(1832-1901)
418 / A
The Social Background of Victorian Literature / 421
FIE SOCIAL BACKGROUND OF VICTORIAN LITERATURE
Q. 67. Write a note on the social background of the literature of the Victorian era. (Agra 1958)
Introduction :-
That the literature of a particular era is intimately and even organically connected with its social background is too patent a truism to need reiteration. A history of English literaturc^ccording to Compton-Rickctt, ”needs to be limned on a background of its social activities, in order to be clearly seen and nicely app’raiscd.” It is particularly true of the Victorian age. Almost all the writers of the age show in their creative activity a keen awareness of their social environment, and many of them come forward as social critics. Compton-Rickett observes : The closer approximation of literature to social life is very marked in the Victorian era. Kingsley writes passionate social tracts in the guise of a story; cheap bread inspires the muse of Ebenezcr Elliot; Elizabeth Barrett voices The Cry of the Children and Thomas Hood immortalises the weary sempstress and the despairing unfortunate. Carlylc, after excursions into German literature and European history plunges into the political problems of the day. Ruskin, starting as critic of the art of painting, turns in the new century to the more complex art of life, and no man of letters has tackled industrial problems with greater insight and more brilliant suggestiveness.”
A Complex Age :-
The Victorian era was an age of rapid flux and baffling complexity. Moody and Lovett aver : ”Never before, sot even in the troubled seventeenth century had there been such rapid and sweeping changes in the social fabric of England: and never before had literature been so closely in league or so openly at war, with the forces of social life.” It is hazardous to sum up an age in a formula ; and it is particularly hazardous to sum up in this fashion the Victorian age. Two features make such a thing particularly difficult :
(i) the very rapid and sweeping changes which the age witnessed and
(ii) The complexity of social forces operating in the age at any given moment.
The words of A. C. Ward are very apt here: ’One of the irritating characteristics of the Victorian age is its refusal to be covered by any of the commendatory or derogatory labels from time, to time attached
H^*> / *» • »•*»*.«• j ’
to it. It was an Age of Faith and an Age of Doubt-; an Age of Morality and of Hypocrisy, of Prosperity and Poverty, of Idealism and Materialism, of Progress and Decline, of Splendour and Squalor. It was a solemn age yet it produced more humorous writers than any other single period : it was advanced in intellect yet immature in emotion. And though as an historical period it lasted for more than sixty years, disintegrating forces were pecking at its foundations forty years or more in advance of Queen Victoria’s death in 1901.” The literature of the age reflects this complexity and is also influenced by •t.
The Development.of Science :•
The two most important features of the Victorian Age were (i) the development of science; and (ii) the progress of democracy.
We now propose to discuss at some length these features in all their important ramifications and, of course, their impact on contemporary literature. Now, for the development of experimental science.
The rapid development of physical science in the Victorian age transformed the material environment of the people and both directly as well as indirectly made itself felt in the literature of the age. The age witnessed a great outpouring of scientific literature. Such epochmaking works as Darwin’s Origin of the Species came cut in this age. But more important than such direct influence was the indirect and almost ubiquitous influence which the rapid development of physical science exerted on Victorian literature. The advancement of science”, says Compton-Rickett, ”has transformed man’s outlook upon life and has affected every channel of intellectual activity.” In what respects did this transformation come about ? First, it encouraged a materialist outlook. The ”other-worldliness” gave place to ”this-worldiness.” Commercialisation of aH human activity soon followed accompanied by a marked shift in the values of life. Materialism and commericalism inevitably lead men to restlessness as much as hectic activity. The ”busy hum of men” was alien to all spiritual repose. Well could have another Wordsworth lamented:
The world is too much with us; late and soont Getting and spending we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours.
No doubt, Victorian scientists started ”seeing” much in Nature, but not in die Wordsworthian sense. To them Nature was non-human as a spider or a weed which is so nonchalantly cut up and read lectures upon.
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Secondly, the development of science was inslr ncntal in nurturing even among the literary writers, the peculiar scientific temper. Some of them even had a recourse to ”scientific” methods in their literary works. Tennyson, for instance, followed as a poet the scientific method of description which puts a premium on the accuracy of detail. His nature poetry is, according to Compton-Rickett, ”like the work of an inspired scientist.” In the historical literature of the age also the scientific temper seems to be at work. Carlyle, who was bitterly opposed to science in other ways, Buckle and many others adopted as historians the scientific method of discovering and orientating accurate facts and relating them* to the psyche of an age. The method of induction and rigorous research watessentially scientific. In the realm of fiction, too, the invisible htfnd of science was definitely at work. About this aspect Compton-Rickett maintains : ”In fiction, the scientific spirit is no less discernible: the problems of heredity and environment preoccupying the attention of the novelists. The social problem (sic] of the earlier Victorians, of Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Kingslcy and Reade, give place to points in biology, psychology, patholgy. The influence of Herbert Spencer and of Comte meets us in the pages of George Eliot: while the analytical methods pf science are even more, subtly followed in the fiction of George Eliot, the early writings of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, and the intimate Wesscx studies of Thomas Hardy.” Thirdly, the development of science caused a marked spiritual disturbance which often took the shape of scepticism and, sometimes, of patent agnosticism. Mid-Victorian poetry is particularly shot with the tincture of this spiritual disturbance caused by the sudden crumbling the of age-old edifice of Christian values. Illustrating this point Compton-Rickett observes : The questioning note in Clough.the pessimism of James Thomson, the wistful melancholy of Matthew Arnold, the fatalism of Fitzgerald, all testify to the sceptical tendencies evoked by scientific research. It did not kill poetry, but i stifled for a while the lyric impulse and overweighted verse with speculative thought.” The last sentence is over-true, and should with advantage be considered with respect to the poetry of the Victorian age to see the striking difference which the development of science brought about in the general complexion of poetry. Only a handful of writers such as Browning remained undisturbed. Browning could write: Cod’s in His Heaven– All’s right with the world.
But that opinion is very unrepresentative, being limited only to such incorrigible optimists as Browning who are rare not only in the
424 / A History of English Literature
Victorian age but in any other age. Arnold with his plaintive doubtfulness and Tennyson with his inquisitive note (In Memoriam) arc much more typical in this respect.
Fourthly, the development of science led England to the Industrial Revolution which started, no doubt, about 1760, but found its real climax only during the Victorian age. This Revolution brought in the economic and social changes arising out of the replacement of industries carried on in the home with simple machines by industries in, factories with power-driven machinery. On account of the excessive significance of the Industrial Revolution we will discuss it under a separate sub-head.
The Industrial Revolution :•
The Industrial Revolution ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity. But on the side of debit, it converted the ”merry England” into a sooty and squalid England and it also gave rise to a number of social problems which are the inevitable bane of industrialisation. With the conversion of the agrarian economy into industrial economfwas created, on the one hand, a new class of privileged millowners and big industrialists and, on the other, a huge horde of ill-clothed and ill-fed labourers whose rights were yet to be protected over the years by a long succession of legislative measures. There was a virtual exodus of people from the country to the numerous town* which had started resounding with the grind and buzz of heavy machinery. The policy oflaissezfaire as expounded first by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations was seized upon by the Victorian political economists like Mill, Malthus and Ricardo, and applied to the working of the new industrial system. This application was tantamount to the denial of all rights to the labour except perhaps the right to starve. Mayhew in his work London Poor paints a harrowing picture of the miserable life of the working classes of Victorian London. The intransigent political economists for a number of years succeeded, in preventing the government from saving the poor from the merciless exploitation of the capitalists. Thus the Industrial Revolution proved much less than an unalloyed blessing.
The so-called political economy and the pontifical utterances of Us champions did not go unattacked. Carlyle and Ruskin did their best to strike at the foundations of this ”science” which Ruskin called ”nescience.” Whereas Carlyle spoke as an inspired prophet, Ruskin combined the inspiration of a prophet with the hard core of a dialectical skill that he displayed effectively in Unto This Last which he called the greatest work of his life and whichjncidentally, influenced Gandhi a great deal by helping him to form many opinions of his own. Most of
The Social Background of Victorian Literature / 425
Ruskin’s later works arc imbued with the spirit of social reform. Dickens also displays in his novels a soft corner lor the miserable poor, their wretched dwelling-places and their poor and squalid lives. His novel Oliver Twist, for instance, contains some very realistic pictures of London slums, and Hard Times is an unveiled and calculated attack on the contemporary political economy of the school of Gradgrind who figures among the chief protagonists of the novel. Dckcns is nothing if not a social satirist. As Compton-Rickctl puts it, ”for the motley multitude that pour through the streets, for the hole-and-corner places of the City, for London as-an incomprehcnsiblc,tcrrifying, fascinating, delightful pcrsonality-cvery brick and stone ulivc with tragic humour– Dickens remains unrivalled.” Dickens was not only a realist, however, but a satirist, and a very brilliant satirist at that. We cannot entirely agree with Cross who opines: The attacks of Dickens on science and political economy arc hysterical curiosities”. If we remove the elements of fantasy we will get at a very small but a very genuine core of hard common sense.
The Progress of Democracy :-
Basically, the whole progress of English political history is the movement from uncompromising royalism to uncompromising democracy. In the Victorian age this shift was considerably accelerated under the impact of various operating factors. Starting with the year
1832, several Reform Bills were enacted which progressively granted voting rights to more and more people, ultimately ending in universal adult suffrage. As a result the House of Commons remained, in Compton -Rickelt’s words, ”no longer an oligarchy.” It was only then that the expectations raised by the French Revolution (1789) came to be fulfilled. The impact of democracy on the literature of the age is evident. One of its important manifestation is the keen interest which the writers of the age evinced in the hopes and fears of the poor people and in ”low life” as a whole. Most Victorians, it is true, believed in a kind of caste system and what Thackeray called snobbery, and sniffed at each other like dogs when two of them inet. But almost all writers stood for the demolition of these artificial social barriers and the recognition of the inalienable humanity of the underdog. No writer worthy of note seems to be unaware of the process, of rapid demoralisation of the political system. The common man comes and stays as the hero of most works of literature. This process brought in its wake increased educational opportunities for the poor. There was thus a rapid expansion of the reading public who became the new patrons of literature. The writer was thus compelled to cater for these new classes of readers. The democratic spirit of Victorian literature
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has thus to be studied with reference to the readers also. The unprecedented expansion of journalistic activity is also to be considered likewise. The serialised novels of Thackeray, Dickens and others are a peculiar product of their age.
Sex and DomesUc life :•
As regards sex, the Victorians were extremely prudish. Even a trivial impropriety of dress (not to speak of the modern ”topless” and the ”mini skirt” which, in the opinion of the house in the annual debate of the Oxford Union held in 1966, ”does not go far enough”) would send the Victorian martinets into paroxysms of rage. They were indeed very touchy about sex which they treated with a hush-hush incommodiousness. Even Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot and others who were stark realists in everything else, did not Hft the lid off the aaimality of their characters. They approached the beast of sex very gingerly, and with gloves on. Thackeray, who gives in Vanity Fair the interesting career of a smart little meretrix (Becky Sharp), does not show even by suggestion the Httle animal that is in her. All this is done ’to avoid shocking the susceptibilities of the readers. Victorian parents were quite domineering. Even now adays, when a teenager finds her father not very forward in letting her have her own way with her ”dates”, she can be heard complaining: ”Oh, I have a Victorian sort of papa!” Mr. Murdstone’s cruelty to David Copperfield is an instance of the authority which a Victorian father exercised.
Even too much of drinking was held culpable in the Victorian era. Gone were the days of coffee-house boozing so rampant in the eighteenth century which produced such lovers of wine as Addison, Steele, and Dr. Johnson. The last named wrote (k seems in earnest): ”He who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.* And Writer Scott wrote in 1825 :”Sots are excluded from the best company.” Dickens eyes drunkards with sinister fascination. In his early novels he indeed deals with intemperance in his usual light-hearted vein, but in later works he treats the subject with grim and didactic purposiveness. Dickens is, in fact, reflecting the marked shift in public opinion and taste.
THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE ON VICTORIAN / LITERATURE
Q.68. Discuss the Influence of «dence<* the IHentwre of tfce Victorian era, (Rohtlkhand 1984)
Or
Q. Consider the influence of scientific thought on Victorian literature. (RohHkhand 1985)
Or
Q. Estimate the effect of progress of science on the literature of the Victorian era. (Pun-
jab 1966)
Or
Q. Assess the influence of science on the outlook of Victorian writers. (Punjab 1962)
Introduction :-
According to Compton-Rickett, the two most important features of the Victorian era were:
(i) the progress of democracy, and
(ii) the development of science.
While not denying the fact that the Victorian age was a very complex age defying neat labelling, we can still maintain that the two above-mentioned tendencies were then the most powerfully operative. Physical science has always remained progressive. Every new sun brings in some new addition to the stock of scientific knowledge. However, it was around the middle of the nineteenth century that the progress of science was tremendously accelerated, to continue as such till our own times.” Victorian Columbuses discovered many new Americas in the realm of science. While the unprecedented development of science made for material prosperity, it also brought about a revolution in the habitsof thought as also Ac traditions of Christian faith. This revolution in thinking could not but score a deep impression upon contemporary literature. Literature is the record of the consciousness of a nation, and, therefore, goes on changing itself with the changes in national consciousness. The Victorian age was an age of sharp flux generated mainly by the development of science, and the literature of this age mirrors this flux quite authentically.
In the Victorian age science expanded in all ks departments such as geology, anthropology, chemistry, botany, astronomy,and zoology. Natural phenomena were no longer viewed with the sense of wonder of the primitive man or the smugness of an all- believing’Christian but with the searching eyes of a scientist bent up*on knowing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The change in the temper of the times can be illustrated by an example. Wordsworth, the pioneer of the Romantic Movement and the ”archpriest of Nature,” had complained against the physical analyst’s tendency to dissect everything to get at the truth of its structure, nature, and existence. He had lamented that
428 / A History of English Literature
”we murder to dissect.” In the Victorian age, however, Ruskin, who himself was a sensitive aesthete critical of the passion for dissection,1 had to admit that to dissect a flower could sometimes be as proper as to dream over it. The Royal Society was established as early as 1662, but even in the eighteenth century it was a popular pastime with writers (particularly the Tory satirists like Pope and Swift) to laugh at the pretensions of scientists known contemptuously as ”the virtuosi.’” Swift’s sat ire on the experiments of scientists in the kingdom of Laputa is too well-known to need any mention. In the Victorian age the time was fit for laughing at the conservative ignoramuses like Swift rather than the experimental scientists who were working real wonders. The Direct Influence :-
The unprecedented development of science in the Victorian era influenced literature both directly and indirectly. Much of the literature of the age is permeated with the spirit of science which influenced it more indirectly than directly. Our intention here is not to trace the development of scientific literature or even any other department of non-creative literature. However, it is of interest to note that the Victorian age saw the appearance of a large number of books which were literary as well as scientific. The rigorous differentiation between science and literature, which our modern age of excessive specialisation makes persistently’, was not much knows! to the Victorian age. Quite a few writers of the age seem to be standing on the no-man’s-land between the territories of science and literature. Most of these writers had taken upon themselves the role of the ”popularisers” o/-science. T. H. Huxley was the most outstanding of such nodescript writers as could be classified both as scientists and as literati. He was pleased to call himself ”the bull-dog of Darwin.” He propagated the teachings of Darwin as enshrined in his epoch-making work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). Huxley with his lucid style and amazing combative powers did very good work for defending Darwin in particular and science and freedom of thought and expression in general. Huxley, as Samuel C. Chew says, ”possessed gifts of style which could popularize science by lucid and readily intelligible presentation, as in the renowned lecture On a Piece of Chalk Jttt did useful work in advancing the cause of popular education, though as Arnold argued,
I. He resigned «he Slide Profess onhip of Art « Oxford « a protest igaina the cttMishmentoftlaboratory for the dissection of human bodies.
2.SeePt. III ofGvllmr’tTravels.
The Influence of Science on Victorian Literature / 429
he laid too much emphasis upon the value of the natural sciences as a discipline a. the expense of the older humane curriculum.” It is of interest to note that another scientist of the age-John Tyndall–gave equal importance to science and literature in his proposed cur riculum.
Another direct influence of the development of science is discernible in the vast polemical literature which appeared in the age
• either to defend or to attack the principles of Darwin. All important men of letters were divided into the Gnostics and the Agnostics. Tennyson suggested the formation of a society to counteract the heresies of Darwinian Agnostics. He said: ”Something must be done to put down these agnostics.” However, ultimately both the Gnostics and the Agnostics were admitted to a learned society, known ”as the Metaphysical Society, which discussed the spiritual disturbance engendered by Darwin and others. People of such diverse interests as Tyndall, Huxley, Tennyson, Leslie Stephen, Ruskin, Mark Pattison, Gladstone, Browning.and the Duke of Argyll were associated with the Society.
The Indirect Influence :-
More important than such direct influence was the indirect and almost ubiquitous influence which the development of physical science exerted on the literature and literati of the Victorian era. The advancement of science”, observes Compton-Rickett, ”has transformed man’s outlook upon life and has affected every channel of intellectual activity.’ How and in what respects, we propose to discuss now. In doing so we will mostly confine ourselves to creative literature.
Materialism and Anti-materialism ;-
The development of science, naturally enough, led the people of the age to adopt a materialistic creed. The ”other-worldiness” gave place to ”this-worJdliness.” In spite of the desperate efforts of some intellectuals to reconcile religion and morality with science, the two drifted inevitably apart. Materialism and commercialism led the people to hectic activity and restlessness. The ”busy hum of men”, in Milton’s words, was alien to all spiritual repose, and well could have another Wordsworth lamented:
The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours.
Contemporary scientists ”saw” much in Nature, but not in the Wordsworthian sense. To them Nature was as non-human asspider or a weed which is so nonchalantly cut up for reading lectures upon.
1. See his essay ”Science «d Literature.”
430. / A History of English Literature
This rising wave of materialism which came in the wake of the development of science dismayed a number of sensitive writers sucii as Carlylc, Arnold and Raskin, who directed their strokes at the very foundations of the superstructure of Victorian materialistic values. Literature is nothing if it does not make a man aware of the higher values of life and turn him away from the blind cult of Mammon-worship. Thackeray in his magnum opus, Vanity Fair, attacked the rank materialism and insufferable snobbery which characterised the age of Queen Victoria. Matthew Arnold called the English aristocracy and nobility ”barbarians,” the middle classes ”Philistines”, and the common people ”populace”. He showed how all these classes suffered from spiritual narrow-mindedness and inscnsitivcncss. He campaigned for making them pervious to the higher values of life and the much-needed enlightenment which would wean them from the craving for gold. His force was mostly exerted against ”Philistinism”. Carlyle raised a prophet-like voice against the brutality of the age of the machine. He upheld vigorously the human values which were then fast disintegrating. Even the scientist John Tyndall, in his essay mentioned above, praised Carlyle for his message of action. Ruskin reserved the vials of his wrath for all the so-called blessings of science and the Industrial Revolution. Among other things he condemned his contemporaries’ tendency to make money by hook or crook, not for any laudable purpose, but just for the sake of making more money. A man making money was compared by him to a cricketer making runs which in themselves meant nothing at all. Dickens in his own peculiar way took the Grandgrind-like materialists to task.
The Growth of the Scientific Temper :-
. The development of science was also instrumental in nurturing in Victorian writers the peculiar scientific temper. Under its influence some, of them had a recourse to scientific methods in their literary works. Tennyson, for instance, followed as a poet the scientific method of description which puts a premium upon the accuracy of detail. His nature poetry is, according to Compton-Rickett, ”like the work of an inspired scientist.” In the historical literature of the age also the scientific temper seems to be at work. Carlyle, who was bittlery opposed to science in many ways, Buckle,and many others adopted as historians the scientific method of discovering,ascertaining ,and orientating accurate facts and relating them to the psyche of an age. The method of rigorous research, rational discussion, unimpassioncd cxaminatk>n» and induction was essentially scientific. The desire for rational truth became the guiding-star of not only the historians but also the ”fictitious
The Influence of Science on Victorian Literature / 431
historians,” namely, the novelists. The English novel had at its back a pretty long tradition of realism starting with Defoe. In the later Victorian age the stress on realism was not only reinforced but many other scientific tendencies also started operating upon the novel. ComptonRickett avers in this connexion : ”In fiction the scientific spirit is no less discernible : the problems of heredity and environment preoccupying the attention of the novelists. The social problems of the earlier Victorians, of Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Kingsley and Reade give place to points in biology, psychology, pathology. The influence of Herbert Spencer and of Comte meets us in the pages of George Eliot; while the analytical methods are even more subtly followed in the fiction of George Eliot, the early writings of Mrs. Humphrey Wfcrd, and the intimate Wessex studies of Mr. Thomas Hardy.” Among the major Victorian poets who adopted the methods of science may be mentioned Robert Browning who used the psychoanalytic approach for his task of the exploration of the human soul, which he did with the intellectual curiosity of a Darwin or Newton. According to a critic, ”Browning is the greatest English poet who wrote by a rational impulse.”
Spiritual Disturbance :•>
.The development of science in the Victorian era also caused a marked spiritual disturbance which took quite often the shape of scepticism and sometimes of patent agnosticism and even downright freethinking. Mid-Victorian poetry is particularly shot with the tincture of this spiritual disturbance caused by the sudden collapse of the age-old edifice of Christian values. Illustrating this point, ComptonRickett observes: The questioning note in Clough, the pessimism of James Thomson, the wistful melancholy of Matthew Arnold, the fatalism of Fitzgerald, all testify*} the sceptical tendencies evoked by scientific research. It did not kill poetry, but it stifled for a while the lyric impulse and overweighted verse with speculative thought.” The last sentence is overtrue and should be considered with reference to the poetry of the Romantic Age to see the striking difference which the development of science created in the general complexion of Victorian poetry. Only a handful of writers, such as Browning, remained undisturbed and could still say:
Cod’s in His heavenAirs right with the wortd.
But the rest became victims of growing doubts regarding the ultimate values of life. Darwin and others had knocked the bottom out of the
432 ’ A History of English Literature
concept of the divine origin of the universe, and had ”proved” that human- beings were the descendants of not Adam and Eve, but apes who themselves had descended from other forms of life. Christianity was destroyed, but nothing could fill the vacuum. The doubts and the consequent spiritual restlessness caused by science were shared by all the poefs, but the answers they gave were different. Even the normally complacent Tennyson struck an inquisitive note in In Memoriam. Arnold expressed his plaintive doubtfulness in numerous of his poems and groped about in search of a spiritual stance. His mournful pessimism finds good expression in Dover Beach where he says that the world,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath realty neitiier joy, nor love, norligfu,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night
Fitzgerald struck the note of fatalism-epicureanism. If you are here just for a while to be swept into nothingness by the relentless hand of time, why not then drink and be merry ?
The moving fingerwrites and having writ
Moves on, not all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line;
i.yraUthy tears wash out a word of it.
Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough,
A cup of wine, a book of verse and thou
Singing beside me in the wilderness,
And wilderness is paradise enow t
Hardy adopts the Schopenhaurean philosophy of pessimism. He has a deterministic attitude towards life and bears the ironies of fate as the mechanistic workings of an insensitive power. And so forth. Some Exceptions :-
Some of the Victorian writers-including a few major ones-remained unaffected by the development of science and the forging of the scientific temper. The Pre-Rephaelite Movement as also the Tractarian Movement show no influence of science at all. The former was concerned chiefly with painting. Its protagonists like Rossetti, Swinburne/
t
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n
4
0
j
Ifennyson as a Representative / 433
and Morris favoured art for the sake of art and envisaged poetry as a branch of aesthetics. Their main concern was with the appreciation and creation of beauty and not with breaking their heads or hearts on dialectic activity. The Tractarian Movement, which involved such important writers as Newman, was religious in nature and had nothing to do with science.
TENNYSON AS A REPRESENTATIVE OF HIS AGE
Q.69. How far is it justified to describe Tennyson as the representative poet of the Victorian era?
(Rohilkhand 1983) Or Consider Tennyson as the representative poet of his age.
(Punjab Sept 1956) Or
Q.
Q. Discuss Tennyson as a representative poet of the
Victorian age (Agra 1962)
Or
Q. Why is Tennyson regarded as the representative poet of his age. ? (Viknun 1962)
Introduction :-
Tennyson is, in the words of W. J. Long, ”probably the most representative literary man of the Victorian era.” His work is an authentic epitome of all the important features of his age. Whatever be our estimate regarding his greatness as a poet~and most mpdern critics are convinced of his mediocrity-there can be no doubt about the representative value of his work. He is as good a representative and chronicler of his age as Chaucer, Spenser,and Pope were of their own respective agesi Tennyson’s career as a poet extended over more than half a century during which period many changes occurred. In his poetry he kept pace with the changing times^Stopford Brooke says:
1. See W.H. Hudson, An Outline History of English Literature, p. 299: ”The changes which Tennyson’s thought underwent in regard to social and political questions itself reveals his curious sensitiveness to the tendencies of his time; for the sanguine temper of his early manhood, the misgivings and reactionary utterances of his middle age; and the chastened hopefulness of his last years, are alike reflections of successive moods which were widely characteristic of his generation.’
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”For more than sixty years he lived close to the present life of England, as far as he was capable of comprehending and sympathising with its movements; and he inwove what he felt concerning it into his poetry.” It does not mean, however, that he had no individuality of his own : he did have individuality, though it was not he alone but also the ethos of his age that found utterance in his poetry. He was the Poet Laureate, but we can even call him the national poet without any hesitation. He indeed fixed for the future generations the essence and the spirit of his age. Tennyson did not concern himself much with the externals of contemporary life, such as the international conflicts: except for theCremianWar we will find little mention of contemporary upheavals and conflicts in his poetry; but the deeper cur– rents of contemporary thought and feeling run in his poetic compositions and are worthy of examination by a student of the Victorian ethos. In this sense he bears a curious resemblance to Chaucer, the unofficial chronicler of the later fourteenth century. A Champion of Order :-
The Victorian age was singularly unemotional and stood for balance, order,and discipline. The radicalism, revolutionism,and even the individualism of the romantics like Shelley had already become a thing of the past. All enthusiasm, excitement, or prophetic fervour was eyed with suspicion by the sane Victorians who were terribly afraid of disorder and anarchy. Even the Victorian ”Chartists” (those who stood for the extension of political power to the working-classes) believed in constitutional means to effect political changes and would have been offended at being dubbed ”revolutionaries.” Evolution not revolution, was the slogan. England and the Continent had had enough of excitement. What was needed now was calm thinking and constructive action. The Victorians, as a critic puts it, ”had enough of tremendous thoughts in familiar shape. They now wanted familiar thoughts in tremendous shape.”
Now, Tennyson reflects adequately the Victorian respect for balance and order, and the corresponding fear and1 contempt for lawlessness and disorder. Many a time he expresses his love of England, which is partly generated by her political stability. Order in England is not only a reason of Tennyson’s pride in his country, but also his love for it. At a place he says about England It is the land Oiat free men till; Tliat sober-suited freedom chose; The land where girt with friends and foes, A man may speak the thing he will, A land of settled government; A land of just and old renown.
Tennyson as a Representative / 435
Attention may be directed to the last but one line of the passage quoted above. ”Nothing is,” proclaims Tennyson ”that errs from law. According to Compton-Rickett, the Victorian age witnessed- a shift from individualism to collectivism. In other words, individual impulses came increasingly under the discipline of social conventions. Tennyson is an exponent of this shift in thought. His love of order is reflected in the most quoted of his lines:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. From the first line it must be noted what the old order changes yielding place to a new order, not to disorder or chaos. Tennyson is not for stagnancy or the status quo, but he is not for change that would hurl everything into chaos. In these beliefs he represents his age. The Rise of Democracy :-
This mortal terror of revolution and anarchy makes Tennyson, necessarily, a reactionary, or, at least, a conventionalist. The Victorian age was, so to say, a ”middle-aged” period, wedded to a plethora of social conventions. Nevertheless, it witnessed a gradual change from aristocracy to democracy. According to Compton-Rickett, an important feature of the Victorian age was ”the steady advance of democratic ideals.” Things moved surely though steadily towards the ultimate Chartist goal of universal suffrage. How far does Tennyson reflect this change in his poetry ? It must be understood that Tennyson was not another Ruskin. He clung to old order of aristocracy but when he found the swelling tide of democracy impossible to be checked, he persuaded himself to strike a compromise between aristocracy and democracy. He was an aristocrat by birth, upbringing and his ways of thinking, but we cannot but admit that he had a genuinely sympathetic interest in the common people and common things. If he wrote The Princess, Maud, and The Idylls of the Kings, he also wrote such poems as Dora and Enoch Arden which are concerned with poor people. Female Suffrage and Education :-
Tennyson’s conservatism is also apparent from his views on female suffrage and education, which, in the Victorian age, were burning topics. He did not associate himself with the loud-mouthed suffragists of his age. Nor did he think highly of formal education for the fair sex. He could have readily agreed with Addison that ”family is the proper sphere for a woman to shine in.” Like Addison he was for keeping a wedge between the two sexes either of which was supposedly designed by God for a particular furlction and was endowed accordingly.
!
436 / A History of English Literature
Man for the field and woman for the hearth, Man for the sword and for the needle she, Man to command and woman to obeyi Att else confusion.
The last line should be considered with reference to Tennyson’s love of order, which we have detailed above.
The Princess (1847), one of the major poems of Tennyson, deals with the contemporary issue of female education which aroused an acrimonious strife between its supporters and opponents. Of course, Tennyson ranged himself on the side of its opponents. Higher education in his view was likely to kill the essential femininity of women. In the poem just referred to he shows the apparent untenability of the views of Princess Ida on female education. She establishes a university for women and, very like a Victorian ”suffragette”, shrieks for the rights of women. She even refuses to marry the prince to whom she was betrothed in her childhood. But where does all this end ? Ida’s intransigence is gone and she marries the prince. Tennyson implies that she is ”reformed” as she gives up her cry for equality, loses her * obstreperousness, and agrees to be, what Coventry Patmore would call, ”the angel in the house.” –
Love, Sex, and Social Taboos :•
Tennyson is a representative Victorian in his attitude to love and sex About these things Victorians were indeed quite prudish..Even a trivial impropriety of dress (not to speak of the modern ”topless” and the ”mini-skirt”, which, in the opinion of the house in the annual debate of the Oxford Union held in 1966, ”does not go far enough”)1 would send the Victorian martinets into paroxysms of rage. They were indeed very touchy about sex which they were prone to treat with a hush-hush incommodiousness. Thackerary, Dickens, George Eliot, and others who were stark realists in everything else did not dare lift the lid off the animality of their characters. They approached the beast of sex gingerly, and with gloves on. Tennyson is no exception. In his treatment of love and sex he has neither the frank conviviality of Fielding, nor the voluptuousness of Marlowe or Spenser, nor the ribaldry of Chaucer of the Miller’s Tale. He does not think of love in terms of the Platonic transcendentalism of Shelley ; he does think of it as an earthly passion, but refuses to excoriate it, not to speak of exploring its interior. Unbridled passion he looks down upon, especially when it is non-conjugal. Such passion would be destructive of social
1. The motion was, of couse, carried.
Tennyson as a Representative / 437
order and has to be viewed as a disintegrating and mischievous force. Too often does he proffer the sermon of rising above one s.animality. Arise and ffy
The reeling faun, the sensual feast, Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die.
Tennyson’s lovers are always full-dressed. They love each other like perfect Victorians and are invariably married. A typical instance is provided by The Lady of Shallot in which we are introduced to ”two young lovers” walking together in the moonlight. Before the reader should get scandalised, Tennyson reassures him that these lovers were ”lately wed.* Marriage and procreation are exalted by Tennyson as the symbols of order and human immortality. But licentiousness is to be curbed as it is symptomatic of disorder. ReHgtoa. Science, and ”the Victorian Compromise” :-
According to Compton-Rickctt, the progress of scientific thought was one of the two most important features of the Victorian era (the other one being, as already pointed out, ”the steady advance of democratic ideals”). The progress of science tended to undermine the very foundations of the Christian faith by calling into question many a scriptural ”truth.” Darwin’s evolutionary doctrine, which traced the descent of human beings from; pes, gave a serious blow to Genesis and shook the Christian belief in the immortality of the human soul, not to speak of a plethora of minor points of the Christian doctrine. Needless to say, all this caused an earthquake in the realm of contemporary thinking and brought many an adamant-built edifice tumbling to the ground. All Victorian writers, in some way or other, give expression to the doubts and the consequent spiritual disturbance generated by scientific discoveries. Some of the Victorians clung to the old faith and aspersed what they called the new-fangled opinions, others went over to the side of science and turned agnostics, and still some others tried in panic to effect some sort of compromise between the two conflicting forces (of science and belief). Tennyson, on the whole, may be classed with the third group–the one which stood for what is often called ”the Victorian Compromise.” He was too greatly affected by the development of science to remain an orthodox Christian, but still he was not so much affected as to turn an unqualified agnostic like, say, T. H. Huxley. In his poetry we often meet with an evidence of his groping for a moral stance, though it is true that he has fewer doubts than Arnoid and he is much more of a facile optimist than most of his
438 /A History of English literature
sensitive and introspective contemporaries. ”No poet,” says a critic, ”was more exercised by religious problems than he; and no poet was more sensitive to scientific thought than he.” But his attitude was an attitude of compromise and he_propoonded a via media between materalistic science and dogmatic ChristianityJHc was not much of a sceptic, though he could say:
Then remains more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
In In Memoriam, no doubt, the ultimate questions of life, death,and immortality are somewhat probed into. Likewise, in The Two Voices ’and elsewhere doubt and faith are tentatively probed. But the whole thing ends in a reassuring note of faith in God:
The sun, the moon, the stars, the hills and the plainst
Are not these, O Soul, the vision of Him who reigns ? He believes
That nothing walks with aimless feet,
Tliat not one life shall be destroyed.
And there are men who are not just ape-like but ”Godlike”– obviously not the descendants of apes.
Tlio’ world on world in myriad myriads roll
Round us, each with different powers,
And other forms of life than ours,
Wliat know we greater than the soul ?
On God and Godlike men we build our trust.
Such ”trust” may be pejoratively called facile optimism or smug complacency but it is essentially Victorian, even more Victorian than the much-publicized ”Victorian Compromise”.
Conclusion :-
These fundamental aspects of Victorian thought (along with such minor elements as militant patriotism and colonialism) entitle Tennyson to be considered a representative Victorian. He was indeed a great poet, even thought his representative value may be much greater than
I Incidentally, here is a funny limerick based on the evolutionary theory : Said an ape as he swung by his tail. To his children both male and female: ^ ”From amongst you my dears
In a number of years. May evolve a professor or Yake!”
Matthew Arnold As a Critic /439
his intrinsic value. ”It will he right,” to conclude with Lyall, ”for the future historians to treat Tennyson as a representative of the Victorian period and to draw inferences from his work as to the general, Intel! xtuul and political tendencies of the nineteenth century.”
MATTHEW ARNOLD AS A CRITIC OF HIS AGE
– Q 70. Write a note on Matthew Arnold as a critic of his age.
(Punjab Sept. 1956) Or Q. Consider Matthew Arnold as a social critic.
(Companion Question) Consider Ruskin and Arnold as critics of Victorian society. (Punjab 1963)
Introduction :-
Matthew Arnold was both a distinguished poet and prose writer of the Victorian era. He wrote on varied topics such as literature, education, politics, and religion. But whatever topic he handled, his approach was always critical and,morc often than not, constructive. The same critical attitude is discernible in much of his poetry also. As lago said of himself, Arnold, too, is ”nothing if not critical.” All of his critical work, it may be pointed out, is of a piece. Criticism, whether literary or social or political or educational, performs, according to Arnold, the same function and demands the same qualities of intelligence, discrimination, knowledge, and disinterestedness. Criticism is nothing if it is not related to life. Life is the main thing. So Arnold’s criticism of literature, society, politics, and religion all tends towards being a criticism of life. So does his poe! ic activity. Thus criticism with Arnold denotes a comprehensive activity which embraces all the departments of life. He himself defines criticism as ”the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge , theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is.” Thus criticism with Arnold is a definite kind of approach to life. J. D. Jump observes ; ”Writing on literature, education, politics and religion, he tries to encourage a free play of the mind upon the material before it and so to help its readers to get rid of any stock notions and pieces of mental petrifaction which maybe hampering their thought.” In other words, Arnold stood for the annihilation of all tyrannical dogmas, prejudices, and orthodox notions. That there was a pressing need foi such a campaign in England
*tu / r History of English Literature
cannot be gainsaid. ”Matthew Arnold,” to quote Hugh Walker, ”inherited the teacher’s instinct, and he was profoundly influenced by his sense of what his country needed. To be useful to England was always one of his greatest ambitions; and he knew that the way to be useful was to supply that wherein England was deficient.” Obviously it was the rational and.disapassionate appraisal of the life ”wherein England was
deficient.” And that explains his donning of the mantle of a critic.
/
The Bearing of Arnold’s Literary Criticism on Life and Society :•
As a critic Arnold is best known as a literary critic. But his literary criticism has a close bearing on society and life in general. He was extremely impatient of the slogan ”Art for Art’s Sake” which was raised by the Pre-Raphaelites, aesthetes, and some other nondescript groups. Consequently, his literary criticism is submerged in the criticism of society. According to him, ”poetry is a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism.” Criticism, according to him, should be ”sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge.” In his own literary and critical essays he is often led to specifically social criticism. In his lectures on Homer, for instance, he expatiates upon the frailty of intellectual conscience among his countrymen. Likewise, in The Function of Criticism at the Present Times” he points Oat the absurdity of numerous false notions which l.uvc a free play in tnglasd owing to lh« absence or weakness of such intellectual conscience. In a word, Arnold is a critic of his age even while he is engaged, apparently, in literary criticism.
Social Criticism in Arnold’s Poetry :-.
Arnold’s oft-quoted remark that poetry is, or should be, ”a criticism of life” has provided a juicy bone for numerous critics to gnaw at. Most critics have,however, spurned it as a frivolous truism. Thus George Saintsbury dismisses it as such, because as he observes in A History of English Criticism, ”all literature is the application of ideas to life: and to say that poetry is the application of ideas to life, under the conditions fixed for poetry is simply a vain repetition.” Likewise, T. S. Eliot (in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism) observes that Arnold’s dictum about poetry makes no sense. He holds that life is an awful mystery and we cannot criticise it properly ; it can only be done just vaguely. However, J.D. Jump makes bold attempts to defend Arnold. ”A good deal of nonsense,” observes he, ”has been written about this phrase (”a criticism of life”) by commentators who were so impatient to reject it that they could not wait to understand it… It would be difficult to find fault with this as an account of the ideal attitude of a poet, or other creative artist, towards his experience.”
Matthew Arnold As a critic / 441
How far and in what way is Arnold’s own poetry ”a criticism of life”? Hugh Walker answers this question in the following words :
”His much-condemned definition of poetry as ’a criticism of life’ is at least true of his own poetry. Even in the literary sense, there is a surprising quantity of wise criticism in his verse….But Arnold’s verse is critical in a Tar deeper sense than this. In all his deepest poems, in Thyrsis and The Scholar Gipsy fin Resignation, in the Obermann poems, in A Southern Mgfa, Arnold is passing judgement on the life of his age, the life of his country, the lives of individual men. In the last-named poem the fate of his brother, dying in exile in the attempt to return to the country of his birth, becomes the text for a sermon on the restless energy of the English and on the ’strange irony of fate’ which preserves for the members of such a race graves so peaceful as theirs by ’those hoary Indian hills’ and ’this gracious Midland sea.’
”In all this Arnold is quite consistent with himself. Holding, that what Europe in Urn generation principally needed was criticism he gave this criticism in verse as well as in prose…”
Quite often Arnold’s criticism of life in his poetry does not go beyond the expression of a sense of resignation. Such a criticism is definitely negative. If Keats escapes from life, Arnold resigns himself to it. Life with him is not something to be enjoyed, but something to be suffered. Resignation to life is also of two kinds: one escapist, and the other Stoic In the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse the resignation is of the first kind. Sick of the fury, fret, and fever of life, the poet appeals to the monastic cloister to take him into its fold.
Oh, hide me in your gloom profound,
% solemn seats ofhofypain I
Take me, cowl’d forms, and fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again.
This desire to ”possess my soul again” is a recurring feature of Arnold’s poetic expression. His most insistent counsel to the people is to ”possess their souls”. He felt that with the relentless and catastrophic advance of the materialistic values in his age human beings had lost contact with their inner spirit which is the abode of all the higher values of life.
The other kind of Ainoldian resignation is more assertive and valiant and much less negative. It arises/from a pessimistic insight into the arcanum of life. It is an acceptance of the human predicament, a recognition and an adju.-tp.cnt to the fact that duty is not usually
442 / A History of English Literature
attended by a meet reward. Duty is still to be performed and the event left to God. We are ordained to spend life
In beating where we must not aass
And seeking what we shall not find. Nature herself is resigned to* the pain of existence:
Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread,
The solemn hills around us spread,
This stream which falls incessantly,
The strange, scrawl’d rocks; the lonely sky,
If I might lend their life a voice,
Seem to bear rather than rejoice. Science and Faith :-
Like most other Victorian writers, Arnold expresses m his work the conflict between science and faith which his age witnessed. The unprecedented development of experimental science had come to shake the very foundations of Christianity by calling into question Genesis and much else besides. Arnold felt that he was breathing in a kind of spiritual vacuum. Like Janus he looked both ways. Neither like T. H. Huxley could he align himself completely with the new mode of thinking (by turning an agnostic) nor could he cling to the ruins of a crumbling order. Spiritual disturbance often manifesting itself in despair was the natural outcome of such a predicament. Arnold found himself shuttkcocking
between two worlds, one dead,
Tlie other powerless to be bom.
This desperate groping for something like a firm moral stance finds expression in much of his most typical poetry. As Moody and Lovett maintain, Arnold’s ”prevailing tone is one of doubt and half-despairing stoicism.” Dover Beach is the finest embodiment of Arnold’s dominant mood. He refers to the crumbling of the religious edifice:
The Sea of Faith.
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like tite folds of a bright girdle furl’d;
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
-?>•• B Matthew Arnold As a critic / 443
He is keenly aware of the terribllole confusion caused by the conflict between science and faith, between at advancing materialism and retreating Christianity:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another ’for the worvrld which seems
To lie before us like a land 9, of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so IK new,
Hath realty neither joy. no/v love, nor light.
Nor certitude, nor peace, nonor help for pain;
And we are here as on a dartrkling plain
Swept with confused alarm,: of struggle and flight.
Where ignorant armies clashkh by night.’
He compares modern civilization to H Rachel:
Ah, not the radiant spirit ofQGreece alone
She hod-one power, which mnade her breast its’home .’ ;fi
In her, like us, there clash’d ^contending powers, j
Germany. France. Christ. Mtfioses, Athens. Rome. ??
The strife, (he mixture in her.- soul are ours.. ,-.(.•• Her genius and her glory are •& her own.
What is, after all, the way out it of his confusion! ”In Arnold’s opinion,” says Hugh Walker, ”that wvivhich the time demands above all things is the discovery of some shorese, not false or impossible, towards which to steer. We need some Colunimbus to guide us over a trackless ocean to a new continent which he. discerns, though we cannot. Our misfortune is that we can find no sucrh pilot. Goethe, the ’physician’ of Europe’s ’iron age,’ had laid his fmgger on the seat, of the disease, but he failed to find a cure. Arnold neveisr conceived hiinself to be capable of succeeding where Goethe had fi failed. On the contrary, he rather teaches that the problem had growwn so complex that scarcely any intellect could suffice for its solution.. This feeling of almost insuperable difficulty is the secret of Arnold’s. melancholy. It gives a sense of brooding pause, almost of the paralysis of action, to his verse. It is the secret of his attraction for some mindds, and of an alienation amounting almost to repulsion between him amid many others. It makes him, in verse as well as in prose, critical rathther than constructive.”
”Culture and Anarchy” :-
Among Arnold’s works dealing wwith social and political questions, the pride of place must go to Cultures and Anarchy (1869) which was
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«
obviously occasioned by the mass agitations preceding the passage of the Reform Bill of 1869 which granted voting rights to the working classes of towns and thus almost doubled the electorate. The Victorian age is generally known to us as an age of peace and prosperity and most of all, political stability (in spite of the numerous unsuccessful attempts made on the life of Queen Victoria). But behind the imposing facade of order^Arnold perceived some anarchic forces at work. Anarchy, according to him is essentially antonymous to culture. When every body is bent upon ”doing as one likes”, culture is in danger. What makes for culture ? It is, in his words, a ”view in which the love of our neighbours, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the wocld better and happier than we found it-motives eminently such as are called social-come in as parts of the ground of culture and the main and pre-eminent parts.” Culture is thus a social passion of doing good. And anarchy is its very negation. Arnold was convinced of the progress of democracy, but he desired that the transition to democracy should not be allowed to destroy the social edifice. He was against unchartered freedom which allowed all to have their own ways. ”The moment,” writes he, ”it is plainly put before us that a man is asserting his personal liberty, we are half disarmed; because we are believers in freedom and not in some dream of a right reason to which the assertion of our freedom is to be subordinated.” He supports a ”firm state-power” to hold such anarchic tendencies in check. The state should not be representative of any single class, because all individual classes have been depraved by the contagion of materialism-the higher classes have been materialised, the middle classes desensitised, and the lower classes brutalised. Along with Culture and Anarchy may be mentioned here Friendship’s Garland (18*71) in which is contained,according to Hugh Walker, ”the very best of Arnold’s criticism on the social rather than the political side.” Educational Criticism :•
A word in the end about Arnold’s educational criticism. Arnold was an Inspector of Schools and then the Professor of Poetry of Oxford. He was, naturally, interested in educational reforms and wrote quite a few tracts in this connexion. Many of the reforms which he advocated have since been implemented. Compton-Rickett observes: ”There were no more liberal-minded, clear-sighted educational reformers in the Victorian era than he and Thomas Henry Huxley.”
Pessimism in Victorian Poetry / 445
/PESSIMISM IN VICTORIAN POETRY
*~/ Q. 71. Write a note on pessimism in Victorian poetry:
(Punjab 1962) Or Q. Write a short essay on any one of the following :-
(a) Pessimistic note in Victorian Poetry
(and three more topics). (Punjab 1965)
Introduction :-
In the texture of Victorian poetry there funs a noticeable strand of pessimism, mostly the work of the group of poets consisting chiefly of Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, James Thomson,and Edward Fitzgerald. By pessimism we mean, if not a philosophy of life, at least a well reasoned-out attitude towards life based on a temper of mind that looks on the dark side of things. To feel or express melancholy is not necessarily to be a pessimist unless this melancholy is well thoughtout. Who is more subject to moods of melancholy than Shelley, for instance ? And Shelley is an optimist for all that. The Origin of Pessimism :-
Victorian pessimism, in most cases, is the outcome of a deepseated spiritual disturbance to which the sensitive poets of the age were eminently prone. The age experienced a protracted battle between the advancing forces of science and agnosticism and the retreating forces of Christianity and faith which had been holding the fort for times immemorial. While the tremendous advance of science destroyed much of the exisiting faith, it could not provide another spiritual anchor. Many thinkers and poets, then, felt lost, without moorings or a rudder. They found themselves blundering
between two worlds,- one dead,
Tlie other powerless to be bom,
Some attempted some sort of compromise, and failed ; others were knocked about on the flood of doubt and despair and ensuing melancholy which settled into pessimism. Some like Thomas Henry Huxley went over to open agnosticism and started singing paeans of the powers of science. Some, like Macaulay, dazzled by the material splendour and prosperity ushered in by the development of science, gravitated towards a posture of smug, ’Victorian” complacency. Robert Browning kept his chin above the commotion of all doubts, and complacently believed:
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God’s in His Heaven’All’j right with the world.
But such optimism was essentially alien to Victorian spirit, and it is not surprising that he was taken to task by a number of his contemporaries and a still larger number of his successors.
From what has been said it should be clear that pessimism of (some of) the Victorians arose from impersonal grounds, not subjective experience. The only possible exception is, perhaps, James Thomson whose life was, indeed, fur from happy–though it was he himself (and not his circumstances) who was lo blame for it. The rest of Victorian pessimists were well-placed and materially prosperous individuals. Between them and pessimists like Voltaire, Swift^and Schopenhauer may thus-be drawn a line, as the pessimism of the latter was nurtured, if not generated, by their unhappy lives as individuals. All Victorian pessimistic poets were endowed with the following two qualities:
(i) A sensitive, acutely impressionable rnind, with a tendency
towards self-introspection. • •
(ii) A searching intclle’cl.
Their poetry reflects both of them quite abundantly. It was their tendency to be too intellectual and to subject everything to a searching intellect that was perhaps responsible for much of their pessimism. Compton-Rickctt observes in A History of English Literature : ”It was the endeavour to inlcllectitalise the visions of imaginative life that led Arnold, Clough, Fitzgerald, and James Thomson into that mood of wistful melancholy, that crystallised soon into a more or less pessimistic criticism of life.”
After these preliminary remarks let us now consider the pessimistic note in the poetry of some important Victorian poets.
Tennyson (1809-1892) :-
To include Tennyson among the Victorian pessimists is, on the face of it, as egregious a solecism as to include Hercules among the fair sex ! Tennyson is usually considered a sleek optimist with a certain irritating cocksureness regarding the transcendent power of God. He is not a pessimist; but there are melancholy and pessimistic moods which he gives expression to now and then–though only to sweep them aside soon after. ”For me”, says Harold Nicholson, ”the essential Tennyson is a morbid and unhappy mystic.” Robin Mayhead contradicts this opinion, for according to him, ”some of Tennyson’s most successful poetry has nothing to do with the morbid and the melancholy.” How ever, he adds, that it must ”be granted that this trait is certainly of capital
Pessimism in Victorian Poetry / 447
importance.”
Tennyson’s In Memoriam, one of his major works, is an elegy which contain not only the expression of the poet’s personal grief at the death of his friend Arthur Hallam but also grapples with the ultimate issue of human predicament. Life, death,and the whole creation are discussed with recurring references to the evolutionary theory which, even before Darwin, had started rocking the times. At moments the poet’s faith wavers and he is inclined to be pessimistic, but all doubts are ultimately cleared with a rcassertion of faith in God and man-His favoured creature. Tennyson-salutes
Tliat God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.
’ According to Robin Mayhead, in In Memoriam we find ”a progress from the initial stunned grief, through gradual acquiescence, to a condition of peace and serenity in which passionate regret is replaced by the consciousness of union with the spirit.” It was not for nothing that Queen Victoria said to Tennyson: ”Next to the Bible In Memoriam is my comfort.”
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) :-
Arnold is the most consistently pessimistic of all the major Victorian poets. According to Middleton .’ Murry, ”Arnold’s most consistent achievement was in the kind which we call elegiac.” ”He is,” observes Garrod, ”the greatest elegiac poet in our language not by virtue merely of Tliyrsis but by virtue of the whole temper of his Muse. His genius was essentially elegiac.” Tliyrsis is, of course, a formal elegy written by Arnold at the death of his friend Arthur Hugh Clough. But almost all (he rest of Arnold’s poems are also characterised by a sort of elegiac tone, melancholy brooding, and Stoic resignation. Much of his pessimism conies from his ill-adjustment to the changing conditions of his times. As has been said in the beginning, the advance of science in the Victorian age had given a rude shock to the body of Christian beliefs. Arnold was neither too much influenced by science so as to turn a downright atheist, nor so little as to remain an unquestioning believer. He found himself standing on the parting of the ways and shaken by the gusts of opposing winds. This spiritual disturbance took the form of despairing pessimism at the consciousness of spiritual vacuity as well as a searching introspection combined with a groping for a moral stance. In Dover Beach he observes that ”the Sea of Faith” has now withdrawn and the world as he sees it
448 / A History of English Literature
Hath realty neither joy, nor tight, nor love,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain,
And we are here as on a darkling plain ,
Swept with confused alarm? of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Whatever little ”certitude”, ”peace*,;or ”help for pain” is possible, can be secured from true love-.-of Course, man-woman love. Hence his appeal:
Ah love, let us be true ’
To one another.
Likewise, in The Buried Life he points out what companionship may do to alleviate ”the fret and worry of life ”;
Only but Ms is rare
When a beloved hand is laid in ours… ”•• The eye sinks inward, and heart lies plain, ; > And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know. ….
And there arrives a lull in the hot race
* Wlierein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, Rest.
The air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast. But, mostly, Arnold strikes the note of melancholy loneliness.
Yes ! in the sea of life enisled
With echoing strains between us thrown,
Dotting tite shoreless watery wild
We mortal millions live alone. Lonelines is a feature of nature also.
Alone the sun rises and alone spring the great streams. Arnold’s attitude to life is, mostly, of pessimistic resignation. He believes that life is a thing to suffer rather than to enjoy. But resignation is also of two kinds: one escapist, and the other, Stoic. In the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse his resignation is of the former kind. Sick of the fever, fret and fury of life, he appeals to the monastic cloisters to take him into their fold:
Oh hide me in your gloom profound;
Ye solemn seats of holy pain t
Take me, cowl’d forms, and fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again.
Pessimism in Victorian Poetry / 449
But more often Arnold’s resignation is of the Stoic kind. It is usually accompanied by a paralysis of action. Arnold knows the inherent lot of men
For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new.
Wlw hesitate and falter life away
And lose tomorrow the ground won today.
Sometimes, like Hardy, he finds man like a straw knocked about by the waves of the dark sea of destiny:
We are all like swimmers in the sea,
Poised on the top of a huge wave of fate •
Which hangs uncertain to which side to fall,
And whether it will leave us up to land,
’Or whether it will roll us out to the sea.
Back out to sea, to the waves of death,
We know not.
Arnold’s pessimism, however unmitigated and melancholy, is yet of a manly character and singularly free from the weakness of sentimcntalism or excessive self-pity or clever attitudinisation. Observes Compton-Rickett : ”No whining, no luxury of grief, no sentimental pessimism. Neither is there any joy, any real peace. It is the serenity of a troubled but brave spirit.”
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861):-
Clough was a lifelong friend of Arnold and his death was the subject of Arnold’s elegy Tliyrsis. He resembles his friend a great deal, provided we ignore the very obvious points of contrast. F. L. Lucas calls him ”a half-hewn Matthew Arnold, left lying in the quarry.” We have in Clough the same brooding melancholy, spiritual unrest,and disturbing introspection as we find in Arnold, dough’s mind was deeply exercised by the Science-Faith conflict which influenced Victorian thought and poetry. His was a searching intellect which probed into the mysteries of the ultimate questions of God, human, destiny, life and death. However, in his inquiries and analyses he does not approach the dignity and stature of Arnold. For one thing, he does not have the singlemindedness and emotional integrity of his friend. His is not an unrelieved pessimism-in the Botliie the dominant note is that of high spirits and holiday tranquillity. G. D. Klingopulos observes: ”Clough’s work is not by any means entirely sombre, much is humorous and faintly satirical.” For aa instance of his cutting sarcasm see the following lines from The Latest Decalogue:
450 / A History of English Literature
Thou sltalt have one God only, who ., ,v •,. ;
Would be at the expense of two ?
No graven images may be
Worshipped except, the currency…
Thou shall not kill, but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive.
”Say not the struggle nought availeth,” a usual anthology piece,puts forward an optimistic message of action and hope for the best. During the dark years of the Second World War the poem was used by Sir Winston Churchill as a morale-boosting text. It contains in Ulysses-like terms what is called the philosophy of action, not the Stoic endurance which characterises Arnoldian attitude. Comparing the two poets, Hugh Walker observes: ”dough is the more hopeful poet of the two. Arnold lays the whole stress upon courageous endurance, the doing of duty in spite of the certainty of defeat. Clough sees all the western land bright in the sunshine, and the tide breaking in elsewhere if not here.” Clough’s Dipsychus is a good example of the Victorian conflict between two spiritual voices. But, as is usual with Clough, the note of seriousness in the poem is ’often broken by sallies of wit and humour.
James Thomson (1834-1882) :-
James Thomson in The City of Dreadful Night and the shorter Insomnia struck a note of the intensest, nightmarish pessimism. As a young boy he had been fed on Calvinistic doctrines which he later found to be inadequate in the changing context of the times. Absolute despair, unrelieved by any ”silver lining,” was the outcome. He himself was subject to insomnia and at night he used to feel lonely and gloomy, This personal experience gives a touch of reality to the ghoulish pictures he draws in the poems mentioned above. His pessimism does not have the brooding energy or Stoic fortitude of Arnold’s or Clough’s. It is the issue of a morbid mind which puts one in mind of Poe. It is not for nothing that he is often labelled as the English Poe or the English Leonardi. In the words of Hugh Walker, ”his pessimism was founded on the conviction that there was no hope for humanity any more than for himself, and that the appearance of progress was a mere illusion-”
As a man, Thomson was not altogether an unalloyed melancholiac lost to all sense of humour, fun,or humamtarianism. He definitely had more sides to his personality. He was, says Compton-Rickett, ”in his happie’r moments, an affectionate and steadfast friend, a delightful companion, and an unselfish worker in the cause of humanity.”
Pessimism in Victorian Poetry / 45]
S’W;
Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1888) :-
Edward Fitzgeral I is chiefly known for his verse translation of the Persian Rubaiyat of Omar KJiayyam. This work, says David Daiches, ”puts an altogether, more attractive face on pessimism. Thomson alternated between hedonism and despair; Fitzgerald expressed a hedonism grounded on skepticism.” Fitzgerald’s pessimism is inherent in his acceptance of the evanescence of life and its purposelessness. This acceptance makes him cry a halt to all maddening activity and prompts him to devote whatever time he has been granted in this world to sensual pleasures. His pessimism is of the Epicurean kind. His paradise is earthly, somewhat drugged, but overflowing with Oriental splendour and luxury. Wine, women ,and verse are its chief features.
A book of verses underneath the bough,
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou ’ Beside me singing in the wilderness,
Oh, wilderness were paradise enow ! Fatalism is an important ingredient in Fitzgerald’s pessimism .
The moving finger writes and having writ
* Moves on, not all tliy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line.
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it. And, again:
Oh threats of Hell and hopes of Paradise ! One thing at least is certain-Tliis Life flies; . |;, One thing is certain and the rest is lies; s\ The flower that once has blown for ever dies. Later Pessimistic Poets :- •
The pessimism of some later Victorian poets is more ”modern” than ”Victorian.” Such poets include Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), John Davidson (1857-1905), Ernest Dowson (1867-1900), A. E. Housman (1859-1936), with some lesser ones who may not detain us here.
After the adverse reception to his last novel Jude the Obscure, Hardy gave up the rest of his life to poetry. His Wessex Poems appeared in 1898, but his highest poetical achievement, The Dynasts, came only after the end of the Victorian era. Hardy, as Legouis, says, ”was the poet of disillusionment.” His poetry has the qualities of. sincerity and technical excellence. Davidson’s Fleet Street Eclogues (1893-96) and Ballads and Songs (1894) are also charged with pessimism. He, say Grierson and,Smith, was ”a little of the spasmodic; apt when strongly
r i
;’’j,.>» f.f-
moved and angry to over-spur his Pegasus and grow a little shrill.” However, he is splendid not unoften, particularly in his ballads. Dowson was particularly influenced by Verlaine, the cynical French poet of the nineteenth century. Housman’s Shropshire Lad came out in 1896. This work is steeped in a stoically pessimistic and somewhat oppressive spirit. In it, to quote Joseph Warren Beach, ”the fragrance of gallant youth and love is distilled in the glittering alembic of fate and death and’gather ye rosebuds’ sung to a bitter, but haunting tune.”
/ PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY
72- Discuss the main features of the Pre-Raphaelite poetry.
(Rohilkhand 1991) Or
Write a comprehensive critical essay on (he PreRaphaelite School cf English Poetry (Rohilkhand 1989)
Or Attempt an essay on the Pre-Repbadite School of Poetry.
(Rohilkhand 1984) Or
Write a brief essay on one of the following :~
(d) The Pre-Raphaelites
(and three more topics). (Agra 1989) ~
Or
Write a note on Pre-Raphaelitism with special reference to the poetry of 0. G. Rossetti. (Punjab 1960)
Or
Describe the aims and achievements of the PreRaphaelite movement (Punjab 1976)
Or
Write an essay on the Pre-Raphaelite movement in English poetry (Gorakhpur 1982)
Or
Bring out the principal characteristic* of the Pr* Raphaelite School of poetry and give an account of the. poets of the school. (Agra 1972)
Q.
O,
Q.
Q.
Q.
Q.
Q.
Pre-Raphaelite Poetry / 453 Introduction :•
The Pre-Raphaelite movement, which was initiated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the mid-nineteenth century, was originally not a literary but an artistic movement. Rossetti, himself a painter (and a poet as well), felt that contemporary painting had become too formal, academic^nd unrealistic. He desired to see it taken back to the realism, sensuousness, and devotion to detail which characterise the art of the Italian painters before Raphael. Raphael (1483-1520) was, no doubt, an excellent and noted painter of his day, but Rossetti and his ilk perhaps rightly thought that he had started the movement towards academism in art. Led by Rossetti some painters organised themselves in London in 1848 into a group which came to-be called the ”PreRaphaelite Brotherhood.” Apart from Rossetti, William Hofman Hunt, John Millais, Thomas Woolner,and James Coilinson were the important members of this group. In painting, they broke the shackles of stereotyped traditions. Like Rousseau they effected ”a return to Nature” by giving up the bulk of traditionaliscd sophistication which had accumulated over the centuries after Raphael. The creed of the Pre- , Raphaelite Brotherhood was ”an entire adherence to the simplicity of art.” Ruskin, who came to champion the cause of the Pre-Raphaelites in the teeth of severe opposition, said that ”they imitate no pictures : they paint from nature only.” And again : ”Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape background is painted to the last touch in the open air from the thing itself.. Every minute accessory is painted in the same manner.” And when he said this, he said a great deal. The anti-conventionalism of the Pre-Raphaelites marks them as neo-romantics. Literary Repercussions :-
Rossetti and some other members of the Brotherhood were both painters and poets. Consequently, Pre-Raphaelitism, not remaining confined to painting, made itself felt in English poetry. The qualities which distinguished Pre-Raphaelite painting also characterised PreRaphaelite poetry. In poetry the movement came in the shape of a revolt against contemporary poetry of the k«nd of Tennyson’s which was full of tradition and involved in the immediate, mundane problems of contemporary society. To justify their ideas, the Brotherhood started a periodical publication, The Germ, which did not, however, extend beyond four numbers. As an organised group the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood ceased to exist beyond the early 1850’s. But with the meeting of Rossetti and William Morris in 1856. ;he movement was revitalised. Other poets like Swinburne, Covent;/ Patmore,and .Austini Dobson also came under Rossetti’s influence. But they did not go unattacked. Robert Buchanan came out with a stinging onslaught on
I
TUfc.
454 / A History of English Literature
Pre-Raphaelite P»>ciry / 455
***«-
V”
what he considered was the indecently erotic nature of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. This attack was delivered in his article The Fleshly School of Poetry. Rossetti and Swinburne were quick to join issues with him, and the result was a fair mass of polemics. The Antecedents of Pre-Rapnaelitlsm :-
Before we discuss the features of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, it will be profitable to cast a glance at the antecedents of Pre-Raphaelitism. First, of course, was the work of thirteenth-century Italian poets, which like that of the compatriot painters of the same age, was marked by sensuousness, devotion to detaiLand realism. A kind of mysticism and love of symbolism also characterised their work. Next, there was Spenser whose poetry in its symbolism, sensuousness, and mystical overtones is near Pre-Raphaelite poetry. Last but not least was the poetry of nineteenth.century English romantic poets, particularly Keats. Saintsbury in A History of Nineteenth Century Literature considers Pre-Raphaelitism a direct and legitimate development of the Romantic Revival in England. Coleridge’s supernaturaiism, Keats’* sensuousness, Shelley’s mysticism, Wordsworth’s concern for ”the meanest flower that blows”~all merge into the poetry of the PreRaphaelites. The Pre-Raphaelites’ insistence on realism has to be taken with a grain of salt. In poetry, at last, they were as keen escapists as most of the Romantics themselves bad been. A critic observes: ”Despite their professed aim of realism, the Pre-Raphaelite poet tended ultimately toward the creation of a poetic realm in which medievalism, musicality, and vague religious feeling combined to achieve a narcotically escapist effect”. Lastly we may mention Tennyson himself, the metrical artist and r-nnoisseur of sounds. /Salient Features :-
Let us now consider the salient features of Pre-Raphaelite poetry.
(1) Break with Tradition :-
Pre-Raphaelite poetry broke with the set tradition of poets like Tennyson. The Pre-Rephaelites revolted against the over-concern of poets like Tennyson with contemporary socio-political problems. Consequently, none of the Pre-Raphaelites concerns himself with sordid realism and the mundane issues of his day, but escapes to a dream-world of his own making.
(2) Medievalism :-
This dream-world is often provided by the Middle Ages which had, even before the Pre-Raphaelites, exercised a strong hold on the minds of some Romantics like Coleridge, Keats, and Scott. Medieval Italy, being the land of artists before Raphael, held for them a very special attraction. The medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites had ”a subtle something” which differentiates it from that of the Romantics before
I
them. Saintsbury observes in. this context : The return of thus ’school was to a medievalism different from the tentative and scrappy medievalism of Percy, from the genial but slightly superficial medievalism of Scott, and even from the more exact but narrow and distinctly conventional medievalism of Tennyson.” Some PrcRaphaelites, such as Hunt and Millais the painter, were somewhat sceptical of medievalism but Rosscttt and Morris, in particular, felt a compulsive fascination for the romance,, chivalry, gorgcousncss, mystery and supcrnaluralism of the Middle”Ages;”Many of Rossctii’s poems (like Tlie Blessed Damozcl and Sister Helen) arc redolent of the spirit of the Middle Ages. ”As a medievalist” says Cpmplon-Rickelt in A History of English Literature : ”Rossctti is obviously in congenial surroundings for the mingled warp of sensuousncss and supcrscnsuousness, so characteristic of the Middle Ages, suited to a nicety his peculiar .genius.” However, it was Rossetti alone who, among the members of the original Brotherhood, exalted medievalism to a cult. Later, Morris also came under the medieval spell. Morris was particularly interested in Chaucer, the fourteenth-century English poet. Though there is no resemblance worth the name between Morris and Chaucer, yet Morris* interest in the Middle Ages (to which Chaucer belonged) is noteworthy. Like Rossetti he found asylum from the sordidness of contemporary life in the splendour of the Middle Ages. Most of Morris’ works (such as Cuinever and Other Poems, The Haystack in Hie Flood, and some poems in the collection Eartlily Paradise) are steeped in the medieval spirit. Explaining Morris* return to the Middle Ages, Alfred Noyes observes in William Morris (English Men of Letters) : ”Morris turned to the Middle Ages hot as a mere aesthete seeking an anodyne, not as an aesthetic scholar composing skilful exercises, but as a child turns to the fairy land.” (3) Devotion to Detail :-
The Pre-Raphaelites, as a rule, bothered more about the particular than about the general Both in their painting and their poetry ws corns across a persistent tendency to dwell scrupulously on each and every detail, however minor or even insignificant by itself. They do not wield a broad and hurried brush, but love to linger on details for their own sake. They tried to paint the thing itself-not a traditional copy of it. For a perfect faithfulness of description the fidelity to details was, therefore, necessary. Sometimes this concern for details degenerates into a mannerised trick,, but very often it strikes the reader with a forceful, concrete effect, nuking for freshness of perception. It rasy be pointed out that even before the Prc- Raphaelite*, in sosae poems such As Tennyson’s Mariana, Coleridge’s Christabel, and Keats’i The Eve of StMark) this tendency to linger on simple details is discernible. Indeed, Christabe) has rightly been called ”lie first Prc R.upli*f fe> pw*\ *
456 / A History of English Literature
The details we have been talking about arc purely visual in painting, but in poetry they may be auditory as well as visual. Pre-Raphaelite poets love both visual and auditory details. Now to take some examples. Sec the closing lines of Rossetti’,4 Last Confession : She had a mouth
Made to bring death of life-the underlip
Sucked in, as if it strove to kiss itself;
Her face was pearly pale.
Again, note the details in the very first stanza of The Blessed Damozel:
The. blessed Damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than lite deptli
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
The thi.’d and fourth lines are suggestive as well as concrete, but the last two lines could have been written by Defoe himself. Consider, again, the following passage from Morns’ Golden Wings:
There were five swans thai nevqr did eat
TJie water-weeds, for ladies came
Each day, and young knights did the same
And gave them cakes and bread for meat.
As an illustration of the abundance of auditory details, see the following passage from Rossetti’s My Sister’s Sleep:
Twelve struck. Tlie sound, by dwindling years
Heard in each hour crept off, and then
Tlie ruffled silence spread again
Like water that a pebble stirs.
’Oifr iirffiner’rWSJi’Km where she sat :
Her needles, as she laid them down,
Mst lightly, and her silken gown
Settled; no other noise than that. (4) Sensuousness :-
Like Rossetti most Pre-Raphaelites were painters as well as poets.
That explains much of the sensuousness of their poetry as well as their
loving concern for details. Much of their poetry is as concrete as
pointing. Referring to Rossetti, Corapton-Rickett observes: That the
pictorial element is more insistent in Rossetti than in Keats is obviously
1. Defoe also loves to dwell on concrete details to lend Tits tales a
good degree of verisimilitude. He tells u \ for instance, how many
limes the parrot spoke and how many biscuits Robinson Crusoe
ate.
Pre-Raphaelite Poetry / 457
due to the fact that Rossetti’s outlook on the world is essentially that of the painter. He thinks and feels in pigments.” Out this thinking and feeling ”in pigments” sometimes leads the Pre-Raphaelites to excess, giving rise to two defects:
(i) Too much concern for detail without thematic relevance or any other functional significance. For instance, see the following lines from Rossetti’s My Sister’s Sleep :
Without, there was a cold moon up, Of winter radiance sheer and thin; The hollow halo it was in Was like an icy crystal cup..
(ii) Excessive recourse to colourful decoration which within limits is pleasing enough, but becomes a cloying confection if carried beyond. As a typical instance of the Pre-Raphaelite taste for decoration consider the following lines from Christina Rossetti’s A Birthday : Raise me a dais of silk and down; Hang it with vair and purple dyes ! Carve it in doves and pomegranates, And peacocks with a hundred eyes : Work it in gold and silver grapes In leaves and silverfleur-de-fys.
A quaint feature of Rossetti is his interchange of sensory functions: he appears to be capable, for instance, of hearing with his eyes and seeing with his ears. Thus in Silent Noon we have the phrase ”visible silence”, and last four (parenthetical) words in The Blessed Damozel are ”I heard her tears.” (5) Fleshly School of Poetry :-
The sensuousness of the Pre Raphaelites was considered culpable by the prudish Victorians when it came to the beauties of the human body. The Pre-Raphaelites made no bones about the exhibition of their voluptuous tendencies. But it is difficult to charge them with grossness or immorality. Swinburne and others strongly reacted to the charge of Buchanan that the poetry of their school was ”fleshly.” Such poems as Rossetti’s Troy Town and The House of Life are somewhat ”fleshly,” but Rossetti is not an indecent sensualist as he deals with the physical body as something interfused with the inner character and even the spirit itself. Swinburne, however, was much too daring. Grierson and Smith observe : ”Never since Venus and Adonis, Hero and Leandet and the Songs and Sonnets of Donne had the passion of the senses been presented with such daring frankness.” Swinburne struck the readers with as intense a feeling of shock mixed with amazement as Byron had done before him. Indeed, it is to be admitted that the Pre-Raphaelites had an emotional overplus which led them to excessive sensuousness not
f
458 / A History of English Literature
entirely free from the immoral taint. Swinburne by his ”protracted adolescence rather than by adult passion”, paints, as A. C. Ward puts it, ”the bitter blossoms of fierce kisses, the Hps intertwined and bitten, the bruised throats and bosoms, the heaving limbs^he dead desires and barren lusts.” All this is ”fleshly” enough. (6) Metre aod Music :-
Pre-Raphaelite poetry is rich not only in pictorial quality but also in music. The trouble is that the Pre-Raphaelites go to excess in both. Swinburne exhibits both the merits and demerits of being over-musical. The excessive use of alliteration and onomatopoeic effects makes often for a cloying sweetners. Legouis observes: vowels call to vowels and consonants to consonants, and these links often seem stronger than the links of thought or imagery.” According to Compton-Rickett, Swinburne’s effects are harmonic rather than melodic. As an instance, see the following lines from his Tristram ofLyonesse (1882):
Nor shall they feel or fear, whose date is done,
Aught that made once more dark the living sun
And bitterer in their breathing lips the breath
Than the dark dawn and bitter dust of death.
Alliteration is good if it does not become a persistent mannerism, and if it does not ”out-sound” the sense.
D. G. ROSSETTI AS A PRE-RAPHAELITE POET
Q.73 Write a short essay on any one of the following :• •;• (b) D. G. Rossetti as a Pre-Raphaelite poet.
(and three more topics). (Punjab 1963)
Introduction :-
D.G. Rossetti was the founder and the most important member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which came into being in 1848. Initially, the Pre-Raphaelite Movement was meant to wean contemporary painting from academism and take it back to realism, sensuousness, and devotion to detail-qualities which characterised the work of the Italian painters before Raphael (1483-1529). The members of the Brotherhood intended to sweep away the dust of traditionalised sophistication which had been accumulating over the centuries in the field of painting. They abjured all unrealistic methods and exalted photographic representationalism.
D. G. Rossclti as a Pre-Raphaelite Poet 1459
Rossetti and some other members of ”P. R. B.” were both painters -nd poets. It was natural, therefore, for the new movement to make itself fek tn the field of poetry also. In poetry, too, the movement came in the form of a revolt against tradition-the poetic tradition of Tennyson. The poetry of Tennyson and other representative Victorians was felt by the brethren to be too academic and too much concerned with
”” contemporary social problems. They believed in ”art for art’s sake” and therefore scorned to soil the wings of their Muse by letting her fly too near the earth. Among the major Pre-Raphaelite poets art Rossetti himself, Morris, and Swinburne. It is impossible to discuss’the works of all of them as if they were of a piece. Each one of these poets has his own individuality, and the poetry of each has itself varying shades from page to page. Nevertheless, we can discover some common links which run through the bulk of the work of all. Of all the Pre-
7 Raphaelites, D. G. Rossetti is, to use Compton-Rickett’s words, ”the most distinguished representative.”
Revolt against Tradition :-
Rossetti rebelled both in painting and poetry against the set academic traditions. In poetry he departed from the tradition which considered poetry to be ”a criticism of life” and which required it to be full of ”high seriousness.1” Unlike Tennyson Rossetti deals with no socio-political problems of the day. He refuses to take congnizance of the distressing and pressing problems of his age, and leaves it to Tennyson and Arnold to worry their heads over the contemporary conflict between Science and Faith. Rossetti’s cult is the cult of art and beauty. It is perhaps only in Jenny that he seems willing to look at a contemporary (rather universal) problem-that of prostitution. But
^ even there he prescribes no remedies. His treatment of prostitution is rather diagnostic than prophylactic. He, like other Pre-Raphaelites,
| loves to dwell in a dream-world of his own.
His Medievalism :•
This ”dream-world” is mostly provided by the Middle Ages. The medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites hada’subtle something” which
4 individualised it. A critic observes: The return of this school was to a rocdievalism different from the tentative and scrappy medievalism of ; Percy, from the genial but slightly superfical medievalism of Scott, and cv*n from the more exact but narrov, and distinctly conventional Medievalism of Tennyson.” ”As a medievalist,” says Compton-Rickett, Rossetti is obviously in congenial surrounding, for the mingled warp °f sensuousness and supersensuousness, so characteristic of the MidfJe_Ages,suited to a nicety his peculiar genius.” Many of his poems
I • Both these expression* are Matthew Arnold’s.
\
460 / A History of English Literature
recapture the mystery, splendour, and beauty of the Middle Ages, the romantic medievalists before Rossetti-Scbu, Keats, and Coleridge-were fascinated for different reasons. Rossetti’s interest in the Middle Ages was due to al I these reasons. Witness Compton- Rickett’s opinion : ”The human elements of old romance were finely apprehended by Scott and William Morris; the sensuous elements attracted Keats; the mystic elements inspired Coleridge. But no »one poet has gathered up-all these elements in the way that Rossetti nas done.”
Sense of Mystery :•
Two of these three ”diverse elements” need elaboration. They are:- (i) mysticism; and (ii) sensuousness.
To begin with, let us take mysticism, which we will treat in the sense of ”suggestion of mystery” rather than a spiritual creed exalting transcendentalism or intuition. In his ability to create a sense of mystery, Rossetti sometimes approaches Coleridge himself. Take, for example, the following stanza from The Blessed Damozel: The sun was gone now; the curled moon Was like a little feather Fluttering far down the gulf and now She spoke through the still weather; Her voice was like the voice the stars Had when they sang together.
Consider, again, the following lines from Sister Helen :
Here high up in the balcony,
Sister Helen,
The moon flies face to face with me; Outside it’s merry in the wind’s wake,
Sister Helen.
In the shaken trees the chill stars shake, Hush, heard you a horse tread as you spoke;-
Little brother?
Rightly does Corapfon-Rickett point out: ”Coleridge alone could match the haunting mystery of lines like these.” Again consider the very opening lines which, with a question, the answer, and the refrain create a sense of sinister mystery:
’Why did you melt your waxen men,
Sister Helen?
To-day is the third since you began’. ’The time was long, ytt the time ran, tittle brother.
Bf D. G. Rossetti as a Pre-Raphaelite Poet / 461
*’ O Mother, Mary Mother,
Tliree days to-day, between Hell and Heaven! For instances of Rossetti’s successful attempts at creating a sense of mystery, consider also the following lines:
Words whose silence wastes and kills. Girt in dark growths, yet glimmering with one star, *• The spacious vigil of the stars.
Devotion to Detail :-
The Pre-Raphaelites, as a rule, bothered more about the particular than about the general. Both in their painting and poetry we come across a persistent tendency to dwell scrupulously on each and every detail however insignificant by itself. They do not wield a broad and hurried brush, but love to linger, Spenser-like, on details. Of course, •? for faithfulness of representation, fidelity to details is necessary. However, sometimes this over-concern for details degenerates into a mannerism, though as often it also strikes the reader with a forceful, concrete effect. In a word, this tendency to overprize minor details is open to two dangers as follows:
(i) It may involve, as Samuel C. Chew avers, ”the sacrifice of central emphasis.”
(ii) It may not serve any functional purpose at all. Consider in this context the following stanza from My Sister’s Sleep. The detailed and very concrete picturing of the moon arrests the attention of the reader at once, but the poem would not have suffered functionally without it. Without there was a cold moon up, Of winter radiance sheer and tliin; Tl\e hollow halo it was in •* Was like an icy crystal cup.
But quite often Rossetti’s attention to details functional as well as felicitous. It may be pointed out that, even before Rossetti, quite a few poets- such as Tennyson (Mariana), Coleridge1 (Christabef) and Keats (The Eve of St. Mark) had shown this tendency to linger on simple and minute details. Spenser/was perhaps the pioneer in this field. So Rossetti and other Pre-RaphaeliteA were just cultivating a tendency
I” * which was already thcre-though not in the same intensity. In painting, the xletaiis~are only of the visual kind, but in poetry ’hey may be auditory as well. Rossetti in his poetry gives importance to both auditory and visual details. Consider some examples. First, the dosing lines of A Last Confession (written after the manner of Browning’s dramatic monologues like My Last Duchess) ’.
– r1-• –’ ’ ••- • •-• ’ – ’’ –…- -•-
1. Christabel has well been called, the first Pre-Raphaelite poem.”
462 / A History of English Literature
a
She had a mouth • f . :AO’ |
Made to bring death to life-the u’nderiip |
Sucked in, as if it strove to kiss itsel;
Her face was pearfy pale.
Again, note die visual details in die very first stanza of his first important poem The Blessed Damozel:
Tlie blessed Damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of HeavenShe had three lilies in her hand
And tl\e stars in her hair were seven.
The following lines horn Jenny picture the young prostitute sleeping with her head on the speaker’s knee:
Why, Jenny, you ’re asleep at last l-
Asleep, poor Jenny, hard andfast,-
So young and soft and tired; so fait ’•
With chin thus nestled in your hair,
Mouth quiet, eyelids almost blue
As if some sky of dreams shone through}
As an illustration of the abundance of auditory details see the following lines from My Sister’s Sleep:
Twelve struck; the sound, by dwindling years
Heard in each hour, crept off, and then
The ruffled silence spread again,
Like water that a pebble stirs.
Our mother rose from where she sat;
Her needles, as she laid them down,
Met lightfyfand her silken gown
Settled; no other noise than tltat.
Sensuousness :•
The accumulation of such sensory details make for sensuousness which has come to be recognized as one of the fundamental characteristics of all Pre-Raphaelite poetry. Rossetti, like several other members of the ”P. R. B.; was a painter as well as a poet. It is not inexplicable, therefore, that he treated poetry as if it were painting. Compton-Rickett observes: That the pictorial element is more insistent in Rossetti than in Keats is obviously due to the fact that Rossetti’s outlook on the world is essentially that of the painter. He thinks and feel in pigments.” Too much of ’thinking and feeling in pigments” can also lead him to some defects. The two major defects are:
(i) Indulgence in over-decoration,
(ii) When related to the human body, the. impression of sensuality or voluptuousness may be created. –
D. G. Rossetti as a Pre-Raphaelite Poet / 453
We will consider the second under the next sub-head. Let us here give some examples of the Rdssetti’s overwrought pictorialness which first pleases but then cloys the reader. The following illustrative lines are from The Bride’s Prelude:
The belt was silveii and the clasp
Oflozenged arm-bearings;
A world of mirrored tints minute
The rippling sunshine wrought into *t,
That flushed her hand and warmed her foot. Or, again :
Deep in the sun-searched growths, the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky. Compton-Rickett observes that” likeKeats, he is carried away at times by this [intensity of sense impressions] into an ultra-opulence of illustration that weakens his work as an artist.” When Rossetti shuns this ”ultra-opulence” he can execute excellent pictorial effects-such as the following (in Jenny):
…your fair face I see Reflected tying on my knee, Where teems witli first foreshadowing Your pier-glass scrawled with diamond rings : And on your bosom all night worn yesterday’s rose now droops alone, 9-
But dies not yet this summer mom. •Fleshly” :-
As said above, Rossetti’s sensuousness often takes the shape of voluptuousness when it comes to dwell upon the beauties of the human body. The Pre-Raphaelites, particularly Swinburne, exulted in the graces of the feminine body, and thus scandalised the prudish Victorians. Buchanan attacked Pre-Raphaelite poetry as the ”fleshly school of poetry”-eyen though later he withdrew his charge. In some Rossetti poemsjsuch as Tory Town and many sonnets in The House of Life, we do come across ”fleshly” details, even though he is much less candid than Swinburne. Even in Jenny he strikes the voluptuous note in the lines quoted below:
Why Jenny, as I watch you there,-
For all your wealth of loosened hair,
Your silk ungirdled and unlac ’d
And warm sweets open to the waist,
All golden in the lamplight gleam.
Rossetti was three quarters Italian; and he treated passion fundamentally as a hot-blooded Italian rather than a hoity-toity Englishman. Italy has been a land of eroticism peopled by seasoned volup-
’fc.
464 / A History of English Literature
-w
tuaries since times immemorial. There is in Rossetti a frank admission of passion and its sensuous, even sensual, contours. But he is seldom coarse or ribald. All the sensuous details of the body and passion are artistically delivered «with considerable finesse which cushions any shock which the sensibility of the reader might be otherwise subject to. Moreover, to quote Cbmpton-Rickett, ”senses were for Rossetti sacramental emblems of the spirit.” The sensuous and the spiritual often merge and mingle in his pictures. He can well say:
The soul I know not from thy body, nor
Tlteefrom myself, neither our love from CodWhei he is too voluptuous he tries to spiritualise everything, as he does in the following lines from Tory Town, where the parenthetical refrain is used as a vaguely spiritualising device:
Heayenbom Helen, Sparta’s queen.
(O Troy Town I)
Had two breasts of heavenly sheen,
The sun and moon of the heart’s desire.
All Love’s lordship lay between.
Metre and Musk :•
Pre-Raphaelite poetry is rich not only in pictorial quality but also in the musical. The trouble is that some Pre-Raphaelites, particularly Swinburne, go t Jixcess in both. Rossetti’s poetry is a model of wellmanipulated music, neither too rich nor too austere. He does not indulge in alliteration and onomatopoeia to the extent as Swinburne does. Rossetti was a successful metrical artist and he effectively made use of many stanzaic forms of his own invention. His use of various ballad measures is also very happy.
THE ART OF CHARLES DICKENS
Q. 74. Write a short essay on any one of the following :-
(b) the art of Charles Dickens, (and three more topics).
(Punjab 1963)
Introduction :-
According to David Cecil, Dickens is ”the most representative of Vlctorian novelists. Some will contend that he is also the greatest. No doubt he lacks the profundity of George Eliot, the consuming passion of the Bronte sisters, and the peculiar eclat of Thackeray, yet he surpasses them all in his basic humanity, a childlike- naivete, and an amazingly fecund imagination. These qualities place him among the foremost of all English novelists. Dickens achieved in his lifetime wide popularity among all sections of readers. Cambell, the famous Lord
. ’ The Art of Charles Dickens {455
Chief Justice, remarked that he would have been prouder of having written Pickwick Papers than of all the honours he had earned at the Bar. Dickens’ popularity overstepped the frontiers of his country and spread in most countries of Europe, as also across the Atlantic. While he was in America, he received a hero’s welcome everywhere. Children festooned him as if some sort of Santa Claus had come. Even in Russia Dickens found a wonderful response. And when he died, an Italian newspaper bore very characteristically for its headline the news: ”Our Charles Dickens is dead.” Indeed, Dickens was not of his country alone but of all the world. He will be read as long as books are read. This ”forecast” is based on the fact that up to today, about a century and a quarter after his death (1870), there has been no time when his popularity suffered any noticeable decline, whereas all these years too many literary reputations have been made and marred. Dkkens and Social Reform :-.
It must be understood at the very outset that Dickens’ art is art with a purpose. In the Victorian age even poetry-perhaps the most ”aesthetic” department of literature-was approached by many writers as a handmaiden of social reform. Tennyson’s is a typical case. The Pre-Raphaelites and some others, no doubt,did not let their Muse soil her wings by allowing her to fly too close to the earth. But the PreRaphaelites were not typical Victorians. They represented a revolt rather than a tradition. Dickens did not shut himself up in an ivory tower of such a kind as ”aesthetic culture” or ”Gothicism.” In his novels he strikes from first to last a loud and clear note of humanitarianism which is the most attractive note in the Dickensian orchestra. He can be called one of the greatest social reformers of his time. That he works in earnest is unquestionable-but he does not let himself fly into tantrums or slide into the quagmire of cynicism of which the work of such social reformers as Ruskin is not altogether innocent. Many a novel of Dickens seems to have been built around a particular social theme. For instance, Bleak House attacks ”the law’s delays”; Nicholas Nickleby, the abuses of charity schools and the sadism of schoolmasters; Hard Times, the pet concepts of the then current ”political economy” which was also attacked by Ruskin and Carlyle; Little Dorrit, the inhumanities to which poor debtors are often subjected; and so forth. But above all such social criticism is the basic lesson of humaneness and charity which almost all Dickens’ novels teach implicitly or explicit ly. And then there is the most ebullient, convivial optimism of Dickens, which, even though not altogether acceptable as the last word on the philosophical exploration of life and the universe is yet acceptable for its basic good humour and throbbing humanity. An opinion runs: ”Despite its many evils-the hardness of heart and the sefishness
466 / A History of English Literature
of those in high pUces-the greed and hypocrisy which were so prevalent-the wicked class prejudices which divided man from man-the world was still for Dickens a very good world to live in.” Nowhere does Dickens say that ”all is right with the world,” but nowhere does he say either that ’all is wrong with the world.” He is a realist no less than an optimist
CharacteriMtloa :-
The fertility of Dickens’ creative imagination is simply amazing. His first novel, Pickwick Papers, had a swarming mass of finely delineated characters, and he kept up the pace of supply for all the subsequent novels. One very peculiar feature of Dickens’ work as a novelist is that his novels, when joined together, create a world of their own, somewhat different’no doubt from our world and even the real world of his own day but none-the-less akin to both in mauy ways. We cannot exactly talk of the world of Thackeray’s or George Eliot’s novels, but we can talk of the world of Dickens’ novels which has very recognizable contours and peculiarities and which is full of characters whom we know better than even our aunts and uncles. Take any character from Dickens. He seems every inch a denizen of Dickens’ world. We generally find it difficult to recall to which novel he belongs, but we do not find it difficult to say to which world he belongs. As a painter of the life of his day Dickens works on a very crowded canvas, and very often he uses colours which are too blazing to be compatible with reality. This brings us to the oft-repeated charge that he gives not characters but caricatures. There is some substance in the charge. But all his characters are not caricatures. After Compton-Rickett we can divide Dickens’ characters into various groups as shown below:
Dickens’s Characters I
(1)
The normal (2) The abnormal
(i) Satirical portraits (ii) The grotesques (iii) The villains
(drawn for a special purpose)
The abnormal characters do not embody ”normal” reality, but they are not essentially unrealistic. It is curious that Dickens succeeds better with the abnormal than with the normal characters. Normality does not attract him on account of being dull and ”ordinary”.
Dickens is more successful with characters drawn from the middle and lower classes of his society. As a child and young man he had seen and even experienced the life of these classes. It was in his blood even
The Art of Charles Dickens /467
after he had become a high-hat with his thumping success in the field of fiction. He is much less successful with the bigwigs and aristocracy.1 There are some set types which make their appearance much too often in Dickens’ novels. Some of them, according to a critic, are:
(i) The innocent little child, like Oliver, Joe, Paul, Tiny Tim, and little Nell, appealing powerfully to the child love in every human heart”;
(ii) ”the horrible or grotesque foil, like Squeer, Fagin, Quilp, Uriah Heep, and Bill Sykcs”;
(iii) ”the grandiloquent or broadly humorous fellow, the fun master, like Micawber and Sam Walter”;
(iv) ”and fourth, a tenderly or powerfully drawn figure like Lady Dedlock of Bleak House, and Sydney Carton oiA Tale of Two Cities, which rise to the dignity of true characters.”
Applying E. M. Forster’s distinction between ”flat” and ”round” characters to the characters of Dickens’ novels, we find that almost all of them are flat, not round. A Dickens character is usually built, like a Jonsonian ”humour,” around a single quality, and is incapable of surprising us in a convincing way. Dickens’ characters do not ”develop,” and they do not surprise. But in spite of their lack of development and their numerous oddities, they are ”living” beings, being the effusions of a tremendously vital imagination.
Plot-Construction :-
On the strictly structural side of his art, Dickens can boast only of modest success. Several of his novels mock the very ideal of structure, or even any other principle of pattern. It was only in his latest novelsBleak House, A Tale of Two Cift”ej,and Our Mutual Friend-that he was able to offer somewhat coherent plots. For the rest, they all exhibit a gross neglect of all architectonic principles. For one thing, he is always more interested in individual episodes and individual characters than in the job of integrating them into a well-proportioned pattern. Many characters-and, some of them, most interesting-serve no structural function; but they are there all Jthe same, and we too wish them to be’ there in spite of their egregious structural irrelevance. Among such characters may be mentioned Mrs. Gamp, Mr. Micawber, Mr. Crummels, and Flora Pinching. As a novelist, Dickens is a traditionalist, as he accepts the formal pattern of the novel handed over to him by Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett-his love from, childhood. Some of
1. ”….his pictures of the upper classes are almost always prejudiced and exaggerated, generally inaccurate, seldom kindly.” ~ Samuel C. Chew, A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh, p. 1351.
2. But he forgets the lesson of Fielding whose Tom Jones is a neplus ultra of structure.
468 / A History of English Literature
his novels depict the career of the hero from his infancy till manhood. This naturally involves him in the handling of a mass of vicissitudes as variegated as life itself. To impose even a passable unity on the sprawling episodes representing these vicissitudes is definitely beyond him.
One of the very important reasons for the weakness of the structural unity of Dickens’ novels is to be so*ught in the mode of their original publication: they were published serially in newspapers. Now, the serial mode of publication asks for a particular kind of discipline on the part of the author, but it is also excessively detrimental to the structural pattern of the novels so published. From month to month or week to week or fortnight to fortnight (as the case may be) the author goes on and on without having a clear idea as to what he is heading for. He receives letters from fans asking him to give this or that turn to the events-to kill a character, to make someone rich or poor, to arrange a marriage, and so on. And he obliges some. In every instalment there has to be some ”kick.” Between one instalment and the next, organic development naturally suffers, because the author sends one instalment and goes about whistling till the time for the next compels him to take pen in hand once again. It is natural, therefore, for Dickens’ novels to be ill-constructed, ”\fery often” observes David Cecil, ”he leaves a great many threads loose till the last chapter; and then finds there is not enough time to tie them up neatly. The main strands are knotted roughly together, the minor wisps are left hanging forlornly.”
Humour :-
But we readily excuse Dickens’ architectonic deficiency the moment we take congnizance of his humour. Humour is the very soul of his work. It presents his novels from becoming tiresome and itself is not tiresome. He is never a bore, as Thackeray is sometimes, and George Eliot not unoften. Dickens’ humour arises from a deep human sympathy and is ever fresh and refreshing. It is customary to compare him with such great humorists before him as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Fielding. Sometimes his humour is corrective and satiric-but it always has the quality of geniality, charity, and tolerance. Humour with him is not only an occasional mood but a consistent point of view, and even a ”philosophy of life.” His comic fertility is indeed amazing. We have above referred to Dickens’ ”world.” This world is peopled by a vast number af humorous characters. Dickens is at his best in what is called the humour of character. We meet with few Falstaffs in his novels, but his ”comic fecundity” is greater than Shakespeare’s.
It must be admitted that Dickens’ humour is not very subtle. As a humorist he does not rise to the subtlety even of Fielding and Thackeray. Fielding was often as coarse and farcical as Dickens-and some-
1
The Art of CharlesDickens/469
times even surpassed him; however, that profundity of sustained ironical attitude which we find in bis Jonathan Wilde lies obviously beyond the capability of Dickens. Dickens’ humour is superficial rather than profound. Very often it is of the nature of full-blooded farce or caricature. In most of his characters we find a persistent reiteration of one particular note which becomes comic simply because of the number of times it is flaunted for our attention-very like the comic snatch of a circus buffoon, which is greeted with uproarious laughter when it comes after, say, the third time. Mr. Micawber always waiting for something tp ”turn up”, Barkis who is always ”willing”, Mrs. Gummidge always complaining that things are going contrary with her-all are abundantly comic figures; but they lack any subtle or profound touch. Pathos :-
But in one way, at least, Dickens’ humour rises above being a flashy, superficial affair, and that is its porximity to pathos. Like Lamb’s, Dickens’ laughter is never far from tears. He makes us smile sometimes through our tears. It will be unfair to say that he is entirely superficial, even though splendidly superficial, and ignorant of the tragic facets of life. Life he views as a tragi-comedy, and if he laughs and laughs, he does so not because he is unaware of the tragic part of it, but because his attitude is ”healthy” and untainted by morbidity. In such novels as Hard Times he manifests a surprisingly profound knowledge of and concern for some fundamental problems of the machine age which his England had begun to take congnizance of. And his treatment of these problems is far from frivolous.
Dickens was as considerably influenced by Goldsmith and Sterne as by Fielding and Smollet. Sterne’s sentimentalisin and rather hypersensitive human sympathy as also Goldsmith’s fundamental sweetness and fellow-feeling often make themselves felt in Dickens’ work. The earliest attempt made by Dickens at the delineation of the pathetic is to be found in his very first novel Pickwick Papers-tiie, death of the Chancery prisoners. He is wonderfully successful in delineating the pathos of child life. As a child, he himself had suffered much, and his accounts of such life are always redolent of his personal experiences. Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, David Coppe^ield, and many more novels are rich in pathetic accounts of fhe lives of their heroes in childhood. What is more, pathos in them mingles and merges with humour, creating very peculiar effects.
Autobiographic Touches :-
A peculiar feature of Dickens’ art as novelist is his tendency to be autobiographic. He constantly draws upon his own expen«a<u:, acd UK
470 / A History of English Literature
sympathies and antipathies which we find so persistenly manifested by him in his work very often have their origin in the years of his adolescence. Many of his novels are the records of his own life-though modified by subjection to the canons of art. Thus David Copperfield is, in essentials, Dickens’ autobiography. Oliver Twist uses a lot of material supplied by his own experience of the low life of London in his tender years. In Bleak House he draws substantially upon his early knowledge of law courts and legal affairs. He recollects his school days in Nicholas Nickleby. And so forth.
Conclusion :-
In spite of the formidable number of flaws and limitations from which Dickens’ art as a novelist suffers, he is a great novelist. His humour, basic human sympathy, and his rich, vitalising imagination are his basic assets, even though he is deficient in the architectural skill as well as other formal and ”technical” qualifications as a novelist. He may be coarse and superficial, but we must remember that he is never a bore. And when that is said, much is!
THE WOMEN NOVELISTS OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
5. Discuss the chief women novelist of the early 19th century.
(GNDU1994)
century.
Or
Q.
Q. Examine the contribution to English novel of the major women novelists of the Victorian era. (Rohilkhand 1990)
Or
Q. Write a note on the important women novelists of Victorian Age with special reference to George Eliot
(Rohilkhand 1981)
(Companion Question). Comment on the work of the major women novelists of the 19tB -ntury
(Punjab 1976) Introduction :-
The Victorian era is known for the galax, of female novelists that it threw up. They include Mrs. Trollope, Mrs. Gore, Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Bray, Mrs. Henry Wood, Charlotte Yunge, Mrs. OHphant, Mrs.
The Women Novelists of the Victorian Era / 471
Lynn Lynton, M. E. Braddon, ”Ouida,” Rhoda Broughton, Edna Lyall, and still many more now justly forgotten, but the four most important women novelists, who yet are quite important, arc :
(i) Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) *
(ii) Emlle Bronte (1818-1848)
,(iii) Mrs Gaskell (1810-1865)
(iv) George Eliot (1819-1880)
Mrs. Gaskell may need some special pleading for being included among the rank of the great women novelists of the Victorian era, but as for the rest, their place in the history of English literature appears to be secure enough. Of the four, the two first-named were sisters and their methods and achievements as novelists met at many planes. But each of the remaining two pursued her own line and made herself known in the field of English novel in her own particular way.
After these preliminary remarks, let us consider individually the work and achievement of the important women novelists of the Victorian era.
Charlotte Bronte :•
The three Bronte sisters-Anne, Charlotte, and Emily-collectively known often as the ”stormy sisterhood,” who took the England of their time by storm, were in actual life shy and isolated girls with rather uneventful lives. All of them died young and died of turbercuiosis as their two other ”non-literary” sisters did. They were daughters of a strict Irish parson who made them lead a life of what Corhpton-Rickett calls, ”the sternest self-repression.1’ But behind their outwardly rippleless lives lurked tempest-tossed souls which found an outlet in their novels which are all so patently autobiographic. They poured their inner life into the mould of the novel. This consideration leads Hugh Walker to assert : ”The Brontes belong to that class of writers whom it is ’ impossible to understand except through the medium of biography.” But too much of preoccupation with biography should not be allowed to lead us to a lopsided appreciation of their novels. Thus Samuel C. Chew observes: The three Bronte sisters have been overlaid with so much biography, criticism, and conjecture that in reading about them there is danger lest th own books be left unread.” Charlotte B ronte wrote the following four novels: .
(i) The Professor
(ii) Vittette
(Hi) Jane Eyre
(iv) Shirley
The first two novels were based on her personal experiences at a Brussels boarding-house where she most probably fell in love with the
3
472 / A History of English Literature
Belgian scholar Heger who perfectly answered her conception of a dashing hero of the Byronic type. Her soul had always yearned for such a Lochmvar, but she being the daughter of a village parson, the men who made proposals to her actually were lacklustre curates with one of whom she ultimately settled down in 1854–a year before her death. But she worshipped a dashing, splendid, masculine figure as Heger was. Her frustrated passion for him provides the groundwork of her first two novels. The heroine of her third novel is a governess, just like her sister Anne. Her tempestuous love-affair with Rochester–a combination of wonderful nobility and meanness is the staple of this novel. In Shirley, to quote Legouis, ”she set a story of intimate emotion against a background of Yorkshire in the time of the industrial disturbances.” Perhaps the elemental and unchastened presence of the Yorkshire moor among which the Brontes lived is to some extent responsible for the fierce passions and elemental emotions which are characteristic of their works.
Charlotte Bronte in her novels revolted against the traditions of Jane Austen, Dickens, and Thackeray. Thackeray’s Vanity. Fair she praised in glowing terms, but she herself never attempted anything of the kind. Her novels arc novels not of manners but of passions and the naked soul. Her characters-mostly the effusions of her own soul-are elemental figures acting in the backdrop of elemental nature. The social paraphernalia is altogether dispensed with. ”Gone”, says David Cecil, ”is the busy prosaic urban wor’d with its complicated structure and its trivial motives, silenced the accents of everyday chatter, vanished are newspapers, fashions, business houses, duchesses, footmen, and snobs. Instead the gale rages under the elemental sky, while indoors, their faces rugged in the fierce firelight, austere figures of np clearly defined class or period declare eternal love and hate to one another in phrases of stilted eloquence and staggering candour/
According to Compton-Rickett three characteristics ”detach themselves from ths writings of Charlotte Bronte.” They are: (i) the note of intimacy, (ii) the note of passion; and (iii) the note of revolt.
The note of intimacy is caused by the markedly autobiographic slant of her novels. The note of passion is struck by a lonely sensitive-woman on behalf of another woman. Her point of view is specifically the point of view of a woman. Like Mrs. Browning she effectually represents in her life and novels the pangs of a forlorn woman whose Prince Charming is yet to come. She pictures and highlights the primeval woman. As regards the note of revolt, we must point out that she was a rebel by nature and a Puritan by training. She could not reconcile these two elements, ”Charlotte”, says Compton-Rickett, ”had the soul of a primi-
Tlic Women Novelists of the Victorian Era / 473
live woman, leashed in by a few early Victorian conventions, and she is always straining against the leash while upbraiding at herself for doing so.” Though she did not fully, or even appreciably, revolt against social conventions, she at least revolted against the prevailing conventions of the novel.
Emily Bronte :-
Emily was a poet as well as a novelist, and her only novel Wuthcrinx Heights is a p<wm as well as a novel. ”There is no other book,” says Legouis, ”which contain*; so many of the troubled, tumultuous, and rebellious elements of romanticism.” She is fiercer than even Charlotte, but her fierceness is strangely accompanied by numerous strokes of intuitive illumination. She looks like a Byron in petticoats. She is also a rebel, but her rebelliousness is tempered by a sense of spirituality. She expresses, as very few do, the Infinite passion And the pain of finite hearts that yearn.
Wulhcring Heights is a .story of primal passions enacted amongst elemental environment. Catherine Earnshaw in her wild ness and beauty is like a panther. Healhcliff, with his consuming passion for Catherine and his flaming desire for revenge, looks like a character from an ancient Greek tragedy. Catherine’s call to Healhcliff from her grave has about it all the mystery of the hidden forces of the universe. Indeed, Walter Allen observes : The central fact about Emily Bronte is that she is a mystic”. Her mysticism lies not only in her handling of the voice of the dead Catherine calling Heathcliff to her, but also in her use of symbols. It trickles in other forms throughout the novel in expressions like the following coming from Catherine:
”Nelly, I am Heathcliff! If all else perished, and he remained. I should still continue to be: and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.”
There is no evidence”, says Samuel C. Chew, that ”she was deeply read in the literature of mysticism, but there is equally no doubt that she was a mystic.” This critic believes that at least once, early in her youth, ”Emily had attained the mystical experience in its entirety.” Charlotte Bronte in Shirley also refers to Shirley’s (Emily’s) visions and truces. In many of her poems, too, Emily tries to give expression to her mystical experience; for instance, at one place she exclaims:
Speak, Cod of visions, plead for me,
And tell me why I have chosen thee.
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Mrs. Gaskell :•
Mrs. Gaskell had nothing of this passion and frustration of the Bronte sisters. She was the wife of a quiet Unitarian clergyman in Manchester-one of the buzzing centres of English industry. She was mot her of seven children, and she had, according to Walter Allen, ”what maybe called the serenity of the fulfilled* and»accepted everything with the air of, what David Cecil calls, ”serene satisfaction.” Her sense of humour and deep human sympathy are obvious manifestations of her serenity.
What distinguishes the novels of Mrs. Gaskell is her deep social consciousness combined with a compassionate observation of the life around her. Her novels divide themselves into two well-defined categories.
(1) First, we have novels like Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855) which deal with the social and industrial problems arising out of the masters-workmen struggles which were a feature of the industrial age which had then just got under way. Being herself a resident of Manchester, Mrs. Gaskell was a witness to the ”blessing” of the Industrial Revolution. She pressed into service her personal observation of the situation prevailing in ”the hungry forties.” In Mary Barton the heroine who gives her name to the title is daughter of a workman who led by the fervour of trade unionism, murders Henry Carson, a fiery master, after his wife and son are dead from starvation. The novel gives a’realistic picture of the poverty of the working classes and their animus against their masters whose crueltry is, however, considerably exaggerated by Mrs Gaskell. North and South is a realistic, thoughtful, and thought-provoking presentation of the conflict then raging between the industrial North and the feudal, agricultural South.
(2) Secondly, we have novels like Cranford, Ruth, Wives and Daughters, and Sylvia’s Lovers which eschew all industrial problems and are concerned with rural life and manners which Mrs. Gaskell knew so well, thanks to her long stay at Knutsford with her aunt, before she settled at Manchester with her husband. Of all the novels of this category the best and the best known is Cranford which is a disguised name for her own Knutsford. Cranford is a classic of its own kind. It portrays a world inhabited by women alone. These women belong to middle-class families, and their main occupation is gossip, tea-making, and tea-drinking. W. J. Long observes : The sympathy, the keen observation, and the gentle humour with which the small affairs of a country village are described make Cranford one of the most delightful stories in the English language.” In Ruth Mrs. Gaskell foreshadows the psychological novel of George Eliot. Wives and Daughters is a social comedy, and contains the character of Cynthia Kirkpatrick~”oneof the
Novelists of the Victorian Era /475
most striking young women in English fiction.” Sylvia’s Lovers is a rather didactic story in a domestic setting.
George Eliot :-
With George Eliot we come to the most philosophical of all the major Victorian novelists, both female and male. Philosophy is both her strength and weakness as a novelist. It keeps her from falling into bathos or triviality, but at the same time gives her art an ultra serious and reflective quality which makes it ”heavy reading.” Even her humour-the faculty in which she doubtlessly is quite rich-has about it the quality of ponderous reflectiveness. But often there are some aphoristic strokes wnich do tell-as the following:
”Animals arc such agreeable friends,they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.”
”What a man wants in a wife mostly is to make sure of one fool as’H tell him he’s wise.”
”I’m not denyin’ the women are foolish… God Almighty made ’em to match the men.”
”I’m not one of those who see the cat in the dairy and wonder what she’s come after.”
George Eliot’s important novels are the following: (i) The Mill on the Floss (\\)AdamBede (m)Romola • (iv) Felix Holt (v) Daniel Deronda . (vi) Middlemarch.
All of them are marked by extreme seriousness of purpose and execution. As Samuel C. Chew observes, ”in George Eliot’s hands the novel was not primarily for entertainment but for the serious discussion of moral issues.” She is, indeed, too didactic and makes every incident a text for moralistic expatiation. ”She”, says the critic just quoted, ”inculcates the importance of being earnest: but the virtues so earnestly striven after-industry, self-restraint, conscientiousness-are very drab; ’school- teacher’s virtues’ they have been tmkindly called.” In her novels we invariably meet with the clash of circumstances with the human will. She, indeed, believed that circumstances influenced character, but she did not show circumstances entirely determining character. A man called upon to choose between two women or a woman to choose between two men is the common leitmotif of her novels. She emphasizes the need for a moral choice uninfluenced by any selfish motives. She herself did not believe in any conventional moral creed and lived with Lewes as his wife without marriage, in spite of the defamatory rebukes of her priggish contemporaries. But in spite of her
476 / A History of English Literature
frank agnosticism and contempt for strait-jacketing traditionalism, she valued ethics both in her life and her work as a novelist.
Another im(K>rtanl feature of her novels is their very deep concern with human psychology. Her novels arc all novels of character. ”She”, says CompUm-Rickett, ”was the first novelist to lay the stress wholly upon character rather than incident; to make her stories spiritual rather than physical dramas.” In her characterisation she displays both subtlety and variety. Her studies of the inner man, but more particularly the inner woman, are marvellous. She puts all the emphasis on the inside, very Unit on the outside. David Cecil observes in this connexion : ”We do not remember her serious characters by their appearance or the way they talk, indeed we do not remember these things clearly at all. Her portraits arc primarily portraits of the inner man.”
George Eliot excels at portraying the tragedy of unfulfilled female longings. She identifies herself with her chief female characters and unfolds their inner feelings with masterly strokes. Compton-Rickctt points out : ”Maggie’s cry was for fuller life, Ramola’s for ampler knowledge, Darothea’s for larger opportunity for doing good.” These themes arc dealt with by George Eliot with a striking psychological profundity which makes her a very worthy forerunner of the psychological novelists like Hcary James. Let us conclude with David Cecil’s words: ”She stands at the gateway between the old novel and the new, a massive caryatid, heavy of countenance and uneasy of altitude, but noble, monumental, profoundly impressive.”
THE WORK AND LITERARY MERITS
OF CARLYLE
Q. 76. Consider the work and literary merits of two of the following :- Carlyle (and five more writers). Agra (1952)
Or Q. Attempt an appreciation of the work of Thomas Carlyle
(Punjab 1966) Or
Q. Consider the work and influence of aay two of the folkwrlaf :-
(e)Carij1* (Punjab 1972)
(and five BUMS aatners),,
The Work and Literary Merits ot uanyic / m ,
Introduction :-
”He was the greatest of the Brito»r . nis timc-and after the British fashion of not coming near perfection; Titanic, not Olympian; a heaver of rocks, not a shapcr.”
This is what Gocrgc Meredith wrote of John Carlyle at his death. Meredith’s judgement hits the bull’s eye. Carlyle was certainly a Titan who worked havoc with the pet lackadaisical notions of bis day. His strident envangclicism and inspired pronouncement had to be heard by his age and were also, to some extent, at least, translated into pracBut he was a very complex figure, and sometimes his message, though loud and vehement and fiery, was none toojclear. Anyway, he was an influence if not a reformer.
Carlyle started his literary career with his translation of a German work and his Life of Schiller (1823). Later he came out with a string of prose works which have made for him a secure niche in the realm of immortal writers. These works include Sartor Resartiis, Tlie French Revolution, Chartism, On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, Past and Present, Oliver CronwcWs Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations; Latter Day Pamphlets; Life of John Sterling, and the History of Frederick the Great.
Let us briefly discuss the more important of Carlylc’s works listed above.
”Sartor Resartus” :-
Sartor Resartus is one of the greatest works of Carlyle. There are many who consider it to be the greatest of all. A. C. Ward observes that ”it is arguably his greatest work.” It was first published in America in
1836, and the English edition came only in 1838 though the work had been published serially, in Fraser’s Magazine, years earlier. ”Sartor Resartus” literally means ”the tailor re-tailored.” It was given by Carlyle to be his edition of the work of an eccentric German philosopher of the name Herr Diogenes Teufelsodrockh. In fact, however, the work is entirely his own, and contains his famous ”clothes philosophy” which interprets the universe and its working, as also the affairs of men in terms of clothes. He seems to have taken a hint from Swift who in his A Talc of Tub attempted a similar thing, not without trenchant satire ranging over targets from tailor-worship to the most serious matters of religion and the spirit. The meaning of Carlyle’s work is to be studied and comprehended at two levels:
(i) First, society is interpreted as a body laden with a heavy load of clothes which signify deadening custom, officialdom, shams, and ras-
•478 / A History of English Literature
tcism. Once the clothes were somewhat useful ; but by constant prolonged wear they have grown a stiff, lifeless burden which, Carlylc suggests, should be shaken off.
(ii) Secondly, the universe is the body and time and space arc its eternal garments. The real man is hidden under’his clothes, the real society under custom and tradition, and the essence of the universe under the garments of time and space. This point is obviously of a mystic nature, and Carlylc has not been successful in making it too clear. He is apparently under the influence of the German transcendentalism and Goelhe who put forward the same idea in describing the earth-spirit in his Faust :
I sit at the roaring loom of Time
And weave the living garment of God.
A point of interest in the work is Carlylc’s delineation of his early spiritual conflict, in the chapters entitled ”Everlasting No” and ”Everlasting Yea”. The ”Yea” triumphs over the ”No.”
”The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the rudely jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves in separate Firmaments : deep silent rock-foundations are built beneath, and the skyey vault with its everlasting Luminaries above: instead of a dark wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, heaven-encompassed World.”
The French Revolution” :-
The French Revolution is the work of essentially a zestful creative artist who Las turned to history. In doing so he does not strictly adhere to the minutiae of history, but nor does he falsify its major points. Lord Acton in Letters to Mary Gladstone 8uid Lectures on the French Revolution charged Carlyle with extreme laxity in his handling of history. But Aulard, the notable French authority, has given all the credit to Carlyle for making a fairly accurate and extremely discriminating use of all the historical material then available. There is no denying the fact that Carlyle departed from the rationalistic historiographers of the eighteenth century. His very conception of history and historiography was different, ”History”, he said, ”is the essence of innumerable biographies”; and again : ”No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men”. Armed with these fundamental notions, Carlyle approached a tumultuous period of French history. The results are remarkable. His work has nothing of the dead-weight of dry-as-dust factual details. It is a poem-rather a stirring drama. It reminds us, say Moody and Lovett, ”of a play by Shakespeare or by Aeschylus, acted by millions of figures on a gigantic
1
The Work and Literary Merits of Carlyle / 479
stage, [making] this the capital example in English of the dramatic j. portraiture of an historical era.” -Carlyle’s imagination vitalises and Krivifies the whole period. Further,he brings to bear his ethics on his Etudy of history. ”He is here,” says W. J.Long, ”the preacher rather than •he historian,his text is the eternal justice; and his message is that all
wrong-doing is inevitably followed by vengeance.”
”Heroes and Hero Worship” :•
The series of lectures which Carlyle delivered in 1837 was published under this title in 1841. Carlyle was a firm believer in the rather gloomy dictum ”Might is Right.” He was for all-out hero worship. About this work William J. Long observes : ”To get at the truth of history we must study hot movements but men, and read not state papers but the biographies of heroes.” His summary of history as presented in this work has six divisions : (i) The Hero as Divinity, having for its general subject Odin, the ”type Norseman,” who, Carlyle thinks, was some old heroic chief, afterwards deified by his countrymen; (ii) The Hero as Prophet, treating of Mahomet and the rise of Islam ; (iii) The Hero as Poet, in which Dante and Shakespeare are taken as typqs ; (iv) The Hero as Priest, or religious leader, in which Luther appears as the hero of the Reformation, and Knox as the hero of puritanisra; (v) The Hero as Man of Letters, in which we have the curious choice of Johnson, Rousseau, and Burns; (vi) The Hero as King, in which Cromwell and Napolcan appear as the heroes of ”reform by revolution.” The book”, says Long’abounds in startling ideas, expressed with originality and power, and is pervaded thoughout by an atmosphere of intense moral earnestness.”
Carlyle’s zeal for hero-worship has been censured by many modern critics who see in it solid support for dictatorship and dictators of (he kind of Stalin and Hitler. See for instance,Sir H. J. C.Grierson’s Carfyle and Hitler (1930).
”Past and Present” :-
This work published in 1843 is a powerful indictment of almost all the pet values of the Victorian age. In it, to quote Legouis, ”he contrasts the religious society of the Middle Ages, idealistic and well organized, wth the materialism and anarchy of modern times.” Carlyle’s standard °> reference was a certain Abbot Sampson who lived sometime in the twelfth century. He is evidently one of Carlyle’s heroes. With his P°wer, ability, and organizing capacity the Abbot gave stability to his society. By contrast, Carlyle shows the evils arising from the worship of the ”mud-gods of modern civilisation.”
480 / A History of English Literature
”Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches” (1845) :•
It is one of the major works of Carlyle. William J. Long observes: ’Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches is, in our personal judgement, Carlyle’s best historical work. His idea is to present the very soul of the great Puritan leader. He gives us, as of first importance, Cromwell’s own words, and connects them by a commentary in which other men and events are described with vigour and vividness. Cromwell was one of Carlyle’s greatest heroes, and in this case he is most careful to present the facts which occasion his own enthusiasm. The result is, on the whole, the most lifelike picture of a great historical character that we possess. Other historians had heaped calumny upon Cromwell till the English public regarded him with prejudice and horror; and it is an indication of Carlyle’s power that by a single book he revolutionized England’s opinion of one of her greatest men.” ”The Life of Sterling” (1851) :-
It is a biography of Sterling who was one of the heroes who impressed and influenced Carlyle. The book has indisputable merits. And according to Hugh Walker, it is ”the purest work of art Carlyle ever produced, and one of the most beautiful biographies in English, -probably the one which best of all satisfies Carlyle’s own conception of what a biography ought to be.” ”History of Frederick the Great” (1855-65) :-
This monumental work runs into six volumes; and according to A. C. Ward, it is a ”monumental failure.” Much labour and pain doubtlessly went into the preparation of this work. It entailed Carlyle’s personal stay in Germany to study all the available material connected with the life and achievement of the great Prussian king. We agree with Compton-Rickett that Frederick is ”the greatest intellectual feat per* formed by Carlyle.” But, to quote the same critic: ”The book severely taxed Carlyle’s powers, as we may believe when we consider its scope and content; and it is one of the hardest to construe of the author’s writinss, largely because Carlyle’s mannerisms of style are nowhere more abundant.”
Carlyle’s ”Message” :-
Carlyle was ”a heaver of rocks.” He was extremely critical of his age, and succeeded in demolishing the claptrap of traditionalised notions of the Victorian age,. His age indeed was witness to unprecedented prosperity and enlightenment ushered in by the Industrial
The Work and Literary Merits of Carlyle/481
t
Revolution. Macaulay sang paeans to the materialistic glory of the age. But Carlyle shut his eyes on material splendour. He hated democracy. Parliament, universal franchise; aU liberalism, traditional dogmas, hollow offioaldcnh/ami MammbnM*wrship. He favoured slavery, heroworship- dictatorship,’the doctrine of work, and so on. InrelBgfofi’he subjected his Carviinisift’to the influence of German transcejidg«t«nshi < and evolved a mystic crfced of hU own. , ’ ’ * ” •
Below the welter of Carlyle’s assertions can be discovered the spirit which is expressed .by .Moody and Lovett in the following words: . ..• • – •’ – ..• • . • ’ .•:-,• •..-• ,.:- ;./ t.-i’.i-v. :•.••.
This spu U may be denned as an intense moral indignation against .whatever is weak or false, or mechanical, and an intense morat enthusiasm for whatever1 is sincere and heroically forceful.”
Carlyle’s ”service to his age” is summed up by Moody and Lovclt
. • . »•’••’’#””••’ ’ *• ’.’••• •-’ ’ •”!’=••., -. r * ..;.*•• •• • • .
in this manner:,, . . .
. ”Carlyle poured icto the swirling life of his time a stream of intense moral ardour and indignation which gradually raised the level of ethical feeling. He united in remarkable degree the artistic and the moral impulse: and he is in this respect typical of the Victorian era, during which more than ever before, art was infused with moral purpose. But his nature was too extravagant, his tone too bitterly protesting, and his method too perverse to allow him to become the supremely representative figure of the *ge, Gonformatioowas: reserved for Alfred Lord TenHy*dh.^ •”• ••-.•>-.• ’ • ”>••- : ’ ” ••• •••••• ’ ’ ’ ’
-Cat^i;l^:.\,:;://; ;\’ ’-’ ’ ’ .;.’ …
’ Carh/le’s literary merit has been variously assessed. His style has struck’different readers in different ways. Some have hailed it as the zealous voice of a prophet, while others have keenly disapproved of its excessive mannerisms. No doubt, the style of some of his works like the Life of Schiller is a model of clarity and simplicity, but the style* of his major works like Sartor Resartus is too deficient in these qualities. According to Moody and Lovett, it is ”a style of expression entirely without example, fuU of un-English idiom, of violent inversions, startling pauses, and sharp angularities–a style which he employed to rouse the attention of his reader as a series of electric shocks. This extraordinary literary instrument he continued to use for the remainder of his life! It has been said that henceforth he wrote English no more but ’Carlylcse’, a style wonderfully well suited to his purpose of rousing a sluggish public out of mental and moral apathy into an alertness to great issues.” Nevertheless, Carfyfe had to suffer harsh criticism from
482/A History of English Literature >,,
his contemporaries for his peculiar style, laine called his style ”demoniacal” and Carlyle himself, ”a strange animal, a relic of a tost family, a sort of mastodon who has strayed in a world not made for him.” James Smetham in his Letters referred to him as a ”great Gothic whale lumbering and floundering in the Northern Seas, and spouting his ’foam fountains’ under the crackling Aurora and the piercing Hyperborian stars.” Jefferey condemned wholesale both Carlyle and his style.
William J. Long, comparing Carlye’s style with Macaulay’s, says that whereas Macaulay’s style is that of an orator, Carlyle’s is that of an exhorter. Macaulay is always polished to the finish, but Carlyle wants to exhort, and in his excessive enthusiasm to do so he does not bother about any convention-even the one of following the rules of
grammar.
At its best, Carlyle’s style has an oracular twang and a consuming intensity which illuminates as well as withers. But sometimes the elaborate apparatus misfires, and he seems to be, to use the words of Edmond Scherer, ”demeaning himself like a mystagogue.” When they do not seem to be performing their function, we certainly get sick of ’his lavishly employed capitals, compound words, inversions, personifications, ellipses, italics, and a hundred other ”tricks.” But we cannot always with justice deny his style the merits of intensity, imaginative power, and pictorial richness.
JOHN RUSKIN
Q. 77. Write notes on the works and achievements of two of the following :- Ruskin (and five more writers). (Punjab 1977)
Or Q. Attempt an appraisal of the/literary work of Ruskin.
(Punjab 1966) Or
Q. Consider the work and literary merits of two of the following:. Ruskin (and five more writers) (Agra 1972)
Or Q. Write critical notes on any two of the following writers:
Ruskin. IOhnRUSkk «*
(and five more writers). (Agf| 19g7)
’.”-…: Or
Consider the Work and Influence of any two of the following:-
(c) Ruskin
(and flve more autors). (Punjab 1972)
(Companion Question). Consider Ruskin and Arnold as critks of Victorian Society. (Punjab 1963)
Introduction :*
Ruskin (1819-1900) was a sensitive soul who pitted himself against the inhumanity of the age of machine. Born in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, he raised his prophetic voice against the rank materialism which had been ushered in by industrial expansion and cut-throat competition. But what is more, he was an artist himself and a keen lover of ail art. He made himself felt in the field of art criticism as well as in that of social criticism. Add to that his remarkable sense of vigorous and colourful style. So Ruskin’s work and achievement have to be studied under three heads as given below:
(i) as an art critic;
(ii) as a social critic; and
(iii) as a literary artist. As an Art Critic :-
Art was Ruskin’s life and soul. He himself was both an artist and an art critic. His numerous paintings and drawings testify to the keenness of his eye and the subtle perception to which he gave a sensitive and exquisite expression. His eminence as an art critic is easily recognised the moment we recall that he served for a number of years as the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford. In fact he entered the world of letters through art criticism. His Modem Painters, whose first volume appeared in 1843 (when he was only twenty-four) and whose subsequent volumes sporadically appeared over a number of years following, was a remarkable book of its kind. The long, original title of the book effectively indicated its content: Modem Painters: Their Supaiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters proved by Examples of the True, the Beautiful, and the Intellectual, from the Works of Modem Artists, especially those ofJ. M. W Turner, By a Graduate of Oxford. In painting, Ruskin made a plea for the spurning of all academism and conventionalism. He favoured simplicity and naturalism. He pointed out that the artist should approach nature with
484 / A History of English Literature
no prejudice or preoccupation. He should select nothing, reject nothing, despise nothing, and exaggerate nothing. With these ideas it was natural for Ruskin to praise Turner, as also such naturalistic painters as Veronese, Ttntoret, and Titian. He stood for a kind of utter simplicity as contrasted to technical virtuosity. He averred that painting should be something more than ”an ingenious arrangement of pigments.” He limited himself only to landscape painting. He did not have much sympathy for the painting of ”the human form divine.” The painting of the human body in the nude simply scandalised him, as it did most Victorians. He was extremely critical of the ”fleshliness” of the PrcRaphaelites though he defended (of course, only later) their realism and devotion to detail, which, as a matter of fact, he also supported in Modem Painters.
As an art critic, Ruskin did not concern himself only with painting. He went ahead, and in some of his writings, particularly The Seven Lamps of Architecture and TJie Stones of Venice, he came’forward to discuss the art of architecture. His fundamental point, which he repeated over and over again, was, in his own words ”that certain right states of temper and moral feeling were the magic powers by which all good architecture had been produced.” For him art was to be considered as the spiritual history of a nation. He emphasized the relation between act and life, and art and morality. ”Art,” he asserted, ”in all its forms was but a manifestation of a sound personal and social life.” Art he considered to be an action; and, therefore, as indicative of the artist’s temper and spiritual condition as any other important action of his. Though he favoured principles of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood yet he keenly opposed their slogan ”Art for the sake of art-” The ”seven lamps of architecure,” according to him, are:
(i) Truth
(ii) Power
(iii) Beauty
(iv) Life
(v) Sacrifice
(vi) Memory
(vii) Obedience.
These are the ”lamps” which illuminate all architecture and without which it would be a gloomy, listless affair.
The Stones of Venice, which Carlyle described as ”a sermon in stones,” envisaged a practical application of the principles of architecture enunciated by Ruskin in Tlie Seven Lamps of Architecture, in this
”x
John Ruskin / 485
work Ruskin praised Venetian Gothic architecture asjllustrative of the faith and spirituality of the people of that era. However, he forgot the very important point that Venetian architecture reached its apogee only when the moral and spiritual rot had already set in, seriously damaging the faith and sprituality of the earlier era. Anyway, Ruskin exalted Gothic architecture, to the discredit of Renaissance architecture. Raskin’s laudation of Gothic art and architecture was greatly responsible for the revival of Gothicism in architecture in the Victorian era. According to Peter Quennell, one of the chief reasons why Ruskin’s popularity has declined in the modem age is that ”his name recalls the worst excesses’ of the Victorian neo; Gothic architecture.” Indeed, it is Ruskin’s patent fault to have gone too far in stressing the presence of a very strong bond between art and morality, in intransigent defiance of the fact that great art has been produced even in ages notorious for moral depravity and spiritual bankruptcy. As a Social Critic :-
Apparently, there appears a great contradiction between Ruskin the aesthete and Ruskin the socio-economist. But when we look closely and deeply we find the development of the artist into a social reformer bereft of all inconsistency. His zeal for social reform grew legitimately out of his immense enthusiasm for aesthetic studies. He did not desert art for sociology, as has been said of him; rather he took up sociology because of his love of art. With his perpetual insistence on the connexion between art and life he felt that great art could not be realised in an age like his where the conditions of life were so degrading and spiritually deadening. He felt, as he himself put it, to be living in a besieged city in which all talk of art and beauty would go unheard. All art grew out of national character, and, therefore, for the growth of great art it was imperative to cleanse and remodel all the social institutions which went to determine national character. These considerations led Ruskin the art critic to Ruskin the social critic. Thus we can agree with Compton-Rickett when he observes: ”His life was all a piece. His social teaching is a corollary of his art criticism….” Indeed, as Ruskin said, ”no one could go on painting pictures in a burning house.”
So Ruskin came forward to extinguish this ”fire” of social injustice and a million other ailments from which the society of his age was suffering. The Industrial Revolution had brought prosperity to thousands, but, at the same time, misery to millions. Ruskin declared :The atmosphere in which the comfortable classes of modern English society live, is most unfavourable to intellectual stature.” He
484 / A History of English Literature
no prejudice or preoccupation. He should select nothing, reject nothing, despise nothing, and exaggerate nothing. With these ideas it was natural for Ruskin to praise Turner, as also such naturalistic painters as Veronese, Tintoret, and Titian. He stood for a kind of utter simplicky as contrasted to technical virtuosity. He averred that painting should be something more than ”an ingenious arrangement of pigments.” He limited himself only to landscape painting. He did not have much sympathy for the painting of ”the human form divine.” The painting of the human body in the nude simply scandalised him, as it did most Victorians. He was extremely critical of the ”fleshliness” of the PrcRaphaelites though he defended (of course, only later) their realism and devotion to detail, which, as a matter of fact, he also supported in Modem Painters.
As an art critic, Ruskin did not concern himself only with painting. He went ahead, and in some of his writings, particularly The Seven Lamps of Architecture and Tlie Stones of Venice, he came’forward to discuss the art of architecture. His fundamental point, which he repeated over and over again, was, in his own words ”that certain right states of temper and moral feeling were the magic powers by which all good architecture had been produced.” For him art was to be considered as the spiritual history of a nation. He emphasized the relation between art and life, and art and morality. ”Art,” he asserted, ”in all its forms was but a manifestation of a sound personal and social life.” Art he considered to be an action; and, therefore, as indicative of the artist’s temper and spiritual condition as any other important action of his. Though he favoured principles of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood yet he keenly opposed their slogan ”Art for the sake of art.” The ”seven lamps of architecure,” according to him, are:
(i) Truth
(ii) Power
(iii) Beauty
(iv) Life
(v) Sacrifice
(vi) Memory
(vii) Obedience.
These are the ”lamps” which illuminate all architecture and without which it would be a gloomy, listless affair.
The Stones of Venice, which Carlyle described as ”a sermon in stones,” envisaged a practical application of the principles of architecture enunciated by Ruskin in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in this
x
John Ruskin / 485
work Ruskin praised Venetian Gothic architecture asjUustrative of the faith and spirituality of the people of that era. However, he forgot the very important point that Venetian architecture reached its apogee only when the moral and spiritual rot had already set in, seriously damaging the faith and sprituality of the earlier era. Anyway, Ruskin exalted Gothic architecture, to the discredit of Renaissance architecture. Raskin’s laudation of Gothic art and architecture was greatly responsible for the revival of Gothitism in architecture in the Victorian era. According to Peter Quennell, one of the chief reasons why Ruskin’s popularity has declined in the modern age is that ”his name recalls the worst excesses’ of the Victorian neo; Gothic architecture.” Indeed, it is Ruskin’s patent fault to have gone too far in stressing the presence of a very strong bond between art and morality, in intransigent defiance of the fact that great art has been produced even in ages notorious for moral depravity and spiritual bankruptcy. As a Social Critic :-
Apparently, there appears a great contradiction between Ruskin the aesthete and Ruskin the socio-economist. But when we look closely and deeply we find the development of the artist into a social reformer bereft of all inconsistency. His zeal for social reform grew legitimately out of his immense enthusiasm for aesthetic studies. He did not desert art for sociology, as has been said of him; rather he took up sociology because of his love of art. With his perpetual insistence on the connexion between art and life he felt that great art could not be realised in an age like his where the conditions of life were so degrading and spiritually deadening. He felt, as he himself put it, to be living hi a besieged city in which all talk of art and beauty would go unheard. All art grew out of national character, and, therefore, for the growth of great art it was imperative to cleanse and remodel all the social institutions which went to determine national character. These considerations led Ruskin the art critic to Ruskin the social critic. Thus we can agree with Compton-Rickctt when he observes: ”His life was all a piece. His social teaching is a corollary of his art criticism….” Indeed, as Ruskin said, ”no one could go on painting pictures in a burning house.”
So Ruskin came forward to extinguish this ”fire” of social injustice and a million other ailments from which the society of his age was suffering. The Industrial Revolution had brought prosperity to thousands, but, at the same time, misery to millions. Ruskin declared :The atmosphere in which the comfortable classes of modern English society live, is most unfavourable to intellectual stature.” He
486 / A History of English Literature
found on one side absolute richness which deadened the soul, on the other, absolute poverty which deadened both body and soul.
Ruskin’s object as social critic and reformer was,to quote Compton-Rickett, ”to humanise political’economy* The conventional •political economy” which Ruskin called ”nescience,* and elsewhere, ”a bastard science,* owed its origin to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations which was the bible of the political economists of Ruskin’s age-such as Mill and Ricardo. Unto This Last was a remarkable work by Ruskin, where he somewhat systematically set about the task of challenging the pontifical utterances of self-important political economists. He gave a new definition of wealth and value, but, most of all, he apparently succeeded in demolishing the superstructure of ”the bastard science” by shaking its very foundations. The political economists based all their principles on the assumption of ”the economic man. ”Ruskin tried to show that there was none like an economic man, that is, a man who is wholly motivated by considerations of monetary profit. Ruskin contended that our motive power is not the desire of gain, but a soul. He emphasised the importance of what he called ”social affections” in determining the actions of a normal human being. Thus he tried to nullify all the conclusions of the political economists by challenging their very premises.
Political economy was, according to him,concejrned with ”certain accidental phenomena of modern commercial operations,” and thus it deserved to be called not political but mercantile economy. True political economy, he pointed ouLshould concern the economy of the entire nation. In Munra Pulvcris he affirmed that there could be no real political economy apart from a comprehensive sociology. A rational political economy, in fact, has to be just one of the several ramifications of a comprehensive philosophy of soci. :j. Ruskin here and there in his work did try to give something like such a compreheasive philosophy but he miserably failed. He seized the root of the matter, but thereafter could not make any headway. He confined himself to such haphazard resources as the Bible, Plato, Gothic art, and Carlyle. Hence was it that he was condemned by many as one who was talking something about which he knew nothing. Thus one opinion described him as ”a lounging aesthete who walked into economics and talked sentimentalism.” But whatever might be said against him we cannot, with reason, call his knowledge of political economy into question. He failed-as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Leibnitz had faiSed–to give an integrated philosophy of society, but he Sad a rare dialectical skill In a word, by knowledge, he was fit to be a critic of political economy, but, by temperament, hs was not.
For his temperament was not scientific but prophetic and oratorical. For one thing, he was an economist who campaigned against the
John Ruskin / 487
love of money! He often shrieked against conlcmjKjrary socicty-’this yelping, carnivorous crew mad for money and lust; tearing each other to pieces, and starving each other to death and leaving heaps of their dung and ponds of their spittle on every palace floor and altar stone.” Now such fulmintions are not ’scientific”; and nor was Ruskin a scientist He was a prophet and a critic of the type of Carlyle whose ”young lieutenant” he was. Like Carlyle he tried to rouse the moral consciousness of his age. But his message was, not unoften, both confusing and confused. And not only this; he was often self- contradictory. To his deep chagrin many thought that his ”sound and fury” signified ”nothing”.
But we must value Ruskin for the numerous concrete proposals which he made and which have since been put into operation. Many of them were considered at that time too radical but now they appear to be only too tame. He campaigned (without being a”socialist* in the accepted sense of the term) for the abandonment by the government of the policy of laissez-faire. He wanted it to take effectual steps to safeguard the interests of workers aga’.ist unscrupulous industrial magnates. Such a view as Ruskin’s was considered the most scandalous by the economic theorists, and was dubbed as interference ia the ^natural” working of the ”natural” law of demand and supply. Ricardo’s iron law of wages according to which wages in an industry working on the princq>le affaizzezfoire were bound to drop to the mere subsistence level, made Ruskin simply sick. He campaigned for the fixation of wages, the number of working hours, and so On. He also made a plea for the establishment of government training schools for youth, state enterprise in the manufacture and distribution of consumer goods, unemployment benefits, the provision of food and shelter ”for the old and destitute,” and so forth. Almost all of his proposals (leaving aside some very fantastic ones) have since been accepted-even in India. He has often, and rightly, been called a pioneer of the welfare state. He summed up the basis of his ideal state in these words : ”! hole! it undisputably that the first duty of a state is to sec that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated, till it attained years of discretion.”
As a social critic, Ruskin aligned himself with no political party. As John Rosenberg observes ia his recent book on Rusktn, Tlie Darkening Glass, Ruskin ”was as apolitical as a rational creature could be.” He dissociated himself from both Tories and Liberals. He could well say: ”Of course, I am a socialist of the most stern sort, but I am a Tory of the sternest sort.” At another time he shouted: ”I am a violent liberal and I hate all Liberalism as I do Beelzebub,* and at another : ”I am the reddest of the red.” He refused to yoke his prophetic inspiration and
I See Introduction to Unto This Last
488/ A History of English Literature
reformative Ted to any single political party or movement. ”Like afl genuine revolutionaries,” observes J ului Rosenberg, ’he passed beyond politics.* He might not have been powerful, but be was certainly influential. The Labour Party of Engfstml accepted maayaCliK (caskings, and even some very eminent foreigners Hkc Tolstoy and Gandhi were profoundly influenced by his work, :,,
As a Literary Artist :- ; :••,-;.
As a literary artist, Loo, Ruskin did not belong loiiny one particuiar ”school”. His prose was enriched by as various influences as the Bible, Jeremy Taylor, Pope, and Scott. It is of interest to note that he used not one but many kinds of style. From Modem Painters to Unto This Last is a far cry. In the former, he shows* marked predilection for gorgeous and colourful effects and poetic flavour. The style is finished, glossy, elaborate, rhythmical, profuse, using the subtlest devices of alliteration, assonance, parallelism, and many others. Many of his sentences sprawl interminably in the seventeenth-century fashion. Many passages read like blank versc–of course, written as prose. Very often images, epithets, and allusions intertwine themselves into a mass of mazy plexus from which it becomes difficult to extract the sound and the sense together. Groping for some sense, the reader has to play hide and seek in a painted labyrinth of verbiage. Later, however, Ruskia realised that prose has to be functional. The result of this realisation was a marked change of style. From Unto This Last onwards he was all for simplicity, lucidity, and vigour of expression. Later, in one of his lectures, be quoted a passage each from Modem Painters and Unto This Last and pointed ’out the very obvious stylistic difference between the two. He gave a piquant illustration. Formerly, he pointed out, if he found somebody’s house on fire, he would say to him: ”Sir, the abode in which you probably passed the delightful days of youth, is in a state of inflammation.” But now he would simply say: ”Sir, your house in on fire.”
But though Ruskin’s style underwent a change,it will be wrong to assume that he totally lost the sense of the aesthete in words and his poetic spells. Even though such works as Unto’ This Last and The Crown of Wild Olive arc couched in a simple and lucid style, this style is not without evidence of verbal felicity and the spell and cadence associated with his earlier style. For one thing, he has a wonderful ability of glowing description, and in his descriptions he combines the poet’s car for music with the painter’s eye for colour. Natural beauties, particularly those of the landscape, touch his sensitive soul making it pour itself out in glowing musical terms. If Turner, his everlasting favourite, was the ”colour-poet of nature,” Rui’’in was the ”prose poet of nature.”
Q.78. The Oxford Movement / 489
THE OXFORD MOVEMENT Write a short note on the Oxford Movement
(Rohilkhand 1987} -: ’’ ’ .” Or ’*, v •
Write a note on the Oxford Movement and its influence on English literature. (Puravanchal 1993)
•••”••’ Or ’•” ” ;~ ’
Discuss the Oxford Movement with speical reference to Cardinal John Henry Newman. (Rohilkhand 1981)
. Or .
Write a short essay on one of the following subjects :- (e) The Oxford Movement •
(and four more topics). • (Agra 1968)
-••;.– or ’ •• .-• •
Write a short essay on one of the following:- : * XO The Oxford Movement
” (and five more topics). (Agra 1960)
’ »•-=-’•;•-•• ; • Or – ’ ’
’’”’., $• ,Write’a short essay on one of the following :- ’’^ ! ; (d)Oxford Movement ’” (and three more topics). (Punjab l«rT2)
IntrcNtoctioq-thc Aims :-
V,.’-..”. One only Way to life:. .’ /
-.-:Y. One faith, deliver”J once for all;
• One holy.Band, endow’d with Heaven’s high call; ,’-• : One earnest, endless strife :-
This is the Church, the Eternal framed of old.
; These lines from a poem by John Kcblc (the ”founder” of the Oxford Movement) give us some help to answer the question as 10 what the Oxford Movement was about. This Movement was, fundamentally, religious in nature, and one of its aims was to rehabilitate the dignity of the Church andlo deliver it from the grasp of secular authority. But that was only one of the manifold issues which the Movement dealt with. Some other issues may also be mentioned here. One of them was the growing strength of Liberalism in religion and politics. The protagonists of this movement came forward to combat tooth and nail all such Liberalism as appeared in the Church as Latiludinarianism. The Oxford Movement had nothing to do with politics, but it favoured Conservatism or Toryism (of course, in religion). As W. H. Hutton points out in Tlie Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. XII, it ”was certainly not a Tbry movement, but it was opposed to liberalism in all hs aspects. To the philosophy of conservatism the Oxford leaders were
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much indebted.” Further, the Movement was opposed to rationalism in matters concerned with the Church. The Victorian age witnessed a rapid and tremendous expansion of physical science and even more than in the eighteenth century (the age of prose and reason) there was. a temptation in the nineteenth to put religion to the test of rational scientific examination. T. H. Huxley, for instance, became an agnostic after failing to be convinced of the truth of Christianity, considered rationally and scientifically. The Oxford Movement stressed the absurdity of examining the Church in the light of reason. The Oxford men put special emphasis on faith as something suprarational. The main* spring of the Oxford Movement,” observes Hugh Walker, ”was the dread of rationalism.” According to the same critic, the ”problem” for Newman (the chief force of the Movement) ”was how to check the growth of rationalism as he saw it in England.”
AnU-Rationalisra :-
This aggressive anti-rationalism manifested itself in the Oxford men’s affirmation of the’ miracles associated with the history of the ancient church and numerous saints. The people, influenced by science id their age, were already finding it too hard to give credence to the numerous Scriptural miracles, and the Oxford men were adding new ones which had never been seriously believed except perhaps by the very orthodox Roman Catholics. This flagrant anti-rationalism, certainly out of tune with the times, naturally alienated many otherwise sympathetic people.
Romantic :-
This anti-rationalism was somewhat ”romantic.” Indeed between the Romantic Movement and the Oxford Movement there is something curiously common. The ”romantic* interest in the Middle Ages for their mystery and splendour r one of these common factors. As Moody andLovett put it, the Oxfor 1 Movement stood for *the restoration of the poetry, the mystic ritu. and service which had characterised the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages:” It was this medievalism which was probably responsible ft r the ultimate entry of Newman into the Roman Catholic fold. The ro.uaatic tendency of the protagonists of the Oxford Movement, is a!so apparent in a different way-thcir poetry. As Eugene R. Fairweather points out, ”their poetic sensibility-which cannot be ignored, in view of the fact that Kebje, Newman and Williams were all fluent, if’minor’, poets-was ’romantic* in tone.” Antl’Erastlanisja :•
But the fundamental factor which sparked &ff the Movement and watch was taken congnizance of and condemned by almost all the
The Oxford Movement / 491
”brethren” was the increasing interference of secular authority in the affairs of the Church. All of them were at daggers drawn with Erastianism (= the control of the Church by the State). The chief aim of the Oxford Movement, in the words of one of its protagonists, was to convince the people that ”the Church was more than a merely human institution; that it had privileges, sacraments, a ministry, ordained by Christ.” Moody and Lovett observe in this connexion : ”Newman and his friends wished also to defend the Church, in view of its divine character, against the interference of the state, which was disposed to reform h along with Parliament .and other institutions, curtailing its powers and revenues.” Thus the Oxford Movement stood for Anti- Erastianism.
The History of the Movement :-
These were the most important points which shaped the Oxford Movement. But the ”brethren” were by ho means a united lot. A brief survey of the history of this Movement will show this.
Newman was the soul of the Movement. But, generally, the name of John Keble is mentioned as the man who started the Movement. In July 1833 Keble preached a sermon at Oxford before the judges of assize, on national apostasy and against the Erastian and Latitudinarian tendencies of the day. His speech formally inaugurated the Movement, and even Newman accepted Keble as its ”true and primary author.” But it must be noted that Keble only provided the spark; the fuel had already been piling for long. Keble was a quiet, simple, and modest man not of much literary pretension, but known for his anonymous book of sacred poems, The Christian Year, published in
1827. According to Hugh Walker, ”there is nothing great in his life or in his works”. Anyway, he is the accepted pioneer of the Oxford Movement
Keble’s sermon was followed by the generation of intense feeling in like-minded men of Oxford. They included Newman, Froude, Pusey and many more. Their concerted action crystallised in the publication of Tracts for the Tunes, the first of which came in September 1833. It was entitled Thought on the Ministerial Commission, respectfully addressed to the Clergy. The publication of the tracts continued till 1841 with contributions from many bands. However, Newman who wrote some twenty-nine of them was, as Hugh Walker puts it ”the soul of the Tracts.’* None approached him in the darky of thought as well as of expression.
-W2 / A History of English Literature
The avowed aim of the Tracts was to creatc-public opinion in favour of ’the privileges of the Church and against Popery and Dissent.” However/slowly and steadily the trend of thought as expressed hi the Tracts showed evidence of moving towards the Church of Rome and away from the Church of England. Things came to a head in the famous (rather notorious) Tract XC, which came from Newman’s pen. In it Newman showed his Romish tendency by taking upon himself the task \ of arguing that the thirtyninc Articles were in no way opposed to the Council of Trent. In other words, he was making a plea for the Church of Rome and undermining a’ universally accepted Anglican view. This tract created a tremendous commotion. All the Anglican bishop* condemned it vociferously. Newman’s conversion was complete after he had read articles by Wiseman, the able leader of the English Roman Catholics.
The general hostility which Newman provoked made it impossible for him to continue staying at Oxford. So he took refuge at Littlemore. He resigned his ecclesiastical living at Oxford in September 1843 and joined lay communion. Some of his ardent followers also joined him at Littlemore.
Meanwhile, W. G.Ward,an ebullient and energetic follower of Newman, published what W. H. Hutton calls ”a heavy and exasperating book”–77ie Idea of a Christian Oiurch. Ward openly favoured the Roman Church pointing to what he described as the ”most joyful, most wonderful, most unexpected sight! We find the whole cycle of Roman doctrine gradually possessing members of English churchmen.* It was a very provocative book. The scandalised members of the University at a convocation held on February 13, 1845 withdrew from Ward the degrees of B. A. and M. A. The book had a wide influence but it is poor literature. Well did Jenkyns, the Master of Baliiol, tell Ward : ”Well, Ward, your book is like yourself; fat, awakward, and ungainly.”
Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism was formally complete when on October 9,1845 he became a member of the Church of Rome. Later, in 1879, the Pope made him a cardinal. But after 1845 the Oxford Movement spread beyond Oxford. The ”brethren” were no longer perfectly united. Some like Ward accepted Roman Catholicism, but others like Pusey continued their work staying within the Anglican fold.
The Literary Aspect of the Movement :•
The Oxford Movement was basically a religious movement Directly, it had nothing to do with literature. However, the numerous
The Oxford Movement /493
writings which it threw up had -some reprercussion on contemporary literary taste and style. Previously also, divines (such as Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, and Tilloison), had exerted some inllucncc on literature even when they had written on purely religious themes. W.H. Hutton maintains in this context: The Oxford movement certainly belongs to the history of English religion more definitely than to the history of English literature; hul il had greul inllucncc, outside its own definite members, on the literary taste of its age.” But out of the whole mass of the literature the Movement gave rise to, we can pick out as good literature only a handful of poems and Apologia, which is, in Hugh Walker’s words, ”eminently and emphatically literature.” As for the rest of the works, they are biblia abiblia ( = books that are no books). • •:-..’
Some Iractarians Considered-Keble :•
John Keble (1792-1866) was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and an Anglican preacher. It was he, as we have already said, who started the Oxford Movement with his famous sermon of 1833. He could boast of no intellectual calibre, though he was a saintly, simple, and humble figure. He,as Compton-Rickctt puts it, ”gives us the emotional atmosphere of the movement.” His literary merits are negligible, but some of his poetry is enjoyable for its sincerity and emotion.
Newman :• ’; ’
John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was the spirit behind the Movement. Hurrell Froude called him the ”indicating number,” the rest of the Tractarians being just so many ciphers. His contribution to literal ture is also the most considerable. His pellucid sincerity and simplicity, I which are his distinguishing marks as both man and as writer, are ^abundantly visible in his best work Apologia pro VitaSua (1864) which Hie wrote in self-defence in reply to Charles Kingsley’s charge of •dishonesty against both himself and his new Church. Newman was Rtung into action and immediately took up die task of writing an I apology to explain his conduct. As he puts it, he made his fingers ”walk I twenty miles a day” so as to finish his work quickly. The Apologia is I characterised by what Hugh Walker calls a ”palpitating humanity I which vivifies every line.” In this work Newman has poured his heart and soul out. ”It has,” says W. H. Hutton, ”the merits of a letter rather than of a book’.’But Newman is a finished artist. The greatest recommendation of his prose is its directness and simplicity. This crystalline simplicity, however, is the outcome of a rigorous art and abundant energy in check.
Newman’s other works, like the Essay of the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), The Idea of a University Defined (1873), and
494 / A History of English Literature
rJigious novels Loss and Cain (1848) and,Ca//irta (1856), have also the same qualities of style. Mention may also be made of Newman’s verse. He wrote well, but the only memorable poem written by him is (he famous prayer poem’Lead Kindly Light.’
Hurrell Froude :•
Richard Hurrell Froude (1803-1836) was a link between Keble and Newman, He was, doubtlessly, a brilliant young man. He is now chiefly known for his posthumous Remains (1836). He wrote two of the Tracts for the Times and some poems. He was, as he himself said, quite ”hot-headed,” and he offended quite a number of people.
Pusey :- .
Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882) was a man of very wide learning. He gave his name to the protagonists of the Oxford Movement (who came to be commonly termed ”Puseyites”). But in almost every respect he is inferior to Newman. As Compton-Rickett observes, ”he is far less attractive as a personality, more questionable in his methods and immeasurably inferior as a literary craftsman.” Considered from the literary point of view, Pusey’s work is indeed hopeless. His style is, to quote Hugh Walker, ”crude, ungainly and confused.”
Ward :-
William George Ward (1812-1882) was an extremely talentedman who followed Newman’s lead in conversion to Roman Catholicism. We have already referred to The Idea of a Christian Church (1844) which is his best known work. His Essays on the Philosophy of Theism (collected in 1884) were written to controvert the views of Mill His style is inelegant and cumbrous, but his ideas stirred his times.
Church :-
Richard William Church (1815-1890) is,after Newman, the best of those connected with the Oxford Movement in the literary quality of their work. His clear and vigorous style, his sympathy and eclecticism are apparent in his monographs on writers as diverse in their nature and art as Dante, Spenser, and Bacon. Church also wrote a quite objective history of the Oxford Movement, published posthumously in
1891. With a rare degree of self-effacement, he refrains from mentioning his own name in this history, even though he had played an important role in the Movement.
Conclusion :-
Apart from those mentioned, there is ”a whole Hydra more.” But, to us: Dryden’s words
1
The Naughty Nineties / 495
To speak tlie rest, who better are forgot, Would tire a well-breath ’d Witness of the Plot. So we end here.
What tangible effect did the Movement produce ? To quote Eugene R. Fairweather, ”the Oxford Movement, for all its profound conservatism, seriously altered the accepted patterns of Anglican thought and practice.” For one thing, it directed the attention of the people to ”personal holiness,” and was responsible for reviving or confirming the practices of serious prayers, formal piety, and fasting. It re-orientated the common views about apostolic authority, and, with some success, discovered a link between the Church of England and the Pre-Rcformation-Church (of•Rome). It made the Church of England conscious of the onslaught of Liberalism and Erastianism. Thus the Oxford Movement was more than a passing ripple on the surface of ”the sea of faith.”
THE NAUGHTY NINETIES
Give an adequate account of the literary achievement of ”The Naughty Nineties.” (Rohilkhand 1985)
(Punjab 1978)
Or
Give an adequate account of the literary achievement of the last decade of the nineteenth century.
(Rohikhand 1990)
Or
Write a short essay on one of the following: (b) ’The Naughty Nineties’ (and eight more topics.) (Agra 1966)
Introduction :-
Lo I how upon Parnassus’slopes they romp.
The sons of Wat, Dow, David, John, and Thomp. The last decade of the nineteenth century was characterised less by ’naughtiness’ than revolt, decadence, and not a little confusion. The age of Queen Victoria extended beyond the end of the nineteenth century, but in the last ten years of the century many powerful forces could be seen at work pulling down the edifice of Victorianism. The process of destruction (partly for reconstruction) was attended with
4% / A History of English Literature
quite a bit of uneasiness. Therefore we can easily agree with Joseph Warren Beach that the last years of the nineteenth century were ”the somewhat miscellaneous and uneasy period.” Some ultra-Radicals like Oscar Wilde could be called ”naughty”, too, bill the revolt or transition in its totality cannot be decorated with’the sViriccpiihcl/For that matter, most of the outstanding Victorians ”•hadr been critics and revolutionaries who stood against their lirnc-splrit. Carlylej Riiskirf, Arnold, and Rossetti may be noted in this Context. On the other hand, those who, more or less, identified thcmseiyds with this spiritMacaulay and Tennyson, for instance-are now rankeij lower
Fhe Nature of the Revolt >
”Victorianism” is a complex agglomeration of several values,’and
the revolt of the nineties against Vtctorianisrn is1 also quite1 cbmplcfc
According to Compton-Rickett, this revolt has three prongs^ Frr^t, it
reiterates the old revolutionary formula of Liberty, Equality,’ and
Fraternity, in a new setting. Sccondly.it worships power rather than
beauty. And thirdly, it challenges the older values of art and life. But
such generalisations touch but a part of reality-as most generalisations
do. However, our point holds that in the nineties there was abroad a
spirit of critidsm^crutiny, and revolt. The ”Victorian Compromise,”
was on top Of the casualty list. In the socio-political field Gladstonian
Liberal pacificism gave place to commercial imperialism.’ The Fabian
Movement exalted enlightened sbda^mVdrth^ox morally and prig-
gishness associated with typical Victorians were swept away and a less
restricted moral code was’pot totb5 opef atipn ”tfjPa’’ntijii$f: $
KtteratewsV flier Victorian conflfitt1>&weenrlitffaHtf Scf«ic<e Mu&n
had disturbed sensitive souls like Matthew Arnold was now reserved-
mostly in favour of Science, but in a few cases, in favour .of Faith.
Formerly, even agnostics like X H. Huxley had to take notice- qf
religion, even if only to criticise JM But. now th^taftitiucfettecatne one
of indifference rather than of crijticism or, actjwaccepwnce. 5ut all
these revolutionary tendencies \yeEC not;a harmonuHM.^At many
points they crisscrossed eaqK oilier, and they agficfteiJ, dj>|t(;reiU oten of
letters in different ways. Foe example, socialism and egaiiUu’ianism
could not go well with imperialism. Oscar Wilde was a protagonist of
the Aesthetic Movement, and yet he was a keen socialist. Rudyard
Kipling was a blatant imperialist, but had connexions with the Pre-
Raphaelites. The Fabians, like the Webbs and Shaw; supported the.
capitalistic Liberals and even their imperialistic wing. In a WQfd, the
revolt of the nineties looks to us confused-but not so ”naughty.*
The Literary Tendencies :-../..
The nineties were a period of hectic literary activity. Poetry and the novel flourished well-as they did in the previous yean of the
The Naughty Nineties / 4l/7
Victorian age. But the period also witnessed a revival of the drama. The Aesthetic Movement of Pater and Oscar Wild was calculated to wean literature from the usual Victorian tendency of dealing with social questions, and to exalt the sense of beauty, especially of literary form. There was also a movement for the revival of Irish literature in which Moore and Yeats played major roles. In poetry some voices echoing the past could also be heard, but, mostly, the tendency was to make new experiments. The same was the case with the department of fiction. !n the literature of the nineties, considered as a whole, two distinct tendencies (among a welter of others) may be especially noted:
(1) The pessimistic tendency found in the work of Hardy, Housman, Gissing, and others.
(2) The Continental tendency. The men of letters in the age looked more and more towards France. The older Victorians were mostly insular, making exception for the limited influence of Germany. But now the Russian Tolstoy and the Scandinavian Ibsen came to be admired and emulated.
Let us now consider at some length the achievement of the nineties in various departments of creative literature.
ad:
Introduction :-
POETRY
Many new tendencies are discernible in the poetry of the nineties. Even then, this department of literature is, of all, the most conservative-mainly perhaps because of the reason that however revolutionary a poet may be, he has to draw upon a fund of poetic language and other apparatus established and sanctified by a long tradition and more or less well set in the mind of the reader. In this period we hear the voices of such traditionalists as Stephen Philips (1864–1915) and Robert Bridges (1844-1930). Philips’ Poems (1897) have pronounced echoes of the great Victorian masters. Bridges, the Poet Laureate, was a very conscious artist, but like the Cavalier lyricists he combined artistry and spontaneity,with felicitous results.
Religious Poets :- , !?,
Among the poets who used and even advanced the traditional Victorian poetic techniques may be mentioned the two Roman Catholic poets-Francis Thompson (1859-1907) and Alice Meyncll (1850-1922) who were influenced by Coventry Patmore, and some of whose best poems were published in the nineties. Thompson often
’ ” ’ ,-f• –
498 / A History of English Literature
recalls the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth ccntury-particubrly Crashaw. He is bold, colourful, and even flamboyant. Alice Mcyncll wrote about love as well as religion. But her work is just mediocre.
The Pessimists :•
The pessimistic poets of the nineties fan into a group of their own. They include Hardy (1848–1928), John Davk^on (1859-1905), Ernest Dowson (1867-1900), A. E. Housman (1859–1936), and some lesser ones. After the adverse reception to his last novel Jude the Obscure Hardy gave the rest of his life to poetry. His Wessex Poems appeared in 1898, but his highest poetical achievement The Dynasts came only in the. twentieth century. Hardy, as Lcgouis says .”was the poet of disillusionment.” His poetry has the quality of sincerity and technical excellence. Davidson’s Fleet Street Eclogues (1893-96) and Ballads and Songs (1894) are also filled with pessismim. Davidson, say Gricrson and Smith, was ”a little of the spasmodic, apt when strongly moved and angry to overspur his Pegasus and grow a little shrill.” However, he is splendid quite often, particularly in his ballads. Dowson was particularly influenced by Verlaine, the cynical French poet of the nineteenth century. Housman’s Shropshire Lad came out in 18%. The work is steeped in a stoically pessimistic spirit. In it, to quote Joseph Warren Beach, ”the fragrance of galjant youth and love is distilled in the glittering alembic of fate and death, and ’gather ye rosebuds’ sung to a bitter but haunting tune.”
The Imperialists :-
Among the ”imperialists” the most outstanding were Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) and W. H. Henley (1849-1903) who, to use the words of Legouis, were ”poets of effort and action.” Kipling was born in India and was for a number of years editor of the daily Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore. His Barrack-Room Ballads and the Seven Seas were published in the nineties. In his exquisite mastery of rhythm he comes close to Swinburne. Henley in Vie Song of the Sword (1892) tried to breathe the spirit of adventure into prosaic people. His poetry is not only robust but robustious. His typical note rings in the following lines:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul. ” The Decadents :- -,
Lastly, we have to consider briefly the-group of poets known as the ”decadents.” They were influenced by Pater’s aesthetidsm, but their
The Naughty Nineties / 499
acknowledged leader was Oscar Wilde. They published a periodical, The Yellow Book, whi:h continued between 1894 and 1897. The periodical was illustrated by Aubcry Beardsley. The decadents loved to shock the reader’s morality, and, as such, wrote on daring subjects in a daring manner which amply fulfilled their desire.
FICTION
Introduction :-
•
The spirit of revolt is much more intense in the fiction than the poetry of the eighteen-nineties. This revolt in fiction is, according to Moody and Lovett,.two-fold.
(1) First, there is the tendency to ”restore the spirit ot romance to the novel.” This tendency is shown by such novelists as Conrad, Stevenson, Barrie, and Kipling.
(2) The second tendency is shown by sucn writers as Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy. These writers regarded the novel as a social document, and in some cases as a medium of propaganda.” Previous to them such Victorian novelists as George Eliot, Charles Reade, and Charles Kingsley had done the same. But what distinguishes the social critics and propagandists of the nineties ”is the severity of their criticism and the depth of their antipathy to the age in which they had grown up and which they chose to depict.”
The First Group :-
R. L. Stevenson’s Island Nights Entertainment, Tlie Ebb Tide, and David Balfour appeared in the nineties. These novels are gripping stories of adventure, and are full of the spirit of joie de vivre which makes them interesting reading for the juveniles. Kipling’s stories are also interesting-especially those with an Indian setting which he knew so well. Sir J. M. Barrie’s Tlie Little Minister (1891) and Sentimental Tommy (1896) appeared in the nineties. His novels are mostly the psychological studies of their heroes, though the element of adventure is also very much there. Conrad’s novels concern the adventures of sea-life but they are not just stories of adventure or action. Joseph Warren Beach observes: ”What most fascinated him was the soul of man struggling desperately with the vast indifferent forces of nature, or still better with subtle lures of his own spirit-power, prestige, ambition, cowardice, or sheer malevolence.” Thus his novels have a depth absent from the flashy stories of Stevenson and Kipling. The Second Group :•
H. G. Wells wrote novels of science as well as of serious social criticism. However, his only novel which appeared in the nineties is The
500 / A History of English Literature
Time Machine (1895) which is a fantastic romance based on the imaginary development of physical science. It was in the novels to come that he appeared as a social critic. None of the novels of Bennett and Galsworthy appeared in the nineties and therefore they may here be ’ignored.
Other* Novelists :-
Among the rest of the novelists who were neither romancers nor social critics the most prominent place ought to be given to Thomas Hardy. His two major novels Tess ofllu d’Urbcrvilles (1891) and (his last) hide the Obscure (1896) appeared in the period under review. Tcss is the tragedy of a simple village maid, and hide that of a naive young man who would be a scholar. These novels, as Hardy’s rest, arc permeated with a pessimistic, deterministic point of view which conceives human beings as mere puppets in the hands of dark, mechanistic forces of the universe. Jude had some sensuous scenes which were condemned by many of Hardy’s contemporaries, and it was this fact that made him bid farewell to novel-writing.
Gissing’s Odd Women (1893) and New Grub Street (1891) were first published in the 1890’s. Gissing’s novels wear an atmosphere of gloomy oppressiveness created by his indulgence in the stark and seamy realities of life: ”In truth” say Moody and Lovclt, ”Gissing’s was a root out of dry ground, with lililc beauty of form, or amplitude of style, but urged upward by a stern, concentrated force of personality which carried it to a permanent place in English literature.”
Among the lesser novelists may be mentioned George Moore who \n-Estlier Waters (1894) gave an authentic picture of a servant girl; Israel Zangwill, who wrote about the life of Jews; and Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
DRAMA
Tlit Ke%tv»l :•
The last years of the nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic revival. The drama which in the Victorian age had all alone been lying moribund sprang once again to life. Not only were many plays written, but (hey were read, enjoyed, staged, and admired.
Hie Social Drama •-
The most vigo’-ms drama of the age was concerned with social and domestic problems and was considerably influenced t, *bsen. Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929) and Sir Arthur Wing Pincro (loJ5- -1934) were its most outstanding practitioners. Jones’s plays Michael and His
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Lost Angel and Mrs. Dane’s Defence arc the most notable of all his works. He also wrote some satirical comedies of manners. As for Pincro, to quote Moody and Lovett, ”he cast a wider net, and caught in it the insincerities and hypocrisies inseparable from a complex and sophisticated social life.” Oscar Wild’s plays like Lady Windermcre’s Fan (1S92), A Woman of Nolmponance (1893), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) may^also be noted here, though the lone of his social criticism is much lighter and anything but ”earnest.” He excels in wit ol the kind of Sheridan’s.
Shaw is, doubtlessly, the greatest of all the dramatists of this period. His collection-Wary.! Pleasant and Unpleasant-appeared in
1898. He combined his most exquisite wit with a very marked propagandist aim. He was anti-romantic and had a perpetual craving for correcting the most commonly held opinions-romantic” or otherwise-which were supposed to be correct.
Irish Drama :-
In the nineties some Irish writers, under the influence of Ibsen, started the Irish National Theatre in Dublin, where plays written by Irish dramatists were to be acted. The experiment continued till 1901. Among the Irish dramatists the most outstanding were J. M. Svnge (1879-1901) and W. B. Yeats (1865-1939). ”Synge’s genius,” say Moody and Lovett, ”consisted in his ability to give his characters a place in nature, and constantly to draw poetry from this surrounding nature.” Yeats’s Tlie Land of Heart’s Desire (1896) and TJte Countess CatMeen (1899) were staged in the eighteen-nineties. The merit of his plays consists not only in the delineation of characters but in the use of the devices of symbolism and dream-like atmosphere.
CRITICISM
Pater and Others :-
Pater and Oscar Wilde were the promoters of the slogan, ”Art for Art’s Sake,” which was too often heard in the nineties. Pater was the chief spokesman of the school of aesthetic criticism which exalts beauty at the cost of everything else, including, of course, the content. Pater had a special praise for exquisite craftsmanship and his own style, which is extraordinarily finished, illustrates his predilection. Pater influenced Wilde a great deal. Wilde’s Intentions came in 1891. Legouis observes about him: ’He spiced the doctrine of ’art for art’s sake’ with a certain cynicism; wit, paradox, and mocking humour give a keen edge to his beautifully wrought prose.”
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THE ESSAY FROM LAMB TO STEVENSON
Q. 80. Give an account of the essay from Lamb to Stevenson.
Or Q’ Write a critical note on the major literary essayists
of the Victorian age. Introduction :•
The essay from Lamb to Stevenson had a very prosperous career. The popularity of this genre can be imagined when we point out that in this period there were almost as many essayists as there were writers. For the sake of convenience we can divide the essayists of the period into four, more or less well-defined, groups as given below:
(1) The major romantic essayists-Lamb, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and De Quinccy.
(2) Other essayists who wrote for magazines. (The four major essayists just named also wrote mostly for magazines). The other essayists belonging to this category include Robert Chambers, Thackeray, etc.
(3) The historian-essayists ; that is, those who wrote essays on historical events and personalities. Those belonging to this group include Carlylc, Macaulay, and Frt>udc.
(4) The essayists who belong to the latter half c,f the nine tccnth century. They include R. L. Stevenson, Alexander Smith, John Skclton, and some others.
Now let us consider these four groups in detail one by one. The Major Romantic Essayists :-
Among this group, Charles Lamb (1775-1834) undoubtedly enjoys the pride of place. Hugh Walker calls him the essayist par excellence, and another critic, ”the prince of essayists.” With Lamb we find the completion of the change in- the English essay from objectivity to subjectivity and from formality to familiarity. Most of his essays were published by him in the London Magazine. Later they were issued in two collections entitled Essays ofElia (1823) and Last Essays ofElia (1833). Since the time of their first appearance, Lamb’s essays have been attractive reading for generation after generation of readers. Lamb is so subjective that ’Yom his essays (of course, with some modifications) we can reconstruct his inner and outer biography. Lamb takes the reader into confidence .Hid exch’angcs hc;-t t heats with
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him with the most charming and button-holing familiarity which completely disarms even the most cussed reader. Add to his subjective charm, his tenderness, his broad human sympathy, his sense of pathos, and, above ail his ubiquitous humour which gives a particular tone to his essays from end to end. He ”romanticises” everyday things and experiences by projecting upon them the roseate light of his bizarre imagination. Many of his essays are like lyrics through which his personality-a strange combination of the imp and the sage-peeps constantly. His style is queerly archaic and does not recommend itself as a model..
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) comes close to Lamb as an essayist. He wrote critical essays as well. We cannot rank him high among the English critics on account of his marked and implacable prejudices, his indulgence in a lot of woolly verbiage, and his lack of any welldefined critical locus standi. His criticism is pre-eminently impressionistic, and, as such, may be called romantic. His essays on nonliterary topics, however, claim a high placement. Apart from the charm of his personality, his intimacy with the reader and the refreshing vigour of his style (which, unlike’tamb’s, is not marred by any leaning on seventeenth-century stylists), there is in his essays a wonderful note of gusto andjoie de vrvre. Hazlitt’s life was far from happy, and he was prone to fits of melancholia, but he ioved life with a tremendous gusto some of which he imparts to the reader of his essays. As R. L. Stevenson (who tried at times to ape him) once remarked,all of us may be fine gentlemen, but none of us can write like Hazlitt. To quote W.E. Henley, ”at his highest moments Hazlitt is hard to beat; and has not these many years been beaten.”
Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) cannot be placed very high in the hierarchy of English essayists. He was much influenced by the essayists of the age of Queen Anne-particularly Steele and Addison. However, instead of the didactic fervour and social charm of those essayists he had the charm of self-revelation. Hunt’s essays are, to use the words of Moody and Lovett, ”kindly spirited” and ’mildly humorous.” That they are such will be evident from the perusal of ”Coaches and Their Horses^ The Month of May”, ”Deaths of Little Children,” and ”A Visit to the Zoological Gardens.* Leigh Hunt’s style is easy, voluble, and charming, but it cannot be called a great style because of the absence from it of any overwhelming vigour, strength of conviction, or even any unmistakably individual feature. He wrote some critical essays also which arc of mediocre quality. But at least one of his shorter poems, ”Abou Ben Adhem” has been enjoying incessant popularity.
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Thomas DC Quinccy (1785-1859) was a very peculiar man, and still more peculiar writer. Much of his prose cannot be strictly considered as belonging to the province of the essay. He himself divided his works into three sections to one of which he was pleased to give the name of essays. But his ”essays” are, indeed, too voluminous. His prose style is near poetry: it is colourful, gorgeous, and musical and has a peculiarly dreamy grace. In the nineteenth century he wrote the prose which was written by seventeenth-century masters. But at his best he makes you spell-bound with the subtle cadences of his language which at times becomes almost incantatory. But during his uninspired moments-and they come pretty often-he is often vulgar and tawdry. Other Essayists Writing for Magazines :•
The magazine enjoyed a singular popularity among readers in (he nineteenth century, and many essayists turned to it for the publication of their compositions. Let us consider some of the major contributors apart from the ones just discussed.
Miss Mary Russell M it ford (1787-1855) contributed many sketches of village life to the London Magazine in which Lamb’s essays were also then being published. Between 1824 and 1832 she wrote quite a number of such essays, which were later published in one volume under the title Our Village. She often suggests Crabbe on account of her love of realistic details. But she is quite different from him on account of her geniality and corresponding lack of censoriousness. Her character-sketches are, doubtlessly, the best of her writings. Her, tone is intimately personal and, as such, an asset to her as an essayist.
Robert Chambers (1802-1871) with his brother William started an organ Chamber’s Journal in 1832, which was meant for imparting useful knowledge to the middle classes of society. Robert Chambers wrote hundreds of essays over and above his copious journalistic work j;;^ his serious treatise Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) which anticipated the work of Darwin. As an essayist Chambers is almost always interesting in spite of the tremendous vastness of his theolatic range. ”Everywhere,” he wrote, ”I have sought less to attain elegance or observe refinement, than to avoid that last of literary sinsdulness.” He was indeed a very successful journalist and eminently readable. His two most outstanding qualities as an essayist are his numour and his astonishingly accurate and expansive knowledge.
Hugh Miller (1802-1856) was an extremely busy and popular journalist with unmistakable literary ability. His Footprints of the Creator was a very influential book in which he tried to controvert the
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views of Chambers as expressed in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. For sixteen years he was editor of the paper The Witness owned by himself. Much of what he wrote for the paper was of ephemeral interest, though some of it is of interest even today. About a thousand articles written by him for The Witness were later coQected and published as Essays Historical and Biographical, Political and Social, Literary and Scientific. The Essays,’ maintains Hugh Walker, ”are journalistic, but it is the journalism of a man of literary genius, and of one who, like Scott, had as much sense as genius. They show that he possessed a keen and penetrating eye, wide sympathies, and clear intelligence. The biographical ones display a just appreciation of charracter, the critical ones genuine literary taste, and the social ones sound and balanced judgement.”
Dr. John Brown (1810-1882) also contributed to The Witness. He was a man of multifarious ability, and the topics of his essays are, accordingly, varied. However, the best of his compositions are about dogs, not men and their affairs. He seems to be an exquisite canine psychologist. His description of the dog named Toby is unbeatable. Toby’s tail, we are told, ”was a tail perse : it was of immense girth and not short, equal throughout like a policeman’s baton; the machinery for working it was of great power and acted in a way, as far as I have been able to discover, quite origufal.” But Brown could be serious as well as humorous. He was an art critic of some merit, too. Hugh Walker observes: ”An imagination akin to the poetic humour, ready power of illustrating from literature and from art, and a sound psychology, are the qualities which give Brown’s papers their value.” But, all told, Brown is a conspicuous member of only the second string of English essayists.
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) is better known as a novelist ; but he wrote quite a few essays, especially in Eraser’s Magazine. Roundabout Papers, The Book of Snobs, Sketches and Travels in London, the Christmas Books,and the Sketch Books are mainly collections of essays. Thackeray is always informal and extremely rambling. To take an example, consider his essays ”On a Joke I heard From the late Thomas Hood.” In it Thackeray nowhere tells the joke! His essays are delightful, light reading. He himself wrote: ”In these humble essay-kins, I have taken leave to egotise. I cry out about the shoes which pinch me…I prattle about the dish which I love, the wine which I like, the talk I heard yesterday…A brisk and honest small-beer will refresh those who do not care for the frothy out-pourings of heavier taps…Some philosophers get their wisdom with deep
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thought, and out of ponderous libraries; I pick up my small crumbs of cogitation at a dinner-table….”In his essays Thackeray is serious, humorous, chivalrous, cynical, and sentimental by turns. The Historian-essayists :-
”Of the historian-essayists Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) is by far the richest and profoundest,” says Hugh Walker. Carlyle was not only a historian but a prophet. He wrote essays on critical, biographical, historical, social, and political subjects, during his writing career from Richter (1827) to Shooting Niagara (1867). His essays cannot be placed beside his major works, but they do have value of their own. As a historiographer Carlyle believed in the view that history was nothing but a collection of the biographies of heroes (whom he worshipped). As a critic he displays a wonderful catholicity and sympathy. He gives not only bis favourite Novalis his due but also shows proper appreciation of such writers as Didoret and Voltaire for whom he had little intellectual or emotional sympathy. His style is always strident and forceful, and is full of prophetic inspiration and a rare strength of conviction.
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) entered upon his career as a writer with his essay on Milton, which appeared in The Edinburgh , Review in 1825 and which was tobe the first of the famous series-CnVfcal and Historical Essays. His very first essay sky-rocketed him into the firmament of eminence. As an essayist he is represented by his contributions to the journal above named and the various biographical sketches he wrote for Encylopaedia Britannica. Macaulay can be given credit as a historian for his wonderful gift of forceful and vivid narration which forces itself upon the reader. But as a critic he has very little merit. Misjudgements on Bacon, Milton, Addison etc. are readable but utterly indefensible. His lachrymosic praise of Addison with corresponding denigration of Voltaire and Swift, for example, is altogether untenable. What matters for the reader of today is his wonderful style ”It,” says Hugh Walker, ”is energetic, vivid, picturesque. It has a boundless fertility of illustration. There is no style more rousing. The reader of Macaulay may be stirred to active opposition; the one thing I hat is hardly possible is that he should be left indifferent.”
James Anthony Froude (1818-1894) was a disciple of Carlyle whose Life he wrote. Froude has a place among English essayists on account of his Short Studies of Great Subjects. He has a gift of clear and fluent style, but he lacks the important qualities of humour and self-revelation, and, as such, much of his merit as an essayist is com
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promised. The essay in Froudc’s hand shows clear marks of decline if not decadence.
Lastly, in this group we have to consider Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-1892) who wrote much, but not much excellent. With him the literary historian passes away. The Essayists of the Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century :-
7
Alexander Smith (1829-1867) was a good deal overrated in his age both as a poet and prose writer. As an essayist we have to consider him as the author of the volume entitled Dreamthrop (1863) which contains a dozen essays. Smith is almost always delightful, and he understands his craft. His style is limpid and flowing. Most of his thoughts are trite, but they are expressed well. He himself was of the view that ”the world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when a thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in,’ and from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new.” He excels in gripping description. Many of his essays give us pictures of village life, and ”A Lark’s Flight” gives a powerful description of a hanging.
Sir John Skelton (1831-1897), better known by his pseudonym ”Shirley,” ”had,” according to High Walker, ”a very pleasant style and a deft touch.” He published quite a number of* essays on an extensive range of topics. ”He” says Hugh Walker, ”was learned enough to be instructive and humorous enough to be amusing. He touched literature, and life and nature, and all with skill. The odour of Russia clings to many of his pages, the air of the heather and of the sea hangs about others; for he had a keen feelings for nature, and a happy knack of imparting his own sentiment. Sometimes… the style is just a little too chatty, but in an essayist the fault is less than the vice of stiffness would be.’1
A. K. H. Boyd (1825-1899) as an essayist is good only in parts. He is simple to the point of being trivial. He announced his abhorrence of loose and rambling style, and considered Bacon and even Tacitus to be his models. But we find no sententiousness in him. Nevertheless, he charms in his own simple way though he can often be bafflingly sly.
Sir Arthur Halps (1819-1875) is quite arid and dull. Charles Kingsley (1818-1875) is much superior to him. Hugh Walker maintains : ”As essayist Kingsley’s merits are, in the critical essays, vigour, rapidity and decision, in the descriptive essays, the combination of the heart of a poet with the high spirits of a sportsman.” Kingsley was at heart a boy, and many of his essays palpitate with the joie de
wvre.
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John Ruskin (1819-1900) as an essayist, on the other hand, was too old. He was all too serious. His output as a prose writer is very large, and a number of his books-such as Unto This Last, A Jay for Ever, and Sesame and Lilies-can easily be considered as collections of essays. He is seldom personal and still less humorous, even though he sometimes uses his gift of biting sarcasm. At any rate his temperament is fun damentally different from that of a natural essayists like Charles Lamb or R. L. Stevenson.
With Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) we come to the greatest essayist of the Victorian era. He is better known for his stories of adventure, such as Treasure Island and Kidnapped, but the collection of ess&ys-Vtrginibus Puerisque (1881)–is also a delightful, intimate, and self-revelatory book. After Lamb and Hazlitt, Stevenson in spite of the fact that he fought all his life a losing batde against a fatal disease, was an optimist to his fingertips. He made much of life. He modelled himself on Hazlitt and captured some of his gusto and the joy of living. As a stylist he is considered with Pater as a ”fine* writer. He polished his style to the extreme without making it tawdry or flashy. He had a wonderful sense of detail both as an observer and as a stylist. And this sense pays.