A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

It is improbable that Hartley Coleridge would ever have been a great poet: he might, if Fate or even if the Oriel dons had been a little kinder, have been a great critic. As it is, his essays, his introduction to Massinger and Ford, and his Marginalia, suffer on the one side from certain defects of reading; for his access to books was latterly small, and even when it had been ample, as at Oxford, in London, or at Southey's house, he confesses that he had availed himself of it but little. Hence he is often wrong, and more often incomplete, from sheer lack of information. Secondly, much of his work is mere jotting, never in the very least degree intended for publication, and sometimes explicitly corrected or retracted by later jottings of the same kind. In such a case we can rather augur of the might-have-been than pronounce on the actual. But the two volumes are full of delicate critical views on literature; and the longest series, "Ignoramus on the Fine Arts," shows how widely, with better luck and more opportunity, he might have extended his critical performances. In short, Hartley Coleridge, if a "sair sicht" to the moralist, is an interesting and far from a wholly painful one to the lover of literature, which he himself loved so much, and practised, with all his disadvantages, so successfully.

All the persons hitherto mentioned in this chapter appear by undoubted right in any history of English Literature: it may cause a little surprise to see that of Maginn figuring with them. Yet his abilities were scarcely inferior to those of any; and he was kept back from sharing their fame only by infirmities of character and by his succumbing to that fatal Bohemianism which, constantly recurring among men of letters, exercised its attractions with special force in the early days of journalism in this century. William Maginn (1793), who was the son of a schoolmaster at Cork, took a brilliant degree at Trinity College, Dublin, and for some years followed his father's profession. The establishment, however, and the style of Blackwood were an irresistible attraction to him, and he drifted to Edinburgh, wrote a great deal in the earlier and more boisterous days of Maga under the pseudonym of Ensign O'Doherty, and has, as has been said, some claims to be considered the originator of the Noctes. Then, as he had gone from Ireland to Edinburgh, he went from Edinburgh to London, and took part in divers Tory periodicals, acting as Paris correspondent for some of them till, about 1830, he started, or helped in starting, a London Blackwood in Fraser. He had now every opportunity, and he gathered round him a staff almost more brilliant than that of the Edinburgh, of the London, of the Quarterly, or of Blackwood itself. But he was equally reckless of his health and of his money. The acknowledged original of Thackeray's Captain Shandon, he was not seldom in jail; and at last, assisted by Sir Robert Peel almost too late, he died at Walton on Thames in August 1842, not yet fifty, but an utter wreck.

The collections of Maginn's work are anything but exhaustive, and the work itself suffers from all the drawbacks, probable if not inevitable, of work written in the intervals of carouse, at the last moment, for ephemeral purposes. Yet it is instinct with a perhaps brighter genius than the more accomplished productions of some much more famous men. The Homeric Ballads, though they have been praised by some, are nearly worthless; and the longer attempts in fiction are not happy. But Maginn's shorter stories in Blackwood, especially the inimitable "Story without a Tail," are charming; his more serious critical work, especially that on Shakespeare, displays a remarkable combination of wide reading, critical acumen, and sound sense; and his miscellanies in prose and verse, especially the latter, are characterised by a mixture of fantastic humour, adaptive wit, and rare but real pathos and melody, which is the best note of the specially Irish mode. It must be said, however, that Maginn is chiefly important to the literary historian as the captain of a band of distinguished persons, and as in a way the link between the journalism of the first and the journalism of the second third of the century. A famous plate by Maclise, entitled "The Fraserians," contains, seated round abundant bottles, with Maginn as president, portraits (in order by "the way of the sun," and omitting minor personages) of Irving, Gleig the Chaplain-General, Sir Egerton Brydges, Allan Cunningham, Carlyle, Count D'Orsay, Brewster, Theodore Hook, Lockhart, Crofton Croker of the Irish Fairy Tales, Jerdan, Dunlop of the "History of Fiction," Gait, Hogg, Coleridge, Harrison Ainsworth, Thackeray, Southey, and Barry Cornwall. It is improbable that all these contributed at one time, and tolerably certain that some of them were very sparing and infrequent contributors at any time, but the important point is the juxtaposition of the generation which was departing and the generation which was coming on – of Southey with Thackeray and of Coleridge with Carlyle. Yet it will be noticed (and the point is of some importance) that these new-comers are, at least the best of them, much less merely periodical writers than those who came immediately before them. In part no doubt this was accident; in part it was due to the greater prominence which novels and serial works of other kinds were beginning to assume; in part it may be to the fact that the great increase in the number of magazines and newspapers had lowered their individual dignity and perhaps their profitableness. But it is certain that of the list just mentioned, Thackeray and Carlyle, of the contemporary new generation of the Edinburgh Macaulay, of the nascent Westminster Mill, and others, were not, like Jeffrey, like Sydney Smith, like Wilson, and like De Quincey, content to write articles. They aspired to write, and they did write, books; and, that being so, they will all be treated in chapters other than the present, appropriated to the kinds in which their chief books were designed.

The name of John Sterling is that of a man who, with no great literary claims of his own, managed to connect it durably and in a double fashion with literature, first as the subject of an immortal biography by Carlyle, secondly as the name-giver of the famous Sterling Club, which about 1838, and hardly numbering more members than the century did years, included a surprising proportion of the most rising men of letters of the day, while all but a very few of its members were of literary mark. John Sterling himself was the son of a rather eccentric father, Edward Sterling, who, after trying soldiering with no great, and farming with decidedly ill, success, turned to journalism and succeeded brilliantly on the Times. His son was born in the Isle of Bute on 20th July 1806, was educated, first privately, then at Glasgow, and when about nineteen went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he fell in with a famous and brilliant set. He migrated from Trinity College to Trinity Hall, took no degree, wrote a little for the then young Athenæum, was engaged in a romantic and in all ways rather unfortunate business of encouraging a rebellion in Spain, but married instead of taking active part in it, and went to the West Indies. When he came home he, it is said under Coleridgean influence, took orders, but soon developed heterodox views and gave up active duty. He lived, though under sentence of death by consumption, till 1843, spending much time abroad, but writing a little, chiefly for periodicals.

The chief characteristic of Sterling in life and thought appears to have been a vacillating impulsiveness, while in letters his production, small in bulk, is anything but strong in substance or form. But, like some other men who do not, in the common phrase, "do much," he seems to have been singularly effectual as a centre of literary friendship and following. The Sterling Club included not merely Tennyson, John Stuart Mill, Carlyle, Allan Cunningham, Lord Houghton, Sir Francis Palgrave, Bishop Thirlwall, who all receive separate notice elsewhere, but others who, being of less general fame, may best be noticed together here. There were the scholars Blakesley, Worsley, and Hepworth Thompson (afterwards Master of Trinity); H. N. Coleridge, the poet's nephew, son-in-law, and editor; Sir Francis Doyle, afterwards Professor of Poetry at Oxford, the author of some interesting reminiscences in prose, and in verse of some of the best songs and poems on military subjects to be found in the language, such as "The Loss of the Birkenhead," the "Private of the Buffs," and above all the noble and consummate "Red Thread of Honour"; Sir Edmund Head, Fellow of Merton and Governor-General of Canada, and a writer on art (not to be confounded with his namesake Sir Francis, the agreeable miscellanist, reviewer, and travel writer, who was also a baronet and also connected with Canada, where he was Governor of the Upper Province at the time of the Rebellion of 1835). There was Sir George Cornewall Lewis, a keen scholar and a fastidious writer, whose somewhat short life (1806-63) was chiefly occupied by politics; for he was a Poor-Law Commissioner, a Member of Parliament, and a holder of numerous offices up to those of Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State. Lewis, who edited the Edinburgh for a short time, wrote no very long work, but many on a great variety of subjects, the chief perhaps being On the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion, 1850 (a book interesting to contrast with one by a living statesman forty-five years later), the Inquiry into the Credibility of the Ancient Roman History (1855), and later treatises on The Government of Dependencies and the Best Form of Government. He was also an exact verbal scholar, was, despite the addiction to "dry" subjects which this list may seem to show, the author of not a few jeux d'esprit, and was famous for his conversational sayings, the most hackneyed of which is probably "Life would be tolerable if it were not for its amusements."

But even this did not exhaust the Sterling Club. There was another scholar, Malden, who should have been mentioned with the group above; the second Sir Frederick Pollock, who wrote too little but left an excellent translation of Dante, besides some reminiscences and other work; Philip Pusey, elder brother of the theologian, and a man of remarkable ability; James Spedding, who devoted almost the whole of his literary life to the study, championship, and editing of Bacon, but left other essays and reviews of great merit; Twisleton, who undertook with singular patience and shrewdness the solution of literary and historical problems like the Junius question and that of the African martyrs; and lastly George Stovin Venables, who for some five and thirty years was the main pillar in political writing of the Saturday Review, was a parliamentary lawyer of great diligence and success, and combined a singularly exact and wide knowledge of books and men in politics and literature with a keen judgment, an admirably forcible if somewhat mannered style, a disposition far more kindly than the world was apt to credit him with, and a famous power of conversation. All these men, almost without exception, were more or less contributors to periodicals; and it may certainly be said that, but for periodicals, it is rather unlikely that some of them would have contributed to literature at all.

Not as a member of the Sterling Club, but as the intimate friend of all its greatest members, as a contributor, though a rather unfrequent one, to papers, and as a writer of singular and extraordinary quality but difficult to class under a more precise head, may be noticed Edward FitzGerald, who, long a recluse, unstintedly admired by his friends but quite unknown to the public, became famous late in life by his translation of Omar Khayyám, and familiar somewhat after his death through the publication of his charming letters by Mr. Aldis Wright. He was born on 31st March 1809, near Woodbridge in Suffolk, the neighbourhood which was his headquarters for almost his entire life, till his death on a visit to a grandson of the poet Crabbe at Merton in Norfolk, 14th June 1883. He went to school at Bury, and thence to Cambridge, where he laid the foundation of his acquaintance with the famous Trinity set of 1825-30. But on taking his degree in the last named year and leaving college, he took to no profession, but entered on the life of reading, thinking, gardening, and boating, which he pursued for more than half a century. Besides his Trinity contemporaries, from Tennyson and Thackeray downwards, he had Carlyle for an intimate friend, and he married the daughter of Bernard Barton, the poet-Quaker and friend of Lamb. He published nothing till the second half of the century had opened, when Euphranor, written long before at Cambridge, or with reference to it, appeared. Then he learnt Spanish, and first showed his extraordinary faculty of translation by Englishing divers dramas of Calderon. Spanish gave way to Persian, and after some exercises elsewhere the famous version, paraphrase, or whatever it is to be called, of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám appeared in 1859, to be much altered in subsequent editions.

FitzGerald's works in the collected edition of 1889 fill three pretty stout volumes, to which a considerable number of letters (he was first of all and almost solely a letter-writer and translator) have been added. In his prose (no disrespect being intended to Euphranor, a dialogue Berkeleian in form and of great beauty, and other things) he interests us doubly as a character and as a critic, for the letters contain much criticism. Personally FitzGerald was a man of rather few and not obtrusive, but deep and warm sympathies, slow to make new friends but intensely tenacious of and affectionate towards the old, with a very strong distaste for crowds and general society, and undoubtedly somewhat of what the French call a maniaque, that is to say, a slightly hypochondriac crotcheteer. These characteristics, which make him interesting as a man, are still more interestingly reflected in his criticism, which is often one-sided and unjust, sometimes crotchety (as when he would not admit that even his beloved Alfred Tennyson had ever been at his best since the collection of 1842), but often also wonderfully delicate and true.

As a translator he stands almost alone, his peculiar virtue, noticeable alike in his versions from the Spanish and Greek, being so capitally and once for all illustrated in that of Omar Khayyám that in narrow space it is not necessary to go beyond this. From the purist and pedantic point of view FitzGerald, no doubt, is wildly unfaithful. He scarcely ever renders word for word, and will insert, omit, alter, with perfect freedom; yet the total effect is reproduced as perhaps no other translator has ever reproduced it. Whether his version of the Rubaiyat, with its sensuous fatalism, its ridicule of asceticism and renunciation, and its bewildering kaleidoscope of mysticism that becomes materialist and materialism that becomes mystical, has not indirectly had influences, practical and literary, the results of which would have been more abhorrent to FitzGerald than to almost any one else, may be suggested. But the beauty of the poem as a poem is unmistakable and altogether astounding. The melancholy richness of the rolling quatrain with its unicorn rhymes, the quaint mixture of farce and solemnity, passion and playfulness, the abundance of the imagery, the power of the thought, the seduction of the rhetoric, make the poem actually, though not original or English, one of the greatest of English poems.

Of the periodical too, if not entirely, was Richard Harris Barham, "Thomas Ingoldsby," the author of the most popular book of light verse that ever issued from the press. His one novel, My Cousin Nicholas, was written for Blackwood; the immortal Ingoldsby Legends appeared in Bentley and Colburn. Born at Canterbury in 1788, of a family possessed of landed property, though not of much, and educated at St. Paul's School and Brasenose College, Barham took orders, and, working with thorough conscience as a clergyman, despite his light literature, became a minor canon in St. Paul's Cathedral. He died in 1845. Hardly any book is more widely known than the collected Ingoldsby Legends, which originally appeared in the last eight years of their author's life. Very recently they have met with a little priggish depreciation, the natural and indeed inevitable result, first of a certain change in speech and manners, and then of their long and vast popularity. Nor would any one contend that they are exactly great literature. But for inexhaustible fun that never gets flat and scarcely ever simply uproarious, for a facility and felicity in rhyme and rhythm which is almost miraculous, and for a blending of the grotesque and the terrible which, if less fine than Praed's or Hood's, is only inferior to theirs – no one competent to judge and enjoy will ever go to Barham in vain.

The same difficulty which beset us at the end of the last chapter recurs here, the difficulty arising from the existence of large numbers of persons of the third or lower ranks whose inclusion may be desired or their exclusion resented. At the head, or near it, of this class stand such figures as that of Douglas Jerrold, a sort of very inferior Hook on the other side of politics, with a dash (also very inferior) of Hood, whose Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures and similar things were very popular at and a little before the middle of the century, but whose permanent literary value is of the smallest, if indeed it can be said to exist. But of these – not a few of them more worthy if less prominent in their day than Jerrold – there could be no end; and there would be little profit in trying to reach any. The successful "contributor," by the laws of the case, climbs on the shoulders of his less successful mates even more than elsewhere; and the very impetus which lands him on the height rejects them into the depths.

CHAPTER V

THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY

After the brilliant group of historians whose work illustrated the close of the period covered by the preceding volume, it was some time before a historical writer of the first rank again appeared in England; and there were reasons for this. Not that, as in the case of purely creative literature, in prose as in verse, there is any natural or actual lull between different successive periods in this case; on the contrary the writing of history is more likely to be stimulated by example, and requires rather the utmost talent than positive genius, except in those rare cases which, as in other departments, are not to be accounted for, either in their presence or in their absence, by observation or inference. But in the first place the greatest minds of the first generation of which we have to take account, who were born about the beginning of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, were, partly by time and partly by chance, directed for the most part either into poetry, or into politics, or into active life; and the five and twenty years of the Revolutionary War in which they passed their manhood were more likely to provide materials for history, than history itself.

Yet history, after the example given by Hume, by Robertson, and above all by Gibbon, was not at all likely to cease, nor did some men of great talents in other ways fail to betake themselves to it. Godwin was a historian, and, considering his strong prejudices, the unkindness of fortune (for history demands leisure almost as much as poetry), and some defects of knowledge, not a contemptible historian in his way. Mackintosh, intended for a philosopher, was a historian. Southey was a very considerable historian, and master of one of the most admirable historical styles on record. But he was signally unfortunate in having that work of his which should have been most popular, the History of the Peninsular War, pitted against another by a younger man of professional competence, of actual experience, and of brilliant literary powers, Sir William Napier (1786-1860). The literary value of these two histories is more even than a generation which probably reads neither much and has almost forgotten Southey is apt to imagine; and though there is no doubt that the Poet Laureate was strongly prejudiced on the Tory side, his competitor was even more partial and biassed against that side. But the difference between the two books is the difference between a task admirably performed, and performed to a certain extent con amore, by a skilled practitioner in task-work, and the special effort of one who was at once an enthusiast and an expert in his subject. It is customary to call Napier's History of the Peninsular War "the finest military history in the English language," and so, perhaps, it is. The famous description of the Battle of Albuera is only one of many showing eloquence without any mere fine writing, and with the knowledge of the soldier covering the artist's exaggeration.

Moore, Campbell, Scott himself, were all, as has been previously recorded in the notices of their proper work, historians by trade, though hardly, even to the extent to which Southey was, historians by craft. But an exception must be made for the exquisite Tales of a Grandfather, in which Sir Walter, without perhaps a very strict application of historical criticism, applied his creative powers, refreshed in their decay by combined affection for the subject and for the presumed auditor, to fashioning the traditional history of old Scotland into one of the most delightful narratives of any language or time. But Henry Hallam, a contemporary of these men (1778-1859), unlike them lives as a historian only, or as a historian and literary critic – occupations so frequently combined during the present century that perhaps an apology is due for the presentation of some writers under the general head of one class rather than under that of the other. Hallam, the son of a Dean of Bristol, educated at Eton and Christ Church, an early Edinburgh reviewer, and an honoured pundit and champion of the Whig party, possessing also great literary tastes, much industry, and considerable faculty both of judging and writing, united almost all the qualifications for a high reputation; while his abstinence from public affairs, and from participation in the violent half-personal, half-political squabbles which were common among the literary men of his day, freed him from most of the disadvantages, while retaining for him all the advantages, of party connections. Early, too, he obtained a post in the Civil Service (a Commissionership of Audit), which gave him a comfortable subsistence while leaving him plenty of leisure. For thirty years, between 1818 and 1848, he produced a series of books on political and literary history which at once attained a very high reputation, and can hardly be said to have yet lost it. These were a View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, published in the first, and supplemented by a volume of notes and corrections in the last, of the years just mentioned; a Constitutional History of England from Henry VII. to George II. (1827); and an Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries (1837-39).

The value of Hallam as a political and as a literary historian is by no means the same. In the former capacity he was perhaps too much influenced by that artificial and rather curious ideal of politics which distinguished the Whig party of the later eighteenth century, which was exaggerated, celebrated brilliantly, and perhaps buried by his pupil and younger contemporary, Macaulay, and which practically erects the result of a coincidence of accidents in English history into a permanent and rationally defensible form of government, comparable with and preferable to the earlier and unchanging forms of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy with their sub-varieties. A certain coldness and sluggishness of temperament and sympathy also marred this part of Hallam's work, though less mischievously than elsewhere. But to balance these drawbacks handsomely in his favour, he possessed an industry which, immense as have been the pains spent on his subjects since he wrote, leaves him in possession of a very fair part of the field as a still trustworthy authority; a mind, on the whole, judicial and fair; and an excellently clear and scholarly if not exactly brilliant or engaging style.