Victorian Literature: Sixty Years of Books and Bookmen

by Clement King Shorter

In 1848 he was appointed head of the Birmingham Oratory, and there he resided—with one short break as rector of the Roman Catholic University at Dublin—for nearly forty years. In 1879 he was created a cardinal, and his visit to Rome and installation as a Prince of the Sacred College excited much attention in England. Although by temperament and inclination one of the least combative and most retiring of men, Cardinal Newman found himself again and again in the thick of the argumentative fray. At one time he was involved in a libel action by an ex-priest and ultra-Protestant lecturer named Father Achilli, and this cost Newman and his friends twelve thousand pounds; at another time he was arguing with the foremost English statesman, Mr Gladstone, as to the probable loyalty of English Roman Catholics if the Papacy and the English Government were brought into collision. In one great controversy of his life he was generally admitted to have achieved a success, and this success is associated with an enduring literary work, the autobiography which he calls his "Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ." Reviewing Froude's "History of England" in Macmillan's Magazine (January 1864), Charles Kingsley charged Newman with being careless about truth, and with teaching that cunning and not truth-seeking was the acceptable method of the Roman Catholic clergy. Brought to bay by Newman, Kingsley contradicted himself in an amazing fashion, and even the most enthusiastic Protestants were compelled to admit that the clever novelist was no match for the trained dialectician. Mrs Kingsley, in her charming life of her husband, practically admits that he was worsted in the conflict, and J. A. Froude, his brother-in-law, wrote: "Kingsley entirely misunderstood Newman's character. Newman's whole life had been a struggle for truth. He had neglected his own interests; he had never thought of them at all. He had brought to bear a most powerful and subtle intellect to support the convictions of a conscience which was superstitiously sensitive. His single object had been to discover what were the real relations between man and his Maker, and to shape his own conduct by the conclusions at which he arrived. To represent such a person as careless of truth was neither generous nor even reasonable."

The final outcome of the controversy was the publication of the "Apologia," a work which, alike in beauty of style and devotion of spirit, must be assigned a very high place in religious literature. My space is too limited to pass in review, or even to name, the thirty-six volumes which contain the writings of this eloquent preacher and teacher. His "Dream of Gerontius" and "Verses on Various Occasions" show his high qualities as a poet; his "Apologia," "Callista," and "Essay in aid of the Grammar of Assent," display his genius as a prose stylist. In "Callista: a Sketch of the Third Century," he pictures a beautiful Greek girl, who becomes a convert to Christianity after a severe struggle between human affection and religious faith. The "Grammar of Assent" is an apology for Christianity, far above the narrow controversies in which the author took so distinguished a part.

The question whether Cardinal Newman or Carlyle has been the most influential personality in Victorian literature will be largely decided by the temperament of the critic. Mr Swinburne, looking at them both from a standpoint of antagonism to the priestly proclivities of the one and to the tyrannical proclivities of the other, apostrophised them jointly in the well-known lines:—

"With all our hearts we praise you whom ye hate,

High souls that hate us; for our hopes are higher,

And higher than yours the goal of our desire,

Though high your ends be as your hearts are great."

Newman, indeed, left England more dominated by ritual than in any other period of its history, the Roman Church more powerful than ever before, the new High Church party in the Establishment a great institution, with the rival Prime Ministers, Mr Gladstone and Lord Salisbury, among its supporters, and a taste for ritual conspicuous in the chapels of the Nonconformists. And yet with all this Carlyle was the more dominant personality.

Thomas Carlyle1795-1881 was born at Ecclefechan, in Dumfriesshire, on the 4th of December 1795. His father was a stonemason, at whose death Carlyle thus tenderly wrote in his Diary:—"I owe him much more than existence. I owe him a noble inspiring example. It was he exclusively that determined on educating me; that from his small hard-earned funds sent me to school and college, and made me whatever I am and may become. Let me not mourn for my father, let me do worthily of him. So shall he still live, even here in me, and his worth plant itself honourably forth into new generations." From Annan Grammar School the young Carlyle went to Edinburgh University, where he became a voracious reader, although never a great classical scholar. He then took the post of mathematical tutor at Annan school, and afterwards at Kirkcaldy, where he was friendly with Edward Irving, afterwards the famous preacher. Disgusted with this life he flung up his appointment, and determined to study for the law. For some time he eked out a scanty subsistence in Edinburgh by writing biographies for Brewster's Encyclopædia. It was at this period that he obtained some measure of mental and moral stimulus from his German studies. Goethe opened a new world to him. He began to study German in 1819, induced thereto by Madame de Staël's interesting account of the German poets and philosophers. Goethe was seventy-five years old when in 1824 he received from Carlyle an English translation of "Wilhelm Meister," with a letter, saying, "Four years ago, when I read your 'Faust' among the mountains of my native Scotland, I could not but fancy I might one day see you, and pour out before you, as before a father, the woes and wanderings of a heart whose mysteries you seemed so thoroughly to comprehend, and could so beautifully represent." Two years later Carlyle sent Goethe his "Life of Schiller," and once again he expressed his intense devotion to one "whose voice came to me from afar, with counsel and help, in my utmost need." "For if," he continues, "I have been delivered from darkness into any measure of light, if I know aught of myself and my destination, it is to the study of your writings more than to any other circumstance that I owe this; it is you more than any other man that I should always thank and reverence with the feeling of a disciple to his Master, nay, of a son to his spiritual Father." In the meantime Carlyle had married Jane Welsh, the daughter of a doctor in Haddington, and had settled at the lonely farm-house of Craigenputtock, in Dumfriesshire. There he was visited by Emerson, and there he remained for six years, before removing to London. Not only had Carlyle then translated "Wilhelm Meister" and written the "Life of Schiller," but he had made numerous translations from Musæus, Tieck, and Richter, and had published essays on these and other German authors. Jean Paul Richter had a peculiar attraction for him, and there can be no doubt that Carlyle owed his extraordinary style, in some degree, to his study of the German humorist.

The forty-seven years of Carlyle's London life (1834-1881) were years of incessant literary activity. The thirty volumes which came from his pen during that time not only secured for him a permanent place amongst the historians, biographers, and essayists of our literature, but they kindled for him a glow of intense personal enthusiasm amongst the best of his contemporaries, such as, perhaps, no other English author has enjoyed. At his death on the 5th of February, 1881, the world knew Carlyle, apart from his books, as a man of simple tastes, content, in spite of the wealth which literary success had brought, to reside amidst unostentatious surroundings, ever ready to help the distressed and needy, refusing a title and the like official recognitions, and carrying out to the letter the reverence, earnestness, and unobtrusive manliness which he had inculcated in his writings; devotedly attached to his wife, whom he described on her tombstone as having "unweariedly forwarded him as none else could, in all of good that he did or attempted;" and, in short, worthy of the address presented to him on his eightieth birthday, by nearly all the men of literary and scientific eminence in England, including, amongst others, Lord Tennyson and George Eliot, Robert Browning and Professor Huxley. "A whole generation has elapsed," they said, "since you described for us the hero as a man of letters. We congratulate you and ourselves on the spacious fulness of years which has enabled you to sustain this rare dignity amongst mankind in all its possible splendour and completeness." The publication of Mr Froude's nine volumes of memorials caused a considerable revulsion of feeling. The Carlyle of these "Letters" and "Reminiscences" appeared to be over-censorious in his estimate of his contemporaries, not too considerate in his relations with his wife, and, however admirable he might find contentment in Richter or Heyne, not content without much murmuring to accept a life of restricted means.