A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

He has been classed here as a historian, and though the bulk of his work is very great and its apparent variety considerable, it will be found that history and her sister biography, even when his subjects bore an appearance of difference, always in reality engaged his attention. His three greatest books, containing more than half his work in bulk, —The French Revolution, the Cromwell, and the Frederick, – are all openly and avowedly historical. The Schiller and the Sterling are biographies; the Sartor Resartus a fantastic autobiography. Nearly all the Essays, even those which are most literary in subject – all the Lectures on Heroes, the greater part of Past and Present, The Early Kings of Norway, the John Knox, are more or less plainly and strictly historical or biographical. Even Chartism, the non-antique part of Past and Present, and the Latter-Day Pamphlets, deal with politics in the sense in which politics are the principal agent in making history, regard them constantly and almost solely in their actual or probable effect on the life-story of the nation, and to no small extent of its individual members. Out of the historic relation of nation or individual Carlyle would very rarely attempt to place, and hardly ever succeeded in placing, any thing or person. He could not in the least judge literature – of which he was so great a practitioner always, and sometimes so great a judge – from the point of view of form: he would have scorned to do so, and did scorn those who did so. His deficiencies in abstract philosophy, whether political, theological, metaphysical, or other, arise directly from this – that he could never contemplate any of these things as abstract, but only in the common conduct of men towards their fellows, towards themselves, and towards God. For Carlyle never "forgot God," though he might speak unadvisedly with his lips of other men's ways of remembering Him. The "human document," as later slang has it, was in effect the only thing that interested him; and he was content to employ it in constructing human history. More than once he put his idea of this history formally under a formal title. But his entire work is a much better exposition of that idea than these particular essays; and it is not easy to open any page of it in which the idea itself is not vividly illustrated and enforced upon the reader.

But once more, this is no place for even a summary, much less for a discussion, of the much discussed Carlylian "Gospel of Work"; of its apostle's less vague, but also less disputable, condemnations of shams and cants; or of the innumerable applications and uses to which he put these doctrines. The important thing for our purpose is that these applications took form in thirty volumes of the most brilliant, the most stimulating, the most varied, the most original work in English literature. The titles of this work have been given; to give here any notion of their contents would take the chapter. Carlyle could be – as in the Cromwell, where he sets himself and confines himself to the double task of elucidating his hero's rugged or crafty obscurities of speech and writing and of piecing them into a connected history, or where he wrestles with the huge accumulation of documents about Frederick – as practical as the driest of Dry-as-dusts. But others could equal, though few surpass him, in this. Where he stands alone is in a fantastic fertility of divagation and comment which is as much his own as the clear, neat directness of Macaulay is his. Much of it is due to his gospel, or temper, or whatever it is to be called, of earnest suasion to work and scornful denunciation of cant; something to his wide reading and apt faculty of illustration; but most to his style.

In the early days of his unpopularity this style used to be abused with heat or dismissed with scorn as mere falsetto, copied to a great extent from Richter. It is certain that in Carlyle's very earliest works there is small trace of it; and that he writes in a fashion not very startlingly different from that of any well-read and well-taught author of his time. And it is certain also that it was after his special addiction to German studies that the new manner appeared. Yet it is very far indeed from being copied from any single model, or even from any single language; and a great deal that is in it is not German at all. Something may even be traced to our own more fantastic writers in the seventeenth century, such as Sir Thomas Urquhart in Scotland and Sir Roger L'Estrange in England; much to a Scottish fervour and quaintness blending itself with and utilising a wider range of reading than had been usual with Scotsmen; most to the idiosyncrasy of the individual.

Carlyle's style is not seldom spoken of as compact of tricks and manners; and no doubt these are present in it. Yet a narrow inspection will show that its effect is by no means due so much in reality as in appearance to the retaining of capital letters, the violent breaches and aposiopeses, the omission of pronouns and colourless parts of speech generally, the coining of new words, and the introduction of unusual forms. These things are often there, but they are not always; and even when they are, there is something else much more important, much more characteristic, but also much harder to put the finger on. There is in Carlyle's fiercer and more serious passages a fiery glow of enthusiasm or indignation, in his lighter ones a quaint felicity of unexpected humour, in his expositions a vividness of presentment, in his arguments a sledge-hammer force, all of which are not to be found together anywhere else, and none of which is to be found anywhere in quite the same form. And despite the savagery, both of his indignation and his laughter, there is no greater master of tenderness. Wherever he is at home, and he seldom wanders far from it, the weapon of Carlyle is like none other, – it is the very sword of Goliath.

And this sword pierces to the joints and marrow as no other of the second division of our authors of the nineteenth century proper pierces, with the exception of that of Tennyson in verse. It is possible to disagree with Carlyle intensely; perhaps it is not possible to agree with him in any detailed manner, unless the agreer be somewhat destitute of individual taste and judgment. But on his whole aspect and tendency, reserving individual expressions, he is, as few are, great. The diathesis is there – the general disposition towards noble and high things. The expression is there – the capacity of putting what is felt and meant in a manner always contemptuous of mediocrity, yet seldom disdainful of common sense. To speak on the best things in an original way, in a distinguished style, is the privilege of the elect in literature; and none of those who were born within, or closely upon, the beginning of the century has had these gifts in English as have the authors of The Lotos Eaters and Sartor Resartus.

Only one other writer of history during the century, himself the latest to die of his generation except Mr. Ruskin, deserves, for the union of historical and literary merit, to be placed, if not on a level with Macaulay and Carlyle, yet not far below them; but a not inconsiderable number of historians and biographers of value who distinguished themselves about or since the middle of the century must be chronicled more or less briefly. Two Scottish scholars of eminence, both in turn Historiographers Royal of Scotland, John Hill Burton and William Forbes Skene, were born in the same year, 1809. Burton, who died in 1881, busied himself with the history of his country at large, beginning with the period since the Revolution, and tackling the earlier and more distinctively national time afterwards. He was not a very good writer, but displayed very great industry and learning with a sound and impartial judgment. Skene, on the other hand, was the greatest authority of his time (he lived till 1892) on "Celtic Scotland," which is the title of his principal book. In the same year (or in 1808) was born Charles Merivale, afterwards Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and Dean of Ely, who, besides other work, established himself in the same class of historians with Hallam and Milman, Thirlwall and Grote, by his extensive History of the Romans under the Empire. On the whole, Merivale (who died in 1894) ranks, both for historical and literary gifts, somewhat below the other members of this remarkable group – a position which is still a very honourable one.

Shortly after these three was born Alexander Kinglake (1811-1891) – a man of very remarkable talents, but something of a "terrible example" in regard to the practice, which has already been noticed as characteristic of the century, of devoting enormously long histories to special subjects and points. Kinglake, who was a native of Somerset, an Eton and Cambridge man, a barrister subsequently, for some years a Member of Parliament, and a man of independent means, first distinguished himself in letters by the very brilliant and popular book of travels in the East called Eothen which was published in 1847. That there is something of manner and trick about this is not to be denied; but it must be allowed that the trick and manner have been followed, apparently with success, in travel-writing for about half a century, while it cannot be fairly said that Kinglake himself had any exact models, though he may have owed something to Beckford and a little to Sterne. It is not very easy to say whether Kinglake's literary reputation would have stood higher or lower if he had written nothing else; but as a matter of fact, before many years were over, he attempted a much more ambitious task in the History of the Crimean War, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1863, though the book was not finished till twenty years later. That this history shows no small literary faculties no competent judge can deny. The art of word-painting – a dubious and dangerous art – is pushed to almost its furthest limits; the writer has a wonderful gift of combining the minutest and most numerous details into an orderly and intelligible whole; and the quality which the French untranslatably call diable au corps, or, as we more pedantically say, "dæmonic energy," is present everywhere. But the book is monstrously out of proportion, – a single battle has something like an entire volume, and the events of some two years occupy eight, – and, clear as the individual pictures are, the panorama is of such endless length that the mind's eye retains no proper notion of it. In the second place, the style, though brilliant, is hard and brassy, full of points that are more suitable to the platform or the newspaper than to the historic page, – not so much polished as varnished, and after a short time intolerably fatiguing. In the third, – and this is the gravest fault of all, – the author's private or patriotic likes or dislikes pervade the whole performance and reduce too much of it to a tissue of extravagant advocacy or depreciation, made more disgusting by the repetition of catch phrases and pet labels somewhat after the manner of Dickens. Sir Stratford Canning, "the great Eltchi," is one of Kinglake's divinities, Lord Raglan another; and an acute and energetic, but not quite heaven-born diplomatist, a most honest, modest, and in difficult circumstances steadfast, if not always judicious soldier, become, the one Marlborough in the council-chamber, the other Marlborough in the field. On the other hand, for this or that reason, Mr. Kinglake had taken a violent dislike to the Emperor Napoleon the Third, and affected, as did some other English Liberals, to consider the coup d'état as not merely a dubious piece of statecraft, but a hideous and abominable crime. Consequently, he abused all those who took part in it with tedious virulence, which has probably made not a few Englishmen look on them with much more leniency than they deserved. In short, Kinglake, with many of the qualities of the craftsman in an extraordinary degree, was almost entirely deficient in those of the artist. He served as a favourite example to Mr. Matthew Arnold of the deficiency of the British literary temper in accomplishment and grace, and it cannot be denied that Mr. Arnold's strictures were here justified to an extent which was not always the case when he assumed the office of censor.

John Forster, who was born a year later than Kinglake, and died fifteen years before him, was an industrious writer of biographies and biographical history, the friend of a good many men of letters, editor for many years of the Examiner, and secretary to the Lunacy Commissioners. He paid particular attention to the period of the Rebellion; his Arrest of the Five Members being his chief work, among several devoted to it. He wrote a Life of Goldsmith, and began one of Swift. In contemporary biography his chief performances were lives of Landor and of Dickens, with both of whom he was extremely intimate. In private life Forster had the character of a bumptious busybody, which character indeed the two books just mentioned, even without the anecdotes abundant in more recent books of biography, abundantly establish. And towards the men of letters with whom he was intimate (Carlyle and Browning may be added to Landor and Dickens) he seems to have behaved like a Boswell-Podsnap, while in the latter half of the character he no doubt sat to Dickens himself. But he was an indefatigable literary inquirer, and seems, in a patronising kind of way, to have been liberal enough of the result of his inquiries. He had a real interest both in history and literature, and he wrote fairly enough.

One of the most curious figures among the historians of this century was Henry Thomas Buckle, who was born near Blackheath in 1823, and privately educated. He had ample means, and was fond of books; and in 1857 he brought out the first volume (which was followed by a second in 1861) of a History of Civilisation. He did not nearly complete – in fact he only began – his scheme, in which the European part was ultimately intended to be subordinate to the English, and he died of typhus at Damascus in May 1862. The book attained at once, and for some time kept, an extraordinary popularity, which has been succeeded by a rather unjust depreciation. Both are to be accounted for by the fact that it is in many ways a book rather of the French than of the English type, and displays in fuller measure than almost any of Buckle's contemporaries in France itself, with the possible exception of Taine, could boast, the frank and fearless, some would say the headlong and headstrong, habit of generalisation – scorning particulars, or merely impressing into service such as are useful to it and drumming the others out – on which Frenchmen pride themselves, and for the lack of which they are apt to pronounce English historians, and indeed English men of letters of all kinds, plodding and unilluminated craftsmen rather than artists. In Buckle's reflections on Spain and Scotland, he accounts for the whole history of both countries and the whole character of both peoples by local conditions in the first place, and by forms of civil and ecclesiastical government. In respect to these last, his views were crude Voltairianism; but perhaps this is the best and most characteristic example of his method. He was extremely prejudiced; his lack of solid disciplinary education made him unapt to understand the true force and relative value of his facts and arguments; and as his premises are for the most part capriciously selected facts cemented together with an untempered mortar of theory, his actual conclusions are rarely of much value. But his style is clear and vigorous; the aggressive raiding character of his argument is agreeably stimulating, and excellent to make his readers clear up their minds on the other side; while the dread of over-generalisation, however healthy in itself, has been so long a dominant force in English letters and philosophy that a little excess the other way might be decidedly useful as an alterative. The worst fault of Buckle was the Voltairianism above referred to, causing or caused by, as is always the case, a deplorable lack of taste, which is not confined to religious matters.

Edward Augustus Freeman, who was a little younger than Buckle and survived him for thirty years, had some points in common with the historian of civilisation, though his education, interests, and tone in reference to religion were wholly different. Mr. Freeman, who was not at any public school but was a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, very soon devoted himself to the study of early English history, and secured a durable position by his elaborate History of the Norman Conquest (1867-76), which, even though the largest and most important, was only one among scores of works, ending in an unfinished History of Sicily. He was, when he died in 1892, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and he had for many years been very influential in determining the course of historical study. He was also, for many years of his life, an active journalist, being especially known as a contributor to the Saturday Review, and he sometimes took a very busy part in politics. Mr. Freeman was a student of untiring energy, and will always deserve honourable memory as the first historian who recognised and utilised the value of architecture in supplying historical documents and illustrations. His style was at times picturesque but too diffuse, and disfigured by a habit of allusion as teasing as Macaulay's antithesis or Kinglake's stock phrases. That he was apt to pronounce very strong opinions on almost any question with which he dealt, was perhaps a less drawback to his excellence as a historian than the violently controversial tone in which he was wont to deal with those who happened to hold opinions different from his own. Putting defects of manner aside, there is no question that, for his own special period of English history (the eleventh and twelfth centuries), Mr. Freeman did more than any man had done before him, and as much as any man has done for any other period; while in relation to his further subjects of study, his work, though less trustworthy, is full of stimulus and of information.

His chief pupil John Richard Green, who was born in 1837 and died of consumption in 1883, was a native of Oxford, and was educated there at Magdalen College School and Jesus College. Mr. Green, like Mr. Freeman, was a frequent contributor to the Saturday Review, and did some clerical duty in the east of London; but he is best known by his historical work on English subjects, especially the famous Short History of the English People, perhaps the most popular work of its class and kind ever written. Mr. Green professed, on a principle which had been growing in favour for some time, to extend the usual conception of historical dealing to social, literary, and other matters. These, however, had never as a fact been overlooked by historians, and the popularity of the book was chiefly due to its judicious selection of interesting facts, to the spirit of the narrative, and to the style, based partly on Macaulay, but infused with a modernness which exactly hit the taste of the readers of our time. Mr. Green afterwards expanded this book somewhat; and his early death cut short a series of more extended monographs, The Making of England, The Conquest of England, etc., which would have enabled him to display the minute knowledge on which his more summary treatment of the general theme had been based.

Among historians to whom in larger space more extended notice than is here possible would have to be given, perhaps the first place is due to Philip Henry, sixth Earl Stanhope (1805-75), who (chiefly under the title of Lord Mahon, which he bore before his succession to the earldom in 1855) was an active historical writer of great diligence and impartiality, and possessed of a fair though not very distinguished style. The first notable work, – a History of the War of the Succession in Spain (1832), – of Lord Stanhope (who was an Oxford man, took some part in politics, and was a devoted Peelite) was reviewed by Macaulay, and he wrote later several other and minor historical books. But his reputation rests on his History of Europe from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles, which occupied him for some twenty years, finishing in 1854. Very much less known to the general, but of singular ability, was William Johnson or Cory, who under the earlier name had attracted considerable public attention as an Eton master and as author of a small but remarkable volume of poems called Ionica. After his retirement from Eton and the change of his name, Mr. Cory amused himself with the composition of a History of England, or rather a long essay thereon, which was very little read and falls completely out of the ordinary conception of such a book, but is distinguished by an exceptionally good and scholarly style, as well as by views and expressions of great originality. Many others must pass wholly unnoticed that we may finish this chapter with one capital name.

One of the greatest historians of the century, except for one curious and unfortunate defect, and (without any drawback) one of the greatest writers of English prose during that century, was James Anthony Froude, who was born at Dartington near Totnes in 1818, on 23rd April (Shakespeare's birthday and St. George's Day), and died in 1894 at the Molt near Salcombe in his native county. Mr. Froude (the youngest son of the Archdeacon of Totnes and the brother of Richard Hurrell Froude who played so remarkable a part in the Oxford Movement, and of William Froude the distinguished naval engineer) was a Westminster boy, and went to Oriel College, Oxford, afterwards obtaining a fellowship at Exeter. Like his elder brother he engaged in the Tractarian Movement, and was specially under the influence of Newman, taking orders in 1844. The great convulsion, however, of Newman's secession sent him, not as it sent some with Newman, but like Mark Pattison and a few more, into scepticism if not exactly negation, on all religious matters. He put his change of opinions (he had previously written under the pseudonym of "Zeta" a novel called Shadows of the Clouds) into a book entitled The Nemesis of Faith, published in 1849, resigned his fellowship, gave up or lost (to his great good fortune) a post which had been offered him in Tasmania, and betook himself to literature, being very much, except in point of style, under the influence of Carlyle. He wrote for Fraser, the Westminster, and other periodicals; but was not content with fugitive compositions, and soon planned a History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Armada. The first volumes of this appeared in 1856, and it was finished in 1869. Meanwhile Froude from time to time collected his essays into volumes called Short Studies, which contain some of his very best writing. His next large work was The English in Ireland, which was published in three volumes (1871-74). In 1874-75 Lord Carnarvon sent him on Government missions to the Cape, an importation of a French practice into England which was not very well justified by the particular instance. Between 1881 and 1884 he was occupied as Carlyle's literary executor in issuing his biographical remains. Later Oceana and The English in the West Indies contained at once sketches of travel and political reflections; and in 1889 he published an Irish historical romance, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy. He was made Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford in succession to Mr. Freeman, and his two latest works, Erasmus, published just before, and English Seamen some months after his death, contain in part the results of the appointment.

It is a vulgar observation that the natural element of some men appears to be hot water. No English author of the century justifies this better than Mr. Froude. His early change of faith attracted to him a very considerable share of the obloquy which usually (and perhaps not so unreasonably as is sometimes thought) attaches to violent revolutions of opinion on important points. His History was no sooner published than most acrimonious attacks were made upon it, and continued for many years, by a school of historical students with the late Mr. Freeman at their head. His Irish book, coinciding with the rise of "Home Rule" sentiment in Ireland, brought upon him furious enmity from the Irish Nationalist party and from those who, at first or by and by, sympathised with them in England. His colonial visits and criticisms not merely attracted to him the animosity of all those Englishmen who espoused the politics of non-intervention and non-aggrandisement, but aroused lively irritation in the Colonies themselves. About his discharge of his duties as Carlyle's executor, a perfect tempest of indignation arose; it being alleged that he had either carelessly, or through bad taste, or with deliberate treachery, revealed his dead friend's and master's weaknesses and domestic troubles to the public view.