The Age of Tennyson. Hugh Walker
The transforming power upon thought of the theory of evolution may be measured by the fact that the majority even of those who dislike and deny Darwinian evolution still believe that there has been evolution of some kind. For thoughtful men, unless they are heavily fettered by preconceptions, the old view has become impossible; and no other except an evolutionary one has hitherto been even imagined. Here therefore there is a great unsettlement of popular ideas, and no little energy has been expended in fitting men’s minds to the new conditions. Tractarianism, Pre-Raphaelitism, the satire, tempered with mysticism, of Carlyle, the idealistic optimism of Browning, and the creedless Christianity of Matthew Arnold, are all attempts to satisfy either the intellectual or the moral and artistic needs of modern times, and all show the influence of the scientific thought of the age.
Some of these forces however have been in the main reactionary. Side by side with the movement of science, which has on the whole tended to positivism, agnosticism, and in a word to negative views of things spiritual, there has gone on a remarkable revival of conceptions diametrically opposed to these. The old narrow Protestantism of England was powerful enough to struggle against Catholic Emancipation until the delay became a danger to the state. Yet hardly was this act of justice done when the great reaction known as the Oxford Movement began. It was, as its consummate literary expression, the Apologia of Newman, proves, the product of a double discontent,—a discontent, on the one hand, with that movement of science just spoken of; and a discontent, on the other hand, with what was felt to be the ‘creed outworn’ of English Protestantism. As against the latter it has achieved, among those who hungered for a more emotional religion, a wonderful success. As against the former its utter failure has been veiled only by that success.
Kindred in spirit and almost contemporaneous in origin was the movement of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. On the surface, this seems quite unrelated to Tractarianism; for while the Tractarians were all for dogma, the Pre-Raphaelites were indifferent to it. But both movements were in essence protests on behalf of the imaginative and æsthetic in human nature against the exclusive nourishment of the intellectual element; and they proved their kinship by each in its own way seeking to bring about a revival of Mediævalism. In this fact moreover we see wherein their value consisted. They fought a battle on behalf of aspects of the truth temporarily threatened with neglect. In so far as they asserted or implied the incompleteness of the scientific view of life they were almost wholly right. In so far as they asserted its positive falsity they were almost wholly wrong. The latter was however the error principally of the religious movement. The Pre-Raphaelites may have been wrong in many respects in their conceptions of art; but at least they generally confined themselves within their own domain.
Both of these schools, though they differ in degree of guilt, are chargeable with the sin of ‘rending the seamless garment of thought.’ The Pre-Raphaelite, implicitly if not in words, teaches that there is an intellectual world and an æsthetic world. The Tractarians not merely implied but insisted that there is a domain of reason and a domain of authority.1 Because of this fundamental error we must look for the main current of modern thought elsewhere; for if there is any one thing that modern philosophy unequivocally teaches, it is that all such divisions are unsound. And we find that all the greatest men of letters of the period are on this point in agreement with the philosophers. Carlyle, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Thackeray and George Eliot, all in various ways teach that art must not ignore the intellectual problem. Tennyson seemed for a time to hold aloof and to live in a lotos-land of artistic beauty, but he soon became restless, and all his greater works are charged with an intellectual as well as an artistic meaning. These men are not in all respects self-consistent. Browning in particular turned his back in his old age upon the principle which inspired his more youthful work. But in spite of inconsistencies he and the rest must all be classed as teaching, with the philosophers, the unity of intellectual and spiritual life, and the impossibility of ministering to the one without satisfying the other; and for this reason it is to them rather than to writers of more limited view that we must look for guidance in the labyrinth of contemporary life.
CHAPTER I
Poetry is so clearly the head and front of literature that in most periods the first and chief attention must be paid to the poets. The Victorian age is an exception, at least as regards the order in which prose and poetry claim notice, and perhaps partly as regards their relative prominence. The man who first gives us a key to the significance of the age of Tennyson is not Tennyson himself, nor Browning, nor any writer of verse, but one who believed that the day of poetry was past,—Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). Considerably older than the poets, he had, notwithstanding his early difficulties, notwithstanding too the slow ripening of his own genius, made a name in literature and stamped his mark on his generation before either of them was widely known.
Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan (the Entepfuhl of Sartor Resartus) in Dumfriesshire. He was educated first at the local schools, and afterwards at the University of Edinburgh, to which he refers in Sartor as ‘the worst of all hitherto discovered universities.’ The purpose he had in view was to take the divinity course and enter the ministry of the Scottish Church. But this was rather the design of his parents than his own; as time went on ‘grave prohibitive doubts’ accumulated; and about the year 1817 Carlyle definitely abandoned his purpose. He was already supporting himself by school-mastering, an occupation which grew more and more irksome, and which in turn was thrown up in December, 1818. For some time he drifted, oppressed by doubts and dyspepsia, until in 1821 occurred the one fact recorded in Sartor Resartus, the incident in the Rue St. Thomas de l’Enfer (Leith Walk), wherein Carlyle, shaking off his doubts, stands up and confronts the Everlasting No and its claim, ‘Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil’s),’ with the answer, ‘I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee.’ This he ranks as his ‘spiritual new birth;’ and as such it ought to receive attention in any account, however brief, of a life which was mainly inward and spiritual.
But spiritual regeneration could not supply the need of daily bread. Carlyle supported himself partly by the tutorship of private pupils, a form of teaching less distasteful to him than his school work had been. He was at the same time studying hard and reading widely, in French, Italian, Spanish, and afterwards in German, as well as in English, and was slowly gravitating towards the profession of literature. He contributed articles to Brewster’s Encyclopædia. Through Edward Irving, who had been for several years a generous friend, he was introduced to Taylor, the proprietor of the London Magazine, who published for him the Life of Schiller. About the same time the translation of Wilhelm Meister was issued through the agency of an Edinburgh publisher.
Carlyle’s marriage occurred in 1826, and he was for a short time happy. But there still remained difficulties of finance as well as difficulties of temper. Literary occupation did not prove either as easy to get or as remunerative as Carlyle had hoped. His German Romance was financially a failure, and publishers were on that account the less disposed to consider his books. He made unsuccessful attempts to find employment as a professor, first in the London University, and again at St. Andrews. He had lived since his marriage at Comely Bank, but had cherished more or less all the time the purpose of retiring to his wife’s farm of Craigenputtock, a solitary moorland place in Dumfriesshire. Moved probably by these disappointments, he carried out his purpose in 1828. ‘Hinaus ins freie Feld,’ to escape that necessity which ‘makes blue-stockings of women, magazine hacks of men,’—this had been the impulse which drove him thither. In less than four months it was ‘this Devil’s den, Craigenputtock.’ But ‘this Devil’s den’ was his home from 1828 to 1834, and, whatever doubts may be entertained as to the wisdom and kindness of Carlyle in taking his wife there, if we judge by the result, we must pronounce that he did what was best for his own literary development. It was during those years that Carlyle grew to his full intellectual stature. There and then were composed a great number of his essays; notably, among the literary class, the essay on Burns, written at the beginning of the Craigenputtock period, and, among the historical class, The Diamond Necklace, written near the end. There too was written that autobiography of ‘symbolical myth’ which, after being hawked in vain from one publisher to another, at last appeared piecemeal in Fraser’s Magazine. There too the French Revolution was, not indeed
In later times this has been confused with the very different doctrine that there is a domain of authority