Studies in Early Victorian Literature | Page 7

and Gibbon, as it was understood by Littré,
Döllinger, and Mommsen, may be said to have disappeared in England.
Cardinal Newman, Mark Pattison, Dr. Pusey, were said to be very
learned, but it was a kind of learning which kept very much to itself.
For good or for evil, our literature is now absorbed in the urgent social
problem, and is become but an instrument in the vast field of
Sociology--the science of Society.
This predominance of Sociology, the restless rapidity of modern life,
the omnipresence of material activity, fully account for the special
character of modern literature. Literature is no longer "bookish"--but
practical, social, propagandist. It is full of life--but it is a dispersive,
analytic, erratic form of vitality. It has a most fastidious taste in
form--but it often flings the critical spirit aside in its passion for doing,
in its ardour to convince and to inspire. It is industrious, full of learning
and research--but it regards its learning as an instrument of influence,
not as an end of thought. It can work up a poem or an essay, as
carefully as Mieris or Breughel polished a cabinet picture--and it can
"tear a passion to tatters," or tumble its note-books into a volume all in
a heap. It has no "standard," no "model," no "best writer"--and yet it
has a curious faculty for reviving every known form and imitating any
style. It is intensely historical, but so accurately historical that it is
afraid to throw the least colour of imagination around its history. It has
consummate poetic feeling, and copious poetic gifts--but it has now no
single poet of the first rank. It has infinite romantic resources, and an
army of skilful novelists--and yet it has no single living writer worthy
to be named beside the great romancers of the nineteenth century.

This rich, many-sided, strenuous literature, which will place the name
of Victoria higher than that of Elizabeth in the history of our language,
would form a splendid subject hereafter for some one of our
descendants who was equal to the task of treating our Victorian
literature as a whole. In the meantime, it may be worth while for the
men and women of to-day, who are full of all the excellent work
around us, to be reminded of the good things produced now nearly
sixty years ago. As one who can remember much that was given to the
world in a former generation, I shall endeavour in these little sketches
to mark some of the characteristics of the best writers in the early
Victorian Age, confining myself for the present to prose literature of
the imaginative kind.
It is now some time since the country of Shakespeare and of Milton has
been without its poet laureate, and to the non-poetical world the
absence of that court functionary is hardly perceptible. Nay, the
question has begun to arise, If there is to be a laureate in poetry, why
not a laureate also in prose romance? And if there were a laureate in
prose romance, whom should we choose?
The same phenomenon meets us in the realm of prose fiction as in
poetry: that we have vast quantities of thoughtful work produced, an
army of cultivated workers, a great demand, an equally great supply, a
very high average of merit--and yet so little of the very first rank. For
the first time in the present century, English literature is without a
single living novelist of world-wide reputation. The nineteenth century
opened with Castle Rackrent and the admirably original tales of Maria
Edgeworth. Jane Austen followed in the same field. And since
Waverley appeared, in 1814, we have had a succession of fine
romances in unbroken line. Fenimore Cooper's work is nearly
contemporary with the best of Scott's. At Sir Walter's death
Bulwer-Lytton was in full career. And Lytton, Disraeli, Hawthorne, the
Brontës, Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope were all at their best nearly
together. During the last twenty years or so of this splendid period they
had been joined by George Eliot; and of the whole band Anthony
Trollope was the survivor. With him our language lost the last of those
companions of the fireside in mansion and cottage whose names are

household words, whose books are in every hand, where the English
tongue is heard.
We need not engage in any critical estimate of these writers: we are but
too well aware of their failures and defects. Lytton indited not a little
bombast, Dickens had his incurable mannerisms, and Thackeray his
conventional cynicisms. There are passages in George Eliot's romances
which read like sticky bits from a lecture on comparative palaeontology;
and Disraeli, who for fifty years threw off most readable tales in the
intervals of politics, seems always to be laughing at the public behind
his mask. Yet the good