THE VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE.
WE ventured to remark last week, in noticing a speech made at the Mansion House by the editor of the Quarterly Review, that we should not expect our own Victorian age to hold its place eventually in Literature on a level with the Georgian age which preceded it. The great difference between the two we take to be this,—that while the Georgian age was great not only in the calmness, clearness, and confidence of its vision of the scenery of human life, but also in the originality and fervour of the revolutionary energy with which new paths of literature were struck out, the Victorian age, hitherto at least, has been one much more marked by restlessness and transitional modes of feeling and thought than by either the self-confidence and comprehensiveness of the earlier Georgian age, or the eager and vivid originality :of its last five-and-twenty years. The Georgian age was the age of Gibbon and Burke, of Sheridan and Canning, of Cowper and Burns, of Walter Scott and Jane Austen, and, again, of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. In other words, it included both a period of undisturbed thought when an imagination such as Gibbon's could feed itself on certain conventional prejudices, and range freely over the great field of history, sifting carefully the facts that would beat fill up that magnificent and heavily gilded framework of history which he had formed for himself,—and also a period of vehement emotion in which the imagination was thrown back upon the romance of the past, like Scott's, or on solitary communion with Nature, like Wordsworth's, or feasted itself on visionary beauty, like that of Coleridge or Keats,—or, on the other hand, when it sought either at once to multiply and confound the moral paradoxes of the world, like Byron's, or took refuge in the exquisite lyrical wail of Shelley's thin and eager desolation. The Georgian era, then, was rich by combining genius which sought its inspiration in a fixed and traditional view of human life and human society, with genius which might be called genius of revolt, but which nevertheless had not got to the point of hesitating between two opinions, and trying to steer its way through genuinely unsettled convictions. Either in Cowper or Burns, either in Gibbon or Burke, either in Scott or Jane Austen, you find a mind whose basis of thought and vision of the social system are taken for granted. And either in Byron or Shelley, on the other hand, you find the poetry of different kinds of revolt based on the assumption that the existing state of society is radically evil. Thus, the Georgian era combines the stateliest literature of a settled age, with the most vigorous literature of an age of revolt.
It is very different with our own. The Victorian age has been a restless age in all its phases, an age of investigation and innovation without full confidence either in its assump- tions or its doubts. Its greatest and most characteristic literary effort, its greatest effort at imaginative history, and perhaps also at historical imagination, Carlyle's " French Revolution," was an attempt to reveal the moral forces which make political and social life unstable, to indicate the fiery crater on the hot crust of which nations live, and, of course, like all such first efforts of restless imagination, it exaggerated the instability it depicted, and perhaps did something at once to increase the danger by stimulating revolutionary agencies, and to give a salutary warning to those who had it in their power to postpone and attenuate that danger. Macaulay's genius, great as it is, seems to belong rather to the type of the Georgian era in which Macaulay grew up, than to that of the Victorian era in which be wrote; and of all our other historical writers, it may surely be said that, so far as they are really great, they are rather scientific and tentative, like Sir Henry Maine and Mr. Freeman, searching out the origin of a few of our institutions in the past, than restorers, like Gibbon, who strive to give a connected and vivid picture of any considerable section of the world's life. Carlyle'e great effort to help no to conceive what a people's heart is like, and to give us a transcendental study of the most exciting episode in modern history, seems to us to be as characteristic of the Victorian age, as Gibbon's "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was of the Georgian age. It is characteristic chiefly because it reveals without at all adequately explaining the sources of our unrest, because, most of all the writings of the age, it makes us feel our ignorance and impotence, and the difficulty, not to say the impossibility, of removing them. What Carlyle has done by a singular mixture of industrious research and imaginative vision, writers like Mr. Freeman and Sir Henry Maine have done in a very different fashion by the application of a comparative scientific method to a sifting of facts as industrious as Carlyle's and of far wider range. In any case, the most characteristic work of the Victorian age has been of a tentative and un- settling kind, showing us how little historical precedents con- form themselves to ethical principles, and how easy it is for democratic passion to outgrow the command wielded over human habits by historical precedent, especially when the rulers who rule by virtue of precedent, have ignored the claims of the larger human sympathies. It tells us plainly how near we are to moral chaos when ancient custom pulls one way and human sympathies the other.
And if we pass from history to biography and philosophy, do we not find the same contrast? Compare Boswell's Life of Johnson, or Sonthey's Life of Cowper, or the same writer's Life of Wesley, with Stanley's Life of Arnold, or Colonel Manrica's Life of his father, F. D. Maurice, or Fronde's Life of Carlyle, or Cardinal Newman's account of his own career, and how strange is the contrast between lives led either on fixed and tranquil assumptions, or (like Wesley's) on new principles carried as it were by escalade in one passionate burst of feeling, and never after- wards modified or doubted, and those of the new era, which are fall of questionings and of adjustments of hypothesis to fact, or of fact
to hypothesis, from their opening to their close. When we come to the Victorian age, we come to lives thirsting for new principles and hardly able to master them,—like Arnold seeking to identify Church and State ; or Maurice seeking to magnify the charity and piety of all the Churches to the dimensions of his own illimitable love and reverence ; or Carlyle raving at the world, partly for not finding everything miraculous, and partly for finding any special episode more miraculous than any other ; or Cardinal Newman surveying all the creeds and all the Churches with his piercing and penetrating eye, and finally selecting that which bad in it the highest genealogical descent and the grandest historical career. And if this is so with our biography, it is still more so with our philosophy. In Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and James Mar- tineau, we have the most characteristic types of English philosophy in the Victorian age. In all of them we have the same great desire to find some new hypothesis on which philosophy can be reconstructed, but only in the first of them any clear sense of triumphant success, and that only because Darwin's field of research, rich as it was, was so strictly limited that it could not be called the field of philosophy in the larger sense. In all the others we have either a philosophy of experience yearning after a transcendental flight, as Mill did in his " Essays on Religion," and Spencer in his " Universal Postulate;" or an a priori philosophy endeavouring to assimilate the more knotty elements of experience, as Dr. Martineau does in that remarkable study of the source of moral obligation con- tained in his "Types of Ethical Theory." In none of these great thinkers, Darwin excepted, do you see that they have arrived satisfactorily at anything like the new point of departure for which they were seeking. And in Darwin it is the very limited field of his inquiry which alone secures to him the sense of pro- visional satisfaction. He discovered, no doubt, a great principle by which to account for the shading-off of one species into another ; but the philosophy which explains shades of difference is only philosophy in the narrowest senile.
Naturally enough, this condition of thought has reflected itself in our lighter literature, and has not, on the whole, been favourable to our Art. Compare Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot with Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen, and you see at once how the restlessness of the age has affected the art even of its greatest genius. Dickens was perhaps hardly educated in a world where he could feel the pressure of the moral atmosphere. To him the new age expressed itself rather as a democratic stimulus than as an intellectual unrest. Yet it injured his greatest faculty of all, his inexhaustible humour, by inspiring him with a constant desire to reform what he hardly understood, to revile the legal machinery of the day, to reform the Poor-Law, to assail cut-and-dried systems of education, and so forth. Indeed, we should describe him as the most wonderful of humourists inoculated by an epidemic philanthropy which weakened. and distracted him. Thackeray's genius was of a mach more intellectual order ; but it was penetrated with that deep unrest, that doubt of human nature, that sense of the inscrutability of the divine order, that mingled passion of pity and of disdain, which made him talk of all his characters as " puppets," and made him too often think of human nature as the great puppet of all. George Eliot's earlier art wan less injured than Thackeray's by the great unrest of the age, for her nature was less passionate, and her studies of human character were, originally at least, as just as they were humorous. But as the great travail of the nineteenth century got hold of her, and she herself became more and more aware of the unsatisfactory character of life, and felt that longing to join " the choir invisible," which made her ever more and more clearly conscious that in her philosophy " the choir invisible " was also non-existent, a great melancholy fell upon her, and in " Middle- march" and "Daniel Deronda " she made her chief subject either an unrest which resulted. in failure, or an unrest which exhaled in vague and visionary designs. Unquestionably the art of the Victorian novelists has nothing in it of the happy serenity of the art of the age which preceded it.
In poetry, however, there is no necessary incompatibility with an age of unrest,—though, of course, high dramatic and epic poetry can hardly be expected except from poets who have distinct and satisfying ideals both of action and of character. Still, there is nothing necessarily restful in the breast of the poet ; and in Tennyson and Matthew Arnold we have had great poets who have given to the spirit of aspiration and of elegy some of the noblest poems in the English language,
But the impatience and excitability proper to an age of inquisi- tiveness and of change, have had their effect on our poetry. They have left the mark of hurry and breathlessness on one of our greatest and most powerful imaginative thinkers, Mr. Browning, who ventriloquises for us under a hundred different masks without perfecting more than a tenth part of his work, and makes us exclaim with Matthew Arnold,— "Bat we brought forth and reared in hours
Of change, alarm, surprise,— What shelter to grow ripe ie ours, What leisure to grow wise ? "
Again, upon Clough, another very great poet, the restlessness of the age told with damaging effect, though rather in discouraging him from work for which he was eminently fit, than in injuring the form of the little he actually gave us. An eager, inquisitive age like ours not nnfrequently strikes even the poetry of desire dumb, for the curious gaze of semi-scientific analysis is unfavourable to the lyric mood.
In a word, the Victorian literature, taken as a whole, while it has owed to the democratic wave of our time an immense prac- ticality, a wide and deep vitality, a didactic lucidity and force such as no other age of English literature ever had, and a strain of sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men such as was impossible till the present day, has undoubtedly found the waters of the human imagination too deeply troubled, too turbid both in thought and sentiment, to admit of that calm and serene benignity which is of the very essence of the highest literature. The age of inquisitive philanthropy moves to its depths even the moat profoundly poetic tempera- ment, and renders it easier to sing the dirge of faith as Matthew Arnold has sung it, than to exult in the only light in which the true poet can ever really live and breathe with freedom.
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