The Victorian Age in Literature | Page 4

and admired English literature, would have cursed freely
over Kubla Khan; and if the Committee of Public Safety had not
already executed Shelley as an aristocrat, they would certainly have
locked him up for a madman. Even Hébert (the one really vile
Revolutionist), had he been reproached by English poets with
worshipping the Goddess of Reason, might legitimately have retorted
that it was rather the Goddess of Unreason that they set up to be
worshipped. Verbally considered, Carlyle's French Revolution was
more revolutionary than the real French Revolution: and if Carrier, in
an exaggerative phrase, empurpled the Loire with carnage, Turner
almost literally set the Thames on fire.
This trend of the English Romantics to carry out the revolutionary idea

not savagely in works, but very wildly indeed in words, had several
results; the most important of which was this. It started English
literature after the Revolution with a sort of bent towards independence
and eccentricity, which in the brighter wits became individuality, and in
the duller ones, Individualism. English Romantics, English Liberals,
were not public men making a republic, but poets, each seeing a vision.
The lonelier version of liberty was a sort of aristocratic anarchism in
Byron and Shelley; but though in Victorian times it faded into much
milder prejudices and much more bourgeois crotchets, England
retained from that twist a certain odd separation and privacy. England
became much more of an island than she had ever been before. There
fell from her about this time, not only the understanding of France or
Germany, but to her own long and yet lingering disaster, the
understanding of Ireland. She had not joined in the attempt to create
European democracy; nor did she, save in the first glow of Waterloo,
join in the counter-attempt to destroy it. The life in her literature was
still, to a large extent, the romantic liberalism of Rousseau, the free and
humane truisms that had refreshed the other nations, the return to
Nature and to natural rights. But that which in Rousseau was a creed,
became in Hazlitt a taste and in Lamb little more than a whim. These
latter and their like form a group at the beginning of the nineteenth
century of those we may call the Eccentrics: they gather round
Coleridge and his decaying dreams or linger in the tracks of Keats and
Shelley and Godwin; Lamb with his bibliomania and creed of pure
caprice, the most unique of all geniuses; Leigh Hunt with his Bohemian
impecuniosity; Landor with his tempestuous temper, throwing plates on
the floor; Hazlitt with his bitterness and his low love affair; even that
healthier and happier Bohemian, Peacock. With these, in one sense at
least, goes De Quincey. He was, unlike most of these embers of the
revolutionary age in letters, a Tory; and was attached to the political
army which is best represented in letters by the virile laughter and
leisure of Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianæ. But he had nothing in common
with that environment. It remained for some time as a Tory tradition,
which balanced the cold and brilliant aristocracy of the Whigs. It lived
on the legend of Trafalgar; the sense that insularity was independence;
the sense that anomalies are as jolly as family jokes; the general sense
that old salts are the salt of the earth. It still lives in some old songs

about Nelson or Waterloo, which are vastly more pompous and vastly
more sincere than the cockney cocksureness of later Jingo lyrics. But it
is hard to connect De Quincey with it; or, indeed, with anything else.
De Quincey would certainly have been a happier man, and almost
certainly a better man, if he had got drunk on toddy with Wilson,
instead of getting calm and clear (as he himself describes) on opium,
and with no company but a book of German metaphysics. But he would
hardly have revealed those wonderful vistas and perspectives of prose,
which permit one to call him the first and most powerful of the
decadents: those sentences that lengthen out like nightmare corridors,
or rise higher and higher like impossible eastern pagodas. He was a
morbid fellow, and far less moral than Burns; for when Burns
confessed excess he did not defend it. But he has cast a gigantic
shadow on our literature, and was as certainly a genius as Poe. Also he
had humour, which Poe had not. And if any one still smarting from the
pinpricks of Wilde or Whistler, wants to convict them of plagiarism in
their "art for art" epigrams--he will find most of what they said said
better in Murder as One of the Fine Arts.
One great man remains of this elder group, who did their last work only
under Victoria; he knew most of the members of it, yet he did not