Part 1 (1/2)
Victorian Literature.
by Clement K. Shorter.
INTRODUCTORY
Asked by a kindly publisher to add one more to the Jubilee volumes which commemorate the sixtieth year of the Queen's reign, I am pleased at the opportunity thus afforded me of gathering up a few impressions of pleasant reading hours. ”Every age,” says Emerson, ”must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.” It is true, of course, and as a result the popular favourite of to-day is well-nigh forgotten to-morrow.
In reading the critical journals of thirty years ago it is made quite clear that they contain few judgments which would be sustained by a consensus of critical opinion to-day. Whether time will deal as hardly with the critical judgments of to-day we may not live to see. I have no ambition to put this book to a personal test. So far as it has any worth at all it is meant to be bibliographical and not critical. It aspires to furnish the young student, in handy form, with as large a number of facts about books as can be concentrated in so small a volume. That this has been done under the guise of a consecutive narrative, and not in the form of a dictionary, is merely for the convenience of the writer.
I have endeavoured to say as little as possible about living poets and novelists. With the historians and critics the matter is of less importance. To say that Mr Samuel Rawson Gardiner has written a useful history, or that Professor David Ma.s.son's ”Life of Milton” is a valuable contribution to biographical literature, will excite no antagonism. But to attempt to a.s.sign Mr W. B. Yeats a place among the poets, or ”Mark Rutherford” a position among the prose writers of the day, is to trespa.s.s upon ground which it is wiser to leave to the critics who write in the literary journals from week to week. It was not possible to ignore all living writers. I have ignored as many as I dared.
It was my intention at first to devote a chapter to Sixty Years of American Literature. But for that task an Englishman who has paid but one short visit to the United States has no qualification. He can write of American literature only as seen through English eyes. That is to see much of it, it is true. Few Americans realise the enormous influence which the literature of their own land has had upon this country.
Probably the most read poet in England during the sixty years has been Longfellow. Probably the most read novel has been ”Uncle Tom's Cabin.”
Among people who claim to be distinctly literary Hawthorne has been all but the favourite novelist, Was.h.i.+ngton Irving not the least popular of essayists, and Emerson the most invigorating moral influence. In my youth ”The Wide, Wide World” and ”Queechy” were in everybody's hands; as the stories of Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Frank Stockton, Henry James, and Mary Wilkins are to-day. Apart from d.i.c.kens, nearly all our laughter has come from Mark Twain and Artemus Ward.
In history, we in England have read Prescott and Motley; in poetry we have read Walt Whitman, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, and, above all, James Russell Lowell, who endeared himself to us alike as a poet, a critic, and in his own person when he represented the United States at the Court of St James's. Lastly I recall the delight with which as a boy I read the ”Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” and the joy with which as a man I visited the author, Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his pleasant study in Beacon Street, Boston. These and many other writers have made America and the Americans very dear to Englishmen, and this in spite of much wild and foolish talk in the journals of the two countries.
I have to thank Mr William Mackenzie, the well-known publisher of Glasgow, for kindly letting me draw upon some articles which I wrote for his ”National Cyclopaedia” ten years ago, and upon the literary section, which he and his editor, Mr John Brabner, permitted me to contribute at that time to a book ent.i.tled ”The Victorian Empire.” I have also to thank my friends, Dr Robertson Nicoll and Mr L. F. Austin, for kindly reading my proof-sheets, Mr Edward Clodd for valuable suggestions, and Mr Sydney Webb, a friend of old student days, for reading the chapter which treats briefly of sociology and economics.
A compilation of this kind can scarcely hope to escape the defects of most such enterprises--errors both of date and of fact. I shall be glad to receive corrections for the next edition.
CLEMENT K. SHORTER.
_September 27, 1897._
CHAPTER I
The Poets
When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, most of the great poets who had been inspired by the French Revolutionary epoch were dead. Keats had died in Rome in 1821, Sh.e.l.ley was drowned in the Gulf of Spezzia in 1822, Byron died at Missolonghi in 1824, Scott at Abbotsford in 1832, and Coleridge at Highgate in 1834. Southey was Poet Laureate, although Wordsworth held a paramount place, recognised on all hands as the greatest poet of the day.
The gulf which separates the =Southey (1774-1843)= of the laureates.h.i.+p from the Southey who presents himself to our judgment to-day is almost impossible to bridge over. Southey, as the average bookman thinks of him now, is the author of a ”Life of Nelson” and of one or two lyrics and ballads.[1] The ”Life of Nelson” is constantly republished for an age keenly bent on Nelson wors.h.i.+p, but for the exacting it has been superseded by at least two biographies from living authors.[2] That Southey should live mainly by a book which was merely a publisher's commission, and not by the works which he and his contemporaries deemed immortal, is one of the ironies of literature. Southey's ”Cowper” is a much better biography than his ”Nelson,” but in Cowper the world has almost ceased to be interested. It does not now read ”Table Talk” and ”The Task” any more than it reads ”Thalaba” and ”Madoc,” although every cultivated household of sixty years ago could talk freely of these poems. There will probably be a revival of interest in Cowper. It is safe to a.s.sume that there will never be a revival of interest in Southey, and that his very lengthy poems are doomed to oblivion.
And yet it is interesting to note where Southey's contemporaries placed him. Sh.e.l.ley thought ”Thalaba” magnificent, and its influence was marked in ”Queen Mab.” Coleridge spoke of its ”pastoral charm.” Landor found ”Madoc” superb. Scott said that he had read it three or four times with ever-increasing admiration. It kept Charles James Fox out of bed till the small hours! But inexorable time has declared that these poems have no permanent place in literature. Time, however, has left us a kindly memory of Southey the man. Sara Coleridge's a.s.sertion that he was ”on the whole the best man she had ever known,” tallies with the judgment of many others of his contemporaries--who did not come into collision with his relentless prejudices.
Relentless prejudice was equally a characteristic of Southey's greater successor as Poet Laureate. =William Wordsworth (1770-1850)= had written all the poems by which he will live when the Queen came to the throne, but further recognition awaited the author of ”Lyrical Ballads” and ”Laodamia” in the thirteen years of his life that were yet to come. It was in 1839 that Keble, as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, welcomed Wordsworth when he received the honorary degree of D.C.L. with the eulogy that he had ”shed a celestial light upon the affections, the occupations and the piety of the poor.” In 1842 he obtained an annuity from the Civil List, and in the following year he succeeded Southey as laureate. The mere fact, however, that Wordsworth wrote nothing of importance in the present reign does not permit of his dismissal as a pre-Victorian author. His real influence, splendid and serene, was made upon the age which is pa.s.sing away.
He found us when the age had bound Our souls in its benumbing round; He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.
During the period in which Wordsworth's poems were coming from the press he was scoffed at alike by Byron and by the authors of ”Rejected Addresses,” and they appealed to a sympathetic audience. Coleridge had, indeed, praised him generously enough, but the author of ”The Ode to Duty” knew nothing of the enthusiastic partisans.h.i.+p which was to be his lot in the later years of his life, and for more than a quarter of a century after his death. I have before me two books which will serve to indicate the high-water-mark of Wordsworth's popularity. One is a volume of selections from his poems, which was edited by Mr Matthew Arnold,[3]
the other, a volume of Transactions of the Wordsworth Society, which was privately issued to the members. In his little volume of ”Selections” Mr Arnold, then recognised on all hands as our most important living critic, insisted upon Wordsworth's pre-eminence in poetry, placing him indeed on a level with Shakspere and Milton, and a.s.signing to Byron and Sh.e.l.ley a secondary rank.
Mr Arnold, as events proved, only echoed a pervading sentiment. The Wordsworth Society was founded, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dean of St Paul's, the Lord Chief Justice of England, the then American Minister--Mr Lowell--and a number of distinguished literary men, among its members. The Transactions of that Society give evidence that among the thoughtful men and women of the last decade Wordsworth was by far the strongest influence, that he was not merely a literary tradition, but that he was a vital force in the minds and hearts of nearly all the most interesting people of the period. Students of to-day, however, will be well content to read Wordsworth only in Matthew Arnold's ”Selections.” Here they will find him as a sonneteer proclaiming liberty with scarcely less zeal and power than Milton. They will find him as the sympathetic friend of the poor and of the oppressed. To be dead to the charm of Matthew Arnold's ”Selections from Wordsworth” is to care nothing for poetry. To appreciate with any measure of enthusiasm the twelve volumes of Wordsworth's collected writings is equally to have one's sense of true poetry deadened and destroyed. We have no time now for ”The Excursion” and ”The Prelude.” We have less for Wordsworth's ”Ecclesiastical Sonnets” and ”The Borderers.” For his copious prose moralizings one has no toleration whatever.