The uprising of the weekly newspaper took shape in two remarkably different forms, represented respectively by Household Words, which Dickens started early in the fifties, and by the Saturday Review, which came a little later. The former might best be described as a monthly of the Blackwood and London kind cheapened, made more frequent in issue, and adjusted to a considerably lower and more popular standard of interest and culture—politics, moreover, being ostensibly though not quite really excluded. Dickens contributed to it largely himself. He received contributions from writers of established repute like Bulwer and Lever; but he made his chief mark with the paper by breeding up a school of younger writers who wrote to his own pattern in fiction, miscellaneous essay, and other things. Wilkie Collins was the chief of these, but there were many others. In particular the periodical developed a sort of popular, jocular, and picturesque-descriptive manner of treating places, travels, ceremonies, and what not, which took the public fancy immensely. It was not quite original (for Leigh Hunt, Wainewright the murderer-miscellanist of the London, some of the Blackwood men, and others, had anticipated it to a certain extent), and it was vulgarised as regards all its models; but it was distinct and remarkable. The æsthetic and literary tone of Household Words, and of its successor All the Year Round to a somewhat less extent, was distinctly what is called Philistine; and though Dickens always had a moral purpose, he did not aim much higher than amusement that should not be morbid, and instruction of the middle-class diffusion-of-knowledge kind. But there was very little harm and much good to be said of Household Words; and if some of the imitations of it were far from being happy, its own popularity and that of its successor were very fairly deserved.
The aims, the character, and the success of the Saturday Review were of the most widely different character. It was less novel in form, for the weekly review was an established thing, and had at least two very respectable examples—the Examiner, which (under the Hunts, under Fonblanque, under Forster, and under the late Mr. Minto) had a brilliant, if never an extremely prosperous, career for three-quarters of the century, and the Spectator, which attained a reputation for unswerving honesty under the editorship of Mr. Rentoul, and has increased it under that of its present conductors. But both these were Liberal papers first of all; the Saturday Review, at first and accidentally Peelite, was really (throughout the nearly forty years during which it remained in the possession of the same family and was directed by a succession of editors each of whom had been trained under his predecessor) Independent Tory, or (to use a rather unhappy and now half-forgotten name) Liberal-Conservative. It never tied itself to party chariot-wheels, and from the first to the last of the period just referred to very distinguished writers of Liberal and Radical opinions contributed to it. But the general attitude of the paper during this time expressed that peculiar tone of mainly Conservative persiflage which has distinguished in literature the great line of writers beginning with Aristophanes. Its staff was, as a rule, recruited from the two Universities (though there was no kind of exclusion for the unmatriculated; as a matter of fact, neither of its first two editors was a son either of Oxford or Cambridge), and it always insisted on the necessity of classical culture. It eschewed the private personality which had been too apt to disfigure newspapers of a satirical kind during the first half of the century; but it claimed and exercised to the full the privilege of commenting on every public writing, utterance, or record of the subjects of its criticism. It observed, for perhaps a longer time than any other paper, the salutary principles of anonymity (real as well as ostensible) in regard to the authorship of particular articles; and those who knew were constantly amused at the public mistakes on this subject.
Applying this kind of criticism,—perfectly fearless, on the whole fairly impartial, informed, human errors excepted, by a rather exceptionally high degree of intelligence and education, and above all keeping before it the motto, framed by its "sweet enemy" Thackeray, of being written "by gentlemen for gentlemen,"—the Saturday Review quickly attained, and for many years held, the very highest place in English critical journalism as regards literature, in a somewhat less degree politics, and in a degree even greater the farrago of social and miscellaneous matters. By consent too general and too unbiassed to be questioned, it gave and maintained a certain tone of comment which prevailed for the seventh, eighth, and ninth decades of the century, and of which the general note may be said to have been a coolly scornful intolerance of ignorance and folly. There were those who accused it even in its palmiest days of being insufficiently positive and constructive; but on the negative side it was generally sound in intention, and in execution admirably thorough. It may sometimes have mishandled an honest man, it may sometimes have forgiven a knave; but it always hated a fool, and struck at him with might and with main.
The second change began with the establishment of the Cornhill and Macmillan's Magazine, two or three years later. There was no perceptible difference in the general scheme of these periodicals from that of the earlier ones, of which Blackwood and Fraser were the most famous; but their price was lowered from half a crown to a shilling, and the principle of signed articles and of long novels by famous names was adopted. The editorship of Thackeray in the Cornhill, with the contributions of Matthew Arnold and others, quickly gave a character to it; while Macmillan's could boast contributions from the Kingsleys, Henry and Charles, as well as from many others. From this time the monthly magazine, with the exception of Blackwood, found a shilling, which attempts have been recently made to lower to sixpence, its almost necessary tariff, while the equal necessity of addressing the largest possible audience made pure politics, with occasional exceptions, unwelcome in it. It is to the credit of the English magazines of this class, however, that they have never relinquished the tradition of serious literary studies. Many of the essays of Mr. Arnold appeared first either in one or the other of the two just mentioned; the Cornhill even ventured upon Mr. Ruskin's Unto this Last; and other famous books of a permanent character saw the light in these, in Temple Bar, started by Mr. Bentley, in the rather short-lived St. Paul's, of which Anthony Trollope was editor, and in others.
Whether the starting of the monthly "Review" as distinguished from the "Magazine," which came again a little later towards the middle or end of the sixties, be traceable to a parallel popularisation of the quarterly ideal—to the need for the political and "heavy" articles which the lightened monthlies had extruded—or to a mere imitation of the famous French Revue des Deux Mondes, is an academic question. The first of these new Reviews was the Fortnightly, which found the exact French model unsuitable to the meridian of Greenwich, and dropped the fortnightly issue, while retaining the title. It was followed by the Contemporary, the Nineteenth Century, and others. The exclusion of fiction in these was not invariable—the Fortnightly, in particular, has published many of Mr. Meredith's novels. But, as a rule, these reviews have busied themselves with more or less serious subjects, and have encouraged signed publication.
It would, of course, be impossible here to go through all, or even all the most noteworthy, of the periodicals of the century. We are dealing with classes, not individuals, and the only class yet to be noticed—daily newspapers falling out of our ken almost entirely—are those weekly newspapers which have eschewed politics altogether. The oldest and most famous of these is the Athenæum, which still flourishes after a life of nearly seventy years, while between forty and fifty years later the Academy was founded on the same general principles. But the Athenæum has always cleaved, as far as its main articles went, to the unsigned system, while the Academy started at a period which leant the other way. Of late years, too, criticism proper, that is to say, of letters and art, has played a larger and larger part in daily newspapers, some of which attempt a complete review of books as they appear, while others give reviews of selected works as full as those of the weeklies. If any distinct setting of example is necessary to be attributed in this case, the credit is perhaps mainly due to the original Pall Mall Gazette, an evening newspaper started in 1864 with one of the most brilliant staffs ever known, including many of the original Saturday writers and others.
The result of this combined opportunity and stimulus in so many forms has been that almost the whole of the critical work of the latter part of the century has passed through periodicals—that, except as regards Mr. Ruskin, a writer always indocile to editing, every one who will shortly be mentioned in this chapter has either won his spurs or exercised them in this kind, and that of the others, mentioned in other chapters and in connection with other subjects, a very small proportion can be said to have been entirely disdainful of periodical publication. At the very middle of the century, and later, the older Quarterlies were supported by men like John Wilson Croker, a survival of their first generation Nassau W. Senior, and Abraham Hayward, the last a famous talker and "diner-out." Other chief critics and essayists, besides Kingsley and Froude, were George Brimley, Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge; Henry Lancaster, a Balliol man and a Scotch barrister; and Walter Bagehot, a banker, and not a member of either University. Brimley has left us what is perhaps the best appreciation of Tennyson in the time between the days when that poet was flouted or doubted by the usual critic, and those when he was accepted as a matter of course or cavilled at as a matter of paradox; and Lancaster occupies pretty much the same position with regard to Thackeray. It is not so easy to single out any particular and distinguishing critical effort of Bagehot's, who wrote on all subjects, from Lombard Street to Tennyson, and from the Coup d'État (which he saw) to Browning. But his distinction of the poetical art of Wordsworth and that of these other poets as "pure, ornate, and grotesque" will suffice to show his standpoint, which was a sort of middle place between the classical and the Romantic. Bagehot wrote well, and possessed a most keen intelligence. Also to be classed here are Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, the very agreeable author of Horæ Subsecivæ, and James Hannay, a brilliant journalist, a novelist of some merit and an essayist of more, and author of A Course of English Literature which, though a little popular and desultory, is full of sense and stimulus.
Most popular of all at the time was Sir Arthur Helps (1813-75), a country gentleman of some means and of the usual education, who took to a mixed life of official and literary work, did some useful work in regard to Spanish-American history, but acquired most popularity by a series of dialogues, mostly occupied by ethical and æsthetic criticism, called Friends in Council. This contains plenty of knowledge of books, touches of wit and humour, a satisfactory standard of morals and manners, a certain effort at philosophy, but suffers from the limitations of its date. In different ways enough—for he was as quiet as the other was showy—Helps was the counterpart of Kinglake, as exhibiting a certain stage in the progress of English culture during the middle of the century—a stage in which the Briton was considerably more alive to foreign things than he had been, had enlarged his sphere in many ways, and was at least striving to be cosmopolitan, but had lost insular strength without acquiring Continental suppleness.
Of the literary critic who attracted most public attention during this period,—the late Mr. Matthew Arnold,—considerable mention has already been made in dealing with his poetry, and biographical details must be looked for there. It will be remembered that Mr. Arnold was not very early a popular writer either as poet or prose-man, that his poetical exercises preceded by a good deal his prose, and that these latter were, if not determined, largely influenced by his appointment to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. He began, however, towards the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties, to be much noticed, not merely as the deliverer of lectures, but as the contributor of essays of an exceedingly novel, piquant, and provocative kind; and in 1865 these, or some of them, were collected and published under the title of Essays in Criticism. These Essays—nine in number, besides a characteristic preface—dealt ostensibly for the most part, if not wholly, with literary subjects,—"The Function of Criticism," "The Literary Influence of Academies," "The Guérins" (brother and sister), "Heine," "Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment," "Joubert," "Spinoza," and "Marcus Aurelius,"—but they extended the purport of the title of the first of them in the widest possible way. Mr. Arnold did not meddle with art, but he extended the province of literature outside of it even more widely than Mr. Ruskin did, and was, under a guise of pleasant scepticism, as dogmatic within the literary province as Mr. Ruskin in the artistic. It might almost be said that Mr. Arnold put himself forth, with a becoming attempt at modesty of manner, but with very uncompromising intentions, as "Socrates in London," questioning, probing, rebuking with ironical faithfulness, the British Philistine—a German term which he, though not the first to import it, made first popular—in literature, in newspapers, in manners, in politics, in philosophy. Foreign, and specially French, ways were sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, held up as examples for our improvement; and the want of "ideas," the want of "light," the want of "culture," was dwelt on with a mixture of sorrow and satire. All this was couched in a very peculiar and (till its mannerism became irritating) a very captivating style, which cannot be assigned to any single original, but which is a sort of compound or eclectic outcome of the old Oxford academic style as it may be seen at times in Newman, of French persiflage, and of some elements peculiar to Mr. Arnold himself. The strongest, though the most dangerous, of these elements was a trick of iterating words and phrases, sometimes exactly, sometimes with a very slight variation, which inevitably arrested attention, and perhaps at first produced conviction, on the principle formulated by a satirist (also of Oxford) a little later in the words—
What I tell you three times is true.