The Progress of the Century

by Unknown

In a more recent generation Byron prolonged the Wertherism of Werther, Byron being thus a grandson of Rousseau, while he borrowed his form, and borrowed it very ill, from what Scott borrowed of Coleridge. The genius of Byron is not contested by the sane, but except in satire it seldom found clear and adequate, because it sought hurried, heedless, and tumultuous, expression. Scott had a better ear and was not so reckless an improvisatore. Poems that can endure are not written like Byron’s, in the brief leisure of fashionable industry. We admire the native impetus of Byron, his gift of satire, his sensitiveness to elemental force in nature and in man, but we cannot understand the furore which was so much the child of his title, his beauty, his recklessness, and his studiously cultivated air of mystery. Mr. Lenville, as reported by Mr. Folair, said that Nicholas Nickleby was “a regular stick of an actor, and it’s only the mystery about him that has caused him to go down with the people here, though Lenville says he don’t believe there’s anything at all in it.” A later age must partly adopt the same theory of Byron’s original and unparalleled success in Europe as well as in England. He was mysterious Manfred, he was Childe Harold, he was the Corsair; a hero of Mrs. Radcliffe’s, with an Oriental air and a gloomy secret and a heart burning with indignation against the unworthy species of men. What had Byron done? Even Goethe was curious, believing wild anecdotes; now we really do not care what Byron did, recognizing in him, his genius, and his pose, not so much the “Satanic,” as the result of hysteria and madness in his race. Satanism, from of old, has been mainly hysteria. The element of personal reclame in Byron has faded, and with it fades his reputation as an earth-shaking poet. Attempts to revive that fame in our day, attempts to bring us back to “the noble poet,” are respectable, being based on loyalty to the taste of our great-grandfathers and grandmothers in all civilized countries. But the efforts are futile. “Byron,” says Mr. Saintsbury, “seems to me a poet distinctly of the second class, and not even of the best kind of second, inasmuch as his greatness is chiefly derived from a sort of parody, a sort of imitation of the qualities of the first. His verse is to the greatest poetry what melodrama is to tragedy, what plaster is to marble, what pinchbeck is to gold.” Such, however unpopular they may be, are my own candid sentiments, for though from childhood I could and did read all our great poets with pleasure, it was not with the kind of pleasure which Byron in his satire and his declamation could occasionally give me. He is monotonous, he is rhetorical, his versification is often incredibly bad, and he is more obscure, mainly by dint of hurry, bad printing, and bad grammar, than Mr. Browning. Thus Byron leaves us impressed as with a vast, even volcanic, yet dandified force, untrained and often misdirected. Either by nature, or in reaction, he professed sympathy with the Augustan school of Queen Anne’s reign, and sided with Pope in the long quarrel as to whether Pope is a poet.

Even the modern opponents of Byron must recognize in him qualities which won the admiration and affection of Scott and Shelley. In Shelley we had a true child of the revolution, the Aufklarung, and the later eighteenth century. His boyhood trifled with chemical science (probably not then popular with the human boy); his adolescence was given to converting school-girls into “dear little atheists.” His social ideas, like those of some advanced moderns, aimed at the absolute destruction of the family; and the moral of Laon and Cythna went far behind the morals of the most backward savages, who make incest a capital offence. Shelley, a boy all his life, was more boyishly devoted to destruction than even the newest writers on the relations of the sexes. In “making all things new” both he and they are, in fact, relapsing on a condition of society which, if it ever existed, is so old that it may be called “pre-human,” and is contrary to nature, as far as we can study human nature in the least developed of tribes. His ideas conducted Shelley to the tragedy and farce of his career: his desertion of one young wife, followed by her suicide, and his marriage with another, in entire opposition to his own opinions. In literature he began at school with a devout following of Mrs. Radcliffe; while, in Queen Mab and Alastor, vigorous but vague and misty Childe Harold, wandering in No Man’s Land, he first displayed his originality in poetical form. His personal character being noble and generous in the highest degree, his sympathy with the poor and the oppressed being a true passion, Shelley’s errors arose from the fixed idea that almost every human ordinance must, being old, be necessarily bad. He would recognize that there is, after all, something right in the sixth commandment, but did not draw the inference that a gleam of reason might also be found in most of the rest of the Decalogue. The state of society then, as always, provoked revolt, but the state of society was grievous, not because its moral laws were bad, but because its laws were not obeyed. Shelley had no turn for narrative, and, in such poems as The Revolt of Islam, it is the splendid meteoric genius, the unexcelled music that captivate. In lyrics he was probably the most original force since the Elizabethan age: his verse is a singing and soaring flame. In Adonis his righteous indignation carries him forward like an angel with a sword of fire; and The Witch of Atlas is a triumph in a new “fairy way of writing.” His is the Muse of clouds and stars, of sea and tempest, of all the aspects, and, in appearance, most capricious forces of the world, yet his is also the Muse of flowers and peaceful woods, of dejection and of delight. What the born rebel, Milton, might have been without the foundation and trammels of Puritanism, that Shelley was, though his wild and tender lyric note was even more exquisite than Milton’s. Neither was, in the full sense, human, for both were without humor, as may be seen in their humorous pieces.

Keats, but three years younger than Shelley (1795), was more a true child of the nineteenth century. His social ideas, though of course liberal, were more in abeyance; he was more exclusively an artist; and his art was more controlled by the revived Elizabethanism of Leigh Hunt (1784). That singular man, who had so much taste, and so much of it bad; so intense a theory of social benevolence, and so keen a belief that it was more blessed to receive than to give, “owed little” (in the way of literature) “to any but the old masters, and many contemporaries owed not a little to him.” Few owed more, for good and bad, than Keats. Virgil he had found out for himself, and had translated when a schoolboy. Spenser, too, he found for himself, and Greece he discovered afresh in Lemprière’s Dictionary and in Chapman’s Homer. But this superficial euphuism and elaborate verbal quaintness he partly derived at second hand from Leigh Hunt.

That something in Leigh Hunt which suggested Harold Skimpole to Dickens, and his violent conception of The Cockney School to Lockhart, was not hidden from Keats, and inspired him with some bitter words. It was what he derived from Hunt that gave occasion to Keats’s assailants, who were more of political than of literary partisans. Lockhart, or Wilson, or both, with the Quarterly reviewer, in attacking Endymion were attacking, they thought, a member of an affected, effeminate, and radical coterie. Keats himself, maturing with the suddenness of genius, looked on Endymion as thoroughly immature. But killed, or even discouraged, by his critics he was not, and on a page of a copy of Lamia where his publishers spoke of his discouragment he wrote “This is a lie.” (The copy is in the possession of Canon Ainger.) Keats, like Burns, whom he so intensely admired and so unerringly judged as a man and a poet, was his own best critic. Despite his boyish lusciousness of taste, and the fever of letters written when dying, there was no manlier or more chivalrous soul in England than that of the poet of the odes to the nightingale and to autumn. Keats at his best attained sheer perfection of language, of emotion, and of thought. As he advised Shelley to be, he was not content with less than filling all the rifts with pure gold. “Untaught,” like the minstrel of Odysseus, he combined a Greek clarity and largeness of manner with that romance which Greece does not lack, but which he possessed in a degree more conspicuous, at least to readers who are not Greeks. Though he has not been and cannot be imitated, he has supplied to Tennyson and the best moderns a standard and an ideal. That the Shakespearian copiousness of humanity and humor and dramatic genius would ever have been his nothing indicates, but what writer of the nineteenth century, except Scott, has possessed a large share of these qualities? In poetry, not one, and it was in prose that Scott wore his fragment of the cloak of Shakespeare. For the century has not produced, in England or America, a great dramatic poet. It is to fiction, to Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Stevenson, Meredith, Hawthorne, George Eliot, that we must look for the humor and humanity and passion which, earlier, found their vehicle in the drama.

Ours is a reading rather than a seeing century, though this does not explain the reason which made the great novelists incapable of writing for the stage. Of the other poets of the early century, Campbell, Rogers, Moore, Landor, Hogg, and the ladies, Mrs. Hemans, and L. E. L., and Beddoes, space does not permit us to treat. Landor’s audience has not increased; Rogers has none; Campbell is best remembered for war songs which I fear are overrated; Hogg, despite some exquisite passages in Kilmeny, and some admirable songs, suffers from his countrymen’s exclusive devotion to Robbie Burns. When Scott turned to fiction (1814) the current of popular taste at once changed into that channel. Byron had still his vogue; Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge then sang only to the few initiated; Wordsworth was past his prime; and with the general public nothing was really popular but fiction, and that fiction was Scott’s. Miss Austen is probably much more widely appreciated to-day than when she died, little noted by the world, in 1817. A criticism of Scott’s novels, which first made fiction supreme and far above poetry in the estimation of “the reading public,” cannot be attempted in this place. The best estimate of Scott, if far from most favorable, is his own, in the introduction to The Fortunes of Nigel. His faults of prolixity, haste, indifference to delicacy of style, and even to grammar; his “big bow-wow” vein (as he calls it); the stilted theatrical language of his Catherine Glovers and Helen Macgregors—all these defects, with his hasty denouéments (as of Shakespeare and Molière), are patent, are confessed, and probably deter many readers from making profit of his humor, his rich knowledge of and sympathy with all human nature, his infrequent but exquisite touches of passion, his tragedy and comedy. None the less, Scott is the main stock of the fiction of the century. Men may now have more minute knowledge, though so wide a knowledge has none; may have more wit, if less humor; may eagerly hunt for all that Scott loathed and avoided in our animal nature; may, indeed must, practise a more careful style, but all the novelists are, willy-nilly, children of Scott and Miss Austen. Dickens, indeed, owed more to Smollett (one of Scott’s chief favorites), Thackeray owed more to Fielding, the “Kailyard School” owed more to Galt (1779—1839). But Scott is “the father of the rest,” above all, of Dumas; and Miss Austen is the mother. Lord Lytton and Mr. Disraeli had, especially at first, a tinge of Byronism, later developing on their own lines: Mr. Disraeli’s political; Lord Lytton’s multifarious, including the line of modern mysticism, now often worked. Scott lived to be interested in Lytton, and might have seen (though probably he did not see them) the little-noted beginnings of Browning and Tennyson, about 1830.

What he did see, and admire, was the performance of Cooper, with whom actual and living American fiction may perhaps be said to take its rise. In England, Cooper was regarded as the Scott of America; and it is to be regretted that Lockhart did not excise a splenetic personal reference to Cooper in Sir Walter’s Journal. He was old, tired, and fatigued with the pressure of society in Paris when he wrote. Cooper had the genius to appropriate the unworked fields of American patriotic seafaring life, and of the manners of the Red Man; he is “Cooper of the wood and wave.” Eagerly were his works read by boys, when Thackeray was a boy, and when I was a boy. Never shall his readers forget the “Long Carabine,” to whom Thackeray was devoted, and Uncas, and Chingachgook.

“Still we love the Delaware,
And still we hate the Mingos.”

Doubtless Cooper’s Indians are not “realistically” treated, though there is infinitely more of truth in his dignified hunters and warriors than people conversant only with the Red Man of to-day are ready to believe. But Cooper, probably, does not live with the immortality of his first renowned successor, Hawthorne, who, for secure perfection of form, is to modern fiction what Keats is to modern poetry. Like Scott, Hawthorne is the unforced fruit of his ancestry and the society into which he was born—a Puritan, not a Cavalier artist, with a background of austere faith and of old superstition, differentiated from that of the Covenanters by the shadow of deep forests and of struggles with the Indians and the wild things of the woods. These had passed into mellow memories, as, for Scott, had passed the age of witches, fairies, reivers, and claymores. Entirely, in the Scarlet Letter, as by way of hereditary influence in the House of Seven Gables, Hawthorne reproduced what was old, making it poetically enduring. His Mosses from an Old Manse, and other brief tales set the fashion, except by Poe, long unfollowed, of the conte. Neither author has been excelled in his own portion of this field. Hawthorne’s haunted consciences, Poe’s treasure tale, his detective stories, and his tales of terror remain unequalled, though so profusely imitated. This epoch, say from 1830 to 1855, was a kind of classical interspace in the literature of the century. France, preoccupied by war in the first thirty years of the age, now awoke to her own famous romantic era, with Hugo, Dumas, Musset, Gautier, George Sand, Sainte-Beuve, Mérimée—names of the highest. Germany, to the non-Teutonic world, is, in poetry, represented by Heine, and, in science, philosophy, philology, and history by a galaxy of innovators ingenious and industrious. America saw Hawthorne, Poe, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Ticknor, Prescott, Motley, Longfellow, Bryant, Emerson, in their prime; while England had Carlyle, Tennyson, Newman, Browning, the Brontës, Kingsley, Thackeray, Dickens, and Ruskin, all recognized and flourishing.

We look around and see, as Mr. Stevenson says in a letter, that “the suns have set,” while we are scarcely conscious of new dawns. Who can explain, by circumstances of social evolution and historical event, the rising and the setting of such constellations of genius? It is not enough to speak of the democratic demand, naturally indifferent to style, for never was style the object of such anxious research, except in other ages of euphuism. Encouragement is even overabundant; “masterpieces” are announced every week, and forgotten every year. It may be the prejudice of hoary eld, but I must confess that our new literature does not seem to me to show such promise of permanence as the literature of 1830–1860 gave, and, so far, has fulfilled. Has fulfilled in spite of our sneers at the “early Victorian,” which was not socialistic, or evolutionist and Darwin-ridden, and was “respectable,” and did avert its eyes from all that most people in real life don’t care to stare at. This “prudery” was no new thing. The Greeks, in except some late decadents and in the old comedy, have a “prudish” literature. The Latin classics are not in the taste of M. Zola. The age of Chaucer, the age of Elizabeth, were grossly frank, that of the Restoration was frankly lewd, but we have sought out many inventions over which Sedley and Rochester would not have cared to linger. Their grossness was gay; ours is morbidly squalid. Such things are absent from the work of Hawthorne and Holmes, Longfellow, Dickens, Thackeray, and the rest. Such things we now treat of, greatly daring, and somehow our elders appear apt to outlaugh and outlive us as humorists, novelists, and poets. It is strange.

Into the merits of that remarkable middle age of the century we cannot enter in much detail. Tennyson holds unimperilled the throne of the poet of the time. That his thought is not especially penetrating, whether he deals with the intricacies of human character, or with the problems of the universe, may be readily admitted. But I am unaware that any poet has yet “got the absolute into a corner,” or solved the problems of the universe. Tennyson, more than people suppose, was, personally, a mystic, with his own mystic experiences; and his philosophy was influenced by them. He “followed the Gleam.” Neither in the Idylls of the King nor in plays, was dramatic rendering of character his forte. His forte was charm, and music, and the interpretation of nature. In these he is the equal of the Mantuan, is the Virgil of the modern world, “golden branch among the shadows.” Moreover, he has infinite variety: from Mariana to Fatima and Rizpah; from the Lotos-Eaters, which “adds a new charm” after the Faërie Queene, to the Northern Farmer, from Ulysses to Crossing the Bar. The early Morte d’Arthur is of unsurpassed nobility and magic; the last poem, Crossing the Bar, is no less pre-eminent in these qualities. Tennyson, in short, had genius; new, as all genius is new, and no occasional defects of taste or temper can impair the splendor and richness of his gift to the world, nor the immortality of his fame.