“N’est-ce pas?” says my lady, in a low, sweet voice, still hanging on his arm.
Esmond turned round with a start and a blush, as he met his mistress’s clear eyes. He had forgotten her, rapt in admiration of the filia pulcrior.
I have said some hard things, Gentlemen, upon Thackeray and have indicated some dislike of him here and there, or, at least, some impatience. But to the man who could at once so poignantly and so reticently bring those two scenes into contrast—with all its meaning—all meaning—modulated to so perfect a balance of heart and intelligence wedded in human speech—well, to that man I conclude by bowing the head, acknowledging a real master: a great melancholy man with his genius running in streaks, often in thin streaks about him but always, when uttered, uttered in liquid lovely prose.
THE VICTORIAN BACKGROUND
I
I intend, in this and two following lectures, Gentlemen, taking my illustrations in the main from Victorian times, to examine with you how one and the same social question, urgent in our politics, presented itself to several writers of imaginative genius, all of whom found something intolerable in England and sought in their several ways to amend it.
At the beginning of this enquiry let me disclaim any parti pris about the duty of an imaginative writer towards the politics of his age. Aristophanes has a political sense, Virgil a strong one even when imitating Theocritus; Theocritus none: yet both are delightful: Lucretius has no care for politics, Horace has any amount, and both are delightful again: the evils of his time which oppress the author of Piers Plowman, affect Chaucer not at all: Dante is intensely political, Petrarch, far less sublime as a poet, disdains the business; Villon is for life as it flies, Ronsard for verse and art (and the devil take the rest); Spenser, with a sore enough political experience, casts it off almost as absolutely as does Ariosto. Shakespeare has a strong patriotic sense and a manly political sense: but he treats politics—let us take King John and Coriolanus for examples—artistically, for their dramatic value. He knows about
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely
and that they can be unendurable: but he does not use them for propaganda (odious word!) whatever the minute of utterance. Milton put all his religion into verse, his politics into prose; save for a passage or two in Lycidas and Paradise Lost he excluded politics from his high poetry. On the other hand Dryden had a high poetic sense of politics, and it pervades the bulk of his original poetry, while the opening of his famous Essay of Dramatic Poesy strikes an introductory note as sure as Virgil’s, through whom a deep undercurrent of politics runs from the first page of the Eclogues to the last of the Æneid. Our poets of the eighteenth century were social and political in the main: since if you once take Man for your theme, you, or some one following you, must be drawn on irresistibly to compare the position you assign him in the scheme of things with his actual position in the body politic, to consider the “Rights of Man,” “man’s inhumanity to man” and so forth. An Essay on Man (with the philosophy Pope borrowed for it) leads on to The Deserted Village:
Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey,