VOLUME IX SLICE VI English Language to Epsom Salts (continued 5)

To the passion, imagination or musical quality essential to the most inspired kinds of poetry Alexander Pope (1688-1744) can lay small claim. His best work is contained in the Satires and Epistles, which are largely of the Pope. proverb-in-rhyme order. Yet in lucid, terse and pungent phrases he has rarely if ever been surpassed. His classical fancy, his elegant turn for periphrasis and his venomous sting alike made him the idol of that urbane age. Voltaire in 1726 had called him the best poet living, and at his death his style was paramount throughout the civilized world. It was the apotheosis of wit, point, lucidity and technical correctness. Pope was the first Englishman to make poetry pay (apart from patronage). He was flattered by imitation to an extent which threatened to throw the school of poetry which he represented into permanent discredit. Prior, Gay, Parnell, Akenside, Pomfret, Garth, Young, Johnson, Goldsmith, Falconer, Glover, Grainger, Darwin, Rogers, Hayley and indeed a host of others—the once famous mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease—worshipped Pope as their poetic founder. The second-rate wore his badge. But although the cult of Pope was the established religion of poetic taste from 1714 to 1798, there were always nonconformists. The poetic revolt, indeed, was far more versatile than the religious revival of the century. The Winter Thomson. (1726) of James Thomson may be regarded as inaugurating a new era in English poetry. Lady Winchilsea, John Philips, author of Cyder, and John Dyer, whose Grongar Hill was published a few months before Winter, had pleaded by their work for a truthful and unaffected, and at the same time a romantic treatment of nature in poetry; but the ideal of artificiality and of a frigid poetic diction by which English poetry was dominated since the days of Waller and Cowley was first effectively challenged by Thomson. At the time when the Popean couplet was at the height of its vogue he deliberately put it aside in favour of the higher poetic power of blank verse. And he it was who transmitted the sentiment of natural beauty not merely to imitators such as Savage, Armstrong, Somerville, Collins. Gray. Langhorne, Mickle and Shenstone, but also to his elegist, William Collins, to Gray and to Cowper, and so indirectly to the lyrical bards of 1798. By the same hands and those of Shenstone experiments were being made in the stanza of The Faerie Queene; a little later, owing to the virtuosity of Bishop Percy, the cultivation of the old English and Scottish ballad literature was beginning to take a serious turn. Dissatisfaction with the limitations of “Augustan” poetry was similarly responsible for the revived interest in Shakespeare and Chaucer. Gray stood not only for a far more intimate worship of wild external nature, but also for an awakened curiosity in Scandinavian, Celtic and Icelandic poetry.

To pretend then that the poetic heart of the 18th century was Popean to the core is nothing short of extravagance. There were a number of true poets in the second and third quarters of the century to whom all credit is due as pioneers and precentors of the romantic movement under the depressing conditions to which innovators in poetry are commonly subject. They may strike us as rather an anaemic band after the great Elizabethan poets. Four of them were mentally deranged (Collins, Smart, Cowper, Blake), while Gray was a hermit, and Shenstone and Thomson the most indolent of recluses. The most adventurous, one might say the most virile of the group, was a boy who died at the age of seventeen. Single men all (save for Blake), a more despondent group of artists as a whole it would not perhaps be easy to discover. Catacombs and cypresses were the forms of imagery that came to them most naturally. Elegies and funeral odes were the types of expression in which they were happiest. Yet they strove in the main to follow the gleam in poetry, to reinstate imagination upon its throne, and to substitute the singing voice for the rhetorical recitative of the heroic couplet. Within two years of the death of Pope, in 1746, William Collins was content to sing (not say) what he had in him without a glimpse of wit or a flash of eloquence—and in him many have discerned the germ of that romantic éclosion which blossomed in Christabel. A more important if less original factor in that movement was Collins’s severe critic Thomas Gray, a man of the widest curiosities of his time, in whom every attribute of the poet to which scholarship, taste and refinement are contributory may be found to the full, but in whom the strong creative energy is fatally lacking—despite the fact that he wrote a string of “divine truisms” in his Elegy, which has given to multitudes more of the exquisite pleasure of poetry than any other single piece in the English language. Shenstone and Percy, Capell, the Wartons and eventually Chatterton, continued to mine in the shafts which Gray had been the first to sink. Their laborious work of discovery resembled that which was commencing in regard to the Gothic architecture which the age of Pope had come to regard as rude and barbaric. The Augustans had come seriously to regard all pre-Drydenic poetry as grossly barbarian. One of the greatest achievements of the mid-eighteenth century was concerned with the disintegration of this obstinate delusion. The process was manifold; and it led, among other things, to a realization of the importance of the study of comparative literature.

The literary grouping of the 18th century is, perhaps, the biggest thing on the whole that English art has to show; but among all its groups the most famous, and probably the most original, is that of its proto-novelists The novel. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne. All nations have had their novels, which are as old at least as Greek vases. The various types have generally had collective appellations such as Milesian Tales, Alexandrian Romances, Romances of Chivalry, Acta Sanctorum, Gesta Romanorum, Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, Romances of Roguery, Arabian Nights; but owing to the rivalry of other more popular or more respectable or at least more eclectic literary forms, they seldom managed to attain a permanent lodgment in the library. The taste in prose fiction changes, perhaps, more rapidly than that in any other kind of literature. In Britain alone several forms had passed their prime since the days of Caxton and his Arthurian prose romance of Morte d’Arthur. Such were the wearisome Arcadian romance or pastoral heroic; the new centos of tales of chivalry like the Seven Champions of Christendom; the utopian, political and philosophical romances (Oceana, The Man in the Moone); the grotesque and facetious stories of rogues retailed from the Spanish or French in dwarf volumes; the prolix romance of modernized classic heroism (The Grand Cyrus); the religious allegory (Bunyan’s Life and Death of Mr Badman); the novels of outspoken French or Italian gallantry, represented by Aphra Behn; the imaginary voyages so notably adapted to satire by Dr Swift; and last, but not least, the minutely prosaic chronicle-novels of Daniel Defoe. The prospect of the novel was changing rapidly. The development of the individual and of a large well-to-do urban middle class, which was rapidly multiplying its area of leisure, involved a curious and self-conscious society, hungry for pleasure and new sensations, anxious to be told about themselves, willing in some cases even to learn civilization from their betters. The disrepute into which the drama had fallen since Jeremy Collier’s attack on it directed this society by an almost inevitable course into the flowery paths of fiction. The novel, it is true, had a reputation which was for the time being almost as unsavoury as that of the drama, but the novel was not a confirmed ill-doer, and it only needed a touch of genius to create for it a vast congregation of enthusiastic votaries. In the Tatler and Spectator were already found the methods and subjects of the modern novel. The De Coverley papers in the Spectator, in fact, want nothing but a love-thread to convert them into a serial novel of a high order. The supreme importance of the sentimental interest had already been discovered and exemplified to good purpose in France by Madame de la Fayette, the Marquise de Tencin, Marivaux and the Abbé Prevost. Richardson. Samuel Richardson (1689-1762), therefore, when he produced the first two modern novels of European fame in Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), inherited far more than he invented. There had been Richardsonians before Richardson. Clarissa is nevertheless a pioneer work, and we have it on the high authority of M. Jusserand that the English have contributed more than any other people to the formation of the contemporary novel. Of the long-winded, typical and rather chaotic English novel of love analysis and moral sentiment (as opposed to the romance of adventure) Richardson is the first successful charioteer.

The novel in England gained prodigiously by the shock of opposition between the ideals of Richardson and Henry Fielding (1707-1754), his rival and parodist. Fielding’s brutal toleration is a fine corrective to the slightly rancid Fielding. morality of Richardson, with its frank insistence upon the cash-value of chastity and virtue. Fielding is, to be brief, the succinct antithesis of Richardson, and represents the opposite pole of English character. He is the Cavalier, Richardson the Roundhead; he is the gentleman, Richardson the tradesman; he represents church and county, Richardson chapel and borough. Richardson had much of the patient insight and intensity of genius, but he lacked the humour and literary accomplishment which Fielding had in rich abundance. Fielding combined breadth and keenness, classical culture and a delicate Gallic irony to an extent rare among English writers. He lacked the delicate intuition of Richardson in the analysis of women, nor Smollett. could he compass the broad farcical humour of Smollett or the sombre colouring by which Smollett produces at times such poignant effects of contrast. There was no poetry in Fielding; but there was practically every other ingredient of a great prose writer—taste, culture, order, vivacity, humour, penetrating irony and vivid, pervading common sense, and it is Fielding’s chef-d’œuvre Tom Jones (1749) that we must regard if not as the fundament at least as the head of the corner in English prose fiction. Before Tom Jones appeared, the success of the novel had drawn a new competitor into the field in Tobias Smollett, the descendant of a good western lowland family who had knocked about the world and seen more of its hurlyburly than Fielding himself. In Roderick Random (1748) Smollett represents a rougher and more uncivilized world even than that depicted in Joseph Andrews. The savagery and horse-play peculiar to these two novelists derives in part from the rogue romance of Spain (as then recently revived by Lesage), and has a counterpart to some extent in the graphic art of Hogarth and Rowlandson; yet one cannot altogether ignore an element of exaggeration which has greatly injured both these writers in the estimation (and still more in the affection) of posterity. The genius which struggles through novels such as Roderick Random and Ferdinand Count Fathom was nearly submerged under the hard conditions of a general writer during the third quarter of the 18th century, and it speaks volumes for Smollett’s powers of recuperation that he survived to write two such masterpieces of sardonic and humorous observation as his Travels and Humphry Clinker.

The fourth proto-master of the English novel was the antiquarian humorist Lawrence Sterne. Though they owed a good deal to Don Quixote and the French novelists, Fielding and Smollett were essentially observers of life in the quick. Sterne. Sterne brought a far-fetched style, a bookish apparatus and a deliberate eccentricity into fiction. Tristram Shandy, produced successively in nine small volumes between 1760 and 1764, is the pretended history of a personage who is not born (before the fourth volume) and hardly ever appears, carried on in an eccentric rigmarole of old and new, original and borrowed humour, arranged in a style well known to students of the later Valois humorists as fatrasie. Far more than Molière, Sterne took his literary bien wherever he found it. But he invented a kind of tremolo style of his own, with the aid of which, in conjunction with the most unblushingly indecent innuendoes, and with a conspicuous genius for humorous portraiture, trembling upon the verge of the pathetic, he succeeded in winning a new domain for the art of fiction.

These four great writers then, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne—all of them great pessimists in comparison with the benignant philosophers of a later fiction—first thoroughly fertilized this important field. Richardson obtained a European fame during his lifetime. Sterne, as a pioneer impressionist, gave all subsequent stylists a new handle. Fielding and Smollett grasped the new instrument more vigorously, and fashioned with it models which, after serving as patterns to Scott, Marryat, Cooper, Ainsworth, Dickens, Lever, Stevenson, Merriman, Weyman and other romancists of the 19th century, have still retained a fair measure of their original popularity unimpaired.

Apart from the novelists, the middle period of the 18th century is strong in prose writers: these include Dr Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Lord Chesterfield and Horace Walpole. The last three were all influenced by the sovereign Johnson. lucidity of the best French style of the day. Chesterfield and Walpole were both writers of aristocratic experience and of European knowledge and sentiment. Johnson alone was a distinctively English thinker and stylist. His knowledge of the world, outside England, was derived from books, he was a good deal of a scholar, an earnest moralist, and something of a divine; his style, at any rate, reaches back to Taylor, Barrow and South, and has a good deal of the complex structure, the cadence, and the balance of English and Latinistic words proper to the 17th century, though the later influence of Addison and Bolingbroke is also apparent; Johnson himself was fond of the essay, the satire in verse, and the moral tale (Rasselas); but he lacked the creative imagination indispensable for such work and excelled chiefly as biographer and critic. For a critic even, it must be admitted that he was singly deficient in original ideas. He upholds authority. He judges by what he regards as the accepted rules, derived by Dryden, Rapin, Boileau, Le Bossu, Rymer, Dennis, Pope and such “estimable critics” from the ancients, whose decisions on such matters he regards as paramount. He tries to carry out a systematic, motived criticism; but he asserts rather than persuades or convinces. We go to his critical works (Lives of the Poets and Essay on Shakespeare) not for their conclusions, but for their shrewd comments on life, and for an application to literary problems of a caustic common sense. Johnson’s character and conversation, his knowledge and memory were far more remarkable than his ideas or his writings, admirable though the best of these were; the exceptional traits which met in his person and made that age regard him as a nonpareil have found in James Boswell a delineator unrivalled in patience, dexterity and dramatic insight. The result has been a portrait of a man of letters more alive at the present time than that which any other age or nation has bequeathed to us. In most of his ideas Johnson was a generation behind the typical academic critics of his date, Joseph and Thomas Warton, who championed against his authority what the doctor regarded as the finicking notions of Gray. Both of the Wartons were enthusiastic for Spenser and the older poetry; they were saturated with Milton whom they placed far above the correct Mr Pope, they wrote sonnets (thereby provoking Johnson’s ire) and attempted to revive medieval and Celtic lore in every direction. Johnson’s one attempt at a novel or tale was Rasselas, a long “Rambler” essay upon the vanity of human hope and ambition, something after the manner of the Oriental tales of which Voltaire had caught the idea from Swift and Montesquieu; but Rasselas is quite unenlivened by humour, personality or any other charm.

This one quality that Johnson so completely lacked was possessed in its fullest perfection by Oliver Goldsmith, whose style is the supreme expression of 18th-century clearness, simplicity and easy graceful fluency. Much of Goldsmith. Goldsmith’s material, whether as playwright, story writer or essayist, is trite and commonplace—his material worked up by any other hand would be worthless. But, whenever Goldsmith writes about human life, he seems to pay it a compliment, a relief of fun and good fellowship accompanies his slightest description, his playful and delicate touch could transform every thought that he handled into something radiant with sunlight and fragrant with the perfume of youth. Goldsmith’s plots are Irish, his critical theories are French with a light top dressing of Johnson and Reynolds or Burke, while his prose style is an idealization of Addison. His versatility was great, and, in this and in other respects, he and Johnson are constantly reminding us that they were hardened professionals, writing against time for money.

Much of the best prose work of this period, from 1740 to 1780, was done under very different conditions. The increase of travel, of intercourse between the nobility of Europe, and of a sense of solidarity, self-consciousness, leisure and connoisseurship among that section of English society known as the governing class, or, since Disraeli, as “the Venetian oligarchy,” could hardly fail to produce an increasing crop of those elaborate collections of letters and memoirs which had already attained their apogee in France with Mme de Sévigné and the duc de Saint-Simon. England was not to remain far behind, for in 1718 commence the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; ten years more saw the commencement of Lord Hervey’s Memoirs of the Reign of George II.; and Lord Chesterfield and Lord Orford Chesterfield and Walpole. (better known as Horace Walpole) both began their inimitable series of Letters about 1740. These writings, none of them written ostensibly for the press, serve to show the enormous strides that English prose was making as a medium of vivacious description. The letters are all the recreation of extensive knowledge and cosmopolitan acquirements; they are not strong on the poetic or imaginative side of things, but they have an intense appreciation of the actual and mundane side of fallible humanity. Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his son and to his godson are far more, for they introduce a Ciceronian polish and a Gallic irony and wit into the hitherto uncultivated garden of the literary graces in English prose. Chesterfield, whose theme is manners and social amenity, deliberately seeks a form of expression appropriate to his text—the perfection of tact, neatness, good order and savoir faire. After his grandfather, the marquess of Halifax, Lord Chesterfield, the synonym in the vulgar world for a heartless exquisite, is in reality the first fine gentleman and epicurean in the best sense in English polite literature. Both Chesterfield and Walpole were conspicuous as raconteurs in an age of witty talkers, of whose talk R.B. Sheridan, in The School for Scandal (1777), served up a suprême. Some of it may be tinsel, but it looks wonderfully well under the lights. The star comedy of the century represents the sparkle of this brilliant crowd: it reveals no hearts, but it shows us every trick of phrase, every eccentricity of manner and every foible of thought. But the most mundane of the letter writers, the most frivolous, and also the most pungent, is Horace Walpole, whose writings are an epitome of the history and biography of the Georgian era. “Fiddles sing all through them, wax lights, fine dresses, fine jokes, fine plate, fine equipages glitter and sparkle; never was such a brilliant, smirking Vanity Fair as that through which he leads us.” Yet, in some ways, he was a corrective to the self-complacency of his generation, a vast dilettante, lover of “Gothic,” of curios and antiques, of costly printing, of old illuminations and stained glass. In his short miracle-novel, called The Castle of Otranto, he set a fashion for mystery and terror in fiction, for medieval legend, diablerie, mystery, horror, antique furniture and Gothic jargon, which led directly by the route of Anne Radcliffe, Maturin, Vathek, St Leon and Frankenstein, to Queenhoo Hall, to Waverley and even to Hugo and Poe.

Meanwhile the area of the Memoir was widening rapidly in the hands of Fanny, the sly daughter of the wordly-wise and fashionable musician, Dr Burney, author of a novel (Evelina) most satirical and facete, written ere she was Fanny Burney. Boswell. well out of her teens; not too kind a satirist of her former patroness, Mrs Thrale (afterwards Piozzi), the least tiresome of the new group of scribbling sibyls, blue stockings, lady dilettanti and Della Cruscans. Both, as portraitists and purveyors of Johnsoniana, were surpassed by the inimitable James Boswell, first and most fatuous of all interviewers, in brief a biographical genius, with a new recipe, distinct from Sterne’s, for disclosing personality, and a deliberate, artificial method of revealing himself to us, as it were, unawares.

From all these and many other experiments, a far more flexible prose was developing in England, adapted for those critical reviews, magazines and journals which were multiplying rapidly to exploit the new masculine interest, apart from the schools, in history, topography, natural philosophy and the picturesque, just as circulating libraries were springing up to exploit the new feminine passion for fiction, which together with memoirs and fashionable poetry contributed to give the booksellers bigger and bigger ideas.

It is surprising how many types of literary productions with which we are now familiar were first moulded into definite and classical form during the Johnsonian period. In addition to the novel one need only mention the The progress of authorship. economic treatise, as exemplified for the first time in the admirable symmetry of The Wealth of Nations, the diary of a faithful observer of nature such as Gilbert White, the Fifteen Discourses (1769-1791) in which Sir Joshua Reynolds endeavours for the first time to expound for England a philosophy of Art, the historico-philosophical tableau as exemplified by Robertson and Gibbon, the light political parody of which the poetry of The Rolliad and Anti-Jacobin afford so many excellent models; and, going to the other extreme, the ponderous archaeological or topographical monograph, as exemplified in Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens, in Robert Wood’s colossal Ruins of Palmyra (1753), or the monumental History of Leicestershire by John Nichols. Such works as this last might well seem the outcome of Horace Walpole’s maxim: In this scribbling age “let those who can’t write, glean.” In short, the literary landscape in Johnson’s day was slowly but surely assuming the general outlines to which we are all accustomed. The literary conditions of the period dated from the time of Pope in their main features, and it is quite possible that they were more considerably modified in Johnson’s own lifetime than they have been since. The booksellers, or, as they would now be called, publishers, were steadily superseding the old ties of patronage, and basing their relations with authors upon a commercial footing. A stage in their progress is marked by the success of Johnson’s friend and Hume’s correspondent, William Strahan, who kept a coach, “a credit to literature.” The evolution of a normal status for the author was aided by the definition of copyright and gradual extinction of piracy.

Histories of their own time by Clarendon and Burnet have been in much request from their own day to this, and the first, at least, is a fine monument of English prose; Bolingbroke again, in 1735, dwelt memorably upon the ethical, Historians. political and philosophical value of history. But it was not until the third quarter of the 18th century that English literature freed itself from the imputation of lagging hopelessly behind France, Italy and Germany in the serious work of historical reconstruction. Hume published the first volume of his History of England in 1754. Robertson’s History of Scotland saw the light in 1759 and his Charles V. in 1769; Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire came in 1776. Hume was, perhaps, the first modernist in history; he attempted to give his work a modern interest and, Scot though he was, a modern style—it could not fail, as he knew, to derive piquancy from its derision of the Whiggish assumption which regarded 1688 as a political millennium. Wm. Robertson was, perhaps, the first man to adapt the polished periphrases of the pulpit to historical generalization. The gifts of compromise which he had learned as Moderator of the General Assembly he brought to bear upon his historical studies, and a language so unfamiliar to his lips as academic English he wrote with so much the more care that the greatest connoisseurs of the day were enthusiastic about “Robertson’s wonderful style.” Even more portentous in its superhuman dignity was the style of Edward Gibbon, who combined with the unspiritual optimism of Hume and Robertson a far more concentrated devotion to his subject, an industry more monumental, a greater co-ordinative vigour, and a malice which, even in the 18th century, rendered him the least credulous man of his age. Of all histories, therefore, based upon the transmitted evidence of other ages rather than on the personal observation of the writer’s own, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall has hitherto maintained its reputation best. Hume, even before he was superseded, fell a prey to continuations and abridgements, while Robertson was supplanted systematically by the ornate pages of W.H. Prescott.

The increasing transparency of texture in the working English prose during this period is shown in the writings of theologians such as Butler and Paley, and of thinkers such as Berkeley and Hume, who, by prolonging and extending Berkeley’s contention that matter was an abstraction, had shown that mind would have to be considered an abstraction too, thereby signalling a school of reaction to common sense or “external reality” represented by Thomas Reid, and with modifications by David Hartley, Abraham Tucker and others. Butler and Paley are merely two of the biggest and most characteristic apologists of that day, both great stylists, though it must be allowed that their very lucidity and good sense excites almost more doubt than it stills, and both very successful in repelling the enemy in controversy, though their very success accentuates the faults of that unspiritual age in which churchmen were so far more concerned about the title deeds than about the living portion of the church’s estate. Free thought was already beginning to sap their defences in various directions, and in Tom Paine, Priestley, Price, Godwin and Mackintosh they found more formidable adversaries than in the earlier deists. The greatest champion, however, of continuity and conservation both in church and state, against the new schools of latitudinarians and radicals, the great eulogist of the unwritten constitution, and the most perfect master of emotional prose in this period, prose in which the harmony of sense and sound is attained to an extent hardly ever seen outside supreme poetry, was Edmund Burke, one of the most commanding intellects in the whole range of political letters—a striking contrast in this respect to Junius, whose mechanical and journalistic talent for invective has a quite ephemeral value.

From 1660 to 1760 the English mind was still much occupied in shaking off the last traces of feudality. The crown, the parliament, the manor and the old penal code were left, it is true: but the old tenures and gild-brotherhoods, Return to nature. the old social habits, miracles, arts, faith, religion and letters were irrevocably gone. The attempt of the young Chevalier in 1745 was a complete anachronism, and no sooner was this generally felt to be so than men began to regret that it should so be. Men began to describe as “grand” and “picturesque” scenery hitherto summarized as “barren mountains covered in mist”; while Voltaire and Pope were at their height, the world began to realize that the Augustan age, in its zeal for rationality, civism and trim parterres, had neglected the wild freshness of an age when literature was a wild flower that grew on the common. Rousseau laid the axe to the root of this over-sophistication of life; Goldsmith, half understanding, echoed some of his ideas in “The Deserted Village.” Back from books to men was now the prescription—from the crowded town to the spacious country. From plains and valleys to peaks and pinewoods. From cities, where men were rich and corrupt, to the earlier and more primitive moods of earth. The breath had scarcely left the body of the Grand Monarque before an intrigue was set on foot to dispute the provisions of his will. So with the critical testament of Pope. Within a few years of his death we find Gray, Warton, Hurd and other disciples of the new age denying to Pope the highest kind of poetic excellence, and exalting imagination and fancy into a sphere far above the Augustan qualities of correct taste and good judgment. Decentralization and revolt were the new watchwords in literature. We must eschew France and Italy and go rather to Iceland or the Hebrides for fresh poetic emotions: we must shun academies and classic coffee-houses and go into the street-corners or the hedge-lanes in search of Volkspoesie. An old muniment chest Change in poetic spirit. and a roll of yellow parchment were the finest incentives to the new spirit of the picturesque. How else are we to explain the enthusiasm that welcomed the sham Ossianic poems of James Macpherson in 1760; Percy’s patched-up ballads of 1765 (Reliques of Ancient Poetry); the new enthusiasm for Chaucer; the “black letter” school of Ritson, Tyrrwhitt, George Ellis, Steevens, Ireland and Malone; above all, the spurious 15th-century poems poured forth in 1768-1769 with such a wild gusto of archaic imagination by a prodigy not quite seventeen years of age? Chatterton’s precocious fantasy cast a wonderful spell upon the romantic imagination of other times. It does not prepare us for the change that was coming over the poetic spirit of the last two decades of the century, but it does at least help us to explain it. The great masters of verse in Britain during this period were the three very disparate figures of William Cowper, William Blake and Robert Burns. Cowper was not a poet of vivid and rapturous visions. There is always something of the rusticating city-scholar about his humour. The ungovernable impulse and imaginative passion of the great masters of poesy were not his to claim. His motives to express himself in verse came very largely from the outside. The greater part, nearly all his best poetry is of the occasional order. To touch and retouch, he says, in one of his letters—among the most delightful in English—is the secret of almost all good writing, especially verse. Whatever is short should be nervous, masculine and compact. In all Cowper. Blake. Burns. the arts that raise the best occasional poetry to the level of greatness Cowper is supreme. In phrase-moulding, verbal gymnastic and prosodical marquetry he has scarcely a rival, and the fruits of his poetic industry are enshrined in the filigree of a most delicate fancy and a highly cultivated intelligence, purified and thrice refined in the fire of mental affliction. His work expresses the rapid civilization of his time, its humanitarian feeling and growing sensitiveness to natural beauty, home comfort, the claims of animals and the charms of light literature. In many of his short poems, such as “The Royal George,” artistic simplicity is indistinguishable from the stern reticence of genius. William Blake had no immediate literary descendants, for he worked alone, and Lamb was practically alone in recognizing what he wrote as poetry. But he was by far the most original of the reactionaries who preceded the Romantic Revival, and he caught far more of the Elizabethan air in his lyric verse than any one else before Coleridge. The Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, in 1789 and 1794, sing themselves, and have a bird-like spontaneity that has been the despair of all song-writers from that day to this. After 1800 he winged his flight farther and farther into strange and unknown regions. In the finest of these earlier lyrics, which owe so little to his contemporaries, the ripple of the stream of romance that began to gush forth in 1798 is distinctly heard. But the first poetic genius of the century was unmistakably Robert Burns. In song and satire alike Burns is racy, in the highest degree, of the poets of North Britain, who since Robert Sempill, Willy Hamilton of Gilbertfield, douce Allan Ramsay, the Edinburgh periwig-maker and miscellanist, and Robert Fergusson, “the writer-chiel, a deathless name,” had kept alive the old native poetic tradition, had provided the strolling fiddlers with merry and wanton staves, and had perpetuated the daintiest shreds of national music, the broadest colloquialisms, and the warmest hues of patriotic or local sentiment. Burns immortalizes these old staves by means of his keener vision, his more fiery spirit, his stronger passion and his richer volume of sound. Burns’s fate was a pathetic one. Brief, broken glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete, his poems wanted all things for completeness: culture, leisure, sustained effort, length of life. Yet occasional, fragmentary, extemporary as most of them are, they bear the guinea stamp of true genius. His eye is unerring, his humour of the ripest, his wit both fine and abundant. His ear is less subtle, except when dialect is concerned. There he is infallible. Landscape he understands in subordination to life. For abstract ideas about Liberty and 1789 he cares little. But he is a patriot and an insurgent, a hater of social distinction and of the rich. Of the divine right or eternal merit of the system under which the poor man sweats to put money into the rich man’s pocket and fights to keep it there, and is despised in proportion to the amount of his perspiration, he had a low opinion. His work has inspired the meek, has made the poor feel themselves less of ciphers in the world and given courage to the down-trodden. His love of women has inspired some of the most ardently beautiful lyrics in the world. Among modern folk-poets such as Jókai and Mistral, the position of Burns in the hearts of his own people is the best assured.

Bibliographical Note.—The dearth of literary history in England makes it rather difficult to obtain a good general view of letters in Britain during the 18th century. Much may be gleaned, however, from chapters of Lecky’s History of England during the 18th Century, from Stephen’s Lectures on English Literature and Society in the 18th Century (1904), from Taine’s History of English Literature (van Laun’s translation), from vols. v. and vi. of Prof. Courthope’s History of English Poetry, and from the second volume of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature (1902). The two vols. dealing respectively with the Age of Pope and the Age of Johnson in Bell’s Handbooks of English Literature will be found useful, and suggestive chapters will be found in Saintsbury’s Short History and in A.H. Thompson’s Student’s History of English Literature (1901). The same may, perhaps, be said of books v. and vi. in the Bookman Illustrated History of English Literature (1906), by the present writer. Sidelights of value are to be found in Walter Raleigh’s little book on the English Novel, in Beljame’s Le Publique et les hommes de lettres en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle, in H.A. Beers’ History of English Romanticism in the 18th Century (1899), and above all in Sir Leslie Stephen’s History of English Thought during the 18th Century; Stephen’s Hours in a Library, the monographs dealing with the period in the English Men of Letters series, the Vignettes and Portraits of Austin Dobson and George Paston, Elwin’s Eighteenth Century Men of Letters, and Thomas Wright’s Caricature History of the Georges, must also be kept in mind.

(T. Se.)

VI. The 19th Century

We have seen how great was the reverence which the 18th century paid to poetry, and how many different kinds of poetic experiment were going on, mostly by the imitative efforts of revivalists (Spenserians, Miltonians, Shakespeareans, Ballad-mongers, Scandinavian, Celtic, Gothic scholars and the like), but also in the direction of nature study and landscape description, while the more formal type of Augustan poetry, satire and description, in the direct succession of Pope, was by no means neglected.

The most original vein in the 19th century was supplied by the Wordsworth group, the first manifesto of which appeared in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798. William Wordsworth himself represents, in the first place, a revolutionary movement Wordsworth. against the poetic diction of study-poets since the first acceptance of the Miltonic model by Addison. His ideal, imperfectly carried out, was a reversion to popular language of the utmost simplicity and directness. He added to this the idea of the enlargement of man by Nature, after Rousseau, and went further than this in the utterance of an essentially pantheistic desire to become part of its loveliness, to partake in a mystical sense of the loneliness of the mountain, the sound of falling water, the upper horizon of the clouds and the wind. To the growing multitude of educated people who were being pent in huge cities these ideas were far sweeter than the formalities of the old pastoral. Wordsworth’s great discovery, perhaps, was that popular poetry need not be imitative, artificial or condescending, but that a simple story truthfully told of the passion, affliction or devotion of simple folk, and appealing to the primal emotion, is worthy of the highest effort of the poetic artist, and may achieve a poetic value far in advance of conventional descriptions of strikingly grouped incidents picturesquely magnified or rhetorically exaggerated. But Wordsworth’s theories might have ended very much where they began, had it not been for their impregnation by the complementary genius of Coleridge.

Coleridge at his best was inspired by the supreme poetic gifts of passion, imagination, simplicity and mystery, combining form and colour, sound and sense, novelty and antiquity, realism and romanticism, scholarly ode and popular Coleridge. ballad. His three fragmentary poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan are the three spells and touchstones, constituting what is often regarded by the best judges as the high-standard of modern English poetry. Their subtleties and beauties irradiated the homelier artistic conceptions of Wordsworth, and the effect on him was permanent. Coleridge’s inspiration, on the other hand, was irrecoverable; a physical element was due, no doubt, to the first exaltation indirectly due to the opium habit, but the moral influence was contributed by the Wordsworths. The steady will of the Dalesman seems to have constrained Coleridge’s imagination from aimless wandering; his lofty and unwavering self-confidence inspired his friend with a similar energy. Away from Wordsworth after 1798, Coleridge lost himself in visions of work that always remained to be “transcribed,” by one who had every poetic gift—save the rudimentary will for sustained and concentrated effort.

Coleridge’s more delicate sensibility to the older notes of that more musical era in English poetry which preceded the age of Dryden and Pope was due in no small measure to the luminous yet subtle intuitions of his friend Charles Lamb. Lamb. Lamb’s appreciation of the imaginative beauty inhumed in old English literature amounted to positive genius, and the persistence with which he brought his perception of the supreme importance of imagination and music in poetry to bear upon some of the finest creative minds of 1800, in talk, letters, selections and essays, brought about a gradual revolution in the aesthetic morality of the day. He paid little heed to the old rhetoric and the ars poetica of classical comparison. His aim was rather to discover the mystery, the folk-seed and the old-world element, latent in so much of the finer ancient poetry and implicit in so much of the new. The Essays of Elia (1820-1825) are the binnacle of Lamb’s vessel of exploration. Lamb and his great Hazlitt. rival, William Hazlitt, both maintained that criticism was not so much an affair of learning, or an exercise of comparative and expository judgment, as an act of imagination in itself. Hazlitt became one of the master essayists, a fine critical analyst and declaimer, denouncing all insipidity and affectation, stirring the soul with metaphor, soaring easily and acquiring a momentum in his prose which often approximates to the impassioned utterance of Burke. Like Lamb, he wanted to measure his contemporaries by the Elizabethans, or still older masters, and he was deeply impressed by Lyrical Ballads. The new critics gradually found responsible auxiliaries, notably Leigh Hunt. De Quincey. Leigh Hunt, De Quincey and Wilson of Blackwood’s. Leigh Hunt, not very important in himself, was a cause of great authorship in others. He increased both the depth and area of modern literary sensibility. The world of books was to him an enchanted forest, in which every leaf had its own secret. He was the most catholic of critics, but he knew what was poor—at least in other people. As an essayist he is a feminine diminutive of Lamb, excellent in fancy and literary illustration, but far inferior in decisive insight or penetrative masculine wit. The Miltonic quality of impassioned pyramidal prose is best seen in Thomas De Quincey, of all the essayists of this age, or any age, the most diffuse, unequal and irreducible to rule, and which yet at times trembles upon the brink of a rhythmical sonority which seems almost to rival that of the greatest poetry. Leigh Hunt supplies a valuable link between Lamb, the sole external moderator of the Lake school, Byron, Shelley, and the junior branch of imaginative Aesthetic, represented by Keats.

John Keats (1795-1821), three years younger than Shelley, was the greatest poetic artist of his time, and would probably have surpassed all, but for his collapse of health at twenty-five. His vocation was as unmistakable as Keats. that of Chatterton, with whose youthful ardour his own had points of likeness. The two contemporary conceptions of him as a fatuous Cockney Bunthorne or as “a tadpole of the lakes” were equally erroneous. But Keats was in a sense the first of the virtuoso or aesthetic school (caricatured later by the formula of “Art for Art’s sake”); artistic beauty was to him a kind of religion, his expression was more technical, less personal than that of his contemporaries, he was a conscious “romantic,” and he travelled in the realms of gold with less impedimenta than any of his fellows. Byron had always himself to talk about, Wordsworth saw the universe too much through the medium of his own self-importance, Coleridge was a metaphysician, Shelley hymned Intellectual Beauty; Keats treats of his subject, “A Greek Urn,” “A Nightingale,” the season of “Autumn,” in such a way that our thought centres not upon the poet but upon the enchantment of that which he sings. In his three great medievalising poems, “The Pot of Basil,” “The Eve of St Agnes” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” even more than in his Odes, Keats is the forerunner of Tennyson, the greatest of the word-painters. But apart from his perfection of loveliness, he has a natural magic and a glow of humanity surpassing that of any other known poet. His poetry, immature as it was, gave a new beauty to the language. His loss was the greatest English Literature has sustained.

Before Tennyson, Rossetti and Morris, Keats’s best disciples in the aesthetic school were Thomas Lovell Beddoes, George Dailey and Thomas Hood, the failure of whose “Midsummer Fairies” and “Fair Inez” drove him Landor. into that almost mortific vein of verbal humour which threw up here and there a masterpiece such as “The Song of a Shirt.” The master virtuoso of English poetry in another department (the classical) during this and the following age was Walter Savage Landor, who threw off a few fragments of verse worthy of the Greek Anthology, but in his Dialogues or “Imaginary Conversations” evolved a kind of violent monologizing upon the commonplace which descends into the most dismal caverns of egotism. Carlyle furiously questioned his competence. Mr Shaw allows his classical amateurship and respectable strenuosity of character, but denounces his work, with a substratum of truth, as that of a “blathering, unreadable pedant.”

Among those, however, who found early nutriment in Landor’s Miltonic Gebir (1798) must be reckoned the most poetical of our poets. P.B. Shelley was a spirit apart, who fits into no group, the associate of Byron, but spiritually as Shelley. remote from him as possible, hated by the rationalists of his age, and regarded by the poets with more pity than jealousy. He wrote only for poets, and had no public during his lifetime among general readers, by whom, however, he is now regarded as the poet par excellence. In his conduct it must be admitted that he was in a sense, like Coleridge, irresponsible, but on the other hand his poetic energy was irresistible and all his work is technically of the highest order of excellence. In ideal beauties it is supreme; its great lack is its want of humanity; in this he is the opposite of Wordsworth who reads human nature into everything. Shelley, on the other hand, dehumanises things and makes them unearthly. He hangs a poem, like a cobweb or a silver cloud, on a horn of the crescent moon, and leaves it to dangle there in a current of ether. His quest was continuous for figures of beauty, figures, however, more ethereal and less sensuous than those in Keats; having obtained such an idea he passed it again and again through the prism of his mind, in talk, letters, prefaces, poems. The deep sense of the mystery of words and their lightest variations in the skein of poetry, half forgotten since Milton’s time, had been recovered in a great measure by Coleridge and Wordsworth since 1798; Lamb, too, and Hazlitt, and, perhaps, Hogg were in the secret, while Keats had its open sesame on his lips ere he died. The union of poetic emotion with verbal music of the greatest perfection was the aim of all, but none of these masters made words breathe and sing with quite the same spontaneous ease and fervour that Shelley attained in some of the lyrics written between twenty-four and thirty, such as “The Cloud,” “The Skylark,” the “Ode of the West Wind,” “The Sensitive Plant,” the “Indian Serenade.”

The path of the new romantic school had been thoroughly prepared during the age of Gray, Cowper and Burns, and it won its triumphs with little resistance and no serious convulsions. The opposition was noisy, but its representative character has been exaggerated. In the meantime, however, the old-fashioned school and the Popean couplet, the Johnsonian dignity of reflection and the Goldsmithian ideal of generalized description, were well maintained by George Crabbe (1754-1832), “though Nature’s sternest painter yet the best,” a worsted-stockinged Pope and austere delineator of village misdoing and penurious age, and Samuel Rogers (1763-1855), the banker poet, liberal in sentiment, extreme Tory in form, and dilettante delineator of Italy to the music of the heroic couplet. Robert Southey, Thomas Campbell and Thomas Moore were a dozen years younger and divided their allegiance between two schools. In the main, however, they were still poeticisers of the orthodox old pattern, though all wrote a few songs of exceptional merit, and Campbell especially by defying the old anathemas.

The great champion of the Augustan masters was himself the architect of revolution. First the idol and then the outcast of respectable society, Lord Byron sought relief in new cadences and new themes for his poetic talent. Byron. He was, however, essentially a history painter or a satirist in verse. He had none of the sensitive aesthetic taste of a Keats, none of the spiritual ardour of a Shelley, or of the elemental beauty or artistry of Wordsworth or Coleridge. He manages the pen (said Scott) with the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality. The “Lake Poets” sought to create an impression deep, calm and profound, Byron to start a theme which should enable him to pose, travel, astonish, bewilder and confound as lover of daring, freedom, passion and revolt. For the subtler symphonic music—that music of the spheres to which the ears of poets alone are attuned—Byron had an imperfect sympathy. The delicate ear is often revolted in his poetry by the vices of impromptu work. He steadily refused to polish, to file or to furbish—the damning, inevitable sign of a man born to wear a golden tassel. “I am like the tiger. If I miss the first spring I go growling back to the jungle.” Subtlety is sacrificed to freshness and vigour. The exultation, the breadth, the sweeping magnificence of his effects are consequently most appreciated abroad, where the ineradicable flaws of his style have no power to annoy.

The European fame of Byron was from the first something quite unique. At Missolonghi people ran through the streets crying “The great man is dead—he is gone.” His corpse was refused entrance at Westminster; but the poet was taken to the inmost heart of Russia, Poland, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Scandinavia, and among the Slavonic nations generally. In Italy his influence is plainly seen in Berchet, Leopardi, Giusti, and even Carducci. In Spain the Myrtle Society was founded in Byron’s honour. Hugo in his Orientales traversed Greece. Chateaubriand joined the Greek Committee. Delavigne dedicated his verse to Byron; Lamartine wrote another canto to Childe Harold; Mérimée is interpenetrated by Byronesque feeling which also animates the best work of Heine, Pushkin, Lermontov, and Mickievicz, and even De Musset.

Like Scott, Byron was a man of two eras, and not too much ahead of his time to hold the Press-Dragon in fee. His supremacy and that of his satellites Moore and Campbell were championed by the old papers and by the two new Criticism. blatant Quarterlies, whose sails were filled not with the light airs of the future but by the Augustan “gales” of the classical past. The distinction of this new phalanx of old-fashioned critics who wanted to confer literature by university degree was that they wrote as gentlemen for gentlemen: they first gave criticism in England a respectable shakedown. Francis Jeffrey, a man of extraordinary ability and editor of The Edinburgh Review from 1803 to 1829 (with the mercurial Sydney Smith, the first of English conversationists, as his aide-de-camp), exercised a powerful influence as a standardizer of the second rate. He was one of the first of the critics to grasp firmly the main idea of literary evolution—the importance of time, environment, race and historical development upon the literary landscape; but he was vigorously aristocratic in his preferences, a hater of mystery, symbolism or allegory, an instinctive individualist of intolerant pattern. His chief weapons against the new ideas were social superiority and omniscience, and he used both unsparingly. The strident political partisanship of the Edinburgh raised up within six years a serious rival in the Quarterly, which was edited in turn by the good-natured pedagogue William Gifford and by Scott’s extremely able son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart, the “scorpion” of the infant Blackwood. With the aid of the remnant of the old anti-Jacobins, Canning, Ellis, Barrow, Southey, Croker, Hayward, Apperley and others, the theory of Quarterly infallibility was carried to its highest point of development about 1845.

The historical and critical work of the Quarterly era, as might be expected, was appropriate to this gentlemanly censorship. The thinkers of the day were economic or juristic—Bentham, the great codifier; Malthus, whose theory of population gave Darwin his main impulse to theorise; and Mackintosh, whose liberal opposition to Burke deserved a better fate than it has ever perhaps received. The historians were mainly of the second class—the judicial Hallam, the ornate Roscoe, the plodding Lingard, the accomplished Milman, the curious Isaac D’Israeli, the academic Bishop Thirlwall. Mitford and Grote may be considered in the light of Tory and Radical historical pamphleteers, but Grote’s work has the much larger measure of permanent value. As the historian of British India, James Mill’s industry led him beyond his thesis of Benthamism in practice. Sir William Napier’s heroic picture of the Peninsular War is strongly tinged by bias against the Tory administration of 1808-1813; but it conserves some imperishable scenes of war. Some of the most magnetic prose of the Regency Period was contained in the copious and insincere but profoundly emotionalising pamphlets of the self-taught Surrey labourer William Cobbett, in whom Diderot’s paradox of a comedian is astonishingly illustrated. Lockhart’s Lives of Burns and of Sir Walter Scott—the last perhaps the most memorable prose monument of its epoch—appeared in 1828 and 1838, and both formed the subjects of Thomas Carlyle in the Edinburgh Review, where, under the unwelcome discipline of Jeffrey, the new prophet worked nobly though in harness.

Great as the triumph of the Romantic masters and the new ideas was, it is in the ranks of the Old School after all that we have to look for the greatest single figure in the literature of this age. Except in the imitative vein of ballad Scott. or folk-song, the poetry of Sir Walter Scott is never quite first-rate. It is poetry for repetition rather than for close meditation or contemplation, and resembles a military band more than a full orchestra. Nor will his prose bear careful analysis. It is a good servant, no more. When we consider, however, not the intensity but the vast extent, range and versatility of Scott’s powers, we are constrained to assign him the first place in his own age, if not that in the next seat to Shakespeare in the whole of the English literary Pantheon. Like Shakespeare, he made humour and a knowledge of human nature his first instruments in depicting the past. Unlike Shakespeare, he was a born antiquary, and he had a great (perhaps excessive) belief in mise en scène, costume, patois and scenic properties generally. His portraiture, however, is Shakespearean in its wisdom and maturity, and, although he wrote very rapidly, it must be remembered that his mind had been prepared by strenuous work for twenty years as a storehouse of material in which nothing was handled until it had been carefully mounted by the imagination, classified in the memory, and tested by experimental use. Once he has got the imagination of the reader well grounded to earth, there is nothing he loves better than telling a good story. Of detail he is often careless. But he trusted to a full wallet, and rightly, for mainly by his abundance he raised the literature of the novel to its highest point of influence, breathing into it a new spirit, giving it a fulness and universality of life, a romantic charm, a dignity and elevation, and thereby a coherence, a power and predominance which it never had before.

In Scott the various lines of 18th-century conservatism and 19th-century romantic revival most wonderfully converge. His intense feeling for Long Ago made him a romantic almost from his cradle. The master faculties of history and humour made a strong conservative of him; but his Toryism was of a very different spring from that of Coleridge or Wordsworth. It was not a reaction from disappointment in the sequel of 1789, nor was it the result of reasoned conviction. It was indwelling, rooted deeply in the fibres of the soil, to which Scott’s attachment was passionate, and nourished as from a source by ancestral sentiment and “heather” tradition. This sentiment made Scott a victorious pioneer of the Romantic movement all over Europe. At the same time we must remember that, with all his fondness for medievalism, he was fundamentally a thorough 18th-century Scotsman and successor of Bailie Nicol Jarvie: a worshipper of good sense, toleration, modern and expert governmental ideas, who valued the past chiefly by way of picturesque relief, and was thoroughly alive to the benefit of peaceful and orderly rule, and deeply convinced that we are much better off as we are than we could have been in the days of King Richard or good Queen Bess. Scott had the mind of an enlightened 18th-century administrator and statesmen who had made a fierce hobby of armour and old ballads. To expect him to treat of intense passion or romantic medievalism as Charlotte Brontë or Dante Gabriel Rossetti would have treated them is as absurd as to expect to find the sentiments of a Mrs Browning blossoming amidst the horse-play of Tom Jones or Harry Lorrequer. Scott has few niceties or secrets: he was never subtle, morbid or fantastic. His handling is ever broad, vigorous, easy, careless, healthy and free. Yet nobly simple and straightforward as man and writer were, there is something very complex about his literary legacy, which has gone into all lands and created bigoted enemies (Carlyle, Borrow) as well as unexpected friends (Hazlitt, Newman, Jowett); and we can seldom be sure whether his influence is reactionary or the reverse. There has always been something semi-feudal about it. The “shirra” has a demesne in letters as broad as a countryside, a band of mesne vassals and a host of Eildon hillsmen, Tweedside cottiers, minor feudatories and forest retainers attached to the “Abbotsford Hunt.” Scott’s humour, humanity and insistence upon the continuity of history transformed English literature profoundly.

Scott set himself to coin a quarter of a million sterling out of the new continent of which he felt himself the Columbus. He failed (quite narrowly), but he made the Novel the paymaster of literature for at least a hundred years. Transition fiction. His immediate contemporaries and successors were not particularly great. John Galt (1779-1839), Susan Ferrier (1782-1854) and D.M. Moir (1798-1851) all attempted the delineation of Scottish scenes with a good deal of shrewdness of insight and humour. The main bridge from Scott to the great novelists of the ’forties and ’fifties was supplied by sporting, military, naval and political novels, represented in turn by Surtees, Smith, Hook, Maxwell, Lever, Marryat, Cooper, Morier, Ainsworth, Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli. Surtees gave all-important hints to Pickwick, Marryat developed grotesque character-drawing, Ainsworth and Bulwer attempted new effects in criminology and contemporary glitter. Disraeli in the ’thirties was one of the foremost romantic wits who had yet attempted the novel. Early in the ’forties he received the laying-on of hands from the Young England party, and attempted to propagandize the good tidings of his mission in Coningsby and Sybil, novels full of entraînement and promise, if not of actual genius. Unhappily the author was enmeshed in the fatal drolleries of the English party system, and Lothair is virtually a confession of abandoned ideals. He completes the forward party in fiction; Jane Austen (1775-1815) stands to this as Crabbe and Rogers to Coleridge and Shelley. She represents the fine flower of the expiring 18th century. Scott could do the trumpet notes on the organ. She fingers the fine ivory flutes. She combines self-knowledge and artistic reticence with a complete tact and an absolute lucidity of vision within the area prescribed. Within the limits of a park wall in a country parish, absolutely oblivious of Europe and the universe, her art is among the finest and most finished that our literature has to offer. In irony she had no rival at that period. But the trimness of her plots and the delicacy of her miniature work have affinities in Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Martineau and Mary Russell Mitford, three excellent writers of pure English prose. There is a finer aroma of style in the contemporary “novels” of Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866). These, however, are rather tournaments of talk than novels proper, releasing a flood of satiric portraiture upon the idealism of the day—difficult to be apprehended in perfection save by professed students. Peacock’s style had an appreciable influence upon his son-in-law George Meredith (1828-1909). His philosophy is for the most part Tory irritability exploding in ridicule; but Peacock was one of the most lettered men of his age, and his flouts and jeers smack of good reading, old wine and respectable prejudices. In these his greatest successor was George Borrow (1803-1881), who used three volumes of half-imaginary autobiography and road-faring in strange lands as a sounding-board for a kind of romantic revolt against the century of comfort, toleration, manufactures, mechanical inventions, cheap travel and commercial expansion, unaccompanied (as he maintains) by any commensurate growth of human wisdom, happiness, security or dignity.

In the year of Queen Victoria’s accession most of the great writers of the early part of the century, whom we may denominate as “late Georgian,” were silent. Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb, Sheridan, Hazlitt, Mackintosh, The Victorian era. Crabbe and Cobbett were gone. Wordsworth, Southey, Campbell, Moore, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, De Quincey, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Mitford, Leigh Hunt, Brougham, Samuel Rogers were still living, but the vital portion of their work was already done. The principal authors who belong equally to the Georgian and Victorian eras are Landor, Bulwer, Marryat, Hallam, Milman and Disraeli; none of whom, with the exception of the last, approaches the first rank in either. The significant work of Tennyson, the Brownings, Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, Trollope, the Kingsleys, Spencer, Mill, Darwin, Ruskin, Grote, Macaulay, Freeman, Froude, Lecky, Buckle, Green, Maine, Borrow, FitzGerald, Arnold, Rossetti, Swinburne, Meredith, Hardy, Stevenson, Morris, Newman, Pater, Jefferies—the work of these writers may be termed conclusively Victorian; it gives the era a stamp of its own and distinguishes it as the most varied in intellectual riches in the whole course of our literature. Circumstances have seldom in the world been more favourable to a great outburst of literary energy. The nation was secure and prosperous to an unexampled degree, conscious of the will and the power to expand still further. The canons of taste were still aristocratic. Books were made and unmade according to a regular standard. Literature was the one form of art which the English understood, in which they had always excelled since 1579, and in which their originality was supreme. To the native genius for poetry was now added the advantage of materials for a prose which in lucidity and versatility should surpass even that of Goldsmith and Hazlitt. The diversity of form and content of this great literature was commensurate with the development of human knowledge and power which marked its age. In this and some other respects it resembles the extraordinary contemporary development in French literature which began under the reign of Louis Philippe. The one signally disconcerting thing about the great Victorian writers is their amazing prolixity. Not content with two or three long books, they write whole literatures. A score of volumes, each as long as the Bible or Shakespeare, barely represents the output of such authors as Carlyle, Ruskin, Froude, Dickens, Thackeray, Newman, Spencer or Trollope. They obtained vast quantities of new readers, for the middle class was beginning to read with avidity; but the quality of brevity, the knowledge when to stop, and with it the older classic conciseness and the nobler Hellenic idea of a perfect measure—these things were as though they had not been. Meanwhile, the old schools were broken up and the foolscap addressed to the old masters. Singers, entertainers, critics and historians abound. Every man may say what is in him in the phrases that he likes best, and the sole motto that compels is “every style is permissible except the style that is tiresome.” The old models are strangely discredited, and the only conventions which hold are those concerning the subjects which English delicacy held to be tabooed. These conventions were inordinately strict, and were held to include all the unrestrained, illicit impulses of love and all the more violent aberrations from the Christian code of faith and ethics. Infidel speculation and the liaisons of lawless love (which had begun to form the staple of the new French fiction—hence regarded by respectable English critics of the time as profoundly vitiated and scandalous) had no recognized existence and were totally ignored in literature designed for general reading. The second or Goody-two-Shoes convention remained strictly in force until the penultimate decade of the 19th century, and was acquiesced in or at least submitted to by practically all the greatest writers of the Victorian age. The great poets and novelists of that day easily out-topped their fellows. Society had no difficulty in responding to the summons of its literary leaders. Nor was their fame partial, social or sectional. The great novelists of early Victorian days were aristocratic and democratic at once. Their popularity was universal within the limits of the language and beyond it. The greatest of men were men of imagination rather than men of ideas, but such sociological and moral ideas as they derived from their environment were poured helter-skelter into their novels, which took the form of huge pantechnicon magazines. Another distinctive feature of the Victorian novel is the position it enabled women to attain in literature, a position attained by them in creative work neither before nor since.

The novelists to a certain extent created their own method like the great dramatists, but such rigid prejudices or conventions as they found already in possession they respected without demur. Both Dickens and Thackeray write Dickens. as if they were almost entirely innocent of the existence of sexual vice. As artists and thinkers they were both formless. But the enormous self-complacency of the England of their time, assisted alike by the part played by the nation from 1793 to 1815, evangelicalism, free trade (which was originally a system of super-nationalism) and later, evolution, generated in them a great benignity and a strong determination towards a liberal and humanitarian philosophy. Despite, however, the diffuseness of the envelope and the limitations of horizon referred to, the unbookish and almost unlettered genius of Charles Dickens (1812-1870), the son of a poor lower middle-class clerk, almost entirely self-educated, has asserted for itself the foremost place in the literary history of the period. Dickens broke every rule, rioted in absurdity and bathed in extravagance. But everything he wrote was received with an almost frantic joy by those who recognized his creations as deifications of themselves, his scenery as drawn by one of the quickest and intensest observers that ever lived, and his drollery as an accumulated dividend from the treasury of human laughter. Dickens’s mannerisms were severe, but his geniality as a writer broke down every obstruction, reduced Jeffrey to tears and Sydney Smith to helpless laughter.

The novel in France was soon to diverge and adopt the form of an anecdote illustrating the traits of a very small group of persons, but the English novel, owing mainly to the predilection of Dickens for those Gargantuan entertainers Thackeray. of his youth, Fielding and Smollett, was to remain anchored to the history. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) was even more historical than Dickens, and most of his leading characters are provided with a detailed genealogy. Dickens’s great works, excepting David Copperfield and Great Expectations, had all appeared when Thackeray made his mark in 1848 with Vanity Fair, and Thackeray follows most of his predecessor’s conventions, including his conventional religion, ethics and politics, but he avoids his worse faults of theatricality. He never forces the note or lashes himself into fury or sentimentality; he limits himself in satire to the polite sphere which he understands, he is a great master of style and possesses every one of its fairy gifts except brevity. He creates characters and scenes worthy of Dickens, but within a smaller range and without the same abundance. He is a traveller and a cosmopolitan, while Dickens is irredeemably Cockney. He is often content to criticize or annotate or to preach upon some congenial theme, while Dickens would be in the flush of humorous creation. His range, it must be remembered, is wide, in most respects a good deal wider than his great contemporary’s, for he is at once novelist, pamphleteer, essayist, historian, critic, and the writer of some of the most delicate and sentimental vers d’occasion in the language.

The absorption of England in itself is shown with exceptional force in the case of Thackeray, who was by nature a cosmopolitan, yet whose work is so absorbed with the structure of English society as to be almost unintelligible Charlotte Brontë. to foreigners. The exploration of the human heart and conscience in relation to the new problems of the time had been almost abandoned by the novel since Richardson’s time. It was for woman to attempt to resolve these questions, and with the aid of powerful imagination to propound very different conclusions. The conviction of Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) was that the mutual passionate love of one man and one woman is sacred and creates a centre of highest life, energy and joy in the world. George Eliot (1819-1880), on the other George Eliot. hand, detected a blind and cruel egoism in all such ecstasy of individual passion. It was in the autumn of 1847 that Jane Eyre shocked the primness of the coteries by the unconcealed ardour of its love passages. Twelve years later Adam Bede astonished the world by the intensity of its ethical light and shade. The introspective novel was now very gradually to establish a supremacy over the historical. The romance of the Brontës’ forlorn life colours Jane Eyre, colours Wuthering Heights and colours Villette; their work is inseparable from their story to an extent that we perhaps hardly realize. George Eliot did not receive this adventitious aid from romance, and her work was, perhaps, unduly burdened by ethical diatribe, scientific disquisition and moral and philosophical asides. It is more than redeemed, however, by her sovereign humour, by the actual truth in the portrayal of that absolutely self-centred Midland society of the ’thirties and ’forties, and by the moral significance which she extracts from the smaller actions and more ordinary characters of life by means of sympathy, imagination and a deep human compassion. Her novels are generally admitted to have obtained twin summits in Adam Bede (1859) and Middlemarch (1872). An even nicer delineator of the most delicate shades of the curiously remote provincial society of that day was Mrs Gaskell (1810-1865), whose Cranford and Wives and Daughters attain to the perfection of easy, natural and unaffected English narrative. Enthusiasm and a picturesque boyish ardour and partisanship are the chief features of Westward Ho! and the other vivid and stirring novels of Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), to which a subtler gift in the discrimination of character must be added in the case of his brother Henry Kingsley Kingsley. Trollope. Reade. Meredith. Hardy. (1830-1876). Charles, however, was probably more accomplished as a poet than in the to him too exciting operation of taking sides in a romance. The novels of Trollope, Reade and Wilkie Collins are, generally speaking, a secondary product of the literary forces which produced the great fiction of the ’fifties. The two last were great at structure and sensation: Trollope dogs the prose of every-day life with a certainty and a clearness that border upon inspiration. The great novels of George Meredith range between 1859 and 1880, stories of characters deeply interesting who reveal themselves to us by flashes and trust to our inspiration to do the rest. The wit, the sparkle, the entrain and the horizon of these books, from Richard Feverel to the master analysis of The Egoist, have converted the study of Meredith into an exact science. Thomas Hardy occupies a place scarcely inferior to Meredith’s as a stylist, a discoverer of new elements of the plaintive and the wistful in the vanishing of past ideals, as a depicter of the old southern rustic life of England and its tragi-comedy, in a series of novels which take rank with the greatest.

If Victorian literature had something more than a paragon in Dickens, it had its paragon too in the poet Tennyson. The son of a Lincolnshire parson of squirearchal descent, Alfred Tennyson consecrated himself to the vocation Tennyson. of poesy with the same unalterable conviction that had characterized Milton, Pope, Thomson, Wordsworth and Keats, and that was yet to signalize Rossetti and Swinburne, and he became easily the greatest virtuoso of his time in his art. To lyrics and idylls of a luxurious and exotic picturesqueness he gave a perfection of technique which criticism has chastened only to perfect in such miracles of description as “The Lotus Eaters,” “The Dream of Fair Women,” and “Morte d’Arthur.” He received as vapour the sense of uneasiness as to the problems of the future which pervaded his generation, and in the elegies and lyrics of In Memoriam, in The Princess and in Maud he gave them back to his contemporaries in a running stream, which still sparkles and radiates amid the gloom. After the lyrical monodrama of Maud in 1855 he devoted his flawless technique of design, harmony and rhythm to works primarily of decoration and design (The Idylls of the King), and to experiments in metrical drama for which the time was not ripe; but his main occupation was varied almost to the last by lyrical blossoms such as “Frater Ave,” “Roman Virgil,” or “Crossing the Bar,” which, like “Tears, Idle Tears” and “O that ’twere possible,” embody the aspirations of Flaubert towards a perfected art of language shaping as no other verse probably can.

Few, perhaps, would go now to In Memoriam as to an oracle for illumination and guidance as many of Queen Victoria’s contemporaries did, from the Queen herself downwards. And yet it will take very long ere its fascination Browning. fades. In language most musical it rearticulates the gospel of Sorrow and Love, and it remains still a pathetic expression of emotions, sentiments and truths which, as long as human nature remains the same, and as long as calamity, sorrow and death are busy in the world, must be always repeating themselves. Its power, perhaps, we may feel of this poem and indeed of most of Tennyson’s poetry, is not quite equal to its charm. And if we feel this strongly, we shall regard Robert Browning as the typical poet of the Victorian era. His thought has been compared to a galvanic battery for the use of spiritual paralytics. The grave defect of Browning is that his ideas, however excellent, are so seldom completely won; they are left in a twilight, or even a darkness more Cimmerian than that to which the worst of the virtuosi dedicate their ideas. Similarly, even in his “Dramatic Romances and Lyrics” (1845) or his “Men and Women” (1855) he rarely depicts action, seldom goes further than interpreting the mind of man as he approaches action. If Dickens may be described as the eye of Victorian literature, Tennyson the ear attuned to the subtlest melodies, Swinburne the reed to which everything blew to music, Thackeray the velvet pulpit-cushion, Eliot the impending brow, and Meredith the cerebral dome, then Browning might well be described as the active brain itself eternally expounding some point of view remote in time and place from its own. Tennyson was ostensibly and always a poet in his life and his art, in his blue cloak and sombrero, his mind and study alike stored with intaglios of the thought of all ages, always sounding and remodelling his verses so that they shall attain the maximum of sweetness and symmetry. He was a recluse. Browning on the other hand dissembled his poethood, successfully disguised his muse under the semblance of a stock merchant, was civil to his fellowmen, and though nervous with bores, encountered every one he met as if he were going to receive more than he could impart. In Tennyson’s poetry we are always discovering new beauties. In Browning’s we are finding new blemishes. Why he chose rhythm and metre for seven-eighths of his purpose is somewhat of a mystery. His protest against the materialistic view of life is, perhaps, a more valid one than Tennyson’s; he is at pains to show us the noble elements valuable in spite of failure to achieve tangible success. He realizes that the greater the man, the greater is the failure, yet protests unfailingly against the despondent or materialist view of life. His nimble appreciation of character and motive attracts the attentive curiosity of highly intellectual people; but the question recurs with some persistence as to whether poetry, after all, was the right medium for the expression of these views.

Many of Browning’s ideas and fertilizations will, perhaps, owing to the difficulty and uncertainty which attaches to their form, penetrate the future indirectly as the stimulant of other men’s work. This is especially the case with Ruskin. Morris. Symonds. Pater. those remarkable writers who have for the first time given the fine arts a considerable place in English literature, notably John Ruskin (Modern Painters, 1842, Seven Lamps, 1849, Stones of Venice, 1853), William Morris, John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater. Browning, it is true, shared the discipleship of the first two with Kingsley and Carlyle. But Ruskin outlived all discipleships and transcended almost all the prose writers of his period in a style the elements of emotional power in which still preserve their secret.

More a poet of doubt than either Tennyson or the college friend, A.H. Clough, whose loss he lamented in one of the finest pastoral elegies of all ages, Matthew Arnold takes rank with Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne alone Arnold. among the Dii Majores of Victorian poetry. He is perhaps a disciple of Wordsworth even more than of Goethe, and he finds in Nature, described in rarefied though at times intensely beautiful phrase, the balm for the unrest of man’s unsatisfied yearnings, the divorce between soul and intellect, and the sense of contrast between the barren toil of man and the magic operancy of nature. His most delicate and intimate strains are tinged with melancholy. The infinite desire of what might have been, the lacrimae rerum, inspires “Resignation,” one of the finest pieces in his volume of 1849 (The Strayed Reveller). In the deeply-sighed lines of “Dover Beach” in 1867 it is associated with his sense of the decay of faith. The dreaming garden trees, the full moon and the white evening star of the beautiful English-coloured Thyrsis evoke the same mood, and render Arnold one of the supreme among elegiac poets. But his poetry is the most individual in the circle and admits the popular heart never for an instant. As a popularizer of Renan and of the view of the Bible, not as a talisman but as a literature, and, again, as a chastener of his contemporaries by means of the iteration of a few telling phrases about philistines, barbarians, sweetness and light, sweet reasonableness, high seriousness, Hebraism and Hellenism, “young lions of the Daily Telegraph,” and “the note of provinciality,” Arnold far eclipsed his fame as a poet during his lifetime. His crusade of banter against the bad civilization of his own class was one of the most audaciously successful things of the kind ever accomplished. But all his prose theorizing was excessively superficial. In poetry he sounded a note which the prose Arnold seemed hopelessly unable ever to fathom.

It is easier to speak of the virtuoso group who derived their first incitement to poetry from Chatterton, Keats and the early exotic ballads of Tennyson, far though these yet were from attaining the perfection in which they now Rossetti. appear after half a century of assiduous correction. The chief of them were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his sister Christina, William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne. The founders of this school, which took and acquired the name Pre-Raphaelite, were profoundly impressed by the Dante revival and by the study of the early Florentine masters. Rossetti himself was an accomplished translator from Dante and from Villon. He preferred Keats to Shelley because (like himself) he had no philosophy. The 18th century was to him as if it had never been, he dislikes Greek lucidity and the open air, and prefers lean medieval saints, spectral images and mystic loves. The passion of these students was retrospective; they wanted to revive the literature of a forgotten past, Italian, Scandinavian, French, above all, medieval. To do this is a question of enthusiastic experiment and adventure. Rossetti leads the way with his sonnets and ballads. Christina follows with Goblin Market, though she subsequently, with a perfected technique, writes poetry more and more confined to the religious emotions. William Morris publishes in 1858 his Defence of Guenevere, followed in ten years by The Earthly Paradise, a collection of metrical tales, which hang in the sunshine like tapestries woven of golden thread, where we should naturally expect the ordinary paperhanging of prose romance.

From the verdurous gloom of the studio with its mysterious and occult properties in which Rossetti compounded his colours, Morris went forth shortly to chant and then to narrate Socialist songs and parables. Algernon Charles Swinburne. Swinburne set forth to scandalize the critics of 1866 with the roses and lilies of vice and white death in Poems and Ballads, which was greeted with howls and hisses, and reproach against a “fleshly school of modern poetry.” Scandalous verses these were, rioting on the crests of some of these billows of song. More discerning persons perceived the harmless impersonal unreality and mischievous youthful extravagance of all these Cyprian outbursts, that the poems were the outpourings of a young singer up to the chin in the Pierian flood, and possessed by a poetic energy so urgent that it could not wait to apply the touchstones of reality or the chastening planes of experience. Swinburne far surpassed the promoters of this exotic school in technical excellence, and in Atalanta in Calydon and its successors may be said to have widened the bounds of English song, to have created a new music and liberated a new harmonic scale in his verse. Of the two elements which, superadded to a consummate technique, compose the great poet, intensity of imagination and intensity of passion, the latter in Swinburne much predominated. The result was a great abundance of heat and glow and not perhaps quite enough defining light. Hence the tendency to be incomprehensible, so fatal in its fascination for the poets of the last century, which would almost justify the title of the triumvirs of twilight to three of the greatest. It is this incomprehensibility which alienates the poet from the popular understanding and confines his audience to poets, students and scholars. Poetry is often comparable to a mountain range with its points and aiguilles, its peaks and crags, its domes and its summits. But Swinburne’s poetry, filled with the sound and movement of great waters, is as incommunicable as the sea. Trackless and almost boundless, it has no points, no definite summits. The poet never seems to know precisely when he is going to stop. His metrical flow is wave-like, beautiful and rather monotonous, inseparable from the general effect. His endings seem due to an exhaustion of rhythm rather than to an exhaustion of sense. A cessation of meaning is less perceptible than a cessation of magnificent sound.

Akin in some sense to the attempt made to get behind the veil and to recapture the old charms and spells of the middle ages, to discover the open sesame of the Morte D’Arthur and the Mabinogion and to reveal the old Celtic and Newman and the Church. monastic life which once filled and dominated our islands, was the attempt to overthrow the twin gods of the ’forties and ’fifties, state-Protestantism and the sanctity of trade. The curiously assorted Saint Georges who fought these monsters were John Henry Newman and Thomas Carlyle. The first cause of the movement was, of course, the anomalous position of the Anglican Church, which had become a province of the oligarchy officered by younger sons. It stood apart from foreign Protestantism; its ignorance of Rome, and consequently of what it protested against, was colossal; it was conscious of itself only as an establishment—it had produced some very great men since the days of the non-jurors, when it had mislaid its historical conscience, but these had either been great scholars in their studies, such as Berkeley, Butler, Warburton, Thomas Scott, or revivalists, evangelicals and missionaries, such as Wilson, Wesley, Newton, Romaine, Cecil, Venn, Martyn, who were essentially Congregationalists rather than historical Churchmen. A new spiritual beacon was to be raised; an attempt was to be made to realize the historical and cosmic aspects of the English Church, to examine its connexions, its descent and its title-deeds. In this attempt Newman was to spend the best years of his life.

The growth of liberal opinions and the denudation of the English Church of spiritual and historical ideas, leaving “only pulpit orators at Clapham and Islington and two-bottle orthodox” to defend it, seemed to involve the continued existence of Anglicanism in any form in considerable doubt. Swift had said at the commencement of the 18th century that if an act was passed for the extirpation of the gospel, bank stock might decline 1%; but a century later it is doubtful whether the passing of such a bill would have left any trace, however evanescent, upon the stability of the money market. The Anglican via media had enemies not only in the philosophical radicals, but also in the new caste of men of science. Perhaps, as J.A. Froude suggests, these combined enemies, The Edinburgh Review, Brougham, Mackintosh, the Reform Ministry, Low Church philosophy and the London University were not so very terrible after all. The Church was a vested interest which had a greater stake in the country and was harder to eradicate than they imagined. But it had nothing to give to the historian and the idealist. They were right to fight for what their souls craved after and found in the Church of Andrewes, Herbert, Ken and Waterland. Belief in the divine mission of the Church lingered on in the minds of such men as Alexander Knox or his disciple Bishop Jebb; but few were prepared to answer the question—“What is the Church as spoken of in England? Is it the Church of Christ?”—and the answers were various. Hooker had said it was “the nation”; and in entirely altered circumstances, with some qualifications, Dr Arnold said the same. It was “the Establishment” according to the lawyers and politicians, both Whig and Tory. It was an invisible and mystical body, said the Evangelicals. It was the aggregate of separate congregations, said the Nonconformists. It was the parliamentary creation of the Reformation, said the Erastians. The true Church was the communion of the Pope; the pretended Church was a legalized schism, said the Roman Catholics. All these ideas were floating about, loose and vague, among people who talked much about the Church.

One thing was persistently obvious, namely, that the nationalist church had become opportunist in every fibre, and that it had thrown off almost every semblance of ecclesiastical discipline. The view was circulated that the Church owed its continued existence to the good sense of the individuals who officered it, and to the esteem which possession and good sense combined invariably engendered in the reigning oligarchy. But since Christianity was true—and Newman was the one man of modern times who seems never to have doubted this, never to have overlooked the unmistakable threat of eternal punishment to the wicked and unbelieving—modern England, with its march of intellect and its chatter about progress, was advancing with a light heart to the verge of a bottomless abyss. By a diametrically opposite chain of reasoning Newman reached much the same conclusion as Carlyle. Newman sought a haven of security in a rapprochement with the Catholic Church. The medieval influences already at work in Oxford began to fan the flame which kindled to a blaze in the ninetieth of the celebrated Tracts for the Times. It proved the turning of the ways leading Keble and Pusey to Anglican ritual and Newman to Rome. This anti-liberal campaign was poison to the state-churchmen and Protestants, and became perhaps the chief intellectual storm centre of the century. Charles Kingsley in 1864 sought to illustrate by recent events that veracity could not be considered a Roman virtue.

After some preliminary ironic sparring Newman was stung into writing what he deliberately called Apologia pro vita sua. In this, apart from the masterly dialectic and exposition in which he had already shown himself an adept, a Scientific cross-currents. volume of autobiography is made a chapter of general history, unsurpassed in its kind since the Confessions of St Augustine, combined with a perfection of form, a precision of phrasing and a charm of style peculiar to the genius of the author, rendering it one of the masterpieces of English prose. But while Newman was thus sounding a retreat, louder and more urgent voices were signalling the advance in a totally opposite direction. The Apologia fell in point of time between The Origin of Species and Descent of Man, in which Charles Darwin was laying the corner stones of the new science of which Thomas Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace were to be among the first apostles, and almost coincided with the First Principles of a synthetic philosophy, in which Herbert Spencer was formulating a set of probabilities wholly destructive to the acceptance of positive truth in any one religion. The typical historian of the Macaulay. ’fifties, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and the seminal thinker of the ’sixties, John Stuart Mill, had as determinedly averted their faces from the old conception of revealed religion. Nourished in the school of the great Whig pamphleteer historians, George Grote and Henry Hallam, Macaulay combined gifts of memory, enthusiastic conviction, portraiture and literary expression, which gave to his historical writing a resonance unequalled (even by Michelet) in modern literature. In spite of faults of taste and fairness, Macaulay’s resplendent gifts enabled him to achieve for the period from Charles II. to the peace of Ryswick what Thucydides had done for the Peloponnesian War. The pictures that he drew with such exultant force are stamped ineffaceably upon the popular mind. His chief faults are not of detail, but rather a lack of subtlety as regards characterization and motive, a disposition to envisage history too exclusively as a politician, and the sequence of historical events as a kind of ordered progress towards the material ideals of universal trade and Whig optimism as revealed in the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Macaulay’s tendency to disparage the past brought his whole vision of the Cosmos into sharp collision with that of his rival appellant to the historical conscience, Thomas Carlyle, a man whose despair of the present easily exceeded Carlyle. Newman’s. But Carlyle’s despondency was totally irrespective of the attitude preserved by England towards the Holy Father, whom he seldom referred to save as “the three-hatted Papa” and “servant of the devil.” It may be in fact almost regarded as the reverse or complement to the excess of self-complacency in Macaulay. We may correct the excess of one by the opposite excess of the other. Macaulay was an optimist in ecstasy with the material advance of his time in knowledge and power; the growth of national wealth, machinery and means of lighting and locomotion caused him to glow with satisfaction. Carlyle, the pessimist, regards all such symptoms of mechanical development as contemptible. Far from panegyrizing his own time, he criticizes it without mercy. Macaulay had great faith in rules and regulations, reform bills and parliamentary machinery. Carlyle regards them as wiles of the devil. Frederick William of Prussia, according to Macaulay, was the most execrable of fiends, a cross between Moloch and Puck, his palace was hell, and Oliver Twist and Smike were petted children compared with his son the crown prince. In the same bluff and honest father Carlyle recognized the realized ideal of his fancy and hugged the just man made perfect to his heart of hearts. Such men as Bentham and Cobden, Mill and Macaulay, had in Carlyle’s opinion spared themselves no mistaken exertion to exalt the prosperity and happiness of their own day. The time had come to react at all hazards against the prevalent surfeit of civilization. Henceforth his literary activity was to take two main directions. First, tracts for the times against modern tendencies, especially against the demoralizing modern talk about progress by means of money and machinery which emanated like a miasma from the writings of such men as Mill, Macaulay, Brougham, Buckle and from the Quarterlies. Secondly, a cyclopean exhibition of Caesarism, discipline, the regimentation of workers, and the convertibility of the Big Stick and the Bible, with a preference to the Big Stick as a panacea. The snowball was to grow rapidly among such writers as Kingsley, Ruskin, George Borrow, unencumbered by reasoning or deductive processes which they despised. Carlyle himself felt that the condition of England was one for anger rather than discussion. He detested the rationalism and symmetry of such methodists of thought as Mill, Buckle, Darwin, Spencer, Lecky, Ricardo and other demonstrations of the dismal science—mere chatter he called it. The palliative philanthropy of the day had become his aversion even more than the inroads of Rome under cover of the Oxford movement which Froude, Borrow and Kingsley set themselves to correct. As an historian of a formal order Carlyle’s historical portraits cannot bear a strict comparison with the published work of Gibbon and Macaulay, or even of Maine and Froude in this period, but as a biographer and autobiographer Carlyle’s caustic insight has enabled him to produce much which is of the very stuff of human nature. Surrounded by philomaths and savants who wrote smoothly about the perfectibility of man and his institutions, Carlyle almost alone refused to distil his angry eloquence and went on railing against the passive growth of civilization at the heart of which he declared that he had discovered a cancer. This uncouth Titan worship and prostration before brute force, this constant ranting about jarls and vikings trembles often on the verge of cant and comedy, and his fiddling on the one string of human pretension and bankruptcy became discordant almost to the point of chaos. Instinctively destructive, he resents the apostleship of teachers like Mill, or the pioneer discoveries of men like Herbert Spencer and Darwin. He remains, nevertheless, a great incalculable figure, the cross grandfather of a school of thought which is largely unconscious of its debt and which so far as it recognizes it takes Carlyle in a manner wholly different from that of his contemporaries.

The deaths of Carlyle and George Eliot (and also of George Borrow) in 1881 make a starting-point for the new schools of historians, novelists, critics and biographers, and New schools. those new nature students who claim to cure those evil effects of civilization which Carlyle and his disciples had discovered. History in the hands of Macaulay, Buckle and Carlyle had been occupied mainly with the bias and tendency of change, the results obtained by those who consulted the oracle being more often than not diametrically opposite. With Froude still on the one hand as the champion of History. Protestantism, and with E.A. Freeman and J.R. Green on the other as nationalist historians, the school of applied history was fully represented in the next generation, but as the records grew and multiplied in print in accordance with the wise provisions made in 1857 by the commencement of the Rolls Series of medieval historians, and the Calendars of State Papers, to be followed shortly by the rapidly growing volumes of Calendars of Historical Manuscripts, historians began to concentrate their attention more upon the process of change as their right subject matter and to rely more and more upon documents, statistics and other impersonal and disinterested forms of material. Such historical writers as Lecky, Lord Acton, Creighton, Morley and Bryce contributed to the process of transition mainly as essayists, but the new doctrines were tested and to a certain extent put into action by such writers as Thorold Rogers, Stubbs, Gardiner and Maitland. The theory that History is a science, no less and no more, was propounded in so many words by Professor Bury in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge in 1903, and this view and the corresponding divergence of history from the traditional pathway of Belles Lettres has become steadily more dominant in the world of historical research and historical writing since 1881. The bulk of quite modern historical writing can certainly be justified from no other point of view.