The greater and more strictly literary names of those who have tried the stage in the intervals of happier studies, from Miss Mitford and R. H. Horne to Tennyson, have been mentioned elsewhere; and there is no need to return to them. Dr. James Westland Marston (1820-90) was once much praised, and was an author of Macready's. Miss Isabella Harwood, daughter of the second editor of the Saturday Review, produced under the pseudonym of "Ross Neil" a series of closet-dramas of excellent composition and really poetical fancy, but wanting the one thing needful. Perhaps a few other writers might with pains be added; and of course every reviewer knows that the flow of five-act tragedies, though less abundant than of old, has continued. But, on the whole, the sentence already put in more than one form remains true and firm—that in this period the dramatic work of those who have been really men and women of letters is generally far inferior to their other work, and that, with the rarest exceptions, the dramatic work of those who have not excelled in other kinds of literature is not literature at all.
CHAPTER XII
CONCLUSION
A conclusion which avows that it might almost as well have presented itself as a preface may seem to be self-condemned; it must be the business of the following pages to justify it. In summing up on such a great matter as this it is desirable—it is indeed necessary—to indicate, in broader lines than at the mere outset would have seemed appropriate or indeed possible, the general course of thought and of speech, of literary matter and literary form, during the century and more which is submitted to the view. We can thus place individuals in their position to each other and to the whole more boldly and with less reserve; we can sketch the general character of existing movements, the movers in which have been exempt from individual consideration by virtue of their life and work being incomplete; we can at once record accomplishment and indicate tendency.
The period dealt with in the first chapter of this book illustrates the differences in appeal of such periods to the merely dilettante and "tasting" critic, and to the student of literature in the historical and comparative fashion. To the former it is one of the most ungrateful of all such sub-periods or sub-divisions in English literature. He finds in it none, or at most Boswell's Johnson, Burns, and the Lyrical Ballads (this last at its extreme end), of the chief and principal things on which alone he delights to fix his attention. Its better poetry, such as that of Cowper and Crabbe, he regards at best with a forced esteem; its worse is almost below his disgust. Its fiction is preposterous and childish; it contributes nothing even to the less "bellettristic" departments of literature that is worth his attention; it is a tedious dead season about which there is nothing tolerable except the prospect of getting rid of it before very long.
To the latter—to the historical and comparative student—on the other hand, it has an interest of an absolutely unique kind. As was observed in a former volume of this history, the other great blossoming time of English literature—that which we call Elizabethan, and by which we mean the last five and twenty years of the Queen's reign and the fifty or sixty after her death—was preceded by no certain signs except those of restless seeking. Here, on the contrary, with no greater advantage of looking back, we can see the old fruit dropping off and the new forming, in a dozen different kinds and a hundred different ways. Extravagance on one side always provokes extravagance on the other; and because the impatient revolt of Coleridge and some others of the actual leaders into the Promised Land chose to present the eighteenth century as a mere wilderness in respect of poetry, enjoyment of nature, and so forth, there have been of late years critics who maintained that the poetical decadence of that century is all a delusion; in other words (it may be supposed) that Akenside and Mason are the poetical equals of Herrick and Donne. The via media, as almost always, is here also the via veritatis. The poets of the eighteenth century were poets; but the poetical stream did not, as a rule, run very high or strong in their channels, and they were tempted to make up for the sluggishness and shallowness of the water by playing rather artificial and rococo tricks with the banks. The fiction of the eighteenth century was, at its greatest, equal to the greatest ever seen; but it was as yet advancing with uncertain steps, and had not nearly explored its own domain. The history of the eighteenth century had returned to the true sense of history, and was endeavouring to be accurate; but it only once attained—it is true that with Gibbon it probably attained once for all—a perfect combination of diligence and range, of matter and of style.
In all these respects the list might, if it were proper, be extended to much greater length. The twenty years from 1780 to 1800 show us in the most fascinating manner the turn of the tide, not as yet coming in three feet abreast, rather creeping up by tortuous channels and chance depressions, but rising and forcing a way wherever it could. In the poets, major and minor, of the period, omitting, and even not wholly omitting, Burns and Blake—who are of no time intrinsically, but who, as it happens, belong accidentally to this time as exponents, the one of the refreshing influence of dialect and freedom from literary convention, the other of the refreshing influence of sympathy with old models and mystical dreaming—all the restlessness of the approaching crisis is seen. Nothing in literature is more interesting than to watch the effect of the half-unconscious aims and desires of Cowper and Crabbe, to see how they try to put the new wine in the old bottles, to compare them with Goldsmith and Thomson on the one hand, with Wordsworth and Coleridge on the other. Hayley perhaps alone, or almost alone, is rebel to the comparative method. Hayley is one of these hopeless creatures who abound at all periods, and whose native cast of nothingness takes a faint fashion from the time. But even in the verse of "Monk" Lewis we see the itch for new measures, the craving for lyric movement; even in the day-flies of the Della Crusca group the desire to be "something different." And then in Bowles, with his sonnets of places, in Sayers, with his rhymeless Pindarics, we come upon the actual guides to the right way, guides the oddest, the blindest, the most stumbling, but still—as not merely chronology but the positive testimony and the still more positive practice of those who followed them show—real guides and no misleaders.
Least studied, perhaps, because of its want of positive savour in comparison with their later achievements, but more interesting than all of these, is the early work of Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth themselves, and the work, not merely early but later, of men like Rogers and Campbell. Here the spectacle already presented in Crabbe and Cowper is repeated; but the process is in a further stage, and the fermentation is determining, according to the nature of the fermenting material. On Rogers it is nearly powerless; in Campbell only in his lyrics does it succeed in breaking up and dissolving the old crust; in Southey the effect is never quite complete; in Coleridge and Wordsworth, but especially in Coleridge, the leaven changes all the latter lump. Thenceforward the process is reversed. Instead of instances of advance amid a mass of inertia or aimless wandering we have instances of reaction amid a mass of advance. The work of the revolutionary time is done; the scholar, contrary to Goethe's dictum, has now not merely to exercise himself but to perfect.