His contemporary, Browning, had the misfortune to attract, by his faults, the people who wish to believe themselves clever, because they labor at appreciating passages which the poet had made obscure. Darkness is not depth, nor is obscurity a merit. From his letters it is plain that Mr. Browning had not the gift of lucid expression; from his poems it is manifest that he had not, in a high degree, the gift of verbal music and of charms. His gift of the grotesque, very real and original, was also his snare. In Christmas Eve and Easter Day, with Men and Women, we have the true essence of Browning at his best; we have his dramatic lyrics, with their amazing abundance of character and variety of measure. After the first fascinating volume The Ring and the Book became monotonous. One song in Paracelsus, to myself, seems worth all the dissection of character in the blank verse. There are many who find a kind of spiritual help in such pieces as Prospice. There are thousands who find in Men and Women a sort of intellectual enjoyment (or entertainment) which they can derive from no other poet who ever lived. An energy, life, and sympathy, breaking forth in fresh, unheard-of ways; vocal in strange, piercing, untried measures: these are the imperishable qualities of Browning. Look at his rendering of the Agamemnon: such is his version of life. The poetry of Æschylus is not there: “carmina desunt”; but there is a new, odd, unexpected rendering of the tragedy. So poignant and broken, sad, glad, grotesque, and pitiful, was Browning’s rendering of life. He was “ever a fighter”: no poet is more exempt from whining and despair. Destiny linked him with Mrs. Browning, whose genius, sincere and original, is apt to be obscured by palpable faults of manner, emotion, and even rhyme, on which it is superfluous to dwell. Her merits, and some of her defects, made Mrs. Browning the most popular of women poets in England, except, perhaps, Miss Ingelow. Both, in the crowd of accomplished versifiers, appear as true poets, though both, no doubt, fail to reach the place of Miss Christina Rossetti, who never can be popular.
The matter of popularity is full of puzzles and paradoxes. Tennyson was popular, yet great because he is popular. There was a moment when popularity without permanence might have been expected for Longfellow. The excellence of his moral intentions was then more obvious than the poetry. Such early pieces as Excelsior and The Psalm of Life yield odd results on analysis. But not much better can be said for the Queen of the May, and for parts of The Miller’s Daughter. In these is a marvellous dexterity in sinking. But sink, and remain sunk, was as little characteristic of Longfellow as of Tennyson. He was a true poet, in his lyrics, even in his translations, as well as in Evangeline, and that excellent experiment Hiawatha, where the measure of the Finnish popular poems is applied to the not dissimilar legends of another woodland race. But Longfellow lacked that undefinable quality of the rare, the strange, the hitherto unheard yet delightful note which now and again is heard in the verse of Edgar Poe. He was an Ishmaelite in literature, his hand against every man’s hand, and hence seems to be less admired where he was personally known than in France and England. It is not the famous Raven, but such pieces as To Helen, the Sleeper, and at most a dozen others which give Poe his high place in the judgment of his admirers. Not his ideas, but the beauty of his haunting lines, confers on him the laurel. Of Bryant, as a rule, and of Whittier almost always, the reverse is the truth. The acceptability of their ideas, the refined simplicity, not the natural magic, of their form, are their claims to renown. Except in a few places, as in such as his Commemoration Ode, Mr. Lowell is better remembered for the wit and vigor of his Biglow poems than for his serious verse, at least in England; while Emerson’s prose has precedence here over his poetry. The wisdom of the East and West, blended with his happy, courageous temper, made Emerson a corrective Carlyle, while Thoreau is the complement of Emerson.
Concerning the great Victorian novelists, Thackeray and Dickens, so much is daily written that remark is superfluous. A master of observation of all that had rarely been observed, a generous heart, an original and abundant humorist, the greatest source of mirth in our century, Dickens appears to wear less well than his rival. The unapproached merits of Thackeray’s style must preserve him in literature; his pathos is rare and unforced; his form of humor is as permanent as that of Fielding, and as successfully matched by his phrasing. Even his verse, mirthful or melancholy, does not fade, and has its own place on the borderland of poetry. George Eliot’s fame, too, must revive the success of her earlier and more humorous novels, before she became too fond of the Spencerian philosophy, and took herself too seriously, a natural result of adulation. Charlotte Brontë, in the same way, has been, as it were, rediscovered amid a chorus of fresh applauses, and with perhaps rather too curious investigations. In America, after Hawthorne, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Mrs. Beecher Stowe were the novelists most generally admired in England, when Thackeray and Dickens were verging to their decline. It is, indeed, to be regretted that Dr. Holmes did not write more fiction when in his prime. His excellent and original Elsie Venner, and Guardian Angel, with their humorous pictures of real life and their thread of phantasy, half mystical, half scientific, border (as often in the Poet and Professor at the Breakfast Table) on the ground of “psychical research.” Dr. Holmes was not merely, in verse and prose, an exquisite wit, but a man of rare knowledge, a man of science, and a sturdy defender of the purity of the language. Mrs. Beecher Stowe, on the other hand, took the world by storm with a vivid tract in the form of fiction; a book now not easy to criticise, but which can still move to laughter and tears. It is my “insular ignorance” which prevents me from appreciating other American fictions of that age, before the days of writers still happily living and working: Mark Twain, Bret Harte, W. D. Howells, Henry James, and scores of others, who, being here to speak for themselves, shall not be commented upon in this place. With Mr. Howells, as a critic, I have tried to break lances, while ready to admit one of his main contentions, that the art of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, and others of our fathers would have profited much by being a finer art, by condensation, by omission, by avoidance of the superfluous. But that our modern fiction is a greater art, that romance and story-telling and adventure are obsolete, or ought to be obsolete, that I can never admit while human nature is human nature. Mankind will never be content, in fiction, with tales of the psychology of the ordinary person; ordinary as we are, we desire to be, like Homer’s Heracles, conversant with great adventures. Mr. Howells perhaps may think Aristotle a Greek snob when he maintains that tragedy must find its theme in the sorrows of the god-descended kings. Are not the griefs of the poor or of the middle classes as poignant? They are; but they do not involve such heights and depths of fortune, raising or wrecking whole states, as do the woes “of Thebes, or Atreus’s line.” The fall of Prince Charles from an hour even of shadowy royalty, from the leadership of an army, from the wondering admiration of Europe and the applause of Voltaire into the subject and dependent sot is an example of modern historical tragedy; in its elevation and its decline more apt to move “pity and terror” than the circumstance that a journalist has taken to drink.
As in the case of America, so in that of England, I cannot enter into the merits of living novelists in so wide a task as the brief review of a century. Mr. Meredith, as a veteran of the 60’s, has shown, perhaps, fully what is the nature of his achievement; he shines as a creator of character (the highest praise) and as a writer with a thoroughly original view of the world, as a poet and as a wit. That his manner is entirely fortunate, and not rather tinged with wilful eccentricities like those of Browning and Carlyle, can scarcely be disputed. An accomplished young novelist has admitted to me that his manner is “catching,” and that he has to struggle against half-conscious efforts at imitation. Others do not struggle; and most grow older before they are able to write like themselves, with their own voices. Even Mr. Stevenson was caught now and then, his own voice being original indeed, but yet full of memories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and even of the Cameronian writers. To my mind Mr. Stevenson was the greatest, or, at least, the most enjoyable, of our novelists since George Eliot, excelling in matter and form, though probably always prevented by thwarting circumstances from doing himself complete justice. He practically revived in England the novel historical, now so abundantly practised, and practised with spirit, by Mr. Stanley Weyman, Mr. Anthony Hope, Dr. Conan Doyle, Mr. A. E. W. Mason, and a regiment of followers. The novel scientific, as in the hands of Mr. Wells, and the novel of adventure, “beyond the bounds of known romanticism,” as in Mr. Rider Haggard’s works, with the detective novel and the Oriental and imperialistic romances of Mr. Kipling, prove that man will not be satisfied with domestic realism alone. I never thought he would! Mr. Kipling’s astonishing powers of vision, his habit of ruthlessly cutting the superfluous, and his amazing command of technicalities, help to account for his world-wide fame. But the greatest of these is vision, not an acquired result of thought, but a gift of Heaven. The age has also produced a wealth of novels with a purpose. Would that the authors could be induced to state their purposes squarely, in undecorative treatises! But I confess that the treatises would not be read. The specialism of modern science has also invaded fiction, and some authors find a county or a parish wide enough for the work of a lifetime. The district has its dialect, and who can reprove it when spoken by the creatures of Mr. Barrie and Mr. Crockett? This kind of fiction is the result of our desire to learn (through novels) about the lives of all sorts and conditions of men. Enfin, the whole scope of mortal existence is now the farrage libelli of the novelists who range from prehistoric man to Bethnal Green; from Thrums to Central Africa. There is not the same eagerness to read history, which James II. regarded as “more instructive, and quite as amusing.” My heart is here with King James, and I confess to gaining more entertainment from Carlyle’s Frederick the Great than from most novels.
The earlier historians, from Scott to Carlyle, Macaulay and Froude, placed the human interest in the front rank. They conceived that history had to do with human beings of passions, caprices, moods, loves, and hates, dwelling in a world of interesting costumes, arms, architecture, ideas, and beliefs. Thus Carlyle, with much research, created his Cromwell or his Frederick, as Scott created his Queen Mary, his Louis XI., his James VI., or his Cromwell in Woodstock, who is not too remote from Carlyle’s. For these reasons Scott, Froude, Carlyle, and Macaulay really are “amusing” as well as instructive historians. When institutions and constitutions had to be described they were placed in separate compartments, as in the works of Hallam and Bishop Stubbs. Historians studied manuscripts, of course, but it was not held that only the unprinted was the valuable, that a new survey of known matter was absolutely valueless.
In the end of the century we have history which is not “as interesting as a novel” (like that of Prescott, Motley, Froude, and Macaulay), but very far from gay. Novelty of research is, quite justly, insisted upon (though research is as old as Hemingburgh, and was much advanced by Gibbon, Carter, Rymer, Walpole, Tytler, and so on) till, by a natural error, every scrap won from a wilderness of charters is valued beyond its deserts. The human interest is frowned upon; movements of forces, political and social, are treated in preference to personal character and adventure. Meticulous accuracy is insisted upon, till nervous students are actually afraid to publish. Even Mommsen, greatest of original students, is regarded as frivolous, even Curtius as “popular” by the modern school. It is natural to man to run into these excesses of reaction. Froude is not often accurate, Macaulay has prejudices, even Mr. Freeman was not sound about Knights’ Fees and about a certain palisade. Now the public does not care about Knights’ Fees or about the Manor, much; nor even about the obscure early history of civic institutions. In fact, even references to authorities frighten away part of the public, whose timidity I do not applaud. The results of our frivolity and of the portentous gravity of some modern historians is that, since Mr. Green, scarcely any writer of history is read except for examinations. As long as historians declare (often with perfect truth) that their own works are not literature, but something far more awful and solemn, namely science, history must be unpopular. But we are only waiting for a man of genius as accurate as the most meticulous, and as interesting as the agreeably irresponsible Froude. Of science I am not to treat, so I am dispensed from remarks on our scientific modern historians. It is certain that in collecting and printing and calendaring documents the age in all countries has shown praiseworthy industry, while Mr. Parkman in America, like our mid-century historians, was not too scientific to be readable.
Of theology, except when recommended by the art of a Newman or a Jowett, nothing is here to be said; though I could cheerfully say a good deal, especially about Biblical criticism. But that is science, though scarcely the sort of science which has been defined as “organized common-sense.” The poetry of the late century in England boasts the names of Rossetti, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, and Mr. Swinburne. It is tinged, in the former with mediævalism derived from the Italians and Chaucer; while in Mr. Swinburne every conceivable literary influence, from the Greeks to Baudelaire, from the Elizabethans to Victor Hugo, makes itself abundantly conspicuous. These poets, younger than Matthew Arnold, are not much influenced by Wordsworth, though by Shelley Mr. Swinburne was influenced. On the other hand, Mr. Arnold was a modern, academic, heterodox Wordsworth, and often a truly delightful poet.
He stood much aloof from the contemporary literature of his day, and his letters prove that he was no fervent admirer even of Tennyson or Browning. His own poetry has been to many, as to myself, full of delightful passages, whether he wrote of the Oxford country-side, or of Wordsworth’s hills, of “the shorn and parcelled Oxus,” or of the moaning sea that Sophocles long ago heard as he heard it on Dover beach. He was our greatest modern elegiac poet; a master of the Dirge. Of the living, again, no criticism can be offered; we only note the names, and real if very various merits, of Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. Watson, Mr. Davidson, Mr. Dobson, Mr. Benson, Mr. Thompson, Mr. Henley, Mr. Gosse, Mr. Stephen Philips, Mrs. Marriott Watson, Mrs. Maynell, Mr. Kipling, “a nest of singing birds.” It would be impertinent, and indeed perilous, to “draw invidious distinctions,” as the undergraduate said about the major and minor prophets: nor is it for this century to sift the poetic sheep from the goats, who, in an age that reads little poetry, are greatly guilty of much verse.
The unassuming and decried art of criticism remains. Essays are of no one age; there are similar excellences in every good essayist since Montaigne. We have no Hazlitt, Lamb, or Leigh Hunt, but we had Mr. Stephenson and Mr. Pater, so unlike in all but conscious interest in style, and reminiscence of the best models. Indeed, essay writing is almost an unpractised art, as the public “has no use for it,” any more than for the letter H on the Sandwich boards. A fairly bad novelist can live; to an appallingly bad novelist the workhouse unfolds its awful valves. In literary criticism Mr. Arnold stood alone in his age, and Mr. Arnold’s literary income, it is known, surprised, when stated, the Commissioners of Income Tax: not by its affluence. Of living critics it would be in the highest degree dangerous to say a word, though many words, both of praise and dispraise, might be said of a person of reckless character. That (with obvious exceptions) most critics are men intimately familiar with what is best, from Homer to Mr. Stephen Philips, few students would venture to aver. That we (for am I not the least of all critics, and not worthy to be called a critic?) are entirely devoid of ignorance, personal bias, likes, dislikes, prejudices, pet aversions, indolence, we are not so blindly conceited as to maintain. We have been taught by many centuries of creative geniuses, from Theocritus to the latest protesting popular novelists, to know our proper place, and we take refuge in “confession and avoidance.” The new century will not know our names when we pass where Dennis and where Cibber are, unless Mr. Robert Buchanan writes a new Dunciad.
The century, even if we are in full decadence (of which we are not the best judges), has been glorious in literature, and holds its own well with any in modern history. English itself has passed from the occasionally stilted Augustan survival, through the novelties of Macaulay, De Quincey, and Carlyle, and the early decorated of Mr. Ruskin, into slipshod slang in one extreme, and euphuism in the other. But the main stream keeps its course, and English may be written with perfect purity, and with new fluency and variety, by the men for whom the task is reserved by fate. But what does the century bequeath by way of intellectual motive? Little but the more or less transformed forces of the eighteenth century. There is science, but science, happily, is beginning to be aware that she is not really omniscient. Conceivably her foot is on the border of a new region, often surmised, never explored, full of light on the problems of spirit and matter. Hence, indeed, might come a new force in letters. Again, the social ideas of 1750–1800 may take practical shapes of incalculable momentousness, but these would not for long be favorable to literature. Or, less probably, the return on the past may assume practical shape, though this element of the later eighteenth century may seem, as far as letters go, to be exhausted. In brief, as I began by saying, the division of literary periods by measures of time is a cross-division. This peculiarity the last hundred years possess: that literature now blossoms on a far wider field. English-speaking America had, indeed, a literature long before the War of Independence; but it was not a literature for every reader of to-day. Now, and for long, the States have taken their own part in history, fiction, poetry, and all other branches of letters. Germany came back into world literature again just at the ending of the eighteenth century, after unregarded ages of neglect. Russia and the Scandinavian North awoke about the same time, and daily widen their influence, as does Belgium in the sunshine of Maeterlinck. France, of course, has in all time been in the foremost rank; while to balance America, Russia, and the North, Italy and Spain have scarcely held the place which through so many centuries was their own. Such changes in national literatures resemble the political waxings and wanings of national fortunes. The English-speaking peoples may have their eclipse; perhaps it is heralded by a modern comparative deficiency in humor which, if England and America cease to laugh, will die out of a profoundly solemn world.