A contemporary (though very much longer lived) of Davy's and the most famous Englishwoman who has ever written on scientific subjects, was Mary Fairfax, better known from the name of her second husband as Mrs. Somerville. She was born at Jedburgh on 26th December 1780, and when twenty-four married her cousin, Captain Greig, a member of a family of Scotchmen who had settled in the Russian navy. Her first husband died two years afterwards, and six years later she married Dr. William Somerville, also her cousin. She had already devoted much attention, especially during her widowhood, to mathematics and astronomy; and after her second marriage she had no difficulty in pursuing these studies. She adapted Laplace's Mécanique Céleste in 1823, and followed it up by more original work on physics, astronomy, and physical geography. Her life was prolonged till 1872, and an interesting autobiography appeared a year later. It is possible that Mrs. Somerville profited somewhat in reputation by her coincidence with the period of "diffusion of useful knowledge." But she had real scientific knowledge and real literary gifts; and she made good use of both.
Of at least respectable literary merit, though hardly of enough to justify the devoting of much space to them here, were Sir David Brewster (1781-1868), Sir John Herschel (1792-1871), Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875), Sir Roderick Murchison (1792-1871), the first a mathematician and physicist, the second an astronomer, the third and fourth geologists, and all more or less copious writers on their several subjects. John Tyndall (1820-1893), a younger man than any of these, had perhaps a more distinctly literary talent. Born in Ireland, and for some time a railway engineer, he gave himself up about 1847 to the study and teaching of physics, was remarkable for the effect of his lecturing, and held several Government appointments. His Presidential Address to the British Association at Belfast in 1874 was not less noteworthy for materialism in substance than for a brilliant if somewhat brassy style.
But the chief Englishmen of science who were men of letters during our period were Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley. The opinions of the first of these, their origin, the circumstances of their first expression, and the probabilities of their future, have been the subject of about as much controversy as in a given time has been bestowed upon any subject, certainly on any similar subject. But we enjoy here the privilege of neglecting this almost entirely. Darwin is to the literary historian a very interesting subject, for he was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, who himself, besides being the capital example of the polished mediocrity of eighteenth century verse when all freshness had gone out of it, was a man of science and an evolutionist in his way. Charles (who was also christened Robert) was the son of yet another Dr. Darwin, an F.R.S. He was born on 12th February 1809 at Shrewsbury, and his mother was (as was afterwards his wife) a daughter of the Wedgwoods of Etruria. After passing through the famous school of his native town, Darwin went to Edinburgh for some years and then entered Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1828. Here he devoted himself to physical science, and after taking his degree was, in 1831, appointed to the Beagle, which was starting on a scientific cruise. He spent five years in the South Seas and did not return to England till late in 1836—a voyage which perhaps prejudicially affected his health, but established his knowledge of nature. After his return he settled down to scientific work, alone and in the scientific societies, married in 1839, and was busy for many years afterwards in publishing the results of the voyage. He possessed considerable means, and for the last forty years of his life lived at his ease at Down near Beckenham, experimenting in crossing species and maturing his views. These took form, under circumstances interesting but foreign to our theme, in the famous Origin of Species, published in 1859, and this was followed by a great number of other books, the most noteworthy of which, if not the scientifically soundest, was The Descent of Man (1871). Darwin died after many years of continuous ill-health on 19th April 1882.
Late in life he is said to have confessed that his relish for Shakespeare and for pure literature generally, which had in earlier days been keen, had entirely vanished. But there was perhaps nothing very surprising in this, seeing that he had for half a century given himself up with extraordinary and ever-increasing thoroughness to a class of investigations the most remote possible from literature, and yet not, as pure mathematical study not seldom induces its votaries, inducing men to cultivate letters by mere contrast. Yet the ancestral literary tendency had only fallen dormant in him then; and earlier it had been active. It can indeed hardly be said that either his contribution to the Voyage of the Beagle, or The Origin of Species, or The Descent of Man, or any of the others, is absolutely remarkable for style in the ordinary sense of that phrase. The style of Darwin attempts no ornateness, and on the other hand it is not of those extremely simple styles which are independent of ornament and to which ornament would be simply a defacement. But it is very clear; it is not in the least slovenly; and there is about it the indefinable sense that the writer might have been a much greater writer, simply as such, than he is, if he had cared to take the trouble, and had not been almost solely intent upon his matter. Such writers are not so common that they should be neglected, and they may at least stand in the Court of the Gentiles, the "provincial band" of literature.
A very remarkable book which was in a way Darwinism before Darwin, which attracted much attention and violent opposition in 1844, the year of its publication, and which for a long time remained unowned, was the Vestiges of Creation, subsequently known to be the work of Robert Chambers, the younger of two brothers who did great things in the popular publishing trade at Edinburgh, and who founded a house which has always been foremost in the diffusion of sound and cheap literature, information, and amusement. Robert was born at Peebles in 1802 and died at St. Andrews in 1871, having been, besides his publishing labours, a voluminous author and compiler. Nothing he did was quite equal to the Vestiges, a book rather literary than scientific, and treating the still crude evolution theory rather from the point of view of popular philosophy than from that of strict biological investigation; but curiously stimulating and enthusiastic, with a touch of poetry in it not often to be found in such books, and attractive as showing the way in which doctrines which are about to take a strong hold of the general mind not infrequently communicate themselves, in an unfinished but inspiring form, to persons who, except general literary culture and interest, do not seem to offer any specially favourable soil for their germination. Purely scientific men have usually rather pooh-poohed the Vestiges, but there is the Platonic quality in it.
The Vestiges, like its more famous successor, was violently attacked as irreligious. One of its opponents, from a point of view half orthodox and half scientific, was Hugh Miller, a man of sterling excellence, of an interesting and in its close melancholy career, of real importance as a geologist, and possessed of an extremely agreeable literary faculty. Miller was born at Cromarty in 1802, and though more than fairly educated, held till he was past thirty no higher position than that of a stone-mason. He had begun to write, however, earlier than this, and, engaging in particular in the two rather dissimilar subjects of geology and "Free Kirk" polemic, he was made editor of the Witness, a newspaper started in the interest of the new principles. After nearly twenty busy years of journalism and authorship he shot himself in December 1856, as it is supposed in a fit of insanity brought on by overwork. Miller was a very careful observer, and his Old Red Sandstone (1841) made a great addition to the knowledge of fossils. He followed this up by a great number of other works, some merely polemical, others descriptive of his own life and travels. In all the better parts of Hugh Miller's writings there is a remarkable style, extremely popular and unpretentious but never trivial or slipshod, which is not far below the best styles of the century for its special purpose, though in some respects it smacks more of the eighteenth, and has a certain relation with that of White of Selborne.
The most considerable literary gifts of the century among men of science probably belonged to a man more than twenty years younger than Miller, and more than fifteen younger than Darwin, who died so recently that until the greater part of this book was written it seemed that he would have no place in it. Thomas Henry Huxley, born in May 1825, at Ealing, studied medicine, and becoming a navy doctor, executed like Darwin a voyage to the South Seas. His scientific work, though early distinguished, met with no great encouragement from the Admiralty, and he left the service, though he held many public appointments in later life. He became F.R.S. at six-and-twenty, and from that time onwards till his sixtieth year he was a busy professor, lecturer, member of commissions, and (for a time) inspector of fisheries. In the ever greater and greater specialising of science which has taken place, Huxley was chiefly a morphologist. But outside the range of special studies he was chiefly known as a vigorous champion of Darwinism and a something more than vigorous aggressor in the cause of Agnosticism (a word which he himself did much to spread), attacking supernaturalism of every kind, and (though disclaiming materialism and not choosing to call himself an atheist) unceasingly demanding that all things should submit themselves to naturalist criticism. A great number of brilliant essays and lectures were composed by him on different parts of what may be called the debateable land between science, philosophy, and theology. And one of his most characteristic and masterly single studies was a little book on Hume, contributed to the series of "English Men of Letters" in 1879.
This varied, copious, and brilliant polemic may or may not have been open in substance to the charge which the bolder and more thoroughgoing defenders of orthodoxy brought against it, that it committed the logical error of demanding submission on the part of supernaturalism to laws and limits to which, by its very essence, supernaturalism disclaimed allegiance. But the form of it was excellent. Mr. Huxley had read much, and had borrowed weapons and armour from more than one Schoolman and Father as well as from purely profane authors. He had an admirable style, free alike from the great faults of his contemporaries, "preciousness" and slipshodness, and a knack of crisp but not too mannered phrase recalling that of Swift or, still more, of Bentley. It has been said, with some truth as well as with some paradox, that a literary critic of the very first class was lost in him, at the salvage only of some scientific monographs, which like all their kind will be antiquated some day, and of some polemics which must suffer equally from the touch of time.
CHAPTER XI
DRAMA
At no period, probably, in the history of English literature, from the sixteenth century until that with which we are now dealing, would it have been possible to compress the history of the drama during a hundred years into the space which it is here proposed to give it. If we were dealing with the works of living men the historian might be justly charged with arrogant incompetence in not taking more notice of them. But, fortunately, that is not the case; and the brevity of the treatment is equally compatible with a belief that the plays of the present day are masterpieces, and with a suspicion that they are not. As to the past we have, with the exception of a few protesters, general consent that the English drama of the nineteenth century has displayed one curious and disastrous characteristic. The plays, as a rule, which have been good literature have either never been acted or have seldom succeeded as plays; the plays that have been acted and have been successful have seldom been good literature.
The best idea of the state of the drama between 1790 and 1810 may perhaps be obtained by any one who cares to look through—it would require a monomania, a desert island, or at least a succession of wet days in a country inn to enable any one to read through—the ten volumes of Mrs. Inchbald's Modern British Theatre, printed in 1811 "from the prompt-books of the Theatres Royal." This publication, supplementing the larger British Theatre of the same editor, contains more than two volumes of the works of Frederick Reynolds, a prolific playwright who was responsible for the English version of Werther in drama; another of Mrs. Inchbald's own writing and adaptation; one of Holcroft's later works; one of Cumberland's; and the other five made up of lesser pieces by Colman the younger, Dibdin, and others, serious plays in blank verse such as Hannah More's Percy, and the Honourable John St. John's Mary Queen of Scots, etc. More than one of these was a person of talent, more than one a person even of very great talent; while Holcroft and Colman, if not others, had displayed special ability for drama. Yet there is, perhaps, in the fifty plays of the ten volumes only one that can be called a good play, only one which is readable, and that is the Trip to Scarborough, which Sheridan simply adapted, which he did little more than edit, from Vanbrugh's Relapse. Outside these volumes the acting drama of the period may be best studied in the other and better work of the pair just mentioned, and in O'Keefe.
John O'Keefe, or O'Keeffe (for the name is spelt both ways), was a very long-lived man, who was born at Dublin in 1748 and died at Southampton in 1833. But in the later years of his life he suffered from blindness; and the period of his greatest dramatic activity almost exactly coincided with that of our first chapter. He is said to have written some fifty pieces, of various kinds, between 1781 and 1798; and in the latter year he published a collection of about thirty, referring in the preface to others which "an inconsiderate disposal of the copyright" prevented him from including. O'Keefe was to a certain extent a follower of Foote; but his pieces—though he was a practised actor—depended less upon his own powers of exposition than Foote's. They range from rather farcical comedies to pure farces and comediettas much interspersed with songs for music; and their strictly literary merit is not often great, while for sheer extravagance they require the utmost license of the boards to excuse them. There is, however, something much more taking in them than in most of the dramatic work of the time. For instance, the "wild farce" (referred to but not named by Lamb in his paper on Munden) of The Merry Mourners, though as "improbable" as Mrs. Barbauld thought The Ancient Mariner to be, has a singular hustle and bustle of sustained interest, and not a few shrewd strokes such as the following, which perhaps does not only apply to the end of the eighteenth century. "Your London ladies are so mannified with their switch rattans and coats, and watch-chain nibbities, and their tip-top hats and their cauliflower cravats, that, ecod! there's no mark of their being women except the petticoat." The Castle of Andalusia (1782) is an early and capital example of the bandit drama, and The Poor Soldier of the Irish comic opera. Wild Oats supplied favourite parts to the actors of the time in Rover and Ephraim Smooth; and, with a little good will, one may read even slight things like A Beggar on Horseback and The Doldrum with some amusement. But O'Keefe has few gifts beyond knowledge of the stage, Irish shrewdness, Irish rattle, and an honest, straightforward simplicity; and that one turns to him from other dramatists of the period with some relief, is even more to their discredit than to his credit.
A curious and early fruit of this gradual divorce between drama and literature was Joanna Baillie, a lady whose virtues, amiability, and in a way talents, caused her to be spoken of by her own contemporaries with an admiration which posterity has found it hard to echo as concerns her strictly literary position in drama—some of her shorter poems were good. She was born in 1762 at Bothwell, of a good Scotch family, and her mother was a sister of the great surgeon Hunter. This gift descended to her elder brother Matthew, who was very famous in his own day as an anatomist and physician. Partly to be near him, Joanna and her sister Agnes established themselves at Hampstead, where she often entertained Scott and other great people, and where she lived till 23rd February 1851. In 1798 she published the first of a series of Plays on the Passions, in which the eighteenth century theory of the ruling passion was carried out to the uncompromising and even whimsical extent of supplying a brace of dramas, a tragedy and a comedy, on each of the stronger passions, Hatred, Fear, Love, etc. The first volume, which opened with the rather striking closet drama of Basil, sometimes spoken of as Count Basil, was prefaced by an introductory discourse of considerable ability. The book, coming at a dead season of literature, was well received. It reached its third edition in the second year from its appearance, and one of its plays, De Montfort, was acted, with Kemble in the title part, not without success. A second volume followed in 1802, and a third in 1812. In 1804 one of Miscellaneous Plays had been issued, while others and some poems were added later. Joanna's plays in general, it was admitted, would not act (though the Ettrick Shepherd in the Noctes Ambrosianæ denies this), and it requires some effort to read them. The blank verse of the tragedies, though respectable, is uninspired; the local and historical colour, whether of Byzantine, Saxon, or Renaissance times, is of that fatal "property" character which has been noticed in the novel before Scott; and the passion-scheme is obviously inartistic. The comedies are sometimes genuinely funny; but they do not display either the direct and fresh observation of manners, or the genial creation of character, which alone can make comedy last. In short Miss Baillie was fortunate in the moment of her appearance, but she cannot be called either a great dramatist or a good one.
The school of Artificial Tragedy—the phrase, though not a consecrated one, is as legitimate as that of artificial comedy—which sprung up soon after the beginning of this century, and which continued during its first half or thereabouts, if not later, is a curious phenomenon in English history, and has hardly yet received the attention it deserves. The tragedy of the eighteenth century is almost beneath contempt, being for the most part pale French echo or else transpontine melodrama, with a few plaster-cast attempts to reproduce an entirely misunderstood Shakespeare. It was impossible that the Romantic movement in itself, and the study of the Elizabethan drama which it induced, should not lead to the practise of tragedy, while the existence of the Kembles as players and managers, might be thought to promise well for the tragic stage.
Yet there has always been something out of joint with English nineteenth century tragedy. Of Lamb's John Woodvil and Godwin's Antonio mention has been made. Byron's tragedies are indeed by no means the worst part of his work; but they also shared the defects of that work as poetry, and they were not eminently distinguished for acting qualities. Scott had no dramatic faculty; Shelley's Cenci, despite its splendid poetry, is not actable; indeed the only one of the great English nineteenth century Pléiade who was successful on the stage was Coleridge; and Remorse and Zapolya are not masterpieces.
Yet the fascination of the theatre, or at least of the drama, seemed to continue unaltered, and the attempts on or in it varied from the wild fantasy pieces of Beddoes (which no stage but the Elizabethan—if even that—could ever have welcomed) to the curious academic drama of which types extend not merely from Milman's Fazio in 1815 to Talfourd's Ion twenty years later, but further still. Of Milman notice has been taken in his far truer vocation as historian. Talfourd was a good lawyer, a worthy man, and as noted above, the friend and editor of Lamb. But his tragedies are very cold, and it is difficult to believe that Ion can have had any other attraction besides the popularity and skill of Macready, who indeed was greatly responsible for the appearance both of this and of better plays. In particular he stood usher to divers productions of Browning's which have been mentioned, such as the rather involved and impossible Strafford, and the intensely pathetic but not wholly straightforward Blot in the 'Scutcheon. This last is the one play of the century which—with a certain unsubstantiality of matter, a defect almost total in character, and a constant provocation to the fatal question, "Why are all these people behaving in this way?"—has the actual tragic vis in its central point.
The character, however, and the condemnation of the English drama of the first half of this century from the literary point of view, are summed up in the single statement that its most prominent and successful dramatist was James Sheridan Knowles. Born in 1784, and son of the great Sheridan's cousin at Cork, Knowles was introduced to London literary society pretty early. He tried soldiering (at least the militia) and medicine; but his bent towards the stage was too strong, and he became an actor, though never a very successful one, and a teacher of acting, though never a manager. He was about thirty when he turned dramatist, and though his plays justify the theatrical maxim that no one who has not practical knowledge of the stage can write a good acting play, they also justify the maxim of the study that in his day literary excellence had in some mysterious way obtained or suffered a divorce from dramatic merit. Not that these plays are exactly contemptible as literature, but that as literature they are not in the least remarkable. The most famous of his tragedies is Virginius, which dates, as performed in London at least, from 1820. It was preceded and followed by others, of which the best are perhaps Caius Gracchus (1815), and William Tell (1834). His comedies have worn better, and The Hunchback (1832), and the Love Chase (1836), are still interesting examples of last-century artificial comedy slightly refreshed. Independently of his technical knowledge, Knowles really had that knowledge of human nature without which drama is impossible, and he could write very respectable English. But the fatal thing about him is that he is content to dwell in decencies for ever. There is no inspiration in him; his style, his verse, his theme, his character, his treatment are all emphatically mediocre, and his technique as a dramatist deserves only a little, though a little, warmer praise.
Better as literature, and at least as good as drama, are the best plays of the first Lord Lytton, another of the eminent hands of Macready, who undoubtedly counted for something in the success of The Lady of Lyons, Richelieu, and Money, the two first produced in 1838, and the last in 1840. Richelieu is the nearest to Knowles in competence without excellence, the other two perhaps excel if not positively yet relatively. Many spectators quite recently, while unable to check laughter at the grandiloquent sentimentality and the stock situations of The Lady of Lyons, have been unable to avoid being touched by its real though ordinary pathos, and moved by its astonishing cleverness; while Money is probably the very best comic example of the hybrid kind above referred to, the modernised artificial comedy. But Bulwer's other plays, though the unsuccessful Duchesse de la Vallière is not bad reading, were less fortunate, and one of them is the subject of perhaps the most successful of Thackeray's early reviews in the grotesque style, preserved in the Yellowplush Papers.
It will be observed that, with the single and not very notable exception of Sheridan Knowles, almost all the names already mentioned are those of persons to whom drama was a mere by-work. Another exception may be found in James R. Planché (1796-1880), a man of no very exalted birth or elaborate education, but an archæologist of some merit, and from 1854 onwards an official representative of the honourable though discredited science of Heraldry as Rouge Croix Pursuivant and Somerset Herald. From 1818 onward Planché was the author, adapter, translator, and what not, of innumerable—they certainly run to hundreds—dramatic pieces of every possible sort from regular plays to sheer extravaganzas. He was happiest perhaps in the lighter and freer kinds, having a pleasant and never vulgar style of jocularity, a fair lyrical gift, and the indefinable knowledge of what is a play. But he stands only on the verge of literature proper, and the propriety, indeed the necessity, of including him here is the strongest possible evidence of the poverty of dramatic literature in our period. It would indeed only be possible to extend this chapter much by including men who have no real claim to appear, and who would too forcibly suggest the hired guests of story, introduced in order to avoid a too obtrusive confession of the absence of guests entitled to be present.
The greater and more strictly literary names of those who have tried the stage in the intervals of happier studies, from Miss Mitford and R. H. Horne to Tennyson, have been mentioned elsewhere; and there is no need to return to them. Dr. James Westland Marston (1820-90) was once much praised, and was an author of Macready's. Miss Isabella Harwood, daughter of the second editor of the Saturday Review, produced under the pseudonym of "Ross Neil" a series of closet-dramas of excellent composition and really poetical fancy, but wanting the one thing needful. Perhaps a few other writers might with pains be added; and of course every reviewer knows that the flow of five-act tragedies, though less abundant than of old, has continued. But, on the whole, the sentence already put in more than one form remains true and firm—that in this period the dramatic work of those who have been really men and women of letters is generally far inferior to their other work, and that, with the rarest exceptions, the dramatic work of those who have not excelled in other kinds of literature is not literature at all.
CHAPTER XII
CONCLUSION
A conclusion which avows that it might almost as well have presented itself as a preface may seem to be self-condemned; it must be the business of the following pages to justify it. In summing up on such a great matter as this it is desirable—it is indeed necessary—to indicate, in broader lines than at the mere outset would have seemed appropriate or indeed possible, the general course of thought and of speech, of literary matter and literary form, during the century and more which is submitted to the view. We can thus place individuals in their position to each other and to the whole more boldly and with less reserve; we can sketch the general character of existing movements, the movers in which have been exempt from individual consideration by virtue of their life and work being incomplete; we can at once record accomplishment and indicate tendency.
The period dealt with in the first chapter of this book illustrates the differences in appeal of such periods to the merely dilettante and "tasting" critic, and to the student of literature in the historical and comparative fashion. To the former it is one of the most ungrateful of all such sub-periods or sub-divisions in English literature. He finds in it none, or at most Boswell's Johnson, Burns, and the Lyrical Ballads (this last at its extreme end), of the chief and principal things on which alone he delights to fix his attention. Its better poetry, such as that of Cowper and Crabbe, he regards at best with a forced esteem; its worse is almost below his disgust. Its fiction is preposterous and childish; it contributes nothing even to the less "bellettristic" departments of literature that is worth his attention; it is a tedious dead season about which there is nothing tolerable except the prospect of getting rid of it before very long.
To the latter—to the historical and comparative student—on the other hand, it has an interest of an absolutely unique kind. As was observed in a former volume of this history, the other great blossoming time of English literature—that which we call Elizabethan, and by which we mean the last five and twenty years of the Queen's reign and the fifty or sixty after her death—was preceded by no certain signs except those of restless seeking. Here, on the contrary, with no greater advantage of looking back, we can see the old fruit dropping off and the new forming, in a dozen different kinds and a hundred different ways. Extravagance on one side always provokes extravagance on the other; and because the impatient revolt of Coleridge and some others of the actual leaders into the Promised Land chose to present the eighteenth century as a mere wilderness in respect of poetry, enjoyment of nature, and so forth, there have been of late years critics who maintained that the poetical decadence of that century is all a delusion; in other words (it may be supposed) that Akenside and Mason are the poetical equals of Herrick and Donne. The via media, as almost always, is here also the via veritatis. The poets of the eighteenth century were poets; but the poetical stream did not, as a rule, run very high or strong in their channels, and they were tempted to make up for the sluggishness and shallowness of the water by playing rather artificial and rococo tricks with the banks. The fiction of the eighteenth century was, at its greatest, equal to the greatest ever seen; but it was as yet advancing with uncertain steps, and had not nearly explored its own domain. The history of the eighteenth century had returned to the true sense of history, and was endeavouring to be accurate; but it only once attained—it is true that with Gibbon it probably attained once for all—a perfect combination of diligence and range, of matter and of style.
In all these respects the list might, if it were proper, be extended to much greater length. The twenty years from 1780 to 1800 show us in the most fascinating manner the turn of the tide, not as yet coming in three feet abreast, rather creeping up by tortuous channels and chance depressions, but rising and forcing a way wherever it could. In the poets, major and minor, of the period, omitting, and even not wholly omitting, Burns and Blake—who are of no time intrinsically, but who, as it happens, belong accidentally to this time as exponents, the one of the refreshing influence of dialect and freedom from literary convention, the other of the refreshing influence of sympathy with old models and mystical dreaming—all the restlessness of the approaching crisis is seen. Nothing in literature is more interesting than to watch the effect of the half-unconscious aims and desires of Cowper and Crabbe, to see how they try to put the new wine in the old bottles, to compare them with Goldsmith and Thomson on the one hand, with Wordsworth and Coleridge on the other. Hayley perhaps alone, or almost alone, is rebel to the comparative method. Hayley is one of these hopeless creatures who abound at all periods, and whose native cast of nothingness takes a faint fashion from the time. But even in the verse of "Monk" Lewis we see the itch for new measures, the craving for lyric movement; even in the day-flies of the Della Crusca group the desire to be "something different." And then in Bowles, with his sonnets of places, in Sayers, with his rhymeless Pindarics, we come upon the actual guides to the right way, guides the oddest, the blindest, the most stumbling, but still—as not merely chronology but the positive testimony and the still more positive practice of those who followed them show—real guides and no misleaders.
Least studied, perhaps, because of its want of positive savour in comparison with their later achievements, but more interesting than all of these, is the early work of Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth themselves, and the work, not merely early but later, of men like Rogers and Campbell. Here the spectacle already presented in Crabbe and Cowper is repeated; but the process is in a further stage, and the fermentation is determining, according to the nature of the fermenting material. On Rogers it is nearly powerless; in Campbell only in his lyrics does it succeed in breaking up and dissolving the old crust; in Southey the effect is never quite complete; in Coleridge and Wordsworth, but especially in Coleridge, the leaven changes all the latter lump. Thenceforward the process is reversed. Instead of instances of advance amid a mass of inertia or aimless wandering we have instances of reaction amid a mass of advance. The work of the revolutionary time is done; the scholar, contrary to Goethe's dictum, has now not merely to exercise himself but to perfect.
The phenomena of the time in fiction are of the same character, but they lead as yet to no such distinct turn. The tale-telling of Beckford is like the singing of Burns, not uncoloured by the time, but still in the main purely individual; the purpose of the novels of Holcroft, Godwin, and Bage is groping in the dark; the Radcliffian romance and its exaggeration by Lewis exhibit the same uncertainty, the same application of the Rule of False. And there is for once a more philosophical and less cowardly explanation—that Scott, the Joshua in this instance, as Coleridge and Wordsworth were in the other, was occupied elsewhere before he sought the Palestine of the novel. For it must be remembered that prose fiction, though it had been cultivated in a scattered and tentative way for thousands of years, was up to this time the most inorganic of literary kinds. Poets, when they chose to give themselves up to poetry and to turn their backs on convention, were almost as well off then as now. They had but to open the great Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, the Latins such as Lucretius and Catullus, the great mediæval, the great Renaissance examples of their own art, to see, as soon as they chose to see, where and how to go right. The adventurer in fiction was destitute of any such assistance. Only a few examples of much real excellence in his art were before him; many of those existing (including most of the mediæval instances) were hardly before him at all; and none of these, with the exception of the eighteenth century novel of manners and character (which, in the nature of the case, was at that special time the last thing he wanted to imitate), and the short tale of France and Italy, could be said to have been brought to anything like perfection. Hence the wanderings and the stumblings here were far greater, the touch of the groping hands far feebler and less sure than even in poetry; but the crying for the light was there too, and it was to be heard in time. Even as it was, before the century closed, Miss Edgeworth had given important new lines to fiction, and was on the eve of opening the most fertile of all its seams or veins, that of national or provincial character; the purpose-novel just referred to was full of future, though it might be a future of a perilous and disputable kind; the terror-romance, subdued to saner limits and informed with greater knowledge and greater genius, was not soon to cease out of the land; and, a detail not to be neglected, the ever increasing popularity of the novel was making it more and more certain that it would number good intellects sooner or later.
In all other directions, with the single exception of drama, in which there was neither performance nor promise, so far as literature was concerned, to any great extent, the same restlessness of effort, and not always the same incompetence of result was seen. The fact of the revolutionary war abroad and the coercive policy thereby necessitated at home may have somewhat postponed the appearance of the new kind of periodical, in all shapes from quarterly to daily, which was to be so great a feature of the next age; but the same causes increased the desire for it and prepared not a few of its constituents. It is impossible for any tolerably careful reader not to notice how much more "modern," to use an unphilosophical but indispensable term, is the political satire both in verse and prose, which has been noticed in the first chapter of this book, than the things of more or less the same kind that immediately preceded it. It was an accident, no doubt, that made the Anti-Jacobin ridicule Darwin's caricature of eighteenth century style in poetry; yet that ridicule did far more to put this particular convention out of fashion than all the attacks of the same paper on innovators like Coleridge (who at that time had hardly attempted their literary innovations) could do harm. The very interest in foreign affairs, brought about by the most universal war that had ever been known, helped to introduce the foreign element which was to play so large a part in literature; and little affection as the critic may have for the principles of Godwin or of Paine, he cannot deny that the spirit of inquiry, the rally and shock of attack and defence, are things a great deal better for literature than a placid contentment with accepted conventions.
Theology indeed may share with drama the reproach of having very little that is good to show from this time, or indeed for a long time to come. For the non-conformist sects and the Low Church party, which had resulted from the Evangelical movement in the earlier eighteenth century, were, the Unitarians excepted, for the most part illiterate. The Deist controversy had ceased, or, as conducted against Paine, required no literary skill; and the High Church movement had not begun. Philosophy, not productive of very much, was more active; and the intensely alien and novel styles of German thought were certain in time to produce their effect, while their working was in exact line with all the other tendencies we have been surveying.
In short, during these twenty years, literature in almost all its parts was being thoroughly "boxed about." The hands that stirred it were not of the strongest as yet, they were absolutely unskilled, and for the most part they had not even any very clear conception of what they wanted to do. But almost everybody felt that something had to be done, and was anxious—even childishly anxious—to do something. It by no means always happens that such anxiety is rewarded or is a good sign; but it is always a noteworthy one, and in this instance there is no doubt about either the fact of the reward or its goodness.
The subsequent history of poetry during the century divides itself in an exceedingly interesting way, which has not perhaps yet been subjected to full critical comment. There are in it five pretty sharply marked periods of some ten or fifteen years each, which are distinguished, the first, third, and fifth, by the appearance in more or less numbers of poets of very high merit, and of characteristics more or less distinctly original; the second and fourth by poetic growths, not indeed scanty in amount and sometimes exquisite in quality, but tentative, fragmentary, and undecided. It will of course be understood that in this, as in all literary classifications, mathematical accuracy must not be expected, and that the lives of many of the poets mentioned necessarily extend long before and after the periods which their poetical production specially distinguishes. In fact the life of Wordsworth covers as nearly as possible the whole five sub-periods mentioned, reckoning from his own birth-year to that of almost the youngest of the poets, of whom we shall here take account. And perhaps there are few better ways of realising the extraordinary eminence of English nineteenth century poetry than by observing, that during these eighty years there was never a single one at which more or fewer persons were not in existence, who had produced or were to produce poetry of the first class. And the more the five-fold division indicated is examined and analysed the more curious and interesting will its phenomena appear.
The divisions or batches of birth-years are worth indicating separately: the first comprises the eighth and ninth decades of the eighteenth century, from the birth of Scott and the Lakers to that of Shelley, with Keats as a belated and so to speak posthumous but most genuine child of it; the second covers about fifteen years from the birth of George Darley, who was of the same year (1795) with Keats, to the eve of that of Tennyson; the third goes from 1810 or thereabouts, throwing back to include the elder Tennysons and Mrs. Browning; the fourth extends from about 1825 to 1836; the fifth from the birth of Mr. Morris (throwing back as before to admit Rossetti) to the end.
In the first of these we see the Romantic revolt or renaissance, whichever word may be preferred, growing up under the joint influences of the opening of mediæval and foreign literature; of the excitement of the wars of the French Revolution; of the more hidden but perhaps more potent force of simple ebb-and-flow which governs the world in all things, though some fondly call it Progress; and of the even more mysterious chance or choice, which from time to time brings into the world, generally in groups, persons suited to effect the necessary changes. The "Return to Nature," or to be less question-begging let us say the taking up of a new standpoint in regard to nature, made half unconsciously by men like Cowper and Crabbe, assisted without intending it by men like Burns and Blake, effected in intention if not in full achievement by feeble but lucky pioneers like Bowles, asserts itself once for all in the Lyrical Ballads, and then works itself out in different—in almost all possibly different—ways through the varying administration of the same spirit by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, in the highest and primary rank, by Scott and Byron in the next, by Southey, Campbell, Leigh Hunt, Moore, and others in the third. And it is again most interesting to watch how the exertion of influence and the character of it are by no means in proportion to the exact poetical strength of the agent. Scott and Byron, certainly inferior as poets to the first four mentioned, have probably had a greater bulk of poetical influence and poetical action on mankind at large certainly, and a vastly earlier, more immediate and more sweeping influence on other poets than their betters. Leigh Hunt, a poet quite of the third rank, exercised directly and indirectly, through Shelley and Keats, an influence on the form of poetry, on metre, cadence, phrase, greater than any of the others, save Wordsworth and Byron, and perhaps more than these. In all ways, however, by this channel and that, in straightforward or stealthy fashion, the poetic flood comes up, and by the death of Byron, Shelley and Keats having still more prematurely gone before, it is at its very highest spring. Six and twenty years passed, from 1798 to 1824, from the time when the Lyrical Ballads were brought out to take their chance to the time when Mr. Beddoes, Mr. Procter, and somebody else clubbed to publish Shelley's posthumous poems at their own expense or at least guarantee, and justly objected to paying for more than 250 copies, because more were not likely to be sold. In these six and twenty years such an addition had been made to English poetry as five times the space had not previously seen, as perhaps was not far from equalling the glorious gains of a not very different though somewhat longer space of time between the appearance of the Shepherd's Calendar and the death of Shakespeare.
But the sequel of this abnormally high tide is hardly less interesting than itself. We generally expect at such moments in literature either a decided falling off, or else a period of decent imitation, of "school work." It would be absurd to say that there is no contrast, no falling off, and no imitation in the group of poets noticed at the end of the second chapter in this volume. But they are not utterly decadent, and they are by no means purely or merely imitative. On the contrary, their note is quite different from that of mere school work, and in a sort of eccentric and spasmodic fashion they attain to singular excellence. Hood, Praed, Macaulay, Taylor, Darley, Beddoes, Hartley Coleridge, Horne, are not to Wordsworth or Coleridge, to Byron or to Shelley, what the later so-called Elizabethan playwrights are to Jonson and Fletcher, the later poets of the same time to Spenser and Donne. But they almost all, perhaps all, seem forced to turn into some bye-way or backwater of poetry, to be unable or unwilling to keep the crown of the causeway, the flood of the tide. Hood and Praed—the former after actually attempting great poetry, and coming nearer to it than some great poets come in their first attempts—wander into the special borderland of humorous and grotesque verse, achieving in different parts of it something not unlike absolute and unsurpassed success. Beddoes, and to some extent Darley, adopt fantastic varieties, grim in the former's hands, playful chiefly in the latter's, but alike remote from everyday interests and broad appeals; while the incomparable lyrics of Beddoes are of no special time or school, their very Elizabethanism being somewhat delusive. Taylor and Horne attempt the serious moral play with hardly any stage purposes or possibilities, and Horne in Orion tries an eccentric kind of ethical or satirical epic. Macaulay—the most prominent of all, and the most popular in his tastes and aims—is perhaps the nearest to a "schoolman," adapting Scott as he does in his Lays; yet even here there is no mere imitation.
Thus the people of this minor transition exhibit—in a most interesting way, rendered even more interesting by the repetition of it which, as we have seen and shall see, came about twenty years later—the mixed phenomena of an after-piece and a lever de rideau, of precursorship and what we must for want of a better word call decadence. They were not strong enough in themselves, or were not favourably enough circumstanced, entirely to refresh or redirect the main current of poetry; so they deviated from it. But hardly in the least of them is there absent the sign and symptom of the poetic spirit being still about, of the poetic craft still in full working order. And their occasional efforts, their experiments in the half-kinds they affected, have a curious charm. English poetry would be undeniably poorer without the unearthly snatches of Beddoes, the exquisitely urbane verse-of-society of Praed, the pathetic-grotesque of Hood, even the stately tirades of Horne and Taylor. Some of them, if not all, may at this or that time have been exaggerated in value, by caprice, by reaction, by mere personal sympathy. But no universal critic will refuse admiration to them in and for themselves.
In the next stage we are again face to face, not with half-talents, uncertain of their direction, but with whole genius, inevitably working on its predestined lines. Nothing quite like the poetical career and the poetical conception of Alfred Tennyson and of Robert Browning, so different in all respects, except that of duration and coincidence in time, meets us in English, perhaps nothing similar meets us in any literature. It is easy to overestimate both; and both have been over-estimated. It is still easier to depreciate both; and both have been depreciated. Both wrote constantly, and at frequent intervals, for some sixty years—the same sixty years—and, with not more than fair allowance for the effects of time, both wrote at the end better than at the beginning, and nearly as well as at the best time of each. Wordsworth, it is true, wrote for nearly as long, but no one can assert the same duration of equality in his production.
In a certain sense, no doubt, neither can claim the same distinct individuality, the same unmistakable and elementary quality, as that which distinguishes Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Shelley. The work of each is always at once recognisable by any tolerably competent judge; but the signs of identity are more composite than atomic, more derived and literary than essentially native. Browning's unconventional mannerisms, and his wide range of subject, have made him seem even less of a mere scholar than Tennyson; but, as a fact, each is independent enough to a certain extent and to a certain extent only. In both appears, perhaps for the first time, certainly for the first time in combination with distinct original genius, that indebtedness to the past, that relapse upon it in the very act of forming vast schemes for the future, which is more the note of the nineteenth century than anything else. They not merely have all literature and all history behind them; but they know it. Yet this knowledge does not weigh on them. They do not exactly neglect it as Wordsworth and Shelley were still able to do, but they keep it under. It is the attendant fiend for which they must find work, but which they never, as too many of their contemporaries and followers have done, allow to become their master. And so they two, as it seems to me, do actually win their way to the first class, not perhaps to the absolutely first division of it, but to a first class still pretty rigidly limited.
It is not the object of this Conclusion to deal with the performances of individuals at any length, and therefore I must refer back to the text for a detailed indication of the position of Keats as the summer-up of the tradition of the first of the groups or periods here noticed, and the begetter, master, and teacher of the third, as well as for descriptions of the different manners in which Tennyson and Browning respectively shared and distributed between themselves that catholic curiosity in poetical subject, that exploration of all history and art and literature, which is the main characteristic of strictly nineteenth century poetry. But it is very pertinent here to point out the remarkable way in which these two poets, from the unexampled combination of length and potency in their poetical period of influence, governed all the poetry that has followed them. We shall now see that under their shadow at least two well-marked groups arose, each of magnitude and individuality sufficient to justify the assignment to it of a separate position. Yet it was in their shadow that these rose and flourished, and though the trees themselves have at length fallen, the shadow of their names is almost as great as ever.
The first of these two groups, the fourth of our present classification, renews, as has been said before, the features of its twenty or thirty years older forerunner, the group between Keats and Tennyson, in a most curious and attractive fashion. Once more we find the notes of uncertainty, of straying into paths,—not always quite blind-alleys, but bye-paths certainly,—the presence of isolated burst and flash, of effort unsuccessful or unequal as a whole. But here we find, what in the earlier chapter or section we do not find, distinct imitativeness and positive school-following. This imitation, attempting Shelley at times with little success (for, let it be repeated, Shelley is not imitable), selected in regular chronological order, three masters, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning, though in each stage the master of the preceding rather shared than yielded his chair. It has been said in a famous passage that Wordsworth was more read about sixty years ago than at any time before or since, and this may perhaps be true. But his influence on writers has not depended on his popularity with readers, and from Sir Aubrey de Vere, who was born more than a century ago, to verse-writers who have only just published, his unmistakable tone, the tone which, so far as we can see, would never have been if Wordsworth had never existed, shows itself. The writing influence of Tennyson did not begin till the issue of the Poems of 1842, but it began almost immediately then, and has remained in full force to the present day. It is an influence somewhat more external and technical than Wordsworth's, but for that reason even more unmistakable, and some of its results are among the most curious of school-copies in literature. As for Browning, imitation there tried both the outside and the inside, not very often with happy results, but, of course, with results even more obvious to the most uncritical eye than the results of the imitation of Tennyson itself.
The attempts to be original and to break away from these and their imitations—the principal of them being that of the so-called Spasmodic school, which flourished at the dead waist and middle of the century—were not particularly happy, and those who incline to gloomy views may say that the imitation was less happy still. In Mr. Matthew Arnold, a recalcitrant but unmistakable Wordsworthian, sharing a partly reluctant allegiance between Wordsworth, the ancients, Goethe, and Tennyson himself, it is impossible not to think that a freer attitude, a more independent and less literary aim, might have strengthened his elegance, supplied his curious mixture of stiffness and grace, and even made him less unequal than he actually is. And yet he is much the greatest poet of the period. Its effect was more disastrous still upon the second Lord Lytton, who was content to employ an excellent lyrical vein, and a gift of verse satire of the fantastic kind so distinct and fascinating, that it approaches the merit of fantasists in other kinds of the former group, like Beddoes and Darley, to far too great an extent on echoes. The fact is, that by this time, to speak conceitedly, the obsession of the book was getting oppressive. Men could hardly sing for remembering, or, at least, without remembering, what others had sung before them, and became either slavishly imitative or wilfully recalcitrant to imitation. The great leaders indeed continued to sing each in his own way, and, though with perfect knowledge of their forerunners, not in the least hampered by that knowledge. But something else was needed to freshen the middle regions of song.
It was found in that remarkable completion of the English Romantic movement, which is in relation to art called præ-Raphaelitism, and which is represented in literature, to mention only the greatest names, by Rossetti, his sister, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Swinburne. The death of the two former, and the fact that the movement itself, still active in art, has in a manner rounded itself off, though it is not necessarily finished, in literature, enable us to discuss it here as a whole, though its two chief poets are luckily still alive.
The first thing of interest in general history which strikes us, in regard to this delightful chapter of English poetry, is its illustration—a common one in life and letters—of the fact that there is a false as well as a true side to the question quoted by Aristotle: "If water chokes you, what are you to drink on the top of it?" "Wine," one kind of humourist might answer; "More water," another: and both rightly. It has been said that the group which preceded this suffered from the pressure of too constant, wide, and various reminiscence, literary, artistic, and other. The præ-Raphaelites refreshed themselves and the world by applying still more strenuously to the particular kind and period of such reminiscence which had been hitherto, despite the mediæval excursions of many from Percy to Tennyson, imperfectly utilised. The literary practitioners of the school (with whom alone we are concerned) were not indeed by any means purely mediæval in their choice of subject, in their founts of inspiration, or in their method of treatment. English poetry has known few if any more accomplished scholars both in the classics and in the modern languages than Mr. Swinburne, for instance; and something similar might be said of others. But, on the whole, the return of this school—for all new things in literature are returns—was to a mediævalism different from the tentative and scrappy mediævalism of Percy, from the genial but slightly superficial mediævalism of Scott, and even from the more exact but narrow and distinctly conventionalised mediævalism of Tennyson. They had other appeals, but this was their chief.
It may seem that mere or main archaism is not a very charming or powerful thing, and in weaker hands it would not have been either one or the other; but it so happened that these hands were very strong indeed. Mr. Rossetti had one of the most astonishing combinations ever known of artistically separate gifts, as well as a singular blend of passion and humour. His sister was one of the great religious poets of the world. Mr. Swinburne has never been surpassed, if he has ever been equalled, by any poet in any language for command of the more rushing and flowing forms of verse. Mr. Morris has few equals in any time or country for narrative at once decorative and musical. Moreover, though it may seem whimsical or extravagant to say so, these poets added to the very charm of mediæval literature which they thus revived a subtle something which differentiates it from—which to our perhaps blind sight seems to be wanting in—mediæval literature itself. It is constantly complained (and some of those who cannot go all the way with the complainants can see what they mean) that the graceful and labyrinthine stories, the sweet snatches of song, the quaint drama and legend of the Middle Ages lack—to us—life; that they are shadowy, unreal, tapestry on the wall, not alive even as living pageants are. By the strong touch of modernness which these poets and the best of their followers introduced into their work, they have given the vivification required.
Beyond them we must not go, nor inquire whether the poets who have not come to forty years represent a new school of the masterful and supreme kind, or one of the experimental and striving sort, or something a good deal worse than this, a period of sheer interval and suspense, unenlivened even by considerable attempt. Not only our scheme, not only common prudence and politeness, but most of all the conditions of critical necessity insist on the curtain being here dropped. It is possible that a critic may be able to isolate and project himself sufficiently to judge, as posterity will judge them, the actually accomplished work of his own contemporaries and juniors. But even such a skilful and fortunate person cannot judge the work which they have not yet produced, and which may in all cases, and must in some, modify their position and alter their rank.
But what has been has been, and on this mass (not in the actual case "vulgar" by any means) of things done it is possible to pronounce securely. And with security it may be said that for total amount, total merit, total claims of freshness and distinctness, no period of poetical literature can much, if at all, exceed the ninety years of English verse from The Ancient Mariner to Crossing the Bar. The world has had few poets better than the best of ours during this time in degree; it has had none like Shelley, perhaps none exactly like Wordsworth, in kind. The secret of long narrative poems that should interest has been recovered; the sonnet, one of the smallest but one of the most perfect of poetic forms, has been recovered likewise. Attempts to recover the poetic drama have been mostly failures; and serious satire has hardly reappeared. But lighter satire, with other "applied" poetry, has shown variety and excellence. Above all lyric, the most poetic kind of poetry, has attained a perfection never known before, except once in England and once in Greece. It has been impossible hitherto to make a full and free anthology of the lyric poets from Burns and Blake to Tennyson and Browning to match the anthologies often made of those from Surrey or Sidney to Herrick or Vaughan. But when it can be done it is a question whether the later volume will not even excel the earlier in intensity and variety, if not perhaps in freshness of charm.
And then it is needful once more to insist, even at the risk of disgusting, on the additional interest given by the subtle and delicate, but still distinctly traceable gradations, the swell and sinking, the flow and ebb, of poetical production and character during the time. As no other flourishing time of any poetry has lasted so long, so none has had the chance of developing these mutations in so extensive and attractive a manner; in none has it been possible to feel the pulse of poetry, so to speak, in so connected and considerable a succession of experiment. Poetical criticism can never be scientific; but it can seldom have had an opportunity of going nearer to a scientific process than here, owing to the volume, the connection, the duration, the accessibility of the phenomena submitted to the critic. The actual secret as usual escapes; but we can hunt the fugitive by a closer trail than usual through the chambers of her flight.
Of the highest poetry, however, as of other highest things, Goethe's famous axiom Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh holds good. Although there is a difference between the expressions of this highest poetry in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, in the fourteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth after Christ there is also a certain quiet sameness, not indiscernibility but still identity. The lower kinds of literature admit of more apparent and striking freshness of exterior. And perhaps the most strikingly fresh, some might even say the distinctive, product of the nineteenth century, is its prose fiction.
This, as has been shown in detail, is much later in date than the poetry in anything like a characteristic and fully developed state. Although it was busily produced during the last twenty years of the eighteenth century and the first fifteen of the nineteenth, the very best work of the time, except such purely isolated things as Vathek, are experiments, and all but the very best—the novels of Miss Edgeworth, those written but not till quite the end of the time published by Miss Austen, and a very few others—are experiments of singular lameness and ill success.
With Scott's change from verse to prose, the modern romance admittedly, and to a greater extent than is generally thought the modern novel, came into being; and neither has gone out of being since. In the two chapters which have been devoted to the subject we have seen how the overpowering success of Waverley bred a whole generation of historical novels; how side by side with this the older novel of manners, slightly altered, continued to be issued, with comic deviations chiefly, as in the hands of Theodore Hook; how Bulwer attempted a sort of cross between the two; how about the middle of the century the historical novel either ceased or changed, to revive later after a middle period illustrated by the brilliant romances of Kingsley; how about the same time the strictly modern novel of manners came into being in the hands of Thackeray, Miss Brontë, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope, Dickens overlapping both periods in a fantastic and nondescript style of his own; and how more recently still both romance and novel have spread out and ramified into endless subdivisions.
There is, however, this broad line of demarcation between poetry and the novel, that they are written for different ends and from different motives. It is natural to man to write poetry; it does not appear to be by any means so certainly or unvaryingly necessary to him to read it. Except at rare periods and for short times, poetry has never offered the slightest chance of livelihood to any considerable number of persons; and it is tolerably certain that if the aggregate number of poets since the foundation of the world had had nothing to live on but their aggregate gains as poets, starvation would have been the commonplace rule, instead of the dramatic exception, among the sons of Apollo.
On the other hand, it is no doubt also natural to man to tell prose stories, and it seems, though it was a late-discovered aptitude, that it is not unnatural to him to read them; but the writing of them does not seem to be at all an innate or widely disseminated need. Until some hundred or two hundred years ago very few were written at all; the instances of persons who do but write novels because they must are exceedingly rare, and it is as certain as anything can be that of the enormous production of the last three-quarters of a century not 5, perhaps not 1 per cent would have been produced if the producing had not led, during the whole of that time, in most cases but those of hopeless incompetence to some sort of a livelihood, in many to very comfortable income, and in some to positive wealth and fame. In other words, poetry is the creation of supply and novel-writing of demand; poetry can hardly ever be a trade and in very rare cases a profession, while novel-writing is commonly a very respectable profession, and unfortunately sometimes a rather disreputable trade.
Like other professions, however, it enlists genius sometimes, talent often; and the several and successive ways in which this genius and this talent show themselves are of more than sufficient interest. But the steady demand, and the inevitable answer to it, work adversely to such spontaneous and interesting fluctuations of production as those which we have traced in reference to poetry. There have been times, particularly that between the cessation of Sir Walter's best work and the perfecting of that of Thackeray, in which the average value of even the best novels was much lower than at other times. But even in these the average volume maintained itself very well, and, indeed, steadily increased.
It is this which, with another to be mentioned shortly, will, so far as it is possible for a contemporary to judge, be noted in the literary history of the future as the distinguishing crop or field of the nineteenth century. Sermons, essays, plays, no doubt, continue to be written; but the novel has supplanted the sermon, the essay, the play in the place which each at different times held as the popular form of literature. It may be added, or repeated, that it has in part at least achieved this result by trespassing upon the provinces of all these three forms and of many others. This is true, but is of somewhat less importance than might be thought. The fable has an old trick of adjusting itself to almost every possible kind of literary use, and the novel is only an enlarged and more fully organised fable. It does not, no doubt, do best when it abuses this privilege of its ancestor, and saturates itself overmuch with "purpose," but it has at least an ancestral right to do so.
There is no doubt also that the popularity of the novel has been very directly connected with a cause which has had all manner of effects fathered upon it—often with no just causation or filiation whatever—to wit, the spread of education. In the proper sense of course the spread of education must always be strictly limited. The number of educable persons probably bears a pretty constant ratio to the population, and when the education reaches the level of the individual's containing power, it simply runs over and is lost. But it is possible to teach nearly everybody reading and writing; and it is a curious but exact observation that a very large proportion of those who have been taught reading require something to read. Now the older departments of literature do not lend themselves with any facility to constant reading by the average man or woman, whose requirements may be said to be amusement rather than positive delight, occupation much rather than intellectual exertion, and above all, something to pass time. For these requirements, or this compound requirement, the hearing of some new thing has been of old recognised as the surest and most generally useful specific. And the novel holds itself out, not indeed always quite truly, as being new or nothing by name and nature. Accordingly the demand for novels has gone on ever increasing, and the supply has never failed to keep up with it.
Nor would it be just to say that the quality has sunk appreciably. The absolutely palmy day of the English nineteenth century in novel-writing was no doubt some thirty-five or forty years ago. Not even the contemporary France of that date can show such a "galaxy-gallery" as the British novelists—Dickens, Thackeray, Miss Brontë, George Eliot, Trollope, Kingsley, Bulwer, Disraeli, Lever, Mr. Meredith, and others—who all wrote in the fifties. But at the beginning of the period the towering genius of Scott and the perfect art of Miss Austen, if we add to them Miss Edgeworth's genial talent, did not find very much of even good second-rate matter to back them; there was, as has been said, a positively barren time succeeding this first stage and preceding the "fifty" period; and twenty years or a little more ago, when Thackeray and Dickens were dead, Trollope and George Eliot past their best, Kingsley and Bulwer moribund, Mr. Meredith writing sparely and unnoticed, the new romantic school not arisen, and no recruit of distinction except Mr. Blackmore firmly set, things were apparently a great deal worse with us in point of novel-writing than they are at present. Whether, with a return of promise and an increase of performance, with a variation of styles and an abundance of experiment, there has also been a relapse into the extravagances which we have had in this very book to chronicle as characterising the fiction of exactly a century ago,—whether we have had over-luxuriant and non-natural style, attempts to attract by loose morality, novels of purpose, novels of problem, and so forth,—and whether the coming age will dismiss much of our most modern work as not superior in literary and inferior in other appeal to the work of Godwin and Lewis, Holcroft and Bage, it is not necessary distinctly to say. But our best is certainly better than the best of that time, our worst is perhaps not worse; and the novel occupies a far higher place in general estimation than it did then. Indeed it has been observed by the sarcastic that to some readers of novels, and even to some writers of them, "novel" and "book" seem to be synonymous terms, and that when such persons speak of "literature," they mean and pretty distinctly indicate that they mean novel-writing, and novel-writing only. This at least shows that the seed which Scott sowed, or the plant which he grafted, has not lost its vitality.
Certainly not less, perhaps even more, distinctive of the time in history must be that development and transformation of what is broadly called the newspaper, of which the facts and details have occupied two more of these chapters. It is true that at times considerably earlier than even the earliest that here concerns us, periodical writing had been something of a power in England as regards politics, had enlisted eminent hands, and had even served once or twice as the means of introduction of considerable works in belles lettres. But the Addisonian Essay had been something of an accident; Swift's participation in the Examiner was another; Defoe's abundant journalism brought him more discredit than profit or praise; and though Pulteney and the Opposition worked the press against Walpole, the process brought little benefit to the persons concerned. Reviewing was meagrely done and wretchedly paid; the examples of Robinson Crusoe earlier and Sir Launcelot Greaves later are exceptions which prove the rule that the feuilleton was not in demand; in fact before our present period newspaper-writing was rather dangerous, was more than rather disreputable, and offered exceedingly little encouragement to any one to make it the occasion of work in pure literature, or even to employ it as a means of livelihood, while attempting other and higher, though less paying kinds.
The period of the French Revolution, if not the French Revolution itself, changed all this, assisted no doubt by the natural and inevitable effects of the spread of reading and the multiplication of books. People wanted to see the news; papers sprang up in competition to enable them to see the news; and the competitors strove to make themselves more agreeable than their rivals by adding new attractions. Again, the activity of the Jacobin party, which early and of course directed itself to the press, necessitated activity on the other side. The keenest intellects, the best-trained wits of the nation, sometimes under some disguise, sometimes openly, took to journalism, and it became simply absurd to regard the journalist as a disreputable garreteer when Windham and Canning were journalists. The larger sale of books and the formation of a regular system of "pushing" them also developed reviews—too frequently, no doubt, in the direction of mere puffing, but even thus with the beneficent result that other reviews came into existence which were not mere puff-engines.
Even these causes and others will not entirely explain the extraordinary development of periodicals of all kinds from quarterly to daily, of which the Edinburgh, Blackwood, the Examiner, and the Times were respectively the most remarkable examples and pioneers in the earlier years of the century, though as a literary organ the Morning Post had at first rather the advantage of the Times. But, as has been said here constantly, you can never explain everything in literary history; and it would be extremely dull if you could. The newspaper press had, for good or for ill, to come; external events to some obvious extent helped its coming; individual talents and aptitudes helped it likewise; but the main determining force was the force of hidden destiny.