Studies in Early Victorian Literature | Page 2

Froude, Lecky, Milman, Green, Maine, Matthew
Arnold, Symonds, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, John Morley, to say
nothing of younger men who are still in their prime and promise.
Widely as these differ among themselves, they have characters which
differentiate them from all men of the eighteenth century, and also from
the men of the era of Goethe and Scott. Can we imagine _Sartor
Resartus being published in the age of Johnson, or In Memoriam_ in
that of Byron? How different a land is the Italy which Ruskin sees from
the Italy that Rogers knew! What a new world is that of the Brontës and
George Eliot beside that which was painted by Miss Edgeworth and
Miss Austen! In what things would Southey and John Morley agree,
except about books and pure English? Place Burke _On the Sublime
and Beautiful beside Ruskin's Modern Painters_; compare the Stones of
Venice with Eustace's Classical Tour; compare Carlyle's French
Revolution with Gibbon's Decline and Fall; compare the _Book of
Snobs with Addison's Spectator; contrast The Ring and the Book_ with
Gray's Elegy or Cowper's Task. What wholly different types, ideas,
aims! The age of Pope and Addison, of Johnson and Gibbon, clung to
symmetry, "the grand air," the "best models"; it cared much more for
books than for social reforms, and in the world of letters a classical
manner was valued far more than originality of ideas. And when we
come to a later age, what an irrepressible and stormy imagination do we
find! Byron, Shelley, Scott, Coleridge, Campbell, Southey, Landor,
revelled in romance and colour, in battle and phantasmagoria, in
tragedy, mystery, and legend. They boiled over with excitement, and
their visions were full of fight. The roar and fire of the great
revolutionary struggle filled men's brains with fierce and strange
dreams.

Our Victorian Age is as different from the Virgilian and Ciceronian
style of the age of Gray and Johnson, as it is from the resounding
torrent which was poured forth by Byron and Scott. The social
earnestness of our time colours our literature, and almost distorts our
literature; while, on the other hand, our practical and scientific genius
scorns the melodramatic imagery with which our grandfathers were
delighted. Gibbon would have smiled a cruel epigram, if he had been
expected to thrust a Latter-Day Pamphlet on the social question into
one of his chapters on the Fall of Rome. But Carlyle's _French
Revolution_ is as much political rhapsody and invective as it is history.
Dickens made a series of novels serve as onslaughts on various social
abuses; and George Eliot's heart is ever with Darwin, Spencer, and
Comte, as much as it is with Miss Austen. Ruskin would sacrifice all
the pictures in the world, if society would transform itself into a
Brotherhood of St. George. Tennyson has tried to put the dilemmas of
theological controversy into lyric poetry, and Psychology is now to be
studied, not in metaphysical ethics, but in popular novels. The aim of
the modern historian is to compile a Times newspaper of events which
happened three or four, eight or ten centuries ago. The aim of the
modern philosopher is to tabulate mountains of research, and to prune
away with agnostic non possumus the ancient oracles of hypothesis and
imagination.
Our literature to-day has many characteristics: but its central note is the
dominant influence of Sociology--enthusiasm for social truths as an
instrument of social reform. It is scientific, subjective, introspective,
historical, archaeological:--full of vitality, versatility, and
diligence:--intensely personal, defiant of all law, of standards, of
convention:--laborious, exact, but often indifferent to grace, symmetry,
or colour:--it is learned, critical, cultured:--with all its ambition and its
fine feeling, it is unsympathetic to the highest forms of the imagination,
and quite alien to the drama of action.
It would be a difficult problem in social dynamics to fix anything like a
true date for this change in the tone of literature, and to trace it back to
its real social causes. The historian of English literature will perhaps
take the death of Walter Scott, in 1832, as a typical date. By a curious

coincidence, Goethe died in the same year. Two years later Coleridge
and Lamb died. Within a few years more most of those who belonged
to the era of Byron, Shelley, Scott, and Sheridan were departed or had
sung their last effective note. The exceptions were Wordsworth and his
immediate Lakist followers, Landor and Bulwer, of whom the latter
two continued to produce. The death of Scott happened in the year of
the Reform Act of 1832; and here we reach a political and social cause
of the great change. The reformed democratic Parliament of 1832 was
itself the reaction after the furious upheaval caused by the Revolution
of 1789, and it heralded the social and legislative revolution of