The Victorian Age in Literature | Page 2

I feel myself wholly incompetent; but as that applies to every
other literary enterprise I ever went in for, the sensation is not wholly
novel: indeed, it is rather reassuring than otherwise to realise that I am
now doing something that nobody could do properly. The chief peril of
the process, however, will be an inevitable tendency to make the
spiritual landscape too large for the figures. I must ask for indulgence if
such criticism traces too far back into politics or ethics the roots of
which great books were the blossoms; makes Utilitarianism more
important than Liberty or talks more of the Oxford Movement than of

The Christian Year. I can only answer in the very temper of the age of
which I write: for I also was born a Victorian; and sympathise not a
little with the serious Victorian spirit. I can only answer, I shall not
make religion more important than it was to Keble, or politics more
sacred than they were to Mill.
CHAPTER I
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE AND ITS ENEMIES
The previous literary life of this country had left vigorous many old
forces in the Victorian time, as in our time. Roman Britain and
Mediæval England are still not only alive but lively; for real
development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life
from them, as from a root. Even when we improve we never progress.
For progress, the metaphor from the road, implies a man leaving his
home behind him: but improvement means a man exalting the towers
or extending the gardens of his home. The ancient English literature
was like all the several literatures of Christendom, alike in its likeness,
alike in its very unlikeness. Like all European cultures, it was European;
like all European cultures, it was something more than European. A
most marked and unmanageable national temperament is plain in
Chaucer and the ballads of Robin Hood; in spite of deep and sometimes
disastrous changes of national policy, that note is still unmistakable in
Shakespeare, in Johnson and his friends, in Cobbett, in Dickens. It is
vain to dream of defining such vivid things; a national soul is as
indefinable as a smell, and as unmistakable. I remember a friend who
tried impatiently to explain the word "mistletoe" to a German, and cried
at last, despairing, "Well, you know holly--mistletoe's the opposite!" I
do not commend this logical method in the comparison of plants or
nations. But if he had said to the Teuton, "Well, you know
Germany--England's the opposite"--the definition, though fallacious,
would not have been wholly false. England, like all Christian countries,
absorbed valuable elements from the forests and the rude romanticism
of the North; but, like all Christian countries, it drank its longest
literary draughts from the classic fountains of the ancients: nor was this
(as is so often loosely thought) a matter of the mere "Renaissance." The

English tongue and talent of speech did not merely flower suddenly
into the gargantuan polysyllables of the great Elizabethans; it had
always been full of the popular Latin of the Middle Ages. But whatever
balance of blood and racial idiom one allows, it is really true that the
only suggestion that gets near the Englishman is to hint how far he is
from the German. The Germans, like the Welsh, can sing perfectly
serious songs perfectly seriously in chorus: can with clear eyes and
clear voices join together in words of innocent and beautiful personal
passion, for a false maiden or a dead child. The nearest one can get to
defining the poetic temper of Englishmen is to say that they couldn't do
this even for beer. They can sing in chorus, and louder than other
Christians: but they must have in their songs something, I know not
what, that is at once shamefaced and rowdy. If the matter be emotional,
it must somehow be also broad, common and comic, as "Wapping Old
Stairs" and "Sally in Our Alley." If it be patriotic, it must somehow be
openly bombastic and, as it were, indefensible, like "Rule Britannia" or
like that superb song (I never knew its name, if it has one) that records
the number of leagues from Ushant to the Scilly Isles. Also there is a
tender love-lyric called "O Tarry Trousers" which is even more English
than the heart of The Midsummer Night's Dream. But our greatest bards
and sages have often shown a tendency to rant it and roar it like true
British sailors; to employ an extravagance that is half conscious and
therefore half humorous. Compare, for example, the rants of
Shakespeare with the rants of Victor Hugo. A piece of Hugo's
eloquence is either a serious triumph or a serious collapse: one feels the
poet is offended at a smile. But Shakespeare