A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

As a literary historian and critic Hallam deserves, except on the score of industry and width of reading, rather less praise; and his dicta, once quoted with veneration even by good authorities, and borrowed, with or without acknowledgment, by nearly all second-hand writers, are being more and more neglected by both. Nor is this unjust, for Hallam, though possessed, as has been said, of sound and wide scholarship, and of a taste fairly trustworthy in accepted and recognised matters, was too apt to be at a loss when confronted with an abnormal or eccentric literary personality, shared far too much the hide-bound narrowness of the rules which guided his friend Jeffrey, lacked the enthusiasm which not seldom melted Jeffrey's chains of ice, and was constantly apt to intrude into the court of literary judgments, methods, procedures, and codes of law which have no business there.

Many other estimable, and some excellent writers fill up the space of fifty years, which may be described best, both for remembrance and for accuracy, as the space between Gibbon and Carlyle. William Roscoe, who was born as far back as 1753 and did not die till 1831, was the son of a market-gardener near Liverpool, and had few advantages of education, but became an attorney, attached himself strenuously to literature, especially Italian literature, and in 1796 published his Life of Lorenzo de Medici, which, after finishing it, he followed up nine years later with the Life of Leo the Tenth. Both obtained not merely an English but a continental reputation, both became in a manner classics, and both retain value to this day, though the Italian Renaissance has been a specially favourite subject of modern inquiry. Roscoe was a violent Whig, and not a very dispassionate student in some respects; but he wrote well, and he is an early example of the diffusion of the historic spirit proper, in which Gibbon had at once set the example and, with some lapses, attained nearly to perfection.

William Mitford (1744-1827) was even an older man than Roscoe, and belonged to a slightly less modern school of history-writing. He was a man of means, a friend of Gibbon, his fellow-officer in the militia, and like him a strong Tory, though unlike him he could not keep his politics out of his history. Although Mitford's hatred of democracy, whether well- or ill-founded, makes him sometimes unfair, and though his History of Greece contains some blunders, it is on the whole rather a pity that it should have been superseded to the extent to which it actually has been by those of Grote and Thirlwall. For it is not more prejudiced and much better written than Grote's, while it has greater liveliness and zest than the Bishop's. It occupied more than thirty years in publication, the first volume appearing in 1784, the last in 1818.

While Roscoe and Mitford were thus dealing with foreign and ancient subjects, English history became the theme of a somewhat younger pair of historians, one of whom, Sharon Turner, was born in 1768 and died in 1847; while John Lingard, born three years later, outlived Turner by four. Lingard was a Roman Catholic priest, and after being educated at Douai, divided most of his time between pastoral work and teaching at the newly founded Roman Catholic school of Ushaw. He was the author of what still retains the credit of being the best history of England on the great scale, in point of the union of accuracy, skilful arrangement, fairness (despite his inevitable prepossessions), and competent literary form, – no mean credit for a member of an unpopular minority to have attained in a century of the most active historical investigation. Turner was more of a specialist and particularist, and his style is not very estimable. He wrote many books on English history, those on the later periods being of little value. But his History of the Anglo-Saxons, first issued in 1799, was based on thorough research, and may be said to have for the first time rescued the period of origins of English history from the discreditable condition of perfunctory, traditional, and second- or third-hand treatment in which most, if not all, previous historians of England had been content to leave it.

Sir Francis Palgrave, another historian to whom the student of early English history is deeply indebted, was born in London in 1788, his paternal name being Cohen. He took to the law, and early devoted himself both within and outside his profession to genealogical and antiquarian research. Before much attention had been paid in France itself to Old French, he published a collection of Anglo-Norman poems in 1818, and from these studies he passed to that of English history as such. He was knighted in 1832, and made Deputy-Keeper of the Records in 1838; his tenure of this post being only terminated by his death in 1861. Palgrave edited many State documents (writs, calendars, rolls, and so forth), and in his last years executed a History of Normandy and England of great value. His considerable literary power became more considerable still in two of his sons: the eldest, for some time past Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Mr. F. T. Palgrave, being still alive, and therefore merely to be mentioned; while the second, William Gifford, who was born in 1826 and died in 1888, Minister at Monte Video, was a man of the most brilliant talents and the most varied career. He was a soldier, a Jesuit, a traveller in the most forbidden parts of Arabia at the expense of a foreign country, and for nearly a quarter of a century a member of the consular and diplomatic service of his own. His Narrative of his Arabian journey, his Dutch Guiana, and some remarkable poems are only a few of his works, all of which have strong character.

Nearly contemporary with these was Dr. Thomas M'Crie (1772-1835), whose Lives of Knox (1812) and Melville (1819) entitle him to something like the title of Historian of Scotch Presbyterianism in its militant period. M'Crie, who was styled by Hallam (a person not given to nicknames), "the Protestant Hildebrand," was a worthy and learned man of untiring industry, and his subjects so intimately concern not merely Scottish but British history for nearly two centuries, that his handling of them could not but be important. But he was desperately prejudiced, and his furious attack on Sir Walter Scott's Old Mortality, by which he is perhaps known to more persons than by his own far from uninteresting works, argues a crass deficiency in intellectual and æsthetic comprehension.

The tenth decade of the eighteenth century was as much a decade of historians as the eighth had been a decade of poets; and with Milman and Tytler born in 1791, Alison in 1792, Grote in 1794, Arnold and Carlyle in 1795, Thirlwall in 1797, and Macaulay in 1800, it may probably challenge comparison with any period of equal length. The batch falls into three pretty distinct classes, and the individual members of it are also pretty widely separated in importance, so that it may be more convenient to discuss them in the inverse order of their merit rather than in the direct order of their births.

Patrick Fraser Tytler, son and grandson of historians (his grandfather William being the first and not the worst champion of Queen Mary against the somewhat Philistine estimates of Hume and Robertson, and his father Alexander a Professor of History, a Scotch Judge, and an excellent writer in various kinds of belles lettres), was a man of the finest character, the friend of most of the great men of letters at Edinburgh in the age of Scott and Jeffrey, and the author of an excellent History of Scotland from Alexander the Third to the Union of the Crowns. He was born in 1791, was called to the Scotch Bar in 1813, and died young for a historian (a class which has so much to do with Time that he is apt to be merciful to it) in 1849. He was perhaps hardly a man of genius, but he commanded universal respect. Sir Archibald Alison was the son of a clergyman of the same name, who, after taking orders in England and holding some benefices there, became known as the author of Essays on the Principles of Taste, which possess a good deal of formal and some real merit. Archibald the younger was highly distinguished at the University of Edinburgh, was called to the Scotch Bar, and distinguished himself there also, being ultimately appointed Sheriff of Lanarkshire. Like most of the brighter wits among his immediate contemporaries in Scotland (we have the indisputable testimony of Jeffrey to the fact) Alison was an out-and-out Tory, and a constant contributor to Blackwood, while his literary activity took very numerous shapes. At last he began, and in the twenty years from 1839 to 1859 carried through, a History of Europe during the French Revolution, completed by one of Europe from the Fall of the First to the Accession of the Third Napoleon. He died in 1867. It was rather unfortunate for Alison that he did not undertake this great work until the period of Liberal triumph which marked the middle decades of the century had well set in. It was still more unlucky, and it could less be set down to the operations of unkind chance, that in many of the qualifications of the writer in general, and the historical writer in particular, he was deficient. He had energy and industry; he was much less inaccurate than it was long the fashion to represent him; a high sense of patriotism and the political virtues generally, a very fair faculty of judging evidence, and a thorough interest in his subject were his. But his book was most unfortunately diffuse, earning its author the sobriquet of "Mr. Wordy," and it was conspicuously lacking in grasp, both in the marshalling of events and in the depicting of characters. Critics, even when they sympathised, have never liked it; but contrary to the wont of very lengthy histories, it found considerable favour with the public, who, as the French gibe has it, were not "hampered by the style," and who probably found in the popular explanation of a great series of important and interesting affairs all that they cared for. Nor is it unlikely that this popularity rather exaggerated the ill-will of the critics themselves. Alison is not quotable; he is, even after youth, read with no small difficulty; but it would be no bad thing if other periods of history had been treated in his manner and spirit.

Henry Hart Milman belongs to very much the same class of historian as Hallam, but unlike Hallam he was a poet, and, though a Broad Churchman of the days before the nickname was given, more of an adherent to the imaginative and traditional side of things. His father was a King's Physician, and he was educated at Eton and Brasenose. He obtained the Newdigate, and after bringing out his best play Fazio (of which more will be said later), took orders and received the vicarage of St. Mary's, Reading. Some poems of merit in the second class, including some hymns very nearly in the first, followed, and in 1821 he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford, where six years later he was Bampton Lecturer. It was in 1829 that Milman, who had been a frequent contributor to the Quarterly Review, began the series of his works on ecclesiastical history with the History of the Jews, the weakest of them (for Milman was not a very great Hebraist, and while endeavouring to avoid rigid orthodoxy did not satisfy the demands of the newer heterodox criticism). The History of Christianity to the Abolition of Paganism was better (1840), and the History of Latin Christianity (1854) better still. This last indeed, based on an erudition which enabled Milman to re-edit Gibbon with advantage, is a great book, and will probably live. For Milman here really knew; he had (like most poets who write prose with fair practice) an excellent style; and he was able – as many men who have had knowledge have not been able, and as many who have had style have not tried or have failed to do – to rise to the height of a really great argument, and treat it with the grasp and ease which are the soul of history. That he owed much to Gibbon himself is certain; that he did not fail to use his pupilage to that greatest of historians so as to rank among the best of his followers is not less certain, and is high enough praise for any man. He received the Deanery of St. Paul's in 1849, and held it till his death in 1868, having worthily sustained the glory of this the most literary of all great preferments in the Church of England by tradition, and having earned among English ecclesiastical historians a place like that of Napier among their military comrades.

Hallam and Milman were both, as has been said, Oxford men, and the unmistakable impress of that University was on both, though less on Hallam than on Milman. It is all the more interesting that their chief historical contemporaries of the same class were, the one a Cambridge man, and one of the most distinguished, the other not a University man at all. Both Grote and Thirlwall, as it happens, were educated at the same public school, Charterhouse. George Grote, the elder of them, born in 1794, was the son of a banker, and himself carried on that business for many years of his life. He was an extreme Liberal, or as it then began to be called, Radical, and a chief of the Philosophical Radicals of his time – persons who followed Bentham and the elder Mill. He was elected member for the City in the first Reform Parliament and held the seat for nine years; though if he had not retired he would probably have been turned out. Leaving Parliament in 1841, he left business two years later, and gave himself up to his History of Greece, which was published in the ten years between 1846 and 1856. He died in 1871, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. So was, four years later, his school-fellow, fellow-historian of Greece, and junior by three years, Connop Thirlwall. Thirlwall was one of the rare examples of extraordinary infant precocity (he could read Latin at three and Greek at four) who have been great scholars and men of distinction in after life, and to a ripe age. He was of a Northumbrian family, but was born at Stepney. From Charterhouse he went rather early (in 1814) to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had almost the most brilliant undergraduate career on record, and duly gained his fellowship. He entered Lincoln's Inn, was actually called to the Bar, but preferred the Church, and took orders in his thirtieth year. He had already shown a strong leaning to theology, and had translated Schleiermacher. He now returned to Cambridge, taking both tutorial work and cure of souls; but in 1834 his Liberal views attracted the disfavour of Christopher Wordsworth, Master of Trinity, and Thirlwall, resigning his tutorship, was consoled by Brougham with a Yorkshire living. Nor was this long his only preferment, for the Whigs were not too well off for clergymen who united scholarship, character, and piety, and he was made Bishop of St. David's in 1840. He held the see for thirty-four years, working untiringly, earning justly (though his orthodoxy was of a somewhat Broad character, and he could reconcile his conscience to voting for the disestablishment of the Irish Church) the character of one of the most exemplary bishops of the century, and seldom dining without a cat on his shoulder.

Thirlwall wrote many Charges, some of them famous, some delightful letters, part of a translation of Niebuhr, and some essays, while Grote, besides his historical work, produced some political and other work before it, with a large but not very good book on Plato, and the beginning of another on Aristotle after it. But it is by their Histories of Greece that they must live in literature. These histories (of which Grote's was planned and begun as early as 1823, though not completed till long afterwards, while Thirlwall's began to appear in 1835, and was finished just after Grote's saw the light) were both written with a certain general similarity of point of view as antidotes to Mitford, and as putting the Liberal view of the ever memorable and ever typical history of the Greek states. But in other respects they diverge widely; and it has been a constant source of regret to scholars that the more popular, and as the French would say tapageur, of the two, to a considerable extent eclipsed the solid worth and the excellent form of Thirlwall. Grote's history displays immense painstaking and no inconsiderable scholarship, though it is very nearly as much a "party pamphlet" as Macaulay's own, the advocate's client being in this case not merely the Athenian democracy but even the Athenian demagogue. Yet it to a great extent redeems this by the vivid way in which it makes the subject alive, and turns Herodotus and Thucydides, Demosthenes and Xenophon, from dead texts and school-books into theses of eager and stimulating interest. But it has absolutely no style; its scale is much too great; the endless discussions and arguments on quite minor points tend to throw the whole out of focus, and to disaccustom the student's eye and mind to impartial and judicial handling; and the reader constantly sighs for the placid Olympian grasp of Gibbon, nay, even for the confident dogmatism of Macaulay himself, instead of the perpetual singlestick of argument which clatters and flourishes away to the utter discomposure of the dignity of the Historic Muse.

It is possible, on the other hand, that Thirlwall may have sacrificed a little too much, considering his age and its demands, to mere dispassionate dignity. He is seldom picturesque, and indeed he never tries to be so. But to a scholarship naturally far superior to Grote's, he united a much fairer and more judicial mind, and the faculty of writing – instead of loose stuff not exactly ungrammatical nor always uncomely, but entirely devoid of any grace of style – an excellent kind of classical English, but slightly changed from the best eighteenth century models. And he had what Grote lacked, the gift of seeing that the historian need not – nay, that he ought not to – parade every detail of the arguments by which he has reached his conclusions; but should state those conclusions themselves, reserving himself for occasional emergencies in which process as well as result may be properly exhibited. It is fair to say, in putting this curious pair forward as examples respectively of the popular and scholarly methods of historical writing, that Grote's learning and industry were very much more than popular, while Thirlwall's sense and style might with advantage have put on, now and then, a little more pomp and circumstance. But still the contrast holds; and until fresh discoveries like that of the Athenian Polity accumulate to an extent which calls for and obtains a new real historian of Greece, it is Thirlwall and not Grote who deserves the first rank as such in English.

Intimately connected with all these historians in time and style, but having over them the temporary advantage of being famous in another way, and the, as some think, permanent disadvantage of falling prematurely out of public favour, was Thomas Arnold. He was born at Cowes, in the Isle of Wight, on 13th June 1795, and was educated at Winchester and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At the age of twenty he was elected a fellow of Oriel – a distinction which was, and remained for two decades, almost the highest in the University – and he gained both Chancellor's Essay prizes, for Latin and English. Oriel was not in his time, as it was very shortly afterwards, a centre of ecclesiastical orthodoxy; but rather the home of a curious transition blend of thought which in different persons took the high-and-dry or the Rationalist direction, and was only generally opposed to Evangelicalism. Arnold himself inclined to the Liberal side, and had also strong personal gifts for teaching. He took orders, but neither became a tutor nor took a living, and established himself at Laleham, on the Thames, to take private pupils. After ten years' practice here he was elected to the Head-mastership of Rugby, a school then, after vicissitudes, holding little if anything more than a medium place among those English Grammar Schools which ranked below the great schools of Eton, Harrow, Westminster, Winchester, and Charterhouse. How he succeeded in placing it on something like an equality with these, and how on the other hand he became, as it were, the apostle of the infant Broad Church School which held aloof alike from Evangelicals and Tractarians, are points which do not directly concern us. His more than indirect influence on literature was great; for few schools have contributed to it, in the same time, a greater number of famous writers than Rugby did under his head-mastership. His direct connection with it was limited to a fair number of miscellaneous works, many sermons, an edition of Thucydides, and a History of Rome which did not proceed (owing to his death in 1842, just after he had been appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford) beyond the Second Punic War. Arnold, once perhaps injudiciously extolled by adoring pupils, and the defender of a theory of churchmanship which strains rather to the uttermost the principle of unorthodox economy, has rather sunk between the undying disapproval of the orthodox and the fact that the unorthodox have long left his standpoint. But his style is undoubtedly of its own kind scholarly and excellent; the matter of his history suffers from the common fault of taking Niebuhr at too high a valuation.

Thomas Babington Macaulay (who may be conveniently discussed before Carlyle, though he was Carlyle's junior by five years, inasmuch as, even putting relative critical estimate aside, he died much earlier and represented on the whole an older style of thought) was born at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire on 25th October 1800. His father, Zachary Macaulay, though a very active agitator against the Slave Trade, was a strong Tory; and the son's conversion to Whig opinions was effected at some not clearly ascertained period after he had reached manhood. A very precocious child, he was at first privately educated, but entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of eighteen. Here he fell in with a set somewhat but not much less distinguished than that of the famous time, about ten years later, of which Tennyson was the centre – a set the most brilliant member of which, besides Macaulay, was the poet Praed. Praed had been accustomed to journalism before he left Eton, and had made acquaintance at Windsor with the bookseller Knight, for whose Quarterly Magazine both he and Macaulay wrote some very good things. Macaulay himself obtained the Chancellor's prize for English poems on "Pompeii" and "Evening," in two successive years 1819 and 1820; and after a very distinguished undergraduate career was elected fellow of his college. He went to the Bar, and his father's fortune, which had been a good one, being lost, his chances were for a time uncertain. In 1825, however, he won the admiration of Jeffrey and a place on the Edinburgh Review by his well-known, and slightly gaudy, but wonderfully fresh and stimulating article on Milton; and literature, which had always been his ideal employment, seemed already likely to yield him a fair subsistence – for review-writing was at that time much more highly paid than it is at present. Moreover the Whigs, on the eve of their long postponed triumph, were looking out for young men of talent; and Macaulay, being recruited by them, was put into Lord Lansdowne's pocket-borough of Calne. In the Reform debates themselves he distinguished himself greatly, and after the Bill was carried, having been elected for Leeds, he was not long in receiving his reward. It was munificent, for he, a man of little more than thirty, who had made no reputation at the Bar, though much elsewhere, was appointed Legal Member of Council in India with a salary very much of which could in those days be saved by a careful man, especially if, like Macaulay, he was unmarried. Accordingly when, after between four and five years' stay, Macaulay in 1838 returned home, he was in possession of means sufficient to enable him to devote himself without fear or hindrance to literary and political pursuits, while his fame had been raised higher during his absence by his contributions to the Edinburgh Review. Indeed his Indian experiences furnished the information – erroneous in some cases and partisan in others, but brilliantly used – enabling him to write the famous essays on Clive and on Hastings, where his historical method is at almost its best. He was elected member for Edinburgh, a very high compliment, in 1839; and next year became Secretary for War. In 1842 and 1843 respectively he established his position in verse and prose by publishing the Lays of Ancient Rome and a collection of his Essays; and in 1846 he was made Postmaster-General. But his support of the Maynooth Grant offended the Protestantism of his constituents, and he lost his seat, and for the time his political opportunities, in 1847. The disaster was no disaster for literature: he had long been employed on a History of England from the Accession of James II., and being now able to devote his whole time to it, he published the first volumes in 1848 with astonishing success.