Social Transformations of the Victorian Age Part 11

While this was going on in London, the entire provinces were vigorously taking their part in the new movement. The death of the d.u.c.h.ess of Gloucester in 1857 was not allowed by the Queen's representative to interfere with his opening in that year the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, the completeness of which was largely due to the Royal encouragement to private owners to send their statues and paintings to the show. Thirty years later the Jubilee anniversary of 1887 was observed in the same city by a like display of the creations of British genius. Then the objects exhibited were the property no longer of the leisured, or a patrician cla.s.s. They belonged also to the new patrons whom, during less than half a century, success in manufacture and commerce, accompanied by the liberal agencies of travel and education have stimulated to compet.i.tion with the social order whose exclusive appanage art encouragement once was. The material proof of art progress is the increase of art values. Many instances of these were given in an earlier chapter.

During his lifetime David c.o.x was glad to sell his landscapes for 20. c.o.x had formed his genius amid the rural scenes of Hereford. He never liked London. After living there fourteen years he settled at Birmingham. Here, during his lifetime he had the satisfaction of seeing his masterpiece in oil colour bought for 40. Ten years later, when the painter was dead, it secured 50 in the open market. In the early seventies a Birmingham manufacturer, the former partner of Mr Chamberlain gave for it 2,300. In the same way De Wint's landscapes during his lifetime seldom commanded more than 50. To-day they sometimes fetch 1,000, and are reckoned cheap at 700 or 800 guineas.

The social consideration, and with it the commercial possibilities, of any professional calling have in England always been regulated by its degree of connection with the State. The department of practical art established at South Kensington with the encouragement of the Prince Consort under the Directorship of Mr Henry Cole in 1852 had no sooner expanded into the science and art department under the President of the Council instead of under the Board of Trade than the social repute of pract.i.tioners in all branches of decorative art appreciably improved.

About this time, too, Marlborough House, up to that date an asylum for exhibited pictures and a receptacle for the Duke of Wellington's funeral car, suggested itself as a future residence for the Prince of Wales when he came to have an establishment of his own. In 1856-7, therefore, the House of Commons, without demur, allotted 10,000 for the removal of the chaos of artistic treasures from their temporary resting place in Pall Mall to their permanent home in South Kensington. Hither, therefore, were sent the national purchases made at the sale of the Bernal collection, a full account of which has been given in an earlier chapter.

Directly art was in this way officially and substantially incorporated by the State, the golden stream of private munificence with no check and in great volume flowed towards Brompton. Most readers of these lines will remember the consignment to this wealthy spot of the d.i.c.kens ma.n.u.scripts and relics as well as the library and paintings bequeathed to it by the friend and biographer of d.i.c.kens, the late John Forster, in 1876. These had some years earlier been preceded by the pictures, bric-a-brac, and foreign furniture collected by various private connoisseurs, now stowed away in the gla.s.s-covered cabinets which line the galleries and which, studied daily by English artizans, have probably done more than the '51 Exhibition ever effected, towards improving the designs of English manufacture.

South Kensington, it should be remembered, is richer even than it appears.

Its activities are ubiquitous. It is a bank of art treasures on which inst.i.tutions affiliated to it throughout the Kingdom can draw at discretion. To-day this department of State, decorative as to its purpose, but distinctly remunerative as to its results, is supported by an annual endowment of nearly half a million. That outlay not only gives profitable holidays to countless pleasure seekers from every quarter of the Kingdom; it enables a yearly average of 30,000 pupils of both s.e.xes to pa.s.s through its art and science cla.s.ses.

This apparatus for developing and training the future artists of England has been accompanied with an increasingly lavish expenditure by the State when a chance has occurred of permanently adding to its artistic wealth.

Thus, during the early eighties the Treasury paid for a single painting from the Blenheim collection, the Ansidei Madonna of Raphael, exactly the same sum that, thirty years earlier, had been voted for the entire collection of Sir Robert Peel.[85]

The transformation effected during the Victorian age in the position of English art is ill.u.s.trated by the statistics of visitors to the Royal Academy exhibitions not less significantly than by the increase of prices itself. Only within the last few years has what is called the 'private'

view of the Royal Academy become a fete day of fashionable society;--a promenade for the display of the latest devices in Parisian or Bond Street toilettes. Long after the great Exhibition or even the Prince Consort's death, it was that the view of the critics, from being confined strictly to the judges of the press, began to be transformed into an immense meeting of authors, scholars, divines, novelists of both s.e.xes, art fanciers of every degree; all of them able to produce some credentials of critical apt.i.tude or profession, and of some slight connection with periodical letters. The figures themselves shall tell their tale. To the earliest exhibition at the Academy rooms, then in Trafalgar Square, of the Queen's reign, the admissions were less than 79,000. Ten years later they just fell short of 91,000. Between 1846 and 1866 the increase was 94,000.

The additions steadily continued till in 1879 the high water mark of 391,197 was reached. Since that date they have fluctuated: depending, as one might naturally expect, upon the state of trade in the country, upon the weather in town, or upon the general character of the London season.

Thus, in 1896, which was not a very brilliant season, the admissions were 10 less than in the preceding year, or in the Queen's jubilee year of 1887.

The mutual relations of art and wealth are probably for the most part beneficial to each. The painter, during the latter half of the whole Victorian age, has been the chief educator of the plutocrat, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti shrewdly antic.i.p.ated must prove the case. If the intellectual teaching of the brush were not easily apprehended, there would, for the representatives of the new wealth, have been no special training in the humanities at all. As it is, the aristocracy of wealth, following the creditable example of the aristocracy of birth, in England as well as Italy, has secured for itself mental culture not less than social distinction by its patronage of the creators of the nation's art.

To that role it brings the shrewdness already displayed in making its fortune. Such a patron may be a generous paymaster; he insists on having value for his money; he is quick to detect scamped work, or shortcomings in technical detail; he no longer, as he was once fabled to do, buys his canvases at so much per square foot any more than he fills his library shelves by the yard. That no meritorious artist in Victorian England is now likely to live and die so miserably as Haydon is due to the fact that the newest wealth finds its natural outlet in the encouragement of the oldest art. No aggregate of spiritual or intellectual interests has ever been firmly established in England without being subject to some great organic movement as a test of vitality before its roots struck deep in the soil of British minds. Literature experienced many such phases. So did science. So also, in the Oxford Anglican movement and in others since then, did religion. Before, therefore, the new art was firmly enthroned in our midst, it was at once shaken and quickened by that nineteenth century revolution known as pre-Raphaelite; about this so much has been written by recent experts as to absolve one from the duty of dwelling on it in detail here. Art in the hands of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, and other men of genius entered upon this ordeal as a sectional and limited pursuit.

It came forth a new national interest or rather one of European concern as well. Without that severe process of discipline, Leighton and Millais, to mention only two typical names, would not have taken their place as masters of the brush for a continental as well as for an insular public.

Nor would the fame of the English school first known through the Paris Exhibition of 1855, extended by the Paris Exhibition of 1868, have secured for English artists representation in all the great galleries of the world, and have added to British painters or to their national themes the crown of foreign recognition and of cosmopolitan esteem. Later chroniclers of the Victorian age may be able to record the same progress in the sculptor's, as in the painter's art. Our climate is not favourable to the out of door triumphs of the plastic art. But those who have examined the statue of Outram in Pall Mall; who have gazed upon the effigy of the great Duke of Wellington by Alfred Stevens in St Paul's; or have noted the growing power as well as popularity of Hamo Th.o.r.n.ycroft, still a young man, cannot doubt that, apart from the successful labours of a naturalized but most patriotic foreigner and his school, Sir Edgar Boehm, the English chisel is in a fair way of emulating the progress of the English brush.

Commercial prosperity in art, as in other things, moves in cycles. The years between 1870 and 1885 were very prosperous to English painters. The lean years followed then, and are still being experienced while these lines are written. As to the high prices given at Christie's and set forth elsewhere in this volume, they have been generally for the works of old and departed masters. With very few exceptions, the decade between 1886 and 1896 has witnessed none of those prices for contemporary artists which marked the preceding period. This, too, notwithstanding the standard of artistic work to-day is infinitely higher than it was; and that the paintings which were hung on the line and were the talk of the town thirty years ago, would have a very slight chance of being accepted at all to-day.[86]

CHAPTER XXVI

POPULAR CULTURE IN THE CRUCIBLE

Translation into fact of ideals not less than transformations seen in the People's Palace, Whitechapel, and in the free libraries, originated by the Ewart Act, affecting as they do all contemporary life. The working of these in town and country. Proved connection between popular education and morality; what books free libraries like best. a.n.a.logous work for upper cla.s.ses done by Mudie's, and by the London Library. Their progress traced. Help rendered by these to public servants and literary producers. Carlyle, Thackeray, etc.

Eclectic and educating influences of these shown in detail. The new public and the new magazines. General review of influences at work.

Great services of minor poets and prophets of the period.

Not only transformations, but translations of ideals into fact, mark our age. A popular novelist gave a fancy sketch of a palace in which art, pleasure, and instruction should meet together to gladden the lives of the London poor. Almost as soon as could have been done by the genius of Aladdin's Lamp, the People's Palace shoots up in the Mile End Road.

In 1841 Thomas Carlyle sighed for the day when a 'people's library' should be as much a part of every town as Her Majesty's jail, or in his own grim words--Her Majesty's gallows. The reign was still young when the philosopher's vision began to take shape and substance. In every centre of population from the Tyne to the Thames, from the Thames to the Tamar, a place where, without payment, upon no other conditions save those of reasonably clean hands, and silence, the working man is as well off for newspapers and books as a Bishop at the Athenaeum Club, has changed the Victorian landscape. These buildings, comely to look at, comfortable to enter, have competed with the later board schools in transforming the appearance of London suburb and provincial town. Where Knightsbridge merges into Chelsea first, and Fulham afterwards, there, during the early days of the reign, desolate fields and miry ways used to stretch their unlovely length. After dusk there were few lamps to light; the roads were not more safe than Hounslow Heath had been some generations earlier.

To-day this district is covered by a ma.s.s of buildings in red brick or stone, of aspect rather more academic than the new quarter of Victorian Oxford. Among these are the free libraries, built, partly out of the public rates, partly out of private funds. If it chance to be Sat.u.r.day night, hundreds of working men, decently clad, with parcels under their arms will be seen pa.s.sing to and fro near these buildings. They are not going to the public house. The packages they carry do not imply a negotiation with the p.a.w.nbroker. The men are, in fact, returning to the library the books which, taken out some days earlier, have given them their reading during the week after the day's work has been done. Certain processes supplementary to these studies have still to be performed. Even in our age of improvement, the reference library kept by an artizan at his fireside is not extensive. Nothing quickens the intellectual appet.i.te like its earliest gratification. As our student has travelled through the volumes which have occupied him, he has become aware of allusions for the full understanding of which fresh information is required. He has, therefore, while going along, made notes of points to look up. This, therefore, is one of his errands to-night.

No professional visitor to the British Museum sets more systematically to work than our day labourer in the Fulham or Pimlico district. Before his visit this evening to the place of silence and of books he has, perhaps, had recourse to a member of the University Settlement in his neighbourhood, or possibly even to his own employer if the employer happens to be better read than the employed. The local librarian presently to be consulted needs to combine patience and method with something like omniscience. The note book is produced by our working man in which the points for enquiry have been jotted down. In a few minutes the official has placed the researcher on the right track. Before his studies are ended that night he will have hunted up facts and figures enough to furnish forth a leading article for a journalist, or a speech in Committee for a Member of Parliament.

Not only in the industrial suburbs of the capital, but throughout the Kingdom, this is the sort of thing which takes place at least on one evening in every week. It is one among the many agencies which, nowadays, make the humblest reader so terrible a critic, and which cause a working man's meeting to be not less intolerant of mere rhetoric than the House of Commons itself.

Like everything else which during our age has been brought towards perfection, the free library movement existed among us in germ from the earliest days, before indeed the books themselves were known. When Lancashire monasteries had ceased to be gratuitous places of literary study, their ma.n.u.scripts and parchments were housed in the Chetham Library, with its old oriel windows at Manchester; in the Guildhall Library at London, certainly coeval with Whittington; in the libraries of Bristol or Liverpool which compete with London in antiquity, and with which the Protector Somerset is said to have made somewhat too free.

The patronymic of the man who was the father of the free library as it is known in England to-day is preserved in the second name of Mr Gladstone.

Mr Ewart belonged to an old Kirkcudbright family. He had been at Eton with Dr Pusey and Speaker Denison. In the spring of 1843 he obtained a Committee of the House of Commons to enquire into the conditions of popular reading throughout the United Kingdom. Disraeli, Monckton Milnes, Cardwell, Kershaw, were among the more famous names that the Committee included. Less than ten years after this, the Ewart Act, based on the Committee report was the law of the land.

In the early autumn of 1852, the new legislation was celebrated in a very practical manner by the opening of the free library at Manchester; the town which had been the birthplace of the movement.

Sir John Potter, the father of the present Mr T. B. Potter, took the chair. On the platform among the speakers were John Bright, Bulwer Lytton, Sir James Stephen, the future Lord Houghton, d.i.c.kens and Thackeray; Charles d.i.c.kens made a speech in his happiest, and therefore incomparable, vein, on the Manchester School, an expression then in many mouths. The success of the experiment first ill.u.s.trated on the Irwell was gradual. The provinces led the way which at last the capital followed. So late as 1886, only two parishes out of the sixty-seven within the metropolitan area had adopted the Acts. By August 1891 this number had risen to thirty. Other London districts have since followed.[87] With time the result has been more than satisfactory. In the manner already seen it has affected the life and appearance of every town in the country, and has certainly provided a machinery without which as a supplement the educational apparatus of free schools would do little.

To-day, therefore, in any large district, London or provincial, it is the exception for the Free Libraries Act not to be operative. That the power to read and the taste for reading does not always make good citizens, is of course true enough. On the other hand the close connection between ignorance and crime is instructively shown by a few historic statistics cited by Mr T. Greenwood, in his valuable volume on _Public Libraries_.

These figures are to the following effect.

In 1856 the number of young persons committed for indictable offences was 14,000. In 1866, when the State had, by the action of the Privy Council, since 1833 a.s.sumed educational responsibility, and cheap literature of the better sort had, thanks to Charles Knight, and his many public-spirited imitators, become general, the number was decreased to 10,000. When School Boards were fully at work, there was a yet further reduction to 7,000; and this though the population had risen from 19 to 27 millions. Pa.s.sing to a later date, out of 164,000 persons in prison between the years 1880-90, 60,000 were entirely uneducated. Nor is it less suggestive that since the teaching of the people was seriously taken in hand by the State in 1870, no new prison has been built; while several buildings which were prisons have been changed into public libraries, or, as in the case of Milbank, have been converted into a fine art gallery.

An objection is sometimes raised against the multiplication of free libraries on the ground that they promote exclusively the perusal of the most worthless fiction among the cla.s.s least likely to be proof against the social dangers of this cla.s.s of writing. No novel, perhaps, is so entirely mischievous as not to be preferable to the occupations from which for a few hours, it may withdraw the illiterate reader. In truth however a very careful examination of the facts by enquiries made at representative free libraries throughout the country justify the statement that novels form a stepping stone to books of a more seriously improving kind.

The same statistics show the demand for fiction already to be on the decrease. Thus, in the case of the Newcastle-on-Tyne library; during a recent twelvemonth, of the books issued to readers 6569 were fiction. The next year the proportion was 6428. A year later it was 6181. In 1896 the figures were 5522. The latest enquiries show this decline in the demand for fiction to be steadily going forward. Further, the category of fiction is stretched by free libraries to include not only the coloured paper boards containing the latest sensational romance of the day, but all the masterpieces of Fielding, nearly all the writings of Defoe, the _Arcadia_ of Sir Philip Sidney, the _Tristram Shandy_ of Lawrence Sterne, the _Don Quixote_ of Cervantes, and the Dialogues of Lucian.

The remarkably elastic connotation with which the word fiction is thus invested, may make one doubt whether a case might not be established even for novel reading. As a fact the works most in demand at any typical London library, _e.g._, that of Chelsea, are not novels at all. Here the favourites seem to be Herbert Spencer's _First Principles_, thrice asked for on the day this library was visited, his _Ecclesiastical Inst.i.tutions_, twice asked for. Aristotle's _Ethics_, the works of Spinoza, Martineau's _Types of Ethical Theory_, Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, J. S. Mill's _Logic_, Professor Sayce's _Vindications of Revealed Religion by the Light of Ancient Monuments_, all Sir Charles Dilke's works of travel, Carlyle, Froude; _Ca.s.sell's Popular Educator_, Todhunter's _Euclid_ are in greater demand than any fictions. However many copies of these there might be, none, it is thought, would be often out of hand.

It is not only what are called the industrial cla.s.ses whose literary resources have been expanded and transformed during the Victorian age.

Libraries for a different cla.s.s of readers have of late years increased throughout the Kingdom, in the provinces not less than in the capital.

Mudie's is, in the most literal sense of the epithet, a national agency.

Its headquarters are in London. There is no town or village book club in the country, which is not fed from its metropolitan shelves. Mudie's Library was founded by the late C. E. Mudie, in 1842, two years after the St James's Square London Library. If light literature were alone in demand, this library would not flourish as during more than half a century it has done. Without it, many of the candidates for the Indian, the Home Civil Services and other such examinations would be unable to get up their books. A theologian like Canon Liddon turns new light on old truths. A pious and picturesque impressionist like Dean Arthur Stanley presents the scenes and incidents of sacred story as he has himself seen or imagined them. A Darwin propounds a fresh theory for the origin of life; a Froude rehabilitates a Tudor; a Freeman refutes a Froude; a Livingstone explores a Dark Continent; a Stanley recovers a reluctant Livingstone or an indignant Emin. A Green ill.u.s.trates the growth of an English people; a Lecky supplements the work of a Buckle or makes the eighteenth century real as the nineteenth.

Mudie's is the channel through which these streams of culture are conveyed to the majority of English readers; for, highly educated as the Victorian age may be, it is with books that its economies begin To buy volumes that can be borrowed or hired, is accounted wanton extravagance. A work which requires more study, which holds public attention longer than a novel, must obviously be most profitable to the circulating librarian. Nor would self-interest let him be a distributor of fiction alone or even primarily.

The increase of novel readers as of novel writers is indeed the great literary feature of the day. Not less characteristic of the time are the new periodicals which have created a fresh public for themselves. The sixpenny magazines count their circulation by millions, and are borrowed from the library as well as bought by their readers. But it is the standard works, as shown by the instances already specified that give to Mudie's its deserved epithet of 'Select.'

Rather more grave in its contents, and didactic in its origin and purpose, the London Library, in St James's Square has during more than half a century been a most productive agent in the culture not less of the whole upper middle cla.s.ses than in the equipment for their tasks of writing men and women.[88] On the Mid-summer Day of 1840, with Lord Eliot in the chair there was held at the Freemasons' Tavern a meeting, the object of which was to provide literary workers and others at their homes with those books for which they then had to go to the reading room of the British Museum.

The result was the formation of a Committee of the leading literary persons of the period, the drawing up of rules and of a list of desiderated books, the acquisition of premises in Pall Mall. Towards the end of December in the same year, the new inst.i.tution was opened in its first home in Pall Mall with, on a smaller scale, the same kind of accommodations that it possesses to-day in St James's Square. As the earliest prospectus reminded the public, no less a person than Edward Gibbon had first lamented the lack of any lending library befitting the dignity of an Imperial capital in London.

When, in the May of 1841, this library was first in working order, its stock was some 3,000 volumes. A year later these figures had risen to 13,000. Since then, at an outlay of some 50,000, its contents have been increased to nearly 200,000. Situated in the heart of clubland, the Library has done for the education of clubmen, including penmen of every degree, all that Mudie's can have done for the instruction of families.

Not that the London Library is without claim to be considered a domestic inst.i.tution. Its reading room is frequented by as many lady journalists of the new school verifying references for their articles, as by male writers of an older type. There are few households where its books are not to be found. Carlyle and Thackeray are only two of the many well-known men who have been helped by it in suffusing historic descriptions with local or personal colour. It was to ascertain the exact hues of George Washington's waistcoat[89] that Thackeray consulted the late librarian Robert Harrison as to the cla.s.sical authorities.

Nor are there many writers of recent years in the English tongue, who have not been indebted to London Librarians from the days of Cochrane, the first of the line, to those of Hagberg Wright, his latest successor,[90]

for seasonable hints as to what authorities most usefully to consult.

As has been already seen, in the theory and practice of the culture now popularized in England, there is a growing tendency on the part of science and art to trench upon the ground formerly occupied by literature. The fashionable vocabulary of culture is itself an instance of this. Metaphors from the palette, the scalpel, the crucible, the retort, are applied to indicate the commonest and oldest literary phenomena. Or we hear of loaded epithets, of dynamic diction, of sonatas in sentences, of fugues in periods, and of new stratifications in style. Amid all our improvements we are a little mixed, and have still to decide where the province of the writer ends and that of his brother in some other art begins. This is a transient, as it is a transitional phase. It may perhaps confuse posterity which will scarcely recognize as the same language the lectures of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the orations of Lord Leighton, the art criticisms of Steele or Addison in _The Spectator_, of Walter H. Pater, of J. A.

Symonds, in _The Cornhill Magazine_, or one of the monthly Reviews.

The survey of the agencies now at work upon different social levels, shows that even thus the education which comes of reading, competes at some disadvantage with the instruction that is the result of lectures in cla.s.s rooms, of demonstrations in scientific 'theatres,' of days and nights spent in museums of sculpture or in galleries of paintings.

During the second or third decades of the present reign, the literary system of the country, as shown in the introductory chapter to this work, was dominated by the presence of a few ill.u.s.trious men, who naturally became models for imitation to a host of workers. During their lives, d.i.c.kens and Thackeray both founded schools. The former was, through the weekly magazines he edited, the founder of newspaper descriptive writing, especially of the picturesque Parliamentary narrative recently brought to so high a point of perfection by clever writers now alive. The entire company of satirical essayists in the weekly press, was first inspired by Thackeray. Each master was surrounded by personal admirers and literary imitators in a degree unapproached by any of his contemporaries or successors. The author of _The Newcomes_ was outlived[91] by the accomplished writer of that series which began with _Pelham_ in 1828 and neared its end with _The Parisians_ almost fifty years later.

While the anniversaries of the Queen's accession were few in number, Lytton by the side of d.i.c.kens, as a popular master of the pen, filled something like the place which Thackeray had occupied before him. During most of his time, another man of letters belonging like Lytton to the t.i.tled cla.s.ses divided with Lytton the social patronage of literary beginners. No man of his day did so much as Lytton to help younger men with the booksellers, as in his old-fashioned phrase he was apt to call the publishers. He had indeed a rival or a colleague in these good offices in Lord Stanhope, then Lord Mahon, the historian, as also in Mr Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, the timely friend of Coventry Patmore, and the rescuer from great troubles of a forgotten but deserving poet David Gray.

When as yet journalism as a profession was not fully organized, and young authors still looked first to the pillars of Paternoster Row, an introduction to Lord Lytton or to Lord Stanhope was the surest stepping stone to print. In this way Antonio Gallenga, then an obscure refugee, with a.s.sociations of the dagger and bowl about him, having won the good word of Lytton, found a publisher for his _History of Piedmont_. This in its turn opened to him the office of the _Times_. Here he made his name not only as among the most brilliant, best informed and versatile of newspaper writers but, together with William Howard Russell, as a founder of that school of graphic newspaper narrative since represented by Archibald Forbes, Edward Dicey, B. H. Becker, G. A. Henty, George Augustus Sala, and John O'Shea.

The development of the press has changed most of the conditions of literary life. For very many Englishmen of all cla.s.ses, the periodical, daily, weekly, or monthly, is practically an exclusive synonym for literature itself. This fact of course has reacted upon the whole cla.s.s of professional writers. The most commercially successful of men and women of letters are, as, since the days of Sir Walter Scott, they have been, authors of some novel which hits the taste of the moment, and fixes the interest of the town. When George Eliot wedded in her writings the artistic to the scientific spirit, she invented a combination unknown till then; she opened a gold mine for herself and the more dexterous of her disciples. d.i.c.kens and Thackeray both realized high prices for the labour of their pen. Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade were not far behind. But the men of this cla.s.s were either original creators of literary types that will take their place with the characters of Shakespeare, and Cervantes, or else were masters in the manufacture of exciting and dramatic plots.