A history of English literature

by Edward Albert

THE DEVELOPMENT OF LITERARY FORMS

The Victorian epoch was exceedingly productive of literary work of a high quality, but the amount of actual innovation is by no means great. Writers were as a rule content to work upon former models, and the improvements they did achieve were often dubious and unimportant.

1. Poetry. (a) The lyrical output is very large and varied, as a glance through the works of the poets already mentioned will show. In form there is little of fresh interest. Tennyson was content to follow the methods of Keats, though Browning’s complicated forms and Swinburne’s long musical lines were more freely used by them than by any previous writers.

(b) In descriptive and narrative poetry there is a greater advance to chronicle. In subject—for example, in the poems of Browning and Morris—there is great variety, embracing many climes and periods; in method there is much diversity, ranging from the cultured elegance of Tennyson’s English landscapes to the wild impressionism of Whitman in America. The Pre-Raphaelite school, also, united several features which had not been seen before in combination. These were a fondness for medieval themes treated in an unconventional manner, a richly colored pictorial effect, and a studied and melodious simplicity. The works of Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne provide many examples of this development of poetry. On the whole we can say that the Victorians were strongest on the descriptive side of poetry, which agreed with the more meditative habits of the period, as contrasted with the warmer and more lyrical emotions of the previous age.

There were many attempts at purely narrative poetry, with interesting results. Tennyson thought of reviving the epic, but in him the epical impulse was not sufficiently strong, and his great narrative poem was produced as smaller fragments which he called idylls. Browning’s Ring and the Book is curious, for it can be called a psychological epic—a narrative in which emotion removes action from the chief place. In this class of poetry The Earthly Paradise of William Morris is a return to the old romantic tale as we find it in the works of Chaucer.

2. Drama. Nearly all the major poets of the period wrote tragedy on the lines of the accepted models. Few of these attained to real distinction; they were rather the conscientious efforts of men who were striving to succeed in the impossible task of really reviving the poetical drama. Of them all, Swinburne’s tragedies, especially those concerned with Mary Queen of Scots, possess the greatest warmth and energy; and Browning’s earlier plays, before he over-developed his style, have sincerity and sometimes real dramatic power. As for comedy, it was almost wholly neglected as a purely literary form.

A development to be noticed is the popularity of the dramatic monologue. In Ulysses, Tithonus, and other pieces Tennyson achieved some of his most successful results; and Browning’s host of monologues, wide in range and striking in detail, are perhaps his greatest contribution to literature. The method common to this kind of monologue was to take some character and make him reveal his inmost self in his own words.

3. Prose. (a) By the middle of the nineteenth century the novel, as a species of literature, had thrust itself into the first rank. We shall therefore consider it first.

In the novels of Thackeray and Dickens the various qualities of the domestic novel are gathered together and carried a stage forward. Dickens did much to idealize the England of his day, and to depict the life of the lower and middle classes with imagination and humor. As a satirist and an observer of manners Thackeray easily excels his contemporaries. The other novelists were to a great extent gleaners in the spacious field that was reaped by the two greater writers. Charlotte Brontë supplied a somber passion that colored the drabness of her life; Trollope specialized with his parsons; Collins wrote mystery stories. Of the rest, George Eliot showed a closeness of application to the mental process of her characters that was carried further in the work of Meredith, and has led to the “psychological” novels of the present day.

In Esmond the historical novel made an advance. Here Thackeray was not content to master the history of the period he described; he sought to reproduce also the language and atmosphere. This is an extremely difficult thing to achieve, and is possible only in novels dealing with a limited period of time, but Thackeray scored a remarkable success.

(b) The development of the Short story, as a separate species of literature, will be touched upon in the next chapter.

(c) In the case of the essay we have to note the expansion of the literary type into the treatise-in-little. This method was made popular by Macaulay, and continued by Carlyle, Symonds, Pater, and many others. Of the miscellaneous essayists, both Dickens, in some parts of The Uncommercial Traveller, and Thackeray, in The Roundabout Papers, successfully practiced the shorter Addisonian type; and this again was enlarged and made more pretentious by Ruskin, Pater, and Stevenson.

(d) The lecture becomes a prominent literary species for a time. Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, and many others both in England and America published lectures in book-form. Earlier critics like Hazlitt and Coleridge had done so; but, almost for the first time, Ruskin gave a distinct style and manner to the lecture.

(e) The historians are strongly represented. Carlyle and Macaulay, in spite of their great industry and real care for history, have now fallen behind in the race as historians, and survive chiefly as stylists. The new method that arose was typified in the solid and valuable work of William Stubbs (1825–1901), Edward A. Freeman (1823–92), and Samuel R. Gardiner (1829–1902). These historians avoided the charms of literary style, concentrated upon some aspect of history, and, basing their results upon patient research into original authorities, produced valuable additions to human knowledge.

(f) We have already noticed that in this period the scientific treatise attained to literary rank. We may mention as early examples of this type Sir Thomas Browne’s curious treatise on Urne Buriall, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and the graceful essays of Berkeley.