Chapter IX: The Victorian Age, 1837-1900 (1)

History of the Period.--In the two periods of English history most remarkable for their accomplishment, the Elizabethan and the Victorian, the throne was occupied by women. Queen Victoria, the granddaughter of George III., ruled from 1837 to the beginning of 1901. Her long reign of sixty-three years may be said to close with the end of the nineteenth century.

For nearly fifty years after the battle of Waterloo (1815), England had no war of magnitude. In 1854 she joined France in a war against Russia to keep her from taking Constantinople. Tennyson's well-known poem, _The Charge of the Light Brigade_, commemorates an incident in this bloody contest, which was successful in preventing Russia from dismembering Turkey.

When the Turks massacred the Christians in Bulgaria in 1876, Russia fought and conquered Turkey. England again intervened, this time after the war, in the Berlin Congress (1878). In return for her diplomatic services and for a guaranty to maintain the integrity of certain Turkish territory, England received from Turkey the island of Cyprus. As a result of this Congress, the principalities of Roumania, Servia, and Bulgaria were formed, but the Turk was allowed to remain in Europe. A later English prime minister, Lord Salisbury (1830-1903), referring to England's espousal of the Turkish cause, said that she had "backed the wrong horse." The bloody war of 1912-1913 between Turkey and the allied armies of Bulgaria, Servia, Montenegro, and Greece was the result of this mistake.

An important part of England's history during this period centers around the expansion, protection, and development of her colonies in Asia, Australia, Africa, and America. England was then constantly agitated by the fear that Russia might grow strong enough to seize India or some other English colonial possessions.

A serious rebellion in India (1857) led England to take from the East India Company the government of that colony. "Empress of India" was later (1876) added to the titles of Queen Victoria. Had India not been an English colony, literature might not have had Kipling's fascinating _Jungle Books_ and Hindu stories. England's protectorate over Egypt (1882) was assumed in order to strengthen her control over the newly completed Suez Canal (1869), which was needed for her communication with India and her Australian colonies.

The Boer war in South Africa (1899-1902)required the largest number of troops that England ever mustered into service in any of her wars. The final outcome of this desperate struggle was the further extension of her South African possessions.

In the nineteenth century, England's most notable political achievement was "her successful rule over colonies, ranging from India, with its 280,000,000 subjects, to Fanning Island with its population of thirty." Her tactful guidance was for the must part directed toward enabling them to develop and to govern themselves. She had learned a valuable lesson from the American revolution.

Ireland, however, failed to secure her share of the benefits that usually resulted from English rule. She was neither regarded as a colony, like Australia, nor as an integral part of England. For the greater part of the century her condition was deplorable. The great prime minister, William E. Gladstone (1809-1898), tried to secure needed home rule for her, but did not succeed. Toward the end of the century, more liberal laws regarding the tenure of the land and more self-government afforded some relief from unjust conditions.

During the Victorian age the government of England became more democratic. Two reform bills (1867 and 1884) gave almost unrestricted suffrage to men. The extension of the franchise and the granting of local self-government to her counties (1888) made England one of the most democratic of all nations. Her monarch has less power than the president of the United States.

The Victorian age saw the rise of trades unions and the passing of many laws to improve the condition of the working classes. As the tariff protecting the home grower of wheat had raised the price of bread and caused much suffering to the poor, England not only repealed this duty (1846) but also became practically a free-trade country. The age won laurels in providing more educational facilities for all, in abridging class privileges, and in showing increasing recognition of human rights, without a bloody revolution such as took place in France. A rough indication of the amount of social and moral progress is the decrease in the number of convicts in England, from about 50,000 at the accession of Victoria to less than 6000 at her death.

An Age of Science and Invention.--In the extent and the variety of inventions, in their rapid improvement and utilization for human needs, and in general scientific progress, the sixty-three years of the Victorian age surpassed all the rest of historic time.

When Victoria ascended the throne, the stage coach was the common means of traveling; only two short pieces of railroad had been constructed; the electric telegraph had not been developed; few steamships had crossed the Atlantic. The modern use of the telephone would then have seemed as improbable as the wildest Arabian Nights' tale. Before her reign ended, the railroad, the telegraph, the steamship, and the telephone had wrought an almost magical change in travel and in communication.

The Victorian age introduced anaesthetics and antiseptic surgery, developed photography, the sciences of chemistry and physics, of biology and zoölogy, of botany and geology. The enthusiastic scientific worker appeared in every field, endeavoring to understand the laws of nature and to apply them in the service of man. Science also turned its attention to human progress and welfare. The new science of sociology had earnest students.

The Influence of Science on Literature.--The Victorian age was the first to set forth clearly the evolution hypothesis, which teaches the orderly development from simple to complex forms. While the idea of evolution had suggested itself to many naturalists, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was the first to gain a wide hearing for the theory. After years of careful study of nature, he published in 1859 _The Origin of Species by Natural Selection_, an epoch-making work, which had a far-reaching effect on the thought of the age.

The influence of his doctrine of evolution is especially apparent in Tennyson's poetry, in George Eliot's fiction, in religious thought, and in the change in viewing social problems. In his _Synthetic Philosophy_, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), philosopher and metaphysician, applied the doctrine of evolution not only to plants and animals but also to society, morality, and religion.

Two eminent scientists, John Tyndall (1820-1893) and Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), did much to popularize science and to cause the age to seek a broader education. Tyndall's _Fragments of Science_ (1871) contains a fine lecture on the _Scientific Use of the Imagination_, in which he becomes almost poetic in his imaginative conception of evolution:--

"Not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular
or animal life, not alone the nobler
forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite
and wonderful mechanism of the human
body, but the human mind itself,--emotion,
intellect, will, and all their phenomena,--were
once latent in a fiery cloud... All our philosophy, all our poetry,
all our science, and all our art,--Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and
Raphael,--are potential in the fires of the sun."

Unlike Keats in his _Lamia_, Tyndall is firm in his belief that science will not clip the wings of imagination. In the same lecture he says:--

"How are we to lay hold of the physical basis of light, since, like
that of life itself, it lies entirely without the domain of the
senses? We are gifted with the power of imagination and by this
power we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of the
senses... Bounded and conditioned by coöperant reason, imagination
becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer.
Newton's passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was at the
outset a leap of the imagination."

Huxley was even a more brilliant interpreter of science to popular audiences. His so-called _Lay Sermons_ (1870) are invigorating presentations of scientific and educational subjects. He awakened many to a sense of the importance of "knowing the laws of the physical world" and "the relations of cause and effect therein." Nowhere is he more impressive than where he forces us to admit that we must all play the chess game of life against an opponent that never makes an error and never fails to count our mistakes against us.

"The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the
universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature.
The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his
play is always fair, just, and patient. But we also know, to our
cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest
allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest
stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which
the strong man shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is
checkmated--without haste, but without remorse.
* * * * *
"Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty
game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect
in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things
and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the
affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move
in harmony with those laws."[1]

We find the influence of science manifest in much of the general literature of the age, as well as in the special writings of the scientists. Science introduced to literature a new interest in humanity and impressed on writers what is known as the "growth idea." Preceding literature, with the conspicuous exception of Shakespeare's work, had for the most part presented individuals whose character was already fixed. This age loved to show the growth of souls. George Eliot's novels are frequently Darwinian demonstrations of the various steps in the moral growth or the perversion of the individual. In _Rabbi Ben Ezra_, Browning thus expresses this new idea of the working of the Divine Power:--

"He fixed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance."

The Trend of Prose; Minor Prose Writers.--The prose of this age is remarkable for amount and variety. In addition to the work of the scientists, there are the essays and histories of Macaulay and Carlyle, the essays and varied prose of Newman, the art and social philosophy of Ruskin, the critical essays of Matthew Arnold and Swinburne.

One essayist, Walter Pater (1839-1894), an Oxford graduate and teacher, who kept himself aloof from contemporary thought, produced almost a new type of serious prose, distinguished for color, ornamentation, melody, and poetic thought. Even such prosaic objects as wood and brick were to his retrospective gaze "half mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows where." His object was to charm his reader, to haunt him with vague suggestions rather than to make a logical appeal to him, or to add to his world of vivid fact, after the manner of Macaulay. A quotation from Pater's most brilliant essay, _Leonardo Da Vinci_, in the volume, _The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry_[2] (1873) will show some of the characteristics of his prose. This description of Da Vinci's masterpiece, the portrait of Mona Lisa, has added to the world-wide fame of that picture--

"Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come,'
and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from
within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange
thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a
moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women
of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into
which the soul with its maladies has passed!... She is older than
the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead
many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a
diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and
trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda,
was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of
Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and
flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the
changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands."

The period from 1780 to 1837 had only two great writers of fiction,--Scott and Jane Austen; but the Victorian age saw the novel gain the ascendancy that the drama enjoyed in Elizabethan times.

In addition to the chief novelists,--Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and Kipling,--there were many other writers who produced one or more excellent works of fiction. In this class are the Brontë sisters, especially Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) and Emily Brontë (1818-1848), the daughters of a clergyman, who lived in Haworth, Yorkshire. They had genius, but they were hampered by poverty, lack of sympathy, and peculiar environment. Charlotte Brontë's _Jane Eyre_ (1847) is a thrilling story, which centers around the experiences of one of the great nineteenth-century heroines of fiction. This virile novel, an unusual compound of sensational romance and of intense realism, lives because the highly gifted author made it pulsate with her own life. Unlike _Jane Eyre_, Emily Brontë's powerful novel, _Wuthering Heights_ (1847) is not pleasant reading. This romantic novel is really her imaginative interpretation of the Yorkshire life that she knew. If she had humanized _Wuthering Heights_, it could have been classed among the greatest novels of the Victorian age. She might have learned this art, had she not died at the age of thirty. "Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone," wrote Charlotte Brontë of her sister Emily.

Among the other authors who deserve mention for one or more works of fiction are: Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873), a versatile writer whose best-known work is _The Last Days of Pompeii_; Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), whose _Cranford_ (1853) is an inimitable picture of mid-nineteenth century life in a small Cheshire village; Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), whose _Barchester Towers_ is a realistic study of life in a cathedral town; Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), who stirs the blood in _Westward Ho!_ (1855), a tale of Elizabethan seamen; Charles Reade (1814-1884), author of _The Cloister and the Hearth_ (1861), a careful and fascinating study of fifteenth-century life; R.D. Blackmore (1825-1900), whose _Lorna Doone_ (1869) is a thrilling North Devonshire story of life and love in the latter part of the seventeenth century; J.M. Barrie (1860- ), whose _The Little Minister_ (1891) is a richly human, sympathetic, and humorous story, the scene of which is laid in Kirriemuir, a town about sixty miles north of Edinburgh. His _Sentimental Tommy_ (1896), although not so widely popular, is an unusually original, semi-autobiographical story of imaginative boyhood. This entire chapter could be filled with merely the titles of Victorian novels, many of which possess some distinctive merit.

The changed character of the reading public furnished one reason for the unprecedented growth of fiction. The spread of education through public schools, newspapers, cheap magazines, and books caused a widespread habit of reading, which before this time was not common among the large numbers of the uneducated and the poor. The masses, however, did not care for uninteresting or abstruse works. The majority of books drawn from the circulating libraries were novels.

The scientific spirit of the age impelled the greatest novelists to try to paint actual life as it impressed them. Dickens chose the lower classes in London; Thackeray, the clubs and fashionable world; George Eliot, the country life near her birthplace in Warwickshire; Hardy, the people of his Wessex; Meredith, the cosmopolitan life of egotistical man; Kipling, the life of India both in jungle and camp, as well as the life of the great outer world. These writers of fiction all sought a realistic background, although some of them did not hesitate to use romantic touches to heighten the general effect. Stevenson was the chief writer of romances.

The Trend of Poetry: Minor Poets.--The Victorian age was dominated by two great poets,--Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. Browning showed the influence of science in his tendency to analyze human motives and actions. In one line of _Fra Lippo Lippi_, he voices the new poetic attitude toward the world:--

"To find its meaning is my meat and drink."

Browning advanced into new fields, while Tennyson was more content to make a beautiful poetic translation of much of the thought of the age. In his youth he wrote:--

"Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time."

From merely reading Tennyson's verse, one could gauge quite accurately the trend of Victorian scientific thought.

The poetry of both Browning and Tennyson is so resonant with faith that they have been called great religious teachers. Rudyard Kipling, the poet of imperialistic England, of her "far-flung battle line," attributes her "dominion over palm and pine" to faith in the "Lord God of Hosts."

In the minor poets, there is often a different strain. Arnold is beset with doubt, and hears no "clear call," such as Tennyson voices in _Crossing the Bar_. Swinburne, seeing the pessimistic side of the shield of evolution, exclaims:--

"Thou hast fed one rose with dust of many men."

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), Oxford tutor, traveler, and educational examiner, was a poet who struggled with the doubt of the age. He loved--

"To finger idly some old Gordian knot,
Unskilled to sunder, and too weak to cleave,
And with much toil attain to half-believe."

His verse would be forgotten if it expressed only such an uncertain note; but his greatest poem thus records his belief in the value of life's struggle and gives a hint of final victory:--

"Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labor and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

"If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It maybe, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field."

Although he paid too little attention to the form of his verse, some of his poems have the vitality of an earnest, thoughtful sincerity.

Two poets, W. E. Henley (1849-1903) and Robert Bridges (1844- ), although they do not possess Robert Browning's genius, yet have much of his capacity to inspire others with joy in "the mere living." Henley, a cripple and a great sufferer, was a poet, critic, and London editor. His message is "the joy of life ":--

"...the blackbird sings but a box-wood flute,
But I lose him best of all
For his song is all of the joy of life."

His verse, which is elemental, full of enthusiasm and beauty, often reminds us of the work of the thirteenth-century lyrists.

Robert Bridges, an Oxford graduate, physician, critic, and poet, also had for his creed: "Life and joy are one." His universe, like Shelley's, is an incarnation of the spirit of love:--

"Love can tell, and love alone,
Whence the million stars were strewn,
Why each atom knows its own,
How, in spite of woe and death,
Gay is life, and sweet is breath."

He wishes for no happier day than the present one. Bridges has been called a classical poet because he often selects Greek and Roman subjects for his verse, and because he writes with a formality, purity, and precision of style. He is, however, most delightful in such volumes as _Shorter Poems_ and _New Poems_.[3] wherein he describes in a simple, artless manner English rural scenes and fireside joys. In 1913 he was appointed poet laureate, to succeed Alfred Austin.

John Davidson (1857-1909), a Scotch poet, who came to London and wrestled with poverty, produced much uneven work. In his best verse, there is often a pleasing combination of poetic beauty and vigorous movement. Lines like these from his _Ballad of a Nun_ have been much admired:--

"On many a mountain's happy head
Dawn lightly laid her rosy hand.
The adventurous son took heaven by storm,
Clouds scattered largesses of rain."

Davidson later became an offensively shrill preacher of materialism and lost his early charm. Some of the best of his poetry may be found in _Fleet Street Ecologues_.

Francis Thompson (1860-1907), a Catholic poet, who has been called a nineteenth-century Crashaw, passed much of his short life of suffering in London, where he was once reduced to selling matches on a street corner. His greatest poem, _The Hound of Heaven_ (1893), is an impassioned lyrical rendering of the passage in the _Psalms_ beginning: "Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?" While fleeing down "the long savannahs of the blue," the poet hears a Voice say:--

"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."

William Watson (1858- ), a London poet, looked to Milton, Wordsworth, and Arnold as his masters. Some of Watson's best verse, such as _Wordsworth's Grave_, is written in praise of dead poets. His early volume _Epigrams_ (1884), containing one hundred poems of four lines each, shows his power of conveying poetic thought in brief space. One of these poems is called _Shelley and Harriet Westbrook_:--

"A star looked down from heaven and loved a flower,
Grown in earth's garden--loved it for an hour:
Let eyes that trace his orbit in the spheres
Refuse not, to a ruin'd rosebud, tears."[4]

Many expected to see Watson appointed poet-laureate to succeed Tennyson. Possibly mental trouble, which had temporarily affected him, influenced the choice; for Alfred Austin (1835-1913) received the laureateship in 1896. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, Watson disliked those whom he called a "phrase-tormenting fantastic chorus of poets." His best verse shows depth of poetic thought, directness of expression, and a strong sense of moral values.

The Victorian age has provided poetry to suit almost all tastes. In striking contrast with those who wrestled with the eternal verities are such poets and essayists as Austin Dobson (1840- ), long a clerk of the London Board of Trade, and Arthur Symons (1865- ), a poet and discriminating prose critic. Austin Dobson, who is fond of eighteenth-century subjects, is at his best in graceful society verse. His poems show the touch of a highly skilled metrical artist who has been a careful student of French poetry. His ease of expression, freshness, and humor charm readers of his verse without making serious demands on their attention. His best poems are found in _Vignettes in Rhyme_ (1873), _At the Sign of the Lyre_ (1885), and _Collected Poems_ (1913).

In choice of subject matter, Arthur Symons sometimes suggests the Cavalier poets. He has often squandered his powers in acting on his theory that it is one of the provinces of verse to record any momentary mood, irrespective of its value. His deftness of touch and acute poetic sensibility are evident in such short poems as _Rain on the Down, Credo, A Roundel of Rest_ and _The Last Memory_.[5]

The Pre-Raphaelite Movement.--In 1848 three artists, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), William Holman-Hunt (1827-1910), and John Everett Millais (1829-1896), formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Others soon joined the movement which was primarily artistic, not literary. Painting had become imitative. The uppermost question in the artist's mind was, "How would Raphael or some other authority have painted this picture?" The new school determined to paint things from a direct study of nature, without a thought of the way in which any one else would have painted them. They decided to assume the same independence as the Pre-Raphaelite artists, who expressed their individuality in their own way. Keats was the favorite author of the new school. The artists painted subjects suggested by his poems, and Rossetti thought him "the one true heir of Shakespeare."

When the Pre-Raphaelite paintings were violently attacked, Ruskin examined them and decided that they conformed to the principles which he had already laid down in the first two volumes of _Modern Painters_ (1843, 1846), so he wrote _Pre-Raphaelitism_ (1851) as the champion of the new school. It has been humorously said that some of the painters of this school, before beginning a new picture, took an oath "to paint the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

The new movement in poetry followed this revolt in art. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the head of the literary Pre-Raphaelites, though born in London, was of Italian parentage in which there was a strain of English blood. His poem, _The Blessed Damozel_ (first published in 1850), has had the greatest influence of any Pre-Raphaelite literary production. This poem was suggested by _The Raven_ (1845), the work of the American, Edgar Allan Poe. Rossetti said:--

"I saw that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the
grief of the lover an earth, and I determined to reverse the
conditions, and give utterance to the yearnings of the loved one in
heaven."

His Blessed Damozel, wearing a white rose, "Mary's gift," leaning out from the gold bar of heaven, watching with sad eyes, "deeper than the depth of waters stilled at even," for the coming of her lover, has left a lasting impression on many readers. Simplicity, beauty, and pathos are the chief characteristics of this poem, which, like Bryant's _Thanatopsis_, was written by a youth of eighteen.

Painting was the chief work of Rossetti's life, but he wrote many other poems. Some of the most characteristic of these are the two semi-ballads, _Sister Helen_ and _The King's Tragedy, Rose Mary, Love's Nocturn_, and _Sonnets_.

One of the earliest of these Sonnets, _Mary's Girlhood_, describes the child as:--

"An angel-watered lily, that near God
Grows and is quiet."

His sister, Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), the author of much religious verse, shows the unaffected naturalness of the new movement. This stanza from her _Amor Mundi_ (_Love of the World_) is characteristic:--

"So they two went together in glowing August weather,
The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right;
And dear she was to doat on, her swift feet seemed to float on
The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight."

William Morris (1834-1896), Oxford graduate, decorator, manufacturer, printer, and poet, was born near London. He was fascinated by _The Blessed Damozel_, and his first and most poetical volume, _The Defence of Guinevere and Other Poems_ (1858), shows Rossetti's influence. The simplicity insisted on by the new school is evident in such lines as these from _Two Red Roses across the Moon_:--

"There was a lady lived in a hall,
Large in the eyes and slim and tall;
And ever she sung from noon to noon,
Two red roses across the moon."

Morris later wrote a long series of narrative poems, called _The Earthly Paradise_ (1868-1870) and an epic, _Sigurd the Volsung_ (1876). He turned from Pre-Raphaelitism to become an earnest social reformer.

In literature, the Pre-Raphaelite movement disdained the old conventions and started a miniature romantic revival, which emphasized individuality, direct expression, and the use of simple words. Its influence soon became merged in that of the earlier and far greater romantic school.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, 1800-1859

Life.--A prominent figure in the social and political life of England during the first part of the century was Thomas Babington Macaulay, a man of brilliant intellectual powers, strict integrity of character, and enormous capacity for work. He loved England and gloried in her liberties and her commercial prosperity. He served her for many years in the House of Commons, and he bent his whole energy and splendid forensic talent in favor of the Reform Bill of 1832, which secured greater political liberty for England.

He was not a theorizer, but a practical man of affairs. Notwithstanding the fact that his political opinions were ready made for him by the Whig party, his career in the House was never "inconsistent with rectitude of intention and independence of spirit." He voted conscientiously for measures, although he personally sacrificed hundreds of pounds by so doing.

He was a remarkable talker. A single speech of his has been known to change an entire vote in Parliament. Unlike Coleridge, he did not indulge in monologue, but showed to finest advantage in debate. His power of memory was wonderful. He often startled an opponent by quoting from a given chapter and page of a book. He repeated long passages from _Paradise Lost_; and it is said he could have restored it complete, had it all been lost.

His disposition was sweet and his life altogether fortunate. His biographer says of him: "Descended from Scotch Presbyterians --ministers many of them--on his father's side, and from a Quaker family on his mother's, he probably united as many guaranties of 'good birth,' in the moral sense of the word, as could be found in these islands at the beginning of the century."

He was born at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, in 1800. He was prepared for college at good private schools, and sent to Cambridge when he was eighteen. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1825; but, in the following year, he determined to adopt literature as a profession, owing to the welcome given to his _Essay on Milton_. As he had written epics, histories, and metrical romances prior to the age of ten, his choice of a profession was neither hasty nor unexpected.

He continued from this time to write for the _Edinburgh Review_, but literature was not the only field of his activity. He had a seat in Parliament, and he held several positions under the Government. He was never unemployed. Many of his _Essays_ were written before breakfast; while the other members of the household were asleep.

He was a voracious reader. If he walked in the country or in London, he always carried a book to read. He spent some years in the government's service in India. On the long voyage over, he read incessantly, and on the return trip he studied the German language.

He was beyond the age of forty when he found the leisure to begin his _History of England_. He worked uninterruptedly, but broke down early, dying at the age of fifty-nine.

With his large, fine physique, his sturdy common sense, his interest in practical matters, and his satisfaction in the physical improvements of the people, Macaulay was a fine specimen of the English gentleman.

Essays and Poetry.--Like De Quincey, Macaulay was a frequent contributor to periodicals. He wrote graphic essays on men of action and historical periods. The essays most worthy of mention in this class are _Sir William Temple, Lord Clive, Warren Hastings_, and _William Pitt, Earl of Chatham_. Some of his essays on English writers and literary subjects are still classic. Among these are _Milton, Dryden, Addison, Southey's Edition of Pilgrim's Progress, Croker's Edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson_, and the biographical essays on _Bunyan, Goldsmith_, and _Johnson_, contributed to the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. Although they may lack deep spiritual insight into the fundamental principles of life and literary criticism, these essays are still deservedly read by most students of English history and literature.

Gosse says: "The most restive of juvenile minds, if induced to enter one of Macaulay's essays, is almost certain to reappear at the other end of it gratified, and, to an appreciable extent, cultivated." These _Essays_ have developed a taste for general reading in many who could not have been induced to begin with anything dry or hard. Many who have read Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ during the past fifty years say that Macaulay first turned their attention to that fascinating work. In the following quotation from an essay on that great biography, we may note his love for interesting concrete statements, presented in a vigorous and clear style:--

"Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fullness of his fame and in the
enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any
other man in history. Everything about him, his chat, his wig, his
figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling
walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked
his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish
sauce and veal pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea,
his trick of touching the posts as he walked ... all are as familiar
to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from
childhood."

Macaulay wrote some stirring ballad poetry, known as _Lays of Ancient Rome_, which gives a good picture of the proud Roman Republic in its valorous days. These ballads have something of Scott's healthy, manly ring. They contain rhetorical and martial stanzas, which are the delight of many boys; but they lack the spirituality and beauty that are necessary for great poetry.

History of England.--Macaulay had for some time wondered why some one should not do for real history what Scott had done for imaginary history. Macaulay accordingly proposed to himself the task of writing a history that should be more accurate than Hume's and possess something of the interest of Scott's historical romances. In 1848 appeared the first two volumes of _The History of England from the Accession of James II_. Macaulay had the satisfaction of seeing his work, in sales and popular appreciation, surpass the novels. He intended to trace the development of English liberty from James II. to the death of George III.; but his minute method of treatment allowed him to unfold only sixteen years (from 1685 to 1701) of that period, so important in the constitutional and religious history of England.

Macaulay's pages are not a graveyard for the dry bones of history. The human beings that figure in his chapters have been restored to life by his touch. We see Charles II. "before the dew was off in St. James's Park striding among the trees, playing with his spaniels, and flinging corn to his ducks." We gaze for a moment with the English courtiers at William III.:--

"They observed that the king spoke in a somewhat imperious tone,
even to the wife to whom he owed so much, and whom he sincerely
loved and esteemed. They were amused and shocked to see him,
when the Princess Anne dined with him, and when the first green peas
of the year were put on the table, devour the whole dish without
offering a spoonful to her Royal Highness, and they pronounced that
this great soldier and politician was no better than a low Dutch
bear."[6]

Parts of the _History_ are masterpieces of the narrator's art. A trained novelist, unhampered by historical facts, could scarcely have surpassed the last part of Macaulay's eighth chapter in relating the trial of the seven Bishops. Our blood tingles to the tips of our fingers as we read in the fifth chapter the story of Monmouth's rebellion and of the Bloody Assizes of Judge Jeffreys.

Macaulay shirked no labor in preparing himself to write the _History_. He read thousands of pages of authorities and he personally visited the great battlefields in order to give accurate descriptions. Notwithstanding such preparation, the value of his _History_ is impaired, not only because he sometimes displays partisanship, but also because he fails to appreciate the significance of underlying social movements. He does not adopt the modern idea that history is a record of social growth, moral as well as physical. While a graphic picture of the exterior aspects of society is presented, we are given no profound insight into the interior movements of a great constitutional epoch. We may say of both Gibbon and Macaulay that they are too often mere surveyors, rather than geologists, of the historic field.[7] The popularity of the _History_ is not injured by this method.

Macaulay's grasp of fact never weakens, his love of manly courage never relaxes, his joy in bygone time never fails, his zeal for the free institutions of England never falters, and his style is never dull.

General Characteristics.--The chief quality of Macaulay's style is its clearness. Contemporaries said that the printers' readers never had to read his sentences a second time to understand them. This clearness is attained, first, by the structure of his sentences. He avoids entangling clauses, obscure references in his pronouns, and long sentences whenever they are in danger of becoming involved and causing the reader to lose his way. In the second place, if the idea is a difficult one or not likely to be apprehended at its full worth, Macaulay repeats his meaning from a different point of view and throws additional light on the subject by varied illustrations.

In the third place, his works abound in concrete ideas, which are more readily grasped than abstract ones. He is not content to write: "The smallest actual good is better than the most magnificent promise of impossibilities:" but he gives the concrete equivalent: "An acre in Middlesex is worth a principality in Utopia."

It is possible for style to be both clear and lifeless, but his style is as energetic as it is clear. In narration he takes high rank. His erudition, displayed in the vast stores of fact that his memory retained for effective service in every direction, is worthy of special mention.

While his excellences may serve as a model, he has faults that admirers would do well to avoid. His fondness for contrast often leads him to make one picture too bright and the other too dark. His love of antithesis has the merit of arousing attention in his readers and of crystallizing some thoughts into enduring epigrammatic form; but he is often led to sacrifice exact truth in order to obtain fine contrasts, as in the following:--

"The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the
bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators."

Macaulay is more the apostle of the material than of the spiritual. He lacked sympathy with theories and aspirations that could not accomplish immediate practical results. While his vigorous, easily-read pages exert a healthy fascination, they are not illumined with the spiritual glow that sheds luster on the pages of the great Victorian moral teachers, like Carlyle and Ruskin. He has, however, had more influence on the prose style of the last half of the nineteenth century than any other writer. Many continue to find in him their most effective teacher of a clear, energetic form of expression.

JOHN HENRY, CARDINAL NEWMAN, 1801-1890

Life.--Newman, who was born in London the year after Macaulay, represents a different aspect of English thought. Macaulay was thrilled in contemplating the great material growth and energy of the nation. Newman's interest was centered in the development of the spiritual life.

This son of a practical London banker was writing verses at nine, a mock drama at twelve, and at fourteen, "he broke out into periodicals, _The Spy_ and _Anti-Spy_, intended to answer one another." Of his tendency toward mysticism in youth, he wrote:--

"I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true; my imagination ran on
unknown influences, on magical powers and influences. I thought life
might be a dream, or I an angel, and all this world a deception, my
fellow angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and
deceiving me with the semblance of a material world."

In his youth he imitated the style of Addison, Johnson, and Gibbon. Few boys of his generation had as much practice in writing English prose. At the age of fifteen years and ten months he entered Trinity College, Oxford, from which he was graduated at nineteen. Two years later he won an Oxford fellowship, and in 1824 he became a clergyman of the Church of England.

The rest of his life belongs mainly to theological history. He became one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement (1833-1841) toward stricter High-Church principles, as opposed to liberalism, and in 1845 he joined the Catholic Church. He was rector of the new Catholic University at Dublin from 1854 to 1858. In 1879 he was made a cardinal. Most of his later life was spent at Edgbaston (near Birmingham) at the Oratory of St. Philip Neri.

Works and General Characteristics.--Newman was a voluminous writer. An edition of his works in thirty-six volumes was issued during his lifetime. Most of these properly belong to the history of theological thought. His _Apologia pro Vita Sua_, which he wrote in reply to an attack by Charles Kingsley, an Episcopal clergyman, is really, as its sub-title indicates, _A History of His Religious Opinions_. This intimate, sympathetic account of his religious experiences won him many friends. He wrote two novels: _Loss and Gain_ (1848), which gives an excellent picture of Oxford society during the last days of the Oxford Movement, and _Callista_ (1852), a vivid story of an early Christian martyr in Africa. His best-known hymn, _Lead kindly Light_, remains a favorite with all Christian denominations. _The Dream of Gerontius_ (1865) is a poem that has been called "the happiest effort to represent the unseen world that has been made since the time of Dante."

Those who are not interested in Newman's Episcopal or Catholic sermons or in his great theological treatises will find some of his best prose in the work known as _The Idea of a University_. This volume, containing 521 pages, is composed of discussions, lectures, and essays, prepared while he was rector of the University at Dublin.

Newman's prose is worthy of close study for the following reasons:--

(1) His style is a clear, transparent medium for the presentation of thought. He molded his sentences with the care of an artist. He said:--

"I have been obliged to take great pains with everything I have ever
written, and I often write chapters over and over again, besides
innumerable corrections and interlinear additions."

His definition of style is "a thinking out into language," not an ornamental "addition from without." He employs his characteristic irony in ridiculing those who think that "_one_ man could do the thought and _another_ the style":--

"We read in Persian travels of the way in which young gentlemen
go to work in the East, when they would engage in correspondence
with those who inspire them with hope or fear. They cannot write one
sentence themselves; so they betake themselves to the professional
letter writer... The man of thought comes to the man of words; and
the man of words duly instructed in the thought, dips the pen of
desire into the ink of devotedness, and proceeds to spread it over
the page of desolation. Then the nightingale of affection is heard
to warble to the rose of loveliness, while the breeze of anxiety
plays around the brow of expectation. This is what the Easterns are
said to consider fine writing;
and it seems pretty much the idea of the school of critics to whom I
have been referring."[8]

It was a pleasure to him to "think out" expressions like the following:--

"Ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt."

"Calculation never made a hero."

"Here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have
changed often."

(2) Like Macaulay, Newman excelled in the use of the concrete. In his _Historical Sketches_, he imagines the agent of a London company sent to inspect Attica:--

"He would report that the climate was mild; the hills were
limestone; there was plenty of good marble; more pasture land than
at first survey might have been expected, sufficient certainly for
sheep and goats; fisheries productive; silver mines once, but long
since worked out; figs fair; oil first rate; olives in profusion...
He would not tell how that same delicate and brilliant atmosphere
freshened up the pale olive till the olive forgot its monotony, and
its cheek glowed like the arbutus or the beech of the Umbrian
hills."

A general statement about superseding "the operation of the laws of the universe in a multitude of ways" does not satisfy him. He specifies in those ways when he records his belief that saints have "raised the dead to life, crossed the sea without vessels, multiplied grain and bread, cured incurable diseases."

(3) He modestly called himself a rhetorician, but he possessed also the qualities of an acute thinker. He displayed unusual sagacity in detecting the value of different arguments in persuasion. He could arrange in proper proportion the most complex tangle of facts, so as to make one clear impression. Such power made him one of the great Victorian masters of argumentative prose.

THOMAS CARLYLE, 1795-1881

Life.--Thomas Carlyle, who became one of the great tonic forces of the nineteenth century, was also most interested in spiritual growth. He specially emphasized the gospel of work as the only agency that could develop the atmosphere necessary for such growth, and, though deeply religious, he cared little for any special faith or creed.

The son of a Scotch stone mason, Thomas Carlyle was born in 1795 at Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire. At the age of fourteen, the boy was ready for the University of Edinburgh, and he walked the eighty miles between it and his home. After he was graduated, he felt that he could not enter the ministry, as his parents wished. He therefore taught while he was considering what vocation to follow.

In 1821 he met Jane Welsh, a brilliant and beautiful girl, descended on her father's side from John Knox and on her mother's from William Wallace. With the spirit of Wallace, she climbed in her girlhood up to places that a boy would have considered perilous. When she was forbidden to take up such a masculine study as Latin, she promptly learned to decline a Latin noun. Carlyle had much trouble in winning her; but she finally consented to be his wife, and they were married in 1826. In 1828 they went to live for six lonely years on her farm at Craigenputtock, sixteen miles north of Dumfries, where it was so quiet that Mrs. Carlyle said she could hear the sheep nibbling the grass a quarter of a mile away. Ralph Waldo Emerson visited them here and formed a lifelong friendship with Carlyle. It was here that Carlyle fought the intense spiritual battle of his early life, here that he wrote his first great work, _Sartor Resartus_, which his wife pronounced "a work of genius, dear."

It would be difficult to overestimate the beneficent influence which Mrs. Carlyle exerted over her husband in those trying days of poverty and spiritual stress. When her private correspondence was inadvisedly published after his death, she unwittingly became her husband's Boswell. For many years after the appearance of her letters, his personality and treatment of her were more discussed than his writings. Her references to marital unhappiness were for awhile given undue prominence; but with the passing of time there came a recognition of the fact that she was almost as brilliant a writer as her husband, that, like him, she was frequently ill, and that in expressing things in a striking way, she sometimes exercised his prerogative of exaggeration. "Carlyle has to take a journey always after writing a book," she declared, "and then gets so weary with knocking about that he has to write another book to recover from it." She once said that living with him was as bad as keeping a lunatic asylum.

Unfortunately, his early privations had caused him to have chronic indigestion. He thought that the worst punishment he could suggest for Satan would be to compel him to "try to digest for all eternity with my stomach." This disorder rendered Carlyle peculiarly irascible and explosive. His wife's quick temper sometimes took fire at his querulousness; but her many actions, which spoke much louder than her words, showed how deeply she loved him and how proud she was of his genius. After their removal to London, she would quietly buy the neighbors' crowing roosters, which kept him awake, and she prepared food that would best suit his disordered digestion. She complained of his seeming lack of appreciation. "You don't want to be praised for doing your duty," he said. "I did, though," she wrote.

Carlyle's lack of restraint was most evident in little things. A German who came from Weimar to see him was unfortunately admitted during a period of stress in writing. A minute later the German was seen rapidly descending the stairs and leaving the house. Carlyle immediately hurried to the room where his wife was receiving a visitor, and tragically asked what he had done to cause the Almighty to send a German all the way from Weimar to wrench off the handles of his cupboard doors. Carlyle did not then appear to realize that the frightened German had mistaken the locked cupboard doors for the exit from the room. On the other hand, when the great political economist, John Stuart Mill, was responsible for the loss of the borrowed manuscript of the first volume of _The French Revolution_, Carlyle said to his wife: "Well, Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we must endeavor to hide from him how very serious the business is to us." To rewrite this volume cost Carlyle a year's exhausting labor.

In 1834 Carlyle went to London, where he lived for the rest of his life in Cheyne Row, Chelsea. The publication of _The French Revolution_ in 1837 made him famous. Other works of his soon appeared, to add to his fame. His essays, collected and published in 1839 under the title, _Critical and Miscellaneous Essays_, contained his sympathetic _Essay on Burns_, which no subsequent writer has surpassed. _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations_ (1845) permanently raised England's estimation of that warrior statesman.

Carlyle's writings, his lectures on such subjects as _Heroes and Hero Worship_ (1841), and his oracular criticism on government and life made him as conspicuous a figure as Dr. Samuel Johnson had been in the previous century. Carlyle's last great work, _History of Friedrich II_., was fortunately finished in 1865, the year before his great misfortune.

In the latter part of 1865 the students of the University of Edinburgh elected Carlyle Lord Rector of that institution because they considered him the man most worthy to receive such high honor. In the spring of 1866, he went to Edinburgh to deliver his inaugural address. Before he returned, he received a telegram stating that his wife had died of heart failure while she was taking a drive in London. The blow was a crushing one. The epitaph that he placed on her monument shows his final realization of her worth and of his irreparable loss. He said truly that the light of his life had gone out.

During his remaining years, he produced little of value except his _Reminiscences_, a considerable part of which had been written long before. Honors, however, came to him until the last. The Prussian Order of Merit was conferred on him in 1874. The English government offered him the Grand Cross of Bath and a pension, both of which he declined. On his eightieth birthday, more than a hundred of the most distinguished men of the English-speaking race joined in giving him a gold medallion portrait. When he died in 1881, an offer of interment in Westminster Abbey was declined and he was laid beside his parents in the graveyard at Ecclefechan.

Sartor Resartus.--Like Coleridge, Carlyle was a student of German philosophy and literature. His earliest work was _The Life of Friedrich Schiller_ (1823-1825), which won for him the appreciation and friendship of the German poet, Goethe.

Carlyle's first great original work, the one in which he best delivers his message to humanity, is _Sartor Resartus_ (_The Tailor Patched_). This first appeared serially in _Fraser's Magazine_ in 1833-1834. He feigned that he was merely editing a treatise on _The Philosophy of Clothes_, the work of a German professor, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. This professor is really Carlyle himself; but the disguise gave him an excuse for writing in a strange style and for beginning many of his nouns with capitals, after the German fashion.

When _Sartor Resartus_ first appeared, Mrs. Carlyle remarked that it was "completely understood and appreciated only by women and mad people." This work did not for some years receive sufficient attention in England to justify publication in book form. The case was different in America, where the first edition with a preface by Emerson was published in 1836, two years before the appearance of the English edition. In the year of Carlyle's death, a cheap London edition of 30,000 copies was sold in a few weeks.

Carlyle calls _Sartor Resartus_ a "Philosophy of Clothes." He uses the term "Clothes" symbolically to signify the outward expression of the spiritual. He calls Nature "the Living Garment of God." He teaches us to regard these vestments only as semblances and to look beyond them to the inner spirit, which is the reality. The century's material progress, which was such a cause of pride to Macaulay, was to Carlyle only a semblance, not a sign of real spiritual growth. He says of the utilitarian philosophy, which he hated intensely:--

"It spreads like a sort of Dog-madness; till the whole World-kennel
will be rabid."

The majority of readers cared nothing for the symbolism of _Sartor Resartus_; but they responded to its effective presentation of the gospel of work and faced the duties of life with increased energy. Carlyle seemed to stand before them saying:--