The study of Eastern civilisation has been another special line of modern research. The explorations of Layard threw a flood of light upon Nineveh, and, in the still more remote East, Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson achieved the remarkable feat of deciphering the Persian cuneiform inscriptions. Curiously enough, the same thing was done independently and almost simultaneously by Dr. Edward Hincks. Another portion of the East was studied by E. W. Lane, the greatest English Arabic scholar of his time, the best translator before Sir Richard Burton of the Arabian Nights, and author of one of the best books on life in the East, the Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians.
George Borrow
(1803-1881).
Among travellers who were not scholars, David Livingstone deserves mention for the greatness of his African discoveries, and McClintock as the chief in his time of Arctic explorers. But in the literary sense both were far surpassed by George Borrow, an author very hard to classify, but whom some would be disposed, for more reasons than one, to rank among the writers of fiction. Borrow did write stories, Lavengro (1851), and its sequel, The Romany Rye (1857), where facts of his own life are bewilderingly mingled with fiction; while it is strongly suspected that there is no small element of romance in the books of travel on which his fame chiefly rests. He had a remarkable gift for languages. Among other little-known tongues, he studied the Gipsy speech, and published a volume on The Gipsies in Spain (1841), and a word-book of the English Gipsy dialect. His best book however is The Bible in Spain (1843), an exceedingly readable account of his travels as colporteur in that country. Whether it be trustworthy as a record of facts or not, The Bible in Spain has at least induced some whose whole interest was in tracts and colportage to read a piece of good literature, and has delighted with entertaining adventures others who looked for nothing better than an enlarged specimen of the tract kind.
CHAPTER X.
POETRY FROM 1850 TO 1870: THE INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT.
We have already seen that traces of change in the spirit of poetry manifest themselves soon after the opening of the present period. They appear in the works of men like Bailey and Sir Henry Taylor, and they grow steadily stronger in the successive volumes of Tennyson. We have also seen that a spirit cognate to this manifests itself in other departments of literature as well. It attains its full growth, especially in poetry and art, about the middle of the century; and so marked is the difference from the previous four-and-twenty years that it has been called the English Renaissance. The name is too ambitious and grandiloquent, yet if we do not press it unduly it will be useful in reminding us that literature had in nearly all departments come to be dominated by new ideals. Nowhere do we see them more conspicuous than in poetry. Their influence is visible in the rise of new schools; first, the ‘Spasmodic School,’ stronger in passion than in intellect, and greater in promise than in performance; and secondly, the Pre-Raphaelites, who were primarily artists, but who were also men of letters. The first article of their creed was to be true to nature; but they were far from being realists as the word is now commonly understood. More important than either of these were those whose task may be described as that of wedding intellect to imagination. They were not a new school, for their leaders, Browning and Tennyson, had been active all through the first part of the period. But their power and their influence had now grown to maturity; both in their choice of subject and in their treatment they were swayed by the spirit of the time; and they were reinforced by some new writers who took a similar view of the functions of poetry.
The greatest of these new writers is Matthew Arnold, and his thought is so eminently representative of the generation that it may be well to consider him even before his seniors. It was as a poet that Arnold began his literary career. He won prizes for poetry at Rugby and at Oxford, and in 1849 he published his first volume, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems. Empedocles on Etna, also accompanied by other poems, followed in 1852, and another volume of poems the year after. A few additions to the pieces thus published were gradually made, and in 1867 appeared the New Poems. From that date Arnold wrote poetry sparingly. His career was therefore comparatively short, and the bulk of his verse is not great. He was frozen into silence by ‘that dull indifference to his gifts and services which stirred the fruitless indignation of his friends.’ But in poetry quality counts for more than quantity. Small in bulk as is his contribution, Gray has nevertheless a secure place among the immortals. Arnold’s contribution is much larger than Gray’s, and it has the same purity and beauty of finish.
Arnold was born just at the proper time to feel the forces of change working around him, and the sense of change is from the first deeply impressed upon his poetry. It is this, combined with his critical attitude of mind, that makes him specially the voice of the doubts and difficulties of his generation. The critical aspect of Arnold’s verse has been already noted. It is critical of human existence as well as of other poetry. In Obermann Once More, in Thyrsis, in The Scholar Gipsy, in Mycerinus, in Resignation, in the lines To a Gipsy Child, and in numerous other pieces we see the workings of this critical spirit. We see too that he is most of all weighed down with the profound sense of change. He finds himself in a world where all things have to be made new, and where the power that promised to renew them remains unseen. This is the case with religion, for the conviction of the decay of Christianity in the dogmatic sense is as plainly visible in Arnold’s verse as in his prose. It is the case also with politics and the social system. The French Revolution had shaken these, and had left to the next generation the task of rebuilding them. Its tremendous magnitude awes Arnold. He has none of that confident optimism which in Browning springs from breadth of intellect; still less does he share that which, in the panegyrists of material progress, is begotten of narrowness. He thinks the conditions of the time unfavourable to spiritual growth. It does not afford that ‘shelter to grow ripe,’ and that ‘leisure to grow wise,’ which even Goethe found in his youth, exposed though he was in maturer years to ‘the blasts of a tremendous time.’