



Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Andrew Templeton, Josephine
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A HISTORY

OF

NINETEENTH CENTURY

LITERATURE

(1780-1895)

BY

GEORGE SAINTSBURY

PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF
EDINBURGH

_New York_

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.

1906

_All rights reserved_


COPYRIGHT, 1896,
BY MACMILLAN AND CO.

Set up and electrotyped, January, 1896. Reprinted October,
1896; August, 1898; September, 1899; April, 1902; March, 1904;
November, 1906.

_Norwood Press_
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.




PREFACE


In the execution of the present task (which I took over about two years
ago from hands worthier than mine, but then more occupied) some
difficulties of necessity occurred which did not present themselves to
myself when I undertook the volume of Elizabethan Literature, or to my
immediate predecessor in grappling with the period between 1660 and
1780.

The most obvious and serious of these was the question, "What should be
done with living authors?" Independently of certain perils of selection
and exclusion, of proportion and of freedom of speech, I believe it will
be recognised by every one who has ever attempted it, that to mix
estimates of work which is done and of work which is unfinished is to
the last degree unsatisfactory. I therefore resolved to include no
living writer, except Mr. Ruskin, in this volume for the purpose of
detailed criticism, though some may be now and then mentioned in
passing.

Even with this limitation the task remained a rather formidable one.
Those who are least disposed to overvalue literary work in proportion as
it approaches their own time will still acknowledge that the last
hundred and fifteen years are fuller furnished than either of the
periods of not very dissimilar length which have been already dealt
with. The proportion of names of the first, or of a very high second
class, is distinctly larger than in the eighteenth century; the bulk of
literary production is infinitely greater than in the Elizabethan time.
Further, save in regard to the earliest subsections of this period, Time
has not performed his office, beneficent to the reader but more
beneficent to the historian, of sifting and riddling out writers whom it
is no longer necessary to consider, save in a spirit of adventurous or
affectionate antiquarianism. I must ask the reader to believe me when I
say that many who do not appear here at all, or who are dismissed in a
few lines, have yet been the subjects of careful reading on my part. If
some exclusions (not due to mere oversight) appear arbitrary or unjust,
I would urge that this is not a Dictionary of Authors, nor a Catalogue
of Books, but a History of Literature; and that to mention everybody is
as impossible as to say everything. As I have revised the sheets the old
query has recurred to myself only too often, and sometimes in reference
to very favourite books and authors of my own. Where, it may be asked,
is Kenelm Digby and the _Broad Stone of Honour_? Where Sir Richard
Burton (as great a contrast to Digby as can well be imagined)? Where
Laurence Oliphant, who, but the other day, seemed to many clever men the
cleverest man they knew? Where John Foster, who provided food for the
thoughtful public two generations ago? Where Greville of the caustic
diaries, and his editor (latest deceased) Mr. Reeve, and Crabb Robinson,
and many others? Some of these and others are really _neiges d'antan_;
some baffle the historian in miniature by being rebels to brief and
exact characterisation; some, nay many, are simply crowded out.

I must also ask pardon for having exercised apparently arbitrary
discretion in alternately separating the work of the same writer under
different chapter-headings, and grouping it with a certain disregard of
the strict limits of the chapter-heading itself. I think I shall obtain
this pardon from those who remember the advantage obtainable from a
connected view of the progress of distinct literary kinds, and that,
sometimes not to be foregone, of considering the whole work of certain
writers together.

To provide room for the greater press of material, it was necessary to
make some slight changes of omission in the scheme of the earlier
volumes. The opportunity of considerable gain was suggested in the
department of extract--which obviously became less necessary in the case
of authors many of whom are familiar, and hardly any accessible with
real difficulty. Nor did it seem necessary to take up room with the
bibliographical index, the utility of which in my Elizabethan volume I
was glad to find almost universally recognised. This would have had to
be greatly more voluminous here; and it was much less necessary. With a
very few exceptions, all the writers here included are either kept in
print, or can be obtained without much trouble at the second-hand
bookshops.

To what has thus been said as to the principles of arrangement it cannot
be necessary to add very much as to the principles of criticism. They
are the same as those which I have always endeavoured to maintain--that
is to say, I have attempted to preserve a perfectly independent, and, as
far as possible, a rationally uniform judgment, taking account of none
but literary characteristics, but taking account of all characteristics
that are literary. It may be, and it probably is, more and more
difficult to take achromatic views of literature as it becomes more and
more modern; it is certainly more difficult to get this achromatic
character, even where it exists, acknowledged by contemporaries. But it
has at least been my constant effort to attain it.

In the circumstances, and with a view to avoid not merely repetition but
confusion and dislocation in the body of the book, I have thought it
better to make the concluding chapter one of considerably greater length
than the corresponding part of the Elizabethan volume, and to reserve
for it the greater part of what may be called connecting and
comprehensive criticism. In this will be found what may be not
improperly described from one point of view as the opening of the case,
and from another as its summing up--the evidence which justifies both
being contained in the earlier chapters.

It is perhaps not improper to add that the completion of this book has
been made a little difficult by the incidence of new duties, not in
themselves unconnected with its subject. But I have done my best to
prevent or supply oversight.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I

THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

PAGE

     The Starting-point--Cowper--Crabbe--Blake--Burns--Minor
     Poets--The Political Satirists--Gifford--Mathias--Dr. Moore,
     etc.--Paine--Godwin--Holcroft--Beckford, etc.--Mrs.
     Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis--Hannah More--Gilpin               1


CHAPTER II

THE NEW POETRY

     Wordsworth--Coleridge--Southey--Scott--Byron--Shelley--Keats--
     Rogers--Campbell--Moore--Leigh Hunt--Hogg--Landor--Minor
     Poets born before Tennyson--Beddoes--Sir Henry Taylor--Mrs.
     Hemans and L, E. L.--Hood and Praed                          49




CHAPTER III

THE NEW FICTION

     Interval--Maturin--Miss Edgeworth--Miss Austen--The _Waverley
     Novels_--Hook--Bulwer--Dickens--Thackeray--Marryat--Lever--Minor
     Naval Novelists--Disraeli--Peacock--Borrow--Miss
     Martineau--Miss Mitford                                     125


CHAPTER IV

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS.

     New Periodicals at the beginning of the
     Century--Cobbett--The _Edinburgh Review_--Jeffrey--Sydney
     Smith--The _Quarterly_--_Blackwood's_ and the _London
     Magazines_--Lamb--Hazlitt--Wilson--Lockhart--De
     Quincey--Leigh Hunt--Hartley Coleridge--Maginn and
     _Fraser_--Sterling and the Sterling Club--Edward
     FitzGerald--Barham                                          166


CHAPTER V

THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY

     Occasional
     Historians--Hallam--Roscoe--Mitford--Lingard--Turner--
     Palgrave--The Tytlers--Alison--Milman--Grote and
     Thirlwall--Arnold--Macaulay--Carlyle--Minor
     Figures--Buckle--Kinglake--Freeman and Green--Froude        211


CHAPTER VI

THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD

     Tennyson--Mr. and Mrs. Browning--Matthew Arnold--The
     Prae-Raphaelite Movement--Rossetti--Miss
     Rossetti--O'Shaughnessy--Thomson--Minor Poets--Lord
     Houghton--Aytoun--The Spasmodics--Minor
     Poets--Clough--Locker--The Earl of Lytton--Humorous
     Verse-Writers--Poetesses                                    253


CHAPTER VII

THE NOVEL SINCE 1850

     Changes in the Novel--Miss Bronte--George Eliot--Charles
     Kingsley--The Trollopes--Reade--Minor Novelists--Stevenson  317


CHAPTER VIII

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

     Limits of this and following Chapters--Bentham--
     Mackintosh--The Mills--Hamilton and the Hamiltonians--
     Mansel--Other Philosophers--Jurisprudents:
     Austin, Maine, Stephen--Political Economists and
     Malthus--The Oxford Movement--Pusey--Keble--Newman--The
     Scottish Disruption--Chalmers--Irving--Other
     Divines--Maurice--Robertson                                 342


CHAPTER IX

LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM IN ART AND LETTERS

     Changes in Periodicals--The _Saturday Review_--Critics of
     the middle of the Century--Helps--Matthew Arnold in
     Prose--Mr. Ruskin--Jefferies--Pater--Symonds--Minto         378


CHAPTER X

SCHOLARSHIP AND SCIENCE

     Increasing Difficulty of
     Selection--Porson--Conington--Munro--Sellar--Robertson
     Smith--Davy--Mrs. Somerville--Other Scientific Writers--
     Darwin--_Vestiges of Creation_--Hugh Miller--Huxley         404


CHAPTER XI

DRAMA

     Weakness of this department throughout--O'Keefe--Joanna
     Baillie--Knowles--Bulwer--Planche                           417


CHAPTER XII

CONCLUSION

     Survey and Analysis of the Period in the several
     divisions--Revolutions in Style--The present state of
     Literature                                                  425


INDEX                                                            471




CHAPTER I

THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY


The period of English literary history which is dealt with in the
opening part of the present volume includes, of necessity, among its
most illustrious names, not a few whose work will not be the subject of
formal discussion here, because the major part of it was done within the
scope of the volume which preceded. Thus, to mention only one of these
names, the most splendid displays of Burke's power--the efforts in which
he at last gave to mankind what had previously been too often devoted to
party--date from this time, and even from the later part of it; while
Gibbon did not die till 1794, and Horace Walpole not till 1797. Even
Johnson, the type and dictator at once of the eighteenth century in
literary England, survived the date of 1780 by four years.

Nevertheless the beginning of the ninth decade of the century did
actually correspond with a real change, a real line of demarcation. Not
only did the old writers drop off one by one, not only did no new
writers of utterly distinct idiosyncrasy (Burns and Blake excepted) make
their appearance till quite the end of it, but it was also marked by the
appearance of men of letters and of literary styles which announced, if
not very distinctly, the coming of changes of the most sweeping kind.
Hard as it may be to exhibit the exact contrast between, say, Goldsmith
and men like Cowper on the one side and Crabbe on the other, that
contrast cannot but be felt by every reader who has used himself in the
very least to the consideration of literary differences. And as with
individuals, so with kinds. No special production of these twenty years
may be of the highest value; but there is a certain idiosyncrasy, if
only an idiosyncrasy of transition--an unlikeness to anything that comes
before, and to anything, unless directly imitated, that comes
after--which is equally distinguishable in the curious succession of
poetical satires from Peter Pindar to the _Anti-Jacobin_, in the
terror-and-mystery novels of the school of Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk
Lewis, in the large, if not from the literary point of view extremely
noteworthy, department of politics and economics which in various ways
employed the pens of writers so different as Moore, Young, Godwin,
Priestley, Horne, Tooke, Cobbett, and Paine.

Giving poetry, as usual, the precedence even in the most unpoetical
periods, we shall find in the four names already cited--those of Crabbe,
Cowper, Blake, and Burns--examples of which even the most poetical
period need not be ashamed. In what may be called the absolute spirit of
poetry, the _nescio quid_ which makes the greatest poets, no one has
ever surpassed Burns and Blake at their best; though the perfection of
Burns is limited in kind, and the perfection of Blake still more limited
in duration and sustained force. Cowper would have been a great poet of
the second class at any time, and in some times might have attained the
first. As for Crabbe, he very seldom has the absolute spirit of poetry
just mentioned; but the vigour and the distinction of his verse, as well
as his wonderful faculty of observation in rendering scene and
character, are undeniable. And it is not perhaps childish to point out
that there is something odd and out of the way about the poetical career
of all these poets of the transition. Cowper's terrible malady postpones
his first efforts in song to an age when most poets are losing their
voices; Crabbe, beginning brilliantly and popularly, relapses into a
silence of nearly a quarter of a century before breaking out with
greater power and skill than ever; Burns runs one of the shortest, if
one of the most brilliant, Blake one of the longest, the strangest, the
most intermittent, of poetical careers. Nor is it superfluous to draw
attention further to the fact that when we leave this little company--at
the best august, at the worst more than respectable--we drop suddenly to
the flattest and most hopeless bog of poesiless verse that lies anywhere
on the map of England's literature. Passing from the ethereal music of
the Scottish ploughman and the English painter, from Cowper's noble or
gentle thought and his accomplished versification, from Crabbe's manly
vigour and his Rembrandt touch, we find nothing, unless it be the
ingenious but not strictly poetical burlesque of the Wolcots and the
Lawrences, till we come to the drivel of Hayley and the drought of
Darwin.

Of the quartette, William Cowper was by far the oldest; the other three
being contemporaries within a few years. He was born on 26th November
1731 at Great Berkhampstead. His father was a clergyman and a royal
chaplain, his mother one of the Norfolk Donnes. Her early death, and
that school discomfort which afterwards found vent in _Tirocinium_,
appear to have aggravated a natural melancholia; though after leaving
Westminster, and during his normal studies at both branches of the law,
he seems to have been cheerful enough. How what should have been the
making of his fortune,--his appointment as Clerk of the Journals to the
House of Lords,--not unassisted by religious mania, drove him through
sheer nervousness to attempt suicide, is one of the best known things in
English literary biography, as indeed are most of the few events of his
sad life,--owing partly to his own charming letters, partly to the
biographies of Southey and others. His latest days were his unhappiest,
and after years of more or less complete loss of reason he died on 27th
April 1800.

It has been said that Cowper did not take to writing till late in life.
He had had literary friends--Churchill, Lloyd, and others--in youth, and
must always have had literary sympathies; but it was not till he was
nearly fifty, nor till the greater part of twenty years after his first
mental seizure, that he attempted composition at the instance of his
friend Newton and the Unwins. Beginning with hymns and trifles, he
before long undertook, at this or that person's suggestion, longer
poems, such as _Truth_, _The Progress of Error_, and _Expostulation_,
which were finished by 1781 and published next year, to be followed by
the still better and more famous _Task_, suggested to him by Lady
Austen. This appeared in 1785, and was very popular. He had already
begun to translate Homer, which occupied him for the greater part of
seven years. Nothing perhaps settled him more in the public affections
than "John Gilpin," the subject of which he also owed to Lady Austen;
and he continued to write occasional pieces of exquisite accomplishment.
Almost the last, if not actually the last, of these, written just before
the final obscuration of his faculties, was the beautiful and terrible
"Castaway," an avowed allegory of his own condition.

Cowper, even more than most writers, deserves and requites consideration
under the double aspect of matter and form. In both he did much to alter
the generally accepted conditions of English poetry; and if his formal
services have perhaps received less attention than they merit, his
material achievements have never been denied. His disposition--in which,
by a common enough contrast, the blackest and most hopeless melancholy
was accompanied by the merriest and most playful humour--reflected
itself unequally in his verse, the lighter side chiefly being exhibited.
Except in "The Castaway," and a few--not many--of the hymns, Cowper is
the very reverse of a gloomy poet. His amiability, however, could also
pass into very strong moral indignation, and he endeavoured to give
voice to this in a somewhat novel kind of satire, more serious and
earnest than that of Pope, much less political and personal than that of
Dryden, lighter and more restrained than that of the Elizabethans. His
own unworldly disposition, together with the excessively retired life
which he had led since early manhood, rather damaged the chances of
Cowper as a satirist. We always feel that his censure wants actuality,
that it is an exercise rather than an experience. His efforts in it,
however, no doubt assisted, and were assisted by, that alteration of
the fashionable Popian couplet which, after the example partly of
Churchill and with a considerable return to Dryden, he attempted, made
popular, and handed on to the next generation to dis-Pope yet further.
This couplet, paralleled by a not wholly dissimilar refashioning of
blank verse, in which, though not deserting Milton, he beat out for
himself a scheme quite different from Thomson's, perhaps show at their
best in the descriptive matter of _The Task_ and similar poems. It was
in these that Cowper chiefly displayed that faculty of "bringing back
the eye to the object" and the object to the eye, in which he has been
commonly and justly thought to be the great English restorer. Long
before the end of the Elizabethan period, poetical observation of nature
had ceased to be just; and, after substituting for justness the wildest
eccentricities of conceit, it went for a long time into another
extreme--that of copying and recopying certain academic
conventionalities, instead of even attempting the natural model. It is
not true, as Wordsworth and others have said, that Dryden himself could
not draw from the life. He could and did; but his genius was not
specially attracted to such drawing, his subjects did not usually call
for it, and his readers did not want it. It is not true that Thomson
could not "see"; nor is it true of all his contemporaries and immediate
followers that they were blind. But the eighteenth century had slipped
into a fault which was at least as fatal as that of the
Idealist-Impressionists of the seventeenth, or as that of the
Realist-Impressionists of our own time. The former neglected
universality in their hunt after personal conceits; the latter neglect
it in the endeavour to add nothing to rigidly elaborated personal
sensation. The one kind outstrips nature; the other comes short of art.
From Dryden to Cowper the fault was different from both of these. It
neglected the personal impression and the attention to nature too much.
It dared not present either without stewing them in a sauce of stock
ideas, stock conventions, stock words and phrases, which equally missed
the universal and the particular. Cowper and the other great men who
were his contemporaries by publication if not by birth, set to work to
cure this fault. Even the weakest of them could never have been guilty
of such a passage as that famous one which Congreve (as clever a man as
any) wrote, and which Johnson (as clever a man as any) admired. The
sentiment which actuated them was, if we may trust Coleridge's account
of Boyer or Bowyer, the famous tyrant of Christ's Hospital, well
diffused. "'Nymph,' boy? You mean your nurse's daughter," puts in a
somewhat brutal and narrow form the correction which the time needed,
and which these four in their different ways applied.

We have already glanced at the way in which Cowper applied it in his
larger poems: he did it equally well, and perhaps more tellingly, in his
smaller. The day on which a poet of no mean pretensions, one belonging
altogether to the upper classes of English society, and one whose lack
of university education mattered the less because the universities were
just then at their nadir, dared to write of the snake he killed

    "And taught him never to come there no more"

was an epoch-making day. Swift would have done it; but Swift was in many
ways a voice crying in the wilderness, and Swift was not, strictly
speaking, a poet at all. Byrom would have done it; but Byrom was
emphatically a minor poet. Cowper could--at least in and for his
day--boast the major afflatus, and Cowper did not disdain vernacular
truth. He never could have been vulgar; there is not in the whole range
of English literature quite such a gentleman in his own way as Cowper.
But he has escaped almost entirely from the genteel style--from the
notion of things as below the dignity of literature.

His prose in this respect is at least equal to his verse, though, as it
was known much later, it has greater tendency than influence. All good
critics have agreed that his letters are not surpassed, perhaps not
surpassable. He has more freedom than Gray; he has none of the coxcombry
of Walpole and Byron; and there is no fifth name that can be put even
into competition with him. Ease, correctness, facility of expression,
freedom from convention within his range, harmony, truth to nature,
truth to art:--these things meet in the hapless recluse of Olney as they
had not met for a century--perhaps as they had never met--in English
epistles. The one thing that he wanted was strength: as his madness was
melancholy, not raving, so was his sanity mild but not triumphant.

George Crabbe was three and twenty years younger than Cowper, having
been born on Christmas Eve 1754. But his first publication, _The
Library_, the success of which was due to the generous and quick-sighted
patronage of Burke after the poet had wrestled with a hard youth,
coincided almost exactly with the first appearance of Cowper, and indeed
a little anticipated it. _The Village_ appeared in 1783, and _The
Newspaper_ in 1785, and then Crabbe (who had taken orders, had been
instituted to livings in the East of England, and had married, after a
long engagement, his first love) was silent for two and twenty years. He
began again in 1807 with _The Parish Register_. _The Borough_, his
greatest work, appeared in 1810. Shifting from the East of England to
the West in 1813, he spent the last twenty years of his long life at
Trowbridge in Wiltshire, and died in 1832 at the age of seventy-eight.

The external (and, as will be presently remarked, something more than
the external) uniformity of his work is great, and its external
conformity to the traditions and expectations of the time at which it
first appeared is almost greater. A hasty judgment, and even one which,
though not hasty, is not very keen-sighted, might see little difference
between Crabbe and any poet from Pope to Goldsmith except the
innovators. He is all but constant to the heroic couplet--the Spenserian
introduction to _The Birth of Flattery_, the variously-grouped
octosyllabic quatrains of _Reflections_, _Sir Eustace Grey_, _The Hall
of Justice_, and _Woman_, with a few other deviations, being merely
islets among a wide sea of rhymed decasyllabics constituting at least
nineteen-twentieths of the poet's outpouring. Moreover, he was as a rule
constant, not