Clement King Shorter

“ If Matthew Arnold's plea for poetry as a criticism of life holds good, it is precisely the poets, novelists and historians who are the true critics. An alternative plan would have been to give a chapter to prose writers and another to the poets; and still another arrangement would have been to divide the subject, as De Quincey suggested, into the literature of power and the literature of imagination, the former including the philosophers and historians, the latter the poets, the novelists, and the more picturesque of the prose writers—Carlyle and Ruskin, for example. ”

“ If Dickens had been a learned University Professor he would not have possessed the equipment most needful for the artist who was to portray to us in an imperishable manner the London which is now fast disappearing. The people who censure Dickens are those for whom he has served a purpose and is of no further use. They are a mere drop in the ocean of readers. ”

“ Many years have now passed away since Herbert Spencer claimed the whole domain of knowledge as his own, and undertook to revise, in accordance with the latest lights, the whole sphere of philosophy. What must have seemed intolerable presumption in 1860 became in 1896 a completed task. In universality of knowledge he rivals Aristotle and Bacon at a time when the sphere of learning is immensely larger than in their epochs. It is not within the province of this survey of literature to go through the twelve large volumes of his works in detail. ”

“ The hearts of all of us go out to Tennyson when we think of the music of his verses, of his gifts of natural description, his fine and captivating imagination; but our hearts and our intellects go out to Browning, as to one who has enshrined our best thoughts, who has touched all our deepest emotions. ”

“ The reign of Victoria has been pre-eminently the reign of the historian in our literature. Greater poets we had seen in the reigns of the Georges, greater essayists in the reign of Anne. But Grote and Carlyle, Macaulay and Gardiner, Bishop Stubbs and Dr Freeman, had no counterparts in an earlier age—always excepting the one great name of Gibbon. Before them there were chroniclers of contemporary events and pamphleteers under the guise of historians, but little more. ”

“ His escape from Tractarianism had made him unfriendly to all kindred movements, and his views of the struggle between Catholicism and Evangelicalism in the sixteenth century are more worthy of a Puritan divine than of an academic writer of our own day. But we can forgive all this, and much more, to one who has described with so much delicate fancy the adventurous life of Drake and Hawkins, the intrigues of the Scottish Queen, and the restless fickleness and untruthfulness of Elizabeth. ”

“ With the historians and critics the matter is of less importance. To say that Mr Samuel Rawson Gardiner has written a useful history, or that Professor David Masson's "Life of Milton" is a valuable contribution to biographical literature, will excite no antagonism. But to attempt to assign Mr W. B. Yeats a place among the poets, or "Mark Rutherford" a position among the prose writers of the day, is to trespass upon ground which it is wiser to leave to the critics who write in the literary journals from week to week. It was not possible to ignore all living writers. ”

“ The Queen will have seen reputations blaze forth and flicker out ignominiously; she will have 193 seen many a writer hailed for immortal to-day and forgotten to-morrow. She will have seen, however, a succession of writers, Browning and Tennyson, Carlyle and Ruskin, most notable of all, who in their impulse towards high ideals of human brotherhood, in their enthusiasm of humanity, have given us a literature without a parallel in history; and she will not be without a sense of gratification that that literature will go down the ages bearing the name of Victorian. ”

“ It is a greatly-daring but extremely beautiful and reverent attempt to deal with the terrible problem of the presence of moral and physical evil, but quite apart from its value as a contribution to the philosophy of life, it is a singularly striking and beautiful piece of literary work, full of the exquisite imaginings and lovely fancies of the accomplished poet and man of letters. ”

“ It is not easy to tolerate the phraseology of the seventeenth century in modern books. This defect of style is regrettably noticeable in two volumes of literary history which Professor 175 Saintsbury has published, one dealing with the seventeenth and the other with the nineteenth century. It is in certain brief biographies of Sir Walter Scott and others that Professor Saintsbury is most excellent; but his wide knowledge and his genuine grasp of the most salient characteristics of good literature are indisputable qualities which rank him high among the bookmen of his day. ”

“ The age has been, particularly in its later developments, an age of good critics of literature. Criticism unhappily rarely lasts much beyond its own decade. Even Mr Matthew Arnold lives now only by his poetry, and the many good things that he said about books are being steadily forgotten. ”

“ Carlyle is surely the greatest figure in our modern literature. He wrote no poetry worth consideration, it is true. His verse would long since have been forgotten had it not been for his effectiveness as a prose writer. But although we are accustomed to the claim for poetry that it ranks higher than prose, it must be conceded that in Victorian literature this is not the case, and that Carlyle's enormous personality, his capacity for influencing others for good and ill, have made him the greatest moral and intellectual force of his age. ”

“ Mr Gardiner will not perhaps be counted a brilliant writer. He gives us none of the fire and eloquence, almost bordering on poetry, which we find so abundantly in Froude; but he has been described by Sir John Seeley as the only historian who has trodden the controversial ground of seventeenth-century English political history with absolute fairness and impartiality. James and Charles, Buckingham and Bristol, Strafford and Pym, stand out in clear and well-defined lineaments. There is no hero-worship to blind us ”

“ Many writers have embodied the main conclusions of the historians we have named, in brief, but useful, histories for the use of the more advanced schools. The more successful of these are the Rev. James Franck Bright and the late John Richard Green. James Franck Bright1832- is master of University College, Oxford, and his "English History for the use of Public Schools" is a work so lucidly and carefully written, that it is entitled to be lifted out of the category of mere text-books, and to take rank as good literature. Still more is this true of Green's "Short History of the English People." ”

“ Although Mr H. M. Stanley, Dr Nansen, and other adventurous spirits of our time, may be quite as important in the general drift of the world's doings as any of the literary men whose names are contained in this volume, their books have no place whatever in literature. It is noteworthy, however, that books written by travellers have been, during the past ten years or more, by far the most popular form of reading, apart from fiction. Interest in historical study and speculative writing seems to have declined; interest in travel is as marked as ever. ”

“ The daily journals bring their achievements sufficiently to the front. But literary workers owe so much to the untiring zeal of Sir Walter Besant1838- in their behalf, that at the risk of inconsistency I mention his "All Sorts and Conditions of Men," a story which not only sold by thousands, but had a practical influence such as is rarely given to poet or novelist to achieve. The writer dreams of a wealthy heiress devoting her time and money to purifying and elevating the East End of London. She builds a Palace of Delight, and devotes it to the service of the people. ”

“ Perhaps no other man then living could have shown himself competent to deal with Goethe's many-sidedness—to discuss "Faust" and "Tasso," "Hermann und Dorothea" at one moment, the poet's biological and botanical discoveries the next, and to estimate at their true worth the speculations on colours, which Goethe held to be more calculated than his poems to secure him immortality. The book remains the standard life of the great Weimar sage in this country, and is popular in Germany, in spite of a vast Goethe literature which has been published since its appearance. ”

“ They will find him as the sympathetic friend of the poor and of the oppressed. To be dead to the charm of Matthew Arnold's "Selections from Wordsworth" is to care nothing for poetry. To appreciate with any measure of enthusiasm the twelve volumes of Wordsworth's collected writings is equally to have one's sense of true poetry deadened and destroyed. ”

“ It is because the spirit which breathes in the words of this young workman has been the guiding moral force of numbers of men and women in all stations of life, during the last sixty years, that I have devoted so much space to Carlyle. It is of the greatest importance to literature that the man whose eloquent preaching of justice, sincerity, and reverence has turned the hearts of thousands of 119 his fellowmen towards nobility and simplicity of life, should not himself have been out of harmony with all that he taught. ”

“ He knows Elizabethan literature with remarkable thoroughness, and he knows the literature of many ages and many lands better than most of the professors. His appreciation of Charles Lamb endears him to English readers, and his eulogies of Victor Hugo command the respect of Frenchmen. A great poet and a great prose writer, Mr Swinburne is perhaps the most distinguished literary figure of our day. Only when in the distant years his country has lost him, will a great folly be generally recognised. ”

“ The final outcome of the controversy was the publication of the "Apologia," a work which, alike in beauty of style and devotion of spirit, must be assigned a very high place in religious literature. My space is too limited to pass in review, or even to name, the thirty-six volumes which contain the writings of this eloquent preacher and teacher. His "Dream of Gerontius" and "Verses on Various Occasions" show his high qualities as a poet; his "Apologia," "Callista," and "Essay in aid of the Grammar of Assent," display his genius as a prose stylist. ”

“ Mr Swinburne has written well in several languages other than his own. In his own he has written tragedies of wider purpose than those of Tennyson, of equal insight with those of Browning. He has written 17 noble sonnets, lyrics of exquisite melody, and one poem, "Ave atque Vale," which takes rank among the imperishable elegies of our literature. He has abundant spontaneity and a marvellous gift of rhythm. Added to all this, he is a critic of almost unequalled learning and distinction. He was the first to give adequate recognition to the poetic genius of Matthew Arnold and Emily Brontë. ”

“ The great epoch of English fiction began with Goldsmith and Richardson, and ended with Sir Walter Scott. It was an epoch which gave us "The Vicar of Wakefield," "Clarissa," "Tom Jones," "Pride and Prejudice," "Humphrey Clinker," and "Tristram Shandy." That fiction had a naturalness and spontaneity to which the novels of the Victorian Era can lay no claim. The novels of the period with which we are concerned aspire to regenerate mankind. Dickens, indeed, started off with but little literary equipment save sundry eighteenth century novels. ”

“ That old caustic man of deepest feeling, with an ill-temper and a tender heart, and a racking imagination, speaking from the grave, and bearing unto it that cross of passionate remorse which few among us dare to face, seems to some of us now a figure nobler and truer, a teacher greater far than in the days when all his pain and love and remorse were still hidden from us all. ”

“ A journalist of equal distinction was Richard Holt Hutton1826-1897, the editor of the Spectator, who in that journal maintained for thirty-five years the high-water mark of dignified and independent criticism, in an age in which the extensive intercourse of authors and critics, the constant communication between the writers of books and the writers for newspapers, has made independent criticism a difficult, and, indeed, almost impossible achievement. ”

“ Happily the times have long passed when literature needed the patronage of the powerful. To-day it can honourably stand alone. But it is pleasing to remember that the sovereign whose sixty years of rule make so remarkable a record in literature, as in many other aspects of the world's progress, has taken a sympathetic interest in the books and bookmen of the epoch. ”

“ I admit that they 'give pause' in this busy bustling life of ours; but if you reflect how willingly six separate volumes of philosophy would be read in the course of the year the undertaking seems less formidable. No one who considers the immense importance of a doctrine which will give unity to his life, would hesitate to pay a higher price than that of a year's study. ”

“ It is true that Macaulay is sometimes inaccurate, that he is not seldom unjust to the characters whom he paints so vividly. It is now a commonplace to say that his history was written, as Carlyle said, "to prove that Providence was on the side of the Whigs." It is clear that he was a man of strong literary prejudices, and he undoubtedly owes much of his popularity to the fact that he expresses in grandly 94 rhetorical language the average sentiment of his day, its belief in material prosperity, and its delight in being told that there has been no age of the world so happy as our own. ”