Part 31

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

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

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

His contemporary, Browning, had the misfortune to attract, by his faults, the people who wish to believe themselves clever, because they labor at appreciating passages which the poet had made obscure. Darkness is not depth, nor is obscurity a merit. From his letters it is plain that Mr. Browning had not the gift of lucid expression; from his poems it is manifest that he had not, in a high degree, the gift of verbal music and of charms. His gift of the grotesque, very real and original, was also his snare. In _Christmas Eve_ and _Easter Day_, with _Men and Women_, we have the true essence of Browning at his best; we have his dramatic lyrics, with their amazing abundance of character and variety of measure. After the first fascinating volume _The Ring and the Book_ became monotonous. One song in _Paracelsus_, to myself, seems worth all the dissection of character in the blank verse. There are many who find a kind of spiritual help in such pieces as _Prospice_. There are thousands who find in _Men and Women_ a sort of intellectual enjoyment (or entertainment) which they can derive from no other poet who ever lived. An energy, life, and sympathy, breaking forth in fresh, unheard-of ways; vocal in strange, piercing, untried measures: these are the imperishable qualities of Browning. Look at his rendering of the Agamemnon: such is his version of life. The poetry of Æschylus is not there: “_carmina desunt_”; but there is a new, odd, unexpected rendering of the tragedy. So poignant and broken, sad, glad, grotesque, and pitiful, was Browning’s rendering of life. He was “ever a fighter”: no poet is more exempt from whining and despair. Destiny linked him with Mrs. Browning, whose genius, sincere and original, is apt to be obscured by palpable faults of manner, emotion, and even rhyme, on which it is superfluous to dwell. Her merits, and some of her defects, made Mrs. Browning the most popular of women poets in England, except, perhaps, Miss Ingelow. Both, in the crowd of accomplished versifiers, appear as true poets, though both, no doubt, fail to reach the place of Miss Christina Rossetti, who never can be popular.

The matter of popularity is full of puzzles and paradoxes. Tennyson was popular, yet great because he is popular. There was a moment when popularity without permanence might have been expected for Longfellow. The excellence of his moral intentions was then more obvious than the poetry. Such early pieces as _Excelsior_ and _The Psalm of Life_ yield odd results on analysis. But not much better can be said for the _Queen of the May_, and for parts of _The Miller’s Daughter_. In these is a marvellous dexterity in sinking. But sink, and remain sunk, was as little characteristic of Longfellow as of Tennyson. He was a true poet, in his lyrics, even in his translations, as well as in _Evangeline_, and that excellent experiment _Hiawatha_, where the measure of the Finnish popular poems is applied to the not dissimilar legends of another woodland race. But Longfellow lacked that undefinable quality of the rare, the strange, the hitherto unheard yet delightful note which now and again is heard in the verse of Edgar Poe. He was an Ishmaelite in literature, his hand against every man’s hand, and hence seems to be less admired where he was personally known than in France and England. It is not the famous _Raven_, but such pieces as _To Helen_, _the Sleeper_, and at most a dozen others which give Poe his high place in the judgment of his admirers. Not his ideas, but the beauty of his haunting lines, confers on him the laurel. Of Bryant, as a rule, and of Whittier almost always, the reverse is the truth. The acceptability of their ideas, the refined simplicity, not the natural magic, of their form, are their claims to renown. Except in a few places, as in such as his _Commemoration Ode_, Mr. Lowell is better remembered for the wit and vigor of his Biglow poems than for his serious verse, at least in England; while Emerson’s prose has precedence here over his poetry. The wisdom of the East and West, blended with his happy, courageous temper, made Emerson a corrective Carlyle, while Thoreau is the complement of Emerson.

Concerning the great Victorian novelists, Thackeray and Dickens, so much is daily written that remark is superfluous. A master of observation of all that had rarely been observed, a generous heart, an original and abundant humorist, the greatest source of mirth in our century, Dickens appears to wear less well than his rival. The unapproached merits of Thackeray’s style must preserve him in literature; his pathos is rare and unforced; his form of humor is as permanent as that of Fielding, and as successfully matched by his phrasing. Even his verse, mirthful or melancholy, does not fade, and has its own place on the borderland of poetry. George Eliot’s fame, too, must revive the success of her earlier and more humorous novels, before she became too fond of the Spencerian philosophy, and took herself too seriously, a natural result of adulation. Charlotte Brontë, in the same way, has been, as it were, rediscovered amid a chorus of fresh applauses, and with perhaps rather too curious investigations. In America, after Hawthorne, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Mrs. Beecher Stowe were the novelists most generally admired in England, when Thackeray and Dickens were verging to their decline. It is, indeed, to be regretted that Dr. Holmes did not write more fiction when in his prime. His excellent and original _Elsie Venner_, and _Guardian Angel_, with their humorous pictures of real life and their thread of phantasy, half mystical, half scientific, border (as often in the _Poet_ and _Professor at the Breakfast Table_) on the ground of “psychical research.” Dr. Holmes was not merely, in verse and prose, an exquisite wit, but a man of rare knowledge, a man of science, and a sturdy defender of the purity of the language. Mrs. Beecher Stowe, on the other hand, took the world by storm with a vivid tract in the form of fiction; a book now not easy to criticise, but which can still move to laughter and tears. It is my “insular ignorance” which prevents me from appreciating other American fictions of that age, before the days of writers still happily living and working: Mark Twain, Bret Harte, W. D. Howells, Henry James, and scores of others, who, being here to speak for themselves, shall not be commented upon in this place. With Mr. Howells, as a critic, I have tried to break lances, while ready to admit one of his main contentions, that the art of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, and others of our fathers would have profited much by being a finer art, by condensation, by omission, by avoidance of the superfluous. But that our modern fiction is a greater art, that romance and story-telling and adventure are obsolete, or ought to be obsolete, that I can never admit while human nature is human nature. Mankind will never be content, in fiction, with tales of the psychology of the ordinary person; ordinary as we are, we desire to be, like Homer’s Heracles, conversant with great adventures. Mr. Howells perhaps may think Aristotle a Greek snob when he maintains that tragedy must find its theme in the sorrows of the god-descended kings. Are not the griefs of the poor or of the middle classes as poignant? They are; but they do not involve such heights and depths of fortune, raising or wrecking whole states, as do the woes “of Thebes, or Atreus’s line.” The fall of Prince Charles from an hour even of shadowy royalty, from the leadership of an army, from the wondering admiration of Europe and the applause of Voltaire into the subject and dependent sot is an example of modern historical tragedy; in its elevation and its decline more apt to move “pity and terror” than the circumstance that a journalist has taken to drink.

As in the case of America, so in that of England, I cannot enter into the merits of living novelists in so wide a task as the brief review of a century. Mr. Meredith, as a veteran of the 60’s, has shown, perhaps, fully what is the nature of his achievement; he shines as a creator of character (the highest praise) and as a writer with a thoroughly original view of the world, as a poet and as a wit. That his manner is entirely fortunate, and not rather tinged with wilful eccentricities like those of Browning and Carlyle, can scarcely be disputed. An accomplished young novelist has admitted to me that his manner is “catching,” and that he has to struggle against half-conscious efforts at imitation. Others do not struggle; and most grow older before they are able to write like themselves, with their own voices. Even Mr. Stevenson was caught now and then, his own voice being original indeed, but yet full of memories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and even of the Cameronian writers. To my mind Mr. Stevenson was the greatest, or, at least, the most enjoyable, of our novelists since George Eliot, excelling in matter and form, though probably always prevented by thwarting circumstances from doing himself complete justice. He practically revived in England the novel historical, now so abundantly practised, and practised with spirit, by Mr. Stanley Weyman, Mr. Anthony Hope, Dr. Conan Doyle, Mr. A. E. W. Mason, and a regiment of followers. The novel scientific, as in the hands of Mr. Wells, and the novel of adventure, “beyond the bounds of known romanticism,” as in Mr. Rider Haggard’s works, with the detective novel and the Oriental and imperialistic romances of Mr. Kipling, prove that man will not be satisfied with domestic realism alone. I never thought he would! Mr. Kipling’s astonishing powers of vision, his habit of ruthlessly cutting the superfluous, and his amazing command of technicalities, help to account for his world-wide fame. But the greatest of these is vision, not an acquired result of thought, but a gift of Heaven. The age has also produced a wealth of novels with a purpose. Would that the authors could be induced to state their purposes squarely, in undecorative treatises! But I confess that the treatises would not be read. The specialism of modern science has also invaded fiction, and some authors find a county or a parish wide enough for the work of a lifetime. The district has its dialect, and who can reprove it when spoken by the creatures of Mr. Barrie and Mr. Crockett? This kind of fiction is the result of our desire to learn (through novels) about the lives of all sorts and conditions of men. _Enfin_, the whole scope of mortal existence is now the _farrage libelli_ of the novelists who range from prehistoric man to Bethnal Green; from Thrums to Central Africa. There is not the same eagerness to read history, which James II. regarded as “more instructive, and quite as amusing.” My heart is here with King James, and I confess to gaining more entertainment from Carlyle’s _Frederick the Great_ than from most novels.

The earlier historians, from Scott to Carlyle, Macaulay and Froude, placed the human interest in the front rank. They conceived that history had to do with human beings of passions, caprices, moods, loves, and hates, dwelling in a world of interesting costumes, arms, architecture, ideas, and beliefs. Thus Carlyle, with much research, created his Cromwell or his Frederick, as Scott created his Queen Mary, his Louis XI., his James VI., or his Cromwell in _Woodstock_, who is not too remote from Carlyle’s. For these reasons Scott, Froude, Carlyle, and Macaulay really are “amusing” as well as instructive historians. When institutions and constitutions had to be described they were placed in separate compartments, as in the works of Hallam and Bishop Stubbs. Historians studied manuscripts, of course, but it was not held that only the unprinted was the valuable, that a new survey of known matter was absolutely valueless.

In the end of the century we have history which is not “as interesting as a novel” (like that of Prescott, Motley, Froude, and Macaulay), but very far from gay. Novelty of research is, quite justly, insisted upon (though research is as old as Hemingburgh, and was much advanced by Gibbon, Carter, Rymer, Walpole, Tytler, and so on) till, by a natural error, every scrap won from a wilderness of charters is valued beyond its deserts. The human interest is frowned upon; movements of forces, political and social, are treated in preference to personal character and adventure. Meticulous accuracy is insisted upon, till nervous students are actually afraid to publish. Even Mommsen, greatest of original students, is regarded as frivolous, even Curtius as “popular” by the modern school. It is natural to man to run into these excesses of reaction. Froude is not often accurate, Macaulay has prejudices, even Mr. Freeman was not sound about Knights’ Fees and about a certain palisade. Now the public does not care about Knights’ Fees or about the Manor, much; nor even about the obscure early history of civic institutions. In fact, even references to authorities frighten away part of the public, whose timidity I do not applaud. The results of our frivolity and of the portentous gravity of some modern historians is that, since Mr. Green, scarcely any writer of history is read except for examinations. As long as historians declare (often with perfect truth) that their own works are not literature, but something far more awful and solemn, namely science, history must be unpopular. But we are only waiting for a man of genius as accurate as the most meticulous, and as interesting as the agreeably irresponsible Froude. Of science I am not to treat, so I am dispensed from remarks on our scientific modern historians. It is certain that in collecting and printing and calendaring documents the age in all countries has shown praiseworthy industry, while Mr. Parkman in America, like our mid-century historians, was not too scientific to be readable.

Of theology, except when recommended by the art of a Newman or a Jowett, nothing is here to be said; though I could cheerfully say a good deal, especially about Biblical criticism. But that is science, though scarcely the sort of science which has been defined as “organized common-sense.” The poetry of the late century in England boasts the names of Rossetti, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, and Mr. Swinburne. It is tinged, in the former with mediævalism derived from the Italians and Chaucer; while in Mr. Swinburne every conceivable literary influence, from the Greeks to Baudelaire, from the Elizabethans to Victor Hugo, makes itself abundantly conspicuous. These poets, younger than Matthew Arnold, are not much influenced by Wordsworth, though by Shelley Mr. Swinburne was influenced. On the other hand, Mr. Arnold was a modern, academic, heterodox Wordsworth, and often a truly delightful poet.

He stood much aloof from the contemporary literature of his day, and his letters prove that he was no fervent admirer even of Tennyson or Browning. His own poetry has been to many, as to myself, full of delightful passages, whether he wrote of the Oxford country-side, or of Wordsworth’s hills, of “the shorn and parcelled Oxus,” or of the moaning sea that Sophocles long ago heard as he heard it on Dover beach. He was our greatest modern elegiac poet; a master of the Dirge. Of the living, again, no criticism can be offered; we only note the names, and real if very various merits, of Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. Watson, Mr. Davidson, Mr. Dobson, Mr. Benson, Mr. Thompson, Mr. Henley, Mr. Gosse, Mr. Stephen Philips, Mrs. Marriott Watson, Mrs. Maynell, Mr. Kipling, “a nest of singing birds.” It would be impertinent, and indeed perilous, to “draw invidious distinctions,” as the undergraduate said about the major and minor prophets: nor is it for this century to sift the poetic sheep from the goats, who, in an age that reads little poetry, are greatly guilty of much verse.

The unassuming and decried art of criticism remains. Essays are of no one age; there are similar excellences in every good essayist since Montaigne. We have no Hazlitt, Lamb, or Leigh Hunt, but we had Mr. Stephenson and Mr. Pater, so unlike in all but conscious interest in style, and reminiscence of the best models. Indeed, essay writing is almost an unpractised art, as the public “has no use for it,” any more than for the letter H on the Sandwich boards. A fairly bad novelist can live; to an appallingly bad novelist the workhouse unfolds its awful valves. In literary criticism Mr. Arnold stood alone in his age, and Mr. Arnold’s literary income, it is known, surprised, when stated, the Commissioners of Income Tax: not by its affluence. Of living critics it would be in the highest degree dangerous to say a word, though many words, both of praise and dispraise, might be said of a person of reckless character. That (with obvious exceptions) most critics are men intimately familiar with what is best, from Homer to Mr. Stephen Philips, few students would venture to aver. That we (for am I not the least of all critics, and not worthy to be called a critic?) are entirely devoid of ignorance, personal bias, likes, dislikes, prejudices, pet aversions, indolence, we are not so blindly conceited as to maintain. We have been taught by many centuries of creative geniuses, from Theocritus to the latest protesting popular novelists, to know our proper place, and we take refuge in “confession and avoidance.” The new century will not know our names when we pass where Dennis and where Cibber are, unless Mr. Robert Buchanan writes a new _Dunciad_.