Halleck's New English Literature · Chapter 82Chapter IX: The Victorian Age, 1837-1900
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History of the Period.—In the two periods of English history most remarkable for their accomplishment, the Elizabethan and the Victorian, the throne was occupied by women. Queen Victoria, the granddaughter of George III., ruled from 1837 to the beginning of 1901. Her long reign of sixty-three years may be said to close with the end of the nineteenth century.
For nearly fifty years after the battle of Waterloo (1815), England had no war of magnitude. In 1854 she joined France in a war against Russia to keep her from taking Constantinople. Tennyson's well-known poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade, commemorates an incident in this bloody contest, which was successful in preventing Russia from dismembering Turkey.
When the Turks massacred the Christians in Bulgaria in 1876, Russia fought and conquered Turkey. England again intervened, this time after the war, in the Berlin Congress (1878). In return for her diplomatic services and for a guaranty to maintain the integrity of certain Turkish territory, England received from Turkey the island of Cyprus. As a result of this Congress, the principalities of Roumania, Servia, and Bulgaria were formed, but the Turk was allowed to remain in Europe. A later English prime minister, Lord Salisbury (1830-1903), referring to England's espousal of the Turkish cause, said that she had "backed the wrong horse." The bloody war of 1912-1913 between Turkey and the allied armies of Bulgaria, Servia, Montenegro, and Greece was the result of this mistake.
An important part of England's history during this period centers around the expansion, protection, and development of her colonies in Asia, Australia, Africa, and America. England was then constantly agitated by the fear that Russia might grow strong enough to seize India or some other English colonial possessions.
A serious rebellion in India (1857) led England to take from the East India Company the government of that colony. "Empress of India" was later (1876) added to the titles of Queen Victoria. Had India not been an English colony, literature might not have had Kipling's fascinating Jungle Books and Hindu stories. England's protectorate over Egypt (1882) was assumed in order to strengthen her control over the newly completed Suez Canal (1869), which was needed for her communication with India and her Australian colonies.
The Boer war in South Africa (1899-1902)required the largest number of troops that England ever mustered into service in any of her wars. The final outcome of this desperate struggle was the further extension of her South African possessions.
In the nineteenth century, England's most notable political achievement was "her successful rule over colonies, ranging from India, with its 280,000,000 subjects, to Fanning Island with its population of thirty." Her tactful guidance was for the must part directed toward enabling them to develop and to govern themselves. She had learned a valuable lesson from the American revolution.
Ireland, however, failed to secure her share of the benefits that usually resulted from English rule. She was neither regarded as a colony, like Australia, nor as an integral part of England. For the greater part of the century her condition was deplorable. The great prime minister, William E. Gladstone (1809-1898), tried to secure needed home rule for her, but did not succeed. Toward the end of the century, more liberal laws regarding the tenure of the land and more self-government afforded some relief from unjust conditions.
During the Victorian age the government of England became more democratic. Two reform bills (1867 and 1884) gave almost unrestricted suffrage to men. The extension of the franchise and the granting of local self-government to her counties (1888) made England one of the most democratic of all nations. Her monarch has less power than the president of the United States.
The Victorian age saw the rise of trades unions and the passing of many laws to improve the condition of the working classes. As the tariff protecting the home grower of wheat had raised the price of bread and caused much suffering to the poor, England not only repealed this duty (1846) but also became practically a free-trade country. The age won laurels in providing more educational facilities for all, in abridging class privileges, and in showing increasing recognition of human rights, without a bloody revolution such as took place in France. A rough indication of the amount of social and moral progress is the decrease in the number of convicts in England, from about 50,000 at the accession of Victoria to less than 6000 at her death.
An Age of Science and Invention.—In the extent and the variety of inventions, in their rapid improvement and utilization for human needs, and in general scientific progress, the sixty-three years of the Victorian age surpassed all the rest of historic time.
When Victoria ascended the throne, the stage coach was the common means of traveling; only two short pieces of railroad had been constructed; the electric telegraph had not been developed; few steamships had crossed the Atlantic. The modern use of the telephone would then have seemed as improbable as the wildest Arabian Nights' tale. Before her reign ended, the railroad, the telegraph, the steamship, and the telephone had wrought an almost magical change in travel and in communication.
The Victorian age introduced anaesthetics and antiseptic surgery, developed photography, the sciences of chemistry and physics, of biology and zoölogy, of botany and geology. The enthusiastic scientific worker appeared in every field, endeavoring to understand the laws of nature and to apply them in the service of man. Science also turned its attention to human progress and welfare. The new science of sociology had earnest students.
[Illustration: CHARLES DARWIN.]
The Influence of Science on Literature.—The Victorian age was the first to set forth clearly the evolution hypothesis, which teaches the orderly development from simple to complex forms. While the idea of evolution had suggested itself to many naturalists, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was the first to gain a wide hearing for the theory. After years of careful study of nature, he published in 1859 The Origin of Species by Natural Selection, an epoch-making work, which had a far-reaching effect on the thought of the age.
The influence of his doctrine of evolution is especially apparent in Tennyson's poetry, in George Eliot's fiction, in religious thought, and in the change in viewing social problems. In his Synthetic Philosophy, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), philosopher and metaphysician, applied the doctrine of evolution not only to plants and animals but also to society, morality, and religion.
Two eminent scientists, John Tyndall (1820-1893) and Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), did much to popularize science and to cause the age to seek a broader education. Tyndall's Fragments of Science (1871) contains a fine lecture on the Scientific Use of the Imagination, in which he becomes almost poetic in his imaginative conception of evolution:—
"Not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular or animal life, not alone the nobler forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but the human mind itself,—emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena,—were once latent in a fiery cloud… All our philosophy, all our poetry, all our science, and all our art,—Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael,—are potential in the fires of the sun."
[Illustration: JOHN TYNDALL.]
Unlike Keats in his Lamia, Tyndall is firm in his belief that science will not clip the wings of imagination. In the same lecture he says:—
"How are we to lay hold of the physical basis of light, since, like that of life itself, it lies entirely without the domain of the senses? We are gifted with the power of imagination and by this power we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of the senses… Bounded and conditioned by coöperant reason, imagination becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer. Newton's passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was at the outset a leap of the imagination."
Huxley was even a more brilliant interpreter of science to popular audiences. His so-called Lay Sermons (1870) are invigorating presentations of scientific and educational subjects. He awakened many to a sense of the importance of "knowing the laws of the physical world" and "the relations of cause and effect therein." Nowhere is he more impressive than where he forces us to admit that we must all play the chess game of life against an opponent that never makes an error and never fails to count our mistakes against us.
[Illustration: THOMAS HUXLEY. From the painting by Collier, National Portrait Gallery.]
"The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong man shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated—without haste, but without remorse. * * * * * "Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws."[1]
We find the influence of science manifest in much of the general literature of the age, as well as in the special writings of the scientists. Science introduced to literature a new interest in humanity and impressed on writers what is known as the "growth idea." Preceding literature, with the conspicuous exception of Shakespeare's work, had for the most part presented individuals whose character was already fixed. This age loved to show the growth of souls. George Eliot's novels are frequently Darwinian demonstrations of the various steps in the moral growth or the perversion of the individual. In Rabbi Ben Ezra, Browning thus expresses this new idea of the working of the Divine Power:—
"He fixed thee mid this dance Of plastic circumstance."
The Trend of Prose; Minor Prose Writers.—The prose of this age is remarkable for amount and variety. In addition to the work of the scientists, there are the essays and histories of Macaulay and Carlyle, the essays and varied prose of Newman, the art and social philosophy of Ruskin, the critical essays of Matthew Arnold and Swinburne.
One essayist, Walter Pater (1839-1894), an Oxford graduate and teacher, who kept himself aloof from contemporary thought, produced almost a new type of serious prose, distinguished for color, ornamentation, melody, and poetic thought. Even such prosaic objects as wood and brick were to his retrospective gaze "half mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows where." His object was to charm his reader, to haunt him with vague suggestions rather than to make a logical appeal to him, or to add to his world of vivid fact, after the manner of Macaulay. A quotation from Pater's most brilliant essay, Leonardo Da Vinci, in the volume, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry[2] (1873) will show some of the characteristics of his prose. This description of Da Vinci's masterpiece, the portrait of Mona Lisa, has added to the world-wide fame of that picture—
"Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with its maladies has passed!… She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands."
The period from 1780 to 1837 had only two great writers of fiction,—Scott and Jane Austen; but the Victorian age saw the novel gain the ascendancy that the drama enjoyed in Elizabethan times.
In addition to the chief novelists,—Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and Kipling,—there were many other writers who produced one or more excellent works of fiction. In this class are the Brontë sisters, especially Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) and Emily Brontë (1818-1848), the daughters of a clergyman, who lived in Haworth, Yorkshire. They had genius, but they were hampered by poverty, lack of sympathy, and peculiar environment. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) is a thrilling story, which centers around the experiences of one of the great nineteenth-century heroines of fiction. This virile novel, an unusual compound of sensational romance and of intense realism, lives because the highly gifted author made it pulsate with her own life. Unlike Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë's powerful novel, Wuthering Heights (1847) is not pleasant reading. This romantic novel is really her imaginative interpretation of the Yorkshire life that she knew. If she had humanized Wuthering Heights, it could have been classed among the greatest novels of the Victorian age. She might have learned this art, had she not died at the age of thirty. "Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone," wrote Charlotte Brontë of her sister Emily.
Among the other authors who deserve mention for one or more works of fiction are: Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873), a versatile writer whose best-known work is The Last Days of Pompeii; Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), whose Cranford (1853) is an inimitable picture of mid-nineteenth century life in a small Cheshire village; Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), whose Barchester Towers is a realistic study of life in a cathedral town; Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), who stirs the blood in Westward Ho! (1855), a tale of Elizabethan seamen; Charles Reade (1814-1884), author of The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), a careful and fascinating study of fifteenth-century life; R.D. Blackmore (1825-1900), whose Lorna Doone (1869) is a thrilling North Devonshire story of life and love in the latter part of the seventeenth century; J.M. Barrie (1860- ), whose The Little Minister (1891) is a richly human, sympathetic, and humorous story, the scene of which is laid in Kirriemuir, a town about sixty miles north of Edinburgh. His Sentimental Tommy (1896), although not so widely popular, is an unusually original, semi-autobiographical story of imaginative boyhood. This entire chapter could be filled with merely the titles of Victorian novels, many of which possess some distinctive merit.
The changed character of the reading public furnished one reason for the unprecedented growth of fiction. The spread of education through public schools, newspapers, cheap magazines, and books caused a widespread habit of reading, which before this time was not common among the large numbers of the uneducated and the poor. The masses, however, did not care for uninteresting or abstruse works. The majority of books drawn from the circulating libraries were novels.
The scientific spirit of the age impelled the greatest novelists to try to paint actual life as it impressed them. Dickens chose the lower classes in London; Thackeray, the clubs and fashionable world; George Eliot, the country life near her birthplace in Warwickshire; Hardy, the people of his Wessex; Meredith, the cosmopolitan life of egotistical man; Kipling, the life of India both in jungle and camp, as well as the life of the great outer world. These writers of fiction all sought a realistic background, although some of them did not hesitate to use romantic touches to heighten the general effect. Stevenson was the chief writer of romances.
The Trend of Poetry: Minor Poets.—The Victorian age was dominated by two great poets,—Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. Browning showed the influence of science in his tendency to analyze human motives and actions. In one line of Fra Lippo Lippi, he voices the new poetic attitude toward the world:—
"To find its meaning is my meat and drink."
Browning advanced into new fields, while Tennyson was more content to make a beautiful poetic translation of much of the thought of the age. In his youth he wrote:—
"Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time."
From merely reading Tennyson's verse, one could gauge quite accurately the trend of Victorian scientific thought.
The poetry of both Browning and Tennyson is so resonant with faith that they have been called great religious teachers. Rudyard Kipling, the poet of imperialistic England, of her "far-flung battle line," attributes her "dominion over palm and pine" to faith in the "Lord God of Hosts."
In the minor poets, there is often a different strain. Arnold is beset with doubt, and hears no "clear call," such as Tennyson voices in Crossing the Bar. Swinburne, seeing the pessimistic side of the shield of evolution, exclaims:—
"Thou hast fed one rose with dust of many men."
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), Oxford tutor, traveler, and educational examiner, was a poet who struggled with the doubt of the age. He loved—
"To finger idly some old Gordian knot, Unskilled to sunder, and too weak to cleave, And with much toil attain to half-believe."
His verse would be forgotten if it expressed only such an uncertain note; but his greatest poem thus records his belief in the value of life's struggle and gives a hint of final victory:—
"Say not the struggle naught availeth, The labor and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been they remain.
"If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; It maybe, in yon smoke concealed, Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers, And, but for you, possess the field."
Although he paid too little attention to the form of his verse, some of his poems have the vitality of an earnest, thoughtful sincerity.
Two poets, W. E. Henley (1849-1903) and Robert Bridges (1844- ), although they do not possess Robert Browning's genius, yet have much of his capacity to inspire others with joy in "the mere living." Henley, a cripple and a great sufferer, was a poet, critic, and London editor. His message is "the joy of life ":—
"…the blackbird sings but a box-wood flute, But I lose him best of all For his song is all of the joy of life."
His verse, which is elemental, full of enthusiasm and beauty, often reminds us of the work of the thirteenth-century lyrists.
Robert Bridges, an Oxford graduate, physician, critic, and poet, also had for his creed: "Life and joy are one." His universe, like Shelley's, is an incarnation of the spirit of love:—
"Love can tell, and love alone, Whence the million stars were strewn, Why each atom knows its own, How, in spite of woe and death, Gay is life, and sweet is breath."
He wishes for no happier day than the present one. Bridges has been called a classical poet because he often selects Greek and Roman subjects for his verse, and because he writes with a formality, purity, and precision of style. He is, however, most delightful in such volumes as Shorter Poems and New Poems.[3] wherein he describes in a simple, artless manner English rural scenes and fireside joys. In 1913 he was appointed poet laureate, to succeed Alfred Austin.
John Davidson (1857-1909), a Scotch poet, who came to London and wrestled with poverty, produced much uneven work. In his best verse, there is often a pleasing combination of poetic beauty and vigorous movement. Lines like these from his Ballad of a Nun have been much admired:—
"On many a mountain's happy head Dawn lightly laid her rosy hand. The adventurous son took heaven by storm, Clouds scattered largesses of rain."
Davidson later became an offensively shrill preacher of materialism and lost his early charm. Some of the best of his poetry may be found in Fleet Street Ecologues.
Francis Thompson (1860-1907), a Catholic poet, who has been called a nineteenth-century Crashaw, passed much of his short life of suffering in London, where he was once reduced to selling matches on a street corner. His greatest poem, The Hound of Heaven (1893), is an impassioned lyrical rendering of the passage in the Psalms beginning: "Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?" While fleeing down "the long savannahs of the blue," the poet hears a Voice say:—
"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."
William Watson (1858- ), a London poet, looked to Milton, Wordsworth, and Arnold as his masters. Some of Watson's best verse, such as Wordsworth's Grave, is written in praise of dead poets. His early volume Epigrams (1884), containing one hundred poems of four lines each, shows his power of conveying poetic thought in brief space. One of these poems is called Shelley and Harriet Westbrook:—
"A star looked down from heaven and loved a flower, Grown in earth's garden—loved it for an hour: Let eyes that trace his orbit in the spheres Refuse not, to a ruin'd rosebud, tears."[4]
Many expected to see Watson appointed poet-laureate to succeed Tennyson. Possibly mental trouble, which had temporarily affected him, influenced the choice; for Alfred Austin (1835-1913) received the laureateship in 1896. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, Watson disliked those whom he called a "phrase-tormenting fantastic chorus of poets." His best verse shows depth of poetic thought, directness of expression, and a strong sense of moral values.
The Victorian age has provided poetry to suit almost all tastes. In striking contrast with those who wrestled with the eternal verities are such poets and essayists as Austin Dobson (1840- ), long a clerk of the London Board of Trade, and Arthur Symons (1865- ), a poet and discriminating prose critic. Austin Dobson, who is fond of eighteenth-century subjects, is at his best in graceful society verse. His poems show the touch of a highly skilled metrical artist who has been a careful student of French poetry. His ease of expression, freshness, and humor charm readers of his verse without making serious demands on their attention. His best poems are found in Vignettes in Rhyme (1873), At the Sign of the Lyre (1885), and Collected Poems (1913).
In choice of subject matter, Arthur Symons sometimes suggests the Cavalier poets. He has often squandered his powers in acting on his theory that it is one of the provinces of verse to record any momentary mood, irrespective of its value. His deftness of touch and acute poetic sensibility are evident in such short poems as Rain on the Down, Credo, A Roundel of Rest and The Last Memory.[5]
[Illustration: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. From the drawing by himself, National Portrait Gallery.]
The Pre-Raphaelite Movement.—In 1848 three artists, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), William Holman-Hunt (1827-1910), and John Everett Millais (1829-1896), formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Others soon joined the movement which was primarily artistic, not literary. Painting had become imitative. The uppermost question in the artist's mind was, "How would Raphael or some other authority have painted this picture?" The new school determined to paint things from a direct study of nature, without a thought of the way in which any one else would have painted them. They decided to assume the same independence as the Pre-Raphaelite artists, who expressed their individuality in their own way. Keats was the favorite author of the new school. The artists painted subjects suggested by his poems, and Rossetti thought him "the one true heir of Shakespeare."
When the Pre-Raphaelite paintings were violently attacked, Ruskin examined them and decided that they conformed to the principles which he had already laid down in the first two volumes of Modern Painters (1843, 1846), so he wrote Pre-Raphaelitism (1851) as the champion of the new school. It has been humorously said that some of the painters of this school, before beginning a new picture, took an oath "to paint the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."
The new movement in poetry followed this revolt in art. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the head of the literary Pre-Raphaelites, though born in London, was of Italian parentage in which there was a strain of English blood. His poem, The Blessed Damozel (first published in 1850), has had the greatest influence of any Pre-Raphaelite literary production. This poem was suggested by The Raven (1845), the work of the American, Edgar Allan Poe. Rossetti said:—
"I saw that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover an earth, and I determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearnings of the loved one in heaven."
His Blessed Damozel, wearing a white rose, "Mary's gift," leaning out from the gold bar of heaven, watching with sad eyes, "deeper than the depth of waters stilled at even," for the coming of her lover, has left a lasting impression on many readers. Simplicity, beauty, and pathos are the chief characteristics of this poem, which, like Bryant's Thanatopsis, was written by a youth of eighteen.
Painting was the chief work of Rossetti's life, but he wrote many other poems. Some of the most characteristic of these are the two semi-ballads, Sister Helen and The King's Tragedy, Rose Mary, Love's Nocturn, and Sonnets.
One of the earliest of these Sonnets, Mary's Girlhood, describes the child as:—
"An angel-watered lily, that near God Grows and is quiet."
His sister, Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), the author of much religious verse, shows the unaffected naturalness of the new movement. This stanza from her Amor Mundi (Love of the World) is characteristic:—
"So they two went together in glowing August weather, The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right; And dear she was to doat on, her swift feet seemed to float on The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight."
William Morris (1834-1896), Oxford graduate, decorator, manufacturer, printer, and poet, was born near London. He was fascinated by The Blessed Damozel, and his first and most poetical volume, The Defence of Guinevere and Other Poems (1858), shows Rossetti's influence. The simplicity insisted on by the new school is evident in such lines as these from Two Red Roses across the Moon:—
"There was a lady lived in a hall, Large in the eyes and slim and tall; And ever she sung from noon to noon, Two red roses across the moon."
Morris later wrote a long series of narrative poems, called The Earthly Paradise (1868-1870) and an epic, Sigurd the Volsung (1876). He turned from Pre-Raphaelitism to become an earnest social reformer.
In literature, the Pre-Raphaelite movement disdained the old conventions and started a miniature romantic revival, which emphasized individuality, direct expression, and the use of simple words. Its influence soon became merged in that of the earlier and far greater romantic school.