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.