A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

The aims, the character, and the success of the Saturday Review were of the most widely different character. It was less novel in form, for the weekly review was an established thing, and had at least two very respectable examples – the Examiner, which (under the Hunts, under Fonblanque, under Forster, and under the late Mr. Minto) had a brilliant, if never an extremely prosperous, career for three-quarters of the century, and the Spectator, which attained a reputation for unswerving honesty under the editorship of Mr. Rentoul, and has increased it under that of its present conductors. But both these were Liberal papers first of all; the Saturday Review, at first and accidentally Peelite, was really (throughout the nearly forty years during which it remained in the possession of the same family and was directed by a succession of editors each of whom had been trained under his predecessor) Independent Tory, or (to use a rather unhappy and now half-forgotten name) Liberal-Conservative. It never tied itself to party chariot-wheels, and from the first to the last of the period just referred to very distinguished writers of Liberal and Radical opinions contributed to it. But the general attitude of the paper during this time expressed that peculiar tone of mainly Conservative persiflage which has distinguished in literature the great line of writers beginning with Aristophanes. Its staff was, as a rule, recruited from the two Universities (though there was no kind of exclusion for the unmatriculated; as a matter of fact, neither of its first two editors was a son either of Oxford or Cambridge), and it always insisted on the necessity of classical culture. It eschewed the private personality which had been too apt to disfigure newspapers of a satirical kind during the first half of the century; but it claimed and exercised to the full the privilege of commenting on every public writing, utterance, or record of the subjects of its criticism. It observed, for perhaps a longer time than any other paper, the salutary principles of anonymity (real as well as ostensible) in regard to the authorship of particular articles; and those who knew were constantly amused at the public mistakes on this subject.

Applying this kind of criticism, – perfectly fearless, on the whole fairly impartial, informed, human errors excepted, by a rather exceptionally high degree of intelligence and education, and above all keeping before it the motto, framed by its "sweet enemy" Thackeray, of being written "by gentlemen for gentlemen," – the Saturday Review quickly attained, and for many years held, the very highest place in English critical journalism as regards literature, in a somewhat less degree politics, and in a degree even greater the farrago of social and miscellaneous matters. By consent too general and too unbiassed to be questioned, it gave and maintained a certain tone of comment which prevailed for the seventh, eighth, and ninth decades of the century, and of which the general note may be said to have been a coolly scornful intolerance of ignorance and folly. There were those who accused it even in its palmiest days of being insufficiently positive and constructive; but on the negative side it was generally sound in intention, and in execution admirably thorough. It may sometimes have mishandled an honest man, it may sometimes have forgiven a knave; but it always hated a fool, and struck at him with might and with main.

The second change began with the establishment of the Cornhill and Macmillan's Magazine, two or three years later. There was no perceptible difference in the general scheme of these periodicals from that of the earlier ones, of which Blackwood and Fraser were the most famous; but their price was lowered from half a crown to a shilling, and the principle of signed articles and of long novels by famous names was adopted. The editorship of Thackeray in the Cornhill, with the contributions of Matthew Arnold and others, quickly gave a character to it; while Macmillan's could boast contributions from the Kingsleys, Henry and Charles, as well as from many others. From this time the monthly magazine, with the exception of Blackwood, found a shilling, which attempts have been recently made to lower to sixpence, its almost necessary tariff, while the equal necessity of addressing the largest possible audience made pure politics, with occasional exceptions, unwelcome in it. It is to the credit of the English magazines of this class, however, that they have never relinquished the tradition of serious literary studies. Many of the essays of Mr. Arnold appeared first either in one or the other of the two just mentioned; the Cornhill even ventured upon Mr. Ruskin's Unto this Last; and other famous books of a permanent character saw the light in these, in Temple Bar, started by Mr. Bentley, in the rather short-lived St. Paul's, of which Anthony Trollope was editor, and in others.

Whether the starting of the monthly "Review" as distinguished from the "Magazine," which came again a little later towards the middle or end of the sixties, be traceable to a parallel popularisation of the quarterly ideal – to the need for the political and "heavy" articles which the lightened monthlies had extruded – or to a mere imitation of the famous French Revue des Deux Mondes, is an academic question. The first of these new Reviews was the Fortnightly, which found the exact French model unsuitable to the meridian of Greenwich, and dropped the fortnightly issue, while retaining the title. It was followed by the Contemporary, the Nineteenth Century, and others. The exclusion of fiction in these was not invariable – the Fortnightly, in particular, has published many of Mr. Meredith's novels. But, as a rule, these reviews have busied themselves with more or less serious subjects, and have encouraged signed publication.

It would, of course, be impossible here to go through all, or even all the most noteworthy, of the periodicals of the century. We are dealing with classes, not individuals, and the only class yet to be noticed – daily newspapers falling out of our ken almost entirely – are those weekly newspapers which have eschewed politics altogether. The oldest and most famous of these is the Athenæum, which still flourishes after a life of nearly seventy years, while between forty and fifty years later the Academy was founded on the same general principles. But the Athenæum has always cleaved, as far as its main articles went, to the unsigned system, while the Academy started at a period which leant the other way. Of late years, too, criticism proper, that is to say, of letters and art, has played a larger and larger part in daily newspapers, some of which attempt a complete review of books as they appear, while others give reviews of selected works as full as those of the weeklies. If any distinct setting of example is necessary to be attributed in this case, the credit is perhaps mainly due to the original Pall Mall Gazette, an evening newspaper started in 1864 with one of the most brilliant staffs ever known, including many of the original Saturday writers and others.

The result of this combined opportunity and stimulus in so many forms has been that almost the whole of the critical work of the latter part of the century has passed through periodicals – that, except as regards Mr. Ruskin, a writer always indocile to editing, every one who will shortly be mentioned in this chapter has either won his spurs or exercised them in this kind, and that of the others, mentioned in other chapters and in connection with other subjects, a very small proportion can be said to have been entirely disdainful of periodical publication. At the very middle of the century, and later, the older Quarterlies were supported by men like John Wilson Croker, a survival of their first generation Nassau W. Senior, and Abraham Hayward, the last a famous talker and "diner-out." Other chief critics and essayists, besides Kingsley and Froude, were George Brimley, Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge; Henry Lancaster, a Balliol man and a Scotch barrister; and Walter Bagehot, a banker, and not a member of either University. Brimley has left us what is perhaps the best appreciation of Tennyson in the time between the days when that poet was flouted or doubted by the usual critic, and those when he was accepted as a matter of course or cavilled at as a matter of paradox; and Lancaster occupies pretty much the same position with regard to Thackeray. It is not so easy to single out any particular and distinguishing critical effort of Bagehot's, who wrote on all subjects, from Lombard Street to Tennyson, and from the Coup d'État (which he saw) to Browning. But his distinction of the poetical art of Wordsworth and that of these other poets as "pure, ornate, and grotesque" will suffice to show his standpoint, which was a sort of middle place between the classical and the Romantic. Bagehot wrote well, and possessed a most keen intelligence. Also to be classed here are Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, the very agreeable author of Horæ Subsecivæ, and James Hannay, a brilliant journalist, a novelist of some merit and an essayist of more, and author of A Course of English Literature which, though a little popular and desultory, is full of sense and stimulus.

Most popular of all at the time was Sir Arthur Helps (1813-75), a country gentleman of some means and of the usual education, who took to a mixed life of official and literary work, did some useful work in regard to Spanish-American history, but acquired most popularity by a series of dialogues, mostly occupied by ethical and æsthetic criticism, called Friends in Council. This contains plenty of knowledge of books, touches of wit and humour, a satisfactory standard of morals and manners, a certain effort at philosophy, but suffers from the limitations of its date. In different ways enough – for he was as quiet as the other was showy – Helps was the counterpart of Kinglake, as exhibiting a certain stage in the progress of English culture during the middle of the century – a stage in which the Briton was considerably more alive to foreign things than he had been, had enlarged his sphere in many ways, and was at least striving to be cosmopolitan, but had lost insular strength without acquiring Continental suppleness.

Of the literary critic who attracted most public attention during this period, – the late Mr. Matthew Arnold, – considerable mention has already been made in dealing with his poetry, and biographical details must be looked for there. It will be remembered that Mr. Arnold was not very early a popular writer either as poet or prose-man, that his poetical exercises preceded by a good deal his prose, and that these latter were, if not determined, largely influenced by his appointment to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. He began, however, towards the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties, to be much noticed, not merely as the deliverer of lectures, but as the contributor of essays of an exceedingly novel, piquant, and provocative kind; and in 1865 these, or some of them, were collected and published under the title of Essays in Criticism. These Essays– nine in number, besides a characteristic preface – dealt ostensibly for the most part, if not wholly, with literary subjects, – "The Function of Criticism," "The Literary Influence of Academies," "The Guérins" (brother and sister), "Heine," "Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment," "Joubert," "Spinoza," and "Marcus Aurelius," – but they extended the purport of the title of the first of them in the widest possible way. Mr. Arnold did not meddle with art, but he extended the province of literature outside of it even more widely than Mr. Ruskin did, and was, under a guise of pleasant scepticism, as dogmatic within the literary province as Mr. Ruskin in the artistic. It might almost be said that Mr. Arnold put himself forth, with a becoming attempt at modesty of manner, but with very uncompromising intentions, as "Socrates in London," questioning, probing, rebuking with ironical faithfulness, the British Philistine – a German term which he, though not the first to import it, made first popular – in literature, in newspapers, in manners, in politics, in philosophy. Foreign, and specially French, ways were sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, held up as examples for our improvement; and the want of "ideas," the want of "light," the want of "culture," was dwelt on with a mixture of sorrow and satire. All this was couched in a very peculiar and (till its mannerism became irritating) a very captivating style, which cannot be assigned to any single original, but which is a sort of compound or eclectic outcome of the old Oxford academic style as it may be seen at times in Newman, of French persiflage, and of some elements peculiar to Mr. Arnold himself. The strongest, though the most dangerous, of these elements was a trick of iterating words and phrases, sometimes exactly, sometimes with a very slight variation, which inevitably arrested attention, and perhaps at first produced conviction, on the principle formulated by a satirist (also of Oxford) a little later in the words —

What I tell you three times is true.

But besides and underneath all this flourish, all this wide-ranging scatter of sometimes rather haphazard arrows, there was a solid literary value in Mr. Arnold's method. As has been noticed earlier in this chapter, the literary essay of the best kind had somewhat gone off in England during the middle of the century, and the short, crisp criticisms which had appeared to take its place in weekly papers were almost necessarily exposed to grave faults and inadequacies. It was Mr. Arnold's great merit that by holding up Sainte-Beuve, from whom he had learnt much, and other French critics, and by urging successfully the revival of the practice of "introducing" editions of classics by a sound biographical and critical essay from the pen of some contemporary, he did much to cure this state of things. So that, whereas the corpus of English essay-criticism between 1800 and 1835 or thereabouts is admirable, and that of 1835 to 1865 rather thin and scanty, the last third of the century is not on such very bad terms as regards the first. And he gave example as well as precept, showing – though his subjects, as in the case of the Guérins, were sometimes most eccentrically selected – a great deal of critical acuteness, coupled, it may be, with something of critical "will-worship," with a capricious and unargued preference of this and rejection of that, but exhibiting wide if not extraordinarily deep reading, an honest enthusiasm for the best things, and above all a fascinating rhetoric.

The immediate effect of this remarkable book was good almost unmixedly on two of the three parties concerned. It was more than time for the flower of middle-class complacency, which horticulturists of all degrees, from Macaulay downwards, had successively striven to cultivate, and which was already overblown, to drop from its stalk; and the whiff of pleasant scorn which Mr. Arnold directed at it was just the thing to puff it off. So the public, upon which he was never likely to produce too much effect, had reason to thank him for the effect that he did produce, or helped to produce. And on the critics too his effect, or the effect of which he was the symptom and voice, was also good, recalling them on the one hand from the dulness of the long reviews of the period, and on the other from the flippancy of the short, while inculcating a wider if not always a sounder comparison. Practically German poetry had nothing left to do in Mr. Arnold's day, and French had much: he thought just the other way, and reserved his encomium of France for its prose, in which it was drooping and failing. But this did not matter: it is the general scope of the critic's advice which is valuable in such cases, and the general scope of Mr. Arnold's was sound. On the third party, however, – himself, – the effect was a little disastrous. The reception which, after long waiting, he had attained, encouraged him not so much to continue in his proper sphere of literary criticism as to embark on a wide and far-ranging enterprise of general censure, which narrowed itself pretty rapidly to an attempt to establish undogmatic on the ruins of dogmatic Christianity. It would be very improper to discuss such an undertaking on the merits here; or to criticise narrowly the series of singular treatises which absorbed (with exceptions, no doubt, such as the quaint sally of Friendship's Garland on the occasion of the Franco-German War) Mr. Arnold's energies for some fifteen or sixteen years. The titles —Culture and Anarchy, God and the Bible, St. Paul and Protestantism, Literature and Dogma, etc. – are well known. Of the contents it is enough to say that, apart from the popular audacity of their wit and the interesting spectacle of a pure man of letters confidently attacking thorny questions without any apparatus of special knowledge and study, they have not been generally thought quite worthy of their author. There are many brilliant passages in these books as writing, just as there are some astonishing lapses of taste and logic; but the real fault of the whole set is that they are popular, that they undergo the very curse, of speaking without qualification and without true culture, which Mr. Arnold had himself so freely pronounced.

Fortunately, however, he never quite abandoned the old ways; and in his last years he returned to them almost wholly. Nothing better of the kind (individual crotchets always excepted) has ever been written than his introductions to selected lives from Johnson's Poets, to Byron, to Shelley (the most crotchety and unsound of all), to Wordsworth (incomparably the best). He aided others; and a collection of his purely or mainly literary work is still eagerly expected. Even this would be extremely unequal and open to exception here and there. But it would contain some of the very best things to be found in any English critic. And this after all, if not the absolutely highest, is one of the highest things that can be said of a critic, and one of the rarest. Undoubtedly the influence of Mr. Arnold did not make for good entirely. He discouraged – without in the least meaning to do so, and indeed meaning quite the contrary – seriousness, thoroughness, scholarship in criticism. He discouraged – without in the least meaning to do so, and indeed meaning quite the contrary – simplicity and unaffectedness in style. But he was a most powerful stimulus, and in some ways, if not in all, a great example. Some at least of the things he said were in the very greatest need of saying, and some of the ways in which he said them were inimitably charming.

Contemporary with Mr. Arnold, and his complement in critical influence, was John Ruskin, the sole living author of whom it has seemed proper to treat here at length, and, since the death of Mr. Froude, the sole surviving man of letters of the first class who had published before the middle of the century. He was born in 1819: he has given copious accounts of his family, of his youth at Denmark Hill, and so forth, and all the world knows that his father was a sherry merchant who, though he lived rather plainly, was able to give his son an early and plentiful indulgence in that Continental travel which had so much to do with developing his genius. Mr. Ruskin's education was oddly combined; for, after going to no school, he was sent to Christ Church as a gentleman-commoner and took his degree in 1842, having gained the Newdigate three years earlier. He wrote a good deal of other verse in his early years, – and he made himself a not inconsiderable draughtsman. But his real vocation was as little the practice of art as it was the practice of poetry. As early as 1843 there appeared, by "a Graduate of Oxford," the first volume of the famous Modern Painters, which ran to five large volumes, which covered seventeen years in its original period of publication, and which was very largely altered and remodelled by the author during and after this period. But Mr. Ruskin by no means confined his energies before 1860 to this extensive task. The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and (between 1851 and 1853) the larger Stones of Venice, did for architecture what the companion work did for painting. The Præ-Raphaelite movement of the middle of the century found in Mr. Ruskin an ardent encomiast and literary apostle, and between 1850 and 1860 he delivered divers lectures, the text of which —Architecture and Painting (1854), Political Economy of Art (1858) – was subsequently published in as elaborately magnificent a style as his other works. As Modern Painters drew to its close he became prolific of more numerous and shorter works, generally with somewhat fantastic but agreeable titles —Unto this Last (1861), Munera Pulveris (1862), Sesame and Lilies (1865), The Cestus of Aglaia (1865), The Ethics of the Dust (1866), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), Time and Tide by Wear and Tyne (1867), The Queen of the Air (1869), Aratra Pentelici and The Eagle's Nest (1872), Ariadne Florentina (1873), Proserpina and Deucalion (1875 seq.), St. Mark's Rest and Præterita (1885). Not a few of these were issued in parts and numbers, but Mr. Ruskin's bulkiest and most characteristic venture in this kind was Fors Clavigera, which was published at irregular intervals from 1871 to 1884. He has written many other things even in book form, besides innumerable essays and letters, some of which have been collected in two gatherings —Arrows of the Chace and On the Old Road.

Two things are mainly perceptible in this immense and at first sight rather bewildering production. The first, the most disputable and probably the least important, though the most at the author's heart, is a vast, fluctuating, but on the whole pretty coherent body of doctrine in reference to Art. Up to Mr. Ruskin's day, æsthetics had been little cultivated in England, and such handlings of the subject as existed – Burke's, Adam Smith's, Alison's, and a few others – were of a jejune and academic character. Even writers of distinct literary genius and of great taste for the matter, who had not resided abroad long, such as Hazlitt, much more such as Charles Lamb and Hartley Coleridge, betray the want of range and practice in examples. Even the valuable and interesting work of Mrs. Jameson (1794-1860) was more occupied with careful arrangement and attractive illustration than with original theory; and, well as she wrote, her Characteristics of Shakespeare's Women (1832) is perhaps more important as literature than the series of volumes —Sacred and Legendary Art, etc. – which she executed between 1845 and her death. The sense of the endless and priceless illustration of the best art which was provided by Gothic domestic and ecclesiastical architecture was only wakening; as for painting, the examples publicly visible in England were very few, and even private collections were mostly limited to one or two fashionable schools – Raphael and his successors, the later Low Country schools, the French painters in the grand style, and a few Spaniards.

Strongly impressed by the Romantic revival (he has all his life been the staunchest of Sir Walter's devotees), a passionate lover of Gothic architecture both at home and abroad, and early drawn both to the romantic nature-painting of Turner and the gorgeous colouring of the early Italian schools, Mr. Ruskin heralded Art with a passion of which eighteenth century "gusto" had had no notion. But he was by no means satisfied with heralding Art alone. Anathematising at once the doctrine that utility is beauty – that beauty is utility he would always have cheerfully admitted – and the doctrine that the beautiful is not necessarily connected either with utility, with goodness, or with truth, he from the first and to the last has endeavoured to work ethics and æsthetics into a sort of single texture of warp and woof respectively, pushing his endeavours into the most multiform, the most curious, and it must be owned sometimes the most grotesque ramifications and extremities. But he was not satisfied with this bold attempt at the marriage of two things sometimes deemed hostile to, and generally held to be independent of, one another. He must needs be bolder still, and actually attempt to ally with Art, if not to subject to her, the youngest, the most rebellious, and, as it might seem, the most matter-of-fact and utilitarian of all the sciences – that of Political Economy. As we have seen, he had brought the subjects together in lectures pretty early in his career, and he developed the combination further in the eccentric book called Unto this Last, originally published in the Cornhill Magazine as noted above. In this Æsthetics and Economics combined took a distinctly Socialist turn; and as England was under the very fullest dominion of the Liberal middle-class regime, with its belief in laissez-faire and in supply-and-demand, Mr. Ruskin was not a little pooh-poohed. It would be improper here to attack or to defend his views, but it is part of the historian's duty to say that, for good or for ill, they have, though in forms different from his and doubtless by no means always meeting his approval, made constant headway, and that much legislation and still more agitation on the extreme Liberal side, and not there only, may be said to represent, with very slight transformation, Ruskinian doctrine applied, now and then, to very anti-Ruskinian purposes.