We turn to the great masters of extravagant expression. At their head we place Lord Macaulay, who has demonstrated the art of making history romantic, and romance historical. Query: whether Sir Walter Scott was not the founder of the contemporaneous historical school? At any rate the cry is, “Let us have no more dryly accurate histories like Lingard’s or Arnold’s. Relegate to an appendix state papers and statistics. Give us delightful conversations between historical personages, somewhat in the style of Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, only not so heavy.” It is so delightful to enter into the secret motives of men, to interpret their hidden spirit, and clearly understand their whole mental and moral being. This is the new school of historical writing, carried to extravagant lengths by Macaulay, Froude, and Carlyle. The old-fashioned idea of history was the simple and exact statement of events, the ascertained motives of historical personages, and the actual results of their deeds and decrees. This idea the trio before mentioned scout with derisive laughter. Macaulay writes down “the dignity of history”; Froude penetrates into the arcana of royal bosoms; and Carlyle shrilly hoots at the Dryasdusts for their historical investigations, and makes a bonfire of archives and state papers. Of this precious triad Macaulay is the least vehement, but none the less must we dub him an extravagant. He never can say a thing naturally. He cannot rise above an epigram or an antithesis. Nor was there ever any intellectual growth in him. In Trevelyan’s Life and Letters of Macaulay there is a characteristic anecdote of his boyhood. His mother refused him a piece of cake for some misdemeanor—for missing a lesson, we think. “Very well,” antithetically answered the future reviewer (ætat. 9), “hereafter industry shall be my bread and application my butter.” This might have been written in the Edinburgh forty years after. When the famous essay on Milton appeared, sensationalism had not as yet invaded the prosy precincts of the reviews. Jeffrey’s classic but dull reviews were models; nor did the humor of the “joking parson of St. Paul’s” receive much countenance from the Scotch, on whom the parson revenged himself when he said that a surgical operation was necessary to get a joke into a Scotchman’s head. Macaulay’s brilliancy took the town by storm. But what is there in the review of Milton? of Johnson? of Bacon? He began the carnival of the sensational. George Cornewall Lewis said of Macaulay: “The idea of a man of forty writing such flowery and sentimental stuff! Macaulay will never be anything but a rhetorician.” But the reading people had their appetites whetted by Scott and Byron, and there has been little sobriety in literature since. The extravagance of the praise with which Macaulay bedaubed Milton struck the critics at the time; but when they answered, he was famous. The Americans raved over him. It was perhaps as well that his History was never finished, for it is morally certain that his infatuation for saying brilliant things would have led him to hurl Washington and the American patriots of the Revolution from their pedestals. He could not resist the temptation to bid men abate their admiration of any esteemed character. To wind up with a brilliant period was the height of his poor literary ambition. Of course he received his reward; but no man now who values his reputation for scholarship would think of citing him as an historical or, what may seem stranger, a literary authority. That glowing tribute to the Catholic Church in the review on Ranke has always seemed to us one of his rhetorical bursts. There were in the subject light and color, imposing figures, an atmosphere of art and beauty, and innumerable chances for introducing epigrams and startling paradoxes. He wrote an article which flames like one of Rubens’ pictures. The whole argument is false from beginning to end, and its logic would shame the New Zealander himself. The conclusion which any thoughtful man would draw from the powers and attributes therein ascribed to the Catholic Church is that such an institution must be divine—a conclusion furthest from the reviewer’s thought. He has made the dull pages of English political history as interesting as a fairy-tale, under which designation it no doubt will be tabulated by future scholars; for there is not a point d’appui in the entire history, from his glorification of King William to his defamation of Penn, that has not been shattered by some one. But who should seriously attack romance?
James II. was a poltroon, and William III. was a brave man and a great statesman. Macaulay did not attempt all the possibilities of sensationalism. This was left for J. A. Froude, who now reigns in his stead. Casting about for a striking character, Froude lights on Henry VIII. And it is here that that delightful historico-romantic style soars to hitherto unexplored heights of extravagance. The injured monarch is introduced to the sound of mournful music. His tortured mind is apparent in his anguish-riven face. Contemplate at leisure that Achillean form, that massive brow, the melancholy grace of those royal legs. A pensive smile irradiates a countenance on which all the graces play. He is thinking of Katharine. His conscience is smitten. Enter to him Anne Boleyn. What thoughts are hidden beneath that alabaster brow?—and so on for volumes. The forte of the historian of this school is his thorough knowledge of the thoughts and designs of his personages. Nothing escapes his eagle eye. This wondrous faculty, which has hitherto been considered preternatural, enables him to detect deep meanings in the slightest act. The king smiled significantly. Ah-hah! Sergeant Buzfuz’s interpretation of Pickwick’s note about the warming-pan sinks into obscurity alongside of the calm and connected analysis of motive that Mr. Froude can weave out of King Henry’s stockings. It will amuse our readers to take up a few pages of any of Froude’s historical works, and study out illustrations of this criticism. They will soon discover that it is he who does all the thinking, planning, and suffering for his historical automata, that are moved by the chords of his sympathetic heart. No one would call Froude a historian except in burlesque. He is a romancist.
But what shall we say of the Scotch Diogenes, Carlyle, who hurls books instead of tubs, though the latter missile would do less mischief? He is an extravagant. We have hesitated some time about classing him in the school, but we think that we are justified, at least by the wildness, unconnectedness, and rhapsodical fury of his speech. Besides, he frantically hates and denounces America, which fact would set him down at once as a man of unbalanced intellect and malignant humor. He used to know how to write English, as his Life of Schiller and Life of John Sterling abundantly prove. But in an evil hour he learned German, and the next view of him we have discovers him tossing in a maelstrom of German metaphysics. He certainly deserved a better fate. We very much doubt if any sane man can long keep his wits and study German philosophy, especially in the mad outcomes of Fichte’s Absolute Identity and Schelling’s theories of the το εγο. The best minds of Germany, both Catholic and Protestant, Möhler and Neander, have pronounced the judgment of all sensible men upon these absurdities in one word—rubbish. Carlyle patiently worked in this rubbish for years, and his result is not half so good as his brave old words, spoken out of his honest heart: “Do what you are able to do in this world and leave the rest to God.” In the name of common sense, do rational men care anything about the critic of Pure Reason, or the beer and tobacco speculations of conceited egoists? It were well if men, like the parish priest in Don Quixote, burnt all those foolish books of knight-errantry carried on in a world as dreamy and fantastic as that fabled by the old writers on chivalry. Carlyle’s command of language is marvellous, but his style is hybrid, wearisome, and frequently unintelligible. He is sensational, in a bad sense, too. There is not a hero that he has chosen who was not chosen with an eye to effect: Mohammed, a prophet! Luther, the hero-priest! Cromwell, the hero-king! The selection of these worthies enabled him to say something startling. Then the idea of taking Frederick II. of Prussia as a type of the heroic, kingly, religious, literary, and general excellence of the eighteenth century was carrying the extravagant a little too far. The old man now sits like a bear with a sore head. We pardon him much, for we look upon him as an embittered and disappointed man. He seems not to care what he says nor how rudely he says it. His criticism on Swinburne, the erotic poet, whose success is an indication of something rotten in English letters, is so harsh that we hesitate to quote it, though it is richly deserved: “He is a man up to his neck in a cess-pool, and adding to the filth.” We need Diogenes to snub Alexander and to trample on the pride of Plato. Had Carlyle escaped fantastic Germanism and its wretched philosophizing, he would rank with the greatest masters of language in any tongue. The glow and beauty of many of his descriptions are beyond praise, and no more skilful hand has ever drawn the vast and gloomy tableaux of the French Revolution. His historical method has the same vice as Macaulay’s and Froude’s. He is pictorial, imaginative, and given to unwarranted speculation. His style has the worst faults of the sensational school, though it may be alleged in his defence that his vast knowledge of German has unconsciously and radically modified it. Affectation he has none, which cannot be said of his imitators in word-coining.
Literary criticism, which certainly should have advanced somewhat since the days of Dennis, is at present as “slashing” as that old cynic himself could have desired. The great reviews, spoiled by Macaulay’s example, have adopted a supercilious tone that but ill comports with the dignity and functions of true criticism. We recall only one great exception, John Wilson (Christopher North), in recent English literary criticism, that is not open to the charge of querulous fault-finding. The narrowness of the English reviews, and their fatal obtuseness to see beyond the limits they have drawn for themselves, have deprived them of the proper power of literary judgment or suggestive writing such as we associate with a review. The latest of their number, the Nineteenth Century, is not long enough before us to enable us to form a satisfactory judgment. It lacks unity, but, perchance, this is a merit. The reader knows beforehand the judgment of the Edinburgh, the London and British Quarterlies, and the Westminster on any subject. They are a bench of Lord Jeffreys passing sentence before any evidence is presented to them.
There is no writer on whom sensationalism works such quick and fatal destruction as the critic. We look to him to be above the passions of the hour, the rage of the fashion, and the influence of literary and political cliques. Even his admiration must be tempered. He must betray no weaknesses. When we come across a critique which runs over with passion, weak sentiment, petty jealousies, unworthy bickerings, and a subdued but potent sensationalism, we are shocked and disappointed. Most contemporary reviews are pompous exhibitions of the writer’s own learning, which may be in one sense encyclopædic, and which generally throws the author under review quite in the shade. The older reviewers gave some hearing to an author. They quoted him largely, and enabled the reader to judge for himself. They proffered their opinions modestly, and supported their objections with proof drawn from the book itself. But nowadays, if a reviewer condescends to advert to the book which he is supposed to be reviewing, it is in a high and mighty tone of censure or of autocratic approval. This obtrusion of self and opinions smacks much of the sensational. The reviewer wishes to be seen upon the tripod, and he is convinced in his own heart, or at least allows his reader plainly to understand, that he could write a much better book than that which he has deigned to review. Slashing criticisms are in great favor. Oh! for another Macaulay to blast another Montgomery. We say, Oh! for another Pope to place these gentlemen in another Dunciad. There is no merit in cutting a book to pieces. An eye sharpened by malice and on the lookout for faults will detect blunders in a title. Where merited chastisement must be inflicted it should not be spared; but that is a poor idea of literary criticism that views it as a medium of communicating only stinging comment and bitter diatribe. Criticism is essentially calm and judicial. It should sift a book as law does evidence. No stormy passions should be suffered to disturb its equanimity. There is no other department of letters that invites and exacts such rare scholarship and genial wisdom.
The man who can quickly recognize and honestly praise a work of genius, and, through wise commendation, introduce it to a wide circle of readers, merits a crown more precious than the poet’s. In these days of much bad writing and wide reading there is deep need of such exact criticism, such careful watchfulness over literature, and such sure guidance of the public taste. Keep sensationalism at least out of our reviews and our book notices, for if the critic loses the reckoning we are indeed at sea.
We hinted that sectarian theology has its sensational side. If we can dignify with the name of theology that congeries of books, sermons, pamphlets, and tracts that is the literary outcome of Protestantism, then theology, the queen of the sciences, is in the plight of Hecuba as described in Hamlet:
“But who, oh! who had seen the mobled queen
Run barefoot up and down, threatening the flames,” etc.
No attempt is made to conceal the sensationalism of the Protestant pulpit. A dull preacher had best betake himself to another occupation; say anything that will be listened to, sooner than behold the agonizing sight of a sleeping congregation. Modern congregations do not enjoy the traditional nap. They are kept awake by the attitudinizer in the pulpit. They are not sure of what he is going to say next. Sir Roger de Coverley made his chaplain preach one of Barrow’s sermons, and, thus being assured of orthodoxy, he slept with a quiet conscience. The quality of the majority of Protestant sermons is as spiced and sensational as the average popular lecture. What motive but that of making a sensation can induce Farrar and Stanley to preach against hell in Westminster Abbey? Their sermons are as high colored as a story in the New York Ledger. The new tack which the Protestant hulk is now painfully taking is the harmonization of science and religion. We verily believe that Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall take a malicious pleasure in seeing the squirms of Protestant theologians. Those men know themselves the inconclusiveness of their arguments against revelation, but the fatal spell is on science, too—it must be sensational or nothing. The old scientists worked calmly away for years, and set forth the results of their investigations with the modesty of true merit. But Huxley cannot anatomize the leg of a spider without publishing the process in the newspapers, with some reflections upon its bearing and probably fatal effect upon the Mosaic records.