A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

By far the larger bulk of the works, however, belongs to theology. This includes twelve volumes of Sermons, all but a small part delivered before Newman's change of creed, and eight of them the Parochial and Plain Sermons, preached in the pulpit of St. Mary's but not to the University; four of treatises, including the most famous and characteristic of Newman's works except the Apologia, The Grammar of Assent, and The Development of Christian Doctrine; four of Essays; three of Historical Sketches; four theological, chiefly on Arianism, and translations of St. Athanasius; and six Polemical, which culminate in the Apologia. With respect to the substance of this work it is soon easy, putting controversial matters as much as possible apart, to discover where Newman's strength and weakness respectively lay. He was distinctly deficient in the historic sense; and in the Apologia itself he threw curious light on this deficiency, and startled even friends and fellow-converts, by speaking contemptuously of "antiquarian arguments." The same defect is quaintly illustrated by a naïf and evidently sincere complaint that he should have been complained of for (in his own words) "attributing to the middle of the third century what is certainly to be found in the fourth." And it is understood that he was not regarded either by Anglican or by Roman Catholic experts as a very deep theologian in either of his stages. The special characteristic – the ethos as his own contemporaries and immediate successors at Oxford would have said – of Newman seems to have been strangely combined. He was perhaps the last of the very great preachers in English – of those who combined a thoroughly classical training, a scholarly form, with the incommunicable and almost inexplicable power to move audiences and readers. And he was one of the first of that class of journalists who in the new age have succeeded the preachers, whether for good or ill, as the prophets of the illiterate. It may seem strange to speak of Newman as a journalist; but if any one will read his essays, his Apologia, above all the curious set of articles called The Tamworth Reading-Room, he will see what a journalist was lost, or only partly developed, in this cardinal. He had the conviction, which is far more necessary to a journalist than is generally thought; and yet his convictions were not of that extremely systematic and far-reaching kind which no doubt often stands in the journalist's way. He had the faculty of mixing bad and good argument, which is far more effective with mixed audiences than unbated logic. And, little as he is thought of as sympathising with the common people, he was entirely free from that contempt of them which always prevents a man from gaining their ear unless he is a consummately clever scoundrel.

It may however be retorted that if Newman was a born journalist, sermons and theology must be a much better school of style in journalism than articles and politics. And it is quite true that his writing at its best is of extraordinary charm, while that charm is not, as in the case of some of his contemporaries and successors, derived from dubiously legitimate ornament and flourish, but observes the purest classical limitations of proportion and form. It has perhaps sometimes been a little over-valued, either by those who in this way or that – out of love for what he joined or hate to what he left – were in uncritical sympathy with Newman, or by others it may be from pure ignorance of the fact that much of this charm is the common property of the more scholarly writers of the time, and is only eminently, not specially, present in him. But of the fact of it there is no doubt. In such a sermon for instance as that on "The Individuality of the Soul," a thought or series of thoughts, in itself poetically grandiose enough for Taylor or even for Donne, is presented in the simplest but in the most marvellously impressive language. The sentences are neither volleying in their shortness, nor do they roll thundrously; the cadences though perfect are not engineered with elaborate musical art; there are in proportion very few adjectives; the writer exercises the most extreme continence in metaphor, simile, illustration, all the tricks and frounces of literary art. Yet Taylor, though he might have attained more sweetness or more grandeur, could hardly have been more beautiful; and though Donne might have been so, it would have been at the expense of clearness. Newman is so clear that he has often been accused of being, and sometimes is, a little hard; but this is not always or often the case: it is especially not so when he is dealing with things which, as in the sermon just referred to and that other on "The Intermediate State," admit the diffusion of religious awe. The presence of that awe, and of a constant sense and dread of Sin, have been said, and probably with truth, to be keynotes of Newman's religious ideas, and of his religious history; but they did not harden, as in thinkers of another temper has often been the case, his style or his thought. On the contrary, they softened both; and it is when he is least under the influence of them that unction chiefly deserts him. Yet he by no means often sought to excite his hearers. He held, as he himself somewhere says, that "impassioned thoughts and sublime imaginings have no strength in them." And this conviction of his can hardly be strange to the fact that few writers indulge so little as Newman in what is called fine writing. He has "organ passages," but they are such as the wind blowing as it lists draws from him, not such as are produced by deliberate playing on himself.

In a wider space it would be interesting to comment on numerous other exponents of the Movement. Archdeacon afterwards Cardinal Manning (1807-93), the successful rival of Newman among those Anglican clergymen who joined the Church of Rome, was less a man of letters than a very astute man of business; but his sermons before he left the Church had merit, and he afterwards wrote a good deal. Richard Hurrell Froude (1803-36), elder brother of the historian, had a very great and not perhaps a very beneficent influence on Newman, and through Newman on others; but he died too soon to leave much work. His chief distinguishing note was a vigorous and daring humour allied to a strong reactionary sentiment. Isaac Williams, the second poet of the Movement (1802-65), was in most respects, as well as in poetry, a minor Keble. W. G. Ward, commonly called "Ideal" Ward from his famous, very ill-written, very ill-digested, but important Ideal of a Christian Church, which was the alarm-bell for the flight to Rome, was a curiously constituted person of whom something has been said in reference to Clough. He had little connection with pure letters, and after his secession to Rome and his succession to a large fortune he finally devoted himself to metaphysics of a kind. His acuteness was great, and he had a scholastic subtlety and logical deftness which made him very formidable to the loose thinkers and reasoners of Utilitarianism and anti-Supernaturalism. One of the latest important survivors was Dean Church (1815-91), who, as Proctor, had arrested the persecution of the Tractarians, with which it was sought to complete the condemnation of Ward's Ideal, and who afterwards, both in a country cure and as Dean of St. Paul's, acquired very high literary rank by work on Dante, Anselm, Spenser, and other subjects, leaving also the best though unfortunately an incomplete history of the Movement itself; while the two Mozleys, the one a considerable theologian, the other an active journalist, brothers-in-law of Newman, also deserve mention. Last of all perhaps we must notice Henry Parry Liddon (1829-90), of a younger generation, but the right-hand man of Pusey in his later day, and his biographer afterwards – a popular and pleasing, though rather rhetorical than argumentative or original, preacher, and a man very much affected by his friends. Even this list is nothing like complete, but it is impossible to enlarge it.

Midway between the Movement and its enemies, a partial sympathiser in early days, almost an enemy when the popular tide turned against it, almost a leader when public favour once more set in in its favour, was Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and Winchester (1805-73). The third son of the celebrated emancipationist and evangelical, he had brothers who were more attracted than himself by the centripetal force of Roman doctrine, and succumbed to it. Worldly perhaps as much as spiritual motives kept him steadier. He did invaluable work as a bishop; and at all times of his life he was in literature a distinct supporter of the High Church cause, though with declensions and defections of Erastian and evangelical backsliding. He was a very admirable preacher, though his sermons do not read as well as they "heard"; some of his devotional manuals are of great excellence; and in the heyday of High Church allegory (an interesting by-walk of literature which can only be glanced at here, but which was trodden by some estimable and even some eminent writers) he produced the well hit-off tale of Agathos (1839). But it may be that he will, as a writer, chiefly survive in the remarkable letters and diaries in his Life, which are not only most valuable for the political and ecclesiastical history of the time, but precious always as human documents and sometimes as literary compositions.

Three remarkable persons must be mentioned among the opponents of (and in one case harsh judgment might say the deserters of) the Movement. These were Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Mark Pattison, and Benjamin Jowett. Stanley, born in 1815, was the son of the (afterwards) Bishop of Norwich and a nephew of the first Lord Stanley of Alderley, and was brought up very much under the influence of Arnold, whose biographer he became. But he went further than Arnold in Broad Church ways. His career at Rugby and at Oxford was distinguished, and after being fellow and tutor of University College for some ten years, he became successively Canon of Canterbury, Canon of Christ Church, and Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, and Dean of Westminster, in which last post he had almost greater opportunities than any bishop, and used them to the full. He also wrote busily, devoting himself especially to the geography of Palestine and the history of the Eastern Church, which he handled in a florid and popular style, though not with much accuracy or scholarship. Personally, Stanley was much liked, though his conception of his duties as a sworn servant of the Church has seemed strange to some. He died in July 1881.

Mark Pattison (1813-84), Fellow and Rector of Lincoln College, had a less amiable character than Stanley's, but a greater intellect and far nicer, profounder, and wider scholarship, though he actually did very little. He fell under the influence of Newman early, and was one of that leader's closest associates in his monastic retreat at Littlemore. But when Newman "went over," the wave swept Pattison neither to Rome nor safely on to higher English ground, but into a religious scepticism, the exact extent of which was nowhere definitely announced, but which was regarded by some as nearly total. He did not nominally leave the Church, but he acted always with the extreme Liberal party in the University, and he was one of the famous Seven who contributed to Essays and Reviews11. The shock of his religious revolution was completed by a secular disappointment – his defeat for the office of Rector, which he actually attained much later; and a temper always morbid, appears, to judge from his painful but extraordinarily interesting and characteristic Memoirs, to have been permanently soured. Even active study became difficult to him, and though he was understood to have a more extensive acquaintance with the humanists of the late Renaissance than any man of his day, his knowledge took little written form except a volume on Isaac Casaubon. He also wrote an admirable little book on Milton for the English Men of Letters, edited parts of Milton and Pope, and contributed a not inconsiderable number of essays and articles to the Quarterly and Saturday Reviews, and other papers. The autobiography mentioned was published after his death.

Despite Pattison's peculiar temper he had warm and devoted friends, and it was impossible for any one, whether personally liking him or not, to deny him the possession of most unusual gifts. Whether his small performance was due to the shocks just referred to, to genuine fastidiousness and resolve to do nothing but the best, or to these things mixed with a strong dash of downright indolence and want of energy, is hard to say. But it would be entirely unjust to regard him as merely a man who was "going to do something." His actual work though not large is admirable, and his style is the perfection of academic correctness, not destitute of either vigour or grace.

There were some resemblances between Pattison and Jowett (1817-94); but the latter, unlike Pattison, had never had any sympathies with the religious renaissance of his time. Like Pattison he passed his entire life (after he obtained a Balliol fellowship) in his College, and like him became head of it; while he was a much more prominent member of the Liberal party in Oxford. His position as Regius Professor of Greek gave him considerable influence even beyond Balliol. He, too, was an Essayist and Reviewer, and he exercised a quiet but pervading influence in University matters. He even acquired no mean name in literature, though his work, after an early Commentary on some Epistles of St. Paul, was almost entirely confined to translations, especially of Plato, and though in these translations he was much assisted by pupils. He wrote well, but with much less distinction and elegance than Pattison, nor had he by any means the same taste for literature and erudition in it. But, as an influence on the class of persons from whom men of letters are drawn, no one has exceeded him in his day.

The dramatic catastrophe of the Disruption of the Scotch Kirk, which, by a strange coincidence, was nearly contemporary with the crisis of the Oxford Movement, set the final seal upon the reputation of Thomas Chalmers, who headed the seceders. But this reputation had been made long before, and indeed Chalmers died 30th May 1847, only four years after he "went out." He was a much older man than the Oxford leaders, having been born in 1780, and after having for some years, though a minister, devoted himself chiefly to secular studies, he became famous as a preacher at the Tron Church, Glasgow. In 1823 he was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews, and (shortly afterwards) of Theology in Edinburgh. He was one of the Bridgewater treatise writers – a group of distinguished persons endowed to produce tractates on Natural Theology – and his work, The Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man, was one of the most famous of that set, procuring for him a correspondence-membership from the French Institute and a D.C.L. from Oxford. Chalmers' works are extremely voluminous; the testimony as to the effect of his preaching is tolerably uniform; he was a man of very wide range of thought, and of remarkable faculty of popularisation; and there is no doubt that he was a born leader of men. But as literature his works have hardly maintained the reputation which they once had, and even those who revere him, unless they let reverence stifle criticism, are apt to acknowledge that there is more rhetoric than logic in him, and that the rhetoric itself is not of the finest.

Edward Irving, at one time an assistant to Chalmers, and an early friend of Carlyle, was twelve years the junior of Chalmers himself, and died thirteen years before him. But at nearly the time when Chalmers was at the height of his reputation as a preacher in Glasgow, Irving was drawing crowds to the unfashionable quarter of Hatton Garden, London, by sermons of extraordinary brilliancy. Later he developed eccentricities of doctrine which do not concern us, and his preaching has not worn much better than that of his old superior. Irving, however, had more strictly literary affinities than Chalmers; he came under the influence of Coleridge (which probably had not a little to do both with his eloquence and with his vagaries); and he may be regarded as having been much more of a man of letters who had lost his way and strayed into theology than as a theologian proper.

To what extent this great and famous influence of Coleridge actually worked upon Frederick Denison Maurice has been debated. It is however generally stated that he, like his friend Sterling, was induced to take orders in the Church of England by this influence. He was not a very young man when in 1834, the year of Irving's death, he did this, for he had been born in 1805, and had been educated at Cambridge, though being then a Unitarian he did not take a degree. He afterwards went to Oxford and took an M.A. degree there, and he was regarded for a time as a sort of outlying sympathiser with the Tractarian Movement. But his opinions took a very different line of development not merely from those of Newman, but from those of Keble and Pusey. He indeed never left the Church, in which he held divers preferments; and though his views on eternal punishment lost him a professorship in King's College, London, he met with no formal ecclesiastical censure. But he came to be regarded as a champion of the Broad Church school, and upheld eloquently and vehemently, if not always with a sufficiency either of logic or of learning, a curious conglomerate of "advanced" views, ranging from Christian Socialism to something like the views of the Atonement attributed to Origen, and from deprecation of dogma to deprecation of the then fashionable political economy. He was made Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge in 1866, and died in 1872. Maurice's sermons were effective, and his other works numerous. A very generous and amiable person with a deficient sense of history, Maurice in his writing is a sort of elder, less gifted, and more exclusively theological Charles Kingsley, on whom he exercised great and rather unfortunate influence. But his looseness of thought, wayward eclecticism of system, and want of accurate learning, were not remedied by Kingsley's splendid pictorial faculty, his creative imagination, or his brilliant style.

Somewhat akin to Maurice, but of a more feminine and less robust temperament, was Frederick Robertson, generally called "Robertson of Brighton," from the place of his last cure. Robertson, who was the son of a soldier, was born in London on 3rd February 1816. After a rather eccentric education and some vacillations about a profession, he went, rather late, to Oxford, and was ordained in 1840. He had very bad health, but did duty, chiefly at Cheltenham and at Brighton, pretty valiantly, and died on August 1853. He published next to nothing in his lifetime, but after his death there appeared several volumes of sermons which gained great popularity, and were followed by other posthumous works. Robertson's preaching is not very easy to judge, because the published sermons are admittedly not what was actually delivered, but after-reminiscences or summaries, and the judgment is not rendered easier by the injudicious and gushing laudation of which he has been made the subject. He certainly possessed a happy gift of phrase now and then, and remarkable earnestness.

Note. – In no chapter, perhaps, has there been greater difficulty as to inclusion and exclusion than in the present. The names of Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, of Dean Alford, of Bishop Lightfoot for England, of Bishop Charles Wordsworth, of Dean Ramsay, of Drs. Candlish, Guthrie, and Macleod for Scotland, may seem to clamour among orthodox theologians, those of W. R. Greg, of James Hinton, of W. K. Clifford among not always orthodox lay dealers with the problems of philosophy, or of theology, or both. With less tyrannous limits of space Principal Tulloch, who was noteworthy in both these and in pure literature as well (he was the last editor of Fraser), must have received at least brief notice in this chapter, as must his brother Principal, J. C. Shairp (an amiable poet, an agreeable critic, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford), in others.

CHAPTER IX

LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM IN ART AND LETTERS

In a former chapter we conducted the history of criticism, especially literary criticism, and that chiefly as displayed in the periodicals which were reorganized and refreshed in the early years of the century, to about 1850. We have now to take it up at that point and conduct it – subject to the limitations of our plan as regards living authors, and in one extremely important case taking the license of outstepping these limits – to the present or almost the present day. We shall have to consider the rise and performances of two great individual writers, one of whom entirely re-created, if he may not almost be said to have created, the criticism of art in England, while the other gave a new temper, if not exactly a new direction, to the criticism of literature; and we shall have, in regard to periodicals, to observe the rise, in the first place of the weekly newspaper, and then of the daily, as competitors in strictly critical and literary work with the quarterly and monthly reviews, as well as some changes in these latter.

For just as we found that the first development of nineteenth century criticism coincided with or followed upon a new departure or development in periodicals, so we shall find that a similar change accompanied or caused changes in the middle of the century. Although the popularity of the quarterly and monthly reviews and magazines which had been headed respectively by the Edinburgh and Blackwood did not exactly wane, and though some of the most brilliant work of the middle of the century – George Eliot's novels, Kingsley's and Froude's essays, and the like – appeared in them, the ever fickle appetite of readers seemed to desire something else in shape, something different in price, style, and form. Why this sort of change, which is perpetually recurring, should usually bring with it a corresponding change, and sometimes a corresponding improvement, of literary production, is more than any one can say, but the fact is not easily disputable.

On the present occasion the change took three successive forms – first, the raising, or rather restoring, of the weekly sixpenny critical newspaper to a higher pitch of popularity than it had ever held; secondly, the cheapening and multiplying of the monthly magazines; thirdly, the establishment of new monthly reviews, somewhat more resembling the old quarterlies than anything else, but with signed instead of anonymous articles.

The uprising of the weekly newspaper took shape in two remarkably different forms, represented respectively by Household Words, which Dickens started early in the fifties, and by the Saturday Review, which came a little later. The former might best be described as a monthly of the Blackwood and London kind cheapened, made more frequent in issue, and adjusted to a considerably lower and more popular standard of interest and culture – politics, moreover, being ostensibly though not quite really excluded. Dickens contributed to it largely himself. He received contributions from writers of established repute like Bulwer and Lever; but he made his chief mark with the paper by breeding up a school of younger writers who wrote to his own pattern in fiction, miscellaneous essay, and other things. Wilkie Collins was the chief of these, but there were many others. In particular the periodical developed a sort of popular, jocular, and picturesque-descriptive manner of treating places, travels, ceremonies, and what not, which took the public fancy immensely. It was not quite original (for Leigh Hunt, Wainewright the murderer-miscellanist of the London, some of the Blackwood men, and others, had anticipated it to a certain extent), and it was vulgarised as regards all its models; but it was distinct and remarkable. The æsthetic and literary tone of Household Words, and of its successor All the Year Round to a somewhat less extent, was distinctly what is called Philistine; and though Dickens always had a moral purpose, he did not aim much higher than amusement that should not be morbid, and instruction of the middle-class diffusion-of-knowledge kind. But there was very little harm and much good to be said of Household Words; and if some of the imitations of it were far from being happy, its own popularity and that of its successor were very fairly deserved.