A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

by George Saintsbury

Science, that is to say physical science, which has sometimes openly boasted itself as about to take, and has much more commonly made silent preparations for taking, the place both of philosophy and of theology, will hardly be said by the hardiest of her adherents to have done very much to justify these claims to seats not yet quite vacant from the point of view of the purely literary critic. We have had some excellent scientific writers, from Bishop Watson to Professor Huxley; and some of the books of the century which would deserve remembrance and reading, whatever their subject matter, have been books of science. Yet it is scarcely rash to assert that the essential characteristics of science and the essential characteristics of literature are, if not so diametrically opposed as some have thought, at any rate very far apart from one another. Literature can never be scientific; and though science may be literary, yet it is rather in the fashion in which a man borrows some alien vesture in order to present himself, in compliance with decency and custom, at a foreign court. Mathematics give us the example—perhaps the only example—of pure science, of what all science would be if it could, and of what it approaches, ever more nearly, as far as it can. It is needless to say that the perfect presentation of mathematics is in pure symbols, divested of all form and colour, of all personal tincture and bias. And it should be equally superfluous to add that it is in form and colour, in suggestion of sound rather than in precise expression and sense, in personal bias and personal tincture, that not merely the attraction but the very essence of literature consists.

By so much as verbal science or scholarship, which would seem to be more especially bound to be literature, claims to be and endeavours to be strictly scientific, by so much also necessarily does it divorce itself from the literature which it studies. This, if not an enormously great, is certainly rather a sore evil; and it is one of the most considerable and characteristic signs of the period we are discussing. The older scholarship, though sufficiently minute, still clung to the literary side proper: it was even, in the technical dialect of one of the universities, opposed to "science," which word indeed was itself used in a rather technical way. The invention of comparative philology, with its even more recent off-shoot phonetics, has changed all this, and we now find "linguistic" and "literary" used by common consent as things not merely different but hostile, with a further tendency on the part of linguistics to claim the term "scholarship" exclusively for itself.

This could hardly in any case be healthy. What may be the abstract value of the science, or group of sciences, called philology, it is perhaps not necessary here to inquire. It is sufficient to say that it clearly has nothing to do with literature except in accidental and remote applications, that it stands thereto much as geology does to architecture. Unfortunately, while the scientific side of scholarship is thus becoming, if it has not become, wholly unliterary, the æsthetic side has shown signs of becoming, to far too great an extent, unscientific in the bad and baneful sense. With some honourable exceptions, we find critics of literature too often divided into linguists who seem neither to think nor to be capable of thinking of the meaning or the melody, of the individual and technical mastery, of an author, a book, or a passage, and into loose æsthetic rhetoricians who will sometimes discourse on Æschylus without knowing a second aorist from an Attic perfect, and pronounce eulogies or depreciations on Virgil without having the faintest idea whether there is or is not any authority for quamvis with one mood rather than another. Nor is it possible to see what eirenicon is likely to present itself between two parties, of whom the extremists on the one side may justly point to such things as have here been quoted, while the extremists on the other feel it a duty to pronounce phonetics the merest "hariolation," and a very large part of what goes by the name of philology ingenious guesswork, some of which may possibly not be false, but hardly any of which can on principles of sound general criticism be demonstrated to be true. It is not wonderful, though it is in the highest degree unhealthy, that the stricter scholars should be more or less scornfully relinquishing the province of literary criticism altogether, while the looser æsthetics consider themselves entitled to neglect scholarship in any proper sense with a similarly scornful indifference.

It is, however, impossible that offences of this sort should not come now and then in the history of literature, and fortunately, in that history, they disappear as they appear. For the present purpose it is more important to conclude this conclusion with a few general remarks on the past, fewer on the present, and fewest of all on the future.

On this last head, indeed, no words were perhaps even better than even fewest; though something of the sort may be expected. Rash as prophecy always is, it is never quite so rash as in literature; and though we can sometimes, looking backward, say—perhaps even then with some rashness—that such and such a change might or ought to have been expected, it is very seldom that we can, when deprived of this illegitimate advantage, vaticinate on such subjects with any safety. Yet the study of the present always, so to speak, includes and overlaps something of the future, and by comparison at least of other presents we can discern what it is at least not improbable that the future may be. What, then, is the present of literature in England?

It can be described with the greater freedom that, as constantly repeated, we are not merely at liberty ex hypothesi to omit references to individuals, but are ex hypothesi bound to exclude them. And no writer, as it happens rather curiously, of anything like great promise or performance who was born later than the beginning of the fifties has died as yet, though the century is so near its close. Yet again, all the greatest men of the first quarter of the century, with the single exception of Mr. Ruskin, are gone; and not many of the second remain. By putting these simple and unmistakable facts together it will be seen, in a fashion equally free from liability to cavil and from disobliging glances towards persons, that the present is at best a stationary state in our literary history. Were we distinctly on the mounting hand, it is, on the general calculation of the liabilities of human life, certain that we must have had our Shelley or our Keats side by side with our Wordsworth and our Coleridge. That we have much excellent work is certain; that we have much of the absolutely first class not so. And if we examine even the good work of our younger writers we shall find in much of it two notes or symptoms—one of imitation or exaggeration, the other of uncertain and eccentric quest for novelty—which have been already noted above as signs of decadence or transition.

Whether it is to be transition or decadence, that is the question. For the solution of it we can only advance with safety a few considerations, such as that in no literary history have periods of fresh and first-rate production ever continued longer than—that they have seldom continued so long as—the period now under notice, and that it is reasonable, it is almost certain, that, though by no means an absolutely dead season, yet a period of comparatively faint life and illustration should follow. To this it may be added as a consideration not without philosophical weight that the motives, the thoughts, the hopes, the fears, perhaps even the manners, which have defrayed the expense of the literary production of this generation, together with the literary forms in which, according to custom, they have embodied and ensconced themselves, have been treated with unexampled, certainly with unsurpassed, thoroughness, and must now be near exhaustion; while it is by no means clear that any fresh set is ready to take their place. It is on this last point, no doubt, that the more sanguine prophets would like to fight the battle, urging that new social ideas, and so forth, are in possession of the ground. But this is not the field for that battle.

In dealing with what has been, with the secular hour that we have actually and securely had, we are on far safer, if not on positively safe ground. Here the sheaves are actually reaped and brought home; and if the teller of them makes a mistake, his judgment, and his judgment only, need be at fault. Not all ways of such telling are of equal value. It may be tempting, for instance, but can hardly be very profitable, to attempt to strike an exact balance between the production of the century from 1780 to 1880 with that of the other great English literary century from 1580 to 1680. Dear as the exercise is to some literary accountants, there is perhaps no satisfactory system of book-keeping by which we can really set the assets and the liabilities of the period from the appearance of Spenser to the death of Browne against the assets and liabilities of that from the appearance of Burns to the death of Tennyson, and say which has the greater sum to its credit. Still more vague and futile would it be to attempt to set with any exactness this balance-sheet against that of the other great literary periods of other countries, languages, and times. Here again, most emphatically, accuracy of this kind is not to be expected.

But what we can say with confidence and profit is that the nineteenth century in England and English is of these great periods, and of the greatest of them; that it has taken its place finally and certainly, with a right never likely to be seriously challenged, and in a rank never likely to be much surpassed.

The period which lisped its numbers in Burns and Blake and Cowper, which broke out into full song with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, which, not to mention scores of minor singers, took up the tale with Tennyson and Browning and passed it on to Arnold, Rossetti, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Swinburne, need fear no comparisons in the matter of poetry. In prose fiction, as we have seen, it stands alone. It is almost a century of origins as regards the most important kinds; it is quite a century of capital and classical performance in them. In "making"—prose or verse—no time leaves record of performance more distinguished or more various.