A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

by George Saintsbury

That in one great literary kind, drama, it exhibits lamentable deficiency, that indeed in that kind it hardly counts at all, has been admitted; and it is not probable that in any of the serious prose kinds, except history, it will ever rank very high when compared with others. Its theology has, as far as literature is concerned, been a little wanting in dignity, in finish, and even in fervour, its philosophy either commonplace or jargonish, its exercises in science and scholarship ever divorcing themselves further from literary ideals. But in the quality of its miscellaneous writing, as well as in the facilities given to such writing by its special growth—some would say its special fungus—of the periodical, it again rises to the first class. Hardly the period of Montaigne and Bacon, certainly not that of Dryden, Cowley, and Temple, nor that of Addison and Steele, nor that of Johnson and Goldsmith, can vie with the century of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, of Leigh Hunt and Thomas de Quincey, of Macaulay and Thackeray and Carlyle, of Arnold and Mr. Ruskin. Miscellaneous we have been,—perhaps too much so,—but we should be a little saved by the excellence of some of our miscellanists.

Pessimists would probably say that the distinguishing and not altogether favourable notes of the century are a somewhat vagabond curiosity in matter and a tormented unrest of style. The former concerns us little, and is chiefly noticeable here because of the effect which it has had on the great transformation of historical writing so often noticed; the latter concerns us intimately. And no doubt there is hardly a single feature—not even the growth of the novel, not even the development of the newspaper—which will so distinctly and permanently distinguish this century in English literary history as the great changes which have come over style, and especially prose style. There has been less opportunity to notice these collectively in any of the former chapters than there has been to notice some other changes: nor was this of much importance, for the present is the right place for gathering up the fragments.

The change of style in prose is undoubtedly as much the leading feature of the century as is in poetry the change of thought and outlook, on which latter enough perhaps has been said elsewhere; the whole of our two long chapters on poetry being indeed, with great part of this conclusion, a continuous exposition of it. But the change in prose was neither confined to, nor specially connected with, any single department of literature. Indirectly indeed, and distantly, it may be said to have been connected with the growth of the essay and the popularity of periodicals; and yet it is not quite certain that this was anything more than a coincidence due to the actual fact that the first extensive practitioners of ornate prose, Wilson and De Quincey, were in a way journalists.

That the sudden ornateness, in part a mere ordinary reaction, was also in part due to a reflection of the greater gorgeousness of poetry, though it was in itself less a matter of thought than of style, is true. But literary reactions are always in part at least literary developments; and after the prose of Burke and Gibbon, even after that of Johnson, it was certain that the excessive plainness reached in the mid-eighteenth century would be exchanged for something else. But it could not possibly have been anticipated that the change would exhibit the extent or the variety that it has actually shown.

That it has enriched English literature with a great deal of admirable matter is certain; that it has not merely produced a great deal of sad stuff, but has perhaps inflicted some permanent or at least lasting damage on the purity, the simplicity, and in the best sense the strength of style, is at least equally certain. It is less easy to say whether it is, as a movement, near its close, or with what sort of reaction it is likely to be followed. On the one hand the indication of particular follies and excesses may not seem decisive; for there is little doubt that in all the stages of this flamboyant movement—from De Quincey to Carlyle, from Carlyle to Mr. Ruskin, from Mr. Ruskin to persons whom it is unnecessary to mention—the advocates of the sober styles thought and said that the force of extravagance could no further go, and that the last outrages had been committed on the dignity and simplicity of English. On the other hand there are signs, which are very unlikely to deceive the practised critic, tending to show that the mode is likely to change. When actual frippery is seen hanging up in Monmouth Street or Monmouth Street's successors, when cheap imitations of fashionable garments crowd the shop windows and decorate the bodies of the vulgar—then the wise know that this fashion will shortly change. And certainly something similar may be observed in literature to-day. Cacophony jostles preciousness in novel and newspaper; attempts at contorted epigram appear side by side with slips showing that the writer has not the slightest knowledge of the classics in the old sense, and knows exceedingly little of anything that can be called classic in the widest possible acceptation of the term. Tyrannies cease when the cobblers begin to fear them; fashions, especially literary fashions, when the cobblers take them up.

Yet the production of what must or may be called literature is now so large, and in consequence of the spread of what is called education the appetite so largely exceeds the taste for it, that it is not so easy as it would once have been to forecast the extent and validity of any reaction that may take place.

If, without undue praising of times past, without pleading guilty to the prejudices sometimes attributed to an academic education, and also without trespassing beyond the proper limits of this book, it may be permitted to express an opinion on the present state of English literature, that opinion, while it need not be very gloomy, can hardly be very sanguine. And one ground for discouragement, which very especially concerns us, lies in the fact that on the whole we are now too "literary." Not, as has been said, that the general taste is too refined, but that there is a too indiscriminate appetite in the general; not that the actual original force of our writers is, with rare exceptions, at all alarming, but that a certain amount of literary craftsmanship, a certain knowledge of the past and present of literature, is with us in a rather inconvenient degree. The public demands quantity, not quality; and it is ready, for a time at any rate, to pay for its quantity with almost unheard of returns, both, as the homely old phrase goes, in praise and in pudding. And the writer, though seldom hampered by too exact an education in form, has had books, as a rule, too much with him. Sometimes he simply copies, and knows that he copies; oftener, without knowing it, he follows and imitates, while he thinks that he is doing original work.

And worse than all this, the abundance of reading has created an altogether artificial habit—a habit quite as artificial as any that can ever have prevailed at other periods—of regarding the main stuff and substance of literature. Much reading of novels, which are to the ordinary reader his books, and his only books, has induced him to take their standards as the standards of both nature and life. And this is all the more dangerous because in all probability the writers of these very novels have themselves acquired their knowledge, formed their standards, in a manner little if at all more first-hand. We have nature, not as Jones or Brown saw it for himself, but as he saw it through the spectacles of Mr. Ruskin or of Jefferies; art, not as he saw it himself, but as he saw it through those of Mr. Ruskin again or of Mr. Pater; literary criticism as he learnt it from Mr. Arnold or from Sainte-Beuve; criticism of life as he took it from Thackeray or from Mr. Meredith.

Something like this has occurred at least three times before in the history of European literature. It happened in late Græco-Roman times, and all the world knows what the cure was then, and how the much-discussed barbarian cleared the mind of Europe of its literary cant by very nearly clearing out all the literature as well. It happened on a much smaller scale, and with a less tremendous purgation, at the close of the Middle Ages, when the world suddenly, as it were, shut up one library and opened another; and at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, when it shut both of these or the greater part of them, and took to a small bookshelf of "classics," a slender stock of carefully observed formulæ and—common sense.

What it will take to now, nobody can say; but that it will in one fashion or another change most of its recent wear, shut most of its recent books, and perhaps give itself something of a holiday from literature, except in scholastic shapes, may be not quite impossible. Another Lyrical Ballads may be coming for this decade, as it came a hundred years ago: all we can say is that it apparently has not come yet. But whether it does come or does not, the moment is certainly no bad one, even if chronology did not make it inviting, for setting in order the actual, the certain, the past and registered production of the century since the dawn of the great change which ended its vigil. The historian, as he closes his record, is only too conscious of the objections to omission that may probably be brought against him, and of those of too liberal admission which certainly will be brought. It is possible that for some tastes even this chapter may not contain enough of Tendenz-discussion, that they may miss the broader sweeps and more confident generalisations of another school of criticism. But the old objection to fighting with armour which you have not proved has always seemed a sound one, and has seldom failed to be justified of those who set it at nought. Careful arrangement of detail and premiss, cautious drawing of conclusions, and constant subjection of these conclusions to that process of literary comparison which I believe to be the strongest, the safest, the best engine of literary criticism altogether—these are the things which I have endeavoured to observe here. It might have shown greater strength of mind to reject a large number of the authors here named, and so bring the matter into case for more extended treatment of interesting individuals. But there is something, as it seems to me, a little presumptuous in a too peremptory anticipation of the operations of Time the Scavenger. The critic may pretty well foresee the operations of the wallet-bearer, but he is not to dictate to him the particular "alms for oblivion" which he shall give. As it used to be the custom for a dramatic author, even though damned, to have his entrées at the theatre, so those who have once made an actual figure on the literary stage are entitled, until some considerable time has elapsed, to book-room. They lose it gradually and almost automatically; and as I have left out many writers of the end of last century whom, if I had been writing sixty years since, I should doubtless have put in, many of the first half of it whom I should have admitted if I had been writing thirty years since, so in another generation others will no doubt exercise a similar thinning on my own passed or pressed men.