A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

George Saintsbury

A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

PREFACE

In the execution of the present task (which I took over about two years ago from hands worthier than mine, but then more occupied) some difficulties of necessity occurred which did not present themselves to myself when I undertook the volume of Elizabethan Literature, or to my immediate predecessor in grappling with the period between 1660 and 1780.

The most obvious and serious of these was the question, "What should be done with living authors?" Independently of certain perils of selection and exclusion, of proportion and of freedom of speech, I believe it will be recognised by every one who has ever attempted it, that to mix estimates of work which is done and of work which is unfinished is to the last degree unsatisfactory. I therefore resolved to include no living writer, except Mr. Ruskin, in this volume for the purpose of detailed criticism, though some may be now and then mentioned in passing.

Even with this limitation the task remained a rather formidable one. Those who are least disposed to overvalue literary work in proportion as it approaches their own time will still acknowledge that the last hundred and fifteen years are fuller furnished than either of the periods of not very dissimilar length which have been already dealt with. The proportion of names of the first, or of a very high second class, is distinctly larger than in the eighteenth century; the bulk of literary production is infinitely greater than in the Elizabethan time. Further, save in regard to the earliest subsections of this period, Time has not performed his office, beneficent to the reader but more beneficent to the historian, of sifting and riddling out writers whom it is no longer necessary to consider, save in a spirit of adventurous or affectionate antiquarianism. I must ask the reader to believe me when I say that many who do not appear here at all, or who are dismissed in a few lines, have yet been the subjects of careful reading on my part. If some exclusions (not due to mere oversight) appear arbitrary or unjust, I would urge that this is not a Dictionary of Authors, nor a Catalogue of Books, but a History of Literature; and that to mention everybody is as impossible as to say everything. As I have revised the sheets the old query has recurred to myself only too often, and sometimes in reference to very favourite books and authors of my own. Where, it may be asked, is Kenelm Digby and the Broad Stone of Honour? Where Sir Richard Burton (as great a contrast to Digby as can well be imagined)? Where Laurence Oliphant, who, but the other day, seemed to many clever men the cleverest man they knew? Where John Foster, who provided food for the thoughtful public two generations ago? Where Greville of the caustic diaries, and his editor (latest deceased) Mr. Reeve, and Crabb Robinson, and many others? Some of these and others are really neiges d'antan; some baffle the historian in miniature by being rebels to brief and exact characterisation; some, nay many, are simply crowded out.

I must also ask pardon for having exercised apparently arbitrary discretion in alternately separating the work of the same writer under different chapter-headings, and grouping it with a certain disregard of the strict limits of the chapter-heading itself. I think I shall obtain this pardon from those who remember the advantage obtainable from a connected view of the progress of distinct literary kinds, and that, sometimes not to be foregone, of considering the whole work of certain writers together.

To provide room for the greater press of material, it was necessary to make some slight changes of omission in the scheme of the earlier volumes. The opportunity of considerable gain was suggested in the department of extract – which obviously became less necessary in the case of authors many of whom are familiar, and hardly any accessible with real difficulty. Nor did it seem necessary to take up room with the bibliographical index, the utility of which in my Elizabethan volume I was glad to find almost universally recognised. This would have had to be greatly more voluminous here; and it was much less necessary. With a very few exceptions, all the writers here included are either kept in print, or can be obtained without much trouble at the second-hand bookshops.

To what has thus been said as to the principles of arrangement it cannot be necessary to add very much as to the principles of criticism. They are the same as those which I have always endeavoured to maintain – that is to say, I have attempted to preserve a perfectly independent, and, as far as possible, a rationally uniform judgment, taking account of none but literary characteristics, but taking account of all characteristics that are literary. It may be, and it probably is, more and more difficult to take achromatic views of literature as it becomes more and more modern; it is certainly more difficult to get this achromatic character, even where it exists, acknowledged by contemporaries. But it has at least been my constant effort to attain it.

In the circumstances, and with a view to avoid not merely repetition but confusion and dislocation in the body of the book, I have thought it better to make the concluding chapter one of considerably greater length than the corresponding part of the Elizabethan volume, and to reserve for it the greater part of what may be called connecting and comprehensive criticism. In this will be found what may be not improperly described from one point of view as the opening of the case, and from another as its summing up – the evidence which justifies both being contained in the earlier chapters.

It is perhaps not improper to add that the completion of this book has been made a little difficult by the incidence of new duties, not in themselves unconnected with its subject. But I have done my best to prevent or supply oversight.

CHAPTER I

THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The period of English literary history which is dealt with in the opening part of the present volume includes, of necessity, among its most illustrious names, not a few whose work will not be the subject of formal discussion here, because the major part of it was done within the scope of the volume which preceded. Thus, to mention only one of these names, the most splendid displays of Burke's power – the efforts in which he at last gave to mankind what had previously been too often devoted to party – date from this time, and even from the later part of it; while Gibbon did not die till 1794, and Horace Walpole not till 1797. Even Johnson, the type and dictator at once of the eighteenth century in literary England, survived the date of 1780 by four years.

Nevertheless the beginning of the ninth decade of the century did actually correspond with a real change, a real line of demarcation. Not only did the old writers drop off one by one, not only did no new writers of utterly distinct idiosyncrasy (Burns and Blake excepted) make their appearance till quite the end of it, but it was also marked by the appearance of men of letters and of literary styles which announced, if not very distinctly, the coming of changes of the most sweeping kind. Hard as it may be to exhibit the exact contrast between, say, Goldsmith and men like Cowper on the one side and Crabbe on the other, that contrast cannot but be felt by every reader who has used himself in the very least to the consideration of literary differences. And as with individuals, so with kinds. No special production of these twenty years may be of the highest value; but there is a certain idiosyncrasy, if only an idiosyncrasy of transition – an unlikeness to anything that comes before, and to anything, unless directly imitated, that comes after – which is equally distinguishable in the curious succession of poetical satires from Peter Pindar to the Anti-Jacobin, in the terror-and-mystery novels of the school of Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis, in the large, if not from the literary point of view extremely noteworthy, department of politics and economics which in various ways employed the pens of writers so different as Moore, Young, Godwin, Priestley, Horne, Tooke, Cobbett, and Paine.

Giving poetry, as usual, the precedence even in the most unpoetical periods, we shall find in the four names already cited – those of Crabbe, Cowper, Blake, and Burns – examples of which even the most poetical period need not be ashamed. In what may be called the absolute spirit of poetry, the nescio quid which makes the greatest poets, no one has ever surpassed Burns and Blake at their best; though the perfection of Burns is limited in kind, and the perfection of Blake still more limited in duration and sustained force. Cowper would have been a great poet of the second class at any time, and in some times might have attained the first. As for Crabbe, he very seldom has the absolute spirit of poetry just mentioned; but the vigour and the distinction of his verse, as well as his wonderful faculty of observation in rendering scene and character, are undeniable. And it is not perhaps childish to point out that there is something odd and out of the way about the poetical career of all these poets of the transition. Cowper's terrible malady postpones his first efforts in song to an age when most poets are losing their voices; Crabbe, beginning brilliantly and popularly, relapses into a silence of nearly a quarter of a century before breaking out with greater power and skill than ever; Burns runs one of the shortest, if one of the most brilliant, Blake one of the longest, the strangest, the most intermittent, of poetical careers. Nor is it superfluous to draw attention further to the fact that when we leave this little company – at the best august, at the worst more than respectable – we drop suddenly to the flattest and most hopeless bog of poesiless verse that lies anywhere on the map of England's literature. Passing from the ethereal music of the Scottish ploughman and the English painter, from Cowper's noble or gentle thought and his accomplished versification, from Crabbe's manly vigour and his Rembrandt touch, we find nothing, unless it be the ingenious but not strictly poetical burlesque of the Wolcots and the Lawrences, till we come to the drivel of Hayley and the drought of Darwin.

Of the quartette, William Cowper was by far the oldest; the other three being contemporaries within a few years. He was born on 26th November 1731 at Great Berkhampstead. His father was a clergyman and a royal chaplain, his mother one of the Norfolk Donnes. Her early death, and that school discomfort which afterwards found vent in Tirocinium, appear to have aggravated a natural melancholia; though after leaving Westminster, and during his normal studies at both branches of the law, he seems to have been cheerful enough. How what should have been the making of his fortune, – his appointment as Clerk of the Journals to the House of Lords, – not unassisted by religious mania, drove him through sheer nervousness to attempt suicide, is one of the best known things in English literary biography, as indeed are most of the few events of his sad life, – owing partly to his own charming letters, partly to the biographies of Southey and others. His latest days were his unhappiest, and after years of more or less complete loss of reason he died on 27th April 1800.

It has been said that Cowper did not take to writing till late in life. He had had literary friends – Churchill, Lloyd, and others – in youth, and must always have had literary sympathies; but it was not till he was nearly fifty, nor till the greater part of twenty years after his first mental seizure, that he attempted composition at the instance of his friend Newton and the Unwins. Beginning with hymns and trifles, he before long undertook, at this or that person's suggestion, longer poems, such as Truth, The Progress of Error, and Expostulation, which were finished by 1781 and published next year, to be followed by the still better and more famous Task, suggested to him by Lady Austen. This appeared in 1785, and was very popular. He had already begun to translate Homer, which occupied him for the greater part of seven years. Nothing perhaps settled him more in the public affections than "John Gilpin," the subject of which he also owed to Lady Austen; and he continued to write occasional pieces of exquisite accomplishment. Almost the last, if not actually the last, of these, written just before the final obscuration of his faculties, was the beautiful and terrible "Castaway," an avowed allegory of his own condition.

Cowper, even more than most writers, deserves and requites consideration under the double aspect of matter and form. In both he did much to alter the generally accepted conditions of English poetry; and if his formal services have perhaps received less attention than they merit, his material achievements have never been denied. His disposition – in which, by a common enough contrast, the blackest and most hopeless melancholy was accompanied by the merriest and most playful humour – reflected itself unequally in his verse, the lighter side chiefly being exhibited. Except in "The Castaway," and a few – not many – of the hymns, Cowper is the very reverse of a gloomy poet. His amiability, however, could also pass into very strong moral indignation, and he endeavoured to give voice to this in a somewhat novel kind of satire, more serious and earnest than that of Pope, much less political and personal than that of Dryden, lighter and more restrained than that of the Elizabethans. His own unworldly disposition, together with the excessively retired life which he had led since early manhood, rather damaged the chances of Cowper as a satirist. We always feel that his censure wants actuality, that it is an exercise rather than an experience. His efforts in it, however, no doubt assisted, and were assisted by, that alteration of the fashionable Popian couplet which, after the example partly of Churchill and with a considerable return to Dryden, he attempted, made popular, and handed on to the next generation to dis-Pope yet further. This couplet, paralleled by a not wholly dissimilar refashioning of blank verse, in which, though not deserting Milton, he beat out for himself a scheme quite different from Thomson's, perhaps show at their best in the descriptive matter of The Task and similar poems. It was in these that Cowper chiefly displayed that faculty of "bringing back the eye to the object" and the object to the eye, in which he has been commonly and justly thought to be the great English restorer. Long before the end of the Elizabethan period, poetical observation of nature had ceased to be just; and, after substituting for justness the wildest eccentricities of conceit, it went for a long time into another extreme – that of copying and recopying certain academic conventionalities, instead of even attempting the natural model. It is not true, as Wordsworth and others have said, that Dryden himself could not draw from the life. He could and did; but his genius was not specially attracted to such drawing, his subjects did not usually call for it, and his readers did not want it. It is not true that Thomson could not "see"; nor is it true of all his contemporaries and immediate followers that they were blind. But the eighteenth century had slipped into a fault which was at least as fatal as that of the Idealist-Impressionists of the seventeenth, or as that of the Realist-Impressionists of our own time. The former neglected universality in their hunt after personal conceits; the latter neglect it in the endeavour to add nothing to rigidly elaborated personal sensation. The one kind outstrips nature; the other comes short of art. From Dryden to Cowper the fault was different from both of these. It neglected the personal impression and the attention to nature too much. It dared not present either without stewing them in a sauce of stock ideas, stock conventions, stock words and phrases, which equally missed the universal and the particular. Cowper and the other great men who were his contemporaries by publication if not by birth, set to work to cure this fault. Even the weakest of them could never have been guilty of such a passage as that famous one which Congreve (as clever a man as any) wrote, and which Johnson (as clever a man as any) admired. The sentiment which actuated them was, if we may trust Coleridge's account of Boyer or Bowyer, the famous tyrant of Christ's Hospital, well diffused. "'Nymph,' boy? You mean your nurse's daughter," puts in a somewhat brutal and narrow form the correction which the time needed, and which these four in their different ways applied.

We have already glanced at the way in which Cowper applied it in his larger poems: he did it equally well, and perhaps more tellingly, in his smaller. The day on which a poet of no mean pretensions, one belonging altogether to the upper classes of English society, and one whose lack of university education mattered the less because the universities were just then at their nadir, dared to write of the snake he killed was an epoch-making day. Swift would have done it; but Swift was in many ways a voice crying in the wilderness, and Swift was not, strictly speaking, a poet at all. Byrom would have done it; but Byrom was emphatically a minor poet. Cowper could – at least in and for his day – boast the major afflatus, and Cowper did not disdain vernacular truth. He never could have been vulgar; there is not in the whole range of English literature quite such a gentleman in his own way as Cowper. But he has escaped almost entirely from the genteel style – from the notion of things as below the dignity of literature.

"And taught him never to come there no more"

His prose in this respect is at least equal to his verse, though, as it was known much later, it has greater tendency than influence. All good critics have agreed that his letters are not surpassed, perhaps not surpassable. He has more freedom than Gray; he has none of the coxcombry of Walpole and Byron; and there is no fifth name that can be put even into competition with him. Ease, correctness, facility of expression, freedom from convention within his range, harmony, truth to nature, truth to art: – these things meet in the hapless recluse of Olney as they had not met for a century – perhaps as they had never met – in English epistles. The one thing that he wanted was strength: as his madness was melancholy, not raving, so was his sanity mild but not triumphant.

George Crabbe was three and twenty years younger than Cowper, having been born on Christmas Eve 1754. But his first publication, The Library, the success of which was due to the generous and quick-sighted patronage of Burke after the poet had wrestled with a hard youth, coincided almost exactly with the first appearance of Cowper, and indeed a little anticipated it. The Village appeared in 1783, and The Newspaper in 1785, and then Crabbe (who had taken orders, had been instituted to livings in the East of England, and had married, after a long engagement, his first love) was silent for two and twenty years. He began again in 1807 with The Parish Register. The Borough, his greatest work, appeared in 1810. Shifting from the East of England to the West in 1813, he spent the last twenty years of his long life at Trowbridge in Wiltshire, and died in 1832 at the age of seventy-eight.

The external (and, as will be presently remarked, something more than the external) uniformity of his work is great, and its external conformity to the traditions and expectations of the time at which it first appeared is almost greater. A hasty judgment, and even one which, though not hasty, is not very keen-sighted, might see little difference between Crabbe and any poet from Pope to Goldsmith except the innovators. He is all but constant to the heroic couplet – the Spenserian introduction to The Birth of Flattery, the variously-grouped octosyllabic quatrains of Reflections, Sir Eustace Grey, The Hall of Justice, and Woman, with a few other deviations, being merely islets among a wide sea of rhymed decasyllabics constituting at least nineteen-twentieths of the poet's outpouring. Moreover, he was as a rule constant, not merely to the couplet, but to what has been called the "shut" couplet – the couplet more or less rigidly confined to itself, and not overlapping. But he did sometimes overlap, and either in fealty to Dryden, or from a secret feeling of the craving for freedom which his more lawless contemporaries expressed in other ways, he reverted to the Drydenian triplet and Alexandrine on which Pope had frowned. In Crabbe's couplet, too, there is something which distinguishes it from almost all others. This something varies very much in appeal. It is sometimes, nay, too often, a rather ludicrous something, possessing a sort of awkward prosaic "flop," which is excellently caricatured in Rejected Addresses. But it always shows signs of a desire to throw the emphasis with more variation than the icy uniformity of the Popian cadence admitted; and it is sometimes curiously effective.

Crabbe's position, independently of the strange gap in his publication (which has been variously accounted for), is not a little singular. The greater and the better part of his work was composed when the Romantic revival was in full swing, but it shows little or no trace of the influence of that revival in versification or diction. His earliest attempts do indeed show the same reaction from Pope to Dryden (of whom we know that he was an eager student) which is visible in Cowper and Churchill; and throughout his work, both earlier and later, there is a ruthless discarding of conventional imagery and a stern attention to the realities of scenery and character. But Crabbe has none of the Grace of the new dispensation, if he has some glimpses of its Law. He sails so close to the wind of poetry that he is sometimes merely prosaic and often nearly so. His conception of life is anti-idealist almost to pessimism, and he has no fancy. The "jewels five words long" are not his: indeed there clung to him a certain obscurity of expression which Johnson is said to have good-naturedly smoothed out in his first work to some extent, but from which he never got quite free. The extravagances as well as the graces of the new poetry were quite alien from him; its exotic tastes touched him not; its love for antiquity (though he knew old English poetry by no means ill) seems to have left him wholly cold. The anxieties and sufferings of lower and middle-class life, the "natural death of love" (which, there seems some reason to fear, he had experienced), the common English country scenery and society of his time – these were his subjects, and he dealt with them in a fashion the mastery of which is to this day a joy to all competent readers. No writer of his time had an influence which so made for truth pure and simple, yet not untouched by the necessary "disprosing" processes of art. For Crabbe is not a mere realist; and whoso considers him as such has not apprehended him. But he was a realist to this extent, that he always went to the model and never to the pattern-drawing on the Academy walls. And that was what his time needed. His general characteristics are extremely uniform: even the external shape and internal subject-matter of his poems are almost confined to the shape and matter of the verse-tale. He need not, and indeed cannot, in a book like this, be dealt with at much length. But he is a very great writer, and a most important figure at this turning-point of English literature.

Yet, however one may sympathise with Cowper, however much one may admire Crabbe, it is difficult for any true lover of poetry not to feel the sense of a "Pisgah sight," and something more, of the promised land of poetry, in passing from these writers to William Blake and Robert Burns. Here there is no more allowance necessary, except in the first case for imperfection of accomplishment, in the second for shortness of life and comparative narrowness of range. The quality and opportuneness of poetry are in each case undeniable. Since the deaths of Herrick and Vaughan, England had not seen any one who had the finer lyrical gifts of the poet as Blake had them. Since the death of Dunbar, Scotland had not seen such strength and intensity of poetic genius (joined in this case to a gift of melody which Dunbar never had) as were shown by Burns. There was scarcely more than a twelvemonth between their births; for Blake was born in 1757 (the day appears not to be known), and Burns in January 1759. But Blake long outlived Burns, and did not die till 1828, while Burns was no more in July 1796. Neither the long life nor the short one provided any events which demand chronicling here. Both poets were rather fortunate in their wives, though Blake clave to Catherine Boucher more constantly than Burns to his Jean. Neither was well provided with this world's goods; Burns wearing out his short life in difficulties as farmer and as excise-man, while all the piety of biographers has left it something of a mystery how Blake got through his long life with no better resources than a few very poorly paid private commissions for his works of design, the sale of his hand-made books of poetry and prophecy, and such occasional employment in engraving as his unconventional style and his still more unconventional habits and temper allowed him to accept or to keep. In some respects the two were different enough according to commonplace standards, less so perhaps according to others. The forty years of Burns, and the more than seventy of Blake, were equally passed in a rapture; but morality has less quarrel with Blake, who was essentially a "God-intoxicated man" and spent his life in one long dream of art and prophecy, than with Burns, who was generally in love, and not unfrequently in liquor. But we need no more either of antithesis or of comparison: the purely literary matter calls us.