CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY The original of tliis book is in 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 072 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE. STUDlfes IN EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE BY FREDERIC HARRISON SECOND EDITION EDWARD ARNOLD LONDON NEW YORK 37 BEDFORD Street 70 Fifth Avenue NOTE. The following essays appeared in the "Forum" of New York, and simultaneously.in London, during the years 1894-95. They have been carefully revised and partly re-written, after due consideration of various suggestions and criticisms both in England and in America. The aim of the writer was to attempt a mature estimate of the permanent influ- ence and artistic achievement of some of the prin- cipal prose writers in the earlier half of the reign of our Queen. The work of living authors has not been touched upon, nor any book of poetry, phi- losophy, or science. CONTENTS. Page I. Characteristics of Victorian Literature . 9 II. Thomas Carlyle 43 III. Lord Macaulay 64 IV, Benjamin Disraeli 88 V. William Makepeace Thackeray . . . . 107 VI. Charles Dickens 128 VII. Charlotte Bronte 145 VIII. Charles Kingsley 163 IX. Anthony Trollope 183 X. George Eliot 205 CHARACTERISTICS OF VICTORIAN LITERATURE That which in England is conveniently described as the Victorian Age of literature has a character of its own, at once brilliant, diverse, and complex. It is an age peculiarly difficult to label in a phrase ; but its copious and versatile gifts will make it memorable in the history of modern civilisation. The Victorian Age, it is true, has no Shakespeare or Milton, no Bacon or Hume, no Fielding or Scott, — no supreme master in poetry, philosophy, or romance, whose work is incorporated with the thought of the world, who is destined to form epochs and to endure for centuries. Its genius is more scientific than literary, more historical than dramatic, greater in discovery than in abstract thought In lyric poetry and in romance our age has names second only to the greatest; its researches into nature and history are at least equal to those of any previous epoch; and if it has not many great phi- losophers, it has developed the latest, most arduous, most important of all the sciences. This is the age of Sociology ; its central achievement has been the revelation of social laws. This social aspect of lO EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE l thought colours the poetry, the romance, the litera- ture, the art, and the philosophy of the Victorian Age. Literature has been the gainer thereby in originality and in force. It has been the loser in symmetry, in dignity, in grace. The Victorian Age is a convenient term in English literature to describe the period from 1837 to 1895: not that we assign any sacramental efficacy to a reign, or assume that the Queen has given any spe- cial impulse to the writers of her time. Neither reigns, nor years, nor centuries, nor any arbitrary measure of time in the gradual evolution of thought can be exactly applied, or have any formative in- fluence. A period of so many years, having some well-known name by which it can be labelled, is a mere artifice of classification. And of course an Englishman will not venture to include in his survey the American writers, or to bring them within his national era. The date, 1837, is an arbitrary point, and a purely English point. Yet it is curious how different a colour may be seen in the main current of the English literature produced before and after that year. In the year of the Queen's accession to the throne, the great Writers of the early part of this century were either dead or silent. Scott, Byroii, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb, Sheridan, Hazlitt, Mackintosh, Crabbe, and Cobbett, were gone. There was still living in 1837, Wordsworth, Southey, Camp- bell, Moore, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, De Quincey, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Mitford, Leigh Hunt, Brougham, Samuel Rogers : — living, it is true, but they had all produced their important work at some earlier date. Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Macaulay, Tennyson, I VICTORIAN LITERATURE II Browning, had begun to write, but were not generally known. The principal English authors who belong equally to the Georgian and to the Victorian Age are Landor, Bulwer, Disraeli, Hallam, and Milman, and they are not quite in the very first rank in either age. It is a significant fact that the reign of the Queen has produced, with trifling exceptions, the whole work of Tennyson, the Brownings, Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontes, George Eliot, Kingsley, Trol- lope, Spencer, Mill, Darwin, Ruskin, Grote, Macaulay, Freeman, Froude, Lecky, Milman, Green, Maine, Matthew Arnold, Symonds, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, John Morley, to say nothing of younger men who are still in their prime and promise. Widely as these differ among themselves, they have characters which differentiate them from all men of the eighteenth century, and also from the men of the era of Goethe and Scott. Can we im- agine Sartor Resartus being published in the age of Johnson, or In Memoriam in that of Byron? How different a land is the Italy which Ruskin sees from the Italy that Rogers knew ! What a new world is that of the Brontes and George Eliot beside that which was painted by Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen ! In what things would Southey and John Morley agree, except about books and pure English? Place Burke On the Sublime and Beautiful beside Ruskin's Modern Painters; compare the Stones of Venice with Eustace's Classical Tour ; compare Car- lyle's French Revolution with Gibbon's Decline and Fall ; compare the Book of Snobs with Addison's Spectator ; contrast the Ring and the Book with Gray's Elegy or Cowper's Task. What wholly dif- 12 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE l ferent types, ideas, aims ! The age of Pope and Addison, of Johnson and Gibbon, clung to symmetry, " the grand air," the " best models ; " it cared much more for books than for social reforms, and in the world of letters a classical manner was valued far more than originality of ideas. And when we come to a later age, what an irrepressible and stormy imagination do we find! Byron, Shelley, Scott, Coleridge, Campbell, Southey, Landor, revelled in romance and colour, in battle and phantasmagoria, in tragedy, mystery, and legend. They boiled over with excitement, and their visions were full of fight The roar and fire of the great revolutionary struggle filled men's brains with fierce and strange dreams. Our Victorian Age is as different from the Virgilian and Ciceronian style of the age of Gray and Johnson, as it is from the resounding torrent which was poured forth by Byron and Scott. The social earnestness of our time colours our literature, and almost distorts our literature; while, on the other hand, our prac- tical and scientific genius scorns the melodramatic imagery with which our grandfathers were delighted. Gibbon would have smiled a cruel epigram, if he had been expected to thrust a Latter-Day Pamphlet on the social question into one of his chapters on the Fall of Rome. But Carlyle's French Revolution is as much political rhapsody and invective as it is history. Dickens made a series of novels serve as onslaughts on various social abuses; and George Eliot's heart is ever with Darwin, Spencer, and Comte, as much as it^with Miss Austen. Ruskin would sacrifice all the pictures in the world, if society would transform itself into a Brotherhood I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 13 of St. George. Tennyson has tried to put the dilemmas of theological controversy into lyric poe- try, and Psychology is now to be studied, not in metaphysical ethics, but in popular novels. The aim of the modern historian is to compile a Times newspaper of events which happened three or four, eight or ten centuries ago. The aim of the modern philosopher is to tabulate mountains of research, and to prune away with agnostic non possumus the ancient oracles of hypothesis and imagination. Our literature to-day has many characteristics: but its central note is the dominant influence of Sociology, — enthusiasm for social truths as an instru- ment of social reform. It is scientific, subjective, introspective, historical, archaeological : — full of vital- ity, versatility, and diligence : — intensely personal, defiant of all law, of standards, of convention : — laborious, exact, but often indifferent to grace, sym- metry, or colour: — it is learned, critical, cultured: — with all its ambition and its fine feeling, it is un- sympathetic to the highest forms of the imagination, and quite alien to the drama of action. It would be a difficult problem in social dynamics to fix anything like a true date for this change in the tone of literature, and to trace it back to its real social causes. The historian of English literature will perhaps take the death of Walter Scott, in 1832, as a typical date. By a curious coincidence, Goethe died in the same year. Two years later Coleridge and Lamb died. Within a few years more most of those who belonged to the era of Byron, Shelley, Scott, and Sheridan were departed or had sung their last effective note. The excep- 14 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE I tions were Wordsworth and his immediate Lakist fol- lowers, Landor and Bulwer, of whom the latter two continued to produce. The death of Scott happened in the year of the Reform Act of 1832 ; and here we reach a political and social cause of the great change. The reformed democratic Parliament of 1832 was itself the reaction after the furious upheaval caused by the Revolution of 1789, and it heralded the social and legislative revolution of the last sixty years. It was the era when the steam-power and railway system was founded, and the vast industrial development which went with it. The last sixty years have witnessed a profound material revolution in English life ; and the reaction on our literature has been deep and wide. The most obvious and superficial change in lit- erature is the extreme diversity of its form. There is no standard now, no conventional type, no good " model." It is an age of "Go-as-you-please," and of tous les genres sont bons, surtout le genre ennuyeux. In almost any age of English literature, or indeed of any other literature, an experienced critic can detect the tone of the epoch at once in prose or verse. There is in them an unmistakeable Zeit-Geist in phraseology and form. The Elizabethan drama, essay, or philosophy could not be mistaken for the drama, essay, or philosophy of the Restoration ; the heroic couplet reigned from Dryden to Byron ; Ciceronian diction reigned from Addison to Burke ; and then the Quarterlies, with Southey, Lamb, Scott, De Quincey, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, and Leigh Hunt, introduced a simpler, easier tone of the well- bred causeur, as free from classical mannerism as it VICTORIAN LITERATURE was free from subtle mechanism or epigrammatic brilliance. Down to about the death of Scott and Coleridge, almost any page of English prose or verse could be certainly attributed to its proper generation by the mark of its style alone. T he Victorian literature presents a dozen style s, every man speaking out what is„.in _hini. in the p hrases he likes bes t. Our Zeit-Geist flashes all across the heavens at once. Let us place a page from Sartor Resartus beside a page from Macaulay's History of England, or either beside a page from Arnold's Literature and Dogma or one from the Stones of Venice. Here are four typical styles in prose, each of which has been much admired and imitated ; yet they differ as widely as Shelley from Ovid, or Tennyson from Pope. Again, for verse, contrast Paracelsus with The Princess, — poems writ- ten about the same time by friends and colleagues. Compare a poem of William Morris with one by Lewis Morris. Compare Swinburne's Songs and Sonnets with Matthew Arnold's Oberntann ; Rudyard Kipling's Ballads with The Light of Asia. Have they any common standard of form, any type of metre? The purists doubt as to the style of Carlyle as a " model," but no one denies that the French Revolution and Hero- Worship, at least in certain passages, display a mastery over language as splen- did as anything in our prose literature. Exactly the same might be said also of Esmond, and again of Silas Marner, and again of the Seven Lamps of Architecture. Yet all of these differ as widely as one style can differ from another. Fifine at the Fair, and The Angel in the House, have each fervent 1 6 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE admirers. No ! there is no recognised " model " either in verse or in prose. In truth, we have now both in prose and in verse strongly contrasted types, each of which commands admiration and following. Both in prose and verse we have one type which has carried subtle finish and a purism studied almost to the point of " precious- ness," alongside of another type which crowds its effects without regard to tone and harmony, and by its side a third type which trots along breathless in its shirt-sleeves. Tennyson's In Memoriam has that exquisite polish of workmanship which we find in such poets as Virgil, Racine, and Milton, — that per- fection of phrase which we cannot conceive the poet capable of improving by any labour. Put aside for the moment any question about the ideas, inspira- tion, or power of the poem as a whole, and consider that, in all those hundreds of stanzas, there is hardly one line that is either careless, prosaic, or harsh, not a single false note, nothing commonplace, nothing over-coloured, but uniform harmony of phrase. This perfection of phrasing is not always to be found even in the greatest poets, for iEschylus and Dante at times strike a fierce discord, and Shakespeare, Cal- deron, and Goethe sometimes pass into rank extrava- ganza. But this scholarly and measured speech has impressed itself on the poetry of our time, inso- much, that the Tennysonian cycle of minor poets has a higher standard of grace, precision, and subtlety of phrase than the second rank of any modern litera- ture : — a standard which puts to shame the rugosi- ties of strong men like Dryden, Burns, and Byron. There is plenty of mannerism in this school of our I VICTORIAN LITERATURE IJ minor poetry, but no one can call it either slovenly or harsh. The friend, contemporary, almost the rival of Tennyson, one whom some think endowed by na- ture with even stronger genius, on the other hand, struck notes of discord harsher, louder, and more frequent than any poet since Elizabethan times. Whatever we hold about the insight and imagination of Browning, no one can doubt that he often chose to be uncouth, crabbed, grotesque, and even clown- ish, when the humour was on him. There are high precedents for genius choosing its own instrument and making its own music. But, whatever were Browning's latent powers of melody, his method when he chose to play upon the gong, or the ancient instrument of marrow-bone and cleavers, was the exact antithesis of Tennyson's ; and he set on edge the teeth of those who love the exquisite cadences of In Memoriam and Maud. Browning has left deep influence, if not a school. The younger Lytton, George Meredith, Buchanan, here and there Swin- burne and William Morris, seem to break loose from the graceful harmony which the Tennysonians affect, and to plunge headlong into the obscure, the un- couth, the ghastly, and the lurid. No one denies originality and power in many of these pieces : but they are flat blasphemy against the pellucid melody of the Tennysonian idyll. Our poetry seems to be under two contrary spells: it is enthralled at one time by the ravishing symmetry of Mozart; at an- other time it yearns for the crashing discords that thunder along the march of the Valkyrie through the air. 1 8 EARLY VICTOR/AN LITERATURE As in poetry, so in prose. We find in our best prose of to-day an extraordinary mastery over pure, nervous, imaginative language; and all this, along- side here of a riotous extravagance, and there, of a crude and garrulous commonplace. Thackeray's best i chapters, say in Vanity Fair, Esmond, the Humor- 1 ists, contain an almost perfect prose style, — a style las nervous as that of Swift, as easy as that of Gold- f smith, as graceful as that of Addison, as rich as that of Gibbon or Burke. No English romances have been clothed in a language so chaste and scholarly, — not even Fielding's. Certainly not the Waverley series ; for Scott, as we know, rehearsed his glowing chronicles of the past with the somewhat conven- tional verbosity of the improvisatore who recites but will not pause to write. George Eliot relates her story with an art even more cultivated than that of Thackeray, — though, doubtless, with an over-elab- orated self-consciousness, and perceptible suggestions of the laboratory of the student. TroUope tells his artless tales in perfectly pure, natural, and most articulate prose, the language of a man of the world telling a good story well. And a dozen living novel- ists are masters of a style of extreme ease and grace. Side by side with this chastened English prose, we have men of genius who have fallen into evil habits. Bulwer, who knew better, would quite revel in a stagey bombast; Dickens, with his pathos and his humour, was capable of sinking into a theatrical mannerism and cockney vulgarities of wretched taste ; Disraeli, with all his wit and savoir /aire, has printed some rank fustian, and much slip-slop gossip; and I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 1 9 George Meredith at times can be as jerky and mys- terious as a prose Browning. Charlotte Bronte and Kingsley could both descend to blue fire and demo- niac incoherences. Macaulay is brilliant and em- phatic, but we weary at last of his everlasting staccato on the trumpet; and even the magnificent sym- phonies of Ruskin at his best will end sometimes in a sort of coda of fantasias which suggest lime-lights and coloured lenses. Carlyle, if not the greatest prose master of our age, must be held to be, by virtue of his original genius and mass of stroke, the literary dictator of Victorian prose. And, though we all know how wantonly he often misused his mighty gift, though no one now would venture to imitate him even at a distance, and though Matthew Arnold was ever taking up his parable — " Flee Carlylese as the very Devil!" — we are sliding into Carlylese unconsciously from time to time, and even Culture itself fell into the trap in the very act of warning others. Side by side with such chastened literary art as that of Thackeray and George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and John Morley, Lecky and Froude, Maine and Symonds, side by side with a Carlylese tendency to extravagance, slang, and caricature, we find another vein in English prose, — the flat, ungainly, nerveless style of mere scientific research. What lumps of raw fact are flung at our heads ! What interminable gritty collops of learning have we to munch ! Through what tangles of uninteresting phenomena are we not dragged in the name of Research, Truth, and the higher Philosophy ! Mr. Mill and Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bain and Mr. Sidgwick, have taught our age very 20 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE I much ; but no one of them was ever seen to smile ; and it is not easy to recall in their voluminous works a single irradiating image or one monumental phrase. There are eminent historians to-day who disdain the luminous style of Hume and Robertson, and yet deride the colour and fire of Gibbon. Grote poured forth the precious contents of his portentous note- books with as little care for rhythm and as little sense of proportion as a German professor. Free- man and Gardiner have evidently trained themselves in the same school of elaborate learning, till they would appear to count the graceful English of Froude, Lecky, and Green as hardly becoming the dignity of history. It would seem as if the charge which some of our historians are most anxious to avoid is the charge of being " readable," and of keeping to them- selves any fact that they know. , The men who are rather pleased than pained to hear themselves called by the barbarous term of " scientists " seem to think that it matters nothing how ill-digested be their book, or how commonplace be their language. They are accustomed to lecture to students in the laboratory in their shirt-sleeves with their hands in their pockets; and they believe that immortality may be achieved if they can pile up enough facts and manufacture an adequate number of monographs. And they do this, in the teeth of excellent examples to the contrary. Huxley and Tyndall have given their brethren in science fine examples of a pure, vigorous, and well-knit style. Yet, how many of them are still quite content to go rumbling along with an interminable rigmarole of dry " memoirs." Our ponderous biographies of third- VICTORIAN LITERATURE 21 rate people tend to become mere bags of letters and waste-paper baskets. And all this with such con- summate models before us, and so very high a standard of general cultivation. We have had in this age men who write an English as pure and powerful as any in the whole range of our literature ; we have tens of thousands of men and women who write a per- fectly correct and intelligent prose. And yet out of a million books, we find so very few which even aim at being works of art in the sense that Tom Jones is a work of art, and the Decline and Fall is a work of art. It is, no doubt, this preponderance of the practical, scientific, and social energies which has checked in our Victorian Age the highest imaginative and dra- matic genius. With all its achievements in lyric and psychologic poetry, it has hardly attempted to scale the empyrean of song. In the seventy-six years that have passed since Shelley conceived his Prometheus, as he sat gazing over the sombre ruins of the Cam- pagna, no one has ever ventured into that seventh heaven of invention. Since the School for Scandal i^iyyj') no English drama has been produced which has anything like the same hold on the stage. For more than sixty years the English stage has not known one consummate actor. Though men of real genius have in these sixty years laboured at the higher drama, they have hardly achieved even such measures of success as fell to Byron and Shelley with Manfred and the Cenci. With all its lyric and psychologic power, with all its energy and its learn- ing, the Victorian Age has not quite equalled the age of Goethe. It is as if its scientific spirit checked the 22 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE supreme imagination: as if its social earnestness produced a distaste for merely dramatic passion. One of the most striking facts about our modern literature is the preponderance of the " subjective " over the " objective." The interest in external events, as the subject of imaginative work, quite pales before the interest in analysis of mental and moral impulse. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Jane Austen, have com- pletely dominated our age, and have displaced the epic and legendary themes of Scott, Byron, Campbell, and Southey. The Two Voices, In Memoriam, The Ring and the Book, Silas Marner, Vanity Fair, Bleak House, dissect brain and heart, but do not make their prime motive in any thrilling history. The crisis of modern romance goes on in the conscience, not in the outside world. Hence the enormous multiplica- tion of the psychologic novel, a form of art which the eighteenth century would have viewed with wonder and perplexity. The curious part of this is the strik- ing abatement of taste for the historical romance, in spite of the immense extension of historical study and archaeological revival. We know far more about the past, both within and without, than did our fathers ; and we are always seeking to realise to our- selves the habits, ideas, aspect, the very clothes and furniture of ages of old, which we study with sympa- thetic zeal and in the minutest detail. Yet the his- torical romance appears only at intervals. Harold and Esmond are both more than forty years old, Romola more than thirty years old. They are none of them quite unqualified successes; and no later his- torical romance has approached these three in power and interest. Why is it, that, in an age pre-eminently I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 23 historical, in an age so redundant of novels, the his- torical novel is out of fashion? Partly, no doubt, our romancers shun comparison with the mighty Wizard of the North ; partly, the analytic genius of our time so greatly exceeds its synthetic genius ; and mainly, the range of our historical learning inclines us to restore the past by exact scholarship and not by fiction without authority. George Eliot was so anx- ious to have her local colour accurate that she ended by becoming somewhat fatiguing. Some day, no doubt, the genius of romance will return to this inexhaustible field with enthusiasm equal to Scott's, with a knowledge far more accurate than his, and a spirit quite purged from political and social bias. From the death of Scott in 1832 until 1894 are sixty-two years ; and if we divide this period into 1 equal parts at the year 1863 (it was the year of Thackeray's death), we shall be struck with the fact that the purely literary product of the first period , of thirty-one years (1832-1863) is superior to thej purely literary product of the second period of thirty- 1 one years (i 863-1 894). The former period gives 1 us all that was best of Tennyson, the Brownings, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, the Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope, George Eliot, Kingsley, Dis- raeli, Dr. Arnold, Thirlwall, Grote, Hallam, Milman, Macaulay, Mill, Froude, Layard, Kinglake, Ruskin. The second period gave us in the main, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, G. H. Lewes, Maine, Leslie Stephen; John Morley, Matthew Arnold, Lecky, Freeman, Stubbs, Bryce, Green, Gardiner, Symonds, Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne. Poetry, romance, the critical, imaginative, and pictorial power dominate the former 24 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE I period : philosophy, science, politics, history are the real inspiration of the latter period. The era since the death of Scott is essentially a scientific age, a sociologic age ; and this is peculiarly- visible in the second half of this era of sixty-two years. About the middle of the period we see how the scientific and sociologic interest begins to over- shadow, if not to oust, the literary, poetic, and romantic interest. Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859; and its effect on thought became marked within the next few years. In 1862, Herbert Spencer commenced to issue his great encyclopaedic work, Synthetic Philosophy, still, we trust, to be com- pleted after more than thirty years of devoted toil. Darwin's later books appeared about the same period, as did a large body of scientific works in popular form by Huxley, Tyndall, Wallace, Lewes, Lubbock, Tylor, and Clifford. It is only needful here to refer to such scientific works as directly reacted on general literature. About the same time the later specula- tions of Comte began to attract public attention in England, and the Positive Polity was translated in 1875. Between the years 1 860-1 875, there grew up in England an absorbing interest in Social Philo- sophy, and a conviction that the idea of invariable law offered a solution of the progress of society. Evolution as an idea was in the air, and it was applied to Man as much as to Nature. It is no part of our present purpose to trace its growth from the scientific aspect. It is enough to note how it acted and reacted on general literature. Poetry began to hover round the problem of Evo- lution. It wrapped it in mystery, denounced it with I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 25 fine indignation, and took it for the text of some rather prosaic homilies. Criticism fell into the pre- vailing theory: so did history, and even romance. Philosophy and Science are not the best foster- mothers of Poetry and Romance. Philosophy and Science grew more solemn than ever; and Poetry and Romance lost something of their wilder fancy and their light heart. Literature grew less spontaneous, more correct, more learned, and, it may be, more absorbed in its practical purpose of modifying social life. The old notion of literature being a business apart from affairs, of men of letters being an order, of an absorption in books being ample work for a life, — all this is far from the rule. At least twenty members of the present and late Governments have been copious writers ; Mr. Gladstone and at least three or four of his late colleagues are quite in the front rank of living authors, — nay, several of them began their career as literary men. It would be difficult to name an important writer of the Victorian Age who has not at times flung himself with ardour into the great social, political, or religious battles of his time. Thackeray, Trollope, Green, Symonds, are possible exceptions, — examples of bookmen who passed their lives with books, and who never wrote to promote " a cause." But all the rest have entered on the " burning questions " of their age, and most of them with the main part of their force. As a consequence " learning," as it was understood by Casaubon, Scali- ger, Bentley, Johnson, and Gibbon, as it was under- stood by Littre, DoUinger, and Mommsen, may be said to have disappeared in England. Cardinal New- 26 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE i man, Mark Pattison, Dr. Pusey, were said to be very- learned, but it was a kind of learning which kept very much to itself. For good or for evil, our liter- ature is now absorbed in the urgent social problem, and is become but an instrument in the vast field of Sociology, — the science of Society. This predominance of Sociology, the restless rapidity of modern life, the omnipresence of material activity, fully account for the special character of modern literature. Literature is no longer " bookish," — but practical, social, propagandist. It is full of life, — but it is a dispersive, analytic, erratic form of vitality. It has a most fastidious taste in form, — but it often flings the critical spirit aside in its passion for doing, in its ardour to convince and to inspire. It is industrious, full of learning and research, — but it regards its learning as an instrument of influence, not as an end of thought. It can work up a poem or an essay, as carefully as Mieris or Breughel polished a cabinet picture, — and it can " tear a passion to tatters," or tumble its note-books into a volume all in a heap. It has no " standard," no " model," no " best writer," — and yet it has a curious faculty for reviving every known form and imitating any style. It is intensely historical, but so accurately historical that it is afraid to throw the least colour of imagination around its history. It has consummate poetic feeling, and copious poetic gifts, — but it has now no single poet of the first rank. It has infinite romantic resources, and an army of skilful novelists, — and yet it has no single living writer worthy to be named beside the great romancers of the nineteenth century. I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 2^ This rich, many-sided, strenuous literature, which will place the name of Victoria higher than that of Elizabeth in the history of our language, would form a splendid subject hereafter for some one of our descendants who was equal to the task of treating our Victorian literature as a whole. In the mean time, it may be worth while for the men and women of to- day, who are full of all the excellent work around us, to be reminded of the good things produced now nearly sixty years ago. As one who can remember much that was given to the world in a former genera- tion, I shall endeavour in these little sketches to mark some of the characteristics of the best writers in the early Victorian Age, confining myself for the present to prose literature of the imaginative kind. It is now some time since the country of Shake- speare and of Milton has been without its poet lau- reate, and to the non-poetical world the absence of that court functionary is hardly perceptible. Nay, the question has begun to arise. If there is to be a laureate in poetry, why not a laureate also in prose romance? And if there were a laureate in prose romance whom should we choose? The same phenomenon meets us in the realm of prose fiction as in poetry : that we have vast quanti- ties of thoughtful work produced, an army of cultivated workers, a great demand, an equally great supply, a very high average of merit, — and yet so little of the very first rank. For the first time in the pres- ent century, English literature is without a single living novelist of world-wide reputation. The nine- teenth century opened with Castle Rackrent and the admirably original tales of Maria Edgeworth. Jane 28 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE I Austen followed in the same field. And since Wav- erley appeared, in 1814, we have had a succession of fine romances in unbroken line. Fenimore Cooper's work is nearly contemporary with the best of Scott's. At Sir Walter's death Bulwer-Lytton was in full career. And Lytton, Disraeli, Hawthorne, the Brontes, Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope were all at their best nearly together. During the last twenty years or so of this splendid period they had been joined by George Eliot; and of the whole band Anthony Trollope was the survivor. With him our language lost the last of those companions of the fire- side in mansion and cottage whose names are house- hold words, whose books are in every hand, where the English tongue is heard. We need not engage in any critical estimate of these writers : we are but too well aware of their fail- ures and defects. Lytton indited not a little bombast, Dickens had his incurable mannerisms, and Thack- eray his conventional cynicisms. There are passages in George Eliot's romances which read like sticky bits from a lecture on comparative palaeontologj' ; and Disraeli, who for fifty years threw ofT most read- able tales in the intervals of politics, seems always to be laughing at the public behind his mask. Yet the good sense of mankind remembers the best and for- gets the worst, even if the worst be four-fifths of the whole. The place of genius is decided by its inimitable hits, and its misses evermore drop out of memory as time goes on. The world loves its bright spirits for what they give it, and it does not score their blots like an examiner marking a student's paper. Thus I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 29 the men and women of the first rank still hold the field in the million homes where English tales are a source of happiness ; and it would be perverse to maintain that any living men have reached that level. We can see no trace that Pickwick or Emma, Natty Bumpi^o or Uncas, are losing their hold on the imagination of men and women, any more than Jeanie Deans and the Antiquary. Oliver Twist, the Last Days of Pompeii, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, have more readers than ever. And I find the Last Chronicle of Bar set, Lothair, and Silas Marner as fresh as they were a quarter of a century ago. We all admit that there are delightful writers still. I am not about to decry our living romancers, and certainly not to criticise them. If any man choose to maintain that there is more poetry in Tess than in the entire Barsetshire series, that Dickens could not have bettered the Two Drummer Boys of Rudyard Kipling, that Treasure Island has a realism as vivid as Robinson Crusoe, that Mrs. Wood's Village Tragedy may rank with Silas Marner, that Howells and Besant, Ouida and Rhoda Broughton, Henry James and Mrs. Burnett, are as good reading as we need, that Bret Harte has struck a line as original as that of Dickens, and that George Meredith has an eye for character which reminds us not seldom of Thackeray and Fielding, — I do not dispute it. I am no one-book man or one-style man, but enjoy what is good in all. But I am thinking of the settled judg- ment and the visible practice of the vast English- speaking and English-reading world. And judging by that test, we cannot shut our eyes to this, that we have no living romancer who has yet achieved that 30 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE world-wide place of being read and welcomed in every home where the language is heard or known. George Meredith has been a prolific writer for thirty years and Stevenson for twenty years; but their most ardent admirers, among whom I would be counted, can hardly claim for them a triumph so great. ^ We come, then, to this, that for the first time during this whole century now ending, English litera- ture can count no living novelist whom the world, and not merely the esoteric circle of cultured Englishmen, consents to stamp with the mark of accepted fame. One is too eccentric, obscure, and subtle, another too local and equal, a third too sketchy, this one too unreal, that one far too real, too obvious, too prosaic, to win and to hold the great public by their spell. Critics praise them, friends utter rhapsodies, good judges enjoy them, — but their fame is partial, local, sectional, compared to the fame of Scott, Dickens, or Thackeray. What is the cause? I do not hesitate to say it is that we have over-trained our taste, we are overdone with criticism, we are too systematically drilled, there is far too much moderate literature and far too fasti- dious a standard in literature. Ev ery one is afraid to let himself go, to offend the conventions, or to raise a sneer. It is the inevitable result of uniformr- ity in education and discipline in mental training. Millions can write good grammar, easy and accurate sentences, and imitate the best examples of the age. Education has been driven at high pressure into literary lines, and a monotonous correctness in lit- erary taste has been erected into a moral code. Tens I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 3 1 of thousands of us can put the finger on a bit of exaggeration, or a false light in the local colour, or a slip in perfect realism. The result is a photo- graphic accuracy of detail, a barren monotony of commonplace, and the cramping of real inventive genius. It is the penalty of giving ourselves up to mechanical culture. If another Dickens were to break out to-morrow with the riotous tomfoolery of Pickwick at the trial, or of Weller and Stiggins, a thousand lucid criticisms would denounce it as vulgar balderdash. Glaucus and Nydia at Pompeii would be called melodramatic rant. The House of the Seven Gables would be re- jected by a sixpenny magazine, and Jane Ejre would not rise above a common "shocker." Hence, the enormous growth of the Kodak school of romance, — the snap-shots at every-day realism with a hand camera. We know how it is done. A woman of forty, stout, plain, and dull, sits in an ordinary par- lour at a tea-table, near an angular girl with a bad squint. "Some tea?" said Mary, touching the pot. "I don't mind," replied Jane, in a careless tone; "I am rather tired and it is a dull day." " It is," said Mary, as her lack-lustre eyes glanced at the murky sky without. " Another cup ? " And so the modern romajice dribbles on hour by hour, chapter by chap- ter, volume by volume, recording, as in a phono- graph, the minute commonplace of the average man and woman in perfectly real but entirely common situations. To this dead level of correctness literary purism has brought romance. The reaction against the photographic style, on the other hand, leads to spasmodic efforts to arouse the jaded interest by 32 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE I forced sensationalism, physiological bestialities, and a crude form of the hobgoblin and bogey business. In all the ages of great productive work there were intense individuality, great freedom, and plenty of failures. Tom Jones delighted the town which was satiated with gross absurdities, some of them, alas ! from the pen of Fielding himself Shake- speare wrote happily before criticism had invented the canons of the drama, and Sir Walter's stories had no reviews to expose his historical blunders. In the great romance age which began to decline some forty years ' agorthere"'vvarifroranSKF'or such good avef^g^^^^^]|'we^^[^n^^""cnlicrsni"Kad' hot be- come a fine art; every one was free to like what he pleased, and preposterous stuff was written and en- joyed. Of course it cannot be good to like prepos- terous stuff, and an educated taste ought to improve literature. But it is almost a worse thing when general culture produces an artificial monotony, when people are taught what they ought to like, when to violate the canons of taste is far worse than to laugh at the Ten Commandments. With a very high average of fairly good work, an immense mass of such work, and an elaborate code of criticism, the production of brilliant and inimitable successes is usually arrested in every field. Having thousands of graceful verse-writers, we have no great poet ; in a torrent of skilful fiction, we have no great novehst; with many charming painters, who hardly seem to have a fault, we have no great artist ; with mises-en-scine, make-up costumes, and accessories for our plays such as the world never saw before, we have no great actor ; and with ten thousand thought- I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 33 ful writers, we have not a single genius of the first rank. Elaborate culture casts chill looks on original ideas. Genius itself is made to feel the crudeness and extravagance of its first efforts and retires with shame to take a lower place. We are all so fastidious about form, and have got such fixed regulation views about form, we are so correct, so much like one another, such good boys and girls, that the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies of the inventive spirit are taught from childhood to control themselves and to conform to the decorum of good society. A highly organised code of culture may give us good manners, but it is the death of genius. There are other things which check the flow of a really original literature, though perhaps a high average culture and a mechanical system of educa- tion may be the most potent. Violent poHtical struggles check it: an absorption in material in- terests checks it: uniformity of habits, a general love of comfort, conscious self-criticism make it dull and turbid. Now our age is marked by all of these. From the age of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, the French genius produced almost no imaginative work of really European importance until it some- what revived again with Chateaubriand in the present century. Nor in England can We count anything of a like kind from the death of Goldsmith until we reach Scott, Byron, and Wordsworth after an interval of forty years. In the United States the great eras of imaginative production have been those which were free from political and military struggles. The case of France is indeed conclusive proof 3 34 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE I how suddenly political turmoil kills imaginative work. French literature, which during the greater part of the eighteenth century had shown amazing activity, suddenly seems arrested with Rousseau ; and in the latter years of the eighteenth century there is abso- lutely nothing of even moderate quality in the field of art. The same is true of England for the last thirty years of the same century. Shakespeare's dramas were not produced till his country had victoriously passed through the death-struggle of the religious wars in the sixteenth century. The civil war of the Puritans arrested poetry, so that for nearly thirty years the muse of Milton himself withdrew into her solitary cell. Dryden carried on the torch for a time. But prose literature did not revive in England until the Hanoverian settlement. Political ferment kills literature: prolonged war kills it: social agitation unnerves it ; and still more the uneasy sense of being on the verge of great and unknown change. Take our Queen's reign of now some fifty-eight years (1837-1895) and divide it in half at the year 1 866. It is plain that by far the greater part of the "Victorian" literature was produced in the former half and quite the inferior part of it was produced in the latter half. By the year 1866 we had already got all, or all that was best, of Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin, Lytton, Thackeray, Dickens, Trol- lope, George Eliot, Disraeli, Kingsley, and others who lived after that date. In 1865 Lord Palmerston died, and with him died the old Parliamentary era. In the same year died Abraham Lincoln in the great crisis of the reconstruction of the American Constitu- tion. We attach no peculiar importance to that date. I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 35 But it is certain that both English and American people have been in this last twenty-nine years absorbed in constitutional agitations which go deep down into our social system. We in England have passed from one constitutional struggle to another, and we are now in the most acute stage of all this period. Parhamentary reform, continental changes, colonial wars, military preparations. Home Rule, have absorbed the public mind and stunned it with cataracts of stormy debate. We are all politicians, all party-men now. There is upon us also, both in England and in America, a social ferment that goes deeper than any mere constitutional struggle. It is the vague, pro- found, multiform, and mysterious upheaval that is loosely called Socialism, — not Socialism in any definite formula, but the universal yearning of the millions for power, consideration, material improve- ment, and social equality. The very vagueness, uni- versality, and unbounded scope of the claim they make constitute its power. All orders and classes are concerned in it : all minds of whatever type are affected by it: every political, social, or industrial axiom has to be reconsidered in the light of it: it appeals to all men and it enters into life at every corner and pore. We are like men under the glamour of some great change impending. The spell of a new order holds us undecided and expect- ant. There is something in the air, and that some- thing is a vague and indescribable sense that a new time is coming. Men felt it in France, and indeed all over Europe, from 1780 till 1790. It was an un- certain and rather pleasing state of expectancy. It 36 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE i did not check activity, nor enjoyment, nor science. But it diverted the pro founder minds from the higher forms of imaginative work. There is no reason to assume that Socialism or the ideals of Socialism are at all hostile to literature or even imaginative poetry, provided they are not too close, not actually causing direct agitation. But when men are debating bills in heated meetings, they do not often see these questions in the halo of romance. Rousseau's Hiloise and Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield vjer:e quite a generation before the Revo- lution, at a time when franchise and agrarian politics had hardly begun. The poetry and the romance of a great social reformation are never visible to men in the midst of it, who are ready to tear each other's eyes out in the name of Eight-Hours Bills and Land Nationalisation. When men have got to this stage they want lighter matter to amuse them at home; but they can hardly appreciate, even if they could find, the loftier flights of social romance. Sam Weller to-day has joined a union, and reads his Henry George. Rawdon Crawley of our own genera- tion is a mere drunken ruffian, only fit to point the moral in a lecture on the drink traffic. And Becky Sharp is voted to be a stupid libel on the social destiny of the modern school " marm." The great advance in the material comfort and uniformity of life and manners dries up the very sources of prose romance, even more than it ruins poetry. The poet is by nature an isolated spirit dwelling in an ideal world of his own. But the prose novelist draws life as he sees it in the concrete from intimate knowledge of real men and women. I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 37 How intensely did Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Thack- eray, Miss Austen, Miss Edgeworth, know by expe- rience the characters they drew ! A romance cannot be constructed out of the novelist's inner conscious- ness as Paradise Lost, Shelley's Prometheus, and Wordsworth's Excursion were constructed. Even Scott becomes grave and melodramatic when he peoples his stage with those whose like he never saw. But how vastly more romantic was the Scot- land of Scott than is the Scotland of Stevenson ! The Vicar of Wakefield and Squire Western are not to be found in an age that is busy with railways and telegraphs and the Review of Reviews. Pickwick and Oliver Twist have been improved off the face of the earth by cheap newspapers and sanitary reform. The fun has gone out of Vanity Fair, and the House of the Seven Gables is an hotel with seven hundred beds. Comfort, electric light, railway sleeping-cars, and equality are excellent things, but they are the death of romance. The essence of romance is variety, contrast, individuality, the eccentric, the unconven- tional. Level up society, put nineteen out of every twenty on fairly equal terms, popularise literature, and turn the Ten Commandments into a code of decorum, and you cut up by the roots all romantic types of life. The England of Fielding and the Scotland of Scott were breezy, boisterous, dis- orderly, picturesque, and jolly worlds, where gay and hot spirits got into mischief and played mad pranks as, in the words of the old song, "They powlered up and down a bit and had a rattling day." Laws, police, total abstinence, general education, and 38 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE I weak digestions have put an end to pranks, as we are all proud to say. The result is that Romance, finding little of romance in the real world, has taken two different lines in the desperate effort to amuse us somehow. The virtuous line is the phonographic reproduction of every-day life in ordinary situations. The disreputable line is Zolaesque bestiality, and forced, unreal, unlovely, and hysterical sensation- alism. It cannot be more than a paradox to pretend that fin de siicle has anything to do with it. But it is a curious coincidence how the last decade of modern centuries seems to die down in creative fertility. The hundred millions who speak our English tongue have now no accepted living master of the first rank, either in verse or in prose. In 1793 there was not one in all Europe. In 1693, though Dryden lingered in his decline, it was one of the most barren moments in English literature. And so in 1593, though the Faery Queen was just printed, and Shakespeare had begun, to write, there were nothing but the first streaks which herald the dawn. But this is obviously a mere coincidence; nor can an artificial division of time affect the rise or fall of genius. It may be that in these latter days, when our age is the victim of self- conscious introspection, the close of a century which has shown such energy may affect us in some uncon- scious way. Perhaps there is a vague impression that the world is about to turn over a new page in the mighty ledger of mankind, that it is now too late to do much with the nineteenth century, and that we will make a new start with the twentieth. The world is growing less interesting, less mysteri- I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 39 ous, le ss manifold, at any rate to the QH ter eye. The mtse-en-scine ot external life is less rich in colour and in contrast. Magnificence, squalor, oddity, historic survivals, and picturesque personalities grow rarer year by year. Everybody writes a grammatical letter in conventional style, wears the clothes in fashion, and conforms to the courtesies of life. It is right, good, and wise : but a little dull. It is the lady-like age, the epoch of the dress-coat, of the prize lad and the girl of the period. Mr. Charles Pearson, in his remarkable forecast of National Life and Character, warned us how the universal levelling of modern democracy must end in a certain monot- ony and a lowered vitality. We live longer, but in quiet, comfortable, orderly ways. This is not at all injurious to morality, politics, industry, science, phi- losophy, or religion. It is not necessarily injurious to poetry, at least of the lower flight. But it is ad- verse to high art. And it is asphyxiating to romance. The novelist must draw from the living model and he must address the people of his own age. He can- not write for posterity, nor can he live in a day-dream world of his own. The poet is often lost to his own contemporaries. It may need two or three, five or six, generations to reveal him, as Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, and Wordsworth may remind us. But the novelist must live in his generation, be of it most intensely, and if he is to delight at all, like the actor, he must delight his own age. What sons of their own time were Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope: how intensely did they drink with both hands from the cup of life. George Eliot, George Meredith, Louis Stevenson, Howells, James, look on 40 EARL Y VICTORIAN LITERA TURE i life from a private box. We see their kid gloves and their opera-glass, and we know that nothing could ever take them on to the stage and ruffle it with the world of the day, like men of the world who mean to taste life. There is no known instance of a great novelist who lived obscure in a solitary retreat or who became famous only after the lapse of many generations. It is the lady-like age: and so it is the age of ladies' novels. Women have it all their own way now in romance. They carry off all the prizes, just as girl students do in the studios of Paris. Up to a certain point, within their own limits, they are supreme. Half the modern romance, and many people think the better half, is written by women. That is perfectly natural, an obvious result of modern society. The romance to which our age best lends itself is the romance of ordinary society, with delicate shades of character and feeling in place of furious passion or picturesque incident. Women are by nature and training more subtle observers of these social nuances and refined waverings of the heart than any others but men of rare genius. The field is a small and home-like area, the requirements are mainly those of graceful intuition, the tone must be pure, lady-like, subdued. In this sphere it is plain that women have a marked superiority; it is the sphere in which Jane Austen is the yet unapproached queen. But we may look for more Jane Austens, and on wider fields with a yet deeper insight into far grander characters. The social romance of the future is the true poetic function of women. It is their own realm, in which they will doubtless achieve I VICTORIAN LITERATURE 4 1 yet unimagined triumphs. Men, revolting from this polite and monotonous world, are trying desperate expedients. But they are all wrong; the age is against it. Try to get out of modern democratic uniformity and decorum and you may as well try to get out of your skin. Mr. Stevenson was driven to playing at Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling once seemed bent on dying in a tussle with Fuzzy- Wuzzy in the Soudan. But it is no good. A dirty savage is no longer a romantic being. And as to the romance of the wigwam, it reminds me of the Jews who keep the Feast of Tabernacles by putting up some boughs in a back yard. Let us have no nonsense, no topsy-turvy straining after new effects, which is so wearisome to those who love the racy naturalisn of Parson Adams and Edie Ochiltree. But let us have no pessimism also. The age is against the romance of colour, movement, pas- sion, and jollity. !But it is full of the romance of subtle and decorous psychology. It is not the highest art : it is indeed a very limited art. But it is true art: wholesome, sound, and cheerful. The world does not exist in order to supply brilliant liter- ature ; and the march of democratic equality and of decorous social uniformity is too certain a thing, in one sense too blessed a thing, to be denied or to be denounced. An age of colour, movement, variety, and romantic beauty will come again one day, we know not how. There will be then a romance of passion and incident, of strenuous ambition and mad merriment. But not to-day nor to-morrow. Let us accept what the dregs of the nineteenth century can 42 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE i give US, without murmuring and repining for what it cannot give and should not seek to give. In this Httle series of studies, I shall make no attempt to estimate the later literature of the Victo- rian Age, nor will I at all refer to any living writer. Nor shall I deal with social and moral philosophy, poetry, art, or religion. I propose to look back, from our present point of view, on the literature, in the narrower sense of the term, produced in the earlier part of the Queen's reign. II THOMAS CARLYLE It is now for about half a century that the world has had all that is most masterly in the work of Thomas Carlyle. And a time has arrived when we may very fairly seek to weigh the sum total of influ- ence which he left on his own and on subsequent generations. We are now far enough off, neither to be dazzled by his eloquence nor irritated by his eccentricities. The men whom he derided and who shook their heads at him are gone : fresh problems, new hopes, other heroes and prophets whom he knew not, have arisen. Our world is in no sense his world. And it has become a very fair question to ask — What is the residuum of permanent effect from these great books of his, which have been permeating English thought for half a century and more? It is a rare honour for any writer — at least for one who is neither poet nor novelist — to have his pro- ductions live beyond two generations, and to continue to be a great literary force, when fifty years have altered all the conditions in which he wrote and the purposes and ideas which he treated. It cannot be said that Carlyle's effective influence is less now than it was a generation ago. It has lived through the 44 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE il Utilitarian and Evolution movements and has not been extinguished by them. And Thomas Carlyle bids fair to enter into that sacred band whose names outlive their own century and give some special tone to their national literature. The survival of certain books and names from generation to generation does not depend on merit alone. Boswell's Life of Johnson is immortal : though we do not rank " Bozzy " as a hero or a genius. Hume's History of England is a classic : though it can hardly be said to be an adequate account of our country. Few books have ever exercised so amazing an influence as Rousseau's Social Contract; yet the loosest mind of to-day can perceive its sophis- try. Burke's diatribes on the French Revolution affected the history of Europe ; though no one denies that they were inspired by passion and deformed by panic. Hobbes has very few readers to-day; but the Leviathan may last as long as More's Utopia, which has hardly more readers in our age. Books which exert a paramount influence over their con- temporaries may die down and be known only in the history of literature. And books, again, • of very moderate value, written by men of one-sided intellect or founded on somewhat shallow theories, may, by virtue of some special quality, or as embodying some potent idea, attain to a permanent place in the world of letters. Many a great book ceases very early to command readers : and many books continue to be read although they are far from great. The first question that arises is this: Do the chief works of Carlyle belong to that class of books which attain an enduring and increasing power, or to 11 THOMAS CARLYLE 45 that class which effect great things for one or two generations and then become practically obsolete? It would not be safe to put his masterpieces in any- exclusive sense into either of these categories ; but we may infer that they will ultimately tend to the second class rather than the first. Books which attain to an enduring and increasing power are such books as the Ethics, the Politics, and the Republic, the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius and of Vauvenar- gues, the Essays of Bacon and of Hume, Plutarch's Lives and Gibbon's Rome. In these we have a mass of pregnant and ever-fertile thought in a form that is perennially luminous and inspiring. It can hardly be said that even the masterpieces of Carlyle — no! not the Revolution, Cromwell, or the Heroes — reach this point of immortal wisdom clothed with consum- mate art. The " personal equation " of Teufelsdrock- hian humour, its whimsies and conundrums, its wild outbursts of hate and scorn, not a few false judg- ments, and perverse likes and dislikes, — all this is too common and too glaring in the Carlylean cycle, to permit its master to pass into the portals where dwell the wise, serene, just, and immortal spirits. Not of such is the Kingdom of the literary Immortals. On the other hand, if these masterpieces of sixty years ago are not quite amongst the great books of the world, it would be preposterous to regard them as obsolete, or such as now interest only the his- torian of literature. They are read to-day practically as much as ever, and are certain to be read for a generation or two to come. But they are not read to-day with the passionate delight in the wonderful originality, nor have they the commanding authority 46 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE n they seemed to possess for the faithful disciples of the 'forties and the 'fifties. Nor can any one suppose that the next century will continue to read them, except with an open and unbiassed mind, and a willingness to admit that even here there is much dead wood, gross error, and pitiable exaggeration. When we begin to read in that spirit, however splendid be the imagination, and however keen the logic, we are no longer under the spell of a master: we are reading a memorable book, with a primary desire to learn how former generations looked upon things. Thomas Carlyle, like all other voluminous writers, wrote very much that cannot be called equal to his best ; and it cannot be denied that the inferior pieces hold a rather large proportion of the whole. Nothing is less fatal to true criticism than the popular habit of blindly overvaluing the inferior work of men of genius, unless it be the habit of undervaluing them by looking at their worst instead of at their best. Great men are to be judged by their highest; and it is not of very great consequence if this highest forms a moderate part of the total product. Now, what are the masterpieces of Thomas Carlyle? In the order of their production they are Sartor Resar- tus, \Zi\; French Revolution, 1837; Hcro-Worship, 1840; Past and Present, 1843; Cromwell, 1845. We need not be alarmed if this list forms but a third of the thirty volumes (not including translations) ; and if it omits such potent outbursts as Chartism, 1839; and Latter-Day Pamphlets, 1850; or such a wonder- ful piece of history as Friedrich the Second, 1858-1865. Chartism and the Latter-Day Pamphlets are full of II THOMAS CARLYLE 47 eloquence, insight, indignation, and pity, and they exerted a great and wholesome effect on the genera- tion whom they smote as with the rebuke and warn- ing of a prophet. But, as we look back on them after forty or fifty years of experience, we find in them too much of passionate exaggeration, at times a ferocious wrong-headedness, and everywhere so little practical guidance or fruitful suggestion, that we cannot reckon these magnificent Jeremiads as permanent masterpieces. As to Friedrich, it is not a book at all, but an encyclopaedia of German biographies in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Who reads every word of these ten volumes? Who cares to know how big was the belly of some court chamberlain, or who were the lovers of some unendurable Frau ? What a welter of dull garbage! In what dustheaps dost thou not smother us, Teufelsdrockh ! Oh, Thomas, Thomas, what Titania has bewitched thee with the head of Dryasdust on thy noble shoulders? Compare Friedrich with Cromwell. In the Life of the Puritan hero we have a great purpose, a pro- longed homily, a magnificent appeal against an un- just sentence passed two hundred years before by ignorance, bigotry, and passion. The literary in- terest never overpowers the social and political, the moral and the religious purpose. Twenty years later, when he takes up the German Friedrich, the literary interest overpowers the historical. Half of the ten volumes of Friedrich are taken up with tire- some anecdotes about the ordinary appendages of a German court. Even the true greatness of Fred- erick — his organisation of a model civil administra- 48 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ll tion — is completely obscured in the deluge of court gossip and Potsdamiana. Friedrich is a wonderful work, highly valuable to the student, a memorable result of Teufelsdrockhian industry, and humour, — but it is not a masterpiece : judged by the standard of Carlyle's own masterpieces, it is really a failure. Cromwell is the life of a hero and a statesman; Friedrich consists of miscellaneous memoirs of the court and camp of the greatest of modern rulers. On the whole, we may count the Cromwell as the greatest of Carlyle's effective products. With his own right hand, alone and by a single stroke, he completely reversed the judgment of the English nation about their greatest man. The whole weight of Church, monarchy, aristocracy, fashion, literature, and wit, had for two centuries combined to falsify history and distort the character of the noblest of English statesmen. And a simple man of letters, by one book, at once and for ever reversed this sentence, silenced the allied forces of calumny and rancour, and placed Oliver for all future time as the greatest hero of the Protestant movement. There are few examples in the history of literature of so great and so sudden a triumph of truth and justice. At the same time, it is well to remember that the Cromwell is not a literary masterpiece, in the sense of being an organic work of high art. It is not the " Life " of Cromwell : it was not so designed, and was never so worked out. It is his "Letters and Speeches," illustrated by notes. A work so planned cannot possibly be a work of art, or a perfect piece of biography. The constant passage from text to commentary, from small print to large, from Oliver's n THOMAS CARLYLE 49 Puritan sermonising to Carlyle's Sartorian eccen- tricities, destroys the artistic harmony of the book as an organic work of art. The " Life " of Cromwell was in fact never written by Carlyle; and has yet to be written. Never yet was such splendid material for a "Life" prepared by a great historian. Sartor Resartus (183 1), the earliest of his greater works, is unquestionably the most original, the most characteristic, the deepest and most lyrical of his pro- ductions. Here is the Sage of Craigenputtock at his best, at his grimmest, and, we must add, in his most incoherent mood. To make men think, to rouse men out of the slough of the conventional, the sensual, the mechanical, to make men feel, by sheer force of poetry, pathos, and humour, the religious mystery of life and the " wretchlessness of unclean living " — (as our Church article hath it) — nothing could be more trumpet-tongued than Sartor. The Gospel according to Teufelsdrockh is, however, a somewhat Apocalyptic dispensation, and few there be who can "rehearse the articles of his belief" with anything like precision. Another and a more serious diffi- culty is this. How many a " general reader " steadily reads through Sartor from cover to cover? And of such, how many entirely understand the inner Philo- sophy of Clothes, and follow all the allusions, quips, and nicknames of Sartorian subjectivity. It would be a fine subject for some Self-Improvement Circle of readers to write examination papers upon ques- tions as to the exact meaning of all the inward mus- ings of Teufelsdrockh. The first class of successful candidates, one fears, would be small. A book, — not of science or of pure philosophy, or any tech- 4 so EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE il nical art whatever, — but a book addressed to the general reader, and designed for the education of the public, and which can be intelligently digested and assimilated by so very few of the public, can hardly be counted as an unqualified success. And the adepts who have mastered the inwardness of Sartor are rare and few. The French Revolution, however, is far more dis- tinctly a work of art than Cromwell, and far more accessible to the great public than Sartor. Indeed the French Revolution is usually, and very properly, spoken of and thought of, as a prose poem, if prose poem there can be. It has the essential character of an epic, short of rhythm and versification. Its "argument" and its "books"; its contrasts and " episodes " ; its grouping of characters and d^noi^ ment, — are as carefully elaborated as the Gerusa- lemme of Tasso, or the jiEneid of Virgil. And it produces on the mind the effect of a poem with an epic or dramatic plot. It is only a reader thoroughly at home in the history of the time, who can resist the poet's spell when, at the end of Part III., Book VII., he is told that the Revolution is " ended," and the curtain falls. As a matter of real history, this is an arbitrary invention. For the street fight on the day named in the Revolutionary Calendar — 13 Vendi- miaire, An 4 (5th October, 1795), is merely a casual point in a long movement, at which the poet finds it artistic to stop. But the French Revolution does not stop there, nor did the "Whiff of Grapeshot" end it in any but an arbitrary sense. When the poet tells us that, upon Napoleon's defeating the sections around the Convention, " the hour had come and the II THOMAS CARLYLE 5 1 Man," and that the thing called the French Revolu- tion was thereby " blown into space," nothing more silly, mendacious, and " phantasmic " was ever stated by sober historian. The Convention was itself the living embodiment and product of the Revolution, and Bonaparte's smart feat in protecting it, increased its authority and confidence. If Carlyle's French Revolution be trusted as real history, it lands us in as futile a non sequitur as ever historian committed. Viewed as an historical poem, the French Revolu- tion is a splendid creation. Its passion, energy, colour, and vast prodigality of ineffaceable pictures, place it undoubtedly at the head of all the pictorial his- tories of modern times. And the dramatic rapidity of its action, and the inexhaustible contrasts of its scenes and tableaux — things which so fatally per- vert its truthfulness as authentic history — immensely heighten the effect of the poem on the reader's mind. Not that Carlyle was capable of deliberately manu- facturing an historical romance in the mendacious way of Thiers and Lamartine. But, having resolved to cast the cataclysm of 1 789 and the few years before and after it into a dramatic poem, he inevitably, and no doubt unconsciously, treated certain incidents and certain men with a poet's hcense or with a distorted vision. This too is more apparent toward the close of his work, when he begins to show signs of fatigue and exhaustion. Nay, it is to be feared that we are still suffering from the outrage committed on Victo- rian literature by Mr. Mill's incendiary housemaid. We may yet note marks of arson in the restored volume. At the same time, there are large parts of his work which are as true historically as they are poetically 52 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ir brilliant. Part I. — " The Bastille " — is almost per- fect. The whole description of Versailles, its court, and government, of the effervescence of Paris, — from the death of Louis XV. to the capture of Versailles, — is both powerful and true. Part II. — " The Con- stitution " — is the weakest part of the whole from the point of view of accurate history. And Part III. — " The Terror " — is only trustworthy in separate pictures and episodes, however splendid its dramatic power. It would need an essay, or rather a volume, on the French Revolution to enumerate all the wrong judg- ments and fallacies of Carlyle's book, if we bring it to the bar of sober and authentic history. First and foremost comes his fundamental misconception that the Revolution was an anarchical outburst against corruption and oppression, instead of being, as it was, the systematic foundation of a new order of society. Again, he takes it to be a purely French, local, and political movement, instead of seeing that it was an European, social, spiritual movement toward a more humane civilisation. And next, he regards the Revolution as taking place in the six years be- tween the taking of the Bastille and the defeat of the Sections by Bonaparte ; whereas the Revolution was preparing from the time of Louis XIV., and is not yet ended in the time of President Faure. Next to the capital mistake of misconceiving the entire character and result of the Revolution, comes _the insole nce which treats the public m en of France dur- mg a whole generation as mere subjects for ribaldry and^axiggture. From this uniform mockery, Mira- beau and Bonaparte, two of the least worthy of them. II THOMAS CARLYLE S3 are almost alone exempted. This is a blunder in art, as well as a moral and historical offence. Men like i Condorcet, Danton, Hoche, Carnot, not to name a score of other old Conventionels, soldiers, and leaders, I were pure, enlightened, and valorous patriots, — with a breadth of soul an d socia l sym pathi es and_hop es i , t haT^ower far ^ ^we^^^jn sular ^ .prplyfJices and \1 ^^'^^^^Se^genius, and moralist though he also was himself. But though the French Revolution is not to be accepted as historical authority, it is profoundly stimulating and instructive, when we look on it as a lyrical apologue. It is an historical phantasmagoria — which, though hardly more literally true than Aristophanes' Knights or Clouds, may almost be placed beside these immortal satires for its imagina- tion, wisdom, and insight. The personages and the events of the French Revolution in fact succeeded each other with such startling rapidity and such bewildering variety, that it is difficult for any but the most patient student to keep the men and the phases steadily before the eye without confusion and in distinct form. This Carlyle has done far better than any other historian of the period, perhaps even better than any historian whatever. That so many Englishmen are more familiar with the scenes and the men and women of the French Revolution than they are with the scenes and the men and women of their own history, is very largely the work of Carlyle. And as to the vices and weakness of the Old Regime, the electric contagion of the people of Paris, the in- domitable elasticity of the French spirit, the magnetic 54 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE II power of the French genius, the famous furia francese, and the terrible rage into which it can be lashed, — all this Carlyle has told with a truth and insight that has not been surpassed by any modern historian. It being then clearly understood that Carlyle did not leave us the trustworthy history of the French Revolution, in the way in which Thucydides gave us the authentic annals of the Peloponnesian war, or Caesar the official dispatches of the Conquest of Gaul, we must willingly admit that Carlyle's history is one of the most fruitful products of the nineteenth century. No one else certainly has written the authentic story of the French Revolution at large, or of more than certain aspects and incidents of it. In spite of misconceptions, and such mistaken estimates as those of Mirabeau and Bonaparte, such insolent mockery of good and able men, such ridiculous caricatures as that of the " Feast of Pikes " and the trial of the King, such ribald horse-play as " Grilled Herrings " and " Lion Sprawling," in spite of blots and blunders in every chapter, — the French Revolution is destined to live long and to stand forth to posterity as the typical work of the master. It cannot be said to have done such work as the Cromwell ; for it is far less true and sound as history, and it is only one out of scores of interpreters of the Revolution, whereas in the Cromwell Carlyle worked single-handed. But being far more organic, far more imaginative, indeed more powerful than the Cromwell in literary art, the French Revolution — produced, we may remember, exactly in the middle of the author's life — will remain the enduring monument of Carlyle's great spirit and splendid brain. 11 THOMAS CARLYLE 55 The book entitled Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840), to give it its full and original title, comes next in order of time, and per- haps of abiding value. It is a book rather difficult for us now to estimate after more than half a century, for so very much has been done in the interval to build upon these foundations, to enlarge our knowl- edge of these very heroes, and the estimates of Carlyle in the first half of this century are for the most part so completely the commonplaces of the English-speaking world at the close of the century, that when we open the Heroes again it is apt to seem obvious, connu, the emphatic assertion of a truism that no one disputes. How infinitely better do we now, in 1895, know Dante and Shakespeare, Crom- well and Napoleon, than did our grandfathers in 1840! Who, nowadays, imagines Mahomet to have been an impostor, or Burns to have been a mere tipsy song-writer? What a copious literature has the last half-century given us on Dante, on Islam and its spirit, on Rousseau, on Burns, on the English and the French revolutions! But in 1840 the true nature of these men was very faintly understood. Few people but soldiers had the least chance of being called " heroes," and the " heroic in history " was certainly not thought to include either poets, preach- ers, or men of letters. Heroes and Hero-Worship, like the Cromwell, has, in fact, done its work so com- pletely that we find it a little too familiar to need any constant reading or careful study. To judge fairly all that Carlyle effected by his book on Heroes we must put ourselves at the point of view of the time when it was written, the days of 56 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE li Wellington and Melbourne, Brougham and Macaulay, Southey and Coleridge. None of these men under- stood the heroic in Norse mythology, or the grandeur of Oliver Cromwell, or the supreme importance of the Divina Commedia as the embodiment of Catholic Feudalism. All this Carlyle felt as no Englishman before him had felt, and told us in a voice which has since been accepted as conclusive. How far deeper is the view of Carlyle about some familiar personal- ity like Johnson than is that of Macaulay, how much farther does Carlyle see into the Shakesperean firma- ment than even Coleridge ! How far better does he understand Rousseau and Burns than did Southey, laureate and critic as he was hailed in his time. The book is a collection of Lectures, and we now know how entirely Carlyle loathed that kind of utterance, how much he felt the restraints and limits it involved. And for that reason, the book is the simplest and most easily legible of his works, with the least of his mannerism and the largest concessions to the written language of sublunary mortals. Nearly all the judg- ments he passes are not only sound, but now almost universally accepted. To deal with the heroic in history, he needed, as he said, six months rather than six days. It was intended, he told his hearers, "to break ground," to clear up misunderstandings. It has done this : and a rich crop has resulted from his ploughshare. Nothing but a few sketches could be compressed into six hours. But it is curious how many things seem omitted in this survey of the heroic. At the age of forty-five Carlyle had not recognised Friedrich at all, for he does not figure in the " Hero as King." II THOMAS CARLYLE 57 Napoleon takes his place, though Bonaparte was a " hero " only in the bad sense of hero which Carlyle was seeking to explode. It is well that, since he finished the French Revolution, Carlyle seems to have found out that Bonaparte " parted with Reality," and had become a charlatan, a sham. Still for all that, he remains " our last great man." Mazzini was pres- ent at the delivery of these lectures ; and when he had listened to this last, he went up to Carlyle and told him that he had undone his Hero-Worship and had fallen from the truth ; and from that hour Mazzini would hold no terms with the gospel of One-Man. To make Hero-Worship close with the installation of Napoleon as " our last great man," was to expose the inherent weakness of the Sartorian creed, — that humanity exists for the sake of its great men. The other strange delusion is the entire omission from the " Hero as Priest " of any Catholic hero. Not only are St. Bernard and St. Francis, Becket and Lanfranc — all the martyrs and missionaries of Catholicism — con- signed to oblivion ; but not a word is said of Alfred, Godfrey, St. Louis, St. Ferdinand, and St. Stephen. In a single volume there must be selection of types. But the whole idea of Hero-Worship was perverted in a plan which had no room for a single Catholic chief or priest. This perverse exaggeration of Puritan religion, and the still more unjust hatred of Catholic religion, unfortunately runs through all Carlyle's work, and perhaps nowhere breaks out in so repulsive a form as in the piece called "Jesuitism" (1850), in the Latter-Day Pamphlets (No. VIII.). Discarding the creed, the practice, and the language of Puritanism, 58 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ii Carlyle still retained its narrowness, its self-righteous- ness, its intolerance, and its savagery. The moralist, to whom John Knox was a hero, but St. Bernard was not, but only a follower of the "three-chatted Papa," and an apostle of " Pig's-wash," was hardly the man to exhaust the heroic in history. In the " Hero as Man-of-Letters," Carlyle was at home. If ever pure letters produced a hero, the sage of Chelsea was one. With Johnson, with Rousseau, he is per- fectly rational, and the mass of literature which has accumulated round the names of these two, only tends to confirm the essential justice of Carlyle's estimate. Nor need we dispute his estimate of the vigour and manliness of Burns. It is only when Carlyle describes him as "the most gifted British soul" in the eighteenth century — the century of Hume, Adam Smith, Fielding, and Burke — that we begin to smile. Burns was a noble-hearted fellow, as well as a born poet. But perhaps the whole cycle of Sartorian extravaganza contains no saying so futile as the complaint, that the British nation in the great war with France entrusted their destinies to a iphantasmic Pitt, instead of to "the Thunder-god, Robert Burns." Napoleon would no doubt have welcomed such a change of ministry. It is incoher- ences of this sort which undo so much of the splendid service that Carlyle gave to his age. But we are not willing to let the defects of Carlyle's philosophy drive out of mind the permanent and beautiful things in his literary work. Past and Present {iS4^) is certainly a success, — a happy and true thought, full of originality, worked out with art and power. The idea of embedding a living and « THOMAS CARLYLE 59 pathetic picture of monastic life in the twelfth cen- tury, and a minute study of the labours of enlightened churchmen in the early struggles of civilisation, — the idea of embedding this tale, as if it were the remains of some disinterred saint, in the midst of a series of essays on the vices and weaknesses of modern society, — was a highly original and instructive device, only to be worked to success by a master. And the master brought it to a delightful success. In all his writings of thirty volumes there are few pages more attractive than the story of Jocelin of Brakelond, Abbot Hugo, Abbot Samson, and the festival of St. Edmund, which all pass away as in a vision leaving " a mutilated black ruin amidst green expanses," — as we so often see in our England to- day after the trampling of seven centuries over the graves of the early monks. And then, when the preacher passes suddenly from the twelfth century to the nineteenth, from toiling and ascetic monks to cotton spinners and platform orators, the efifect is electric, — as though some old Benedictine rose from the dead and began to preach in the crowded streets of a city of factories. Have we yet, after fifty years of this time of tepid hanker- ing after Socialism and Theophilanthropic experi- ments, got much farther than Thomas Carlyle in his preaching in Book IV. on " Aristocracies," " Captains of Industry," " The Landed," " The Gifted " ? What truth, what force in the aphorism : — " To predict the Future, to manage the Present, would not be so impossible, had not the Past been so sacrilegiously mishandled ; effaced, and what is worse, defaced ! " — " Of all Bibles, the frightfulest to disbelieve in is 60 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE II this ' Bible of Universal History.' " — " The Leaders of Industry, if Industry is ever to be led, are virtually the Captains of the World." What new meaning that phrase has acquired in these fifty years ! " Men of letters may become a ' chivalry,' an actual instead of a virtual Priesthood." Well ! not men of letters exactly : but perhaps philosophers, with an adequate moral, and scientific training. Here, as so often, Carlyle just missed a grand truth to which his insight and nobility of soul had led him, through his perverse inability to accept any systematic philosophy, and through his habit to listen to the whispering of his own heart as if it were equivalent to scientific cer- tainty. But the whole book. Past and Present, is a splendid piece and has done much to mould the thought of our time. It would impress us much more than it does, were it not already become the very basis of all sincere thought about social prob- lems and the future conditions of industry. Of the Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1845) we have already spoken, as the greatest of our author's effective products, inasmuch as it produced the most definite practical result in moulding opinion, and a result of the highest importance. But it is not, as we have seen, a work of art, or even an organic work at all, and it cannot compare in literary charm with some other of the author's works. We do not turn to the Cromwell again and again, as we do to the French Revolution, or to Sartor, which we can take up from time to time as we do a poem or a romance. Many of the great books of the world are not read and re-read by the public, just as none but special students continually resort to the Novum Organum, II THOMAS CARLYLE 6 1 or the Wealth of Nations. For similar reasons, the Cromwell will never be a favourite book with the next century, as it cannot be said to have been with ours. It has done its work with masterly power; and its work will endure. And some day perhaps, from out these materials, and those collected by Mr. Gardiner, and by oi irepl Gardiner, a Life of Crom- well may be finally composed. It is true that Carlyle's determination to force Oliver upon us as perfect saint and infallible hero is irritating and sometimes laughable ; it is true that his zeal to be-dwarf every one but Cromwell himself is unjust and untrue; and the depreciation of every man who declines to play into Oliver's hands is too often manifest. But, on the whole, the judgments are so sound, the supporting authorities are so over- whelming, the work of verification is so thorough, so scrupulous, so perfectly borne out by all subsequent research, — that the future will no doubt look on the Cromwell, not only as the most extraordinary, but the most satisfactory and effective of all Carlyle's work ; although, for the reasons stated, it can never have the largest measure of his literary charm ox\ possess the full afflatus of his poetic and mystical i genius. By the time that Cromwell was published, Thomas Carlyle was turned of fifty, and had produced nearly two-thirds of his total work. It may be doubted if any later book will be permanently counted amongst his masterpieces. Friedrich, for reasons set forth, was an attempt in late life to repeat the feat of the Cromwell: it was a much less urgent task: and it was not so well performed. The Latter-Day Pam- 62 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ii phlets (1850) do not add much that is new to Past and Present (1843) or to Sartor (1831) ; and little of what they add is either needful or true. The world had been fully enlightened about Wind-bags, Shams, the approach to Tophet, Stump-orators, Palaver- Parliaments, Phantasm-Captains, and the rest of the Sartorian puppet-pantomime. There was a profound truth in all of these invectives, warnings, and prophe- cies. But the prophet's voice at last got so shrieky and monotonous, that instead of warning and inspir- ing a second generation, these terrific maledictions began to pall upon a practical world. An ardent admirer of the prophet has said that, when he first heard Carlyle speak face to face, he could hardly resist the impression that he was listening to an actor personating the Sage of Chelsea, and mimick- ing the stock phrases of the Latter-Day Pamphlets. Certainly no man of sense can find any serious guid- ance on any definite social problem from these " Pamphlets " of his morbid decline. Carlyle at last sat eating his heart out, like Napoleon on St. Helena. His true friends will hasten to throw such a decent covering as Japhet and Shem threw around Noah, over the latest melancholy outbursts about Negroesyi Reformers, Jamaica massacres, and the anticipatecf conflagration of Paris by the Germans. It is pitiful indeed to find in "the collected and revised works," thirty-six volumes, the drivel of his Pro-Slavery advocacy, and of ill-condi ^ned snarling at honest men labujuring to reform ancient abuses. " " It is perilous for any man, however consummate be his genius, to place himself on a solitary rock apart from all living men and defiant of all before him, as II THOMAS CARLYLE 63 the sole source of truth out of his own inner con- sciousness. It is fatal to any man, however noble his own spirit, to look upon this earth as " one fuliginous dust-heap," and the whole human race as a mere herd of swine rushing violently down a steep place into the sea. Nor can the guidance of mankind be with safety . entrusted to one who for eighty-six years insisted on remaining by his own hearth-stone a mere omnivorous reader and omnige- nous writer of books. Carlyle was a true and pure " man of letters," looking at things and speaking to men, alone in his study, through the medium of printed paper. All that a " man of letters," of great genius and lofty spirit, could do by consuming and producing mere printed paper, he did. And as the " supreme man of letters " of his time he will ever be honoured and long continue to be read. He deliber- ately cultivated a form of speech which made him unreadable to all except English-speaking readers, and intelligible only to a select and cultivated body even amongst them. He wrote in what, for practical purposes, is a local, or rather personal, dialect. And thus he deprived himself of that world-wide and European influence which belongs to such men as Hume, Gibbon, Scott, Byron, — even to Macaulay, Tennyson, Dickens, Ruskin, and Spencer. But his name will stand beside theirs in the history of British thought in the nineteenth century; and a devoted band of chosen readers, wherever the Anglo-Saxon tongue is heard, will for generations to come continue to drink inspiration from the two or three master- pieces of the Annandale peasant-poet. Ill LORD MACAULAY Macaulay, who counted his years of life by those of this century, may fairly claim to have had the greatest body of readers, and to be the most admired prose-writer of the Victorian Age. It is now some seventy years since his first brilliant essay on " Mil- ton " took the world by storm. It is half a century since that fascinating series of Essays was closed, and little short of that time since his famous History appeared. The editions of it in England and in America are counted by thousands ; it has six trans- lations into German, and translations into ten other European languages. It made him rich, famous, and a peer. Has it given him a foremost place in Eng- lish literature? Here is a case where the judgment of the public and the judgment of experts is in striking contrast. The readers both of the Old and of the New World continue to give the most practical evidence that they love his books. Macaulay is a rare example of a writer all of whose works are almost equally popular, and believed by many to be equally good. Essays, Lays, History, Lives, — all are read by mil- lions ; as critic, poet, historian, biographer, Macaulay Ill LORD MACAULAY 65 has achieved world-wide renown. And yet some of our best critics deny him either fine taste, or subtlety, or delicate discrimination, catholic sympathies, or serene judgment. They say he is always more de- claimer than thinker, — more advocate than judge. The poets deny that the Lays are poetry at all. The modern school of scientific historians declare that the History is a splendid failure, and it proves how rotten was the theory on which it is constructed. The pur- ists in style shake their heads over his everlasting antitheses, the mannerism of violent phrases and the perpetual abuse of paradox. His most indulgent friends admit the force of these defects, which they usuallyspeakof ashis "limitations" or his "methods." Here, indeed, is an opportunity for one of those long- drawn antitheses of which Macaulay was so great a master. How he would himself have revelled in the paradox, — " that books which were household words with every cowboy in Nevada, and every Baboo in Bengal, were condemned by men of culture as the work of a Philistine and a mannerist; " " how ballads which were the delight of every child were ridiculed by critics as rhetorical jingles that would hardly win a prize in a public school ; " " how the most famous of all modern reviewers scarcely gave us one ex- ample of delicate appreciation or subtle analysis; " how it comes about " that the most elaborate of modern histories does not contain an idea above the commonplaces of a crammer's text-book," — and so forth, in the true Black-and-White style which is so clear and so familiar. But let us beware of applying to Macaulay himself that tone of exaggeration and laborious antithesis which he so often applied to 5 66 EARLY VICTORIA!^ LITERATURE ill others. Boswell, he says, was immortal, " because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb." It would be a feeble parody to retort that Macaulay became a great literary power " because he had no philosophy, little subtlety, and a heavy hand." For my part, I am slow to believe that the judgment of the whole English-speaking race, a judgment maintained over more than half a century, can be altogether wrong; and the writer who has given such delight, has influenced so many writers, and has taught so much to so many persons, can hardly have been a shallow mannerist, or an ungovernable partisan. No one denies that Macaulay had a prodigious know- ledge of books; that in literary fecundity and in varied improvisation he has rarely been surpassed; that his good sense is unfailing, his spirit manly, just, and generous; and lastly, that his command over language had unequalled qualities of precision, energy, and brilliance. These are all very great and sterling qualities. And it is right to acknowledge them with no unstinted honour, — even whilst we are fully con- scious of the profound shortcomings and limitations that accompanied but did not destroy them. In a previous paper we discussed the permanent contribution to English literature of Thomas Carlyle ; and it is curious to note how complete a contrast these t\vo famous writers present. Carlyle was a simple, self-taught, recluse man of letters : Macaulay was legislator, cabinet minister, orator, politician, peer, — a pet of society, a famous talker, and member of numerous academies. Carlyle was poor, despond- ent, morbid, and cynical: Macaulay was rich, opti- mist, overflowing with health, high spirits, and good Ill LORD MACAULAY 6j nature. The one hardly ever knew what the world called success: the other hardly ever knew failure. Carlyle had in him the elements that make the poet, the prophet, the apostle, the social philosopher. In Macaulay these were singularly wanting ; he was the man of affairs, the busy politician, the rhetorician, the eulogist of society as it is, the believer in material progress, in the ultimate triumph of all that is prac- tical and commonplace, and in the final discomfiture of all that is visionary and Utopian. The Teufels- drockhian dialect is obscure even to its select students : the Macaulay sentence is plain as that of Swift him- self. Carlyle's gospel is full of passion, novelty, suggestion, theory, and social problems. Macaulay turned his back on social problems and disdained any kind of gospel. He had no mission to tell the world how bad it is ; on the contrary, he was never wearied with his proofs that it ought to be well satisfied with its lot and its vast superiority in all things to its ancestors. The great public, wherever English books pene- trate, from the White Sea to Australia, from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, loves the brilliant, manly, downright optimist; the critics and the philosophers care more for the moody and prophetic pessimist. But this does not decide the matter ; and it does not follow that either public or critic has the whole truth. If books were written only in the dialect and with the apocalyptic spirit of Sartor, it is certain that mil- lions would cease to read books, and could gain little from books if they did. And if the only books were such " purple patches " of history as Macaulay left us, with their hard and fast divisions of men into 68 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE III sheep and goats, and minute biographies of fops, pedants, and grandees, narrated in the same resonant, rhetorical, unsympathetic, and falsely emphatic style, — this generation would have a very patchwork idea of past ages and a narrow sense of the resources of our English language. There is room for both liter- ary schools, and we need teachers of many kinds. We must not ask of any kind more than they can give. Macaulay has led millions who read no one else, or who never read before, to know something of the past, and to enjoy reading. He will have done them serious harm if he has persuaded them that this is the best that can be done in historical literature, or that this is the way in which the English language can be most fitly used. Let us be thankful for his energy, learning, brilliance. He is no priest, philoso- pher, or master. Let us delight in him as a fireside companion. In one thing all agree, — critics, public, friends, and opponents. Macaulay's was a life of purity, honour, courage, generosity, affection, and manly persever- ance, almost without a stain or a defect. His life, it was true, was singularly fortunate, and he had but few trials, and no formidable obstacles. He was bred up in the comfortable egoism of the opulent middle classes; the religion of comfort, laisser-faire, and social order was infused into his bones. But, so far as his traditions and temper would permit, his life was as honourable, as unsullied, and as generous, as ever was that of any man who lived in the fierce light that beats upon the famous. We know his nature and his career as well as we know any man's; and we find it on every side wholesome, just, and right. Ill LORD MAC AULA Y 69 He has been fortunate in his biographers, and amply criticised by the best judges. His nephew, Sir George Trevelyan, has written his life at length in a fine book. Dean Milman and Mark Pattison have given us vignettes ; Cotter Morison has adorned the Men of Letters series with a delightful and sympa- thetic sketch ; and John Morley and Leslie Stephen have weighed his work in the balance with judicial acumen and temperate firmness. There is but one voice in all this company. It was a fine, generous, honourable, and sterling nature. His books deserve their vast popularity and may long continue to main- tain it. But Macaulay must not be judged amongst philosophers, — nor even amongst the real masters of the English language. And, unless duly corrected, he may lead historical students astray and his imi- tators into an obtrusive mannerism. Let us take a famous passage from one of his most famous essays, written in the zenith of his powers after his return from India, at the age of forty, — an essay on a grand subject which never ceased to fas- cinate his imagination, composed with all his amazing resources of memory and his dazzling mastery of colour. It is the third paragraph of his well-known review of Von Ranke's History of the Popes. The passage is familiar to all readers, and some of its phrases are household words. It is rather long as well as trite ; but it contains in a single page such a profusion of historical suggestion ; it is so vigorous, so characteristic of Macaulay in all his undoubted resources as in all his mannerism and limitations ; it is so essentially true, and yet so thoroughly obvious ; it is so grand in form, and yet so meagre in philoso- 70 EARLY VICTORIAN' LITERATURE in phic logic, that it may be worth while to analyse it in detail; and for that purpose it must be set forth, even though it convey to most readers little more than a sonorous truism. There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilization. No other institu- tion is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphi- theatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth ; and far beyond Pepin the august dynasty extends, tiU it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy ; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth, to the farthest ends of the world, missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated her for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascen- dancy extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which, a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and Ill LORD MACAULAY 7 1 fifty millions ; and it will be difficult to show that all the other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the eccle- siastical establishments that now exist in the world ; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had crossed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were stiU worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller fi-om New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast soli- tude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's. Here we have Macaulay in all his strength and all his limitations. The passage contains in the main a solid truth — a truth which was very little accepted in England in the year 1840 — a truth of vast import and very needful to assert. And this truth is clothed in such pomp of illustration, and is hammered into the mind with such accumulated blows ; it is so clear, so hard, so coruscating with images, that it is im- possible to escape its effect. The paragraph is one never to be forgotten, and not easy to be refuted or qualified. No intelligent tiro in history can read that page without being set a-thinking, without feeling that he has a formidable problem to solve. Tens of thousands of young minds must have had that deeply-coloured picture of Rome visibly before them in many a Protestant home in England and in Amer- ica. Now, all this is a very great merit. To have posed a great historical problem, at a time when it 72 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE III was very faintly grasped, and to have sent it ringing across the English-speaking world in such a form that he who runs may read, — nay, he who rides, he who sails, he who watches sheep or stock must read, — this is a real and signal service conferred on literature and on thought. Compare this soHd sense with Carlyle's ribaldry about " the three-hatted Papa," " pig's-wash," " servants of the Devil," " this accursed nightmare," and the rest of his execrations, — and we see the difference between the sane judgment of the man of the world and the prejudices of intolerant fanaticism. But, unfortunately, Macaulay, having stated in majestic antitheses his problem of " the unchangeable Church," makes no attempt to provide us with a solu- tion. This splendid eulogium is not meant to con- vert us to Catholicism, — very far from it. Macaulay was no Catholic, and had only a sort of literary admiration for the Papacy. As Mr. Cotter Morison has shown, he leaves the problem just where he feund it, and such theories as he offers are not quite trust- worthy. He does not suggest that the Catholic Church is permanent because it possesses truth : but, rather, because men's ideas of truth are a matter of idiosyncrasy or digestion. The whole essay is not a very safe guide to the history of Protestantism or of Catholicism, though it is full of brilliant points and sensible assertions. And in the end our essayist, the rebel from his Puritan traditions, and the close ally of sceptical Gallios, after forty pages of learned pros and cons, declares that he will not say more for fear of " exciting angry feelings." He rather sneers at Protestant fervour; he declaims grand sentences Ill LORD MACAULAY 73 about Catholic fervour. He will not declare for either of them ; and it does not seem to matter much in the long run for which men declare, provided they can be kept well in hand by saving common-sense. In the mean time the topic is a mine of paradox to the picturesque historian. This is not philosophy, it is not history, but it is full of a certain rich literary seed. The passage, though a truism to all thoughtful men, was a striking novelty to English Protestants fifty years ago. But it will hardly bear a close scru- tiny of these sweeping, sharp-edged, " cock-sure " dogmas of which it is composed. The exact propo- sitions it contains may be singly accurate ; but as to the most enduring " work of human policy," it is fair to remember that the Civil Law of Rome has a con- tinuous history of at least twenty-four centuries ; that the Roman Empire from Augustus to the last Con- stantine in New Rome endured for fifteen centuries ; and from Augustus to the last Hapsburg it endured for eighteen centuries. There is a certain ambiguity between the way in which Macaulay alternates be- tween the Papacy and the Christian Church, which are not at all the same thing. The Papacy, as a European or cosmical institution, can hardly be said to have more than twelve centuries of continuous history on the stage of the world. The religion and institutions of Confucius and of Buddha have twice that epoch; and the religion and institutions of Moses have thirty centuries; and the Califate in some form or other is nearly coeval with the Papacy. The judicious eulogist has guarded himself against denying in words any of these facts ; but a cool sur- 74 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ill vey of universal history will somewhat blunt the edge of Macaulay's trenchant phrases. After all, we must admit that the passage as a whole, apart from the superlatives, is substantially true, and contains a most valuable and very striking thought. Passing from the thought to the form of this famous passage, with what a wealth of illustration is it en- forced, with what telling contrasts, with what gor- geous associations ! How vivid the images, how stately the personages, who are called up to heighten the lights of the tableau of the Vatican ! Ancient and modern civilisation are joined by it; it recalls the Pantheon and the Colosseum ; it gave sanction to the Empire of Charlemagne and to that of Napoleon, it inspired Augustin, and confronted Attila ; Venice is a mere modern foundation; the Church is older than Hengist and Horsa, Clovis, or Mahomet; yet it stretches over the Atlantic continent from Missouri to Cape Horn, and still goes on conquering and to conquer. And the climax of this kaleidoscopic "symphony in purple and gold" — the New Zealander sketching the ruins of St. Paul's from a broken arch of London Bridge — has become a proverb, and is repeated daily by men who never heard of Macaulay, much less of Von Ranke, and is an inimitable bit of picturesque colouring. It is very telling, nobly hyperbolic, no man can misunderstand it, or forget it. The most practised hand will not find it easy to " go one better than" Macaulay in a swingeing trope. It is a fascinating literary artifice, and it has fascinated many to their ruin. In feebler hands, it degenerates into what in London journalistic slang is known as "telegraphese." A pocket encyclopaedia and a co- Ill LORD MACAULAY 75 pious store of adjectives have enabled many a youth to roar out brilliant articles " as gently as a sucking dove." But all men of power have their imitators, and are open to parody and spurious coining. Now, Macaulay, however brilliant and kaleidoscopic, is always using his own vast reading, his own warm imagination, his unfailing fecundity, and his sterling good sense. Turn to the style of the passage, — it is perfectly pellucid in meaning, rings on the ear like the crack of a rifle, is sonorous, rich, and swift. One can fancy the whole passage spoken by an orator ; indeed it is difficult to resist the illusion that it was " declaimed " before it was written. We catch the oratorial tags and devices, the repeated phrase, the incessant anti- thesis, the alternate rise and fall of eloquent speech. It is declamation — fine declamation — but we miss the musical undertones, the subtle involutions, the unexpected bursts, and mysterious cadences of really great written prose. The term "the Republic of Venice " is repeated three times in three lines : the term " the Papacy " is repeated three times in two lines. Any other writer would substitute a simple "it" for most of these; and it is difficult to see how the paragraph would lose. The orator aids his hearers by constant repetition of the same term ; the writer avoids this lest he prove monotonous. The short sentences of four or five words interposed to break the torrent — the repetition of the same words — the sea-saw of black and white, old and young, base and pure — all these are the stock-in-trade of the rhetorician, not of the master of written prose. Now, Macaulay was a rhetorician, a consummate ']6 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE in rhetorician, who wrote powerful invectives or pane- gyrics in massive rhetoric which differed from speeches mainly in their very close fibre, in their chiselled phrasing, and above all in their dazzling profusion of literary illustration. If it was oratory, it was the oratory of a speaker of enormous reading, inexhaus- tible memory, and consummate skill with words. There is nothing at all exceptional about this pas- sage which has been chosen for analysis. It is a fair and typical piece of Macaulay's best style. Indeed his method is so uniform and so mechanical that any page of his writing exhibits the same force and the same defects as any other. Take one of the most famous of his scenes, the trial of Warren Hastings, toward the end of that elaborate essay, written in 1 841. Every one knows the gorgeous and sonorous description of Westminster Hall, beginning — "The place was worthy of such a trial." In the next sen- tence the word " hall " recurs five times, and the rela- tive " which " occurs three times, and is not related to the same noun. Ten sentences in succession open with the pronoun " there." It is a perfect galaxy of varied colour, pomp, and illustration ; but the effect is somewhat artificial, and the whole scene smells of the court upholsterer. The "just sentence of Bacon " pairs off with " the just absolution of Somers ; " the " greatest painter " sits beside the " greatest scholar of the age ; " ladies have " lips more persuasive than those of Fox ; " there, too, is " the beautiful mother of a beautiful race." And in the midst of these long- drawn superlatives and glittering contrasts come in short martial phrases, as brief and sharp as a drill- sergeant's word of command. " Neither military nor Ill LORD MACAULAY jy civil pomp was wanting." — " The avenues were lined with grenadiers." — " The streets were kept clear by cavalry." No man can forget these short, hard decisive sentences. The artificial structure of his paragraphs grew upon Macaulay with age. His History of England opens with a paragraph of four sentences. Each of these begins with "I purpose," "I shall;" and the last sentence of the four has ten clauses each beginning with " how." The next paragraph has four succes- sive sentences beginning " It will be seen," — and the last sentence has again three clauses each beginning with " how." The fourth paragraph contains the word " I," four times in as many lines. This method of composition has its own merits. The repetition of words and phrases helps the perception and pre- vents the possibility of misunderstanding. Where effects are simply enumerated, the monotony of form is logically correct. Every successive sen- tence heralded by a repeated " how," or " there," or "I," adjusts itself into its proper line without an effort of thought on the reader's part. It is not graceful; it is pompous, and distinctly rhetorical. But it is eminently clear, emphatic, orderly, and easy to follow or to remember. Hence it is unpleasing to the finely attuned ear, and is counted somewhat vulgar by the trained lover of style, whilst it is immensely popular with those who read but little, and is able to give them as much pleasure as it gives instruction. The famous passage about Westminster Hall, written in 1841, may be compared with the equally known passage on the Chapel in the Tower which occurs in the fifth chapter of the History, written in 78 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE III 1848. It begins as all lovers of English remember, — " In truth there is no sadder spot on the earth than this little cemetery." The passage continues with " there " and " thither " repeated eight times ; it bristles with contrasts, graces and horrors, antithesis, climax, and sonorous heraldries. " Such was the dust with which the dust of Monmouth mingled." It is a fine paragraph, which has impressed and de- lighted millions. But it is, after all, rather facile mor- alising; its rhetorical artifice has been imitated with success in many a prize essay and not a few tall-talk- ing journals. How much more pathos is there in a stanza from Gray's Elegy, or a sentence from Car- lyle's Bastille, or Burke's French Revolution! The habit of false emphasis and the love of super- latives is a far worse defect, and no one has attempted to clear Macaulay of the charge. It runs through every page he wrote, from his essay on Milton, with which he astonished the town at the age of twenty- five, down to the close of his History wherein we read that James II. valued Lord Perth as " author of the last improvements on the thumb-screw." Indeed no more glaring example of Macaulay's megalomania or taste for exaggeration can be found than the famous piece in the Milton on the Restoration of Charles II. Then came those days, never to be recalled without a blush, the days of servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love, of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the par- adise of cold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. The king cringed to his rival that he might trample on his people, sank into a viceroy of France, and pocketed, with complacent infamy, her de- Ill LORD MAC AULA Y 79 grading insults, and her more degrading gold. The caresses of harlots and the jests of buffoons regulated the policy of the State. The government had just ability enough to deceive and just religion enough to persecute. The prin- ciples of liberty were the scoff of every grinning courtier, and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean. In every high place, worship was paid to Charles and James, Belial and Moloch ; and England propitiated these obscene and cruel idols with the blood of her best and bravest chil- dren. Crime succeeded to crime, and disgrace to disgrace, till the race, accursed of God and man, was a second time driven forth, to wander on the face of the earth, and to be a by-word and a shaking of the head to the nations. This is vigorous invective, in the style of Cicero against Catiline, or Junius attacking a duke; it is brilliant rhetoric and scathing satire. At bottom it has substantial truth, if the attention is fixed on Whitehall and the scandalous chronicle of its fre- quenters. It differs also from much in Macaulay's invectives in being the genuine hot-headed passion of an ardent reformer only twenty-five years old. It is substantially true as a picture of the Court at the Restoration : but in form how extravagant, even of that! Charles II. is Belial; James is Moloch; and Charles is propitiated by the blood of English- men ! — Charles, easy, courteous, good-natured, profli- gate Charles. And all this of the age of the Paradise Lost and the Morning Hymn, of Jeremy Taylor, Izaak Walton, Locke, Newton, and Wren ! Watch Macaulay banging on his antithetic drum, — " ser- vitude without loyalty and sensuality without love," — " dwarfish talents and gigantic vices," — " ability enough to deceive," — " religion enough to per- 8o EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE m secute." Every phrase is a superlative ; every word has its contrast ; every sentence has its climax. And withal let us admit that it is tremendously powerful, that no one who ever read it can forget it, and few even who have read it fail to be tinged with its fury and contempt. And, though a tissue of superlatives, it bears a solid truth, and has turned to just thoughts many a young spirit prone to be fascinated by Charles's good-nature, and impressed with the halo of the divine consecration of kings. But the savage sarcasms which are tolerable in a passionate young reformer smarting under the follies of George IV., are a serious defect in a grave histo- rian, when used indiscriminately of men and women in every age and under every condition. In his Machiavelli, Macaulay hints that the best histories are perhaps "those in which a little of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed." " Much," he says, " is gained in effect." It is to be feared that this youthful indiscretion was never wholly purged out of him. Boswell, we know, was " a dunce, a par- asite, and a coxcomb," — and therefore immortal. He was one of " the smallest men that ever lived," of " the meanest and feeblest intellect," " servile," " shallow," " a bigot and a sot," and so forth, — and yet " a great writer, because he was a great fool." We all know what is meant ; and there is a substra- tum of truth in this ; but it is tearing a paradox to tatters. How differently has Carlyle dealt with poor dear Bozzy ! Croker's Boswell' s Johnson " is as bad as bad can be," full of "monstrous blunders," (he had put 1761 for 1766), "gross mistakes," "for which a schoolboy would be flogged." Southey is m LORD M AC AULA Y 8 1 " Utterly destitute of the power of discerning truth from falshood." He prints a joke which " is enough to make us ashamed of our species." Robert Mont- gomery pours out " a roaring cataract of nonsense." One of his tropes is "the worst similitude in the world." And yet Macaulay can rebuke Johnson for " big words wasted on little things " ! Neither Cicero, Milton, Swift, nor Junius ever dealt in more furious words than Macaulay, who had not the excuse of controversy or passion. Frederick William of Prussia was "the most execrable of fiends, a cross between Moloch and Puck ; " " his palace was hell ; " compared with the Prince, afterwards Frederick the Great, " Oliver Twist in the workhouse, and Smike at Dotheboys Hall were petted children." It would be difficult for Mark Twain to beat that. "The follies and vices of King John were the salvation of England." Cranmer was peculiarly fitted to or- ganise the Church of England by being " unscrupu- lous, indifferent, a coward, and a time-server." James I. was given to " stammering, slobbering, shedding unmanly tears," alternating between the buffoon and the pedagogue. James II. "amused himself with hearing Covenanters shriek;" he was "a libertine, singularly slow and narrow in understanding, obstinate, harsh, and unforgiving." The country gentleman of that age talked like " the most ignorant clown ; " his wife and daughter were in taste " below a stillroom maid of the present day." The chaplain was a mere servant, and was expected to marry a servant girl whose character had been blown upon. But it ought to be remembered that all of these descriptions are substantially true. Macaulay's pic- 6 82 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE in tures of the Stuarts, of Cromwell, of the Restoration and its courtiers, of Milton, of William III., are all faithful and just ; Boswell was often absurd ; Southey was shallow ; Montgomery was an impostor ; Fred- erick William did treat his son brutally ; the country squire and the parson two centuries ago were much rougher people than they are to-day. And if Ma- caulay had simply told us this in measured language of this kind, he would have failed in beating his lesson into the mind. Not only was " a little of fictitious narrative judiciously employed," but not a little of picturesque exaggeration and redundant superlatives. Carlyle is an even worse offender in this line. Did he not call Macaulay himself " squat, low-browed, commonplace," — "a poor creature, with his diction- ary literature and his saloon arrogance," — "no vision in him," — " will neither see nor do any great thing " ? ^ Ruskin, Freeman, Froude, and others have been tempted to deal in gross superlatives. But with all these it has been under the stimulus of violent indig- nation. With Macaulay the superlatives pour out as his native vernacular without heat or wrath, as a mere rhetorician's trick, as the favourite tones of a great colourist. And though the trick, like all literary tricks, grows upon the artist, and becomes singularly offensive to the man of taste, it must always be re- membered that, with_M^acaulay, the prais e or blame is usuallj^Liust and true; he is very rarej^_g£Qssly unfair and wrorig, as Carlyle. so _often^ is; and if Macaulay rSorts too often to the superlative degree, he is usually entitled to use the comparative degree of the same adjective. ' Froude's Carlyle, i. 192. HI LORD MACAULAY 83 The style, with all its defects, has had a solid suc- cess and has done great things. By clothing his historical judgments and his critical reflections in these cutting and sonorous periods, he has forced them on the attention of a vast body of readers wherever English is read at all, and on millions who have neither time nor attainments for any regular studies of their own. How many men has Macaulay succeeded in reaching, to whom all other history and criticism is a closed book, or a book in an unknown tongue ! If he were a sciolist or a wrong-headed fanatic, this would be a serious evil. But, as he is substantially right in his judgments, brimful of saving common-sense and generous feeling, and profoundly well read in his own periods and his favourite litera- ture, Macaulay has conferred most memorable ser- vices on the readers of English throughout the world. He stands between philosophic historians and the public very much as journals and periodicals stand between the masses and great libraries. Macaulay is a glorified journalist and reviewer, who brings the matured results of scholars to the man in the street in a form that he can remember and enjoy, when he could not make use of a merely learned book. He performs the office of the ballad-maker or story- teller in an age before books were known or were common. And it is largely due to his influence that the best journals and periodicals of our day are writ- ten in a style so clear, so direct, so resonant. We need not imitate his mannerism ; we may all learn to be outspoken, lucid, and brisk. It is the very perfection of his qualities in rousing the interest of the great public which has drawn 84 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE in down on Macaulay the grave rebukes of so many- fine judges of the higher historical literature. Cotter Morison, Mark Pattison, Leslie Stephen, and John Morley all agree that his style has none of the subtler charms of the noblest prose, that his conception of history is radically unsound, that, in fact, it broke down by its own unwieldy proportions. Mr. Mori- son has very justly remarked that if the History of England had ever been completed on the same scale for the whole of the period as originally designed, it would have run to fifty volumes, and would have occupied in composition one hundred and fifty years. As it is, the eight duodecimo volumes give us the events of sixteen years, from 1685 to 1701 ; so that the history of England from Alfred would require five hundred similar volumes. Now, Gibbon's eight octavo volumes give us the history of the world for thirteen centuries; that is to say. Gibbon has re- counted the history of a century in nearly the same space that Macaulay records the history of a year. There cannot be a doubt that Gibbon's Decline and Fall is immeasurably superior to Macaulay's frag- ment, in thought, in imagination, in form, in all the qualities of permanent history; it stands on a far higher plane; it will long outlast and overshadow it. Compared with this, Macaulay's delightful and brilliant pictures are mere glorified journalism. Macaulay, who was no braggart, has put it on record that his conception of history was more just than that of Hume, Robertson, Voltaire, and Gibbon. It is perfectly true that his conception was different from theirs, his execution was different, and he does not address the same class of readers. But his con- HI LORD MACAULAY 85 ception of history was not just; it was a mistake. His leading idea was to make history a true romance. He has accomplished this; and he has given us a historical novel drawn frotn authentic documents. This is, no doubt, a very useful thing to do, a most interesting book to read; it is very pleasant liter- ature, and has a certain teaching of its own to a certain order of readers. But it is not history. It sacrifices the breadth of view, the organic life, the philosophy, the grand continuity of human society. It must be a sectional picture of a very limited period in a selected area; it can give us only the external; it inevitably tends to trivial detail and to amusing personalities ; it necessarily blinds us to the slow sequence of the ages. Besides this, it explains none of the deeper causes of movement; for, to make a picture, the artist must give us the visible and the obvious. History, in its highest sense, is th e I r ecord of ^the evolution of humanity, in whole or in part. To compose an historical novel from documents is to put this object aside. History, said Macaulay in his Hallam, " is a compound of poetry and philoso- phy." But in practice, he substituted word-painting 1 for poetry, and anecdote for philosophy. His own I delightful and popular History of England is a compound of historical romance and biographical memoir. Maca ulay's strong point was in narrative, and in narrative he has been surpassed by hardly any historian and even by few novelists. Scott and i Victor Hugo have hardly a scene more stirring than Macaulay's death of Charles II., Monmouth's rebel- ' lion, the flight of James II., the trial of Titus Oates, 86 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE in the inner life of William III. This is a very great quality which has deservedly made him popular. And if Macaulay had less philosophy than almost any historian of the smallest pretension, he has a skill in narration which places him in a fair line with the greatest. Unfortunately, this superb genius for narration has rarely been devoted to the grander events and the noblest chiefs in history. Even his hero William III. hardly lives in his canvas with such a glowing light as Charles II., Monmouth, and Jeffreys. The expulsion of James II. was a very poor affair if compared with the story of Charles I. and the Parliament. If Macaulay had painted for us the Council Chamber of Cromwell as he has painted the Whitehall of Charles II. ; if he had described the battle of Naseby as well as he has pictured the fight of Sedgemoor; if he had narrated the campaigns of Marlborough as brilliantly as he has told that which ended at the Boyne, — how much should we have had! But it could not be. His own conception of his- tory made this impossible. It is well said that he planned his history " on the scale of an ordnance map." He did what a German professor does when he tries to fathom English society by studying the Times newspaper day by day. The enormous mass of detail, the infinitesimal minuteness of view, beat him. As he complained about Samuel Johnson, he runs into " big words about little things." Charles's mistress, her pug-dog, the page-boy who tended the dog, nay, the boy's putative father, occupy the fore- ground : and the poet, the statesman, and the hero retire into the middle distance or the background. LORD MAC AULA Y 8/ What would we not have given to have had Macau- lay's History of England continued down to his own time, the wars of Marlborough, the reign of Anne, the poets, wits, romancers, inventors, reformers, and heroes of the eighteenth century, the careers of Walpole, Chatham, Pitt, Burke, Fox, Nelson, Wel- lington, Brougham, Bentham, and Canning, — the formation of the British Empire, — the great revolu- tionary struggle in Europe ! The one thought which dims our enjoyment of this fascinating collection of memoirs, and these veracious historical romances, is the sense of what we might have had, if their author had been a great historian as well as a magnificent literary artist. IV BENJAMIN DISRAELI In the blaze of the political reputation of the Earl of Beaconsfield we are too apt to overlook the liter- ary claims of Benjamin Disraeli. But many of those who have small sympathy with his career as a states- man find a keen relish in certain of his writings ; and it is hardly a paradox to augur that in a few genera- tions more the former chief of the new Tory Democ- racy may have become a tradition, whilst certain of his social satires may continue to be widely read. Bolingbroke, Swift, Sheridan, and Macaulay live in English literature, but are little remembered as poli- ticians ; and Burke, the philosopher, grows larger in power over our thoughts, as Burke, the party orator, becomes less and less by time. We do not talk of Viscount St. Albans, the learned Chancellor: we speak only of Bacon, the brilliant writer, the potent thinker. And so perhaps in the next century, we shall hear less of Lord Beaconsfield, the Imperial Prime Minister : but Benjamin Disraeli's pictures of English society and the British Parliament may still amuse and instruct our descendants. It is true that the permanent parts of his twenty works may prove to be small. Pictures, vignettes, IV BENJAMIN DISRAELI 89 sketches, epigrams will survive rather than elaborate works of art ; these gems of wit and fancy will have to be picked out of a mass of rubbish ; and they will be enjoyed for their vivacious originality and Vol- tairean pungency, not as masterpieces or complete creations. That Disraeli wrote much stuff is true enough, but so did Fielding, so did Swift, and Defoe, and Goldsmith, Writers are to be judged by their best; and it does not matter so very much if that best is little in bulk. Disraeli's social and political satires have a peculiar and rare flavour of their own, charged with an insight and a vein of wit such as no other man perhaps in this century has touched, — so that, even though they be thrown off in sketches and sometimes in mere jeux d' esprit, they bring him into the company of Swift, Voltaire, and Montesquieu. He is certainly inferior to all these mighty satirists both in wit and passion, and also in definite purpose. But he has touches of their lightning-flash irradiating contemporary society. And it seems a pity that the famous Men of Letters series which admits (and rightly admits) Hawthorne and De Quincey, could find no room for the author oi Ixion in Heaven, The Infernal Marriage, Coningsby, and Lothair. Disraeli's literary reputation has suffered much in England by the unfortunate circumstance of his hav- ing been the leader of a political party. As the chief of a powerful party which he transformed with amazing audacity, as the victorious destroyer of the old Whig oligarchy and the founder of the new Tory democracy, as a man of Jewish birth and alien race, as a man to whom satire was the normal weapon and bombastic affectation a deliberate expedient for daz- go EARL Y VICTORIAN LITERA TURE iv zling the weak, — Disraeli, even in his writings, has been exposed in England to a bitter system of dis- paragement which blinds partisans to their real liter- ary merit. His political opponents, and they are many and savage, can see little to admire in his strange romances ; his political worshippers and fol- lowers, who took him seriously as a great statesman, are not fond of imagining their hero as an airy satirist. His romances as well as his satires are wholly unlike anything English ; and though he had brilliant liter- ary powers, he never acquired any serious literary education. Much as he had read, he had no learning, and no systematic knowledge of any kind. He was never, strictly speaking, even an accurate master of literary English. He would slip, as it were, uncon- sciously, into foreign idioms and obsolete words. In America, where his name arouses no political preju- dice, he is better judged. To the Englishman, at least to the pedant, he is still a somewhat elaborate jest. Let us put aside every bias of political sympathy and anything that we know or suspect of the nature of the man, and we may find in the writer, Benjamin Disraeli, certain very rare qualities which justify his immense popularity in America, and which ought to maintain it in England. In his preface to Lothair (October 1870), he proudly said that it had been " more extensively read both by the people of the United Kingdom and the United States than any work that has appeared for the last half century." This singular popularity must have a ground. Dis- raeli, in truth, belongs to that very small group of real political satirists of whom Swift is the type. He IV BENJAMIN DISRAELI 91 is not the equal of the terrible Dean ; but it may be doubted if any Englishman since Swift has had the same power of presenting vivid pictures and decisive criticisms of the political and social organism of his times. It is this Aristophanic gift which Swift had. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rabelais, Diderot, Heine, Beaumarchais had it. Carlyle had it for other ages, and in a historic spirit. There have been far greater satirists, men like Fielding and Thackeray, who have drawn far more powerful pictures of particular char- acters, foibles, or social maladies. But since Swift we have had no Englishman who could give us a vivid and amusing picture of our political life, as laid bare to the eye of a consummate political genius. It must be admitted that, with all the rare qualities of Disraeli's literary work, he hardly ever took it quite seriously, or except as an interlude and with some ulterior aim. In his early pieces he simply sought to startle the town and to show what a wonderfully clever young fellow had descended upon it. In his later books, such as Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred, he wished to propound a new party programme. Lothair was a picture of British society, partly indul- gent and sympathetic, partly caustic or contemptuous, but presented all through with a vein of persiflage, mockery, and extravaganza. All this was amusing and original ; but every one of these things is fatal to sustained and serious art If an active politician seeks to galvanise a new party by a series of novels, the romances cannot be works of literary art. If a young man wants only to advertise his own smart- ness, he will not produce a beautiful thing. And if a statesman out of office wishes to amuse himself by 92 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE IV alternate banter and laudation of the very society which he has led and which looks to him as its inspi- ration, the result will be infinitely entertaining, but not a great work of art Disraeli therejforc -jgith \\\.tx^y^^^^^^j^^\^^i_^or:^x v,^w^c^;^s^ them in the way in ^hich a tone arti s^worfa, and only resor^oto theni^^ajneans^f gaining some practi- caTand^^^^jngJerjgljend. "" „^-,~«-^»««i ButTTr^sraeli's ambition led him to political and social triumphs, for which he sacrificed artistic suc- cess and literary honours, we ought not to be blind to the rare qualities which are squandered in his books. He did not produce immortal romances, — he knew nothing of an ingenious plot, or a striking situation, or a creative character, — but he did give us inimitable political satires and some delicious social pantomimes ; and he presented these with an *■ ,, ■'■* I 11 ' - III .iLiii- -r. orginal^wit in which the French-excel, whic£_is very rare indeed in England. Ask not of Disraeli more than Tie professes to give you, judge him by his own standard, and he will still furnish you with delightful reading, with suggestive and original thoughts. He is usually inclined to make game of his reader, his subject, and even of himself; but he lets you see that he never forgets this, and never attempts to conceal it. He is seldom dull, never sardonic or cruel, and always clean, healthy, and decent. His heroines are ideal fairy queens, his heroes are all visionary and chivalrous nincompoops ; and even, though we know that much of it is whimsical banter and nonsensical fancy, there is an air of refined extravaganza in these books which may continue to give them a lasting charm. IV BENJAMIN DISRAELI 93 The short juvenile drolleries of his restless youth are the least defective as works of art; and, being brief and simple y^^ay?

mate zest when he painted the dark a nd th e foul. His creative imagination fell short of the true equi- poise, of that just vision of chiaroscuro, which we find in the greatest masters of the human heart. This 1 imi tation of his genius has been visited upon Thackeraj^with a heavy hand. And such as it is, he must bear it. The plac e of Th ^ckerav^in Enp[lish literaturewill alw ays be determined bv his Vanity Fair : which will be read, we may confidently predict, as long as Tom jFones, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy, The Anti- quary, and Pickwick. But all the best of his pieces, even the smaller jeux d'esprit, may be read with delight again and again by young and old. And of the best are — Esmond, The Newcomes, Barry Lyn- don, the Book of Snobs, the Hoggarty Diamond, some of the Burlesques and Christmas Books, and the English Humourists. Of these, Esmond has every quality of a great book, except its artificial form, its excessive elaboration of historical colouring, and its unsavoury plot. Beatrix Esmond is almost as won- derful a creation as Becky Sharp ; though, if formed on a grander mould, she has less fascination than that incorrigible minx. The Newcomes, if in some JV. M. THACKERAY 127 ways the most genial of the longer pieces, is plainly without the power of Vanity Fair. And if Barry Lyndon has this power, it is an awful picture of cruelty and meanness. The Book of Snobs and the Hoggarty Diamond were each a kind of prelude to Vanity Fair, and both contain some of its essential marks of pathos and of power. It is indeed strange to us now to remember that both of these books, written with such finished mastery of hand and full of such passages of wit and insight, could have been published for years before the world had recognised that it had a new and consummate writer before it. The Book of Snobs indeed may truly be said to have , seriously improved the public opinion of the age, and to have given a death-blow to many odious forms of sycophancy and affectation which passed unrebuked in England fifty years ago. And the Burlesque Romances and the English Humourists have certainly assisted in forming the public taste and in promoting a sound criticism of our standard fiction. Charlotte Bronte dedicated her J^ane Eyre, in 1847, to William Makepeace Thackeray, as "the first social regenerator of the day." Such language, though interesting as coming from a girl of singular genius and sincerity, however ignorant of real life, was excessive. But we may truly assert that he has enriched our literature with some classical master- pieces in the comedy of contemporary manners. VI CHARLES DICKENS It is a fearsome thing to venture to say anything' now about Charles Dickens, whom we have all loved, enjoyed, and laughed over: whose tales are house- hold words in every home where the English tongue is heard, whose characters are our own school-friends, the sentiment of our youthful memories, our boon- companions and our early attachments. To view him in any critical light is a task as risky as it would be to discuss the permanent value of some fashionable amusement, a favourite actor, a popular beverage, or a famous horse. Millions and millions of old and young love Charles Dickens, know his personages by heart, play at games with his incidents and names, and from the bottom of their souls believe that there never was such fun, and that there never will be con- ceived again such inimitable beings, as they find in his ever-fresh and ever-varied pages. This is by itself a very high title to honour : perhaps it is the chief jewel in the crown that rests on the head of Charles Dickens. I am myself one of these devotees, of these lovers, of these slaves of his : or at least I can remember that I have been. To have stirred this pure and natural humanity, this force of sympa- VI CHARLES DICKENS 129 thy, in such countless millions is a great triumph. Men and women to-day do not want any criticism of Charles Dickens, any talk about him at all. They enjoy him as he is : they examine one another in his books : they gossip on by the hour about his innu- merable characters, his never-to-be-forgotten wag- geries and fancies. No account of early Victorian literature can omit the name of Charles Dickens from the famous writers of the time. How could we avoid notice of one whose first immortal tale coincides with the accession of our Queen, and who for thirty-three successive years continued to pour out a long stream of books that still delight the English-speaking world ? When we begin to talk about the permanent place in Eng- lish literature of eminent writers, one of the first definite problems is presented by Charles Dickens. And it is one of the most obscure of such problems ; because, more than almost any writer of our age, Charles Dickens has his own accustomed nook at every fireside: he is a familiar friend, a welcome guest ; we remember the glance of his eye ; we have held his hand, as it were, in our own. The children brighten up as his step is heard; the chairs are drawn round the hearth, and a fresh glow is given to the room. We do not criticise one whom we love, nor do we suffer others to do so. And there is p er- ha ps a wider sympathv with Charles Dickens as a p erson than with any other writer of our tim e. For this reason there has been hardly any serious criti- cism or estimate of Dickens as a great artist, apart from some peevish and sectional disparagement of his genius, which has been too much tinged with 9 I30 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vi academic pedantry and the bias of aristocratic temper or political antagonism. I am free to confess that I am in no mood to pre- tend making up my mind for any impartial estimate of Charles Dickens as an abiding power in English literature. The "personal equation" is in my own case somewhat too strong to leave me with a per- fectly " dry light " in the matter. I will make a clean breast of it at once by saying, that I can remember reading some of the most famous of these books in their green covers, month by month, as they came out in parts, when I was myself a child or " in my 'teens." That period included the first ten of the main works from Pickwick down to David Copperfield. With Bleak House, which I read as a student of philo- sophy at Oxford beginning to be familiar with Aris- totelian canons, I felt my enjoyment mellowed by a somewhat more measured judgment. From that time onward Charles Dickens threw himself into a great variety of undertakings and many diverse kinds of publication. His Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities, were never to me anything like the wonder and delight that I found in Oliver Twist, Nicklehy, and Copperfield. And as to the short tales and the later pieces down to Edwin Drood, I never find my- self turning back to them ; the very memory of the story is fading away; and I fail to recall the charac- ters and names. A mature judgment will decide that the series after David Copperfield, written when the author was thirty-eight, was not equal to the series of the thirteen years preceding. Charles Dickens will always be remembered by Pickwick, Oliver Twist, VI CHARLES DICKENS 13 1 Nickleby, and Copperfield. And though these tales will long continue to delight both old and young, learned and unlearned alike, they are most to be envied who read him when young, and they are most to be pitied who read him with a critical spirit. May that be far from us, as we take up our Pickwick and talk over the autobiographic pathos of David Copperfield. This vivid sympathy with the man is made stronger in my own case in that, from my own boyhood till his death, I was continually seeing him, was frequently his neighbour both in London and the seaside, knew some of his friends, and heard much about him and about his work. Though I never spoke to him, there were times when I saw him almost daily; I heard him speak and read in public; and his favourite haunts in London and the country have been familiar to me from my boyhood. And thus, as I read again my Pickwick, and Nickleby, and Copperfield, there come back to me many personal and local memories of my own. The personality of Charles Dickens was, even to his distant readers, vivid and intense; and hence it is much more so to those who have known his person. I am thus an ardent Pickwickian myself; and anything I say about our immortal Founder must be understood in a Pickwickian sense. Charles Dickens was before all things a great humourist, — doubtless the greatest of this century ; for, though we may find in Scott a more truly Shakespearean humour of the highest order, the humour of Dickens is so varied, so paramount, so inexhaustible, that he stands forth in our mem- ory as the humourist of the age. Swift, Fielding, 132 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vi Hogarth, Sterne, and Goldsmith, in the last century, reached at times a more enduring level of humour without caricature ; but the gift has been more rarely imparted to their successors in the age of steam. Now, we shall never get an adequate definition ot that imponderable term, — humour, — a term which, perhaps, was invented to be the eternal theme ot budding essayists. We need not be quite as liberal in our interpretation of humour as was Thackeray in opening his English Humourists ; for he declared that its business was to awaken and direct our love, our pity, our kindness, our scorn for imposture, our tenderness for the weak, to comment on the actions and passions of life, to be the week-day preacher, — and much more to that effect. But it may serve our immediate purpose to say with Samuel Johnson that humour is " grotesque imagery ; " and " grotesque " is " distorted of figure ; unnatural." That is to say, humour is an effort of the imagination presenting human nature with some element of distortion or disproportion which instantly kindles mirth. It must be imaginative ; it must touch the bed-rock of human nature ; it must arouse merriment and not anger or scorn. In this fine and most rare gift Charles Dickens abounded to overflowing; and this humour poured in perfect cataracts of "grotesque imagery" over every phase of life of the poor and the lower middle classes of his time, in London and a few of its suburbs and neighbouring parts. This in itself is a great title to honour; it is his main work, his noblest title. His sphere was wide, but not at all general ; it was strictly limited to the range of his own indefatigable observations. He VI CHARLES DICKENS 1 33 hardly ever drew a character or painted a scene, even of the most subordinate kind, which he had not studied from the life with minute care, and whenever he did for a moment wander out of his limits, he made an egregious failure. But this task of his, to cast the sunshine of pathos and of genial mirth over the humblest, dullest, and most uninvit- ing of our fellow-creatures, was a great social mission to which his whole genius was devoted. No waif and stray was so repulsive, no drudge was so mean, no criminal was so atrocious, but what Charles Dickens could feel for him some ray of sympathy, or extract some pathetic mirth out of his abject state. And Dickens does not look on the mean and the vile as do Balzac and Zola, that is, from without, like the detective or the surgeon. He sees things more or less from their point of view: he feels with the Marchioness: he himself as a child was once a Smike: he cannot help liking the fun of the Art- ful Dodger: he has been a good friend to Barkis: he likes Traddles : he loves Joe : poor Nancy ends her vile life in heroism : and even his brute of a dog worships Bill Sikes. Here lies the secret of his power over such count- less millions of readers. He not only paints a vast range of ordinary humanity and suffering or wearied humanity, but he speaks for it and lives in it himself, and throws a halo of imagination over it, and brings home to the great mass of average readers a new sense of sympathy and gaiety. This humane kinship with the vulgar and the common, this magic which strikes poetry out of the dust of the streets, and dis- covers traces of beauty and joy in the most monoto- 134 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vi nous of lives, is, in the true and best sense of the term, Christ-like, with a message and gospel of hope. Thackeray must have had Charles Dickens in his mind when he wrote : " The humourous writer pro- fesses to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness, — your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture, — your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy." Charles Dickens, of all writers of our age, assuredly did this in every work of his pen, for thirty-three years of incessant production. It is his great title to honour; and a novelist can desire no higher title than this. There is another quality in which Charles Dickens is supreme, — in purity. Here is a writer who is realistic, if ever any writer was, in the sense of having closely observed the lowest strata of city life, who has drawn the most miserable outcasts, the most aban- doned men and women in the dregs of society, who has invented many dreadful scenes of passion, lust, seduction, and debauchery; and yet in forty works and more you will not find a page which a mother need withhold from her grown daughter. As Thack- eray wrote of his friend : " I am grateful for the innocent laughter and the sweet and unsullied page which the author of David Copperfield gives to my children." We need not formulate any dogma or rule on such a topic, nor is it essential that all books should be written virginibus puerisque ; but it is cer- tain that every word of Charles Dickens was so written, even when he set himself (as he sometimes did) to describe animal natures and the vilest of their sex. Dickens is a realist in that he probes the gloomiest recesses and faces the most disheartening VI CHARLES DICKENS 135 problems of life: he is an idealist in that he never presents us the common or the vile with mere com- monplace or repulsiveness, and without some ray of humane and genial charm to which ordinary eyes are blind. Dickens, then, was above all things a humourist, an inexhaustible humourist, to whom the humblest forms of daily life wore a certain sunny air of genial mirth ; but the question remains if he was a humourist of the highest order : was he a poet, a creator of abiding imaginative types ? Old John- son's definition of humour as " grotesque imagery," and " grotesque " as meaning some distortion in figure, may not be adequate as a description of humour, but it well describes the essential feature of Charles Dickens. His infallible instrument is caricature, — which strictly means an " overload," as Johnson says, " an exaggerated resemblance." Cari- cature is a likeness having some comical exaggeration or distortion. Now, caricature is a legitimate and potent instrument of humour, which great masters have used with consummate effect. Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Rembrandt, Hogarth, use it; but only at times, and in a subsidiary way. Rabelais, Swift, Fielding, use this weapon not unfrequently ; Shakespeare very sparingly; Goldsmith and Scott, I think, almost never. Caricature, the essence of which is exaggeration of some selected feature, dis- tortion of figure, disproportion of some part, is a potent resource, but one to which the greater masters resort rarely and with much moderation. Now, with Charles Dickens caricature — that comi- cal exaggeration of a particular feature, distortion of some part beyond nature — is not only the 136 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vi essence of his humour, but it is the universal and ever-present source of his mirth. It would not be true to say that exaggeration is the sole form of humour that he uses, but there is hardly a character of his to which it is not applied, nor a scene of which it is not the pervading "motive." Some feature, some oddity, some temperament is seized, dwelt upon, played with, and turned inside out, with in- cessant repetition and unwearied energy. Every char- acter, except the walking gentleman and the walking lady, the insipid lover, or the colourless friend, have some feature thrust out of proportion, magnified be- yond nature. Sam Weller never speaks without his anecdote, Uriah is always " 'umble," Barkis is always " willin'," Mark Tapley is always "jolly," Dombey is always solemn, and Toots is invariably idiotic. It is no doubt natural that Barnaby's Raven should always want tea, whatever happens, for the poor bird has but a limited vocabulary. But one does not see why articulate and sane persons like Captain Cuttle, Pecksniff, and Micawber should repeat the same phrases under every condition and to all persons. This, no doubt, is the essence of farce: it may be irresistibly droll as farce, but it does not rise beyond farce. And at last even the most enthusiastic Pick- wickian wearies of such monotony of iteration. Now, the keynote of caricature being the distor- tion of nature, it inevitably follows that humourous exaggeration is unnatural, however droll ; and, where it is the main source of the drollery, the picture as a whole ceases to be within the bounds of nature. But the great masters of the human heart invariably remain true to nature ; not merely true to a selected VI CHARLES DICKENS 137 feature, but to the natural form as a whole. Falstafif, in his wildest humour, speaks and acts as such a man really might speak and act. He has no catch- phrase on which he harps, as if he were a talking- machine wound up to emit a dozen sounds. Parson Adams speaks and acts as such a being might do in nature. The comic characters of Goldsmith, Scott, or Thackeray do not outrun and defy nature, nor does their drollery depend on any special and ab- normal feature, much less on any stock phrase which they use as a label. The illustrations of Cruikshank and Phiz are delightfully droll, and often caricatures of a high order. But being caricatures they over- load and exaggerate nature, and indeed are always, in one sense, impossible in nature. The grins, the grimaces, the contortions, the dwarfs, the idiots, the monstrosities of these wonderful sketches could not be found in human beings constructed on any known anatomy. And Dickens's own characters have the same element of unnatural distortion. It is possible that these familiar caricatures have even done harm to his reputation. His creations are of a higher order of art and are more distinctly spontaneous and original. But the grotesque sketches with which he almost uniformly presented his books accentuate the element of caricature on which he relied; and often add an unnatural extravagance beyond that extravagance which was the essence of his own method. The consequence is that everything in Dickens is " in the excess," as Aristotle would say, and not " in the mean." Whether it is Tony Weller, or "the Shepherd," or the Fat Boy, Hugh or the Raven, 138 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vi Toots or Traddles, Micawber or Skimpole, Gamp or Mantalini, — all are overloaded in the sense that they exceed nature, and are more or less extravagant. They are wonderful and delightful caricatures, but they are impossible in fact. The similes are hyper- bolic; the names are grotesque; the incidents par- take of harlequinade, and the speeches of roaring farce. It is often wildly droll, but it is rather the drollery of the stage than of the book. The char- acters are never possible in fact; they are not, and are not meant to be, nature; they are always and everywhere comic distortions of nature. Gold- smith's Dr. Primrose tells us that he chose his wife for the same qualities for which she chose her wedding gown. That is humour, but it is also pure, literal, exact truth to nature. David Copperfield's little wife is called a lap-dog, acts like a lap-dog, and dies like a lap-dog; the lap-dog simile is so much overdone that we are glad to get rid of her, and instead of weeping with Copperfield, we feel disposed to call him a ninny. Nothing is more wonderful in Dickens than his exuberance of animal spirits, that inexhaustible fountain of life and gaiety, in which he equals Scott and far surpasses any other modern. The intensity of the man, his electric activity, his spasmodic nervous power, quite dazzle and stun us. But this restless gaiety too often grows fatiguing, as the rol- licking fun begins to pall upon us, as the jokes ring hollow, and the wit gets stale by incessant reiteration. We know how much in real life we get to hate the joker who does not know when to stop, who repeats his jests, and forces the laugh when it VI CHARLES DICKENS 1 39 does not flow freely. Something of the kind the most devoted of Dickens's readers feel when they take in too much at one time. None but the very greatest can maintain for long one incessant outpour of drollery, much less of extravagance. Aristophanes could do it; Shakespeare could do it; so could Cervantes; and so, too, Rabelais. But then, the wildest extravagance of these men is so rich, so varied, so charged with insight and thought, and, in the case of Rabelais, so resplendent with learning and suggestion, that we never feel satiety and the cruel sense that the painted mask on the stage is grinning at us, whilst the actor behind it is weary and sad. When one who is not amongst the very greatest pours forth the same inextinguishable laughter in the same key, repeating the same tricks, and multiplying kindred oddities, people of cultiva- tion enjoy it heartily once, twice, it may be a dozen times, but at last they make way for the young bloods who can go thirty-seven times to see " Charley's Aunt." A good deal has been said about Dickens's want of reading; and his enthusiastic biographer very fairly answers that Charles Dickens's book was the great book of life, of which he was an indefatigable student. When other men were at school and at college, he was gathering up a vast experience of the hard world, and when his brother writers were poring over big volumes in their libraries, he was pacing up and down London and its suburbs with inexhaustible energy, drinking in oddities, idio- syncrasies, and wayside incidents at every pore. It is quite true: London is a microcosm, an endless I40 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vi and bottomless- Bjhyl nn ; - yhich, perhaps^ no m ag h as ever known so well, as, did] Charles Dic^^n s. This was his library: here he gathered that vast encyclopaedia of human nature, which some are inclined to call " cockney," but if it be, " Cockayne " must be a very large country indeed. Still, the fact remains, that of book-learning of any kind Dickens remained, to the end of his days, perhaps more utterly innocent than any other famous English writer since Shakespeare. His biographer labours to prove that he had read Fielding and Smollett, Don Quixote and Gil Bias, The Spectator, and Robin- son Crusoe. Perhaps he had, like most men who have learned to read. But, no doubt, this utter severance from books, which we feel in his tales, will ultimately tell against their immortality. This rigid abstinence from books, which Dickens practised on system, had another reaction that we notice in his style. Not only do we feel in reading his novels that we have no reason to assume that he had ever read anything except a few popular romances, but we note that he can hardly be said to have a formed literary style of his own. Dickens had mannerisms, but hardly a style. In some ways, this is a good thing: much less can he be said to have a bad style. It is simply no style. He knows nothing of the crisp, modulated, balanced, and re- served mastery of phrase and sentence which marks Thackeray. Nor is it the easy simplicity of Robin- son Crusoe and the Vicar of Wakefield. The tale spins along, and the incidents rattle on with the volubility of a good story-teller who warms up as he goes, but who never stops to think of his sentences VI CHARLES DICKENS I4I and phrases. He often gets verbose, rings the changes on a point which he sees to have caught his hearers ; he plays with a fancy out of measure, and turns his jest inside out and over and over, Uke a fine comic actor when the house is in a roar. His language is free, perfectly clear, often redundant, sometimes grandiloquent, and usually addressed more to the pit than to the boxes. And he is a little prone to slide, even in his own proper person, into those formal courtesies and obsolete compliments which forty years ago survived amongst the superior orders of bagmen and managing clerks. There is an old topic of discussion whether Dickens could invent an organic and powerful plot, and carry out an elaborate scheme with perfect skill. It is certain that he has never done so, and it can hardly be said that he has ever essayed it. The serial form in parts, wherein almost all his stories were cast, requiring each number of three chapters to be " assorted," like sugar-plums, with grave and gay, so as to tell just enough but not too much, made a highly wrought scheme almost impossible. It is plain that Charles Dickens had nothing of that epical gift which gave us Tom Jones and Ivanhoe. Perhaps the persistent use of the serial form shows that he felt no interest in that supreme art of an immense drama duly unfolded to a prepared end. In Pickwick there neither was, nor could there be, any organic plot. In Oliver Twist, in Barnaby Rudge, in Dombey, in Bleak House, in the Tale of Two Cities, there are indications of his possessing this power, and in certains parts of these tales we seem to be in the presence of a great master of 142 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vi epical narration. But the power is not sustained; and it must be confessed that in none of these tales is there a complete and equal scheme. In most of the other books, especially in those after Bleak House, the plot is so artless, so dicousu, so confused, that even practised readers of Dickens fail to keep it clear in their mind. The serial form, where a leading character wanders about to various places, and meets a succession of quaint parties, seems to be that which suited his genius and which he himself most entirely enjoyed. In contrast with the Pickwickian method of comic rambles in search of human " curios," Dickens in- troduced some darker effects and persons of a more or less sensational kind. Some of these are as power- ful as anything in modern fiction; and Fagin and Bill Sikes, Smike and poor Jo, the Gordon riots and the storms at sea, may stand beside some tableaux of Victor Hugo for lurid power and intense realism. But it was only at times and during the first half of his career that Dickens could keep clear of melo- drama and somewhat stagey blue fire. And at times his blue fire was of a very cheap kind. Rosa Dartle and Carker, Steerforth and Blandois, Quilp and Uriah Heep, have a melancholy glitter of the footlights over them. We cannot see what the villains want, except to look villainous, and we fail to make out where is the danger to the innocent victims. We find the villain of the piece frantically struggling to get some paper, or to get hold of some boy or girl. But as the scene is in London in the nineteenth century, and not in Naples in the fifteenth century, we cannot see who is in real danger, or why, or of VI CHARLES DICKENS 1 43 what. And with all this, Dickens was not incapable of bathos, or tragedy suddenly exploding in farce. The end of Krook by spontaneous combustion is such a case : but a worse case is the death of Dora, Copperfield's baby wife, along with that of the lap- dog, Jip. This is one of those unforgotten, unpar- donable, egregious blunders in art, in feeling, even in decency, which must finally exclude Charles Dickens from the rank of the true immortals. But his books will long be read for his wonderful successes, and his weaker pieces will entirely be laid aside, as are the failures of so many great men, the rubbish of Fielding, of Goldsmith, of Defoe ; which do nothing now to dim the glory of Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, and Robinson Crusoe. The glory of Charles Dickens will always be in his Pickwick, his first, his best, his inimitable triumph. It is true that it is a novel without a plot, without beginning, middle, or end, with much more of caricature than of character, with some extravagant tom-foolery, and plenty of vulgarity. But its originality, its irrepressi- ble drolleries, its substantial human nature, and its intense vitality, place it quite in a class by itself. We can no more group it, or test it by any canon of criticism, than we could group or define Pantagruel or Faust. There are some works of genius which seem to transcend all criticism, of which the very extravagances and incoherences increase the charm. And Pickwick ought to live with Gil Bias and Tristram Shandy. In a deeper vein, the tragic scenes in Oliver Twist and in Barnaby Rudge must long hold their ground, for they can be read and re- read in youth, in manhood, in old age. The story 144 EARLY VICTORIAN- LITERATUSE of Dotheboys Hall, the Yarmouth memories of Copperfield, little Nell, Mrs. Gamp, Micawber, Toots, Captain Cuttle, Pecksniff, and many more will long- continue to delight the youth of the English-speaking races. But few writers are remembered so keenly by certain characters, certain scenes, incidental whimsies, and so little for entire novels treated strictly as works of art. There is no reason whatever for pretending that all these scores of tales are at all to be compared with the best of them, or that the invention of some inimitable scenes and characters is enough to make a supreme and faultless artist. The young and the uncritical make too much of Charles Dickens, when they fail to distinguish be- tween his best and his worst. Their fastidious seniors make too little of him, when they note his many shortcomings and fail to see that in certain elements of humour he has no equal and no rival. If we mean Charles Dickens to live we must fix our eye on these supreme gifts alone. VII. CHARLOTTE BRONTE. They who are still youthful in the nineties can hardly understand the thrill which went through us all in the forties upon the appearance of yam Eyre, on the discovery of a new genius and a new style. The reputation of most later writers grew by degrees and by repeated impressions of good work. Trollope, George Eliot, Stevenson, George Meredith, did not conquer the interest of the larger public until after many books and by gradual widening of the judg- ment of experts. But little Charlotte Bronte, who published but three tales in six years and who died at the age of thirty-eight, bounded into immediate fame, — a fame that after nearly fifty years we do not even now find to have been excessive. And then, there was such personal interest in the writer's self, in her intense individuality, in her strong character; there was so much sympathy with her hard and lonely life; there was such pathos in her family history and the tragedy which threw gloom over her whole life, and cut it off in youth after a few months of happiness. To have lived in poverty, in a remote and wild moorland, almost friendless and in continual struggle against sickness, to have 146 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE been motherless since the age of five, to have lost four sisters and a brother before she was more than thirty-three, to have been sole survivor of a large household, to have passed a life of continual weak- ness, toil, and suffering, — and then to be cut off after nine months of marriage, — all this touched the sympathies of the world as the private life of few writers touches them. And then the shock of her sudden death came upon us as a personal sorrow. Such genius, such courage, such perseverance, such promise, — and yet but three books in all, published at intervals of two and of four years ! There was meaning in the somewhat unusual form in which Mrs. Gaskell opens her Life of Charlotte Bronte, setting out verbatim in her first chapter the seven memorial inscriptions to the buried family in Haworth Church, and placing on the title-page a vignette of Haworth churchyard with its white tombstones. Charlotte Bronte was a kind of prosaic, most demure and orthodox Shelley in the Victorian literature, — with visible genius, an intense personality, unquench- able fire, an early and tragic death. And all this pas- sion in a little prim, shy, delicate, proud Puritan girl ! To this sympathy our great writer, whom she herself called "the first social regenerator of the day," did full justice in that beautiful little piece which he wrote in the Cornhill Magazine upon her death and which is the last of the Romidabout Papers in the twenty-second volume of Thackeray's collected works. It is called The Last Sketch : it is so elo- quent, so true, so sympathetic that it deserves to be remembered, and yet after forty years it is too seldom read. VII CHARLOTTE BRONTE 1 47 Of the multitude that have read her books, who has not known and deplored the tragedy of her family, her own most sad and untimely fate ? Which of her readers has not become her friend ? Who that has known her books has not admired the artist's noble Enghsh, the burning love of truth, the bravery, the simplicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager sympathy, the pious love and reverence, the passionate honour, so to speak, of the woman? What a story is that of that family of poets in their solitude yonder on the gloomy northern moors ! He goes on to deplore that "the heart newly awakened to love and happiness, and throbbing with maternal hope, had ceased to beat." He speaks of her "trembling little frame, the little hand, the great honest eyes." He speaks of his recollections of her in society, of " the impetuous honesty " which seemed the character of the woman — I fancied an austere little Joan of Arc marching in upon us, and rebuking our easy lives, our easy morals. She gave me the impression of being a very pure, and lofty, and high- minded person. A great and holy reverence of right and truth seemed to be with her always. Such, in our brief interview, she appeared to me. As one thinks of that life so noble, so lonely, — of that passion for truth, — of those nights and nights of eager study, swarming fancies, invention, de- pression, elation, prayer; as one reads the necessarily incom- plete, though most touching and admirable history of the heart that throbbed in this one little frame, — of this one amongst the myriads of souls that have lived and died on this great earth, — this great earth?— this little speck in the infinite universe of God, — with what wonder do we think of to-day, with what awe await to-morrow, when that which is now but darkly seen shall be clear! 148 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vn It is quite natural and right that Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, indeed all who have spoken of the author of" Jane Eyre, should insist primarily on the personality of Charlotte Bronte. It is this intense personality which is the distinctive note of her books. They are not so much tales as imaginary autobiographies. They are not objective presentations of men and women in the world. They are subjective sketches of a Bronte under various conditions, and of the few men and women who occasionally cross the narrow circle of the Bronte world. Of the three stories she published, two are autobiographies, and the third is a fancy portrait of her sister Emily. Charlotte Bronte is herself Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, and Emily Bronte is Shirley Keeldar. So in The Professor, her earliest but posthumous tale, Francis Henri again is simply a little Swiss Bronte. That story also is told as an autobiography, but, though the narrator is supposed to be one William Crimsworth, it is a woman who speaks, sees, and dreams all through the book. The four tales, which together were the work of eight years, are all variations upon a Bronte and the two Bronte worlds in Yorkshire and Belgium. It is most significant (but quite natural) that Mrs. Gaskell in her Life of Charlotte Bronte devotes more than half her book to the story of the family before the publi- cation of Jane Eyre. The four tales are not so much romances as artistic and imaginative autobiographies. To say this is by no means to detract from their rare value. The romances of adventure, of incident, of intrigue, of character, of society, or of humour, depend on a great variety of observation and a multiplicity of contrasts. There is not much of VII CHARLOTTE BRONTE lA^ Walter Scott, as a man, in Ivanhoe or of Alexander Dumas in the Trois Mousquetaires ; and Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Bulwer, Miss Edgeworth, Stevenson, and Meredith, — even Miss Austen and George Eliot, — seek to paint men and women whom they conceive and whom we may see and know, and not themselves and their own home circle. But Charlotte Bronte told us her own life, her own feel- ings, sufferings, pride, joy, and ambition. She bared for us her own inner soul, and all that it had known and desired, and this she did with a noble, pure, simple, but intense truth. There was neither egoism, nor monotony, nor commonplace in it. It was all coloured with native imagination and a sense of true art. There is ample room in Art for these subjective idealisations of even the narrowest world. Shelley's lyrics are intensely self-centred, but no one can find in them either realism or egoism. The field in prose is far more limited, and the risk of becoming tedious and morbid is greater. But a true artist can now and then in prose produce most precious portraits of self and glowing autobiographic fantasies of a noble kind. And Charlotte Bronte was a true artist. She was also more than this; a brave, sincere, high-minded woman, with a soul, as the great moralist saw, "of impetuous honesty." She was not seduced, or even moved, by her sudden fame. She put aside the prospect of success, money, and social distinction as things which revolted her. She was quite right. With all her genius it was strictly and narrowly limited ; she was ignorant of the world to a degree immeasurably below that of any other known writer of fiction; her world was incredibly scanty and 150 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vii barren. She had to spin everything out of her own brain in that cold, still, gruesome Haworth parsonage. It was impossible for any genius to paint a world of which it was as ignorant as a child. Hence, in eight years she only completed four tales for publication. And she did right. With her strict limits both of brain and of experience she could not go further. Perhaps, as it was, she did more than was needed. Shirley and Villette, with all their fine scenes, are interesting now mainly because Charlotte Bronte wrote them, and because they throw light upon her brain and nature. The Professor is entirely so, and has hardly any other quality. We need not groan that we have no more than we have from her pen. Jane Eyre would suffice for many reputations, and alone will live. In considering the gifted Bronte family, it is really Charlotte alone who finally concerns us. Emily Bronte was a wild, original, and striking creature, but her one book is a kind of prose Kubla Khan, — a nightmare of the superheated imagination. Anne Bronte always seems but a pale reflection of the family. In any other family she might be interest- ing, just as "Barrel Mirabeau" was the good boy and fool of the Mirabeau family, though in another family he would have been the genius and the profli- gate. And so, the poems of the whole three are interesting as psychologic studies, but have hardly a single stanza that can be called poetry at all. It is significant, but hardly paradoxical, that Charlotte's verses are the worst of the three. How many born writers of musical prose have persisted in manufac- turing verse of a curiously dull and unmelodious quality ! The absolute masters of prose and of verse VII CHARLOTTE BRONTE 151 in equal perfection hardly exceed Shakespeare and Shelley, Goethe, and Hugo. And Charlotte Bronte is an eminent example of a strong imagination work- ing with freedom in prose, but which began by using the instrument of verse, and used it in a manner that never rose for an instant above mediocrity. Of the Brontes it is Charlotte only who concerns us, and of Charlotte's work it is Jane Eyre only that can be called a masterpiece. To call it a masterpiece, as Thackeray did, is not to deny its manifold and manifest shortcomings. It is a very small corner of the world that it gives, and that world is seen by a single acute observer from without. The plain little governess dominates the whole book and fills every page. Everything and every one appear, not as we see them and know them in the world, but as they look to a keen-eyed girl who had hardly ever left her native village. Had the whole book been cast into the form of impersonal narration, this limitation, this huge ignorance of life, this amateur's attempt to construct a romance by the light of nature instead of observation and study of persons, would have been a failure. As the autobiography of Jane Eyre — let us say at once of Charlotte Bronte — it is consum- mate art. It produces the illusion we feel in reading Robinson Crusoe. In the whole range of modern fiction there are few characters whom we feel that we know so intimately as we do Jane Eyre. She is as intensely familiar to us as Becky Sharp or Parson Adams. Much more than this. Not only do we feel an intimate knowledge of Jane Eyre, but we see every one by the eyes of Jane Eyre only. Edward Rochester has not a few touches of the 152 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vn melodramatic villain; and no man would ever draw a man with such conventional and Byronic extrava- gances. If Edward Rochester had been described in impersonal narrative with all his brutalities, his stage villain frowns, and his Grand Turk whims, it would have spoiled the book. But Edward Rochester, the " master " of the little governess, as seen by the eyes of a passionate, romantic, but utterly unsophisti- cated girl, is a powerful character ; and all the incon- sistencies, the afifectation, the savageries we might detect in him, become the natural love-dream of a most imaginative and most ignorant young woman. A consummate master of style has spoken, we have just seen, of the " noble English" that Charlotte Bronte wrote. It is true that she never reached the exquisite ease, culture, and raciness of Thackeray's English. She lapsed now and then into provincial solecisms; she "named" facts as well as persons; girls talk of a "beautiful man"; nor did she know anything of the scientific elaboration of George Eliot or the subtle grace of Stevenson. But the style is of high quality and conscientious finish, — terse, pure, picturesque, and sound. Like everything she did, it was most scrupulously honest, — the result of a sin- cere and vivid soul, resolved to utter what it had most at heart in the clearest tone. Very few writers of romance have ever been masters of a style so effective, so nervous, so capable of rising into floods of melody and pathos. There is a fine passage of the kind in one of her least known books, the earliest indeed of all, which no publisher could be found in her lifetime to print. The " Professor " has just pro- posed, has been accepted, and goes home to bed VII CHARLOTTE BRONTE I S3 half-crazy and fasting. A sudden reaction falls on his over-wrought nerves, A horror of great darkness fell upon me ; I felt my chamber invaded by one I had known formerly, but had thought for ever departed. I was temporarily a prey to hypochondria. She had been my acquaintance, nay, my guest, once before in boyhood ; I had entertained her at bed and board for a year ; for that space of time I had her to myself in secret ; she lay with me, she ate with me, she walked out with me, showing me nooks in woods, hollows in hills, where we could sit together, and where she could drop her drear veil over me, and so hide sky and sun, grass and green tree ; taking me entirely to her death-cold bosom, and holding me with arms of bone. What tales she would tell me at such hours ! What songs she would recite in my ears ! How she would discourse to me of her own country, — the grave, — and again and again promise to conduct me there ere long ; and drawing me to the ~very brink of a black, sullen river, show me, on the other side, shores unequal with mound, monument, and tablet, standing up in a glimmer more hoary than moonlight. " NecropoUs ! " she would whisper, pointing to the pale piles, and add, " It contains a mansion prepared for you." Finely imagined, — finely said ! It has the ring and vi^eird mystery of De Quincey. There are phrases that Thackeray would not have used, such as jar on the ear and betray an immature taste. " Necro- polis" is a strange affectation when "City of the Dead" was at hand; and "pointing to the pale piles " is a hideous alliteration. But in spite of such immaturities (and the writer never saw the text in type) the passage shows wonderful power of lan- guage and sense of music in prose. How fine is the sentence "taking me to her death-cold bosom, 154 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vii and holding me with arms of bone," and that of the tombstones, " in a glimmer more hoary than moon- light." Coleridge might have used such a phrase in the Ancient Mariner or in Christabel. Yet these were the thoughts and the words of a lonely girl of thirty as she watched the dreary churchyard at Haworth from the windows of its unlovely parsonage. This vivid power of painting in words is specially called forth by the look of nature and the scenes she describes. Charlotte Bronte had, in the highest degree, that which Ruskin has called the " pathetic fallacy," the eye which beholds nature coloured by the light of the inner soul. In this quality she really reaches the level of fine poetry. Her intense sym- pathy with her native moors and glens is akin to that of Wordsworth. She almost never attempts to de- scribe any scenery with which she is not deeply familiar. But how wonderfully she catches the tone of her own moorland, skies, storm-winds, secluded hall or cottage ! The charm of the hour lay in its approaching dimness, in the low-gliding and pale-beaming sun. I was a mile from Thomfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here ; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide, on each side, there were only fields, where no cattle now browsed ; and the Uttle brown birds, which stirred occa- sionally in the hedge, looked like single russet leaves that had VII CHARLOTTE BRONTE 1 55 forgotten to drop. . . . From my seat I could look down on Thomfield : the gray and battlemented hall was the principal object in the vale below me ; its woods and dark rookery rose against the west. I lingered till the sun went down amongst the trees, and sank crimson and clear behind them. How admirable is this icy hush of nature in breath- less expectation of the first coming of the master of Thornfield, — of the master of Jane herself. And yet, how simple in phrase, how pure, how Words- worthian in its sympathy with earth even in her most bare and sober hues ! And then that storm which ushers in the story of the Vampyre woman tearing Jane's wedding veil at her bedside, when " the clouds drifted from pole to pole, fast following, mass on mass." And as Jane watches the shivered chestnut- tree, "black and riven, the trunk, split down the centre, gasped ghastly," — a strange but powerful alliteration. "The moon appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled the fissure ; her disk was blood-red and half overcast ; she seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly in the deep drift of cloud." An admirable overture to that terrific scene of the mad wife's visit to the rival's bed. Charlotte Bronte is great in clouds, like a prose Shelley. We all recall that mysterious storm in which Villette darkly closes, and with it the expected bridegroom of Lucy Snowe : — The wind takes its autumn moan; but — he is coming. The skies hang full and dark, — a rack sails from the west ; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms, — arches and broad radiations; there rise resplendent mornings, — glori- ous, royal, purple as monarch in his state ; the heavens are 156 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE m one flame ; so wild are they, they rival battle at its thickest, — so bloody, they shame Victory in her pride. . . . When the sun returned his light was night to some ! And into that night Lucy's master, lover, husband, has for ever passed. This sympathy with nature, and this power to invest it with feeling for the human drama of which it is the scene, lifts little Charlotte Bronte into the company of the poets. No one, however, can enter into all the art of her landscapes unless he knows those Yorkshire moors, the straggling upland villages, bare, cold, gray, uncanny, with low, unlovely stone buildings, and stern church towers and graveyards, varied with brawling brooks and wooded glens, and here and there a grim manor-house that had seen war. It is so often that the dwellers in the least picturesque and smiling countries are found to love their native country best and to invest it with the most enduring art. And the pilgrims to Haworth Parsonage have in times past been as ardent as those who flock to Grasmere or to Abbotsford. Jane Eyre is full of this " pathetic fallacy," or as- pect of nature dyed in the human emotions of which it is the mute witness. The storm in the garden at night when Rochester first offers marriage to his little governess, and they return to the house drenched in rain and melted with joy, is a fine example of this power. From first to last, the correspondence be- tween the local scene and the human drama is a distinctive mark in Jane Eyre. If I were asked to choose that scene in the whole tale which impresses itself most on my memory, I should turn to the thirty-sixth chapter when Jane VII CHARLOTTE BRONTE 1 57 comes back to have a look at Thornfield Hall, peeps on the battlemented mansion which she had loved so well, and is struck dumb to find it burnt out to a mere skeleton, — "I looked with timorous joy toward a stately house : I saw a blackened ruin." The suddeness of this shock, its unexpected and yet natural catastrophe, its mysterious imagery of the loves of Edward Rochester and Jane Eyre, and the intense sympathy which earth, wood, rookery, and ruin seem to feel for the girl's eagerness, amazement, and horror, have always seemed to me to reach the highest note of art in romance. It is now forty- seven years since I first read that piece ; and in all these years I have found no single scene in later fiction which is so vividly and indelibly burnt into the memory as is this. The whole of this chapter, and what follows it, is intensely real and true. And the very denouement of the tale itself, — that inevitable bathos into which the romance so often dribbles out its last inglorious breath, — has a manliness and sincerity of its own: " the sky is no longer a blank to him, — the earth no longer a void." The famous scene in the twenty-sixth chapter with the interrupted marriage, when Rochester drags the whole bridal party into the den of his maniacal wife, the wild struggle with the mad woman, the despair of Jane, — all this is as powerful as anything whatever in English fiction. It is even a masterpiece of ingenious construction and dramatic action. It is difficult to form a cool estimate of a piece so intense, so vivid, and so artful in its mechanism. The whole incident is conceived with the most perfect reality ; the plot is original, startling, and yet not wholly 158 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vil extravagant. But it must be confessed that the plot is not worked out in details in a faultless way. It is undoubtedly in substance " sensational," and has been called the parent of modern sensationalism. Edward Rochester acts as a Rochester might; but he too often talks like the "wicked baronet" of low melo- drama. The execution is not always quite equal to the conception. The affiance of Jane and Edward Rochester, their attempted marriage, the wild temp- tation of Jane, her fierce rebuff of the tempter, his despair and remorse, her agony and flight, — all are consummate in conception, marred here and there as they are in details by the blue fire and conventional imprecations of the stage. The concluding chapters of the book, when Jane finally rejects St. John Rivers and goes back to Thornfield and to her " master," are all indeed excellent. St. John is not successful as a character ; but he serves to produce the crisis and to be foil to Rochester. St. John, it is true, is not a real being : like Rochester, he is a type of man as he affects the brain and heart of a highly sensitive and imaginative girl. Objectively speaking, as men living and acting in a practical world, St. John and Rochester are both in some degree caricatures of men; and, if the narrative were a cold story calmly composed by a certain Miss Bronte to amuse us, we could not avoid the sense of unreality in the men. But the intensity of the vision, the realism of every scene, the fierce yet self-governed passion of Jane herself, pouririg out, as in a secret diary, her agonies of love, of scorn, of pride, of abandonment, — all this produces an illusion on us : we are no longer reading a novel VII CHARLOTTE BRONTE 1 59 of society, but we are admitted to the wild musings of a girl's soul; and, though she makes out her first lover to be a generous brute and her second lover to be a devout machine, we feel it quite natural that Jane, with her pride and her heart of fire and her romantic brain, should so in her diary describe them. St. John Rivers, if we take him coolly outside of Jane's portrait gallery, is little more than a puppet. We never seem to get nearer to his own mind and heart, and his conduct and language are hardly com- patible with the noble attributes with which he is said to be adorned. A man of such refined culture, of such high intelligence, of such social distinction and experience, of such angelic character, does not treat women with studied insolence and diabolical cynicism. That a girl, half maddened by disappointed love, should romantically come to erect his image into that of a sort of diabolic angel, is natural enough, and her conduct when she leaves Moor House is right and true, though we cannot say as much for Rivers' words. But the impression of the whole scene is right. In the same way, Edward Rochester, if we take him simply as a cultured and travelled country gentleman, who was a magnate and great parti in his county, is barely within the range of possibility. As St. John Rivers is a walking contradictory of a diabolic saint, so Edward Rochester is a violent specimen of the heroic ruffian. In Emily Bronte's gruesome phantasmagoria of Wuthering Heights there is a ruffian named Heathcliff; and, whatever be his brutalities and imprecations, we always feel in reading it that Wuthering Heights is merely a grisly dream, not a novel at all. Edward Rochester has l6o EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vn something of the Heathcliff too. But Rochester is a man of the best English society, courted by wealth and rank, a man of cultivated tastes, of wide expe- rience and refined habits, and lastly of most generous and heroic impulses, — and yet such a man swears at his people like a horse-dealer, teases and bullies his little governess, treats his adopted child like a dog, almost kicks his brother-in-law in his rages, plays shocking tricks with his governess at night, offers her marriage, and attempts to commit bigamy in his own parish with his living wife still under the same roof! That a man of Rochester's resource, experience, and forethought, should keep his maniac wife in his own ancestral home where he is entertaining the county families and courting a neighbouring peer's sister, and that, after the maniac had often attempted murder and arson, — all this is beyond the range of probabilities. And yet the story could not go on without it. And so, Edward Rochester, man of the world as he is, risks his life, his home, and everything and every one dear to him in order that his little governess, Jane Eyre, should have the materials for in- diting a thrilling autobiography. It cannot be denied that this is the very essence of " sensationalism," which means a succession of thrilling surprises constructed out of situations that are practically impossible. Nor, alas ! can we deny that there are ugly bits of real coarseness in Jane Eyre. It is true that most of them are the effects of that portentous ignorance of the world and of civilised society which the soli- tary dreamer of Haworth Parsonage had no means of removing. The fine ladies, the lords and soldiers in the drawing-room at Thornfield are described with VII CHARLOTTE BRONTE l6l inimitable life, but they are described as they appeared to the lady's-maids, not to each other or to the world. Charlotte Bronte perhaps did not know that an elegant girl of rank does not in a friend's house address her host's footman before his guests in these words, — "Cease that chatter, blockhead! and do my bidding." Nor does a gentleman speak to his governess of the same lady whom he is thought to be about to marry in these terms, — " She is a rare one, is she not, Jane? A strapper, — a real strapper, Jane: big, brown, and buxom." But all these things are rather the result of pure ignorance. Charlotte Bronte, when she wrote her first book, had hardly ever seen any Englishmen but a few curates, the vil- lagers, and her degraded brother, with rare glimpses of lower middle-class homes. But Jane Eyre's own doings and sayings are hardly the effect of mere igno- rance. Her nocturnal adventures with her " master " are given with delightful naivete ; her consenting to hear out her " master's" story of his foreign amours is not pleasant. Her two avowals to Edward Rochester, — one before he had declared his love for her, and the other on her return to him, — are certainly some- what frank. Jane Eyre in truth does all but propose marriage twice to Edward Rochester ; and she is the first to avow her love, even when she believed he was about to marry another woman. It is indeed wrung from her; it is human nature ; it is a splendid encounter of passion ; and if it be bold in the little woman, it is redeemed by her noble defiance of his tainted suit, and her desperate flight from her married lover. But Jane Eyre's ignorances and simplicities, the improbabilities of her men, the violence of the plot. 1 62 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vii the weird romance about her own life, are all made acceptable to us by being shown to us only through the secret visions of a passionate and romantic girl. As the autobiography of a brave and original woman, who bares to us her whole heart without reserve and without fear, Jane Eyre stands forth as a great book of the nineteenth century. It stands just in the middle of the century, when men were still under the spell of Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and yet it is not wholly alien to the methods of our latest realists. It is true that a purely subjective work in prose romance, an autobiographic revelation of a sensitive heart, is not the highest and certainly not the widest art. Scott and Thackeray — even Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth — paint the world, or part of the world, as it is, crowded with men and women of various characters. Charlotte Bronte painted not the world, hardly a corner of the world, but the very soul of one proud and loving girl. That is enough : we need ask no more. It was done with consum- mate power. We feel that we know her life, from ill- used childhood to her proud matronhood; we know her home, her school, her professional duties, her loves and hates, her agonies and her joys, with that intense familiarity and certainty of vision with which our own personal memories are graven on our brain. With all its faults, its narrowness of range, its occa- sional extravagances, yane Eyre will long be remem- bered as one of the most creative influences of the Victorian literature, one of the most poetic pieces of English romance, and among the most vivid master- pieces in the rare order of Hterary " Confessions." VIII CHARLES KINGSLEY In this series of papers I have been trying to note some of the more definite literary forces which tended to mould English opinion during the epoch of the present Queen. I can remember the issue of nearly all the greater products of the Victorian writers, or at least the heyday of their early fame. I do not speak of any living writer, and confine myself to the writers of our country. Much less do I permit my- self to speak of those living lights of literature from whom we may yet receive work even surpassing that of those who are gone. My aim has been not so much to weigh each writer in the delicate balance of mere literary merit, but rather, from the point of view of the historian of ideas and of manners, to record the successive influences which, in the last fifty years or so, have moulded or reflected English opinion through printed books, be they of the dog- matic or of the imaginative order. In so doing, I have to speak of writers whose vogue is passing away with the present generation, or those of whom we must admit very grave defects and feebleness. Some of them may be little cared for to- day ; though they have a place in the evolution of British society and thought. l64 EARLY VICTORIAA' LITERATURE viii Charles Kingsley has such a place, — not by reason of any supreme work or any very rare quality of his own, but by virtue of his versatility, his verve, his fecundity, his irrepressible gift of breaking out in some new line, his strong and reckless sympathy, and above all by real literary brilliance. Where he failed to impress, to teach, to inspire, — almost even though he stirred men to anger or laughter, — Charles Kingsley for a generation continued to interest the public, to scatter amongst them ideas or problems ; he made many people think, and gave many people delight. He woke them up in all sorts of ways, about all sorts of things. He wrote lyrics, songs, dramas, romances, sermons, Platonic dialogues, news- paper articles, children's fairy books, scientific man- uals, philosophical essays, lectures, extravaganzas, and theological polemics. Hardly any of these were quite in the first rank, and some of them were thin, flashy, and almost silly. But most of them had the saving gift of getting home to the interests, ideas, and tastes of the great public, and he made them think even when he was very wrong himself. Such activity, such keenness, such command of literary resources, has to be reckoned with in a man of warm feeling and generous impulses ; and thus, if Charles Kingsley is no longer with very many either prophet or master, he was a literary influence of at least the second rank in his own generation. This would not be enough to make a permanent reputation if it stood alone ; but there were moments in which he bounded into the first rank. It would hardly be safe to call Kingsley a poet of great pre- tension, although there are passages in The Saint's VIII CHARLES KINGSLEY 1 65 Tragedy and in the Ballads of real power ; but he has written songs which, as songs for the voice, have hardly been surpassed by Tennyson himself. The Sands of Dee and The Three Fishers, if not poetry of quite perfect kind, have that incommunicable and indescribable element of the cantabile which fits them to the wail of a sympathetic voice perhaps even better than any songs of the most finished poetry. A true song must be simple, familiar, musically suggestive of a single touching idea, and nothing more. And this is just the mysterious quality of these songs and the source of their immense popularity. Again, with- out pretending that Kingsley is a great novelist, there are scenes, especially descriptive scenes, in Hypatia, in Westward Ho ! which belong to the very highest order of literary painting, and have hardly any superior in the romances of our era. No romances, except Thackeray's, have the same glow of style in such profusion and variety; and Thackeray himself was no such poet of natural beauty as Charles Kingsley, ^ a poet, be it remembered, who by sheer force of imagination could realise for us landscapes and climates of which he himself had no sort of experience. Even Scott himself has hardly done this with so vivid a brush. Kingsley was a striking example of that which is so characteristic of recent English literature, — its strong, practical, social, ethical, or theological bent. It is in marked contrast with French literature. Our writers are always using their literary gifts to preach, to teach, to promulgate a new social or religious movement, to reform somebody or something, to illustrate a new doctrine. From first to last, Carlyle 1 66 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE viii regarded himself even more as preacher than as artist: so does his follower, Mr. Ruskin. Macaulay seemed to write history in order to prove the im- measurable superiority of the Whig to the Tory; and Froude and Freeman write history to enforce their own moral. Disraeli's novels were the programme of a party and the defence of a cause; and even Dickens and Thackeray plant their knives deep into the social abuses of their time. Charles Kingsley was not professed novelist, nor professed man of letters. He was novelist, poet, essayist, and historian, almost by accident, or with ulterior aims. Essentially, he was a moralist, a preacher, a socialist, a reformer, and a theologian. To begin with his poetry, and he himself began his literary career with verses at the age of sixteen, he began to write poetry almost as a child, and some of his earlier verses are his best. If Kingsley, with all his literary gifts, was never quite in the first rank in anything, he came nearest to being a poet of mark. Some of his ballads almost touch the high-water mark of true ballad poetry, with its abrupt fierce blows of tragedy and pathos, its simple touches of primitive rude speech, its reserve of force, its un- spoken mysteries. At any rate, Kingsley's best ballads have no superior in the ballads of the Victo- rian era in lilt, in massiveness of stroke, in strange unexpected turns. The Weird Lady is an astonish- ing piece for a lad of twenty-one, — it begins with, "The swevens came up round Harold the Earl, Like motes in the sunn^s beam," — and it ends with the stanza, — vm CHARLES KINGSLEY 167 A white dove out of the coffin flew ; Earl Harold's mouth it kist ; He fell on his face, wherever he stood ; And the white dove carried his soul to God Or ever the bearers wist. That little piece is surely a bit of pure and rare ballad poetry. A New Forest Ballad is also good, it ends thus — They dug three graves in Lyndhurst yard ; They dug them side by side ; Two yeomen lie there, and a maiden fair, A widow and never a bride. So too is the Outlaw, whose last request is this : — And when I 'm taen and hangit, mither, a brittling o' my deer, Ye 'II no leave your bairn to the corbie craws, to dangle in the air; But ye '11 send up my twa douce brethren, and ye '11 steal me fra the tree, And bury me up on the brown, brown muirs, where I aye loved to be. The famous ballad in Yeast might have been a great success if Kingsley would have limited it to five stanzas instead of twenty. What a ring there is in the opening lines — The merry brown hares came leaping Over the crsst of the hill — If he could only have been satisfied with the first five stanzas what a ballad it would have been 1 — If only he had closed it with the verse — She thought of the dark plantation And the hares, and her husband's blood, And the voice of her indignation Rose up to the throne of God. l68 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vm That was enough for a ballad, but not for a political novel. The other fifteen stanzas were required for his story ; they may be vigorous rhetoric, impressive moralising, but they are too argumentative and too rhetorical to be ballad poetry. It is curious how much of Kingsley's work, both poetry and prose, is inspired by his love of sport and his indignation at game laws ! His songs, spoiled as they are to our ears by poor music and too often maudlin voices, are as good songs and as fitted for singing as any in our time. The Sands of Dee, hacknied and vulgarised as it is by the banalities of the drawing-room, is really (to use a hacknied and vulgarised phrase) a "haunting" piece of song; and though Ruskin may pronounce " the cruel crawling foam " to be a false use of the pathetic fallacy, the song, for what it professes to be, is certainly a thing to live. I have always felt more kindly toward the East wind since Kingsley's Wel- come, wild North-Easter ! and his Church Hymns such as — Who will say the world is dying? and The Day of the Lord is at hand, at hand ! — are far above the level even of the better modern hymns. We have not yet touched upon Kingsley's longest and most ambitious poem, — The Sainfs Tragedy. With all its merits and beauties it is a mistake. It was avowedly a controversial diatribe against the celibacy and priestcraft of Romanism, and was ori- ginally designed to be in prose. That is not a safe basis for a dramatic poem, and the poem suffers from the fact that it is in great part a theological pamphlet. It would have made a most interesting historical novel as a medieval pendant to Hypatia ; but it is not a great lyrical drama. As we have had viil CHARLES KIiVGSLEY l6g no great lyrical drama at all since Manfred and The Cenci, that is not much in its dispraise. There are powerful passages, much poetic grace in the piece; but the four thousand lines of this elabo- rate polemical poem rather weary us, and a perfer- vid appeal to the Protestantism and uxoriousness of Britons should have been cast into other moulds. The long poem of Andromeda almost succeeds in that impossible feat, — the revival of the hexameter in English. It may be a hard saying to the country- men of Longfellow, but the truth is that the hexa- meter is a metrical monster in our English speech. The paucity of easy dactyls and the absence of all true spondees in English words, the preponderance of consonants over vowels, the want of inflected forms, and other peculiarities in our language, — make the hexameter incapable of transplantation; and this magnificent metre loses with us all its ma- jesty, its ease, its beauty. The very line can hardly be printed on an ordinary page, for the immense number of letters in each English verse causes an unsightly doubling of the lines, chokes the voice, and wearies the ear. In the hexameter line of Homer there are usually about thirty letters, of which only twelve are consonants; in the English hexameter there are often sixty letters, of which nearly forty are consonants. And the Homeric hexameter will have six words where the English hexameter has twelve or fourteen.-' Yet having set himself this 1 Amongst other difficulties it may be observed that such words as "and," "is," "are," " the," '' who," " his " " its," "have," "been," — words without which few English sentences can be constructed, — do not form the short syllables of a true dactyl. 1 70 EARL Y VICTORIAN LITERA TURE utterly hopeless and thankless task, to write English hexameter, Kingsley produced some five hundred lines of Andromeda, which in rhythm, ease, rapidity, and metrical correctness are quite amongst the best in the language. It is very rare to meet with any Eng- lish hexameter which in rhythm, stress, and prosody is perfectly accurate. Andromeda contains many such hnes, as for example : — Violet, asphodel, ivy, and vine-leaves, roses and lilies, — Nereid, siren, and triton, and dolphin, and arrowy fishes. These lines are true hexameters, chiefly because they consist of Latin and Greek words; and they have little more than forty letters, of which barely more than half are consonants. They would be almost pure hexameters, if in lieu of the long and, we could put et, or re. And there are only three Saxon words in the two lines. But hexameters consisting of purely English words, especially of Anglo-Saxon words, halt and stammer like a school-boy's exercise. The attempt of Kingsley in Andromeda is most ingenious and most instructive. I have dwelt so much upon Kingsley's poetry because, though he was hardly a " minor poet," — an order which now boasts sixty members, — he wrote a few short pieces which came wonderfully near being a great success. And again, it is the imaginative element in all his work, the creative fire and the vivid life which he threw into his prose as much as his verse, into his controversies as much as into his fictions, that gave them their popularity and their savour. Nearly every one of Kingsley's imaginative works was polemical, full of controversy, theological, political, social, and racial; and this alone prevented VIII CHARLES KINGSLEY 171 them from being great works. Interesting works they are; full of vigour, beauty, and ardent con- ception; and it is wonderful that so much art and fancy could be thrown into what is in substance polemical pamphleteering. Of them all Hypatia is the best known and the best conceived. Z^/«^2« was written in 1853 in the prime of his manhood and was on the face of it a controversial work. Its sub-title was — New Foes with an Old Face, — its preface elaborates the moral and spiritual ideas that it teaches, the very titles of the chapters bear biblical phrases and classical moralising as their style. I should be sorry to guarantee the accuracy of the local colouring and the detail of its elaborate history; but the life, realism, and pictorial brilliancy of the scenes give it a power which is rare indeed in an historical novel. It has not the great and full knowledge of Roinola, much less the consummate style and setting of Esmond; but it has a vividness, a rapidity, a definiteness which completely enthral the imagination and stamp its scenes on the memory. It is that rare thing, an historical romance which does not drag. It is not one of those romances of which we fail to understand the incidents, and often forget what it is that the personages are struggling so fiercely to obtain. No one who has read Hypatia in early life will fail to remember its chief scenes or its leading characters, if he lives to old age. After forty years this romance has been cast into a drama and placed upon the London stage, and it is frequently the subject of some vigorous pictures. In any estimate of Hypatia as a romance, it is 172 EARLY VICTOR/AN LITERATURE Vlil right to consider the curious tangle of difficulties which Kingsley crowded into his task. It was to be a realistic historical novel dated in an age of which the public knew nothing, set in a country of which the author had no experience, but which many of us know under wholly altered conditions. It was to carry on controversies as to the older and the later types of Christianity, as to Polytheism, Judaism, and Monotheism ; it was to confute Romanism, Scepti- cism and German metaphysics ; it was to denounce celibacy and monasticism, to glorify muscular Christianity, to give glowing pictures of Greek sen- suousness and Roman rascality, and finally to secure the apotheosis of Scandinavian heroism. And in spite of these incongruous and incompatible aims, the story still remains a vivid and fascinating tale. That makes it a real tour-de-force. It is true that it has many of the faults of Bulwer, a certain staginess, melodramatic soliloquies, careless incongruities, crude sensationalism, — but withal, it has some of the merits of Bulwer at his best, in The Last Days of Pompeii, Rienzi, The Last of the Barons, — the play of human passion and adventure, intensity of reproduction however inaccurate in detail ; it has " go," intelligi- bility, memorability. The characters interest us, the scenes amuse us, the pictures are not forgotten. The stately beauty of Hypatia, the seductive fasci- nation of Pelagia, the childlike nature of Philammon, the subtle cynicism of Raphael Aben-Ezra, the mighty audacity of the Goths, the fanaticism of Cyril, and the strange clash of three elements o£ civilisation, — Graeco-Roman, Christian, Teutonic, — give us definite impressions, leave a permanent im- VIII CHARLES KINGSLEY 1 73 print on our thoughts. There are extravagances, theatricaHties, impossibilities enough. The Gothic princes comport themselves hke British seamen ashore in Suez or Bombay; Raphael talks like young Lancelot Smith in Yeast ; Hypatia is a Greek Argemone ; and Bishop Synesius is merely an African fifth century Charles Kingsley, what Sydney Smith called a " squarson," or compound of squire and par- son. Still, after all, — bating grandiloquences and incongruities and " errors excepted," Hypatia lives, moves, and speaks to us ; and, in the matter of vitality and interest, is amongst the very few successes in his- torical romance in the whole Victorian literature. Westward Ho! shares with Hypatia the merit of being a successful historical romance. It is free from many of the faults of Hypatia, it is more mature, more carefully written. It is not laden with the difficulties of Hypatia; it is only in part an historical romance at all; the English scenery is placed in a country which Kingsley knew perfectly and from boyhood; and the only controversy involved was the interminable debate about Jesuit mendacity and Romanist priestcraft. So that, if Westward Ho ! does not present us with the weaknesses and the dilemmas of Hypatia, on the other hand it is not so briUiant or so rich with interest. But it has real and lasting qualities. The Devon coast scenery which Kingsley knew and loved, the West Indian and tropical scenery, which he loved but did not know, are both painted with wonderful force of imaginative colour. When one recalls all that Kingsley has done in the landscape of romance, — Alexandria and the desert of the Nile, West Indian 174 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE viii jungles and rivers, Bideford Bay, his own heaths in Yeast, the fever-dens of London in Alton Locke, — one is almost inclined to rank him in this single gift of description as first of all the novelists since Scott. Compared with the brilliancy and variety of Kingsley's pictures of country, Bulwer's and Disraeli's are conventional; even those of Dickens are but local ; Thackeray and Trollope have no interest in landscape at all ; George Eliot 's keen interest is not so spontaneous as Kingsley's, and Charlotte Bronte's wonderful gift is strictly limited to the narrow field of her own experience. But Kingsley, as a landscape painter, can image to us other continents and many zones, and he carries us to distant chmates with astonishing force of reality. Two Years Ago has some vigorous scenes, but it has neither the merits nor the defects of Kingsley in historical romance. Its scene is too near for his fine imagination to work poetically, and it is too much of a sermon and pamphlet to be worth a second or a third reading ; and as to Hereward the Wake, I must confess to not having been able to complete even a first reading, and that after sundry , trials. Of Kingsley's remaining fanciful pieces it is enough to say that The Heroes still remains, after forty years, the child's introduction to Greek myth- ology, and is still the best book of its class. When we compare it with another attempt by a romancer of genius, and set it beside the sticky dulness of The Tanglewood Tales, it looks like a group of real Tanagra figurines placed beside a painted plaster cast. Kingsley's Heroes, in spite of the inevitable sermon addressed in the preface to all good boys viii CHARLES KINGSLEY 1 75 and girls, has the real simplicity of Greek art, and the demi-gods tell their myths in noble and pure English. The Water Babies is an immortal bit of fun, which will be read in the next century with Gulliver and The Ring and the Rose, long after we have all forgotten the nonsensical whims about science and the conventional pulpit moralising which Kingsley scattered broadcast into everything he said or wrote. We have as yet said nothing about that which was Kingsley's most characteristic and effective work, — his political fictions. These were the pieces by which his fame was first achieved, and no doubt they are the works which gave him his chief influence on his generation. But, for that very reason, they suffered most of all his writings as works of art. Yeast is a book very difficult to classify. It is not exactly a novel, it is more than a Dialogue, it is too romantic for a sermon, it is too imaginative for a pamphlet, it is too full of action for a political and social treatise. Incongruous as it is, it is interesting and effective, and contains some of Kingsley's best work. It has some of his most striking verses, some of his finest pictures of scenery, many of his most eloquent thoughts, all his solid ideas, the passion of his youth, and the first glow of his enthusiasm. It was written before he was thirty, before he thought himself to be a philosopher, before he professed to be entrusted with a direct message from God. Its title — Yeast — suggests that it is a ferment thrown into the com- pound mass of current political, social, and religious ideas, to make them work and issue in some new combination. Kingsley himself was a kind of fer- ment His mind was itself destined to cause a vio- 176 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE viii lent chemical reaction in the torpid fluids into which it was projected. His early and most amorphous work of Yeast did this with singular vigour, in a fresh and reckless way, with rare literary and poetic skill. If I spoke my whole mind, I should count Yeast as Kingsley's typical prose work. It is full of anom- alies, full of fallacies, raising difficulties it fails to solve, crying out upon maladies and sores for which it quite omits to offer a remedy. But that is Kings- ley all over. He was a mass of over-excited nerves and ill-ordered ideas, much more poet than philoso- pher, more sympathetic than lucid, full of passionate indignation, recklessly self-confident, cynically dis- dainful of consistency, patience, good sense. He had the Rousseau temperament, with its furious elo- quence, its blind sympathies and antipathies, its splendid sophistries. Yeast was plainly the Chris- tian reverse of the Carlyle image and superscription, as read in Sartor and Past and Present. Kmgsjey was always profoundly influenced by Frederick D . Mauri ce, who was a kind of spiritual Carlyle, without the genius or the learning of the mighty Sartor, with a fine gift of sympathy instead of sarcasm, with a genuine neo-Christian devoutness in lieu of an old- Hebrew Goetheism. Kingsley had some of Carlyle's passion, of his eloquence, of his power to strike fire out of stones. And so, just because Yeast was so disjointed as a composition, so desultory in thought, so splendidly defiant of all the conventions of litera- ture and all the ten commandments of British society in 1849, 1 am inclined to rank it as Kingsley's typical performance in prose. It is more a work of art than Alton Locke, for it is much shorter, less akin to jour- Mil CHARLES KINGSLEY 1 77 nalism, less spasmodic, and more full of poetry. Yeast deals with the country, — which Kingsley knew better and loved more than he did the town. It deals with real, permanent, deep social evils, and it paints no fancy portrait of the labourer, the squire, the poacher, or the village parson. Kingsley there speaks of what he knew, and he describes that which he felt with the soul of a poet. The hunting scenes in Yeast, the river vignettes, the village revel, are exquisite pieces of painting. And the difficulties overcome in the book are extreme. To fuse together a Platonic Dialogue and a Carlyle latter-day pamphlet, and to mould this compound into a rural romance in the style of Silas Marner, heightened with extracts from University Pulpit sermons, with some ringing ballads, and political diatribes in the vein of Cobbett's appeals to the People — this was to show wonderful literary versatility and animation. And, after forty- five years, Yeast can be read and re-read still ! Alton Locke was no doubt more popular, more passionately in earnest, more definite and intelligible than Yeast; and if I fail to hold it quite as the equal of Yeast in literary merit, it is because these very qualities necessarily impair it as a work of art. It was written, we well know, under violent excitement and by a terrible strain on the neuropathic organism of the poet-preacher. It is undoubtedly spasmodic, crude, and disorderly. A generation which has grown fastidious on the consummate finish of Es- mond, Romola, and Treasure Island, is a little critical of the hasty outpourings of spirit which satisfied our fathers in the forties, after the manner of Sybil, the Last of the Barons, or Barnaby Rudge. The Ten- 178 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vili nysonian modulation of phrase had not yet been popularised in prose, and spasmodic soliloquies and melodramatic eloquence did not offend men so cruelly as they offend us now. As Yeast was inspired by Sartor Resartus, so Alton Locke was inspired by Carlyle's French Revolution. The effect of Carlyle upon Kingsley is plain enough throughout, down to the day when Carlyle led Kingsley to approve the judicial murder of negroes in Jamaica. Kingsley himself tells us, by the mouth of Alton Locke (chap, ix.), " I know no book, always excepting Milton, which at once so quickened and exalted my poetical view of man and his history, as that great prose poem, the single epic of modern days, Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution. Kingsley's three masters were — in poe- try, Tennyson; in social philosophy, Carlyle; in things moral and spiritual, Frederick D. Maurice. He had far more of genius than had Maurice ; he was a much more passionate reformer than Tennyson ; he was far more genial and social than Carlyle. Not that he imitated any of the three. Yeast is not at all copied from Sartor, either in form or in thought ; nor is Alton Locke in any sense imitated from the French Revolution. It is inspired by it; but Yeast and Alton Locke are entirely original, and were native outbursts from Kingsley's own fierce imagination and intense human sympathy. And in many ways they were amongst the most powerful influences over the thought of the young of the last generation. In the early fifties we were not so fastidious in the matter of style and composi- tion as we have now become. Furious eloquence and somewhat melodramatic incongruities did not VIII CHARLES KINGSLEY 1 79 shock US SO much, if we found them to come from a really glowing imagination and from genuine in- spiration, albeit somewhat unpruned and ill-ordered. Now Kingsley " let himself go," in the way of Byron, Disraeli, Bulwer, and Dickens, who not seldom poured out their conceptions in what we now hold to be spasmodic form. It is possible that the genteeler taste of our age may prevent the young of to-day from caring for Alton Locke. But I can assure them that five-and-forty years ago that book had a great effect and came home to the heart of many. And the effect was permanent and creative. We may see to-day in England widespread results of that potent social movement which was called Christian Social- ism, a movement of which Kingsley was neither the founder nor the chief leader, but of which his early books were the main popular exponents, and to which they gave a definiteness and a key which the movement itself sadly lacked. I was not of an age to take part in that move- ment, but in after years at the Working Men's College, which grew out of it, I gained a personal knowledge of what was one of the most striking movements of our time. Nowadays, when leading statesmen assure us "we are all Socialists now," when the demands of the old " Chartists" are Liberal common form, when trades-unionism, co-operation, and state-aided benefits are largely supported by poli- ticians, churchmen, journals, and writers, it is difficult for us now to conceive the bitter opposition which assailed the small band of reformers who, five-and- forty years ago, spoke up for these reforms. Of that small band, who stood alone amongst the literary, academic, and ecclesiastical class, Charles Kingsley l8o EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE viii was the most outspoken, the most eloquent, and assuredly the most effective. I do not say the wisest, the most consistent, or the most stanch; nor need we here discuss the strength or the weakness of the Christian Socialist reform. When we remember how widely this vague initiative has spread and developed, when we read again Alton Locke and Yeast, and note how much has been practically done in forty years to redress or mitigate the abuses against which these books uttered the first burning protest, we may form some estimate of all that the present generation of Englishmen owes to Charles Kingsley and his friends. I have dwelt last and most seriously upon Kingsley's earliest books, because they were in many respects his most powerful, his typical works. As he grew in years, he did not develop. He improved for a time in literary form, but his excitable nerve- system, his impulsive imagination, drove him into tasks for which he had no gift, and where he floated hither and thither without sure guide. From the time of his ofificial success, that is, for the last fifteen years of his life, he produced nothing worthy of him- self, and much that was manifest book-making — the mere outpouring of the professional preacher and story-teller. Of his historical and philosophical work I shall not speak at all. His shallow Cambridge Inaugural Lecture, given by him as Professor of History, was torn to pieces in the Westminster Review (vol. xix. p. 305, April, 1861), it is said, by a brother Professor of History. Much less need we speak of his miserable duel with Cardinal Newman, wherein he was so shamefully worsted. For fifteen years he poured out lectures, sermons, tales, travels, poems, vill CHARLES KINGSLEY l8l dialogues, children's books, and historical, philo- sophical, theological, social, scientific, and sanitary essays, — but the Charles Kingsley of Yeast, Qi Alton Locke, of Hypatia, of Westward Ho! of the Ballads and Poems, we never knew again. He burnt out his fiery spirit at last, at the age of fifty-five, in a series of restless enterprises, and a vehement outpour- ing of miscellaneous eloquence. Charles Kingsley was a man of genius, half poet, half controversialist. The two elements did not blend altogether well. His poetic passion carried away his reason and often confused his logic. His argumentative vehemence too often marred his fine imagination. Thus his Saints Tragedy is partly a satire on Romanism, and his ballad in Yeast is mainly a radical pamphlet. Hardly one of his books is with- out a controversial preface, controversial titles, chap- ters, or passages on questions of theology, churches, races, politics, or society. Indeed, excepting some of his poems, and some of his popular or children's books (but not even all of these), all his works are of a controversial kind. Whatever he did he did with heart, and this was at once his merit and his weak- ness. Before all things, he was a preacher, a priest of the English Church, a Christian minister. He was, indeed, a liberal priest, sometimes even too free and easy. He brings in the sacred name perhaps more often than any other writer, and he does so not always in a devout way. He seemed at last to use the word " God " as if it were an expletive or mere intensive like a Greek 76, meaning " very much " or " very good," as where he so oddly calls the North- East wind "the wind of God." And he betrays a most unclerjcal interest in physical torture and phXr 1 82 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE vni sical voluptuousness {Hypatia, The Saints Tragedy, Saint Maura, Westward Ho /), though it is true that his real nature is both eminently manly and pure. As we have done all through these estimates of great writers, we have to take the great writer at his best and forget his worst. It is a melancholy reflec- tion that we so often find a man of genius working himself out to an unworthy close, it is too often feared, in the thirst of success and even the attraction of gain. But at his best Charles Kingsley left some fine and abiding influences behind him, and achieved some brilliant things. Would that we always had men of his dauntless spirit, of his restless energy, of his burning sympathy, of his keen imagination ! He reminds us somewhat of his own Bishop Synesius, as described in Hypatia (chap, xxi.), who " was one of those many-sided, volatile, restless men, who taste joy and sorrow, if not deeply or permanently, yet abundantly and passionately " — " He lived ... in a whirlwind of good deeds, meddling and toiling for the mere pleasure of action; and as soon as there was nothing to be done, which, till lately, had hap- pened seldom enough with him, paid the penalty for past excitement in fits of melancholy. A man of magniloquent and flowery style, not without a vein of self-conceit; yet withal of overflowing kindliness, racy humour, and unflinching courage, both physical and moral ; with a very clear practical faculty, and a very muddy speculative one," — and so on. Charles Kings- ley must have been thinking of his own tastes when he drew the portrait of the " squire-bishop." But he did more than the Bishop of Cyrene, and was himself a compound of squire-parson-poet. And in all three characters he showed some of the best sides of each. IX ANTHONY TROLLOPE Some of our younger friends who read the name which heads this essay may incline to think that it ought to be very short indeed, nay, be limited to a single remark; and, like the famous chapter on the snakes in Iceland, it should simply run — that An- thony Trollope has no place at all in Victorian litera- ture. We did not think so in England in the fifties, the sixties, and the seventies, in the heyday of Vic- torian romance; and I do not think we ought to pass that judgment now in this last quinquennium of our century. I shall have to put our friend Anthony in a very moderate and prosaic rank; I shall not conceal my sense of his modest claims and conspic- uous faults, of his prolixity, his limited sphere, his commonplace. But in view of the enormous popu- larity he once enjoyed, of the space he filled for a whole generation, I cannot altogether omit him from these studies of the Victorian writers. I have, too, a personal reason for including him in the series. I knew him well, knew his subjects, and his stage. I have seen him at work at the " Megatherium Club," chatted with him at the " Uni- verse," dined with him at George Eliot's, and even met him in the hunting-field. I was familiar with the 1 84 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ix political personages and crises which he describes; and much of the local colouring in which his romances were framed was for years the local colouring that I daily saw around me. Most of the famous writers of whom I have been speaking in this series (with the exception of Charlotte Bronte) I have often seen and heard speak in public and in private, but I cannot be said to have known them as friends. But Anthony Trollope I knew well. I knew the world in which he lived, I saw the scenes, the characters, the life he paints, day by day in the same clubs, in the same rooms, and under the same conditions as he saw them. To re-read some of his best stories, as I have just done, is to me like looking through a photo- graphic album of my acquaintances, companions, and familiar reminiscences of some thirty years ago. I can hear the loud voice, the honest laugh, see the keen eyes of our old friend as I turn to the admirable vignette portrait in his posthumous Autobiography, and I can almost hear him tell the anecdotes recounted in that pleasant book. Does the present generation know that frank and amusing book, — one of the most brisk and manly autobiographies in our language? Of course it is gar- rulous, egoistical, self-complacent in a way. When a famous writer, at the close of a long career of varied activity, takes up his pen to tell us how he has lived, and how his books were written, and what he has loved, seen, suffered, and striven for, — it is his business to be garrulous ; we want him to talk about himself, and to give us such peeps into his own heart and brain as he chooses to unlock. That is what an " autobiography " means. And never did man do this in a more hearty. IX ANTHONY TROLLOPE 185 manly, good-tempered spirit, with more good sense, with more modest bonhomie, with a more genial ego- ism. He has been an enormous worker ; he is proud of his industry. He has fought his way under cruel hardships to wealth and fame : and he is well satis- fied with his success. He has had millions of readers ; he has been well paid ; he has had good friends ; he has enjoyed life. He is happy in telling us how he did it. He does not overrate himself. He believes some of his work is good : at least it is honest, pure, sound work which has pleased millions of readers. Much of his work he knows to be poor stuff, and he says so at once. He makes no pretence to genius ; he does not claim to be a hero ; he has no rare qual- ities — or none but industry and courage — and he has met with no peculiar sufferings and no cruel and undeserved rebuffs. He has his own ideas about literary work, — you may think them commonplace, mechanical, mercenary ideas, — but that is a true picture of Anthony TroIIope ; of his strong, manly, pure mind, of his clear head, of his average moral sense : a good fellow, a warm friend, a brave soul, a genial companion. With all his artless self-complacency in his own success, Trollope took a very modest estimate of his own powers. I remember a characteristic discussion about their modes of writing between Trollope and George Eliot at a little dinner party in her house.^ ' This anecdote has been doubted, on the ground that such rapid composition is impossible. But Trollope in his Autobiography asserts this fact, exactly as he told George Eliot, except that the first half hour was occupied by. re-reading the work of the previous day. The average morning's work was thus 2500 words, written in two and a half hours. 1 86 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ix " Why ! " said Anthony, " I sit down every morning at 5.30 with my watch on my desk, and for three hours I regularly produce 250 words every quarter of an hour." George Eliot positively quivered with horror at the thought, — she who could write only when she felt in the vein, who wrote, re-wrote, and destroyed her manuscript two or three times, and as often as not sat at her table without writing at all, " There are days and days together," she groaned out, " when I cannot write a line." " Yes ! " said TroUope, " with imaginative work like yours that is quite natural ; but with my mechanical stuff it 's a sheer matter of industry. It 's not the head that does it, — it's the cobbler's wax on the seat and the stick- ing to my chair ! " In his Autobiography he has elaborately explained this process, — how he wrote day by day, including Sundays, whatever his duties, his amusements, or the place; measuring out every page, counting the words, and exacting the given quantity hour by hour. He wrote continuously 2500 words in each day, and at times more than 25,000 words in a week. He wrote whilst engaged in severe professional drudgery, whilst hunting thrice a week, and in the whirl of London society. He wrote in railway trains, on a sea voyage, and in a town club room. Whether he was on a journey, or pressed with office reports, or visiting friends, he wrote just the same. Dr. Thome was written whilst he was very sea-sick in a gale at sea, or was negotiating a treaty with Nubar Pasha ; and the day after finishing Dr. Thome he began The Bertrams. It is one of the most amazing, and one of the most comical, records of literary activity we have. No one can IX ANTHONY TROLLOPE 1 87 suppose that work of a very high class can be so produced at all. Nor does Trollope pretend that it is of a high class. He says it is honest work, the best he could do. He takes a strange pleasure in recounting these feats of literary productiveness. He poses as the champion of the age in quantity and rapidity. This lightning novelist could produce a volume in two or three weeks ; and thus he could easily turn out three novels of three volumes each in a year. He gives us an exact list of sixty works produced in about thirty-five years, and a total of about ;^70,ooo as the earnings of some twenty-four years. He insists that he never neglected his Post-Ofiice work, but was an invaluable and energetic public servant; he insists that, much as he enjoyed his literary profits, he was never misled by the desire of money; and he insists that he could have done no better work ,if he had written much less, or if he had given more time to each book. In all this he does not convince us. He certainly showed transcendent force of will, of nerve, and of endurance. " It 's dogged as does it ! " says Giles Hoggett to Mr. Crawley, in The Last Chronicle of Bar set ; and if "dogged" could make a great novelist, Anthony Trollope was pre- eminently " dogged." But a great novelist needs other gifts. And to tell us that he would not have done better work if his whole life had been given to his work, if every book, every chapter of every book were the fruit of ample meditation and repeated revision, if he had never written with any thought of profit, never written but what he could not contain hidden within' him, — this is to tell us palpable nonsense. 1 88 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE IX Trollope's sixty works no doubt exceed the prod- uct of any Englishman of our age; but they fall short of the product of Dumas, George Sand, and Scribe. And, though but a small part of the sixty works can be called good, the inferior work is not discreditable : it is free from affectation, extravagance, nastiness, or balderdash. It never sinks into such tawdry stuff as Bulwer, Disraeli, and even Dickens, -could indite in their worst moods. TroUope is never bombastic, or sensational, or prurient, or grotesque. Even at his worst, he writes pure, bright, graceful English; he tells us about wholesome men and women in a manly tone, and if he becomes dull, he is neither ridiculous nor odious. He is very often dull : or rather utterly commonplace. It is the fash- ion with the present generation to assert that he is never anything but commonplace; but this is the judgment of a perverted taste. His besetting danger is certainly the commonplace. It is true that he is almost never dramatic, or powerful, or original. His plots are of obvious and simple construction ; his characters are neither new, nor subtle, nor powerful ; and his field is strictly limited to special aspects of the higher English society in town and country. But in his very best work, he has risen above common- place and has painted certain types of English men and women with much grace and consummate truth. One of Trollope's strong points and one source of his popularity was a command over plain English almost perfect for his own limited purpose. It is limpid, flexible, and melodious. It never rises into eloquence, poetry, or power ; but it is always easy, clear, simple, and vigorous. Trollope was not IX ANTHONY TROLLOPE 1 89 capable of the sustained mastery over style that we find in Esmond, nor had he the wit, passion, and pathos at Thackeray's command. But of all con- temporaries he comes nearest to Thackeray in easy conversations and in quiet narration of incidents and motives. Sometimes, but very rarely, Trollope is vulgar, — for good old Anthony had a coarse vein : it was in the family : — but as a rule his language is conspicuous for its ease, simplicity, and unity of tone. This was one good result of his enormous rapidity of execution. His books read from cover to cover, as if they were spoken in one sitting by an improvisatore in one and the same mood, who never hesitated an instant for a word, and who never failed to seize the word he wanted. This ease and mastery over speech was the fruit of prodigious practice and industry both in office work and in literary work. It is a mastery which conceals itself, and appears to the reader the easiest thing in the world. How few out of many millions have studied that subtle mechanism of ear and thought which created the melodious ripple of these fluent and pellucid words. His work has one special quality that has not been sufficiently noticed. It has the most wonderful unity of texture and a perfect harmony of tone. From the first line to the last, there is never a sentence or a passage which strikes a discordant note; we are, never worried by a spasmodic phrase, nor bored by| fine writing that fails to " come off." Nor is there ever a paragraph which we need to read over again, or a phrase that looks obscure, artificial, or enigmatic. This can hardly be said of any other novelist of this century, except of Jane Austen, for even Thackeray igo EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ix himself is now and then artificial in Esmond, and the vulgarity of Yellowplush at last becomes fatiguing. Now Trollope reproduces for us that simplicity, unity, and ease of Jane Austen, whose facile grace flows on like the sprightly talk of a charming woman, mistress of herself and sure of her hearers. This uniform ease, of course, goes with the absence of all the greatest qualities of style ; absence of any passion, poetry, mystery, or subtlety. He never rises, it is true, to the level of the great masters of language. But, for the ordinary incidents of life amongst well- bred and well-to-do men and women of the world, the form of Trollope's tales is almost as well adapted as the form of Jane Austen. In absolute realism of spoken words Trollope has hardly any equal. His characters utter quite literally the same words, and no more, that such persons utter in actual life. The characters, it is true, are the average men and women we meet in the educated world, and the situations, motives, and feelings described are seldom above or below the ordinary incidents of modern life. But within this very limited range of incident, and for this very common average of person and character, the con- versations are photographic or stenographic repro- ductions of actual speech. His letters, especially his young ladies' letters, are singularly real, life-like, and characteristic. We have long got rid of the artificial eloquence and the studied witticisms of the older school. Richardson, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Scott put into the mouths of their heroes and heroines elaborate speeches, poetry, eloquence, and epigrams which are no more like real speech than the allocu- IX ANTHONY TROLLOPS 191 tions of kings and queens in Shakespeare are like natural talk. That has long been discarded. Jane Austen and Thackeray make their men and women discourse as men and women do. But perhaps with Thackeray, the talk is too racy, too brilliant, too rich with wit, humour, and character, to be quite literally truthful. Now, Trollope, taking a far lower and simpler line, makes his characters talk with literal truth to nature. This photographic realism of conversation is com- mon enough now : but it has too often the defects of photography; it is bleared, coarse, and ill-favoured. As we all know, in the new realism a young woman and her lover talk thus: "Old gal! why so glum?" said he — " It 's my luck ! " says she^ and flings her straw hat on the floor. That is the new photographic style, but it does not please us of an older genera- tion. Now Trollope makes his people utter such phrases as the characters he presents to us actually use in real life, — or rather such phrases as they did use thirty years ago. And yet, although he hardly ever rises into eloquence, wit, brilliancy, or sinks into any form of talk either unnaturally tall, or unnaturally low, — still, the conversations are just sufficiently pointed, humorous, or characteristic, to amuse the reader and develop the speaker's character. Trollope in this exactly hits the happy mean. Like Mr. Woodhouse's gruel, his conversations are "thin — but not so very thin." He never attempts grandilo- quence ; but then he never sinks into the fashionable bathos of — " Sugar in your tea, dear? " — " Another lump, if you please," — nor does he fall into the fashionable realism of — " Dry up, old man ! " No ! 192 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE IX TroUope's characters speak with literal nature; and yet with enough of point, humour, vigour, to make it pleasant reading. We may at once confess to his faults and limita- tions. They are plain enough, constant, and quite incapable of defence. Out of his sixty works, I should be sorry to pick more than ten as being worth a second reading, or twenty which are worth a first reading. Nor amongst the good books could I count any of the last ten years. The range of characters is limited to the clergy and professional men of a cathedral city, to the county families and the respectabilities of a quiet village, to the life of clubs, public offices, and Parliament in London, and to the ways of " society " as it existed in England in the third quarter of the present century. The plots are neither new nor ingenious; the incidents are rarely more than commonplace; the characters are seldom very powerful, or original, or complex. There are_very few " psychologic p roble ms, very few dra- matic situations, very few revelations of a new world and unfamiliar natures. There are some natural scenes in Ireland; now and then a cook-maid, a farmer, a labourer, or a clerk, come on the stage and play their short parts with faultless demeanour. But otherwise, the entire company appear in the frock-coats and crinolines of the period, and every scene is played in silk hats, bonnets, and regulation evening toilette. But within this limited range of life, this uni- formity of" genteel comedy," Trollope has not seldom given us pieces of inimitable truthfulness and curious delicacy of observation. The dignitaries of the cathedral close, the sporting squires, the county IX ANTHONY TROLLOPE 1 93 magnates, the country doctors, and the rectory home, are drawn with a precision, a refinement, an absolute fidelity that only Jane Austen could compass. There is no caricature, no burlesque, nothing improbable or over-wrought. The bishop, the dean, the warden, the curate, the apothecary, the duke, the master of fox- hounds, the bishop's wife, the archdeacon's lady, the vicar's daughter, the governess, the undergraduate, — all are perfectly true to nature. So, too, are the men in the clubs in London, the chiefs, subordinates, and clerks in the public offices, the ministers and members of Parliament, the leaders, and rank and file of London " society." They never utter a sentence which is not exactly what such men and women do utter ; they do and they think nothing but what such men and women think and do in real life. Their habits, conversation, dress, and interests are photographically accurate, to the point of illusion. It is not high art — but it is art. The field is a narrow one ; the actors are ordi- nary. But the skill, grace, and humour with which the scenes are caught, and the absolute illusion of truthfulness, redeem it from the commonplace. The stage of Trollope's drama is not a wide one, but it is far wider than that of Jane Austen. His plots and incidents are sufficiently trite and ordinary, but they are dramatic and original, if contrasted with those of Emma or Mansfield Park. No one will compare little Jane's delicate palfrey with Anthony's big-boned hunter; nor would any one commit the bad taste of treating these quadrupeds as if they were entered for a race; but a narrow stage and familiar incidents are not necessarily fatal to true art. If Trollope had done nothing more than paint 13 194 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ix ordinary English society with photographic accuracy of detail, it would not be a great performance. But he has done more than this. In the Barsetshire series, at any rate, he has risen to a point of drawing characters with a very subtle insight and delicate intuition. The warden, the bishop, Mrs. Proudie, Dr. Thorne, Mary Thorne, Lily Dale, Lady Arabella, and, above all, Mr. Crawley, are characters definitely conceived, profoundly mastered, and truly portrayed. TroUope evidently judged Crawley to be his greatest creation, and the Last Chronicle of Barset to be his principal achievement. In this he was doubtless right. There are real characters also in the two Phineas Finn tales. Chiltern, Finn, Glencora Palliser, Laura Kennedy, and Marie Goesler, are subtly con- ceived and truly worked out. This is enough to make a decent reputation, however flat be the inter- minable pot-boilers that precede and follow them. The list of TroUope's real successes is not very long. The six tales of the Barsetshire cycle. The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, The Last Chronicle of Barset, are unquestionably his main achievements ; and of these either Doctor Thorne or The Last Chronicle is the best. The Crawley story is undoubtedly the finest thing Trollope ever did ; but for myself, I enjoy the unity, completeness, and masterly scheme of Doctor Thorne, and I like Mary Thorne better than any of TroUope's women. If, to the six Barset tales, we add Orley Farm, The Claver- ings, the two Phineas Finns, and the Eustace Dia- monds, we shall include, perhaps, more than posterity will ever trouble itself about, and almost exactly one- IX ANTHONY TROLLOPE 195 fifth of the novels he left behind. The ten or twelve of Trollope's best will continue to be read, and will, in a future generation, no doubt, regain not a little of their early vogue. This will be due, in part, to their own inherent merit as graceful, truthful, subtle observation of contemporary types, clothed in a style of transparent ease. Partly, it will be due to this : that these tales will reproduce for the future certain phases of life in the nineteenth century in England with minute fidelity and the most literal realism. This is no doubt the cause of the revulsion of opinion by which in some English circles Trollope has suffered of late. If there are fashions, habits, and tastes which the rising generation is certain to despise, it is such as were current in the youth of their own parents about thirty or forty years before them. The collars, the bonnets, the furniture, the etiquette, the books of that age always seem to the young to be the last word of all that is awkward and " bad form," although in two or three generations these very modes regain a certain quaint charm. And for the moment poor Anthony represents to the emancipated youth of our time all that was " banal " and prosy some thirty years ago. The taste of our youth sets hard for a new heaven, or at least a new earth, and if not that, it may be a new hell. Novels or poems without conundrums, without psychologic problems, with no sexual theorems to solve, with no unique idiosyncrasies to fathom, without anything unnatural, or sickening, without hospital nastinesses, — are all, we are assured, unworthy the notice of the youth of either sex who are really up to date. In the style of the new pornographic and clinical school 196 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ix of art, the sayings and doings of wholesome men and women who live in drawing-rooms and regularly dress before dinner are " beastly rot," and fit for no one but children and old maids. But we conservatives of an older school are grate- ful to Anthony that he produced for the last gener- ation an immense collection of pleasant tales without a single foul spot or unclean incident. It was his boast that he had never written a line which a pure woman could not read without a blush. This is no doubt one of the grounds on which he is so often denounced as passL His tales, of course, are full of love, and the love is not always discreet or virtuous. There are cases of guilty love, of mad love, of ungoverned and unreasoning passion. But there is not an impure or prurient passage in the whole library of tales. Much more than this : in the centre of almost every tale, we are taken to the heart of a spotless, loving, refined, brave English girl. In nothing does Anthony Trollope delight I more than when he unveils to us the secret thoughts I of a noble-hearted maiden who loves strongly but who has a spirit as strong as her love, a clear brain and a pure will. In nothing is he more successful ; nowhere is he more subtle, more true, more interest- ing. In this fine gift, he surpasses all his contem- poraries, and almost all other English novelists. Mary Thorne, Lily Dale, Lucy Roberts, — I would almost add, Martha Dunstable, — may not be heroines of romance, and are certainly not great creations. But they are pure, right-minded, delicate, brave women ; and it does one good to be admitted to the sacred confessional of their hearts. IX ANTHONY TROLLOPE 1 97 It must be admitted that they are " young ladies," nurtured in the conventional refinement of the last generation, high-bred, and trained in the jealous sensitiveness of what was thought to be "maiden modesty" thirty or forty years ago. That is their misfortune to-day; it is now rather silly to be a " young lady " at all, and the old-fashioned " maiden modesty" of their mothers and grandmothers is become positively ridiculous. Young women of the present date, we are assured in the language of our gilded youth, have to be either "jolly girls" or " crocks " ; and Mary Thorne and Lily Dale are certainly not " jolly girls." Their trials and agonies are not different from those which may happen in any ordinary family, and the problems they have to solve are those which may await any girl at any time. But the subtle touches with which we are admitted to their meditations, the delicate weighing of compet- ing counsels and motives, the living pulses of heart and brain, and the essential soundness and reality of the mental and moral crisis, — are all told with an art that may be beneath that of Jane Austen, but which certainly is akin to (,hers, and has the same quality of pure and simple human nature. Pure and simple human nature is, for the moment, out of fashion as the subject of modern romance. But it remains a curious problem how the boisterous, brawny, thick-skinned lump of manhood whom we knew as Anthony Trollope ever came to conceive so many delicate and sensitive country maidens, and to see so deeply and so truly into the heart of their maiden meditations. Trollope is equally successful with some other 198 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ix social problems and characters of unstable equilib- rium. They are none of them very profound or ex- alted studies in psychology ; but they are truthful, natural, and ingenious ; and it needed a sure and deli- cate hand to make them interesting and life-like. The feeble, solemn, timid, vacillating bishop, driven to distraction by some clerical scandal in his tea-cup of a diocese ; the pompous ecclesiastic with wounded dignity and family quarrels ; the over-sensitive priest whose conscience is more acute than his brain ; the weak, generous, cowardly owner of an embarrassed estate ; the honest and impulsive youth placed be- tween love and duty ; the loving girl who will not sacrifice dignity to love; the public official who is torn between conscience and self-interest; the man in a great position who does not know his own mind ; the man with honest principles who is tempted above his strength by love, ambition, or ruin, — all of these live in the pages of TroUope with perfect truth to nature and reality of movement. It would be too much to say that any of them are masterly creations, unless it be Crawley and the Proudies, but they are absolutely truthful, real, living portraits. The situations are not very striking, but then they are perfectly natural. And the characters never say or do a thing which oversteps by a hair's-breadth the probable and natural conduct of such persons. All this is now said to be commonplace, goody- goody, and Philistine. There are no female acrobats, burglars, gutter-urchins, crapulous prostitutes, no pathological anatomy of diseased bodies and carious souls, hardly a single case of adultery in all Trollope. But they who can exist without these stimulants IX ANTHONY TROLLOPE I99 may find pleasant reading yet in his best work. The Last Chronicle of Barset is a really good tale which deserves to live, and the whole Crawley episode rises to the level of fine imaginative work. Doctor Thome is a sound, pleasant, ingenious story from beginning to end. It has perhaps the best plot of all Trollope's books, and, singularly enough, it is the only plot which he admits not to be his own. I count Mary Thorne as his best woman and Doctor Thorne as one of his best men. The unity of Doctor Thorne is very striking and ingenious. The stage is crowded : there are nearly a score of well- marked characters and five distinct households ; but the whole series works into the same plot ; the scene is constantly varied, and yet there is no double plot or separate companies. Thus, though the whole story revolves round the fortunes of a single family, the interest and the movement never flag for a page. The machinery is very simple ; the characters are of average strength and merit ; the incidents and issues are ordinary enough. And the general effect is whole- some, manly, womanly, refined, and true to nature. The episcopal and ciapitular group of ecclesiastics round the Cathedral of Barchester is Trollope's main creation, and is destined to endure for some time. It is all in its way inimitably true and subtly gradu- ated from bishop to dean, from dean to canon, and so on through the whole chapter down to the verger and the porter. The relations of these dignitaries to each other, the relation of their womankind to each other, the relation of the clerical world to the town world and to the county world, their conventional etiquette, their jealousies, their feuds, their scandals, 200 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ix and their entertainments, are all marked with admi- rable truth and a refined touch. The relation of the village respectabilities to the county families, the relation of the county families to the great ducal magnate, are all given with curious precision and subtle discrimination. When The Warden appeared just forty years ago, I happened to be a pupil in the chambers of the late Sir Henry Maine, then a famous critic of the Saturday Review ; and I well remember his interest and delight in welcoming a new writer, from whom he thought so much might be expected. The relations of London " Society " to the parliamen- tary and ministerial world as described in Trollope's later books are all treated with entire mastery. It is this thorough knowledge of the organism of English society which specially distinguishes TroUope. It is a quality in which Thackeray alone is his equal; and Thackeray himself has drawn no complex social organism with such consummate completeness as Trollope's Barchester Close. It is of course purely English, locally true to England only. But it is, as Nathaniel Hawthorne said, "solid and substantial," " as real as if it were a great lump out of the earth," — "just as English as a beefsteak." What makes all that so strange is this, that when he began to write novels, TroUope had far less experience than have most cultivated men of cathedral closes, rectories, and county families. He had never been to a college, and till past middle life he never had access to the higher grades of English society. He never at any time, and certainly not when the Bar- chester cycle began, had any footing whatever in clerical circles, and but little intimate acquaintance IX ANTHONY TROLLOPE 20I with young ladies of birth and refinement in country- homes. He never was much thrown with the young bloods of the army, of the universities, or of Parlia- ment. He rarely consorted with dukes or county magnates, and he never lived in the centre of the political world. Yet this rough, self-taught, busy Post-Office surveyor in Ireland, perpetually travelling about the country on the inspections of his duty, managed to see to the very marrow of the prelates of a cathedral, to the inner histories of the duke's castle and the squire's home, into the secret musings of the rector's daughter, and into the tangled web of parlia- mentary intrigue. He did all this with a perfectly sure and subtle touch, which was often, it is true, somewhat tame, and is never perhaps of any very great brilliance, but which was almost faultlessly true, never extravagant, never unreal. And, to add to the wonder, you might meet him for an hour ; and, how- ever much you might like his bluff, hearty, resonant personality, you would have said he was the last man to have any delicate sympathy with bishops, dukes, or young ladies. His insight into parhamentary life was surprisingly accurate and deep. He had not the genius of Dis- raeli, but his pictures are utterly free from caricature or distortion of any kind. In his photographic por- traiture of the British Parliament he surpassed all his contemporaries; and inasmuch as such studies can only have a local and sectional interest, they have probably injured his popularity and his art. His conduct of legal intricacies and the ways of lawyers is singularly correct; and the long and elaborate trial scene in Phineas Redux is a masterpiece of 202 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE IX natural and faithful descriptions of an Old Bailey criminal trial in which " society " happens to be in- volved. Yet of courts of law, as of bishops' palaces, rectory firesides, the lobbies of Parliament, and ducal " house parties," Trollope could have known almost nothing except as an occasional and outside observer. The life of London clubs, the habits and personnel of a public office, the hunting-field, and the social hierarchy and ten commandments observed in a country town, — these things Trollope knew to the minutest shade, and he has described them with wonderful truth and zest. There was a truly pathetic drollery in his violent passion for certain enjoyments, — hunting, whist, and the smoking-room of his club. I cannot forget the comical rage which he felt at Professor Freeman's attack on fox-hunting. I am not a sporting man myself; and, though I may look on fox-hunting as one of the less deadly sins involved in " sport," I know nothing about it. But it chanced that as a young man I had been charged with the duty of escorting a certain young lady to a "meet" of fox- hounds in Essex. A fox was found; but what happened I hardly remember ; save this, that, in the middle of a hot burst, I found myself alongside of Anthony Trollope, who was shouting and roaring out " What ! — what are you doing here? " And he was never tired of holding me up to the scorn of the " Universe " club as a deserter from the principles of Professor Freeman and John Morley. I had taken no part in the controversy, but it gave him huge delight to have detected such backsHding in one of the school he detested. Like other sporting men IX ANTHONY TROLLOPE 203 who imagine that their love of " sport " is a love of nature, when it is merely a pleasure in physical exer- cise, Trollope cared little for the poetic aspect of nature. His books, like Thackeray's, hardly contain a single fine picture of the country, of the sea, of mountains, or of rivers. Compared with Fielding, Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, George Eliot, he is a man blind to the loveliness of nature. To him, as to other fox-hunters, the country was good or bad as it promised or did not promise a good " run." Though Trollope was a great traveller, he rarely uses his experiences in a novel, whereas Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, George Eliot fill their pages with foreign adventures and scenes of travel. His hard riding as an overgrown heavy-weight, his systematic whist playing, his loud talk, his burly ubiquity and irrepressible energy in everything, — formed one of the marvels of the last generation. And that such a colossus of blood and bone should spend his mornings, before we were out of bed, in analysing the hypersensitive conscience of an archdeacon, the secret confidences whispered between a prudent mamma and a love-lorn young lady, or the subtle meanderings of Marie Goesler's heart, — this was a real psychologic problem. There can be no doubt that this constitutional vehemence of his, this hypertrophy of blood and muscle, injured his work and dimmed his reputation. Much of his work he ought to have burnt. His classical studies are worthless, his Life of Thackeray and his Travels are mere book-making. His novels, even the best, are revised and printed with scandalous haste. He speaks of a "toga virile" and of "the 204 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE ix husband oi his bosom," for wife ; and there are mis- prints in every paragraph. When, in his Autobiog- raphy, he let the public into the story of his method, of his mechanical writing so many words per hour, of his beginning a new tale the day after he finished the last, of his having no particular plot, and hardly thinking about a plot, and all the little trade secrets of his factory, the public felt some disgust and was almost inclined to think it had been cheated out of its ;^70,000. Anthony TroUope was not a fraud, nor even a mere tradesman. His reputation may perhaps par- tially revive, and some of his best work may be read in the next century. His best work will of course be a mere residuum of his sixty books, as is the best of nearly all prolific writers. I am inclined to think the permanent survival may be limited to the Barchester cycle, with Orley Farm and the two Phineas Finns. In any case, his books will hereafter bear a certain historical interest, as the best record of actual manners in the higher English society between 1855 and 1875. That value nothing can take away, however dull, connu, and out of date the books may now seem to our new youth. It is a curious problem why our new youth persists in filling its stomach with the poorest trash that is "new," — i. e. published in 1895, whilst it will not look at a book that is " old," — /. e. published in 1865, though both are equally unknown to the young reader. If our new youth ever could bring itself to take up a book having 1865 on its title-page, it might find in the best of Anthony TroUope much subtle observation, many manly and womanly natures, un- failing purity of tone, and wholesome enjoyment. X GEORGE ELIOT It will be the duty of the more serious criticism of another generation in some degree to revive the reputation of George Eliot as an abiding literary- force, — a reputation which the taste of the hour is rather disposed to reduce. Five-and-twenty years ago the tendency w,as towards excessive praise : many judges, of trained literary insight, proclaimed her as the greatest genius of the age, one of the brightest stars of English literature, nay, said some of them, quite losing control of their speech, — a modern Shakespeare, and so forth. Some cooler heads looked grave, but none save the inveterate cynics ventured to mock; and the great public, as usual, thought it best to follow the lead of so many men and so many women of the higher culture. The inevitable reaction ensued : when, not only were the grave shortcomings of George Eliot ruthlessly con- demned, but her noble aim and superb qualities were blindly ignored. The taste in popular romance sways hither and thither in sudden revulsion, like the taste in hats or in frocks, or the verdict of manhood suffrage. This or that type becomes suddenly the rage, this or tfiat 206 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE x mannerism is voted an ofifence, as qu ickly as fashio a. ruhs after j^new^tmtTor boycotts an obsolete s leeve. Journalism and all'the otKer forces of" tlie hour stimu- late these caprices and carry away the masses by their volubility and noise. It is the business oT serious criticism, keeping a cooler head, to correct these fervid impulses of the day, — whilst excited audiences in the amphitheatre raise or depress the fatal thumb, awarding life or death to the combatants in the great arena. The business of criticism is to judge, — to judge upon the whole evidence, after hearing counsel on both sides with equal attention, after weighing every shred of argument and every word that any witness has to offer, and after patient study of every aspect of the case, to deliver a complete and reasoned esti- mate of the whole matter at issue. The true critic is not a mere juryman, who has nothing to do but to pronounce a bare verdict of " guilty " or " not guilty." He is a judge of the supreme court of equity, who may find, in some intricate story unravelled at his bar, a dozen errors in law and as many mistakes of fact, and yet may give substantial relief or may decree onerous penalties. It is easy enough to de- tect faults, easy enough to insist on merits : the thing wanted to guide the public is the cool, compensated, equitable judgment that is not seduced by any con- spicuous charm, and is not irritated by any incor- rigible defect, but which, missing no point of merit and none of failure, finally and resolutely strikes the just balance. This just balance, with all its intricate adjustments of compensation and equivalence, is peculiarly needed GEORGE ELIOT 207 in the case of George Eliot, and at the same time is unusually difficult. George Eliot was most conspicu- ous as an artist, as a worker in the sphere of imagina- tion and creation. At the same time, she had very rare powers and a really unusual learning quite out- side of imaginative art. And these reflective powers and such stores of knowledge are often antagonistic to creative art, and undoubtedly were so not seldom with her. If Aristotle himself had written a dull psychological tragedy, we might read it for his sake, but we should not forgive him, and we ought not to forgive him. And if Shakespeare himself had written the Novum Organum or the Principia, we should not have had Hamlet and Lear as we now know them. There is no compensation between philosophy and poetry. No profundity, no learning, can give beauty to verses which lack the divine fire. If George Eliot's fame has to be based solely on her great powers and endowments, her art would not be worth much. How- ever, it is not so : she was an artist, with true artistic gifts. Her philosophic power and her scientific attainments often enoble these gifts: yet it is too often evident that they seriously mar and embarrass them. Turn it the other way. Until nearly the age of forty, George Eliot was known only as a critical and philosophical writer. And in reading, in logical acumen, and in breadth of view, she was the equal of the first minds of her time. But no one of her contemporaries, eminent in philosophy and science, approached her, however remotely, in artistic gifts ; and no one of them even attempted to invest ethical and social ideas with high imagination and beautiful 208 • EARLY VICTORIA AT LITERATURE x ideals. Thus, George Eliot was of a far higher mental plane than any contemporary who has used imaginative prose as an art, and she was also a far greater artist than any contemporary philosopher. It is quite certain that learning and wisdom may be lodged in the same brain with the highest poetry, as Lucretius, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Goethe may prove. And men of original power have not seldom used imaginative art with signal success to convey the ideas with which they were charged ; for this has been done by Cervantes, Rabelais, Swift, Rousseau, Byron, Shelley, and Goethe. It is therefore legitimate and natural that a power- ful and teeming mind should resort to art as its medium, and also that an artist of high aims should be a systematic thinker and an omnivorous student. The combination is very rare and success is sin- gularly difficult. To fail in art is to lose all and to end in utter failure. And to carry ethical pur- pose and erudition into art is indeed a perilous undertaking, wherein but one or two of the greatest have wholly succeeded. The problem with George Eliot is to judge how far she has succeeded in the all but impossible task. That her success is far from complete is but too obvious. That she has had many incidental successes is also obvious. Her work is not sufficiently spontaneous, not easy or simple, not buoyant enough. But it has great no- bility, rare distinction. It may not live as perfect art; but it should not perish as ambitious failures perish. If George Eliot were not a writer of romance, she was nothing at all in the front ranks of Victorian GEORGE ELIOT 209 literature. With all her powers of mind, her mastery of language, her immense stores of know- ledge and supreme culture, she gave to the world nothing of great mark, acknowledged and known as hers, except her famous romances; for, as we shall presently see, we cannot count any of the poems as of great mark. But, as a writer of romance, George Eliot differs essentially and for the worse from all the other great writers of romance in her own or preceding generations. Most certainly she was not a born romancer; she had no spontaneous gift of telling stories, no irrepressible genius that way. Now all the great romancers have been born to it, as Robinson Crusoe was born to the sea, or as Turner was born to paint. Though Scott published novels late, he had begun Waverley at thirty-four; his earlier works are romantic ballads and metrical romances ; and from boyhood, at home and abroad, he was ever filled with some tale of adventure and character. Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth "lisped" in novelettes, as Pope said he "Hsped in numbers." Though Charlotte Bronte pubhshed so little, she wrote stories incessantly from childhood. Lytton, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, invented tales as part of their daily lives, and from the earliest age. But George Eliot was thirty-nine when her first tales were published, and she was forty before she was known to the public as a novelist at all. And so little was novel-writing her natural gift, that her most intimate friends never suspected her power, nor did she herself altogether enjoy the exercise of her art. To the last her periods of mental gestation were long, painful, and unhopeful. Parturition was 14 2IO EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE x a dangerous crisis, and the long-expected infant was reared with misgivings and a superfluity of coddling. The romances of George Eliot came like some enfant de miracle, born late in the mother's life, at the cost of infinite pain, much anxiety, and amidst the won- dering trepidation of expectant circles of friends. Even in her best books we never quite get over the sense of almost painful elaboration, of a power- ful mind having rich gifts striving to produce some rare music with an unfamihar and uncongenial in- strument. It reminds us of Beethoven evolving his majestic sonatas on an untuned and dilapidated old piano, the defects of which he could not himself hear. The conventional critic in The Vicar of Wakefield is told to say that "the picture would have been better if the artist had taken more pains." With George Eliot too often we are made to feel that the picture would have been, at any rate, more enjoyable if the artist had taken less pains. To study her more ambitious tales is Hke an attempt to master some new system of psychology. The metaphysical power, the originality of conception, the long brood- ing over anomalies and objections, — these are all there : but the rapid improvisation and easy inven- tion are not there. Such qualities would indeed be wholly out of place in philosophy, but they are the essence of romance. In romance we want to feel that the piece is only brought to an end by time and our human powers of listening; that there is "plenty more where these come from ; " that the story-teller enjoys telling stories for their own sake, and would go on with the tales, though the audience were reduced to a child, an idiot, and a deaf man. GEORGE ELIOT 211 This explains the paradox that the most popular, and most certainly the most praised of George Eliot's works, are the simpler and the shorter. Every one enjoys the Scenes of Clerical Life, short stories of a hundred pages each, with simple plots and a few characters in everyday life. I have no doubt myself that Silas Marner comes nearer to being a great success than any of the more elaborate books. Yet Silas Marner is about one-fifth part of the length of Middlemarch ; and its plot, mise-en-sckne, and incidents are simplicity itself. There is no science, no book-learning, and but few ethical problems in it from beginning to end ; and it all goes in one small volume, for the tale concerns but the neighbours of one quiet village. Yet the quaint and idyllic charm of the piece, the perfection of tone and keeping, the harmony of the landscape, the pure, deep humanity of it, all make it a true and exquisite work of high art. Modern English (and I am one of those who hold that the best modern English is as good as any in our literature) has few pieces of description more gem-like in its crystalline facets than the opening chapter that tells of the pale, uncanny weaver of Raveloe in his stone cottage by the deserted pit. Some of us can remember such house weavers in such lonesome cottages on the Northern moors, and have heard the unfamiliar rattle of the loom in a half- ruinous homestead. How perfect is that vignette of Raveloe — " a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices" — with its " strange lingering echoes of the old demon-worship among the grey-haired peasantry!" The entire 212 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE x picture of the village and its village life a hundred years ago, is finished with the musical and reserved note of poetry, such as we are taught to love in Wordsworth and Tennyson. And for quiet humour modern literature has few happier scenes than the fire- side at the " Rainbow," with Macey and Winthrop, the butcher and the farrier, over their pipes and their hot potations, and the quarrel about " seeing ghos'es," about smelling them ! Within this most graceful and refined picture of rural life there is a dominant ethical motive which she herself describes as its aim, " to set in a strong light the remedial influences of pure, natural, human relations." This aim is perfectly worked out: it is a right and healthy conception, not too subtle, not too common : — to put it in simpler words than hers, it is how a lonely, crabbed, ill-used old man is human- ised by the love of a faithful and affectionate child. The form is poetic : the moral is both just and noble : the characters are living, and the story is original, natural, and dramatic. The only thing, indeed, which Silas Marner wants to make it a really great romance is more ease, more rapidity, more " go." The mel- ody runs so uniformly in minor keys, the sense of care, meditation, and introspection is so apparent in every line, the amount of serious thought lavished by the writer and required of the reader is so continuous, that we are not carried away, we are not excited, inspired, and thrilled as we are by Jane Eyre or Esmond. We enjoy a beautiful book with a fine moral, set in exquisite prose, with consummate liter- ary resources, full of fine thoughts, true, ennobling thoughts, and with no weak side at all, unless it be GEORGE ELIOT 213 the sense of being over-wrought, like a picture which has been stippled over in every surface. A clever French woman said of George Eliot's conversation — elle £^coute quand elle parle ! Just so, as we read on we seem t o see how she held up each sentenc e into the lig ht as it fell from her pen, scrutinjsed it toseelFsomFTarer'pKrasF^igEtnot Of all the more important i^JssTSzIas'Marner is that wherein we least feel this excessive thoughtfulness. And thus it is the best. Perhaps other born ro- mancers would have thrown into it more life, energy, jollity, or passion. Thackeray would have made the weaver a serio-comic hermit: Dickens would have made Eppie a sentimental angel; Charlotte Bronte would have curdled our blood ; Trollope might have made more of Nancy's courting. But no one of them could have given us a more lofty lesson " of the re- medial influences of pure, natural, human relations." The only doubt is, whether a novel is the medium for such lessons. On this, opinions are, and will remain, divided. The lesson and the art ought both to be faultless. When we ask for a romance fully developed and more than a graceful vignette, Adam Bede must be regarded as the principal, and with the wider public it is always the typical, work of George Eliot. She said herself that it seemed to her " impossible that she should ever write anything so good and true again," — and herein she was no doubt right. It is the only one of her works in prose or verse which we feel to be inevitable, spontaneous, written out of the abundance of enjoyment and experience. It is of all 214 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE x her books the heartiest, the wittiest, the most cheer- ful, or rather the least desponding. In that book it may be that she exhausted herself and her own resources of observation as an eye-witness. She wrote fine things in other veins, in different scenes, and she conceived other characters and new situa- tions. But for all practical purposes Adam Bede was the typical romance, which everything she had thought or known impelled her to write, in which she told the best of what she had seen and the most important of what she had to say. Had she never written anything but Adam Bede, she would have had a special place of her own in English romance : — and I am not sure that anything else which she pro- duced very materially raised, enlarged, or quahfied that place. The Mill on the Floss must always be very interest- ing to all who knew George Eliot and loved her work, if for no other reason, for its autobiographic and personal touches and its revelation of yearnings and misgivings hardly suspected in life. There are scenes and minor characters in it which hold their own against Adam Bede, but as a whole it is not so strong or so rich in colour, and it can hardly be said to occupy new ground. It has not the pathos of Amos Barton, nor the exquisite style of Silas Marner, nor the breadth and constructive merit of Adam, Bede. And except to the chosen band of Eliotists, it is not likely to retain any permanent popularity. It is a book to study for those who have special interest in George Eliot as woman, as teacher, and as artist — but for my own part I find it rather a book to reflect upon than a book to read and to re-read. GEORGE ELIOT 21 5 With respect to Romola, though we must all agree with Mr. Oscar Browning that it is " replete with learning," " weighed with knowledge in every page," exquisite in art, and so forth, it is really impossible to call it with him " the best historical novel ever written." Even in exact reproduction of another age, it cannot compare with Esmond, and how im- measurably as romance is it beneath the fire and movement of a dozen historical romances that one could name ! The beauty of the Florentine pictures, the enormous care, thought, and reading, lavished on the story, the variety of literary resource, — all make it a most memorable work, a work almost sui generis, a book which every student of Italy, every lover of Florence must mark, learn, and inwardly digest. But to call it a complete success is to go too far. The task was too great. To frame in a complex background of historical erudition an ethical problem of even greater complexity and subtlety, — this was a task which might have sorely tried even greater powers than hers, — a task in which Goethe and Scott might have succeeded, but which Goethe and Scott were too truly the born artists to attempt with- out ample care, and too busy with many things to devote to it the required labour. Romola is certainly a wonderful monument of literary accomplishments; but it remains a tour de force, too elaborate, too laboured, too intricate, too erudite. As the French say, it has trop de choses, it is too long, too full, over-costumed, too 'studiously mounted on the stage. We sometimes see nowadays " a Shakespearean revival," with scenery studied by eminent artists on the spot, costumes archaeologically 2l6 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE x accurate, real armour, " properties " from famous collections, a mise-en-scine of lavish splendour and indefatigable research, — and then we ask, how can "Hamlet" or " Lear" live up to such learning, and why is "Romeo" such a melancholy devil? Few men enjoyed the earlier portions of Romola more than I did. Italianissimo and Florentissimo as I was, it was an intense treat. But, though I have read and re-read Romold irom. time to time, it has always been in sections. I have never read it straight through at one time ; and to this hour, I am not quite clear about all the ramifications of the plot and the various cross-purposes of the persons. Could any one say this about Quentin Durward or Ivanhoe, or of the Last Days of Pompeii, or of Esmond or even of Hypatia or Westward Ho ! Romola, we know, tried its author most cruelly in composition, nor need we wonder at this. " I began it," she said, " a young woman — I finished it an old woman." " It ploughed into her," said her husband, " more than any of her other books." And, in my opinion, it marks the decline of her genius. I cannot count any of the later books as equal to her earlier works. Her great period of production reaches at most over the six years 1858-1863 (aetat. 39-45), in which she produced Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Adam Bede (i8sg), The Mill on the Floss (i860), Silas Marner (1861), and Romola (1863). If we measure by strict success in the highest art, this period should not be extended beyond the four years which closed with Silas Marner. Romola is an ambitious, beautiful, altogether noble essay to fly skyward like Icarus, whose ingenious mechanism was melted by the sun- GEORGE ELIOT 21/ light in mid-career. And I cannot count any of the later pieces, prose or verse, as anything but inferior to Romola. They have great beauties, fine passages, subtle characters, and high conceptions, — but they are the artificial products of a brain that showed symptoms of exhaustion, of a great writer who was striving after impossible tasks without freedom and without enjoyment. I cannot at all agree with those admirers of George Eliot's genius who believe that it grew continuously in power, who even assure us that it reached its zenith in Daniel Deronda. What can they mean? Daniel Deronda, as usual, shows brilliant literary skill in many passages, and its insight into modern Hebraism is a psychological problem. But with all its merits and even beauties, Daniel Deronda has the fatal defect of unpleasant characters who are neither beautiful nor interesting, terrible situations which bore rather than terrify us, a plot which is at once preposterous and wearisome. As to Middlemarch, — George Eliot's longest, most crowded, and ethically most elaborated romance, — with all its subtlety, its humour, its variety, and its sardonic insight into provincial Philistinism, it becomes at last tedious and disagreeable by reason of the interminable maunderings of tedious men and women, and the slow and reiterated dissection of disagreeable anato- mies. At this moment I cannot, after twenty years, recall the indefinite, lingering plot, or the precise relations to each other of the curiously uninteresting families, who talked scandal and fuss about in Middlemarch town. In Felix Holt I was naturally much interested, 2l8 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE x having read it in manuscript, and advised upon the point of law, as appears from her published letters in the Life by J. Cross. There are two or three lines — the lawyers' " opinion on the case " — which she asked me to sketch; and I remember telling her when she inserted these lines in the book, that I should always be able to say. that I had written at least a sentence which was embodied in English literature. Felix Holt contains some fine characters and scenes, but it cannot be regarded as equal to Adam Bede and Silas Mamer. We will not speak of Theophrastus Such, 1879, written just before her death. It was the work of a woman physically and intellectually exhausted. I feel a certain guilty sense of disappointment when I think of the book, for I possibly had some hand in causing it to be written. I had sent her a long letter pointing out that our literature, with all its wealth of achievement in every known sphere, was still deficient in one form of composition in which the French stood paramount and alone. That was what they called Pensees, — moral and philosophical reflections in the form of epigrams or rather aphorisms. I thought, and I still think, that this form of composition was peculiarly suited to her genuis, at least in her prime. It was not in her prime when she painfully evolved the sour affectations set forth in Theophrastus. A word or two must be said about the Poems. They have poetic subjects, ideas, similes: they are full of poetic yearning, crowded with poetic imagery ; they have everything poetry needs, except poetry They have not the poet's hall-mark. They are imi- tation poems, like the forged " ancient masters " GEORGE ELIOT 219 they concoct at Florence, or the Tanagra statuettes they make in Germany. With all her consummate literary gifts and tastes, George Eliot never managed to write a poem, and never could be brought to see that the verses she wrote were not poems. It was an exaggeration of the defect that mars her prose ; and her verses throw great light on her prose. They are over-laboured; the conception overpowers the form; they are too intensely anxious to be recog- nised as poems. We see not so much poetic passion, as a passionate yearning after poetic passion. We have, — not the inevitable, incalculable, inimitable, phrase of real poetry, — but the slowly distilled, cal- culated, and imitated effort to reach the spontaneous. It is melancholy indeed to have to admit this, after such labour, such noble conceptions, such mastery over language : but it is the truth. And it explains much of kindred failure in her prose work. Great imagination, noble conceptions, mastery over lan- guage can do much, but they cannot make a poet. Nothing can, but being a poet. Nor can these gifts make a great romancer or poet in prose. Nothing can, but being born to romance, being a prose poet. As the Gospel has it, — " Which of^ you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? " George Eliot had not sufificiently meditated on this scripture. She too often supposed that by taking thought, — by enormous pains, profound thought, by putting this thought in exquisite and noble words, — she might produce an immortal romance, an immortal poem. And yet let us never forget that the Spanish Gypsy is a very grand conception, that it has some noble 220 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE x scenes, and here and there some stately lines, — even some beautiful passages, could we forget the artificial alliteration and the tuneless discords to which the poet's ear seems utterly insensible. The opening lines seem to promise well and have much of mel- low thought, in spite of five hissing sibilants in the very first verse — 'T is the warm South, where Europe spreads her lands. Like fretted leaflets, breathing on the deep : And then comes in the fourth line an awful cacophony of alliteration, — and an alliteration in " c." A Calm earth-goddess crowned with corn and vines. Then we have a really pretty but artificial line, — an alliteration in " m." On the Mid Sea that moans with memories. The seventh line again is an alliteration of alternate "p" and"d." Pant dumbly passionate with dreams of youth. The tenth line is an excruciating alliteration in sibilants. Feeds the famed stream that waters Andalus. But it must be admitted that the next line is graceful — And loiters, amorous of the fragrant air. The whole introduction of some 400 lines is full of beautiful images, fine thoughts, and striking phrases, but it is crowded, artificial, brocaded to excess with trap de choses ; and it suddenly breaks into drama, GEORGE ELIOT 221 with dialogue in person. This alternation of drama- tic form and dialogue with epical narrative, inter- larding the tragedy in parts with portentously long explanatory comment, is perhaps the most unlucky novelty which was ever attempted in verse. What would one say if even fine passages out of Words- worth's Excursion had been accidentally bound up between the pages of Shakespeare's Hamlet? But it is needless to enlarge on all the metrical and poetic defects of this medley of nearly 10,000 lines, with its lip-twisting, ear-torturing lyrics — (was there ever such a cacophony as — O the sweet sweet prime Of the past spring-time ! — ) with its strange alternations of action and narration, its soliloquies of 150 unbroken lines, and all its other incongruities. The important point is, that it has a really grand scheme, that the characters of Zarca and of Fedalma are lofty, impressive, and nobly dramatic, that the whole poem is, in conception, a work of power and true imagination. Just as Kingsley, who had far greater poetic faculty than George Eliot, mistook in making the Saint's Tragedy a drama, when he might have made it a grand his- torical romance, so George Eliot made a cruel mis- take in writing the Spanish Gypsy as a poem, when she might have written it as an historical romance, — a romance, it iriay be, much superior to Romola, as the subject and the conception were on grander lines. It is to me a truly melancholy duty to have to admit that so much in the noble conceptions and 222 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE x rich thought of George Eliot was not a complete success in ultimate execution, — and that, in great measure, because the conception and aim were so great and the execution so profoundly conscientious. I knew her well, I was amongst those who had the deepest regard for her mental power and her moral insight. I always recognised her as one of the best and most cultured minds of her time. I had great faith in her judgment, and could respect her courage even when I repudiated her opinions. But I never was one of those who exaggerated her gifts as an artist. I never could count anything later than Silas Marner as a complete and unqualified masterpiece. One may have the imaginative power shown by Michael Angelo in his Sistine Chapel, or his Medicean tombs, and yet, if one is not complete master of the brush and the chisel, no imagination, no thought, will produce a masterpiece in fresco or in marble. George Eliot was a most thoughtful artist, but she was more of a thinker than an artist; she was always more the artist when she was least the thinker ; and when she conceived a work of art in her sublimest aspirations (as notably in The Spanish Gypsy), she almost makes us doubt if she were an artist at all. She was an artist; and the younger generations will make an unpardonable error if they fail to do justice to the permanent survival of her best and earliest work. They will also be guilty of unpardon- able blindness, if they fail to note how completely she stands above all her contemporary rivals in romance, by thought, by knowledge, by nobility of aim. She raised the whole art of romance into a higher plane of thought, of culture, and of philoso- GEORGE ELIOT 223 phic grasp. And when she failed, it was often by reason of the nobility of her aim itself, of the volume of her own learning, of the intensity of her own standard of perfection. Her passages in prose are studied with the care that men usually bestow on a sonnet ; her accessories and landscapes are patient and conscientious transcripts of actual spots of country and town ; her drama is a problem of ethical teach- ing, subtly elaborated, and minutely probed. In these high aims and difficult ambitions, she not seldom failed, or achieved a somewhat academic and qualified success. But the task was not seldom such that even to have fallen short of complete success was a far from ignoble triumph. She raised the whole art of romance to a higher plane, I say; and, although in this ambitious aim she too often sacrificed freshness, ease, and simpli- city, the weight of the limits she imposed on herself must fairly be counted in the balance. Romance had never before in England been written with such a sense of responsibility, with such eager subtlety of form, and with such high ethical purpose. The sense of responsibility wearies many readers, and at last crushed the writer ; thejbxia.became."_p.!:e.cious," and at last pedantic; and the ethical purpose was s'ometimes' more visible than the ethical life. In the French drama Corneille had great conceptions, noble types of character, stately verse, and tragic situations ; but English readers too often find him mannered, arti- ficial, dull. Corneille, I freely admit, is not Shakes- peare: I greatly prefer Shakespeare; but I prefer Corneille to Ibsen. We have plenty of Ibsenites to- day, and rather a plethora than a dearth orTgnoHle 224 EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE x creatures in s qualid situations who expo se to us the ir mean lives jvith considerable truth to nature ^. In such an age, it is just as weirHiat~tHe lessons of Adam Bede, Romola, Fedalma and Zarca, should not be quite forgotten. The art of romance, in the widest and loftiest sense of the term, is even yet in its infancy. Ancient liter- ature, mediaeval literature, knew nothing of it. Nor indeed did modern literature entirely conceive it in all its fulness until the days of Le Sage, Richardson, Fielding, and Goldsmith. Nay, we may say that its power was not quite revealed before Scott, Goethe, Manzoni, Jane Austen, Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens, and George Sand. Its subtlety, its flexibility, its capacity for analytic research, its variety of range, and facility for reaching all hearts and all minds, — all this is simply incalculable. And we may be sure that the star of romance has not yet reached its zenith. It is the art of the future, — and an art where- in women are quite as likely to reign as men. It would be treason to Art to pretend that George Eliot came near to such perfection. But she had certain qualities that none of her predecessors had quite possessed, and she strove for an ideal which may one day become something more than a dream, — a dream that as yet eludes and escapes from the mind as it struggles to grasp it and to fix it. /i ^r. BILLINa AND SONS, PIIINTKRS, OUILDKORD. November, 1896 MR. EDWARD ARNOLD'S London: 37 BEDFORD STREET. New York : 70 FIFTH AVENUE. THE ADVENTURES OF MY LIFE. By HENRI ROCHEFORT. The authorised English edition, revised and specially arranged by M. RoCHEFORT, and translated under his personal supervision by E. W. Smith, editor of the Daily Messenger in Paris. In two volumes, large crown 8vo., 25s. Daily Telegraph. — ' It is of absorbing interest — more truly historical than most histories, and far more romantic than the general run of romances. Journalist, novelist, critic, politi-, cal agitator, communist, froscrit, duellist, Rochefort has led the life of a dozen ordinary men, and has been closely mixed up in the public affairs of France from the fall of Louis Philippe to the present date.' Times. — 'These extremely amusing memoirs.' Standard. — ' The story of his life has all the fascination of romance. The events through which M. Rochefort lived are exciting enough, described as they are from the standpoint of one who played no mean part in bringing them about, and written with the picturesque vigour, the audacity, and the malicious wit of a man with a genius for journalism of the less scrupulous kind ; but the drama is of secondary interest compared with the life-history of the actor. A turbulent and ungovernable spirit he has been throughout, and it is to this very quality that his memoirs owe their intensely human and dramatic interest.' St. James's Gazette. — ' Amazingly spirited and lively. ' Mr. T. P. 0,'CoNNOR, in The Weekly Sun. — 'The book is far more interesting than a novel. It hasn't a dull or commonplace page from the first to the last j and if others have the same feelings as I, they will find it difficult to lay the volumes down for a moment after they have once started their perusal.' Mr. Edward Arnold's List. THROUGH THE SUB-ARCTIC FOIiEST—Cotitimed. Mr. Pike is well known as an explorer, and in the journey now described he traversed some completely unknown country round the Pelly Lakes. For many months he supported himself entirely by hunting and fishing, being absolutely cut off from any chance of obtaining supplies. Such a journey could not fail to be productive of many exciting episodes, and though the author treats them lightly, the hardships he went through form a fine test of the true explorer's spirit. The Sportsman's Library. Edited by Sir HERBERT MAXWELL, Bart, M.P. This series will consist of a selection from the best works of past writers on sport, carefully chosen either on account of their literary merit, of the light thrown by them on the habits and resources of a bygone age, or of their permanent value as contributions to knowledge of the various subjects dealt with. The volumes will be issued at the rate of two or three a year. They will contain in every instance an introductory chapter by the Editor, and such notes as may be necessary to explain or correct the author's statements. Illustrations in the original works, when of sufficient merit or interest, will be reproduced in facsimile, supplemented with new ones by the modern artists best qualified to deal with the various subjects. Among the artists whose co-operation has already been secured are Messrs. G. E. Lodge, J. G. Millais, A. Thorburn, C. Whymper, G. H. Jalland, A. C. Corbould, P. Chenevix Trench, etc. The size of the volumes will be a handsome 8vo., and special care will be bestowed upon every detail of paper, print, and binding. The following will be published this season : THE LIFE OF A FOX. By THOMAS SMITH, Master of the Hambledon and Pytchley Hounds. With Illustrations by the Author and Six Coloured Plates by G. H. Jalland. Large 8vo., handsomely bound, 15s. Also a limited Large-paper Edition, two guineas net. This volume will contain both of Smith's published works—' The Life of a Fox' and ' The Diary of a Huntsman.' The author's reputation as a hunts- man, as well as his gift of literary expression and his skill as a spirited draughtsman, made these books exceedingly popular in their day, and thejr have now become very rare. Mr. Edward Arnold's List. The Sportsman's Library—Continued. A SPORTING TOUR THROUGH THE NORTHERN PARTS OF ENGLAND, AND GREAT PART OF THE HIGHLANDS OF SCOTLAND. By Colonel T. THORNTON, of Thornville Royal, in Yorkshire. With a selection from the original illustrations by Garrard, portraits of the Author, and new plates by G. E. Lodge, F. C. Bennett, and others. Large 8vo., handsomely bound, 15s. Also a limited Large-paper Edition, two guineas net. This work, published in 1804, and reviewed the next year by Sir Walter Scott in the Edinburgh Review, has never been reprinted. It is extremely interesting, not only on account of the graphic descriptions of shooting, hawking, and angling, but because of the author's shrewd observations on the state of society and manners, and his sympathetic description of scenery. THE SPORTSMAN IN IRELAND. By COSMOPOLITE. With numerous illustrations and coloured plates by P. Chenevix Trench. NEW AND CHEAPER EDITION. A LITTLE TOUR IN IRELAND. By 'OXONIAN' (The Very Rev. S. Reynolds Hole). With nearly forty Illustrations by John Leech. Large crown 8vo., 6s. This famous book being now entirely out of print, a new edition, containing all the original plates, has been prepared, and will be issued at a popular price, in order that it may take its share in the good work of promoting a better acquaintance with the charms of the Emerald Isle. John Leech and his friend 'Oxonian' could not, it is true, foresee the birth of the Irish Tourist Association ; but the inimitable pencil of the artist and the genial pen of the Dean of Rochester have helped in no small degree to familiarize the English public with the numberless attractions of Ireland and its laughter-loving people. Mr. Edward Arnold's List. THE CHANCES OF DEATH; AND OTHER STUDIES IN EVOLUTION. By KARL PEARSON, F.R.S., Author of ' The Ethic of Free Thought! etc. With Illustrations and Diagrams. Demy 8vo., l6s. This is the first substantial work published by Professor Pearson since his well-known ' Ethic of Free Thought ' appeared some years ago. The volume contains several scientific essays dealing with Chance in various aspects, from the Chances of Death to so-called Games of Chance, and points out how far mathematical theory corresponds with actual results. Another series of papers discusses problems of deep interest in connection with Woman and Labour, while a third section deals with important problems of modern political progress. HABIT AND INSTINCT. A Study in Heredity. By C. LLOYD MORGAN, Author of ' Animal Life and Intelligence^ ' The Springs of Conduct ^ etc. Demy 8vo., l6s. In the winter of 1895-96 Professor Lloyd Morgan delivered the series of ' Lowell Lectures ' which form the basis of this work. The subject is one which has been the author's special study for many years, and in the present volume he has given the mature result of his researches. Summary of Contents. I. Preliminary Definitions and Illustrations. — II. -IV. Observations on Young Birds. — V. Observations on Young Mammals. — VI. On the Relation of Consciousness to Instinct and to Habit. — VII. On the Relation of Intelligence to the Acquisition of Habits. — VIII. On Imitation. — IX. On the Emotions in their Relation to Instinct.— X. On some Habits and Instincts of the Pairing Season. — XI. On the Instincts of Nest-building, Incubation, and Migration. — XII. On the Relation of Organic to Mental Evolution. — XIII. Are Acquired Habits inherited ? — ^XIV. On Modification and Variation. — XV. Habit and Instinct in Man. THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA. By EDWARD WASHBURN HOPKINS, Ph.D. (Leipzig), Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology in Bryn Mawr College, U.S.A. Over 600 pages, demy 8vo., 8s. 6d. net. This is the first volume of an important series entitled ' Handbooks on the History of Religions.' Among the other volumes now in course of prepara- tion are those dealing with the religions of (ii.) Babylonia and Persia, (iii.) the Ancient Teutons, (iv.) Persia, (vi.) Egypt, (vii.) Israel. Mr. Edward Arnold's List. THE PLANT-LORE AND GARDEN-CRAFT OF SHAKESPEARE. By HENRY N. ELLACOMBE, M.A., Vicar of Bitton, Author of ^ In a Gloucestershire Garden^ etc. Fully illustrated by Major E. Bengough Ricketts. Large crown 8vo., handsomely bound, los. 6d. This is a new edition of a book originally issued for private circulation, which has now been long out of print. It was spoken of by the Spectator as 'a work which is entitled from its worth to a place in every Shakespearian library,' and efforts have been made in the present edition to give the text an adequate adornment. The volume is a complete and standard work of reference on the plants mentioned by Shakespeare. Canon Ellacombe takes each plant separately, and gives interesting particulars of its life-history and its place in legend and poetry. The illustrations by Major Ricketts are very beautiful and charac- teristic of the work. The artist has made a special visit to Stratford-on-Avon to sketch the scenes of Shakespeare's Garden-Lore, and has also depicted many of the plants named with great skill. A BOOK ABOUT ROSES. By the Very Rev. S. REYNOLDS HOLE, Dean of Rochester, - Author of ' A Book about the Garden ^ ' A Little Tour in Ireland,' etc. Illustrated by H. G. MooN and G. Elgood. The Presentation Edition, with coloured plates, etc., handsomely bound, IDS. 6d. ; Popular Edition, with frontispiece, 3s. 6d. The call for a fifteenth edition of this popular work has enabled Dean Hole to thoroughly revise and largely to rewrite the book, bringing the infor- mation in it well up to date. Advantage has also been taken of the oppor- tunity to respond to the frequently-expressed wishes of many admirers of the book for a more handsome and illustrated edition ; it has, therefore, been reprinted, and beautifully COLOURED PLATES have been drawn by Mr. H. G. Moon, while Mr. G. Elgood contributes charming black-and-white pictures. There is also a facsimile of a sketch by John Leech given to Dean Hole, and never before published. The book will be issued in two forms : (i) with the coloured plates, etc. at half a guinea ; and (2) with frontispiece, at 3s. 6d. Mr. Edward Arnold's List. OLD ENGLISH GLASSES. An Account of Glass Drinking-Vessels in England from Early Times to the end of the Eighteenth Century. With Introductory Notices of Continental Glasses during the same period, Original Documents, etc. By ALBERT HARTSHORNE, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Illustrated by upwards of 50 full-page Tinted Plates in the best style of Lithography, and several hundred outline Illustrations in the text. Super royal 4to., price Three Guineas net. The plates and outline illustrations are prepared for reproduction by Mr. W. S. Weatherly and Mr. R. Paul I'espectively, from full-size or scale drawings by the author of the actual drinking-vessels in nearly every instance. The text will be printed in the finest style, and the lithographic work executed by Messrs. W. Griggs and Son. The volume is now in the press, and will, it is hoped, be ready for delivery before the end of the year. The First Edition will be limited to One Thousand Copies at Three Guineas net. Note- — A full prospectus, giving a complete account of the principal contents of this elaborate and magnificent work, which treats of a subject never before comprehensively undertaken for England, can he had post free on application. A TREASURY OF MINOR BRITISH POETRY. Selected and arranged, with Notes, by J. CHURTON COLLINS. Crown 8vo., 7s. 6d. In compiling this volijme Mr. Churton Collins has been influenced by a desire to form a collection of poetry containing many charming pieces hitherto ignored in similar works. It is believed that compilers of anthologies have confined themselves too much to a few standard authors, and that there are a number of less-known writers who have composed one or two poems quite as fine as anything by the great masters. The present selection will reveal a mine of hitherto unsuspected treasures to many lovers of English Poetry. EARLY ENGLISH FURNITURE. An Account of the Famous English Cabinet-makers, With numerous fine Illustrations of their Work. By Mrs. Warren Clouston. I vol., crown 4to. Mr. Edward Arnold's List. BOOKS FOR THE SPRING OF 1897. THE REMINISCENCES OF AUBREY DE VERE. This interesting work of the well-known poet, containing many valuable recollections of his famous contemporaries for half a century, will be ready- early in the new year. SOLDIERING AND SURVEYING IN BRITISH EAST AFRICA. An Account of the Survey of the Uganda Railway, and the various Campaigns in the British Protectorate during the last few years. By Major J. R. MACDONALD, R.E. Fully illustrated. WILD NORWAY. By ABEL CHAPMAN, Author of ' Wi^d Spain,' etc. Illustrated by Charles Whymper and the Author. This work will be published in the spring of 1897. MEMORIES OF THE MONTHS. A Charming Series of Sketches of Nature in her Varying Moods from January to December. By Sir HERBERT MAXWELL, Bart., M.P. FISH TALES, AND SOME OTHERS. By FRANK NEWBOLT. With Illustrations. PARISIAN BEGGARS. Translated from the French ' Paris qui.mendie' by the Lady Herschell 10 Mr. Edward Arnold's List. THE CRUISE OF THE 'ANTARCTIC TO THE SOUTH POLAR REGIONS. By H. J. BULL, A Member of the Expedition. With frontispiece by W. L. Wyllie, A.R.A., and numerous full-page illustra- tions by W. G. Burn-Murdoch. Demy 8vo., 15s. ' The book is one of adventure in another besides the commercial sense, and as a record of Antarctic exploration one of the most attractive in print.' — Daily News. ' In reading his narrative we feel none of the ennui and worry of the voyage. The author's fun lightens up in a most welcome way a tale which has in it much that is intrinsically interesting. ' — Scotsman. PERSIA REVISITED. With Remarks on H.I.M. Mozuffer-ed-Din Shah, and the Present Situation in Persia (1896). By General Sir T. E. GORDON, K.C.LE., C.B., C.S.I., Formerly Military Attach^ and Oriental Secretary to the British Legation at Teheran, Author of ' The Roof of the World,' etc. Demy 8vo., with full-page illustrations, los. 6d. ' A book replete with first-hand knowledge, and one that must for the present be regarded as indispensable to an adequate acquaintance with the condition and prospects of Persia.' — Aberdeen Free Press. THE EARLY CHARTERED COMPANIES, A.D. 1296-1858. By GEORGE CAWSTON, Barrister-at-Law, AND A. H. KEANE, F.R.G.S. Large crown 8vo., with frontispiece, los. 6d. Mr. Cawston claims to have lighted on an almost unexplored field of research, and it must be conceded that his volume furnishes a great deal of interesting information which without its aid must for the most part have been sought for in sources not accessible to ordinary readers. ' — Daily News. Mr. nawara ArnoMs List. ii FOURTH EDIT/ON. FIRE AND SWORD IN THE SUDAN. A Personal Narrative of Fighting and Serving the Dervishes, 1879-1895. By SLATIN PASHA, Colonel in the Egyptian Army, formerly Governor and Commandant of the Troops in Darfur. Translated and Edited by Major F. R. Wingate, R.A., D.S.O., Author of ' Mahdiism and the Egyptian Soudan,' etc. Fully Illustrated by R. Talbot Kelly. Royal 8vo., 21s. net. From The Times : ' Whether Slatin's work is more important and attractive as a powerful exhortation on a subject of the greatest political importance and of special national significance from the noble English blood spilt in the Sudan, or as a chapter of human experience wherein truth far surpassed fiction in hair-breadth escapes and deeds of daring beyond what seemed possible, it would be difficult to decide ; but the whole result is one that places this volume on a shelf of its own, not merely as the book of the day, but as the authority for all time on the great Mahommedan upheaval in the Sudan, which was accompanied by an amount of human slaughter and suffering that defies calculation.' ' Absolutely unique. Were we to try to extract, or even notice, all the striking things in this book, we should fill our paper. ' — Spectator. THE EXPLORATION OF THE CAUCASUS. By DOUGLAS W. FRESHFIELD, Lately President of the Alpine Club, and Honorary Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society. With Contributions by H. W. Holder, J. G. Cockin, H. Woolley, M. De Dechy, and Prof. Bonney, D.Sc, F.R.S. Illustrated by 3 Panoramas, 74 Full-page Photogravures, about 140 Illustra- tions in the text, chiefly from Photographs by Vittorio Sella, and 4 Original Maps, including the first authentic map of the Caucasus specially prepared from unpublished sources by Mr. Freshfield. In two volumes, large 4to., 600 pages. Three Guineas net. 'We can only say, in a word, that a more interesting, more vivid, more conscientious, more exhaustive, and in parts more thrilling, account of a region as yet comparatively un- known has never come before us. No record of exploration has ever been published in this country in so splendid a material form, and, beyond contradiction, no pictures of mountains to illustrate the exploits of climbers have approached the very numerous photo- graphs of Signor Sella. ' — Daily Chronicle. ' Mr. Freshfield's work on the Caucasus is not merely the most important mountaineering book of the year, but probably the most important that has been published since the time of Tyndall and Ball. Every part of Mr. Freshfield's book is solid, and will remain perma- nentlyr valuable. It brings within two volumes the record of everything that has been done and the substance of everything that has been learnt during the first twenty-eight years of Caucasian exploration by expert climbers.' — Manchester Guardian. 12 Mr. Edward Arnold's List. WAGNER'S HEROINES. BRUNNHILDA— SENTA-ISOLDA. By CONSTANCE MAUD, Author of ' Wagner's Heroes.' Illustrated by J. W. Maud. Crown 8vo., Ss. SECOND EDITION. WAGNER'S HEROES. PARSIFAL-TANNHAUSER— LOHENGRIN-HANS SACHS. By CONSTANCE MAUD. Illustrated by Granville Fell. Crown 8vo., 5s. ' Miss Maud has done for the Shakespeare of music what Charles Lamb once did for the real Shakespeare.'— ZJai/c Telegraph. 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A RELUCTANT EVANGELIST, AND OTHER STORIES. By ALICE SPINNER, Azithor of ' Lucilla,' ' A Study in Colour,' etc. Crown 8vo., 6s. INTERLUDES. By MAUD OXENDEN. Crown 8vo., 6s. THE BAYONET THAT CAME HOME. By N. WYNNE WILLIAMS, Author of ' Tales of Modern Greece.' Crown 8vo., 3s. 6d. New Work by the Author of ' Into the Highways and Hedges. WORTH WHILE. By F. F. MONTR^SOR, Author of 'Into the Highways and Hedges,' ' The One who looked on, etc. One vol., crown Svo., cloth, 2s. 6d. ' Two most pathetic and beautiful stories make up this little volume. The writer is^ to be congratulated on the delicate beauty of her stories.' — Liverpool Mercury. ' Both the stories in this volume are of very superior quality. The characters are distinctly original, and the workmanship is admirable,' — Glasgow Herald. 14 Mr. Edward Arnold's List. RECENT WORKS OF FICTION. {See also p. 23.) A New Story by the Author of ' The Red Badge of Courage.' GEORGE'S MOTHER. By STEPHEN CRANE. Author of ' The Red Badge of Courage,' etc. Cloth, 2S. ' In his latest work Stephen Crane scores heavily. It is a swatch torn from the great web of city life, a picture in which every touch reveals the true literary workman. Its pathos grips the heart close ; its characters are to the life, and here and there are caught gleams of humour that complete the symmetry of the pages. The already enviable reputation of the author of "The Red Badge of Courage " will be heightened by this small volume.' — Aberdeen Free Press. HADJIRA. A Turkish Love Story. By 'ADALET.' One vol., crown 8vo., cloth, 6s. ' Certainly one of the most interesting and valuable works of fiction issued from the press for a long time past. Even if we were to regard the book as an ordinary novel, we could commend it heartily ; but its great value lies in the fact that it reveals to us a hidden world, and does so with manifest fidelity. 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With Contributions in Prose and Verse by Old Wykehamists. Demy 410., cloth, 2SS. net. A few copies of the first edition, limited to 1,000 copies, are still to be had. lYir. jz,u,wu,nA/ ryrnuvu, j List. 23 FICTION. SIX SHILLING NOVELS. A RELUCTANT EVANGELIST. By Alice Spinner. (Seepage 13.) INTERLUDES. By Maud Oxenden. (Seepage 13.) A MASK AND A MARTYR. By E. Livingston Prescott. (See page 14.) HADJIRA. By Adulet. (Seepage 14.) TOMMY ATKINS. A Tale of the Ranks. By Robert Blatchford, Author of ' A Son of the Forge,' ' Merrie England,' etc. Second Edition. Crown 8vo., cloth, 6s. ORMISDAL. A Novel. By the Earl of Dunmore, F.R.G.S., Author of 'The Pamirs.' One vol., crown 8vo., cloth, 6s. THE TUTOR'S SECRET. (Le Secret du Prdcepteur.) Translated from the French of Victor Chbrbulikz. One vol., crown 8vo., cloth, 6s. THREE SHILLING AND SIXPENNY NOVELS. THE BAYONET THAT CAME HOME. By N. Wynne Williams. (Seepage 13.) ON THE THRESHOLD. By Isabella O. Ford, Author of 'Miss Blake of Monkshalton. 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Vol. IV. Psychology. Vol. V. .