Kitabı oku: «A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)», sayfa 33
By so much as verbal science or scholarship, which would seem to be more especially bound to be literature, claims to be and endeavours to be strictly scientific, by so much also necessarily does it divorce itself from the literature which it studies. This, if not an enormously great, is certainly rather a sore evil; and it is one of the most considerable and characteristic signs of the period we are discussing. The older scholarship, though sufficiently minute, still clung to the literary side proper: it was even, in the technical dialect of one of the universities, opposed to "science," which word indeed was itself used in a rather technical way. The invention of comparative philology, with its even more recent off-shoot phonetics, has changed all this, and we now find "linguistic" and "literary" used by common consent as things not merely different but hostile, with a further tendency on the part of linguistics to claim the term "scholarship" exclusively for itself.
This could hardly in any case be healthy. What may be the abstract value of the science, or group of sciences, called philology, it is perhaps not necessary here to inquire. It is sufficient to say that it clearly has nothing to do with literature except in accidental and remote applications, that it stands thereto much as geology does to architecture. Unfortunately, while the scientific side of scholarship is thus becoming, if it has not become, wholly unliterary, the æsthetic side has shown signs of becoming, to far too great an extent, unscientific in the bad and baneful sense. With some honourable exceptions, we find critics of literature too often divided into linguists who seem neither to think nor to be capable of thinking of the meaning or the melody, of the individual and technical mastery, of an author, a book, or a passage, and into loose æsthetic rhetoricians who will sometimes discourse on Æschylus without knowing a second aorist from an Attic perfect, and pronounce eulogies or depreciations on Virgil without having the faintest idea whether there is or is not any authority for quamvis with one mood rather than another. Nor is it possible to see what eirenicon is likely to present itself between two parties, of whom the extremists on the one side may justly point to such things as have here been quoted, while the extremists on the other feel it a duty to pronounce phonetics the merest "hariolation," and a very large part of what goes by the name of philology ingenious guesswork, some of which may possibly not be false, but hardly any of which can on principles of sound general criticism be demonstrated to be true. It is not wonderful, though it is in the highest degree unhealthy, that the stricter scholars should be more or less scornfully relinquishing the province of literary criticism altogether, while the looser æsthetics consider themselves entitled to neglect scholarship in any proper sense with a similarly scornful indifference.
It is, however, impossible that offences of this sort should not come now and then in the history of literature, and fortunately, in that history, they disappear as they appear. For the present purpose it is more important to conclude this conclusion with a few general remarks on the past, fewer on the present, and fewest of all on the future.
On this last head, indeed, no words were perhaps even better than even fewest; though something of the sort may be expected. Rash as prophecy always is, it is never quite so rash as in literature; and though we can sometimes, looking backward, say – perhaps even then with some rashness – that such and such a change might or ought to have been expected, it is very seldom that we can, when deprived of this illegitimate advantage, vaticinate on such subjects with any safety. Yet the study of the present always, so to speak, includes and overlaps something of the future, and by comparison at least of other presents we can discern what it is at least not improbable that the future may be. What, then, is the present of literature in England?
It can be described with the greater freedom that, as constantly repeated, we are not merely at liberty ex hypothesi to omit references to individuals, but are ex hypothesi bound to exclude them. And no writer, as it happens rather curiously, of anything like great promise or performance who was born later than the beginning of the fifties has died as yet, though the century is so near its close. Yet again, all the greatest men of the first quarter of the century, with the single exception of Mr. Ruskin, are gone; and not many of the second remain. By putting these simple and unmistakable facts together it will be seen, in a fashion equally free from liability to cavil and from disobliging glances towards persons, that the present is at best a stationary state in our literary history. Were we distinctly on the mounting hand, it is, on the general calculation of the liabilities of human life, certain that we must have had our Shelley or our Keats side by side with our Wordsworth and our Coleridge. That we have much excellent work is certain; that we have much of the absolutely first class not so. And if we examine even the good work of our younger writers we shall find in much of it two notes or symptoms – one of imitation or exaggeration, the other of uncertain and eccentric quest for novelty – which have been already noted above as signs of decadence or transition.
Whether it is to be transition or decadence, that is the question. For the solution of it we can only advance with safety a few considerations, such as that in no literary history have periods of fresh and first-rate production ever continued longer than – that they have seldom continued so long as – the period now under notice, and that it is reasonable, it is almost certain, that, though by no means an absolutely dead season, yet a period of comparatively faint life and illustration should follow. To this it may be added as a consideration not without philosophical weight that the motives, the thoughts, the hopes, the fears, perhaps even the manners, which have defrayed the expense of the literary production of this generation, together with the literary forms in which, according to custom, they have embodied and ensconced themselves, have been treated with unexampled, certainly with unsurpassed, thoroughness, and must now be near exhaustion; while it is by no means clear that any fresh set is ready to take their place. It is on this last point, no doubt, that the more sanguine prophets would like to fight the battle, urging that new social ideas, and so forth, are in possession of the ground. But this is not the field for that battle.
In dealing with what has been, with the secular hour that we have actually and securely had, we are on far safer, if not on positively safe ground. Here the sheaves are actually reaped and brought home; and if the teller of them makes a mistake, his judgment, and his judgment only, need be at fault. Not all ways of such telling are of equal value. It may be tempting, for instance, but can hardly be very profitable, to attempt to strike an exact balance between the production of the century from 1780 to 1880 with that of the other great English literary century from 1580 to 1680. Dear as the exercise is to some literary accountants, there is perhaps no satisfactory system of book-keeping by which we can really set the assets and the liabilities of the period from the appearance of Spenser to the death of Browne against the assets and liabilities of that from the appearance of Burns to the death of Tennyson, and say which has the greater sum to its credit. Still more vague and futile would it be to attempt to set with any exactness this balance-sheet against that of the other great literary periods of other countries, languages, and times. Here again, most emphatically, accuracy of this kind is not to be expected.
But what we can say with confidence and profit is that the nineteenth century in England and English is of these great periods, and of the greatest of them; that it has taken its place finally and certainly, with a right never likely to be seriously challenged, and in a rank never likely to be much surpassed.
The period which lisped its numbers in Burns and Blake and Cowper, which broke out into full song with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, which, not to mention scores of minor singers, took up the tale with Tennyson and Browning and passed it on to Arnold, Rossetti, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Swinburne, need fear no comparisons in the matter of poetry. In prose fiction, as we have seen, it stands alone. It is almost a century of origins as regards the most important kinds; it is quite a century of capital and classical performance in them. In "making" – prose or verse – no time leaves record of performance more distinguished or more various.
That in one great literary kind, drama, it exhibits lamentable deficiency, that indeed in that kind it hardly counts at all, has been admitted; and it is not probable that in any of the serious prose kinds, except history, it will ever rank very high when compared with others. Its theology has, as far as literature is concerned, been a little wanting in dignity, in finish, and even in fervour, its philosophy either commonplace or jargonish, its exercises in science and scholarship ever divorcing themselves further from literary ideals. But in the quality of its miscellaneous writing, as well as in the facilities given to such writing by its special growth – some would say its special fungus – of the periodical, it again rises to the first class. Hardly the period of Montaigne and Bacon, certainly not that of Dryden, Cowley, and Temple, nor that of Addison and Steele, nor that of Johnson and Goldsmith, can vie with the century of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, of Leigh Hunt and Thomas de Quincey, of Macaulay and Thackeray and Carlyle, of Arnold and Mr. Ruskin. Miscellaneous we have been, – perhaps too much so, – but we should be a little saved by the excellence of some of our miscellanists.
Pessimists would probably say that the distinguishing and not altogether favourable notes of the century are a somewhat vagabond curiosity in matter and a tormented unrest of style. The former concerns us little, and is chiefly noticeable here because of the effect which it has had on the great transformation of historical writing so often noticed; the latter concerns us intimately. And no doubt there is hardly a single feature – not even the growth of the novel, not even the development of the newspaper – which will so distinctly and permanently distinguish this century in English literary history as the great changes which have come over style, and especially prose style. There has been less opportunity to notice these collectively in any of the former chapters than there has been to notice some other changes: nor was this of much importance, for the present is the right place for gathering up the fragments.
The change of style in prose is undoubtedly as much the leading feature of the century as is in poetry the change of thought and outlook, on which latter enough perhaps has been said elsewhere; the whole of our two long chapters on poetry being indeed, with great part of this conclusion, a continuous exposition of it. But the change in prose was neither confined to, nor specially connected with, any single department of literature. Indirectly indeed, and distantly, it may be said to have been connected with the growth of the essay and the popularity of periodicals; and yet it is not quite certain that this was anything more than a coincidence due to the actual fact that the first extensive practitioners of ornate prose, Wilson and De Quincey, were in a way journalists.
That the sudden ornateness, in part a mere ordinary reaction, was also in part due to a reflection of the greater gorgeousness of poetry, though it was in itself less a matter of thought than of style, is true. But literary reactions are always in part at least literary developments; and after the prose of Burke and Gibbon, even after that of Johnson, it was certain that the excessive plainness reached in the mid-eighteenth century would be exchanged for something else. But it could not possibly have been anticipated that the change would exhibit the extent or the variety that it has actually shown.
That it has enriched English literature with a great deal of admirable matter is certain; that it has not merely produced a great deal of sad stuff, but has perhaps inflicted some permanent or at least lasting damage on the purity, the simplicity, and in the best sense the strength of style, is at least equally certain. It is less easy to say whether it is, as a movement, near its close, or with what sort of reaction it is likely to be followed. On the one hand the indication of particular follies and excesses may not seem decisive; for there is little doubt that in all the stages of this flamboyant movement – from De Quincey to Carlyle, from Carlyle to Mr. Ruskin, from Mr. Ruskin to persons whom it is unnecessary to mention – the advocates of the sober styles thought and said that the force of extravagance could no further go, and that the last outrages had been committed on the dignity and simplicity of English. On the other hand there are signs, which are very unlikely to deceive the practised critic, tending to show that the mode is likely to change. When actual frippery is seen hanging up in Monmouth Street or Monmouth Street's successors, when cheap imitations of fashionable garments crowd the shop windows and decorate the bodies of the vulgar – then the wise know that this fashion will shortly change. And certainly something similar may be observed in literature to-day. Cacophony jostles preciousness in novel and newspaper; attempts at contorted epigram appear side by side with slips showing that the writer has not the slightest knowledge of the classics in the old sense, and knows exceedingly little of anything that can be called classic in the widest possible acceptation of the term. Tyrannies cease when the cobblers begin to fear them; fashions, especially literary fashions, when the cobblers take them up.
Yet the production of what must or may be called literature is now so large, and in consequence of the spread of what is called education the appetite so largely exceeds the taste for it, that it is not so easy as it would once have been to forecast the extent and validity of any reaction that may take place.
If, without undue praising of times past, without pleading guilty to the prejudices sometimes attributed to an academic education, and also without trespassing beyond the proper limits of this book, it may be permitted to express an opinion on the present state of English literature, that opinion, while it need not be very gloomy, can hardly be very sanguine. And one ground for discouragement, which very especially concerns us, lies in the fact that on the whole we are now too "literary." Not, as has been said, that the general taste is too refined, but that there is a too indiscriminate appetite in the general; not that the actual original force of our writers is, with rare exceptions, at all alarming, but that a certain amount of literary craftsmanship, a certain knowledge of the past and present of literature, is with us in a rather inconvenient degree. The public demands quantity, not quality; and it is ready, for a time at any rate, to pay for its quantity with almost unheard of returns, both, as the homely old phrase goes, in praise and in pudding. And the writer, though seldom hampered by too exact an education in form, has had books, as a rule, too much with him. Sometimes he simply copies, and knows that he copies; oftener, without knowing it, he follows and imitates, while he thinks that he is doing original work.
And worse than all this, the abundance of reading has created an altogether artificial habit – a habit quite as artificial as any that can ever have prevailed at other periods – of regarding the main stuff and substance of literature. Much reading of novels, which are to the ordinary reader his books, and his only books, has induced him to take their standards as the standards of both nature and life. And this is all the more dangerous because in all probability the writers of these very novels have themselves acquired their knowledge, formed their standards, in a manner little if at all more first-hand. We have nature, not as Jones or Brown saw it for himself, but as he saw it through the spectacles of Mr. Ruskin or of Jefferies; art, not as he saw it himself, but as he saw it through those of Mr. Ruskin again or of Mr. Pater; literary criticism as he learnt it from Mr. Arnold or from Sainte-Beuve; criticism of life as he took it from Thackeray or from Mr. Meredith.
Something like this has occurred at least three times before in the history of European literature. It happened in late Græco-Roman times, and all the world knows what the cure was then, and how the much-discussed barbarian cleared the mind of Europe of its literary cant by very nearly clearing out all the literature as well. It happened on a much smaller scale, and with a less tremendous purgation, at the close of the Middle Ages, when the world suddenly, as it were, shut up one library and opened another; and at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, when it shut both of these or the greater part of them, and took to a small bookshelf of "classics," a slender stock of carefully observed formulæ and – common sense.
What it will take to now, nobody can say; but that it will in one fashion or another change most of its recent wear, shut most of its recent books, and perhaps give itself something of a holiday from literature, except in scholastic shapes, may be not quite impossible. Another Lyrical Ballads may be coming for this decade, as it came a hundred years ago: all we can say is that it apparently has not come yet. But whether it does come or does not, the moment is certainly no bad one, even if chronology did not make it inviting, for setting in order the actual, the certain, the past and registered production of the century since the dawn of the great change which ended its vigil. The historian, as he closes his record, is only too conscious of the objections to omission that may probably be brought against him, and of those of too liberal admission which certainly will be brought. It is possible that for some tastes even this chapter may not contain enough of Tendenz-discussion, that they may miss the broader sweeps and more confident generalisations of another school of criticism. But the old objection to fighting with armour which you have not proved has always seemed a sound one, and has seldom failed to be justified of those who set it at nought. Careful arrangement of detail and premiss, cautious drawing of conclusions, and constant subjection of these conclusions to that process of literary comparison which I believe to be the strongest, the safest, the best engine of literary criticism altogether – these are the things which I have endeavoured to observe here. It might have shown greater strength of mind to reject a large number of the authors here named, and so bring the matter into case for more extended treatment of interesting individuals. But there is something, as it seems to me, a little presumptuous in a too peremptory anticipation of the operations of Time the Scavenger. The critic may pretty well foresee the operations of the wallet-bearer, but he is not to dictate to him the particular "alms for oblivion" which he shall give. As it used to be the custom for a dramatic author, even though damned, to have his entrées at the theatre, so those who have once made an actual figure on the literary stage are entitled, until some considerable time has elapsed, to book-room. They lose it gradually and almost automatically; and as I have left out many writers of the end of last century whom, if I had been writing sixty years since, I should doubtless have put in, many of the first half of it whom I should have admitted if I had been writing thirty years since, so in another generation others will no doubt exercise a similar thinning on my own passed or pressed men.
But few, however, I think, appear here without more or less right of admission to the mind-map of the century's literature which a well-furnished mind should at this moment contain. That such a mind-map, quite irrespective of examinations and lecture-courses, and of literary bread-study generally, is a valuable thing, I have no doubt. And I think, without wishing to magnify mine office, that the general possession of it might do something to counteract these disastrous influences which have been referred to a little earlier. A man should surely be a little less apt to take the pinchbeck poetry of his own day for gold when he remembers the Della Cruscans and Sentimentalists, the Montgomerys and the Tuppers; the terror-novel and the Minerva Press should surely be useful skeletons to him at his feast of fiction in kinds which it would be beyond my province to describe more particularly. He will not clamour, as I have known very excellent persons clamour, for the "raising of English to a new power" when he has before him the long procession of ingenious jargonists whose jargon has been in its turn hailed as a revelation and dismissed as an old song. And he will neither overexalt the dignity of literature, nor be a self-tormentor and a tormentor of others about its approaching decline and fall, when he sees how constantly, how incessantly, the kissed mouth has renewed its freshness, the apparently dying flower has shed seed and shot suckers for a new growth.
