A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895) Part 14

Edward Irving, at one time an a.s.sistant to Chalmers, and an early friend of Carlyle, was twelve years the junior of Chalmers himself, and died thirteen years before him. But at nearly the time when Chalmers was at the height of his reputation as a preacher in Glasgow, Irving was drawing crowds to the unfashionable quarter of Hatton Garden, London, by sermons of extraordinary brilliancy. Later he developed eccentricities of doctrine which do not concern us, and his preaching has not worn much better than that of his old superior. Irving, however, had more strictly literary affinities than Chalmers; he came under the influence of Coleridge (which probably had not a little to do both with his eloquence and with his vagaries); and he may be regarded as having been much more of a man of letters who had lost his way and strayed into theology than as a theologian proper.

To what extent this great and famous influence of Coleridge actually worked upon Frederick Denison Maurice has been debated. It is however generally stated that he, like his friend Sterling, was induced to take orders in the Church of England by this influence. He was not a very young man when in 1834, the year of Irving's death, he did this, for he had been born in 1805, and had been educated at Cambridge, though being then a Unitarian he did not take a degree. He afterwards went to Oxford and took an M.A. degree there, and he was regarded for a time as a sort of outlying sympathiser with the Tractarian Movement. But his opinions took a very different line of development not merely from those of Newman, but from those of Keble and Pusey. He indeed never left the Church, in which he held divers preferments; and though his views on eternal punishment lost him a professorship in King's College, London, he met with no formal ecclesiastical censure. But he came to be regarded as a champion of the Broad Church school, and upheld eloquently and vehemently, if not always with a sufficiency either of logic or of learning, a curious conglomerate of "advanced" views, ranging from Christian Socialism to something like the views of the Atonement attributed to Origen, and from deprecation of dogma to deprecation of the then fashionable political economy. He was made Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge in 1866, and died in 1872. Maurice's sermons were effective, and his other works numerous. A very generous and amiable person with a deficient sense of history, Maurice in his writing is a sort of elder, less gifted, and more exclusively theological Charles Kingsley, on whom he exercised great and rather unfortunate influence. But his looseness of thought, wayward eclecticism of system, and want of accurate learning, were not remedied by Kingsley's splendid pictorial faculty, his creative imagination, or his brilliant style.

Somewhat akin to Maurice, but of a more feminine and less robust temperament, was Frederick Robertson, generally called "Robertson of Brighton," from the place of his last cure. Robertson, who was the son of a soldier, was born in London on 3rd February 1816. After a rather eccentric education and some vacillations about a profession, he went, rather late, to Oxford, and was ordained in 1840. He had very bad health, but did duty, chiefly at Cheltenham and at Brighton, pretty valiantly, and died on August 1853. He published next to nothing in his lifetime, but after his death there appeared several volumes of sermons which gained great popularity, and were followed by other posthumous works. Robertson's preaching is not very easy to judge, because the published sermons are admittedly not what was actually delivered, but after-reminiscences or summaries, and the judgment is not rendered easier by the injudicious and gushing laudation of which he has been made the subject. He certainly possessed a happy gift of phrase now and then, and remarkable earnestness.

NOTE.--In no chapter, perhaps, has there been greater difficulty as to inclusion and exclusion than in the present. The names of Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, of Dean Alford, of Bishop Lightfoot for England, of Bishop Charles Wordsworth, of Dean Ramsay, of Drs. Candlish, Guthrie, and Macleod for Scotland, may seem to clamour among orthodox theologians, those of W. R. Greg, of James Hinton, of W. K.

Clifford among not always orthodox lay dealers with the problems of philosophy, or of theology, or both. With less tyrannous limits of s.p.a.ce Princ.i.p.al Tulloch, who was noteworthy in both these and in pure literature as well (he was the last editor of _Fraser_), must have received at least brief notice in this chapter, as must his brother Princ.i.p.al, J. C. Shairp (an amiable poet, an agreeable critic, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford), in others.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] This famous book, published in 1860, was a collection of papers by six clergymen and a layman, some of which undoubtedly were, and the rest of which were by a.s.sociation thought to be, unorthodox. It was condemned by Convocation, and actual legal proceedings were taken against two of the writers, but without final effect.

CHAPTER IX

LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM IN ART AND LETTERS

In a former chapter we conducted the history of criticism, especially literary criticism, and that chiefly as displayed in the periodicals which were reorganized and refreshed in the early years of the century, to about 1850. We have now to take it up at that point and conduct it--subject to the limitations of our plan as regards living authors, and in one extremely important case taking the license of outstepping these limits--to the present or almost the present day. We shall have to consider the rise and performances of two great individual writers, one of whom entirely re-created, if he may not almost be said to have created, the criticism of art in England, while the other gave a new temper, if not exactly a new direction, to the criticism of literature; and we shall have, in regard to periodicals, to observe the rise, in the first place of the weekly newspaper, and then of the daily, as compet.i.tors in strictly critical and literary work with the quarterly and monthly reviews, as well as some changes in these latter.

For just as we found that the first development of nineteenth century criticism coincided with or followed upon a new departure or development in periodicals, so we shall find that a similar change accompanied or caused changes in the middle of the century. Although the popularity of the quarterly and monthly reviews and magazines which had been headed respectively by the _Edinburgh_ and _Blackwood_ did not exactly wane, and though some of the most brilliant work of the middle of the century--George Eliot's novels, Kingsley's and Froude's essays, and the like--appeared in them, the ever fickle appet.i.te of readers seemed to desire something else in shape, something different in price, style, and form. Why this sort of change, which is perpetually recurring, should usually bring with it a corresponding change, and sometimes a corresponding improvement, of literary production, is more than any one can say, but the fact is not easily disputable.

On the present occasion the change took three successive forms--first, the raising, or rather restoring, of the weekly sixpenny critical newspaper to a higher pitch of popularity than it had ever held; secondly, the cheapening and multiplying of the monthly magazines; thirdly, the establishment of new monthly reviews, somewhat more resembling the old quarterlies than anything else, but with signed instead of anonymous articles.

The uprising of the weekly newspaper took shape in two remarkably different forms, represented respectively by _Household Words_, which d.i.c.kens started early in the fifties, and by the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, which came a little later. The former might best be described as a monthly of the _Blackwood_ and _London_ kind cheapened, made more frequent in issue, and adjusted to a considerably lower and more popular standard of interest and culture--politics, moreover, being ostensibly though not quite really excluded. d.i.c.kens contributed to it largely himself. He received contributions from writers of established repute like Bulwer and Lever; but he made his chief mark with the paper by breeding up a school of younger writers who wrote to his own pattern in fiction, miscellaneous essay, and other things. Wilkie Collins was the chief of these, but there were many others. In particular the periodical developed a sort of popular, jocular, and picturesque-descriptive manner of treating places, travels, ceremonies, and what not, which took the public fancy immensely. It was not quite original (for Leigh Hunt, Wainewright the murderer-miscellanist of the _London_, some of the _Blackwood_ men, and others, had antic.i.p.ated it to a certain extent), and it was vulgarised as regards all its models; but it was distinct and remarkable. The aesthetic and literary tone of _Household Words_, and of its successor _All the Year Round_ to a somewhat less extent, was distinctly what is called Philistine; and though d.i.c.kens always had a moral purpose, he did not aim much higher than amus.e.m.e.nt that should not be morbid, and instruction of the middle-cla.s.s diffusion-of-knowledge kind. But there was very little harm and much good to be said of _Household Words_; and if some of the imitations of it were far from being happy, its own popularity and that of its successor were very fairly deserved.

The aims, the character, and the success of the _Sat.u.r.day Review_ were of the most widely different character. It was less novel in form, for the weekly review was an established thing, and had at least two very respectable examples--the _Examiner_, which (under the Hunts, under Fonblanque, under Forster, and under the late Mr. Minto) had a brilliant, if never an extremely prosperous, career for three-quarters of the century, and the _Spectator_, which attained a reputation for unswerving honesty under the editorship of Mr. Rentoul, and has increased it under that of its present conductors. But both these were Liberal papers first of all; the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, at first and accidentally Peelite, was really (throughout the nearly forty years during which it remained in the possession of the same family and was directed by a succession of editors each of whom had been trained under his predecessor) Independent Tory, or (to use a rather unhappy and now half-forgotten name) Liberal-Conservative. It never tied itself to party chariot-wheels, and from the first to the last of the period just referred to very distinguished writers of Liberal and Radical opinions contributed to it. But the general att.i.tude of the paper during this time expressed that peculiar tone of mainly Conservative persiflage which has distinguished in literature the great line of writers beginning with Aristophanes. Its staff was, as a rule, recruited from the two Universities (though there was no kind of exclusion for the unmatriculated; as a matter of fact, neither of its first two editors was a son either of Oxford or Cambridge), and it always insisted on the necessity of cla.s.sical culture. It eschewed the private personality which had been too apt to disfigure newspapers of a satirical kind during the first half of the century; but it claimed and exercised to the full the privilege of commenting on every public writing, utterance, or record of the subjects of its criticism. It observed, for perhaps a longer time than any other paper, the salutary principles of anonymity (real as well as ostensible) in regard to the authorship of particular articles; and those who knew were constantly amused at the public mistakes on this subject.

Applying this kind of criticism,--perfectly fearless, on the whole fairly impartial, informed, human errors excepted, by a rather exceptionally high degree of intelligence and education, and above all keeping before it the motto, framed by its "sweet enemy" Thackeray, of being written "by gentlemen for gentlemen,"--the _Sat.u.r.day Review_ quickly attained, and for many years held, the very highest place in English critical journalism as regards literature, in a somewhat less degree politics, and in a degree even greater the farrago of social and miscellaneous matters. By consent too general and too unbia.s.sed to be questioned, it gave and maintained a certain tone of comment which prevailed for the seventh, eighth, and ninth decades of the century, and of which the general note may be said to have been a coolly scornful intolerance of ignorance and folly. There were those who accused it even in its palmiest days of being insufficiently positive and constructive; but on the negative side it was generally sound in intention, and in execution admirably thorough. It may sometimes have mishandled an honest man, it may sometimes have forgiven a knave; but it always hated a fool, and struck at him with might and with main.

The second change began with the establishment of the _Cornhill_ and _Macmillan's Magazine_, two or three years later. There was no perceptible difference in the general scheme of these periodicals from that of the earlier ones, of which _Blackwood_ and _Fraser_ were the most famous; but their price was lowered from half a crown to a shilling, and the principle of signed articles and of long novels by famous names was adopted. The editorship of Thackeray in the _Cornhill_, with the contributions of Matthew Arnold and others, quickly gave a character to it; while _Macmillan's_ could boast contributions from the Kingsleys, Henry and Charles, as well as from many others. From this time the monthly magazine, with the exception of _Blackwood_, found a shilling, which attempts have been recently made to lower to sixpence, its almost necessary tariff, while the equal necessity of addressing the largest possible audience made pure politics, with occasional exceptions, unwelcome in it. It is to the credit of the English magazines of this cla.s.s, however, that they have never relinquished the tradition of serious literary studies. Many of the essays of Mr. Arnold appeared first either in one or the other of the two just mentioned; the _Cornhill_ even ventured upon Mr. Ruskin's _Unto this Last_; and other famous books of a permanent character saw the light in these, in _Temple Bar_, started by Mr. Bentley, in the rather short-lived _St. Paul's_, of which Anthony Trollope was editor, and in others.

Whether the starting of the monthly "Review" as distinguished from the "Magazine," which came again a little later towards the middle or end of the sixties, be traceable to a parallel popularisation of the quarterly ideal--to the need for the political and "heavy" articles which the lightened monthlies had extruded--or to a mere imitation of the famous French _Revue des Deux Mondes_, is an academic question. The first of these new Reviews was the _Fortnightly_, which found the exact French model unsuitable to the meridian of Greenwich, and dropped the fortnightly issue, while retaining the t.i.tle. It was followed by the _Contemporary_, the _Nineteenth Century_, and others. The exclusion of fiction in these was not invariable--the _Fortnightly_, in particular, has published many of Mr. Meredith's novels. But, as a rule, these reviews have busied themselves with more or less serious subjects, and have encouraged signed publication.

It would, of course, be impossible here to go through all, or even all the most noteworthy, of the periodicals of the century. We are dealing with cla.s.ses, not individuals, and the only cla.s.s yet to be noticed--daily newspapers falling out of our ken almost entirely--are those weekly newspapers which have eschewed politics altogether. The oldest and most famous of these is the _Athenaeum_, which still flourishes after a life of nearly seventy years, while between forty and fifty years later the _Academy_ was founded on the same general principles. But the _Athenaeum_ has always cleaved, as far as its main articles went, to the unsigned system, while the _Academy_ started at a period which leant the other way. Of late years, too, criticism proper, that is to say, of letters and art, has played a larger and larger part in daily newspapers, some of which attempt a complete review of books as they appear, while others give reviews of selected works as full as those of the weeklies. If any distinct setting of example is necessary to be attributed in this case, the credit is perhaps mainly due to the original _Pall Mall Gazette_, an evening newspaper started in 1864 with one of the most brilliant staffs ever known, including many of the original _Sat.u.r.day_ writers and others.

The result of this combined opportunity and stimulus in so many forms has been that almost the whole of the critical work of the latter part of the century has pa.s.sed through periodicals--that, except as regards Mr. Ruskin, a writer always indocile to editing, every one who will shortly be mentioned in this chapter has either won his spurs or exercised them in this kind, and that of the others, mentioned in other chapters and in connection with other subjects, a very small proportion can be said to have been entirely disdainful of periodical publication.

At the very middle of the century, and later, the older Quarterlies were supported by men like John Wilson Croker, a survival of their first generation Na.s.sau W. Senior, and Abraham Hayward, the last a famous talker and "diner-out." Other chief critics and essayists, besides Kingsley and Froude, were George Brimley, Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge; Henry Lancaster, a Balliol man and a Scotch barrister; and Walter Bagehot, a banker, and not a member of either University.

Brimley has left us what is perhaps the best appreciation of Tennyson in the time between the days when that poet was flouted or doubted by the usual critic, and those when he was accepted as a matter of course or cavilled at as a matter of paradox; and Lancaster occupies pretty much the same position with regard to Thackeray. It is not so easy to single out any particular and distinguishing critical effort of Bagehot's, who wrote on all subjects, from Lombard Street to Tennyson, and from the _Coup d'etat_ (which he saw) to Browning. But his distinction of the poetical art of Wordsworth and that of these other poets as "pure, ornate, and grotesque" will suffice to show his standpoint, which was a sort of middle place between the cla.s.sical and the Romantic. Bagehot wrote well, and possessed a most keen intelligence. Also to be cla.s.sed here are Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, the very agreeable author of _Horae Subsecivae_, and James Hannay, a brilliant journalist, a novelist of some merit and an essayist of more, and author of _A Course of English Literature_ which, though a little popular and desultory, is full of sense and stimulus.

Most popular of all at the time was Sir Arthur Helps (1813-75), a country gentleman of some means and of the usual education, who took to a mixed life of official and literary work, did some useful work in regard to Spanish-American history, but acquired most popularity by a series of dialogues, mostly occupied by ethical and aesthetic criticism, called _Friends in Council_. This contains plenty of knowledge of books, touches of wit and humour, a satisfactory standard of morals and manners, a certain effort at philosophy, but suffers from the limitations of its date. In different ways enough--for he was as quiet as the other was showy--Helps was the counterpart of Kinglake, as exhibiting a certain stage in the progress of English culture during the middle of the century--a stage in which the Briton was considerably more alive to foreign things than he had been, had enlarged his sphere in many ways, and was at least striving to be cosmopolitan, but had lost insular strength without acquiring Continental suppleness.

Of the literary critic who attracted most public attention during this period,--the late Mr. Matthew Arnold,--considerable mention has already been made in dealing with his poetry, and biographical details must be looked for there. It will be remembered that Mr. Arnold was not very early a popular writer either as poet or prose-man, that his poetical exercises preceded by a good deal his prose, and that these latter were, if not determined, largely influenced by his appointment to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. He began, however, towards the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties, to be much noticed, not merely as the deliverer of lectures, but as the contributor of essays of an exceedingly novel, piquant, and provocative kind; and in 1865 these, or some of them, were collected and published under the t.i.tle of _Essays in Criticism_. These _Essays_--nine in number, besides a characteristic preface--dealt ostensibly for the most part, if not wholly, with literary subjects,--"The Function of Criticism," "The Literary Influence of Academies," "The Guerins" (brother and sister), "Heine," "Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment," "Joubert," "Spinoza," and "Marcus Aurelius,"--but they extended the purport of the t.i.tle of the first of them in the widest possible way. Mr. Arnold did not meddle with art, but he extended the province of literature outside of it even more widely than Mr. Ruskin did, and was, under a guise of pleasant scepticism, as dogmatic within the literary province as Mr. Ruskin in the artistic. It might almost be said that Mr. Arnold put himself forth, with a becoming attempt at modesty of manner, but with very uncompromising intentions, as "Socrates in London," questioning, probing, rebuking with ironical faithfulness, the British Philistine--a German term which he, though not the first to import it, made first popular--in literature, in newspapers, in manners, in politics, in philosophy. Foreign, and specially French, ways were sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, held up as examples for our improvement; and the want of "ideas," the want of "light," the want of "culture," was dwelt on with a mixture of sorrow and satire. All this was couched in a very peculiar and (till its mannerism became irritating) a very captivating style, which cannot be a.s.signed to any single original, but which is a sort of compound or eclectic outcome of the old Oxford academic style as it may be seen at times in Newman, of French persiflage, and of some elements peculiar to Mr. Arnold himself. The strongest, though the most dangerous, of these elements was a trick of iterating words and phrases, sometimes exactly, sometimes with a very slight variation, which inevitably arrested attention, and perhaps at first produced conviction, on the principle formulated by a satirist (also of Oxford) a little later in the words--

What I tell you three times is true.

But besides and underneath all this flourish, all this wide-ranging scatter of sometimes rather haphazard arrows, there was a solid literary value in Mr. Arnold's method. As has been noticed earlier in this chapter, the literary essay of the best kind had somewhat gone off in England during the middle of the century, and the short, crisp criticisms which had appeared to take its place in weekly papers were almost necessarily exposed to grave faults and inadequacies. It was Mr.

Arnold's great merit that by holding up Sainte-Beuve, from whom he had learnt much, and other French critics, and by urging successfully the revival of the practice of "introducing" editions of cla.s.sics by a sound biographical and critical essay from the pen of some contemporary, he did much to cure this state of things. So that, whereas the _corpus_ of English essay-criticism between 1800 and 1835 or thereabouts is admirable, and that of 1835 to 1865 rather thin and scanty, the last third of the century is not on such very bad terms as regards the first.

And he gave example as well as precept, showing--though his subjects, as in the case of the Guerins, were sometimes most eccentrically selected--a great deal of critical acuteness, coupled, it may be, with something of critical "will-worship," with a capricious and unargued preference of this and rejection of that, but exhibiting wide if not extraordinarily deep reading, an honest enthusiasm for the best things, and above all a fascinating rhetoric.

The immediate effect of this remarkable book was good almost unmixedly on two of the three parties concerned. It was more than time for the flower of middle-cla.s.s complacency, which horticulturists of all degrees, from Macaulay downwards, had successively striven to cultivate, and which was already overblown, to drop from its stalk; and the whiff of pleasant scorn which Mr. Arnold directed at it was just the thing to puff it off. So the public, upon which he was never likely to produce too much effect, had reason to thank him for the effect that he did produce, or helped to produce. And on the critics too his effect, or the effect of which he was the symptom and voice, was also good, recalling them on the one hand from the dulness of the long reviews of the period, and on the other from the flippancy of the short, while inculcating a wider if not always a sounder comparison. Practically German poetry had nothing left to do in Mr. Arnold's day, and French had much: he thought just the other way, and reserved his encomium of France for its prose, in which it was drooping and failing. But this did not matter: it is the general scope of the critic's advice which is valuable in such cases, and the general scope of Mr. Arnold's was sound. On the third party, however,--himself,--the effect was a little disastrous. The reception which, after long waiting, he had attained, encouraged him not so much to continue in his proper sphere of literary criticism as to embark on a wide and far-ranging enterprise of general censure, which narrowed itself pretty rapidly to an attempt to establish undogmatic on the ruins of dogmatic Christianity. It would be very improper to discuss such an undertaking on the merits here; or to criticise narrowly the series of singular treatises which absorbed (with exceptions, no doubt, such as the quaint sally of _Friendship's Garland_ on the occasion of the Franco-German War) Mr. Arnold's energies for some fifteen or sixteen years. The t.i.tles--_Culture and Anarchy_, _G.o.d and the Bible_, _St. Paul and Protestantism_, _Literature and Dogma_, etc.--are well known. Of the contents it is enough to say that, apart from the popular audacity of their wit and the interesting spectacle of a pure man of letters confidently attacking th.o.r.n.y questions without any apparatus of special knowledge and study, they have not been generally thought quite worthy of their author. There are many brilliant pa.s.sages in these books as writing, just as there are some astonishing lapses of taste and logic; but the real fault of the whole set is that they are popular, that they undergo the very curse, of speaking without qualification and without true culture, which Mr. Arnold had himself so freely p.r.o.nounced.

Fortunately, however, he never quite abandoned the old ways; and in his last years he returned to them almost wholly. Nothing better of the kind (individual crotchets always excepted) has ever been written than his introductions to selected lives from Johnson's _Poets_, to Byron, to Sh.e.l.ley (the most crotchety and unsound of all), to Wordsworth (incomparably the best). He aided others; and a collection of his purely or mainly literary work is still eagerly expected. Even this would be extremely unequal and open to exception here and there. But it would contain some of the very best things to be found in any English critic.

And this after all, if not the absolutely highest, is one of the highest things that can be said of a critic, and one of the rarest. Undoubtedly the influence of Mr. Arnold did not make for good entirely. He discouraged--without in the least meaning to do so, and indeed meaning quite the contrary--seriousness, thoroughness, scholarship in criticism.

He discouraged--without in the least meaning to do so, and indeed meaning quite the contrary--simplicity and unaffectedness in style. But he was a most powerful stimulus, and in some ways, if not in all, a great example. Some at least of the things he said were in the very greatest need of saying, and some of the ways in which he said them were inimitably charming.

Contemporary with Mr. Arnold, and his complement in critical influence, was John Ruskin, the sole living author of whom it has seemed proper to treat here at length, and, since the death of Mr. Froude, the sole surviving man of letters of the first cla.s.s who had published before the middle of the century. He was born in 1819: he has given copious accounts of his family, of his youth at Denmark Hill, and so forth, and all the world knows that his father was a sherry merchant who, though he lived rather plainly, was able to give his son an early and plentiful indulgence in that Continental travel which had so much to do with developing his genius. Mr. Ruskin's education was oddly combined; for, after going to no school, he was sent to Christ Church as a gentleman-commoner and took his degree in 1842, having gained the Newdigate three years earlier. He wrote a good deal of other verse in his early years,--and he made himself a not inconsiderable draughtsman.

But his real vocation was as little the practice of art as it was the practice of poetry. As early as 1843 there appeared, by "a Graduate of Oxford," the first volume of the famous _Modern Painters_, which ran to five large volumes, which covered seventeen years in its original period of publication, and which was very largely altered and remodelled by the author during and after this period. But Mr. Ruskin by no means confined his energies before 1860 to this extensive task. The _Seven Lamps of Architecture_ (1849), and (between 1851 and 1853) the larger _Stones of Venice_, did for architecture what the companion work did for painting.

The Prae-Raphaelite movement of the middle of the century found in Mr.

Ruskin an ardent encomiast and literary apostle, and between 1850 and 1860 he delivered divers lectures, the text of which--_Architecture and Painting_ (1854), _Political Economy of Art_ (1858)--was subsequently published in as elaborately magnificent a style as his other works. As _Modern Painters_ drew to its close he became prolific of more numerous and shorter works, generally with somewhat fantastic but agreeable t.i.tles--_Unto this Last_ (1861), _Munera Pulveris_ (1862), _Sesame and Lilies_ (1865), _The Cestus of Aglaia_ (1865), _The Ethics of the Dust_ (1866), _The Crown of Wild Olive_ (1866), _Time and Tide by Wear and Tyne_ (1867), _The Queen of the Air_ (1869), _Aratra Pentelici_ and _The Eagle's Nest_ (1872), _Ariadne Florentina_ (1873), _Proserpina and Deucalion_ (1875 _seq._), _St. Mark's Rest_ and _Praeterita_ (1885). Not a few of these were issued in parts and numbers, but Mr. Ruskin's bulkiest and most characteristic venture in this kind was _Fors Clavigera_, which was published at irregular intervals from 1871 to 1884. He has written many other things even in book form, besides innumerable essays and letters, some of which have been collected in two gatherings--_Arrows of the Chace_ and _On the Old Road_.

Two things are mainly perceptible in this immense and at first sight rather bewildering production. The first, the most disputable and probably the least important, though the most at the author's heart, is a vast, fluctuating, but on the whole pretty coherent body of doctrine in reference to Art. Up to Mr. Ruskin's day, aesthetics had been little cultivated in England, and such handlings of the subject as existed--Burke's, Adam Smith's, Alison's, and a few others--were of a jejune and academic character. Even writers of distinct literary genius and of great taste for the matter, who had not resided abroad long, such as Hazlitt, much more such as Charles Lamb and Hartley Coleridge, betray the want of range and practice in examples. Even the valuable and interesting work of Mrs. Jameson (1794-1860) was more occupied with careful arrangement and attractive ill.u.s.tration than with original theory; and, well as she wrote, her _Characteristics of Shakespeare's Women_ (1832) is perhaps more important as literature than the series of volumes--_Sacred and Legendary Art_, etc.--which she executed between 1845 and her death. The sense of the endless and priceless ill.u.s.tration of the best art which was provided by Gothic domestic and ecclesiastical architecture was only wakening; as for painting, the examples publicly visible in England were very few, and even private collections were mostly limited to one or two fashionable schools--Raphael and his successors, the later Low Country schools, the French painters in the grand style, and a few Spaniards.

Strongly impressed by the Romantic revival (he has all his life been the staunchest of Sir Walter's devotees), a pa.s.sionate lover of Gothic architecture both at home and abroad, and early drawn both to the romantic nature-painting of Turner and the gorgeous colouring of the early Italian schools, Mr. Ruskin heralded Art with a pa.s.sion of which eighteenth century "gusto" had had no notion. But he was by no means satisfied with heralding Art alone. Anathematising at once the doctrine that utility is beauty--that beauty is utility he would always have cheerfully admitted--and the doctrine that the beautiful is not necessarily connected either with utility, with goodness, or with truth, he from the first and to the last has endeavoured to work ethics and aesthetics into a sort of single texture of warp and woof respectively, pushing his endeavours into the most multiform, the most curious, and it must be owned sometimes the most grotesque ramifications and extremities. But he was not satisfied with this bold attempt at the marriage of two things sometimes deemed hostile to, and generally held to be independent of, one another. He must needs be bolder still, and actually attempt to ally with Art, if not to subject to her, the youngest, the most rebellious, and, as it might seem, the most matter-of-fact and utilitarian of all the sciences--that of Political Economy. As we have seen, he had brought the subjects together in lectures pretty early in his career, and he developed the combination further in the eccentric book called _Unto this Last_, originally published in the _Cornhill Magazine_ as noted above. In this aesthetics and Economics combined took a distinctly Socialist turn; and as England was under the very fullest dominion of the Liberal middle-cla.s.s regime, with its belief in _laissez-faire_ and in supply-and-demand, Mr. Ruskin was not a little pooh-poohed. It would be improper here to attack or to defend his views, but it is part of the historian's duty to say that, for good or for ill, they have, though in forms different from his and doubtless by no means always meeting his approval, made constant headway, and that much legislation and still more agitation on the extreme Liberal side, and not there only, may be said to represent, with very slight transformation, Ruskinian doctrine applied, now and then, to very anti-Ruskinian purposes.

With regard to aesthetics proper, it might be contended, without too much rashness, that the history of Ruskinism has not been different; but to some observers it seems to have described rather a curve than a steady ascent. After being, between 1840 and 1860, laughed at, despised, attacked all at once, Mr. Ruskin found his influence as an art teacher rise steadily during the seventh decade of the century, and attain its highest point about the close thereof, when he was made Slade Professor in his own university, and caused young Oxford to do many fantastic things. But, as always happens, the hour of triumph was the hour, not, perhaps, of downfall, but of opposition and renegation. Side by side with Mr. Ruskin's own theories had risen the doctrine of Art-for-Art's sake, which, itself as usual half truth and half nonsense, cut at the very root of Ruskinism. On the other hand, the practical centre of art-schools had shifted from Italy and Germany to Paris and its neighbourhood, where morality has seldom been able to make anything like a home; and the younger painters and sculptors, full of realism, impressionism, and what not, would have none of the doctrines which, as a matter of fact, stood in immediate relationship of antecedence to their own. Lastly, it must be admitted that the extreme dogmatism on all the subjects of the encyclopedia in which Mr. Ruskin had seen fit to indulge, was certain to provoke a revolt. But with the substance of Ruskinism, further than is necessary for comprehension, we are not concerned.

Yet there are not many things in the English nineteenth century with which a historian is more concerned than with the style of the deliverance of these ideas. We have noticed in former chapters--we shall have to notice yet more in the conclusion--the attempts made in the years just preceding and immediately following Mr. Ruskin's birth, by Landor, by De Quincey, by Wilson, and by others in the direction of ornate, of--as some call it--_flamboyant_ English prose. All the tendencies thus enumerated found their crown and flower in Mr. Ruskin himself. That later the crowns and the flowers were, so to speak, divided, varied, and multiplied by later pract.i.tioners, some of whom will presently be noticed, while more are still alive, is quite true.

But in 1895 it is not very unsafe to prophesy that the _flamboyant_ style of the nineteenth century will be found by posterity to have reached its highest exposition in prose with Mr. Ruskin himself.

Like all great prose styles--and the difference between prose and poetry here is very remarkable--this was born nearly full grown. The instances of comparison in those who have tried both harmonies are rare; those in poets only are delusive and uncertain. But with the three greatest poets of England who have also been great prose writers, Milton, Dryden, Sh.e.l.ley, the a.s.sertion that the distinctive quality of their prose developed itself earlier than the distinctive quality of their verse is only disputable in the case of Milton. And Milton, as it happened, wrote prose and verse in manners more nearly approaching each other than any one on record. Mr. Ruskin has not been a poet, except in extreme minority; but he has been a great prose writer from the first. It is almost inconceivable that good judges can ever have had any doubt about him. It is perfectly--it is, indeed, childishly easy to pick faults, even if matter be kept wholly out of sight. In Mr. Ruskin's later books a certain tendency to conversational familiarity sometimes mocks those, and not those only, who hold to the tradition of dignified and _ex cathedra_ p.r.o.nouncement; in his earlier, and in all, it is possible for Momus to note an undue floridness, an inclination to blank verse in prose, tricks and manners of this or that kind unduly exuberant and protuberant.

But when all these things have been allowed for to the very fullest, what an enormous advance there is on anything that had gone before! The ornate prose writers of the seventeenth century had too frequently regarded their libraries only; they had seldom looked abroad to the vast field of nature, and of art other than literary art. The ornate writers of the eighteenth, great as they were, had been as afraid of introspection as of looking outwards, and had spun their webs, so far as style and ornament were concerned, of words only. Those of the early nineteenth had been conscious of revolt, and, like all conscious revolters, had not possessed their souls in sufficient quietness and confidence. Landor, half a cla.s.sic and half a Romantic, had been too much the slave of phrase,--though of a great phrase. Wilson, impatient in everything, had fluctuated between grandeur and _galimatias_, bathos and bad taste; De Quincey, at times supreme, had at others simply succ.u.mbed to "rigmarole." Mr. Ruskin had a gift of expression equal to the best of these men; and, unlike them, he had an immense, a steady, a uniform group of models before him. Indulge as he might in extravagance, there were always before him, as on a vastly extended dais set before the student, the glories of nature and of art, the great personalities and productions of the great artists. He had seen, and he could see (which is a different thing), the perennial beauties of mountain and cloud, of tree, and sea, and river; the beauties long, if not perennial, of architecture and painting. A man may say foolish things,--Mr. Ruskin has said plenty; but when he has Venice and Amiens and Salisbury, the Alps and the Jura and the Rhine, Scott and Wordsworth, Turner and Lionardo, always silently present before his mind's eye, he can never, if he is a man of genius, go wholly wrong. And he can never go more than a little wrong when he is furnished by his genius with such a gift of expression as Mr. Ruskin has had.

For this gift of expression was such as had never been seen before, and such as, for all the copying and vulgarising of it, has never been seen since. It is a commonplace of literary history that description, as such, is not common or far advanced in the earlier English prose. We find Gray, far on in the eighteenth century, trying to describe a sunrise, and evidently vexed at the little "figure it makes on paper."

Then the tourists and the travellers of the end of that age made valiant but not always well directed efforts to induce "it" to make a figure on paper. Then came the experts or student-interpreters in ornate prose who have been mentioned. And then came Mr. Ruskin. "Never so before and never quite so since," must be the repeated verdict. The first sprightly runnings in these, as in other kinds, are never surpa.s.sed.

Kingsley, an almost contemporary, Mr. Swinburne, a younger rival, have come near; others have done creditably in imitation; none have equalled, and certainly none have surpa.s.sed. Let the reader read the "Wave Studies" in the first volume of _Modern Painters_, more than fifty years old; the "Pine Forest in the Jura," almost forty; the "Angel of the Sea," fully thirty-five, and say, if he has any knowledge of English literature, whether there had been anything like any of these before.

Sh.e.l.ley, perhaps, in some of his prose had gone near it. Sh.e.l.ley was almost as great a prose writer as he was a poet. No one else could even be mentioned.

Nor was it mere description, great as Mr. Ruskin is in that, which differentiated him so strongly. He is a bad arguer; but his arguments are couched in rhetoric so persuasive that the very critics who detect his fallacies would almost consent to forfeit the power of detecting, if they could acquire that of constructing, such delightful paralogisms.

His crotchets of all sorts are sometimes merely childish, and not even always or very often original; for, like all fertile minds, he never could receive any seed of thought from another but it bore plant and fruit at once. But the statement of them is at its best so captivating that weaklings may pardonably accept, and strong men may justly tolerate, the worthless kernel for the sake of the exquisite husk. Few men have less of the true spirit of criticism than Mr. Ruskin, for in his enthusiasm he will compa.s.s sea and land to exalt his favourite, often for reasons which are perfectly invalid; and in his appreciation he is not to be trusted at all, having a feminine rather than a masculine faculty of unreasoned dislike. But praise or blame, argue or paralogise as he may, the golden beauty of his form redeems his matter in the eyes of all but those who are unhappy enough not to see it.

That his influence has been wholly good no one can say. There is scarcely a page of him that can be safely accepted on the whole as matter, and the unwary have accepted whole volumes; his form is peculiarly liable to abuse in the way of imitation, and it has actually been abused to nausea and to ridicule. But this is not his fault. There is so little subtlety about Mr. Ruskin that he can hardly deceive even an intelligent child when he goes wrong. There is so much genius about him that the most practised student of English can never have done with admiration at the effects that he produces, after all these centuries, with the old material and the old tools. He is constantly provocative of adverse, even of severe criticism; of half the heresies from which he has suffered--not only that of impressionism--he was himself the unconscious heresiarch. And yet the more one reads him the more one feels inclined almost to let him go uncriticised, to vote him the primacy in nineteenth-century prose by simple acclamation.

Richard (or as his full name ran), John Richard Jefferies, occupies, though an infinitely smaller and a considerably lower place than Mr.

Ruskin's, yet one almost as distinctly isolated in a particular department of aesthetic description. The son of a farmer at Coate, in North Wiltshire, and born in November 1848, he began journalism at eighteen, and was a contributor to the _North Wilts Herald_ till he was nearly thirty. Then he went to London, and in 1878 published some sketches (previously contributed to the _Pall Mall Gazette_) under the t.i.tle of _The Game-Keeper at Home_. These, though not much bought, were very much admired; and Jefferies was encouraged to devote himself to work of the same kind, which he varied with curious and not very vigorous semi-philosophic speculations and attempts at downright novels (a kind which he had also tried in his youth). Unfortunately the peculiar sort of descriptive writing in which he excelled was not very widely called for, could hardly under the most favourable circ.u.mstances have brought in any great sums of money, and was peculiarly liable to depreciate when written to order. It does not appear that Jefferies had the rare though sometimes recorded power of accommodating himself to ordinary newspaper hack-work, while reserving himself for better things now and then; and finally, he had not been long in London before painful and ultimately fatal disease added to his troubles. He died in August 1887, being not yet forty. A burst of popularity followed; his books, _The Game-Keeper at Home_, _Wild Life in a Southern Country_, _The Amateur Poacher_, _Round about a Great Estate_, etc., none of which had been printed in large numbers, were sold at four or five times their published price; and, worst of all, cheap imitations of his style began to flood the newspapers. Nay, the yet later results of this imitation was that another reaction set in, and even Jefferies' own work was once more pooh-poohed.

The neglect, the over-valuation, and the shift back to injustice, were all examples of the evils which beset literature at the present time, and which the much-blamed critic is almost powerless to cause or cure.

In other days Jefferies was quite as likely to have been insufficiently rewarded at first by the public; but he would then have had no temptation to over-write himself, or try alien tasks, and he would have stood a very good chance of a pension, or a sinecure, or an easy office in church or state, on one or other of which he might have lived at ease and written at leisure. Nothing else could really have been of service to him, for his talent, though rare and exquisite, was neither rich nor versatile. It consisted in a power of observing nature more than Wordsworthian in delicacy, and almost Wordsworthian in the presence of a sentimental philosophic background of thought. Unluckily for Jefferies, his philosophic background was not like Wordsworth's, clear and cheerful, but wholly vague and partly gloomy. Writing, too, in prose not verse, and after Mr. Ruskin, he attempted an exceedingly florid style, which at its happiest was happy enough, but which was not always at that point, and which when it was not was apt to become trivial or tawdry, or both. It is therefore certain that his importance for posterity will dwindle, if it has not already dwindled, to that given by a bundle of descriptive selections. But these will occupy a foremost place on their particular shelf, the shelf at the head of which stand Gilbert White and Gray.

Mr. Arnold, it has been said, abstained almost entirely from dealing with art. Mr. Ruskin, who has abstained from dealing with nothing, did not abstain from criticism of literature, but his utterances in it have been more than usually _obiter dicta_. Yet we must take the two together if we are to understand the most powerful influence and the most flourishing school of criticism, literary and other, which has existed for the last thirty years. This school may be said to halt in a way between purely literary and generally aesthetic handling, and when it can to mix the two. Most of its scholars--men obviously under the influence both of Arnold and of Ruskin, either in submission or in revolt, are alive, and we reason not of them. But, as it happens, the two most famous, one of whom was a prose writer, pure and simple, the other a copious artist in prose and verse, have died recently and call for judgment. These were Walter Horatio Pater and John Addington Symonds.

The first-named was born in 1839, and went to Oxford, where he was elected to a fellowship at Brasenose. He spent the whole of the rest of his life either at that college or in London, practising no profession, competing for no preferment, and for many years at least producing literature itself with extreme sparingness. It was in 1873 that Mr.

Pater first collected a volume of _Studies in the History of Renaissance_, which attracted the keenest attention both as to its manner and as to its matter. The point of view, which was that of an exceedingly refined and carefully guarded Hedonism, was in a way and at least in its formulation novel. Mr. Pater did not meddle with any question of religion; he did not (though there were some who scented immorality in his att.i.tude) offend directly any ethical prejudice or principle. But he laid it down explicitly in some places, implicitly throughout, that the object of life should be to extract to the utmost the pleasure of living in the more refined way, and expressly and especially the pleasure to be derived from education and art. The indebtedness of this both to the Arnoldian and Ruskinian creeds, its advance (in the main a legitimate advance) on the former, and its heretical deviation from the development of the latter, require no comment. But this propaganda, if so violent a word may be used, of Mr.

Pater's placid creed, called to aid a most remarkable style--a style of the new kind, lavish of adjective and the _mot de lumiere_, but not exceedingly florid, and aiming especially at such an arrangement of the clause, the sentence, and the paragraph, such a concerted harmony of cadence and symphony, as had not been deliberately tried before in prose. The effects which it produced on different tastes were themselves sufficiently different. Some found the purport too distasteful to give a dispa.s.sionate attention to the presentment; others disliked the manner itself as formal, effeminate, and "precious." But there were others who, while recognising the danger of excess in this direction, thought and think that a distinct and remarkable experiment had been made in English prose, and that the best examples of it deserved a place with the best examples of the ornater styles at any previous time and in any other kind.