Halleck's New English Literature Part 56

[Footnote 14: _Sonnet_: "The world is too much with us."]

[Footnote 15: _Hart Leap Well_.]

[Footnote 16: _A Day-Dream_.]

[Footnote 17: _Biographia Literaria_, Chapter XIV.]

[Footnote 18: _Ibid_., Chapter XXII.]

[Footnote 19: _Manfred_, Act I.]

[Footnote 20: _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_, Canto III.]

[Footnote 21: _The Dream_.]

[Footnote 22: _Adonais_, Stanza xlix]

[Footnote 23: _Epipsychidion_.]

[Footnote 24: _Ode to the West Wind_.]

[Footnote 25: For a discussion of the different sensory images of the poets, see the author's _Education of the Central Nervous System_, pages 109-208.]

[Footnote 26: _Sleep and Poetry_.]

[Footnote 27: For full t.i.tles, see p. 50.]

[Footnote 28: For full t.i.tles, see p. 6.]

CHAPTER IX: THE VICTORIAN AGE, 1837-1900

History of the Period.--In the two periods of English history most remarkable for their accomplishment, the Elizabethan and the Victorian, the throne was occupied by women. Queen Victoria, the granddaughter of George III., ruled from 1837 to the beginning of 1901. Her long reign of sixty-three years may be said to close with the end of the nineteenth century.

For nearly fifty years after the battle of Waterloo (1815), England had no war of magnitude. In 1854 she joined France in a war against Russia to keep her from taking Constantinople. Tennyson's well-known poem, _The Charge of the Light Brigade_, commemorates an incident in this b.l.o.o.d.y contest, which was successful in preventing Russia from dismembering Turkey.

When the Turks ma.s.sacred the Christians in Bulgaria in 1876, Russia fought and conquered Turkey. England again intervened, this time after the war, in the Berlin Congress (1878). In return for her diplomatic services and for a guaranty to maintain the integrity of certain Turkish territory, England received from Turkey the island of Cyprus.

As a result of this Congress, the princ.i.p.alities of Roumania, Servia, and Bulgaria were formed, but the Turk was allowed to remain in Europe. A later English prime minister, Lord Salisbury (1830-1903), referring to England's espousal of the Turkish cause, said that she had "backed the wrong horse." The b.l.o.o.d.y war of 1912-1913 between Turkey and the allied armies of Bulgaria, Servia, Montenegro, and Greece was the result of this mistake.

An important part of England's history during this period centers around the expansion, protection, and development of her colonies in Asia, Australia, Africa, and America. England was then constantly agitated by the fear that Russia might grow strong enough to seize India or some other English colonial possessions.

A serious rebellion in India (1857) led England to take from the East India Company the government of that colony. "Empress of India" was later (1876) added to the t.i.tles of Queen Victoria. Had India not been an English colony, literature might not have had Kipling's fascinating _Jungle Books_ and Hindu stories. England's protectorate over Egypt (1882) was a.s.sumed in order to strengthen her control over the newly completed Suez Ca.n.a.l (1869), which was needed for her communication with India and her Australian colonies.

The Boer war in South Africa (1899-1902)required the largest number of troops that England ever mustered into service in any of her wars. The final outcome of this desperate struggle was the further extension of her South African possessions.

In the nineteenth century, England's most notable political achievement was "her successful rule over colonies, ranging from India, with its 280,000,000 subjects, to Fanning Island with its population of thirty." Her tactful guidance was for the must part directed toward enabling them to develop and to govern themselves. She had learned a valuable lesson from the American revolution.

Ireland, however, failed to secure her share of the benefits that usually resulted from English rule. She was neither regarded as a colony, like Australia, nor as an integral part of England. For the greater part of the century her condition was deplorable. The great prime minister, William E. Gladstone (1809-1898), tried to secure needed home rule for her, but did not succeed. Toward the end of the century, more liberal laws regarding the tenure of the land and more self-government afforded some relief from unjust conditions.

During the Victorian age the government of England became more democratic. Two reform bills (1867 and 1884) gave almost unrestricted suffrage to men. The extension of the franchise and the granting of local self-government to her counties (1888) made England one of the most democratic of all nations. Her monarch has less power than the president of the United States.

The Victorian age saw the rise of trades unions and the pa.s.sing of many laws to improve the condition of the working cla.s.ses. As the tariff protecting the home grower of wheat had raised the price of bread and caused much suffering to the poor, England not only repealed this duty (1846) but also became practically a free-trade country. The age won laurels in providing more educational facilities for all, in abridging cla.s.s privileges, and in showing increasing recognition of human rights, without a b.l.o.o.d.y revolution such as took place in France. A rough indication of the amount of social and moral progress is the decrease in the number of convicts in England, from about 50,000 at the accession of Victoria to less than 6000 at her death.

An Age of Science and Invention.--In the extent and the variety of inventions, in their rapid improvement and utilization for human needs, and in general scientific progress, the sixty-three years of the Victorian age surpa.s.sed all the rest of historic time.

When Victoria ascended the throne, the stage coach was the common means of traveling; only two short pieces of railroad had been constructed; the electric telegraph had not been developed; few steamships had crossed the Atlantic. The modern use of the telephone would then have seemed as improbable as the wildest Arabian Nights'

tale. Before her reign ended, the railroad, the telegraph, the steamship, and the telephone had wrought an almost magical change in travel and in communication.

The Victorian age introduced anaesthetics and antiseptic surgery, developed photography, the sciences of chemistry and physics, of biology and zoology, of botany and geology. The enthusiastic scientific worker appeared in every field, endeavoring to understand the laws of nature and to apply them in the service of man. Science also turned its attention to human progress and welfare. The new science of sociology had earnest students.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHARLES DARWIN.]

The Influence of Science on Literature.--The Victorian age was the first to set forth clearly the evolution hypothesis, which teaches the orderly development from simple to complex forms. While the idea of evolution had suggested itself to many naturalists, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was the first to gain a wide hearing for the theory. After years of careful study of nature, he published in 1859 _The Origin of Species by Natural Selection_, an epoch-making work, which had a far-reaching effect on the thought of the age.

The influence of his doctrine of evolution is especially apparent in Tennyson's poetry, in George Eliot's fiction, in religious thought, and in the change in viewing social problems. In his _Synthetic Philosophy_, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), philosopher and metaphysician, applied the doctrine of evolution not only to plants and animals but also to society, morality, and religion.

Two eminent scientists, John Tyndall (1820-1893) and Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), did much to popularize science and to cause the age to seek a broader education. Tyndall's _Fragments of Science_ (1871) contains a fine lecture on the _Scientific Use of the Imagination_, in which he becomes almost poetic in his imaginative conception of evolution:--

"Not alone the more ign.o.ble forms of animalcular or animal life, not alone the n.o.bler forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but the human mind itself,--emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena,--were once latent in a fiery cloud... All our philosophy, all our poetry, all our science, and all our art,--Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael,--are potential in the fires of the sun."

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN TYNDALL.]

Unlike Keats in his _Lamia_, Tyndall is firm in his belief that science will not clip the wings of imagination. In the same lecture he says:--

"How are we to lay hold of the physical basis of light, since, like that of life itself, it lies entirely without the domain of the senses? We are gifted with the power of imagination and by this power we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of the senses... Bounded and conditioned by cooperant reason, imagination becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer.

Newton's pa.s.sage from a falling apple to a falling moon was at the outset a leap of the imagination."

Huxley was even a more brilliant interpreter of science to popular audiences. His so-called _Lay Sermons_ (1870) are invigorating presentations of scientific and educational subjects. He awakened many to a sense of the importance of "knowing the laws of the physical world" and "the relations of cause and effect therein." Nowhere is he more impressive than where he forces us to admit that we must all play the chess game of life against an opponent that never makes an error and never fails to count our mistakes against us.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THOMAS HUXLEY. _From the painting by Collier, National Portrait Gallery_.]

"The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature.

The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong man shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated--without haste, but without remorse.

"Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws."[1]

We find the influence of science manifest in much of the general literature of the age, as well as in the special writings of the scientists. Science introduced to literature a new interest in humanity and impressed on writers what is known as the "growth idea."

Preceding literature, with the conspicuous exception of Shakespeare's work, had for the most part presented individuals whose character was already fixed. This age loved to show the growth of souls. George Eliot's novels are frequently Darwinian demonstrations of the various steps in the moral growth or the perversion of the individual. In _Rabbi Ben Ezra_, Browning thus expresses this new idea of the working of the Divine Power:--

"He fixed thee mid this dance Of plastic circ.u.mstance."

The Trend of Prose; Minor Prose Writers.--The prose of this age is remarkable for amount and variety. In addition to the work of the scientists, there are the essays and histories of Macaulay and Carlyle, the essays and varied prose of Newman, the art and social philosophy of Ruskin, the critical essays of Matthew Arnold and Swinburne.

One essayist, Walter Pater (1839-1894), an Oxford graduate and teacher, who kept himself aloof from contemporary thought, produced almost a new type of serious prose, distinguished for color, ornamentation, melody, and poetic thought. Even such prosaic objects as wood and brick were to his retrospective gaze "half mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows where." His object was to charm his reader, to haunt him with vague suggestions rather than to make a logical appeal to him, or to add to his world of vivid fact, after the manner of Macaulay. A quotation from Pater's most brilliant essay, _Leonardo Da Vinci_, in the volume, _The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry_[2] (1873) will show some of the characteristics of his prose. This description of Da Vinci's masterpiece, the portrait of Mona Lisa, has added to the world-wide fame of that picture--

"Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come,'

and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite pa.s.sions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek G.o.ddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with its maladies has pa.s.sed!... She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands."

The period from 1780 to 1837 had only two great writers of fiction,--Scott and Jane Austen; but the Victorian age saw the novel gain the ascendancy that the drama enjoyed in Elizabethan times.