A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

Clough has been called by persons of distinction a "bad poet"; but this was only a joke, and, with all respect to those who made it, a rather bad joke. The author of "Qua Cursum Ventus," of the marvellous picture of the advancing tide in "Say not the struggle," and of not a few other things, was certainly no bad poet, though it would not be uncritical to call him a thin one. He was born at Liverpool on New Year's Day 1819, spent part of his childhood in America, went to Rugby very young and distinguished himself there greatly, though it may be doubted whether the peculiar system which Arnold had just brought into full play was the healthiest for a self-conscious and rather morbid nature like Clough's. From Rugby he went to Balliol, and was entirely upset, not, as is sometimes most unjustly said, by Newman, but by the influence of W. G. Ward, a genial Puck of Theology, who, himself caring for nothing but mathematics, philosophy, and play-acting, disturbed the consciences of others by metaphysical quibbles, and then took refuge in the Church of Rome. Clough, who had been elected to an Oriel fellowship, threw it up in 1848, turned freethinker, and became the head of an educational institution in London called University Hall. He did not hold this very long, receiving a post in the Education Office, which he held in various forms till his death in 1861 at Florence.

It is not necessary to be biassed by Matthew Arnold's musical epicede of "Thyrsis" in order to admit, nor should any bias against his theological views and his rather restless character be sufficient to induce any one to deny, a distinct vein of poetry in Clough. His earliest and most popular considerable work, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (the title of which was originally rather different,) is written in hexameters which do not, like Kingsley's, escape the curse of that "pestilent heresy"; and the later Amours de Voyage and Dipsychus, though there are fine passages in both, bring him very close to the Spasmodic school, of which in fact he was an unattached and more cultivated member, with fancies directed rather to religiosity than to strict literature. Ambarvalia had preceded the Bothie, and other things followed. On the whole, Clough is one of the most unsatisfactory products of that well-known form of nineteenth century scepticism which has neither the strength to believe nor the courage to disbelieve "and have done with it." He hankers and looks back, his "two souls" are always warring with each other, and though the clash and conflict sometimes bring out fine things (as in the two pieces above cited and the still finer poem at Naples with the refrain "Christ is not risen"), though his "Latest Decalogue" has satirical merit, and some of his country poems, written without undercurrent of thought, are fresh and genial, he is on the whole a failure. But he is a failure of a considerable poet, and some fragments of success chequer him.

Frederick Locker, who on his second marriage took the additional name of Lampson, was born in 1821 of a family long connected with the Navy and with Greenwich Hospital. He himself held for some years a post in the Admiralty; but he was much more addicted to society and to literature than to official work. His first marriage with Lady Charlotte Bruce strengthened his social position, and his second gave him wealth. He published, as early as 1857, a volume of light verse entitled London Lyrics, which, with the work of Prior, Praed, and Mr. Austin Dobson, stands at the head of its kind in English. But – an exceedingly rare thing for amateur as well as for professional writers in our time – he was not tempted either by profit or fame to write copiously. He added during his not short life, which closed in May 1895, a few more poems to London Lyrics. He edited in 1867 an anthology of his own kind of verse called Lyra Elegantiarum, and in 1879 he produced a miscellany of verse and prose, original and selected, called Patchwork, in which some have seen his most accomplished and characteristic production. In form it is something like Southey's Omniana, partly a commonplace book, partly full of original things; but the extracts are so choicely made and the original part is so delightful that it is not quite like any book in the language. If Charles Lamb had been of Mr. Locker's time and circumstances he might have made its fellow. "My Guardian Angel," a short prose anecdote, is, as nearly as the present writer knows, unique. Latterly its author was chiefly known as a man of much hospitality and a collector of choice books. He would not do anything bad, and apparently he did not feel inclined to do anything good. And as this is a century when almost everybody must still be doing, and taking the chance of goodness and badness, such an exception to the rule should meet with honour.

No poet of the period, perhaps none of the century, occupies a position less settled by general criticism, or more difficult to settle, than that of Edward Robert, first Earl of Lytton, for a long time known in poetry as "Owen Meredith." The only son of the novelist, he was born on 8th November 1831, and after going to Harrow, but not to either university, entered the diplomatic service at the age of eighteen. In this he filled a great many different offices at a great many different places for nearly thirty years, till, after succeeding to his father's title, he was made First Minister at Lisbon, and then in 1876 Viceroy of India. This post he gave up in 1880, and after the return of the Tory party to power, was sent in 1887 as Ambassador to Paris, where he was very popular, and where he died in 1892.

Despite the fact that his time, save for the interval of 1880-87, was thus uninterruptedly occupied with business, Lord Lytton was an indefatigable writer of verse; while in The Ring of Amasis he tried the prose romance. His chief poetical books were Clytemnestra (1855); The Wanderer (1859), which contains some charming lyrical work; Lucile (1860), a verse story; Songs of Servia (Serbski Pesme) (1861); Orval, or the Fool of Time and Chronicles and Characters (1869); Fables in Song (1874); Glenaveril, a very long modern epic (1885); and After Paradise, or Legends of Exile (1887). Besides these he collaborated in 1861 with his friend Julian Fane in a poem, Tannhäuser, which, though too much of a Tennysonian echo, has good passages; and after his death two volumes equal if not superior to anything he had done, Marah, a collection of short poems, and King Poppy, a fantastic epic, were published. This extensive and not always easily accessible work is conveniently represented by two volumes of selections, one representing chiefly the earlier and shorter works, edited by Miss Betham-Edwards in 1890, the other drawn mostly from the later and longer, edited by his daughter, Lady Betty Balfour, in 1894. This latter was accompanied by reprints of The Wanderer and Lucile.

The difficulties in criticism above referred to arise, not merely from the voluminousness of this work, nor from the fact that Lord Lytton shares with all the poets of his special generation, except Rossetti, that inability to hit upon a definite and distinct manner of his own which is so frequently and strangely remarkable in what may be called intermediate poetical periods. Indeed in his later years he did strike out something like a very distinct style. But he suffers more than any other poet of anything like his gifts from two faults, one of which is perhaps the fault that hurts a poet most with the vulgar, and the other that which does him most harm with critics. He was so frankly pleased with, and so apt at imitating the work of his great contemporaries, that he would publish things to which fools gave the name of plagiarisms – when they were in fact studies in the manner of Tennyson, Heine, Browning, and others. And in the second place, though he frequently rewrote, it seemed impossible for him to retrench and concentrate. To this may be added his fondness for extremely long narrative poems, the taste for which has certainly gone out, while it may be doubted whether, unless they are pure romances of adventure, they are ever good things.

The consequence of all this, and perhaps of other things less legitimately literary, such as political partnership, has hitherto been that Lord Lytton has been ranked very far indeed below his proper place. For he had two poetical gifts, the higher of them in a high, the lower in an eminent degree. The first was the gift of true lyric, not seldom indeed marred by the lack of polish above noticed, but real, true, and constant, from the "Fata Morgana" and "Buried Heart" of The Wanderer to the "Experientia Docet" and "Selenites" of Marah, more than thirty years later. The other was a much more individual power, and by some might be ranked higher. It is the gift of what can best generally be called ironical narration, using irony in its proper sense of covert suggestive speech. This took various forms, indicated with more or less clearness in the very titles of Chronicles and Characters and Fables in Song, – symbolic-mystical in Legends of Exile (where not only some of the legends but the poems called "Uriel" and "Strangers" are among the best things of the author and highly typical of his later manner), and fantastically romantic, with a strong touch of symbolism, in King Poppy. And when, as happens in most of the pieces mentioned above and many others, the combination welds itself into a kind of passionate allegory, few poets show a better power of transporting the reader in the due poetic manner. There can be no doubt that if Lord Lytton had developed this faculty somewhat earlier (there are traces of it very early), had made its exercises rather more clear and direct, and had subjected their expression to severer thinning and compression, he would have made a great reputation as a poet. As it is, it cannot be denied that he had the positive faculties of poetry in kind and degree only inferior to those possessed by at most four or five of his English contemporaries from Tennyson downwards.

Nor should there perhaps lack mention of Roden Noel and Thomas Ashe, two writers in whom, from their earlier work, it was not unreasonable to expect poets of a distinct kind, and who, though they never improved on this early work, can never be said exactly to have declined from it. The first and elder was a son of the Earl of Gainsborough, was born in 1834, went to Cambridge, travelled a good deal, and at various times, till his death at the age of sixty, published much verse and not a little prose, both showing a distinctly poetical imagination without a sufficient organ of expression. Nor did he ever develop this except in A Little Child's Monument, where the passionate personal agony injures as much as it helps the poetical result. Mr. Ashe, who was born in 1836, and died in 1889, also a Cambridge man, had a much less ambitious and rather less interesting but somewhat better-organised talent for verse, and his Sorrows of Hypsipyle, published in 1866, caused and authorised at the time considerable expectations from him. But his vein was rather the result of classical culture working on a slight original talent than anything better, and he did not rise beyond a pleasant competence in verse which was never that of a poetaster, but hardly ever that of a distinct poet. In which respect he may appear here as the representative of no scanty company dead and living. For even the longest chapter of a book must have an end; and it is impossible to find room in it for the discussion of the question, whether the friends of Oliver Madox Brown, son of the famous Præ-Raphaelite painter, were or were not wrong in seeing extraordinary promise in his boyish work; whether the sonnets of Ernest Lefroy (1855-91) were exercises or works of art. A few more remarks on humorous poets and women-poets must close the record.

In the art of merely or mainly humorous singing two names, those of Edward Lear and Charles Stuart Calverley, entirely dominate the rest among dead writers in the last part of the century. Lear, a good deal the elder man of the two, was born in 1813, was a painter by profession, and was the "E. L." of a well-known poem of Tennyson's. It was not till 1861 that his delightful nonsense-verses, known to his friends in private, were first published, and they received various additions at intervals till his death in 1888. The sheer nonsense-verse – the amphigouri as the French call it – has been tried in various countries and at various times, but never with such success as in England, and it has seldom, if ever, been cultivated in England with such success as by Lear. His happy concoction of fantastic names, the easy slipping flow of his verse, and above all, the irresistible parody of sense and pathos that he contrived to instil into his rigmarole are unapproachable. In a new and not in the least opprobrious sense he was "within the realms of Nonsense absolute."

Calverley attempted less "uttermost isles" of fun. Born in 1831 of an excellent Yorkshire family, he was educated at Harrow, and – a thing as rare in the nineteenth as common in the seventeenth century – at both universities, gaining at both a great reputation for scholarship, eccentricity, and bodily strength. After some time he married and began to work at the Bar; but an accident on the ice in 1867 brought on concussion of the brain, though he lingered in constantly weakening health till 1884. His Verses and Translations twenty-two years earlier had made him the model of all literary undergraduates with a turn for humour; and he was able in spite of his affliction to issue some things later, the chief being Fly Leaves in 1872. Calverley, as has been said, was a scholar, and his versions both from and into the classical languages would of themselves have given him a reputation; but his forte lay partly in the easier vein of parody, wherein few excelled him, partly in the more difficult one of original light verse, wherein he had a turn (as in his famous eulogy on tobacco) quite his own. He has never been equalled in this, or even approached, except by James Kenneth Stephen (1859-92), whose premature death deprived his friends of a most amiable personality, and literature, in all probability, of a considerable ornament. As it was, "J. K. S." left next to nothing but two tiny collections of verse, showing an inspiration midway between Calverley and Praed, but with quite sufficient personal note.

Two other writers of less scholarly style, but belonging to the London Bohemian school of the third quarter of the century, W. J. Prowse, "Nicholas" (1836-70), and H. S. Leigh (1837-83), may be noticed. Prowse, whose career was very short, was the author of the charming lines on "The beautiful City of Prague," which have been attributed to others: while Leigh's Carols of Cockayne (he was also a playwright) vary the note of Hood happily, and now and then with a real originality.

Except Miss Rossetti, no woman during this time approached the poetical excellence of Mrs. Barrett Browning. But the whole period has been unprecedentedly fertile in poetesses, and whereas we had but five or six to mention in the earlier chapter devoted to verse, we have here at least a dozen, though no one who requires very extended notice here. Lady Dufferin (1807-1867), mother of the well-known diplomatist, a member of the Sheridan family, and her sister, and junior by a year, Mrs. Norton (1808-1876), were both writers of facile and elegant verse, with the Irish note of easy melody. The former was the less known to the general reader, though a few of her pieces, such as "The Irish Emigrant" and "Katie's Letter," have always been favourite numbers for recitation. Mrs. Norton at one time enjoyed a considerable reputation as a poetess by contributions to "Annuals" and "Souvenirs," chiefly in the sentimental ballad style which pleased the second quarter of the century. "The Outward Bound," "Bingen on the Rhine," and other things are at least passable, and one of the author's latest and most ambitious poems, The Lady of La Garaye, has a sustained respectability. To a few fanatical admirers the scanty verse of Emily Brontë has seemed worthy of such high praise that only mass of work would appear to be wanting to put her in the first rank of poetesses if not of poets. Part of this, however, it is to be feared, is due to admiration of the supposed freedom of thought in her celebrated "Last Lines," which either in sincerity or bravado pronounce that "vain are the thousand creeds," and declare for a sort of vague Pantheism, immanent at once in self and the world. At thirty, however, a genuine poetess should have produced more than a mere handful of verse, and its best things should be independent of polemical partisanship either for or against orthodoxy. As a matter of fact, her exquisite "Remembrance," and the slightly rhetorical but brave and swinging epigram of "The Old Stoic," give her better claims than the "Last Lines," and with them and a few others place her as a remarkable though not by any means a supreme figure.

The more prudent admirers of Marian Evans (George Eliot), who wrote a good deal of verse, either admit that her verse was not poetry, or hold up a much-quoted passage, "Oh, may I join the choir invisible," which, like the far superior piece just referred to, is only a hymn on the side which generally dispenses with hymns; and not a very good one, though couched in fair Wordsworthian blank verse. They would no doubt indulge in derisive scorn at the idea of the mild muse of Adelaide Anne Procter, daughter of "Barry Cornwall," receiving praise denied to Miss Brontë and Miss Evans; and it must be admitted that Miss Procter never did anything so good as "Remembrance." On the other hand, she was quite free from the "sawdust" and heaviness which mar George Eliot's verse. Her style was akin to that which has been noticed in speaking of Mrs. Norton, though of a somewhat later fashion, and like those of her father, her songs, especially the famous "Message," had the knack of suiting composers. Menella Bute Stedley and Dora Greenwell, a respectable pair, somewhat older than Miss Procter (she was born in 1825 and died in 1864), considerably outlived her, Miss Stedley's life lasting from 1820 to 1877, and Miss Greenwell's from 1821 to 1882. Both were invalids, and soothed their cares with verse, the latter to the better effect, though both in no despicable strain. Augusta Webster (1840-94) and Emily Pfeiffer ( -1890) were later poetesses of the same kind, but lower rank, though both were greatly praised by certain critics. Sarah Williams, a short-lived writer of some sweetness (1841-68), commended herself chiefly to those who enjoy verse religious but "broad"; Constance Naden to those who like pessimist agnosticism; Amy Levy to those who can deplore a sad fate and admire notes few and not soaring, but passionate and genuine.

CHAPTER VII

THE NOVEL SINCE 1850

Certain novelists who were mentioned at the end of chapter iii., though they all lived far into the last half of the century, not only belonged essentially to its first division, but strictly speaking fell out of strict chronological arrangement of any kind, being of the class of more or less eccentric men of genius who may appear at any time and belong to none in particular; and certain others of the earlier time, less eccentric, lived on far towards our own. About 1850 however, a little before or a little after it, there appeared a group of novelists of great talent, and in some cases of genius itself, who were less self-centred, and exemplified to a greater degree the special tendencies of the time. These tendencies were variously connected with the Oxford or Tractarian Movement; the transfer of political power from the upper to the middle classes by the first Reform Bill; the rise of what is for shortness called Science; the greater esteem accorded to and the more general practice of what is, again for shortness, called Art; the extension in a certain sense of education; the re-engagement of England, long severed from continental politics, in those politics by the Crimean war; the enormous development of commerce by the use of steam navigation and of railways; the opening up of Australia and its neighbourhood; the change effected in the East by the removal, gradual for some time, then rapid and complete after the Indian Mutiny, of the power of the East India Company; and the "Liberal" movement generally.

To work and counterwork out the influence of these various causes on separate authors, and the connection of the authors with the causes, would take a volume in itself. But on the scale and within the limits possible here, the names of Charlotte Brontë, Marian Evans (commonly called George Eliot), Charles Kingsley, Anthony Trollope, and Charles Reade will give us such central points as can be most safely utilised. Another, Miss Charlotte Yonge, the chief practitioner of the religious novel, was contemporary with almost the earliest of these, but falls out of this book as still living.

The members of this group were, as happens with a repeated coincidence in literary history too distinct to be altogether neglected, born within a very few years of each other: Reade in 1814, Trollope in 1815, Miss Brontë next year, Kingsley and Miss Evans in 1819; but as generally happens likewise, their appearance as authors, or at least as novelists, did not follow in exact sequel. The first-renowned, the shortest-lived, and though by no means the most brilliant or powerful, in a certain way the freshest and most independent, was Charlotte Brontë, the daughter of a Yorkshire clergyman of eccentric and not altogether amiable character and of Irish blood. She was born on 21st April 1816. The origin of the Brontës or Pruntys has, as well as their family history generally, been discussed with the curiously disproportionate minuteness characteristic of our time; but hardly anything need be said of the results of the investigation, except that they were undoubtedly Irish. Charlotte's mother died soon after the Rev. Patrick Brontë had received the living of Haworth, and Charlotte herself was sent to school at a place called Cowan's Bridge, her experiences at which have in the same way been the subject of endless inquiry into the infinitely little, in connection with the "Lowood" of Jane Eyre. After two of her sisters had died, and she herself had been very ill, she was taken away and educated partly at home, partly elsewhere. Her two surviving sisters, who were her juniors, Emily by two years and Anne by four, were both of more or less literary leanings, and as they were all intended to be governesses, the sole profession for poor gentlewomen in the middle of the century, Emily and Charlotte were sent to Brussels to qualify. In 1846 the three published a joint volume of Poems under the pseudonyms (which kept their initials) of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, and to people over middle age Charlotte Brontë is still perhaps most familiar as Currer Bell. Emily's poems are elsewhere commented upon. The eldest and youngest sister had no poetical vocation, and Anne had not much for prose. But she, like the others, attempted it after the failure of their verse in a triad of novels, The Professor, by Charlotte; Wuthering Heights (very much praised by those who look first for unconventionality and force), by Emily, who followed it with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; and Agnes Grey, by Anne. But Charlotte could not get The Professor published – indeed it is anything but a good book – and set to work at the famous Jane Eyre, which after being freely refused by publishers, was accepted by Messrs. Smith and Elder and published in 1847, with the result of violent attacks and very considerable popularity. Death the next year and the year after robbed her of both her sisters and of her brother Patrick, a ne'er-do-weel, who, on the strength of his Bohemianism and his sisters, is sometimes supposed to have had genius. Shirley appeared in 1849, and Villette in 1852. In 1854 Charlotte married her father's curate, Mr. Nicholls, but died next year, on 31st March 1855.

Perhaps the most interesting way of looking at Charlotte Brontë, who, as has been said, has been violently attacked, and who has also been extravagantly praised (though not so extravagantly as her sister Emily), is to look at her in the light of a precursor or transition-novelist, representing the time when the followers of Scott had wearied the public with second-rate romances, when Thackeray had not arisen, or had only just arisen, and when the modern domestic novel in its various kinds, from the religious to the problematic, was for the most part in embryo, or in very early stages. This latter novel she in fact anticipated in many of its kinds, and partly to the fact of this anticipation, partly to the vividness which her representation of personal experiences gave to her work, may the popularity which it at first had, and such of it as has survived, be assigned. In this latter point, however, lay danger as well as safety. It seems very improbable that if Charlotte Brontë had lived, and if she had continued to write, her stock of experiences would have sufficed her; and it would not appear that she had much else. She is indeed credited with inventing the "ugly hero" in the Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre, but in the long-run ugliness palls almost as much as beauty, perhaps sooner. Except in touches probably due to suggestions from Emily, the "weirdness" of the younger sister was not exhibited by the elder. The more melodramatic parts of the book would not have borne repetition, and its main appeal now lies in the Lowood scenes and the character of Jane herself, which are both admittedly autobiographical. So also Shirley is her sister Emily, the curates who pester her appear to have been almost in case to enter libel actions if they thought proper, and Villette is little more than an embroidered version of the Brussels sojourn. How successful an appeal of this kind is, the experience of Byron and many others has shown; how dangerous it is, could not be better shown than by the same experience. It was Charlotte Brontë's good fortune that she died before she had utterly exhausted her vein, though those who fail to regard Paul Emanuel with the affection which he seems to inspire in some, may think that she went perilously near it. But fate was kind to her: some interesting biographies and brilliant essays at different periods have revived and championed her fame: and her books – at least Jane Eyre almost as a whole and parts of the others – will always be simply interesting to the novel-reader, and interesting in a more indirect fashion to the critic. For this last will perceive that, thin and crude as they are, they are original, they belong to their own present and future, not to their past, and that so they hold in the history of literature a greater place than many books of greater accomplishment which are simply worked on already projected and accepted lines. Emily's work, though too small in bulk and too limited in character to be put really high, has this original character in intense equality.