Victorian Literature: Sixty Years of Books and Bookmen

by Clement King Shorter

Carlyle's "Cromwell" has less attraction for us to-day than the "French Revolution"; but the service to historical study was even greater. Opinions will always differ as to the wisdom of the Protector's policy and the righteousness of his deeds, but since the publication of these letters and speeches, "edited with the care of an antiquarian and the genius of a poet,"[17] Cromwell's sincerity and genuine piety have been unimpugned. There are others beside Mr Froude who esteem the "History of Frederick II." Carlyle's greatest work. The humour of the book is wonderful, for Carlyle is the greatest humorist since Sterne, and nowhere is this humour more conspicuous than in "Frederick." The splendid portraits of all the most important figures in the eighteenth century fix themselves indelibly in the memory, and it is even said that German soldiers study the art of war from the descriptions of Frederick's campaigns. Nevertheless, the book has much in it that is unsatisfying to Englishmen. Frederick and his father could not easily excite the hero-worshipping inclinations of a free people, and even Carlyle became disillusioned as he proceeded with his task, and finally admitted that Frederick was not worth the trouble he had given to him. He commenced it as a "History of Frederick the Great," and concluded it as a "History of Frederick, called the Great."

Carlyle is surely the greatest figure in our modern literature. He wrote no poetry worth consideration, it is true. His verse would long since have been forgotten had it not been for his effectiveness as a prose writer. But although we are accustomed to the claim for poetry that it ranks higher than prose, it must be conceded that in Victorian literature this is not the case, and that Carlyle's enormous personality, his capacity for influencing others for good and ill, have made him the greatest moral and intellectual force of his age. To him we owe the indifference to mere political shibboleths, the lull in party warfare, which is the note of our age. He gave no definite answer to any question, but he gave us the impetus which led others to seek for solutions. His literary influence on Froude and Mill, Mr Ruskin and Mr Lecky, and numbers of others was tremendous. The place which was occupied by Swift in the eighteenth century is held by Carlyle in the nineteenth, and though every line that he has written should cease to be read, he will still be remembered as the greatest of literary figures in an age of great men of letters.

CHAPTER IV

The Critics

The plan of describing all the writers of a period who are not poets, novelists and historians as critics is open to many objections, although I intend to adopt it. If Matthew Arnold's plea for poetry as a criticism of life holds good, it is precisely the poets, novelists and historians who are the true critics. An alternative plan would have been to give a chapter to prose writers and another to the poets; and still another arrangement would have been to divide the subject, as De Quincey suggested, into the literature of power and the literature of imagination, the former including the philosophers and historians, the latter the poets, the novelists, and the more picturesque of the prose writers—Carlyle and Ruskin, for example.

One unhesitatingly assigns to Mr Ruskin the distinction of the critic whose work is most eloquent and impressive. John Ruskin1819- was born in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, London. He has told us in his autobiography, "Præterita," of his early life under a tender mother's care, of his boyish affection for Byron and Scott, and of the youthful impulse to art study excited by the present of Rogers's "Italy," with Turner's illustrations. In 1837 he was entered as a gentleman commoner at Christ Church, Oxford, gaining, two years later, the Newdigate prize for English poetry, his subject being "Salsette and Elephanta." In 1843 he produced the first volume of "Modern Painters: their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters. By a Graduate of Oxford." The work originated, he says, "in indignation at the shallow and false criticism of the periodicals of the day on the work of the great living artist to whom it principally refers." The artist in question was Joseph Mallord William Turner, upon whom Ruskin has pronounced somewhat contradictory judgments at different periods in his career. "Modern Painters" soon extended beyond the mere essay at first intended, and in its final form of five handsome volumes, it was not only a philosophical treatise on landscape painting, but an exhaustive dissertation on many phases of life from one whom Mazzini declared to possess "the most analytic brain in Europe."

Another important work, "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" (1849), is a brilliant attempt at reform in domestic and church architecture. The "lamps" represent the characteristics which good architecture should possess. The first is the Lamp of Sacrifice: "What of beauty and what of riches we may possess, let a portion be dedicated to God. It was in this spirit that our cathedrals were built." The second, the Lamp of Truth, is a plea for honesty in architecture, no imitation wood or marble, but solid wood and solid stone. "Exactly as a woman of feeling," he says, "would not wear false jewels, so would a builder of honour disdain false ornaments. The using of them is just as downright and inexcusable a lie." The third is the Lamp of Power: "Until that street architecture of ours is bettered, until we give it some size and boldness, until we give our windows recess and our walls thickness, I know not how we can blame our architects for their feebleness in more important work." The fourth is the Lamp of Beauty, and in this chapter he maintains that "all the most lovely forms and thoughts" are directly taken from natural objects. The fifth is the Lamp of Life. "To those who love architecture," he says, "the life and accent of the hand are everything." The sixth is the Lamp of Memory: "All public edifices should be records of national life, all ordinary dwelling-houses endeared to their owners by sacred and sweet associations. There is infinite sanctity in a good man's house!" The seventh is the Lamp of Obedience, and here he pleads eloquently for the enforcement of an established type of architecture—the Gothic, in his judgment, lending itself most readily to all services, vulgar or noble. The "Stones of Venice" (1851-1853), in three volumes, gives in further detail Ruskin's views of the laws of architecture. The pre-Raphaelite movement of Millais, Rossetti, and Holman Hunt early enlisted his sympathy, and in "Pre-Raphaelitism" (1851) he declared that they had worthily followed the advice given in "Modern Painters," to "go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing." From that time until his Slade lectures at Oxford in 1883-1884 Ruskin wrote several books on painting and architecture, all of them in a style which attracts even those who are least in sympathy with his opinions.

But as Goethe declared of himself that posterity would honour him, not for his poetry, but for his discoveries in science, so Ruskin, perhaps more justly, insists that it is as an economist that he is most deserving of remembrance. The four essays on the first principles of political economy, entitled "Unto this Last" (1862), he declares to be "the truest, rightest-worded, and most serviceable things" he has ever written. These essays were originally published by Thackeray in the Cornhill Magazine, but the remonstrances of its readers brought the series to a speedy end. The principles of state socialism there initiated have since entered the field in direct contest with the established order of things. Mr Ruskin would have every child in the country taught a trade at the cost of government; he would have manufactories and workshops entirely under government regulation for the production and sale of every necessary of life, and for the exercise of every useful art; he would permit competition with government manufactories and shops, but all who desired work could be sure of it at the state establishments: finally, he would provide comfortable homes for the old and destitute, as "it ought to be quite as natural and straightforward a matter for a labourer to take his pension from his parish, because he has deserved well of his parish, as for a man in higher rank to take his pension from his country because he has deserved well of his country." Ruskin has amplified his economic doctrines in "Munera Pulveris," "Time and Tide by Wear and Tyne," and "Fors Clavigera." "Time and Tide" is a collection of letters on the laws of work to the late Thomas Dixon, a working corkcutter of Sunderland. They were originally published in the Manchester Examiner. "Fors Clavigera" is a series of ninety-six letters to working-men, which were issued in monthly parts, and rendered additionally interesting by the quantity of autobiographical anecdotes so freely interspersed in their pages. The title is derived, as Ruskin has explained, from the Latin fors, the best part of three good English words—force, fortitude, and fortune; the root of the adjective clavigera being either clava, a club, clavis, a key, or clavus, a nail, and gero, to carry. Fors the Club-bearer therefore represents the strength of Hercules or of Deed; the Key-bearer, the strength of Ulysses or of Patience; and the Nail-bearer, the strength of Lycurgus or of Law.

To carry out his principles practically, Ruskin established for a short time a tea shop in the Marylebone Road, where nothing but the best tea was sold at a fair price, and he founded the St George's Guild with a view of showing "the rational organisation of country life independent of that of cities;" or in other words, the restoration of the peasantry to the soil of England. One of the conditions of membership was that every member should give one-tenth of his property to the guild for carrying out its work. Ruskin led the way, his property being then estimated at £70,000. He has told us in "Fors" that out of the £157,000 left him by his parents he has spent £153,000. Much of this must have gone to the Ruskin Museum at Sheffield.