A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

Of the highest poetry, however, as of other highest things, Goethe's famous axiom Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh holds good. Although there is a difference between the expressions of this highest poetry in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, in the fourteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth after Christ there is also a certain quiet sameness, not indiscernibility but still identity. The lower kinds of literature admit of more apparent and striking freshness of exterior. And perhaps the most strikingly fresh, some might even say the distinctive, product of the nineteenth century, is its prose fiction.

This, as has been shown in detail, is much later in date than the poetry in anything like a characteristic and fully developed state. Although it was busily produced during the last twenty years of the eighteenth century and the first fifteen of the nineteenth, the very best work of the time, except such purely isolated things as Vathek, are experiments, and all but the very best – the novels of Miss Edgeworth, those written but not till quite the end of the time published by Miss Austen, and a very few others – are experiments of singular lameness and ill success.

With Scott's change from verse to prose, the modern romance admittedly, and to a greater extent than is generally thought the modern novel, came into being; and neither has gone out of being since. In the two chapters which have been devoted to the subject we have seen how the overpowering success of Waverley bred a whole generation of historical novels; how side by side with this the older novel of manners, slightly altered, continued to be issued, with comic deviations chiefly, as in the hands of Theodore Hook; how Bulwer attempted a sort of cross between the two; how about the middle of the century the historical novel either ceased or changed, to revive later after a middle period illustrated by the brilliant romances of Kingsley; how about the same time the strictly modern novel of manners came into being in the hands of Thackeray, Miss Brontë, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope, Dickens overlapping both periods in a fantastic and nondescript style of his own; and how more recently still both romance and novel have spread out and ramified into endless subdivisions.

There is, however, this broad line of demarcation between poetry and the novel, that they are written for different ends and from different motives. It is natural to man to write poetry; it does not appear to be by any means so certainly or unvaryingly necessary to him to read it. Except at rare periods and for short times, poetry has never offered the slightest chance of livelihood to any considerable number of persons; and it is tolerably certain that if the aggregate number of poets since the foundation of the world had had nothing to live on but their aggregate gains as poets, starvation would have been the commonplace rule, instead of the dramatic exception, among the sons of Apollo.

On the other hand, it is no doubt also natural to man to tell prose stories, and it seems, though it was a late-discovered aptitude, that it is not unnatural to him to read them; but the writing of them does not seem to be at all an innate or widely disseminated need. Until some hundred or two hundred years ago very few were written at all; the instances of persons who do but write novels because they must are exceedingly rare, and it is as certain as anything can be that of the enormous production of the last three-quarters of a century not 5, perhaps not 1 per cent would have been produced if the producing had not led, during the whole of that time, in most cases but those of hopeless incompetence to some sort of a livelihood, in many to very comfortable income, and in some to positive wealth and fame. In other words, poetry is the creation of supply and novel-writing of demand; poetry can hardly ever be a trade and in very rare cases a profession, while novel-writing is commonly a very respectable profession, and unfortunately sometimes a rather disreputable trade.

Like other professions, however, it enlists genius sometimes, talent often; and the several and successive ways in which this genius and this talent show themselves are of more than sufficient interest. But the steady demand, and the inevitable answer to it, work adversely to such spontaneous and interesting fluctuations of production as those which we have traced in reference to poetry. There have been times, particularly that between the cessation of Sir Walter's best work and the perfecting of that of Thackeray, in which the average value of even the best novels was much lower than at other times. But even in these the average volume maintained itself very well, and, indeed, steadily increased.

It is this which, with another to be mentioned shortly, will, so far as it is possible for a contemporary to judge, be noted in the literary history of the future as the distinguishing crop or field of the nineteenth century. Sermons, essays, plays, no doubt, continue to be written; but the novel has supplanted the sermon, the essay, the play in the place which each at different times held as the popular form of literature. It may be added, or repeated, that it has in part at least achieved this result by trespassing upon the provinces of all these three forms and of many others. This is true, but is of somewhat less importance than might be thought. The fable has an old trick of adjusting itself to almost every possible kind of literary use, and the novel is only an enlarged and more fully organised fable. It does not, no doubt, do best when it abuses this privilege of its ancestor, and saturates itself overmuch with "purpose," but it has at least an ancestral right to do so.

There is no doubt also that the popularity of the novel has been very directly connected with a cause which has had all manner of effects fathered upon it – often with no just causation or filiation whatever – to wit, the spread of education. In the proper sense of course the spread of education must always be strictly limited. The number of educable persons probably bears a pretty constant ratio to the population, and when the education reaches the level of the individual's containing power, it simply runs over and is lost. But it is possible to teach nearly everybody reading and writing; and it is a curious but exact observation that a very large proportion of those who have been taught reading require something to read. Now the older departments of literature do not lend themselves with any facility to constant reading by the average man or woman, whose requirements may be said to be amusement rather than positive delight, occupation much rather than intellectual exertion, and above all, something to pass time. For these requirements, or this compound requirement, the hearing of some new thing has been of old recognised as the surest and most generally useful specific. And the novel holds itself out, not indeed always quite truly, as being new or nothing by name and nature. Accordingly the demand for novels has gone on ever increasing, and the supply has never failed to keep up with it.

Nor would it be just to say that the quality has sunk appreciably. The absolutely palmy day of the English nineteenth century in novel-writing was no doubt some thirty-five or forty years ago. Not even the contemporary France of that date can show such a "galaxy-gallery" as the British novelists – Dickens, Thackeray, Miss Brontë, George Eliot, Trollope, Kingsley, Bulwer, Disraeli, Lever, Mr. Meredith, and others – who all wrote in the fifties. But at the beginning of the period the towering genius of Scott and the perfect art of Miss Austen, if we add to them Miss Edgeworth's genial talent, did not find very much of even good second-rate matter to back them; there was, as has been said, a positively barren time succeeding this first stage and preceding the "fifty" period; and twenty years or a little more ago, when Thackeray and Dickens were dead, Trollope and George Eliot past their best, Kingsley and Bulwer moribund, Mr. Meredith writing sparely and unnoticed, the new romantic school not arisen, and no recruit of distinction except Mr. Blackmore firmly set, things were apparently a great deal worse with us in point of novel-writing than they are at present. Whether, with a return of promise and an increase of performance, with a variation of styles and an abundance of experiment, there has also been a relapse into the extravagances which we have had in this very book to chronicle as characterising the fiction of exactly a century ago, – whether we have had over-luxuriant and non-natural style, attempts to attract by loose morality, novels of purpose, novels of problem, and so forth, – and whether the coming age will dismiss much of our most modern work as not superior in literary and inferior in other appeal to the work of Godwin and Lewis, Holcroft and Bage, it is not necessary distinctly to say. But our best is certainly better than the best of that time, our worst is perhaps not worse; and the novel occupies a far higher place in general estimation than it did then. Indeed it has been observed by the sarcastic that to some readers of novels, and even to some writers of them, "novel" and "book" seem to be synonymous terms, and that when such persons speak of "literature," they mean and pretty distinctly indicate that they mean novel-writing, and novel-writing only. This at least shows that the seed which Scott sowed, or the plant which he grafted, has not lost its vitality.

Certainly not less, perhaps even more, distinctive of the time in history must be that development and transformation of what is broadly called the newspaper, of which the facts and details have occupied two more of these chapters. It is true that at times considerably earlier than even the earliest that here concerns us, periodical writing had been something of a power in England as regards politics, had enlisted eminent hands, and had even served once or twice as the means of introduction of considerable works in belles lettres. But the Addisonian Essay had been something of an accident; Swift's participation in the Examiner was another; Defoe's abundant journalism brought him more discredit than profit or praise; and though Pulteney and the Opposition worked the press against Walpole, the process brought little benefit to the persons concerned. Reviewing was meagrely done and wretchedly paid; the examples of Robinson Crusoe earlier and Sir Launcelot Greaves later are exceptions which prove the rule that the feuilleton was not in demand; in fact before our present period newspaper-writing was rather dangerous, was more than rather disreputable, and offered exceedingly little encouragement to any one to make it the occasion of work in pure literature, or even to employ it as a means of livelihood, while attempting other and higher, though less paying kinds.

The period of the French Revolution, if not the French Revolution itself, changed all this, assisted no doubt by the natural and inevitable effects of the spread of reading and the multiplication of books. People wanted to see the news; papers sprang up in competition to enable them to see the news; and the competitors strove to make themselves more agreeable than their rivals by adding new attractions. Again, the activity of the Jacobin party, which early and of course directed itself to the press, necessitated activity on the other side. The keenest intellects, the best-trained wits of the nation, sometimes under some disguise, sometimes openly, took to journalism, and it became simply absurd to regard the journalist as a disreputable garreteer when Windham and Canning were journalists. The larger sale of books and the formation of a regular system of "pushing" them also developed reviews – too frequently, no doubt, in the direction of mere puffing, but even thus with the beneficent result that other reviews came into existence which were not mere puff-engines.

Even these causes and others will not entirely explain the extraordinary development of periodicals of all kinds from quarterly to daily, of which the Edinburgh, Blackwood, the Examiner, and the Times were respectively the most remarkable examples and pioneers in the earlier years of the century, though as a literary organ the Morning Post had at first rather the advantage of the Times. But, as has been said here constantly, you can never explain everything in literary history; and it would be extremely dull if you could. The newspaper press had, for good or for ill, to come; external events to some obvious extent helped its coming; individual talents and aptitudes helped it likewise; but the main determining force was the force of hidden destiny.

There is, however, no mistake possible about the results. It is but a slight exaggeration to say that the periodical rapidly swallowed up all other forms of literature, to this extent and in this sense, that there is hardly a single one of these forms capital performance in which has not at one time or another formed part of the stuff of periodicals, and has not by them been first introduced to the world. Not a little of our poetry; probably the major part of our best fiction; all but a very small part of our essay-writing, critical, meditative, and miscellaneous; and a portion, much larger than would at one time have seemed conceivable, of serious writing in history, philosophy, theology, science, and scholarship, have passed through the mint or mill of the newspaper press before presenting themselves in book form. A certain appreciable, though small part of the best, with much of the worst, has never got beyond that form.

To attempt to collect the result of this change is to attempt something not at all easy, something perhaps which may be regarded as not particularly valuable. The distinction between literature and journalism which is so often heard is, like most such things, a fallacy, or at least capable of being made fallacious. Put as it usually is when the intention is disobliging to the journalist, it comes to this: – that the Essays of Elia, that Southey's Life of Nelson, that some of the best work of Carlyle, Tennyson, Thackeray, and others the list of whom might be prolonged at pleasure, is not literature. Put as it sometimes is by extremely foolish people, it would go to the extent that anything which has not been published in a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly publication is literature.

There is probably no subject on which it is more necessary to clear the mind of cant than this. Of course there is journalism in the sense opposed to literature, though not necessarily opposed in any bad sense. No wise man intends, and no wise man will ever suffer, articles which are in the strict sense articles, which are intended to comment on merely passing events, and to produce a merely immediate effect, to be extracted from journals and put on record as books. Not only is the treatment unsuitable for such record, but it may almost be said that the treatment suitable for things so to be recorded is actually unsuitable for things ephemeral. But there is a very large amount of writing to which this does not in the least apply, and in which it can make no kind of real difference whether the result appears by itself in a bound cloth volume as a whole, or in parts with other things in a pamphlet, covered with paper, or not covered at all. The grain of truth which the fallacy carries is really this: – that the habit of treating some subjects in the peculiar fashion most effective in journalism may spread disastrously to the treatment of other subjects which ought to be treated as literature. This is a truth, but not a large one. There have been at all times, at least since the invention of printing and probably before it, persons who, though they may be guiltless of having ever written an article in their lives, have turned out more or less ponderous library volumes in which the very worst sins of the worst kind of journalist are rampant.

There are, however, more thoughtful reasons for regarding the development of periodicals as not an unmixed boon to letters. The more evanescent kinds of writing are, putting fiction out of the question, so much the more profitable in journalism that it certainly may tempt – that it certainly has tempted – men who could produce, and would otherwise have produced, solid literature. And there is so much more room in it for light things than for things which the average reader regards as heavy, that the heavy contributor is apt to be at a discount, and the light at a premium. But all this is exceedingly obvious. And it may be met on the other side by the equally obvious consideration already referred to, that periodicals have made the literary life possible in a vast number of cases where it was not possible before; that whereas "toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol" was not a very exaggerated description of its prospects little more than a hundred years ago, the patron has become superfluous, want and the gaol rather unlikely, except in cases of extreme misconduct, incompetence, or ill-luck, while if toil and envy remain unvanquished, they are not specially fated to the literary lot. Indeed the more paradoxical of Devil's Advocates against the press usually urge that it has made the literary life too easy, has tempted too many into it, and has thereby increased the flood of mediocrity.

The most serious objection of all perhaps, though even this is rather idle in face of accomplished facts, is that the perpetual mincing up and boiling down of the constituents of the diet of reading have produced, in the appetite and digestive faculties of the modern reader, an inability to cope with a really solid meal of perhaps slightly tough matter, and that periodicals not merely eschew the provision of this solid stuff themselves, but do their best to make things worse by manipulating the contents of books that do contain it.

The fact, however, once more, concerns us much more than moralisings about the fact; and the fact of the prominence, the extraordinary prominence, of the periodical press in the nineteenth century, is as little open to dispute as the prominence in that century's later mechanical history of discoveries in electricity, or in its earlier of experiments with steam. Occasionally one may hear enthusiasts of one kind or another announcing with joy or horror that the periodical is killing the book. But if it is, it is very impartially engaged in begetting it at the same time that it kills; and it may be very seriously doubted whether this killing of a book is an easy act of murder to commit. With the printing press to produce, the curiosity of man to demand, and his vanity and greed – if not also his genius and ambition – to supply, the book is in all probability pretty safe. In the forms and varieties of this periodical publication we have seen some interesting changes. As might have been expected, the tendency has been for the intervals of publication to be shortened – for the quarterly to give way as the fashionable form to the monthly, the monthly to the weekly, the weekly to the daily. Many years ago Macaulay, in a mild protest against having his articles altered by Macvey Napier, suggested in effect that the bloom might be left on poor things destined to be read only for a month or so. The duration of an article now may be measured rather by hours than by weeks. Still many of these changes are more apparent than real; and just as the institution of the graver monthly reviews twenty years ago simply reintroduced the quarterly article in a scarcely altered form after it had been pushed out of favour by the slighter magazine, so other introductions have been in fact reintroductions.

One point, however, of real importance in literary history remains to be noticed, and that is the conflict between signed and anonymous writing. Partly from the causes above enumerated as having conduced to the keeping of journalism in a condition of discredit and danger, partly owing to national idiosyncrasies, the habit of anonymous writing was almost universal in the English press at the beginning of the century. It may have been perfectly well known that such and such an article in the Quarterly was by Southey or Croker, such another in the Edinburgh by Sydney Smith or Macaulay, but the knowledge was, so to speak, unofficial. The question of the identity of "Zeta" in Blackwood cost a man's life; and the system resulted (in daily papers especially) in so much editorial inter-mixture and refashioning, that sometimes it would really have been impossible to assign a single and authentic paternity. Even about the editorship of the great periodicals a sort of coquetry of veiling was preserved, and editors' names, though in most cases perfectly well known, seldom or never appeared.

It is difficult to say exactly when or how this system began to be infringed. But there is no doubt that the prominence given in Household Words to the name and personality of Dickens, who was not unfriendly to self-advertisement, had a good deal to do with it; and when, a little later, the cheap shilling magazines appeared, writing with names became the rule, without them the exception. Criticism, however, for obvious reasons still held back; and it was not till about five and twenty years ago that the example, taken more or less directly from the French, of signed reviews was set by the Academy among weekly papers, and the Fortnightly among monthly reviews. It has been very largely followed even in daily newspapers, and the Saturday Review was probably the last newspaper of mark that maintained an absolutely rigid system of anonymity. It should, however, be observed that the change, while not even yet complete – leading articles being still very rarely signed – has by no means united all suffrages, and has even lost some that it had. Mr. John Morley, for instance, who had espoused it warmly as editor of the Fortnightly, and had, perhaps, done more than any other man to spread it, has avowed in a very interesting paper grave doubts about the result. Still it undoubtedly has increased, and is increasing, and in such cases it is much easier to express an opinion that things ought to be diminished, than either to expect that they will, or to devise any means whereby the diminution is to be effected. As for what is desirable as distinguished from what is likely, the weight of opinion may be thought to be in favour of the absence of signature. Anonymous criticism, if abused, may no doubt be abused to a graver extent than is possible with signed criticism. But such a hackneyed maxim as corruptio optimi shows that this is of itself no argument. On the other hand, signed criticism diminishes both the responsibility and the authority of the editor; it adds either an unhealthy gag or an unhealthy stimulus to the tongue and pen of the contributor; it lessens the general weight of the verdict; and it provokes the worst fault of criticism, the aim at showing off the critic's cleverness rather than at exhibiting the real value and character of the thing criticised. And perhaps some may think the most serious objection of all to be that it encourages the employment of critics, and the reception of what they say, rather for their names than for their competence.

In that very important department of literature which stands midway between Belles Lettres and Science, the department of History, the century cannot indeed claim such striking and popularly effective innovations as in the departments of prose fiction and of periodical writing. Yet it may be questioned whether the change of this old kind is not in itself almost as noteworthy as in the other cases is the practical introduction of a new. What the change is was epigrammatically, if somewhat paradoxically, summed up recently by a great authority, Lord Acton. "History," the Cambridge Professor of that art or science said in his inaugural lecture, "has become independent of the historian."

It is possible to demur to the fact, but it is not difficult to explain the meaning. From the necessity of the case, the earliest history, at least in the West, is almost independent of documents and records. Thucydides and Herodotus wrote, the one from what he had actually seen and heard of contemporary events, the other partly from the same sources and partly from tradition of short date. Somewhat later historians of course had their predecessors before them, and in a few cases a certain amount of document, but never a large amount. When history, vernacular or Latin, began to be written again in the dark and middle ages, the absence of documents was complicated (except in the case of those early chroniclers, English and Irish chiefly, who merely put down local events) by that more peculiar and unaccountable, though possibly kindred, absence of critical spirit, which, of the many things more or less fancifully attributed to the mediæval mind, is perhaps the most certain. It is a constant puzzle to modern readers how to account exactly for the fashion in which men, evidently of great intellectual ability, managed to be without any sense of the value of evidence, or any faculty of distinguishing palpable and undoubted fiction from what either was, or reasonably might be held to be, history. But by degrees this sense came into being side by side with the multiplication of the document itself. Even then, however, it was very long before the average historian either could or would regard himself as bound first to consult all the documents available, and then to sift and adjust them in accordance rather with the laws of evidence and the teachings of the philosophy of history than with his own predilections, or with the necessities of an agreeable narrative. But the patient industry of the French school of historical scholars, at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, founded this new tradition; the magnificent genius of Gibbon showed how the observance of it might not be incompatible with history-writing of the most literary kind; the national and natural tendency of German study adopted it; and shortly after Gibbon's own day the school of historians, which is nothing if not documentary, began gradually to oust that of which the picturesque, if not strictly historical, legend about the Abbé Vertot and his "Mon siège est fait" is the anecdotic locus classicus of characterisation.