Studies in Early Victorian Literature | Page 3

the last
sixty years. It was the era when the steam-power and railway system
was founded, and the vast industrial development which went with it.
The last sixty years have witnessed a profound material revolution in
English life; and the reaction on our literature has been deep and wide.
The most obvious and superficial change in literature is the extreme
diversity of its form. There is no standard now, no conventional type,
no good "model." It is an age of "Go-as-you-please," and of _tous les
genres sont bons, surtout le genre ennuyeux_. In almost any age of
English literature, or indeed of any other literature, an experienced
critic can detect the tone of the epoch at once in prose or verse. There is
in them an unmistakeable Zeit-Geist in phraseology and form. The
Elizabethan drama, essay, or philosophy could not be mistaken for the
drama, essay, or philosophy of the Restoration; the heroic couplet
reigned from Dryden to Byron; Ciceronian diction reigned from
Addison to Burke; and then the Quarterlies, with Southey, Lamb, Scott,
De Quincey, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, and Leigh Hunt, introduced a
simpler, easier tone of the well-bred causeur, as free from classical
mannerism as it was free from subtle mechanism or epigrammatic
brilliance. Down to about the death of Scott and Coleridge, almost any
page of English prose or verse could be certainly attributed to its proper
generation by the mark of its style alone.
The Victorian literature presents a dozen styles, every man speaking
out what is in him, in the phrases he likes best. Our Zeit-Geist flashes
all across the heavens at once. Let us place a page from Sartor Resartus
beside a page from Macaulay's History of England, or either beside a

page from Arnold's Literature and Dogma or one from the Stones of
Venice. Here are four typical styles in prose, each of which has been
much admired and imitated; yet they differ as widely as Shelley from
Ovid, or Tennyson from Pope. Again, for verse, contrast Paracelsus
with The Princess--poems written about the same time by friends and
colleagues. Compare a poem of William Morris with one by Lewis
Morris. Compare Swinburne's Songs and Sonnets with Matthew
Arnold's Obermann; Rudyard Kipling's Ballads with _The Light of
Asia_. Have they any common standard of form, any type of metre?
The purists doubt as to the style of Carlyle as a "model," but no one
denies that the French Revolution and Hero-Worship, at least in certain
passages, display a mastery over language as splendid as anything in
our prose literature. Exactly the same might be said also of Esmond,
and again of Silas Marner, and again of the _Seven Lamps of
Architecture_. Yet all of these differ as widely as one style can differ
from another. Fifine at the Fair, and _The Angel in the House_, have
each fervent admirers. No! there is no recognised "model" either in
verse or in prose.
In truth, we have now both in prose and in verse strongly-contrasted
types, each of which commands admiration and following. Both in
prose and verse we have one type which has carried subtle finish and a
purism studied almost to the point of "preciousness," alongside of
another type which crowds its effects without regard to tone and
harmony, and by its side a third type which trots along breathless in its
shirt-sleeves. Tennyson's In Memoriam has that exquisite polish of
workmanship which we find in such poets as Virgil, Racine, and
Milton--that perfection of phrase which we cannot conceive the poet
capable of improving by any labour. Put aside for the moment any
question about the ideas, inspiration, or power of the poem as a whole,
and consider that, in all those hundreds of stanzas, there is hardly one
line that is either careless, prosaic, or harsh, not a single false note,
nothing commonplace, nothing over-coloured, but uniform harmony of
phrase. This perfection of phrasing is not always to be found even in
the greatest poets, for Aeschylus and Dante at times strike a fierce
discord, and Shakespeare, Calderon, and Goethe sometimes pass into
rank extravaganza. But this scholarly and measured speech has

impressed itself on the poetry of our time--insomuch, that the
Tennysonian cycle of minor poets has a higher standard of grace,
precision, and subtlety of phrase than the second rank of any modern
literature:--a standard which puts to shame the rugosities of strong men
like Dryden, Burns, and Byron. There is plenty of mannerism in this
school of our minor poetry, but no one can call it either slovenly or
harsh.
The friend, contemporary, almost the rival of Tennyson, one whom
some think endowed by nature with even stronger genius, on the other
hand, struck notes of discord harsher, louder, and more frequent than
any poet since Elizabethan times. Whatever we