The Age of Tennyson

Lockhart undoubtedly shared that excessive personality which was the blot of criticism, and especially of the Blackwood school, in his generation. He has been charged with the Blackwood article on Keats, and with the Quarterly article on Jane Eyre, but he may now be acquitted of both these sins. It was however Lockhart who wrote the Quarterly article on Tennyson’s early poems; but this, though bad in tone and excessively severe, is to a large extent critically sound. So far as they can be traced, Lockhart’s criticisms are such as might be expected from his mind,—clear, incisive and vigorous. They are however often unsympathetic and harsh, because criticism was then too apt to be interpreted as fault-finding, and Lockhart could not wholly free himself from the influence of a vicious tradition.

But it is by his Life of Scott (1836-1838) that Lockhart will live in literature. He had in an ample measure the first of all requirements in a biographer, personal acquaintance with the man whose life he wrote. Almost from the time of his introduction, and certainly from the date of his marriage, Lockhart’s relations with Scott were of the closest; and though he was not personally familiar with the facts of Scott’s earlier life, he knew quite enough to understand the springs of the man’s character. Moreover, in the autobiographical fragment and in the endless stores of family and friendly anecdote open to him he had ample means of making good the deficiency. For among Lockhart’s advantages is to be reckoned the fact that he had not merely married into the family, but had married, as it were, into the circle of friends. The Life of Scott shows that the families of Abbotsford, of Chiefswood and of Huntley Burn (the last Scott’s great friends the Fergusons) were for many purposes only one larger family.

There are certain dangers, as well as great advantages, to the biographer even in intimate friendship. Misused in one way, it lowers the biographer’s own character; misused in another, it either lowers or unnaturally exalts that of his subject. Boswell, employing his materials with excellent effect for the purposes of his book, degrades himself. Froude, making a mistake of another sort, exaggerates all the less lovable characteristics of Carlyle; while there are multitudes who paint pictures not of flesh and blood, but of impossible saints and heroes. ‘A love passing the love of biographers’ was Macaulay’s phrase for the excess of hero-worship. Lockhart has avoided all these errors. When his book was read the contradictory charges were brought against him, on the one hand of having exaggerated Scott’s virtues and concealed his faults, and on the other of ungenerous and derogatory criticism. We may be sure that Lockhart’s temptation, if he felt any, was rather to ‘extenuate’ than to ‘set down in malice.’ But, with a noble confidence in a noble character, he does not extenuate. To describe Scott as a mere money-lover would be untrue; yet many have felt that there is a fault in his relation to wealth, and Lockhart uses just the right words when he says, ‘I dare not deny that he set more of his affections, during great part of his life, upon worldly things, wealth among others, than might have become such an intellect;’ and he gives just the right explanation when he goes on to trace this defect to its root in the imagination. In his treatment of the commercial matters in which Scott was involved, Lockhart is equally judicial.

The tact of Lockhart deserves as much praise as his fairness of judgment. As regards part of his work, he was put to the test a few years ago by the publication of Scott’s Journal. Lockhart had made liberal extracts from this journal, explaining at the same time that passages were necessarily suppressed because of their bearing upon persons then alive. A comparison of his extracts with the journal now accessible in extenso shows how skilfully he suppressed what was likely to give pain, while at the same time producing much the same general impression as the whole document leaves.

A biography, like a letter, may be said to have two authors, the man written about and the person who writes. Scott certainly gave Lockhart the greatest assistance, both by what he wrote and by what he was. At the beginning the delightful fragment of autobiography, towards the end the profoundly interesting Journal, and all through the free, manly, large-hearted letters, were materials of the choicest sort. Scott himself moreover, genial, cordial, of manifold activity, a centre of racy anecdote, was a person whom it was far more easy to set in an attractive frame than any mere literary recluse. Many could have produced a good life of such a man. Lockhart’s special praise is that he has written a great one. Except Johnson, there is no English man of letters so well depicted as Scott. Lockhart’s taste and style are excellent. The caustic wit which ran riot in the young Blackwood reviewer is restrained by the experience of years and by the necessities of the subject. Lockhart’s own part of the narrative is told in grave, temperate English, simple almost to severity, but in a high degree flexible. In the brighter parts there is a pleasant lightness in Lockhart’s touch; in the more serious parts he is weighty and powerful; and on occasion, especially towards the end, there is a restrained emotion which proves that part of his wonderful success is due to the fact that his heart was in his work.

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley

(1815-1881).

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley ranks considerably below Lockhart, yet his Life of Arnold (1844) is inferior only to the few unapproachable masterpieces of biography. Stanley was a fluent and able writer in several fields, but in most respects his work is now somewhat discredited. His Commentary on the Epistles to the Corinthians (1855) has been severely handled for inaccuracy and defective scholarship. His Lectures on the Eastern Church (1861) and On the Jewish Church (1863-1876), and his book of Eastern travel, Sinai and Palestine (1856) are delightful in literary execution, but they are popular rather than solid. Stanley neither was nor, apparently, cared to be exact. He trusted too much to his gift of making things interesting, and had an inadequate conception of the duty he owed to his readers of writing what was true. Other travellers who have followed his footsteps in the East have sometimes found that the scenes he describes, in charming English, are such as are visible only to those whose eyes can penetrate rocks and mountains. This constitutional inaccuracy is a blot upon nearly all his works, and his one permanent contribution to literature will probably prove to be the Life of Dr. Arnold. There is here, as Stanley’s biographer justly says, ‘a glow of repressed enthusiasm which gives to the work one of its greatest charms.’ Stanley loved Arnold, and threw himself with unwonted thoroughness into the task of depicting him. For two years, we are told, he abandoned for it every other occupation that was not an absolute duty. The principal defect of the Life is that the plan—a portion of narrative, and then a body of letters—is too rigid and mechanical. But the narrative is exceedingly good, giving within moderate compass a clear impression of Arnold; and the letters are well selected and full of interest.

Minor Historians and Biographers

Sir Archibald Alison

(1792-1867).

Sir Archibald Alison was the son of a clergyman who won a name for a work on the Principles of Taste. Alison practised at the Scottish bar, became Sheriff of Lanarkshire, and was knighted for his services to literature. His magnum opus is a History of Europe during the French Revolution, which he afterwards continued to the accession of Napoleon III. It is laborious and honest, though not unprejudiced. Disraeli sneeringly said that ‘Mr. Wordy’ had proved by his twenty volumes that Providence was on the side of the Tories.

John Hill Burton

(1809-1881).

John Hill Burton, best known as the historian of Scotland, was an industrious man of letters, who wrote on many subjects,—The Scot Abroad, The Book Hunter, and The Age of Queen Anne, as well as the History of Scotland. The last is the work of a capable and careful writer rather than of a great historian. Burton is sensible and dispassionate, and he has collected and put into shape the principal results of modern research as applied to Scotland.

John Forster

(1812-1876).

John Forster was a laborious but somewhat commonplace writer. He was the author of a Life of Goldsmith (1848) and a Life of Sir John Eliot (1864). But his most valuable works are two biographies of contemporaries, the Life of Landor (1869) and the Life of Dickens (1872-1874). Forster had little power of realising character, and the subjects of his biographies are never clearly outlined. His Life of Dickens has an importance beyond its intrinsic merits, because it is the most authoritative book on the great novelist.

Walter Farquhar Hook

(1798-1875).

Walter Farquhar Hook was a prominent clergyman, whose doctrine, that the English Roman Catholics were really seceders from the Church of England, caused a great stir when it was first promulgated. His vast design of the Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury (1860-1876) was ultimately executed in twelve big volumes. The plan was too large and the characters treated too multifarious for really good biography, but it is solid and valuable work.

Sir John William Kaye

(1814-1876).

Sir John William Kaye wrote two meritorious books of military history, The History of the War in Afghanistan (1851), and The History of the Sepoy War in India (1864-1876). The latter, which roused some controversy, was left unfinished at Kaye’s death, and was afterwards completed by Colonel Malleson.

Sir Francis Palgrave

(1788-1861).

Sir Francis Palgrave was in the early part of his life an active contributor to the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, and a diligent editor of state documents. His Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth (1832) threw much light on the early history of England. Palgrave was in his day one of the most earnest students of mediæval history.

Philip Henry, Earl Stanhope

(1805-1875).

Philip Henry, Earl Stanhope, wrote the History of the War of the Succession in Spain, the History of the Reign of Queen Anne, and the History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles. He took great pains with his work, but he does not reach distinction either of thought or style.

Sir William Stirling-Maxwell

(1818-1878).

Sir William Stirling-Maxwell is less widely known than he deserves to be, but this is partly due to the expensiveness of his works. He wrote Annals of the Artists of Spain, The Cloister Life of Charles V., Velasquez and his Work, and a posthumous book, Don John of Austria. All his work is distinguished for learning and good taste.

Agnes Strickland

(1806-1874)

Agnes Strickland was a popular writer whose work is readable rather than profound or original. Her principal books are the Lives of the Queens of England, followed up by Lives of the Queens of Scotland.

Patrick Fraser Tytler

(1791-1849).

Patrick Fraser Tytler, another historian of Scotland, came of a family distinguished both in literature and in law. His History of Scotland has been superseded in general favour by Burton’s, which has the advantage of embodying more recent research. Tytler however was the abler man of the two, and he had a higher literary gift than Burton. Except where the narrative has to be re-written in the light of later discoveries, his judgment is always worth weighing.

CHAPTER VII

THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY

The early part of the nineteenth century was not very prolific in the department of speculative thought, but signs of movement may be detected in the third decade. Each of the English universities became the centre of a very active intellectual society. The Cambridge men showed a bent towards general literature and philosophy, or to theology of a type cognate to philosophy. In the works of Whately Oxford gave signs of a philosophical revival; but she devoted herself mainly to theology, and the practical isolation of Whately, a hard and arid though a vigorous man, calls the more attention to her speculative poverty. The celebrated ‘Oxford movement,’ whose roots are in the twenties, though its visible growth dates only from the thirties, is of incomparably greater importance than this feeble revival.

John Keble

(1792-1866).

Newman, the great artificer of the movement, rightly traces its inception to the influence of John Keble. But Keble’s true literary form is poetry, and his principal contribution to poetry belongs to the preceding period. His prose works are not in themselves of great importance. As Professor of Poetry at Oxford he delivered lectures (in Latin) on critical subjects. In his character of pastor he preached many sermons, and a selection from them was published in 1847. The most famous of his pulpit utterances was one preached in 1833 on ‘National Apostasy.’ ‘I have ever considered and kept the day,’ says Newman, with regard to the delivery of this sermon, ‘as the start of the religious movement of 1833.’ Finally, in 1863, appeared Keble’s latest work of importance, a Life of Bishop Wilson.

Keble’s influence was essentially personal, and was due to his saintly life more than to anything he wrote, even in poetry. The Tractarian movement took its rise in a longing for saintliness, of which Keble furnished a living example. He was not to any considerable extent an originator of theory. Certain germs of theory about the Church, about its relation to pre-Reformation times, about authority in religion, were in the air, and they became absorbed in Keble’s system. But his was not a creative mind, and his position at the head of the Anglo-Catholic movement was little more than an accident. He was like a child who by a thrust of his hand sends a finely-poised rock thundering down a hill. In his literary aspects he is disappointing. A brilliant boy and a most blameless man, he remains throughout too little of this world. The pale perfection of his life is reflected in his works. He would have been better had he been less good; he would have been much better had he been less feminine.

In the ranks of the movement so initiated were included an unusual number of men who must be classed among the ‘might-have-beens’ of literature; men of great reputation eclipsed by premature death, men who never wrote, or men whose writings disappointed expectation. Nearly all its members had literary tastes, a fact not surprising when we consider how large a part imagination played in its start and development. But Hurrell Froude, one of the most daring-minded men engaged in it, died early, leaving only inadequate remains as evidence of his great gifts. W. G. Ward lived, but only to prove by his Ideal of a Christian Church that the power of writing good English was not among his endowments; and if the poetry of Keble is only second or even third-rate, that of Isaac Williams, a versifier of the movement, is of lower grade still. Manning was more the man of action than the man of letters; while the work of Dean Church and Canon Liddon, both of whom had marked literary talents, falls principally outside the limits of this period. There remain two remarkable men, one the very soul of the movement, the other its greatest recruit, who have attained, the first a great, the second a respectable place in letters. These are Cardinal Newman and Pusey, of whom the latter may be considered the exception to the rule that the Tractarians were by nature and instinct men of letters. Pusey was not; he was rather the technical theologian with no direct interest in letters at all.

John Henry Newman

(1801-1890).

John Henry Newman has been described by J. A. Froude, in language hardly too strong, as ‘the indicating number’ of the movement, all the others being, in comparison with him, but as cyphers. The story of Newman’s inner life has been told with inimitable grace in the Apologia pro Vita Sua, and this is not only his greatest contribution to literature, but the best document for his life and doctrines. There are few studies more interesting than the contrast presented by this book on the one side, and the Phases of Faith by its author’s brother, F. W. Newman, on the other. The younger Newman too has a mind prone to religion, but he decides to rest in reason, while his brother leans upon authority. Not unnaturally they drift very far apart; not unnaturally too the author of the Phases of Faith is amazed that it took his brother ten years to discover whither he was going.

Newman’s education was private till he went to Oxford, where, in 1822, he won a fellowship at Oriel, then the great intellectual college of the university. He was at this time a Calvinist in his religious views, and held, among other things, that the Pope was Antichrist. At Oxford he came under the influence of Whately, who, he says, taught him to think. But the two men were essentially antipathetic and foredoomed to part, not the best of friends. Newman drew gradually closer to men of a very different stamp—R. J. Wilberforce, Hurrell Froude and Keble. His Arians of the Fourth Century was finished in 1832, and he took rest after the fatigue of writing it in a memorable journey with Hurrell Froude in the Mediterranean. During this journey he composed most of his verses printed in the Lyra Apostolica, and towards the end of it the exquisite hymn, ‘Lead, kindly light.’

After his return, in 1833, Newman began, ‘out of his own head,’ the Tracts for the Times. They culminated in the celebrated Tract XC (1841), which raised such a storm of opposition that the series had to be closed. Contemporaneously with the Tracts, Newman was busied with other works in defence of the Via Media. To this class belong The Prophetical Office of the Church (1837) and the Lectures on Justification (1838). He was moreover building up a great reputation as a preacher; and, as if all this was not enough, he was for several years editor of The British Critic. The storm raised by his opinions, and especially by Tract XC, drove him into retirement at Littlemore in 1841. He called it his Torres Vedras, in the conviction that he, like Wellington, was destined to ‘issue forth anew,’ and to conquer. But the actual course was different. In 1843 he retracted his former strictures on Rome, and resigned his charge of St. Mary’s. For two years more he lingered in the Church of England, foreseeing the inevitable end, but slow to take a step of such importance without absolute assurance. In 1845 he was received into the Roman communion. Here the history of his spiritual development may be said to close. ‘It was,’ he says, ‘like coming into port after a rough sea.’ He repudiates the idea that his mind was afterwards idle; but there was no change, no anxiety, no doubt. He seems to be unconscious that this individual peace may be dear bought for the human race, and that the absence of doubt is, to use his own favourite word, the ‘note’ of a low type.

Among the voluminous works of Newman, in addition to those of his Anglican period already mentioned, the most important are The Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), the Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), The Dream of Gerontius (1865), and the Grammar of Assent (1870).

Except the Apologia, no work of Newman’s is more valuable or more helpful to an understanding of him than The Dream of Gerontius, subtle, mystical, imaginative. Newman’s great reputation for prose, and the supreme interest attaching to his life, seem to have obscured the fame he might have won, and deserved, as a poet. His poetry is religious without the weakness, or at any rate the limitedness, which mars so much religious verse. He was, in poetry as well as in theology, a greater and more masculine Keble, one with all the real purity of Keble, but with also the indispensable flavour of earth. ‘I was in a humour, certainly,’ he says of the Anglican divines, ‘to bite off their ears;’ and one loves him for it. It is worth remembering also that he taught the need of hatred as well as love; and though he explained and limited the teaching, there is meaning in the very form of expression. There was iron in Newman’s frame and gall in his blood.

Newman’s mind was fundamentally imaginative, and in him imagination, though of an intellectual cast, was conjoined with an acutely sensitive organisation. Moreover, he had a tendency to solitude which powerfully influenced his development. Finally, along with his sensitiveness and power of imagination there went a subtle gift of logic, subordinate upon the whole to imagination, but clamorous until it had received what might at least plausibly pass for satisfaction. These characteristics together explain Newman’s work.

There can be no dispute about the imaginative cast of Newman’s mind. He had, besides the poet’s, the philosopher’s or speculative imagination. He pondered habitually over the secret of the universe. There is an often quoted sentence at the beginning of the Apologia which is vital to a comprehension of him. ‘I thought life might be a dream, or I an angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world.’ It has been said that no one has any genuine gift for philosophy who has never doubted the reality of material things. Newman evidently had the necessary ‘note’ of philosophy, but he had it with a morbid addition which, without careful control, might lead to strange and even disastrous results. If Newman had only known German he would have found in the German philosophers an idealism far more profound and more rational than any he was ever able to frame for himself. But in England the dominant philosophy was Benthamism, the dominant theology was equally hard, and Newman turned from both in disgust, took to the theological road-making of the Via Media, and finally found refuge in Rome, driven by the conviction that ‘there are but two alternatives, the way to Rome and the way to atheism.’

Newman’s sensitiveness produced a shrinking from intercourse and strengthened a love of solitude probably constitutional and not altogether wholesome. He was believed to be, and to have the ambition to be, the head of a party. In truth, he shrank almost morbidly from the idea of leadership, and it was in spite of himself that he gathered followers. Even the few friends with whom he lived in familiar intercourse came ‘unasked, unhoped.’ It would have been better for him had he been able to speak out more freely and to harmonise himself with the world around him. Instead, he fell back upon himself and upon a study of the Fathers, hoping to find the full truth in the primitive days of Christianity. This is a fatal error which, in theory, vitiates most theology, but from the effects of which a great deal of it is saved by inconsistency. Newman himself was afterwards led in his course towards Rome to recognise development in doctrine. The Fathers are doubtless excellent reading, but they are safe reading to him only who can read them in the light of the present day. It is vain to think of stopping the wheels of change even in theology. A creed which meant one thing in the first century, even though its verbal expression remain the same, means something widely different in the nineteenth. Newman unfortunately could conceive of modern thought only as a detestable and soul-deadening ‘liberalism,’ a halfway house to atheism, as Anglicanism was, in his mature view, a halfway house to Rome. Had he been more a real participant in contemporary life, his conceptions would insensibly have taken their bent from the ‘liberalism’ he hated; and, little as he thought it, he had something to learn from that liberalism, just as it had something to learn from him.

Newman was moreover a logician, though he ultimately found refuge in a communion where the science of logic is little needed. The subtlety of his logic is unquestionable. The doubt which some feel is rather with regard to its honesty. This doubt however is only felt by those who fail to understand how behind and beneath and above his logic there spread and towered his imagination and his emotions. Newman was compelled by the law of his nature to find a foundation for his religion; he neither understood nor respected those who let it exist as a mere sentiment. ‘I determined,’ says he with reference to a time of crisis, ‘to be guided, not by my imagination, but by my reason.’ It was this resolve that kept him so long out of the Church of Rome. He is wholly, even transparently sincere. Nevertheless, in spite of himself, he is guided by imagination after all. The conclusion is at every point a foregone one; and his pause results, not in genuine reasons for the change, but in increased strength of feeling compelling it. This is what observers have noted in Newman’s logic, and what has led them to doubt his sincerity. His dice are always loaded, but they are loaded against his own will. The absolute need for him to rest on authority makes it certain from the start that authority will win.