A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

by George Saintsbury

But besides and underneath all this flourish, all this wide-ranging scatter of sometimes rather haphazard arrows, there was a solid literary value in Mr. Arnold's method. As has been noticed earlier in this chapter, the literary essay of the best kind had somewhat gone off in England during the middle of the century, and the short, crisp criticisms which had appeared to take its place in weekly papers were almost necessarily exposed to grave faults and inadequacies. It was Mr. Arnold's great merit that by holding up Sainte-Beuve, from whom he had learnt much, and other French critics, and by urging successfully the revival of the practice of "introducing" editions of classics by a sound biographical and critical essay from the pen of some contemporary, he did much to cure this state of things. So that, whereas the corpus of English essay-criticism between 1800 and 1835 or thereabouts is admirable, and that of 1835 to 1865 rather thin and scanty, the last third of the century is not on such very bad terms as regards the first. And he gave example as well as precept, showing—though his subjects, as in the case of the Guérins, were sometimes most eccentrically selected—a great deal of critical acuteness, coupled, it may be, with something of critical "will-worship," with a capricious and unargued preference of this and rejection of that, but exhibiting wide if not extraordinarily deep reading, an honest enthusiasm for the best things, and above all a fascinating rhetoric.

The immediate effect of this remarkable book was good almost unmixedly on two of the three parties concerned. It was more than time for the flower of middle-class complacency, which horticulturists of all degrees, from Macaulay downwards, had successively striven to cultivate, and which was already overblown, to drop from its stalk; and the whiff of pleasant scorn which Mr. Arnold directed at it was just the thing to puff it off. So the public, upon which he was never likely to produce too much effect, had reason to thank him for the effect that he did produce, or helped to produce. And on the critics too his effect, or the effect of which he was the symptom and voice, was also good, recalling them on the one hand from the dulness of the long reviews of the period, and on the other from the flippancy of the short, while inculcating a wider if not always a sounder comparison. Practically German poetry had nothing left to do in Mr. Arnold's day, and French had much: he thought just the other way, and reserved his encomium of France for its prose, in which it was drooping and failing. But this did not matter: it is the general scope of the critic's advice which is valuable in such cases, and the general scope of Mr. Arnold's was sound. On the third party, however,—himself,—the effect was a little disastrous. The reception which, after long waiting, he had attained, encouraged him not so much to continue in his proper sphere of literary criticism as to embark on a wide and far-ranging enterprise of general censure, which narrowed itself pretty rapidly to an attempt to establish undogmatic on the ruins of dogmatic Christianity. It would be very improper to discuss such an undertaking on the merits here; or to criticise narrowly the series of singular treatises which absorbed (with exceptions, no doubt, such as the quaint sally of Friendship's Garland on the occasion of the Franco-German War) Mr. Arnold's energies for some fifteen or sixteen years. The titles—Culture and Anarchy, God and the Bible, St. Paul and Protestantism, Literature and Dogma, etc.—are well known. Of the contents it is enough to say that, apart from the popular audacity of their wit and the interesting spectacle of a pure man of letters confidently attacking thorny questions without any apparatus of special knowledge and study, they have not been generally thought quite worthy of their author. There are many brilliant passages in these books as writing, just as there are some astonishing lapses of taste and logic; but the real fault of the whole set is that they are popular, that they undergo the very curse, of speaking without qualification and without true culture, which Mr. Arnold had himself so freely pronounced.

Fortunately, however, he never quite abandoned the old ways; and in his last years he returned to them almost wholly. Nothing better of the kind (individual crotchets always excepted) has ever been written than his introductions to selected lives from Johnson's Poets, to Byron, to Shelley (the most crotchety and unsound of all), to Wordsworth (incomparably the best). He aided others; and a collection of his purely or mainly literary work is still eagerly expected. Even this would be extremely unequal and open to exception here and there. But it would contain some of the very best things to be found in any English critic. And this after all, if not the absolutely highest, is one of the highest things that can be said of a critic, and one of the rarest. Undoubtedly the influence of Mr. Arnold did not make for good entirely. He discouraged—without in the least meaning to do so, and indeed meaning quite the contrary—seriousness, thoroughness, scholarship in criticism. He discouraged—without in the least meaning to do so, and indeed meaning quite the contrary—simplicity and unaffectedness in style. But he was a most powerful stimulus, and in some ways, if not in all, a great example. Some at least of the things he said were in the very greatest need of saying, and some of the ways in which he said them were inimitably charming.

Contemporary with Mr. Arnold, and his complement in critical influence, was John Ruskin, the sole living author of whom it has seemed proper to treat here at length, and, since the death of Mr. Froude, the sole surviving man of letters of the first class who had published before the middle of the century. He was born in 1819: he has given copious accounts of his family, of his youth at Denmark Hill, and so forth, and all the world knows that his father was a sherry merchant who, though he lived rather plainly, was able to give his son an early and plentiful indulgence in that Continental travel which had so much to do with developing his genius. Mr. Ruskin's education was oddly combined; for, after going to no school, he was sent to Christ Church as a gentleman-commoner and took his degree in 1842, having gained the Newdigate three years earlier. He wrote a good deal of other verse in his early years,—and he made himself a not inconsiderable draughtsman. But his real vocation was as little the practice of art as it was the practice of poetry. As early as 1843 there appeared, by "a Graduate of Oxford," the first volume of the famous Modern Painters, which ran to five large volumes, which covered seventeen years in its original period of publication, and which was very largely altered and remodelled by the author during and after this period. But Mr. Ruskin by no means confined his energies before 1860 to this extensive task. The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and (between 1851 and 1853) the larger Stones of Venice, did for architecture what the companion work did for painting. The Præ-Raphaelite movement of the middle of the century found in Mr. Ruskin an ardent encomiast and literary apostle, and between 1850 and 1860 he delivered divers lectures, the text of which—Architecture and Painting (1854), Political Economy of Art (1858)—was subsequently published in as elaborately magnificent a style as his other works. As Modern Painters drew to its close he became prolific of more numerous and shorter works, generally with somewhat fantastic but agreeable titles—Unto this Last (1861), Munera Pulveris (1862), Sesame and Lilies (1865), The Cestus of Aglaia (1865), The Ethics of the Dust (1866), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), Time and Tide by Wear and Tyne (1867), The Queen of the Air (1869), Aratra Pentelici and The Eagle's Nest (1872), Ariadne Florentina (1873), Proserpina and Deucalion (1875 seq.), St. Mark's Rest and Præterita (1885). Not a few of these were issued in parts and numbers, but Mr. Ruskin's bulkiest and most characteristic venture in this kind was Fors Clavigera, which was published at irregular intervals from 1871 to 1884. He has written many other things even in book form, besides innumerable essays and letters, some of which have been collected in two gatherings—Arrows of the Chace and On the Old Road.

Two things are mainly perceptible in this immense and at first sight rather bewildering production. The first, the most disputable and probably the least important, though the most at the author's heart, is a vast, fluctuating, but on the whole pretty coherent body of doctrine in reference to Art. Up to Mr. Ruskin's day, æsthetics had been little cultivated in England, and such handlings of the subject as existed—Burke's, Adam Smith's, Alison's, and a few others—were of a jejune and academic character. Even writers of distinct literary genius and of great taste for the matter, who had not resided abroad long, such as Hazlitt, much more such as Charles Lamb and Hartley Coleridge, betray the want of range and practice in examples. Even the valuable and interesting work of Mrs. Jameson (1794-1860) was more occupied with careful arrangement and attractive illustration than with original theory; and, well as she wrote, her Characteristics of Shakespeare's Women (1832) is perhaps more important as literature than the series of volumes—Sacred and Legendary Art, etc.—which she executed between 1845 and her death. The sense of the endless and priceless illustration of the best art which was provided by Gothic domestic and ecclesiastical architecture was only wakening; as for painting, the examples publicly visible in England were very few, and even private collections were mostly limited to one or two fashionable schools—Raphael and his successors, the later Low Country schools, the French painters in the grand style, and a few Spaniards.

Strongly impressed by the Romantic revival (he has all his life been the staunchest of Sir Walter's devotees), a passionate lover of Gothic architecture both at home and abroad, and early drawn both to the romantic nature-painting of Turner and the gorgeous colouring of the early Italian schools, Mr. Ruskin heralded Art with a passion of which eighteenth century "gusto" had had no notion. But he was by no means satisfied with heralding Art alone. Anathematising at once the doctrine that utility is beauty—that beauty is utility he would always have cheerfully admitted—and the doctrine that the beautiful is not necessarily connected either with utility, with goodness, or with truth, he from the first and to the last has endeavoured to work ethics and æsthetics into a sort of single texture of warp and woof respectively, pushing his endeavours into the most multiform, the most curious, and it must be owned sometimes the most grotesque ramifications and extremities. But he was not satisfied with this bold attempt at the marriage of two things sometimes deemed hostile to, and generally held to be independent of, one another. He must needs be bolder still, and actually attempt to ally with Art, if not to subject to her, the youngest, the most rebellious, and, as it might seem, the most matter-of-fact and utilitarian of all the sciences—that of Political Economy. As we have seen, he had brought the subjects together in lectures pretty early in his career, and he developed the combination further in the eccentric book called Unto this Last, originally published in the Cornhill Magazine as noted above. In this Æsthetics and Economics combined took a distinctly Socialist turn; and as England was under the very fullest dominion of the Liberal middle-class regime, with its belief in laissez-faire and in supply-and-demand, Mr. Ruskin was not a little pooh-poohed. It would be improper here to attack or to defend his views, but it is part of the historian's duty to say that, for good or for ill, they have, though in forms different from his and doubtless by no means always meeting his approval, made constant headway, and that much legislation and still more agitation on the extreme Liberal side, and not there only, may be said to represent, with very slight transformation, Ruskinian doctrine applied, now and then, to very anti-Ruskinian purposes.

With regard to æsthetics proper, it might be contended, without too much rashness, that the history of Ruskinism has not been different; but to some observers it seems to have described rather a curve than a steady ascent. After being, between 1840 and 1860, laughed at, despised, attacked all at once, Mr. Ruskin found his influence as an art teacher rise steadily during the seventh decade of the century, and attain its highest point about the close thereof, when he was made Slade Professor in his own university, and caused young Oxford to do many fantastic things. But, as always happens, the hour of triumph was the hour, not, perhaps, of downfall, but of opposition and renegation. Side by side with Mr. Ruskin's own theories had risen the doctrine of Art-for-Art's sake, which, itself as usual half truth and half nonsense, cut at the very root of Ruskinism. On the other hand, the practical centre of art-schools had shifted from Italy and Germany to Paris and its neighbourhood, where morality has seldom been able to make anything like a home; and the younger painters and sculptors, full of realism, impressionism, and what not, would have none of the doctrines which, as a matter of fact, stood in immediate relationship of antecedence to their own. Lastly, it must be admitted that the extreme dogmatism on all the subjects of the encyclopedia in which Mr. Ruskin had seen fit to indulge, was certain to provoke a revolt. But with the substance of Ruskinism, further than is necessary for comprehension, we are not concerned.

Yet there are not many things in the English nineteenth century with which a historian is more concerned than with the style of the deliverance of these ideas. We have noticed in former chapters—we shall have to notice yet more in the conclusion—the attempts made in the years just preceding and immediately following Mr. Ruskin's birth, by Landor, by De Quincey, by Wilson, and by others in the direction of ornate, of—as some call it—flamboyant English prose. All the tendencies thus enumerated found their crown and flower in Mr. Ruskin himself. That later the crowns and the flowers were, so to speak, divided, varied, and multiplied by later practitioners, some of whom will presently be noticed, while more are still alive, is quite true. But in 1895 it is not very unsafe to prophesy that the flamboyant style of the nineteenth century will be found by posterity to have reached its highest exposition in prose with Mr. Ruskin himself.

Like all great prose styles—and the difference between prose and poetry here is very remarkable—this was born nearly full grown. The instances of comparison in those who have tried both harmonies are rare; those in poets only are delusive and uncertain. But with the three greatest poets of England who have also been great prose writers, Milton, Dryden, Shelley, the assertion that the distinctive quality of their prose developed itself earlier than the distinctive quality of their verse is only disputable in the case of Milton. And Milton, as it happened, wrote prose and verse in manners more nearly approaching each other than any one on record. Mr. Ruskin has not been a poet, except in extreme minority; but he has been a great prose writer from the first. It is almost inconceivable that good judges can ever have had any doubt about him. It is perfectly—it is, indeed, childishly easy to pick faults, even if matter be kept wholly out of sight. In Mr. Ruskin's later books a certain tendency to conversational familiarity sometimes mocks those, and not those only, who hold to the tradition of dignified and ex cathedra pronouncement; in his earlier, and in all, it is possible for Momus to note an undue floridness, an inclination to blank verse in prose, tricks and manners of this or that kind unduly exuberant and protuberant.

But when all these things have been allowed for to the very fullest, what an enormous advance there is on anything that had gone before! The ornate prose writers of the seventeenth century had too frequently regarded their libraries only; they had seldom looked abroad to the vast field of nature, and of art other than literary art. The ornate writers of the eighteenth, great as they were, had been as afraid of introspection as of looking outwards, and had spun their webs, so far as style and ornament were concerned, of words only. Those of the early nineteenth had been conscious of revolt, and, like all conscious revolters, had not possessed their souls in sufficient quietness and confidence. Landor, half a classic and half a Romantic, had been too much the slave of phrase,—though of a great phrase. Wilson, impatient in everything, had fluctuated between grandeur and galimatias, bathos and bad taste; De Quincey, at times supreme, had at others simply succumbed to "rigmarole." Mr. Ruskin had a gift of expression equal to the best of these men; and, unlike them, he had an immense, a steady, a uniform group of models before him. Indulge as he might in extravagance, there were always before him, as on a vastly extended dais set before the student, the glories of nature and of art, the great personalities and productions of the great artists. He had seen, and he could see (which is a different thing), the perennial beauties of mountain and cloud, of tree, and sea, and river; the beauties long, if not perennial, of architecture and painting. A man may say foolish things,—Mr. Ruskin has said plenty; but when he has Venice and Amiens and Salisbury, the Alps and the Jura and the Rhine, Scott and Wordsworth, Turner and Lionardo, always silently present before his mind's eye, he can never, if he is a man of genius, go wholly wrong. And he can never go more than a little wrong when he is furnished by his genius with such a gift of expression as Mr. Ruskin has had.