Studies in Early Victorian Literature | Page 5

fire of Gibbon.
Grote poured forth the precious contents of his portentous notebooks
with as little care for rhythm and as little sense of proportion as a
German professor. Freeman and Gardiner have evidently trained
themselves in the same school of elaborate learning, till they would
appear to count the graceful English of Froude, Lecky, and Green as
hardly becoming the dignity of history. It would seem as if the charge
which some of our historians are most anxious to avoid is the charge of
being "readable," and of keeping to themselves any fact that they know.
The men who are rather pleased than pained to hear themselves called
by the barbarous term of "scientists" seem to think that it matters
nothing how ill-digested be their book, or how commonplace be their
language. They are accustomed to lecture to students in the laboratory
in their shirt-sleeves with their hands in their pockets; and they believe
that immortality may be achieved if they can pile up enough facts and
manufacture an adequate number of monographs. And they do this, in
the teeth of excellent examples to the contrary. Huxley and Tyndall
have given their brethren in science fine examples of a pure, vigorous,
and well-knit style. Yet, how many of them are still quite content to go
rumbling along with an interminable rigmarole of dry "memoirs." Our
ponderous biographies of third-rate people tend to become mere bags
of letters and waste-paper baskets. And all this with such consummate
models before us, and so very high a standard of general cultivation.
We have had in this age men who write an English as pure and
powerful as any in the whole range of our literature; we have tens of

thousands of men and women who write a perfectly correct and
intelligent prose. And yet out of a million books, we find so very few
which even aim at being works of art in the sense that Tom Jones is a
work of art, and the Decline and Fall is a work of art.
It is, no doubt, this preponderance of the practical, scientific, and social
energies which has checked in our Victorian Age the highest
imaginative and dramatic genius. With all its achievements in lyric and
psychologic poetry, it has hardly attempted to scale the empyrean of
song. In the seventy-six years that have passed since Shelley conceived
his Prometheus, as he sat gazing over the sombre ruins of the
Campagna, no one has ever ventured into that seventh heaven of
invention. Since the School for Scandal (1777) no English drama has
been produced which has anything like the same hold on the stage. For
more than sixty years the English stage has not known one consummate
actor. Though men of real genius have in these sixty years laboured at
the higher drama, they have hardly achieved even such measures of
success as fell to Byron and Shelley with Manfred and the Cenci. With
all its lyric and psychologic power, with all its energy and its learning,
the Victorian Age has not quite equalled the age of Goethe. It is as if its
scientific spirit checked the supreme imagination: as if its social
earnestness produced a distaste for merely dramatic passion.
One of the most striking facts about our modern literature is the
preponderance of the "subjective" over the "objective." The interest in
external events, as the subject of imaginative work, quite pales before
the interest in analysis of mental and moral impulse. Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Jane Austen, have completely dominated our age, and have
displaced the epic and legendary themes of Scott, Byron, Campbell,
and Southey. The Two Voices, In Memoriam, _The Ring and the Book,
Silas Marner, Vanity Fair, Bleak House_, dissect brain and heart, but
do not make their prime motive in any thrilling history. The crisis of
modern romance goes on in the conscience, not in the outside world.
Hence the enormous multiplication of the psychologic novel, a form of
art which the eighteenth century would have viewed with wonder and
perplexity. The curious part of this is the striking abatement of taste for
the historical romance, in spite of the immense extension of historical

study and archaeological revival. We know far more about the past,
both within and without, than did our fathers; and we are always
seeking to realise to ourselves the habits, ideas, aspect, the very clothes
and furniture of ages of old, which we study with sympathetic zeal and
in the minutest detail. Yet the historical romance appears only at
intervals. Harold and Esmond are both more than forty years old,
Romola more than thirty years old. They are none of them quite
unqualified successes; and no later historical romance has approached
these three in power and interest. Why is it, that, in an age
pre-eminently historical,