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      VICTORIAN LITERATURE

      SIXTY YEARS OF BOOKS
      AND BOOKMEN




      _Births have brought us richness and variety,
      And other births will bring us richness and variety;
      I do not call one greater and one smaller;
      That which fills its period and place is equal to any_.

      _Walt Whitman_




      VICTORIAN
      LITERATURE

      SIXTY YEARS
      OF BOOKS AND
      BOOKMEN

      BY
      CLEMENT SHORTER

      LONDON: JAMES BOWDEN
      10 HENRIETTA STREET
      COVENT GARDEN W.C. 1897




INTRODUCTORY


Asked by a kindly publisher to add one more to the Jubilee volumes which
commemorate the sixtieth year of the Queen's reign, I am pleased at the
opportunity thus afforded me of gathering up a few impressions of
pleasant reading hours. "Every age," says Emerson, "must write its own
books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of
an older period will not fit this." It is true, of course, and as a
result the popular favourite of to-day is well-nigh forgotten to-morrow.
In reading the critical journals of thirty years ago it is made quite
clear that they contain few judgments which would be sustained by a
consensus of critical opinion to-day. Whether time will deal as hardly
with the critical judgments of to-day we may not live to see. I have no
ambition to put this book to a personal test. So far as it has any worth
at all it is meant to be bibliographical and not critical. It aspires to
furnish the young student, in handy form, with as large a number of
facts about books as can be concentrated in so small a volume. That this
has been done under the guise of a consecutive narrative, and not in
the form of a dictionary, is merely for the convenience of the writer.

I have endeavoured to say as little as possible about living poets and
novelists. 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. I have ignored as many as I dared.

It was my intention at first to devote a chapter to Sixty Years of
American Literature. But for that task an Englishman who has paid but
one short visit to the United States has no qualification. He can write
of American literature only as seen through English eyes. That is to see
much of it, it is true. Few Americans realise the enormous influence
which the literature of their own land has had upon this country.
Probably the most read poet in England during the sixty years has been
Longfellow. Probably the most read novel has been "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
Among people who claim to be distinctly literary Hawthorne has been all
but the favourite novelist, Washington Irving not the least popular of
essayists, and Emerson the most invigorating moral influence. In my
youth "The Wide, Wide World" and "Queechy" were in everybody's hands; as
the stories of Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich,
Frank Stockton, Henry James, and Mary Wilkins are to-day. Apart from
Dickens, nearly all our laughter has come from Mark Twain and Artemus
Ward.

In history, we in England have read Prescott and Motley; in poetry we
have read Walt Whitman, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier,
and, above all, James Russell Lowell, who endeared himself to us alike
as a poet, a critic, and in his own person when he represented the
United States at the Court of St James's. Lastly I recall the delight
with which as a boy I read the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," and
the joy with which as a man I visited the author, Dr Oliver Wendell
Holmes, in his pleasant study in Beacon Street, Boston. These and many
other writers have made America and the Americans very dear to
Englishmen, and this in spite of much wild and foolish talk in the
journals of the two countries.

I have to thank Mr William Mackenzie, the well-known publisher of
Glasgow, for kindly letting me draw upon some articles which I wrote
for his "National Cyclopaedia" ten years ago, and upon the literary
section, which he and his editor, Mr John Brabner, permitted me to
contribute at that time to a book entitled "The Victorian Empire." I
have also to thank my friends, Dr Robertson Nicoll and Mr L. F. Austin,
for kindly reading my proof-sheets, Mr Edward Clodd for valuable
suggestions, and Mr Sydney Webb, a friend of old student days, for
reading the chapter which treats briefly of sociology and economics.

A compilation of this kind can scarcely hope to escape the defects of
most such enterprises--errors both of date and of fact. I shall be glad
to receive corrections for the next edition.

      CLEMENT K. SHORTER.

      _September 27, 1897._




CHAPTER I

The Poets


When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, most of the great poets
who had been inspired by the French Revolutionary epoch were dead. Keats
had died in Rome in 1821, Shelley was drowned in the Gulf of Spezzia in
1822, Byron died at Missolonghi in 1824, Scott at Abbotsford in 1832,
and Coleridge at Highgate in 1834. Southey was Poet Laureate, although
Wordsworth held a paramount place, recognised on all hands as the
greatest poet of the day.


The gulf which separates the =Southey (1774-1843)= of the laureateship
from the Southey who presents himself to our judgment to-day is almost
impossible to bridge over. Southey, as the average bookman thinks of him
now, is the author of a "Life of Nelson" and of one or two lyrics and
ballads.[1] The "Life of Nelson" is constantly republished for an age
keenly bent on Nelson worship, but for the exacting it has been
superseded by at least two biographies from living authors.[2] That
Southey should live mainly by a book which was merely a publisher's
commission, and not by the works which he and his contemporaries deemed
immortal, is one of the ironies of literature. Southey's "Cowper" is a
much better biography than his "