A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895) Part 17

There is no doubt also that the popularity of the novel has been very directly connected with a cause which has had all manner of effects fathered upon it--often with no just causation or filiation whatever--to wit, the spread of education. In the proper sense of course the spread of education must always be strictly limited. The number of educable persons probably bears a pretty constant ratio to the population, and when the education reaches the level of the individual's containing power, it simply runs over and is lost. But it is possible to teach nearly everybody reading and writing; and it is a curious but exact observation that a very large proportion of those who have been taught reading require something to read. Now the older departments of literature do not lend themselves with any facility to constant reading by the average man or woman, whose requirements may be said to be amus.e.m.e.nt rather than positive delight, occupation much rather than intellectual exertion, and above all, something to pa.s.s time. For these requirements, or this compound requirement, the hearing of some new thing has been of old recognised as the surest and most generally useful specific. And the novel holds itself out, not indeed always quite truly, as being new or nothing by name and nature. Accordingly the demand for novels has gone on ever increasing, and the supply has never failed to keep up with it.

Nor would it be just to say that the quality has sunk appreciably. The absolutely palmy day of the English nineteenth century in novel-writing was no doubt some thirty-five or forty years ago. Not even the contemporary France of that date can show such a "galaxy-gallery" as the British novelists--d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, Miss Bronte, George Eliot, Trollope, Kingsley, Bulwer, Disraeli, Lever, Mr. Meredith, and others--who all wrote in the fifties. But at the beginning of the period the towering genius of Scott and the perfect art of Miss Austen, if we add to them Miss Edgeworth's genial talent, did not find very much of even good second-rate matter to back them; there was, as has been said, a positively barren time succeeding this first stage and preceding the "fifty" period; and twenty years or a little more ago, when Thackeray and d.i.c.kens were dead, Trollope and George Eliot past their best, Kingsley and Bulwer moribund, Mr. Meredith writing sparely and unnoticed, the new romantic school not arisen, and no recruit of distinction except Mr. Blackmore firmly set, things were apparently a great deal worse with us in point of novel-writing than they are at present. Whether, with a return of promise and an increase of performance, with a variation of styles and an abundance of experiment, there has also been a relapse into the extravagances which we have had in this very book to chronicle as characterising the fiction of exactly a century ago,--whether we have had over-luxuriant and non-natural style, attempts to attract by loose morality, novels of purpose, novels of problem, and so forth,--and whether the coming age will dismiss much of our most modern work as not superior in literary and inferior in other appeal to the work of G.o.dwin and Lewis, Holcroft and Bage, it is not necessary distinctly to say. But our best is certainly better than the best of that time, our worst is perhaps not worse; and the novel occupies a far higher place in general estimation than it did then.

Indeed it has been observed by the sarcastic that to some readers of novels, and even to some writers of them, "novel" and "book" seem to be synonymous terms, and that when such persons speak of "literature," they mean and pretty distinctly indicate that they mean novel-writing, and novel-writing only. This at least shows that the seed which Scott sowed, or the plant which he grafted, has not lost its vitality.

Certainly not less, perhaps even more, distinctive of the time in history must be that development and transformation of what is broadly called the newspaper, of which the facts and details have occupied two more of these chapters. It is true that at times considerably earlier than even the earliest that here concerns us, periodical writing had been something of a power in England as regards politics, had enlisted eminent hands, and had even served once or twice as the means of introduction of considerable works in _belles lettres_. But the Addisonian Essay had been something of an accident; Swift's partic.i.p.ation in the _Examiner_ was another; Defoe's abundant journalism brought him more discredit than profit or praise; and though Pulteney and the Opposition worked the press against Walpole, the process brought little benefit to the persons concerned. Reviewing was meagrely done and wretchedly paid; the examples of _Robinson Crusoe_ earlier and _Sir Launcelot Greaves_ later are exceptions which prove the rule that the _feuilleton_ was not in demand; in fact before our present period newspaper-writing was rather dangerous, was more than rather disreputable, and offered exceedingly little encouragement to any one to make it the occasion of work in pure literature, or even to employ it as a means of livelihood, while attempting other and higher, though less paying kinds.

The period of the French Revolution, if not the French Revolution itself, changed all this, a.s.sisted no doubt by the natural and inevitable effects of the spread of reading and the multiplication of books. People wanted to see the news; papers sprang up in compet.i.tion to enable them to see the news; and the compet.i.tors strove to make themselves more agreeable than their rivals by adding new attractions.

Again, the activity of the Jacobin party, which early and of course directed itself to the press, necessitated activity on the other side.

The keenest intellects, the best-trained wits of the nation, sometimes under some disguise, sometimes openly, took to journalism, and it became simply absurd to regard the journalist as a disreputable garreteer when Windham and Canning were journalists. The larger sale of books and the formation of a regular system of "pushing" them also developed reviews--too frequently, no doubt, in the direction of mere puffing, but even thus with the beneficent result that other reviews came into existence which were not mere puff-engines.

Even these causes and others will not entirely explain the extraordinary development of periodicals of all kinds from quarterly to daily, of which the _Edinburgh_, _Blackwood_, the _Examiner_, and the _Times_ were respectively the most remarkable examples and pioneers in the earlier years of the century, though as a literary organ the _Morning Post_ had at first rather the advantage of the _Times_. But, as has been said here constantly, you can never explain everything in literary history; and it would be extremely dull if you could. The newspaper press had, for good or for ill, to come; external events to some obvious extent helped its coming; individual talents and apt.i.tudes helped it likewise; but the main determining force was the force of hidden destiny.

There is, however, no mistake possible about the results. It is but a slight exaggeration to say that the periodical rapidly swallowed up all other forms of literature, to this extent and in this sense, that there is hardly a single one of these forms capital performance in which has not at one time or another formed part of the stuff of periodicals, and has not by them been first introduced to the world. Not a little of our poetry; probably the major part of our best fiction; all but a very small part of our essay-writing, critical, meditative, and miscellaneous; and a portion, much larger than would at one time have seemed conceivable, of serious writing in history, philosophy, theology, science, and scholarship, have pa.s.sed through the mint or mill of the newspaper press before presenting themselves in book form. A certain appreciable, though small part of the best, with much of the worst, has never got beyond that form.

To attempt to collect the result of this change is to attempt something not at all easy, something perhaps which may be regarded as not particularly valuable. The distinction between literature and journalism which is so often heard is, like most such things, a fallacy, or at least capable of being made fallacious. Put as it usually is when the intention is disobliging to the journalist, it comes to this:--that the _Essays of Elia_, that Southey's _Life of Nelson_, that some of the best work of Carlyle, Tennyson, Thackeray, and others the list of whom might be prolonged at pleasure, is not literature. Put as it sometimes is by extremely foolish people, it would go to the extent that anything which has _not_ been published in a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly publication is literature.

There is probably no subject on which it is more necessary to clear the mind of cant than this. Of course there is journalism in the sense opposed to literature, though not necessarily opposed in any bad sense.

No wise man intends, and no wise man will ever suffer, articles which are in the strict sense articles, which are intended to comment on merely pa.s.sing events, and to produce a merely immediate effect, to be extracted from journals and put on record as books. Not only is the treatment unsuitable for such record, but it may almost be said that the treatment suitable for things so to be recorded is actually unsuitable for things ephemeral. But there is a very large amount of writing to which this does not in the least apply, and in which it can make no kind of real difference whether the result appears by itself in a bound cloth volume as a whole, or in parts with other things in a pamphlet, covered with paper, or not covered at all. The grain of truth which the fallacy carries is really this:--that the habit of treating some subjects in the peculiar fashion most effective in journalism may spread disastrously to the treatment of other subjects which ought to be treated as literature.

This is a truth, but not a large one. There have been at all times, at least since the invention of printing and probably before it, persons who, though they may be guiltless of having ever written an article in their lives, have turned out more or less ponderous library volumes in which the very worst sins of the worst kind of journalist are rampant.

There are, however, more thoughtful reasons for regarding the development of periodicals as not an unmixed boon to letters. The more evanescent kinds of writing are, putting fiction out of the question, so much the more profitable in journalism that it certainly may tempt--that it certainly has tempted--men who could produce, and would otherwise have produced, solid literature. And there is so much more room in it for light things than for things which the average reader regards as heavy, that the heavy contributor is apt to be at a discount, and the light at a premium. But all this is exceedingly obvious. And it may be met on the other side by the equally obvious consideration already referred to, that periodicals have made the literary life possible in a vast number of cases where it was not possible before; that whereas "toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol" was not a very exaggerated description of its prospects little more than a hundred years ago, the patron has become superfluous, want and the gaol rather unlikely, except in cases of extreme misconduct, incompetence, or ill-luck, while if toil and envy remain unvanquished, they are not specially fated to the literary lot. Indeed the more paradoxical of Devil's Advocates against the press usually urge that it has made the literary life too easy, has tempted too many into it, and has thereby increased the flood of mediocrity.

The most serious objection of all perhaps, though even this is rather idle in face of accomplished facts, is that the perpetual mincing up and boiling down of the const.i.tuents of the diet of reading have produced, in the appet.i.te and digestive faculties of the modern reader, an inability to cope with a really solid meal of perhaps slightly tough matter, and that periodicals not merely eschew the provision of this solid stuff themselves, but do their best to make things worse by manipulating the contents of books that do contain it.

The fact, however, once more, concerns us much more than moralisings about the fact; and the fact of the prominence, the extraordinary prominence, of the periodical press in the nineteenth century, is as little open to dispute as the prominence in that century's later mechanical history of discoveries in electricity, or in its earlier of experiments with steam. Occasionally one may hear enthusiasts of one kind or another announcing with joy or horror that the periodical is killing the book. But if it is, it is very impartially engaged in begetting it at the same time that it kills; and it may be very seriously doubted whether this killing of a book is an easy act of murder to commit. With the printing press to produce, the curiosity of man to demand, and his vanity and greed--if not also his genius and ambition--to supply, the book is in all probability pretty safe. In the forms and varieties of this periodical publication we have seen some interesting changes. As might have been expected, the tendency has been for the intervals of publication to be shortened--for the quarterly to give way as the fashionable form to the monthly, the monthly to the weekly, the weekly to the daily. Many years ago Macaulay, in a mild protest against having his articles altered by Macvey Napier, suggested in effect that the bloom might be left on poor things destined to be read only for a month or so. The duration of an article now may be measured rather by hours than by weeks. Still many of these changes are more apparent than real; and just as the inst.i.tution of the graver monthly reviews twenty years ago simply reintroduced the quarterly article in a scarcely altered form after it had been pushed out of favour by the slighter magazine, so other introductions have been in fact reintroductions.

One point, however, of real importance in literary history remains to be noticed, and that is the conflict between signed and anonymous writing.

Partly from the causes above enumerated as having conduced to the keeping of journalism in a condition of discredit and danger, partly owing to national idiosyncrasies, the habit of anonymous writing was almost universal in the English press at the beginning of the century.

It may have been perfectly well known that such and such an article in the _Quarterly_ was by Southey or Croker, such another in the _Edinburgh_ by Sydney Smith or Macaulay, but the knowledge was, so to speak, unofficial. The question of the ident.i.ty of "Zeta" in _Blackwood_ cost a man's life; and the system resulted (in daily papers especially) in so much editorial inter-mixture and refashioning, that sometimes it would really have been impossible to a.s.sign a single and authentic paternity. Even about the editorship of the great periodicals a sort of coquetry of veiling was preserved, and editors' names, though in most cases perfectly well known, seldom or never appeared.

It is difficult to say exactly when or how this system began to be infringed. But there is no doubt that the prominence given in _Household Words_ to the name and personality of d.i.c.kens, who was not unfriendly to self-advertis.e.m.e.nt, had a good deal to do with it; and when, a little later, the cheap shilling magazines appeared, writing with names became the rule, without them the exception. Criticism, however, for obvious reasons still held back; and it was not till about five and twenty years ago that the example, taken more or less directly from the French, of signed reviews was set by the _Academy_ among weekly papers, and the _Fortnightly_ among monthly reviews. It has been very largely followed even in daily newspapers, and the _Sat.u.r.day Review_ was probably the last newspaper of mark that maintained an absolutely rigid system of anonymity. It should, however, be observed that the change, while not even yet complete--leading articles being still very rarely signed--has by no means united all suffrages, and has even lost some that it had.

Mr. John Morley, for instance, who had espoused it warmly as editor of the _Fortnightly_, and had, perhaps, done more than any other man to spread it, has avowed in a very interesting paper grave doubts about the result. Still it undoubtedly has increased, and is increasing, and in such cases it is much easier to express an opinion that things ought to be diminished, than either to expect that they will, or to devise any means whereby the diminution is to be effected. As for what is desirable as distinguished from what is likely, the weight of opinion may be thought to be in favour of the absence of signature. Anonymous criticism, if abused, may no doubt be abused to a graver extent than is possible with signed criticism. But such a hackneyed maxim as _corruptio optimi_ shows that this is of itself no argument. On the other hand, signed criticism diminishes both the responsibility and the authority of the editor; it adds either an unhealthy gag or an unhealthy stimulus to the tongue and pen of the contributor; it lessens the general weight of the verdict; and it provokes the worst fault of criticism, the aim at showing off the critic's cleverness rather than at exhibiting the real value and character of the thing criticised. And perhaps some may think the most serious objection of all to be that it encourages the employment of critics, and the reception of what they say, rather for their names than for their competence.

In that very important department of literature which stands midway between Belles Lettres and Science, the department of History, the century cannot indeed claim such striking and popularly effective innovations as in the departments of prose fiction and of periodical writing. Yet it may be questioned whether the change of this old kind is not in itself almost as noteworthy as in the other cases is the practical introduction of a new. What the change is was epigrammatically, if somewhat paradoxically, summed up recently by a great authority, Lord Acton. "History," the Cambridge Professor of that art or science said in his inaugural lecture, "has become independent of the historian."

It is possible to demur to the fact, but it is not difficult to explain the meaning. From the necessity of the case, the earliest history, at least in the West, is almost independent of doc.u.ments and records.

Thucydides and Herodotus wrote, the one from what he had actually seen and heard of contemporary events, the other partly from the same sources and partly from tradition of short date. Somewhat later historians of course had their predecessors before them, and in a few cases a certain amount of doc.u.ment, but never a large amount. When history, vernacular or Latin, began to be written again in the dark and middle ages, the absence of doc.u.ments was complicated (except in the case of those early chroniclers, English and Irish chiefly, who merely put down local events) by that more peculiar and unaccountable, though possibly kindred, absence of critical spirit, which, of the many things more or less fancifully attributed to the mediaeval mind, is perhaps the most certain. It is a constant puzzle to modern readers how to account exactly for the fashion in which men, evidently of great intellectual ability, managed to be without any sense of the value of evidence, or any faculty of distinguishing palpable and undoubted fiction from what either was, or reasonably might be held to be, history. But by degrees this sense came into being side by side with the multiplication of the doc.u.ment itself. Even then, however, it was very long before the average historian either could or would regard himself as bound first to consult all the doc.u.ments available, and then to sift and adjust them in accordance rather with the laws of evidence and the teachings of the philosophy of history than with his own predilections, or with the necessities of an agreeable narrative. But the patient industry of the French school of historical scholars, at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, founded this new tradition; the magnificent genius of Gibbon showed how the observance of it might not be incompatible with history-writing of the most literary kind; the national and natural tendency of German study adopted it; and shortly after Gibbon's own day the school of historians, which is nothing if not doc.u.mentary, began gradually to oust that of which the picturesque, if not strictly historical, legend about the Abbe Vertot and his "Mon siege est fait" is the anecdotic _locus cla.s.sicus_ of characterisation.

It has been shown, in the chapter devoted to the subject, how this school of doc.u.mentary historians grew and flourished in England itself, from the days of Turner and Palgrave to those of Froude and Freeman.

Certainly there could not, at least for some time, be said to be any very sensible tendency in history to dispense with the historian, or, in other and perhaps rather more intelligible words, of history ceasing to be literary. No historians have been more omnilegent, more careful of the doc.u.ment, than Carlyle and Macaulay, much as they differed in other respects, and in no histories has the "historian"--that is to say, the personal writer as opposed to the mere "diplomatist"--been more evident than he is in theirs. Nor is it very easy to see why the mere study of the doc.u.ment, still less why the mere acc.u.mulation of the doc.u.ment, should ever render superfluous the intelligent shaping which the historian alone can give. In the first place, doc.u.ments are contradictory and want shifting and harmonising; in the second they want grasping and interpreting; in the third (and most important of all) they need to be made alive.

Nevertheless Lord Acton's somewhat enigmatic utterance points, however vaguely, to real dangers, and it would be idle to say that these dangers have not been exemplified in the period and department we are considering. In the first place, the ever-increasing burden of the doc.u.ments to be consulted is more and more crushing, and more and more likely to induce any one but a mere drudge either to relinquish the task in despair, or to perform it with a constant fear before his eyes, which prevents freedom and breadth of work. In the second it leads, on the one hand, to enormous extension of the scale of histories, on the other to an undue restraining and limiting of their subjects. Macaulay took four large volumes to do, nominally at least, not more than a dozen years; Froude twelve to cover fifty or sixty; Grote as many to deal with the important, but neither long nor richly doc.u.mented, period of Greek, or rather Athenian, flourishing. To this has to be added the very serious drawback that when examination of doc.u.ments is ranked before everything, even the slightest questioning of that examination becomes fatal, and a historian is discredited because some one of his critics has found a doc.u.ment unknown to him, or a flaw, possibly of the slightest importance, in his interpretation of the texts.

Nevertheless it is necessary to lay our account with this new style of history, and it is fortunately possible to admit that the gains of it have not been small. Thanks to its pract.i.tioners, we know infinitely more than our fathers did, though it may not be so certain that we make as good a use of our knowledge. And the evil of multiplication of particulars, like other evils, brings its own cure. The work of mere rough-hewing, of examination into the brute facts, is being done--has to no small extent actually been done--as it never was done before. The "inedited" has ceased to be inedited--is put on record for anybody to examine with little trouble. The mere loss of valuable material, which has gone on in former ages to an extent only partially compensated by the welcome destruction of material that has no value at all, has been stopped. The pioneers of the historical summer (to borrow a decorative phrase from Charles of Orleans) have been very widely abroad, and there is no particular reason why the summer itself should not come.

When it does it will perhaps discard some ways and fashions which have been lately in vogue; but it will a.s.suredly profit by much that has been done during the period we survey, no less in form than in matter. The methods have been to a certain extent improved, the examples have been multiplied, the historical sense has certainly taken a wider and deeper hold of mankind. Very little is wanting but some one _ausus contemnere vana_; and when the future Thucydides or the future Carlyle sets to work, he will be freed, by the labour of others, alike from the paucity of materials that a little weakened Thucydides, and from the brute ma.s.s of them that embittered the life of Carlyle.

Not so much is to be said of the remaining divisions or departments individually. If the drama of the century is not, in so far as acting drama is concerned, almost a blank from the point of view of literature, the literary drama of the century is almost a blank as regards acting qualities. It is true that there have been at times attempts to obtain rest.i.tution of conjugal rights on one side or on the other. In the second and third decades, perhaps a little later, a strong effort was made to give vogue to, and some vogue was obtained for, the scholarly if pale attempts of Milman and Talfourd, and the respectable work of others. Bulwer, his natural genius a.s.sisted by the stage-craft of Macready, brought the acting and the literary play perhaps nearer together than any one else did. Much later still, the mighty authority of Tennyson, taking to dramatic writing at the time when he was the unquestioned head of English poetry and English literature, and a.s.sisted by the active efforts of the most popular actor and manager of the day, succeeded in holding the stage fairly well with plays which are not very dramatic among dramas, and which are certainly not very poetical among their author's poems. With more recent times we have luckily nothing to do, and the a.s.sertions of some authors that they themselves or others have brought back literature to the stage may be left confronted with the a.s.sertions of not a few actors that, for reasons which they do not themselves profess entirely to comprehend, a modern drama is almost bound not to be literary if it is to act, and not to act if it is literary. Some have boldly solved the difficulty by hinting, if not declaring, that the drama is an outworn form except as mere spectacle or entertainment; others have exhausted themselves in solutions of a less trenchant kind; none, it may safely be said, has really solved it. And though it is quite true that what has happened was predicted sixty or seventy years ago, as a result of the breach of the monopoly of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, it is fair to say that the condition of the drama of at least a quarter of a century earlier had been little if at all better than it has been since. It is a simple fact that since Sheridan we have had no dramatist who combined very high acting with very high literary merit.

Of what have been called the applied departments of literature, a somewhat less melancholy account has to be given; but, except in their enormous multiplication of quant.i.ty, they present few opportunities for remarks of a general character.

Very great names have been added to the list of theological writers, but these names on the whole belong to the earlier rather than to the later portion of the period, and even then something of a change has been observable in the kinds of their writing. The sermon, that is to say the literary sermon, has become more and more uncommon; and the popular ear which calls upon itself to hear sermons at all prefers usually what are styled practical discourses, often deviating very considerably from the sermon norm, or else extremely florid addresses modelled on later Continental patterns, and having as a rule few good literary qualities.

So, too, the elaborate theological treatise has gone out of fashion, and it may be doubted whether, at least for the last half century, a single book of the kind has been added to the first cla.s.s of Anglican theological writing. This writing has thus taken the form either of discourses of the older kind, maintained in existence by endowment or by old prescription, such as the Bampton Lectures, or of rather popular polemics, or of what may be called without disrespect theological journalism of various kinds. The general historical energy of the century, moreover, has not displayed itself least in the theological department, and valuable additions have been made, not merely to general church history, but to a vast body of biography and journal-history, as well as to a certain amount of Biblical scholarship. In this latter direction English scholars have distinguished themselves by somewhat less violation of the rules of criticism in general than their foreign brethren and masters. But it cannot be said that the nineteenth century is ever likely to rank high in the history of English theology. Even its greatest names--Irving, Chalmers, the Oxford leaders, and others, with perhaps the single exception of Newman--are important much more personally and as influences than as literary figures; while the rank and file, putting history aside, have been distinctly less noteworthy than in any of the three preceding centuries.

The "handmaid of theology" has received, at any rate during the first half of the period, or even the first three-quarters, more distinguished attentions than her mistress; and the additions made to the list headed by Erigena and Anselm, if we allow Latin to count, by Bacon and Hobbes, if we stick to the vernacular, have been many and great. Yet it would not be unreasonable laudation of times past to say that there hardly, after Hume's death, arose any philosopher who combined the originality, the acuteness, and the literary skill of Hume during the first half of this century, while certainly, at least till within a period forbidden to our scheme, the latter part of the time has not seen any writer who could vie even with those of the earlier. To a certain extent the historical and critical tendencies so often noticed have here been unfortunate, inasmuch as they have diverted philosophical students from original writing--or at least from writing as original as the somewhat narrow and self-repeating paths of philosophy admit--to historical and critical exercises. But there is also no doubt that the immense authority which the too long neglected writers of Germany attained, a little before the middle of the century, has been unfortunate in at least one respect, if not also in others. The ignorant contempt of technicalities, and the determination to refer all things to common sense employing common language, which distinguished the eighteenth century with us, was certain to provoke a reaction; and this reaction, a.s.sisted by imitation of the Germans, produced in the decades from 1840 onwards an ever-increasing tendency among English philosophers or students of philosophy to employ a jargon often as merely technical as the language of the schoolmen, and not seldom far emptier of any real argument. It is not too much to say that if the rough methods of Hobbes with a terminology far less fallacious, were employed with this jargon, it would look much poorer than Bramhall's scholasticisms look in the hands of the redoubtable Nominalist. Fortunately of late there have been more signs than one of yet another turn of tide, and of a fresh appeal to the _communis sensus_, not it may be hoped of the obstinately and deafly exoteric character of the eighteenth century, but such as will refuse to pay itself with words, and will exercise a judicious criticism in a language understanded of all educated people. Then, and not till then, we may expect to meet philosophy that is literature and literature that is philosophic.

Science, that is to say physical science, which has sometimes openly boasted itself as about to take, and has much more commonly made silent preparations for taking, the place both of philosophy and of theology, will hardly be said by the hardiest of her adherents to have done very much to justify these claims to seats not yet quite vacant from the point of view of the purely literary critic. We have had some excellent scientific writers, from Bishop Watson to Professor Huxley; and some of the books of the century which would deserve remembrance and reading, whatever their subject matter, have been books of science. Yet it is scarcely rash to a.s.sert that the essential characteristics of science and the essential characteristics of literature are, if not so diametrically opposed as some have thought, at any rate very far apart from one another. Literature can never be scientific; and though science may be literary, yet it is rather in the fashion in which a man borrows some alien vesture in order to present himself, in compliance with decency and custom, at a foreign court. Mathematics give us the example--perhaps the only example--of pure science, of what all science would be if it could, and of what it approaches, ever more nearly, as far as it can. It is needless to say that the perfect presentation of mathematics is in pure symbols, divested of all form and colour, of all personal tincture and bias. And it should be equally superfluous to add that it is in form and colour, in suggestion of sound rather than in precise expression and sense, in personal bias and personal tincture, that not merely the attraction but the very essence of literature consists.

By so much as verbal science or scholarship, which would seem to be more especially bound to be literature, claims to be and endeavours to be strictly scientific, by so much also necessarily does it divorce itself from the literature which it studies. This, if not an enormously great, is certainly rather a sore evil; and it is one of the most considerable and characteristic signs of the period we are discussing. The older scholarship, though sufficiently minute, still clung to the literary side proper: it was even, in the technical dialect of one of the universities, opposed to "science," which word indeed was itself used in a rather technical way. The invention of comparative philology, with its even more recent off-shoot phonetics, has changed all this, and we now find "linguistic" and "literary" used by common consent as things not merely different but hostile, with a further tendency on the part of linguistics to claim the term "scholarship" exclusively for itself.

This could hardly in any case be healthy. What may be the abstract value of the science, or group of sciences, called philology, it is perhaps not necessary here to inquire. It is sufficient to say that it clearly has nothing to do with literature except in accidental and remote applications, that it stands thereto much as geology does to architecture. Unfortunately, while the scientific side of scholarship is thus becoming, if it has not become, wholly unliterary, the aesthetic side has shown signs of becoming, to far too great an extent, unscientific in the bad and baneful sense. With some honourable exceptions, we find critics of literature too often divided into linguists who seem neither to think nor to be capable of thinking of the meaning or the melody, of the individual and technical mastery, of an author, a book, or a pa.s.sage, and into loose aesthetic rhetoricians who will sometimes discourse on aeschylus without knowing a second aorist from an Attic perfect, and p.r.o.nounce eulogies or depreciations on Virgil without having the faintest idea whether there is or is not any authority for _quamvis_ with one mood rather than another. Nor is it possible to see what eirenicon is likely to present itself between two parties, of whom the extremists on the one side may justly point to such things as have here been quoted, while the extremists on the other feel it a duty to p.r.o.nounce phonetics the merest "hariolation," and a very large part of what goes by the name of philology ingenious guesswork, some of which may possibly not be false, but hardly any of which can on principles of sound general criticism be demonstrated to be true. It is not wonderful, though it is in the highest degree unhealthy, that the stricter scholars should be more or less scornfully relinquishing the province of literary criticism altogether, while the looser aesthetics consider themselves ent.i.tled to neglect scholarship in any proper sense with a similarly scornful indifference.

It is, however, impossible that offences of this sort should not come now and then in the history of literature, and fortunately, in that history, they disappear as they appear. For the present purpose it is more important to conclude this conclusion with a few general remarks on the past, fewer on the present, and fewest of all on the future.

On this last head, indeed, no words were perhaps even better than even fewest; though something of the sort may be expected. Rash as prophecy always is, it is never quite so rash as in literature; and though we can sometimes, looking backward, say--perhaps even then with some rashness--that such and such a change might or ought to have been expected, it is very seldom that we can, when deprived of this illegitimate advantage, vaticinate on such subjects with any safety. Yet the study of the present always, so to speak, includes and overlaps something of the future, and by comparison at least of other presents we can discern what it is at least not improbable that the future may be.

What, then, is the present of literature in England?

It can be described with the greater freedom that, as constantly repeated, we are not merely at liberty _ex hypothesi_ to omit references to individuals, but are _ex hypothesi_ bound to exclude them. And no writer, as it happens rather curiously, of anything like great promise or performance who was born later than the beginning of the fifties has died as yet, though the century is so near its close. Yet again, all the greatest men of the first quarter of the century, with the single exception of Mr. Ruskin, are gone; and not many of the second remain. By putting these simple and unmistakable facts together it will be seen, in a fashion equally free from liability to cavil and from disobliging glances towards persons, that the present is at best a stationary state in our literary history. Were we distinctly on the mounting hand, it is, on the general calculation of the liabilities of human life, certain that we must have had our Sh.e.l.ley or our Keats side by side with our Wordsworth and our Coleridge. That we have much excellent work is certain; that we have much of the absolutely first cla.s.s not so. And if we examine even the good work of our younger writers we shall find in much of it two notes or symptoms--one of imitation or exaggeration, the other of uncertain and eccentric quest for novelty--which have been already noted above as signs of decadence or transition.

Whether it is to be transition or decadence, that is the question. For the solution of it we can only advance with safety a few considerations, such as that in no literary history have periods of fresh and first-rate production ever continued longer than--that they have seldom continued so long as--the period now under notice, and that it is reasonable, it is almost certain, that, though by no means an absolutely dead season, yet a period of comparatively faint life and ill.u.s.tration should follow. To this it may be added as a consideration not without philosophical weight that the motives, the thoughts, the hopes, the fears, perhaps even the manners, which have defrayed the expense of the literary production of this generation, together with the literary forms in which, according to custom, they have embodied and ensconced themselves, have been treated with unexampled, certainly with unsurpa.s.sed, thoroughness, and must now be near exhaustion; while it is by no means clear that any fresh set is ready to take their place. It is on this last point, no doubt, that the more sanguine prophets would like to fight the battle, urging that new social ideas, and so forth, _are_ in possession of the ground. But this is not the field for that battle.

In dealing with what has been, with the secular hour that we have actually and securely had, we are on far safer, if not on positively safe ground. Here the sheaves are actually reaped and brought home; and if the teller of them makes a mistake, his judgment, and his judgment only, need be at fault. Not all ways of such telling are of equal value.

It may be tempting, for instance, but can hardly be very profitable, to attempt to strike an exact balance between the production of the century from 1780 to 1880 with that of the other great English literary century from 1580 to 1680. Dear as the exercise is to some literary accountants, there is perhaps no satisfactory system of book-keeping by which we can really set the a.s.sets and the liabilities of the period from the appearance of Spenser to the death of Browne against the a.s.sets and liabilities of that from the appearance of Burns to the death of Tennyson, and say which has the greater sum to its credit. Still more vague and futile would it be to attempt to set with any exactness this balance-sheet against that of the other great literary periods of other countries, languages, and times. Here again, most emphatically, accuracy of this kind is _not_ to be expected.

But what we can say with confidence and profit is that the nineteenth century in England and English is of these great periods, and of the greatest of them; that it has taken its place finally and certainly, with a right never likely to be seriously challenged, and in a rank never likely to be much surpa.s.sed.

The period which lisped its numbers in Burns and Blake and Cowper, which broke out into full song with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, and Keats, which, not to mention scores of minor singers, took up the tale with Tennyson and Browning and pa.s.sed it on to Arnold, Rossetti, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Swinburne, need fear no comparisons in the matter of poetry. In prose fiction, as we have seen, it stands alone. It is almost a century of origins as regards the most important kinds; it is quite a century of capital and cla.s.sical performance in them. In "making"--prose or verse--no time leaves record of performance more distinguished or more various.

That in one great literary kind, drama, it exhibits lamentable deficiency, that indeed in that kind it hardly counts at all, has been admitted; and it is not probable that in any of the serious prose kinds, except history, it will ever rank very high when compared with others.

Its theology has, as far as literature is concerned, been a little wanting in dignity, in finish, and even in fervour, its philosophy either commonplace or jargonish, its exercises in science and scholarship ever divorcing themselves further from literary ideals. But in the quality of its miscellaneous writing, as well as in the facilities given to such writing by its special growth--some would say its special fungus--of the periodical, it again rises to the first cla.s.s. Hardly the period of Montaigne and Bacon, certainly not that of Dryden, Cowley, and Temple, nor that of Addison and Steele, nor that of Johnson and Goldsmith, can vie with the century of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, of Leigh Hunt and Thomas de Quincey, of Macaulay and Thackeray and Carlyle, of Arnold and Mr. Ruskin. Miscellaneous we have been,--perhaps too much so,--but we should be a little saved by the excellence of some of our miscellanists.

Pessimists would probably say that the distinguishing and not altogether favourable notes of the century are a somewhat vagabond curiosity in matter and a tormented unrest of style. The former concerns us little, and is chiefly noticeable here because of the effect which it has had on the great transformation of historical writing so often noticed; the latter concerns us intimately. And no doubt there is hardly a single feature--not even the growth of the novel, not even the development of the newspaper--which will so distinctly and permanently distinguish this century in English literary history as the great changes which have come over style, and especially prose style. There has been less opportunity to notice these collectively in any of the former chapters than there has been to notice some other changes: nor was this of much importance, for the present is the right place for gathering up the fragments.

The change of style in prose is undoubtedly as much the leading feature of the century as is in poetry the change of thought and outlook, on which latter enough perhaps has been said elsewhere; the whole of our two long chapters on poetry being indeed, with great part of this conclusion, a continuous exposition of it. But the change in prose was neither confined to, nor specially connected with, any single department of literature. Indirectly indeed, and distantly, it may be said to have been connected with the growth of the essay and the popularity of periodicals; and yet it is not quite certain that this was anything more than a coincidence due to the actual fact that the first extensive pract.i.tioners of ornate prose, Wilson and De Quincey, were in a way journalists.

That the sudden ornateness, in part a mere ordinary reaction, was also in part due to a reflection of the greater gorgeousness of poetry, though it was in itself less a matter of thought than of style, is true.

But literary reactions are always in part at least literary developments; and after the prose of Burke and Gibbon, even after that of Johnson, it was certain that the excessive plainness reached in the mid-eighteenth century would be exchanged for something else. But it could not possibly have been antic.i.p.ated that the change would exhibit the extent or the variety that it has actually shown.

That it has enriched English literature with a great deal of admirable matter is certain; that it has not merely produced a great deal of sad stuff, but has perhaps inflicted some permanent or at least lasting damage on the purity, the simplicity, and in the best sense the strength of style, is at least equally certain. It is less easy to say whether it is, as a movement, near its close, or with what sort of reaction it is likely to be followed. On the one hand the indication of particular follies and excesses may not seem decisive; for there is little doubt that in all the stages of this _flamboyant_ movement--from De Quincey to Carlyle, from Carlyle to Mr. Ruskin, from Mr. Ruskin to persons whom it is unnecessary to mention--the advocates of the sober styles thought and said that the force of extravagance could no further go, and that the last outrages had been committed on the dignity and simplicity of English. On the other hand there are signs, which are very unlikely to deceive the practised critic, tending to show that the mode is likely to change. When actual frippery is seen hanging up in Monmouth Street or Monmouth Street's successors, when cheap imitations of fashionable garments crowd the shop windows and decorate the bodies of the vulgar--then the wise know that this fashion will shortly change. And certainly something similar may be observed in literature to-day.

Cacophony jostles preciousness in novel and newspaper; attempts at contorted epigram appear side by side with slips showing that the writer has not the slightest knowledge of the cla.s.sics in the old sense, and knows exceedingly little of anything that can be called cla.s.sic in the widest possible acceptation of the term. Tyrannies cease when the cobblers begin to fear them; fashions, especially literary fashions, when the cobblers take them up.

Yet the production of what must or may be called literature is now so large, and in consequence of the spread of what is called education the appet.i.te so largely exceeds the taste for it, that it is not so easy as it would once have been to forecast the extent and validity of any reaction that may take place.

If, without undue praising of times past, without pleading guilty to the prejudices sometimes attributed to an academic education, and also without trespa.s.sing beyond the proper limits of this book, it may be permitted to express an opinion on the present state of English literature, that opinion, while it need not be very gloomy, can hardly be very sanguine. And one ground for discouragement, which very especially concerns us, lies in the fact that on the whole we are now _too_ "literary." Not, as has been said, that the general taste is too refined, but that there is a too indiscriminate appet.i.te in the general; not that the actual original force of our writers is, with rare exceptions, at all alarming, but that a certain amount of literary craftsmanship, a certain knowledge of the past and present of literature, is with us in a rather inconvenient degree. The public demands quant.i.ty, not quality; and it is ready, for a time at any rate, to pay for its quant.i.ty with almost unheard of returns, both, as the homely old phrase goes, in praise and in pudding. And the writer, though seldom hampered by too exact an education in form, has had books, as a rule, too much with him. Sometimes he simply copies, and knows that he copies; oftener, without knowing it, he follows and imitates, while he thinks that he is doing original work.

And worse than all this, the abundance of reading has created an altogether artificial habit--a habit quite as artificial as any that can ever have prevailed at other periods--of regarding the main stuff and substance of literature. Much reading of novels, which are to the ordinary reader his books, and his only books, has induced him to take their standards as the standards of both nature and life. And this is all the more dangerous because in all probability the writers of these very novels have themselves acquired their knowledge, formed their standards, in a manner little if at all more first-hand. We have nature, not as Jones or Brown saw it for himself, but as he saw it through the spectacles of Mr. Ruskin or of Jefferies; art, not as he saw it himself, but as he saw it through those of Mr. Ruskin again or of Mr. Pater; literary criticism as he learnt it from Mr. Arnold or from Sainte-Beuve; criticism of life as he took it from Thackeray or from Mr. Meredith.

Something like this has occurred at least three times before in the history of European literature. It happened in late Graeco-Roman times, and all the world knows what the cure was then, and how the much-discussed barbarian cleared the mind of Europe of its literary cant by very nearly clearing out all the literature as well. It happened on a much smaller scale, and with a less tremendous purgation, at the close of the Middle Ages, when the world suddenly, as it were, shut up one library and opened another; and at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, when it shut both of these or the greater part of them, and took to a small bookshelf of "cla.s.sics," a slender stock of carefully observed formulae and--common sense.