and in the article on Pope; but these papers are all
too long. On the Germans, poets as well as philosophers, he is
usually superficial. Occasionally he draws a happy distinction, as
in the famous division between the literature of knowledge and
the literature of power; occasionally too his imagination illumi-
nates a dark passage as in the paper On the Knocking at the Gate
in Macbeth. But the recollection of such things only serves to
deepen the regret that, like his fellow-victim of the opium habit,
Coleridge, he so seldom produced what was worthy of his great
powers.
It is impossible to pass to the younger men without being
consciojis of a descent, the nature and extent of which is perhaps
most clearly seen if we compare A New Spirit of the Age (1844)
withi the work of Hazlitt published nineteen years before. The
two books stand in a different relation to the periods criticised.
Hazlitt's was the summing up of an era of literature at its close

for rriost of the writers with whom he dealt had done their
greatest work before he wrote. Home, who edited the later
book, and his coadjutors, dealt, for the most part, with men who
were only at the opening of their career. This, no doubt, helps
to account for the fact that in their case the selection is less sure
and happy and the treatment less firm ; but it does not account
for the decline in quality throughout the book. This impression
of decline is confirmed when we observe the changes in the
management of the great periodicals. Macvey Napier was a man
of far less talent than Jeffrey, and Elwin was unmistakably inferior
to Lockhart. The Monthly Repository, for many years the organ

of the Unitarians, had unusual good fortune in its editors.
William Johnson Fox (1786-1864) has the distinction of being
the firstman who welcomed Browning, and fully deserves the
praise due to keenness of judgment and to courage ; for he never
shrank from expressing an unpopular opinion. On his retirement,
the Repository was edited successively by men so highly gifted as
Leigh Hunt and R. H. Home ; but Fox had changed its rdle
from that of a party organ to that of an impartial advocate of
truth ; and, alas, the change did not pay. But the Repository was
exceptional. As a rule, the editors were undistinguished, land so
was the work of the contributors. Though the name of Abraham
Hayward (1801-1884), author of The Art of Dining (1852),
carried weight, his Biographical and Critical Essays are not
stimulating. James Hannay (1827-1873) wrote with vigour and
insight in his lectures on satire and satirists, and not a little fancy
is shown in the suggestive comparisons ; but his scholarship was
defective. Had he been granted a longer life and better health,
George Brimley (1819-1857) might have made a great name;
but his actual achievement was little more than a very suggestive
essay on Tennyson {Cambridge Essays, 1855) and a volume of
essays posthumously published.
E. S. Dallas (1828-1879), i" his extremely able and interesting
book, The Gay Science (1866), itself an admirable contribution to
critical literature, divides criticism into three classes, editorial,
biographic and scientific. The first, which he ranks lowest,
received a great development during the period with which we
have to deal. One of the marked characteristics of the Revolu-
tionary period was the revival of interest in Elizabethan literature,
which showed itself both in the creative work of the time and in
the illuminative criticism of Coleridge and Lamb. The interest
continued, but its manifestation in criticism became more
editorial and biographic, and less aesthetic. Shakespeare was
edited arid re-edited, the minor dramatists received their share of
attention, and Bacon absorbed the life of one whom the best
judges of the time pronounced capable of important original
work.
A spice of a kind of interest not unexampled, but happily
uncommon, was contributed to Shakespeare criticism by John
Payne whose History of English Dramatic
Collier (1789-1883),
Poetry (1831) is a work of such solid merit as to deepen greatly
the regret at the stain upon the author's name. At that time
Collier was honoured by every scholar, and to all appearance
deserved honour. His edition of Shakespeare (1842— 1844) was
received with the respect due to the work of one who had proved
his capacity to deal with the subject. Not till 1852 was the
notorious Perkins Folio heard of; and in the following year some
of its readings were embodied in Notes and Emendations to the
Plays of Shakespeare. On the word of Collier they were, naturally
enough, received as genuine even by such a competent judge as
James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (1820-1889), who had already
made considerable progress in those studies which made him the
foremost authority of his generation on the life of Shakespeare.
Halliwell, as he then was, felt the scholar's debt to an elder
scholar who had pointed him the way ; and to the end he refused
to believe that Collier was not himself deceived. Others were
less chivalrous, or more clear-sighted. Singer, who afterwards
issued a useful edition of Shakespeare, gave the first public
utterance to scepticism in his Text of Shakespeare Vindicated
(1853). Collier, for his part, buttressed one dubious story with
another, contradicted himself, issued complete lists of the Perkins
readings which proved to be incomplete, made another wonderful
discovery of a set of long-lost notes on Coleridge's lectures on
Shakespeare and Milton, and in the end left no doubt in any
impartial mind that he was one of the victims of the curious

mania for literary fraud. But though this taint vitiates all of
Collier's own work, even the forgeries of the Perkins Folio did
good indirectly, for they deepened the interest in the text of
Shakespeare, and had some influence on the work of Howard
Staunton (1810-1874), famous for his chess, and of Alexander
Dyce (1798-1869), as well as of Singer. Dyce, who was perhaps
the best of this group of critics, was a wide, as well as an accurate,
student of the Elizabethan drama, and he edited Middleton,
Beaumont and Fletcher, Marlowe, and Webster, as well as
Shakespeare. As regard's the text however the greatest and

completest work of the generation is the well-known Cambridge
Shakespeare (1863-1866), which was reissued in 1887.
The Concordance (1879) of Mary Cowden-Clarke can hardly
be ranked as either but it was a most
literature or criticism;
useful aid to criticism and a very solid and creditable piece of
work. Her husband's lectures on Shakespeare, delivered between
1854 and 1856, had considerable influence in their day in
popularising the great poet, and the parts which have been pub-
lished are still worth reading. A union at once matrimonial and
literary was a thing no longer rare. S. C. Hall and his wife,
Henry Nelson and Sara Coleridge and William and Mary Howitt
are examples, as well as the Brownings and G. H. Lewes and
George Eliot.
This was a natural enough result of the adoption by women
of the profession of letters. Another result was the study of the
problem of sex from a new point of view. Consciously or
unconsciously, this problem influences the work of nearly all the
women of the time ; and a curious illustration of it is afforded by the
group of women who have written about Shakespeare. We see it
in Mrs Jatneson's Characteristics of Shakespeare's Women (1832),

and Lady Martin's book On some of Shakespeare's Female
in
Characters (1885); and though Mary Cowden-Clarke is an
exception in her Concordance, she betrays the influence in a way
of her own in her Girlhood of Shakespear^s Heroines (1851).
Anna Brownell Jameson (i 794-1 860) fills a larger place in
literature by virtue of the series of works beginning with Sacred
and Legendary Art (1848), treating in similar fashion the legends
of the saints, of the monastic orders and of the Madonna, and
ending with The History of Our Lord (1864) which was left
incomplete at her death and was finished by Lady Eastlake ; but
it is doubtful whether she ever did better work than in her early
Shakespearean studies. Her art-criticism was partly an inherit-

ance from her father, a miniature painter, partly the result of the
stimulus given by Ruskin to such studies; but good judges
condemn her as inaccurate and deficient in technical knowledge.
In the Shakespeare criticisms she knew her ground; she brought
to the subject certain special gifts which men could not possess
unless they rivalled Shakespeare himself; and as she also wrote
well, the result is a very fresh, interesting and suggestive book
Helena Savile Faucit, Lady Martin (iSry-iSgS), had qualifications

even higher; for she possessed not only literary skill, and the
sympathy and understanding of a woman for women, but the long
training of the stage as well, on which she was perhaps the
greatest interpreter, since Mrs Siddons, of the very characters
whom she had to consider critically in her book.
More criticism of the editorial and biographical kinds has
been expended upon Shakespeare than upon any other English
writer. The editorial work has been fruitful; but though portly
volumes have been written, there is still a "plentiful lack'' of
ascertained facts of the biographical sort. To the great contem-
porary whose name has been so curiously associated with
Shakespeare's, one man in the Victorian era devoted himself
completely. Of criticism of the editorial sort there is no more
remarkable example than James Spedding's (1808-1881) edition
of the works of Bacon. Spedding was stirred by Macaulay's
celebrated essay, which he answered pungently and in many
points convincingly in Evenings with a Reviewer (1848). From
this he was led on to edit the works with an exhaustive but
formless biography. He did the work with such characteristic
deliberation that it occupied his whole life. There is room
to doubt whether Spedding's unsparing devotion has, after all,
attained its end. It was easy enough to show that Macaulay
was wrong with regard to the Baconian philosophy, and not

difficult to point out the one-sidedness and exaggeration of
his criticisms of Bacon's life. But to win acceptance for a
fundamentally different view of the life was a much harder task.
Englishmen like R. W. Church and foreign scholars like Brandes

remained unconvinced, and the question of the character of Bacon
must be regarded as still unsettled. Spedding sacrificed forty years,
says FitzGerald, "to re-edit his [Bacon's] Works, which did not need
such re-edition, and to vindicate his Character which could not
be cleared^." And those forty years were years of the life of one
' FitzGerald's Letters.
who, in the judgment of FitzGerald himself, of Thackeray and of

Tennyson, was among the ablest men of the time.
Scholarly work of the editorial species is indispensable ; but it
would be extravagance of praise to assign to such work a high
rank as literature. It belongs to the literature of knowledge, not
to the literature of power, and recalls the schools of Alexandria
rather than the great creative ages of Greece^ This may, indeed,
be said of all criticism. But the division between the two kinds
of literature is not fixed and definite, and as the creative may
sink towards the critical, so the critical may rise towards the
creative. In the hands of the greatest masters criticism becomes
a new sort of creation ; in Lessing's, unfolding great principles
in Goethe's, turning upon genius the flash-light of a genius in
most cases greater than that which is criticised. Editorial
criticism, however, can in no case rise to this level, and is not
to be censured for not being that which in the nature of things it
cannot be. But, tested by its own canons, it reveals the mediocre
character of criticism after the age of the Revolution was ended.
For not only do we fail to discover com-
any critical intuition
parable to that of Lamb no display

or of Coleridge, but there is
of editorial acumen equal to that of Theobald, and no work of

monumental learning like the great variorum edition of Dr H.
Howard Furness in the present day. Neither is the kind of work
to which the majority devote themselves the highest, nor is that
which they accomplish of the best quality in its kind.
As time goes on, however, the depleted ranks are filled once
more, and soon after the middle of the century a number of men
of high genius in poetry, in fiction, or in other forms of literature,
have to be ranked as critics likewise. Ruskin, Matthew Arnold,
Thackeray and Rossetti are all critics as well as great creative
writers. Walter Bagehot and John Brown are men of inferior
rank to these, yet still of great gifts. Bagehot ranks primarily as
an economist and constitutional writer, and is discussed elsewhere;
but in the fifties and sixties he was a power in criticism likewise.
Sound judgment, a sense of humour, sympathy, and a gift for
epigrammatic expression, make his criticisms at once instructive

and eminently readable.
Dr John Brown (1810-1882) of Edinburgh is less easily
placed, either as to his rank or as to his class. He was not

a great genius, yet he was too exquisite to be fairly denominated
a minor writer. Though he wrote of many things, he did not
write much on any one subject; but a vein of criticism runs
through a great deal of his work, and it is clear that he possessed
the critical gift in a very uncommon degree. He was one of
those men, more common at the bar than in the medical pro-
fession, who, while regarding their own occupation as the business
of their lives, consider themselves imperfectly qualified for that
business unless they can feel and cherish intellectual and literary
interests outside its bounds. He never looked upon himself as a

man of letters ; his papers were " horae subsecivae " ; and yet he
felt that while he was writing them he was fitting himself all the
better for his work as a physician. In the essays on professional
subjects included in Horae Subsecivae there is no point more
frequently insisted on than this. It was however reading and
thinking on extra-professional subjects that he considered neces-

sary, rather than writing upon them. He drifted into writing,
never took himself seriously, and never was fully conscious how
wonderful was the gift of style which he possessed. But for his
wife it is probable that many of his papers would never have been
written. In 1846 Brown started on his career as a writer with a
series of essays on art. An article on Ruskin's Modern Painters
followed ; after that came Locke and Sydenham ; and so gradually
the materials for the three volumes of Horae Subsecivae were
compiled. These volumes give Brown a niche among those
authors who are not only admired but loved. There is not a
little in them, in their humour and exquisite felicity of style,
which calls to mind Charles Lamb ; and the reader's feeling for
Brown has that quality of personal friendship of which almost all
readers of Lamb are conscious. Another author whom they
frequently suggest is Brown's fellow-physician, Oliver Wendell
Holmes, a writer stronger, richer and more varied than he,' but
hardly so delicately beautiful.
Brown's writings are always unpretentious. There is no
straining for effect, no display of learning, not the slightest
apparent effort even to write well. The simple limpid English

seems to flow quite naturally from the pen. It is either a triumph
of the art of concealing more probably, a wonderful
art, or,
example of a natural gift and perfected by constant

refined
intercourse with the best writers, old and new. There is much
that is more ambitious and more eloquent in the prose of his
time ; but there is nothing more flawless than the prose of
Dr John Brown. Probably the perfection of his work will
preserve his name when the names of many who made far more
noise in their day have been forgotten. That unobtrusive modesty
which pervades Brown's writings, as it marked his daily life, begets
a tendency to underrate the serious worth of Horae Subsecivae.
The author claims so little we are in danger of
for his essays that
accepting them too nearly at -his own estimate; and it takes an
effort of reflection to realise how great is their range and how
solid their value, as well as how beautiful their style. His essays
on Locke and Sydenham and Free Competition in Medicine are
serious contributions to medical literature, full, not of that medical
science in which he did not much believe, but of that benign
wisdom which is the crowning grace of the experienced physician.
And perhaps Brown's command over character isdue to the
medical experience whence this wisdom springs. At least his
theory was that the physician had to treat the man, not the
disease ; and he could not treat him without understanding him.
As an art critic, though he had no pretensions to technical

training, Brown had few equals. All that he wrote on painting
and on literature was the outcome of a singularly refined and
sensitive natural taste. He felt instinctively the meaning of the
painter or of the poet, and he explained it in the aptest words.
There is no more sympathetic bit of criticism in the English
language than his comments on the song, "Oh, I'm wat, wat!"
There are few more simply touching pieces than the paper on
Thackeray's death. A
most refined sense of the poetical breathes
in the essay on Henry Vaughan. It was not capacity, but only
time, and perhaps inclination, that were wanting to make Brown

one of the greatest critics of his generation. The pity is that time
did not serve or incUnation move him more frequently. His
criticisms of themen who made Edinburgh great during his own
boyhood would have been a precious possession. He knew some
of them. Jeffrey had called to offer his congratulations on Locke
and Sydenham. He had listened to the eloquence of Wilson in
his lecture-room. He had often with boyish reverence watched
Scott limp along Princes Street to his house in Castle Street.
And he loved what they, and especially what Scott, loved. He
was almost as deeply imbued as Scott himself with the love of the
Border scenery — and of dogs. He thought that only Homer, or
King David, or Sir Walter could have worthily rehearsed the
battle of the Game Chicken with Yarrow, and his death by the
'
bite of Rab ; but he proves that at least one more was quite
worthy to treat the theme. It is with papers of this sort, neither
professional nor critical, that Brown's name
closely, andis most
in the minds of many almost exclusively, associated. Rab and his
Friends, Our Dogs and Marjorie Fleming these are the titles —
that most readily rise to the mind when we think of him. No
doubt he was fortunate in his subjects. There has only been one
Marjorie Fleming; but there was only one John Brown, who
could have so delicately handled her touching little story. And
how common in a coarser hand might have been the story of
Rab and his friends Just a big mastiff, a carrier and his suffering
!
wife; but man, woman and dog are alike immortal. Brown is
the prince of all writers on dogs : there is probably nothing of its
kind in literature equal to Our Dogs. The animals all have

characters and stand apart from one another in the memory,
distinctand individual. Wolfe's name lives in literature for the
sake of his Burial of Sir John Moore; Campbell's would be safe
if he had written nothing but Ye Mariners of England; and
Gray's, if it were only, for the great Elegy. Brown's three essays
are as unique and perfect, each in its way, as any of these ; and
though small bodies of prose are a less sure guarantee of
permanent remembrance than short pieces of verse, it may be
hoped that they will keep his memory green for generations yet
to come.
Most of the greater men who have been named were critics of
literature only by the way, yet even their by-work served to ennoble
criticism. No one who has read Thackeray's English Humourists

can doubt the greatness of his critical faculty. It is attested also
by numerous detached papers, by his parodies and by many
passages in the novels. The Pre-Raphaelites created a school in
criticism as well as in painting and poetry. Ruskin was one of
the greatest forces of the century in all matters of taste. He and
the Pre-Raphaelites, however, are more particularly critics of art
in the narrower sense than critics of literature ; and as such they
will be considered in the next section of this chapter. There
remains only Arnold, the true successor, by reason of the quality
and the influence of his work, of Coleridge and Lamb.
Matthew Arnold is one of the few men who are almost equally
important in poetry and in prose. The majority Of those who
are keenly conscious of his charm will rank his verse higher than
his prose ; but it was not as a poet that he had most influence
upon' his own generation and upon the young men who were
rising to maturity as he grew old. In his case, the line between
the period of verse and the period of prose is less precisely drawn
than it is. in the case of Scott ; but there is, nevertheless, a clear
predominance of poetry during the earlier part of his career, and
a clear predominance of prose for the last twenty years of his life.
His poetical career came practically to an end in 1867. As a

prose writer he made his first appearance in 1853, when the
striking jireface to the Foems of that year proclaimed, to the
discerning, the advent of a new force in criticism and of a new
master of prose ; but the influence most potent in turning him
towards prose was, perverse as the fact Elppears, his tenure of the
chair of poetry at Oxford, which began in 1857 and lasted for ten
years. The ' reason is plain enough. Arnold held that the main
efibrt of the intellect of Europe had been for many years a
critical effort, while English literature was singularly deficient in
criticism. By " criticism " he meant a good deal more than literary
criticism. He defined it as "the endeavour, in all branches of
knowledge, theology, philosophy,^ history, art, science, to see the
object as in itself it really is'." But though literary criticism
was not the whole, it was an indispensable part of this critical
^ On Translating Homes',
W. 61
movetnenti Matthew Arnold inherited the teacher's instinct, and
he was profoundly influenced by his sense of what his country
needed. To be useful to England was always one of his greatest
ambitions ; and he knew that the way to be useful was to supply
that wherein England was deficient.
To Arnold's tenure of the professorship of poetry we owe
directly On Translating Homer (1861), Last Words on Trans-
lating Homer (1862) and On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) j
indirectly, we Owe to it also the classical drama Merope (1858),

"
which Mr Herbert Paul characterises as " the real inauguration
of the professorship. Merope itself may be regarded as a sort of
critical and there went with
essay (an unfortunate one) in verse ;
it a long and carefully-reasoned preface, in which Arnold advo-

cated the cause of classical as against romantic poetry, as he had
already done in the preface to the poems of 1853. From the
year 1863 onwards Arnold was a frequent contributor to periodi-
cals. latter part of his life he was much in request for
In the
lectures and addresses, the most important of which including —
the Speech at Eton, Emerson and the fine address on Milton,
delivered only a few weeks before Arnold's death have been —
reprinted in one or other of the volumes of essays.
All Arnold's prose is critical in the wider sense, and the most
important part of it is devoted to the criticism of literature. To
this class belong parts of the Mixed Essays (1879) and Discourses
in America (1885), as well as the two series oi Essays in Criticism
(1865 and 1888). It is these latter books, with the lectures on
Homer and the admirable preface to the poems of 1853 (after-
wards somewhat incongruously appended to the Irish Essays)

which show Arnold at his best in criticism. Of all the books he
ever wrote, the first series of Essays on Criticism has been the
most widely and deeply influential. It is no richer in critical
insight and wisdom than the second series, but to many young
men it came with much of the force of a revelation. Arnold's
later writings reiterated the lesson, but they could not convey a
lesson so freshand so original as that carried by the volume of
1865. Even where the writer's views did not win assent, the
wealth of thought and of illustration, the charm of style, the
commanded attention. For

persuasiveness, the perfect breeding,
thirty years therehad been no such criticism in English. Man of
genius as he was, Ruskin's was marred by capriciousness, and the
show of principle which he spread over his criticisms was largely
illusory. No one else, not even Bagehot, combined the necessary
knowledge with' sympathetic insight and the power to write
English, in nearly as high a degree as Arnold. Other critics
made happy hits, but no other critic of the time worked so much
upon principles fully understood and clearly explained.
Arnold, the panegyrist of classical lucidity, proportion and
restraint, may be regarded as at once the complement and the
corrective of the great critics of the Revolutionary epoch. Their
revolt against the eighteenth century had at last been completely
successful. Principles akin to theirs reigned in poetry, in painting
and in and were increasingly influential' in religion.
architecture,
Only and in politics, where Benthamism
in the sphere of science,
was now supreme, may the eighteenth century be said to have
retained its influence. Arnold thought that romanticism had
been overdone, and that a new classicism was imperatively
needed. ^Jt must not "However be t[ie~classicism oflheûeen
Anne writers. They and their successors down to the Revolution
lived in an age of prose. "A sort of spiritual east wind 'was at
that time blowing'." " ^^^den^j-niPope^re not classics of our
poetry, they are classics of our prose'." The difference between
genuine poetry and the poetry of their school is that " their poetry
is conceived and composed in their wits, genume poetry is con-
ceived^îSLcflmposed in the soul'." Nevertheless, their time is
" our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century " ; and in the
light they give the nineteenth must correct its own mistiness and
mysticism.
Arnold's objections to romanticism were partly due to the
nature of the thing itself, and partly to the sense that there were
in it special dangers to the country which it was his constant wish

to serve. The classicist and the romanticist are, it has been said,
born, not made ; and this is Clearly true in the case of Arnold.
Living when he did, he could not escape the influence of romance,
1 Essay on Gray, ^ The Study of Poetry. » Essay on Gray.
61 —
even if he had wished to do so ; and he was far too catholic in
taste, far too intelligent, to wish it. His sense of its value is
shown the lovely apostrophe to Oxford, perhaps the finest

in
passage in the whole of his prose, where it is as a " queen of
romance," "whispering from her towers the last enchantments of
the Middle Age," that he does homage to this most potent of all
combatants against his special enemies, the Philistines. Occa-

sionally he shows the influence in his own poems, as in Tristram
and Iseult. But there is usually something grudging in his admis-
sion of the merits of romance, and, when they win, him at all, the
great romanticists win him by force. He quotes with approval
from " the most delicate of living critics :
'
Comme tout genre de
composition a son dcueil particulier, celui du genre romanesque,
dest lefaux^.' " He was never a lover of Shelley ; it was late before
he became ardent in admiration of Keats ; he was always at least
as fully conscious of the defects of Coleridge as of his merits. He
admired the and power of Elizabethan literature, but found
spirit
it "steeped in humours and, whimsicality up to its very lips'," and
pronounced Chapman's translatiofi of Homer faulty because, for

Homer's plainness and directness, it substituted the fancifulness
characteristic of the translator's time. And though Arnold has
praised Shakespeare in a noble sonnet, even Shakespeare is un-
sparingly censured for a style in many passages tortured and
faultily difficult and a diction fantastic and false. Once and again
Arnold insists that, for England, Milton is a safer model than the
greatest of dramatists.
Arnold then was by ;nature unsympathetic towards^ romantic
poetry. Fpr a hundred years romance had been turning more
and more towards the Middle Age, of which in Arnold's eyes the
characteristics are "its grotesqueness, its conceits, its irrationality'."
Roinanceencourages eccentricity, arbitrariness, self-will. Romance

is- and attaches extravagant importance "to"
negligent of ûnity,
bea,utiful passages —
purple patches. " We ha^fe poems which seemT
to exist merely for the sake of single lines and passages not for ;
the sake of producing any total impression. We

have critics whp
seem to direct, their, attention merely to. detached expressions, .to..
' On Translating Homer. ' ibid. * ibid.
LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM g6S
Jhejanguage about the action, not to the.action itself ^" Keats's J

Isabella is "a perfect' treasure-house of graceful and felicitous
words and images'"'; but the effect of the story itself "is abso-
lutely null." Arnold thought that, even when they prided them-
selves on their fidelity, the romanticists were apt to go wrong by
attending only, or too much, to the parts. The Pre-Raphaelites,__
Jie^êldj^did_nqt understand "that the peculiar effect .iLnature
residesjnjthe wholeând not in the__partsii'
These evils of the romantic tendency seemed to Arnold
especially dangerous in the case of England, because they are the
înnateltendency of the English race. The habit of doing things
by bits, distrust of ideas and idealism, aij ex aggCTatCTtndiw cttial ism
which takes pride in each man's being a law unto himself, are
"characteristic, and are fostered by lawlessness in- literature.
EngEna" is"the native home of intellectual eccentricity of^TT
kinds'*," a country where in 1829 an elaborate book was publishedj
"which enchanted the English reverends, to make out that Ma-
homet was the little horn of the he-goat that figures in the eighth
chapter of Daniel, and that the Pope was the great hdrn^" This
is provinciality in the extreme, the spirit whence springs "the
dissidence of dissent.'' It is essential to find a corrective.

Arnold's corrective, on its literary side, is classicism as opposed
_to romanticism. In the preface to the poems of 1853, in the lec-
tures on' fraSSating Homer, in the address on Milton, from the
earliest of his he stated and reiterated
published essays to the latest,
his conviction of the vital classical_spirit and ,

importance of the
style to a race and a literature so rich and so great as he knew
the English to be, yet deplorably deficient as he thought in — —

what the classical spirit could impart. He found the characteris;„
tics of the Greeks to be '^cahn, cheerful ness, dismtereited obiec-
tivity*." He found Greek4iteratu|e_to be ^minated^ by.ihfi_idfia-.
oTtHe""wholer" Above all he found classical literature to be per-
vaded "by "the grand style," which he could discover in only two
poetical works inIKe modern languages, Dante's Divine Comedy
1 Preface to Poems, 1853. ^ ibid.
' On Translating Bomer. * Littrary Influence of Academies.
" ibid. " Preface to Poems, 1853.
and Milton's Paradise Lost^- Here then was something not super-
fluous, but specially needed. This sense of the. whole is, in Arrjold's
opinion, just what is most lacking_in the_ English poets ; this grand
style is the rarest of all things in the whole range ofjmodern litera-,
ture. And students of Arnold's poetry know how highly he valued
calm and cheerfulness as the best means to cure the " sick hurry "
and " divided aims " of modern life, and to enable the modern
man to " possess his soul."
It was a cognate feeling which led Arnold to turn to France
rather than to Germany for models and instruction. The English
fault lay in being too Teutonic ; and therefore Germany, rich as
she was in ideas, was for England a dangerous guide. France, on the
contrary, with her Latin culture, her lucidity, her love of logical
completeness, possessed just what England lacked. Arnold
therefore made the first serious effort of the century to turn
England back to that study of French literature which had been
so influential in- the previous century. He neither underestimated
German nor overestimated French literature. He was one of the
most ardent admirers of Goethe. While he thought poetry the
and consummation of literature, he had a low opinion of
flciwer
French poetry ; and its great instrument, the Alexandrine, seemed

to him poor and tinkling in comparison with the hexameter or
with English blank verse. " France, famed in all great arts, in
ndne supreme," indicates his belief that French literature never

soars where Shakespeare and where Milton are. Genius, he says,
"is mainly an affair of energy""; and therefore England, which is
pre-eminent for energy, has produced some of the greatest geniuses

of all time. Clearly then it was no belief in the inherent or
general superiority of Frenchmen which made Arnold turn for

instruction to France. It. was his persistent utilitarianism, his
conviction of the vanity of dwelling boastfully upon that which we
possess and of the utility of searching out and trying to remedy
our deficiencies. Our true business was "to see ourselves as
others see us." France, with less capacity than England for the
^ On Translating Homer.
Literary Influence of Academies. Landor before him had declared energy
*
to be " the soul of poetry." SotUhey and Person.

highest flights of genius, was eminent for certain qualities which

England had not, or had in much inferior degree, 'f Openness of
mind and flexibility of intelligence were very signal characteristics
of the Athenian people in ancient times ; everybody will feel that.
Openness of mind and flexibility of intelligence are remarkable

characteristics of the French people in modern times ; at any rate,
they strikingly characterise them as compared with us ; I think
everybody^ or almost everybody, will feel that\" English energy
can produce the genius of Shakespeare ; but when it takes the
wrong road it is capable of identifying- Mahomet with the little
horn and the Pope with the great horn. If openness of mind and
flexibility of intelligence can be grafted on it, absurdities of this
sort will become impossible.

Arnold was attracted all the more strongly towards France
because of his conviction that what Europe specially needed was
combined with his perception that the qualities of intel-
criticism,
and style characteristic of the French writers were such as to
lect
make them great in the field of criticism. In France therefore,

more than elsewhere in the modern world, was to be found the
aid necessary towards filling a great void in English literatura
For the spiritual nurture of England, modern France was the
complement of ancient Athens.
A similar predilection is manifest in what Arnold, has to say
about the literature of Germany. He thinks that Carlyle made a
mistake in attaching too much importance to Tieck, Novalis,
Richter,, and the romantic writers generally. Goethe was "the
manifest centre of German literature'"; but from him as spring,
the main stream was that which flowed, not through the romance
writers, but through Heine, who was destined to destroy the
romantic school. The great value of Goethe, as he himself

declared,. was that he had been the liberator of the Germans and
especially of the German poets. And this he was, in Arnold's
opinion, because his "profound, imperturbable naturalism is
absolutely fatal to all routine thinking'." work of The great

Heine, in his turn, was that he brought the genius of France to
bear upon the genius of Germany. " Germany, that vast mine of
''
Literary Influence of Academies. ^ Heine, * ibid.
ideas, had no need to import ideas, as such, from any foreign
country ; and if Heine had carried ideas, as such, from France to
Germany, he would but have been carrying coals to Newcastle.!

But that for which France, far less meditative than Germany, is
eminent, is the prompt, ardent, and practical application of an
idea, when she seizes it, in all departments of human activity
which admit it And that in which Germany most fails, and by
failing in which she appears so helpless and impotent, is just the
practical application of her innumerable ideas... Heine was, as he
calls himself, a Child of the French Revolution,' an ' Initiator,'
'
because he vigorously assured the Germans that ideas were not

counters or marbles, to be played with for their own sake ; because
he exhibited in literature modern ideas applied with the utmost
freedom, clearness and originality ^." Mutatis mutandis, the work
here attributed to Heine is exactly the work which Arnold was
attejnpting to do for England. Once more we are impressed by
Arnold's practical instinct, his utilitarianism ; we are impressed
also by his love for definiteness of meaning and clearness of

expression. He will have nothing to do with the mystics ; he is
full of admiration for those who can make a practical use of ideas
which have a meaning for the modern world.
There is nothing else in Arnold's criticism so deep-rooted as
his intense practicality ; but this is combined with another charac-
teristic rarely found along with it, an almost complete detachment
of mind from what are usually called '
practical considerations.'
The practical man is he can take no man's
generally self-centred
;
view but his own. But in Arnold's opinion, to be self-centred or

self-willed is absolutely incompatible with useful criticism. The
Greeks are valuable to us because one of the qualities of the Greek
spirit is " disinterested objectivity." An often-quoted passage in
the essay On the Function of Criticism at the Present Time declares
that the rule for EngUsh criticism may be summed up in one
word disinterestedness, and further explains that disinterestedness
is shown by "keeping aloof from what is called 'the practical view
of things.' " The criticism of literature, he means, must not be

deflected from its course by considerations of pohtics, or religion,
' Heine.
or of anything extraneous whatsoever. All this must be eliminated.

Caprice, waywardness, " provinciality," must be eliminated. "I
wish to decide nothing of my own authority; the great art of
criticism is to get oneself out of the way and to let humanity
decide'." Only thus can criticism be valuable and teach anything
worth learning. To keep aloof from " what is called the practical '
'
view of things " is the indispensable condition of being practical
in the better sense ; for the practical view, so-called, is the view
distorted by irrelevant considerations. It precludes flexibility of
mind ; while " to try and approach truth on one side after another,
not to strive or cry, nor to persist in pressing forward, on any one

side, with violence and self-will, — it is Only thus, it seems to me,
that may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious
mortals
Goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline, but only thus
even in outlined"
Disinterestedness then is the first and greatest rule of
criticism. But the critic cannot be disinterested, to any purpose,
in vacuo. An indispensable part of his equipment is knowledge,^
knowledge of the best that has been thought afad Said in the world.
Deficiency in this respect has been a frequent cailse' of disaster in
England. " We show, as a nation, laudable energy and persis-
tence in walking according to the best light that we have, but are
not quite careful enough, perhaps, to see that our light be not
darkness'." The equipment of knowledge is as indispensable
even for the poet as it is for the critic. " The English poetry of
the first quarter of this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of
creative force, did not know enough''." And again " The true :
key to how much in our Byron, even in our Wordsworth, is this !
— that they had their source in a great rftovement of feeling, not

in a great movement of mind'." In the same spirit; Arnold
declares'in the Letters that " no modern poet can make very much
of his business unless he is pre-eminently strong " in intellectual
power and even Tennyson fell below his standard in this respect.
;
The critic must know the best that has been thought and said,
^ Pagan and Mediteval Religious Sentiment.
^ Preface to Essays in Criticism. ' Culture and Anarchy.
* Function of Criticism. " Hid.
97° THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
both in ancient and in modern times, not only in his own language,
but in the languages from which his native literature is derived,
and in those which are producing literature concurrently. It is
thus, by the comparative method, by seeing how others do what
we also are impelled to attempt, that " provinciality " is avoided.
But although he insisted on the need of knowledge, Arnold was
fully alive to the dangers of a vast load of learning. What it was
vital to know was not everything that had been thought and said,
but the best. He was aware that " the historical estimate " often
resulted in strange freaks, and that the discoverer of some for-
gotten poetaster was under temptation to magnify the value of his

discovery. He was serious in his answer to the antagonist who
charged him with ignorance. Pleading guilty to the charge, he
added " And yet, perverse as it seems to say so, I sometimes
:
find myself wishing, when dealing with these matters of poetical

criticism, that my ignorance were even greater than it is. To'
handle these matters properly there is needed a poise so perfect
that the least overweight in any direction tends to destroy the
•
balance. Temper destroys it, a crotchet destroys it, even erudi-

tion may destroy it To press to the sense of the thing itself
with which one is dealing, not to go off on some collateral issue
about the thing, is the hardest matter in the world. The '
thing
itself with which one is here dealing, — ^the critical perception of
poetic truth, — is of all things the most volatile, elusive, and
evanescent ; by even pressing too impetuously after it, one runs
the risk of losing it. The critic of poetry should have the finest
tact, the nicest moderation, the most free, flexible, and elastic
spirit imaginable; he should be indeed the 'ondoyant et divers,'
the undulating and diverse being of Montaigne. The less he can
deal with his subject simply and freely, the more things he has to
take into account in dealing with it, — the more, in short, he has
to encumber himself, — so much the greater force of spirit he
needs to retain his elasticity. But one cannot exactly have this
greater force by wishing for it ; so, for the force of spirit one has,
the load put upon it is often heavier than it will well bear. The late
Duke of Wellington, said of a certain peer that '
it was a great pity
his education had been so far too much lor his abilities.' In like
manner, one often sees erudition out of all proportion ^

to its
owner's critical faculty. know, therefore,

Little as I I am always
apprehensive, in dealing with poetry, lest even that little should
prove too much for my abilities^'
'
In the essay on the Literary Influence of Academies Arnold

criticises the provincial spirit, and, in contrasting with it "the tone
of the centre," he, whether consciously or unconsciously, portrays
his own critical method. " The provincial spirit exaggerates the
value of its ideas for want of a high standard at hand by which to
try them. Or rather, for want of such a standard, it gives one
idea too much prominence at the expense of others ; it orders its
ideas amiss ; it and dislikes too

ishurried away by fancies ; it likes
passionately, too exclusively. Its admiration weeps hysterical
tears, and its disapprobation foams at the mouth. So we get the
eruptive and the aggressive manner in literature ; the former
prevails most in our criticism, the latter in our newspapers. For,
not having the lucidity of a large and centrally placed intelli-
gence, the provincial spirit has not its graciousness ; it does
not persuade, it makes war; it has not urbanity, the tone of
the city, of the centre, the tone which always aims at a spiritual
and intellectual and not excluding the use of banter,
effect,
never disjoins banter from politeness, from felicity.'' No

itself
more admirable account could be penned, both of what Arnold

consistently avoided, and of what he aimed at and did. He
never weep^ hysterical tears, never foams at the mouth, never
makes war. He is always gracious and urbane, and his banter is
never disjoined from politeness. Arnold's wit could be extremely
cutting, as the essayon Shelley proves ; but it is always scrupu-
lously courteous. He grievously provoked some of his antagonists
but his own good-nature was never ruffled, and no one could ever
say of him that he had overstepped the bounds of perfect breed-
ing. He is separated by the diameter of the ecliptic from the
bludgeon and blundeirbuss criticism of the early periodicals. No
One was more persistent in opinion when he felt himself to be
right. His warfare against Philistinism, for example, was life-long
(though he first impc)rted the term from Germany in the essay on
^ Last Words on Translating Homer.
Heine). His advocacy of " the grand style " begins in his earliest
critical essay
; and in the latest thing he ever wrote we find it set
over against that Philistinism " All the Anglo-Saxon contagion, all
:
the flood of Anglo-Saxon commonness, beats vainly against the i
great style but cannot shake it, and has to accept its triumph^" Yet
it is the truth of the opinions that he values, not the fact that the
opinions are his own ; it is the falsity of other views that raises his
opposition, and the fact that they are the views of certain persons
with whom he has crossed swords is unimportant. He had little
of that combativeness which is conspicuous in Huxley. " It is
not in my nature,— some of my critics would rather say, not in
—
my power, to dispute on behalf of any opinion, even my own,
very obstinately"," is a judgment which shows sound insight into
himself. He did not dispute on behalf of his opinions but so ;
long as he retained them he reiterated them. He knew enough

about education to be aware that in, many cases the truth can
only prevail by being frequently repeated.
The whole of Arnold's prose, as well as much of his verse, is,
as has been already said, critical in spirit and substance. But

besides the volumes which criticise literature, there are three other
groups of his prose writings which require some notice. One
embraces the works which he wrote in bis professional character
as an inspector of schools, an office which he held from 1851 till
just two years before sudden death in April, 1888. In the
his
course of this occupation he wrote numerous reports which' are
buried in blue-books, but he also wrote several volurries which
have been published separately. Some of the work of vy;hich they
are the record Arnold thoroughly enjoyed. He was foreign
assistant-commissioner under the commission which was charged
with the duty of enquiring into the state of popular education in
England and he entered with zest into his duties of investigating
;
the and universities of France and Germany.

schools The
volumes which embody the results at which he arrived have all
the lucidity and mudh of the attractiveness which characterised
their author ; but it is hardly in the nature of things that parlia-
' Milton.
» Preface to Essays in. Criticism, v.
. LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 973
mentary reports, even when they are the work of the most
eminent authors, should live.
Of greater importance are the social and political and theo-
logical criticisms of Arnold. His first separate publication in
prose was a political pamphlet, England and the Italian Question
(1859), and the political interest is manifest in his literary criticisms.
It finds varied expression in Cultfire and Anarchy (1869), which

is described as " an essay in political and social criticism," in
Mixed Essays (1879), in Irish Essays (1882) and in Discourses in
America (1885). The very best of Arnold's criticism on the
social rather than the political side is contained in Friendships
Garland (1871), which he was curiously unwilling to reprint.
These letters,-, which were first printed in The Pall Mall Gazette
between 1866 and 1870, are the richest of all Arnold's writings in
wit and humour. But though the manner is light the purpose is
serious, and there is far more wisdom in the easy banter than in
many tomes of solemn disquisition.
Many of the political essays have suffered more or less from
the change of political interests or the solution of the problems
discussed; but there much in them that has a permanent value.
is
Arnold was a who kept himself detached from party. He

liberal
thought jthat current politics had little bearing upon what really
iriterested him, — English civilisation. He was not without his
prejudices, and his opposition to the Burials Bill, which removed

a monstrous injustice, cannot be,re|Called now without astonish-
ment. No doubt, too, he was sometimes academic. But, on the
whole, a review of his opinions shows the value of detachment and
disinterestedness. Take, for example, the triple thesis of Ecce,
convertiwmr ad Gentes. It is admirable for its frjinkness. Ad'
dressing an assembly of working meri, Arnold, with perfect
candour, declares his conviction that t;he present system in
England mafteriaîses the upper class, vulgarises the middle class
and brutalises the lower class^ ; but he does it in the way which
is least offensive; To remedy this evil he says that ever since,
twenty years before, he went about the Continent to learn what
|i
One is remindedof Mill's answer when he was heckled at Westminster
'
'
;'•
Did you say that the English working men weip liars ? " "I did."
the schools were Uke there, he had "felt convinced that for the
progress of our civilisation, here in England, three things were
above all necessary :
—a reduction in those immense inequalities
of condition and property amongst us, of which our land-syitem is
the base ; a genuine municipal system ; and public schools for
the middle classes." It was especially the last point that he
brought before his audience of working men; and his special
object was, having failed to convince the middle class iri their
own interest, to prove to the working men that the education of
the class above them was their interest as well. The genuine
municipal system, in Arnold's sense, has come ; the system of
secondary educatiofl-is coming ; the levelling of inequalities is still
a task for the future, but

> it seems nearly certain that
' it will be
carried out. Did any practical politician thirty years ago show
greater foresight? The interest in civilisation rather than iii
'
practical ' politics seems to have justified itself
The theological group of writings includes St Paul and
Protestantism {\Zio), Literature and Dogma (1873), God' and the
Bible (1875) and Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877).
The obvious criticism, that these volumes are works on theology
by one who was not a theologian is, from Arnold's point of view,
inconclusive, to say the least of For Arnold believed tliat
it.
religion had suffered greatly in the past, and was likely to suffer
still more in the future, from the influence of a stereotyped
theology. He was the opponent of all creeds he held that ;
religion had hardened itself into formulae which the growth of

knowledge was rendering more and more incredible, and that in
order to make it real and vital once more it must be freed from
this incubus of the incredible. Those who regarded Arnold as
an irreligious man were profoundly mistaken. The most pious
soul could hardly show deeper religious feeling than his Note-
Books (1892) show. But it required either personal knowledge
of the man, or exceptional keenness of insight, to perceive this
to be true of one who defined God as " a stream of tendency,
'
not ourselves, which makes for righteousness."

Such a man was certainly heterodox, and his treatment of the
Bible could not be welcome to those who heartily accepted
the standards of the Church, or who were satisfied with the

formulae of Protestant dissent. It is also true that the scholarship in
Arnold's books of this class
is largely second-hand. He had not the
equipment of a Harnack or a Wellhausen. Yet he was remark-
ably well qualified for the end he had in view ; and surely that
end was one worth pursuing. His principal thesis is that the true
interpretation of the Bible must be a literary, not a scientific, one.
The hard measure he dealt to Colenso was due to his dislike of

the scientific interpretation. Doubtless he went to excess; for
there iS 'scope for a scientific as well as for a literary interpretation.
But his view is essentially correct; and theology has committed
grave mistakes_ iii ignoring the fluidity of a great work of literature,
arid interpreting its utterances as if they were the precise and
definite premises of a syllogism.
.
Literature and Dogma, the greatest of Arnold's books on
religion, created a good deal of commotion, passing through three
editions within the year in which it was published. Objection
was taken, not altogether without ground, to its levity of tone
but Arnold's answer was that, he wrote in the manner which was
natural to him. " Ponderous works," he says, " produce no •
effect; the religious world which complains of me would not read

me if I treated my subject as they say it ought to be treated... J
do not mean them to prescribe a mode of treatment of my subject
tome which would lead to my being wholly ineffective both with
them and with everybody else'.'ii: He was fully convinced that

his work would not injure, but would further, religion, and he
pointed to the fact that while, on the one hand, heiwas blamed for
being too negative, on the other, he was taken to task for being
too positive. " It will more and more become evident how
entirely religious is the work I have done in Literature and Dogma.

The enemies of religion see this well enough already. It is odd
that while I was in my recent article blaming a new book, Super-
natural Heligion, for being purely negative in its Bible criticism,
Morley in The Fortnightly was praising the book for this very
thing, which he says is all we want at present, and contrasting my
' Letters of Matthew Arnold, ii. 120.

book unfavourably with it as not insisting enough on the negative
sideand on disproof ^"
Arnold's theological works were signs of the time, and as
such they have a position in the development of thought. Those
who care for religion may be divided into two classes. Some, in
their conviction of its importance, are prepared to subordinate
everything to it. Others, who perhaps esteem it no less highly,
feel that in the sphere of religion, as everywhere, reason must

be supreme. Within the last half-century the latter class has
gained a weight it never had before ; and to it are addressed
such books as Arnold's, and as Seeley's Ecce Homo and bis
Natural JReligion. These books are spoken of here, for con-
venience, as theological; but they might, with greater accuracy, be
described as documents in the revolt against theology. They are
the layman's protest against the assumption that any profession, or
that the students of any particular branch of learning, could have
a quasi-monopoly of the questions of deepest import in life. Work
like that of Arnold, or of Seeley, or of Oliver Wendell Holmes
in America, rests ultimately upon the conviction that there are
a hundred ways to the truth about religion, and that the
student of history, or of literature, or of science, or of philosophy,
may. just as likely reach the truth as the student of theology.
Nay more, such books imply a deep distrust of the conclu-
sion actually reached by theology, a belief that theology has,
as it were, materialised itself in error, and that the business of
thought is to cut religion free from a connexion which is damaging
to its health, if not dangerous: to its existence. They face the
question of the possible disappearance of all existing forms of
faith, and the rejection of what is called '
supernaturalism '
; and
they indicate the belief of the writers that even if theology were
swept into the rubbish-heap of forgotten literature, and miracles
were universally rejected, what is life-giving and sustaining in
religion would still remain.
Among contemporary and later critics there is none com-
parable to Arnold in weight and originality and suggestiveness,
but there have been many who have done valuable work. Prancis
* Letters, ii. ny.
Turner Palgrave (1824-1897), the poet, would be notewohhy were

itonly as the editor of the best of all English anthologies, The
Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics (1861), in the selection of
which he displayed a critical faculty of a very rare sort. Though
he had far less critical insight, John Skelton (1831-1897)^
Sir
long known by his pseudonym of had a very pleasant
Shirley,;
style and a deft touch. He was a man of varied gifts, a good
story-teller, critic, historian and essayist. His Table Talk (1895),
Nugae Criticae (1862) and A Campaigner at Home (1865) are
readable and interesting volumes, light, pleasant, witty and, at
the same time, wise with a wisdom deeper than is to be found in
multitudes of the most solemn books. The; defence of Mary
Stuart, whatever may be thought of its historical merits, is an
admirable piece of composition, and Maitland of
'
Lethingtotp
(1887-1888) is a fascinating biography, skilfully displaying the
,
workings of an exceedingly keen and subtle mind, and presenting

a picture of the age scarcely rivalled in recent years for vividness
and pictorial brilliancy. In his criticisms Skelton is happiest when
he is easy and informal. Literary allusions lightly intermingled
with discussions on sport and passages of observation of nature
from the judgments passed
illustrations of the credibility of history
on such debated characters as Montrose and Claverhouse ; pic-

tures of men, like the admirable one of Sir Charles Napier in ;
A Campaigner at Home ; these were the things in which Skelton

excelled. Another side of his work, illustrated passim in Tadle Talk
and here and there in the miscellaneous essays, invites comparison
with the work of a St Andrews contemporary, A. K. H. Boyd, the
" country parson," a kind of ''ba;bbling brook," whose Recreations
(1859) and Graver TAougkts {i&6z) and Critical Essays (1865)

contain a good deal of skilful writing marred by garrulity and
a petty love of gossip.
In the more serious critical work of recent years there are two
chief strands, which may be distinguished as, respectively, the
intellectual The latter was of the, more recent
and the emotional.
growth. was associated specially with the University of Oxford^
It
was akin to the "movement," and to the Pre-Raphaelitism which

also, grew there, and was largely indebted to Ruskin, but with this
w. 62
profound difference, that whereas the ethical element was vital
with Ruskin, was completely cast out by the aesthetic critics,

it
who held the introduction of mpral conceptions to be foreign to

art The chief of this school was Walter Pater, who is treated
elsewhere; but John Addington Sy mends (1840-1893) may be
taken as a not inadequate representative both of the strength and
of the weakness of the school. Symonds's magnum opus, The
Renaissance in Italy (1875— 1886), belongs to the domain of
history, but the history is treated in a characteristic fashion. The
first interest of the. writer is not politics, nor even religion, but
literature and art In other .historians these are, quite" rightly,
made side issues : Symonds makes them the chief theme. He

was partly justified by the peculiar character of the period of which
he had chosen to treat ; but even at the Renascence they had not
quite the prominence he gives them. Even on this side of his
work Symonds is too purely aesthetic, and fails to give a fully
comprehensive view of the intellectual movement : Mr F. Harrison
has acutely remarked that he scarcely mentions the science of the
Renascence. There is, in short, a certain lightness in the intellec-
tualfoundations which augurs ill for thei permanence of the super-

structure, pleasing as it is.
• The same holds true of Symonds's minor works. His mono-

graphs on Shelley (1878), Sir Philip Sidney (1886) and Ben
Jonson (1886) are not much more than good journey-work,
brilliant in parts, but by no means great as wholes. His Shake-
speare's Predecessors in the English Drama \-l%%/^ is not sufiScientLy
thorough. Perhaps his best work is to be found in Essays Specu-
lative and Suggestive (1890), where he was not called upon to
sustain his flight after he was tired. The '
speculation ' is that of
a man with scarcely even an average gift for philosophy, but the
'
appreciations ' of art show catholicity as well as delicacy of taste,
and wide knowledge. The style is apt to be too elaborate, and it
is matter for regret that Symonds, in common with all his school,
showed too much anxiety about the manner of saying things, and
too little about the thing said: Few have been able to ponder about
style, asR. L. Stevenson did, without sustaining damage. The healthy
impatience of the stibject which Froude showed is usually safer.

The aesthetic school of criticism did a r,eal sefvipe to litera-
ture. It was one phase of "the renascence of 'Sfonder"ji it told in
favour of sympathy as against' hard rule, of freedoni against con-
vention ; yet we must rejoice that it never at any time obt3,ined
.
real predominance in England. However good ^njptiops may be,

they are safer under the guidance of intellect,; and while ,fr(e,edp,r)5i
is indispensable to excellence, care must be taken that
,
it does pot
degenerate into license. The habitual moderation of the English
mind led to a middle course. .Except in a, few cases aestheticism
was merely an influence, not an uncurbed power. It had force
to modify the old judicial style, but not to replace
i it. , The two
are blended in Matthews, Arnold. They are blendeiii in R. L.
Stevenson also, notwithstanding his deep' sympathy vfify, aestheti-
cism ; while in Steiwenson's friend and coadjutor Williarn Ernest
Henley (1849-1903) —greater in verse than in: prose —there is
even a rebound to the opposite ejftreme. Noi^îriticism, even of

the early days of the reviews, is more dogmatic,.,inore grudely and
even brutally denunciatory, than much of Henley's in. Views and
Reviews (1890-1902). The judge is in his ^hair, and the bâck
cap is by his side. The brilliant essay on Burns would deserve
the highest praise were it not so hard and unsympathetic. His
nearest analogue is Heine, whom he icXiQw^ti'longe intervallo,
in keenness of intellect.
In the closing years of the nineteenth century Henley swayed

many of the younger men, but the steadjestinfluenceiwas rathpr
that of two older men, Richajd Holt Hutton (1826^1897). and
Leslie Stephen (1832-1904). H. D. Traill (1842— 1900) belongs to
the same class, but stapds on a lower plane.
Hutton's spiritual history
is interesting. He ,y?as one of the
band of intellectual men, astonishingly numerpus considering how
small the sect was and is, who started life a Unitarian. For »
time he edited a Unitarian magazine; but, like Maurice, whom,
he admired and by whom he was influenced, and whom in some
ways he resembled, he worked his way through Unitarianism to
Anglicanism. Latterly reports were current that he ;
tended
towards Romanism, They werg probably quite unfounded ; -
but
undoubtedly in the course of his development Hutton's intellect
62 —
received a' kind of twist or bias which rendered'his judgment on
matters theolbgicial not wholly trustworthy. This was amusingly
illustrated on the publication of Darwin's book on earthworms,
when The Spectator'' XooV occasion to remark Upon the wonderful
evidence of providential government afforded by the fact that the

worms were made to do so much work purely for the benefit of
hiSinanity. "The critic had completely mistaken the drift of
Darwin's argument, and failed to observe that the worms derive
'
their own nourishment from the matter which passes through their
bodies.
'
-In ttie earlier part of his career Hutton was closely associated
with^'Walter Bagehot, along with whom he edited The National
Review from 1855 to 1864. And most loyal he proved himself
to the faine'Of his coadjutor. Long before the true greatness of
Bagehot was understood Hutton declared ; and the firm estab-
it
lishment of Bagehot's fame now due to his influence.

is largely
So too he was One of the most consistent and intelligent admirers
of Matthew Arnold's poetry; in days when there were few who
'
understood it. But the great --fact of Button's life was his con-
nexion with TM^'Spectatot, of which journal he was joint-editor
>
along with Meredith'Townsend from 1861 to 1897. Hutton took

special charge of the literary side. In this capacity he may be
said to have formed a school. No English journal had a more
marked individuality than The Spectator under Hutton's guidance,
and that individuality must have been due not merely to what he
himself vsrrotfe, but to the influence which he exercised over the
Oth^r' contributors.
Judged merely by his books Hutton suffers as all journalists
are bouiid to suffer. Mtich of the work is necessarily ephemeral,
nearly all of it must be 'influenced for evil by the conditions
under which it is produced. Hutton's Essays, Theological and
Literary (187 1) and his Criticisms on Contemporary Thought and
Thinkers {i%i)i^ are soimd'and sensible, but hardly great; and to
do justice to him we have to remember that he was not merely
the authol' of these and other works, but the man who, for more
than a generation, inspii'ed one of the best and most influential of
English literary periodicals.
LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 98I
In pure literature Sir Leslie Stephen' is a larger figure. He

married Harriet Thackeray the year after the death of her father^
and for eleven years.,. (i 871-1882) he sat in- that very . editorial
chair which Thackeray hadfouijd so thorny. ,His greatest leditorial :
task, however, was that which he undertook in connexion with The.

Dictionary of National Biography, &. work iwhich was under his
charge from 1882 to 1891,, when advancing years and failing
strength caused him, to relinquish it. ,|
Leslie Stephen was much more than a literary critic, but for
thirty years; he was among the most prominent and, competent of
his time in that capacity among others. Perhaps the most striking
merit of his criticism is a broad sanity of judgment, expressed in
lucid, vigorous and occasionally humorous EngUsh, and ajways
securely based on a knowledge of the facts. The Hofirs 'in a
Library. (1874-1879) are excellent reading, and if at times the
opinions expressed may seem questionable, they are always
worthy of considieration. From the first Stephen shows the ,
historian's and scholar's respect for the solid fêt. Hence his
tendency to the biographic form, hence, doubtless,This acceptance
of the editorial chair of The Dictionary of National Biogrâpky-
He wrote no fewer than four monographs, on JohnSipn, (Pope,
Swift and George Eliot, for the English Men of Letters series ; and
in these the biographical element takes precedence of the critical.
Few were equal to Stephen in this art of condensed biography
perhaps in the whole series only Mark Pattisoh's Milton is clearly
superior to Stephen's Johnson. His Studies of a Biographer
(1898) show the same sort of masteSy; though in the shorter
studies, especially those of his later years,; there is some tei^dency
to slur facts —to leave undone, or to do imperfectly, the indi-
spensable '
hodman ' work. Stephen was by temperament
inclined to suspect and to avoid f; those .'appreciations' which
were, not exactly popular, but comme il faut, through most of
his career. He distrusted impressionism
he had no confidence :
in that which could render no reason more definite than "I

feel it." .
. ,
Stephen was a rationalist, and his greatest w;orks lie outside
the domain of literary criticism. The author of English Thought

in the Eighteenth Oertkiry (1876) and The English- Utilitarians
(1900) Was a bigger man than the author of a few literary
monographs. Buf in these greater works we see just the same
characteristics, and from them we learn to understand more
'
clearly what precisely was the position of Stephen as a critic.

We are particularly impressed with the fact that the author, like
Johnson, was fundamentally a moralist The only questions into
which he threw himself whole-heartedly were moral questions.
His Itnowledge, hiswide reach of thought, his acuteness, were all
at the service of moral truth; so too was something else, —

poignancy of personal feeling which gives to a few of the essays,
in particular An Agnostics Apology and Wordsworth's Ethics, a
fefvokr of tone which makes them almost poetical.
A great part of Stepheii's task was the rehabilitation of the

eighteenth century. He had studied its thought, and he under-
stood it as few of his contemporaries did. More than enough,
he believed, had been made of •
its deficiencies ; it was time to
insist onde mofe upon its merits and its services, its sanity and its
lucidity. He carried his favourite Hume with him to the country

Which he has charmingly described in his Playground of Europe
(1871), and though, happily, among the snows of the'Alps he was
sbmetifties able to forget all books, there or elsewhere he read
" David," as he affectionately calls him, closely and intelligently.
The work on the Utilitarians was practically a continuation of the

history of eighteenth century thought, and the love of the latter
is natural in the lover of the former. The same taste is shown
in Stephen's criticism. He never could beUeve that all merit
was summed up in romanticism. He was for comprehension
but he evidently thought that it was more importaiit to la;^
upon what was represented by Pope and Swift and Johnson

stress
than upon what was represented by Coleridge and Shelley and
Keats.
Less of a journalist than Hutton, less of a philosopher than
Leslie Stephen, but more of a poet than either, was Richard Gamett
(1835-1-906), who for many years adorned the British Museum as
the keeper of its Gamett began his
printed books. literary career
with a volume of poems, Primula and other Lyrics (1858), which

was succeeded in the following year by lo in Egypt, and other

Poems. After that for many years Gairnett wrote little verse except
translations; and, though he had a real lyrical gift, his highest
endowments were not poetical. It he did his
was as a critic that
best work. His Carlyle (1887) is the best of all the volumes of
the kind which have been written about that much-debated man;
and his little monograph on Coleridge (1904) is also a model. It
was in the fine tone and taste it gave to his criticism that Garnett's
poetical turn told best. No man of his time excelled him in this
respect.
§ 2. AestJietic Criticism.
Close as is the relation between literature and what are called

the fine arts, the latter lie, in themselves, beyond the province of
the historian of literature ; and until the nineteenth century they
never had, in England, a literature of their own.- In the
eighteenth century the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds were
the most considerable writings of their class, and none but an
extravagant panegyrist could pretend that the -literature- of that
time would be seriously impoverished if they were lost. In truth,
though Sir Joshua was admitted an honoured place in the
to
literary club, the greaif dictator of letters was profoundly convinced
of the superiority of his own craft to that of his friend ; and the
majority of Johnson's subjects agreed with him. " I had rather,"
said he, "see the portrait of a dog that I know than all the
allegorical paintings they can show me in the world." If Sir
Joshua had not painted) men and women, all his technical skill
would have helped him little to win Johnson's favour and respect.
Before -the nineteenth ce'ntmry was very old, evidences of a
change of sentiment began' to accumulate. Lamb was a warm
admirer of Hogarth as well as of Shakespeare. Wordsworth
immortalised Sir George Beaumont in his verse. Hazlitt in
numerous essays, and above all in the Conversations of Northcote
(1830), illustrated the union of the criticism of art with literary
criticism ; and the Conversdtions won from- Ruskin the praise of
being "the best piece of existing criticism founded on the prin-
ciples of Sir Joshua's school^"
Contemporaneously with the Conversations of Northcote,
Benjamin Haydon (1786-1846), with a self-confidence half
sublime, half grotesque, and a courage wholly admirable, was
devoting himself to the task he had chosen as the work of his
life, the elevation of the,- art of England. Ruskin declares that
" nothing except disgrace and misguidance will ever be gathered
from such work as that of Haydon'"; and unless a man is prepared
to defy the great apostle of art, he must not rank Haydon as a
painter. Nevertheless, if not in the paintings, then in the Auto-
biography, there remains an imperishable memorial of all that
courage and self-devotion. No form of composition is rarer than
a perfectly sincere autobiography, and none is more interesting
when, once or twice in a hundred years, it is found. And such
is the autobiography of Haydon. Benvenuto Cellini himself is
not more naked and unashamed. Haydon is absolutely open just
because he never drearris that there is anything to be ashamed of;
and as, in point of fact,he was, in many respects^ a man of rare
nobility, the book in which his character one of is enshrined is
surpassing interest. be true that he never with the brush

,
If it
painted a picture which deserved to live, he at least painted one

with the pen. Some: may find significance in the fact that
two of the handful of great autobiographies are autobiographies of
artists; but they must explain why it is that a third is that of
Benjamin Franklin, the man of science, and a fourth that of Gibbon

the historian, and that two others were written by Augustine the
saint and by Rousseau the sinner. One more service of Haydon's
deserves commemoration. He was the first to see the beauty of
the Elgin Marbles. He studied them unweariedly when they lay
neglected in a dirty pentrhouse in Park Lane, and it was largely
through his ceaseless efforts that they were secured for the nation.
As Ruskin was the first of his time to recognise the great-

surely as
ness of Tintoret, so surely was Haydon the first professional artist
to see and proclaim the matchless beauty of the Greek sculptures.
Whatever inay be the defect of Haydon's work as a painter,
• Prmterita, i. 327. .
* Mfiderit Pointers, y, 196.
there is no reason to lament that he did not devote himself to

literature instead. It is not probable that he could, have pro-
duced another consummate work, like the, Autobiography. That
work shows, it is true, a powerful intellect, and its author might
have written many vigorous and interesting books; but it presents
no evidence of unusual literary skill. Its excellence consists in the
portraiture of one man, Haydon himself. He had but one life to ,
live, but one self to paint; and, there, probably, his literary faculty
in its highest phase began and ended. The reader can hardly
even wish the poor painter success ; for the less amiable qualities
which are readily pardoned in a record, of grim effort would be
intolerable if they appeared as the self-sufficiency of a, prosperous
man. , ,
Haydon is an example of a man who failed after mighty effort
in one and achieved .success, as it were by .^.pcident, in

art,
another. he has won a name in literature, it is a thing he

If
never purposed what he wrote was meant tp immortalise the
; ,
painter, not the scribe ; it was tOj turn the attention of men to
the genius who imagined the Raising of Lazarus and the Judg-
ment of Solomon ; it was to do, for Benjamin Robert Haydon
what Modern Painters did for Turner. There were others who,
like Haydon, tried both arts, and, unlike him, consciously and
deliberately abandoned one for the other.: Thackeray, because

he could not draw, gave up the ambition to be an artist and
became a novelist instead.^ Ruskin wojild have been an artist
,
but for certain defects, in particular the lack of the power of

design, of which he became; conscious. In Rossetti, the gifts of
painting and of poetry were almost equally developed ; and atten-
tion has already been called to a sirnilar blending of the two arts
in many others of the Pre-Raphaelite grojip.
This conjunction of the is a .characteristic of .the
arts, then,
time. Nothing be found in the eighteenth
parallel to it is to
century; probably no relation so intimate could be pointed to at
anytime. It was not by accident that the conjunction showed
itself just then. The spirit of romance had moved the whole
emotional nature, and whenthenature was complex and many-sided
it inevitably sought various modes of expression. It is not extrava-
gantly fanciful to imagine a kinship between the word-visions of
Shelley and the colour-visions of Turner. It was, perhaps, partly
habit and tradition which kept the arts of the poet and the painter
asunder in the case of these men. A generation later the tradition
had lost much of its force, and the actual kinship of the arts was
becoming more and more manifest. Men felt dimly what they
have only in recent years come to realise clearly. Their hearts
burned within them, they knew not why; but the power which
made them bum was, under all its multifarious shapes, funda-
mentally the same. and romantic
Classic in poetry, utilitarian
and idealist in philosophy, evangelical and tractarian in religion,
were all names indicating different aspects of one great opposition,
the opposition of the spirit of the nineteenth century to the spirit
of the eighteenth. The Bowles-Pope' controversy has its analogue
in the opposition, which is not a controversy, between the
classical theories of Haydon and the Gothic ones of Ruskin.
" It is not possible," Ruskin writes, " that the classical spirit
should ever take possession of a mind of the highest order'."
Here the word " classical " is used in the sense which it bore in
the eighteenth century. But even in presence of a grander
classicism, Ruskin is comparatively cold. " I would not," he
writes, " surrender, from an architectural point of view, one mighty
line of the colossal; quiet, life-in-death statue mountains of Egypt
with their narrow fixed eyes and hands on their rocky limbs, nor
one Romanesque fagade with its porphyry mosaic of indefinable
monsters, nor one Gothic moulding of rigid saints and grinning
goblins, for ten Parthenons^." The italics are Ruskin's ; but when
the fullest allowance is made for the qualification, the statement
is sufliciently remarkable. It would be tedious and superfluous
to quote his words of vituperation and contempt for the Renas-

cence. It would be equally superfluous to demonstrate his
admiration of the Gothic^ No one knew better than he the
crudity, the affectations and the inconsistencies of the early Gothic
revival. He points them out in his favourite Scott himself " He :
had some confused love of Gothic architecture, because it was

dark, picturesque, old, and like nature; but could not tell the
' Modern Painters, v. 267. * ibid. ii. 219-320.
Literary and aesthetic criticism 987
worst frbm the best, and built for himself perhaps the most incon-
gruous arid ugly pile that gentlemanly modernism ever designed
marking, in the most curious and subtle way, that mingling of
reverence with irreverence which is so striking in the age;- he
reverences Melrose, yet casts one of its piscinas, puts a modern steel
grate into it, arid makes it his fire-place^." Yet such conceptions
of Gothic, Crude as they were, with the still cruder conceptions of
Horace Walpole, were the necessary foundations for'Ruskin's work.
"The first step," says Ruskin, "to the understanding either
the mind of pbsition of a great man ought, I think, to be an
inquiry into the elements of his early instruction, and the mode
in which he was affected by the circumstances of surrounding
life." Such an inquiry is own
certainly fruitful in his case; and
in Prmterita and Fbrs Clavigera we have ample materials,
presented in attractive but chalracteristically garrulous fashion.
John Ruskin (1819— 1900) was three-quarters Scotch by blood,
and wholly evangelical Protestant by religious training-. His
father migrated to London as a clerk to a firm of wine merchants,
oh 'the dissolution of which he became himself head of a new
firm which was founded to take its place. Through his paternal
grandmother he Was related to the Maitlands of Kenmore Ca:stle
and the Agnews of LochnaW, and his grât-grandmother had at
orle time had custody of that precious document, the' National
Covenant. Jdhn James Ruskin married his c^Jiisin, Margaret

Cox. Their Scih,' John Ruskin, was an only child. He was
reared in the quietest of homes, and naturally its teaching sank
deep' into his niture. Superficially, at least, he seemed to be
irifluenced more by his mother than by his father. She was

rigidly evangelical, atid she cherished the dfearh of making her
son an evangelical clergyman. Both father and son acquiesced
in the evangelicalism rather than shared it. "Thoiigh he went
to fchurch with a resigned countenance, I knew very well thathe
liked going just as little as I did''." The purpose of rnaking young
Ruskin an ' clergyman was frustrated by the still m6re
evangelica:l
rigid evangelicalism of an aunt, his father's' sister, who gave him
cold mutton for Sunday's dinner, " which — as I much preferred it
1 Modern Painters, iii. 283. * frceUrUa, lii. 10.

hot —greatly diminished the influence of The Pilgrim's Progress},"
Nevertheless, faith in the maternal doctrines was slow to decay,
and their influence lasted for life. Sabbatarianism held the most
enduring power. The father and son^ on their foreign tours,
indulged in walks on Sunday with unholy
dashed with a
joy,
sense that they were children of perdition. till 1858 did Not
Ruskin go so far as to draw on Sunday, "with a dimly alarmed
sense of its being a new fact in existence^" for him. And he adds,
" Come to pass how it might, the real new fact in existence for
me „was th^t my drawings did not prosper that year,, and, in
deepest sense, never prospered again." One is reminded of Scott's
story of witchcraft in connexion with Laird Nippy, and his com-
ment after its fulfilment in the bankruptcy of the Laird :
" And
now, think whatever we choose of it, my good friend. Nippy
is a bankrupt'." Lockhart evidently thought that Scott had a
lingering half-belief in something "no canny" behind the story;
and Ruskin's manner suggests a similar relic of belief in his
case.
Probably jay this teaching Mrs Ruskin was injuriously cramp-
ing and fettering her son's mind and life; but there can be.no
question as to the value of the unceasing training in the Bible
which she gave him from the dawn of his intelligence till he went
to Oxford. The method was as mechanical as possible. The
mother and son began with the opening of Genesis and read
steadily through, day by day, omitting nothing, till they reached
the end of the Apocalypse ; when they began over again. But
the result was that Ruskin acquired a marvellous knowledge of the
Bible,and that this supplies a backbone to his thought and style,
which otherwise might have been fatally invertebrate.
As the sense of religion remained profound in Ruskin even
after he had almost wholly- discarded dogma, it is important to
understand the ideas of religion which went to form his growing
mind. But in the earlier and greater part of his career it was his
destiny to be the apostle of the religion of beauty; and it is therer
fore not less important to understand how his sense of beauty
1 Praterita, 2. " ibid. iii.

i. 34.
» \jodi.\v3.-!t\ Life of Scott, \u 187-188.
was awakened and nourished. This was mainly the work of his
father, a person of greater intellectual power and of more varied
gifts,.' though of less concentrated strength, than his mother. ;The
son speaks of his father's " high natural powers, and exquisitely
romantic sensibility'." Those powers were considerable enough
to draw the attention of the Edinburgh philosopher, Thomas
Brown, and to induce him to write with marked respect to the
elder Ruskin. The romantic sensibility showed itself in a love
of natural scenery, of paintings and drawings, and of romantic
literature. Scott was a prime favourite; and the taste was trans-
mitted from the father to the son. " I can no more recollect the
time," says the latter, " when I did not know them [the Waverley
Novels] than when I did not know the Bible"." Pope's Homer
had been another book in which the boy delighted ; and, a little
later, Byron was added by the father, who also had an ambition
for his gifted son. It was that he would " write poetry as good
as Byron's, only pious'." There was nothing inconsistent between
this and the mother's design to make him an evangelical clergy-
man; for another part of the father's dream was that his son
should "preach sermons as good as Bossuet's, only Protestant.''
The father's pride in Modem Painters never quite reconciled him
to the loss either of the verses or of the sermons. The gorgeous
prose seemed to him scarcely equivalent to the poetry which
was never written ;and " he would have been a bishop* " was his
sad remark to a friend, when contrasting what was with what
might, have been.
Under his father's guidance, then, Ruskin read the right books.
It is also important to notice that, in the course of his business,
the elder Ruskin showed the boy much of the finest, scenery in
England.. The family custom was to take a coaching tour in
the summer, combining business with pleasure, calling upon
customers, and inspecting all noteworthy mansions and castles on
the route. A little later, in 1833, Prout's Sketches in Flatiders and
Germany suggested a longer journey; and the tour to the Rhine

and Switzerland was the first of many wanderings for pleasure
only, or for pleasure and education combined. Thus the young
1 Prateriia, i. 127. * ibid. 43. ' ibid. 284. * ibid. 20.
Ruskin gradually became familiar with the best Europe had to

show both in nature and art, and much of his after work would
,
have been impossible but for this training of eye and hand (for
he drew diligently on his travels) in the knowledge and love of
the beautiful.
Besides all this, the elder Ruskin possessed and transmitted
to his son a keen and sensitive taste in art. Another man, his
partner Telford, introduced young Ruskin to the work of Turner

by the gift of the illustrated edition of Rogers's Italy; but it was
the common joy of the father and son in Prout which suggested
the tour just mentioned. In later days the two diverged in taste,
but during Ruskin's period of growth he could count upon a

singularly keen and delicate sympathy at home.
Fortunate in his home, Ruskin was no less fortunate in the
time of his birth. "A very few years, —within the hundred,—
before that, no child could have been born to care for mountains,
or for the men that lived' among them, in that way. Till Rous-
seau's time there had been no 'sentimental' love of nature; and
till Scott's, no such apprehensive love of 'all sorts and conditions
of men,' not in the soul merely, but in the flesh. St: Bernard of
La Fontaine, looking out to Mont Blanc with his child's eyes,
sees above Mont Blanc the Madonna; St Bernard of Talloires,
not the lake of Annecy, but the dead between Martigny and
Aosta;. But for me, the Alps and their people were alike beautiful
in their snow, and their humanity; and I wanted, neither for them
nor myself, sight of any thrones in heaven but the rocks, or of
any spirits in heaven but the clouds^"
In 1837 Ruskin went into residence at Christ Church, Oxford.
Hitherto bis education had been wholly private, and its quality
had been very uneven. As regards art, it could hajrdly have been
improved; for, besides the advantages already 'mentioned, the boy
had had the benefit of lessons from Copley Fielding. In litera^

ture too it was excellent. His father, whom the son—himself a
most accomplished reader— declares to have been " an absolutely
beautiful reader of the best poetry and prose read aloud "all V
the Shakespeare comedies and historical plays again and again,
1 PraUrita, i. 164-165.
'^
ibidA- 79.
all Scott, and all Don Quixote." In respect of Greek he was less
fortunate. Dr Andrews, in Walworth the Ruskin

whose chapel in
family worshipped, had a local reputation as a scholar, and Mr
Ruskin thought he would be a fit and proper person to instruct
his son in the classics. It proved that " he knew little more of
Greek than the letters, and declensions of nouns " ; and though '
" he wrote the letters prettily," his instruction hardly tended to
high scholarship in his pupil. Consequently, the young Ruskin

carried to Oxford a mixture of knowledge and ignorance: almost
as puzzling as that of Gibbon. Already at eighteen he knew
some things better, probably, than any man in England of other ;
things he was so ignorant that was questionable whether He

it
could pass his responsions. For unfortunately the thipgs which

Ruskin knew were things which did not count at Oxford, and the
things of which he was ignorant were essential.
It is needless to dwell upon the life at Oxford. Intimate as
was to be the connexion of Ruskin with the University, the
influence of Oxford upon him was slight, and he never bore her
stamp, as Newman didy and Arnold. It is riot merely that his
studies were other than the prescribed studies of the place: even
the beauty of Oxford failed to impress him as it impressed her
chosen sons. When in Prceterita he names the "three centres of
his life's thought," no one is surprised that Oxford is not one of
them, though probably all feel, not merely surprise ibut astonish-
ment that Venice and Florence are not named, and that all the
work he did inthe former city is described as "bye-workl" The
three centres in question are Rouen, Geneva and Pisa. In
Ruskin's own judgment therefore the vital part of his education
was 'derived' from those sojourns on the Continent to which
reference has already been made.
They were periods not of idleness, nor of mere indulgence, but
of strenuous though pleasuraible work. It was only by this means
that Ruskin could have amassed that knowledge of art in all its
forms which is the ground-work of his great books, 'Modern Painters.,

The Stones of Venice and The Seven Lamps of Architect-ure, as well
as of the various courses of lectures, &c., by which in latter days

' Prdterita, ' ibid. i. 235.
i. 99.
he discharged his duties as Slade Professor. But all this time
Ruskin was doing more than extend his kniowledge of colours
and forms, and of the use made of these in art. To him, art
was always full of meaning, it expressed ideas, it was a part of
life, and all life was a unity. "However mean or inconsiderable
the act," he says truly and finely, "there is something in the
well doing of it, which has fellowship with the noblest forms
of manly, virtue'." It is one of his foibles to see the meaning
of every stone in a building, of every tint in a picture, of

every twig on a tree ; and a disciple's confidence in the master
is somewhat shakeni by the discovery that he is given to denying
flatly what teni years before he had most confidently affirmed.
But though Ruskin frequently carried his principles to excess, his

faith tha.t.in all true art there is a meaning which may be expressed
in words gives inexhaustible interest to his criticisms. It also

made his study of art profoundly influential upon himself. There
were no water-tight compartments in his mind. He could not
disjoin his aesthetic sense from his moral nature; or rather,
though he could, he held it wrong to do, so. He objects to the
identification of truth with beauty. " One," he says, " is a
property of statements, the other of objects." While however
they are separable, "it is; wrong to separate them ; they are to be
'sought together in the order of their worthiness ; that is to say,
truth and beauty afterwards. High art differs from low art
first,
in possessing an excess of beauty in addition to its truth, not

in possessing excess of bea.uty inconsistent with truth^." Believing
as he did that the scenes of nature, the pictures and the buildings
which he studied and loved, .became part of himself and modified
that self, he could not possibly be indifferent to their moral
aspect.
•'
As Ruskin therefore brought the whole contents of his; mind
to bear upon his criticism, the question \phat hjs views were, not
on art, alone, but on everything, is strictly i;elevant to the inter-
pretation of that, criticism. And this is especially the case, with
regard to his deepest convictions. In an indispensable section of

Fors Clavigera. (Letter Lxxvi.) Ruskin has reviewed his own
1 Seven Lamps, Introd. 7.
" Modern Painters, iii. 35 n.
spiritual history. He divides it into three parts. Up to 1858, it
was, with him, Protestantism of nothing. Then he was " un-con-

verted" by the sermon of "a little squeaking idiot" in a Walden-
sian chapel. He had previously discovered that "all beautiful
prayers were Catholic, — all wise interpretations of the Bible
Catholic ;
—and every manner of Protestant written services what'
soever either insolently altered corruptions, or washed-out and
ground-down ddbris of the great Catholic collects, litanies, and
songs of praise'." Yet he could not become a Catholic because
he " no more believed in the living Pope than he did in the
livirig Khan of Tartary^" For sixteen years, from 1858 to 1874,
he lived "with 'the religion of humanity' for rough and strong
and sure foundation of everything." Then came the final change,
which made Jôrs " much more distinctly Christian in its tone."
"I am myself much of a Turk, more of a Jew; alas, most of all,
an infidel ; but not an atom of a heretic : Catholic I of the
Catholics," is Ruskin's summing up about himself.
This summary of the development of Ruskin's religious beliefs
has led us many years forwards. Retracing our steps, we find
Ruskin's Oxford career interrupted in 1840 by a serious illness
which forced him to go abroad, and so rather advanced than
retarded his true education. In 1842 he at last went up for his
degree. He entered only for a pass, and his Latin was so bad
that his success was questionable ; but bad Latin was forgiven for
the sake of good divinity, philosophy and mathematics ; and the
examiners gave him "a complimentary double-fourth."
But the humble degree was soon to be rendered illustrious
for in the following year appeared Modern Painters, by a Graduate

of Oxford, the first of the five volumes which were destined to
fill a large part of the author's life till i860. This volume was
not Ruskin's earliest venture in authorship, though it was by far
the most importaint and ambitious hitherto. From 1834 to 1836

various articles of his had appeared in the Magazine of Natural
History; and between 1835 ^-^^ 1844 he contributed a number
of poems to Friendshifs Offering, a periodical edited by Thomas
PrceUrita, iii. 31. ^ ihid.

' Fors Clavigera, Ixxvi.
63
Pringle, a minor but, within his limits, a genuine poet. These
poetical effortswere continued for a year or two longer in The
Keepsake and Heath's Book of Beauty ; but Ruskin convinced
himself, to his father's sorrow, that verse was not, for him, the
proper medium of expression. Though his solitary academical
success was the winning of the Newdigate prize in 1839 with the
poem, Sahetie and Elephanta, he gradually dropped metrical
composition. Probably the most noteworthy writings of those
early years were the series of articles begun in Loudon's Archi-
tectural Magazine in 1837, under the title of Introduction to the
Poetry of Architecture, a subject which, as the author himself says,
half his future life was to be spent in discoursing of.
All these writings were trifling compared with the volume

which in 1843 roused universal curiosity about the anonymous
author. The impulse to write it came from the depreciation of
Turner by the school of art then reigning. Of " the two paths "
concerning which Ruskin afterwards wrote, this reigning school
took the path of convention; and then, as always, Ruskin was
the panegyrist of natural art. Nothing that is natural can be
ugly, nothing that is not natural can be beautiful, was his favourite
dogma. While this gave the impulse, the power to write was
largely due to Ruskin's familiarity with the drawings of Turner in
the collection of Godfrey Windus, a retired coach-builder living
at Tottenham. Of course Ruskin's own collection was then
unformed: it was not till 1839 that the family got its second
Turner drawing. Windus however was a collector, and his
collection was always open to his fellow-enthusiast; for "nobody,
in all England, at that time, —
and Turner was already sixty,
cared, in the true sense of the word, for Turner, but the retired
coachmaker of Tottenham, and I'." The common feeling with
regard to the great painter was expressed by the article in Black-
wood's Magazine which first stirred Ruskin to write a reply.
Upon this state of taste and feeling Modern Painters burst
likea thunderclap. It riveted attention, and it astonished readers
both by the novelty and the decision of the opinions expressed,
and by the extraordinary eloquence of the language. Whoever
\ Praterita, ii. 16-17.
Literary and aesthetic criticism 995
the Graduate of Oxford might be, he was clearly not a person to

be despised the critic of art was himself an artist, at least in
:
words. In all literature, there was no such word-painting as his :
the colours were as dazzling as those of his favourite Turner

himself. Take, for example, the great storm-picture 'from the
Alban Mount: — "Not long ago, I was slowly descending this
very bit of carriage-road, the first turn after you leave Albano,
not a little impeded by the worthy successors of the ancient
prototypes of Veiento. It had been wild weather when I left
Rome, and all across the Campagna the clouds were sweeping in
sulphurous blue, with a clap of thunder or two, and breaking
gleams of sun along the Claudian aqueduct lighting up the infinity
of its arches like the bridge of chaos. But as I climbed the long
slope of the Alban Mount, the storm swept finally to the north,
and the noble outlines of the domes of Albano, and graceful
darkness of its ilex grove, rose against pure streaks of alternate
blue and amber; the upper sky gradually flushing through the
last fragments of rain-cloud in deep palpitating azure, half sether
and half dew. The noonday sun came slanting down the rocky
slopes of La Riccia, and their masses of entangled and tall
foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure of
a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with rain.
I cannot call it colour, it was conflagration. Purple, and crimson,
and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle, the rejoicing
trees sank into the valley in showers of light, every separate leaf
quivering with buoyant and burning life; each, as it turned to
reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an
emerald. Far up into the recesses of the valley, the green vistas
arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea,
with the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks for foam, and
silver flakes of orange spray tossed into the air around them,
breaking over the grey walls of rock into a thousand separate
stars, fading and kindling
alternately as the weak wind lifted and
let them Every blade of grass burned like the golden floor
fall.
of heaven, opening in sudden gleams as the foliage broke and

closed above it, as sheet-lightning opens in a cloud at sunset;
the motionless masses of dark rock —dark though flushed with
63—2
scarlet lichen, casting shadows across its restless
their quiet
radiance, the fountain underneath them filling its marble hollow
with blue mist and fitful sound ; and over all, the multitudinous
bars of amber and rose, the sacred clouds that have no darkness,
and only exist to illumine, were seen in fathomless intervals
between the solemn and orbed repose of the stone pines, passing
to lose themselves in the last, white, blinding lustre of the
measureless line where the Campagna melted into the blaze of
the sea^."
The style of Ruskin is unquestionably in great part the secret
of his power. would be superfluous to comment upon the
It
magnlficeiit eloquence whatever could be effected by a gorgeous

:
embroidery of words was evidently within the competence of the

writer. The danger was rather that he might have been seduced
into an excess of ornaments. A style of this sort is cloying, and
the limpid simplicity of a page of Goldsmith is more universally
and more permanently pleasing. But from the first Ruskin
varied his majestic periods with piquant phrases and sly touches
of humour ; and, fortunately, the development of his style tended
rather to simplicity than to increase of splendour.No one has
been more severe than himself upon the excess and exaggeration
into which this gift of expressive words occasionally led him.
" See the mischief of fine writing," is his own comment in a note
upon a passage volume of Modern Painters, and
in the second
its substance is repeated many times in his works. No one was
ever more frank \n self-criticism, and even in self-contradiction.
Both as to style and as to substance he pours out the vials of
wrath no less copiously upon himself than upon others.
The success of the first volume of Modern Painters fixed
the career of Ruskin, The vision of the evangelical clergyman
faded from before his mother's eyes, and that of the poet writing
verse as good as Byron's, only pious, ceased to delight his father.
They listened even with tears to the reading of the finer passages
of Modern Painters in manuscript; yet they were never fully
reconciled to the new mode of life. The education of foreign
travel and art study went on as before. In 1844 Ruskin was in
^ Modern Painters, i. 164-166.
Switzerland, in 18^1.5 i" Italy, and again in 1846 we find him back
at his beloved' Chamouni. In that year the second volume of
Modern Painters appeared. The press notices, says the author,
were "either cautious or complimentary,-^— none, to the best of
my memory, contemptuous'." No one will wonder there would :
have been ground for surprise had it been otherwise. For in the
interval the second edition of the first volunie had been published,
and it contained a new preface, in which the critics were vigorously
dealt with. Most of them are passed over in comprehensive
contempt; but the Blackwood critic is singled out for special
honour. It may be doubted whether he enjoyed it much:
" Writers like the present critic of Blackwood's Magazine deserve
more respect; the respect due to honest, hopeless, helpless
imbecility. There is something exalted in the innocence of their
feeblemindedness ; one cannot suspect them of partiality, for it
implies 'feeling; nor of prejudice, for it implies some previous
acquaintance with their subject. I do not know that, even in
this age of charlatanry, I could point to a more barefaced instance
of imposture on the simplicity of the public, than the insertion of

those pieces of criticism in a respectable periodical. We are not
so insulted with opinions on music from persons ignorant of its
notes; nor with treatises on philology by persons unacquainted
with the alphabet ; but here
is page after page of criticism, which
one may read from end to end, looking for something which the
writer knows, and finding nothing," —and so on. Evidently the
Graduate of Oxford was very iwell able to take care of himself,
and the critics were wise in showing respect for his teeth and
claws.
Ten years passed before the next two volumes of Modern
Painters were published, and yet four after that before it was
ended, not " concluded," by the publication of the fifth and last
voluiiie in i860. No wonder the author's father feared he would
be dead before it was done. But the delay was due to no lack
of industry. The cause lay in the discursiveness of the author's
mind, the width of his sympathies, and his passion for thorough-
ness when he was roused to interest. Modern Painters alone would
^ PraUrita, \\. 286.
have been no mean achievement even for a period so long as
seventeen years.But it was far from being the only production
of those years. The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) was
"thrown together during the preparation of one of the sections of
Modern Painters^" The Stones of Venice (1851-1853) was also a
bye-work. And there were many things in addition of less
importance, Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds (185 1),
Pre-RaphMlitism (1851), Lectures on Architecture and Painting
(1854), The Political Economy of Art (1857), The Two Paths
(1859), &c.
To the year i860 belong not only the concluding volume of
Modern Painters, but also Unto this Last (as a separate volume,
1862). It is the point of separation between the two great
branches of Ruskin's work. After i860 Ruskin the art critic
lived on, it and as Slade Professor there still remained
is true ;
for him much work, both brilliant and solid, to do. But this
work mainly illustrated in detail, or reiterated, the principles the
author had already laid down. There are no more books of art-
criticism on the great scale. On the other hand, Ruskin the
Social Reformer, with all his fervour, his high aims, his unselfish-
ness, hiskeen insight and his astonishing blindness, his wisdom
and emerged into view. It would be a profound
his perversity,
mistake to look upon this interest in social reform as something
new all that is new is the prominence given to it. There is no
:
real break anywhere in the life of Ruskin; it is a continuous

development, partly concealed by the superficial contradictions of
a whimsical, self-willed and arrogantly self-confident nature, —the
nature with which he was born, and which was nourished by his
solitary education.
There are few important points connected with the work of

Ruskin about which mistakes are more frequently made than
about this. Ruskin the art critic is looked upon as a different
man from Ruskin the social reformer. The truth is that the
social reformer was latent in his character from the first. In
i860 his work for art was in its great outlines done ; and his
restless intellectual energy forced him into the other field. The
1 Preface to The Seven Lamps of Architecture.
organic connexion between the two phases is evident if we con-
sider only the importance of the moral element in Ruskin's
criticisms. But there are many indications more specific than
this. Take, for example,this passage from The Seven Lamps —
" We have just spent, for instance, a hundred and fifty millions,
with which we have paid men for digging ground from one place
and depositing it in another. We have formed a large class of
men, the railway navvies, especially reckless, unmanageable, and
dangerous. We have maintained besides (let us state the benefits
a number of ironfounders
as fairly as possible) in an unhealthy
and painful employment; we have developed (this at least is
good) a very large amount of mechanical ingenuity; and we have,
in fine, attained thepower of going fast from one place to another.
Meantime we have had no mental interest or concern ourselves
in the operations we have set on foot, but have been left to the
usual vanities and cares of our existence. Suppose, on the other
hand, that we had employed the same sums in building beautiful
houses and churches. We should have maintained the same
number of men, not in driving wheelbarrows, but in a distinctly
technical, if not intellectual employment; and those who were
more intelligent among them would have been especially happy
in that employment, as having room in it for the development of
their fancy, and being directed by it to that observation of beauty
which, associated with the pursuit of natural science, at present
forms the enjoyment of many of the more intelligent manu-
facturing operatives. Of mechanical ingenuity, there is, I imagine,
at least as much required to build a cathedral as to cut a tunnel

or contrive a locomotive : we should, therefore, have developed
as much would
science, while the artistical element of intellect
have been added to the gain. Meantime we should ourselves
have been much happier and wiser by the interest we should have
taken in the work with which we were personally concerned and ;
when all was done, instead of the very doubtful advantage of the
power of going fast from place to pkce, we should have had the
certain advantage of increased pleasure in stopping at home'."
Are not the germs both of the truths and of the fallacies of the
' Seven Lamp : Zamji of Obedience.

lOOO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
economic and social teaching of Ruskin present here? In 1849
the thoughts were in his mind, and only time and the impulse
were needed.
The economical and social and pamphlets, were
essays, lectures
the outcome of that '
humanity which was Ruskin's
religion of '
chief stay for sixteen years. The development is perfectly natural;

but it was much helped by the intimacy which grew up between
Ruskin and Carlyle, whom Ruskin loved in latter days to call
his "master," and whom he read so constantly as to find himself

modes of expression'." This influence
"perpetually falling into his
increased greatly after when the personal acquaintance
1850,
between the two men became intimate; and in Ruskin's views
of the condition of England, in his contempt for the existing
political economy and John Stuart Mill as its apostle, in the
for
principles of the politicaleconomy which he wished to substitute
for that, in his Toryism and his Radicalism, in his sympathy with
the people and his faith in the leadership of the Hero or King,
we see innumerable traces of Carlyle's teaching.
Ruskin was " ever a fighter." His youth had been spent in
the battle against conventionalism in art ; in his prime he began
a battle against orthodoxy in political economy. The latter was
far the more formidable affair of the two. The critics of art had
been speedily reduced to "caution"; the economists were not
so easily silenced or overawed. They were numerous, and they
were in possession of the field. Unto this Last first appeared
in the form of essays in The Cornhill Magazine, then edited by
Ruskin's friend Thackeray. The outcry was so great that after
three papers had been printed Thackeray had the painful task
of writing that he could admit only one more. Opposition
made Ruskin more dogmatic and determined. " After turning
the matter hither and thither in my mind for two years more,
I resolved to make it the central work of my life to write an
exhaustive treatise on Political Economy ''." Another friend in the
editorial chair, Froude, who was then conducting Fraser's Magazine,
thought he might risk publishing the unpopular principles, not-
^ Modem Painters, Appendix iii.
* Munera Pulvens, Preface, xxviii.

LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM lOOI
withstanding the experience of Thackeray. Ruskin accordingly

sent him the preface of the projected work. It was printed in
four articles in the years 1862 and 1863 and then once more j
the author had to be informed that it must be discontinued.

These articles were afterwards published together under the name
Munera Pulveris, the. title chosen for the larger work which was
never written.
But though the systematic treatise remains unwritten, the
most important of Ruskin's la,ter works are devoted to the ex-
position and expansion and practical application of the principles
laid down in the essays contributed to The Cornhill and to
Fruser's Magazine. The Crown of Wild Olive (1866) works
out certain fundamental principles of labour, commerce and
war. Time and Tide (1867), in the shape of a series of letters
to a working man, develops with greater freedom the principles
laid down in Munera them in their social
Pulveris, considering
rather than in their purely economic aspect. And of course the
long series of letters, entitled Fors Clavigera, which ran on with
some breaks from 187 1 to 1884, had for its principal purpose the
enforcement and the illustration of the author's economic and
social ideas. Sesame and Lilies (1865) is informed with the same
spirit, which likewise pervades the greater part even of the art work
done in connexion with the Siade professorship. Ruskin's own

classification of his. works is instructive, though the divisions
must not be too rigidly insisted upon —
Modern Painters" he
:
says, "taught the claim of all lower nature on the hearts of

men; of the rock, and wave, and herb, as a part of their necessary
spirit life ; in all that I now bid you to do, to dress the earth and
keep it, I am fulfilling what I then began. The Stones of Venice
taught the laws of constructive Art, and the dependence of all
human work or edifice, for its beauty, on the happy life of the
workman. Unto this Last taxiî the laws of that life itself, and
its dependence on the Sun of Justice the Inaugural Oxford
:
lectures, the necessity that it should be led, and the gracious

laws of beauty and labour recognized, by the upper, no less than
the lower, classes of England; and lastly Fors Clavigera has
declared the relation of these to each other, and the only possible
conditions of peace and honour, for low and high, rich and
poor, together^ in the holding of that first' Estate, under the only
Despot, God, from which whoso falls, angel or man, is kept, not
mythically nor disputably, but here in visible horror of chains
under darkness to the judgment of the great day and in keeping
:
which service is perfect freedom, and inheritance of all that a

loving Creator can give to His creatures, and an immortal Father
to His children \"
The events of later life seldom have that spiritual importance
which frequently belongs to the history of youth. The man is
formed, and he can neither be un-formed nor re-formed. There

is however one event in Ruskin's middle life which cannot be
passed over. In 1869 he was elected Slade profe'ssor of art at
Oxford, and in February, 1870, he delivered his inaugui'al lecture
in the Sheldonian Theatre, whither he was forced to adjourn
because the crowd was too great for the Museum, the place
originally designated for the lecture. Between that date and
1877 Ruskin delivered at Oxford numerous courses of lectures.
His final tenure of the Slade professorship in 1883 and 1884
produced two more courses, The Art of England and The
Pleasures of England; the latter of which was, through the
influence of friends, stopped before it was completed.
A large number of Ruskin's later works were either originally
lectures delivered by him as Slade professor of fine art, or they
originated from what he conceived to be the indirect duties of

the professorship. To the former class belong Aratra Pentelici
(1872), a course of lectures on sculpture which he delivered in
1870; T?ie Eagles Nest (1872), a discussion of the relation
between art and science; Ariadne Florentina (1873), which
treats of engraving on wood and metal; and Vald'Arno (1874),
a study of Tuscan art. To this class too belong the Lectures on
Art (1870) ; and they are the most important of all, because they
give the best and most compendious view of Ruskin's principles
of art as he held them in later years. Among the writings
indirectly connected with his chair are Mornings in Florence
1 Fors Clavigera, Ixxviii.

LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM IOO3
(1875-77), Si Mark's Rest (1877-84) and The Bible of Amiens

(1880-85), all written with the purpose of teaching travellers
what to admire in those shrines of art.
It might seem on the surface as if Ruskin had forgotten the

economic interests of the decade 1860-1870, and gone back to
his original love of art. In reality, there was no abandonment
and no reversion. The love of art had never ceased, and the
interest in social and economic problems had always been present.
Rather, after 1870, we find a more perfect fusion of them, so long
as Ruskin's mind retained its full power. The spirit of the art-
teaching of this period is forecast in the first course of lectures

at Oxford, calls upon the young men of England
where Ruskin
to make a source of light to the whole world, a
their country
temple of peace, the mistress of the sciences and the arts. On
the other hand, the continuance of his social interests is amply
attested by many of his public activities. Indeed, while he was
less occupied than in the preceding decade with purely economic
problems, he was more than ever devoted heart and soul to

moral and social questions. Occasionally the manifestations of
his interest were a little grotesque. The making of the road
at Hinksey was somewhat eccentric. The Guild of St George,
established in 1871, absorbed a great deal of Ruskin's time and
energy ; and it^ results have scarcely conduced to the acceptance
of his theories. The agricultural experiments have been no more
sjiccessful than was their American precursor, Brook Farm;, and
though the industrial experiments have in a, few cases succeeded,

they give little promise of a regeneration of society.
At the same time, that extraordinary series of letters, Fors
Clavigera, was running its course. It contains many passages
of great wisdom as well as beauty; but it exhibits in an
exaggerated form most of the author's and here and
defects,
there in the latter part it bears traces of a mind unhinged.
Ruskin was, in truth, dangerously overworking
himself during
those years, and he paid the penalty in the breakdown in 1878.
He recovered, but never so far as to regain the full force of his
intelligence. The interesting Prmterita, which in some passages
shows all the old beauty of style, was written subsequently; but
the garrulity which marks it is not wholly due to its autobio-
graphical a symptom also of lessened force.

character: it is
Ruskin was then in the third of the periods which he regarded

as the normal divisions of men's lives. " Note these three great
divisions — essentially those of all men's lives, but singularly
separate in his [Scott's], —the days of youthj of labour, and of
death. Youth is properly the forming time — that in which a
man makes himself, or is made, what he is for ever to be. Then
comes the time of labour, when, having become the best he can
be, he does the best he can do. Then the time of death, which,
in happy lives, is very short: but always a time. The ceasing to
breathe is only the end of deaths" As Ruskin's French critic,
M. Bardoux, points out, this last happiness was not his. The
"jours de mort" extended far beyond even the seven years which
he assigned to Scott.
This sketch of the life and work of Ruskin sufficiently explains
the two divergent views which have been taken of him, and the
modes of treatment to which he has been subjected. One writer
looks upon him as primarily and principally a teacher of aesthetics;
to another he is above all a moralist and social reformer. In
France, the foreign country in which Ruskin has been most
influential and most closely studied, the former view prevails.
For many years it prevailed in England too; and long after
Ruskin had begun to write on political economy, what he said

on that subject was regarded as not much more than a vagary
of an eccentric man of genius. Latterly the tendency has been
to regard the ethical and social phases in Ruskin's work as
fundamental, and to look upon the aesthetic element as only
secondary and derivative. Both views are partly true, but
they have be united before we get the full truth. The
to
later Enghsh view is that which most accurately represents
Ruskin as he was in himself; the French and the early English
view best indicates his place in literature. Modem Painters
remains not only his vehemently as he would have
largest, but,
denied it, his greatest work. This book, The Stones of Venice,
The Seven Lamp and the Lectures on Art, are likely to be longer
' Fors Clavigera, Ixxxii.
remembered than Unto this Last (which 'Ruskin himself pre-

ferred to all his other writings), Munera Pulveris and Fors
Clewigera.
In the aesthetic theory, or, more accurately, in the aesthetic
feeling of Ruskin, nothing is more remarkable than the controlling
influence of the spirit of mediaevalism'. He might be called the
Newman of the aesthetic movement. Like Newman, he was
repelled by the pure rationalism of the eighteenth century. To
him, as to Newman, mediaeval times were not the dark ages, but
the bright ages. He did in art a work similar in kind to that
which Newman was busy doing in religion. At first he did it
unconsciously and unwittingly. As late as 1851 he received

comfort from the confession of Protestant faith by the Pre-
Raphaelites, though he was by that time already shaken in the
faith himself. In truth, it was from the first external to him,
something he had been taught, something which never became
part of himself. In the second volume of Modem Painters we
see this in the contrast he draws between Christian art
and Greek
art. He holds it must "be visible in
for certain that shortconjing
every Pagan conception, when set beside Christian." Not only
so, but there is such difference of kind "as to make all Greek
conception full of danger to the student in proportion to his

admiration of it"; and he points to the fatal effect of its "pernicious
element" on the " solemn purity " of the Italian schools. "The
Greek could not conceive a spirit ; he could do nothing without
limbs ; his God
is a 'finite God, talking, pursuing, and going
journeys ;any time he was touched with a true feeling of the

if at
unseen powers around him, it was in the field of' poised battle; for
there is something in the near coming of the shadow of death,
something in the devoted fulfilment of mortal duty, that reveals
the real God, though darkly. That pause on the field of Platsea
was not one of vain superstition; the two white figures that 1
•
blazed along the Delphic plain, when the earthquake and the
fire led the charge from Olympus, were more than sunbeams
on the battle dust; the sacred cloud, with its lance light and
triumph singing, that went down to brood over the masts at
Salamis, was more than morning mist among the olives; and
yet what were the Greek's thoughts of his God of Battle ? No
spirit power was in the vision: it was a being of clay strength,
and human passion, foul, fierce, and changeful; of penetrable
arms, and vulnerable flesh. Gather what we may of great from
Pagan chisel or Pagan dream, and set it beside the orderer of
Christian warfare, Michael the Archangel: not Milton's 'with
hostile brow and visage all inflamed'; not even Milton's in
kingly treading of the hills of Paradise ; not Raffaelle's with the

expanded wings and brandished spear ; but Perugino's with his
triple crest of traceless plume unshaken in heaven, his hand
fallen on his crossleted sword, the truth girdle binding his un-
dinted armour; God has put His power upon him; resistless
radiance is on his limbs ; no lines are there of earthly strength,
no trace on the divine features of earthly anger; trustful, and
thoughtful, fearless, but full of love, incapable except of the
repose of eternal conquest, vessel and instrument of Omnipotence,
filled like a cloud with the victor light, the dust of principalities
and powers beneath his feet, the murmur of hell against him
heard by his spiritual ear like the winding of a shell on the far
off sea shore'."
At this period, as we have seen in an earlier part of this book,
there was the same
between mysticism and rationalism
division
in the thought of England as that which prevailed in Greece
in the sixth century B.c. Ruskin essayed to play the part of
Pythagoras, and to combine the religious and the philosophic
movements. Notwithstanding his early Protestantism and his
laterfreedom from dogma, the above passage indicates in which
scale his weight would tell. "In such unions," says Professor
Bury, "the mystic element always wins the preponderance." In
the case of Ruskin it certainly did so in that curious 'Catholicism'
which was his final faith. Already in 1846 we see in the passage
just quoted the trend of his mind; in 185 1 it is more manifest in
the grotesque "excommunication'' of the Notes on the Construction
of Sheepfolds; and in 1877 we see the final stage, when he
speaks of "the magnificent cheat which the Devil played
on the Protestant sect, from Knox downwards," which was
,
1 Modem Painters, ii. 237-238.

"the consummation of his great victory over the Christian

Church, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries'."
Manifestly, the path of Ruskin lies parallel to that of Newman.
The starting-point is different, and the goal is different; but
movement in both cases is in the same direction. Read "liberal"
for " Greek " in the passage quoted above from Modem Painters,
and translate the language of art into that of theology, and vfe
have in effect this passage from the Apologia —

" The Evangelical party itself, with their late successes, seemed
to have lost that simplicity and unworldliness which I admired so
much in Milner and Scott. It was not that I did not venerate
such a man as Ryder, the then Bishop of Lichfield, and others
of similar sentiments, who were not yet promoted out of the ranks
of the Clergy, but I thought little of the Evangelicals as a class. I
thought 'they played into the hands of the Liberals. With the
Establishment thus divided and threatened, thus ignorant of its
true strength, I compared that Power of which I

fresh vigorous
,
was reading in the first centuries. In her triumphant zeal on

behalf of that Primeval Mystery, to which I had had so great a
devotion from my youth, I recognized the movement of my
Spiritual Mother. 'Incessu patuit Dea.' The self-conquest of
her Ascetics, the patience of her Martyrs, the irresistible determi-
nation of her Bishops, the joyous swing of her advance, both
exalted and abashed me. I said to myself, 'Look on this
picture and on that'; I felt affection tor my own Church, but

not tenderness ; I felt dismay at her prospects, anger and scorn at
her do-nothing perplexity. I thought that if Liberalism once got a
footing within her, it was sure of the victory in the event. I saw
that Reformation principles were powerless to rescue her. As to
leaving her, the thought never crossed my imagination ; still I
ever kept before me that there was something greater, than the
Established Church, and that that was the Church Catholic and
Apostolic, set up from the beginning, of which she was but the
local presence and the organ. She was nothing, unless she was
this. She must be dealt with strongly, or she. would be lost.
There was need of a second reformation."
^ Fors Clavigera, Ixxxii., a.
Ruskin was unconscious of the parallelism ; but he was never
tired of moralising, or of making religious, art and that nature on
which healthy art is based. It is true, he declares that the love
of nature is a separate thing from moral principle, but he main^
tains that it is inconsistent with evil passions. He sees a con-
nexion — though he admits exceptions —between things innocent
and things brightly colou'red. He especially associates nature
with humanity. The famous passage on the Jura in The Seven
Lamps an assertion of this intimate association ; and we find
is
the same doctrine in many ainother passage. Mountains, he

maintains, mould character and implant religion ; and indeed this
is true of the love of nature in all her forms. " Supposing all
circumstances otherwise the same with respect to two individuals,

the onewho loves nature most will be always found to have more
faith inGod than the other\"
If nature appeals to men and forms character, the things
which men have made must inevitably express character. The
painters whom Ruskin judges are ranked higher or lower accord-
ing to the ethical qualities their works express. Turner is exalted
for his truth, Claude abased for falsity. Religion is the source
of Giotto's strength ; irreligion is the weakness of Titian. It is,
Ruskin tells lis, a characteristic of the great school of art that it
"introduces in the conception of its subject as much beauty as is
possible, consistently with truth." But "the corruption of the

schools of high art... consists in the sacrifice of truth to beauty.
Great art dwells on all that is beautiful; but false art omits or
changes all that Great art accepts Nature as she is, but
is ugly.
directs the eyes and thoughts to what is most perfect in her j false
art saves itself the trouble of direction by removing or altering
whatever it thinks objectionable''."

So too when Ruskin turns to architecture, it is moral or
religious (Juahties for the evidence of which he seeks in the stones.
The very titles of the chapters of The Seven Lamps of Architecture

bear witness to this. The " lamps " are the lamps of Sacrifice, of
Truth, of Power, of Beauty, of Life, of Memory, of Obedience.
1 Modem Painters, iii. 317. The italics are Euskin's.
2 Modem Painters, iii. 36-37.
The Stones of Venice everywhere bears similar evidence. In the

comparison between the fourteenth and fifteenth century work
on the Ducal Palace, the point upon which most stress is laid is
the difference between the figure of Hope on the ninth capital
and its imitation on the twenty-ninth. On the earlier, " Hope is
praying, while above her a hand is seen emerging from sunbeams
— the hand of God (according to that of Revelation, 'The Lord
giveth them light'); and the inscription above is 'Spes optima in
Deo.'" On the later capital, "she is still praying; but she is
praying to the sun only; The hand of God is gone^." And the
same conception is expressed in more general terms where Ruskin
notes the effect of the rise of the Renascence spirit, " the change
to which London owes St Paul's, Rome St Peter's, Venice and
Vicenza the edifices commonly supposed to be their noblest, and
Europe in general the degradation of every art she has since
practised."
" This change," he goes on, " appears first in a loss of truth
and vitality in existing architecture all over the world.. 1. All the
Gothics in existence, southern or northern, were corrupted at
once: the German and French lost themselves in every species
of extravagance ; the English Gothic was confined, in its in-
sanity, by a strait- waistcoat of perpendicular lines; the Italian

efflorescedon the mainland into the meaningless ornamentation
of the Certosa of Paviaand the Cathedral of Como (a style some-
times ignorantly called Italian Gothic), and at Venice into the
insipid confusion of the Porta della Carta and wild crockets of
St Mark's. This corruption of all architecture, especklly eccle-
siastical, corresponded with, and marked, the state of religion .
over all Europe, —

the peculiar degradation of the Romanist
superstition,and of public morality in consequence, which brought
about the Reformation"." In short, the statement in The Crown
of Wild Olive is no exaggeration :
—
" The Stones of Venice had,
from beginning to end, no other aim than to show that this Gothic
architecture of Venice had arisen out of, and indicated in all its
features, a state of pure national faith and of domestic virtue;
' Stones of Venue: The Quaiij/, xlviii. The italics are Ruskin's.
' ibid. XXXV.
w. 64
lOIO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
arid that its Renaissance architecture had arisen out of, and in
all its features indicated, a state of concealed national infidelity
and of domestic corruption.''' •
It is necessary to dwell on these points, for in them we see

the true unity of Ruskin's work. There is no sharp break at
Unto this Last, only a development. The emphasis which has lain
upon Beauty passes to Truth. We look more frequently beneath

the symbol to the thing symbolised. It is necessary also, because
here we find the central significance of Ruskin's art-criticism. He
is no preacher of 'art for art's sake'; it is rather 'art for the tise
of man and the glory of God.' This is indeed, in Ruskin's
conception, the true aim of all human action and not of art only.
He expressed the latter part of it in the opening chapter of the
second volume of Modern Painters in a manner which startled
some of his readers south of the Tweed, though it was familiar
enough to the dwellers north of the river for it is suggested by,;
arid the very phraseology is closely imitated from, the Shorter

Catechism. "Man's use and function... are, to be the witness of
the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable
obedience and resultant happiness." The former part had already
found expression more than dnce in the first volume. His praise
of art is not measured by its technical perfection, but by its power
of conveying ideas ; and ideas in their turn are valuable in pro-
portion as they tend to develop the noblest faculties. " The art
is greatest which conveys to the mind of the spectator,by any

means whatsoever, the greatest number of the greatest ideas ; and
I call an idea great in proportion as it is received by a higher
faculty of the mind, and as it more fully occupies, and in occupy-
ing, exercisesand exalts, the faculty by which it is received^."
Ruskin did not yet pause to investigate the idea of utility; but
when in later years he did so, it is just in such a service as this
that he finds true utility.
At the start,* Ruskin contemplated a systematic treatment

of the question of aesthetics. In the first volume of Modern
Painters he discriminates between the ideas of power, of imitation,
of truth, of beauty and of relation which can be received from
1 Modern Painters, i. 12-13.
LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM IOH
works ofart, and declares his intention of investigating especially
the three last- The plan is followed, though discursivelyj in the
first volume, and also, though still less strictly, in tlie second;
but in the third it is specifically renounced. "I do not intend
now," he says, " to^ pursue the inquiry in a ttiethod so laboriously
systematic ; for the subject may, it seems to me, be more usefully
treated by pursuing the different questions which arise out of it
just as they occur ' to- us, without too great scrupulousness in
maTking connections, or insisting on sequences. Much time is
wasted by human beings, in general, on establishment of systems;
and it often takes more labour to master the intricacies of an
artificial connection, than to remember the Separate facts which
are so carefully connected^." In the interval df ten years between
the second and the third volumes Ruskin had discovered the
" harmfulness " of philosophy; but probably both the discovery
itself and the abandonment of system were diie to the growing
conviction that the discursiveness which had characterised him
froiri the start was a necessity of his nature: His criticism of
art, therefore,' is essentially unsystematic. One thing suggests
another. He turns aside to formulate the principles of architec
ture and to investigate the great buildings of Venice; and he
weaves in -with these self-imposed tasks principles of literary
criticism, of morals and of religion. The' same is true still more
emphatically of the later courses of lecttireSj in which we find a
hotch-potch' of the thought and emotion of Ruskin.
was most fortunate for Ruskin that he did thus abandon
It
system. It is where he is'-most systematic that he is most per-
verse, and that he falls into the most glaring blunders. Where
he follows his own fine taste and feeiling he is usually right;
where he is supporting a theory or formulating a definition he is
capable of being most egregiously wrong. In all literature there
is hardly a greater absurdity than his definition of architecture.
"It is very necessary," he says, "in the outset of all inquiry, to
distinguish carefully between Architecture and Building^" .
And
he proceeds to do so with amazing results. Architecture as a firle
art, it seems, is "that art which, taking up and [admitting, as

' Modern Painters, iii, 2. * Seven Lamps.
64—8
IOI2 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
conditions of its working, the necessities and common :
uses of
the building, impresses on
form certain characters, venerable or
its
b|eautiful, but otherwise unnecessary." "Thus, I suppose," he

goes on, " no one would call the laws architectural which deter- ;
mine, the height of a breastwork or the position of a bastion.

But if to the stone facing of that bastion be added an unnecessary
feature, as a cable moulding, that is architecture. It would be
simply unreasonable to call battlements or machicolations archi-
tectural features, so long as they consist only of an .advanced
gallery supported on projected masses, with open intervals beneath
for offence. if these projecting masses be carved beneath
But
into rounded courses, which are useless, and if the headings of the
intervals be arched and trefoiled, which is useless, '^^^ is Archi-
tecture'."
In The Republic^ Socrates shows that, on the . principles of
Polemarchus, justice is useful only where, money is useless, and
he rightly regards this as a reductio ad absurdum. The unso-
phisticated man must be content to be "simply unreasonable,"
and toigo on feeling that architecture is all the greater architecture
and all the more nobly a " fine art " if it produces its effect without
the:,added grace of something useless. And that it can do so is
obvioiis. It would be "simply unreasonable" to pretend that
the bastion depends for its effect upon the useless cable moulding
more than upon the battlements or machicolations. But we
may appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober. If it be true of
art in general that "that art is greatest which conveys to the
mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever,, the greatest
number of the greatest ideas," then surely it is true of architecture.
If useless ornament be the test of architecture, many modern
buildings are smothered with it, and modern architecture must be
surpassingly great. The laying down of principles df this sort is
positively mischievous, for it encourages effort of the wrong sort

and distracts attention from what is important and vital.
In matters of detail Ruskin is seldom as far astray as he is in

this matter of fundamental principle ; yet he is not infrequently
wrong-headed. His foible is omniscience; and it is often difficult
^ Seven Lamps: 77ie Lamp of Sacrifice.
LITERARY 'AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM IOI3
to believe that he has penetrated the mind of the artist as

thoroughly as his criticisms would imply. Further, when he once
takes the wrong road he follows it to the end. His colours are
strong : the wholly admirable on the one hand is too often
opposed to the wholly vile on the other. He is an advocate the :
contrast of Claude with Turner is unfair to the former. '

When he
once sets out to find faults he finds them everywhere ; when it
suits him to point out merit, everything is a virtue. Except where

he is sympathetic he is a very unsafe guide. Soitietimes he would
seem to have founded his judgment upon the first of a man's
works which he happened to come across, and never to have
overcome the prepossession, whether favourable or adverse, so
created. Sheer caprice is probably the cause of many of his self-
contradictions. But account must be taken also of a curious
limitation of his power of comprehension. He concentrated so long
and so intensely on the study of inanimate nature that he failed
to develop .the capacity (if indeed he possessed it in germ) for an
equal understanding of life. There is truth in the judgment of
the great painter Watts "The higher the art, the less he [Ruskin]
:
seemed capable of comprehending it. He had no sympathy with

the human or divine ; and was incapable of appreciating either
Michael Angelo or Titian^." And yet he was of opinion that
" the intense love of nature is, in modern times, characteristic of
persons not of the first order of intellect, but of brilliant imagina-

tion, quick sympathy,, and undefined religious principle, suffering
also usuallyunder strong and ill-governed .passions""; and he.
would have explained the preponderance of nature in his own
work (supposing him to have admitted it) as due to his weakr
nesses. ' '
u >
Ruskin figures in literature primarily as a critic of painting
and architecture, but -he was also a ready and a skilful critic
of literature ; and though his literary criticisms are sporadic and

unsystematic, they are among the most important since tîedeath
of Lamb. His opinions on Homer, on Shakespeare and on
Scott are expressed as freely and as frequently as his opinions on
any artist, with the exception of Turner. They are based upon
* Life qfjowett, ii. 109. ' Modern Painters, iii. 303.
I0I4 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
the same principle, and they are less important only because
Ruskin was not in this department a pioneen. The core of his
criticism, in literature as in art, is the principle of Naturalism.
He interrogates both painter and poet in ordfer to discover how
far each interprets (not necessarily imitates) nature ; and so he is
himself, above and beyond all, an interpreter of nature. "The
more I think of it," he says, "I find this conclusion more
impressed upon me, —that the greatest thing a human soul ever
does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a
plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think,
but thousands can tliink for one who can see; To see clearly is
poetry, prophecy, and religion,— all in one'." To this* test there-
fore he is constantly bringing all the writers whom he touches
upon, just as it is by this test that he tries Ttirner and Claude;
So too he is continually gibing at German philossphy, because
he thinks it has let go the guiding' thread of naturalism.
'
In
naturalism also lie the roots of the doctrine of the "pathetic
fallacy"; and the sense that he is the apostle of nature repeatedly
tempts Ruskin, poetic and imaginative as his own mind is, to the
verge of literalism. Even his favourites incur censure if they
forget the relation, of humble subjection in which they stand to .
nature. One of those favourites, he says, had "a vague notion

that Nature would not be able to get on well without Words-
worth ^" ; and he thinks the worse of the poet for it.
Naturalism was no new thing in poetry when Ruskin adopted
it as the principle of his criticism. There lay behind him two
generations of poetry imbued with this spirit, and he was enabled
to analyse it> to set it in its place, to assign its limits andi to deter-
mine the conditions of its validity. This is his principal service

to criticism; and his deliberate effort to turn away the English
mind from what he believed to be its excessive addiction to
German thought is only another aspect of it. But it deserves
special mention, because it new trend of criticism.
indicates a
Under Coleridge and Carlyle, had looked towards

criticism
Germany; under Ruskin, it looks away from Germany with her

idealistic philosophy to nature herself; under Arnold, the gaze is
1 Modern Painters, iii. 3;S. " iiid. iii. 287.

LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM IO15
turned towards France, as the country which, by reason of the very

differences between her and us, can best supply our deficiencies.
The thing seen however, on which Ruskin lays stress, must
be interpreted to include the object of the mental, as well as
that of the bodily, eye. It means a respect and reverence for
fact of any sortj or for truth, and is opposed to empty fancies
or to " imaginations as one would," whether they be found in the
idealistic dreams of German philosophy, or in those attributions
of human feeling to inanimate nature which are characteristic of
modern poetry. To the highest order of mind as well as to the
lowest, ''a by the river's brim" is just a primrose.
primrose
Intermediate stands "the man who perceives wrongly, because
he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a
jwimrose : a star; or a sun, or a fairy's shield, or a forsaken maiden'."
Ruskin shows wonderful fertility in the application of his
critical principles. The literary illustratibni wells up from the rich
stores of his mind while he is laying down, the laws of art, or
fulminating against those of political economy, or advising the
workmen or the maidens of England, or reviewing the facts of his
own life and in most cases the criticism is enridied and made
;
more suggestive by the context in which it is placed. Yet a

plausible case could easily be made out for pronouncing it worth-
less. To criticise means to judge and few men have been more
;
wilful and' capricious in judgment than Ruskin. He was full of

prejudice. Though his sympathies were they were
fairly wide,'
not all-embracing, and outside ' thîr range he was untrustworthy.

He was too completely a man of his own age to be just to the
eighteenth centur^; for when he was at the zenith of his powers,
that century was at the nadir of its reputation. That excessive

self-confidence which is a feature of his criticism of art mars his
criticism of literature also. Highly as he valued reverence, it is
to be feared that he sometimes forgot it. No shadow of doubt

disturbs him the meaning is what he says it is,' and ought to be
:
what he goes on to indicate. And yet it would not infrequently

be possible to suggest very plausible criticisms in a sense exactly
contrary to his.
^ Modem Painters, iii. 168,
IOl6 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
But though to criticise is to judge, it sometimes proves that an
erroneous judgment is more helpful than a correct one. " Errare
mehercule malo cum Platone quam cum istis vera sentire," is not
the expression of an insane devotion to authority; it rather im-
plies the conviction that the great man is "always profitable
company." And so it is with Ruskin's criticisms. We may
question the doctrine of the "pathetic fallacy," and point out in-
consistencies in the author's treatment of it. We may think his
praise of Scott excessive and his appreciation of Shelley inadequate.
We may think the colours lurid in which he paints Dickens and
the. other novelists who represent " foul " fiction. We may differ
from him in a thousand ways ; but the fact remains that his
criticism is always stimulating and that we learn more from him
even when he is most wrong-headed, than we do from multitudes
of criticisms to which no exception can be taken, but which lack
the vitalising quality of Ruskin.
Notwithstanding i all its perversities and inconsistencies, the
permanent worth of Ruskin's work is immense. His very success
makes it difficult to rate sufficiently high the daring originality of
his art-criticism. Not only did he discover Turner, but the great
Venetians as well. "Tintoret,"' he says, "was virtually unseen,
Veronese unfelt, Carpaccio not so much as named, when I began
to stiidy them ^." To have brought them to the light and to have
supplied the eyes wherewith to see them, is itself a great achieve-
ment. And if in his later treatment of social and economic
problems he achieved no such complete success, it would be, a
profound mistake to suppose that what he wrote produced no
effect. He was one of the Readers in the revolt against orthodox
political economy, and to him, in no small measure, are due the
decay of individualism and the rise of socialism in these latter
days. He saw the ugliness of the modern industrial system at a

time when the great majority of his contemporaries were under the
spell of its power. Though few of his peculiar opinions have been
adopted, exactly as he held them, yet for thirty years the whole
tendency of English thought has been towards conclusions
cognate to those which he could hardly get liberty to express.
' Fralerila, i. 335.
LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM IOI7
Eyen where he seems, and is, least practical, there is an under-

lying truth in his doctrines ; and his most violent excesses are the
corrective of an opposite excess at least as far removed from the
perfect balance. This test of the practical is that which he can
least bear ; but it is also that which, for him, is least just. " He
writtes," said Charlotte Bronte, with keen insight, " like a conse-
cratjed priest of the Abstract and Ideal'." This was his true
function, — and a practical nation,
to be, for a materialising age
the Vpriest of the visionary and impalpable, and to prove that this
too lis real by showing how it moulds character.
IThough the influence of Ruskin was powerful upon all the
art critics who came after him, it would be a mistake to suppose
that be was the sole impulsive force, or that if he had not written
their work would not have been done. Books like Pugiri's
Contrasts (1836) prove that the time was ripe for such work.
The love of medievalism in art was now sufficiently old to
examine itself and to feel the need of understanding the reasons
upon which it rested. Hence, soon after Ruskin began to write,
and at .first independently of him, the Pre-Raphaelites began to
formulate their principles. Among ,the contents of their magazine,
The Germ, were two very able articles on The Subject in Art by
John Lucas Tupper, a sculptor and a friend of Holman Hunt
and above all there was the exceedingly striking and beautifully
written allegorical tale by Dante Rpssetti entitled Hand and
Soul, which contains the whole essence of Pre-Raphaelitism
,
both in art and ,

in poetry. The story of the blind gropings of
Ghiaro dell' Erma recalls the aspirations of Browning's Paracelsus,
by which Rossetti's article may have been influenced ; for before
this datehe had becpme one of Browning's most ardent admirers.
Chiaro at first aims at fa,me, and wins it, only to find it unsatisfy-
ing. He starts anew with the purpose of impressing the beholder
by the presentment of moral greatness ; and to do this " he did
not choose for his medium the action and passion of human life,
but cold symbolism and abstract impersonation." Again he has
gone astray; his works have no power of appeal to the general
heart; and the frescoes presenting a moral allegory of Peace are
' Mrs Gaskell's Lift of CharloUe Bronte,
IOl8 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
crimsoned with the blood of brawlers. Chiaro himself, moreovjer^
remains as unsatisfied as ever. In his helplessness and bewildjep-
meat there appears to him a vision, the image' of his own soiul,
which addresses him, exhorts him, explains how far and why
he has failed in the past, and how he may win real succesiji in
what may yet remain to him of a future. It is in the utterai)ices
of Chiaro's soul that we find the core of the Pre-Raphafelite

creed.
"Seek thine own conscience (not thy mind's conscience, but
thine heart's), and all shall approve and suffice."..." Look well
lest this also be folly, —
to say, I, in doing this, do strengthen
'
God among men.' When at any time hath he cried unto thee,
'My son, lend me thy shoulder, for I fall ?'"..." Give thou to
God no more than he asketh of thee, but to man also, that' which
is man's. In all that thou doest work from thine own heart,
simply; for his heart is as thine, when thine is wise and humble
and he shall have understanding of thee." And the closing
injunction of the vision is, "Chiaro, servant of God, take now
thine Art unto thee, and paint me thus, as I am, to know me
weak, as I am, and in the weeds of this time; only with eyes
which seek out labour, and with a faith, not learned, yet jealous of
prayer. Do this ; so shall thy soul stand before thee always, and
perplex thee no more."
The doctrine meant to be conveyed First weis unmistakable.
have the abjuration of thejold fake motives of The strife art.
for fame and the dirtect aim to embody faith anftoâch morality,
are alike wrong. All external canons are renounced. The artist's
true guide is his owri soul, his true business is to workTfom Ks~
^n heart, the rules which are binding on him are therules wEl^
he finds written there. What is there he is to paint : that, to him,
is at jjU-ce nature. and_ the true .and jmly.. religion
. . It ja_in_this_
sense that the Pre-Raphaelite movement is a return to ..nature.
The Pre-Raphaelites did not primarily interest themselves in
external nature ; and it is significant that, in his brother's list of
those poets who had greatly infllienced Dante Rossetti, we do not
find the name of Wordsworth. Herein it is manifest that Rossetti
is widely different from Ruskin, who was not only a disciple of
LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM lOIQ
Wordsworth, but was, almost in his own despite, a devotee of

external nature.
A similar doctrine is taught in a group of three sonnets entitled
The Choke, which were afterwards embodied in The House of Life.
They harmony with
are primarily ethical, but they are quite in
such a theory of art as They present three alternatives of
this.
life. The first is, "Eat thou and drink," the second; "Watch
thou and fear,'' and the third, " Think thou and act " ; and it is
manifest that Rossetti deems the third the true choica Man's
business is neither to Jivejor the pleasure of the momeat,_nor to
waJtch_Sffld_prayJn_awe of a power abpve him, but to think and
act ini the sphere in which he finds^himself. It is Goethe's self-
realisation over again ; and if the result is different, it is because

the self to be realised is different to begin with. It is in essence a
conception intensely individualistic; and it reminds us that, if the
Pre-Raphaelites were in some respects in harmony with the party
of the Catholic reaction, they also came into being when the most
individiialistic of English, schools of thought was at the summit of
its power. '
Inferior only; toRuskinând Rgs§etti in his influence upon the

aesthetic movement was Walter Pater (1839- 1894), a man whose
"w^FJt is Impossible toj read withouF' admiration tinged with a
certain regret ; it is so admirable for the end in view, and yet it
^canies so unmistakably the marks of decadeiicfii.- Pater was one

of 'those fastidious writers condemned, like Gray, by what is
strongest as well as by what is weakest in their own nature to a

certain meagreness of production, and his native tendency was
increased by the view he 'took of the circumstances of the age in
which' he lived. Not Arnold himself was more impressed by its
complexity. "That imaginative .prose," he says, ^'should be the
special and opportune art of the modem world results from two
important facts' about the latter : first, the chaotic variety and
complexity of its interests, making the intellectual issue, the rejÛy
master currents df the present time incalculable^-^ condition of
mind little susceptible of the restraints proper to verse form, so
that the most characteristic verse of the nineteenth century has
been lawless verse; and secondly, an all-pervading naturalism a
curiosity about everything whatever as it really is, involving a
certain humility of attitude, cognate to what must, after all, be
the less ambitious form of literature'." This passage from the
essay on Style belongs to the later period of Pater's authorship
but the ideas were his from the start, and it is evident that
the man who was thus impressed by the complexity of the issues,
and humbled by the wide range of curiosity, was not likely to
rush prematurely into print, or to be very copious and facile as
an author. His earliest contribution to literature was the essay
on Coleridge, first, printed in 1866; and from that date onwards
he slowly produced the papers gathered together in Studies in the
History of tke Renaissance (iSj^), Imaginary Portraits (1887),
Appreciations (1889), Greek Studies (1895) and Miscellaneous
Studies (189s). Plato and Platonism (1893) was the outcome of
lectureswhich he delivered with almost as much suffering as
Carlyle,though lecturing was part of- the business of Pater's life.
His most ambitious, and on the whole his greatest, work, Marius
the Epicurean (1885), was the fruit of six years of the mbst
concentrated labour he ever gave. Gaston de Latour (1896),
which might have rivalled Marius, remained unfinished at his
death.
With the exception of Marius, the lectures on Plato and the
unfinished Gaston de Latour, the whole of Pater's work belongs to
the class of miscellaneous writings, and , formally it is critical
rather than creative ; but, though the subjects are various, ithe
impression conveyed is remarkably uniform. All that Pater wrote
is as deeply marked with the personality of the writer as is the
work of RuskiH' himself. In both cases we may doubt whether
the interpretation of the critic would have been accepted by the
artist ; but also in both cases the work has a value independent
of the question of the soundness of the interpretation. We may

reasonably think Pater's description of La Gioconda over- wrought,
we may suspect that it puts too much into the picture, we may
even doubt whether be not, as an interpretation of Leonardo,
it
wholly misleading ; but, even so, it remains a very beautiful piece

of writing and in itself a valuable work of art. Pope's Homer
^ Appftciationt, 7.
LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM 1 02
may not be Homer, but: if it is " a very pretty poem," it has a

solid value of its own.
Pater illustrates the complexity of the age, which so deeply
impressed him, by the multitude of strands which are twined
fpgether in his own work. The Middle Ages and the Italian
Renascence, painting and poetry, classicism and romamticisiiij. all
contribute to it. No one carries the suggestion of more numerous
a,nd more various writers. The influence of Plato is pervasive,
and that of Goethe only less so. Traces of Ruskin and the Pre-
Raphaelites are less numerous than might be expected; for,
though Pater had many sympathies in common with them, his
methods were different. Breaths or whiffs of Sir Thomas Browne
and Lamb and Hawthorne and Arnold, widely different as they
are from one another and from Pater, are also borne by his sen-
tences. And yet through all this he remains highly original and
individual. Eew writers are more completely non-dramatic than
Pater. Whatever the character he depicts, it is always really Pater
who appears upon the, canvas. This is true of all t\x& Imaginary
Portraits, of The Child in. the House, of Emerald Uthwart and
of Mariuf\the Epicurean. The mirror which Pater holds up to
nature is one which xan reflect only himself. There is nothing in
:
the Jeagt degree objective in his work it is hardly top much to say
;
that the whole of it, whether intentionally or not, is autobiographic.

The very artists and poets whom
he passes in review have to take
his colour, and it may be questioned whether he ever jSUGceeded;
in putting himself in the place of the iman he criticised. Hence
he is best when he deals with men who have a large share of his
own introspective, brooding nature, and he is unsatisfactory in
dealing with a genius of the free and objective type, like Shaken
speare. It can hardly be doubted that the elaborate passage in
which he describps the effect of Oxford upon Uthwart is a tran-
script from his own experience. Uthwart, we are told, cares, for
the beauties of Oxford, in themselves, and, except through assor
ciation, less when he is among them than in retrospect. But then,
" It was almost retrospect even now, with an anticipation of
regret, in rare moments of solitude perhaps, when ithe i oars
splashed far up the narrow streamlets through the fields on May
evenings among the fritillaries — does the reader know them?
that strange remnant just here of a richer extinct flora^dry
flbwers, though with a drop of dubious honey in each. Snakes'
heads, the rude call them, for their shape, scale-marked too, and
in colour like rusted blood, as if they grew from some forgotten
battle-field, the bodies, the rotten armour yet delicate, beautiful, —
waving proudly ^"
It would be hard to find a passage more characteristic of
Pater's peonliar imagination than this, or more illustrative both 'of
his merits and his defects. There is a kind of uncanniness in it,
as there is sometimes in Hawthorne, and in spite of its beauty the
reader is tempted to ask whether it is altogether' wholesome.
This, certainly, would hardly do for " human nature's daily food."
It is the product of a highly artificial, perhaps a decadent, life, it
is the air of the hot-house, to be breathed now and then for the
sake of the strange and beautiful flowers that grow there, but
whence the escape into the free air of heaven is a joy and a relief.
In the case of Pater then, the " personal equation " is a thing
for which liberal allowance must be made, and his judgments both
of painters and of writers commend themselves rather to a coterie
than to the world at large. They are, in short, "appreciations"
rather than- judgments. There
however another aspect to
is
Pater's critical work. He can hardly be called technically a

philosopher; his Plato and Pldtenismis essentially an attempt to
get at the thought through sympathy with the thinker; and so far
as he deals with abstract principles, he prefers principles of the
^motional nature to principles of the understand ing. But few
have wntteirnTOTerwiseTyupon style, and the sentence in which
he concentrates the essence of his doctrine is unimpeachable:
" Say what you have to say, what you have a will to say, in the
simplest, the most direct and exact manner possible, with no
surplusage :-^there, is the justification of the sentence so fortu-
nately born, '
entire, smooth, and round,' that it needs no punc-
tuation, and also (that is the point !) of the most elaborate period,
if it be right in its elaboration ^" JFe^ again, JiaAfe_more wisely
discriminated between the romantic and the classicaLeiemeaJTiir'

' '^
Appreciations, ^t.
^ MisieilaneDus StuiUes, Zii.
LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM IO23
literatu re. He finds the essential elements -oLthexomajatic. spirit

tobe^^ûriosity and the lov£o£bMJii^/jthat of theckssical_s£irit,
" a,£Qnjely order.^ He quotes with qualified approval Stendhal's
saying that "all good art was romantic in its day" ; and his own
love for and affinity to the romantic spirit is obvious. But the
true function of Pateris to make the romantic once more classical,
to superimgosejhe "comely order "upon beauty, and doing so m

mevitably to reduce the strangeness. This he does almost in
spite of himself, and yet with the approval of his own judgment.
The influence of Gqethe upon him
due to his sense that Goethe
is
too, in a far larger way, did the same. In the essay on Winckel-
mann he points out 'that Goethe illustrates- the—union .o£ ihe.
romantic spirit with Hellenism, and„tljg..,pxepi3ndfiranEe-of the
Henenicelement. Of this union,_says Pater, the jtft of the nine-
teenth _century is the His pciint Of view therefore is
child.
similar to that orMatthewÂrnbld ; but that brealth from the outer
world which Arnold brings is never felt in Pater. He is cloistered,
— a recluse looking out from the windows of a College upon a
world in which he has no part or lot. The whole moral atmo-
sphere of the two men is also different. Pater, from first to last,
is epicurean, while through the playful banter of Arnold there is
always audible the undertone of Stoicism.

CHAPTER HI
MISCELLANEOUS PROSE
,1 The miscellaneous prose of this period presents almost as
difficult a problem of s^lectiop as the fiction, and is even more
baffling in respect of arrangement. There is however no diffi-
culty about the first figure. For age, for
: copiousness and for
distinction, Walter Savage Landor '(i 775-1864) clearly deserves
the precedence; and though a poet so considerable may seem
out of place among miscellaneous writers, yet his greatest work is
in prose, and it can only be classified in this way.

Landor was throughout his long life a strange union of contra-
dictions. A republican and yet a born aristocrat, a polished
gentleman who dropped his h's, a life-long rebel who was by
nature a despot, a man of the most exquisite tenderness yet of
ungovernable violence, a classical scholar and a model of classical
style yet of ultra-romantic freakishness, there is scarcely anything
that may be said of him which has not to be qualified by some-
thing that seems almost to annul it. The key-note of Landor's life
is struck in his rustication from Oxford for an act of violence in

1794. In 1808 he went to Spain to support the cause of Spanish
independence; but neither independence nor anything else can'
be supported without some control of temper, which Landor
could not or would not exercise. Returning to England, he
bought the estate of Llanthony Abbey in Monmouthshire. He
had great and generous plans for its improvement; but in the
end he quarrelled with all around him, lost his own capital, and
effected nothing. In 181 r he married in haê, and found
leisure to repent in the fifty-three years of life which remained to
MISCELLANEOUS PROSE IO25
him. He went abroad in 1814, and from 1815 to 1835 he lived

in Italy, during the latter part of the period at Florence. A
violent quarrel vpith his wife drove him back to England, where he
settled at Bath. Twenty-thfee years later he was once more
driven into exile by an action of libel which he had provoked.
In Florence, to which he returned, he died, and there he lies
much memorable Englisk
buried in the cemetery which holds so
dust.
There are few English writers about whom opinion is more
sharply divided than it is about Landor. He never has been and
he never can be popular. "I shall dine late, but the dining-
room will be well lighted, the guests few and select," is the well-
known expression of his own opinion about his own ultimate
position. It calls to mind Milton's " fit audience, though few-" ;
but there is this difference between the two poets', that about
Milton critical opinion, at least, is undivided, and the multitude
buy Paradise Lost though they do not read it; while about
Landor critics dispute and the multitude are indifferent because
they know him not The reason of the difference is that, just as
in Lander's character immense force was conjoined with a weak-
ness almost childish, so in his works elements of grandeur scarcely
to be surpassed are found in union with weaknesses and in-
capacitieswhich are almost fatal to true excellence.
Landor's immensely long life gives him a peculiar interest.
When he began to write, Lyrical Ballads was not yet published,
and before he ended all his own great contemporaries as
well as many younger men were dead. Carlyle had almost
finished his literary career. Macaulay was dead. Thackeray
died within a few months of the appearance of the Heroic
Idylls (1863); and Dickens had only seven more years to
live. The Brontes had come and gone, and George Eliot was in
mid-career. Browning and Tennyson had been writing for thirty
years. Darwin's great work was shaking the world. In short,
Landor, having lived through the whole of one great era, had
survived to see a second past its meridian. No one else in an
equal degree belongs at once to the Revolutionary period and to
the Victorian. At the same time, scarcely any one stands so
aloof from both.
w. 65
Lander's earliest publication was a volume of poems in 1795 ;
but it was three years later before his first work of note, Gebir,
was published. A few years afterwards he translated it into

Latin, and this interchange of tongues was repeated subsequently
when the Idyllia Heroica were translated and incorporated in
the Hellenics (1847). Landor was one of the most skilful, as
well as one of the last, of those who have practised the exotic art
of Latin verse. Love of the art and pleasure in the exercise of his
own skill were, no doubt, the real causes of his writing Latin
verses ; but it is amusing and also instructive to read that one
object of the Latin translation of Gebir was to make the English

original popular. What might not be expected of a man who
could conceive and carry out such a scheme ? But this story of
the legendary prince who gave his name to Gibraltar was neither
by its substance nor by its treatment calculated for popularity. It
remains fragmentary, much of it is episodic, and the "statuesque''

quality in the style, which struck both Soiithey and De Quincey,
though it is eminently literary, had little attraction for the average
reader. And the average reader could plead for himself that, though
it is easy to extract fine fragments from Gebir, it is not easy to
maintain that the whole is a fine poem. Throughout this remained
one of Lander's greatest defects. Classical as he was in style, he

had a most unclassical incapacity for constructing a whole.
Count Julian (18 12) is Landor's earliest attempt in the drama.
Long afterwards he followed it up with the trilogy on the story of
Queen Giovanna and the Siege of Ancona
of Naples (183 9-1 841)
(1846), the last of which has been pronounced by some good
judges his best drama. Probably however the majority will agree
with Mr Crump in preferring Count Julian. But in truth all
Landor's dramas are compositions which have only a distant rela-
tion to the stage, and th&y are correctly described by himself as

" no better than Imaginary Conversations in metre.'' In spite of
the fact that much of his best work, both in prose and verse, is
dramatic in form, Landor had not really the essentials of dramatic

genius. He could never get himself out of the way. As Browning
(who recognised the kinship, and declared that he "owed more as
a writer to Landor than to any contemporary'") always wrote like
' Mrs Brownings Letters, edited by Kenyon.
Browning, so Landor's style is always Lander's, whoever may be

the speaker. Andmust be added that he is far from being as
it
successful as Browning in losing himself in the other characters.

Browning's characters speak the words of Browning, but their
sentiments are their own ; in the case of Landor, we are always
liable to see Landor as well as to hear his voice. Such success as
he achieves is won when the character in some degree resembles
himself. This is the cause of the superiority of Count Julian.
The passions which sway Julian's nature and the revenge he plans
are just such asLandor himself would have felt and might have
planned under such a wrong as that which Julian suffered. Hence
the sympathy with which Landor enters into this character and its
superiority to the other dramatis pei'sonae. But it is the extrava-

gance of injudicious praise to couple Count Julian, as De Quincey
did, with Milton's Satan and the Prometheus of Aeschylus.
Up to the Tdyllia Heroica, published in 18 14 and reprinted
with additions in 1820, Landor had figured exclusively as a poet j
but he had not before found where his true strength as a poet
lay. The management of the narrative in Gebir proves that he
had not epic genius, and even Count Julian is not satisfactory as
a drama. In the Idyllia Heroica he struck his true vein. They
were dramatic scenes, not dramas, or short tales, not narratives of
epic proportions; and in them Landor's weakness in the con-
structive faculty is hid, while his noble style gives them dignity
and weight He had already tried this style in Chrysaor, which
firstappeared in an anonymous volume of poetry published in
1802. It is in pieces like this, and the Hamadryad, and The
Shades of Agamemnon and Iphigeneia, and in the pieces entitled
To Corinth and Regeneration, that Landor's real greatness as a
poet appears. There must be added the epigrams, in which he
has scarcely an equal in English, and some snatches of lyrical
verse, including such gems as the magical Rose Aylmer, and" the
majestic lines,
" I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art

I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks and I am ready to depart."
65—2
In such short pieces Landor at his best is unsurpassed ; and a
rigorous selection of these, with choice passages from the longer
poems, might give him the appearance of a great poet. But
great as a poet he in truth is not There is too much dross
mingled with the gold of the shorter poems, and the longer ones
are too faulty in construction, to give him a good title to that
rank.
Landor wrote poetry all through his career, and the lines
above quoted, which read like an old man's farewell to life, were
printed in a volume which was published when he was seventy-
eight. But in the main, poetry was the pursuit of Landor's youth
and early middle age, and prose was the form which he chose by
preference in later years. Certainly the greatest of his works are
the Imaginary Conversations (1824-1853).
The form which best suited Landor was the dialogue, or that
cognate form employed in Pericles and Aspasia (1836), where we

seem to have a dialogue conducted by letters. He
had plenty of
predecessors. He was no admirer of Plato, and would not have
been attracted to the dialogue by the fact that Plato had employed
it. Lyttelton's Dialogues of the Dead have a closer resemblance
to Landor's design and he may have been influenced by the
;
fact that Southey, whom he admired and loved above all contem-
poraries, had in mind his Colloquies on Society at the time when
Landor began to work on his Conversations.
The dialogue could be made as episodic as Landor pleased
fora chance suggestion is sufficient to turn a conversation in
a new direction. He rarely develops one train of thought sys-
tematically, as Plato does. The longer dialogues often reflect his
whims and caprices, while the shorter ones are consistent and
coherent because of their shortness. There is one important
exception in Pericles and Aspasia, certainly the best-sustained
work Landor ever produced, and one singularly consistent
that
in its development of the characters of both Pericles and Aspasia.
If Browning meant to acknowledge indebtedness to Landor in
respect of dramatic intuition, he probably had this work in mind.
There is however a striking similarity between the two in one
other point. Both show the same indifference to action, and the
same concentrated interest in a dramatic situation just before or

just after fateful actiori.
It is in the classical dialogues that Landor is happiest; for
there his knowledge was ripest, and there too his sympathies,
both as man and as artist, were keenest. In these also his style
is at its best J
a kind of pre-established harmony
for there is
between the subject and the treatment. As a master of severe
yet magnificent English, Landor has no superior and hardly an
equal, ^sop and Rhodopi is an acknowledged masterpiece for
the tender beauty of the story and the perfection of the language.
Less celebrated, but hardly less excellent, is the praise of Greece
put into the mouth of Panaetius in the dialogues with Scipio
Aemilianus and Polybius; and there are many other passages,
especially in the Roman same austere
dialogues, which have the
beauty. The Greek dialogues are more
the Greek
flexible, as
character was, and the best soar even higher than the Roman.
Probably Landor was right in his own preference for the con-
versation of Epicurus with Leontion and Ternissa.
Even in the Conversations, however, the shortcomings of the
poems reappear. The parts are superior to the whole Landor is :
master of the paragraph rather than the complete dialogue, and

of the sentence rather than the paragraph. There is scarcely a
dialogue he has written from which sentences of the highest
excellence could not be quoted, and there are few which are not
marred by flaws of taste. His prejudices, of inordinate admira-
tion or unmeasured dislike, appear in the most unexpected places.
In Gebir, the hero visits the under-world, and there he finds the
shade of the King of England who was reigning when Gebir was
written. In this violent way Landor constantly drags in his own
loves and hates, —
more frequently, as was natural, in the modem
than in the classical dialogues ; and this difference is among the
causes of the superiority of the latter.
One of Landor's special gifts is the power of giving memorable

expression to thoughts which may be stigmatised as commonplace,
but which are so only because they have regard to the common
destiny of mankind. One of his favourite reflections, driven home
to him, perhaps, by his own unpopularity, is on the fate of the great
man to be fully known only when he is dead. The fine couplet
about " the gates of fame and of the grave," quoted in the intro-
duction to this book, is his, and in the Conversations he reiterates
the thought once and again. " The voice comes deepest from the
sepulchre, and a great name hath its roots in the dead body."
" The sun colours the sky most deeply and most diffusely when
he hath sunk below the horizon and they who never said, How
;
'
say at last, How brightly he set " The

! '
beneficently he shines
!
' '
close of the dialogue of Alexander and the priest of Hammon (a

poor dialogue, because it is filled with Landorian prejudice) is a
wonderful example of this use of the commonplace. There is no
idea more trite than that of the kinship of man with the dust ; yet it
can be handled with magnificent literary effect. The burial service
of the Church of England shows one way of doing it : Landor
found another. The interlocutors are just issuing from the cavern
where Alexander has been shown the horrible serpent which is
declared to be the daughter of Jupiter. The conversation

originally ended with the words of Alexander, "Glory to Jupiter
the Ram !
" By a happy afterthought Landor added,
" Priest. Thou stoppest on a sudden thy prayers and praises
to Father Jupiter. Son Alexander, art thou not satisfied ? What
ails thee, drawing the back of thy hand across thine eyes ?
Alexander. A little dust flew into them as the door opened.

Priest. Of that dust are the sands of the desert and the Kings
of Macedon."
" Ripeness is all" There never was a better illustration of the
fact that setting may make all the difference between the common-
place and the great, or of the fact that the knowledge when to be
silent is sometimes the truest eloquence.
It would be easy to multiply examples. In prose as in verse
Landor is one of the most quotable of writers. He gains by
having his gems taken from their setting, for they are perfect in
themselves. There are other writers, like Scott, who cannot be
adequately represented in fragments, because they neither aim at
nor achieve perfection in the parts, but rather rely upon general
effects. The difference illustrates the uncertainty of judgment by
selections. It would be easy by means of extracts to exhibit
Landor as a much greater man than Scott. Regarded purely as a

prose stylist, he is indeed far greater; and his best verses are
technically much more perfect than Scott's. And yet, both in verse
and in prose, the more faulty writer is the greater man.
There is one aspect of Landor's prose work which demands
special notice, —
his literary criticism, upon which a scathing judg-
ment has been pronounced by one of the latest critics of critics.
"Of judicial quality or qualities," writes Professor Saintsbury',
" he had not one single trace, and, even putting them out of the
question, his intelligence was streaked and flawed by strange veins
of positive silliness." Though the judgment requires some qualifica-
tion (and receives it from Professor Saintsbury himself), it contains
an amount of truth fatal to Landor's pretensions as a critic. He
is best judged, not by the formal criticisms, but by the conversa-
tions devoted to critical themes, of which the principal are the
dialogues between Southey and Porson on Wordsworth, and those
between Southey and Landor on Milton. In these dialogues
there is indeed ample evidence of acumen, but it is often mis-
and gives an impression of carping peevishness altogether
directed,
destructive of the dignity of the subject. Of the dialogues on
Wordsworth, the second, which is of nearly twenty years later date
than its predecessor, reads almost like a recantation of the praise
bestowed in the first, and constitutes, in effect, a most ungenerous
attack upon the old poet. The fact that many of the criticisms
are in themselves sound is no justification. No other great poet
can be made ridiculous so easily as Wordsworth; and this fact
lays upon the critic the obligation to accompany the censure
which is just with the praise which is still more just. It is no
real defence of Landor that the criticisms are put into the mouth
of Porson and are therefore to be regarded as dramatic utterances.
He was under no obligation to write them. They are in them-
selves as offensive as any of the early critical attacks upon
Wordsworth, and, if they had been made early, would probably
have been more harmful, because they are enforced by numerous
quotations.
Many have felt that one of the difficulties in the study of
1 History of Criticism, iii. 276t
Landor the extraordinary contrast, as it seems to them, between
is
his life and character on the one hand, and his works on the
other. Superficially, the contrast is complete; and though in
reality we may trace the man in his works, there are still very
remarkable differences. Such inconsistences as this which has

just been mentioned about Wordsworth, such violence as appears
m his unmeasured censure of Canning, the prejudice which shines
through every reference to Pitt, the utter untrustworthiness of
judgment visible almost everywhere in the Conversations, are just
what might be expected from such a man as Landor was. The
contradiction between the man and his works lurks in the style
rather than the substance. A priori, Landor's style might have
been expected to be turbid and lawless ; in reality, the adjectives
which have been applied to it are " monumental," " statuesque,"
"severe,"' "austere," whatever may suggest the very opposite of
turbidity or lawlessness. more can be said by way of
Little
explanation than that the love of high and restrained literature
and the instinct for language were as much inborn in him as the
violent passions with which these qualities seem so inconsistent.
It was no case of gradual development and of force turning nature
from her path. Landor was incapable of the consistent and per-
severing exercise of such force; and his earliest writings, alike in
verse and in prose, exhibit the qualities which distinguished him
through the whole of his long career.
Of all the writers of his time Landor stands most alone.
Coming at the moment of the great romantic revival, a generous
admirer of Southey and in his saner moments of Wordsworth
(though he was always unjust to Coleridge), Landor nevertheless
was through life a classicist rather than a romanticist In many
ways he was akin to the eighteenth century, and may be regarded as
a link between it and the nineteenth. His preference of Aristotle to
Plato is significant of much. "His religion," says Leslie Stephen,
"was that of the eighteenth century noble." His classicism, it is
true,was founded on deeper and far more comprehensive scholar-
ship than that of Pope; yet this too serves to connect him with the
past.
Another link with a past age is supplied by Mary Russell
MISCELLANEOUS PROSE I033
Mitford (1787-1855), whose tragedies are briefly noticed else-

where. Her works are both varied and of considerable bulk,
including stories and poems of many kinds besides the dramas.
Among one of those curious notes of sex which female
the rest is
writers can seldom refrain from introducing Narrative Poems on

the Female Character (18 13). But in these spheres she must take
a subordinate position, while she has her own Uttle niche in
hterature where she is queen. The author ofOur Village (1824—
1832) has a position safer than that of many far more preten-
tious figures, for her sketches are quite the best of their kind, except
Cranford. They originally appeared in The London Magazine ; and
there is something in the shrewd observation of the writer, as well
as in the humour, which calls to mind along with her the special
glory of The London Magazine, Charles Lamb. The closest affinity
however is that between Miss Mitford and the American writer who
is still best known as Miss Mary Wilkins, and who has done for the
rural life of New England, with almost equal grace and with quite
equal humour, what the elder writer did some half a century earlier
for the rural life of Old England.
The powers with which Miss Mitford was most richly endowed
might be expected to give merit to anything from her pen of a
reminiscent or autobiographic nature, and her letters confirm the
expectation. But anyone who turns with high hopes to her
Recollections of a Literary Life (1852) will be disappointed. The
little local pictures and the fragments of autobiography are, it is
true, excellent No reader can forget how she, a little girl, was
taken by her imprudent and somewhat unprincipled, though
kindly, father to a lottery office, where she chose a number,
obstinately insisted upon it in spite of difficulties, and by means of
that number won a large prize, —
which speedily slipped through
her father's fingers, as her mother's fortune had slipped through
them before. But the criticism, of which the book principally
consists, though not without grace, is of small intrinsic value, and
deals mainly with subjects which have been treated with more
insight by others.
In Our Village, on the other hand. Miss Mitford is almost
faultless. She never strikes a wrong note : style and thought are
completely in harmony with the nature of the subject-matter. Her
close observation of the character of villagers and of the incidents
of village life, her love of nature and of animals, her kindliness of
tone combined with a gently sarcastic humour, and her charmingly
pure and easy English, make the book delightful to read. She is
a keener and closer observer of inanimate nature, of animals and

of incidents, than her fellow-artist, Miss Wilkins ; but perhaps in
the delineation of humours the advantage lies on the whole with
the latter. Another writer with whom Miss Mitford may be
usefully compared is Mrs Gaskell, many of the qualities of whose
masterpiece, Cranford, are present also in Our Village. In all
three there is an unmistakably feminine touch ; but in their case

" feminine " does not mean " weak " or " inferior."
The foundation of Miss Mitford's art is sympathy, by reason
of which she ranks among those writers who are even more beloved
than they are admired. It is sympathy which guides her observa-
tion, and it is sympathy too which inspires her humour. An

Admiral on Shore, with all its lively and gently amusing detail, is
full of sympathy; so is My School-Fellows; so is The Vicar's Maid.
But perhaps the best illustration of the humour and pathos, which
are the two manifestations of this sympathy, is to be found in Modern
Antiques. It is impossible to read without a smile the description
of the little old maid in the presence of her lover of bygone
years : — " She blushed and bridled ; fidgeted with her mittens on
her apron; flirted a fan nearly as tall as herself, and held her
head on one side with that peculiar air which I have noted in the
shyer birds, and ladies in love." For delicacy of observation the
comparison of the old lady in love with a shy bird is unsurpassed.
But Miss Mitford's sympathy is too deep to stop with laughter
alone :
—
" She manoeuvred to get him next her at the tea-table
him in his absence
liked to be his partner at whist; loved to talk of
knew an hour the time of his return ; and did not dislike a
to
little gentle raillery on the subject —
even I But, traitress to my —
sex, how can I jest with such feelings ? Rather let me sigh over
the world of woe, that in fifty years of hopeless constancy must
have passed through that maiden heart ! The timid hopes ; the
sickening suspense; the slow, slow feeur; the bitter disappoint-
ment the powerless anger ; the relenting

; the forgiveness ;
and then again, that interest, kinder, truer, more unchanging

than friendship, that lingering woman's love — Oh how can I
jest over such feelings? They are passed —
away for she is
gone, and he —but they clung by her to the last, and ceased only
in death."
Somewhat younger, but still old enough to supply another
link between the eighteenth century and the nineteenth, was

Julius Hare (1795-1855) who, in conjunction with his brother
Augustus (1792-1834), wrote the once-celebrated Guesses at Truth
(1827), but who is now most widely known by reason of his con-
nexion with John Sterling, and through Sterling with Carlyle.
Hare was in his earlier days an associate of Thirlwall, and was
one of those who helped to popularise German literature and
philosophy in England. In his time he played a considerable
part in controversy. He crossed swords with Sir William Hamilton,
the metaphysician, on behalf of Luther, whose character for
orthodoxy he considered to have been impugned by Hamilton;
and as Archdeacon of Lewes he sought in his charges to with-
stand the Romanising influence of Newman and his followers.
Guesses at Truth is a collection of aphorisms on a wide variety
of subjects, — theology, morals, literature, politics, philosophy.
Many them are well written, but few have that compression
of
which befits an aphorism the tendency of the Hares was to
:
expand rather than to condense. In short, though good, the

Guesses are not the best; and the aphoristic form, even more
than the poetic, demands the highest excellence. Perhaps .the
very absence of any striking originality contributed to their
popularity. They expressed attractively thoughts just a little
beyond the reach of the average man, but not too complex for
his comprehension.
The stamp of the commonplace is still more clear upon the
works of Arthur Helps (1813-1875), the most characteristic
Sir
of which are not unlike Guesses at Truth. In his lifetime Helps
won a reputation far higher than he deserved ; and they were no
ordinarymen who praised him. Ruskin in one passage names
him along with Wordsworth and Carlyle as one of the three
moderns to whom he owed most; and elsewhere he is linked with
Plato and Carlyle as one of those thinkers who by their sincerity
become in some sort seers. The association of Helps with such
names as these seems ludicrous now, and his numerous volumes,
historical, biographical, dramatic and aphoristic, will be searched
in vain for a justification. Judgments such as Raskin's must either

be passed over as among the enigmas of contemporary criticism,
or we must suppose that even the man of genius has a liking for
the commonplace when it happens to be seasoned to his taste.
Of all that Helps attempted, that which he did best was the
essay or dialogue of social criticism and the minor ethics. This
is the substance of his Friends in Council (1847-1859) and
Companions of my Solitude (185 1). These books are not without
value for their common sense, but the thought is somewhat
attenuated.
There is more solid substance in the writings of WUliam
Rathbone Greg (1809-1881), although he never won such praise
as was showered upon Helps. The reason was, perhaps, partly
the acerbity of his literary manner, and partly the fact that he
was usually on the unpopular side. He rarely said smooth things,
and his opinions, both on religion and on politics, were of the sort
which are accepted unwillingly if they are accepted at all. In
Greg was one of those thoughtful Unitarians who were
religion,
and are numerous in his native county of Lancashire, and his

Creed of Christendom (185 1), which caused considerable stir when
itwas published, expressed opinions which were by no means
in harmony with those of the majority. His Enigmas of Life
(1872), a book which dealt with cognate problems, attained a far
wider popularity, passing in twenty years through no fewer than
eighteen editions. on every page the impress of the
It bears
writer's profound and is on the whole his most valuable
sincerity,
work. But Greg handled political and economic as well as ethical
and religious topics, and here too he made himself the champion
of unpopular views. In politics, he was a doctrinaire of the
Manchester school, condemning all interference between master
and man, and, in his Rocks Ahead (1874), taking a gloomy view of
the future because he saw how inevitable such interference was.
It can hardly be said that Greg was gifted with great speculative
originality, but he was distinguished for the intellectual quality of
lucidity and the moral quality of sincerity ; and the combination
brings about that his books are among the best adapted to
it
afford a view of the contemporary problems upon which they touch,

as these problems appeared to a remarkably keen intelligence.
We rise to a higher plane of literature in the bright, terse,
humorous sentences of William Brighty Rands (1823-1882), a man

as much under-rated as Helps has been over-rated. He found no
one to link his name with the names of Plato and Carlyle and
Wordsworth. Many, both children and adults, who were delighted
with his Lilliput Levee (1864) and Lilliput Lectures (1871), never
knew the name of the man who had given them pleasure;
for Rands wrote anonymously or under the pseudonyms of
Matthew Browne and Henry Holbeach, and the world was not
sufficiently interested to penetrate his disguise. He wrote poetry
as well as prose. The above-named volumes are among the best
collections of children's verses in the language, and the name of
Rands ought to be associated with the names of Lewis Carroll and
R. L. Stevenson among the authors of that Kbrary of juvenile
literature one of the most graceful and beautiful products
which is
of recent years. Like those of the other two, the verses of Rands,
though meant for children, are none the less true poetry, and
delightful to adults as well. The anthology must be indeed select
in which the little girl's address to the earth would not deserve a
place :
" Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful World,

With the wonderful water round you curled.
And the wonderful grass upon your breast
World, you are beautifully dressed.
The wonderfiil air is over me.
And the wonderful wind is shaking the tree,
It walks on the water, and whirls the mills.
And talks to itself on the top of the hills.
You friendly Earth ! how

do you go,
far
With the wheat-fields that nod, and the rivers that flow,
With cities, and gardens, and cliffs, and isles.
And people upon you for thousands of miles ?
Ah, you are so great and I am so small,
I tremble to think of you, World, at all
And yet when I said my prayers to-day,

A whisper inside me seemed to say,
'
You are more than the Earth, though you are such a dot
! '
You can love and think, and the Earth cannot
In his prose Rands is always thoughtful and often distin-
guished. His Chaucer's England (1869) is a sound and scholarly

work; but he is seen at his best in Views and Opinions (1866)
and above all in Henry Ifolbeach, Student in Life and Philosophy
(1865), where, much in the fashion of Hare and Helps, but with
more power and depth than either, he utters keen and original
criticisms on the politics, society and religion of contemporary
England, in a style of mingled humour and sarcasm which is
exceedingly attractive. Rands either did not possess or did not
care to exercise the dramatic gift of creation; but no one could put a
keener edge upon a distinction, and he could describe and contrast
types of character with rare felicity. He knew
mind the English
thoroughly in all its social and had the
religious distinctions. He
subtlety of observation with respect to classes which George Eliot
brings to bear upon individuals, and George Eliot must have
delighted in, if she ever read, his description of the minister of the
Little Meeting, " a very energetic, active man, wiry in frame ; but a
shoe-maker, self-taught; his heart amply supplied with the milk of
human-kindness, and his creed blazing with damnation." Per-
haps there is nothing else in Rands altogether so beautiful as the
verses quoted, or so clearly etched as the picture of the minister
of the Little Meeting, but there is much that may fairly be com-
pared with them. He is a man who will bear study, and whose
works might with advantage be resuscitated.
In a time so late as the nineteenth century of the Christian
era it might be expected that the literature of travel must have
lost its zest through the exhaustion of the material ; and it is true
that the kind of mystery which shrouded the course of Columbus
was gone, and great part even of that which spread round Captain
Cook was dispelled. But there was still abundant possibility of
adventure, and it is surprising to reflect how small a part of the
earth's surface was really known in the year 1800. Mungo Park
had just begun to open the interior of Africa, the Far East was
known only superficially, Central Asia and the interior of Australia
not at all. Even so old a country as Egypt was very imperfectly
understood. It was not till 1883 that the Egypt Exploration
Fund was founded, largely through the exertions of the most
distinguished of female Egyptologists, Amelia Blandford Edwards
(1831-1892), whose A Thousand Miles up the Nik (1877)
shows a profound interest in the ancient history of Egypt, and
possesses an uncommon power of awakening interest in the reader.
The extreme North and the extreme South were at that date both
beyond human ken. The bulk of the work which has since been
done belongs rather to the history of discovery than to the history
of literature; but two or three incidents and characters stand out so
prominently that they have become a part both of history and of
literature. The tragic story of Sir John Franklin and the heroic
efforts to discover and relieve him profoundly impressed the
English-speaking world in the middle of the nineteenth century.
The honour of discovery belongs to Sir F. L. McClintock, who, in
The Voyage of the Fox (1859), narrates how he solved the mystery
of the fate of Franklin ; but the literary honours belong to the
American Elisha Kent Kane, whose Arctic Explorations (1856) is
one of the most fascinating books of travel in the English language.
It is quite worthy to stand as a rival to Curzon's Monasteries of the
Levant (1849), which Ruskin pronounced to be "the most
delightful book of travels I ever opened S" or indeed to anything
except Esthen.
A somewhat similar tie links the great missionary, David
Livingstone (1813-1873), with the bold and adventurous news-
paper correspondent, Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), who
sought and found him in the heart of Africa, and who afterwards
headed two of the most successful exploring expeditions ever
undertaken in Africa. The writings of Livingstone are perfectly
simple. He makes no pretence to eloquence, nor does he try
by any artifice to heighten the effect, but this absence of effort
renders the effect all the greater. Stanley, on the other hand,
* Stones of Venice, Introd. L 23 n.
always retained the instincts and habits of the newspaper corre-
spondent and had a keen eye to effect. Partly for this very
reason the writings of the elder man are the more pleasing to
read.
That missionary zeal which carried Livingstone in the footsteps
of Robert Moffat has been one of the great incentives to the
exploration of Africa; another has been that sense of mystery
which, from before the days of Herodotus, surrounded the question
of the sources of the Nile. No river in the whole world has had
such a fascination for the human intellect. The Nile has been in
touch with the oldest civilisations, and it has been, and is, of vital
importance to one of the most interesting regions of the earth's
surface. As its rise and fall brought plenty or starvation, all who
dwelt upon or who even visited itsbanks were bound, if they had
any intellectual curiosity at all, to wonder what was the unseen
cause of its fluctuations. This problem fascinated, among others,
John Hanning Speke (1827-1864), Richard Burton (1821— 1890)
and Samuel Baker (1821-1893). Explorers have not, as a class,
been very articulate, and what they have written often owes its
merit to plenitude of adventures and of new information rather
than to skill in arrangement or expression. But no one of
the whole class could be worse as a writer than Speke. His
Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863) was his as
regards its substance, but it owes whatever merit it possesses to
the labour of his editor, who turned his shapeless sentences into
English and brought order out of chaos. Baker's works. The
Albert JVyanza (1866), The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia (1867),
Ismailia (1874), &c., are full of interest ; but he too may be left to
the geographer and explorer.
The case is very different with Sir Richard Burton, scholar
and soldier, gentleman and adventurer, a knight-errant astray by
some strange chance from the Middle Ages, his head filled with
the lore which was foreign to his predecessors, but his heart as
hotly athirst for adventures as Don Quixote's own. In his
verses on Burton's death Swinburne suggests a comparison with
Raleigh, and in all history and fiction there is probably no figure
so like Burton's as that of the great Elizabethan adventurer.
MISCELLANEOUS PROSE I04I
Burton's private education in France and Italy perhaps laid the

foundation of that love of languages which afterwards distinguished
him. His career at Oxford was brought to a close after a year's
residence by a sentence of rustication. After a short period of
service in India he began that life of travel with which his name
will always be chiefly associated. The journey recorded in the
Pilgrimage El-Medinah and Meccah (1855-1856) took place in
to
1852. The book hasthat stamp of individuality which Burton

never failed to give to his works, and it proves him to have
possessed an intimacy of knowledge of Eastern life and compre-
hension of the Eastern character almost unexampled among the
men of the West; for at every moment the traveller's life depended
upon the success of a disguise which few Europeans could have
worn for a day without detection. Probably Burton's only rival
in completeness of knowledge is Mr Doughty, the author of
Travels in Arabia Deserta.
In 1854, and again in 1856, Burton was in Africa with Speke;
but the two travellers quarrelled violently, and it was Speke who
had the honour at last to discover the sources of the Nile. There
was evidently something intractable in Burton he could not act:
with others ; and so he was time and again shunted on to a siding,

and his immense knowledge of languages and of science, his
energy, daring, enterprise and originality, all ended in failure,
judged by the world's measure of success and failure. He was
born to quarrel with officialdom. His name was struck off the army
list, and he was dismissed from the consular service, though in
the latter case he was soon reinstated. Curiously enough, he suc-

ceeded at Trieste another man of letters, Charles Lever, who,
like himself, " drank fierce and fast " of the cup of life ; and, like
Lever, he lived and died there lamenting the fate which had
consigned him to this quiet nook of the Adriatic. His latter
years however were not without the relief of travel in Midian

and in Africa.
Burton's books of travel, whether they deal with Asia, or
Africa, or America, apart from their stores of fact and their
records of adventure, have a special value from the deep
all
impress of individuality which they bear. It is this which gives

W. 66
his books the cachet of literature. His style, if it were possible to
disjoin it from the man, would not be very good; but it is Burton,
and therefore just the fittest and best for his purpose. And the
record of a personality comparable to Raleigh's, inscribed by his
own hand, is clearly a precious possession. On the side of
scholarship, Burton's most remarkable performance was, doubt-
less, the translation of The Arabian Nights (1885-1888); but the
truth is that the interest in that translation rests largely upon

ethnological grounds ; and it has been shown since Burton's
death that, simply as a translator, he was indebted, a good deal
more than he had a strict right to be, to his predecessor Edward
William Lane (1801-1876), the first man who made a version
directly from the Arabic into English, a most accomplished Eastern
scholar, and the author of an admirable book on the Manners and
Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). Regarded simply
as a translation, and apart from the interest alluded to, there
is probably as much version of Camoens
merit in Burton's
(i 880-1 884) as in the more celebrated Arabian Nights. The
former at least reads well, and has won the praise of those
Portuguese scholars who are entitled to an opinion about its
merits as a translation.
Besides such professional or quasi-professional travellers and
explorers as these, there were two literary nondescripts of the
period. Borrow and Laurence Oliphant, who had a full share of
the wanderer and adventurer in their blood, and who put enough
of it into their writings to give them a close kinship with this
group.
George Borrow (1803-1881) is certainly one of the most
interesting,and in some respects one of the most puzzling, figures
in recent literature. There are several points of contact between
him and Burton. Both were notable linguists, though Burton's
scholarship was much more accurate than that of Borrow, whose
philology was ingenious and sometimes erratic conjecture rather
than science. Both were men of splendid physique, daring to
the verge of foolhardihood, sworn foes to convention, friends to
the outcast and f gangrel classes of all countries.
' Both were "first-
class fighting men " ; but there is a difference between the hero of
the bouts of fisticuffs narrated in Lavengro and the author of Tite

Book of the •Szf(7r</(i884). Whether it be the weapon that makes
the difference or no, it is certain that the comparison with the
knight-errant, which is would
inevitable in the case of Burton,
never be suggested in that of Borrow. had a Both, finally,
marked strain of the gypsy character if not of gypsy blood, and

both were as restless as gjrpsies under any sort of restraint, and
as eager for a free wandering life.
Burton's most adventurous travels took place in lands, not

indeed very far off when distance is measured by parasangs, but
morally distant by all the breadth of that gulf which separates
East from West
Borrow in his earlier years might seem to have
made it his task toshow that characters and scenes almost as
strange, and adventures scarcely less thrilling, might be encountered
without crossing the narrow seas. It was long a moot point how
far his books were faithful to fact and how far they were simply
fictitious ; but his biographer, Mr W. J. Knapp, who has followed
his footsteps with patient industry and devotion, declares that

"no truer books were ever penned than The Bibk in Spain and
—
Lavengro Romany-Rye." He admits, indeed, that Borrow is un-
trustworthy in dates and such-like details, and it is possible that
an element not of Uteral fact may have escaped the biographer
but his judgment of the essential truth of Lavengro (1851) and its
sequel The Romany-Rye (1857) establishes these strange books as
parts of an autobiography \ These two stories, however, only carry
the narrative down to 1825, when Borrow was twenty-two years old.
The travels there narrated were of the kind in which Borrow
dehghted all through his life. He always chose the byway and
shimned the highway. He traversed, first and last, the greater
part of Europe and much of the East j but his chosen companions
were always wanderers and outcasts, and the scenes he delighted
in were those which no other foreigner had ever visited. His
special friends were the gypsies, and the greater part of his
literary work, from The Zincali (1841), an account of the gypsies
of Spain, to Romano Lavo-LU (1874), a glossary of the English
1 He is confinned by Francis Hindes Groome (1857-1903), the editor of
the foimei book and one of the greatest English authorities on gypsies.
66—2
gypsy language, was more or less intimately associated with
them.
The charm of Lavengro and, in a less degree, of The Romany-
Rye lies in their singular freshness of tone, their defiance of
convention, their wealth of curious information, the exceeding
strangeness that such things could happen and such lives could
be led in a country so hedged in and plotted out as England,
above all in the sense of abounding vitality which Borrow imparts.
There is nothing like the joy of physical life which glows through
his pages, except that which animates also the works of Christo-
pher North. But keen as was his relish for a wandering and
adventurous life, Borrow seems to have cared little for nature in
the Wordsworthian sense. He enjoyed alike breezy mountain
and shady lane, but he took them very much for granted : they
were his environment, and there was no need to fuss and worry
about them. The material upon which he worked was man, as
man is when he is formed by contact with nature.
Borrow was not however wholly absorbed by his passion for
the outcast races, but retained an interest also in the literary,
and social questions of civilised society. Above all, he
political
was through life profoundly interested in the religious questions

which were then dividing England. He was violently anti-Papal,
and hated with a bitter hatred all that tended to draw England
nearer to Rome. It was this passion, combined with his know-
ledge of languages, that induced him to turn towards the Bible
Society, and commended him to it. The employment was in
some respects highly congenial, for he had to travel in many
countries, as well as to translate the Scriptures for their inhabi-
tants, and to distribute copies among them. From this occupa-
tion Borrow's greatest book. The Bible in Spain (1843), took its
origin. This narrative of his travels as a colporteur in Spain was
the most astonishing as well as the most literary of all the reports
the Bible Society ever received from its agents. The Society
doubtless expected an elaborate and edifying tract, full of piety,
of zeal for the scriptures and of assurances of their wonderful
influence upon a benighted population. There are indeed such
things in the book, but there is also a breezy worldliness which,
probably, the Society took with an uneasy pleasure — surprised

and pained that so much of the Old Adam should survive, yet
interested against their
will. There are many books about Spain
which describe Madrid and Seville and Cordova and Cadiz, the
Alhambra, the Escurial, the cathedrals, the art-galleries ; but there
is probably no other —
at least none written by an Englishman
which so lays open the heart of the country, the character of the
people, the mode of life, not only off the beaten track, but among
classes about whom the vast majority of Spaniards themselves
probably know nothing. If The Bible in Spain be " one of the
truest books ever penned" (and it has the stamp of truth), it is
was not less surprising to the

easy to believe that, in great part, it
Spaniard than Lavengro was to the Englishman.

If any man of the nineteenth century might dispute with
Burton the title of the modem Raleigh it would be Laurence
Oliphant (1829-1888). Both the Victorians, as well as the Eliza-
bethan, were in some sense ; but Oliphant was more
visionaries
spiritual and less '
sensible,' in two meanings of the word, than
the others. Like Burton's, his life is a record of apparent failure.
Nothing that he did, nothing that he wrote, seems to realise the
possibilities that were in him ; and yet everything from his hand
bears, more or less clearly, the stamp of genius, even if it be
sometimes a genius near allied to madness.
Oliphant seemed to be a predestined wanderer. He was bom
at Cape Town, and, after a brief school career at Salisbury, he
spent far more of his life abroad than in England. In his boy-
hood he travelled in company with his parents; but from early
manhood he roamed over the world by himself, visiting Russia,
America and the Far East, acting as newspaper correspondent in the
Crimea and again in the Franco-Prussian War, and coming through
many strange and thrilling adventures. It is amazing to reflect
that only half-a-century has passed since he found a mediaeval
system of civilisation prevalent in Japan, and since he barely
escaped with his life from the extraordinary attack of Japanese
swordsmen narrated in his Episodes in a Life of Adventure (1887).
After his return wounded from the lâtion to Japan there followed
the longest of his residences during manhood within the shores of
Britain. It was a period of literary and political activity. He was
one of the founders of The Owl; his frequent papers in Blackwood's
Magazine were among its most attractive features in the sixties;
he was gathering the materials for his most remarkable book,
Piccadilly (1870); from 1865 to 1867 he was member of Parlia-
ment for the Stirling Burghs. Then, suddenly, he resigned and
went to America to join the religious community of the
"Prophet" Thomas Lake Harris.
This action brings into startling prominence one of the two
sharply-contrasted aspects of Oliphant's character. On the one
hand, he was among the most practical of men, shrewd in business,
a keen financier, a subtle diplomatist. On the other hand, he
was a dreamer and a mystic, capable of surrendering himself to the
most absurd delusions and, when under their influence, utterly
destitute of judgment. This polished gentleman, accomplished
writer and shrewd man of the world, pronounced Harris "the
greatest poet of the age," and submitted to be, for the benefit of
a vulgar schemer, what he disdained to be for his own sake, an —
instrument for money-making. For not the least curious part of
the strange story is that Oliphant's occupations as a member of
the community were of the most worldly sort, and the most
conspicuous difference between the life of religion, as he was
instructed to lead it, and the life of the world, was that in the
former the gains went to another man. Irritating however as is
this connexion with Harris in the eye of common sense, it was
just the combination of an enthusiasm bordering upon insanity
with a keen practical intellect that made Oliphant the man of
genius he was. The outcome of his religious enthusiasm
literary
is to be found in Sympneumata (1885) and Scientific Religion
(1888), the former of which purports, and undoubtedly was

believed by them, to be a revelation to his wife, which she dictated
to him. They are not great books, but they are very remarkable
psychological documents.
As a man of letters, Oliphant will rank neither as a religious
philosopher, nor as a traveller, nor as a novelist, but as a satirist
of society. His books of travel. The Russian Shores of the Black
Sea (1853), Episodes in a Life of Adventure, &c., interesting
as they are, are not unique like Burton's. His Piuadilly and
Altiora Peto (1883) have the form of novels, but not the reality.
Their vitality lies in the satire which runs through them. English
society is keenly analysed and criticised in Piccadilly and in
Fashionable Philosophy {-LiiZi). In The Autobiography of a Joint-
Stock Company America is treated in a similar way. As a satirist,
Oliphant had the great advantage of adequate knowledge. To
him, as one of the most fascinating personalities of the time,
every grade of society was open. To a man so profoundly
a visionary who thought the world well lost for the
religious,
guidance of the prophet Harris, the ideals of society seemed mean
and sordid ; and if society is justified in criticising what seem to
be his aberrations, it might be worth its while considering whether
there be not an element of truth in his criticism too.
Knowledge of the Far East was scanty when Laurence
OHphant published his Narrative of the Earl of Elgin's Mission
to China and Japan (1859), but in the half-century which has
since elapsed great additions have beenmade to it As regards
Japan, no one has contributedmore than Lafcadio Heam (1850-
1904), a man remarkable alike for his life and for his writings.
He owed his peculiar Christian name to the place of his birth,
Leucadia in the Ionian Islands. From his youth he was a
wanderer and a rebel against the conventions of society. In the
beginning of his literary career he made his living by journalism
on the staflF of an American paper. What was wanted by the
readers was scarcely Uterature j but Heam was by instinct a man
of letters, and in the teeth of circumstance he forced his way
to recognition in the profession of his choice. His American
experiences made him familiarly acquainted with the Southern
States and with the French West Indies, about which he has
written with great vividness and charm. But he had heard the
call of the East, and, leaving America, he accepted a position as
lecturer on English literature in the University of Tokio. He
married a Japanese wife, adopted in great measure the habits of
the people among whom he Uved, and thus acquired an intimacy of
knowledge such as none can hope to gain who are content to
look on from the outside. There has lately been some exaggera-
tion of Hearn's literary merit, but his Glimpses of Unfamiliar
Japan (1894), Kokoro (1896), Gleanings in Buddha-Fields (1897),
Japan : an Attempt at Interpretation (1904), as well as his other
works dealing with that country, are books of value alike for
substance and for form.

If it is only occasionally that the traveller deserves notice as a
man of letters, still more rare in which the pure
the cases are
sportsman does There are however three or four in this
so.
class whom it would be unjust to pass over. William Scrope

(1772-1852) describes The Art of Deer-Stalking (1838) with a
complete absorption in the subject, and a conviction of its suffi-
ciency to satisfy the soul of man, which would move the most
apathetic. John Colquhoun (1805— 1885) in The Moor and the
Loch (1840), though his English is not impeccable and his
occasional verses are little better than doggerel, shows the spirit
of the poet as well as of the sportsman, and gives fascinating
descriptions of the arts of fishing and grouse-shooting as practised
in their older and, as some hold, their finer forms in the High-
lands of Scotland. Still greater praise due to Charles St John
is
(1809-1856), who added to the merits of Colquhoun a higher

grade of accomplishment as a field naturalist, and whose Wild
Sports and Natural History of the Highlands (1846), Tour in
Sutherlandshire (1849) and Natural History and Sport in Moray
(1863) are among the most delightful of all the books of their
class.St John's best-known piece of work is the story of the
Muckle Hart of Ben More, which was the means of first bringing
him to the notice of men whom he, in his modesty, considered
more literary than himself; but there is much besides in his
books which is hardly less attractive than that admirable story.
Finally, William Bromley-Davenport's Sport (1885), for its spirit
and vivacity, well deserves a place beside these classics. In
particular, the story of salmon-fishing in Norway is in its kind
unsurpassed, and the speechless grief of the fisherman on the
escape of the '
record ' salmon is among the things which cannot
be forgotten.
There is plainly a certain relation between these men and the
author of The Gamekeeper at Home (1878), Wild Life in a Southern
County (i8jg), The Amafeur Poacher (1879), The Life of the Fields
(1884),and many other works of the same type. But in truth
Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) belongs, not to the class of sports-
men, but to that of field-naturalists and observers, like Gilbert
White of Selborne. There is a good deal of poetic feeling in the
works named. This scion of a Wiltshire yeoman stock united in
a degree scarcely paralleled the tastes of the observer of nature
and of the man of books, and it is that union which gives him his
place in literature. No English writer has ever possessed a more
minute acquaintance with the facts of nature. But this, which is
his strength, is also his weakness. His matter, in great part, is
and many of the admired passages are little better than

trivial,
catalogues of the common sights and sounds of the country.

The books are pleasant reading, but the reader who is not an
expert in natural history will find that he has carried little away
from them.
Perhaps it was a half-consciousness of this defect which led to
a gradual change in the later works of Jefferies, to the intro-
duction of a mystical element and to the freer play of imagination.
This is exemplified in Wood Magic (1881) and in the later of his
two books of autobiography. The Story of my Heart (1883). Its
predecessor, Bevis (1882), the story of an imaginative boyhood,
is a widely different production, which needs only concentration
in order to rival even Mark Twain's admirable Tom Sawyer.
The difference between thisand The Story of my Heart brings
out with great clearness one of the defects of Jefferies. Under
an appearance of simplicity he conceals a high degree of sophisti-
cation. Accordingly, when he passes beyond childhood, he is
not content to narrate the facts of his life ; and in The Story of
my Heart he seems to be perpetually straining after something
which he cannot reach. If his books on nature chronicle small
beer, they have the advantage over the mystical volumes in that
they are more sincere and genuine.
It is desirable that the last name of
all should be of greater
weight than those which have just been mentioned; and it will
be not unfit if it carries also that suggestion of mournfulness
which we associate with the end of an age. The sense that here
lOSO THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
and now isfin de silcle is illusory. Every year begins and ends a
century ; every year is the start as well as the close of an age.
Yet what is never true of the whole may be true of the part. The
individual dies though the race lives on; and there are phases
and aspects of the work of the race too in which we see the
evidence of decadence and death. Certainly never in recent
years, perhaps never in the history of literature, have these been
more conspicuous than in the case of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).
Mournfulness of the deepest is linked with his name, but so
also is genius in a degree rarely surpassed in this generation.
He is the gleaner of fleurs de mal. He brings to mind that
creation of Hawthorne's weird fancy, the fungus brilliant but fatal,
which can only grow from a dead man's heart.

The son of distinguished parents, Wilde seemed from boyhood
to be marked put for a great career. At school, at Trinity College,
Dublin, and at Oxford, he took without effort that foremost position
which others win with sweat of brain. It would have been well
forhim had success been less easy. In his last and greatest book
he tells how his mother had loved to quote Carlyle's translation
of Goethe's lines,
"Who never ate his bread in sorrow,

Who never spent the midnight hours
Weeping and waiting for the morrow,
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers."
He says that he had utterly rejected this doctrine, and loved only
the suimy side of the garden of life. He learnt at last that life
without shadow is as incomplete as life without sunshine. "Those

who know what beauty is " had always interested him ; he learnt
to be interested also in " those who know what sorrow is." But
before he did so his days were drawing to an end, and his great
powers had been frittered away on work which was only occasion-
ally worthy of them. His fatal defect is that he was, almost
through life, what he calls himself, a. fl&neur, & poseur; and it is
the sincere and the earnest which endures.

Even in what was best in the Oxford of Wilde's day there
were elements which nourished the unwholesome part of his
MISCELLANEOUS PROSE I05I
nature. It was the time when Ruskin's influence was at its
height ; and Wilde was a disciple, but an eclectic one. The basis
of Ruskin's aestheticism is ethical : Wilde adopted theêstheticism,
but eliminated the morals. The affectations of the new aesthetic
school are hardly worth recalling. Theirs was a religion of beauty
alone. Art was to be cultivated for its own sake and not for
anything extraneous. In Wilde's case we have proof from the
start that there was affectation at the root of all this ; from time
to time some strong emotion sweeps the affectation away, and we
feel the beating of the poet's heart. The noble apostrophe to
England, Ave Imperatrix, was the product of such a moment, and
isto be found in the early volume of Poems (1881), written in the
full tide of the aesthetic movement. So is the touching and pro-
foundly sincere Requiescat: —
"Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.
All her bright golden hair

Tarnished with rust.
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.
Lily-like, white as snow.

She hardly knew
She was ^ woman, so
Sweetly she grew.
Coffin-board, heavy stone.

Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone,
Shb is at rest.
Peace, peace, she cannot hear

Lyre or sonnet.
All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it."
But Wilde far too seldom struck such notes, and though he was
capable of rising above affectation, the habit of insincerity grew
upon him and emasculated the greater part of his writings. The
IOS2 THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
bulk of his verse is over-wrought, and we tire of it, and long for
something less sophisticated.
Wilde was and he soon turned aside from lyrical
versatile,
verse to prose and the drama. His dramas are productions of

extraordinary skill and talent which have won a place in the
esteem of continental critics scarcely rivalled by those of any
contemporary English dramatist. Lady Windermere's Fan (1893)
is a miracle of wit; and A Woman of no Importance (1894) and
The Importance of being Earnest (1899) ^^^ monuments of
almost exhaustless ingenuity and resource. They are all " trivial
comedies for serious people." It pleased Wilde to pose as a
trifler ; but he was a trifler who

and there is often a won-
thought,
derful suggestiveness in his lightest banterand his wildest paradox.
In non-dramatic prose too Wilde showed the highest skill. He
was an artist in words in whose person the traditional wit of his
countrymen seemed to be concentrated. His stories and his
critical essays alike are brilliant with epigram. The Decay of
Lying, in the volume of critical essays entitled Intentions (i&gi), is
hardly to be matched for pungent wit. Notwithstanding the air of
persiflage easy to detect a serious purpose beneath. Occa-
it is
sionally, as inThe Soul of Man under Socialism, which appeared

in The Fortnightly Review in 1891, the seriousness comes close to
the surface.
But the great overthrow which befell Wilde in 1895, his
condemnation to imprisonment with hard labour for two years,
made him almost a new man ; and the two productions which we
owe to that awful experience, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898),
written after his release, and the prose work De Profundis (1905),
which was composed in prison, overshadowed everything else he
ever wrote. They are unique in English literature, perhaps in
all literature ; for probably no one else, gifted like Wilde, ever
underwent such an experience.
These two works bring home to the most thoughtless the
tragic difference which may underlie sentences verbally identical.
Experience proves that habitual criminals, hardened by custom
and coarse of nerve, may pass through periods of imprisonment
longer than Wilde's with little change. But to the sensitive,
MISCELLANEOUS PROSE I0S3
delicately-nurtured poet the two years stretched out into an age

of agony. His whole mental horizon changes. If unreality is
the vice of his earlier work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol is even
appallingly real. Though the style is rhetorical, the emotions
which it expresses are grimly genuine ; even Wilde's extraordinary
cleverness could not have invented such feelings. Here at last
the conventions of an artificial age are flung aside, and we are
face to face with naked humanity. Even greater is De Profundis.
Surely no such cry ever before came from the deeps. In contact
with stern facts, Wilde unlearns all the philosophy of pleasure to
which he had devoted his life, and is forced to acknowledge the

truth of his mother's teaching. Almost, it would seem, he was
delivered from his own nature. He stood on the verge of moral
salvation. In thought at least he reached heights whither he had
never soared in the days of his facile and brilliant success, and
his greatest literary bequest is this cry of a soul in agony. But
the trial which made him anew also broke him. He turned from
the prison a doomed man, and some two years on Novem-
later,
ber 30, 1900, he died, —he who had loved youth and dreaded
agCj old at forty-five. The curtain falls in gloom at once upon
the century and upon the most brilliant figure of its closing years.
But to him who reads De Profundis thoughtfully and sympatheti-
cally, it is a gloom which is flecked with light, a death which
carries with it the promise of resurrection.

INDEX
Acton, Lord, quoted, 891 ; 903-905 Austin, John, 153 ff., 196, 203
Adams, Sarah Flower, 361 Aytoun, W. E., 328 f., 336, 513
Aikin, Lucy, 182
Ainsworth, Harrison, 619, 6n, 685 Bacon, quoted, 117, 332; 648, 836,
Alexander, William, 79s 838. 917. 926, 956
Alison, Sir Archibald, 907 f. Bagehot, Walter, 156, 164, 197,
Allingham, William, 509-570 203-208, 435, 453, 828; quoted,
Aristophanes, 332 859; 884, 957, 963, 980
Aristotle, quoted, 117; 838, 858 Bailey, P. J., 343, 346-349. 460
Arnold, Sir Edwin, 603-605 Baillie, Joanna, 361
Arnold, Matthew, 12,96; quoted, 100, Bain, Alexander, 157 n., 174
119; 32 If 328; quoted, 354; 413, Baker, Samuel, 1040
444 f., 453 ff-; quoted, 455; 464, Balfour, Graham, quoted, 810
465-480; and Clough, 464-465, Balladists, the, 328-333
467 ; his abandonment of poetry, Ballantynes, the, 923
466-467 ; his attitude to religion, Balzac, 776
467-470; his position in history, Bamford, Samuel, 350
468-469 on modern life, 47CK4J1
; Banim, John, 625, 629-€3i, 636
his melancholy, 471;' His verse Banim, Michael, 630 f.
critical, 471-472; classical, not Barbauld, Aima L., 182
romantic, 472 f. ; and French Barham, R. H., 331, 338
literature, 472-473; and Words- Barnes, William, 399-402, 825
worth, 473 ; his passion for truth, Barrett, E. See Browning, E. B.
474; his elegiac verse, 474-476; Barrie, J. M., 739, 761 n., 807
- "his sense of loneliness, 476-477; Barton, Bernard, 240 f.
the charge of coldness, 478-480; Bayly, T. H., 334
502. 527, 533, 538, 560, 604; Beaufort, Louis de, 848
quoted, 723; 836, 840, 874, 946, Beddoes, T. L., quoted, 30; 240, 263,
948 f., 957, 961-976; on classicism 273-282, 283, 343
and romanticism, 963-966 ; on Beers, H. A., 17 n., 274, 427;
France and Germany, 966-968; quoted, 660
on disinterestedness, 968-969; on Benn, A. W., 98 n., 120
knowledge, 969-971; on the pro- Bentham, Jeremy, 152 f., 155, i6i
vincial spirit, 971-972; his political Berkeley, Bishop, 185
essays, 973-974; bis theological Besant, Walter, 797, 799
writings, 974-976 ; 979. 1014, Bigs. J- Stanyan, 514
1019, 1023 Black, William, 798-799
Arnold, Thomas, 96, 103, 453 ff. Blackie, J. S., 519, 572-573
quoted, 849; 850-854, 877f.,925f. Blackmore, Richard, 765, 797-798
Arnold, Thomas, junior, quoted, 456 Blackwood, John, quoted, 651
Arnold, William Delafield, 851 Blackwood, William, 930 f.
Austen, Jane, 623, 681, 684, 708 Blackwood's Magazine, 283, 932,
Austin, Charles, 153, 831 f. 935 ff-. 9S0. 997
ios6 INDEX
Blair, Robert, 505 Paracelsus, 313-316, 414 f. ;his
Blanchard, Laman, 334 dramas, 316-322 ; and Shakespeare,
Bodley, J. E. C, quoted, 8 317 ff.; 327, 343, 368, 372, 383 f.,
Bon Gaultier Ballads, 329, 332 f. 385. 394. 397. 404. 411-443; his
Borrow, George, 20, 755, 825, 1042- Germanism, 412, 414; Christmas
1045 Eve and Easter Day, 413-415,
Boswell, James, 65i, 839, 917 427-428; his view of asceticism,
Bosworth, Joseph, 824 415-416; his dramatic monologues,
Boucicault, Dion, 758 f. 417 ff., 435 ff.; poems of love,
Bouhours, D. 25 , 417-419 ; poems dealing with
Bowles, W. L., 367 religion, 419-423 ; poems on art,
Bowring, John, 258 423-427 ; and medisevalism, 427-
Boyd, A. K. H., 977 429 The Ring and the Book, 430-
;
Bradlaugh, Charles, 587 433; his later poems, 433, 439;

Bray, A. E., 708, 710 his translations from the Greek,
Bridges, Robert, quoted, 529 n. 433-434; The Inn Album, 439-
Brimley, George, 953 441 ;his merits and defects, 441-
Broad Church Movement, the, 93 ff., 443; 452. 460. 469. 478, 502, 561,
98 ff., 103 ff. S67, 595. 601, 607, 747, 777, 781,
Bromley- Davenport, W., 1048 787, 789, 793 f., 1017, 1026 ff.
Bronte, Charlotte, 362, 372, 658, 685, Buchanan, Robert, 495, 574-585!
710, 711-722; her childhood and his independence, 575, 584; his
education, 711-713; Jane Eyre, Northern poems, 576-577; London
714-717; romance and realism, Poems, 576, 577-578; The Book of
714-715; her want of humour, Orm, 577, 580-581 ; and Pre-
717-718; Shirley, •jiS-'jig; Villette, Raphaelitism, 579 f. ; his religion,
720, 721; 732, 738, 740, 770 583 the leader of a new return
;
Bronte, Emily, 372 f., 595, 710 f., to nature, 585

719. 723-724 Buckle, H. T., 197-202, 224 n.
Bronte, Patrick, 711 Bulwer, E. L. See Lytton, E.
Bronte, Patrick Branwell, 712 Bulwer
Brooke, Stopford, 490 Burke, 174, 378, 603, 707
Brooks, Shirley, 333 Burne-Jones, Edward, 446, 528 f.
Brough, Robert, 349, 541 Burne-Jones, Lady, quoted, 546
Brougham, Henry, 934 Burns, 58, 333, 361, 378, 388, 399 ff.,
Brown, George Douglas, 811 418, 683, 715, 807, 947
Brown, Dr John, 86, 87; quoted, Burton, J. H., 901 f.
349; 36s. 519; quoted, 522; 957, Burton, Sir Richard, 644, 1040-1042,
958-960 1043
Brown, Oliver Madox, 798 Bury, J. B., quoted, 14, 15, 1006
Brown, Thomas, 29, 142, 143, 989 Butler, Samuel, 813-814
Brown, T. E., 21, 572 Byron, 26, 44, 240, 272, 293ff.,
Browning, E. B., 252, 327, 344, 360, 321, 347t 367. 478 f-i 613. 618,
362, 365, 366-372 her Sonnets
; 644, 650, 655, 861, 924, 937, 969,
from the Portuguese, 369 ; Aurora 989
Leigh, yio-yji; 413.414. 4Si. 503.
602, 781, 840 Caine, Hall, quoted, 492 ; 495
Browning, Robert, 12; quoted, 17; Caird, Edward, 191-193
57, 72, 107, 113, 122, 128; quoted, Caird, John, 109-110
254; 272,, 283, 288; quoted, Cairnes, J. E., 207, 209
297 n. ; 309-326; his early life, Calverley, C. S., 333, 595, 606-607
309-310; and Italy, 311, 412, 426- Cambridge Shakespeare, The, 955
427, 429; Pauline, 311-312; and Cambridge University, 291 ff,, 831 f.
Shelley, 312, 411; and Tennyson, Campbell, Dykes, quoted, 29
312-313.326, 383 f-> 4"> 442.443; Campbell, J. McLeod, 92-93
INDEX IOS7
Campbell, John, Lord, 131 Chaldee Manuscript, The, 144, 940 f.

Campbell, Thomas, 522, 960 Chalmers, Thomas, 82, 85, 86-91
Canterbury Tales, The, 332 his oratory, 87 ; his statesmanship,
Carleton, W., 357, 624, 625-629, 88 ff. ; and the Disruption, 89 f.
636 and German thought, 91; 113
Carlyle, Jane Welsh, 35, 37 f., 100, Chambers, Robert, 215-217
737; quoted, 927 Chamier,' Frederick, 642-643
Carlyle, Thomas, 4, 8; quoted, 10; Chapman, 482
12 ff. , 30-79; 20, 22, his early Chateaubriand, quoted, la
life. 30-32; Ws style, 31, 49-51; Chatterton, 798
his humour, 31, 33, 50; and Chaucer, 495, 536
Froude, 33 ff. ; and Lady Ash- Chesney, C. C, 908
burton, 38 ; on genius, 38 ; and
• Chorley, H. F., 613
German literature, 39 ff. ; on Cole- Church, R.W., quoted, 129; 135-137
ridge, 40; on German philosophy, Clapham sect, the, 84
41 ; on French Fhilosophism, 42 ; Clare, John, 241-245
and Goethe, 43 ff. ; on philosophy, Classicism, 275, 933, 963 ff., 986
43 OB-artj.^; and religion, 47 ff.,
; Clive, Mrs Archer, 365-366, 708
76; at Craigenputtock, 51-52; his Clough, A. H., 204, 413, 444, 453 f.,
criticism, 52-59; on bit^raphy, 53, 455-465; TTie.Bothie of Tober^na-
6<) ff. ; on history, 53, 6g S.; oil Vuolich, ^n-^1,%-, Dipsychus, 459-
•
Scott, 56; on Voltaire, 56-57;. on 461; his attitude to religion, 454,

Bums, 58 on Johnson and Hume,
; 461-464 ; and Matthew Arnold,
59-61 ; at Cheyne Row, 61 Sartor ; '
464-465, 467, 474
Resartus, 61; French Revolution, Colbum, publisher, 709
6 2-63, ^7 ^* » Heroes, 64 ; Chartism, Colenso, J. W., iio-iii, 414
^4 1., Cromwell, 65 : Past and Coleridgeans, the, 98 ff., 161
Present, 65, 77; Latter^Day J'am- Coleri(ê, Derwent, 831 f.
phlets, Sg, fft Life of Sterling, QoTeridgei, Hartley, 254-^57
65, 76 ; Frederick the Great, .65, Coleridge, Henry Nekonij 831 f.
71 ff. ; his supposed worship of Coleridge,- S. T., 24, 27 ff., 40 f.
success, 71-73 ; on might and right, '43 f-. sSi.; quoted, ^155, 375;
73 f. ; and Aristotle, 74 ; his f.,489
560, 633, 773, 836, 932,
idealism, 75 ; his politics, 76 939' 1014
charged wilE^lf-contradiction, 77; Coleridge, .Sara, 364, 365
his influence, 78 ; on the oiânisa- Collier, J. P., 954
tion of labour, 78-79; 86, 92, CoUins, J. Churton, his Early Poems
99 f.; quoted, loi, 122; 145, 153, of Tennyson, 297 n.
158, lOi, 200 f., 209, 246, 288; CoUins, Mortimer, 606
quoted, 334, 335; 356, 397, 447, Collins, Wilkie, 757, 771
451, 472, 481, 527. 533, 538, 573, Gohnan, George, 666, 670
618, 624, 633, 658, 661; quoted, Colquhoun, John; 771, 1048
'
669; 675; quoted, 676; 684, 694, Commonweal, The, 541 f.

768, 777, 790. 819. 828 ff., 834, Comte, 112, 167, r78 ff., 221, 377
836 ff., 844, 866, 868 f:, 871 f., Congreve, Richard, 178-179
874 f., 904; quoted, 922-923, 926, Cook, '£iiza, 592
948 f., 1000, 1014 Cooper, Fenimore, 641, 643, 776
Carroll, Lewis. See Dodgson, C. L. Cooper, Thomas, 350, 352
Catholic Poets, the, 339-342 Copleston, E., 93, 95 f., 130
Catholic Reaction, the, 14 ff., iii ff., Corn-Law Rhymes, 58 f., 340, 245-
349, 454j 506 ff. 249
Cavour, 446 •Cornwall, Barry. See Procter, B. W.
Celtic Revival, the, 276, 353-360, ^Corson, Hiram, quoted, 383
568-585, 625 ff Cory, William, 597-599
Cervantes, 378, 618 Cowden-Clarke, Charles, 955
W. 67
ios8 INDEX
Cowden-Clarke, Mary, 955 705. 737'. 755. 757. 783 f'. 811,
Cowell, E. B., 485, 487 814, 928 f.
Crabbe, 400 Digby, Kenelm, 19
Craik, Dinah Maria, 591, 748 Disraeli, B., 334 f., ,645, ,653-659,
Crashaw, Richard, 609 685, 700, 755, 776
Creighton, Mandell, 866, 889-^892 Dixon, R. W., 529, 544-^45
Croker, Crofton, 357, 635 f. Dobell, B., 586
Cruikshank, 666 Dobell, Sydney, 349, 413, 444 f.,
Cunningham, Allan, 240 f. 1447. 451. 460. 513. 514-523;
Curzon, Robert, 1039 quoted, 525
Dobson, Austin, 334, 585
Dallas, E. S., 953 Dodgson, C. L., 815-816, 817,
Dante, 756 1037
Darley, George, 263, 276-'277, 357, Dolby, George, 676
632 Domett, Alfred, 324-325
Darwin, C, 12, 21; quoted, 33; 196, Don Quixote, 383
213 f., 216, 220,. 222, 223-232; Doughty, C. M.,: 644, 1041
i
\As, Journal of Sesiarckes, 225-226 Dojvson, Ernest, 608

Coral Reefs, 226; The 'Origin of Doyle, F. H., 293 f., 329-330,
Species, 227-230; The Descent of .605 •
Man, 230-231 on earthwoitos,

; iDramatic literature of the nineteenth
n^ ; SSS f- 980 '
:
century, the, 263 ff., 3i8ff., 361 f.,
'
Davidson, John, 610-61 c 406 ff.
Decline in literature, periods ofj 4 ff. Draper, J. W., 900

Defoe, Daniel,; 640' Drydeu, 378
Democracy, modern, 9 ff., 252, 377, Dublin University Magazine, 7%e, 632
642 f., 612,- 857 f. Duff, Sir M. G., quoted, joo
De Quincey, quoted, 23 ; 27 ; quoted, Dufferin, Lady, 364
28, 44-45; 619; quoted, 643; Duffy, C. G., quoted, 38
874, 949J.951-952 ' Dumas, Alex., 641, 776
De Tabley, J. B. Leicester Warren, ,Du Maurier, George, 706
Lord, 254, 321, 474, 504, sei- Dumont, E., 160
ses Dyce, Alexander, 954
De Tocqueville, 3
De Vere, Sir Aubrey, 266-267, Eastlake, Lady, jie Rigby, Elizabeth
357 f- Eckermann's Conversations, of Goethe
De Vere, Aubrey,. 100; quoted, 126; quoted, 48
260; quoted, 304; 358, 568 Edgeworth, Maria, 356, 622, 624
Dicey, A. V., 884 . Edinburgh literary society, 519
Dickens, Charles, 13, 183, 317, 613, Edinburgh Review, The, 613, 934 ff.,
634, 652, 658, 660, 661-687; his . 950
early history, 661-663; Sketches "by Edwards, Amelia B., 1039
Boz, 663 ; Pickwick, 663, 664-666, Egan, Pierce, 613, 666, 670
, 6^9 f. ; his plots, -655; an original Eliot, George, 133, 180 f., 362, 447,
writer, 667 the novelist of London
; 692, 621, 679, 708, 710, 722, 728-
and of low litCi 667-669;, and 747 ; her learly lifp, 728-731 her ; ,
modern tales of mean streets, 670- learning, 731, 735; her religion,
671 ; realistic' and roniantici ele- 729-730, 740 f.; translates Strauss,
ments, 67 1-673 ; an4 America, 674- 731 ; her relations with Lewes,
67 5 677 ; as a historical novelist,
> 732-733; Scenes of Clerical Life,
675 ; his public readings, 675-677; 'lZi-1i'\\ Romola, 734, 744; sources
his later novels, 677; his pathos, of her characters, 735-738 ; her
679-681; his ijhumour, 681-683; humour, 738-739; her sympathy,
his exaggeration, 682-684 ; and the 740; her clerical characters, 740-
novel of purppse, 684-686; 697, 741; on mariiiage, 741-74S
,
be- ;
INDEX IOS9
comes more philosophical, 742- French Revolution, the, 3, 7 ff., 17,
744 ;Middlemarch, 745-746 her ; 68, 468 f.

psychological problems, 746-747 . Frere, Sir Bartle, quoted, 8,71
753 f. ; quoted, 783 ; 787, 814, 1038 Froude, J. A., and Carlyle, 33 ff.;
Elizabethan Revival, the, 240, 263, 125 453. 829. 865, 866-876;
f.,
280 ff., 343 and the Tractarians, 866 ; The

Elliott, Ebenezer, 245-249, 252, 349, Nemesis of Faith, 866 f. ; the
535. 542 f. influence of Carlyle, 866, 867-868
Elton, C. I., 887 his Short Studies, 86S; his Ilistory
Emqrpon , 40, 63 f., 185, 603 of England, 868-874 ; on the 1
>
Erskine,'' Thomas, 92 Reformation, 869; his patriotism,

Essays and Reviews ^ 107, no, 414 869-870; his inaccuracy, 870-875;
Evangelical theologians, the, 82 ff. his literary merits, 873-875 ; his
Evolution, 21 f., 173, 177 ff., 214 ff., imperialism, 875 ; 885, 1000
382, 387, 821 Froude, R. H., quoted, 116; 117 f.
Ewald, G. H. A. v., 862 FuUerton, Lady G., 709
Ewing, Juliana Horatia, 816-817
Examiner, The, 661 Gait, John, 623-624, 795 f., 808
Gardiner, S. R., 866, 892-894
Faber, F. W., 127, 260, 341 Gamett, Richard, quoted, 58, 511;
Facetious verse, 331-333 982-983
Faraday, Michael, 238 f. Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 650 f., 1
Ferguson, Sir S., 358, 569 658, 685, 710 ff., 724-728, 738,
Ferrier, J. F., quoted, 146, 148; 185- 1034
186; quoted, 943 Gatty, Margaret, 815, 816-817
Ferrier, Susan, 623 Germ, The, 493, 565, 1017
Feuerbach, Ladwig A., 732 " Germanism,' 48 ff., 91, 98 f., 191,
Fielding, H., '378, 666, 684, 695 863
Finlay, George, 861-862 German and philosophy,
literature
Fischer, Kuno, quoted, 392 23 ff-. 39 98 £. 103 ff., 133,
ff-.
FitzGerald, Edward, 296; quoted, 139, 147, 184 ff., i8o, 455, 966 ff.
305; 360, 444 f-. 480-490; his Gibbon, 39; quoted, 63; 818 ff., 830,
translation of Calderon, 483-484 844, 861, 864 f., 876, 897, 9r
of Aeschylus and Sophocles, 484 Gifford, William, 935, 938
of Omar Khayyam, 485-490; and Gissing, George, quoted, 660; 665 n.
Horace, 488-489 568, 603 ; quoted,
; 680, 814-815
956 Gladstone, W: E., 82, 446, 653
Fitz-Roy, R., 224 Glascock, W. N., 642
Forster, John, 661, 676, 927-929 Gleig, G. R., 639
Forster, W. E., quoted, 334 Goethe, 13, 18, 26, 28, 30, 44ff.i 59,
Fox, Caroline, quoted, 37 ; 160 329, 347, 420, 459, 470 f., 474,
quoted, 183, 357; 919 60s, 688, 747, 897, 926 f., 957,
Fox, W. J., quoted, 312, 313, 953 967 f., 1023, 1050
Fraser, A. C, quoted, 144, 146 Goldsmith, O., ^^6
Eraser's Magazine, 633, 635 Gore, Catherine, 709 f.
Freeman, E. A., 824, 844, 848 f., Gosse, E., quoted, 278
853; quoted, 861 ; 866, 869 ff., Gothic revival, the, 24, 274
873, 875, 876-882 ; his aversion Grahame, James, 258
from philosophy, 877 ; on the unity Grant, James, 640
of history, 878-; his Teutonism, Gray, David, 335, 574-575
878, 88i; 882 ff., 892 ff., 917 Gray, Thomas, 450, 474 f., 537 f.,
French critics of English literature, 615, 960, roi9
743 Green, J. R., quoted, 115, 824; 866,
„
. ^ ,
French literature, influence of, 23 f., 886-888, 893 f. .
472 f-. 547. 966 ff- Green, T. H., 177, 189-191

io6o INDEX
Green-well, Dora, 592 Herzfeld, G., 25
Greg, W. R., 183, 725, 1036-1037 Hoffding, H., 22
Greville, Charles, 834, 918 f. Hogarth, 701
Griffin, Gerald, 357, 625, 629, 631- Hogg, James, 941
632 Holmes, O. W., 310, 958, 976
Grimm, Jacob, 825 Hood, Thomas, 249-254. 333. 338.
Grote, George, 153 ff., 173, 819, 649
848 854, 856-858
ff., Hook, Nathaniel, 848
Guest, Lady Charlotte, 354 Hook, Theodore, 338, 633-634, 670
Gtiiney, L. I., quoted, 359 Hook, W. F., 130-131
Guizot, quoted, 707 710
; Hooker, J., 214, 216
Guthrie, Thomas, 8z, 91, 215 Hope, Thomas, 644
Horace, 488 f.
Hake, T. G., Joi Home, R. H., 343-346, 952
Hall, Robert, 83 Homer, Francis, 934, 938
Hall, S. C, quoted, 242 Hort, F. J. A., 140, 903
Hallam, A. H., 293 f., 300-301, Houghton, Lord. See Milnes, R. M.
798 Howells, W. D., quoted, 680
Hallam, H., 827-829, 883 f., 892 Hughes, Thomas, 770
Halliwell-Phillipps, J. Q., 954 Hugo, Victor, 621
Hamilton, Thomas, 640 Humboldt, 224
Hamilton, Sir William, 30, r44-i5i, Hume, David, 24 f., 59 ff., 141 ff.,
163 f., 219, 941, 103S 148, ISO, 153, 166 f., 8:8 ff.
Hamilton, Sir W. Rowan, 238 f. Hunt, Leigh, 934, 937, 949-951
Hamley, E. B., 908 Hutton, James, 213
Hampden, R. D., 93, 96 Hutton, R. H., 479, 979-980
Hannay, James, 643-644, 953 Huxley, T. H., quoted, 100; I2i n.;
Hare, Julius, 29, 99, 849, 1035, 1038 quoted, 123; 135, 151, 171,201, 214,
Harrison, F., 978 216, 220, 229, 231, 232-238; his
Harte, Bret, 679 style, 232-233; his love of truth,
Harwood, Isabella, 361, 592 233-234; as a controversialist, 234,
Hawker, R. S., 260, 328, 330 f., 342 237 f.; quoted, 302 ; 766, 819, 972
Hawkins, Edward, 850
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 397, 460, Ibsen, 351, 518
,1022 Ingelow, Jean, 594 f.
Haydon, Benjamin, 984-985, 986 Ingram, J. K., 571

Hayward, Abraham, 953 Irving, Edward, 91 f., 633, 930
Hazlitt, W., quoted, 87; 932, 939, Ivanhoe, 880
952, 983
Head, Sir F. B., quoted, 362 James, G. P. R., 622
Heam, Lafcadio, 222, 1047-1048 Jameson, Anna, 955
Heber, Reginald, 259 f. Jebb, R. C, 835, 843 quoted, 886
;
Hegel, quoted, 57; 105, no, 196, 460 Jefferies, Richard, 1048-1049
Hegelians, the English, 184 ff., 218 Jeffrey, Francis, 44, 51, 75, 678 f.,
Heine, 274, 967 f., 979 749; quoted, 838, 841, 932; 934,
Helps, Sir Arthur, 1035-1036, 1038 938 f.
Hemans, F. D., 362 f., 366 Jenkyns, Richard, 129
Henderson, G. F. R., 908, 916 Jerrold, Douglas, 635
Henley, W.
E., S99-601. 808, 979 Johnson, Lionel, quoted, 507
Hennell, Charles, 730 Johnson, S., 10 f., 59 ff., 707, 917;
Henslow, J. S., 213, 223 quoted, 983
Herbert, Lord, of Cherbury, 384 Jones, Ebenezer, 352-353
Herodotus, 844 Jones, E. C, 349, 447, 542 f.
Heron- Allen, E., quoted, 4S6n. Jones, Richard, 209 n.

Herschel, Sir J., 164, 224 Jones,' Sir William, 603
INDEX I06l
Jotison, Ben, 384 Livingstone, David, 1039

Jowett, B., quoted, 94 f.; 105-107, Locker- Lampson, F., 334, 337, 606
134, 186-188; quoted, 313; 453, Lockhart, J. G., quoted, 26 ; 44,
482 64 quoted, 145 ; 282, 296; quoted,
;
Joyce, J. B., 37° 303-304; 622 f.; quoted, 633; 653;

quoted, 654; 661, 663, 921-924,
" Kailyarders, the," 805, 807 f. 930, 938, 941. 943> 944-947. 988
Kane, E. K., 1039 Lockyer, Norman, quoted, 302
Kant, 28 ff., 147 Lofft, Capel, 350-352
Kaye, J. W., 916 Longfellow, H. W., 458
Keats, 282 f., 293, 296, 312, 345, Lover, Samuel, 636
35«. 375. 409. 535. 560, 615, 798 Lovett, W., 350
Keble,J., 115 ff., 259, 260-263, 339 f., Lucretius, 423, 439
749 Lushington, Franklin, 447
Kemble, Fanny, 361-362, 919 Lushington, Henry, 447
Kemble, J. M., 823 f. Lyall, Sir Alfred, 605
Kinglake, A. W., 908, 911-916 Lyell, Sir Charles, 212-214
Kingsley, C, 98, 100, 123,458, 532f., Lyrical poetry of the nineteenth
538, 641, 658, 6S5, 753, 765-769 century, the, 322
Kingsley, Heniy, 769 Lyttelton, George, Lord, 1028
Kipling, Rudyard, 528, 605, 642 Lytton, E. Bulwer, 271-273, 366,
Knapp, W. J., quoted, 1043 389, 621, 645, 646-653, 659^ 684 f.,
Knowles, Sheridan, 263, 264-265 770
Knox, John, 917 Lytton, Robert, Lord, 601-603
Lamarck, 214 Mabinogibn, The, 354, 392 f.

Lamb, Charles, 68r, 932, 939, 958, Macaulay, T. B., 84 f., 137, 203,
983. 1033 328 f., 336 f., 354, 469, 614, 653,
London, L. E., 363, 366 679; quoted, 827; 829, 830-846;
Landor, W. S., 338, 546 f., 598, 615, and the Clapham sect, 830 f. ; at
928, 1024-1032 Cambridge, 83 1-833; ™ Parliament,
Lane, E. W., 1042 833-835 ; in India, 833 his passion
;
Langlois and Seignobos, quoted, 856 for reading, 834 f.; "an oratorical
Lassalle, Ferdinand, 792 historian," 835; his essaysi 836,
Lawrence, G. J., 770 839-840; his criticism, 836; his
Lecky, W. E. H., 19, 197, 500; literary conservatism, 837 ; not
quoted, 508 ; 570 ; quoted, 871 ;
philosophical, 838, 843; his His-
900-903 tory, 840-846 ; his style, 840-842
Le Fanu, J. S., 637 his use of detail, 842-843 his bias,
;
Leigh, H. S., 608 844-845; his treatment of enthu-

Leslie, T. E. Cliffe, 210 siasts, 845; 857. 868, 871, 874,
Lessing, 957 881, 885 f., 913; quoted, 921;
Lever, Charlfes, 357, 636-639, 641, 922, 956
700, 104 Macaulay, Zachary, 830
Lewes, G. H., 179-180, 720, 732 ff., Maccallum, M. W., 392
926-927 MacCarthy, D. F., 570, 624
Lewis, Sir G. Comewall, 205 ; quoted, M«Chntock, Sir F. L., 1039
843; 849, 858-860 MacDonald, George, 573-574, 794-
Liddon, H. P., 137-139 796
Liggins, Mr, 734, 736 M«Gee, T. D'Arcy, 570
Lightfoot, J. B., 108, 140, 903 MackaU, J. W., quoted, 491 f., 529,
Lilly,W. S., 871 532 f. ; 537
Lingard, John, 829-830 Mackay, Charles, 572
Literary Anecdotes of the XIX Cen- Maclaren, Ian. See Watson, John
tury, 391 Macleod, Fiona. See Sharp, William
io62 INDEX
Maginn, William, 356, 632-633, 635, Taylor, 159, 162; his Autobio-,
943 graphy, 159; his marriage, i6i
Mahan, A. T., 88s member of Parliament, 162 ; his
Mahony, Francis, 357, 635 aim in writing, 162 ; his Logic,
Maine, H. S., 155 f., 197, 201-203 163-167 ;his Political Economy,
Maitland, F. W., 86, 884 f., 905- 167-169; his Utilitarianism, 170;
907 and Comte, 170-171; his Exami-
Malleson, G. B., 916 nation of Hamilton, 171-172; his
Mallock, W. H., 83 n. Liberty, 172-173; 175 f., 178 f.,
Malory, 392 f. 189 f., 196 f., 208 f., 838; quoted,
Malthus, i6o, 168, 208 847, 861 ; 1000
Mangan, J. C, 356, 358-360, 571, Miller,Hugh, 91, 214-215, 217 f.
608 Milman, H. H., 263, 266, 351, 859,
Mann, Miss K., 276 862-865
Manning, H. E., 127, 129 (., 294 Milnes, R. M., Lord Houghton,
Mansel, H. L., 125, 146, 148, 151 f., quoted, 128; 292 f., 334-33'5jl56i
219 quoted,. 575, 835
Mant, Bishop, 258. 863 Milton, 294, 345 ff., 375; quoted,
Marryat, Florence, 642 380; 382, 389, 392, 443, 472,
Marryat, Frederick, 640-64?, 643 474 f-. 496. 522. 559. 756. 1025
Marsh, Anne, 709 Mitchel, John, quoted, 358
Marston, J. Westland, 566 Mitford, M. R., 267, 361 ; quoted,
Marston, Philip Bourke, 566, 588 365 f. ; 388, 708, 1033-1035
.
Martin, Lady, 955 f. Mitford, William, 819, 848, 856 ,
Martin, Theodore, 329 Moir, D. M., 623

Martineau, Harriet, 64, 178, 180, Mommsen, 845, 857, 860
181-184, 196, 208; quoted, 350 f., Montesquieu, 196
648 708, 720, 908
;
Montgomery, James, 259
Martineau, James, 181, 193-196 Montgomery, Robert, 240
Massey,. Gerald, 349, 447-448 Moore, Thomas, 333, 357, 924
Masson, David, 929 More, Hannah, 730
Maurice, F. D., 29, 99-102, 151 f., Morier, James, 485, 644
765 Morison, J. Cotter, 819
Maxwell, W. Hamilton, 639 Morley, Lord, quoted, 171 ; 975
May, Sir T. E., 883 f. Morris, Lewis, 571-572
Meredith, George, 365, 7S7, 776- Morris, William, 446, 494 f., 527,
794;, on comedy, 777; his poetry, 528-544; his early poetry, 529-
778-782 ; T/ie Ordeal of Richard 530 ; his mediaevalism, 530-531,
FeTierd, 783-786 ; his humour, 537 his view of art, 531-533 ; and
;
783 f. ; his style, 784, 703 ; psycho- social questions, 531-534, 535,
logical problems, 786-787, 792 541-544; Jason, 535-536; The
his female characters, 787, 789, Earthly Paradise, 536-538; and
79 1 f. ; his feeling for nationality, Scandinavian Uterature, 537-540
788; Rhoda Fleming, 789; The Sigurd the Volsung, 539-540 and;
Egoist, 790-792 ; Diana of the Scott, 539-540 ; his prose romances,

Crossways, 792-793; 814 544; 559. 565
Meredith, Owen. See Lytton, Robert, Motherwell, W., 328, 330
Lord Moultrie, John, 831 f.
Merivale, Charles, 860 Mozley, J. B., 135
Michelet, 857, 872 Mozley, Thomas, 135
Mill, James, 142 f. MuUer, Max, 603 f., 825-827, 867
Mill, John Stuart, 30, 44, 65, 100; Murray, John, 12, 863, 931
quoted, loi ; 122, 151 ff., 156- Murray, R. F., 608
174; his education, 156-157;' his Myers, Frederick, 566
emotional nature, 157 ff. ; and Mrs Mylne, James, 144
INDEX 1063
Naden, Constance, 597 Owenites, the, i6i .

<
Nairne, Lady, 360 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The,

Napier, Macvey, 76 ; quoted, 678 493. 529 f'
Napier, Sir W. F. P., 908-910, Oxford Movement, the, 20, in ff.,
911 ff.; quoted, 914; 915 118 ff., 127 ff., 137 f., 445, 45*.
Nation, The, 632 454 ff., 500 f., 506 ff.
Nationality, spirit of, lo, 353 ff., Oxford school of history, the, 87s ff.
445 ff., 516, 527-528, 819-820, 881
National Reformer, The, 587
Neale, J. M., 260, 341 f. Pain, James, 794
Negri, Gaetano, 744 Palgrave, Sir F., 824
Neil, Ross. See Harwood, Isabella Palgrave, F. T., 599, 977
Newman, F. W., 117, 119, I93f.,895 Pastoral poetry, 387 f.
- -Pater, Walter,
Newman, J. H., 20, 83, 85, 94, 96 978, 1019-1023
104, 114-127; his Apologia, 114- Patmore, Coventry, 493, 508 f., 510-
115 ; and Oxford, 115 ; his lefters, 512, 608
1 20 ; his Development of Christian Paton, J. Noel, 445, 510
Doctrine, 120; his choice of ' rest,' Patriotic verse, 447, 449 ff., 553 ff.
I2I-I22 his alternatives. Atheism
; Pattison, Mark, 108-109, '37 ^•' 453'
or Catholicity, 122-123; his so- 455
phistryi 123-126; his style, 126- Paul, Herbert, quoted, 597 ; 598
127; 128, 130, 133, 136 ff., 260, quoted, 962
339-340. 397' 4'4. 4S3. 500. Peacock, T. Love, 614-618
507, 685, 766, 866, 868, 1005 Pearson, Charles, quoted, 81, 851;
quoted, 1007 888-889
New Monthly Magazine, The, 249 f. Periodical literature, 612 f., 932-937
New Spirit of the Age, A, 343 Pessimism, the poetry of, 585-591
Nichol, John, quoted, 52 ; 540 Petrarch, 385
Niebuhr, 849, 852, 859, 878 Pfeiffer, EmUy, 592
Nodes Ambrosianae, 643 Philosophic Poets, the, 343-349
Noel, Roden, 566 Philosophy and literature, 14, 21
Noetics, the, 93-9S> 45* Planch^, J. R., 264 ff.
North, Christopher. See Wilson, Plato, 766j 822 ; quoted, 1012
John Plutarch, 917
Norton, 0. E., quoted, 483, 871 Poe, E. A., quoted, 345; 360, 500,
Norton, Hon. Mrs, 362, 364-365 665, 757
Poetesses, the, 360-3 7 3
Political poetry, 349-353, 448-449
Oakeley, F., quoted, 127 Pollok, Robert, 259-260
O'Connell, Daniel, 654 Pope, Alexander, 367, 378, 443, 454,
O'Donoghue, D. J., quoted, 358 n. 482f., 615, 818
625 Popularity in poetry, 400-402
O'Leary, Ellen, 570 Positivists, the, 21, 170 f., 178 ff.
Oliphant, Laurence, 755, 930, 1042, Praed, W. M., 334, 336-339, 606,
1045-1047 831 f.
Oliphant, Margaret, 749-752, 929- Pre-Raphaelites, the, 288, 343, 418,
931 445. 490-512. 527. 5*8-567, 650,
Oman, C. W. C, quoted, 909 961, 1005, 1017 ff.
O'Reilly, J. B., 570 Prior, M., 333, 337
Orinda, the Matchless, 360 Procter, A. A., 593-594
Osboume, Lloyd, 809 Procter, B. W. (Barry Cornwall), 268
O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 565-566, 585 Prout, Father. See Mahony, Francis
Ossian, 26 f., 354, 378 Pugin, A. W. N., 1017
Outram, George, 333 Punch, 689, 947-948
Owen, Robert, 18, 2j6 Purpose, the novel of, 755-757
1064 INDEX
Pusey, E. B., 105, 107, 130 if., 497-499 ; his ballads, 499 ; the
137 f- typical arlist, 499-500 ; 502 and ;
Christina Rossetti, 506-507 ; 508 f.

quoted, 511; 529, 530, 534 f.,
Quarterly Rmiew, The, 298, 365, 536, 545. 547. 558, 561. 565.
718, 932, 935 ff. 567. 596; quoted, 710; 744, 749,
777. 781. 957. 985. 1017-1019
Rbssetti, W. M., quoted, 447, 490 f.,
Rabelais, 618 494
Ramsay, Allan, 388, 584 Ruskin, John, quoted, 100, in; 209,
Randall, J. R., 359 211, 311 ; quoted, 323 f., 427, 494;
Rands, W. B., 1037-1038 531. 533 f- ; quoted, 679 ; 874,
Ranke, L. von, quoted, 885 948 f., 957, 961, 963, 977 f., 98s,
Rationalism, 14 ff., 900 986-1017; on the classical spirit,
Raynouard, Franyois, 859 986, 1005-1006 his early life,
;
Reade, Charles, 620 ; quoted, '648 ; 987-990; and Oxford, 990-991,

685, 753 f-. 757-764; as dramatist, 993 ;his conception of art, 992,
758. 759-760 ; his realism, 760, 1008-1010; his spiritual history,
763; his novels of purpose, 761 f.; 993, 1006 ; Modern Painters, 993,
The Cloister and the Hearth, 763- 994-998; 1004 ; as social reformer,
764; 768 998-1002, 1003 his relation to
;
Reid, Thomas, 142, 148 Carlyle, 1000; as Slade professor,

Rejected Addresses, 332 f. 1002; and Newman, 1005, 1007;
Religion and literature, 14 unsystematic, loio-ioii ; on archi-
Religious poetry, 257-263 tecture, 1011-1012; his limitations,
Rembrandt, 755 1012-1013; his literary criticisms,
Renan, E., 175 1013-1016; his permanent worth,
Retrospective Review, The, 935 ioi'6-ioi7 ; 1020, 1035 f. quoted, ;
Reynolds, J. H., 249, 251, 283 1039; 1051

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 983
Ricardo, D., 167 ff., 208 f.
Rice, James, 797, 799 St John, Charles, 771, 1048
Richardson, S., 440, 684, 695, 789 Saintsbury, George, quoted, 935,
Richter, 45 1031
Rigby, Elizabeth (Lady Eastlake), Salt, H. S., quoted, 586 f., 589
720, 946 Sand, George, 602
Ritchie, D. G., 222 Sartor Resartus, 32, 49, 61, 158, 635,
Robertson, F. W., 101-102 „ 933
Robertson, J. M., 199 Sceptical Reaction, Poets of the, 445,
Robinson, H. Crabb, 44, 204 452-480
Rogers, Samuel, 385 ; quoted, 698 Scherer, Edmond, quoted, 51, T71,
Rogers, Thorold, 210.; quoted, 894 743
Romanticism, 19 ff., 26 if., 274-275, SchUler, 44 ff.
933. 963 ff- Scott, Michael, 643

Rose, H. J., 118 Scott, Thomas, 83
Rossetti, Christina, 260, 360, 366, Scott, Sir Walter, 19 f., 25 f., 44, 56,
444, 493 501-507; and Dante
f., 142, 206, 260, 328, 356 f.,361,
Rossetti, 506-507; 508 479- 499. 640, 613 f., 616, 619 ff.,
D. G., 283, 311, 313, 328,
ossetti, 641, 649 f., 660, 666 f., 670 f., 674,
413. 444. 478. 485. 490-501 ; and 677, 684 f., 698, 700, 704, 708, 714;
Tractarianism, 491, 500; literary quoted, 715; 738, 753 f., 773,
influences upon him, 49^-492; his 795 f., 806, 808, 811, 880, 921 ff.,
influence upon others, 494 ; the 926, 937, 945, 960, 986, 988 ff.,
charge of fleshliness, 495 ; his 1004, 1030 f.
sensuousness, 496-497 his strength. ; Scrope, WUliam, 771, 1048
INDEX 1065
Sedgwick, A., 216, 228 Stephen, J. K., 333, 607

Seeley, J. R., 890 f., 895-899, goof., Stephen, Leslie, 19, 157 n., 188, 979,
903. 976 981-982
Senancour, 469 Stephens, W. R. W., quoted, 876
Senior, N. W., 919 Sterling, John, 12, 29, 02, 99, 866
Sewell, Elizabeth, 709 Sterne, Lawrence, 681
Sewell, W., 867 Stevenson, R. L., 722, ,5991., 620,
Seymour, R., 663 f., 687 717. 754. 757. 761, 765. 795 f-,
Seymour, Mrs, 758 f. 797. 799"8ii ; his heterodoxy, 800-
Shairp, J. C, quoted, 469 802 ; his interest in public questions,
Shakespeare, n, 283 f., 317 ff., 327, 803 ; his style, 803-804 ; his
389, 392 f., 407, 418, 432, 440, criticism, 804 ; his poetry, 805
479, 4S6, 618 f., 630, 656, 668, his romances, 805-808 ; his patrio-
680, 683, 693, 698 ff., 739, 756, tism, 807-808; his South Sea
763. 779. 781 stories, 808-809 5 •^'' J'^yll '""^
Sharp, William, 796-797 Mr Hyde, 809-810; his short
Shelley, 18, 269, 281 ff., 293 ff., 312, stories, 810-811 ; 812 f., 886,
3«i. 352. 38«. 409. 474 f-. 478, 978 f., 1037
614. 655. 714. 779 Stewart, Dugald, 29, 142 f.
Shorthonse, J., 83, 812-813 Stirling-Maxwell, Sir W., 365
Sidgwick, Henry, 175-177 Strauss, D. F., 112, 731
Simeon, Charles, 83 Stuart, Wilson, quoted, 157
Singer, S. W., 954 Stubbs, William, 848, 865, 869, 875 f.,
Skelton, Sir John, 977 882-886, 890, 892 f., 906, 917
Smedley, Francis, 769 Sunderland, Thomas, 292
Smedley, Menella B., 592, 595 Surtees, R. S., 663
Smetham, James, quoted, 49; 349 Swift, 701
Smiles, S., quoted, 12; 930-931 Swinburne, A. C, 292; quoted, 480;
Smith, Albert, 770 485, 494 f., 511, 545-561; his
Smith, Alexander, 349, 444, 447, threefold mission, 547 ; his pre-
514, 518, 523-526, 602 cocity, 547; Atalanta in Calydon,
Smith, H. M., 83 n. 548, 556; Poems and Ballads
Smith, Horace, 619, 621 f. 548-550; his romanticism, 550;
Smith, Sydney, 772, 934, 938 his mediaevalism, 550; his diîas,
Smith, William, 213 550-551 ;and the national move-
Smollett, 378, 640, 666 ment, 552-553; his patriotism,
Southey, 388, 633; quoted, 827 n., 553-555; his love of the sea, 554,
932; 1028 557 ; his development, 556 ; his
Spasmodic School, the, 288, 349, Jacobite poems, 557-558 ; his
513-526 prose writings, 558-559; his power
Spedding, James, 137; quoted, 309; of initiation, 559; his rank as a
481, 957 poet, 560-561 ; 562, 565, 763, 1040
Spake, J. H., 1040 f. Symonds, J. A., 978
Spencer, Herbert, 151, 173 n., 196,
218-222 Tacitus, 844, 872, 913
Spenser, Edmund, 387, 937 Taine, 49, 51 ; quoted, 837, 921; 922
Stanhope, Lord, 901 f. Tait, A. C, 82
Stanley, A. P., 105 ff., 109, 121, 453; Talfourd, T. N., 263, 27(>-27r
quoted, 457; 925-926 Taylor, Sir Henry, quoted, 34, 71, 97;
Stanley, H. M., 1039-1040 160, 240, 263, 268-270, 272 f.,
Staunton, Howard, 954 275.. 277. 295
Stedman, E. C, quoted, 579 Taylor, Isaac, 730 f.
Stendhal, quoted, 1023 Taylor, Tom, 758 ff.
Stephen, Fitzjames, 833 Taylor, William, 25, 30, 44, 182
io66 INDEX
Tennyson, Alfred, 8, 12, 14; quoted, Thomson, James, author of The
37; 99, 267, 283, 287, 288-309 ; his Seasons, 378
early life, 288-289; Poems, chiefly Thomson, James, pessimist, 585-591;
Lyrical, 294, 297 ff. ; Poems (1832), quoted, 652
294, 297 ff.; Poems (1842), 294, Thorpe, B., 529, 538, 824
297 ff. ; his development, 295 ff., Thucydides, 822, 844 f., 913, 917
398, 404 ff. and religion, 302, 383
; Tom Brown's School Days, 851
and science, 302 and A. H. ; Tractarianism. See Oxford Movement
Hallam, 300-301, 303 ; and Ar- Traill,H. D., 979
thurian legend, 302, 389-390 and ; Transcendentalism, 28 ff., 43, 119,
Browning, 312 f., 326, 383 f., 129, 131
411, 442 f. ; 327, 335; 374-410; Trench, R. C, 357, 824-825
his patriotism, 375, 409 ; his Trevelyan, Sir G., quoted, 84
learning, 375 f ; his peerage, 376;
.
TroUope, Anthony, 759, 764 f., 772-
and medisevalism, 376 f., 393, 776, 797
397; The Princess, 377-380; In TroUope, Frances, 709-710, 772
Memoriam, 380-385, 386 f.; Maud, Tupper, J. L., 1017
386 f., 514, 530 ; the English Tupper, M., 12, 341s, 355
/dylls, 3SJ-388 Idylls of the King,
; Turner, C. Tennyson, 289-290
390-398 Enoch Arden, 398 poems
; ;
Turner, J. M. W., 994
in dialect, 398, 403 ; the dramatic Turner, Sharon, 823
element, 399, 403-404, 406-409 Twain, Mark, 785, 1049
413, 435, 447 ; his pajinotic poems, Tyndall, John, 238
448-451 ; 452, 458,^4f., 481, 486,
502, 514, 527, izofiiii., 559, 561,
596, 602; qujjt^, 677, 688; 773, Undergraduate Papers, 546, 552
822, 969^,.^ Utilitarians, the, 21 f., 152 ff., 173 ff.,
Tennysop<Oiarles. See Turner, C. T. 190. 397. 850, 937

TemjySmi, Frederick, 290-291
iitonic theory, the, 353, 355, 878-
'Bi Veitch, John, 146
Thackeray, W. M., 84, 179, 292, 333, Venturi, Madame, quoted, 34-36
481, 618, 620, 622, 633, 639, 641, Vers de Sociiti, 333-339
- — 64!^—649-*«?-|652, 656, 660, 664,
666, 669, 673 f., 677 ff., 685 f.,
Vestiges of Creation, 215 f., 228
Vico, 196
687-706 ; bis early life, 687-689 ; Virgil, 443, 680 f.
Barry Lyndon, 689-690 ; his Voltaire, 39, 56 f., 59, 743
realism, 690, 695-696, 704 how in- ;
fluenced by periodical publication,

691 ; Vanity Fair, 692-693, 695 ff. Wade, Thomas, 240, 263, 285-286
called a cynic, 693-694 ; and me- Wallace, A. R., 227 f., 230
diocrity, 694; "not a novelist, but Walpole, Horace, 987
a satirist," 697 change in the later
; Warburton, Eliot, 911
novels, 699 ; 700-701
his lectures, Ward, James, 221 f.
Esmond, 701, 703-704 as editor, ; Ward, W. G., 127, 129, 455 f,
702; and romance, 704 ff. ; and Warren, Samuel, 644-646

the historical novel, 704 f. 718, ;
Watson, John, 811
720, 776 f., 787, 948, 957, 961, Watson, William, 474, 479, 527
1000 Watts, G. F., quoted, 1013
Thiers, L. A., 8, 857 Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 274
Thirlwall, Connop, 103-104, 849, Waugh, Edwin, 402
854 ff Webster, Augusta, 592, 595-597
Thorn, William, 241 Wells, C. J., 240, 263, 272, 283-285,
Thompson, Francis, 608-609, 610 343
INDEX 1067
Werner, A. G., 213 Wilson, John, 144, 361, 623, 930,

Westcott, B. F., 140 938, 941-94+. 951' 1044
Westminster Review, The, 161, 218, Wingate, David, 402
258, 935 f- Wiseman, N. P., r27-i29, 414, 423
Whately, R., 96-98 Witness, The, 91, 936
Whewell, W., 164 f. Wolfe, Charles, 571, 960
White, Blanco, 97 Wolfe, General, 773
White, H. K., 258 i- Women's rights, ,3?f=379
Whitehead, Charles, 663-664 Wood, Mrs Hgriry, 748
Whitworth, Prebendary, 83 n. Woolner, Thomas, 445, 508
Whyte-Melville, G. J., 770-771, 774 Wordsworth, 24, 211, 260 f., 293,
Wilberforce, S., iii, 131 f., 134, 341 quoted, 363, 369 ; 388, 401,
;
229 435. 439. 473. 498, 512. 563. 609,

Wilde, Oscar, 570, 760, 1049-1053 747, 836, 888, 933, 969, 983, 1014,
Wilkins, M. E., 1033 f. 101&, 1031
Williams, Isaac, 132, 260, 341
Williams, Sarah, 592 Yeats, W. B., quoted, 569
Wilson, David, quoted, 32, 34; 871 Yonge, C. M., 748-749
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FROM THE FUND GIVEN BY

3 1924 013 261 577

tine Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions in

the United States on the use of the text.

http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 3261 577

HUGH WALKER, LL.D., D.Litt.

at the University Press

ic)[0, 1913, 1921

could hope to make it here, except by anticipating what

not accomphshed, I should be disposed to write no

who have been good enough to help me in my work. I

am greatly indebted to Professor Henry Jones, of Glasgow,

I have dealt only with writers who have passed away.

invidious ; and the death of Swinburne and of Meredith

II. The German Influence : Thomas Carlyle .

III. Science 211

CREATIVE ART. A. POETRY

III. The Minor Poets: Earlier Period 327

CREATIVE ART. B PROSE FICTION

II. Literary and Aesthetic Criticism 932

Edward Irving, 1792-1834.

- The Nature of the Atoneinent; 1855,

John Henry Newman {continued). : , i .

Tracts for the Times (with others), 1833-1841.

The Development of Christian Doctrine, 1845.

Nicholas Patrick Wiseman, 1803-1865.

Life of William Wilberforce. (with his brother),. 1838.

The Primitive Doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration, 1856.

Brooke Foss Westcott, 1825-1901.

CHAPTER II. PHILOSOPHY.

The Principles of Political Ecortomy, 1883.

Edward Caird, 183S-1908,

James Mattineau, 1805-1900. '

Rationale of Religious Inquiry, 1836.

The Seat of Authority in Reli^on, 1890.

History of Civilisation, 1857-186(5.

The Early History of Institutions, 1S75.

History of Agriculture and Prices in England, 1866-1887.

CHAPTER III. SCIENCE.

My Schools and Schoolmasters, 1854,

Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 1844;'

CHAPTER I. THE INTERREGNUM IN POETRY.

William Thorn, i798?-i848.

Hartley Coleridge, 1796-1S49.

Biyan Waller Procter, 1787-1874.

CHAPTER n. THE NEW KINGS.

CHAPTER in. THE MINOR POETS.

Philip James Bailey, 18x6-1902.

Ernest, or Political Regeneration, 1839.

CHAPTER IV. TENNYSON.

CHAPTER VL THE TURN OF THE CENTURY.

Edward FitzGerald, 1809-1883.

J. Noel Patoil, 1821-1901.

CHAPTER VII. LATER DEVELOPMENTS.

The Queen Mother, Rosamond, l86b.

Searching the Net, 1873.

George MacDonald, 1 824-1 895.