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A History of English Literature

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4. Conspicuous in Keats is his spiritual kinship with the ancient Greeks.
He assimilated with eager delight all the riches of the Greek imagination,
even though he never learned the language and was dependent on the dull
mediums of dictionaries and translations. It is not only that his
recognition of the permanently significant and beautiful embodiment of the
central facts of life in the Greek stories led him to select some of them
as the subjects for several of his most important poems; but his whole
feeling, notably his feeling for Nature, seems almost precisely that of the
Greeks, especially, perhaps, of the earlier generations among whom their
mythology took shape. To him also Nature appears alive with divinities.
Walking through the woods he almost expects to catch glimpses of hamadryads
peering from their trees, nymphs rising from the fountains, and startled
fauns with shaggy skins and cloven feet scurrying away among the bushes.

In his later poetry, also, the deeper force of the Greek spirit led him
from his early Romantic formlessness to the achievement of the most
exquisite classical perfection of form and finish. His Romantic glow and
emotion never fade or cool, but such poems as the Odes to the Nightingale
and to a Grecian Urn, and the fragment of 'Hyperion,' are absolutely
flawless and satisfying in structure and expression.

SUMMARY. One of the best comments on the poets whom we have just been
considering is a single sentence of Lowell: 'Three men, almost
contemporaneous with each other, Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron, were the
great means of bringing back English poetry from the sandy deserts of
rhetoric and recovering for her her triple inheritance of simplicity,
sensuousness, and passion.' But justice must be done also to the
'Renaissance of Wonder' in Coleridge, the ideal aspiration of Shelley, and
the healthy stirring of the elementary instincts by Scott.

LESSER WRITERS. Throughout our discussion of the nineteenth century it will
be more than ever necessary to pass by with little or no mention various
authors who are almost of the first rank. To our present period belong:
Thomas Campbell (1777-1844), author of 'Ye Mariners of England,'
'Hohenlinden,' and other spirited battle lyrics; Thomas Moore (1779-1852),
a facile but over-sentimental Irishman, author of 'Irish Melodies,' 'Lalla
Rookh,' and a famous life of Byron; Charles. Lamb (1775-1834), the
delightfully whimsical essayist and lover of Shakspere; William Hazlitt
(1778-1830), a romantically dogmatic but sympathetically appreciative
critic; Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859), a capricious and voluminous author,
master of a poetic prose style, best known for his 'Confessions of an
English Opium-Eater'; Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), the best nineteenth
century English representative, both in prose and in lyric verse, of the
pure classical spirit, though his own temperament was violently romantic;
Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866), author of some delightful satirical and
humorous novels, of which 'Maid Marian' anticipated 'Ivanhoe'; and Miss
Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855), among whose charming prose sketches of
country life 'Our Village' is best and best-known.




CHAPTER XI

PERIOD IX. THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, ABOUT 1830 TO 1901


GENERAL CONDITIONS. The last completed period of English literature, almost
coincident in extent with the reign of the queen whose name it bears
(Victoria, queen 1837-1901), stands nearly beside The Elizabethan period in
the significance and interest of its work. The Elizabethan literature to be
sure, in its imaginative and spiritual enthusiasm, is the expression of a
period more profoundly great than the Victorian; but the Victorian
literature speaks for an age which witnessed incomparably greater changes
than any that had gone before in all the conditions of life--material
comforts, scientific knowledge, and, absolutely speaking, in intellectual
and spiritual enlightenment. Moreover, to twentieth century students the
Victorian literature makes a specially strong appeal because it is in part
the literature of our own time and its ideas and point of view are in large
measure ours. We must begin by glancing briefly at some of the general
determining changes and conditions to which reference has just been made,
and we may naturally begin with the merely material ones.

Before the accession of Queen Victoria the 'industrial revolution,' the
vast development of manufacturing made possible in the latter part of the
eighteenth century by the introduction of coal and the steam engine, had
rendered England the richest nation in the world, and the movement
continued with steadily accelerating momentum throughout the period. Hand
in hand with it went the increase of population from less than thirteen
millions in England in 1825 to nearly three times as many at the end of the
period. The introduction of the steam railway and the steamship, at the
beginning of the period, in place of the lumbering stagecoach and the
sailing vessel, broke up the old stagnant and stationary habits of life and
increased the amount of travel at least a thousand times. The discovery of
the electric telegraph in 1844 brought almost every important part of
Europe, and eventually of the world, nearer to every town dweller than the
nearest county had been in the eighteenth century; and the development of
the modern newspaper out of the few feeble sheets of 1825 (dailies and
weeklies in London, only weeklies elsewhere), carried full accounts of the
doings of the whole world, in place of long-delayed fragmentary rumors, to
every door within a few hours. No less striking was the progress in public
health and the increase in human happiness due to the enormous advance in
the sciences of medicine, surgery, and hygiene. Indeed these sciences in
their modern form virtually began with the discovery of the facts of
bacteriology about 1860, and the use of antiseptics fifteen years later,
and not much earlier began the effective opposition to the frightful
epidemics which had formerly been supposed to be dependent only on the will
of Providence.

Political and social progress, though less astonishing, was substantial. In
1830 England, nominally a monarchy, was in reality a plutocracy of about a
hundred thousand men--landed nobles, gentry, and wealthy merchants--whose
privileges dated back to fifteenth century conditions. The first Reform
Bill, of 1832, forced on Parliament by popular pressure, extended the right
of voting to men of the 'middle class,' and the subsequent bills of 1867
and 1885 made it universal for men. Meanwhile the House of Commons slowly
asserted itself against the hereditary House of Lords, and thus England
became perhaps the most truly democratic of the great nations of the world.
At the beginning of the period the social condition of the great body of
the population was extremely bad. Laborers in factories and mines and on
farms were largely in a state of virtual though not nominal slavery,
living, many of them, in unspeakable moral and physical conditions. Little
by little improvement came, partly by the passage of laws, partly by the
growth of trades-unions. The substitution in the middle of the century of
free-trade for protection through the passage of the 'Corn-Laws' afforded
much relief by lowering the price of food. Socialism, taking shape as a
definite movement in the middle of the century, became one to be reckoned
with before its close, though the majority of the more well-to-do classes
failed to understand even then the growing necessity for far-reaching
economic and social changes. Humanitarian consciousness, however, gained
greatly during the period. The middle and upper classes awoke to some
extent to their duty to the poor, and sympathetic benevolent effort, both
organized and informal, increased very largely in amount and intelligence.
Popular education, too, which in 1830 had no connection with the State and
was in every respect very incomplete, was developed and finally made
compulsory as regards the rudiments.

Still more permanently significant, perhaps, was the transformation of the
former conceptions of the nature and meaning of the world and life, through
the discoveries of science. Geology and astronomy now gradually compelled
all thinking people to realize the unthinkable duration of the cosmic
processes and the comparative littleness of our earth in the vast extent of
the universe. Absolutely revolutionary for almost all lines if thought was
the gradual adoption by almost all thinkers of the theory of Evolution,
which, partly formulated by Lamarck early in the century, received definite
statement in 1859 in Charles Darwin's 'Origin of Species.' The great
modification in the externals of religious belief thus brought about was
confirmed also by the growth of the science of historical criticism.

This movement of religious change was met in its early stages by the very
interesting reactionary 'Oxford' or 'Tractarian' Movement, which asserted
the supreme authority of the Church and its traditional doctrines. The most
important figure in this movement, who connects it definitely with
literature, was John Henry Newman (1801-90), author of the hymn 'Lead,
Kindly Light,' a man of winning personality and great literary skill. For
fifteen years, as vicar of the Oxford University Church, Newman was a great
spiritual force in the English communion, but the series of 'Tracts for the
Times' to which he largely contributed, ending in 1841 in the famous Tract
90, tell the story of his gradual progress toward Rome. Thereafter as an
avowed Roman Catholic and head of a monastic establishment Newman showed
himself a formidable controversialist, especially in a literary encounter
with the clergyman-novelist Charles Kingsley which led to Newman's famous
'Apologia pro Vita Sua' (Apology for My Life), one of the secondary
literary masterpieces of the century. His services to the Catholic Church
were recognized in 1879 by his appointment as a Cardinal. More than one of
the influences thus hastily surveyed combine in creating the moral, social,
and intellectual strenuousness which is one of the main marks of the
literature of the period. More conspicuously than ever before the majority
of the great writers, not least the poets and novelists, were impelled not
merely by the emotional or dramatic creative impulse but by the sense of a
message for their age which should broaden the vision and elevate the
ideals of the masses of their fellows. The literature of the period,
therefore, lacks the disinterested and joyous spontaneity of, for example,
the Elizabethan period, and its mood is far more complex than that of the
partly socially-minded pseudo-classicists.

While all the new influences were manifesting themselves in Victorian
literature they did not, of course, supersede the great general inherited
tendencies. This literature is in the main romantic. On the social side
this should be evident; the Victorian social humanitarianism is merely the
developed form of the eighteenth century romantic democratic impulse. On
the esthetic side the romantic traits are also present, though not so
aggressively as in the previous period; with romantic vigor the Victorian
literature often combines exquisite classical finish; indeed, it is so
eclectic and composite that all the definite older terms take on new and
less sharply contrasting meanings when applied to it.

So long a period naturally falls into sub-divisions; during its middle part
in particular, progress and triumphant romanticism, not yet largely
attacked by scientific scepticism, had created a prevailing atmosphere of
somewhat passive sentiment and optimism both in society and in literature
which has given to the adjective 'mid-Victorian' a very definite
denotation. The adjective and its period are commonly spoken of with
contempt in our own day by those persons who pride themselves on their
complete sophistication and superiority to all intellectual and emotional
weakness. But during the 'mid-Victorian' years, there was also a
comparative healthiness in the lives of the well-to-do classes and in
literature which had never before been equalled and which may finally prove
no less praiseworthy than the rather self-conscious freedom and unrestraint
of the early twentieth century.

The most important literature of the whole period falls under the three
heads of essays, poetry, and prose fiction, which we may best consider in
that order.

LORD MACAULAY. The first great figure, chronologically, in the period, and
one of the most clearly-defined and striking personalities in English
literature, is Thomas Babington Macaulay, [Footnote: The details of
Macaulay's life are known from the; famous biography of him by his nephew,
Sir George Trevelyan.] who represents in the fullest degree the Victorian
vigor and delight in material progress, but is quite untouched by the
Victorian spiritual striving. The descendant of Scottish ministers and
English Quakers, Macaulay was born in 1800. His father was a tireless and
devoted member of the group of London anti-slavery workers (Claphamites),
and was Secretary of the company which conducted Sierra Leone (the African
state for enfranchised negroes); he had also made a private fortune in
African trade. From his very babyhood the son displayed almost incredible
intellectual precocity and power of memory. His voracious reading began at
the age of three, when he 'for the most part lay on the rug before the
fire, with his book on the floor, and a piece of bread-and-butter in his
hand.' Once, in his fifth year, when a servant had spilled an urn of hot
coffee over his legs, he replied to the distressed inquiries of the lady of
the house, 'Thank you, madam, the agony is abated.' From the first it seems
to have been almost impossible for him to forget anything which had ever
found lodgment in, or even passed through, his mind. His childish
production of both verse and prose was immense. These qualities and
accomplishments, however, did not make him a prig. Both as child and as
man, though he was aggressive and showed the prejudices of his class, he
was essentially natural and unaffected; and as man he was one of the most
cordial and affectionate of companions, lavish of his time with his
friends, and one of the most interesting of conversationalists. As he grew
toward maturity he proved unique in his manner, as well as in his power, of
reading. It is said that he read books faster than other people skimmed
them, and skimmed them as fast as any one else could turn the leaves, this,
however, without superficiality. One of the habits of his middle life was
to walk through London, even the most crowded parts, 'as fast as other
people walked, and reading a book a great deal faster than anybody else
could read.' His remarkable endowments, however, were largely
counterbalanced by his deficiency in the spiritual sense. This appears most
seriously in his writings, but it shows itself also in his personal tastes.
For Nature he cared little; like Dr. Johnson he 'found London the place for
him.' One occasion when he remarked on the playing of 'God save the Queen'
is said to have been the only one when he ever appeared to distinguish one
tune from another. Even on the material side of life he had limitations
very unusual in an English gentleman. Except for walking, which might
almost be called a main occupation with him, he neither practised nor cared
for any form of athletic exercise, 'could neither swim nor row nor drive
nor skate nor shoot,' nor scarcely ride.

From private schools Macaulay proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge,
where he remained through the seven years required for the Master's degree.
In spite of his aversion for mathematics, he finally won a 'lay'
fellowship, which did not involve residence at the University nor any other
obligation, but which almost sufficed for his support during the seven
years of its duration. At this time his father failed in his business, and
during several years Macaulay was largely occupied with the heavy task of
reestablishing it and paying the creditors. In college he had begun to
write in prose and verse for the public literary magazines, and in 1825
appeared his essay on Milton, the first of the nearly forty literary,
historical, and biographical essays which during the next thirty years or
more he contributed to 'The Edinburgh Review.' He also nominally studied
law, and was admitted to the bar in 1826, but he took no interest in the
profession. In 1828 he was made a Commissioner of Bankruptcy and in 1830 he
attained the immediate object of his ambition by receiving from a nobleman
who controlled it a seat in Parliament. Here he at once distinguished
himself as orator and worker. Heart and soul a Liberal, he took a prominent
part in the passage of the first Reform Bill, of 1832, living at the same
time a busy social life in titled society. The Ministry rewarded his
services with a position on the Board of Control, which represented the
government in its relations with the East India Company, and in 1834, in
order to earn the fortune which seemed to him essential to his continuance
in the unremunerative career of public life, he accepted the position of
legal adviser to the Supreme Council of India, which carried with it a seat
in that Council and a salary of £10,000 a year. During the three months
voyage to India he 'devoured' and in many cases copiously annotated a vast
number of books in 'Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, and English;
folios, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos.' Under the pressure of actual
necessity he now mastered the law, and the most important parts of the
astonishing mass of work that he performed during his three and a half
years in India consisted in redrafting the penal code and in helping to
organize education.

Soon after his return to England he was elected to Parliament as member for
Edinburgh, and for two years he was in the Cabinet. Somewhat later the
publication of his 'Lays of Ancient Rome' and of his collected essays
brought him immense fame as a writer, and in 1847 his defeat at Edinburgh
for reelection to Parliament gave him time for concentrated labor on the
'History of England' which he had already begun as his crowning work. To it
he thenceforth devoted most of his energies, reading and sifting the whole
mass of available source-material and visiting the scenes of the chief
historical events. The popular success of the five volumes which he
succeeded in preparing and published at intervals was enormous. In 1852 he
was reelected to Parliament at Edinburgh, but ill-health resulting from his
long-continued excessive expenditure of energy warned him that he had not
long to live. He was made a baron in 1857 and died in 1859, deeply mourned
both because of his manly character and because with him perished mostly
unrecorded a knowledge of the facts of English history more minute,
probably, than that of any one else who has ever lived.

Macaulay never married, but, warm-hearted as he was, always lived largely
in his affection for his sisters and for the children of one of them, Lady
Trevelyan. In his public life he displayed as an individual a fearless and
admirable devotion to principle, modified somewhat by the practical
politician's devotion to party. From every point of view, his character was
remarkable, though bounded by his very definite limitations.

Least noteworthy among Macaulay's works are his poems, of which the 'Lays
of Ancient Rome' are chief. Here his purpose is to embody his conception of
the heroic historical ballads which must have been current among the early
Romans as among the medieval English--to recreate these ballads for modern
readers. For this sort of verse Macaulay's temperament was precisely
adapted, and the 'Lays' present the simple characters, scenes, and ideals
of the early Roman republican period with a sympathetic vividness and in
stirring rhythms which give them an unlimited appeal to boys. None the less
the 'Lays' really make nothing else so clear as that in the true sense of
the word Macaulay was not at all a poet. They show absolutely nothing of
the finer feeling which adds so much, for example, to the descriptions in
Scott's somewhat similar romances, and they are separated by all the
breadth of the world from the realm of delicate sensation and imagination
to which Spenser and Keats and all the genuine poets are native-born.

The power of Macaulay's prose works, as no critic has failed to note, rests
on his genius as an orator. For oratory he was rarely endowed. The
composition of a speech was for him a matter of a few hours; with almost
preternatural mental activity he organized and sifted the material,
commonly as he paced up and down his garden or his room; then, the whole
ready, nearly verbatim, in his mind, he would pass to the House of Commons
to hold his colleagues spell-bound during several hours of fervid
eloquence. Gladstone testified that the announcement of Macaulay's
intention to speak was 'like a trumpet call to fill the benches.' The great
qualities, then, of his essays and his 'History' are those which give
success to the best sort of popular oratory--dramatic vividness and
clearness, positiveness, and vigorous, movement and interest. He realizes
characters and situations, on the external side, completely, and conveys
his impression to his readers with scarcely any diminution of force. Of
expository structure he is almost as great a master as Burke, though in his
essays and 'History' the more concrete nature of his material makes him
prevailingly a narrator. He sees and presents his subjects as wholes,
enlivening them with realistic details and pictures, but keeping the
subordinate parts subordinate and disposing of the less important events in
rapid summaries. Of clear and trenchant, though metallic, narrative and
expository style he is a master. His sentences, whether long or short, are
always lucid; he knows the full value of a short sentence suddenly snapped
out after a prolonged period; and no other writer has ever made such'
frequent and striking (though somewhat monotonous) use of deliberate
oratorical balance of clauses and strong antithesis, or more illuminating
use of vivid resumes. The best of his essays, like those on the Earl of
Chatham and on the two men who won India for England, Clive and Warren
Hastings, are models of the comparatively brief comprehensive dissertation
of the form employed by Johnson in his 'Lives of the Poets.'

Macaulay, however, manifests the, defects even of his virtues. His
positiveness, fascinating and effective as it is for an uncritical reader,
carries with it extreme self-confidence and dogmatism, which render him
violently intolerant of any interpretations of characters and events except
those that he has formed, and formed sometimes hastily and with prejudice.
The very clearness and brilliancy of his style are often obtained at the
expense of real truth; for the force of his sweeping statements and his
balanced antitheses often requires much heightening or even distortion of
the facts; in making each event and each character stand out in the
plainest outline he has often stripped it of its background of qualifying
circumstances. These specific limitations, it will be evident, are
outgrowths of his great underlying deficiency--the deficiency in spiritual
feeling and insight. Macaulay is a masterly limner of the external side of
life, but he is scarcely conscious of the interior world in which the finer
spirits live and work out their destinies. Carlyle's description of his
appearance is significant: 'I noticed the homely Norse features that you
find everywhere in the Western Isles, and I thought to myself, "Well, any
one can see that you are an honest, good sort of fellow, made out of
oatmeal." Macaulay's eminently clear, rapid, and practical mind
comprehended fully and respected whatever could be seen and understood by
the intellect; things of more subtle nature he generally disbelieved in or
dismissed with contempt. In dealing with complex or subtle characters he
cannot reveal the deeper spiritual motives from which their action sprang;
and in his view of history he does not include the underlying and
controlling spiritual forces. Macaulay was the most brilliant of those whom
the Germans have named Philistines, the people for whom life consists of
material things; specifically he was the representative of the great body
of middle-class early-Victorian liberals, enthusiastically convinced that
in the triumphs of the Liberal party, of democracy, and of mechanical
invention, the millennium was being rapidly realized. Macaulay wrote a
fatal indictment of himself when in praising Bacon as the father of modern
science he depreciated Plato, the idealist. Plato's philosophy, said
Macaulay, 'began in words and ended in words,' and he added that 'an acre
in Middlesex is better than a peerage in Utopia.' In his literary and
personal essays, therefore, such as the famous ones on Milton and Bacon,
which belong early in his career, all his immense reading did not suffice
to produce sympathetic and sensitive judgments; there is often more
pretentiousness of style than significance of interpretation. In later life
he himself frankly expressed regret that he had ever written these essays.

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