A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

It has been shown, in the chapter devoted to the subject, how this school of documentary historians grew and flourished in England itself, from the days of Turner and Palgrave to those of Froude and Freeman. Certainly there could not, at least for some time, be said to be any very sensible tendency in history to dispense with the historian, or, in other and perhaps rather more intelligible words, of history ceasing to be literary. No historians have been more omnilegent, more careful of the document, than Carlyle and Macaulay, much as they differed in other respects, and in no histories has the "historian" – that is to say, the personal writer as opposed to the mere "diplomatist" – been more evident than he is in theirs. Nor is it very easy to see why the mere study of the document, still less why the mere accumulation of the document, should ever render superfluous the intelligent shaping which the historian alone can give. In the first place, documents are contradictory and want shifting and harmonising; in the second they want grasping and interpreting; in the third (and most important of all) they need to be made alive.

Nevertheless Lord Acton's somewhat enigmatic utterance points, however vaguely, to real dangers, and it would be idle to say that these dangers have not been exemplified in the period and department we are considering. In the first place, the ever-increasing burden of the documents to be consulted is more and more crushing, and more and more likely to induce any one but a mere drudge either to relinquish the task in despair, or to perform it with a constant fear before his eyes, which prevents freedom and breadth of work. In the second it leads, on the one hand, to enormous extension of the scale of histories, on the other to an undue restraining and limiting of their subjects. Macaulay took four large volumes to do, nominally at least, not more than a dozen years; Froude twelve to cover fifty or sixty; Grote as many to deal with the important, but neither long nor richly documented, period of Greek, or rather Athenian, flourishing. To this has to be added the very serious drawback that when examination of documents is ranked before everything, even the slightest questioning of that examination becomes fatal, and a historian is discredited because some one of his critics has found a document unknown to him, or a flaw, possibly of the slightest importance, in his interpretation of the texts.

Nevertheless it is necessary to lay our account with this new style of history, and it is fortunately possible to admit that the gains of it have not been small. Thanks to its practitioners, we know infinitely more than our fathers did, though it may not be so certain that we make as good a use of our knowledge. And the evil of multiplication of particulars, like other evils, brings its own cure. The work of mere rough-hewing, of examination into the brute facts, is being done – has to no small extent actually been done – as it never was done before. The "inedited" has ceased to be inedited – is put on record for anybody to examine with little trouble. The mere loss of valuable material, which has gone on in former ages to an extent only partially compensated by the welcome destruction of material that has no value at all, has been stopped. The pioneers of the historical summer (to borrow a decorative phrase from Charles of Orleans) have been very widely abroad, and there is no particular reason why the summer itself should not come.

When it does it will perhaps discard some ways and fashions which have been lately in vogue; but it will assuredly profit by much that has been done during the period we survey, no less in form than in matter. The methods have been to a certain extent improved, the examples have been multiplied, the historical sense has certainly taken a wider and deeper hold of mankind. Very little is wanting but some one ausus contemnere vana; and when the future Thucydides or the future Carlyle sets to work, he will be freed, by the labour of others, alike from the paucity of materials that a little weakened Thucydides, and from the brute mass of them that embittered the life of Carlyle.

Not so much is to be said of the remaining divisions or departments individually. If the drama of the century is not, in so far as acting drama is concerned, almost a blank from the point of view of literature, the literary drama of the century is almost a blank as regards acting qualities. It is true that there have been at times attempts to obtain restitution of conjugal rights on one side or on the other. In the second and third decades, perhaps a little later, a strong effort was made to give vogue to, and some vogue was obtained for, the scholarly if pale attempts of Milman and Talfourd, and the respectable work of others. Bulwer, his natural genius assisted by the stage-craft of Macready, brought the acting and the literary play perhaps nearer together than any one else did. Much later still, the mighty authority of Tennyson, taking to dramatic writing at the time when he was the unquestioned head of English poetry and English literature, and assisted by the active efforts of the most popular actor and manager of the day, succeeded in holding the stage fairly well with plays which are not very dramatic among dramas, and which are certainly not very poetical among their author's poems. With more recent times we have luckily nothing to do, and the assertions of some authors that they themselves or others have brought back literature to the stage may be left confronted with the assertions of not a few actors that, for reasons which they do not themselves profess entirely to comprehend, a modern drama is almost bound not to be literary if it is to act, and not to act if it is literary. Some have boldly solved the difficulty by hinting, if not declaring, that the drama is an outworn form except as mere spectacle or entertainment; others have exhausted themselves in solutions of a less trenchant kind; none, it may safely be said, has really solved it. And though it is quite true that what has happened was predicted sixty or seventy years ago, as a result of the breach of the monopoly of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, it is fair to say that the condition of the drama of at least a quarter of a century earlier had been little if at all better than it has been since. It is a simple fact that since Sheridan we have had no dramatist who combined very high acting with very high literary merit.

Of what have been called the applied departments of literature, a somewhat less melancholy account has to be given; but, except in their enormous multiplication of quantity, they present few opportunities for remarks of a general character.

Very great names have been added to the list of theological writers, but these names on the whole belong to the earlier rather than to the later portion of the period, and even then something of a change has been observable in the kinds of their writing. The sermon, that is to say the literary sermon, has become more and more uncommon; and the popular ear which calls upon itself to hear sermons at all prefers usually what are styled practical discourses, often deviating very considerably from the sermon norm, or else extremely florid addresses modelled on later Continental patterns, and having as a rule few good literary qualities. So, too, the elaborate theological treatise has gone out of fashion, and it may be doubted whether, at least for the last half century, a single book of the kind has been added to the first class of Anglican theological writing. This writing has thus taken the form either of discourses of the older kind, maintained in existence by endowment or by old prescription, such as the Bampton Lectures, or of rather popular polemics, or of what may be called without disrespect theological journalism of various kinds. The general historical energy of the century, moreover, has not displayed itself least in the theological department, and valuable additions have been made, not merely to general church history, but to a vast body of biography and journal-history, as well as to a certain amount of Biblical scholarship. In this latter direction English scholars have distinguished themselves by somewhat less violation of the rules of criticism in general than their foreign brethren and masters. But it cannot be said that the nineteenth century is ever likely to rank high in the history of English theology. Even its greatest names – Irving, Chalmers, the Oxford leaders, and others, with perhaps the single exception of Newman – are important much more personally and as influences than as literary figures; while the rank and file, putting history aside, have been distinctly less noteworthy than in any of the three preceding centuries.

The "handmaid of theology" has received, at any rate during the first half of the period, or even the first three-quarters, more distinguished attentions than her mistress; and the additions made to the list headed by Erigena and Anselm, if we allow Latin to count, by Bacon and Hobbes, if we stick to the vernacular, have been many and great. Yet it would not be unreasonable laudation of times past to say that there hardly, after Hume's death, arose any philosopher who combined the originality, the acuteness, and the literary skill of Hume during the first half of this century, while certainly, at least till within a period forbidden to our scheme, the latter part of the time has not seen any writer who could vie even with those of the earlier. To a certain extent the historical and critical tendencies so often noticed have here been unfortunate, inasmuch as they have diverted philosophical students from original writing – or at least from writing as original as the somewhat narrow and self-repeating paths of philosophy admit – to historical and critical exercises. But there is also no doubt that the immense authority which the too long neglected writers of Germany attained, a little before the middle of the century, has been unfortunate in at least one respect, if not also in others. The ignorant contempt of technicalities, and the determination to refer all things to common sense employing common language, which distinguished the eighteenth century with us, was certain to provoke a reaction; and this reaction, assisted by imitation of the Germans, produced in the decades from 1840 onwards an ever-increasing tendency among English philosophers or students of philosophy to employ a jargon often as merely technical as the language of the schoolmen, and not seldom far emptier of any real argument. It is not too much to say that if the rough methods of Hobbes with a terminology far less fallacious, were employed with this jargon, it would look much poorer than Bramhall's scholasticisms look in the hands of the redoubtable Nominalist. Fortunately of late there have been more signs than one of yet another turn of tide, and of a fresh appeal to the communis sensus, not it may be hoped of the obstinately and deafly exoteric character of the eighteenth century, but such as will refuse to pay itself with words, and will exercise a judicious criticism in a language understanded of all educated people. Then, and not till then, we may expect to meet philosophy that is literature and literature that is philosophic.

Science, that is to say physical science, which has sometimes openly boasted itself as about to take, and has much more commonly made silent preparations for taking, the place both of philosophy and of theology, will hardly be said by the hardiest of her adherents to have done very much to justify these claims to seats not yet quite vacant from the point of view of the purely literary critic. We have had some excellent scientific writers, from Bishop Watson to Professor Huxley; and some of the books of the century which would deserve remembrance and reading, whatever their subject matter, have been books of science. Yet it is scarcely rash to assert that the essential characteristics of science and the essential characteristics of literature are, if not so diametrically opposed as some have thought, at any rate very far apart from one another. Literature can never be scientific; and though science may be literary, yet it is rather in the fashion in which a man borrows some alien vesture in order to present himself, in compliance with decency and custom, at a foreign court. Mathematics give us the example – perhaps the only example – of pure science, of what all science would be if it could, and of what it approaches, ever more nearly, as far as it can. It is needless to say that the perfect presentation of mathematics is in pure symbols, divested of all form and colour, of all personal tincture and bias. And it should be equally superfluous to add that it is in form and colour, in suggestion of sound rather than in precise expression and sense, in personal bias and personal tincture, that not merely the attraction but the very essence of literature consists.

By so much as verbal science or scholarship, which would seem to be more especially bound to be literature, claims to be and endeavours to be strictly scientific, by so much also necessarily does it divorce itself from the literature which it studies. This, if not an enormously great, is certainly rather a sore evil; and it is one of the most considerable and characteristic signs of the period we are discussing. The older scholarship, though sufficiently minute, still clung to the literary side proper: it was even, in the technical dialect of one of the universities, opposed to "science," which word indeed was itself used in a rather technical way. The invention of comparative philology, with its even more recent off-shoot phonetics, has changed all this, and we now find "linguistic" and "literary" used by common consent as things not merely different but hostile, with a further tendency on the part of linguistics to claim the term "scholarship" exclusively for itself.

This could hardly in any case be healthy. What may be the abstract value of the science, or group of sciences, called philology, it is perhaps not necessary here to inquire. It is sufficient to say that it clearly has nothing to do with literature except in accidental and remote applications, that it stands thereto much as geology does to architecture. Unfortunately, while the scientific side of scholarship is thus becoming, if it has not become, wholly unliterary, the æsthetic side has shown signs of becoming, to far too great an extent, unscientific in the bad and baneful sense. With some honourable exceptions, we find critics of literature too often divided into linguists who seem neither to think nor to be capable of thinking of the meaning or the melody, of the individual and technical mastery, of an author, a book, or a passage, and into loose æsthetic rhetoricians who will sometimes discourse on Æschylus without knowing a second aorist from an Attic perfect, and pronounce eulogies or depreciations on Virgil without having the faintest idea whether there is or is not any authority for quamvis with one mood rather than another. Nor is it possible to see what eirenicon is likely to present itself between two parties, of whom the extremists on the one side may justly point to such things as have here been quoted, while the extremists on the other feel it a duty to pronounce phonetics the merest "hariolation," and a very large part of what goes by the name of philology ingenious guesswork, some of which may possibly not be false, but hardly any of which can on principles of sound general criticism be demonstrated to be true. It is not wonderful, though it is in the highest degree unhealthy, that the stricter scholars should be more or less scornfully relinquishing the province of literary criticism altogether, while the looser æsthetics consider themselves entitled to neglect scholarship in any proper sense with a similarly scornful indifference.

It is, however, impossible that offences of this sort should not come now and then in the history of literature, and fortunately, in that history, they disappear as they appear. For the present purpose it is more important to conclude this conclusion with a few general remarks on the past, fewer on the present, and fewest of all on the future.

On this last head, indeed, no words were perhaps even better than even fewest; though something of the sort may be expected. Rash as prophecy always is, it is never quite so rash as in literature; and though we can sometimes, looking backward, say – perhaps even then with some rashness – that such and such a change might or ought to have been expected, it is very seldom that we can, when deprived of this illegitimate advantage, vaticinate on such subjects with any safety. Yet the study of the present always, so to speak, includes and overlaps something of the future, and by comparison at least of other presents we can discern what it is at least not improbable that the future may be. What, then, is the present of literature in England?

It can be described with the greater freedom that, as constantly repeated, we are not merely at liberty ex hypothesi to omit references to individuals, but are ex hypothesi bound to exclude them. And no writer, as it happens rather curiously, of anything like great promise or performance who was born later than the beginning of the fifties has died as yet, though the century is so near its close. Yet again, all the greatest men of the first quarter of the century, with the single exception of Mr. Ruskin, are gone; and not many of the second remain. By putting these simple and unmistakable facts together it will be seen, in a fashion equally free from liability to cavil and from disobliging glances towards persons, that the present is at best a stationary state in our literary history. Were we distinctly on the mounting hand, it is, on the general calculation of the liabilities of human life, certain that we must have had our Shelley or our Keats side by side with our Wordsworth and our Coleridge. That we have much excellent work is certain; that we have much of the absolutely first class not so. And if we examine even the good work of our younger writers we shall find in much of it two notes or symptoms – one of imitation or exaggeration, the other of uncertain and eccentric quest for novelty – which have been already noted above as signs of decadence or transition.

Whether it is to be transition or decadence, that is the question. For the solution of it we can only advance with safety a few considerations, such as that in no literary history have periods of fresh and first-rate production ever continued longer than – that they have seldom continued so long as – the period now under notice, and that it is reasonable, it is almost certain, that, though by no means an absolutely dead season, yet a period of comparatively faint life and illustration should follow. To this it may be added as a consideration not without philosophical weight that the motives, the thoughts, the hopes, the fears, perhaps even the manners, which have defrayed the expense of the literary production of this generation, together with the literary forms in which, according to custom, they have embodied and ensconced themselves, have been treated with unexampled, certainly with unsurpassed, thoroughness, and must now be near exhaustion; while it is by no means clear that any fresh set is ready to take their place. It is on this last point, no doubt, that the more sanguine prophets would like to fight the battle, urging that new social ideas, and so forth, are in possession of the ground. But this is not the field for that battle.

In dealing with what has been, with the secular hour that we have actually and securely had, we are on far safer, if not on positively safe ground. Here the sheaves are actually reaped and brought home; and if the teller of them makes a mistake, his judgment, and his judgment only, need be at fault. Not all ways of such telling are of equal value. It may be tempting, for instance, but can hardly be very profitable, to attempt to strike an exact balance between the production of the century from 1780 to 1880 with that of the other great English literary century from 1580 to 1680. Dear as the exercise is to some literary accountants, there is perhaps no satisfactory system of book-keeping by which we can really set the assets and the liabilities of the period from the appearance of Spenser to the death of Browne against the assets and liabilities of that from the appearance of Burns to the death of Tennyson, and say which has the greater sum to its credit. Still more vague and futile would it be to attempt to set with any exactness this balance-sheet against that of the other great literary periods of other countries, languages, and times. Here again, most emphatically, accuracy of this kind is not to be expected.

But what we can say with confidence and profit is that the nineteenth century in England and English is of these great periods, and of the greatest of them; that it has taken its place finally and certainly, with a right never likely to be seriously challenged, and in a rank never likely to be much surpassed.

The period which lisped its numbers in Burns and Blake and Cowper, which broke out into full song with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, which, not to mention scores of minor singers, took up the tale with Tennyson and Browning and passed it on to Arnold, Rossetti, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Swinburne, need fear no comparisons in the matter of poetry. In prose fiction, as we have seen, it stands alone. It is almost a century of origins as regards the most important kinds; it is quite a century of capital and classical performance in them. In "making" – prose or verse – no time leaves record of performance more distinguished or more various.

That in one great literary kind, drama, it exhibits lamentable deficiency, that indeed in that kind it hardly counts at all, has been admitted; and it is not probable that in any of the serious prose kinds, except history, it will ever rank very high when compared with others. Its theology has, as far as literature is concerned, been a little wanting in dignity, in finish, and even in fervour, its philosophy either commonplace or jargonish, its exercises in science and scholarship ever divorcing themselves further from literary ideals. But in the quality of its miscellaneous writing, as well as in the facilities given to such writing by its special growth – some would say its special fungus – of the periodical, it again rises to the first class. Hardly the period of Montaigne and Bacon, certainly not that of Dryden, Cowley, and Temple, nor that of Addison and Steele, nor that of Johnson and Goldsmith, can vie with the century of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, of Leigh Hunt and Thomas de Quincey, of Macaulay and Thackeray and Carlyle, of Arnold and Mr. Ruskin. Miscellaneous we have been, – perhaps too much so, – but we should be a little saved by the excellence of some of our miscellanists.

Pessimists would probably say that the distinguishing and not altogether favourable notes of the century are a somewhat vagabond curiosity in matter and a tormented unrest of style. The former concerns us little, and is chiefly noticeable here because of the effect which it has had on the great transformation of historical writing so often noticed; the latter concerns us intimately. And no doubt there is hardly a single feature – not even the growth of the novel, not even the development of the newspaper – which will so distinctly and permanently distinguish this century in English literary history as the great changes which have come over style, and especially prose style. There has been less opportunity to notice these collectively in any of the former chapters than there has been to notice some other changes: nor was this of much importance, for the present is the right place for gathering up the fragments.

The change of style in prose is undoubtedly as much the leading feature of the century as is in poetry the change of thought and outlook, on which latter enough perhaps has been said elsewhere; the whole of our two long chapters on poetry being indeed, with great part of this conclusion, a continuous exposition of it. But the change in prose was neither confined to, nor specially connected with, any single department of literature. Indirectly indeed, and distantly, it may be said to have been connected with the growth of the essay and the popularity of periodicals; and yet it is not quite certain that this was anything more than a coincidence due to the actual fact that the first extensive practitioners of ornate prose, Wilson and De Quincey, were in a way journalists.