Victorian Period of the

VICTORIAN PERIOD OF THE 19TH CENTURY Introduction.—During the Romantic Revival the pendulum had swung from revolt to reaction, from rapturous hope to des pair. The revolutionary ardour of the youthful Wordsworth and Coleridge had deadened into the rigidity of The Ecclesiastical Sonnets or sunk into the spiritual lassitude of the "Ode to De jection." Shelley's metaphysical and Byron's political visions of a world regenerated by freedom had been quenched in the waves of the bay of Spezzia and the swamps of Missolonghi. The gen eration that had endured the disastrous aftermath of the Napo leonic wars could never recapture the intoxication of the Revolu tionary dawn. Vet it could not find permanent satisfaction in the humorous irony of Peacock or in the communion with beauty of Keats. It began, therefore, a new forward movement. Its con ception of progress was no longer the taking of Heaven by storm, but gradual, orderly advance. The Reform Bill of 1832 was a renewed pledge of faith in slowly working political machinery, instead of catastrophic upheaval, as the means of social better ment. In the scientific sphere geological discovery accustomed men to the idea of gradual transformation, and prepared the way for the evolutionary doctrines that have closed for ever the vision of humanity attaining perfection at a bound. As the ascent of man was shown to be by stages, the importance of education in furthering his development was realized as never before. Such were the conditions in which the literature arose that is known by the name of the young queen who in 1837 succeeded to the throne of Elizabeth and Anne. Each of these has also given her name to a literary epoch. The Tudor queen was herself the cynosure of the poets and playwrights of her day ; Anne was no magnetic personality, but her court and Capital were the focus of the Augustan wits. When Victoria came to the throne, literature had learned neither to look for inspiration to a sov ereign nor to concentrate its gaze upon the charmed circle of the town. Yet it was not for nothing that from 1837 to z 90o a woman was the centre of social and, in a sense, political life. Feminine activities were thereby stimulated in all fields, includ ing that of literature. And it made for that reticence in the treatment of sexual problems which, whether considered a merit or a defect, was, till its later phases, distinctive of the Victorian period.

That period is more remarkable for the high level of its attain ment in very varied branches of literature than for absolute pre eminence in one. The Elizabethan age primarily spells Drama; the Augustan, Satire ; the Romantic Revival, Poetry. The Novel may claim to be the most representative Victorian type. Yet does either Pickwick or Vanity Fair count for as much as Newman's Apologia or Darwin's Origin of Species? It was in fields outside of pure literature, not only in science and theology, but history, law, and economics, that the age produced much of its most notable work. These are, however, primarily the concern of others than the historian of literature.

Tennyson.

In the highest sphere of letters, poetry, the Vic torian achievement is linked with, and yet distinct from, that of the preceding age. When the young Cambridge prizeman, Alfred Ten nyson, published his first volumes of verse in 1832 and 1833 an un friendly critic accused him of "out-babying Wordsworth and out glittering Keats." He had not Wordsworth's sense of the mystical union of Nature and man, but excelled him in exactness of obser vation and description. He was not absorbed, like Keats, in pure beauty, but practised a more fastidious and scholarly art. From the first even in his lovely reshaping of classical stories, and more explicitly in such poems as "The Palace of Art" and "The Two Voices," there is an 'undercurrent of malaise. In In Memoriam (185o) the sudden death of a deeply loved friend raised the fundamental questions of the age when religion and science were beginning their conflict. Even if the poet's solution may seem inadequate to-day, the stanzas in their exquisitely apt metre are imperishable cameos of mid-Victorian life in the rectory and the hall. And if the lapse of years has made The Princess (1847), in its treatment of woman's sphere, a museum-piece it lives by the beauty of its songs. In the Idylls of the King (1859-85) Tenny son allegorized King Arthur as the soul of man at war with the senses. Such a conception could not be successfully combined with that of Arthur in his human relationships, especially as the husband of Guinevere. The poet is to blame for the incongruity. But it is unjust on that account not to recognize the spiritual insight in the handling of the central theme or the narrative beauty of individual Idylls and episodes. The "reaction against Tennyson" of which the Idylls of the King has borne the brunt, has spent much of its force; his place is secure as the represen tative poet of his age.

The Brownings.

Strongly contrasted, except in fundamental convictions, is Robert Browning, educated outside the traditional pale, and except for an early debt to the "sun-treader" Shelley, curiously dissociated from the poets of the Romantic Revival. He throws back to Donne and the "metaphysical" school in sub tlety of thought and pregnancy of style. He is preoccupied with the inner life of the individual, his motives and aspirations. After a period of experiment in dramatic and semi-dramatic forms he found the monologue to be his fittest instrument and made use of it in Men and Women (18S5), Dramatis Personae (1864) and elsewhere. The speakers range from an Arab physician and a Greek "tyrant" to Renaissance painters and thence to moderns like "Bishop Blougram" and "Sludge the Medium." With his cos mopolitan interests and knowledge of the arts Browning could always furnish setting. But he rings the changes on the same leading motives—earthly life as a probation, high failure worth more than low success. Behind his "men and women" looms the interpreting personality of their creator. The method reaches its climax in The Ring and the Book (1868-69) where it is used to illuminate from the lips of criminal, victim, priest, the pope and others all of brutality and beauty that lies behind the bare facts of an Italian murder case. The frequently uncouth and grotesque phrasing serves, as a rule, a dramatic pur pose. Anapaestic and dactylic rhythms suited him best for poems in stanza forms, but it is in passages of blank verse of strangely individual fascination that he achieved his rarest metrical effects.

Browning's fame grew more slowly than that of his wife but has now overshadowed it. Her poetic art has weaknesses—senti mentality, facile fluency, and slovenly technique—which are in particular disfavour to-day. But in her so-called Sonnets from the Portuguese, written during her courtship, the intensity of her passion swept sentimentality away, and the curb of the sonnet form checked the too easy flow of her verse. In short lyric out bursts, "Cowper's Grave" and "The Cry of the Children," she struck a peculiarly tender note. She had not the genius for narra tive, and Aurora Leigh (1856), a blank-verse novel, has long out lived its immediate success.

Matthew Arnold.

Mrs. Browning's study of Greek litera ture had taught her nothing of Greek restraint. Far otherwise was it with the young Oxford graduate, Matthew Arnold, who in 1849 made his first poetic venture. Yet the ardent classicist was in his depths a modern. None felt more acutely than he the shifting of the traditional religious and intellectual landmarks. His is the cry of one, "Wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born." For relief he goes to the calm and serenity of Greek art, and to the healing touch of Nature. All these elements are blended in The Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis where the genius of Greek pastoral elegy gathers in her hands flowers from the Oxford fields, and hears the troubled sound of piping from other than Dorian flutes. Nowhere was that piping more troubled than in the verse of Arnold's Rugby and Balliol friend, A. H. Clough. Thyrsis and such of his own lyrics as "Qua Cursum Ventus" will do more for his immortality than his intro spective hexameter poems, The Bothie and Amours de Voyage.

The Pre-Raphaelite Poets.

While Arnold and Clough were confronting the challenging issues of their own day, a group of young poets and artists were turning their gaze backward to the middle ages. Linked in the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood they issued in 185o the short-lived Germ where they advocated sin cerity in art and poetry and sought to renew the mystical fervour of the age of the primitives. To D. G. Rossetti, of Italian parent age, love in The Blessed Damozel is a transcendental ecstasy as it was to Dante and his circle of whom he became the inter preter to Victorian England. Later in the eerie romance of early Scottish history and legend he found material for The King's Tragedy and Sister Helen. In his sonnet-sequence, The House of Life, in which each sonnet is "a moment's monument," his mys tical conception of love was blended with a sensuous warmth unfamiliar to the North and misunderstood by the profane. To his sister Christina love was known in its unearthly and devo tional aspects, and it found in her sonnets, Monna Innominata, and her lyrics that exquisitely simple and heartfelt expression which was the ideal of the pre-Raphaelites but which they did not all attain.

The Germ had its successor in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856) chiefly inspired by William Morris. For him and his friends as for the Rossettis, the middle ages were full of en chantment. But it was to feudal France and legendary Britain that they were drawn. In The Defence of Guenevere and other Arthurian poems Morris did not, like Tennyson, spiritualize epi sodes from the cycle, but got deep into the heart of mediaeval passion. Here, and in such feathery lyrics as "Two Red Roses across the Moon" he struck his most original notes. His growing devotion to Chaucer led him to emulate The Canterbury Tales in a long series of narrative poems, Jason, The Earthly Paradise (1868-7o), and (as Icelandic saga more and more captivated him) Sigurd the Volsung (1877). Morris has the story-teller's art, and felicities of detail are everywhere, but the poems in their some what mannered simplicity have a derivative air.

Swinburne.

In Poems and Ballads (1866) A. C. Swinburne accentuated the sensuousness of The House of Life into frank voluptuousness. Unlike his Balliol forerunner, Matthew Arnold, he had drawn from Greek literature a creed of hedonistic nihilism which thrilled through "Dolores" and "Laus Veneris." It was given an intoxicating quality by the new singer's almost magical mastery over word and rhythm. In Atalanta in Calydon the same astonishing virtuosity gave renewed life to an ancient story, and to the dialogue and choruses of Greek tragedy. Swinburne's prolific later output of lyric, drama, and narrative verse displayed no widening of imaginative vision, and virtuosity tended to be come a mechanical device. But through the "voluptuous garden closes" there was ever the purifying virtue of the elemental forces he loved—the sun and stars, the winds, and, above all, the sea.

As Swinburne had put to new use the machinery of Greek drama so did Edward FitzGerald that of Spanish in his versions, not merely translations, of Calderon's plays. Still more free was the handling of his original in his adaptation (1859-68) of the Rubdiydt of the Persian poet, Omar Khayyam. In loo stanzas of novel and arresting rhythm he gives flawless expression to the creed of carpe diem. No other Victorian poet was so felicitously to hold the East in fee. But Sir A. Lyall's Verses Written in India gave a fine edge to the contrast between native and English life and thought. Sir Edwin Arnold's sympathetic interpretation in facile blank-verse of Buddha's career in The Light of Asia (1879) had a wide vogue.

Coventry Patmore.

The Roman Catholic poetic tradition revived by Christina Rossetti was carried on by Coventry Pat more who, of ter his earlier illumination of the domesticities in The Angel in the House displayed in the Odes of The Unknown Eros (1877) a strangely different temper and diction reminiscent of the metaphysical school. Alice Meynell had much of the range and quality of Christina Rossetti with more conscious and deliberate art. It was due in part to her and her entourage that Francis Thompson was enabled to gain an ear for the intricate harmonies and mystical imagery of The Hound of Heaven and its companion poems.

The shipwreck of his fortunes from which Thompson was saved befell two men whose poetic interpretation of life was diametrically opposed to his. James Thomson (B.V.) could, however, give voice to other moods than the stark pessimism of The City of Dreadful Night (1874). John Davidson in his Fleet Street Eclogues and Ballads blended verbal crudities and rebellious temper with genuine imagination and power. But personal misfortune is less of a tragedy in the poetic career than the downfall of too meteoric a reputation. Such has been the fate of J. M. Tupper, whose Proverbial Philosophy had an ephem eral vogue; of Lewis Morris with his modern applications of Greek legends in the Epic of Hades; and of Stephen Phillips whose plays in verse, over-rated when brought on the stage, have more merit than is now allowed.

Anglo-Irish Poets.

There was a feeble rustle from English history and scenes in the verse of Alfred Austin. In strong contrast was the inspiration from the legends and annals of Ire land that breathed full and free through the lyrics of W. B. Yeats. Master of that exquisitely simple and liquid speech which is the secret of Anglo-Irish genius, he has "spread his dreams under our feet" and carried us to the enchanted haunts of the Gael. The mysticism of G. W. Russell (A.E.) looks inward to the Ireland in the heart, while James Stephens gives voice to the humorous realism which is its complement in the Celtic "make up." Moira O'Neill has shown that Ulster too has its Songs of the Glens of Antrim. Herbert Trench had a style more highly wrought than that of his brethren of the Pale, and the top of his achievement was with other themes than theirs. The in herited Celtic strain worked more potently in the genius of the English-born George Meredith, though blended with an intel lectual apprehension of man's kinship with earth and his upward evolution. From the poems dominated by this conception Mere dith ranges through the dewy freshness of Love in a Valley, the tragic intensity of Modern Love (1862) and the apocalyptic vi sion of the Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History (1898).

Local Poetry.

The poetry of local association which cul minates in the Irish literary movement can point to other achieve ments in more specialized spheres. William Barnes made music on the Doric lute of the Dorset dialect. T. E. Brown chanted Foc'sle Yarns in an Anglo-Manx recitative. The soft accent of Devon sings through the "Drake's Drum' of Sir Henry Newbolt, though elsewhere it is in a pure strain of the King's English that he tells of the deeds of the King's Englishmen on sea and shore. The more consciously imperial muse of Rudyard Kipling has enlisted the argot of the Indian barrack-room and compound, but it dispenses with this when it takes the loftier range of the "Recessional" or of the panegyric on the Sussex of Wilfrid and to-day. In A. E. Housman's Shropshire Lad (1896) the local setting is of less account than the sombre impress and the gem like finish of his art.

Religious poetry has had its chief voices in John Keble, carry ing on the Anglican tradition of George Herbert, with a new Wordsworthian note; and in J. H. Newman, a greater master, except for some inspired hymns, in prose than in verse. The lighter sides of life have had numerous interpreters in a series of highly accomplished craftsmen in verse. R. H. Barham, C. S. Calverley, Edward Lear, J. K. Stephen, Austin Dobson, and W. S. Gilbert are not merely wits but adepts, in their various styles, in verbal and metrical technique. And it is a kindred virtuosity, ap plied in a loftier sphere, that helps to give distinction to the poetry of Robert Bridges, who was himself a student of the metrical art. His technical accomplishment and a surface austerity tended to mask the underlying spontaneity and tenderness of the best of his lyric verse. He wore the Laureate's wreath worthily, but not, like Tennyson, with popular acclaim.

Drama.

In the considerable field of drama the Victorian period till its closing years marks an almost complete divorce between literature and the stage. In the year of the Queen's accession the publication of Browning's Strafford and R. H. Horne's Death of Marlowe showed that poetic drama was not dead, but it was Lytton's theatrically effective Richelieu and The Lady of Lyons (1838) that won favour on the boards. J. Westland's verse tragedies had a short life; Swinburne's were not intended for the stage. The genius of Henry Irving illumined the tawdry but pathetic Charles I. (18 71) of W. G. Wills, and afterwards found finer material in Tennyson's plays, especially Becket.

Melodrama was more to the taste of the early Victorians, as provided by J. B. Buckstone and Dion Boucicault. The latter's Corsican Brothers had a prolonged vogue, but his gifts of dialogue and humour show to more advantage in his Irish dramas The Colleen Bawn and The Shaughraun, while his earlier London Assurance (1841), in a vein of higher comedy, has life in it yet. So too has the most famous of the many farces of the time, J. M. Morton's Box and Cox (1847). This cannot be said of J. R. Planche's burlesques, or even of Tom Taylor's deftly constructed plays like Still Waters Run Deep (18J5) or 'Twixt Axe and Crown (1870.

In T. W. Robertson's Society (1865), followed by Ours, Caste, and School, the voice of nature is again heard amidst theatrical artifice and conventionality, and, in spite of all changes, still sounds in these comedies to-day. The cheaper sentiment of H. J. Byron's successful Uncle Dick's Darling and Our Boys (1875) has lost its appeal. W. S. Gilbert showed in his verse-plays, beginning with The Palace of Truth (1870) hints of the genius for topsy turvy logic that was to be fully revealed in his comic opera libretti. In the 189o's the witty dialogue of Oscar Wilde's artificial com edies and the high craftsmanship of the earlier plays of Sir. A. W. Pinero and H. A. Jones begin that dramatic renaissance which, stimulated by the influence of Ibsen, has revolutionized the out look and methods of the English stage.

Character.

In the other main field of creative literature, the novel, the Victorian age, in spite of its limitation of outlook, had closer links with the 18th century than with Scott or Jane Austen. W. M. Thackeray, as his English Humourists proves.

was a close student of that century and his conception of the novel was akin to that of Fielding, as the "comic epic in prose." Thus in the broad sweep of their scheme and the variety of their characterization, Vanity Fair, Pendennis, and The Newcomes (1848-55) descend from Tom Jones. In other ways Thackeray carries on the Fielding tradition. His favourite targets are hypoc risy and affectation ; he makes confidants of his readers ; his English, less virile but, more modulated than that of Fielding, is fastidious and pure. But he lacks Fielding's buoyant animalism and his devastating irony. With all Thackeray's command of mockery and pathos and charm, he had not the supremely cre ative gift ; even Becky Sharp is not completely flesh-and-blood. Hence his historical imagination, working in a sympathetic medium, has produced in Henry Esmond and Beatrix figures that are more real to us than the Osbornes and the Crawleys who have faded with the social changes of two generations. But the keenly observed idiosyncrasies of a Barry Lyndon and a Blanche Amory and "The Campaigner" will be repeated, in different guises, from age to age.

Dickens.

If Thackeray is a lesser Fielding, Dickens is a highly magnified Smollett. Some of the sailor folk with whom Smollett had been thrown were transformed by him into eccentrics of idea and speech. By Dickens the whole world was seen under such a transformation. G. K. Chesterton has said that Mr. Pickwick is a fairy. In this sense all the most typical Dickens characters Sam Weller, Mr. Micawber, Uriah Heep, Mrs. Gamp, are fairies, good or bad. They never existed or could exist on solid earth, and they have therefore the indestructible life of the super natural. More than any other Englishman since Shakespeare, Dickens was a magician who could call spirits from the vasty deep. He was of course much else. He was a Cockney of the Cockneys; a humanitarian reformer with his zeal sharpened by his own early privations; a sentimentalist; and at his worst, a writer of very bad English. And in The Tale of Two Cities and Barnaby Rudge he could take on the mantle of the historical novelist. But in essence he is the modern Prospero.

The Bronte Sisters.

While the kaleidescopic fantasy of Dickens was at work in London, on the northern moors the Brontë sisters were infusing into English fiction the passionate intensity of their lonely and introspective lives. In Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853), whether the setting be that of a Yorkshire hall, with a harrowing secret, or a Brussels boarding school, with a too magnetic "professor," the tumult of the heart of Jane and of Lucy Snowe is a revelation of Charlotte's own emo tional experiences. Emily, with a less realistic grip but with fiercer imagination transfigures the tale of terror into the master piece of W uthering Heights (1847), red-hot with passion and dark with Rembrandtesque gloom. Mrs. Gaskell, the biographer of the Brontës, sets her own tales against the background of in dustrial Lancashire, but her delicate observation is at its fine flower in the little Cheshire idyll of Cranford (1853).

George Eliot.

George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) pictured from the first in Scenes from Clerical Life (1858) the domestic tragedies that lay behind the placid beauty of her native War wickshire. In Adam Bede (1859) and The Mill on the Floss (186o) it is in the same setting that the chief personages work out their destinies according to her determinist creed. But her creative power shows its richest fruit in the humours of Mrs. Poyser and the Tulliver aunts. Middlemarch (1871-72) carries on the Warwickshire series with some loss of freshness but with enhanced analytical power. Silas Marner is a masterly miniature. But in political, historical, and racial fiction (Felix Holt, Romola, Daniel Deronda), her genius became submerged under alien loads.

George Eliot's title, Scenes from Clerical Life, might have been used by Anthony Trollope to cover the Barsetshire novels from The Warden and Barchester Towers to The Last Chronicle of Barset (1851-67) . Himself a civil servant, without clerical asso ciations, he succeeded by some intuitive gift in the nicely discrimi nated delineation of ecclesiastical types from the bishop and his stronger half, Mrs. Proudie, downwards. He was scarcely less successful with the other "county" sets, nor did he fail when he tried his hand on the political novel. But here he had been anticipated by a master, who knew every turn of the game. Ben jamin Disraeli after experimenting on other lines turned in Con ingsby (1844) and Sybil (1845) to "the condition of the people" question and in Tancred (1847) to the wider problem of racial destiny. The flamboyancy of the style matches the glow of social aspiration which has its foil in the satiric edge of the profes sional portraits—Rigby, Tadpole and Taper.

The Humanitarian Novel.

It was the practical reforming zeal of a parson with Chartist sympathies, that inspired Charles Kingsley in Yeast (1848) and Alton Locke (185o), while in Hypa tia and Westward Ho he revives the clash of conflicting moral and religious ideals in i st century Egypt and Elizabethan England. Charles Reade showed a similar union of historical imagination and propagandist zeal, with more lurid intensity, in The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) and It's Never too late to Mend (1853). His humanitarian interest in convict prison reform was mingled in Lord Lytton's Paul Clifford (1839) and kindred tales with a sentimental glorification of criminals. This sentimental alloy runs through Lytton's prolific output of social and domestic novels, studies in the occult and historical romances, of which the most purely imaginative, The Last Days of Pompeii, has worn best. Crime and mystery pre-occupied Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White and other tours de force of ingenious construction. Mrs. Henry Wood and Miss Braddon both shared this power of telling a well-knit and arresting tale. "Ouida" (Louise de la Ramee), though she had a sense of beauty and of pathos, gave to the more flamboyant elements in the Lytton type of romance an exotic flavour that touched burlesque.

It needs an effort to realize that Charles Lever's novels are of the same Anglo-Irish origin as the poems of Yeats and "A. E." But the gaily irresponsible episodes of Cork and Dublin garrison life in Charles O'Malley are an other than poetic avenue of escape from the everyday world. Among other regional novels R. D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone (1869) is pre-eminent less as a his torical romance than as compact of Devon dialect, scenes, and characters. George Macdonald and William Black continued from different angles the delineation of Scottish types and scenes before the more minute realism of the "Kailyard" school of Sir J. M. Barrie, S. R. Crockett and Ian MacLaren. The romantic genius of R. L. Stevenson looked backward in Kidnapped (1886) and its successors to the Scotland of the Jacobite era, or roamed through uncharted regions in Treasure Island (1883) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). If the high artifice of his style sometimes over loaded his longer tales, he is a master of the short story. Here too is Rudyard Kipling's chosen field. In Plain Tales from the Hills (1887) and similar collections, and on a broader canvas in Kim he has exhibited with searching realism Anglo-Indian and native life in their manifold facets. In the Jungle Books 95) he has explored a fascinating region close to, but outside of, human ken. But even Mowgli's experiences are ordinary com pared with the adventures of the Alice of Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson) in Wonderland (1866) or Through the Looking-Glass, where the March Hare and the Queen of Hearts are "forms more real than living man." The born apostle of romance can find it anywhere. George Borrow, agent of the Bible Society, wove episodes from his travels, together with experiences among gypsies, prize-fighters and vagabonds of the road, into a magnetic blend of autobiography and fiction in The Bible in Spain, Lavengro and The Romany Rye (1843-57). More devotional minds than his have turned the novel to semi-religious use. Elizabeth Sewell's Amy Herbert and Charlotte M. Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe were in the Anglo Catholic tradition which later in the century made a magnetic appeal through J. H. Shorthouse's mystical and semi-historic John Inglesant (1881). A more characteristically Victorian ideal was exhibited in Dinah Mulock's John Halifax, Gentleman; and Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown's Schooldays enshrined the prac tical gospel of muscular Christianity. Mrs. Oliphant in Salem Chapel and M. Hale White in The Autobiography of Mark Ruther ford pictured the rebellion of fine spirits against narrow provincial pietism. Mrs. Humphry Ward dealt with a more purely intellec tual crisis in Robert Elsmere, where an Anglican parson loses his faith in the Christian creed. It was in stark revolt from all Vic torian religious and domestic influences that Samuel Butler penned the vitriolic Way of all Flesh; and it was the bitterness of one bred outside these influences that wrung from George Gissing such studies in pessimistic realism as Born in Exile.

Hardy and Meredith.

But a pessimism that is mainly the outcome of personal experience seems insignificant beside the spirit of philosophic fatalism that broods over the Wessex novels of Thomas Hardy. Throughout the quarter of a century of pro duction from Under the Greenwood Tree (18 7 2) and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) to Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1894), Hardy maintains the same sense of the kin ship of man and nature, the same ironic conception of the work ing out of human destinies. But the rustic humours and the pastoral setting give more relief to the earlier tales; in the later the tragic evolution is more relentless and austere. George Mere dith also, during the well-nigh 4o years that lie between The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and The Amazing Marriage (1895) took as his starting-point the kinship between man and nature. But his individual men and women are not shown in the toils of circumstance ; they are all working out their own fates as members of a civilized society, in which the relations of the sexes are of predominant importance. Because Meredith's world is outwardly akin to Thackeray's we realize the gulf between his brilliant, vivid heroines and their pallid forerunners. But in the elliptical pregnancy of his style he came near to breaking the mould of the narrative art that Thackeray had handed on from the 18th century masters of fiction and had stamped with his own individuality.

History, Biography and Essay.

It was by his mastery of this narrative art that T. B. Macaulay gave to his Essays and to his unfinished History of England (1849-61) the attraction of a novel. His Whig sympathies doubtless led to some distortion of perspective and to propagandist selection from his vast store of memorized material. But if truth sometimes escapes between his antitheses, this is the concern of history, and it does not affect the lucidity of his style or his descriptive genius. His nephew and biographer, Sir George Trevelyan, carried on with less rhetorical art his tradition in politics and letters. A more austerely Radical outlook, affected partly by French influences, characterizes Lord Morley's studies of Burke, Voltaire and Rousseau.

Carlyle.

Thomas Carlyle was not only, like Macaulay, an essayist and historian but also a semi-philosopher. Sartor Re sartus (1833-34) is, under a thin veil, a spiritual autobiography in which Calvinistic morality and Kantian idealism are predomi nant elements. In his lectures on Heroes (184o), Carlyle gave his most genial interpretation, through a galaxy of examples, of the hero-worship which took more challenging form in the biog raphies of Cromwell and Frederick the Great, and became ag gressive in the later political pamphlets. In his French Revolu tion (183 7) we read history by the lightning-flashes of a style of jagged beauty that sometimes blinds us to the arduous toil that went to the making of the work.

J. A.

Froude, Carlyle's biographer, shared his propagandist views which coloured his presentation of Tudor history set forth in flexible and melodious prose. From the opposite angle, but with something of the same picturesque power, J. R. Green in his Short History traced the fortunes of the English people. The fervour of Sir John Seeley's belief in the imperial destinies of that people lent a glow to his Expansion of England, as did Gold win Smith's exactly opposite views to The Empire and other separatist writings. Sir W. Napier and A. W. Kinglake bring energy, sometimes controversial, and glow into the sphere of the military historian.

Of the more purely scientific historians, building upon docu mentary or legal bases, only the more prominent names can be mentioned—H. T. Buckle, Henry Hallam, George Grote, Sir F. Palgrave, E. A. Freeman, William Stubbs, S. R. Gardiner, Man dell Creighton, F. W. Maitland, Sir Henry Maine, W. E. Lecky, A. V. Dicey, James Bryce and Lord Acton. The style of most of these has the virtue of aptness to the subject-matter, and with some it can rise on occasion to eloquence, but truth not art is their quest. So too with the writers on economic and philosophical subjects, though J. S. Mill stands by himself. The classic sim plicity and purity of his style in his Principles of Political Econ omy (1847), Liberty and his Autobiography (1873) will always give them a place in literature however views may change. And this is true for different reasons of a later philosopher of a differ ent school, F. H. Bradley. The literary quality, though not absent, is more subdued in the writings of Walter Bagehot, Leslie Stephen, James Martineau, F. D. Maurice and T. H. Green. The scientific enquirers had no direct concern with letters. But some of the phrases in which the doctrine of evolution was set forth by Charles Darwin himself, or by Herbert Spencer and T. H. Huxley, "the survival of the fittest," "the struggle for existence," "adaptation to environment," had an arresting imaginative quality. Huxley in especial had the secret of a style perfectly tempered for argument and exposition, and, when he desired, matchless for invective.

Ruskin.

Among the writers of imaginative prose John Ruskin stands conspicuous by the volume and variety of his work. But the more he changes the more he is the same ; national and indi vidual welfare is throughout his concern. In Modern Painters (1843-6o) a defence of Turner grew into an exposition of the true principles of beauty in nature and in art ; The Seven Lamps and Stones of Venice interpreted to a commercialized age the spiritual message of Gothic architecture. The same message, ap plied to another sphere, is set forth in his writings on political economy beginning with Unto this Last (1862) and in his letters on social subjects in Time and Tide and Fors Clavigera. His style has a similar unity in diversity. The purple elaboration of Mod ern Painters is replaced in Unto this Last by limpid simplicity, but the alliteration and the balanced cadence and the biblical echoes remain.

William Morris in his lectures and visionary tales blended, like Ruskin, artistic and social "hopes and fears." But Walter Pater in his studies of the Renaissance art was seen in detachment from extraneous influences as a revelation of sensations and emotions in all their intensity.

By the grace and delicate precision of the style in his auto biographical Apologia (1869) and other controversial writings Cardinal Newman takes a foremost place among Victorian mas ters of prose. Matthew Arnold, from the opposite pole of thought, eulogized Newman's prose as "of the centre." His own highest qualities were not shown in his treatises on religious and political subjects, though he popularized such catchwords as "Sweetness and Light." But in Essays in Criticism (185 5) and his Oxford lec tures he applied felicitously, though with an occasional lapse, a canon of appreciation based upon international standards, with the touchstone of "the grand style." W. E. Henley, George Saints bury, R. H. Hutton, Edward Dowden, A. C. Bradley, Sir W. Raleigh, Sir Sidney Lee and Sir Edmund Gosse are other promi nent names in the sphere of critical appreciation or literary biography. R. L. Stevenson, Andrew Lang, Oscar Wilde and A. B. Walkley are more notable as essayists with a personal note. And at the opposite end of the scale mention may be made of the great co-operative undertakings which were begun during the period, the Oxford New English Dictionary, the Dictionary of National Biography and the Victorian County Histories. They at least are certain to give it an enduring remembrance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.—E. Dowden, Studies in Literature 1789-1877 Bibliography.—E. Dowden, Studies in Literature 1789-1877 (1882) ; E. C. Stedman, Victorian Poets (Boston, 1887) ; R. H. Hutton, Literary Essays (1888) ; W. J. Courthope, History of English Poetry vol. vi. (6 vols., 1895-191o) ; H. Walker, The Greater Victorian Poets (1895) and Literature of the Victorian Era (191o) ; G. Saintsbury, Nineteenth Century Literature (1896) ; G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (1913) ; J. W. Cunliffe, English Literature during the Last Half Century (1979, end ed., 1923) ; O. Elton, Survey of English Literature 1830-1880 (2 vols., 192o) ; A. H. Thorndike, Litera ture in a Changing Age (192o) ; M. Sadleir, Excursions in Victorian Bibliography (1922). See also the Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiii. and xiv. (ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, 14 vols., 1907-27) ; and The English Poets, vols. iv. and v. (edit. T. H. Ward, 5 vols., 1883-1918) ; Selections of English Prose, vol. v. (edit. H. Craik, 5 vols., ; The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (ed. A. Quiller-Couch, 1912). (F. S. B.) It must remain for a remoter posterity to pass judgment upon the English literature of 1911-26; to decide which (if any) of the authors then living were really great; to discern with certitude the trends and the characteristic colour of the age. Among those who lived through the period, it was a common opinion that it was not an age "of giants"; that the poets were not as great as Brown ing or Tennyson, nor any of the novelists as eminent as Dickens, Thackeray or Fielding. That opinion, as yet, can only be tentative; in the ultimate, reputations are decided by the permanent, as contrasted with the topical, appeal to the human mind and heart; and it may be that to posterity all the writers of the age will seem to have, qualities and a tone in common which were not evident to themselves.

If there is foundation for the general view that there is a defect of passion in the most recent English literature and a lack of major achievements, the reasons must certainly be found in the state of thought and of what passes for thought. Men's views about the universe, the purpose of life and the nature and destiny of the soul, must profoundly influence their works of art, as well as their other actions, however frequent may be the antinomy between their proclaimed theories and their obscure but obstinate impulses. There can be no doubt that the period under review was, at least in what are called "intellectual circles," a period of con fusion, of conflict, of doubt manifesting itself here in energetic pessimism, here in fatigue and apathy, here in blind hedonism, here in a desperate search for new creeds, sometimes brutally pagan. "Why should I?" was the dominant note, accompanied by a subtler "Why shouldn't I?"; and often neither awaited an answer.

Politics, popularized science, psycho-analysis and the results of their wide study are powerfully present in a large proportion of the most intelligent modern novels, and the novel, grown polymor phous, is the characteristic medium of the age. Just as the Pre Raphaelites segregated themselves behind the arras in flight from the smoke of the first industrial age, so certain modern novelists have declined to be affected by the smoke of modern controversy. Amongst novelists, since Meredith and Stevenson died, Joseph Conrad and George Moore were signal examples of the kind of artist who can build a raft for himself and escape from the topical welter. Conrad had his religion and his morality, "a few simple maxims," a code of honour and fidelity. He did not shrink from the major problems either; he was perennially occupied with the difficulties of conduct, the mystery of evil, the veil over the face of Destiny. Yet, as an artist, he did not primarily set out as a sublimated journalist, to mingle art with conversion and sub version, to add his word to the babel of tongues discussing prop erty, sex, the multiple self and spiritualism. His views were mani fest and set ; so were his doubts; he wrote to record what he saw of magnificence, even in the form and visage of tempest and terror, in the most beautiful language he could find. Of Conrad's last works, The Rover (1923) was a prelude to the posthumous Sus pense (1925), the torso of what might have been a great book, set in the Mediterranean, with Napoleon in Elba a shadow imminent over the action. He died in 1924, a Pole by birth, a seaman by training, who had achieved miracles in a tongue not his own.

George Moore, in his latest years, modified his manner and took new materials. His Irish trilogy, Hail and Farewell (1911 14), might be classed, by some of the friends whose words and deeds it records, with "fiction"; at least it does indicate his aims. Politics and religion may be and are touched on here, but they are raw material for art, for witty, graceful and tuneful writing; and the desire to create a finely shaped and phrased work is never subordinate to a desire to inform the reader. In The Brook Kerith (1916) and Heloise and Abelard (1921), Moore took his torical events and settings and made of them stories like tapes tries in the evenness of their flow and the carefulness of their execution.

Apart from these, the outstanding novelists of their generation were H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett. Ulti mately, Wells is not likely to be thought of primarily as a novelist, and he himself has stated that he has dedicated himself to journal ism rather than art. He was the Rousseau, as Shaw was the Vol taire, of his time. As a workman and a poet in prose, he never excelled his early short stories and "scientific romances," in which extreme assumptions led up to ingenious and seemingly inevitable chains of consequence. Nor did any of his later novels, in which sexual romance, contemporary politics, satire and Utopian preach ing are mingled, betray quite the same care or contain quite such fine sustained passages of description as Tono-Bungay (1909). But Mr. Britling Sees it Through (1916) was a remarkable record of the effect of the War upon one man's mind, and The Undying Fire (1919) a very striking and successful modernization of the arguments canvassed in the Book of Job and In Memoriam. He was tireless as a tractarian and amongst the most astonishing by products of his great energy and zeal was an Outline of History (1919-2o), unique among such compilations for the raciness of its narration and the ingenuity of its summary of all the world's annals since the ball of fire first began to cool.

The reforming, or at least the protesting, bias was strong also in the novels of John Galsworthy. The Forsyte Saga (1922), with its sequel A Modern Comedy (1929), a collection of novels early and late, about one respectable family, was the crown of all his work. For all his air of detachment Galsworthy could not help presenting the respectable and complacent incompletely; more humour might have led to more truth ; so even might a less acutely sensitive humanitarianism. But the achievement of his presenta tion of the mere moeurs of South Kensington and of country houses cannot be denied ; and his writing at its best, if uniformly quiet, is extremely good.

In Arnold Bennett the propagandist instinct was much weaker, though the reporting proclivity was strong. He was never slip shod and dull, but in some of his books the chief interest lay in brilliant journalistic descriptions of superficial aspects of "West End life," some were light-hearted farces, and the best were long meditated and profoundly "understanding" stories about real human beings, stories in which all his talents were brought into play, but all kept subordinate to his genius. The chief of his later books, a worthy successor to Clayhanger (1910) and The Old Wives' Tale (1908), was Riceyman Steps (1923).

Among the younger novelists, Hugh Walpole (Wintersmoon, 1928, was his best book), Compton Mackenzie, Rose Macaulay, E. M. Delafield, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Francis Brett-Young, Vir ginia Woolf and Margaret Kennedy were widely read. D. H. Lawrence, brooding like many of them over the mysteries of sex and expounding vaguely prophetic things, showed great descrip tive power and a gift for sentences like lightnings. Walter de la Mare in Memoirs of a Midget (1921) wrote a long modern fairy tale, like a poet's wood, full of flowers and insects, with a candle light window at the end of a path and the constellations glittering in the dark sky overhead. H. Belloc's The Four Men (1912) was remarkable for its Sussex walks, its' gay dialogue and its songs. E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924) was the most notable book of a maturing and slowly-working novelist, a book in which the artist brooded over the whole surface of Indian and Anglo Indian life, showing the general through the particular. David Garnett's Lady into Fox (1923) and Hugh de Selincourt's The Cricket Match (1925) were short books beautifully composed. Among short-story writers W. W. Jacobs lost none of his old cun ning and Katherine Mansfield, cut off in her youth, came, in Bliss and The Garden Party, nearer to Tchekhov, the remarkable and most celebrated founder of the art of the short-story in Russia, than any other of his many disciples. May Sinclair, J. D. Beres ford, E. F. Benson, Leo Myers, R. H. Mottram, Aldous Huxley, P. G. Wodehouse, Frank Swinnerton, C. E. Montague (d. 1928) and many other names might be added to the list of the novelists, who produced novels competent or more than competent. • It is by no means inconceivable that in later retrospect the years of the World War and the years immediately preceding and follow ing will be held in literature to be remarkable chiefly for their poetry. There may have been few long poems of great note, but a very large volume of good lyric poetry by a very large number of writers was produced.

One of the most extraordinary phenomena of the period was the continued fertility of the older poets. When nearly 8o, the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, produced a new volume of poems, October and Other Poems (192o), a collection which showed no waning of his technical powers, experimental curiosity and gift of observation, and (more unusual still) no slacking of his emotional ardour. Perhaps the finest of all our landscape poets, and cer tainly one of the most careful and cunning artists who has ever worked with English words and English rhythms, he stands out conspicuously also by virtue of his perennial freshness and energy.

As Dr. Bridges at Oxford, so Thomas Hardy (184o-1928) at Dorchester continued to command the astonished admiration of his juniors. Hardy, turning to verse in his old age after a long, and nobly productive, servitude to the novel, followed up The Dynasts and his three earlier volumes of lyric and narrative poems with a series of volumes beginning with Satires of Circumstance (1914) and culminating in Human Shows (1925). Grim little tragedies, tender memories of the beloved dead and Wessex scenes long vanished, hard clear etchings of landscape, sea and shingle, down and puddled lane, bare tree and shivering bird; many of these written in extreme old age, surpassed the best of Hardy's previous work. These poems were marked by a great and seem ingly spontaneous gift of metrical invention, a power of emotion which enabled the poet to incorporate the most unmanageable words in the movement of his music, and a quick sensitiveness, a capacity for suffering and pure joy, rare in the old.

Another prolific veteran was C. M. Doughty (d. 1926), author of Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), one of the greatest books of the kind in any language, who followed up his Dawn in Britain (1906), with a series of long poems. The Clouds (1912), The Cliffs (1909), The Titans (191 6) and Mansoul (192o), epical dramas and dramatic epics in which archaism and topicality, naivete and sublimity are strangely mingled, are interspersed with massive passages in which the imagination ranges over all time.

Sir William Watson published one volume during, and one after, the War in which, whilst not equalling his major achieve ments, he showed that his talents for pithy yet magniloquent state ment and for the careful polishing of verse remained unimpaired. Maurice Hewlett (d. 1923) devoted his last years mainly to poetry. His Song of the Plow (1916), perhaps the finest of all his works and certainly one of the few memorable long poems of the period, was a racy, vigorous, picturesque summary of English history from the point of view of "Hodge." Laurence Binyon, of the other poets of that generation, perhaps wrote the most im pressive volume of War poetry, The Four Years (1919), in which the meditations and agonies and exaltations of the humanitarian and the patriot in face of the great calamity are expressed with power and dignity.

Noble poetry inspired by the War was also among the last work of Herbert Trench (d. 1923) and Alice Meynell (d. 1922), Mrs. Meynell's little book A Father of Women (1917) displaying rigid restraint, perfection of workmanship and concentrated emotion. A similar frugality was manifest in A. E. Housman's Last Poems (1922), its author's first collection of poems since A Shropshire Lad (1896), of a generation before. A few of the new poems sur passed the finest of the old for beauty and imagery and cadence, and the book was received with enthusiasm by the larger public and with reverent admiration by fellow artists. Gilbert Murray continued to add to his beautiful translations from Euripides. One volume, which contained some excellent epigrams and some spirited poems of the War, was all that the period added to the poetical works of Rudyard Kipling.

There remain a large number of poets whose reputations were not fully established in 1911, or who emerged during or after the War. The most notable progress among the former was made by Walter de la Mare, whose early books were followed by The Listeners (1912), Peacock Pie (r 9 ^3) and others, including a two-volume collection in 1920. This poet usually inhabits pro vinces which he has made his own : woods haunted by fairies, mid night gardens and heaths haunted by ghosts, desolate shores haunted by memory. The exquisite melody and felicity of his most typical work would give him a high place among English poets; yet what is called the "major" note is not absent from his work.

The slow, vivid, sunlit style of T. Sturge Moore was again seen at its best in The Sea is Kind (1914) ; G. K. Chesterton, with "Lepanto," the songs in The Flying Inn (1914) and a few comic poems intensified his readers' regret that he found so little time for verse ; Hilaire Belloc added a few beautiful lyrics, notably "Tarantella," to the small body of his serious verse; and W. H. Davies almost annually delighted his admirers with a little collec tion of nature lyrics. Alfred Noyes, with the two first volumes of The Torch Bearers (1922-25), opened an ambitious epic of human intellectual development.

In 1911 there broke upon the world John Masefield's The Ever lasting Mercy, a sensational story of conversion written in vigor ous octosyllabics. It had, as lively narrative work usually has, a great success; and the author followed it up with a series of long poems on rural and marine tragedies. Dauber (1913) was prob ably the best of them, but there were good things in all. Of his shorter poems "Biography," a series of vivid pictures from mem ory and "August 1914," were notable.

Several of the best poets of their generation died in the War. Rupert Brooke (d. 1915), by virtue of his beauty, radiant per sonality and talents, became, when his 1914 and Other Poems (1915) were published, the general symbol of youth that went into the furnace. His maturer work showed grace, wit, intellectual curiosity and a growing perception of the chief goods of life.

James Elroy Flecker (d. 1915) died of consumption at Davos, cut off from home by a ring of battle-grounds. His Collected Poems (1916) show that he had outgrown early affectation and uncertainty, achieved a style, pictorial and euphonious, of his own, and secured his grasp upon his deepest loves and most personal dreams. The East, which fascinated and repelled him, inspired many of his best things ; it was also the source of his posthumous drama Hassan (5922), produced at His Majesty's theatre, London, in 1923. Wilfred Owen, killed in 1918, was unknown in life. His Poems (192o) were very interesting for their technical use of assonance; but his technical genius, however remarkable, was less so than the magnitude of his vision and the ardour of his spirit. Charles H. Sorley (d. 1915) was another boy who was killed on the verge of greatness; and Julian Grenfell (d. 1915), professional soldier and fine boxer, went to his death with the finest song of the War on his lips, "Into Battle" (1915) .

Edward Thomas (d. 1917) had had a strange career. Before 1914 he was known as a voluminous writer and journalist whose hack work was scattered with fine descriptions of nature, but whom no one thought of as a poet. Under the stimulus of the American poet, Robert Frost, he turned, in his last two fertile years, to the making of poetry, nature poetry unique in its kind. Exact observation and record of landscape could go no farther than this; but his Poems (192o) would not be as fine as they are were it not for their faltering music and the positive, if quiet and melancholy, personality which suffuses them all.

Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Robert Nichols all came into notice during the War as writers of powerful and "realistic" poems describing it. Surviving, they all developed interestingly. Ralph Hodgson (Poems, 1917) was always a poet of slender pro duction, but his "Song of Honour," "The Bull" and "Eve" are among the best-loved poems of the time. Edmund Blunden, mainly a recorder of rural scenes in the tradition of Morland and Constable, showed a very individual talent, and John Freeman must be singled out for the beauty of his rhythms, his spiritual strength and his landscape'; D. H. Lawrence (especially Birds, Beasts and Flowers, 1923) for his graphic power and apprehension of the crude forces of nature. Amongst others who, in few poems or many, have beautifully registered moments and moods, have 'Blunden and Freeman were awarded the Hawthornden prize, founded by Miss Alice Warrender in 1919 for imaginative work by young writers, the other recipients during the period being Edward Shanks, Romer Wilson, David Garnett, R. H. Mottram, Sean O'Casey, V. Sackville-West and Henry Williamson.

dreamed or reflected, are Lascelles Abercrombie, Gordon Bot tomley, A. Y. Campbell, John Drinkwater, Edward Davison, Hum bert Wolfe, Frank Kendon, Harold Monro, Edward Shanks, W. J. Turner, Dorothy Wellesley, Victoria Sackville-West.

The Irish poetical movement (see IRISH LITERATURE) begun in the previous generation by "AE" (George Russell) and W. B. Yeats, showed signs of exhaustion. "AE" wrote little ; Yeats in his later poems escaped from "the Celtic twilight," abandoned the Celtic myths and discarded the languorous manner of his early triumphs for a hard, bare style in which, used for describ ing the outer world and the inner, he wrote poems often obscure but always full of thought, which many held to be his finest. Thomas Macdonagh and Joseph Plunkett, who died after the Easter Week rebellion of 1916, had written good lyrics; Joseph Campbell, Seumas O'Sullivan and a few others did as much; but the most notable "new" poet of the period was James Steph ens, author of the delightful prose fantasy The Crock of Gold (1912).