HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

No. 61

_Editors:_

THE RT. HON. H. A. L. FISHER, M. A. , F. B. A. 

PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, LITT. D. , LL. D. , F. B. A. 

PROF. SIR J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M. A. 

PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M. A. 

_A complete classified list of the volumes of The Home UniversityLibrary already published to be found at the back of this book. _

THE VICTORIAN AGEIN LITERATURE

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

NEW YORKHENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

LONDONTHORNTON BUTTERWORTH LTD. 

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

 INTRODUCTION 7

 I THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE AND ITS ENEMIES 12

 II THE GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 90

 III THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 156

 IV THE BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 204

 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 253

 INDEX 255

The Editors wish to explain that this book is not put forward as anauthoritative history of Victorian literature. It is a free and personalstatement of views and impressions about the significance of Victorianliterature made by Mr. Chesterton at the Editors' express invitation. 

THE VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE

INTRODUCTION

A section of a long and splendid literature can be most convenientlytreated in one of two ways. It can be divided as one cuts a currant cakeor a Gruyère cheese, taking the currants (or the holes) as they come. Orit can be divided as one cuts wood--along the grain: if one thinks thatthere is a grain. But the two are never the same: the names never comein the same order in actual time as they come in any serious study of aspirit or a tendency. The critic who wishes to move onward with the lifeof an epoch, must be always running backwards and forwards among itsmere dates; just as a branch bends back and forth continually; yet thegrain in the branch runs true like an unbroken river. 

Mere chronological order, indeed, is almost as arbitrary as alphabeticalorder. To deal with Darwin, Dickens, Browning, in the sequence of thebirthday book would be to forge about as real a chain as the "Tacitus, Tolstoy, Tupper" of a biographical dictionary. It might lend itselfmore, perhaps, to accuracy: and it might satisfy that school of criticswho hold that every artist should be treated as a solitary craftsman, indifferent to the commonwealth and unconcerned about moral things. Towrite on that principle in the present case, however, would involve allthose delicate difficulties, known to politicians, which beset thepublic defence of a doctrine which one heartily disbelieves. It is quiteneedless here to go into the old "art for art's sake"--business, orexplain at length why individual artists cannot be reviewed withoutreference to their traditions and creeds. It is enough to say that withother creeds they would have been, for literary purposes, otherindividuals. Their views do not, of course, make the brains in theirheads any more than the ink in their pens. But it is equally evidentthat mere brain-power, without attributes or aims, a wheel revolving inthe void, would be a subject about as entertaining as ink. The moment wedifferentiate the minds, we must differentiate by doctrines and moralsentiments. A mere sympathy for democratic merry-making and mourningwill not make a man a writer like Dickens. But without that sympathyDickens would not be a writer like Dickens; and probably not a writer atall. A mere conviction that Catholic thought is the clearest as well asthe best disciplined, will not make a man a writer like Newman. Butwithout that conviction Newman would not be a writer like Newman; andprobably not a writer at all. It is useless for the æsthete (or anyother anarchist) to urge the isolated individuality of the artist, apartfrom his attitude to his age. His attitude to his age is hisindividuality: men are never individual when alone. 

It only remains for me, therefore, to take the more delicate andentangled task; and deal with the great Victorians, not only by datesand names, but rather by schools and streams of thought. It is a taskfor which I feel myself wholly incompetent; but as that applies to everyother literary enterprise I ever went in for, the sensation is notwholly novel: indeed, it is rather reassuring than otherwise to realisethat I am now doing something that nobody could do properly. The chiefperil of the process, however, will be an inevitable tendency to makethe spiritual landscape too large for the figures. I must ask forindulgence if such criticism traces too far back into politics or ethicsthe roots of which great books were the blossoms; makes Utilitarianismmore important than _Liberty_ or talks more of the Oxford Movement thanof _The Christian Year_. I can only answer in the very temper of theage of which I write: for I also was born a Victorian; and sympathisenot a little with the serious Victorian spirit. I can only answer, Ishall not make religion more important than it was to Keble, or politicsmore sacred than they were to Mill. 

CHAPTER I

THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE AND ITS ENEMIES

The previous literary life of this country had left vigorous many oldforces in the Victorian time, as in our time. Roman Britain and MediævalEngland are still not only alive but lively; for real development is notleaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as froma root. Even when we improve we never progress. For progress, themetaphor from the road, implies a man leaving his home behind him: butimprovement means a man exalting the towers or extending the gardens ofhis home. The ancient English literature was like all the severalliteratures of Christendom, alike in its likeness, alike in its veryunlikeness. Like all European cultures, it was European; like allEuropean cultures, it was something more than European. A most markedand unmanageable national temperament is plain in Chaucer and theballads of Robin Hood; in spite of deep and sometimes disastrous changesof national policy, that note is still unmistakable in Shakespeare, inJohnson and his friends, in Cobbett, in Dickens. It is vain to dream ofdefining such vivid things; a national soul is as indefinable as asmell, and as unmistakable. I remember a friend who tried impatiently toexplain the word "mistletoe" to a German, and cried at last, despairing, "Well, you know holly--mistletoe's the opposite!" I do not commend thislogical method in the comparison of plants or nations. But if he hadsaid to the Teuton, "Well, you know Germany--England's theopposite"--the definition, though fallacious, would not have been whollyfalse. England, like all Christian countries, absorbed valuable elementsfrom the forests and the rude romanticism of the North; but, like allChristian countries, it drank its longest literary draughts from theclassic fountains of the ancients: nor was this (as is so often looselythought) a matter of the mere "Renaissance. " The English tongue andtalent of speech did not merely flower suddenly into the gargantuanpolysyllables of the great Elizabethans; it had always been full of thepopular Latin of the Middle Ages. But whatever balance of blood andracial idiom one allows, it is really true that the only suggestion thatgets near the Englishman is to hint how far he is from the German. TheGermans, like the Welsh, can sing perfectly serious songs perfectlyseriously in chorus: can with clear eyes and clear voices join togetherin words of innocent and beautiful personal passion, for a false maidenor a dead child. The nearest one can get to defining the poetic temperof Englishmen is to say that they couldn't do this even for beer. Theycan sing in chorus, and louder than other Christians: but they must havein their songs something, I know not what, that is at once shamefacedand rowdy. If the matter be emotional, it must somehow be also broad, common and comic, as "Wapping Old Stairs" and "Sally in Our Alley. " Ifit be patriotic, it must somehow be openly bombastic and, as it were, indefensible, like "Rule Britannia" or like that superb song (I neverknew its name, if it has one) that records the number of leagues fromUshant to the Scilly Isles. Also there is a tender love-lyric called "OTarry Trousers" which is even more English than the heart of _TheMidsummer Night's Dream_. But our greatest bards and sages have oftenshown a tendency to rant it and roar it like true British sailors; toemploy an extravagance that is half conscious and therefore halfhumorous. Compare, for example, the rants of Shakespeare with the rantsof Victor Hugo. A piece of Hugo's eloquence is either a serious triumphor a serious collapse: one feels the poet is offended at a smile. ButShakespeare seems rather proud of talking nonsense: I never can readthat rousing and mounting description of the storm, where it comes to--

 "Who take the ruffian billows by the top, Curling their monstrous heads, and _hanging_ them With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds. "

without seeing an immense balloon rising from the ground, withShakespeare grinning over the edge of the car, and saying, "You can'tstop me: I am above reason now. " That is the nearest we can get to thegeneral national spirit, which we have now to follow through one briefand curious but very national episode. 

Three years before the young queen was crowned, William Cobbett wasburied at Farnham. It may seem strange to begin with this greatneglected name, rather than the old age of Wordsworth or the young deathof Shelley. But to any one who feels literature as human, the emptychair of Cobbett is more solemn and significant than the throne. Withhim died the sort of democracy that was a return to Nature, and whichonly poets and mobs can understand. After him Radicalism is urban--andToryism suburban. Going through green Warwickshire, Cobbett might havethought of the crops and Shelley of the clouds. But Shelley would havecalled Birmingham what Cobbett called it--a hell-hole. Cobbett was onewith after Liberals in the ideal of Man under an equal law, a citizen ofno mean city. He differed from after Liberals in strongly affirming thatLiverpool and Leeds are mean cities. 

It is no idle Hibernianism to say that towards the end of the eighteenthcentury the most important event in English history happened in France. It would seem still more perverse, yet it would be still more precise, to say that the most important event in English history was the eventthat never happened at all--the English Revolution on the lines of theFrench Revolution. Its failure was not due to any lack of fervour oreven ferocity in those who would have brought it about: from the timewhen the first shout went up for Wilkes to the time when the lastLuddite fires were quenched in a cold rain of rationalism, the spirit ofCobbett, of rural republicanism, of English and patriotic democracy, burned like a beacon. The revolution failed because it was foiled byanother revolution; an aristocratic revolution, a victory of the richover the poor. It was about this time that the common lands were finallyenclosed; that the more cruel game laws were first established; thatEngland became finally a land of landlords instead of commonland-owners. I will not call it a Tory reaction; for much of the worstof it (especially of the land-grabbing) was done by Whigs; but we maycertainly call it Anti-Jacobin. Now this fact, though political, is notonly relevant but essential to everything that concerned literature. Theupshot was that though England was full of the revolutionary ideas, nevertheless there was no revolution. And the effect of this in turn wasthat from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of thenineteenth the spirit of revolt in England took a wholly literary form. In France it was what people did that was wild and elemental; in Englandit was what people wrote. It is a quaint comment on the notion that theEnglish are practical and the French merely visionary, that we wererebels in arts while they were rebels in arms. 

It has been well and wittily said (as illustrating the mildness ofEnglish and the violence of French developments) that the same Gospel ofRousseau which in France produced the Terror, in England produced_Sandford and Merton_. But people forget that in literature the Englishwere by no means restrained by Mr. Barlow; and that if we turn frompolitics to art, we shall find the two parts peculiarly reversed. Itwould be equally true to say that the same eighteenth-centuryemancipation which in France produced the pictures of David, in Englandproduced the pictures of Blake. There never were, I think, men who gaveto the imagination so much of the sense of having broken out into thevery borderlands of being, as did the great English poets of theromantic or revolutionary period; than Coleridge in the secret sunlightof the Antarctic, where the waters were like witches' oils; than Keatslooking out of those extreme mysterious casements upon that ultimatesea. The heroes and criminals of the great French crisis would have beenquite as incapable of such imaginative independence as Keats andColeridge would have been incapable of winning the battle of Wattignies. In Paris the tree of liberty was a garden tree, clipped very correctly;and Robespierre used the razor more regularly than the guillotine. Danton, who knew and admired English literature, would have cursedfreely over _Kubla Khan_; and if the Committee of Public Safety had notalready executed Shelley as an aristocrat, they would certainly havelocked him up for a madman. Even Hébert (the one really vileRevolutionist), had he been reproached by English poets with worshippingthe Goddess of Reason, might legitimately have retorted that it wasrather the Goddess of Unreason that they set up to be worshipped. Verbally considered, Carlyle's _French Revolution_ was morerevolutionary than the real French Revolution: and if Carrier, in anexaggerative phrase, empurpled the Loire with carnage, Turner almostliterally set the Thames on fire. 

This trend of the English Romantics to carry out the revolutionary ideanot savagely in works, but very wildly indeed in words, had severalresults; the most important of which was this. It started Englishliterature after the Revolution with a sort of bent towards independenceand eccentricity, which in the brighter wits became individuality, andin the duller ones, Individualism. English Romantics, English Liberals, were not public men making a republic, but poets, each seeing a vision. The lonelier version of liberty was a sort of aristocratic anarchism inByron and Shelley; but though in Victorian times it faded into muchmilder prejudices and much more _bourgeois_ crotchets, England retainedfrom that twist a certain odd separation and privacy. England becamemuch more of an island than she had ever been before. There fell fromher about this time, not only the understanding of France or Germany, but to her own long and yet lingering disaster, the understanding ofIreland. She had not joined in the attempt to create European democracy;nor did she, save in the first glow of Waterloo, join in thecounter-attempt to destroy it. The life in her literature was still, toa large extent, the romantic liberalism of Rousseau, the free and humanetruisms that had refreshed the other nations, the return to Nature andto natural rights. But that which in Rousseau was a creed, became inHazlitt a taste and in Lamb little more than a whim. These latter andtheir like form a group at the beginning of the nineteenth century ofthose we may call the Eccentrics: they gather round Coleridge and hisdecaying dreams or linger in the tracks of Keats and Shelley and Godwin;Lamb with his bibliomania and creed of pure caprice, the most unique ofall geniuses; Leigh Hunt with his Bohemian impecuniosity; Landor withhis tempestuous temper, throwing plates on the floor; Hazlitt with hisbitterness and his low love affair; even that healthier and happierBohemian, Peacock. With these, in one sense at least, goes De Quincey. He was, unlike most of these embers of the revolutionary age in letters, a Tory; and was attached to the political army which is best representedin letters by the virile laughter and leisure of Wilson's _NoctesAmbrosianæ_. But he had nothing in common with that environment. Itremained for some time as a Tory tradition, which balanced the cold andbrilliant aristocracy of the Whigs. It lived on the legend of Trafalgar;the sense that insularity was independence; the sense that anomalies areas jolly as family jokes; the general sense that old salts are the saltof the earth. It still lives in some old songs about Nelson or Waterloo, which are vastly more pompous and vastly more sincere than the cockneycocksureness of later Jingo lyrics. But it is hard to connect De Quinceywith it; or, indeed, with anything else. De Quincey would certainly havebeen a happier man, and almost certainly a better man, if he had gotdrunk on toddy with Wilson, instead of getting calm and clear (as hehimself describes) on opium, and with no company but a book of Germanmetaphysics. But he would hardly have revealed those wonderful vistasand perspectives of prose, which permit one to call him the first andmost powerful of the decadents: those sentences that lengthen out likenightmare corridors, or rise higher and higher like impossible easternpagodas. He was a morbid fellow, and far less moral than Burns; for whenBurns confessed excess he did not defend it. But he has cast a giganticshadow on our literature, and was as certainly a genius as Poe. Also hehad humour, which Poe had not. And if any one still smarting from thepinpricks of Wilde or Whistler, wants to convict them of plagiarism intheir "art for art" epigrams--he will find most of what they said saidbetter in _Murder as One of the Fine Arts_. 

One great man remains of this elder group, who did their last work onlyunder Victoria; he knew most of the members of it, yet he did not belongto it in any corporate sense. He was a poor man and an invalid, withScotch blood and a strong, though perhaps only inherited, quarrel withthe old Calvinism; by name Thomas Hood. Poverty and illness forced himto the toils of an incessant jester; and the revolt against gloomyreligion made him turn his wit, whenever he could, in the direction ofa defence of happier and humaner views. In the long great roll thatincludes Homer and Shakespeare, he was the last great man who reallyemployed the pun. His puns were not all good (nor were Shakespeare's), but the best of them were a strong and fresh form of art. The pun issaid to be a thing of two meanings; but with Hood there were threemeanings, for there was also the abstract truth that would have beenthere with no pun at all. The pun of Hood is underrated, like the "wit"of Voltaire, by those who forget that the words of Voltaire were notpins, but swords. In Hood at his best the verbal neatness only gives tothe satire or the scorn a ring of finality such as is given by rhyme. For rhyme does go with reason, since the aim of both is to bring thingsto an end. The tragic necessity of puns tautened and hardened Hood'sgenius; so that there is always a sort of shadow of that sharpnessacross all his serious poems, falling like the shadow of a sword. "Sewing at once with a double thread a shroud as well as a shirt"--"Wethought her dying when she slept, and sleeping when she died"--"Oh God, that bread should be so dear and flesh and blood so cheap"--none canfail to note in these a certain fighting discipline of phrase, acompactness and point which was well trained in lines like "Acannon-ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms. " In France hewould have been a great epigrammatist, like Hugo. In England he is apunster. 

There was nothing at least in this group I have loosely called theEccentrics that disturbs the general sense that all their generation waspart of the sunset of the great revolutionary poets. This fading glamouraffected England in a sentimental and, to some extent, a snobbishdirection; making men feel that great lords with long curls and whiskerswere naturally the wits that led the world. But it affected England alsonegatively and by reaction; for it associated such men as Byron withsuperiority, but not with success. The English middle classes were ledto distrust poetry almost as much as they admired it. They could notbelieve that either vision at the one end or violence at the other couldever be practical. They were deaf to that great warning of Hugo: "Yousay the poet is in the clouds; but so is the thunderbolt. " Idealsexhausted themselves in the void; Victorian England, very unwisely, would have no more to do with idealists in politics. And this, chiefly, because there had been about these great poets a young and splendidsterility; since the pantheist Shelley was in fact washed under by thewave of the world, or Byron sank in death as he drew the sword forHellas. 

The chief turn of nineteenth-century England was taken about the timewhen a footman at Holland House opened a door and announced "Mr. Macaulay. " Macaulay's literary popularity was representative and it wasdeserved; but his presence among the great Whig families marks anepoch. He was the son of one of the first "friends of the negro, " whosehonest industry and philanthropy were darkened by a religion of sombresmugness, which almost makes one fancy they loved the negro for hiscolour, and would have turned away from red or yellow men as needlesslygaudy. But his wit and his politics (combined with that dropping of thePuritan tenets but retention of the Puritan tone which marked his classand generation), lifted him into a sphere which was utterly opposite tothat from which he came. This Whig world was exclusive; but it was notnarrow. It was very difficult for an outsider to get into it; but if hedid get into it he was in a much freer atmosphere than any other inEngland. Of those aristocrats, the Old Guard of the eighteenth century, many denied God, many defended Bonaparte, and nearly all sneered at theRoyal Family. Nor did wealth or birth make any barriers for those oncewithin this singular Whig world. The platform was high, but it waslevel. Moreover the upstart nowadays pushes himself by wealth: but theWhigs could choose their upstarts. In that world Macaulay found Rogers, with his phosphorescent and corpse-like brilliancy; there he foundSydney Smith, bursting with crackers of common sense, an admirable oldheathen; there he found Tom Moore, the romantic of the Regency, ashortened shadow of Lord Byron. That he reached this platform andremained on it is, I say, typical of a turning-point in the century. Forthe fundamental fact of early Victorian history was this: the decisionof the middle classes to employ their new wealth in backing up a sort ofaristocratical compromise, and not (like the middle class in the FrenchRevolution) insisting on a clean sweep and a clear democratic programme. It went along with the decision of the aristocracy to recruit itselfmore freely from the middle class. It was then also that Victorian"prudery" began: the great lords yielded on this as on Free Trade. These two decisions have made the doubtful England of to-day; andMacaulay is typical of them; he is the _bourgeois_ in Belgravia. Thealliance is marked by his great speeches for Lord Grey's Reform Bill: itis marked even more significantly in his speech against the Chartists. Cobbett was dead. 

Macaulay makes the foundation of the Victorian age in all its veryEnglish and unique elements: its praise of Puritan politics andabandonment of Puritan theology; its belief in a cautious but perpetualpatching up of the Constitution; its admiration for industrial wealth. But above all he typifies the two things that really make the VictorianAge itself, the cheapness and narrowness of its conscious formulæ; therichness and humanity of its unconscious tradition. There were twoMacaulays, a rational Macaulay who was generally wrong, and a romanticMacaulay who was almost invariably right. All that was small in himderives from the dull parliamentarism of men like Sir James Mackintosh;but all that was great in him has much more kinship with the festiveantiquarianism of Sir Walter Scott. 

As a philosopher he had only two thoughts; and neither of them is true. The first was that politics, as an experimental science, must go onimproving, along with clocks, pistols or penknives, by the mereaccumulation of experiment and variety. He was, indeed, far toostrong-minded a man to accept the hazy modern notion that the soul inits highest sense can change: he seems to have held that religion cannever get any better and that poetry rather tends to get worse. But hedid not see the flaw in his political theory; which is that unless thesoul improves with time there is no guarantee that the accumulations ofexperience will be adequately used. Figures do not add themselves up;birds do not label or stuff themselves; comets do not calculate theirown courses; these things are done by the soul of man. And if the soulof man is subject to other laws, is liable to sin, to sleep, toanarchism or to suicide, then all sciences including politics may fallas sterile and lie as fallow as before man's reason was made. Macaulayseemed sometimes to talk as if clocks produced clocks, or guns hadfamilies of little pistols, or a penknife littered like a pig. The otherview he held was the more or less utilitarian theory of toleration; thatwe should get the best butcher whether he was a Baptist or aMuggletonian, and the best soldier whether he was a Wesleyan or anIrvingite. The compromise worked well enough in an England Protestant inbulk; but Macaulay ought to have seen that it has its limitations. Agood butcher might be a Baptist; he is not very likely to be a Buddhist. A good soldier might be a Wesleyan; he would hardly be a Quaker. For therest, Macaulay was concerned to interpret the seventeenth century interms of the triumph of the Whigs as champions of public rights; and heupheld this one-sidedly but not malignantly in a style of rounded andringing sentences, which at its best is like steel and at its worst liketin. 

This was the small conscious Macaulay; the great unconscious Macaulaywas very different. His noble enduring quality in our literature isthis: that he truly had an abstract passion for history; a warm, poeticand sincere enthusiasm for great things as such; an ardour and appetitefor great books, great battles, great cities, great men. He felt andused names like trumpets. The reader's greatest joy is in the writer'sown joy, when he can let his last phrase fall like a hammer on someresounding name like Hildebrand or Charlemagne, on the eagles of Rome orthe pillars of Hercules. As with Walter Scott, some of the best thingsin his prose and poetry are the surnames that he did not make. And it isremarkable to notice that this romance of history, so far from makinghim more partial or untrustworthy, was the only thing that made himmoderately just. His reason was entirely one-sided and fanatical. Itwas his imagination that was well-balanced and broad. He wasmonotonously certain that only Whigs were right; but it was necessarythat Tories should at least be great, that his heroes might have foemenworthy of their steel. If there was one thing in the world he hated itwas a High Church Royalist parson; yet when Jeremy Collier the Jacobitepriest raises a real banner, all Macaulay's blood warms with the mereprospect of a fight. "It is inspiriting to see how gallantly thesolitary outlaw advances to attack enemies formidable separately, and, it might have been thought, irresistible when combined; distributes hisswashing blows right and left among Wycherley, Congreve and Vanbrugh, treads the wretched D'Urfey down in the dirt beneath his feet; andstrikes with all his strength full at the towering crest of Dryden. "That is exactly where Macaulay is great; because he is almost Homeric. The whole triumph turns upon mere names; but men are commanded bynames. So his poem on the Armada is really a good geography book gonemad; one sees the map of England come alive and march and mix under theeye. 

The chief tragedy in the trend of later literature may be expressed bysaying that the smaller Macaulay conquered the larger. Later men hadless and less of that hot love of history he had inherited from Scott. They had more and more of that cold science of self-interests which hehad learnt from Bentham. 

The name of this great man, though it belongs to a period before theVictorian, is, like the name of Cobbett, very important to it. Insubstance Macaulay accepted the conclusions of Bentham; though heoffered brilliant objections to all his arguments. In any case the soulof Bentham (if he had one) went marching on, like John Brown; and in thecentral Victorian movement it was certainly he who won. John Stuart Millwas the final flower of that growth. He was himself fresh and delicateand pure; but that is the business of a flower. Though he had to preacha hard rationalism in religion, a hard competition in economics, a hardegoism in ethics, his own soul had all that silvery sensitiveness thatcan be seen in his fine portrait by Watts. He boasted none of thatbrutal optimism with which his friends and followers of the ManchesterSchool expounded their cheery negations. There was about Mill even asort of embarrassment; he exhibited all the wheels of his iron universerather reluctantly, like a gentleman in trade showing ladies over hisfactory. There shone in him a beautiful reverence for women, which isall the more touching because, in his department, as it were, he couldonly offer them so dry a gift as the Victorian Parliamentary Franchise. 

Now in trying to describe how the Victorian writers stood to each other, we must recur to the very real difficulty noted at the beginning: thedifficulty of keeping the moral order parallel with the chronologicalorder. For the mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions andnot by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction willoccur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated:notions will be first defined long after they are dead. It is no goodgetting the almanac to look up moonshine; and most literature in thissense is moonshine. Thus Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as itwere, from a Shelleyan extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. ThusNewman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yetdelivered, that was coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason noone can understand tradition, or even history, who has not sometenderness for anachronism. 

Now for the great part of the Victorian era the utilitarian traditionwhich reached its highest in Mill held the centre of the field; it wasthe philosophy in office, so to speak. It sustained its march ofcodification and inquiry until it had made possible the great victoriesof Darwin and Huxley and Wallace. If we take Macaulay at the beginningof the epoch and Huxley at the end of it, we shall find that they hadmuch in common. They were both square-jawed, simple men, greedy ofcontroversy but scornful of sophistry, dead to mysticism but very muchalive to morality; and they were both very much more under the influenceof their own admirable rhetoric than they knew. Huxley, especially, wasmuch more a literary than a scientific man. It is amusing to note thatwhen Huxley was charged with being rhetorical, he expressed his horrorof "plastering the fair face of truth with that pestilent cosmetic, rhetoric, " which is itself about as well-plastered a piece of rhetoricas Ruskin himself could have managed. The difference that the period haddeveloped can best be seen if we consider this: that while neither wasof a spiritual sort, Macaulay took it for granted that common senserequired some kind of theology, while Huxley took it for granted thatcommon sense meant having none. Macaulay, it is said, never talked abouthis religion: but Huxley was always talking about the religion he hadn'tgot. 

But though this simple Victorian rationalism held the centre, and in acertain sense _was_ the Victorian era, it was assailed on many sides, and had been assailed even before the beginning of that era. The rest ofthe intellectual history of the time is a series of reactions againstit, which come wave after wave. They have succeeded in shaking it, butnot in dislodging it from the modern mind. The first of these was theOxford Movement; a bow that broke when it had let loose the flashingarrow that was Newman. The second reaction was one man; without teachersor pupils--Dickens. The third reaction was a group that tried to createa sort of new romantic Protestantism, to pit against both Reason andRome--Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, Maurice--perhaps Tennyson. Browningalso was at once romantic and Puritan; but he belonged to no group, andworked against materialism in a manner entirely his own. Though as a boyhe bought eagerly Shelley's revolutionary poems, he did not think ofbecoming a revolutionary poet. He concentrated on the special souls ofmen; seeking God in a series of private interviews. Hence Browning, great as he is, is rather one of the Victorian novelists than wholly ofthe Victorian poets. From Ruskin, again, descend those who may be calledthe Pre-Raphaelites of prose and poetry. 

It is really with this rationalism triumphant, and with the romance ofthese various attacks on it, that the study of Victorian literaturebegins and proceeds. Bentham was already the prophet of a powerful sect;Macaulay was already the historian of an historic party, before the trueVictorian epoch began. The middle classes were emerging in a state ofdamaged Puritanism. The upper classes were utterly pagan. Their clearand courageous testimony remains in those immortal words of LordMelbourne, who had led the young queen to the throne and long stoodthere as her protector. "No one has more respect for the Christianreligion than I have; but really, when it comes to intruding it intoprivate life----" What was pure paganism in the politics of Melbournebecame a sort of mystical cynicism in the politics of Disraeli; and iswell mirrored in his novels--for he was a man who felt at home inmirrors. With every allowance for aliens and eccentrics and all theaccidents that must always eat the edges of any systematiccircumference, it may still be said that the Utilitarians held the fort. 

Of the Oxford Movement what remains most strongly in the Victorian Epochcentres round the challenge of Newman, its one great literary man. Butthe movement as a whole had been of great significance in the verygenesis and make up of the society: yet that significance is not quiteeasy immediately to define. It was certainly not æsthetic ritualism;scarcely one of the Oxford High Churchmen was what we should call aRitualist. It was certainly not a conscious reaching out towards Rome:except on a Roman Catholic theory which might explain all our unrests bythat dim desire. It knew little of Europe, it knew nothing of Ireland, to which any merely Roman Catholic revulsion would obviously haveturned. In the first instance, I think, the more it is studied, the moreit would appear that it was a movement of mere religion as such. It wasnot so much a taste for Catholic dogma, but simply a hunger for dogma. For dogma means the serious satisfaction of the mind. Dogma does notmean the absence of thought, but the end of thought. It was a revoltagainst the Victorian spirit in one particular aspect of it; which mayroughly be called (in a cosy and domestic Victorian metaphor) havingyour cake and eating it too. It saw that the solid and seriousVictorians were fundamentally frivolous--because they werefundamentally inconsistent. 

A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligenttalk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. Solong as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and ashape. Mahomet created, when he forbade wine but allowed five wives: hecreated a very big thing, which we have still to deal with. The firstFrench Republic created, when it affirmed property and abolishedpeerages; France still stands like a square, four-sided building whichEurope has besieged in vain. The men of the Oxford Movement would havebeen horrified at being compared either with Moslems or Jacobins. Buttheir sub-conscious thirst was for something that Moslems and Jacobinshad and ordinary Anglicans had not: the exalted excitement ofconsistency. If you were a Moslem you were not a Bacchanal. If you werea Republican you were not a peer. And so the Oxford men, even in theirfirst and dimmest stages, felt that if you were a Churchman you were nota Dissenter. The Oxford Movement was, out of the very roots of itsbeing, a rational movement; almost a rationalist movement. In that itdiffered sharply from the other reactions that shook the Utilitariancompromise; the blinding mysticism of Carlyle, the mere manlyemotionalism of Dickens. It was an appeal to reason: reason said that ifa Christian had a feast day he must have a fast day too. Otherwise, alldays ought to be alike; and this was that very Utilitarianism againstwhich their Oxford Movement was the first and most rational assault. 

This idea, even by reason of its reason, narrowed into a sort of sharpspear, of which the spear blade was Newman. It did forget many of theother forces that were fighting on its side. But the movement couldboast, first and last, many men who had this eager dogmatic quality:Keble, who spoilt a poem in order to recognise a doctrine; Faber, whotold the rich, almost with taunts, that God sent the poor as eagles tostrip them; Froude, who with Newman announced his return in the arrogantmotto of Achilles. But the greater part of all this happened before whatis properly our period; and in that period Newman, and perhaps Newmanalone, is the expression and summary of the whole school. It wascertainly in the Victorian Age, and after his passage to Rome, thatNewman claimed his complete right to be in any book on modern Englishliterature. This is no place for estimating his theology: but one pointabout it does clearly emerge. Whatever else is right, the theory thatNewman went over to Rome to find peace and an end of argument, is quiteunquestionably wrong. He had far more quarrels after he had gone over toRome. But, though he had far more quarrels, he had far fewercompromises: and he was of that temper which is tortured more bycompromise than by quarrel. He was a man at once of abnormal energy andabnormal sensibility: nobody without that combination could have writtenthe _Apologia_. If he sometimes seemed to skin his enemies alive, it wasbecause he himself lacked a skin. In this sense his _Apologia_ is atriumph far beyond the ephemeral charge on which it was founded; in thissense he does indeed (to use his own expression) vanquish not hisaccuser but his judges. Many men would shrink from recording all theircold fits and hesitations and prolonged inconsistencies: I am sure itwas the breath of life to Newman to confess them, now that he had donewith them for ever. His _Lectures on the Present Position of EnglishCatholics_, practically preached against a raging mob, rise not onlyhigher but happier, as his instant unpopularity increases. There issomething grander than humour, there is fun, in the very first lectureabout the British Constitution as explained to a meeting of Russians. But always his triumphs are the triumphs of a highly sensitive man: aman must feel insults before he can so insultingly and splendidlyavenge them. He is a naked man, who carries a naked sword. The qualityof his literary style is so successful that it succeeds in escapingdefinition. The quality of his logic is that of a long but passionatepatience, which waits until he has fixed all corners of an iron trap. But the quality of his moral comment on the age remains what I havesaid: a protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasingirrationality of mere Victorian comfort and compromise. So far as thepresent purpose is concerned, his protest died with him: he left fewimitators and (it may easily be conceived) no successful imitators. Thesuggestion of him lingers on in the exquisite Elizabethan perversity ofCoventry Patmore; and has later flamed out from the shy volcano ofFrancis Thompson. Otherwise (as we shall see in the parallel case ofRuskin's Socialism) he has no followers in his own age: but very many inours. 

The next group of reactionaries or romantics or whatever we elect tocall them, gathers roughly around one great name. Scotland, from whichhad come so many of those harsh economists who made the first Radicalphilosophies of the Victorian Age, was destined also to fling forth (Ihad almost said to spit forth) their fiercest and most extraordinaryenemy. The two primary things in Thomas Carlyle were his early Scotcheducation and his later German culture. The first was in almost allrespects his strength; the latter in some respects his weakness. As anordinary lowland peasant, he inherited the really valuable historicproperty of the Scots, their independence, their fighting spirit, andtheir instinctive philosophic consideration of men merely as men. But hewas not an ordinary peasant. If he had laboured obscurely in his villagetill death, he would have been yet locally a marked man; a man with awild eye, a man with an air of silent anger; perhaps a man at whomstones were sometimes thrown. A strain of disease and suffering ranathwart both his body and his soul. In spite of his praise of silence, it was only through his gift of utterance that he escaped madness. Butwhile his fellow-peasants would have seen this in him and perhaps mockedit, they would also have seen something which they always expect in suchmen, and they would have got it: vision, a power in the mind akin tosecond sight. Like many ungainly or otherwise unattractive Scotchmen, hewas a seer. By which I do not mean to refer so much to histranscendental rhapsodies about the World-soul or the Nature-garment orthe Mysteries and Eternities generally, these seem to me to belong moreto his German side and to be less sincere and vital. I mean a real powerof seeing things suddenly, not apparently reached by any process; agrand power of guessing. He _saw_ the crowd of the new States General, Danton with his "rude flattened face, " Robespierre peering mistilythrough his spectacles. He _saw_ the English charge at Dunbar. He_guessed_ that Mirabeau, however dissipated and diseased, had somethingsturdy inside him. He _guessed_ that Lafayette, however brave andvictorious, had nothing inside him. He supported the lawlessness ofCromwell, because across two centuries he almost physically _felt_ thefeebleness and hopelessness of the moderate Parliamentarians. He said aword of sympathy for the universally vituperated Jacobins of theMountain, because through thick veils of national prejudice andmisrepresentation, he felt the impossibility of the Gironde. He waswrong in denying to Scott the power of being inside his characters: buthe really had a good deal of that power himself. It was one of hisinnumerable and rather provincial crotchets to encourage prose asagainst poetry. But, as a matter of fact, he himself was much greaterconsidered as a kind of poet than considered as anything else; and thecentral idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child. 

He first emerged, as it were, as a student and disciple of Goethe. Theconnection was not wholly fortunate. With much of what Goethe reallystood for he was not really in sympathy; but in his own obstinate way, he tried to knock his idol into shape instead of choosing another. Hepushed further and further the extravagances of a vivid but veryunbalanced and barbaric style, in the praise of a poet who reallyrepresented the calmest classicism and the attempt to restore a Hellenicequilibrium in the mind. It is like watching a shaggy Scandinaviandecorating a Greek statue washed up by chance on his shores. And whilethe strength of Goethe was a strength of completion and serenity, whichCarlyle not only never found but never even sought, the weaknesses ofGoethe were of a sort that did not draw the best out of Carlyle. The onecivilised element that the German classicists forgot to put into theirbeautiful balance was a sense of humour. And great poet as Goethe was, there is to the last something faintly fatuous about his halfsceptical, half sentimental self-importance; a Lord Chamberlain ofteacup politics; an earnest and elderly flirt; a German of the Germans. Now Carlyle had humour; he had it in his very style, but it never gotinto his philosophy. His philosophy largely remained a heavy Teutonicidealism, absurdly unaware of the complexity of things; as when heperpetually repeated (as with a kind of flat-footed stamping) thatpeople ought to tell the truth; apparently supposing, to quoteStevenson's phrase, that telling the truth is as easy as blind hookey. Yet, though his general honesty is unquestionable, he was by no meansone of those who will give up a fancy under the shock of a fact. If bysheer genius he frequently guessed right, he was not the kind of man toadmit easily that he had guessed wrong. His version of Cromwell's filthycruelties in Ireland, or his impatient slurring over of the mostsinister riddle in the morality of Frederick the Great--these passagesare, one must frankly say, disingenuous. But it is, so to speak, agenerous disingenuousness; the heat and momentum of sincere admirations, not the shuffling fear and flattery of the constitutional or patriotichistorian. It bears most resemblance to the incurable prejudices of awoman. 

For the rest there hovered behind all this transcendental haze a certainpresence of old northern paganism; he really had some sympathy with thevast vague gods of that moody but not unmanly Nature-worship which seemsto have filled the darkness of the North before the coming of the RomanEagle or the Christian Cross. This he combined, allowing for certainsceptical omissions, with the grisly Old Testament God he had heardabout in the black Sabbaths of his childhood; and so promulgated(against both Rationalists and Catholics) a sort of heathen Puritanism:Protestantism purged of its evidences of Christianity. 

His great and real work was the attack on Utilitarianism: which did realgood, though there was much that was muddled and dangerous in thehistorical philosophy which he preached as an alternative. It is hisreal glory that he was the first to see clearly and say plainly thegreat truth of our time; that the wealth of the state is not theprosperity of the people. Macaulay and the Mills and all the regular runof the Early Victorians, took it for granted that if Manchester wasgetting richer, we had got hold of the key to comfort and progress. Carlyle pointed out (with stronger sagacity and humour than he showed onany other question) that it was just as true to say that Manchester wasgetting poorer as that it was getting richer: or, in other words, thatManchester was not getting richer at all, but only some of the lesspleasing people in Manchester. In this matter he is to be noted inconnection with national developments much later; for he thus became thefirst prophet of the Socialists. _Sartor Resartus_ is an admirablefantasia; _The French Revolution_ is, with all its faults, a reallyfine piece of history; the lectures on Heroes contain some masterlysketches of personalities. But I think it is in _Past and Present_, andthe essay on _Chartism_, that Carlyle achieves the work he was chosen bygods and men to achieve; which possibly might not have been achieved bya happier or more healthy-minded man. He never rose to more deadly ironythan in such _macabre_ descriptions as that of the poor woman provingher sisterhood with the rich by giving them all typhoid fever; or thatperfect piece of _badinage_ about "Overproduction of Shirts"; in whichhe imagines the aristocrats claiming to be quite clear of this offence. "Will you bandy accusations, will you accuse _us_ of overproduction? Wetake the Heavens and the Earth to witness that we have produced nothingat all. .. . He that accuses us of producing, let him show himself. Lethim say what and when. " And he never wrote so sternly and justly as whenhe compared the "divine sorrow" of Dante with the "undivine sorrow" ofUtilitarianism, which had already come down to talking about thebreeding of the poor and to hinting at infanticide. This is arepresentative quarrel; for if the Utilitarian spirit reached itshighest point in Mill, it certainly reached its lowest point in Malthus. 

One last element in the influence of Carlyle ought to be mentioned;because it very strongly dominated his disciples--especially Kingsley, and to some extent Tennyson and Ruskin. Because he frowned at thecockney cheerfulness of the cheaper economists, they and othersrepresented him as a pessimist, and reduced all his azure infinities toa fit of the blues. But Carlyle's philosophy, more carefully considered, will be found to be dangerously optimist rather than pessimist. As athinker Carlyle is not sad, but recklessly and rather unscrupulouslysatisfied. For he seems to have held the theory that good could not bedefinitely defeated in this world; and that everything in the long runfinds its right level. It began with what we may call the "Bible ofHistory" idea: that all affairs and politics were a clouded but unbrokenrevelation of the divine. Thus any enormous and unaltered humansettlement--as the Norman Conquest or the secession of America--we mustsuppose to be the will of God. It lent itself to picturesque treatment;and Carlyle and the Carlyleans were above all things picturesque. Itgave them at first a rhetorical advantage over the Catholic and otherolder schools. They could boast that their Creator was still creating;that he was in Man and Nature, and was not hedged round in a Paradise orimprisoned in a pyx. They could say their God had not grown too old forwar: that He was present at Gettysburg and Gravelotte as much as atGibeon and Gilboa. I do not mean that they literally said theseparticular things: they are what I should have said had I been bribed todefend their position. But they said things to the same effect: thatwhat manages finally to happen, happens for a higher purpose. Carlylesaid the French Revolution was a thing settled in the eternal councilsto be; and therefore (and not because it was right) attacking it was"fighting against God. " And Kingsley even carried the principle so faras to tell a lady she should remain in the Church of England mainlybecause God had put her there. But in spite of its superficialspirituality and encouragement, it is not hard to see how such adoctrine could be abused. It practically comes to saying that God is onthe side of the big battalions--or at least, of the victorious ones. Thus a creed which set out to create conquerors would only corruptsoldiers; corrupt them with a craven and unsoldierly worship of success:and that which began as the philosophy of courage ends as the philosophyof cowardice. If, indeed, Carlyle were right in saying that right isonly "rightly articulated" might, men would never articulate or move inany way. For no act can have might before it is done: if there is noright, it cannot rationally be done at all. This element, like theAnti-Utilitarian element, is to be kept in mind in connection with afterdevelopments: for in this Carlyle is the first cry of Imperialism, as(in the other case) of Socialism: and the two babes unborn who stir atthe trumpet are Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Kipling alsocarries on from Carlyle the concentration on the purely Hebraic parts ofthe Bible. The fallacy of this whole philosophy is that if God is indeedpresent at a modern battle, He may be present not as on Gilboa butGolgotha. 

Carlyle's direct historical worship of strength and the rest of it wasfortunately not very fruitful; and perhaps lingered only in Froude thehistorian. Even he is more an interruption than a continuity. Froudedevelops rather the harsher and more impatient moral counsels of hismaster than like Ruskin the more romantic and sympathetic. He carries onthe tradition of Hero Worship: but carries far beyond Carlyle thepractice of worshipping people who cannot rationally be called heroes. In this matter that eccentric eye of the seer certainly helped Carlyle:in Cromwell and Frederick the Great there was at least somethingself-begotten, original or mystical; if they were not heroes they wereat least demigods or perhaps demons. But Froude set himself to thepraise of the Tudors, a much lower class of people; ill-conditionedprosperous people who merely waxed fat and kicked. Such strength asHenry VIII had was the strength of a badly trained horse that bolts, notof any clear or courageous rider who controls him. There is a sort ofstrong man mentioned in Scripture who, because he masters himself, ismore than he that takes a city. There is another kind of strong man(known to the medical profession) who cannot master himself; and whom itmay take half a city to take alive. But for all that he is a lowlunatic, and not a hero; and of that sort were too many of the heroeswhom Froude attempted to praise. A kind of instinct kept Carlyle fromover-praising Henry VIII; or that highly cultivated and complicatedliar, Queen Elizabeth. Here, the only importance of this is that one ofCarlyle's followers carried further that "strength" which was the realweakness of Carlyle. I have heard that Froude's life of Carlyle wasunsympathetic; but if it was so it was a sort of parricide. For therest, like Macaulay, he was a picturesque and partisan historian: but, like Macaulay (and unlike the craven scientific historians of to-day) hewas not ashamed of being partisan or of being picturesque. Such studiesas he wrote on the Elizabethan seamen and adventurers, represent verytriumphantly the sort of romance of England that all this school wasattempting to establish; and link him up with Kingsley and the rest. 

Ruskin may be very roughly regarded as the young lieutenant of Carlylein his war on Utilitarian Radicalism: but as an individual he presentsmany and curious divergences. In the matter of style, he enrichedEnglish without disordering it. And in the matter of religion (whichwas the key of this age as of every other) he did not, like Carlyle, setup the romance of the great Puritans as a rival to the romance of theCatholic Church. Rather he set up and worshipped all the arts andtrophies of the Catholic Church as a rival to the Church itself. Noneneed dispute that he held a perfectly tenable position if he chose toassociate early Florentine art with a Christianity still comparativelypure, and such sensualities as the Renaissance bred with the corruptionof a Papacy. But this does not alter, as a merely artistic fact, thestrange air of ill-ease and irritation with which Ruskin seems to teardown the gargoyles of Amiens or the marbles of Venice, as things ofwhich Europe is not worthy; and take them away with him to a reallycareful museum, situated dangerously near Clapham. Many of the great menof that generation, indeed, had a sort of divided mind; an ethicalheadache which was literally a "splitting headache"; for there was aschism in the sympathies. When these men looked at some historicobject, like the Catholic Church or the French Revolution, they did notknow whether they loved or hated it most. Carlyle's two eyes were out offocus, as one may say, when he looked at democracy: he had one eye onValmy and the other on Sedan. In the same way, Ruskin had a strong righthand that wrote of the great mediæval minsters in tall harmonies andtraceries as splendid as their own; and also, so to speak, a weak andfeverish left hand that was always fidgeting and trying to take the penaway--and write an evangelical tract about the immorality of foreigners. Many of their contemporaries were the same. The sea of Tennyson's mindwas troubled under its serene surface. The incessant excitement ofKingsley, though romantic and attractive in many ways, was a great dealmore like Nervous Christianity than Muscular Christianity. It would bequite unfair to say of Ruskin that there was any major inconsistencybetween his mediæval tastes and his very unmediæval temper: and minorinconsistencies do not matter in anybody. But it is not quite unfair tosay of him that he seemed to want all parts of the Cathedral except thealtar. 

As an artist in prose he is one of the most miraculous products of theextremely poetical genius of England. The length of a Ruskin sentence islike that length in the long arrow that was boasted of by the drawers ofthe long bow. He draws, not a cloth-yard shaft but a long lance to hisear: he shoots a spear. But the whole goes light as a bird and straightas a bullet. There is no Victorian writer before him to whom he evensuggests a comparison, technically considered, except perhaps DeQuincey; who also employed the long rich rolling sentence that, like arocket, bursts into stars at the end. But De Quincey's sentences, as Ihave said, have always a dreamy and insecure sense about them, like theturret on toppling turret of some mad sultan's pagoda. Ruskin's sentencebranches into brackets and relative clauses as a straight strong treebranches into boughs and bifurcations, rather shaking off its burdenthan merely adding to it. It is interesting to remember that Ruskinwrote some of the best of these sentences in the attempt to show that hedid understand the growth of trees, and that nobody else did--exceptTurner, of course. It is also (to those acquainted with his perverse andwild rhetorical prejudices) even more amusing to remember that if aRuskin sentence (occupying one or two pages of small print) does notremind us of the growth of a tree, the only other thing it does remindof is the triumphant passage of a railway train. 

Ruskin left behind him in his turn two quite separate streams ofinspiration. The first and more practical was concerned, like Carlyle's_Chartism_, with a challenge to the social conclusions of the orthodoxeconomists. He was not so great a man as Carlyle, but he was a much moreclear-headed man; and the point and stab of his challenge still reallystands and sticks, like a dagger in a dead man. He answered the theorythat we must always get the cheapest labour we can, by pointing out thatwe never do get the cheapest labour we can, in any matter about which wereally care twopence. We do not get the cheapest doctor. We either get adoctor who charges nothing or a doctor who charges a recognised andrespectable fee. We do not trust the cheapest bishop. We do not allowadmirals to compete. We do not tell generals to undercut each other onthe eve of a war. We either employ none of them or we employ all of themat an official rate of pay. All this was set out in the strongest andleast sentimental of his books, _Unto this Last_; but many suggestionsof it are scattered through _Sesame and Lilies_, _The Political Economyof Art_, and even _Modern Painters_. On this side of his soul Ruskinbecame the second founder of Socialism. The argument was not by anymeans a complete or unconquerable weapon, but I think it knocked outwhat little remained of the brains of the early Victorian rationalists. It is entirely nonsensical to speak of Ruskin as a lounging æsthete, whostrolled into economics, and talked sentimentalism. In plain fact, Ruskin was seldom so sensible and logical (right or wrong) as when hewas talking about economics. He constantly talked the most gloriousnonsense about landscape and natural history, which it was his businessto understand. Within his own limits, he talked the most cold commonsense about political economy, which was no business of his at all. 

On the other side of his literary soul, his mere unwrapping of thewealth and wonder of European art, he set going another influence, earlier and vaguer than his influence on Socialism. He represented whatwas at first the Pre-Raphaelite School in painting, but afterwards amuch larger and looser Pre-Raphaelite School in poetry and prose. Theword "looser" will not be found unfair if we remember how Swinburne andall the wildest friends of the Rossettis carried this movement forward. They used the mediæval imagery to blaspheme the mediæval religion. Ruskin's dark and doubtful decision to accept Catholic art but notCatholic ethics had borne rapid or even flagrant fruit by the time thatSwinburne, writing about a harlot, composed a learned and sympatheticand indecent parody on the Litany of the Blessed Virgin. 

With the poets I deal in another part of this book; but the influence ofRuskin's great prose touching art criticism can best be expressed in thename of the next great prose writer on such subjects. That name isWalter Pater: and the name is the full measure of the extent to whichRuskin's vague but vast influence had escaped from his hands. Patereventually joined the Church of Rome (which would not have pleasedRuskin at all), but it is surely fair to say of the mass of his workthat its moral tone is neither Puritan nor Catholic, but strictly andsplendidly Pagan. In Pater we have Ruskin without the prejudices, thatis, without the funny parts. I may be wrong, but I cannot recall at thismoment a single passage in which Pater's style takes a holiday or inwhich his wisdom plays the fool. Newman and Ruskin were as careful andgraceful stylists as he. Newman and Ruskin were as serious, elaborate, and even academic thinkers as he. But Ruskin let himself go aboutrailways. Newman let himself go about Kingsley. Pater cannot let himselfgo for the excellent reason that he wants to stay: to stay at the pointwhere all the keenest emotions meet, as he explains in the splendidperoration of _The Renaissance_. The only objection to being where allthe keenest emotions meet is that you feel none of them. 

In this sense Pater may well stand for a substantial summary of theæsthetes, apart from the purely poetical merits of men like Rossetti andSwinburne. Like Swinburne and others he first attempted to use mediævaltradition without trusting it. These people wanted to see Paganism_through_ Christianity: because it involved the incidental amusement ofseeing through Christianity itself. They not only tried to be in allages at once (which is a very reasonable ambition, though not oftenrealised), but they wanted to be on all sides at once: which isnonsense. Swinburne tries to question the philosophy of Christianity inthe metres of a Christmas carol: and Dante Rossetti tries to write as ifhe were Christina Rossetti. Certainly the almost successful summit ofall this attempt is Pater's superb passage on the Mona Lisa; in which heseeks to make her at once a mystery of good and a mystery of evil. Thephilosophy is false; even evidently false, for it bears no fruit to-day. There never was a woman, not Eve herself in the instant of temptation, who could smile the same smile as the mother of Helen and the mother ofMary. But it is the high-water mark of that vast attempt at animpartiality reached through art: and no other mere artist ever rose sohigh again. 

Apart from this Ruskinian offshoot through Pre-Raphaelitism into whatwas called Æstheticism, the remains of the inspiration of Carlyle fill avery large part in the Victorian life, but not strictly so large a partin the Victorian literature. Charles Kingsley was a great publicist; apopular preacher; a popular novelist; and (in two cases at least) a verygood novelist. His _Water Babies_ is really a breezy and roaring freak;like a holiday at the seaside--a holiday where one talks natural historywithout taking it seriously. Some of the songs in this and other of hisworks are very real songs: notably, "When all the World is Young, Lad, "which comes very near to being the only true defence of marriage in thecontroversies of the nineteenth century. But when all this is allowed, no one will seriously rank Kingsley, in the really literary sense, onthe level of Carlyle or Ruskin, Tennyson or Browning, Dickens orThackeray: and if such a place cannot be given to him, it can be giveneven less to his lusty and pleasant friend, Tom Hughes, whosepersonality floats towards the frankness of the _Boy's Own Paper_; or tohis deep, suggestive metaphysical friend Maurice, who floats rathertowards _The Hibbert Journal_. The moral and social influence of thesethings is not to be forgotten: but they leave the domain of letters. Thevoice of Carlyle is not heard again in letters till the coming ofKipling and Henley. 

One other name of great importance should appear here, because it cannotappear very appropriately anywhere else: the man hardly belonged to thesame school as Ruskin and Carlyle, but fought many of their battles, andwas even more concentrated on their main task--the task of convictingliberal _bourgeois_ England of priggishness and provinciality. I mean, of course, Matthew Arnold. Against Mill's "liberty" and Carlyle's"strength" and Ruskin's "nature, " he set up a new presence and entitywhich he called "culture, " the disinterested play of the mind throughthe sifting of the best books and authorities. Though a little dandifiedin phrase, he was undoubtedly serious and public-spirited in intention. He sometimes talked of culture almost as if it were a man, or at least achurch (for a church has a sort of personality): some may suspect thatculture was a man, whose name was Matthew Arnold. But Arnold was notonly right but highly valuable. If we have said that Carlyle was a manthat saw things, we may add that Arnold was chiefly valuable as a manwho knew things. Well as he was endowed intellectually, his power camemore from information than intellect. He simply happened to know certainthings, that Carlyle didn't know, that Kingsley didn't know, that Huxleyand Herbert Spencer didn't know: that England didn't know. He knew thatEngland was a part of Europe: and not so important a part as it had beenthe morning after Waterloo. He knew that England was then (as it is now)an oligarchical State, and that many great nations are not. He knewthat a real democracy need not live and does not live in that perpetualpanic about using the powers of the State, which possessed men likeSpencer and Cobden. He knew a rational minimum of culture and commoncourtesy could exist and did exist throughout large democracies. He knewthe Catholic Church had been in history "the Church of the multitude":he knew it was not a sect. He knew that great landlords are no more apart of the economic law than nigger-drivers: he knew that small ownerscould and did prosper. He was not so much the philosopher as the man ofthe world: he reminded us that Europe was a society while Ruskin wastreating it as a picture gallery. He was a sort of Heaven-sent courier. His frontal attack on the vulgar and sullen optimism of Victorianutility may be summoned up in the admirable sentence, in which he askedthe English what was the use of a train taking them quickly fromIslington to Camberwell, if it only took them "from a dismal andilliberal life in Islington to a dismal and illiberal life inCamberwell?"

His attitude to that great religious enigma round which all these greatmen were grouped as in a ring, was individual and decidedly curious. Heseems to have believed that a "Historic Church, " that is, someestablished organisation with ceremonies and sacred books, etc. , couldbe perpetually preserved as a sort of vessel to contain the spiritualideas of the age, whatever those ideas might happen to be. He clearlyseems to have contemplated a melting away of the doctrines of the Churchand even of the meaning of the words: but he thought a certain need inman would always be best satisfied by public worship and especially bythe great religious literatures of the past. He would embalm the bodythat it might often be revisited by the soul--or souls. Something of thesort has been suggested by Dr. Coit and others of the ethical societiesin our own time. But while Arnold would loosen the theological bonds ofthe Church, he would not loosen the official bonds of the State. Youmust not disestablish the Church: you must not even leave the Church:you must stop inside it and think what you choose. Enemies might saythat he was simply trying to establish and endow Agnosticism. It isfairer and truer to say that unconsciously he was trying to restorePaganism: for this State Ritualism without theology, and without muchbelief, actually was the practice of the ancient world. Arnold may havethought that he was building an altar to the Unknown God; but he wasreally building it to Divus Cæsar. 

As a critic he was chiefly concerned to preserve criticism itself; toset a measure to praise and blame and support the classics against thefashions. It is here that it is specially true of him, if of no writerelse, that the style was the man. The most vital thing he invented was anew style: founded on the patient unravelling of the tangled Victorianideas, as if they were matted hair under a comb. He did not mind howelaborately long he made a sentence, so long as he made it clear. Hewould constantly repeat whole phrases word for word in the samesentence, rather than risk ambiguity by abbreviation. His genius showeditself in turning this method of a laborious lucidity into a peculiarlyexasperating form of satire and controversy. Newman's strength was in asort of stifled passion, a dangerous patience of polite logic and then:"Cowards! if I advanced a step you would run away: it is not you I fear. _Di me terrent, et Jupiter hostis. _" If Newman seemed suddenly to flyinto a temper, Carlyle seemed never to fly out of one. But Arnold kept asmile of heart-broken forbearance, as of the teacher in an idiot school, that was enormously insulting. One trick he often tried with success. Ifhis opponent had said something foolish, like "the destiny of England isin the great heart of England, " Arnold would repeat the phrase again andagain until it looked more foolish than it really was. Thus he recursagain and again to "the British College of Health in the New Road" tillthe reader wants to rush out and burn the place down. Arnold's greaterror was that he sometimes thus wearied us of his own phrases, as wellas of his enemies'. 

These names are roughly representative of the long series of protestsagainst the cold commercial rationalism which held Parliament and theschools through the earlier Victorian time, in so far as those protestswere made in the name of neglected intellect, insulted art, forgottenheroism and desecrated religion. But already the Utilitarian citadel hadbeen more heavily bombarded on the other side by one lonely andunlettered man of genius. 

The rise of Dickens is like the rising of a vast mob. This is not onlybecause his tales are indeed as crowded and populous as towns: for trulyit was not so much that Dickens appeared as that a hundred Dickenscharacters appeared. It is also because he was the sort of man who hasthe impersonal impetus of a mob: what Poe meant when he truly said thatpopular rumour, if really spontaneous, was like the intuition of theindividual man of genius. Those who speak scornfully of the ignorance ofthe mob do not err as to the fact itself; their error is in not seeingthat just as a crowd is comparatively ignorant, so a crowd iscomparatively innocent. It will have the old and human faults; but it isnot likely to specialise in the special faults of that particularsociety: because the effort of the strong and successful in all ages isto keep the poor out of society. If the higher castes have developedsome special moral beauty or grace, as they occasionally do (forinstance, mediæval chivalry), it is likely enough, of course, that themass of men will miss it. But if they have developed some perversion orover-emphasis, as they much more often do (for instance, the Renaissancepoisoning), then it will be the tendency of the mass of men to miss thattoo. The point might be put in many ways; you may say if you will thatthe poor are always at the tail of the procession, and that whether theyare morally worse or better depends on whether humanity as a whole isproceeding towards heaven or hell. When humanity is going to hell, thepoor are always nearest to heaven. 

Dickens was a mob--and a mob in revolt; he fought by the light ofnature; he had not a theory, but a thirst. If any one chooses to offerthe cheap sarcasm that his thirst was largely a thirst for milk-punch, Iam content to reply with complete gravity and entire contempt that in asense this is perfectly true. His thirst was for things as humble, ashuman, as laughable as that daily bread for which we cry to God. He hadno particular plan of reform; or, when he had, it was startlingly pettyand parochial compared with the deep, confused clamour of comradeshipand insurrection that fills all his narrative. It would not be gravelyunjust to him to compare him to his own heroine, Arabella Allen, who"didn't know what she did like, " but who (when confronted with Mr. BobSawyer) "did know what she didn't like. " Dickens did know what he didn'tlike. He didn't like the Unrivalled Happiness which Mr. Roebuck praised;the economic laws that were working so faultlessly in Fever Alley; thewealth that was accumulating so rapidly in Bleeding Heart Yard. But, above all, he didn't like the _mean_ side of the Manchester philosophy:the preaching of an impossible thrift and an intolerable temperance. Hehated the implication that because a man was a miser in Latin he mustalso be a miser in English. And this meanness of the Utilitarians hadgone very far--infecting many finer minds who had fought theUtilitarians. In the _Edinburgh Review_, a thing like Malthus could bechampioned by a man like Macaulay. 

The twin root facts of the revolution called Dickens are these: first, that he attacked the cold Victorian compromise; second, that heattacked it without knowing he was doing it--certainly without knowingthat other people were doing it. He was attacking something which wewill call Mr. Gradgrind. He was utterly unaware (in any essential sense)that any one else had attacked Mr. Gradgrind. All the other attacks hadcome from positions of learning or cultured eccentricity of which he wasentirely ignorant, and to which, therefore (like a spirited fellow), hefelt a furious hostility. Thus, for instance, he hated that LittleBethel to which Kit's mother went: he hated it simply as Kit hated it. Newman could have told him it was hateful, because it had no root inreligious history; it was not even a sapling sprung of the seed of somegreat human and heathen tree: it was a monstrous mushroom that grows inthe moonshine and dies in the dawn. Dickens knew no more of religioushistory than Kit; he simply smelt the fungus, and it stank. Thus, again, he hated that insolent luxury of a class counting itself a comfortableexception to all mankind; he hated it as Kate Nickleby hated SirMulberry Hawke--by instinct. Carlyle could have told him that all theworld was full of that anger against the impudent fatness of the few. But when Dickens wrote about Kate Nickleby, he knew about as much of theworld--as Kate Nickleby. He did write _The Tale of Two Cities_ longafterwards; but that was when he _had_ been instructed by Carlyle. Hisfirst revolutionism was as private and internal as feeling sea-sick. Thus, once more, he wrote against Mr. Gradgrind long before he createdhim. In _The Chimes_, conceived in quite his casual and charitableseason, with the _Christmas Carol_ and the _Cricket on the Hearth_, hehit hard at the economists. Ruskin, in the same fashion, would have toldhim that the worst thing about the economists was that they were noteconomists: that they missed many essential things even in economics. But Dickens did not know whether they were economists or not: he onlyknew that they wanted hitting. Thus, to take a last case out of many, Dickens travelled in a French railway train, and noticed that thiseccentric nation provided him with wine that he could drink andsandwiches he could eat, and manners he could tolerate. And rememberingthe ghastly sawdust-eating waiting-rooms of the North English railways, he wrote that rich chapter in _Mugby Junction_. Matthew Arnold couldhave told him that this was but a part of the general thinning down ofEuropean civilisation in these islands at the edge of it; that for twoor three thousand years the Latin society has learnt how to drink wine, and how not to drink too much of it. Dickens did not in the leastunderstand the Latin society: but he did understand the wine. If (toprolong an idle but not entirely false metaphor) we have called Carlylea man who saw and Arnold a man who knew, we might truly call Dickens aman who tasted, that is, a man who really felt. In spite of all thesilly talk about his vulgarity, he really had, in the strict andserious sense, good taste. All real good taste is gusto--the power ofappreciating the presence--or the absence--of a particular and positivepleasure. He had no learning; he was not misled by the label on thebottle--for that is what learning largely meant in his time. He openedhis mouth and shut his eyes and saw what the Age of Reason would givehim. And, having tasted it, he spat it out. 

I am constrained to consider Dickens here among the fighters; though Iought (on the pure principles of Art) to be considering him in thechapter which I have allotted to the story-tellers. But we should getthe whole Victorian perspective wrong, in my opinion at least, if we didnot see that Dickens was primarily the most successful of all theonslaughts on the solid scientific school; because he did not attackfrom the standpoint of extraordinary faith, like Newman; or thestandpoint of extraordinary inspiration, like Carlyle; or the standpointof extraordinary detachment or serenity, like Arnold; but from thestandpoint of quite ordinary and quite hearty dislike. To give but oneinstance more, Matthew Arnold, trying to carry into England constructiveeducational schemes which he could see spread like a clear railway mapall over the Continent, was much badgered about what he really thoughtwas _wrong_ with English middle-class education. Despairing ofexplaining to the English middle class the idea of high and centralpublic instruction, as distinct from coarse and hole-and-corner privateinstruction, he invoked the aid of Dickens. He said the Englishmiddle-class school was the sort of school where Mr. Creakle sat, withhis buttered toast and his cane. Now Dickens had probably never seen anyother kind of school--certainly he had never understood the systematicState Schools in which Arnold had learnt his lesson. But he saw the caneand the buttered toast, and he _knew_ that it was all wrong. In thissense, Dickens, the great romanticist, is truly the great realist also. For he had no abstractions: he had nothing except realities out of whichto make a romance. 

With Dickens, then, re-arises that reality with which I began and which(curtly, but I think not falsely) I have called Cobbett. In dealing withfiction as such, I shall have occasion to say wherein Dickens is weakerand stronger than that England of the eighteenth century: here it issufficient to say that he represents the return of Cobbett in this vitalsense; that he is proud of being the ordinary man. No one can understandthe thousand caricatures by Dickens who does not understand that he iscomparing them all with his own common sense. Dickens, in the bulk, liked the things that Cobbett had liked; what is perhaps more to thepoint, he hated the things that Cobbett had hated; the Tudors, thelawyers, the leisurely oppression of the poor. Cobbett's fine fightingjournalism had been what is nowadays called "personal, " that is, itsupposed human beings to be human. But Cobbett was also personal in theless satisfactory sense; he could only multiply monsters who wereexaggerations of his enemies or exaggerations of himself. Dickens waspersonal in a more godlike sense; he could multiply persons. He couldcreate all the farce and tragedy of his age over again, with creaturesunborn to sin and creatures unborn to suffer. That which had not beenachieved by the fierce facts of Cobbett, the burning dreams of Carlyle, the white-hot proofs of Newman, was really or very nearly achieved by acrowd of impossible people. In the centre stood that citadel of atheistindustrialism: and if indeed it has ever been taken, it was taken by therush of that unreal army. 

CHAPTER II

THE GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS

The Victorian novel was a thing entirely Victorian; quite unique andsuited to a sort of cosiness in that country and that age. But the novelitself, though not merely Victorian, is mainly modern. No clear-headedperson wastes his time over definitions, except where he thinks his owndefinition would probably be in dispute. I merely say, therefore, thatwhen I say "novel, " I mean a fictitious narrative (almost invariably, but not necessarily, in prose) of which the essential is that the storyis not told for the sake of its naked pointedness as an anecdote, or forthe sake of the irrelevant landscapes and visions that can be caught upin it, but for the sake of some study of the difference between humanbeings. There are several things that make this mode of art unique. Oneof the most conspicuous is that it is the art in which the conquests ofwoman are quite beyond controversy. The proposition that Victorian womenhave done well in politics and philosophy is not necessarily an untrueproposition; but it is a partisan proposition. I never heard that manywomen, let alone men, shared the views of Mary Wollstonecraft; I neverheard that millions of believers flocked to the religion tentativelyfounded by Miss Frances Power Cobbe. They did, undoubtedly, flock toMrs. Eddy; but it will not be unfair to that lady to call her followinga sect, and not altogether unreasonable to say that such insaneexceptions prove the rule. Nor can I at this moment think of a singlemodern woman writing on politics or abstract things, whose work is ofundisputed importance; except perhaps Mrs. Sidney Webb, who settlesthings by the simple process of ordering about the citizens of a state, as she might the servants in a kitchen. There has been, at any rate, nowriter on moral or political theory that can be mentioned, withoutseeming comic, in the same breath with the great female novelists. Butwhen we come to the novelists, the women have, on the whole, equality;and certainly, in some points, superiority. Jane Austen is as strong inher own way as Scott is in his. But she is, for all practical purposes, never weak in her own way--and Scott very often is. Charlotte Brontëdedicated _Jane Eyre_ to the author of _Vanity Fair_. I should hesitateto say that Charlotte Brontë's is a better book than Thackeray's, but Ithink it might well be maintained that it is a better story. All sortsof inquiring asses (equally ignorant of the old nature of woman and thenew nature of the novel) whispered wisely that George Eliot's novelswere really written by George Lewes. I will cheerfully answer for thefact that, if they had been written by George Lewes, no one would everhave read them. Those who have read his book on Robespierre will haveno doubt about my meaning. I am no idolater of George Eliot; but a manwho could concoct such a crushing opiate about the most excitingoccasion in history certainly did not write _The Mill on the Floss_. This is the first fact about the novel, that it is the introduction of anew and rather curious kind of art; and it has been found to bepeculiarly feminine, from the first good novel by Fanny Burney to thelast good novel by Miss May Sinclair. The truth is, I think, that themodern novel is a new thing; not new in its essence (for that is aphilosophy for fools), but new in the sense that it lets loose many ofthe things that are old. It is a hearty and exhaustive overhauling ofthat part of human existence which has always been the woman's province, or rather kingdom; the play of personalities in private, the realdifference between Tommy and Joe. It is right that womanhood shouldspecialise in individuals, and be praised for doing so; just as in theMiddle Ages she specialised in dignity and was praised for doing so. People put the matter wrong when they say that the novel is a study ofhuman nature. Human nature is a thing that even men can understand. Human nature is born of the pain of a woman; human nature plays atpeep-bo when it is two and at cricket when it is twelve; human natureearns its living and desires the other sex and dies. What the noveldeals with is what women have to deal with; the differentiations, thetwists and turns of this eternal river. The key of this new form of art, which we call fiction, is sympathy. And sympathy does not mean so muchfeeling with all who feel, but rather suffering with all who suffer. Andit was inevitable, under such an inspiration, that more attention shouldbe given to the awkward corners of life than to its even flow. The verypromising domestic channel dug by the Victorian women, in books like_Cranford_, by Mrs. Gaskell, would have got to the sea, if they had beenleft alone to dig it. They might have made domesticity a fairyland. Unfortunately another idea, the idea of imitating men's cuffs andcollars and documents, cut across this purely female discovery anddestroyed it. 

It may seem mere praise of the novel to say it is the art of sympathyand the study of human variations. But indeed, though this is a goodthing, it is not universally good. We have gained in sympathy; but wehave lost in brotherhood. Old quarrels had more equality than modernexonerations. Two peasants in the Middle Ages quarrelled about their twofields. But they went to the same church, served in the same semi-feudalmilitia, and had the same morality, which ever might happen to bebreaking it at the moment. The very cause of their quarrel was the causeof their fraternity; they both liked land. But suppose one of them ateetotaler who desired the abolition of hops on both farms; suppose theother a vegetarian who desired the abolition of chickens on both farms:and it is at once apparent that a quarrel of quite a different kindwould begin; and that in that quarrel it would not be a question offarmer against farmer, but of individual against individual. Thisfundamental sense of human fraternity can only exist in the presence ofpositive religion. Man is merely man only when he is seen against thesky. If he is seen against any landscape, he is only a man of that land. If he is seen against any house, he is only a householder. Only wheredeath and eternity are intensely present can human beings fully feeltheir fellowship. Once the divine darkness against which we stand isreally dismissed from the mind (as it was very nearly dismissed in theVictorian time) the differences between human beings becomeoverpoweringly plain; whether they are expressed in the high caricaturesof Dickens or the low lunacies of Zola. 

This can be seen in a sort of picture in the Prologue of the _CanterburyTales_; which is already pregnant with the promise of the English novel. The characters there are at once graphically and delicatelydifferentiated; the Doctor with his rich cloak, his careful meals, hiscoldness to religion; the Franklin, whose white beard was so fresh thatit recalled the daisies, and in whose house it snowed meat and drink;the Summoner, from whose fearful face, like a red cherub's, the childrenfled, and who wore a garland like a hoop; the Miller with his short redhair and bagpipes and brutal head, with which he could break down adoor; the Lover who was as sleepless as a nightingale; the Knight, theCook, the Clerk of Oxford. Pendennis or the Cook, M. Mirabolant, isnowhere so vividly varied by a few merely verbal strokes. But the greatdifference is deeper and more striking. It is simply that Pendenniswould never have gone riding with a cook at all. Chaucer's knight rodewith a cook quite naturally; because the thing they were all seekingtogether was as much above knighthood as it was above cookery. Soldiersand swindlers and bullies and outcasts, they were all going to theshrine of a distant saint. To what sort of distant saint would Pendennisand Colonel Newcome and Mr. Moss and Captain Costigan and Ridley thebutler and Bayham and Sir Barnes Newcome and Laura and the Duchessd'Ivry and Warrington and Captain Blackball and Lady Kew travel, laughing and telling tales together?

The growth of the novel, therefore, must not be too easily called anincrease in the interest in humanity. It is an increase in the interestin the things in which men differ; much fuller and finer work had beendone before about the things in which they agree. And this intenseinterest in variety had its bad side as well as its good; it has ratherincreased social distinctions in a serious and spiritual sense. Most ofthe oblivion of democracy is due to the oblivion of death. But in itsown manner and measure, it was a real advance and experiment of theEuropean mind, like the public art of the Renaissance or the fairylandof physical science explored in the nineteenth century. It was a moreunquestionable benefit than these: and in that development women playeda peculiar part, English women especially, and Victorian women most ofall. 

It is perhaps partly, though certainly not entirely, this influence ofthe great women writers that explains another very arresting andimportant fact about the emergence of genuinely Victorian fiction. Ithad been by this time decided, by the powers that had influence (and bypublic opinion also, at least in the middle-class sense), that certainverbal limits must be set to such literature. The novel must be whatsome would call pure and others would call prudish; but what is not, properly considered, either one or the other: it is rather a more orless business proposal (right or wrong) that every writer shall draw theline at literal physical description of things socially concealed. Itwas originally merely verbal; it had not, primarily, any dream ofpurifying the topic or the moral tone. Dickens and Thackeray claimedvery properly the right to deal with shameful passions and suggest theirshameful culminations; Scott sometimes dealt with ideas positivelyhorrible--as in that grand Glenallan tragedy which is as appalling asthe _Œdipus_ or _The Cenci_. None of these great men would havetolerated for a moment being talked to (as the muddle-headed amateurcensors talk to artists to-day) about "wholesome" topics and suggestions"that cannot elevate. " They had to describe the great battle of good andevil and they described both; but they accepted a working Victoriancompromise about what should happen behind the scenes and what on thestage. Dickens did not claim the license of diction Fielding might haveclaimed in repeating the senile ecstasies of Gride (let us say) over hispurchased bride: but Dickens does not leave the reader in the faintestdoubt about what sort of feelings they were; nor is there any reason whyhe should. Thackeray would not have described the toilet details of thesecret balls of Lord Steyne: he left that to Lady Cardigan. But no onewho had read Thackeray's version would be surprised at Lady Cardigan's. But though the great Victorian novelists would not have permitted theimpudence of the suggestion that every part of their problem must bewholesome and innocent in itself, it is still tenable (I do not say itis certain) that by yielding to the Philistines on this verbalcompromise, they have in the long run worked for impurity rather thanpurity. In one point I do certainly think that Victorian Bowdlerism didpure harm. This is the simple point that, nine times out of ten, thecoarse word is the word that condemns an evil and the refined word theword that excuses it. A common evasion, for instance, substitutes forthe word that brands self-sale as the essential sin, a word which weaklysuggests that it is no more wicked than walking down the street. Thegreat peril of such soft mystifications is that extreme evils (theythat are abnormal even by the standard of evil) have a very long start. Where ordinary wrong is made unintelligible, extraordinary wrong cancount on remaining more unintelligible still; especially among those wholive in such an atmosphere of long words. It is a cruel comment on thepurity of the Victorian Age, that the age ended (save for the burstingof a single scandal) in a thing being everywhere called "Art, " "TheGreek Spirit, " "The Platonic Ideal" and so on--which any navvy mendingthe road outside would have stamped with a word as vile and as vulgar asit deserved. 

This reticence, right or wrong, may have been connected with theparticipation of women with men in the matter of fiction. It is animportant point: the sexes can only be coarse separately. It wascertainly also due, as I have already suggested, to the treaty betweenthe rich _bourgeoisie_ and the old aristocracy, which both had to make, for the common and congenial purpose of keeping the English peopledown. But it was due much more than this to a general moral atmospherein the Victorian Age. It is impossible to express that spirit except bythe electric bell of a name. It was latitudinarian, and yet it waslimited. It could be content with nothing less than the whole cosmos:yet the cosmos with which it was content was small. It is false to sayit was without humour: yet there was something by instinct unsmiling init. It was always saying solidly that things were "enough"; and provingby that sharpness (as of the shutting of a door) that they were notenough. It took, I will not say its pleasures, but even itsemancipations, sadly. Definitions seem to escape this way and that inthe attempt to locate it as an idea. But every one will understand me ifI call it George Eliot. 

I begin with this great woman of letters for both the two reasonsalready mentioned. She represents the rationalism of the old VictorianAge at its highest. She and Mill are like two great mountains at the endof that long, hard chain which is the watershed of the Early Victoriantime. They alone rise high enough to be confused among the clouds--orperhaps confused among the stars. They certainly were seeking truth, asNewman and Carlyle were; the slow slope of the later Victorian vulgaritydoes not lower their precipice and pinnacle. But I begin with this namealso because it emphasises the idea of modern fiction as a fresh andlargely a female thing. The novel of the nineteenth century was female;as fully as the novel of the eighteenth century was male. It is quitecertain that no woman could have written _Roderick Random_. It is notquite so certain that no woman could have written _Esmond_. The strengthand subtlety of woman had certainly sunk deep into English letters whenGeorge Eliot began to write. 

Her originals and even her contemporaries had shown the feminine powerin fiction as well or better than she. Charlotte Brontë, understoodalong her own instincts, was as great; Jane Austen was greater. Thelatter comes into our present consideration only as that mostexasperating thing, an ideal unachieved. It is like leaving anunconquered fortress in the rear. No woman later has captured thecomplete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while allthe after women went about looking for their brains. She could describea man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Brontë could do. She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know whatshe did not know--like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanishedworld before the great progressive age of which I write. 

One of the characteristics of the central Victorian spirit was atendency to substitute a certain more or less satisfied seriousness forthe extremes of tragedy and comedy. This is marked by a certain changein George Eliot; as it is marked by a certain limitation or moderationin Dickens. Dickens was the People, as it was in the eighteenth centuryand still largely is, in spite of all the talk for and against BoardSchool Education: comic, tragic, realistic, free-spoken, far looser inwords than in deeds. It marks the silent strength and pressure of thespirit of the Victorian middle class that even to Dickens it neveroccurred to revive the verbal coarseness of Smollett or Swift. The otherproof of the same pressure is the change in George Eliot. She was not agenius in the elemental sense of Dickens; she could never have beeneither so strong or so soft. But she did originally represent some ofthe same popular realities: and her first books (at least as comparedwith her latest) were full of sound fun and bitter pathos. Mr. MaxBeerbohm has remarked (in his glorious essay called _Ichabod_, I think), that Silas Marner would not have forgotten his miserliness if GeorgeEliot had written of him in her maturity. I have a great regard for Mr. Beerbohm's literary judgments; and it may be so. But if literaturemeans anything more than a cold calculation of the chances, if there isin it, as I believe, any deeper idea of detaching the spirit of lifefrom the dull obstacles of life, of permitting human nature really toreveal itself as human, if (to put it shortly) literature has anythingon earth to do with being _interesting_--then I think we would ratherhave a few more Marners than that rich maturity that gave us theanalysed dust-heaps of _Daniel Deronda_. 

In her best novels there is real humour, of a cool sparkling sort; thereis a strong sense of substantial character that has not yet degeneratedinto psychology; there is a great deal of wisdom, chiefly about women;indeed there is almost every element of literature except a certainindescribable thing called _glamour_; which was the whole stock-in-tradeof the Brontës, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp clambers amid rottenwood by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray when Esmond with hismelancholy eyes wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenuesof Castlewood. Of this quality (which some have called, but hastily, theessential of literature) George Eliot had not little but nothing. Herair is bright and intellectually even exciting; but it is like the airof a cloudless day on the parade at Brighton. She sees people clearly, but not through an atmosphere. And she can conjure up storms in theconscious, but not in the subconscious mind. 

It is true (though the idea should not be exaggerated) that thisdeficiency was largely due to her being cut off from all thoseconceptions that had made the fiction of a Muse; the deep idea thatthere are really demons and angels behind men. Certainly the increasingatheism of her school spoilt her own particular imaginative talent: shewas far less free when she thought like Ladislaw than when she thoughtlike Casaubon. It also betrayed her on a matter specially requiringcommon sense; I mean sex. There is nothing that is so profoundly falseas rationalist flirtation. Each sex is trying to be both sexes at once;and the result is a confusion more untruthful than any conventions. Thiscan easily be seen by comparing her with a greater woman who died beforethe beginning of our present problem. Jane Austen was born before thosebonds which (we are told) protected woman from truth, were burst by theBrontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains thatJane Austen knew much more about men than either of them. Jane Austenmay have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truththat was protected from her. When Darcy, in finally confessing hisfaults, says, "I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice_though not in theory_, " he gets nearer to a complete confession of theintelligent male than ever was even hinted by the Byronic lapses of theBrontës' heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot's. JaneAusten, of course, covered an infinitely smaller field than any of herlater rivals; but I have always believed in the victory of smallnationalities. 

The Brontës suggest themselves here; because their superficialqualities, the qualities that can be seized upon in satire, were in thisan exaggeration of what was, in George Eliot, hardly more than anomission. There was perhaps a time when Mr. Rawjester was more widelyknown than Mr. Rochester. And certainly Mr. Rochester (to adopt thediction of that other eminent country gentleman, Mr. Darcy) was simplyindividualistic not only in practice, but in theory. Now any one may beso in practice: but a man who is simply individualistic in theory mustmerely be an ass. Undoubtedly the Brontës exposed themselves to somemisunderstanding by thus perpetually making the masculine creature muchmore masculine than he wants to be. Thackeray (a man of strong thoughsleepy virility) asked in his exquisite plaintive way: "Why do our ladynovelists make the men bully the women?" It is, I think, unquestionablytrue that the Brontës treated the male as an almost anarchic thingcoming in from outside nature; much as people on this planet regard acomet. Even the really delicate and sustained comedy of Paul Emanuel isnot quite free from this air of studying something alien. The reply maybe made that the women in men's novels are equally fallacious. The replyis probably just. 

What the Brontës really brought into fiction was exactly what Carlylebrought into history; the blast of the mysticism of the North. They wereof Irish blood settled on the windy heights of Yorkshire; in thatcountry where Catholicism lingered latest, but in a superstitious form;where modern industrialism came earliest and was more superstitiousstill. The strong winds and sterile places, the old tyranny of baronsand the new and blacker tyranny of manufacturers, has made and left thatcountry a land of barbarians. All Charlotte Brontë's earlier work isfull of that sullen and unmanageable world; moss-troopers turnedhurriedly into miners; the last of the old world forced into supportingthe very first crudities of the new. In this way Charlotte Brontërepresents the Victorian settlement in a special way. The EarlyVictorian Industrialism is to George Eliot and to Charlotte Brontë, rather as the Late Victorian Imperialism would have been to Mrs. HumphryWard in the centre of the empire and to Miss Olive Schreiner at the edgeof it. The real strength there is in characters like Robert Moore, whenhe is dealing with anything except women, is the romance of industry inits first advance: a romance that has not remained. On such fightingfrontiers people always exaggerate the strong qualities the masculinesex does possess, and always add a great many strong qualities that itdoes not possess. That is, briefly, all the reason in the Brontës onthis special subject: the rest is stark unreason. It can be most clearlyseen in that sister of Charlotte Brontë's who has achieved the realfeat of remaining as a great woman rather than a great writer. There isreally, in a narrow but intense way, a tradition of Emily Brontë: asthere is a tradition of St. Peter or Dr. Johnson. People talk as if theyhad known her, apart from her works. She must have been something morethan an original person; perhaps an origin. But so far as her writtenworks go she enters English letters only as an original person--andrather a narrow one. Her imagination was sometimes superhuman--alwaysinhuman. _Wuthering Heights_ might have been written by an eagle. She isthe strongest instance of these strong imaginations that made the othersex a monster: for Heathcliffe fails as a man as catastrophically as hesucceeds as a demon. I think Emily Brontë was further narrowed by thebroadness of her religious views; but never, of course, so much asGeorge Eliot. 

In any case, it is Charlotte Brontë who enters Victorian literature. Theshortest way of stating her strong contribution is, I think, this: thatshe reached the highest romance through the lowest realism. She did notset out with Amadis of Gaul in a forest or with Mr. Pickwick in a comicclub. She set out with herself, with her own dingy clothes, andaccidental ugliness, and flat, coarse, provincial household; andforcibly fused all such muddy materials into a spirited fairy-tale. Ifthe first chapters on the home and school had not proved how heavy andhateful _sanity_ can be, there would really be less point in theinsanity of Mr. Rochester's wife--or the not much milder insanity ofMrs. Rochester's husband. She discovered the secret of hiding thesensational in the commonplace: and _Jane Eyre_ remains the best of herbooks (better even than _Villette_) because while it is a human documentwritten in blood, it is also one of the best blood-and-thunder detectivestories in the world. 

But while Emily Brontë was as unsociable as a storm at midnight, andwhile Charlotte Brontë was at best like that warmer and more domesticthing, a house on fire--they do connect themselves with the calm ofGeorge Eliot, as the forerunners of many later developments of thefeminine advance. Many forerunners (if it comes to that) would have feltrather ill if they had seen the things they foreran. This notion of ahazy anticipation of after history has been absurdly overdone: as whenmen connect Chaucer with the Reformation; which is like connecting Homerwith the Syracusan Expedition. But it is to some extent true that allthese great Victorian women had a sort of unrest in their souls. And theproof of it is that (after what I will claim to call the healthier timeof Dickens and Thackeray) it began to be admitted by the great Victorianmen. If there had not been something in that irritation, we shouldhardly have had to speak in these pages of _Diana of the Crossways_ orof _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_. To what this strange and very local sexwar has been due I shall not ask, because I have no answer. That it wasdue to votes or even little legal inequalities about marriage, I feelmyself here too close to realities even to discuss. My own guess is thatit has been due to the great neglect of the military spirit by the maleVictorians. The woman felt obscurely that she was still running hermortal risk, while the man was not still running his. But I know nothingabout it; nor does anybody else. 

In so short a book on so vast, complex and living a subject, it isimpossible to drop even into the second rank of good authors, whose nameis legion; but it is impossible to leave that considerable female forcein fiction which has so largely made the very nature of the modernnovel, without mentioning two names which almost brought that secondrank up to the first rank. They were at utterly opposite poles. The onesucceeded by being a much mellower and more Christian George Eliot; theother succeeded by being a much more mad and unchristian Emily Brontë. But Mrs. Oliphant and the author calling herself "Ouida" both forcedthemselves well within the frontier of fine literature. _The BeleagueredCity_ is literature in its highest sense; the other works of its authortend to fall into fiction in its best working sense. Mrs. Oliphant wasinfinitely saner in that city of ghosts than the cosmopolitan Ouida everwas in any of the cities of men. Mrs. Oliphant would never have dared todiscover, either in heaven or hell, such a thing as a hairbrush with itsback encrusted with diamonds. But though Ouida was violent and weakwhere Mrs. Oliphant might have been mild and strong, her own triumphswere her own. She had a real power of expressing the senses through herstyle; of conveying the very heat of blue skies or the bursting ofpalpable pomegranates. And just as Mrs. Oliphant transfused her moretimid Victorian tales with a true and intense faith in the Christianmystery--so Ouida, with infinite fury and infinite confusion ofthought, did fill her books with Byron and the remains of the FrenchRevolution. In the track of such genius there has been quite anaccumulation of true talent as in the children's tales of Mrs. Ewing, the historical tales of Miss Yonge, the tales of Mrs. Molesworth, and soon. On a general review I do not think I have been wrong in taking thefemale novelists first. I think they gave its special shape, itstemporary twist, to the Victorian novel. 

Nevertheless it is a shock (I almost dare to call it a relief) to comeback to the males. It is the more abrupt because the first name thatmust be mentioned derives directly from the mere maleness of the Sterneand Smollett novel. I have already spoken of Dickens as the most homelyand instinctive, and therefore probably the heaviest, of all theonslaughts made on the central Victorian satisfaction. There istherefore the less to say of him here, where we consider him only as anovelist; but there is still much more to say than can even conceivablybe said. Dickens, as we have stated, inherited the old comic, ramblingnovel from Smollett and the rest. Dickens, as we have also stated, consented to expurgate that novel. But when all origins and allrestraints have been defined and allowed for, the creature that came outwas such as we shall not see again. Smollett was coarse; but Smollettwas also cruel. Dickens was frequently horrible; he was never cruel. Theart of Dickens was the most exquisite of arts: it was the art ofenjoying everybody. Dickens, being a very human writer, had to be a veryhuman being; he had his faults and sensibilities in a strong degree; andI do not for a moment maintain that he enjoyed everybody in his dailylife. But he enjoyed everybody in his books: and everybody has enjoyedeverybody in those books even till to-day. His books are full of baffledvillains stalking out or cowardly bullies kicked downstairs. But thevillains and the cowards are such delightful people that the readeralways hopes the villain will put his head through a side window andmake a last remark; or that the bully will say one thing more, even fromthe bottom of the stairs. The reader really hopes this; and he cannotget rid of the fancy that the author hopes so too. I cannot at themoment recall that Dickens ever killed a comic villain, except Quilp, who was deliberately made even more villainous than comic. There can beno serious fears for the life of Mr. Wegg in the muckcart; though Mr. Pecksniff fell to be a borrower of money, and Mr. Mantalini to turning amangle, the human race has the comfort of thinking they are still alive:and one might have the rapture of receiving a begging letter from Mr. Pecksniff, or even of catching Mr. Mantalini collecting the washing, ifone always lurked about on Monday mornings. This sentiment (the trueartist will be relieved to hear) is entirely unmoral. Mrs. Wilferdeserved death much more than Mr. Quilp, for she had succeeded inpoisoning family life persistently, while he was (to say the least ofit) intermittent in his domesticity. But who can honestly say he doesnot hope Mrs. Wilfer is still talking like Mrs. Wilfer--especially if itis only in a book? This is the artistic greatness of Dickens, before andafter which there is really nothing to be said. He had the power ofcreating people, both possible and impossible, who were simply preciousand priceless people; and anything subtler added to that truth reallyonly weakens it. 

The mention of Mrs. Wilfer (whom the heart is loth to leave) reminds oneof the only elementary ethical truth that is essential in the study ofDickens. That is that he had broad or universal sympathies in a sensetotally unknown to the social reformers who wallow in such phrases. Dickens (unlike the social reformers) really did sympathise with everysort of victim of every sort of tyrant. He did truly pray for _all_ whoare desolate and oppressed. If you try to tie him to any cause narrowerthan that Prayer Book definition, you will find you have shut out halfhis best work. If, in your sympathy for Mrs. Quilp, you call Dickens thechampion of downtrodden woman, you will suddenly remember Mr. Wilfer, and find yourself unable to deny the existence of downtrodden man. If inyour sympathy for Mr. Rouncewell you call Dickens the champion of amanly middle-class Liberalism against Chesney Wold, you will suddenlyremember Stephen Blackpool--and find yourself unable to deny that Mr. Rouncewell might be a pretty insupportable cock on his own dung-hill. Ifin your sympathy for Stephen Blackpool you call Dickens a Socialist (asdoes Mr. Pugh), and think of him as merely heralding the greatCollectivist revolt against Victorian Individualism and Capitalism, which seemed so clearly to be the crisis at the end of this epoch--youwill suddenly remember the agreeable young Barnacle at theCircumlocution Office: and you will be unable, for very shame, toassert that Dickens would have trusted the poor to a State Department. Dickens did not merely believe in the brotherhood of men in the weakmodern way; he was the brotherhood of men, and knew it was a brotherhoodin sin as well as in aspiration. And he was not only larger than the oldfactions he satirised; he was larger than any of our great socialschools that have gone forward since he died. 

The seemingly quaint custom of comparing Dickens and Thackeray existedin their own time, and no one will dismiss it with entire disdain whoremembers that the Victorian tradition was domestic and genuine, evenwhen it was hoodwinked and unworldly. There must have been some reasonfor making this imaginary duel between two quite separate and quiteamiable acquaintances. And there is, after all, some reason for it. Itis not, as was once cheaply said, that Thackeray went in for truth, andDickens for mere caricature. There is a huge accumulation of truth, down to the smallest detail, in Dickens: he seems sometimes a meremountain of facts. Thackeray, in comparison, often seems quite carelessand elusive; almost as if he did not quite know where all his characterswere. There is a truth behind the popular distinction; but it lies muchdeeper. Perhaps the best way of stating it is this: that Dickens usedreality, while aiming at an effect of romance; while Thackeray used theloose language and ordinary approaches of romance, while aiming at aneffect of reality. It was the special and splendid business of Dickensto introduce us to people who would have been quite incredible if he hadnot told us so much truth about them. It was the special and not lesssplendid task of Thackeray to introduce us to people whom we knewalready. Paradoxically, but very practically, it followed that hisintroductions were the longer of the two. When we hear of Aunt BetsyTrotwood, we vividly envisage everything about her, from her gardeninggloves to her seaside residence, from her hard, handsome face to hertame lunatic laughing at the bedroom window. It is all so minutely truethat she must be true also. We only feel inclined to walk round theEnglish coast until we find that particular garden and that particularaunt. But when we turn from the aunt of Copperfield to the uncle ofPendennis, we are more likely to run round the coast trying to find awatering-place where he isn't than one where he is. The moment one seesMajor Pendennis, one sees a hundred Major Pendennises. It is not amatter of mere realism. Miss Trotwood's bonnet and gardening tools andcupboard full of old-fashioned bottles are quite as true in thematerialistic way as the Major's cuffs and corner table and toast andnewspaper. Both writers are realistic: but Dickens writes realism inorder to make the incredible credible. Thackeray writes it in order tomake us recognise an old friend. Whether we shall be pleased to meet theold friend is quite another matter: I think we should be better pleasedto meet Miss Trotwood, and find, as David Copperfield did, a new friend, a new world. But we recognise Major Pendennis even when we avoid him. Henceforth Thackeray can count on our seeing him from his wig to hiswell-blacked boots whenever he chooses to say "Major Pendennis paid acall. " Dickens, on the other hand, had to keep up an incessantexcitement about his characters; and no man on earth but he could havekept it up. 

It may be said, in approximate summary, that Thackeray is the novelistof memory--of our memories as well as his own. Dickens seems to expectall his characters, like amusing strangers arriving at lunch: as if theygave him not only pleasure, but surprise. But Thackeray is everybody'spast--is everybody's youth. Forgotten friends flit about the passages ofdreamy colleges and unremembered clubs; we hear fragments of unfinishedconversations, we see faces without names for an instant, fixed for everin some trivial grimace: we smell the strong smell of social cliquesnow quite incongruous to us; and there stir in all the little rooms atonce the hundred ghosts of oneself. 

For this purpose Thackeray was equipped with a singularly easy andsympathetic style, carved in slow soft curves where Dickens hacked outhis images with a hatchet. There was a sort of avuncular indulgenceabout his attitude; what he called his "preaching" was at worst a sortof grumbling, ending with the sentiment that boys will be boys and thatthere's nothing new under the sun. He was not really either a cynic or a_censor morum_; but (in another sense than Chaucer's) a gentle pardoner:having seen the weaknesses he is sometimes almost weak about them. Hereally comes nearer to exculpating Pendennis or Ethel Newcome than anyother author, who saw what he saw, would have been. The rare wrath ofsuch men is all the more effective; and there are passages in _VanityFair_ and still more in _The Book of Snobs_, where he does make thedance of wealth and fashion look stiff and monstrous, like a Babylonianmasquerade. But he never quite did it in such a way as to turn thecourse of the Victorian Age. 

It may seem strange to say that Thackeray did not know enough of theworld; yet this was the truth about him in large matters of thephilosophy of life, and especially of his own time. He did not know theway things were going: he was too Victorian to understand the Victorianepoch. He did not know enough ignorant people to have heard the news. Inone of his delightful asides he imagines two little clerks commentingerroneously on the appearance of Lady Kew or Sir Brian Newcome in thePark, and says: "How should Jones and Brown, who are not, _vouscomprenez, du monde_, understand these mysteries?" But I think Thackerayknew quite as little about Jones and Brown as they knew about Newcomeand Kew; his world was _le monde_. Hence he seemed to take it forgranted that the Victorian compromise would last; while Dickens (whoknew his Jones and Brown) had already guessed that it would not. Thackeray did not realise that the Victorian platform was a movingplatform. To take but one instance, he was a Radical like Dickens; allreally representative Victorians, except perhaps Tennyson, wereRadicals. But he seems to have thought of all reform as simple andstraightforward and all of a piece; as if Catholic Emancipation, the NewPoor Law, Free Trade and the Factory Acts and Popular Education were allparts of one almost self-evident evolution of enlightenment. Dickens, being in touch with the democracy, had already discovered that thecountry had come to a dark place of divided ways and divided counsels. In _Hard Times_ he realised Democracy at war with Radicalism; andbecame, with so incompatible an ally as Ruskin, not indeed a Socialist, but certainly an anti-Individualist. In _Our Mutual Friend_ he felt thestrength of the new rich, and knew they had begun to transform thearistocracy, instead of the aristocracy transforming them. He knew thatVeneering had carried off Twemlow in triumph. He very nearly knew whatwe all know to-day: that, so far from it being possible to plod alongthe progressive road with more votes and more Free Trade, England musteither sharply become very much more democratic or as rapidly becomevery much less so. 

There gathers round these two great novelists a considerable group ofgood novelists, who more or less mirror their mid-Victorian mood. WilkieCollins may be said to be in this way a lesser Dickens and AnthonyTrollope a lesser Thackeray. Wilkie Collins is chiefly typical of histime in this respect: that while his moral and religious conceptionswere as mechanical as his carefully constructed fictitious conspiracies, he nevertheless informed the latter with a sort of involuntary mysticismwhich dealt wholly with the darker side of the soul. For this was oneof the most peculiar of the problems of the Victorian mind. The idea ofthe supernatural was perhaps at as low an ebb as it had everbeen--certainly much lower than it is now. But in spite of this, and inspite of a certain ethical cheeriness that was almost _de rigueur_--thestrange fact remains that the only sort of supernaturalism theVictorians allowed to their imaginations was a sad supernaturalism. Theymight have ghost stories, but not saints' stories. They could triflewith the curse or unpardoning prophecy of a witch, but not with thepardon of a priest. They seem to have held (I believe erroneously) thatthe supernatural was safest when it came from below. When we think (forexample) of the uncountable riches of religious art, imagery, ritual andpopular legend that has clustered round Christmas through all theChristian ages, it is a truly extraordinary thing to reflect thatDickens (wishing to have in _The Christmas Carol_ a little happysupernaturalism by way of a change) actually had to make up a mythologyfor himself. Here was one of the rare cases where Dickens, in a real andhuman sense, did suffer from the lack of culture. For the rest, WilkieCollins is these two elements: the mechanical and the mystical; bothvery good of their kind. He is one of the few novelists in whose case itis proper and literal to speak of his "plots. " He was a plotter; he wentabout to slay Godfrey Ablewhite as coldly and craftily as the Indiansdid. But he also had a sound though sinister note of true magic; as inthe repetition of the two white dresses in _The Woman in White_; or ofthe dreams with their double explanations in _Armadale_. His ghosts dowalk. They are alive; and walk as softly as Count Fosco, but as solidly. Finally, _The Moonstone_ is probably the best detective tale in theworld. 

Anthony Trollope, a clear and very capable realist, represents ratheranother side of the Victorian spirit of comfort; its leisureliness, itslove of detail, especially of domestic detail; its love of followingcharacters and kindred from book to book and from generation togeneration. Dickens very seldom tried this latter experiment, and then(as in _Master Humphrey's Clock_) unsuccessfully; those magnesium blazesof his were too brilliant and glaring to be indefinitely prolonged. ButThackeray was full of it; and we often feel that the characters in _TheNewcomes_ or _Philip_ might legitimately complain that their talk andtale are being perpetually interrupted and pestered by people out ofother books. Within his narrower limits, Trollope was a more strict andmasterly realist than Thackeray, and even those who would call hispersonages "types" would admit that they are as vivid as characters. Itwas a bustling but a quiet world that he described: politics before thecoming of the Irish and the Socialists; the Church in the lull betweenthe Oxford Movement and the modern High Anglican energy. And it isnotable in the Victorian spirit once more that though his clergymen areall of them real men and many of them good men, it never really occursto us to think of them as the priests of a religion. 

Charles Reade may be said to go along with these; and Disraeli and evenKingsley; not because these three very different persons had anythingparticular in common, but because they all fell short of the first rankin about the same degree. Charles Reade had a kind of cold coarsenessabout him, not morally but artistically, which keeps him out of the bestliterature as such: but he is of importance to the Victorian developmentin another way; because he has the harsher and more tragic note that hascome later in the study of our social problems. He is the first of theangry realists. Kingsley's best books may be called boys' books. Thereis a real though a juvenile poetry in _Westward Ho!_ and though thatnarrative, historically considered, is very much of a lie, it is a good, thundering honest lie. There are also genuinely eloquent things in_Hypatia_, and a certain electric atmosphere of sectarian excitementthat Kingsley kept himself in, and did know how to convey. He said hewrote the book in his heart's blood. This is an exaggeration, but thereis a truth in it; and one does feel that he may have relieved hisfeelings by writing it in red ink. As for Disraeli, his novels are ableand interesting considered as everything except novels, and are animportant contribution precisely because they are written by an alienwho did not take our politics so seriously as Trollope did. They areimportant again as showing those later Victorian changes which men likeThackeray missed. Disraeli did do something towards revealing thedishonesty of our politics--even if he had done a good deal towardsbringing it about. 

Between this group and the next there hovers a figure very hard toplace; not higher in letters than these, yet not easy to class withthem; I mean Bulwer Lytton. He was no greater than they were; yetsomehow he seems to take up more space. He did not, in the ultimatereckoning, do anything in particular: but he was a figure; rather asOscar Wilde was later a figure. You could not have the Victorian Agewithout him. And this was not due to wholly superficial things like hisdandyism, his dark, sinister good looks and a great deal of the merepolished melodrama that he wrote. There was something in his all-roundinterests; in the variety of things he tried; in his half-aristocraticswagger as poet and politician, that made him in some ways a realtouchstone of the time. It is noticeable about him that he is alwaysturning up everywhere and that he brings other people out, generally ina hostile spirit. His Byronic and almost Oriental ostentation was usedby the young Thackeray as something on which to sharpen his new razor ofVictorian common sense. His pose as a dilettante satirist inflamed theexecrable temper of Tennyson, and led to those lively comparisons to abandbox and a lion in curlpapers. He interposed the glove of warning andthe tear of sensibility between us and the proper ending of _GreatExpectations_. Of his own books, by far the best are the really charmingcomedies about _The Caxtons_ and _Kenelm Chillingly_; none of his otherworks have a high literary importance now, with the possible exceptionof _A Strange Story_; but his _Coming Race_ is historically interestingas foreshadowing those novels of the future which were afterwards such aweapon of the Socialists. Lastly, there was an element indefinable aboutLytton, which often is in adventurers; which amounts to a suspicion thatthere was something in him after all. It rang out of him when he said tothe hesitating Crimean Parliament: "Destroy your Government and saveyour army. "

With the next phase of Victorian fiction we enter a new world; thelater, more revolutionary, more continental, freer but in some waysweaker world in which we live to-day. The subtle and sad change thatwas passing like twilight across the English brain at this time is verywell expressed in the fact that men have come to mention the great nameof Meredith in the same breath as Mr. Thomas Hardy. Both writers, doubtless, disagreed with the orthodox religion of the ordinary Englishvillage. Most of us have disagreed with that religion until we made thesimple discovery that it does not exist. But in any age where ideascould be even feebly disentangled from each other, it would have beenevident at once that Meredith and Hardy were, intellectually speaking, mortal enemies. They were much more opposed to each other than Newmanwas to Kingsley; or than Abelard was to St. Bernard. But then theycollided in a sceptical age, which is like colliding in a London fog. There can never be any clear controversy in a sceptical age. 

Nevertheless both Hardy and Meredith did mean something; and they didmean diametrically opposite things. Meredith was perhaps the only manin the modern world who has almost had the high honour of rising out ofthe low estate of a Pantheist into the high estate of a Pagan. A Paganis a person who can do what hardly any person for the last two thousandyears could do: a person who can take Nature naturally. It is due toMeredith to say that no one outside a few of the great Greeks has evertaken Nature so naturally as he did. And it is also due to him to saythat no one outside Colney Hatch ever took Nature so unnaturally as itwas taken in what Mr. Hardy has had the blasphemy to call Wessex Tales. This division between the two points of view is vital; because the turnof the nineteenth century was a very sharp one; by it we have reachedthe rapids in which we find ourselves to-day. 

Meredith really is a Pantheist. You can express it by saying that God isthe great All: you can express it much more intelligently by saying thatPan is the great god. But there is some sense in it, and the sense isthis: that some people believe that this world is sufficiently good atbottom for us to trust ourselves to it without very much knowing why. Itis the whole point in most of Meredith's tales that there is somethingbehind us that often saves us when we understand neither it norourselves. He sometimes talked mere intellectualism about women: butthat is because the most brilliant brains can get tired. Meredith'sbrain was quite tired when it wrote some of its most quoted and leastinteresting epigrams: like that about passing Seraglio Point, but notdoubling Cape Turk. Those who can see Meredith's mind in that are withthose who can see Dickens' mind in Little Nell. Both were chivalrouspronouncements on behalf of oppressed females: neither has any earthlymeaning as ideas. 

But what Meredith did do for women was not to emancipate them (whichmeans nothing) but to express them, which means a great deal. And heoften expressed them right, even when he expressed himself wrong. Take, for instance, that phrase so often quoted: "Woman will be the last thingcivilised by man. " Intellectually it is something worse than false; itis the opposite of what he was always attempting to say. So far fromadmitting any equality in the sexes, it logically admits that a man mayuse against a woman any chains or whips he has been in the habit ofusing against a tiger or a bear. He stood as the special champion offemale dignity: but I cannot remember any author, Eastern or Western, who has so calmly assumed that man is the master and woman merely thematerial, as Meredith really does in this phrase. Any one who knows afree woman (she is generally a married woman) will immediately beinclined to ask two simple and catastrophic questions, first: "Whyshould woman be civilised?" and, second: "Why, if she is to becivilised, should she be civilised by man?" In the mere intellectualismof the matter, Meredith seems to be talking the most brutal sexmastery: he, at any rate, has not doubled Cape Turk, nor even passedSeraglio Point. Now why is it that we all really feel that thisMeredithian passage is not so insolently masculine as in mere logic itwould seem? I think it is for this simple reason: that there issomething about Meredith making us feel that it is not woman hedisbelieves in, but civilisation. It is a dark undemonstrated feelingthat Meredith would really be rather sorry if woman were civilised byman--or by anything else. When we have got that, we have got the realPagan--the man that does believe in Pan. 

It is proper to put this philosophic matter first, before the æstheticappreciation of Meredith, because with Meredith a sort of passing bellhas rung and the Victorian orthodoxy is certainly no longer safe. Dickens and Carlyle, as we have said, rebelled against the orthodoxcompromise: but Meredith has escaped from it. Cosmopolitanism, Socialism, Feminism are already in the air; and Queen Victoria hasbegun to look like Mrs. Grundy. But to escape from a city is one thing:to choose a road is another. The free-thinker who found himself outsidethe Victorian city, found himself also in the fork of two very differentnaturalistic paths. One of them went upwards through a tangled butliving forest to lonely but healthy hills: the other went down to aswamp. Hardy went down to botanise in the swamp, while Meredith climbedtowards the sun. Meredith became, at his best, a sort of daintilydressed Walt Whitman: Hardy became a sort of village atheist broodingand blaspheming over the village idiot. It is largely because thefree-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether theywant to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that theirsmall but sincere movement has failed. 

For the duel is deadly; and any agnostic who wishes to be anything morethan a Nihilist must sympathise with one version of nature or theother. The God of Meredith is impersonal; but he is often more healthyand kindly than any of the persons. That of Thomas Hardy is almost madepersonal by the intense feeling that he is poisonous. Nature is alwayscoming in to save Meredith's women; Nature is always coming in to betrayand ruin Hardy's. It has been said that if God had not existed it wouldhave been necessary to invent Him. But it is not often, as in Mr. Hardy's case, that it is necessary to invent Him in order to prove howunnecessary (and undesirable) He is. But Mr. Hardy is anthropomorphicout of sheer atheism. He personifies the universe in order to give it apiece of his mind. But the fight is unequal for the old philosophicalreason: that the universe had already given Mr. Hardy a piece of _its_mind to fight with. One curious result of this divergence in the twotypes of sceptic is this: that when these two brilliant novelists breakdown or blow up or otherwise lose for a moment their artisticself-command, they are both equally wild, but wild in oppositedirections. Meredith shows an extravagance in comedy which, if it werenot so complicated, every one would call broad farce. But Mr. Hardy hasthe honour of inventing a new sort of game, which may be called theextravagance of depression. The placing of the weak lover and his newlove in such a place that they actually see the black flag announcingthat Tess has been hanged is utterly inexcusable in art and probability;it is a cruel practical joke. But it is a practical joke at which evenits author cannot brighten up enough to laugh. 

But it is when we consider the great artistic power of these twowriters, with all their eccentricities, that we see even more clearlythat free-thought was, as it were, a fight between finger-posts. For itis the remarkable fact that it was the man who had the healthy and manlyoutlook who had the crabbed and perverse style; it was the man who hadthe crabbed and perverse outlook who had the healthy and manly style. The reader may well have complained of paradox when I observed abovethat Meredith, unlike most neo-Pagans, did in his way take Naturenaturally. It may be suggested, in tones of some remonstrance, thatthings like "though pierced by the cruel acerb, " or "thy fleetingness isbigger in the ghost, " or "her gabbling grey she eyes askant, " or "sheerfilm of the surface awag" are not taking Nature naturally. And this istrue of Meredith's style, but it is not true of his spirit; nor even, apparently, of his serious opinions. In one of the poems I have quotedhe actually says of those who live nearest to that Nature he was alwayspraising--

 "Have they but held her laws and nature dear, They mouth no sentence of inverted wit";

which certainly was what Meredith himself was doing most of the time. But a similar paradox of the combination of plain tastes with twistedphrases can also be seen in Browning. Something of the same can be seenin many of the cavalier poets. I do not understand it: it may be thatthe fertility of a cheerful mind crowds everything, so that the tree isentangled in its own branches; or it may be that the cheerful mind caresless whether it is understood or not; as a man is less articulate whenhe is humming than when he is calling for help. 

Certainly Meredith suffers from applying a complex method to men andthings he does not mean to be complex; nay, honestly admires for beingsimple. The conversations between Diana and Redworth fail of their fullcontrast because Meredith can afford the twopence for Diana coloured, but cannot afford the penny for Redworth plain. Meredith's ideals wereneither sceptical nor finicky: but they can be called insufficient. Hehad, perhaps, over and above his honest Pantheism two convictionsprofound enough to be called prejudices. He was probably of Welshblood, certainly of Celtic sympathies, and he set himself more swiftlythough more subtly than Ruskin or Swinburne to undermining the enormouscomplacency of John Bull. He also had a sincere hope in the strength ofwomanhood, and may be said, almost without hyperbole, to have begottengigantic daughters. He may yet suffer for his chivalric interference asmany champions do. I have little doubt that when St. George had killedthe dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess. But certainly neitherof these two vital enthusiasms touched the Victorian trouble. Thedisaster of the modern English is not that they are not Celtic, but thatthey are not English. The tragedy of the modern woman is not that she isnot allowed to follow man, but that she follows him far too slavishly. This conscious and theorising Meredith did not get very near his problemand is certainly miles away from ours. But the other Meredith was acreator; which means a god. That is true of him which is true of sodifferent a man as Dickens, that all one can say of him is that he isfull of good things. A reader opening one of his books feels like aschoolboy opening a hamper which he knows to have somehow cost a hundredpounds. He may be more bewildered by it than by an ordinary hamper; buthe gets the impression of a real richness of thought; and that is whatone really gets from such riots of felicity as _Evan Harrington_ or_Harry Richmond_. His philosophy may be barren, but he was not. And thechief feeling among those that enjoy him is a mere wish that more peoplecould enjoy him too. 

I end here upon Hardy and Meredith; because this parting of the ways toopen optimism and open pessimism really was the end of the Victorianpeace. There are many other men, very nearly as great, on whom I mightdelight to linger: on Shorthouse, for instance, who in one way goes withMrs. Browning or Coventry Patmore. I mean that he has a wide culture, which is called by some a narrow religion. When we think what even thebest novels about cavaliers have been (written by men like Scott orStevenson) it is a wonderful thing that the author of _John Inglesant_could write a cavalier romance in which he forgot Cromwell butremembered Hobbes. But Shorthouse is outside the period in fiction inthe same sort of way in which Francis Thompson is outside it in poetry. He did not accept the Victorian basis. He knew too much. 

There is one more matter that may best be considered here, thoughbriefly: it illustrates the extreme difficulty of dealing with theVictorian English in a book like this, because of their eccentricity;not of opinions, but of character and artistic form. There are severalgreat Victorians who will not fit into any of the obvious categories Iemploy; because they will not fit into anything, hardly into the worlditself. Where Germany or Italy would relieve the monotony of mankind bypaying serious respect to an artist, or a scholar, or a patrioticwarrior, or a priest--it was always the instinct of the English to do itby pointing out a Character. Dr. Johnson has faded as a poet or acritic, but he survives as a Character. Cobbett is neglected(unfortunately) as a publicist and pamphleteer, but he is remembered asa Character. Now these people continued to crop up through the Victoriantime; and each stands so much by himself that I shall end these pageswith a profound suspicion that I have forgotten to mention a Characterof gigantic dimensions. Perhaps the best example of such eccentrics isGeorge Borrow; who sympathised with unsuccessful nomads like the gipsieswhile every one else sympathised with successful nomads like the Jews;who had a genius like the west wind for the awakening of wild and casualfriendships and the drag and attraction of the roads. But whether GeorgeBorrow ought to go into the section devoted to philosophers, or thesection devoted to novelists, or the section devoted to liars, nobodyelse has ever known, even if he did. 

But the strongest case of this Victorian power of being abruptlyoriginal in a corner can be found in two things: the literature meantmerely for children and the literature meant merely for fun. It is truethat these two very Victorian things often melted into each other (aswas the way of Victorian things), but not sufficiently to make it safeto mass them together without distinction. Thus there was GeorgeMacdonald, a Scot of genius as genuine as Carlyle's; he could writefairy-tales that made all experience a fairy-tale. He could give thereal sense that every one had the end of an elfin thread that must atlast lead them into Paradise. It was a sort of optimist Calvinism. Butsuch really significant fairy-tales were accidents of genius. Of theVictorian Age as a whole it is true to say that it did discover a newthing; a thing called Nonsense. It may be doubted whether this thing wasreally invented to please children. Rather it was invented by oldpeople trying to prove their first childhood, and sometimes succeedingonly in proving their second. But whatever else the thing was, it wasEnglish and it was individual. Lewis Carroll gave mathematics a holiday:he carried logic into the wild lands of illogicality. Edward Lear, aricher, more romantic and therefore more truly Victorian buffoon, improved the experiment. But the more we study it, the more we shall, Ithink, conclude that it reposed on something more real and profound inthe Victorians than even their just and exquisite appreciation ofchildren. It came from the deep Victorian sense of humour. 

It may appear, because I have used from time to time the only possiblephrases for the case, that I mean the Victorian Englishman to appear asa blockhead, which means an unconscious buffoon. To all this there is afinal answer: that he was also a conscious buffoon--and a successfulone. He was a humorist; and one of the best humorists in Europe. Thatwhich Goethe had never taught the Germans, Byron did manage to teach theEnglish--the duty of not taking him seriously. The strong and shrewdVictorian humour appears in every slash of the pencil of Charles Keene;in every undergraduate inspiration of Calverley or "Q. " or J. K. S. Theyhad largely forgotten both art and arms: but the gods had left themlaughter. 

But the final proof that the Victorians were alive by this laughter, canbe found in the fact they could manage and master for a moment even thecosmopolitan modern theatre. They could contrive to put "The BabBallads" on the stage. To turn a private name into a public epithet is athing given to few: but the word "Gilbertian" will probably last longerthan the name Gilbert. 

It meant a real Victorian talent; that of exploding unexpectedly andalmost, as it seemed, unintentionally. Gilbert made good jokes by thethousand; but he never (in his best days) made the joke that couldpossibly have been expected of him. This is the last essential of theVictorian. Laugh at him as a limited man, a moralist, conventionalist, an opportunist, a formalist. But remember also that he was really ahumorist; and may still be laughing at you. 

CHAPTER III

THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS

What was really unsatisfactory in Victorian literature is something mucheasier to feel than to state. It was not so much a superiority in themen of other ages to the Victorian men. It was a superiority ofVictorian men to themselves. The individual was unequal. Perhaps that iswhy the society became unequal: I cannot say. They were lame giants; thestrongest of them walked on one leg a little shorter than the other. Agreat man in any age must be a common man, and also an uncommon man. Those that are only uncommon men are perverts and sowers of pestilence. But somehow the great Victorian man was more and less than this. He wasat once a giant and a dwarf. When he has been sweeping the sky incircles infinitely great, he suddenly shrivels into somethingindescribably small. There is a moment when Carlyle turns suddenly froma high creative mystic to a common Calvinist. There are moments whenGeorge Eliot turns from a prophetess into a governess. There are alsomoments when Ruskin turns into a governess, without even the excuse ofsex. But in all these cases the alteration comes as a thing quite abruptand unreasonable. We do not feel this acute angle anywhere in Homer orin Virgil or in Chaucer or in Shakespeare or in Dryden; such things asthey knew they knew. It is no disgrace to Homer that he had notdiscovered Britain; or to Virgil that he had not discovered America; orto Chaucer that he had not discovered the solar system; or to Drydenthat he had not discovered the steam-engine. But we do most frequentlyfeel, with the Victorians, that the very vastness of the number ofthings they know illustrates the abrupt abyss of the things they do notknow. We feel, in a sort of way, that it _is_ a disgrace to a man likeCarlyle when he asks the Irish why they do not bestir themselves andre-forest their country: saying not a word about the soaking up of everysort of profit by the landlords which made that and every other Irishimprovement impossible. We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man likeRuskin when he says, with a solemn visage, that building in iron is uglyand unreal, but that the weightiest objection is that there is nomention of it in the Bible; we feel as if he had just said he could findno hair-brushes in Habakkuk. We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a manlike Thackeray when he proposes that people should be forcibly preventedfrom being nuns, merely because he has no fixed intention of becoming anun himself. We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like Tennyson, when he talks of the French revolutions, the huge crusades that hadrecreated the whole of his civilisation, as being "no graver than aschoolboy's barring out. " We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man likeBrowning to make spluttering and spiteful puns about the names Newman, Wiseman, and Manning. We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man likeNewman when he confesses that for some time he felt as if he couldn'tcome in to the Catholic Church, because of that dreadful Mr. DanielO'Connell, who had the vulgarity to fight for his own country. We feelthat it _is_ a disgrace to a man like Dickens, when he makes a blindbrute and savage out of a man like St. Dunstan; it sounds as if it werenot Dickens talking but Dombey. We feel it _is_ a disgrace to a man likeSwinburne, when he has a Jingo fit and calls the Boer children in theconcentration camps "Whelps of treacherous dams whom none save we havespared to starve and slay": we feel that Swinburne, for the first time, really has become an immoral and indecent writer. All this is a certainodd provincialism peculiar to the English in that great century: theywere in a kind of pocket; they appealed to too narrow a public opinion;I am certain that no French or German men of the same genius made suchremarks. Renan was the enemy of the Catholic Church; but who can imagineRenan writing of it as Kingsley or Dickens did? Taine was the enemy ofthe French Revolution; but who can imagine Taine talking about it asTennyson or Newman talked? Even Matthew Arnold, though he saw this periland prided himself on escaping it, did not altogether escape it. Theremust be (to use an Irishism) something shallow in the depths of any manwho talks about the _Zeitgeist_ as if it were a living thing. 

But this defect is very specially the key to the case of the two greatVictorian poets, Tennyson and Browning; the two spirited or beautifultunes, so to speak, to which the other events marched or danced. It wasespecially so of Tennyson, for a reason which raises some of the mostreal problems about his poetry. Tennyson, of course, owed a great dealto Virgil. There is no question of plagiarism here; a debt to Virgil islike a debt to Nature. But Tennyson was a provincial Virgil. In suchpassages as that about the schoolboy's barring out he might be called asuburban Virgil. I mean that he tried to have the universal balance ofall the ideas at which the great Roman had aimed: but he hadn't got holdof all the ideas to balance. Hence his work was not a balance of truths, like the universe. It was a balance of whims; like the BritishConstitution. It is intensely typical of Tennyson's philosophical temperthat he was almost the only Poet Laureate who was not ludicrous. It isnot absurd to think of Tennyson as tuning his harp in praise of QueenVictoria: that is, it is not absurd in the same sense as Chaucer's harphallowed by dedication to Richard II or Wordsworth's harp hallowed bydedication to George IV is absurd. Richard's court could not properlyappreciate either Chaucer's daisies or his "devotion. " George IV wouldnot have gone pottering about Helvellyn in search of purity and thesimple annals of the poor. But Tennyson did sincerely believe in theVictorian compromise; and sincerity is never undignified. He really didhold a great many of the same views as Queen Victoria, though he wasgifted with a more fortunate literary style. If Dickens is Cobbett'sdemocracy stirring in its grave, Tennyson is the exquisitely ornamentalextinguisher on the flame of the first revolutionary poets. England hassettled down; England has become Victorian. The compromise wasinteresting, it was national and for a long time it was successful:there is still a great deal to be said for it. But it was as freakishand unphilosophic, as arbitrary and untranslatable, as a beggar'spatched coat or a child's secret language. Now it is here that Browninghad a certain odd advantage over Tennyson; which has, perhaps, somewhatexaggerated his intellectual superiority to him. Browning's eccentricstyle was more suitable to the poetry of a nation of eccentrics; ofpeople for the time being removed far from the centre of intellectualinterests. The hearty and pleasant task of expressing one's intensedislike of something one doesn't understand is much more poeticallyachieved by saying, in a general way "Grrr--you swine!" than it is bylaboured lines such as "the red fool-fury of the Seine. " We all feelthat there is more of the man in Browning here; more of Dr. Johnson orCobbett. Browning is the Englishman taking himself wilfully, followinghis nose like a bull-dog, going by his own likes and dislikes. We cannothelp feeling that Tennyson is the Englishman taking himselfseriously--an awful sight. One's memory flutters unhappily over acertain letter about the Papal Guards written by Sir WilloughbyPatterne. It is here chiefly that Tennyson suffers by that veryVirgilian loveliness and dignity of diction which he put to the serviceof such a small and anomalous national scheme. Virgil had the best newsto tell as well as the best words to tell it in. His world might besad; but it was the largest world one could live in before the coming ofChristianity. If he told the Romans to spare the vanquished and to wardown the mighty, at least he was more or less well informed about who_were_ mighty and who _were_ vanquished. But when Tennyson wrote verseslike--

 "Of freedom in her regal seat, Of England; not the schoolboy heat, The blind hysterics of the Celt"

he quite literally did not know one word of what he was talking about;he did not know what Celts are, or what hysterics are, or what freedomwas, or what regal was or even of what England was--in the living Europeof that time. 

His religious range was very much wider and wiser than his political;but here also he suffered from treating as true universality a thingthat was only a sort of lukewarm local patriotism. Here also hesuffered by the very splendour and perfection of his poetical powers. Hewas quite the opposite of the man who cannot express himself; theinarticulate singer who dies with all his music in him. He had a greatdeal to say; but he had much more power of expression than was wantedfor anything he had to express. He could not think up to the height ofhis own towering style. 

For whatever else Tennyson was, he was a great poet; no mind that feelsitself free, that is, above the ebb and flow of fashion, can feelanything but contempt for the later effort to discredit him in thatrespect. It is true that, like Browning and almost every other Victorianpoet, he was really two poets. But it is just to him to insist that inhis case (unlike Browning's) both the poets were good. The first is moreor less like Stevenson in metre; it is a magical luck or skill in themere choice of words. "Wet sands marbled with moon and cloud"--"Flits bythe sea-blue bird of March"--"Leafless ribs and iron horns"--"When thelong dun wolds are ribbed with snow"--in all these cases one word is thekeystone of an arch which would fall into ruin without it. But there areother strong phrases that recall not Stevenson but rather their commonmaster, Virgil--"Tears from the depths of some divine despair"--"Thereis fallen a splendid tear from the passion-flower at the gate"--"Was agreat water; and the moon was full"--"God made Himself an awful rose ofdawn. " These do not depend on a word but on an idea: they might even betranslated. It is also true, I think, that he was first and last a lyricpoet. He was always best when he expressed himself shortly. In longpoems he had an unfortunate habit of eventually saying very nearly theopposite of what he meant to say. I will take only two instances of whatI mean. In the _Idylls of the King_, and in _In Memoriam_ (his twosustained and ambitious efforts), particular phrases are always flashingout the whole fire of the truth; the truth that Tennyson meant. Butowing to his English indolence, his English aristocraticirresponsibility, his English vagueness in thought, he always managed tomake the main poem mean exactly what he did not mean. Thus, these twolines which simply say that

 "Lancelot was the first in tournament, But Arthur mightiest in the battle-field"

do really express what he meant to express about Arthur being after all"the highest, yet most human too; not Lancelot, nor another. " But as hishero is actually developed, we have exactly the opposite impression;that poor old Lancelot, with all his faults, was much more of a man thanArthur. He was a Victorian in the bad as well as the good sense; hecould not keep priggishness out of long poems. Or again, take the caseof _In Memoriam_. I will quote one verse (probably incorrectly) whichhas always seemed to me splendid, and which does express what the wholepoem should express--but hardly does. 

 "That we may lift from out the dust, A voice as unto him that hears A cry above the conquered years Of one that ever works, and trust. "

The poem should have been a cry above the conquered years. It might wellhave been that if the poet could have said sharply at the end of it, asa pure piece of dogma, "I've forgotten every feature of the man's face:I know God holds him alive. " But under the influence of the mereleisurely length of the thing, the reader _does_ rather receive theimpression that the wound has been healed only by time; and that thevictor hours _can_ boast that this is the man that loved and lost, butall he was is overworn. This is not the truth; and Tennyson did notintend it for the truth. It is simply the result of the lack ofsomething militant, dogmatic and structural in him: whereby he could notbe trusted with the trail of a very long literary process withoutentangling himself like a kitten playing cat's-cradle. 

Browning, as above suggested, got on much better with eccentric andsecluded England because he treated it as eccentric and secluded; aplace where one could do what one liked. To a considerable extent he diddo what he liked; arousing not a few complaints; and many doubts andconjectures as to why on earth he liked it. Many comparativelysympathetic persons pondered upon what pleasure it could give any man towrite _Sordello_ or rhyme "end-knot" to "offend not. " Nevertheless hewas no anarchist and no mystagogue; and even where he was defective, hisdefect has commonly been stated wrongly. The two chief charges againsthim were a contempt for form unworthy of an artist, and a poor pride inobscurity. The obscurity is true, though not, I think, the pride in it;but the truth about this charge rather rises out of the truth about theother. The other charge is not true. Browning cared very much for form;he cared very much for style. You may not happen to like his style; buthe did. To say that he had not enough mastery over form to expresshimself perfectly like Tennyson or Swinburne is like criticising thegriffin of a mediæval gargoyle without even knowing that it is agriffin; treating it as an infantile and unsuccessful attempt at aclassical angel. A poet indifferent to form ought to mean a poet who didnot care what form he used as long as he expressed his thoughts. Hemight be a rather entertaining sort of poet; telling a smoking-roomstory in blank verse or writing a hunting-song in the Spenserian stanza;giving a realistic analysis of infanticide in a series of triolets; orproving the truth of Immortality in a long string of limericks. Browningcertainly had no such indifference. Almost every poem of Browning, especially the shortest and most successful ones, was moulded or gravenin some special style, generally grotesque, but invariably deliberate. In most cases whenever he wrote a new song he wrote a new kind of song. The new lyric is not only of a different metre, but of a differentshape. No one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style asthat horrible one beginning "John, Master of the Temple of God, " withits weird choruses and creepy prose directions. No one, not evenBrowning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as _Pisgah-sights_. Noone, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as _Time'sRevenges_. No one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the samestyle as _Meeting at Night_ and _Parting at Morning_. No one, not evenBrowning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as _The Flight of theDuchess_, or in the same style as _The Grammarian's Funeral_, or in thesame style as _A Star_, or in the same style as that astounding lyricwhich begins abruptly "Some people hang pictures up. " These metres andmanners were not accidental; they really do suit the sort of spiritualexperiment Browning was making in each case. Browning, then, was notchaotic; he was deliberately grotesque. But there certainly was, overand above this grotesqueness, a perversity and irrationality about theman which led him to play the fool in the middle of his own poems; toleave off carving gargoyles and simply begin throwing stones. Hiscurious complicated puns are an example of this: Hood had used the punto make a sentence or a sentiment especially pointed and clear. InBrowning the word with two meanings seems to mean rather less, ifanything, than the word with one. It also applies to his trick ofsetting himself to cope with impossible rhymes. It may be fun, though itis not poetry, to try rhyming to ranunculus; but even the funpresupposes that you _do_ rhyme to it; and I will affirm, and hold underpersecution, that "Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle-us" does not rhyme toit. 

The obscurity, to which he must in a large degree plead guilty, was, curiously enough, the result rather of the gay artist in him than thedeep thinker. It is patience in the Browning students; in Browning itwas only impatience. He wanted to say something comic and energetic andhe wanted to say it quick. And, between his artistic skill in thefantastic and his temperamental turn for the abrupt, the idea sometimesflashed past unseen. But it is quite an error to suppose that these arethe dark mines containing his treasure. The two or three great and truethings he really had to say he generally managed to say quite simply. Thus he really did want to say that God had indeed made man and womanone flesh; that the sex relation was religious in this real sense thateven in our sin and despair we take it for granted and expect a sort ofvirtue in it. The feelings of the bad husband about the good wife, forinstance, are about as subtle and entangled as any matter on this earth;and Browning really had something to say about them. But he said it insome of the plainest and most unmistakable words in all literature; aslucid as a flash of lightning. "Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"Or again, he did really want to say that death and such moral terrorswere best taken in a military spirit; he could not have said it moresimply than: "I was ever a fighter; one fight more, the best and thelast. " He did really wish to say that human life was unworkable unlessimmortality were implied in it every other moment; he could not havesaid it more simply: "leave now to dogs and apes; Man has for ever. " Theobscurities were not merely superficial, but often covered quitesuperficial ideas. He was as likely as not to be most unintelligible ofall in writing a compliment in a lady's album. I remember in my boyhood(when Browning kept us awake like coffee) a friend reading out the poemabout the portrait to which I have already referred, reading it in thatrapid dramatic way in which this poet must be read. And I was profoundlypuzzled at the passage where it seemed to say that the cousindisparaged the picture, "while John scorns ale. " I could not think whatthis sudden teetotalism on the part of John had to do with the affair, but I forgot to ask at the time and it was only years afterwards that, looking at the book, I found it was "John's corns ail, " a veryBrowningesque way of saying he winced. Most of Browning's obscurity isof that sort--the mistakes are almost as quaint as misprints--and theBrowning student, in that sense, is more a proof reader than a disciple. For the rest his real religion was of the most manly, even the mostboyish sort. He is called an optimist; but the word suggests acalculated contentment which was not in the least one of his vices. Whathe really was was a romantic. He offered the cosmos as an adventurerather than a scheme. He did not explain evil, far less explain it away;he enjoyed defying it. He was a troubadour even in theology andmetaphysics: like the _Jongleurs de Dieu_ of St. Francis. He may be saidto have serenaded heaven with a guitar, and even, so to speak, tried toclimb there with a rope ladder. Thus his most vivid things are thered-hot little love lyrics, or rather, little love dramas. He did onereally original and admirable thing: he managed the real details ofmodern love affairs in verse, and love is the most realistic thing inthe world. He substituted the street with the green blind for the fadedgarden of Watteau, and the "blue spirt of a lighted match" for themonotony of the evening star. 

Before leaving him it should be added that he was fitted to deepen theVictorian mind, but not to broaden it. With all his Italian sympathiesand Italian residence, he was not the man to get Victorian England outof its provincial rut: on many things Kingsley himself was not sonarrow. His celebrated wife was wider and wiser than he in this sense;for she was, however one-sidedly, involved in the emotions of centralEuropean politics. She defended Louis Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel; andintelligently, as one conscious of the case against them both. As towhy it now seems simple to defend the first Italian King, but absurd todefend the last French Emperor--well, the reason is sad and simple. Itis concerned with certain curious things called success and failure, andI ought to have considered it under the heading of _The Book of Snobs_. But Elizabeth Barrett, at least, was no snob: her political poems haverather an impatient air, as if they were written, and even published, rather prematurely--just before the fall of her idol. These oldpolitical poems of hers are too little read to-day; they are amongst themost sincere documents on the history of the times, and many modernblunders could be corrected by the reading of them. And ElizabethBarrett had a strength really rare among women poets; the strength ofthe phrase. She excelled in her sex, in epigram, almost as much asVoltaire in his. Pointed phrases like: "Martyrs by the pang without thepalm"--or "Incense to sweeten a crime and myrrh to embitter a curse, "these expressions, which are witty after the old fashion of the conceit, came quite freshly and spontaneously to her quite modern mind. But thefirst fact is this, that these epigrams of hers were never so true aswhen they turned on one of the two or three pivots on which contemporaryEurope was really turning. She is by far the most European of all theEnglish poets of that age; all of them, even her own much greaterhusband, look local beside her. Tennyson and the rest are nowhere. Takeany positive political fact, such as the final fall of Napoleon. Tennyson wrote these profoundly foolish lines--

 "He thought to quell the stubborn hearts of oak Madman!"

as if the defeat of an English regiment were a violation of the laws ofNature. Mrs. Browning knew no more facts about Napoleon, perhaps, thanTennyson did; but she knew the truth. Her epigram on Napoleon's fall isin one line

 "And kings crept out again to feel the sun. "

Talleyrand would have clapped his horrible old hands at that. Herinstinct about the statesman and the soldier was very like Jane Austen'sinstinct for the gentleman and the man. It is not unnoticeable that asMiss Austen spent most of her life in a village, Miss Barrett spent mostof her life on a sofa. The godlike power of guessing seems (for somereason I do not understand) to grow under such conditions. UnfortunatelyMrs. Browning was like all the other Victorians in going a little lame, as I have roughly called it, having one leg shorter than the other. Buther case was, in one sense, extreme. She exaggerated both ways. She wastoo strong and too weak, or (as a false sex philosophy would express it)too masculine and too feminine. I mean that she hit the centre ofweakness with almost the same emphatic precision with which she hit thecentre of strength. She could write finally of the factory wheels"grinding life down from its mark, " a strong and strictly trueobservation. Unfortunately she could also write of Euripides "with hisdroppings of warm tears. " She could write in _A Drama of Exile_, areally fine exposition, touching the later relation of Adam and theanimals: unfortunately the tears were again turned on at the wrongmoment at the main; and the stage direction commands a silence, onlybroken by the dropping of angel's tears. How much noise is made byangel's tears? Is it a sound of emptied buckets, or of garden hose, orof mountain cataracts? That is the sort of question which ElizabethBarrett's extreme love of the extreme was always tempting people to ask. Yet the question, as asked, does her a heavy historical injustice; weremember all the lines in her work which were weak enough to be called"womanly, " we forget the multitude of strong lines that are strongenough to be called "manly"; lines that Kingsley or Henley would havejumped for joy to print in proof of their manliness. She had one of thepeculiar talents of true rhetoric, that of a powerful concentration. Asto the critic who thinks her poetry owed anything to the great poet whowas her husband, he can go and live in the same hotel with the man whocan believe that George Eliot owed anything to the extravagantimagination of Mr. George Henry Lewes. So far from Browning inspiring orinterfering, he did not in one sense interfere enough. Her realinferiority to him in literature is that he was consciously while shewas unconsciously absurd. 

It is natural, in the matter of Victorian moral change, to takeSwinburne as the next name here. He is the only poet who was also, inthe European sense, on the spot; even if, in the sense of the Gilbertiansong, the spot was barred. He also knew that something rather crucialwas happening to Christendom; he thought it was getting unchristened. Itis even a little amusing, indeed, that these two Pro-Italian poetsalmost conducted a political correspondence in rhyme. Mrs. Browningsternly reproached those who had ever doubted the good faith of the Kingof Sardinia, whom she acclaimed as being truly a king. Swinburne, lyrically alluding to her as "Sea-eagle of English feather, " broadlyhinted that the chief blunder of that wild fowl had been her support ofan autocratic adventurer: "calling a crowned man royal, that was no morethan a king. " But it is not fair, even in this important connection, tojudge Swinburne by _Songs Before Sunrise_. They were songs before asunrise that has never turned up. Their dogmatic assertions have for along time past stared starkly at us as nonsense. As, for instance, thephrase "Glory to Man in the Highest, for man is the master of things";after which there is evidently nothing to be said, except that it isnot true. But even where Swinburne had his greater grip, as in thatgrave and partly just poem _Before a Crucifix_, Swinburne, the mostLatin, the most learned, the most largely travelled of the Victorians, still knows far less of the facts than even Mrs. Browning. The whole ofthe poem, _Before a Crucifix_, breaks down by one mere mistake. Itimagines that the French or Italian peasants who fell on their kneesbefore the Crucifix did so because they were slaves. They fell on theirknees because they were free men, probably owning their own farms. Swinburne could have found round about Putney plenty of slaves who hadno crucifixes: but only crucifixions. 

When we come to ethics and philosophy, doubtless we find Swinburne infull revolt, not only against the temperate idealism of Tennyson, butagainst the genuine piety and moral enthusiasm of people like Mrs. Browning. But here again Swinburne is very English, nay, he is veryVictorian, for his revolt is illogical. For the purposes of intelligentinsurrection against priests and kings, Swinburne ought to havedescribed the natural life of man, free and beautiful, and proved fromthis both the noxiousness and the needlessness of such chains. Unfortunately Swinburne rebelled against Nature first and then tried torebel against religion for doing exactly the same thing that he haddone. His songs of joy are not really immoral; but his songs of sorroware. But when he merely hurls at the priest the assertion that flesh isgrass and life is sorrow, he really lays himself open to the restrainedanswer, "So I have ventured, on various occasions, to remark. " When hewent forth, as it were, as the champion of pagan change and pleasure, heheard uplifted the grand choruses of his own _Atalanta_, in his rear, refusing hope. 

The splendid diction that blazes through the whole of that drama, thatstill dances exquisitely in the more lyrical _Poems and Ballads_, makessome marvellous appearances in _Songs Before Sunrise_, and then mainlyfalters and fades away, is, of course, the chief thing about Swinburne. The style is the man; and some will add that it does not, thusunsupported, amount to much of a man. But the style itself suffers someinjustice from those who would speak thus. The views expressed are oftenquite foolish and often quite insincere; but the style itself is amanlier and more natural thing than is commonly made out. It is not inthe least languorous or luxurious or merely musical and sensuous, as onewould gather from both the eulogies and the satires, from the consciousand the unconscious imitations. On the contrary, it is a sort offighting and profane parody of the Old Testament; and its lines are madeof short English words like the short Roman swords. The first line ofone of his finest poems, for instance, runs, "I have lived long enoughto have seen one thing, that love hath an end. " In that sentence onlyone small "e" gets outside the monosyllable. Through all hisinterminable tragedies, he was fondest of lines like--

 "If ever I leave off to honour you God give me shame; I were the worst churl born. "

The dramas were far from being short and dramatic; but the words reallywere. Nor was his verse merely smooth; except his very bad verse, like"the lilies and languors of virtue, to the raptures and roses of vice, "which both, in cheapness of form and foolishness of sentiment, may becalled the worst couplet in the world's literature. In his real poetry(even in the same poem) his rhythm and rhyme are as original andambitious as Browning; and the only difference between him and Browningis, not that he is smooth and without ridges, but that he always creststhe ridge triumphantly and Browning often does not--

 "On thy bosom though many a kiss be, There are none such as knew it of old. Was it Alciphron once or Arisbe, Male ringlets or feminine gold, That thy lips met with under the statue Whence a look shot out sharp after thieves From the eyes of the garden-god at you Across the fig-leaves. "

Look at the rhymes in that verse, and you will see they are as stiff atask as Browning's: only they are successful. That is the real strengthof Swinburne--a style. It was a style that nobody could really imitate;and least of all Swinburne himself, though he made the attempt allthrough his later years. He was, if ever there was one, an inspiredpoet. I do not think it the highest sort of poet. And you never discoverwho is an inspired poet until the inspiration goes. 

With Swinburne we step into the circle of that later Victorian influencewhich was very vaguely called Æsthetic. Like all human things, butespecially Victorian things, it was not only complex but confused. Things in it that were at one on the emotional side were flatly at waron the intellectual. In the section of the painters, it was the alliesor pupils of Ruskin, pious, almost painfully exact, and copying mediævaldetails rather for their truth than their beauty. In the section of thepoets it was pretty loose, Swinburne being the leader of the revels. Butthere was one great man who was in both sections, a painter and a poet, who may be said to bestride the chasm like a giant. It is in an odd andliteral sense true that the name of Rossetti is important here, for thename implies the nationality. I have loosely called Carlyle and theBrontës the romance from the North; the nearest to a general definitionof the Æsthetic movement is to call it the romance from the South. It isthat warm wind that had never blown so strong since Chaucer, standing inhis cold English April, had smelt the spring in Provence. The Englishmanhas always found it easier to get inspiration from the Italians thanfrom the French; they call to each other across that unconquered castleof reason. Browning's _Englishman in Italy_, Browning's _Italian inEngland_, were both happier than either would have been in France. Rossetti was the Italian in England, as Browning was the Englishman inItaly; and the first broad fact about the artistic revolution Rossettiwrought is written when we have written his name. But if the South letsin warmth or heat, it also lets in hardness. The more the orange tree isluxuriant in growth, the less it is loose in outline. And it is exactlywhere the sea is slightly warmer than marble that it looks slightlyharder. This, I think, is the one universal power behind the Æstheticand Pre-Raphaelite movements, which all agreed in two things at least:strictness in the line and strength, nay violence, in the colour. 

Rossetti was a remarkable man in more ways than one; he did not succeedin any art; if he had he would probably never have been heard of. It washis happy knack of half failing in both the arts that has made him asuccess. If he had been as good a poet as Tennyson, he would have been apoet who painted pictures. If he had been as good a painter asBurne-Jones, he would have been a painter who wrote poems. It is odd tonote on the very threshold of the extreme art movement that this greatartist largely succeeded by not defining his art. His poems were toopictorial. His pictures were too poetical. That is why they reallyconquered the cold satisfaction of the Victorians, because they did meansomething, even if it was a small artistic thing. 

Rossetti was one with Ruskin, on the one hand, and Swinburne on theother, in reviving the decorative instinct of the Middle Ages. WhileRuskin, in letters only, praised that decoration Rossetti and hisfriends repeated it. They almost made patterns of their poems. Thatfrequent return of the refrain which was foolishly discussed byProfessor Nordau was, in Rossetti's case, of such sadness as sometimesto amount to sameness. The criticism on him, from a mediæval point ofview, is not that he insisted on a chorus, but that he could not insiston a jolly chorus. Many of his poems were truly mediæval, but they wouldhave been even more mediæval if he could ever have written such arefrain as "Tally Ho!" or even "Tooral-ooral" instead of "Tall Troy's onfire. " With Rossetti goes, of course, his sister, a real poet, thoughshe also illustrated that Pre-Raphaelite's conflict of views thatcovered their coincidence of taste. Both used the angular outlines, theburning transparencies, the fixed but still unfathomable symbols of thegreat mediæval civilisation; but Rossetti used the religious imagery (onthe whole) irreligiously, Christina Rossetti used it religiously but (onthe whole) so to make it seem a narrower religion. 

One poet, or, to speak more strictly, one poem, belongs to the samegeneral atmosphere and impulse as Swinburne; the free but languidatmosphere of later Victorian art. But this time the wind blew fromhotter and heavier gardens than the gardens of Italy. EdwardFitzgerald, a cultured eccentric, a friend of Tennyson, produced whatprofessed to be a translation of the Persian poet Omar, who wrotequatrains about wine and roses and things in general. Whether thePersian original, in its own Persian way, was greater or less than thisversion I must not discuss here, and could not discuss anywhere. But itis quite clear that Fitzgerald's work is much too good to be a goodtranslation. It is as personal and creative a thing as ever was written;and the best expression of a bad mood, a mood that may, for all I know, be permanent in Persia, but was certainly at this time particularlyfashionable in England. In the technical sense of literature it is oneof the most remarkable achievements of that age; as poetical asSwinburne and far more perfect. In this verbal sense its most arrestingquality is a combination of something haunting and harmonious that flowsby like a river or a song, with something else that is compact andpregnant like a pithy saying picked out in rock by the chisel of somepagan philosopher. It is at once a tune that escapes and an inscriptionthat remains. Thus, alone among the reckless and romantic verses thatfirst rose in Coleridge or Keats, it preserves something also of the witand civilisation of the eighteenth century. Lines like "a Muezzin fromthe tower of darkness cries, " or "Their mouths are stopped with dust"are successful in the same sense as "Pinnacled dim in the intense inane"or "Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. " But--

 "Indeed, indeed, repentance oft before I swore; but was I sober when I swore?"

is equally successful in the same sense as--

 "Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer And without sneering teach the rest to sneer. "

It thus earned a right to be considered the complete expression of thatscepticism and sensual sadness into which later Victorian literature wasmore and more falling away: a sort of bible of unbelief. For a cold fithad followed the hot fit of Swinburne, which was of a feverish sort: hehad set out to break down without having, or even thinking he had, therudiments of rebuilding in him; and he effected nothing national even inthe way of destruction. The Tennysonians still walked past him as primlyas a young ladies' school--the Browningites still inked their eyebrowsand minds in looking for the lost syntax of Browning; while Browninghimself was away looking for God, rather in the spirit of a truant boyfrom their school looking for birds' nests. The nineteenth-centurysceptics did not really shake the respectable world and alter it, as theeighteenth-century sceptics had done; but that was because theeighteenth-century sceptics were something more than sceptics, andbelieved in Greek tragedies, in Roman laws, in the Republic. TheSwinburnian sceptics had nothing to fight for but a frame of mind; andwhen ordinary English people listened to it, they came to the conclusionthat it was a frame of mind they would rather hear about thanexperience. But these later poets did, so to speak, spread their soul inall the empty spaces; weaker brethren, disappointed artists, unattachedindividuals, very young people, were sapped or swept away by thesesongs; which, so far as any particular sense in them goes, were almostsongs without words. It is because there is something which is after allindescribably manly, intellectual, firm about Fitzgerald's way ofphrasing the pessimism that he towers above the slope that was tumblingdown to the decadents. But it is still pessimism, a thing unfit for awhite man; a thing like opium, that may often be a poison and sometimesa medicine, but never a food for us, who are driven by an inner commandnot only to think but to live, not only to live but to grow, and notonly to grow but to build. 

And, indeed, we see the insufficiency of such sad extremes even in thenext name among the major poets; we see the Swinburnian parody ofmediævalism, the inverted Catholicism of the decadents, struggling toget back somehow on its feet. The æsthetic school had, not quiteunjustly, the name of mere dilettanti. But it is fair to say that in thenext of them, a workman and a tradesman, we already feel something ofthat return to real issues leading up to the real revolts that broke upVictorianism at last. In the mere art of words, indeed, William Morriscarried much further than Swinburne or Rossetti the mere imitation ofstiff mediæval ornament. The other mediævalists had their modernmoments; which were (if they had only known it) much more mediæval thantheir mediæval moments. Swinburne could write--

 "We shall see Buonaparte the bastard Kick heels with his throat in a rope. "

One has an uneasy feeling that William Morris would have writtensomething like--

 "And the kin of the ill king Bonaparte Hath a high gallows for all his part. "

Rossetti could, for once in a way, write poetry about a real woman andcall her "Jenny. " One has a disturbed suspicion that Morris would havecalled her "Jehanne. "

But all that seems at first more archaic and decorative about Morrisreally arose from the fact that he was more virile and real than eitherSwinburne or Rossetti. It arose from the fact that he really was, whathe so often called himself, a craftsman. He had enough masculinestrength to be tidy: that is, after the masculine manner, tidy about hisown trade. If his poems were too like wallpapers, it was because hereally could make wallpapers. He knew that lines of poetry ought to bein a row, as palings ought to be in a row; and he knew that neitherpalings nor poetry looks any the worse for being simple or even severe. In a sense Morris was all the more creative because he felt the hardlimits of creation as he would have felt them if he were not working inwords but in wood; and if he was unduly dominated by the mereconventions of the mediævals, it was largely because they were (whateverelse they were) the very finest fraternity of free workmen the world isever likely to see. 

The very things that were urged against Morris are in this sense part ofhis ethical importance; part of the more promising and wholesome turn hewas half unconsciously giving to the movement of modern art. His hazierfellow-Socialists blamed him because he made money; but this was atleast in some degree because he made other things to make money: it waspart of the real and refreshing fact that at last an æsthete hadappeared who could make something. If he was a capitalist, at least hewas what later capitalists cannot or will not be--something higher thana capitalist, a tradesman. As compared with aristocrats like Swinburneor aliens like Rossetti, he was vitally English and vitally Victorian. He inherits some of that paradoxical glory which Napoleon gavereluctantly to a nation of shopkeepers. He was the last of that nation;he did not go out golfing: like that founder of the artistic shopman, Samuel Richardson, "he kept his shop, and his shop kept him. " Theimportance of his Socialism can easily be exaggerated. Among otherlesser points, he was not a Socialist; he was a sort of Dickensiananarchist. His instinct for titles was always exquisite. It is part ofhis instinct of decoration: for on a page the title always looksimportant and the printed mass of matter a mere dado under it. And noone had ever nobler titles than _The Roots of the Mountains_ or _TheWood at the End of the World_. The reader feels he hardly need read thefairy-tale because the title is so suggestive. But, when all is said, henever chose a better title than that of his social Utopia, _News fromNowhere_. He wrote it while the last Victorians were already embarked ontheir bold task of fixing the future--of narrating to-day what hashappened to-morrow. They named their books by cold titles suggestingstraight corridors of marble--titles like _Looking Backward_. But Morriswas an artist as well as an anarchist. _News from Nowhere_ is anirresponsible title; and it is an irresponsible book. It does notdescribe the problem solved; it does not describe wealth either wieldedby the State or divided equally among the citizens. It simply describesan undiscovered country where every one feels good-natured all day. Thathe could even dream so is his true dignity as a poet. He was the firstof the Æsthetes to smell mediævalism as a smell of the morning; and notas a mere scent of decay. 

With him the poetry that had been peculiarly Victorian practicallyends; and, on the whole, it is a happy ending. There are many otherminor names of major importance; but for one reason or other they do notderive from the schools that had dominated this epoch as such. ThusThompson, the author of _The City of Dreadful Night_, was a fine poet;but his pessimism combined with a close pugnacity does not follow any ofthe large but loose lines of the Swinburnian age. But he was a greatperson--he knew how to be democratic in the dark. Thus Coventry Patmorewas a much greater person. He was bursting with ideas, likeBrowning--and truer ideas as a rule. He was as eccentric and florid andElizabethan as Browning; and often in moods and metres that evenBrowning was never wild enough to think of. No one will ever forget thefirst time he read Patmore's hint that the cosmos is a thing that Godmade huge only "to make dirt cheap"; just as nobody will ever forget thesudden shout he uttered when he first heard Mrs. Todgers asked for therough outline of a wooden leg. These things are not jokes, butdiscoveries. But the very fact that Patmore was, as it were, theCatholic Browning, keeps him out of the Victorian atmosphere as such. The Victorian English simply thought him an indecent sentimentalist, asthey did all the hot and humble religious diarists of Italy or Spain. Something of the same fate followed the most powerful of that lastVictorian group who were called "Minor Poets. " They numbered many otherfine artists: notably Mr. William Watson, who is truly Victorian in thathe made a manly attempt to tread down the decadents and return to theright reason of Wordsworth--

 "I have not paid the world The evil and the insolent courtesy Of offering it my baseness as a gift. "

But none of them were able even to understand Francis Thompson; hissky-scraping humility, his mountains of mystical detail, his occasionaland unashamed weakness, his sudden and sacred blasphemies. Perhaps theshortest definition of the Victorian Age is that he stood outside it. 

CHAPTER IV

THE BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE

If it be curiously and carefully considered it will, I think, appearmore and more true that the struggle between the old spiritual theoryand the new material theory in England ended simply in a deadlock; and adeadlock that has endured. It is still impossible to say absolutely thatEngland is a Christian country or a heathen country; almost exactly asit was impossible when Herbert Spencer began to write. Separate elementsof both sorts are alive, and even increasingly alive. But neither thebeliever nor the unbeliever has the impudence to call himself theEnglishman. Certainly the great Victorian rationalism has succeeded indoing a damage to religion. It has done what is perhaps the worst of alldamages to religion. It has driven it entirely into the power of thereligious people. Men like Newman, men like Coventry Patmore, men whowould have been mystics in any case, were driven back upon being muchmore extravagantly religious than they would have been in a religiouscountry. Men like Huxley, men like Kingsley, men like most Victorianmen, were equally driven back on being irreligious; that is, on doubtingthings which men's normal imagination does not necessarily doubt. Butcertainly the most final and forcible fact is that this war ended likethe battle of Sheriffmuir, as the poet says; they both did fight, andboth did beat, and both did run away. They have left to theirdescendants a treaty that has become a dull torture. Men may believe inimmortality, and none of the men know why. Men may not believe inmiracles, and none of the men know why. The Christian Church had beenjust strong enough to check the conquest of her chief citadels. Therationalist movement had been just strong enough to conquer some of heroutposts, as it seemed, for ever. Neither was strong enough to expel theother; and Victorian England was in a state which some call liberty andsome call lockjaw. 

But the situation can be stated another way. There came a time, roughlysomewhere about 1880, when the two great positive enthusiasms of WesternEurope had for the time exhausted each other--Christianity and theFrench Revolution. About that time there used to be a sad and notunsympathetic jest going about to the effect that Queen Victoria mightvery well live longer than the Prince of Wales. Somewhat in the sameway, though the republican impulse was hardly a hundred years old andthe religious impulse nearly two thousand, yet as far as England wasconcerned, the old wave and the new seemed to be spent at the same time. On the one hand Darwin, especially through the strong journalisticgenius of Huxley, had won a very wide spread though an exceedinglyvague victory. I do not mean that Darwin's own doctrine was vague; hiswas merely one particular hypothesis about how animal variety might havearisen; and that particular hypothesis, though it will always beinteresting, is now very much the reverse of secure. But it is only inthe strictly scientific world and among strictly scientific men thatDarwin's detailed suggestion has largely broken down. The general publicimpression that he had entirely proved his case (whatever it was) wasearly arrived at, and still remains. It was and is hazily associatedwith the negation of religion. But (and this is the important point) itwas also associated with the negation of democracy. The sameMid-Victorian muddle-headedness that made people think that "evolution"meant that we need not admit the supremacy of God, also made them thinkthat "survival" meant that we must admit the supremacy of men. Huxleyhad no hand in spreading these fallacies; he was a fair fighter; and hetold his own followers, who spoke thus, most emphatically not to playthe fool. He said most strongly that his or any theory of evolution leftthe old philosophical arguments for a creator, right or wrong, exactlywhere they were before. He also said most emphatically that any one whoused the argument of Nature against the ideal of justice or an equallaw, was as senseless as a gardener who should fight on the side of theill weeds merely because they grew apace. I wish, indeed, that in such arude summary as this, I had space to do justice to Huxley as a literaryman and a moralist. He had a live taste and talent for the Englishtongue, which he devoted to the task of keeping Victorian rationalismrational. He did not succeed. As so often happens when a ratherunhealthy doubt is in the atmosphere, the strongest words of their greatcaptain could not keep the growing crowds of agnostics back from themost hopeless and inhuman extremes of destructive thought. Nonsense notyet quite dead about the folly of allowing the unfit to survive beganto be more and more wildly whispered. Such helpless specimens of"advanced thought" are, of course, quite as inconsistent with Darwinismas they are with democracy or with any other intelligent propositionever offered. But these unintelligent propositions were offered; and theultimate result was this rather important one: that the harshness ofUtilitarianism began to turn into downright tyranny. That beautifulfaith in human nature and in freedom which had made delicate the dry airof John Stuart Mill; that robust, romantic sense of justice which hadredeemed even the injustices of Macaulay--all that seemed slowly andsadly to be drying up. Under the shock of Darwinism all that was good inthe Victorian rationalism shook and dissolved like dust. All that wasbad in it abode and clung like clay. The magnificent emancipationevaporated; the mean calculation remained. One could still calculate inclear statistical tables, how many men lived, how many men died. Onemust not ask how they lived; for that is politics. One must not ask howthey died; for that is religion. And religion and politics were ruledout of all the Later Victorian debating clubs; even including thedebating club at Westminster. What third thing they were discussing, which was neither religion nor politics, I do not know. I have tried theexperiment of reading solidly through a vast number of their records andreviews and discussions; and still I do not know. The only third thing Ican think of to balance religion and politics is art; and no one wellacquainted with the debates at St. Stephen's will imagine that the artof extreme eloquence was the cause of the confusion. None will maintainthat our political masters are removed from us by an infinite artisticsuperiority in the choice of words. The politicians know nothing ofpolitics, which is their own affair: they know nothing of religion, which is certainly not their affair: it may legitimately be said thatthey have to do with nothing; they have reached that low and last levelwhere a man knows as little about his own claim, as he does about hisenemies'. In any case there can be no doubt about the effect of thisparticular situation on the problem of ethics and science. The duty ofdragging truth out by the tail or the hind leg or any other corner onecan possibly get hold of, a perfectly sound duty in itself, had somehowcome into collision with the older and larger duty of knowing somethingabout the organism and ends of a creature; or, in the everyday phrase, being able to make head or tail of it. This paradox pursued andtormented the Victorians. They could not or would not see that humanityrepels or welcomes the railway-train, simply according to what peoplecome by it. They could not see that one welcomes or smashes thetelephone, according to what words one hears in it. They really seem tohave felt that the train could be a substitute for its own passengers;or the telephone a substitute for its own voice. 

In any case it is clear that a change had begun to pass over scientificinquiry, of which we have seen the culmination in our own day. There hadbegun that easy automatic habit, of science as an oiled andsmooth-running machine, that habit of treating things as obviouslyunquestionable, when, indeed, they are obviously questionable. Thisbegan with vaccination in the Early Victorian Age; it extended to theearly licence of vivisection in its later age; it has found a sort offitting foolscap, or crown of crime and folly, in the thing calledEugenics. In all three cases the point was not so much that the pioneershad not proved their case; it was rather that, by an unexpressed rule ofrespectability, they were not required to prove it. This rather abrupttwist of the rationalistic mind in the direction of arbitrary power, certainly weakened the Liberal movement from within. And meanwhile itwas being weakened by heavy blows from without. 

There is a week that is the turn of the year; there was a year that wasthe turn of the century. About 1870 the force of the French Revolutionfaltered and fell: the year that was everywhere the death of Liberalideas: the year when Paris fell: the year when Dickens died. While thenew foes of freedom, the sceptics and scientists, were damagingdemocracy in ideas, the old foes of freedom, the emperors and the kings, were damaging her more heavily in arms. For a moment it almost seemedthat the old Tory ring of iron, the Holy Alliance, had recombinedagainst France. But there was just this difference: that the HolyAlliance was now not arguably, but almost avowedly, an Unholy Alliance. It was an alliance between those who still thought they could deny thedignity of man and those who had recently begun to have a bright hope ofdenying even the dignity of God. Eighteenth-century Prussia wasProtestant and probably religious. Nineteenth-century Prussia was almostutterly atheist. Thus the old spirit of liberty felt itself shut up atboth ends, that which was called progressive and that which was calledreactionary: barricaded by Bismarck with blood and iron and by Darwin byblood and bones. The enormous depression which infects many excellentpeople born about this time, probably has this cause. 

It was a great calamity that the freedom of Wilkes and the faith of Dr. Johnson fought each other. But it was an even worse calamity that theypractically killed each other. They killed each other almostsimultaneously, like Herminius and Mamilius. Liberalism (in Newman'ssense) really did strike Christianity through headpiece and throughhead; that is, it did daze and stun the ignorant and ill-preparedintellect of the English Christian. And Christianity did smiteLiberalism through breastplate and through breast; that is, it didsucceed, through arms and all sorts of awful accidents, in piercing moreor less to the heart of the Utilitarian--and finding that he had none. Victorian Protestantism had not head enough for the business; VictorianRadicalism had not heart enough for the business. Down fell they deadtogether, exactly as Macaulay's Lay says, and still stood all who sawthem fall almost until the hour at which I write. 

This coincident collapse of both religious and political idealismproduced a curious cold air of emptiness and real subconsciousagnosticism such as is extremely unusual in the history of mankind. Itis what Mr. Wells, with his usual verbal delicacy and accuracy, spoke ofas that ironical silence that follows a great controversy. It is whatpeople less intelligent than Mr. Wells meant by calling themselves _finde siècle_; though, of course, rationally speaking, there is no morereason for being sad towards the end of a hundred years than towards theend of five hundred fortnights. There was no arithmetical autumn, butthere was a spiritual one. And it came from the fact suggested in theparagraphs above; the sense that man's two great inspirations hadfailed him together. The Christian religion was much more dead in theeighteenth century than it was in the nineteenth century. But therepublican enthusiasm was also much more alive. If their scepticism wascold, and their faith even colder, their practical politics were wildlyidealistic; and if they doubted the kingdom of heaven, they weregloriously credulous about the chances of it coming on earth. In thesame way the old pagan republican feeling was much more dead in thefeudal darkness of the eleventh or twelfth centuries, than it was even acentury later; but if creative politics were at their lowest, creativetheology was almost at its highest point of energy. 

The modern world, in fact, had fallen between two stools. It had fallenbetween that austere old three-legged stool which was the tripod of thecold priestess of Apollo; and that other mystical and mediæval stoolthat may well be called the Stool of Repentance. It kept neither of thetwo values as intensely valuable. It could not believe in the bonds thatbound men; but, then, neither could it believe in the men they bound. Itwas always restrained in its hatred of slavery by a half remembrance ofits yet greater hatred of liberty. They were almost alone, I think, inthus carrying to its extreme the negative attitude already noted in MissArabella Allen. Anselm would have despised a civic crown, but he wouldnot have despised a relic. Voltaire would have despised a relic; but hewould not have despised a vote. We hardly find them both despised tillwe come to the age of Oscar Wilde. 

These years that followed on that double disillusionment were like onelong afternoon in a rich house on a rainy day. It was not merely thateverybody believed that nothing would happen; it was also that everybodybelieved that anything happening was even duller than nothing happening. It was in this stale atmosphere that a few flickers of the oldSwinburnian flame survived; and were called Art. The great men of theolder artistic movement did not live in this time; rather they livedthrough it. But this time did produce an interregnum of art that had atruth of its own; though that truth was near to being only a consistentlie. 

The movement of those called Æsthetes (as satirised in _Patience_) andthe movement of those afterwards called Decadents (satirised in Mr. Street's delightful _Autobiography of a Boy_) had the same captain; orat any rate the same bandmaster. Oscar Wilde walked in front of thefirst procession wearing a sunflower, and in front of the secondprocession wearing a green carnation. With the æsthetic movement and itsmore serious elements, I deal elsewhere; but the second appearance ofWilde is also connected with real intellectual influences, largelynegative, indeed, but subtle and influential. The mark in most of thearts of this time was a certain quality which those who like it wouldcall "uniqueness of aspect, " and those who do not like it "not quitecoming off. " I mean the thing meant something from one standpoint; butits mark was that the _smallest_ change of standpoint made it unmeaningand unthinkable--a foolish joke. A beggar painted by Rembrandt is assolid as a statue, however roughly he is sketched in; the soul can walkall round him like a public monument. We see he would have otheraspects; and that they would all be the aspects of a beggar. Even if onedid not admit the extraordinary qualities in the painting, one wouldhave to admit the ordinary qualities in the sitter. If it is not amasterpiece it is a man. But a nocturne by Whistler of mist on theThames is either a masterpiece or it is nothing; it is either a nocturneor a nightmare of childish nonsense. Made in a certain mood, viewedthrough a certain temperament, conceived under certain conventions, itmay be, it often is, an unreplaceable poem, a vision that may never beseen again. But the moment it ceases to be a splendid picture it ceasesto be a picture at all. Or, again, if _Hamlet_ is not a great tragedy itis an uncommonly good tale. The people and the posture of affairs wouldstill be there even if one thought that Shakespeare's moral attitude waswrong. Just as one could imagine all the other sides of Rembrandt'sbeggar, so, with the mind's eye (Horatio), one can see all four sides ofthe castle of Elsinore. One might tell the tale from the point of viewof Laërtes or Claudius or Polonius or the gravedigger; and it wouldstill be a good tale and the same tale. But if we take a play like_Pelléas and Mélisande_, we shall find that unless we grasp theparticular fairy thread of thought the poet rather hazily flings to us, we cannot grasp anything whatever. Except from one extreme poetic pointof view, the thing is not a play; it is not a bad play, it is a mass ofclotted nonsense. One whole act describes the lovers going to look for aring in a distant cave when they both know they have dropped it down awell. Seen from some secret window on some special side of the soul'sturret, this might convey a sense of faerie futility in our human life. But it is quite obvious that unless it called forth that one kind ofsympathy, it would call forth nothing but laughter and rotten eggs. Inthe same play the husband chases his wife with a drawn sword, the wiferemarking at intervals "I am not gay. " Now there may really be an ideain this; the idea of human misfortune coming most cruelly upon theoptimism of innocence; that the lonely human heart says, like a child ata party, "I am not enjoying myself as I thought I should. " But it isplain that unless one thinks of this idea (and of this idea only) theexpression is not in the least unsuccessful pathos; it is very broad andhighly successful farce. Maeterlinck and the decadents, in short, mayfairly boast of being subtle; but they must not mind if they are callednarrow. 

This is the spirit of Wilde's work and of most of the literary work donein that time and fashion. It is, as Mr. Arthur Symons said, an attitude;but it is an attitude in the flat, not in the round; not a statue, butthe cardboard king in a toy-theatre, which can only be looked at fromthe front. In Wilde's own poetry we have particularly a perpetuallytoppling possibility of the absurd; a sense of just falling too short orjust going too far. "Plant lilies at my head" has something wrong aboutit; something silly that is not there in--

 "And put a grey stone at my head"

in the old ballad. But even where Wilde was right, he had a way of beingright with this excessive strain on the reader's sympathy (and gravity)which was the mark of all these men with a "point of view. " There is avery sound sonnet of his in which he begins by lamenting mere anarchy, as hostile to the art and civilisation that were his only gods; but endsby saying--

 "And yet These Christs that die upon the barricades God knows that I am with them--in some ways. "

Now that is really very true; that is the way a man of wide reading andworldly experience, but not ungenerous impulses, does feel about themere fanatic, who is at once a nuisance to humanity and an honour tohuman nature. Yet who can read that last line without feeling that Wildeis poised on the edge of a precipice of bathos; that the phrase comesvery near to being quite startlingly silly. It is as in the case ofMaeterlinck, let the reader move his standpoint one inch nearer thepopular standpoint, and there is nothing for the thing but harsh, hostile, unconquerable mirth. Somehow the image of Wilde lolling like anelegant leviathan on a sofa, and saying between the whiffs of a scentedcigarette that martyrdom is martyrdom in some respects, has seized onand mastered all more delicate considerations in the mind. It is unwisein a poet to goad the sleeping lion of laughter. 

In less dexterous hands the decadent idea, what there was of it, wententirely to pieces, which nobody has troubled to pick up. Oddly enough(unless this be always the Nemesis of excess) it began to beinsupportable in the very ways in which it claimed specially to besubtle and tactful; in the feeling for different art-forms, in thewelding of subject and style, in the appropriateness of the epithet andthe unity of the mood. Wilde himself wrote some things that were notimmorality, but merely bad taste; not the bad taste of the conservativesuburbs, which merely means anything violent or shocking, but real badtaste; as in a stern subject treated in a florid style; an over-dressedwoman at a supper of old friends; or a bad joke that nobody had time tolaugh at. This mixture of sensibility and coarseness in the man was verycurious; and I for one cannot endure (for example) his sensual way ofspeaking of dead substances, satin or marble or velvet, as if he werestroking a lot of dogs and cats. But there was a sort of power--or atleast weight--in his coarseness. His lapses were those proper to the onegood thing he really was, an Irish swashbuckler--a fighter. Some of theRoman Emperors might have had the same luxuriousness and yet the samecourage. But the later decadents were far worse, especially the decadentcritics, the decadent illustrators--there were even decadent publishers. And they utterly lost the light and reason of their existence: they weremasters of the clumsy and the incongruous. I will take only one example. Aubrey Beardsley may be admired as an artist or no; he does not enterinto the scope of this book. But it is true that there is a certainbrief mood, a certain narrow aspect of life, which he renders to theimagination rightly. It is mostly felt under white, deathly lights inPiccadilly, with the black hollow of heaven behind shiny hats or paintedfaces: a horrible impression that all mankind are masks. This being thething Beardsley could express (and the only thing he could express), itis the solemn and awful fact that he was set down to illustrate Malory's_Morte d'Arthur_. There is no need to say more; taste, in the artist'ssense, must have been utterly dead. They might as well have employedBurne-Jones to illustrate _Martin Chuzzlewit_. It would not have beenmore ludicrous than putting this portrayer of evil puppets, with theirthin lines like wire and their small faces like perverted children's, totrace against the grand barbaric forests the sin and the sorrow ofLancelot. 

To return to the chief of the decadents, I will not speak of the end ofthe individual story: there was horror and there was expiation. And, asmy conscience goes at least, no man should say one word that couldweaken the horror--or the pardon. But there is one literary consequenceof the thing which must be mentioned, because it bears us on to thatmuch breezier movement which first began to break in upon all thisghastly idleness--I mean the Socialist Movement. I do not mean "_DeProfundis_"; I do not think he had got to the real depths when he wrotethat book. I mean the one real thing he ever wrote: _The Ballad ofReading Gaol_; in which we hear a cry for common justice and brotherhoodvery much deeper, more democratic and more true to the real trend of thepopulace to-day, than anything the Socialists ever uttered even in theboldest pages of Bernard Shaw. 

Before we pass on to the two expansive movements in which the VictorianAge really ended, the accident of a distinguished artist is availablefor estimating this somewhat cool and sad afternoon of the epoch at itspurest; not in lounging pessimism or luxurious aberrations, but inearnest skill and a high devotion to letters. This change that had come, like the change from a golden sunset to a grey twilight, can be veryadequately measured if we compare the insight and intricacy of Meredithwith the insight and intricacy of Mr. Henry James. The characters ofboth are delicate and indisputable; but we must all have had a feelingthat the characters in Meredith are gods, but that the characters inHenry James are ghosts. I do not mean that they are unreal: I believe inghosts. So does Mr. Henry James; he has written some of his very finestliterature about the little habits of these creatures. He is in the deepsense of a dishonoured word, a Spiritualist if ever there was one. ButMeredith was a materialist as well. The difference is that a ghost is adisembodied spirit; while a god (to be worth worrying about) must be anembodied spirit. The presence of soul and substance together involvesone of the two or three things which most of the Victorians did notunderstand--the thing called a sacrament. It is because he had a naturalaffinity for this mystical materialism that Meredith, in spite of hisaffectations, is a poet: and, in spite of his Victorian Agnosticism (orignorance) is a pious Pagan and not a mere Pantheist. Mr. Henry James isat the other extreme. His thrill is not so much in symbol or mysteriousemblem as in the absence of interventions and protections between mindand mind. It is not mystery: it is rather a sort of terror at knowingtoo much. He lives in glass houses; he is akin to Maeterlinck in afeeling of the nakedness of souls. None of the Meredithian things, windor wine or sex or stark nonsense, ever gets between Mr. James and hisprey. But the thing is a deficiency as well as a talent: we cannot butadmire the figures that walk about in his afternoon drawing-rooms; butwe have a certain sense that they are figures that have no faces. 

For the rest, he is most widely known, or perhaps only most widelychaffed, because of a literary style that lends itself to parody and isa glorious feast for Mr. Max Beerbohm. It may be called The Hampered, orObstacle Race Style, in which one continually trips over commas andrelative clauses; and where the sense has to be perpetually qualifiedlest it should mean too much. But such satire, however friendly, is insome sense unfair to him; because it leaves out his sense of generalartistic design, which is not only high, but bold. This appears, Ithink, most strongly in his short stories; in his long novels the reader(or at least one reader) does get rather tired of everybody treatingeverybody else in a manner which in real life would be an impossibleintellectual strain. But in his short studies there is the unanswerablething called real originality; especially in the very shape and point ofthe tale. It may sound odd to compare him to Mr. Rudyard Kipling: but heis like Kipling and also like Wells in this practical sense: that no oneever wrote a story at all like the _Mark of the Beast_; no one everwrote a story at all like _A Kink in Space_: and in the same sense noone ever wrote a story like _The Great Good Place_. It is alone in orderand species; and it is masterly. He struck his deepest note in thatterrible story, _The Turn of the Screw_; and though there is in theheart of that horror a truth of repentance and religion, it is againnotable of the Victorian writers that the only supernatural note theycan strike assuredly is the tragic and almost the diabolic. Only Mr. MaxBeerbohm has been able to imagine Mr. Henry James writing aboutChristmas. 

Now upon this interregnum, this cold and brilliant waiting-room whichwas Henry James at its highest and Wilde at its worst, there broke intwo positive movements, largely honest though essentially unhistoric andprofane, which were destined to crack up the old Victorian solidity pastrepair. The first was Bernard Shaw and the Socialists: the second wasRudyard Kipling and the Imperialists. I take the Socialists first notbecause they necessarily came so in order of time, but because they wereless the note upon which the epoch actually ended. 

William Morris, of whom we have already spoken, may be said tointroduce the Socialists, but rather in a social sense than aphilosophical. He was their friend, and in a sort of political way, their father; but he was not their founder, for he would not havebelieved a word of what they ultimately came to say. Nor is this theconventional notion of the old man not keeping pace with the audacity ofthe young. Morris would have been disgusted not with the wildness, butthe tameness of our tidy Fabians. He was not a Socialist, but he was aRevolutionist; he didn't know much more about what he was; but he knewthat. In this way, being a full-blooded fellow, he rather repeats thegenial sulkiness of Dickens. And if we take this fact about him first, we shall find it a key to the whole movement of this time. For the onedominating truth which overshadows everything else at this point is apolitical and economic one. The Industrial System, run by a small classof Capitalists on a theory of competitive contract, had been quitehonestly established by the early Victorians and was one of the primarybeliefs of Victorianism. The Industrial System, so run, had becomeanother name for hell. By Morris's time and ever since, England has beendivided into three classes: Knaves, Fools, and Revolutionists. 

History is full of forgotten controversies; and those who speak ofSocialism now have nearly all forgotten that for some time it was analmost equal fight between Socialism and Anarchism for the leadership ofthe exodus from Capitalism. It is here that Herbert Spencer comes inlogically, though not chronologically; also that much more interestingman, Auberon Herbert. Spencer has no special place as a man of letters;and a vastly exaggerated place as a philosopher. His real importance wasthat he was very nearly an Anarchist. The indefinable greatness there isabout him after all, in spite of the silliest and smuggest limitations, is in a certain consistency and completeness from his own point ofview. There is something mediæval, and therefore manful, about writing abook about everything in the world. Now this simplicity expressed itselfin politics in carrying the Victorian worship of liberty to the mostridiculous lengths; almost to the length of voluntary taxes andvoluntary insurance against murder. He tried, in short, to solve theproblem of the State by eliminating the State from it. He was resistedin this by the powerful good sense of Huxley; but his books becamesacred books for a rising generation of rather bewildered rebels, whothought we might perhaps get out of the mess if everybody did as heliked. 

Thus the Anarchists and Socialists fought a battle over the death-bed ofVictorian Industrialism; in which the Socialists (that is, those whostood for increasing instead of diminishing the power of Government) wona complete victory and have almost exterminated their enemy. TheAnarchist one meets here and there nowadays is a sad sight; he isdisappointed with the future, as well as with the past. 

This victory of the Socialists was largely a literary victory; becauseit was effected and popularised not only by a wit, but by a sincere wit;and one who had the same sort of militant lucidity that Huxley had shownin the last generation and Voltaire in the last century. A young Irishjournalist, impatient of the impoverished Protestantism and Liberalismto which he had been bred, came out as the champion of Socialism not asa matter of sentiment, but as a matter of common sense. The primaryposition of Bernard Shaw towards the Victorian Age may be roughlysummarised thus: the typical Victorian said coolly: "Our system may notbe a perfect system, but it works. " Bernard Shaw replied, even morecoolly: "It may be a perfect system, for all I know or care. But it doesnot work. " He and a society called the Fabians, which once exercisedconsiderable influence, followed this shrewd and sound strategic hintto avoid mere emotional attack on the cruelty of Capitalism; and toconcentrate on its clumsiness, its ludicrous incapacity to do its ownwork. This campaign succeeded, in the sense that while (in the educatedworld) it was the Socialist who looked the fool at the beginning of thatcampaign, it is the Anti-Socialist who looks the fool at the end of it. But while it won the educated classes it lost the populace for ever. Itdried up those springs of blood and tears out of which all revolt mustcome if it is to be anything but bureaucratic readjustment. We beganthis book with the fires of the French Revolution still burning, butburning low. Bernard Shaw was honestly in revolt in his own way: but itwas Bernard Shaw who trod out the last ember of the Great Revolution. Bernard Shaw proceeded to apply to many other things the same sort ofhilarious realism which he thus successfully applied to the industrialproblem. He also enjoyed giving people a piece of his mind; but a pieceof his mind was a more appetising and less raw-looking object than apiece of Hardy's. There were many modes of revolt growing all aroundhim; Shaw supported them--and supplanted them. Many were pitting therealism of war against the romance of war: they succeeded in making thefight dreary and repulsive, but the book dreary and repulsive too. Shaw, in _Arms and the Man_, did manage to make war funny as well asfrightful. Many were questioning the right of revenge or punishment; butthey wrote their books in such a way that the reader was ready torelease all mankind if he might revenge himself on the author. Shaw, in_Captain Brassbound's Conversion_, really showed at its best the merrymercy of the pagan; that beautiful human nature that can neither rise topenance nor sink to revenge. Many had proved that even the mostindependent incomes drank blood out of the veins of the oppressed: butthey wrote it in such a style that their readers knew more aboutdepression than oppression. In _Widowers' Houses_ Shaw very nearly (butnot quite) succeeded in making a farce out of statistics. And theultimate utility of his brilliant interruption can best be expressed inthe very title of that play. When ages of essential European ethics havesaid "widows' houses, " it suddenly occurs to him to say "but what aboutwidowers' houses?" There is a sort of insane equity about it which waswhat Bernard Shaw had the power to give, and gave. 

Out of the same social ferment arose a man of equally unquestionablegenius, Mr. H. G. Wells. His first importance was that he wrote greatadventure stories in the new world the men of science had discovered. Hewalked on a round slippery world as boldly as Ulysses or Tom Jones hadworked on a flat one. Cyrano de Bergerac or Baron Munchausen, or othertypical men of science, had treated the moon as a mere flat silvermirror in which Man saw his own image--the Man in the Moon. Wellstreated the moon as a globe, like our own; bringing forth monsters asmoonish as we are earthy. The exquisitely penetrating political andsocial satire he afterwards wrote belongs to an age later than theVictorian. But because, even from the beginning, his whole trend wasSocialist, it is right to place him here. 

While the old Victorian ideas were being disturbed by an increasingtorture at home, they were also intoxicated by a new romance fromabroad. It did not come from Italy with Rossetti and Browning, or fromPersia with Fitzgerald: but it came from countries as remote, countrieswhich were (as the simple phrase of that period ran) "painted red" onthe map. It was an attempt to reform England through the newer nations;by the criticism of the forgotten colonies, rather than of the forgottenclasses. Both Socialism and Imperialism were utterly alien to theVictorian idea. From the point of view of a Victorian aristocrat likePalmerston, Socialism would be the cheek of gutter snipes; Imperialismwould be the intrusion of cads. But cads are not alone concerned. 

Broadly, the phase in which the Victorian epoch closed was what can onlybe called the Imperialist phase. Between that and us stands a veryindividual artist who must nevertheless be connected with that phase. AsI said at the beginning, Macaulay (or, rather, the mind Macaulay sharedwith most of his powerful middle class) remains as a sort of pavement orflat foundation under all the Victorians. They discussed the dogmasrather than denied them. Now one of the dogmas of Macaulay was the dogmaof progress. A fair statement of the truth in it is not really so hard. Investigation of anything naturally takes some little time. It takessome time to sort letters so as to find a letter: it takes some time totest a gas-bracket so as to find the leak; it takes some time to siftevidence so as to find the truth. Now the curse that fell on the laterVictorians was this: that they began to value the time more than thetruth. One felt so secretarial when sorting letters that one never foundthe letter; one felt so scientific in explaining gas that one neverfound the leak; and one felt so judicial, so impartial, in weighingevidence that one had to be bribed to come to any conclusion at all. This was the last note of the Victorians: procrastination was calledprogress. 

Now if we look for the worst fruits of this fallacy we shall find themin historical criticism. There is a curious habit of treating any onewho comes before a strong movement as the "forerunner" of that movement. That is, he is treated as a sort of slave running in advance of a greatarmy. Obviously, the analogy really arises from St. John the Baptist, for whom the phrase "forerunner" was rather peculiarly invented. Equallyobviously, such a phrase only applies to an alleged or real divineevent: otherwise the forerunner would be a founder. Unless Jesus hadbeen the Baptist's God, He would simply have been his disciple. 

Nevertheless the fallacy of the "forerunner" has been largely used inliterature. Thus men will call a universal satirist like Langland a"morning star of the Reformation, " or some such rubbish; whereas theReformation was not larger, but much smaller than Langland. It wassimply the victory of one class of his foes, the greedy merchants, overanother class of his foes, the lazy abbots. In real history thisconstantly occurs; that some small movement happens to favour one of themillion things suggested by some great man; whereupon the great man isturned into the running slave of the small movement. Thus certainsectarian movements borrowed the sensationalism without thesacramentalism of Wesley. Thus certain groups of decadents found iteasier to imitate De Quincey's opium than his eloquence. Unless we graspthis plain common sense (that you or I are not responsible for what someridiculous sect a hundred years hence may choose to do with what we say)the peculiar position of Stevenson in later Victorian letters cannotbegin to be understood. For he was a very universal man; and talked somesense not only on every subject, but, so far as it is logicallypossible, in every sense. But the glaring deficiencies of the Victoriancompromise had by that time begun to gape so wide that he was forced, bymere freedom of philosophy and fancy, to urge the neglected things. Andyet this very urgency certainly brought on an opposite fever, which hewould not have liked if he had lived to understand it. He liked Kipling, though with many healthy hesitations; but he would not have liked thetriumph of Kipling: which was the success of the politician and thefailure of the poet. Yet when we look back up the false perspective oftime, Stevenson does seem in a sense to have prepared that imperial anddownward path. 

I shall not talk here, any more than anywhere else in this book, aboutthe "sedulous ape" business. No man ever wrote as well as Stevenson whocared only about writing. Yet there is a sense, though a misleading one, in which his original inspirations were artistic rather than purelyphilosophical. To put the point in that curt covenanting way which hehimself could sometimes command, he thought it immoral to neglectromance. The whole of his real position was expressed in that phrase ofone of his letters "our civilisation is a dingy ungentlemanly business:it drops so much out of a man. " On the whole he concluded that what hadbeen dropped out of the man was the boy. He pursued pirates as Defoewould have fled from them; and summed up his simplest emotions in thattouching _cri de cœur_ "shall we never shed blood?" He did for thepenny dreadful what Coleridge had done for the penny ballad. He provedthat, because it was really human, it could really rise as near toheaven as human nature could take it. If Thackeray is our youth, Stevenson is our boyhood: and though this is not the most artisticthing in him, it is the most important thing in the history of Victorianart. All the other fine things he did were, for curious reasons, remotefrom the current of his age. For instance, he had the good as well asthe bad of coming from a Scotch Calvinist's house. No man in that agehad so healthy an instinct for the actuality of positive evil. In _TheMaster of Ballantrae_ he did prove with a pen of steel, that the Devilis a gentleman--but is none the less the Devil. It is alsocharacteristic of him (and of the revolt from Victorian respectabilityin general) that his most blood-and-thunder sensational tale is alsothat which contains his most intimate and bitter truth. _Dr. Jekyll andMr. Hyde_ is a double triumph; it has the outside excitement thatbelongs to Conan Doyle with the inside excitement that belongs to HenryJames. Alas, it is equally characteristic of the Victorian time thatwhile nearly every Englishman has enjoyed the anecdote, hardly oneEnglishman has seen the joke--I mean the point. You will find twentyallusions to Jekyll and Hyde in a day's newspaper reading. You will alsofind that all such allusions suppose the two personalities to be equal, neither caring for the other. Or more roughly, they think the book meansthat man can be cloven into two creatures, good and evil. The whole stabof the story is that man _can't_: because while evil does not care forgood, good must care for evil. Or, in other words, man cannot escapefrom God, because good is the God in man; and insists on omniscience. This point, which is good psychology and also good theology and alsogood art, has missed its main intention merely because it was also goodstory-telling. 

If the rather vague Victorian public did not appreciate the deep andeven tragic ethics with which Stevenson was concerned, still less werethey of a sort to appreciate the French finish and fastidiousness of hisstyle; in which he seemed to pick the right word up on the point of hispen, like a man playing spillikins. But that style also had a qualitythat could be felt; it had a military edge to it, an _acies_; and therewas a kind of swordsmanship about it. Thus all the circumstances led, not so much to the narrowing of Stevenson to the romance of the fightingspirit; but the narrowing of his influence to that romance. He had agreat many other things to say; but this was what we were willing tohear: a reaction against the gross contempt for soldiering which hadreally given a certain Chinese deadness to the Victorians. Yet anothercircumstance thrust him down the same path; and in a manner not whollyfortunate. The fact that he was a sick man immeasurably increases thecredit to his manhood in preaching a sane levity and pugnaciousoptimism. But it also forbade him full familiarity with the actualitiesof sport, war, or comradeship: and here and there his note is false inthese matters, and reminds one (though very remotely) of the mereprovincial bully that Henley sometimes sank to be. 

For Stevenson had at his elbow a friend, an invalid like himself, a manof courage and stoicism like himself; but a man in whom everything thatStevenson made delicate and rational became unbalanced and blind. Thedifference is, moreover, that Stevenson was quite right in claiming thathe could treat his limitation as an accident; that his medicines "didnot colour his life. " His life was really coloured out of a shillingpaint-box, like his toy-theatre: such high spirits as he had are the keyto him: his sufferings are not the key to him. But Henley's sufferingsare the key to Henley; much must be excused him, and there is much to beexcused. The result was that while there was always a certain daintyequity about Stevenson's judgments, even when he was wrong, Henleyseemed to think that on the right side the wronger you were the better. There was much that was feminine in him; and he is most understandablewhen surprised in those little solitary poems which speak of emotionsmellowed, of sunset and a quiet end. Henley hurled himself into the newfashion of praising Colonial adventure at the expense both of theChristian and the republican traditions; but the sentiment did notspread widely until the note was struck outside England in one of theconquered countries; and a writer of Anglo-Indian short stories showedthe stamp of the thing called genius; that indefinable, dangerous andoften temporary thing. 

For it is really impossible to criticise Rudyard Kipling as part ofVictorian literature, because he is the end of such literature. He hasmany other powerful elements; an Indian element, which makes himexquisitely sympathetic with the Indian; a vague Jingo influence whichmakes him sympathetic with the man that crushes the Indian; a vaguejournalistic sympathy with the men that misrepresent everything that hashappened to the Indian; but of the Victorian virtues, nothing. 

All that was right or wrong in Kipling was expressed in the finalconvulsion that he almost in person managed to achieve. The nearest thatany honest man can come to the thing called "impartiality" is to confessthat he is partial. I therefore confess that I think this last turn ofthe Victorian Age was an unfortunate turn; much on the other side can besaid, and I hope will be said. But about the facts there can be noquestion. The Imperialism of Kipling was equally remote from theVictorian caution and the Victorian idealism: and our subject does quiteseriously end here. The world was full of the trampling of totally newforces, gold was sighted from far in a sort of cynical romanticism: theguns opened across Africa; and the great queen died. 

 * * * * *

Of what will now be the future of so separate and almost secretive anadventure of the English, the present writer will not permit himself, even for an instant, to prophesy. The Victorian Age made one or twomistakes, but they were mistakes that were really useful; that is, mistakes that were really mistaken. They thought that commerce outside acountry must extend peace: it has certainly often extended war. Theythought that commerce inside a country must certainly promoteprosperity; it has largely promoted poverty. But for them these wereexperiments; for us they ought to be lessons. If _we_ continue thecapitalist use of the populace--if _we_ continue the capitalist use ofexternal arms, it will lie heavy on the living. The dishonour will notbe on the dead. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

After having surveyed the immense field presented in such a volume asMr. George Mair's _Modern English Literature_ in this series, or, morefully, in the _Cambridge History of Modern Literature_, the later volumeof Chambers' _English Literature_, Mr. Gosse's _History of ModernEnglish Literature_, or Henry Morley's _English Literature in the Reignof Victoria_, the wise reader will choose some portion for closer study, and will go straight to the originals before he has any further trafficwith critics or commentators, however able. 

He will then need the aid of fuller biographies. Some Victorian _Lives_are already classic, or nearly so, among them Sir G. Trevelyan's_Macaulay_, Forster's _Dickens_, Mrs. Gaskell's _Charlotte Brontë_, Froude's _Carlyle_, and Sir E. T. Cook's _Ruskin_. With these may beranged the great _Dictionary of National Biography_. The "English Men ofLetters" Series includes H. D. Traill's _Coleridge_, Ainger's _Lamb_, Trollope's _Thackeray_, Leslie Stephen's _George Eliot_, Herbert Paul's_Matthew Arnold_, Sir A. Lyall's _Tennyson_, G. K. Chesterton's _RobertBrowning_, and A. C. Benson's _Fitzgerald_. At least two autobiographiesmust be named, those of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, and, asantidote to Newman's _Apologia_, the gay self-revelations of Borrow, andJefferies' _Story of My Heart_. Other considerable volumes are W. J. Cross's _George Eliot_, Lionel Johnson's _Art of Thomas Hardy_, Mr. W. M. Rossetti's _Dante G. Rossetti_, Colvin's _R. L. Stevenson_, J. W. Mackail's _William Morris_, Holman Hunt's _Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood_, Sir Leslie Stephen's _The Utilitarians_, Buxton Forman's _Our LivingPoets_, Edward Thomas's _Swinburne_, Monypenny's _Disraeli_, Dawson's_Victorian Novelists_, and Stedman's _Victorian Poets_. The "Everyman"_Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature_ is useful fordates. 

The latter half of the second volume of Mr. F. A. Mumby's _Letters ofLiterary Men_ is devoted to the Victorian Age. There are fullercollections of the _Letters_ of Leigh Hunt, Thackeray, Dickens, theBrownings, Fitzgerald, Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, and morerecently the _Letters of George Meredith_, edited by his son. 

Among the important critical writers of the period, Matthew Arnold(_Essays in Criticism_, _Study of Celtic Literature_, etc. ) standseasily first. Others are John, now Lord, Morley (_Studies inLiterature_, etc. ), Augustine Birrell (_Obiter Dicta_, _Essays_), W. E. Henley (_Views and Reviews_), J. Addington Symonds (_Essays_), J. Churton Collins, Richard Garnett, Stopford A. Brooke, George E. B. Saintsbury (_History of Criticism_), R. H. Hutton (_ContemporaryThought_), J. M. Robertson (_Modern Humanists_, _Buckle_, etc. ), FredericHarrison (_The Choice of Books_, etc. ), Andrew Lang, Walter Bagehot, Edmund Gosse, Prof. Dowden, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir A. T. QuillerCouch. 

INDEX

Æsthetes, the, and Decadents, 218-27Arnold, Matthew, 73-79, 87Austen, Jane, 92, 105, 109

Bentham, 36Blake, 20Borrow, 151Brontë, Charlotte, 92, 105, 110-14----, Emily, 113Browning, Elizabeth B. , 176-82----, R. , 40-41, 159, 162-63Byron, 22

Carlyle, 40, 49-62, 158Carroll, Lewis, 153Cobbett, 16-17, 88, 151Coleridge, 20Collins, Wilkie, 130, 132

Darwin, 38, 206-7, 209De Quincey, 23-25, 65Dickens, 40, 79-89, 100, 106, 119-23, 129, 131Disraeli, 42, 135

Eliot, George, 92, 103-9, 157

Faber, 46Fitzgerald, 192-95French Revolution, Influence of, 18-21Froude, 60, 62

Gaskell, Mrs. , 94Gilbert, 154

Hardy, Thomas, 138-39, 143-45Hazlitt, 23Henley, W. E. , 247-48Hood, Thomas, 25-27Hughes, Tom, 73Humour, Victorian, 152-55Hunt, Leigh, 23Huxley, 39-40, 205

Imperialism, 60, 239

James, Henry, 228-31

Keats, 20Keble, 45Kingsley, 40, 59, 64, 72, 134-35Kipling, R. , 60, 249-50

Lamb, 23Landor, 23Lear, Edward, 153Literary temperament, the English, 13-16Lytton, Bulwer, 135-37

Macaulay, 28-36, 55Macdonald, George, 152Maurice, F. D. , 40, 73Melbourne, Lord, 42Meredith, George, 138-49, 228Mill, J. S. , 36-37, 55Morris, Wm. , 196-200, 232

Newman, 38, 40, 45-48, 78, 159Novel, The Modern, 90-99

Oliphant, Mrs. , 116-17"Ouida, " 117Oxford Movement, 42-45

Pater, Walter, 69-71Patmore, 48, 201-2Pre-Raphaelite School, 68, 72

Reade, Charles, 134Rossetti, D. G. And C. , 71, 188-91Ruskin, 40, 62-8, 70, 158

Science, Victorian, 208-12Shaw, G. B. , 60, 235-38Shelley, 22-23Shorthouse, 149-50Socialism, 60, 67, 122, 198, 227, 231-39Spencer, Herbert, 75, 233-34Stevenson, R. L. , 243-49Swinburne, 69, 159, 181-88

Tennyson, 40, 64, 160-69Thackeray, 100, 110, 123-30, 158Thompson, Francis, 48, 201, 202Trollope, Anthony, 130, 132-33

Watson, Wm. , 202Wells, H. G. , 238-39Wilde, Oscar, 218-23Women, Victorian, 91, 99, 104, 115-16, 140