Studies in Early Victorian Literature. Frederic 1831-1923 Harrison
began to hover round the problem of Evolution. It wrapped it in mystery, denounced it with fine indignation, and took it for the text of some rather prosaic homilies. Criticism fell into the prevailing theory: so did history, and even romance. Philosophy and Science are not the best foster-mothers of Poetry and Romance. Philosophy and Science grew more solemn than ever; and Poetry and Romance lost something of their wilder fancy and their light heart. Literature grew less spontaneous, more correct, more learned, and, it may be, more absorbed in its practical purpose of modifying social life.
The old notion of literature being a business apart from affairs, of men of letters being an order, of an absorption in books being ample work for a life—all this is far from the rule. At least twenty members of the present and late Governments have been copious writers; Mr. Gladstone and at least three or four of his late colleagues are quite in the front rank of living authors—nay, several of them began their career as literary men. It would be difficult to name an important writer of the Victorian Age who has not at times flung himself with ardour into the great social, political, or religious battles of his time. Thackeray, Trollope, Green, Symonds, are possible exceptions—examples of bookmen who passed their lives with books, and who never wrote to promote "a cause." But all the rest have entered on the "burning questions" of their age, and most of them with the main part of their force. As a consequence "learning," as it was understood by Casaubon, Scaliger, Bentley, Johnson, and Gibbon, as it was understood by Littré, Döllinger, and Mommsen, may be said to have disappeared in England. Cardinal Newman, Mark Pattison, Dr. Pusey, were said to be very learned, but it was a kind of learning which kept very much to itself. For good or for evil, our literature is now absorbed in the urgent social problem, and is become but an instrument in the vast field of Sociology—the science of Society.
This predominance of Sociology, the restless rapidity of modern life, the omnipresence of material activity, fully account for the special character of modern literature. Literature is no longer "bookish"—but practical, social, propagandist. It is full of life—but it is a dispersive, analytic, erratic form of vitality. It has a most fastidious taste in form—but it often flings the critical spirit aside in its passion for doing, in its ardour to convince and to inspire. It is industrious, full of learning and research—but it regards its learning as an instrument of influence, not as an end of thought. It can work up a poem or an essay, as carefully as Mieris or Breughel polished a cabinet picture—and it can "tear a passion to tatters," or tumble its note-books into a volume all in a heap. It has no "standard," no "model," no "best writer"—and yet it has a curious faculty for reviving every known form and imitating any style. It is intensely historical, but so accurately historical that it is afraid to throw the least colour of imagination around its history. It has consummate poetic feeling, and copious poetic gifts—but it has now no single poet of the first rank. It has infinite romantic resources, and an army of skilful novelists—and yet it has no single living writer worthy to be named beside the great romancers of the nineteenth century.
This rich, many-sided, strenuous literature, which will place the name of Victoria higher than that of Elizabeth in the history of our language, would form a splendid subject hereafter for some one of our descendants who was equal to the task of treating our Victorian literature as a whole. In the meantime, it may be worth while for the men and women of to-day, who are full of all the excellent work around us, to be reminded of the good things produced now nearly sixty years ago. As one who can remember much that was given to the world in a former generation, I shall endeavour in these little sketches to mark some of the characteristics of the best writers in the early Victorian Age, confining myself for the present to prose literature of the imaginative kind.
It is now some time since the country of Shakespeare and of Milton has been without its poet laureate, and to the non-poetical world the absence of that court functionary is hardly perceptible. Nay, the question has begun to arise, If there is to be a laureate in poetry, why not a laureate also in prose romance? And if there were a laureate in prose romance, whom should we choose?
The same phenomenon meets us in the realm of prose fiction as in poetry: that we have vast quantities of thoughtful work produced, an army of cultivated workers, a great demand, an equally great supply, a very high average of merit—and yet so little of the very first rank. For the first time in the present century, English literature is without a single living novelist of world-wide reputation. The nineteenth century opened with Castle Rackrent and the admirably original tales of Maria Edgeworth. Jane Austen followed in the same field. And since Waverley appeared, in 1814, we have had a succession of fine romances in unbroken line. Fenimore Cooper's work is nearly contemporary with the best of Scott's. At Sir Walter's death Bulwer-Lytton was in full career. And Lytton, Disraeli, Hawthorne, the Brontës, Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope were all at their best nearly together. During the last twenty years or so of this splendid period they had been joined by George Eliot; and of the whole band Anthony Trollope was the survivor. With him our language lost the last of those companions of the fireside in mansion and cottage whose names are household words, whose books are in every hand, where the English tongue is heard.
We need not engage in any critical estimate of these writers: we are but too well aware of their failures and defects. Lytton indited not a little bombast, Dickens had his incurable mannerisms, and Thackeray his conventional cynicisms. There are passages in George Eliot's romances which read like sticky bits from a lecture on comparative palaeontology; and Disraeli, who for fifty years threw off most readable tales in the intervals of politics, seems always to be laughing at the public behind his mask. Yet the good sense of mankind remembers the best and forgets the worst, even if the worst be four-fifths of the whole.
The place of genius is decided by its inimitable hits, and its misses evermore drop out of memory as time goes on. The world loves its bright spirits for what they give it, and it does not score their blots like an examiner marking a student's paper. Thus the men and women of the first rank still hold the field in the million homes where English tales are a source of happiness; and it would be perverse to maintain that any living men have reached that level. We can see no trace that Pickwick or Emma, Natty Bumppo or Uncas, are losing their hold on the imagination of men and women, any more than Jeanie Deans and the Antiquary. Oliver Twist, the Last Days of Pompeii, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, have more readers than ever. And I find the Last Chronicle of Barset, Lothair, and Silas Marner as fresh as they were a quarter of a century ago.
We all admit that there are delightful writers still. I am not about to decry our living romancers, and certainly not to criticise them. If any man choose to maintain that there is more poetry in Tess than in the entire Barsetshire series, that Dickens could not have bettered the Two Drummer Boys of Rudyard Kipling, that Treasure Island has a realism as vivid as Robinson Crusoe, that Mrs. Wood's Village Tragedy may rank with Silas Marner, that Howells and Besant, Ouida and Rhoda Broughton, Henry James and Mrs. Burnett, are as good reading as we need, that Bret Harte has struck a line as original as that of Dickens, and that George Meredith has an eye for character which reminds us not seldom of Thackeray and Fielding—I do not dispute it. I am no one-book man or one-style man, but enjoy what is good in all. But I am thinking of the settled judgment and the visible practice of the vast English-speaking and English-reading world. And judging by that test, we cannot shut our eyes to this, that we have no living romancer who has yet achieved that world-wide place of being read and welcomed in every home where the language is heard or known. George Meredith has been a prolific writer for thirty years and Stevenson for twenty years; but their most ardent admirers, among whom I would be counted, can hardly claim for them a triumph so great.
We come, then, to this, that for the first time during this whole century now ending, English literature can count no living novelist whom the world, and not merely the esoteric circle of cultured Englishmen, consents to stamp with the mark of accepted fame. One is too eccentric, obscure, and subtle, another too local and equal, a third too sketchy, this one too unreal, that one far too real, too obvious, too prosaic, to win and to hold the great public by their spell. Critics praise them, friends utter rhapsodies, good judges enjoy them—but their fame is partial, local, sectional, compared to the fame of Scott, Dickens, or Thackeray.
What is the cause? I do not hesitate to say it is that we have over-trained our taste, we are