Studies in Early Victorian Literature | Page 4

hold about the insight
and imagination of Browning, no one can doubt that he often chose to
be uncouth, crabbed, grotesque, and even clownish, when the humour
was on him. There are high precedents for genius choosing its own
instrument and making its own music. But, whatever were Browning's
latent powers of melody, his method when he chose to play upon the
gong, or the ancient instrument of marrow-bone and cleavers, was the
exact antithesis of Tennyson's; and he set on edge the teeth of those
who love the exquisite cadences of In Memoriam and Maud. Browning
has left deep influence, if not a school. The younger Lytton, George
Meredith, Buchanan, here and there Swinburne and William Morris,
seem to break loose from the graceful harmony which the
Tennysonians affect, and to plunge headlong into the obscure, the
uncouth, the ghastly, and the lurid. No one denies originality and power
in many of these pieces: but they are flat blasphemy against the
pellucid melody of the Tennysonian idyll. Our poetry seems to be
under two contrary spells: it is enthralled at one time by the ravishing
symmetry of Mozart; at another time it yearns for the crashing discords
that thunder along the march of the Valkyrie through the air.
As in poetry, so in prose. We find in our best prose of to-day an
extraordinary mastery over pure, nervous, imaginative language; and
all this, alongside here of a riotous extravagance, and there, of a crude
and garrulous commonplace. Thackeray's best chapters, say in _Vanity
Fair, Esmond, the Humourists_, contain an almost perfect prose style--a
style as nervous as that of Swift, as easy as that of Goldsmith, as

graceful as that of Addison, as rich as that of Gibbon or Burke. No
English romances have been clothed in a language so chaste and
scholarly--not even Fielding's. Certainly not the Waverley series; for
Scott, as we know, rehearsed his glowing chronicles of the past with
the somewhat conventional verbosity of the improvisatore who recites
but will not pause to write. George Eliot relates her story with an art
even more cultivated than that of Thackeray--though, doubtless, with
an over-elaborated self-consciousness, and perceptible suggestions of
the laboratory of the student. Trollope tells his artless tales in perfectly
pure, natural, and most articulate prose, the language of a man of the
world telling a good story well. And a dozen living novelists are
masters of a style of extreme ease and grace.
Side by side with this chastened English prose, we have men of genius
who have fallen into evil habits. Bulwer, who knew better, would quite
revel in a stagey bombast; Dickens, with his pathos and his humour,
was capable of sinking into a theatrical mannerism and cockney
vulgarities of wretched taste; Disraeli, with all his wit and savoir faire,
has printed some rank fustian, and much slip-slop gossip; and George
Meredith at times can be as jerky and mysterious as a prose Browning.
Charlotte Brontë and Kingsley could both descend to blue fire and
demoniac incoherences. Macaulay is brilliant and emphatic, but we
weary at last of his everlasting staccato on the trumpet; and even the
magnificent symphonies of Ruskin at his best will end sometimes in a
sort of coda of fantasias which suggest limelights and coloured lenses.
Carlyle, if not the greatest prose master of our age, must be held to be,
by virtue of his original genius and mass of stroke, the literary dictator
of Victorian prose. And, though we all know how wantonly he often
misused his mighty gift, though no one now would venture to imitate
him even at a distance, and though Matthew Arnold was ever taking up
his parable--"Flee Carlylese as the very Devil!"--we are sliding into
Carlylese unconsciously from time to time, and even Culture itself fell
into the trap in the very act of warning others.
Side by side with such chastened literary art as that of Thackeray and
George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and John Morley, Lecky and Froude,
Maine and Symonds, side by side with a Carlylese tendency to

extravagance, slang, and caricature, we find another vein in English
prose--the flat, ungainly, nerveless style of mere scientific research.
What lumps of raw fact are flung at our heads! What interminable
gritty collops of learning have we to munch! Through what tangles of
uninteresting phenomena are we not dragged in the name of Research,
Truth, and the higher Philosophy! Mr. Mill and Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bain
and Mr. Sidgwick, have taught our age very much; but no one of them
was ever seen to smile; and it is not easy to recall in their voluminous
works a single irradiating image or one monumental phrase.
There are eminent historians to-day who disdain the luminous style of
Hume and Robertson, and yet deride the colour and