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THE VICTORIAN AGE IN
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BY G. K. CHESTERTON
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HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.8.A.
PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, D.LlTT.,
LL.D., F.B.A.
PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.
PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
(Columbia University, U.S.A.)
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HENRY HOLT
YORK
AND COMPANY
THE
VICTORIAN AGE
IN LITERATURE
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
'
LONDON
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, 8.K.
AND BONOAY, SUFFOLK
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
INTRODUCTION 7
1 THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE AND ITS ENEMIES 12
II THE GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS . . 90
III THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS . . .156
IV THE BREAK-UP OP THE COMPROMISE . . 204
BIBLIOGRAPHY 253
INDEX . . 255
THE Editors wish to explain that this
book is not put forward as an authoritative
history of Victorian literature. It is a free
and personal statement of views and im-
pressions about the significance of Victorian
literature made by Mr. Chesterton at the
Editors' express invitation.
vi
THE VICTORIAN AGE IN
LITERATURE
INTRODUCTION
A SECTION of a long and splendid literature
can be most conveniently treated in one of
two ways. It can be divided as one cuts
a currant cake or a Gruyere cheese, taking
the currants (or the holes) as they come.
Or it can be divided as one cuts wood along
the grain : if one thinks that there is a grain.
But the two are never the same : the names
never come in the same order in actual time
as they come in any serious study of a spirit
or a tendency. The critic who wishes to
move onward with the life of an epoch, must
be always running backwards and forwards
among its mere dates ; just as a branch bends
back and forth continually; yet the grain
7
8 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
in the branch runs true like an unbroken
river.
Mere chronological order, indeed, is almost
as arbitrary as alphabetical order. To deal
with Darwin, Dickens, Browning, in the
sequence of the birthday book would be to
forge about as real a chain as the " Tacitus,
Tolstoy, Tupper " of a biographical dictionary.
It might lend itself more, perhaps, to accuracy :
and it might satisfy that school of critics who
hold that every artist should be treated
as a solitary craftsman, indifferent to the
commonwealth and unconcerned about moral
things. To write on that principle in the
present case, however, would involve all
those delicate difficulties, known to politicians,
which beset the public defence of a doctrine
which one heartily disbelieves. It is quite
needless here to go into the old " art for
art's sake " business, or explain at length
why individual artists cannot be reviewed
without reference to their traditions and
creeds. It is enough to say that with other
INTRODUCTION 9
creeds they would have been, for literary
purposes, other individuals. Their views do
not, of course, make the brains in their heads
any more than the ink in their pens. But it
is equally evident that mere brain-power,
without attributes or aims, a wheel revolving
in the void, would be a subject about as
entertaining as ink. The moment we differ-
entiate the minds, we must differentiate by
doctrines and moral sentiments. A mere
sympathy for democratic merry-making and
mourning will not make a man a writer
like Dickens. But without that sympathy
Dickens would not be a writer like Dickens;
and probably not a writer at all. A mere
conviction that Catholic thought is the clearest
as well as the best disciplined, will not make
a man a writer like Newman. But without
that conviction Newman would not be a
writer like Newman ; and probably not a writer
at all. It is useless for the aesthete (or any
other anarchist) to urge the isolated individual-
ity of the artist, apart from his attitude to his
10 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
age. His attitude to his age is his individual-
ity : men are never individual when alone.
It only remains for me, therefore, to take
the more delicate and entangled task; and
deal with the great Victorians, not only by
dates and names, but rather by schools and
streams of thought. It is a task for which
I feel myself wholly incompetent ; but as that
applies to every other literary enterprise I
ever went in for, the sensation is not wholly
novel : indeed, it is rather reassuring than
otherwise to realise that I am now doing
something that nobody could do properly.
The chief peril of the process, however, will
be an inevitable tendency to make the spiritual
landscape too large for the figures. I must
ask for indulgence if such criticism traces too
far back into politics or ethics the roots of which
great books were the blossoms; makes Utili-
tarianism more important than Liberty or
talks more of the Oxford Movement than
of The Christian Year. I can only answer
in the very temper of the age of which I
INTRODUCTION 11
write : for I also was born a Victorian ; and
sympathise not a little with the serious
Victorian spirit. I can only answer, I shall
not make religion more important than it
was to Keble, or politics more sacred than
they were to Mill.
CHAPTER I
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE AND ITS ENEMIES
THE previous literary life of this country
had left vigorous many old forces in the
Victorian time, as in our time. Roman
Britain and Mediaeval England are still not
only alive but lively ; for real development is
not leaving things behind, as on a road, but
drawing life from them, as from a root. Even
when we improve we never progress. For
progress, the metaphor from the road, implies
a man leaving his home behind him : but
improvement means a man exalting the
towers or extending the gardens of his home.
The ancient English literature was like all the
several literatures of Christendom, alike in its
likeness, alike in its very unlikeness. Like
all European cultures, it was European ; like
all European cultures, it was something more
12
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 13
than European. A most marked and un-
manageable national temperament is plain in
Chaucer and the ballads of Robin Hood; in
spite of deep and sometimes disastrous
changes of national policy, that note is still
unmistakable in Shakespeare, in Johnson and
his friends, in Cobbett, in Dickens. It is
vain to dream of defining such vivid things;
a national soul is as indefinable as a smell,
and as unmistakable. I remember a friend
who tried impatiently to explain the word
" mistletoe " to a German, and cried at last,
despairing, " Well, you know holly mistle-
toe's the opposite ! " I do not commend this
logical method in the comparison of plants or
nations. But if he had said to the Teuton,
" Well, you know Germany England's the
opposite " the definition, though fallacious,
would not have been wholly false. England,
like all Christian countries, absorbed valuable
elements from the forests and the rude
romanticism of the North; but, like all
Christian countries, it drank its longest
14 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
literary draughts from the classic fountains
of the ancients : nor was this (as is so often
loosely thought) a matter of the mere
" Renaissance." The English tongue and
talent of speech did not merely flower suddenly
into the gargantuan polysyllables of the great
Elizabethans; it had always been full of the
popular Latin of the Middle Ages. But
whatever balance of blood and racial idiom
one allows, it is really true that the only
suggestion that gets near the Englishman is
to hint how far he is from the German. The
Germans, like the Welsh, can sing perfectly
serious songs perfectly seriously in chorus :
can with clear eyes and clear voices, join
together in words of innocent and beautiful
personal passion, for a false maiden or a dead
child. The nearest one can get to denning
the poetic temper of Englishmen is to say
that they couldn't do this even for beer.
They can sing in chorus, and louder than
other Christians : but they must have in their
songs something, I know not what, that is at
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 15
once shamefaced and rowdy. If the matter
be emotional, it must somehow be also broad,
common and comic, as " Wapping Old Stairs "
and " Sally in Our Alley." If it be patriotic,
it must somehow be openly bombastic and,
as it were, indefensible, like " Rule Britannia "
or like that superb song (I never knew its
name, if it has one) that records the number
of leagues from Ushant to the Scilly Isles.
Also there is a tender love-lyric called " O
Tarry Trousers " which is even more English
than the heart of The Midsummer Night's
Dream. But our greatest bards and sages
have often shown a tendency to rant it and
roar it like true British sailors; to employ an
extravagance that is half conscious and there-
fore half humorous. Compare, for example,
the rants of Shakespeare with the rants of
Victor Hugo. A piece of Hugo's eloquence is
either a serious triumph or a serious collapse :
one feels the poet is offended at a smile. But
Shakespeare seems rather proud of talking
nonsense : I never can read that rousing and
16 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
mounting description of the storm, where it
comes to
" Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging
them
With deafening clamour in the slippery
clouds."
without seeing an immense balloon rising
from the ground, with Shakespeare grinning
over the edge of the car, and saying, " You
can't stop me : I am above reason now."
That is the nearest we can get to the general
national spirit, which we have now to follow
through one brief and curious but very
national episode.
Three years before the young queen was
crowned, William Cobbett was buried at
Farnham. It may seem strange to begin
with this great neglected name, rather than
the old age of Wordsworth or the young
death of Shelley. But to any one who feels
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 17
literature as human, the empty chair of
Cobbett is more solemn and significant than
the throne. With him died the sort of
democracy that was a return to Nature, and
which only poets and mobs can understand.
After him Radicalism is urban and Toryism
suburban. Going through green Warwick-
shire, Cobbett might have thought of the
crops and Shelley of the clouds. But Shelley
would have called Birmingham what Cobbett
called it a hell-hole. Cobbett was one with
after Liberals in the ideal of Man under an
equal law, a citizen of no mean city. He
differed from after Liberals in strongly affirming
that Liverpool and Leeds are mean cities.
It is no idle Hibernianism to say that
towards the end of the eighteenth century
the most important event in English history
happened in France. It would seem still
more perverse, yet it would be still more
precise, to say that the most important event
in English history was the event that never
happened at all the English Revolution on
B
18 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
the lines of the French Revolution. Its
failure was not due to any lack of fervour or
even ferocity in those who would have brought
it about : from the time when the first shout
went up for Wilkes to the time when the last
Luddite fires were quenched in a cold rain of
rationalism, the spirit of Cobbett, of rural
republicanism, of English and patriotic
democracy, burned like a beacon. The
revolution failed because it was foiled by
another revolution; an aristocratic revolu-
tion, a victory of the rich over the poor. It
was about this time that the common lands
were finally enclosed; that the more cruel
game laws were first established; that
England became finally a land of landlords
instead of common land-owners. I will not
call it a Tory reaction ; for much of the worst
of it (especially of the land-grabbing) was
done by Whigs ; but we may certainly call it
Anti- Jacobin. Now this fact, though political,
is not only relevant but essential to everything
that concerned literature. The upshot was
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 19
that though England was full of the revolu-
tionary ideas, nevertheless there was no
revolution. And the effect of this in turn
was that from the middle of the eighteenth
century to the middle of the nineteenth the
spirit of revolt in England took a wholly
literary form. In France it was what people
did that was wild and elemental; in England
it was what people wrote. It is a quaint
comment on the notion that the English are
practical and the French merely visionary,
that we were rebels in arts while they were
rebels in arms.
It has been well and wittily said (as illus-
trating the mildness of English and the
violence of French developments) that the
same Gospel of Rousseau which in France
produced the Terror, in England produced
Sandford and Merton. But people forget that
in literature the English were by no means
restrained by Mr. Barlow; and that if we
turn from politics to art, we shall find the
two parts peculiarly reversed. It would be
B 2
20 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
equally true to say that the same eighteenth-
century emancipation which in France pro-
duced the pictures of David, in England
produced the pictures of Blake. There never
were, I think, men who gave to the imagina-
tion so much of the sense of having broken
out into the very borderlands of being, as
did the great English poets of the romantic
or revolutionary period ; than Coleridge in the
secret sunlight of the Antarctic, where the
waters were like witches' oils; than Keats
looking out of those extreme mysterious case-
ments upon that ultimate sea. The heroes
and criminals of the great French crisis would
have been quite as incapable of such imagina-
tive independence as Keats and Coleridge
would have been incapable of winning the
battle of Wattignies. In Paris the tree of
liberty was a garden tree, clipped very
correctly; and Robespierre used the razor
more regularly than the guillotine. Danton,
who knew and admired English literature,
would have cursed freely over Kubla Khan;
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 21
and if the Committee of Public Safety had
not already executed Shelley as an aristocrat,
they would certainly have locked him up for
a madman. Even Hebert (the one really vile
Revolutionist), had he been reproached by
English poets with worshipping the Goddess
of Reason, might legitimately have retorted
that it was rather the Goddess of Unreason
that they set up to be worshipped. Verbally
considered, Carlyle's French Revolution was
more revolutionary than the real French
Revolution : and if Carrier, in an exaggera-
tive phrase, empurpled the Loire with carnage,
Turner almost literally set the Thames on
fire.
This trend of the English Romantics to
carry out the revolutionary idea not savagely
in works, but very wildly indeed in words, had
several results; the most important of which
was this. It started English literature after
the Revolution with a sort of bent towards
independence and eccentricity, which in the
brighter wits became individuality, and in the
22 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
duller ones, Individualism. English Roman-
tics, English Liberals, were not public men
making a republic, but poets, each seeing a
vision. The lonelier version of liberty was a
sort of aristocratic anarchism in Byron and
Shelley; but though in Victorian times it
faded into much milder prejudices and much
more bourgeois crotchets, England retained
from that twist a certain odd separation
and privacy. England became much more
of an island than she had ever been before.
There fell from her about this time, not only
the understanding of France or Germany, but
to her own long and yet lingering disaster, the
understanding of Ireland. She had not joined
in the attempt to create European democracy ;
nor did she, save in the first glow of Waterloo,
join in the counter-attempt to destroy it.
The life in her literature was still, to a large
extent, the romantic liberalism of Rousseau,
the free and humane truisms that had re-
freshed the^other nations, the return to Nature
and to natural rights. But that which in
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 23
Rousseau was a creed, became in Hazlitt a
taste and in Lamb little more than a whim.
These latter and their like form a group at the
beginning of the nineteenth century of those
we may call the Eccentrics : they gather round
Coleridge and his decaying dreams or linger
in the tracks of Keats and Shelley and
Godwin ; Lamb with his bibliomania and
creed of pure caprice, the most unique of all
geniuses ; Leigh Hunt with his Bohemian
impecuniosity ; Landor with his tempestuous
temper, throwing plates on the floor; Hazlitt
with his bitterness and his low love affair;
even that healthier and happier Bohemian,
Peacock. With these, in one sense at least,
goes De Quincey. He was, unlike most of
these embers of the revolutionary age in
letters, a Tory; and was attached to the
political army which is best represented in
letters by the virile laughter and leisure of
Wilson's Nodes Ambrosiance. But he had
nothing in common with that environment.
It remained for some time as a Tory tradition,
24 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
which balanced the cold and brilliant aris-
tocracy of the Whigs. It lived on the legend
of Trafalgar; the sense that insularity was
independence; the sense that anomalies are
as jolly as family jokes ; the general sense that
old salts are the salt of the earth. It still
lives in some old songs about Nelson or
Waterloo, which are vastly more pompous
and vastly more sincere than the cockney
cocksureness of later Jingo lyrics. But it is
hard to connect De Quincey with it ; or,
indeed, with anything else. De Quincey
would certainly have been a happier man,
and almost certainly a better man, if he had
got drunk on toddy with Wilson, instead of
getting calm and clear (as he himself de-
scribes) on opium, and with no company but
a book of German metaphysics. But he
would hardly have revealed those wonderful
vistas and perspectives of prose, which
permit one to call him the first and most
powerful of the decadents : those sentences
that lengthen out like nightmare corridors, or
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 25
rise higher and higher like impossible eastern
pagodas. He was a morbid fellow, and far
less moral than Burns ; for when Burns con-
fessed excess he did not defend it. But he
has cast a gigantic shadow on our literature,
and was as certainly a genius as Poe. Also
he had humour, which Poe had not. And if
any one still smarting from the pinpricks of
Wilde or Whistler, wants to convict them of
plagarism in their " art for art " epigrams
he will find most of what they said said
better in Murder as One of the Fine Arts.
One great man remains of this elder group,
who did their last work only under Victoria ;
he knew most of the members of it, yet he did
not belong to it in any corporate sense. He
was a poor man and an invalid, with Scotch
blood and a strong, though perhaps only
inherited, quarrel with the old Calvinism ; by
name Thomas Hood. Poverty and illness
forced him to the toils of an incessant jester ;
and the revolt against gloomy religion made
him turn his wit, whenever he could, in the
26 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
direction of a defence of happier and humaner
views. In the long great roll that includes
Homer and Shakespeare, he was the last
great man who really employed the pun.
His puns were not all good (nor were Shake-
speare's), but the best of them were a strong
and fresh form of art. The pun is said to be
a thing of two meanings ; but with Hood there
were three meanings, for there was also the
abstract truth that would have been there
with no pun at all. The pun of Hood is
underrated, like the " wit " of Voltaire, by
those who forget that the words of Voltaire
were not pins, but swords. In Hood at his
best the verbal neatness only gives to the
satire or the scorn a ring of finality such as is
given by ryhme. For rhyme does go with
reason, since the aim of both is to bring things
to an end. The tragic necessity of puns
tautened and hardened Hood's genius; so
that there is always a sort of shadow of that
sharpness across all his serious poems, falling
like the shadow of a sword. " Sewing at once
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 27
with a double thread a shroud as well as a
shirt" " We thought her dying when she
slept, and sleeping when she died " " Oh
God, that bread should be so dear and flesh
and blood so cheap " none can fail to note
in these a certain fighting discipline of phrase,
a compactness and point which was well
trained in lines like " A cannon-ball took off
his legs, so he laid down his arms." In
France he would have been a great epi-
grammatist, like Hugo. In England he is
a punster.
There was nothing at least in this group
I have loosely called the Eccentrics that
disturbs the general sense that all their
generation was part of the sunset of the great
revolutionary poets. This fading glamour
affected England in a sentimental and, to
some extent, a snobbish direction ; making
men feel that great lords with long curls
and whiskers were naturally the wits that led
the world. But it affected England also
negatively and by reaction ; for it associated
28 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
such men as Byron with superiority, but not
with success. The English middle classes
were led to distrust poetry almost as much as
they admired it. They could not believe
that either vision at the one end or violence at
the other could ever be practical. They were
deaf to that great warning of Hugo : " You
say the poet is in the clouds; but so is the
thunderbolt." Ideals exhausted themselves
in the void ; Victorian England, very unwisely,
would have no more to do with idealists in
politics. And this, chiefly, because there had
been about these great poets a young and
splendid sterility; since the pantheist Shelley
was in fact washed under by the wave of the
world, or Byron sank in death as he drew the
sword for Hellas.
The chief turn of nineteenth - century
England was taken about the time when a
footman at Holland House opened a door
and announced " Mr. Macaulay." Macaulay's
literary popularity was representative and it
was deserved; but his presence among the
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 29
great Whig families marks an epoch. He was
the son of one of the first " friends of the
negro," whose honest industry and philan-
thropy were darkened by a religion of sombre
smugness, which almost makes one fancy
they loved the negro for his colour, and would
have turned away from red or yellow men
as needlessly gaudy. But his wit and his
politics (combined with that dropping of the
Puritan tenets but retention of the Puritan
tone which marked his class and generation),
lifted him into a sphere which was utterly
opposite to that from which he came. This
Whig world was exclusive; but it was not
narrow. It was very difficult for an outsider
to get into it ; but if he did get into it he was
in a much freer atmosphere than any other
in England. Of those aristocrats, the Old
Guard of the eighteenth century, many denied
God, many defended Bonaparte, and nearly
all sneered at the Royal Family. Nor did
wealth or birth make any barriers for those
once within this singular Whig world. The
30 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
platform was high, but it was level. More-
over the upstart nowadays pushes himself by
wealth : but the Whigs could choose their
upstarts. In that world Macaulay found
Rogers, with his phosphorescent and corpse-
like brilliancy; there he found Sidney Smith,
bursting with crackers of common sense, an
admirable old heathen; there he found Tom
Moore, the romantic of the Regency, a
shortened shadow of Lord Byron. That he
reached this platform and remained on it is,
I say, typical of a turning-point in the
century. For the fundamental fact of early
Victorian history was this ; the decision of the
middle classes to employ their new wealth in
backing up a sort of aristocratical compromise,
and not (like the middle class in the French
Revolution) insisting on a clean sweep and
a clear democratic programme. It went
along with the decision of the aristocracy to
recruit itself more freely from the middle
class. It was then also that Victorian
" prudery " began : the great lords yielded on
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 31
this as on Free Trade. These two decisions
have made the doubtful England of to-day;
and Macaulay is typical of them; he is
the bourgeois in Belgravia. The alliance is
marked by his great speeches for Lord Grey's
Reform Bill : it is marked even more signifi-
cantly in his speech against the Chartists.
Cobbett was dead.
Macaulay makes the foundation of the
Victorian age in all its very English and
unique elements : its praise of Puritan politics
and abandonment of Puritan theology; its
belief in a cautious but perpetual patching up
of the Constitution ; its admiration for in-
dustrial wealth. But above all he typifies the
two things that really make the Victorian Age
itself, the cheapness and narrowness of its
conscious formulae ; the richness and humanity
of its unconscious tradition. There were two
Macaulays, a rational Macaulay who was
generally wrong, and a romantic Macaulay
who was almost invariably right. All that
was small in him derives from the dull
32 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
parliamentarism of men like Sir James Mackin-
tosh ; but all that was great in him has much
more kinship with the festive antiquarianism
of Sir Walter Scott.
As a philosopher he had only two thoughts ;
and neither of them are true. The first was
that politics, as an experimental science, must
go on improving, along with clocks, pistols
or penknives, by the mere accumulation of
experiment and variety. He was, indeed, far
too strong-minded a man to accept the hazy
modern notion that the soul in its highest
sense can change : he seems to have held
that religion can never get any better and
that poetry rather tends to get worse. But
he did not see the flaw in his political theory ;
which is that unless the soul improves with
time there is no guarantee that the accumula-
tions of experience will be adequately used.
Figures do not add themselves up; birds do
not label or stuff themselves ; comets do not
calculate their own courses; these things are
done by the soul of man. And if the soul of
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 33
man is subject to other laws, is liable to sin,
to sleep, to anarchism or to suicide, then all
sciences including politics may fall as sterile
and lie as fallow as before man's reason was
made. Macaulay seemed sometimes to talk
as if clocks produced clocks, or guns had
families of little pistols, or a penknife littered
like a pig. The other view he held was the
more or less utilitarian theory of toleration ;
that we should get the best butcher whether
he was a Baptist or a Muggletonian and the
best soldier, whether he was a Wesleyan or
an Irvingite. The compromise worked well
enough in an England Protestant in bulk;
but Macaulay ought to have seen that it has
its limitations. A good butcher might be
Baptist ; he is not very likely to be a Buddhist.
A good soldier might be a Wesleyan ; he would
hardly be a Quaker. For the rest, Macaulay
was concerned to interpret the seventeenth
century in terms of the triumph of the Whigs
as champions of public rights ; and he upheld
this one-sidedly but not malignantly in a
34 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
style of rounded and ringing sentences, which
at its best is like steel and at its worst like tin.
This was the small conscious Macaulay;
the great unconscious Macaulay was very
different. His noble enduring quality in our
literature is this : that he truly had an abstract
passion for history ; a warm, poetic and sincere
enthusiasm for great things as such; an
ardour and appetite for great books, great
battles, great cities, great men. He felt and
used names like trumpets. The reader's
greatest joy is in the writer's own joy, when
he can let his last phrase fall like a hammer
on some resounding name like Hildebrand or
Charlemagne, on the eagles of Rome or the
pillars of Hercules. As with Walter Scott,
some of the best things in his prose and poetry
are the surnames that he did not make. And
it is remarkable to notice that this romance of
history, so far from making him more partial
or untrustworthy, was the only thing that
made him moderately just. His reason was
entirely one-sided and fanatical. It was his
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 35
imagination that was well-balanced and
broad. He was monotonously certain that
only Whigs were right ; but it was necessary
that Tories should at least be great, that his
heroes might have foemen worthy of their
steel. If there was one thing in the world
he hated it was a High Church Royalist
parson ; yet when Jeremy Collier the Jacobite
priest raises a real banner, all Macaulay's
blood warms with the mere prospect of a
fight. " It is inspiriting to see how gallantly
the solitary outlaw advances to attack enemies
formidable separately, and, it might have
been thought, irresistible when combined ;
distributes his swashing blows right and left
among Wycherley, Congreve and Vanbrugh,
treads the wretched D'Urfey down in the
dirt beneath his feet ; and strikes with all his
strength full at the towering crest of Dryden."
That is exactly where Macaulay is great ;
because he is almost Homeric. The whole
triumph turns upon mere names ; but men are
commanded by names. So his poem on the
o 2
36 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
Armada is really a good geography book
gone mad ; one sees the map of England come
alive and march and mix under the eye.
The chief tragedy in the trend of later
literature may be expressed by saying that
the smaller Macaulay conquered the larger.
Later men had less and less of that hot love of
history he had inherited from Scott. They
had more and more of that cold science
of self-interests which he had learnt from
Bent ham.
The name of this great man, though it
belongs to a period before the Victorian, is,
like the name of Cobbett, very important to
it. In substance Macaulay accepted the con-
clusions of Bentham; though he offered
brilliant objections to all his arguments. In
any case the soul of Bentham (if he had one)
went marching on, like John Brown; and
in the central Victorian movement it was
certainly he who won. John Stuart Mill was
the final flower of that growth. He was
himself fresh and delicate and pure ; but that
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 37
is the business of a flower. Though he had
to preach a hard rationalism in religion, a
hard competition in economics, a hard egoism
in ethics, his own soul had all that silvery
sensitiveness that can be seen in his fine
portrait by Watts. He boasted none of that
brutal optimism with which his friends and
followers of the Manchester School expounded
their cheery negations. There was about Mill
even a sort of embarrassment ; he exhibited
all the wheels of his iron universe rather
reluctantly, like a gentleman in trade showing
ladies over his factory. There shone in him
a beautiful reverence for women, which is all
the more touching because, in his department,
as it were, he could only offer them so dry a
gift as the Victorian Parliamentary Franchise.
Now in trying to describe how the Victorian
writers stood to each other, we must recur
to the very real difficulty noted at the begin-
ning; the difficulty of keeping the moral
order parallel with the chronological order.
For the mind moves by instincts, associations,
38 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
premonitions and not by fixed dates or com-
pleted processes. Action and reaction will
occur simultaneously : or the cause actually
be found after the effect. Errors will be re-
sisted before they have been properly pro-
mulgated : notions will be first defined long
after they are dead. It is no good getting the
almanac to look up moonshine; and most
literature in this sense is moonshine. Thus
Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as
it were, from a Shelleyan extreme of panthe-
ism as yet disembodied. Thus Newman took
down the iron sword of dogma to parry a
blow not yet delivered, that was coming from
the club of Darwin. For this reason no one
can understand tradition, or even history,
who has not some tenderness for anachronism.
Now for the great part of the Victorian
era the utilitarian tradition which reached its
highest in Mill held the centre of the field ; it
was the philosophy in office, so to speak. It
sustained its march of codification and inquiry
until it had made possible the great victories
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 39
of Darwin and Huxley and Wallace. If we
take Macaulay at the beginning of the epoch
and Huxley at the end of it, we shall find that
they had much in common. They were both
square-jawed, simple men, greedy of contro-
versy but scornful of sophistry, dead to mysti-
cism but very much alive to morality; and
they were both very much more under the
influence of their own admirable rhetoric
than they knew. Huxley, especially, was
much more a literary than a scientific man.
It is amusing to note that when Huxley was
charged with being rhetorical, he expressed
his horror of " plastering the fair face of truth
with that pestilent cosmetic, rhetoric," which
is itself about as well-plastered a piece of
rhetoric as Ruskin himself could have managed.
The difference that the period had developed
can best be seen if we consider this : that while
neither was of a spiritual sort, Macaulay took
it for granted that common sense required
some kind of theology, while Huxley took it
for granted that common sense meant having
40 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
none. Macaulay, it is said, never talked
about his religion : but Huxley was always
talking about the religion he hadn't got.
But though this simple Victorian rational-
ism held the centre, and in a certain sense was
the Victorian era, it was assailed on many
sides, and had been assailed even before the
beginning of that era. The rest of the
intellectual history of the time is a series of
reactions against it, which come wave after
wave. They have succeeded in shaking it,
but not in dislodging it from the modern
mind. The first of these was the Oxford
Movement; a bow that broke when it had
let loose the flashing arrow that was Newman.
The second reaction was one man; without
teachers or pupils Dickens. The third re-
action was a group that tried to create a sort
of new romantic Protestantism, to pit against
both Reason and Rome Carlyle, Rus-
kin, Kingsley, Maurice perhaps Tennyson.
Browning also was at once romantic and
Puritan ; but he belonged to no group, and
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 41
worked against materialism in a manner
entirely his own. Though as a boy he bought
eagerly Shelley's revolutionary poems, he did
not think of becoming a revolutionary poet.
He concentrated on the special souls of men ;
seeking God in a series of private interviews.
Hence Browning, great as he is, is rather one
of the Victorian novelists than wholly of the
Victorian poets. From Ruskin, again, de-
scend those who may be called the Pre-
Raphaelites of prose and poetry.
It is really with this rationalism triumphant,
and with the romance of these various attacks
on it, that the study of Victorian literature
begins and proceeds. Bent ham was already
the prophet of a powerful sect; Macaulay
was already the historian of an historic party,
before the true Victorian epoch began. The
middle classes were emerging in a state of
damaged Puritanism. The upper classes were
utterly pagan. Their clear and courageous
testimony remains in those immortal words
of Lord Melbourne, who had led the young
42 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
queen to the throne and long stood there as
her protector. " No one has more respect
for the Christian religion than I have; but
really, when it comes to intruding it into
private life " What was pure paganism
in the politics of Melbourne became a sort of
mystical cynicism in the politics of Disraeli;
and is well mirrored in his novels for he was
a man who felt at home in mirrors. With
every allowance for aliens and eccentrics and
all the accidents that must always eat the
edges of any systematic circumference, it
may still be said that the Utilitarians held
the fort.
Of the Oxford Movement what remains
most strongly in the Victorian Epoch centres
round the challenge of Newman, its one great
literary man. But the movement as a whole
had been of great significance in the very
genesis and make up of the society : yet that
significance is not quite easy immediately to
define. It was certainly not aesthetic ritual-
ism ; scarcely one of the Oxford High Church-
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 43
men was what we should call a Ritualist. It
was certainly not a conscious reaching out
towards Rome : except on a Roman Catholic
theory which might explain all our unrests
by that dim desire. It knew little of Europe,
it knew nothing of Ireland, to which any
merely Roman Catholic revulsion would
obviously have turned. In the first instance,
I think, the more it is studied, the more it
would appear that it was a movement of mere
religion as such. It was not so much a taste
for Catholic dogma, but simply a hunger for
dogma. For dogma means the serious satis-
faction of the mind. Dogma does not mean
the absence of thought, but the end of thought.
It was a revolt against the Victorian spirit
in one particular aspect of it; which may
roughly be called (in a cosy and domestic
Victorian metaphor) having your cake and
eating it too. It saw that the solid and
serious Victorians were fundamentally frivol-
ous because they were fundamentally in-
consistent.
44 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
A man making the confession of any creed
worth ten minutes' intelligent talk, is always
a man who gains something and gives up
something. So long as he does both he can
create : for he is making an outline and a
shape. Mahomet created, when he forbade
wine but allowed five wives : he created a
very big thing, which we have still to deal
with. The first French Republic created,
when it affirmed property and abolished
peerages ; France still stands like a square,
four-sided building which Europe has be-
sieged in vain. The men of the Oxford
Movement would have been horrified at being
compared either with Moslems or Jacobins.
But their sub-conscious thirst was for some-
thing that Moslems and Jacobins had and
ordinary Anglicans had not : the exalted
excitement of consistency. If you were a
Moslem you were not a Bacchanal. If you
were a Republican you were not a peer. And
so the Oxford men, even in their first and
dimmest stages, felt that if you were a Church-
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 45
man you were not a Dissenter. The Oxford
Movement was, out of the very roots of its
being, a rational movement ; almost a ration-
alist movement. In that it differed sharply
from the other reactions that shook the Utili-
tarian compromise ; the blinding mysticism of
Carlyle, the mere manly emotionalism of
Dickens. It was an appeal to reason : reason
said that if a Christian had a feast day he
must have a fast day too. Otherwise, all
days ought to be alike; and this was that
very Utilitarianism against which their Ox-
ford Movement was the first and most
rational assault.
This idea, even by reason of its reason,
narrowed into a sort of sharp spear, of which
the spear blade was Newman. It did forget
many of the other forces that were fighting
on its side. But the movement could boast,
first and last, many men who had this eager
dogmatic quality; Keble, who spoilt a poem
in order to recognise a doctrine; Faber who
told the rich, almost with taunts, that God
46 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATUR
sent the poor as eagles to strip them, Froude
who, with Newman announced his return in
the arrogant motto of Achilles. But the
greater part of all this happened before what
is properly our period ; and in that period
Newman, and perhaps Newman alone, is the
expression and summary of the whole school.
It was certainly in the Victorian Age, and after
his passage to Rome, that Newman claimed
his complete right to be in any book on
modern English literature. This is no place
for estimating his theology : but one point
about it does clearly emerge. Whatever else
is right, the theory that Newman went over
to Rome to find peace and an end of argument,
is quite unquestionably wrong. He had far
more quarrels after he had gone over to Rome.
But, though he had far more quarrels, he had
far fewer compromises : and he was of that
temper which is tortured more by compromise
than by quarrel. He was a man at once of
abnormal energy and abnormal sensibility :
nobody without that combination could
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 47
have written the Apologia. If he sometimes
seemed to skin his enemies alive, it was be-
cause he himself lacked a skin. In this sense
his Apologia is a triumph far beyond the
ephemeral charge on which it was founded ;
in this sense he does indeed (to use his own
expression) vanquish not his accuser but his
judges. Many men would shrink from re-
cording all their cold fits and hesitations and
prolonged inconsistencies : I am sure it was
the breath of life to Newman to confess them,
now that he had done with them for ever.
His Lectures on the Present Position of English
Catholics, practically preached against a
raging mob, rise not only higher but happier,,
as his instant unpopularity increases. There
is something grander than humour, there is.
fun, in the very first lecture about the British
Constitution as explained to a meeting of
Russians. But always his triumphs are the
triumphs of a highly sensitive man : a man
must feel insults before he can so insultingly
and splendidly avenge them. He is a naked
48 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
man, who carries a naked sword. The
quality of his literary style is so successful
that it succeeds in escaping definition. The
quality of his logic is that of a long but passion-
ate patience, which waits until he has fixed
all corners of an iron trap. But the quality
of his moral comment on the age remains
what I have said : a protest of the rationality
of religion as against the increasing irration-
ality of mere Victorian comfort and com-
promise. So far as the present purpose is
concerned, his protest died with him : he
left few imitators and (it may easily be
conceived) no successful imitators. The sug-
gestion of him lingers on in the exquisite
Elizabethan perversity of Coventry Patmore ;
and has later flamed out from the shy volcano
of Francis Thompson. Otherwise (as we
shall see in the parallel case of Ruskin's
Socialism) he has no followers in his own age :
but very many in ours.
The next group of reactionaries or romantics
or whatever we elect to call them, gathers
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 49
roughly around one great name. Scotland,
from which had come so many of those harsh
economists who made the first Radical philo-
sophies of the Victorian Age, was destined also
to fling forth (I had almost said to spit forth)
their fiercest and most extraordinary enemy.
The two primary things in Thomas Carlyle
were his early Scotch education and his later
German culture. The first was in almost all
respects his strength; the latter in some
respects his weakness. As an ordinary low-
land peasant, he inherited the really valuable
historic property of the Scots, their indepen-
dence, their fighting spirit, and their in-
stinctive philosophic consideration of men
merely as men. But he was not an ordinary
peasant. If he had laboured obscurely in
his village till death, he would have been yet
locally a marked man; a man with a wild
eye, a man with an air of silent anger ; perhaps
a man at whom stones were sometimes thrown.
A strain of disease and suffering ran athwart
both his body and his soul. In spite of his
D
50 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
praise of silence, it was only through his gift
of utterance that he escaped madness. But
while his fellow-peasants would have seen
this in him and perhaps mocked it, they would
also have seen something which they always
expect in such men, and they would have got
it : vision, a power in the mind akin to second
sight. Like many ungainly or otherwise
unattractive Scotchmen, he was a seer. By
which I do not mean to refer so much to his
transcendental rhapsodies about the World-
soul or the Nature-garment or the Mysteries
and Eternities generally, these seem to me
to belong more to his German side and to be
less sincere and vital. I mean a real power of
seeing things suddenly, not apparently reached
by any process; a grand power of guessing.
He saw the crowd of the new States General,
Danton with his " rude flattened face,"
Robespierre peering mistily through his
spectacles. He saw the English charge at
Dunbar. He guessed that Mirabeau, however
dissipated and diseased, had something sturdy
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 51
inside him. He guessed that Lafayette, how-
ever brave and victorious, had nothing inside
him. He supported the lawlessness of Crom-
well, because across two centuries he almost
physically felt the feebleness and hopelessness
of the moderate Parliamentarians. He said
a word of sympathy for the universally
vituperated Jacobins of the Mountain, be-
cause through thick veils of national prejudice
and misrepresentation, he felt the impossibility
of the Gironde. He was wrong in denying
to Scott the power of being inside his char-
acters : but he really had a good deal of that
power himself. It was one of his innumerable
and rather provincial crochets to encourage
prose as against poetry. But, as a matter of
fact, he himself was much greater considered
as a kind of poet than considered as anything
else ; and the central idea of poetry is the idea
of guessing right, like a child.
He first emerged, as it were, as a student
and disciple of Goethe. The connection was
not wholly fortunate. With much of what
D 2
52 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
Goethe really stood for he was not really in
sympathy; but in his own obstinate way, he
tried to knock his idol into shape instead of
choosing another. He pushed further and
further the extravagances of a vivid but very
unbalanced and barbaric style, in the praise
of a poet who really represented the calmest
classicism and the attempt to restore a Hellenic
equilibrium in the mind. It is like watching
a shaggy Scandinavian decorating a Greek
statue washed up by chance on his shores.
And while the strength of Goethe was a
strength of completion and serenity, which
Carlyle not only never found but never even
sought, the weaknesses of Goethe were of a
sort that did not draw the best out of Carlyle.
The one civilised element that the German
classicists forgot to put into their beautiful
balance was a sense of humour. And great
poet as Goethe was, there is to the last some-
thing faintly fatuous about his half sceptical,
half sentimental self-importance; a Lord
Chamberlain of teacup politics; an earnest
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 53
and elderly flirt ; a German of the Germans.
Now Carlyle had humour; he had it in his
very style, but it never got into his philosophy.
His philosophy largely remained a heavy
Teutonic idealism, absurdly unaware of the
complexity of things ; as when he perpetually
repeated (as with a kind of flat-footed
stamping) that people ought to tell the
truth; apparently supposing, to quote
Stevenson's phrase, that telling the truth
is as easy as blind hookey. Yet, though his
general honesty is unquestionable, he was by
no means one of those who will give up a
fancy under the shock of a fact. If by sheer
genius he frequently guessed right, he was not
the kind of man to admit easily that he had
guessed wrong. His version of Cromwell's
filthy cruelties in Ireland, or his impatient
slurring over of the most sinister riddle in
the morality of Frederick the Great these
passages are, one must frankly say, dis-
ingenuous. But it is, so to speak, a generous
disingenuousness;_the heat and momentum
54 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
of sincere admirations, not the shuffling fear
and flattery of the constitutional or patriotic
historian. It bears most resemblance to the
incurable prejudices of a woman.
For the rest there hovered behind all this
transcendental haze a certain presence of old
northern paganism; he really had some
sympathy with the vast vague gods of that
moody but not unmanly Nature -worship which
seems to have filled the darkness of the North
before the coming of the Roman Eagle or the
Christian Cross. This he combined, allowing
for certain sceptical omissions, with the grisly
Old Testament God he had heard about
in the black Sabbaths of his childhood; and
so promulgated (against both Rationalists
and Catholics) a sort of heathen Puritanism :
Protestantism purged of its evidences of
Christianity.
His great and real work was the attack on
Utilitarianism : which did real good, though
there was much that was muddled and danger-
ous in the historical philosophy which he
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 55
preached as an alternative. It is his real
glory that he was the first to see clearly and
say plainly the great truth of our time ; that
the wealth of the state is not the prosperity
of the people. Macaulay and the Mills and
all the regular run of the Early Victorians,
took it for granted that if Manchester was
getting richer, we had got hold of the key to
comfort and progress. Carlyle pointed out
(with stronger sagacity and humour than he
showed on any other question) that it was
just as true to say that Manchester was getting
poorer as that it was getting richer : or, in
other words, that Manchester was not getting
richer at all, but only some of the less pleasing
people in Manchester. In this matter he is
to be noted in connection with national
developments much later ; for he thus became
the first prophet of the Socialists. Sartor
Resartus is an admirable fantasia ; The French
Revolution is, with all its faults, a really fine
piece of history; the lectures on Heroes
contain some masterly sketches of person-
56 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
alities. But I think it is in Past and Present,
and the essay on Chartism, that Carlyle
achieves the work he was chosen by gods and
men to achieve; which possibly might not
have been achieved by a happier or more
healthy-minded man. He never rose to more
deadly irony than in such macabre descriptions
as that of the poor woman proving her sister-
hood with the rich by giving them all typhoid
fever; or that perfect piece of badinage
about " Overproduction of Shirts " ; in which
he imagines the aristocrats claiming to be
quite clear of this offence. " Will you bandy
accusations, will you accuse us of over-
production ? We take the Heavens and the
Earth to witness that we have produced
nothing at all ... He that accuses us of pro-
ducing, let him show himself. Let him say
what and when." And he never wrote so sternly
and justly as when he compared the " divine
sorrow " of Dante with the " undivine sorrow "
of Utilitarianism, which had already come
down to talking about the breeding of the poor
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 57
and to hinting at infanticide. This is a repre-
sentative quarrel ; for if the Utilitarian spirit
reached its highest point in Mill, it certainly
reached its lowest point in Malthus.
One last element in the influence of Carlyle
ought to be mentioned; because it very
strongly dominated his disciples especially
Kingsley, and to some extent Tennyson and
Ruskin. Because he frowned at the cockney
cheerfulness of the cheaper economists, they
and others represented him as a pessimist,
and reduced all his azure infinities to a fit
of the blues. But Carlyle's philosophy, more
carefully considered, will be found to be
dangerously optimist rather than pessimist.
As a thinker Carlyle is not sad, but recklessly
and rather unscrupulously satisfied. For he
seems to have held the theory that good could
not be definitely defeated in this world ; and
that everything in the long run finds its right
level. It began with what we may call the
" Bible of History " idea : that all human
affairs and politics were a clouded but
58 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
unbroken revelation of the divine. Thus any
enormous and unaltered human settlement
as the Norman Conquest or the secession of
America we must suppose to be the will of
God. It lent itself to picturesque treatment ;
and Carlyle and the Carlyleans were above
all things picturesque. It gave them at first
a rhetorical advantage over the Catholic and
other older schools. They could boast that
their Creator was still creating; that he was
in Man and Nature, and was not hedged round
in a Paradise or imprisoned in a pyx. They
could say their God had not grown too old
for war : that He was present at Gettysburg
and Gravelotte as much as at Gibeon and
Gilboa. I do not mean that they literally
said these particular things : they are what I
should have said had I been bribed to defend
their position. But they said things to the
same effect : that what manages finally to
happen, happens for a higher purpose. Carlyle
said the French Revolution was a thing settled
in the eternal councils to be ; and therefore
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 59
(and not because it was right) attacking it
was " fighting against God.'* And Kingsley
even carried the principle so far as to tell a
lady she should remain in the Church of
England mainly because God had put her
there. But in spite of its superficial spirituality
and encouragement, it is not hard to see how
such a doctrine could be abused. It practi-
cally comes to saying that God is on the side
of the big battalions or at least, of the vic-
torious ones. Thus a creed which set out to
create conquerors would only corrupt soldiers ;
corrupt them with a craven and unsoldierly
worship of success : and that which began as
the philosophy of courage ends as the philo-
sophy of cowardice. If, indeed, Carlyle
were right in saying that right is only " rightly
articulated " might, men would never articu-
late or move in any way. For no act can have
might before it is done : if there is no right,
it cannot rationally be done at all. This
element, like the Anti -Utilitarian element, is
to be kept in mind in connection with after
60 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
developments : for in this Carlyle is the first
cry of Imperialism, as (in the other case) of
Socialism: and the two babes unborn who
stir at the trumpet are Mr. Bernard Shaw and
Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Kipling also carries
on from Carlyle the concentration on the
purely Hebraic parts of the Bible. The
fallacy of this whole philosophy is that if God
is indeed present at a modern battle, He may
be present not as on Gilboa but Golgotha.
Carlyle's direct historical worship of strength
and the rest of it was fortunately not very
fruitful ; and perhaps lingered only in Froude
the historian. Even he is more an interruption
than a continuity. Froude develops rather
the harsher and more impatient moral counsels
of his master than like Ruskin the more
romantic and sympathetic. He carries on
the tradition of Hero Worship : but carries
far beyond Carlyle the practice of worshipping
people who cannot rationally be called heroes.
In this matter that eccentric eye of the seer
certainly helped Carlyle : in Cromwell and
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 61
Frederick the Great there was at least some-
thing self -begotten, original or mystical; if
they were not heroes they were at least
demigods or perhaps demons. But Froude
set himself to the praise of the Tudor s, a much
lower class of people ; ill-conditioned prosper-
ous people who merely waxed fat and kicked.
Such strength as Henry VIII had was the
strength of a badly trained horse that bolts,
not of any clear or courageous rider who
controls him. There is a sort of strong man
mentioned in Scripture who, because he
masters himself, is more than he that takes a
city. There is another kind of strong man
(known to the medical profession) who cannot
master himself ; and whom it may take half a
city to take alive. But for all that he is a
low lunatic, and not a hero ; and of that sort
were too many of the heroes whom Froude
attempted to praise. A kind of instinct kept
Carlyle from over-praising Henry VIII ; or that
highly cultivated and complicated liar, Queen
Elizabeth. Here, the only importance of this
62 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
is that one of Carlyle's followers carried further
that " strength " which was the real weakness
of Carlyle. I have heard that Froude's life
of Carlyle was unsympathetic; but if it was
so it was a sort of parricide. For the rest,
like Macaulay, he was a picturesque and
partisan historian : but, like Macaulay (and
unlike the craven scientific historians of to-
day) he was not ashamed of being partisan
or of being picturesque. Such studies as
he wrote on the Elizabethan seamen and
adventurers, represent very triumphantly the
sort of romance of England that all this school
was attempting to establish ; and link him up
with Kingsley and the rest.
Ruskin may be very roughly regarded as
the young lieutenant of Carlyle in his war on
Utilitarian Radicalism : but as an individual
he presents many and curious divergences.
In the matter of style, he enriched English
without disordering it. And in the matter of
religion (which was the key of this age as of
every other) he did not, like Carlyle, set up
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 63
the romance of the great Puritans as a rival
to the romance of the Catholic Church.
Rather he set up and worshipped all the arts
and trophies of the Catholic Church as a rival
to the Church itself. None need dispute
that he held a perfectly tenable position if he
chose to associate early Florentine art with a
Christianity still comparatively pure, and such
sensualities as the Renaissance bred with
the corruption of a Papacy. But this does
not alter, as a merely artistic fact, the strange
air of ill -ease and irritation with which Ruskin
seems to tear down the gargoyles of Amiens
or the marbles of Venice, as things of which
Europe is not worthy; and take them away
with him to a really careful museum, situated
dangerously near Clapham. Many of the
great men of that generation, indeed, had a
sort of divided mind; an ethical headache
which was literally a " splitting headache " ;
for there was a schism in the sympathies.
When these men looked at some historic
object, like the Catholic Church or the French
64, VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
Revolution, they did not know whether they
loved or hated it most. Carlyle's two eyes
were out of focus, as one may say, when
he looked at democracy : he had one eye
on Valmy and the other on Sedan. In the
same way, Ruskin had a strong right hand
that wrote of the great mediaeval minsters in
tall harmonies and traceries as splendid as
their own ; and also, so to speak, a weak and
feverish left hand that was always fidgeting
and trying to take the pen away and write
an evangelical tract about the immorality of
foreigners. Many of their contemporaries
were the same. The sea of Tennyson's mind
was troubled under its serene surface. The
incessant excitement of Kingsley, though
romantic and attractive in many ways, was
a great deal more like Nervous Christianity
than Muscular Christianity. It would be
quite unfair to say of Ruskin that there was
any major inconsistency between his mediaeval
tastes and his very unmediaeval temper :
and minor inconsistencies do not matter in
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 65
anybody. But it is not quite unfair to say
of him that he seemed to want all parts of the
Cathedral except the altar.
As an artist in prose he is one of the most
miraculous products of the extremely poetical
genius of England. The length of a Ruskin
sentence is like that length in the long arrow
that was boasted of by the drawers of the long
bow. He draws, not a cloth-yard shaft but
a long lance to his ear : he shoots a spear.
But the whole goes light as a bird and straight
as a bullet. There is no Victorian writer
before him to whom he even suggests a
comparison, technically considered, except
perhaps De Quincey ; who also employed the
long rich rolling sentence that, like a rocket,
bursts into stars at the end. But De Quincey's
sentences, as I have said, have always a
dreamy and insecure sense about them, like
the turret on toppling turret of some mad
sultan's pagoda. Ruskin 's sentence branches
into brackets and relative clauses as a straight
strong tree branches into boughs and bifur-
66 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
cations, rather shaking off its burden than
merely adding to it. It is interesting to
remember that Ruskin wrote some of the best
of these sentences in the attempt to show that
he did understand the growth of trees, and that
nobody else did except Turner, of course.
It is also (to those acquainted with his per-
verse and wild rhetorical prejudices) even more
amusing to remember that if a Ruskin sentence
(occupying one or two pages of small print)
does not remind us of the growth of a tree,
the only other thing it does remind of is the
triumphant passage of a railway train.
Ruskin left behind him in his turn two
quite separate streams of inspiration. The
first and more practical was concerned, like
Carlyle's Chartism, with a challenge to the
social conclusions of the orthodox economists.
He was not so great a man as Carlyle, but he
was a much more clear-headed man ; and the
point and stab of his challenge still really
stands and sticks, like a dagger in a dead man.
He answered the theory that we must always
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 67
get the cheapest labour we can, by pointing
out that we never do get the cheapest labour
we can, in any matter about which we really
care twopence. We do not get the cheapest
doctor. We either get a doctor who charges
nothing or a doctor who charges a recognised
and respectable fee. We do not trust the
cheapest bishop. We do not allow admirals
to compete. We do not tell generals to under-
cut each other on the eve of a war. We
either employ none of them or we employ all
of them at an official rate of pay. All this
was set out in the strongest and least senti-
mental of his books, Unto this Last; but
many suggestions of it are scattered through
Sesame and Lilies, The Political Economy of
Art, and even Modern Painters. On this side
of his soul Ruskin became the second founder
of Socialism. The argument was not by any
means a complete or unconquerable weapon,
but I think it knocked out what little re-
mained of the brains of the early Victorian
rationalists. It is entirely nonsensical to*
E 2
68 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
speak of Ruskin as a lounging aesthete, who
strolled into economics, and talked senti-
mentalism. In plain fact, Ruskin was seldom
so sensible and logical (right or wrong) as
when he was talking about economics. He
constantly talked the most glorious nonsense
about landscape and natural history, which
it was his business to understand. Within
his own limits, he talked the most cold com-
mon sense about political economy, which
was no business of his at all.
On the other side of his literary soul, his
mere unwrapping of the wealth and wonder of
European art, he set going another influence,
earlier and vaguer than his influence on
Socialism. He represented what was at first
the Pre-Raphaelite School in painting, but
afterwards a much larger and looser Pre-
Raphaelite School in poetry and prose. The
word " looser " will not be found unfair if
we remember how Swinburne and all the
wildest friends of the Rossettis carried this
movement forward. They used the mediaeval
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 69
imagery to blaspheme the mediaeval religion.
Raskin's dark and doubtful decision to accept
Catholic art but not Catholic ethics had borne
rapid or even flagrant fruit by the time that
Swinburne, writing about a harlot, composed
a learned and sympathetic and indecent
parody on the Litany of the Blessed Virgin.
With the poets I deal in another part of this
book; but the influence of Ruskin's great
prose touching art criticism can best be
expressed in the name of the next great prose
writer on such subjects. That name is Walter
Pater : and the name is the full measure of
the extent to which Ruskin's vague but vast
influence had escaped from his hands. Pater
eventually joined the Church of Rome (which
would not have pleased Ruskin at all), but it
is surely fair to say of the mass of his work
that its moral tone is neither Puritan nor
Catholic, but strictly and splendidly Pagan.
In Pater we have Ruskin without the pre-
judices, that is, without the funny parts. I
may be wrong, but I cannot recall at this
70 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
moment a single passage in which Pater's
style takes a holiday or in which his wisdom
plays the fool. Newman and Ruskin were
as careful and graceful stylists as he. New-
man and Ruskin were as serious, elaborate,
and even academic thinkers as he. But
Ruskin let himself go about railways. New-
man let himself go about Kingsley. Pater
cannot let himself go for the excellent reason
that he wants to stay : to stay at the point
where all the keenest emotions meet, as he
explains in the splendid peroration of The
Renaissance. The only objection to being
where all the keenest emotions meet is that
you feel none of them.
In this sense Pater may well stand for a
substantial summary of the aesthetes, apart
from the purely poetical merits of men like
Rossetti and Swinburne. Like Swinburne
and others he first attempted to use mediaeval
tradition without trusting it. These people
wanted to see Paganism through Christianity :
because it involved the incidental amusement
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 71
of seeing through Christianity itself. They
not only tried to be in all ages at once (which
is a very reasonable ambition, though not
often realised), but they wanted to be on all
sides at once : which is nonsense. Swinburne
tries to question the philosophy of Christianity
in the metres of a Christmas carol : and
Dante Rossetti tries to write as if he were
Christina Rossetti. Certainly the almost
successful summit of all this attempt is Pater's
superb passage on the Monna Lisa ; in which
he seeks to make her at once a mystery of
good and a mystery of evil. The philosophy
is false; even evidently false, for it bears no
fruit to-day. There never was a woman,
not Eve herself in the instant of temptation,
who could smile the same smile as the mother
of Helen and the mother of Mary. But it
is the high-water mark of that vast attempt
at an impartiality reached through art : and
no other mere artist ever rose so high again.
Apart from this Ruskinian offshoot through
Pre-Raphaelitism into what was called
72 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
jEstheticism, the remains of the inspiration
of Carlyle fill a very large part in the Victorian
life, but not strictly so large a part in the
Victorian literature. Charles Kingsley was
a great publicist; a popular preacher; a
popular novelist; and (in two cases at least)
a very good novelist. His Water Babies is
really a breezy and roaring freak; like a
holiday at the seaside a holiday where one
talks natural history without taking it
seriously. Some of the songs in this and other
of his works are very real songs : notably,
" When all the World is Young, Lad," which
comes very near to being the only true defence
of marriage in the controversies of the nine-
teenth century. But when all this is allowed,
no one will seriously rank Kingsley, in the
really literary sense on the level of Carlyle
or Ruskin, Tennyson or Browning, Dickens
or Thackeray : and if such a place cannot be
given to him, it can be given even less to his
lusty and pleasant friend, Tom Hughes, whose
personality floats towards the frankness of
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 75
the Boy's Own Paper; or to his deep, sug-
gestive metaphysical friend Maurice, who
floats rather towards The Hibbert Journal.
The moral and social influence of these things
is not to be forgotten : but they leave the
domain of letters. The voice of Carlyle is
not heard again in letters till the coming of
Kipling and Henley.
One other name of great importance should
appear here, because it cannot appear very
appropriately anywhere else : the man hardly
belonged to the same school as Ruskin and
Carlyle, but fought many of their battles,
and was even more concentrated on their
main task the task of convicting liberal
bourgeois England of priggishness and provin-
ciality. I mean, of course, Matthew Arnold.
Against Mill's "liberty" and Carlyle's
" strength " and Ruskin's " nature," he set
up a new presence and entity which he called
4i culture," the disinterested play of the mind
through the sifting of the best books and
authorities. Though a little dandified in
74 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
phrase, he was undoubtedly serious and public-
spirited in intention. He sometimes talked
of culture almost as if it were a man, or at
least a church (for a church has a sort of
personality) : some may suspect that culture
was a man, whose name was Matthew Arnold.
But Arnold was not only right but highly
valuable. If we have said that Carlyle was
a man that saw things, we may add that
Arnold was chiefly valuable as a man who
knew things. Well as he was endowed
intellectually, his power came more from
information than intellect. He simply hap-
pened to know certain things, that Carlyle
didn't know, that Kingsley didn't know, that
Huxley and Herbert Spencer didn't know :
that England didn't know. He knew that
England was a part of Europe : and not so
important a part as it had been the morning
after Waterloo. He knew that England was
then (as it is now) an oligarchical State, and
that many great nations are not. He knew
that a real democracy need not live and does
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 75
not live in that perpetual panic about using
the powers of the State, which possessed men
like Spencer and Cobden. He knew a rational
minimum of culture and common courtesy
could exist and did exist throughout large
democracies. He knew the Catholic Church
had been in history " the Church of the multi-
tude " : he knew it was not a sect. He knew
that great landlords are no more a part of the
economic law than nigger-drivers : he knew
that small owners could and did prosper. He
was not so much the philosopher as the man
of the world : he reminded us that Europe
was a society while Ruskin was treating it as
a picture gallery. He was a sort of Heaven-
sent courier. His frontal attack on the vulgar
and sullen optimism of Victorian utility may be
summed up in the admirable sentence, in which
he asked the English what was the use of a
train taking them quickly from Islington to
Camberwell, if it only took them " from a
dismal and illiberal life in Islington to a dismal
and illiberal life in Camberwell ? "
76 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
His attitude to that great religious enigma
round which all these great men were grouped
as in a ring, was individual and decidedly
curious. He seems to have believed that a
t; Historic Church," that is, some established
organisation with ceremonies and sacred books,
etc., could be perpetually preserved as a sort
of vessel to contain the spiritual ideas of the
age, whatever those ideas might happen to
be. He clearly seems to have contemplated
a melting away of the doctrines of the Church
and even of the meaning of the words : but
he thought a certain need in man would always
be best satisfied by public worship and
especially by the great religious literatures of
the past. He would embalm the body that
it might often be revisited by the soul or
souls. Something of the sort has been
suggested by Dr. Coit and others of the
ethical societies in our own time. But while
Arnold would loosen the theological bonds of
the Church, he would not loosen the official
bonds of the State. You must not disestab-
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 77
lish the Church : you must not even leave the
Church : you must stop inside it and think
what you choose. Enemies might say that
he was simply trying to establish and endow
Agnosticism. It is fairer and truer to say that
unconsciously he was trying to restore Pagan-
ism : for this State Ritualism without theology,
and without much belief, actually was the
practice of the ancient world. Arnold may
have thought that he was building an altar
to the Unknown God; but he was really
building it to Divus Caesar.
As a critic he was chiefly concerned to
preserve criticism itself; to set a measure to
praise and blame and support the classics
against the fashions. It is here that it is
specially true of him, if of no writer else, that
the style was the man. The most vital thing
he invented was a new style : founded on the
patient unravelling of the tangled Victorian
ideas, as if they were matted hair under a
comb. He did not mind how elaborately long
he made a sentence, so long as he made it
78 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
clear. He would constantly repeat whole
phrases word for word in the same sentence,
rather than risk ambiguity by abbreviation.
His genius showed itself in turning this method
of a laborious lucidity into a peculiarly
exasperating form of satire and controversy.
Newman's strength was in a sort of stifled
passion, a dangerous patience of polite logic
and then : " Cowards ! if I advanced a step
you would run away : it is not you I fear.
Di me terrent, et Jupiter hostis." If Newman
seemed suddenly to fly into a temper, Carlyle
seemed never to fly out of one. But Arnold
kept a smile of heart-broken forbearance, as
of the teacher in an idiot school, that was
enormously insulting. One trick he often tried
with success. If his opponent had said some-
thing foolish, like " the destiny of England is
in the great heart of England," Arnold would
repeat the phrase again and again until it
looked more foolish than it really was. Thus
he recurs again and again to " the British
College of Health in the New Road " till the
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 79
reader wants to rush out and burn the place
down. Arnold's great error was that he some-
times thus wearied us of his own phrases, as
well as of his enemies'.
These names are roughly representative of
the long series of protests against the cold
commercial rationalism which held Parliament
and the schools through the earlier Victorian
time, in so far as those protests were made in
the name of neglected intellect, insulted art,
forgotten heroism and desecrated religion.
But already the Utilitarian citadel had been
more heavily bombarded on the other side by
one lonely and unlettered man of genius.
The rise of Dickens is like the rising of a vast
mob. This is not only because his tales are
indeed as crowded and populous as towns :
for truly it was not so much that Dickens
appeared as that a hundred Dickens char-
acters appeared. It is also because he was
the sort of man who has the impersonal
impetus of a mob : what Poe meant when he
truly said that popular rumour, if really
SO VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
spontaneous, was like the intuition of the
individual man of genius. Those who speak
scornfully of the ignorance of the mob do
not err as to the fact itself; their error is in
not seeing that just as a crowd is comparatively
ignorant, so a crowd is comparatively in-
nocent. It will have the old and human
faults ; but it is not likely to specialise in the
special faults of that particular society :
because the effort of the strong and successful
in all ages is to keep the poor out of society.
If the higher castes have developed some
special moral beauty or grace, as they occa-
sionally do (for instance, mediaeval chivalry),
it is likely enough, of course, that the mass of
men will miss it. But if they have developed
some perversion or over-emphasis, as they
much more often do (for instance, the Re-
naissance poisoning), then it will be the ten-
-dency of the mass of men to miss that too.
The point might be put in many ways; yoi
may say if you will that the poor are alway
^at the tail of the procession, and that whethe
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 81
they are morally worse or better depends on
whether humanity as a whole is proceeding
towards heaven or hell. When humanity is
going to hell, the poor are always nearest to
heaven.
Dickens was a mob and a mob in revolt ;
he fought by the light of nature; he had
not a theory, but a thirst. If any one chooses
to offer the cheap sarcasm that his thirst
was largely a thirst for milk-punch, I am
content to reply with complete gravity and
entire contempt that in a sense this is per-
fectly true. His thirst was for things as
humble, as human, as laughable as that daily
bread for which we cry to God. He had no
particular plan of reform; or, when he had,
it was startlingly petty and parochial compared
with the deep, confused clamour of comradeship
and insurrection that fills all his narrative.
It would not be gravely unjust to him to
compare him to his own heroine, Arabella
Allen, who " didn't know what she did like,"
but who (when confronted with Mr. Bob
82 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
Sawyer) " did know what she didn't like."
Dickens did know what he didn't like. He
didn't like the Unrivalled Happiness which
Mr. Roebuck praised ; the economic laws that
were working so faultlessly in Fever Alley;
the wealth that was accumulating so rapidly
in Bleeding Heart Yard. But, above all, he
didn't like the mean side of the Manchester
philosophy: the preaching of an impossible
thrift and an intolerable temperance. He
hated the implication that because a man
was a miser in Latin he must also be a miser
in English. And this meanness of the Utili-
tarians had gone very far infecting many
finer minds who had fought the Utilitarians.
In the Edinburgh Review, a thing like Malthus
could be championed by a man like Macaulay.
The twin root facts of the revolution called
Dickens are these : first, that he attacked the
cold Victorian compromise; second, that he
attacked it without knowing he was doing
it certainly without knowing that other
people were doing it. He was attacking
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 83
something which we will call MrJGradgrind.
He was utterly unaware (in any essential
sense) that any one else had attacked Mr.
Gradgrind. All the other attacks had come
from positions of learning or cultured eccen-
tricity of which he was entirely ignorant,
and to which, therefore (like a spirited fellow),
he felt a furious hostility. Thus, for instance,
he hated that Little Bethel to which Kit's
mother went : he hated it simply as Kit
hated it. Newman could have told him it was
hateful, because it had no root in religious
history; it was not even a sapling sprung of
the seed of some great human and heathen
tree : it was a monstrous mushroom that grows
in the moonshine and dies in the dawn.
Dickens knew no more of religious history
than Kit ; he simply smelt the fungus, and it
stank. Thus, again, he hated that insolent
luxury of a class counting itself a comfortable
exception to all mankind; he hated it as
Kate Nickleby hated Sir Mulberry Hawke
by instinct. Carlyle could have told him
F 2
84 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
that all the world was full of that anger
against the impudent fatness of the few.
But when Dickens wrote about Kate Nickleby,
he knew about as much of the world as
Kate Nickleby. He did write The Tale of
Two Cities long afterwards ; but that was when
he had been instructed by Carlyle. His first
revolutionism was as private and internal as
feeling sea-sick. Thus, once more, he wrote
against Mr. Gradgrind long before he created
him. In The Chimes, conceived in quite his
casual and charitable season, with the Christ-
mas Carol and the Cricket on the Hearth, he
hit hard at the economists. Ruskin, in the
same fashion, would have told him that the
worst thing about the economists was that
they were not economists : that they missed
many essential things even in economics.
But Dickens did not know whether they were
economists or not : he only knew that they
wanted hitting. Thus, to take a last case
out of many, Dickens travelled in a French
railway train, and noticed that this eccentric
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 85
nation provided him with wine that he could
drink and sandwiches he could eat, and
manners he could tolerate. And remembering
the ghastly sawdust -eating waiting-rooms of
the North English railways, he wrote that
rich chapter in Mugby Junction. Matthew
Arnold could have told him that this was
but a part of the general thinning down of
European civilisation in these islands at the
edge of it; that for two or three thousand
years the Latin society has learnt how to
drink wine, and how not to drink too much
of it. Dickens did not in the least under-
stand the Latin society : but he did under-
stand the wine. If (to prolong an idle but
not entirely false metaphor) we have called
Carlyle a man who saw and Arnold a man who
knew, we might truly call Dickens a man
who tasted, that is, a man who really felt.
In spite of all the silly talk about his vulgarity,
he really had, in the strict and serious sense,
good taste. All real good taste is gusto
the power of appreciating the presence or
86 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
the absence of a particular and positive
pleasure. He had no learning; he was not
misled by the label on the bottle for that
is what learning largely meant in his time.
He opened his mouth and shut his eyes and
saw what the Age of Reason would give him.
And, having tasted it, he spat it out.
I am constrained to consider Dickens here
among the fighters ; though I ought (on the
pure principles of Art) to be considering him
in the chapter which I have allotted to the
story-tellers. But we should get the whole
Victorian perspective wrong, in my opinion
at least, if we did not see that Dickens was
primarily the most successful of all the
onslaughts on the solid scientific school;
because he did not attack from the standpoint
of extraordinary faith, like Newman; or the
standpoint of extraordinary inspiration, like
Carlyle; or the standpoint of extraordinary
detachment or serenity, like Arnold ; but from
the standpoint of quite ordinary and quite
hearty dislike. To give but one instance
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 87
more, Matthew Arnold, trying to carry into
England constructive educational schemes
which he could see spread like a clear railway
map all over the Continent, was much
badgered about what he really thought was
wrong with English middle-class education.
Despairing of explaining to the English
middle class the idea of high and central
public instruction, as distinct from coarse
and hole-and-corner private instruction, he
invoked the aid of Dickens. He said the
English middle-class school was the sort of
school where Mr. Creakle sat, with his but-
tered toast and his cane. Now Dickens had
probably never seen any other kind of school
certainly he had never understood the syste-
matic State Schools in which Arnold had learnt
his lesson. But he saw the cane and the
buttered toast, and he knew that it was all
wrong. In this sense, Dickens, the great
romanticist, is truly the great realist also. For
he had no abstractions : he had nothing except
realities out of which to make a romance.
88 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
With Dickens, then, re-arises that reality
with which I began and which (curtly, but
I think not falsely) I have called Cobbett.
In dealing with fiction as such, I shall have
occasion to say wherein Dickens is weaker
and stronger than that England of the
eighteenth century : here it is sufficient to
say that he represents the return of Cobbett
in this vital sense; that he is proud of being
the ordinary man. No one can understand
the thousand caricatures by Dickens who does
not understand that he is comparing them
all with his own common sense. Dickens,
in the bulk, liked the things that Cobbett
had liked ; what is perhaps more to the point,
he hated the things that Cobbett had hated ;
the Tudors, the lawyers, the leisurely oppres-
sion of the poor. Cobbett 's fine fighting
journalism had been what is nowadays called
" personal," that is, it supposed human beings
to be human. But Cobbett was also personal
in the less satisfactory sense; he could only
multiply monsters who were exaggerations
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE 89
of his enemies or exaggerations of himself.
Dickens was personal in a more godlike sense ;
he could multiply persons. He could create
all the farce and tragedy of his age over again,
with creatures unborn to sin and creatures
unborn to suffer. That which had not been
achieved by the fierce facts of Cobbett, the
burning dreams of Carlyle, the white-hot
proofs of Newman, was really or very nearly
achieved by a crowd of impossible people.
In the centre stood that citadel of atheist
industrialism : and if indeed it has ever been
taken, it was taken by the rush of that unreal
army.
CHAPTER II
THE GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS
THE Victorian novel was a thing entirely
Victorian; quite unique and suited to a sort
of cosiness in that country and that age,
But the novel itself, though not merely
Victorian, is mainly modern. No clear-
headed person wastes his time over defini-
tions, except where he thinks his own definition
would probably be in dispute. I merely say,
therefore, that when I say " novel," I mean
a fictitious narrative (almost invariably, but
not necessarily, in prose) of which the essential
is that the story is not told for the sake of
its naked pointedness as an anecdote, or for the
sake of the irrelevant landscapes and visions
that can be caught up in it, but for the sake
of some study of the difference between
human beings. There are several things that
90
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 91
make this mode of art unique. One of the
most conspicuous is that it is the art in which
the conquests of woman are quite beyond
controversy. The proposition that Victorian
women have done well in politics and philo-
sophy is not necessarily an untrue proposition ;
but it is a partisan proposition. I never heard
that many women, let alone men, shared
the views of Mary Wollstoncroft ; I never
heard that millions of believers flocked to the
religion tentatively founded by Miss Frances
Power Cobbe. They did, undoubtedly, flock
to Mrs. Eddy; but it will not be unfair to
that lady to call her following a sect, and not
altogether unreasonable to say that such
insane exceptions prove the rule. Nor can
I at this moment think of a single modern
woman writing on politics or abstract things,
whose work is of undisputed importance;
except perhaps Mrs. Sidney Webb, who settles
things by the simple process of ordering about
the citizens of a state, as she might the
servants in a kitchen. There has been, at
92 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
any rate, no writer on moral or political theory
that can be mentioned, without seeming
comic, in the same breath with the great
female novelists. But when we come to the
novelists, the women have, on the whole,
equality; and certainly, in some points,
superiority. Jane Austen is as strong in
her own way as Scott is in his. But she is,
for all practical purposes, never weak in her
own way and Scott very often is. Char-
lotte Bronte dedicated Jane Eyre to the
author of Vanity Fair. I should hesitate to
say that Charlotte Brontes is a better book
than Thackeray's, but I think it might well
be maintained that it is a better story. All
sorts of inquiring asses (equally ignorant
of the old nature of woman and the new
nature of the novel) whispered wisely that
George Eliot's novels were really written by
George Lewes. I will cheerfully answer for the
fact that, if they had been written by George
Lewes, no one would ever have read them.
Those who have read his book on Robespierre
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 93
will have no doubt about my meaning. I am
no idolater of George Eliot ; but a man who
could concoct such a crushing opiate about
the most exciting occasion in history cer-
tainly did not write The Mill on the Floss.
This is the first fact about the novel, that it
is the introduction of a new and rather curious
kind of art; and it has been found to be
peculiarly feminine, from the first good novel
by Fanny Bumey to the last good novel by
Miss May Sinclair. The truth is, I think,
that the modern novel is a new thing; not
new in its essence (for that is a philosophy for
fools), but new in the sense that it lets loose
many of the things that are old. It is a
hearty and exhaustive overhauling of that
part of human existence which has always
been the woman's province, or rather king-
dom ; the play of personalities in private, the
real difference between Tommy and Joe. It
is right that womanhood should specialise in
individuals, and be praised for doing so; just
as in the Middle Ages she specialised in
94 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
dignity and was praised for doing so. People
put the matter wrong when they say that the
novel is a study of human nature. Human
nature is a thing that even men can under-
stand. Human nature is born of the pain
of a woman; human nature plays at peep-bo
when it is two and at cricket when it is
twelve; human nature earns its living and
desires the other sex and dies. What the
novel deals with is what women have to deal
with ; the differentiations, the twists and turns
of this eternal river. The key of this new
form of art, which we call fiction, is sympathy.
And sympathy does not mean so much
feeling with all who feel, but rather suffering
with all who suffer. And it was inevitable,
under such an inspiration, that more attention
should be given to the awkward corners of
life than to its even flow. The very promising
domestic channel dug by the Victorian women,
in books like Cr an ford, by Mrs. Gaskell, would
have got to the sea, if they had been left alone
to dig it. They might have made domesticity
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 95
a fairyland. Unfortunately another idea, the
idea of imitating men's cuffs and collars and
documents, cut across this purely female dis-
covery and destroyed it.
It may seem mere praise of the novel to
say it is the art of sympathy and the study
of human variations. But indeed, though
this is a good thing, it is not universally good.
We have gained in sympathy; but we have
lost in brotherhood. Old quarrels had more
equality than modern exonerations. Two
peasants in the Middle Ages quarrelled about
their two fields. But they went to the same
church, served in the same semi-feudal militia,
and had the same morality, whichever might
happen to be breaking it at the moment.
The very cause of their quarrel was the cause
of their fraternity; they both liked land.
But suppose one of them a teetotaler who
desired the abolition of hops on both farms;
suppose the other a vegetarian who desired
the abolition of chickens on both farms : and
it is at once apparent that a quarrel of quite
96 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
a different kind would begin; and that in
that quarrel it would not be a question of
farmer against farmer, but of individual
against individual. This fundamental sense
of human fraternity can only exist in the
presence of positive religion. Man is merely
man only when he is seen against the sky.
If he is seen against any landscape, he is
only a man of that land. If he is seen against
any house, he is only a householder. Only
where death and eternity are intensely present
can human beings fully feel their fellowship.
Once the divine darkness against which we
stand is really dismissed from the mind (as
it was very nearly dismissed in the Victorian
time) the differences between human beings
become overpoweringly plain; whether they
are expressed in the high caricatures of
Dickens or the low lunacies of Zola.
This can be seen in a sort of picture in the
Prologue of the Canterbury Tales ; which is
already pregnant with the promise of the
English novel. The characters there are
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 97
at once graphically and delicately differ-
entiated ; the Doctor with his rich cloak, his
careful meals, his coldness to religion; the
Franklin, whose white beard was so fresh
that it recalled the daisies, and in whose
house it snowed meat and drink; the Sum-
moner, from whose fearful face, like a red
cherub's, the children fled, and who wore a
garland like a hoop; the Miller with his
short red hair and bagpipes and brutal head,
with which he could break down a door; the
Lover who was as sleepless as a nightingale;
the Knight, the Cook, the Clerk of Oxford.
Pendennis or the Cook, M. Mirabolant, are
nowhere so vividly varied by a few merely
verbal strokes. But the great difference is
deeper and more striking. It is simply that
Pendennis would never have gone riding with
a cook at all. Chaucer's knight rode with a
cook quite naturally; because the thing they
were all seeking together was as much above
knighthood as it was above cookery. Soldiers
and swindlers and bullies and outcasts, they
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98 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
were all going to the shrine of a distant saint.
To what sort of distant saint would Pendennis
and Colonel Newcome and Mr. Moss and
Captain Costigan and Ridley the butler and
Bayham and Sir Barnes Newcome and Laura
and the Duchess d'lvry and Warrington and
Captain Blackball and Lady Kew travel,
laughing and telling tales together ?
The growth of the novel, therefore, must
not be too easily called an increase in the
interest in humanity. It is an increase in
the interest in the things in which men differ ;
much fuller and finer work had been done
before about the things in which they agree.
And this intense interest in variety had its
bad side as well as its good; it has rather
increased social distinctions in a serious and
spiritual sense. Most of the oblivion of
democracy is due to the oblivion of death.
But in its own manner and measure, it was a
real advance and experiment of the European
mind, like the public art of the Renaissance
or the fairyland of physical science explored
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 99
in the nineteenth century. It was a more
unquestionable benefit than these : and in
that development women played a peculiar
part, English women especially, and Victorian
women most of all.
It is perhaps partly, though certainly not
entirely, this influence of the great women
writers that explains another very arresting
and important fact about the emergence of
genuinely Victorian fiction. It had been by
this time decided, by the powers that had
influence (and by public opinion also, at
least in the middle-class sense), that certain
verbal limits must be set to such literature.
The novel must be what some would call
pure and others would call prudish ; but what
is not, properly considered, either one or the
other : it is rather a more or less business
proposal (right or wrong) that every writer
shall draw the line at literal physical descrip-
tion of things socially concealed. It was
originally merely verbal; it had not, prima-
rily, any dream of purifying the topic or the
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100 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
moral tone. Dickens and Thackeray claimed
very properly the right to deal with shameful
passions and suggest their shameful culmina-
tions; Scott sometimes dealt with ideas
positively horrible as in that grand Glenallan
tragedy which is as appalling as the CEdipus
or The Cenci. None of these great men would
have tolerated for a moment being talked to
(as the muddle-headed amateur censors talk to
artists to-day) about " wholesome " topics and
suggestions " that cannot elevate." They had
to describe the great battle of good and evil
and they described both; but they accepted
a working Victorian compromise about what
should happen behind the scenes and what
on the stage. Dickens did not claim the
license of diction Fielding might have claimed
in repeating the senile ecstasies of Gride (let
us say) over his purchased bride : but Dickens
does not leave the reader in the faintest doubt
about what sort of feelings they were ; nor
is there any reason why he should. Thackeray
would not have described the toilet details
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 101
of the secret balls of Lord Steyne : he left
that to Lady Cardigan. But no one who had
read Thackeray's version would be surprised
at Lady Cardigan's. But though the great
Victorian novelists would not have permitted
the impudence of the suggestion that every
part of their problem must be wholesome and
innocent in itself, it is still tenable (I do not
say it is certain) that by yielding to the
Philistines on this verbal compromise, they
have in the long run worked for impurity
rather than purity. In one point I do cer-
tainly think that Victorian Bowdlerism did
pure harm. This is the simple point that,
nine times out of ten, the coarse word is
the word that condemns an evil and the
refined word the word that excuses it. A
common evasion, for instance, substitutes for
the word that brands self -sale as the essential
sin, a word which weakly suggests that it is
no more wicked than walking down the street.
The great peril of such soft mystifications is
that extreme evils (they that are abnormal
102 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
even by the standard of evil) have a very
long start. Where ordinary wrong is made
unintelligible, extraordinary wrong can count
on remaining more unintelligible still; especi-
ally among those who live in such an atmo-
sphere of long words. It is a cruel comment
on the purity of the Victorian Age, that the
age ended (save for the bursting of a single
scandal) in a thing being everywhere called
t; Art," " The Greek Spirit," " The Platonic
Ideal " and so on which any navvy mend-
ing the road outside would have stamped
with a word as vile and as vulgar as it
deserved.
This reticence, right or wrong, may have
been connected with the participation of
women with men in the matter of fiction. It
is an important point : the sexes can only be
coarse separately. It was certainly also due,
as I have already suggested, to the treaty
between the rich bourgeoisie and the old
aristocracy, which both had to make, for the
common and congenial purpose of keeping
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 103
the English people down. But it was due
much more than this to a general moral
atmosphere in the Victorian Age. It is
impossible to express that spirit except by
the electric bell of a name. It was latitudin-
arian, and yet it was limited. It could be
content with nothing less than the whole
cosmos : yet the cosmos with which it was
content was small. It is false to say it was
without humour : yet there was something by
instinct unsmiling in it. It was always saying
solidly that things were "enough"; and
proving by that sharpness (as of the shutting
of a door) that they were not enough. It
took, I will not say its pleasures, but even its
emancipations, sadly. Definitions seem to
escape this way and that in the attempt to
locate it as an idea. But every one will
understand me if I call it George Eliot.
I begin with this great woman of letters
for both the two reasons already mentioned.
She represents the rationalism of the old
Victorian Age at its highest. She and Mill
104 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
are like two great mountains at the end of
that long, hard chain which is the watershed
of the Early Victorian time. They alone rise
high enough to be confused among the clouds
or perhaps confused among the stars. They
certainly were seeking truth, as Newman and
Carlyle were; the slow slope of the later
Victorian vulgarity does not lower their
precipice and pinnacle. But I begin with this
name also because it emphasises the idea of
modern fiction as a fresh and largely a female
thing. The novel of the nineteenth century
was female; as fully as the novel of the
eighteenth century was male. It is quite
certain that no woman could have written
Roderick Random. It is not quite so certain
that no woman could have written Esmond.
The strength and subtlety of woman had
certainly sunk deep into English letters when
George Eliot began to write.
Her originals and even her contemporaries
had shown the feminine power in fiction as
well or better than she. Charlotte Bronte",
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 105
understood along her own instincts, was as
great; Jane Austen was greater. The latter
comes into our present consideration only
as that most exasperating thing, an ideal
unachieved. It is like leaving an uncon-
quered fortress in the rear. No woman later
has captured the complete common sense of
Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while
all the after women went about looking for
their brains. She could describe a man coolly ;
which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte
Bronte could do. She knew what she knew,
like a sound dogmatist : she did not know what
she did not know like a sound agnostic.
But she belongs to a vanished world before
the great progressive age of which I write.
One of the characteristics of the central
Victorian spirit was a tendency to substitute a
certain more or less satisfied seriousness for the
extremes of tragedy and comedy. This is
marked by a certain change in George Eliot;
as it is marked by a certain limitation or
moderation in Dickens. Dickens was the
106 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
People, as it was in the eighteenth century
and still largely is, in spite of all the talk
for and against Board School Education :
comic, tragic, realistic, free-spoken, far looser
in words than in deeds. It marks the silent
strength and pressure of the spirit of the
Victorian middle class that even to Dickens
it never occurred to revive the verbal coarse-
ness of Smollett or Swift. The other proof
of the same pressure is the change in George
Eliot. She was not a genius in the elemental
sense of Dickens; she could never have been
either so strong or so soft. But she did
originally represent some of the same popular
realities : and her first books (at least as
compared with her latest) were full of sound
fun and bitter pathos. Mr. Max Beerbohm
has remarked (in his glorious essay called
IcJiabod, I think), that Silas Marner would
not have forgotten his miserliness if George
Eliot had written of him in her maturity. I
have a great regard for Mr. Beerbohm's
literary judgments; and it may be so. But
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 107
if literature means anything more than a cold
calculation of the chances, if there is in it, as
I believe, any deeper idea of detaching the
spirit of life from the dull obstacles of life,
of permitting human nature really to reveal
itself as human, if (to put it shortly) literature
has anything on earth to do with being
interesting then I think we would rather
have a few more Marners than that rich
maturity that gave us the analysed dust-
heaps of Daniel Deronda.
In her best novels there is real humour,
of a cool sparkling sort ; there is a strong
sense of substantial character that has not
yet degenerated into psychology; there is
a great deal of wisdom, chiefly about women ;
indeed there is almost every element of
literature except a certain indescribable thing
called glamour ; which was the whole stock-
in-trade of the Brontes, which we feel in
Dickens when Quilp clambers amid rotten
wood by the desolate river; and even in
Thackerav when Esmond with his melan
108 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
choly eyes wanders like some swarthy crow
about the dismal avenues of Castlewood.
Of this quality (which some have called, but
hastily, the essential of literature) George
Eliot had not little but nothing. Her air
is bright and intellectually even exciting;
but it is like the air of a cloudless day on the
parade at Brighton. She sees people clearly,
but not through an atmosphere. And she
can conjure up storms in the conscious, but
not in the subconscious mind.
It is true (though the idea should not be
exaggerated) that this deficiency was largely
due to her being cut off from all those concep-
tions that had made the fiction of a Muse ; the
deep idea that there are really demons and
angels behind men. Certainly the increasing
atheism of her school spoilt her own particular
imaginative talent : she was far less free when
she thought like Ladislaw than when she
thought like Casaubon. It also betrayed her
on a matter specially requiring common sense
I mean sex. There is nothing that is so pro-
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 109
foundly false as rationalist flirtation. Each
sex is trying to be both sexes at once; and
the result is a confusion more untruthful than
any conventions. This can easily be seen
by comparing her with a greater woman who
died before the beginning of our present
problem. Jane Austen was born before those
bonds which (we are told) protected woman
from truth, were burst by the Brontes or
elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet
the fact remains that Jane Austen knew much
more about men than either of them. Jane
Austen may have been protected from truth :
but it was precious little of truth that was
protected from her. When Darcy, in finally
confessing his faults, says, " I have been a
selfish being all my life, in practice though not
in theory," he gets nearer to a complete con-
fession of the intelligent male than ever was
even hinted by the Byronic lapses of the
Brontes' heroes or the elaborate exculpations
of George Eliot's. Jane Austen, of course,
covered an infinitely smaller field than any
110 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
of her later rivals ; but I have always believed
in the victory of small nationalities.
The Bronte's suggest themselves here; be-
cause their superficial qualities, the qualities
that can be seized upon in satire, were in this
an exaggeration of what was, in George Eliot,
hardly more than an omission. There was
perhaps a time when Mr. Raw jester was more
widely known than Mr. Rochester. And
certainly Mr. Rochester (to adopt the diction
of that other eminent country gentleman,
Mr. Darcy) was simply individualistic not
only in practice, but in theory. Now any
one may be so in practice : but a man
who is simply individualistic in theory must
merely be an ass. Undoubtedly the Brontes
exposed themselves to some misunderstanding
by thus perpetually making the masculine
creature much more masculine than he wants
to be. Thackeray (a man of strong though
sleepy virility) asked in his exquisite plaintive
way : " Why do our lady novelists make the
men bully the women ? " It is, I think,
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 111
unquestionably true that the Brontes treated
the male as an almost anarchic thing coming
in from outside nature; much as people on
this planet regard a comet. Even the really
delicate and sustained comedy of Paul Emanuel
is not quite free from this air of studying
something alien. The reply may be made
that the women in men's novels are equally
fallacious. The reply is probably just.
What the Brontes really brought into fiction
was exactly what Carlyle brought into history ;
the blast of the mysticism of the North. They
were of Irish blood settled on the windy
heights of Yorkshire; in that country where
Catholicism lingered latest, but in a super-
stitious form; where modern industrialism
came earliest and was more superstitious still.
The strong winds and sterile places, the old
tyranny of barons and the new and blacker
tyranny of manufacturers, has made and left
that country a land of barbarians. All
Charlotte Bronte's earlier work is full of
that sullen and unmanageable world; moss-
112 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
troopers turned hurriedly into miners ; the last
of the old world forced into supporting the very
first crudities of the new. In this way Char-
lotte Bronte represents the Victorian settle-
ment in a special way. The Early Victorian
Industrialism is to George Eliot and to
Charlotte Bronte, rather as the Late Vic-
torian Imperialism would have been to
Mrs. Humphry Ward in the centre of the
empire and to Miss Olive Schreiner at the
edge of it. The real strength there is in
characters like Robert Moore, when he is
dealing with anything except women, is the
romance of industry in its first advance : a
romance that has not remained. On such
fighting frontiers people always exaggerate the
strong qualities the masculine sex does possess,
and always add a great many strong qualities
that it does not possess. That is, briefly, all
the reason in the Brontes on this special
subject : the rest is stark unreason. It can
be most clearly seen in that sister of Charlotte
Bronte's, who has achieved the real feat of
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 118
remaining as a great woman rather than a
great writer. There is really, in a narrow
but intense way, a tradition of Emily Bronte :
as there is a tradition of St. Peter or Dr,
Johnson. People talk as if they had known
her, apart from her works. She must have
been something more than an original person ;
perhaps an origin. But so far as her written
works go she enters English letters only as
an original person and rather a narrow one.
Her imagination was sometimes superhuman
always inhuman. Wuthering Heights might
have been written by an eagle. She is the
strongest instance of these strong imaginations
that made the other sex a monster : for
Heathcliffe fails as a man as catastrophically
as he succeeds as a demon. I think Emily
Bronte was further narrowed by the broadness
of her religious views ; but never, of course,
so much as George Eliot.
In any case, it is Charlotte Bronte* who
enters Victorian literature. The shortest way
of stating her strong contribution is, I think,
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114 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
this : that she reached the highest romance
through the lowest realism. She did not
set out with Amadis of Gaul in a forest or
with Mr. Pickwick in a comic club. She set
out with herself, with her own dingy clothes,
and accidental ugliness, and flat, coarse,
provincial household; and forcibly fused all
such muddy materials into a spirited fairy-
tale. If the first chapters on the home and
school had not proved how heavy and hateful
sanity can be, there would really be less point
in the insanity of Mr. Rochester's wife or the
not much milder insanity of Mrs. Rochester's
husband. She discovered the secret of hiding
the sensational in the commonplace : and
Jane Eyre remains the best of her books
(better even than Villette) because while it
is a human document written in blood, it
is also one of the best blood-and-thunder
detective stories in the world.
But while Emily Bronte was as unsociable
as a storm at midnight, and while Charlotte
Bronte was at best like that warmer and more
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 115
domestic thing, a house on fire they do
connect themselves with the calm of George
Eliot, as the forerunners of many later
developments of the feminine advance. Many
forerunners (if it comes to that) would have
felt rather ill if they had seen the things they
foreran. This notion of a hazy anticipation
of after history has been absurdly overdone :
as when men connect Chaucer with the
Reformation ; which is like connecting Homer
with the Syracusan Expedition. But it is
to some extent true that all these great
Victorian women had a sort of unrest in
their souls. And the proof of it is that (after
what I will claim to call the healthier time
of Dickens and Thackeray) it began to be
admitted by the great Victorian men. If
there had not been something in that irrita-
tion, we should hardly have had to speak
in these pages of Diana of the Crossways or
of Tess of the D'Urbewille's. To what this
strange and very local sex war has been due
I shall not ask, because I have no answer.
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116 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
That it was due to votes or even little legal
inequalities about marriage, I feel myself
here too close to realities even to discuss. My
own guess is that it has been due to the great
neglect of the military spirit by the male
Victorians. The woman felt obscurely that
she was still running her mortal risk, while the
man was not still running his. But I know
nothing about it ; nor does anybody else.
In so short a book on so vast, complex and
living a subject, it is impossible to drop even
into the second rank of good authors, whose
name is legion ; but it is impossible to leave
that considerable female force in fiction which
has so largely made the very nature of the
modern novel, without mentioning two names
which almost brought that second rank up
to the first rank. They were at utterly
opposite poles. The one succeeded by being
a much mellower and more Christian George
Eliot ; the other succeeded by being a much
more mad and unchristian Emily Bronte.
But Mrs. Oliphant and the author calling
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 117
herself " Ouida " both forced themselves well
within the frontier of fine literature. The
Beleaguered City is literature in its highest
sense; the other works of its author tend to
fall into fiction in its best working sense.
Mrs. Oliphant was infinitely saner in that
city of ghosts than the cosmopolitan Ouida
ever was in any of the cities of men. Mrs.
Oliphant would never have dared to discover,
either in heaven or hell, such a thing as a
hairbrush with its back encrusted with
diamonds. But though Ouida was violent
and weak where Mrs. Oliphant might have
been mild and strong, her own triumphs
were her own. She had a real power of
expressing the senses through her style;
of conveying the very heat of blue skies or
the bursting of palpable pomegranates. And
just as Mrs. Oliphant transfused her more
timid Victorian tales with a true and
intense faith in the Christian mystery so
Ouida, with infinite fury and infinite con-
fusion of thought, did fill her books with
118 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
Byron and the remains of the French Revolu-
tion. In the track of such genius there has
been quite an accumulation of true talent as
in the children's tales of Mrs. Ewing, the
historical tales of Miss Yonge, the tales of
Mrs. Moles worth, and so on. On a general
review I do not think I have been wrong in
taking the female novelists first. I think
they gave its special shape, its temporary
twist, to the Victorian novel.
Nevertheless it is a shock (I almost dare to
call it a relief) to come back to the males.
It is the more abrupt because the first name
that must be mentioned derives directly
from the mere maleness of the Sterne and
Smollett novel. I have already spoken of
Dickens as the most homely and instinctive,
and therefore probably the heaviest, of all
the onslaughts made on the central Victorian
satisfaction. There is therefore the less to
say of him here, where we consider him only
as a novelist : but there is still much more
to say than can even conceivably be said.
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 119
Dickens, as we have stated, inherited the old
comic, rambling novel from Smollett and
the rest. Dickens, as we have also stated,
consented to expurgate that novel. But
when all origins and all restraints have been
denned and allowed for, the creature that
came out was such as we shall not see again.
Smollett was coarse; but Smollett was also
cruel. Dickens was frequently horrible; he
was never cruel. The art of Dickens was the
most exquisite of arts : it was the art of
enjoying everybody. Dickens, being a very
human writer, had to be a very human being ;
he had his faults and sensibilities in a strong
degree ; and I do not for a moment maintain
that he enjoyed everybody in his daily life.
But he enjoyed everybody in his books ; and
everybody has enjoyed everybody in those
books even till to-day. His books are full
of baffled villains stalking out or cowardly
bullies kicked downstairs. But the villains
and the cowards are such delightful people
that the reader always hopes the villain will
120 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
put his head through a side window and make
a last remark ; or that the bully will say one
thing more, even from the bottom of the
stairs. The reader really hopes this; and he
cannot get rid of the fancy that the author
hopes so too. I cannot at the moment recall
that Dickens ever killed a comic villain,
except Quilp, who was deliberately made even
more villainous than comic. There can be
no serious fears for the life of Mr. Wegg in
the muckcart; though Mr. Pecksniff fell to
be a borrower of money, and Mr. Mantalini
to turning a mangle, the human race has the
comfort of thinking they are still alive : and
one might have the rapture of receiving a
begging letter from Mr. Pecksniff, or even of
catching Mr. Mantalini collecting the washing,
if one always lurked about on Monday morn-
ings. This sentiment (the true artist will
be relieved to hear) is entirely unmoral.
Mrs. Wilfer deserved death much more than
Mr. Quilp, for she had succeeded in poisoning
family life persistently, while he was (to say
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 121
the least of it) intermittent in his domesticity.
But who can honestly say he does not hope
Mrs. Wilfer is still talking like Mrs. Wilfer
especially if it is only in a book ? This is the
artistic greatness of Dickens, before and after
which there is really nothing to be said. He
had the power of creating people, both possible
and impossible, who were simply precious and
priceless people; and anything subtler added
to that truth really only weakens it.
The mention of Mrs. Wilfer (whom the heart
is loth to leave) reminds one of the only
elementary ethical truth that is essential in
the study of Dickens. That is that he had
broad or universal sympathies in a sense
totally unknown to the social reformers who
wallow in such phrases. Dickens (unlike the
social reformers) really did sympathise with
every sort of victim of every sort of tyrant.
He did truly pray for all who are desolate
and oppressed. If you try to tie him to any
cause narrower than that Prayer Book defini-
tion, you will find you have shut out half his
122 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
best work. If, in your sympathy for Mrs.
Quilp, you call Dickens the champion of
downtrodden woman, you will suddenly
remember Mr. Wilfer, and find yourself
unable to deny the existence of downtrodden
man. If in your sympathy for Mr. Rounce-
well you call Dickens the champion of a
manly middle-class Liberalism against Chesney
Wold, you will suddenly remember Stephen
Blackpool and find yourself unable to deny
that Mr. Rouncewell might be a pretty
insupportable cock on his own dunghill. If
in your sympathy for Stephen Blackpool
you call Dickens a Socialist (as does Mr.
Pugh), and think of him as merely heralding
the great Collectivist revolt against Victorian
Individualism and Capitalism, which seemed
so clearly to be the crisis at the end of this
epoch you will suddenly remember the
agreeable young Barnacle at the Circum-
locution Office : and you will be unable, for
very shame, to assert that Dickens would
have trusted the poor to a State Department.
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 123
Dickens did not merely believe in the brother-
hood of men in the weak modern way; he
was the brotherhood of men, and knew it was
a brotherhood in sin as well as in aspiration.
And he was not only larger than the old factions
he satirised; he was larger than any of our
great social schools that have gone forward
since he died.
The seemingly quaint custom of comparing
Dickens and Thackeray existed in their own
time; and no one will dismiss it with entire
disdain who remembers that the Victorian
tradition was domestic and genuine, even when
it was hoodwinked and unworldly. There
must have been some reason for making this
imaginary duel between two quite separate
and quite amiable acquaintances. And there
is, after all, some reason for it. It is not, as
was once cheaply said, that Thackeray went
in for truth, and Dickens for mere carica-
ture. There is a huge accumulation of truth,
down to the smallest detail, in Dickens : he
seems sometimes a mere mountain of facts.
124 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
Thackeray, in comparison, often seems quite
careless and elusive; almost as if he did not
quite know where all his characters were.
There is a truth behind the popular distinc-
tion ; but it lies much deeper. Perhaps the
best way of stating it is this : that Dickens
used reality, while aiming at an effect of
romance; while Thackeray used the loose
language and ordinary approaches of romance,
while aiming at an effect of reality. It was
the special and splendid business of Dickens
to introduce us to people who would have been
quite incredible if he had not told us so much
truth about them. It was the special and
not less splendid task of Thackeray to intro-
duce us to people whom we knew already.
Paradoxically, but very practically, it followed
that his introductions were the longer of the
two. When we hear of Aunt Betsy Trotwood,
we vividly envisage everything about her,
from her gardening gloves to her seaside
residence, from her hard, handsome face to
her tame lunatic laughing at the bedroom
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 125
window. It is all so minutely true that she
must be true also. We only feel inclined to
walk round the English coast until we find
that particular garden and that particular
aunt. But when we turn from the aunt of
Copperfield to the uncle of Pendennis, we are
more likely to run round the coast trying to
find a watering-place where he isn't than one
where he is. The moment one sees Major
Pendennis, one sees a hundred Major Pen-
dennises. It is not a matter of mere realism.
Miss Trotwood's bonnet and gardening tools
and cupboard full of old-fashioned bottles
are quite as true in the materialistic way as
the Major's cuffs and corner table and toast
and newspaper. Both writers are realistic :
but Dickens writes realism in order to make
the incredible credible. Thackeray writes it
in order to make us recognise an old friend.
Whether we shall be pleased to meet the old
friend is quite another matter : I think we
should be better pleased to meet Miss Trot-
wood, and find, as David Copperfield did,
126 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
a new friend, a new world. But we recognise
Major Pendennis even when we avoid him.
Henceforth Thackeray can count on our
seeing him from his wig to his well-blacked
boots whenever he chooses to say " Major
Pendennis paid a call." Dickens, on the
other hand, had to keep up an incessant
excitement about his characters ; and no man
on earth but he could have kept it up.
It may be said, in approximate summary,
that Thackeray is the novelist of memory of
our memories as well as his own. Dickens
seems to expect all his characters, like amusing
strangers arriving at lunch : as if they gave
him not only pleasure, but surprise. But
Thackeray is everybody's past is everybody's
youth. Forgotten friends flit about the
passages of dreamy colleges and unremem-
bered clubs ; we hear fragments of unfinished
conversations, we see faces without names
for an instant, fixed for ever in some trivial
grimace : we smell the strong smell of social
cliques now quite incongruous to us; and
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 127
there stir in all the little rooms at once the
hundred ghosts of oneself.
For this purpose Thackeray was equipped
with a singularly easy and sympathetic style,
carved in slow soft curves where Dickens
hacked out his images with a hatchet. There
was a sort of avuncular indulgence about
his attitude ; what he called his " preaching "
was at worst a sort of grumbling, ending with
the sentiment that boys will be boys and that
there's nothing new under the sun. He was
not really either a cynic or a censor morum ;
but (in another sense than Chaucer's) a gentle
pardoner : having seen the weaknesses he is
sometimes almost weak about them. He
really comes nearer to exculpating Pendennis
or Ethel Newcome than any other author, who
saw what he saw, would have been. The
rare wrath of such men is all the more effective ;
and there are passages in Vanity Fair and
still more in The Book of Snobs, where he
does make the dance of wealth and fashion
look stiff and monstrous, like a Babylonian
128 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
masquerade. But he never quite did it in
such a way as to turn the course of the
Victorian Age,
It may seem strange to say that Thackeray
did not know enough of the world; yet this
was the truth about him in large matters of
the philosophy of life, and especially of his
own time. He did not know the way things
were going : he was too Victorian to under-
stand the Victorian epoch. He did not know
enough ignorant people to have heard the
news. In one of his delightful asides he
imagines two little clerks commenting erro-
neously on the appearance of Lady Kew or Sir
Brian Newcome in the Park, and says : " How
should Jones and Brown, who are not, vous
comprenez, du monde, understand these mys-
teries ? " But I think Thackeray knew quite
as little about Jones and Brown as they knew
about Newcome and Kew; his world was le
monde. Hence he seemed to take it for
granted that the Victorian compromise would
last ; while Dickens (who knew his Jones and
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 129
Brown) had already guessed that it would not.
Thackeray did not realise that the Victorian
platform was a moving platform. To take
but one instance, he was a Radical like
Dickens ; all really representative Victorians,
except perhaps Tennyson, were Radicals.
But he seems to have thought of all reform
as simple and straightforward and all of a
piece; as if Catholic Emancipation, the New
Poor Law, Free Trade and the Factory Acts
and Popular Education were all parts of one
almost self-evident evolution of enlighten-
ment. Dickens, being in touch with the
democracy, had already discovered that the
country had come to a dark place of divided
ways and divided counsels. In Hard Times
he realised Democracy at war with Radicalism ;
and became, with so incompatible an ally as
Ruskin, not indeed a Socialist, but certainly
an anti-Individualist. In Our Mutual Friend
he felt the strength of the new rich, and knew
they had begun to transform the aristocracy,
instead of the aristocracy transforming them*
130 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
He knew that Veneering had carried off
Twemlow in triumph. He very nearly knew
what we all know to-day : that, so far from
it being possible to plod along the progressive
road with more votes and more Free Trade,
England must either sharply become very
much more democratic or as rapidly become
very much less so.
There gathers round these two great
novelists a considerable group of good novel-
ists, who more or less mirror their mid-
Victorian mood. Wilkie Collins may be said
to be in this way a lesser Dickens and Anthony
Trollope a lesser Thackeray. Wilkie Collins
is chiefly typical of his time in this respect:
that while his moral and religious conceptions
were as mechanical as his carefully con-
structed fictitious conspiracies, he nevertheless
informed the latter with a sort of involuntary
mysticism which dealt wholly with the darker
side of the soul. For this was one of the most
peculiar of the problems of the Victorian
^iind. The idea of the supernatural was
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 131
perhaps at as low an ebb as it had ever been
certainly much lower than it is now. But in
spite of this, and in spite of a certain ethical
cheeriness that was almost de rigueur the
strange fact remains that the only sort of
supernaturalism the Victorians allowed to
their imaginations was a sad supernaturalism.
They might have ghost stories, but not saints'
stories. They could trifle with the curse or
unpardoning prophecy of a witch, but not with
the pardon of a priest. They seem to have
held (I believe erroneously) that the super-
natural was safest when it came from below.
When we think (for example) of the un-
countable riches of religious art, imagery,
ritual and popular legend that has clustered
round Christmas through all the Christian
ages, it is a truly extraordinary thing to
reflect that Dickens (wishing to have in The
Christmas Carol a little happy supernaturalism
by way of a change) actually had to make up
a mythology for himself. Here was one of the
rare cases where Dickens, in a real and human
1 2
132 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
sense, did suffer from the lack of culture.
For the rest, Wilkie Collins is these two
elements : the mechanical and the mystical ;
both very good of their kind. He is one of
the few novelists in whose case it is proper
and literal to speak of his " plots." He was a
plotter; he went about to slay Godfrey
Ablewhite as coldly and craftily as the
Indians did. But he also had a sound though
sinister note of true magic; as in the repeti-
tion of the two white dresses in The Woman
in White ; or of the dreams with their double
explanations in Armadale. His ghosts do
walk. They are alive; and walk as softly as
Count Fosco, but as solidly. Finally, The
Moonstone is probably the best detective tale
in the world.
Anthony Trollope, a clear and very capable
realist, represents rather another side of the
Victorian spirit of comfort; its leisureliness,
its love of detail, especially of domestic
detail; its love of following characters an<
kindred from book to book and from genera
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 133
tion to generation. Dickens very seldom
tried this latter experiment, and then (as in
Master Humphrey's Clock) unsuccessfully;
those magnesium blazes of his were too
brilliant and glaring to be indefinitely pro-
longed. But Thackeray was full of it; and
we often feel that the characters in The New-
comes or Philip might legitimately complain
that their talk and tale are being perpetually
interrupted and pestered by people out of
other books. Within his narrower limits,
Troll ope was a more strict and masterly
realist than Thackeray, and even those who
would call his personages " types " would
admit that they are as vivid as characters.
It was a bustling but a quiet world that he
described : politics before the coming of the
Irish and the Socialists; the Church in the
lull between the Oxford Movement and the
modern High Anglican energy. And it is
notable in the Victorian spirit once more
that though his clergymen are all of them real
men and many of them good men, it never
134 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
really occurs to us to think of them as the
priests of a religion.
Charles Reade may be said to go along with
these ; and Disraeli and even Kingsley ; not
because these three very different persons
had anything particular in common, but
because they all fell short of the first rank in
about the same degree. Charles Reade had
a kind of cold coarseness about him, not
morally but artistically, which keeps him out
of the best literature as such : but he is of
importance to the Victorian development in
another way ; because he has the harsher and
more tragic note that has come later in the
study of our social problems. He is the first
of the angry realists. Kingsley's best books
may be called boys* books. There is a real
though a juvenile poetry in Westward Ho !
and though that narrative, historically con-
sidered, is very much of a lie, it is a good,
thundering honest lie. There are also
genuinely eloquent things in Hypatia, and
a certain electric atmosphere of sectarian
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 135
excitement that Kingsley kept himself in,
and did know how to convey. He said he
wrote the book in his heart's blood. This is
an exaggeration, but there is a truth in it;
and one does feel that he may have relieved
his feelings by writing it in red ink. As for
Disraeli, his novels are able and interesting
considered as everything except novels, and
are an important contribution precisely be-
cause they are written by an alien who did
not take our politics so seriously as Trollope
did. They are important again as showing
those later Victorian changes which men like
Thackeray missed. Disraeli did do something
towards revealing the dishonesty of our
politics even if he had done a good deal
towards bringing it about.
Between this group and the next there
hovers a figure very hard to place ; not higher
in letters than these, yet not easy to class
with them ; I mean Bulwer Lytton. He was
no greater than they were ; yet somehow he
seems to take up more space. He did not,
186 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
in the ultimate reckoning, do anything in
particular : but he was a figure ; rather as
Oscar Wilde was later a figure. You could
not have the Victorian Age without him.
And this was not due to wholly superficial
things like his dandyism, his dark, sinister
good looks and a great deal of the mere
polished melodrama that he wrote. There
was something in his all -round interests; in
the variety of things he tried; in his half-
aristocratic swagger as poet and politician,
that made him in some ways a real touch-
stone of the time. It is noticeable about him
that he is always turning up everywhere and
that he brings other people out, generally
in a hostile spirit. His Byronic and almost
Oriental ostentation was used by the young
Thackeray as something on which to sharpen
his new razor of Victorian common sense.
His pose as a dilettante satirist inflamed the
execrable temper of Tennyson, and led to
those lively comparisons to a bandbox and
a lion in curlpapers. He interposed the glove
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 137
of warning and the tear of sensibility between
us and the proper ending of Great Expectations.
Of his own books, by far the best are the
really charming comedies about The Caxtons
and Kenelm Chillingley ; none of his other
works have a high literary importance now ;
with the possible exception of A Strange
Story ; but his Coming Race is historically
interesting as foreshadowing those novels of
the future which were afterwards such a
weapon of the Socialists. Lastly, there was an
element indefinable about Lytton, which often
is in adventurers ; which amounts to a suspi-
cion that there was something in him after all.
It rang out of him when he said to the hesi-
tating Crimean Parliament : " Destroy your
Government and save your army."
With the next phase of Victorian fiction
we enter a new world ; the later, more revolu-
tionary, more continental, freer but in some
ways weaker world in which we live to-day.
The subtle and sad change that was passing
like twilight across the English brain at this
138 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
time is very well expressed in the fact that
men have come to mention the great name of
Meredith in the same breath as Mr. Thomas
Hardy. Both writers, doubtless, disagreed
with the orthodox religion of the ordinary
English village. Most of us have disagreed
with that religion until we made the simple
discovery that it does not exist. But in any
age where ideas could be even feebly dis-
entangled from each other, it would have been
evident at once that Meredith and Hardy
were, intellectually speaking, mortal enemies.
They were much more opposed to each other
than Newman was to Kingsley; or than
Abelard was to St. Bernard. But then they
collided in a sceptical age, which is like
colliding in a London fog. There can never
be any clear controversy in a sceptical age.
Nevertheless both Hardy and Meredith
did mean something; and they did mean
diametrically opposite things. Meredith was
perhaps the only man in the modern world
who has almost had the high honour of rising
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 139
out of the low estate of a Pantheist into the
high estate of a Pagan. A Pagan is a person
who can do what hardly any person for the
last two thousand years could do : a person
who can take Nature naturally. It is due
to Meredith to say that no one outside a few
of the great Greeks has ever taken Nature
so naturally as he did. And it is also due
to him to say that no one outside Colney
Hatch ever took Nature so unnaturally as
it was taken in what Mr. Hardy has had the
blasphemy to call Wessex Tales. This division
between the two points of view is vital;
because the turn of the nineteenth century
was a very sharp one ; by it we have reached
the rapids in which we find ourselves to-day.
Meredith really is a Pantheist. You can
express it by saying that God is the great
All : you can express it much more intelli-
gently by saying that Pan is the great god.
But there is some sense in it, and the sense is
this : that some people believe that this world
is sufficiently good at bottom for us to
140 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
trust ourselves to it without very much
knowing why. It is the whole point in most
of Meredith's tales that there is something
behind us that often saves us when we under-
stand neither it nor ourselves. He sometimes
talked mere intellectualism about women :
but that is because the most brilliant brains
can get tired. Meredith's brain was quite
tired when it wrote some of its most quoted
and least interesting epigrams : like that
about passing Seraglio Point, but not doubling
Cape Turk. Those who can see Meredith's
mind in that are with those who can see
Dickens' mind in Little Nell. Both were
chivalrous pronouncements on behalf of
oppressed females : neither have any earthly
meaning as ideas.
But what Meredith did do for women was
not to emancipate them (which means
nothing) but to express them, which means a
great deal. And he often expressed them
right, even when he expressed himself wrong.
Take, for instance, that phrase so often
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 141
quoted : 4i Woman will be the last tiling
civilised by man." Intellectually it is some-
thing worse than false; it is the opposite
of what he was always attempting to say.
So far from admitting any equality in the
sexes, it logically admits that a man may use
against a woman any chains or whips he has
been in the habit of using against a tiger or
a bear. He stood as the special champion of
female dignity : but I cannot remember any
author, Eastern or Western, who has so calmly
assumed that man is the master and woman
merely the material, as Meredith really does
in this phrase. Any one who knows a free
woman (she is generally a married woman) will
immediately be inclined to ask two simple and
catastrophic questions, first : " Why should
woman be civilised ? " and, second : " Why,
if she is to be civilised, should she be civilised
by man ? " In the mere intellectualism of
the matter, Meredith seems to be talking the
most brutal sex mastery : he, at any rate,
has not doubled Cape Turk, nor even passed
142 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
Seraglio Point. Now why is it that we all
really feel that this Meredithian passage is
not so insolently masculine as in mere logic
it would seem ? I think it is for this simple
reason : that there is something about Mere-
dith making us feel that it is not woman he
disbelieves in, but civilisation. It is a dark
undemonstrated feeling that Meredith would
really be rather sorry if woman were civilised
by man or by anything else. When we have
got that, we have got the real Pagan the
man that does believe in Pan.
It is proper to put this philosophic matter
first, before the aesthetic appreciation of
Meredith, because with Meredith a sort of
passing bell has rung and the Victorian
orthodoxy is certainly no longer safe. Dickens
and Carlyle, as we have said, rebelled against
the orthodox compromise : but Meredith
has escaped from it. Cosmopolitanism,
Socialism, Feminism are already in the air;
and Queen Victoria has begun to look like
Mrs. Grundy But to escape from a city is
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 143
one thing : to choose a road is another. The
free-thinker who found himself outside the
Victorian city, found himself also in the fork
of two very different naturalistic paths.
One of them went upwards through a tangled
but living forest to lonely but healthy hills :
the other went down to a swamp. Hardy
went down to botanise in the swamp, while
Meredith climbed towards the sun. Meredith
became, at his best, a sort of daintily dressed
Walt Whitman : Hardy became a sort of
village atheist brooding and blaspheming
over the village idiot. It is largely because
the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly
made up their minds whether they want to
be more optimist or more pessimist than
Christianity that their small but sincere
movement has failed.
For the duel is deadly; and any agnostic
who wishes to be anything more than a
Nihilist must sympathise with one version of
nature or the other. The God of Meredith
is impersonal; but he is often more healthy
144 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
and kindly than any of the persons. That of
Thomas Hardy is almost made personal by
the intense feeling that he is poisonous.
Nature is always coming in to save Meredith's
women ; Nature is always coming in to betray
and ruin Hardy's. It has been said that if
God had not existed it would have been
necessary to invent Him. But it is not often,
as in Mr. Hardy's case, that it is necessary to
invent Him in order to prove how unnecessary
(and undesirable) He is. But Mr. Hardy is
anthropomorphic out of sheer atheism. He
personifies the universe in order to give it a
piece of his mind. But the fight is unequal
for the old philosophical reason : that the
universe had already given Mr. Hardy a piece
of its mind to fight with. One curious result
of this divergence in the two types of sceptic
is this : that when these two brilliant novelists
break down or blow up or otherwise lose for a
moment their artistic self-command, they are
both equally wild, but wild in opposite
directions. Meredith shows an extravagance
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 145
in comedy which, if it were not so complicated,
every one would call broad farce. But Mr.
Hardy has the honour of inventing a new sort
of game, which may be called the extravagance
of depression. The placing of the weak lover
and his new love in such a place that they
actually see the black flag announcing that
Tess has been hanged is utterly inexcusable
in art and probability; it is a cruel practical
joke. But it is a practical joke at which
even its author cannot brighten up enough
to laugh.
But it is when we consider the great artistic
power of these two writers, with all their
eccentricities, that we see even more clearly
that free-thought was, as it were, a fight
between finger-posts. For it is the remarkable
fact that it was the man who had the healthy
and manly outlook who had the crabbed and
perverse style; it was the man who had the
crabbed and perverse outlook who had the
healthy and manly style. The reader may
well have complained of paradox when I
146 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
observed above that Meredith, unlike most
neo-Pagans, did in his way take Nature
naturally. It may be suggested, in tones of
some remonstrance, that things like " though
pierced by the cruel acerb " or " thy fleeting-
ness is bigger in the ghost," or " her gabbling
grey she eyes askant," or " sheer film of the sur-
face awag " are not taking Nature naturally.
And this is true of Meredith's style, but it is
not true of his spirit; nor even, apparently,
of his serious opinions. In one of the poems
I have quoted he actually says of those who
live nearest to that Nature he was always
praising
" Have they but held her laws and nature
dear,
They mouth no sentence of inverted wit " ;
which certainly was what Meredith himself
was doing most of the time. But a similar
paradox of the combination of plain tastes
with twisted phrases can also be seen in
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 147
Browning. Something of the same can be
seen in many of the cavalier poets. I do
not understand it : it may be that the fertility
of a cheerful mind crowds everything, so
that the tree is entangled in its own branches ;
or it may be that the cheerful mind cares
less whether it is understood or not ; as a man
is less articulate when he is humming than
when he is calling for help.
Certainly Meredith suffers from applying
a complex method to men and things he does
not mean to be complex; nay, honestly
admires for being simple. The conversations
between Diana and Redworth fail of their
full contrast because Meredith can afford
the twopence for Diana coloured, but can-
not afford the penny for Redworth plain.
Meredith's ideals were neither sceptical nor
finnicky : but they can be called insufficient.
He had, perhaps, over and above his honest
Pantheism two convictions profound enough
to be called prejudices. He was probably of
Welsh blood, certainly of Celtic sympathies,
K 2
148 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
and he set himself more swiftly though more
subtly than Ruskin or Swinburne to under-
mining the enormous complacency of John
Bull. He also had a sincere hope in the
strength of womanhood, and may be said,
almost without hyperbole, to have begotten
gigantic daughters. He may yet suffer for
his chivalric interference as many champions
do. I have little doubt that when St. George
had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid
of the princess. But certainly neither of
these two vital enthusiasms touched the
Victorian trouble. The disaster of the modern
English is not that they are not Celtic, but
that they are not English. The tragedy of
the modern woman is not that she is not
allowed to follow man, but that she follows
him far too slavishly. This conscious and
theorising Meredith did not get very near
his problem and is certainly miles away from
ours. But the other Meredith was a creator;
which means a god. That is true of him
which is true of so different a man as Dickens.
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 149
that all one can say of him is that he is full
of good things. A reader opening one of his
books feels like a schoolboy opening a hamper
which he knows to have somehow cost a
hundred pounds. He may be more bewildered
by it than by an ordinary hamper; but he
gets the impression of a real richness of
thought; and that is what one really gets
from such riots of felicity as Evan Harrington
or Harry Richmond. His philosophy may be
barren, but he was not. And the chief feeling
among those that enjoy him is a mere wish
that more people could enjoy him too.
I end here upon Hardy and Meredith;
because this parting of the ways to open
optimism and open pessimism really was the
end of the Victorian peace. There are many
other men, very nearly as great, on whom
I might delight to linger : on Shorthouse,
for instance, who in one way goes with
Mrs. Browning or Coventry Patmore. I
mean that he has a wide culture, which is
called by some a narrow religion. When we
150 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
think what even the best novels about
cavaliers have been (written by men like
Scott or Stevenson) it is a wonderful thing
that the author of John Ingksant could write
a cavalier romance in which he forgot Cromwell
but remembered Hobbes. But Short house
is outside the period in fiction in the same sort
of way in which Francis Thompson is outside
it in poetry. He did not accept the Victorian
basis. He knew too much.
There is one more matter that may best
be considered here, though briefly : it illus-
trates the extreme difficulty of dealing with
the Victorian English in a book like this,
because of their eccentricity ; not of opinions,
but of character and artistic form. There
are several great Victorians who will not fit
into any of the obvious categories I employ;
because they will not fit into anything, hardly
into the world itself. Where Germany or
Italy would relieve the monotony of mankind
by paying serious respect to an artist, or a
scholar, or a patriotic warrior, or a priest
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 151
it was always the instinct of the English to
do it by pointing out a Character. Dr.
Johnson has faded as a poet or a critic, but
he survives as a Character. Cobbett is
neglected (unfortunately) as a publicist and
pamphleteer, but he is remembered as a
Character. Now these people continued to
crop up through the Victorian time ; and each
stands so much by himself that I shall end
these pages with a profound suspicion that
I have forgotten to mention a Character of
gigantic dimensions. Perhaps the best ex-
ample of such eccentrics is George Borrow;
who sympathised with unsuccessful nomads
like the gipsies while every one else sympa-
thised with successful nomads like the Jews;
who had a genius like the west wind for the
awakening of wild and casual friendships and
the drag and attraction of the roads. But
whether George Borrow ought to go into the
section devoted to philosophers, or the section
devoted to novelists, or the section devoted to
liars, nobody else has ever Known, even if he did.
152 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
But the strongest case of this Victorian
power of being abruptly original in a corner
can be found in two things : the literature
meant merely for children and the literature
meant merely for fun. It is true that these
two very Victorian things often melted into
each other (as was the way of Victorian
things), but not sufficiently to make it safe
to mass them together without distinction.
Thus there was George Macdonald, a Scot of
genius as genuine as Carlyle's; he could
write fairy-tales that made all experience a
fairy-tale. He could give the real sense that
every one had the end of an elfin thread that
must at last lead them into Paradise. It was
a sort of optimist Calvinism. But such really
significant fairy-tales were accidents of genius.
Of the Victorian Age as a whole it is true to
say that it did discover a new thing ; a thing
called Nonsense. It may be doubted whether
this thing was really invented to please
children. Rather it was invented by old
people trying to prove their first childhood,
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 153
and sometimes succeeding only in proving
their second. But whatever else the thing
was, it was English and it was individual.
Lewis Carroll gave mathematics a holiday :
he carried logic into the wild lands of illogic-
ality. Edward Lear, a richer, more romantic
and therefore more truly Victorian buffoon,
improved the experiment. But the more
we study it, the more we shall, I think, con-
clude that it reposed on something more real
and profound in the Victorians than even their
just and exquisite appreciation of children.
It came from the deep Victorian sense of
humour.
It may appear, because I have used from
time to time the only possible phrases for the
case, that I mean the Victorian Englishman
to appear as a blockhead, which means an
unconscious buffoon. To all this there is a
final answer : that he was also a conscious
buffoon and a successful one. He w r as a
humorist; and one of the best humorists
in Europe. That which Goethe had never
154 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
taught the Germans, Byron did manage to
teach the English the duty of not taking
him seriously. The strong and shrewd
Victorian humour appears in every slash of
the pencil of Charles Keene; in every under-
graduate inspiration of Calverley or " Q." or
J.K.S. They had largely forgotten both
art and arms : but the gods had left them
laughter.
But the final proof that the Victorians were
alive by this laughter, can be found in the
fact they could manage and master for a
moment even the cosmopolitan modern
theatre They could contrive to put " The
Bab Ballads " on the stage. To turn a private
name into a public epithet is a thing given to
few : but the word " Gilbertian " will probably
last longer than the name Gilbert.
It meant a real Victorian talent; that of
exploding unexpectedly and almost, as it
seemed, unintentionally. Gilbert made good
jokes by the thousand; but he never (in his
best days) made the joke that could possibly
GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 155
have been expected of him. This is the last
essential of the Victorian. Laugh at him as a
limited man, a moralist, conventionalist, an
opportunist, a formalist. But remember also
that he was really a humorist ; and may still
be laughing at you
CHAPTER III
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS
WHAT was really unsatisfactory in Victorian
literature is something much easier to feel
than to state. It was not so much a superi-
ority in the men of other ages to the Victorian
men. It was a superiority of Victorian men
to themselves. The individual was unequal.
Perhaps that is why the society became un-
equal : I cannot say. They were lame giants ;
the strongest of them walked on one leg a
little shorter than the other. A great man in
any age must be a common man, and also an
uncommon man. Those that are only un-
common men are perverts and sowers of
pestilence. But somehow the great Victorian
man was more and less than this. He was
at once a giant and a dwarf. When he has
been sweeping the sky in circles infinitely
166
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 157
great, he suddenly shrivels into something
indescribably small. There is a moment
when Carlyle turns suddenly from a high
creative mystic to a common Calvinist. There
are moments when George Eliot turns from
a prophetess into a governess. There are
also moments when Ruskin turns into a
governess, without even the excuse of sex.
But in all these cases the alteration comes
as a thing quite abrupt and unreasonable.
We do not feel this acute angle anywhere
in Homer or in Virgil or in Chaucer or in
Shakespeare or in Dryden; such things as
they knew they knew. It is no disgrace to
Homer that he had not discovered Britain;
or to Virgil that he had not discovered
America; or to Chaucer that he had not
discovered the solar system; or to Dryden
that he had not discovered the steam-engine.
But we do most frequently feel, with the
Victorians, that the very vastness of the
number of things they know illustrates the
abrupt abyss of the things they do not know.
158 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
We feel, in a sort of way, that it is a disgrace to
a man like Carlyle when he asks the Irish
why they do not bestir themselves and re-
forest their country : saying not a word about
the soaking up of every sort of profit by the
landlords which made that and every other
Irish improvement impossible. We feel that
it is a disgrace to a man like Ruskin when he
says, with a solemn visage, that building in
iron is ugly and unreal, but that the weightiest
objection is that there is no mention of it
in the Bible ; we feel as if he had just said he
could find no hair-brushes in Habakkuk. We
feel that it is a disgrace to a man like Thackeray
when he proposes that people should be
forcibly prevented from being nuns, merely
because he has no fixed intention of becoming
a nun himself. We feel that it is a disgrace
to a man like Tennyson, when he talks of the
French revolutions, the huge crusades that
had recreated the whole of his civilisation,
as being " no graver than a schoolboy's
barring out." We feel that it is a disgrace
; THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 159
to a man like Browning to make spluttering
and spiteful puns about the names Newman,
Wiseman, and Manning. We feel that it
is a disgrace to a man like Newman when
he confesses that for some time he felt
as if he couldn't come in to the Catholic
Church, because of that dreadful Mr. Daniel
O'Connell, who had the vulgarity to fight
for his own country. We feel that it is a
disgrace to a man like Dickens, when he makes
a blind brute and savage out of a man like
St. Dunstan; it sounds as if it were not
Dickens talking but Dombey. We feel it is
a disgrace to a man like Swinburne, when he
has a Jingo fit and calls the Boer children in
the concentration camps " Whelps of treacher-
ous dams whom none save we have spared to
starve and slay " : we feel that Swinburne,
for the first time, really has become an immoral
and indecent writer. All this is a certain odd
provincialism peculiar to the English in that
great century : they were in a kind of pocket ;
they appealed to too narrow a public opinion ;
160 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
I am certain that no French or German men
of the same genius made such remarks. Renan
was the enemy of the Catholic Church; but
who can imagine Renan writing of it as
Kingsley or Dickens did ? Taine was the
enemy of the French Revolution; but who
can imagine Taine talking about it as Tenny-
son or Newman talked ? Even Matthew
Arnold, though he saw this peril and prided
himself on escaping it, did not altogether
escape it. There must be (to use an Irishism)
something shallow in the depths of any man
who talks about the Zeitgeist as if it were a
living thing.
But this defect is very specially the key
to the case of the two great Victorian poets,
Tennyson and Browning; the two spirited
or beautiful tunes, so to speak, to which the
other events marched or danced. It was
especially so of Tennyson, for a reason which
raises some of the most real problems about
his poetry. Tennyson, of course, owed
great deal to Virgil. There is no question ol
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 161
plagiarism here; a debt to Virgil is like a
debt to Nature. But Tennyson was a
provincial Virgil. In such passages as that
about the schoolboy's barring out he might
be called a suburban Virgil. I mean that he
tried to have the universal balance of all the
ideas at which the great Roman had aimed :
but he hadn't got hold of all the ideas to
balance. Hence his work was not a balance of
truths, like the universe. It was a balance
of whims; like the British Constitution. It
is intensely typical of Tennyson's philosophical
temper that he was almost the only Poet
Laureate who was not ludicrous. It is not
absurd to think of Tennyson as tuning his
harp in praise of Queen Victoria : that is, it is
not absurd in the same sense as Chaucer's
harp hallowed by dedication to Richard II
or Wordsworth's harp hallowed by dedication
to George IV is absurd. Richard's court could
not properly appreciate either Chaucer's daisies
or his " devotion." George IV would not
have gone pottering about Helvellyn in search
162 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
of purity and the simple annals of the poor.
But Tennyson did sincerely believe in the
Victorian compromise ; and sincerity is never
undignified. He really did hold a great
many of the same views as Queen Victoria,
though he was gifted with a more fortunate
literary style. If Dickens is Cobbett's
democracy stirring in its grave, Tennyson is
the exquisitely ornamental extinguisher on
the flame of the first revolutionary poets.
England has settled down; England has
become Victorian. The compromise was
interesting, it was national and for a long
time it was successful : there is still a great
deal to be said for it. But it was as freakish
and unphilosophic, as arbitrary and untrans-
latable, as a beggar's patched coat or a child's
secret language. Now it is here that Browning
had a certain odd advantage over Tennyson ;
which has, perhaps, somewhat exaggerated
his intellectual superiority to him. Brown-
ing's eccentric style was more suitable to the
poetry of a nation of eccentrics; of people
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 163
for the time being removed far from the centre
of intellectual interests. The hearty and
pleasant task of expressing one's intense
dislike of something one doesn't understand
is much more poetically achieved by saying,
in a general way " Grrr you swine 1 " than
it is by laboured lines such as " the red fool-
fury of the Seine." We all feel that there is
more of the man in Browning here; more of
Dr. Johnson or Cobbett. Browning is the
Englishman taking himself wilfully, following
liis nose like a bull-dog, going by his own likes
and dislikes. We cannot help feeling that
Tennyson is the Englishman taking himself
seriously an awful sight. One's memory
flutters unhappily over a certain letter about
the Papal Guards written by Sir Willoughby
Patterne. It is here chiefly that Tennyson
suffers by that very Virgilian loveliness and
dignity of diction which he put to the service
of such a small and anomalous national
scheme. Virgil had the best news to tell as
well as the best words to tell it in. His world
L 2
164 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
might be sad; but it was the largest world
one could live in before the coming of Christi-
anity. If he told the Romans to spare the
vanquished and to war down the mighty, at
least he was more or less well informed about
who were mighty and who were vanquished.
But when Tennyson wrote verses like
" Of freedom in her regal seat,
Of England; not the schoolboy heat,
The blind hysterics of the Celt "
he quite literally did not know one word of
what he was talking about ; he did not know
what Celts are, or what hysterics are, or what
freedom was, or what regal was or even
of what England was in the living Europe
of that time.
His religious range was very much wider
and wiser than his political; but here also
he suffered from treating as true universality
a thing that was only a sort of lukewarm local
patriotism. Here also he suffered by the
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 165
very splendour and perfection of his poetical
powers. He was quite the opposite of the
man who cannot express himself; the in-
articulate singer who dies with all his music in
him. He had a great deal to say; but he
had much more power of expression than was
wanted for anything he had to express. He
could not think up to the height of his own
towering style.
For whatever else Tennyson was, he was a
great poet; no mind that feels itself free,
that is, above the ebb and flow of fashion, can
feel anything but contempt for the later effort
to discredit him in that respect. It is true
that, like Browning and almost every other
Victorian poet, he was really two poets. But
it is just to him to insist that in his case
(unlike Browning's) both the poets were good,
The first is more or less like Stevenson in
metre ; it is a magical luck or skill in the mere
choice of words. " Wet sands marbled with
moon and cloud " " Flits by the sea-blue bird
of March " " Leafless ribs and iron horns "
166 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
" When the long dun wolds are ribbed with
snow " in all these cases one word is the
keystone of an arch which would fall into
ruin without it. But there are other strong
phrases that recall not Stevenson but rather
their common master, Virgil " Tears from
the depths of some divine despair " " There
is fallen a splendid tear from the passion-
flower at the gate " " Was a great water ;
and the moon was full " " God made Himself
an awful rose of dawn." These do not
depend on a word but on an idea : they might
even be translated. It is also true, I think,
that he was first and last a lyric poet. He was
always best when he expressed himself
shortly. In long poems he had an unfortunate
habit of eventually saying very nearly the
opposite of what he meant to say. I will
take only two instances of what I mean.
In the Idylls of the King, and in In Memariam
(his two sustained and ambitious efforts),
particular phrases are always flashing out the
whole fire of the truth ; the truth that Tenny-
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 167
son meant. But owing to his English indo-
lence, his English aristocratic irresponsibility,
his English vagueness in thought, he always
managed to make the main poem mean
exactly what he did not mean. Thus, these
two lines which simply say that
" Lancelot was the first in tournament,
But Arthur mightiest in the battle-field "
do really express what he meant to express
about Arthur being after all " the highest,
yet most human too; not Lancelot, nor
another." But as his hero is actually
developed, we have exactly the opposite
impression; that poor old Lancelot, with all
his faults, was much more of a man than
Arthur. He was a Victorian in the bad as
well as the good sense; he could not keep
priggishness out of long poems. Or again,
take the case of In Memoriam. I will quote
one verse (probably incorrectly) which has
always seemed to me splendid, and which
168 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
does express what the whole poem should
express but hardly does.
" That we may lift from out the dust,
A voice as unto him that hears
A cry above the conquered years
Of one that ever works, and trust."
The poem should have been a cry above the
conquered years. It might well have been
that if the poet could have said sharply at
the end of it, as a pure piece of dogma, " I've
forgotten every feature of the man's face : I
know God holds him alive." But under the
influence of the mere leisurely length of the
thing, the reader does rather receive the
impression that the wound has been healed
only by time; and that the victor hours can
boast that this is the man that loved and
lost, but all he was is overworn. This is not
the truth; and Tennyson did not intend it
for the truth. It is simply the result of the
lack of something militant, dogmatic and
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 169
structural in him : whereby he could not be
trusted with the trail of a very long literary
process without entangling himself like a
kitten playing cat's-cradle.
Browning, as above suggested, got on much
better with eccentric and secluded England
because he treated it as eccentric and secluded ;
a place where one could do what one liked.
To a considerable extent he did do what he
liked; arousing not a few complaints; and
many doubts and conjectures as to why on
earth he liked it. Many comparatively sympa-
thetic persons pondered upon what pleasure
it could give any man to write Sordello or
rhyme " end-knot " to " offend not." Never-
theless he was no anarchist and no mystagogue ;
and even where he was defective, his defect
has commonly been stated wrongly. The
two chief charges against him were a contempt
for form unworthy of an artist, and a poor
pride in obscurity. The obscurity is true,
though not, I think, the pride in it ; but the
truth about this charge rather rises out of the
170 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
truth about the other. The other charge is
not true. Browning cared very much for
form; he cared very much for style. You
may not happen to like his style; but he
did. To say that he had not enough mastery
over form to express himself perfectly like
Tennyson or Swinburne is like criticising the
griffin of a mediaeval gargoyle without even
knowing that it is a griffin; treating as an
infantile and unsuccessful attempt at a classical
angel. A poet indifferent to form ought to
mean a poet who did not care what form he
used as long as he expressed his thoughts.
He might be a rather entertaining sort of poet ;
telling a smoking-room story in blank verse
or writing a hunting-song in the Spenserian
stanza ; giving a realistic analysis of infanticide
in a series of triolets; or proving the truth
of Immortality in a long string of limericks.
Browning certainly had no such indifference.
Almost every poem of Browning, especially
the shortest and most successful ones, was
moulded or graven in some special style,
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 171
generally grotesque, but invariably deliberate.
In most cases whenever he wrote a new song
he wrote a new kind of song. The new lyric
is not only of a different metre, but of a
different shape. No one, not even Browning,
ever wrote a poem in the same style as that
horrible one beginning " John, Master of the
Temple of God," with its weird choruses and
creepy prose directions. No one, not even
Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style
as Pisgah- sights. No one, not even Browning,
ever wrote a poem in the same style as Time's
Revenges, no one, not even Browning, ever
wrote a poem in the same style as Meeting at
Night and Parting at Morning. No one, not
even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the
same style as The Flight of the Duchess, or in
the same style as The Grammarian 9 s Funeral, or
in the same style as A Star, or in the same
style as that astounding lyric which begins
abruptly " Some people hang pictures up."
These metres and manners were not accidental ;
they really do suit the sort of spiritual ex-
172 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
periment Browning was making in each case.
Browning, then, was not chaotic; he was
deliberately grotesque. But there certainly
was, over and above this grotesqueness, a
perversity and irrationality about the man
which led him to play the fool in the middle
of his own poems; to leave off carving
gargoyles and simply begin throwing stones.
His curious complicated puns are an example
of this : Hood had used the pun to make
a sentence or a sentiment especially pointed
and clear. In Browning the word with two
meanings seems to mean rather less, if any-
thing, than the word with one. It also applies
to his trick of setting himself to cope with
impossible rhymes. It may be fun, though
it is not poetry, to try rnyming to ranunculus ;
but even the fun presupposes that you do
rhyme to it ; and I will affirm, and hold under
persecution, that " Tommy-make-room-for-
your-uncle-us " does not rhyme to it.
The obscurity, to which he must in a large
degree plead guilty, was, curiously enough, the
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 173
result rather of the gay artist in him than the
deep thinker. It is patience in the Browning
students ; in Browning it was only impatience.
He wanted to say something comic and
energetic and he wanted to say it quick. And,
between his artistic skill in the fantastic and
his temperamental turn for the abrupt, the
idea sometimes flashed past unseen. But it
is quite an error to suppose that these are
the dark mines containing his treasure. The
two or three great and true things he really
had to say he generally managed to say quite
simply. Thus he really did want to say that
God had indeed made man and woman one
flesh; that the sex relation was religious in
this real sense that even in our sin and despair
we take it for granted and expect a sort of
virtue in it. The feelings of the bad husband
about the good wife, for instance, are about
as subtle and entangled as any matter on this
earth; and Browning really had something
to say about them. But he said it in some of
the plainest and most unmistakable words
174 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
in all literature ; as lucid as a flash of light-
ning. " Pompilia, will you let them murder
me ? " Or again, he did really want to say
that death and such moral terrors were best
taken in a military spirit ; he could not have
said it more simply than : " I was ever a fighter ;
one fight more, the best and the last." He
did really wish to say that human life was
unworkable unless immortality were implied
in it every other moment ; he could not have
said it more simply : " leave now to dogs
and apes ; Man has for ever." The obscurities
were not merely superficial, but often covered
quite superficial ideas. He was as likely as
not to be most unintelligible of all in writing
a compliment in a lady's album. I remember
in my boyhood (when Browning kept us awake
like coffee) a friend reading out the poem about
the portrait to which I have already referred,
reading it in that rapid dramatic way in which
this poet must be read. And I was profoundly
puzzled at the passage where it seemed to say
that the cousin disparaged the picture, " while
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 175
John scorns ale." I could not think what
this sudden teetotalism on the part of John
had to do with the affair, but I forgot to ask
at the time and it was only years afterwards
that, looking at the book, I found it was
" John's corns ail," a very Browningesque
way of saying he winced. Most of Browning's
obscurity is of that sort the mistakes are
almost as quaint as misprints and the
Browning student, in that sense, is more a
proof reader than a disciple. For the rest
his real religion was of the most manly, even
the most boyish sort. He is called an
optimist ; but the word suggests a calculated
contentment which was not in the least one
of his vices. What he really was was a
romantic. He offered the cosmos as an
adventure rather than a scheme. He did
not explain evil, far less explain it away : he
enjoyed defying it. He was a troubadour
even in theology and metaphysics : like the
Jongleurs de Dieu of St. Francis. He may be
said to have serenaded heaven with a guitar,
176 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
and even, so to speak, tried to climb there with
a rope ladder. Thus his most vivid things
are the red-hot little love lyrics, or rather,
little love dramas. He did one really original
and admirable thing : he managed the real
details of modern love affairs in verse, and
love is the most realistic thing in the world.
He substituted the street with the green
blind for the faded garden of Watteau, and
the " blue spirt of a lighted match " for the
monotony of the evening star.
Before leaving him it should be added that
he was fitted to deepen the Victorian mind,
but not to broaden it. With all his Italian
sympathies and Italian residence, he was not
the man to get Victorian England out of its
provincial rut : on many things Kingsley
himself was not so narrow. His celebrated
wife was wider and wiser than he in this sense ;
for she was, however one-sidedly, involved
in the emotions of central European politics.
She defended Louis Napoleon and Victor
Emmanuel ; and intelligently, as one conscious
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 177
of the case against them both. As to why
it now seems simple to defend the first Italian
King, but absurd to defend the last French
Emperor well the reason is sad and simple.
It is concerned with certain curious things
called success and failure, and I ought to
have considered it under the heading of
The Book of Snobs. But Elizabeth Barrett,
at least, was no snob : her political poems
have rather an impatient air, as if they
were written, and even published, rather pre-
maturely just before the fall of her idol.
These old political poems of hers are too little
read to-day; they are amongst the most
sincere documents on the history of the
times, and many modern blunders could be
corrected by the reading of them. And
Elizabeth Barrett had a strength really rare
among women poets ; the strength of the
phrase. She excelled in her sex, in epigram,
almost as much as Voltaire in his. Pointed
phrases like : " Martyrs by the pang without
the palm " or " Incense to sweeten a crime
M
178 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
and myrrh to embitter a curse," these ex-
pressions, which are witty after the old
fashion of the conceit, came quite freshly and
spontaneously to her quite modern mind.
But the first fact is this, that these epigrams
of hers were never so true as when they
turned on one of the two or three pivots on
which contemporary Europe was really turn-
ing. She is by far the most European of
all the English poets of that age ; all of them,
even her own much greater husband, look
local beside her. Tennyson and the rest
are nowhere. Take any positive political
fact, such as the final fall of Napoleon.
Tennyson wrote these profoundly foolish
lines
" He thought to quell the stubborn hearts
of oak
Madman ! "
as if the defeat of an English regiment were a
violation of the laws of Nature. Mrs. Brown-
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 179
ing knew no more facts about Napoleon,
perhaps, than Tennyson did; but she knew
the truth. Her epigram on Napoleon's fall
is in one line
"And kings crept out again to feel the sun.
Talleyrand would have clapped his horrible
old hands at that. Her instinct about the
statesman and the soldier was very like Jane
Austen's instinct for the gentleman and the
man. It is not unnoticeable that as Miss
Austen spent most of her life in a village,
Miss Barrett spent most of her life on a sofa.
The godlike power of guessing seems (for
some reason I do not understand) to grow
under such conditions. Unfortunately Mrs.
Browning was like all the other Victorians
in going a little lame, as I have roughly called
it, having one leg shorter than the other.
But her case was, in one sense, extreme. She
exaggerated both ways. She was too strong
and too weak, or (as a false sex philosophy
M 2
180 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
would express it), too masculine and too
feminine. I mean that she hit the centre of
weakness with almost the same emphatic
precision with which she hit the centre of
strength. She could write finally of the
factory wheels " grinding life down from its
mark " a strong and strictly true observation.
Unfortunately she could also write of Euripides
" with his droppings of warm tears." She
could write in A Drama of Exile, a really
fine exposition, touching the later relation of
Adam and the animals : unfortunately the
tears were again turned on at the wrong
moment at the main ; and the stage direction
commands a silence, only broken by the
dropping of angel's tears. How much noise
is made by angel's tears ? Is it a sound of
emptied buckets, or of garden hoses, or of
mountain cataracts ? That is the sort of
question which Elizabeth Barrett's extreme
love of the extreme was always tempting
people to ask. Yet the question, as asked,
does her a heavy historical injustice; we
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 181
remember all the lines in her work which
were weak enough to be called " womanly,"
we forget the multitude of strong lines that
are strong enough to be called " manly " ;
lines that Kingsley or Henley would have
jumped for joy to print in proof of their
manliness. She had one of the peculiar
talents of true rhetoric, that of a powerful
concentration. As to the critic who thinks
her poetry owed anything to the great poet
who was her husband, he can go and live in the
same hotel with the man who can believe that
George Eliot owed anything to the extrava-
gant imagination of Mr. George Henry Lewes.
So far from Browning inspiring or interfering,
he did not in one sense interfere enough.
Her real inferiority to him in literature is
that he was consciously while she was un-
consciously absurd.
It is natural, in the matter of Victorian
moral change, to take Swinburne as the next
name here. He is the only poet who was also,
in the European sense, on the spot ; even if,
182 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
in the sense of the Gilbertian song, the spot
was barred. He also knew that something
rather crucial was happening to Christendom ;
he thought it was getting unchristened. It is
even a little amusing, indeed, that these two
Pro-Italian poets almost conducted a political
correspondence in rhyme. Mrs. Browning
sternly reproached those who had ever doubted
the good faith of the King of Sardinia, whom
she acclaimed as being truly a king, Swin-
burne, lyrically alluding to her as " Sea-eagle
of English feather," broadly hinted that the
chief blunder of that wild fowl had been her
support of an autocratic adventurer : " calling
a crowned man royal, that was no more than
a king." But it is not fair, even in this
important connection, to judge Swinburne by
Songs Before Sunrise. They were songs before
a sunrise that has never turned up. Their
dogmatic assertions have for a long time past
stared starkly at us as nonsense. As, for
instance, the phrase " Glory to Man in the
Highest, for man is the master of things " :
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 183
after which there is evidently nothing to be
said, except that it is not true. But even
where Swinburne had his greater grip, as in
that grave and partly just poem Before a
Crucifix, Swinburne, the most Latin, the most
learned, the most largely travelled of the
Victorians, still knows far less of the facts
than even Mrs. Browning. The whole of the
poem, Before a Crucifix, breaks down by one
mere mistake. It imagines that the French
or Italian peasants who fell on their knees
before the Crucifix did so because they were
slaves. They fell on their knees because they
were free men, probably owning their own
farms. Swinburne could have found round
about Putney plenty of slaves who had no
crucifixes : but only crucifixions.
When we come to ethics and philosophy,
doubtless we find Swinburne in full revolt, not
only against the temperate idealism of Tenny-
son, but against the genuine piety and moral
enthusiasm of people like Mrs. Browning.
But here again Swinburne is very English,
184 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
nay, he is very Victorian, for his revolt is
illogical. For the purposes of intelligent
insurrection against priests and kings, Swin-
burne ought to have described the natural life
of man, free and beautiful, and proved from
this both the noxiousness and the needlessness
of such chains. Unfortunately Swinburne
rebelled against Nature first and then tried to
rebel against religion for doing exactly the
same thing that he had done. His songs of
joy are not really immoral ; but his songs of
sorrow are. But when he merely hurls at the
priest the assertion that flesh is grass and life
is sorrow, he really lays himself open to the
restrained answer, "So I have ventured, on
various occasions, to remark.'* When he
went forth, as it were, as the champion of
pagan change and pleasure, he heard uplifted
the grand choruses of his own Atalanta, in his
rear, refusing hope.
The splendid diction that blazes through the
whole of that drama, that still dances exqui-
sitely in the more lyrical Poems and Ballads,
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 185
makes some marvellous appearances in Songs
Before Sunrise, and then mainly falters and
fades away, is, of course, the chief thing about
Swinburne. The style is the man ; and some
will add that it does not, thus unsupported,
amount to much of a man. But the style
itself suffers some injustice from those who
would speak thus. The views expressed are
often quite foolish and often quite insincere;
but the style itself is a manlier and more
natural thing than is commonly made out. It
is not in the least languorous or luxurious or
merely musical and sensuous, as one would
gather from both the eulogies and the satires,
from the conscious and the unconscious
imitations. On the contrary, it is a sort of
fighting and profane parody of the Old Testa-
ment ; and its lines are made of short English
words like the short Roman swords. The
first line of one of his finest poems, for instance,
runs, " I have lived long enough to have seen
one thing, that love hath an end." In that
sentence only one small " e " gets outside the
186 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
monosyllable. Through all his interminable
tragedies, he was fondest of lines like
" If ever I leave off to honour you
God give me shame ; I were the worst churl
born."
The dramas were far from being short and
dramatic; but the words really were. Nor
was his verse merely smooth ; except his very
bad verse, like " the lilies and languors of
virtue, to the raptures and roses of vice,"
which both, in cheapness of form and foolish-
ness of sentiment, may be called the worst
couplet in the world's literature. In his real
poetry (even in the same poem) his rhythm
and rhyme are as original and ambitious as
Browning; and the only difference between
him and Browning is, not that he is smooth
and without ridges, but that he always crests
the ridge triumphantly and Browning often
does not
" On thy bosom though many a kiss be,
There are none such as knew it of old.
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 187
Was it Alciphron once or Arisbe,
Male ringlets or feminine gold,
That thy lips met with under the statue
Whence a look shot out sharp after thieves
From the eyes of the garden-god at you
Across the fig-leaves."
Look at the rhymes in that verse, and you
will see they are as stiff a task as Browning's :
only they are successful. That is the real
strength of Swinburne a style. It was a
style that nobody could really imitate; and
least of all Swinburne himself, though he made
the attempt all through his later years. He
was, if ever there was one, an inspired poet. I
do not think it the highest sort of poet. And
you never discover who is an inspired poet
until the inspiration goes.
With Swinburne we step into the circle of
that later Victorian influence which was very
vaguely called ^Esthetic. Like all human
things, but especially Victorian things, it was
not only complex but confused. Things in
188 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
it that were at one on the emotional side were
flatly at war on the intellectual. In the sec-
tion of the painters, it was the allies or pupils
of Ruskin, pious, almost painfully exact, and
copying mediaeval details rather for their truth
than their beauty. In the section of the poets
it was pretty loose, Swinburne being the leader
of the revels. But there was one great man
who was in both sections, a painter and a poet,
who may be said to bestride the chasm like a
giant. It is in an odd and literal sense true
that the name of Rossetti is important here,
for the name implies the nationality. I have
loosely called Carlyle and the Brontes the
romance from the North; the nearest to a
general definition of the ^Esthetic movement
is to call it the romance from the South. It
is that warm wind that had never blown so
strong since Chaucer, standing in his cold
English April, had smelt the spring in
Provence. The Englishman has always founc
it easier to get inspiration from the Italians
than from the French ; they call to each other
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 189
across that unconquered castle of reason.
Browning's Englishman in Italy, Browning's
Italian in England, were both happier than
either would have been in France. Rossetti
was the Italian in England, as Browning was
the Englishman in Italy ; and the first broad
fact about the artistic revolution Rossetti
wrought is written when we have written his
name. But if the South lets in warmth or
heat, it also lets in hardness. The more the
orange tree is luxuriant in growth, the less it
is loose in outline. And it is exactly where the
sea is slightly warmer than marble that it
looks slightly harder. This, I think, is the
one universal power behind the Esthetic and
Pre-Raphaelite movements, which all agreed
in two things at least : strictness in the line
and strength, nay violence, in the colour.
Rossetti was a remarkable man in more
ways than one ; he did not succeed in any art ;
if he had he would probably never have been
heard of. It was his happy knack of half
failing in both the arts that has made him a
190 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
success. If he had been as good a poet as
Tennyson, he would have been a poet who
painted pictures. If he had been as good a
painter as Burne-Jones, he would have been
a painter who wrote poems. It is odd to note
on the very threshold of the extreme art
movement that this great artist largely
succeeded by not denning his art. His poems
were too pictorial. His pictures were too
poetical. That is why they really conquered
the cold satisfaction of the Victorians, because
they did mean something, even if it was a
small artistic thing.
Rossetti was one with Ruskin, on the one
hand, and Swinburne on the other, in reviving
the decorative instinct of the Middle Ages.
While Ruskin, in letters only, praised that
decoration Rossetti and his friends repeated it.
They almost made patterns of their poems.
That frequent return of the refrain which was
foolishly discussed by Professor Nordau was,
in Rossetti 's case, of such sadness as some-
times to amount to sameness. The criticism
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 191
on him, from a mediaeval point of view, is not
that he insisted on a chorus, but that he could
not insist on a jolly chorus. Many of his
poems were truly mediaeval, but they would
have been even more mediaeval if he could
ever have written such a refrain as " Tally
Ho ! " or even " Tooral-ooral " instead of
"Tall Troy's on fire." With Rossetti goes,
of course, his sister, a real poet, though she
also illustrated that Pre-Raphaelite's conflict
of views that covered their coincidence of
taste. Both used the angular outlines, the
burning transparencies, the fixed but still
unfathomable symbols of the great mediaeval
civilisation; but Rossetti used the religious
imagery (on the whole) irreligiously, Christina
Rossetti used it religiously but (on the whole)
so to make it seem a narrower religion.
One poet, or, to speak more strictly, one
poem, belongs to the same general atmosphere
and impulse as Swinburne; the free but
languid atmosphere of later Victorian art.
But this time the wind blew from hotter and
192 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
heavier gardens than the gardens of Italy.
Edward Fitzgerald, a cultured eccentric, a
friend of Tennyson, produced what professed
to be a translation of the Persian poet Omar,
who wrote quatrains about wine and roses
and things in general. Whether the Persian
original, in its own Persian way, was greater
or less than this version I must not discuss
here, and could not discuss anywhere. But it
is quite clear that Fitzgerald's work is much
too good to be a good translation. It is as
personal and creative a thing as ever was
written; and the best expression of a bad
mood, a mood that may, for all I know, be
permanent in Persia, but was certainly at
this time particularly fashionable in England.
In the technical sense of literature it is one of
the most remarkable achievements of that
age; as poetical as Swinburne and far more
perfect. In this verbal sense its most arresting
quality is a combination of something haunt-
ing and harmonious that flows by like a river
or a song, with something else that is compact
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 193
and pregnant like a pithy saying picked out
in rock by the chisel of some pagan philoso-
pher. It is at once a tune that escapes and
an inscription that remains. Thus, alone
among the reckless and romantic verses that
first rose in Coleridge or Keats, it preserves
something also of the wit and civilisation of
the eighteenth century. Lines like " a Muezzin
from the tower of darkness cries," or " Their
mouths are stopped with dust " are successful
in the same sense as " Pinnacled dim in
the intense inane " or " Through verdurous
glooms and winding mossy ways." But
ifc Indeed, indeed, repentance oft before
I swore; but was I sober when I swore ? "
is equally successful in the same sense as
" Damn with faint praise, assent with civil
leer
And without sneering teach the rest to
194 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
It thus earned a right to be considered the
complete expression of that scepticism and
sensual sadness into which later Victorian
literature was more and more falling away :
a sort of bible of unbelief. For a cold fit had
followed the hot fit of Swinburne, which was
of a feverish sort : he had set out to break
down without having, or even thinking he
had, the rudiments of rebuilding in him;
and he effected nothing national even in
the way of destruction. The Tennysonians
still walked past him as primly as a young
ladies' school the Browningites still inked
their eyebrows and minds in looking for the
lost syntax of Browning; while Browning
himself was away looking for God, rather
in the spirit of a truant boy from their
school looking for birds' nests. The nine-
teenth-century sceptics did not really shake
the respectable world and alter it, as the
eighteenth-century sceptics had done; but
that was because the eighteenth-century
sceptics were something more than sceptics,
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 195
and believed in Greek tragedies, in Roman
laws, in the Republic. The Swinburnian
sceptics had nothing to fight for but a frame
of mind; and when ordinary English people
listened to it, they came to the conclusion
that it was a frame of mind they would rather
hear about than experience. But these later
poets did, so to speak, spread their soul in
all the empty spaces; weaker brethren,
disappointed artists, unattached individuals,
very young people, were sapped or swept
away by these songs; which, so far as any
particular sense in them goes, were almost
songs without words. It is because there i&
something which is after all indescribably
manly, intellectual, firm about Fitzgerald's
way of phrasing the pessimism that he towers
above the slope that was tumbling down to
the decadents. But it is still pessimism, a
thing unfit for a white man; a thing like
opium, that may often be a poison and some-
times a medicine, but never a food for us r
who are driven by an inner command not
N 2
196 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
only to think but to live, not only to live
but to grow, and not only to grow but to
build.
And, indeed, we see the insufficiency of
such sad extremes even in the next name
among the major poets; we see the Swin-
burnian parody of mediae valism, the inverted
Catholicism of the decadents, struggling to
get back somehow on its feet. The aesthetic
school had, not quite unjustly, the name of
mere dilettanti. But it is fair to say that in
t he next of them, a workman and a tradesman,
we already feel something of that return to
real issues leading up to the real revolts that
broke up Victorianism at last. In the mere
art of words, indeed, William Morris carried
much further than Swinburne, or Rossetti
the mere imitation of stiff mediaeval orna-
ment. The other mediaevalists had their
modern moments; which were (if they had
only known it) much more mediaeval than
their mediaeval moments. Swinburne could
write
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 197
44 We shall see Buonaparte the bastard
Kick heels with his throat in a rope."
One has an uneasy feeling that William Morris
would have written something like
" And the kin of the ill king Bonaparte
Hath a high gallows for all his part."
Rossetti could, for once in a way, write poetry
about a real woman and call her " Jenny."
One has a disturbed suspicion that Morris
would have called her " Jehanne."
But all that seems at first more archaic and
decorative about Morris really arose from the
fact that he was more virile and real than
either Swinburne or Rossetti. It arose from
the fact that he really was, what he so often
called himself, a craftsman. He had enough
masculine strength to be tidy : that is, after
the masculine manner, tidy about his own
trade. If his poems were too like wallpapers,
it was because he really could make wall-
198 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
papers. He knew that lines of poetry ought
to be in a row, as palings ought to be in a row ;
and he knew that neither palings nor poetry
look any the worse for being simple or even
severe. In a sense Morris was all the more
creative because he felt the hard limits of
creation as he would have felt them if he were
not working in words but in wood ; and if he
was unduly dominated by the mere conven-
tions of the mediaevals, it was largely because
they were (whatever else they were) the very
finest fraternity of free workmen the world is
ever likely to see.
The very things that were urged against
Morris are in this sense part of his ethical
importance; part of the more promising and
wholesome turn he was half unconsciously
giving to the movement of modern art. His
hazier fellow-Socialists blamed him because
he made money ; but this was at least in some
degree because he made other things to make
money : it was part of the real and refreshing
fact that at last an aesthete had appeared who
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 199
could make something. If he was a capitalist,
at least he was what later capitalists cannot or
will not be something higher than a capital-
ist, a tradesman. As compared with aristo-
crats like Swinburne or aliens like Rossetti,
he was vitally English and vitally Victorian.
He inherits some of that paradoxical glory
which Napoleon gave reluctantly to a nation
of shopkeepers. He was the last of that
nation ; he did not go out golfing : like that
founder of the artistic shopman, Samuel
Richardson, " he kept his shop, and his shop
kept him." The importance of his Socialism
can easily be exaggerated. Among other
lesser points, he was not a Socialist ; he was a
sort of Dickensian anarchist. His instinct
for titles was always exquisite. It is part of
his instinct of decoration : for on a page the
title always looks important and the printed
mass of matter a mere dado under it. And
no one had ever nobler titles than The Roots
of the Mountains or The Wood at the End of the
World. The reader feels he hardly need read
200 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
the fairy-tale because the title is so suggestive.
But, when all is said, he never chose a better
title than that of his social Utopia, News
from Nowhere. He wrote it while the last
Victorians were already embarked on their
bold task of fixing the future of narrating
to-day what has happened to-morrow. They
named their books by cold titles suggesting
straight corridors of marble titles like
Looking Backtvard. But Morris was an
artist as well as an anarchist. News from
Nowhere is an irresponsible title ; and it is an
irresponsible book. It does not describe the
problem solved; it does not describe wealth
either wielded by the State or divided equally
among the citizens. It simply describes an
undiscovered country where every one feels
good-natured all day. That he could even
dream so is his true dignity as a poet. He was
the first of the ^Esthetes to smell medievalism
as a smell of the morning ; and not as a mere
scent of decay.
With him the poetry that had been pecu-
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 202
liarly Victorian practically ends ; and, on the
whole, it is a happy ending. There are many
other minor names of major importance ; but
for one reason or other they do not derive
from the schools that had dominated this
epoch as such. Thus Thompson, the author
of The City of Dreadful Night, was a fine poet ;
but his pessimism combined with a close
pugnacity does not follow any of the large
but loose lines of the Swinburnian age. But
he was a great person he knew how to be
democratic in the dark. Thus Coventry Pat-
more was a much greater person. He was
bursting with ideas, like Browning and truer
ideas as a rule. He was as eccentric and florid
and Elizabethan as Browning; and often in
moods and metres that even Browning was
never wild enough to think of. No one will
ever forget the first time he read Patmore's
hint that the cosmos is a thing that God made
huge only " to make dirt cheap " ; just as
nobody will ever forget the sudden shout he
uttered when he first heard Mrs. Todgers asked
202 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
for the rough outline of a wooden leg. These
things are not jokes, but discoveries. But the
very fact that Patmore was, as it were, the
Catholic Browning, keeps him out of the
Victorian atmosphere as such. The Victorian
English simply thought him an indecent
sentimentalist, as they did all the hot and
humble religious diarists of Italy or Spain.
Something of the same fate followed the most
powerful of that last Victorian group who were
called " Minor Poets." They numbered many
other fine artists : notably Mr. William
Watson, who is truly Victorian in that he
made a manly attempt to tread down the
decadents and return to the right reason of
Wordsworth
" I have not paid the world
The evil and the insolent courtesy
Of offering it my baseness as a gift."
But none of them were able even to under-
stand Francis Thompson; his sky-scraping
THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 203
humility, his mountains of mystical detail,
his occasional and unashamed weakness, his
sudden and sacred blasphemies. Perhaps the
shortest definition of the Victorian Age is that
he stood outside it.
CHAPTER IV
THE BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE
IF it be curiously and carefully considered
it will, I think, appear more and more true
that the struggle between the old spiritual
theory and the new material theory in England
ended simply in a deadlock; and a deadlock
that has endured. It is still impossible to
say absolutely that England is a Christian
country or a heathen country ; almost exactly
as it was impossible when Herbert Spencer
began to write. Separate elements of both
sorts are alive, and even increasingly alive.
But neither the believer nor the unbeliever
has the impudence to call himself the English-
man. Certainly the great Victorian rational-
ism has succeeded in doing a damage to
religion. It has done what is perhaps the
worst of all damages to religion. It has driven
204
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 205
it entirely into the power of tne religious
people. Men like Newman, men like Coventry
Patmore, men who would have been mystics
in any case, were driven back upon being much
more extravagantly religious than they would
have been in a religious country. Men like
Huxley, men like Kingsley, men like most
Victorian men, were equally driven back on
being irreligious ; that is, on doubting things
which men's normal imagination does not
necessarily doubt. But certainly the most
final and forcible fact is that this war ended
like the battle of Sherrifmuir, as the poet says ;
they both did fight, and both did beat, and
both did run away. They have left to their
descendants a treaty that has become a dull
torture. Men may believe in immortality,
and none of the men know why. Men may
not believe in miracles, and none of the men
know why. The Christian Church had been
just strong enough to check the conquest of
Iher chief citadels. The rationalist movement
shad been just strong enough to conquer some
206 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
of her outposts, as it seemed, for ever. Neither
was strong enough to expel the other; and
Victorian England was in a state which some
call liberty and some call lockjaw.
But the situation can be stated another
way. There came a time, roughly somewhere
about 1880, when the two great positive
enthusiasms of Western Europe had for the
time exhausted each other Christianity and
the French Revolution. About that time
there used to be a sad and not unsympathetic
jest going about to the effect that Queen
Victoria might very well live longer than the
Prince of Wales. Somewhat in the same way,
though the republican impulse was hardly a
hundred years old and the religious impulse
nearly two thousand, yet as far as England
was concerned, the old wave and the new
seemed to be spent at the same time. On the
one hand Darwin, especially through the
strong journalistic genius of Huxley, had won
a very wide spread though an exceedingly
vague victory. I do not mean that Darwin's
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 20T
own doctrine was vague; his was merely one
particular hypothesis about how animal
variety might have arisen; and that par-
ticular hypothesis, though it will always be
interesting, is now very much the reverse
of secure. But it is only in the strictly
scientific world and among strictly scientific
men that Darwin's detailed suggestion has
largely broken down. The general public
impression that he had entirely proved his
case (whatever it was) was early arrived at,
and still remains. It was and is hazily
associated with the negation of religion.
But (and this is the important point) it was
also associated with the negation of demo-
cracy. The same Mid- Victorian muddle-
headedness that made people think that
" evolution " meant that we need not admit
the supremacy of God, also made them think
that " survival " meant that we must admit
the supremacy of men. Huxley had no hand
in spreading these fallacies; he was a fair
fighter; and he told his own followers, who
208 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
spoke thus, most emphatically not to play the
fool. He said most strongly that his or any
theory of evolution left the old philosophical
arguments for a creator, right or wrong,
exactly where they were before. He also said
most emphatically that any one who used the
argument of Nature against the ideal of justice
or an equal law, was as senseless as a gardener
who should fight on the side of the ill weeds
merely because they grew apace. I wish,
indeed, that in such a rude summary as this,
I had space to do justice to Huxley as a
Jiterary man and a moralist. He had a Jive
taste and talent for the English tongue, which
he devoted to the task of keeping Victorian
rationalism rational. He did not succeed.
As so often happens when a rather unhealthy
doubt is in the atmosphere, the strongest
words of their great captain could not keep
the growing crowds of agnostics back from
the most hopeless and inhuman extremes of
destructive thought. Nonsense not yet quite
dead about the folly of allowing the unfit to
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 209
survive began to be more and more wildly
whispered. Such helpless specimens of " ad-
vanced thought " are, of course, quite as
inconsistent with Darwinism as they are with
democracy or with any other intelligent
proposition ever offered. But these unintel-
ligent propositions were offered; and the
ultimate result was this rather important one :
that the harshness of Utilitarianism began to
turn into downright tyranny. That beautiful
faith in human nature and in freedom which
had made delicate the dry air of John Stuart
Mill; that robust, romantic sense of justice
which had redeemed even the injustices of
Macaulay all that seemed slowly and sadly
to be drying up. Under the shock of Darwin-
ism all that was good in the Victorian rational-
ism shook and dissolved like dust. All that
was bad in it abode and clung like clay. The
magnificent emancipation evaporated ; the
mean calculation remained. One could still
calculate in clear statistical tables, how many
men lived, how many men died. One must
210 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
not ask how they lived; for that is politics.
One must not ask how they died ; for that is
religion. And religion and politics were ruled
out of all the Later Victorian debating clubs ;
even including the debating club at West-
minster. What third thing they were dis-
cussing, which was neither religion nor politics,
I do not know. I have tried the experiment
of reading solidly through a vast number of
their records and reviews and discussions ;
and still I do not know. The only third thing
I can think of to balance religion and politics
is art ; and no one well acquainted with the
debates at St. Stephen's will imagine that the
art of extreme eloquence was the cause of
the confusion. None will maintain that our
political masters are removed from us by an
infinite artistic superiority in the choice of
words. The politicians know nothing of
politics, which is their own affair : they know
nothing of religion, which is certainly not their
affair : it may legitimately be said that they
have to do with nothing; they have reached
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 211
that low and last level where a man knows as
little about his own claim, as he does about
his enemies'. In any case there can be no
doubt about the effect of this particular
situation on the problem of ethics and science.
The duty of dragging truth out by the tail
or the hind leg or any other corner one can
possibly get hold of, a perfectly sound duty in
itself, had somehow come into collision with
the older and larger duty of knowing some-
thing about the organism and ends of a
creature; or, in the everyday phrase, being
able to make head or tail of it. This paradox
pursued and tormented the Victorians. They
could not or would not see that humanity
repels or welcomes the railway-train, simply
according to what people come by it. They
could not see that one welcomes or smashes
the telephone, according to what words one
hears in it. They really seem to have felt
that the train could be a substitute for its
own passengers ; or the telephone a substitute
for its own voice,
o 2
212 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
In any case it is clear that a change had
begun to pass over scientific inquiry, of which
we have seen the culmination in our own day.
There had begun that easy automatic habit,
of science as an oiled and smooth-running
machine, that habit of treating things as
obviously unquestionable, when, indeed, they
are obviously questionable. This began with
vaccination in the Early Victorian Age; it
extended to the early licence of vivisection
in its later age ; it has found a sort of fitting
foolscap, or crown of crime and folly, in the
thing called Eugenics. In all three cases the
point was not so much that the pioneers had
not proved their case ; it was rather that, by
an unexpressed rule of respectability, they
were not required to prove it. This rather
abrupt twist of the rationalistic mind in the
direction of arbitrary power, certainly weak-
ened the Liberal movement from within.
And meanwhile it was being weakened by
heavy blows from without.
There is a week that is the turn of the year ;
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 213
there was a year that was the turn of the
century. About 1870 the force of the French
Revolution faltered and fell : the year that
was everywhere the death of Liberal ideas : the
year when Paris fell : the year when Dickens
died. While the new foes of freedom, the
sceptics and scientists, were damaging demo-
cracy in ideas, the old foes of freedom, the
emperors and the kings, were damaging her
more heavily in arms. For a moment it
almost seemed that the old Tory ring of iron,
the Holy Alliance, had recombined against
France. But there was just this difference :
that the Holy Alliance was now not arguably,
but almost avowedly, an Unholy Alliance.
It was an alliance between those who still
thought they could deny the dignity of man
and those who had recently begun to have a
bright hope of denying even the dignity of
God. Eighteenth-century Prussia was Protes-
tant and probably religious. Nineteenth-
century Prussia was almost utterly atheist.
Thus the old spirit of liberty felt itself shut
214 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
up at both ends, that which was called pro-
gressive and that which was called reactionary :
barricaded by Bismarck with blood and
iron and by Darwin by blood and bones.
The enormous depression which infects man}
excellent people born about this time, prob-
ably has this cause.
It was a great calamity that the freedom of
Wilkes and the faith of Dr. Johnson fought
each other. But it was an even worse
calamity that they practically killed each
other. They killed each other almost simul-
taneously, like Herminius and Mamilius.
Liberalism (in Newman's sense) really did
strike Christianity through headpiece and
through head; that is, it did daze and stun
the ignorant and ill-prepared intellect of
the English Christian. And Christianity did
smite Liberalism through breastplate and
through breast; that is, it did succeed,
through arms and all sorts of awful accidents,
in piercing more or less to the heart of the
Utilitarian and finding that he had none,
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 215
Victorian Protestantism had not head enough
for the business; Victorian Radicalism had
not heart enough for the business. Down fell
they dead together, exactly as Macaulay's Lay
says, and still stood all who saw them fall
almost until the hour at which I write.
This coincident collapse of both religious
and political idealism produced a curious cold
air of emptiness and real subconscious agnosti-
cism such as is extremely unusual in the
history of mankind. It is what Mr. Wells,
with his usual verbal delicacy and accuracy,
spoke of as that ironical silence that follows
a great controversy. It is what people less
intelligent than Mr. Wells meant by calling
themselves fin de siecle ; though, of course,
rationally speaking, there is no more reason
for being sad towards the end of a hundred
years than towards the end of five hundred
fortnights. There was no arithmetical au-
tumn, but there was a spiritual one. And it
came from the fact suggested in the para-
graphs above ; the sense that man's two great
216 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
inspirations had failed him together. The
Christian religion was much more dead in the
eighteenth century than it was in the nine-
teenth century. But the republican enthusi-
asm was also much more alive. If their
scepticism was cold, and their faith even
colder, their practical politics were wildly
idealistic; and if they doubted the kingdom
of heaven, they were gloriously credulous
about the chances of it coming on earth.
In the same way the old pagan republican
feeling was much more dead in the feudal
darkness of the eleventh or twelfth centuries,
than it was even a century later; but if
creative politics were at their lowest, creative
theology was almost at its highest point of
energy.
The modern world, in fact, had fallen
between two stools. It had fallen between
that austere old three-legged stool which was
the tripod of the cold priestess of Apollo;
and that other mystical and mediaeval stool
that may well be called the Stool of Repent-
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 217
ance. It kept neither of the two values as
intensely valuable. It could not believe in
the bonds that bound men ; but, then, neither
could it believe in the men they bound. It
was always restrained in its hatred of slavery
by a half remembrance of its yet greater
hatred of liberty. They were almost alone,
I think, in thus carrying to its extreme the
negative attitude already noted in Miss
Arabella Allen. Anselm would have despised
a civic crown, but he would not have despised
a relic. Voltaire would have despised a relic ;
but he would not have despised a vote. We
hardly find them both despised till we come to
the age of Oscar Wilde.
These years that followed on that double
disillusionment were like one long afternoon
in a rich house on a rainy day. It was not
merely that everybody believed that nothing
would happen; it was also that everybody
believed that anything happening was even
duller than nothing happening. It was in
this stale atmosphere that a few flickers of
218 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
the old Swinburnian flame survived ; and were
called Art. The great men of the older
artistic movement did not live in this time;
rather they lived through it. But this time
did produce an interregnum of art that had
a truth of its own ; though that truth was near
to being only a consistent lie.
The movement of those called ^Esthetes (as
satirised in Patience) and the movement of
those afterwards called Decadents (satirised
in Mr. Street's delightful Autobiography of a
Boy) had the same captain; or at any rate
the same bandmaster. Oscar Wilde walked
in front of the first procession wearing a sun-
flower, and in front of the second procession
wearing a green carnation. With the aesthetic
movement and its more serious elements, I
deal elsewhere ; but the second appearance of
Wilde is also connected with real intellectual
influences, largely negative, indeed, but subtle
and influential. The mark in most of the
arts of this time was a certain quality which
those who like it would call " uniqueness of
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 219
aspect," and those who do not like it " not
quite coming off." I mean the thing meant
something from one standpoint; but its
mark was that the smallest change of stand-
point made it unmeaning and unthinkable
a foolish joke. A beggar painted by Rem-
brandt is as solid as a statue, however roughly
he is sketched in ; the soul can walk all round
him like a public monument. We see he
would have other aspects; and that they
would all be the aspects of a beggar. Even
if one did not admit the extraordinary
qualities in the painting, one would have to
admit the ordinary qualities in the sitter. If
it is not a masterpiece it is a man. But a
nocturne by Whistler of mist on the Thames
is either a masterpiece or it is nothing;
it is either a nocturne or a nightmare of
childish nonsense. Made in a certain mood,
viewed through a certain temperament, con-
ceived under certain conventions, it may be,
it often is, an unreplaceable poem, a vision
that may never be seen again. But the
2-20 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
moment it ceases to be a splendid picture it
ceases to be a picture at all. Or, again, if
Hamlet is not a great tragedy it is an un-
commonly good tale. The people and the
posture of affairs would still be there even if
one thought that Shakespeare's moral attitude
was wrong. Just as one could imagine all
the other sides of Rembrandt's beggar, so,
with the mind's eye (Horatio), one can see
all four sides of the castle of Elsinore. One
might tell the tale from the point of view of
Laertes or Claudius or Polonius or the grave-
digger ; and it would still be a good tale and
the same tale. But if we take a play like
Pelias and Melisande, we shall find that unless
we grasp the particular fairy thread of
thought the poet rather hazily flings to us,
we cannot grasp anything whatever. Except
from one extreme poetic point of view, the
thing is not a play ; it is not a bad play, it is
a mass of clotted nonsense. One whole act
describes the lovers going to look for a ring in
a distant cave when they both know they
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 221
have dropped it down a well. Seen from
some secret window on some special side of
the soul's turret, this might convey a sense of
faerie futility in our human life. But it is
quite obvious that unless it called forth that
one kind of sympathy, it would call forth
nothing but laughter and rotten eggs. In
the same play the husband chases his wife
with a drawn sword, the wife remarking at
intervals " I am not gay." Now there may
really be an idea in this ; the idea of human
misfortune coming most cruelly upon the
optimism of innocence; that the lonely
human heart says, like a child at a party,
44 1 am not enjoying myself as I thought I
should." But it is plain that unless one
thinks of this idea (and of this idea only) the
expression is not in the least unsuccessful
pathos ; it is very broad and highly successful
farce. Maeterlinck and the decadents, in
short, may fairly boast of being subtle; but
they must not mind if they are called narrow.
This is the spirit of Wilde's work and of
222 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
most of literary work done in that time and
fashion. It is, as Mr. Arthur Symons said,
an attitude ; but it is an attitude in the flat,
not in the round; not a statue, but the card-
board king in a toy-theatre, which can only
be looked at from the front. In Wilde's own
poetry we have particularly a perpetually
toppling possibility of the absurd; a sense of
just falling too short or just going too far.
" Plant lilies at my head " has something
wrong about it; something silly that is not
there in
" And put a grey stone at my head "
in the old ballad. But even where Wilde
was right, he had a way of being right with
this excessive strain on the reader's sympathy
(and gravity) which was the mark of all these
men with a " point of view." There is a very
sound sonnet of his in which he begins by
lamenting mere anarchy, as hostile to the art
and civilisation that were his only gods ; but
ends by saying
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 223
" And yet
' Tliese Christs that die upon the barricades
God knows that I am with them in some
ways."
Now that is really very true ; that is the way
a man of wide reading and worldly experience,
but not ungenerous impulses, does feel about
the mere fanatic, who is at once a nuisance to
humanity and an honour to human nature.
Yet who can read that last line without feeling
that Wilde is poised on the edge of a precipice
of bathos ; that the phrase comes very near
to being quite startlingly silly. It is as in
the case of Maeterlinck, let the reader move
his standpoint one inch nearer the popular
standpoint, and there is nothing for the
thing but harsh, hostile, unconquerable mirth.
Somehow the image of Wilde lolling like an
elegant leviathan on a sofa, and saying
between the whiffs of a scented cigarette that
martyrdom is martyrdom in some respects,
has seized on and mastered all more delicate
224 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
considerations in the mind. It is unwise in
a poet to goad the sleeping lion of laughter.
In less dexterous hands the decadent idea,
what there was of it, went entirely to pieces,
which nobody has troubled to pick up.
Oddly enough (unless this be always the
Nemesis of excess) it began to be insupportable
in the very ways in which it claimed specially
to be subtle and tactful ; in the feeling for
different art-forms, in the welding of subject
and style, in the appropriateness of the
epithet and the unity of the mood. Wilde
himself wrote some things that were not
immorality, but merely bad taste; not the
bad taste of the conservative suburbs, which
merely means anything violent or shocking,
but real bad taste; as in a stern subject
treated in a florid style; an over-dressed
woman at a supper of old friends; or a bad
joke that nobody had time to laugh at. This
mixture of sensibility and coarseness in tl
man was very curious; and I for one cann<
endure (for example) his sensual way
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 225
speaking of dead substances, satin or marble
or velvet, as if he were stroking a lot of dogs
and cats. But there was a sort of power or
at least weight in his coarseness. His lapses
were those proper to the one good thing he
really was, an Irish swashbuckler a fighter.
Some of the Roman Emperors might have had
the same luxuriousness and yet the same
courage. But the later decadents were far
worse, especially the decadent critics, the
decadent illustrators there were even deca-
dent publishers. And they utterly lost the
light and reason of their existence : they were
masters of the clumsy and the incongruous.
I will take only one example. Aubrey
Beardsley may be admired as an artist or
no ; he does not enter into the scope of this
book. But it is true that there is a certain
brief mood, a certain narrow aspect of life,
which he renders to the imagination rightly.
It is mostly felt under white, deathly lights in
Piccadilly, with the black hollow of heaven
behind shiny hats or painted faces : a horrible
p
2'2C VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
impression that all mankind are masks. This
being the thing Beardsley could express (and
the only thing he could express), it is the
solemn and awful fact that he was set
down to illustrate Malory's Morte Darthur.
There is no need to say more; taste, in the
artist's sense, must have been utterly dead.
They might as well have employed Burne
Jones to illustrate Martin Chuzzlettit. It
would not have been more ludicrous than
putting this portrayer of evil puppets, with
their thin lines like wire and their small faces
like perverted children's, to trace against the
grand barbaric forests the sin and the sorrow
of Lancelot.
To return to the chief of the decadents, I
will not speak of the end of the individual
story : there was horror and there was ex-
piation. And, as my conscience goes at
least, no man should say one word that could
weaken the horror or the pardon. But
there is one literary consequence of the thing
which must be mentioned, because it bears
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 227
us on to that much breezier movement which
first began to break in upon all this ghastly
idleness I mean the Socialist Movement.
I do not mean " De Profundis"; I do not
think he had got to the real depths when he
wrote that book. I mean the one real thing
he ever wrote : The Ballad of Reading
Gaol; in which we hear a cry for common
justice and brotherhood very much deeper,
more democratic and more true to the real
trend of the populace to-day, than anything
the Socialists ever uttered even in the boldest
pages of Bernard Shaw.
Before we pass on to the two expansive
movements in which the Victorian Age really
ended, the accident of a distinguished artist
is available for estimating this somewhat cool
and sad afternoon of the epoch at its pur-
est; not in lounging pessimism or luxurious
aberrations, but in earnest skill and a high
devotion to letters. This change that had
come, like the change from a golden sunset
to a grey twilight, can be very adequately
p 2
228 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
measured if we compare the insight and
intricacy of Meredith with the insight and
intricacy of Mr. Henry James. The characters
of both are delicate and indisputable ; but we
must all have had a feeling that the characters
in Meredith are gods, but that the characters
in Henry James are ghosts. I do not mean
that they are unreal : I believe in ghosts.
So does Mr. Henry James; he has written
some of his very finest literature about the
little habits of these creatures. He is in the
deep sense of a dishonoured word, a Spiritualist
if ever there was one. But Meredith was a
materialist as well. The difference is that
a ghost is a disembodied spirit ; while a god
(to be worth worrying about) must be an
embodied spirit. The presence of soul and
substance together involves one of the two
or three things which most of the Victorians
did not understand the thing called a sacra-
ment. It is because he had a natural affinity
for this mystical materialism that Meredith,
in spite of his affectations, is a poet : and,
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 229
in spite of his Victorian Agnosticism (or
ignorance) is a pious Pagan and not a mere
Pantheist. Mr. Henry James is at the other
extreme. His thrill is not so much in symbol
or mysterious emblem as in the absence of
interventions and protections between mind
and mind. It is not mystery : it is rather a
sort of terror at knowing too much. He lives
in glass houses ; he is akin to Maeterlinck in a
feeling of the nakedness of souls. None of
the Meredithian things, wind or wine or sex
or stark nonsense ever gets between Mr. James
and his prey. But the thing is a deficiency
as well as a talent : we cannot but admire the
figures that walk about in his afternoon
drawing-rooms; but we have a certain sense
that they are figures that have no faces.
For the rest, he is most widely known, or
perhaps only most widely chaffed, because of
a literary style that lends itself to parody and
is a glorious feast for Mr. Max Beerbohm. It
may be called The Hampered, or Obstacle Race
Style, in which one continually trips over
230 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
commas and relative clauses; and where the
sense has to be perpetually qualified lest it
should mean too much. But such satire,
however friendly, is in some sense unfair to
him ; because it leaves out his sense of general
artistic design, which is not only high, but
bold. This appears, I think, most strongly
in his short stories ; in his long novels the
reader (or at least one reader) does get rather
tired of everybody treating everybody else
in a manner which in real life would be an
impossible intellectual strain. But in his
short studies there is the unanswerable thing
called real originality; especially in the very
shape and point of the tale. It may sound
odd to compare him to Mr. Rudyard Kipling :
but he is like Kipling and also like Wells in
this practical sense : that no one ever wrote
a story at all like the Mark of the Beast ; no
one ever wrote a story at all like A Kink in
Space : and in the same sense no one ever wrote
a story like The Great Good Place. It is alone
in order and species ; and it is masterly. He
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 231
struck his deepest note in that terrible story,
The Turn of the Screw ; and though there is
in the heart of that horror a truth of repent-
ance and religion, it is again notable of the
Victorian writers that the only supernatural
note they can strike assuredly is the tragic
and almost the diabolic. Only Mr. Max
Beerbohm has been able to imagine Mr.
Henry James writing about Christmas.
Now upon this interregnum, this cold and
brilliant waiting-room which was Henry
James at its highest and Wilde at its worst,
there broke in two positive movements, largely
honest though essentially unhistoric and
profane, which were destined to crack up
the old Victorian solidity past repair. The
first was Bernard Shaw and the Socialists:
the second was Rudyard Kipling and the
Imperialists. I take the Socialists first not
because they necessarily came so in order of
time, but because they were less the note
upon which the epoch actually ended.
William Morris, of whom we have already
232 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
spoken, may be said to introduce the Socialists,
but rather in a social sense than a philosophi-
cal. He was their friend, and in a sort of
political way, their father; but he was not
their founder, for he would not have believed
a word of what they ultimately came to say.
Nor is this the conventional notion of the
old man not keeping pace with the audacity
of the young. Morris would have been dis-
gusted not with the wildness, but the tame-
ness of our tidy Fabians. He was not a
Socialist, but he was a Revolutionist ; he didn't
know much more about what he was; but
he knew that. In this way, being a full-
blooded fellow, he rather repeats the genial
sulkiness of Dickens. And if we take this
fact about him first, we shall find it a key
to the whole movement of this time. For
the one dominating truth which overshadows
everything else at this point is a political and
economic one. The Industrial System, run
by a small class of Capitalists on a theory of
competitive contract, had been quite honestly
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 233
established by the early Victorians and was
one of the primary beliefs of Victorianism.
The Industrial System, so run, had become
another name for hell. By Morris's time and
ever since, England has been divided into
three classes: Knaves, Fools and Revolu-
tionists.
History is full of forgotten controversies;
and those who speak of Socialism now have
nearly all forgotten that for some time it was
an almost equal fight between Socialism and
Anarchism for the leadership of the exodus
from Capitalism. It is here that Herbert
Spencer comes in logically, though not chrono-
logically; also that much more interesting
man, Auberon Herbert. Spencer has no
special place as a man of letters ; and a vastly
exaggerated place as a philosopher. His real
importance was that he was very nearly an
Anarchist. The indefinable greatness there
is about him after all, in spite of the silliest
and smuggest limitations, is in a certain
consistency and completeness from his own
234 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
point of view. There is something mediaeval,
and therefore manful, about writing a book
about everything in the world. Now this
simplicity expressed itself in politics in carry-
ing the Victorian worship of liberty to the
most ridiculous lengths ; almost to the length
of voluntary taxes and voluntary insurance
against murder. He tried, in short, to solve
the problem of the State by eliminating
the State from it. He was resisted in this by
the powerful good sense of Huxley; but his
books became sacred books for a rising
generation of rather bewildered rebels, who
thought we might perhaps get out of the
mess if everybody did as he liked.
Thus the Anarchists and Socialists fought
a battle over the death- bed of Victorian Indus-
trialism; in which the Socialists (that is,
those who stood for increasing instead of
diminishing the power of Government) won
a complete victory and have almost extermi-
nated then* enemy. The Anarchist one meets
here and there nowadays is a sad sight ; he is
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 235
disappointed with the future, as well as with
the past.
This victory of the Socialists was largely a
literary victory; because it was effected and
popularised not only by a wit, but by a sincere
wit; and one who had the same sort of
militant lucidity that Huxley had shown in
the last generation and Voltaire in the last
century. A young Irish journalist, impatient
of the impoverished Protestantism and
Liberalism to which he had been bred, came
out as the champion of Socialism not as a
matter of sentiment, but as a matter of common
sense. The primary position of Bernard
Shaw towards the Victorian Age may be
roughly summarised thus : the typical Vic-
torian said coolly : " Our system may not be
a perfect system, but it works." Bernard
Shaw replied, even more coolly: " It may be
a perfect system, for all I know or care. But
it does not work." He and a society called
the Fabians, which once exercised considerable
influence, followed this shrewd and sound
236 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
strategic hint to avoid mere emotional attack
on the cruelty of Capitalism ; and to concen-
trate on its clumsiness, its ludicrous incapacity
to do its own work. This campaign succeeded,
in the sense that while (in the educated world)
it was the Socialist who looked the fool at
the beginning of that campaign, it is the
Anti-Socialist who looks the fool at the end
of it. But while it won the educated classes
it lost the populace for ever. It dried up
those springs of blood and tears out of which
all revolt must come if it is to be anything
but Bureaucratic readjustment. We began
this book with the fires of the French Revolu-
tion still burning, but burning low. Bernard
Shaw was honestly in revolt in his own way :
but it was Bernard Shaw who trod out the
last ember of the Great Revolution.
Bernard Shaw proceeded to apply to many
other things the same sort of hilarious realism
which he thus successfully applied to the indus-
trial problem. He also enjoyed giving people
a piece of his mind ; but a piece of his mind
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 237
was f\ more appetising and less raw-looking
object than a piece of Hardy's. There were
many modes of revolt growing all around him ;
Shaw supported them and supplanted them.
Many were pitting the realism of war against
the romance of war : they succeeded in making
the fight dreary and repulsive, but the book
dreary and repulsive too. Shaw, in Arms
and the Man, did manage to make war funny
as well as frightful. Many were questioning
the right of revenge or punishment; but they
wrote their books in such a way that the
reader was ready to release all mankind if he
might revenge himself on the author. Shaw,
in Captain Brassbound* s Conversion, really
showed at its best the merry mercy of the
pagan; that beautiful human nature that
can neither rise to penance nor sink to revenge.
Many had proved that even the most indepen-
dent incomes drank blood out of the veins of
the oppressed : but they wrote it in such a
style that their readers knew more about
depression than oppression. In Widowers'
238 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
Houses Shaw very nearly (but not quite)
succeeded in making a farce out of statistics.
And the ultimate utility of his brilliant
interruption can best be expressed in the
very title of that play. When ages of essential
European ethics have said " widows' houses,"
it suddenly occurs to him to say " but what
about widowers' houses ? " There is a sort
of insane equity about it which was what
Bernard Shaw had the power to give, and
gave.
Out of the same social ferment arose a
man of equally unquestionable genius, Mr
H. G. Wells. His first importance was that
he wrote great adventure stories in the new
world the men of science had discovered.
He walked on a round slippery world as boldly
as Ulysses or Tom Jones had worked on a
flat one. Cyrano de Bergerac or Baron
Munchausen, or other typical men of science,
had treated the moon as a mere flat silver
mirror in which Man saw his own image the
Man in the Moon. Wells treated the moon
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 239
as a globe, like our own; bringing forth
monsters as moonish as we are earthy. The
exquisitely penetrating political and social
satire he afterwards wrote belong to an age
later than the Victorian. But because, even
from the beginning, his whole trend was
Socialist, it is right to place him here.
While the old Victorian ideas were being
disturbed by an increasing torture at home,
they were also intoxicated by a new romance
from abroad. It did not come from Italy
with Rossetti and Browning, or from Persia
with Fitzgerald : but it came from countries
as remote, countries which were (as the simple
phrase of that period ran) " painted red " on
the map. It was an attempt to reform
England through the newer nations ; by the
criticism of the forgotten colonies, rather
than of the forgotten classes. Both Socialism
and Imperialism were utterly alien to the
Victorian idea. From the point of view of a
Victorian aristocrat like Palmerston, Socialism
would be the cheek of gutter snipes ; Imperial-
240 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
ism would be the intrusion of cads. But cads
are not alone concerned.
Broadly, the phase in which the Victorian
epoch closed was what can only be called
the Imperialist phase. Between that and us
stands a very individual artist who must
nevertheless be connected with that phase.
As I said at the beginning, Macaulay (or,
rather, the mind Macaulay shared with most
of his powerful middle class) remains as a
sort of pavement or flat foundation under all
the Victorians. They discussed the dogmas
rather than denied them. Now one of the
dogmas of Macaulay was the dogma of
progress. A fair statement of the truth in it
is not really so hard. Investigation of any-
thing naturally takes some little time. It
takes some time to sort letters so as to find
a letter : it takes some time to test a gas-
bracket so as to find the leak; it takes some
time to sift evidence so as to find the truth.
Now the curse that fell on the later Victorians
was this: that they began to value the time
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 241
more than the truth. One felt so secretarial
when sorting letters that one never found the
letter; one felt so scientific in explaining gas
that one never found the leak; and one felt
so judicial, so impartial, in weighing evidence
that one had to be bribed to come to any con-
clusion at all. This was the last note of the
Victorians : procrastination was called progress.
Now if we look for the worst fruits of
this fallacy we shall find them in historical
criticism. There is a curious habit of treating
any one who comes before a strong movement
as the " forerunner " of that movement.
That is, he is treated as a sort of slave running
in advance of a great army. Obviously, the
analogy really arises from St. John the Baptist,
for whom the phrase " forerunner " was rather
peculiarly invented. Equally obviously,
such a phrase only applies to an alleged or
real divine event : otherwise the forerunner
would be a founder. Unless Jesus had been
the Baptist's God, He would simply have
been his disciple.
Q
242 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
Nevertheless the fallacy of the "fore-
runner" has been largely used in literature.
Thus men will call a universal satirist like
Langland a " morning star of the Reforma-
tion," or some such rubbish; whereas the
Reformation was not larger, but much smaller
than Langland. It was simply the victory
of one class of his foes, the greedy merchants,
over another class of his foes, the lazy abbots.
In real history this constantly occurs; that
some small movement happens to favour one
of the million things suggested by some great
man ; whereupon the great man is turned into
the running slave of the small movement.
Thus certain sectarian movements borrowed
the sensationalism without the sacramentalism
of Wesley. Thus certain groups of decadents
found it easier to imitate De Quincey's opium
than his eloquence. Unless we grasp this
plain common sense (that you or I are not
responsible for what some ridiculous sect a
hundred years hence may choose to do with
what we say) the peculiar position of Stevenson
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 243
in later Victorian letters cannot begin to be
understood. For he was a very universal man ;
and talked some sense not only on every
subject, but, so far as it is logically possible, in
every sense. But the glaring deficiencies of
the Victorian compromise had by that time
begun to gape so wide that he was forced, by
mere freedom of philosophy and fancy, to
urge the neglected things. And yet this very
urgency certainly brought on an opposite
fever, which he would not have liked if he
had lived to understand it. He liked Kipling,
though with many healthy hesitations ; but
he would not have liked the triumph of
Kipling : which was the success of the poli-
tician and the failure of the poet. Yet when
we look back up the false perspective of time,
Stevenson does seem in a sense to have
prepared that imperial and downward path.
I shall not talk here, any more than any-
where else in this book, about the " sedulous
ape " business. No man ever wrote as well
as Stevenson who cared only about writing.
Q 2
244 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
Yet there is a sense, though a misleading one,
in which his original inspirations were artistic
rather than purely philosophical. To put the
point in that curt covenanting way which he
himself could sometimes command, he thought
it immoral to neglect romance. The whole of
his real position was expressed in that phrase
of one of his letters " our civilisation is a dingy
ungentlemanly business : it drops so much
out of a man." On the whole he concluded
that what had been dropped out of the man was
the boy. He pursued pirates as Defoe would
have fled from them; and summed up his
simplest emotions in that touching cri de coeur
" shall we never shed blood ? " He did for
the penny dreadful what Coleridge had done
for the penny ballad. He proved that, because
it was really human, it could really rise as
near to heaven as human nature could take
it. If Thackeray is our youth, Stevenson is
our boyhood : and though this is not the
most artistic thing in him, it is the most
important thing in the history of Victorian
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 245
art. All the other fine things he did were,
for curious reasons, remote from the current
of his age. For instance, he had the good as
well as the bad of coming from a Scotch
Calvinisms house. No man in that age had so
healthy an instinct for the actuality of positive
evil. In The Master of Ballantree he did prove
with a pen of steel, that the Devil is a gentleman
but is none the less the Devil. It is also
characteristic of him (and of the revolt from
Victorian respectability in general) that his
most blood-and-thunder sensational tale is also
that which contains his most intimate and
bitter truth. Dr. ' Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
is a double triumph ; it has the outside excite-
ment that belongs to Conan Doyle with the
inside excitement that belongs to Henry
James. Alas, it is equally characteristic of
the Victorian time that while nearly every
Englishman has enjoyed the anecdote, hardly
one Englishman has seen the joke I mean
the point. You will find twenty allusions to
Jekyll and Hyde in a day's newspaper reading.
246 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
You will also find that all such allusions
suppose the two personalities to be equal,
neither caring for the other. Or more roughly,
they think the book means that man can be
cloven into two creatures, good and evil. The
whole stab of the story is that man can't:
because while evil does not care for good, good
must care for evil. Or, in other words, man
cannot escape from God, because good is the
God in man ; and insists on omniscience. This
point which is good psychology and also good
theology and also good art, has missed its
main intention merely because it was also
good story-telling.
If the rather vague Victorian public did
not appreciate the deep and even tragic ethics
with which Stevenson was concerned, still
less were they of a sort to appreciate the
French finish and fastidiousness of his style;
in which he seemed to pick the right word up
on the point of his pen, like a man playing
spillikins. But that style also had a quality
that could be felt ; it had a military edge to it,
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 247
an acies ; and there was a kind of swordsman-
ship about it. Thus all the circumstances
led, not so much to the narrowing of Stevenson
to the romance of the fighting spirit ; but the
narrowing of his influence to that romance.
He had a great many other things to say ; but
this was what we were willing to hear : a
reaction against the gross contempt for
soldiering which had really given a certain
Chinese deadness to the Victorians. Yet
another circumstance thrust him down the
same path; and in a manner not wholly
fortunate. The fact that he was a sick man
immeasurably increases the credit to his
manhood in preaching a sane levity and
pugnacious optimism. But it also forbade
him full familiarity with the actualities of
sport, war, or comradeship : and here and there
his note is false in these matters ; and reminds
one (though very remotely) of the mere
provincial bully that Henley sometimes sank
to be.
For Stevenson had at his elbow a friend, an
248 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
invalid like himself, a man of courage and
stoicism like himself; but a man in whom
everything that Stevenson made delicate and
rational became unbalanced and blind. The
difference is, moreover, that Stevenson was
quite right in claiming that he could treat his
limitation as an accident; that his medicines
" did not colour his life." His life was really
coloured out of a shilling paint-box, like his
toy-theatre : such high spirits as he had are
the key to him : his sufferings are not the key
to him. But Henley's sufferings are the key
to Henley; much must be excused him, and
there is much to be excused. The result was
that while there was always a certain dainty
equity about Stevenson's judgments, even
when he was wrong, Henley seemed to think
that on the right side the wronger you were
the better. There was much that was femi-
nine in him ; and he is most understandable
when surprised in those little solitary poems
which speak of emotions mellowed, of sunset
and a quiet end. Henley hurled himself into
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 249
the new fashion of praising Colonial adventure
at the expense both of the Christian and the
republican traditions; but the sentiment did
not spread widely until the note was struck
outside England in one of the conquered
countries ; and a writer of Anglo-Indian short
stories showed the stamp of the thing called
genius ; that indefinable, dangerous and often
temporary thing.
For it is really impossible to criticise
Rudyard Kipling as part of Victorian litera-
ture, because he is the end of such literature.
He has many other powerful elements; an
Indian element, which makes him exquisitely
sympathetic with the Indian; a vague Jingo
influence which makes him sympathetic with
the man that crushes the Indian; a vague
journalistic sympathy with the men that
misrepresent everything that has happened
to the Indian; but of the Victorian virtues,
nothing.
All that was right or wrong in Kipling was
expressed in the final convulsion that he
250 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
almost in person managed to achieve. The
nearest that any honest man can come to
the thing called " impartiality " is to confess
that he is partial. I therefore confess that
I think this last turn of the Victorian Age was
an unfortunate turn ; much on the other side
can be said, and I hope will be said. But
about the facts there can be no question. The
Imperialism of Kipling was equally remote
from the Victorian caution and the Victorian
idealism : and our subject does quite seriously
end here. The world was full of the trampling
of totally new forces, gold was sighted from
far in a sort of cynical romanticism : the
guns opened across Africa; and the great
queen died.
* * * * *
Of what will now be the future of so separate
and almost secretive an adventure of the
English, the present writer will not permit
himself, even for an instant, to prophesy.
The Victorian Age made one or two mistakes
but they were mistakes that were really
BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 251
useful ; that is, mistakes that were really
mistaken. They thought that commerce out-
side a country must extend peace : it has
certainly often extended war. They thought
that commerce inside a country must certainly
promote prosperity; it has largely promoted
poverty. But for them these were experi-
ments ; for us they ought to be lessons. If
we continue the capitalist use of the populace
if we continue the capitalist use of external
arms, it will lie heavy on the living. The
dishonour will not be on the dead.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
AFTER having surveyed the immense field presented in such
a volume as Mr. George Mair's Modern English Literature in
this series, or, more fully, in the Cambridge History of Modern
Literature, the later volume of Chambers' English Literature,
Mr. Gosse's History of Modern English Literature, or Henry
Mo r ley's English Literature in tlue Reign of Victoria, the wise
reader will choose some portion for closer study, and will go
straight to the originals before he has any further traffic with
critics or commentators, however able.
He will then need the aid of fuller biographies. Some
Victorian Lives are already classic, or nearly so, among them
Sir G. Trevelyan's Macaulay, Forster's Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell's
Charlotte Bronte, Fronde's Carlyle, and Sir E. T. Cook's
Ruskin. With these may be ranged the great Dictionary of
National Biography. The "English Men of Letters" Series
includes H. D. Traill's Coleridge, Ainger's Lamb, Trollope's
Thackeray, Leslie Stephen's George Eliot, Herbert Paul's
Matthew Arnold, Sir A. Lyall's Tennyson, G. K. Chesterton's
Robert Browning, and A. C. Benson's Fitzgerald. At least
two autobiographies must be named, those of Herbert Spencer
and John Stuart Mill, and, as antidote to Newman's Apologia,
the gay self- revelations of Borrow, and JetFeries' Story of My
Heart. Other considerable volumes are W. J. Cross's George
Eliot, Lionel Johnson's Art of Thomas Hardy, Mr. W. M.
Rossetti's Dante G. Rossettt, Colvin's R. L. Stevenson, J. W.
Mackail's William Morris, Holman Hunt's Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, Sir Leslie Stephen's The Utilitarians, Buxton
Forman's Our Living Poets, Edward Thomas's Swinburne,
Monypenny's Disraeli, Dawson's Victorian Novelists, and
Stedman's Victorian Poets. The "Everyman" Short Bio-
graphical Dictionary of English Literature is useful for dates.
The latter half of the second volume of Mr. F. A. Mumby's
Letters of Literary Men is devoted to the Victorian Age.
There are fuller collections of the Letters of Leigh Hunt,
Thackeray, Dickens, the Brownings, Fitzgerald, Charles
253
254 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Kingslcy, Matthew Arnold, and more recently the Letters of
George Meredith, edited by his son.
Among the important critical writers of the period, Matthew
Arnold (Essays in Criticism, Study of Celtic Literature, etc.)
stands easily tirst. Others are John, now Lord, Morley (Studies
in Literature, etc.), Augustine Birrell (Obiter Dicta, Essays),
W. E. Henley (Views and Reviews), J. Addington Symonds
(Essays), J. Churton Collins, Richard Garnett, Stopford A.
Brooke, George E. B. Saintabury (History of Criticism), R. H.
Hutton (Contemporary Thought), J. M. Robertson (Modern
Humanists, Buckle, etc.), Frederic Harrison (The Choice of
Books, etc.), Andrew Lang, Walter Bagehot, Edmund Gosse,
Prof. Dowden, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir A. T. Quiller
Couch.
INDEX
the, and Decadents,
L'18-27
Arnold, Matthew, 73-79, 87
Austen, Jane, 02, 105, 109
Bentham, 86
Blake, 20
Borrow, 151
Bronte, Charlotte, 92, 104, 110-14
, Emily, 113
Browning, R., 40-41, 150, 162-63
, Elizabeth B., 170-81
Byron, 32
Carlyle, 40, 49-62, 158
Carroll, Lewis, 153
Cobbett, 16-17, 88, 151
Coleridge. 20
Collins, Wilkie, 130, 132
Darwin, 38, 206-7, 209
De Quincey, 23-25, 65
Dickens, 40, 79-8, 100, 106, 119-
28, 129, 131
Disraeli. 42, 135
Eliot, George, 92, 102-9, 157
Puber, 45
Fitegerald, 102-95
French Revolution, Influence of,
18-21
Proude, 60, 62
Gaekell, Mr*., 94
Gilbert, 1G4
Hardy, Thomas, 138-39, 143-45
Hazlitt, 23
Henley, W. B., 247-48
Hood, Thomaw, 25-27
Hughes, Tom, 72
Humour, Victorian, 152 SO
Hunt, Leigh, 23
Huxley, 39-40, 205
Imperialism, 60, 239
James, Henry, 228-31
Keats, 22
Keble, 45
Kingsley, 40, 59, 64, 72, 134 35
Kipling, R., 60, 249-50
Lamb, 23
Landor, 23
Lear, Edward, 153
Literary temperament, the E
lish, 13-16
Lytton, Bulwer, 135-37
Macaulay, 28-36, 55
Macdonald, George, 152
Maurice, F. D., 40, 73
Melbourne, Lord, 41-42
Meredith, George, 138-49. 228
MU1, J. S., 36-37, 55
Morris, Wm., 196-200, 232
Newman, 38, 40, 45-48, 78, 159
Novel, The Modern, 90-99
Oliphant, Mrs., 116-17
"Ouida,"117
Oxford Movement, 42-45
Pater, Walter, 69-71
Patmore, 48, 201-2
Pre-Raphaelite School, 6S, 71
Reade, Charles, 134
255
256
INDEX
Rossetti, D. G., and C., 71, 188-91
Ruskin, 40, 62-8, 70, 158
Science, Victorian, 208-12
Shaw, G. B., 60, 235-38
Shelley, 22-23
Shorthouse, 149-50
Socialism, 60, 67, 122, 198, 227,
231-39
Spencer, Herbert, 75, 233-34
Stcronson, R. L., 242-49
Swinburno, 69, 159, 181-88
Tennyson, 40, 64, 160-69
Thackeray, 100, 110, 123-80, 158
Thompson, Francis, 48, 201, 202
Trollope, Anthony, 130, 132-33
Watson, Wm., 202
Wells, H. G., 238-39
Wilde, Oscar, 218-23
Women, Victorian, 91, 99. 104, 115-
16, 140
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with philosophy, art, religion, and practical life." Aberdeen Journal.
36. CLIMATE AND WEATHER
By Prof. H. N. DICKSON, D.Sc.Oxon., M.A., F.R.S.E., President of the
Royal Meteorological Society. (With Diagrams.) "The author has succeeded
in presenting in a very lucid and agreeable manner the causes of the movements
of the atmosphere and of the more stable winds." Manchester Guardian.
41. ANTHROPOLOGY
By R. R. MARETT, M.A., Reader in Social Anthropology in Oxford University.
"An absolutely perfect handbook, so clear that a child could understand it, so
fascinating and human that it beats fiction ' to a frazzle.'" Morning Leader.
44. THE PRINCIPLES OF PHYSIOLOGY
By Prof. J. G. MCK.ENDRICK, M.D. "It is a delightful and wonderfully
comprehensive handling of a subject which, while of importance to all, does
not readily lend itself to untechnical explanation. . . . Upon every page of it
is stamped the impress of a creative imagination." Glasgow Herald.
46. MATTER AND ENERGY
By F. Sounv, M.A., F.R.S. "Prof. Soddy has successfully accomplished
the very difficult task of making physics of absorbing interest on popular
lines." Nature.
49. PSYCHOLOGY, THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOUR
By Prof. W. McDouGAi.L, F.R.S., M.B. "A happy example of the non-
technical handling of an unwieldy science, suggesting rather than dogmatising.
It should whet appetites for deeper study." Christian World.
53. THE MAKING OF THE EARTH
By Prof. J. W. GREGORY, F.R.S. (With 38 Maps and Figures.) "A
fascinating little volume. . . . Among the many good things contained in the
series this takes a high place. "--The Atheneeum.
57. THE HUMAN BODY
By A. KEITH, M.U., LL.D., Conservator of Museum and Hunterian Professor,
Royal College of Surgeons. (Illustrated.) " It literally makes the 'dry bones'
to live. It will certainly take a high place among the classics of popular
science." Manc/iester Guardian.
58. ELECTRICITY
By GISBERT KAPP, D.Eng., Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Univer-
sity of Birmingham. (Illustrated.) "It will be appreciated greatly by learners
and by the great number of amateurs who are interested in what is one of the
most fascinating of scientific studies." Glasgow Herald.
62. THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF LIFE
By Dr BENJAMIN MOORE, Professor of Bio-Chemistry, University College,
Liverpool.
67. CHEMISTRY
By RAPHAEL MELDOLA, F.R.S., Professor of Chemistry in Finsbury Technical
College, London. Presents clearly, without the detail demanded by the
expert, the way in which chemical science has developed, and the stage it has
reached.
IN PREPARATION
THE MINERAL WORLD. By Sir T. H. HOLLAND, K.C.I. E., D.Sc.
PLANT LIFE. By Prof. J. B. FARMER, F.R.S.
NERVES. By Prof. D. FRASER HARRIS, M.D., D.Sc.
A STUDY OF SEX. By Prof. J. A. THOMSON and Prof. PATRICK GKDDES.
THE GROWTH OF EUROPE. By Prof. GRENVILLK COLE.
OCEANOGRAPHY. By Sir JOHN MURRAY, K.C.B., F.R.S.
Philosophy and "Religion
15. MOHAMMEDANISM
By Prof. D. S. MARGOLIOUTH, M.A., D.Litt. "This generous shilling's
worth of wisdom. ... A delicate, humorous, and most responsible tractate
by an illuminative professor." Daily Mail.
40. THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
By the Hon. BERTRAND RUSSEI.L, F.R.S. "A book that the 'man in the
street ' will recognise at once to be a boon. . . . Consistently lucid and non-
technical throughout." Christian World.
47. BUDDHISM
By Mrs RHYS DAVIDS, M.A. " The author presents very attractively as well
as very learnedly the philosophy of Buddhism as the greatest scholars of the
day interpret it." Daily News.
6
go. NONCONFORMITY: Its ORIGIN and PROGRESS
By Principal W. B. SELBIE, M.A. "The historical part is brilliant in its
insight, clarity, and proportion ; and in the later chapters Dr Selbie proves
himself to be an ideal exponent of sound and moderate views." Christian
World.
54. ETHICS
By G. E. MOORE, M.A., Lecturer in Moral Science in Cambridge University.
"A very lucid though closely reasoned outline of the logic of good conduct.
. . . This non-technical little book should make for clear thinking and wider
tolerance." Christian World.
56. THE MAKING OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
By Prof. B. W. BACON, LL.D., D.D. "Professor Bacon has boldly, and
wisely, taken his own line, mentioning opposing views only occasionally, and
has produced, as a result, an extraordinarily vivid, stimulating, and lucid
book." Manchester Guardian.
60. MISSIONS: THEIR RISE and DEVELOPMENT
By Mrs CRKIGHTON. "Very interestingly done. ... Its style is simple,
direct, unhackneyed, and should find appreciation where a more fervently
pious style of writing repels." Methodist Recorder.
68. COMPARATIVE RELIGION
By Prof. J. ESTLIN CARPENTER, D.Litt., Principal of Manchester College,
Oxford.
IN PREPARATION
THE OLD TESTAMENT. By Prof. GEORGE MOORE, D.D., LL.D.
BETWEEN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS. By R. H.
CHARLES, D.D.
A HISTORY of FREEDOM of THOUGHT. By Prof. J. B. BURY, LL.D.
A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. By CLEMENT WEBB, M.A.
Social Science
i. PARLIAMENT
Its History, Constitution, and Practice. By Sir COURTENAY P. ILBERT,
G.C.B., K. C.S.I., Clerk of the House of Commons. " The best book on the
history and practice of the House of Commons since Bagehot's 'Constitution.' "
Yorkshire P< st.
5. THE STOCK EXCHANGE
By F. W. HIKST, Editor of " The Economist." " To an unfinancial mind must
be a revelation. . . . The book is as clear, vigorous, and sane as Bagehot's ' Lom-
bard Street,' than which there is no higher compliment." Morning Leader.
6. IRISH NATIONALITY
By Mrs J. R. GKKEN. " As glowing as it is learned. No book could be more
timely." Daily News.
10. THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT
By J. RAMSAY MAC.DONALD, M.P. "Admirably adapted for the purpose of
exposition." The Times.
11. CONSERVATISM
By LORD HUGH CECIL, M.A., M.P. " One of those great little books which
seldom appear more than once in a generation." Morning Post.
By J. J. FiND'.AY, M.A., Ph.D., Professor of Education in
University. " An amazingly comprehensive volume. ... It is a
1 6. THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH
By J. A HOBSON, AI.A. " Mr J. A. Hobson holds an unique position among
living economists. . . . Original, reasonable, and illuminating." The Nation.
21. LIBERALISM
By L. T. HOBHOU--E, M.A., Professor of Sociology in the University of London.
"A book of rare quality. . . . We have nothing but praise for the rapid and
masterly summaries of the arguments from first principles which form a large
part of this book." Westminster Gazette-
24. THE EVOLUTION OF fVDUSTRY
By D. H. MACGRKGOX, M.A., Profes-orpf Political Economy in the University
of Leeds " A volume so dispassionate in terms may be read with profit by all
interested in the present state of unrest." Aberdeen Journal.
26. AGRICULTURE
By Prof. W. SOMEKVIU.E, F.L.S. "It makes the results of laboratory work
at the University accessible to the practical farmer." Athenaum.
30 ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH LAW
By W. M. GF.LDART, M A., B.C.L., Vinerian Professor of English Law at
Oxford. " Contains a very clear account of the elementary principles under-
lying the rules of English Law." Scots Law Times.
38. THE SCHOOL: An Introduction to the Study of Education.
Manchester
remarkable
performance, distinguished in its crisp, striking phraseology as well as its
mclusiveness of subject-matter." Morning Post.
59. ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
By S. J. CHAPMAN, M.A., Professor of Political Economy in Manchester
University. "Its importance is not to be measured by its price. Probably
the best recent critical exposition of the analytical method in economic
science." Glasgow Herald.
69. THE NEWSPAPER
By G. BINNEY DIBBLEE, M.A. (Illustrated.) The best account extant of the
organisation ol the newspaper press, including Continental, American, and
Colonial journals.
IN PREPARATION
POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: From Bacon to Locke.
By G. P. GOOCH, M.A.
POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: From BenthaiK to J. S.
Mill. By Prof. W. L. DAVIDSON
POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: From Herbert Spencer
to To-day. By ERVEST BARKER, M.A.
SHELLEY, GODWIN, AND THEIR CIRCLE. By H. N. BRAILS-
FORD.
THE CRIMINAL AND THE COMMUNITY. By Viscount ST.
CYRES, M.A.
COMMONS ENS E IN LAW. By Prof. P. VINOGRADOFF, D.C.L.
THE CIVIL SERVICE. By GRAHAM WALLAS, M A.
ENGLISH VILLAGE LIFE. By E. N. BENNETT. M.A.
CO-PARTNERSHIP AND PROFIT-SHARING. By ANEUR
WILLIAMS, J. P.
THE SOCIAL SETTLEMENT. By JANE ADDAMS and R. A. WOODS.
ORE A T INVENTIONS. By Prof- J. L. MYRES, M.A., F.S.A.
TOWN PLANNING. By RAYMOND UNWIN.
London: WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
And of all Bookshops and Bookstalls.
